Games That Affected Me Like A Disaster

This is the text from my talk at the wonderful Now Play This festival last year, where I was in august company with Em Short & Merrit Kopas speaking on the theme of Games and Intimacy. Thanks so much to Holly and George for giving me a chance to be part of the festival, and for the opportunity to talk about my relationship with games in a much more personal and confessional way than I ever have before, in a public venue.

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“I think
we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. […]
But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us
deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like
being banished into forests far from everyone […] A book
must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.” - Kafka

The title
of my talk is “games that affected me like a disaster” - but the
more I thought about it the more I realised I was stretching the term
“disaster”. I wanted to talk about the games that affected me,
that made me feel and scraped me raw – in good ways and bad. I
think it probably says something more about me that the word that
seemed most appropriate to describe being made to feel something
is “disaster”. Books do this to me all the time – characters
and situations reach out from the pages of the text. Books have
wounded me – both in the sense of grief and in the sense of
catharsis. There are books I know I will never read again that I
refuse to get rid of – they sit on my shelf, more monument than
book, a physical reminder of that moment of connection.

That’s
really what I want to talk about today: a sense of connection. Books
connect with me all the time but games so rarely do. Every now and
then, not very often at all, a game – an experience – connects
with me, acknowledges my humanity. And while each individual
experience, each particular moment is meaningful on its own
particular terms the thread that runs through them is a sense of
intimacy, mediated through a variety of forms.

Let’s talk
about fear. I think this is probably one of the most common ways in
which mainstream videogames manage to stumble into creating intimacy
– the intimacy of risking digital death, of failing a challenge in
a roomful of peers, of admitting defeat. The first time I remember a
game making me feel fear is the Aladdin game for the SNES – the
magic carpet level in the cave. If you’ve played the game you know
what I mean. The game – which has up until then been gentle
platforming – suddenly asks you to navigate more freely on this
magic carpet – the screen autoscrolls faster and faster, waves of
lava rise up and reach for you as you swerve to avoid the cave walls
closing in. It was a lot for a six year old. It terrified me.

The moment
that level loaded up, I’d call my dad in from the other room, hand
the controller over to him and tuck myself behind him on the sofa,
shouting warnings and covering my eyes when he had a close call. I’d
feel a perverse pleasure when he occasionally died and perverse pride
when he beat the level on the first try. He never made fun of me for
being afraid. He never made me feel like I was being a girl
about it – or even if I was – that being a girl about it was a
bad thing. He’d hand back the controller – reluctantly – and
watch me continue. I never did learn to beat that level, but those
times remain some of my abiding memories of my childhood – those
shared moments, me, my dad and the Aladdin game – intimacy and
connection as an accidental consequence of the game’s design.

When I
think about my important experiences with videogames, most of them
fall into this category – catalysts for emotional or social
connections outside of the game, more so than a connection with
the game. Games as shared experiences, or things you feel things with
rather than things which make you feel. But there are exceptions:
I’ve always loved the Bioware games – though the one which I’ve
played most is the often unfairly maligned Dragon Age: II, and it’s
because of the characters. I can load up almost any of my – thirty
or so? - saves and work out where in the plot I am not through quests
but through the progression of my character relationships. I remember
my – real-life – partner walking into the room during a
particularly fraught emotional conversation with Anders, my romantic
interest – and I felt – not embarrassment at being caught out
romancing a digital construct but a flare of resentment. I had earned
this conversation through friendship and care – he was trusting me
– protagonist, player, person – with his truths. It was private.
The fact that I had a controller in my hands and he spoke to me from
a television screen did not, at that moment, matter. Nor did it
matter that my partner had played Dragon Age II before, and probably
experienced this very same conversation. Of course it didn’t matter.
This is the same urge that drives players to recreate multiple
endings or particular
outcomes in their own
playthrough even if they’ve seen it on youtube – it’s different
when it’s your game.
When you’ve pressed the buttons and chosen the dialogue options. When
it’s your sweat on the controller. Playing the game is an act of
shared creation, and there is nothing more intimate than that.

(Hilariously
- every time I replay Dragon Age II I try to romance a different
character but I always end up with Anders – it always feels like a
betrayal to flirt with anyone else.)

I
feel like it would be remiss not to talk about the companion cube a
little bit – the companion cube in Portal is often held up as the
gold standard for creating an emotional connection in videogames.
It’s an abstracted companion, a physical object with only one real
“expression” - perfect for the player to project onto. And – er
spoilers – the big moment where the companion cube is sacrificed,
it’s tragic and terrible. People happily admit they shed a tear. I
have to confess – I didn’t cry. Look, I felt bad, okay? I’m not a
complete monster – but did I grieve? Did I feel it as a wrenching
loss? I’m sorry, I didn’t. There’s something too ironic and
distancing and clever about
the companion cube’s “death” to make it truly affecting –
because it’s an inanimate object, we can grieve for it with hipster
melodrama. It’s always smacked me as slightly insincere.

