--------------------------
Below is the written
component of the paper I presented at the Wandering Games Conference on the 12th July
2019. The superscript numbers in the text indicate the number of the
corresponding slide you should view in the embedded Powerpoint above (you can access
the slides separately as a PDF here).
I’d like to thank Melissa Kagen, Eben Muse and all the staff and student helpers at Bangor University that made such an endlessly inspiring conference happen. It was probably my favourite academic event of all time in how it brought together such a warm and passionate group of people over shared interests and loves, and I really hope Wandering Games returns for another conference next year.
--------------------------
When1 we talk about
the unique qualities of games in which we wander – whether we’re traversing
virtual or physical worlds – what do we refer to? We might describe the rules2
(or lack thereof) that determine how we wander; what roles we play in the world
of the game. We might describe the process3 of navigating – how the
ways we wander the game environments impact our relationships with
them. And we might talk about the outcomes4 of playing these games –
we might describe events and encounters that occurred as we wandered, and how
the journey made us feel.
Essentially, with wandering games
we distinguish something unique in the relationships between players and their
environment, which differs5 from other types of games where one’s
surroundings might be seen more as a backdrop to the gameplay, or a territory
upon which gameplay unfolds. Rather, the environment, and how we traverse it,
is central to the meaning-making process that occurs during wandering games. In
geographical terms6, we could say that we’re distinguishing between
game spaces and game places.
In this presentation, I want to
demonstrate the usefulness of geographical approaches for making sense of the
meaning-making process that takes place in wandering games. By understanding
their unfolding interrelationships of bodies, social relationships and
technologies as a form of dwelling in place, we can not only better understand
the ways that players play and experience wandering games, but think about their
potential for enabling practices of design and play that articulate different
ways of being in the world.
To do this, I’m going to draw on
research involving both video games and physical location-based games. The
first is a study7 of walking simulator video games, in which I
carried out autoethnographic playing of 12 walking sims and interviewed their
developers. The second8 is a long-term study of the
GPS-based treasure-hunting game Geocaching, for which I’ve also used
autoethnography, as well as analysing geocache descriptions9 and the
logs other players have left after finding the hidden containers.
I’m going to talk about two key
aspects of the place-making process that occurs in these games: emplacement10
– how information is positioned in the game’s world to elicit certain kinds of
responses, and what kinds of information; and enaction11 –
how players engage with and make sense of this information as they wander, and
the situated acts and inconsistencies these forms of wandering might entail.
Together12, this
discussion will point towards experiences of dwelling in the worlds of
wandering games as something assembled contingently, between connections and
disconnections of human and non-human agents that unfold through the
navigational gameplay. I’ll finish by explaining how this way of thinking can
help us get to grips with what these games do, and what they can allow us to do
as designers and players.
As13 we wander through
the environment of a game, our feelings and perceptions will be shaped by what
we encounter and the information we glean from the world, whether it was put
there intentionally or not.
In walking simulator games,
developers aim to qualify these experiences through environmental
storytelling – whereby the construction of a narrative relies on the
player’s navigation between pieces of information purposefully embedded across
the game’s environment, and the interpretations they make from these evocative
narrative elements.
In Geocaching14, we
might say that this informational ‘environment’ is expanded to include all the materials
players can use to find a geocache: the description and hints available on the
cache webpage, curated by its owner, and past activity logs. Players then
determine how this information corresponds to what they encounter physically.
But what does this distribution
of information across the environments of these games achieve?
Most notably15, it
allows players to choose what they focus on – a function Michael Nitsche calls
‘dynamic focalization’. The meanings that players derive from the distributed
information are determined by what they notice in the world; and what
their inclinations and motivations are as they explore. The possibility of
ignoring16 certain pieces of embedded information means that players
can decide the manner in which they want to invest in the world – whether to
look in one place as opposed to another; whether to spend a long time piecing
together details of what they encounter, or simply find what they need and
leave.
By positioning this moment of
focalization right at the heart of the game space, the player experience is
tailored to their own affective and emotional sensibilities. Navigating17
the world becomes a personalised event in which the significance of locations
in the game environment becomes tied to the interests and urges of the
individual player.
Furthermore, many developers seek
to invite individual interpretation18 through the content of
these narrative elements themselves, which is often deliberately ambiguous and
multi-vocal.
In walking sims, this might come
across in the use of symbolism, or artefacts that are written or spoken by
multiple characters. While these aesthetic elements have their own voice and
perspective, there’s no singular trustworthy narrator to filter what’s
meaningful. Players have to decide what’s significant for themselves.
In Geocaching19, this
active encouragement of interpretation is most apparent in the use of hints,
which ask the player to apply their interpretation of the words to their
surroundings. One of my favourite examples is a geocache I found where the hint
was ‘I don’t ever want to feel like I did that day’. At first the phrase seemed
to bear no relation whatsoever to my location, until it suddenly clicked that
those words are the lyrics to the Red Hot Chili Peppers song ‘Under the
Bridge’. Sure enough20, that’s where the cache was located. But I’m
also aware of the degree of personalisation that this method provokes, because every
time I walk past that particular bridge, I think about that moment of
discovery, and often the song comes into my head too!
