Editor's Note: this article contains ending spoilers for Papo y Yo and Demon's Souls.
Video games are addictive, but they also offer an opportunity to reconsider what addiction actually is; to ask ourselves why we fear it, and why it produces guilt in those who suffer from it. And video games can actually do something unprecedented: they make addiction a directed part of the player's experience. In games, addiction can become a familiar and survivable part of the human experience, not a devastating weakness lying dormant in our genealogies. And in that way, games can both translate addiction into art and make addiction itself an art.
The Fallout games used the basic tension between moderate consumption and full-blown dependence as a way of balancing its buffs and boosts. Drinking wine or whiskey before a fight, for instance, provides a temporary boost to strength and defense but comes at the cost of intelligence and precision. If this trade-off suits your play style, the game will eventually punish you for the preference, simulating an addiction withdrawal state with impaired vision and inhibited movement. The same mechanic applies to a number of substances in the game, from Stimpaks to Med-X.
Max Payne 3 ties its health regeneration system to the plot point of haggard Max's addiction to pain pills. When he's wounded he can take a bottle of pain pills to numb the effects of damage and bring him back to a state where he can be maximally aggressive. In a way, drugs are the engine of postponement in Max Payne, keeping the monstrous hero from confronting the consequences of his lifestyle for a few moments longer.
Rockstar's other cynical opus, Grand Theft Auto IV, depicts its impression of drunkenness when Nico take dates to a local bar. After a few drinks even basic actions like walking or aiming a reticule in a game of darts can become overwhelmingly imprecise, mired in controls that respond late to inputs and then wildly overcompensate for them. The sequence is at its best when drunk Nico gets back into a car and tries to drive drunkenly, turning the game's already loose driving mechanics into an impossible-to-control mess of dead pedestrians, side-swiped cars, and broken traffic laws.
The recently released Papo y Yo makes addiction a central metaphor for its mechanics. A young boy must use coconuts and poisonous frogs to bait a giant monster through environmental puzzles. The innocuous coconuts cause the monster to feel full and fall asleep, which allows the boy to use his belly as a trampoline to reach new areas, but the poisonous frogs turn the monster into a flaming beast who becomes obsessed with hunting the boy down and throwing him into the ground again and again.
Developed by Vander Caballero, a former Army of Two designer, the game can be taken as a petite fantasy diorama the child of an alcoholic and abusive father might make. The boy in the game occasionally slips into black and white flashbacks where his drunk father appears to have killed someone on a drive home. The ending directly connects the boy's cowering in fear of the frog-dosed monster to his hiding from his drunken father, who is trying to whip him with a belt. This is as naked as metaphors come, and its conclusion -- in which the boy sacrifices a mirror image of himself to the monster, lures it into a trap, and kills it -- is an effigial cutting of ties with the worst of his past.
In the broadest terms, addiction can be bisected into those that involve chemicals that actively change a person's body chemistry, and psychological/behavioral addictions more closely associated with the dependence video games can engender. With Papo y Yo we have a game that might lightly trigger some behaviorally addictive people, used as an evocation of the suffering that can come from chemical addiction. This distinction actually offers some insight into just how superstitiously we approach chemical addiction in the first place, an affliction which is rooted in biology and yet has its most successful treatment in the form of 12 step programs and group therapy.
Alcohol is an ideal substance to capture this duality -- the biological malaise that can only be healed through psychoanalysis. For all the daydreams of hedonistic house parties and amber-lit happy hours, there is a dark but constant acknowledgement that all of that joy is also a loose gamble with one's propensity toward addiction.
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The easiest and surest self-medication for that guilt and worthlessness is another distracting high.
In many cases this negative interpretation of the act contributes to an addictive cycle, where the person feels guilty and worthless because they have slipped into a category of social derision and shame, and yet the easiest and surest self-medication for that guilt and worthlessness is another distracting high. The stigma exaggerates the distance between someone with an addiction and everyone who identifies as a non-addict.
The word itself derives from Latin, addicere, to assign. Addicts are assigned a new identity, one that separates them from the normal flow of society. They are no longer us, but are defined by their sicknesses, an outwardly normal person who contains an untrustworthy beast within. When we ask whether or not something is addictive -- games for example -- what we're really asking is whether or not we have done something that will label us as an addict. In this view, addiction is not a capacity we all have in varying intensities, but a thing that happens to some of us, something that comes from outside, brands us, and leaves us forever assigned to another category.
Addictive properties are almost imperceptible in Papo y Yo, with its short length and relatively simple puzzle design, yet it offers a decent template for what many posit as the basic addictive formula. Writing in the BBC, Tom Stafford suggests video games' addictive properties can be explained through the Zeigarnik Effect. The phenomenon was first outlined in the 1930s by a Russian psychologist who noticed that waiters had outstanding memories for customer orders, but then completely forgot them after the food had been served. The Effect claims that the human mind is disproportionately more drawn to unfinished tasks and disorder.
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Video games are a powerful problem delivery device.
By this logic, video games are a powerful problem delivery device, regularly administering new forms of incomplete tasks and unordered items. Our ability to see what remains undone in a game world, and the powerful compulsion to reach in and do it, ordering the disorder, creates the addictive compulsion loop wherein players are drawn to completing one more task in perpetuity. This particular quality of video games can be exceptionally powerful, causing mild hallucinations and obsessive thought patterns, sometimes known as Tetris Syndrome.
