The Girliest Show on Earth

(Note: cross-posted to my friend Debbi's excellent blog, Kiss My Wonder Woman)

Allow me to begin with a grand, sweeping declaration: 'Supernatural' is the most feminine show on television right now.* Yes, the gory supernatural horror show starring two male characters and an almost entirely male supporting cast, that Supernatural. This may seem to you like a non-obvious statement, given the nature of the show, but allow me to explain. It's all in the definition of feminine.

Let's take a moment to look at two media landscapes side by side: the pop-culture mainstream media (fictional media only, for the purposes of this discussion), primarily produced by and for males, and the fan-media landscape of fanfiction, fanvids, etc., produced primarily by and for females.** 

Shows in the standard pop-mediascape tend to center around things happening. They can be dramatic things or wacky things depending on the type of show, but we are nevertheless expected to understand the characters based on the things they do - the actions they take in specific circumstances and in response to events in their lives. Characters tend to be defined by what they do. 

Take, for instance, the show 'Community.' We know Jeff is narcissistic and arrogant, but ultimately tends to come through for his friends. We know this because he can and does make grand speeches at the drop of a hat, because he used to be a lawyer and often still acts like one, because despite what he says and however reluctantly he does them, his actions are usually those of a reliable friend, at least by the end of the episode.

Take Britta - we know her as a somewhat hypocritical feminist who latches onto any nearby cause that seems even vaguely political, and has a tendency to be unaware of her own flaws. We know this because we see her fickle attraction to men who don't treat her well, we see her jumping onto convenient bandwagons, and we see her constantly screw up things around her, often from lack of self-awareness. Her actions speak for her. If you were to give a breakdown of the sequence of actions of an episode of one of these shows, it would tell you most, if not all that you need to know about the nature of the characters involved.

Here, by way of a for instance, is a detailed summary of the actions in one episode of Community: The biology professor assigns everyone in class random lab partners. The members of the study group request that they be allowed to pair with each other instead. This is allowed, but the group has an odd number of people so they pick up a random person from the class, Todd. After attempting to work together in the first set of pairs, most of the group members discover that they are incompatible with each other one-on-one; Troy and Abed because of over-exposure to each other, Britta because she doesn't want to hear Shirley talk about her baby, and Annie because Jeff doesn't want to do the work. They return to the study room and demand a partner change, relying on Abed's impartiality to create an algorithm to choose partners. When Abed's algorithm is revealed to be based on popularity, the group devolves into more bickering about their relative popularity. The rift is finally healed by the group coming together to gang up on Todd, who was sick of the in-fighting and just wanted to do the assignment.

This summary gives us a pretty good indication of the insular but tension-frought nature of the study group, and how the characters love and hate each other at the same time. But we get it entirely through the actions of the characters, the plot of the episode. The episode isn't really about the nature of the study group so much as the nature of the study group is something that can be inferred from a set of wacky circumstances.

Compare this to the fan-mediascape. Fan-media tends to center around characters feeling things, and we are asked to understand the characters based on those feelings and on the inter-character relationships. There are plenty of fanfics and even more fanvids in which nothing or almost nothing actually happens, but our understand of the characters is significantly deepened or changed based on their introspection or their emotional reactions to events. When things do happen in fanfics, these events are almost always catalysts for the author and reader to explore how the character feels about them and what the character's emotional reaction is. 

Even the character's actions in response to this catalyst are shown as an organic growth from the character's emotions, or are shown specifically to indicate to the reader the nature of the character's emotional response. Obviously this can be and is presented with varying degrees of class and subtlety - a poor writer will just outright tell us what the character is feeling, while more experienced writers can more subtly examine the tension and emotionality through things like tone, inner dialogue, and strategic emotionally-motivated actions.

Take, for instance, this fic: Play It All Night Long (http://janie-tangerine.livejournal.com/290160.html). This is a Supernatural AU where Dean is a radio DJ and Cas is one of his listeners who calls in. If you were to describe the central action in this fic, it would go like this: Dean hosts a radio show, and Cas calls in repeatedly. Then, when Cas gets kicked out of his apartment, Dean offers to help him out by taking him in, since he himself experienced similar issues in the past. Dean's brother and Cas's brother show up, and everyone meets each other. Dean and Cas hook up. The end. But of course that doesn't come even close to describing what is interesting or memorable about this fic.

