Games That Affected Me Like A Disaster
This is the text from my talk at the wonderful Now Play This festival last year, where I was in august company with Em Short & Merrit Kopas speaking on the theme of Games and Intimacy. Thanks so much to Holly and George for giving me a chance to be part of the festival, and for the opportunity to talk about my relationship with games in a much more personal and confessional way than I ever have before, in a public venue.
“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. [...] But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone [...] A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.” - Kafka
The title of my talk is “games that affected me like a disaster” - but the more I thought about it the more I realised I was stretching the term “disaster”. I wanted to talk about the games that affected me, that made me feel and scraped me raw – in good ways and bad. I think it probably says something more about me that the word that seemed most appropriate to describe being made to feel something is “disaster”. Books do this to me all the time – characters and situations reach out from the pages of the text. Books have wounded me – both in the sense of grief and in the sense of catharsis. There are books I know I will never read again that I refuse to get rid of – they sit on my shelf, more monument than book, a physical reminder of that moment of connection.
That's really what I want to talk about today: a sense of connection. Books connect with me all the time but games so rarely do. Every now and then, not very often at all, a game – an experience – connects with me, acknowledges my humanity. And while each individual experience, each particular moment is meaningful on its own particular terms the thread that runs through them is a sense of intimacy, mediated through a variety of forms.
Let's talk about fear. I think this is probably one of the most common ways in which mainstream videogames manage to stumble into creating intimacy – the intimacy of risking digital death, of failing a challenge in a roomful of peers, of admitting defeat. The first time I remember a game making me feel fear is the Aladdin game for the SNES – the magic carpet level in the cave. If you've played the game you know what I mean. The game – which has up until then been gentle platforming – suddenly asks you to navigate more freely on this magic carpet – the screen autoscrolls faster and faster, waves of lava rise up and reach for you as you swerve to avoid the cave walls closing in. It was a lot for a six year old. It terrified me.
The moment that level loaded up, I'd call my dad in from the other room, hand the controller over to him and tuck myself behind him on the sofa, shouting warnings and covering my eyes when he had a close call. I'd feel a perverse pleasure when he occasionally died and perverse pride when he beat the level on the first try. He never made fun of me for being afraid. He never made me feel like I was being a girl about it – or even if I was – that being a girl about it was a bad thing. He'd hand back the controller – reluctantly – and watch me continue. I never did learn to beat that level, but those times remain some of my abiding memories of my childhood – those shared moments, me, my dad and the Aladdin game – intimacy and connection as an accidental consequence of the game's design.
When I think about my important experiences with videogames, most of them fall into this category – catalysts for emotional or social connections outside of the game, more so than a connection with the game. Games as shared experiences, or things you feel things with rather than things which make you feel. But there are exceptions: I've always loved the Bioware games – though the one which I've played most is the often unfairly maligned Dragon Age: II, and it's because of the characters. I can load up almost any of my – thirty or so? - saves and work out where in the plot I am not through quests but through the progression of my character relationships. I remember my – real-life – partner walking into the room during a particularly fraught emotional conversation with Anders, my romantic interest – and I felt – not embarrassment at being caught out romancing a digital construct but a flare of resentment. I had earned this conversation through friendship and care – he was trusting me – protagonist, player, person – with his truths. It was private. The fact that I had a controller in my hands and he spoke to me from a television screen did not, at that moment, matter. Nor did it matter that my partner had played Dragon Age II before, and probably experienced this very same conversation. Of course it didn't matter. This is the same urge that drives players to recreate multiple endings or particular outcomes in their own playthrough even if they've seen it on youtube – it's different when it's your game. When you've pressed the buttons and chosen the dialogue options. When it's your sweat on the controller. Playing the game is an act of shared creation, and there is nothing more intimate than that.
(Hilariously - every time I replay Dragon Age II I try to romance a different character but I always end up with Anders – it always feels like a betrayal to flirt with anyone else.)
I feel like it would be remiss not to talk about the companion cube a little bit – the companion cube in Portal is often held up as the gold standard for creating an emotional connection in videogames. It's an abstracted companion, a physical object with only one real “expression” - perfect for the player to project onto. And – er spoilers – the big moment where the companion cube is sacrificed, it's tragic and terrible. People happily admit they shed a tear. I have to confess – I didn't cry. Look, I felt bad, okay? I'm not a complete monster – but did I grieve? Did I feel it as a wrenching loss? I'm sorry, I didn't. There's something too ironic and distancing and clever about the companion cube's “death” to make it truly affecting – because it's an inanimate object, we can grieve for it with hipster melodrama. It's always smacked me as slightly insincere.
