The Three-Headed Monkey

This is the end...

2016-10-25T10:13:00.002+01:00

This is the end, my only friend, the end...

The Three-Headed Monkey closes; its 60 posts will remain on the Internet until the end of times (or until blogger decides to pull the switch). I will keep writing about video games, the current research project, and whatever is coming after that, but not here. So, it's not really an end, it's more like a change of venue.

I'll invite all of you, people of the Internet, to my new home: danielmuriel.com. Not very original, isn't it? Very functional nonetheless.

Just one last song:

Bye, bye! See you on the other... site.

Video games and guilty pleasures: suffering desires

2016-06-11T14:33:00.000+01:00

Today I am going to embed the video of my participation at the IV Conference on Sociology of the Ordinary (website in Spanish), which was held in Madrid on 4-5 May 2016. My talk was on how video games are able to articulate desires in more complex ways, given their biotechnological and prosthetic nature; I focused specifically on what I call suffering desires, that is, our attraction to activities that potentially make us suffer. I illustrated my arguments using video games such as Dark Souls, Heavy Rain, Papers, Please, and This War of Mine. The presentation is in Spanish, but I've included English subtitles.

Video games and guilty pleasures: suffering desires

Some thoughts on... Life is Strange

2016-04-08T13:13:00.000+01:00

Today, some thoughts on Life is Strange (Dontnod Entertainment, 2015).

Chronicle of an announced disaster

Life is Strange tells us a tale of an announced disaster. It is to a great extent a tragedy, and like in every tragedy the hiatus is the most important part, that is, what happens in the narrative journey that leads us to the inevitable ending. In that journey the game deals with ordinary, yet thorny, issues such as the transition to adulthood, the meaning of friendship, the act of returning home as an stranger, the loss of a loved one, bullying, harassment, rape, suicide. Dontnod's title succeeds in connecting players to those experiences, making them relatable almost without noticing it. It is easy to empathise with the characters in the game and it forces us to reflect on their problems (which become ours too).

We play as a young adolescent, Max Caulfield, who is in transition to different places: on the one hand, looking to the future, she walks towards adulthood and what it entails in terms of personal and professional choices; on the other hand, looking to the past (since she is returning to her home town, Arcadia Bay), she faces the memories of herself and those she left behind. She comes back to join the Blackwell Academy, a senior high school specialised in Science and Arts, from where she wants to start a career as a photographer. In that uncomfortable quotidian context, Max finds out she is able to rewind reality, to go back in time. The game, a clever decision in my opinion, does not explain where this ability comes from; it is just given to us and becomes the central narrative and mechanic device of Life is Strange. We progress using this power, but it also help us explore the narrative nuances of the game - although we need to remember that, due to its tragic nature, the main story is already written - by allowing us to retrace our footsteps and take alternative paths. It is about exhausting the arch of possibilities. In this way, Dontnod's work makes an old power permitted by several video games in the past playable: to reload a former save point in order to explore new alternatives.

This approach is key for the player's immersion. Giving us the opportunity to undo our actions, the game leads us to be more aware of our choices: 'I should have intervened', 'I should have said that other thing', 'why did I not do it differently?' Life is Strange makes that awareness even more evident in those scarce moments in which it strips the player of the power of rewinding reality; when we realise, terrified, that our actions will have consequences we will not be able to revert.

Ultimately, what the game gives you on one hand, the power of undoing your choices and letting you explore different alternatives, it is stolen from you on the other: it is, as I already considered above, the inevitability of the disaster. Life is Strange is the experience of a hiatus in which we enjoy a deceitful freedom, because in the end it only allows us to choose between losses. For better or worse, that is the only thing that life usually has to offer.

Some thoughts on... The Park

2016-02-24T11:39:00.003+00:00

Today, some thoughts on The Park (Funcom, 2015).

The anguish of the parent

If we decided to create a list with what we consider our universal fears - those fears we can claim almost without a doubt that everybody experiences regardless of their cultural and historical contexts, I am certain that the fear of losing our children would be among them. Not only am I alluding to the terrible experience - always traumatic - of their passing, but to the horror of realising that one of your children has disappeared in the crowd or is not where she or he was supposed to be. The Park (Funcom, 2015), a spin-off from the MMO The Secret World (Funcom, 2012), is based on that anguish, which works as the foundation for the development of a story about loss - literal and emotional - of the loved ones, maternity, and misery - moral and material.

That's the starting point of The Park. We play the role of a mother who is looking for her son inside a closed, semi-abandoned, amusement park. One of the original mechanics of the game, almost the only one, involves calling Callum, the boy, who occasionally answers with short phrases such as 'You can't catch me', 'This way, mommy!', 'Over here!', 'Come on, this way!', and 'Catch me mommy!'. The protagonist's shout also triggers visual clues that tell the player what to look for (find a document or an event that can be activated). We mainly interact with the video game through those cries of distress, using a language of anguish, and as the game progresses the initial nervousness turns into desperation. In that sense, The Park seeks to cause a sense of permanent uneasiness among players, putting them in that state of mind throughout the game.

Funcom's work is clearly divided into two parts. The first part is set in an amusement park - more open, with more references to the universe of The Secret World - while the second one situates us in an oppressive representation of the family home, a section reminiscent of P.T. (a benchmark for these kinds of games) that shakes the conscience (hers and ours). In both parts we sense - or rather we know - that everything is headed towards a disastrous denouement. The game does not hide the outcome, since the ending is not the most important thing, but the journey, the ride that sinks into the darkest corners of the human being and will inevitably derail.

The Park is short and does not challenge the player with any worth mentioning obstacle. It is not possible to die, there are no puzzles or major impediments, and the probabilities to get lost in the game's map are close to none. It seem evident that its aim is not to propose an ordinary gameplay challenge to players; it is more about presenting an emotional challenge to them. What does it mean to grow up in a broken home? How do you survive the loss of a loved one? How do you deal with your material needs when we live in a system that is hostile to those who cannot provide for themselves? What does it mean to be a parent in a context of family, economic and social helplessness?

Throughout the game, we find numerous truculent references to the already grotesque Grimm brothers' tale, Hansel and Gretel. These allusions are not gratuitous; they are essential to understand The Park. It's the anguish of the parent who, unable to take care of his or her children, leaves them to their fate. However, that does not reduce their anxiety, on the contrary, it grows until it swallows them up. There are several things that we can isolate, forgot, or even stop loving. Our children do not seem to be one of them.

Interviews - Pawel Miechowski on This War of Mine

2016-01-14T16:27:00.000+00:00

Today, the exceptional Pawel Miechowski - Senior Writer at 11 Bit Studios - on This War of Mine.

Daniel Muriel: Could you tell me something about yourself, about your academic and professional background? And why did you end up working in the videogame industry?

Pawel: Because my older brother does so [Laughter]. We’ve been working on games since ages together. I’m doing it since high school. Pretty much all my work life has been involved in gaming, except I was a bartender once, just for a year. This is it. I studied journalism at the University of Wrocław like more than ten years ago. Since then, I've been working professionally in game development and I want to do it forever [Laughter]

DM: That’s a good thing. Why did you decide to do a game like This War of Mine?

P: The idea came straight from my brother, exactly, at one of the meetings. He told us we should do a game about war, but its real side, how people suffer during war. The idea was so inspiring that everybody got it instantly, and simply said, “Yeah, let’s do it, absolutely!” Of course, there had to be proper research to be done, we had to approach the topic with appropriate respect. However, we knew the gaming as a storytelling form grew up enough to accept talking about serious topics via proper game language, be it survival mechanics or non-linear dialogues, and start such stuff that games can offer and, at the same time, very specific to games as a form of storytelling. We also knew that we are making the game for the mature gamer, because we are the generation that grew up with gaming. We’re close to forty, but since we were kids, we had Commodores and Amigas and then PCs and then consoles and every machine you can play a game on. Games are a natural part of our culture for us, because we grew up with them and since we grew up with them, we treat it as natural form of storytelling, and as such, you can cover any topic. In this trend of maturation, This War of Mine was created. It’s not the only example, because more and more games are dealing with commenting war as politics or as the social condition of humans in general. Tolerance, acceptation, etcetera, etcetera. I guess this is one of the good examples of the fact that games grew up.

DM: What kind of impact do you think This War of Mine had on the people who played it or is having right now on the people who are playing it?

P: This is a very personal question, so it’s hard to generalise it somehow, because that would be asking you “what did you feel when you were watching Interstellar?” People have very subjective reception, but I believe This War of Mine could be an eye opener, because we got tons of feedback from the gaming community all around the world, telling that was a very emotional experience, playing the game, and as such it could work as an eye opening experience. One of our programmers, he went to Dev Gamm conference in Moscow, say three or four months ago, and surprisingly Russians were very excited about the game. Not in a way that they enjoyed playing it, but that someone dared to make such an antiwar game in the end, being a war game at the same time. For them it was eye opening indeed, because they told us they didn’t know war could be perceived that way. In Russian propaganda and mentality, whatever is driving them in their life, it is very common to present war, when you invade other countries, as something good because for them that is justice. They don’t think about, you know, everyday victims of war. I don’t know, this is tough, but for them this was eye opening. I’m really, really proud because of this fact, that you can do such thing via a game.

DM: Imagine that someone is playing This War of Mine today. What impact would you like to have on this person?

P: Well, I think each member of our team should speak for himself or herself. For me, that is the antiwar message. I’m a complete pacifist, I think war is the worst that might happen in the world, and constant trivialisation of war in pop culture was something that made us somehow resistant to suffering. You can blame not only games, but television, movies. War is sexy and effective only when you blow stuff up, explode and shoot around and everything that set your adrenaline pumped. We somehow forget we can show also the other side. I am not blaming the entire pop culture for showing that war is so exciting from one point, because when you are in the mood, you watch an action movie, or you read a criminal book, but we shouldn't be focusing only on this side, because the real war is, pardon my French, damn horrible suffering.

DM: There was someone on the internet who said “wow, what a cool game, it seems like this is this year’s Papers, Please in terms of empathy simulation”. Would you agree with this? Would you consider your game an empathy simulation?

P: Yes, in fact, Papers, Please was one of the inspirations because we had the opportunity to meet the creator, Lucas [Pope], in San Francisco and speak about his project at an early stage. We were thrilled that we also have these ideas for provoking somehow empathy in gaming. When we saw the great success of Papers, Please, we were sure that we’re in this process of maturation, and we can treat This War of Mine as such, as a serious mature game. Papers, Please was a great a game that inspired us to move on with our project, to make an empathy game.

DM: I also found this comment on the internet, this person said: “the game is tough; I wish some characters were sociopaths/psychopaths, because, you know, if you steal some food from an old couple causing them to starve to death or kill someone who is not a thug, they go into huge depression and just become worthless.” This is a very interesting and a strong reaction to the moral scenarios you propose in the game. “I wish some of my characters were sociopaths”, I think you have created a powerful to get emotional responses from gamers. What do you think when you hear or read something like this?

P: You know, it’s about perception. You don’t have any control over how people react to the stories you tell. I can imagine people being frightened by watching The Shining by Stanley Kubrick. I can imagine people being totally excited how Jack Nicholson smashes the door with his axe. The same thing we’re having in This War of Mine. I know people depressed because they saw suffering in a game. I saw people excited, because they survived. I saw people having a sort of catharsis feeling when they survived, and I saw people being embarrassed or even had feelings of remorse because of the evil deeds they have made in the virtual world. But yet, it is a virtual world. You can invest, and you should, I guess, invest your empathy in this world, but let’s not forget, this is just a virtual reality, and same situation applies to the other forms of storytelling as well. When you watch a film, you should remember, this is just a film, right? I’m fully aware of really different perceptions of the game, however, I am certain that most of the feedback is very positive, in a way that people invested their empathy in the game and acted as we wanted when we were creating the game. So, cooperate, work, and see how to survive, rather than kill, steal and run away.

DM: Once you were speaking about how players tend to think about each location as a solution that you can use or a riddle that you can solve, because players are programmed with this way of thinking after decades of playing. And then, you added, “If you do something the player isn’t programmed for, he or she doesn’t know what to do and starts to act more subconsciously. Emotions are raised there, in this subconscious”. Is This War of Mine a device to make emotions emerge from there?

P: That is a tricky question, because we wanted to create such a tool and we use this technique, however, this is a very complicated question, it is actually a philosophical question, right? Where are the emotions born? If you act consciously, you are definitely more able to control your emotions. If you don’t, then things are happening somewhere beyond your state of mind, at least the ones you can define at the moment. We used techniques that made players play very attentively, and while paying a lot of attention to the game consciously, other processes werw "pushed" to the subconscious, making it relatively easier to raise emotions. When you provoke subconscious acting, you keep the player engaged. You are more likely to evoke emotions. Games and stories all are about raising proper emotions.

DM: I know we are speaking about a video game, virtual worlds... but can this game tell you something about who you are or what would you able to do under some circumstances?

P: Yes. Because that’s how war looks like, and as such, the environment is the one that puts humans to a test. We can only imagine it, luckily, because we were never in a war. Our grandfathers and grandmothers were... because in Poland, every family suffered war. Luckily, we can only imagine, but our imagination made this picture to make it closer to people, so they can somehow put them to a moral test, because war is the ultimate test. This is a sentence we often met during different stories about war, because, you know, you may be starving, you may be wounded. There are extreme situations that war puts in front of people, and somehow people survive it. It’s all about decisions. Although the brutal reality of war doesn’t ask you about anything, and just kills you, of course. That happened quite often. But it’s a question of the decision makers, who raise war, not ours, right?

DM: In an article written by Simon Parkin at The New Yorker, he quoted you, that you wanted to create a different kind of dramatic experience, something closer to a tragedy. Why did you seek to create this kind of dramatic experience? Why a tragedy?

P: Partially because games might be mature for storytelling, and partially because we perceived games as something reserved only for, let’s say, those emotions related to enjoyment or excitement in storytelling. While, if you look at the history of the entire forms of art or storytelling or whatever you call it, you always had comedy in ancient theatre, and you had tragedy. One was for fun, the other was for catharsis, and then medieval theatre served the same purposes. When movies were born more than a century ago, they went the same way, of course a bit quicker than ancient theatre, but still, and now the games are going through it. First, they served as a comedy platform, and now they opened and will work as a tragedy as well, and you can even mix both in games, because you have a game like The Last of Us, which a lot is about action, but also about compassion and taking care of other people. So, yeah, this is it, games can and should be not only comedies. I mean, I love comedies and action movies, and such stuff, but I think this is not everything, and now, games can talk about everything and imagine what happens when virtual reality would be widely introduced. The Oculus technology, for example. We will be able to create complete digital worlds, like in Matrix, and it’s up to us what they would offer to you. Would it be a pleasure, an excitement, compassion, an entire set of things you can tell via such technology. I’m pretty certain we shouldn’t be looking to just one dimension, so to speak.

DM: Leigh Alexander on Gamasutra wrote that “where other war games are often entertaining, This War of Mine is often frankly depressing”. There were also comments like Reid McCarter on Kill Screen that said “11 bit studios greatest success with This War of Mine, it turns out, is in creating a videogame that is profoundly unpleasant to experience.” Have you designed a depressing game on purpose? Did you want to create a game that gives an unpleasant experience to the players?

P: Showing the war presented via a game required from us staying close to reality. If you want to show war without depression, death, sadness, hate and violence, you cannot do that because war is about it. So we had to stay close to reality and we did it on as many levels as possible. Of course, it’s not a full 3D recreation of the Second World War and the whole Holocaust and such. It’s a fictional war, but that’s enough to show the mechanisms of war, the basic ones, when you are, pardon me, fucked up and you need to survive and take care of your beloved ones.

DM: In this sense, there was as debate on the comments of Rock, Paper, Shotgun, about whether they would recommend the game or not. Not because they thought it was a bad game, on the contrary, they thought it was really interesting and it had an impact on them, but they weren’t sure if this kind of experience would be suitable for all people, because it’s not a video game just to have fun, and it can make you feel awful in a way. I know you’re an interested part is this, but would you recommend this game to everyone? Or depending on the type of person, would you reconsider its recommendation?

P: I don’t know. I would need to know such person. Some movies are not for delicate people, because they are brutal, so probably this game is not for everyone. If you invest a lot, you may feel too sad, I don’t know. That’s a really personal question. However, I know veterans who found this game a clearing experience, a cathartic one. I know stories from a girl who was a daughter of a war refugee and she wrote that the game helped them understand her mother, who was a war refugee and the horrors she went through during that war, Vietnamese, in this case. This is very personal. On the contrary, I cannot think of a good movie that shouldn’t be recommended to anyone; if their story is good and tells something important, that’s a story for everyone. This is the thing you may call beautiful, right? Suitable for anyone, and anyone can find it important, unless he or she is a sociopath [laughter].

DM: You said that in This War of Mine, there is no tutorial, because when war breaks out, there is no tutorial, you are just on your own. This is one of the things that actually struck me most deeply in my first gameplay. You are on your own.Why did you decide to put the player into this situation where you don’t know exactly what to do?

P: That’s simple, because that’s how war looks like. Putting away the game from reality and making some tutorial wouldn’t be close to the topic and probably would be very bad for the immersion and immersion is a very important part of playing games, right? You need to invest yourself in the game, whether it’s competition or building or mathematical issues to be solved.

DM: I found this comment on IGN. This person said that “the idea of not being able to take charge of your fate disturbs me, and I’d probably played it once… but if I’m going to feel like crap, then it’s something I’d rather avoid since I play videogames to feel empowered, not to feel even more depressed.” Do you seek to make people feel disempowered? To feel defenceless?

P: Well, I understand escapism in gaming, but escapism is not everything. If you want to run into power fantasy, to feel the powerful lord all the time, yeah, feel free to do so, but the world is not that way. This is the reason why we read books, this is the reason why we read newspapers, this is the reason why we talk to other people, to know what’s going on and what’s the truth. This is the reason I’m not sure each game should be about feeling powerful and if you want to say something important, and you are a game developer, and this is your tool, then yeah, do it. In the end, that might be depressing for a gamer, but I don’t think that’s wrong. When I played Papers, Please and my family died at the end because I screwed something up during the playthrough, I felt bad. But I somehow appreciated that the game put me in such situation because it plays on strings that were not within reach in games before. I really, really appreciate it as a gamer. It’s like watching Shawshank Redemption: it’s not about laughing and adrenaline, but you watch Shawshank Redemption over and over because it’s such a great story and gives you some feelings.

DM: Yeah, I mean that’s one of the most important things about video games, they make you feel things and put you into situations that otherwise you’d never experience and that is important in terms of empathy and any other things that you can develop or feel. Also, I find it interesting that you mentioned that you photographed yourselves to be put into the game. What is behind this idea or this decision you made?

P: That’s simple. We didn’t want to have anonymous models or shiny beautiful actors. We wanted regular people, looking like people you may meet on the street. Because we are not that beautiful: some guys have big bellies, some are skinny and some have not so beautiful faces, we wanted to scan ourselves and make models. We didn’t have enough models, so we asked our girlfriends, and our friends, and even our guard from the office, a very nice man, who plays Anton in the game. We invited him and he was really, really happy to do that with us. The models are based on real people.

DM: You did a lot of research and the stories and biographies in the game are based on what you learned during the research phase. Could you tell me something more about this research? What kind of research did you carry out and why was it important for the development of the game?

P: Well, that’s not too difficult if you think about it, because unfortunately war is a very thrilling topic, so people talk about it, make videos about it and there is a lot information about war, if you want to search. Each conflict is well researched when it comes to politics and such bullshit. They are not so well researched when it comes to people’s stories. We were looking for memoirs, interviews with people who simply survived a war. We were looking for things that got stuck in their mind as examples of how they perceived war and those are often very, very emotional stories. We are from Poland, so a lot of stories can be told by our grandmothers and grandfathers. I know a lot of stories from my grandma, she passed away a few years ago, but I still remember. It’s a living memory, happily this is only memory, so we’re the third generation of people in Poland born in a safe country and I hope it stays that way. But even in Warsaw you can find a lot of stories about war, because the city was devastated. There are even neighbourhoods in Warsaw that you can still see war, like bullet holes and stuff like that. So it’s present in the end, and it’s not that difficult. For example, the siege of Sarajevo is very, very well documented. If you go to FAMA Collection, it’s like a virtual museum, with video interviews with different people from Sarajevo and there are literally thousands of video interviews, thousands. So you may just, you know, go to that page and watch the videos and people have interesting things to say. A fireman was talking about fires during the city, but people who were working as accountants, they just had to stay home and watch through their windows what happened and they were the best witnesses of what happened, better than historical books.

DM: Just one more question. In an interview at GameSpot, you said, “whatever you find in the game is a translation into game mechanics of the facts of how civilians experience war”. How can you translate those real civilians’ war experiences into game mechanics?

