The Hidden Conquest
Third-Person Turn Base RPG
Play, Art & the Human Condition
An Existentialist Approach to Understanding Games
Team Size: 1
Role: Game Designer
Tools: MS Office
Period: 120 Days
URL: https://bit.ly/3Aky8xB
Art: Elliot Dangerfield – Landscape
Philosophy is not "a critique of words by means of other words" but to facilitate the emergence of the "Great Individual".
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
❖ Abstract ❖
Over the years we have talked more about the depth of games and in all of that forgetting about their breath, which is the true essence of this medium. The primary focus of this page is more on the philosophical side of games and discussing them as a unique art form. I will argue that this medium can create artistic expression exploring a wide range of human emotions and conditions. This paper seeks to get into the existentialist approach to game design dealing with the variety of experiences and emotions. Borrowing insights from a wide variety of video game theorists as well as my own experiences as a player and as a consumer of many forms of media, I will be doing a specific case study about
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Revisiting the definition of games and play in general,
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Discussing them as an art form,
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The anatomy of meaningful player experiences and emotions during play,
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The final conclusion of how we, the creators, can approach the making of games that allow us to consider video games as a unique art form respective to the medium itself.
Art: William-Adolphe Bouguereau - Dante and Virgil
“What do we possess today as “Art”? A faked music, filled with artificial noisiness of massed instruments; a failed painting, full of idiotic, exotic and Showcard effects, that every ten years or so concocts out of the form-wealth of millennia some new “style” which is in fact no style at all since everyone does as he pleases…So it has been in the Last Act of all Cultures.”
~ Oswald Spengler
❖ Games and Play ❖
There was always a murky grey area between the play and games from the beginning. Before getting further into video games, I will be discussing the shared history and some common ground between the aesthetics of play and games as well as some clarification of how they differ from each other.
First of all, let’s not get confused with the terms games, play, and gameplay. All these are three individual terms with their meanings in respective areas. Play, what is it? When we talk about play, is it just an activity of escapism for one’s self? Or the play is just related to the games? So, first I will be diving deep into the fundamentals of play and its nature around living beings. With play we go back a long time, it started with the human evolution because play can be anything, it can be a process of cognitive and social learning, it can be one’s desire of doing anything without any expectation and certain objective, it can be a little kid just sitting there and playing by himself with no worries of the world, it can be learning something without knowing about it, it can be a random activity of two beings playing and showing love for each other. Both play and humans evolved together over time, but play’s essence is in everything and everywhere, from humans to animals to nature.
On the other hand, when a play involves obeying the rules, that particular activity converts into a game, and a play with its own internal rules can turn out to be a game. Independent from its rules, a true game experience and meaning always emerge through its quality of play. When we look at this world, we see systems and rules all around us, with each playing their roles, but unlike the play, not every rule and system functions out of desirability. Some work because of the necessity created by living beings. Hence everyone has their own game going from humans to animals to nature. Eventually, a game is an activity of play and a random play can turn out to be a game when it has rules and conflicts with certain outcomes. There is always some kind of faded narrative hovering over those game rules or play and later these very elements produce an emergent narrative based on the context of that particular activity.
Now that we have talked about the fundamental nature of play and games, it’s time to get us into the area of how they differ from each other? Games and play both are embedded very closely with each other. Play is deeply rooted in the human condition with no intentionality and expectation behind that but in games there are rules, and constraints played out together due to human desire, intentions and necessity. Play comes from within any living being synthesized out of the consciousness from their own existence without even knowing about it. But in the case of games, they are played out because one wants something out of it and that can be anything an experience
Art: Nikolaj Alexandrowitsch Yaroshenko - Elbrus behind the Clouds
“What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I must know…What matters is to find a purpose…to find a truth that is true for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die…This is what my soul thirsts for as the African desert thirsts for water.”
~ Søren Kierkegaard
of various emotions, narrative, challenge with knowing every bit of the whole process. This can be the most important fact that differentiates both play and games.
Both games and play were part of the world we live in, but as we progressed over the years, the knowledge increased, leading to more information and a broader array of human emotions and experiences. All of that wisdom, knowledge and information needed to pass to the people of present and future generations. So what we did is created multiple kinds of mediums to express that information in various kinds of ways. From paintings, literature, poetry, theatrical play, singing, dancing, philosophy, movies, video games, and many more. Those all were the mediums and we used them according to our artistic imagination and capability, keeping everything within the constraint of that particular medium.
