Recently, Michael of the Brainy Gamer wrote a brilliant (yet terribly misunderstood) exploration of the phenomenology of keeping a scorecard at a baseball game. Sounds a little boring eh? You bet… until you understand the level of intimacy that he creates just by writing down a few numbers and thinking through the game. In this post I’ll try to do justice to just what Michael might have meant by the word “engagement” by talking a little bit about what people do when they “engage” themselves with a game. Before you read this, it’s critical to read Michael’s post first… because I’ll be referring to it throughout. Trust me, it’s worth it.

Let’s deal with scorekeeping a baseball game first:

“Scoring a ballgame brings you closer to the game being played on the field”

How is it possible that keeping a score card at a baseball game could actually create a level of intimacy with the game that goes beyond spectating? Isn’t it just a cold calculus of the mind?

From what I can tell, this intimacy is produced in two ways:

1) Through the mechanics of maintaining the scorekeeping card. Michael writes of his experience: “A right-handed batter steps to the plate to face a right-handed pitcher. These two have faced each other many times, so I note that this pitcher “owns” this batter with a mark next to the batter’s name. The flags, which indicated that the wind was blowing out at the start of the game, have now gone limp, so I note that on my scorecard as well.”  From what we gather from his story, keeping the score card requires patience, attentiveness, technical skill, judgment, and a darned good memory. This skillful act, while important (as we’ll find out), is secondary to another personal act…

2) Through the imaginative work of playing the roles of the pitcher, batter, fielders, basemen, etc. This act, as form of engagement with the game, is primary. It involves how we imagine the on-field players are feeling and thinking. As Michael says in a later comment, “If the batter can be patient, he will likely see a good pitch to hit, but if he’s over-anxious, as my scorecard tells me he was both previous times, he’s probably going to be vulnerable to a pitch low and away. He knows this. The pitcher knows this. And so do I.”

Now let’s think about what happens when someone scorekeeps the way he does. The scorekeeper does not just record numbers, statistically analyze them, and spit back out the results. He also does not just imagine the game as a personal fantasy; the game is going on in front of him. He is also not a passive spectator - he feels invested in the game as if his judgments were just as important as the pitcher’s choices.

What the scorekeeper does, and I daresay all people familiar with role-play do, is engage themselves with the game at a level beyond both rule-following and imaginary fantasy. The scorekeeper is like an appreciator of fine art or music: they are mindful of the subtleties and nuances of the ‘rules’ while simultaneously mindful of the art work itself. Where the casual spectator can only engage with the game in fantasy, and the rigid statistician does not “see” a game but a complex calculus, the scorekeeper plays the game. They are engaged with the baseball game at a bodily and spiritual level - the game unfolds for them at their personal pace.

Based on those distinctions we can imagine that there are three (idealized) kinds of video game players:

“The Accountant”

The game is enjoyed at a distance as sets or levels of generative rules. The game is played in terms of understanding these rules and making distinctions, and using this understanding to obtain something of personal interest: in-game artifacts, treasure, quest completion, character attributes, etc.

Because the player has no personal engagement with the rules, the rules are seen as inviolable, impersonal, and external; the player often attempts to master or dominate the game.

“The Devourer”

The game is enjoyed as a flight into fantasy; it is “consumed” by the player because s/he makes no distinctions of quality or quantity within the game. This kind of player simply relies upon their inchoate sense of personal value which determines their play style, and the game is subsumed by their desires. If the game rules do not suit them, they are tossed, ignored, or violated (ie. cheating). The kind of game does not matter much in the end; an FPS could be just as enjoyable as an adventure game as long as it satiates their desires.

“The Role-Player”

The game is understood as deeply personal yet otherworldly. The game world exists as a living, breathing, self-sufficient world, separate from the player’s desires. Yet, the role-player finds ways of discovering his/her desires within the game, by understanding the game’s rules. The player’s desires, in the end, are reshaped by their understanding of the rules. They engage with the game world (usually through a Player-Character or avatar) with a sense of commitment, care, and personal value for what happens in the game. This player plays in the game.

