Chapter Eight

Player Empathy

The previous chapter has argued that players are not in the same position as characters. When a character feels an egotistic self-concern, such as fear at a monster, a viewer may mentally simulate an (inhibited) version of that emotional state, but the viewer primarily experiences an altruistic concern for them. Here what concerns us is Carrol's (1984) additional observation that film viewers may feel an egocentric concern for their own position as a viewer and that this self-concern may conflict with their altruistic attitude towards characters. It similarly can be argued that players sometimes care less about the interests of their characters than they do about their own interests as a player. For example, when players engage in combat in FFX a character may function as a tool in the player's attempt to win the battle, and failure may be registered as sorrow in and for the player.

We cannot simply refer to this self-concern as imagine-self empathy and oppose it to imagine-other empathy directed to characters because there is no need to “imagine” another's situation: the player responds to his/her immediate position of oneself as a player in a game macrostructure (Tan, 1997, p. 185; see also Davis, Hull, Young & Warren, 1987; Hoffman, 1982; Stotland, Mathews, Cherman, Hansson & Richardson, 1978). Grodal (2003) and Frasca (2003) have offered similar arguments that some video games function as simulations , in that, rather than treating the game as representing anything, the player acts as if s/he occupied that space. U nlike the empathy and virtual wishing on behalf of characters which occurs while watching a film or cut-scene, ergodic sequences utilise the player's sensorimotor, cognitive and emotional scripts as if s/he were in that situation, albeit within a context of (partial) enactive mediation and/or subtraction.

It might seem inappropriate to use the term empathy to refer to the player's experience of his/her own situation, but to say that the player actually believes s/he occupies the simulated space, and acts on that basis, is to presume that the player is either gullible or deluded. Even in the most convincing simulation one can maintain cognitive awareness of the simulation, and most video games, including FFX , offer something very far from a convincing simulation. By implication, the situational context of play is defined by rules that are absent, or differently codified, outside of the play-space. Players may empathise with their prospects of winning or losing a game in a way that is uncommon during their daily activity. The term “player-empathy” can be used to distinguish the empathy that players feel towards themselves from the empathy that players feel towards characters. This player empathy may be seen as separable from, but usually overlapping with, the ways in which players empathise with themselves beyond the play-situation. When a player feels that what has transpired in the game is significant beyond the game, as when a character's death in the game reinforces a player's general sense that s/he is a failure, or mortal, then “player-empathy” may be said to have blurred into the player's everyday experience of selfhood.

This chapter addresses players' emotional experience of play by arguing that gameplay promotes “pre-operatory” cognition (Piaget, 1951, 1978), characterised by egocentrism, by extending the agency of players, but that this egocentrism is regularly blocked. It is argued that while blocked egocentrism may be explained in psychoanalytic terms of narcissistic rage and anxieties about the (male) ego, Tomkins' (1962) and Nathanson's (1992) model of shame provides a more useful account of the emotional experience of gameplay.

Preoperational Egocentrism and its Blocking at the Interface

For Piaget (1951, 1978), intelligence emerges from sensorimotor experience, in that as children grow they not only become capable of mentally representing sensorimotor actions, they become more systematic and logical in their organization of schemata, and increasingly adept at mentally manipulating them. Piaget refers to such cognitive work as “operations,” which he defines as “internalised actions.” At the concrete-operational stage, these operations can be mentally reversed, but they cannot be applied to complex or hypothetical problems. At the formal-operational stage, operations can be applied to all types of problems, including complex verbal and hypothetical ones.

While gameplay frequently engages the sensorimotor system, the performance of procedural schemata during ergodic sequences usually requires higher-level strategic cognition. Certainly, Loftus and Loftus (1983) discussion of player's strategies presumes that players have these cognitive capabilities, and the bottom-up and top-down cognitive processes discussed throughout this thesis require concrete- and formal-operational thought. Ind eed, Turkle's (1984) distinction between two dominant styles of computer mastery parallel Piaget's categories. The “concrete” style is akin to Levi-Strauss' (1966/1976) notion of “bricolage” in that it is an approach to problem-solving which “involves entering into a relationship with [one's] work materials” (Turkle, 1984, p. 51). The individual experiments, makes mistakes, goes back, and reconsiders different approaches, until a workable/working model is found. By contrast, the “abstract” style of mastery is characterised by a top-down approach, that is, an attempt to progressively break down tasks into components. Turkle's “concrete” and “abstract” styles may be seen as modes characterised by the predominance of concrete- and formal-operational operations, respectively, in that both styles would involve the use of both concrete- and formal-operations.

Turkle's emphasis on “abstract” and “concrete” styles is valid at a high level of generality, but it ignores what Piaget (1929/1973, 1950/2001, 1951, 1978) called “pre-concepts,” or “preoperatory thought,” now commonly referred to as “preoperational” ( Wadsworth , 1989). For Piaget, cognition is preoperational prior to the acquisition of operational thinking. Pre operations have prelogical qualities, and are characterised by: an inability to follow certain transformations; an inability to mentally reverse operations; a tendency to focus on only one, or a few, of a stimulus' variables (“centration”); and the privileging of perception over cognition.

In characterising preoperational cognition it is useful to emphasise its close relationship with magico-religious modes of thought. Early anthropologists' were particularly concerned with the presence or absence of “rationality” in particular cultures and made a clear distinction between prelogical and logical thought (Horton & Finnegan, 1973, p. 17). Freud's (1913/1950) early account of magico-religious thinking, for example, followed Frazer's (1912/1993) view that ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis. An individual's psychological stages of narcissism/auto-eroticism, attachment to love objects, and abandonment to the reality principle were seen as respective parallels to the evolution of totemism, monotheism, and science. Consequently, early anthropologists tended to dismiss the primitive thinking—of “primitives”, women and children—as developmentally inferior.

This position is no longer accepted because so-called “primitives” are as capable of scientific modes of thought as “civilised” scientists, who may in turn utilise non-scientific modes to legitimate their supposed “objectivity” (see Evans-Pritchard, 1937/1985; Levy-Bruhl, 1935/1983; Malinowski, 1954). Indeed, Turkle (1995) argues that the increased tendency towards a “concrete” style of computer use results from a cultural revaluation of concrete modes of thought that were formerly dismissed as “primitive,” child-like, and feminine. The present position is that both pragmatic (proto-scientific) and magico-religious modes of thought may be found across the diversity of human cultures and that this reflects the “psychic unity of [hu]mankind” (Tambiah, 1989, p. 84); yet at the same time, different “modes” of rationality coexist within cultures and individuals.

