Results tagged “agency” from Softcore Gamer

This time of year is always busy, but this year has been especially busy for me. This is the first chance I've had in a long while to come up for air and leave a post on the blog while I'm here. Other projects have kept me from updating for the past several weeks, which is a shame mostly because I left a lot of interesting comments hanging on the previous entry. Certainly there is a lot to be said on the relationship between games and movies, and it's a topic that I hope to revisit in the near future.

For the moment, let me share with you a bit of what I've been working on lately. Here's the Cache website, which is intended to be the public face of a series of projects that Jamie and I are currently working on, all related back to one key idea: creating narrative through a process of discovery rather than role-playing. The first such project, titled CONTROL, is currently in a beta stage and can be downloaded from the website.

CONTROL is based on a card game created by Jamie and Mike Rossmassler. There are 256 cards, laid out in sixteen four-by-four grids. Each card in the grid represents a space; each of the sixteen sequential pages represents a fifteen-second span of time. The player chooses a card and reads it: it describes the space during that time. The player chooses more cards, or turns the page in order to increment or decrement time. After a few such moves, the player selects one card out of his or her hand to set aside; the others are returned. After sixteen turns, the player has build up an inventory (a cache, if you will) of sixteen carefully-selected cards which tell a story.

This story represents the creative aspect of the game. Although the player doesn't create, or even influence, what is written on any of these cards, they get to choose which ones to include and which to ignore, and how they should be assembled. The results can be surprisingly unpredictable. Some players are documentarians; others take artistic license with their stories. Once the game is completed, the story remains, an artifact of the experience.

We're looking for feedback from playtesters so that we can continue to improve CONTROL and the other games that will follow. You can help by downloading and playing the beta version and filling out our survey. Any feedback is appreciated! This is an experimental game, so we're trying to push boundaries, but ultimately we're trying to figure out how to make it fun, as well.

Special note to people who have already played an earlier version of CONTROL: There were a couple versions that saw closed beta testing. One was the original paper prototype that Jamie and Mike put together. Another was an early digital version that suffered from a massive memory leak. If you played one of these versions, I encourage you to at least register your email address at the Cache website. The memory leak has been fixed, and the most recent version added in a much-requested feature that was missing from the original release. We will continue to update the game with features, based on feedback and our own wishlist, and we'll notify you occasionally when a new version goes live.

Last week, RJ Layton posted a scathing editorial on the relationship between movies and games - not about the generally terrible results of making movies based on games or games based on movies, but rather about the use of cut-scenes, full-motion video, and non-interactive segments in game design, as well as the apparent cinephilic mentality of game designers. The post has already generated quite a bit of discussion: a response from Jamie Antonisse, a follow-up in which RJ speaks to a specific example of this phenomenon, and my own bizarre romp through rhetorical fallacy. As entertaining as it was to draw analogies to body image and substance abuse into the conversation, I feel like I have more serious things to add. A lot of them, actually, and maybe I'll get to some more of them eventually, but today I'm going to concentrate on one important point: emotion.

RJ and Jamie both bring up emotion, its role in storytelling, and its devilishly cinematic associations. I'd like to focus a little more closely on this complex relationship between emotion, film, and games. RJ seems to be of the opinion that a game which focuses on story and emotion, or at least one that markets itself around those terms, is likely to have hold cinematic qualities in esteem; in his words, "controllers with no player holding them, some pretty music, and a close-up of the a character’s face." Which isn't to say that games are devoid of admirable content with emotional significance. RJ illustrates this point with exemplars like the sense of triumph that comes with beating Punch-Out!! or the sense of pride that comes with managing urban growth in SimCity. Jamie echoes this by describing sadness and bemusement as "filmic" emotions, which are better expressed in movies than games, in contrast to other emotions like triumph and frustration, which are better expressed in games than movies.

I think, as far as the exploration of emotion in games goes, Jamie strikes gold with this point, but he doesn't delve as far into it as I'd like. I would similarly organize emotions around two categories, passive (or filmic) and agency-based. Passive emotions are a response to some external stimulus. Agency-based emotions, alternatively, are a response to first-party actions. Passive emotions cover a broad range and include simple emotions like joy, sorrow, and horror; relational emotions like love and jealousy are more complex passive emotions. Agency-based emotions include triumph, remorse, and pride. These emotions imply a previous action on the part of the person experiencing the emotion.

In crafting a narrative experience, cinema can utilize the whole extensive range of passive emotions. It's no surprise that movies have become adept at using these emotions to tell stories. After all, storytelling in film - or at least the contemporary incarnation of the medium - is based entirely around building emotion to a cathartic point. But no matter how a movie presents its story, it is still an instance of a passive medium, and as such it's limited by the distinction between emotions. The narrative of the film has no direct access to any of the agency-based emotions.

