EPIC AWESOMENESS: An Exploration of Play, Art, Love and Death in Video Games
Submitted by Heidi K. McDonald As part of a Tutorial in Film and Digital Technology AND Communications April 13, 2012
Chatham University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Preface
At the 2012 Game Developers’ Conference in San Francisco, California during March 5 –
9, one of the highlights was a design talk given by the legendary Sid Meier, inventor of the
Civilization game series. Meier’s lecture, called “Interesting Decisions,” explained strategies for building meaningful gaming experiences for players which offer surprise, suspense, and challenge. One of Meier’s slides, as he was wrapping up, said, “Maximize the awesomeness.
Make it epic.”
While this does not seem as though it is very specific or practical advice for aspiring game designers, the slide resonated with me. Meier’s words encapsulated the degree to which gamers and game developers are passionate about gaming, which is not as much a “Chic Geek” culture as it is a medium that fully captures the imaginations of, and speaks to, those who love to game. There is not a single gamer out there who has not felt that “epic awesomeness,” or, the natural high that accompanies playing a visually beautiful, engaging and well-crafted game.
When deciding to name my tutorial, which offers in-depth examinations of a few facets of video games, I could not help but adopt the words of Sid Meier in an effort to find a phrase that captures what gaming is for me, and for other gamers.
A student’s senior tutorial is the culmination of her journey at Chatham University. My journey began at the age of 39, apprehensive about being in a classroom again after so many years and about being twice the age of my classmates. As my journey ends, with new academic goals clarified and met, and with a full-time position as a Game Designer awaiting me upon my graduation, I have reflected upon what I want to outlast me at Chatham as a testament to this journey. What I need readers to know is that video games matter. They matter not merely because of the positive change they can enact in the world, or because of the social connections that can be made and maintained through gaming; but because video games are an art form as valid as any other medium, and affect people to the same degree. It is a young industry, and those who join young industries take on the awesome responsibility to shape the industry and help it evolve. This excites me greatly, and as I leave Chatham to take my place in this industry, I expect to continue the intellectual curiosity and creativity which originally brought me to this point. I can’t wait to maximize the awesomeness and make it epic.
There are some people – friends, family members, colleagues, professors and professional mentors without whom this tutorial, and indeed the culmination of this journey, would not have been possible:
• Jesse Schell, Professor of Entertainment Technology, Carnegie-Mellon University • Sheri Graner Ray, Studio Design Lead, Schell Games • Sabrina Haskell, Senior Designer, Schell Games • Jennifer Brandes Hepler, Senior Writer, BioWare Edmonton • Brenda Garno , President, LootDrop • Jason VandenBerghe, Creative Director, UbiSoft • Ian MacKenzie and Tim Brengle, Coordinators of the Conference Associate Program • The Conference Associates from the Game Developers’ Conference 2012 • Phyrra.com • Rachel Muehrer • Emma Johnson at Chatham University’s PACE Center • Monica Ritter at Chatham University’s Career Development Office • Deborah Prise, Gateway Student Advisor and Experiential Learning Portfolio Coordinator • David Burke, Professor, Chatham University • Kristen Shaeffer, Professor, Chatham University • Dr. Katie Cruger, Professor, Chatham University • Dr. Prajna Paramita Parasher, Advisor and Professor, Chatham University • Jason, Annie, Simon and Ian (my family)
I would like to dedicate my tutorial to four strong and wonderful women in my family who taught me everything I know about work ethic, personal truth, and following your heart: Rev. Dr. Maurine C. Waun (my best friend who wonderfully, is also my mother) Marion Bannister (my late maternal grandmother who wasn’t afraid to be opinionated) Judy White Ora (my late aunt whose humor and zest for excellence inspire me always) Zelma O’Neal (my great-grandmother’s sister, who saw what she wanted in life and made it happen)
Now, let’s maximize some awesomeness! EPIC AWESOMENESS: Play, Art, Love and Death in Video Games
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. The Importance of Games is Play
3. Games: Art and Industry
4. Relationships in Games: The NPC Romance Project
5. Epic Fail: Death by Design in Video Games
6. Conclusion CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
THE NATURE OF ART AND THE VIDEO GAME
Art is a dialogue between an artist and the world. The artist sees the world in her own way, and uses what she sees to inspire work that celebrates, mourns, provokes, or otherwise makes a statement about whatever in the world served as the inspiration for the artwork. The audience then looks at the art, digests it, and reflects upon it. (In some specific cases, such as church windows or gravestones, the communication has been intended as one-sided, to convey a religious lesson; but in this tutorial we will focus on the interactive nature of art.) In very special cases, a work of art can influence how a person operates in the world. In this manner, the very nature of art is interactive. In the digital age, video games function as a form of interactive art that continues this dialogue and will continue to evolve as an art form.
This conversation between artist, art, and consumer has been taking place for thousands of years. From the time of the cavemen when people drew pictures with pigments from plants and animals, to the Middle Ages when artists wrote, painted, silk screened, embroidered and sculpted, to Twentieth Century inventions such as the camera, the motion camera, the computer, and into the digital age, the media may have changed, but the nature of the exchange has been the same. Art remains a dialogue between world and artist, artist and audience, and audience to both artist and world.
In the digital age, artists make use of digital technology and pop culture to conduct the dialogue. Technology allows the blurring of the lines between different media, allowing for intertextuality, and the re-definition of art forms. This tutorial will focus on several facets of video games: the relationship between gamer, game and game designer; the game as art and industry; the importance of games and play; death and human relationships in games; and finally, how games can improve the human existence. Gaming does and will continue to occupy an important role within contemporary aesthetic culture.
Jesse Schell, the CEO of Schell Games wrote the book on game design as an art, entitled,
“The Art of Game Design.” Sheri Graner Ray is a world-recognized expert in the concept of gender inclusive game design. These are but two of the experts who have informed this tutorial, which is about the importance of games as an art form. Before examining the influence of these experts, non-gaming readers should have some context.
A BRIEF AND GENERAL HISTORY OF VIDEO GAMING
To begin to explain my tutorial idea to people who are not gamers, it is important to explain a brief history of gaming, to provide some context for the project. Video gaming became popularized with arcade games in the 1980s, with games such as Pac-Man, Centipede,
Dig-Dug, Galaxian and Donkey Kong. Players had no choice about whether to play male or female characters. The representations of the players within the game, or the player avatars, were always either male or asexual, such as Mario the Plumber in Donkey Kong, the asexual spaceship in Galaxian, the bug-shooter in Centipede, and the person of indeterminate gender in
Dig-Dug. Portrayals of women in those games (if there were any at all) were limited to the
“damsel in distress,” such as the princess in Donkey Kong who needed to be rescued.
Adding to arcade games in the 1980s (notes Sheri Graner Ray in Gender Inclusive Game
Design: Expanding the Market), console games such as PONG (invented in 1972 and released on console in 1975) and the Atari-2600, simultaneously brought gaming into people’s living rooms and meant that video gaming could be a family activity. The Atari-2600 was released in fall of
1977, when I was 7 years old, and I remember its impact. By the time the Christmas came in
1978, when I was in the 3rd grade, every child in my class already had an Atari-2600, and this is what my sister and I really wanted for Christmas. Our parents did not have much money, and did not believe us when we said everyone else had an Atari (but it was the truth). On Christmas morning, we opened a PONG, and tried to hide our disappointment from our proud parents, who thought they were doing something really cool for us instead of buying us an outdated, 3- year-old console that nobody else was buying anymore. I actually consider that the moment that I became a gamer, because that is the point at which I remember wanting to play more kinds of games and to pay more attention to what the new gaming products were.
In the mid-1980s, another type of gaming began, though I did not know about it because our family did not have a computer yet. Text adventures functioned as an interactive story in which a Player would assume the role of a character in a story, move through the story through a series of decision points, and choose the directions he or she wished to go. The outcome of the game would depend on the Player’s choices along the way. The writing in these games was the most primitive variation on the type of work I perform for Schell Games, in which I must write decision trees and outcomes for the story, in a role-playing game (RPG).
Sheri Graner Ray cites a 1986 Infocom text adventure game called The Leather Goddesses of
Phobos as the first video game to ever offer players a choice about playing a male, or a female, character. The choice was the first choice the player made in the game, as to whether they walk into the men’s room or the ladies’ room; writer Steve Meretzky explained that this was the simplest way to offer that choice initially, without drawing too much choice to it (Ray, 2004).
Text adventure games gave way to the internet in the mid-1990s. My personal experience with video games fell off in the late 1980s because I was focusing at that point on other things. I did not continue with gaming until 1998, at which point I was a divorced mother of two toddlers. I owned a computer, but was not aware of their use in gaming until I re- connected with and married a high school friend who had become a computer administrator.
What a change it was, to skip directly from arcade games and console games, to EverQuest!
EverQuest was a massively multi-player online roleplaying game (MMORPG, or MMO for short) which adopted a swords and sorcery theme. While it was the first MMO I had ever experienced, it was not the first MMO at that point. Ultima Online (UO), released the year before, had not only been the first, but was coincidentally worked on by Sheri Graner Ray.
MMO’s are still huge, as are PC games and games for consoles (the most popular of which are now the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and the Wii). Now, gaming has moved into more casual, social formats such as Facebook games, and games for mobile devices. Part of the reason the video game industry is overall a tough field, is because the technology is in constant flux, and investors are consequently skittish. The best ideas do not always get made, and there are many, many titles that never see the light of day because the money runs out, someone else releases a similar game first, or the speed of game development is slower than the release of new technologies. JESSE SCHELL, GAME DESIGN AS ART, AND THE GAMIFICATION MOVEMENT
Jesse Schell was named one of MIT’s “Top 100 Young Innovators in the World” in 2005.
His college textbook, which he wrote for the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), is well-regarded in the industry and accessible to laymen who are beginning in the field of game design. Schell’s work asks people to expand their thinking about the appeal of games. Anyone can play a game and know whether it is fun or not, but Schell’s book challenges readers to think about why a game is fun on a psychological level.
Game design is an intricate system of balance, challenge, unpredictability, comedy, purpose, and above all, interactivity. The way a player of a game, speaking in terms of digital technology, interacts with that game is similar to the dialogue between artist and world. Each aspect of this conversation, from a game design standpoint, requires careful planning.
A film is linear in that it tells a story which people see and hear. People can review or discuss the film once they have seen in, and there may be additional DVD features which allow buyers some kind of interactive content. However, a film is not interactive in the same way that a video game is. Video games require input from the user, and response from that user once the user has received feedback. Because there is more give and take involved with a game than with a film, game design requires more time and thought. Designing a game successfully, because doing so requires such a delicate balance of many, many factors, becomes art.
There are generally three parts to video game design, represented by the three departments in the Jesse Schell’s studio, Schell Games: programming, design, and art. The art department brings to life the game as art, in a literal sense. Things must be drawn and animated. The programming department is responsible to create the code which allows the game to work, and on the selected platform. The design department is responsible for deciding the theme of the game, what happens in the game from the player’s point of view, what the story is (including locations, plot lines, characters, etc.) , and every other aspect of what the player experience of the game will be. All of these elements in the studio work together to produce a video game, and Schell argues that while the game contains art, the process of designing games itself is also an art.
Schell is a recognized expert in game design (philosophy, practice, mechanics, and more) but is also on the forefront of a movement within the gaming industry called the gamification movement, which has both exciting and terrifying implications for fields beyond the game industry. An exciting implication would be making it more fun for children to learn, using gamified digital textbooks; a terrifying implication would be advertisers running amok by gamifying even life’s most menial tasks, for corporate benefit (Schell’s example is brushing one’s teeth). Schell’s new book, which he is currently researching, will be about gamification. In his TED talk from the DICE Summit in February, 2010, called “When Games Invade Real Life”
(with over 345,000 views), Schell examines what’s presently happening in the gaming industry, and an extreme version of where that could go.
Imagine a world where even menial everyday tasks are broken down into a series of games where players must earn points and achievements that are redeemable for tax breaks, college scholarships, or free products from companies. Schell envisions a world where marketers measure the use of their products in your lives, using a game mechanism, by which they reward you with discounts and special offers. Gamification could be an opportunity to engage children further in their education, or, make work at a corporation more fun.
Gamification is a tool, as a hammer is a tool; with a hammer, one can destroy all the windows in a house, or, one can build something amazing. Schell’s point is that gamification, as a tool, should be used wisely, and for noble purposes.
Schell notes that the most popular video games of the past three to five years are those that have had crossovers into real life. A few examples he cites of this include WebKinz, where a child buys a stuffed animal which comes with a code the child can redeem online for the ability to play with an online version of his stuffed animal; Guitar Hero which requires people to buy a plastic guitar to use with the virtual game; or, the Wii Fit, which has health implications in real life for people playing the games. What these games have in common, he says, is their ability to capitalize on psychological rewards. For example (he said in a different lecture held at Schell
Games), if one had a red button which would automatically complete a task you prefer not to do, like doing your taxes, that game would be “the best game ever.” If that same red button were employed to automatically complete a task you find enjoyable, it would suddenly be “the worst game ever.” The gamification movement seeks to deliberately blur the lines between
“have to do” versus “want to do” by finding creative ways to make mundane or unenjoyable things, fun.
Educators and corporations alike are beginning to employ gamification concepts in ways that simultaneously apply more pressure to students and employees, but also motivate them, make them better, and produce better results. Prof. Lee Sheldon, a game design professor at the University of Indiana, starts his students at the beginning of the semester at Level 1, with 0 experience points. Every time a student attends class, or turns in an assignment, that student earns experience points, and can level up to a maximum level of 12, and earn a maximum number of 1,860 points. He has gamified his grading system (Schell TED Talk, 2010).
Schell is an important resource in the study of games because of his ideas about design.
Also, his understanding of gamification is important. His ideas about how the gaming industry may evolve based on the gamification concept bears attention from students and industry experts alike.
SHERI GRANER RAY AND GENDER INCLUSIVE GAME DESIGN
The Design Lead at Schell Games is well-recognized in her own right. Sheri Graner Ray has worked in the gaming industry since 1990, for major studios such as Maxis, Electronic Arts, and SONY. She has worked on titles such as the Nancy Drew series (RPG), Ultima Online
(MMORPG), and Star Wars Galaxies (MMORPG). The Hollywood Reporter wrote of her in 2004 as one of the 100 most influential women in the gaming industry, and the International Game
Developers’ Association (IGDA) honored her in 2005 with a Game Developers Choice Award.
She founded Women in Games International and is the author of Gender Inclusive Game
Design: Expanding the Market (Ray, 2004). Ray has brought awareness and begun important conversations about the roles of women in one of the only industries that grew during the 2008 recession (inc.com). Her book has done much to show how and why women are marginalized both in the field of game design, and on the user side of gaming.
Understanding a very brief history of video gaming, where it’s been and where it’s headed, people can then take up the important points Sheri Graner Ray makes in her book about the reasons why games and the gaming industry are male dominated, and how that can begin to be corrected. Sheri argues that basic neurological and psychological differences between men and women should be considered in the design phase of video games, so content can be developed that satisfies both male and female instincts and therefore open the appeal of a game to both genders. Often, notes Ray, the design elements of a game in concert with the machine interface can act as a barrier to women being able to enjoy that game.
Ray collected empirical research which pointed to key differences in men and women that would affect their enjoyment of a game. Men, she found, are more apt to jump right in and start mashing buttons to figure a game out, whereas women take the more calculated approach of wanting to learn how to do something before trying it themselves. This presents a specific issue in Xbox 360 games where hidden moves can be unlocked with a specific combination of keys being pressed, because male players will have found these hidden moves but women, more often, won’t even know about them.
Men Prefer Women Prefer Jump right in, press buttons Learn and watch, then play Death as punishment No punishment, but delay until challenge solved Repetition Variety Targeting moving objects Targeting non-moving objects in non-cluttered fields in cluttered fields Self-gratification in group play Group gratification in group play Complicated interface Uncomplicated interface Visual stimulation Emotional stimulation
Table 1. Examples of the differences in game play preferences relating to basic differences in males and females, found in Sheri Graner Ray’s book, Gender Inclusive Game Design: Expanding the Market.
In American McGee’s Alice, players need to use complicated sequences of button- pushing to do certain moves, and if a player makes a mistake, death occurs and a player will be forced to start at a far-behind save point. BioShock has similar game mechanics. These both function as examples of games Ray argues are preferential to male players and exclusionary to the preferences and physiological strengths of women. Ray argues that certain games are designed toward male preferences and do not consider female preferences at all. It should not, then, come as a surprise that the gaming industry is predominantly male.
Science, math and technology fields are statistically male-dominated, both in the university setting and in the workplace setting. Ray cites a number of reasons why this is so; intimidation with machines, less encouragement in primary and high schools for female students, history. Ray believes that until more women are actively recruited into gaming companies, and women’s perspectives are included in the design phase of games more often, and women become a more significant force in terms of who buys and plays video games, things will not change much.