Magico-religious thought is not reducible to preoperations, nor do players of FFX simply regress to a preoperational stage, since they remain capable of formal-operations. However, formal-operational thinking is domain-specific, and unless an adult's environment demands accommodation there is not usually any need to utilise formal-operations. This being the case, it is possible to argue that there is a “preoperational mode” characterised by a preponderence of preoperational reasoning, but which presumes the use of other operations. More specifically, i t can be argued that certain aspects of gameplay promote characteristics of preoperational thought—phenomenalistic causality, naïve realism, and physiognomic perception—often associated with magical thinking.

Phenomenalistic causality describes the process whereby the conjunction of events is mistaken as a causal relation, and is associated with children's (and “primitive”) beliefs in magic, as when opening a curtain is seen as creating light or jumping up and down is seen as causing crops to grow higher. In video games this may as result from players misperceiving the causal, or cybernetic, relationships which bind them to the game. For example, the conjunction of pressing the “O” button may be immediately followed by the appearance of a wandering monster, and may thereby be seen (or experienced) as causally related, even if the effect was random, or was triggered by some other event. This is partly a consequence of “intuitive” and well-known interfaces: the less troublesome the process of interaction, the less likely it is that a player will attend to signs at the interface as representations of computational processes. While this is likely to be a fairly transitory phenomenon, it overlaps with naïve realism, the belief that signs have an indexical relationship with the objects to which they refer. This is evident in children's beliefs in the power of words and language in which the quality of the object is seen as residing in the word and vice versa. Here there is no active perception of signs standing for, or motivating, processes within the computer. That is, digital signs—the character, the game world, and opponents—become treated as the objects of one's actions, not as representing something else. For example, players may perceive “power-ups,” including potions, as powerful in and of themselves, not as indexical of the power a character gains from them, and which is observed in subsequent actions.

This process is perhaps most obvious when one imbues the buttons and game controller with a quasi-mystical power, a tendency that has been exploited in Sony's Playstation advertising campaign, which mystifies the game controller's symbols. Certainly, the Playstation controller's symbols are the point of contact between the diegetic and non-diegetic, the liminal entry point between the unreal and real, between the extended agency of the player's will and the limited agency of the character in his/her mundane existence. These are the symbols on the gates of the “Third Space” referred to in some of the advertisements for the Playstation 2. It is therefore not surprising that, stripped of any specific context of (inter)action in/with the game, they may represent the magical act of immersion or imagination itself, or the magical enforcement of the player's will, and are imbued with power (see Tambiah, 1996).

What is significant is that it is easy to mistake oneself as the cause of an event. T his may occur whenever a player experiences a fortuitous congruence between his/her desire and game feedback: a character is injured, but finds a healing potion; a character is close to dying, but the opponent misses him/her; an opponent seems to be winning, but then the character defeats it with a critical attack. In such instances, it may seem as if the player has caused something to happen. Since the transparency of the interface brackets out the technicalities of mediation, a particular act, such as clicking on a menu item, seems to translate thought into deed (see Dibbell, 1993; Stefik, 1996). This blurs the boundaries between mind and body, such that the interface may be experienced as a place where one's thoughts or desires are magically manifested.

A player's felt interpenetration between will and world may lead to physiognomic perception, the tendency to project emotional states onto inanimate objects, or, more accurately, the inability to distinguish inner states of being from an external situation. We have already discussed this in terms of projection and the uncanny, and similarly Scott Bukatman (1993) has argued that virtual reality environments, and computers in general, are a “place for the return” of Freud's notion of the “omnipotence of thought” (1993, p. 209), in that the interface not only masks the body, it seemingly translates thought into deed. It can be argued that this experience occurs when players project or perceive events in terms of their own anxieties. For example, players of FFX may worry that they will not find enough potions to get them to the next save point, or that they will not find a save point before they have to stop playing to perform some social obligation, and one of these fears comes true . Players may feel anxious about being attacked by a particular monster, and find themselves suddenly confronted by a wandering monster of that type. In such situations, players' anxiety about their fate readily leads to an assumption that there are aggressive and malevolent external forces acting against them, and players may constantly search for proof of this in game events. Here the player does not so much feel that s/he has caused something to happen so much as feel that his or her fears were (and are) justified.

While Csikszentmihalyi's (1975, 1990, 1993) flow state is characterised by a narrowing of attention it is, of course, not necessarily accompanied by the kind of illogical cognition that Piaget associates with preoperational thought. Nonetheless, increased immersion into the logic of the game world and a state of flow does promote an egocentric tendency to bracket out mediating (computational, biological and social) processes. If, for Tan (1997), film viewers voluntarily enter into the illusions bound up in the diegetic effect, then it is likely that players may voluntary enter into the experience of the machine as a proximal extension of the self, cultivating a preoperational egocentrism which serves their pleasurable experience of mastery. In other words, if gameplay is a space for ego-gratification, then players may seek a high degree of attunement between their thoughts and feedback at the interface, and this may produce characteristics of preoperational thought, including egocentrism.

While both psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology may have terminology for this process, the Freudian account (1919/1990) is less productive. A return of the repressed may occur during gameplay, producing some paranoid projection, but a modified version of Piaget's (1929/1973) model of preoperational egocentrism offers a more general account of the adaptive function of players' cognitive and affective work. Emotion, in its uninhibited extremes, overrides cognition and forces us to act; in its less extreme or inhibited forms it motivates and narrows attentiveness. It may be useful, then, to see the motivated and narrowed attentiveness that occurs during an emotional event as a form of “centration,” in that certain aspects of a situation are not processed: one focuses upon the most salient threat and the concomitant affordances. This involves an increasing emphasis on nervous processes that are phylogenetically archaic, and it may activate preoperational thinking which is global or stereotypical in its appraisal (“The Al Bhed are Arabic! Don't trust them! Fight/Run!”).

Stereotypes are a potential problem in any communicative context, in that they tend to produce a generalised negative/positive affect for a group, minimise the perception of variation, nominate and marginalise “others,” constrain perception and behaviour, and are often self-confirming (Guirdham, 1999, p. 163). However, stereotyping, which may be seen as an adult manifestation of preoperational thought, is not simply prelogical, outmoded, or incorrect. Stereotypes are an economic (albeit lazy) way of appraising one's environment. They provide ready-to-hand, general appraisals which are sometimes valid at a broad level of generality, short circuiting the need for convoluted reflection, thereby freeing one to act quickly (see Mackie & Hamilton, 1993). Because much gameplay demands quick action, and deliberately fosters a gratifying immersion, flow, and egocentrism, preoperational thought is a functionally useful way of accommodating information at the interface. Egocentrism therefore may be seen as the defining aspect of those preoperations that occur at the interface.