Let me stay on this for just a moment, because even though it follows logically, I think it might be a controversial point. Jamie mentions, in his post, feeling a sense of triumph in the movie Return of the King. I'm making the claim that a movie cannot make the audience feel triumph, because the feeling of triumph implies an action - specifically, a successful attempt at overcoming an obstacle - as the basis for the emotion. A movie cannot truly inspire an agency-based emotion, but it can use character identification to simulate it. Return of the King, like any good movie, makes the audience identify with one or more characters as, through the course of the story, the characters experience emotions. In this case, the character portrayed in the movie makes a successful attempt to overcome an obstacle, and experiences triumph in response to this action. The audience, if they are identifying with the character, does not feel triumph directly but does feel joy in sympathy with the character's triumph.

Identification is a device that the film industry uses - very effectively - to trick the audience into thinking they are experiencing an agency-based emotion. But in every case, the audience's feeling is once-removed from the emotion in question. The absolute best that a movie can hope for is that the audience becomes so deeply immersed in the film and sympathizes so deeply with a character that they literally forget that they are removed from the action on-screen. If this ever happens, it is exceedingly rare; and if it were to happen, it would involve some sort of hypnosis or delusional psychosis or other strange psychology that I'm not comfortable with. The point is that, in any reasonable example, the experience of a sympathetic response isn't the same as the actual emotion on which it's based.

Access to a complete range of emotions is one of the greatest advantages games, as a medium, have over cinema. Games can inspire any of the passive emotions that movies do by telling a story in a traditional, cinematic sort of fashion. But games have an extended emotional repertoire, and some of the agency-based emotions that are exclusive to the medium pack a serious punch. Triumph, as has been frequently mentioned, is common in games. Shame is used in Guitar Hero through the boos and jeers of the audience before the player fails a song. Honor and remorse are employed by Bioshock in its touted rescue/harvest mechanic. Humility is a component of the excellent work of interactive fiction, The Baron (on which I will spend more time in the future). Frustration is part of the emotional range of any of the multitude of games that are purposefully difficult.

My personal favorite example of agency-based emotion, because it effected me so strongly when I experienced it, is the use of regret and self-loathing in KOTOR, when the player feels compelled by his or her allegiance to the dark side to betray two of the protagonist's companions. This experience demonstrated to me that the power of effectively-used agency-based emotions can absolutely dwarf that of passive emotions. At the moment, the video game industry has not matured to the point that these emotions are being used to their full potential. But story in games is being continually explored and expanded, both by independent game designers and mainstream games. The effect that interactivity has on emotion will be developed and refined until games regularly deliver the same level of emotional narrative that cinema is used to. At which point, the ability to tap directly into the full set of agency-based emotions will give interactive media greater affective power than passive media has ever had.

I don't know exactly why I'm so excited about the launch of Valve's Orange Box today, since I have no personal investment in the Half Life series and I won't even get to play the thing until later this month, when I trade the PS2 I've been using back for my 360. But I've been looking forward to Portal since, well, since the first time I heard about it. Which is a little ridiculous because, as much as I love to have a game take advantage of the ethereal nature of virtual worlds to screw with the laws of physics, there's good chance I'm not going to love the game itself. I'm trying to steel myself for a hardcore approach to spacial puzzles (read: platformer) with a killer difficulty curve. Even so, I can't help get excited about it.

But the point is, I've started to get excited about the other games included in this package. I'll finally get my chance to play Half Life 2, for one thing, which is supposed to have been the "Thinking Man's FPS" before Bioshock stole the title away. Episodes One and Two represent a step forward for episodic gaming, a cause to which I have been whole-heartedly converted. I love the style and aesthetic of Team Fortress 2, and by all accounts it's well balanced and a great deal of fun. And, quite frankly, whatever you think of these individual games, you have to admire the whole shebang. The contents display enough variety to appeal to a pretty decent range of tastes, and give everyone a chance to explore something they might not otherwise try.

Maybe more than anything else, this spoiler-free review of Episode Two by John Walker over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun has got me itching to find out what I've been missing all these years. Whether or not you're a Half-Life fan, I'd recommend you check out the article, which heaps all sorts of eloquent praise on the game. John was impressed by its style and polish, among other things. "Better than any FPS before, Episode Two disguises its linearity not by presenting you with false choices, but by making the only path on offer the only path you’d ever want to take. Go back and you’ll realise there is only ever one route. But you still picked it." I'm always impressed by this sort of attention to level design, which is perhaps the keystone to creating an effective narrative experience in a linear game. By definition, linearity limits a player's ability to make choices, which can severely decrease the player's sense of agency. Designing a linear game that doesn't feel linear is an impressive feat, and it allows the game effective use of the entire range of agency-based emotions, from pride to helplessness to regret.

By any measure, it seems the Orange Box is scoring high marks. To make your Orange Day celebrations complete, I'd also like to point out the first Team Fortress 2 machinima that hit yesterday, also brought to you by Rock, Paper, Shotgun. General agreement seems to be that it runs long, but it's elegant and touching and occasionally pretty funny. I have a soft spot in my heart for machinima, probably because I desperately want it to be possible to put together a great film without a huge art budget, and possibly because I love to see what creative people can do with constraints. (My abiding affection for the Red vs. Blue series probably falls in there somewhere, too.) Certainly, TF2 seemed to treat this film well. I haven't played the game, so I don't know how the camera works, but I was personally pretty impressed by some of the cinematography that they pulled off.