And after going through all of this, we have come to video games that have their unique philosophies of expressing information and creating experiences. We all have unique ways of understanding everything, derived from our own individual existence. So our definition and interpretation of the same thing may vary from person to person, the same goes for everything in the world and lastly also for video games.
Like every medium video games have their principles, foundations and constraints. In these constraints, one applies his theory and vision of what video games can be and how they communicate the specific information of one with players across the world. Even though we all share the same medium but our need for using it might vary to multiple degrees. Many game theorists and designers gave their formal views on what video games are?
Video games are possibly the first concretive, mechanically reproduced form of art: they are mass artwork shaped by audience input.
Video games are interfaces that enable cognitive and social learning, they are training devices in some sense what developmental psychologists view as the reason for play.
Sid Meier once called video games a series of interesting decisions.
Will Wright views them as systematic sandboxes.
Conditions that are necessary to be a game are rules, conflict, valued outcome and player ability.
Video games are systems in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules that result in a quantifiable outcome.
Art: John Martin - The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah
Every transformation demands as its precondition "the ending of a world” - the collapse of an old philosophy of life.
~ Carl Jung
The images, systems and sounds of a videogame are props for the imagination. Videogames are fiction because they are representational artefacts that depict situations with an imagined existence only, and they rely on our cognitive abilities to imagine such things.
Videogames are fiction machines, which produce fictional content based on user input. Furthermore, video games permit players to fictionally act within fictional worlds. The greatest potential for videogames to contribute to the arts, says Grant Tavinor, is the novel and literature way in which this fictional interactivity can encourage emotional involvement. In videogames, the player produces emotions, which lead to fictional actions in the fictional world — thus their emotions become part of that fictional world. The player’s own emotions become props for make-believe; as the player integrates their own emotions into the fiction, and thus becomes more deeply involved.
Games create opportunities for developing certain human excellence by presenting obstacles that must be mastered and overcome in order to achieve the goal set by the game.
Games are the activity of play and foreground the active role of the players in creating a play. On the other hand, computer game studies have tended to treat games as structures or systems and have been interested in how those systems give rise to play.
Games have the capacity to be many things: objects of aesthetic appreciation; designed systems that structure play; venues for skilled activities and competition; and goads to something like children’s play. Games have their fundamental foundation that has been followed for many years and one uses his creativity of merging the existing elements in an interesting way that leads designers to their definition and meaning of games.
In the end, I heard somewhere that games are just another one of human beings’ attempts to make sense of the world around them.
❖ Art and Video Games ❖
What is art? When we say this is a work of art, what do we mean by that? Is art held on its own or just a mere creation of its artist?
In simple words, art is a collection of serious information with an indirect secondary language that tries to incorporate itself within the constraint of its targeted medium alongside the intentions of the artist.
Art is an independent entity that exists for its own sake or to try to convey something meaningful, not to ingratiate everyone around.
Art can be defined as creative, emotional and purposeful. Someone has to make it, someone had to communicate something with a specific emotion whether joy, anger or indifference.
Art: Jacek Malczewski - Death
Most of us fear the deadening of the body and would resort to every means to avoid falling into such a state, but when it comes to the deadening of the mind, we're not in the least concerned.
~ Epictetus
We can define art by its formal properties articulating the language and craft of a medium to reveal what is truly unique about it.
We can also define it by its purpose whether it be for evolutionary goals, symbolically encoded cultural purposes or any number of philosophical definitions from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche to Heidegger however perhaps the most tangible legacy of art is its impact and its ability to transform both us and the world around us in measurable ways.
Raph Koster, a video game theoretician, also questions the artistic legitimacy of the video game medium. He sees art first and foremost as a means of expressing complex information and said:
“So what is art? My take on it is simple. Media provides information. Entertainment provides comforting, simplistic information. And art provides challenging information, stuff that you have to think about in order to absorb. Art uses a particular medium to communicate within the constraints of that medium, and often what is communicated is thoughts about the medium itself”.
