Six walks in digital worlds: walking simulators, neuroaesthetics, video games, and virtual reality

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Content Six Walks in Digital Worlds:
Walking Simulators, Neuroaesthetics, Video Games, and Virtual Reality
By
Russell McDermott
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES)
August 2024
Copyright 2024 Russell McDermott

ii
My mom, Teresa, drove me and my cat and all my stuff across the country in a U-Haul so I could
begin this journey at USC. She passed in 2023. I miss her so much. This dissertation is for her.

iii
Acknowledgments
I would not have completed this dissertation without the kindness and support of so many
people. Naturally, I would have been in no position to do this work had I not received a generous
research package from the University of Southern California, the department of cinema and
media studies, and the Annenberg foundation. I appreciate their support. I would like to thank
my wonderful committee members, Henry Jenkins and Kiki Benzon, for their time and feedback
at every step. I cannot express how much I appreciate their time, intelligence, and guidance. I
would also like to thank Tara McPherson, who provided support and feedback to me while I
prepared for and passed my qualifying examinations. I relied so much on the friendship and
mentoring of my co-chairs: Ellen Seiter and Vicki Callahan. Whether it was work or cats or
basketball, I always knew Vicki would be there to chat—to work through problems or worries
and to celebrate successes. I count myself blessed, too, to have Ellen as a chair. I have learned so
much from you as a person and as a professional. I truly could not have imagined I would be so
lucky when I agreed to come to USC to work with you. I couldn’t have dreamed of a better fit.
I would especially like to thank Kam Copeland and Patricia Ciccone—you both were
always there to read, to be sounding boards, to be cheerleaders. You are such good friends. I
appreciate, too, the reading and feedback that Matt Humphreys and David Boyd did on early
chapters. I am also thankful for the support of my loving family. I would not have even begun
this work had my dad not defied my grandmother and my teachers by giving me a video game
controller when I was “way too young to be playing video games.” He has always supported me
in everything. I am so grateful.
Finally, I am so so so lucky to have a kind and patient and supportive partner. I love you,
Sonia, and I see all the work you have done to help me make it here.

iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements..........................................................................................................................ii
List of Figures................................................................................................................................. vi
Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... xii
Introduction..................................................................................................................................... .1
Chapter 1: Firewatch, Locomotion, and Immersion ..................................................................... 17
Firewatch....................................................................................................................................... 22
Bordwell and Turvey ….................................................................................................................32
Chapter 2: More Tempest in Teapot than Hamlet on Holodeck.................................................... 40
Medium Specificity........................................................................................................................ 46
The Holodeck Problem.................................................................................................................. 54
Tacoma………................................................................................................................................ 56
Chapter 3: Finishing a Swan—Co-Authoring, Agency, and Constraint ....................................... 67
Authorship……............................................................................................................................. 71
Enactivism/Transactionism............................................................................................................ 77
Agency and Constraint................................................................................................................... 83
Chapter 4: Navigation Memory Palaces/Memory Ruins in Ether One…………………………. 90
Fallout 4 and the Memory Den…………….................................................................................. 94
Ether One……............................................................................................................................... 98
Navigation……………………………………………………………………………………… 106
Chapter 5: Empathy Machines and Edith Finch ………............................................................. 112
What is Empathy?........................................................................................................................ 114
The Empathy Machine…………................................................................................................. 128
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………... 146
Epilogue………………………………………………………………………………………... 153
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................164

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LIST OF FIGURES
1.1 The player uses a map to navigate the park. They are given verbal descriptions of interactable
objects. Their walkie talkies become a key object of communication, gameplay, and narrative.
They find a cut wire. Lost, the Player uses environmental cues to navigate. The QR code is of a
playthrough segment which includes Henry falling. His hands are losing the rope. It is, I would
argue. a highly immersive sequence. (password Locomotion)
1.2 The player uses a map to navigate the park. They are given verbal descriptions of interactable
objects. Their walkie talkies become a key object of communication, gameplay, and narrative.
They find a cut wire. Lost, the Player uses environmental cues to navigate. The QR code is of a
playthrough segment which includes Henry falling. His hands are losing the rope. It is, I would
argue. a highly immersive sequence. (password Locomotion)
1.3 The player uses a map to navigate the park. They are given verbal descriptions of interactable
objects. Their walkie talkies become a key object of communication, gameplay, and narrative.
They find a cut wire. Lost, the Player uses environmental cues to navigate. The QR code is of a
playthrough segment which includes Henry falling. His hands are losing the rope. It is, I would
argue. a highly immersive sequence. (password Locomotion)
1.4 The player uses a map to navigate the park. They are given verbal descriptions of interactable
objects. Their walkie talkies become a key object of communication, gameplay, and narrative.
They find a cut wire. Lost, the Player uses environmental cues to navigate. The QR code is of a
playthrough segment which includes Henry falling. His hands are losing the rope. It is, I would
argue. a highly immersive sequence. (password Locomotion)
1.5 The player uses a map to navigate the park. They are given verbal descriptions of interactable
objects. Their walkie talkies become a key object of communication, gameplay, and narrative.
They find a cut wire. Lost, the Player uses environmental cues to navigate. The QR code is of a
playthrough segment which includes Henry falling. His hands are losing the rope. It is, I would
argue. a highly immersive sequence. (password Locomotion)
2.1 Player explores room with Sarah and sees a television with the news. Player can only look on
from Sarah’s vantage point in back of car. Player controls Joel, frantically carrying Sarah
through zombie-infested streets. QR code is link to video playthrough of sequence.
2.2 Player explores room with Sarah and sees a television with the news. Player can only look on
from Sarah’s vantage point in back of car. Player controls Joel, frantically carrying Sarah
through zombie-infested streets. QR code is link to video playthrough of sequence.
2.3 Player explores room with Sarah and sees a television with the news. Player can only look on
from Sarah’s vantage point in back of car. Player controls Joel, frantically carrying Sarah
through zombie-infested streets. QR code is link to video playthrough of sequence.
2.4 show the player activating and interacting with one of the hologram crew members (E.V. St James) as
she prepares a talk. The player is able to access biographical and other personal information through a
pop-up interface. The QR code is a link to the sequence (password: tacoma)
2.5 show the player activating and interacting with one of the hologram crew members (E.V. St James) as
she prepares a talk. The player is able to access biographical and other personal information through a
pop-up interface. The QR code is a link to the sequence (password: tacoma)

