Game Aesthetics
(c.2002)
Malone's research has been influential, and is useful from both a design point of view and as a checklist for analysis, but his taxonomy is insensitive to players' aesthetic preferences. Myers (1990c), by contrast, developed Malone's work, using questionnaires (Q-methodology) with a sample of 44 gamers, to identify dominant aesthetics in the subjects' favourite video games. As the basis for his questions, Myers uses four criteria: challenge, curiosity, fantasy and interactivity (and their opposites: ease of play; realism; familiarity; and stability/constancy). He sorts players' responses into five principal “factor arrays”: the game as a new challenge (skill building); the game as a pleasant, non-threatening social diversion; the game as meditative withdrawal; the game as an enemy; and the game as a new challenge (skill-proving). He suggests that the three most common aesthetics are: the “game as challenge, subcategorised as (a) game providing a challenging opponent (game as referee) and (b) game being a challenging opponent (game as enemy)”; the “game as meditation”; and the “game as social activity (more common in video than home computer games)” (p. 385).
The dominant aesthetic in the above accounts are based on skill mastery, and certainly:
many investigators have concluded that the appeal [of video games] rests in challenges to improve one's skills, to attain a higher level of game complexity, to persist in the face of obstacles and setbacks, to exceed one's own or some other target of excellence. (Durkin, 1995, pp. 16-7)
A sense of development, accumulation and mastery is evident in many elements of game structure: the use of high scores, levels, quests and bonuses; and step-by-step increases in pace, the difficulty of opponents and levels, and the power of characters. These intrinsically motivating aspects of gameplay are amenable to Wallace's (1999) use of “operant conditioning,” in that the placement, timing and scale of problems and rewards determine the continued interest of the player.
More generally, Turkle (1984) argues that young children quickly develop concerns with “domination, ranking, testing, proving oneself” (p. 58) whose roots are “aggressive, passionate and eroticized” (p. 59). In this respect, the tendency towards skill development and mastery may be related to the predominantly male demographic of video games (Anderson & Ford, 1987; Cacha, 1983; Chambers & Ascione, 1987; Cooper & Mackie, 1986; Dominick, 1984; Eysenck & Nias, 1978; Graybill, Kirsch & Esselman, 1985; Kaplan, 1983; Kaplan & Kaplan, 1981; McClure & Mears, 1984). Indeed, Skirrow (1990) uses Melanie Klein's (1932) psychoanalytic theories about the relationship between infants and their mother's bodies to argue that gameplay is a masculine discourse that includes:
a reactivation of infantile feelings triggered by the games, and, partly, perhaps, the attractions of masochism. . . . Continuing to perform in the game . . . is the same as continuing to live. When you stop you die” (p. 331).
For Skirrow, an internalised anxiety about an unreal danger, understood in terms of castration anxiety, is externalised with the embodiment of the “penis-as-magic-wand” (p. 331). Kinder (1991) similarly argues that “the repetitive, segmented, serial nature” (p. 110) of game narratives, during which players are “constantly threatened by short circuiting and premature deaths” (p. 111), “leads to a disavowal of obsolescence, castration and death” (p. 110). For both Skirrow and Kinder, then, the increasing mastery of the typically male protagonist is a pre-emptive attempt to protect the male ego, or phallus, from annihilation or diminution.
Turkle (1984) argues that young players appreciate the consistency of the strictly “rule-governed worlds” (p. 77) of games, and in many respects a game functions as an opponent whose strategies are gradually learnt and mastered. Myers (1990a) and Friedman (1995), following game designer Chris Crawford (1984), argue that video games reveal their constructedness more than other media. Friedman (1995) observes that:
Learning and winning . . . a computer game is a process of demystification: One succeeds by discovering how the software is put together. The player molds his or her strategy through trial-and-error experimentation to see “what works”-which actions are rewarded and punished. (p. 82)
In short, video games, being “simulated, rule-driven worlds” (Turkle, 1984, p. 74), allow players to discover, or demystify, their inner workings, rules, “secrets,” and “logic structures” and, ultimately, how they are “put together” (Kirksaether, 1998, p. 82). Indeed, Wertheim (1999) argues that:
[the adventure game] Adventure may be seen as a metaphor for computing itself. During the game, players cracked the code of this virtual world in much the same way that a hacker would crack the code of a computer operating system. (p. 246)
Herz (1997) similarly observes that: “charting out subterranean passages and dead ends is pretty much analogous to mapping out a circuit or debugging a piece of code (p. 11). Unlike print or film texts, then, a game may be replayed until the structure of the software has been apprehended, and manuals, magazines, and other game accessories help players expose this structure.
