I don’t think anyone in this discussion is arguing there is an absence of emotion in games (or if they are, they shouldn’t!).

Sure, the act of playing any game — poker, chess, Go Fish, Halo 3 — can evoke pleasure, joy, fear, sadness, satisfaction, awe. But I’d argue those emotions are about the thrill of competition, and challenge of interacting with the rules of the game itself, often arbitrary ones. Whether I feel joy because I outwitted an opponent playing poker, or outwitted an opponent playing Halo 3, they’re emotions evoked by beating or losing to another player, about mastering the mechanics of the game. We feel the emotions associated with racking up points, successfully aiming a weapon, avoiding being fragged.

If these game mechanics are “about” anything, they’re about outwitting an opponent (strategy, determination, perseverance, etc. in the abstract).

In the cases of games set in concrete situations, additional emotions felt are typically about something like survival in a deathmatch, or the feeling of doing some sort of physical dexterity (racing, jumping and running, etc.). I’ll admit, games can do a decent job making you feel the raw emotion you’d feel if you’re in battle, or playing a sport.

Separately, in stories, emotions can also be evoked during the telling — the careful, linear doling out of a pre-set sequence of events. Movies, TV, literature, they all do this, of course. We feel the emotions of watching characters deal with conflict, go through difficult situations, often emphathizing and identifying with them.

But: I’m seeking something different than emotions evoked by winning/losing/mastery, and something different than emotion envoked by watching another character deal with conflict.

I’m seeking emotion evoked when one is engaged in the interaction dynamics that directly are how people interrelate with each other, the mechanics of things like intimacy, seduction, manipulation, moral conflict, friendship. In such a game, you’d be faced with many decisions to make at many times, with no pre-ordained plot you’re following — just as with real-life intimacy, manipulation, moral conflict. On a continuous basis, the decisions you make lead to consequences; the further decisions you make lead to more consequences, and so on. (Note this is not meant to a purely realistic simulation of life; the overall pacing and structure of this game would be “tighter” — i.e., more efficient, more focused, with little meandering — compared to real-life; it would be a dramatized experience.)

In such a game, the emotions evoked would be generated because you’re directly engaged in the dynamics of how people interrelate; and, the events in the game are caused by your decisions. It’s all hinging on and focused on you, the player.

(Among existing games, The Sims is one of the few that is inching towards such generativity.)

Games with linear plots, at the end of the day, offer you no meaningful choices. You must solve a series of puzzles, in a certain order, otherwise the game goes nowhere. Story-wise, they’re fancy page-turners. Simply read a walkthrough of the game Ico; the emotion evoked by Yorda being sucked away to darkness is the same as if you’re watching a movie of it. It’s a real emotion, but it’s not about you, the player, and any decision you’ve made. It’s just good old-fashioned storytelling (GOFST), in which you turn the “pages” of the fixed Ico story by solving physical platform puzzles and killing monsters. Games with local agency — temporary effects on other characters — often fool players with the illusion that your actions matter. In Ico you have some local agency (as Sean B. mentions), but it doesn’t add up to anything.

Does that make sense?

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games could be about recognition and humanity, about the sense of the uncanny — of meeting something familiar and human that you’ve never quite seen before, of seeing something you see all the time transformed into a completely different kind of signifier. Games could do this — they haven’t, but they could. It’d be worth trying.

AI may not be where the payoff is, at least in the short term. Maybe multiplayer gaming, combined with really insightful design, will do the job. People are better at simulating people than computers are.

Take Sissyfight. It solves the multipolar problem in wargames — when there are more than two players competing with each other who do you choose to ally with and who do you attack? — by making it completely arbitrary, more or less like the schoolyard playground. I’ve seen Sissyfight players choose allegiances based on hair color, name, or who they think is the funniest. So you have this vicious competition over nothing and people depending on capricious, paper-thin alliances. The game paints a rich, satirical picture of human nature. Not a very flattering picture, but there you have it.

But if you look at what is actually happening when you are playing a multiplayer game – alliances are formed, broken; you are teasing a longtime friend; you bond with someone you hadn’t had a chance to talk to etc…

This is not because people simulate people, but because people _are_ people, and our interaction does not speak about the human condition, it _is_ the human condition …

OK, so I like games.

But will multiplayer games offer, for lack of a better term, “well formed experiences”? Will the signal-to-noise ratio be too low when real, naive, amateur players are providing the core content? We can look to “reality” TV shows, which are heavily edited and perhaps almost scripted to achieve a minimal level of well-formed-ness.

Without well-formed experiences — efficient pacing, filtering out the ‘boring bits’ — games may not breakthrough to a mass audience. Most people just don’t have the time to spend hours and hours playing a game for a few moments of meaningful drama. Games will need to be as “efficient” as movies, TV and books in this regard. Don’t you think?

(I’ve made a similar argument about very open-ended, non-multiplayer simulation games.)