P: Well, that’s of course sometimes a simplification or compromise that you need to do when designing a game. For example, obviously the day is just a few minutes in the game. It’s not twenty four hours. It's not a one to one picture, because otherwise it wouldn't be a game. Now, human mind is a very complicated thing and somehow we tried to picture different personalities and minds that react in different ways. Our AI designer, a very smart guy, he created few thousands of different states of each character in the game that can be triggered via different behavior, be it stealing, helping, starving, getting ill, etcetera, or even being drunk, and each personality may react in a different way (to give an example - selfish guy being less touched by theft). That’s just a simulation, yet he simulated a few thousands of states. But it’s mathematics, right? It’s just counting. We didn’t want to show the numbers, because people are not made of numbers, so we put the human in front of the story and behind it, there are all the rules. That’s how games work. You need to think about certain rules that are similar to what you believe as the simulation could be, and yet it needs to be engaging; so you need to make some simplifications and compromises to make it engaging.

Other interviews:
Mark Foster on Titan Souls (Acid Nerve, Devolver Digital, 2015)
Karla Zimonja on Gone Home (Fulbright, 2013)

Some thoughts on... Papers, Please

2015-11-18T12:17:00.002+00:00

Today, some thoughts on Papers, Please (Lucas Pope, 2013).

The frontier as the limit of the human condition

In recent weeks, we have sadly witnessed an endless amount of news, images and discourses on the Syrian refugee crisis. In fact, we all know it is not a new phenomenon. It is the new version of a story told for the thousandth time, which narrates the tale of those human beings who seek something very simple but, apparently, very difficult to achieve: a better life (or a life without a further ado, since it is often a matter of life or death). They escape from wars, famine, misery, all kinds of persecutions. It does not matter if what expects them on the other side of the multiple frontiers they have to cross, as if they were participating in a cruel obstacle race, is nothing particularly good; they are even ready to risk their lives in the process. Simply, they have no choice. Border after border, these people only yearn for one thing: reach their destination.

The frontier - that liminal space - is a place between two places; it's an universe with its own rules and meanings, which are different from those we find on both sides of the border. The frontier is a transit area but it is also a detention zone, where the authorities decide who enters and who stays out. It is in that paranormal borderline sphere where Papers, Please (Lucas Pope, 2013) takes place. We put ourselves in a Cerberus subaltern's shoes, precisely, to deal with other subalterns: the people piled up on the other side of the border who want to enter our territory, the glorious Arstotzka.

It is widely accepted that Lucas Pope's work recreates a frontier that reminds us of a former soviet republic. Definitely, it is almost impossible not to notice that the game exudes all those things that we would associate to what happened on the East side of the Iron Curtain: from the fictitious names of the countries to the dull aesthetic that impregnates its whole design, typical of the soviet bloc. However, the more time I spent as an Arstotzka's frontier inspector, the more it reminded me of the present. Passports, id cards, work passes, forms, entry visas, frisks, augmented security measures due to terrorist threats, full body scans, inquisitorial interrogations... Is all of this typical of extinct soviet republics or is this closer to how the frontiers of 'advanced' Western democracies work?

You have to make a tremendous effort in order to survive and provide for you family because everything depends, to a great extent, on how efficient you are in managing that crossing point we call the frontier. That means we are force to leave several human beings behind, maybe abandon them to a terrible fate. Fortunately, Papers, Please gives the player some leeway to, from time to time, make decisions that are against the rules and regulations. You can poke holes in the system, giving opportunities to those who had none. You might be creating a greater evil or damaging your own interests, but at least you are able to negotiate in the limits of that limit that is the frontier.

In any case, Papers, Please does not evoke a more or less distant past, but a very close situation, the present. So close that it hurts.

Some thoughts on... Among the Sleep

2015-11-03T12:03:00.000+00:00

Today, some thoughts on Among the Sleep (Krillbite Studio, 2014).

The horrors of the quotidian

Among the Sleep (Krillbite Studio, 2014) is based on an interesting premise: we play the role of a toddler, which essentially determines our skills and point of view in the game. Not only is it about a matter of perspective (looking the world from below) or abilities (as toddlers, we will face difficulties opening doors, reaching high areas, lifting objects), but also about how to interpret the world and its stimuli (sounds, shadows, lights, spaces). The reading the infant does of reality, between magical and terrifying, is what principally feeds Krillobite Studio's title.

Wearing a footed pyjamas with a print of stars and crescent moons, we incarnate a nameless toddler who will have to unblock memories in order to unveil the true monster that haunts him in the darkness of a series of quotidian - but distorted by the child's imagination - landscapes. We will do it while crawling, climbing furniture and gliding down impossible slides. We won't we alone, though. We will be accompanied by a teddy bear called, hold your breath, Teddy. The bear works as an external narrator and a guide during the game. The developers use this narrative workaround to elude the unavoidable silence of the toddler. Teddy also plays a role in terms of mechanics: if we hug him, he will light up and help us see in the darkness.

The truth is that the title causes uneasiness and discomfort rather than fear, especially as the plot progresses and we start to be aware of certain elements: the disturbing drawings presumably done by the toddler, the multitude empty alcohol bottles, the intimidating presence of specific objects and quotidian events such as cloth hanged in a wardrobe, the noise of a slammed door, the crash of objects hitting the floor, and a woman sobbing in the distance. The more recognisable and mundane the environment is, far from other imaginative representations, the more it produces uneasiness (in this sense, the video game works better at the beginning and the end than in its middle development).

After all, the horrors of the quotidian are the worst of all. They are not supernatural and that's why they frighten us; these horrors can be real, anyone can experience them, and they happen in the heart of our private spaces, where we are supposed to feel safe: at home, with our loved ones. The quotidian horrors pollute and threaten our personal safe havens.

I won't unveil here how the misfortunes of the blue pyjamas toddler and his friend Teddy end, but the ending - although foreseeable to a certain extent - is disheartening. Interpreting the whole game experience in a tone of quotidian horrors reminds me that, as it was theorised by Hannah Arendt, evil can be banal and anyone, even the most normal and unexpected individuals, could be the monsters.

Interviews - Mark Foster on Titan Souls

2015-10-26T17:50:00.000+00:00

That day was pouring down in Manchester. I was going to meet an indie developer at Takk, a café in the Northern Quarter, the Mancunian version of hipster-land. I entered the café, which was reasonably busy. The number of Macs per square metre was high as expected. I ordered an Earl Grey tea, as any British gentleman would have done. A nice conversation with a nice lad in a nice environment was about to happen.

Today, the great Mark Foster - cofounder of Acid Nerve - on Titan Souls.

Daniel Muriel: Could you tell me a little bit about your background and how did you end working at the video game industry?

Mark Foster: Well, since I was a kid, I always wanted to make video games. I remember playing Sonic on the Mega Drive Genesis, when I was about 5, or something, and seeing the kind of worlds that someone created in a computer game, I really liked that, I wanted to do that for myself. A few years later, when I was maybe about 12 or something, I found like a program on a shelf in Game, Public Spaceship. And it said, you know, make your games and stuff, and it had like… it was a picture of a platform game, where someone is firing a ship out of a cannon on the background, and I thought “oh, that’s cool, let’s give it a go”, and I bought it and get home. It was all like Blizt and C type hybrid code, and I didn’t have a clue at any of them. I tried it a bit, and mess around with some of the examples there, and couldn’t get anything worthy, so I just put it away. For a few years later, I picked up a program called Click and Play, which is a similar kind of thing, so there is no code, it’s like you just drag and drop stuff around, and it makes it much, much simpler. And that’s when I started getting into it because I could actually make something. So I made a few games in the Click and Play games factory, and that’s where I started to learn how to logic programming. I was making again Sonic type games because I really like that when I was a kid. And then eventually, I found that CD again in a drawer, and I got it out and started looking at it. Because I had all that knowledge built up from playing with the other programs, so I thought about it more logically and then got more into it, that was my first actual programming, yeah. And then, from there I just kind of carrying on, making small games in my spare time. Then I went to uni, in Manchester, and did Games Technology there. To be honest, I didn’t really learn that much in the course. Some of it was programming modules, some of it was design, and the design was more about stories and stuff, rather than actual game design. But doing things at my own time I learned a lot about game design, and then I moved onto… I got a job as a software engineer for a company which is a software warehouse, a warehouse management software company, which is really boring [Laughter].That was coding with C, that’s where I learned the most about programming, because you actually have to do stuff with it. You sort of have to adapt to it, and I learned a lot there. Basically, as soon as I went into that job, I was kind of planning on doing the indie game thing. I knew I always wanted to make games, but I didn’t know where to get into the Triple A games company, because I wanted to do the design stuff, but my experience is with programming, so I probably ended up doing the programming role, and not really have that much design control. So I always wanted to like… just go off and do my own thing. While I was there, I worked on… I got my first Mac and I was learning objective C, so I produced iOS games. I actually launched a small iOS game, and that gave me some bit of money. I think it was like 2 dollars, something like that. Still like, occasionally, I get like 20 pounds from Apple into my account, “oh, that’s cool. It’s alright”, that was like two years ago, when I launched that. So I was working there, and I saved up money in my spare time and then eventually I just quit the job and went indie full time. I was working on a video game at the time called Chroma, which is a 2D platformer. So yeah, I quit my job, worked on that for like a year, and then we did the Titan Souls jam, and then Devolver picked that up, and put us making that game…

DM: Why did you decide to do a game like Titan Souls? What did you seek doing this game?

M: When we first made it, it was for this jam, so we made it in three days. You know the story about that, right?

DM: Yes, I know the story.

M: So the only thing we were trying to achieve was completing a game in three days, really. Because of the themes, we discovered Titan Souls. The idea of having a one hit boss mechanic game, so that was “oh, this is quite cool”. And then, when we got to expand it with Devolver, we just kind of wanted to see what else we could do with that kind of thing. The moment of the kill is like the sweet moment of the game, so we kind of build the entire thing around that one moment, we tried to push that as far as possible. And things like, when you die, you have to run back for the fight, so it’s like more… maybe more frustrating, but also more… like death has more meaning, and when you actually pull off the kill, that frustration that has built up is released and it’s even better. We tried to make those feel as good as possible. That’s kind of, the core of the game.

DM: When you were working on the game, did you explicitly think about the people that were going to play it? You said on Gamasutra said that you always knew that Titan Souls was going to be a niche game.

M: It was the kind of game that we wanted to play. I’m not sure… I definitely think that it’s not everyone’s kind of game, because it’s very difficult, to a certain point. But some players will be really good at it, and they’ll find it may be easier than a lot of people, and it’s maybe those are the kind of people we’re trying to appeal to. I rather make a game that a few people really love than everyone kind of felt was alright, you know. Making someone think “that is really, really good”, that’s a cool thing. Even if others on the other spectrum, people go “I hate it, it’s terrible”.

DM: In general, what impact do you think Titan Souls had on the people who played it, or well, the people who are playing it now, what kind of impact it’s having on them?

M: Not sure. Interesting question. I’m not sure what kind of lasting impact would be. I think the achievement of getting these kills off… it depends on the person. Maybe another game designer, maybe they couldn’t take some things away from it, because it is a… when we were making it, we kind of describe it as an arrogant game, because its design is really, really strict back in this. It’s quite a small number of mechanics and it’s just built around this one thing. We were always reluctant to expand that in any way, we wouldn’t add things like in a RPG, like stats or anything like that. So maybe if a game designer was going to play it, they would maybe learn a bit about it. Because I certainly learned while making it. If I made a more traditional game in the future, the knowledge of what we’ve done now I would just carry over. To other people, I’m not sure what kind of impact do it have.

DM: What kind of impact would you like to have on them?

M: The only impact I would like to have is that they enjoy the experience. Make people have something to have fun with. The main thing is giving people something to … basically giving them an obstacle to overcome, then overcoming it themselves, actually gives them the enjoyment. This is maybe not specifically aimed, the sense of accomplishment they get for beating something. We just set the challenge for people and if they wanted, they could try and beat it.

Enjoy your frustration

DM: In one interview at E3 you said something like, what I told you, a lot people hated it, it was because of the difficulty of the game. Is it something that you actually like about your game, a game that can make people hate you in a way?

M: I’m not sure I like being hated, but I know what you mean. I’m okay with it. I think a lot of people who say that, at the moment of thinking “I hate who ever made this”, it’s not they really hate it. They’re angry, and they just take out some frustration. But when they kill something, they’ll think “oh, I love them”. [laughter] It’s the way you think. I think I’m fine with it. It wasn’t like a goal to make people hate you, but it’s a side effect to make something that frustrates people.

DM: In another interview, at PAX East, you mentioned that this guy who was playing on a Vita while he was on a plane and he wanted to scream so badly…

M: Yeah, that was Angie from Devolver Digital. I don’t think anyone from Devolver finished the game. [laughter] They just give money and stuff and published it, and the never played through the entire thing. Yeah, Angie was on a plane, he might be flying to PAX. Because it was a Vita, he had the urge to kind of smash the thing, but it would have been a very expensive moment of rage. I actually had that as well, because we left it for a while, and I was on a plane going somewhere, and I was playing the hard mode version of the game, and I wanted to smash the computer! [laughter]. Yeah, it was a weird moment of “Man, I hate whoever made this game. Oh, wait, it’s me!” I think that’s kind of funny that people do that.

DM: Would you say this is a game that makes people want to scream at the screen? Did you decide that… did you have that on mind? It’s interesting this kind of reaction …

M: Yeah, I think it’s the kind of thing. It was never specifically in my mind, but it was kind inevitable that feeling comes across. Any game that frustrates people is obviously going to make them get mad and that is necessary to make the enjoyment. You have like the negatives and the positives to it, to make it …

DM: That’s part of the approach. In order to make people enjoy the game, you frustrate them first.

M: That certainly doesn’t apply to all games, that’s just to these kinds of… these niche games, because some people don’t want to feel frustrated in the game. There are people that play something more relaxed, where you still get the sense of achievement for doing so, but it’s not someone punching you in the face before that. [laughter]

DM: When you designed this, did you specifically think that “there’s going to be a lot of repetition, a lot of frustration”, did you want the player to suffer?

M: A little bit. The game is designed around not having any repetition in the actual gameplay. But there’s repetition in like, you have to run back to the fight. So, it is a bit of suffering. There is like a theme … actual design reasons why we put that run back in. Death has meaning, because you have to run back, so you actually lose something in real life, like seconds of time or something before you actually get back into it. And that builds up in your mind and makes it… it is like suffering, you get more frustrated with the game. When you actually achieve the kill, and you succeeded, you don’t have to do that anymore, it’s kind of like “I’ve beaten this, screw you, game”. Of course there is a few other reasons to it as well like… we wanted to have this really quiet peaceful over world, and then when you are going to fight, it’s like a manic, like really intense. It’s quite a different juxtaposition of these two. You got moments of silence between the noise, to make the noise as loud as possible.

DM: It’s interesting that you are building up the tension there.

M: And that’s kind of the reward as well. You have a very intense battle, you get a moment of like [sigh] “ahh”, and you are just walking around and in like this environment, thinking “I don’t want to go into another room, because I can get my ass kicked again”.

DM: In Giantbomb you said that at some point, when you were watching people playing the game at some of these conventions, you said it was great to see people hit that frustration zone. What is great about seeing someone frustrated?

M: I’m guessing is that, when you see someone like that, they’re clearly invested in the game. It has roped them in, and if they’re getting frustrated, because they want to win, so seeing people like that, just means they actually … maybe they’re not enjoying it as in like, they’re having a really great time, but they’re enjoying it in a way that they are engaged with it, I guess. The best bit is when they actually pull up the kill. You’re watching someone really frustrated and then brought the kill. I’ve seen people getting really excited. One of my favourite memories of showing the game was… when we were at E3. We had a double booking at the press appointments. So there’s one guy in there, and a bunch of people outside, and they were all watching him play, and we were thinking “Oh, no, he’s having a bad time”, because these spectators are booing and cheering whenever he’s doing anything. And he killed this one titan, and he’s got up and start dancing. And he started doing an improvised rap over the music, and it was the funniest, weirdest thing I’ve ever seen, because we thought he was having a horrible time, but he was really enjoying it. So that was fun. It is always cool to watch players’ reactions in person. Especially if they do get really into it.

DM: Have you witnessed someone that, for instance, started to play, and after a few tries… “this is not for me”?

M: It didn’t actually happen. Maybe a few. It didn’t really happen as much as we would have thought. Maybe that happened more for people playing it at home, than at an expo. I think it kind of … it’s a good game to show at expo, because people then just jumps in, and they can try out a bit. Because everything is really fast paced, they can have just like ten minutes, maybe kill a boss, and then after that “ah it’s sweet, I really like it, it’s really good”. But then at home, maybe they’d get more frustrated. If you got a crowd of people watching you and cheering you on, maybe that is more incentive to beat it, even more pressure added, which makes the kill even better.

DM: Do you think that a game like this still can be considered as something fun? This equation between frustration and enjoyment…

M: I hope it’s fun, because else why are people want to continue to play it? I mean, I’ve said a lot of its weight around the game it’s about being an achievement, but I think the actual process for achieving is still fun as well. There’s many moments like that in a fight, like you pull up a perfect dodge, or something like that, and you feel really good about it, and the adrenaline is going. And I think that whole process is fun, in general. The achievement is an extra like a sweet thing on top of it.

DM: Why do we like to play video games even if they frustrate us? Why is that something that appeals to us?

M: With that kind of game, I don’t know… it’s… it’s something to overcome, like having a challenge like that, I think is pretty due to that kind of game. There’s loads of different games, a lot of them don’t do that. A lot of old games, like Zelda on the NES, in the eighties, that was very hard, very frustrating and that was just the kind of game at the time. Megaman as well, most kind of games. Nowadays, it kind of went to a lull that, a lot of AAA companies will want you to see all the content they made. They’ve put in millions of dollars, and made all that stuff and they want you to see it all. They want you to get your money’s worth. When things like Demon Souls or Dark Souls came out, they kind of turned it all upside down, went back to kinds of roots of like “this is going to be hard, you’re going to have to pay in sweat and tears to actually get to this point”. It is hard, and it’s also that you can compare yourself against other people, like how other people do against this game. You can think “oh, I’ve beat it. These people couldn’t beat it”, you feel motivated. You can test yourself to see … if people identify as being good in games, and then they can beat these games to prove their worth, or something. I think that’s a lot of it, but also those kinds of games I just find really fun anyway, especially like Dark Souls, the way the game feels to play, and kind of the exploration. There’s actual combat mechanics in it, but there’s also a lot of other things around the game which could be very interesting for the story and things like that. You kind of have a sense of discovery when you find things in these games.

Punish and Discipline

DM: Speaking of Dark Souls, you mentioned that one of your favourite situations in a game like Dark Souls is like when you’re fighting a boss, your health bar is almost gone and you don’t have any item to recover your health, an estus flask, and the boss is also on the verge of dying, and then your heart is beating fast… is that the reason you wanted to translate that experience to your game? Making an entire game about that moment.

M: Yeah, that moment in games is really like, that’s when the adrenaline is going and you’re really tense, you want to take the last swing and kill it, but you’re so worried that you’re going to die, you maybe play more cautiously or maybe you play too aggressively and you die, and it’s all really frustrating. We took that idea with Titan Souls and basically just scratched that time of moment out for the entire fight, and I think that was one of the considerations we had when we first made the jam game. “If we did it like this, it would feel like that all time, right?”. And, it kind of did, and we just really liked it.

DM: Do you think the fact that you can almost immediately come back to fight the boss again might be diminishing that feeling? I know that you said that there is some sort of punishment as you have to walk again, even if it’s just for a few seconds. But don’t you think that this is something different from Dark Souls?

M: It’s definitely different. There’s a lot of differences between them, because of things like… the soul mechanic in Dark Souls, where you want to get back, so you can recover your souls, and also when you’re going back, you have to fight your way through a lot of enemies, or find a way to get past them quickly without getting hurt or killed, and that is a different thing. It’s like that bonfire would be maybe a minute or two as well, so much longer. In our game, it isn’t the same thing. The bonfires play a really significant role in Dark Souls. When you gone through a long area, and you got no health and you’re like “oh my god”, and you find a bonfire, that moment is like “oh my god, what a relief”. You sit down, next to the bonfire, recover, it’s really powerful. That isn’t something we have in Titan Souls, because of the way the game is structured. But I think the run back to boss, it doesn’t have the same kind of heart to it, like the bonfire in Dark Souls, but I think it is mechanically really good for the game. If you didn’t have that in it, you restart the boss straight away. There’d kind of be almost no point in dying, because you got one health, and one boss is one health, so if you… say, in like the Eye Cube fight or something like that, if you die, and then you respawn immediately, it doesn’t make a difference, because it’s not like game has helped that, because it doesn’t have any. It’s a weird thing.

