Beetles: Rock Band--Music and Empathy

The New York Times magazine has one of the most thoughtful and insightful pieces of game reporting I've seen in a long time, about Beetles: Rock Band. What was striking for me was the articulation by both the makers of the game, and by band members and their loved ones, of the deep appeal of performing/embodying the music making, and the great potential for turning music back into an active, performative, joyful part of everyday peoples' lives, as it was before the great era of recording. To quote the article directly:

"'When you need to move your body in synchrony with the music in specific ways, it connects you with the music in a deeper way than when you are just listening to it,' Rigopulos went on to say. Paul McCartney said much the same thing when I spoke with him in June. 'That’s what you want,' he told me. 'You want people to get engaged.' McCartney sees the game as 'a natural, modern extension” of what the Beatles did in the ’60s, only now people can feel as if “they possess or own the song, that they’ve been in it.' “

Or as Yoko Ono said in the piece: “It’s like dancing,” she said, or even “a very strong active meditation.”

This reminded me a column Ian Bogost wrote for Gamasutra recently that dealt with the use of gesture and movement in games, in particular his comment that 'gestures, be they transitive or intransitive, direct or indirect, can also alter an actor's own thoughts or feelings about the world or himself. These sensations can be complex, and they can evolve.'

Interestingly, the core emotional feel of the game is a departure from the typical frustration/fiero cycle that Nicole Lazzaro describes in her research--as Harmonix's Alex Rigopulos says in the article: “It is subtle, and it is sweet, and it is very embracing. This game isn’t about winning. That’s generally not done in big mainstream games.”

The reporter notes that the game isn't so much about competition, but is quite cooperative. Perhaps the musical performance paradigm is helping to drive a profound shift even from the AAA mass market side in the kinds of emotional experiences that games aim to provide to players. As Jenova Chen said in his Develop 2009 talk, "Sometimes hard fun is your enemy," said Chen, "but it’s too easy to try and make a hard, fun game, as it’s almost all we know."

Muto--haunting graffiti beings

I visited the Bremen Weserburg Museum yesterday, where I saw an exhibition called Urban Art. By far my favorite piece there was a video which was of graffiti that had been done on walls around Buenos Aires and Baden by an artist called 'Blu'. The figures transform, engulf one another, shatter, and otherwise crawl, scamper and squat against the walls of an urban landscape of decay and other graffiti.

You can see the video here. The artist's work is lovely but also deeply disturbing. My daughter watched it and got very frightened (she is 2 1/2). This surprised me (I wouldn't knowingly frighten her) and in thinking it over, it seems to me that Blu provides a very bleak and disturbing vision of human nature. His figures are lonely and do not have much emotion--they are blank, hungry, scrabbling things. I find them beautiful but I cannot connect to them except as the mirror of a form of despair and isolation and blankness.

What I especially love about them is the way they move through the landscape, magically, occasionally kicking over something in their way that is 'real'. It feels as though they would not register my presence at all, but would simply dance over me, leaving a white trail of paint, if I stood in the way.

Body Swapping and Empathy

There was an intriguing article in the New York Times today about a Swedish research team that has been doing experiments with giving people the illusion of swapping bodies with someone else:

"The technique is simple. A subject stands or sits opposite the scientist, as if engaged in an interview. Both are wearing headsets, with special goggles, the scientist’s containing small film cameras. The goggles are rigged so the subject sees what the scientist sees: to the right and left are the scientist’s arms, and below is the scientist’s body.

To add a physical element, the researchers have each person squeeze the other’s hand, as if in a handshake. Now the subject can see and “feel” the new body. In a matter of seconds, the illusion is complete. In a series of studies, using mannequins and stroking both bodies’ bellies simultaneously, the Karolinska researchers have found that men and women say they not only feel they have taken on the new body, but also unconsciously cringe when it is poked or threatened."

While they caution that people who are already mentally disturbed might be harmed by trying this out, they also point out that this is a very powerful way for someone to take another's perspective, and perhaps gain some insight.

It's a fascinating validation of what we already see happening in video games. Players project themselves into their avatars, seeing through their eyes in the game world and taking actions within the physical constraints of this 'borrowed' body, reacting intuitively to what happens to their character as gameplay unfolds. It suggests that, once games have more powerful and nuanced social interactions built into them, we have an extremely powerful empathy generating medium on our hands.

Montreal International Game Summit 2008

Just got back from this year's Game Summit in Montreal. I gave a talk there based upon my recent edited book: Game Usability: Advice from the Experts for Advancing the Player Experience, and also hosted a roundtable on the theme of usability and games. The conference was well attended and there were some terrific talks--Jason Della Rocca has photos and a bit of a summary up on his website.

