Just over a decade ago, the game running constantly in the background of my mind and the one that I would rush home from school to play was Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast. The single-player campaign was forgettable (especially in comparison to its predecessor); what had me hooked were its online duels. Forgoing the more chaotic free-for-all arena fights, duel servers were set up to rotationally allow two players to duel, lightsabers only, while everyone else watched. The winner stayed to fight another round while the loser was swapped out with the next player in line.

For a time, this seemed incredible to me: switching fighting stances on the fly, moving/jumping/rolling all around the arena, and always keeping your finger primed to mash if you got into a saber lock. I was caught up in this simulation of swordfighting: the responsiveness, the dynamism, the viscerality of it all. I felt it was the closest I’d ever had to a “true dueling experience.” And then I realized the absurdity of it all. The best players were not good duelists, they were simply good at entering the button sequences required to pull of special moves and exploiting their opponents when they fumbled in doing so. When this realization settled in, I felt silly. Here I was, thinking I was experiencing the thrill of swordfighting when all I was doing was mashing keys.

But this isn’t an entirely fair assessment. What I had more accurately been doing was experiencing some of the thrill of swordfighting through abstracted engagement. A click of the mouse is a far cry from swinging a sword, but if the effect is the same (albeit in a simulated form) and its consequences believable, surely it’s not without some of that responsiveness/dynamism/viscerality that swept me up in the first place.

This week I’ve observed a similar pattern in myself playing Infinity Blade II. “I can dodge and block and parry and it’s all so intuitive and natural!” But still all I’m actually doing amounts to taps and swipes on this tiny device in my hands. Yet I’m excited by it: I’ve been given the opportunity to swordfight competently without any of the usual investment or risk. I’ve got enough options ready at my fingertips to feel like I’m responding smartly and dynamically to any given situation. And then I can watch someone else heft the weapon and take the hits and pretend that it’s me.

But it’s a delicate balancing act: take away too much of the player’s investment and consequence and they no longer feel engaged. Pile on too much of these and they feel overwhelmed. There’s a thin line to tread in simulating experience and what we want, I think, is to have the bulk of an experiential payoff available to us after a relatively trivial exertion of effort. This is why Guitar Hero caught on as it did: by reducing the guitar-playing experience to timing and button presses and tying correct execution to rock-out soundtracks, I can feel like a rock star without having to climb that ladder.

It might be “better” to actually learn to swordfight or to play the guitar; these real-world pursuits have auxiliary benefits that aren’t captured in game simulation, but it’s a whole heck of a lot less accessible. And what of the more fantastical? I’ll never have the opportunity to fight a dragon; that’s something I’ll only ever be able to enjoy through simulation. Perhaps, one day, when we achieve fully immersive virtual reality, I’ll have to reexamine this topic. But for now I am content with a little abstraction. Are they still games if they’re indistinguishable from reality?