Homecoming: False Memory or Truth?

How is it that we can experience homecoming in a completely new game? Conventional psychological theory tells us that memories are like photographic images stored somewhere in the brain, and when we have a memory of something that we could not have possibly experienced in our lifetime, that it is a “false memory”. Similarly, when someone hearkens back to a childhood that seems altogether rose-tinted, we accuse them of nostalgia for a past that never really existed. In both cases there is heavy emphasis upon the idea that what is “true” or “real” about our memories is that they correctly represent what “actually” happened in the past. When we let sentimental/romantic feelings like comfort and familiarity take us over, the memories we have are distorted by those feelings.

An Imagined Childhood

But that does not help to explain how and why homecoming feels real to us, and how a brand new game can send our hearts back to a past that we may not have even experienced for ourselves. Most recently, I had that feeling playing Mount & Blade: Warband. The first hour of Warband was like being sent back to the early 1990′s, playing Sid Meier’s Pirates! I am not the first person to comment on the many similarities between Warband and Pirates! (some even sneer ‘It is just Pirates! with horses and castles’). But it wasn’t just the gameplay that reminded me of Sid Meier’s original creation, it was the entire expressive style of Warband that made me feel like I was back home, huddled around an old 286 with a couple of my buddies, doing our damndest to haul ass back to Antigua with a frigate full of illicit booty.

The thing is, I never owned Pirates! back in the 1990′s. But a couple of my friends did own the game, and they would regale me with tales of buccaneering and swashbuckling on the high seas. They would hang out together in a bedroom during those balmy junior high school summers, glued to the computer and taking turns in the hot seat until the wee hours of the morning. At least, that is how I imagine it. And for all intents and purposes, that’s what growing up on a farm in western Canada was all about in the 90′s: weeks of boredom punctuated by days of intense gaming with your closest friend. (Or, in my case, with my sister).

In actuality, I didn’t play Pirates! Gold until 1998 on my Pentium-133. I played it by myself, in my lonely single-bedroom apartment. No story there.

So: I have this feeling of homecoming when I play Mount & Blade: Warband that hearkens back to a childhood that I did not “actually” live, but I feel like I should have lived. If we listen to the average social psychologist, I sound like an irreparably damaged person who can’t distinguish between their imagination and their recollections.

But if we take a much different approach to memory, what appears to be childish nostalgia is instead a powerful disclosure of the essence of gaming. Phenomenologist and philosopher Gaston Bachelard, thinking about our encounters with bird nests, writes that homecoming “takes us back to our childhood or, rather, to a childhood; to the childhoods we should have had.  For not many of us have been endowed by life with the full measure of its cosmic implications.”

Homecoming as Re-inhabiting the Past

Let’s face it: most of us, in actuality, squandered youthhood on terrible console games and even worse TV shows and music. But the youthhood of the adult, the one that I experience now as I play games in a way that I should have when I was a teenager, creates new memories and new experiences. When I feel homecoming in a great game, I do not fabricate my childhood (as the social psychologist thinks), but I re-imagine what being-at-home felt like as a boy, and lend my childhood over to the experience that I am making with the game.

If that is true – that my childhood is changing and revealing new truths about me as I play games – then we do not interpret games: games interpret us.

When I was fourteen years old, I bought the complete Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set from my older teenaged neighbour for $10 (including colour changing dice!). I remember shaking with anticipation as I got home, imagining all of the amazing adventures that my friends and I would go on together. When I got home, I called three of my closest friends up and asked them if they wanted to come over and play a game of D&D together. The response was less than enthusiastic, and the game ended up collecting dust on my bookshelf, along with a dozen-or-so character sheets that I laboriously worked on.

I grew up in a time and place where the word “D&D” was tantamount to declaring yourself a sexless nerd, loner or devil worshipper to the entire junior high school. It was the early 1990′s, and the intense popularity of Dungeons and Dragons in the 70s and 80s was wearing off fast. The idea of sitting around a table with a few buddies and calling up fantasied worlds with a roll of the dice was coming up against the harsher realities of grunge music and the gulf war. The farm town I grew up in was predominantly Catholic. Films like Mazes and Monsters starring Tom Hanks (a teenager who suffers from psychosis and starts to live out his D&D character in real life), and the religious backlash of the 1980s against D&D was firmly embedded in the memories of parents and us kids.