Many games edge toward a self-aware commentary on the emptiness in these structures, but Demon's Souls is among the most intense, a near-perfect combination of artistic pathos and inescapable compulsion. The game is a nightmare of subtle complication that besets even simple goals with an exhausting number of secondary requirements and branching alternatives.
To turn your +4 Falchion into a magically charged Crescent Falchion, you'll first need 12 shards of Sharpstone, hoping they'll drop from the Miners in Stonefang Tunnel. Once you've farmed enough by repeating runs in one area, you'll be able to upgrade the Falchion to +6, and then you'll have to go harvest Darkmoonstones from Reapers in the Shrine of Storms, then return to the Stonefang blacksmith and have him convert the weapon. It's not complicated, and at no point is it especially difficult to imagine doing the necessary work to reach your goal. Yet the complications are just significant enough to trigger the part of the brain susceptible to the Zeigarnik Effect.
You can see the desirable endpoint, and the steps between it and your current state are systemically palpable. To this acquisition lust Demon's Souls adds several other systems that ask players to prioritize several simple goals -- each with their own slightly more complicated achievement paths. In the hour or two it will take to farm upgrade stones you could instead grind to increase your strength and dexterity, or else learn to use another weapon already in your inventory. Or else you could simply go on with the quest, choosing to sharpen your technique against the next tough boss and find a way to beat him with your current gear and stats. Demon's Souls is a vast network of simple tasks, and they are insidiously balanced against one another so that even when the player is diligently on her way to completing one, it comes at the cost of knowing there are several others left undone by that choice.
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Demon's Souls is a vast network of simple tasks, and they are insidiously balanced.
From Software seems to have been well aware of the torturously irresolvable desires Demon's Souls would evoke in players, appointing its lore and art with avaricious bastards, imprisoned liars, and a smothering sense of rot and waste. The game seems to taunt bleary-eyed grinders with its absence of musical accompaniment in most areas, filled with distant echoes that can't immediately be placed (the ghostly ringing of tiny bells in the Tower of Latria, the smoldering of torches in the distant haze of the Valley of Defilement). As one runs through these spaces where everything wants only to kill you, to prevent you from retrieving the ornament of order nested at the far end of the level, one's thoughts drift off into craven, irritable obsessiveness like a drunk returning to the liquor cabinet after everyone's gone to bed.
The game's apparent ending is a masterful play on the anguished but incessant need to solve, order, and advance. The penultimate boss has an attack that can in a few seconds drain an entire level of experience from your character. By the end of the game, each of these levels will have become symbolic of hours of toil, dutiful grinding in overfamiliar locations, falling into the same attack patterns against the same old enemies. It has the emotional effect of seeing a freshly bought bottle of whiskey shatter and spill its precious contents on the floor. And after this overwhelming fight, where players can see the dozens upon dozens of hours preparing to finish the game cruelly erased, they're drawn into the final encounter with the Old One, the source of all the rot and evil. The boss is a writhing, wilted worm of formerly human flesh, who can barely move let alone attack.
After killing him he delivers the game's summary motto, "No one wishes to go on." With this he dies, and the game throws you back to the very start. What seemed like a self-contained heroic epic is, in fact, an endless cycle of obsession, upgrading, grinding, and laboring in ignominy, encountering the same constrained characters that begin to seem more and more like road blocks on an infinite loop. Demon's Souls is an addictive hell. Its modular presentation spoking outward from a central hub, and its thorough absence of beauty in favor of rubble, filth, and toxicity, perfectly evoke the emotional meaning of its nihilistic system. Players become the addict who says he doesn't want to use anymore, knows it's killing him, and then takes another dose.
Addiction is a difficult and irreducible subject, but coded into the language of game systems we find a deployment of addiction's most basic properties in a way that intends to be emotional and artistic rather than destructive and stigma-laden. Games can make addiction art, and in doing so they point us toward an irrational fear we have about addictions in the first place. They begin in us; they are not exogenous spirits that invade us, but ways in which our best and most human characteristics can sometimes turn against us.
We are surrounded by addictive things, most people live with their lives in a matrix of complicated consumption choices with major positive and negative repercussions. We joke about being caffeine junkies, accept the modest thrills of a sugar high, and advertise pretty people having libidinally-charged conversations at cocktail hour.
And so a simple pleasure or a quirk of rationality can become unmoored from its purposeful context and turn into a histrionic tautology, both a means and an end. How this can happen to some of us, and to such extremes, is still unclear enough to leave room for our worst and most parochial superstitions, filling the void with dull stereotypes about zombie-eyed addicts who have abdicated their human dignity.
Games can free us from these separatist desires, if only by nudging us a tiny bit closer toward those we'd subconsciously forced into new identities: addicts, failures, broken people. In games we might yet discover our own weakened seams, which, when led on in the right environment, could rupture and leave us obsessively thinking about our next fix, our next level, our next button press. And with this comes the implicit challenge that everyone must answer for themselves: when will you stop, when will you have gained enough levels, chased after enough rarities, pressed enough buttons? We end with ourselves, after all, and it was only ourselves that we secretly feared when we set out to escape.
Michael Thomsen is a freelance writer based in New York. He subsides entirely on offal and intoxicants. Follow him on Twitter at @mike_thomsen.
Source : ign[dot]com
