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.

Mastery as Pleasure

Nels writes,

… there are certainly some [games] where I engaged with the story and characters (Planescape: Torment, Fallout, any adventure game, etc.). But the majority of my favourites would be games where I had the opportunity to master their systems, to improve skills. I think this also helps explain why so many games can have a terrible story and lackluster writing but still be a very satisfying experience…

I share in his enjoyment of mastery and skill acquisition, as I think most gamers do. Recently I’ve been playing through Final Fantasy VII again, and re-acquainting myself with the world after a long hiatus. Even though this is the n’th time I’ve played through the game, I’m always finding out something new and surprising (I truly didn’t understand Elemental materia until now, for instance) – or learning how to exploit certain areas of the game to maximize my characters’ levels. Anyone who has played Tetris understands the joy of mastery (think of your pleasure at completing four unbroken rows).

Mastery as Unpleasure

At the same time, mastery is not the only way in which we enjoy things. Often, mastery stands in the way of enjoyment. For instance, there is a large nature preserve near our city that my fiancée Stacey and I like to go hiking at. It is a large and complex forest, with plenty of trails to get lost on. We have hiked with people who wish to master the trails: they want to know all of the short-cuts, the fastest way to get from beginning to end, the most efficient method of eating (on your feet!), etc etc. When Stacey and I go for a hike, it’s to see the scenery. The land, the trees and the water all speak to us – we have to be very still, very silent some times for this to happen. This kind of joy cannot happen when we distance ourselves from the park by trying to master it.

Back to gaming. I worry that gaming has become predominantly a means for mastering imaginary places. Shadow of the Colossus, as a game that definitely lends itself to killing things, becomes an exercise in dominating other beasts. The rich joys that it’s sparse landscape evokes are passed over in favour of a joy of control, mastery, usage. The same can be said for games like World of Warcraft that throw the player into an exploitative form.

This is especially obvious when, as Madigan recognizes, many of us primarily play games as “to temporarily detach escape from reality, including our jobs or school. While some games leave us whit knuckled, others can be very relaxing. And at their heart, games are about mastery, developing new skills, or acquiring new knowledge.” Games have become a way of managing psychological symptoms – they allow us to withdraw from the stressors and responsibilities that fill our everyday lives. Our desire for mastery in the private world of games seems to point, most obviously, to a desire for control that is unmet in our public lives. We turn to games to fulfill that desire, and they become what is termed (in Freudian language) “substitute-gratifications” or “neurotic pleasures”. Gaming, when negatively defined as a way of managing work or school stress, is a form of repression. That is what I call a “negative definition” of gaming – a method for modulating stress without realizing anything positive in itself. Work now circumscribes and enframes play. That is a dangerous place to be in.

The Way Out (or: Poetic Joy)

I wish to resist that pessimistic interpretation. That is what got Freudian psychoanalysis into trouble in the first place, because he saw the end-product of civilization to be repression. I would rather follow the path that Norman O. Brown carves out in his magnum opus Life Against Death (Chapter XVI: The Resurrection of the Body) and Gaston Bachelard does in his Poetics of Space. Joyful living: true enjoyment, free from the burden of repression, “pure sublimation” as Bachelard calls it, is possible. This activity is called Play. Playfulness – expression as a pleasure in itself – does not abhor boundaries nor does it see them as unbreakable “rules”. Play takes boundaries and makes them part of its expressive dynamism. Work – all of our institutionalized settings – become places for playing. But playfulness for adults is not the naïve polymorphous perversity that we see in infants. Adults must learn to play through the language, cultural practices and institutions that we live in, whether we like them or not. Video games and work are two of those institutions.

I see the “poetic imagination” as one source for the joys of play. When I imagine through the world that a story, a poem, or a game  has to offer, part of me is “in the game” and part of the game “is in me”. I cannot distinguish very easily between myself and this imaginary world. In those moments, where I allow myself to imagine freely while respecting the world the place has to offer, I am at my most playful. I see things that I did not see before. I feel things – fear, pleasure, anger, surprise, disgust – that I did not feel when I stood outside of the world and peered into it from a distance. That world calls out new emotions and experiences from me – Shadow of the Colossus is no longer a series of quests with colossi that must be overcome in order to complete it, but an austere landscape that allows Agro’s trot, canter and gallop, to explode with vitality. Watching Agro run, and imagining the wild thunder of its hoofbeats echoing across the canyon, is a pleasure of its own. Feeling the awesome earthquake of a colossi’s footfalls as Wander stumbles madly to get away is frightening. As I play and use the world’s contours to enrich my imagination, I am reminded that I not only have a body, but that I am a body.

Becoming Expressive

In other words, I sometimes play games to “blow off some steam” from work, or to escape from the nightmarish demands of a student life that stands outside of my control. But when mastery (or domination, violence, aggression, etc) becomes a game’s central source of pleasure, it places a mortgage on my desires, gratifying them temporarily until they rear up again in a few weeks. It is neurotic pleasure.

However, when I fulfill a game with my own imaginings and make myself a part of the world it offers – whatever that might be – and allow myself to be transformed (emotionally, bodily, spiritually) in the process, I enjoy the game in a completely different way that does not pay dues to repression or neurosis. This poetic way of imagining changes the game: I can no longer just shut down the game after a few hours and call it a night. The game dwells in me. I lay awake at night imagining how to express to my fiancée, family, or friends, what I experienced earlier that night. Poetic imagining places within me the demand to become an artist of a kind: to express for others something that demands re-expression. Learning to play a game in that second manner, and showing for others how a game is part of my means for expressing myself, has become my life’s work.

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:

When I play any game, using a standard NES/PS2/PS3/Xbox/GameCube controller layout -- my fingers and thumbs find their places. If it’s a NES, my right thumb handles the A+B buttons while my left thumb takes care of the D-Pad. There are no moments of confusion, I never have to ask myself, “which button is it again?”. The same goes for the PS2 and PS3 games: my fingers know their business. As soon as I settle down to play the game, my fingers are no longer fingers to me. They are a part of the game -- my fingers become something like my mouth when I am speaking -- they spring into action when Mario needs to bound over a Chain Chomp or needs to go down a green pipe. My fingers never become a part of my foreground or focal experience -- in other words, my fingers become repressed parts of my bodily experience.¹ If I had to think about what I was going to do next before committing myself to the act, Super Mario 3 would become unplayable.² In other words, games like Mario 3 require us to forget that we have fingers for a few moments in order to bring a natural flow into the game. Without getting too artsy or mixing metaphors, many games demand that the player become a pianist of a kind.

Mouse-based interfaces that we typically see in adventure games require a different kind of skilfulness. My hand has to learn to map the horizontal two-dimensional space of the mouse to an on-screen virtual space. I have to learn that forwards-is-up, and backwards-is-down, and that I have to move the cursor to the right position in order to make my character do something. In this kind of interface, I still “repress” my hand -- at some point my hand disappears and the cursor becomes invisible to me. The cursor moves simultaneously with my hand. My hand knows where it needs to go on-screen in order to make Guybrush Threepwood pick up a wooden mallet. I don’t think to myself: there is a mallet, and I need to click ‘pick up’, then click on the mallet. Exploring the world of Monkey Island 2 becomes a natural gesture for me.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiYUIcxibtY

(this review demonstrates how focal one’s finger can become when playing Myst on a touch device)

But can the same be said for touch-based devices that require us to make physical contact with the display in order to play the game? For instance, while the Myst interface is more or less the same between the PC/Mac and iPhone versions, the fact that I have to occlude some of the screen with my fingertip in order to “do” something changes the game subtly. Every time I reach forward and click on the screen with my finger I feel the cool glass push back at me, and I leave a fingerprint. There is something very focal in interacting with touch-based devices, because my finger does not fall into the background as easily. Compare that to the PC version: my hand is always on the mouse, my fingers always in their familiar positions on the mouse buttons. They never leave that surface, and the mouse becomes an extension of my body. On the iPod, my finger is constantly leaving the surface, popping in and out of my visual field.

But it’s the same game, right? Not for me. While the iPhone version of Myst is a wonderful port of the original game, I cannot quite dwell in the world simply because I cannot repress my awareness of my fingertips. I feel like I am playing a game. It is not quite bad enough to totally remove me from the world, but it is enough to remind me that yes -- I am playing a game on my iPod Touch and this is a virtual/fictional world that I am interacting with. The PC version of Myst is nothing like that -- when I click something I am reaching into the world and flipping a toggle switch.

Returning to my anecdote: does my friend’s 2 1/2 year old son experience his favourite iPod Touch game as a ‘real’ world? Or is his experience like mine — somewhat disembodied and self-conscious? Is this an inherent problem with touch-based interfaces, or do some of us already experience bodily repression that allows us to ignore our fingertips when we touch the display? How much have designers appreciated the qualitative change in gameplay experience as a result of the massive turn towards touch-based gaming, and have they done anything to respond to it? What are your experiences with touch-based (or even motion-based) interfaces; how do they change your experience of the game?