DM: Still, there were people complaining about that. Why cannot I respawn in the same room?

M: Oh, yeah. That was the main thing I expected, and a lot of people hated it, but they’re not supposed to like it, really. Some people actually do, they say “oh yeah, I quite like having this kind of moment of peace, where I go, OK, let me think how to do it”. I think, the way that the mechanic works is, there’s loads of very, very intricate design decisions, that you don’t see as a player. All you think of as a player “why does it make me run back to the boss, why doesn’t it spawn me so that I can fight it again”. But if you don’t think about that stuff, you just let that kind of frustration build up. That is in particular made to make the kills feel as good as possible.

DM: You define these kinds of games as punishing games. Is that what Titan Souls is?

M: Yeah, Titan Souls is definitely a punishing game. If you make a single mistake, you’ll die, and you have to run back. That is very punishing. Things like the iron mode, where you only have one life. That is punishment. We made the game for those kinds of people, people who want to just really punish themselves.

DM: Because you said that you have to die to learn. So it has to be painful process to play Titan Souls.

M: You technically don’t have to die, if you were incredibly good. But, I’ve never seen anyone play through a game without dying yet. I’ve seen some people one shot Titans, like when they haven’t seen them, but not the whole game, that would be something [laughter]. I don’t think that I can do that now! I think whenever you die, you’ve learned something about the way that it moves and things like that, and what you did wrong. And I think, the core thing to it is that whenever you die, it’s your fault, it’s never like the boss being random, there’s no random in the game. Often the Blob boss moving in slightly random way. But most of the fights are kind of … it’s kind of like you’re controlling the boss. Your position on the screen, your action at the time, dictates what the boss is going to do. The boss will always move in a very specific pattern that is based on that, like the Eye Cube always moves around one tile at a time. It’s always following you, so there’s no random thing to it. What you need to do in a fight is move around and learn how to control the boss in certain ways. So the game is kind of about control, really.

Player agency and (dis-)empowerment

DM: Do you think that in a way you were trying to disempower the player and leaving them at the mercy of the game? Because you are telling me now it is all about controlling the situation. You’re leaving the player vulnerable, just one hit kills you. But at the same time you’re saying this is about control.

M: They are very vulnerable, you know, one hit get them killed. It is kind of like they have no real power, because they’re so fragile, when you first look at it. When you as a player become more skilled in it, you understand that you have all the power, because you control these titans and you can kill them, where they can’t really kill you, you keep coming back. In real life, you kind of get better in the game, and you get more understanding and that lets you feel like you have more power in the game.

DM: That’s interesting, because you say that you make people feel powerful once they’re able to overcome the challenge.

M: Yeah, so it’s not like the player’s stats got higher; it’s you in real life having become good at it. You actually gain some skill.

DM: It’s not your character the one that is leveling up.

M: Yeah, it’s you. Exactly. I think that’s one of the key things to the game, to make people feel they’ve actually achieved something.

DM: In a way, this game is transforming the people who are playing it, because actually it’s the player who has to become better by doing that.

M: That’s why we call it an arrogant game. That kind of design is like “no, we don’t want you to level the character, we want you to level up”. But at the same time, things like Dark Souls, I’ve played through Dark Souls without leveling the character to see if that’s possible. There’s a sub Reddit that it’s called… can’t remember, it’s like Soul Level 1, or 1bro, or something like that. You play through the qhole game without leveling up. So you got lower health, you can only have a certain amount of armor, you want to be faster all the time. I think the best weapon at level 1 is a barbed club. You level the club, and you’re still pretty powerful, really. The main thing is, because your health and vitality and endurance is lower, you can’t get hit, ever. It’s basically like Titan Souls, where you get hit, you die. I quite liked playing like that.

DM: At Gamasutra you said that the gameplay becomes about control and the game’s about understanding and manipulating the enemy. Could you tell me more about this idea of taking control of the situation? Because the game disempowers you in a way, but actually you are telling me that you have to take control of it.

M: The power that you have is that these bosses will move in a predictable way relative to you. That is the part you have control over the fight, if you as a person know how to control it. Like the Guardian with its two fists, like that moves in that way, the fist will try to get you with a certain range and rotation. If you move over to the other side, where the other fist is closer, it’ll switch hands, so if you make it move around and chase you in a certain way so you could make it switch hands when you want it to, and then you have your oppotunity to kill it. You’re controlling what it’s doing, so you can manipulate it into a position where you can kill it. The same with the Brain fight, it’s not moving randomly, it’s going at you, so you can imagine “ok, it’s going to come at me here, it would bounce of this wall in this trajectory and it would end up on a switch”. So you do that, you move out of the way, and it keeps moving and it ends up on the switch, and while it’s doing that, you’re running in front of the fire, so you can align yourself in the way you know it’s going to end up, and you shoot it through that, and then you run away from the Brain as it’s coming down at you, and you know you need to put this much distance between, because he’s always going to chase you, and then you can wind your arrow, when you know it’s going to land not on you, then you kill it. It’s just about understanding how the fight is going to work, and manipulating the boss to move in that way.

DM: So you put a lot of thinking on the design of every titan, because they’re very different.

M: Yeah, that was the hard part of making the game, because everything is so… and the way you… maybe in a more traditional kind of boss fight that you slashing and… it can be more lenient, because you have like opportunities to do damage to it, rather than opportunities to outright kill it. So that had to be really finely tuned to get that kind of thing right, and having the weak spot exposed. It should be kind of exposed all the time, but actually getting to it is really difficult. So, designing around those kind of limitations is really, really difficult to do and interesting as well.

DM: At Kill Screen, the author of the review said that Titan Souls gives you the opportunity to feel the success of the impossible shot, the hail Mary, the curved bullet, to experience it first hand, is this another reason why are so appealing for some people to play games like this?

M: Again, I think it’s achievement, like people feeling really good about actually doing something like that. Those kinds of windows are … if you actually think about the amount of time you can do it, they seem impossible. I know the numbers behind them, like, I can tell you… have you played the Yeti?

DM: Yes

M: Yes? When it lands, it rolls and lands, rolls and lands, rolls and lands. And on the first and second landing, the window to hit it, is ten frames, which is one sixth of a second. On the third landing it has forty frames, four sixths of a second, so it’s like the longer you go on, there are certain options which are slightly more lenient than the rest. But people get them on those tiny moments, they feel really good, because they’ve done something that is really kind of ridiculous, because they understood how to do it.

DM: Did you measure these things, I mean, you know the window you have to defeat this boss?

M: I just have the numbers that controls, so the way I made the game, it’s a sixty frames per second game, as a base, so the actual logic is around that fact. I’d say like, when it lands, the time accounts this single frame, so when it’s done, it doesn’t count. I have absolute control over the number of frames they’re doing it for, so that’s why I know all of those numbers. But when we’re making it more difficult, we just kind of tweak them. It was at a point of like “hmmm, ten frames is a bit too long, let’s move it down to six”, tweaking it by four is really nothing. Making that kind of really, really small change, but towards it, it was like… made a big difference.

DM: In the hard mode everything is faster…

M: There’s a few differences, where the hard mode is generally moving faster. It’s harder to actually stay alive. Those windows I was just talking about, those change, a lot of those are smaller windows to actually get the kills. Some of them actually change completely. Some of them have different things, like the plant fight gets extra tentacles and stuff like that. The Yeti fight in hard made, when I said it lands on ten frames, in hard made, when it lands, it doesn’t stop, it just keeps rolling until the fourth one, where it lands with that ten frame window. So we actually then force you to do the ten frame window kill. Hard mode is faster, at the kills, and some of the moves get changed a little bit.

Criticism

DM: There were people doing some criticism about Titan Souls, for instance, this is from Polygon, this person didn’t find the game challenging because not only did he usually know where the weak point was from the beginning, he also was able to easily recognise the patterns of the Titans. For this person, it wasn’t challenging because of that, because he could recognise the patterns very easily. Even if he lacked the ability to execute them, but once he recognised that, well, there is no mistery. What do you think about this kind of…?

M: That’s kind of not the player that we were aiming for. It’s like totally fine… is that from the Polygon article?

DM: Yes, it was the Polygon article, Arthur Gies…

M: Yeah, he just didn’t really get the game, he thought that a lot of it was down to just random chance, just taking pot shots of the game. Which isn’t… you can’t really dictate how people play a game, it isn’t how we intended it to play. That’s the reason why we kind of have the running back to the fight stuff, so you’re more careful. You’re maybe focusing at first on surviving before attacking them, whereas his tactic were kind of just go in, just randomly throw arrows at it and try to kill it, maybe. But, if people don’t enjoy that frustration, then it’s just not for them, which is fine. I still think it’s that kind of game, you either love it or hate it.

DM: There was a lot of… it was intended as some sort of demake of Shadow Colossus. But there are people that think these references are misleading because, for instance, Shadow Colossus has more exploration, there is no possibility to kill the colossus so quick, there are different weapons… What would you say to these people?

M: So is that people who do think that is misleading?

DM: Yes.

M: I agree with them. The thing is… there is kind of a thing with games called games, medium and culture to… they would describe a game based on other games. So Titan Souls was “oh, it’s Shadow Colossus meets…” – I just going to put an American accent there because everybody there was “oh it’s kind of Shadow of the Colossus” [Laughter]. Every single person! They always say Shadow of the Colossus, Dark Souls and Legend of Zelda. And you can understand why, and it does get people a fast kind of thing in their head, like “oh yeah, ok, it is like this”, but it’s some other things to those three games smashed together in a completely different way to Titan Souls, when they see Titan Souls, they think they’re disappointed by it. It’s an interesting thing, but like all games nowadays will be described that way. Because everything is kind of built off the shoulders of its predecessors. Most games can be compared to other games. It’s rare to get a game that’s really, really unique. The only thing that I can think of that’s been recent that was completely… that couldn’t be really compared to anything would be Papers, Please. That’s not like any other game I’ve played, it’s such a weird, strange thing that is really interesting.

DM: There’s going to be games that are going to be compared to Papers, Please.

M: Yeah, because now it’s a reference point. So I think that thing comparing to Shadows… when we originally made it, we said like “oh, we did a demake of Shadow Colossus”, we weren’t thinking of that as a commodity or anything like that. We were just thinking “this might be fun!” Making some of those boss fights, the actual game it doesn’t play anything like Shadow Colossus, it’s just a part of the vibe it accomplishes. It does a good job of giving you a slight idea of what it’s like pretty quickly.

DM: Because now video games have a history and sometimes is going to be inevitable that people start comparing the newer games to previous games. I think that’s part of the process. Now that video games is part of a more or less established culture.

M: I think that kind of thing did us a favour, really, in terms of game marketing towards how the game came up, because people were pretty hyped about it. You hear those things, and people think “oh my god, this game is going to be the best game ever”, they might… maybe isn’t what they were expecting, but they might still enjoy the game. That comparison, I think, drew people into the game as well, so it’s not all negative.

DM: It’s been pointed out that the game lacks narrative. Was that intended? Or maybe people just have not been able to find it.

M: That’s probably one of the weakest parts of the game. There is a narrative playing through it, but it’s kind of in the background, it’s really kind of hidden. You have to really think about what you’re seeing and what is going on, to actually try and build the picture. We kind of figured that some people would collaborate and… throw together ideas and compare notes and stuff, “oh, maybe this is going on”. But that kind of thing didn’t really happen. I don’t know if we maybe not got quite the exposure that we need for that yet. I also think that maybe we could’ve introduced the story more to people, in some way, because everything we did, was really, really, obscure and hands off, whereas if we’d given people a kind of hook, something to set them off, looking for the story rather than just assume people would try and find it. There is definitely… I wrote like a few pages about the lore about all the kind of history of the world in the game, and stuff, and that was just my own acknowledgment, that we could fit everything together, but no one’s seen that. To piece things together, for example, the boss names are all in these language of hieroglyphics, but after you complete the full game and you beat the true ending, you got to unlock all these names as well, so you can read everything. But there’s examples of storytelling like the knight fight, his name is in English straight away, because your character has prior knowledge of it, which then makes you think “oh, maybe he was a human before this”, so maybe humans brought titans here, and you can kind of scrap a story from those things. There’s also a titan that just talks to you in the game, I don’t know if you’ve seen that.

DM: Yes? No, I didn’t…

M: At one point in the game, there’s a secret kind of hidden titan that you find and it’s really passive, it doesn’t attack you, you just kill it, but it talks to you. It’s a kind of weird interesting break in the gameplay because you expect something, and it kind of subvert that expectation, something starts talking to you, “what’s going on?” And that kind of reveals a bit of story as well. What it tells you, it tells you some information, but it’s still a bit like mysterious and enigmatic.

DM: Also people said that the universe recreated is quite empty, desolated in a way…Why did you decide to carry out this kind of design of emptiness?

M: I think, maybe the world is slightly bigger than it needs to be, but it was built for these massive creatures, so it is going to be a big world compared to the character, and maybe it didn’t have the impact that we wanted to, but it was kind of like the scale of the world put into the game.

Identity and community within video game culture

DM: In a more general sense, how would you define video games? Could you give a definition of video games?

M: It’s a difficult thing, because there’s so… it’s weird that video games are like this one thing, but if you look at two random video games, they are just nothing alike. Crash Bandicoot and Call of Duty, they’re both video games, but one is about simulating killing people in a warzone, the other one is that you’re a weird cartoon spinning around. They’re completely different, but yet theyr’re the same thing because of the depth of what video games are. I guess video game would just be something that allows people to play in a virtual system. I guess that’s really, really, not very specific in any way, but because it’s such a broad spectrum of things. The video part is the digital and then the game part is pleasure/play. There is a weird discussion that’s been going on with things like the game Proteus. One of the top Steam reviews says “this is not a game” [laughter], but it still lets you wander around, play, and you’re like “I like chase a frog and I jump around”. You just kind of like mess around and have fun in it. But just because it doesn’t have these set goals that you’d have in most games, does that mean it isn’t a game? What is a game?

DM: That was one of the things I wanted to ask you about. These kinds of games like Proteus and others, considered as walking simulators. There are a lot of people that say “these are not games”. That’s why I ask these questions. What makes a video game to be a video game? Where is the frontier… what is the level of interactivity that you must have in a game to be considered a game?

M: I think the main thing is having some interactivity is necessary. There was one thing that I saw, like a few months ago. Basically, it was classified as a game by the author, but it was just basically a screensaver. I think leaves would fall down, and you couldn’t do anything, you couldn’t interact with it in any way. It is supposed to be a game because then you could like maybe count the leaves? I don’t know! That was the most…. Like… I’ve seen anyone try to push the argument. But I think anything that lets you play, I think that’s the key thing to it. Proteus lets you play around. It’s not got this set of goals and stuff, but it does have that fun element to it. I think that is probably the most important thing when you’re classifying games. I went to an event on Friday, called Feral Vector. Have you ever heard of that?

DM: No…

M: It’s like a small event for game designers to go to. It’s a really, really kind of interesting thing, like games culture, because it’s celebrating games as art and stuff as well, it’s like talking about the art merits in games. It’s not really about the game mechanics. Dick Hogg from… he made Hohokum, he did the visual art and everything. He did a talk, that was called ‘The art guy”, because people would say like “oh, you’re the art guy, because you do all the art?”, but then he was like “but, isn’t the game art?” So that would mean the programmer is creating art as well, because they’re making this world, so their development is there like an art guy. But it’s this weird kind of thing where the visualised scene is the art, but like the music isn’t seen as art, but is still art. It was an interesting eye-opening kind of thing. That’s the kind of thinking I was talking about, games as art, celebrating that.

DM: Do you think there’s a video game culture in our contemporary society?

M: Yeah. Well, I think games are everywhere. Everyone plays games. Even if it’s not video games, people when they were a kid on a playground they would play some games or whatever. I think games are an important part of everyday life. People who are walking down the street and don’t step on a crack, that kind of thing, it’s like kind of a game. Games are just everywhere. I think video game culture is a… what you said ‘video game culture’, that makes me think more of people who are really into video games who like… you know, they play Counter Strike obsessively, or something like that. That kind of person online, generally seen to be more aggressive. That’s the kind of image that gets pictured in my mind, but at the same time, I think most people play video games in some way. Nowadays, when you go on your phone, you play Candy Crush or whatever, Angry Birds. Everyone has played a video game. So I think we do live in a culture that has video games everywhere.

DM: Video games are part of our culture right now. That idea that everybody can play video games and actually everybody is playing video games or at least they recognise the importance of video games in our culture.

M: I think the idea of the kind of a teenage male basement, that all thing now is kind of disappearing. Everyone can play games, anyone, and anyone does. The diversity in games like World of Warcraft, which are online, those MMO’s, you can find anyone playing that. It’s cool that it’s just like everyone plays video games now.

DM: Do you define yourself as a gamer?

M: That is a good question because… I’d say that everyone’s a gamer, in some way. Yeah, I don’t know, I guess, yeag. I play games, therefore I’m a gamer.

DM: Is it part of who you are, of your identity?

M: I’ve never really thought of it in that way, because, again, I assume that most people do. Maybe most people don’t play video games that much, but some people would… they maybe still would play games on the phone or whatever. But I would sit and play games for a few hours on my PlayStation or my computer or whatever. So, yes, I guess I would identify as a gamer like in that kind of way of gamer.

DM: And would you use that label, for instance, to be introduced as such, would you feel comfortable with that? “Well, this is Mark, he’s a gamer…”

M: Well, because of the kind of world I live in, everyone I know is a gamer, so it wouldn’t… that’s why I’ve never really thought about it, it doesn’t make sense, because everyone I know plays video games. I think I probably identify as myself, I would say I’m a game developer, it’s like this states my identity. That’s how I identify as a game developer, that’s my entire life is that. I think as a gamer… yeah I assume everyone as a gamer [laughter].

DM: I think you have open definition of video gamer because there are other people who consider that just playing some games don’t make you a gamer. They think in order to be a gamer you have to be very involved in the…

M: That has to be a specific kind of game… It’s a weird thing, because like, really, why would we need that kind of a definition? If most people do play some games, technically, that makes everyone a gamer, because they’re playing games. But then, if people are then saying “no, you need to play this kind of game”. It’s like “well, is that like a sub-genre gamer?” Why do you need to define yourself by these kinds of parameters? I don’t think it’s a healthy way of living, trying to put yourself in these weird boxes. I don’t think it’s really needed.

DM: There has been a lot of controversy about this thing called Gamergate, probably part of it it’s people saying “no, no, we are the hardcore gamers…”

M: That’s an interesting thing, because with the whole Gamergate thing, I think a lot of people who identify as gamers, specifically, who do all that kind of believe and say “I am a gamer, because I play games, maybe not everyone I know does that, I play Call of Duty, Counter Strike, MMO’s, whatever, I am a gamer”. That whole thing was like, people saying that isn’t really a thing anymore. And they were kind of offended by that, because they identify so heavily as a gamer, that was part of them, and they didn’t like the idea that someone was trying to take that away from them maybe, which is interesting. I think as time goes on, I think that would disappear a bit, because games are so mainstream now, I think everyone is a gamer.

DM: Usually identity is about… not only the things that you share with other people but also what differentiates you from the other. But now everybody is…

M: Yeah, you maybe need something else to...

DM: Speaking of which, do you think there is a community of gamers? Because if everyone can be a gamer, there is no community of gamers anymore, or is there still a sense of community of gamers?

M: Well, I don’t know there’s much of a community of just general gamers. Because I think the communities that grow around these games nowadays are more based around the actual game that they’re playing. Like, people who have Counter Strike clans, League of Legends, DotA, that kind of thing, where you’re playing with friends online. Especially with MMO’s like World of Warcraft, where people are in a guild, and hang around, doing raids and stuff, with twenty five doing a raid, and maybe with like hundred people in the guild and they all get to know each other and become friends and stuff. They identify themselves as like a raid or a PvP or whatever. “I’m a WoW player”, and then “I’m a PvP’er”, there’s a subversion of that as well. I think that’s what people would identify more with, rather than saying like “yeah, I’m a gamer” because… I don’t know of any place where you go to meet other gamers, I don’t know if that’s a thing. If there is, I would be interested in checking that out. I don’t think there’s any, except maybe for online, Reddit, or something like that, where you got like r/gaming. I don’t really… but it’s seems is too many people there to actually form any kind of community.

DM: It’s difficult to say if there is a general community of gamers but, in a way, like imagined communities, something like is there…

M: Yeah, and you feel you’re part of it…

DM: Yes, or maybe it’s just on the Internet, there’s some sort of… maybe you can interact with people with the same interests. But, yeah, it’s difficult to say if there is a general community of gamers.

