Let’s bust out the Aristotle: Catharsis is “the purging of the emotions of pity and fear that are aroused in the viewer of a tragedy” more or less. (I lifted that from here.)
This is a pretty nice trick. Let’s rephrase it to point out, explicitly, what the trick is: “arousing an emotion in the viewer, then processing it. Processing the crap out of it.” So we’re making the audience feel something… then WHAMMO. Give them a payoff. Odds are, if it were a “τραγῳδία”, that meant killing the protagonist but, if we were lucky, the protagonist could kill the antagonist first (or set something in motion that meant that the antagonist would be killed after)… but much of this is due to the limitations of the medium.
Seriously, let’s say you’re making a play, what are the tools that you have at your disposal to make me feel something? Well, there’s the love story, the revenge story… um… the downfall story… um… the accidental hero… um… there are not a whole lot. Interestingly, each of these also requires a first act where we introduce pretty much everybody and, by way of introduction, we pretty much establish that you, the audience, should like our protagonist, be irritated by our antagonist, find our love interest lovely, our enemy spiteful, and our situation perilous. That’s how we’re going to draw you in and get you to agree to feel the stuff we’re going to ask you to feel and then, after we do that, we’ll put our characters through the paces and you can process your feelings however you want.
Such are the limitations of Third Person Narratives (hey, such is the nature of the stage play). Now, I mean, sure. You might be able to do a play with such a tight third-person POV (and if you don’t deviate from it) that it comes across as a 1st person POV… but, really, if you want to tell a 1st person POV you pretty much have to use a novel. Indeed, one of the reasons you’d want to do this is that it’s much more intimate… person to person, if you will… that it does some of the heavy lifting of “getting the audience to care” that is a little more difficult when you’re stuck having your audience be a group of people all experiencing your story together. (Those of you who have done plays know that sometimes you’ve got *THIS* audience on Friday and they’re just dead… while *THAT* audience on Saturday is laughing at the jokes, cooing at the love interest, and hissing at the bad guys and how those two different audiences change the entire experience for the actors on the stage and, surely, creates a feedback loop for everybody involved… and, of course, that reading a novel is very much *NOT* like that.)
Which brings me to how video games are able to use the 2nd person narrative. Move forward to move forward, turn left and right to turn left and right, and pull the trigger to fire the gun. Perhaps I still need to create compelling characters to get you to *CARE*… but, when it comes to creating a protagonist? You will be doing that heavy lifting for me. Congratulations, you’re no longer merely the audience of our story, you’re the star of it.
Which brings me to Far Cry 3
And there we are. You are in a world where your brother was just murdered by a drug kingpin’s Main Man. Oh, he’s also oppressing the island. Oh, he’s also still got your friends. Here’s your first gun.
What are you inclined to do?
And that’s what makes this particular medium so very intoxicating. In the first five minutes, you know why you cannot wait to see the bad guy get his comeuppance… and all of the heavy lifting (apart from the voice acting and facial expression software and whatnot, of course) was done by you, the audience. Catharsis? All you have to do is pull the trigger.
for all of its faults – which are legion, though the ui patch that just came out appears to have fixed some of the more glaring tech issues – the opening to far cry 3 is really well done. it helps that the voice acting (outside of the main character) is quality.
so how are you finding the great white hope sim?
I’m on the 2nd Island and I have stolen my enemy outfit.
I’ve climbed all the radio towers, I’ve liberated all of the camps, and now I’m just cleaning up the last of the hunting and assassination contracts before I continue on with the main missions.
I am having the time of my life.
i’m curious if you’ll still feel that way with a few more go arounds. i lost a lot of steam somewhere about 25% in (i’m guessing at where i actually am as far as the story goes).
Well, I beat the game last night.
I’ve of two minds: I had a *LOT* of fun playing the “not the main storyline of the game” game. Sneaking through hostile territory to figure out the climbing puzzle of each individual radio tower was fun, trying to figure out how to go completely undetected for each camp liberation, hunting the precise animals that would upgrade my equipment to the max, and then getting the various assassination contracts and figuring out how to get my target with a knife, rather than with my (awesome) equipment?
Dude. That game was *AWESOME*.
The problem is with the main storyline and, even with its appeals to the viewer to seriously look at the tropes being explored here with their exploration of racism, colonialism, white privilege, and cultural relativism… they’re still portraying the antagonists as people who engage in kidnapping, ransom, human trafficking, drug trafficking (and not the “people should be allowed to engage in whatever recreation they choose” but the stuff that entails kidnapping, ransoming, human trafficking, etc), and generally showing you pathetic people who have been abused by powerful people (drug kingpins!) and then they ask you for help.
