Foundations of Digital Games Paper
I submitted a paper and a scholarship app for the Foundations of Digital Games conference on a Disney cruise ship. My paper is part of my larger ideas about how games work as a medium, but it basically says that to have effective emotion, games mechanical structure must mirror the narrative structure. This explains, in my opinion, both a lot of the limitations of the medium people talk about as well as giving an idea of how to combat the problem. Right now the technology of games isn’t being used to create mechanical depth as much as it could be; advances in graphics and AI don’t necessarily mean deeper interaction. And the deeper interaction needed for emotion is not what consumers want, partly because of the difficulty of learning deep mechanics that aren’t natural and partly because movies and books serve the narrative niche video game makers all say they want to expand into. So, to avoid the problem altogether, people make cutscenes to partition game from narrative. Half-life was an important shift in attitude, but noone has really capitalized on it to create a deeply narrative game rather than one that is simply atmospheric.
I use horror games as my example because the connection is obvious: a scary monster in a movie appears scary and threatens the main character (whom we have empathy/sympathy/identification for/with) to create effective tension, whereas in a game the monster must both appear scary and be scary in game mechanical terms. A zombie with 1 hit point will not create fear in the player.
When I talk about limitations in the interactive medium I mean how do you describe love in game mechanical terms. The very nature of games is dependent on the fact that we know what is happening isn’t real (read Rules of Play if you haven’t already), but the model we have to work with is. Since interaction is a property of real life shared with games, and games always hang on their unreality, game interactions have to hit a narrow sweet spot to generate emotion. Games are too concrete to be metaphorical. More realistic graphics can make this problem worse. It’s kind of ironic that fantasy and science fiction have so dominated the medium when it is the medium most true to life in many ways. Of course escapism is the reason we play games rather than live life, but there’s room for documentary, real drama, and real meaning once we open up the play space and explore the multitude of possible interactions.