By forcing a player to do unpleasant things, a video game can encourage a player to reflect critically on those actions. As I’ve written about on Geek Studies and elsewhere—and as others have put quite well too—”forced failure” scenarios in games allow for new avenues of meaning, new emotional responses from media that pure spectatorship can’t easily provide. In my paper “Seeking Truth in Video Game Ratings,” I offered this technique as evidence that the mere presence of violence in a game isn’t enough to qualify the content as inherently immoral (or even amoral). I stand by that perspective.

As this technique becomes more commonly understood as part of the vocabulary of game design, however, it’s worth noting that recent games appear to be showing how heavy handed and poorly conceived the application of “violent gameplay to discourage violence” can potentially be.

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Over the last several posts on storytelling in gaming I’ve written (1, 2, 3, 4), I’ve discussed some ways that players might find narrative meaning in games. Sometimes this is only possible when we go looking for it; sometimes it’s possible because of the way the game was designed; and sometimes we can see how narrative engagement might be possible, but might work better if the game were designed more for it.

This post explores the last of these scenarios. I believe games can be designed in such a way that they preserve a player’s feeling of agency—allowing for emotional reactions other than what we could get purely as spectators—but also allow preserve engagement with a story by recognizing the distinction (suggested in my last post) between what games encourage players to do for narrative purposes and what games reward players for doing in the form of distinct assets or benefits in gameplay terms. Designers can and should sometimes make players want to do things for story-based reasons, not just for gameplay-based reasons.

Why make this distinction? Quite simply, the tension between these elements can lead to some fascinating and meaningful scenarios when handled well, and can completely break our sense of immersion and engagement when handled poorly. Let me give some examples.

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This post continues a loosely-linked series of posts (including this, this, and this) on how we can find narrative meaning in replayed games. You can re-watch a favorite DVD again and again, but it’s tricky to replay an old game and still enjoy it for the story because the enjoyment of story is so linked with the experience of being challenged and excited by the game. This leads some gamers to force artificial limitations onto ourselves just to maintain a sense of challenge in ways that preserve the story, something most games are not designed to do. In this post, I’ll discuss one such artificial limitation—”permadeath” experiments with Far Cry 2—and what allowing characters to stay dead can do for the narrative experience of a game.

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As I discussed in my previous post, games can be played with attention to appeals offered by immersion in story and appeals offered by a sense of mastery, but we tend to see more attention to the latter when in the way games are designed to be played and replayed. Once you’ve mastered the skills required to excel in a game, it can sometimes feel too boring or easy, and so we crank up the Difficulty when we want to replay it. Making enemies stronger and protagonists weaker solves the issue of maintaining the appeal of mastery, but it does nothing to address the appeal of story. The sense of your own agency in producing the story is replaced by a sense of struggling to avoid repetition, whether boring (if it’s too easy) or frustrating (if it’s too hard).

Why not make up our own difficulty adjustments and imagine our own stories, then? Why not play “hardcore” or “permadeath” style, deciding that when our protagonist dies, it stays dead? Why not reject using the best weapons and skills available to our hero? Or, if a certain degree of variation is actually built into the game—such as the ability to play in a way that disagrees with our initial inclinations, perhaps as a villain rather than a hero—why not replay that way?

In fact, many gamers do just these things—and sometimes, I’m one of them. I had originally planned just one more post in this series on blending story and mastery appeals in games, but I’m going to have to spread it out over a couple more. In this post, I’ll discuss some ways I’ve tried to spice up replays by limiting my actions according to things that might make sense in the context of a story. I’ll discuss another recently blogged experiment in the post that follows this one, focusing on the narrative potential of irreversible actions. (And I’ll probably write another post after that, too, as I actually wrote this post on the next one months ago, and have new thoughts on these matters developed since then.)

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It’s more than a little embarrassing to note that my most recent post before this one was the second part of a three-part series begun in early August. There is a reason, of course: I started the series in the window of time between turning in my dissertation to my committee and going to defend it in Philadelphia.

On August 12th, I defended my dissertation, Geek Cultures: Media and Identity in the Digital Age, and passed with only a few minor requests for revisions. I’m currently looking into options for publication, but in the meantime, feel free to email me directly (jason @ this domain) if you’d like a copy.

So, finishing the dissertation probably means I’ve had plenty of time to blog, right? Well, not so much, but I aim to remedy that now. Shortly after the defense, I started my new job as an assistant professor in the Communication department at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts (not too far from where I grew up, in Newton Upper Falls).

It turns out that designing and teaching three entirely new classes (plus committees and advising) is something of a handful, though certainly an improvement on the Morlock lifestyle that dissertation writing encourages. Now, in November, I’m finally getting to know the ins and outs of the new campus, figuring out what motivates and interests my students best, and carving out some time to do things other than course prep.