An independent piece of creation that can produce a transcendence experience and invoke emotion with a deep realization despite knowing one’s intelligence, behaviours and beliefs. Art is much like an experience of some deeper kind that you will know just by experiencing it. There is no analysis, it is right there in front of you.
Art tells us the ecstatic truth creating a transcendent experience within ourselves, an inner chronicle of who we are.
Video games as an art form is a very heated debate over the years. Many theorists and critics of a variety of platforms gave their opinion in favour or against it and gave their thoughts behind that objection. So, there will be two primary matters that going to be discussed:
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Multiple perspectives of reviewing games.
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Seeing video games as a unique art form.
Even before thinking of video games as an art, we first have to change our perspectives as a player, general audience or developer when simply talking, playing, making and reviewing games.
Seriousness among video games is the most important factor for considering this medium as a unique art form of its own. Many argue the fact that games are play undermines their integrity as art pieces. When something is infused into the bound of play, does it loses its artistic expression and qualities? Not just only the video games when the word play is associated with anything, the subject just loses its seriousness and falls under the ambiguity of escapism. People consume games not meant to be entertaining all the time, they have their own goals which could vary on their levels.
Art: David Ryckaert III - La ronde des Farfadets de Les Farfadets
"I feel it is the duty of one who goes his own way to inform society of what he finds on his voyage of discovery, be it cooling water for the thirsty or the sandy wastes of unfruitful error. The one helps, the other warns. Not the criticism of individual contemporaries will decide the truth or falsity of his discoveries, but future generations. There are things that are not yet true today, perhaps we dare not find them true, but tomorrow they may be so. So every man whose fate is to go his individual way must proceed with hopefulness and watchfulness, ever conscious of his loneliness and its dangers."
~ Carl Jung
Despite containing art in them, games are too popular and concerned with providing a service to the player to count as art. Someone has to make it to share their vision of reality, with people who can’t see the complexity of reality because in the end art should exist for its own sake.
We still talk about games as a product to sell as opposed to cultural meaningful artefacts. Great graphics, sound, groundbreaking technical achievement and even better gameplay instead of analyzing why do we play and is that play meaningful? How the virtual experience can have meaningful real-world consequences for the player?
An art form has its own internal rules and so do the video games. We still are in our infancy state with lots to learn and grow with a power of interactivity that can create an intimate relationship between the player and the game. Something else interactivity does extremely well is empathy, games can simulate the experiences of others by forcing us to go through what they do whether in minor thematic or direct ways. Video games are the only medium that could come close to the true essence of literature and leverage the imagination of the player in a form of play that the designer Brian Upton called interpretive play.
In the end, games are about play dealing with the broad range of human experiences, conditions and emotions in their own unique style.
❖ Anatomy of Experiences and Emotions ❖
A moment was experienced then the neurons transmitted that information to the brain and an emotion was predicted or created for that specific moment, ready to be expressed as an external or internal realization of the emotional feeling of that moment.
The information is flowing in a cycle around these three entities – experience, emotions and feelings. I will be discussing primarily the importance of experiences and emotions, outside and inside the boundary of video games.
The human mind stores our moment-to-moment life in a form of memory and the moment which are very special, summed up as an experience in the human psyche. The general human experience in life and in video games are almost very similar in nature due to the typicality of experiences. So two primary topics related to the experiences to be discussed in this section:
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How experiences do shape our beliefs as human beings? By diving deep into the aesthetics and artistic nature of experiences.
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Generic similarities and typicality of experiences across multiple mediums.
As John Dewey says, when artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in experience, a wall is built around them that renders almost opaque their general significance, with which esthetic theory deals. Art is remitted to a separate realm, where it is cut off from that association with the materials and aims of every other form of human effort, undergoing, and achievement. A primary task is thus imposed upon one who undertakes to write upon the philosophy of the fine arts.
This task is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience. We cannot answer these questions any more than we can trace the development of art out of the everyday experience unless we have a clear and coherent idea of what is meant when we say "normal experience". Fortunately, the road to arriving at such an idea is open and well-marked. The nature of experience is determined by the essential conditions of life.
