My thesis in the Media Design program (MDP) is centered around creating introspective spaces through interactive gaming. While the statement is pretty straightforward, I feel like there’s a bit of distance to traverse to really see the full value of a master’s thesis exploration in this area.
I’ve talked with other students and MDP faculty before on the reputation of the video game medium and its often contentious relationship with other fields like film and art. Similarities can be drawn between the development of the video game field (still in its toddler years in my opinion) and that of the film industry, though the two fields still vary greatly. The question, “Are video games art?” still makes the rounds on different gaming & new media sites as well as in the blogosphere, but does little more than birth new flame wars and half-based speculations on what art is or should be. The one thing that is advantageous with comparing film & art to video gaming is in dissecting how film & art pieces move their viewers to look inwardly and critically at the world around them. How does Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, What Dreams May Come, & What the Bleep Do We Know!? coherently move people towards a certain frame of mind in which their focus turns inward? I’d like to list a few art pieces that do the same, but the art landscape is so vast and has such controversial borders (“What is art?”) that I’ll avoid trying to narrow things down to a few generally accepted pieces. There are artworks that can move us to redefine ourselves and our views on the world and I’ll leave it at that.
Can the video game medium create these same changes in people? First off, the video game community has to stop referring to their projects as, “just games.” By doing so, the outside world also views our projects as “just games” and will never see their potential to be more than entertainment. Film makers don’t reference their work as “just films,” and neither do artists talk about their work in the same trivializing manner. Once the gaming community accepts that video games can form and shape our self-reflections, then the rest of society will begin to also.
Secondly, the video game medium has some amazing affordances which film and art lack. The greatest of these is interactivity. Ian Bogost talks about the power in this activity in his Gamasutra article, Persuasive Games: Gestures as Meaning.
“Yet, the game’s ['Manhunt 2' on the Wii] coupling of gestures to violent acts makes them more, not less repugnant by implicating the player in their commitment.
In Manhunt 2, we are meant to feel the power of Daniel Lamb’s psychopathy alongside our own disgust at it. It is a game that helps us see how thin the line can be between madness and reason by making us perform abuse.”
The great potential of the video game medium is taking the player in to the world and making choices with consequences. There is a difference between passively watching “Saw 3” and actively choosing to torture someone in a game like Manhunt 2 or the controversial Torture Quest in the MMO World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King (WoW:WotLK). The interactivity in video games lets users have unique, personal experiences. In my opinion, within those personal experiences is the potential to show users a different way to see themselves in a much more profound way than film and art can show.
So how can video gaming move toward these introspective experiences? Potential is alright, but isn’t worth a lot unless put into practice. This is where the practice of Media Design comes in. Creating a video game is a truly multi-disciplinary process involving programmers, artists, sound designers, game designers, producers, etc. Harnessing all of these media to work cohesively towards a worthwhile end goal is an undertaking in and of itself. However, also understanding how to design an experience which pulls at people’s notions of their own morality or forces them to re-evaluate how they’ve been living is an even larger issue to tackle successfully. Design as research (in the form of cultural probes) can be helpful here, as well as iterative design.
An earlier project in the Media Design program was one called the “Prosthetic Table,” a design intervention in early 2008 for the course Super Studio 2. With the project, a group that I worked with sought to understand the dinner table and how families interact with one another, as well as how they could interact with another family. What dynamics would form and what would change? Would there be a connection or lack of intimacy with the family? Would there be competition or cohesion in how the family interacted with one another? We discovered a lot on family dynamics & interactions, as well as came upon different ways in which we could get at deeper themes within each individual in the family unit. Now I don’t think that there needs to be a full, year-long graduate course to create methods on figuring out meaningful information on individuals’ inner thoughts, but using media to research in order to create more or different types media is something that can be done in the video gaming medium. My two thesis projects are such attempts.
The “Paper Balloons” iPhone App, while having a much more advanced level of finish than most of our Super Studio projects, is still an experiment into creating an interactive, introspective experience. The “Whisper Stones” installation is the same and could lead to new understandings on how to facilitate a thought-provoking transition into an area of thinking not ventured into before, all through interactive video gaming. Both projects could fail and the “Paper Balloons” App is being submitted to the Apple store to see if such an experience could be financially sustainable in today’s market. Despite the success or failure of either project, something will still be learned which will inform my own design process.
