Game Psychology

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The Angry Gamer

March 16, 2010 in Game Psychology | 3 comments

broken ps3 controllerA few minutes ago I got a text message from a friend of mine who’s been playing Assassin’s Creed 2 on his PS3. The message read “Turns out AC2 is a very frustrating game, and this controllers fly apart like a chinese motorcycle.. lol”, with it the following photo (see left) was attached. I was disturbed, but not surprised, to see that kind of behaviour in a 30 year old man. The same went for a friend of mine whose 4 year old son threw his Gamecube controller at the family LCD tv, smashing it to pieces (see below). A mother I knew had two young sons who fought incessantly over the use of the computer to play Ultima Online, to the point of one of them destroying it in rage and jealousy. I asked myself: why do people become destructive in an activity that is supposed to be pleasurable?

I can remember my first bout of rage at a video game: it was ChopLifter for the Sega Master System when I was 12 years old. After many hours of play I had managed to get to one of the last levels without losing a single helicopter. In a matter of 30 seconds as I tried to fly through a cavern full of lava, I lost all three of my lives. I distinctly remember shrieking in rage, trying to rip the controller into shreds, and finally throwing it into the wall (to no avail). I shut off the system and stomped off, never to play the game again.

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When do you call a game a Game?

March 11, 2010 in Game Industry, Game Psychology, Game Research, Irritating Rants, Philosophy | 12 comments

Yesterday I happened across an article about comic books in a local newspaper (See Magazine for fellow Edmontonians). In his fantastic article (please, read it first!), When Do You Call a Comic a Comic?, Kenton Smith reasons out the essence of comic books. Kenton laboriously works through all of the usual options: it is an expression of the imagination through illustration, a “juxtaposition of words and pictures”, a non-linear narrative medium, a dynamic moment expressed in a static frame?

All of those answers – yes they are, and no they aren’t, X – get us no closer to answering his initial question. And that’s the same question we’ve been trying to face for years in the gaming world. When do we call a game a game? Michaël Samyn and Auriea Harvey’s (Tale of Tales) creations The Endless Forest, the Graveyard, and The Path all provoked a response from gamers. Some praised their willingness to experiment with what has become a starkly conventional medium. Others simply raged with incredulity at what they saw lacking in terms of gameplay, while others said things akin to, “I want to tell you that, in its most banally distilled form, The Path is a game about exploration, risk, patience and vulnerability – but I’m hampered by the obvious fact that The Path is just not a game. At all.”

That last response is the one that interests me most. In some ways, it reflects the problem that Kenton Smith runs into in trying to define comic books in terms of their essential structure. Although Kenton is obviously sensitive to the importance of a reader’s experience in defining what a comic book “is”, he does not approach the question that way. Similarly, I think that most of us get caught up in using language that tries to define a game as “a thing” rather than as a kind of experience that we have. We create a problem for ourselves when we think of games only as things with definable properties separate from ourselves, when really no problem exists at all. We continue to try defining games as objects with properties – as Igor Hardy attempts to do in this recent article on adventure games – and end up confusing ourselves over what they really are for us. (Edit: Be sure to read Igor’s article and the comments below it, as well as the exchange between Igor and I. We have a lot more in common than I originally assumed!) In this article, I provide an alternative to the current understanding of games, and hope that it gets us out of this foxhole.

(Note: Chris Crawford’s wonderfully written The Art of Computer Game Design is a step in the right direction I think, but not a complete one)

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Trying to Catch the Wind: An Interview with Jenova Chen, Part 1

January 25, 2010 in Artful Games, Game Art, Game Psychology, Interviews | 4 comments

Flower (PS3)

“We should find ourselves indulging in similar daydreams if we started musing under the cone-shaped roof of a wind-mill. We should sense its terrestrial nature, and imagine it to be a primitive hut stuck together with mud, firmly set on the ground in order to resist the wind. Then, in an immense synthesis, we should dream at the same time of a winged house that whines at the slightest breeze and refines the energies of the wind. Millers, who are the wind thieves, make good flour from storms.” – Gason Bachelard, The Poetics of Space.