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.

Left: Steve Purcell’s original box art. Right: the new box art.
(click here to compare the box art at higher resolution)

From Painterly to Linear

Wölfflin wanted to distinguish between artistic styles based on a handful of objective principles. The most important, to me, is his distinction between linear and painterly. Wölfflin himself writes, in a linear style, ”stress is laid on the limits of things; in the other the work tends to look limitless. Seeing by volumes and outlines isolates objects: for the painterly eye, they merge. In [a linear painting] interest lies more in the perception of individual material objects as solid, tangible bodies; in [a painterly painting], in the apprehension of the world as a shifting semblance.” In my own words: linear styles tend to define sharp separations between objects, while painterly styles tend to allow things in the scene to flow into one another. Linear paintings also tend to have “flat” surfaces, make use of photorealism, and are often seen in comic-book style artwork. Painterly works rely upon visible brush strokes that give the piece a “textured” appearance, usually use wider brushes, and mix together uniform colours in the same region for expressive effect.

So how do I see this playing a role in the above paintings? The original Monkey Island 2 box art by Steve Purcell on the left seems to take a more painterly approach, while the new box art on the right takes a more linear approach. Look at LeChuck’s beard in Purcell’s painting: a light source from the mast plays off his beard, creating a strange mix of yellows, browns and oranges. In the new box art, LeChuck’s beard is no longer curly and frazzled, but a series of grey-black blocks. The ropes on Purcell’s work are textured and tactile, while the new artist flattens all texture out of them so they blend into the background. Guybrush goes from a flowing and smooth style in Purcell’s painting, to a series of geometric angles in the new painting (compare the shirt collars and hair for instance).

What does this ACTUALLY mean for a player?

The overall effect is that the second work is presented in a much more linear manner than Purcell’s original (more painterly) work. While the depicted content of the two paintings are almost identical (they both have the same objects), the expressive qualities are certainly different. The new painting “flattens” out all features for an overall balance between each element of the scene; in particular the bodies of LeChuck, the voodoo doll, and Guybrush are “equally important” to the scene. My eye is caught by the pin in LeChuck’s hand, but afterwards I find myself struggling to follow the action of the scene. Guybrush might either be playing Hide-and-Go-Seek, listening to an iPod, or in actual physical pain. I can’t tell, given the (lack of) expression on his face. LeChuck looks non-human, comic bookish, and a hobbyist evil-doer. The monkey on the mast is either whistling or leering. Because nothing is textured or exaggerated for expressive effect, I don’t have much of an emotional “grip” on the scene.

In Purcell’s painting, he is clearly playing favourites: my eye immediately goes to LeChuck’s face, then to what he is staring at (the voodoo doll), then to the threatening hand, and finally to Guybrush’s agonized face. Purcell wants to tell the story of Monkey Island in one glance, and he excels at it. My emotional grip is set up by the kind of story that Purcell is trying to tell, where there is explicit tension between the characters. Guybrush isn’t just in pain, he is in agony as LeChuck tortures him. LeChuck isn’t just a goofy villain with an obsession for voodoo dolls, but a human being-truly-gone-bad, evidenced in his “undead” look. The monkey on the mast looks truly concerned, mirroring our own horror at the sight of LeChuck.

In the end, the new cover art loses all of its dramatic tension, giving way to Monkey Island’s lighter comedic side. The new cover art belongs to a generation of gamers, in my opinion, that welcome flat representation over painterly expression. As photorealism and linear comic book artwork become increasingly popular among gamers, I suspect that we will see less of Purcell’s painterly style, and more linear and representational art styles. Given the differences in how I understand the narrative (see above) through the cover art, a move to linear styles might be to our detriment as gamers who want a good yarn.

At the same time, Wölfflin’s point was there neither linear nor painterly styles are “better” than one another, they just express different things. Ultimately however, this depends on how you see each art style. Which of the above appeals to you more? Why?

Finally, here are some original unreleased paintings that Steve Purcell did for Monkey Island 2. Note that these are even more painterly in style than the final box art:

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.

These days I still get frustrated playing games, but I express it differently – sometimes I take a deep breath and try to change my play-style, other times I become angry and close the game without saving. But on the whole, it feels different. I keep it in the back of my mind that games are a pleasure and a responsibility, and when I’m frustrated it likely has nothing to do with the game itself.

In the case of my friend, whose work life is punctuated by all kinds of unmitigated stresses and frustrations, games offer a space that concentrates his rage and aggression towards others. If they don’t offer him some kind of killing or destruction or competition, the game bores him, so he tends to seek out games that infuriate him.

To me, this is gaming in its most negative sense: a safe substitute object for displaced aggression at life. Freud would, I think, see the “angry gamer” as typical of a repressive society and an underdeveloped psyche; sort of like the sports fan who screams obscenities at the television during a hockey game.

Now, I’m always on the side of acknowledging the salutary nature of gaming and how games can offer personal insight. But in the case of gamer anger, but I earnestly see few opportunities for personal development. It seems to me that this is one of the unanswered questions in gamer psychology, yet one of the crucial ones in terms of the current research on video game violence and aggression. I’m not trying to make a moral judgment on those who express anger as they play games, but rather try to understand the factors involved in that expression. Do you know an ‘angry gamer’, and if so, what were the relevant factors in this person’s (or your own) expression of anger in games?

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)

We call it a game when we are gaming.

I think Kenton’s original question sets us off in the right direction. The question isn’t “what is a game?” (that leads straight into the territory of the confusion I mentioned earlier), but rather, when we’re doing some activity – when do we know that activity is called gaming?

In my opinion, the only place to turn to in order to answer that question is everyday experience. I know I’m playing a game by the kind of activity I’m engaged in. If I’m playing a console game, I hit the PS button on my controller and walk to the kitchen while hearing the familiar orchestra tuning bootup noise. I grab a coke from the fridge and a glass full of ice. My fiancee isn’t home – I take a sip of the ice cold drink with guilty pleasure, because I know she’d scorn me for it if she was there.

I lazily slump down on the couch and load up Trine. After the first few awkward minutes I’m drawn in by the introduction, and begin to lean forward. My elbows are now perched on my knees and my wrists are perfectly parallel to my legs, thumbs resting comfortably on the thumbsticks. My eyes are fixed intently on the screen and they dart around as they attend to highlights and surprises that appear out of nowhere. The rest of the room disappears from around me – literally disappears.. our three cats (despite their annoying whines) are no longer part of my perceptual scene. As I traverse the levels my thumbs do the work on their own accord, although at times my index fingers still haphazardly fumble with the R1/L1 triggers, trying to switch to the right character quickly. The more intense the action, the more I lean forward, until my face is closer to the TV than my hands are. I’m tense, even though the game is not very demanding. When I’m done playing – usually in bored frustration – I don’t even bother saving the game and toss the controller into the corner of the couch. That’s the last I see of my PS3 for a few days.

With PC games, it’s a whole different – yet similar – activity. I walk into my office, and turn on the machine, letting the glow of my cinema display light up the room with its warm blue glow. While the computer boots, I walk over to the kitchen and put on a kettle of tea. While the kettle heats up, I run back to the office to get Mass Effect 2 loading, because I know it’s going to be a few minutes. Stacey says that she’d like to work on her paintings in the office while I’m playing, and I’m glad to have the company. I pour both of us a cup of rooibos and honey, and I turn my complete attention to the game. I get the sense that an entire world is waiting to be explored. I lean back in my chair and watch the introduction cinematic. At first, I can hear Stacey turn her chair to watch it with me – but after the first couple of minutes she loses interest and goes back to her painting. I turn down the sound a little to allow her to concentrate on her artwork; my ears strain even more to involve me in the game’s world.

A very young Chris sits back with nerd pride after finishing Ghostbusters II, while his mom takes a photo of the credits rolling for posterity. That’s Slimer on the screen left side of the screen. (Note the Strongbadesque 3.5″ low-density diskette box behind the printer.)

As I play through the tutorialized introduction, my vision darkens around the peripheries… already the office has begun to disappear around me. A few minutes later, I am fully drawn into the game, I am speaking with fellow marines and scientists around me and shooting at droids that are patrolling the area. When I run, my eyes pay attention only to the center of the screen and allow the details at the fringes to blur around me. When I scrutinize an area for equipment lockers, I walk and check every  dark area of a room, my eyes on the hunt for anything cube-like on the screen. When I’m speaking with other characters, my eyes move between the text at the bottom of the screen and the physiognomy of each character; I find their motion-captured gestures distracting, so I spend more time reading the text. Mostly, I hear their voices – no I feel their voices… the actor’s voices and the text are more tangible to me than the visual scene. Eventually, my body becomes weary and Stacey has long gone to bed – I did not even notice her leaving. It is 1am, and I’m remorseful for not talking with her tonight. But I feel satisfied, as if I’ve completed the first leg of a long journey ahead of me. I am putting my character to sleep, just as I put myself to sleep.