Life of any form goes in an environment; not merely in it because of it, but through interaction with it. At every moment the living creature is exposed to the elements of its surroundings and had to deal with them to satisfy the need of both sides. The career and destiny of a living being are bound up with its interchanges with its environment, not externally but in the most intimate way. As we grow, our conscious knowledge evolves with a certain set of experiences of every interaction we had in the past and the same happens in present. It might be with an object, animal or any form of life form in this world. The reality we believe or see is the collection of those prior experiences and these experiences continuously impact our personal and collective consciousness, eventually shaping us as human beings and defining who we really are?
The environment is full of similar structures, what makes the difference is one’s perspective about seeing things and in the masses that perspective is similar too, except few who go beyond the line and try to create their own with the past knowledge and the prior experiences they had. So the foundation of most human experiences is typical and generic in nature. Typicality and generality lie in the heart of human experiences and this foundation applies itself across every form of expressive medium and lastly video games.
Experiences are also tied to the one will and based on that further dividing them into intentional and embodied agency.
The human experience is tied to the exercise of intentional agency. We want to do something and for the sake of experiencing it, we exercise that desire.
Embodied human agency is constrained and enabled by material and social structure (Anthony Giddens, 1984), and, crucially, by at least a partial and potential awareness of the ways in which such structures help and hinder the projects of action. The second claim is thus that embodied agency is central to the experience that human experience is to some extent, the experience of the various structures within which agency is exercised and that it is tied to the typical.
As John Dewey writes, the aesthetic experience is distinct from experience in general by the fact that it is not bound to a given object or phenomenon: it is lived for itself and constitutes an experience of the experience, becoming its own end by virtue of a constant reflection on its ever-shifting becoming. Because the actual world, that in which we live, is a combination of movement and culmination, of breaks and reunion, the experience of a living creature is capable of esthetic quality. The living being recurrently loses and re-establishes equilibrium with his surroundings.
Art: Johann Jacob Weber - "Mammon and His Slave", wood engraving
Show me a man who is not a slave; one is a slave to sex, another to money, another to ambition; all are slave to hope or fear...And there's no state of slavery more disgraceful than one which is self-imposed.
~ Seneca
The moment of passage from disturbance into harmony is that of intensest life and from the continuous chaos to gaining a rhythmic harmony is the root of the aesthetic in experience. This disturbance can be anything related to learning, everyday interaction to understanding something to the fullest after a long process.
What is the nature of a computer game player’s experience? To have a computer game experience is to have a functional experience, one that is tailored to its function as a computer game. This function is defined by the sum of the properties that produce the meaning of a computer game experience, distinct from the other experiences of human existence: the player ascribes this particular meaning to his experience instead of another.
We now have a quickly sketched argument for typicality of experience which should eventually allow an analysis of player experience as potentially generic experiences tied to the exercise of embodied agency in relation to generic video game design structures. Experiences tied to video games are potentially generic in the sense of having the potential to be experienced as similar to other experiences. This is partly because human experience is inextricably bound up with typicality and generality, and partly because video games themselves are generic products.
A player’s imagination is what allows a reflexive return on the computer game experience so that new ways of doing things can be actualized. Imagination is a way to bridge the past and the future so that meaning can be produced; we could say that imagination allows the production of meaning through a player’s past knowledge and experiences, the future experience of the game, and those which he shapes in the ongoing present.
As we have already discussed human experiences, let’s just dive into the nature of emotions and the physiology of feelings.
Emotions are predictions, and guesses that our brain constructs at that moment from our past experiences and interactions.
Just like experiences, emotions are not built into our brains at birth but they are constructed over the course of life from our everyday interactions, situation and conditions in the environment. Emotions are not hard-wired and built into our brain but are dynamic in nature that can evolve and change similar to the experiences. So when we come in contact with a specific moment our mind surf through all the past interaction and experiences similar to that moment and try to predict the best possible result to match up to that moment. That is why some people do not react in some situations because they didn’t experience it all their lives.
And some are those ecstatic moments when the brain doesn’t know how to define that illuminating range of emotions that are very deep life realizing in nature. These kinds of phenomena are very rare and eventually make us ask the questions that matter.
Art: Gustave Moreau - Hercules and the Hydra
For now he will have to descend into the depth of existence with a string of curious questions on his lips: Why do I live? What lessons have I learned from life? How do I become what I am and Why do I suffer from being what I am?