In this article I consider the major comeback, at least in my life and those people around me, that pen’n'paper roleplaying games are making, and consider the repercussions that this will have for how the youth of today will experience future cRPGs.

1990: CRPGs Emerge in the Golden Age

To fill that gap, I turned to computer role playing games like the Ultima series, the Quest for Glory series, Wing Commander: Privateer, Betrayal at Krondor, and (years later) Fallout. These were games that had strong central characters who were on quests to save the world, involved dark and esoteric forms of magic or skilfulness, and demanded an imaginative leap from the player. I had to identify and empathize with the characters of the world if I was going to devote dozens of hours to saving it, and this gaming fulfilled a gigantic imaginative and moral gap in my life as a teenager, allowing me to explore dangerous or taboo topics in a safe manner. These games, while not particularly approved of by most parents and friends (I am sure that my parents worried at how many evenings I spent with Ultima VIII: Pagan), at least were too new to have acquired the stigma that D&D had. If the 1980s was the decade of pen’n'paper gaming, the 1990s was the decade of the CRPG.

(This is fairly consistent with the timeline that Matt Barton draws up in Dungeons & Desktops: The History of Computer Role-Playing Games. Barton argues that the late 1980′s and early 1990′s usher in a “Golden Age” of computer and console roleplaying games.)

Being a teenager during the Golden Age of CRPGs meant that I was in an awkward spot – I was part of a generation who bridged the older pen’n'paper tradition with a new CRPG-literate generation of gamers. I learned some of the language of role-playing through fantasy books, some through my brief flirts with the D&D Basic Set, and most through the dominant CRPGs of that time. My understanding of an RPG was that it was part imagination, but mostly set in a world of characters and places that were pre-determined by the author or designer. Sure, they could come up with non-linear ways of telling a story (i.e. Wing Commander: Privateer follows a largely player-directed story arc) but the content of the game was largely predetermined. Or, if the plot was predeterminate, I might focus on customizing my character and focusing on certain skills and abilities that I found important, such as my Magic User in Quest for Glory. If the game were particularly involving I might invest myself emotionally in the quest by imagining myself into the role of the Avatar or hero, making moral choices that reflected the character whom I wanted to ‘play’. But lost in all of this was the participatory storytelling that made pen’n'paper roleplaying games truly unique.

CRPG Becomes the Norm

What emerged in the late 90′s and early 2000′s was a CRPG-literate crowd of gamers with very specific expectations about what a roleplaying game is. We wanted games with statistics – lots of ‘em. We wanted games with all kinds of open-ended exploration. We wanted games that let us customize our character’s abilities. We wanted party-based adventuring, even though 4 of the 5 party members were computer-controlled. We wanted epic stories that took dozens of hours to complete, each replete with subquests or sidequests to keep us entertained while on the “main” quest.

But lost in this emerging literacy were the original pen’n'paper games that created the metaphors for gameplay that CRPGs aped algorithmically. Kids born in the mid-1990′s have grown up in a world where Dungeons and Dragons no longer carries any meaning beyond being a particular brand of computer role-playing games. Many of the teenagers in our “Art Guild” after-school program are very literate when it comes to playing computer games, but the idea of playing a pen’n'paper adventure seems quaintly confusing to them. Like driving around in your Ford Model-T when you have a Porsche sitting in the garage.

Discovering that the Old is New

Of course, D&D has not remained dormant for the last 30 years. In fact, there are probably more pen’n'paper systems available today than there ever were. So for the last few years, my wife and I have had the great fortune to have participated in a number of campaigns – some as DM, some as players – from Deadlands to Planescape to a re-imagining of Ultima VIII: Pagan. Each time we play, I am struck by the rich and complex social scene that plays out before us.

A few weeks ago I brought in a D&D Basic Set to the Art Guild, and asked a handful of teenagers if they wanted to “play a real role-playing game”. Only one of them had played a pen’n'paper game before, and the rest were curious but totally unfamiliar with D&D. So we sat down, rolled up some very basic character sheets, and began our journey.

DM: “You are standing on a 30-foot high cobblestone wall.”

Player 1: “Why?”

DM: “I’m not sure. You hear the sound of a gong behind you, along with villagers screaming ‘get him!’ and ‘he’s on top of the wall!’