Blocked Egocentrism and its Emotional or Aesthetic Significance

While egocentrism may frequently occur, then, gameplay may be characterised through its repeated blocking, and earlier chapters have indirectly discussed aspects of video gameplay that may cause this. Chapter Two argued that digital articulation may block Gestalt impression of an image, and that shifts between observational or ergodic attitudes produce disjunctive proximal-distal transactions, especially when players are promised the freedom to act in a virtual world but can only choose from some basic, repetitious commands. We can extend this account by arguing that because preoperational experience is characterised by ignorance of mediation, video games may block egocentrism by drawing attention to their semiotic qualities. For example, the sense of the video game as an expression of one's mind is effectively blocked when one learns, or is confronted by, a new assignment of sign-functions. This occurs at the beginning of FFX , when characters acquire a new Overdrive, and when the player first plays blitzball. Such blocking is obvious when the player has to consciously check the controls and (re-)read the manual.

Increasing mastery will minimise an awareness of sign-functions, but the forced and hurried use of habituated procedural schemata may lead to make mistakes that create the same effect. Errors, for example, are obvious during those actions, such as Overdrive charging, which require complex and/or time-pressured button combinations during periods of high-affect: Auron's Shooting Star Overdrive requires players to press: “?,” “O,” “?,” “X,” “Left,” “Right,” and “X” during a rapid countdown. More routine “errors” occur during combat when one scrolls down a small menu to find an item but scrolls past it because the inventory has not been properly sorted. Similar problems also occur because of unexpected or complex options during menu navigation. For example, a player may have fallen into a pattern of choosing various menu options for three selected characters in combat which is effective against most monsters (Attack: [Selected Monster]), but then may come across a monster which requires a different sequence. If the player accidentally falls into the habituated sequence at some point, the player may be frustrated at the computer's inability to differentiate the selected assignment of sign-expression to a sign-vehicle (the routine: Attack: [Selected Monster]) from the intended assignment of a sign-expression to a sign-vehicle (such as: Summon: Ixion) in the Combat Menu.

Chapter Three argued that shifts in and between narrative and game interest structures may defer or block access to the objects of one's interest, and we may extend this by arguing that the game interface may block one's agency by limiting access to information that is important to the maintenance of flow. Poole (2000) addresses this by distinguishing the use of the “camera” in video games from its use in film. For him, the analogy to “camera” in describing the point of view in video games is limited in that, “cinematic camerawork of the kind that is immediately noticeable or stylish . . . often depends for its effect on hiding something from the viewer, not letting you see everything” (p. 81). We might accept Poole 's point, then, that: “there can be no dramatic irony in videogames, because dramatic irony depends on a knowledge differential between spectator and protagonist – yet in a videogame the player is both spectator and protagonist at once” (p. 81). When games attempt to “replicate this kind of stylised shot choice,” by (say) hiding an item or monster where players cannot see it, it “becomes a fraudulent and frustrating method of inducing tension: the player can get killed by zombies, not because the environment is cleverly designed, but because s/he was deliberately hindered from seeing them coming until it was too late”; consequently, “a purely filmic notion of camerawork cannot work in a videogame context. Film manipulates the viewer, but a game depends on being manipulable” (p. 81).

Against this it can be argued that level design in many games (most especially FPSs) involves the deliberate placement of monsters and objects to surprise, startle or frustrate the player (see Kushner, 2003, p. 143) and/or to exploit the graphical technology (Poole, 2000, p. 130). Some players accept that levels have to be replayed until they are known and mastered—after all, this is Friedman's (1995) aesthetic of “demystification,” Turkle's (1995) “tinkering,” and Myers (1990b) “experimentation.” While FFX 's game macrostructures are not governed by an aesthetic of surprise and shock, they do reward with items players who explore hidden areas. Consequently, the blocking of items, like the chests hidden behind crates on the Luca docks, is a challenge that is part of the game's aesthetic of mastery and demystification, coded in both ergodic and narrative in terms of the exploration and colonisation of space ( Fuller & Jenkins, 1995). Certainly, it is frustrating to search an area and realise there was nothing to be found, but players are not required or expected to find every item hidden on the side of paths, behind boxes, or in distant or secret locations, since players can pass the game without them. Whether players search systematically, continuously, or occasionally depends upon their elected strategy and style of play.

Nonetheless, earlier chapters addressed other processes that may block a player's egocentrism. Chapter Five discussed the dual narrative and game coding of characters, which Chapter Six argued could lead to a tension between characters as ideal egos and ego-ideals; and Chapter Seven argued that players' empathetic emotions depend upon their separateness from characters. These arguments hold open the possibility that characters may act against a player's virtual wishes, guidance, or commands. W hile empathy may result from seeing characters as independent, unique and unpredictable personalities, a character's ignorance of one's virtual guidance in observational sequences, and the absence of desired affordances during ergodic sequences, may be experienced as defiance . Consequently, characters who engage in actions that are not in accord with a player's motives or goals may effectively deny or undermine that player's free interaction, mastery and desired omnipotence over the game world.

It is evident, then, that gameplay both encourages and blocks egocentrism; the issue that follows this recognition is the emotional or aesthetic significance of such blocking. Within psychoanalytic discourse, the blocking of egocentrism may be seen primarily as a cause for fear or anger. In Freud's or Klein's terms (see respectively Kinder, 1991, and Skirrow, 1980) blocked egocentrism may be seen in terms of fear, in that t he constant threat of failure or being overwhelmed by opponents during gameplay may be premised upon an aggressive defence against the regression of the male ego to an earlier state of vulnerability. First person shooters (FPS) may be seen as exploiting this quality. For example, Carr (2003) argues that Silent Hill (1999), being a horror game, “aims for intensity, tension and fright” (p. 3), and to this end is “tense, sparse and linear” (p. 2). Its incessant fighting and tight first-person perspective hold open the possibility of sudden death, and its horror-genre premise of supernatural incursion creates a sense of the monstrous violation of the real. The fighting, maze-like space, limited save points, keys and puzzles, all drive the player inevitably forward in a “tidal pull” (p. 3), allowing the game to “instigate and maintain pace and tension, [fuelling] its unnerving visions of death and possession” (p. 2). This constitutes a characteristically male aesthetic or pathology that constantly places the ego under threat while providing affordances for reactive and pre-emptive destruction. Creed's (1993) account of the monstrous-feminine would seem applicable here, in that the presence of monstrous and dangerous females, such as the alien in Aliens vs Predator (1999), explicitly links a threat to the player's ego to male anxieties about female sexual power.

