Author: KristenBuglio

While my personal experience with “summer camps” was never quite in line with Isbisters ideals, the concept of bonding in secluded environments with forced communities is certainly not lost on me from other life experiences like work, clubs, and, accurately, video games.  There is an very interesting bond created between people of forced kinship, and especially temporary kinship.  Isbister mentions Journey, an online exploratory game with very little distinction between players(built from experience of the player).  This reminds me of other titles, “Meadow” and “The isle”, where The Isle is a game of surviving and progressing an online community through limited forms of communication and distinction from each other.  Meadow is an exploratory game of limited communications where players are able to change their avatar through unlocking items which require multiple players to be present.  All three titles express the beauty of temporary bonds, stressing the dismay of losing track of the person you’ve been traveling with for the past hour when you suddenly come into contact with others, the need for people to find alternate ways of expressing their typical character design cues or chat mediums, limiting you, instead, to the simple actions you can take in game, and finally, exercising our minds ability to distinguish patterns and personalities from the slightest, simplest of indications.

My immediate response was humored as Isbister started off the chapter bringing up motion controls, reminding me of the gimicky fad of gameplay which centered around such ideas.  While the systems she mentioned, Wii, and the Kinect(She also mentions a system called the “Move” which I have actually never even heard of, and therefore cannot speak for, but will take the fact that I have not heard of it as reason enough to say it didn’t make itself a console worth reckoning with) have a sort of naive charm that seems appealing in a family or party-game kind of setting or playstyle, but lacks the muscle of games which don’t have to rely on considering the great deal of input inaccuracy.  I also feel as though, while watching another’s movements may induce emotions the character a user is playing is far more powerful as a reference then a physical person mimicking those movements or even mimicking those movements yourself.  To have to act out some part of your character’s movements may seem at first a very immersive idea, but it is actually quite the distraction, by focusing on your own fumbling movements rather than using the precise conversions normal controllers have for movement you no longer get the emotion from watching the player.  Think about food advertisement, the burger on the picture looks great right?  that burger is the hypothetical movement, the movement designed to look good and not directly represent real motion, it’s flows far more, and its minor details are accentuated. it’s lettuce is green and crisp.  But motion control is like actually ordering the burger, it’s no longer a hypothetical- it exists in real space, so sure, you get to eat it now, and there is something nice about actually feeling some part of the movements your character is making, but this burger isn’t all done up to look good, it isn’t the ideal, beautiful burger you saw in that image but rather something slopped together by a person probably getting paid minimum wage.  So sure, you may get to eat the burger, but its completely different from that same feeling you get when your eating it vicariously through your own imagination, or, in gamespace, your avatar.

Katherine Isbister starts the book relating the emotional experience players have of games to that of movie-goers or novel-readers.  I found the pre-condition of this relation, the notion (provided within the opening quote by designer Will Wright of the ever popular sims) that it is assumed by the general public that games do not provide the strong emotional experience of these other mediums to be quite baffling.  I’d even go as far to say that the feelings evoked in games have the potential to be much stronger than those of novels or movies, based on the principle quality of games which is the ability to choose, and that ability’s potential to have a meaningful outcome within the game.  Readers and watchers are merely, in a vast majority of cases, observers.  It is not to say that observation alone cannot produce immense bouts of emotion but rather that there is a certain “realness” of the immersion associated with games.  It is much different to watch sports than it is to play them, for example.  Perhaps you can claim to feel the rush of the win, the anxiety of a close call from behind the screen as you reach for your potato chips, but only those whose direct instantaneous choices determine the outcome of it every moment of the way can truly make claim to the feelings related to their actions.  Besides Choices, Katherine highlights a second quality of games she calls “flow” in which she describes as an “optimal performance state” and likened to being in “the zone” in various activities.  This is a state, she explained, where the world beyond the current task dissolves away, creating a very strong immersion into the game as it is the current task.  However, I disagree with her statement that this is a quality unique to games, as I believe a very similar phenomenon occurs in other mediums, specifically the previously mentioned movies and novels, as one tunes out everything which is not the current state and focuses in on the specific task before them, even if that task is the simple one of following along.