Nonetheless, Friedman (1995) overstates the importance of “demystification” when he argues: “the moment [a game] is no longer interesting is the moment when all its secrets have been discovered” (p. 82). He implies one over-riding gaming genre, style or aesthetic of (explorative) mastery, when games are inherently repetitive and allow for replay. Object-event sequences, including enemy activities, are often randomised, and in multi-player games the demystification necessarily extends to the strategies of another player. Unless one is capable of plotting in real-time all factors that determine randomisation in a video game, or another player's strategy is completely understood and predictable, total mastery is impossible. Even Malone (also see Provenzo, 1991 and Wallace, 1999) observes that game appeal is influenced by the degree of randomness, and Chandler (1994) writes:
most good games are not solely a test of skill, but offer an element of chance which can encourage those who less confident of their current level of playing skill. Children, I would suggest, are well aware of this feature, and many prefer games in which they can blame luck for their failures. (¶ 18)
So while some players like “testing their worth” against an unforgiving machine, others dislike the rigidity of strictly rule-governed domains, finding it an “intolerable. . . pressure, . . . a taunt, a put-down” (Turkle, 1984, p. 86).
Competition between players may provide a context for challenge and mastery, but the social dimensions of video games may constitute a distinctive aesthetic. Provenzo (1991) argues that arcade gaming constituted a sub-culture that was one of the “great equalizers of youth culture because [they] allow[ed] an eight year-old to approach a fifteen-year-old and discuss something as peers” (p. x). Other research (Lepper, 1985; Mitchell, 1985) has indicated that video games may promote filial interaction when youth play within the family environment and talk about games with their parents. Unfortunately, early arcade culture was lost with the transformation of arcades into sanitised places where parents were encouraged to leave their children in shopping malls (Herz, 1997). However, games still may be played with friends or family; shared knowledge of video games still provides a basis for social interaction; and Local Area Network (LAN) parties and game conventions are contemporary spaces for collective gameplay. The problem is that much of the recent research on computer-mediated communities has tended to focus on specialised PC-users, notably those who use Multi-User Dungeons (or MUDs) (see Baym, 1995; Beaubien, 1996; Chesebro & Bonsall, 1989; Curtis, 1996; Dery, 1994; Foster, 1997; Jones, 1995, 1998a, 1988b; Kim, 2000; Kolko & Reid, 1998; Kollock & Smith, 1999; Porter, 1997; Stone, 1995; Rheingold, 1991; Strate, Jacobson & Gibson, 1996; Wilbur, 1997).
Video games may also serve a social function without other players. Selnow (1984) has argued that children may regard the game itself as “a kind of surrogate companion and their interactions with the games as social interactions” to the extent that the game becomes an “electronic friend” (p. 58). Turkle (1984) argues that video games offer a form of useful escape for disabled children, and online interaction especially allows disabled children social interaction otherwise denied them. Wallace (1999) makes a more general argument that it “is hard for any humdrum reality to compete with [the worlds of video games], especially for people whose lives are troubled by low self-esteem, boredom, lack of social support, or unsatisfactory personal relationships” (p. 172). Video games, then, offer a compensatory sense of achievement, autonomy and self-esteem (Greenfield, 1984; Nelson & Carlson, 1986; Turkle, 1984). However, some children may feel “cut off” when they finish a game (Turkle, 1984, p. 66), and it is possible that too much control over a game world may lead children to be impatient with a less obeisant real world (Sheingold, cited in Greenfield, 1984, p. 114).
While mastery and social interaction may play important roles in the aesthetics of gameplay, the experience of identification, immersion and agency is of equal importance. The departure point for early theorists concerned with these experiences was television (Durkin, 1995, 1999; Greenfield, 1984; Turkle, 1984). Greenfield (1984) argued that both TV and video games have a visual appeal, and that their moving images especially appeal to young viewers (p. 88-90). Indeed, for her, familiarity with TV is one reason why children respond so readily to video games. For Stallabras (1996), by contrast, video games are distinguished from other media by their use of interaction: “the passivity of cinema and television is displaced by an environment in which the player's actions have a direct, immediate consequence on the virtual world” (p. 85). However, Greenfield (1984), Turkle (1984), Skirrow (1990), and Kinder (1991) argue that what is truly distinctive about video games is that they combine a passive mode of spectatorship associated with cinema and television with more active modes of participation and interaction. For Skirrow (1990), the “‘audience' disappears as a distinction between ‘doer' and ‘viewer'” (p. 330), and the enigmas for the performer are of the order of “Where am I?” rather than “Who am I?”