A hybrid approach: in The Diamond Age, Stephenson imagines that paid, trained human actors will play the role of key characters in real-time interactive dramas. But this idea sounds expensive. Hey, perhaps instead of waitering, starving actors will take minimum wage jobs populating virtual worlds? A bit akin to walking around in a mouse suit in Disneyland, but far less prone to heat stroke.

But maybe the real problem here is I’m trying to stretch the definition of the word “game” too far. We need a new word, kind of how the word “movies” came about for narrative fiction films!

(Again, I can’t wait for the aforementioned First Person, which I believe goes to town discussing the tension between story and game.)

We could — taking Mark’s post(s) as inspiration — ask a different question, such as, “Why has none of the creative software that meaningfully addresses human sexuality been as commercially successful as that focused on shooting people?” We could also ask, “Why have so few academic papers been written about Counter-Strike as compared with afternoon?” But we already know the answers to these questions.

Mark’s query is a dead end. Rather than trying to drum up interest in this old question, I think he’d offer us more by exploring what’s wrong with it, as he recently did with a similar question he created through definition, “Where are the hypertexts?” (Speaking at Hypertext 2003 Mark explored a number of ways that this question, which he asked quite publicly and often for a while, was founded on a definition of hypertext that left out the most interesting ways the web creates hypertext. The short paper he was delivering while he made the comments is: Collage, Composites, Construction.)

Great points. You’re right, come to think of it, by Meier’s definition of game, it includes hypertext. … So I suppose I’m interpreting Mark’s question as a version of your first newly-posed question — why have human-condition issues, which get addressed in all other media (literature, theater, cinema, TV, music), not yet been successfully addressed in the most popular form of interactive media, namely games? That’s a good question, the one I was trying to answer. Exactly where is the dividing line (or the need to create one) between hypertext and game is less interesting, and perhaps distracting.

My response to the question: Syndicate

I could probably come up with more, but the question becomes moot with just one game.

Maybe it was inheriting its sociological and political statements from books (Neuromancer) and movies (Bladerunner) but the statements were there anyway.

In any case, this discussion is interesting even if the question isn’t.

Maybe companies like Zoesis will be able to jump start a higher level of investment in developing technologies useful for the “art film” area of digital media. I’ve got my fingers crossed. In a different vein, Lisbeth and Torill have written recently about the possibility of Scandinavian initiatives to publicly fund new kinds of work. And I know there’s been some talk of alternative funding models on this side of the Atlantic. Hopefully we’ll see a variety of new possibilities emerge in the near future.

As far as a commercial proposition between student art film and blockbuster in the gaming industry, this can in part be found in the patronage system that some MMPORPGs use with success. A Tale In the Desert is a fair example of a small company, eGenisis, publishing a game online and finding revenue in the monthly subscriptions to their world. And I might add a non-violent AND modestly popular world, at that.

In regards to player agency and how it can generate meaning in and of itself, I’m curious to see what you folks think of this little game, and how it produces meaning…

(http://www.citadeloftruth.com/members/mtdew/futility.exe)

Perhaps you are familiar with it, perhaps not. I’m hesitant to say more about it until you’ve tried it, but the programme itself is a tiny ms-dos based adventure of sorts that I found while browsing a forum on games as art.

Also, do you have any information you can point us to about the second game you mention? I don’t have easy access to a machine that runs DOS programs at the moment.

1. Why did Mark ask the question of serious human interest about computer games? It would never cross our mind to ask if chess, monopoly, soccer, roulette, or cops and robbers are able to evoke themes of deep human significance. I take this as meaning that computer games are perceived as being closer to literature, film, and drama than these other games because of their frequent narrative content. (I can hear the collective scream of the ludologists on the other side of the Atlantic.)

2. My answer to Marks’s question: why should games cater to “serious human interests” to be valuable? Don’t we deserve an occasional break form the concerns of the real world? Don’t fantasy, make-believe and pure play for its own sake have value as a way to relieve the stress of being citizens of an imperfect, often cruel world?

3. To many people computer games have something to say about sexuality: witness the recent avalanche of essays that present Lacanian interpretations of the player’s relation to her avatar, or of the general cultural obsession with Lara Croft’s anatomy. Of course, there are just as many people who don’t care about these issues. (And by the way, nowadays there are just as many academic essays about Doom, Half-life and their consorts as about Afternoon.)

4. There HAVE been attempts to make serious statements by means of games: for instance Gonzalo Frasca’s Kabul Kaboom. But if Kabul Kaboom makes a forceful statement in an original (that is, artistic) way, it is not very much fun to play, and I doubt that anybody would want to play the game again after getting the point. The game-dimension is clearly subordinated to the message, as in an advertisement, narrative is subordinated to the promotion of the product. I would therefore say that games that make serious statements tend to be pseudo-games.

5. Can literature or word-based texts be playful: certainly, as Nick’s lovely preface to the current issue of Poems that Go demonstrate. Can they be playful and serious at the same time? I wonder. If Oulipo—the literary movement that promoted the use of ludic strategies in texts—evokes any human emotions, these are comic rather than tragic. Jacque Roubaut, Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino have a wonderful sense of humor. But “serious existential concerns” are not the forte of these authors. None of them ever got me depressed ! There are admittedly some moving stories in George Perec’s La Vie Mode d’Emploi (Life as a User’s Manual), but only when one forgets that he is playing word games.