Of course we can see that these player types are idealized, and every player sits in all camps simultaneously, but drawing out the distinctions brings us closer to understanding just what’s at stake for the average player.

Loving Games is Hard Work

Appreciating anything is more than just distilling our personal enjoyment from it, and more than just coldly analyzing its constituent elements one at a time. Appreciating games, art, music, baseball, the subtleties of my cat’s meows, all require a deep personal engagement only possible when we allow ourselves to become mindful of the rules, what’s happening in front of us, and our selves. Developing a phenomenology (a description of our personal engagement with some phenomenon) of video and computer games is one of the new languages that we have to develop, among other things. Understanding and appreciating games allows us to engage with them in deeper waters and ensures that they won’t become just another flavor of the month. I’m deeply thankful that Michael started paddling us down this creek in the first place.

In this article I take on the very common problem of players becoming bored or frustrated by “art games”. I try to spin some new language around games that help us understand how they relate to art, and vice-versa, all in the hope that more gamers have the opportunity to take on any kind of game without quitting in frustration.

I don’t begrudge gamers for having difficulty with understanding art - almost everyone does. Gamers came up with these responses to The Graveyard and The Jackyard (culled from various sources):

“Am I right in saying that Tale of Tales don’t make “games”, rather, they make “interactive experiences”, because it would be crass to call their works “games”?
Sigh.”

“That wasn’t very fun.”

“I think ‘interactive experience’ is a fair name for it; there’s very little which is traditionally game-like about it. Anyway, not really worth playing, I think. There’s just an awkward camera, a slow walk, and a quiet song.”

“The camera is actually sort of central to what I don’t like about the game; that they give you the pretense of a world you can walk about and explore, and then the inexplicably broken camera is the excuse that keeps you from being able to explore it at all. So I immediately fight with it, walking off the screen till I can’t see the lady any more and am afraid I’m stuck on something back there.”

“Does anyone know what to do???
(Except walking around?)”

“Certainly interesting, but seems very short.”

Common to all of these comments is the sense that games are about immediacy: action, reaction, novelty, responsiveness, control, like, dislike, etc. For a large majority of gamers, games are about immediate and momentary enjoyment. Games that don’t respond with immediate feedback, give the player a sense of exploration or achievement, or give the player complete control over the character, are often reviewed as boring or frustrating experiences. To some degree that accounts for why the great majority, 99.999% of all games created today, are player-driven action games. These kinds of games put the player in the hot seat and hand over the keys to an on-screen representation of themselves. “Interaction” is understood as something active, something that the player does and the game responds to.

In other forms of art, interaction is often understood differently. Viewing a painting, listening to music, or reading poetry is also thought of as an interactive experience - between the viewer-listener-reader and the art piece. “Interactivity” in this case is predicated upon the idea that the artist produces a work that engages the audience’s imaginations and feelings. Ultimately, the responsibility for engaging with a work of art is in the hands of the audience - the artist has no “say” in determining what our experiences are. The art piece is a public artifact in an imaginative dialogue with an audience.

Video and computer games are held against a different standard of interactivity. “Interactivity” in games mean that the computer must provide the player with the illusion that the computer is “responding” to the player’s choices. When that illusion is frustrated, for instance because the character cannot “do” what the player wants her/him to do, players often feel that their sense of dialogue with the game is destroyed. In this form of immediate activity the player is in a literal dialogue with the game. In many ways video games imitate or represent real-world dialogical interaction. Action-reaction. Decision-consequence.

The point is that in imaginative dialogues the audience shoulders the great responsibility of the interpretive work. In video games, the great bulk of interpretive work is done by the computer. In the first, the audience gains a sense of closeness with the piece through the imagination - the symbols in the work of art evoke imagery and feelings for us. In video games, the sense of closeness is based upon a physicalistic metaphor - if I push against a box on the screen it better damned move! The meaning of what is happening is progressively and literally shaped by the computer, in response to the player’s actions.

