Ragdoll Metaphysics: Game Research, Ghost Stories, Alan Moore, and Academia: The Far Reaches of Edutainment
Academia has thrown up a bunch of interesting game projects over the past few years. As more gamers get into positions of academic usefulness, so that trend grows. Of course university and research groups have long been creating games with educational purposes in mind, but they're now handling increasingly hefty budgets.
One of the most high-profile projects (and most obvious recent failures) was Indiana University's Arden: The World Of William Shakespeare, which reportedly had a grant of $250,000. It was an experimental MMO which came about via the work of Professor Ed Castronova, author of Synthetic Worlds. Castronova wondered whether the creation of a genuinely educational MMO was possible, and set up the student development project to find out. Having spent thousands of dollars on Arden it was shut down. Castronova cited "a lack of fun".
But I don't suppose that was the only reason. Games don't necessarily have to be fun to be engaging. Indeed "fun" seems like a trite expression in the face of some contemporary projects: games can provoke more than simple enjoyment. Look at the terrifying crypts of Stalker, or the strange sadness of Shadow of the Colossus. To realise that games ride on more than fun only takes a quick glance at the bigger picture.
One game researcher for whom "fun" seems inappropriate is the academically oriented team The Chinese Room, who are games researchers working for the University Of Portsmouth in the UK. Their medium, for now at least, is the Half-Life 2 mod, and the experiences they've created are peculiar investigations into the emotive possibilities of game design. They've realised that 3D games, with their claustrophobia and their immersive properties, can be spooky, scary and deeply evocative.
The first of mods created by The Chinese Room, Dear Esther, is a solemn, elegiac experience in which you wander around an abandoned island to the contemplative narrations of, presumably, the character you are in control of. It's a peculiar and unsettling experience, with little "game" or interactivity, but with a certain idiosyncratic atmosphere that will either draw you in or put you off within a few minutes.
Given that it's been made using limited resources and the aging Half-Life 2 engine, it's also uniquely beautiful. The author, Daniel Pinchbeck, describes it as an "interactive ghost story", but it could also be seen as an ambiguous puzzle, or simply a strange island that gives you a mood-provoking verbal backdrop to rather unmotivated wanderings. Exploration for exploration's sake, because it's a novel experience, and you might just value that..
The Chinese Room's most recent effort, Korsakovia, is significantly more intense. Again, it's a Half-Life 2 mod, this time with more than just environment and narration, because the crowbar makes an appearance. It's rather more of a videogame, too, with identifiable enemies: clouds of black smoke that steadily, horrifically, drag you towards death.
Pinchbeck describes Korsakovia as "a survival horror FPS that aims to trap the player in the splintering fragments of a destroyed mind." That sounds like the bit of blurb from the back of the box of any number of survival horror games, but this time that destroyed mind is one of those that might be suffered by psychotics in the real world. It's a creative interpretation of the horrific Korsakoff's Syndrome, which sufferers radically lose their grip on reality.
The narration in Korsakavia suggests that not only are you hallucinating the visual events because you are blind (with the auditory events possibly be real) but that you aren't necessarily experiencing things in a linear sequence. One of the symptoms of Korsakoff's is amnesia, and a lost of temporality. Those of you who have read Oliver Sacks' incredible document of weird neurological cases, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, might remember "The Lost Mariner", who was faced with a similar predicament.
Korsakovia takes mental illness as its theme, and attempts to teach us a little bit about how it might be experienced. So is this... edutainment?
Whether or not it's actually educational, or simply fictional, what's interesting about this to me is that Korsakovia, and to some degree Dear Esther, is about exploring the nature of conscious experience. And that's not just a critic being poncy: that's what it's /explicitly/ about, as the stated intent of the project.
I'd say it's success is limited in that regard, but it probably points to something else more important with what it does achieve (which is to create a provocative, occasionally terrifying experience). What it points to is games being used, increasingly, as a tool for exploring specific ideas about how we experience life. It demonstrates that games are not just about exploring how to kill all the zombies, or understanding what Ken Levine did after he read Atlas Shrugged, but about interpreting the entire wide-open field of human experience.
That's an area of research that has many more layers than the largest onion in France, and it needs a whole bunch of tools available to make it accessible and comprehensible. In this instance videogames are tools. They are tools that academics and developers are still finding uses for. We have a very long way before we even identify all the uses, let alone set about addressing them. I think what The Chinese Room are doing is something of a signpost for how to think about them in that way.
