Well, Lindsey and I have reached the end of our first month at the helm of BoRT and I think I speak for both of us when I say there’s a great big emotional relief – a catharsis, of sorts – in seeing such enthusiastic participation. Wait a minute, ‘Catharsis!’ Why, that was the theme of August-September’s Blogs of the Round Table! (Nailed it.)
It’s not abnormal to hear players reference the time they devote to games as a type of stress release. We play to escape reality, to cope with emotions, to vent frustration, and to experience surmountable problems in the wake of real-world problems that may seem unsolvable.
Tell us about your experiences with games as catharsis. Did a particular game experience help you find peace of mind? Did a particular narrative strike a chord that helped you overcome a challenge? Did your frustrated rage of a particularly hard level help you vent deeper frustrations that weren’t game related? Did you ever rage-quit a game and have an epiphany about yourself? Did you ever find yourself in a better place or positive position as a result of play?
We begin our decompression with Rachel Helps at one of the best blog-title puns around, The Ludi Bin. Helps found playing the third Ace Attorney game useful in mitigating her anxieties surrounding the first time she had to breastfeed her newborn daughter. As she concludes in the article, “Playing games also helped me to feel like I was more than a milk machine–I was a milk machine AND someone who could connect small logical leaps in a videogame!” And, really, is there anything more to want? In seriousness, I was happy that the roundup kicked off on such a positive note.
Over at Experience Points dot net, Scott Juster and Jorge Albor turn one of their infamous “serious, but not humourless conversation about videogames” to our current discussion. They run the gamut, from the games that expunge negative emotions, games that seem to encourage negative emotions but actually don’t, games that inspire positive emotions, games that vacate bowels…wait. They cover a lot in thirty minutes and their trademark levity makes even the headier ideas digestible.
Matt Leslie takes to his blog, Lesmocon, to describe how his experiences with videogames and borderline personality disorder interacted in cathartic ways. Leslie describes not only how success in a multiplayer match of The Last of Us can help him negotiate difficult social situations or how failure in a game can be profoundly frustrating.
I find it helpful that there is always an opportunity for me to interact with other people without the need to engage with them intellectually or emotionally. I go through semi-regular periods of withdrawal, where it’s just best for me to lock myself in a dark room and get on with whatever needs getting on with, but it’s important to not completely detach yourself from the world.
It’s a really balanced approach from a perspective often overlooked in games, which is why I was glad to see Leslie and a few other folks take it.
One of the other writers to personalize and balance the idea of catharsis is Jake Tucker on Indie Haven. Tucker discusses how videogames provided a cathartic outlet that helped him deal with Asperger’s syndrome while also evincing how that same catharsis, without moderation, resembles addiction. “I wanted to write an entirely uplifting blog post, but there’s two sides to the story. Catharsis is defined as the purification and purgation of emotions. Sometimes this catharsis can do more harm than good.”
Over at As Houses, Leigh Harrison has a brief conversation with his younger self via Internet Time Gate about Postal 2. Harrison, who has made me suddenly very conscious about my high clause-per-sentence ratio, praises Postal 2 for letting the player dictate the terms of its violence. In a nutshell: “Postal 2 was/is compelling because it allows you to, for a time, play it as though you exist in a world where you have least one other response available to you.”
Like Harrison, Bill Coberly of Ontological Geek fame looks at how violence can prompt a form of catharsis. Coberly examines the Lancer, the default, be-chainsawed weapon of Gears of War series. As Mr. Coberly explains, the use of the totally-practical auxiliary chainsaw bayonette is rife with emotional drama:
In many games, killing an enemy is not, in and of itself, particularly tense. The badguy pokes his head out of cover, you blow it off with a sniper rifle. But the chainsaw kill is rife with tension. When you rev your chainsaw, you have to stop shooting and slowly advance towards your target…
…
…It’s brutal, egregious, and incredibly satisfying. The catharsis after a successful chainsaw-kill comes not only from whatever real-life emotional baggage you might be working out on the poor bastard, but also from the emotional tension the mechanics built along the way.
Amanda Swan goes a different direction. As she explains in her blog, Player One, Lara Croft’s self-assertion in the latest Tomb Raider is remarkably cathartic because she is able to be heroic and without the usual baggage that women protagonists are saddled with, “She kills the bad guy and rescues the damsel in distress while maintaining a believable feminine edge.” Context is queen for Swan, and Lara’s deviation from the norm is a huge relief.
Meghan Blythe Adams invites us to her online home of The Bagatelle to describe the most anxiety-provoking moment she ever experienced in a game: the accidental killing of Ellen, an NPC in Fallout 3. Her experience, though unpleasant, became “something of a watershed moment for my academic practice…the fact remains that I already experienced the worst anxiety and self-doubt my beloved object of study could muster in me.” For what it’s worth, I also felt too bad about what happened in the vault to get much farther.
Daniel Parker at Arms Folded Tight puts the topic to rest with his own personal remix of Depression Quest. Parker stamps his own experiences with depression onto the game’s template in a deep account of his own experiences with the condition and Depression Quest’s role in learning to manage it.
Y’know, that actually did feel pretty cathartic. I think I needed that. Anyway, don’t forget to add the BoRT Linkomatic 5000 to your blog. Just embed the following code on your blog’s page:
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I’d like to thank all the writers who partook in this festival of feels and I hope that everyone else enjoyed reading this month’s submissions as much as I did. Lindsey and I are going to try to make BoRT to a monthly activity again, so stay tuned for October’s theme.