vi
2.6 show the player activating and interacting with one of the hologram crew members (E.V. St James) as
she prepares a talk. The player is able to access biographical and other personal information through a
pop-up interface. The QR code is a link to the sequence (password: tacoma)
2.7 The game askes the player and player character to register their body positional data in order to access
Tacoma’s AR system. The game thematizes its mechanics to reflect on its mode of storytelling. This will
be an embodied story about bodies in space. QR code links to video of sequence (password: tacoma).
2.8 The game askes the player and player character to register their body positional data in order to access
Tacoma’s AR system. The game thematizes its mechanics to reflect on its mode of storytelling. This will
be an embodied story about bodies in space. QR code links to video of sequence (password: tacoma).
2.9 The game askes the player and player character to register their body positional data in order to access
Tacoma’s AR system. The game thematizes its mechanics to reflect on its mode of storytelling. This will
be an embodied story about bodies in space. QR code links to video of sequence (password: tacoma).
3.1 The game’s storybook opening which tells Monroe’s story so far.
3.2 The game’s storybook opening which tells Monroe’s story so far.
3.3 The game’s storybook opening which tells Monroe’s story so far.
3.4 The game’s storybook opening which tells Monroe’s story so far.
3.5 (cropped): Monroe is met with a perfectly white space, an infinite emptiness that becomes
full as the player character and Monroe fire balls of ink into the white abyss. What was blank
space, is suddenly full—of park benches, steppingstones, walkways and walls.
3.6 (cropped): Monroe is met with a perfectly white space, an infinite emptiness that becomes
full as the player character and Monroe fire balls of ink into the white abyss. What was blank
space, is suddenly full—of park benches, steppingstones, walkways and walls.
3.7 (cropped): Monroe is met with a perfectly white space, an infinite emptiness that becomes
full as the player character and Monroe fire balls of ink into the white abyss. What was blank
space, is suddenly full—of park benches, steppingstones, walkways and walls.
3.8 (cropped): Monroe is met with a perfectly white space, an infinite emptiness that becomes
full as the player character and Monroe fire balls of ink into the white abyss. What was blank
space, is suddenly full—of park benches, steppingstones, walkways and walls.
3.9 (cropped): Monroe is met with a perfectly white space, an infinite emptiness that becomes
full as the player character and Monroe fire balls of ink into the white abyss. What was blank
space, is suddenly full—of park benches, steppingstones, walkways and walls.
3.10 (cropped): Monroe is met with a perfectly white space, an infinite emptiness that becomes
full as the player character and Monroe fire balls of ink into the white abyss. What was blank
space, is suddenly full—of park benches, steppingstones, walkways and walls.
3.11 (cropped): Monroe is met with a perfectly white space, an infinite emptiness that becomes
full as the player character and Monroe fire balls of ink into the white abyss. What was blank
space, is suddenly full—of park benches, steppingstones, walkways and walls.

vii
3.12 (cropped): Monroe is met with a perfectly white space, an infinite emptiness that becomes
full as the player character and Monroe fire balls of ink into the white abyss. What was blank
space, is suddenly full—of park benches, steppingstones, walkways and walls.
3.13 (cropped): Monroe is met with a perfectly white space, an infinite emptiness that becomes
full as the player character and Monroe fire balls of ink into the white abyss. What was blank
space, is suddenly full—of park benches, steppingstones, walkways and walls.
3.14 (cropped): Monroe is met with a perfectly white space, an infinite emptiness that becomes
full as the player character and Monroe fire balls of ink into the white abyss. What was blank
space, is suddenly full—of park benches, steppingstones, walkways and walls.
3.15 (cropped): Monroe is met with a perfectly white space, an infinite emptiness that becomes
full as the player character and Monroe fire balls of ink into the white abyss. What was blank
space, is suddenly full—of park benches, steppingstones, walkways and walls.
3.16 (cropped): Monroe is met with a perfectly white space, an infinite emptiness that becomes
full as the player character and Monroe fire balls of ink into the white abyss. What was blank
space, is suddenly full—of park benches, steppingstones, walkways and walls.
3.17 The Player greedily fills in the white space with thick ink, finding a note about the king’s
desire to keep things white. These textual components are pages in a book.
3.18 The Player greedily fills in the white space with thick ink, finding a note about the king’s
desire to keep things white. These textual components are pages in a book.
3.19 The Player greedily fills in the white space with thick ink, finding a note about the king’s
desire to keep things white. These textual components are pages in a book.
3.20 The Player greedily fills in the white space with thick ink, finding a note about the king’s
desire to keep things white. These textual components are pages in a book.
3.21 The Player greedily fills in the white space with thick ink, finding a note about the king’s
desire to keep things white. These textual components are pages in a book.
3.22 The Player greedily fills in the white space with thick ink, finding a note about the king’s
desire to keep things white. These textual components are pages in a book.
3.23 The Player greedily fills in the white space with thick ink, finding a note about the king’s
desire to keep things white. These textual components are pages in a book.
3.24 The Player greedily fills in the white space with thick ink, finding a note about the king’s
desire to keep things white. These textual components are pages in a book.
3.25 The Player greedily fills in the white space with thick ink, finding a note about the king’s
desire to keep things white. These textual components are pages in a book.
3.26 The Player greedily fills in the white space with thick ink, finding a note about the king’s
desire to keep things white. These textual components are pages in a book.
3.27 The Player greedily fills in the white space with thick ink, finding a note about the king’s
desire to keep things white. These textual components are pages in a book.

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3.28 The Player greedily fills in the white space with thick ink, finding a note about the king’s
desire to keep things white. These textual components are pages in a book.
3.29 Shaw attempts to consolidate Hall and Gibson’s models into a framework which takes
seriously the structural differences generated by direct interactivity, machines, and system-design
(Diagram from Shaw’s text)
4.1 Using the “memory lounger” (8) in the memory den. The player is able to explore the
memories of their now deceased adversary. Neurons act as bridges between memories and
locations. Coincidentally, the game narrative sets this exploration up as a way for the player
character to learn the location of one of the game’s potential big bads. The sequence also serves
to allow the player to empathize, perhaps, with Kellogg, the man previously responsible for the
death of the player character’s spouse and the kidnapping of their child.
4.2 Using the “memory lounger” (8) in the memory den. The player is able to explore the
memories of their now deceased adversary. Neurons act as bridges between memories and
locations. Coincidentally, the game narrative sets this exploration up as a way for the player
character to learn the location of one of the game’s potential big bads. The sequence also serves
to allow the player to empathize, perhaps, with Kellogg, the man previously responsible for the
death of the player character’s spouse and the kidnapping of their child.
4.3 Using the “memory lounger” (8) in the memory den. The player is able to explore the
memories of their now deceased adversary. Neurons act as bridges between memories and
locations. Coincidentally, the game narrative sets this exploration up as a way for the player
character to learn the location of one of the game’s potential big bads. The sequence also serves
to allow the player to empathize, perhaps, with Kellogg, the man previously responsible for the
death of the player character’s spouse and the kidnapping of their child.
4.4 Using the “memory lounger” (8) in the memory den. The player is able to explore the
memories of their now deceased adversary. Neurons act as bridges between memories and
locations. Coincidentally, the game narrative sets this exploration up as a way for the player
character to learn the location of one of the game’s potential big bads. The sequence also serves
to allow the player to empathize, perhaps, with Kellogg, the man previously responsible for the
death of the player character’s spouse and the kidnapping of their child.
4.5 Using the “memory lounger” (8) in the memory den. The player is able to explore the
memories of their now deceased adversary. Neurons act as bridges between memories and
locations. Coincidentally, the game narrative sets this exploration up as a way for the player
character to learn the location of one of the game’s potential big bads. The sequence also serves
to allow the player to empathize, perhaps, with Kellogg, the man previously responsible for the
death of the player character’s spouse and the kidnapping of their child.
4.6 Using the “memory lounger” (8) in the memory den. The player is able to explore the
memories of their now deceased adversary. Neurons act as bridges between memories and
locations. Coincidentally, the game narrative sets this exploration up as a way for the player
character to learn the location of one of the game’s potential big bads. The sequence also serves
to allow the player to empathize, perhaps, with Kellogg, the man previously responsible for the
death of the player character’s spouse and the kidnapping of their child.

