Short essay on player identification in complex visual fields, from a psychological perspective.
All games are about the negotiation of the Other. What is the Other? Whatever I feel I am not. The more strongly distinguished from oneself, the more other the Other is. Just as it is typical to project one’s identity into the player-character of a game, it is also typical to project the Other onto adversaries in the game. Players met online, enemies, bosses—obviously I am not them, so they must be Other. We may do the same thing for supporting characters, NPCs. As in life, the Other is elusive and mutable.
Even if there are not characters in the game to project upon, the Other is present. Games typically present some kind of challenge, or at the very least, the tension of response to player action. The Other is constellated throughout all of this, even in the most apparently solitary games. When you play Tetris, for instance, the Other may be felt in the force that seems to be competing against your interests, accelerating blocks and deciding which pieces you get.
In any case, the striving that occurs within the game, the tension that propels the experience in any form, is due to the distance between the egoic projection and the Other. This striving—this negotiation between these two beings—is the game.
The first computer game ever, Spacewar!, was a shooter. Why is shooting such an incredibly effective motif in video games? For as long as there have been projectiles, humans have been associating them with, uh, projection. We are intuitively aware that we are always “firing” our attention at objects. We are able to see due to the reflection (“throwing back”) of light. As such, the casting of coarser objects—stones, arrows, bullets—is easy to associate with the coarser projections that are typically the volley sent to the big O. And, by definition, things can only be thrown AT something that is apart from the thrower.
In a game whose gameplay centralizes shooting or throwing, we can usually expect that the negotiation with the Other is one of space: projectiles hitting where something is or where it is not. In many cases, the player wants to avoid being hit and to successfully hit other things. Amazing.
The danmaku (“bullet curtain”) subgenre takes this concept to an extreme, where in certain encounters the occupiable space is reduced to almost nothing, so that the player is forced to follow a tiny crevice of empty space between curtains of bullets. This makes apparent the negotiation of space between the player and the Other: the screen is turned into an intricate, moving mesh of positive and negative space, and the entire game is about being where the bullets aren’t. Staring at a game like this for long enough can create an optical inversion effect, where the empty, occupiable space appears to become embossed—as if the bullets are the background and the space between them is the overlay.
Another sensation a danmaku player may feel, as their occupiable area becomes ever smaller, is that each pocket of territory they find is an acquisition—a fleeting refuge. In other genres, including the predecessor of danmaku, the shmup, the typical object of acquisition is a power-up, something that increases your liberties and capacities. The psychological analogy here is that some characteristic is being integrated into the mediating vessel (the ship). In a danmaku when a player finds a secure space, that can feel equivalent to the attainment of a power-up, in the sense that it also expands a player’s liberties: it buys them one more second of time. Simple empty space becomes “like” a power-up. This blurs the line between game objects that are otherwise conceptually totally distinct, and the blurring is due to the anchoring of the player’s attention. An old shmup like Gradius might have so many power-ups on screen at a time, that they can occupy a constellation of attention that is similarly arranged to the meager empty space in a modern danmaku.
The experience of playing a danmaku may produce a certain psychedelic effect, but this is not due only to the floral patterns of projectiles. As we have seen, there are a number of inversions that the danmaku facilitates: the empty space can visually move to the “top” of the layers of action, even though this is diegetically false; the empty space erodes its status of mechanical neutrality as it comes to feel more like an acquisitional territory. And above all else: the weaving in between bullets makes bare the central premise of negotiation with the Other. When the screen becomes essentially a moving arrangement of color, you are looking at a direct visualization of “what is me” and “what I am not.”
“Bullet curtain.” The casting of a curtain over an object emphasizes its form and contour. Like with Tetris, the entire dramatic action of a danmaku is simplified into maneuvering segments of space that are either advantage or detriment. The flatness of such a procedure is even less atomic than it is in other 2D games—the player approaches an asymptote of incorporation into a single object—me-and-the-other—rather than participation as one acting agent within an objective field. The bullet curtain in its extreme is also a convenient visual metaphor for the Deleuzian fold, in which a sufficient amount of exterior complexity produces an interiority; we see this in the example of the negative space “popping out,” inverting the backdrop.
