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- [00:00]
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Tron Ares Narrator
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Meditation Guide
to get it ready.
- [01:11]
Tron Ares Narrator
The countdown is complete.
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Rudolf Inderst (Podcast Host)
There's no going back.
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- [01:23]
Victor (Guest, Game Studies Scholar)
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:27]
Rudolf Inderst (Podcast Host)
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to New Books in Game Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. On this channel, we explore new scholarship that unpacks what games mean, how they are designed, how they are played, and how they resonate far beyond the screen. I'm your host, Rudolf Inders, professor for Game Studies and Game Design at the University of Applied Sciences, Neue Ulm, Germany. Before we get started, though, if you enjoy the show, please consider leaving us a five star review on Apple Podcasts or whichever platform you prefer. It really helps others discover us. And of course, feel free to share this episode or all the others with your community or gaming groups. And now, let's dive into today's conversation. I'm very happy to welcome Victor, who joins us to talk about his new book, Zen and Slow Games, published by MIT Press. Victor, welcome to the show.
- [02:30]
Victor (Guest, Game Studies Scholar)
Thank you. I'm very happy to be here. Thanks a lot for having me.
- [02:34]
Rudolf Inderst (Podcast Host)
To start us off, could you briefly introduce yourself and your research background? What initially drew you to the question of slowness and reflectiveness in video games, especially in a medium so often associated with speed, action and quick reflexes? I'm feeling old already, so I'm a
- [02:55]
Victor (Guest, Game Studies Scholar)
game scholar working in Barcelona teaching video game history. Video games as a cultural industry narrative Design, interactive narrative. And I've been working with this stuff for most of my professional life. I'm feeling old also too. I'm a kind of a jack of all trades, master of none, because I've been touching many things. My focus on history is on failures. And I'm adding a regional perspective to almost everything I do these days. I've published a couple of books about European video games I call collaborate with Japan Foundation. So I've always tried to keep this, let's say local, international perspective in everything I do. But the Zen book comes from my initial research. My dissertation was on player freedom and in particular how games direct the freedom of players. How games direct players without it being theater proper, without giving them notes and forcing them to adhere to strict lines. And when I finished my dissertation I started noticing that was around. It was 2013, so early days of the last of the past decade, I started noticing that the concept, the title of Zen modes was becoming super popular. It was everywhere in casual games, in almost every kind of game that tried to get people that normally didn't play had some kind of Zen mode as a kind of, let's say, release from gameplay and release from game demands. And on the side, while I was working on my PhD, I took a diploma on East Asian Studies. I've always been interested in Japan, but also Korea and China. And I thought, okay, let's dig into this. Let's see why people are using Zen, what these Zen modes are, what they are trying to do to, let's say, gel in the idea. And then it was a long process of discovery because shortly after that people started using around 2015 16, slow gaming became the new world, the new fashionable term. So I followed that, I kept an eye on that for a decade. The whole idea changed a lot because in the beginning it was more about Zen and the ethics of Zen. So I had a couple of publications on, on compassion and stuff like that. But then I realized that I needed to put together a history of slowness. It was not only Zen as a type of gameplay mode, it was not only slow gaming as a trend. It was kind of a long history of something that had always already been there. Slowness was the discovery of slowness for me. So I didn't know where I was going to end up. But it was a very slow process. Fittingly.
- [05:53]
Rudolf Inderst (Podcast Host)
Yeah, dear listeners, by the way, when you hear this, this might not be all the new hot news to you, but Microsoft just has released the one of the latest Forza Horizon 6 trailers and they were very clever because they were just showing the actual racetracks, but no cars at all, and the Japanese environment. And obviously it worked quite well because all the, or lots of viewers were asking instantly for some sort of Zen mode, just enjoying the landscape with all the user interface stuff. But we will talk about this, I'm pretty sure. So in the book, you challenge what you call the dominant discourse of action in video games and instead foreground reflectiveness as a style of play. Could you explain what you mean by reflective games and why you felt the need to. To propose this term as an umbrella concept?