ix
4.7 Using the “memory lounger” (8) in the memory den. The player is able to explore the
memories of their now deceased adversary. Neurons act as bridges between memories and
locations. Coincidentally, the game narrative sets this exploration up as a way for the player
character to learn the location of one of the game’s potential big bads. The sequence also serves
to allow the player to empathize, perhaps, with Kellogg, the man previously responsible for the
death of the player character’s spouse and the kidnapping of their child.
4.8 While other walking simulators contain a lot of object interaction, the puzzles in Either One
are dependent on the careful selection and use of objects scattered through the gamespace
4.9 While other walking simulators contain a lot of object interaction, the puzzles in Either One
are dependent on the careful selection and use of objects scattered through the gamespace
4.10 While other walking simulators contain a lot of object interaction, the puzzles in Either One
are dependent on the careful selection and use of objects scattered through the gamespace
4.11 The harbor, mines, and lighthouse (in ruin and then restored by the player)
4.12 The harbor, mines, and lighthouse (in ruin and then restored by the player)
4.13 The harbor, mines, and lighthouse (in ruin and then restored by the player)
4.14 The harbor, mines, and lighthouse (in ruin and then restored by the player)
4.15 The lighthouse, the final destination of the game, also serves as a dominant landmark,
structuring much of the surrounding space. This surrounding space is full of recognizable
features including the pathways and edges here. The gamespace is highly imageable, and thus
highly memorable and navigable. Fitting for a game about memory, fragmentation, and
reconciliation.
4.16 The lighthouse, the final destination of the game, also serves as a dominant landmark,
structuring much of the surrounding space. This surrounding space is full of recognizable
features including the pathways and edges here. The gamespace is highly imageable, and thus
highly memorable and navigable. Fitting for a game about memory, fragmentation, and
reconciliation.
4.17 The lighthouse, the final destination of the game, also serves as a dominant landmark,
structuring much of the surrounding space. This surrounding space is full of recognizable
features including the pathways and edges here. The gamespace is highly imageable, and thus
highly memorable and navigable. Fitting for a game about memory, fragmentation, and
reconciliation.
4.18 The lighthouse, the final destination of the game, also serves as a dominant landmark,
structuring much of the surrounding space. This surrounding space is full of recognizable
features including the pathways and edges here. The gamespace is highly imageable, and thus
highly memorable and navigable. Fitting for a game about memory, fragmentation, and
reconciliation.
5.1 The secret of What Remains of Edith Finch is found in how it thematizes the empathic
function of art. The loveliness hidden in books and all sorts of other things.

x
5.2 The secret of What Remains of Edith Finch is found in how it thematizes the empathic
function of art. The loveliness hidden in books and all sorts of other things.
5.3 Calvin swings on the swing set before launching and soaring away. The player feels the
weight of the body, the movement of legs, the nostalgia of summers on swings.
5.4 Calvin swings on the swing set before launching and soaring away. The player feels the
weight of the body, the movement of legs, the nostalgia of summers on swings.
5.5 Calvin swings on the swing set before launching and soaring away. The player feels the
weight of the body, the movement of legs, the nostalgia of summers on swings.
5.6 Calvin swings on the swing set before launching and soaring away. The player feels the
weight of the body, the movement of legs, the nostalgia of summers on swings.
5.7 Calvin swings on the swing set before launching and soaring away. The player feels the
weight of the body, the movement of legs, the nostalgia of summers on swings.
5.8 These almost need no comment. But the insensitivity of experience and thoughtlessness of
the PR moment seems a much more fitting example of what Nakamura is critiquing in her essay
on empathy and white, liberal good feelings.
5.9 These almost need no comment. But the insensitivity of experience and thoughtlessness of
the PR moment seems a much more fitting example of what Nakamura is critiquing in her essay
on empathy and white, liberal good feelings.
5.10 Some examples from dys4ia. In these cases, frustration is present in both mechanics and
textual components.
5.11 Some examples from dys4ia. In these cases, frustration is present in both mechanics and
textual components.
5.12 Some examples from dys4ia. In these cases, frustration is present in both mechanics and
textual components.
6.1 Images from VR poem, “Collision”
6.2 Images from VR poem, “Collision”
6.3 Images from VR poem, “Collision”
6.4 the sky of the first poem
6.5 Car and table
6.6 Car and table
6.7 Various Views from the second poem and the poem’s sky.
6.8 Various Views from the second poem and the poem’s sky.
6.9 Various Views from the second poem and the poem’s sky.
6.10 Various Views from the second poem and the poem’s sky.

xi
6.11 Various Views from the second poem and the poem’s sky.
6.12 Various Views from the second poem and the poem’s sky.
6.13 Various Views from the second poem and the poem’s sky.
6.14 Various Views from the second poem and the poem’s sky.

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ABSTRACT
This dissertation adapts and applies theoretical principles and experimental results from
neuroaesthetics to videogames and virtual reality works as a form of naturalized, third culture,
game aesthetics. Neuroaesthetic theoretical principals serve to intervene in or update arguments
and beliefs within game studies as a discipline. These theoretical positions are combined with
and held against those from phenomenological and cognitive science which often position the
player as either a body or a brain but not as a holistic organism. The primary genre of work under
consideration here is the walking simulator videogame genre. The walking simulator genre is
applicable to this study because it resembles actions and motions similar to the kinds of actions
and motions typical to a human experience. It is also useful to this study as it is often maligned
as ontologically incomplete or imperfect as a game. Chapters one and two of the dissertation
consider the value of naturalized game aesthetics in 1.the analysis of first-person movement and
its connection to phenomenological work on the movement of the camera in film and 2.
Embodied simulation as it relates to specific games, issues of medium specificity in games and
also movements in interactive theater. Chapter three reconsiders the combinational authorship
model of a gamic experience with consideration given to extant theories in cognitive science and
pragmatism (philosophy). Reframing agency is key to understanding games—as is demonstrated
in chapters two and three. Chapter four considers the brain and representations of the brain
within a reframing of memory palaces as a mechanism for understanding gamic navigation and
spatial negotiation. The dissertation concludes with an elongated discussion of empathy across
media forms and posits an expanded concept of empathy as one way to navigate the competing,
misunderstood, often at odds definitions that circulate popular discourse. The document
concludes with two virtual reality poems which attempt to enact some of the theoretical positions
laid out in the preceding chapters.

