{% pullquote Kopas is on to something for sure. If you haven’t checked out Soft Chambers yet… you must! %}

In her recent post, tenderness & responsibility, Kopas wonders how game creators can “inspire [in players] not just feelings of being cared for, but the desire to care for another”. She voices concern that, because of the way they have often been presented in games, we have learned to resent our weaker allies or wards because of the burden they present. She posits that,

when we — the powerful, the resilient — are joined by a weaker party, when we are told to protect them, we resent their softness and vulnerability

we come to resent the way that the weak drag us down to failure

{% pullquote Aevee Bee is the original cutie! %}

That last phrase, “drag us down to failure” links to an article by Aevee Bee, who calls escort missions the emotional impact of escort missions “dumb”, and says often “the total opposite of designer intention”. Bee’s account of the failure of traditional escort missions to inspire tenderness initialy appeared to me to describe a failure of the mechanics in those games. Protecting our ward in games like Ico often felt arbitrary, and usually didn’t provide a significant enough “buff” to offset the pain of dragging them about. Not to mention their inscesent barks! This failure, repeated throughout our adolescence, may have trained us off of the empathy designers wish we could feel for our wards. Viewed as a question about mechanics, it is reasonable to imagine this rift could be repaired by tweeking the rules surrounding the escort.

{% pullquote To be clear: I agree with @fengxii ’s assertion that “No one really knows what they mean when they throw [the word ‘mechanics’] around”. I’ll be using it as an undefined term throughout; make of it what you will. %}

Given a significant enough buff, or some interesting tertiary effects on gameplay, could we be inspired to care for our wards? Author Jason Rohrer has frequently shown me how a system of rules — accompanied by the right metaphors — can be super evocative. In playing Rohrer’s Gravitation, I experienced a conflicting meddly of feelings: my appreciation for the daughter character (made concrete by her effect on my jump height); a nagging guilty feeling that I was just using her; and a pang of honest grief when, finally, she dissapeared (presumably something I could have forstalled by playing better). Rohrer has demonstrated his acquity for inspiring particular feelings in his players with games like Passage and Gravitation, and has been vocal about how important he believes it is for games to do this.

{% pullquote Beirne %}

In his article Misplacing Value, Beirne paraphrases an interview with Rohrer, which describes how Rohrer improved the dynamic in his latest game, The Castle Doctrine, by introducing a wife and children for the player to care for. In addition to simply being present, the wife has in-game effects that work to the player’s benefit. The idea, as explained in the interview, was that this would elevate the player’s struggle beyond one of mere hoarding, putting it on a more personal level. Beirne, however, disagrees that this is what has been achieved. He argues that by giving the wife a clear, quantifiable benefit to the player, Rohrer has stunted their ability to empathize with her at all.

This is quite a powerful statement, but Beigne has something even stronger to say on the subject: Beigne believes it is villainous to value another character in a game world based on their utility as a tool. He compares the Husband in Rohrer’s MMO to Glados or Kain, for whom humans are merely a means. He quite reasonabley disagrees with “designers [who] believe commoditization of people encourages healthy relationships”. Beigne rejects the idea that tenderness can be fostered by providing functional benefits, saying that functionality is no substitute for empathy. This opinion isn’t easy to reconcile with Rohrer’s, who beileves that a sufficiently deep system encouraging players to ape the behaviours associated with some emotion is as close to the real thing as we can hope to come. “If you get people to act like they feel a certain way”, Rohrer claims “they will actually end up feeling that way.”

So who’s right? Let’s get some more Kopas and Bee in here. Then let’s go out to HCI and finally get Vance to denounce arguments based on HCI.

Players often handle games as though they were puzzles, or toys, rather than treating them with respect. Kopas believs that these “utilitarian modes of interacting with digital games” prevent players from experiencing games in the first person, and disrupt their ability to empathize. She posts,

a major barrier to the exploration of emotional resonance in games is the puzzle-solving orientation, in which all game objects and actors are reduced to the status of things to be used in order to achieve an end

We can reasonably extend this opinion to the other side of the coin, where game creators live: Kopas believes that approaching game design from a puzzle-solving orientation (for example by trying to game the human condition as Rohrer does) may form a similar barrier to tenderness.

We can reconcile Bee’s account of the escort mission with Beigne’s condemnation of the functional ward: Bee at no point advocates that the ward should make the player better than they were, or make the game easier or more fun… rather she is lamenting that they often make the player’s experience worse. Beigne admits that he, too, “felt no remorse for wanting to leave [Yorda] behind”.

Finally now compare Rohrer’s approach to gamification and stuff, and get Vance to denounce that.

If we admit this, we can now, I think, rule out one interpretation of Kopas’ question. She is not asking, “what kinds of systems of mechanics could we design that would inspire the desire to care for another?”; she asking about something inherent in us, and not in the form of the game. I think this may be what she means when she asks,

how can we inspire feelings… that override, challenge, or play with established utilitarian modes of interacting with digital games?