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.

Indirect Storytelling in Facebook's Packrat

I've been playing the facebook app game "Packrat" (copyright Alamofire Digital Collectibles) for over a year now. It's an addicting little sucker - a collectible card game wherein you use in-game credits to purchase cards from stores, or use cards you already have to steal new ones from other people. The cards belong to various themed sets, and each card has a point value. Low-level cards from the same set can be combined to form higher-level cards from that set (which, most of the time, cannot be gotten in any other way), and the object is to collect all the cards from a given set and "vault" them so that they can no longer be stolen from you. It can be played with or without active friends playing the game, although as with most facebook apps, there is a bonus for getting friends to join.

I didn't start thinking about Packrat as a form of narrative until recently - perhaps because they've only just started using it as such in a more blatant fashion. It's not direct, obvious narrative like you'd find in a novel or a movie, but much more subtle. It arises from the nature of the card sets, and how they're designed. Allow me to explain via example. The following is one of the current sets of cards, "The Razor's Plunder," and the cards required to make each card:

Base Cards:
Pickaxe
Shovel
Treasure Map Fragment
Metal Detector
Trail of Treasure
Iron Heart (a sort of steampunk engine)
Stone of Fortune
Marked Palm Tree
Unfortunate Treasure Hunter (a skeleton)

Built Cards:
Captain's Gig: Iron Heart x3
Treasure Cave: Metal Detector, Marked Palm, Unfortunate Treasure Hunter
Captain Auger Confrontation (a fearsome-looking pirate with a sword): Treasure Map Fragment, Trail of Treasure, Stone of Fortune
Converted Cutlass Arm: Pickaxe, Shovel, Iron Heart
Swashbuckling!: Treasure Cave, Captain Augur Confrontation, Converted Cutlass Arm
The Razor Triumphant (the Captain with a handful of gold): Swashbuckling! x2, Captain's Gig

Consider the direction in which these card combinations leads the mind. Like a connect-the-dot drawing, the makers of Packrat lay out a few key points along the way to allow the player to construct a narrative of swashbuckling pirates, hastily assembled mechanical limbs, and a struggle over hidden treasure. The details of the narrative may differ from player to player as they construct it in their minds, but the essential plotted course is there.

"The Razor's Plunder" is not the only Packrat set with an implicit narrative. Recently released sets include an "Independence Day" set wherein you make Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Hancock, and combine them to form the Declaration of Independence. "Ink Wars" told the story of two rival tattoo parlors, one upscale and one rundown and sketchy, and the tattoos produced by each. Currently in progress is an "Ants & Grasshoppers" set, which seems to be a slightly revised version of the classic tale about work and procrastination. (The high card in that set is called "Bug Summit," and seems to be a meeting between the emperor of the grasshoppers and the queen of the ants.)

Packrat is an interesting example of a non-traditional narrative - but one nonetheless clearly intended by the game's creators. The combinations within each set are clearly intended to evoke some very specific images and causal relations. But the narrative itself - including its timeline - must be literally constructed by the player from these building blocks. It's a good reminder that our current models of narrative are not all-inclusive, and that it is still possible to think of storytelling in new, and entirely radical ways.

Required Playing: Eternal Darkness

Silicon Knights. 2002. Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. Nintendo GameCube. Nintendo.

Reading a description of the plot of Eternal Darkness might not give you the greatest confidence about the game's innovation; the plot reads more or less like a cheap Lovecraft ripoff. When I played it the first time, I was looking specifically at its "fourth wall"-breaking elements. I was not expecting to be completely blown away by the narrative structure. Since I played it, it has become my opinion that this game should be required playing for anyone discussing narrative in video games - its narrative structure is one of the most unique and well-designed that I have ever seen in a video game.

Eternal Darkness goes like this: a young girl named Alexandra is told that her grandfather has been murdered, and goes to his house to find out what happened. There she discovers a mysterious book - the Tome of Eternal Darkness - containing a legend about the Elder Gods, each of whom is trying to come into our world and take it over. The legend also tells of one of the God's undead servants, a former Roman soldier called Pious Augustus. While reading, Alex notices that most of the book is missing - it seems to have been removed. She inspects the house to find the other chapters.

