Expressionist Gameplay

[Shane Liesegang]

Let's see if Google properly splits this off into a separate thread... if not, apologies for clogging the sticky thread!

Thanks for linking, Cameron. "Indexicality" is a fantastic term and a concept I want to explore more now. This kind of thing came up when we were working with the author of our novel tie-ins -- we told him to portray the Imperial City as having tens of thousands of residents (even though Oblivion only showed about 50) because the "real" Imperial City is, well, a real city. Transmediation has an interesting effect on what can be properly represented.

(I'm also a fan of the typographical pun you pulled off, even though my 11th grade English teacher hated that I made a point that something was "a turning point not only for Hamlet, but for Hamlet." )

On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 9:47 PM, Cameron Kunzelman <cameron....@gmail.com> wrote:

So Shane just introduced himself in the introduction thread as a designer and an avid reader of games writing stuff, but I think he undersells himself as a person who writes about games. The newest post of his on "expressionistic gaming" really gives us a good starting point to think about questions of representations in games. More specifically: his point about expectations of "real" Whiterun in "real" Tamriel is sort of a fascinating take on what we could think of as a kind of video game indexicality--is there a thing, a real, that video games are showing us a weird imprint of? Is Skyrim this weird fragment of Skyrim.

It is a weird question, but I think there are interesting questions to be said about the "real" nature of unreal spaces (MMO studies are probably doing this work really, really well already).

[Cameron Kunzelman]

Charles Sander Peirce is sort of boring to read but he was really brilliant in his splitting up of signs into three parts (you can read a long thing on him here). The media studies/basic stuff is that signs are either:

1. Indexes--an imprint of something that existed once and the sign itself is a literal index of that thing having existed. The classic example is a thumb print; it is a sign that can only be made by the presence of an object in the world. There is also a secondary use of index as a shifter, as an index finger, that points out that something was there, that says "look."

2. Icons--a sign that looks like the thing that it is meant to represent. Hieroglyphics are sort of the go-to here; wheat looks like wheat.

3. Symbols--they are purely contextual, they have infinitely shifting meaning, they aren't attached to anything in the real. So, for example, letters of the alphabet or numbers are purely symbolic.

Not meaning to get all "look at this knowledge, bro" but I think that these differentiations are cool when you take video games into account. Can we talk about games, and game spaces, having an indexical relationship to an imaginary? I don't really know; is matching up to a thought-of world an indexical relationship? These are rhetorical, but they are also REALLY COOL questions I think.

[Kaitlin Tremblay]

It's kind of funny that indexicality got brought up here. I've been thinking a lot about it in relation to video games recently, because I was going through my old film notes for an article I'm working on about video games as memory and how nostalgia works in this particular medium. My professor taught us film as memory, and I've been thinking about how this plays out in video games (since games play with images and representations of character/society in a much more interactive way than film does). So we lament a loss of indexicality and authenticity of images in our ever-increasing digitalized lives, but how does this play out in a medium (like video games) that is entirely representational and not playing to a notion of "true" authenticity? Is there more :truth" in these representations when they're more free to explore concepts?

 

I know this isn't exactly a response to your example of Imperial City, Shane, but I think that's a great example: how do we represent something appropriately in different mediums and still convey a level of honesty? And more importantly, what does it say that an honest representation differs from medium to medium.

[Cameron Kunzelman]

I gotta do some research, but I wonder if there has been much work done on indexicality and CGI. 

[Mollusk Gone Bad]

Never read Piece, but I I read the long thing, and both in that and your response I'm getting hung up on whether those three parts are intended to be mutually exclusive. If not, I'm not sure talking about a purely indexical relationship to the imaginary makes sense. And if so, is it possible for a sign to represent another sign? Or even a set of signs? Because I can maybe conceptualize a model in which signs to imaginary spaces are nested packets of references. The order or hierarchy could work in a few ways (for instance, the "game" is an index to an array of both icons and symbols, many in turn representing another set of symbols or indices, eventually terminating in a hybrid set of objects)

This may just be a blind alley based on my own misreading/lack of exposure, though.

