Securing Home Base: Separation-Individuation, Attachment Theory, and the “Virtual Worlds” Paradigm in Video Games

ABSTRACT

This paper identifies the “virtual worlds” paradigm in psychoanalytic approaches to video games. Sometimes counterproductive to game interpretation, this paradigm views all games as an escape into separate and substitutive virtual reality. I argue that the virtual worlds framework only applies to some video games, and rarely encapsulates most games’ address to the player. I propose an alternative approach based in separation-individuation and attachment theory, pointing to how a wide variety of games provide players with “secure base” experiences as a form of affect regulation and metacognition. Introducing three broad categories of tether fantasies in video games—lifeline, home base, and perpetuum mobile—, I map out some of the generic terrain of commercial games from a secure base perspective, emphasizing the value of going and coming in the process of developing autonomy. I argue that the tether fantasy in video games not only illustrates the integration of attachment and separation-individuation schools of thought, but also offers a compelling reason to reconsider the analytical meaning of video game play. The paper’s analysis of Minecraft as a home base tether game also explores the question of how games can themselves serve as an anchor for ventures into more complicated social worlds at times of transition like nest-leaving, or for times of stress in adult life.

KEYWORDS:

• Videogames
• fantasy
• virtual worlds
• attachment theory
• separation-individuation

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Alisa Zhao for her scrupulous research assistance and Dr. Karen Gilmore for her keen guidance and supportive feedback during the writing process.

Notes

1. See, for example, especially visible work on games in fields beyond game studies proper, from economists like Castronova (Synthetic Worlds, 2006) to sociologists like Taylor (Play Between Worlds, 2009) and psychotherapists like Turkle (whose games publications span several decades, but who has published on the topic as recently as 2012).

2. This term builds on the “separate worlds view” in Stevens, Satwicz, and McCarthy (2008), who conceived of it as a widespread attitude toward games that

holds, in different ways for different writers, that game play is a world apart from people’s other activities in everyday life. Whether this separateness is framed in technocentric terms like “immersion in virtual worlds” or in academic terms that conceptualize video games as a “discourse” or “semiotic domain,” we see a persistent bent that analyzes video game play as largely disconnected from other moments and activities in people’s lives. (43)

Stevens, Satwicz, and McCarthy adopted an ethnographic approach to look at the context of play to expand the frame of analysis for the separate worlds view, rather than rejecting it. This paper opts for a distinct but related term—the virtual worlds paradigm—to break not just with the practice of treating the game as an artificially separated reality, but also to stake a definitional claim, that very few games in intention or effect are separate, self-contained virtual worlds.

3. Grau’s (2003) book, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, offers a thorough and representative account of the major voices, both historically and conceptually, that have contributed to the VW paradigm in digital media. Grau traced a familiar lineage of immersive technologies:

Before the panorama, there were successful attempts to create illusionist image spaces with traditional images, and after its demise—together with many artistic visions that never left the drawing board—technology was applied in the attempt to integrate the image and the observer: stereoscope, Cineorama, stereoptic television, Sensorama, Expanded Cinema, 3-D, Omnimax, and IMAX cinema, as well as the head-mounted display with its military origins. (Grau 2003, 5)

French film critic Andre Bazin spoke of “the myth of total cinema,” a wish brought to cinema for a total illusion in the medium’s representations. Video games have come to represent only the most recent technology fueling the long-standing wish for a totally immersive virtual reality—critics in game studies label this wish the Holodeck fantasy after the imagined futuristic technology on the Star Trek: The Next Generation series, which games scholars like Murray (Hamlet on the Holodeck, 1977) have overtly identified as the near future of gaming. It has been the near future of video games for decades. The future-oriented Holodeck imaginers are part of a broader group of new media scholars invested in the fantasy space of “cyberspace,” which Chun (2006) noted is “an odd name for a communication medium,” because, “Unlike newspaper (news + paper) or film, it does not comprise its content or its physical materials” (38–9). The term cyberspace “erases all reference to content, apparatus, process, or form, offering instead a metaphor and a mirage, for cyberspace is not spatial” (Chun 2006, 39). Chun traced the term to its “sci-fi” origins, in Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), about jacking into a virtual universe and leaving your body behind. Although the imagery is based in imagination, not a description of the medium’s form or content, it still holds sway over the attitudes of many toward video games. In this mindset, all games are striving toward totally immersive virtual reality and seek to supplant this world with a virtual one—failure to do so is assumed to be due to technological limitation, not the presence of a competing motivation.

4. The VW view, like virtual reality technology itself, does not engage questions of content or software. Rather, the focus lies almost entirely on the technology (weight of headset, how hot the batteries get, etc.) and the obsessive wish for an alternative reality, broad access to which is assumed to have wide-reaching effects (economic, social, psychological, etc.). In a recent interview for yet another major article about how virtual reality technology is “right around the corner,” a senior researcher at Sony working on virtual reality technology for the Playstation 4, remarked that “in the past few months [Sony] has gotten the hardware far enough along that the software will now matter more” (Stein 2015, 45). A large portion of the article details the range of conflicting potential uses for the technology. Psychological research has much to offer this conversation, but only if we begin to address the specific empowerment fantasies already structuring video games.