This is why games like The Graveyard and The Jackyard often receive such (empty) criticism. Many gamers don’t want to interact with a piece through an imaginative dialogue, they want the kinds of literal dialogues that they’ve become accustomed to. So-called “art games” often play at the more imaginative end of the tension between imagination and immediacy - art games require the player to make some kind of interpretive judgment in order to determine what is meaningful, and rely much less upon the elements of literal dialogue to shape meanings.

True, we speak in relative terms here. There are many games that play at the tension between imagination and literal interactivity, and many of these accomplish the feat marvelously. Interactive fiction games often deliver interactivity through the imagination. Sandbox games provide an open environment where the imagination can be expressed through interactivity. Somewhere closer to the middle are role-playing games such as Planescape: Torment and Wasteland that put the player in the midst of the action, yet provide a living and breathing landscape that defies total control.

Near the imaginative end of the spectrum is The Jackyard. Richard Hofmeier does a great job of exploiting and frustrating the expectations of the literal gamer. The game is full of obstacles that aren’t puzzles to be solved, art images that simply exist for their aesthetic qualities, and a coal-colored palette that is deeply integrated with its equally stark musical score. The world that Richard has produced is an artifact for our exploration and understanding, by prodding at artistic expression through the language of game. Determining how and if his work achieves what it is trying to do is your work as the player. So temporarily put aside your preconceptions (or not) and give The Jackyard and The Graveyard a go. Post your comments on the games, and let’s try to figure out together what the heck they mean.

Once we’ve started to develop this new language of art in games, I suspect that “game criticism” and “game reviews” will be much more interesting than a reviewer’s opinion.

design documents, email archives, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made.

So why does this matter? Because he went through the drive and weaved together the tale of why Milliway’s: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe was never completed nor released. If you have not played the excellent Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy IF game (designed and created by Steve Meretzky and Douglas Adams) you’re missing out on a crucial piece of computer game history and a damned fun (difficult!) game. I’ll let Andy tell the story, except for two points:

1. It tells the story of a venerable game company in decline; crisis even. Being 1989, Infocom had already merged with Activision and Milliway’s had been languishing since its inception in ‘85. The company closes with not a bang…
2. It comes with a playable prototype of Milliway’s (!!)

Comments from the ex-Infocom folks on the story seem to agree with some of Andy’s story, however it is quite clear that there is more to this than meets the eye. It will be interesting to see what comes of this in the following weeks, as it quite clearly has ruffled a few feathers - and for good reasons.

Thankfully Jason Scott’s new documentary, Get Lamp, is scheduled for release some time this year. I suspect that his own exploration into the world of interactive fiction, complete with interviews of major designers and programmers, should be just as utterly fascinating just as his epic BBS: The Documentary was.

A Few Examples of iMUSE in Action

Note: I’ve intentionally dropped the speech volume on the audio tracks in these video clips so it’s easier to focus on the musical score. You’ll need Flash installed to view the following clips I uploaded to Youtube. The clips have been resized to fit this page, so click on them to see larger versions.

In this scene from The Curse of Monkey Island, Wally - a cartographer-cum-pirate - breaks down under Guybrush’s relentless teasing (“I’m gonna… I’m… gonna…. <sniff>”). As you watch the clip, listen to the way in which the metre and rhythm of the score remains the same, while the melody changes to suit a more upbeat and less sinister atmosphere. The transition, heralded by a few light drum beats, reflects the “lightening up” of the situation after Wally finally stops threatening Guybrush with his revolver. The melody transitions seamlessly and gives me the sense that the silly but desperate situation has resolved for our bumbling hero.