1
Introduction
Undergirding this document are two lectures. The first, served as Umberto Eco’s 1959
Charles Eliot Norton Lecture that was delivered from 1992 to 1993 and published later in 1994.
The second, was delivered by C.P. Snow in 1959 as the Rede Lecture at Cambridge. The former
consists of Eco’s attempts to imagine and unpack the encounter between model reader and model
author—to describe the sets of tasks and strategies deployed by said reader, as if wandering in
the woods, to sort through both text and the construction of the text. This text is valuable not
only for its metaphor of walking—something this dissertation is deeply interested in—but also in
the way it considers the reader and the work, the value it places on, as an example, slowing
down, lingering, meandering, taking one’s time. This manuscript pays tribute to Eco’s efforts,
too, through titular homage: the former, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods is after all ripe for the
adapting when one is writing about walking simulator video games, narrativity, simulation, and
games.
The term “walking simulator” originated as a dismissive counterclaim in online forums in
order distinguish them from “real games.” The generic grouping went through a series of
acclamations, contestations, and reclamations before recirculating in the general gaming
community as a normal category of interactive media (at least) or game (at most). “Walking
simulator” is by no means a misnomer. The player character in the game moves (often slowly)
through an environment that is presented through a first-person perspective. The player can
“walk” but they typically cannot jump or run. Likewise, while these games resemble first-person
shooters (in their perspective and environmental detail) they do not afford shooting, throwing,
hitting or other kinds of player-enacted violence. While walking simulators emphasize story,
their narratives are brief; unlike RPGs, for example, which may take hundreds of hours to play,

2
walking sims typically last no longer than three to four hours. Objectives, when present at all,
often take the form of fetch or exploration missions. If games typically invite players to lean into
the screen, these games ask them to relax. They do not require twitch-fast reflexes, faultless aim,
or persistent attention—in fact, a player could leave the game running and simply watch a field
or trees dance in the breeze. They privilege story and characterization, but they do not
necessarily bombard the player with walls of text. Instead, they often tell their tales through
environmental cues, objects, acts of discovery, and a player’s interaction with both the
environment and NPCs (when available). These stories are often about memory, family history,
reconciliation, loss, and melancholy, with the player taking the role of a kind of environmental
detective, searching and sleuthing through spaces and things for strands of meaning—a book on
a shelf, a picture of a lost sister, a keyhole hidden, or some random piece of hobby paraphernalia.
Stuff, often sad stuff, is foregrounded, brought up and worn out to trigger a memory, to register a
regret, or to connect with one’s ancestors. Things forgotten take a center stage, dreamlike, but
are made manifest out of the everyday and often beautiful landscapes and locations. All in all,
they are certainly not what one typically imagines when reaching for a description of what games
are today. They are
C.P. Snow’s talk, though older than Eco’s, feels timely in this moment in the academy.
Concerned with the gaps and fissures between disciplines caused by departmentalization and
specialization, Snow pleads reader of his lecture to work across the chasm which separates the
arts and humanities from the sciences:
…I believe the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly split into
two polar groups. When I say intellectual life, I mean to include also a large part of our

3
practical life, because I should be the last person to suggest the two can at the deepest
level be distinguished. I shall come back to the practical life a little later.
…
Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists, and as the most representative,
the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes
(particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all a lack of
understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other. Their attitudes are so
different that, even on the level of emotion, they can’t find much common ground.1

These gaps certainly still exist—and misunderstanding, apathy or antipathy spring up in
occasional bouts between the fields—well known examples include the Sokal affair and the
general “science wars” of the 90s2
. Perhaps more routinely, though, participants within each of
the fields ignore the other and the findings, worldviews, or critical lenses which could perhaps
benefit both given a modicum of cross-pollination. C.P. Snow’s original argument, rather
antagonistic to the humanities itself, positions the humanities as full of “literary intellectuals”
who are positioned as snobs by Snow. Snow’s position, then, does contribute to the issues he is
pointing out as problems. While this can make it difficult to take his solutions seriously, this does
not mean that his diagnostic position was or is inaccurate. While his solution seems to be the
subversion of the humanities to the natural sciences, his argument that the divisions between the
humanities and the natural sciences are hindering the gains that could be had through synthesis is
convincing.
1
Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Martino Fine Books. 2013
2
This text will not rehash these debates, but instead positions them as illustrative of the long tail of Snow’s work.

4
Murray Smith, in work that also served as inspiration for this dissertation, contends that
C.P. Snow is a thinker of now—that the humanities, and in particular aesthetics, could benefit
from a reckoning with scientific method and thought. In Film, Art, and the Third Culture, he
argues that the debates sparked by Snow “became the focus of an often heated debate that
continued through the 1960s, and—as I will argue—continues to resonate today.3” Smith reads
the relationship between the humanities and sciences as having four potential readings or
outcomes. Smith states, the “first of these two naturalistic positions is sometimes described
as replacement naturalism. In this view, the human sciences are simply a sub-domain of science
more generally; over time, the study of human behaviour will simply be subsumed by the
methods of the natural sciences.4” Alternative to these replacement positions are “cooperative
naturalism…the goal [of which] is a genuinely integrative one, where the knowledge and
methods of the natural sciences come to complement rather than replace or eliminate those of the
human sciences.5” The final perspective, according to Smith is one of “contrast to these varieties
of naturalism…autonomism, the view that the study of human behaviour must proceed by quite
distinct methods from those fit for the physical and (non-human) animal world.6” Even in this
articulation of the relationship between the sciences and humanities lies a kind of tension. They
are positioned as at odds, fundamentally, with the most forgiving way through a kind of
complementary resignation—rather than a true productive integration of thought and form.
A prime example of the tension between the two discourses was the Sokal hoax. The
hoax, performed by Alan Sokal, a mathematician and physics scholar, who submitted an essay to
3
Smith, Murray. Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film (Oxford, 2017; online edn, Oxford
Academic, 20 Apr. 2017
4
Ibid
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid

5
Social Text parodying the kind of language he thought would certainly be the product of the
journal’s increasingly lax peer review process. To Social Text’s credit, they appeared to be
operating in good faith to increase the type and kind of submissions received by the journal—to
bypass issues related to educational and institutional privilege, and to connect the humanities and
the sciences into a productive relationship. In recollection of the event for the 100th issue of the
journal, Anna McCarthy contends that
Moreover, although Sokal and his supporters attributed his success to the slipshod
tyranny of a collective-based editorial process that eschewed the disciplinary gatekeeping
mechanisms of peer review, it is also possible to see his actions as the result of a gradual
weakening of collective bonds, associated in part with journal’s institutionalization.
The Sokal affair, then, also revealed weaknesses in the changing modes of journal publishing.
McCarthy suggests that this moment also represented a culmination of misunderstandings latent
in the fields. I also, for my part, consider Sokal’s intervention one of bad faith, coming, too, from
a position which sought to coopt the other discourse and transform it into a likeness more fitting
his vision of the humanities.
Snow, for his part, too, felt victim to this desire to transform. Throughout his text the
humanities are viewed as doted upon, and unrightfully understood, while the sciences escape
them. He suggests, throughout, that the sciences need more public attention, money, and that—
more fundamentally—the literary community should pay as much attention to the sciences as he
believed the scientists have paid to literature. His position is, of course, extremely biased in favor
of the sciences.