In both of these cases, I have no confusion about what I am doing. I am gaming; I am playing games. I do not need to seek an essential structure in each game, because both evoke from me a certain kind of response – one I recognize as a demand “to sit back and play this for a while”. When the space between me and the game collapse, either due to frustration, boredom, or exhaustion, I know that I am done gaming. The game does not exist for me all of a sudden, and I have other more important things to do.

What does this view afford us?

If we came to understand games as interactive experiences that create “a space for playing”, we would be much closer to figuring out why they are so different (and perhaps similar to) other kinds of activities that we do. And, it would also help to define – I think – the difference between an RPG, an adventure game, or an FPS. They are experientially different and technologically the same. From this view, there is no such thing as a game mechanic outside of the way I play the game.

Developers no longer should focus on trying to get “the right mechanic” – but rather to try setting up a certain kind of experience for the player. If you want the player to play an adventure game, do not introduce control schemes that draw out an FPS experience. If you want the player to experience your game as an RTS, create a space in which their eyes are drawn in all four cardinal directions of the screen, waiting for the ensuing invasion. If you want your game to be experienced as an RPG, you better be able to draw the player into a world they experience as real and meaningful. In the end, the designer has to know a lot more about how players experience a game than what the rules of the game are. That’s why playing your game over and over again – and allowing other people to play it – turns a mediocre game into one worth talking about.

“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.

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.)

The Hero Archetype and the Spiritual Quest

Within many cultural and religious traditions, acts of poverty and self-defacement are seen among the highest forms of piety possible. Vows of poverty, for instance, were a requirement in order to join the righteous Knights Templar (aka. “The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon”). Around the same time, it was not uncommon for Anorexia mirabilis (“miraculous lack of appetite”) among pious women, who later experienced spiritual enlightenment… a famous case being Catherine of Siena, “who purportedly ate nothing but a spoonful of herbs a day, aside from the Eucharist” . Among the Crow aboriginal people of Montana, cutting off a piece of one’s finger and severe fasting were ways of inducing sacred visions. Even for us living in modernity, the whole idea of a spiritual and moral quest somehow involves “giving up oneself” or one’s treasured things in favour of some kind of insight into oneself. In each of these examples there is the sense that one makes self-sacrifice in order to fulfill something greater than oneself – it is an act of good, pure and simple.

Similarly, role-playing games are often premised on a hero whose quest is ordained in relation to some greater good. Mass Effect’s Commander Shepherd is a potential galactic saviour, Jack of BioShock wishes to escape his imprisonment and save the little sisters, the Avatar of Ultima VIII: Pagan wishes to return to his own world, Cloud of Final Fantasy VII is on the trail of his nemesis Sepiroth, the Fallout 3 protagonist begins with a search for her/his father, and Crono and the gang are on a quest to prevent the destruction of the world in Chrono Trigger. (In most of these games it is equally possible to refuse the higher calling, but I will confront this later.)

All of these games are premised in some kind of moral choice that the player must make.

In most of these games, I attempt to play a character that is capable of saving his (sometimes her) own butt in a pinch, but ultimately tries to live quietly and benevolently. In most cases, PC-NPC dialogues support a Ned Flanders type character through the traditional Good/Neutral/Evil response options, although sometimes requires a bit of tactfulness on my part to make things work out morally for the character. Threat of violence is a last resort.

Yet, despite my social niceties, in almost every one of these games, I can expect to be dozing on a bed of filthy lucre, armoured like a steel triceratops, and carrying an arsenal of weapons capable of total world annihilation a few times over, by the end of the game. It usually ends up in some final boss fight where I have to put all of my destructive

powers to the test in order to vanquish the Enemy (whether it is a character or a problem of some kind). Inevitably, my decked-out party overcomes the Enemy and happiness is granted to the universe once more. My character (and her/his party) is exalted into glory, and occasionally the hero(ine) wins over the love interest. I watch the ending cinematic, give a few Oscar nods to the friends and family who made it all possible, and call it a game.

Yet, days later, I feel like Conan the Barbarian, sitting on his throne at the end of the first film like a king who has done it all yet feels ultimately unfulfilled. This is when the spiritual hollowness of traditional RPGs grates at me.

The hero’s quest, which was originally a spiritual quest of the ilk I described earlier, has become literalized into a gradual accrual of power; in doing so the chances for spiritual development and transformation are almost completely squashed. Rather than going through a process of “giving up” oneself for a greater good, and later realizing that evil is always carried within oneself and not ‘out there in the world’ – as we see in traditional piety, the modern RPG hero/heroine does the opposite – s/he overcomes evil by destroying it. I still go through the rituals of self-sacrifice and a whole lot of blood’n'sweat’n'tears, but they are all motivated toward making myself a demi-god.

The Hypocritical/Moralistic Hero

In that light, traditional RPGs – not all of them mind you! – produce what I’d like to call the “hypocritical hero” or the “moralistic hero”. This is the hero that always gives out 10 gp to beggars on the street, knowing that s/he has 4500 gp resting comfortably in the larders. There is no real self-abasement this hero’s acts; it is temporary inconveniencing under a mask of generosity. Sort of like the guy who lambasts anyone who doesn’t drink Eco-Friendly coffee, and proceeds to drive his Hummer to work.

I should note: I have purposely neglected the “evil” hero in the prior thoughts because many RPGs already lend themselves to this kind of role-playing. I can simply choose the “bad guy” conversation options and live out my days as a greedy gunslinger with an attitude. The point is that the evil hero is fully supported by the game, because s/he is guaranteed to be rich and powerful by the end of the game. There is no hypocrisy possible for the evil hero; most RPGs already celebrate this kind of behaviour in the gameplay itself.

Notable Exceptions

Here be spoilers: At the same time, there are some major exceptions to my characterization of RPGs. The Nameless One of Planescape: Torment begins on an identity quest that is ultimately resolvable in a very different manner than the kind I noted earlier. While the evil and greedy incarnations of The Nameless One can be role-played throughout the game effectively, the “good” character can resolve his identity by embracing his symbolic shadow. He learns his true name in an act of humility and self-acceptance. The Nameless One can fulfill his spiritual quest without destroying or battling anyone as he realizes that he has always faced an inner (moral) battle. He makes no use of his accrued power, swords or sorcery, and instead relies upon the insight that he is the source of his own evils. In other words, the “good” ending is truly possible in Torment. Equally possible are the evil or instrumental endings, but those are premised against the possibility of being truly regretful of his past sins.

In another example, the protagonist (yourself) of Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar is sent on a spiritual quest, although this one is not particularly about you. It is about the meaning of things and the discovery of a moral reality that underlies all acts of good and evil in the world of Britannia. It is about saving a world gone to petty thievery and selfishness. Acknowledging the virtues (Honesty, Compassion, Valor, Justice, Honor, Sacrifice, Spirituality, Humility) involves the player discovering ways of practicing each of these virtues in the game itself. Like the Knights Templar, acts of sacrifice and compassion are a requirement for membership in this game. And like Planescape, the game is not resolved in an epic battle made possible by insane physical strength or mental powers, but by answering 8 questions that test your knowledge of the virtues themselves. One of the final phrases asks, “What, in knowing the true self, knows all?” To the modern gamer, ending an RPG with philosophical questions would be unimaginable. At the same time, an “evil” or selfish ending is not possible in this game – the game is only resolvable if you accept and fulfill the quest of being the Avatar (the embodiment) of the virtues.
/end spoilers.

Concluding Thoughts

What I’ve been trying to get at in this article is that despite our appreciation that games are meaningful, they often celebrate the worst aspects of our humanity (selfishness, the desire to dominate others) with the guise of moral righteousness. Worse, games like Arcanum, the Final Fantasy series, and Fallout 3 make it completely impossible to complete a game without needing to max out the protagonist’s attributes and inventory and in doing so celebrate adolescent power fantasies. The original spiritual quest, despite it being the entire point of the game as acknowledged by the story, is totally maligned by the underlying gameplay. If developers want to genuinely acknowledge our desire for meaning and self-transformation, they will have to develop a better sense for what is involved in a “moral choice”… it is certainly not a case of hoarding guns’n'ammo and picking the ethical alternative in a conversation.

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

Without going into the rugged details of psychoanalysis, one of Freud’s most successful disciples was the therapist, inventor, philosophy, and thinker, Wilhelm Reich. Reich’s particular interpretation of psychoanalysis met a lot of opposition, in particular to his hands-on (literally!) approach to therapy – in many cases he would massage the tight muscles of his patients during conversation in analysis. Much of Reich’s psychoanalysis focused on the body – its internal structure, spiritual structure, and (most important for us) the body’s visible surface structure.

