When I was six years old, my mother worked in an Adult Education Centre – her job was to train and teach adults, usually women who had been living as house wives for most of their lives, how to re-integrate into the workforce. The Adult Education Centre was a stone’s throw from my elementary school at the time, so my sister and I would walk over there and spend the afternoon with my mom after school most days. Sure, getting to spend the afternoon with my mom and sister was always great… but the real reason I went there was my love affair with the single taciturn and sensible IBM PC XT with a monochrome monitor that sat on a table along the wall: It had a game that let me fly a plane.

In this article I explore the different qualities the word “simulation” has, and argue for a more experiential approach to flight. A note to readers: I’d love to hear about your experience with all kinds of flight simulators, because I have intentionally pared it down to just a few here.

Flight Simulation in its Infancy: MSFS 1.0

Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0 was, to my best knowledge, my first computer gaming experience. One of the teachers – when he wasn’t busy – would sit down with us, and patiently point out the controls: left hand on F2 for power, and right hand on the numeric keypad for direction. My sister would hold down F2, and I’d feebly try to point the “plane” down the runway.

I write “plane” pejoratively. The problem with MSFS 1.0 was that the experience of flight was an afterthought – the aircraft never appears on-screen, the field and runway are low-res projections, engine sound is limited to a variable buzz from the PC speaker, and the instruments are the only real indication that something important is happening.

Inevitably, we would careen down the runway and the plane would edge upwards for a second, stall, and land back on the tarmac. Twenty frustrated minutes later, my sister and I would give up and wander over to the Xerox machine and make copies of our hands.

From a gamer’s perspective, I am being unfair: MSFS1.0 was one of the earliest flight sims, and SubLogic’s programming efforts were leaps and bounds ahead of their competitors. But, I think, when you see past the crude graphics and choppy frame rate, you see less a “game” than a spreadsheet.

So the question is: what is being simulated? Should a flight simulator try to simulate the experience of flight, or simulate the mathematics of instrumentation?

Ask anyone that’s flown in the front seats of a smaller aircraft like a Cessna 172 or Piper Cherokee: the aircraft is very responsive. A feather touch on the control column pitches down the nose a few degrees, and the tail snaps upright in a single motion… your gut climbs up into your throat, and your head swims for a brief second. The sound of the little engine thrums in the cabin, and penetrates past the David Clark headset that is vacuum-sealed around your ears. As a passenger, I can stare at the instruments and appreciate that there are a dozen things happening simultaneously, but I really don’t know (or care) what they mean. I’m focused on the feeling of flight itself.

A Step Closer: Aces of the Pacific

Fast forward about seven years. Sitting in my uncle and aunt’s office, with a much heftier and sexier machine: an AST Advantage! 386 with a 256-color VGA card. They owned Aces of the Pacific and a CH Products Flightstick Pro. Afternoons were spent gunning down Japanese Zero’s from the cabin of my P-38 Lightning.

The flight model in Aces of the Pacific is pretty responsive. As you’ll see in the video, climbing off of the runway is effortless… the engines rev up to max within a couple seconds, getting up to takeoff speed within five seconds, and once in the air the aircraft snaps left and right as if it were a dragonfly. A real P-38 flies nothing like this. But, I spent months dogfighting and bombing, running missions for both sides of the second World War just to scrape up another hour of time in the cockpit. It was fun.

But when you strip away the art, there wasn’t very much difference between Aces of the Pacific and Wing Commander II. The “simulation” of flight in these flight combat games was so heavily tuned for combat that any semblance of simulation was tossed out the window. Training my 37mm cannon on a Japanese Zero at 8,000 feet wasn’t much different than training up my Broadsword’s Mass Drivers on a Kilrathi Dralthi at Nav 1. Something was lost in the experience of flight in Aces of the Pacific, and it wasn’t until 1995 that Looking Glass Technologies finally got it right. And, to my knowledge, no flight simulator has gotten the experience of flight right since.

What it Really Feels like to Fly: Flight Unlimited

Sitting in my uncle and aunt’s office in 1995, this time with an even beefier Gateway 2000 Pentium 90 that my uncle called “The Ol’ Stove” because the processor alone could heat up a room. But that kind of horsepower was necessary, because Flight Unlimited demanded some pretty serious computing resources.