Real
feelings – in my experience anyway – always have an edge of
embarrassment. There’s something a little bit naff, a little bit
uncool, a little bit awkward
and unfashionable about real feelings.

Going
back to Dragon Age – I was playing Inquisition a few months ago,
and ended up going on a date with Cullen – he’s an ex-Templar, I’m
a mage, so, y'know, if you’ve played the game you know it’s already
pretty fraught. So we’re walking along the battlements, having this
pretty serious, incredibly awkward conversation – for all the
fantastical trappings and drama, it’s a conversation that feels
familiar and true – the underlying questions are familiar anyway:
can we really care about each other? Are we brave enough, or stupid
enough, to admit that to each other? The music swells in the
background, and the characters lean closer together on the screen –
and one of their underlings interrupts them with a report. The camera
lingers on the embarrassment on your protagonist’s face, and I felt
it too – the moment’s been shattered. The underling is sent away
and as your protagonist begins to mumble some excuse so she can get
the hell out of there, Cullen turns and kisses you. It surprised me.
It charmed me. It felt
joyous and delightful and spontaneous and made me smile till I caught
myself at it – it felt momentous, because videogames so rarely
startle me into a genuine emotional response.

And
it was a result of writing and pacing but also the character models –
vastly improved over the previous games – the edge of a smile on an
NPC’s face that doesn’t trigger that uncanny valley discomfort. All
too often the graphics and attempted realism of videogames actually
distance me from them rather than pull me in, but
this moment in Inquisition gives me hope – because it is the last
thing from spontaneous – it is designed and manufactured and pretty
mainstream – but somehow manages to feel as though it is. And I
think that part of it is because it’s a little awkward, a little
silly – it isn’t a perfect romance novel moment, with all the edges
and imperfections sanded down too smooth.

For
all that it’s made by a triple-A studio it still feels like it was
made by people – the money and production don’t quite manage to
obscure that. I think that’s important. Intimacy necessitates
vulnerability – I think it’s harder to be vulnerable with something
expensive and smooth and corporate and impersonal. Which
is why some of the most intimate gaming experiences I’ve had have
been with Twine games – they are often much more directly a
dialogue between game-maker and player, often about personal,
confessional topics, many dealing with identity, gender, sexuality.
If I tried to tell you about all the twine games that affected me
we’d be here until day after tomorrow so instead I’ll just tell you
about With Those We Love Alive by porpentine – one of my favourite
games of last year. It’s a game about love and power and
self-destruction. About the intimacy of oppression. In porpentine’s
nightmare-fantasy world we can’t escape participating in
institutional violence, no matter how carefully we make our choices.
We’re victims and perpetrators and more than each of those labels
might imply. Porpentine also asks us – at various key moments in
the game – to draw symbols on our bodies to represent particular
events and choices. The game makes a tool of the player to pull
itself out of a purely digital space, to impinge on the physical.
Alice O'Connor wrote a great piece on Rock Paper Shotgun about this,
saying that
drawing these symbols “is
a lark until you realise you’re marking and changing yourself in
response to cruel and oppressive things”.

But
the fact of the matter is – you’ve done it to yourself, you’re
doing it to yourself. While the game illuminated the path, you’re the
one who chose to walk down it. It’s a physical reminder of your own
responsibility, your culpability – it makes of it a game mechanic.

The
physicality of it makes it feel more human, too, I think. As does the
very distinctive and particular lyricism of porpentine’s voice. Just
like when you’re reading a book, it’s an engagement with an authorial
voice, with another human being’s work. They’re
exposing themselves on the page or
screen,
and so it’s easier to expose yourself in the reading – I think
that’s why intimacy is
so much easier to design and experience in text
or live games and physical
experiences, because the protections are pulled back, for the
performers and the players both.

The
first time I realised I wanted to make games was when I saw
Punchdrunk’s the Masque of the Red Death in 2007 – it’s an
immersive experience where you are both spectator and participant.
You’re given plague-doctor masks as you walk in, and you – and
everyone else in the audience – wanders around a painstakingly
decked out space, weaving in and out of stories, actors brushing past
you and entangling you in their scenes without any of the distancing
luxury of a stage. My friends and I came out of Masque of the Red
Death and spent hours at the pub after swapping stories, sharing
experiences – discussing some of the places of overlap, seething
with jealousy over some of the more personal, unique stories that some
of us were lucky to stumble into. One of my friends got pulled aside
for a one-on-one retelling of the Telltale Heart.