The fic is about the way Dean feels about his past and his present, the way Cas feels about the same. It's about the connection that their similar emotional landscapes allow them to make with each other. It's about the way they both feel about their respective families, and the way that who they are as characters makes them interact with those close to them. It's about navigating the treacherous waters of loneliness, guilt, expectations, and companionship. It's about the emotionality of the characters, and how they interact with each other.

Now, I'm not saying that no mainstream media contains any feelings, just like I'm not saying that fanfiction never has a plot. I'm talking about what drives the two mediascapes, the underlying causes behind why these media are made the way they are, and the elements that determine who most enjoys consuming them. These things don't make up the entirety of either mediascape, but I believe that this is at their respective cores; you couldn't easily get away with having a TV episode where nothing happens other than people talking about their feelings, but you see this in fanfiction all the time. 

I also believe that this trend towards emotionality in fan-media is at least in part a female-driven response to a lack of strong emotionality in the mainstream pop-media. I think the contrast between the two is very telling, and in fact that the general lack of emotionality in the mainstream pop-mediascape is actually a symptom of the relatively small proportion of women involved in its creation. 

But what does all this have to do with Supernatural? Well, let's take a look.

What, at it's core, is Supernatural about? It's about the relationship between two brothers who hunt monsters. It's about the way that Sam fights against the darker aspects of himself, and his ability to cope with the shit that life throws at him. It's about Dean's low self-esteem and his self-hatred, his broken soul and his complete inability to cope with the shit that life throws at him. It's about Dean wanting to reach out and make connections with people and being afraid to do so. It's about Sam wanting to reach out and make connections with people but getting slapped in the face every time he tries. Oh, and also monsters and blood and gore and stuff happen.

More and more (as the writers catch on to the nature of their fanbase and how best to cater to them, one assumes), Supernatural has become a show in which the actions are little more than an excuse to show us something about the emotionality of the characters, or the relationships between the characters. Heck, one of the major storylines in the end of the last season was Dean coming to grips with Cas's betrayal and coming to forgive him for it. Again, it was about Dean reaching out to try and make a connection with someone.

Yes, things happen in Supernatural, I'm not saying they don't. But more and more it's becoming apparent what the fans really crave: it's the conversations the characters are having. It's the way Dean's been carrying around Cas's coat the whole season, presumably in the hope that Cas might yet come back to them, despite the complicated state of their relationship. It's about why we care about these characters, and who they are. We long ago established what it is that they actually do, and that hasn't really changed in ages; who they are is given to us in how they behave with those they care about, and how the things they do affect them emotionally. That's the core of emotionality, and the core of female-centric media.

So when I say that Supernatural is the most feminine show on television, what I mean is that more than any other show I've see, it's the most correctly-targeted towards a female viewing audience, and the most ripe to appeal to female viewers (the hot male leads certainly don't hurt). Unlike most shows that the media says are targeted towards women ('New Girl' and similar sitcoms, etc.), Supernatural - dark and bloody though it is - is the one that actually shows women what they want to see, to the point where the emotional exploitation of the male characters might almost begin to be on par with some of the less egregious physical exploitation of female characters in main-stream male-targeted media.

And I, for one, say: bring on more shows just like it.

* Or one of the most feminine, at least. I don't watch nearly as much television as Debbi does, so there might be other shows that also fit my particular definition of feminine on the air right now that even do so to the same or greater degree that Supernatural does. But if so, I've never seen them. I leave it to others therefore, after reading this, to argue whether certain other shows fit this definition better or worse than Supernatural does.

** There is a corresponding male fan-media landscape as well, but it's somewhat different in nature and not what I'm discussing here. If you want some good breakdowns of the differences between these fan-media landscapes, go look up some essays and/or books on fan culture by Henry Jenkins. Seriously though, that guy is awesome.

The Uke As Guilt-Free Anti-Feminist Female

When I was just starting the fifth grade, I had a friend. We'll call her Mary. Mary was four years older than I was, and when I first met her we bonded over our mutual love of anime - specifically Sailor Moon. She was the one who leant me her untranslated volumes of the manga Kusatta Kyouhei no Houteishiki - describing the story to me as she had half learned from assiduous internet research and half deduced from following the illustrations - and, in doing so, gave me my first introduction to shounen ai.

