SOLO

Can a video game change you?

Can it move your spirit? 

Take you from one state of mind to a new state, a new condition, a new emotion, a new way of thinking?

This isn’t a question that professional developers ask very often, at least not in public discussions. But there is a related question that does get asked quite a bit in public forums: Can a game make you feel an emotion other than the adrenalin rush of anxiety, the pleasure of victory, or the disappointment of defeat? As far back as 1982, Electronic Arts, which was just getting started at the time, asked this question in an ad for its games:

“Can a computer game make you cry?”

Darren Gladstone, writing in 2004 for Computer Gaming World (now Games for Windows Magazine), picked up on this idea.

“Most games,” according to Gladstone, “just scare you.”

But he goes on to talk at length about the subject with then-VP and General Director of EA Los Angeles, Neil Young. Young’s belief was that games have to be able to move people in other ways than simply scaring them. According to Young, “The next big step is being able to move people emotionally versus purely adrenally… The truth of the matter is that the game industry has yet to create its equivalent of Citizen Kane.”

David Freeman, author of Creating Emotion in Games, recounts a provocative experience he had while working on a game development team. He was sitting in on a brainstorming session at the Game Developers Conference and the round table participants were discussing ways to put emotions into games. The moderator leaned forward and posed what he thought was a sure-fire question to get the group humming with ideas: “Who here has had a profound emotional experience while playing a game?” According to Freeman, he then sat back and waited for the discussion to erupt with excited responses.

No one in the group had a single response. In fact, the silence that fell over the room was akin to a Buddhist temple at meditation time.

“The subject of emotion in games is a new continent,” Freeman concludes. “An uncharted continent.”

But that was back in 2003. Since then, much has changed in the gaming world because of three events: WarCraft 3, Half Life 2, and Bioshock. Although the idea that even as recently as 2003 a roomful of gamers and game developers could not recall a single significant emotion they had experienced while playing games is mind-boggling. Had I been present at that conference, I would have had several significant events to share.

For starters, way back in 1998, one of the first emotional experiences I had during a game occurred while playing the original Age of Empires. There’s a scenario in the Babylonian Campaign in which you must build a city starting only with a priest unit. This requires you to capture at least one enemy villager, so that you have a unit with the ability to construct a storage pit, harvest wood, and eventually build a town center where more villagers can be trained. In time there will be enough resources to construct military buildings, an army, and you’re off and running.

The first step, though, is getting possession of a single villager.

In Age of Empires, priests had the ability to convert enemy units to your side, by essentially casting a “spell.” The spell took several seconds to work, however. During that time the rest of the target’s team were alerted that one of its members was under attack and came swarming to kill you. Game over. Reload.

An additional complication was that all the enemy’s villagers were hard at work in the center of their most heavily-defended area, well protected by clubmen and, as the enemy’s technology advanced, axemen. I remember the whole delicate process of converting a clubman first, then having my priest stand behind him, healing him, while he fought off the other clubmen who invariably came to kill him. When I had enough clubmen to protect a villager, I located a stray target, a villager who had wandered off to chop some wood, and turned my priest’s conversion spell on him. There was a characteristic wo-lo-lo sound made by the priest while he worked his religious spell that I’m sure many of you recall. Needless to say, after a bit of wo-lo-lo-ing, I was finally able to add a villager to my growing band of followers.

My little city was started at last and my empire soon would follow.

Then, about forty minutes into game, my priest got killed in a battle.

What happened next was completely unexpected: a wave of sadness came over me. That priest, after all, had founded my city. He was the father of my civilization. And when he was killed I experienced a genuine moment of loss. Due to his singularity (I hadn’t created any more priests yet), he had become a character in my mind, a personage endowed with identity and significance. He was no longer an important part of my overall strategy. I had enough soldiers to kill and slash and burn my way to victory. The old priest used to just hang around in the center of the village in case someone needed to be healed. But he was someone I had become attached to, and I experienced an emotional moment when he was killed.

Even now, ten years later when I teach game design and game writing to my students at New York University, I talk about this essential event. I call it the “experiential moment,” or the “transformative moment,” or sometimes just “the moment.”

It is the moment of change.

The moment when the spirit is altered.

