#gamefeel

How is gaming different from other art forms? Well, let’s not get bogged down in that. But we can say briefly: in a game you perform actions (as in dance), within an artistically constructed fixed field (as in film). No other medium can offer that experience. Though you perform in theater and dance, those actions occur within the boundless and unpredictable domain of physical reality. And while a film presents a defined field of observation, it is not subject to alteration by its witness. Only gaming offers movement and performance within the confines of the fixed field.

Under any circumstance, focusing on a fixed field becomes a potential vessel for conditioning the psyche. It’s not uncommon for people to come away with their personalities transformed from looking at a painting or closely studying an anthill. The special efficacy of gaming in this endeavor is due to the immediacy of acting within the vessel and the clear delineation of permitted actions. To expedite the process further, games often give the player a clear entry point for the “I”: an avatar into which a player can more consciously self-associate. So while the entire game is microcosmically representative of the player’s psyche, the player-character provides a handy vehicle for mediation (akin to the ego). This projection of the ego into the player-character is relatively obvious (we say “I made the jump!” even though it is Mario who has jumped).

The player-character may or may not act as a reliable representative of the game as a whole, because they will have some semblance of their own identity. That is to say, no avatar can be a totally neutral instrument of mediation; even a single pixel will inspire some affective response in the player. There can be no accounting for the idiosyncrasies of each player’s relationship to their player-character.  How much of ourselves do we consciously recognize in this avatar? Which aspects of our personality does this avatar encourage us to access? This representative of our conscious will is not a clear cast into which we pour ourselves, and our relationship to this intermediary figure will evolve as we play. All this is to say that game-entrainment derives from identification with the gestalt game experience, of which the player-character is only a part.

Of course there is no set way to initiate this style of gaming. Entrainment is just something that happens when we play any game. We throw ourselves – to varying degree – into the game, and what transpires there is suggestive to the unconscious psyche. It is then helpful to bring conscious reflection to the events of the game through interpretation. But again, there is no rulebook, for the same reason that there are no true dream dictionaries.* No generic codification can be assigned to these processes because the disposition of the player, the game itself, and the relationship between the player and the game each hold countless idiosyncrasies. In order to understand how a particular play experience has conditioned the mind, it is most helpful to remain open and honest in your own impressions, and freely associate from there. What events from the game stood out? What did they remind you of? And so on.

While it is helpful to have an attitude of openness to interpretation during gameplay, it is even more helpful to play naturally. Entrainment occurs most efficiently during experiences of immersion. Gamers have pointed out that there are two primary types of immersion: mechanical and narrative, and that a flow state emerges when the two immersions are in harmony. For this reason, I would argue that games which elicit elevated concentration from the player are more effective in this practice. Concentration can be coaxed by the demands of precision movements, as in all manner of action games: shooters, bullet hells, platformers, MOBAs, fighting games. This is representative of mechanical immersion. Concentration can also be seduced into elevation by rich diegetic elements, common in sandbox games, RPGs, visual novels, detective games. This is representative of the so-called narrative immersion. It seems that an increased focus on either count leads to a denser self-projection, and all the more so when the two immersions are acting in concert.

There is one more premise of game-entrainment that is most elusive. When the mind is partitioned into these projections within games, it typically requires very selective attention. On one level, the visual vocabulary of the game is inculcated until recognition is immediate. Think of cherries, coins, blue and green potions: color-and-form compositions that indicate some beneficial effect. Then there are objects that are detriments. There are also objects that are neutral, objects that produce a random effect, and objects whose effect changes depending on other conditions. There are objects with intelligence and objects that are totally passive. The player quickly learns to codify these objects based on the expected result of interaction with them. In a modern game, there are tons of these signifiers that require different anticipations. It is no longer a dichotomy of “touching this is good, touching that is bad,” but a complex tapestry of visual elements that require individual discernment in how they are treated by the player.

So beyond acclimating to the concrete signifiers, the player also develops a fluency for the game’s patterns. Objects and events often come in specific formations. Routines and gestures are repeated. Enemies have intended or unintended tells. Certain events have rules about what precedes or follows. The player becomes intimately familiar with certain situations. In that familiarity, the player both develops conscious responses to game conditions (like learning a combo), and unconsciously accrues a lexicon of habits and shorthands (throwing a bomb at a certain enemy because that’s what you did last time).

When we distribute our focus into similar formations repeatedly, we develop postures of attention. Anyone who has played enough Tetris to see the blocks fall as they fall asleep can testify to this. This suggests that the mental hotkeys that we develop from observing patterns and responding in postures extend beyond the game and into the inner world. We find our dreams inflected with game scenarios, or that these same scenarios are overlaid upon our perception of the world in small eruptions of fantasy. When a posture of attention bleeds into other orders of phenomenal experience, that indicates to me that something new is being accessed in the recesses of the psyche – some formerly unconscious content is coming into view. I would suppose that the particular nature of the content would have some isomorphic relationship to the posture of attention, but is not wholly represented by it.

So, in allowing ourselves to be conditioned by games, we should consider not just the aesthetics and the gameplay, but also how the mind is situated in its task. Each of these elements contributes to gamefeel, the feeling of participating in games. The more aspects of a game that can be consciously understood by the player, the more material there is with which to interpret and appreciate the psycho-simulative process. Conscious game-entrainment is a valuable tool for understanding one’s own mind, providing a designated space to negotiate the complexes of the unconscious. VR games are already being considered for clinical use in the treatment of phobias, and researchers have designed a video game that functions as a CBT course. There are also the countless testimonies of people who intuitively turned to gaming as an instrument of self-care in response to a variety of behavioral disorders.

In addition to its direct therapeutic application, conscious game-entrainment has another important social capacity: the cultivation of new aesthetic fluencies. Video games and other digital media have already profoundly changed our visual habits and comprehensions (as the rising fields of UX and UI can attest). There is no common system of signification to describe the attentional postures (much less the embodied experience) demanded by new media. Yet to best appreciate and employ the forms of the current culture, we need to sensitize ourselves to their affective functioning. In their classic survey of visual media, Practices of Looking, Sturken and Cartwright lay it out: “Digital imaging’s multiplicity of perspectives and its openings for multiple entry points and potential for new combinations of [players] and objects suggest many possible entry points into engagement in the ongoing making of worlds and worldviews.” The broader our awareness of our self-association within the virtual, and the more definition given to the sense-impressions derived therein, the more we as players are able to intentionally participate in the transformation of our worldview.

It also seems self-explanatory that video games as a creative medium would benefit from players and developers consciously exploring styles of symbolic engagement.

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Oh my is this game amazing. At no point did i struggle with where to go even though it seems as though you can go anywhere. Every scene has props set up that allow the player to establish what happened there without actually being told. From a messy attic, to all the areas with shoreline (a mercenary company that acts as one of the main antagonists) equipment set up all over the place.

All the audio and effects made for a very immersive experience and every time Nathan began to fall down a cliff, or a bridge broke, you could feel it and it gets your blood pumping