In other essays, I have elaborated the idea that game-entrainment—the psychic projection of the player into the game—is best engendered by qualities like focus, repetition, and meaningful aesethetic-somatic relationship. The extreme amount of focus required for danmaku play of course accounts for much of the projective gravity, but we should also not underestimate the draw of the asymptotic fold. If indeed the exterior complexity is the condition for a sudden flip into interiority—an intensity born out of extension—then maybe there is something that occurs at high-level danmaku play, where the player is more within the game’s field than their own body, and they momentarily witness that body as an exteriorization of the being who is currently in the game. Does this not account for the fantasmic, wish-fulfillment puella imagery of popular danmaku games? Does this not account for the stereotype of danmaku players’ deeply intimate and fixated relationship with these games?
Game-entrainment is psychosimulation therapy. It describes any act of participation in a game whose effects extend into the unconscious mind of the player. To an extent, all gaming is entrainment. Whether the player is dropping blocks, zapping aliens, or kicking balls, they are, in different measure, inhabiting these games. When the player partitions part of their mind into the game world, and actions are performed upon that projected part, those actions affect the whole of the psyche. This is the basic premise of alchemy, and much has been written about the participation mystique in theater, dance, visual art, fishing, archery, tea ceremony, and almost every other human endeavor under the sun. But gaming offers a unique capacity in this task, and it deserves much more attention.
How is gaming different from other art forms? Well, let’s not get bogged down in that. But we can say briefly: in a game you perform actions (as in dance), within an artistically constructed fixed field (as in film). No other medium can offer that experience. Though you perform in theater and dance, those actions occur within the boundless and unpredictable domain of physical reality. And while a film presents a defined field of observation, it is not subject to alteration by its witness. Only gaming offers movement and performance within the confines of the fixed field.
Under any circumstance, focusing on a fixed field becomes a potential vessel for conditioning the psyche. It’s not uncommon for people to come away with their personalities transformed from looking at a painting or closely studying an anthill. The special efficacy of gaming in this endeavor is due to the immediacy of acting within the vessel and the clear delineation of permitted actions. To expedite the process further, games often give the player a clear entry point for the “I”: an avatar into which a player can more consciously self-associate. So while the entire game is microcosmically representative of the player’s psyche, the player-character provides a handy vehicle for mediation (akin to the ego). This projection of the ego into the player-character is relatively obvious (we say “I made the jump!” even though it is Mario who has jumped).
The player-character may or may not act as a reliable representative of the game as a whole, because they will have some semblance of their own identity. That is to say, no avatar can be a totally neutral instrument of mediation; even a single pixel will inspire some affective response in the player. There can be no accounting for the idiosyncrasies of each player’s relationship to their player-character. How much of ourselves do we consciously recognize in this avatar? Which aspects of our personality does this avatar encourage us to access? This representative of our conscious will is not a clear cast into which we pour ourselves, and our relationship to this intermediary figure will evolve as we play. All this is to say that game-entrainment derives from identification with the gestalt game experience, of which the player-character is only a part.
Of course there is no set way to initiate this style of gaming. Entrainment is just something that happens when we play any game. We throw ourselves – to varying degree – into the game, and what transpires there is suggestive to the unconscious psyche. It is then helpful to bring conscious reflection to the events of the game through interpretation. But again, there is no rulebook, for the same reason that there are no true dream dictionaries.* No generic codification can be assigned to these processes because the disposition of the player, the game itself, and the relationship between the player and the game each hold countless idiosyncrasies. In order to understand how a particular play experience has conditioned the mind, it is most helpful to remain open and honest in your own impressions, and freely associate from there. What events from the game stood out? What did they remind you of? And so on.
While it is helpful to have an attitude of openness to interpretation during gameplay, it is even more helpful to play naturally. Entrainment occurs most efficiently during experiences of immersion. Gamers have pointed out that there are two primary types of immersion: mechanical and narrative, and that a flow state emerges when the two immersions are in harmony. For this reason, I would argue that games which elicit elevated concentration from the player are more effective in this practice. Concentration can be coaxed by the demands of precision movements, as in all manner of action games: shooters, bullet hells, platformers, MOBAs, fighting games. This is representative of mechanical immersion. Concentration can also be seduced into elevation by rich diegetic elements, common in sandbox games, RPGs, visual novels, detective games. This is representative of the so-called narrative immersion. It seems that an increased focus on either count leads to a denser self-projection, and all the more so when the two immersions are acting in concert.
