Only a game? Player misery across game boundaries

ABSTRACT

Videogames often confront players with frustratingly difficult challenges, fearsome enemies, and tragic stories. As such, they can evoke feelings of failure, sadness, anger, and fear. Although these feelings are usually regarded as undesirable, many players seem to enjoy videogames which cause them. In this paper, I argue that player misery often originates from a fictional or lusory attitude which brackets game events from real-life, making the player’s emotions solely relevant within the game context. As they are part of the game themselves, these negative emotions can be enjoyed and easily relativized, since players can acknowledge that their cause is ‘only a game’. However, there are feelings of misery associated with the playing of videogames which are not caused by either the game’s fiction or challenge. In the last part of this paper, I describe a qualitatively different kind of player misery: one that is caused by elements that are not perceived as part of the game by the player, and is not bracketed from real life by a lusory or fictional attitude.

KEYWORDS:

• Videogames
• emotions
• fiction
• make-believe
• lusory attitude
• failure

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A more thorough discussion of the paradox of fiction in videogames can be found in Van de Mosselaer (2018).

2. This is supported by the sales figures of horror games. The latest installment of the Resident Evil horror-game series, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (Capcom 2017), released on 17 January 2017, sold 6 million copies by 31 December 2019. The zombie-infested remake of Resident Evil 2 (Capcom 2019), released on 25 January 2019, shipped over 3 million copies worldwide in its first week of sales. (Data retrieved from http://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/news/html/e190129.html, accessed on 31 January 2019).

3. Players often take the sadness a game makes them feel as a reason to describe the game as a good game, or even as art. One Reddit user describes a scene in Mass Effect 3 (BioWare 2012), saying ‘A couple of tears came out after that. I’m not sure if it was regret, loss or stress, but damn was that a great game.’ Another user takes Transistor’s sad ending as a reason for the game being a ‘masterpiece’ (https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/2d0yv9/do_video_games_really_make_you_cry/, accessed on 31 January 2019). Moreover, players of The Last of Us (Naughty Dog 2013) often refer to the game’s saddest moments to explain why they like the game so much. One user reports that The Last of Us became his favorite videogame because of ‘the opening scene. I have never cried while playing a game before, but that scene just destroyed me’ (https://www.reddit.com/r/thelastofus/comments/27ln8g/at_what_point_did_the_last_of_us_become_your/, accessed on 31 January 2019).

4. Zimmerman himself commented on Salen and his narrow interpretation of the magic circle in ‘Jerked Around by the Magic Circle: Clearing the Air Ten Years Later’ (Zimmerman 2012).

5. Note that there are also emotions connected to the playing of videogames that, strictly, do not have anything to do with the game itself. For example, a game glitch or power outage right before giving the final blow in a boss fight can be incredibly frustrating, but there is nothing the game (or the developers of the game) did to bring this frustration about. The videogame did not cause the player misery, the malfunctioning of the videogame did.

6. For a more in-depth application of Waltonian fiction theory to videogames as interactive fictions, see Wildman and Woodward (2018).

7. https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1l9jbf/im_finally_playing_arkham_asylum_and_this_part/. Accessed on December 1^st, 2018.

8. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Kt2f5Lw21I. Accessed on January 31^st, 2019.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO)[1188219N].