The basic story experience consists of a continuous interaction between perceptions (I see a monster approaching), emotions (I feel fear, because I know or sense that monsters are dangerous), cognitions (I think that I’d better shoot the monster), and action (the actual motor act of shooting that changes the motivational emotion — fear — into relaxation). …

[T]he ability to hold the story (including possible future elements of that story) in our consciousness — an ability that is important for prolonged action patterns — is independent of language: we can perform this holding operation at the nonverbal level of perception-emotion-action. (pp. 161-63)

PECMA frames narrativity as a neurological process provoked out of biological necessity. It then gives way to mediated representations in order to communicate individual experiences to others. In Grodal’s account, narrative is not just a social construction whose particulars are contingent upon historical context. Narrative “is not some arbitrary or ideological invention” (p. 161). Instead, stories become complex, interwoven fabrics of neurological adaptations (“a reflection of the brain’s innate architecture”), stitched together with cultural and social practices as they arise from human experiences.

Still further, narrative perspective can then be understood in emotional terms because third-person perspective is an “extrapolation” from the first-person: “We infer how other people experience things by extrapolating from our own experiences” (p. 165). In as much as we sympathize with the experiences of others, we do so best when we can draw from something we deem to be similar in our own experiences. Consider as example the oft-used argument that one cannot understand unless that person has been there. Mediated stories essentially try to place into third-person perspective our first-person experiences, sometimes to communicate them to others and sometimes to better understand them ourselves. What Grodal calls “first-person emotions” are reflexive, oft-uncontrolled emotional reactions to stimuli. “Third-person emotions” are those that allow us to feel connected to others.

The most fundamental emotions — love, hate, jealousy, curiosity, sorrow, and fear — can only be fully experienced in the first person. But the assumption of a third-person perspective enables us to simulate these emotions and modulate them through sympathy, as, for example, when we pity the tragic hero or admire the superhuman. First-person emotions are dynamic in the sense that they stimulate us to action, whereas third-person emotions such as pity or admiration, though they too may motivate action, tend to be more static dispositions. (p. 167)

What stimulates first-person emotions can be socially constructed, but the emotional response itself is not. If I am afraid of something, my body will respond somehow and move me to some kind of action — sometimes without my awareness of the action. Yet, what I am afraid of could be something that in no way whatsoever bothers my wife. As an example, she is not fazed at all by removing her contact lenses. Watching her do so makes my skin crawl! When we swam with sharks on our honeymoon, I was in total heaven. After we got on the boat, she semi-threatened to divorce me!

Furthermore, consider the description I just gave. In order to modulate my first-person emotions into a third-person perspective, I had to narrate them in a way to make them “concrete” for the audience. Narration will always do this, but with the aim of making these emotions “present,” to borrow a phenomenological term. Grodal uses “present tense.” Even though narrative often assumes a past-tense, it hopes engender in the audience a sense that things are happening”now.” According to Grodal, film achieves this better than written narrative. He adds that games possibly outstrip all other narrative experiences because their interactions operate from a first-person emotional base and allow for the motor action to manifest in a much more embodied way.

A lot of recent scholarship in games research has turned its attention away from the narrativity debate that characterized such research in the late 90s and early 2000s. Instead of focusing on the game-artifact as a structurally defined phenomenon, the play experience is emerging in scholarship as a phenomenological and embodied phenomenon. Studying the players is becoming just as important as studying the game’s structure — or its rules and fiction. Synthesizing both approaches together can open up games scholarship to a whole new vista both in terms of rhetorical or ludological study, as well as practical applications for designing and building sleeker, more efficient, or more expressive systems.

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.