6
More recently in the US and elsewhere, there has been a renewed attention placed on the
sciences. This is particularly visible in the form of STEM/STEAM education preferences at all
levels of education. The efforts to promote STEM extended up to the White House. A statement
from February of 2016 reminds the public
Over the past seven years, the Obama Administration’s efforts have resulted in
unprecedented levels of public-private collaboration in STEM education; policies and
budgets focused on maximizing Federal investment to increase student access and
engagement in active, rigorous STEM-learning experiences; and meaningful efforts to
inspire and recognize young inventors, discoverers, and makers.7
The White House at the time secured grant funding from both the private industry and the budget
to increase student access to STEM activities and exercises, technology and education. STEM
initiatives, later, due to the desire to differentiate and grow (and to reflect needs present in the
community) began using the acronym STEAM to include the arts (sandwiched, somehow,
between engineering and mathematics, probably because the result still sounded good—and
somehow more industrial than the former acronym. The resultant funding boom would
undoubtedly warm Snow’s heart. Students everywhere would now know, certainly, the laws of
thermodynamics. These efforts, art-sandwiched or not, have had little effect in terms of bridging
divides between the humanities and the sciences. Instead they have simply privileged the “hard
sciences” over humanistic inquiry.
A more promising bridge is the growing field of neuroaesthetics with well known centers
at Penn and Parma. Fascinating, international work is being done on questions of art when
7
Handelsman, Jo and Megan Smith. “STEM for All” Obama White House Archives
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/02/11/stem-all. Accessed April, 29 2024.

7
considering the activity of the brain (and, more accurately, the brain/body or organism). Anjan
Chatterjee’s work out of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics, and Vittorio Gallese’s work out of
Parma, serve, I believe as positive examples of productive work across the chasm which divides
the two cultures. Gallese’s insistence that neuroaesthetics in general, and his theory of embodied
simulation in particular not replace one paradigm with another is refreshing. Much of this work
relies on groundbreaking work done by Gallese and Guerra.
But first the questions should be posed, why should one bring together the sciences and
the humanities? Is enough gained from bridging the gap to justify the work? Are, perhaps the
disciplines simply too far apart from one another? I think a lot can be gained from bringing the
two together.
I contend that extant theories of gamic reception rely too heavily on outmoded, dualistic
conceptions of the player. Equally lacking are contemporary medium-essentialist descriptions of
the properties of “gameness.” These positions do not include many types of games and, as such,
they exclude both these objects and their players from the normative discourse around games.
The Walking Simulator is a genre that—precisely because it sits at the margins of thinking
about the ontological properties of games and the ways in which they are perceived and
played—is situated perfectly for the intervention in game studies that my dissertation makes.
Game studies has been unnecessarily preoccupied with discourse around form, and restricted by
its preoccupation with the binary “game/not game” logic of exclusion. Similarly, gamic
reception is all too often positioned either from cognitivist or analytic philosophical perspectives
or from phenomenological or affect-centered positions.

8
Contemporary work in neuroaesthetics circumvents some of the brain or body dualistic
positioning of past thought and instead positions the perceiver of a work of art (and the human
being as an entity) as an organism, a brain/body. This approach bypasses some of the problems
with existing games discourses and addresses many issues found in phenomenological (bodyfirst) or cognitive (mind-first) approaches to games, by considering the player as organism.
Games discourse often frames game/player interaction through either body-focused
phenomenological discourse (Brendan Keogh’s excellent A Play of Bodies: How we Perceive
Videogames but also Mark B.N Hansen’s Bodies in Code) or through cognitivist or pragmatic
philosophical models which emphasize mental processes (Juul’s work on medium specificity and
failure and also Daniel Reynolds Media in Mind). Simply put, games scholars often perceive
games as working primarily through users’ bodies or primarily through users’ minds. This
dissertation will, instead, apply concepts and theoretical methodologies from neuroscience to
games (particularly walking simulators and VR experiences) that will attempt to circumvent the
mind-only and body-only positions. It will then read these borrowed concepts from neuroscience
in conjunction with, contrasted to, and hopefully synthesized with some of the existing
phenomenological-leaning and cognitive-leaning work in game studies with the goal of
reframing approaches that work, don’t work and altering the discourse away from the
problematic and non-functional arguments and positions common at the present moment. The
walking simulator, because of its formal characteristics and its status as contested genre, serves
as a perfect genre through which to test some of these theoretical and methodological
formulations and practices.
This theoretical approach is indebted to recent work in neuroscience—including the work
done by Vittorio Gallesse, Jennifer Groh, and Sergei Gepshtein on embodied simulation,

9
movement and space, and visibility and invisibility. My hope is that this approach better
accommodates the variety of things long considered “not games” as well as in-between objects
(what Jesper Juul calls “Borderline Cases8”). I believe it does this precisely because it views
games as works particularly concerned with spatiality—and the embodied human perception and
appreciation of space.
One such position in neuroaesthetics comes from Adriano D’Aloia and Ruggero Eugeni
who posit “neurofilmology” as a methodological approach which posits the “viewer-asorganism” rather than the “viewer-as mind” approaches found in psychoanalytic film theory and
the cognitive or analytic approach or the “viewer-as-body” models found in phenomenological or
continental film criticism. The viewer-as-organism model accommodates, simultaneously, a
variety of processes. It can make sense of “sensory, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, motor,
active, mnemonic” processes concurrently, ordering and processing as is fit. D’Aloia and Eugeni
view neurofilmology as a continuation and integration of previous phases of
cinema/neuroscience scholarship: “psychocinematics,” “neurocinematics,” “neurocognitive film
and media theory,” and “film neuroaesthetics”. The viewer-as-organism is modified without
much effort into the “player-as-organism,” and with it “neurofilmology” may likewise twist into
a “neuroludology.” Just as spectators within a theater sort through a variety of processes, sorting
them and producing meaning out of them, so does the gamer: at home or outside, online or solo,
8 1 Juul, “The Game, The Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness.” In Level Up: Digital
Games Research Conference Proceedings, eds Marinka Copier and Joost Raessens, 30-45. UtrechtL
2003. Retrieved from http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/gameplayerworld/

10
with friends or alone9
. From this work, this dissertation performs a kind of “neuroludology,”
applying these bridging concepts to a variety of case study games with the goal, in each instance,
of better understanding games, players, and the genre of the walking simulator along the way.
This document enriches the discussion of the walking simulator genre and reconfigures existing
discourses on player/game interaction.
Within the subdiscipline of neuroaesthetics and specifically neuroscience and film,
Vittorio Gallese has emerged different kind of third culture practitioner than Snow. When
discussion his goals when working on aesthetics, Gallese explains “[i]f neuroscientific
approaches to film and art are to be applied successfully, they must be critical; their potential and
their heuristic limitations must be clear…10” Here he is clearly calling for a gap-filling approach
which functions more as a complimentary conversation than a relationship in which one side is
subordinated to the other. He continues, “…they must be open to dialogue and constructive
collaboration with other disciplines such as the history of cinema and the theory of film,
philosophy and humanistic studies.11” This approach, he is convinced (as am I) will aid both
fields.
The final objective must be to discover how to profitably conjugate the experiential
dimension through a study of the underlying subpersonal processes and mechanisms
9
D’Aloia, Adriano, and Ruggero Eugeni. “Neurofilmology: An Introduction” Cinema & Cie. Vol XIV no. 22/23
Spring/Fall 2014
10 Gallese, Vittorio. “Naturializing Aesthetic Experience: The Role of Embodied Simulation” Projections Vol 12 Issue
2. Winter 2018: 50-59. 53
11 Ibid 53

