Doctoral Dissertation
Meaning and Emotion in Final Fantasy X: Re-Theorising Realism and Identification in Video Games. [Word Document 4.5 MB]
My Doctoral dissertation (submitted January 20, 2005) engages with existing theories about new media and digital culture through an extended qualitative analysis of a single video game: Final Fantasy X. It reviews the current research on video games and offers a cross-disciplinary theoretical model for digital aesthetics and the experience of gameplay. While it draws from traditional theories within Cultural and Media Studies it is concerned with the limitations of these theories, and in addressing these it also draws from contemporary research on cognition, affect, and emotion. It follows the APA Referencing format.
Rather than waste time changing the format, I've simply included the entire Word document that was approved by the graduate school, including digital images. I've already spotted a few typos; if you spot any other grammatical slips that passed by the editorial process, please e-mail me so that I have a list of errata before I send it to a publisher.
Overview
Introduction - Argues that while a multi-disciplinary approach to video game studies is needed, at this early stage of research semiotic and structuralist terminology remains useful.
Chapter One offers an analytical literature review arguing that: the cognitve and affective work that occurs during gameplay is a mediated version of everyday activity; that game aesthetics can be analysed in terms of the sensorimotor and cognitive demands they make on players; that early research on emotion was problematic; and that a more systematic account of the regulation of meaning and emotion in gameplay is needed.
Chapter Two draws on Torben Grodal's work on film to explore the perceptual qualities of the interface, such as changes in proximal and distal perception, and how these produce a sense of unreality in players. It argues that digital representation may direct our mental focus onto pre-meaning intensities, creating proximal impressions that may retard higher cognitive and emotional processing. The variety of perceptual parameters may give rise to ambiguous experiences of reality-status.
Chapter Three draws upon Ed Tan's work on film and argues that "interest" may be the basic emotion of gameplay. It analyses how it may be preserved within and across narrative and ergodic sequences, with reference to Barthes' analysis of hermeneutic codes.
Chapter Four argues that the hermeneutic structure of FFX exploits the modalities of the real known as the marvellous, uncanny, and the fantastic, in that interest is regulated by uncertainty as to whether or not events have happened. It suggests that this hermeneutic coding of reality may complement the ambiguous reality status addressed in chapter two.
Chapter Five argues that interest is regulated by the coding of characters, and analyses how players engage in a process of cognitive identification of their traits. It argues that video game characters are doubly coded across narrative and game macrostructures.
Chapter Six analyses the issue of player investment in characters and the game by reviewing the psychoanalytic model of identification, specifically the distinction between the ideal ego, ego ideal, and super ego. It argues that the double coding of characters may be seen in terms of a tension between different modes of identification, producing complex dynamics of desire. However, the psychoanalytic model is seen as a limited basis for a model of identification because of its insensitivity to the diverse range of human emotions.
Chapter Seven analyses the emotional responses players have towards characters on the basis of the difference in position between players and characters. It initially addresses the affective dimensions of empathy, notably FFX's coding of such innate releasers as attractiveness, which reinforce the desirability of characters as ego ideals. It subsequently addresses cognitive dimensions of empathy, arguing that FFX may be hermeneutically characterised as a tragedy and that sadness may be a dominant, recurring empathetic emotion.
Chapter Eight argues that empathy felt towards characters may be blocked by a player's self-concern for his/her own position as a player. Video game play is seen as promoting preoperational cognition, including egocentric impressions of attunement between self and machine. Blocked agency is seen as a violation of a player's labour. While this might be seen in psychanalytic terms of narcissistic rage it may be more usefully seen as producing the affect of shame, as theorising by Silvan Tomkins and Donald Nathanson.
Chapter Nine argues that the playful attempt to engage with a video game may be confounded by one's realisation of the impersonal, logical, meaningless, unemotional and unempathic qualities of the computer as a partner in play. This may elicit Tomkins' affect of shame in the sense of a disavowal of a positive experience of selfhood; in a broader sense the experience of the player may be seen as analogous to Sartre's description of existentialism. However, gameplay may be characterised by an attempt to confront the machine with an attitude of courage and humour, and that the shared experience of labour and suffering provides a basis for community, especially for players of online games who must deal with the arbitrary whims of an indifferent network.
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Published Articles and Conference Papers
I presented and published the following two refereed articles early on in my Doctoral research. They're really just bookmarks of the work in progress, in that their arguments were elaborated in my dissertation.