In this scene, Guybrush enters the Voodoo Priestess’s swamp, greeted by Murray the Talking Skull. As Guybrush enters the rotting swamp boat the music transitions from a soft ethereal score to a slightly spookier score with the addition of another wind instrument (anyone know what that instrument is called?). The mood changes again when Guybrush pulls the alligator’s tongue and as the Voodoo Priestess appears she is introduced by the addition of a subtle reggae beat played on the organ. Mixed into the Voodoo Priestess’s beat is a soft trumpet chorus that fades in and out that adds a sense of foreboding to the scene. All of these subtleties are, of course, recognized only at the subconscious level as we play the game but add a fine atmosphere to each scene and help paint the characters in certain musical tones.

In this scene, Guybrush walks into the Barbershop and the music transitions immediately. See if you can pick out the five different themes that are played here as he speaks with each buccaneer hairstylist. The differences are all subtle, and serve to both colour the personalities of each pirate and the player’s expectations. If you want to hear the different audio tracks independently, head on over to iMUSE Island - my thanks to them for noticing the different mixes in the first place!

How does iMUSE Work?

According to the original patent document for iMUSE, the purpose of the system is to produce “aesthetically appropriate and natural” music and sound effects that modify the “texture, mood and character” of scenes in response to “a directing system”. The musical sequence (composed of notes and instruments) that the composer sends to the directing system is marked at crucial musical junction points, ie. at every ‘measure’, marking positions at which the music can branch. The musical sequencer has the ability to jump to any specific point of a composition (unlike most music), thus giving a standard musical score much more flexibility much like the difference between an mp3 file and a cassette tape. Furthermore, as I will demonstrate in the next part, iMUSE was also able to transpose musical arrangements into completely different tunes, giving the melody different tones and moods to suit the scene. The easiest way to imagine iMUSE is to think of a musical version of interactive hypertext - the user can jump around and re-arrange things at her/his whim.

The early versions of iMUSE-based games used “MIDI” tracks. Since midi arrangements are progressions of electronic musical notes, each note could be remixed on-the-fly. In some LucasArts games that use midi, such as Monkey Island 2, all sorts of transforms (tempo, volume, pan, instruments, etc) are applied to the midi sequence in order to achieve some dramatic effect. In this scene, Guybrush joins a spitting contest. As he approaches the ’spitmeister’, listen as the music detunes and quickly drops out instruments, hailing the entrance of our blundering protagonist. Hey, at least he hocked up a decent loogie this time!In games that use mp3-based musical data, the score is broken up into many constituent musical tracks. Each track, as we saw with the Barbery Coast pirates earlier, are timed identical to each other, so the music engine can seamlessly transition between tracks. While the sound designers lose some flexibility with mp3-based music (because they cannot mix the track note-by-note, instrument-by-instrument, in realtime), they at least can standardize the sound coming out of the speakers on the player’s end because the tracks have been pre-recorded according to their specifications.

Final Thoughts

While the musical feats that the iMUSE technology accomplishes are impressive in themselves, it is clear that all of these examples work not only because of the smooth transitions and/or identical rhythms - they work because the sound designers and composers found the right melodies and rhythms that suited the particular dramatic effect represented in each scene or for each character. iMUSE does not create good arrangements itself, as is evidenced by the occasional failed drama in several games, but rather relies upon the creative composers and designers who use it to craft the right mood for a scene. The subtlety that iMUSE allows for gives players the sense that they’re playing a game, and not simply interacting with a computer. And, when scripted-in with interactive dialogue, art direction, animation, story, and unique characters, the end products are adventure games that capture dramatic moments reminiscent of old radio and television dramas. Add in the rather kooky humor that most LucasArts game writers are known for, and every game beams with a gentle yet compelling story that’s downright enjoyable. Since iMUSE was one of those under-the-hood engines that was meant to work through subtlety, it isn’t surprising that it hasn’t really gotten its due now that it has faded into obscurity. It’s sad that there are so few games that can match the kinds of dramatic achievements that the creators of iMUSE did in their time.

If you’re interested in playing some of the classic LucasArts adventure games, I highly suggest heading on over to the SCUMMVM web site and downloading one of the best open source software projects on the web. SCUMMVM allows you to play all of those great oldies on modern PC’s running Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

If you’re looking for LucasArts-composed music to add to your music library, wander over to WorldMaker.net (scroll down to the comments section) and take a look at the suggestions - I can confirm those are all great compositions!