11
expressed by the brain-body and promote investigations that can lead to progress in both
the theoretical and philosophical stylistic fields12
He attempts to accomplish this, I part, through adherence to the “’third-culture approach’ and
…[by following]…the biocultural turn.13” The “concept of the biocultural,” Gallese argues,
“complicates standard dichotomous accounts of the human mind that used to oppose nature to
culture without fully eliminating this binary opposition. It does so by envisioning the cultural as
an extension or outgrowth of the natural—that is, as an evolved capacity of humans to develop
and use instrumental intelligence.14” For Gallese, this position does not subordinate the cultural
to the biological, but rather sees them as existing in the same space. Finally, he contends that
If science can abandon its delusion of total explanatory self-sufficiency, it can greatly
benefit from transdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration. The latter could bring to
scientists’ attention an enormous corpus of knowledge testifying to the world’s great
cultural diversity and to some universal principals presiding over the way human beings
can relate to reality through the lens of art and fiction…15
Gallese sees theories of embodiment, in particular embodied simulation as one
methodological/theoretical approach to bridging humanities and natural sciences discourses.
Gallese has focused on the work of Merleau-Ponty and other thinkers who are considered
phenomenologists, in much of his work. He is found, frequently, testing theories found in
phenomenological film theory against standard experiments in neuroscience (examining neural
12 Ibid 53
13 Ibid 51.
14 Ibid 51
15 Ibid 51.

12
firing in response to specific audio-visual inputs and reading it against the theoretical claims of
Merleau-Ponty, Vivian Sobchack, Laura Marks, and Jennifer Barker to name a few). In this way
his work bridges the disciplinary gap from the direction of the trained scientist. His work is
experimental first. This dissertation hopes to bridge these discourses but from the other direction,
through a descriptive rather than an experimental position. It is not my hope, here, to claim
expertise in neuroscience. Instead, I hope to theoretically apply and expand the frameworks from
neuroscience—in particular work on empathy, embodiment, embodied simulation, and
navigation—to update some beliefs prevalent to games studies, generally, and to unpack and
understand the walking simulator game genre in particular.
In chapter one, on Firewatch and immersive first-person perspectives, I argue that
walking simulator video games are situated particularly well for a neuroaesthetic analysis
because they are slow moving, are in the first-person perspective, and have a “camera”
movement which simulates the Steadicam from cinema. This chapter articulates this position
through Gallese and Guerra’s reading and reinterpretation of Vivian Sobchack’s position on the
camera in cinema. I then articulate a dominate critique of neurocinematics (and from that a
potential critique of neuroludology) and summarize dominate counter positions from Malcolm
Turvey and David Boardwell. I argue that Turvey in particular misreads Gallese and Guerra’s
positions vis a vis embodied simulation and does not correctly distinguish between the
conceptual operating system (embodied simulation) and the operational mechanics of that system
(mirror neurons). I further argue that Turvey engages in a straw man fallacy in his critique.
Chapter two resituates questions around form and medium specificity. It begins with a
discussion of Ian Bogost’s discussion of media which prioritizes “what they do best,” suggesting
that media—TV, games, books—should engage less in things that other media are “better at” and

13
capitalize on what makes them unique. His own writing is connected to work from early in the
academic study of video games, including Jesper Juul and Markku Eskelinen—who were central
to the early “narratology/ludology” debate. This discussion informs a critique of Bogost’s
position on medium specificity. Beneath Bogost’s position, I argue, is a criticism of Janet
Murray’s conceptualization of agency by way of the metaphor of the holodeck in Hamlet on the
Holodeck. This metaphor, formulated in part in Janet Murray’s seminal text imagines games as
functioning similarly to the holodeck as present in Star Trek, totally immersive experiences in
which a centralizing agency can inhabit a world of their creation. Bogost’s criticism serves his
goal of centering “play” and “procedurality” within the academic discourse around games. The
chapter then turns to neuroludic components of engagement, specifically embodied simulation,
and theory of mind, in order to create an alternative to Bogost’s concepts of procedure and play.
It will apply these discussions to Tacoma, a walking simulator set on a space station in which the
player character revisits the memories of the characters on the station (but which will be read as
the memories of the station itself). This reading will complicate both the holodeck metaphor and
Bogost’s inadequate critique of it. This chapter concludes with an alternative position against
Murray’s formulation but one informed by neuroaesthetics.. It concludes with a description of
agency as diminished, replaced with the intersubjective position engendered by the human
subject’s “being with” the stuff of the world—whether real or digital, object or other.
Chapter three extends the discussion of agency found in chapter two. In this instance,
though, the discussion applies to issues of constraint, authorial control, and a variety of
competing discourses on each topic from both film and game disciplines. The chapter opens with
considerations about the role of authorship, the pen stroke, and the hand, in the auteur theories of
film and authorship theories of texts. It then discusses the roles of enactivism—borrowed from

14
cognitive science—and transactionism—taken from John Dewey by way of Daniel Reynolds—in
contemporary games studies. These concepts are mapped onto recent discussions of agency and
constraint in game studies. Both are then connected to the notion of embodied bounded
rationality and applied to Unfinished Swan, a game in which the player reveals/constructs the
world with thrown black paint, and which, in return, determines and coordinates the player’s
experience of the game. Embodied bounded rationality is positioned, here, as an alternative
means to understanding Unfinished Swan and other gaming experiences in which the player
generates the world by seeing it and being in it.
Chapter four centers the role of memory and navigation in Ether One. This chapter
will also consider the role of memory in the walking simulator genre in particular and games
more broadly. The chapter includes a discussion of memory palaces and the role of the
hippocampus in both memory and navigation. Beginning with a discussion of the memory den
sequence in Fallout 4, the chapter considers the ways in which memory is spatialized in that
game and others. It is particularly concerned with the ways in which memory is spatialized and
narrativized in this instance. The brain, too, is presented as navigable: neurons serve as bridges
between the moments in the sequence. The discussion of Ether One, a game which places the
player in the role of a memory specialist of sorts, one that works through and rehabilitates the
memory of someone suffering from dementia. This chapter will read Ether One as an attempt
at a navigable memory palace and as a game which meditates specifically on the role of
navigation and object interaction in the production of and activation of memory.
Chapter five focuses on the role of empathy in games. This chapter will consider the
role of empathy in games, film, and VR—as marketing pitch, as over-ambitious utopian
dream, as a machine for, and as place of deserved criticism. It will then consider works by