However, such accounts are not particularly relevant to role-playing games (RPGs). Carr (2003) observes that, compared with Silent Hill (1999), the RPG Planescape: Torment (1999) is more concerned with immersion, and is consequently dilatory, encyclopaedic, open-ended and cyclical, encouraging detours and the (re-)examination of detail. Players can save almost anywhere, minimising fear of re-play, and there is a more accommodating top-down perspective which provides for visual mastery and a strategic orientation. Its goals also “remain dispersed or vague,” and in place of an ongoing anxious rush it prefers “to be savoured, wandered through, in the company of armed companions” (p. 8)—in short, in relative safety . Carr implies that it would be misleading to place undue emphasis on psychoanalytic accounts of negative affects—on a constant re-staging of primal fear about death or ego-loss—in RPGs, which promote an aesthetic that is atmospheric and strategic.

These comments apply almost wholesale to FFX , which allows replay, offers a third person perspective, is open-ended, and encourages mastery through combat strategy and exploration. Most of the game's images of bodily disintegration and death are so typical to fantasy fiction, RPGs, and previous instalments of the Final Fantasy series, that they may be seen less as expressing latent anxieties about separation anxiety, (s)mothering, castration or death than as conserving the genre. For example, while stereotypical images of the monstrous-feminine (Creed, 1993) may be found in many CRPGs, the only real horrifying female figure in FFX is Yunalesca: the main opponents are male. A player may interpret this absence in terms of a male destructive force that must be destroyed to re-instate the role of the nurturing mother (absent from Tidus' life) in the (re-) productive (social) life of Spira (whose positive aspects are figured by Yuna). Yet such an interpretation is more intelligible at a hermeneutic level in relation to broad cultural anxieties, and hardly describes the player's likely interpretation of the game or motivation.

In a Lacanian ( 1977/2001) account, the forced shift from a narcissistic experience when one's agency is blocked may be seen as posing the presence of an Other that challenges the Self at the level of the imaginary, inciting narcissistic rage. This might be seen as a useful and broadly applicable model. After all, while play may be ideally satisfying to the ego, games require challenge and necessarily frustrate the ego. Difficulty settings not only accommodate flow by adapting play to a player's increasing mastery of the system, they indicate that challenge is an aesthetic of gameplay, and anger is an emotion that may help us face challenges. Furth ermore, the labour of play may be seen as analogous to the labour of shoring up the ego. Indeed, it cannot be over-emphasised how much of the player's affective activity is bound up in the simple issue of labour, of the expenditure of time and effort. FFX requires up to 90 hours of gameplay and complex cognitive strategies which, if they fail, require players to repeat extended sequences. Characters, including the history of their development, may function as an index of the player's investment in the game as a whole, with death of a character less a figuration of the player's castration than an index of the player's loss of labour . The point is that the greater the loss of labour, the greater the offense to the ego, and the greater the narcissistic rage.

This angry response to a challenge to the self response may be reinforced because, as was argued in Chapter Seven, the absence of moral, human qualities minimises empathy and maximises negative empathetic emotions. That is, the computer may be attributed with super-human qualities that promote an angry sense of unfair opposition which opposes any sense of egocentrism. If a computer wins it can be accused of cheating because, not being human, it does not think , it merely calculates to an inhuman degree. This promotes the kind of injustice one might feel if two people were given the same mathematical problem to solve, but one of the people had a calculator. In this sense the computer is an instrumentality to which the player has no access. Such an awareness of the computer as a computer may lead players to recognise that there is not an equal playing field, which takes away any sense of play as a just experience. T he computer's lack of reciprocity may lead to an expiatory type of anger in which players punish the game, smashing and cursing it, for a felt injustice. It is not just that: “You cheated” or: “You broke the rules”; there is a more profound sense that: “You betrayed me! This was meant to be fun!” It is precisely because players are encouraged to promote egocentrism at the interface (an overextension of the self into the machine) that the rage they feel towards the machine may be so potent: there is a sense of having been betrayed during an (invited) intimate moment.

However, seeing gameplay in terms of male ego anxiety and aggression readily suggests a phallocentric stance or a polemical feminist agenda. We should not forget that story- and character-based games such as Final Fantasy attract more of the female market (Cassel & Jenkins, 1998), and psychoanalytic accounts tend to draw attention away from why some games appeal to both genders. As Grodal (1997) argues of film, most of the perceptual, cognitive and affective aspects of gameplay already addressed—affective tone, the regulation of interest, and the production of empathetic emotions—are not gender specific. Therefore, reducing analysis to issues of gender misrepresents the emotional experience of gameplay. This is not to argue that gender should not be addressed, that gender is never central to the experience of gameplay, or that the above psychoanalytic accounts are without value; it is morely to state that more fundamental processes need to be accommodated. Indeed, we can correct some of the gender bias in psychoanalytic accounts by simply observing that male players do not usually fear the loss of their penis so much as the loss of the phallus, and that castration may be read as trans-gender metaphor for the dimunition of a player's ego through the loss of (symbols of) power . Similarly, while aggression may be associated with males, we can observe that narcissistic rage is not always gendered and often will depend upon the consolidation of an ind ividual player's ego.

Nonetheless, while play may be experienced in psychoanalytic terms as the labour of shoring up the ego, with fear resulting from one's loss of power and anger resulting from a challenge to one's agency, it can be argued that players may sometimes feel quite differently about the work of gameplay: slowly guiding a character across an entire level, fighting recurring wandering monsters, re-loading sections and replaying them, for the possibility of some future reward of interest or fun. The following argues that i f gameplay is experienced, not as a constant state of egocentrism and flow, but as a recurring sense of blocking with an ongoing threat of the loss of labour, then shame may be central to gameplay.