There's a bit in Alan Moore's weird spoken-word performance Snakes & Ladders where he talks about imagination as if it were a realm, a place we travel to and explore. He suggests that creative people - painters, writers, sculptors - are as much exporters from this realm as they are explorers of it. The imaginatively and creatively gifted are able to come back from the lands of the fictive and sell that experience on to us in books, poems, paintings and ideas. They furnish us with "dreamland bric-a-brac" (at a considerable mark-up) so that our lives might be a little more interesting. Games are just another channel for exporting that stuff into the real world.
I'm probably taking Moore rather too literally here, but that notion of exploration, of bringing back what we find in imagination to share it with others, has always seemed to me to be at its most concrete with videogames. While we are able to directly share visions in films, appreciate imaginative precipitate in writing, or listen in on previously unknown audioscapes in music, it's only in gaming that we are genuinely able to root about in imaginative spaces on our own time. I read about Korsakoff's Syndrome in Sacks' book, but it took Korsakovia for it to frighten me firsthand. I'd suggest that it's in gaming where our imaginative exports can be best understood and examined, as if we were there ourselves.
Games are, of course, seldom the imaginative enterprise of a single person. Their collaborative nature means that whatever game makers bring back from imagination tends to be an amalgam: a collective project of and for a number of minds. We are, I sometimes think, exploring a kind of collectively imagined space when we play certain games (I'm not talking Tetris here, obviously) with the mechanistic imagination of one designer bolted into the architectural fantasies of another. To paraphrase Will Wright, a game is model in the mind of multiple people (which is something I talk about in my book - out in paperback soon!)
And there seem like there must be some drawbacks to this. Is this collective imagining of games one of the reasons why they tend to focus on a narrow band of imagination? Do critics decry games because games need, more than any other media, to be something a group of people can all agree on? Isn't that why diversions from the standard templates are always met with such excitement or surprise? Getting a large number of creative people to head out into the same imaginative realm is a monumental task, and it's a reason why game directors like to riff off familiar films or activities you can see on TV to define their projects. A familiar movie gets everyone on the same page with great immediacy. "Want to know what this game is going to be like? Go watch Aliens, you'll soon catch up." We are pushed into familiar, well-explored areas of imagination.
However, there are also teams who are both exploring strange annexes and also creating games that are very much about imaginative exploration. These idiosyncratic few do seem like Alan Moore's "exporters", giving us something genuinely new investigate and explore. Once the team have figured out how to drag the thing back from their imaginations, so we get to examine its exotic experiences - like the kind we can't get at home.
Hopefully, as game-making tools become easier to use, and creating interesting experiences becomes cheaper, we'll see more of this sort of thing appear on our screens. The Chinese Room, meanwhile, asks an interesting question of games research as a whole: shouldn't academia be looking at what games are best at, and asking if that really does amount to "fun"? If games are going to be used for educational purposes, then the designers need to start thinking about precisely what it is that games are capable of, and devising the conditions required to test it. We need to figure out, as writers and sculptures have done, what games are going to allow us to import to the real world.
Dear Esther can be found here, and Korsakovia can be found here. Half-Life: Episode 2 is required to play both.
[Jim Rossignol is an editor at RockPaperShotgun.com and the author of This Gaming Life, an account of the life of modern videogames and some of the people who play them. Ragdoll Metaphysics is his Offworld column exploring and analyzing gaming's vast world of esoterica.]
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hdon
#1 – 8:04 PM September 23, 2009
Best article on OffWorld yet. I'd also like to add, though, a more mundane approach to explaining away the apparent necessity of traditional videogame fun. That is: like chiptunes and pixelgraphics, artists (and consumers) are going to be thinking within the frameworks of our own life experiences. If the golden era of gaming was in the mid-1980s to early 1990s, conventional wisdom about innovation tells us that the children of that era should be arriving at their peak creative and academic right about now. *Somebody* must have known all along that trade routes to this particular memespace county would start sprouting up all over the place right about now...
Bobby Smiles
#2 – 6:24 AM September 24, 2009
Games don't necessarily have to be fun to be engaging.
Reread that sentence until you see what's wrong with it.
Tired of people who hate games writing about them as if they cared at all about them.
Jim Rossignol
#3 – 8:28 AM September 24, 2009
Yeah, famous games-hater, me.
