From Losing to Loss: Exploring the Expressive Capacities of Videogames Beyond Death As Failure

From Losing to Loss: Exploring the Expressive Capacities of Videogames Beyond Death as Failure By Sabine Harrer Abstract In games, loss is as ubiquitous as it is trivial. One reason for this has been found in the established convention of on-screen character death as a signifier for failure (Klastrup 2006; Grant 2011; Johnson 2011). If that’s all that games have to offer in terms of addressing an existential trope of human experience, the worried pro- tectionist concludes, shouldn’t we dismiss this intrinsically flat medium as inferior to more established media forms such as film or literature? (Ebert 2010). Contrary to this view, this paper discusses gameplay examples that shed light on how this medium might leverage its expressive resources to arrive at rich representations of loss. First, the notion of loss implied in Sigmund Freud’s work “Mourning and Mel- ancholia” (1917) will be discussed in relation to losing in games. Looking at procedurality, fictional alignment and experiential metaphor as three expressive gameplay devices identified by Doris Rusch (2009) will help explain the expressive shortcoming of losing and lay out what is at stake with profound gameplay expression. Moreover, it will serve as the keywords structuring the following analysis of three videogames, Final Fantasy VII (1997), Ico (2001) and Passage (2007), and their design decisions fostering deep representations of loss. Keeping the Freudian notion of loss in mind, we can trace its repercussions on the three expressive dimensions respectively. Following a separate analysis of each gameplay example, the last section will discuss some commonalities and differences and arrive at the identification of desired object, permanent disruption and lineari- ty as design aspects modeling loss in more compelling ways than losing. Keywords: Loss, human experience, game design, procedural expression, fiction, metaphor, cultural studies. Harrer, Sabine: “From Losing to Loss”, Culture Unbound, Volume 5, 2013: 607–620. Hosted by Linköping University Electronic Press: http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se Introduction If games are playgrounds for thought, they may be the perfect venue for testing our reactions to this unknowable thing. And because we use games to process experiences in a safe space, we can use them to confront in play what we never want to have to confront in reality. We can rehearse what we’ll do when death leaves us lost. Because it will. (Grant 2011) Contrary to being dismissed as trivial tools of temporary distraction (Ebert 2010), digital games are now increasingly explored in their capacity to engage players in profound ways. Efforts “to make the medium deeply important to people” (Blow 2010), have spurred design approaches to “critical play” (Flanagan 2009), non- profit initiatives like “games4change”1 and research on “the human condition in videogames” (Rusch 2009), investing in the development and investigation of a rich, sophisticated game culture. They mirror a concern for games as significant cultural artifacts, seeking to question and expand the notion of games constantly. This brings about the need to understand the representational affordances of the medium, calling for the critical exploration of game design conventions and ways to use them for rich forms of expression. Discussing loss and mourning as a trope in videogames, this essay responds to this need by drawing together psychoanalysis, design theory and cultural analysis to understand the expressive mechanisms of games in relation to emotional states. First, I will introduce the Freudian concept of loss, arguing that games have been blamed for its trivialization due to their central losing component. The distinction between loss and losing is a helpful starting point to the question how we arrive at profound and compelling representations of loss, and to counter the limitation of games’ emotional bandwidth. This question will be pursued by adopting a game design lens based on Doris Rusch’s (2009) identification of three expressive devices in games; procedurality, fictional alignment and experiential metaphor. These key concepts, which according to Rusch foster a purposeful design of human experience in videogames, will be used to structure the following analysis of three gameplay moments from Final Fantasy VII (1997), Ico (2001), and Passage (2007). In spite of the different cultural, economic and artistic contexts these games work in, they arguably offer some strong structural commonalities in how they deal with loss beyond losing. The core interest of this analysis is to systemat- ically trace these common features and explore the way they resonate with a Freudian concept of loss. [608] Culture Unbound, Volume 5, 2013 Loss Versus Losing In his study on “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) Sigmund Freud explores loss as a universal emotional state in human life. Analyzing “profound mourning, as the reaction to the loss of someone who is loved” (1917: 244) he talks about the culturally contingent reaction to a universal human