At the 2009 GDC, I had the opportunity to sit down with Jenova Chen, a designer and developer who needs no introduction. Over 10 months later, Jamie Love of GameSugar.net persuaded me to publish the interview in the form of a podcast. Many hours of editing later (thanks Jamie!) the first part of a two-part interview is now available online.

You can listen to the interview in a flash player here, or download the mp3 directly. (Warning to the bandwidth-challenged: the file is 75mb)

I hope you enjoy listening to Jenova’s thoughts on the relation between art and games – it’s a rare opportunity to sit down with such a generous and articulate soul. Part 2 of the interview is forthcoming, and like this one will be posted on GameSugar.net.

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The Humble and Valiant (ie. Filthy Rich/Powerful) Hero

November 26, 2009 in Artful Games, Game History, Game Psychology, Irritating Rants, Philosophy | 19 comments

keef-thiefInto my first 10 hours of Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, I’m already flush with gold. My gnomish gunsmith, despite his commitment to doing only good deeds in the world, has a silver tongue and he’s already bedded one of the girls at Madam Lil’s (a bawdy house) in Tarant for free. He struts around Tarant with not a party of likeminded adventurers, but groupies attracted by his charismatic charm.

I’m nearing the end of Fallout 3, and my wasteland ranger who has spent most of his adult life trying to free the wastes from oppression and slavery, is loaded with every kind of ammunition and ranged weaponry imaginable. Despite his meek and non-aggressive social demeanour, there is nothing humble about someone who’s packin’ a Fat Boy – a shoulder-launched nuke weapon – around all day.

While both of these games always offer a “high road” approach to moral choices in conversation as we would expect in a contemporary RPG, the games still rely upon a highly individualistic and egocentric play structure. In this article I try to understand how games supposedly devoted to allowing moral choices, in fact offer highly hypocritical experiences for the do-gooder player. (Spoiler-alert for Planescape: Torment and Ultima IV near the bottom of the article.)

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Body Armour and the Problem of “Avataritis”

October 16, 2009 in Game Art, Game Psychology, Irritating Rants | 15 comments

masterchiefToday, Martyn Zachary of The Slow Down posted a very lucid reconsideration of the industry’s current obsession with what he calls “avataritis”: the phenomenon of adding character customization to every game and in doing so attempting to fully cater to the player’s conscious desires. Martyn (successfully, I think) argues that character customization (ie. create-your-own-avatar) in games is a feature at odds with itself. He writes,

Customization may seem to offer developers and players alike a chance to mask, to separate an avatar from its perfunctory position and move it closer to the player, bridging the gap between various players of different origins, but due to the avatar’s function as a literary element, a character never does become perfectly liberated from its original environs and place of creation.

After wading through so many awful, pretentious and intellectualistic blog posts over the years, Martyn’s post seized me right away. It is thoughtful, smart, and honest. And important to anyone who thinks in terms of the idea of a gamer community, it leaves the door open for re-articulation and consideration; not just opinion launching. But before, before you read my response, read Martyn’s excellent article for yourself.

In this article I want to very quickly sketch out my re-take of Avataritis, and try to contextualize the problem in terms of a psychology of defense, and show that gamers fall prey to some of the same problems that my students do. I may just fall into a pit of crocodiles on this one, so read generously ;)

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An Expedition into the Lost World of Exploration: ToeJam & Earl

September 23, 2009 in Artful Games, Game Psychology, Mainstream Games, Retro Gaming | 4 comments

Toe_Jam__EarlThe extremely thoughtful and critical comments in response to my previous post got me thinking about the role of exploration in games. In this post I’ll try to do some justice to how gamers can still hang on to a sense of exploration for its own sake, and enjoying games as a form of pure entertainment.

