Telling our stories inside and outside the games

Hi droqen:

I don’t know that this is actually “working out more the concept” as you said, but these are the places my mind went while reading you so I’ll lay them out.

[GAMEFEEL] is worth caring about because it’s all focused on what the player is actually doing. GAMEFEEL matters because it is literally real, whereas videogame physics are just a virtual simulation; narrative is just an interesting story; graphics are just pictures you can look at on a screen.” 

– Droqen in What’s actually happening? Videogames are REAL

I like this approach! You’re focusing on the phenomenology of games. In the real actual emotions and actions taking place inside the player rather than in the art product that triggers these responses. I had said once that games only actually exist if there’s someone to play them. I said it in relation to the importance of the player as a fundamental part of the product, in a Barthes-esque or Cortázar-esque framework; but now that you express this, I feel like it relates. The player interaction is indeed the most real part of the artistic experience (is what makes it an experience rather than a product). What makes a system feel alive.

[In Werewolf and tabletop RPGs] I think if you get into the right mindset, you can play along and act as though the story we’re telling together is something that’s “really happening”. (…) Imagination is a skill and we’re all practicing it together.”

– Droqen in What’s actually happening? Videogames are REAL

This is absolutely lovely. But, as you said, I also struggle to engage in those modes as I grow older. I feel like it takes a lot more of effort to imagine out of nowhere and I’ve always felt like I need a lot more energy to play Werewolf than other RPGs with more closed rules/settings. It’s funny, cause I would get the feeling of “I don’t want to think, I want the game to deliver me a closed, finished experience”, but of course, those are not the games I remember later. The games I remember are the ones that, as Jack says:

leave me with some space to find some meaning for myself”. 

–Jack in HAIKU games

Mikhail Bakhtin uses to explain narrative in novels an Einstein’s concept called Chronotope: a space-time continuum, a 4D space in which stories can occur, basically. But I heard Espen Aarseth referring to games as meta-chronotopes, because they produce a new chronotope in each session, and we as players can create our story there. This happens in all games, and I feel that the more weight decisions have in the game, the more meta-chronotope they are. Open world games create completely different scenes each time, and my experience playing Outer Wilds for example will be broadly different from the one of any other player. And this is especially true in multiplayer games, and especially in creative ones. 

We’re more drawn to remember and tell stories of games in which we could live our own stories in, that left us enough space to create. Because:

The other thing that’s really happening is we’re all getting together to tell a story and try to imagine our story is really happening”

– Droqen in What’s actually happening? Videogames are REAL

Praising emersion 

I want a game to exmerse me; by contrast to immersing me in its fictional world, I want to be pulled out of it as quickly as possible, so that I can instead focus on the actual details of my experience and the real people around me, and occasionally, other real systems”

– Droqen in What’s actually happening? Videogames are REAL

This is a topic I’m most interested about! I enjoy both playing and analyzing games that create meaningful situations outside the proper game interface. Specially those that create human interactions and build communities, the reason why Cruel World was meaningful, and I know a lot of people with NAVE Arcade tattoos; the game encourages all this beautiful interactions of players outside itself. But that’s a topic for another letter.

I wanted to bring along two examples of emersive games to discuss.

Bounden is a cooperative dancing mobile game. Two players grab the phone and have to coordinate the movements outside the screen to accomplish some goals inside the screen. I guess all dancing games are emersive, but I had never played a game that made me share such an intimate dynamic with another player. It’s not just cooperation inside the game mechanics, all your attention must be in your partner’s real life body movements. It’s a really beautiful experience. 

Another example is Pokemon Go (and Ingress, but that one I didn’t experienced). The part I would enjoy the most by far was the Pokestops mechanic. Because it wasn’t that much about the game itself but about my real world around me, and the places people would find interesting or worth showing. And as a traveller and urban-spaces lover, that feature would help me pay attention to things that otherwise I might not have noticed.

Are there ways to encourage emersivity in design? To make players more aware of themselves and their actual reality rather than the fictional world presented?