Cognitive Work in Video Gameplay [Link to off-site PDF File 903KB] - This article argues that it is useful to identify four different cognitive modes of engagement with video games that recapitulate Piaget's four stages of cognitive development. This argument was developed through the literature review and chapter eight of my PhD. I presented it at the ANZCA 2002 conference in Brisbane, Queensland.
Narrative and Interaction in Computer Games [Word Document 1.6MB] - This article, which unfortunately had to be cut extremely short for submission, applies and adapts Barthes' narrative codes to video games. Most of the arguments were separated out and elaborated throughout my PhD. I presented this at the ANZCA 2001 conference in Perth, Western Australia.
Flickering Utopias : A Metaphor of Compassionate Agency in Late Capitalism - This paper draws from Buddhist philosophy to argue that Cultural Studies' political praxis and rhetoric, being based upon desire and transgression, reproduces suffering at the moment it seeks to challenge it. It offers a complementary metaphor of "flickering utopias" - compassionate moments that are apolitical but are ideally preparatory to political praxis - to counter the tendency towards embittered politics and helpless apathy in late capitalism. It draws from contemporary theory on emotion and ritual to argue that the separation of political fermentation from internal alchemy, of which Buddhist meditation and ritual is but one example, recapitulates the anthropological distinction between rational and pre-rational modes of thought. This paper was presented at the Imagining the Future Conference at Monash University in Melbourne, Victoria.
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Articles in Progress
The following are papers are somewhere between conception and completion. Articles drawn from chapters in my submitted PhD will only be submitted if I have trouble getting the PhD published.
Affect in Video Games - a version of a chapter removed from my PhD, arguing that the time-pressured demands on sensorimotor and cognitive abilities means that many video games may function more as 'affect machines' (as opposed to Ed Tan's (1997) notion of film as 'emotion machines').
Computational Semiotics - provides a model of classifying meaning at the interface by adapting Aarseth's model of cybertexts to Barthes' model of levels of signification. Some of the basic distinctions are included in my literature review.
Towards the Picaresque as a Model for CRPGs - this was initially the focus of my PhD, but I wanted a better theoretical model of identification and empathy before I pursued this argument further. It argues that the Spanish 'picaresque' genre provides a better model of role-playing games than notions of 'heroic fantasy' or 'adventure'.
Virtual Dice - this was also an early issue in my research, and is concerned with issues of randomization, chaos, and the experience of meaning in gameplay. It prefigured the chapter on existentialism in my PhD.
Satanic Witches, Windy Wizards and Commonsense Warriors: 'Accessing' Magic - This was an overview of different ways in which fictional texts represent the relationship between characters and magic.
The Miracle, The Spell, the Wish: The Economy of Magic - This was a topic that overlapped with my Honours thesis, albeit focusing on a range of differnet populat texts, including Uncle Scrooge comics (with reference to Dorfman and Mattelhart's Marxist account of Donald Duck) and role-playing games.
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Honours Thesis
The Ideological Work of Magic in Late Capitalism and Star Trek (1998)
Like many Honours students I wanted to write a book, and I ended up writing the actual thesis at a late stage on a topic that was peripheral to my research. Its general argument was that while pre-industrial representations of magic allowed humans to psychologically accommodate their submission to natural forces, "magic" in late capitalism naturalises human submission to the forces of late capitalism.
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Essays
This is just a list of some under- and post-graduate essays. I list them only to indicate the trajectory of my early research.
From the Frontiers of Wilderness to the Borders of National Parks - an overview of the history of the concept of conservation, with passing application of the aesthetic categories of picturesque, beautiful and sublime to several categories of 'nature'.
The Fetish of the Crowd - an account of Le Bon's, Freud's and Baudriillard's psychological and political accounts of crowds.
The Family in Utopian Fiction - an analysis of the role of the family in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time.
The State and Terrorism - an account of the shifting significance of terrorism from 'modernity' to 'postmodernity'.
Exposing The Camouflaged Hero in Alien - an analysis of the ideological work in the Ridley Scott film.
A Little Man-Made World - a semiotic analysis of John Donne's "I am a little world made cunningly".
The Laugh of the Medusa - a polemical account of Helen Cixous' article.
Disney Nature - a Baudrillardian analysis of Disney World.
Paranoia and the City - argues that the conditions of urban life meet many of the criteria for paranoia, and therefore may be seen as promoting a 'paranoid outlook'.
V and the Grand Tour - an account of the role of tourism in Thomas Pynchon's novel in relation to theories of capitalism and representation.
Re-Production in the "Bascombe Valley Mystery" - a textual and ideological analysis of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes short story.
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