Shounen ai, literally "boy love" in Japanese, is a genre of Japanese manga and anime (comics and cartoons if we want to be boorish and ignore the subtle cultural differences) that focuses specifically on gay romance between men or boys. This genre is much more popular in Japan than any similar equivalent in the states, and is targeted not at a gay male audience but primarily at straight females. In fact shounen ai is generally written and illustrated by women as well, occasionally to the point of radical inaccuracies about male physiology.

A typical shounen ai story focuses around two characters - the "seme" and the "uke" (pronounced "sehmeh" and "ookeh"). In a literal sense, the seme is the top and the uke is the bottom in the gay relationship. But much more than in any Western story, the characters in shounen ai manga are defined by these labels. The seme is generally gruff, stoic, and often pushy often to the point of being almost rapey. When he is not tough and stoic he is cheerful and puppy-like, overbearing in his eagerness, and still the more aggressive of the two. The uke, by contrast, is usually smaller, more feminine, easily confused, easily brought to tears, overthinks things, is highly emotional, and in most cases, is either reluctant to accept the seme's advances or secretly pines for him without realizing that his feelings are reciprocated. There are a number of stories that can be told with these two archetypes, and for the most part these same stories are told over and over and over again with different set dressing across various manga.

It may sound like these stereotypes lack nuance, but that's a problem endemic to manga and anime as a whole and not unique to shounen ai. Most anime characters fall into broad archetypes - the "tough guy," the "shy girl," the "nerdy character," etc. Much more so than Western media, Japanese media is oriented around comfortable stereotypes that the audience recognizes. I won't spend a lot of time belaboring this point, but if you're interested in the idea, there's a very good book called "Otaku: Japan's Database Animals," by Hiroki Azuma that explains this trend in great and fascinating depth.

When I was in middle school and receiving my first shounen ai education from Mary, these stories were fascinating to me. I was too young to read critically and pick out the fact that all the stories were basically the same - all I knew was that they appealed to a very visceral and newly-formed notion of the romantic (a childish one, yes, but I was a child). To this day I still find myself enjoying some shounen ai here and there, provided it doesn't adhere too faithfully to the basic stereotypes and devices of the genre. There was and still is something appealing about the sheer, unapologetic emotionality of them - the longing, the heartbreak, the misunderstandings, and so forth - that is enjoyable in a very onanistic sort of way.

I had given up more traditional shounen ai for several years when I recently stumbled upon an anime that encompasses all the worst (or best, depending on how you look at it) of shounen ai cliches. (The series, pictured right, is called "World's Greatest First Love" and is available on CrunchyRoll.com, for anyone who is interested.) Looking over it again with a much older and more critical eye, I tried to pinpoint what about it was so pleasing to me back when I first discovered it, why it sparked an interest in me that I have to this day not really lost.
I started to think about the uke character - I have long believed that the uke is basically a wish-fulfillment stand-in for the author/reader, but in male form. At any rate, the character is almost always written in an unbelievably feminine way, either intentionally or from lack of writing skill. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the uke embodies a very specific subset of characteristics.

The uke is everything that we as young women growing up are taught is supposed to be romantic, but which we are simultaneously taught is a sign of weakness in women (or, less charitably, the weakness OF women). Confusion, being too quick to mope and overindulge in negative emotion, sighing crushes from afar that the character is too shy to act upon - all of these are characteristics that are rather Victorian in their notions of how women should behave in a romantic situations, and all of these are traits which modern feminist women abhor in female characters.

If you don't believe me, take Bella Swan. Bella is the main character in the Twilight Series (for the two people who aren't already familiar). She is universally defined by her love for her man, she accepts his stalker-like behavior as a sign of the trueness of his love, and when he breaks up with her she literally spends four months locked in her room staring at the wall and moping. She's that kind of protagonist. Bella Swan is a non-character created to be a wish-fulfillment fantasy for author Stephanie Meyers and her twelve-year-old female audience. A very specific demographic absolutely adores these books, while most of the rest of the reading public basically despises them.

We despise these books because Bella is weak. As more mature women, we don't want to be anything like Bella. We've learned to cope with our emotions, to not let men rule our lives. We hate her for being the sort of character that flies in the face of the equality and respect that women strive for in the modern world. And yet, Twilight DOES have a huge fan following - which indicates that these situations and these behaviors have found some appeal somewhere. How is it that these things can be simultaneously romantic and detestably anti-feminist?

