I didn't really expect my retrospective of Creating Emotion in Games to wind up like this. It's been a while since I've been motivated to recap the next part, and there's a few reasons for that. With at least five, six more blog posts that need to be surmounted in order to finish the project, it was beginning to look intimidating, especially because they just weren't getting creatively fulfilling to me. I'm going to unpack some of that here, along with some of the other things that were beginning to make this a frustrating project.
So I think it's time to call it. Officially, this is going to be the last post in the retrospective, but I'll be talking about the things I want to write about going forward, because I have plenty of ideas ready to go!
The Toolbox of Techniques
This book is one specific thing: it's a toolbox of different bespoke techniques for making games more emotionally involving. There's a sort of utility to that: you can pick up a chapter, get something interesting, even implement it right away. The execution is also a bit cramped. It's hard to really understand what exactly ties it together or structures it--things that seem like they might organize the book give way to a fuzzier, sloppier order. On top of that, certain points start to feel repetitive as they get re-examined through slightly different lenses--did we really need to cover things like character diamonds and relationship layers multiple times?
It's not just a structural issue for me, though--it's that it's hard for me to find unifying philosophies in the book. There aren't big ideas that tie everything together, it's all very utilitarian, "here is a specific way to do a specific thing in games". This isn't a bad thing to have in a book, but it starts to feel like a reference manual and not a guide to a new way of approaching games. But the book pitches itself as a new method for infusing games with emotion! What the book feels like is that, rather than teaching a method, it's dispensing a lot of small ideas and asking the reader to tie things together. None of the biggest connective tissue comes into being, because I think the author is just a bit tucked into his unexamined perspective. For him, games are a matter of narrative polish, and finding ways to recreate cinematic writing within a game framework.
That's fine enough, those sorts of things are useful within a particular context, but they're not very good at providing material to chew on or comment on. They're not much for responding to, which was making this retrospective more of a recap and summary. I was expecting insights and higher-level discussion I could engage with, but the book wasn't really delivering on that, which made it a slog to work through.
A (Lengthy) Sidebar About Women
Oh boy, so. Here we go. The other big thing that really started to grate on me. I understand it was 20 years ago, I know this was the video game industry, but was it too much to ask that this book be reasonably normal about women? There was this thing that started happening as I was reading the book, little drips here and there, until it all started to roll over into a tipping point that really just helped sour me on the whole piece. Heads-up, this is going to hit on some sexist/misogynist content that's at least distasteful, and some stuff that's going to be gross in a kinda troubling way. It's totally fine to bail on this section and move on to the next big header if things start getting rough for you.
Initially, there were little things here and there. Not a lot of eyebrow-raising things or particularly unusual things (except for the one weird attempted joke that went "If you wouldn't invite a bore to your dinner gathering or marry one off to your daughter, sister, or pet, then don't put one in your games."), but over time I started to pick up on that familiar pattern. I chalked it up to a "dead angle", a spot outside someone's view that they aren't able to directly track or notice (usually because of existing bias). Sure, that made sense enough.
But it sure was something how frequently the women mentioned in the book's hypotheticals and examples were in positions of weakness or objects of desire. There's a particularly heavy-handed passage in chapter 2.7, where the author chooses to introduce a femme fatale figure as part of a character dynamic.
You meet a sexy, dubious damsel in distress, who dresses in red and looks at you with bedroom eyes while relaying a sad story that may or may not be true.
I dunno, bud. If there were more roles that women played in these hypotheticals, I could understand it more. If there were more men in these sorts of roles in the examples, I could definitely understand that better. But this singular focus on women as things echoes some very ugly themes in the wider culture that far better-written people than me have gone over. If you don't see it, I can't make you--but to me, it began approaching the point where it bugged me. I was rolling my eyes in chapter 2.13 as an example of creating "mixed emotions" used a World War II squadmate flirting with a "sexy and spunky girl...[who] turned you down in favor of him", when I got whammied from left field.