M: That said, whenever I’m at PAX, I really like those events, because when I’m there, I do kind of feel like everyone else there is in the same kind of… it feels comfortable, because you all have this one major thing in common. You all like games so much that you’re at events celebrating playing games, which is kind of different like just walking around in Manchester, because maybe you look around, you don’t know that anyone else have anything in common with you. But when you are at that kind of position, you do know that. That is a cool thing to know that you have something in common with those people, and maybe that’s what it means to those people to be a gamer. Because they know if they met someone else and says “I’m a gamer”, they immediately have this thing in common.

Other interviews:
Karla Zimonja on Gone Home (Fulbright, 2013)

Some thoughts on... Layers of Fear

2015-10-12T12:17:00.000+01:00

This will be a new section dedicated to a series of brief comments on video games I'd like to say something about. I'm going to call it "Some thoughts on". Enjoy it.

Today, some thoughts on Layers of Fear (Bloober Team).

Layers of fear, layers of existence

Layers of Fear (Bloober Team), available on Steam Early Access, begins quoting Oscar Wilde in The picture of Dorian Gray: 'Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter'. This statement could be interpreted as a specific conception of the notion of authorship; it is the artist, active subject, on whom relies the power of creation over what becomes the passive vessels of their actions: the canvas and the sitter. However, this is a misleading assertion, because the artist-player will be manipulated and dominated by the work-game until the former is trapped by the multiple layers of the latter: layers of narrative, fear and existence.

It is a first person game, with a peculiarity that is easily spotted when we stop: the camera sways as if we were on a ship's deck. This simile is useful to speak about Layers of Fear, because we will witness a personal and family wreckage; maybe even a social one. The fact that outside of the mansion in which the game takes place there is a storm, whose thunders' light intermittently inundate the rooms we go over, enhances the narrative about a sinking vessel that was once magnificent and able to navigate the ocean of the quotidian, the familiar and the professional with favourable wind.

We embody an artist, a painter who has fallen on hard times. He has lost his family and is on the verge of madness. Or that is what we will be unfolding as we advance in the game. Divested of everything - his love ones, his health, his prestige, he only has his art remaining, the last shred of hope he can cling to in order to construct meaning and avoid losing his sanity completely. That is one alternative. The other one is art was what has stripped him, layer by layer, of his humanity, his judgement, his social status. And the best part is how this transformation is made in terms of gameplay.

In Layers of Fear, there are no enemies to defeat, resources to manage, characters to speak to, or even puzzles - strictly speaking - to solve. The aim is to progress from room to room, uncovering different aspects of the story in the shape of newspapers clippings, letters, diary entries, or objects. In the meantime, we interact with the environment, or that is what we are led to believe, because, as the plot progresses, we have the feeling that it is the environment the one that is tampering with us. That constantly keeps the player tense, a feeling of uneasiness that grows as times passes, with each new room; as if we also were starting to be colonised by the protagonist's psychosis. Little by little, the house absorbs the player in a series of rooms that form the layers that are being added to their experience of play, distorting their perception and ability to foresee what will be next. Some parallelisms can be established with P.T., the piece of work that Konami involuntarily turned into a legend. Although nobody can deny P.T.'s influence on Layers of Fear, I think the game stands for itself because it makes everything feel alive without us almost noticing the backstage that makes it possible.

Every time the player 'dies' in the game, even though those deaths are part of the natural development of the game, you respawn in a room where it is possible to read on the wall the following message: 'Death is but a layer'. Reading it makes you shiver and, in my opinion, it is mostly true. After all, life and death are like our experiences, which include failures and successes, sorrows and joys; they are different layers that - superimposed and interwoven, occasionally made of strips of former layers - shape the texture of our reality. And Layers of Fear, that little video game still in development (which I look forward to seeing what else can offer), adds its own existential layer.

EGX, Birmingham 2015: Chronicles of a Doped Video Game Culture

2015-10-05T16:44:00.000+01:00

The path from Birmingham International train station to the NEC's halls where the 2015 edition of EGX was held, considered the biggest video game event in the UK, seemed never ending to me. I hadn't entered the halls of the event and I was already tired. This is the chronicle of my experience at EGX. As a disclaimer I have to say this is my first time at these kinds of events and I will speak from the perplex point of view of the curious sociologist. And I know, the pictures are terrible. Blame the photographer (me), the camera (mine), and the dimmed lights (that's on EGX).

The dope
Don't get me wrong, there was nothing illegal happening at EGX. I am making reference to the stand giving away one of those energetic drinks that are suppose to fuel gamers' drive. I smiled back to the girl who offered me one of the cans; I claimed and took my dosage. It's one of the first things you come across once you step in the hall. Impossible to miss. And it's free! But that was not the only dope in the event. The people, the noise, the flashing images, the lights, the dark zones. Everything was set to drag you into a hyped state of feverish video game overdose. And it worked.

Wandering a non-place

People who attend video game events are not gamers, they're wanderers. The layout is designed to make the attendants jump from one environment-booth to another. These events force us to traverse an endless circuit of wandering, watching, queueing, playing, and repeat. Occasionally you sit somewhere, eat something, tweet, or go to the toilet. But all those things happen on the air; there is no interruption, no schedule (or it is, but the activities are standard copies or the former, even if they're different presentations or talks), no sign (internal or external) that warns you stop or take a break. Everything works in an organic systemic way, flowing like a continuous current. Like those casinos in Las Vegas, there are no changes in the general tone, the light, the music, the sounds. Video game events are an ephemeral version of one of those non-places described by Marc Augé (2009).

Indies vs. The Corporation

In general both indies and big companies work under the cultural logic of late capitalism (Jameson, 1991), but the typical Microsofts, Sonys, Ubisofts and Nintendos like to show muscle by building their own differentiated environments. They are managed as if they were night clubs: wait your turn queueing and, maybe, the guy in the entrance, the one with the list, will let you try their new piece of work for five minutes. Some are nicer than others, but the independent developers are clearly more accessible. And you can actually talk to them while you're playing their games.

Shrillness

One of the things I did was to play video games on platforms I usually don't play, i.e., PS4. If these events are exceptional, as those moments of collective effervescence described by Durkheim (1915), I was determined to do something exceptional. So I came across Everybody's gone to the rapture (The Chinese Room, 2015) and decided to give it a try. That's when I realised these events are really infested and contaminated by sounds, lights and all kinds of stimuli. Everybody's gone to the rapture is suppose to be an immersive and introspective personal experience. If you have some lads next to you with microphones shouting at the top of their lungs in some sort of activity with loud music, video and dancing... that's not what you experience. It's not only their fault, everything is massive and excessive in all its glory. It's part of the attractiveness of the event, but creates disruptive experiences with the medium.

Over-excitement

Remember the dope I wrote about above? At some point, I don't know why, I decided to drink from the can I took. The can was full of warnings: 'tornado', 'storm', 'energy'. Also, the ingredients did not give much space for speculations: guarana, caffeine, taurine. I drank half of the can, anyway. It helped me to vibrate at the same frequency of the event: I wanted to try everything but at the same time I was put off by the flow that drags you around the circuit ceaselessly. Everything becomes a distorted, abnormal experience of what is gaming. Substitute 'religion' for 'gaming' and it's as if Durkheim was describing video game events a century ago:

However, it may be objected that even according to this hypothesis, religion remains the object of a certain delirium. What other name can we give to that state when, after a collective effervescence, men believe themselves transported into an entirely different world from the one they have before their eyes? (1915: 226)

Don't look at me now

Playing video games while surrounded by strangers who are watching your gameplay made me uneasy. It's not nice to feel all those eyes on you when you know your are not a particularly skilled player. This was excruciatingly painful when I tried games I never played before (MGSV, Assasin's Creed: Syndicate) on platforms (PS4) alien to me. It seems that all those days in the arcades are long past now. Were they judging me or it was everything in my head? I blame the dope for this paranoia.

Conclusions

All in all, visiting a video game event for the first time was funny but tiring; interesting but repetitive. These events encourage exploration of video game culture but in a strident way, which, in the end, is fabulous for sociologists, anthropologists and other knowledge scavenging creatures like me.

Bibliography

Augé, Marc (2009). Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso Books.
Durkheim, Emile (1915). The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: George Allen & Unwin.
Jameson, Frederic (1991). Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Not holding the player's hand: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

2015-09-11T12:32:00.001+01:00

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (The Astronauts, 2014) begins with a bold statement: 'This game is a narrative experience that does not hold your hand'. Why have its developers decided to include this sentence at the beginning of the game? It seems obvious they want to distinguish their work from those of others by means of implying that most video games hold players' hands. In other words, video games would tend to spoon-feed players, treating them as if they were just more or less passive recipients and relatively incompetent individuals who should be guided accordingly. That's maybe why there are so many in-game tutorials, reminders of what is your next objective, and autosave points just in case something happens; or why there are so many built-in ersatz google maps in any video game, even though the GPS technology constitutes an anachronism or a mere functional dissonance in the game's universe. But were not interactivity and the player's agency what make video games different? Something is rotten in Rapture.

In order to shed light on this issue, I think it is of the most interest to delve deeper into some of the thoughts expressed by Adrian Chmielarz, creative director of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, about his vision on designing and developing video games at The Astronauts blog. In a text entitled The truth about challenge in games, Chmielarz poses the following question: 'What’s the difference between game challenge and a real challenge?' The answer is clear and simple:

When you challenge yourself to climb a mountain, the mountain does not give a rat’s ass about you. When you challenge yourself to finish a game, the game does everything it can to help you.

After mentioning a long list of elements that are there to ease the gamer's transit towards the end of the game, which includes, among others, self-regenerating health, in-game hints, grenade indicators, and adaptable AI, he concludes: 'it’s not the challenge, but it’s the lack of it that is the reason why people love video games'. Video games desperately encourage players to overcome every obstacle in order to reach the end. In the end, it's an exercise of over-empowering video gamers that, paradoxically, tames them and makes them malleable. Video games become overprotective and, in doing so, divest the player of their initiative, of their ability to face challenging situations, solve problems, overcome barriers, or avoid difficulties. After all, video games guide us constantly, as if every day they were whispering how much they care about us in our ears: There's no problem, you can reload your last checkpoint. Or wait a minute; your health bar will regenerate in a moment. Watch out, they're shooting you from above! Hey, turn to the right now and then you go straight on; you only need to follow the highlighted lines on the ground. Look, there is your aim, you know what you have to do; if not, don't worry, I'll remind you. That's how it is; in general, video games don't seek to frustrate you as a gamer and stop playing them. The subject subjected.

We face thus a paternalist approach that emerges from the video game and its design. It infantilises the player to a great extent by offering them the illusion - joyful and fun, I won't deny it - of the powerful agency, the one able to make a difference in the world that surrounds them. However, the path of power, agency and freedom is full of pitfalls, as Foucault knew well (2003). How to break with this tendency or, at least, offer an alternative to it? How to let the player loose by giving them only the minimum amount of instructions, and let them cope with the universe on their own? In this sense, Chmielarz gives a plausible answer - one that he tries to apply in his works - in another blog entry. Emulating reality, obstinate like those Kafkaesque nightmare worlds - because of their ordinariness, and elusive like Haraway's Coyote - that 'protean trickster' (2004: 68), why not create game worlds that don't care about the player at all?

It's about building game worlds that be indifferent to the player; worlds with their own agency and agenda. The aim is to create universes as if they had already been there before the player arrived. That's why they shouldn't submit to the player just because he or she has showed up. According to Chmielarz, the player must be considered an intruder. And if the intruder wants to survive and progress in that world, know what has happened and what could occur in the future, they will be the ones who must adapt to the environment and not the opposite.

First, a lot of our environments are taken from the real life and put into to the game without the world bending to the player. (...) It’s just you and the Red Creek Valley. And the valley is indifferent, disinterested, real.

I agree with Chmielarz that the universe of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Red Creek Valley, sits there, silent, hardly giving you instructions. You are the one who moves around its landscape; laconically beautiful, photorealistic, crowded with things that once were and don't exist anymore. It is your responsibility as a player to unveil what happened, but there would be no one to tell you if the story (or stories) you concocted are correct. When you finish the game, which you will know because the end credits will start rolling on your screen, Red Creek Valley will have shown and said everything it had to say to you or what you have been able to learn from it. But there won't be anything else; you will be the one who must take full responsibility for the interpretations you make. How are all the stories we found intertwined? What is fiction and what is real? How were the relationships between Ethan's relatives? Stories inside stories? Stories of stories, maybe? What role does Prospero play in all those events? What happened in the end? Life, death?

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is not the only title that tries not to hold players' hands. There are other narrative-driven experiences that leave players on their own when it comes to putting all pieces together, such as Gone Home (Fullbright, 2013), Her Story (Sam Barlow, 2015) or Home (Benjamin Rivers, 2012). Beyond these narrative experiences, there are other video games that follow this idea of creating game worlds indifferent to players like the Dark Souls saga (From Software), Minecraft (Mojang, 2009) or Proteus (Ed Key and David Kanaga, 2013). The player must be a proactive agent in all of those games; players cannot rely on the game world to ask for help. They can turn to the community, though.

These kinds of game universes and the type of active player they help to form encourage what Henry Jenkins coined as participatory culture. It is a culture that 'absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways' (Jenkins et al., 2005: 8). Jenkins suggests there has been a major transformation between a previous culture dominated by a passive audience of consumers and a current culture where is becoming hegemonic a more pro-active attitude towards consumptions, blurring the boundaries between production and consumption (Jenkins, 2006: 60). Thus, it is possible to draw a line that connects active subjects to participatory communities.

Having said this, almost every video game can be analysed through the lens of this type of culture. Whether the game holds your hand or not, it's normal to find communities around them, which interact at different levels: discussions on their plot, strategies to progress or defeat specific enemies, wikis, mods, fan fiction and so forth. What those games intentionally achieve is to go one step further: they introduce the necessity of getting actively involved in the very experience of play. In a way, these video games are rewriting the relationship between developers, video games, and gamers. All of them are active agents that influence each other. Even if the hierarchies between those agents don't disappear completely, they are blurred and the interactions become more complex, dynamic and, potentially, enriching. In this regard, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter couldn't be anything less and there are already multiple interpretations of what happened.

At the beginning of this text I said that something was rotten in Rapture. If you have played Bioshock (Irrational Games, 2007), I'm sure you remember your encounter with Andrew Ryan and the (in)famous 'Would you kindly' plot twist. Bioshock is an outstanding work that teaches us a lesson about power, freedom and agency. It should be studied in Philosophy, Anthropology, Sociology and Political Science courses among others. The irony is Bioshock gives us the lesson from within a video game. Maybe it's the best medium to approach those topics. In fact, we have witnessed the appearance of meta video games for some time now, such as Portal (Valve, 2007), The Stanley Parable (Galactic Café, 2013), The Magic Circle (Question, 2015) or There Is No Game (KaMiZoTo, 2015). These games explicitly address the relationship that is established between developers, video games and video gamers, dealing with the notion of agency and the ability of players to make decisions.

The fact that a video game announces it won't hold your hand at its very beginning might be considered paradoxical. Is not a statement that contradicts itself in the same moment it's been enunciated? If you tell me that you are not going to hold my hand, are not you holding my hand in a certain way? It's like that imperative to practice one's freedom: 'Be free!' Should I obey and then I will stop being free? Should I exercise my freedom to not obey but then I will stop being free again? Could this be a more sophisticated form of controlling our actions after all, like in neoliberal political rationalities (Rose, 1999)? 'Govern yourself!' 'Use your freedom to be regulated!' Nevertheless, as Deleuze (1990) wisely pointed out, among the lines that articulate the dispositifs that dominate us, there are also the lines that help to break them. Not everything is lost. 'A man chooses, a slave obeys,' Andrew Ryan proclaimed. When we play, do we choose or obey? It is a difficult question to answer, but the fact that there are games like The Vanishing of Ethan Carter that try not to hold (too much) our hand while we play is a promising start.

References

Deleuze, Gilles (1990). “What is a dispositif?”, in Armstrong, Timothy J. (editor). Michel Foucault Philospher. New York: Routledge, 159-168.
Haraway, Donna (2004). “The Promises of Monsters: A regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others”, en Haraway, Donna, The Haraway Reader. Nueva York: Routledge, 63-124.
Jenkins, Henry (2006). Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers. Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press.
Jenkins, Henry; Purushotma, Ravi; Clinton, Katherine; Weigel, Margaret; Robison, Alice J. (2005). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Chicago: MacArthur Foundation.
Rose, Nikolas (1999). Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Videogames and Sociology: Twitter's pic of the day summary (46-50)

2015-07-27T19:33:00.000+01:00

This is the tenth round of Pic of the day RECAP (46-50). To understand what all of this is about, check out the original entry.

46 - Max Payne: The American dream

Proud and confident. Almost invincible. That's how Max Payne felt before everything went south for him. Because it seems that when things take a turn for the worse they just go south, where all that is bad happens. "Is the American dream dead?" asked Crish Cillizza in a article published on the Washington Post. There's every likelihood that it is indeed dead. Over, like in the Rob Orbison's song. Kaput, like The Weimar Republic in 1933. In the end, all that middle class canned happiness was mostly bullshit. Advanced liberalism and post-Fordist capitalism are like those free-to-play games; you only win if you pay enough. And by enough I mean a lot.

47 - Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs This world is a machine! A machine for pigs!

This world is a machine! Is that good or bad? Wait a moment, there is more. A machine for pigs! Well, that is more accurate. The world is a big, monstrous, relentless, and ruthless machinery inclined to crush any being that happens to inhabit its entrails. Don't be fooled. A machine for pigs is a more poetical way to refer to a slaughterhouse. And if it wasn't enough wrecking our bodies mercilessly, the machine also wants to break our souls, minds, wishes, ideas, hopes and anything that resembles humanity - that suspicious notion. Just watch all those greedy fascists governing and operating the machine. They're also pigs that will be equally devoured by the machine eventually; they have just decided to buy a little more time sacrificing everyone else in the process.

48 - Octodad: BLRBRLBLBRLBLRBLOOOOOOOO

BLRBR LBLBRLBL RBLOOO OOOOOBLR BRLBLB RLBL RBL OOOOOOO OWeberBL RBRLB LBR LBLRBL OOOO OOOOLatourBL RBR LBL BRLB LRBLO OOOOO OOSocialisationBLRB RLBL BR LBLRBL OOOO OOO ODurkheimBL RBRLB LBRL BLRBLOOO OO OO OETABLRBRL BLBR LBL RBLO OOO OOO OAgencyBLR BRLBL BRLB LRB LOO OOO OOOBourdieuBLR BRLBL BRLBL RBLOO OOOO OO BL RBRLBLB RLBL RBLO OOO OO OOMediationsBL RBRLBL BRLBLR BLOOO OOO OO BLRB RLBLBR LBLRB LOOO OOO OOB LRBR LBL BRLBLR BLOOOO OOOORajoyBL RBR LB LBR LBLRB LOOO OOO OOB LRBR LBLB RLBLRBLO OOO OOO OStructuractionBLRBR LBLB RLB LRBL OOOOOO OOBLR BRLBL BRLB LRBLOO OOOO OOEpistemology BLR BRLBL BRLBL RBLOO OOOO OOGiddensB LRBR LBLB RLBLR BLO OO OOO O

49 - Metro 2033: Light! Someone must be there

Have your ever heard that epistemological crap about the smoke and the fire? You know, if there is smoke, that will be the sign of the existence of a fire and so on and so forth. Well, we tend, not always fortunately, to interpret reality in those terms. Look! Light! Someone must be there. Look! Water! There must be a leak. Look! Lipsticks traces! A woman must have been drinking from this glass. Listen! A dog is barking! Someone must be trespassing. We should deal with those signs as the character in the screenshot: with suspicion and, preferably, drawing a firearm.

50 - The Binding of Isaac: Faith Up!

I often think that video games just copy their mechanics from reality. After all, is not what really happens in real life? Whenever we finish counting the beads of our rosary, faith up! Wherever we visit a church, faith up! Whoever prays to a god, faith up! Whichever sermon you hear, faith up! That also works in the opposite direction, all those things that make our faith go down. All in all, we all have a lifebar or a certain amount of health points, we collect coins and have keys. Some even have guns and bombs. And we try to level up as much as we can in order to overcome any barrier we might find in our paths and to defeat the new boss (sometimes literally) that impedes our progression in life. Doubtlessly, we need as much faith as we can get.