[Kaitlin Tremblay]

I think what's fascinating for me to think about here is what is being attained in the play between reference and referent. The idea of indexicality with games like Mortal Kombat 2, for example, where they used stop-motion on models/fighters is apparent, especially with fighting games: in this thought the moves have a sort of photoshopped indexical mark.

 

I've been thinking a lot about realism in video games and indexicality, too. I prefer a super stylized aesthetic to something photorealistic because for me this feels truer to the feeling/thoughts the game is expressing. I guess whenever I think of indexicality I'm super hung up on how it relates to questions of authenticity. And for me, stylized art feels more authentic than verbatim photorealistic art (it's why I prefer Tim Sale's art the most in comic books, for example). But this might also be my own windmill to tilt at here, so sorry if I'm single-minded, guys!

[Mark Duval]

Do you think it's because if it attempts to be too realistic in appearance it falls into the uncanny valley? 

[Kaitlin Tremblay]

Yes, absolutely. And because (and forgive me for how bad this is going to sound because it already sounds awful in my head), I think that too realistic representations are missing something in their efforts to be accurate. Stylization and exaggerations have the potential to offer more because they're not bound solely in imitation -- does this make any sense? So for me indexicality can almost be a hindrance, maybe.

[Cameron Kunzelman]

So maybe to bring this back around to games writing: is it our critical job to point this out or is it Shane's job as a designer to make the first move?

Also, Kaitlin, I think you should super write a piece on this.

[Mollusk Gone Bad]

So I was thinking a bit more about this and I think lineage plays a role in the type of weird spatial modeling happening in something like Skyrim. Games like Ultima (IV in particular) and its descendents (including the vast majority of jrpgs from the NES on, and I'd even argue the Inifinty Engine games) are pretty clearly treating their representation of space and population as symbolic. There are "overworlds", towns, dungeons, and so forth, but relative scale is inconsistent and mostly irrelevant. Time is compressed (it often takes as long to get from one end of the town to the other as it takes to travel between continents) but that is virtually invisible because even the act of moving your avatar represents something different depending on the setting you're in. When the same player avatar is as big as a tree in one setting, as big as a door in another, and half the size of a mountain in a third, the imaginary space in which you're engaged is pretty clearly abstract. You have "direct" control over movement, but when you move that avatar through the game space there's no sense that you're navigating through a "real" imaginary space. It takes on the weirdly mythological feel of a medieval tapestry or a narrative mosaic. Even as graphics got more detailed, the player transaction was basically the same. In settings where things are to scale, you're interacting with a small representational chunk of the game world. In some cases it's implied that there's more to an area than what you can explore, in others its implied that what you see is "complete", but it represents a "town" or a "forest" in the same way it did in the more clearly abstract games.

In early dungeon crawlers like Bard's tale, though, it seems like a slightly more literal representation of space and movement was intended. The settings were limited in scope, but things seemed basically to scale. There was certainly plenty of abstraction (why were 7 monsters inside this 1 tile room? why is the initial village so small and unpopulated?) but it seemed like there was a more concrete imaginary reality being modeled.

It strikes me that as the representational vocabulary of the dungeon crawlers started to be used in games with the implied scope and vast spaces of the more symbolic rpgs, a weird hybrid of conventions came into play with respect to how spaces, stories and populations were implied.

And as Cameron just pointed out, I guess this should be about critiquing the writing itself and I'm off in the weeds so I'll stop here.

[John Brindle]

Related to this, there's a great article on how Skyrim distorts distance in order to create verisimilitude over internal consistency. It really touches on this issue:

There are three mechanisms that I see as being both the most prominent ways Skyrim does this distortion, and which are, though not unique to video game spaces, certainly mechanisms with no direct analogue to real-world spaces. These are level of detail reduction, perspective distortion, and the fast-travel system...What these three mechanisms do is disconnect the player’s perception of distance and spatial relationships between locations from the actual spatial relationships between those locations as they exist in the game world’s physical geography...

