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D. Rusch:
"Construction of Meaning and Emotion in Computer Games";
Talk: Nordic Games Conference, Malmö; 2006-09-19 - 2006-09-21.

That computer games are involving is a well-known and easily accepted fact. What is probably less easily accepted is the claim that this involvement can be meaningful in a sense that exceeds what Salen and Zimmerman call "meaningful play" (Zimmerman and Salen, 34). Games are often discredited for being mindless pastimes. The thought that they can provide a broad range of emotions, not just those existing within the continuum of frustration and triumph, be revelatory of the human condition, and that they have the potential to generate meaning in a way no traditional form of fiction can, still seems to strain people´s and even some game scholars´ imaginations. Thus, these claims need elaboration and exemplification, which is the purpose of my talk. It shall be explored in what respects games are special compared to traditional media, why they have largely been lacking depth and meaning so far, and what strategies could be employed to tap their potential to produce a wide range of emotional experiences and generate meaning in a way no other form of fiction can. My focus lies on single-player, dramatic computer games, meaning games that contain a relevant fictional component and are played by only one player at a time.
The talk shall be structured in two parts: because involvement is the precondition for any meaningful experience, the first part, which is inspired by Ed Tan´s media psychological research about film as an emotion engine (Tan 1996), deals with the involvement mechanisms at work in computer games. Drawing on Jesper Juuls convincing argumentation that games are "half-real" because although the game-play is situated in fictional worlds, the rules the game-play follows are real (Juul 2006) and relating this observation to Frijda´s Law of Apparent Reality and its implication for games, I try to get to the bottom of the problem, why games thus far seem to have resisted meaning from the standpoint of emotion psychology.
But - and this is one of the main points, I would like to make in my presentation - for a game to broaden its emotional bandwidth, thus enhancing its meaning-potential, the coupling of rules and fiction is essential, because only by integrating fiction, games can appeal to a wider variety of human source concerns. So, the big question is, how the dilemma of the reality-imbalance in games can be turned into something productive? An attempt on developing strategies in this regard will be made in the second part of my talk. I am basing my suggestions on Roland Barthes´s "functional units" of texts, redefining them for games by taking their enactive component into account and investigating their potential to generate meaningful experiences by exploring the ways they can be combined with each other. With examples from the games "Ico", "Silent Hill: Restless Dreams", "Indigo Prophecies", "Hitman" and "The Godfather", I will illustrate how the realization of functional game units via game-play can stimulate a process I call "dynamic meaning generation", which is unique to the interactive form and whose potential is far from being exhausted by current games.