There was a time when culture writers of a certain age were convinced that the newfangled video game craze was turning youngsters into zombies, constantly toiling at an iron wheel wrought by evil designers. Games were mind-worms that infested the synapses of fools, rendering once curious minds into task-orientated drones.
Line up the colors.
Mow down the aliens.
Upgrade those stats.
Onwards, to the grassy, sunlit uplands of the high score table.
But the truth is more prosaic. We play games for the same reason we do anything with our personal leisure time. We're looking to feel something.
Still, the old fogeys were right about one thing. We are being manipulated.
In "How Games Move Us: Emotion By Design" Katherine Isbister investigates how game creators are figuring out different ways to spring actual feelings from the jaded corridors of our psyches.
Isbister is professor of computational media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. (Note: I also live in Santa Cruz, but she and I have never met.) Her slim and satisfying volume approaches games as different kinds of emotional experiences: solo, social, physical and intimate, that last one being about playing with people we already know.
She takes us through a few of the usual suspects associated with the rise of gaming as an emotional exercise. There's a section on Journey, of course, with its lead designer Jenova Chen talking about the importance of flow and avatar empathy. Will Wright, designer of The Sims, is also quoted on how emotional connections in games are simply different than in other art forms.
"I never felt pride, or guilt, watching a movie," he says, his point being that games draw from a different palette than other entertainment.
But Isbister also investigates the emotional meaning of seemingly unlikely games such as City of Heroes, Words with Friends and Wii Sports.
This book is about how designers take the human desire and capacity for feeling and turn all that into meaningful interactions with computers and, via computers, with other humans. It's something that happens, to one degree or another, with all games.
Isbister talks about our empathetic connection with avatars and with non-player characters. Avatars are individuals with whom we create connections. As games become better at illustrating characters, through art, animation, writing and understanding, avatars and NPCs become more powerful conduits for feeling. There is little doubt that the characters in games like Quantum Break are vastly more sophisticated and powerful than those who graced the first PlayStation generation. Just look at Lara Croft.
"How Games Move Us" avoids the error of listing the canon of Big Emotional Moments that games have yielded, mostly in the last decade or so. Those are often cut-scenes that dwell on the death of a beloved character, like (spoilers!) Agro in Shadow of the Colossus or Lee Everett in The Walking Dead. The fact that their number is relatively few is a sign that the sob-scene is really not video gaming's emotional forte.
But it's not in-game events or specific characters that interest her, so much as the underlying systems that make us feel whatever we feel when we play Animal Crossing or World of Warcraft.
In essence, games are artificial constructions based on the real world. We come to them armed with a set of pre-set responses learned from the real world, and we apply them to the fantasy. This is called grounded cognition. Games confirm our ability to understand the world in emotional and practical terms.
1. A level is completed. By me.
"Hurrah."
I have excelled in this chore. I feel good about myself. Just as the designers willed me to feel.
2. A character that I care about dies.
"Boo-hoo."
I am a human who expresses mild grief for the death of a non-existent animal and this feels cathartic.
3. My friend and I are cooperating on a mission.
"Aw, mate."
I feel warm and fuzzy about our relationship, even though he has still not returned my lawnmower.
But games aren't merely representations of the real world. They are also abstracts. In Hush, players press letters on a keyboard in order to sing lullabies to a child. The child needs to sleep, or the genocidal murderers will come and kill us all. This game does not rely on fancy graphics in order to magic us into a state of empathy. It knows us and it knows how we feel about babies being murdered by evil men.
Words With Friends isn't just about mucking around with letters of the alphabet. It's about exploring new ways to interact with the people we care about. There's a good story in this book about a woman who connects with a distant friend through the game, in a way she might not have managed via an awkward meeting in a cafe, or a strained conversation over Facebook. This is exactly the interaction that the game's makers manufactured. As Isbister notes, the creators of Words With Friends are social engineers.
Games allow us to be playful, mischievous and transgressive. Smart designers understand the need to wander off well-trod paths to beat the bushes, for no reason other than to run around chasing rabbits. But games also have a moral dimension. Isbister notes how players in MMOs like City of Heroes monitor and police their worlds, rooting out players who cross social boundaries and pollute the unspoken social rules of the space. This suggests an emotional commitment to the world and to the community at large.
Physical movement is also becoming a bigger part of gaming. We saw a glimpse of its potential in the Wii, how that console connected with people like nothing before. But its limitations were its undoing. Perhaps with the coming of virtual reality, the fun of movement will come back to games. Physical activity is fun. Think of the difference between play-acting a sword fight with a friend, and sparring between two toy knights.
A section on dating sim Love Plus (pictured top of page) is an especially revealing portrait of how games can fulfill a basic emotional need, that being simple companionship. There are many lonely people in the world. Some of them carry on relationships with in-game characters.
It's easy for us to condescendingly think of these players as slightly tragic, just because they find solace in cute, girly avatars with whom they can flirt and dialog-tree. But, surely, we all have friends who are fictional characters, who we will never meet, who are not real. Games offer a way for us to play with people who don't exist.
There's a common refrain about games — you it hear often at industry events like GDC and DICE — that games are more powerful than other art forms because they involve action, participation and self. But that participation also involves a certain abrogation of self to the desires and goals of the designers, the men and women who are tinkering with our interactions in order to make us feel what they want us to feel, and what we have volunteered to feel.
Disguising this manipulation is the central skill of all authors. Somehow, adding direct interaction into the mix — the actual business of doing things — makes emotion by video game design feel slightly awe-inspiring, if not downright scary. It's a skill worth having.
"How Games Move Us" is available now in hardcover and digital editions.