Hello all,
As an introduction I wanted to write a little bit about my research - to give you some impression where I am coming from and what interests me, but of course also to share my knowledge and expand upon it. I realize this project is more practical minded and I assure you I am also quite practical - but I think the academic influence is very important in this new field.
What interests me most (the academic part of me) is expanding our vocabulary and increasing the amount of concepts we have about our field. As the name 'notgames' implies there is a large array of words 'missing'. I noticed this first when in my first years at the Utrecht School of Arts, doing Gamedesign & Development, where there was no word for the type of games I wanted to make; 'quality game' was one of the (failed) words I tried. Later it became 'art games' or 'arthouse games', &c. But I think, at the same time, that time will be a better judge for names than the people living in the present, so although for now I stick with the name 'games' I cannot really justify it other than on personal philosophy. My academic interests, hence, lie more with the concepts we use. Words like 'player' and 'avatar' are quite limited in scope and quantity; a lot of the game discussions I attended were more about finding some words we could agree upon and then struggling to hold a conversation with limited words such as 'player'. And always it would dawn upon me that nobody 'bothered' to define these words and we would have our conversations go around in circles because of our differing interpretations of 'player', or worse, different connotations. Words are important, I believe. To illustrate; many people experience a sense such as 'intimacy' with friends but never read any psychological background on the word and therefore are inapt to truly define what gives them the feeling. I like to think of myself as analytical but when I read up on the subject recently I realized that I had
had the feeling but never knew its boundaries. It had played a role in my life I never could think about it in any sensible way because I lacked a clear 'concept' (an Ayn Rand-like notion of self-understanding). In this same way I believe that as talented and amazing as many makers of (not)games may be, they are always limited by their understanding and vocabulary. So this is what I wish to expand: in the same way an artist may buy 'ochre' instead of being limited to 'brown', so developers of games need a larger vocabulary to explain the different effects.
I have grown interested in the role between player, designer and agents. This is an entirely novel effect; games (or notgames) are with their complexity and simulative qualities such a splendid innovation they have many side-effects that are new in their own right: but much ignored by many fields. The 'relationship' between a character and the player is complex and different from films and books and interests me most. What thrills me is the concept of symbiosis. To illustrate this, let me mention two views I hear often; that games are wish-fulfilment or that they are sympathy based. The former implies that the character you portray is effectively
you but in a different setting and with a new set of values if you so wish. The later is closer to film and implies that we are observing and 'helping' a character through his struggles because we
care for him. These two values are what I heard most through my Utrecht years, and although I suspected more I did not really develop any models for it until I played
The Path and realized a complex emotion existing in my view of the game: I did not feel as-if I were looking at the girl,
nor did I feel I was present and looking after her. I had the strange feeling that I was simultaneously her, myself and 'fate'. In effect, if the girl picked a flower or ran through the forest I could not with myself really state whether this happened because 'I' wanted to do this, because I was pretending 'she' wanted to do this or because 'destiny' forced this upon me. The same happened, more poignantly, with the girls getting killed: I felt it was my lack of caring for them, their own stupidity, but most of all an unavoidable destiny for them. It sounds somewhat floaty but what I mean to illustrate is that for the first time I actively started to question who exactly I was when interacting with the game.
My
Supportive Narrative written for the Utrecht School of Arts (my MA) was a treatment of this basic question. It can be found here on my site:
http://jeroenstout.net/:work#Show:Player,Agent,Designer if you are interested. It is quite lengthy so I will summarize it here.
I do three things in this narrative.
I came from quite a technical field, being a programmer as well, so I had to start with 'marrying' the technological field with the artistic. This marriage is a 'dualistic' (Carthesian) model: there is the technical machine side, which is by definition without feeling and is a pure state-machine; then there is the side where players feel things are a certain way. I call this the
State-machine and
Symbolic sides respectively. This division allows me to describe simultaneously how a computer may process a game, without being romantic, and then describe how the player experiences the game, without being technical.
The second element was describing how an agent works in an interactive environment. It has an input from the world, a 'mind' that processes this based on preferences, and an output. These four things,
input,
mind,
preferences and
output thus define the behaviour of any agent. Changing one changes the behaviour of the agent as a whole. I also talk about 'traits', which are characteristics of characters (portrayed by agents) that the agent may modify. The location of a character, for instance, is often changed, but the actual appearance of a character somewhat more rarely. These traits are defined in the symbolic layer, and through a process dubbed 'projection' brought into the state-machine for processing (alteration) and projected back into the symbolic layer. In this way, a machine can edit attributes which are interpretative.
