Control vs Conditioning in Video Games

In considering the ways in which the process of playing video games is different from other forms of entertainment media it seems at first that video games offer the user more freedom and control. Reading or watching TV and movies could be seen as more passive because the reader or viewer must simply watch events unfold without being able to influence them in any way. Video games seem to offer the user at least some input as they are allowed to control the characters and influence the events that occur.

How much control and freedom do video games really offer users though? It seems that at least with a lot of action and platform games the user is being given a series of choices that result in positive and negative stimuli. Certain actions kill the character while others advance them further. As the game progresses the user learns to avoid the negative stimuli and eventually is able to play the game the correct way and advance the character through the entire game. In this way rather than offering users freedom to influence the outcome of the game it is really conditioning them to play the game the right way. To me it seems debatable whether the act of being conditioned could be considered a more active process than watching the events of a plot unfold in a book, TV show, or movie.

I will say that I think some video games do offer the user more choices and freedom and are more difficult to see as simply a conditioning process. Process oriented games like the Sims allow users to make various choices with no real predetermined goals in order to just see how the choices play out. Similarly games like Fable allow users to really set up and achieve their own goals and decide which directions to take the plot and how to develop the character in terms 0f appearance, actions, and abilities.

It is somewhat difficult for me to make a value judgement on video games. While it seems that games which offer the user more freedom rather than conditioning them would be preferable these games also tend to lack concrete goals and objectives to achieve. While a game might just be conditioning you, it does feel good when you finally get it right and overcome increasingly difficult obstacles. You can argue that this process might not be as active as it seems but I do not think that neccessarily makes these types of games any less valuable or enjoyable than other games.

The Control of Video Games

America is all about freedom and subsequently control and power. There is no such thing as complete freedom and there never will be. Media is no exception. Television and film give us limited freedom. We can choose to watch a comedy movie instead of a horror, but generally we can't decide what the content of a movie or a television show will be.

In the past two decades video games have risen to the top tier of entertainment. Everyone I know has at least one gaming system and most Americans have computers which allow gameplay on the internet as well as PC games. Humans like to be in control or feel as if they are, even if it is a character in a video game. If I want to shoot someone just to take their money on Grand Theft Auto, I can. There are a few different results that can come from this, which were programmed into the game therefore giving me no control over, but how I have the character react to the consequences is up to me.

When I was little all I wanted to do was watch my sister and cousins play video games. When I was between the ages of about 4-10 I mostly watched them rather than play. I knew how to play and I would every once in awhile, but mostly I was too young to get very far. As I got older I wasn't as comfortable watching and I would irritate my sister by being a sort of "back-seat driver." I would tell her go over there or jump here. I was growing up and I wanted more control over what I was seeing. Needless to say, my sister and I are still avid video gamers now (as much as we can be on a limited budget and working our way through college).

Video games can be an escape into a world where we are something better than ourselves. Who wouldn't love to explode a gas station without consequences in Grand Theft Auto, kill hordes of zombies in Resident Evil, or create and live the perfect life in The Sims (PC version). I can see how easy it would be to get lost in these non-existant (and sometimes fantastical) worlds. Yes, there are limits to what a certain game is programmed to do and content is created by someone else, but there's a level of control in video games that's unavailable in other forms of media (and life itself). However, there are books and movies starting to profit off of the idea of audience control. Choose your own adventure books are a great example and Final Destination 3 on DVD follows the same sort of idea. The movie can be watched in it's intended progression and conclusion or you can click on the choose your path version on the DVD menu. In this version of the film there are places where it will stop and ask which way you would prefer to go or which action should be taken providing many different paths through the movie. While this is more time-consuming and expensive for the filmmakers (more scenes need to be made and a lot more editing needs to be done), it gives the audience control that they want and if you give the people what they want the profits will follow.

In video games we aren't just along for the ride (keeping our hands and feet in the vehicle at all times) we make the ride and navigate our way through it. So who knows where video games will lead us, maybe all movies will function like Final Destination 3. We'll just have to wait and see.

Gibson's Chiba, My Chiba: On the Image of Japan in U.S. Cyberpunk

Reading the first chapter of William Gibson's Neuromancer made me nostalgic for Chiba. Not the Chiba of Night City and Ninsei--a kind of "historical park" to the origins of the Yakuza, a "deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself" (11)--but the Chiba of my wife's parents, of the 5-square-block area around their home my children and I know as well as anywhere we've ever been. The Chiba of the Don Quixote department store, the Tsutaya video store, the Book-Off secondhand store, the grocery stores and the combinis, the play parks and the elementary schools; the Chiba that's connected to the downtown bus and train station/shopping district by a ten-minute bus ride or half-hour walk, that's even closer to the Yamada Denki discount electronics store and the public library and a little farther from the discount shoe store--and that's even a long walk from the shrine we go to for New Year's and the cemetery we visit to clean the gravestone of my wife's grandmother, our older daughter's namesake. While it's true that there are areas still basically controlled by the Yakuza, and that the relationship between Chiba and Tokyo might well be analogized to the contrasting images of Jersey City and New York City, I don't need the excellent analysis by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun in Control and Freedom of the related orientalisms of Neuromancer and Ghost in the Shell to convince me that Gibson's Chiba--and his Japan in general--is quite significantly distorted from its reality in the 1980s, much less today.

In a sense, though, I'm not just nostalgic for the real Chiba, but also for the image I got of it from Neuromancer, many years before I ever visited Japan. Nostalia is weird.