The main criticism of Ray’s book on gender in gaming is that she limits her study of gender to male and female, when in actuality there are transgendered people, androgynous people, genderqueers, and other points on the spectrum who are not included. Ray chose to limit her research to male and female for two specific reasons. First, she had to consider where the gaming industry currently is, which is very much rooted in traditional gender roles. She chose to speak to where the industry has been historically and is right now. Second, Ray has sought to study gender and gaming as they relate to transgendered individuals, but she has had difficulty finding female-to-male transgendered gamers to study.
Ray’s work is consistent with that of Gaye Tuchman’s theory of symbolic annihilation.
Tuchman believes that women are symbolically annihilated when they are left out, marginalized, or misrepresented in media (Tuchman). Ray’s book argues that through male- centered game design, women are being left out of the conversation between game designer, game, and gamer. Games, as a medium, can also fall into Tuchman’s theory. The design, the games themselves and their portrayals of women, and the gaming industry, based on Ray’s notice, are congruent with Tuchman. Furthermore, it could be said that Ray’s claims also bear out the theories of bell hooks in that most games are designed predominantly by white males in
America, sold corporately, by corporations headed by members of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, to gamers who are predominantly white and male (hooks).
Schell Games employs roughly 15% women. As a female employee, I am not at any specific disadvantage for being a woman, but, there is going to be a certain level of disconnect when you are the only 41-year-old woman working with mostly men in their mid-twenties.
Most of these single young men will all go places together after work, while I need to go home to my family; whenever they go somewhere, the understanding is that the invitation is “for everybody,” though, I am not specifically invited or not invited, and it would probably be awkward for everyone in many cases, if I showed up. I would not describe Schell in any way as unfriendly, but I would say it is less likely there that anyone seeks me out to talk to me socially, less likely that anyone says “good morning” when I arrive or “good evening” when I leave. One reason why I want to do a tutorial involving game design is to become the change Sheri Graner
Ray and I would like to see in the world: a more gender-inclusive approach being used in the art of game design, and interesting games being designed by and for women.
The project I am currently working on at Schell Games is a role-playing game to be released in September 2012, not to the public but to a very specific, closed audience. The game itself (currently unnamed) is part of a government-sponsored study by Yale University, which will measure the effectiveness of a video game as a teaching tool when conducting HIV prevention programs for low-income minority youths. My job is to create characters and their backstories; locations with detailed descriptions that allow artists to draw them; the main storyline of the game and all of its decisions and outcomes resulting from player choices. I have taken the two courses at Chatham based on inclusiveness, plus it was my personal philosophy before I came to Chatham or to Schell. I found Ray’s book to be an extension of all this, focused on bringing those same concepts into gaming.
Gender inclusiveness is an important issue in any context, whether in the workplace, the educational community, media portrayals, or in the socioeconomic space. At Chatham so far I have had the opportunity to study these concepts as they relate to media and filmmaking. Ray has done well-recognized and important work toward making the gaming industry more inclusive, from both the designer standpoint and the user standpoint. Ray challenges us to consider, as we go forward with designing engaging games, to understand the preferences and differences in gender and to ask ourselves regularly, “What if the Player were female?”
INDUSTRY MENTORS BEYOND SCHELL: THE BIOWARE DREAM TEAM
Women in Games International has a mentoring program called GameMentor Online.
The purpose of this program is to get students with specific projects they need help with, mentors within the industry, to help with their projects. Jennifer Brandes Hepler, originally from New York, was a screenwriter in Los Angeles who transitioned from writing scripts for TV into game writing for BioWare. Now living in Edmonton, Alberta, Ms. Hepler is one of the main writers behind Dragon Age. When I found that the GameMentor admin just happened to select as my mentor not only a senior writer for BioWare, but one of the lead writers on Dragon Age, I was ecstatic.
She reviewed and provided feedback on the Madame President documents as I produced them, which helped me a great deal to understand the pitch process for the video game industry. Once the nature of the project changed, she helped me to clarify a new academic goal for my tutorial. Because BioWare’s mission has to do with story-based gaming, she has indicated that my new research will be of interest to BioWare. If my findings can help understand the hows and whys involved with people’s enjoyment of games in order for game designers to make better and more enjoyable games, I will be glad to contribute to the artistic dialogue between gamer, game and game developer in this way.
TUTORIAL PROJECT CONCEPT: A JOURNEY THAT ECHOES LIFE AS A GAME DESIGNER
When I arrived at Chatham in 2010, my tutorial was going to be a screenplay and possibly a documentary film about a relative in my family who was a 1930s film star.
The tutorial project I selected was a Pitch Document, and a Game Design Document
(GDD) which designed a game for 12 to 17 year old girls:
Teaching them more about their own political leanings, in preparation for helping them choose their political party, with the goal of encouraging civic participation. Teaching them about their own personal management style (using Meyers-Briggs typology) and letting them try it on in a game setting, with the goal of preparing them for leadership. Taking them through the process of running for, and serving in, public office, to educate them about serving in public office and to show them public service as a viable option. I prepared what I thought to be a solid pitch document for the above-described game, tentatively titled Madame President. I did this with input from Sheri Graner Ray, and with help from my GameMentor contact, Jennifer Brandes Hepler. In a completely unexpected twist,
Schell Games received an RFP (Request for Proposal) in November, 2011, about a game relating to elections. A newspaper publisher sought to hire a game design company to design and build a Facebook game around the 2012 election process. When I heard about this, I felt a responsibility to share my tutorial work with others within the company to show that there were similarities between the RFP and the project I was currently working on. I was asked to take the best design concepts from Madame President and re-fit them to the specific requirements of the RFP. I completed the RFP and a one-sheet design diagram, and Schell
Games submitted it to the newspaper publisher as their official pitch. This being the case, both my RFP and my original design concept are now considered proprietary information which cannot be published.
Once classes started in Spring, 2012, I began the new semester realizing that I now had a year’s worth of work to do in a single semester. In the gaming industry, this is known as “crunch time.” A game development team must adjust itself to the release schedule. My tutorial’s release date is May, 2012, non-negotiable, so the Spring, 2012 semester became “crunch time.”
It is incredibly rewarding and exciting for me – being new to this industry -- to know that the company thought my tutorial game’s ideas had merit, and put their name behind my design. This was good for my career but disastrous for my tutorial, which unfortunately had to be changed again because of the now proprietary nature of what I’d previously been working on. It did occur to me, however, that the fast-changing nature of my tutorial has parallels to the ever-shifting game industry. If a new trend comes along, you spot it, you adjust to it, and you move on realizing that other adjustments will need to occur. When you are designing a game, you must be in a state of constant iteration on feedback that you may not always like or agree with, and your final project may end up being something far from what you originally thought it would be. It’s part of life as a game designer, and I find a delicious irony in the fact that my journey toward settling on a tutorial mirrors that constant state of adaptation inherent to what it’s like to be a game designer.
In the Spring, 2012 semester, I have taken Critical Theory and Mass Communications, with professors who are also on my tutorial board. With the addition of these two classes, I have been given some clarity as to how to now proceed on this tutorial. In Critical Theory, we have been discussing the relationship between art and industry - something I deal with daily working in a video game developing company and can speak to. For a project in Mass
Communications, I was part of a group that decided to examine media portrayals of romantic relationships; in thinking about video games and romantic relationships, I stumbled upon a type of research that I was able to confirm has not yet been studied by people in the gaming industry.
In conducting a preliminary survey of gamers about their experiences with romance- able non-player characters (NPCs) in role-playing games (RPGs), I found that people do not always play characters the same gender they are, nor do they necessarily romance characters of the same gender as they would in real life. I also found that people are attracted to certain types of characters in a game, but are not necessarily attracted to the same qualities in real-life people. Upon checking with Jesse Schell and Sheri Graner Ray, they did not believe that this relationship has been examined academically before by anyone in the gaming industry. I asked
Jennifer at BioWare whether they had any data they could supplement mine with, and to both our surprise, BioWare has never studied this relationship either even though they are the premier company for writing romance-able NPCs.
Also taking COR405 pertaining to Death Culture, I was able to undertake an examination of death in video games. I was able to trace the history of the death mechanic from the 1980s forward, and seek to answer what purposes and effects death has (or does not have) in games.
This allowed for yet another facet of gaming to be included in this tutorial.
A NOTE ABOUT TONE.
While I realize that an academic tone seems to be the most appreciated in scholarly works, I have developed a more narrative style along the lines of TED talks and other seminars which have become the standard for discourse in the gaming industry and the tech community.
I apologize to the reader in advance, recognizing the challenge this poses. The audience here, I expect, may just as well be a member of academia as a member of the industry which I have studied and worked in this year. Begging the forgiveness of the more academic reader, I feel it appropriate for this tutorial to maintain that tone which is acceptable in the industry, because I am in the process of adapting to that industry and because any future study I do in that industry will be conducted in that tone. Furthermore, games are an informal, fun topic and I wish to create that idea in the mind of each reader, as I discuss the results of this year-long exploration into video games. IN CONCLUSION
I decided in the end to conduct a thorough examination of the video game as art, as an important means of human expression and psychological release. The process I took to get to my final decision was very like the artistic process generally, and the game design process in particular. The product being released is nothing close to what was originally envisioned or intended, but I trust that it will be a thorough and interesting exploration of the validity of video games as a necessary art form. WORKS CITED
Bissell, Tom. "Tom Bissell on Dead Island - Grantland." Sports and Pop Culture from Bill Simmons and Our Rotating Cast of Writers - Grantland. ESPN Internet Ventures, 13 Sept. 2011. Web. 01 Oct. 2011.
Caroom, Eliot. "In a Recession, It's Fun and Games." Inc.com. Mansueto Ventures LLC, 12 Feb. 2009. Web. 28 Aug. 2011.
"Gamification.com." Gamification.com. Bunchball, 2007. Web. 1 Oct. 2011.
Graner Ray, Sheri. Gender Inclusive Game Design: Expanding the Market. Hingham, MA: Charles River Media, 2004. Print. hooks, bell. "Spike Lee Doing Malcolm X." Sources. Ed. Jarice Hanson and David J. Maxcy. Guilford, CT: Dushkin Pub. Group, 1996. Print.
"People." Schell Games. Schell Games LLC, 2004. Web. 01 Oct. 2011.
Schell, Jesse. "Jesse Schell: When Games Invade Real Life | Video on TED.com." TED: Ideas worth Spreading. TED Conferences LLC, Feb. 2010. Web. 01 Oct. 2011.
Schell, Jesse. The Art of Game Design a Deck of Lenses. Pittsburgh, PA: Schell Games, 2008. Print.
Schell, Jesse. The Art of Game Design. Amsterdam: Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann, 2008. Print.
Schell, Jesse. Things I Finished Blog. Jesse Schell, 30 Sept. 2008. Web. 01 Oct. 2011.
Tuchman, Gaye. "Symbolic Annihilation." 2011. The Gender and Media Reader. Ed. Mary Celeste Kearney. London: Routledge, 2011. 41-58. Print. Chapter 2: Play is Why Games are Important
“Play is the aimless expenditure of exuberant energy” ~Friedrich Schiller
“Play refers to those activities which are accompanied by a state of comparative pleasure, exhilaration, power, and the feeling of self-initiative.” ~J. Barnard Gilmore
“Play is whatever is done spontaneously for its own sake.” ~George Santayana
Dr. Kenneth R. Ginsberg studied the importance of play to healthy child development and found that play is important to that development for a number of reasons. Noting that the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights issued a resolution claiming that all children in the world have the fundamental right to play, Ginsberg writes that play is essential to the healthy development of the human brain, in terms of cognitive function, intellect, and imagination:
“Play allows children to create and explore a world they can master, conquering their fears while practicing adult roles, sometimes in conjunction with other children or adult caregivers. As they master their world, play helps children develop new competencies that lead to enhanced confidence and the resiliency they will need to face future challenges. Undirected play allows children to learn how to work in groups, to share, to negotiate, to resolve conflicts, and to learn self-advocacy skills.” (Dr. Kenneth R. Ginsberg)
In addition to studies that found play to be essential to development, the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan explains the concept of mirror stage. Mirror stage occurs when a toddler begins to mirror adults, and in the process, realizes his or her separation from that adult and his or her own individuality. This mirror stage which is key to Lacan’s model of psychoanalytics as explained in his 1966 book, “Ecrits,” is drawn from play. Sigmund Freud also thought of play as the way that children express their emotions and work out issues related to their subconscious (Bethlehem, 1987). Piaget explains that children use play to socialize, and therefore learn the difference between self-control and a lack thereof (Bethleham, 1987).
If expert theorists, doctors and other pillars of the intellectual community agree that play is essential to human development, then why do video games have such a problem being taken seriously? Video gaming is a relatively new industry, having originated in the 1970’s, and only now are scholars beginning to understand why people become so wrapped up in games. As will be discussed in other chapters, video gaming has been both linked, and not linked, to aggression and violence in children; there are enough studies at this point to support both sides of that issue. So what is it about video games that made their revenue surpass music (Anderson) and movie box offices (Kwan) in recent years? Why do players camp outside of GameStop the night before a newly-released game, why do gamers spend hundreds of dollars attending gaming conventions, and why do more and more universities decide to offer degree programs which entitle people to work in the gaming industry? Something about video games is appealing to people on a very deep level.
WHAT ARE GAMES? “In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun, and, SNAP! The job’s a game!” ~Mary Poppins
Jesse Schell, author of “The Art of Game Design” and professor of Entertainment Technology at Carnegie-Mellon University, lists ten qualities that games have: • Games are entered willfully. • Games have goals. • Games have conflict. • Games have rules. • Games can be won and lost. • Games are interactive. • Games have challenge. • Games can create their own internal value. • Games engage players. • Games are closed, formal systems.
Schell allows for the fact that this may not be an exhaustive list, and understands that what people think of as games and enjoy about games are a very individual kind of thing. The one thing Schell believes is universal about games is that they constitute a problem-solving activity of some sort, though, he does cite examples of games that don’t necessarily involve problems, and things people enjoy about games that don’t have anything to do with solving problems. Schell understands that the definition of a game can be different for different people, and can also be fluid. The definition he adopts which he feels adopts all ten of the qualities of a game listed above is: “A game is a problem-solving activity, approached with a playful attitude.” Using Schell’s logic, the reason class clowns seem to have so much fun at school is that they approach assignments and problems in an academic setting with a playful attitude. Many of the employees at Schell’s South Side Pittsburgh studio will tell you that they were class clowns. It is no wonder that they went on to become professional game designers. This is the kind of psychological approach that is now being used in the “gamification” movement, which seeks to deliberately blur the lines between things that aren’t fun, which people have to do, and things that are fun, which people want to do. The concept of turning things into a game, as Mary Poppins does when she cleans the house, is referred to as gamification and is beginning to have implications in fields like marketing, education, and business.
As the introductory chapter of this tutorial mentioned, Schell warned in his 2010 DICE address that gamification is a tool that can be used nefariously, by advertisers and others who seek to manipulate people’s behavior for capitalistic reasons. However, a hammer is also a tool. One can take a hammer and break every window in a church cathedral, or use that same hammer to build something brilliant. Gamification is a tool that can be used in amazing ways that are only beginning to be understood. While it’s important to keep Schell’s warning in mind, I believe the prospect of using gamification for great purposes is an exciting one, and it’s one of the reasons I decided to pursue a career in gaming.
WHY WE PLAY GAMES. Much speculation occurs among game developers about what motivates players. If someone ever actually figured out a universal answer to that question, they would make a lot of money. Jason VandenBerghe, Creative Director for UbiSoft, lectured at the 2012 Game Developers’ Conference about a new model which he believes can predict player motivations based on their personality types as determined by the Big 5 personality indicator, specifically, to a person’s level of Openness to new experiences, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. VandenBerghe believes that player motivation is tied to a person’s personality characteristics.
Another model that can predict player motivations, and why we play games, is that of Maslow’s Hierachy of Needs. The lowest level on the hierarchy is Physiological needs, which certain sports and physical games (in the video game world, games for the Wii and more physically active games like Dance, Dance Revolution can fill this role). Next is Safety; it can be argued that online games provide players with an opportunity to experiment socially, in a safe and non-threatening, anonymous setting. Similarly, Social needs can be satisfied with online games that people can play in realtime with strangers they meet in-game, or, against their friends using a social network like Facebook. Esteem needs, the second tier in Maslow’s hierarchy, can be fulfilled by any number of games when a player reaches a high score, beats a challenging level, or has some sort of unusual experience in the game (gets a rare loot drop, captures a rare creature, etc.). Games such as The Sims, Civilization and Spore allow the player to play God in their own world, controlling everything that happens in that space; this can satisfy the Esteem need simply by the fact that players get to fulfill this role, or it can be fulfilling to players when they perform their role in a way that is satisfying to them. The top tier of the Hierarchy of Needs, Self-Actualization, is the motivation specifically studied and argued by Dr. Jane McGonigal of the Institute of the Future.