Player 2: “What do I do?”

DM: “I’m not sure. What do you want to do?”

Player 2: “Ummm. What are my options?”

DM: “Well, the wall is a 30 foot drop. You figure that you might be able to climb down if you take your time. There are handholds in the rough cobblestone.”

Player 2: “I want to climb down then.”

DM: “Give me a roll on your D20.”

Player 3: “Which one is the D20?”

And so on.

Three hours later, they had been assaulted by guards dressed in red gowns, fled down a steep switchback mountain path, clung for their lives after falling off the steep sides of the path, got lost in a forest, were assailed by pygmies, and buried a skeleton that they found laying alongside the road. In each of these situations, the characters found themselves arguing over complex issues of trust, greed, courage, friendship and disloyalty. They bargained with one another, joked and teased one another, and learned to tread the fine line between what is ‘in game’ (their character) and what is ‘out of game’ (themselves).

At an individual level, I noticed that each player learned how to communicate their actions and express their thoughts in a much more clear and articulate manner than usual. Ambiguous speech acts like “I walk into the dark forest” were usually met with clarifications from the DM “Well, which direction? In front of you? Do you have a light?” or sometimes with outright remonstrations from the DM, “You walk into the dark forest without a light. You are now lost.”

I also noticed that a few players also took risks that they would have never taken in real life. Stealing something from another person would be impossible for most of these teenagers, but in the game they were able to explore iniquitous acts without serious repercussion. They learned, for instance, that a character needs a motivational space that makes sense of their action – they can’t just walk off the side of a mountain without a sensible reason, or commit an act of evil without some kind of moral context.

Recovering a Tradition

What I am beginning to appreciate is that there is a new generation of CRPGers, who were previously unfamiliar with D&D that are just becoming familiar with pen’n'paper games. Judging by the two three-hour sessions that I have played with the teenagers from the Art Guild, D&D is by far the most successful group activity we have had in 7 months. Already several of them want to learn how to DM and create their own worlds, and take other players out on adventures.

The upshot of this, I hope, is that this new generation of gamers – who are now playing pen’n'paper games – will create a desire to completely revitalize the idea of a CRPG. I don’t think that we need another Baldur’s Gate. I think we need to recapture the vitality and rich social space enacted in pen’n'paper sessions. Designers of the future need to remember that role-playing games are primarily played with friends and involve working out complex social relationships that exist outside of the game. I think that we need CRPGs that aren’t about “choosing moral option A or B”, but rather about having the player ask themselves, “what kind of character is s/he? Would s/he do this?”

Games like Mass Effect 2 and BioShock have returned us to the original problem of telling a story in a coherent manner, while inviting input from the player, but still have not addressed the more fundamental problem that an RPG involves: learning how to clarify one’s own decisions and emotions within a safe, bounded, environment.

I appreciate that CRPGs have become their own modes of expression with standards of their own that do not refer back to pen’n'paper games. But, judging by the quality of the RPG sessions I have participated in, they could still learn a thing or ten. I hope that this new generation of gamers creates a desire for richer CRPGs – games that are more connected to the human feeling and morality that is expressed in the average pen’n'paper session.

In recent years, Floyd dying in the Biolab has become a touchstone for gaming emotion. It is now often cited as a critical moment in the developmental path of gaming, along with (of course) Aerith dying in Final Fantasy VII. (For instance – in the comments area of 11 Nerdy Moments Guaranteed to Make You Cry a few people mention Floyd and effectively put it on the same spectrum as Spock dying in Star Trek and Gandalf dying in Lord of the Rings.) Character death is now a celebrated aspect of the gamer mythos. In this article I take apart what I see as false nostalgia that has sanctified one of the least important parts of Planetfall at the cost of missing the one thing that makes Planetfall stand out as one of the most important text adventures of today.

(If you care about “spoilers”, and haven’t, in the last 27 years taken the time to play Planetfall – now might be a good time to stop reading and start playing.)

Not a lot was said about this moment back in the 1980s. In fact, other than the occasional “Floyd was really cool”, almost nothing was said about Floyd prior to the emergence of the post-2005 gamer/nerd aesthetic. Even James A. McPherson’s (1984) Computer Gaming World review (p. 44) paints Floyd in a somewhat ambivalent light, suggesting that he is (at first) an annoyance, which the reviewer slowly grew to see as a companion.

