A man cries, a woman sinks to her feet in despair and Bennett Foddy is smiling. The games developer and Oxford University professor is playing a montage of the tears and tantrums of London 2012's defeated athletes at Hide&Seek's Weekender conference -- and none of the triumphs.
"Look at his face? what I love is the look on the coach's face after four years of training? beautiful."
Before you start wondering how it is that the creator of the wonderful CLOP -- which sees players leading a unicorn over a small hill using only the H, J, K and L keys -- could take away from one of the country's proudest moments only a series of sadistic thrills, Foddy is about to get to a pretty good point.
"I'm not just taking pleasure in people suffering -- though that's a major component. The Olympics breeds this kind of drama and human suffering on an epic scale... Nobody cries after losing a video game, so that's what's inspiring about this to me," he says.
Foddy cites the example of an injured athlete at the Beijing Olympics who hopped to the finish line: "It showed he cared in a way video game players wouldn't; it's what we struggle with -- making the outcome matter."
Games developers, argues Foddy, could learn a lot from the emotional attachment and despair of the athletes at London 2012. Although multi-player video gaming does provide potential for emotional attachments, gaining an audience on a more epic scale tends to take place only on online gaming platforms and these, Foddy says, cannot replicate the same kind of joy and devastation.
"There are certain types of experiences and emotions you can only have with another person in the room with you, and I feel that we've neglected those experiences a bit since the emergence of online gaming and the rise of the console," Foddy told Wired.co.uk. "There are a number of indie auteur developers who are seeking to address this right now."
Games like Foddy's 100-metre QWOP race bridge the gap a little, by building on the social aspect of gaming. Gaining a huge online following, with players loading clips of their successes and failures on YouTube, the frustrating tasks have led to many an inter-office debate over correct technique. "It's funny because that's one game I didn't develop with a social experience in mind at all, but it turned out to be the most pro-social game I've made."
"It's ironic, but I really think if I had included so-called 'social' features in QWOP (and CLOP) like leaderboards, achievements, friend lists and so on, it wouldn't have been shared in the same social way. So it can be hard to force shared experiences to happen. I know people like 4chan's Chris Poole have often talked about the concept of creating spaces for people to form new interactions and new cultural practices, but it seems to be crucial that you don't try too hard."
So public play and videogames need to try to get people interacting in new ways -- but not too hard. But how can we ever hope to replicate the kind of emotional attachment experienced by athletes that train for years, driven on by the anxieties and deafening screams of an audience of millions?
"It takes different approaches to get different kinds of emotion," Foddy tells Wired.co.uk. "Games need to get more mature in their storytelling if they want to more frequently evoke emotions like ennui or eroticism. But games -- even single-player games -- already hit certain emotional notes pretty hard. You get an intense feeling of awe or sublimity playing a game like Proteus. You can get a sense of glee playing a game like Super Mario Sunshine."
With Foddy's own games, he aims for a rather darker line of reactions, in contrast to the rainbow-coloured world of Mario and company.
"I try to get people to experience emotions like rage, confusion and embarrassment -- I think those notes can be easier to hit in a context with the pressure of a spectator crowd, or even in the context of facing a live human rival in your living room. Beating human beings, and being beaten by them, naturally matters more to me as a player than defeating an emotionless machine."
Essentially, the kinds of emotions Foddy is talking about are down to audience attention. Even in an e-sport, he says, players need to repeatedly perform moves "in a non-trivial way" in order to gain success -- it's about being able to replicate a successful manoeuvre over and over again, on command. Public sports, however, have a performative aspect that is difficult to replicate.
"Here's a simple way of looking at it," says Foddy, "Usain Bolt probably broke the world record for the 100m sprint dozens of times in training, even in competition against his friends and rivals on the Jamaican track team. But it doesn't count, it doesn't matter, and it's in some sense not even a sport, until the grandstand is full."
"So when I am trying to build e-sports, I'm building them mostly with the spectator audience in mind. There should be jokes at the player's expense, for the spectator's amusement. And it needs to be clear to the spectator why one competitor won and the other one lost. It's a problem with gamepads and keyboards that the movements are imperceptible to an onlooker -- it isn't enough that the spectator knows you lost. They have to know why you lost, and how badly you sucked. At that point, you can feel ashamed of your performance. And that's where a sport really starts to matter in a way that a regular game doesn't."
With the tortured, twisted faces of London 2012's most miserable defeated athletes still fresh in his mind, Foddy hope to take inspiration and one day replicate those thrills. "One of my ambitions," he tells Wired.co.uk, "is to make a game that is like a real sport."
Image: cry / flavio rucci / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Source: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-09/20/bennett-foddy-emotional-gaming
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