The vast, vast majority of missions you go on aren’t of the “we put mustard on our hot dogs, those monsters put ketchup! AND MAYONAISSE!!! on their hot dogs!!! WE MUST KILL THEM!!!!” kind of setup but “these people kidnapped your friend and God Only Knows what is happening to him now… and the only way to get your friend back is to kill the people who kidnap people like your friend for a living” kind of setup.
They didn’t even open the “these people are just trying to get by” can of worms (kinda hard to do that when you’re human trafficking) but were deliberately portrayed as, well, yeah scummy people that you know, for a fact, are guilty of serious anti-social felonies in a society that has no law that is not the law of the drug kingpin.
Assassin’s Creed III did a better job of getting me to explore the political ambiguities and if they wanted me to spend more time ruminating on violence in vidya games, they should have explored the whole “grey on grey” thing rather than “grey on black” thing.
i dig it, but i started to feel like the non-main-storyline parts of the game were very repetitive – though i did like the japanese soldier side missions i’ve played thus far. i will have to soldier through to see just how little edward said would approve.
i just played a bit more. some complaints:
1) half assing the narrative. why go to all this trouble to set it up when you know the game is going to be all murderdeathkill?
2) money is useless! USELESS! all that stuff you collect, ugh.
3) psychic dogs. i can kinda forgive that – let’s presume everyone smells AMAZING since i’ve yet to see a shower anywhere – but it’s a bit much. similar issue with the psychotic komodo dragons.
4) so goddamn gamey. again, all this trouble to be grimdark and rapey, yet hi score challenges litter the landscape.
5) collectibles and achievements. the animal hunting is a decent idea – kinda dumb that you can’t just buy and sell pelts but concessions must be made, etc – but the relic stuff is nonsense on stilts.
not to get all pc master race on the issue or anything, but can you imagine the resources of an ubisoft aaa team for the guys who made stalker? i’d pee myself.
Here’s one of the main thing that bugs me:
Lo, I am become Death, destroyer of worlds. I have taken machine gun fire, the full breath from a flamethrower, and been hit with a bazooka and walked away.
But all the antagonist needs to do to get me to lie down? Hit me in the forehead with the butt of his handgun.
I saw this article today on the Times blog. It also addresses the increased empathy for the player-controlled protagonist.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/game-theory-a-playwright-on-the-art-of-video-games/
It strikes me as an amazing medium with a *LOT* of potential for really in-depth storytelling. You pretty much don’t have to have a first act where you tell the audience “here’s why you care”. *YOU ALREADY HAVE BUY-IN*
The fact that people sat down and plugged into your game means that they’re already engaged.
The problem is that so many video games, well, suck. They let violence provide titilation rather than working to let a story provide some sort of mental/emotional purgation of pity/fear. Heck, even the ones that actually tell a good solid story are usually in a fantasy setting… like a D&D universe, or a White Wolf universe, or a DC/Marvel Universe.
Much like with comic books, the medium is pretty much hampered by its own successes… which are, primarily, with adolescent males. And there is all kinds of feedback loopy stuff going on there.
Anyway, thanks for pointing that article out!
Or maybe it’s hampered by having people write backstories while drunk…? ;-P
http://www.rpgamer.com/games/persona/persona4/reviews/persona4strev1.html
Now coming to an anime near you!
Ever played Shalebridge Cradle?
I’ve never even heard of it. Googling now…
OH THIEF 2!!!!
No, I haven’t. Though I have been looking at that “thief bundle” as part of the Steam Holiday Sale…
Actually, it’s thief3… The whole Thief franchise is awesome…
Review, with spoilers:
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=309
There’s a reason it’s the only mission anyone remembers from Thief 3…
Okay, fine. They’re selling the entire thief franchise for $6.74 on Steam.
Why not?
Downloading now.
You’ll want some 4.1 speakers plugged in, if you’ve got ’em. Thief’s got a wonderful sound engine.
Does the Steam version of Thief work easily on multi-core computers? I tried to play it before, but it took some finagling to get it to going.
RR,
I believe “someone” from France just got the Thief engine recompiled to run on modern hardware. Check the fan-sites (the ones with missions on them ought to link over…)
JB – interesting to use comic books as point of comparison. I admit to remaining somewhat skeptical about the ability of games to effectively provide emotional catharsis on the level of other forms of storytelling, precisely *because* they make the player the story’s protagonist.
