The singular power games have to grow in our minds

Games have a singular power that I don’t believe any other medium has. Try this: has the meaning of a screenshot ever changed for you the longer you played a game? Have you ever experienced the feeling of looking at a screenshot early on and not understanding it, and then, many hours later, looking again and understanding it completely?

Think of an image from Balatro, of the jokers in the game, which are immediately an arresting sight, colourful as they are and caught in grotesque poses. What does this image mean to you when you first see it? Perhaps you’re intrigued. There’s a lurid eeriness to the style of the game, and poker – you like poker. But what about hundreds or even thousands of hours later – who am I to judge your Balatro obsession – what does it mean then? Where once you saw a picture, now you see a game.

Blue Prince set this thought off for me. I’ve been playing it what feels like every day, often late into the evening, taking it in turns with my partner to hold the pad – although in truth I prefer being the passenger. I like being the one with the notepad. Perhaps it’s the reporter in me. Regardless, we’re in deep. Blue Prince looms, quite pleasantly, over our daily life. And the deeper I go, the more the game changes, and the more I appreciate the nuance of what I’m seeing in front of me.

Blue Prince is a game about building the interior of a huge and enigmatic mansion, room by room, and each day seeing how close to an almost mythical 46th room you can get. It’s a bit of a deck-builder, a bit of an adventure game, and it’s full of mystery. Seeing the nuance here is as simple as looking at the room cards you’re dealt during the game – the kind you play when you touch a closed door and have to decide what lies beyond. To begin with, these rooms are objects, simple things to be placed, a means to an end. But the longer you play, the more they come alive in your thoughts, as you remember where they were best used or ponder where they might work better. It’s almost as though you give them a personality.

A hallway becomes not just a device for linking rooms together, but a strategically important connector – character – to keep in your deck. Hallways are always unlocked so they work particularly well further up on your house blueprint, where more doors tend to be locked. The specifics aren’t particularly important here but it’s an example of accrued thinking and the way you mentally Sellotape extra meaning to things as you play. And it’s in this thought that the singular magic of games sparkles.

But the object, the thing itself, is unmoving. The variable is you.

Think about a famous painting or a painting you simply know very well. Art, I’ve come to decide, is all about getting a reaction. It’s far better to have someone react to your work and notice it than for onlookers to feel nothing at all. What you want, what you’re after, is someone’s thought. You want people to stop and think momentarily about whatever it is they’re interacting with, because the moment they do is the moment that piece of work starts to stick, starts to connect, starts to live.

Art changes. The way you view a painting, to use a very obvious example, changes depending on how much you know about art or the piece of artwork, or even depending on where you are in life or how you woke up that morning. Start to dig into the story, in particular, and the meaning behind it and the elements you appreciate will change.

It’s the same with a book: read and then re-read it, and perhaps study it, and your relationship with it will change. Learn to play a part in a piece of orchestral music – or learn to act a part in a theatrical play – and the way you think about that music or that play will also change. They will mean more to you and you will find new layers of appreciation for them. But the object, the thing itself, is unmoving. The variable is you.

What marks games out as singular in this regard? A couple of things. With games, thought is mandatory. In a game like Blue Prince, for instance, you have to think in order to progress, so you have to invest. You cannot, as you can in an art gallery, waltz by and only skim the superficial elements of what you see – or watch a play only because it’s got someone famous from TV in it, or to listen to a piece of music simply because it sounds nice. Interacting with things superficially is fine but in a game it will get you nowhere, quite literally. There, your mental investment isn’t optional.

This is a game’s secret trick. It knows it has your attention and mental investment so, slowly, it can begin to demand more from you. It can increase puzzle complexity or challenge difficulty, which are kinds of puzzles anyway – is a boss battle not essentially a puzzle played at speed? It can even hide its truer form in order to reveal it later on, because it knows it’s got you there.

What you see and know of Blue Prince when you begin is quite different to what you know when you’re 30 hours in, or 100 hours in, for example. Just as what you see of Blue Prince in a screenshot when you’re 30 hours in, or 100 hours in, changes too. It’s like a magic eye puzzle that depends not on trying to align your eyes at weird angles and focus levels, but on time invested, and perhaps intelligence. There’s a smug feeling of being in a secret club when you reach this point of understanding, too, of being part of an elite group of people who really ‘know’ what they’re looking at. And the harder it was to get there, to that point of understanding, the more intense the smug becomes.

It doesn’t have to be a puzzle game. I can look at a screenshot from Overwatch, from the early days when I was active, and see not only cool-looking action on the screen but also the visual puzzle in front of me. Who’s alive? Where’s everyone standing? What part of the map are we in? How far is the objective? Should I, or this person whose screenshot I’m looking at, attack or hold back or run away? I get all that in a snapshot glimpse at an image. Hundreds of hours of accrued knowledge dredged up in an instant. That’s what games do.

It helps that games are frequently primarily visual things. So when we see an image from one – even a single one posted alone somewhere – it has the ability to make us feel like we’re playing the game again. It brings it all back. It’s as though there’s a container of game-experience suddenly flipped open somewhere in our brain.

The nature of play has something to do with it, too. By definition games are an interactive thing: you do something and you get a response. Input, output. And the output leads back to…? This inherently makes games a connective thing. They have to connect with us in order to be played. Connection is what? Fundamental.

I feel this every time I review a game and place an image I’ve taken in the article to illustrate it with. I do it to give you an idea of the game I played. But I know that when I place the image, it won’t mean much to you beyond ‘that looks good’ or ‘that looks interesting’ or ‘is it on Game Pass?’. But I see more. I see the experience I’ve just had. I see the characters I’ve felt something for and the journeys they’ve had; I see the puzzles I had to overcome and solve; I see the difficult situations I had to find a way out of. I see and I feel. And I always wonder, when I place these images, how long it will be until you do the same.