JANE McGONIGAL AND GAMES FOR CHANGE. Dr. Jane McGonigal is the current darling of game developers because in her book, “Reality is Broken,” she asserts that video games are going to be key to saving the world. While this might sound farfetched on its face McGonigal explains how gaming communities from all over the world work together to make amazing things happen within the world of a game, using cooperation, innovation, and organization. McGonigal believes that through playing avatars, we play the people we would like to become – our best selves – and slowly become more like our avatars in real life once we have effected change and leadership in the world of the game because we have renewed confidence to do so. McGonigal’s own game, World Without Oil, is a narrative simulation game in which people are asked to imagine a 32-week world crisis where oil is no longer available, and to contribute survival ideas. McGonigal explains that this game resulted in some truly innovative solutions from the community, including over 1,500 blog posts, 68,000 users, and 110,000 observers. Users had this to say about the game: “By playing it out ‘for real’, WWO evoked collective intelligence and the wisdom of crowds in advance. Players worked together to gain grassroots insights into the forces that will rule at street level in a crisis. Their solutions – acts that mold communities, slash wasteful consumption and create more “elastic” lives – stand as vibrant antidotes to official paralysis.”
“WWO didn’t only raise awareness about oil dependence. By creating a simple nonpartisan framework that focused thousands of people from all walks of life upon this common issue, WWO sparked peer learning and inquiry-based exploration of the roots, outcomes, and prevention of an oil crisis. By ‘rousing our democratic imagination,’ WWO fostered deep engagement and changed people’s lives. Via a game, players made themselves better citizens.” ~World Without Oil users
Another example of a game making a positive difference in people’s lives is the game which I am currently the Lead Writer for in my position at Schell Games. The game, currently untitled, is part of a National Institute of Health-funded study by Yale University School of Medicine in which video games are being tested for their effectiveness as a teaching tool for teaching HIV prevention to inner-city youth. About 150 children will receive regular classroom instruction about HIV prevention and the prevention of risky behaviors, and the other 150 children will play our video game. The children’s behavior will then be followed for the next two to three years to see whether there was any difference in the level of risky behaviors they engage in. Hopefully, the study will show that the children who played our video game have a lower instance of risky behaviors. The thought of working on a project that has the opportunity to positively impact lives is both exciting and rewarding. Games for Change is a growing global organization, founded in 2004, which seeks to use gamification to create positive social change:
“Our mission is to catalyze social impact through digital games. Founded in 2004, Games for Change facilitates the creation and distribution of social impact games that serve as critical tools in humanitarian and educational efforts.
Unlike the commercial gaming industry, we aim to leverage entertainment and engagement for social good. To further grow the field, Games for Change convenes multiple stakeholders, highlights best practices, incubates games, and helps create and direct investment into new projects.” ~Games for Change website
With an official journal and professionals all over the world networking through this organization and looking to do great things with game development, Games for Change could be a positive force in the world, using games. They seek to provide support and resources for like-minded professionals in the gaming industry. CONCLUSION. In upcoming chapters of this tutorial, we will discuss other reasons why games are important, including the idea that they are art and industry, and an important vehicle for human expression. We will examine relationships and death – two universal human experiences – as they are dealt with in games; it can also be argued that games are important because they help people process these universal experiences. At their very core, they represent the basic human need for play. Games bring catharsis, social experimentation, release endorphins and make us happier. Some help us stay physically active. Games satisfy needs of our personalities, and motivations on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Games can educate, and drive social change. It is difficult for someone who loves games to explain to a non-gamer why games are important, but I have attempted to do that using applied theory and current scholarly work about video games. Because gaming is a new industry, the amount of scholarly work devoted to games and gaming will only increase henceforth. I look forward to being an active part of that ongoing conversation.
WORKS CITED. Anderson, Nate. "Video Gaming to Be Twice as Big as Music by 2011." Ars Technica. Conde Naste Digital, Inc., 30 Aug. 2007. Web. 14 Nov. 2010.
Bavelier, Daphne, C. Shawn Green, Doug Hyun Han, Perry F. Renshaw, Michael M. Merzenich, and Douglas A. Gentile. "Brains on Games." Nature.com. Nature Publishing Group, Dec. 2011. Web. 03 Apr. 2012.
Bethlehem, Bruno. "The Importance of Play." The Atlantic. The Atlantic Monthly Group, Mar. 1987. Web. 03 Apr. 2012.
Estroff Marano, Hara. "The Power of Play." Psychology Today. Sussex Publishers Ltd., 01 July 1999. Web. 03 Apr. 2012.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. London: Penguin, 2004. Print.
"Games for Change." Games for Change. Games for Change, 2004. Web. 04 Apr. 2012.
Kemp, Gina, Melinda Smith, Bernie DeKoven, and Dr. Jeanne Segal. "Play, Creativity, and Lifelong Learning." Play, Creativity, and Learning: Why Play Matters for Kids and Adults. Helpguide.org, Feb. 2012. Web. 03 Apr. 2012.
Kwan, Michael. "How Much Money Does the Video Game Industry Make - LoveToKnow Video Games." LoveToKnow.com: Video Games. LoveToKnow Corp. Web. 13 Nov. 2010.
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. Paris: Editions Du Seuil, 1966. Print.
"Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs." Motivation Theory. Project Management Course, 2005. Web. 21 Mar. 2012.
McGonigal, Dr. Jane. "Gaming Can Make a Better World." TED: Ideas worth Spreading. TED Conferences LLC, Mar. 2010. Web. 26 Feb. 2012.
McGonigal, Dr. Jane. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.
Schell, Jesse. The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. Amsterdam: Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann, 2008. Print.
Sigman, Michael. "The Importance of Play: It's More Than Just Fun and Games." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 17 Nov. 2011. Web. 03 Apr. 2012.
Spiegel, Alix. "Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills." NPR. NPR, 21 Feb. 2008. Web. 03 Apr. 2012.
VandenBerghe, Jason. "The Five Domains of Play." Game Developers' Conference. Moscone Convention Center, San Francisco, CA. 7 Mar. 2012. Lecture.
"World Without Oil." World Without Oil. ITVS, 2007. Web. 04 Apr. 2012.
Chapter 3: Games: Art and Industry
INTRODUCTION.
In June, 2011, the US Supreme Court made a landmark decision about the medium of video games, finding that video games are an art form that should receive First Amendment freedom of speech protections. (Sutter, Scheisel, 2011) This finding was lauded by both game developers and gamers everywhere because it was yet more evidence to suggest that video games are beginning to be taken more and more seriously as art. The other side of this ongoing debate would seek to position video games solely as a product for consumption, or, yet another piece of mass-produced culture. An analysis of this debate is relevant in studies of critical theory because of its implications when viewed through the lens of the Frankfurt School, a group of neo-Marxist theorists from the 1920s and 1930s, whose examinations of media and communications studies offered much perspective on the debate between art and industry.
This chapter seeks to analyze the specific debate over the artistic integrity of video games in conjunction with Frankfurt School theory and currently available examples of debate on this matter. Video games, while mass-produced and sold, are art; and this is an opinion not held merely by the US Supreme Court.
Author Nate Anderson wrote in 2007 that “video games would be twice as big as music in 2011.” According to the Entertainment Software Association, this actually happened in 2010.
When the recession happened in the United States in 2008, there were two industries that grew: telecommunications and video games. Video games outpaced movie box office receipts as of 2011, and show no signs of slowing down; BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic massively-multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG) sold over 500,000 copies its first day of release in December, 2011. Games are definitely a growing industry with implications in business, education, and other spheres. Video games as an industry, at least from a capitalist standpoint, are not going to be going away.
“The Art of Video Games exhibition will explore the 40-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium, with a focus on striking visual effects, the creative use of new technologies, and the most influential artists and designers.” This is the Smithsonian Institution’s official description of the exhibit which is appearing in its American Art Museum in Washington, DC from March 16, 2012, through September 30, 2012. (HuffPost, 2012) That this museum believes that video game art belongs on the same walls as, for example, the great American painter
Georgia O’Keefe shows that video games are gaining relevance as an art form in American culture. It is a significant development which suggests that video games, while an industry, are also art.
THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL.
Dominic Strinati, when writing about the Frankfurt School, admits that it is “narrow and outmoded” (Strinati). In fact, a key challenge in my tutorial is tying any of my arguments to theorists whose work preceded the video game industry by some 50 years. It is difficult for me because to do so seems irrelevant. There is some relevance in thinking about games as a piece of art, or as a mass-produced piece of popular culture. Through that piece of the Frankfurt
School’s framework, there are parallels to be drawn. The Frankfurt School is a term which applies to a group of neo-Marxist German thinkers of the 1920s. These thinkers were dissatisfied with traditional Marxism in the way that it had evolved almost completely toward communism; they sought instead to relate what they thought of as pure Marxism to a wide variety of other thinkers (mainly psychologists) of that time period, including Freud, Lacan, Hegel and Kant. The formation of the Frankfurt School was primarily influenced by the failed revolutions in Western Europe and by the rise of Naziism in
Germany.
The Frankfurt School is important to the study of Critical Theory because it separated out theories surrounding social sciences from traditional scientific theory. The Frankfurt School concerned itself more with concepts of ideology and social change than with hypotheses, theorems, and traditional means of scientific research. Its criticism of capitalism reflects its pre-
World-War-II context. Marx believed that capitalism would eventually become moot because there were things about its very nature that ran contradictory to its sustainability. For instance, one question asked by Sturken & Cartwright in their analysis of Frankfurt School theory regards whether anything can truly be created without capitalism. This was discussed during our Critical
Theory class and the class came to the conclusion that separating creation and capitalism in
Western society has become impossible. Were people to recycle or barter goods in ways more nontraditional to capitalism, this paradigm might become penetrable. THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND VIDEO GAMES.
This notion of separating creation and capitalism, of using non-traditional models to facilitate the exchange between creation and consumption, is applicable to video games in a couple of respects right now. These examples illuminate the Frankfurt School concept of the valuation of art in terms of its aesthetic value and the value of the labor involved. Video game publishers are concerned only with the bottom line. Sturken & Cartwright discuss the elitism that can happen when curators decide for everyone what constitutes good taste and value in the art world, and this is a concern that also relates to the role of publishers in the gaming industry. The best games don’t always get made, and publishers will sometimes throw money at a bad game; bad sequel games are made pretty commonly, simply to create a franchise that will continue to financially produce. Two examples seek to undermine this model, and the
Frankfurt School theorists would approve.
Kickstarter.com offers game developers a new forum to pre-fund their projects from individuals rather than having to depend on publishers or traditional investors. Two examples of such new models in the game industry are Double Fine and Puzzle Clubhouse. Double Fine, a studio founded in 2000 by former LucasArts developer Tim Schafer, already had a few successful adventure titles under its belt (Psychonauts, Amnesia Fortnights and others) before turning to Kickstarter to try to pre-fund a new adventure game. Adventure games are considered commercially risky, so Schafer decided to seek pre-funding, recognizing that he also had a sizable cult following within the industry already. Schafer asked for $300,000, but earned nearly two million dollars, circumventing the typical process that would involve research and development, promotion, and a publisher taking a sizable portion of the profits (Tito, 2012). Another example of a non-traditional business model, which also has the potential to shake up the capitalist status quo so derided by The Frankfurt School, is Puzzle Clubhouse. Jesse
Schell, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center, owns his own game studio in Pittsburgh. He theorized that people would gladly pay money toward a game development project in exchange for some stake in the game development process, and he invented Puzzle Clubhouse as a way of crowd-sourcing video game content. (Alexander,
2012) Once certain financial thresholds are met from community donations, Schell’s development team will produce episodic gaming which has certain elements that users can submit and vote on. This model invests people in the game design process and offers them ownership – something that for some people is more meaningful than merely buying a game and playing it. This is another model which could potentially change the nature of capitalism within the gaming industry.
While Schell and Schafer both have interesting ideas about how to excommunicate publishers and keep the dialogue between art and artist strictly between those two, there is an ongoing friction between gamers and developers, developers and publishers, and publishers and gamers. Gamers are motivated by wanting a good entertainment experience; developers are motivated by wanting to deliver something that’s fun and has artistic integrity; publishers are concerned with revenue and building brand loyalty. This can be a tenuous set of relationships. Publisher and Developer
“Publishers will continue to trick developers into believing that what they’re making is art,” railed Spry Fox’s David Edery during a roundtable discussion at the 2012 Game Developers’
Conference. The panel, entitled “Designing for Free: How Free-to-Play Games Blur the Line
Between Design and Business,” sought to unpack the balance between art and design, and revenue generation. Matthias Worch from LucasArts felt that it is possible to strike a balance between the two which players, developers and publishers could all be satisfied with. Edery was less confident, expressing much frustration at how bigger publishers restrict design choices because of things like difficult-to-meet release deadlines and budget projections.
Having seen a great game like World of Warcraft begin to recede in quality because of a transition from solely a subscription-based model into a combination of free-to-play, micro- transaction and subscription, the player in me wants to side with Edery. Working for a gaming company, and having experienced that the monetization strategy is an important part of any pitch for a new game, I recognize that Worch occupies the more realistic position. There needs to be a middle ground, in which the player’s experience is not lessened by the monetization strategy, the developer is still proud of the product she releases, and the publisher remains confident that the enterprise will be profitable. Worch suggests that one such middle ground is to allow players to decrease the time it takes to level by offering certain in-game items earlier, for a price. Using Worch’s suggestion, players who are adverse to the repetitive nature of some games, and who don’t like “the grind” that comes along with leveling, can speed up the process for a few dollars; players for whom “the grind” makes attaining the level more meaningful can save their money and level the old-fashioned way. In both cases, players will become less frustrated if micro-transactions are 1) optional, 2) things that can be earned in-game, for free after more time and effort is spent. The key, explains Worch, is making the transaction as painless as possible for the player in a way that does not alter their game unless they wish for it to.
Publishers, because they have quarterly and annual forecasts governing their activities, will often levy a set of mandates onto developers which limit and frustrate those developers.
Often, game endings are rushed because developers are working overtime to meet hard release deadlines. (In 2006, Electronic Arts lost a class action lawsuit over the amount of hours it requires of its salaried employees during “crunch time,” or, the period of time directly preceding a game’s release. The suit claimed sweatshop-like conditions, and Electronic Arts had to pay $14.9 million in settlements to its employees.) (Reimer, 2006) There will be scope cuts that happen on the publisher side which developers then have to deal with; Dragon Age II was limited by a reduced number of locations, and on my own project at Schell games, the number of characters I had to work with had to be reduced for the game to stay within budget guidelines. I found that my narrative and my artistic vision suffered because of these reductions, but, I also took it as a challenge to still craft something of quality that I could completely feel good about. This is one of the greatest challenges a game designer faces, and is a tension not unlike that explained by Sturken & Cartwright in their application of Frankfurt
School theory to art and culture. Developer and Gamer.
The developer and the gamer do seem to have similar motivations, such as artist and art connoisseur. The developer wants to make good games that gamers appreciate, just as the painter wants to make a meaningful, beautiful painting, or as the writer seeks to create a moving story. It is the introduction of the publisher to this mix that causes irritations.
BioWare’s much-awaited title, Mass Effect 3 was released on March 6, 2012. Fans of the series were elated, until they encountered a game ending that many deemed unsatisfactory and contrary to the entire spirit of the Mass Effect trilogy. An online petition asking BioWare to change the ending to Mass Effect 3 or face a boycott of future titles garnered over 43,000 signatures, and BioWare caved to the pressure. Executive producer Casey Hutton admitted that the ending had been a rushed affair because of a publisher-imposed release date, and said that in an effort to listen to and accommodate fans of the series, a new ending may be produced.
(Makuch, 2012) Whether this ending will be available as a free game patch, or whether it will be paid, downloadable content, is unknown at this time. Jesse Schell, who was interviewed about the Mass Effect 3 controversy, believes that this entire situation may have been a public relations strategy designed to keep the title in the news, and to promote any future downloadable content products (Lahti, 2012).
As a professional game writer, I found myself deeply conflicted about this situation. On the one hand, the fans do have a point about the series ending making little sense in light of the entire trilogy’s narrative. The ending was dark; some players do not like endings that are less than happy because they don’t like feeling as though their decisions and actions in the game space didn’t count for anything. As a writer who believes in artistic vision and aesthetic integrity, I can’t fault BioWare’s writers for choosing a dark ending. If there is something that deserves re-consideration, it’s the fact that the ending did nothing to tie the trilogy together cohesively, and left too many loose ends. This situation raised questions about the responsibility artists have to our public; do we maintain our original artistic vision, or do we change that vision to satisfy the desires of the paying public? That is a question that has been asked in art for centuries, and now is being asked in relation to this new art form, the video game.
