I’ve thought about this issue before — being that I’m a nerd and being that I like games, I’ve often wondered just what it is that makes me (and lots of nerds like me) obsess over the ins and outs of other universes and other realities. From chess to Mass Effect 2 (which I’m playing and enjoying lately) to Settlers of Catan to World of WarCraft, all games are really a set of rules. Some are more complicated than others (Civilization is obviously a very complicated game, while Bejeweled is not so much), but essentially they are an interactive set of rules — do something, and this consequence will arise.

That, I think, is both why I and other nerds enjoy games, where the rules are clearly documented, and especially computer games, where the rules are infallible (computers are notoriously stingy rulekeepers, as any programmer will tell you). Because in life, the rules dissolve into countless variants and shades of gray. Relationships are one Rubik’s Cube that I personally haven’t been able to crack. At least in a real Rubik’s Cube, when you turn the cube a certain way, the colors will always react the same. But in a real-life relationship, one word, one look, even one touch can mean many different things. There is no “exactly right” way to woo someone, because the rules are impossible to define and rarely enforced anyway. If there was an actual strategy to a successful relationship — if game theory really applied to human interaction — nerds would be the biggest “players” around.

That makes me sound like I’m a sociopath, and that I’d much rather deal with virtual worlds and characters than the real world and real people (which, to a certain extent, may be true, but I’m social enough, I get out out of the house when I can). But it is interesting to me that many of the things I appreciate about a good game are intrinsically different to what I encounter in the real world situations that I have trouble dealing with. Games create the structure of interactions with their rules and regulations, and without those rules in place, it’s hard for us nerdy folks to figure out what the “right” move actually is.

P.S. After I wrote this, I went to read the comments on that post, and the point was made that “Games have explicit rules and no real stakes. The ‘real’ social world has no rules and high stakes.” That’s an important point, and I humbly admit that it pretty much undoes my point above. For all of their rules and consequences, games have zero to no real world effect, and of course the real social world can make or break your relationships, your job, and your life. So if you get a choice of playing an inconsequential game that lets you experiment all you want, or a one-time-only practically random game that will affect your life forever, which would you choose to do? That kind of paints me as a coward, drawing away from the real world because I’m afraid of losing the more important social game, but so be it. It’s true.