This post is included as part of a Blogs of the Round Table discussion on music in video games. Follow the below drop-down list for other January ‘08 Round Table entries. My sincere thanks to Corvus for accepting my rather last-minute entry! The list below links to other blogs who participated in this month’s Round Table - I strongly suggesting visiting them.. these articles are all particularly good reads.

In the article, Michael says,

In the end, it seems unlikely we’ll discover video games make us smart, happy, and productive; nor is it likely we’ll find they make us stupid, anti-social, and violent. Like most things, video games defy binary definitions of good or evil…

… Dr. Joshua Smyth, associate professor of psychology in The College of Arts and Sciences conducted a randomized trial study of college students contrasting the effects of playing MMORPGs with more traditional single-player or arcade-style games…

“Video game play does interfere in some aspects of real-life — such as academic performance, health and social life — but game play can also foster strong feelings of virtual support and new friendships,” Smyth says…

Such studies won’t settle the “what to do about video games” debate…and that’s a good thing. Instead, they may help move the discussion away from entrenched polemics and toward something that looks more like a reasonable conversation.

After working in academic psychology for the last few years, I have to admit that I think Michael’s conclusion was very hopeful but quite misleading (note: clearly I understand that he was using this research example as fodder for his conclusion, so I do not point any fingers here). Regardless, studies like this in fact do tend to further entrench polemical debates, and are not immune from political rhetoric. For two reasons (that I can think of):

1. The most obvious is that studies like these are often picked up by either side of the debate and used as “proof” - that ’see! games really do ruin people’s lives! this is why my kid didn’t pass Math 113!’ News reporting services are very good at twisting research literature into the kinds of spins they wish to impart, along with the kinds of political goals their organizations have.

Want evidence?

• The American Psychological Association reports that violent video games increase aggression. Could this have anything to do with the APA promoting psychologists as a solution for video game violence in children?
  
• The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation reports that children watch TV and play games just as much as they play outside. Could this have anything to do with the KFF’s interests in American public health policy?
  
• National Geographic reports that video games boost visual skills. Perhaps for… photographing tigers in the wild!? (Okay, a bit of a stretch here, but you get the idea!)

2. Academic psychology is itself in a major flux. After 75 years of intellectual poverty, psychologists are finally starting to own up to the fact that we don’t actually know how to use science in psychology! Studies like these (a) do not reveal anything we didn’t already know about the ways that students play games, (b) do not posit any kind of clear theoretical claim and are simply empirical shots in the dark, (c) do not have any clear understandings of human emotion or feelings (ie. when’s the last time you called your feelings positive or negative?), and (d) do not offer any clear advice for how we should live in life given the kinds of people we already are.

A Quick Case Study: A review of Smyth’s video game article

Smyth’s article is actually titled, “Beyond Self-Selection in Video Game Play: An Experimental Examination of the Consequences of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game Play” and is not a full article but rather a “rapid communication” - a quick 5-page note that describes his experimental methods and discoveries. It is unfortunate that the original source did not bother to read the article, because there are many obvious problems with Smyth’s study and the conclusions the source drew from it:

1. The study was intended to make causal inferences about the effects of game genres on a person’s self-reports of their well-being.
2. The sample was comprised of 100 18-20 year old undergraduate students. 73% of them were male, and 68% of them were caucasian.
3. The study lasted 1 month.
4. The games were: Gauntlet: Dark Legacy (PS2, single-player), Diablo II (PC, single-player), Arcade games (unnamed), and Dark Age of Camelot (PC, multi-player).
5. At the beginning of the study the students were asked to estimate the number of hours they played the games each week, their overall health, sleep quality, academic performance, social life and well-being using a scale from 0 (very poor) to 6 (very good). At the end of the study, the students completed a similar questionnaire that asked them to estimate how enjoyable they thought the game was, how likely they were to keep playing the game after the study, how much they thought the game interfered with real-life socializing, how much they thought the game helped with making new friends, and how much the game had interfered with academic achivement.