Reich argued that the body develops an “armour” after enduring years of sexual oppression in order to restrict one’s desires. When we develop body armour, we physically become rigidified and stilted – our muscles become tense in order to enframe an anxiety-ridden and explosive inner core of emotion and sexual energy. (Reich accordingly glorified the orgasm as a way of breaking-through such body armour).

If you’re still with me, I hope that you are beginning to tack on the same wind as I: the gamer’s body armour prevents genuine identification and dwelling with a game’s protagonist.

What I’m getting at here is the idea that our body physically becomes tense and expressively constrained as we attempt to immunize ourselves from our own emotions, desires, wishes, drives or urges. I see it all the time at work – my students come in looking vigilant, self-conscious, jaw-set, stoney-eyed, tightfisted, and socially withdrawn.

And the gamers among my students are even more shy, and typically avoid eye contact and any expressive gesturing as they speak quietly about the games that they so dearly love. The gamers, and I know this feeling very well myself (read Michael Abbott’s courageous post, Sheepish Gaming for a sense of it), sense that games are a taboo and unsavory topic inappropriate for public expression. The result is an expressively crippled gamer whose desires become wrapped up inside themselves and never find much expression among their colleagues. Even in the cases where people are quite social about their gaming habits and find a community to share it with (ie. here!), the societal taboo that adults have no business in child’s play persists and colours us.

If I’m already treading water here with you so far, just so you know, I plan to drown us both.

The sheepish gamer – the gamer who builds their body armour in relation to a society that remains fully vigilant in enacting taboos – eventually returns to the inner sanctum of their bedroom or office and loads up their favourite game. But they find that they can’t quite relate to the protagonist. Their character seems too unlike them, too alien in her (or his) features. But the armoured gamer is no longer identifying with the character’s inner sense of life – their emotions and desires – but their outer physical appearance.

Many of my students have the same problem – they all judge books by their cover or give an author a perfunctory read and claim, “I couldn’t relate. He was too different from me.” This defensive kind of position, like a queen hiding in a fortress only allowing in to the courtyard those whom she deems to be enough like her, is paralyzing. The vast majority of students who I know, live in a world where they constantly feel besieged and unable to express their emotions and wishes or worries – they never quite make contact with other people, movies, authors, or games. Instead, they judge all things with their vigilant eyes and make mountains out of physical features; another person’s body (or an author’s text) is seen as a surface, and not a promise to something deeper.

The armoured gamer is in the same boat. The on-screen protagonist is seen as a modifiable shell, and if it doesn’t look like them or someone they like, the protagonist instantly becomes judged as unrelatable. Customizable avatars have become so rampant because designers have realized that gamers have changed their understandings of themselves as surfaces and now demand a playable character that mirrors their self-understanding. That is why the “Master Chief” in Halo effectively has no inner emotional structure nor desires; s/he is just a surface. Just a body with armour. And people identify with the Master Chief because s/he already mirrors the life of the armoured gamer. Samus Aran does not need to have an inner self – she is a shell with a scantily clad body inside.

As Jamie Love masterfully notes, Metroid relies upon the “presentation of an empowered and heroic female character – the concept that only a woman can bring balance to the universe. Yet, as empowering as this idea is, it is simultaneously undermined by the artificial enhancement of the power suit that grants Samus the ability to confront these challenges… the suit empowers her while also masking her female identity beneath a generic male template of power that relies on technological augmentations.” Armoured gamers do not identify with Samus – they identify with the suit.

I’m not suggesting that this generalizes to all gamers, nor sufficiently characterizes the life of a single gamer. I’m just suggesting that the sudden appearance of customizable avatars is not some freak coincidence nor a poor design choice that spread like wildfire, but a response to a society who already understands themselves in terms of modifiable surfaces: the body is just a hanger for clothing and hairstyle. The inner being, whoever or whatever it is, must remain hidden at all costs.

In specific response to Martyn’s wonderfully inspiring post, he is no doubt right. I want more games that focus upon proper narrative characterization (in fact, I wrote several articles about this idea years ago), and I want PCs whose inner lives somehow draw me into their troubles. I don’t want to birth or create a character – I want the character to recreate me, as Cervantes’s character Don Quixote does so well. Customizable avatars will not disappear until gamers themselves become willing to experience the game world in terms of the PC’s desires and wishes and worries and not their own egocentric (and self-protective) world. That is a playful, more loving, form of identification.

Again, I realize that I’ve likely offended many of you. This was not my intent. Like Martyn, I wanted to offer that there is a subtler, more intimate, understanding of gamers than is traditionally bandied around on places like Gamasutra who ignore gamer psychology completely. Designers often try to design-their-way-around or completely eradicate the gamer’s social personality, and I think that’s a mistake.

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.

It’s important to understand that TJ&E is thoroughly nonsensical and excels at it. It’s a game about a three-legged red alien reminiscent of Flavor Flav and his slug-shaped hot-dog eating alien buddy from the planet Funkotron, who crash their boom-box/surfboard equipped space ship on Earth. The introduction sets the players on a quest for retrieving the 10 parts of their funkay spacecraft that are strewn over tens of randomly generated levels. I won’t comment on the single-player mode, as the game was originally offered as a “two-player game with a single player option”. In the two-player co-op mode, one person walks TJ around while the other has Earl. TJ walks faster than Earl, but Earl has a larger health bar. Inevitably there is a fight over who gets to be TJ, as he can run away from most enemies. My friend and I both shamefully admitted that we always forced our younger sisters to play Earl.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vloYvK2sK1g

A Brief Tour of the Game

TJ and Earl both amble around the level and search for parts of the space ship while avoiding all sorts of bizarre enemies: “insane dentists, hula girls, obese stay-at-home mothers, and phantom ice cream trucks”. Dropped randomly on each level are presents filled with all sorts of items: super hi-top sneakers that give you a speed bonus, rocket skates that send you flying off at breakneck speed, a telephone that reveals hidden areas of the level’s overhead map, springy shoes that allow you to jump across crevices, or a dummy that draws enemies towards it. Whenever one present is opened, both players receive the same the benefit (or punishment). Familiar to most Mario Kart 64 players, some presents with a question mark just ain’t safe to open. Randomly found throughout the game are helper (and hinderer) characters such as Santa Claus (who will drop a bunch of presents if you sneak up on him), Carrot Wise Man who can identify your mystery presents for a few bucks, the Viking opera singer who destroys all enemies on the screen with her awful singing, or the stampeding pack’o'nerds that will flatten you if you get in their way. Every imaginable hyperbole of American 90′s life is packed into the game.

TJ&E’s Unique, Funky, Style

Pulling all of these elements together is the famously funky soundtrack and visual style. Visually, the game reminds me a bit of the style of animation used in the cartoon Dr. Katz, called “squiggle-vision” meets the colourful personality of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Straight lines and fonts and backgrounds all move around randomly and suggest to the players that gaming is about having fun! Similarly, the excellent bass guitar-driven funky beats lend your efforts at exploration a rhythm that I’ve rarely seen elsewhere… every track encourages you to bob your head along as your fingers do the hard work. This seems like a trite thing, but with the wild visual style and bright colours, the music definitely adds something unspeakably fantastic to the gameplay.

But those things, while goofy and entertaining in themselves, are not what makes the game great.

A Perfect Expression of Co-Operative Play

Jason Moses writes,

What makes TJ&E a great game is its cooperative mode. Playing with someone else opens up a lot of avenues for interaction that aren’t present when playing alone. Pooling information on presents together, arguing about the best route to the exit in a given stage, yelling obscenities when one player gets sucked into a tornado and dropped to a lower level.

Better than that, even, is that playing with someone else allows you to give the other player a high five (in the game, natch) in order to equalize both players’ lifebars. If Earl gets pretty beat up, all it takes to get him back up to speed is a high five. Best play mechanic ever? It’s up there.

In my experience, the 2-player co-op mode also invites (our admittedly adolescent minds) to all kinds of pranks. Threatening to cast a shower of tomatoes on the world (especially when your partner was in lifebar distress), or using the rocket skates present when they were near the edge of the screen, both guaranteed a scuffle at the controllers. At the same time, helping one another explore the world and uncover the fog of war on the map, or putting enemies to sleep by opening a boom-box gift, require a team effort.

And if actually collecting the spaceship parts is one of your goals, then cooperation is a must because the game can be a little unforgiving at times. If you fall off the edge of the map, you land on a lower level of the game. TJ can comfortably navigate level 4, even after Earl has fallen down to level 3. In order to get to level 5, Earl has to make his way back up to level 4, and both have to walk into the elevator. You can imagine how irritating this gets when someone opens up a rocket skates present and you go flying off the edge of the world.