Durkin argues that, compared with TV and film, video game players “do not feel a strong sense of identification with the characters” (1999, p. 129), and he leaves open the question as to whether there are less behavioural effects in games. Fuller and Jenkins (1995) similarly note that, compared with print and film texts, identification with characters in video games is limited because characters tend not to have psychological depth:
Characters play a minimal role, displaying traits that are largely capacities for action: fighting skills, modes of transportation, preestablished goals. . . . Activity drains away the character's strength, as measured by an ever shifting graph at the top of the screen, but it cannot build character, since these figures lack even the most minimal interiority. (p. 61)
Skirrow (1990) is even more critical, stating that: “for the performer of a game the first and third person are almost totally identified, so there can be no suspense based on knowing more (having seen more) than the protagonist who represents you” (p. 330). The major objection to such accounts is that the characters in many print and film texts do not necessarily offer more psychological depth than the average video game character. We cannot judge video games solely on the basis of their status as a medium, since a video game with a complex narrative and detailed characterisation may offer more depth than a poorly written novel. In this respect, the above accounts ignore the distinctiveness of video games by evaluating them in terms of other media.
A s Turkle notes, in a video game: “you have to do more than identify with a character on the screen. You must act for it. Identification through action has a special kind of hold” (1984, p. 79). The issue, then, is how “identification through action” creates a distinctive hold. Friedman (1995) observes that in earlier simulations, like Civilization (1991), one identified principally with a leader from a particular culture or historical period, such as Genghis Khan, indicating a straightforward identification with the role of a leader. However, in more recent simulations like SimCity (1989) there is a “constant shifting of identificatory positions depending on whether one is buying land, organizing the police force, paving the roads, or whatever” (p. 85). Yet simply “attempting to map ‘roles' onto the player's on-screen identification misses the point” (p. 85) since:
overarching these functional shifts . . . is a more general state of identification: with the city as a whole, as a single organism. . . .[or] a process. . . . ‘Losing oneself' in a computer game means, in a sense, identifying with the simulation itself. (pp. 84-85)
Friedman concludes that the player does not simply identify with a role:
the player forms a symbiotic circuit with the computer, a version of the cyborgian consciousness described by Donna Haraway (1985) in her influential “Manifesto for Cyborgs.” The computer comes to feel like an organic extension of one's consciousness, and the player may feel like an extension of the computer itself. (1995, p. 83)
The term “cyborg” is, of course, a contraction of “cybernetic organism”: a synthesis of the technological and biological. This is usually understood in terms of the physical augmentation of humans with technology, but in practice a cyborg is any being that forms a cybernetic relationship—a dynamic, self-regulating, and homeostatic (information) feedback system—that incorporates both organic and non-organic material (Gray, 1995). This means that a person need not be physically fused with a computer to be a cyborg—any causal relationship with technology, such as the feedback loops that occur during gameplay, suffices for the term to apply. Therefore Friedman (1995) could be read as simply referring to the psychological experience of this relationship.
The problem is that Haraway (1985) sees cyborgs as subverting traditional boundaries between physical/non-physical, self/body, human/machine, and thereby creating post-, proto-, and/or non-human beings. On this basis she sees cyborgs as a polemical metaphor for the subversion of all binary systems, including male/female, which presume a primary term. Theorists of computer-mediated communities, including virtual reality, sometimes seem to conflate the literal and metaphorical meanings of the term, implying that cyborgs are inherently subversive or revolutionary (see Featherstone & Burrows, 1995; Gray, 1995; Haraway, 1985; Helsel & Roth, 1991; Reid, 1994; Stone, 1995; Strate, Jacobson & Gibson, 1996; Wolmark, 1999). However, to claim that the cybernetic relationship is inherently subversive is to fall back on essentialism, when it should be obvious that a cybernetic relationship may be read in different ways. Players may simply see the game as a tool and experience immersion without any sense that their humanity, or any other aspect of their identity, has been altered. It suffices to suggest that, in either its literal or metaphorical form, the term “cyborg” only offers a limited account of the relationships between players and their games.
