And you were there, except it wasn’t really you.
Posted by Kerry Turner on May 27, 2010
Filed under: Writing about games
Tags: dreamwork, freud, gamework, laura michet, second person shooter
I don’t usually post links on here – that’s what Twitter’s for, silly – but I’ve been thinking about this post by Laura Michet at the excellent Second Person Shooter for a week now. A whole week!
Michet’s idea of game-work, where she uses the Freudian concept of dream-work to understand and talk about games, instantly clicked with me. Actually, I mean more than that – I want to tell everyone I know to read this, so “clicked with” won’t do at all. It struck me? It delighted me. Anyway.
When you combine all the stuff that is in a game—the obvious stuff, like the art and the script and the mechanics, and then all the ‘latent’ stuff, like “how does this control scheme influence the way I think about the game?” or “what’s special about the actions the game makes me perform?” or “what does this game assume about its audience?” or “how did the game’s creators establish its tone and mood?” and so on, it helps you to get a more complete and holistic idea of what’s actually going on in the game you’re playing—what’s special about it, and what it’s doing to your brain.
This resonates with me for two reasons.
Firstly, it’s a much more eloquent, expansive and well thought out take on something I’ve been thinking about recently. I’ve specifically been interested in the relationship between controls and content for a while now, particularly in games where there’s a strong correspondence between the two. I hand-on-heart believe that the old joystick-wagglers were onto something, even if they didn’t quite hit the mark, and I’m curious to see whether I can follow this idea somewhere interesting. Hearing other people talking about this without recourse to the dreaded “gameplay” makes me feel like I’m not just wasting my life here.
Secondly, it’s a pleasing coincidence. The short project I’m currently working on borrows its narrative from a dream I had (no, wait! Come back!), so I’ve been thinking quite a lot about game-spaces and dream-spaces and how they relate. I want to make the game recognisably dream-like without sacrificing too much of what makes it a game – and the searingly simple point of view that, as the title of the post says, “games are dreams” is quite a freeing take on that dilemma.
Also, props for the mention of Don’t Look Back. If you don’t follow me on Twitter or have to put up with me in real life, you might not know that this game has my heart. My heart.