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 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.

Yesterday, Brian Green over at Gamasutra posted his reflections upon the necessity of establishing “artistic legitimacy” for games. The article does not go into any depth or detail into what cultural/artistic/financial legitimacy actually means for people who are culturally/artistically/financially oppressed; instead it amounts to a bunch of rich kids screaming “You don’t understand us!” and “We hate living in this house!”

I apologize for my derisive tone, but I have never seen this degree of self-aggrandizement and self-pitied whimpering in all my time spent writing about, and criticizing, games. But really, does this kind of whining lend any legitimacy to developers at all? Besides – why has nobody asked if we really want legitimacy? Does legitimacy make good art? Since when was someone stopping developers from making games about the horror of war, or guilt and penance? I hate to rain on your parade here, Green, but most developers stop themselves from making artful games because they perceive a “small market” for that kind of thing. Brian Green claims that “we are stuck making works that can only be appropriate for children”. You say that you’re stuck in the children’s game business? Honestly, I’d like to see Mr. Green name 10 children’s games released this year that did not suck. Compare that to the hundred violent action games that were released, and made money, and we can start talking. Until then, this is self-deception to the nth degree.

Seriously. The folks of “Project Horseshoe” who came up with this idea need to pack up their sleeping bags, take their football, and go back home. Or move to Hollywood where you’ll get all the ego-stroking you need.

Note: Kumar Daryanani Arias posted a very insightful reply over at “Destral’s Blog”; it is worth reading in relation to Green’s article.

A Bit of History

In the last three years I have witnessed a trend in game journalism and game writing. Throughout the 80s and 90s, and the first half of the new millennium, major print publishers were our primary source of game reviews. Cries of review bias and a lack of journalistic integrity were ubiquitous in the 90s… and represented a general discomfort with the idea of a publication being the arms-length advertising appendage of a major console/game publisher. Especially now, it is hard to conceive of Nintendo Power as a credible journalistic source. But, I can remember being 13 years old, dropping five bucks every month on the latest copy of GamePro magazine, knowing that its reviews were skewed at best, and all-out fabricated at worst. I bought a copy of Faceball 2000 for my GameBoy based on a raving review, only to find out it was a horrifically unplayable bastardization of Wolfenstein 3-D. But I still swallowed it, and purchased games in a frenzy.

The De-institutionalization Movement.

Fast-forward to 2005. Twenty years of cynicism mounted, and the “indie” game movement was gaining momentum. All of a sudden gamers and bloggers alike were crying for deeper, less biased, reviews of games. For the next couple of years we tossed accusations of marketing bias and journalistic poverty at the major online review networks, and saw them slowly crumble to what they are now. And I should be clear here… I think the de-institutionalization of game reviewing/writing was a major and welcome disruption of the status quo, and we are better for it. We saw smaller blogs sprout from the collective disillusionment, and the last three years have seen a gradual growth of this “new games journalism”, such that now I do not even find myself cruising the major gaming news networks for information on the latest’n'greatest.

A New Hope.

Now that the great publishing beasts have been defeated and their ashes scattered to the four corners of the Earth, we might take a brief respite to mull over where we have ended up. The “New Games Journalism” movement proposed originally in Kieron Gillen’s Manifesto gave some of us the courage to write about our “subjective” experiences of games. And there is something liberating in the idea: instead of relying upon the traditional objective review criteria (ie. on a 1-10 scale) we could turn to our experiences for inspiration. Like Tom Wolfe, we were going to embrace the “I” in game writing. We were going to build new communities of thinkers and write deeper, more insightful, ways of understanding the boxes of bits and bytes we’ve treasured for the last 30 years.

The New Dire Straits.

But something happened along the way that corrupted the heart of the NGJ ideal. Instead of becoming deeper and more insightful, we became pretentiously intellectual. Instead of writing about our personal connections to games and what they mean for the entire social collective as loving/breathing/thinking human beings, we write about our individual opinions. Instead of understanding the game-player dialectic as a holism – one implying and transforming the other – we atomize and deconstruct gameplay and player experiences as separate things. Instead of providing deep critiques of games and reflect upon what they express of our societies as they are now, the vast majority of critiques cherry-pick superficial aspects of a game – such as an NPC’s skin-colour or gender – and perpetuate the very stereotypes they wish to undermine. Journalistic objectivity has been replaced by opinion and thinned-down experiences, rather than exploring how games-publishers-societies-experiences set the stage for our opinions of them. We ignore hundreds of years of thought on the review of art and aesthetics, and instead feed off of the blogs and inane personal judgements of game developers who are themselves part of the mess.