Real feelings – in my experience anyway – always have an edge of embarrassment. There's something a little bit naff, a little bit uncool, a little bit awkward and unfashionable about real feelings.
Going back to Dragon Age – I was playing Inquisition a few months ago, and ended up going on a date with Cullen – he's an ex-Templar, I'm a mage, so, y'know, if you've played the game you know it's already pretty fraught. So we're walking along the battlements, having this pretty serious, incredibly awkward conversation – for all the fantastical trappings and drama, it's a conversation that feels familiar and true – the underlying questions are familiar anyway: can we really care about each other? Are we brave enough, or stupid enough, to admit that to each other? The music swells in the background, and the characters lean closer together on the screen – and one of their underlings interrupts them with a report. The camera lingers on the embarrassment on your protagonist's face, and I felt it too – the moment's been shattered. The underling is sent away and as your protagonist begins to mumble some excuse so she can get the hell out of there, Cullen turns and kisses you. It surprised me. It charmed me. It felt joyous and delightful and spontaneous and made me smile till I caught myself at it – it felt momentous, because videogames so rarely startle me into a genuine emotional response.
And it was a result of writing and pacing but also the character models – vastly improved over the previous games – the edge of a smile on an NPC's face that doesn't trigger that uncanny valley discomfort. All too often the graphics and attempted realism of videogames actually distance me from them rather than pull me in, but this moment in Inquisition gives me hope – because it is the last thing from spontaneous – it is designed and manufactured and pretty mainstream – but somehow manages to feel as though it is. And I think that part of it is because it's a little awkward, a little silly – it isn't a perfect romance novel moment, with all the edges and imperfections sanded down too smooth.
For all that it's made by a triple-A studio it still feels like it was made by people – the money and production don't quite manage to obscure that. I think that's important. Intimacy necessitates vulnerability – I think it's harder to be vulnerable with something expensive and smooth and corporate and impersonal. Which is why some of the most intimate gaming experiences I've had have been with Twine games – they are often much more directly a dialogue between game-maker and player, often about personal, confessional topics, many dealing with identity, gender, sexuality. If I tried to tell you about all the twine games that affected me we'd be here until day after tomorrow so instead I'll just tell you about With Those We Love Alive by porpentine – one of my favourite games of last year. It's a game about love and power and self-destruction. About the intimacy of oppression. In porpentine's nightmare-fantasy world we can't escape participating in institutional violence, no matter how carefully we make our choices. We're victims and perpetrators and more than each of those labels might imply. Porpentine also asks us – at various key moments in the game – to draw symbols on our bodies to represent particular events and choices. The game makes a tool of the player to pull itself out of a purely digital space, to impinge on the physical. Alice O'Connor wrote a great piece on Rock Paper Shotgun about this, saying that drawing these symbols “is a lark until you realise you’re marking and changing yourself in response to cruel and oppressive things”.
But the fact of the matter is – you've done it to yourself, you're doing it to yourself. While the game illuminated the path, you're the one who chose to walk down it. It's a physical reminder of your own responsibility, your culpability – it makes of it a game mechanic.
The physicality of it makes it feel more human, too, I think. As does the very distinctive and particular lyricism of porpentine's voice. Just like when you're reading a book, it's an engagement with an authorial voice, with another human being's work. They're exposing themselves on the page or screen, and so it's easier to expose yourself in the reading – I think that's why intimacy is so much easier to design and experience in text or live games and physical experiences, because the protections are pulled back, for the performers and the players both.
The first time I realised I wanted to make games was when I saw Punchdrunk's the Masque of the Red Death in 2007 – it's an immersive experience where you are both spectator and participant. You're given plague-doctor masks as you walk in, and you – and everyone else in the audience – wanders around a painstakingly decked out space, weaving in and out of stories, actors brushing past you and entangling you in their scenes without any of the distancing luxury of a stage. My friends and I came out of Masque of the Red Death and spent hours at the pub after swapping stories, sharing experiences – discussing some of the places of overlap, seething with jealousy over some of the more personal, unique stories that some of us were lucky to stumble into. One of my friends got pulled aside for a one-on-one retelling of the Telltale Heart.
