If you missed weeks two and three of our multi-part conference series, “Massively MultiPlay,” this blog post offers a small recap. The final four sessions of the conference felt topical and meaningful as we explored mental health and games, the cultural potential for games to be avenues of comfort, and possibilities through games to examine ourselves and the impact we have on the world.
We launched the second week with a workshop that offered a change in pace: it was a two-hour session titled “Unpacking What We Take with Us,” and in it, Adam Jerrett guided us through a hands-on experience that not only had us playing parts of his game, but also gave us an excuse to wind down for a couple of hours and focus on our well-being and mental health. In the first segment of the workshop, Adam gave a rundown of the game and explained the frameworks that informed it. He described What We Take with Us as an “empathy-based escape room” which utilizes ARG (alternate reality game) mechanics. The game enlisted a fictional character named “Ana” to act as the interlocutor of the game instructions, but Ana was, in fact, also a point of entanglement between real-life paratextual activities and the game itself. That is, for the duration that the game officially ran for in early 2023, Ana was staged as a real person conducting actual research on the game and, through this guise, she “interacted” with the players of the game on the game’s Discord server.
All of these mechanics and interesting intersections are, according to Adam, meant to put several things into focus, including how we derive empathy and connection with others and how games facilitate such opportunities. The game itself is a series of ten tasks that ask the player to move around the zone of one’s immediate surroundings—such as one’s workspace—and do particular activities that are sometimes meditative, sometimes expressive, and at other times asking for emotional labor (e.g. “Write down how you feel today”; “Record what you’d like to say to your past self”). As participants of the Massively MultiPlay workshop played the game, interacting all the while on the What We Take with Us Discord forum, two things were made very evident: gameplay is pervasive, and games are affective.
On the next day, Andy Porter gave a talk titled “‘Living and Dying Well’: Disco Elysium, Spiritfarer, and ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.’” In this hour-long seminar, which included Andy’s presentation followed by a Q&A and discussion session, Andy gave a fascinating overview of two contemporary games, Disco Elysium (ZA/UM, 2019) and Spiritfarer (Thunder Lotus Games, 2020), read through the conceptual and critical lenses of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “carrier bag theory of fiction” (1989). As Andy explains it, Le Guin’s concept of “cultural carrier bags” references her call for alternative models of storytelling and narrative that prioritize “containing,” conducting, and potentially even transmitting the traces and mythos of a community at a given time. Such modes of storytelling are opposed to traditional techno-heroic models which valorize violence, linearity, and a narrow vision of masculine ideals.
On the one hand, while video games are often thought of as espousing the latter ideals and literalizing them into actionable play, Andy brings our attention to certain games—such as Disco Elysium and Spiritfarer—that serve as “carrier bags” of a different set of values. Through Disco Elysium’s unresolved plot (which prompts efforts to build up a sense of a world using “smaller” stories) and Spiritfarer’s cozy game mechanic (which encourages kindness towards the NPCs and ultimately reformulates the notion of death itself), video games illustrate Le Guin’s imperative for stories to take on roles that foster nurturing, caretaking, and connection to or better embeddedness in the world around us.
On the last day of Massively MultiPlay, we had two presentations under the theme, “Plants and Power-ups.” Hosted by Steph Farnsworth, this final session started off with Sam Haddow giving an intriguing talk titled “Think Like a Weed and Die: The Vegetal Horror of The Last of Us.” This presentation centered around the games in The Last of Us franchise (Naughty Dog, 2013), focusing on how these games and other media in the “plant horror” genre upend the anthropocentrism that claims that human beings are naturally the “main characters” of a story, an interaction, or a world. Sam used the 1975 film Shivers as his first example, showing that the work’s unique depiction of its alien parasite is meaningful in that the parasite (or “disease” in humancentric terms) propagates through sexual contact. The film ultimately subverts Sigmund Freud’s determination of normative heterosexuality versus “perverse” sexuality (the latter of which, in Freudian literature, is made up of desires that focus on “other parts of the body,” such as the mouth, which is the conduit for the “kiss” that is needed for Shivers’ parasite to pass from human to human). The film prompts the interrogation of where exactly human anxiety comes from and urges us to think about the nature of human fear—of the “disease,” of non-normative behavior, and of alterity itself.
In his discussion of The Last of Us, Sam told us that the games emphasize human love—in the form of the character’s Joel’s protectiveness over the surrogate daughter-figure of Ellie—which tends, in a “natural” human-centered trajectory, to lead to violence. In this equation, the fungus itself (or the cordyceps “parasite”), is not given much attention other than in the usual antagonistic sense or in terms of standing in for a nature that is clearly separated from human beings and their interests. Sam augmented this reading with an analysis of HBO’s TV adaptation of the games, which can be seen to contain small alterations or additions that further drive home the point: in Sam’s words, “humans have become the weeds,” and “infection is a cleanup that brings a new order.” The talk concluded with a look at The Girl with All the Gifts—in both book (Mike Carey 2014) and film (2016) forms—which tells a story about a similar kind of mycelial life-form presence which causes the extinction of “humanity 1.0.” At the end of the story, as Sam put it, there is a “playful mutation of perspective” that acknowledges the “rightness” of it.
The final talk of Massively MultiPlay was titled “Eco-conscious Gaming? The Use and Abuse of Environmentalist Sentiments,” and in this presentation, Connor Jackson used the games Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerrilla Games, 2017), Alba: A Wildlife Adventure (Ustwo Games, 2020), and Gibbon: Beyond the Trees (Broken Rules, 2022) to talk about a category he calls “eco video games,” or games that contain at their crux a “viewpoint detached from consumption.” These games were delineated using frameworks borrowed from the traditions of ecocinema; they are “ethically charged,” “political,” and contain and encourage a “bioegalitarian view of the world” (Di Bianco, 2020: 2). Part of Connor’s argument seemed to be that games uniquely further such eco-conscious potentials through, for instance, their medium allowance of causing a more robust feedback loop between the ideals of the game and the player’s experiences of it.
Horizon Zero Dawn was used to illustrate a game that, despite its setting in natural environments, “blunts” its ecocritical potential because of its primary focus on action (Condis 2020). Alba: A Wildlife Adventure and Gibbon: Beyond the Trees, on the other hand, are eco video games in Connor’s assessment. Connor highlighted the example of the mechanics involved when taking photographs of animals in Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, which momentarily switches the perspective from third-person view to a first-person view and slots the player into a “conservational view.” The game values animals for simply existing, rather than as resources to be killed, caught, sold, or eaten, as is often the case in other games. Gibbon: Beyond the Trees similarly challenges the anthropocentric perspective, though this time, through the method of having the player play as a nonhuman animal. The embodiment of this avatar allows the player to process the ecocritical message of the game intimately, as they are forced to “move like a gibbon” and see the environment with reflections of human impact in mind.
The past month gave us a rich series of talks, workshops, and seminars that had meaningful resonances across them even as they shone in their individual ways. Thank you to all the speakers who put together these incredible presentations, as well as to all those who attended the conference and added to our discussions.
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