- [06:51]
Victor (Guest, Game Studies Scholar)
I needed an umbrella concept because again, at the early stages it was about Zen modes, then it was about Zen modes and slow gaming. And then I realized that I needed to look at the full history of the medium and to identify the users of slowness before it got a name, before it got the label Zen mode. So slow gaming was taken and it was applied for very precise reasons. And I asked myself what the goals, the design goals and the tenets, the principles were behind these uses of slowness. I realized these were not only games about relaxation. Relaxation can be one of the uses, but it's a result, not the, let's say, design philosophy or the motivation to play and to design games like that. So I had to find like a central core of elements that united this family. And reflectiveness was a key idea. It was not relaxation, it was not just slowness for slowness sake. It was just a whole, let's say. I used family in the beginning, but I changed to style because I realized that style is normally left out of the game studies, conversation. We use style in literature. We use style in, in cinema. It was a style style, meaning, an arrangement of meaning. Style is the way we form meaning and we propose things not only in what we say, but in how we say it and how we present it to the reader, viewer or player. So I realized that there are central elements that keep being repeated in this type of games, like the type of attention we have to activate to play them. The use of time as a technique, I mean, slowness depends on time. The reduction of action reflexes, elements which I call gameplay pressure, and the amplification of other type of elements are normally not analyzed and normally not explored, which I call elements of meditation. Meditation being another complicated word, because meditation can mean reflecting on something. Meditation can mean sitting down and practicing zazen, for example, in Zen. So with meditation, what I wanted to say here is reflection, like thinking through something, considering every element, strategizing. And also I was happy with the nuance of the spiritual element, because it has been part of this style since the early days almost. I also wanted to challenge the idea of flow, the relationship with flow, because you can have flow in action games. Many games in this family do not favor the type of flow that we always apply in game analysis and in game studies. And I went back to the idea of the catalyst. Moments in narrative and moments in gameplay in the case of games where nothing happens. So for me, these ideas had always been in video games. They were always part of what video games could do. If we go back to the early days, we had text adventures and slow games that demanded players playing in this type of, let's say, intellectual mode, if you may, and reflectiveness seem fitting after identifying these elements. So it was kind of going back and forth between the elements and the general idea, the micro details, trying to see what was constant without forcing, let's say, the historical epochs into a single template. So Zen modes are very different from slow gaming. Slow gaming is very different from, I don't know, the early days of text adventures. But all of them share these types of central traits of style. So I settled on style and I settled on reflectiveness and reflective style as a unifying umbrella. But I'm going to say that I will be happy if people keep expanding on that and they challenge the term and maybe we change the name, because names for me are ways to discuss something, to identify what's taking place, but they are not fixed in place. One of the things that I've learned is that ideas have a moment in time and they change and they evolve. And it's good to follow the evolutions of ideas reflective for the time being. I will talk of reflectiveness.
- [11:16]
Rudolf Inderst (Podcast Host)
Now. We both have been talking about how old we feel and so my next question picks up excellently, I think, because you trace the fascinating historical arc from Sen Mouse and same games of the 2000s, particularly during the casual, or so called casual revolution. We all remember, don't we? Well, back in the 2000s, to the emergence of the slow games or slow gaming movement in the 2010s. How do these two moments differ in their design philosophies and cultural contexts? And what connects them?