 

...What’s particularly interesting to me is the way this works with the way that spaces in Bethesda’s open world RPGs have been designed, at least since Morrowind, with a degree of abstraction. This is is something I (perpetually) mean to cover in its own post, but I’m talking about the way small towns and cities seem to be stand-ins, symbolic representations, of larger actual settlements within the fiction of the game, and particularly relevant to the question of distorting space, the way that relatively short distances between settlements seem to be symbolic of longer distances in the fiction.

However, I come to the question of indexicality from what is probably quite an odd background. Basically, I am a World of Warcraft roleplayer, and have been for about seven years now. What that means is I'm part of a community of players who all perform this willing reversal: what "really" exists in the game, the actual space, the dimensions, the village sizes and NPC numbers, is not 'real', and is actually a representation of the true Azeroth, which is more complicated and more like our own Earth; conversely, our imaginary version of how Azeroth looks and works is held up as the real one.

For example, right now, me and my guild are nearing the conclusion of an arduous journey across the continent of Lordaeron. We started in Gilneas and are almost at the eastern coast of the Plaguelands. In our communal fiction, this journey has taken months. IRL, it has taken over a year. In-game, as anyone who's played WoW will probably know, it would take a maximum of a few hours - even solely on foot, even with the 'walk' function toggled on.

The problem with that is that all our imaginary versions are slightly different, and 99.9999% of roleplay disputes come from differences in how we translate the game world into this platonic ideal, or rather, from a failure of communal imagination or a failure to give/take/fudge and make compatible our ideals. My guild, for instance, would not have been able to abstract ourselves so thoroughly and so unitedly from the gameworld were we not a very strong and private community who have all known each other for ages. It's all very silly and lots of fun.

The crucial thing to remember is that, on one level, all game spaces are actual spaces. They have dimensions, movement, size, etc. They have all the properties of real, actual spaces, even if some of them might have some rather odd specific characteristics. This is the one level that does not go away, is hard to misinterpret, and is not subject to a very great extent to player disagreement/subjectivity.

But as Mollusk said, now I'm getting into talking about games, and I suspect I might have to restrict myself to talking about talking here, in order to force myself to still make blog posts. This is something I've been planning to write about, but the whole WoW roleplay scene is so complex and surreal that it's always seemed quite daunting to start explaining it.

[Cameron Kunzelman]

GO WRITE THAT RIGHT NOW JOHN GO GO GO 

[John Brindle]

PS: To stick with writing, I had a bit of a Twitter barney with Lana Polansky about this problem of space. I took issue with her Bit Creature article about "sense of place" in Fallout. Specifically this:

"We actually find in games a formal realization of a very old idea - something that we've tried to recreate through paint, or sculpture, or cinematography, or text. The power of a sense of place."

To me it's a bit short-sighted to namecheck all these other mediums and then celebrate the way games can create a sense of place, when one of the things they can do that other mediums can't is to create an actual place. But Lana definitely felt I had misinterpreted and misread her article, so take all this with a pinch of salt.

(and let me now if anyone thinks I am being impolite by singling her out; it just sticks in my mind as a striking example).

Either way, in general I don't think games writing can afford to forget that game spaces are real spaces, something that comes out very strongly in Robert Yang's post on a project to 3D-print a scale model of Counter-Strike's de_dust.

[John Brindle]

ERRRR error Robert Yang piece link http://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2012/04/why-game-architecture-matters-and.html

Is there some edit functionality I'm missing or have I gotta just be much more careful?

[Cameron Kunzelman]

Just gotta be very careful mwahahahaha.

And no, I think it is totally fine to point to specific pieces and readings of those pieces as long as criticism stays constructive and doesn't fall into personal squabbles or derogatory statements.

[Kaitlin Tremblay]

Ha, thanks Cameron, maybe I will!!

[Mollusk Gone Bad]

While collecting my thoughts on the reality of game space, I came to think that Shane may have mischaracterized expressionism in his article. He focuses on the primacy of the subject with the apparent caveat that there's something external being reflected or represented.

"Expressionism only works as a reflection of some reality, though"

I realize that "some reality" can be read in different ways, but I think it's more in keeping with what was revolutionary about impressionism. It's been a long time since Art History, but I think expressionism was more about creating a concrete representation of the artist's internal states. The concept of "expression" in art, speech, biology or coffee presupposes a model in which there is something within being forcibly expelled.