I sit down in the Pitts Special S2-B and harness up. The view out the front is limited by a handful of gauges, and the wing that tapers across the nose of my little aerobatics plane. Revving up the single engine is a pleasure in itself – it was obviously recorded from a real Pitts Special, and the engine noise changes in pitch and loudness according to its RPMs. The plane lurches forward on the runway, and as I get up to stall speed I notice it start to shimmy back and forth slightly … the wheels are grabbing at the tarmac at different rates, just as I’ve felt in a Cessna 172 as we lift off. A few feet above the runway I experience the “ground effect” – the Pitts floats as if on a cushion due to the increased lift caused by the air pressure being so high close to the tarmac. When I hit climb speed, I pull back hard on the control stick, and the Pitts climbs up into the atmosphere with a metallic groan.

I climb up to 5000 feet for a little fun: the in-game flight instructor is teaching me down to do a “spin” – a forced stall that causes a plane to pitch downward into a corkscrew path. I point the nose up at the sun, cut the engines and hit the left rudder. What happens? My Pitts Special turns to the left and begins to dive, corkscrewing around the left wing. My speed is increasing, and begins to redline the airspeed indictor. I’m “overspeeding” the airframe, and the wind rushing past the wings gives off an eery metallic whine. I don’t want to crash, so I follow the virtual flight instructor’s advice: cut the throttle, apply full rudder in the opposite direction of the spin (in my case, right rudder), and gradually pull back to zero-out my angle of attack. Unbelievably, I recover from the spin, and resume level flight like a pro. And damn, that was fun!

A few minutes later, I do the same spin maneuver and intentionally overspeed the aircraft, and as I careen towards the terrain below, I snap back on the control stick and watch as the forces applied to the fuselage and wings snap the little plane apart. They smash into the ground in a pile of parts that the FAA/NTSB crash investigations teams would have a hard time deciphering. My flight instructor wryly adds a note to the logbook: “Solo flight. Wrecked the plane. We’ll fly in your plane from now on.”

 A Pitts Special exploding in the air as the airframe collapses under extreme G-forces

The whole experience, from takeoff to aerobatic techniques to engine noise (or in the case of the engineless sailplane – the whoosh of air around the cabin), is responsive and enveloping. Anyone who has flown in a small aircraft can attest to how different Flight Unlimited is, say, compared to Microsoft Flight Simulator X.

Computational Fluid Dynamics for Dummies

Flight Unlimited was, and is, the first and only flight simulation game to use a completely different flight physics model. An interview with Seamus Blackley (published in CGW Issue #133, August 1995 - I honestly suggest reading the entire article, it is excellent) – the programmer and designer behind the game – reveals the unique values and skills that went into developing an accurate simulation of flight:

When Blackley set out to design this flight simulation, he wanted the armchair pilot to get that “yummy, visceral, fluid feeling that you get when flying a real airplane.” To do that, Blackley and the Flight Unlimited team had to dive head-first into the Navier-Stokes equations, which, according to Blackley, are “horrible, complicated partial differential equations” that model the way a fluid behaves when it moves around a solid object.

Instead of relying upon a Newtonian system of drag coefficients and vector geometry – where an object remains in motion until it meets an equal and opposite force, or a brute-force approach that models flight on huge tables of data generated in wind turbine lab experiments - Flight Unlimited was built on a physics model derived from Computational Fluid Dynamics.

Blackley, a pilot himself and an ex-graduate student in particle physics at the time, turned to computational fluid dynamics because they could model the feeling of flight moreso than the mathematics of movement. And with computers featuring built-in floating-point processors (like the Pentium) and tons of calculation cycles available, it became possible to use CFDs for the first time in a computer game.

So how does Flight Unlimited actually work? First off, the complex sets of Navier-Stokes partial differential equations would allow the game to simulate the effects of air pressure on a fixed wing: when the air pressure above the wing is less than the air pressure below the wing, the air (a fluid) makes the wing buoyant and pushes the airplane up into the air.