One thing fledgling game developers are warned about is that there will always be a group of people who complains, no matter what you produce, and no matter what you change.
This phenomenon was parodied in Season 5 of the online web series, “The Guild,” when an unsuspecting Felicia Day plays the latest version of her game at a convention booth and complains to a passerby about how the new features of the game are awful. “Are (the developers) smokin’ crack crazy? These changes are moronic,” she fumes. The passerby turns out to be the chief game developer, who responds: “A lot of us worked really hard to get this demo ready for the con. I haven’t slept in a week, personally, getting it ready for people to enjoy…hundreds of us worked like millions of hours to get this thing ready for the con, and you spend like two minutes on it, and you start to tear it apart. You ever think before you type stuff and criticize these things? Why don’t YOU create an imaginary world? It’d probably be like
Fresno or something! Screw this!” (Day, 2011) As a game developer myself, I found this exchange to be humorously true to the relationship between developer and gamer. It is also an example of the valuation of art, and art as a commodity, as discussed by Sturken & Cartwright in their examination of Frankfurt School theory. Gamer and Publisher.
The publisher’s motivation is, quite simply, money. They wish to lure gamers into buying games as a product, by offering special offers and promotions, and by publishing quality games.
Gamers cannot play the game without a monetary transaction from its publisher, unless there is some sort of alternative arrangement involved such as pre-funding through Kickstarter, or the game is free to players through corporate ad sponsorship.
As the industry finds new ways of excluding the publisher from the mix, publishers are adapting in ways that make life more difficult for gamers. A Sony employee leaked information about the specifications of its upcoming PlayStation 4: Orbis console, which Kotaku.com reported. The Orbis will apparently not be backwards compatible, meaning that no games for the PlayStation, the PlayStation 2, or the PlayStation 3 will be playable on the Orbis console and that new games Sony produces after the release of the Orbis will only be playable on the Orbis.
Another modification made by Sony with its Orbis generation is designed to take aim at the popularity of used game stores such as GameStop; the Orbis will reportedly contain technology which does not allow used games to be played on the Orbis console.
The gamer reactions to this information were both instant and angry. “Sony has spent years gaining data on exactly what their customers don't want, and invested millions to deliver it to us,” grumbled one player. (Cohen, 2012) Others swore they will never purchase a Sony product again; however, gamers do tend to go back on manifestos of this nature the second a nee, well-reviewed product emerges. If the game is cool enough and is promoted well enough, gamers will come back to a company even after feeling burned by that company. As the gaming industry continues to evolve and publishers explore new means of making money from video games, it will be interesting to see what gamers will tolerate. Each new decision by publishers tests that threshold a bit more, and will either be grudgingly accepted by the gaming audience, or there will be pushback. Publishers will need to decide in each case whether to adjust.
The triangular relationship between publisher and developer, gamer and developer, and gamer and publisher functions as an example of art as industry, which is discussed by Sturken &
Cartwright in conjunction with their explanation of Frankfurt School theory which addresses mass culture and mass-production of pop culture. The fact that this example can fit so easily into the subjects offered by Sturken & Cartwright is more evidence that video games are in fact an art form. For more evidence, let us turn to the ongoing intellectual debate between gaming scholar Kellee Santiago and Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic, Roger Ebert.
THE SANTIAGO-EBERT DEBATE
An interesting intellectual debate has arisen about video games as art, between
University of Southern California Masters student Kellee Santiago, and Roger Ebert, entertainment writer for the Chicago Sun-Times. Ebert stated on his blog that video games could never be art:
“I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.” (Ebert, 2009)
In response, Santiago offered a TED Talk in 2009 entitled “Video Games are Art: So What
Next?” in which she argues that video games are art. Santiago concedes at the outset that
Ebert is correct in his assertion that nobody in the game industry can cite a game worthy of comparison to the great dramatists and painters from throughout history. Santiago argues in response that paintings did not start out looking like the Mona Lisa, they began looking like cave paintings. The medium evolved over millions of years, and in comparison to that evolution, video games are also evolving in terms of their graphics and their complexity. Santiago then draws a line between games and art, explaining that while hobbyists who enjoy games such as chess, football and mah jong might really like those games, those games are not necessarily art.
Santiago offers this definition, from WikiPedia: “Art is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions.” She quotes author Robert
McKee in his explanation of good art as being “moved by the desire to touch the audience.”
Santiago then goes on to explore gaming examples which she believes have emotional and aesthetic value.
I agree with Santiago’s claims, but believe that she erred in using the examples that she used. She chose to use examples of her own work and that of colleagues, which certainly helped to bring attention to those works, but which did not offer well-known or even very valid examples of what she was trying to communicate. If I were to conduct the same talk, I would use cinematics from BioWare’s Dragon Age: Origins to demonstrate emotional impact, and gameplay footage from Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to demonstrate the visual beauty and exquisite detail inherent to the virtual game world created by Bethesda. These examples are more relevant to most gamers rather than being indie titles which aren’t well-known or readily available to the public. In fact, when paying attention to this intellectual debate and then seeing
Ebert admit that he had yet to experience a game that he would say qualifies as art, my first impulse was to want to send him a copy of Skyrim.
Ebert responded to Santiago in a blog post in April of 2010. Games, argues Ebert (who is admittedly not a gamer), can never be art because 1) they aren't sophisticated enough, 2) they are generally created by more than one artist, 3) art is not something one can win (ie. a game), but must be an experience. Ebert, for his part, cites Plato’s definition of art as “the imitation of nature.” Ebert believes that a cathedral, which is a work made by many, is art, but that in such cases there are often masters in charge of the team who direct the process, and therefore are the true artists. Ebert takes issue with Santiago’s quotation of McKee using the logic that just because art might be motivated by the desire to touch the audience, this is no guarantee that the audience reacts that way, or that the art is any good. After a thoughtful discussion about various definitions of art, Ebert takes issue with the gaming examples that Santiago used in her presentation and says that he does not feel in his opinion “crossed that boundary into artistic expression,” despite the fact that the games have experienced critical acclaim and some economic success. Ebert takes issue with Santiago’s citation of Georges Melies’ films as being simplistic because they are an evolutionary step for the medium of film, but admits that he is handicapped by his love of film on this particular point. He then ends his argument thus:
“Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art form. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Series of Mah Jong in 2009. Why aren't gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves? They have my blessing, not that they care. Do they require validation? In defending their gaming against parents, spouses, children, partners, co-workers or other critics, do they want to be able to look up from the screen and explain, "I'm studying a great form of art?" Then let them say it, if it makes them happy.
I allow Sangtiago the last word. Toward the end of her presentation, she shows a visual with six circles, which represent, I gather, the components now forming for her brave new world of video games as art. The circles are labeled: Development, Finance, Publishing, Marketing, Education, and Executive Management. I rest my case.” (Ebert)
Roger Ebert remains one of my favorite entertainment writers, because he is willing to consider and respectfully engage in these deeper philosophical questions about art and what it means. I do agree that Ebert has a valid point when responding that just because an artist is motivated by the desire to touch his or her audience does not mean the art is good. I also agree that a cathedral is a piece of group-created art; however, I disagree that the only person who is truly an artist in the case of a cathedral is the person guiding the artistic process. On a team that makes video games, there are artists, designers, producers, and programmers. The process involved with making a video game is very much a group process even though there may be one project director or creative director, and I would argue that each person who is involved in that process is a valuable contributor to that process. While, like Ebert, I take issue with
Santiago’s specific examples, I believe that were Ebert to experience some different examples
(such as the aforementioned Dragon Age: Origins and Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim), his opinion might change. It is interesting to me that someone who is not a gamer considers himself to be in a position to judge whether or not games are art and would suggest that this judgment is unfair on his part for exactly that reason.
Ebert uses Santiago’s visual with the circles as more evidence that games are not art.
Presumably, “Development, Finance, Publishing, Marketing, Education, and Executive Management” are subjects which Ebert believes point to games as being an industry, rather than being art. I would observe that these areas cited by Santiago are also relevant to the film industry which Ebert criticizes for a living. Ebert speaks of his love for film when mentioning
Melies but is unable to see the parallels between the corporate side of filmmaking and the business side of gaming, which I also find curious.
In the end, I believe that this interesting debate will continue and include more voices, because gaming is a relatively new medium which will continue to evolve. Both Santiago and
Ebert make salient points, and in dialogue with them, I agree with Santiago, though disagreeing with her examples and allowing Ebert some important observations. We can often not truly understand artistic masterpieces for what they are until history has retrospectively classified them as such. For all we know, the great gaming masterpieces have already been created.
IN CONCLUSION.
In applying Frankfurt School theory to the question of whether video games are industry and art, the gamer and the designer in me wants to yell and scream that they are art. From a purely analytical standpoint, I must realistically conclude that they are both. There is evidence to support both positions simultaneously, and much intellectual debate on the topic.
There is no denying the material success of these games, with their increasingly higher profits, and that gaming is a mass-produced part of American culture. The triangular relationship between developer, gamer, and publisher is complex enough to yield examples in both directions. The fact that these games cannot be played without the product of a machine, and that the interactions in these games are filtered and directed by the machine, is more evidence to suggest that games are a mass-produced piece of industry.
Entities no less than the Smithsonian Institution and the US Supreme Court have sided on the side of games as art. Blogger Tom Chivers explains, in his article about why games are art, that they are art because they are important tools of self-expression. Games capture people’s imaginations, and lead to more creativity on the part of players. (Chivers, 2012).
Games require illustration, animation, design elements and narration -- all elements which are arranged into an experience for the player – a process which falls into Kellee Santiago’s definition of art.
My ultimate disagreement with the Frankfurt School is that while those theorists would believe that art is automatically subjugated by capitalism, I believe that both the artistic side and the business side of games can, do, and will continue in an uneasy but separate coexistence. Where the capitalist element requires concessions in the artistic process, it’s the true creative who can accept those new parameters as a challenge and still find ways to deliver a meaningful and aesthetically pleasing experience. Such creative challenges are at the very heart of being an artist. WORKS CITED.
Alexander, Leigh. "Schell Brings Craft Culture To Games With Puzzle Clubhouse." Gamasutra. UBM Techweb, 29 Dec. 2011. Web. 01 Apr. 2012.
Anderson, Nate. "Video Gaming to Be Twice as Big as Music by 2011." Ars Technica. Conde Naste Digital, Inc., 30 Aug. 2007. Web. 18 Feb. 2012.
Chivers, Tom. "Are Video Games Carnivals of Savagery, or Works of Art? – Telegraph Blogs." The Telegraph UK. Telegraph Media Group LLC, 12 Feb. 2012. Web. 18 Feb. 2012.
Cohen, D. S. "The PS4 Will Reportedly Lock out Used Games." Message to Heidi McDonald. 28 Mar. 2012. E-mail.
Collins, Nick. "Video Games 'more Creative than Reading' - Telegraph." The Telegraph UK. Telegraph Media Group LLC, 12 Feb. 2012. Web. 18 Feb. 2012.
Day, Felicia. "The Guild, Season 5, Episode 3, "Game-o-Rama-Con" The Guild. MSN, XboX LIVE, Zune Marketplace. 11 Aug. 2011. Web series.
Ebert, Roger. "Video Games Can Never Be Art." Chicago Sun-Times Blogs: Roger Ebert's Journal. Chicago Sun-Times, Sun-Times Media, 16 Apr. 2010. Web. 18 Feb. 2012.
"FYI: Video Game Statistics by the Entertainment Software Association | Critical Gaming Project." CGP: Critical Gaming Project Blog. University of Washington, 6 Apr. 2010. Web. 18 Nov. 2012.
Kwan, Michael. "How Much Money Does the Video Game Industry Make - LoveToKnow Video Games." LoveToKnow.com: Video Games. LoveToKnow Corp. Web. 18 Feb. 2012.
Lewis, Mike. "Games as a Commodity." RobotGeek - Video Game News, Reviews, Opinions, and Everything Else. Robot Geek, 24 Aug. 2011. Web. 18 Feb. 2012.
Makuch, Eddie. "BioWare considering Changing Mass Effect 3 Ending." Gamespot. CBS Interactive Inc., 19 Mar. 2012. Web. 01 Apr. 2012.
McGonigal, Jane. "Gaming Can Make a Better World." TED2010, Long Beach, CA. 18 Feb. 2012. Lecture.
Popova, Maria. "Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World." Brain Pickings. Maria Popova, 20 Jan. 2011. Web. 18 Feb. 2012.
Reimer, Jeremy. "Programmers Win Settlement against Electronic Arts." Ars Technica. Conde Naste Media, Inc., Apr. 2006. Web. 01 Apr. 2012.
Santiago, Kellee. "Are Video Games Art?" TED Talks (Independently Organized). University of Southern California. 29 Aug. 2009. Lecture.
Schiesel, Seth. "The Supreme Court Has Ruled: Now Games Have a Duty." The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 28 June 2011. Web. 18 Feb. 2012.
"Smithsonian Details 'Art Of Video Games' Exhibit." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 18 Jan. 2012. Web. 18 Feb. 2012.
Strinati, Dominic. "The Frankfurt School and the Culture Industry." An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 1995. 51-85. Print.
Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. "Modernity, Spectatorship, Power and Knowledge." Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. New York, NY: Oxford UP, 2009. 93-138. Print. Sutter, John D. "Supreme Court Sees Video Games as Art - CNN." CNN. Cable News Network, Turner Broadcasting Company, 27 June 2011. Web. 18 Feb. 2012.
Tito, Greg. "Tim Schafer Raises $1.3 Million." The Escapist Magazine. Themis Media, 27 Feb. 2012. Web. 1 Apr. 2012.
Walton, Brett. "Weekly Software Charts." Video Game Charts, Game Sales, Top Sellers, Game Data - VGChartz. VG Chartz Limited, 2012. Web. 18 Feb. 2012.
The NPC Romance Project
NOTE: Please also refer to the accompanying multi-media presentation for this chapter, which is provided on CD.
INTRODUCTION.
Relationships are an essential part of the human experience, so it is natural when doing an in-depth examination of video games and why they are important, to think about how relationships are portrayed in games. Social networking games and Massively-Multiplayer
Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG’S) connect people in different parts of the world in ways that were unimagined when video games were invented in the late 1970s. Other types of games allow for safe experimentation in sexuality and relationships. Relationships satisfy three of the basic human needs as discussed by Maslow in his Hierarchy of Needs (Maslow), and therefore relationships in games speak to our basic nature as human beings and our motivations.
This tutorial chapter will explore relationships in video games with a special emphasis on an area of study that has attracted industry attention since I began it, which is, player behavior with romance-able non-player characters (NPCs) in role-playing games (RPGs) and how it is both similar and different to players’ real-life experiences. My preliminary study found, and at this writing continues to find in a larger, more comprehensive survey developed with the assistance of industry experts, that video games are doing important cultural work right now toward tolerance in the area of human sexuality. THE HISTORY OF ROMANCE AND RELATIONSHIPS IN GAMES.
In the early 1980s, when arcade games became a part of American pop culture, relationships were limited in video games. In Donkey Kong, an ape kidnaps a princess and it is up to the player to help Mario rescue the princess at the top of the scaffolding; the player would be rewarded merely with a heart. In the Pac-Man franchise’s follow-up release, Ms. Pac-
Man, was identified as female with a bow on its head, and with red lipstick; cutscenes between levels would show Ms. Pac-Man and Pac-Man falling in love and having adorable yellow Pac- babies. In Frogger, players got extra points for picking up a lady frog on the player’s frog’s back, and escorting the lady frog home. Most arcade games of this period, however, were creature driven (space games, races, etc.) and did not include any kind of romance.
When text adventures appeared in the 1990s, there were limited opportunities to romance, but these functions had to be performed using specific phrases that programmers had written into the code for the machine to recognize. The birth of the MMORPG meant that players could all play together online from wherever they were. The chat function made it possible to connect in typed conversation in realtime with other players. This is a trend that continues even more frequently today, and now with the addition of games on social websites such as Facebook, which can pit you against both friends you know in real life, and against complete strangers.
THE NEW MATCHMAKERS: ONLINE GAMES. MSNBC gaming writer Winda Benedetti postulates that Blizzard Entertainment’s
MMORPG, World of Warcraft, is currently a more popular way to meet potential partners than popular dating sites such as Match.com. There are some 12 million subscribers to World of
Warcraft, which is six times the 2 million subscribers on Match.com. Players in World of
Warcraft already have a few common interests (gaming and specifically in that game), and, because they are playing for fun and stress relief, the atmosphere is more likely to be casual and playful and conducive to people’s actual personalities rather than the “good behavior” many people try to display at the outset of meeting someone through a dating site (Benedetti,
2011).