Turkle (1986) provides a more useful departure point when she argues that what players pursue in their interactions with video games is an “altered state,” described less in terms of books and TV than by metaphors taken from “sports, sex or meditation” (p. 60):
Call it ‘muscle memory,' call it ‘flow,' call it ‘trusting your instincts' – the experience of feeling a continuity between mind and body is part of the inner game of any well-played sport. Skilled video game players experience this immediacy of knowing their game with more than their head, and the experience is exhilarating. (p. 81)
An account of such altered states can be found in Csikszentmihalyi's (1975, 1990, 1993) description of “flow.” For Csikszentmihalyi (1975, 1990, 1993), “flow” is “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it” (p. 4). Csikszentmihalyi (1993) identifies eight dimensions of flow: clear goals and immediate feedback; a balance of challenge and skill; the merging between consciousness and one's activity; a high degree of focus; the loss of self-consciousness; an altered sense of time; and an autotelic quality. The flow state, then, is facilitated when there is sufficient challenge to stimulate the individual beyond their normal level of effort: too much challenge creates anxiety, too little creates boredom, and in this respect flow may be seen in terms of an appropriate schedule of reinforcement (Loftus and Loftus, 1983; Wallace, 1999). It can be argued that play has been increasingly identified with—or is seen at its most optimal when players enter—a state of “flow.” In this context, the problem with the term “play” is that it often refers to an activity which may be characterised as an ongoing attempt to (re-)enter the ideal of play: a state of flow that is totally absorbing and gratifying to the ego. Furthermore, while it is useful to analyse how games produce flow experiences, the fact that there are different metaphors for “altered” or “flow” states suggests that it may be better to turn away from generalisations about some universal, ineffable state and attempt to distinguish different types, or qualities, of immersion.
As Murray (1997) argues, “immersion” is “a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water” and what people seek from “a psychologically immersive experience” is:
the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different as water is from air, that takes all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus. We enjoy the movement out of our familiar world, the feeling of alertness that comes from being in this new place, and the delight that comes from learning to move through it. (pp. 98-99)
Murray traces the distinctive qualities of immersion to the “procedural,” “participatory,” “spatial” and “encyclopaedic” characteristics of the computer as a medium. She argues that the computer is procedural in the sense that: “it was designed not to carry static information but to embody complex, contingent behaviors” (p. 72); in short, it is an engine of computation that operates according to programmable rules. The computer is participatory in the sense that it is “responsive to our input” (p. 74), and, for Murray , the notion of “interaction,” applied to computers, refers to an environment “that is both procedural and participatory” (p. 74).
The spatial qualities of the computer are also distinctive because, unlike “linear media such as books,” the computer does not simply represent space in verbal or pictorial form; it represents “navigable space” that users can “move through” (Murray, 1997, p. 79). Indeed, “the computer's spatial quality is created by the interactive process of navigation” (p. 80), in that computers not only calculate spatial representations from a player's perspective, they do so dynamically, in real-time. Lastly, Murray argues that computers are encyclopaedic, in the sense that they can store so much information, making them more capable of representing a procedural, participatory, and spatial world , not just in terms of visual detail, but also scope and dynamics. This encyclopaedic quality provides a basis for “epic-scale narrative” (p. 84), evident in online role-playing games (p. 86) that allow multiple players to create and share occupancy in a developing game world. For Murray , the combination of the spatial and encyclopaedic elements with the procedural and participatory elements is what provides the aesthetic experiences of immersion and the related experience of “agency,” that is, the sense of entering a navigable virtual space and seeing the consequences of one's actions in the virtual world.
It must be emphasised that while full sensory immersion is the ideal of Virtual Reality (see Heim, 1993), video games only offer limited physical immersion, ranging from the wrestling, slapping and kicking of the joystick or cabinet with arcade games to the less physically taxing interaction with a PC game's keyboard and mouse controls. Darley (2000) argues that most video games offer a heightened form of “kinaesthesia”: “the illusion of control and agency in real time and in a realistic looking (and behaving) environment [italics added]” (p. 154). For him: “deliberation is minimal – once the game is under way the player is compelled continually and immediately to respond” (p. 156). Skirrow (1986) has similarly observed that video games often produce a sense of immediacy and danger that leads to “crisis management” (p. 331), and Turkle (1984) has emphasised the importance of survival, in that, in many games, “one false move [and] you're dead” (p. 79). The low tolerance for error in a context of high stakes fosters an increasing level of attention and a more intense or immersive altered state. In this respect, the reflexive and frenzied character of interaction in many video games may compensate for absent sensory channels. However, video games do not necessarily emulate other media and so cannot be seen as merely compensatory. As Murray (1997) argues, they generate their own aesthetics through creative experimentation with their constraints.