experience. Describing how his patients experience loss as a state in which the world “has become poor and empty” (246) he proposes a therapeutic paradigm that contrasts mourning as a fruitful reaction against melancholia as a pathological reaction to loss. While deeply rooted in his practice of individual therapeutic treatment, Freud himself and interpreters of his work alike regarded his findings as metaphorical extensions of a larger cultural condition, and as help to the meaningful interpretation there- of.2 Following Freud, each kind of cultural production can be read as a sublimat- ing act compensating for the ubiquity of loss experienced by a “shared” psychic condition (Freud 1929/1961). While videogames in general can be seen in that light, this essay is more specifically interested in the way videogames can resonate with Freud’s own interest by modeling what “the real loss of a loved object” (Freud 1917: 250) feels like. From a game design stance interested in the meaning potential of games, this question needs to be tackled in awareness of its contin- gency on the player. We thus have to ask, how do certain gameplay characteristics afford loss? This question implies a different view than a determinist stance claiming a cause-effect relation between form (i.e. gameplay) and meaning (i.e. loss). To a certain extent, affordances guide and structure the production of meaning (Van Leeuwen 2005; Kress 2010). Losing can be seen as one such an affordance that according to authors like Johnson (2011) and Grant (2011) cannot per se tie in with a wider experience of human emotion. Johnson writes, Winning and losing are only defined in their relation to us. Their meaning does not come from an abstract ideal that is buried in the rules of the game, but from our experiences in life, such as witnessing a war... or having once won the emotionally fractured heart of the blonde from class, only to have it crumble in my hands. (Johnson 2011) This quote raises the main problem at stake: while games offer new modalities to represent human experiences and desires, designers have yet to explore the ways games’ structural affordances can be meaningfully exploited to come up with representations beyond a mechanistic paradigm. Trying to model loss through losing is to fall into this mechanistic trap, because losing is not a structural affordance of loss; it is an affordance of game progression. At their core videogames are procedural representations which means that they draw their expressive potential from rules of computational execution (Bogost 2007: 5, Rusch 2009). Such rules de- termine the possibilities and constraints of player interaction with a system, in- cluding conditions of winning and losing. Procedurality uses losing as a central Culture Unbound, Volume 5, 2013 [609] tool of signification as it makes certain possibilities tangible to players. This does not mean that losing is necessarily suited to signify loss. Quite contrary, as the death of the main character in most platformer games since Super Mario Bros. in 1985 suggests, losing has mostly been used to represent temporary failure on the way to eventual mastery –potentially hindering but never entirely threatening the player. Game over is yet another moment in an infinite circuit of trial and error, subverting the meaning of death as end of life by using it as a sanctioning mecha- nism for ill-performed player interaction. As a corollary, watching their digital superhero fall into bottomless pitches, die from enemy grenades, or be devoured by zombies under the condition of such a “quantum immortality” (Grant 2011) is hardly suited to affect players emotionally. As Grant concludes, “games have trained us to view death as a triviality” (Grant 2011). This look at platformer games demonstrates that procedurality affords meaning making through the question how does it work? rather than what is displayed?. So is what we see, when we see our game characters die, completely irrelevant to the meaning of the game? Hardly. From a cultural studies perspective, the meaning of gameplay perfor- mance is necessarily caught up in cultural reference, which means that throughout a play experience players establish meaningful links between the medium, their cultural memory, and the real world.3 This requires us to look at procedurality in relation to fictional alignment and experiential metaphor, which according to Do- ris Rusch are the core ingredients of gameplay expression. In her essay Mecha- nisms of the Soul: Tackling the Human Condition in Videogames (2009) she ex- plicitly introduces these three concepts as devices for the purposeful design of human emotional states and complex experiential processes in games. While procedurality is the language by which gameplay becomes structured, fictional alignment refers to its meaningful contextualization in a fictional setting (Rusch & König 2007; Rusch 2009). According to the author, “the game-part brings in the affective strength of the real-world activity and the fiction contextu- alizes those game emotions and enables players to attribute them to the events in the gameworld” (Rusch 2009:3).

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