"Fun" is a crappy, vacuous word, and attempts to boil gaming down to it are equally crappy and vacuous.
chesh
#4 – 10:35 AM September 24, 2009
Fun is all well and good but most of us over the age of 25 or so do occasionally look for other experiences from our art.
Is reading Infinite Jest, Gravity's Rainbow, Ulysses, or Hamlet fun? Not really, but they're still all astounding works of literature.
The two hours I spent watching Requiem For A Dream were some of the most profoundly un-fun of my life, but they are also two of the hours that I value most.
What about less serious fare? I would not call Fatal Frame fun -- my experience playing it being closer to bed-wetting terror -- but I still play it. In fact, until the glorious shootybangs of Resident Evil 4, fun was pretty much an alien concept to the entire survival horror genre -- which remained quite popular, much as horror movies (also not terribly fun) do. How about Stalker (as Jim mentioned), or even Fallout 3 once you've hit level cap and no longer hear that deliciously pavlovian cash register noise? Not really.
tl;dr: if you think that games (or any media) must be fun to be good you are a twat.
echolocate chocolate
#5 – 10:36 AM September 24, 2009
For that matter, "game" is an inadequate word, but it's the one we're stuck with. Same way the vast majority of "film" we watch isn't actually on film, and most comics aren't actually comical.
This was a great article--thanks, Jim!
Bobby Smiles
#6 – 7:36 AM September 25, 2009
Chesh: If you don't find those books fun, I don't know what to tell you. Maybe you should stop reading things like you're still back in school and being forced to for a grade?
Am I supposed to take you seriously ending on a vacuous and crappy insult?
Bobby Smiles
#7 – 7:38 AM September 25, 2009
Also Jim, I'd add that dismissing the term fun, you may as well take your inner child out back and shoot it in the head. It's ridiculous to presume that we don't interact with the world on a deeper level via play. Play is nothing to be ashamed of. I really wish game reviewers of all people would stop writing as if it was, to turn it to nauseatingly poor analysis where we suddenly value gaping design flaws in favour of background noise.
Jim Rossignol
#8 – 10:31 AM September 25, 2009
"It's ridiculous to presume that we don't interact with the world on a deeper level via play."
That's why I don't presume that. Where do I say I do?
I seems like it's you doing the presuming, Mr Smiles.
Cooper42
#9 – 7:50 AM September 27, 2009
I think one of the problems, not only in writing this piece (I imagine) but in some of the academic interest in games, are the two notions of "fun" and "education". (and hence the mild cognitive dissonance people seem to get from 'edutainment')
Replace the terms with "exploration" and "learning" and you have a much better description of where The Chinese Room seems to be. Exploration as a joint effort of the game makers, the game itself and the players, which might be fun, but can also be all those things and more you describe the experience as and learning, not a formal education of handing down knowledge, but of a generating of questions and (maybe) some answers.
In any case, this engagement with computer games can only be a good thing. Academic and artistic involvement with games is not a new thing. There's a rich history of co-opting entertainment mediums for subversive and experimetal forms, and it's about time computer games were used in this way.
Aromatic_Pizza
#10 – 11:50 AM September 27, 2009
I agree with Jim. Saying that all games have to be fun is like saying all movies have to be funny. Yes, fun can be great in games, and I'm sure nobody here is arguing games shouldn't be fun, but if all movies were comedies then we'd be missing out on a lot. I think that just as there is a place for The Hangover in movies and Halo 3 in games, there is also a place for Requiem for a Dream or Dear Esther. Playing through Dear Esther in the initial version, I didn't really have any fun, and I remember most that it was just a dark and depressing slog, but I enjoy having played that. I could recognize it was fantastic even though I was not having fun with it. If games can do this, then why shouldn't they? Why is it not ok to enjoy something like this that isn't fun but is powerful and say "bravo, I would love to see some more of this creativity"?
TeeJayUK
#11 – 1:52 PM September 27, 2009
Not everything made in the HL2 engine is a "game".
A flight simulator used to instruct real pilots isn't a "game" but the same software could be made into a game with very small changes.
A 3d world could be designed for:
entertainment (eg games)
education (eg training)
art (eg 'Dear Esther' (?))
commerce or communication (eg virtual houses for home-buyers/architects, shops and showrooms)
It could combine some or all of these elements.
Re. "a genuinely educational MMO" - massively multiplayer online 'what'? RPG? FPS? Of course an MMO can be 'genuinely educational' if the criteria is simply 'lots of people online interacting' because it leaves things so open. Where does the "game" part come into it?