Previous entries:

Videogames & Sociology: Twitter's pic of the day summary (1-5)

Videogames & Sociology: Twitter's pic of the day summary (6-10)

Videogames & Sociology: Twitter's pic of the day summary (11-15)
Videogames & Sociology: Twitter's pic of the day summary (16-20)
Videogames & Sociology: Twitter's pic of the day summary (21-25)
Videogames & Sociology: Twitter's pic of the day summary (26-30)
Videogames & Sociology: Twitter's pic of the day summary (31-35)
Videogames & Sociology: Twitter's pic of the day summary (36-40)
Videogames & Sociology: Twitter's pic of the day summary (41-45)

Interviews - Karla Zimonja on Gone Home

2015-06-29T11:32:00.000+01:00

After doing a few interviews for my research, I soon realised that people - no matter if they were designers, gamers or any other pertinent actor in the field of video games - tended to mention particular aspects of video games (their mechanics, their narratives, specific moments that were relevant to them somehow) in order to illustrate their points or explain to me what they wanted to convey. Most of the time they found very difficult to express what they were thinking and feeling in an abstract way, so they used particular references attached to gaming experiences to make their thoughts and emotions emerge. I thought then that it could be a good idea to try a new methodological approach: focus my attention on a particular video game, play it, see what was said about it on the Internet (gamers and critics) and, after analysing all that information, contact their developers and ask them about some of the main topics I found during the process. What you'll see in this new section is that conversation.

Today, the fabulous Karla Zimonja, co-founder of Fullbright, on Gone Home.

Daniel Muriel: In order to contextualise the interview, could you tell me something about yourself, about your academic and professional background? How and why did you end working in the video game industry?

Karla Zimonja: Sure, so let’s see. I went to school for animation. I have a degree in animation. I did some TV shows for a couple of years before a friend of mine, who was working at a game company in Massachusetts, was like: “We need an animator, do you know how to animate in 3D?” And I was like: “I know how to do stop motion!”, which is not the same – I tried it for a long time and try to make it the same but it’s not -, and I did some tests and it wasn’t that hard, and so they hired me (this was a long time ago). I was lucky enough that the studio was switching software. They were switching from Lightwave to Maya, so I got to learn along with everyone else, which was super convenient! Then I worked as an animator for a bunch of years and eventually I kind of burned out on it and started working at 2K Marin as a researcher and sound-tech-person-ish part-time, and I just started doing more and more things and then I got to be full-time and got to do a lot of different jobs.

DM: Let’s talk about Gone Home then, right? Why did you decide to do a game like Gone Home? What did you expect to achieve with it?

K: Initially, I think, we just wanted to see if it would work! We wanted to see if we could make a game that was exploratory and interesting in first person without having any combat or puzzles, for that matter. We wanted to see how that would work as a game, and we thought we would like to play something like that, so we sort of hoped that other people would.

DM: Gone Home was released on, if I’m not mistaken, the 15th of August 2013…

K: Yes!

DM: According to what you expected, how everything went, in your opinion? I’m speaking about its reception by both critics and gamers

K: More people cared about it than we assumed it would. We did not necessarily think it would be, you know, super noticeable. But I guess it did end up being that! We got a lot of really good responses and a lot of amazing emails by people who were really touched by it and stuff, and that was extremely good.

DM: Are you satisfied then with the …?

K: Oh yeah, it’s hard to not feel something when someone writes to you and tells you that your video game gave them the courage to likes come out to their parents!

DM: Did you receive a lot of emails or messages saying: “Well, this video game really touched me, or really was important for me”?

K: Yes, we got a surprising amount of emails that are just the sweetest. Yeah, totally! I think part of it is that if you care about something you will have the motivation to write about it, but if you’re really angry about something, you have to dig around and find someone's email, and it's effort, so we got very few horrible people emails and almost always very sweet emails from people who our game meant something to, which is great! I did have to block a lot of people on Twitter, but…

DM: I think that is unavoidable. According to those things you are telling me right now, what impact do you think Gone Home had on the people who played it? What would you say the main emotion people conveyed to you is?

K: There is a lot, because it’s one of those games that you have to kind of engage with it yourself, and on whatever level you happen to engage with it, that will determine your experience of it. There’s a certain range of responses that we definitely … let’s see, we got a surprising number, whenever we heard from guys, they’d be like: “I identify with dad”; we heard from women or young women or actually young men too sometimes - older men, they like dad - but younger men and queer people were often like: “We’re validated by this”, which is really nice. The responses we get are usually very supportive and personal. Not like comments on Steam [laughter]. We actually heard from some parents who played with their pre-teen, or whatever, teenage children, and it’s really cute, it’s really sweet! I think we got one email from a hardcore Christian who was like: “I can't allow my child to look at this.” But yeah, they have to be used to there being gay people in the world, so, sorry, guys! [laughter]

DM: Maybe Gone Home has helped some people to realise that as well.

K: Yeah, I hope so! That’s the thing about video games, they can give you experiences that you can’t have in real life, that you haven’t had, so it can be, hopefully, an experience that can add to someone’s conception of how people are in the world.

DM: When you were working on Gone Home, did you explicitly think about the people who were going to play the video game?

K: We did, because at the very least, we wanted to make it very accessible, so we didn’t want to make it hard for people who were new to first person video games. We did not want them to have a horrible time. We wanted to be able to get someone who says: “I don’t know how to play video games” and go: “Try it!” I think a thing that can be said is that it allows you to learn without pressure. Because there's no timing, puzzles, there is nobody that is going to shoot you if you don’t do something right, etc. etc. So, we got a couple of emails from people that said like, “Now I know how to play first person video games, so I can go play Portal”, or what have you, and that’s cool! [laughter] So, accessibility is a thing. I think that’s actually one of the biggest things. We just wanted a wide range of people be able to play it.

DM: Do you think it’s possible to design a video game without taking into account the people who are going to play it?

K: Uhmm. I’m not sure. If you try to do that you probably just end up designing it to your own specifications. You would just make what’s comfortable for you... I don’t think you can completely abdicate. Something will be there.

DM: You received a lot of emails telling you about what people thought about your game, what impact it had on their lives. Now, in your opinion, what kind of impact would you like to have on them?

K: I feel like my favorite thing that I would like to see more of is older people playing it and realising how things can be different. It would be cool if people who needed it or who would be helped if they played it, although that’s not very specific.

DM: It’s about what you’d like to do with your video games, so I think that’s also something that’s very interesting: just someone who needs it. It’s a good answer!

K: There’s a lady player character, a lady protagonist, so even that might mean something. It seems like games should be at that point, but I don’t think we really are. So it’s nice to provide that to people and I hope that people are pleased.

Is Gone Home a video game?

DM: The status of Gone Home as a video game has been under scrutiny from the beginning, from both critics and gamers. Quoting Brian Crecente from Polygon: “Is Gone Home a video game? Gone Home is a game of exploration and narration, an effective vehicle for storytelling. But its lack of puzzles and combat, and the inability to lose or even change the outcome, have some questioning its gaming legitimacy.” I also found that others recognise that this is a game, but they would have liked to see more of game mechanics. There are also some gamers who say that it’s just an interactive fiction, or a walking simulator, a label which has been used with other games, or that the story of Gone Home could have been delivered as a book or as a film. What do you think about this? Is Gone Home a video game?

K: I don’t see why not. I think it’s a video game. I have no idea why it wouldn’t be. The thing that people don’t necessarily understand, I’m not even sure whether we understand it for ourselves, is that a lot of Gone Home's difficulty, the challenge, takes place in your head. It’s not an external challenge, it’s an internal challenge. You have to figure things out, you have to put pieces together, you have to use your intelligence, and your social intelligence. There’s obviously no way a video game can give you achievements for that, because that’s not possible. I think that it's moving where the challenge is, from dexterity-based skills or quickness to mental challenges. I think that is interesting and I feel like it’s perfectly challenging. It can be a big challenge to figure out what’s going on from disparate pieces of information.

DM: It is very interesting because, right know, I have this written down, it was someone defending Gone Home as a video game, and this person said: “The game happens inside your head, as you start to piece together the scraps of information you’re getting”.

K: They’re exactly correct.

DM: That is actually what you were saying right now.

K: They’re exactly right. I mean, it’s unusual, right? Except, that’s the thing with a lot of interactive fiction and Twine games and such, it's actually not dissimilar. So, I’m not insulted by people calling it interactive fiction at all! Because you are parsing the social and normal events, you’re thinking about them, you have to do work in order to engage with these works. Your work can be skill based, but it’s not manual skill based. It’s interesting.
The other thing is, of course, that you drive your own experience of it. You just follow your own nose, your own interest. You get to follow where you’re interested in, so you can direct your own investigation, basically. You don’t have to find everything in order to understand most of the story. You can investigate to the depths you want to bother with, and stuff like that. It allows you to set your level of engagement, which is hard to do with a book. It’s about choosing your own path.

DM: There are a lot of people who firmly believe that this is a video game, of course. But they say that this is not a ‘classic’ video game. It’s something new. Was this something that you were looking for? Something that is not usual in the video game industry?

K: Oh, definitely! For one thing, we all worked on Bioshock games and we thought, can we do something like that where the world is interesting and want to find out about it, but also there’re no jerks trying to shoot you when you’re doing it? So you get to actually explore, like you want to, as opposed to exploring when you can, and shooting the rest of the time. That was kind of the seed of it, I think.

DM: There was a comment about the game, this person said that it’s a game that might appeal to people who don’t usually play video games. This grabbed my attention, because not only is Gone Home seen as a game, but it could be seen or understood as a device to turn people who don’t play video games into people who play video games.

K: Yeah! I mean, yeah, it can, which I’m really pleased about. We are lucky to have been able to do that, because it is really nice to sort of open that door for people, letting them understand that they don’t have to be intimidated so much. You know, a first-person novice game player watches somebody playing something really fast paced and intense, and I think it's a lot easier for them to just say “Oh, I don’t know! You play it, I won't try.” If you let them learn the basic principles of moving and looking first, it can be a lot better experience, probably. Like I was saying earlier with the lady who said: “yeah, I played your game and now can I play Portal”, and I was like: “That’s really cool!”, because Portal was kind of amazing. Can you imagine, that your first real Triple A video game was Portal? [laughter] That is pretty cool! I love the fact that we can make our games accessible to people. It seems horrible to make games that exclude people. Obviously, there’s always more you can do, you can always do more for people who are disabled in various ways, you know, hearing impaired, sight impaired, and there’s always more to be done.

DM: I know this could be a tricky question, but how would you define video games? Could you give me the definition of video games?

K: Argg, uhmm, alright, let’s see.

DM: I’m sorry but I have to ask this!

K: Let’s see. I sort of feel like anything that is interactive and has feedback that… ugh, that… ugh, this is so wrong! I hate this, I can’t define anything! I went to art school, people ask me: “What is art?” and I’m like: Nope! I don’t know how to do it.

DM: Every time I ask this question, people struggle to give me a definition of games.

K: Someone can always be like: “Well, if you define it that way, then how is Photoshop not a video game?” I feel like in a lot of ways it’s kind of an ‘intent’ thing, much like defining art, like, did you intend this to be a work? And if so, it’s probably what it is! But, I’m not really picky about the definition of video games, shall we say? I think it could be very broad.

DM: That’s the good thing of being a sociologist, because I don’t need to define the object, because I have to let the people do the defining, the social definition of video games. I don’t have to do these kinds of thing, so. [laughter]

Trusting the player

DM: There was this interview with your colleague Steve Gaynor. He said that there was a deep trust in the player to explore and not to be told what to do in the game. Also, in another interview he said, and I quote: “You have to always try to think of what I would want if I were the player, I personally want a game that allows me to inhabit it without getting it all up in my face. Being hands off with a player and trust in them to discover what’s interesting about the game world on their own yields the best result in my opinion.” What does ‘trust the player’ mean to you?

K: We obviously agree pretty closely on that. To me personally, we need to allow the player to pull themselves forward, because if they’re not interested enough to do that, we screwed it up. [laughter] Your motivation is the strongest motivation. I could be like: “Hey, there is this cool coin over here, you can come collect it”, or I can just make this area look interesting and you want to come look at it. When you choose to do it yourself instead of being tricked into it, it’s a much better feeling and experience for the player, period.

DM: Is the player explicitly identified as a fundamental agent responsible for making the narrative possible? Would you say that this story of Gone Home is enacted through the player?

K: Sort of? I think it’s reconstructed in a lot of ways. It’s less performed or enacted, and more reconstructed.

DM: So, you would say this is reconstructed.

K: In a way, yes, it’s reconstructed and understood, I guess. In some ways it’s kind of brought to life, but it’s brought to life by the player’s head, so, it’s a little bit squishy [laughter].

DM: What do you think about the criticism of some aspects of the game that seem not to trust the player that much. I’m going to tell you some examples. Someone mentioned locked doors… So I know there’s an option to play without any locked doors but well… They said the voice-over, the notes, the setting and the stormy night. For some there were these misleading horror elements. They have been depicted as being contrivances and ways to deceive the player. What do you think about this?

K: Well, it’s a lot of things. Mostly those things were necessary in some way or another, because we’re not perfect creators. The locked doors are there so that we can be sure that you got a chance to understand things more or less in order, in chunks. So that we can be reasonably sure people get this part of the narrative, and so after that they could go do another chunk, go nuts. Because it’s a difficult thing to ask of people: “Yeah, here's all these random ideas, figure it out!”. That’s a bit much. Atmospherically, I think we wanted to make it seem like a real life creepy house. Being alone in an empty house is kind of creepy all by itself, right? Some people who played a lot of horror video games are instantly like: “Alright, monsters, horrible things!”, and it’s kind of hard to walk that line, because the more experienced players have a different expectation than the less experienced players. I think we chose to favor the less experienced players in this case, because, I don’t know, they need more attention. We need to think about them more.

DM: What is interesting for maybe more seasoned players is that, for instance, they expect something to happen and then there are no monsters there, but somehow I think that’s cool as well.

K: We repeatedly put details in to say: “Alright, you think this is scary? It’s not actually scary!” We did that a few times. But I think some people were freaked out anyway.

Empathy

DM: One of the words that is usually associated with the game, by both critics and gamers, is ‘empathy’. There are a lot of people who recognise themselves in the characters, the stories, even if they don’t share many characteristics with them. There were people that were emotionally hooked by the game, people caring about the characters’ fate. How do you feel about this idea of empathy?

K: It’s cool. It’s a good thing.

DM: Did you seek to have this particular effect on people?

K: Yes, totally, that is intended. It’s connected to the whole ‘video games allow you to have experiences that you couldn’t have otherwise’ thing. It’s like a grad school-age white dude gets to see what it’s like to think about the world of a teen girl in the nineties. That is … good? [laughter] Giving people other perspectives is good, I think that it is valuable by itself. Empathy, I think, will come if you try to make the characters relatable.

DM: It’s very interesting the fact that a video game can help some people be in the shoes of other people. That is something that I think Gone Home really has achieved.

K: Thank you, that’s really nice!

DM: Really, because I’ve found a lot of comments. Even men, straight men. The game helped them to understand those situations.

K: I think we’re really good at empathy, as humans. It’s nice to be able to exercise that sometimes in video games.

DM: Also, Steve mentioned that you achieved this notion of empathy by not telling too much about Katie, the character. To diminish the dissonance between the player and the player’s character. Do you think there are some limits when it comes to producing this empathy, diminishing this distance, because there is always going to be some distance between the person who’s playing and the character on the screen.

K: Yeah, fair enough. So I think, in a lot of ways we were not necessarily going for empathy with Katie. It was more empathy with Sam, and we were trying to get you in the shoes of Katie, so you could have, basically, permission to have this knowledge and such. You have that basis, theoretically, for not feeling embarrassed for snooping [laughter]. I think Katie supposed to be there for the player to be able to inhabit as seamlessly as possible, but obviously she is not a totally unnamed protagonist, and she does have experiences in her past that the player doesn’t have and stuff like that. We tried to make it not get in the way.

DM: There is a moment in the game that you are reading some of Sam’s notes, and Katie says: “Stop, I don’t want to read this note.” I think it’s the first sexual encounter of Sam. This is the moment where you see, “Wow, the character is stepping in, right now Katie is doing something.”

K: Yeah, that is the divergence. I thought that was fun, and I was actually really pleased to see, like, instantly people took screenshots! Which was really funny and cute. I think that’s fine, because that’s kind of a reminder of who you are in the game, and it’s mostly just a little fun thing.

The mundane texture of Gone Home

DM: Gone Home has been seen as an expression of the mundane and the ordinary, represented as being far from most of the core mechanics that usually define video games. Gone Home seems to radically embrace the quotidian texture of everyday life. For some that was disappointing but was celebrated by others. Gone Home is special because it's mundane; and it's mundane thanks to its peculiarity. What can you tell me about this idea of mundanity and ordinariness in Gone Home?

K: Well it’s definitely mundane as fuck! [Laughter] There’s no argument about that. Honestly, the mundanity comes from trying to keep the world and its events really grounded and believable. If it wasn’t a believable style of furnishing and everything, it wouldn’t feel quite so plausible. We definitely wanted to make it possible for people instantly to think, “Oh, this is basically a real space!” It’s just keeping it as grounded as possible with things that you know what they are, you’ve seen them, your parents probably still have something like this.

DM: Maybe that’s the reason that a lot of people empathise with the game, because it was so normal in a way that it could be anyone’s story.

K: Well I hope that they can still do that without it, because our next game is totally not in a 90’s style [Laughter]. But anyway, yes, I hope people can also do it elsewhere, but I’m glad they had that experience.

DM: One of the major things was the representation of homosexuality in the game. This is something that has been traditionally underrepresented in video games, probably in other fields of culture in general, but why did you decide to use this as part of the story?

K: We decided that kind of procedurally. When we already decided, “Ok, we have enough people on the team to maybe make a house”, and then we thought “Who lives in the house? Probably a family. What problems, what conflicts can families have?” That was one of the more interesting ones. We decided that we wanted a female lead pretty early, and so, you know, it just came out of that. There were things we cared about by default and then things we were constrained by.

DM: People who define themselves as queer, especially among critics, usually praise the game. There were some of them who thought that Gone Home was stereotyped and stigmatizing, how it portrayed the homosexual community. Is this something that annoys you?

K: I mean, there is nothing I can do about it.

DM: But do you think it is fair what they are saying?

K: The thing is with writing a story or having a game that concerns itself with a group of people that doesn’t get much media, when you do that, you can only make one thing. And so everyone from that community wants to see themselves, of course, because who doesn’t? But it’s really hard to provide that to everyone. And that is sad and difficult, but we only made one game and that was what we could make. We were very careful to interview people and get personal experiences that we then based parts of the story on, and we put in the effort to make the story authentic -- a lot of parts of it happened to real people that we know. And if that comes off as cliché to some people then they have probably all lived it or they know a lot of people that lived it and that is kind of rough. But I don’t think you can write anything that will include everyone!

DM: Well, that’s impossible. Did you interview people to make the game, to get the story of it? That is quite interesting! Why and how did you do this research?

K: We contacted people that we knew or sort of knew and did interviews with them and we got stories from people. We interviewed two women who are married, for example. They got together in high school, so there’s a lot of relevant stuff to our story, and they had a lot of really good personal details that were extremely interesting. They had a lot of great stuff! And there's a lot of other little things, like this person I know, she had a not-great experience coming out to her parents and a lot of her specific retelling of what her parents said was so instructive. We tried to ground what we were writing in that, in those lived experiences. I mean, it’s very important to go and do your research when you’re depicting something that is not something that you went through yourself.

DM: Is this something usual in the video game industry?

K: It’s not as common as it should be. Some people are more excited about it than others. I believe strongly in research, because I can never come up with anything that great on my own [laughter], so I need something to point me in the right direction and to constrain things a little bit. When you research you always find just infinite things that you had no idea about, and had you not found things that you didn’t know existed, your work would be much more shallow and it wouldn’t be as good, it wouldn’t be as real. So, if you want to make things believable and real, research is really important!

DM: I find it quite fascinating what you are telling me. How do you translate all that information that you collect during your research into the game? How do you create a character and a story and so on? With Gone Home specifically, but if you can tell me more about other things I would be very pleased.

K: We recorded interviews with people and we all listened to them and discussed what elements we could portray and what details we could change so it’s not too personal etcetera, things like that. We read everything we could that was available to us. I was not into that world in the 90’s, so I didn’t really have it available in my head. So I read books on it, and I read interviews with people who were out at that time. We went to some Goodwill shops and went to some thrift shops and took pictures of horrible furniture and we would say: “My mom had this!” or “My grandmother had this!” and we didn’t remember until we saw it. We actually got a Sears catalogue that… it used to be, once upon a time you’ll get these big thick catalogues in the mail, especially for Christmastime, and they would have a lot of expensive garbage you could buy. There was a toys section, I used to look at that when I was a little kid and be like: “Look at all the toy horses!” or whatever, but it has a whole bunch of other stuff that I never looked at when I was a kid, which is furniture from that time. We got an amazing old catalogue from eBay, and it was just amazing, like there is everything. I guess we were a little young in the actual time period to really take it all in aesthetically -- there were a lot of objects in the catalogue where we said “I remember this, but I wouldn’t be able to recreate it without this specific photo”. It would have been vague, you know? And vagueness kind of doesn’t cut it at all. Nowadays we, both Steve and I, do a fair bit of research as we go, and discuss it and figure out what we can use. There is always so many different avenues to explore, there is always something we can learn from basically anything.

