Chapter Nine

Existential and Holistic Gameplay

The Existential Experience of Play

If we do not belabour its problems as a philosophy, existentialism offers a useful analogy that helps us to draw together some of the arguments in the preceding chapters (Camus, 1955/1991; Heidegger, 1927/1962; Sartre, 1943/1993, 1959/1964 ). By Sartre's ( 1943/1993 ) account, existentialism refers to the belief that we are trapped in existence, forced to live in a meaningless world without recourse to absolute values or any essence of human nature that might organise our experience. The only facts we can take for granted are that we exist, that we will die, and that our interpretations of this existence and death are arbitrary. The human condition consequently involves the absurd necessity of making meaning in a meaningless world, and the awareness of this may be experienced as anguish, shame or nausea.

It can be argued that some of the processes described in previous chapters produce in players the shame, anguish and nausea that Sartre ( 1943/1993 ) associates with existential experience. Sartre describes shame in his account of Being-for-others (etre-pour-autrui) where a being becomes (shamefully) conscious of his/her being as defined by others, as when one is caught peeping through a key-hole (p. 259). He emphasises how, through shame, we exist in a different way: “Shame is by nature recognition. I recognise that I am as the Other sees me” (p. 221). This is a radical moment of disruption, of separation from a prior state of knowing one's self and of Being-for-itself (etre-pour-soi). Here Sartre describes shame as what, in Frijda's (1986) terms, we would call an emotion in that it incorporates a cognitive appraisal of the “Other.” The existential character of this emotion lies in the way it alienates an ind ividual from a valued and meaningful experience of selfhood.

As noted in the last chapter, while some players may feel shame by perceiving themselves as associated with negative stereotypes of gamers, to presume an emotion of shame on behalf of players is to reproduce assumptions that gameplay is a shameful activity. Nonetheless, the frequent disruption of a player's interest or flow may be seen in terms of Tomkins' (1963) account of shame as an auxiliary affect. Schore (1994) not only cites Sartre in his account of shame, he situates Tomkins in relation to more recent theories, notably theories of “mis-attunement” (Kohut, 1974; Meares, 1992). “Mis-attunement” refers to when one experiences (the possibility of) a certain type of attentiveness or feedback, but finds it continually frustrated. This does not require identity in terms of what the two seek from the exchange: if one person likes to talk and the other likes to listen we have an instance of attunement; if both people like to talk and neither likes to listen we have an instance of mis-attunement (see Tomkins, 1962, p. 411). In its mild form, the reduction of a (potentially) positive affect state elicits Tomkins' (1963) definition of shame, with archaic resonances in early experiences of mis-attunement with primary caregivers. However, as Meares (1992) argues within the tradition of self psychology, mis-attunement and its related processes may, at their most systematic and extreme, lead to dissociative disorders, including borderline personality disorder, in which the individual has not had the opportunity to develop an authentic sense of self (see Erikson, 1950, 1968; Kohut, 1971, 1977).

The dysregulation of interest and flow discussed in early chapters may be referred to as mis-attunement with the machine. O f course, players may self-regulate the resulting affects of shame well enough, but shame may nonetheless constitute a significant aspect of the aesthetic experience. Indeed it is possible that the disjunctive qualities of gameplay may resonate with an awareness of the status of the computer as a medium and partner in play. W hile play is meant to be satisfying to the ego, the player may experience a gap, an emptiness, between him/herself and the computer as a fellow agent in a game. C omputation, and computers in general, are coded as not merely mathematical, but logical, as rationality deprived of emotion and morality, as cold, impersonal, and inhuman. If, for existentialists, the world is disenchanted, its facticity is analogous to scientific language: even if there is structure in the world, even if there is order in it, it is not meaningful in that it holds no dignifying place for the human. The player's position vis-a-vis the computer is, then, analogous to the existential individual's position vis-a-vis a universe whose grim facticity, its impersonal order, has no empathy for us. The computer is egoistically self-concerned, stubbornly disinterested in the wants of the player. Mis-attunement therefore may be experienced as a loss of meaning because the computer as an inhuman, dysfunctional opponent blocks empathy and creates a context in which our sense of self, or self-esteem, is diminished. In short, a sense of meaninglessness is linked to not merely the lowering of self-esteem, but to the absence of empathy: a context in which one's ego is not even recognised. The player experiences the emptiness of this disavowal as shame in its most profound sense as a separation from a positive experience of selfhood.