Well, for most readers of Twilight, they can't. You're either in the pro or anti Twilight camp, and there's not a lot of room for compromise. But with shounen ai, there is room for compromise. With shounen ai, you neatly side-step the problem of "is it okay for a girl to be like this?" by making the character a boy. Many of the uke characters in shounen ai manga are just as bad as Bella Swan, but much better received by many of the same women who would scoff at Twilight.

So I suppose the question is, is this okay? Does the fact that the character is male make these behaviors acceptable? Are the actions of the uke scornful, or are they actually romantic in the absence of feminist baggage? It's not a question I feel comfortable answering on my own. Am I a bad feminist because I found (and occasionally still find) these subservient, melodramatic characters compelling, even though they're male? Is shounen ai somehow groundbreaking, or is it just the opposite? And why are these plots compelling at all in the first place - what is the cultural construction that causes us to find these things romantic at all? And if I DO find these things romantic, does that make me a hypocrite for disliking Twilight?

More and more questions pile up, and I feel inadequate to answering any of them. Perhaps it is because I know that the answers will lead to some heavy self-evaluation, always a daunting prospect. But regardless, I hope some of the questions will lead you to thought as well, and encourage you to examine your own preconceptions. Are female stereotypes universally detestable, even when applied to men?

Slash Fiction as Feminist Activity

It's no secret that I'm a pretty big fan of slash fanfiction; writer of much, reader of much more. There are many and varied reasons to enjoy slash, from the most basic counterpart to male interest in lesbianism (one man is hot, so two men are hotter) to more nuanced narrative concerns like the interesting conflicts inherent in social taboos and so on. If you ask me why I'm into slash, I'm likely to give you a different answer on any given day of the week; there are just so many angles to the subject. It's something I think about an awful lot, but one possible explanation did not occur to me until just recently, and it seems to explain a lot.

A friend recently said to me that he thought that any gay material at all in a given piece of work was both "necessary and sufficient" to keep me interested. Which isn't true, but it got me thinking about counterexamples. When do I not need gay characters or gay undertones to enjoy something? When do I dislike something if it doesn't have those qualities? For the most part, there's one common thread that binds these distinctions: the presence or lack of interesting female characters.

I've only recently started to notice how very few interesting female characters there are in media, particularly in the games industry. I mean, I've always been aware of the problem, at least peripherally - but somehow recently it has come into much sharper focus for me. It might have something to do with this rather interesting article I read, linked by a friend: To my someday daughter. But everywhere I turn, I feel like I'm seeing new examples of stupid, vapid, shallow presentations of the feminine.

Case in point: my boyfriend and I just bought an indie game called "Dungeon Defender." It's a good game - a hybrid of action RPG and tower defense that is better than any other attempt at the genre mix that I've seen. The narrative isn't anything particularly novel, but it's cute enough to be less tired than it by rights should be. There are four character classes you can play as, all of which have predefined genders. They are: the squire/knight character (male, human), the sorcerer's apprentice (also male... presumably human? Hard to tell under the robe and hat), the monk (male, human), and the huntress (female, elf).

When you are on the character select screen, choosing which hero you would like to customize to play as, each character has a little animation upon selection. For the three male characters, this is basically a battle animation. They hold up their sword or staff, or in the case of the monk, go into a meditation pose. Know what the elf girl does? She turns around and wiggles her butt at you. That's right - she's even wearing a low-slung belt so you can see the small of her back and the very top of her butt when she does it. And this is the indie scene - don't even get me started on the triple-A atrocities.

Little things like this didn't used to bother me, but the older I get, the more they do. Maybe it's just that as I grow up, I expect the people around me and the things I'm consuming to also grow up and be more mature as well, and it seems like they're falling behind. Or, as I'm sadly realizing, they fell behind long ago. Most big game studios aren't even pretending anymore.

So what does all this have to do with slash? Well, consider the average romance featuring one of these women. Who am I supposed to identify with? The shallow save-me damsel that exists solely to be captured and to be the reward for the hero upon completing his quest? The bad-ass leather-boot-clad action dominatrix whose sole qualities are "is hot" and "can blow shit up"? Why would I want to identify with these women? They're not real people. They're cardboard cutouts. Not only do I not feel kinship with them, I feel abhorrence towards them.