Shame , and the Compass of Shame

In Tomkins' (1963) account, the familiar emotions of shame, defeat, shyness, inferiority, guilt, humiliation, and frustration are built upon an underlying affect of shame. In this model, which accords with Izard's (1984) model of the physiological substrates of the major emotions, shame is an auxiliary affect whose activator is the incomplete reduction of interest or joy. More broadly, shame is a physiological response to sudden and unexpected separation from positive affect, and it is associated with the inhibitive activity of the parasympathetic nervous system. The immediate form of shame as a “slump, blush, averted gaze, and loss of attention” reflects an attenuation of interest, in the sense that “nobody can think clearly in the moment of shame . . . . [It] turns off interest-based consciousness and turns on shame-based consciousness and shameful attention” (Nathanson, 1992, p. 133). Schore's (1994) neurophysiological account describes shame more precisely in terms of an “attachment deactivator” component, which:

[is] mediated by activation of the lateral tegmental limbic circuit, [and] acutely brakes hyperaroused and hyperstimulated states, diminishes positive narcissistic coloring of self-representations, contracts the self, lowers expectations, decreases self-esteem, active coping, interest and curiosity, interferes with cognition and increases overt consciously experienced shame, parasympathetic supported passive coping, blushing, gaze aversion, and depressive affect-toned mood. (p. 363)

Defined this way, shame is the least damaging of the negative affects. It forces us to re-appraise a recent situation, and potentially re-engage with that situation with greater attention to those aspects of it which we perceive to have caused the shame response.

As we develop, this affect is socialised and begins to take on the emotional character usually associated with shame. For example, when we have been cut short mid-sentence, we may initially experience the underlying affect of shame, but we will also search our memory for similar situations. These may refer to social conventions, such as speaking out of turn or too loudly, and layered associations to one's physical ability, sense of helplessness, a lack of success, sense of self, attractiveness, visibility, and anxieties about intimacy, and so on (Nathanson, 1992, p. 317; see below). This awareness of shame is a significant characteristic of its socialised form as an emotion, especially given that the visible signs of shame, such as blushing, usually amplify the affect (Tomkins, 1963, p. 36).

Of course, gameplay is often a solitary situation with a non-human opponent, and players do not usually accord the machine the authority to shame them in the everyday sense. However, the ongoing blocking, frustration, failure and loss of positive affect may be seen as an experience of this innate affect of shame, and it can be argued that there are some instances in which the emotion of shame may emerge. If this is the case, then it may be possible to see some player's strategies of self-regulation in terms of Nathanson's (1992) model of “the compass of shame” (table 8.1), developed in co-operation with Tomkins to find therapeutic applications of his theory. This model identifies four general tendencies—“withdrawal,” “attack other,” “avoidance,” and “attack self”—which suggest four categories of the ways players may attempt to self-regulate the play experience.

In the context of play, which is often characterised by an energetic and pleasurable immersion in the play space, a minimal form of the affect of shame may occur whenever a player's engagement has been suddenly cut short. Where this is seen as simply unexpected, or as reflecting upon one's own failure, this may manifest as a momentary lack of responsiveness, or exhalation, characteristic of resignation. That is, the player may take a second to recognise the separation before making the effort to re-enter the play space. However, it is also possible that gameplay may elicit more extreme forms of shame, especially when the player has a personality prone to shame, or if there is an antecedent condition that makes the player vulnerable to shame, for example a pronounced depressive state. A player in this state may take longer to pick themselves up from their ejection from pleasurable engrossment in the play space, in the depressive sense of learned helplessness. This might be manifested as sitting and staring at the game controller or floor, looking away from the screen, or (at its most extreme) the player quietly getting up or turning off the game. The cognitive expression of this shame might be intelligible in terms of the game as an (anthropomorphised) witness to one's failure and, consequently, a desire not to be “seen” by, or not to be near, the machine.

However, this sense of shame may become even more pronounced, since the status of the computer as a partner in, or context for, play holds open the possibility that the player may recognise or experience the entire process of gameplay as wasted labour, as an empty kind of play. The issue is that, while the computer may have some super-human qualities, it especially may be characterised by the absence of human qualities. The computer does not experience fun, nor can it witness or acknowledge one's fun or ego: it is a cold, rational, unfeeling device, and one's victory may occasionally or retrospectively change from excitement into an uncanny moment of realising that one's intimacy with the game and its characters was experienced with such an impersonal artificial intelligence. Even if one does win, the victory may be seen as a hollow, partial or alien victory against something incapable of recognising or understanding that victory and/or the strategies which led to it.

Shame in the more common sense, as an emotion, may occur whenever one makes a personal link between oneself and negative stereotypes of people who play games, as when a player recognises oneself as having spent too much time on a game, as lazy, failing to confront the real world, or as excessively escapist. However, it is perhaps more likely that players feel shame as a consequence of evaluating gameplay from someone else's perspective. That is, a player may experience the game not in terms of his or her own gratification, but someone else's gratifications, as when the player is engaged in such tedious tasks as navigating the landscape, looking behind bushes, trees, and crates, re-checking areas in case anything was missed, and becomes conscious that this activity is not gratifying to a co-player, viewer or commentator (say, a competitor or researcher). Such an empathetic emotion requires only a minimal form of cognitive empathy: for example, the presumption that the observer prefers kinaesthetic spectacle or some dazzling demonstration of spatial or strategic skill. The player may feel that s/he has failed whenever there is no such spectacle or demonstration, and may oscillate between shame, guilt or embarrassment towards oneself, anxiety about the protracted nature of a dull sequence, or anger towards all the perceived causes for this experience of failure. This can be extended to players who participate with observer-participant research and become self-conscious that play is being evaluated according to some “intellectual” aesthetic. If nothing else, such shamefulness may be sustained by the ongoing presence of the observer, attenuating flow and its pleasurable egocentrism.

The avoidance pole of shame refers to the ways we “reduce, minimize, shake off or limit” (Nathanson, 1992, p. 313), either through drugs, sex, or other stimulation, or by calling attention to whatever brings us pride. That is, avoidance is achieved, not through the physical withdrawal which characterises shame as such, but through diversionary stimulation and/or positive evaluation of one's self-esteem, for example the activation of narcissistic scripts, sometimes to the extent of denial. For Tomkins (1962), Nathanson (1992), and Schore (1994), pride is complementary to shame in regulating self-esteem, or, more precisely, self-esteem is governed by “two dissociable psychobiological components” (Schore, 1994, p. 363). The “attachment deactivator,” which is part of shame, constitutes one of these components; the other component, the “attachment regulator”:

[is] mediated by activation of the mesocortical central tegmental limbic circuit, [and it] reduces consciously experienced shame, negative affective self-representations, low-keyed depressive states and passive coping, and initiates self-comforting functions which enable recovery of sympathetic supported positive hedonic-toned mood and narcissistic affect, expansion of the self, and active stress coping capacities. (p. 363)

The cognitive component of the “shame modulator” that Schore identifies as a “pride” response may include benign responses such as “I'll get it, if I keep trying.” This may give way to attempts to re-define one's aesthetic relationship to the machine. For example, players may accept that the game is harder than they desire and may subsequently change the difficulty settings, or may check to see if there is any preparation that can be accomplished, such as double-checking the manual, playing tutorial sequences, and searching out hints, cheats or walkthroughs. In FFX , certainly, a great deal of time is spent preparing characters by buying and selling items, rearranging items in the inventory, checking cheat notes, and so on, to maximise the chances of surviving a dangerous opponent or section of the game. This allows one to literally avoid moments of mis-attunement or failure and/or overcome whatever initiated shame, and thereupon re-engage with the game without damage to one's self-esteem.

