RAGDOLL METAPHYSICS: GAME RESEARCH, GHOST STORIES, ALAN MOORE, AND ACADEMIA: THE FAR REACHES OF EDUTAINMENT
Academia has thrown up a bunch of interesting game projects over the past few years. As more gamers get into positions of academic usefulness, so that trend grows. Of course university and research groups have long been creating games with educational purposes in mind, but they’re now handling increasingly hefty budgets.
One of the most high-profile projects (and most obvious recent failures) was Indiana University’s Arden: The World Of William Shakespeare, which reportedly had a grant of $250,000. It was an experimental MMO which came about via the work of Professor Ed Castronova, author of Synthetic Worlds. Castronova wondered whether the creation of a genuinely educational MMO was possible, and set up the student development project to find out. Having spent thousands of dollars on Arden it was shut down. Castronova cited “a lack of fun”.
But I don’t suppose that was the only reason. Games don’t necessarily have to be fun to be engaging. Indeed “fun” seems like a trite expression in the face of some contemporary projects: games can provoke more than simple enjoyment. Look at the terrifying crypts of Stalker, or the strange sadness of Shadow of the Colossus. To realise that games ride on more than fun only takes a quick glance at the bigger picture.
One game researcher for whom “fun” seems inappropriate is the academically oriented team The Chinese Room, who are games researchers working for the University Of Portsmouth in the UK. Their medium, for now at least, is the Half-Life 2 mod, and the experiences they’ve created are peculiar investigations into the emotive possibilities of game design. They’ve realised that 3D games, with their claustrophobia and their immersive properties, can be spooky, scary and deeply evocative.
The first of mods created by The Chinese Room, Dear Esther, is a solemn, elegiac experience in which you wander around an abandoned island to the contemplative narrations of, presumably, the character you are in control of. It’s a peculiar and unsettling experience, with little “game” or interactivity, but with a certain idiosyncratic atmosphere that will either draw you in or put you off within a few minutes.
Given that it’s been made using limited resources and the aging Half-Life 2 engine, it’s also uniquely beautiful. The author, Daniel Pinchbeck, describes it as an “interactive ghost story”, but it could also be seen as an ambiguous puzzle, or simply a strange island that gives you a mood-provoking verbal backdrop to rather unmotivated wanderings. Exploration for exploration’s sake, because it’s a novel experience, and you might just value that..
The Chinese Room’s most recent effort, Korsakovia, is significantly more intense. Again, it’s a Half-Life 2 mod, this time with more than just environment and narration, because the crowbar makes an appearance. It’s rather more of a videogame, too, with identifiable enemies: clouds of black smoke that steadily, horrifically, drag you towards death.
Pinchbeck describes Korsakovia as “a survival horror FPS that aims to trap the player in the splintering fragments of a destroyed mind.” That sounds like the bit of blurb from the back of the box of any number of survival horror games, but this time that destroyed mind is one of those that might be suffered by psychotics in the real world. It’s a creative interpretation of the horrific Korsakoff’s Syndrome, which sufferers radically lose their grip on reality.
The narration in Korsakavia suggests that not only are you hallucinating the visual events because you are blind (with the auditory events possibly be real) but that you aren’t necessarily experiencing things in a linear sequence. One of the symptoms of Korsakoff’s is amnesia, and a lost of temporality. Those of you who have read Oliver Sacks’ incredible document of weird neurological cases, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, might remember “The Lost Mariner”, who was faced with a similar predicament.
Korsakovia takes mental illness as its theme, and attempts to teach us a little bit about how it might be experienced. So is this… edutainment?
Whether or not it’s actually educational, or simply fictional, what’s interesting about this to me is that Korsakovia, and to some degree Dear Esther, is about exploring the nature of conscious experience. And that’s not just a critic being poncy: that’s what it’s /explicitly/ about, as the stated intent of the project.
I’d say it’s success is limited in that regard, but it probably points to something else more important with what it does achieve (which is to create a provocative, occasionally terrifying experience). What it points to is games being used, increasingly, as a tool for exploring specific ideas about how we experience life. It demonstrates that games are not just about exploring how to kill all the zombies, or understanding what Ken Levine did after he read Atlas Shrugged, but about interpreting the entire wide-open field of human experience.
That’s an area of research that has many more layers than the largest onion in France, and it needs a whole bunch of tools available to make it accessible and comprehensible. In this instance videogames are tools. They are tools that academics and developers are still finding uses for. We have a very long way before we even identify all the uses, let alone set about addressing them. I think what The Chinese Room are doing is something of a signpost for how to think about them in that way.
There’s a bit in Alan Moore’s weird spoken-word performance Snakes & Ladders where he talks about imagination as if it were a realm, a place we travel to and explore. He suggests that creative people – painters, writers, sculptors – are as much exporters from this realm as they are explorers of it. The imaginatively and creatively gifted are able to come back from the lands of the fictive and sell that experience on to us in books, poems, paintings and ideas. They furnish us with “dreamland bric-a-brac” (at a considerable mark-up) so that our lives might be a little more interesting. Games are just another channel for exporting that stuff into the real world.
I’m probably taking Moore rather too literally here, but that notion of exploration, of bringing back what we find in imagination to share it with others, has always seemed to me to be at its most concrete with videogames. While we are able to directly share visions in films, appreciate imaginative precipitate in writing, or listen in on previously unknown audioscapes in music, it’s only in gaming that we are genuinely able to root about in imaginative spaces on our own time. I read about Korsakoff’s Syndrome in Sacks’ book, but it took Korsakovia for it to frighten me firsthand. I’d suggest that it’s in gaming where our imaginative exports can be best understood and examined, as if we were there ourselves.
Games are, of course, seldom the imaginative enterprise of a single person. Their collaborative nature means that whatever game makers bring back from imagination tends to be an amalgam: a collective project of and for a number of minds. We are, I sometimes think, exploring a kind of collectively imagined space when we play certain games (I’m not talking Tetris here, obviously) with the mechanistic imagination of one designer bolted into the architectural fantasies of another. To paraphrase Will Wright, a game is model in the mind of multiple people (which is something I talk about in my book – out in paperback soon!)
And there seem like there must be some drawbacks to this. 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 investigate and explore. Once the team have 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.
Hopefully, as game-making tools become easier to use, and creating interesting experiences becomes cheaper, we’ll see more of this sort of thing appear on our screens. The Chinese Room, meanwhile, asks an interesting question of games research as a whole: shouldn’t academia be looking at what games are best at, and asking if that really does amount to “fun”? If games are going to be used for educational purposes, then the designers need to start thinking about precisely what it is that games are capable of, and devising the conditions required to test it. We need to figure out, as writers and sculptures have done, what games are going to allow us to import to the real world.
Dear Esther can be found here, and Korsakovia can be found here. Half-Life: Episode 2 is required to play both.
[Jim Rossignol is an editor at RockPaperShotgun.com and the author of This Gaming Life, an account of the life of modern videogames and some of the people who play them. Ragdoll Metaphysics is his Offworld column exploring and analyzing gaming’s vast world of esoterica.]
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