It’s worth noting that this was not a pre-planned event. The scenario designer hadn’t scripted a story that would unfold in a specific way and culminate in a specific event. Nevertheless, it was a story. In a sense, it was a randomly-generated story — yet, considering the specific limitations that had been placed on me by the scenario designer, how random was it? Was there not in fact a very great chance that an experience like this would unfold?

One alternative is that my priest might have lived and when I was declared winner of the scenario, I might have scrolled over to find him and get a smile one last time, remembering how it had all started, before I moved on to the next level.

Yet another alternative: Were I the type of player who likes to build large numbers of priests and attack the enemy with lots of conversion spells, I could have been left with a throng of priests at the very end. Would I then have had a moment when I recalled how it all started, with just one of them?

I’m sure that at least some other players who took on the Babylonian Campaign had moments like the ones I just described. If we all met, we could sit and share accounts of how our experiences played out in that particular scenario. But it’s interesting that we had been left to discover these experiences ourselves, without being guided or forced to make obviously scripted choices.

Again, I say “obviously scripted choices.”

The choices were, after all, scripted. We had only one priest to start. That meant we all had to solve certain problems with him, and we were all liable to become at least a little invested in him.

However, the hand of the storyteller — the scenario designer — remained hidden. A narrative event would unfold, even though it was not what we normally consider to be a narrative. There was no pre-determined set of events culminating in a fixed outcome. Yet of all the multiple outcomes that were possible, there was a very great likelihood we would experience something we did not expect.

Can a video game change you?

I believe the answer to this is self-evident. If games didn’t change us in some way, we wouldn’t be excited about them. I think if the average gamer reflects on his or her experiences playing games, and asks the question, “When did I become excited about games?” they will find themselves describing that exact, elusive, unforgettable moment — the moment I call the “experiential moment.”

A moment when they felt something that they hadn’t felt before.

Essay by Gordon Farrell 

(Continuing the discussion that started in my last column, “Towards the Art of the Game”…)

The best way to articulate the connection I see between art and narrative is to explain how art can be understood as a sort of movement of the human soul.

This is an idea that has engaged great thinkers for centuries.

It started with the Greeks, who were fascinated by the notion that individual human beings can take action to change the world they live in. In their view, we do not live at the mercy of fate or the gods. Instead, we are partners with the gods both in shaping the world, and in shaping our own fates. Greek obsession with the concept of action turned out to be one of the great cornerstones of Western civilization, and the idea that ordinary men and women can do things to significantly alter the world is one of the central cultural beliefs of the West.

We alter the world when we build things. We alter the world when we vote. We alter the world when we apply scientific method to the development of military tactics. Don’t believe me? Go ask the Spartans.

But when we create art, we do more than alter the world. We alter our souls.

As you might well suspect, there is a fascinating journey to be traced from this idea that leads right to the development of video games themselves. Video games both dramatize the way that we alter the world through action, and simultaneously create the illusion for the player that he or she is producing change. In a sense, video games are the ultimate celebration of the notion that what I do matters in the world. Victory or defeat hinges on the actions I take.

The Greeks called the notion that we can alter the world praxis – a word that can be translated as “practical action.” I intend to make some comments about that notion in later entries. Right now, though, I want to focus on a more elusive type of praxis:

The praxis that occurs in the human psyche when we are in the presence of art.

In ancient Greek, “psyche” means “soul.” And in the 4th Century BCE, Aristotle wrote at length about the fact that art produces praxis in our psyches. When I talk about the ways in which video games can touch our souls, I mean it in Aristotle’s sense of the word.

When we are changed by art, our psyche moves from one state to a new state — a new condition. The 19th Century Greek scholar Samuel Butcher called it a psychic energy working outwards. Or, as another scholar  summarized it, “praxis in art is the movement of the psyche towards what seems good to it.”

And so we arrive at this notion that art is movement.

Movement of the human soul.

The idea didn’t die with the Greeks. In the 1st Century BCE, we find the Latin philosopher Horace talking about the way in which art changes us. “It is not enough for poems to have beauty,” he declares, “They must have charm, and lead the hearer’s soul where they will. As men’s faces smile on those who smile, so they respond to those who weep. If you would have me weep, you must first feel grief yourself.” Horace’s ideas about aesthetics played a prominent role in the formation of Western art, especially during the European renaissance. Some of his practical advice now seems unnecessarily stiff, but the core idea remains:

Art must change us.