However, pride may also lead to such over-optimistic responses, such as “I'm worth it, I'll give me/it another chance!” or “There must have been a mistake, let's try that again!” This may lead to preoperational thoughts that conserve the player's egocentrism in spite of contradictory feedback (Reith, 1999). That is, when the conscious exertion of will does not seem magically realised, phenomenalistic causality may be preserved through the use of the kind of magical thinking that gamblers use to justify continued play in spite of losing. In this model failure does not necessarily disprove (the efficacy of) our (desired) omnipotence, it merely proves one's failure to fully enter into the potency of that state. For example, sequences which contradict our expectations of influence may be dismissed in terms of: intention (“I was not thinking about it so I shouldn't have expected it to happen”); intervention (“something was influencing my attempt to realise my intention”); flawed method (“I did something wrong so it didn't happen”); or weighted probability (“If I keep at it it will happen”).

Since preoperational reasoning may function to preserve the state of play, the above kind of thinking is not necessarily symptomatic of some problem in the player's personality or in the experience of play. The broader significance of the pride response is that it functions to renew and augment interest by creating a positive net return, which may provide sufficient stimulus to provide closure and comfortably terminate gameplay. If the affective (and aesthetic) character of play is oriented around self-esteem, pride may signal adequate self-esteem vis a vis the act of play: a sense of accomplishment, of a resolved action tendency. The cognitive form of this might be: “I played to win, and I won: so the game is over.” This closure may make it easier for the player to compartmentalise a gaming session, in spite of the absence of a discrete emotion-episode, and achieve something closer to the kind of cathartic or aesthetic pleasure found after viewing a classical drama or feature film. Nonetheless, some players may turn to pathological evaluations, such as: “I'm great, no matter what this #$%^ thing says!” and may play and fail repeatedly as a means to prove the game's inability to recognise their perceived worth (“What do you know, you're just a dumb machine!”). This kind of pride is so excessive that the experience of gameplay primarily enables aggressive scripts that deal with negative self-esteem.

In the case of the attack self pole of shame, anxiety about the helplessness and isolation characteristic of shame leads one to attempt to take control of the experience, that is, by voluntarily putting oneself down in the presence of another. We thereby accept a reduced sense of self but avoid feelings of helplessness and isolation by maintaining a social dialogue (Nathanson, 1992, p. 313). In place of another, of course, we may simply internalise the voice of the other as a conscience or super-ego and regard the intensity of this voice as surrogate proximity to the other. The most benign response to this might have the cognitive form of: “that was more unexpected or difficult than I could have expected; maybe I'll learn,” such that the player defers to the game as a pupil to a tutor. However, the player may respond in terms of far more damaging layers of association, such as the player cognitions listed in Table 8.2, adapted from Nathanson's (1992) schemata of negative self-evaluation.

The emotional tone of play may not always involve such conscious cognitive responses, and will certainly vary with the player's personality and scripts. However, a frequent, significant response to such negative self-evaluations may be the resumption of play not to prove that the game is faulty, as in the avoidance pole, but to prove that the self is insufficient. This ongoing demonstration may function as a limited form of phatic contact, maintaining the relationship that staves off a feared sense of isolation.

It is common, of course, for players to have emotional responses to the game which are fundamentally aggressive, premised upon narcissistic rage, or upon more complex appraisals of the situational context. However, sometimes aggression may be a secondary, defensive response, as in Nathanson's (1992) fourth pole of shame: attack other . In this case, the shame response “is associated with a feeling of lowered self-worth that is simply unbearable” such that “we are likely to reduce another person so that we can at least be better than someone else” (p. 136). The obvious cognitive form of this kind of response is a verbal reduction, humiliation or abuse of a section of the game (“This section is boring, when do I get back to the fun!”), the game as a whole (“I hate FFX !”), the genre (“I hate Final Fantasy games” or “I hate adventure role-playing games!”), the medium (“I hate video games!” or “I hate computers!”), or a physical (sadistic) attack on the video game itself (striking the console, keyboard or joystick). It might be observed here that when players think: “You cheat!” they are not necessarily engaging in physiognomic perception, that is, projecting of human qualities onto to the game. The expression “you” may be a linguistic convenience, since t he designer of the hardware or software may be accused in absentia , or the player may simply be giving voice to an experience in which s/he feels “cheated.”

However, the attack other pole of gameplay may also be seen when the player takes a prolonged and (mediated) sadistic attitude to play. For example, instead of physically attacking the machine, the player may play in spite of their resentment and deliberately go out of their way to violate the rules of the game. This is evident when players take their time during a timed sequence, deliberately go the wrong way when given a predetermined path, avoid goals or quests the game provides for them, or deliberately crash/kill their vehicle/character. In video games, of course, this rejection of the rules may sometimes be seen as producing a kind of humorous mayhem through comic mis-use. This may, in turn, be taken as setting up an opposition between the inert, stupid inhumanity of the computer (with its grim conformity to rules and its formulaic guide for play) and the creative/destructive activity of the human player (capable of illogical behaviour and absurdity).

Nathanson's (1992) model of the shame therefore suggests some of the ways that players may experience shame and self-regulate it, but it is particularly useful because it suggests that what video games really offer is a context for self-regulation. After all, while self-regulation may be a necessary consequence of gameplay, it is possible that the provision of a context for self-regulation may constitute the aesthetic appeal for some players. This is not the same as saying that players wish to enter a state of “flow,” since a game may offer a series of challenges, frustrations and failures which threaten to sever the player from a state of “flow,” forcing the player to recover from it. The desired “zone” of self-regulation is premised upon a level of difficulty that is not only sufficient to maintain interest but is also capable of producing shame responses. The player, then, may have a sense not so much of seamless “flow” as of a staggered series of interruptions, after which the player must re-appraise the situation, pick themselves up, and re-enter the “flow” state; or, alternately, they enter a state of “flow” whose tonality is negatively charged relative to the perceived proximity of a shame response and the labour required to process it.