During some downtime in the speakers lounge, I ended up talking with a fellow speaker, a notable game developer who I guess I'll protect by not naming, and we were discussing how fun it would be to play a game in which you could pit sumo wrestlers against one another who had the personalities and fighting styles of large corporations. You know, a head-to-head of say, Disney versus Verizon? Or maybe Microsoft versus Google? Where each is a personified, bouncing, ducking and weaving, maybe even 'diaper' wearing character. It could be cathartic to win an epic battle against a company who has frustrated you day in and day out. And fun to see the qualities that you've experienced in the corporate atmosphere of a place where you work, wrought into human form. 

Maybe I should try to convince Ian Bogost to mock such a thing up. Who knows, maybe he already has?

I guess this is the opposite of empathy, in a way, but it certainly speaks to strong emotional experience through characters.

Videogames and your soul

Now that I'm settled in at NYU-Poly, I'm going to renew my efforts to post regularly on this blog. At the moment I've been doing a lot of reading about games and learning, because I'm part of the newly formed NYU Games for Learning Institute (visit here for a description by the Institute's funders, Microsoft).

So far my favorite book about the topic, is James Gee's book Why Video Games are Good for your Soul. It came out in 2005. In it he really is able to put his finger on what makes gaming such a compelling experience for the player. I particularly like how he brings empathy into the picture. He talks about how physicists and other specialists learn to project themselves bodily into a complex model or system, in order to really get a feel for it and make progress in their ideas. He calls this 'embodied empathy for a complex system'. He feels that fusing with a game character through playing that character, is the same kind of process. He points out that good games always do this for players, and often end up teaching them complex things as a result (e.g. he has a rant on Deus Ex: Invisible War and how it allows the player to explore what it might mean to have a world in which abilities can be purchased systemically--e.g. parents buying smarts for their kids).

Gee does a great job expressing the general feel of this kind of empathy, and its power, through tracking on several particular games and examples from them.

I'm excited to use this book to ground some of my own design-based explorations of how specific choices impact player experience and empathy!

The Real Story on Characters and Emotion: Taking it 'to the Streets'!

Our presentation at GDC 08 went well! I know a lot of people were interested in seeing the slides and poster again or even peeking at the data themselves, so I've put everything live.

• Slides
• Poster
• Data

We got some interesting feedback as well! I'll just summarize some of the top responses:

- Culture plays a big role in feedback. What makes the King of All Cosmos (Katamari Damacy) an amusing character here isn't the same in Japan, where he's funny for other reasons. The culture in our survey was mostly American/Canadian/European, which means of course that we are overlooking a big part of the market.

- Almost all named responses were humans or humanoid characters. There were very few animals or pets, except in the favorite allies question where characters like pokemon and pikmin came up a few times. Expected, but an interesting analysis nonetheless.

- Someone during the session asked about heroes vs. antiheroes, and which players felt more of a relation to. Looking back through the data, it actually seems the ratio was about even. My speculation here is some liked heroes for their positive, idealistic qualities, while others found the antiheroes more complex and real. I didn't check to see if this correlated with any demographics (age, genre, etc)... but the good news is, the data will be live as soon as I make this post =)

Our next big topic of research is player-created avatars and player-generated stories. Check back with us soon for an overview and a survey link! =)

This is Corey, signing off.

Cultural differences and touch

Our family booked a train trip to see my husband's family in Bremen, and he was complaining about how crowded the train will be... this brought back memories for me of riding the trains in Japan. I remember one rush hour trip between Kyoto and Osaka where there really were men with white gloves shoving us all onto the train, similar to what you can see in this photo:



We were so densely packed that there was no way to hold a hand rail. Instead you were held up by other bodies all around you. You had to sort of wriggle your way to the train doors one stop ahead of where you needed to get off the train. The experience was extremely overwhelming to me, as someone used to US notions of how crowded in it's acceptable to be.

Wikipedia actually has an entry describing cultural differences in notions about how close we can get, which is termed 'spatial empathy'. The idea being that in some cultures there's a notion that a person 'owns' a certain amount of space around him/herself, and others should not enter it. It's quite shocking to suddenly be pressed against strangers in a train if one is operating under these notions!

Considering the space between people, and how it influences emotion, is hard enough when designing characters in a game for one cultural market. After all, there is a whole research field (proxemics) devoted to the understanding of interpersonal distance.

There are some games that have explored proxemics in interesting ways (remember Ico's hand-holding game mechanic?), but designers have barely scratched the surface of the possibility space.

When I'm supervising Ph.D. students, I tell them that the moment they realize how little they know and get a bit depressed is the moment when they've just started to become good at what they do. I think this may also be true for game designers hoping to create true empathy in games. There are so many facets to the experience to be mastered. It can feel overwhelming, but it is a worthy goal that is achievable...