Jenova Chen, creative director of thatgamecompany graciously accepted my invite to give a talk at the University of California, Riverside for a research group I am a part of this week. Our research this year has focused on play with a particular interest in historicizing and expanding play beyond the boundaries of the common conceptualization of the digital game. Jenova was a perfect capstone to the year as his work in expanding the emotional spectrum of games is part of this project.
Included here below are my introductory remarks and links to his presentation and Q&A.
Last year the Mellon workshop on Affect, Technics, and Ethics, your hosts today, presented a talk by Tracy Fullerton, game design professor at USC. Her presentation situated videogames within a historical lineage of play from board games to sport and beyond in order to expose the rather limited and reductive set of thematics, motivations, gameplay mechanics, and narrative concerns of contemporary digital games. These restrictions are often a product of a fundamental mischaracterization of who exactly a “gamer” is or should be and thus games often appeal to this stereotypically masculine, competitive, and immature “hardcore” gamer. The phenomenal success of the Nintendo Wii and DS, however, demonstrate that interest in the excessively hardcore, that is, complex, realistic, and violent gamic structures with difficult to navigate interfaces and control schemes, is not only alienating a large portion of players but also does not make good business sense. It seems now that videogames are on the verge of a creative evolution facilitated by a full-scale revision of their expressive possibilities enabled by intuitive technological design married to the exploration of their affective possibilities.
In order to demonstrate the potential for disrupting what she termed the “hegemony of play,” Fullerton proudly demoed a product of her students’ efforts at USC that was based on a simple and relatable playful mechanic – creating shapes in the sky. That game, Cloud, was the first of three extraordinary releases from the developer, thatgamecompany, including flOw and Flower. Our speaker today, Jenova Chen, is the creative director and one of the principle visionaries behind these games which have garnered numerous awards and resounding critical acclaim from both enthusiasts and academics. But beyond their success in the market, Chen’s work is quite literally opening up new expressive space within videogames and forging ahead into new counter-hegemonic frontier. His daring and refreshing violations of the hegemony of play in a work like Flower refashion the gamic act as a predominantly affective and emotional experience. Flower rediscovers that play doesn’t have to be destructive or competitive but instead can be patient, reflective, poetic and meditative. And what his efforts yield are deeply ethical games that are environmentally concerned, bearing striking similarity to the legendary animator Hiyao Miyazaki’s films. And it is the way in which Chen’s games tap into the gamer within everyone through the discourse of progressive politics that will have a welcome influence on the future of game design and culture. Cloud, flOw, and Flower each have productively revised the field of possibilities for what games can do and what they feel like. And if what critic McKenzie Wark says is true—that it is not games which represent the world but the world which is becoming more gamelike—then we are all lucky to have Jenova Chen making games.
It is with that that I am pleased to introduce to you our guest speaker for this afternoon Jenova Chen, creative director of thatgamecompany.