... You will meet a robot named Floyd. In the beginning, Floyd might be a nuisance because of his incessant babbling, but as you have probably already guessed he plays an important part in the completion of the game. Floyd's interaction is a very unique
concept in this game. It adds animation to the game without relying on graphics. (In certain parts of the complex I had already mapped I found myself hurrying through the
rooms. As this left Floyd far behind, I ended up slowing down to wait for Floyd to catch up.)

... The addition of Floyd the robot as your part- ner is a unique boost to the interactive nature of these games and I hope to see more of this type of creative innovation in future games.

Maybe McPherson did not want to ruin the ending for new players, but I don’t see anything approaching the histrionics of gamers today who think back to dear little Floyd. Floyd hardly figures into the review any more than an interesting gameplay innovation. What I’m getting at is that gamers have come, through a combination of blind personal nostalgia and participation within a cloistered gamer culture, to exaggerate the meaning of what is a highly overrepresented aspect of Planetfall. Floyd is not a compelling character, and barely amounts to a loyal dog that stays by your side throughout.

What I’m trying to say is that the vast majority of gamers have missed out on the most important part of the game.

Microcosmicity

The philosopher and phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard has something to say about “cosmicity” – the inconceivable vastness of the universe that we experience when we encounter a cosmic poetic image – in say, a poem. The first stanza of William Blake’s oft-quoted poem Auguries of Innocence is a standard example:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

For Bachelard, perceiving infinitude in the miniature is essential to the growth of consciousness. Our world – quite literally – becomes larger as we imagine cosmic vastness. Simultaneously, as we perceive things in miniature, the geometrically tiny encloses something impossibly large. The examples of this today are innumerable – especially in childrens’ popular culture: Basil the Hare freely commiserates with the mice of Redwall Abbey in Brian Jacques’ Redwall series, Tuck Pendleton of Innerspace is miniaturized (along with his spaceship) and injected into a man’s body, or when Flynn is digitized and inserted into the ENCOM mainframe in Tron. In all of these, a leap of the imagination is necessary: I know that Basil is literally 50 times the size of Matthias in Redwall, but I imagine them to live in the same space. The imagination makes literal impossibilities fictional realities. And for Bachelard, who sees the imagination and consciousness as malleable parts of our human makeup, imagining the impossibly infinite is an expansion of our way of being in the world.

Becoming The Grain of Sand

Where does Planetfall fit in this? It is one of the few games that seamlessly integrates microcosmicity into its experience… so much so that the player can feel the mutual intimacy of the miniature and the vast. The scene happens after Floyd has retrieved the miniaturization card for you and died for his efforts. To get off the island, you must first fix a problem with the computer – there is a fault at Relay Station 384 on the computer’s motherboard. Here is what happens:

You - and the laser beam you carry - climb into a miniaturization booth and are shrunken to a being just a few microns across. The computer's circuit board becomes a gigantic maze of highways and platforms - copper traces, junctions and gates. Wielding the laser, you walk over to a nearby relay station and fire several times at a gigantic meteorite, sitting between the relay and the rest of the circuit, preventing it from functioning. The meteorite - an infinitesimal spec of dust to the naked eye - dwarfs you. You walk back to the entrance and encounter a microbe hell-bent on eating you alive. You fire at the microbe relentlessly, and your laserbeam has no effect on the montrosity. The laser is growing hot in your hands. Finally, frustrated, you throw your laser over the side of the platform and the microbe chases after it into oblivion. You run back to the entrance, and you are re-atomized into your former size. All of this happens in a few nanoseconds.

Experiencing Games

Compare my description above of what I see as the most important scene in the game – of being de-atomized and shrunken, destroying a particle of dust with a laser, and being chased by a gigantic microbe – to the oft-spoken sentiment “Floyd’s death made me sad.” I don’t dispute that Floyd’s death was saddening – what I dispute is that his death carries much significance for us as people. I don’t think about Floyd at night, before I go to bed.

What I do imagine is being shrunken to the size of a butterfly’s eyelash, and running around in a labyrinth of tunnels and junctions. In other words, the simple emotion of sadness does not lead me anywhere new – it is just what it is. But microcosmicity… the experience of vastness in an impossible small space… is a new experience and opens me up to new kinds of imagining.