Last night I was sitting with a friend of mine talking about our experiences playing games as kids. We were surprised to learn that we had both owned the cult classic (yet poorly marketed) ToeJam & Earl for the Sega Genesis/Mega-Drive in the 1990’s and brought back some fond memories for each of us.

Its re-appearance on the Wii Virtual Console was a welcome gesture, but I was disappointed with reviewer responses who felt that characters move “lethargically slow”, the gameplay was “unfair”, the funky visual style too “dated” to be enjoyable, and that its 16-bit synth music was too crippled for contemporary gamers. At the same time, most of these reviewers begrudgingly admit that it’s likely a “classic” and enjoys some nostalgic street cred, especially for its two player co-op mode.

After reading those reviews, I realized that ToeJam & Earl - a cult staple of the average SEGA generation child’s household – has become just another brief glint in the endless library of emulated games available for casual play. This is where I want to part ways with the average reviewer out there, and try to show why ToeJam & Earl is still an important game today, and offers something wonderful to the kind of curious, exploration-driven, non-competitive, fun-loving, and non-violent child (or adult!) gamer that we talked about previously. It’s a game that you should be playing with your partner, your child, or a close friend, right now. Nostalgia for its own sake is a very real, and I think very dangerous, part of reflecting on older video games. I think that re-vitalizing them and finding value in them for a new generation is a noble, and difficult task. I’ll do my best.

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The New Dark Continent of Childhood

September 15, 2009 in Game History, Game Psychology, Game Research | 17 comments

lost_worldThis morning I was doing some research for an article I’ve always wanted to write about Jordan Mechner’s magnum opus, The Last Express. Among the wonderful treasures I found, including an unfinished script for a prequel to TLE, was a link to Michael Chabon’s NY Review of Books article titled, “Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood.” In the article, Chabon laments the disappearance of a form of childhood that all of us (in our 30’s and 40’s and older) remember with conflicting emotion. The kind of childhood where a kid, even in the most urbanized environment, would freely explore every dark forest, alleyway and abandoned lot with a pack of her or his friends. It was a childhood experienced as a neighbourhood of familiar and tempting and scary things. In this article I want to take Michael Chabon’s wonderful article and turn it towards gaming, and see how the disappearance of “exploration” and “excellence” has influenced a new generation of gamers.

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Games We Can Dwell Within – What is Interactive Space?

September 4, 2009 in Artful Games, Game Psychology, Retro Gaming | 3 comments

comi-4-full_smallCorvus Elrod’s Blogs of the Round Table for September managed to tempt me out of my self-imposed thesis writing /afk, with one of the most interesting BoRT topics I’ve seen. To boot, the topic is exactly what my PhD dissertation is being written on: how can we conceive of “space” – spatial relationships, objects in space – in video games?  If games are, as Chris Crawford claims (ffwd to 4:32), a “fundamentally spatial” artistic medium – we better understand what the heck the word “spatial” really means for us as gamers. (Thank you to Kimari of Indigo Static for passing along the video.)

When we think of computer and video games, the word “space” is almost automagically translated into “coordinate space” or Cartesian space. After all, almost all games since the late 70’s used some kind of X/Y coordinate system to plot pixels on a screen; in the 90’s that became X/Y/Z space as 3D games took off. This is a technological understanding of space – it envisions space as a kind of empty vacuum in which objects can be arranged in a consistent way – and we perceive those objects according to some kind of spatial formula (ie. 2D or 3D coordinates).

I want to affirm a very different understanding of “spatial” than what most gamers and writers think it means. Space, as we experience it playing games, is not a Cartesian coordinate system for representing objects, characters, narrative, or sound… I believe that there is a much deeper understanding of space in video games that we implicitly live as we play them. And I’ll try doing articulating this different theory of space without any kind of techno-jargon — just a bunch of examples from a game that expresses the kind of space I’m talking about. My point is going to be that gamers experience space in a totally different way than mathematicians like Descartes did or programmers do.

