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This long post was triggered by the "Why do you like games?" topic. I originally was going to post a long comment in response, but as it grew in length I figured that I would derail the topic, so I am starting an new one. Hope you can make it through the whole thing with your sanity in tact ;D.




 I, like nearly every other white middle-class male who grew up in America, have experienced nearly every form of artistic media available to me: I have seen many movies, played many games, read many books (both fiction and non), seen many pictures, experienced conceptual works of art involving nearly every object you can think of, and had the pleasure of listening to the wonderful vibrations that is music. I have dabbled in nearly all of these mediums (film being the noticeable exception), and have taken refuge in one particular medium: painting.

In my dealings with nearly all of these mediums I have had transformative experiences as a direct result of coming in contact with them. Now, for the sake of clarity, I define “transformative experience” as a specific and single event in time in which my consciousness permanently shifted from one mode of perception of the world around me, to another. And by permanent I mean, “permanent, at least until the next transformative experience.”

Now, I'm sure you noticed that I said “nearly all” when I referenced artistic mediums which have had this transformative effect on me, and I am equally sure that you know which the medium has proved itself to be the exception: video games.

A good while ago I began to ask myself, “Why is this the case?” However, I was at the stage  of maturity where I realized that, me being not the most able objectifier of events in my own life, I must first ask the question, “Is this really the case? Have I not ever had a singular event in my long and loving history with games that has transformed me?”

To be honest, I can remember several small and insignificant experiences, but nothing near the scale of those experiences in other mediums. So, for semantics sake I should say that I have had these experiences, but it is important to note that these were nothing major. It seems as if something was being held back.

Before I continue, let me qualify a bit of what I am saying. There is a substantial possibility that playing video games as a youngster has affected the development of my consciousness in some way, but I can only speculate as to what this effect might be. For example, I often enjoyed playing games that rely heavily on strategy and “thinking two moves ahead”. Perhaps this fact might be responsible for my obsession with schedules and sticking to them? Or, was playing all of those strategy games simply exercising an ability that I had already possessed. There are many other interpretations that could be derived, but I do not intend to dwell on this rather speculative point. Instead, this example is given to point out that, yes, games may very well have had an impact on me, just they haven't taken the form of an impactful transformative event.

Now I can move on to: “Why is this the case?”. I think it all boils down to a lack of authorial control or perceived authorial intent (use whichever term you find less inflammatory :) ).

I arrived at this conclusion via an epistemological perspective.  Since I am an empiricist, I believe that knowledge can only be gained through sense/experience, and that consciousness is simply an emergent property of the brain. This of course means that I do not believe that it is possible for an individual to “know” or to “come upon truth” using only his mental faculties. Nor do I believe that “knowledge” is intrinsic quality within a human being.
     To recap: knowledge can only be gained from interactions with external (or, outside of the consciousness) sources. Information, likewise, can only be gained through some sort of interaction with the environment. So, how does this apply to the subject of transformative experiences? Well, I have found that each transformative event in my life has involved the acquisition of new and radical information. It seems to me now that, in order for a transformative experience to occur, the acquisition of new and radical information is a requirement that must be fulfilled. It is this element that poses a great challenge to gameplay as a medium, since it requires a great amount of authorial control (or intent :) ) to convey properly and impact-fully the new information or idea.

As soon as the player is allowed to control any element of the experience, authorial intent becomes fractured and diluted. Unless the player plays the game exactly how the designers envisioned, you might as well toss authorial direction out of the window, because it becomes very hard for the player to “get” whatever the message is. Or, if the player does “get it”, it is a largely underwhelming revelation, again because authorial intent is diluted. In many games authorial intent is played out in a subconscious level, as a part of the environment's design, but this is obviously not enough to create such a transformative experience.

So, a game-play environment has always been simply a playground. It is a place for a player to express himself in. All that is returned to the player after his expression is simply his own self-expression. As a result, the player gains no new knowledge, no new information, and has no great revelation beyond what his own consciousness can give him. To put it offensively, games are an extremely masturbatory exercise. Perhaps this is why games often have a negative stigma attached to them when viewed within a social and cultural context.

