Levine describes healing Trauma as having an intangible, mythological aspect. He says that too often, trauma is attempted to be healed through focusing on the traumatic experience itself, which encourages the traumatised individual to stay stuck, instead of focusing on empowering the individual to be able to release the pent up fight-or-flight energy. I’ve also been reading about Cortisol (The Cortisol Connection by Shawn Talbott) and I recognise that expressing fight or flight responses are both physical and therefore cause the breakdown (or elimination?) of Cortisol from the musculatory system. Levine talks about “trembling” or “shaking” and muscular twitching, which could be interpreted as the body doing its own work and eliminating the Cortisol. Animals do it naturally after the threat has passed, and actors will sometimes to a “Shake out” to remove “nervous energy” before or after going on stage.

So why am I bringing this up (apart from it being a topic of interest to me)? Well, I was struck by Levine’s focus on resolving the response rather than reliving the trauma. He suggests that any visualisation that utilises the Felt Sense to evoke the feeling of Trauma can be used to re-train the individual into feeling capable of and choosing to fight/flee (in their mind/feel it) succesfully, rather than being forced to immobilise and submit. Following this, if a player becomes “immersed” in a game, that is, not literally immersed but have the game as a prompt for their Felt Sense, the player will be able to face threatening and potentially traumatic situations (while all the while safe) and become triumphant… sure, most games you’re probably thinking of right now are geared towards the “fight” instinct, but I remember sneaking around in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and freaking out that the guards were going to see me! And sometimes, such as in Left 4 Dead, sneaking or running and getting into the safehouse is just as important as shooting everything around you.

To some extent, this aligns with my belief that games are ultimate about the feeling of control. But maybe a better term is mastery, or as Levine calls a succesful fight/flight endstate, “Empowerment.”

I’m not saying that all games must contain fight/flight resolution and Empowerment (for example, I love Jones in the Fast Lane and there’s no obvious fight or flight… unless you count turn-based competition and the rush to get the best job with the best pay and the most money and be highly educated…) but in an even more abstract sense, that what we strive for is to arouse that feeling of danger in through our Felt Sense and beat the mythical boss monster. As Levine says:

Most of us enjoy the “natural high” we get from wild arousal. Many of us seek out “near-death” experiences like bungee-jumping, skydiving, and paragliding because of the euphoric feeling that comes with extreme states of arousal. [...] Human beings long to be challenged by life, and we need the arousal that energizes us to meet and overcome these challenges. Deep satisfaction is one of the fruits of a completed arousal cycle. The cycle looks like this: we are challenged or threatened, then aroused; the arousal peaks as we mobilize to face the challenge or threat; then, the arousal is activley brought down, leaving us relaxed and satisfied.

Maybe this isn’t such a bad thing to think about when we are designing games? And maybe this is a more important aspect to consider than “These games are teaching people how to shoot guns” (they generally aren’t, however they ARE increasing hand-eye coordination).

But I actually wanted to post about something he mentions about 1/7th of the way through (pages 17 & 18)…

If I could reach into your mind, make you forgot who you were while leaving your
skills and emotions intact, and have you literally believe that you were Nathan Drake,
hanging out the back of a cargo plane with the desert floor a quarter-mile below you,
and gun-wielding enemies above you, you probably wouldn’t be excited and
entertained in the way that everyone at Naughty Dog hopes for, for players of our
games…
…you’d almost certainly be scared witless! No disrespect, you understand.

This really reminds me of when I was reading about play and leisure, and, I can’t remember who it was or what discipline they came from (or whether it was cited by several people), but they described play as being a way of experiencing negtive emotions or stress, without actually having to experience the repercussions of them. Hm, for all I know, this was something I read about in regards to tragedy/catharsis- it certainly sounds like catharsis. Gwen Gordon and Sean Esbjorn-Hargens do a better job than me of covering it in their paper “Are We Having Fun Yet? an Exploration of the Transformative Power of Play,” where they quote Brian Sutton-Smith as saying:

a virtual simulation characterized by staged contingencies of variation, with opportunities for control engendered by either mastery or further chaos. Clearly the primary motive of players is . . . [to] mimic or mock the uncertainties and risks of survival and, in so doing, engage the propensities of mind, body, and cells in exciting forms of arousal. (p. 231)

It’s very likely that the point of “immersion” (or not) is to “fake” danger in order to evoke catharsis, which is causing an outflow of emotion (which can be positive like relief, or negative like grief). So, it’s true: we never truly forget that we are ourselves (otherwise, all gamers would be like Method Actors… and need a whole set of exercises to set them up and bring them back from their characterisation), but instead become emotionally invested and engaged in the character’s plight. I would even hazard that Action games could learn a lot from Aristotle’s views on Tragedy, or even Shakespeare’s perfection of the craft (because let’s face it, even the writers whom Aristotle thought were da bomb didn’t have as high a hit-rate or longevity as good ole Bill).

In fact, Shakespeare was also king of overcoming another concept described and discussed starting from page 31 of Lemarchand’s talk: Vigilance Fatigue. Shakespeare knew that, while the ancient Greeks could drain you in little over an hour, he couldn’t keep everyone engaged for that long without shouts of “Get on with it!” from the pit (theatre goers today would just quietly leave or fall asleep in their seats, movie goers would demand their money back). So what did he do? After every super intense scene, he’d have the “clowns” come in. He’d use them to break up two heavy scenes, in order to give the audience a “break,” and allow them to release a bit of tension. But more about this in another post.

But I’m going to take some of the concepts and turn them into (hopefully) useful posts.

Oh, and the panel went pretty well, I thought. Most people seemed to enjoy it, or at least were engaged.