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The Poetics of Super Mario World

June 5, 2009 in Artful Games, Game History, Game Psychology, Retro Gaming | 3 comments

smw-sm

Although I am still living in exile from my beloved blog, I did manage to get an editorial piece published over at Toronto Thumbs. In it I reflect on the problem of “nostalgia” and whether playing old games is a case of wearing rose-coloured glasses, or does it have to do with something something deeper..

Thank you to the Toronto Thumbs staff for giving me this opportunity to write something for them, especially to Sir Jamie Love for the impetus to try writing this in the first place.

Bye for now. Miss y’all!

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Re-thinking Interface “Design”

April 16, 2009 in Game Psychology, Mainstream Games, Philosophy | 18 comments

notoolsMatthew Gallant posted an interesting commentary that confronts video game interfaces with Donald Norman’s ubiquitous book on design, The Design of Everyday Things. There is some sense in the three design principles that Norman distils from his analyses of well-designed everyday objects, and Matthew has done a wonderful job of translating them for game designers.

In this article I try to plead a case against ”good” interface design. Rather, I would like to see interfaces that frustrate the gamer and encourage them to explore the game’s world creatively, rather than instrumentally.

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Searching for Imaginative Space? Apply From Within.

April 15, 2009 in Artful Games, Game Psychology, Philosophy, Retro Gaming | 12 comments

infocom_ad1The recent excitement, and subsequent furor, over the new Legends of Zork browser-based online roleplaying game inspired me to think about how much we have changed as a gamer culture since the days of text-based adventure games.

For many of us, Zork hangs among our earliest memories of computer games. In many ways the series’ massive fanbase – in its entire gamut of casual and hardcore and obsessive players – is our miniature equivalent of the Star Wars fanbase: it is rabid.. it demands quality.. it cannot tolerate any deviation from canon.

So designing a new game based on the Zork franchise was a dicey and dangerous decision, especially considering the close ties the series has with the history of video games in general (it was among the first games derived from Colossal Cave Adventure). Stakes were high for everyone involved.

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The Storied Imagination: Finding Meaning in Games

February 6, 2009 in Artful Games, Game Psychology, Game Writing | 5 comments

blacksmithThis is a short post, in reply to an articulate exposition of the concepts of “szujet” and “fabula” by Corvus over at Man Bytes Blog. His patient and detailed consideration of fabula – a theoretical consideration of the narrative order of events – gives us an idea of what the Russian formalists had in mind when they conceived of narratives and stories. So please, head over to Man Bytes Blog and read his post and the comments to it before continuing here, as I will respond to his analysis of narrative as best I can. I apologize if this seems a bit of an academic conversation, but I think we are in ripe territory for a powerful re-imagining of what the story means in relation to storytelling in games.

Note: This is way too long, but it is the quickly-written culmination of six years of study in my life. I’d like to thank Corvus for launching us into the heart of the problem concerning stories and games. Without the kind of community that has come together through Man Bytes Blog, this quality of discussion would never be possible.

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Staying out of Never-Never Land

October 7, 2008 in Game Psychology, Retro Gaming | 12 comments

Michael Abbott of the Brainy Gamer has me thinking again. His latest two provocative posts concern how we think about games – a child’s fancy or an adult’s pursuit. Ultimately, Michael and the great majority of commenters seem to side with the ‘games are serious business’ camp.. which I am no doubt sympathetic towards (why else would I write here!). After all, every morning for the last month I’ve spent 30 minutes on the train playing the original Final Fantasy VII on my PSP, nervously avoiding the glances of curious riders. It does feel exposing playing games in front of other adults.

For me, however, something’s missing. I don’t play games because they’re serious business. Sure, I can defend why they’re serious to other adults – but when I play them that’s not what I have in mind. And I even research games (ie. follow it through and record some observations, do background reading, etc) … but that’s not playing the games. Playing a game involves something else – a suspension of desire, a willingness to invest oneself in the world and accept it at its face value. In this very short article I want to explore the idea that in order for games to move or grip us, they must remain toys or forms of childish entertainment. Seems counterintuitive?

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