Most disturbing in this stillborn transition to a NGJ, I think, is an insidious double-move that involves both the critique and reliance upon “AAA” publishers and the games they release. Where the major online and print publishers of yesteryear were financially dependent upon AAA developers, we have become personally dependent upon them in terms of our identities. Yes, we rant and rave that Electronic Arts and (to a lesser extent) Ubisoft refuse to “innovate” and have become creatively complacent institutions. We pick-apart their games and show that the games they release lack interesting characters, stories, novel narrative approaches, artistic details, and rely upon tired genres and franchises. But in doing that – what new insights about the relations between human beings and games have we come to? None. Or worse, this. We now consume game writing in the same way we consume games. I assure you that the AAA publishers have not suffered because of us.

This New Games Journalism – that was originally supposed to be something like travel writing – was profoundly corrupted in a consumeristic way of thinking about gaming. Instead of reading print mags, we now rely upon blogger “impressions” or “analyses” to justify our purchasing habits, just as we have already been doing for the last 20 years. In the end, journalistic coverage of new game titles consist of “previews” or “reviews” based on web-culled images and personal opinions, the modern re-incarnation of a blogger-driven GamePro. The advertising arms of Nintendo and Sony, where once were discernible in the popular “official” magazines and criticized on that basis, have now been fully integrated in blogger game writing. We now are at the edge of the most pernicious form of self-censorship possible: we have come to understand our tastes and subjective experiences in terms of the individual consumption that the AAA game economy relies upon while at the same time pretending and affirming that our tastes are trustworthy and personal in themselves. We consume games, and write many things about them, and believe that our self-created “communities” of consumption are thoughtful, social, and sufficiently critical. They are not.

The Way Out.

I recognize that this argument will receive some opposition, especially from those deeply committed to game writing and their particular game-playing habits. I recognize my own complacency here – in most articles I have written over the years there is an enticing view of the gamer as someone on a self-critical quest for meaning and self-transformation. Rather than presuming who we are as gamers (which I myself have done for too many years), it is the gamer her/him-self who needs to question his attachment to games.

A New New Games Journalism is concerned with our very being-as-gamers, in light of the specific games we play. It is concerned with how games are both the expression of our societies and selves, and how they come to shape our personal lives in how we play them. It is not based on our opinions of whether a particular game is good or bad or boring or fun, but rather whether we should be playing these games at all or doing other kinds of things. It should be concerned with how we can play games in the light of certain personal goals, or show how particular games transform us to see the world in certain ways. It will be concerned with understanding if games are actually playful or if they are steeped in some other form of activity like consumption or violence. This New New Games Journalism has to give us new opportunities for expressing ourselves in the social arenas we live in, rather than new opportunities for self-censorship and its associated self-deception.

We must write our personal narratives and think about them – just as Kieron Gillen pointed us towards – and show how they fall into a larger living world beyond mere opinion. And in doing that we have to resist the temptation to institutionalize game writing as form of rigid and lazy academic thought, a malignant tumour already beginning to metastasize in some places, and pursue it as a form of poetic self-expression. Game journalism can be just as exciting and enlightening as playing games themselves!

Yes, de-institutionalizing game writing was a step in the right direction, yes we need to become better writers (as Chris Buffa notes), and yes getting rid of objective review criteria was a good thing. Now is the time to take the ball and run with it – we have been running-in-place at the 50 yard line for far too long. There are already some writers out there trying to eke out an existence in the collective roar, but they remain at the fringes of what is read, and require more critical engagement in order to come to a fuller and less fragmented expression. We need a new community of writers willing to try something new together, rather than perpetuate the existing style.

With all the pomp and circumstance of a 15th century aristocrat, I pronounce the New Games Journalism movement dead, rotting in the ground, and in need of a successor.

Long live New New Games Journalism!

Update: Brendan Caldwell wrote an excellent response to my article (and several others on NGJ) that both critiques my position as he sees it, and brings up new, thoughtful questions about the practice of game writing. I highly recommend reading it.

Author’s note: Although this article has been worded quite strongly,  I truly mean no personal disrespect to the writers and gamers and journalists implied or critiqued here. Rather, this is an opportunity to really open up a new discourse on game writing that is sorely overdue. I hope that this produces (even heated) responses, rather than quashes them.

1. There is no communicative “medium” to speak of in art. A medium presupposes a message of some kind – a basic, unambiguous code that can be transmitted from point to point. Because artistic works are inherently ambiguous in their meaning, there are no messages in artistic works. Video and computer games are not a communicative medium, and they have no message.

2. The artist has no hidden message for us. Even when an artist deeply desires to communicate, moralize, educate, challenge, or amuse the audience – their artistic creation will always frustrate, deny, and exceed their intentions. Trying to interpret or understand an artistic work by guessing at the artist’s intentions is a blind, endless, alley.

