SIGDOC sent PDF proofs of my conference paper today.  They looked very good.  And USI approved travel funding to cover expenses.  Here is the initial abstract/proposal I submitted.  The paper has morphed a bit, but you get the gist of it.

As computer technology has significantly progressed in recent years — resulting in high resolution graphics, improved sound design, and more sophisticated control interfaces — these experiences become less and less dependent on traditional techniques of representation and communication. Video games can be seen as procedural systems [Bogost 2007, Malaby 2007] designed to create such experiences, ones with which players want to engage. Player experiences are contingent upon the relationships of six configurative elements: rules and fiction that govern the gamespace [Juul 2005]; perception, emotion, cognition, and action experienced cognitively by the player [Grodal 2003]. Developing analytical tools informed by an interdisciplinary framework allows us to not only critically analyze games more clearly for cultural and technological importance, but to also design games to more effectively take advantage of their communicative potential. These tools should account for affective elements of such experiences, or what Eugenie Shinkle [2008] has labeled “proprioception”. The relationships of these elements to one another are contingent upon the player’s embodied affective responses that emanate from the player in non-linear ways. The purpose of this paper is to synthesize several theories of games analysis, rhetoric,
and representation into a reconfigurable and interdisciplinary model that can usefully analyze the player’s proprioceptive experience. I’ll demonstrate the model’s efficacy through the experiences of two very different games: Grand Theft Auto IV [2008] and The Arcade Wire: Airport Security [2006]. Both depend upon affective player responses to create satirical commentary upon cultural and social problems. They engage unit operations [Bogost 2006] that can be termed “player frustration” as an important element of the player experience. Yet, that frustration is generated and deployed in very different ways: how can such a unit operation be utilized more effectively, and when is it subverted by other unit operations? Assessing the relationships of different elements allows us to see how unit operations work in conjunction and work against one another.

Grafting together Juul’s examination of fiction and rules and Torben Grodal’s cognitive model of narrative, I sketch a method with which understand elements of the experience players encounter, as well as what can be represented to and through the player in that event. Discovering similar unit operations at work within GTA IV and Airport Security allows us to contrast these experiences and the messages communicated through them to better understand how to design for affective elements of player experiences.

The final piece focuses solely on Airport Security.  And, I’ve found that Grodal has elaborated further on his model in his new book Embodied Visions (2009).  Unfortunately, I just managed to snag a copy a couple of days ago.  He develops his ideas I based this paper on into a more robust model he’s dubbed the “PECMA flow model”: Perception, Emotion, Cognition, Motor Action.  Grodal primarily focuses on film, but I think his theory has wonderful potential for constructing useful analytics for interrogating gaming experiences.  PECMA, so far as I can tell, adapts nicely to different media because it assesses narrative and representation as an audience’s experience, and not solely a structural consideration embedded within specific media.

Grodal wants to recover the audience’s experiences from both pure biological determinism and extreme post-structural social constructivism.  An audience’s experience is an amalgamation of “innate dispositions [as] flexible frameworks within which…[t]he development of culture has provided new options for satisfying” inherent psycho-social needs (p. 8).

Rather than assuming that the mind is totally socially constructed and hence completely malleable, a more cautious assumption would be a relative malleability: innate dispositions can be activated by exposure, deactivated by lack of exposure, and modified with certain limits. (p. 11)

As someone trained in a postmodern literary environment, turning to biology to partially explain some things long relegated to semiotics and aesthetics can be a disconcerting step.  Everything within the core of my scholarly being reflexively turns to social construction as to account for meaningful experiences.  But PECMA resonates too well with my own experiences in game spaces and participatory cultures, and it seems to resonate very well with emerging ethnographic research on gaming experiences and online gaming communities.