A related New York Times article by Stephanie Rosenbloom discusses an initiative by
Ramona Pringle, an interactive media producer for PBS’ “Frontline” and professor of new media at the Ryerson School of Image Arts in Toronto. Pringle attended BlizzCon 2009 (Blizzard
Entertainment’s annual World of Warcraft player convention), and noticed the staggering number of couples who had met online playing the game, then married in real life. Pringle says,
“It’s giving people something that they’re missing in the real world. It is a really primal experience. It’s about survival. It’s about needing someone.” This hearkens back to Abraham
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, in which online relationships could satisfy Esteem Needs, the second tier of the hierarchy, as well as Social Needs, on the hierarchy’s third tier. (Bringing the relationship from online to real life could then satisfy the fourth tier, Physiological Needs, and eventually, the most important of Maslow’s motivations – Self Actualization.) (Maslow, 1943)
“When you’re talking on the phone you can say all of those things, but there’s no physicality to it,” said Ms. Romero, a food services director for a gaming company. “And in the game, even though somebody’s 2,000 miles away, they’ve made an effort to sit down and hold your hand. Even though it’s not real, the emotion of it is real.” Speaking of emotions, the first time (Romero) let Dreadmex know she loved him, she did so in the game, and then swiftly logged off. “You can say ‘I love you’ and then run away,” Ms. Romero said. “That moment — ‘Should I tell somebody I love them?’ — it’s a big deal, right? So to be able to say it and then to disappear is pretty great.”
Other gamers have echoed that sentiment, saying that typing their feelings or flirtations is less awkward than saying them aloud. That can lead to more-honest conversations, and fewer misunderstandings. It’s why many players believe that they come to know each other faster and better than, say, people who meet over a few dates. (Rosenbloom, 2011)
This situation is not uncommon, apparently. Another gamer in Rosenbloom’s article who found love in World of Warcraft says, “There’s something magical about falling in love with someone just through writing and then waiting for a reply. It’s evocative of ancient romances where pen-and-ink love letters were delivered on horseback. Just the kind of forgotten world that Warcraft seeks to recreate in digital space.”
Rosenbloom is currently working on a television special which examines gaming couples in combination with Meyers-Briggs personality typography, which is based in Jungian psychology and categorizes people according to Extraversion versus Intraversion, Sensate versus Intuitive, Feeling versus Thinking, and Perceptive versus Judgmental. Her theory is that personality types seek out specific roles to play in these games (ie. The Healer, The Warrior, The
Mage, etc.) and that people are drawn to each other initially based on their experiences interacting with the character archetypes which are most compatible with their MBTI personality type. Likewise, Rosenbloom believes that the cooperative nature of games like
World of Warcraft force people to work together, and in doing so, they meet new and different people. A more recent system of personality indicators called “The Big 5” was recently discussed by UbiSoft Creative Director Jason VandenBerghe in his lecture, “The 5 Domains of Play,” which he delivered at the 2012 Game Developers’ Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. Like
Rosenbloom, VandenBerghe seeks to unpack motivations related to gaming behaviors, though
VandenBerghe’s work approaches this not from a relationship standpoint but from one that asks how we might use this kind of personality data as designers to create better gaming experiences for players. VandenBerghe’s studies could be equally applied, however, to the notions of using games to pursue romance in the real world, as well as to the notion of creating more satisfying pre-written romantic narratives for players1.
In speaking about online gaming, one newer field of gaming bears at least a mention, because it takes the notion of interactive gaming a large step further. Teledildonics, as the genre is called, offer adults a chance to sexually stimulate people online in realtime. There are devices called “Sinulators” to purchase and equip to both male and female anatomy, which connect to the computer. (Lynn, 2004) One goes online and names his or her sexual device, and then whomever has access to the name of that device can control the device using the internet.
This could be used heterosexually or homosexually, between strangers, or between people in long-distance relationships. This product raises more questions than usual about whether the relationship is with a person or with a machine, as the sexual pleasure is being caused by a machine despite the fact that there is an actual person controlling that machine. It also raises questions about the line between romances in games and pornography and where that line is.
1 I am currently in touch with VandenBerghe about this, as his research and mine are both evolving and related. The Sinulator, as a discreet personal item for adults, clearly crosses that line, but offers no solutions about where the line is drawn.
While this chapter, to this point, has dealt with player to player romances in gaming, the major focus of the chapter involves the player and the narrative romance with the non-player character (NPC). NPC’s are prewritten characters which players can interact with based on massive dialogue trees which can result in the player’s compatibility score with that character going up or down (which simulates reactions in real people as you get to know and interact with them). There are a variety of ways these relationships are handled in games, and a major difference in how they are handled and viewed in Eastern versus Western cultures.
EASTERN DATING GAMES AND OTOME.
In Japan, non-player character (NPC) romances are actively marketed. The fact that a game is primarily for the purpose of conducting a romance with an NPC is not only unambiguous, but promoted and sold based on that fact. These games, most of which are made for the Nintendo DS handheld console, range from the chaste to the sexual, and are an accepted part of Japanese culture.
One such segment of the marketplace is being more and more popularly geared toward women and girls, called “Otome.” Otome games are roleplaying narrative games, primarily for
Nintendo DS, in which women and girls can solve mysteries and complete life simulations, all while pursuing one of a handful of romance-able anime character options. The most recent push has been toward females because it is believed in Japan that females represent the largest opportunity for market growth (Otomegames.com). While these games are a mass-produced product as referenced in my chapter about the Frankfurt School and video games as art and industry, it can be argued that these Japanese dating games are also satisfying a deep social need that people have (particularly teens, in their most socially-awkward and formative years).
In 2009, a Japanese man made national news for holding a marriage ceremony in which he pledged himself to Nene Anegesaki, a female anime character in the game “Love Plus” for the Nintendo DS. Sal 9000, the groom, simulcast the wedding on the internet; it was watched in realtime by thousands of people around the world. Sal rented a hall and a minister, sent out invitations, and held a reception. During the wedding, he pledged himself to the NPC. CNN writer Kyungh Lah interviewed the groom:
The wedding, while not legally binding, was Sal's way of expressing his devotion to his avatar girlfriend.
"I love this character, not a machine," said Sal, when asked about whether he can love an electronic device. "I understand 100 percent that this is a game. I understand very well that I cannot marry her physically or legally.”
The courtship began in September when he started playing the game, in which players nurture a deeper relationship through game play. Sal started carrying Nene around the streets of Tokyo and taking her to Disneyland and to a beach resort in Guam.
Sal says Nene is better than a human girlfriend. "She doesn't get angry if I'm late in replying to her. Well, she gets angry, but she forgives me quickly."
Asked if he's courtesy addicted to the game, he says, "If addiction is playing this every single day, then you might call me addicted." With Nene, Sal doesn't feel the need to find a human girlfriend, he added.
Hiroshi Ashizaki, an author who writes about Internet and game addiction, doesn't think Sal 9000 is an extreme case. What is healthy about Sal is that he can communicate with people enough to do an interview on CNN and webcast a half- serious wedding, Ashizaki said.
"There are many others who can't express themselves like Sal can, and those are the cases we worry about," says Ashizaki. What's important to note, Ashizaki says, is that Sal is a representative of many of Japan's young gamers. "Today's Japanese youth can't express their true feelings in reality. They can only do it in the virtual world," Ashizaki said. "It's the reverse of reality that they can only talk about what they feel to a friend in the virtual world." (Lah, 2009)
Both Lah and author Ashizaki believe that what they are witnessing is a healthy form of human expression by the first generation of the digital age. Dr. Catherine Dwyer of Pace
University researched the habits and behaviors in people who are conducting most of their social relationships by machine and found that those who operate in this manner stay more connected because they are contacting each other several times per day, and that these interactions are more honest than they might be in person because the machine removes a level of social awkwardness that might exist in person.
At the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, a short film called “The Arm” examining this same phenomenon received much acclaim (Byer, 2012). In the film, a pair of teenagers meets in a frozen yogurt shop, exchanges phone numbers, and conducts their entire relationship via text message. The girl, who is texting and driving, dies in an accident. The boy realizes upon being asked to speak at the girl’s funeral that their relationship was digital and therefore superficial and possibly not even a relationship at all. This is certainly one opinion on digital connections between people. However, Dwyer stands on the other side, showing us with her research that many people do depend on technology for human connections. Aaron Boulder, also known as
Playground Dad, references a 2009 Pew survey showing that teens send and receive on the average of 80 text messages per day (Boulder, 2012).
Technology is becoming a more and more important tool to keep human beings connected. Technology as a platform for emotionally-stimulating entertainment allows for more interactivity than books did prior to the 20th Century. These games allow for a more personal, customized user experience than everyone experiencing the same words on a page, and each person having their own reactions to it. My research on NPC romance, discussed further in this chapter, should ultimately prove what British playwright Lucy Prebble recently said: that video games are a more creative outlet for the emotion and the imagination than books (Collins, 2012).
ROMANCING THE NON-PLAYER CHARACTER IN WESTERN CULTURE.
In Western culture, non-player character (NPC) romances are handled a bit differently and there is quite a lot more controversy surrounding it. Romance in American games is not generally the entire gaming experience, but more like the whipped cream and the cherry on top of an ice cream sundae – an extra, delicious component that compliments the larger game narrative. This is a component that half of roleplaying game players say they can live with or without, but, a component which one third of roleplaying game players say is “important to crucial.”2
The controversy sometimes surrounding this content in games can be attributed to theories discussed by Dr. Marty Klein in his 2006 article in the Electronic Journal of Human
Sexuality. Klein believes that sexuality in America is what Klein calls a war between two types of people, “erotophobes” and “erotophiles.” Writes Klein, "The goal of this war is to control sexual expression, colonize sexual imagination, and restrict sexual choices." (Klein, 2006) The erotophobes are people associated with the fundamentalist Christian right, whom Klein
2 This was a finding in my preliminary survey associated with the NPC Romance Project. The larger survey ends on May 1, 2012, and the findings will be shared as publicly as possible. describes as threatened by sexuality, sexually repressed, and wanting to control not just their own sexual behaviors but those of everyone else. The erotophiles are those who are more open to sexual expression, sexual exploration, sexual arrangements, sexual privacy, sexual choice, sexual entertainment, sexual health, sexual imagination, and sexual pleasure. Klein argues that in recent years, the erotophobes have been winning.
One recent example of erotophobe involvement in the gaming industry surrounding
NPC romances is the criticism of BioWare Entertainment by the Family Research Council, for having same-sex relationships available to explore in the company’s most recent release, Star
Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG (Deloria, 2012). This story, widely circulated in gamer blogs and electronic news sites, shows how a conservative group is attempting to control the gaming experiences of players according to their own religious codes. It has been BioWare’s policy for some time to write their romance-able characters in both male and female directions.
This is not the first time BioWare has endured such criticism, as lead writer David Gaider received massive internet coverage for a statement he released on behalf of BioWare in response to a straight white male who had complained on the BioWare forums that Dragon
Age II should not contain homosexual romance options, because he is offended by them, and because he represents the majority demographic of gamers. Gaider responded:
The romances in the game are not for “the straight male gamer.” They’re for everyone. We have a lot of fans, many of whom are neither straight nor male, and they deserve no less attention. We have good numbers, after all, on the number of people who actually used similar sorts of content in (Dragon Age: Origins) and thus don’t need to resort to anecdotal evidence to support our idea that their numbers are not insignificant… and that’s ignoring the idea that they don’t have just as much right to play the kind of game they wish as anyone else. The “rights” of anyone with regards to a game are murky at best, but anyone who takes that stance must apply it equally to both the minority as well as the majority. The majority has no inherent “right” to get more options than anyone else. More than that, I would question anyone deciding they speak for “the straight male gamer” just as much as someone claiming they speak for “all RPG fans,” “all female fans” or even “all gay fans.” You don’t. If you wish to express your personal desires, then do so. I have no doubt that any opinion expressed on these forums is shared by many others, but since none of them have elected a spokesperson you’re better off not trying to be one. If your attempt is to convince BioWare developers, I can tell you that you do in fact make your opinion less convincing by doing so.
And if there is any doubt why such an opinion might be met with hostility, it has to do with privilege. You can write it off as “political correctness” if you wish, but the truth is that privilege always lies with the majority. They’re so used to being catered to that they see the lack of catering as an imbalance. They don’t see anything wrong with having things set up to suit them, what’s everyone’s fuss all about? That’s the way it should be, any everyone else should be used to not getting what they want.
The truth is that making a romance available for both genders is far less costly than creating an entirely new one. Does it create some issues of implementation? Sure– but anything you try on this front is going to have its issues, and inevitably you’ll always leave someone out in the cold. In this case, are all straight males left out in the cold? Not at all. There are romances available for them just the same as anyone else. Not all straight males require that their content be exclusive, after all, and you can see that even on this thread.
…Even if someone decides that this makes everyone “unrealistically” bisexual, however, or they can’t handle the idea that the character might be bisexual if they were another PC… I don’t see that as a big concern, to be honest. Romances are never one-size-fits-all, and even for those who don’t mind the sexuality issue there’s no guarantee they’ll find a character they even want to romance. That’s why romances are optional content. It’s such a personal issue that we’ll never be able to please everyone. The very best we can do is give everyone a little bit of choice, and that’s what we tried here.
And the person who says that the only way to please them is to restrict options for others is, if you ask me, the one who deserves it least. And that’s my opinion, expressed as politely as possible. (Gaider, 2011)
BioWare deserves scrutiny on the topic of games with romance-able NPC’s in them, because they are the largest and most successful company producing games of this nature.
Gaider’s response to the “Straight Male Gamer” has inspired loyalty to BioWare in me as a gamer and as an aspiring writer of narratives for video games. Gaider’s stating of his policy (and by extension, BioWare’s, and the entire writing team at BioWare’s policy) was partially responsible for inspiring me to study more about player behavior in video games with romance- able NPC’s. Upon asking Jennifer Brandes Hepler, my mentor through the Women in Games
International’s GameMentor Online program, I found that BioWare has collected no data to verify that their policies are consistent with the desires of gamers, other than sales figures.
THE BIRTH OF THE NPC ROMANCE PROJECT.
In Dr. Katie Cruger’s 100-level communications class, we were divided into groups and asked to examine and present on an area of media that interests us, for the “Media and Social
Change” conference at Chatham on April 5, 2012. The group I was placed in decided to examine relationships in various media; I chose video games. Without a clear direction from which to begin, I studied my own gaming behavior to see if I could find a starting point. As I am not someone who has ever begun a romance with an actual person I met while playing a video game, I decided to instead focus on non-player characters I have responded to during my time as a gamer. (I have only ever played female characters, and have only ever romanced male characters.)
Figure 1, below, combines pictures of the male NPCs I have pursued romances with while playing video games. Seven of these nine men are human, and two are elves. Eight of them have qualities that I would not find attractive in real life (ie. roguishness, violence, political extremism, immorality) yet the character in the center (Alistair from Dragon Age: Origins) had me so invested that I played the entire game through three times in order to get the NPC romance to turn out the way I wanted it to. I wondered about this. Eight times out of nine, I had pursued male characters with personal characteristics which would be abhorrent in real life, yet the one character who had mattered most to me is one who most resembles my real-life husband, both physically and in personality. I found this fascinating but wanted to know why. I began to speak with other people about their experiences with NPC romance in roleplaying games, and found a similar kind of situation: my friends were most often romancing characters who they would never pursue in real life, yet the characters who affected them the most did so because of their similarities to an actual person in their esteem. I asked Jennifer
Brandes Hepler, my mentor at BioWare, whether BioWare collects data on anything like this
(because BioWare is the number one producer of games with this kind of content); BioWare does not. I asked both Jesse Schell and Sheri Graner Ray whether I might have stumbled onto a new area of research in the gaming industry, and they (both university professors of game design in addition to working at Schell Games) both said they believed I had.
I then decided to conduct an anonymous survey among gamers and game developers which measured a few things about player behavior and NPCs in roleplaying games. The survey was created on a free account through SurveyMonkey, which limits users to 10 questions per survey. Using SurveyMonkey, I felt, was problematic because first of all, it depends on self- reporting about behavior. A famous 1934 study by Richard LaPiere found that people’s attitudes and their behaviors are often inconsistent, which is why any method of data collection which involves self-reporting is automatically suspect. Barring any programmed game metrics for this type of data (and BioWare having admitted that there are none), self-reporting then became the best available means of data collection. (Even if BioWare were to install game metrics that tagged player behavior relating to NPC romance – which again is complimentary, side content rather than main game content – the metrics could still not tell whether the player is male or female in real life.) I felt that anonymity would encourage honesty in the face of some questions which might be uncomfortable for players to answer. The data I received in my preliminary survey was interesting enough that I do believe people were honest in their responses to the survey questions.
My original intention with this work was for this to serve as my portion of the group project for COM106. What I did not yet realize in February, 2012 when I began this work was that it would prove to be much bigger and much more important than I had imagined. I had no idea how large this project would become or about the attention it would draw in circles both industrial and academic. I certainly did not start out with any specific hypothesis in mind; I merely wanted to spot any trends which I thought might require further examination.