Even when players do not experience any such sense of the emptiness of play, some effort is required to reinvest in a state of interest, flow or joy from which one has been cut off. Indeed, it is difficult to emphasise how important this labour is to the experience of play, and in elaborating upon it we can find an analogy in what Sartre ( 1943/1993 ) calls “anguish.” For Sartre, anguish refers to the (presumably) familiar moment when we experience the salience of our choices, where our future hinges upon an action in a present separate from the past (pp. 30-33). Anguish is

the recognition of a possibility as my possibility; that is, [anguish] is constituted when consciousness sees itself cut from its essence by nothingness or separated from the future by its very freedom. (p. 35)

If anguish for Sartre is a sense that the future is contingent upon our agency, this may be seen as analogous to the situation when a video game hangs in temporal suspension while awaiting player input, as occurs in most of the menus and navigation screens of FFX . It is at that moment that one may feel isolated from the temporal flow of play and forced into labour. A player may become overwhelmed by the one's awareness of the enormous scope of the game world and the necessity of traversing this scope to satisfy an aesthetic of mastery or demystification. If, as the cover of the Playstation Solutions issue dedicated to FFX suggests, players wish to: “Finish every Quest/Win every battle/Master every character/Learn every secret,” they may feel a sense of incompleteness every time they miss a path they cannot return to, or have missed an item, or have failed and aborted a game. It is possible to speak of as an existential moment whenever the labour of play reverberates upon oneself as a player , when we become aware of the Sisyphean task of wrestling joy from a machine. This is the moment when an attempt to involve the motor system in some supposedly meaningful or pleasurable activity in a play space gives way to demanding, pointless labour.

This experience of shame and anguish may be linked to the experience of nausea. For Sartre ( 1943/1993 ) , nausea is a consequence of a horrible realisation of the facticity and contingency of experience, its grim reality and emptiness. His claim that this is fundamental to other specific types of nausea, for example to spoiled meat, ignores physiological explanations for nausea, but these physiological explanations may be adapted to account for an existential experience of gameplay, given the physiological link between shame and nausea. As Schore (1994) observes, shame is linked to not only the parasympathetic nervous system, which arrests arousal and triggers partial paralysis of motor function, it is also linked to the onset of the vagus nerve, or vagal restraint, which reduces the motility of the gastrointestinal tract, and produces the characteristic nausea associated with shame.

Nausea may also be seen as an independent affect, as is evident in the case of motion sickness, a category of vertigo in which a mismatch between visual stimuli and motion in the vestibular canals of the middle ear interrupts our sense of balance and creates nausea. This:

begins with epigastric discomfort, often described as “stomach awareness,” which is usually accompanied by increased salivation, eructation, and a feeling of bodily warmth. With sustained exposure to the triggering stimulus, gastric emptying is inhibited and symptoms progress to nausea, pallor, sweating and, eventually, vomiting or retching. (Gahlinger, 1999, ¶ 2)

What is important here is that:

actual movement of the body is not necessary to produce symptoms. Purely visual stimuli, such as those from flight simulators, video games, panoramic movies, or even the movement of slides under a microscope, can produce symptoms more effectively than does actual physical motion. (¶ 3)

The latter phenomenon has long been known in military simulators, where it is known as “simulator sickness.” Its cause is held to be either the mismatch of visual and vestibular cues, or too much strain being placed on the vestibular-ocular reflex, which governs synchronisation between eye and head movements. A distinct cause may be the stroboscopic effect of the interface which occurs when, for example, the monitor's refresh rate is too low. Postings to websites, which include amateur experimentation, are one anecdotal source of nauseous responses to video games (see Solomon, 1998, 2000). Working from player accounts, the nausea in video games seems to have become prominent with the rise of the FPS Wolfenstein 3D . This experience was exacerbated by virtual reality goggles, in which case it sometimes elicited vomiting (Kushner, 2003, p. 114), though a staff member at id Software, which designed the game, was known for routinely lying on the floor to recover from motion sickness from the PC interface (p. 150).