15
Nonny de la Peña, Kenneth Goldsmith, anna anthropy, and Chris Milk as cases for different
kinds of readings of empathy. I argue here that these artists are doing different things, and that
recent critiques of empathy as neoliberal excuse making, or avoidance of suffering, are only
applicable to some of these positions. Many still deserve criticisms leveled at them—but for
different reasons. Some are, I contend, good objects, doing good work, like Zoe Quinn’s
Depression Quest. I then argue that Zuckerberg’s VR travel to a flooded Puerto Rico as a PR
sales stunt is, on the other hand, a truly egregious example of suffering tourism. The discussion
then turns to a kind of empathy which is more expansive, embodied, and nuanced. This
expanded and embodied form of empathy is applied to What Remains of Edith Finch (2017), a
game that narrativizes the aesthetic experience of embodied, expanded empathy. This chapter
will ultimately contend that while games and VR are certainly not an “empathy machine” in
the old sense of empathy, they may in fact be an “empathy machine” in a new, expanded, sense
of the word.
The final section of the dissertation serves as a creative application of some of the
positions considered throughout the dissertation. In it I present two VR poetry experiences of
my own creation. These experiences seek to simulate, poetically and aesthetically, the grief
and loss felt with the death of my mother toward the end of the dissertation process. This
epilogue-like chapter considers the creative potential of VR when neuroaesthetics are fore
fronted, suggesting that there is potential for more poetic VR works. The first piece,
“Collision” invites the reader to sit in a simulated version of my kitchen, confronted with the
near collision of self and car. Much of the space is cut out, replaced with a textual component,
a written piece on the suddenness of grief. The second piece reconsiders Ranier Maria Rilke’s
Ninth Duino Elegy, which celebrates living, in the face of eventual death, as magical—and

16
worth the eventual ending. This is contrasted with the appearance of videos of my mother
populating the space, inescapable and always in view.
All of this so far holds up the analytic lens, the framework. No framework is successful
without considering, truly, the work of the player in the game. Returning to Eco, I would like
to foreground his claim, speaking of Italo Calvino’s previous lecture, which opens Six Walks in
the Fictional Woods: “His [Calvino’s] novel is concerned with the presences of the reader in
the story…” he continues, “the wolf” of an important phrase “Lupus in fabula,” “may not even
figure in many situations, and we shall soon see that in its place there could be an ogre. But in
a story there is always a reader, and this reader is a fundamental ingredient not only of the
process of storytelling but also of the tale itself16” This dissertation, similarly, is concerned
with the player in the game. Whatever bounds are placed on the medium, in terms of ontology
or specificity, it means nothing if the player is forgotten, discarded, or not considered. I hope,
always then, to foreground the player in the game. The gamer makes the game. It is with this
insistence that Eco’s work permeates this text. And while I may not return to him directly at
any other point in this document, I believe his influence is present in other ways.
It is important to note, here and throughout the dissertation, that the ideas borrowed
from the sciences, in this case predominately neuroscience, do not represent universally agreed
upon positions. Neuroscience, like cinema studies, game studies, and any other field, is
disciplinarily rich with debate. While total consensus may be uncommon, I have pulled
appropriately applicable concepts and hypotheses and applied them to areas of aesthetic
concern.
16 Eco, Umberto. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Harvard. 1994

17
CHAPTER 1: Firewatch, Locomotion, and Immersion
I suppose a bit of a detour is necessary to answer a pertinent, yet important question: are
walking simulators a particularly good fit for this particular brand of neuroaesthetic analysis? If
so, does that lessen the import of this work, and work like it, in relation to the field of game
studies as a whole? This chapter will contend that because of the structural components of the
genre so far, and because of the ways in which these particular games are stylized, walking
simulators are ideally situated for this particular framing and critique.
Vivian Sobchack in her essay, “Toward Inhabited Space: the Semiotic Structure of
Camera Movement in the Cinema,” outlines the four primary types of movements in cinema.
Proceeding from subject movement, through editing and fixed camera movements (such as the
zoom), she arrives at camera movement, in terms of tracking, handheld, and dolly work as key to
audience engagement in the cinematic experience. As she puts it, “[t]he first, earliest, and most
obvious is the movement of living beings and objects within the projected image…called subject
movement17.” This is the movement of all sorts of stuff within the frame of the screen. It is the
pong paddles and ball, it is space invader ships and aliens, it is space demons charging at the
player character. The second kind, she states, is “most singled out for its part in the constitution
of cinematic meaning, [and] is the movement between projected images called editing.18”
Editing, while terribly important to film and television studies, is considerably less discussed in
games, and typically functions as a notation of change: in level, in place, in lost life, or in point
of view. Third, for Sobchack is “the optical or visual movement of the camera lens from a fixed
17 Sobchack, Vivian. “Toward Inhabited Space: the Semiotic Structure of Camera Movement in Cinema”
Semiotica 41, no. 1-4 (1982): 317.
18 Ibid 317.

18
position and most commonly revealed as zoom19.” Zoom, if deployed at all in games, is
indicative of tool use or power, one which allows the player character to see targets at a
distance—whether location or object—for pursuit or elimination. It is often connected to a
skeuomorphic set of binoculars, a sniper’s scope, or a magnifying glass. Finally, Sobchack
outlines “camera movement, the bodily motion of the camera itself, evidenced on the screen by a
mobile frame and shifting spatial perspective…[and] possibly the kind of movement most central
to our primary understanding of the cinema as a semiotically expressive form of human
communication20…” as elusive, but vitally important to any structural understanding of film.
While elusive to the cinema goer, perhaps, and confounding to or neglected by critics of the
cinema at the time Sobchack’s essay was released, this kind of movement, of the whole frame by
the body of the camera, is readily understood by contemporary game players. Often connected to
the right joystick of a modern game controller, the control of the “camera” by the player has been
a central component of gaming since the shift to 3D and the onset of first and third perspectives
in games. This shift happened, arguably, between the “16bit” consoles (SNES and Sega Genesis)
and the first disc-based game platforms: 3DO, Sega Saturn, and the Sony Playstation, for
example21
.
Often rendered invisible, camera movement for Sobchack reveals itself under specific
circumstances. She connects the liveness of camera movement to the lived experience of the
perceptual, embodied subject of the cinemagoer. This linking arises out of Sobchack’s reading of
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological understanding of human beings as inhabiting space and time
19 Ibid 317.
20 Ibid 317
21 There were first-person oriented games before the advent of disc-based consoles, but they became much more
of the norm with this generation and the rise of the first-person shooter genre of games

19
in their lived experiences of the world. She then further animates the activity (and to a degree the
being) of the camera, its function in the cinema, and its relationship with the spectator. While the
spectator is embodied in the world while they interact with a piece of media, the camera, for
Sobchack, is embodied in the world of the film that the spectator engages with. The distinction
between camera-body and viewer-body boils down to a core issue of subjectivity. It is a
distinction of “here” and “there.” More specifically, she claims that “the motility of the camera is
prereflectively understood as always meaningfully-directed, as intentional: the unifying
embodied activity of a human consciousness as it is situated in and inhabits the world.22” This
situated linking of art work (the film) to the viewing subject (the audience member) by way of
the camera-as-surrogate elevates the role of the camera (and especially its motion) as the primary
signifying point of the cinematic apparatus—it engenders an extension of human consciousness
outward, into the frame, and within the story world.
In terms of games, Sobchack’s reading of the camera as “uniquely embodied in the world
of the film” and evocative of Richard Zaner’s claims about the animate existence of a body
engaged in the world, 23 the potential to read both Sobchack and Zaner through first-person
perspective games is evident. Zaner claims the following about the lived body:
1. The lived-body is the “bearer of the orientational point, 0, with respect to which other
objects are organized into the spatio-temporal surrounding world.
2. The lived-body serves as an ‘organ of perception,’ a single instrument with several
sensory fields that provides us ‘that by means of which’ we have access to the world
as it exists for us.
22 Ibid 317
23 Ibid 327

