Imagination In Games

In a recent article for Offworld, Jim Rossignol writes about how the experiences offered by games are broadening as they become more familiar and more popular among researchers and educators. He mentions Korsakovia, a Half-Life 2 mod which is an interpretation of Korsakoff's syndrome, a brain disorder characterized by confusion and severe memory problems, and makes the point that games (and game engines) can provide interesting and evocative experiences without the constraint of being "fun," much as books and movies can be appreciated without "fun" being an appropriate description. Quoting: "Is this collective imagining of games one of the reasons why they tend to focus on a narrow band of imagination? Do critics decry games because games need, more than any other media, to be something a group of people can all agree on? Isn't that why diversions from the standard templates are always met with such excitement or surprise? Getting a large number of creative people to head out into the same imaginative realm is a monumental task, and it's a reason why game directors like to riff off familiar films or activities you can see on TV to define their projects. A familiar movie gets everyone on the same page with great immediacy. 'Want to know what this game is going to be like? Go watch Aliens, you'll soon catch up.' We are pushed into familiar, well-explored areas of imagination. However, there are also teams who are both exploring strange annexes and also creating games that are very much about imaginative exploration. These idiosyncratic few do seem like Alan Moore's 'exporters,' giving us something genuinely new to investigate and explore. Once the team has figured out how to drag the thing back from their imaginations, so we get to examine its exotic experiences — like the kind we can't get at home."

Comments

like Oddworld or Psychonauts

[TheBilgeRat]

I think this just goes to speak to the fact that the video game industry is thriving in much the same way the film industry thrives. Video games can immerse you in a plot or character in a different more interactive way.

Re:like Oddworld or Psychonauts

[Keill]

But the computer games industry as a whole ISN'T thriving in the same way as every other entertainment industry, YET.

The reason is simple - the industry isn't yet mature enough to cater to the entire market as a whole with a basic quality product. (Some of the products released today, I wouldn't even count as 'basic'). At the minute, it's basically catering to some large areas of the market, and trying it's best to find ways of targeting some others, but since it's still trying to work things out for what works and what doesn't work in a computer game, it's very hit-and-miss.

Unfortunately, since it's following the same basic path as the other industries did, (though with a couple of shortcuts available, such as the internet, which the other industries didn't have at the same time in their period of evolution), it'll take a decade or two for it to fully happen.

What this is talking about is simply that computer games have got a lot more potential than some people realise, which, unfortunately, just means that they'll take even longer to fully mature.

I know some people will (probably) try and argue that the computer games industry is mature - but they're wrong - PARTS of the industry have and are maturing faster than others, but it still has a long way to go to catch up with every other form of entertainment - (and even then, those industries are still evolving too).

The problem with computer games, is that people want the industry to evolve faster than it's able to - as I said, it's going to take a decade or two for it to get to where, say, the film or maybe the music industry is TODAY - that is, assuming of course, that some of the major players in the industry ALLOW it to mature...

(I've found maybe another reason computer games haven't fully matured yet, too, (because of a paper I've been working on). It's become apparent to me that some people don't even fully understand what a computer-game actually IS - (I'm working on a paper talking about cRPG's) - but again, that's a symptom of the way some computer games have evolved and developed, and since it is also a consequence of the market and industry not being mature, it almost ended up going round in circles...

(Imagine that the only book trilogies that exist are all fantasy, such as Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Then imagine that some people, because of that, although they enjoy and prefer the longer and more developed story that trilogy's present, because only Fantasy stories are currently told in that format, they then say that fantasy is therefore defined as a trilogy...).

This is what's happening when a lot of people I've run into, (including some in the industry), who define cRPG's by the type of story they have to TELL, (i.e. plot, narrative etc.). The problem is that story telling is completely separate from gameplay - (which is why we can tell any type of story with any type of game - even two different games with the same story, or the same game with two different stories. The problem these people have, is that the sort of story they want to be told in a game, only seems to exist in cRPG's. And THAT is a consequence of the market not being fully mature... (Imagine a 60-hour racing game, with full narrative/plot/characterization etc. - would it be a cRPG? NO - it would just be longer, more developed racing game, UNLESS, it's also built around the game-play of an RPG too, (which is possible). Again, it's the game-play that matters for games - even cRPG's, though you'd be surprised at the people who've said that cRPG's are an exception to that... :-/)).

Re:like Oddworld or Psychonauts

[Planesdragon]

More to the article's point, I think that it's a bad thing that "genre" in gaming means "style of play mechanics,"

Video games are GAMES. They are not movies, or stories, or paintings. They are meant to be picked up and played by real people for fun. As such, it is entirely appropriate that their market distinction is not "type of story", but rather "type of game."

Re:like Oddworld or Psychonauts

[Kelbear]

I think players want realistic games to be realistic and stylistic games to be stylistic.

Katamari damacy and Okami have very distinctive presentations that aren't realistic at all. Beyond Good and Evil had fantastic art design but used acartoon style.

Like the OP was saying about immersion, the game should suck the player in. Perhaps the problem for many games is that they're all trying to be realistic, but the bar for realism has already been set absurdly high by all the expensive AAA titles. Katamari's blocky whimsical design isn't bashed for being realistic because it was never intended to be. Everything in the game looked like it "belonged" in the setting.