Skimming ahead a few chapters to mentally gear up for the upcoming posts, I hit a point where the author starts joking about the possible "roles" that a character in the United States of America might take on. (Man, why does all the worst stuff pop up when the author tries to be a clown?) Like, sure, "Over-caffeinated novel-writing retro-beatnik" got a chuckle out of me. Then at the end of the list, I get smacked by a phrase I never wanted to see in this book, "Belly-ringed bored nubile tenth-grade goddess" like man I'm pretty sure 90% of writers just need to be banned from the word "nubile" preemptively. I just...it really brought to a head a lot of things, because there is so much to unpack here and I don't want to.
It didn't help that the art in this book is similarly directed. Like sure, there's plenty of women depicted in the book, some of whom are relatively normal (like, they're movie star-level pretty, but that's pretty much normal for women in media I guess), like the World War II girl described as "sexy and spunky" above. And then, well. I started going through the art for about half of the book, because I believe in having hard data when you can. By that point, I'd done some tallying, and it turns out that literally half of the women depicted in the art are significantly sexualized in some way. Cleavage shots, provocative poses, clothes that look more like netting, oh and about a sixth of the women depicted in the art are just straight-up naked (with almost all of those examples being in positions with limited or no agency). (Meanwhile, about 4% of the men are, if I'm being generous, sexualized. One of them could be considered naked, if we count a loincloth--which is a far more lax standard than I'm using to tally the art of women in this book.)
Aside: if you're interested in my numbers, I went through the first 230some pages of the book, finding 78 distinct pieces of art. Of those, the split was 46:28 for male to female (with a few of indeterminate gender), and 16 characters were, I felt, significantly sexualized. 2 of those were male, 14 female, and 5 of those female characters were outright nude.
This is a textbook on game design.
Like look, evocative art to talk about different fantastical settings and evoke atmosphere? Sure. But come on. I just...come on. I know that people get desensitized to this after a point, but this is exactly why the digital game industry struggled with things like Gamergate or the more recent harassment revelations surrounding Activision-Blizzard. Women are people too, and women deserve to be treated normally. A textbook on game design is not the place to show off your art of spicy ladies, and look--nowhere is an appropriate place for you to make edgy jokes about attractive tenth-graders. Ew.
Can we just...not? Seriously. We have got to be better than this. Fortunately, I have read books that were better than this, in the area of game design, but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.
What We Can Learn
So the book frequently put me off and frustrated me for reasons I've discussed above. However, I do still find some valuable things in it--it's still something that I can see myself referencing from time to time as need be, just with some caveats and understandings of its limitations. I don't know that I would recommend it offhand to people (there's better choices out there), but as someone who already has it, I can use it within the context that it's built around.
The techniques that the book outlines are very useful for particular types of design--they're most useful for AAA video games that incorporate narrative, but the general techniques of building connection between players and the game can be extended and adapted for other contexts. It's still true that there's a lot of things games can do to successfully execute on their emotional connection with the player, and having ideas in mind helps to make things that I design better. They don't build interactive narrative on their own, but they will enhance the way that a game narrative comes across.
But those lessons can come from a lot of places, and I don't think that I'd personally seek them out from a book that has various scattered problems like this one, at least not as my first choice.
Into the Future
On that note, I did actually pick up a couple of books that have me incredibly interested. One of them is a prior read (the fourth edition of Tracy Fullerton's Game Design Workshop, of which I previously read the third edition), and one of them is new to me (Katherine Isbister's How Games Move Us). Both are incredibly promising for different reasons. How Games Move Us looks like it's going to tackle similar subject matter as Creating Emotion in Games, but with an angle far more focused on the overall concepts, and digging into specific case studies with a far wider perspective. Meanwhile, Game Design Workshop is an absolute masterclass in game analysis, I cannot overstate how phenomenal it is as a resource. This thing is an exhaustive dive into all sorts of aspects of game design, complete with case studies and articles from different pivotal figures in game design, both digital and analog.
I hope you've found enjoyment and some sort of enlightenment on this journey through an old, flawed textbook. I'm not entirely sure what I'll be doing with these new books (Game Design Workshop in particular is intimidating in scope, but very worthwhile), but rest assured I want to come back to this. Thank you for reading along.
No comments :
Post a Comment