Can we feel empathy in a video game? In his essay Adamant Bodies. The Avatar-Body and the Problem of Autoempathy, Adriano D’Aloia argues that we hardly can because of the relationship we need to maintain with our game avatar. The player is foremost busy in dealing with his intra-subjectivity, “the mediation between the actual user’s Self and the virtual avatar’s Self”. There is a lack of Otherness. The player’s hyperactivity, at the same time enunciator, character and spectator, makes it even more difficult for him to establish an empathic relation with the characters of the video game. Paradoxically, passivity allows the spectator to fully mirror the emotions coming from a movie, which is very different from the kind of involvement required by video games.

The Gomba’s life video (2007) by Kei Houraku illustrates very well this saturation of the Self in video games. In Super Mario games, the screen always follows the hero, making him the centre of the universe; we find it ‘natural’. His enemies, the Gombas, don’t offer any meaningful Otherness. By choosing to lock the screen to two Gombas, Kei Houraku’s artwork exposes the hyperactivity and egocentrism of Super Mario; it ‘denaturalizes’ it for us.

A Gomba’s life, Kei Houraku, 2007

KarmaPhysics < Elvis (2004) by Brody Condon is a “modification of the bloody science fiction first-person-shooter computer game Unreal 2003. [...] The convulsions of Elvis are controlled by the original game’s Karma Ragdoll real-time physics system, generally used to simulate the physical dynamics of game character death”. The application of this death algorithm to the avatars of Elvis is disturbing, despites its banality in Unreal 2003 and similar games. Our empathy for Elvis could be partly due to the absence of any interactivity, or of any avatars standing between us and him…

KarmaPhysics < Elvis, Brody Condon, 2004

Did you ever experience empathy in a video game? And if you feel sometimes that life is like a giant game, does it imply that you can’t feel empathy for others?

Next theme: Magic Circle in video games

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Where does the video game end and the real life begin? With the arrival of simulators, augmented reality and social networking games, frontiers becomes harder to define. And so is the magic circle that separates the fantasy world from the outside world. But is there really a real, outside world that would be exempt of any fantasies? And could video games be completely isolated from their cultural context? Is the concept of magic circle not outdated? In his essay Spatial Typologies of Games, Alex Wade suggests instead to locate video games using the three spaces of Henri Lefebvre: perceived space (how we interpret space), conceived space (space of science and rationality) and lived space (the space where we live). He adds another dimension, digital space. Video games are multidimensional in his model, and need to be situated on the four axes.

Best…flame war…Ever (2007) by Eddo Stern is a conversation recorded on a forum of the EverQuest video game. It is rendered using digital masks inspired by the universe of the game. The conversation and its staging, using an epic soundtrack and digital masks, blur the frontier between the universe of EverQuest and the ‘outside’ world.

Best…flame war…Ever, Eddo Stern, 2007

The Ego-shooter installation (2008) by Sonja-Vanessa Schmitz mixes virtual and tactile reality. Its hand-made game-suit looks more virtual than those in first-person-shooter games. Interior and decorative elements are layered with a 3D replicated environment so that it becomes difficult to differentiate the two universes. Here, lived space is a by-product of digital space.

Ego-shooter, Sonja-Vanessa Schmitz, 2008

What is your reaction to this blurring between digital and material spaces? Do you embrace it and take both the positive and negative aspects, or do you instead resist it by defining clear delimitations between games and the rest of your life?

See also the annex discussion by Gabriele Ferri, Question Blocks: How to make two worlds collide?

Next theme: Chronology in video games

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By Mathias Jansson

How old is Super Mario and how long is a life in videogames? Mario Gerosa and Jennifer Grace-Dawson’s paper Chronology and Historicization in Virtual Worlds and Video Games begins with what seems to be an obvious statement: “Time in virtual worlds is not the same as in real life: in virtual worlds there is a different experience of time.”  If we read a book, see a movie or play a videogame we can experience years of history in the realm of a couple of hours. The real time is in the narrative structure crunched into a room-time that is moving a lot faster than our own time, jumping from event to event and skipping the transport holes, i.e. the boring parts.

