I have put up a conference poster made in collaboration with Albert Dang and Kan Yang Li when I visited Design & Technology at Parson’s School of Design in the fall 0f 2006.
The poster documents an experiment in identifying a basic convention of video games, in this case that players always fight for their own survival, and exploring the ramifications of breaking the convention.
Albert Dang and Kan Yang Li built a two-player game in which the object of the players is to commit suicide by drinking poison and stabbing yourself.
Yes, it is somewhat uncomfortable and perhaps controversial, but we wanted to explore that space by way of a prototype and user testing. The poster was presented at the DiGRA conference in Tokyo September 2007.
Play the game here: http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/suicidegame/
Read the poster here: http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/suicidegame.pdf
From the poster:
Video games do not necessarily present the player with a positive role to play: The player character may be a villain, be morally corrupt. Yet it is almost universally the case that
video games make players fight for the survival of their character. In a discussion of tragedy in interactive media, Marie-Laure Ryan has noted the seeming impossibility of an
Anne Karenina game, a game where the player’s ultimate goal is to commit suicide by throwing herself in front of a train:Interactors would have to be out of their mind-literally and metaphorically–to want to submit themselves to the fate of a heroine who commits suicide as the result of a love affair turned bad, like Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina. Any attempt to turn empathy, which relies on mental simulation, into first-person, genuinely felt emotion would in the vast majority of cases trespass the fragile boundary that separates pleasure from pain.
(Ryan 2001)While Ryan identifies a clear game convention of players fighting for the survival of their character, we know little about what would happen were this convention to be broken:
How would players perceive the controversial or uncomfortable game content in a game where the player had to seek self-destruction?