In games like FFX , the absence of both first person perspective and accelerated motion minimises the chance of “simulator sickness.” Nonetheless, disparity in and between the perceptual, affective and cognitive dimensions of experience may be felt as uncertainty about, for example, an event's or object's proximal or distal qualities, or, more broadly, its “meaning” or significance. This ambiguous reality-status may be experienced as a kind of disorientation in the literal sense that we cannot properly orient ourselves towards the event or object. Even if we commit to an action tendency there may be a persistent feeling of unease that we are acting blindly, or wrongly, without fully understanding what is going on. That is, the disparity between visual and spatial cues for reality-status may produce an occasional disorientation, analogous (and arguably related) to the nauseous disequilibrium that results from disparities between visual and vestibular cues. Unless the perceptual qualities of the interface addressed in Chapter Two are entirely attenuated through habituation, it is possible that a minimal sense of “un-reality” or disorientation persists as a background tone during gameplay. It can more confidently be stated that a more pronounced disorientation occurs during shifts between the diegetic and non-diegetic, when we pass from a state of immersion and re-orient ourselves to the world beyond. The moment when we become aware of having sat in the same spot for hours, of the demands of our forgotten body, and experience our re-orientation to non-diegetic space and time, clearly marks the passage from one state to another.

Whether shame, simulator sickness, or the stroboscopic effect of flickering interfaces are causally distinct in the elicitation of nausea is beside the point. Here we can suggest a way of linking together an emphasis on pre-meaning intensities, the dysregulation of interest and flow, the absence of empathy, and the coding of computation as meaningless. All these processes may be experientially linked as fractures in the Gestalt of play. If for Gestalt psychologists the absence of closure fractures the Gestalt impression of wholeness, and our search for closure is experienced as a search for meaning, then the sustained dysfunction of Gestalt of play may be felt as the suspension, frustration, or absence of meaning. The human, creative activity of the player is alienated and disavowed by the inhuman, logical machine. This is not merely some anxiety about the death or the loss of self, it is a sense of the self fully present to itself as a possibility, yet denied through the absence of another's (the computer's) empathy. This sense of non-being is, of course, not without meaning, since a player might say that the “meaning” is that the game was unsatisfying; the point is that it is experienced as a loss of (personal) meaning and value.

It is possible that, in FFX , any disorientation and/or loss of meaning will resonate with one's cognitive engagement with the narrative. Chapter Four observed several aporia which result from the uncertain reality-status of certain events and which are characteristic of the fantastic. In her account of the fantastic, Jackson (1988) argues that figurations of physical and psychic fragmentation parallel (or are an effect of) social fragmentation in secular, post-Romantic, capitalist culture. These figurations are subversive because they mark the margins of a dominant (ideological) reality or discourse, that which is unseen or unsaid, pointing towards the realm of non-signification. What is notable is that Jackson cites Sartre's categories of the “thetic” and “non-thetic” to emphasise the tension between meaning and non-meaning that characterises the fantastic (p. 75). In short, for Jackson , the uncanny and the fantastic have an existential character. If we set aside Jackson 's ideological assertions about the subversive quality of the fantastic, it can be argued that the disparity of some narrative information in FFX may produce a sense of hesitating uncertainty or cognitive disorientation which complements both shameful ejection from a state of interest and nauseous disorientation produced by mixed perceptions of movement. Collectively, these processes may give rise to a pronounced existential quality of experience.

Of course, if perceptual experiences of unreality may be aesthetically recuperated through FFX 's hermeneutic concern with (un)reality, then similarly an existential drama in FFX 's narrative may aesthetically recuperate any felt sense of meaninglessness. After all, Tidus is teleported—perhaps, in Heidegger's (1962) terms, “thrown”—into a chaotic world in which the (un)dead rule the living, who are threatened by the random destructiveness of Sin. Tidus finds it difficult to believe Spira's acceptance of Sin's domination, but in guiding Yuna to defeat Sin he learns that he is leading her to her death and must confront his own responsibility for her impending death. While Tidus helps to find a way to save Yuna, Tidus discovers that he was already dead. In repeating: “This is my story” several times, Tidus may be read as marking FFX as a bildungsroman: Tidus is a suffering individual, striving to assert his voice and his destiny, to find his place, in a hostile world. Yet upon Tidus' death, Yuna takes up the phrase: “This is my story,” such that his attempt to make sense of the world with himself at the centre of things is lost in the story of the freedom of Spira.