3. What we think of as an artistic “medium” is simply a set of conventions and tools used for artistic expression, bound together in a common style or genre. Painting or drawing media, such as crayons, charcoal, and paper, are tools used for expressive purposes. Computers are the primary medium through which video and computer games are created; games are therefore not a “medium” in the creative, artistic sense. Games are creative expressions brought to life through many kinds of tools.

4. The expressive qualities of a work of art, or video game, come from many different sources. Some of those sources of meaning are bound up with the artistic medium – the fact that a game must proceed in a logical, rule-based, manner. The artistic methods and techniques of the artist also bring a particular personal expression to the work. The cultural and historical context that an artist works in, responds to, lives, contributes to the meanings we find in the work. The emotional and intellectual depth, imaginative capacities, intensity and breadth of feelings, and sensitivity of the reader/viewer/player/audience bring meaning to the art piece. All of these things, bound up together, give us a “sense” of what an artistic work means. Segregating any of these elements (culture, language, artistic method, the artist, the audience, the piece itself) and trying to pin down the source of meaning onto just one thing is a plain mistake. However, contextualizing and interrelating these elements, one to another, gives us the chance to understand what art is about.

So there are a few distinctions: the first (1 & 2) having to do with the confusion over a medium-as-a-means-for-communication, and the second (3 & 4) having to do with the confusion over a game-as-an-artistic-medium.

In the end, games are no different from other symbolic forms insofar as understanding them, what they mean to us and not simply our opinions of them, demands a holistic view of the particular game, the genre, the artist, the artistic method, the culture, and the audience, among many other things. As Michael suggests, sometimes 21st-century Bolivian painters do have much to learn from 18th-century composers, just as game designers have a lot to learn from books, films, music, drama, and fine art. All human expression is a thick jambalaya of influences, and to single any one particular thing out – for instance by claiming that the language for video games should not include the language for film or music – is a mistake, I believe.

And finally, pulling together the roots, similarities, and relationships of meaning in games are not simply “academic” endeavors that only some elite crowd can do. Even being able to say “I’m playing an FPS” is a step in the right direction – of recognizing that this particular game belongs in a long history of first-person shooters. What is tougher is taking those extra few steps, and showing how the particular feelings the game gives you, the other games it plays like, the style of the art or technical direction, or the culture of war or violence that the game was created within – all give a sense to this being a meaningful thing. This is someone everyone is capable of, as long as they’re willing to make a few more connections they weren’t planning to. Like Michael said – this is something worth doing.

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.

This of course begs the question, what does he mean by ‘success’? Just as the Hollywood film industry and the North American record industry buried their heads in the sand when confronted with poor sales figures, the mainstream game industry blames production processes, business practices, and marketing techniques for mediocre sales, instead of taking a cold, hard look at the quality of the MMORPGs being released.

With that in mind, the “critique” that psychochild offers is rather illuminating: ¹

1. Your game suck? Throw money at it. You’ve got tons.

2. Don’t make a game – make intellectual property. That sells.

3. Have 20 years of back-catalogue handy to force your next turd onto the shelves.

4. “Enjoy total freedom” – have so much corporate clout that you can bully your publisher into accepting any release date.

5. “Lie with statistics” – fool your audience into buying your game, because good games don’t sell themselves.

I apologize if this comes across as being terribly cynical, but it is frustrating to watch the mainstream game industry attempt to re-invent itself using the same dead corporate ideas that got the industry into a creative slump in the first place. It is especially worrying when these ideas come from industry representatives that claim to be concerned with re-inventing the medium in closed-door invite-only conferences. Of course, the author is only the messenger here and it doesn’t make sense to point the finger at him alone, but the message we’re hearing is pretty clear: we still haven’t learned anything from WoW.

Pictured above: Big, dumb, and powerful beast. Barely visible: Creative innovation.

Nowhere have I see an analysis of World of Warcraft that questions its value in the game industry, and the creative advancement that it has brought to gamecraft as a whole. Instead, analyses of the game focus on financial success as the ultimate standard, and only demonstrate the ongoing irony of an industry that howls, “we must innovate; push the creative envelope!” while quickly balking at designs that “might not sell”.

If the industry is so concerned with making a purse of a sow’s ear, the first thing I’d like to see are experimental, dangerous, creative exercises; not evolutionary expansions of the same recycled gameplay/stories/genres that I’ve been playing since 1981.

That’s not to ignore the fact that giant, meandering, beasts of companies with hundreds of employees do have to release some sort of game with financial targets in sight, but as I’ve said before – these financial concerns can only be taken into account after creative considerations have been fully realized.

¹(Keep in mind that the point of psychochild’s article isn’t to critique creativity in World of Warcraft – but it is noticable that the only lessons he covers are financially-driven. I would be interested in reading the possible creative/revolutionary game ideas that he sees in WoW.)