Beyond the narrative’s stated goals however, I think the real value in the game is exploration and creative playfulness pure and simple. Finding each of the ship’s parts is simply an excuse to get into the elevator and hop onto another level where you might have a random encounter with Santa or something new that you haven’t seen yet. There’s even a “Jam Out” mode (separate from level exploration) that disables the drum track so you can play your own beats to the music, while TJ and Earl bust a move. The win in this game, if there is one, is in new encounters and the pure enjoyment of opening up mysterious gifts.

If gamers today believe that they have lost interest in the unforgiving cruelty of 1990′s platformers like Wonder Boy, or the barely-entertaining insane difficulty of the Mega Man series, then ToeJam & Earl should be the exact kind of game that caters to their desire for non-violent exploration and co-operation for its own sake. If you’ve played this game with a friend or partner or child, or have memories of playing it, I’d love to hear your about your experiences.

Note: My thanks to Mobygames for supplying the screenshots.

I’m sitting in my 13-year-old cousin’s room, my back leaned uncomfortably against the foot of his metal bedframe, watching him play Jak 3 -- a 3-D shooter/racer/adventure platformer. He finishes a level and we watch the intro cinematic for the next quest; the on-screen drama unfolds slowly as the characters discuss what to do next. We are 30 seconds into the cinematic, and already I can hear my cousin becoming restless, thumbing the ‘x’ button so he can skip the cinematic and cut to the chase.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnZo2zVhonM

(Herding Leaping Lizards in Jak 3.)

Damas enters stage left and addresses Jak and Daxter (and of course myself and my cousin) in a paternal tone, ”You have a reputation for being rash. Didn’t your father tell you to pick your battles wisely?”

Jak responds, “I didn’t know my father.”

Damas continues, “My point is, sometimes you face your enemy head-on and, sometimes you wait until his weakness is revealed! Patience is a warrior’s greatest weapon.”

(To any seasoned gamer, the discover-the-end-boss’s-weakness-by-experimenting-and-observing-it-at-a-distance tactic has the cornerstone of battle for over 20 years.)

At this point, my cousin who is normally a patient and curious child, is becoming irritated with the “unreasonably” long 1-minute cinematic. I realize that he has listened to nothing in the cinematic, he even misses the crucial mission briefing, “I want you to go into the desert and herd a group of lizards into a waiting transport.”

And he’s off, driving around aimlessly in the desert. At some point the game prompts him with a message, “Drive up close to a Leaper.” After chasing a pack of lizards for a few minutes he is becoming frustrated. The lizards dart off in every direction and his thumbs respond in kind, directing the stick toward the Leaper Lizards, but not quickly enough. They get away. After several tries, he manages to land Daxter on one’s back, unsuccessfully trying to direct it toward the village. The lizard has a mind of its own and resists him, he fails to jump over a small cactus, and the lizard dies. The level resets to a few moments earlier. I can hear him slamming the thumbsticks helplessly as he becomes discouraged, and he eventually drops the controller on the  bed.

“See? This game sucks. It’s soooooo hard. Let’s play something else.”

It is the last time he ever plays Jak 3.

I shrug sympathetically and pick up the controller to give it a shot. Despite never playing the Jak series before, my fingers find themselves singing an old song, and I begin exploring the territory with the dune buggy. I get a sense of the geography, the pitfalls and mission targets, and the surprisingly agile driving model. I spot a pack of lizards in the distance and my fingers instinctively accelerate and steer the dune buggy toward them… I accidentally pancake two lizards (the speed of this thing!), but Daxter manages to saddle himself on the third survivor. The encumbered lizard drives like a cat-drawn dogsled, and I laugh as I feebly try to direct it toward the mission goal area.

Eventually, I succeed. It is a silly level and a silly game, with no real consequences for failure -- cute and inoffensive. My cousin is astounded that I complete the level, and shuts off the PS2. Months later, we are talking about the recently-released Prince of Persia (2008) - he is ecstatic about the gameplay feature that prevents the Prince from dying, owing to an infinite number of “saving” catches that Elika makes, preventing any kind of failure.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDloiadrCNM

(feel free to hum along to the amazing tunes of Space Harrier )

I realize at that moment, my cousin and I live radically different childhoods. Mine is populated with memories of Black Belt, Police Quest 2, and Prince of Persia. All of these games, for different reasons, were exercises in utterly inhuman frustration -- whether due to a demand for obscenely quick reflexes, a talent for guessing at verbs in a command parser, or repeating the same level twenty-five times just to discover the “trick” to finishing it. Finishing a game enabled a sacred rite of bragging among friends at school; it was a badge of honour and a sign of manhood accessible to only those elite who had done the same, like knowing the secret password for the neighbourhood treehouse. (We even demanded a photograph of the end-game screen of Space Harrier when my friend finally beat the game in grade 10 because it was so unbelievable a feat). At the same time, those experiences came at the cost of sheer uncontrollable rage. When I was 12 years old, after three hours I flawlessly got to the cavern level in Choplifter and was summarily blown out of the sky by the ejecta of an erupting volcano -- I tried to break the controller in half unsuccessfully and instead threw it against the wall leaving a 3-inch hole. I am not, and never have been, a talented gamer.

But for my cousin, none of these experiences are possible anymore. Jak 3 does not inspire frustration or rage, but disappointment and discouragement. When a game becomes difficult it is not a challenge to his identity as a gamer, and because of which inspires no tenacity in him. If he cannot continue with a game, he turns to a different one. He has never finished a game in his life, nor experiences a desire to do so and would rather try the next new game that captures his attention.

I’m trying to avoid being unfair to my cousin whom I adore. He is a very bright teenager, he desires a sense of accomplishment, and he is surprised and enamoured when he sees an old hand effortlessly flying through Super Mario 3 and Mega Man 2 - games he sees so beyond his skill-level that they inspire only fear. But despite owning game systems his whole life, if they were taken away he would simply watch TV or play with his iPod touch instead. Even the thought of losing my Genesis or Nintendo would have chilled my heart as a boy.

But why would this even matter? Isn’t my cousin’s experience of gaming just “different” than mine, and I’m just a gamer-veteran levying my adult judgments on him? Maybe. But maybe it’s something else -- along with my childhood and all of the dramatic emotions, skilful practice, and social confrontations I had in relation to games -- that my cousin’s world is just a little less colourful, a little less distinct, and full of nameless fears that discourage him from really feeling a deep connection to the games he plays. The Jak 3 story would have enraptured me as a child -- an Oedipal story ripped right out of Star Wars about a boy who comes to learn the identity of his estranged father. But my cousin, as a boy raised in a world of confusing gender identities at home and school and on TV, is not grabbed at all by the story; as Baudrillard writes, “The Oedipal drama is not played out any longer.”

So, why are our childhoods experienced so differently in terms of the games we play, and how we play them? This is where I want to leave things open for debate. Michael Chabon suggests that it is because parents have become too safety-oriented, too afraid of the unknown lurking in the urban world. Roger Ebert believes that we live in a fear-inspiring society that discourages us from becoming “free range children”. J.H. Van den Berg believes it is because children and adults are estranged from one another’s lives, and children no longer can mature naturally. Baudrillard believes it is because post-modernity has turned the child into a fetish-object.

Those all seem to be sensible parts of the whole shebang. Yet, rather than finding ways of maturing kids through the games they play, we now craft games to suit a flattened kind of childhood, one with no real consequences for death, or even the chance to die unfairly. It’s a kind of liberalistic ideal: Everyone should win. A game like The Last Express, by definition, will not interest my cousin because it is based on the idea of exploration for its own sake.

I’m not sure what the answer is here, for in my generation my parents were never involved in gaming in any direct way. But for this generation the answer will be in the realm of good guardianship I think: letting your kids fail, letting them get frustrated with the harshness of the world, and gently encouraging them to keep plugging away at it until they grow that kernel of accomplishment and develop a sense of courage for themselves. Otherwise, the games they play will forever remain a distant dark continent that does not inspire them to jump off of their carefully-padded ships and explore them heroically.

Am I being too naive or idealistic about childhood? Has your play style evolved over the years? Or do you have a child/relative/friend that plays games in a radically different way than you do? If so, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

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.