Now, it may be that this is strictly a technical limitation, and that eventually a point of relatively perfect verisimilitude and ego submersion will be possible. But it seems to me that part of the reason that games remain a bit at arms’ length emotionally is that I cannot totally achieve suspension of disbelief, when I am the protagonist.
Put another way, I am guessing that it is more emotionally involving for us to watch Sir Olivier play “Hamlet”, than it was for Sir Olivier, himself, to actually play “Hamlet”. No matter how good the story is, I am still going to experience that mental “nuh-uh” factor, when I am told that *I* am the man who must avenge my sister’s death by shadowy assassins – man, I just saw her over cornflakes this AM, and she’s fine; I’m just pretending.
No matter how sophisticated the games and stories get, I am not sure if the medium can overcome the “Choose Your Own Adventure”/”Zork” aspect of things – which is to say, they can be fun, and entertaining/educational, but perhaps only somewhat transporting emotionally.
That said, I am definitely not a gamer – the last systems I played were PS1 and N64, and even then, I was in no way hardcore about it. So I defer to the judgement of you guys who know.
As a side bleg – if anyone can recommend good starter PS3 games to try to get me back in, I am open to suggestions. I need ones that either have simpler control commands, or that take the time to get you up to speed with complex controls – I think the ever-growing complexity of controls is, while great for the experienced gamer, a significant barrier to entry for the casual/novice one. I remember when we just had a joystick; then, a joystick and a button. So even if you sucked at something like Pac-Man or Defender, it was still pretty easy to pick up the controller and give it a go. Heck, Doom was a big deal at the time, but the controls were still fairly simple. Not so with most of today’s games.
Now there’s 2 directionals, and multiple buttons, which all must be utilized in concert to have any hope of even partially advancing thru a single level. So the casual or novice gamer may not have the patience for the learning curve.
Sometimes that’s the problem. but not always.
Often, you are put in the place of a detective, a hunter of tales, rather than a maker of tales, himself.
And sometimes you wind up in the tale, as a detective often does… But that is far from a sudden shock.
PS3 games to get you back in… it depends on what you want to get back into doing.
I’d suggest Journey, without hesitation, as that’s a story that you can play by yourself with no hardcoreness necessary. (Available from the PS3 store.)
From there, I’d say that you can pick up Uncharted for *CHEAP* used, and The Walking Dead for around $30 (get it from the PS3 store for only $25, but I like having the physical media).
Those should have entry-level controls to get you back into it and the stories are well on the “not crappy” side of the line.
Cool. The one game I actually have is Uncharted, so I will try that one night; I briefly popped it in when I first got it, but there seemed to be much shooting of pirates that seemed inappropriate for my toddler to be witnessing, so I turned it off and never tried it again (so my PS3 basically functions as an overpriced Blu-Ray player). Journey definitely looks intriguing, I had heard of that one already.
Oh! And Walking Dead is $12.50 on Steam.
I kinda wish I knew that before I got my physical media…
Uncharted 2 has, if’n you ask me, the absolute *BEST* first 10 minute segment I’ve ever seen in a video game. It’s a tutorial that teaches you how to play the game *AND* a toe-curling action sequence.
Uncharted as a whole is a good game, but I wish they had a segment as good as the first 10 minutes of Uncharted 2.
Anyway, the Uncharted series provides an excellent example of “video game as action movie”. It’s “Indiana Jones”, kinda. You’ve got the gruff-yet-avuncular mentor, you’ve got the strong female protagonist love interest, you’ve got your best frenemy as rival… it’s a popcorn movie. If, however, you like popcorn movies? This is a good one.
It’s a tight 3rd person game, though. “You” aren’t Nathan Drake in the same way as “You” are Jason Brody in Far Cry 3.
Anyway, I’m rambling.
all this and no one told him to play dear esther?
http://dear-esther.com
for shame people!
“No matter how sophisticated the games and stories get, I am not sure if the medium can overcome the “Choose Your Own Adventure”/”Zork” aspect of things – which is to say, they can be fun, and entertaining/educational, but perhaps only somewhat transporting emotionally. ”
maybe. depends. i think a lot of people recommend passage and stuff like that – i.e. art games – but i don’t really go for them. but they take stabs at the above, to varying degrees of success.
just struck me: the binding of isaac does the above, but with poop and child abuse.