Massively Immersive

Are videogames a medium? Ian Bogost thinks they are, but Michael Tomsen says that they aren’t. See how Bogost responds to Tomsen’s review of his latest book, How to Do Things with Videogames. I’m leaning more toward Bogost’s argument, but Tomsen’s critique has merit, as well. Distinctions between genres, kinds, or mediums tend to exude a smell of arbitrary when you think about them too hard. I’ll have to look into this more.

Michael R Brown, Puppet Masters: How Game Musicians Manipulate You. 

I usually talk about the visual component of video games, but the aural component is extremely important, too. Music can make or break a game, and I’ve mentioned a few of my favorites: Bastion and SpaceChem. Brown interviews audio designers for Pulse and Dead Space 2 and they discuss what goes on behind-the-scenes.

Have you checked out Metagame? I can see this game starting very intense debates with my gamer friends. Which game was more successful? Minecraft or Mario? What game was more believable? Mortal Kombat or Grand Theft Auto? They plan on having decks available for purchase in December, and I definitely plan on acquiring one.

The World Cyber Games are coming up in the second week of December, and the Pan-American finals will be held from Nov. 4-6. If you haven’t watched eSports before, the WCG is definitely a good place to start. Personally, I’m following the League of Legends bracket. You can watch the finals for the USA bracket here and here. [Warning: Contains explicit gamer language.]

Jesper Juul posted about Chinese ping-pong playing robots and got me thinking about all the “fun” I had messing around with botting in Final Fantasy XI. Can I automate my character to fish for days on end so I don’t actually have to play the game I’m paying to play? Shortly thereafter I realized I needed to play something else.

1

A game is a system in which players engage in artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.

2

No gamer tolerates reality.

3

Any game, like any medium of information, is an extension of the individual or the group. In games we recover the integral person, who in the workaday world or in professional life can use only a small sector of his being.

4

Immersion is complete when the frame falls away so that the player truly believes that he or she is part of an imaginary world. It is only when we immerse ourselves in an illusion that we find who we truly are. Contrary to what we may believe, we must embrace what is beyond ourselves in order to become ourselves. 

5

Processes of value creation have advanced so far that almost everything known as a ‘virtual’ commodity is now certifiably real. Indeed, the very idea of “reality” relies upon the simulation of itself in order to retain its meaning. (Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real. Though Not-real was once Real, the Real is never unreal.)

6

To enlighten us, a good hoax or con must eventually be revealed.

7

The story’s not important; what’s important is the way the world looks. That’s what makes you feel stuff. That’s what puts you there.

8

Good things and bad things alike, they are things of this world and no other. To take mere worldly things in dead earnest betokens a deficit of awareness that is pitiable. The difference between enlightenment and earthly desire is of about the same order of difference between the good and the bad in a romance.

9

Do gamers believe that the protagonists of their games do good?

10

She quite lost herself in games and would spend whole days with them. She could not be sure whether they were true or not.

11

All my story narrates, the meetings and partings, the joys and sorrows, the ups and downs of fortune, are recorded exactly as they happened. (All the best stories are true.)

12

Life is never false; reflect that life itself’s a dream.

13

Like our vernacular tongues, all games are media of interpersonal communication, and they could have neither existence nor meaning except as extensions of our immediate inner lives. For games to be welcome, they must convey an echo of reality.

14

Sometimes I stand and watch the games they play with my daughter, and I think to myself that there certainly are good fabricators in the world. I think that these yarns must come from people much practiced in lying. but perhaps that is not the whole of the story?

15

To dismiss them as lies itself is to depart from the truth. Something can be true and untrue at the same time.

16

False words do exist!

17

What is a fact? What’s a lie, for that matter? What, exactly, constitutes an essay or a story or a poem or even an experience? What happens when we can no longer freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience?

18

If, finally, we ask ‘Are games mass media?’ the answer has to be ‘Yes.’ Games are situations construed to permit simultanoues participation of many people in some significant pattern of their own corporate lives.

19

I can see that that would be the view of someone much given to lying himself. For my part, I am convinced of their truthfulness. (Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true.)

20

So it really was all utter nonsense! Author, copyist, and reader were alike in the dark! Just so much ink splashed for fun, a game, a diversion!

21

Only the truth is funny.

Yes, phlegmatic is a real word. I almost thought it wasn’t, but the almighty OED has it right there, after phlegmasia cerulea dolens. As you may have guessed, I’m feeling ill. I’m quite exhausted, so I’m taking a little shortcut today and posting a snippet from a paper I wrote earlier this year. I analyzed Edward Castronova’s Synthetic Worlds and compared it to relevant portions of Half-Real and Rules of Play. This paper was essentially the seed for what I’m now researching for my thesis.