Video game aesthetics can be usefully distinguished by accounting for the cognitive and/or sensorimotor demands they make of players and the extent to which these make play more engaging. Malone (1984), building upon Papert's (1980) work, identified four categories of elements which he argued were characteristic of “intrinsically motivating” games: first, the existence, clearness, accessibility and meaningfulness of goals; second, the importance of uncertain outcomes through the use of variable difficulty levels, multiple goal levels, randomness, and hidden information; third, an emotionally appealing fantasy that was intrinsically related to skills learned and provided a useful metaphor; and, fourth, curiosity, both sensory (audio and visual effects, as decoration, as enhancing fantasy, as a reward, and as a representation system) and cognitive (surprises and constructive feedback).
Malone's research has been influential, and is useful from both a design point of view and as a checklist for analysis, but his taxonomy is insensitive to players' aesthetic preferences. Myers (1990c), by contrast, developed Malone's work, using questionnaires (Q-methodology) with a sample of 44 gamers, to identify dominant aesthetics in the subjects' favourite video games. As the basis for his questions, Myers uses four criteria: challenge, curiosity, fantasy and interactivity (and their opposites: ease of play; realism; familiarity; and stability/constancy). He sorts players' responses into five principal “factor arrays”: the game as a new challenge (skill building); the game as a pleasant, non-threatening social diversion; the game as meditative withdrawal; the game as an enemy; and the game as a new challenge (skill-proving). He suggests that the three most common aesthetics are: the “game as challenge, subcategorised as (a) game providing a challenging opponent (game as referee) and (b) game being a challenging opponent (game as enemy)”; the “game as meditation”; and the “game as social activity (more common in video than home computer games)” (p. 385).
The dominant aesthetic in the above accounts are based on skill mastery, and certainly:
many investigators have concluded that the appeal [of video games] rests in challenges to improve one's skills, to attain a higher level of game complexity, to persist in the face of obstacles and setbacks, to exceed one's own or some other target of excellence. (Durkin, 1995, pp. 16-7)
A sense of development, accumulation and mastery is evident in many elements of game structure: the use of high scores, levels, quests and bonuses; and step-by-step increases in pace, the difficulty of opponents and levels, and the power of characters. These intrinsically motivating aspects of gameplay are amenable to Wallace's (1999) use of “operant conditioning,” in that the placement, timing and scale of problems and rewards determine the continued interest of the player.
More generally, Turkle (1984) argues that young children quickly develop concerns with “domination, ranking, testing, proving oneself” (p. 58) whose roots are “aggressive, passionate and eroticized” (p. 59). In this respect, the tendency towards skill development and mastery may be related to the predominantly male demographic of video games (Anderson & Ford, 1987; Cacha, 1983; Chambers & Ascione, 1987; Cooper & Mackie, 1986; Dominick, 1984; Eysenck & Nias, 1978; Graybill, Kirsch & Esselman, 1985; Kaplan, 1983; Kaplan & Kaplan, 1981; McClure & Mears, 1984). Indeed, Skirrow (1990) uses Melanie Klein's (1932) psychoanalytic theories about the relationship between infants and their mother's bodies to argue that gameplay is a masculine discourse that includes:
a reactivation of infantile feelings triggered by the games, and, partly, perhaps, the attractions of masochism. . . . Continuing to perform in the game . . . is the same as continuing to live. When you stop you die” (p. 331).
For Skirrow, an internalised anxiety about an unreal danger, understood in terms of castration anxiety, is externalised with the embodiment of the “penis-as-magic-wand” (p. 331). Kinder (1991) similarly argues that “the repetitive, segmented, serial nature” (p. 110) of game narratives, during which players are “constantly threatened by short circuiting and premature deaths” (p. 111), “leads to a disavowal of obsolescence, castration and death” (p. 110). For both Skirrow and Kinder, then, the increasing mastery of the typically male protagonist is a pre-emptive attempt to protect the male ego, or phallus, from annihilation or diminution.
Turkle (1984) argues that young players appreciate the consistency of the strictly “rule-governed worlds” (p. 77) of games, and in many respects a game functions as an opponent whose strategies are gradually learnt and mastered. Myers (1990a) and Friedman (1995), following game designer Chris Crawford (1984), argue that video games reveal their constructedness more than other media. Friedman (1995) observes that:
Learning and winning . . . a computer game is a process of demystification: One succeeds by discovering how the software is put together. The player molds his or her strategy through trial-and-error experimentation to see “what works”-which actions are rewarded and punished. (p. 82)
In short, video games, being “simulated, rule-driven worlds” (Turkle, 1984, p. 74), allow players to discover, or demystify, their inner workings, rules, “secrets,” and “logic structures” and, ultimately, how they are “put together” (Kirksaether, 1998, p. 82). Indeed, Wertheim (1999) argues that:
[the adventure game] Adventure may be seen as a metaphor for computing itself. During the game, players cracked the code of this virtual world in much the same way that a hacker would crack the code of a computer operating system. (p. 246)
Herz (1997) similarly observes that: “charting out subterranean passages and dead ends is pretty much analogous to mapping out a circuit or debugging a piece of code (p. 11). Unlike print or film texts, then, a game may be replayed until the structure of the software has been apprehended, and manuals, magazines, and other game accessories help players expose this structure.