THE INITIAL SURVEY AND RESULTS.
The initial survey for The NPC Romance Project contained the following ten questions:
1. What gender are you in real life?
2. How old are you?
3. When you play a role-playing video game (RPG), what gender character do you most often play?
4. When you play a role-playing video game (RPG) that has romance-able non- player characters (NPCs) in it, which gender character do you usually romance? a. Female b. Male c. Either or both d. I do not pursue romances with NPCs.
5. What are the reasons an NPC might be fun to romance? (Check all that apply.) a. The way the NPC looks (face, body) b. The way the NPC talks (voice) c. The NPC's personality (dialogue) d. The storyline involving the NPC (narrative) e. She/He reminds me favorably of someone in real life f. He/She is the opposite of anyone I'd romance in real life g. I do not or will not romance NPC's 6. For question 6, I found a list of adjectives that users on the BioWare Social Network (BSN) had used to describe NPCs in BioWare’s roleplaying games. For each of these adjectives, I asked participants to identify whether they strongly agree, agree, were neutral, disagreed or strongly disagreed with the idea that each adjective represented an attractive characteristic in an NPC. The list of adjectives: Strong Mysterious Tortured Inherently Bad Same Species Chaste Funny Helpless Exotic Communicative Affectionate Monogamous Violent Principled Attractive Religious Kooky Considerate Seductive Lonely Rogue-ish
7. What are some RPG's you've played, with romance-able NPC's in them?
8. How important are romance-able characters to your overall gaming experience? a. Crucial! b. Important. c. I could take it or leave it. d. Meh. e. Ew. It's unnatural. Not my thing. 9. If you romance NPC's in role-playing video games, why do you do it? (Check all that apply.) a. To watch my avatar do the nasty with that character. b. To entertain myself. c. To see where the story goes based on that romance. d. Because I'm single in real life and it gives me some fulfillment. e. Because it allows me to experiment with romancing characters much different than those I would pursue in real life. f. Because I'm in a long-term relationship and this spices things up in my real relationship. g. Other (please specify)
10. For question 10, I listed a number of statements and asked participants to indicate whether they strongly agreed, agreed, were neutral toward, disagreed, or strongly disagreed with each statement, as applied to the relationships between players of roleplaying games and the romance-able NPCs in those games: a. I become addicted to the game during the romance. b. My real-life relationships are affected. c. It spices up my sex life. d. I become anti-social. e. I can experience more conquests than I would in real life. f. It emotionally stimulates me. g. I can experiment with sex and relationships safely. h. I daydream about the NPC. i. I can act in ways I never would in real life. j. I can cheat on my significant other without actually cheating. k. I create art inspired by the NPC. l. I develop real-life feelings toward the NPC. m. It's escapism. n. It sexually stimulates me. o. Other (please specify)
This survey had 37 respondents, all of whom were friends or co-workers of mine and/or my husband’s. Every respondent save one was a gamer or a professional game developer; I decided that in the next survey, not being a gamer should disqualify participants because a survey filled out by a non-gamer in this case would be meaningless and possibly skew the results. The 37 respondents ranged in age from 19 to 51, with an average age of 34. The respondents were 52% male and 48% female, yet this is not how their gaming behaviors played out:
Fig 2. While only 48% of the respondents’ real-life gender is female, some 61% of respondents said they preferred to play female characters when roleplaying. This means that there is definitely crossover in terms of males choosing to play female characters, but does not specifically break out the figures so that we know what answer females gave and what answer males gave. This is a weakness in the limited survey which I decided to correct and clarify in any subsequent work. We also have no idea according to this survey what the sexual orientation of the participants might be, which might have influenced this result; I also decided to clarify and correct this point in subsequent work. Fig. 3. This finding was an interesting one, because it means that over 30% of players are comfortable romancing either sex NPC in a roleplaying game, an answer that is just as popular as romancing female characters. One humorous read of this data point is that some players would rather romance no NPC at all than a male character. What this data proved is that there is sexual experimentation going on in roleplaying video games. This is not an earth-shattering notion, because one would expect that players in a roleplaying game are automatically assuming characteristics which are different than their real ones. It does seem to be, however, the first set of data in the gaming industry which suggests as conclusively as can be obtained, that experimentation is definitely going on. Whether this experimentation is the result of the content being present, or whether it is for the sake of experimentation itself, is unclear with the preliminary survey and I sought to unpack that a bit further in subsequent work. Fig. 4. In another unexpected finding, narrative, personality and dialogue outranked visuals in the reasons why NPC romances are fun. This is surprising because Sheri Graner Ray in
“Gender-Inclusive Game Design: Expanding the Market” describes that one key physiological difference between what stimulates males versus what stimulates females as visuals being key for males, and written words being more so for females. The finding I expected here was for the visual components here to be equal to the number of males in the study (52%) and for the narrative, personality and dialogue to be relative to the number of females in the study (48%).
What happened in actuality was that narrative, personality and dialogue appears to be very important to all players (82%) and visuals more important to women than expected (62%).
This specific data point should be of interest to BioWare, as, they market themselves as being a company which prides itself on story-centered games. For this particular set of respondents, story proved to be very important. The next question this opens up, then, is regarding how important BioWare is to a conversation about NPCs, since players of these games say that story is important, and BioWare prides itself on producing story-based games.
Fig. 5. Basically, according to these respondents, a conversation about NPC Romance simply cannot take place without considering BioWare products because they are by far the number one producer of roleplaying games with this type of content. This should thrill
BioWare, who until this point has had only sales figures to suggest a success pattern to their game development strategies. Sales figures can determine a gaming franchise’s financial stability, but just because players buy a game does not mean they played it completely through, or liked it, or why they liked or disliked it. This data shows without a doubt that story is important, and therefore, people are playing BioWare’s because stellar story composition is a stated commitment to the company’s development strategy.
With BioWare having emerged as this important to my discussion, I began to think more about their approach to story-based gaming development. As previously mentioned, BioWare has been criticized for making their NPC romances playable from both homosexual and heterosexual positions. This survey showed that such experimentation is happening in games, and that story is important to players, and that players are playing BioWare games often. Could this mean that BioWare’s strategy is more than their preferred way of game development, but that it is also performing important cultural work in the area of tolerance for people of all sexual orientations? Suddenly, I felt a hypothesis beginning to emerge.
BioWare’s games are my favorite to play, because as a game writer, story is the most important to me in the games I devote the most time to. Understanding that my esteem for the company and its products could inadvertently color the results of the surveys, I have proceeded very aware of this fact when interpreting the data. However, there is not any way to spin this data which does not position BioWare as the number one source in the industry for narrative roleplaying games.
If the first theme that emerged from this research was gender-bending and experimenting with sexual orientation in roleplaying games, and the second theme that emerged was that BioWare’s policies on NPC romance need to be examined and studied, then a third theme emerged from this research as well. In trying to glean answers about whether there is a specific character formula that works in order to make more satisfying player experiences with NPC romance, something very interesting has become evident: players often prefer to romance NPCs which have personal characteristics (like violence or immorality) which would be impractical in a real-life partner.
Fig. 6. The list of adjectives which players listed as “attractive” NPC characteristics are neither surprising nor much different than qualities one might look for in a real-life partner. For, who does not want their real-life partner to be communicative, attractive, and affectionate?
One observation which can be made of this set of adjectives is that while BioWare’s customers often complain loud and long about there being too much dialogue in their games, in truth, a character being communicative (79.3% find “communicative” attractive) is almost just as important to players as attractiveness (80% find physical attraction attractive). Players might say they don’t like the amount of character dialogue, but the data gleaned from their preferences speaks otherwise. Perhaps the most interesting preliminary finding of the adjective list is not what players are actively attracted to, but, qualities that players are willing to overlook in the name of NPC romance.
Fig. 7. This is where the data begins to get very interesting. Over 70% of players don’t care whether their NPC romance is monogamous, over 60% don’t care whether the character they are romancing is human, and over 60% don’t care whether their romance character is violent or not. In real life, monogamy is very often a deal-breaker in a relationship, as is violence. In games, players overlook these qualities in a partner. This finding was something that made me feel that further study was necessary. Not only would it be interesting to learn more about the difference between what is attractive in a game versus attractive in real life, but, to find out more about why these differences occur.
What need or motivation do these characters satisfy during gameplay? These questions were raised by this part of the survey and so this section of the survey was expanded on in the more comprehensive survey with the wider respondent pool. For this preliminary survey, I had only used descriptors which had been used by players to describe the characters in NPC romance. I decided to look at the new survey from a different place, adding more descriptors (this time, taken from Match.com’s initial client personality test), and thinking about whether each adjective is:
Something that describes the player in real life
Something that describes the character a player roleplays in games
Something that is attractive or not in an NPC
Something that is attractive or not in a real-life partner
I decided that having this expanded information would shed some more light on the differences and similarities in player behavior in game versus in real life.
Fig. 8. There were two descriptors which respondents responded very negatively to:
“helpless” and “religious.” In a survey where respondents said violence doesn’t matter in the personal characteristics of a romance-able NPC, the term “helpless” was a true turn-off, one interpretation may be that players expect their NPC characters to be strong and self-reliant, and able to handle themselves in a fight – a far cry from Donkey Kong in 1981 where the end goal was to rescue a damsel in distress. Today’s players are apparently more interested in fully- realized characters who are willing to take actives role in the adventure, who are able to assist in their own rescue as easily as to perform a rescue.
That players are turned off by the “religious” aspect of characters is interesting. It suggests that there are certain character motivations and narratives that might be less successful in NPC romance. A character’s religion can be a great source of that character’s story arc, but apparently this could cause a disconnect among players who might then choose not to romance that character.
I began with an open exploration of a facet of gaming, unsure of where it would lead but wanting to learn more about it. After doing a preliminary survey, examining that data and seeing what themes and trends exist and what new questions have arisen, I decided to proceed with a larger study because I have reason to believe that it is of interest to gamers and the gaming industry. The project transitioned from a 100-level course project, to being a larger search for meaning done for the sake of intellectual curiosity alone.
THE EXPANDED SURVEY AND NEXT STEPS.
Once I realized that my preliminary data needed further study, I re-approached Jesse
Schell, Sheri Graner Ray and my BioWare mentor, Jennifer Brandes Hepler. Schell encouraged me to submit to a special volume of the Carnegie-Mellon Entertainment Technology Masters- level journal (the deadline for which is May 14, 2012); his advice regarding further study was to be honest about my data and its collection, and to try to get 200 to 300 respondents. Hepler and Ray both assisted with the development of the larger survey. Ray has offered to help me hone the presentations I will likely give about my data. I used my own funds to open a paid
SurveyMonkey account, and had special business cards printed out which I distributed at the
Game Developers’ Convention in San Francisco, CA, between March 5 and 9, 2012, directing people to the survey link. The second anonymous survey went live on March 1, 2012 and will close on May 1, 2012, which is twice the amount of time as the original survey, which took place from January 23 through February 23, 2012.
Key changes that occurred in the second survey:
A disqualifier which keeps the survey answerable only by people who are gamers and/or game developers, which strengthens the integrity of the data which is collected. Asking people “how they identify” their gender rather than whether their gender is male or female, and offering more choices than simply male and female. Asking people to identify their sexual orientation and to be clearer about their relationship status. Questions about people’s depth of connection to fictional characters in other kinds of media also and how that compares to connections (if any) they have felt toward characters in video games. More detailed descriptor section with more descriptors. More detailed questions about gaming habits.
At this writing, the survey just topped 500 responses, which is a response pool more than ten times the size of the original survey. There is no longer any doubt that the size of the respondent pool is not enough to make the data legitimate. There are some concerns that will need to be addressed regarding this second survey; for instance, it appears that the same person can answer more than once, and some inconsistency because while someone might be single or married right now but this does not mean that their status has always been so when they are completing romances in games. Apart from any inconsistencies or survey issues that will need to be addressed and discussed in my findings, there is the matter of this information needing to be related to theory and other research.
Returning to the beginning of where my research ideas came from, I thought more about the fact that my own gaming behaviors had seen me experiment 8 out of 9 times with characters which were different from those I’d be attracted to in real life, but then fixate the most strongly on the one of the nine characters who was most like my real-life partner. There are a number of different lenses through which this behavior, and the similar of other survey respondents, can be explored.
The “Big Five,” otherwise known as the Five Factor Model (FFM), is a personality framework coined in 1992 by Costa & McCrea and later discussed in their 1997 journal article,
“Personality Trait Structures as a Human Universal.” This framework was used by Jason
VandenBerghe in his “Five Domains of Play” lecture at the 2012 Game Developers’ Conference.
VandenBerghe sought to apply this framework to game design theory in order to help designers provide experiences tailored more specifically to player motivations based on their personalities. I believe that my research is not unrelated to VandenBerghe’s as the Big 5 model can equally be applied to the types of NPC romances that will appeal to different people.
The five qualities evaluated in the FFM are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion,
Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. VandenBerghe observes that a player’s Openness (to new experiences) score is tied to the degree of novelty that he/she seeks in a game; the higher the
Openness score (believes VandenBerghe), the higher the level of novelty a player needs to feel satisfied by the game. Similarly, when designing NPC romances based on this model, someone with a high openness score might be satisfied by a romance with a very imaginative character but someone with a lower Openness score might be satisfied with a composite or archetype, and may stick with human characters and do less exploration outside familiar sexualities.
The Conscientiousness trait has to do with overall work ethic and effort. VandenBerghe observes that a player’s Conscientiousness score is tied to the degree of challenge a player wishes to have in a game. Therefore, a person with a higher Conscientiousness trait likes being challenged and therefore might also like a romance-able NPC who is hard to get, whereas someone with a lower Conscientiousness score might like a bawdy, easier character. The
Extraversion trait is all about the social aspects of a person’s personality, and VandenBerghe says that those with a high Extraversion score like to be socially stimulated most. Translated to
NPC romance, this could look like a character that’s very communicative with many available interactions, or else, having a romance option that’s more of a silent loner. Agreeableness means the degree to which people can get along with others. VandenBerghe’s prescription for people with high Agreeableness scores is harmony (the opposite of which is conflict), so, perhaps people with high Agreeableness scores prefer an NPC romance with a low degree of confrontation and inherent conflict, while people with lower Agreeableness might prefer a stormier romance. Neuroticism, VandenBerghe admits, is different from the other four qualities because someone with a high Neuroticism score tends to seek threat and more neuroticism.
This might mean that someone with a high Neuroticism score might prefer a sad ending or a darker story than someone with a lower score.
Big 5 theory suggests that opposites attract. This may be why I found myself choosing types much different than I normally would –characters with qualities I find reprehensible in real-life partners – eight out of nine times. An article by Suzanne Phillips on Psych Central explains a 2007 study published by Michele Shiota and Robert Levenson which found that couples in which both partners had a similar OCEAN/Big 5 scores did not get along as well over the long term as did couples with different personalities according to OCEAN/Big 5. Perhaps
Shiota & Levenson’s theory about opposites attracting will be supported by the data I collect about which characteristics are attractive and unattractive in NPCs.
Another framework I will be using to look at my survey data is that of Jungian psychology. Two areas of particular interest between my work and Jungian psychology are particularly relating to archetypes and the shadow personality (Fitz-Randolph). The Meyers-
Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is based in Jungian psychology, and functions similarly to the Big 5, though I will not be looking as much at the MBTI as at Jungian archetypal theory and at Dr.
Carolyn Kaufman’s work in using Jungian archetypes to improve romance writing. Among the beliefs that Kaufman holds in this area:
The shadow personality is the seat of creativity. The shadow comprises the mirror reflection of the conscious personality, and Jung believed that people who also embrace the shadow are happier people because they lead a more balanced, less repressed existence and are therefore more able to use their imagination. The shadow personality, when not actively and consciously embraced in balance, can lead people to seek that quality out in potential partners. This is essentially similar to Shiota & Levinson’s position, but coming from a different framework. The Jungian archetype of The Animus, in combination with the shadow personality, can be a very powerful motivator. For people who like romance in books and other media, Kaufman explains that using The Animus in a way that suggests shadow qualities can be especially effective when designing romantic experiences for others.
Again, I am only beginning to understand the true implications of wider research about
NPC romance as it relates to players’ in-game and real-life behaviors. I am actually very excited to have stumbled onto a new type of research which could help solidify me in my new career in entertainment technology, and influence the industry. I hope to emerge from this process with valuable and publishable information, and to speak at conferences about this. That it began as a
100-level class project at a point too late for me to make my entire tutorial about this research, is a shame, but once again, parallels the ever-changing and nature of the gaming industry which
I must as both a student and a professional, adjust to.
CONCLUSION.
