If the visceral level grabs the viewer in the guts, driving automatic reactions, the vicarious level involves the viewer in the story and emotional line of the movie. Normally, the behavioral level of affect is invoked by a person’s activities: it is the level of doing and acting. In the case of a film, the viewer is passive, sitting in a theater, experiencing the action vicariously. Nonetheless, the vicarious experience can play upon the same affective system.
Here is the power of storytelling, of the script, the actors, transporting viewers into the world of make-believe. This is “the willful suspension of disbelief ” that the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge discussed as being essential for poetry. Here is where you get captured, caught up in the story, identifying with the situation and the characters. To be fully engrossed within a movie is to feel the world fade away, time seem to stop, and the body enter the transformed state that the social scientist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has labeled “flow.”
Csikszentmihalyi’s flow state is a special, detached state of consciousness, in which you are aware only of the moment, of the activity, and of the sheer enjoyment. It can occur in almost any activity: skilled tasks, sports, video games, board games, or any kind of mind-absorbing work. You can experience it in the theater, reading a book, or with intense problem solving.
The conditions required for flow to occur include lack of distractions and an activity paced precisely to match your skills, pushing you slightly above your capabilities. The level of difficulty has to be just at the edge of capability: too difficult and the task becomes frustrating; too easy and it becomes boring. The situation has to engage your entire conscious attention. This intense concentration causes outside distractions to fade away and the sense of time to disappear. It is intense, exhausting, productive, and exhilarating. It is no wonder that Csikszentmihalyi and his colleagues have spent considerable time exploring the phenomenon in its many manifestations.
The key to success of the vicarious level in film is the development and maintenance of the flow state. The pace has to be appropriate to avoid frustration or boredom. There can be no interruptions or distractions that might divert attention if one is to become truly captured by flow. Whenever we speak of films or other entertainment as “escapist,” we are referring to the ability of the vicarious state and the behavioral level of affect to disengage people from the cares of life and transport them into some other world.
THE VOYEURISTIC level is that of the intellect, standing back to reflect and observe, to comment and think about an experience. Here is where the depth and complexity of characters, events, and the metaphors and analogies that a movie is meant to convey produce a deeper, richer meaning than is visible on the surface with the characters and story. “The voyeur’s eye,” says Boorstin, “is the mind’s eye, not the heart’s.”
The word “voyeur” often is used to refer to observation of sensual or sexual subjects, which is not the meaning intended here. Boorstin explains that by the term “voyeur,” he means “not the sexual kink but Webster’s second definition of the word: the voyeur is the ‘prying observer.’ The voyeur’s pleasure is the simple joy of seeing the new and the wonderful.”
The voyeur’s eye demands explanation—this is the level of cognition, of understanding and interpreting. As Boorstin points out, the vicarious experience can be profoundly moving, but the voyeur’s eye, ever watching, ever thinking, is logical and reflective: “The voyeur in us is logical to a fault, impatient, picky, literal, but if properly respected it gives the special pleasures of the new and the clever, of a fresh place or crisply thought-out story.” Of course, the voyeur can generate emotional suspense as well. It is the voyeur who knows that the wicked villain is hiding in wait for the hero, that the trap seems inescapable, and therefore that the hero is about to face death or, at the least, pain and torture. This level of excitement requires the thinking mind, and, of course, a clever director who plays upon those conjectures.
But, as Boorstin also points out, the voyeur can ruin a perfectly good movie by critiquing it:It can ruin the most dramatic moment with the most mundane concern: “Where are they?” “How did she get in the car?” “Where did the gun come from?” “Why don’t they call the police?” “He’s already used six shots—how come he’s still firing?” “They’d never get there in time!” For a movie to work, the voyeur’s eye must be pacified. For a movie to work brilliantly, the voyeur’s eye must be entranced.
Voyeuristic movies are reflective movies, for example 2001: A Space Odyssey, which, except for one lengthy visceral section, is mindnumbing in its intellectualism and almost exclusively a reflective experience. Citizen Kane is a fine example of both an entrancing story and a voyeur’s delight.
JUST AS our experiences do not come neatly divided into unique categories of visceral, behavioral, or reflective, so films cannot be stuck neatly into one of three packages: visceral, or vicarious, or voyeuristic. Most experiences, and most films, cut across the boundaries.
The best products and the best films neatly balance all three forms of emotional impact. Although The Magnificent Seven is, as Boorstin puts it, “seven guys saving a town from bandits,” if that were all there was to it, it would not have become such a classic. The film started life in 1954 in Japan as The seven samurai (Shichinin no samurai) , a film directed by Akira Kurosawa. In Japan, it was the story of seven samurai warriors hired to save a village from murderous thieves. It was redone as an American western in 1960 as The Magnificent Seven by John Sturges. Both films follow the same story line (both are excellent, although many movie buffs prefer the original). And both films successfully capture the viewer at all three modes, with engaging visceral spectacles, an engrossing story for the vicarious, and enough depth and hidden metaphorical allusions to content the reflective voyeur.