So if I'm going to identify with someone, I'm much more likely to pick the character that matches me emotionally - or at least has emotions I can empathize with - than I am to pick the character that has boobs. And because I like men, I want the character I identify with or care about to like men. It seems the natural extension or progression of my empathy. It's not that simple, of course, but it proves to be surprisingly true across a very broad variety of cases. The characters I slash are most often the characters I feel empathy for. I hardly ever feel empathy for female characters in anything these days. Because they're barely characters.

Going through the media that I've been consuming lately, I started asking myself - who do I slash, and why?

Avatar: the Last Airbender
I don't slash anyone. Katara is an awesome, complex female character, as are support character females like Toph and Suki.

Supernatural
I slash Dean and Castiel. There are interesting female characters in the series, but they're only ever bit characters; one-or-two-episode players. Mostly there are just NO female characters on the show.

Glee
I'm interested in the canon gay couple, but I don't slash anyone non-canon. I find Rachel and Quinn, while stereotypes, to still be somewhat interesting - at least enough that I care about their emotions and what they're going through. And the shallowness of their characters is balanced out by the fact that the gay couple is actually canon.

Kingdom Hearts
I slash the hell out of this series - Sora and Riku particularly (although one-sided), and Axel and Roxas as a close second. Female characters? Basically one - Kairi (and Namine, who is also Kairi). Know what she does in the game? Mostly get captured. And sometimes wait longingly on an island for her man to return. At least Riku and Axel are somewhat interesting.

Community
No slash pairings, despite the tempting target of Troy and Abed. Annie, Britta, and Shirley are at least as complex as any of the male characters. (They are still fairly simple as characters in these sorts of comedies are, but they can at least be described with actual personality monikers - Naive, Uptight Activist, Religious, etc., rather than as "the girl.")

Sherlock (BBC)/Sherlock Holmes
Very slashy, in both cases. In Sherlock (the slashier of the two, in my opinion), essentially no female characters, barring one bit character who is the female counterpart to an identical male character and a bland love interest non-character who's in about three scenes total. In Sherlock Holmes, two female characters whose personalities are, respectively: "love interest" and "feisty love interest."

I'm not saying this is a hard and fast rule - like, if there is a good female character, I 100% won't slash, and if there isn't I 100% will. I'm just saying, I'm most likely to take an interest in the emotional states and emotional underpinnings of characters that actually have emotions. Most of the time those characters are male. Asking me to care about the doings of a shallow piece of eye-candy is not only ridiculous, it's frankly insulting.

So there you have it - yet another reason to like slash; it's the feminist thing to do.

Agency - To Be Desired?

It's a legitimate question, and one that seems to be coming up a lot in one of my classes: how much agency do we really want in a media experience? Certainly we want some if we're expecting a game; without any at all, then we might as well just be watching a movie. But is more agency necessarily better? How much is too much? Is there even such a thing?

The games that give us the most agency, games like ''The Sims'', where there are no rules holding us down and we can do anything we want, are often the least "game-like" experiences. This is because games are defined by rules. The confines of the system are what give us a solid structure in which to work, to problem-solve, and to explore. It is the reduction of our agency in certain areas that highlights our agency in others.

Rules allow the game's creator to structure an experience. It allows him to provide atmosphere, to dictate events in such a way that our feelings are manipulated (the final goal of all art forms) in the way the designer desires. Such a guided experience can be very pleasurable. But if a guided experience is what we're looking for, then what separates interactive media from movies? Should we not dispense with the interactivity altogether and simply go back to our static films? This, after all, would allow for maximum structure on the part of the creator.

The fact that we do not must mean that there is something inherently pleasurable about interacting. Under this assumption then, how do we compromise? How do we maintain the pleasure of interactivity, while not losing the pleasure of a structured experience, the way we do in ''The Sims''? Game designers are still struggling with this problem, and will likely continue to do so for some time. Rather than trying to define a single answer, perhaps an impossible task, perhaps we should look at what interactivity gives us that is pleasurable. What is it about interactivity that we WANT to keep?