My new (academic) year’s resolution, then, is to get back to blogging. I’ll soon finish that three-part series, and I’m going to try to get back into the blogging routine at least once a week. I may not be doing new research on geekdom itself for the time being, but I suspect I’ll still have things to share for a while. Plus, I think you’ll find that my other research interests are plenty geeky in their own right. After all, someone has to babble on about the theories and usage of video games, web design, and science-fiction. I wouldn’t want there to be a shortage of voices opining on these topics in the blogosphere, so I now solemnly return to perform my duties.

There should be a term for the first time you play a story-focused game, before you really get the hang of how to decimate all your enemies, before you know what’s going to happen in the plot, before you fiddle with the “moral choice” mechanics just to laugh at how big a jerk the protagonist can be, or before you find out that the choices you make don’t even really matter at all. This experience relies on a blend of story-oriented and mastery-oriented appeals, where the challenge of the game heightens the sense of drama and tension in the story, and vice versa.

I don’t know what the term for this type of play should be. Personally, I’d like to see it become more the norm for games with narrative pretensions, but it’s tough to pull off. Even story-oriented games seem to have a hard time pulling it off. And, notably, it’s usually absent in replaying a game. I’m not sure it has to be, though.

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Over at Above 49, one of my favorite gaming blogs, game developer Nels Anderson discusses how social and environmental context are sometimes a better predictor of human behavior than underlying personality variables. This, of course, has pretty relevant implications for how we discuss game design and how we study game play. Before I start mangling this post to serve my own ends, I suggest reading it in full, as it’s pretty insightful.

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Over at Wired, Steven Leckart redoes the Food Pyramid for a “media diet” totaling nine hours daily. Click through for the full-size image. (Link via Dan.)

The proportions between different types of media were foreign to me (I guess I free up relatively more time for gaming by skipping Facebook), but the sum total kind of blew my mind. Perhaps the combination of research, writing, and teaching has thrown off my notions of how much free time normal people have. Do people—or even just the kind of geeks who’d be reading Wired—really spend that long consuming media for pleasure every day?

I wanted to share a quick link from the Chronicle of Higher Education about a professor who encourages students to use Twitter during class (found via Twitter, of course—thanks @zandperl!). The course, originally taught for grad students, is called “Disruptive Technologies in Teaching and Learning,” and features a live Twitter feed projected in the background so students can offer outside links and shyly-yet-publicly consider comments that may derail the discussion.

I think it sounds neat—and, much to my surprise, so do most of those offering comments on Chronicle, it seems. A former student of the class also chimed in to offer some positive reflections and a link to her course blog, which links to other students’ blogs. That should give a sense of the conversations that these technologies encouraged.

In unrelated news, I have about a dozen drafts for new posts that I am dying to complete and post, but they’re going to have to remain drafts until I push through some of my real (i.e., deadline-bound) work. Blogging is my own personal “disruptive technology,” I suppose (but usually in a good way). I expect to be posting a lot come August, the month I defend.

My dissertation occasionally presents me with some odd dilemmas resulting in strange turns of phrase. This is largely an artifact of working with an in-text citation style (APA), which blends a somewhat scientistic air with sometimes quite … let’s say, colorful names and language. No matter how many times I read this sentence, for instance, it looks strange to me, though there’s nothing objectively wrong with it:

Sexist, racist, and homophobic sentiments may be amplified by the somewhat anonymous and depersonalized format of internet venues – an “online disinhibition effect” (Suler, 2004) in psychological terms, though well known to geeks under such terms as “the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory” (Kruhulik & Holkins, 2004).

The phrase is indeed well known, and I offer an endnote to expound upon that a bit. But it still looks like a weird sentence. (And yes, the lowercase “I” in “internet” is intentional.)

My dilemma today is how to cite an article by Iroquois Pliskin. Citing people by handle/screen name is usually no big deal for me. Because I’m quoting heavily from comments on blogs and publicly viewable forums, I already have plenty of citations like “(CmdrTaco, 2007).” This gets trickier when citing someone using a screen name that takes the form of a pen name. If I’m to treat this like a screen name, I’d cite it as “(Iroquois Pliskin, 2009).” On the other hand, this has a first and last name, so should it be “(Pliskin, 2009)”? “Mark Twain” was just a pen name for Samuel Clemens, but I think you’d still cite him as “(Twain, 1876).” And I haven’t even addressed how I decided to cite the Penny Arcade strip noted in the quote above as “(Krahulik and Holkins, 2004)” rather than “(Gabe and Tycho, 2004)”; citing when you have a screen name and a real name associated with a work presents its own challenges as well.

I’m not going to let something so silly hold me up right now, so I’m just going with citing as a screen name for consistency with the other online sources I’m using in cases when no real name is given on the work itself. Perhaps I’ll revise after defending if need be.