Analysis of James Newman's 'The Myth of the Ergodic Videogame: Some Thought on Player-Character Relationships in Videogames'

James Newman suggests that, in terms of the features of the game, the visual representation of things do not matter as much as the actual functions the game's mechanics in how it creates a good game. Newman specifically excludes the advertisement and marketing of games, and focuses more on the game-play. He says that the pleasures of video games lie in the mechanics of the game and how it feels rather than whether or not it's aesthetically pleasing, and even so players may not even need to physically play games to enjoy them, but can experience them through different means and by other ways of engagement. The pleasures of games can be felt through sound and visuals as well as the physical control of the game itself. Cut-scenes and stories can also remind us of events in our lives or past, thus further developing a player's experience of the video game.

Newman attempts to right the "mistake [of considering] that [games] present only one type of experience and foster only one type of engagement." He believes that games are not ergodic, meaning not all games possess the same qualities, purposes and ways of connecting to players, yet they all have similar traits in these.

Newman is a professor and senior lecturer in film, media and creative computing who researches and writes about video games. He himself also plays video games, therefore he may be drawing these ideas from his own experiences. He may have played some games from which he may have drawn multiple experiences and emotions from, and may look for a different variety of things in his video games, and base his choices on that. However, there are people who prefer games to be more aesthetically pleasing, and draw more enjoyment through that than any other aspect of a game. They may not mind if the mechanics are simple and instead think the simple mechanics and the way you play the video game contributes to the beauty of the game's visual features.

I personally think I find the author's argument quite persuasive, though perhaps because I had a similar view to these things myself before reading the extract. This is due to the fact that I have enjoyed several different types of games which have given me different types of experiences. I also do not need to only find enjoyment in a video game by physically controlling said game. There are many popular videos of video game play-throughs on YouTube nowadays and I enjoy following a lot of them. While I think people may disagree with Newman's stance on video games, I believe they may see his points but rather argue the point of how important things are to a game.