 The "brush strokes of experience that create a loose shape for your brain to fill in" seem to be less about capturing or simulating the internal than using the internal as a tool to represent the external, as in impressionism. It's also my understanding that expressionism was less a reaction to photography and more a reaction to impressionism. Did a quick sanity check on wikipedia, which also suggests that it was impressionism that was the reaction to photography. Shane, I wonder if you're conflating the two a bit in your article.

[Shane Liesegang]

Yep I realized my brain fart this morning and corrected the article. Egg on my face; I had always MEANT impressionism, but my Anthology of German Expressionist Drama was staring me in the face as I typed and my addled brain conflated. 

[Zoya]

Lacking training in art theory, I'm not sure what to make of 'indexicality' and 'expressionism' - very sorry for my ignorance - but I'm super interested in the link between nostalgia and notions of historical accuracy in games that are set in a byegone era. I'm writing about Shenmue from that perspective, and I'm finding a comparison with discourse around photography in the 70s and 80s to be very helpful. Susan Sontag had this whole thing about photographs being nostalgic objects, in part because we kind of believe them to carry this accuracy and realism to them. But then other photographers went on to treat their subject as a sort of clash of subjective realities. One feminist Japanese photographer did a project on Yokosuka, which I've been looking into because of it's particular relevance to Shenmue - for her, the work that had previously been done photographing Yokosuka didn't reflect her experience of it as her hometown at all, in part because it focused on spaces that were not safe for her to go to as a young woman. Her photographs are super nostalgic, all about her childhood, and very dark, like it's all fallen through the cracks and only these little fragments of light remain. The nostalgia comes from the reality of the place being photographed, but also the subjective position of the photographer.

So there's this weird ambivalence. On the one hand, you might strive for accurate representation in order to make a nostalgic object that makes tangible something that was fleeting. On the other, nothing can accurately represent your particular experiences or memories, so subjective emotional cues become very important to grounding the representation in a personal past.

On Thursday, 21 February 2013 19:01:08 UTC-8, SJML wrote:

[Kaitlin Tremblay]

Absolutely! That's kind of what I've been writing about in my piece on nostalgia and gaming (which I've been doing on BioShock since it's been on my mind a lot lately, obviously with Infinite coming out soon): that it's not so much about a realistic representation of a past era, but moreso of a realistic representation of our current needs. Pam Cook talks about nostalgic films as being more about identifying and dealing with our current desires/longings by (re)presenting past times in an idealized way for us to express what it is we need to. Nostalgia and memory are necessarily subjective, right, so looking at video games as a medium for memory and containing any sort of cultural/societal indexicality is necessarily going to be coloured by our own versions of "real" and "authentic." We impose nostalgia on something, it is never objectively inherent.

Zoya, your piece on Shenmue sounds fascinating!

[Cameron Kunzelman]

Zoya you might be interested in readings Barthes' Camera Obscura. Sontag is in conversation with it, and it is where the distinction between the "studium" (what is in the photograph and can be analyzed) and the "punctum" (the emotional linkage/affect it generates). It is also super short so you can knock it out in an afternoon and it might be helpful!

In any case, the article sounds awesome.

[Zoya]

Aha! I LOVE Barthes and totally forgot that I need to go and check out Camera Obscura again. Thank you.

Kaitlin, I don't know how to find your email address on here, but I meant to say before that your work sounds really interesting to me and I would love to read a draft if you didn't mind sharing.

[Brendan Keogh]

This is a fascination conversation. While I've never had the words for it, this indexicality is something that I have thought about ever since playing Final Fantasy 7 as a teenager, and I had to accept that the world the game was showing me wasn't the real world. FF7 (and most jrpgs) has these multiple layers of indexicality (world map, turn based fights to represent real conflicts, fmvs, etc). It's almost like a stage show where it knows it isn't showing everything perfectly, and it demands the player uses their imagination to fill in the gaps.