If it doesn’t, it fails.

And, as Horace warns, “the Romans, in boxes and pit alike, will raise a loud guffaw.”

At the end of the European middle ages, Dante picks up this theme in his essays. He called the effect that art has on us “a movement-of-spirit,” a movement he thought should be in the direction of Christian godliness. The 19th Century romantics were so impressed by the power of art to “move” us, the romantic philosopher Auguste Schlegel used the term “artist-philosopher-genius” to refer to the men and women who create art.

In the modern period, Wassily Kandinsky addresses the idea of art as movement as well. In “Concerning the Spiritual in Art,” he wrote: “The spiritual life, to which art belongs and of which she is one of the mightiest elements, is a complicated but definite and easily definable movement forwards and upwards. This movement is the movement of experience. It may take different forms, but it holds at bottom to the same thought and purpose… this need to move ever upwards and forwards, by the sweat of the brow, through suffering and fear.”

Like Aristotle, Kandinsky saw an exact correlation between the experience of art, the experience of the soul, and the experience of life. He argued that life is a movement upwards, towards but never fully achieving the spiritual completeness for which we yearn. True art mirrors this journey and at the same time produces the same experience in the soul of the viewer.

This movement occurs in all art. Aristotle called it “action” — or, in his language, “praxis.”

20th Century classical scholar Francis Fergusson describes Aristotle’s position in this way:

Poets, like painters, musicians, and dancers, Aristotle says, all ‘imitate action’ in their various ways. By ‘action’ he means, not physical activity, but a movement-of-spirit, and by ‘imitation’ he means, not superficial copying, but the countless forms which the life of the human spirit may take, in the media of the arts: musical sound, paint, word, or gesture… all the arts, in some sense, imitate action. 

But in “De Anima” and “Poetics,” Aristotle goes even further. He actually maps out in narrative terms the journey on which art takes us.

Because when we understand it to be movement, we can see how art reflects the dynamics of narrative. It is narrative that encapsulates the experience of movement. I know this seems a stretch but bear with me for a moment…

Art may affect us suddenly, spontaneously, and intuitively.

A narrative may effect us suddenly and spontaneously as well.

 But narrative has a twin sister, as it were, a prosaic Clytemnestra to the divine Helen. And the second aspect of narrative is that its core elements can be extracted and laid bare to the intellect.

Scholars have argued for centuries about the qualities of art that affect us so powerfully. But narrative has been analyzed many times over and its component parts are well understood. In its second, more prosaic incarnation narrative is logical and organized.

Thus, narrative provides us with a map into the soul of art itself.

Art is mysterious.

Narrative allows us to understand the mystery.

The two, though possessing some opposite qualities, are inextricably connected. I believe the close link between them can help explain the way in which games become art.

Essay by Gordon Farrell 

Art is a shared experience.

When people try to determine whether a particular painting is a work of art, they have to be able to stand in front of it, each person soaking it in, each person absorbing the same visual experience. The painting cannot alter from viewing to viewing, even though different persons will view it at different times and in different places. So, too, for a poem. Or a novel. To be considered art, people must be able to read it, unaltered, over a period of time, each person confident they are sharing in the same experience as the others.

Art is also shared across time.

When I read a Robert Frost poem, or listen to a Bach sonata, I know that voices from many decades ago in the first instance, and from hundreds of years ago in the second instance, are being faithfully reproduced. I am experiencing what millions of people before me have experienced, essentially unaltered, in the same form that they experienced it.

Then what is art?

Art is a shared experience that we agree as a society has a significant aesthetic impact on our emotions, our minds, and our sense of ourselves as human beings.

Games will be regarded as art when they meet this standard.

They can only meet this standard when they are shared by many persons, across time, in the same unaltered form.

And only the single player campaign can accomplish this.