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
Lisa Feldman Barrett said, that the brain does come prewired to make some feelings, simple feelings that come from the physiology of your body. So when you're born, you can make feelings like calmness and agitation, excitement, comfort, and discomfort. But these simple feelings are not emotions. They're actually with you every waking moment of your life. They are simple summaries of what's going on inside your body, kind of like a barometer. But they have very little detail, and you need that detail to know what to do next. Predictions link the sensations in your body that give you these simple feelings with what's going on around you in the world so that you know what to do. And sometimes, those constructions are emotions.
She continued with that, “You have more control over your emotions than you think you do. Your brain is wired so that if you change the ingredients that your brain uses to make emotion, then you can transform your emotions. So if you change those ingredients today, you're basically teaching your brain how to predict differently tomorrow, and this is what I call being the architect of your experience”.
Interactivity is the heart of video games, we practice and we try because of that dynamic mechanical interaction-based structure of games. Similarly, video games provide an exercise arena for emotions and experiences because the player produces emotions, which lead to fictional actions in the fictional world - thus their emotions become part of that fictional world. The player’s own emotions become props for make-believe; as Grant Tavinor puts it, the player integrates their own emotions into the fiction and thus becomes more deeply involved. The result could impact the player’s emotions and experiences which could have real meaningful consequences for him.
❖ Conclusion ❖
As in the starting, I talked about the depth and breadth of the game. How do we as the whole community have to focus on a meaningful impact of any sort from a video game experience that I referred to as a breadth of the game? I presented this idea of artistic expression with the basic foundation relating to video games. So now I am going to give you a brief of everything that has been written to that point.
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The evolving nature of play and its interactive states in video games.
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Defining art and connecting the missing dots of art in games while discussing video games as an art form.
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Going deep into the cognitive psychology of experiences and emotions of how the virtual experience can have meaningful real-world consequences for the player.
Initially, before writing all this, I was going to propose a model of how we can approach the development of any video game using all the key information we discussed above then I thought that wasn’t the purpose of this paper. The sole focus was to give different elements and information in an unauthorized way and let you decide to find your own way.
Art: Peter Paul Rubens - Heracles and the Nemea Lion
“Philosophy is not an occupation of a popular nature, nor is it pursued for the sake of self-advertisement. It is not carried on with the object of passing the day in an entertaining sort of way and taking the boredom out of leisure. It moulds and builds the personality, orders one’s life, regulates one’s conduct, shows one what one should do and what one should leave undone, sits at the helm, and keeps one on the correct course as one is tossed about in perilous seas. Without it no one can lead a life free of fear or worry. Every hour of the day countless situations arise that call for advice, and for that advice we have to look to philosophy.”
~ Seneca
But nonetheless, I am going to extract some traditional key attributes from game design and link up all these with the information we learned in this paper.
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Play, interactivity and unauthorized player agency. As Mathias Ward states we should focus on either player-driven stories or designer-driven stories depending on if the character we inhabit is simply a blank avatar or is a fully realized character with motivations.
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Dynamical symbolic meaning that emerges from mechanics rather than a pre-authorized narrative.
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Learning is embedded very deep into the core of video games that is enabled by the interactive play of rules and systems in a very interesting and unique way.
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Deciding initially everything about the categories of experiences and the core emotions because, in the end, that is what the player is going to remember the most. A gameplay mechanic is created but what kind of experience and emotion it is creating is what matters the most.
Now, I will leave you with a few lines of “Dragon Speech” from Chris Crawford.
I dreamed of computer games encompassing the broad range of human experience and emotion. Computer games about tragedy or self-sacrifice, games about duty and honour, patriotism, satirical games about politics or games about human folly, games about man's relationship to God or to nature, games about the passionate love between a boy and a girl or the serene and mature love between husband and wife of decades, things about family relationships or death, mortality, a boy becoming a man or a man realizing he is no longer young, games about a man facing truths at high noon on a dusty main street or a prostitute with a heart of gold.
Chris Crawford said we need a language of emotional expression we need to allow our players to interact with the characters in an emotionally significant fashion it's not good enough to be able to stab them or shoot up or take something away from them or give something to the hurt talk to them Princesses that's not good enough we've got to be able to talk about feelings and emotionally significant the events.