As for our role as writers, I think where I stand is somewhere similar to John. What has always bugged me about early academic games writing is this habit of describing game worlds as completely diegetic and cut-off from the real world of the player and, more significantly, as ideal spaces. That is, you might get an academic describing the Imperial City in Oblivion as having thousands of citizens even though the 'actual' representation of the city in the game clearly doesn't. SoI think critics have a responsibilities to describe the representations, not what they are trying to represent, because that is the 'actual' space on which different players will interpret a different indexical one. Perhaps my favourite example of this is Roger's discussion of a house in Earthbound as having only two walls:

"It's the breed of player most commonly referred to as a "gamer" that will need to buy the house. This gamer will come all the way back to Onett once he has enough money to buy the house. You can't buy the house during the game's ending, when you'll no doubt have more than $10,000 in the bank, because the real-estate agent is gone and the door is locked. You can't buy it past a certain point in the game, either, because once the endgame begins, Onett is invaded by aliens and plunged into eternal darkness until you kill the alien. If you want to buy the house, you have to come back at some reasonably early point in the game. When you buy the house, the real-estate agent takes your money and leaves the doorway. He runs all the way off-screen. You are then free to enter the house. When you go inside, you find that it's a run-down shack with wooden floors and walls. A few boards are missing. With the power of its pixels, the game shows you that the mattress in the middle of the floor has a few springs popping up out of its fabric. The back wall of the house -- the third wall, as it were -- is missing, and we can see the lake in the distance. The fourth wall is already gone -- that's the wall through which we, the player, see our heroes standing in this dilapidated shack. We're looking at, essentially, a house with two walls. This can be construed as what Itoi thinks of the videogame as a medium -- it is a house with two walls. "

I LOVE this passage because it describes the house as it 'actually' is, with a wall missing for the player to see in. The player knows that, in this world, for these characters, that wall still exists and it has just been removed for us to look inside, but what is on the screen is a two-walled house. I think game critics need to be aware of the actual representations first and the indexical world the player is asked to imagine second.

Interestingly, I think it is Melanie Swalwell, the games scholar, who describes games as make-believe--in that the player has to actively use what the game shows them to make a world that makes sense. Running at windmills and all that.

[Shane Liesegang]

Comparison of turn-based combat to a stage show is interesting -- I wonder how much JRPG vs Western RPG evolution has been influenced by our various theater traditions... How come you high-falutin' game academics aren't writing dissertations on how Kabuki/Bunraku/Noh traditions are reflected in games? (Free dissertation topic idea for an academic right there; please just give me half the proceeds from your PhD kthx.)

[Brendan Keogh]

Hahaha. 'Proceeds' from a game-based PhD :p

[Brendan Keogh]

Side note: what really fascinated me about DayZ was that the world didn't feel like this. The spatial relations felt real, not representative or impressionistic. I would spend an hour in that game just walking down a dirt road in a forest, and another two hours trying to find my way back to the road when I ventured down a hill to fill my water bottle. I don't know if it is the sheer size of it or the slowness of my character or something else, but that world actually felt like the size it was depicting was the size it literally was. Which is not to say it is better or worse than typical game worlds (I'm not trying to say more immersive==better or something terrible like that), but it was something I found really interesting.

[Shane Liesegang]

Yeah, DayZ really pushed its literalism in a way that few other games have the gumption to do. I'm reminded a bit of Receiver (which I only know via the Idle Thumbs discussion of it, not first-hand play), and the detail it gives to the interactions with your gun -- interactions most games are content to abstract away as "not fun."

Along the same lines, the average movement speed in Quake was the equivalent of something like 60 MPH -- "real" speeds feel painfully slow to the player, so if you want to push a naturalistic interaction you kind of have to make your whole game based around the details and realism, like DayZ does.

[Mollusk Gone Bad]

Someone in the intro thread said they were doing something on opera in one of the Final Fantasies. Just checked, it was Ryan Thompson and FF6.

I wonder how much cinema has muddied the waters of theatrical influence. Artifact vs performance, authoring vs. playing a role, the grammar of the viewer vs the grammar of the audience etc.
And not to go too far down that road in this thread, but the player as a live performer seems to be a significant conceit in many Japanese games. The language of the scoring in Devil May Cry, the theatrical framing of many Nintendo games (esp the Paper Marios), the regular presence of literal applause sound effects, etc.

