Games as Emotion (Part Two)

Looking back at my older blog series, I guess I've broken the post title convention I used to adopt, which was The Blog Post - Part One (The Partening) or something like that. I guess if you want a subtitle, then I guess part one might be Sadness, but this part two would be Making, which of course makes no sense.

A big part of the reason I've played a lot more games this year, is that they've got a lot easier to play. Roughly this time last year, I spent a bit too much money on a new rig with a 3080 and a curved QHD high refresh rate monitor and as a result games got a lot smoother than my slightly upgraded rig from 2012.

I bought it, of course, to play the PC release of Death Stranding (104 hours), which is an incredible visual feast of a game with DLSS running. I also played and finished Deathloop (time not tracked?) and Rage 2 (40 hours), started and finished a new play through of Prey (around 15-20 hours), and played Hell Let Loose (191 hours), The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (72 hours), Mad Max (47 hours), The Witness (15 hours), Cyberpunk 2077 (6 hours?, I've done one quest after the opening), Disco Elysium (5 hours?, I've made it out the front door of the hotel and visited a book shop), Neocab (time not tracked), replayed half of Titanfall 2 (time delta not tracked because the game whips by), wasted my time getting frustrated by bad stealth mechanics in Alien Isolation (90 minutes) and am still unsure how the majority of games systems work or what I was doing in Destiny 2 (51 hours). Of those games, Death Stranding, Hell Let Loose and the Witcher 3 have become the 5th, 4th and 6th most played games of mine since Steam started recording that sort of thing. I also clocked some hours on Slay the Spire which is undoubtedly up there on time played.

This is mostly to say that the human brain loves lists (or perhaps a table or pie chart), and I am no exception. But my play experience has been made well by getting a new PC, and in turn, I've been able to play a number of well made games. And the games on this list are well made in the sense they exhibit a technical mastery of art and video game development. But that's not what I mean when I used the phrase "well-made" in the previous post.

Instead I think specifically of the interactions between the game, it's systems and aesthetics, and the player, the act of playing itself, to create a story which is experienced in a completely separate mode from being told or shown it: making a story. I've intuitively discarded alternate phrasings like "well-played", "well-designed" or "well-done" (doing a story), because of unwanted meanings associated with those phrases and because I want to emphasise the (conscious and unconscious) choices of the people making the game (in all its aspects, not just game design). I'm trying to gesture towards an active process: the construction of a "well-made" story requires the presence of a player who willingly enters the magic circle and plays the game aided by the game design suspending their disbelief and engaging them. However there are enough random factors in any game and player that I don't want to put any blame on a player if they don't experience the emotion affect intended: this is the distinction between "well-made" and a hypothetical "well-played".

In this sense, a game is a tool that allows a player to generate emotional experiences.

(And now I am torn, because maybe the term should be "well-generated" stories, but I've already used and abused 'generate' too much).

What I'm trying to capture here is best expressed by Hell Let Loose, a first person multiplayer collaborative shooter, where players effectively enter a deliberately limited consensual reality that largely mimics specific World War 2 scenarios. Hell Let Loose defies some conventions of these games while embracing others, but at its heart, much like Death Stranding, it tries to force people to communicate and collaborate in specific modes and channels to achieve objectives. Hell Let Loose does this using a number of now standard mechanisms (pings, voice and chat, group voice and chat) but creates vertical and horizontal choke points in these mechanisms which require players depend on each other to overcome. Players read compass directions and map grids and symbols to each other because targets are hard to see and quickly become dangerous; audio channels become expressive if used sparingly but jammed if overused, with officers having to observe, listen to and use channels and expressions that their squad is not privy to; building and attacking dynamically placed critical infrastructure is more important than individual achievements.

And, unlike a co-op shooter like Left 4 Dead, Hell Let Loose has a wide breadth of experiences for players to choose from, all of which are weighted with enough significance so that they meaningfully impact play: you can choose from driving a supply truck, firing artillery, desperately trying to flank a tank to hit it with one of only two rockets, and so on, so that the potentially each of these actions is a unique experience generator even nearing 200 hours of play. For instance, last night I lead a squad for 10 minutes to push a supply truck 200 meters up a road to try to get a second attacking garrison into Foy, only to have to abandon it to defend a previously well-defended position that was now falling on the other side of the map. For those 10 minutes, moving that truck while under fire was the most important thing we could do, and none of us ever before had had driving a truck such a short distance become so meaningful in the game.

These stories are not "well-told" or "well-shown": they are unique to games. And I am wise enough to see the hand of the game makers in making specific choices in Hell Let Loose that I see a continuum between single player, highly authored experiences like Death Stranding and multi player chaotic experiences like Hell Let Loose.

I'm going to pause a while, play some more Hell Let Loose and then think about writing a part three.