This report was produced during a seminar on non-entertainment games in 2020.
When I was given the topic of experience in the context of non-entertainment games, the first thing I was looking for were games that made use of their gameplay to provide experiences that transcended the normative understanding of pleasure and entertainment. Games that convey strong and meaningful messages through the experiences they engineer. Games like 11bit studios’ This War of Mine (2014) or Frostpunk (2018) and Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please (2013).
My main guiding question was how software that looks like a videogame and feels (at least on a surface level) like a one creates gameplay which is in its enjoyability inferior to the overarching experience constructed? How does experience outplay fun and the pleasure principle and manages to remain engaging for the player?
Before even beginning my fieldwork on This War of Mine, Frostpunk and Papers, Please I recognised one key defining attribute that unifies all of these games. Moral dilemmas and the affordance to apply one’s ethics on to the game. Moral conflict and the experience of making difficult decisions in extreme situations works as a kind of nuclear energy for the engine that generates the experience. One experiences meaning and consequences. Do I save a person but risk the lives of members of my group? Do I share my supplies but run into danger to not survive the upcoming winter? Do I take bribes to supply for my family? These are questions that feel at least meaningful.
In my research, I quickly realised that there was a distinct difference between Frostpunk and the other games. Frostpunk may seem like it provides an experience beyond entertainment yet how moral confrontation is implemented in the game is very calculated and embedded in the game’s constitutional rules. Our decisions in the game, whether we help people, punish them or force unethical laws is always mirrored to us through a score. We continuously see through two parameters if our people are happy and if they are hopeful. Our ethical interaction in the game becomes involved in a continuous feedback loop with these parameters, making it hence a pure videogame which is engaging based on its mechanics and not a game that capitalises on displeasure for the sake of a meaningful experience.
In comparison, This War of Mine included ethical encounters with less predictable outcomes and less feedback to our actions; making it a bit more punishing. Furthermore, the game itself had a strong thematic set up trying to sensitise players against civilians’ situation in war zones. Yet, while creating a meaningful experience through the context, the game represents many aspects and elements that make it engaging from a mechanic-centred perspective. It’s combat and looting system and the time-management involved in setting up camps made This War of Mine in that regards similar to Frostpunk that capitalised fundamentally on its gameplay. Again my search for gameplay that subjects itself to the experience was defied. Yet, I had felt that I was getting closer to what I was looking for.
In replaying Papers, Please I knew that it was the game that is the archetype of a game that uses gameplay for an experience and not gameplay as experience; an experience-game beyond entertainment. Yet, while being unable to stop playing a game that was technically not a pleasure at all, I still had to understand how the game design manages to engineer such an experience.
The game Papers, Please lets us experience being a relatively poor border guard in a fictional communist state. Our job is to check immigrants’ documents; deciding according to official restrictions and laws to let in and who to refuse. The main gameplay is based on making decisions according to rules; accepting or denying immigrants based on a list of requirements.
According to Sicart “Papers, Please is an exploration of totalitarian bureaucratic systems and the banality of evil. Totalitarian bureaucracies can be designed to alienate decision makers from the consequences of their choices and, in doing so, allow participants to feel ethically detached from their decisions.” (Sicart 2019: 151)
So what kind of game is this? It took me a while to figure that this game is technically a serious game because it draws on the idea to be a simulator for practising a job-relevant skill. “A serious game is a digital game created with the intention to entertain and to achieve at least one additional goal (e.g., learning or health). These additional goals are named characterizing goals.” (Dörner, Göbel, Effelsberg & Wiemeyer 2016: 3)
As the game mimicks a job-learning game (becoming skilful at checking documents in time), the question remains: What makes it different from other serious games? I argue that cynicism emerges from the games’ fictional thematic setting, making this a unique serious game.
The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk gave me a working understanding of cynicism and its implications:
“Cynicism is one of the categories in which modern unhappy consciousness looks itself in the eyes. We have the cynical Zeitgeist and that specific taste of a fragmented, overcomplicated, demoralizing world situation in our bones, our nerves, our eyes, and in the corners of our mouths.” (Sloterdijk 1983: 140)
What Sloterdijk means is that cynicism results from the discrepancy between idealism and material reality. It is us standing in between an unenchanted real world and a theoretical ideology of interpreting that world. This is found in the game and its very thematic setting of a fictional communist country. We are subject to an ideological mode of life, that of communism, yet we are faced with the alienated side of idealism through our job. Historical progress, an egalitarian society and the belief in a better future are confronted with violent state repression, corruption and economic dependencies.
This makes Papers Please a cynical serious game, as we are practising our skills for an actual job that cannot even be fulfilled because of the cynical reality created through the totalitarian state in which we practice the job. Hence a cynical serious game, is game that uses the innocent, productive and didactic form of a serious game and obverts the fulfilment of its purpose through cynicism which creates an impossibility to apply the skills for the job correctly.
This aspect is contrasted with the design of moral encounters. We are almost forced by the game design to act unethically because we would not survive. We are either threatened, obliged or forced to enact immoral behaviour like helping terrorists, taking bribes or treating other unequal, but this does not just create a stressful and demoralising experience, but it is also how the game manages to keep us engaged. As the game denies all moral characteristics except for its informality, so us applying our moral code onto the game, we are challenged to test our ethics onto the game. Yet creating through this affordance the same experience and meaning of its scenario.
To conclude, we can say that moral decisions are indeed constitutive for a cynical serious game. Still, to create the desired and authentic experience of a situation like being a border guard in a communist country, the game design must obverse the moral parameters in so far that one would feel as unfairly treated as in the fictional communist state of Astorzska.
Hence, it is not enough to offer the player a chance of moral pondering, but it must make it correspondingly tricky to the experience it tries to create. It needs to foster a cynical relation between something as trivial and innocent like practising our skills for a job and experiencing sum of the immorality of a totalitarian and repressive state
Hence showing how limited and dependent we can be in making an important decision may be a stronger encounter with morality than an illusion of endless possibilities and the simulated easiness od doing the right thing. And this is how Papers Please uses the innocent and productive form of a serious game in dualism to the complicated and demoralising challenges cynicism and immorality poses on the player to create an experience meaningful beyond entertainment.
Throughout my research and the participation in extracurricular activities and my colleagues’ work, I was able to better understand what Non-Entertaining games are being used for and what the implications of them are in our society. It is interesting think of the many ways how games or gamification can be used to sensitise humans or improve their skills.
References
Dörner, R., S. Göbel, W. Effelsberg, and J. Wiemeyer. 2016. Serious Games. New York: Springer International Publishing.
Sicart, Miguel. 2019. “Papers, Please.” In How to Play Video Games, edited by Matthew Payne and Nina Huntemann, 149-156. New York: New York University Press.
Sloterdijk, Peter. 1988. Critique of Cynical Reason. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.