Games that try to present a realistic atmosphere end up getting judged by the likes of Gears of War and Crysis, while a games with a unique art design aren't subjected to that standard. Perhaps dev studios could save a lot of money by intentionally avoiding any comparison to realism?

Umm...

[Muckluck]

There is sort of a "duh" quality to the research here. Your brain is a "use it or lose it" type of organ. The more you use your brain and the more you use it in different ways, the better it gets at operating optimally. Games and education can be a good fit if the designers of educational games can manage to make something fun - not just a computerized version of a classroom. Use the media in a way in which it is already successful.

Maybe combine Grand Theft Auto and education by making the player add up fines or the value of the drugs he just stole...

Re:Umm...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, there is definitely a big opportunity with that because there will be people out there that want to play these types of games. If nothing else going in this direction is a nice change of pace and could lead to some new more creative ideas being incorporated into more mainstream games. For example some of these elements could replace the tendency of those repetitive puzzles that are used so often as a crutch in rpgs.

Re:Umm...

[Bat Country]

In a way, you can argue that the Grand Theft Auto games are already educational games. The physics are unreal, but real enough to give young people a pretty good idea of what is a completely stupid idea when driving. When you drive fast in the rain, your ability to handle the vehicle is diminished to a huge extent. This makes you drive more cautiously. If you're driving a heavier vehicle, it won't turn as sharply and will have difficulty cornering. Tall vehicles are not suitable for sharp turns unless you enjoy being crushed and burned.

An 11-year old girl knew to pull her parents from their car when it had rolled by climbing out of a broken window because she knew from GTA that cars can catch fire when they roll upside down.

While playing GTA, you learn quickly how to recover from a skid, how to turn an uncontrolled spin into a powerslide, how to avoid rolling your vehicle, how to safely control a skid to avoid a collision and what sort of collisions are least damaging if you cannot avoid a collision. These skills do translate to real life - although I'd never before regained control of an actual vehicle which loses traction on ice or gravel, I've spared myself a severe accident on three occasions (once at a 100 foot long patch of black ice, once on a long stretch of frozen ice which looked like snow-covered pavement, and once when run off a mountain road by a logging truck driver who passed illegally) thanks in part to the combat driving skills learned in games like GTA and Interstate '76.

Just because we're not learning how to be more civilly responsible and urbane people by playing these games does not mean that the skills we learn while playing them are not valid, nor does it mean that nothing is being learned at all.

Re:Umm...

[Pinckney]

An 11-year old girl knew to pull her parents from their car when it had rolled by climbing out of a broken window because she knew from GTA that cars can catch fire when they roll upside down.

Unfortunately, that's almost exactly the wrong thing to do. Cars rarely catch fire. Rolling over isn't particularly likely to cause a fire, particularly compared to other forms of crash. If there are signs of fire, by all means, get the injured out immediately. But rollovers can cause very serious neck and spine injuries that can be exacerbated by some well meaning individual trying to move you. Leave that to the paramedics.

No mystery

[Bat Country]

It's no mystery that people don't need games to be fun in order to appreciate them - people play games because they satisfy a need. What that need is depends on the person. When I was working graveyard shift and all of my friends and roommates were on the day shift, I'd play MMORPGs on my days off just to have somebody to talk to in the hours I was awake. I wasn't necessarily enjoying playing the game so much as I was just happy that there was somebody awake who was worth talking to.

Some people play games not to enjoy but to fulfill a need for competition. They may get a thrill out of it, but it's in all likelihood more scratching an itch than it is relaxing and having play time. Casual games have been taking off in popularity because they are part of a subset of games which actually do have to be fun and relaxing.

I'd argue that most AAA game titles that have come out in the last decade have not just been simple fun, in that they were not designed to promote relaxed and enjoyable play, but to drive competition, to require significant effort to improve your skills, to require constant learning and adaptation (even in the most primitive shooters) and to (for most action games) attempt to engage the player in a fiction.

The parallels being drawn between movies, books and games are definitely not baseless; video games serve the same purposes as the classes of fiction in which are rooted. They seek to inspire wonder, fear, excitement, anger and righteous indignation... Ultimately, they serve much of the same purpose as the heroic epics of ancient times; to get people excited about the idea of things that people other than them get to do, while at the same time showing them the sort of awful crap happens to those heroes. The significant difference between video games and epic tales of heroes is that in video games, the hero seldom dies at the end (with a few spectacularly successful exceptions). This remains rewarding to the audience because of their increased level of participation in the myth.

Also, video games serve a very real purpose by allowing a player, albeit fleetingly, to be a hero and make meaningful changes in their environment with a laissez-faire which is not to be found anywhere in the civilized world. A man stuck in a dead-end job in some rural region, so long as he can afford a computer and internet access, can for a brief time every night become an epic hero in a world full of his peers. A child who finds himself alone and bored in the inner city, so long as his parents can afford $15 at a garage sale can be a young boy with a sword who saves a princess and an entire world.

It certainly can't be generalized to the experience of most people playing most games that they're being engaged on an artistic level and are having some deep-seated psychological or emotional need fulfilled by their video gaming experience, but it can certainly be established that not every game is played for fun, and not every game is designed to be fun.

Re:Two minuses make a plus

[tehcyder]

Wouldn't it be interesting to get someone with Korsakoff's syndrome to play Korsakovia? Maybe the two would cancel each other out and everything would make sense.

And maybe a game about retards would make you a genius.