Research into the subject of boredom.

“Boredom is an emotional state experienced when an individual is left without anything in particular to do, and not interested in their surroundings”. The first recorded use of the word boredom is in the novel Bleak House by Charles Dickens, written in 1852, in which it appears six times, although the expression to be a bore had been used in the sense of "to be tiresome or dull" since 1768. The French term for boredom, ennui, is sometimes used in English as well.

That paragraph is the first thing you see when you look up the work boredom in Wikipedia, yeah, yeah I know the online wiki isn’t the most reliable website to get information from but we are looking at boredom not the history of life so it’s going to have to do.

So I’ve started researching on the subject of boredom to see if there is any relation to why we play games and seeing if it has any effect on the industry. I found out that boredom is trivial and that’s why we have created things like games. Boredom is when you can’t find something that satisfies you. But I’ve also found out that boredom isn’t boring at all, kind of like I said in my own theory before researching that boredom leads to some pretty amazing things. When you are bored, your brain activity only drops by 5% but more activity is found in the areas responsible for audio biographical memory, thought about others and conducing hypothetical events (imagination).

So I’m trying to see if boredom has any link or connection with why we play games. I looked into the reason as to why we play games and started with “what is a game?” Well Chris Crawford, a games designer, has a whole theory behind it all and in conclusion a game is interactive, goal orientated and must contain agents, e.g. people. But that’s just his theory so it may not even be true. There’s a great article in the New York Times by Robin Marantz Henig about “why we play games”. I also found an experiment, where they took a baby rat and put it with an adult rat for the years of its “childhood” the rat ended up growing up with a lot less brain active as a normal rat all because the adult wouldn’t play with the baby.

Now then we want to find out what all this has to do with games! Well while I was looking at up what a game actually is, I realised that life is a game. Its interactive, its goal orientated and it contains people. So yes according to Chris Crawford’s theory life is just one big over complicated game. But why have we created video games? We have created them because the goals in life are sometimes very hard to achieve and you can never know if you make the right choices, e.g. I have no idea if the career that I’m going into is the best for me or if the people I am friends with are on my side. Life is hard, and that’s why we have created video games that provide fast, easy to achieve and understandable rewards to make up for the long roads in life. Games give us the satisfaction that life can’t offer us. It makes the unknown easy. When I play chess I know exactly what each piece does and I know exactly how to win the game, where as in life I have no clue when the game of life might even end.