Game Psychology

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The Neurotic Joy of Gaming

August 31, 2010 in Game Psychology, Philosophy | 3 comments

Nels Anderson recently pointed out a post over at Jamie Madigan’s Psychology of Video Games blog. While Madigan’s post does not really say anything new (and is based on the kinds of experimental social scientific research that went out of style in the 1960s – sorry, couldn’t help myself), it does bring up the most important unanswered question that we have as gamers: Why do we play video games?

Nels takes us a large step in the right direction towards understanding this problem when he observes (in his own response to Madigan’s post) that, “We need better ways to talk about what makes games enjoyable.” Gamers, I’ve found, lack articulacy when it comes to understanding our own experiences playing games. Sure, we can go on for hours about what we like/dislike about the game’s rules or design, which characters we found empathizable and which we could not connect with, or how “immersive” the world is. But that’s not the same as being articulate about our own experiences and what they mean to us. Speaking articulately about ourselves requires some kind of language to put things into perspective, especially when it comes to sketching out what makes playing games so darned enjoyable.

Towards that, I want to play with the idea of “mastery” that both Madigan and Nels mention, and how mastering a game is its own enjoyment.

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The Changing Nature of Gaming Interfaces

July 9, 2010 in Game History, Game Psychology, Game Research, Philosophy | 23 comments

The other day I was having coffee with friends who brought their 2 1/2 year old son over for a visit. He was bored, looking for anything to do in our (boring) house – so I handed him an original Game Boy with Super Mario Land 2. I figured that a toddler would enjoy smashing the Game Boy’s bulletproof buttons, making Mario run and jump, and hearing the ear-piercing four-channel music. He took the Game Boy from my hand with interest, and held onto it in the familiar way that all of us hold portables. He looked at the cabbage-green screen and squealed, “MARRIOO!” I asked his mother if he had played games before, and she said, “Oh yeah. He loves playing kiddie games on our iPhone.”

I turned back to her son, and he was frowning intently at the Game Boy. He reached out tentatively and pushed on the plastic screen. Nothing happened. He pushed again, in a different spot. Nothing. I reached over and pushed a button – Mario jumped. He looked at me with a puzzled expression, and turned back to the game. I eventually had to slide his fingers over to the D-Pad and buttons, pushed them down a few times to show him how it worked, and he started to “get it”.

I realized in that moment that we are now living in a time when the standard D-PAD + Buttons layout can no longer be assumed the “standard” way of playing a game. A new generation of players are growing up with motion-based interfaces from Sony (the upcoming Playstation Move), Nintendo (Wii MotionPlus, Balance Board), Harmonix (Rock Band), as well as touch based devices from Apple (iPod Touch/iPhone). Where the 1980s and 1990s almost always guaranteed a familiar mediating interface – whether it be a keyboard, mouse, or D-Pad – I wonder at how the recent explosion of alternative interfaces has changed the way gamers understand what a game is?

For instance, can we really say that Myst or Monkey Island 2 SE for PC are the “same games” as their iPhone variants? On what basis could we distinguish between our experience of playing the two (temporarily setting aside differences in sound quality, resolution, etc)? Is the “touch” aspect really that different from a point-n-click interface using the mouse?

I’m going to waffle here, because I just don’t know. And here’s why:

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A New Bicycle? The Art of Monkey Island 2 Special Edition

May 20, 2010 in Game Art, Game History, Game Psychology, Retro Gaming | 20 comments

The other day I was shopping at “Canadian Tire” (a chain of department stores in Canada, like Wal-Mart), and I noticed a father loading a brand new pink bicycle onto his truck. I saw it as a girly bike – the kind with multicoloured tassels flaring from the handle grips, white plastic training wheels haphazardly poking out of the sides, and a bare frame anxiously waiting to have My Little Pony stickers pasted all over it. I smirked a bit, and kept walking. As I passed the man’s truck, I saw his little girl sitting on the passenger seat, peering through the back window as her father loaded the bike. The look on her face – I cannot find the words to express it – was ecstatic! She was bouncing all over the seat, squealing excitedly like only a 4-year-old can. Like the infamous N64 Kids she looked to be in sheer bliss.

I remember that when I was young, getting a new game was about as exciting as my father coming home with a new bicycle. As I’ve mentioned in a prior post, Monkey Island 2 has a special place in my heart. It was the first game that my sister and I pooled our money together for, after months of back-breaking work on our farm, feeding horses and mowing acres of lawn. In those days, the recession of the early 1990s was hitting my family pretty hard. My mother was attending university at the time, and my father’s carpentry business was not going well at all; money was a constant problem around the house. While my parents paid my sister and I an allowance for doing chores around the acreage, I knew that an allowance was a frivolity that my parents could barely afford. Buying a new game with months worth of our pooled chore money was a big deal.

I would tear open the box as soon as we had left the store, and start digging into the manual. The 45-minute car ride back to my family’s acreage was like torture. The Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge box art (painted by Steve Purcell) became a playground for my imagination; by the time we arrived home I had already created a world and story based on what I saw on the box. My sister and I traded pieces of the game back and forth as we drove home, but inevitably there was something about the box’s front cover art that we both were attracted to. There was something about the cover art that invoked our imaginations. It had horrible tension, an utterly terrifying pirate on the front, and it told a story in one glance: whoever that guy is on the left, he’s in trouble!

So when the new cover art appeared recently for the upcoming release of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, I could not help but notice a stylistic change in the box art. I could not put my finger on it, but it felt like something was missing in the overall presentation. Fearing that this was mere nostalgia rearing its ugly head, I decided to do a side-by-side comparison of the old and the new box art, as well as some of Steve Purcell’s previously unreleased box art. In this article I borrow some terminology from an art critic by the name of Heinrich Wölfflin to help out in distinguishing between the two styles. Keep in mind that I’m no art historian or critic, so any errors I make are mine alone, and not Wölfflin’s. Thanks to Martyn Zachary of Slowdown.vg for posting his own comparison, and my friend Melinda for letting me know about Wölfflin in the first place.

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The Angry Gamer

March 16, 2010 in Game Psychology | 12 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 | 14 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 | 7 comments


“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 | 22 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 | 17 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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