Even Passage, the seminal art game by Jason Rohrer, while comes close to exercising this  demon, is not able to break away entirely from this concept. It comes close simply because he severely limits the player's ability to interact with the environment. Even still, the player is free to exercise himself and may deviate from Rohrer's intentions. For example, when I first played the game, I was not aware that I could move down or up, for some reason I felt that I was supposed to move inexplicably and monotonously to the right. Stupid, I know, but that is how it occurred.

Also, because it is the player expressing himself in the environment (not Jason Rohrer), the player is interpreting the environment and actions from within his/her own established perspective. For example: I was watching a friend of mine play Passage for the first time, and when the companion of the main sprite prevented him from entering a certain area he exclaimed, “That is so true!”. This expression made me wonder, “What if he did not think that a relationship prevents him from doing things and going places? What if he felt that his relationship actually empowered him to go further and do more?”

I believe that the answers to those two questions show that the game is dependent on the player having the same experiences as its designer in order for the game to be provide a revelation. I believe that it is this dependency that prevents Passage from being called “high art” (as Roger Ebert would say), and is why some may view the game as “pretentious”. I am sure that Rohrer did not intend for this to be the case, but it would be impossible for him to deny the implications of allowing a player to impose himself in an environment that he (Rohrer) has created. Basically, an individual plays as him/herself, not Jason Rohrer; it is a physical impossibility for anything otherwise to occur.

I do believe that Rohrer will come much closer to the goal of “games as art” with Sleep is Death. However, maybe unbeknownst to Jason, many of the themes that he is dealing with in creating a truly interactive story-telling game have previously been dealt with in the 1980s by fine artists such as Roy Ascott and others involved in the Telematics movement. I am thinking specifically of “La Plissure Du Texte”, which was part of the Electra exhibition at the Musee d'Art Moderne in Paris in 1983. To be fair, I have yet to actually play Sleep is Death.

IMO, I think that games can jump the hurdle of “transformative experiences” by taking one of two routes: 1.) becoming social: interactions with other human individuals might bring about transformative experiences. AAAAnnnnnd 2.) Trying to coax emergent properties out of complex and dynamic systems that can “interpret” a player's decisions, and then spit these interpretations back to the player so that he/she could learn from them. (I hope that makes sense)


Anyways, these are my thoughts, hope you can add to or destroy them; doing either would make me very happy.


Also, I am surprised that many in the art game movement have yet to build upon the intellectual achievements of the past. For example, the definition of art: the majority of contributors to http://www.northcountrynotes.org/jason-rohrer/arthouseGames/index.php (http://www.northcountrynotes.org/jason-rohrer/arthouseGames/index.php)(arthouse games) say that art is: “any activity that isn't based on survival or reproduction.” This is a very basic and raw definition that fails to give artistic legitimacy to games. Personally, I like to borrow from John Dewey and other pragmatists:

    Art is the living and concrete proof that man is capable of restoring consciously, and thus on the plane of meaning, the union of sense, need, impulse, and action characteristic of the live creature. - John Dewey in Art as Experience

Of course, you would have to read the book to know what is meant by "live creature". Soooo, go read it :).

Also, if you feel that you have had a transformative experience via a game please share! (And no, the statement "I cried when I played (x)" does not constitute in itself as a transformative experience.

Also, pardon me if this has been posted elsewhere, I ran a quick search or two and didn't find anything.

Aaugh! Wall of text.


Sorry if I sound stupid to you but I'm not going to read through all that, man. Can you please make a tl;dr version or something like that?

Well... the baseline is that I argue that authorial control is rather necessary in crafting transformative experiences, and the very nature of gameplay (handing authorship over to the player) makes this very hard to do. Also, authorial control is necessary when considering something to be "high art", as otherwise a game will flounder in ambiguity and/or "pretentiousness".

Don't agree.  My only "transformative" experience in gaming was probably in poker (mainly PLO and NLHE), of all things, which is about as abstract and far from "authorial control" as one can possibly get.  If we're limiting it to computer games, or traditional board games, I'd have to go with Starflights 1 and 2, X-COM or the first Master of Orion.  Only the first have a predetermined experience in the strictest sense, but they're still the best I've had from a game.  The rest are -mostly- about variety; meaningfully different player paths generated from a robust environment, acceptable antagonist agency, and lots of player actions that make meaningful changes to the gameworld.  There's still some overarching thematic material (alien invasion, space empires at war), and that represents authorial control, as do the rules of the game, but it's still quite different from a scripted, narrative-focused game.