There is one more premise of game-entrainment that is most elusive. When the mind is partitioned into these projections within games, it typically requires very selective attention. On one level, the visual vocabulary of the game is inculcated until recognition is immediate. Think of cherries, coins, blue and green potions: color-and-form compositions that indicate some beneficial effect. Then there are objects that are detriments. There are also objects that are neutral, objects that produce a random effect, and objects whose effect changes depending on other conditions. There are objects with intelligence and objects that are totally passive. The player quickly learns to codify these objects based on the expected result of interaction with them. In a modern game, there are tons of these signifiers that require different anticipations. It is no longer a dichotomy of “touching this is good, touching that is bad,” but a complex tapestry of visual elements that require individual discernment in how they are treated by the player.
So beyond acclimating to the concrete signifiers, the player also develops a fluency for the game’s patterns. Objects and events often come in specific formations. Routines and gestures are repeated. Enemies have intended or unintended tells. Certain events have rules about what precedes or follows. The player becomes intimately familiar with certain situations. In that familiarity, the player both develops conscious responses to game conditions (like learning a combo), and unconsciously accrues a lexicon of habits and shorthands (throwing a bomb at a certain enemy because that’s what you did last time).
When we distribute our focus into similar formations repeatedly, we develop postures of attention. Anyone who has played enough Tetris to see the blocks fall as they fall asleep can testify to this. This suggests that the mental hotkeys that we develop from observing patterns and responding in postures extend beyond the game and into the inner world. We find our dreams inflected with game scenarios, or that these same scenarios are overlaid upon our perception of the world in small eruptions of fantasy. When a posture of attention bleeds into other orders of phenomenal experience, that indicates to me that something new is being accessed in the recesses of the psyche – some formerly unconscious content is coming into view. I would suppose that the particular nature of the content would have some isomorphic relationship to the posture of attention, but is not wholly represented by it.
So, in allowing ourselves to be conditioned by games, we should consider not just the aesthetics and the gameplay, but also how the mind is situated in its task. Each of these elements contributes to gamefeel, the feeling of participating in games. The more aspects of a game that can be consciously understood by the player, the more material there is with which to interpret and appreciate the psycho-simulative process. Conscious game-entrainment is a valuable tool for understanding one’s own mind, providing a designated space to negotiate the complexes of the unconscious. VR games are already being considered for clinical use in the treatment of phobias, and researchers have designed a video game that functions as a CBT course. There are also the countless testimonies of people who intuitively turned to gaming as an instrument of self-care in response to a variety of behavioral disorders.
In addition to its direct therapeutic application, conscious game-entrainment has another important social capacity: the cultivation of new aesthetic fluencies. Video games and other digital media have already profoundly changed our visual habits and comprehensions (as the rising fields of UX and UI can attest). There is no common system of signification to describe the attentional postures (much less the embodied experience) demanded by new media. Yet to best appreciate and employ the forms of the current culture, we need to sensitize ourselves to their affective functioning. In their classic survey of visual media, Practices of Looking, Sturken and Cartwright lay it out: “Digital imaging’s multiplicity of perspectives and its openings for multiple entry points and potential for new combinations of [players] and objects suggest many possible entry points into engagement in the ongoing making of worlds and worldviews.” The broader our awareness of our self-association within the virtual, and the more definition given to the sense-impressions derived therein, the more we as players are able to intentionally participate in the transformation of our worldview.
It also seems self-explanatory that video games as a creative medium would benefit from players and developers consciously exploring styles of symbolic engagement.
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* There are still a few common-sense models to make use of in interpretation. We’ve discussed the player-character’s role as a mediator of psychic content, an ego or organizing principle. So what is being organized? Levels and stages can be seen as planes of action, the psychic ground, or lattice of context that frames whatever interactions it contains. As in dreams, a light area and a dark area are likely to inspire different evaluations, as are interior vs. exterior environments, etc. The act of consuming objects or enemies for the sake of growth or progress can be handily codified into integration experiences – especially if this integration confers new abilities or areas. Key characters and bosses can be seen as personifications of the themes of their domain, or as constellations of psychological archetypes (whether they are of any particular import is determined subjectively by the player).