A few of us happened to be standing around a room when the clock chimed, and we were ushered into a locked study where a man declaimed the Raven and finished his tale in a swirl of cape and thrown feathers. The six of us in that room felt a sense of connection, of something momentous and shared – even if we hadn't met before, even if we never would again. The game designer part of me knows perfectly well that there were hundreds of people every night that got ushered into the locked study, and had that “unique experience” as well – but the audience member, the player – still felt a sense of specialness, of ownership. It was my personal story within a shared experience – and the fact that it's “uniqueness” was sleight-of-hand didn't actually diminish it. Punchdrunk manufactured intimacy every night – it designed for it. I think it showed me that you could design for serendipity without making it inauthentic – I think that is something that is particularly within the possibility-space of games. Each player makes their own story out of the tools the game provides them – playing a game is an act of creation, even more acutely than reading a book or watching a film.
2007 was a good year for me, as interactive experiences go – that was also the year I experienced Ontroerend Goed's 'The Smile Off Your Face' at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It was almost the inverse of the Punchdrunk experience – I was not part of an audience but entirely alone, outnumbered by performers. Instead of giving me a mask to confer a sense of freedom, to bring me within the world a la Masque of the Red Death, I was blindfolded and put in a wheelchair. I was not allowed to wander, to explore, to self-direct but I was directed, made powerless and vulnerable as I was put through various sensory experiences.
The sound of a cigarette lighter catching – such a familiar and welcome sound to a smoker such as myself – made me flinch back in the dark. Music began to play and I was pulled to my feet and slow danced with a stranger – an actor? Another audience member? Dancing with a stranger in the dark without the benefit of pounding music or alcohol or even the ability to make nervous small talk is strange and unsettling and oddly, painfully intimate – I never saw his face but I remember the sound of his breathing, the scrape of my shoes against the cement floor, nothing else to distract me from the physicality of the thing – the almost-embrace of slow dancing together.
I was put back int the chair and wheeled around again – I had no sense of the scale of the space, how far I had gone. It was a twenty minute experience but time and distance felt dilated somehow. I had to accept that loss of control – it was an experience designed to make me lose control in increments, to accept further and further intimacies until they could crack me open – and they managed it – I ended up lying on a bed with someone whispering their secrets to me, and then they asked me to tell them a regret. Something secret, that I hadn't told anyone else. That I wondered and worried about.
And I should have felt disoriented and vulnerable and under pressure but instead I felt open and honest and unburdened, and I told her a secret I hadn't even known I was keeping. It took me days to be able to describe the show to anyone else – and even now, I'm not sure whether I've done it justice. I never thought I would be able to let go of control, to accept being vulnerable – but the studied progression of the experience, the movement from physical and sensory intimacy to emotional intimacy – created a space for me to feel and be raw. The careful way the show took away my control but not through oppression but through taking responsibility for me – the first time I was pulled to my feet and stumbled and the actor caught me and held me up. They tested my boundaries to show me I could trust them, as much as I was there in that moment they were there with me too, they were there for me.
Punchdrunk and Ontroerend Goed understood that presence is intimate – but the broader lesson for games is I think that participation is intimate. I don't think it's a coincidence that three of the experiences that affected me – With Those We Love Alive, Smile off Your Face, and Masque explicitly play with power-exchange between participants and creators. Game designers, I think, could learn a lot from BDSM etiquette – Merrit Kopas's twine game Consensual Torture Simulator – a game about hurting someone who wants it, should be required reading – it is such a great example of how making and playing should be approached: as a negotiation.
It's strange to me that most games seem to pretend that the player doesn't exist, or rather can only conceive of the player as the originator of a series of prompts and rote responses rather than a resource to be called upon – as players our minds and our bodies and our creativity and the frozen seas of our emotions are waiting to be engaged, to be used. What we make of something is almost always as interesting as the thing itself – but that's a difficult lesson for a designer.
The urge, I think, is to create something whole and hermetically sealed and perfect, but it's impossible for players to get purchase on perfection. To tear it up and let it tear into us. I've been talking about intimacy as an act of trust – but it isn't just about being able to trust the game or game-makers with our playlerly vulnerability. We also need to be able to design games with trust – with trust for our players. Intimacy doesn't work when it's only one way. Those moments of connection, I think, spring from a shared exposure, a willingness to risk failure and silliness and naffness and messiness, because feeling things, truly and deeply, is always, a disaster.