I want to emphasise that the
relationship between navigation and narrative in games where we wander can be
more structured than it appears. Developers typically make their games
with the aim of achieving particular emotional effects – effects that can make
use of the personal focalization that wandering entails.
For walking simulators21,
developers use three main methods to achieve this. The first is gating, in
which entry and exit points in the world are carefully coordinated to structure
the flow of information the player is exposed to. The second22 is
signposting, in which light and sound directs the player’s attention towards
certain significant elements in their surroundings. And the final23
method is pacing, in which the spacing between narrative information is
carefully managed to elicit dramatic tension and mood.
As you can see, this level of
authorship by developers often simply comes down to how players are able to
move and act in the game world. Shibolet’s24 excellent paper on the
avatar’s movement in Journey, which describes how the ‘story’ of the experience
comes into being almost solely through the sense of trajectory you embody as
you move across the world, reminds us that game worlds in which we wander are
not just a mise-en-scene, but what Andy Lavender calls a mise-en-sensibilité.
The emplacement of information is as multimedia as the practice of game
playing itself.
Indeed, in Geocaching25,
alongside the text we see on the webpage, the way geocaches are hidden is
geared towards players sensually engaging with the world through touch; using
embodied experience to engage with what the abstract view of GPS coordinates
fails to see.
What’s notable, then, about the
navigational qualities of wandering games is how the stories that derive from
these experiences become personalised to the player26.
The constellations of affects and perceptions that players chart become closely
mapped onto internal topographies of the self as much as information
represented digitally. And this is often deliberate. The designed structure of wandering
games can provide opportunities for players to engage on their own terms with
aesthetic and kinaesthetic possibilities in the world. They can become gatekeepers
to “intimate spatial knowledge”, to quote urban explorer Bradley Garrett, turning
the game space into “a place for dwelling rather than merely a territory”.
However27,
understanding how this relationship between navigation and narrative plays out
in practice is crucial, because games are evental media. Whether
you’re loading up software in the case of video games, or heading out for a
playful wander in a physical environment, the emplaced information of the game,
without input from players, is just static architecture. As Alexander Galloway
puts it, games only “exist when enacted”.
So what does enaction mean in the
context of wandering games? How do our actions as players lead us to have
meaningful experiences?
Let’s start with Geocaching28.
When geocachers head out in search for a cache, they travel to the treasure’s
listed coordinates on the Geocaching website. While reaching the given
coordinates will bring the player within close proximity to the geocache, GPS
technology itself is only accurate within a 10-metre radius, and is degraded
further by factors such as tree cover.
Yet rather than fostering a
detachment from the corporeal game environment, these affordances force you to
look up from your device and interact sensually with your physical surroundings
to find the hidden container. The limitations of the technology are what provokes
this sensual engagement.
In turn29, other
players have the agency to hide geocaches in creative or elaborate ways, such
as the one shown here. A geocache’s coordinates are there for anyone to see;
it’s by engaging sensually with the unique materialities of cache locations
that geocachers can feel the sense of empowerment, excitement and intimacy that
the treasure-hunting gameplay aims to provoke.
Furthermore, over time many
geocachers30, myself included, become more adept at this practice of
finding geocaches, learning to recognise signs of disturbed ground, the
sensitivity of the app’s GPS compass, and common hiding techniques. Often
referred to as the player’s ‘geosenses’ or ‘cacher’s eye’, navigating to
geocaches for regular players becomes a process of attunement, whereby
technology, gameplay and material environment combine to re-orient bodily
senses, and intensify the player’s relationship with their surroundings.
We might liken this process to
cognitive mapping31 – the performative act of making connections
between places and meaningful information, whereby, to quote Lynch32,
“nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings,
the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences.” And
this can be found in the gameplay of walking sims too, as we navigate the
mise-en-sensibilité that developers curate.
The issue with fictional worlds,
however, is that the believability of the world – which you could say is the
extent to which players are able to form coherent mental maps of it – is potentially
more fragile33 and subjective. Not only are digital games
susceptible to technical glitches, such as the problems I discovered in
Firewatch with the rendering of textures in certain areas, but also there’s a
fine balance for developers to negotiate in terms of exposing information34.
They want to do so in a way that elicits emotional engagement, while also
leaving enough room for players to stitch together a model of the world that
make sense to them.
For example, during my
autoethnography of walking sims, in some games I’d question how I discovered
narrative information such as diary entries and graffiti that was somehow perfectly
positioned to continue a linear story. As my navigation of the world began to
feel more authored, the world no longer felt believable as a place, but felt
more like a game level, where my own interpretation of events was seemingly
less important. At those moments, it didn’t feel like a world I could imagine
myself into.