The last element was governance; what controls the attributes of agents. I defined three elements that define the behaviour of an agent:
autonomy,
providence and
the player. Providence are events (triggers for instance) that the developer creates to steer agents in a certain direction. The player by interacting with the game influences agents. There is more to do with how providence and the player influence agents; they can influence their input (world state), but also their preferences or method of output. This delves a lot deeper still.
The great end-effect of this, however, is to have opened up the ground between player and characters. The material in this narrative creates concepts for no longer saying a character is controlled by either the player or 'not the player', but is in a state in-between; the girls in The Path have their autonomy but still listen to the player. There is no 'avataristic' role for them (the player = the character). In effect, and the narrative supports this, it is impossible to have a purely player-controlled character as it is impossible to have a game with completely autonomous characters. Creating characters now becomes a question of creating a good relation between these fields.
My current research, then, is about a somewhat more psychological issue, that of 'symbiosis'. As I mentioned before, reading about 'intimacy' first allowed me to think about it clearly. I believe that the concept of 'symbiosis' can be treated in the same way; in effect allowing the readers of my dissertation to think about using it. My rough concept for symbiosis is based on some research I have been doing into how the mind works; modern notions of consciousness and 'self' are immensely different from the 'soul' attitude predominant; our sense of consciousness and self has some presets but adapts to situations. One feels to be 'oneself' in certain settings and under certain conditions. It is possible to be 'estranged' from oneself in different situations because the memories of self do not match the analysis of the current self. It is possible to 'expand' a consciousness by doing things such as driving a vehicle; it removes (or reduces) certain sensations but expands on the feeling of 'having a car as a body' (McLuhan wrote a lot about this). The mind, and self, can be described more in 'flux', or an 'area of effect'. One can even question how we know we are happy - it is not 'implicit' knowledge, but perhaps we just notice the peripherals of 'being happy' and assume we are because 'happy' is a concept (schema) we can apply.
If this all is so much open, games are an amazing experimental ground: we can expand the consciousness to a digital agent. Many games have personification of characters, but they treat the character as we would treat a car: we accept a digital body, but rarely have digital emotions. If the screen shows the perspective to grind against a wall we understand that 'we' hit a wall in our 'expanded' body; but little has been done to expand emotions in the same way. In the same way we ourselves understand we are 'happy' by seeing the signs of our own happiness (be they mental or physical) we may experience digital emotions by recognizing the signs. This sense of symbiosis with another person, their emotions and physique, can be seen in real life with 1-one-1 sports; I fence and I notice with some players we attend and copy
very closely one-another's motions to the point where I have the illusion that I control
their body as much as mine; but outside of conflict naturally sexual acts for many are very symbiotic, sharing more than just physical presence (and I meant that in the least mystical sense), again to the point where there is a sense of shared control.
Whereas in real life we are always constrained to our physical bodies and limits (I can never
literary control the motions of my opponent because I cannot control their brain) in games this field is incredibly more open: from emotions to physical presence, from 1st person to 3rd person, in all manners and forms can we experience this symbiosis. The question is, much like the sense of intimacy,
when and
how?..
This is my research for this year, my MSc - not to make a list of effects or describe every feature; Dan (chineseroom) frequently enough points out this is PhD work for me to enjoy the foresight; but to create a
concept of symbiosis. To propose to 'the world' a first definition of symbiosis. It will not necessary define when or how symbiosis happens but rather to some extent solidify the concept. My goal with it is so new designers can work to make the player more 'symbiotic' with the character, if they so wish, by actually being to use that word in a serious manner; rather than the makeshift combination of words they have at their disposal now. They then can figure out the complex and artistic rules of symbiosis; but the concept must stand.
This has been quite a write and I hope it is of interest to you (if not I am glad it was a good refreshing of memory for me). I would like to add I am still working on (practical) (not)games which themselves never contain any of the theory - the theory is a great support for me. Again, feel free to read the narrative itself if it is of interest.
(Having written where I am coming from I feel a bit more free to comment in other sections as well, so I promise not to stay at two posts.)
-Jeroen
