How to Do Things with Videogames

13. Relaxation

13 Relaxation There is an aphorism commonly invoked when comparing videogames with other media. Videogames, people say, are a “lean forward” medium, while others are “lean back” media. Leaning forward is associated with control, activity, and engagement. Leaning forward requires continuous attention, thought, and movement, even if it’s just the movement of fingers on analog sticks and digital buttons. It’s one of the features that distinguish games from television, even if the former are often played on the latter. Leaning back is associated with relaxation, passivity, and even gluttony—just think of all those snacks we eat slouched on the sofa in front of the television. Physical interfaces like the Wii remote or the Dance Dance Revolution dance pad raise the stakes further, asking the player to get up off the couch entirely. Leaning forward is useful when the desired effect of a game is high attention and twitchiness. But what if we wanted another kind of experience fromagame, from time to timeat least: arelaxing lean-back experience—a Zen game. Of the few attempts to create relaxation in games, Journey to Wild Divine is the most deliberate. It’s marketed as a new age game, a game for wellness. Using a fingertip controller that measures heart rate and skin galvanic response, the player exerts control by attempting to manage this biofeedback. The player might have to regulate heart rate to balance a ball or aim a bow. Wild Divine assumes that relaxation is a medical matter, something in the body that can be measured by devices and reported as interaction feedback. rElAxAtIon It’s an interesting technique, and it really works—at times, anyway. The game’s physiological inputs are responsive, and reducing one’s heart rate through slow breathing can indeed help accomplish tasks in the game. Yet, once completed, that sensation of calm often disappears. When the player succeeds at a task in Wild Divine, the game rewards that success with sudden bursts of visionand sound. As the film scholar Irene Chien hasobserved, these transitions can be so visually and aurally sensuous compared with thestates that bring themabout that theyoften upend the player’s physical victory.1 Anotherexample is theaward-winning Universityof Southern California game Cloud. Its student creators claim Cloud offers “a relaxing, non-stressful, meditative experience.”2 To play, you manipulate a blue-haired character who flies to create clouds. Cloud isa beautiful and unusual game, and both its fictionand aesthetics imply relaxation. But in practice, the game instills exactly the opposite sensation for me. The indirect control of Wild Divine attempts to alleviate the usual physical stressors of games. Cloud uses the mouse, but increases rather than reduces the precision required to use it. The player must grip the mouse tightly to accomplish the small variations in motion the game demands, struggling toget thecharacterto move. Itscontrols frustrate more than they pacify. The students who made Cloud incorporated under the shingle That Game Company, and they followed it up with the commercial title flOw, agameaboutgrowing asmall underwaterorganism by eating floating detritus and parts of other creatures. flOw is simple but visually sensuous, taking advantage of the advanced graphics capabilities of the PlayStation 3, for which it was specifically developed. But as much as flOw’s spirit embraces relaxation, its sensations and themes also defy it. Unlike games like Rez and Geometry Wars, which couple simple graphics to the pulsing beats of club electronica, flOw sets its glowing, procedural line art in the viscous silt of an unexplained underwater realm. Although it rejects the vivid chaos rElAxAtIon of electronica, flOw hardly takes on the hypnotic trance of house music let alone the waiting-room numb of soft jazz. Aurally, flOw lulls the player, but it blends that mollification with a barrage of seductivevisuals. The result isacontradictorysynesthesia, soothing gurgles of watercombined with anxious bursts of light. flOw’s controls further emphasize this discomfort. Movement is accomplished solely via the PlayStation 3 controller’s tilt sensors. Again theplayer mustgraspand twistuncomfortably, using small movements that strain rather than calm. The white palms and throbbing head that punctuate a session of flOw are more reminiscent of drug abuse than meditation. Moreover, flOw is a somewhat disturbing game. Borrowing from the psychological concept the game uses for its title, it offers theplayercontrol overriseand descent in the murk.3 Thecreators suggest that this control allows the player toadjust thegame’s difficulty at will, designing a personalized path between...