The game design group Molleindustria developed in 2010 the game Run Jesus Run: aka the 10 second gospel.  In 10 seconds, you have to crawl out from the cradle, run to save the world and be crucified.  Most scholars would say that Jesus was around 30 years old when he was crucified. So how can 30 years of a lifetime be compressed into 10 second and still be meaningful for the player? The answer is that we have heard so many times the story of Jesus that we can easily identify the most important events in the short game, and fill in the gaps of the history. Another important characteristic of the game is the repetition of time, in one minute we can play the game six times. We can learn something new each time and in the end make it to the crucifixion before times up. In real life you would only have one try to succeed.

Run Jesus Run: aka the 10 second gospel, Molleindustria, 2010

In Jason Rohres’ game Passage (2007) you also play a linear game of life. In takes five minutes to play the game i.e live a life, moving your character from the left corner, symbolising the beginning of life, to the right corner of the screen, the dawn of man, death. Rohrer calls his game a “memento mori”, i.e. “think that you soon will die”. You only need five minutes to play the game and reflect over the shortness of life, but nothing special happens, so the minutes seem very long to the player. Still, if you play the game one hundred times and live one hundred times as the game character, you would only have spent a normal working day of your real life.

Passage, Jason Rohres, 2007

Videogames can not only provide us hours of entertainment. Like any forms of art, they can also change lives. Does it matter if a videogame takes 10 seconds or 10 days to affect our lives?

Next theme: Narratology vs. Ludology in video games

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What is the essence of a game? Is it its set of rules or the story it tells? This is put in simple terms the academic debate that dresses ludologists against narratologists. Most of video games have both, rules and a narrative. But what about games like Tetris? Do they also tell a story? In his essay, Bridging the Narratology-Ludology Divide. The Tetris Case, Jack Post argues that Tetris does, at the condition we extend the concept of the narrative. According to Roland Barthes, “Narratives of the world are numberless and distributed amongst very different substances (languages, gestures, images) and present in many genres to which we could of course add computer games.”

In Animalanima (2004), a game-poems for children designed by Chris Joseph and a group of young artists, poems take many forms: textual, pictorial and rule-based. Playing the game is at first disturbing, because we are not accustomed to play with rules the same way we play with language, such as in poetry. But we end up allowing ourselves this pleasure, thanks to the light-hearted spirit of the game.

Animalanima, Chris Joseph and others, 2004

I would describe Ergon / Logos, an unidentified game object (2009) by Paolo Pedercini, as an interactive poem on the experience of playing with video games. The poem makes many references to semiotics and tells us the story behind the game, bridging in a sense narratology with ludology.

Ergon / Logos, an unidentified game object, Paolo Pedercini, 2009

And you, what do video games tell you?

Next theme: Immersion in video games

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By Mathias Jansson

In the paper The Collapse and Reconstitution of the Cinematic Narrative: Interactivity vs. Immersion in Game Worlds, Otto Lehto wonders what a game is and comes with the following observation: “The game narrative needs to be ‘written’ (played) before it can be ‘read’ (interpreted). Games provide fluidity of interactive immersion: the interface as the place of the merger between the player and the game.”

RPG Paint (2004) by Guthrie Lonergan is a videogame that fits into Lehto’s description. It is a simple game, knight fighting the dark forces mixed with the interface from the Paint software. The player can not only fight with his enemies, he can also change the graphics during the game play by using tools from the Paint iconography: a rubber, a hand and a bucket. In that aspect, the RPG Paint game recalls me of simulation games such as The Sims, in which you are creating the game meanwhile you are playing. It means in semiotic terms that the player is both author and reader at the same time. In literature, Brecht talks about the “Verfremdungesffekt”, when you break the epic illusion on stage. We could also mention meta-literature, when the process of writing is visible and questioned in the narration. In the same way RPG Paint is problematic when it comes to the immersion for the player. How can he simultaneously be absorbed by the narration while he is creating it?