The first chapter features a young woman in an ancient temple, bearing the very same book. At this point, however, the legend is all the book contains. As the young woman progresses through her journey, she writes down her experiences within the book. At the end of her life, she finds herself trapped within the temple.

As she has finished reading, we return to Alex in her grandfather's study. We now have all the information that the young woman in the chapter learned, including any spells she discovered. Alex can use these spells to uncover the next chapter of the book in the house. This chapter features a new character, and his autobiographical segment. Because he has inherited the book after the young woman of the first chapter, he too has access to all her information and spells. He adds his own as he discovers them, thus giving these same powers to Alex.

This goes on for 10 characters, each giving the next piece of the story of the Elder Gods, and providing further clues about what happened to Alex's grandfather. Each character has his or her own strengths and weakness, different items, and different fighting style. The controls, however, are similar enough across characters that the player can easily adjust to a new character within moments. By the time she has completely reconstructed the book, Alex has all the information she needs to defeat Pious Augustus and his Elder God.

The structuring here is brilliant. The multiple flashback system allows for a fascinating nonlinear narrative, while at the same time the inheritance feature of the book allows for completely plausible linear character ascension - the player continues to gain more and more powers, never losing ones she had previously, but without any sort of artificial feeling of "leveling up." Each character is entirely unique, and gives a refreshing change to gameplay (younger characters might have more strength, religious characters have greater sanity, older characters tire more easily, etc.), without being so different as to require the player to learn a new control scheme every time.

The flashbacks are even played with in the narrative in other ways; certain levels will take place in the same maps as previous levels, but with gaps of often hundreds of years. Therefore, things the player does in previous levels, as previous characters, can affect what the player can and cannot do in subsequent levels. (For instance, if you retrieve the longsword the first time you are in the monks' abbey, you can find it again on that character's corpse when your new character returns there years later.) All the stories interweave effortlessly with each other and with Alex's frame story.

As if this astoundingly well-crafted narrative wasn't enough, the game also provides some really interesting breaking of the fourth wall. The game features a "sanity meter" (it is not the only game to do so, but as far as I know, it's the only game to handle it quite like this), where the character you are currently playing has a limited amount of sanity, measured by a green vial on the screen. Witnessing strange and unbelievable horrors will drain your sanity meter, as will falling under the gaze of the game's monsters.

As your sanity drops, you begin to experience some strange effects. Blood might drip from the walls, the floor turns to quicksand, statues turn to watch you as you go past, etc. This is all your standard horror-genre sort of fare, but the game doesn't stop there. It also tries to mess with the player directly. When sanity gets low, the game might throw up a message that the controller has been disconnected, just as you enter a room with a huge crowd of enemies. It might tell you that the TV has been muted, or that the console has been restarted. All these effects are completely outside the context of the game, and aimed specifically at you the player, meant to make you doubt your own sanity. I will admit to being caught in at least one or two of them, and I knew they were coming! This clever little gimmick might be worth checking out on its own, even if the game wasn't a must-play for narrative structure.

I think games like this are a must-play before anyone argues that games can't have innovative or unique narrative structures. True, most games are linear or tree-style narratives, but just because many are, doesn't mean they have to be. I have never been as pleasantly surprised with a game as I was with Eternal Darkness, and while it may not be the most popular game in a commercial sense, I do believe it should be required for all Game Studies academics.

Personal Pronouns in Discussing Games

I originally wanted to talk about this in my paper, but finally decided that it was too difficult a point to support, based as it is mostly on anecdotal evidence. Still, I find it to be largely true, and I think it's worthwhile to mention regarding games, because it helps to shed light on how players relate to in-game characters, and the gaming experience in general. The topic in question is the way players talk about games - specifically, what pronouns they use.

