Last night I had one of those nightmares that shakes you out of a freezer sleep. I glanced around my dark bedroom, just knowing that reality was about to fall apart at the seams. I blame the nightmare on my state of mind at the time of sleep, and I blame that on reading Brenda Laurel's Computers as Theatre, which has made me think more than Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, if such a thing is possible.
The nightmare was quite odd. The gist of it was that I was a sort of playwright, or perhaps a director, of a virtual reality horror game. My idea was that the system would detect changes in the player's heart rate and psychic condition, and reinforce whatever images (or sounds, I suppose--experiences), thereby driving the person to extreme fear. Like a mad scientist, I decided to test the system on myself. At first I was merely walking through a sort of stage-piece haunted house, but slowly a story began to materialize. Apparently, a woman had been killed in the house--and the woman who had bought the house was responsible. I was merely a "visitor," or spectator, who could walk about during the inevitable "drama" and see the ghostly story unfold. Unfortunately, at some point I realized that I was going to see a dead person--it's hard to recreate this in text, but it was a moment I can only describe as the sort of anxiety described by Heidegger. Obviously, the true terror of the supernatural is that actually seeing it means the end of sanity; what is death but being stripped of our experiential safety net?
What followed was an effect that I compare to the feedback you hear when you bring a microphone too close to a speaker. The microphone picks up the noise coming from the speaker and amplifies it; this creates an exponential loop that results in that piercing scream. The "horror" system was picking up and amplifying my fear of seeing a dead person--and amplifying it, then passing that amplified signal back through.
When I had woke up enough to contemplate such things, I began putting pieces together. Brenda Laurel's Computers as Theatre. Graphical adventure games like Dark Fall. Weirdo films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The fact that animals play. Suddenly it dawned on me; drama really is an instinct. A dream is really one part of our brain taking over us playwright and thrusting us into the scenarios whose components are artistically selected and arranged from various bits of our mental experience (what we've seen, heard, and felt, but also what we've thought). The connection is that animals play. Why do animals play? We think they play to train or keep themselves sharp.
I used to have some cats. I noticed right away that they liked to have fun. I had a ball of twine attached to a string on the end of a stick, and it was great fun teasing the cats with it. They'd lunge at the ball, trying to claw it, and end up rolling all over the place. Sometimes they'd crouch ready to spring, at other times feign disinterest and then suddenly lash out at it to catch me by surprise. There could be no doubt that they realized it wasn't a piece of food. They were playing a game, and enjoying the fact that I was playing it with them. Indeed, if I just held the stick in my hand without moving it, they'd come over and start bidding for my attention--they wanted to play.
Now, it's pretty obvious that even though they knew it was a game, the thrill of the sport could probably be traced back to survival. I imagined some saber toothed tiger got by on its speed, dexterity, claws, cunning, and teeth.
So, if that's why cats play, why do we watch "plays?" I assume my reader is willing to go back with me to the history of public entertainment; namely, those "goat songs" and what have you. Laurel claims that our enjoyment of drama comes from the satisfaction we feel as witnessing "complete actions." A whole action is composed of incidents that are causally linked to each other--the end result is the climax and conclusion. A beautifully wrought play is one whose structure is elegant, yet always causally linked. The characters aren't "people," but characters, whose behavior, thanks to dramatic convention built up over the centuries, we can predict if presented with enough "background." A "surprise" on the characters' part is explicable if we learn some secrets we didn't know before (the "reversal.")
Graphical adventure games, then, are interesting because they seem to come close to being interactive dramas. It seems clear to me now that Gilbert and Laurel are right about "obstructionist" puzzles. No matter if a player "wins" or "loses," the result should be fluid and satisfying completion. Yet Laurel is also right to argue for the necessity of constraints. A wide-open, do anything you want type virtuality is only interesting until we understand all the rules and constraints of the virtuality. On the other hand, a highly linear "plot" that is so imposed as to make us feel powerless to affect it--well, that's no good either. What's needed is a world where our actions are constrained (because the things we might think up to do our "constrained" by the experience of the virtuality itself, not our actions), and cause other incidents which lead to a complete action.
We must also, I think, be willing enough to fit ourselves into a "character," and not cheat by purposefully acting out-of-character. In the game Fascade, for instance, I tried entering bizarre dialogue just to see how the system would handle it--then chastised the game for its predictable way of handling such distruptions in the dramatic flow. I also felt the game didn't do enough to constrain what I might think to try, nor did it help me cast myself into the role of a character.
I'll have more to say on this later. Needless to say, Laurel's book has been a feast for thought, and I can't really think of anything nicer I can say about a scholarly work.
Works Cited:
Recent comments