Pleasure - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 32

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about agency and presence in terms of what he
calls “fl ow,” in which people talk of:
• “ losing track of time ”
• “ losing their sense of self ”
• “action follows action according to an internal logic that seems to need no
conscious intervention by the actor”
• “there is little distinction between self and environment, between stimulus
and response or between past, present, and future”
• “ fl ow experiences are attained when there is a perceived match between the
elements of the activity and the subject' s skills. ” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990 )
The importance of this is that it captures the direct link between agency and
presence in computer games.
Sherry Turkle is a sociologist, not a VR person, but she did talk to a huge number
of people who play computer games and MUDs and MOOs in particular. As a result
of this she came up with some very interesting insights into why people play com-
puter games (Turkle, 1997). In particular, she found that playing computer games
with others was one of the major aesthetic pleasures of the medium. Basically she
observed that a major contributing factor for presence (state of mind of being
absorbed) was co-presence (being absorbed with others). People like being with
other people and, in particular, people like being online with other people. Remem-
ber, MUDs date back to the 1970s when text-based adventures were fi rst networked,
so co-presence goes back to the beginnings of computer games. Co-presence was
an aesthetic pleasure of computer games way before 3D graphics was even thought
of. At about the same time you could be co-present with Pac-Man's ghosts but that
was as far as it went graphically. We'll add co-presence to our list, which is now
just about complete. But when we refer to co-presence we don't just mean real
people, we also mean virtual people, NPCs, alien life forms, animals, and just about
anything sentient. People like being with sentient beings.
So far we've come up with a series of discussions about what various people
have said about the aesthetics of computer games and other interactive media. The
next step is to put it all together and make use of it.
In putting together an aesthetics of computer games we should bear in mind
that it is an aesthetics, it is not the aesthetics; it's just one we put together over the
last few years as we did research into computer games and tried to use these ideas
in teaching. We are sure there are other aesthetic pleasures of games and we are
equally sure you could add to the list yourself. It is just that we have found this
particular characterization, which is summarized below, useful in trying to come to
terms with the nature of games.
Our computer game aesthetics consists of:
• Agency, which is characterized by the interplay between:
• Intention
• Perceivable consequence