I didn’t really know what I wanted to do in terms of plot or anything, but I knew I wanted to make a light-hearted adventure game about a girl and a dragon. I wanted a dragon because I have very, very vague memories of some sort of probably-educational game I played in year 3 or 4, where the end part was something to do with a dragon. That seemed a good enough reason as any. Also I’m pretty practiced at drawing dragons. I called it “Georgia and the Dragon” because of St George and the Dragon. I thought it was clever terrible AWESOME.

I started working on a hand-written design doc (somehow, writing by hand seemed like a good idea, as I can’t press “backspace” or just forget to save it), and over a couple of weeks, I started fleshing out the intro and the preliminary puzzles. Then I got stuck, so I left it for a bit. And then I wrote some more, and came up with some silly ideas and themes that I could commit to. I decided I would have a “demo” that was a standalone series of nested puzzles, and then I’d work on the main game while that was out there getting some attention (and funds, hopefully!) Yes! Awesome. And then, the worst. I was stuck. Absolutely, completely, stuck. I had this one puzzle that I just couldn’t make WORK.

And then, a friend linked another friend to Jordan Mercher’s journal entries of The Making of Prince of Persia. I don’t know what it was-maybe it was his own struggle with whether what he was doing was worthwhile-but suddenly I KNEW what to do with that puzzle. Pop! It unblocked. It all made sense. And I was so excited.

And I thought about how, if I was writing a journal, I would have written an entry last Friday: “Saw Liza for coffee, wonderful to hear her GDC stories. Afterwards had dinner with Baz, Shem, and his friend. Complained that I was completely stuck on this puzzle. Discussed a few things, but nothing seemed right.”

Then, less than a week later: “I have it! It’s so right. It makes sense, it does so many good things. I can make a joke, I can foreshadow, I can tell the player what to do without treating them like an idiot! I AM A GOD.”

And then people would think I’m arrogant and it would be awesome, because I’m so afraid of being arrogant that I’ll err on the side of “being terrible.” So I’m forcing myself to do this, I’m forcing myself to be accountable, I’m forcing myself to talk myself up. Because if there’s one thing I know about myself, it’s that I have high standards. And if I have high standards, I’ll either let things fall by the wayside (too embarrassing/not good enough!) or make them awesome. So if I can’t let them fall by the wayside, I’ll be forced to make them awesome. So that’s what I’m doing.

It’s two weeks since I had that puzzle come unblocked, and I’ve made Georgia and the Dragon a Facebook page. I’m making art assets now, which includes character design, items, and world design. I really need a logo. I really need two logos!

But more importantly, I need to keep blogging, both for myself and for others.

As a result, I’ve decided to try out some desktop blogging software. I found a few recommendations for Zoundry, and while there was another (free) tool also recommended, their website was down and I have a zero patience policy so I downloaded Zoundry Raven instead.

So far, it’s… well, it looks almost exactly like I’m sending an email. So it could be super sneaky for those of you who want to blog at work but not look like you’re blogging. And maybe I’ll feel like I’m emailing people and so I’ll blog more. Who knows?

I’m just going to break this into the pros and cons of the game.

Pros: Snappy dialogue. Amusing characters. Tricky but not absurdly complex puzzles. Voice acting was good, except for the lack of female actor in the first episode (so there was just a Pantomime Dame voice or three)

Cons: Over-the-top grotesque gags (seriously, I love dirty, inappropriate, irreverent things… but this was a little too far at times!). All female characters were especially unlikable slags. Inaccessible player character, protecting a town that was shit. I found myself aligning with the villain’s motivation to “clean up this town” more than Hector’s unwilling desire to find his pants and stop said villain.

Seriously. Like, the protagonist is the smartest of a town of the scum of the world, he’s not really interested in saving people, but for some reason he does. It’s almost like it’s just expected, “Oh, you bought the game, you’re here for an Adventure game, now GO!” And I have to admit, this is actually why I persisted in playing it. It wasn’t hard or overly irritating (no ragequit moment), but I’d spent good money on it and wanted to get my money’s worth. I was mildly more engaged when playing as Lambert, the idiot assistant. At least he was kinda adorable and endearing, like a puppy. His motivation was believable… “I want to help Hector!”

Overall, I’m curious as to how many people actually enjoyed the experience of playing the game. Did they feel motivated by the storyline? I was actually disappointed that it was difficult to get into the game, as the dialogue was well written and the puzzles were enjoyably challenging.

Oh man, they made me rage.

The first thing I noticed was my complete lack of empathy with the player character (in BOTH games), which led to a lack of investment in the goals of the game. I only continued playing them because a) I’d paid $20 for the first, and b) I wanted to give the second a fair chance, considering it’s by an Australian developer.

But I couldn’t get over it. I also couldn’t get over how, despite the stories themselves being fairly interesting, the structure of the stories were so flawed that I was just irritated, left with feelings of “why am I doing this?” and “why isn’t this over?”

This isn’t to say that they didn’t do anything right. There were a few things that impressed me, such as well-planned puzzle arcs and interdependencies. I always like those. Proper reviews to come shortly. But, oh my God (the God of narratives/stories/I think that’s Dionysus? He’s also the God of wine and possibly orgies, so that’s pretty cool), do you want to know why point-and-click adventure games aren’t selling so well? Because the best part of them (the adventure) is so average. The writers… I seriously wonder whether they’ve ever learnt anything about writing for any medium where they have to try to keep the audience’s interest (as opposed to the kind of writing that fills time in transit between more interesting events/locations).

There are a few reasons I’ve been absent, the main two being my health and being busy with a ScreenWest Digital Breakout Development Fund grant application. I’ll write more about these later (well, I guess not so much about my health because that’s personal and it’s mostly under control or getting there), but for now I just wanted to post something to bring the blog back to life. Expect more soon!