- [11:50]
Victor (Guest, Game Studies Scholar)
So before the castle revolution, we had many strands that were not always connected, like, as I said, adventures, but also art. The early days of art games, software, toys, non games. Nintendo used the term non games a lot in the early days of the castle revolution, the idea of subtracted design. But nobody was selling that as the unique selling point of the games. Nobody was saying you have to play this because it's slow. With Zen modes, it's the first time that commercially and within the menu of the game, we identify slowness as a positive trait. Like if you want to slow down, you can play. I mean, the casual games were very flexible and were very friendly, were very player complacent, if you may. They allowed everything to take place and they were very. They were kind of relaxing. But they had this idea of being more casual than casual under the name Zen. So they start using that as a signifier of lowering the demands of gameplay. But then it was the time, the early days of the mindfulness revolution, if you may, taking place socially in parallel to casual game design. And a lot of people were getting into mindfulness. Of course, Zen arrived into the west, into Europe and America, a long time before that, decades before that. But people were kind of rediscovering meditation and relaxation, probably because of the pressures of capitalism and the kind of society that was taking shape in that moment and that we live in now. So Zen went from more casual than casual to a pseudo spiritual thing very quickly. Very, very quickly. In the jump From Chazzle to Visual 3, we went from just Zen modes, kind of an endless mode with no score and no pressure, to having a full menu with binaural beats and mantras and a lot of the mumbo jumbo of the jargon that you get when you get into mindfulness apps and stuff like that. And then companies and PR started using Zen games as a general label. Like Flower is not a game with a Zen mode. It's a new genre. Sony said that this is a new genre that is identified by Zen gameplay. So the idea catch on very quickly to the point that in 2009 we had several games identifying as Zen games. And from there the jump to slow games is quite natural and quite quick. Because the difference is that slow gaming was not trying to be part of mindfulness, it was trying to be part of the slow movement. Very often with video games, games and game studies, and I'm going to be critical, but this is self criticism. Very often we study video games in isolation because we need to identify games as something different. We don't want to fall prey to all the disciplines and we say, no, no, video games are islands. They are an island in culture and they are not connected to anything. But video games follow culture, follow society. And society was rejecting speed with the slow movement that started in the 80s. Slow tourism, slow food, slow everything. And the first people to use slow gaming did so in manifestos, did so in defenses of alternative ways of playing and of doing games. So slow gaming was way more socio political. Zen was a commercial label. Slow gaming was a reaction to commercialism. You can find Artur Gantignek, sorry if I mispronounce the surname, openly defending that slow games should be more accommodating to adult players and that they should be made under different conditions. So in a way they are a reaction to crunch, a reaction to the AAA industry, the kind of industry we have now that crash in 2023 because of the things that slow gaming and slow gaming proponents were criticizing. So these are the two moments, Zen mindfulness, slow gaming, slow movement. One of them more, let's say, fitting into the commercialization and the co optation of spirituality. And the other one more sociopolitical, more critical, more active in that area right now.
- [16:20]
Rudolf Inderst (Podcast Host)
Slowness is often misunderstood really as a lack. People say it's less challenging, less intensity, less engagement altogether. But based on your analysis, what kinds of experiences do slow or reflective gains enable that faster action orientated games might, might not?
- [16:42]
Victor (Guest, Game Studies Scholar)
That's one of the main challenges of writing this book. One of the things that took me so long that we normally define these things by luck, like it doesn't have this, it doesn't have score. And many Zen modes are described in this way. For example, in Aalto's Adventure it says something like no score, no pressure, just you on the mountain. So they are normally sold on the lack of other elements that we might not want to face at the moment. But I needed to identify something that was positive, something that we could describe in positive terms. So that's why I dedicated one of the main points, main tenets to what it doesn't have, which is pressure. But again, meditation was something that I needed. I found this particularly difficult to describe. Normally it has to do with rejecting power fantasies for abstraction and meditation, but it has to do with exploration strategy. It has to do with the way we have to navigate and face the video game walls. So exploration can be challenging, but it's slow. Getting stuck in graphic adventures in particular is part of the gameplay. It breaks the flow. So these moments where you have to stop, you have to carefully analyze, you have to, I don't know, you have to think about the game. I don't want to say that you don't think when playing Dancers Revolution. I'm a huge fan of DDR and Panpu. I love action games, I love light gun games. So I'm not rejecting this kind of pressure elements. But in this kind of games we have elements that are positive that we can apply as design elements that are not normally described in any other places. Like the moments where we, let's say, slow down and walk from one point to another in Death Stranding are central to the game. Death Stranding is about carefully planning how we move to one point to another, but also the arrival when we start listening to a song comes out. We see the title and the artist behind the song, and we walk carefully towards the goal of the mission. That's meditative, that's part of the design, that that's there because of some specific reason. So calm is one of the elements, but it's not the only element. So I needed to identify this, let's say, this collection of ideas. Exploration, analysis, strategizing. Dead time. Dead time is a positive element. Dead time meaning, like, for example, I played Kyle the other day, the climbing game, and you have to pause, you have to regain your strength. So you have to find your footing, plan and carefully consider everything you do that's part of the design. That's not a lack of challenge in, let's say, action and speed. It's a type of design, a type of gameplay that's carefully built around reflectiveness and meditation. Meditation, in this case being consideration and analysis. So, yeah, that's the kind of thing that we find and that we can describe without recurring to the absence and the lack of something that we are more familiar with.