DM: I think it’s very important for you that the game would depict a world that was plausible, authentic, relatable. Because I think that you’ve said “We are researching a lot about this, we have to put this that seems to be authentic, the authentic experience, all what is plausible…” Why is that? Why were you so keen to put all that on the game?

K: I personally feel that you can only get to the general via the specific. I think you have to be specific about things in order for people to be able to parse it, because details in the real world are specific. You can’t say that someone is always angry and really understand it until you see them being always angry, right? This is not quite how our brains work. I think, for people to engage in the way that I personally like the best, is through specificity. Because I don't think you can please everyone, you can’t make a thing that is generic and widely applicable to everyone, really. You can in some situations, I’m sure there are ways in which that would work, but that’s not our particular thing. We kind of have to choose a path, and so we'd rather choose one that’s real, I guess.

DM: Part of the story is about sexual abuse, I mean, the one that hints it, because it’s not a direct story there. There are hints that the father might have been abused by his uncle. I think this is something that wasn’t discussed as much as other parts of the story, but it still was there. Why didn’t you introduce this more explicitly?

K: I think that more explicit would have been really ghastly. I feel like stuff that is very strongly terrible is much better as a hint than fully explicated. It’s not something that we would want to be a major part of our game, because it would be horrible. It was a little side story that you can unearth if you’d like. I don’t think it would have worked very well if we made it more central.

DM: But, it’s there, it’s quite brave of you introducing that. In video games it’s something that you cannot see… I was going to say frequently, but I’ve never seen something like that in a video game!

K: I guess that’s another reason to have a light touch with it. There is … uhm, yeah, ugh, I can’t even explain it! The idea of going into it more is just horrible. I feel like the implication that sometimes this is part of people’s lives, something awful that they have to deal with, is more important than describing events like that. There's a big difference between a story centrally about a person making choices and living her life and a story about someone who has had no choice but to be traumatized.

DM: There are other topics that appear in the game over there, like infidelity, even suicide. In hindsight, you see that you approached a lot of controversial topics in the game. But I was also thinking: “But at the same time, these are themes/issues that are mundane as well.” Do you think that the video game is the medium to deal with these issues or is just the expression of those everyday life concerns?

K: I don’t think we were going for any lessons. For me, with stuff like this, the most important part is allowing people to understand why the characters are doing what they're doing, or feeling. It’s not about making statements about abuse, or infidelity. It’s more about understanding what it means -- why would a person make these decisions, how does this change their life? These are more important things to me, rather than trying to give someone a morality story.

Identity and community within video game culture

DM: Just the last set of questions, I promise. Would you define yourself as a gamer?

K: Me?

DM: Yes.

K: Would I define myself as a gamer? I don’t know, not really. I mean, I play games, but I don’t house a significant part of my identity within that.

DM: That is the interesting thing, because what role, do you think, video games play in your life, in your identity?

K: Uhm… identity-wise I feel like it only comes out in terms of something to talk about people with. Otherwise it’s kind of not quite relevant. Like, whatever, I’m playing Pillars of Eternity right now. That doesn’t make me a gamer! [laughter] I don’t know, I’m playing a game, it’s fine. It’s something I do rather than something I am.

DM: But you are working in the video game industry, so you work creating video games, is that not a part of your identity as well? In that sense, I won’t say that means that you are a gamer, but it’s something that video games are attached to your life.

K: Yeah, that’s fine. Again, it’s something I do, rather than something I am. That does not strike me as an intrinsic part of myself. I mean, I make video games, I do it, I am not made of video game! You know what I mean? [Laughter] I don’t know, I have a hard time saying: “I am this”, it’s a little bit weird for me. If somebody said to me “you play games, you’re a gamer”, I'd say “ok sure, fine”, I'm not gonna get real upset about it. I’m just not going to put it that way for myself, I think.

DM: Do you think there is a community of gamers?

K: You mean, in the world?

DM: Yes, like in the world, some people have told me there might be some community of gamers in general but also a community of gamers, specific communities of gamers.

K: I mean, surely, there are. There are a lot of people that treat it as a significant part of their lives and hobby and everything. People who play multiplayer games together and stuff like that, and that is obviously very community based. There is a lot of people who get together and try to solve problems in games together and stuff like that. I don’t see why there shouldn’t be. If people want to do that, there is no reason they can’t! [laughter]

DM: But you do not feel like you belong to a community of gamers.

K: Well, I don’t know, I never thought about it. I don’t know whether I’d define it that way, but also like, I mean, I can discuss games with people, does that make me part of a community? I mean, I don’t really know [laughter].

DM: Last question. Do you think there is a video game culture in our society, in general?

K: A culture… what does that mean? So, ok, what is 'culture' here? What is that? Is it an aspect of some sort of structure that …

DM: Do you think that nowadays video games has become more and more important in our society? A part of a culture in general, is it part of our society? That’s my question.

K: So you are saying “is it part of our culture in a broad way”?

DM: Yes.

K: Sure, why not? I don’t see why not. Movies are, why shouldn’t games be? That sounds fine.

DM: Do you think that this is something that is starting to be more important? I’m not only speaking about only the numbers, obviously the video game industry is growing, but I’m also thinking about people now, even if they don’t play video games, they are starting to recognise symbols or some aspects of video game culture in general, like “Oh, that’s Minecraft!” or “That’s Pacman!”, those kinds of things. Is it starting to get embedded into our culture?

K: Sure. It’s the same as like Marvel movies, there’s people going around all “I’m wearing a Hawkeye t-shirt! I didn’t really know who Hawkeye was before I saw the movie, but now I like Hawkeye!" and I’m like “That’s cool!” Whatever, right? That’s fine! Games are definitely pretty visible now in more ways than they used to be.

You might be interested in having a look at this three-stage Gone Home review:
Flash Sociological Reviews: Gone Home (part 1: the media)
Flash Sociological Reviews: Gone Home (part 2: personal experience)
Flash Sociological Reviews: Gone Home (part 3: video gamers)

Other Interviews:
Mark Foster on Titan Souls (Acid Nerve, Devolver Digital, 2015)

Sociology of short facts: Watch Dogs and the post-identity

2015-05-05T23:43:00.001+01:00

It was one the first weeks of my - recently then - move to Manchester in 2014. The, I cannot recall the number, new edition of Big Brother was on TV. The show barely amuses me anymore, but my attention was grasped by a particular set of events I was witnessing. I'm not sure if this is something that has been happening in recent editions of the show, but surely it was new for me. Every time someone entered the house, it was preceded by a description of the future guest using three short facts that were also superimposed on the screen. Things like 'he is afraid of failure' or 'she loves dogs'. Can we be defined by a number of short statements? Is that how identity formation works today? Far from letting the thought cast away, I lingered on it.

I've been playing Watch Dogs lately, and the question of how identities are constructed nowadays - what I've been asking myself all my whole career as academic - has strongly come back to me with new arguments. In the universe of Watch Dogs, there this Orwellian surveillance system called ctOS (of course, this is not how they promote it to the general public), which can access and control any electronic device or element that is digitally governed (from smartphones and computers to steam pipes and explosives). The system is constantly recording and storing what you say, what you do, what you write; everything that can be grasped through those devices that surround us in our everyday lives. Any similarity with reality is... mere coincidence? We live in a postpanopticon era, indeed. The Foucauldian panopticon - thanks to its success - has exploded, as if had been shattered into countless little fragments that would still maintain intact their ability to watch. Nothing escape the multiple and fragmented eye of this particular Big Brother.

What really caught my eye in the game was, again, those defining short facts. Whenever I used my profiler (a hacking tool that allows you to access the guts of ctOS), a myriad of information about the people who was around me was popping up on my screen. Yet again, sentences such as 'Joined aerophobia group', 'Dyslexic', 'Cited for animal cruelty' or 'Explosives expert' were frantically appearing and disappearing in front of my eyes. Everything was also accompanied by information on their age, occupation and income. Matching all this data would be very interesting, but in this case I'm going to focus on those short facts.

Let's have a closer look at the issue by delving deeper into some examples. I've decided to group them in different categories to facilitate the analysis. It's important to notice that the way I classified the cases is not excluding and may feel clumsy, but it's part of the point I will make. This is only a rough summary of a more detailed analysis I will carry out in a future entry. Keep an eye on it because it's a very interesting sociological experiment.

Old(-ish) modalities of identity
This category encompasses those cases I consider they are part of the old pool of identity: nationality, ethnicity, family, work, gender, class, and so forth. However, we will find that something has changed; even the old modalities of identity show flaws, they are not as closed, strong and indisputable as they were. It reflects the profound changes and contradictions in the process of identity construction nowadays. There are no more taken for granted positions. It includes things like class ('Descended from aristocracy', 'Owns a castle in Wales'), ethnicity ('One-eight Kickapoo'), nationality ('Romanian immigrant', 'Dual citizen'), work ('Freelancer', 'Part-time paparazzi') or family ('Divorced', 'Single parent').

Beliefs, and political and religious stances
This could have been one of the categories within the traditional modes of identity, but the game seems to pay especial attention to political and religious content. We have here, then, a sample of the complex and disarranged system of beliefs that belongs to Watch Dogs' universe. This includes religion ('Religious conservative', 'Listed as agnostic on census', 'Jainist'), political stances ('Islamophobe', 'Member of eugenics group', 'Anti-capitalist blogger', 'Advocate for euthanasia'), and philosophical and existential views ('Objectivist', 'Nihilist', 'Superstitious').

Skills and abilities

To define someone by his or her expertise is a sign of how identities are constructed nowadays. Actually, this only makes sense in a widely extended expert culture that permeates society. In the end, people who are defined by what they know or what they can do.

The skills and abilities stressed by ctOS perfectly fit in the context of our contemporary societies. If we live in a digital age (Kirby, 2009; Gere, 2008), it seems to be reasonable to be defined by facts like 'Proficient with computers' or 'Amateur App Programmer'. Of course, there is still place for old modes of expertise ('European history expert') along with useful multi-purpose skills for the world of globalisation like 'Explosives expert' and 'Speaks multiple languages'.

Hobbies and passions
In a world where play and work are intertwined in different ways, and the time and space for leisure and other activities are less differentiated than ever, hobbies and passions are likely to be relevant when it comes to defining our identities. Depending on the level of engagement and experience acquired through these hobbies, individuals might develop a particular expertise in the field. In a way, this is strongly linked to skills and abilities but I will focus on the idea of what we love and are passionate about, which includes spectacles ('Amateur magician', 'Amateur choir soubrette'), the occult ('Cthulhu enthusiast', 'Amateur ghost hunter'), the unique ('Foreign film enthusiast', 'Renaissance fair enthusiast'), the banal ('Car enthusiast', 'Yoga enthusiast', 'Knitting enthusiast'), fandom ('Soccer fan', 'Basketball season pass holder'), and collectionism ('Comic book collector', 'Collects arcade cabinets').

Illegalisms and other faults
When Foucault, in his Discipline and Punish (1995), approached how western societies have historically dealt with illegalisms, he came to a (maybe not that) shocking conclusion: despite the dominant discourse that shrouds imprisonment institutions (as any other confinement institution), the final aim of prisons is not to rehabilitate the convicted but to mark them as criminals as part of an economy of bodies that maintains them under control. It serves more as a tool to govern society as a whole than to help to those who enter the prison system. Therefore, do illegalisms have an impact on our identities? More than that; they brand the individual by leaving a mark on the deep skin of their identity.

In a world obsessed with surveillance and crime prevention, slowly slipping towards a dystopic future not even imagined by Orwell or Huxley, this looks like a very appropriate way to categorise people. This includes bans ('Banned for local gym', 'Banned from local church'), driving issues ('Multiple unpaid tickets', 'Drives without license'), documents ('Expired work visa', 'False identity on library card', 'Holds a fake degree'), suspicions ('Suspect in hit-and-run', 'Suspected arsonist'), justified crimes ('Assaulted high school bully', 'Assaulted client for refusing to pay'), and financial debts and fines ('Multiple outstanding loans', 'Fined for indecent exposure').

Defined by your past
As someone who has studied the links between cultural heritage and identity, I am in the position to state that we are what we are thanks to, up to a great extent, what we were (or what we think we were). The fact that we can identify what we used to be is actually demarcating what we are now or what we are starting to become (even if it's not clear at the moment). ctOS seems to characterise some people according to what they were in the past, as though it were so overwhelming that it would not let space for new identity formations. Among these past definitions we find things such us 'Made porn film in college', 'Former child prodigy', 'Ex-military' and 'Former chess champion'.

Traumatic events
Traumatic events are a subset of particular incidents from the past that define yourself today. Identities are, more or less, the set of marks imprinted on our bodies, minds and souls. We are born with some of them; others are acquired and disposed during our lifetime. There are those that are deep and indelible, while others are superficial and fleeting. Traumatic events are scarring and leave ugly and irreversible marks on the surface of our identities. Examples of this are 'Victim of childhood abuse', 'Got his niece killed', 'Grandparents fled East Germany', 'Attempted suicide', and 'Disaster survivor'.

Losses, absences and non-existences
In the same way that you can be defined by what you were as much as what you are, you can be defined for what you lack as much as for what you have. Absences can be trivial or traumatic, but all of them have substantial defining properties. It's the significant absence. Sometimes, the emptiness left by a loss is more powerful than any presence. Events ranging from 'Lost front teeth in a fight', or 'Phone reported stolen' to 'Presumed dead' (your existence defined by a non-existence) belong to this group.

Illnesses and other health conditions
Illnesses, like illegalisms, are part of those taxonomic operations that segregate the abnormal from the normal (Gordon, 1991: 37) in the collective imagination of the modern citizenship. We living in societies that have a vast knowledge of thousands of different illnesses and other health conditions, it is almost impossible not to suffer from one or several conditions during our lifetime. We are so traversed by these diseases nowadays that illnesses do not play that segregating role typical of modern societies anymore. The healthy and the sick are not easily told apart; there are different shades of healthiness or sickness.

It seems that ctOS has an interest in highlighting particular illnesses and conditions: sex related ('Dignosed with STD', 'Medicated for low libido'), phobias ('Self-diganosed with aquaphobia, 'Gymnophobic'), addictions ('Alcoholic'), potentially deadly illnesses ('Terminally ill', 'HIV positive', 'Diagnosed with hepatitis C', 'Undergoing chemotherapy', 'Early stages of sclerosis multiple'), allergies ('Allergic to bee stings', 'Lactose intolerant', 'Alergic to chocolate'), mental illness ('Diagnosed manic depresive', 'On medication for schizophrenia', 'Dignosed bipolar', 'Sociopathic tendencies'), other health conditions ('Myopic', 'Narcoleptic', 'Haemophilia carrier', 'Suffers from motion sickness', 'Dyslexic', 'Medicated for blood pressure').

Sex and relationship issues
Sexual practices and the way we engage in relationships are fundamental parts of what we are and how we think of ourselves. It implies one of the most carnal and affective activities of human beings. They shake our bodies and minds; they are feral and cerebral at the same time. This includes the modes of building sexual or affective relationships ('Engages in prostitution', 'Speed dater'), affairs ('Having affair with married woman', 'Having affair with co-worker'), or sexual practices ('Self-proclaimed necrophiliac', 'Practices S&M').

The specific and the regular
Even if it sounds contradictory, individuals can be identified both for very particular episodes (the specific) and for what they normally do (the regular). The regular encompasses things like 'Meditates regularly', 'Collects coupons', 'Runs DDoS attacks', or 'Habitual steroid user'. The specific, however, is more volatile and makes reference to things such as 'Attacked by drunk patron', 'Negotiating rent with landlord', 'Recently ordered human tissue samples', and 'Has multiple computer viruses'.

Consumption and searches
Consumerism and consumer culture are one of the most noticeable features of postmodernity. According to Bauman, the 'way present-day society shapes up its members is dictated first and foremost by the need to play the role of the consumer' (2005: 24). Therefore, our identities are increasingly demarcated by what we consume. That also explains why identities have become fragmented, multiple and ephemeral. Watch Dogs is not oblivious to this global tendency and thus shows us consumption patterns ('Purchases penis enlargement pills', 'Downloads pirated media', 'Frequent purchases: mask', 'Frequently purchases condoms'), what is frequently watched ('Frequently watches torture porn', 'Frequently watches documentaries', 'Frequently watches westerns', 'Frequently watches reality shows'). Furthermore, and bringing this practice to digital age, ctOS also displays frequently visited websites ('Frequents paranormal sites', 'Frequents hacker sites', 'Posts voyeur videos online') and online searches ('Frequent online searches: "Rape"', ''Frequent online searches: "Blume"', "'Frequent online searches: "how to cook meth"', 'Frequent online searches: "Bicurious"').

Video games
Although all of the following short facts could be easily placed within other categories, I've decided to introduce them in this particular section because of its reflexivity (it's a video game after all!). Here we can find things such as 'NVZN beta tester', 'Attends games conference', 'MMORPG enthusiast', 'Addicted to social gaming', and 'Avid video game player'.

Extreme and absurd
As if the very idea of defining someone by a short fact was not (sort of) absurd enough, I've created this group to highlight those descriptions that seemed to be especially extreme ('Buried victims beneath his house', 'Experiment with cannibalism', 'Fishes with dynamite'), absurd ('Maintains blog about "bucket lists"', 'Runs with the bulls in Spain', 'Sober') or irrelevant ('Uses computer library for internet', 'Uses birthday as password').

Before I continue with my argument, let's have a look at the following classification:

In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush; (1) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies (Borges, 1999: 231).

I have to admit that every time I read this classification of animals (a fictional account extracted from the vivid imagination of Borges, who attribute it to a a certain Chinese encyclopaedia) it makes me laugh. The list is disconcerting, if not hilarious. Why does this classification have that effect on us? Foucault, at the beginning of his The Order of Things and after bringing up this delirious classification, concludes that, when confronted with other systems of thought, we start to understand the limits of our own: 'the stark impossibility of thinking that' (1989: xvi). That extravagant classification belongs to a different fundamental form of knowledge, what Foucault called episteme, which makes think within its limits impossible for us:

In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice (Foucault, 1989: 183).

The episteme delimits the space of the thinkable inside a particular society at a specific time. The further you move from those temporal and spatial coordinates, the greater is the possibility of coming across a different ground of positivity. In a way, the astonishment that probably most people feel when they read some of the short facts that ctOS insist on throwing to our screens could be explained by that approach. It shows the seams of our old episteme in its transition to the new conditions of possibility, where the way we think about identities is radically changing. That's also why the cases I selected could have been classified differently and they would have made equal (non)sense. In fact, the central issue here is that those solitaire descriptions escape any attempt to classify them.

Thus, why does a system like CToS, which knows everything about everybody, highlights those specific facts? In terms of identity, why should very specific aspects of someone's life define them or be relevant aspects of him or her? My hypothesis here is there are no longer core elements that define identity in contemporary societies; the old coordinates by which people was understood (nation, gender, class) have been decentred, and now new elements, almost randomly, are becoming as important as them in order to define someone's identity. That would explain, for instance, why our most frequent searches on the Internet might be as important for our processes of identity formation as the illnesses we have. Or why having our computer infested with viruses is as relevant as being a suspected arsonist.

The important question is, then, whether it is possible to be defined by one short fact or not. Once our identities seem not to be attached to specific meta-narratives, other fragments of meaning, more and more specific and global at the same time, are occupying the stage of identity. That's the reason we are defined by what pops up in that moment, by what is relevant at that point: it can change at any time, with new events, when you are in different contexts, with different people; it can change the same day several times, in a continuous overlapping process. What ctOS does is to highlight what matters in that moment, what is relevant for the time and place being. Precisely because we cannot be defined by something that encompasses everything we are, we can be defined by anything that describes us in particular moment. The very notion of identity is being challenged. We are entering in a post-identity era.

I don't know who the people behind the sociological design of Watch Dogs are. How did they come up with that almost infinite list of possible identity definitions? I would be more than pleased to meet them. There has been some criticism about the game's story, depicting it as dull and not appealing enough. In this sense, some of the mechanics have been criticised for not being completely original and for not having made the most of the hacking features in the game. That might be the case, I am not a video game critic. What I am sure of is Watch Dogs has perfectly understood how identity, or what comes after it, works these days.