The portrayal of human relationships in video games has evolved a lot over the years, from a simple visual element representing a damsel in distress, to a narrative, to a full-blown interactive experience in which players can conduct their own romances in realtime with other players, or, in which players can conduct romances with pre-written non-player characters and determine their own outcomes. Some examples of directions these products have evolved into are Otome games in Japan, and teledildonics. The depth of romance in games to this point has been studied as having relevance to actual human relationships. Even romances which are with pre-written characters appear to have a lot of resonance for people. This is a phenomenon I stumbled onto and decided to study further, initially as part of a class project at Chatham
University. My study uncovered a need for larger study, which I hope will have resonance in the greater gaming industry. The project results, while currently unclear, will seek to add to an evolving conversation about how video games as an art form can be an important form of human expression about something as universal as love and relationships between people WORKS CITED.
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NOTE: Please see related multi-media presentation which goes with this chapter, submitted on CD.
INTRODUCTION
Death culture has been evolving in the world for thousands of years, in the United
States since Puritan times, and in games, since their invention. In life, death is an inevitability, which humans grapple with in profound intellectual and philosophical ways. In games, death is not necessarily inevitable, and this is one of the allures of the game. Players can cause death to enemies without any real-life consequences, and can also experience death without dying in real life. Death can be frustrating when playing a game, but also exhilarating because one can always re-start, resurrect, re-load the game and feel as though he or she has cheated death.
I work as a professional video game designer for Schell Games in the South Side.
Examining death in video games not only satisfies the class requirement to do a project examining some aspect of death culture, but also allows me to further my understanding of a crucial game mechanic’s history and use in game design. This is a project that’s fun but also helpful to me in my current profession.
The Entertainment Software Association estimated in 2009 that video games would pass up both music and films in terms of revenue generated, in 2011 (ESA). It happened, but a year earlier than the ESA thought: in 2010. During the recession of 2008-9, video games and telecommunications were the only two industries that experienced economic and job growth
(Inc.). Gaming scholar Dr. Jane McGonigal stated in a recent TED Talk that human beings have collectively spent some 5.9 million years playing World of Warcraft (McGonigal). Games are huge and they’re here to stay, especially with the advent of the Gamification movement, which seeks to make education, marketing, and other facets of everyday life more fun (Schell). To study death in games, then, is a valid pursuit not just for a professional gaming designer and a student of death culture, but as an observer of Western pop culture where games are only gaining in importance.
There are important reasons why death in games deserves further examination. Death in games contributes to our understanding of death in pop culture, and because some argue that video game death desensitizes us to actual death, it bears our investigation. Death is the ultimate mechanic which ends both the player’s gaming experience and the gaming narrative, therefore is a valid study topic for game designers. Death (when present), like everything else in games, must be designed as part of the player experience. Studying such examples can help designers build better player experiences. The evolution of death in video games mirrors the evolution of death culture in US history; our experience and views of death in real and virtual life are in a perpetual state of flux. To gamers…it’s just cool.
THE EVOLUTION OF DEATH IN VIDEO GAMES
Video games were invented in the 1970s but did not become popular until arcade console games became widely available to the public in the early 1980s. In the 1980s, death was always humorous.
Examples of humorous deaths in the 1980s include: A frog getting smashed flat by a moving car on the street in Frogger
Q-Bert rattling off a string of incomprehensible curse words as objects fell on his head
Being carried off to be cooked and eaten by cannibals in Jungle King (which in retrospect
was extremely culturally insensitive)
In 80s games, the player was allotted a pre-set number of lives and death was only permanent and game-ending once the player exhausted their extra lives. Additional lives could be earned by reaching game milestones (such as scoring 20,000 points in Centipede). Part of the appeal of 80s arcade console games was, in addition to solving the challenges presented within the game, the struggle to earn more extra lives before the player’s supply of lives ran out and the game would end.
The 1990s saw the birth of two major forms of games: the text adventure and the
MMORPG. Text adventures were available on 5.14” floppy disks, such as InfoCom’s classic series, Zork. In the late 1980’s and the early 90’s, more people were buying home computers, and therefore, this game was marketed to people with home computers. Players could now play computerized games at home, on their personal computers, instead of going to an arcade.
Text adventures were often very imaginative and full of inspired narratives, and players progressed based on your own choices. It was the first true version of a “role-playing game”
(RPG). Text adventures were frustrating because they were programmed to accept very specific vocabulary, and if you couldn’t figure out the exact words the game wanted you to input, you could not progress further in the game. Also, if you forgot to save your game and then died, you’d lose most of your progress if not have to start completely from the beginning. In text adventures: Death was unexpected and often frustrating.
Death was final, there was only one life, and game is over once that life has been
lost.
There were many different ways to die, and players did not know ahead of time
what they all were.
The late 1990’s saw the birth of the MMORPG, such as Ultima Online and EverQuest.
The invention of the MMORPG forced a change in the evolution of the death mechanic because suddenly, the company had subscribers to keep interested, and final death would be too frustrating and not give players any sense of continuous progression in their game. Here is where death in games changed from Final Death, or “PermaDeath,” to Partial Death, in which players might die for a short time only to be resurrected and given a short-term consequence.
In the games from the 2000s through today, there are many different models of character death. Whether or not character death is involved is usually determined by the genre of the game, the audience of the game, as well as the aesthetic, artistic style, and narrative of the game. The way a game deals with death can affect its rating with the Entertainment
Software Review Board (ESRB, which rates video games for certain age groups in much the same manner that the MPAA rates films), and therefore make the game available to a smaller audience.
DEATH AS A GAME MECHANIC
Player death is part of the triangular relationship between the developer, the player and the game. The developer creates the game to be appreciated by the player, and endeavors to create a product with artistic integrity. The game itself is a product and a commodity, a fact which can sometimes dilute the artistic integrity of the game. The game must work to engage and provide feedback to the player in a way that is entertaining and clear, challenging but not impossible. The player wants entertainment, value for the money they spent on the product of the game, and feedback from the game about his/her performance.
Death is a function which has considerations for all three parts of this triangular relationship. The developer must choose whether death is a design feature of the game, and what form that feature takes. The player sees death as the ultimate feedback, as a tool for getting better at gameplay, as a challenge to be overcome, as something that might drive the story. The game must deliver financially to the developer and emotionally to the player, and death can definitely speak to both goals. If death is too easy, too horrific or makes gameplay too tenuous, the player will become frustrated, emotionally disengage, or worse – stop playing.
There are several functions that are served by player death:
• Serves as a re-set function
• Communicates final failure or loss to the player
• A learning tool that allows the player to memorize the position of enemies and
obstacles and experiment with beating these in different ways.
• Adds narrative drama
Jesse Schell, Professor of Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment
Technology Center and author of “The Art of Game Design,” describes death as a punishment system, which he says is essentially a “reverse reward.” He believes that punishments such as death do have value in games, because, “Punishment creates endogenous value. Taking risks is exciting. Possible punishment increases challenge.” Schell warns designers to be careful not to let punishment make a game no longer fun; however he believes that punishment, when balanced effectively and used in a way that’s fair to the player, can give everything in your game more meaning.
Similarly, Maria Bustillos of online gaming site Kotaku, writes: “The underlying logic of newer games is in balancing the thrill of escaping danger and dismemberment with various other complications in the gameplay, with aspects of exploration and literary elements that provide not just the adrenaline spikes of a shooter game, but permit the player to give rein to a range of more complex intellectual pleasures, to curiosity and narrative appetite.”
Sheri Graner Ray, author of “Gender-Inclusive Game Design: Expanding the Market,” cites studies that examine male and female gaming preferences, in terms of mechanics. In one such study, boys and girls were separated into different rooms and asked to design a game concept. The boys’ game had combat and final death, but the girls chose not to have death, but to have the game obstructed until certain conditions were met. Ray argues in her book that sometimes women are automatically excluded from play by virtue of the fact that the game has been designed with game mechanics that are more favorable, psychologically and physiologically, to men. The fastest-growing group of gamers is casual gamers who are middle- aged women. Casual games, such as the games found on social media (mobile devices and
Facebook), rarely have death involved and have been the largest-growing genre. These facts bear out Ray’s beliefs that if designers make more games that consider both approaches, women will play more games. THE THREE MAIN USES OF DEATH AS A GAME MECHANIC IN VIDEO GAMES
In “Dealing With Death in Video Games,” IGN writer Michael Thomsen identifies the three most popular models of how the death mechanic is used in video games: Final Death (also called “PermaDeath”); Partial Death; and Non-Death. With Final Death, or PermaDeath, the player’s experience ends and the game is over. With Partial Death, a player experiences some sort of resurrection and a delay or a penalty associated with death. In Non-Death, there simply is no death for the player.
With PermaDeath, the states for the player are high because when one dies, the game ends, so one must play more carefully. In games such as Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Dragon Age, if the player’s character is killed during battle, the adventure ends, and, you are offered the opportunity to load the game from its last save point. Sometimes the game will automatically save (auto-save) for players at important points, but sometimes the player must assume this responsibility. Seasoned players understand the incredible inconvenience associated with having to start from an earlier point in the game, and having to re-play some part of it. A variation on PermaDeath occurs in Riot Games’ League of Legends, in which players level a character up, and the higher the level, the higher the stakes because should a character die, the character gets wiped from the server and the player must create a new character from scratch, at level 1, in order to still play the game. PermaDeath can be a real pain because it increases the risk, however, it also increases the exhilaration and reward when a Player continues to survive.
(Schell) Partial Death is a more complex mechanic with many more variations. The consequence for death is temporary inconvenience and delay of game. Partial Death is used in most massively-multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPG’s), because those games rely on their online subscribers to drive the revenue and overall success rate of the game. PermaDeath would not be very conducive to this model, so in most cases, players experience death for a short time before they are resurrected. In Star Wars: The Old Republic, after each death you must wait a longer and longer time to be resurrected at the site of your death; you can wait for another player to resurrect you; or else you can resurrect at a medical center which causes you to have to travel back to where you are. In EverQuest and World of Warcraft, you must travel from a place of resurrection to where your dead body is in the world, and re-inhabit your body; you may also wait until another player resurrects you. In World of Warcraft, you experience
“Resurrection Sickness” for an amount of time relating to your level, during which time your avatar’s characteristics are lowered. In BioShock, you have to watch a death /resurrection animation in its entirety before you can progress with your game.
The third most popular option is deliberate choice of Non-Death, which is most evident in children’s games and puzzle games. In these games, the play is more important than the goal, and often, there is no combat or combat results in a condition that is more like sleep or fainting rather than actual death (as in Pokemon battles). The penalty in a Non-Death situation is failure to unlock more content. The model favors positive reward over negative consequence.
Sometimes “death” happens when time, energy, or supplies run out and you don’t die, you just try again when these are replenished. Non-death offers more exploration and is more education-based (Diego Wolf Pup Rescue, Prankster Planet), so that if players fail at one activity, they can go do another one until they are ready to try again. In racing games, like
Mario Kart, one might get bumped off the track and have to drive back onto the track; in LEGO games and in SEGA’s Sonic the Hedgehog series, coins are dropped which must be picked back up.
THE SIMS: CASE STUDY IN DEATH AND GAMING
A discussion of death in video games bears special mention of Maxis/Electronic Arts’ series, The Sims. In this series, players create virtual people and play through the lives of these people. Players build and furnish Sims’ homes, make Sims’ major social and career choices.
Players can start with a family and play through generations of that same family. Any character within a family can be taken over and played as the main player character at any time.
When a Sim dies, the Grim Reaper appears and the person becomes a transparent ghost. A Sim (unless he or she dies of old age) can sometimes bargain with the Grim Reaper and remain alive by winning a game of “Rock, Paper, Scissors” against him. Should the Grim Reaper appear when others in the family are nearby, the other family members can plea for the life of their loved one, and this sometimes can work. An urn appears where the person stood, and, the player can do a number of things with it: sell it, so that the character is never seen in the game again; place it in the yard of a house, so that the ghost will always haunt the house (though, players can never control the actions of that character again unless the ghost marries a character and becomes part of a family again); or place the grave into a cemetery, where players can choose a monument and inscribe (or re-inscribe at any time) the epitaph.
There are 18 known causes of death in The Sims 3, and in each of these cases, the death is categorized in such a way that the resulting ghost is visually representative of how the character died. If a character burns to death, the ghost is orange with a flame effect; if a character drowned, the ghost is blue and leaves puddles where it roams; if a character was electrocuted, the ghost is yellow with a spark effect. This is a visually interesting way to handle life after death.
The reason that death bears such special mention in The Sims is because of the emotional impact it has. Imagine that you have raised a person from infancy, helping this person through school and college, to finding a career, to dating and marriage and the births of that character’s children and grandchildren. When you have invested a lot of time and care into your Sim, it’s sad to see that Sim pass away even after a well-played life. Players have the ability to take screenshots and video during important points in their Sims’ lives; after a Sim dies, a player might have a series of photographs documenting the life that Sim had. A painting painted by that Sim might hang in an art gallery for generations, and a family home might have photographs on the walls from generations of Sims who came before. Death was extremely well-considered in The Sims and adds a lot of value and meaning to that gameplay for those players who are especially interested in continuing the narrative of their game.
ENEMY DEATH IN GAMES
In “The Psychology of Death,” Robert Kastenbaum explains that when we each realize our own mortality, it is psychologically devastating to us. In this sense, games are a way that we can trick ourselves into a false sense of security regarding our own mortality, because our game characters can survive things in the virtual world which would kill us in the real world. Games can satisfy us on a deep psychological level based on the fact that they allow us to cheat death.
Not all deaths in games are a question of the player character dying, however. Games also allow players to experience killing (creatures, animals, and people) in a way that offers no real-life consequence. In some cases, this can be cathartic. 16-year-old Annie sometimes makes
Sims characters that look like people at school who have been mean to her in real life, just to make their virtual lives miserable or kill them because it lets her feel vindication without actually acting out her frustrations with them in real life. I have found that when I am frustrated with my family, it is healthier to log into a game and whack a bunch of cartoon characters than it is to yell at or hit my children. Not everyone sees the ability to kill without consequence as cathartic.
A number of studies relate violence in video games to increased aggression in real life.
A 2001 study by researchers at Iowa State University found such a link (Anderson and Bushman,
2001), as did an updated 2006 version of the Iowa State study (Anderson, Bushman and
Carnagey, 2006). Another 2001 study by John Sherry at Purdue University related violent video games to increased aggression (Sherry, 2001), as did another 2006 study by the Indiana
University School of Medicine (Kalning, 2006) (though the sample group on the Indiana
University study was only 44 children).
It bears mention that several studies showing a relationship between violent video games and aggression were published in 2001, which was shortly after the Columbine High
School shooting in 1999 (the FBI’s official report on the incident was released in 2002). Teen shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were painted by the media at the time as disaffected gamers who sought to duplicate their gaming experiences in real life. Ten years after
Columbine, however, researchers who wrote books about the incident uncovered very different facts: that Klebold was “a cold-blooded, predatory psychopath” and Harris was his severely- depressed follower and that games did not truly seem to figure into what the duo did on April
20, 1999. (Toppo, 2009).
Another rash of these studies was released in 2006. This was shortly after the school shooting in Red Lake, Minnesota on March 21, 2005 by 16-year-old Jeff Weise, who left 10 dead before killing himself. Weise, someone who had designed murderous Flash animations for subcultural websites, was also associated with violent media.
It stands to reason that after tragedies like Columbine and Red Lake, people seek the answers behind these tragedies. In cases like these where the shooters have been revealed as gamers or technologically proficient in entertainment software, researchers instantly look to these technologies as the explanation for these atrocities. It bears note that studies on similar topics, not conducted after a major school shooting incident, have found that there is no link between violence in games and the level of aggression and/or empathy in children.
On the other side of the debate, Dr. Jane McGonigal notes that the avoidance of death can be a motivator toward great innovation and increased problem-solving capabilities
(McGonigal, 2010). Other studies have found that there is not a link between gaming and violent behavior, or gaming and de-sensitization toward violence. A Journal of Adolescence article in 2004 found no clear link between violent video games and de-sensitization (Baumgartner et al, 2004). A 2008 book published by Harvard University’s School of Medicine found no such link, either (Kutner & Olson, 2008). Professor Henry Jenkins of MIT wrote an editorial for PBS.org which de-bunks eight popular myths about gaming, including the issue of games causing increased violence:
“According to federal crime statistics, the rate of juvenile violent crime in the United States is at a 30-year low. Researchers find that people serving time for violent crimes typically consume less media before committing their crimes than the average person in the general population. It's true that young offenders who have committed school shootings in America have also been game players. But young people in general are more likely to be gamers — 90 percent of boys and 40 percent of girls play. The overwhelming majority of kids who play do NOT commit antisocial acts. According to a 2001 U.S. Surgeon General's report, the strongest risk factors for school shootings centered on mental stability and the quality of home life, not media exposure. The moral panic over violent video games is doubly harmful. It has led adult authorities to be more suspicious and hostile to many kids who already feel cut off from the system. It also misdirects energy away from eliminating the actual causes of youth violence and allows problems to continue to fester.” (Jenkins)
Michael D. Gallagher, the CEO of the Entertainment Software Association, writes that the average age of gamers is 35 and that therefore, the claim that children are negatively influenced by violence in games is moot (Gallagher, 2010). Gallagher also discusses a 2009 survey by the Federal Trade Commission which found that 97% of parents are satisfied with game ratings determined by the Entertainment Software Review Board (ESRB). True, Gallagher is writing as an executive in the gaming industry and is therefore biased toward the industry.