Of course, a key aspect of Sartre's (1943/1993) account is that it is only by accepting our existential state and entering that mode of being he labels anguish that we open ourselves to the dreadful freedom of choosing our world view, our way of life, and taking responsibility for the consequences (p. 553). Similarly, in FFX , Tidus is forced to re-experience the basis for his engagement with a seemingly chaotic world and relearns the reasons for co-operation, trust and loyalty which provide the foundation of morality. Even if we read Tidus' upbeat personality as a kind of desperate happiness, or as a nervous manifestation of unhappiness, he does try to find courage and optimism in the face of what seems hopeless. Similarly, while Yuna is more introspective and maudlin, owing to her awareness of her impending death, she sees it as her duty to put on a brave and happy face for those of Spira, to offer them hope. The conversation between Tidus and Yuna outside Kilika presents the reader with their united choice to laugh and find joy in the company of others. Both ultimately define their humanity by way of humour and moral action in the face of loss, death, tragedy and evil (compared with Seymour, who uses his dreadful freedom to end the freedom of others). That is, Tidus' and Yuna's commitment to laughter and happiness is premised upon loss, hopelessness, and impending death, and therefore has a kind of absurd or hysterical quality to it. The other Guardians certainly point this out to both of them, wondering if they have both not gone insane.

Even if players do not interpret the game precisely in these existential terms, they may experience the game as a tragic romance that dramatises emotional states of hopelessness, resignation, uncertainty, loss, and sadness. In such a reading, the player's experience of shame, anguish and nausea/disorientation, may be experienced as a basis for empathy with Tidus' psychological state. Indeed, j ust as Tidus and Yuna use humour as a means of dealing with a harsh and indifferent world, the player may confront the meaningless, programmed machine—or any disjunctive affect experienced during play—through the use of courage and humour. That is, the player may define his/her humanity as an attitude of courage and humour in the face of the computer as meaningless data and agency, which holds power over them, in the context of a supposedly ego-validating experience. As was noted in Chapter Eight, Aarseth (1997) has observed that the potential for absurd theatre in computer-generated narratives through “the possibility of unintentional sign behavior” (p. 124) has not gained much academic attention or been systematically exploited by the gaming industry. However, players have long regarded the happy, but accidental, convergence of output as a distinct aesthetic of gameplay, and there is a tradition of designers making in-game jokes about the limitations of the interface. While FFX does not go out of its way to exploit self-reflexivity in this way, the use of humour by designers and players is one way in which players may maintain the sense of interaction with the machine, or computer-mediated communication, as an expressive, human act.

Towards Holistic Gameplay

For critics of video games, of course, the problem with video games is precisely that they are meaningful, but that their meanings are ideological, in that they perpetuate violent, sexist, and capitalist values. Following Stallabras' (1996) polemic, the most pervasive ideological contradiction in FFX may be its emphasis on the moral agency and responsibility of the individual. Underneath its supposed values of community, of sociality, of morality, of empathy, the individual player avoids social obligations by spending money on a video game console and game, spending ninety or more hours playing it alone, and dignifies this activity as a demonstration of empathy and a virtual proof of one's own moral disposition. The political activity of the public sphere is reduced to the individual's relationship with the gaming interface as a simulation of interpersonal communication. The narrative therefore legitimates and heroises the self in an ideological context in which the self is a mere consumer in a capitalist system premised upon inequality.

While this is true enough at a certain level of description, it restages anxieties and assumptions about the influence of ideology inherited from the Althussurean-Marxist tradition: that realism naturalises ideological content, and that interaction reinforces identification with characters. This thesis has complemented recent reader-response based research (Consalvo, 1993; Herz, 1997; Frasca, 2003; Jenkins, 1987) by extending the critique of traditional notions of realism and identification. It has argued that reality-status is affected by various perceptual, cognitive and emotional processes, and may have a largely aesthetic function. It has also argued that identification must be seen more in terms of the player's cognitive work, and in relation to empathetic emotions, including those directed towards the player.