- [20:14]
Rudolf Inderst (Podcast Host)
Dear listeners, before we continue, a quick note. If you are involved in running an academic program in game design, development or game studies, this podcast might be the perfect place to share your vision. Our listeners include engaged scholars. Actually, you hear them both at the moment. Educators, students and professionals across the field. Consider placing a short promotional segment to connect with this thoughtful international audience passionate about games and research. And now back to the show. One of the strengths of sand and slow games is surely how carefully you link design choices to modes of attention, mood, and reflection. Could you give an example of a design element, mechanical, audiovisual, or temporal, that you personally see as particularly central to fostering reflectiveness in play?
- [21:10]
Victor (Guest, Game Studies Scholar)
I think I will pick that time because it's the one that connects to wider cultural conversations. It's the central element in slow cinema, for example. And again, for the book, I had to look at the discussions in cinema and how slow cinema was crystallized as a label and a style. And dead time is a recurring idea. The arcade inheritance, the arcade legacy that we still have and which I love, makes dead time a failure in gameplay. Like you cannot have a single moment where you are doing nothing where you are just looking at the screen or enjoying and soaking in the views. But dead time is used very, very often and very skillfully, I will say. Like, for example, Red Dead Redemption has a lot of dead time. Red Dead Redemption will be a case of a game that is not fully on the meditative end of the spectrum. It's kind of in between pressure and meditation, but it has a lot of meditative elements and it has a lot of dead time. Dead time being like waiting moments, waiting mechanics, games like Shenmue where you have to wait. And they had, let's say, mandatory waiting in Shenmue 1. By the time of Shenmue 2, they had. They added an option to skip waiting, which in my view was a mistake because I know that the game did not make the numbers that they were expecting. And it was kind of a suicidal project. Shemu I love it because it was so out of tune with the market that it was one of the most, let's say, artistically daring projects in game history. But they forced players to wait in Shenmue. In Shenmue 1, in Shenmue 2, you have this dead time, but you can skip it. A lot of horror games, and I'm saying horror games like Silent Hill, horror games like Project Zero, Fatal Frame have a lot of dead time. Characters are slow. You have to move from point A to point B. And you have to traverse and suffer the scenery. And there's no way to avoid this time. Nothing is happening, but something might happen. You are tense. You are kind of getting trapped in this atmosphere of dread. Silent Hill 2 will be the, for me, the best example. In the beginning, you have to go down from the viewpoint to the cemetery. And it takes a long time. Every time I play that with my students, they get bored because they are in a classroom. They are not used to this type of games. They play Five Night at Freddy's and stuff like that. So they are not used to this kind of things. But that dead time is very important in constructing what Silent Hill 2 is proposing. So dead time is, for me, a fascinating element. You can find it again in very commercial games. I mentioned Red Dead Redemption 2, Death Stranding, Silent Hill. But you also have it in idle games, in smartphone games like Hungry Hearts Diner, where you have to wait, you have to pause, you have to regain your strength. If they don't penalize you for waiting, if waiting is not a way to force you to pay. We are talking about dead time. Dead time could be a moment in life is strange when you Sit down. And the character automatically reflects and thinks aloud about what they went through and what they want to do. I think they call these moments Zen moments. In the early days of the design of the game, they change it for something like moments of calm. But the idea is very clear. Just sit down, the game pauses and it's giving you time to reflect on what you are playing and experiencing. Identifying dead time is a challenge and it's a very rewarding challenge because the moment you start looking for it, you find it everywhere and you see that it has many productive and happy users.