Excluded from that life, by definition, is anything that will not lead to a positive outcome in the parent’s eyes (these of course are defined economically: getting a high-paying job, graduating magna cum laude at an Ivy League school, receiving educational awards). I have no opinion on whether or not Amy Chua (a professor of Law and economic commentator at Yale) is a good or bad mother, or whether her children are good or bad people. Those conversations have been had.

Instead, I want to know: if a family excludes play from the household or puts major restrictions upon its expression, what kinds of values are being ignored or denied to the child?

What is Playing Anyway?

Play, by its nature, is difficult to confine in any strict definition. It includes all kinds of activities, from pushing around Tonka toys in a sand box, to kids building a hidden fort in the forest, to jamming in an improvisational jazz session. There is something playful and unexpected in all of those activities: the child in the sand box is not moving around sand for any serious purpose, the children in the forest are not architects trying to erect an office building, nor is the jazz group trying to perfect a piece that they have all memorized. In all of these cases, people are exploring the limits of their expressive abilities, creating different kinds of social relationships with other people, or discovering new kinds of properties or relationships that things have. All of these involve re-imagining and transforming our spaces with or without other people.

What Kinds of Play are found in Minecraft?

Games, for some, serve as a means for play. Playing Minecraft with other kids in The Art Guild has taught me just how powerful play is as a form of expression. Over the last few weeks my guildmates and I have been building a community on our Minecraft server. Some of them play, each day, for hours – constructing elaborate fortresses and underground mines with no particular schematic or final product in mind. Others jump in and explore the map, poking around in dark corners and building staircases hundreds of feet high, just to get an overview of the place. Others yet mine obsessively, dwarven-fashion, delving greedily into the Earth for any coal, diamonds or redstone that it might yield to them, jealously guarding their treasures in secret tunnels and hideaways that their guildmates could not hope to find. Others play Minecraft simply to chat and be in the same virtual space as their guildmates, swapping stories about Guild life or talking about events in the game.

The Values of Play

In all these cases, a very complex and thick social fabric is developing where one did not exist before. Yes, some of these teenagers know each other from school. But in the vast number of cases, they barely know one another – they are just acquaintances. Minecraft, as with all the video games that we play together in the Guild, creates a space in which people can come to share collectively, or fight and argue, or love and cherish, or hide secretively, or obsessively collect, or laugh and jibe about. Some of these are more playful than others: those who explore and build for the sake of expression enjoy a form of play that is clearly more playful than those who log in and needlessly squirrel-away resources. But in all of these cases, children are becoming people of certain kinds – whether they are helpful, combative, secretive or impulsive – through the space that the players of the game create in their style of playing it. They are developing new friendships, discovering new emotions (one player recognized for the first time that he is “greedy” with his resources), or learning new social skills (i.e. bartering). The value of the game is precisely in offering opportunities (spaces) in which people can express, and in expressing themselves, become certain kinds of people with desires and motivations and styles of social relating of their own. Play-spaces (of all kinds, not just in games) create moments for social and personal enrichment primarily through expression, and not through institutionalized learning, education, and cognitive or technical skill-building. Play precedes, and is the forerunner to, all forms of adult institutionalized knowledge.

What is Lost?

This all being said, creating a household in which play (of all kinds) is denied serves to create a child who experiences their world in terms of means-ends, instrumental goals, and cognitive or technical skills. Lost in this, I think, are the tacit forms of understanding developed in playing with other people: expressing and dealing with one’s emotions, developing deep friendships, and interpreting the world in terms of one’s imagination rather than relying upon the stock images provided by parents or social institutions. In essence, denying play leads exactly to the kind of ruthless North American society in which we live in today: one defined by work, end goals, and social anomie.

“I am not sure that I have lived since my childhood.”

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Night Flight

December 20, 1987

My sister and I are sitting in front of a small black-and-white television, the bevelled corners of its glass face smudged with dust and cat hair. Our eyes are locked on two elongated snakes, each trailing behind it a long tail. The snakes move in eight directions, chomping down on anything in their path -- including my one tail if I lose my concentration. The four snakes on the screen -- two played by the computer, and two by us -- are all different shades of grey against a snowy field. But I do not see grey snakes as we play -- I see a turquoise-blue one, a blood-red one, a golden one, and one the colour of birch leaves. My sister always takes the green one, and I the red. Outside the cedar-framed window it has started snowing again, with a cold that numbs the cheek, even with our parkas on.