Space is created the second a player sits down and begins playing a game. Most of the time we think of this as an dialogical “interactive space” -- the player issues commands to the computer, and the game responds in some way, which the player responds to, ad infinitum. When we think of interaction in this way, we think of the player and game in some kind of unfolding dialogue with one another. But I’m not convinced that players really dialogue with games or computers. I see the player doing something different when they act in an interactive space. Let’s take the prologue to The Curse of Monkey Island as an example of an expressive interactive space.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IBUfXq0nbk

At the beginning of the game (ffwd to 7:40), Guybrush Threepwood is held captive inside of the hold of LeChuck’s ship; he stands up and exclaims (in the voice of a Shakespearean aside), “I’ve got to get out of here and help Elaine! If I could only get through this one door…”

Here’s where the interactive space begins to unfold. As a first-time player I explore the scene with my hand -- I move the cursor around and click on a few items around Guybrush. A long pole hangs on the wall opposite me -- literally opposite me as a player and for Guybrush too -- so I instinctively reach towards it. Guybrush dramatically drops it into his pants, somehow defying physical reality. I realize -- this game is not just about solving problems or fulfilling quests or hearing a story -- it’s also about finding silliness and humour in the profane. Greedily, I reach for the cannon balls. Guybrush gripes, “Mmmh… they’re too heavy to carry.” I gesture toward the hole beside the cannon, Guybrush partly squeezes himself through the gunport and gets stuck. I motion him back to the hold. Curious at what is in the next room, I gesture toward the door. Guybrush peers into the keyhole of the door, ”I see a diorama of the children of the world living in peace and freedom! …… No wait -- it can’t be that -- it’s just too dark to make out what’s in there.”

As I play with the different items and places in this first scene, a space of possibilities begins to cohere for me. Guybrush is a weakling, so brute force ain’t going to work. Convincing “Bloodnose the Pirate” (aka. Wally) to open the door is not a straightforward request -- it requires neither threats nor persuasion -- but incessant adolescent goading of Wally’s piratehood. If I use the cutlass on Wally, Guybrush grimaces, “I don’t wanna disembowel poor Wally!” This is not the same kind of interactive space as, say, TES: Oblivion which all but encourages the player to slice and dice everything in sight and complete tasks in a straightforward and efficient manner. Instead, Guybrush takes a swipe at a hanging piece of rope, ”Hah-ha! Taste cold steel, feeble cannon restraint rope!” This is definitely not your average adventure hero. He’s got the arms of a palsied 7-year old with rickets!

What I’m getting at here is that our perception is partly shaped through our exploration (touching, smelling, walking, reaching at and taking things), partly through Guybrush’s relations to his world (how he judges things as valuable or interesting or frightening), and partly through Guybrush’s interactions with other characters in that world (how he addresses Wally or Murray the Demonic Skull, for instance). Of course, my perception is shaped partly by the fact that this is a 2D visual space with objects represented in spatial relationships to one another, but the fact is that those spatial mathematical relationships are not what makes the game “matter” for me. The game matters to me because somehow Guybrush has a quest worth pursuing, interesting relationships with his friends and enemies, and a hilarious world in which every action has some kind of unintended and hilarious outcome. So, the “interactive space” in which Guybrush’s world is expressed in is one inherently tied up with my cultural values, senses of humour and morality. Every element of style -- Guybrush’s gawky and loping stride, the expressionistic “painterly” style of the backgrounds, and the lateral-thinking approach to solving puzzles, together evoke an interactive space for the player that encourages creativity and a desire for hilarious misadventure.

Now imagine something different. Imagine that the player only cares about the linear plot, and could care less about the puzzles or fumbling around with each item on the screen. S/he grabs a walkthrough and burns his/her way through the entire game. This is a completely different kind of interactive space; one in which it is no longer experienced in terms of the player’s investment in Guybrush’s world per se, but rather a kind of “storybook” that gets played out in front of her/him. The range of possibilities for creative expression for this player is much, much, smaller than in our previous case. What I’m getting at is that the player has a personality or psychological habitude that typically results in a certain play-style that also contributes to the kind of interactive space s/he experiences. This means that the game’s design both sets limits on the kinds of experiences possible in the game, and the player’s expressive style also sets limits on the kinds of experiences they will have as they play. Players who refuse to “explore” or “dwell” in a world and who see the game as just a bunch of quests that they need plow through, or players who see a game as essentially a storybook or television show, lose out on other expressive qualities the game might have to offer. Alternately, players who see a game as a tool for their personal gratification are likely to miss out on the emotional aspects that the narrative or character interaction might offer.

Like many other kinds of creative games, LucasArt’s The Curse of Monkey Island offers a world that players can come to “dwell” in and understand the range of expression possible within it. Without an adequate understanding of space and how space creates metaphorical boundaries within which we can express things, I suspect that we will continue to reduce a game’s qualities to it’s formal graphical style (2D/3D/isometric/etc) or narrative style (linear/non-linear/emergent/etc). Space is always value-space or cultural-space or dwelling-space or emotional-space, and not the rational Cartesian coordinate space that we’ve been stuck with in our thoughts for over 400 years.

As a final example of an interactive space that encourages creativity, one of the funniest scenes in CMI:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=AawQvD8L_h4

Classic.

Please visit the Blog of the Round Table’s main hall for links to the rest of this month’s entries.

Note: If you’re a philosopher type, the thinkers who inspired this post were those from the Expressivist-Romantic tradition, like Charles Taylor, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Martin Heidegger.

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!

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.

Here are some of the interface design goals that Matthew suggests:

1. Visibility: It Should Be Obvious What a Control Is Used For.
   If I press this button, what will happen? If I want to unlock the door, which control should I use? A system with good visibility allows the user to easily translate goals into actions.
2. Affordance: It Should Be Obvious How a Control Is Used.
   The system should provide “strong clues to the operation of things”. A button affords pushing, a lever affords pulling, etc. The user should know how to operate a control just by looking at it.
3. Feedback: It Should Be Obvious When a Control Has Been Used.
   Once the user has pressed a button, the system should react in a manner that clearly communicates what has just been accomplished. If nothing has happened, this fact should also be obvious.

Each of these design principles is sensible precisely because they are grounded in the way of life we already live: we have goals (or are given goals by the designer), we encounter objects in the world, we use those objects to achieve those goals, we receive feedback when we engage in them. Almost all games that we’ve played are based on this very rational structure.

Instrumental reason in video games

But to get a little philosophical here, all of these principles are based on an instrumental relation to video games. It’s an instrumental view insofar as the world is seen as a collection of things, and the gamer is an organism with clearly specified goals. In order to achieve those goals, s/he must use those things in the correct way. The fact that we call our HIDs “controllers” now instead of a “joysticks” is very indicative of the culture we live in: we tend to believe that games are there to satisfy goals.

But are games tools or instruments? This is the problem I have with Donald Norman’s usability studies: they are all based on an instrumentalist view of the world. If you aren’t playing by the rules that the designer has created, you aren’t doing it right. So the designer is encouraged to make the game’s goals and controls as transparent as possible, so gamers can satisfy quests/goals/rules as efficiently as possible.

But what about play? When we play games, are we trying to satisfy our instrumental goals? Perhaps vaguely. A friend and I used to play Midtown Madness together, and try to cause horrible traffic jams at one side of town, so we could race our car down the highway and hit the jam at the highest possible speed. Sometimes the car would catch an edge of a bumper and launch over the other cars in the jam – kudos would be awarded for the most spectacular collision. We were not playing the game according to the rules – we were trying to break the rules and create new possibilities within the constraints of the game.

Making a case for ‘broken’ interfaces

If you’re designing a new hammer or building a sports car, you want the ‘interface’ (the usability) to be predictable, reliable, and intuitive. You don’t want the hammer dancing around the nail, nor do you want your new sports car choosing a random direction every time you turn left.

But when we make video games, we should not be engineering for usability. A game is not a utility. It is an imaginative space and a play space. Creating “user-friendly” video games is another way of saying, “We are making a faster, better, hammer, that practically anyone can use!” What we need instead, I think, is a game that frustrates us. A game where learning the rules of play – whatever they are – is an exploration in itself. We don’t need to learn the rules first, then learn how to play. We play a game, and learn the bounds of the space as we do it.

Iroquois Pliskin (understandably) argues that Resident Evil 5 suffers from ”bad interface design” that prevents the player from moving forwards in the game. In my view, this has the potential to be a wonderful opportunity for play. Unfortunately, RE5 is just as instrumentally-minded as most gamers are, and only one “solution” to the “puzzle” is the “right” one. Creativity and play do not imagine specific ends such as these. So instead of making RE5′s interface more intuitive, easy-to-play, or straightforward, I’d like to see the game enable creative solutions to its very difficult challenges.

Sure, instrumental reason satisfies our desire for achievement and consumption… but it fundamentally denies other desires we have, such as the desire to play, think creatively, and undermine the rules. I’d like to see some badly designed interfaces that leave lots of cracks in the pavement – spaces for the imagination. A game is not a hammer.

Thank you to (fellow Canuck!) Matthew Gallant and Iroquois Pliskin for their thoughts on game interfaces.

Note: Nels Anderson, who lives dangerously near the 49th parallel, has some interesting thoughts on design/UI issues that are directly pertinent to this discussion here and here… his thoughts fall closer to Matthew Gallant’s reading of Donald Norman’s book than mine do, but they offer an articulate interpretation of game mechanics and interactivity.