It is obvious, of course, that players may feel happiness in the sense of relief at the unexpected end of a long sequence, or gratitude at suddenly finding or being given some desired item or aid. However, happiness, especially as it is associated with flow, may be seen as a reward for self-regulation: mastery comes through practice, through constantly overcoming an opposing force, through defying the external agency of the game and subordinating to our own will, assimilating it as procedural schemata. It is not merely that players win or complete a game, and that their happiness is thereby over and done; happiness itself is won from the game, and this victory allows the player to retrospectively value gameplay. For example, an entire, frustrating and dehumanising session, or history of play, may be emotionally and aesthetically recuperated when an ongoing process of self-regulation finally culminates in success.

The Transfer and Dynamics of Emotion in Video Game Aesthetics

Earlier chapters have identified a number of processes and factors that govern the relationships between players, characters, and games. Notably, it has been argued that focusing upon the identity between characters and players is misleading because a player's position is mediated by an observational attitude and ergodic conventions. That is, players' empathetic emotions are, even when sympathetic, usually different from those of characters, and the empathy that players may feel for themselves as players may interfere with empathy with characters.

Of course, as was noted in the introduction, this thesis has largely focused on “homogeneous” emotional experiences, when in practice each player's emotional experience depends upon antecedent factors. For example, a player's psychobiography and learned patterns of expectation may lead to distinctive emotion-episodes (see Tan, 1997, p. 154). An individual player may have a learned affective response of dissmell to a particular class of people, and may, upon becoming aware of this habituated response, feel guilt which self-amplifies until the individual feels distress, whereupon the individual becomes angry at their susceptibility to this distress, and directs this anger at the class of people in question. If this assembly of affect is triggered by an event in a film, then its points of articulation are unlikely to find realisation in the narrative. Consequently, a viewer's emotion episodes may cross scenes and give rise to expectations and action tendencies that are not accommodated by the narrative.

More generally, existing affects or emotions will affect a player's sensitivity to concerns presented in the game, to the extent that players may respond to unexpected aspects of a situational context. A player who is in an angry state may seek objects for that anger, whereas another player may seek attunement with objects that mirror his/her own self-pity. For example, one player may experience anger at Wakka when he abuses Rikku because of her race, while another player may experience embarrassment, awkwardness or anxiety on Rikku's behalf. Yet another player may experience anger at Sin, who caused Wakka's prejudice by killing his brother Chappu (while using an Al Bhed weapon). Consequently, for some players Wakka's chiding by Tidus may constitute adequate resolution, while for other players the only adequate resolution of defeating Yu Yevon comes later at the resolution of the game.

Nonetheless, it is possible to define antecedents that players are likely to share because of the emotions likely to be cued during prior sequences, and if interest may be preserved or transferred between narrative and game macrostructures, then we may presume that the empathy players feel for characters and the empathy they feel for themselves may operate as antecedents for one another. A nger which finds its expression as global empathy with oneself against the machine (“I hate this game”) may be redirected as local empathy with oneself posed against a particular opponent (“I hate this Funguar!”). Similarly, a global or local empathy with oneself (“I'm useless at this game!”) may be redirected as local empathy with a character (“I pity Tidus!”). This local empathy with Tidus may be redirected as global empathy with all the characters in Spira, or all humans (“We are trapped by our greed and hate!”). Indeed, any local empathy felt towards Tidus when he is attacked by Machina may resonate with a players' sense of being the victim of a frustrating machine.

Multiple, mixed, and dynamic emotional cues may also lead to conflicting or ambivalent emotional states. We may have motor empathy with a character that affords us the pleasure of kinaesthesia, but we may dislike the character's appearance or persona. Innate releasers may present a character as unattractive, yet vulnerable, such that we feel both repulsion and sympathy. We may feel a tonic sympathy for a character as a hero or helper, yet a situational context may promote a phasic contempt for them during a sequence. We may disagree with the reasoning and motives of a character, yet we may respect their courage as they pursue their goals. We may feel that the constraints at the interface resonate with the constraints experienced by a character, yet may also feel that a character's goals are imposed upon or own (we want to do this , but Tidus wants to do this ). We may find that we are so concerned with our labour that a character becomes an index of our own agency, a vehicle of our own gameplay, and we evaluate it solely in terms of aesthetic appeal or functional usefulness. At the same time, some aspect of the character may continually draw us back into a position of sympathy, compassion or admiration.

Some of these dynamics may occur in any medium. For example, poor television reception, a book that is falling apart, or a noisy person in a cinema, may occasionally produce a context of irritation that may be transferred as the desire for an antagonist's punishment; and a book or film character may be both admirable and contemptible. However, the necessary blocking of egocentrism which is a part of any rule-governed game may routinely produce emotions directed towards the medium, or what Tan (1997) calls “artefact emotions” (“A-emotions”). These A-emotions may constantly come into conflict with emotions directed towards the diegesis of narrative and game macrostructures, or what Tan calls “fiction emotions” (“F-emotions”). The tensions resulting from the conflict between A-emotions and F-emotions, which may often result from the dual role of the player as participant and witness, may mean that video games may be characterised by disjunctive or ambivalent emotional states.

Earlier chapters have argued that FFX aesthetically recuperates some of its disjunctive qualities; here we can elaborate that video games in general may accommodate the disjunctive experience of dual character and player coding as part of their aesthetics. Tim Schafer (cited by Pearce, 2003), for example, has observed that when a character is required to perform a particular action, game designers often offer the player a reward so that their own actions coincide with that of the character. For Schafer: “you can't just rely on the story empathy, you have to put in little gameplay bribes, to make them like [a] character and want to pursue [them]” (¶ 6). In FFX , for example, the character's and player's motives for rescuing Yuna are different. While both Tidus and the player may desire to see Seymour get his comeuppance, Tidus has the opportunity to “win” Yuna by saving her, whereas the player is motivated by investment in the act of viewing the progression and/or culmination of a romantic macrostructure, the pleasure of being able to renew a voyeuristic relationship with Yuna, and the practical reward of being able to fight with Yuna's Aeons.

