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?

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.

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

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnZo2zVhonM

(Herding Leaping Lizards in Jak 3.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is the last time he ever plays Jak 3.

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

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

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDloiadrCNM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Early next year I will have the opportunity to teach a course in Psychology that will be laden with game content, and I’d like my students to get a chance to play some games and talk about them. My goal in the course is to show that games, like books, movies, plays, and other creative art forms, can sometimes elucidate deep psychological changes in the player. By deep, I mean the kinds of significant non-transient insights we have when something really grabs us and shows us how to picture the world in a different way. My goal for the course is to show students that games play an active role in our psychological lives, even though we may not notice it. To achieve that, undergraduate students (minimum 2nd-year) will be playing what you consider to be psychologically transforming games, participating in lectures and discussions that interpret the psychological meaning these games have, and by the end of the course writing a paper that discusses their particular experience with a game.

With that in mind, I’d like to defer to the community’s expertise in identifying some of the games that had a deep influence for you, and perhaps why/how these games were so influential. I’m hoping that with a large enough list of games and ideas, I can start identifying themes that will make up the bulk of my psychology course. I’m hoping that some day the particular games and psychological themes that you contribute will become more commonplace in the academy, and subsequently more commonplace in our daily public lives.

In return for your gracious guidance, I’m committed to doing a couple of things. First, I’ll post all of my lecture materials and information publicly, so the entire community has the opportunity to remotely take their first ‘Psychology of Games’ course. With the University’s approval, perhaps I can even post recordings of my lectures in podcast form. Second, I’m committed to posting my experience with teaching the course and hopefully encouraging my students to contribute their opinions on the course, the instructor (me!), and their experiences in playing and reflecting upon the games they play.

So if you’ve had a game that has changed you in some way, no matter how seemingly insignificant or good or bad, I’d like to hear about it. Any genre/platform/experience is fair game – I’m not going to exclude any. I’m going to keep this post alive for as long as possible to give enough people a chance to contribute their experiences/stories.

THANK YOU!

- Chris

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.