You grew tired of the old discussion, so a new one came along: Arrative and videogames.
Your name was starting to feel so normal, so you acquired a new one: Jasper.
Skip to content
My name is Jesper Juul, and I am a Ludologist [researcher of the design, meaning, culture, and politics of games]. This is my blog on game research and other important things.
Jasper, the friendly ghost. :)
sounds interesting – do we need to pay to read the article or do you have it online somewhere else?
The irony:
‘He does not have to identify with anybody on the screen, because he himself is always present for identification’-especially if his name changes!
The question: ok so games can fullfill existential aggression but isn’t interactive feedback and point scoring the identification? Could you have an engaging game where you perform actions and the effects/results are not easily identifiable as caused by you?
“Could you have an engaging academic discussion where you make arguments and the replies are not easily identifiable as being directed to you?”
I think games where you can’t identify causality are always hugely frustrating. Games of pure chance work, but you know they are pure chance. At least you need to feel that you can improve your understanding of how the game works. Isn’t this as close as we can get to a universal rule about game design?
It’s true that such a thing is frustrating, from the very lowest to the very highest degree – from having overly elongated animations in your avatar (taking away your agency) to not being able to choose to kill a mission critical hostage and have the story reflect that.
But if you look at the way Half Life’s story is done, it’s essentially parrallel to any form of input that the player is allowed. Because they are never presented the means to affect the plot (except the HyperSpace Train ride at the very end) they don’t feel frustrated at it, at any point. That’s a great way to deal with the limitations of a very linear game.
But, could one use that property intentionally to frustrate a player? I’m not suggesting frustration for the sake of frustration, but if the frustration is targeted at one embodied system in the game, it could emotioneer (uhrg) the player in that direction.
I think you’re right that it’s important how the game clearly signals that something is beyond your control – you don’t exactly believe that you can somehow stop the experiment from going wrong in the beginning.
Hasn’t this already been used quite extensively? There were some places in Riddick where I first sent a long time trying to kill the baddie only to realize that I could run around him. Something like that?
I was thinking more about a player attacking a frog which never dies, so they get frustrated that unlike everything else in the world, this frog will not bloody die, and thus the message of the game becomes “Don’t take your frustration out on Frogs”, which is very important, I think.
Very important.
But there often is this issue of not knowing when something _is_ destructible. Like a game where you think you can destroy the large stone door, but it turns out just to be a random texture.
It’s only really interesting if it has a “think outside the box” quality?
I was joking about the frog, and now I’m completely lost, sir!