Nonetheless, Friedman (1995) overstates the importance of “demystification” when he argues: “the moment [a game] is no longer interesting is the moment when all its secrets have been discovered” (p. 82). He implies one over-riding gaming genre, style or aesthetic of (explorative) mastery, when games are inherently repetitive and allow for replay. Object-event sequences, including enemy activities, are often randomised, and in multi-player games the demystification necessarily extends to the strategies of another player. Unless one is capable of plotting in real-time all factors that determine randomisation in a video game, or another player's strategy is completely understood and predictable, total mastery is impossible. Even Malone (also see Provenzo, 1991 and Wallace, 1999) observes that game appeal is influenced by the degree of randomness, and Chandler (1994) writes:
most good games are not solely a test of skill, but offer an element of chance which can encourage those who less confident of their current level of playing skill. Children, I would suggest, are well aware of this feature, and many prefer games in which they can blame luck for their failures. (¶ 18)
So while some players like “testing their worth” against an unforgiving machine, others dislike the rigidity of strictly rule-governed domains, finding it an “intolerable. . . pressure, . . . a taunt, a put-down” (Turkle, 1984, p. 86).
Competition between players may provide a context for challenge and mastery, but the social dimensions of video games may constitute a distinctive aesthetic. Provenzo (1991) argues that arcade gaming constituted a sub-culture that was one of the “great equalizers of youth culture because [they] allow[ed] an eight year-old to approach a fifteen-year-old and discuss something as peers” (p. x). Other research (Lepper, 1985; Mitchell, 1985) has indicated that video games may promote filial interaction when youth play within the family environment and talk about games with their parents. Unfortunately, early arcade culture was lost with the transformation of arcades into sanitised places where parents were encouraged to leave their children in shopping malls (Herz, 1997). However, games still may be played with friends or family; shared knowledge of video games still provides a basis for social interaction; and Local Area Network (LAN) parties and game conventions are contemporary spaces for collective gameplay. The problem is that much of the recent research on computer-mediated communities has tended to focus on specialised PC-users, notably those who use Multi-User Dungeons (or MUDs) (see Baym, 1995; Beaubien, 1996; Chesebro & Bonsall, 1989; Curtis, 1996; Dery, 1994; Foster, 1997; Jones, 1995, 1998a, 1988b; Kim, 2000; Kolko & Reid, 1998; Kollock & Smith, 1999; Porter, 1997; Stone, 1995; Rheingold, 1991; Strate, Jacobson & Gibson, 1996; Wilbur, 1997).
Video games may also serve a social function without other players. Selnow (1984) has argued that children may regard the game itself as “a kind of surrogate companion and their interactions with the games as social interactions” to the extent that the game becomes an “electronic friend” (p. 58). Turkle (1984) argues that video games offer a form of useful escape for disabled children, and online interaction especially allows disabled children social interaction otherwise denied them. Wallace (1999) makes a more general argument that it “is hard for any humdrum reality to compete with [the worlds of video games], especially for people whose lives are troubled by low self-esteem, boredom, lack of social support, or unsatisfactory personal relationships” (p. 172). Video games, then, offer a compensatory sense of achievement, autonomy and self-esteem (Greenfield, 1984; Nelson & Carlson, 1986; Turkle, 1984). However, some children may feel “cut off” when they finish a game (Turkle, 1984, p. 66), and it is possible that too much control over a game world may lead children to be impatient with a less obeisant real world (Sheingold, cited in Greenfield, 1984, p. 114).
While mastery and social interaction may play important roles in the aesthetics of gameplay, the experience of identification, immersion and agency is of equal importance. The departure point for early theorists concerned with these experiences was television (Durkin, 1995, 1999; Greenfield, 1984; Turkle, 1984). Greenfield (1984) argued that both TV and video games have a visual appeal, and that their moving images especially appeal to young viewers (p. 88-90). Indeed, for her, familiarity with TV is one reason why children respond so readily to video games. For Stallabras (1996), by contrast, video games are distinguished from other media by their use of interaction: “the passivity of cinema and television is displaced by an environment in which the player's actions have a direct, immediate consequence on the virtual world” (p. 85). However, Greenfield (1984), Turkle (1984), Skirrow (1990), and Kinder (1991) argue that what is truly distinctive about video games is that they combine a passive mode of spectatorship associated with cinema and television with more active modes of participation and interaction. For Skirrow (1990), the “‘audience' disappears as a distinction between ‘doer' and ‘viewer'” (p. 330), and the enigmas for the performer are of the order of “Where am I?” rather than “Who am I?”