We are sitting on the carpet indian-style, and we are both cradling the Mattel Intellivision controller in our hands, elbows propped up on our knees; our thumbs rest tensely on the ’4′ and ’6′ buttons, waiting for the next surprising change in direction. (I would note, years later in a dingy arcade, that this game plays exactly like TRON’s light-cycle game.) My sister begins to grin, and I laugh: I know that she is up to no good, and plans to force me and the computer-player into a corner, a collision that I will pay her back for later.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHXS1oBk5Rk

November 19, 2010

Twenty-three years later, the glass doors of our humble guild-house (in fact, the local Lion’s Club building) shake against the wicked arctic winds that punish the snow-covered streets. The packed room is full of energetic teenagers: some are artists, some are gamers, and some are just kids who want a place to hang out with others. Months ago, my wife and I started an after-school club for teenagers living in the rural town she teaches in. We call it “The Art Guild”.

A guild-mate comes up from behind and elbows me: “Star Fox 64. Right now!” She is fifteen-years-old, and she is my closest friend in the guild.

We plop down in front of a Commodore 1702 monitor (which serves as the guild-house television), sitting a few feet away from the screen, and squint at the conglomerations of triangles on the screen, trying to make out our spaceships on a field of green. We are not playing on the Lylat map, we are on Lylat. Shards of laser beams careen over my shoulder -- she is firing at me, locked on my tail. I am Peppy Hare, and she Fox McCloud. I barrel-roll, dodging hard left, trying to get her off my six o’clock. Her teeth are locked in a grim rictus. “How do I do a somersault?”, I ask, feigning a casual tone. “Not telling!” she jibes. For the next hour, we mock and tease each other as our ships take a similar barrage. We not only play a game (which is in fact, a serious affair), but are playful with one another. For these Dionysian moments, in the thrill and agony of combat, we are made equals.

The Barbaric Past and the Ideal Future

People who reflect on the past, like myself, come under perennial attack from those who see the past as a barbaric obstacle or time of humble ignorance. Many would point at Snafu and ask me, ‘How can you even tell what it is? Is that supposed to be a worm or something?’ And if I reply, ‘That is one of the most original and wonderful games I have ever played’, I am immediately accused of a pernicious nostalgia that makes lemon-aid of lemons. To my accusers, my childhood appears a bit like a Feudalistic farmer, barely surviving under the hardships of serfdom and poverty, crying “My God, I love this.”

I understand that criticism -- for nostalgia would indeed be a fair accusation if I thought that the past only existed in total isolation from the present and that games can be thought of as static objects with mechanical properties. What I mean by that is that gamers, by and large, still think of games as “things” -- as objects to be wrestled with, that have clear and defined properties (i.e. programmed logic, gameplay mechanics, quantifiable sound and graphics). Games are not seen as gaming practices, as ways of engaging with oneself and other people, as spaces or occasions that make possible a whole slough of personal and social experiences. When a game is treated like an object, a subject (the player!) now appears, full of all sorts of warped perceptions and personal vices -- their opinion cannot be trusted, because it is likely to be full of all sorts of personal bias… it is too “subjective”. And worse, lost and confused in the objective view, is the connection between the past and the present: was the game the same for me as a child as it is for me as an adult? It must be so by definition: it is the same game with the same mechanics. Any difference in the game is thought to be due to my subjective biases, as an adult and as a child. My childhood becomes as meaningless and fruitless as my adulthood, and the story that connects both is ruptured in the process.

The Heart of the Field

My sister and I, my friend and I, both play on the same imaginary field. We both are conjoined in some kind of common space that makes our playfulness towards one another a reality that encompasses us both. Moments after the Intellivision and the N64 are shut off, that field disappears. But we do not forget. We all retain that virtual field as part of our future psycho-emotive habitudes. The love of those moments spent with one another, in the comfort of warm rooms embattled by raging winter storms, sows within us a dark seed that awaits its radiant bloom.

If you can stand my tremendously Canadian accent, feel free to listen in on our conversation here. The show notes are also available here.

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.