Depending on the person of the pronoun a player chooses, she might be talking about a variety of different perspectives on a gaming experience. The first-person "I" denotes something that the player in particular did at a given point. Third-person "he" or "she" usually refers to an action taken by the character being played. The second-person "you" refers to an action that any player may or must take in a given situation. (This last is often used on shows like G4's "Cheat," to describe how a game can be played - "Pick up the gun and get onto the platform before you press the button to go up," etc.) Think of these pronouns as three entirely different (although perhaps not entirely separate) levels of gaming:

Level 1: He/She/It
The game's intrinsic story, as presented by the game designer. This level includes the immutable actions performed by the player - static cutscenes, character dialogue, and so on. This is largely the game's "context," or the self-contained world of the game itself.

Level 2: You
The game as a playable (not played) experience - all the decisions and dynamic elements that exist in the game in potentia, elements that may or may not be expressed depending on player choice. A sort of theoretical game experience that could apply to any gamer that might play the game.

Level 3: I
The actual played experience, as opposed to the level 2 playable experience. What actually happened when the player played the game. The decisions she made, the weapons she chose, the direction she decided to go in. The dialogue path she enacted, or the character skill tree she selected. This level corresponds to a single instance of game play, an actual performed example of the level 2 theoretical layer.

While the different levels that can be designated by pronoun use is interesting, what really fascinates me is the way players use these pronouns in conversation when they are discussing games. Players routinely switch back and forth from one to the other, bounding across the layers of designation, sometimes using multiple persons in the same sentence. The experience of playing the game is such a complex one that it cannot merely be related on one of the three levels - the player holds all three in her head at once, and a memorable moment can occur on any of the three planes. This can lead to some confusion of speech, as in the following (not directly quoted, but very typical of the sort of story that players might relate) description of the beginning level of Kingdom Hearts (for those unfamiliar with the game, "Sora" is the name of the player's character):

"So you run across the beach towards the island where Sora and his friends play, only to notice that Sora's friend Riku, who he was fighting earlier, is standing there, apparently surrounded by darkness. So Sora sort of skids to a halt and they have this conversation where Riku's being all weird, and then Riku opens this vortex, and you almost get sucked in, but then you wake up with this weapon, and hear these voices talking about a keyblade. So then I remember that weird cave that I explored on the island earlier, and head back to it, but when I get there it's turned into this huge white door, like the one Sora saw in his dream. And I'm like, 'oh shit,' because that door was really big and important when you run into it before."

I first took note of this phenomenon when it was pointed out to me that I myself was doing it. I had just finished playing Kingdom Hearts 2, and was rather enamored with the game. I was relating my experience to a non-gamer friend with enthusiasm and wild gestures when she smiled at me and gently reminded me, "You know that you're not the main character, right?"

I realized that I had been talking in the first person about unchangeable game events, as though I myself were in control of them. ("And so I run down the mountain, trying to catch him, because I'm pretty sure it's Riku...") It must have seemed silly to my friend that I was saying "I" when I was in fact talking about a young spikey-haired boy with mystical powers. But my connection to the game was so strong that I did feel as though I were in control of these actions, even the immutable cut scenes.

Even though Sora is characterized in a way that is completely different from myself as a player, I still felt a strong enough connection to him, a deep enough immersion in the story, that I experienced it from his point of view. His confusion was my confusion, his actions were my actions. It probably helped that I personally felt very connected to and interested in this story, just because it's the sort of genre I happen to enjoy - but other games accomplish this effect with more widely-applicable immersive tools, such as silent and/or generic (implicitly rather than explicitly characterized) protagonists, or dynamic storylines that actually change depending on player action.

To me, this sort of pronoun confusion indicates that we don't really know who we are when we play games. If we're immersed in the story, the character might be "me," otherwise, a character we feel distant from might be "him." If we're trying to describe to a friend how to play a game, we might put that friend in the position of main character, and the character might be "you." And strangely enough, all three of these persons can apply to the very same gaming experience, in the same telling, interwoven with one another. It truly speaks to the power of gaming as an immersive experience, that it can confuse our very concept of who we are.