Durkin argues that, compared with TV and film, video game players “do not feel a strong sense of identification with the characters” (1999, p. 129), and he leaves open the question as to whether there are less behavioural effects in games. Fuller and Jenkins (1995) similarly note that, compared with print and film texts, identification with characters in video games is limited because characters tend not to have psychological depth:
Characters play a minimal role, displaying traits that are largely capacities for action: fighting skills, modes of transportation, preestablished goals. . . . Activity drains away the character's strength, as measured by an ever shifting graph at the top of the screen, but it cannot build character, since these figures lack even the most minimal interiority. (p. 61)
Skirrow (1990) is even more critical, stating that: “for the performer of a game the first and third person are almost totally identified, so there can be no suspense based on knowing more (having seen more) than the protagonist who represents you” (p. 330). The major objection to such accounts is that the characters in many print and film texts do not necessarily offer more psychological depth than the average video game character. We cannot judge video games solely on the basis of their status as a medium, since a video game with a complex narrative and detailed characterisation may offer more depth than a poorly written novel. In this respect, the above accounts ignore the distinctiveness of video games by evaluating them in terms of other media.
A s Turkle notes, in a video game: “you have to do more than identify with a character on the screen. You must act for it. Identification through action has a special kind of hold” (1984, p. 79). The issue, then, is how “identification through action” creates a distinctive hold. Friedman (1995) observes that in earlier simulations, like Civilization (1991), one identified principally with a leader from a particular culture or historical period, such as Genghis Khan, indicating a straightforward identification with the role of a leader. However, in more recent simulations like SimCity (1989) there is a “constant shifting of identificatory positions depending on whether one is buying land, organizing the police force, paving the roads, or whatever” (p. 85). Yet simply “attempting to map ‘roles' onto the player's on-screen identification misses the point” (p. 85) since:
overarching these functional shifts . . . is a more general state of identification: with the city as a whole, as a single organism. . . .[or] a process. . . . ‘Losing oneself' in a computer game means, in a sense, identifying with the simulation itself. (pp. 84-85)
Friedman concludes that the player does not simply identify with a role:
the player forms a symbiotic circuit with the computer, a version of the cyborgian consciousness described by Donna Haraway (1985) in her influential “Manifesto for Cyborgs.” The computer comes to feel like an organic extension of one's consciousness, and the player may feel like an extension of the computer itself. (1995, p. 83)
The term “cyborg” is, of course, a contraction of “cybernetic organism”: a synthesis of the technological and biological. This is usually understood in terms of the physical augmentation of humans with technology, but in practice a cyborg is any being that forms a cybernetic relationship—a dynamic, self-regulating, and homeostatic (information) feedback system—that incorporates both organic and non-organic material (Gray, 1995). This means that a person need not be physically fused with a computer to be a cyborg—any causal relationship with technology, such as the feedback loops that occur during gameplay, suffices for the term to apply. Therefore Friedman (1995) could be read as simply referring to the psychological experience of this relationship.
The problem is that Haraway (1985) sees cyborgs as subverting traditional boundaries between physical/non-physical, self/body, human/machine, and thereby creating post-, proto-, and/or non-human beings. On this basis she sees cyborgs as a polemical metaphor for the subversion of all binary systems, including male/female, which presume a primary term. Theorists of computer-mediated communities, including virtual reality, sometimes seem to conflate the literal and metaphorical meanings of the term, implying that cyborgs are inherently subversive or revolutionary (see Featherstone & Burrows, 1995; Gray, 1995; Haraway, 1985; Helsel & Roth, 1991; Reid, 1994; Stone, 1995; Strate, Jacobson & Gibson, 1996; Wolmark, 1999). However, to claim that the cybernetic relationship is inherently subversive is to fall back on essentialism, when it should be obvious that a cybernetic relationship may be read in different ways. Players may simply see the game as a tool and experience immersion without any sense that their humanity, or any other aspect of their identity, has been altered. It suffices to suggest that, in either its literal or metaphorical form, the term “cyborg” only offers a limited account of the relationships between players and their games.