Can you give an example of a 'transformative experience' from some other medium? Because I don't really know what you're talking about.

edit: well, to clarify, because I can certainly think of what I would call 'transformative experiences' - I want to know what the baseline here is. How radical a transformation in thinking are you looking for before you're going to call it one? So - can you give us perhaps the least transforming transformative experience that you've had?

Only read the tl;dr version, but isn't that exactly what Ebert said about games? Though I remember that many people called bullshit on that, and I agree. We just haven't explored much of the potential of the interactive medium, so I don't think it's good to state that without complete authoral control you can't create transformative experiences when we're still just scratching the surface.

tldr:

I urge you to read a thread I made recently (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=11978.0).


Can it not also be a place for them to explore what the game maker(s) laid out for them? Do you really think that most games are about enabling the player to express themself?

Your thesis suggests that one may not have a transformative experience if it's not explicitly communicated to one by an artist.


I haven't had what you call a transformative experience with games. But then again, I can't recall such a thing happening to me in other contexts, either.

If I read you right, you're saying that games cannot be as meaningful as other mediums because of player interaction, correct? Or, more accurately, the ability of the player to alter the game subverts authorial intent.

I've given thought to this before, and I have about three replies for you:

1.

All art is this way. When a viewer views a painting, they interpret it through the lens of their own experience. The artist cannot actually convey meaning of their own accord, as even the simple act of visually interpreting requires interpretation.

I feel my language here is a bit vague, so let me try to solidify what I mean though an example. An artist paints a picture of a door halfway open. Now, when a certain group of people views the the piece they assume that the door is in the act of closing, yet when another group views it they assume that the door is being opened. (still more groups might say that the door is standing still while others just shuffle away mumbling, "I don't get it.") The implications of these interpretations are completely opposite of each other, yet each are plausible.

So all art is in some way interactive. For meaning (or for a transformative experience) to be conveyed, the viewer must bring some element of themselves into the viewing.


2.

There actually isn't any way for the player to subvert the author's intent. (or at least, there is only as much opportunity as there is in other media) Even in the worst case scenario, even when the player does nothing but attempt to break the games rules, even when they run outside the map, or glitch through walls, or do any number of supposedly subversive activities, they never see content that someone did not create. As long as they participate in the world of the game, even if only to break its rules, they are experiencing authored content. Even when an AI acts randomly, that AI was scripted, directed, to act randomly. The choice to randomize anything is still a choice.

This also goes back to point number 1 in some ways. If the player chooses to break the rules of the game, that is their choice and is their way of interpreting the experience. Let's say that in a Romeo and Juliet videogame the player makes both walk around on their hands for the entire thing. The player is making of a joke of a serious story. Now, how is this any different from sitting in the back row at a performance of the play and cracking bawdy jokes to your neighbor the entire time.

The ability to subvert authorial intent is nothing new to art, it is simply most obviously possible in games.

3.

Just because the player is able to subvert the experience more easily, does not make it less meaningful. In fact, I'd argue it makes it more meaningful.

If a thing always gives you the same result, even if that result is good it will quickly lose meaning. If there is a possibility for a bad outcome, however, the good result becomes more significant.

For example, if one person puts quarter in a slot machine, pulls the lever, and wins the quarter back, they're certainly not upset about it, but I wouldn't call them ecstatic either. Now, if another person puts in a quarter but gets nothing back, and repeats that until on their millionth quarter they get back one million quarters, they're going to be a lot happier than the first person, yet the end result in each's savings account is the exact same. The difference here is that the second person has experienced all the bad runs and losing a million quarters, where the first person hasn't felt the same sting of loss.

The metaphor isn't perfect, I know, but it does highlight the idea that the contrast between a good and bad experience will make both experiences more meaningful. The possibility of ruination gives creation significance.



These are all musings I've had rattling around my head for a while now, but haven't had a good chance to actually express yet. I'll be interested in your response :) (should you deem this worth response)

Man it's not very funny quoting the whole post like that