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.

Yet, for every aging gamer out there worried about how the latest instalment of the Zork series would fare, there are 1000 more that did not grow up with text adventures. They did not get eaten by grues. They did not integrate the bizarre and off-kilter humor of The Great Underground Empire into their jargon. They are not used to directing a game’s action through computer-parsed language. They do not have to imagine themselves into a world constituted by text.

A Short Review

Here are a few comments selected from the aforementioned thread:

“That is my main and only complaint about the game: it’s absolutely passive. It’s the exact contrary of every other Zork game, where it was your wits and skills that saved the say rather than an automatic dice roll.”

“I like it and I’m playing it(played some beta aswell). I never played the original and frankly; I don’t wanna play text based rpg in this day and age.”

“I have a workmate who did grow up with the Zork originals and I pointed him in the direction of LoZ. His reaction is quite the opposite than John Biggs’ whereby he moans at me there aren’t enough action points in the new one (suggesting he wants to keep playing) but when he tried out the Flash based originals again, he was, like I was, simply frustrated by the continuous ‘I do not understand that word’ type of comments, and not knowing what phrases are actually accepted by the game.”

“Point and click/graphical games always will pale to each of our individual Zork experiences — at least for those of us who played the original text games. LoZ is the same. It isn’t much for “Zorkiness” as it’s a totally different style of game. But I really enjoy it.”

“Legends of Zork is the kind of game that you play for 10-15 minutes in the morning, between checking your e-mail and reading the news. It’s an entertaining diversion.”

These mixed reactions provide an interesting cross-section what happens when people have to make sense of a twist in the path. As several of the commenters point out, Legends of Zork is a turn-based lightweight RPG that is very reminiscent of the BBS door game Legend of the Red Dragon: you walk from town into the forest, kill monsters, return to town with loot, and rest when your hit points are low. In many ways, it is a browser-based incarnation of Diablo, sans a coherent storyline. All battles are decided through visible statistics: an encounter with an enemy plays back a script that describes hit percentages, chances of winning, experiences points gained, HPs lost, and zorkmids won. All and all, the game is a fantastic reinterpretation of hack’n'slash games, repackaged with an eye for 15-minute casual gaming. The artwork comprising the interface reminds me of both Professor Layton and the Curious Village, as well as The Curse of Monkey Island, and seems to do the trick.

Living with Cultural Change

Yet, if I may summarize the collective reaction, it goes something like this: “It’s a fun, cute, game. I can see some people liking it. But it’s no Zork.”

Beyond the pessimism of nostalgia, I think gamers have recognized that something is indeed missing in the formula. Sure, the writing might not be as humorous. Sure, the art style might not suit some people. Sure, going into statistical battles ain’t too much fun after a while. But I think something deeper, more dangerous, lies at the heart of the issue.

The problem is that Legends of Zork is the distant echo of a death knell that rang out in the 1990s when text adventures lost their sheen, and were replaced by clumsy graphical interpretations. Soon afterwards, graphical adventure games themselves were tossed in favour of real-time tactical and FPS games. A rift in our way of living, as gamers, has opened up between the 1980s and the present. Legends of Zork, while a noble attempt at bridging the gap between these alienated gaming eras, has only shown us just how wide the gap is.

The Dialectics of the Imagination and the Game

When I sit down to Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, I am greeted by a stark black space. I hit return – the space fills with white text against the black space – words! My eyes skim across the white-on-black space: I do not see words, I imagine places. I see things. I am located somewhere. The world opens up around me.

I am standing west of the white house. I imagine the texture of the boarded front door: When I was a young boy, there was an abandoned home down the street that I used to sneak into, and steal utensils from its dusty kitchen. The window was boarded up with rough spruce plywood, with a dark knot nestled into the top right corner. It is that rough piece of plywood that I imagine on the front door of the white house. The fear and excitement of the abandoned home is sparked in me for a moment – I do not consciously remember the abandoned home as I play – but the feelings it evokes persist.

I look over at the mailbox. The mailbox is the standard issue grey American mailbox that stands at the end of one’s yard. I recognize it from a scene in Stand By Me in which a group of hooligans drives around smashing mailboxes with a baseball bat. While I do not consciously remember the scene, my limited experience with Americana is stirred for a second.

Curious of the mailbox, my fingers dance over the keys on the keyboard – my eyes fixed on the screen. I do not consciously notice the keys clacking under my fingertips, but my intentions – my whole imagination – leans toward the mailbox.

I smirk a bit realizing how silly my action was – the world resists my clumsy intentions. I try again. This time my hands know exactly what to do. My fingers walk me to the mailbox.

It is one of the leaflets that I stuffed into people’s mailboxes in 1988, when I helped my mother distribute advertisements for a friend of hers who was running in a local election. I was nine years old. The leaflets were a bright orange, filled with text about the “New Democratic Party”. A large dog chased me from one of the yards, and I ran back to our Ford Econoline van, screaming and crying. It is that orange leaflet that I find in the mailbox, but I do not consciously recall the childhood memory of the leaflet – I am only filled with a sense of foreboding sparked by the terrifying dog. A call to adventure. I pick up the leaflet and read it.

I laugh and the tension is relieved. There is something strange about this place – a world that is part fictional world and part my world. I should be writing my dissertation, and the thought of it provokes guilt in me, but I want to play along. I want to be in the Great Underground Empire, just for a little while.

Imagination Lost

Legends of Zork is neither a bad game, nor is it a trivialization of the Zork series. It is the expression of the generational gap we find ourselves in today.

When I stare at the map of the Great Underground Empire as the creators of LoZ imagine it, my eyes take in the gorgeously drawn map – not the places themselves – but the world as seen from a bird’s eye view. I do not walk through the world. My fingers do not dance over the keyboard and do the walking for me. I point with my cursor, and the cursor – the computer and its algorithms – transports me to another place. I magically re-appear in front of the white house. But this is not the abandoned white house of my youth. It is not the house that I stole a rusted swiss-army knife from. It is a white house that corresponds to a popular modern children’s art style. It evokes nothing for me.

I click on the Dark Forest just as I would click on a news link or an RSS feed. The page reloads, and I am presented with a cute illustration of a forest and troll. I am about to choose whether I should run away or fight, but an AJAX script instead takes over and plays back the results of the battle – I do nothing. To the left of the adventure window is a menu that allows me to read a FAQ, change my account settings, or read posts over at the forums.

After a while, my interest wanes. I realize that the game is, for all intents and purposes, a wonderful thing in its own right. It is a game crafted for my 13-year-old cousin who spends most of his day on Facebook. It is crafted for him and his generation, because sitting in front of a black-and-white screen and walking through the world using his fingertips is not possible anymore. He does not imagine himself as a part of the Great Underground Empire, nor is he beckoned by the mailbox. He wants action and he wants cute illustration and he wants it now. He will use up his fifteen minutes of “action points” today and come back to the game tomorrow, nestled in between Twittering and posting his Facebook status. If I ask him, the art style will likely remind him of a handful of Miyazaki films that he’s seen. But it is not a part of his life – it is a part of his day.

Finding the Bridgeheads

We are likely to see more games like Legends of Zork in the future, and I welcome them. These kinds of games will come to define the basis for meaning for an entire generation of gamers that are coming into their own now, just as some of us did in the 1980s. No doubt some of those gamers will eventually come to reflect, not without a touch of sadness, that the games they played and loved as children are gone too.

I do not mourn the loss of text-adventure games; after all, I suspect that more text adventures are being crafted in the homes of indie game designers than ever were created back in the day. What I mourn is the loss of a way of life. Gamer culture has changed so much that a new Zork adventure game no longer would make sense to us. And we know it ourselves: one commenter said that he was “simply frustrated by the continuous ‘I do not understand that word’ type of comments, and not knowing what phrases are actually accepted by the game.”

I am fragmented inside. Part of who I am – my identity as a gamer – still lives in a world where my fingertips walked me through the Great Underground Empire like little feet in a vast geography. The GUE is world that lives only in my fingertips and my mind; the game itself is only a focus for my imagination. But it is the past, and I can only look back it over a great distance. 

Another part of me lives in the present. I walk in the Fallout 3 world by holding down the ‘W’ key. Every detail of that world – from the shapes of the mountains to the kinds of needles on the trees, has been provided for me. When I reach out to open a mailbox, I never fail. I hit the ‘E’ key. I cannot fail at opening the mailbox for a computer algorithm opens the mailbox for me. The mailbox opens without the help of my imagination.

Bridging the gap between these two estranged worlds requires something more than a translation of Zork for a new audience. It requires that we, as gamers, discover new ways of using our imaginations in a world that all but prevents us from doing so. It requires that we, as developers, discover ways of expressing subtlety and nuance using whatever tools we have. It requires that we, as an older generation, find common ground with younger gamers and share in new gaming experiences with them. The outrage levied at Legends of Zork is in many ways unfounded; it is a projection of anger stemming from our social anomie.