Even if we accept that players of video games have the same freedom that they have with other media to produce meaning (see Frasca, 2003), it remains necessary to avoid the fallacy of meaning, especially given that adventure and role-playing games are valued in literary or artistic terms (Aarseth, 1997, Buckles, 1985, 1987; Kelley, 1993; Randall, 1988; Ziegfield, 1989). Players certainly make sense of FFX , but this “making sense” is not the same as the text's “meaning.” To presume that players “find meaning” in the sense of a clear interpretation may misrepresent the experience of play because meaning sometimes may be subordinate to strategic activity and/or emotional experience. In Morley's (1980) terms the “meaning” of many texts may be irrelevant to an audience (or players) (see also Jenkins, 1992; Morley, 1992; Tulloch & Jenkins, 1995). Play is often an end in itself, not merely a conveyor of meanings, or a cause for a secondary experience. This is not to argue that the practice of play cannot, or should not, be seen in semiotic, narratological, ideological or discursive terms. The issue is that some players may not bother to construct much or any meaning at all, except as a retrospective reading formation, and their aesthetic evaluation may be in terms of enjoyment or boredom. Any ideological cognition therefore may be dependant upon whether or not the game successfully met their preferred uses and/or gratifications. In more precise terms, the player's defence of his or her labour will likely affect any evaluation of the game.

The importance of a player's emotional experience to his/her evaluation or meaning of a game may be addressed by way of terms of Tomkins' notion of “affect grouping.” For Tomkins (1962, 1963, 1991) and Nathanson (1992) , recurring stimulus-affect-response sequences are called “scenes,” and become grouped in terms of similarity of source, affect, and response (Nathanson, 1992, p. 246). Stern (1985) refers to these groups of scenes as “Representations of Interactions that have been Generalized,” or RIGs, (p. 97). These scenes, or RIGs, are not memories of particular experiences, but “the summation and integration of a host of experiences” (Nathanson, 1992, p. 246), which allow the individual to select an appropriate script for action. However, what is important is that:

Whenever the organism is able to form such groupings, the group itself becomes an entity that is now capable of triggering affect. . . . [T]his affect magnifies everything within the group. (p. 246)

Affect grouping can be seen as a theory of emotional stereotyping whose dynamics depends upon narcissistic and anaclitic transfer. This model may be applied to either people, characters, games or genres to account for not only the tendency to evaluate complex impressions in general terms (“I liked it” or “I hated it”) but also more subtle relationships between emotion and meaning.

If we apply the concept of affect grouping to real or fictional people it is evident that a positive high valance towards a loved person will lead to a generalised positive valance being extended to all that person's characteristics, including those that are non-average or unattractive, such as a dark mole, a protruding stomach, wide-eyes, and wide-teeth. This generalised assignment of emotion may require, or be facilitated by, a conscious resolution, the cognitive form of which might be: “you have that , which I don't like, but, after all, I love you , and so in fact I really love this , and therefore, all of you.” Since this labour, or investment, is undergone in relation to another person, a relationship is formed which our homeostatic drive will try to preserve: “Through my acceptance of your imperfections I've invested in you and shared something special (my act of love), so how can I give up on you now?” This may be governed by some anxiety that the act of investment (of love, of the equal acceptance of one's own flaws) will not be rewarded (with reciprocal love).

Rejected love, of course, involves an undesirable shame, and the denial of the possibility of such shame may give rise to a frantic effort to preserve one's charitable investment, to maximise the significance of one's act of love as deserving reward. Previously non-ideal characteristics may, subsequently, become signs of the act of investment, of the love as acceptance, as a charitable act which (being compassionate), seems to make one self lovable. We might subsequently think: “how could you not love me, after I've made the effort of overlooking your imperfections?” Indeed, by taking on the role of defender of the other's imperfections, one has acted out an action tendency of protectiveness (“just imagine how others might criticise you for those imperfections”). The imperfect characteristics may come to function anaclitically, through a metonymic transfer of desire, not just as individual desirable qualities (“you are this particular thing , not that general type”) but to a plenitude of them that exceeds the unity of any imago : (“I desire this, and that, and that— all these things about you!”). At the same time, magnification of the entire constellation of signs, the “grouping” of the person's characteristics as part of a total “character,” may make them cohere emotionally.