6. Is seriousness reconcilable with playfulness? Let’s hope the current issue of Poems that go will suggest an answer.

I think there’s truth to that, but that doesn’t address the economics issues Noah raises. In order for authors to innovate in bigger ways, some of their works need some degree of broad appeal so they can be sold, or else authors will only have nights and weekends to create, since they’ll be stuck in day jobs in order to pay the rent, and therefore make smaller, less ambitious works. I’m not saying we must all sell out and create lowest common denominator schlock — just works that enough people will buy to give authors the freedom to innovate full-time. Otherwise progress will go at a snail’s pace. Things are going too slowly as it is.

But it’s not just about economics; don’t we want to create works that are so good that they inherently have mass appeal? Just because we now have a medium that allows us to form smaller communities of like-minded people, doesn’t mean we should give up reaching a broader group. One might argue that there is a broader power and usefulness to works that appeal to more than just a niche group, that tap into universally felt themes.

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misc is the largest category posts a long, thoughful reaction to the discussion here, including a fascinating account of a time that a game left him “in awe, as both gamer and scholar, at something that occurred on the screen in front of me”.

(We’re working on getting excerpts of trackbacks like this to automatically get displayed in the comments window, to save us the work of manually linking to them. However I think this only will work for blogs that ping each other, e.g. Movable Type blogs.)

Alice in Wonderland tells us a lot about sexuality, too. Lewis Carroll is so playful that people often forget that he’s also very serious.

Baseball is as abstract as chess or Monopoly, but I’d suggest that Mark Prior vs. Greg Maddux tells us something about Fathers and Sons.

My separate post about Mass Audience wasn’t about Box Office, but rather about the use of media in service to the 20th century totalitarian state. Different thread, meant for a different audience — and universally misinterpreted. Sorry.

(Years from now, in all my copious spare time (?), when I’m taking a breather from playing the latest deeply immersive, efficiently plotted interactive dramas, and I nostalgically long for the good ol’ days when we didn’t know what the hell we were doing, and crack open those ancient GrandTextAuto archive files, will I be able to read Mark’s response, since it won’t be included in this site’s archive?)

We “play” good stories all the time, but do we ever “play,” or even want to “play” a decent tragedy? I suppose it could, but I don’t think I want to “play” the holocaust game, the slow withering away of cancer game, etc. Maybe some things are best not processed by the ludic impulse.

But I’ve always thought that good literature makes laugh, great literature makes you laugh and then two pages later makes you cry.

“That game made me cry.”

I don’t know . . .

Okay, I’m going to post that regardless of whether or not it makes any sense. Jane Smiley’s use of Monopoly in a Thousand Acres made me sort of think of the obverse of narrative in games, that is narratives that use games as devices in plot. Power’s Prisoner’s Dilemma sticks out as another one.

I’m senseless, the Cubs just won in the postseason for the first time since 1908. I feel like we should all put on funny hats and dance around the room. Thanks to Mark for getting the Cubs in here! Go Cubs! Excuse me, I’m going to be a lousy GTA driver for another week or two. The game’s on.

This is interesting. Motioning my hands over a crystal ball, I would say, “As digital interactive experiences (e.g., games, online worlds, etc.) become more pervasive and powerful, people will demand experiences that can nurture and satisfy them in the same ways books, TV and cinema do, and whatever companies can deliver that product stand to make a fortune, so it’s gonna happen. And then, because of digital media’s potential for sensory immersiveness and seductive customized experiences, it will become dominant. (Literature, cinema and TV wouldn’t die out of course, just shrink a great deal, like theater has.) In fact, these interactive experiences had better damn well address the full spectrum of human condition themes, or else the population will rarely get exposed to them.”

But wait, why does anything have to dominate anything? Well, people only have so much free time, they won’t have time to read books AND go to movies AND play interactive stuff AND watch TV etc. etc. Something has to give. Doesn’t it?

But now I’m wondering, inspired by the discussion so far, that maybe the activity that interactive experiences will squeeze out of our lives won’t be story-based media, but a different ballpark altogether (go Cubs!) — sports, outdoor activities, and the like. Perhaps game-games will remain the primary form of digital interactive entertainment, as they are today, they won’t end up addressing the full spectrum of human condition themes, and to make time for them, we’ll just stop watching football and baseball. We’ll play games, not watch others play games.

Hmm… thinking, thinking…

Nah. My crystal ball tells me that “games” (or some yet-understood, yet-defined, yet-labelled form of immersive, high-degree-of-agency, digital interactive experience, that isn’t strictly a game and even less strictly a story, that addresses human condition themes) are gonna be big, baby. Big.

I notice I didn’t predict that interactive media would eat into the popularity of music. Music seems like a different animal, one that interactive media could never squeeze out of our lives.