The multiplayer game, without a doubt, is the more exciting social phenomenon. When mainstream media reports on games, it is the multiplayer phenomenon that makes for attention-grabbing headlines. But the multiplayer experience can never be shared unaltered. It can be viewed through recording media, but it can’t be experienced, because its value is in the intensity of the moment. Its resolution or conclusion is never known ahead of time by the designer. It cannot be planned, or authored. It is not art. It is sport. Thrilling, uplifting, spiritually enriching sport, but sport nonetheless. Sport exists in the moment. In sport, we experience the competitive human spirit alive inside us right now. It is the perfect complement to art. Art is planned, and it is re-experienced by everyone who absorbs it. Art exists unaltered across time. Sport is exciting exactly because the outcome is unknown. Art is exciting because the outcome has been predetermined, yet it lives in the mind of the viewer as a fresh experience every time it is seen.

As a result of this, only the single player campaign can be art.

And when games are finally acknowledged to be art, it will be the experience of the single player campaign that is cited as proof. It is through the single player campaign that the art of games will be documented.

Do single player campaigns have a significant impact on our emotions, our minds, and our sense of ourselves as human beings?

Everyone who is passionate about SP gaming has, in fact, had either an experience that meets this description, or gotten damned close to it. Now, I can only count on one hand the number of times it has happened to me. But this, too, is common among those who are passionate about the SP game. Most of us have only had a game touch us in the core of our being a handful of times. But they are unforgettable moments, unforgettable because the art of game is so different from any other art form.

The first electronic game I played on a home computing system was Privateer, a space combat game spun off from the Wing Commander series. The premise is that you’re a Han Solo type bounty hunter, smuggler, and all around fighter pilot for hire. You take on jobs, get paid, and buy better weapons — which allow you to take on bigger jobs, get paid more, and buy bigger weapons, etc. When I started playing the game, as far as I could tell, the whole point seemed to be upgrading your ship so you could travel to cool new worlds and explore them.

Whenever you went into space you encountered an interplanetary police force. They scanned your vessel for contraband (which you never had) and from time to time they’d help you fight off pirates. A very nice part of the game’s overall ambiance.

So content was I in collecting my bounties and upgrading my ship that I never realized Privateer had a storyline.

Nor was I ever compelled at any point to enter the storyline.

But at each base where I landed was a bar. And the bartenders would regularly suggest that if I was ever in New Detroit, I should look up a man named so-and-so. Eventually I decided that I wanted to see what New Detroit looked like, so after some fierce battles enroute there, I arrived and looked around. New Detroit was very cool: a city that covered a whole planet where it rains 24/7. Very dystopic and unlike anyplace I’d seen so far in the game. Good stuff.

Eventually I made my way to the bar and sure enough, there was the guy I’d been told to look for. He said he’d discovered a mysterious alien artifact and he offered me a huge fee to travel to another planet and acquire some information he needed to decipher the writing on it. I was low on cash and I agreed. Well, one thing led to another and I soon discovered that I’d been tricked into running drugs for interplanetary criminals.

I will never forget the moment when it hit me:

I was transporting what I thought was a perfectly innocent package when the interplanetary police did a routine scan of my ship — and suddenly they went on attack alert and I was compelled to fight for my life. As soon as I could stop and assess what had happened to me, a chill ran up my spine. These benign, occasionally helpful policemen were now my mortal enemies. I was a marked man and I was on the run. I had unwittingly crossed over a line and there was no way I could go back.

The sheer emotional impact of that moment is something I’ll never forget.

Later I had the opportunity to describe the game to a film producer I was working with on a movie. “It was the best movie I ever played,” I said.

I have no doubt that most people in the game industry can recount similar, unforgettable experiences. For a lot of us, I think, these not only made the particular game a permanent part of our treasured memories, but drew us into the industry, and made us realize we wanted to commit ourselves to creating experiences that would be similarly unforgettable.

What I experienced with Privateer was a scripted narrative event. It happened exactly the way it was supposed to happen. I’m not prepared to say it was art, but it does point the way towards art.

In the 4th Century BCE, the Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle described the dynamics of art and how it impacts the human soul. He went on to point out profound similarities between the way art works in general, and the way narrative structure in particular impacts our hearts and minds.

In other words, art is narrative.

Every work of art is the story of an experience that alters the human soul.

I’m going to take a deeper look at this idea. What does narrative structure tell us about the journey we take when we experience art?

What is the journey we take when a game alters our souls?