These processes are particularly relevant to narrative macrostructures in which characters are developed in complex ways. Chapter Seven argued that prolonged cognitive identification of characters constitutes an investment that raises the stakes for empathetic emotions. This is especially significant when one is cued to judge characters a certain way only to be later offered disclosures that render such judgments inappropriate, as is the case with the Al Bhed and and Jecht. If players develop negative arousal towards a character, any shame, guilt or other emotional response to the initial misjudgment becomes part of the history of their relationship to the character, increasing the arousal that is redirected to, or re-grouped around, the character. Conversely, the process of affect grouping in response to re-typing may occur with negative emotions, as is the case with Seymour . While players may never completely trust Seymour , they may admire him as an ideal ego or ego-ideal, and perhaps even as a super-ego, given that his proposed union with Yuna for the sake of Spira may connote a shared commitment towards civic duty. Given the ambivalence of his traiting, the positive investment in Seymour likely will be accompanied by cognitive dissonance, which will make him a more emotionally interesting character. However, when he betrays Tidus he also betrays the player's greater emotional investment in him, and the excess of emotion will strengthen the player's tendency to polarise negative cognitive and emotional closure around him. In this respect an opponent who initially self-presents as good but then betrays the player's trust may elicit more anger than a character who is evil from the outset.

Complex characters, then, require greater cognitive and emotional investment, and are more emotionally engaging. The implication is that the disjunction between narrative and game macrostructures, and the tension between the dual narrative and game coding of characters, may make gameplay more emotionally engaging. As Chapter Eight argued, the disjunctive qualities of video game characters may be exploited for aesthetic reasons, and may even be perceived as personable. Here we can add that affect grouping may mean that gameplay is given a Gestalt impression of coherence, during play and/or retrospectively. For example, players may determine whether a particular game or gaming experience is aesthetically akin to other games in the genre by simply identifying a match-mismatch between immediate experience and an existing script. For example, if a player likes CRPGs but dislikes FFX , one may not only feel that FFX is a failed CRPG, one may feel a kind of amplified emotional betrayal of one's history of investment in the genre. In broader terms, it is through the operation of scripts that players retrospectively assign a general valance to a game irrespective of the actual conflicted emotions or ambivalence experienced during play. A game that was experienced as enormously frustrating may be re-evaluated in positive terms to maintain one's positive attitude towards the genre to which it belongs, and players may generalise from one or more (idealised) sessions or elements of the game to the rest of their gaming experience, or the rest of their valuation of a genre.

This may be seen in terms of some generalised cases. For example, a player may believe that: “I play CRPGs; I enjoy CRPGs; therefore CRPGs are good.” This belief raises the stakes for a negative valuation of FFX . For example, if: “CRPGs are good, and FFX is an CRPG . . . but FFX is awful,” then one has a problem. If another gamer says: “I played a CRPG, I hated it, and CRPGs are awful,” the player may feel the need to reconcile his view with the other person's. Closure may be achieved by means of the fallacy of petitio principii , or circular logic, once used to justify the inclusion of “literary” texts into the canon of “literature”: “CRPGs are good because they facilitate ‘imagination'; this is evident in that, by playing them, my ‘imagination' is stimulated; anyone who does not like the game is ‘unimaginative,' and therefore my intellectual or artistic inferior.” However, some players may respond to the claims of dissatisfied players using more benign reasoning, such as: “they did not understand the game because they have not spent enough time investing in it to recognise its value: that is why they did not enjoy it and why they are not in a position to judge the genre.” An even more benign defense would simply be to acknowledging one's own experience or subjective preference as the source of justification: “I've played the game for years and have fond memories of it; that is why it is good (for me).”

The importance of a history of investment or labour in the production of a reading formation may be linked to the formation of community through a final analogy to existentialism. The experience of online communities in massively multiplayer online role-playing games, such as Ultima Online (1997), EverQuest (2000), and Dark Age of Camelot (2001), is premised upon, or reinforced by, a realisation of shared vulnerability to the whims of the network. During play one experiences many frustrations: hours spent (or wasted) installing, patching and re-patching the game (or patching the patches, in some cases); hours spent purchasing and installing the appropriate new hardware; being subjected to inexplicable lag, or being kicked off a network in the middle of a game; and, in EverQuest , dying, running across half the continent to fetch one's corpse and inventory items, only to die again. Until one has experienced and dealt with this labour—until one has factored in suffering as part of the aesthetic experience—until one has learned to self-regulate oneself during gameplay—until one has found a way to wrestle joy from such an indifferent machine/network—one has not truly entered the game community. That is, confronting the existential experience of the machine in isolation is the rite of passage which facilitates one's sense of connection to others online: we empathise with a shared condition of dealing with the inhuman context of human play, and use this sense of connection as our basis for evaluating the game as a whole. The same may be said in regards to most video games, including FFX , in that the shared investment in the labour of play not only guides our evaluation of play, it also constitutes a basis for a recognition of another player's suffering. Indeed, the fan community of video games may sometimes have less to do with shared pleasure than with shared attempts to cope with its absence.