Perhaps foremost (arguably; I would be more than happy to debate this point with anyone who so chooses), interactivity is a powerful tool for empathy. Compared to a passive movie-going audience, players are incredibly invested in the life and well-being of the main character, because they are directly responsible for it. It is the decisions and skill of the player that determine what happens to the main character and whether that character lives or dies. By the same token, anything that happens to the character reflects back on the player. If the character is injured, it is not just the character: it is YOU who is injured. If the character murders someone close to him, it wasn't just the character's action: it was YOUR action. When a player is in control of a character, he effectively becomes that character. His own fate, his own success or failure, is innately tied to that of the character. The emotional resonance that occurs therein is therefore necessarily stronger than with other forms of art, simply by virtue of the fact that the player is participating in it.

So then, in order to make use of this powerful empathy, a player must feel like he has control over the character. If too much of the character's actions, or the effects on the character, are out of the player's control, then he no longer feels that these actions/effects are his responsibility. The feeling of empathy is broken. This can happen once the player falls below the threshold of "enough" agency, at which point he feels as though he has no control over the character, or his control makes no difference. At this point, the character becomes just as sympathetic as a character in a book or movie; we might feel something for them, but in a detached sort of way that allows us to distance ourselves from them.

So then, let us return to the question of what is "enough" agency. How much is too much? I would argue that a highly-structured media experience is preferable to an unstructured one. After all, if no creative mind is shaping our experience, then what is the point of being an artist of the medium? However, it is vital that these experiences allow enough agency to make the player feel not only that he has a vested interest in the fate of the main character, but that he has a palpable ''effect'' on the fate of the main character. When he feels this, he becomes engaged with the material, and video games (and other interactive experiences) can do some of their most powerful work.

Emotional Experiences in Gaming

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR "SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS," "PORTAL," AND "CALL OF DUTY 4: MODERN WARFARE."

So I've been thinking recently about emotional experiences I've had playing games, and what causes them. Games, especially good games, have given me quite a few to consider. In "Portal," for instance, I've had moments of genuine laughter, and of genuine panic and fear. Games have given me and others moments of real sadness, and a very real feeling of achieving victory. So what is it about these games that can make me feel so much? Emotional experiences in gaming, I've found, tend to break down into two categories, according to cause: those caused by narrative elements, and those caused by game elements.

Emotional experiences caused by narrative elements are similar to those in other fiction media. When Aggro hurled me over the edge of the crumbling bridge in "Shadow of the Colossus," and subsequently fell to his own (presumed) death, I felt real anguish. Aggro was a character I had grown attached to. He was my sole companion throughout the game, my vital aid in many previous missions, and though I was occasionally annoyed when he had a slower reaction time than I wished, I had really come to think of him with fondness. In fact, I didn't realize just how attached I had become to that horse until I watched him plummet into the canyon.

Most of us are familiar with this sort of experience. Many of us remember crying when we first read "Bridge to Terabithia" or "Where the Red Fern Grows." We become absorbed in fictional worlds, attached to their characters, and invested in their plots. The process of storytelling gives us mental models in our minds of people and events that are as real as those models we create to represent people, places, and things that actually exist in the real world. The things that happen to fictional characters are as real to us as the things that happen to, say, celebrities, sometimes more so - since we often know more about a fictional character's life and motivation than we ever know about the mysterious lives of the rich and famous. So it's not strange when emotion is evoked by a story. We're sort of used to that.

The other way games evoke emotion are through the experience of gaming - the feeling of "yes, success!" when we accomplish a difficult goal, for instance. Puzzle games can be particularly pleasurable for the feeling of cleverness and self-appreciation we get when deciphering a particularly complex brain teaser. We feel a sense of triumph - over the machine, over other players, even over the rules of the game itself. Likewise we can feel defeat, frustration, determination, unease, and even fear, concerning the goals of the game and our progress towards them. Just yesterday I felt such successes and failures when playing a fighting game with a group of friends.

This second type of experience doesn't require story - it comes straight from our real-world experience with the act of playing the game. I can be argued therefore that this type of emotion is therefore more "real," although that term seems to belittle the story-based emotional experiences, which can often be incredibly powerful - sometimes even more than these so-called "real" emotions. (In my opinion, both sets of emotions are real, whether the source they stem from is fictional or not. After all, both emotional experiences take place in the same centers of our brain.)

