Why do we crave tension and friction?
I've been thinking about surprise and friction in media recently. My house and I recently watched The Piano Teacher, and by the end, we were all rather speechless, but in agreement that we thought it was a good movie. Without getting too much into it, I think Haneke explores desire in a really visceral and unflinching fashion, and it was a character study of someone who is constantly met with a feeling of inadequacy and lack of control that echoes every aspect of her life until the very end.
Maybe I just need to write my Letterboxd review on that movie and be done with it.
But what I won't put in my Letterboxd is how tangentially the movie sparked a conversation generally about how we perceive art, especially after a lecture from Game Design class about Level Design that introduced me to the name Christopher Alexander and his fifteen fundamental principles and A Pattern Language.
To that same end, I think its also fascinating that there are 15 principles: Generally, it feels like a lot. But the more I think about it, the more I think it makes sense, because I feel like when we have a solid three or five things to think about, it's easier to parse and they're less likely to contradict each other. When we have fifteen? They all seem to overlap and shift, and they result in the same effect: A little bit of confusion nestled in with a general feeling of understanding.
And as humans, we seem to love that bit of confusion. When we know everything about something, it becomes disinteresting. I think this is especially pertinent when it comes to games because often times game design is about intentionally designing that little bit of confusion or uncertainty, but also designing the release. If we know the winning strategy of a game, it becomes boring. If we know the story ahead of time, we don't want to read it anymore.
This is where I step into a bit of unknown territory: I feel like in my experience, many popular games so far tend to always reconcile this bit of confusion. A wildly successful triple A game never leaves you confused at the end, at least not to my knowledge. But I do wonder about when these successful games will cross audiences and have a sense of wide appeal to everyone, not just "gamers." I've certainly played my fair share of really weird games that leave me with a bit of confusion at the end (sometimes too much), and I don't think its that crazy to say that strange confusing indie arts games are where its going to happen. In the end, I think we've kind of started to figure out how to make a game that's fun to play, but I wonder about how games as a whole have to start experimenting more with leaving people to find their own way to an end beyond the credits screen because there's a chance they'll continue wandering, sharing their journey, and reconciling a tension that was never resolved, extending the life of whatever story they heard.