Pictured above: file photo of actual World of Warcraft player. Courtesy of South Park on Comedy Central.

With those kinds of things in mind, these are the results that Smyth found:

• MMORPG players self-reported playing 14 hours / week, while computer, console and arcade players reported many less hours.
• MMORPG players self-reported significantly less on a 0-6 scale on their overall health, game enjoyment, real-life socializing interference, new friendships, and academic interference.

Now, putting aside the serious experimental problems this kind of project has, what kinds of things should we worry about as critical readers? What kinds of things should this tell us about academic studies on video games?

1. The results rely upon the self-estimates of undergraduate students, the majority of which were white males. Not only do we not know anything meaningful about these guys - their tastes in games, their daily involvement in games, their tastes in films and books - but it also tells us nothing about the habits of female gamers, or gamers who don’t report themselves as being caucasian (such as myself!).
2. Of the games listed in the study, I’ve only played one of them: Diablo II. There is no discussion of what kinds of genres these games belong to, how much these games suck in comparison to each other (I thought D2 was pretty good!), and if these games are even played anymore! Furthermore, on what basis were these games chosen? If the answer is “because they’re the only games the researcher has ever played”, we should worry about the kinds of people conducting game research.
3. What on earth does this researcher mean by “overall health” and “sleep quality”? Are these categories that are actually used in daily life? I don’t remember ever telling anyone that I would rate my overall health as a “4″ on a scale of 0-6; in fact, I have no idea how I would rate my overall health. In comparison to other people? In comparison to my past health? What is included in my overall health - my fitness? weight? tooth decay? This is just an example, but you should be able to ask yourself: for any of the questions that Smyth asks students to answer, do they even make sense? If a friend asked you how much you thought video games affected your ability to socialize, wouldn’t you just say ‘I dunno. Can’t be sure either way, really.’? By virtue of the questions themselves being senseless, their answers are equally senseless.
4. This is the most troubling aspect of the study, aside from all of the aforementioned problems, I think. The study tells us nothing new. It tells us nothing that we did not already know about video games:

• We already knew that MMORPGs are woefully addictive, and take many more hours to play than the average single player game.
• We already knew that if you stay up all night playing games, you’ll probably have a bad sleep.
• We already knew that MMORPGs often allow people to make new “friends” online.
• We already knew that if you play games all day, your school marks are going to suffer. I call it “The Law of FINITE TIME”.
• We already knew that if Jeff stays home to play World of Warcraft all night, he won’t be able to come out for a beer with us.

There is simply not a single insight into what games ‘are’ to the people who play them here. There is not a single interview with any of the players, nor any observation of just how they play the game. The researcher just chose a few questions he thought were important to him as a social psychologist, and asked 100 19-year-olds to take their best guess at answering them. I mean no direct offense to Dr. Joshua Smyth, but this is clearly just poor research. Is this how we want games represented in academic literature?

Pictured above: Front cover of Bruno Bettelheim’s book on a psychoanalytic interpretation of fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment. Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t look so scared of the Wolf, does she? Now, I wonder why…

With those thoughts in mind, I don’t see most academic researchers in any position to advance the debate surrounding video games to something we could call a “conversation”. For that, we have to look at examples of real conversations, social commentaries, books, and philosophers that are in fact providing insightful discussions and debate. This is where we have to turn to a growing mass of thoughtful gamers that are willing to engage in meditative conversations. Academic research in psychology is a world of its own, and rarely has anything insightful to tell us. If you really want to know why violence in video games is a constant moral panic for society, read some psychoanalysis and learn about wish-fulfillment and fantasy and their relations to childhood sexuality. You’ll be disturbed. This is why people want to look to academic studies on games - they don’t want to look inwards.

And if you’re too lazy for that, just watch the World of Warcraft episode of South Park. Even if you don’t like the show, this episode is dead-on.