That process is complicated enough, but add to it the infinitely complex changes in air pressure over the entire plane:

… the propeller creates turbulence and a torque imbalance; the air eddies and curls as it comes off the back of the wing; the air “sticks” to the surface of the airplane, causing drag; and bumps in the plane’s shape, such as the pilot’s canopy, cause turbulence in the moving air. All of this adds up to one hell of a mathematical nightmare, but all of those little blips in turbulence and pressure are calculated by the Navier-Stokes equations…

…the program must compute the air pressures over the entire surface of the airplane, and convert those pressures into a series of force distributions, which are then used to calculate where and how the plane is moving.

 An image generated by a Navier-Stokes analysis of air eddying off a wingtip.

In short, the plane flies through the air because Blackley has simulated an atmosphere in the world that applies air pressure changes to the entire aircraft, and the “control surfaces” of the plane – the rudder, the ailerons, the elevator – all create turbulence and disturbances in the atmosphere that pitch, roll, and lift the plane. A plane feels like a plane because it displaces, and is displaced by, air. As Blackley puts it, “You get everything for free once you get the air’s fluid dynamics right.”

Final Words for Developers

Make no mistake – I’m not arguing for pin-point accurate physics simulation as the key for more immersive and more enjoyable flight simulators (or any other kind of game). In fact, I’ve argued before that we probably should rely a lot less upon “realism” as a central value in most games. The point is that games like Flight Unlimited manage to deliver an enjoyable and visceral flight experience because the developers make the experience, and not the mathematics the core value of the simulator. Developers need to learn to leave the mathematical aspects of games “under the hood” and make them completely subsidiary to the player’s experience. After all, the only thing we have as players is our experience of the game.

Dear Mom,

Bad news. I’m writing to you from a little mansion somewhere in southern Tamir, and I’m stuck. There’s a trapdoor in the ceiling of this room, and I can’t get at it. I tried moving the furniture, but it won’t let me. I tried jumping for it, but my skirt isn’t really geared for jumping. I have all kinds of stuff in my inventory, and none of it works. It even took a long time to get here – seems like everything I try, the world won’t let me do it.

That reminded me of something. Remember when I was a kid, and my sister and I would goof around in King’s Quest IV? We didn’t care if the game didn’t let us do certain things – we just enjoyed screwing around with the world. We’d try to do nonsense stuff like “kick pan in his fat ass” or “punch the minstrel”. Most of the time we’d get back a generic “Can you try saying that in a different way?” or “You’ll have to take a different approach”… but sometimes something hilarious would happen. If we tried to fart on the dwarf, we’d get back “Perhaps you need to purchase a copy of ‘Leisure Suit Larry’?” (*sigh*. Yes mom, I secretly played Leisure Suit Larry with my buddies when I was 12.)

The point is that the text parser was fun partly because it was so finicky and antiquated, and partly because we were goofy kids. Nowadays, I can’t move through the world fast enough because this damned parser keeps getting in the way. Not to mention these ridiculous puzzles! Who the hell put a trapdoor in the ceiling that isn’t accessible from the floor? Why is there an Egyptian crypt in a land full of Anglo-Saxons? Why am I allowed to rob a half-dozen graves near the mansion, but I’m not allowed to steal a bowl of freakin’ soup?

Anyway, I guess I have something to learn from my twelve-year-old self: whenever I get frustrated with a place, it’s probably because I’m not really playing in it anymore.

Love,

Chris

ps: send me a grappling hook with 25ft of rope.

pps: none of the houses in Tamir seem to have toilets. Send me some TP too?

When I read Jorge Albor’s recent post “True and False Memories” over at Experience Points, I was genuinely touched by the experience he earnestly articulated. He describes the intense feeling of familiarity and comfort that we have when we play certain games; I can think of no better term to describe that feeling than what Jorge calls “homecoming”. In Jorge’s case, that feeling of homecoming appeared when he inhabited the familiar space, the sights and sounds, of Aperture Labs in Portal 2. Like picking up a new pair of shoes and finding out that they fit just like a pair in childhood did. Jorge rightly distinguishes homecoming from recollection – the latter being a specific memory tied to a specific past, while the former being a feeling tied to an imagined past. In this post I try to work out what homecoming means, and show that it is neither a case of false memory or nostalgia, but rather a different kind of true memory: one that discloses a personal past that should-have-been.

Homecoming: False Memory or Truth?