RPG Paint, Guthrie Lonergan, 2004

The artist Robert Overweg calls himself a virtual photographer, because he is taking photos from the virtual worlds he is visiting. But is it the artist Robert Overweg who takes the pictures? Isn’t it his avatar, his virtual alias that sees trough the camera lens? The artist is controlling the avatar and is aware that he is moving in a virtual world, does he experience total immersion? Probably not, because in Overweg’s works The end of the virtual world (2010) and Glitches (2010), the virtual worlds appear to us (and to the avatar) with glitches and errors that threaten to break the illusion. Game restrictions are also taken into pictures, such as the borders from where the avatar can’t go any further. To make a thought experiment, imagine one second that humans travel through space and after Pluto find there is an invisible barrier they could not pass. If humankind found such an invisible barrier after Pluto, would we still believe that our reality was real?

The facade (from half-life 2), Glitches, Robert Overweg, 2010

Next theme: Intelligibility in video games

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How can we make sense of a video game? In his essay, Manic Miner under the Shadow of the Colussus: a Semiotic Analysis of the Spatial Dimension in Platform Video Games, Joaquin Siabra-Fraile argues it is thanks to “pragmatic net of objects”. What can be done with objects of a video game determine the logical space of actions. The regularity of that logical space, or system, enables meaning. Immersion is the acceptation by the player of that net of logical conditions; it is the only way for him to make sense of the goal and to complete the video game.

The real-time audio/video Mountain (2009), made by the artist duo Depart at the occasion of their Chukwa’s Approach performance, feels like a video game. Time is counted and flying objects are targeted. The comparison with video games might be far stretched, but they both share an obsession of the targeting. It is the cognitive process that most video games use to engage players with the objects of the game.

The Chukwa’s Approach 1 – The Mountain, artist duo Depart, 2009

The Carmageddon data-bending (2005) by Tim Drage (Cementimental) is a journey to chaos, where objectification and pragmatic net of objects can’t exist anymore. The machinima messes with the objects of the Carmageddon video game, “the player car is mutated into a jagged mass of mangled polygons which fill almost the whole screen, and becomes a moving virtual abstract sculpture.” The experiment is accompanied by the harsh noise of Cementimental, the combination give us a feel of what virtual worlds could look like if their creators didn’t restrict game representations to what we humans can apprehend.

Carmageddon data-bending, Tim Drage (Cementimental), 2005

Are pragmatic nets of object the only conditions of intelligibility in video games? What else do you need to make sense of a game?

See also the annex discussion by Dario Compagno What is a game world? Doors, keys and… good legs.

Next theme: Rules in video games

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By Mathias Jansson

A key characteristic of a videogame could be that it has rules. You have to follow certain rules to succeed in the game. The rules could be as simple as in Pong, hit the ball, or as complex as in Civilization, build an empire from scratch. In his essay Interpretive Cooperation and Procedurality. A Dialogue between Semiotics and Procedural Criticism, Gabriele Ferri describes the cooperation between players and rules as follow: “Users’ cooperation with an interactive matrix generates a ludic discursive universe inside the TIAG (this-is-a-game) layer in which gaming interactions are acknowledged to be fictional. When the focalization is shifted inside it, users abide to TIAG interpretive rules and temporarily set aside encyclopaedic knowledge of the world – not being surprised, for example, by the height of Super Mario’s jumps.”

But what if the videogame suddenly changes, mixes or breaks its own rules during the game play?  Well, if it would happen in the real world, we would call it anarchy, but when it happens in fiction we often call it art. If I would pick one very simple definition of what art is, it would be breaking the rules. The fundament for all art is that it questions and experiments with the rules of reality. In that perspective you could regard the videogame ROM CHECK FAILS (2008) by Farbs as an art piece. In ROM CHECK FAILS, classic arcade games such as Pac-Man, Tetris and Super Mario are mashed-up, the rules and scenarios are randomly changing, making the game nearly impossible to play. It’s like a virus has hit your hard drive and mixed up all your games into a one, or perhaps I would say an artist has hit your hard drive? The title refers to a type of system failure that happens when corrupted code is loaded into the computer’s memory. The rules of the ludic universe are constantly changing so the player cannot any longer recognize the “this-is-a-game” layer and needs instead to shift to a “this-must-be-art” mode.