Bibliography

Bauman, Zygmunt (2005). Work, Consumerism and the New Poor. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Borges, Jorge Luis (1999). Selected Non-Fictions. London: Penguin.

Foucault, Michel (1989). The Order of Things. London: Routledge.

Foucault, Michel (1995). Discipline and Punish. London: Vintage Books.

Gere, Charlie (2008). Digital Culture. London: Reaktion Books

Kirby, Alan (2009). Digimodernism. New York: Continuum

Candy Crush Parliament: video game culture in the age of multitasking

2015-02-28T20:51:00.000+00:00

Recently, I have come across two interesting pieces of news. The first one, from December 2014, related how the conservative Amber Valley MP, Nigel Mills, was playing Candy Crush Saga on his iPad while in a parliamentary committee meeting on pension reforms. The second one described how the Deputy Speaker of the Spanish Parliament, Celia Villalobos, was also playing a game on her tablet during the 2015 State of the Nation Debate, which took place on 24 and 25 February (it seems that, in the end, she was playing Frozen Free Fall instead of Candy Crush Saga). There is even a video of her playing it:

Beyond the reproachable behaviour of these members of the public who are supposed to represent the citizens of their nations, those situations are symptomatic of two, in a way, interrelated things: video game culture is a growing reality nowadays and we live in an age of multitasking that consists of an infinite lapse of undifferentiated time.

It is widely accepted that mobile devices have brought video gaming to a new level, expanding the formerly reserved territory of gamers to new social spaces where more varied sorts of people play video games. Those articles are a good example of it. Two conservative politicians, one a middle age man and the other a senior woman, play on their tablets. But they don't play Candy Crush Saga or Frozen Free Fall anywhere; they are doing it in the parliament, where the sovereignty of the people resides. Moreover, they're playing while working.

This is one of the most noticeable features of this growing video game culture; people play video games everywhere at any time: commuting, watching TV, between classes, in the bathroom, waiting for something or someone, and during any other spare moment they have. We fill those inter-times - the moments we have between the significant and proper tasks - tapping or swiping on our smartphones or tablets. However, consciously or not, we went further. We have started playing while we are doing - or pretending to do - important and relevant things. The multitasking age has arrived.

Our lives have become a set of open tasks that are happening at the same time. We continually jump from one to another in the same fashion as we do between tabs in front of our computer. We don't need to finish a task to initiate another one or to continue with others that are already in progress. Time has lost its linearity and usefulness as a tool for organising our lives:

Without a doubt, modernity was progressively founded on a very mechanical conception of time. Useful time, strictly lineal time, projective time. Time of individual and social history. Time with a beginning and an end, and whose hegemony seems to have done tabula rasa with any other notion of time (Maffesoli, 2001: 66-67).

It seems that today's world has done tabula rasa with time itself. According to Maffesoli, presentism has been installed in our societies, in which we don't consider that 'there are things that are more important than others' (2001: 68). In everyday life, if nothing is important, then, everything is important. We cannot differentiate between spaces, times and activities anymore. We play while working, we work while play. It is even difficult to say what belongs to the field of work or what is supposed to be playful. As Maffesoli states, a ludic conception of society has been generalised: 'The game of the world, or the world as a game. Life as a game is the acceptance of a world as it is' (2001: 80).

In the end, our reality has turned into a perpetual sequence of overlapped inter-times. Time without beginning or end. Irrelevant time, only disturbed by the next deadline. An eternal deadline that nobody meets. And in the meantime, we play video games.

'I shall try not to do it in the future,' declared the MP Nigel Milles when questioned about his slip-up. He didn't say 'I won't do it again' or 'It won't happen again'. He will try. We know what will happen, don't we?

Bibliography

Maffesoli, Michel (2001). El instante eterno [The Eternal Instant]. Buenos Aires: Paidós.

The construction of a video gaming audience

2015-02-19T17:39:00.000+00:00

A sign that video games are becoming central to understand our contemporary cultural forms is their increasing presence in the media. Not only have the specialised magazines on video games grown in numbers - particularly online, but also the traditional press already includes specific sections dedicated to video games.

Magazines have historically played an important role in the formation of early gaming culture, as it was stated by Kirkpatrick (2012) in his Bourdieusian analysis of UK's video game magazines in the 1980s and 1990s: ‘Through the development of a discourse of game evaluation, gaming acquires independence and begins to define itself as a cultural practice’. When this discourse is broaden and inserted into the general-interest newspapers and media, the specific gaming culture starts to blur its boundaries and to affect larger portions of society, generating multitude of video game-related cultures and practices. Nevertheless, if there is a media on which video games have naturally proliferated, that should be, undoubtedly, the Internet.

YouTube, for instance, is packed with gaming channels. In fact, the YouTube channel that has more subscribers is a gaming related one, which is owned by the user PewDiePie, that is, the Swedish Youtuber personality Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg. Currently, his Let’s Play - and many other things to be honest - focused channel has more than 34 million subscribers.

Ramdurai states on Think with Google that among the top 100 YouTube channels worldwide are more than 20 that are gaming related. He shows more data that demonstrates video games are one of the most important audiovisual apparatuses nowadays: ‘YouTube data shows that six of the top ten most-viewed channels in the U.S. are about gaming’. Video games are a central aspect of today’s YouTube generation.

More relevant is the relatively recent creation of a specific broadcasting platform for video games on the Internet: Twitch. I already wrote about it on this post. It was launched on June 2011 and was purchased by Amazon in August 2014 for $970 million. According to Twitch, they have an average of 60 million visitors per month. Twitch basically consists in people watching other people playing video games. Someone creates a channel, starts playing a video game and broadcasts it live. Then, other people can join the channel and watch him or her playing, while they comment on a chat with other viewers (and the person who is playing, who might make references to those comments) and have the opportunity of following, subscribing (paying) or donating to the broadcaster. Moreover, in December 2014, the biggest digital distribution platform in the world, Steam, launched its own broadcasting service.

All of these examples are suggesting that a video game audience has been created. Not only is there an imagined community (Anderson, 2006) of potential gamers that can be represented as an audience of players in a broad sense, the ones who consume and receive a product, but there is also a very particular audience who explicitly seek to watch others play and know more about video games by becoming knowledgeable in that area. It is, indeed, the construction of a more traditional notion of audience, that is, ‘watching others perform’ (Crawford, 2012: 34).

This undermines, as if it was not already undermined enough, the idea that video games do not have an audience. When Eskelinen and Tronstad affirm that video games are audienceless is because they consider that video games ‘don’t need audiences as an integral part of their “communication” structure’ (2003: 196). This reluctance to admit the existence of video game audiences relies on a strict ergodic - the requirement of nontrivial efforts beyond mere interpretations (2003: 197) - approach to video games, which refuses to conceive them as media or to admit that video games can have some characteristics that have been traditionally associated with media such as television, cinema, music or literature. This approach is ignoring essential aspects of video games that are not ergodic or purely interactive (a problematic notion, why should not we consider interpretation as a kind of interactive action?), like ‘map screens, score or lap-time feedback screens and so on’ (Newman, 2002). Crawford expands this not just to cut-scenes and on-rail video game experiences, classic examples of players as simple spectators, but also to the ‘visual- and audio-scapes present in standard video game play’ (Crawford, 2012: 34). Players watch at least as much as, but probably more than, interact with the game. Even the act of watching could be considered a form of interactivity and, undoubtedly, watching is an indissociable part of playing a video game.

The idea of video games as audienceless has always been weak, but now, there are powerful reasons to affirm that there is a vast and massive audience of video gamers. It is also noteworthy to mention that this video game audience goes beyond the specific, yet large, group of video gamers. According to a Google Consumer Survey (cited in Ramdurai) fielded in October 2014, only a 37% of a group of people who watched gaming videos on YouTube considered themselves gamers. Video game culture is reaching society as a whole. The fact that video games are starting to occupy a central position in the media, especially those that belong to the so called new information and communication technologies, is another argument to support the idea of the emergence and consolidation of video game culture.

Bibliography

Anderson, Benedict (2006). Imagined Communities. New York: Verso.
Crawford, Garry (2012). Video Gamers. London: Routledge.
Eskelinen, Markku and Tronstad, Ranghild (2003). ‘Video games and Configurative Performances’, in Wolf, Mark J. and Perron, Bernard (editors). The Video Game Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, 195-220.
Kirkpatrick, Graeme (2012). “Constitutive Tensions of Gaming’s Field: UK gaming magazines and the formation of gaming culture 1981-1995”, Game Studies, vol. 12, 1.
Newman, James (2002). “The Myth of the Ergodic Videogame. Some thoughts on player-character relationships in videogames”, Game Studies, vol 2, 1.

[An extended version of this post in Spanish can be found here at Zenhgames]

Videogames and Sociology: Twitter's pic of the day summary (41-45)

2014-12-15T18:12:00.003+00:00

This is the ninth round of Pic of the day RECAP (41-45). To understand what all of this is about, check out the original entry.

41 - Max Payne 3: There was always something rotten in the air

In one of the most wonderfully unsettling scenes in the history of TV series, an aged agent Cooper sits in the centre of the Red Room accompanied by The Man from Another Place (a dwarf in a red suit) and a ghostly Laura Palmer. Actually, it's not the most unnerving sequence of Twin Peaks, but in that weird dream-like state takes place a very chilling short conversation: "Where we're from, the birds sing a pretty song and there's always music in the air". Is this a metaphor of the fact that Laura Palmer lies in her grave? Are the birds the ones singing in the cemetery? Is the music in the air the cracking sound of the casket slowly collapsing under the weight of soil? When an also aged Max Payne pronounced those similar words, "there is always something rotten in the air", everything became crystalline. "Of course," I thought, "there are always music and something rotten in the air because we all are living in our own grave". And that grave is society.

42 - Moebius: Empire Rising: What exactly is my destiny?

Destiny is about the future. What will I be doing? With whom? Where? In sum, who I will be? Destiny is fate, ergo, it belongs to the realm of what remains uncertain. And uncertainty is a powerful emotion. It makes us anxious, restless, frightened. That's the reason why we keep asking the question to ourselves, even if we do it out loud in front of one of our peers. The question is aimed at us and we already know we can't answer it. But we keep trying, in the fond hope that its reverberation echoes through our daily life anxieties and helps us to overcome the deep feel of uncertainty that once was shallow but now is almost unbearable. What has this to do with sociology? Almost everything. A sociologist is, among other things but mainly, a tracker of destinies. The problem is we are better tracking actors' past and present destinies than the future ones. The real destinies are for fortune-tellers, prophets, groundhogs, meteorologists, peasants and, sometimes, for deputy directors and ministers for pensions.

43 - Arma III: Keep landing zone clear at all times

There are several reasons why we should keep a landing zone clear at all times. The main reason, though, seems to be pretty obvious: to avoid uncomfortable encounters between aircraft and whatever might be on the landing zone. However, the command falls into a paradox. If the landing zone must be clear at all times, how are aeroplanes and helicopters supposed to land on the designated area? In case they touched down, they would be occupying the landing zone and, here's the paradox, it wouldn't be clear anymore. Therefore, the landing zone is both a physical space where aircraft land and a symbolic one where there is the possibility of aircraft landing. When an actual plane lands, it uses the physical space, fulfilling (and destroying temporarily) the potentiality of the symbolic space. The social is quite similar, physical and symbolic at the same time, and full of paradoxes that sustain the fundamental fabric of what we call society, identity, meaning or individuality. Hence, keep the ground of the social clear at all times but don't forget to always occupy it as well.

44 - Catachresis: If only you were not under that veil

If only you were not under that veil. If only you were not so far away. In only you were not underground. If only you were not on the other side. If only you were not occupied. If only you were not afraid. If only you were not married. If only you were not a policeman. If only you were not dead. If only you were not saying if only at all times. All these are wishes that yearn for a particular reality to be different. They all have in common that are enunciated using a negative structure, wishing that things were not as they are right now. This reminds me of all those sociologists who are always projecting their wishes over reality, trying to get rid of those aspects they interpret as being a nuisance for their work. The most common metaphor used is that of the veil. These sociologists insist on unveiling what is behind the mask, erasing the layer that distorts the truth hidden by reality. It is surprising how these scholars haven't found yet that there is nothing beneath the veil; that reality is wide open and available to whomever wants to have a look.

45 - Injustice: God Among Us: But Let's think bigger

There is a global tendency in the circles of self-help gurus that encourage us to think always bigger. We live our meaningless and aimless lives without knowing that we could (and should) think bigger. Escape from one of Weber's worst fears, the iron cage in which we are confined nowadays. It might not be the Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare that he envisaged in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2003), too far to foresee the havoc created by financial capitalism and its neoliberal political rationalities, but it is still a symbolic prison, in the end, the worst kind of jail for an individual. Then, we think bigger, but after doing so, we are still inside the cage. What did we do wrong? Well, just focusing on the bigger picture is not enough. Sometimes it's good to think bigger; we must know the things that surround us can only be explained by other things that are somewhere else both in space and time. However, we should also think smaller: the iron cage exit is not beyond its bars, it's closer than we think, in the details. Those details that explain and make possible those big ideas. Once you master how to think bigger and smaller at the same time, only then, you will be free.

Previous entries:

Videogames & Sociology: Twitter's pic of the day summary (1-5)

Videogames & Sociology: Twitter's pic of the day summary (6-10)

Weber, Max (2003) [1905]. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Los Angeles: Roxbury.

The normalisation of video gaming

2014-12-05T19:27:00.000+00:00

Edited June 2019: as the 2014 ESA report has been removed from their website, I included the closest report available (2015) and changed the data accordingly. Thanks to Anna Gryshko for making me aware of this.

Today, I'm going to back up my hypothesis on the existence of a growing video game culture crunching some numbers that show how the act of video gaming is becoming a normalised activity.

One of the most notable indications that hints there is more than an incipient video game culture is the increasing numbers of people playing video games. It seems that more and more individuals, of different backgrounds, ages and gender, are becoming players (or at least have played once in their lives). Two examples of groups of population that are not usually linked to the generalised representations of video gamers can help me to introduce the debate.

In the first one, Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al. consider that the number of 'people who have never played a video game, from first graders to retirees, seem to be inexorably dwindling' (2008: 134). They illustrate their affirmation with a New York Times article in which the author (Schiesel, 2007) explains how video games are being regularly played in compounds for retirees. A generation of people who did not grow up in a world where video games existed - not at least as a cultural relevant phenomenon - is entering in the dynamic of playing video games.

The second example emphasises the fact that women play more video games than men. Historically, research done in the 1980s and 1990s have suggested that women have been marginalised as video gamers (Crawford, 2012: 53), but in the last years it seems to have changed dramatically. The Guardian published the main findings of the research conducted by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) in the UK (Stuart, 2014), where they assert that women account for the 52% of gamers.

These two snapshots of how more people are playing video games regardless of their demographics, convey the idea that video gaming is not a subculture anymore and has become mainstream culture.

This growing tendency of video game culture sneaking into Western society households seems to be confirmed by more recent surveys. According to the Essential Facts about the Computer and Video Game Industry report of 2015 produced by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the most important video game industry association in the United States, the 42% of Americans play video games. In their report they also state that the 51% of American households own a dedicated game console. Other data of interest shows that the average game player is 35 years old, 44% of gamers are women, and 44% of video gamers are over the age of 35.

If we turn now to the data gathered by the UK Interactive Entertainment (Ukie), the principal video game industry association in the UK, it shows similar figures for the British households. In their UK Video Games Fact Sheet of 2014, which draws on various research reports from different sources, Ukie estimates that 55% of the United Kingdom population plays video games. Depending on the source cited, the distribution of male players and female players in the UK varies between 55% males-45% females and 48% males-52% females.

All the data points to the same facts: around half of people in Western countries play video games, the number of women who play games is almost the same as men, and even those who were not socialised in a video game culture have started to play video games. That would be the general portrait of video gamers, which quantitatively corroborates the hypothesis of an existing and growing video game culture.

However, the brush strokes are so vaguely defined that there is still a great deal of detail missed in that data. Not only do they tend to miss information about who plays what video game on what device - although in fairness some of the reports provide partial data on those issues, but there is also a lack of elaboration on critical aspects of their research. For instance, they define a video gamer as someone who has just played at least once in the last year or in the last six months. This approach quickly overlooks what the implications of that assumption in terms of identity and community construction are. This will be a topic which I will come back to in the future, because it directly affects the controversy about what a video gamer is and who belongs to the community of gamers.

In any case, those are not the only concerns that can be raised against this data. The fact that the ‘original sources are often poorly referenced’ (Crawford, 2012: 51) and that they seem to mix the information from different reports without taking into account the methodological differences between them does not help to figure out how to weight their importance and reliability. Being representatives of the video game industry, these organisations are expected to ‘convey a very particular image of video gaming as normal, social and healthy pursuit’ (Crawford, 2012: 51). In contrast, it can be argued that these organisations seek to accurately represent video gamers because they want to provide the best information for marketing reasons.

Even if the information selected is biased to stress the most spectacular figures in order to give a certain impression of the product they are trying to sell, it is still a valid information that tells us how video game culture has burst into our contemporary societies. Whether this is caused by the rise of new kinds of video games and platforms (the so called casual games, to be played on browsers, consoles like Nintendo Wii or Ouya, mobile phones and tablets) as it has been suggested by authors like Jesper Juul (2010) or by any other factors, the fact is the normalisation of video games and video gaming in our society is now an unavoidable reality:

Video games are becoming normal (...). The rise of casual games is the end of that small historical anomaly of the 1980s and 1990s when video games were played only by only a small part of the population (Juul, 2010: 20).

This is what Juul considers a casual revolution among the world of video games, which in the last years have reached - and keep reaching - a broader audience. The definitions of hardcore gamers and casual gamers will be deal with in other blog entries in order to explain how identities of video gamers are constructed, but it is important to recognise that the expansion of the universe of video games and video gamers is fundamental to understanding the constitution of video game culture: ‘Video games are fast becoming games for everyone’ (Juul, 2010: 152). And if video games are for everyone, that means they are an essential part of our society and not just a subset of it:

Certainly some gamers do seem to belong to a culture distinct from mainstream society. The term subculture, however, is too limited to adequately explain the broader world of games and game players that currently exists (Consalvo, 2007: 3).

All in all, the emergence and consolidation of video game culture in contemporary societies may be best reflected, though not solely, by the inexorable growth of different people playing video games regardless of their age, gender or social status. It is one of the most notable characteristics of this video game culture and is an important evidence of its normalisation in today’s world.

Bibliography

Crawford, Garry (2012). Video Gamers. London: Routledge.
Consalvo, Mia (2007). Cheating. Gaining Advantage in Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Simon; Smith, Jonas H.; Pajares Tosca, Susana (2008). Understanding Video Games. The Essential Introduction. New York: Routledge.
Entertainment Software Association (2015). Essential Facts about the Computer and Video Game Industry
Juul, Jesper (2010). A Casual Revolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Schiesel, Seth (2007). "Video Games Conquer Retirees" in New York Times
Stuart, Keith (2014). "UK gamers: more women play games than men, report finds" in The Guardian
UK Interactive Entertainment (2014). UK Video Games Fact Sheet

A definition of video game culture

2014-11-11T19:53:00.000+00:00

The fundamental premise on which this research project is based is the idea that there is a growing and already consolidated video game culture, which permeates our contemporary societies to a great extent and makes possible to think in terms of video gamer identities, subjectivities and communities. Obviously, this culture is part of broader social phenomena and transformations, such as the existence of digital culture, neo-liberal political rationalities and many other aspects of reality with regard to patterns of leisure, consumption and production in late capitalism. In any case, video game culture is an addition - it does not substitute other cultural forms - to other ‘cultures’ and social processes present in today’s world with which it intertwines in complex ways: expert culture, epistemic culture, knowledge society, risk society, network society and so on.

Let me attempt a practical definition of video game culture:

Video game culture is the institutionalisation of video game practices, experiences and meanings in contemporary societies, which places video games and video gaming not only in a central position among other cultural products but also traverses everyday life: an increasing number of people play video games and they are starting to be recognised as part of our social imaginary, enabling the construction of identities and communities based on them.

This definition shares Garry Crawford’s argument by which video gaming should be understood not as a simple isolated leisure activity, but as a 'culture which extends far beyond the sight of a video game machine or screen' (2012: 143). Crawford states that 'video gaming is not just the act of playing a game, but also a source of memories, dreams, conversations, identities, friendships, artwork, storytelling and so much more’ (2012: 143). That is the definition of culture I would like to apply to the universe of video games, understood in a broad sense as “a system of meaning” (Mäyrä, 2008: 13) as well as a set of social practices.