- [25:15]
Rudolf Inderst (Podcast Host)
The book also feels timely in a broader cultural moment marked by acceleration, burnout and platform driven engagement. And you were also mentioning this before, but I wonder, let's get into it a bit more. How do you see slow gaming relating to a wider conversation about media use, attention, economies and well being? I'm not exactly fond of this, of this particular well being term, but let's keep it for a moment.
- [25:42]
Victor (Guest, Game Studies Scholar)
Yeah, we have to keep it. I'm not fond of it either because it's problematic, but also useful in the, in the sense that it encapsulates the battle for, let's say attention, let's say rest, let's say relaxation. We need years of rest and relaxation. We live in a moment where we are in the middle of a battle for our well being and it has been commercialized. So we are in between mindfulness apps, which I find very stressing and very unrelated. They are kind of the opposites of Zen, because in Zen I don't want to get into the minutiae of Zen. But in Zen you have no goals, you have no objective, it's just being there. And it's way more complex than that. But you don't have to think about any specific goals or numbers or anything. But in this mindfulness apps, we are quantifying relaxation, we are quantifying, we are being productive in being calm. And in the slow movement, we have a political battle against speed, against the acceleration of daily life. We can connect it to Paul Virilio and other criticisms of that dromology and the idea that we live in an accelerated moment, but also in an accelerated moment that is not equally distributed. Acceleration is here, it has not been equally distributed. And I was talking about slow tourism the other day. I find the idea of slow tourism very engaging, but I cannot practice slow tourism. In Italy there's a book called Theoria della classe di Saggiata. This is a mistranslation, but it's usual, the uncomfortable class that from A sociological point of view explains that we can afford almost everything, we meaning the middle classes, especially in Western countries, but we cannot afford them in a comfortable way. We are losing comfortable options. So slow tourism is something that you can do if you have a lot of money. This is all to say that to me, video games are part of this battle. We have a lot of quantity video games. We have a lot of games that feel like jobs. I think we should talk about, we should talk more about the workification of games instead of the gamification of life. We have to check in, we have to participate in daily challenges. We have to clock in the hours. A lot of video games are very long. There are many video games I cannot play as an adult because I would love to play RPGs on my spare time, but they are like 80 hours per game. So I cannot afford that if I want to play more games. So video games demand attention. They are competing with Netflix, they are competing with TikTok, they are competing with chatbots, with AI for our attention. And at the same time, a small part, a small island, a small, let's say, band of rebels are defending a different kind of engagement. Slow gaming is a defense from the inside of a different type of engagement with video games. So of course we have to put video games in this struggle for attention. Of course we have to connect it to them. Idea of the well being and the wellness industry. We are in the middle of an epidemic of wellness. And of course it's part of the attention economy, which for me is the dominating, let's say concept in media studies and let's say sociopolitical critiques of media. I don't know if we can say that video games are being positive or negative. There are positive uses, there are negative uses. As I said, every time I see some kind of gamified meditation apps or games, I shudder because it's kind of anti natural for me. But at least the battle is being fought in video games and we should acknowledge this battle for wellness, well being and attention.
- [30:03]
Rudolf Inderst (Podcast Host)
Right? So it's the andorization of game studies. That's what's happening, what's going down. So finally, for scholars, designers and students listening, what do you hope Zen and slow games will contribute to future discussions in game studies and game design or game design research? What questions are about slowness and reflectiveness do you think are still open?