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

An Imagined Childhood

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

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

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

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

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

Homecoming as Re-inhabiting the Past

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

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

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

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

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

1990: CRPGs Emerge in the Golden Age

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

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

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

CRPG Becomes the Norm

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

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

Discovering that the Old is New

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

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

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

Player 1: “Why?”

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

Player 2: “What do I do?”

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

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

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

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

DM: “Give me a roll on your D20.”

Player 3: “Which one is the D20?”

And so on.

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

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

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

Recovering a Tradition

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

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

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

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

Every time I hear Infocom’s text adventure Planetfall brought up amongst gamers, usually my age or a bit older, someone inevitably brings up their relationship with Floyd – a little ‘bot that is your sole partner for the bulk of the game. Floyd follows you around the abandoned planet, making the occasional smart-assed comment, and helps with the occasional task. At a critical moment of the game, Floyd – and I quote wikipedia here – “performs the ultimate sacrifice and gives his life to retrieve the vital Miniaturization Card from the Biolab” [1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetfall].

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Microcosmicity

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

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

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

Becoming The Grain of Sand

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

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

Experiencing Games

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

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

Recently, my sister referred me to an article that made quite a splash on the Wall Street Journal by Amy Chua: “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior”. (Read it first if you have not). The article is certainly polemical, and it paints a bleak picture of the Chua household: no sleepovers, no playdates, no being in school plays/drama, no watching tv or playing computer games, and above all “no grade less than an A”, etc etc. This is the familiar stereotypical picture of a household run purely on achievement, instrumentality, outcomes and accomplishments. It is a familiar morality tale that could come from the confines of an upper-class household in Victorian England.

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

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

What is Playing Anyway?

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

What Kinds of Play are found in Minecraft?

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

The Values of Play

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

What is Lost?

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

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

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Night Flight

December 20, 1987

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

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

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHXS1oBk5Rk

November 19, 2010

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

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

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

The Barbaric Past and the Ideal Future

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

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

The Heart of the Field

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

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

Nels Anderson recently pointed out a post over at Jamie Madigan’s Psychology of Video Games blog. While Madigan’s post does not really say anything new (and is based on the kinds of experimental social scientific research that went out of style in the 1960s – sorry, couldn’t help myself), it does bring up the most important unanswered question that we have as gamers: Why do we play video games?

Nels takes us a large step in the right direction towards understanding this problem when he observes (in his own response to Madigan’s post) that, “We need better ways to talk about what makes games enjoyable.” Gamers, I’ve found, lack articulacy when it comes to understanding our own experiences playing games. Sure, we can go on for hours about what we like/dislike about the game’s rules or design, which characters we found empathizable and which we could not connect with, or how “immersive” the world is. But that’s not the same as being articulate about our own experiences and what they mean to us. Speaking articulately about ourselves requires some kind of language to put things into perspective, especially when it comes to sketching out what makes playing games so darned enjoyable.

Towards that, I want to play with the idea of “mastery” that both Madigan and Nels mention, and how mastering a game is its own enjoyment.

Mastery as Pleasure

Nels writes,

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

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

Mastery as Unpleasure

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

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

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

The Way Out (or: Poetic Joy)

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

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

Becoming Expressive

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

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

The other day I was having coffee with friends who brought their 2 1/2 year old son over for a visit. He was bored, looking for anything to do in our (boring) house – so I handed him an original Game Boy with Super Mario Land 2. I figured that a toddler would enjoy smashing the Game Boy’s bulletproof buttons, making Mario run and jump, and hearing the ear-piercing four-channel music. He took the Game Boy from my hand with interest, and held onto it in the familiar way that all of us hold portables. He looked at the cabbage-green screen and squealed, “MARRIOO!” I asked his mother if he had played games before, and she said, “Oh yeah. He loves playing kiddie games on our iPhone.”

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.[2. I am using a very special meaning of the word "repression" that Merleau-Ponty introduces in his phenomenology of the body. It is not the same as Freud's notion of repression. (For more details see Lawrence Hass's book Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy, pp. 89-90).] 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.[3. I am always struck that people who have never played side-scrollers like Mario 3 often become frustrated that they have to "think" before acting. The same experience is felt by those learning a second language.] 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.

httpv://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?