Sound, color, and lighting also play critical roles. In the best of cases, they heighten the experience without conscious awareness. Background music, on the face of it, is strange, for it is present even in so-called realistic movies, even though no music plays in our everyday world of real life. Purists scoff at the use of music, but omit it and a movie suffers. Music seems to modulate our affective system to enhance the experience at all levels of involvement: visceral, vicarious, and voyeuristic.
Lighting can intensify experience. Although most films today are shot in color, the director and photographer can dramatically impact the film by the style of lighting and color. Bright primary colors are the one extreme, with subdued pastels or dimly lit scenes another. The extreme case of color is the decision not to use it: to film in black and white. Although rarely used anymore, black and white can convey powerful dramatic impact, quite different from that possible with color. Here, the cinematographer can make skillful use of contrasts—light and dark, subtle grays—to convey an image’s emotional tone.
The craft of filmmaking encompasses a wide variety of domains. All elements of a film make a difference: story line, pace and tempo, music, framing of the shots, editing, camera position and movement. All come together to form a cohesive, complex experience. A thorough analysis can, and has, filled many books.
All these effects work best, however, when they are unnoticed by the viewer. The Man Who Wasn’t There (directed and written by the Coen brothers) was filmed in black and white. Roger Deakins, the cinematographer, stated that he wanted black and white rather than color so as not to distract from the story; unfortunately, he fell in love with the power of monochrome images. The film has wonderfully glorious shots, with high dark/light contrast, and in some places spectacular backlighting, all of which I noticed. This is a no-no in film: if you notice it, it is bad. Noticing takes place at the reflective (voyeur’s) level, distracting you from that suspension of disbelief so essential to becoming fully captured by the flow at the behavioral (vicarious) level.
The story line and engrossing exposition of The Man Who Wasn’t There enhanced the vicarious pleasure of the film, but noticing the photography caused the voyeuristic pleas
ure to interrupt with internal commentary (“How did he do that?” “Look at the magnificent lighting,” and so on) and throw the vicarious pleasure off track. Yes, you should be able to go back afterward and marvel at how a film was done, but this should not intrude upon the experience itself.
Video Games
Overslept, woke at 8:00. Only time for a quick coffee before the carpool arrives. The kitchen is disgusting, didn’t clean up after last night’s little party. Need a bath, but no time (the bathroom’s flooded anyway from the broken sink I never got around to fixing). Got to work late and in horrible shape, was demoted as a result. Got home at 5:00, the repo man promptly showed up and repossessed my television because I forgot to pay my bills. My girlfriend won’t speak to me because she saw me flirting with the neighbor last night.
Did you realize that this quotation is the description of a game? Not only does it feel like real life, but a bad life at that. Why would anyone think it was a game? Aren’t games supposed to be fun? Well, not only is it a description of a game, it is a best-selling one called “The Sims.” Will Wright, the designer and inventor of the Sims, explained that this was a typical day in the life of a game character, as developed by a beginning player.
The Sims is an interactive simulated-world game, otherwise known as a “God” game or sometimes “simulated life.” The player acts like a god, creating characters, populating their world with houses, appliances, and activities. In this game, the player does not control what the game characters do. Instead, the player can only set up the environment and make high-level decisions. The characters control their own lives, although they have to live within the environment and high-level rules established by the player. The result is quite often not at all what their god intended them to do. The quotation is one example of a character unable to cope within the world its god created. But, says Wright, as the player’s skill at creating worlds improves, the character might be able to spend the end of each day “sipping mint-juleps by the pool.”
Wright explains the problem like this:The Sims is really just a game about life. Most people don’t consciously realize how much strategic thinking goes into everyday, minute-to-minute living. We’re so used to doing it that it submerges into our subconscious as a background task. But each decision you make (which door to go through? where to eat lunch? when to go to bed?) is calculated at some level to optimize something (time, happiness, comfort). This game takes that internal process and makes it external and visible. One of the first things players usually do in the game is to recreate their family, home, and friends. Then they’re playing a game about themselves, sort of a strange, surreal mirror of their own lives.
Play is a common activity, engaged in by many animals and, of course, by us humans. Play serves many purposes. It probably is good practice for many of the skills required later in life. It helps children develop the mix of cooperation and competition required to live effectively in social groups. In animals, play helps establish their social dominance hierarchy. Games are more organized than play, usually with formal or, at least, agreed-upon rules, with some goal and usually some scoring mechanism. As a result, games tend to be competitive, with winners and losers.
Sports are even more formally organized than games, and at the professional level, are as much for the spectator as the player. As a result, an analysis of spectator sports is somewhat akin to that of movies, where the experience is vicarious and as a voyeur.
Of all the varieties of play, games, and sports, perhaps the most exciting new development is that of the video game. This is a new genre for entertainment: literature, film, game playing, sports, interactive novel, storytelling—all of these, but more besides.