[Tommy Rousse]

This is a really neat thread.  I've always felt that Morrowind was a stronger game than Oblivion because the sparse population dictated by technological limitations made lots of sense in a far-off colony of a decreipt empire, but very little in the supposedly bustling main cities.  Unfortunately, Bethesda emphasized this disconnect in Oblivion by making the player gather an "army" that ended up consisting of like twelve guys to stop a massive demonic invasion as one of the major events in the story.

I feel a strong premonition that some articles are going to get written about the "gameworld" v. the "real world", so I wanted to tip y'all on some academic work that's relevant to the discussion that I ran across in a game studies course last semester.

So my main bro Gary Alan Fine, the first dude to do an ethnography on role-playing games in Shared Fantasy, has a pretty neat three-part model based on Goffmanian frames for the interaction between the rule system/the imaginary world the rule system represents, the relationship between the players themselves, and the instantiation of both of those in an actual play session (see especially his conversation with the creator of Empire of the Petal Throne about "real" Tekumel v. "game" Tekumel).  It's been recently developed further by Markus Montola, maybe the sharpest fellow writing on role-play today. Here's an article that summarizes his position and Fine's: http://www.ijrp.subcultures.nl/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/montola_the_invisible_rules_of_role_playing.pdf

-T.

[hancock michael]

To follow up on Keogh's make-believe point, I've been reading through Kendall Walton's book, Mimesis as Make-Believe.  (Not entirely an original move on my part, as Marie-Laurie Ryan, Gordon Calleja, and King and Krzywinska among probably many others have made the same connection.)  Anyway, Walton's main argument is that people are constantly using props to perform various acts of make-believe, which go from imagining what you're going to have for supper to performing group thought experiments on the nature of the universe.  It's a particularly interesting example in the history of game studies, I think, because he emphasizes that both games and stories have this make-believe at their core, and, in fact, perform variations of the same sort of make-believe, thus blowing the historical narrative vs. game argument out of the water.  Or at least gives it a light dunking.

He's also got a chapter on how fictional worlds are made up of bundles of fictional truths, including implied and explicit ones.  So to bring things back to the actual topic of discussion, it would be an explicit truth that in the game the Imperial City would have only a finite number of folk, but based on how other characters described it, the appearance of the city, the way it was written about, etc. it would be implied that it was a lot bigger than what the player was actually seeing.  The player would then engage in his or her own games of make-believe about the game, and THAT set of fictional truths might (hopefully) contain the fictional truth that the city actually was filled with more people than they were seeing.

[Ryan Thompson]

Yep, it's me writing about FF6 and opera.  There are more connections than might immediately come to mind -- the game's framing of events as a theatrical performance by casting the players in the roles of the characters they play, such as "Locke as Locke Cole", or "<insert player-named character name here> as Terra Branford" from the ending -- a curtain call if ever there was one -- is especially interesting.  The opera sequence itself neatly foreshadows the overall structure of the game -- during what the audience (both virtual operagoers, who we look down upon but never engage, and players themselves, as "audience" members of the game's story) expects is the final act (the duel between Draco and Ralse / the showdown on the Floating Continent), something completely unexpected happens, causing the plot to be extended significantly (Ultros / Kefka's assassination of Gestahl, and subsequent ruining of the world).

FF6's score, as many of you will know, is heavily inspired by Wagner's use of the leitmotiv...or rather, John Williams' appropriation of that technique the the Star Wars franchise, among others.  It is no coincidence that FF6, so indebted to Williams/Wagner, is the first of the franchise to actively cite Star Wars as an influence by utilizing Biggs and Wedge at the beginning of the game.

Jumping back to the original conversation about indexing and travel in the RPG, you'll notice that the operatic stage (like all performing arts) often does this also.  The stage is a constant, but its length can represent a bedroom or a battlefield depending on the backdrop and corresponding action at hand.  I'm interested in how fast-travel systems and how they utilize our understanding of indexing as a means by which to make those systems "acceptable" in games otherwise touting a very immersive experience (Bethesda games post-Morrowind especially, but others also).