I know I’m beating this immersion drum to death, but bear with me. The difference between virtual reality, or what Castronova calls synthetic worlds, and current video games became a crucial distinction for this paper. I argued that Castronova’s conception of synthetic worlds was wrong because he did not understand the game mechanics or cognitive processes that caused the feeling of “virtual” reality. That said, I don’t understand these processes either, so I hesitate to put money on my analysis.


See what you think.

     …Castronova misrepresents the phenomenon of immersion by oversimplifying how it occurs. He explains that immersion occurs by one of two possible methods, “Either the sensory inputs are so good that you actually think that the crafted environment you’re in is genuine, or, you become so involved mentally and emotionally in the synthetic world that you stop paying attention to the fact that it is only synthetic” he writes (5). Salen and Zimmerman describe this kind of misuse of immersion as the “immersive fallacy” and explain it in the following way:

 “The immersive fallacy is the idea that the pleasure of a media experience lies in its ability to sensually transport the participant to an illusory, simulated reality. According to the immersive fallacy, this reality is so complete that ideally the frame falls away so that the player truly believes that he or she is part of an imaginary world.” (Salen & Zimmerman 450).

     Arguing against the validity of the immersive fallacy, Salen and Zimmerman contend that while game can be immersive for the player, when a player is immersed, they are not transported to another realm of existence and they do not lose their ability to distinguish between game world and real world (452–454). Just as how the Tetris player must never forget to press the correct buttons in order to maneuver the blocks, “[Immersion] is an engagement that occurs through play itself,” they explain, and therefore firmly rooted in the act of playing a game (451). Using Salen and Zimmerman’s explanations, players may become so involved in the synthetic world that they keep playing the game, or the immersive qualities of the synthetic world do not affect a player at all. Castronova does not mention other ways in which players may interact with synthetic worlds. Although Castronova agrees with Salen and Zimmerman as far as not requiring all five senses to cause immersion, he still believes that the purpose of synthetic worlds is to immerse players such that distinctions between game and reality disappear (1-26, 295, 287–294).

I haven’t posted about immersion quite as much as I did a few weeks ago. It’s time for a slight return to the themes of yestermonth.

I was going through my ever growing backlog of blog posts and this post at Penny-Arcade tickled that little spot behind my gallbladder or frontal cortex—wherever it’s located—that piques every time something exudes “relevance”. Check out the visual counterpart of the post, at the very least.

Tycho/Jerry hits on a fundamental struggle in modern video games. The visual capabilities of technology never cease to amaze, and it just keeps getting better. (Personally, I’m not even sure I understand what these capabilities are anymore, since I’m way behind on my hardware. Watching something in 720p still amazes me.) Jerry juxtaposes id’s insane shader in Rage against the completely mute and unbelievable  protagonist. On the one hand, Rage accomplishes an amazing feat of visual fidelity, and on the other, completely ruins the player’s feeling of immersion by employing a narrative that fosters disbelief. I would like to correct myself: this isn’t a struggle in current video games, it’s more of a humongous rift.

For Jerry, a mute protagonist ruins the reality of the gameworld. I understand this. It’s a bit like watching a movie where the main character has lines, but the viewers always have to fill the lines in themselves. It’s participatory, yes, but in the wrong way. At the same time, I’m sure id created Rage this way on purpose. Perhaps they made the decision based on the belief that requiring the player to conform to the personality expressed by a particular voice actor would ruin his or her sense of immersion. I guess you can’t be “in the game” if you don’t believe you’re the person in it. But, Bastion made the same decision. The Kid never speaks. And what’s more, he’s the only character that doesn’t have a real name! Bastion is a third-person hack-n-slash, and Rage is a FPS/RPG, though. That’s a crucial distinction, to be sure.

One of the books I’ve been paging through also addresses the technological capabilities of video games and whether complete immersion will be possible. One author, Ian Foster, believes that technology will advance far enough to allow for “photorealistic virtual worlds,” the upshot of which is the ability for people to inhabit completely virtual worlds that they believe. Foster here mentions William Gibson’s idea of cyberspace.

I’m skeptical. People have been saying these things for a very long time, but our criteria for what constitutes believable virtual reality keeps changing as quickly as technologies do. Vector graphics used to do the job. Now we need pixel shaders and physics simulations. Albert Borgman, in response to Ian Foster, also expresses skepticism. He argues that there’s a limit to what technology can accomplish. Dig deep enough, and a simulation will show itself to be just that: limited. We can’t code for every individual atom and every universal law, especially when we don’t even understand all of them.