Video games were once thought of as a mindless sport for teenage boys. No more. They are now played all around the world, including slightly more than half the population of the United States. They are played by everyone: from children to mature adults, with the average age of a player around thirty, and the gender difference evenly split between men and women. Video games come in many genres. In The Medium of the Video Game, Mark Wolf identifies forty-two different categories:Abstract, Adaptation, Adventure, Artificial Life, Board Games, Capturing, Card Games, Catching, Chase, Collecting, Combat, Demo, Diagnostic, Dodging, Driving, Educational, Escape, Fighting, Flying, Gambling, Interactive Movie, Management Simulation, Maze, Obstacle Course, Pencil-and-Paper Games, Pinball, Platform, Programming Games, Puzzle, Quiz, Racing, Role-Playing, Rhythm and Dance, Shoot ’Em Up, Simulation, Sports, Strategy, Table-Top Games, Target, Text Adventure, Training Simulation, and Utility.
Video games are a mixture of interactive fiction with entertainment. During the twenty-first century, they promise to evolve into radically different forms of entertainment, sport, training, and education. Many games are fairly elementary, simply putting a player in some role where fast reflexes—and sometimes great patience—are required to traverse a relatively fixed set of obstacles in order to move up the levels either to obtain a total game score or to accomplish some simple goal (“rescue the beleaguered princess and save her kingdom”). But wait. The story lines are getting ever-more complex and realistic, the demands upon the player more reflective and cognitive, less visceral and fast motor responses. The graphics and sound are getting so good that simulator games can be used for real training, whether flying an airplane, operating a railroad, or driving a race car or automobile. (The most elaborate video games are the full-motion airplane simulators used by the airlines that are so accurate that they enable pilots to be certified to fly passenger planes without ever flying the actual aircraft. But don’t call these “games”; they are taken very seriously, and some of them can cost as much as the airplane itself.)
Today’s sales of video games approach—and, in some cases, surpass—box-office receipts of movies. And we are still in the early days of video games. Imagine what they will be like in ten or twenty years. In an interactive game what happens in a story depends as much upon your actions as on the plot set up by the author (designer). Contrast this with a movie, where you have no control over the events. As a result, when experienced game players watch a movie, they miss this control, feeling as if they are “stuck watching a one-way plot.” Moreover, the sense of involvement, the flow state, is much more intense in games than in most movies. In movies, you sit at a distance watching events unfold. In a video game, you are an active participant. You are part of the story, and it is happening to you, directly. As Verlyn Klinkenborg says, “what underlies it all is that visceral sense of having walked through a door into another universe.”
The interactive, controlling part of video games is not necessarily superior to the more rigid, fixed format of books, theater, and film. Instead, we have different types of experiences, both of which are desirable. The fixed formats let master storytellers control the events, guiding you through the events in a carefully controlled sequence, very deliberately manipulating your thoughts and emotions until the climax and resolution. You surrender yourself quite voluntarily to this experience, both for the enjoyment and for the lessons that might be learned about life, society, and humanity. In a video game, you are an active participant, and as a result, the experience may vary from time to time—dull, boring, frustrating during one session; exciting, invigorating, rewarding during another. The lessons to be learned will vary depending upon the exact sequence of events that occurred and whether or not you were successful. Books and films clearly have a permanent role in society, as do games, video or otherwise.
Books, theater, movies, and games all occupy a fixed period of time: there is a beginning, then an end. This is not so of life. Sure, birth marks the beginning and death the end, but from your everyday perspective, life is ongoing. It continues even when you sleep or travel. Life cannot be escaped. When you go away, you return to find out what has transpired in your absence (during those moments when you were not in touch via messaging, email, or telephone). Video games are becoming like life.
Video gam
es used to involve single individuals. This will always be a viable genre, but more and more, these games are involving groups, sometimes scattered across the world, communicating through computer networks. Some are on-line, real-time activities, such as sports, games, conversations, entertainment, music, and art. But some are environments, simulated worlds with people, families, households, and communities. In all of these, life goes on even when you, the player, are not present.
Some games have already tried to reach out toward their human players. If you, the player, create a family in a “god” game, nurturing your invented characters over an extended duration, perhaps months or even years, what happens when a family member needs help while you are asleep, or at work, school, or play? Well, if the crisis is severe enough, your game-family member will do just what a real family member would do: contact you by telephone, fax, email, or whatever form works. Someday one might even contact your friends, asking for help. So don’t be surprised if a co-worker interrupts you in an important business meeting to say that your game character is in trouble: it is in urgent need of your assistance.
Yes, video games are an exciting new development in entertainment. But they may turn out to be far more than entertainment. The artificial may cease to be distinguishable from the real.
FIGURE 5.1 Oops! Uh oh, the poor chair.
It lost its ball, and it doesn’t want anyone to know! Look how quietly it’s sneaking out its foot, hoping to get it back before anyone notices.
Emotional Design Page 13