- [30:29]
Victor (Guest, Game Studies Scholar)
So one of the things that I realized I was doing while I was doing it, because again, I was not trying to say anything specific the way I work is that I Follow questions and I try to understand things. So my goal was to understand what I was looking at myself and then explain it to others. But one of the things that I identified is that we still need to widen the ideas we have about video games. For my students, nintendogs is a video game. They are not forced to confront the idea that nintendocs might not be a game in the traditional sense. When nintendocs was released, Nintendo had to say this is a non game electroplankton brain training. Nintendogs, they were all presented as non games. So we are in a more advanced position. We have a wider and a bigger idea of what video games are and can be. But we need to break down different types of video games and different modes, different styles. I would love for people to start discussing style more openly, to be more daring in how we talk about not only what video games do and what they represent, but the way they organize meaning, the way they present something in a more comedic fashion, in a more experimental fashion. And style is a central element of meaning for players, designers and for everybody involved in games. So widen the ideas we have about video games, including things in the margins. To me, it's very baffling that tabletop role playing games were left out of game studies in the early days because I was a dungeon master and a player of role playing games for. For my whole teenagehood. And for me they are games. And they are part of the reason I started playing video games as well. And I played them in parallel. So we still need to expand video games. And I hope that people agree that this reflective style has been kind of a parallel reality since the early days of the medium. We have action games, we have pressure games and we have reflective games. They intermingle. There's a lot of hybridity, but there are two pillars, at least two pillars in the history of games. I think I wanted to write. I chose this collection because it's a collection of very short and accessible. I hope it's accessible books. So I didn't have space to go into detail about particular elements like Dead Time. So I think Dead Time needs more analysis and more, let's say, exploration. And in particular, case studies. I would love for game studies to have more game analysis. If you go to. I have a lot of friends in film studies. If you go to a film studies conference, you are going to have people discussing just one movie in detail, one movie in depth. In video games, we are still forced to include everything in a single work. I have nothing against, let's say, player studies, but in the book. I left a note saying there's an excellent research to be conducted on slowness in players, players using slowness. This is not the book that's going to do that and I pointed people at stub by other scholars that have already done so. I think we need to go into detail in case studies, of course, bias here. I would love to see this. Let's say this perspective applied to particular games, like how does this game use slowness, dead time, the reflective style. How is this game a slow game? That's one of the question that for me is more fruitful. How is this game what it is? How is this franchise what it is? Is Resident Evil a slow franchise? Is not in general, but the tension between slowness and action. I've been replaying Resident Evil for the past few days, five, six Revelations and it's fascinating how Revelations tried to include more dead time, more slowness. They didn't do it very strongly. It's still an action game, but you have to go back and forth, do some backtracking, explore the scenario. Whereas in Resident Evil 6 it's a straight line. You have no time for anything, you don't have any time to think. You just run, kill, run, kill, run, kill. So the tensions between these two modes, it's still a bit unexplored and I haven't had the time and the space to do so. So I will look for people to take it, maybe break it apart, maybe include some things, maybe say, okay, we don't need this concept anymore, but expanding the ideas we have about games, that will be enough. Enjoying it? Enjoying it? I mean, yes, if people read the book and think that it has been provocative in some way and they have had a good time intellectually and as game scholars and players, I would be happy. I'm not that ambitious.
- [35:41]
Rudolf Inderst (Podcast Host)
All right, Victor, thank you so much for joining me today and thanks also for sharing your work on this very rich and thought provoking topic.
- [35:48]
Victor (Guest, Game Studies Scholar)
Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.
- [35:51]
Rudolf Inderst (Podcast Host)
Dear listeners, I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you're an author or editor working in game studies and would like to discuss your latest work, feel free to reach out@rudolf.industooglemail.com you can also find me on LinkedIn and BlueSky under AMStudies. And please leave X. And one last reminder, if you want to support the show, head over to gamestudiesmerch.de and check out our game studies hoodie. Until next time, keep playing and keep thinking.
- [36:32]
Meditation Guide
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- [36:47]
Meditation Guide
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- [36:56]
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