Within this framework, naturalisation need not always be seen in ideological terms of normalising or recuperating potentially subversive impulses and placing them within a socially conservative form. T he preferences of players may be motivated by a personal desire to defend one's investment in a form of leisure, albeit a defence that may often appropriate ideological associations. The ideological function of naturalisation therefore may be seen as a secondary effect, or a special instance, of the equilibration of the individual to his/her environment. In such a framework it is possible to engage in ethnographic work that relates players' experiences to not only broader social formations such as class, gender and race, but also to personality types and scripts.

Conclusion

While game designers like Freeman (2003) eschew “theory,” an understanding of the psychological principles that determine how fictions and games are experienced opens up new possibilities in the creative use of video games as an expressive medium. Throughout this thesis it has been argued that, while gameplay may be a hybrid process, its elements gain coherence and interweave through the cognitive and emotional activity for the player. The regulation of meaning and emotion has been seen as something that occurs not before and after gameplay, but during it, and the supposed limitations of the medium may become part of the aesthetic practice as elements of a holistic medium, genre, game, or experience. T hese processes are not reducible to vulgar accounts of “realism,” “identification,” or “immersion.” If, as Murray (1997) has argued, certain types of game structures may complement the characteristics of the computer as a medium, in FFX narrative and game macrostructures exploit the characteristics of the medium. Notably, an hermeneutic emphasis on reality and tragedy may aesthetically recuperate the disjunctive experience of gameplay.

Lastly, while there is a definite need for ethnographic and other empirical research to counter decontextualised claims about the “effects” of video games, there is still a need for analyses of the structure of the texts themselves. The twenty-five-year head start of the industry means that, in reaching back through the history of the medium, we also have an opportunity to reach back through the history of theory. While theories such as semiotics and structuralism have limitations, they promote attentiveness to textual formations that may sensitise us to the potential subtlety of meaning in general as well as distinctions in and between player discourses produced during ethnographic research. At the same time, cognitive psychology and recent theories of emotion are highly sensitive to non-textual processes, and self psychology and other therapeutic traditions offer a means of better understanding the experience of play. Individually, and in conjunction, these theories can only enrich our understanding of the dynamics of video gameplay. Indeed, if gameplay is about making choices, so too is cultural analysis. By taking advantage of seemingly disparate disciplines we may be in a better position to appreciate the complex choices that determine the meaning of human experience.

Footnotes

1. Sartre's (1943/1993) existentialism betrays its class status by ignoring the important ways that people are beholden to social forces. Many people are so disadvantaged by poverty, war, repression that their experience is characterised by terror or starvation, and Sartre's nausea is not only the least of their concerns, it would be a luxury. It is an insult, or naiveté, to suggest that such people be “authentic” to themselves.

Furthermore, while anyone may have an existential moment such a moment hardly defines that person's constant attitude to life unless they have a personality disorder. Even the most atheistic person may have, or act automatically according to, a (vague) faith in particular beliefs, such as “good is its own reward,” and even the most religious person may have “existential” moments.

2. We might reposition Sartre (1943/1993) by saying that an “existential” experience may refer to a variety of disjunctive states that may result from, or be linked to, a range of perceptual, cognitive, emotional or socio-historical factors. For example, we might distinguish between: an intellectual response to events which suggest a cruelly indifferent humanity and/or universe, such as the bombing of Nagasaki; the emotional response of those who endure trauma (van der Kolk, McFarlane & Weisaeth, 1996); the alienation which results from our psychological separateness from others; the culturally specific “alienation” experienced in capitalist society; and pathological experiences which find their extreme form in borderline personality disorder (BPD), in which a person does not feel like s/he owns or experiences an authentic sense of self (Meares, 1992).