Culture Clash

(May 2004)

Paradox City

Balancing emotion and logic

Longtime industry vet Ernest Adams gave a fabulous lecture on the tail end of this year's Game Developers Conference titled "The Philosophical Roots of Game Design". Heavily attended, it was one of the more enlightening and esoteric pontifications of the GDC, resonantly defining the central and unique juxtaposition video games present: that they are intensely logical constructs which deliver a profound emotional impact. So are games mathematical processes or emotional inspirations?

Everything combines rational and emotional characteristics to a point - poetry involves grammar, foot, and meter; still, it's mostly about the artistic vision of the poet and its impact on the reader. The same goes for painting, filmmaking, sculpture, whatever - but the difference is that the art form is consumable and potentially meaningful regardless of the logical element. You wouldn't find a good poem less stimulating if you learned that the writer had gotten his feet and meters wrong. But if a game developer bungles the logical chunk of creation, the game won't work. On such occasions, the emotional ignition is unavailable.

There are some who would say that serves as elegant proof that games are not art, since a "broken" one can't work its magic while broken art can (the Venus de Milo has no arms and still looks great). Others dodge the question by claiming that games are entertainment, and that entertainment is not art. But for the sake of argument let's assume that they are art, composed more or less equally of algebra and joy. This makes them quite unique. Other art forms don't mix the rational and the emotional so evenly, and an examination of the subject may provide some clues as to what the medium's future might be.

The logical portion of video games - the code, the geometry, the practical aspects of their construction - has been a widely discussed subject pretty much since Space War . But only in the last few years has emotional game development become a swanky enough issue for scholarly cogitation. David Freeman's book Creating Emotion in Games will likely be remembered by game archaeologists as the bridged Rubicon of the emotional movement, the manifesto - if not the first, certainly the best, the most well-conceived, and the one that sparked interest in the science of enhancing the emotional impact of games. Building on this, newer titles like Rules of Play tie the emotioneering aspect in with topical design theory.

Presumably some people could honestly say that they've never experienced an affecting reaction to a narrative game beyond liking or disliking it, being entertained or irritated. Whether these individuals are very callous or simply missed Wing Commander 3 is anyone's guess - but in fairness it's necessary to acknowledge that not everyone sees games as particularly sentimental. And certainly even the emotioneers freely admit that the feelings begat by today's games aren't exactly glittering miracles of sensation. But the potential of such looms, assuming the emotioneering camp gets its way and comes to dominate the philosophy of narrative game design. And it seems that gamers and developers alike want to see that happen.

The significance of games as an approachable form of emotional outlet is only now starting to be appreciated. As mass-consumption of games grows, so will the demand for increasingly mature, satisfying emotional game material. That is critically important in the evolution of games as an artistic medium, because there is one attack on games that the industry cannot easy respond to: that video games are largely the fetishistic reveries of adolescent boys, dealing with protection, rescue, vengeance, or other similarly GI-Joe fundamentals.

Product is changing for the better in that regard, but the evolution is slow and often painstaking. Even Ico , which many would call the current zenith of console-based emotioneering, the poster child whose apogee most other games can only dream of reaching, is about a boy protecting a girl. Game narrative can do better than that - and has (infrequently) on the more mature consumptive platform of the PC. Alas, titles like Thief and System Shock don't get a lot of credit despite an embarrassment of outside-of-the-box emotioneering.

Film study was born, and the medium became accepted as an art, because some exceptionally gifted early viewers looked at the flickering images and realized that they could make people feel rather than just see . Early movies didn't do that; they just showed off the cool new technology. It fell to the second generation to mold what had been called a medium "without a future" into one of the newer entertainment art forms. In fact, film is the perfect defense against those who would argue that "entertainment" is not "art" - there is room for both in each of these media.

The evolution of emotionally compelling video games will be different, or at least it has been up to this point, chiefly because of the presence of a large dollop of mathematica mixed with the sugar and spice. There is no doubt that technology drives this industry, and in so doing also drives the creative process. So rather than tomorrow's game developers doing what today's could not, today's game developers take prevalidated technology and glue it to an emotional foundation. Half-Life proved what can be done with an engine that had until then essentially been a technology demo. So did Deus Ex . BioWare has fashioned a graceful empire of narrative on the dice-and-chart-ridden aggravation of roleplaying's Byzantine past.

Games already make us feel something, and tomorrow's games will make us feel more. Emotioneering in games is the next big thing, the philosophical equivalent of going 3D. Technology has had its turn at the revolutionary pulpit; future game development theory will sing the songs of the heart, not the compiler.