So where’s the balance? Once again, there’s a confusion about what “immersion” means. Sure, I intuit that the game I play only simulated reality, but that doesn’t prevent my immersion. Borgman’s argument feels excessive in this way, and Foster’s, too. Graphics aren’t the be-all-end-all for immersion, and Jerry portrays that clearly with his criticism of Rage. We still want a good story.

I spent all morning compiling my preliminary bibliography for my thesis. So far, there are 51 printed sources on the list, and it keeps growing. I’ll probably get around to actually touching half of those this semester. I’ve read or browsed through about a dozen of them so far. It looks like I’m on track, although the huge stack of books in my room is a little daunting.

It’s really quite pleasing to find that a lot of the “important” texts in this field are still very new. A lot of them have been in print for five or less years, and I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that World of Warcraft, and Second Life hit the “mainstream” around then (go back another five years and it’s EverQuest). It’s also kind of frightening and unfortunate that these are the games everyone references, now.




At the moment, my tentative topic is: “Immersion: Human Interaction with Characters in Virtual Spaces.” With this title I imply a couple of dichotomies. First, with humans and characters, I want to examine how we, as participants in video games, literature, film, or other media, react to simulations or representations of people. In fancy academic words, I want to examine the ontology of self when it (if it exists) encounters a simulacrum of being. (Human being vs. simulacrum being?). Since I want to focus on video games, I believe it’s also important to examine the importance of narrative in relation to mechanics in this section. (I tip my hat to Jesper Juul.) Is it more important that you play the character? Or, is it more important the the character is part of the game?

This points to the seconds lens, the the virtual against the real. With this lens I want to explore notions of reality; how real is real? and how virtual is virtual? I expect some Beaudrillard and posthumanism in this section.

I also have some overarching questions to answer about the role of video games in the Humanities. First, what are video games to the Humanities? Second, how do we read video games for the Humanities? (What do we do with them?) Last, how and why do people find meaning in video games?

I think these questions overlap quite nicely. I expect a fundamental pull toward the middle-ground, toward a synthesis. That’s really what this project is about: synthesizing many different ideas about video games and what they mean into the breadth of humanistic media studies. A bit of game design. A bit of anthropology. A bit of informatics and a bit of literature.

Over the summer I got really into business games. There was one game, called Swords & Potions, on Kongregate that I started playing like crazy. Basically, you run a shop that provides items for all of the would-be adventurers in RPGs. You have to coordinate your production schedules and balance your accounts and etc. It’s quite fun in the sort of, repetitive, min-max efficiency sense. I think it appealed to my inner power-gamer.

Once you progress significantly in the game, you need to find yourself a guild. You can build improvements for your shop, but only fellow guild members can build them for you. I hate this sort of stuff; I despise forced cooperation in video games. You end up having to deal with leeches and generally unpleasant people more than you would have to, otherwise. More importantly, however, it simply feels exactly like what it is most of the time, forced.

So, I decided to create my own guild. I kept the requirements strict and was very selective, and my guild rose through the rankings. We peaked at the #3 spot (there’s a couple hundred guilds) before I simply abandoned them a few weeks before going back to school.

Well. That was fun.

—-

P.S.: If you like business games, check out Chantelise. Quite satisfying.

Also, do you tend to play games in fits and starts? If I find one I like, I usually play it to death very quickly, then move on.

The Humble Bundle. Check it out if you haven’t, already. It’s a wonderful deal and you can support great charities at the same time. I played Trine over the summer, and it was quite fun. It also looked gorgeous, even on my six-year-old desktop.

SpaceChem is a cool puzzle game about fake chemistry, and I’m quite enjoying the soundtrack. Frozen Synapse is a turn-based strategy game done in a simplistic style. I haven’t spent much time with the last two, so I can’t give much more insight. However, I was thinking about purchasing both over the summer, before they wound up in the Humble Bundle.

Anyways, about this “Pentad” thing.

I hadn’t encountered Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pentad before reading an article from the September 2011 issue of Digital Creativity, but I’m now quite interested in examining it, and perhaps using it, in my thesis. Basically, the pentad, as the name suggests, uses five criteria to analyze a text. These criteria are: act, agency, scene, agent, and purpose. Or, in other words: what?, why?, where?, who?, and how?

The authors apply the pentad to Bioshock, and they come up with some interesting results. As they explain, one of the core mechanics of the game is the choice between saving the little girls you find throughout your adventure, or “harvesting” them. The choice you make affects the amount of ADAM you receive, the game’s currency.