ROM CHECK FAIl, Farbs, 2008

Garry’s mod (2004) by Garry Newman is another example of a videogame that challenges the rules of the game genre. The game is described as a sandbox game. Sandbox is a safe area on your computer where you can run and test new software without harming the computer. Garry’s mod has the interface of a First-Person Shooter, but instead of killing enemies and blowing buildings apart, you have the possibility to create your own objects and worlds. Instead of the deconstruction of worlds, which is the common rule of First Person Shooters games, you are constructing worlds, and become in a sense the creator, an artist that investigates and questions the rules of the videogame, creating your own game universe.

Garry’s mod, Garry Newman, 2004

It would be too simplistic to conclude that if videogames have rules, those breaking rules should be called art. But next time you play a videogame, you could ask yourself: “Am I playing by the rules or against the rules?”

Next: What is a game world? Doors, keys and… good legs

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by Dario Compagno, Ph.D. in Semiotics at the University of Siena, Italy

This is the introduction of an annex discussion to the Semiotics of Video Games exhibition. It was lead by Dario Compagno on facebook in October 2010. Please visit the discussion page to see the reactions, and don’t hesitate to post yours.

Computer games are often set into small worlds that resemble our own. The intelligibility of the game lays also in the fact of grasping its physics at a glance, and on the fact that we recognise what is “alive” from what is just an obstacle, and obstacles from what is a simple decoration. We need to immediately recognise what is “bad” (usually what we should avoid or fight) and what is “good” (especially the level’s goal).

We should consider the “logical” structure behind the game. This structure has to be made visible to players through the small world’s objects and characters. Keys and doors are prototypical objects that immediately “show” the game’s logical structure. Whenever a player finds a keys, s/he knows that a door is hidden somewhere; and a closed door “is waiting” to be opened with the right key. Platforms are a main game genre that has somehow infected with its logics all or most of the other genres. In platforms the role of everything is straightforward. Another classical game genre are puzzle games, in which the logical structure for completing a level may be highly elaborated, but this often turns the game small world into nothing but a decoration (and so losing all the advantages of immediate recognition that a good set has).

I would like to launch a discussion about two games that question the straightforward nature of platforms, and make us ask what a game world really is, by putting to the surface its logical structure: Shift (2008) by Armor Games and Continuity (2009) by students from the Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg.

Shift, Armor Games, 2008

Continuity, students from the Chalmers University of Technology, 2009

Next: Questions blocks – How to make two worlds collide?

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by Gabriele Ferri, PhD student in Semiotics at the University of Bologna, Italy

This is the introduction of an annex discussion to the Semiotics of Video Games exhibition. It was lead by Gabriele Ferri on facebook in September 2010. Please visit the discussion page to see the reactions, and don’t hesitate to post yours.

Every video game in the Super Mario franchise features “question blocks”, special elements releasing power-ups when hit. Artist/activist Posterchild published in 2006 the instructions for building their real-life counterparts, asking readers to decorate their surroundings with them. While it was a successful project commenting on public spaces (spaces often used for advertising and not for playing or socializing), a few abandoned cardboard blocks also caused a bomb scare.

Locative and alternate-reality games have already cast some doubts over the idea of the Magic Circle, introduced by Johan Huizinga to separate playful and serious activities, and a trend in interaction design is to make game-worlds collide with the real one. Jane McGonigal argued for using games to highlight and tackle serious real-world issues (http://worldwithoutoil.org/metaabout.htm).

If the Magic Circle is dissolved, will our lives become more playful or will the flow go the other way round, bringing chores to game worlds? Which designs can create better game worlds and a better real one?

Questions blocks, Posterchild, 2006

Go back to the Semiotics of Video Games homepage

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References:

• “Computer Games, between Text and Practice“, edited by Dario Compagno and Patrick Coppock
• “Gamer Theory” by McKenzie Wark, read few quotations from his book.
• “Persuasive Games” by Ian Bogost, read few quotations from his book
• “Video Game Spaces” by Michael Nitsche, read few quotations from his book.