These two methods of evoking emotion have historically been very segregated in their study. The practice of evoking emotion with fiction has long been the study of the creative fields - creative writing, film-making, literary study, theater, and so on. Whereas the evocative powers of games, when studied at all, tend to fall more into the psychology or sociology category - how do humans deal with success and failure? With stress? With competition? It is perhaps because of the vast separation of these two fields that it becomes somewhat difficult to think about the unifying of the two types of emotional experiences.

Some of the most moving emotional experiences I've ever had in games, however, come not from either of these categories, but from clever hybrids of the two. Video games are in the unique position of being able to provide a game experience and a story experience at the same time. Here are a few examples:

When I first played "Portal," and completed the last of the official missions, I was feeling very satisfied with myself. I'd been doing very well, thinking around obstacles and proving myself to be smarter than the machine. GLaDOS was just congratulating me on finishing the test.

Then the platform I was riding turned a corner, towards a bank of fire, and I panicked. An eerie, tense techno theme rose in the background as thoughts flashed through my mind: 'Oh no, GLaDOS betrayed us' - 'I'm going to die, what should I do?' - 'Where can I put a portal?' - 'So that's why the lab is empty, this is what happened to everyone else' - 'Ohshitohshit! I'm gonna die! I have to jump!'

This series of thoughts illustrates the combination of emotional occurrences. On the one hand, my panic was engendered by fear for my game success. I had only seconds to make a difficult decision, solve a puzzle, or else the result would be failure. Actions I had been performing more or less at leisure the rest of the game were suddenly put under extreme time pressure, which caused an equally extreme anxiety.

But on the other hand, part of my panic was entirely story-related. I realized that my character had been betrayed. That all along, the AI had been planning to get rid of my character after she analyzed my abilities. I realized that this must have happened before - that all the test subjects who came before me must have been hurled towards this same fire, that maybe they'd found a way out, but maybe they'd burned to death in the flames. I panicked wondering how I - how my character - was going to get out of this situation.

Another such powerful experience comes from the game "Call of Duty 4," and is one I've written and talked about often before. In the game there is a sequence where one of the characters - a character which the player has been controlling for about half the game thus far - is caught in a nuclear explosion while trying to escape by helicopter. The helicopter goes down, and the player assumes that the character has died.

But wait - he's alive! The GPS locator in the game's loading screen focuses on the character, finding him amidst the wreckage, and the game drops you down into the man's body once more. You awaken to find yourself in the midst of the helicopter wreckage, so injured you can barely move except for a slow crawl. As you stumble out of the twisted hulk of metal, you find yourself in the midst of the nightmarish aftermath of the explosion. An enormous mushroom cloud towers over you on one side, while the wind blows pale-colored dust and debris in a fierce storm all around you.

It quickly becomes horribly obvious: this situation cannot end well. There is no reasonable hope of escape. Everything around you is dead, dying, or destroyed. The faint hope you felt at finding your character alive quickly dwindles into a shocked acceptance of the truth: you are going to die.

The emotional impact here is once again two-fold. On the one hand is the obvious impact of the story elements, the horror of nuclear war, the desolation of the environment, the doomed fate of a well-liked character. But on the other hand, the despair is also game-based: there is no way to win. All the previous missions (with the exception of the "mission" over the opening credits, which is almost more of a cinematic sequence, and should probably be considered differently for a variety of reasons which I won't get into here) have always had a win state, a goal to accomplish, a way to survive. Now, the player must gradually come to terms with the fact that there is nothing he can do. There is no way to win, no way to save the situation, or keep this character around for later use. This is it. You lose.

By combining these two emotional impacts, the game delivers an exceedingly strong message about the danger and destructive force of nuclear war. Neither emotional resonance on its own would do the trick - just forcing you to lose a mission without the story context would be meaningless and frustrating, while having you watch a static story-based cutscene about the character's death would seem preachy and cliche. But together, the combination of the two delivers a startlingly effective experience, reaching out to the heart and soul of the player.

Because of the strength of this impact, I think it's very important in the study and creation of games for us to think about the nature of such emotional experiences - after all, the ability to evoke emotion is one of the strongest powers of Art, no matter what its format. We must learn to appreciate the nature of games in both their capacities to evoke emotion, and think long and hard about the best ways to combine them.