A
few of us happened to be standing around a room when the clock
chimed, and we were ushered into a locked study where a man declaimed
the Raven and finished his tale in a swirl of cape and thrown
feathers. The six of us in
that room felt a sense of connection, of something momentous and
shared – even if we hadn’t met before, even if we never would
again. The game designer part of me knows perfectly well that there
were hundreds of people every night that got ushered into the locked
study, and had that “unique experience” as well – but the
audience member, the player – still felt a sense of specialness, of
ownership. It was my personal story within a shared experience –
and the fact that it’s “uniqueness” was sleight-of-hand didn’t
actually diminish it. Punchdrunk manufactured intimacy every night –
it designed for it. I
think it showed me that you could design for serendipity without
making it inauthentic – I think that is something that is
particularly within the possibility-space of games. Each player makes
their own story out of the tools the game provides them – playing a
game is an act of creation, even more acutely than reading a book or
watching a film.

2007
was a good year for me, as interactive experiences go – that was
also the year I experienced Ontroerend Goed’s ‘The Smile Off Your
Face’ at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It was almost the inverse of
the Punchdrunk experience – I was not part of an audience but
entirely alone, outnumbered by performers. Instead of giving me a mask
to confer a sense of freedom, to bring me within the world a la
Masque of the Red Death, I was blindfolded and put in a wheelchair. I
was not allowed to wander, to explore, to self-direct but I was
directed, made powerless and vulnerable as I was put through various
sensory experiences.

The
sound of a cigarette lighter catching – such a familiar and welcome
sound to a smoker such as myself – made me flinch back in the dark.
Music began to play and I was pulled to my feet and slow danced with
a stranger – an actor? Another audience member? Dancing with a
stranger in the dark without the benefit of pounding music or alcohol
or even the ability to make nervous small talk is strange and
unsettling and oddly, painfully intimate – I never saw his face but
I remember the sound of his breathing, the scrape of my shoes against
the cement floor, nothing else to distract me from the physicality of
the thing – the almost-embrace of slow dancing together.

I
was put back int the chair
and wheeled around again – I had
no sense of the scale of the space, how far I had gone. It was a
twenty minute experience but time and distance felt dilated somehow.
I had to accept that loss of control – it was an experience
designed to make me lose control in increments, to accept further and
further intimacies until they could crack me open – and they
managed it – I ended up lying on a bed with someone whispering
their secrets to me, and then they asked me to tell them a regret.
Something secret, that I hadn’t told anyone else. That I wondered and
worried about.

And
I should have felt disoriented and vulnerable and under pressure but
instead I felt open and honest and unburdened, and I told her a
secret I hadn’t even known I was keeping. It took me days to be able
to describe the show to anyone else – and even now, I’m not sure
whether I’ve done it justice. I never thought I would be able to let
go of control, to accept being vulnerable – but the studied
progression of the experience, the movement from physical and sensory
intimacy to emotional intimacy – created a space for me to feel and
be raw. The careful way the show took away my control but not through
oppression but through taking responsibility for me – the first
time I was pulled to my feet and stumbled and the actor caught me and
held me up. They tested my boundaries to show me I could trust them,
as much as I was there in
that moment they were there with me too, they were there for
me.

Punchdrunk
and Ontroerend Goed
understood that presence
is intimate – but the broader lesson for games is I think that
participation is
intimate. I don’t think it’s
a coincidence that three of the experiences that affected me – With
Those We Love Alive, Smile off Your Face, and Masque explicitly play
with power-exchange between participants and creators. Game
designers, I think, could learn a lot from BDSM etiquette – Merrit
Kopas’s twine game Consensual Torture Simulator – a game about
hurting someone who wants it, should be required reading – it is
such a great example of how making and playing should be approached:
as a negotiation.

It’s
strange to me that most games seem to pretend that the player doesn’t
exist, or rather can only conceive
of the player as the originator of a series of prompts and rote
responses rather than a resource to be called upon – as players our
minds and our bodies and our creativity and the frozen seas of our
emotions are waiting to be engaged, to be used. What
we make of something is almost always as interesting as the thing
itself – but that’s a difficult lesson for a designer.

The
urge, I think, is to create something whole and hermetically sealed
and perfect, but it’s impossible for players to get purchase on
perfection. To tear it up and let it tear into us. I’ve been talking
about intimacy as an act of trust – but it isn’t just about being
able to trust the game or game-makers with our playlerly
vulnerability. We also need to be able to design games with
trust – with trust for our
players. Intimacy doesn’t work when it’s only one way. Those moments
of connection, I think, spring from a shared exposure, a willingness
to risk failure and silliness and naffness and
messiness, because feeling things, truly and deeply, is always, a
disaster.