My economics lectures weren't 'fun'. They weren't a game either. The MMO format doesn't have to be a game, and it might be suitable for various things. Currently chatrooms, blogs, twitters and forums are the most popular way to coordinate mass debates online, but it might be that 3d worlds will have lots of advantages in certain situations (eg demonstrating your new product-line to your global sales force).
Not all 'game-like' to 'game-derived' software are actually 'games'. They might not contain any game playing or game mechanics at all. Simply having a 3d world to walk around doesn't make something a 'game'.
TeeJayUK
#12 – 2:03 PM September 27, 2009
Not everything made in the HL2 engine is a "game".
A flight simulator used to instruct real pilots isn't a "game" but the same software could be made into a game with very small changes.
A 3d world could be designed for:
entertainment (eg games)
education (eg training)
art (eg 'Dear Esther' (?))
commerce or communication (eg virtual houses for home-buyers/architects, shops and showrooms)
It could combine some or all of these elements.
Re. "a genuinely educational MMO" - massively multiplayer online 'what'? RPG? FPS? Of course an MMO can be 'genuinely educational' if the criteria is simply 'lots of people online interacting' because it leaves things so open. Where does the "game" part come into it?
My economics lectures weren't 'fun'. They weren't a game either. The MMO format doesn't have to be a game, and it might be suitable for various things. Currently chatrooms, blogs, twitters and forums are the most popular way to coordinate mass debates online, but it might be that 3d worlds will have lots of advantages in certain situations (eg demonstrating your new product-line to your global sales force).
Not all 'game-like' to 'game-derived' software are actually 'games'. They might not contain any game playing or game mechanics at all. Simply having a 3d world to walk around doesn't make something a 'game'.
Corbeau
#13 – 2:55 PM September 28, 2009
The problem with the term "fun" is that it's so nebulously defined. I don't typically find reading philosophy "fun," but I do find it challenging, engaging, and rewarding. Someone else might say that the combination of challenge, engagement, and reward means that the experience was fun. Thus we wouldn't disagree on the experience, but rather the terminology - and we could go in endless circles arguing about it. "Fun" is simply not an objective term.
Of course, that's just another way to say what Mr. Rossignol already did. :)
Great article, sir - informative, interesting, and dead on!
GL
#14 – 12:50 PM October 10, 2009
Perhaps games would not be so heavily censored if they could lose the stigma suggesting that they're merely gratuitous action fests with nothing to offer but "fun." Books dodge some of the strict certification and legal issues that games seem to suffer from, presumably in part because they're understood to be at times educational, artistic, adult, or valuable in some sense.
Great article, I very much enjoyed it.
BCaron
#15 – 12:57 PM October 10, 2009
Raph Koster's work on fun in gaming notes that fun is the symptom of something else. That something else is often linked to active learning coupled with instant utility for that learning. That's also what I wrote into a free (CC Licensed) book on gaming as the next real tool for education. [you can get this FREE at http://junana.com].
Fun is the symptom, purposeful immersion is the disease (although I prefer "logic"). Fun is the outcome. You don't build fun into a game, you build reasons for gamers to achieve maximal "flow" experiences (see Csikszentmihalyi's work on this).
The word "play" comes from middle English plaega, and was used to denote all skills at manipulating objects (including words). We retain this meaning in word-play, sword-play, etc. "Work" came from woerke, which was reserved for changing the shape of things (e.g., working a piece of metal into a sword). We need to find more ways to bring play into learning.
A really good article. Thanks Jim.
Kyle Armbruster
#16 – 7:26 PM October 11, 2009
A beautiful post which illustrates what I (an academic) have been irritating my colleagues with for years: Games are a serious medium with incredible potential. True, not every game is Citizen Kane, an evidently-fantastic film I've never actually watched, but neither is every movie. Just as early cinema was characterized by silliness and tech demos, so too have video games.
I expect to see more and more real artistic thought put into them, and I'm off right now to download Korsakovia, since Dear Esther was so... fun.
calease
#17 – 12:19 PM October 18, 2009
Jim, the best part of what you write here is pointing out the value of exploring the nature of conscious experience using tools like these. Such a thing is not quantifiable on most levels, which is less than gratifying to the scientist. Science is no country for the storyteller but, as Einstein said, some of the most worthwhile things are not worth counting. Still, pursuing such a nebulous and potentially frustrating task is what play is all about in the first place. Cheers to you and your observations.
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