His points are still valid.
In other words, researchers seem to be split on whether or not violence in video games causes aggression and de-sensitization to violence in real life. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle and requires responsibility and attention from designers, publishers and consumers (especially parents). Consumers can read about ESRB ratings, read reviews and talk to others before purchasing and playing games, and before letting children play them. There is a multitude of gaming choices available and people can always choose more non-violent gaming experiences.i In addition to exercising more conscious choices in gaming, parents can monitor their children’s gaming and limit it when they observe behavioral changes, ie. dropping grades, more aggressive behavior or increased backtalk. This involves a higher level of parental involvement but can ultimately ensure that children are gaming appropriately and in moderation.
IN CONCLUSION
In conclusion, the examination of death in video games is a necessary part of any in- depth examination of the importance of video games. The evolution of death in video games, in a way, mirrors the continuous evolution of death culture in America with different focuses and meanings of death in different decades of gaming being similar to different focuses and meanings of death in different centuries in America. Death is an important mechanic in the development of any game, which can serve any number of purposes. Some games, such as The
Sims, handle death in meaningful ways that contribute to a more dynamic player experience.
Death in games is also hotly debated among scholars and other experts as contributing to de- sensitization and aggression in children. Many of the studies claiming such links were published shortly after a school shooting in which the perpetrator was later identified with gaming.
Ultimately, the responsibility to separate fantasy from reality rests with consumers, and in cases where the consumers are children, with more educated parenting decisions and parental involvement.
WORKS CITED
Books and Articles
Anderson, Craig A., and Brad J. Bushman. "Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggressive Behavior, Aggressive Cognition, Aggressive Affect, Physiological Arousal, and Prosocial Behavior: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Scientific Literature." Psychological Science 12.5 (2001): 353-59. Print.
Anderson, Craig A., Brad J. Bushman, and Nicholas L. Carnagey. "The Effect of Video Game Violence on Physiological Desensitization to Real-life Violence." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (2006). Print.
Anderson, Nate. "Video Gaming to Be Twice as Big as Music by 2011." Ars Technica. Conde Naste Digital, Inc., 30 Aug. 2007. Web. 14 Nov. 2010.
Bustillos, Maria. "How Video Game Deaths Help Us Live." Kotaku. Gawker Media, 23 Aug. 2011. Web. 26 Feb. 2012.
Carmody-Peterson, Edward. "The Portrayal of Death in Video Games." Egg Says Whut? Media Muppet, 17 Jan. 2012. Web. 26 Feb. 2012.
Funk, Jeanne B., Heidi Bechtold Baldacci, Tracie Pasold, and Jennifer Baumgardner. "Violence Exposure in Real-life, Video Games, Television, Movies, and the Internet: Is There Desensitization?" Journal of Adolescence 27.1 (2004): 23-39. Print.
"FYI: Video Game Statistics by the Entertainment Software Association | Critical Gaming Project." CGP: Critical Gaming Project Blog. University of Washington, 6 Apr. 2010. Web. 14 Nov. 2010.
Gallagher, Michael D. "Video Games Don't Cause Children to Be Violent." US News. U.S.News & World Report, 10 May 2010. Web. 17 Mar. 2012.
Grant, J. P. "Life After Death." Kill Screen. Kill Screen Media, 2011. Web. 26 Feb. 2012.
Jenkins, Prof. Henry. "Reality Bytes: Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked." PBS. PBS. Web. 17 Mar. 2012.
Kalning, Kristin. "Does Game Violence Make Teens Aggressive?" Msnbc.com. Msnbc Digital Network, 08 Dec. 2006. Web. 17 Mar. 2012.
Kastenbaum, Robert, and Ruth Aisenberg. The Psychology of Death. New York: Springer Pub., 1972. Print.
Kutner, Lawrence, and Cheryl K. Olson. Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth about Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008. Print.
Kwan, Michael. "How Much Money Does the Video Game Industry Make - LoveToKnow Video Games." LoveToKnow.com: Video Games. LoveToKnow Corp. Web. 13 Nov. 2010.
McGonigal, Dr. Jane. "Gaming Can Make a Better World." TED: Ideas worth Spreading. TED Conferences LLC, Mar. 2010. Web. 26 Feb. 2012.
Ray, Sheri Graner. Gender Inclusive Game Design: Expanding the Market. Hingham, MA: Charles River Media, 2004. Print.
Schell, Jesse. The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. Amsterdam: Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann, 2008. Print.
Sherry, John L. "The Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggression: A Meta-Analysis." Human Communication Research July (2001): 409-31. Print.
Thomsen, Michael. "Dealing With Death in Videogames." IGN. Internet Gaming Network, 5 Apr. 2010. Web. 26 Feb. 2012.
Video Games Mentioned BioShock, Irrational Games (2K Boston), 2007 Centipede, Atari, Inc., 1981 Diego’s Wolf Pup Rescue, Nickelodeon, 2006 DigDug, Namco Galaga, 1982 Dragon Age: Origins: BioWare/Electronic Arts, 2009 Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Bethesda, 2011 EverQuest, 989 Studios/Sony, 1999 Frogger, Konami, 1981 Grand Theft Auto 4, Rockstar Games, 2008 Jungle King, Taito, 1982 League of Legends, Riot Games, 2009 Mario Kart, Nintendo, 1992 Mortal Kombat, Midway Games, 1992-2009 Pac-Man, Namco, 1980 Pokemon, Nintendo, 1996-2012 Prankster Planet, Primal Screen/PBS Kids, 2011 Q*Bert, Gottlieb, 1982 Sonic the Hedgehog, SEGA, 1991-2012 Star Wars: The Old Republic, BioWare/Electronic Arts, 2011 The Sims, Maxis/Electronic Arts, 2002-2012 Ultima Online, Origins Systems/Electronic Arts, 1997 World of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertainment, 2005-2012 Zork, InfoCom, 1979 Chapter 7: Conclusion.
My journey at Chatham University which began with the idea of wanting to be a film industry professional took me in a completely different direction. Media Literacy class, which I took in my first semester, taught me more about intertextuality and how machinima and film are experiencing broader and broader overlaps (with gaming cinematics now being as beautiful and as sophisticated as any CGI effect typically found in a Hollywood film). Other lessons like digital animation, video editing, graphic design, screenwriting and audio production, I found, are directly transferrable to the video gaming industry. As an avid gamer, I had never envisioned getting to work in the industry, let alone in Pittsburgh, yet the lessons I learned at
Chatham combined with my love of gaming and a lucky internship opportunity changed the course of my education and my career. A by-product of this internship has been getting to work with world-renowned industry professionals who have opened up new avenues of intellectual curiosity for me.
Video games matter. They matter because they can move us, in the same way and to the same degree that music or literature can. (In fact, there’s a point at which games can move us even more, because players are able to create their own meaningful experiences through their own choices and the interactive nature of the medium.) Video games constitute a fledgling art form, the validity of which is being debated in scholarly and pop culture circles.
Such discourse is valuable because it adds to our understanding of video games and their impact as much as it adds to our understanding of art. Play is an important part of the human psychology. We need play to help us experiment and learn; we need it to keep our stress levels down, to keep our imagination up. Play is an essential developmental step in human beings as they develop from infancy to childhood, to adolescence to adulthood. Play helps us process our lives, as seen in the practice of play therapy in people who have been through trauma. Play creates endorphins that allow us to be happier people. If play were not important, the gamification movement would have no credence; yet we see the movement gaining influence throughout the gaming industry.
Scholars such as Dr. Jane McGonigal, who argue that games can change the world in positive ways, understand the power of play. McGonigal’s ideas are also currently popular in the industry, because gamers and game developers recognize that play is a part of life that is more than fun, but which can better us as individuals and as people.
Theorists that are popularly taught at Chatham University, such as the Frankfurt School, cannot necessarily be directly relevant to an industry that was invented some 50 years after the theories were. They cannot be completely disregarded, either, as these theorists make important points about the tenuous relationship between commerce and culture. Games, while they are art, are also pieces of mass-produced culture which involve labor and transaction. It is important to recognize traces of this tension in each part of the triangular relationship between the game developer, the game publisher, and the gamer player. The gaming industry, as it continues to evolve, will likely see innovations on the part of all three groups in an attempt to get their primary motivations satisfied, whether that is bringing revenue to publishers, getting to play great games for the lowest possible cost, or developers finding new models of delivering content in ways that maintain the developers’ artistic integrity. Two universal human experiences are love and death, both which are represented over and over in games because games imitate life in the same manner that art imitates life. My exploration of relationships in games led to a new area of study in the video game industry involving player behavior toward non-player characters in single-player roleplaying games.
While this tutorial will be submitted on April 11, 2012, my study in this area will continue after my graduation from Chatham as a means of contributing to my new industry. My exploration of death in video games followed the changes in the death mechanic in an effort to mirror the evolution of death culture in United States history; it explained the design reasons behind death in games, and visited the issue of whether death in games is cathartic and therapeutic, or whether it de-sensitizes people and contributes to violence. This is another ongoing debate in the gaming industry which we as designers have an ethical responsibility to follow and consider in our work. We can choose which companies we wish to work for, and therefore what games we choose to make; in our design choices, we can choose choices that have meaning rather than being gratuitous.
The importance of games will become increasingly relevant to pop culture, to technology, and to life in America. Therefore, while this tutorial topic may not be a common one now, it could very well become a more common one as the medium evolves, as the industry exists for longer, and as scholarship on video games and the gaming industry become more numerous.
The prospect of being able to play a vital part in the evolution of an industry in its infancy, is itself, extremely exciting and reminds me of the following quote:
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” ~Antoine De Saint Exupery
Finding your place in the world is only one part of maximizing your awesomeness and making it epic. It also involves innovation, creativity, and intellectual curiosity. I hope that I have demonstrated my commitment to these principles, in this applied tutorial for Film and Digital
Technology, as well as Communications. My professional development and scholarship in the area of games will continue, but it was my journey through Chatham University which unveiled this purpose to me, and for that I am extremely grateful. APPENDIX: Abstract on The NPC Romance Project for the “Feminists in Games” Conference
The NPC Romance Project began as a class project for a 100-level communications course at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, where I was asked to examine romantic relationships through any medium. My personal experience with romance in video games, rather than any romances developed with other players in online games, has been with non- player characters (NPCs) in single-player roleplaying games (RPGs). Therefore, I decided to report on people’s romances with NPCs in RPGs.
I analyzed my behavior and that of some friends, and then developed a survey about player experiences with NPC romance in RPGs, with the idea of finding patterns in player behavior. As an aspiring game writer/designer interning with Schell Games, I also wanted to see whether there exists any “magical formula” by which game writers can write NPC romance experiences that resonate better with players. At the outset I had no hypothesis or any idea what my findings might be, I merely sought to investigate. In the process of that investigation, I uncovered some interesting findings which begged further study.
At this writing, my preliminary survey of 37 respondents has concluded, and the second, more comprehensive survey has over 500 respondents. The second survey closes May 1, 2012, after which I can report the final findings. This abstract reflects current data, but the presentation at the Toronto conference will reflect final data.
My main three findings currently are:
• Gender-bending and sexual exploration are taking place in single-player RPGs; this is a healthy practice which does important cultural work to promote self-awareness and tolerance. • There does seem to be a pattern to what people find attractive and unattractive in romance-able NPCs, which can be explained both through Jungian psychology and Big 5 theory.
• Any conversation about NPC romance must include BioWare products, and therefore, analysis of BioWare’s policies on NPC romance is particularly important for game writers.
GENDER-BENDING AND SEXUAL EXPLORATION
In “Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet,” Lisa Nakamura coins a phrase called “identity tourism,” meaning that people “use race and gender as amusing prostheses to be donned and shed without ‘real life’ consequences.” Nakamura believes that such identity tourism, when adopted by gamers, is harmful because identity tourists often take their “virtual experiences as other-gendered and other-raced avatars as a kind of lived truth.”
Nakamura asserts that online role-playing games are primarily where identity tourism takes place.
In a related essay from the book, “World of Warcraft & Philosophy,” Phill Alexander describes his experiences playing World of Warcraft as a female character. Alexander supports
Nakamura’s theories. He cautions that identity tourism cannot happen without ethical cost when playing an online roleplaying game in realtime with other human beings because of the real-life connections and emotional attachments that develop in games. Apply these same concepts to single-player RPGs such as Mass Effect and Dragon Age:
Origins, however, and a different dynamic emerges. Nakamura’s “identity tourism” occurs, but without the ethical cost warned by Alexander. My preliminary data for the NPC Romance
Project suggests that a much healthier version of identity tourism is taking place in single-player
RPGs, and that in fact, that important cultural work is happening which creates more tolerance toward people of varied sexual orientations.
It is not news that when playing RPGs, people play characters unlike who they are in life: this is an object of an RPG. However, when I searched for data suggesting the degree to which this happens, the way it happens, and why it happens, I could find none; this was a key motivation for the NPC Romance Project.
My preliminary survey data, and the data collected so far in the larger survey, suggests that gender-bending and the exploration of alternative sexualities IS happening in single-player
RPGs, and I have data suggesting reason and degree. For purposes of single-player RPG’s, I disagree with Nakamura and Alexander.
AN NPC ROMANCE FORMULA
In the initial survey for the NPC Romance Project, I collected some adjectives from the
BioWare Social Network’s forum threads about NPC romances in the BioWare series, Mass
Effect and Dragon Age, and asked respondents to identify descriptors that were attractive, neutral or unattractive in a romance-able NPC. What I found was a disconnect between what descriptors people are attracted to in NPCs versus the practicality of the same such traits real- life romantic partners. The wider survey added descriptors from Match.com’s initial client personality test, and asked respondents to identify whether these descriptors apply to them in real life, to their game characters; whether these descriptors are attractive or unattractive in romance-able NPCs, and attractive or unattractive in real-life partners.
There is a definite difference in the qualities that make for a good NPC romance, versus qualities that make for a good real-life romance. Dr. Carolyn Kaufman’s work applies Jungian psychology (both archetypes and the shadow persona) to romance writing; I found that her theories apply to my data. Additionally, Jason VandenBerghe’s recent presentation at the 2012
Game Developers’ Conference related player motivations to their Big 5 personality types, and his model also has implications for building fulfilling NPC romances.
BIOWARE’S ROLE IN THE NPC ROMANCE CONVERSATION
75% of the NPC romance games cited by respondents in the preliminary survey were
BioWare titles. The top three responses (Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Knights of the Old Republic), which gained 55% of the total responses, were BioWare’s. BioWare must be central to any conversation about NPC romance in RPGs.
BioWare has been criticized by players and conservative organizations (Deloria) for allowing NPCs to be romance-able by both genders. Lead BioWare writer David Gaider responded unapologetically to these complaints in 2010 (Gaider). My data showing the importance of BioWare to this conversation, when reviewed alongside other survey findings, suggests that BioWare delivers players exactly what they want in terms of the ability to explore alternate sexualities. These respondents care deeply about narrative and romance, and
BioWare satisfies service to the story while giving players a safe space in which to explore sexuality. I believe this is important cultural work which bears note from game writers throughout the industry. BioWare is right, and we should take cues from that.
WORKS CITED:
Alexander, Phill. "He's The Kind of Girl Who Wants Matching Daggers." World of Warcraft and Philosophy. By Luke Cuddy and John Nordlinger. Chicago: Open Court, 2009. 153-64. Print.
Deloria, Elizabeth. "FRC Attack BioWare For Same Sex Star Wars Romances, Use The Term 'Gay Empire'" Gameranx. Gameranx, 8 Feb. 2012. Web. 22 Mar. 2012.
Gaider, David. "BioWare Social Network Response to "Straight Male Gamer"" 2010. E-mail.
Kaufman, Dr. Carolyn. Archetype: The Fiction Writer's Guide to Psychology. Archetype Writing, 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2012.
Nakamura, Lisa. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.
VandenBerghe, Jason. "The Five Domains of Play." Game Developers' Conference. Moscone Convention Center, San Francisco, CA. 7 Mar. 2012. Lecture. i I personally refuse to play any game in the Grand Theft Auto series because of how women can be victimized. Other gamers are surprised when I tell them I’ve never played GTA, but they are generally understanding when I explain why.