At first glance, this mechanic seems to offer the player a moral choice between saving or killing a child. In terms of the pentad, the authors explain that this is a “purpose-act ratio,” or a struggle between the outcomes of an action and the act itself. They included a very interesting perspective from a priest who explained how he couldn’t bring himself to “harvest” any of the children, since he believed that it was immoral in any situation. This perspective seems bizarre, especially to any veteran gamer, since these children are not really children. This is especially true in a game like Bioshock that operates almost entirely on metaphor. 

The authors pick up on this peculiarity, as well, and they offer another perspective from the procedural level. At the level of game mechanics, the choice between killing or saving the children does not involve any moral dilemma at all, but merely a choice of weaponry, since the game ties the decision to a currency exchange. The authors refer to this situation as an “agency-act ratio,” or a potential restriction of your choices in-game by game mechanics. Finally, the authors alter the perspective one more time, to that of the player and their “real-world scene.” Here, they ultimately find that the players’ choice boils down to whatever allows them to have more fun.

This is a really quick gloss of an article that was already a quick gloss of a research project, but hopefully you see the potential of this kind of analysis. It seems especially useful for interpreting the so-called moral choices that appear in most FPS and RPG in recent years.

The first (half) month of Massively Immersive has passed, so here’s a recap of the major topics I discussed this month.

• The Land of Illusion, Final Fantasy XI, and Guild Wars
• A short gloss of my childhood experiences with video games.

Bastion and Aristotle (Part One & Two)

• My brief attempt to apply Aristotle’s formulation of tragedy from his Poetics to Supergiant Game’s critically acclaimed Bastion.

Getting Played

• What is a character? Christoph Menke’s analysis of Oedipus Rex had be musing about the qualities of a character and how they’re different than “real” people.

Games (Don’t) Have Narratives

• Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You, provided an interesting take on the difference between narrative and the stories in video games. The ever-present Rules of Play by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman greatly influenced his analysis, which I like, but I had issues with his imagined audience.

The Metaphysics of Superheroes

• I positioned Spider-Man and Batman as fundamentally opposed concepts in order to provide an analogy for the ontology of players and characters. It’s an interesting way to think about it, but the character/player relationship isn’t a simple dualism.

In the comments, Travis posted an apt response to a post in which I wondered about the state of video games in education. He covered many of the important issues currently facing video game studies, all of which are on my list of topics to address. And in our discussion about the meaning and role of immersion in video games, Phillip wrote about the social reasons why certain games are more attractive to him. Thank you to every who commented. Any kind of discussion is critical to my research topic, so if you have anything to say, please don’t hesitate!

In other news, I’m currently reading Neal Stephenson’s new novel, REAMDE, so look forward to my thoughts, reviews, and whatever crazy thoughts it will spark.

Thanks for reading!

For those of you who care, League of Legends (cf. DotA/MOBA) has a new gametype, Dominion. I’m a pretty big fan of LoL, and I’ve been playing it on and off for about two years. In a nutshell, Dominion shuffles around the heretofore established mechanics of the MOBA genre into a 5v5 capture-and-hold gametype.

I got my new laptop on Friday, and of course the first thing I did was play LoL on it. I played a few games of Dominion, and I’m glad to say that it is a refreshing update to a genre that becomes a little repetitive.

I love the significantly shorter 15-20 minute average gametime. The 40+ minute average gametime in the regular 5v5 gametype kept me from truly getting “hardcore” into LoL. It’s just a lot of time to invest in one match. (Tycho from Penny Arcade wrote about it at some point last summer, but I can’t find the entry.) Whenever I lost a match, especially if that match took an hour or more, there was always a sinking feeling of “Well that was a waste.” This is not to mention the situations in which you start off with a less-than-full roster or have someone quit after thirty minutes, which happens more than you would expect. This generated a kind of love/hate relationship between me and LoL. I would play a few games, and get fed up with it, only to  come back a few hours later to try and win a few matches.

Though I’ve come to truly enjoy Summoner’s Rift, I’ll probably play more Dominion during the school year. It’s much easier to play it casually, and it fits into a busier schedule. It’s also exciting to find new champion combinations and builds.

Trying to come up with a cohesive strategy with four random people over the course of the game is difficult. I have a hunch this difficulty has to do with the freshness of the game type, however. Personally, I haven’t built the kind of intuition for Dominion that I had for Summoner’s Rift. I haven’t seen as much coordination as I expected going in, but I think that will change.

I’ll likely have some more in-depth analysis of Dominion, later, after I figure out what I’m actually doing.

(Also, I realized that LoL is really hard to play at low resolutions/on a small monitor. Especially when there’s a large teamfight, everything just turns into an amorphous blob. That’s really my laptop’s fault, though.)