For Schafer, such moments of divergence between character and player motive may be “kind of interesting to the player” (p. 9), and he argues that the player can be thought of as the “intuition” of the character:

The character is . . . hearing this voice in their head that's saying “walk to the right.” And they're like, “okay, I think I want to walk to the right.” And the character always exhibits this cognitive dissonance. They act like they wanted to. “Yeah, I think I want to go over here. I think I want to open this door.” But it's really you, you're kind of like this voice in their head, this Tourette's-syndrome compulsion – “Open the door. Open it!” And they're like, yeah, uh, I want to open the door. . . . Because you're not the actual thought of the character, you're sort of the hunch. . . . It's like in real life, we're getting these weird impulses that we don't really understand sometimes. (¶ 90-92)

This certainly suggests some possibilities about the psychoanalytic relationship between player and character. For example, the player may be not only a character's “intuition,” but also his/her super-ego or unconscious. In the first case, characters may perform such virtues as courage, bravery and self-sacrifice which players have no scope to perform in their mundane lives. The player therefore may function like the character's super-ego, making noble choices, or the character may externalise the player's super-ego such that the play space becomes a realm of honourable heroism. More than this, where the player sees more than the character, helps him to choose wisely, and/or corrects mistakes through replaying a sequence, the player may enact a position of benevolent guidance. That is, acting to ensure a character's survival may be experienced as committing to a reassurance in a higher self or higher forces, a kind of secular faith.

In the second case, characters may perform anti-social acts that express a player's unconscious or repressed impulses. That is, the play space may be seen as criminal playground in which the prohibited desires and villainy that enters players' minds during their everyday life can find remorseless exercise. However, since players' desires are constrained by not only by the social order, but also the limited scope of ergodic action, aggressive actions may be a response to the formulaic rules of the interface and game. Indeed the player's expiatory agency may be targeted at characters, who may be placed in precarious situations less to tempt death than to tempt relief from the stress of the challenge that prohibits the player. Having lost the game a player may renew his/her non-virtual life, simulating an oddly fatalistic immortality. The player thereby becomes part of the forces that drive characters into danger, and is liberated by his/her capacity for chaos and destruction.

While it is possible to view characters as a psychic extension of the player, or vice versa, it is more useful to see divergences between characters and players as inclining players to recognise, understand, and/or act in accordance with, another's (conceptual) point of view. That is, differences between characters and players may help players to become aware that they are engaged in an act of empathy, that they are, after all, role-playing, and may wonder: “What would the character do? How does it differ from what I would do? What are the repercussions of this choice? Given those repercussions, why did I choose to do that? What does that say about me?” Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (1985) was memorable and significant precisely because of the moral dilemmas it posed for players, who found that their actions as a player had repercussions for their characters (Herz, 1997, pp. 155-159; King & Borland, 2003, pp. 74-75). In one section, for example, the player could choose to pay a blind woman a single coin for her help, ignoring not just her disparaging comments, but also the moral implications of such exploitation. Later in the game, the characters learn that they need her help, and if they have been miserly it is too late to apologise: she remains resentful, and the game is harder to complete. Not only is the player forced to realise the consequences of his/her act in the game world, the morality of this act unexpectedly traits the characters under his/her control.

Unfortunately, FFX does not much exploit these possibilities. While the game has narrative depth and complexity, its ergodic freedom is navigational or strategic in that its linear narrative macrostructure is unaffected by player choices, and it has no alternative endings (if failure to reach the end is excluded). In short, it offers no major moral dilemmas premised upon divergences between character and player choices. However, we might make two observations. First, the Final Fantasy series does allow players the freedom to decide to kill or run from certain monsters. While most opponents are Fiends, or Aeons who have not found rest, such that battle is encouraged as part of the quest to free Spira, the player may act out a moral attitude by avoiding unnecessary battles and retreating from animals or supposedly neutral humanoids.

Second, FFX allows players to select from different dialogue options, and, as Smith (2003) argues, choosing one dialogue response over another allows players to take moral ownership of the character's attitudes. For example, in FFVII , players can refuse to buy Aeris' flowers, or can buy them as an act of charity and subsequently give them to Marlene. However, FFX has less options for such moral manoeuvring than FFVII . Perhaps the most notable choice is whether players offer Clasko their honest opinion that he is more suited to work a Chocobo Trainer, or whether they encourage his seemingly hopeless dream to become a Chocobo Knight. In the first case, the attempt to be genuinely helpful risks offending Clasko; in the latter case, the attempt to spare his feelings, or to make him learn the lesson himself, may lead him to waste his time and effort, and may be a cowardly avoidance of confrontation on the player's part. Across the Final Fantasy series, dialogue options like this have no effect on character or narrative development, and tend to provide predictable choices of self-presenting as honest or dishonest, as private or open, as aggressive (rude) or peaceful (polite), as mean or nice, as self-interested or selfless (and so on).

Video games, then, may exploit the disparity between characters and players, even if FFX is not particularly innovative in this respect. However, even when video games do not actively exploit their disjunctive qualities, players may justify and personalise their investment in video games by perceiving disjunctive qualities as personable quirkiness. As Aarseth (1997) argues, some video games may be seen as “autistic” in that they do not properly respond to relevant contextual cues and are governed by their own (often inexplicable) logic. We might equally say that video game characters may sometimes be coded in terms of the cute imprecision of the developing child, in the sense of clumsy sensorimotor co-ordination, and pre-logical cognition. For example, the absurd contradiction between a desirable ideal-ego and its functional weakness—its evident undesirability as a game-agent—may be dealt with through a human resignation, a kind of tolerant and humorous acceptance. This “human” response to the video game character, or, more specifically, the attributes which mark it as a product of a computer program, humanises one's relationship with that character. That is, the human ability to project affection onto inanimate objects, which so characterises children's play, may code the intense relationship between player and character as itself “cute” or “human.” Indeed, because of the defenceless and vulnerability of video game characters as they passively await our informing agency, a protective stance towards them flatters one's own sense of humanity (Tan, 1997, p. 192).

More than this, the computer itself may be coded as child-like. This was more obvious with older PC computers, such as the System-80, or even later models like the Commodore 64. The crude simplicity of the low resolution pixels on older machines may (now) be seen as something like an innate releaser for cuteness. Older users may also remember waiting while their clunky machines took half an hour to load from tape or disk. Beyond the periodic frustration and technical confusion there was sometimes the anticipation of some simple, child-like accomplishment which could be performed without the computer, such as a digital version of a game that might be played better with paper cards or a board. At such moments the computer's execution of its task could create something akin to parental pride, and also perhaps a sense that one can remain in contact with one's own childish qualities from a position of technical mastery. However, just as a child's selfishness and an inability to consider consequences may frustrate us, the “autism” of a computer, coupled with its inscrutable computation, may be distressing. The next chapter takes up this issue by addressing the existential implications of the computer as a partner in play.