5. In a memo for the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery that draws on research from the Journal of Loss and Trauma (Prati and Pietrantoni 2009), Van Slyke (2013) argued that

the cognitive process of rumination and meaning-making have also been linked to greater PTG [posttraumatic growth], which are indicative of the thought processing that often happens after the trauma as survivors struggle to make sense out of the experience. The type of deliberate, constructive ruminative thinking that may promote PTG should be distinguished from automatic, maladaptive rumination often linked to emotional distress. (Van Slyke 2013, 2)

In a recent TED talk, Jane McGonigal linked PTG to video game play on the basis that games have the power to make us more optimistic. This article hopes to offer a more particular account of the form of optimism, the cognitive rumination and meaning making that go along with it, and the nature of the trauma in question (separation trauma).

6. See Manovich’s (2001) “Poetics of Navigation,” Bolter and Grusin’s (2000) discussion of Myst, Murray’s (1997, 129) “The Pleasures of Navigation,” or Aarseth’s (1997) Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. This line of thinking, it should be noted, is adjunct to the VW view.

7. Home base had long seemed anathema to the video game’s progression-based play: the constant forward march of arcade games measured in the number of invested quarters, and the adventure/RPG genres’ typical quest scenario wherein heroes quickly leave home behind for a series of exotic substitutes. However, the home base tether has also meant breaking with the industry’s practice of loading adjacent game spaces separately—especially the interior of built structures—effectively disconnecting inside from outside and dissolving the secure base circuit. In many games, such as Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda series, the outside world contains monsters, the interiors of homes do not, and never the twain shall meet. The practice might push graphical detail within each space, but it undercuts the dialog between them.

8. For a smart review of the trope of outer space in video games, see Majsova (2014).

9. A mod is essentially a download that changes the appearance or some of the rules of the basic game. Mods are a popular means of prolonging the novelty of the underlying game engine, but they also facilitate experimentation and self-expression by offering game design tools to novice game designers.

10. For example, a recent paper on the game’s educational value (and an adherent to the VW paradigm) described it, simply, as “a multiplayer sandbox video game based in a virtual world modeled on the real world” (Short 2012, 55).

11. The minigames are more concerned with referentiality (to other games or genres; e.g., zombie-shooters), agôn (combat-oriented conflict), and, perhaps above all, social interactions (supported by chat or YouTube).

12. In fact, Minecraft in the classroom would fall under what Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2010) described as the ineffective and inefficient constructivist approach to education. Kirschner and colleagues cited more than fifty years of empirical studies of “overwhelming and unambiguous evidence that minimal guidance during instruction is significantly less effective and efficient than guidance specifically designed to support the cognitive processing necessary for learning” (76). The cognitive processing in question refers to a tension between long-term memory and “working” memory, wherein the “aim of all instruction is to alter long-term memory” with the restriction that working memory is severely limited in capacity to do so, to “as low as four, plus or minus one” total elements at a time (77). The constructivist approach, putting students into the thick of a situated learning experience and letting them figure out solutions with minimal teacher guidance, makes very high demands on working memory. Video games are often highlighted for their ability to teach players complicated game rules in this kind of scenario. The exact manner in which this is accomplished is not well understood.

It is worth noting that games rarely if ever present wholly new universes to players, but rather build on past gaming experiences and commonplace “operational logics” (like what Noah Wardrip-Fruin said of “hit detection”) and controller interfaces. Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2010) noted that there “are no known limits to the amount of … information that can be brought into working memory from long-term memory” (77). Experiments on chess players demonstrate the immense capacity of experienced chess players to store ready-made “chunks” of information from past game experience in long-term memory. On the other hand, novice players with no long-term memory for chess struggle to contain all the game’s different elements and strategies within working memory while playing. In this sense, players not already familiar with Minecraft’s game play will not have their “working memory” open for engaging the virtual lesson plan. For those who have already mastered the game, the exact benefit of the virtual lesson is still contested. There is reason to believe the approach is less effective in the classroom than approaches more carefully prepared to facilitate the student’s “cognitive processing” of course material.

13. This is according to demographic research by the Entertainment Software Association (2015).

14. In fact, Seiffge-Krenke (2006) specifically asserted that “the young adult’s leave-taking from the parental home may revive earlier problematic issues of separation and independence” (865).

15. Lyons-Ruth’s (1991) important empirical challenge to Mahler’s “rapprochement” subphase argues that what Mahler saw as a normal part of development (“rapidly alternating desire to push mother away and to cling to her”) was more likely an example of “insecure” (“‘avoidant,’ ‘resistant,’ and ‘disorganized/disoriented’”) infant attachment organizations (Mahler, Pine, and Bergman 1975, 95; Lyons-Ruth 1991, 5, 6). From this perspective, a patient’s apparent return to the rapprochement subphase in a tether fantasy (imaginatively seeking “optimal distance”) could reflect an insecure attachment organization, which has continued since infancy, making the fantasy itself a repetitious attempt to repair insecure attachments during times of stress. Of course, in attachment theory, even seemingly autonomous adults still rely on a secure base (the “anchor” that has been internalized), so there remains a function for the concept of the tether within the behavioral approach.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christopher Goetz

Christopher Goetz, PhD is a film, digital media, and videogame scholar whose research focuses on fantasy and play across a range of platforms, from cinema to interactive digital media. His published works have appeared in Games and Culture, New Media & Society, and First Person Scholar, and are forthcoming in an edited volume on Queer Game Studies. He is one of the founding organizers of the annual Queerness and Games Conference. Chris received his PhD in Film & Media from UC Berkeley, and is currently Assistant Professor of Film Studies and New Media at the University of Iowa.