Love in games : experience and representation

Abstract

This thesis concerns the place of love in games. Specifically, it addresses the question of whether human players can fall in love with computer-generated characters in the context of single-player games. Games can offer strong and intense emotional experiences. Love, however, seems to challenge the affordances of the medium. Digital games are preoccupied with codification due to their algorithmic nature. This suggests that love in games, if it is to feature, has to become quantifiable and preconfigured. Can love ever be so rigid? If we can fall in love in the context of a game with a digital character, what does this mean for our capacity to choose love? Does it mean that our emotions can be manipulated and engineered? What are then the implications for our freedom and will? The thesis distinguishes the above questions into two separate subject matters. In particular, it argues that our emotions can be shaped by meticulous design and intricate plot, something that is evident outside of games as well. At the same time, love is an emotional state that cannot be forced. This is true not only for us but for the persons we share love with. In other words, we may have emotional reactions and feel attachment and care towards digital characters, but as long as they cannot choose us and choose to love us in the same manner that we can, then this experience is not love. Love, unlike or more so than other emotions, demands reciprocation. For this reason, it is argued that games cannot afford love, at least not before they can include agents of intentional embodiment, a contingency that would result in potential reconceptualisation of love. Nonetheless, games can include love as representation, which in the context of the thesis is understood as romance. Love as representation and discourse is highly formulated and codified, providing a certain fantasy of satisfaction and stability. Love as an experience, on the other hand, is an ambivalent fluidity of desire and attachment. While games cannot offer the latter, they can very well offer the former: romance, that is. Because games can offer romance, they can also show how fictional and engineered it is as an experience; that what we actually feel when we experience it, and not only imagine experiencing it, has nothing to do with the thrilling exhilaration that is love. Moreover, games as spatial practices include play, which allows us to experience love as a free-form desire devoid of quantifiable outcomes and goals. In this, games do not destroy love but instead destroy our false preconceptions regarding it, unencumbering our desires in the process. Love in games helps us revalue our freedom with all the potentials and responsibilities that it entails. The thesis starts with showing instances of love in games to contextualise the player experience it concerns itself with. Drawing from medium conventions and especially the damsel in distress trope, it is argued that games can indeed afford love because they constitute codified and designed simulations of challenge. This connection is made by using medieval games and courtly love practices as a point of reference building on work by Johan Huizinga. The above is further analysed to show how love has been structured as a fantasy of stability of desire, examining the political ramifications of this practice. For this, the thesis employs a multidisciplinary approach ranging from biology and neuroscience to psychology, literary and media theory, and critical deconstructionism. It especially draws from the works of Helen Fischer, Paul Ekman, René Girard, Lauren Berlant, and Michel Foucault. Having established the difference between love and romance and shown that games can afford the latter, the thesis turns to the investigation of a proper methodological tool to analyse the experience of love as representation in games. For this, it implements the player involvement model by Gordon Calleja and uses it to analyse game instances that exemplify how games can afford romantic love through their different aspects. The model is further used to examine the love experience in games in terms of macroinvolvement and microinvolvement. The first regards medium preconceptions and conventions that have been criticised by game theorists as problematic and unconducive to the experience of love in games. Finally, regarding microinvolvement, the thesis contends that the challenge games actually face in relation to love is that they contain agents that lack volition. Using phenomenology, embodied perception, and existentialism, it is shown that the player may feel something akin to love for these agents but their feelings cannot be considered love as long as the artificial others they come into contact with cannot love them back. The ethical and technological dimensions of such a development are touched upon in the conclusion opening pathways for further research.