In this sense, the definition of culture I am looking for to describe video games as culture can be situated between the traditional holistic anthropological approach to the notion - almost everything that is produced by humankind - and the more restrictive humanistic one - a particular aspect of a society, usually what is understood as the high forms of culture and within the field of arts.

In its humanistic sense (the most restrictive), culture can be understood as that which is possessed after the effort made to take care of it. Culture distinguishes those who posses it from those who don’t. For the European elites of the 18th century, culture allowed the distinction between the Western European who have achieved the most remarkable human qualities and those, the poor and illiterate along with the non European, seen as primitive in their scale of progress (Berger, 1995: 15). This conceptualisation of culture is not useful for my research because it is too restrictive and discriminating.

In the turn to the 20th century, this ethnocentric usage of the voice ‘culture’ gave way to the traditional anthropological notion of culture, defined by Tylor - whose influence in the emergence and consolidation of anthropology is beyond doubt - in the following inclusive and universal terms:

Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society (Tylor, 1871: 1).

The problem with Tylor’s approach to culture is what Geertz points out: it is so eclectic that forces us to take all directions at the same time, what makes the concept impracticable from a theoretical and practical point of view (1973: 4-5). Even though I feel inclined to theorise video game culture in a broad sense, I agree with Mäyrä when applying those kinds of accounts:

If the concept of culture is taken in this broad and general sense, and applied as such directly into game studies, this can lead into a rather heavy-handed way to conceptualize ‘game culture’. (…) One could also certainly argue that games do not define our existence or place in a society in a way that belonging to a traditional ethnic culture, say Bantu or Inuit culture, defines the way of life and identity for those people. But games and game playing practices do have some significance for those people who are actively engaged with games (Mäyrä 2008: 23).

Mäyrä helps to delimit the notion of culture I want to attach to video games and the group of people who play them. In sum, he is defining culture as a set of shared experiences. If I blend this definition of culture - as shared experiences and meanings - and add other parts like those mentioned by Crawford above - which include certain social practices, I will have as a result the definition of video game culture.

I would not go as further as affirming that video game culture is the most important reality of the present century, but it would be difficult to understand it without its presence. There is no doubt that video game culture is part of and overlaps with other cultures and social processes, but it is still important in order to understand our society and, above all, provides the opportunity to study contemporary identities and social universes of meaning in a strongly framed and bounded way, as if it were an almost perfect sociological laboratory.

Bibliography

Berger, Bennett M. (1995). An Essay on Culture: Symbolic Structure and Social Structure. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Crawford, Garry (2012). Video Gamers. London: Routledge.
Geertz, Clifford (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Mäyrä, Frans (2008). An Introduction to Game Studies. London: Sage.
Tylor, Edward B. (1871). Primitive Culture: Researches Into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. London: John Murray.

[An extended version of this post in Spanish can be found here at Zenhgames]

Touching the heart of video gamers

2014-10-24T12:55:00.002+01:00

'What kind of impact would you like to have on the people who play your video games?' This is a question I have been posing lately in my interviews with developers within the video game industry. My aim is to understand what developers, who usually define themselves as gamers, are trying to achieve with their video games in terms of their influence on video gamers. I have found out that there is a similar pattern in their answers, which can be summarised in the following quote:

It's really hard to explain but it's just... if you can touch somebody's heart (...), if you read that last page or you get to the end of the movie or whatever, you just feel like you've really been touched somehow... I guess I just call that, you know, that there is heart in it and that's what I look in for when I'm able to put it into my work.

Actually, this cite does not come from my interviews; it's the answer that Jane Jensen, the famous video game designer and writer, gave to a question I put on Youtube's comments when they were streaming their launch party for the 20th anniversary edition of the video game Gabriel Knight. Here is the video fragment where she expresses her views on the subject (sorry for the quality of the video!):

In any case, it accurately represents most of the answers I've been receiving in my fieldwork. For instance, they speak about having the same impact on people that they had when they were growing up playing games, making people "emotionally accelerated to play the game", or delivering "powerful emotions" to players. It's all about affecting the individuals who will play their video games in a deep emotional way. At least, two main ideas can be developed from here.

Firstly, video game designers and developers seek to reproduce on others the emotional and meaningful impact they had in the past while they were playing other video games. All of them, without exception, define themselves as being gamers. Video games are a fundamental part of their identity. This means that, intentionally or not, they are participating in the reproduction of the gamer subjectivity, the gamer identity.

Secondly, this approach could be linked to a more general question with regard to the contemporary political rationalities of our time, as it is sustained by Nikolas Rose and other neo-Foucauldian theorists. I'm focusing on a specific consequence of the generalised neo-liberal political rationalities that traverse our today's societies, the ethico-politics:

Ethico-politics reworks the government of souls in the context of the increasing role that culture and consumption mechanisms play in the regulation of forms of life and identity and selftechniques (Rose, 1999: 188).

If ethico-politics are understood as the set of processes and methods through which it is possible "to shape the conduct of human beings by acting upon their sentiments, beliefs, and values" (Rose, 2007: 27), we will find ourselves in an epoch in which, in governmental terms, there is an explicit - though not necessarily intentional - approach to ethical, cultural and identity construction issues (which are not the outcome of other objectives any more: disciplinary - control of passions - or biopolitical - maximisation of the social forces).

In sum, gamers's identities are being addressed - whether they succeed or not - by designers within the video game industry in contemporary societies. There are many ways to allude to it: their soul, their emotions, their heart, their identity, their ethos. No matter what term is used, they all want to touch it, shape it, affect it. The debate on what a gamer is or how a gamer identity is constructed is officially open.

Bibliography

Rose, Nikolas (1999). Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rose, Nikolas (2007). The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

[An extended version of this post in Spanish can be found here at Deus Ex Machina]

Videogames and Sociology: Twitter's pic of the day summary (36-40)

2014-10-04T22:17:00.000+01:00

This is the eighth round of Pic of the day RECAP (36-40). To understand what all of this is about, check out the original entry.

36 - The Forest: I love my guts

This out of proportions love for himself might be interpreted in two, kind of related, ways: one in a metaphorical sense and the other as quite literal. According to the former, he may be referring to his determination and boldness. Who does not love the strength to face obstacles and rise to the challenges? But the guy is actually lying - presumably dead - on a table in the middle of a dark cave. If that careless daredevil attitude got him in there in first place, why would he love those stupid guts? However, if he is alluding to his actual guts - those that we can observe sprouting from his belly, that's, at best, ironic. If fact, everything is just based on a false premise: that the guts were in the T-shirt before they were pulled out. Just like society: did it exist before sociologists say it was there? There's an important difference, though. I would never say 'I love my society'.

37 - Free to Play: Gaming will be the death of you one day

If your aunt prophesies your death by the hand of gaming - and this happens in the film Free to Play (the prophecy, not his demise) - then you should start worrying (I would!). But since she doesn't specify what type of death awaits him, we can only speculate about it. Is it a social death? Gaming has traditionally been linked to social isolation, but lately, and Free to Play is a good example of this tendency, gaming has become mainstream. Is it a professional death? That's more likely, because if he wants to succeed in a eSports career, his time as a pro player will eventually come to an end. Nevertheless, he will still be able to work in other areas (related or not to gaming). Is it a final biological death? There have been reported some ludicrous deaths because of playing video games, but unless he spends more than two days in a row playing uninterruptedly while he solely drinks Mountain Dew (and, to be honest, we don't know if he actually does this), he's not going to die any time soon due to gaming. There is still one unexplored death. That of the inner self. The soul, say some. The subject, say others. In that case, he's already dead and is probably unaware of it.

38 - Faster Than Light: Intruders detected

No matter how far we are from our local coordinates, spatial and temporal, we will always make distinctions between us and the others, the local and the foreigner, our own and the outsiders. Groups, nations, countries, factions, communities, guilds, gangs... wherever and whenever a collective of individuals exists, there will always be people seen as the intruders, which are fundamental to the definition of the group: its constitutive outside.

39 - Penumbra - Black Plague: There cannot be one, there can only be us all

I never get tired of a good old agency-structure debate. Is the individual detached from society a possibility or is just an illusion, a trick played by the collective imagination that creates it? Is society just the outcome of the addition of several individuals or is it something greater than the sum of its 'parts'? What the hive - that collective mind - says in the video game Penumbra is true and false at the same time. We, the sociologists, have been fighting this war for more than a hundred years. Too many casualties, too many efforts to solve the problem. Giddens's structuration theory (1984), Bourdieu's theory that links habitus, field and capital (1998) or Berger and Luckmann's description on how social reality is constructed (1967) have been some interesting and, to certain extent, successful proposals to overcome this problem. I particularly like Latour's elegant approach: "the social possesses the bizarre property of not being made of agency or structure at all, but rather of being a circulating entity" (1999: 17).

40 - Far Cry: Stay low and avoid contact if possible

How many times have we been given this sort of advice? Stay low, don't stand out. Avoid contact, people are dangerous. Is the man lying motionless on his own blood one of those who tried to step out of line? What if he was the one who played by the book and the one holding the gun is the smart guy who didn't listen to the same old story? You can try to avoid contact, but reality is all about connections. No escape there. And sometimes, staying low is precisely what attract all that unwanted attention. Here's my tip: stay low if you are passing behind a low ceiling and avoid contact in case there are sparks coming from it or you see a politician reaching out his hand.

Previous entries:

Videogames & Sociology: Twitter's pic of the day summary (1-5)

Videogames & Sociology: Twitter's pic of the day summary (6-10)

Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas (1967). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Anchor.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1998). Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Giddens, Anthony (1984). The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Latour, Bruno (1999). “On recalling ANT” en Law, John y Hassard, John. Actor-Network Theory and after. Oxford: Blackwell, 15-25.

Diaries from The Forest (vol. 3): Shark Attack!

2014-09-24T14:00:00.002+01:00

This is the third volume of my particular Diaries from The Forest series. This is based on alpha 0.02. To know more about these diaries, please, have a look at the first and second volumes.

Shark Attack!
I decided to move quickly on this occasion. First collect some items around the wreckage and then move towards the beach. It worked perfectly in my mind, what could go wrong? So, I took some provisions, including two circuit boards from the plane (how can they possibly be useful on an island like this?).

I tried to hit a rabbit with a couple of tennis balls, but I missed. Not a proper way to catch animals, I think.

After that, I hit a rabbit with my axe. That seems to be a better way to secure food for myself.

I kept collecting things that I consider useful for my short-term future, i.e. some sticks.

I was headed to the beach once again. A sudden burst of painful memories came to me at that moment. I needed a couple of minutes to compose myself.

I saw a school of sharks in the distance. I decided to have a closer look.

While I was swimming carelessly, I spotted a turtle under the water. Do you know the difference between a turtle and a tortoise? A hint: this is a turtle. And it's in the water. But you can also see them wandering on the island. Walking on soil. I think you've already figured it out.

Out of the blue, a shark started to follow me. I thought it was amazing at first...

... and then I realised that it was coming closer very fast...

...extremely closer...

...

To my shame, I was devoured by a shark. It seems that I have a new enemy on the island. Days survived, 1.

It's interesting to see how PewDiePie - the most famous Youtuber - deals with the sharks in the following video:

Is the introduction of new actors in a game, even supporting ones, relevant enough to make a difference, to transform the global experience, to make people notice it?

An open letter to journal reviewers

2014-09-10T14:42:00.000+01:00

This time I'm not going to write about video games, not even sociology (at least not in a specific sense). I'm in angry sociologist mode and I would like to address my complains to all those journal reviewers/referees out there, including myself. You know, those people who, taking advantage of the blind review process - let me hold my laughter for a moment, become the jury, judge and - if it comes to that - executioner of your paper. It's going to be brief and I'll keep it simple. Here I go:

Journals usually don't let you submit articles containing more than 8000 words (some ask you for less, others might let you add a few more words). Keep that in mind when you are reviewing the text: it's an article, not a fucking PhD!
Remember that you are discussing the content of the article, not the works of the people who are cited in it. If you have a problem with them, go and tell them directly, don't use me as a scapegoat!
Suggest whatever you want to suggest but don't fucking patronise me. I'm a doctor! And if I weren't one, well, I wouldn't like to be patronised either!
Reviews are intended for evaluation purposes, it's not an excuse to show the world how much you know about the subject. Look for your own damn audiences!
The amount of articles published in high impact factor journals that are cited in the paper is NOT indicative of its quality. It's NOT that simple!
Don't you like the article? That's fair. Can you just reject the article politely and provide academic reasons that are exclusively related to the article? Even if you think the text is complete rubbish, you don't need to behave as a pretentious plonker. If not nice, be at least professional!

The rant stops here. Only temporarily. One last thing: if after reading this, you keep playing the idiotic reviewer role, here's what I have for you, courtesy of Phil Fish:

Videogames and Sociology: Twitter's pic of the day summary (31-35)

2014-09-05T20:24:00.002+01:00

This is the seventh round of Pic of the day RECAP (31-35). To understand what all of this is about, check out the original entry.

31 - Doom 3: That way

We are always compelled to behave in a certain manner by different forces (invisible or not). Some of them are subtle, like the smell of recently baked pies. Others are more direct, like a panel in a road which gently reminds you that your speed is being checked by radar. Of course, there are those that are extremely persuasive, like the one we are able to see in the picture: an armed soldier telling us that we must go that way. He doesn't even sweeten his mandate a little bit with a "would you mind..." or a similar grammatical construction that could show a shred of politeness. We're talking about power here. In Foucaldian terms, conduct of the conduct. The most interesting thing of Foucault's notion of power, apart from its relational nature and its link to knowledge, is that there wouldn't be power without freedom. Power exists because you have the chance of not following what is asked of you (directly or indirectly). In fact, if you have a gun pointed at your head, that's hardly a power relationship (although you still have the freedom to cry "shoot!"). When someone does something after having the opportunity to do several other things, then, my friend, that's power.

32 - Papers, please: Papers, please

Speaking of power, let's talk about the power of inscriptions. According to Latour, who initially borrowed the notion from Derrida, inscription is "a general term that refers to all the type of transformations through which an entity becomes materialized into a sign, an archive, a document, a piece of paper, a trace. Usually, (…) inscriptions are two dimensional, superimposable and combinable" (1999: 306). I could write words and more words on inscriptions and their importance in life in general and in science in particular. However, I will focus on the particular transformation that entails ID documents such as passports, work permits, visas, national identity cards or driving licences. What do they all have in common? They're papers (well, some of them are more plastic than paper but that doesn't matter here), yes, but very specific ones: they all translate an entity - your body, your life, your skills, in sum, your identity - into a bidimensional document. It's all there: when you were born, your sex, your name, your address, your likeness, your marital status, your occupation, your ability to drive, to work, to reside. But like any other kind of translation, there is not just a simple correspondence between what is being translated (basically, you) and the translation (the inscription). Everything is transformed in the process. Don't you believe me? Play Papers, please or just try to enter in a foreign country without the required documentation. After all, if those papers are just a plain translation of you, and you're already there, why should you need anything else? And then it's when you start thinking that your body, your identity, yourself might be actually the translation of those inscriptions.

33 - Fez: Reality is perception

Fez is, among other things, about the reality of the real. If we state that reality is perception, we are suggesting that reality is, at least to a certain extent, what we think reality is and not what is just out there. This sounds like ontology to me. But far from the philosophical debates in which the notion of ontology is born, I prefer to use a more practical definition. For instance, García Selgas considers that what "allows us to talk about ontology is not the aspiration of drawing the being of things, but the acknowledgement that every scientific theory entails a specific model of what it deals with" (2003: 29). Substitute "scientific theory" for "theory" or just "personal perception" and, voilà, you are there. Nevertheless, remember that perception is just that, an assumption of what reality is, not reality itself (if there's any). Be specially careful with walls, gravity, policemen, boundaries, grumpy old people, wet floors, and other regular impersonations of the real. Don't go wild just because it's all about perception.

34 - Outlast: Witness

Witness. Is the word written in blood referring to the noun or the verb? If it's the former, who is the witness, that dead guy sitting on the loo? In that case, is that bloody graffiti trying to convey the message the dead of the witness? But is it referring to that particular witness or the witness as a social figure? That would be an interesting interpretation: the witness, a dead body with his head between his legs, is lost in one of the darkest corners of reality, those of its wastes. He's not witnessing any more. And if there is no witness to observe the events that are happening in reality, who would produce narratives of them? Will they stop happening because there is no one watching? Even though this might be seen as a creepy scenario, in my opinion, there would be a more unsettling one: that it is a verb, an imperative: "witness!". You would be situated in the position of the witness, forced to watch and trusted with the responsibility to give testimony when the time comes. And there is no bleaker situation than witnessing the end of witnesses.

35 - Gone Home: You can do better

You can do better, you can always do better. But what about doing worse? Because there is also always space for doing things far worse. Would we say things like "I try hard but it doesn't get any worse"? Or should we say something like "I don't try anything at all but things keep improving"? It might seem odd, but there are a few reasons why we should try doing things worse, at least as an experiment. One of them would be to prove we are in control of things: if you are not able to worsen what you did before, this could mean that your achievements are due to external factors and not as a product of your determination and expertise. Another reason would be to look more human and less conceited. Because nobody wants to hear that they are too good to be true (unless they're in a song). And finally, probably the most important reason to do worse: to do better later on. In the end, worse and better only make sense in relation to each other.

Previous entries:

Videogames & Sociology: Twitter's pic of the day summary (1-5)

Videogames & Sociology: Twitter's pic of the day summary (6-10)

García Selgas, Fernando J. (2003). “Hacia una ontología de la fluidez social”, Política y Sociedad, 40 (1): 27-55.
Latour, Bruno (1999). Pandora's Hope. Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.

The Groundhog Day effect in video games

2014-08-25T21:28:00.001+01:00

Have your ever had that feeling of being repeating the same actions over and over again in a video game? I'm not speaking about the same set of mechanics within a game (which, in fact, can also make you feel that way), but repeating the very same actions and killing/collecting/running through the same enemies/items/corridors. Dark Souls, for instance, could be seen as the paradigm of this particular Groundhog Day effect, but almost in every game you have the chance to feel it. Here's an example of this kind of experience based on Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (in the last attempt almost got it, or that's what I thought, but at the end I failed miserably - once again):

Another good example would be Gods Will Be Watching. Actually , all the game is designed with that idea in mind, you fail and repeat all the time. An endless and painful trial and error process. Even the mechanics are designed to be repetitive, day after day, task after task. You can only manage contextual menus to perform the actions required to progress in the game in a turn-based game. It can be frustrating, but that's the core mechanic of the game: learning the proper strategy, the adequate sequence of actions. Somehow, it makes you keep trying and trying again until you succeed. If you're patient enough, obviously.

The interesting thing is how the mechanics merge into the narrative during the game. Near the end, you realise that all this Groundhog Day vibe is justified and is a fundamental part of the story (and also explains why some characters reappeared even if they were dead, well, sort of). There are random events in the game, little variations that echo through the continuum space-time, but it's always the same situations, performing the same actions.

Is this Groundhog Day effect frustrating? It is, indeed. But why do we keep trying? Do we pursue the temporary relief experienced after overcoming a groundhog-day's segment, even if we know it's just a question of time to bump into the next one? Is it all about a sense of achievement or of a controlled safety? This makes me return to known subjects that are constantly appearing in my research: are video games interactive experiences used for a temporary escapism (the exceptional) or do they belong to the mundane activities we carry out in our daily lives (the ordinary)? On the one hand, video games can be seen as breaks from reality, the quotidian one, because they let us experience unique universes - fantastic or realistic - in which we momentarily detach ourselves from what surrounds us. On the other hand, video games have been integrated into everyday life as part as the many actions, including dull tasks, we carry out on a regular basis.

What happens when these two situations are closely intertwined in the same experience? In other words, what happens when the Groundhog Day effect makes an appearance? Are we escaping from the monotonous aspects of everyday life just to enter into another land of repetitiveness? Are this repetitive quests and actions reassuring in some way? Is this effect that, sooner or later, we all feel playing video games what makes them exceptional? How do we know we're playing any more? Are video games subverting their own playful nature?

I have recently come across Twelve Minutes, a video game in development that its main mechanic seems to be principally based on the Groundhog Day effect:

TWELVE MINUTES is a top down “point-and-click” adventure game in real-time. You are doomed to live the same twelve minutes inside your apartment unless you use your knowledge of what is going to happen in order to change the outcome and break the loop.

This means, along with the other examples mentioned, video games are starting to include, more or less explicitly, the Groundhog Day effect as part of their core mechanics, logic and narrative. They're playing with it. Subverting the subversion?

[An extended version of this post in Spanish can be found here at Deus Ex Machina]