Until we locate those bridgeheads and begin building common experiences between them, I think that we will find ourselves constantly disappointed with anything new.

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.

In Corvus’s piece, we get a coherent and readily understandable view of narratives and stories. I’ll do my best to characterize the view: The author conceives of and produces a story, and the audience interacts (with the author) through the narrative to co-author a coherent, feelingful, set of connected events. Therefore, the author is not in pure “control” of the story… the audience assists in the construction of the temporality of the story. A story, according to Corvus’s interpretation of Eco (which is in turn an interpretation of Russian Formalism through the lens of narratology), is the crafting of a fabula; a coherent logical structure that grows out of the audience’s interaction with a text, film, game, song, etc.

There is something very tempting in this view, because it implies that the reader/player/audience exerts some amount of authorial control, as they story only emerges through their participation in creating it. However, I’d like us to keep in mind that a “narratological” view of stories is only one particular, through powerful, perspective on stories.

Narratology is a kind of “semiotic” approach to story. Although there have been many different interpretations of what a narratological approach implies (Roland Barthes is a particularly important figure here), Eco’s approach shares much with the rest. The general idea is that a story is a text comprised of sentences, and each sentence is comprised of words. At each hierarchical level of analysis (ie. words -> sentences -> characters -> plot), there is a “logical structure”, and the meaning of a story is created through the relations of its logical structures. So let’s take Corvus’s description of how this would work:

Jack was a short man,

Depending on your impression of/experience with pulp detective novels, the 1930s, short men, and people named Jack, you’ve likely formed something of a mental picture.

Jack was a short man, with a bitter laugh.

I would be willing to bet you’re now picturing Jack’s face more clearly. Perhaps hearing his laughter. You may even be imagining the sort of person he is based upon the knowledge that his laugh is bitter.

Jack was a short man, with a bitter laugh. All his life, Jack felt uncomfortable in his own skin.

Do you perhaps feel a twinge of sympathy for Jack? Are you smoothing out his temperament a bit? Imagining for him a self-conscious mannerism?

Setting aside Corvus’s interpretations of the story for a moment, this is an example of the way narratologists work. A story is made up of a bunch of sentences that can be strung together in different ways in order to create different meanings. There is something very logical about the audience understanding a story in this way. We logically relate each sentence to all the sentences around them, and recognize a meaning from the entire collection of sentences.

What underlies this entire procedure is the assumption that sentences (and words, and stories) are composed of “information” -- logical bits that can be transformed by logical operations. The author creates a text (a game, song, or film) by arranging bits of information into coherent and logical structures. We, as the audience (players, listeners, watchers), perform our own logical operations on the text in order to derive a meaning from it. As Corvus notes, we as the audience usually ‘add our own information to the story’ and thus transform the story into a different meaning.

What comes out of this view is that both the author, and the audience, are information managers/transformers. We perform different logical operations on the story and glean a meaning out of it. The question is if there is a limitation in this view? It seems plausible.

First, an objection on behalf of narratology. A narratologist such as Barthes would have a fit if he heard that the story was crafted from a kind of communication between the author and the audience. Barthes puts his whole reputation on the line to demonstrate that a story is meaningful because it is not a dialogue between the author and the audience, nor is it meaningful because an author exerts her/his control over the text. For Barthes, the head-honcho when it comes to narratology, the story’s meaning lies purely in the audience’s interpretation of it. Although I have not read Eco’s work in much detail, if he is a card-carrying narratologist, the idea that the author and audience communicate in order to create meaning would shiver his spine. Rather, narratologists are much more concerned with the audience’s interaction with the text (game, song, film) itself.. the author disappears after the text has been created. Any suggestion that the reader could write a letter to the author to confirm the ‘true meaning’ of the story (as if the author had any sovereign access to it) would have no place in Barthes’s (and I suspect Eco’s) view of narratives.

The reason I beleaguer this point is that I believe that Corvus’s view of stories has the opportunity to look far beyond a logical, semiotic, narratological, view. I think he is concerned with something much broader, concerned with the “hermeneutics” (read: interpretation) of story, which implies the author, the text, and the audience. In a literary hermeneutics (which was originally conceived of in the interpretation of the meaning and translation of Biblical texts), we focus on understanding how the reader (the particular reader -- you -- not just anyone!) understands the story in the light of the cultures and communities they live in, the themes and metaphors and archetypes that the author draws upon, and the specific feelings and experiences that the story evokes in the person.

Think of any game that really grips you or grabs your attention. Planescape: Torment, Final Fantasy VII, or even Flashback: The Quest for Identity come to mind for me. There is something about the story of Flashback that, even now, still manages to grab me. Even though the protagonist of the story, Conrad, never quite develops into a thick character, I still felt compelled by his personal journey. What is it about this man, who crash-lands his flying bike into a jungle, and loses his memory, that compels me to help him along? It is not because I intellectually interpret his situation and follow the bread crumb trail. There is a personal contribution I make here: Conrad’s world is one that makes sense to me. “New Washington” is an Orwellian urban landscape, “The Death Tower” (a game reminiscent of The Running Man) is frightening and perverse, and the alien “morphs” propose the terrifying prospect of a race of identitylessness humanoids. All of these meanings are not my subjective invention .. the story emerges from  my engagement with it in the world.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiaRJitrGQc

This view includes the semiotic perspective that Barthes and Eco propose… but instead of turning a story into a hierarchical arrangement of logical rules and structures… it invites the audience and story into a dialogue with one another. The text (game, song, film), the particular reader, their personal experiences, their society, and the author, comprise a complete storied world together. As the audience participates in their own hermeneutics of the art-object, the story is understood and transformed, as the person understands and transforms their personal world. There is no “text” nor “audience” nor “author” that can stand on its own… story-audience-author-culture co-constitute one another. 

If this is a bit unclear, which I apologize for, think of two romantic couples. One couple has been together for years, and have ‘grown into’ one another… there is a unity to their experience such that the wife can speak for her husband, and the husband can speak for his wife, without any confusion. When one person speaks, s/he speaks the mind of the couple. Now imagine a couple that has been together for a short time and discuss things with one another. When the boyfriend speaks, he tells his girlfriend about his experiences. She responds to him, trying to understand ‘his experience’. They are two solitary points on the map, sending messages to one another, each trying to respond and understand the best they can. The older married couple does not “communicate” to each other -- they simply relate and respond. The younger couple “communicates” and don’t respond to one another -- they are separate individuals.

Hermeneutics (or, more correctly, “expressivist hermeneutics”) thinks of stories much more like the older couple. When I read a story, if I understand it at all, my whole life is implied in it. My personal relationships, my upbringing, the author’s literary style, the particular archetypes used, my feelings, and the style in which I read or play, all come together in a world. Every part of this world is connected to one another. Creating a meaning out of a story is not my personal “subjective” domain, but it is part of a much larger world that I am implied in.

What this means for storytellers and for story-listeners is that they are already engaging in this kind of hermeneutics. Yes, of course there are structural elements to it that are part of our understanding (ie. Aristotle’s suggestion that every story has a beginning, middle, and end), but those structures and logic are not what makes a story grip our hearts. What is primary, I think, and Corvus seems to be implying in his very compelling perspective, is that the way we as readers help author and understand a story through our hermeneutical practices. When we read or play or listen to something, we often do not even recognize that we are engaging in this hermeneutics. It is not based on a logical, conscious, process of operations on a text. It is based on our embodied, feelingful, personal, interpretations that come from our participation in a culture. Flashback means something to me because it expresses a world to me -- I don’t need to consciously interpret it -- it is simply true to my life.

There is a psychology here that matters greatly for our lives. The readers (players, listeners, viewers) who are truly moved and transformed by a good story are something like that elderly married couple -- the story speaks for their life as they speak for the story. The folks (like myself at times!) who stand around the edges of the story and take pot-shots at interpreting what it means are more like the young couple… hopelessly trying to intellectually understand something without really letting it change them. The authors (designers, writers, painters) who do not let their work emerge on its own, and instead attempt to control and manipulate it into a particular meaning, never in the end create a true work of art. Stories transform the imagination, as our imagination transform them.

This is why, months ago, I wrote the article “Narratives and Interactivity Still Misunderstood“. We, as computer users, fundamentally have misunderstood stories and narratives because we think about them like a computer does, rather than think about them like an expressive, caring, hateful, fun-loving, sexual, thinking, human being does. Once we overcome our tendency to already reduce and control what a story is (ie. narrative as a set of logical structures, or an audience as a signal station that receives information and translates it), we will have a much deeper understanding of how stories and games, which have been around for tens of thousands of years, lie at the very heart of our nature as human beings.

Please, tell me if this makes any sense to any of you.