The designers of walking sims aim
to manage some of this inconsistency through testing. While many of the
technical problems have technical solutions, for walking sims testing also
exists to find inconsistencies in how people engage with the world subjectively35.
For example, The Chinese Room re-made the world of Everybody’s Gone to the
Rapture from scratch four or five times, simply because testing revealed that
it didn’t ‘feel’ right to people as a Shropshire village. As James Ash observes36,
testing is a process that enables developers to “render contingency visible” with
the aim that these relationships between technologies, bodies and represented
worlds can be re-attuned towards more “positively affective” outcomes.
We’re beginning to see that the
relationship between navigation and narrative that develops when we wander in
games, which I’m calling a place-making practice, is closely connected to
personal embodied37 responses and their social and cultural
associations. Only last week, I ran a workshop introducing academics to walking
simulators, and some of the people in the room had never even picked up a games
console controller before. It was a stark reminder that experiences of playing
these games always intersect with age, disability, gender, ethnicity and many
other facets of society and culture, whether this is in the playing of the
game, or even being able to access and participate in the activity in the first
place.
In Geocaching38, we’ve
seen this intersection with social and cultural norms play out quite
prominently on a larger scale in the public eye, where the gameplay has
prompted legal action and security alerts, for example. And though I didn’t
experience any barriers to playing the game based on embodied factors alone, as
a white, able-bodied male, my participation at times has been restricted in
other ways.
In the nerve-wracking39
example pictured here, I wasn’t willing to climb to the top of this tree to
grab the geocache hidden there as the weather was windy, and I knew I wouldn’t
be able to make three points of contact on trunk, contravening the social
standards of climbing safety I once learnt. By abandoning my retrieval of the
cache, my experience was characterised by situated articulations of material
conditions, social norms and bodily capacities which weren’t simply playful or
serendipitous, but actively restrictive.
These examples remind us that
practices of place-making40, and the links we develop between
navigation and narrative, aren’t ideologically neutral. As geographer Tim
Cresswell has noted in his seminal work In Place / Out of Place, the link between
place and ‘belonging’ is central to many relationships of power in societies,
particularly when we label certain acts or bodies as being ‘out of place’. Place
becomes not just a domain of community or attunement, but also of ‘geographical
deviance’ and disconnection.
By recognising the potential of
‘geographical deviance’, however, I want to finish by highlighting how acts of
wandering also provide opportunities for transgression. It’s a fairly
tame example41 that I came across during my research, but in the
game Gone Home, which allows players to pick up objects and place them wherever
they want, some players decided to collect all the items you can pick up in the
game and put them in one room; while others curated shrines to the individual
characters, rather than leaving the items as they were found. It’s just a small
example of the potential of navigation as a transgressive act in wandering
games, which can re-write stories of engagement with game places that disrupt
established norms and make some of these underlying rules newly visible.
As digital technology42
has come to influence the ways we encounter and make sense of the worlds we
inhabit, critical thinkers across the arts and humanities have sought to chart
the factors that shape our place in the world as humans.
As a distinctly interactive
medium, with associated concepts of agency and immersion, for example, games are
a particularly useful area of study for getting to grips with our being in the world,
and how interrelationships of human and non-human components influence this.
The conception of place43
I’ve been using today is born out of post-phenomenological approaches in
Geography, which understand our experiences of being in the world as less about
‘being there’, but more about ‘being with’ – being part of an unfolding ecology
of human and non-human agents that assemble contingently and in situ; not
solely centred in the human mind.
What I hope to have demonstrated
today is that, in the unique ways that wandering in games develops meaningful
relationships between individuals and environments, we are talking about
practices of place-making. And by understanding44 what we mean when
we talk about dwelling in place – as something highly personal, sensual,
contingent, performative, and potentially transgressive – we can better
recognise both the opportunities and limitations that arise from these
articulations of bodies, technologies, materials and social norms.
I’m arguing that if we’re going
to make games in which the kinds of experiences we want players to have result
from developing meaningful relationships with the environment, we need to
consider what we mean when we say things like we want to create ‘believable’ or
‘emotionally-engaging’ worlds with a ‘sense of place’.
As a final touchstone45
for my presentation, I want to highlight the work of people in games such as
Kate Edwards, a high-profile member of the games industry who is employed
specifically as a geographical consultant by games companies to critique and
help develop their world-building. If you listen to her talks, you’ll find that
she has lots of anecdotes about games companies that have wanted to effectively
re-write geopolitical history to appeal to certain market, and how she has had
to negotiate the impacts and ethics of these kinds of decisions.
As a way of thinking about
experience that is highly attuned to materialities, the body, society, culture,
geopolitics, and increasingly digital technology, it’s evidence that geographical
approaches are well-placed for thinking about the interconnected factors that
shape how our experiences of game environments are enacted46.
No comments:
Post a Comment