Turkle (1986) provides a more useful departure point when she argues that what players pursue in their interactions with video games is an “altered state,” described less in terms of books and TV than by metaphors taken from “sports, sex or meditation” (p. 60):
Call it ‘muscle memory,' call it ‘flow,' call it ‘trusting your instincts' – the experience of feeling a continuity between mind and body is part of the inner game of any well-played sport. Skilled video game players experience this immediacy of knowing their game with more than their head, and the experience is exhilarating. (p. 81)
An account of such altered states can be found in Csikszentmihalyi's (1975, 1990, 1993) description of “flow.” For Csikszentmihalyi (1975, 1990, 1993), “flow” is “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it” (p. 4). Csikszentmihalyi (1993) identifies eight dimensions of flow: clear goals and immediate feedback; a balance of challenge and skill; the merging between consciousness and one's activity; a high degree of focus; the loss of self-consciousness; an altered sense of time; and an autotelic quality. The flow state, then, is facilitated when there is sufficient challenge to stimulate the individual beyond their normal level of effort: too much challenge creates anxiety, too little creates boredom, and in this respect flow may be seen in terms of an appropriate schedule of reinforcement (Loftus and Loftus, 1983; Wallace, 1999). It can be argued that play has been increasingly identified with—or is seen at its most optimal when players enter—a state of “flow.” In this context, the problem with the term “play” is that it often refers to an activity which may be characterised as an ongoing attempt to (re-)enter the ideal of play: a state of flow that is totally absorbing and gratifying to the ego. Furthermore, while it is useful to analyse how games produce flow experiences, the fact that there are different metaphors for “altered” or “flow” states suggests that it may be better to turn away from generalisations about some universal, ineffable state and attempt to distinguish different types, or qualities, of immersion.
As Murray (1997) argues, “immersion” is “a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water” and what people seek from “a psychologically immersive experience” is:
the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different as water is from air, that takes all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus. We enjoy the movement out of our familiar world, the feeling of alertness that comes from being in this new place, and the delight that comes from learning to move through it. (pp. 98-99)
Murray traces the distinctive qualities of immersion to the “procedural,” “participatory,” “spatial” and “encyclopaedic” characteristics of the computer as a medium. She argues that the computer is procedural in the sense that: “it was designed not to carry static information but to embody complex, contingent behaviors” (p. 72); in short, it is an engine of computation that operates according to programmable rules. The computer is participatory in the sense that it is “responsive to our input” (p. 74), and, for Murray , the notion of “interaction,” applied to computers, refers to an environment “that is both procedural and participatory” (p. 74).
The spatial qualities of the computer are also distinctive because, unlike “linear media such as books,” the computer does not simply represent space in verbal or pictorial form; it represents “navigable space” that users can “move through” (Murray, 1997, p. 79). Indeed, “the computer's spatial quality is created by the interactive process of navigation” (p. 80), in that computers not only calculate spatial representations from a player's perspective, they do so dynamically, in real-time. Lastly, Murray argues that computers are encyclopaedic, in the sense that they can store so much information, making them more capable of representing a procedural, participatory, and spatial world , not just in terms of visual detail, but also scope and dynamics. This encyclopaedic quality provides a basis for “epic-scale narrative” (p. 84), evident in online role-playing games (p. 86) that allow multiple players to create and share occupancy in a developing game world. For Murray , the combination of the spatial and encyclopaedic elements with the procedural and participatory elements is what provides the aesthetic experiences of immersion and the related experience of “agency,” that is, the sense of entering a navigable virtual space and seeing the consequences of one's actions in the virtual world.
It must be emphasised that while full sensory immersion is the ideal of Virtual Reality (see Heim, 1993), video games only offer limited physical immersion, ranging from the wrestling, slapping and kicking of the joystick or cabinet with arcade games to the less physically taxing interaction with a PC game's keyboard and mouse controls. Darley (2000) argues that most video games offer a heightened form of “kinaesthesia”: “the illusion of control and agency in real time and in a realistic looking (and behaving) environment [italics added]” (p. 154). For him: “deliberation is minimal – once the game is under way the player is compelled continually and immediately to respond” (p. 156). Skirrow (1986) has similarly observed that video games often produce a sense of immediacy and danger that leads to “crisis management” (p. 331), and Turkle (1984) has emphasised the importance of survival, in that, in many games, “one false move [and] you're dead” (p. 79). The low tolerance for error in a context of high stakes fosters an increasing level of attention and a more intense or immersive altered state. In this respect, the reflexive and frenzied character of interaction in many video games may compensate for absent sensory channels. However, video games do not necessarily emulate other media and so cannot be seen as merely compensatory. As Murray (1997) argues, they generate their own aesthetics through creative experimentation with their constraints.
