I was reading over Steven Poole's archives when I saw an article he wrote for Edge Magazine about the ways in which video games have been giving their characters real bodies for the first time. Snake, in Metal Gear Solid 3 can now can be poisoned by his food, continues to hurt until he puts a bandage on his cuts, has to eat, and heals as he rests. Unlike many characters, he seems to have a body, not just an avatar.
This is definitely an interesting step foward in games, but I was going to bring up the broader point that it seems that we have no conception of a body in video games most of the time. Instead, it's always an avatar with data stored inside of it; health, items, ammunition, an alias, but no real sense of an existence that precedes this.
And as we hurtle through the digital age, that we're thinking of ourselves more and more in terms of a conscience that floats around from place to place. After all, we spend a lot of our time on our cell phones, or on the internet, where any sense of our body being tied to our identity is gone. I oftentimes find myself looking in the mirror and then realizing "oh wait, that's me?" So is there not some social implication to playing an online game?
When we start to play a game and get engrossed, our sense of self most definitely changes. Our set of functions becomes the logistics of the game itself. We're more ethereal in our connection to what we're controlling in the game; when I play StarCraft I am as much the marines, battlecruisers, and tanks at my command as I am my body when going through my normal life. At the moment it's all I'm thinking about, and it's how i'm defining my position.
So perhaps it's worth it to think about how much most video games rely on a sense of essence. I think that there's a lot to be added to the experience of a game by enriching the player's sense of existence; give him flaws, give him an itch on his back, give him body fat and dirt under his fingernails. It's a wild guess I admit, but I think that we can add a lot of emotion to games doing this; every art form has a set of aesthetics, and this could be part of our own. I'm talking about the jump from 3d models with "hitpoints" to humans beings capable of being hurt, not damaged; growing, not gaining experience; living and breathing. From there we can also lay off of the mind/body duality: if we can connect the player to the character through a functional body, then the player can experience being the character instead of the character being a subservient representation of the person playing, and this is important if we want to bring the player completely into a different world.
It's all a wild guess, and I admit this isn't my most concise or well written entry, so send some comments and I'll be happy to discuss. My general point though is that we need to give the player a real sense of existence to move games forward, not just an aethereal essence.
4 comments:
Though increasing authenticity in the gaming experience is interesting, I'd caution about taking it the wrong way. Part of the fun of games is how they are not like real life - you respawn as soon as you die, you can still move even when hit, etc. A couple years ago, Noah and I were joking about having a meter that, when full, would require that you either go to the bathroom immediately or take a major penalty to movement. Sometimes, games let us escape the itchiness of our backs.
Well, I agree with a lot of what you say. We should not be having dump-o-meters for action games, that's silly and, well, tasteless.
For the kinds of game we're talking about, adding a "body" in the sense that I put it would not be a good idea; nor am I suggesting that we make games where you have to take a shit, I can't imagine one game where that works out, it was tedious at best in The Sims. On the other hand, for something like a new generation of RPGs, I think that we can't focus on character development very well if we're just dealing with moving avatars that talk, those little quirks may be essential to giving more of a sense of being human.
I'm haunted by your comments on the dislocation of the ego. Lacan talks about the child's moment of self-identification when he firsts recognizes himself in the mirror -- the first differentiation of the "ego" from what was previously a pure haze of experience -- and sees the mirror-image as an idealized self.
But perhaps today, instead, we project that idealized self outward onto various electronically-communicated personas, while the mirror presents us only with a fragile shell of sorts. This has been troubling me recently. How is it possible that the person I see in the mirror is contained in the same self that, say, creates a particular image on facebook, or livejournal, or any message boards? The faces I present seem contradictory, irreconcilable.
I'd be lying if I said I understand Lacan, though.
How pertinent that as soon as I posted the above, it took me to a prompt from LiveJournal, confirming if I wanted to "pass my identity" to Blogger.
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