20
3. The lived-body is an organ of perception that, by virtue of its unity, synthesizes the
several sensory fields as the place ‘that on and in which my fields of sensation are
spread out.’
4. The lived-body is that which actualizes the spontaneous and operational ‘strivings of
consciousness’, and which, on a higher level actualizes volition, signifies through
gesture.24

If the camera, in this instance, is replaced, say, by the player’s rendering perspective, I
believe the value of Sobchack’s analysis on the relationship between the embodied subject and
the work of art is heightened. The role of the camera in the first person game, especially the
walking simulator, is under the control of the player, and thus heightens the potential for
embodiment in this particular genre. Similarly, the camera moves in this genre as if it were a
Steadicam rather than a dolly or a zoom, and often closely corresponds to a typical walking
speed (or at the very least is in a range of typical walking speeds). Both of the stylistic features of
this genre further capitalize on the intersubjective potential of camera movement. Recent
reconsiderations of Sobcheck’s now 40-year-old claims, serve to reinforce and naturalize her
argument.
Sobchack’s position in relation to the camera in cinema was recently revisited by Vittorio
Gallese and Michele Guerra in The Empathic Screen: Cinema and Neuroscience in a chapter
titled “Camera Movement and Motor Cognition25” in which they describe an experiment on the
effects of a variety of camera movements on the audience member. They filmed a scene using
24 Zaner, Richard. The Problem of Embodiment as referenced in Sobchack, Vivian. “Toward Inhabited Space: the
Semiotic Structure of Camera Movement in Cinema” Semiotica 41, no. 1-4 (1982). 327.
25 Gallese, Vittorio, and Michele Guerra The Empathic Screen: Cinema and Neuroscience. Oxford UP 2020.

21
four different techniques: “(1) with a still camera positioned at a distance of 2.60 meters from the
scene; (2) adjusting the lens of the camera to zoom in on the action; (3) using a dolly, moving the
camera closer to the scene along fixed tracks; (4) walking towards the scene using a Steadicam,
so that the camera reproduced the movement of the operator26” They sought to learn if the
“mirror neuron mechanism respond[s] differently when observing a film of a person grasping an
object shot with a still camera or a camera reproducing movement…” and if “the mirror neuron
mechanism responds differently to different ways of moving the camera.27” Using survey
responses and EEG, they found the results to be positive. The Steadicam “was most efficacious
in evoking the activation of the mirror neuron mechanism,” zoom was least affective, and dolly
movement was somewhere in the middle in both EEG results and survey response28. Naturally,
and Gallese and Guerra acknowledge this, each of these techniques can be deployed to greater or
lesser effect in terms of engagement and embodiment, but in experimental conditions they
performed differently. Nevertheless, the experiment leads Gallese and Guerra to confirm that
“[t]he intentionality and subjectivity of a movie are largely based on the spectator’s simulation of
the camera movements, which would suggest that the immanent quality of cinematographic
subjectivity lies mostly with the corporeal/bodily nature of the movie and its fruition.”29 Not in
isolation, a similar experiment, by Heimann, Uithol, et al. found that “short video clips of an
empty room with a still, a zooming and a moving camera (Steadicam) that might simulate the
movement of an observer in different ways. We found an event related desynchronization of the
26 Ibid 108.
27 Ibid 108.
28 Ibid 111-113.
29 Ibid 116.

22
beta components of the rolandic mu rhythm that was stronger for the clips produced with
Steadicam than for those produced with a still or zooming camera.30”
In each instance, Sobchack’s claims are met with affirmation by the experiment. The
walking simulator, I argue, corresponds particularly well to the types of camera movement most
evocative in the work laid out by Sobchack and reevaluated by Gallese, Guerra, and others. This
is because the genre operates in the first person, moves in a way corresponding to Steadicam
motion, and at a speed similar enough to typical human locomotion. In order to test this
argument, it is perhaps advisable to turn to an example game, in this case Campo Santos’
Firewatch (2016).
Firewatch
We wanted to make a game where you had the sensation of wandering around. It’s fun to be lost
in the real world but it’s not fun to be lost in a video game. You get bored really fast. So we
wanted to give you the fun of being lost while always being able to find your way”31

--Sean Vanaman, Campo Santo
Firewatch, created by Campo Santo and released in 2016 contains little that would fit the
classic game model established by Jesper Juul and others in the field. The rules of the game are
implicit and embedded, the outcome certainly isn’t valorized (it doesn’t matter how fast you get
through and there is no point system or other reward for completion), the win condition—if there
is one—is built out of experiential play rather than conquest or competition. It doesn’t contain
30 Heimann, Katrin, Sebo Uithol, Marta Calibi, et al. “Embodying the Camera: An EEG Study on the Effect of Camera
Movements on Film Spectators’ Sensorimotor Cortex Activation” Plos One. 14(3)a (2019). 1.
31 Campbell, Colin, “A Year After Firewatch” Polygon, April 3 2017,
https://www.polygon.com/features/2017/4/3/15144298/firewatch-interview-sean-vanaman

23
conditions for failure. Like Gone Home, the game is presented to the player through a firstperson perspective, moves slowly, and limits actions. Unlike Gone Home, Firewatch is
concerned more with exterior space than interior. It is likewise more concerned with the action of
walking itself than with picking things up, reading, and finding keys. Also, the game is less
concerned with revealing an intimate history, slowly, through the ordinary and every day. It
instead lays out the player character’s past immediately at the start, through a list of choices and
accompanying text. The player character had a life before, was married to a woman he loved, but
is now looking for an escape. If Gone Home is concerned with a child reconciling themselves
with their family after an absence and learning some truths about her time gone, Firewatch
concerns itself with running away from all the trappings of family and with escaping the past.
The character’s job at Yellowstone, as a fire lookout, provides them with an opportunity to get
away from everything. The textual elements at the beginning of the game—the questionnaire—
contextualize the player character’s interaction with the space around them. The lack of other
people in the park (and other visible characters in the game) makes sense if this is a game about
isolation and rejection of society. Delilah, the disembodied voice of the player’s boss who can be
heard through the in-game walkie talkie, tasks the player with exploring different areas of the
park, chasing off teenagers, and finally examining a kind of mystery: someone has been
monitoring both the player character and Delilah. The trappings of the thriller serve as more
MacGuffin than central plot. Instead of some grand conspiracy, the player finds out that the
mysterious figure is simply the man who previously held their job, lost his son to a fall while
working, and hid out in the woods to escape his pain. The primary story revolves around the
friendship between Henry and Delilah. The focus of the game is on characterization through
exploration. In order to create a game with no other visible characters and few objects with

24
which one can interact, no failstate or looming danger, only walking through a seemingly open
environment, it goes without saying that the environment and the player character’s movement
through it would necessarily have to be pretty compelling.
Part of what makes Firewatch compelling to many is the ways in which space is
manipulated to feel both expansive and controlled. Sean Vanaman, one of the game’s designers
considers this quality of space to be one of the game’s central components—something the team
had to get right. He states, "It was really hard to figure out. At first we built corridors and it was
bad. So we decided that where we were supposed to be building walls, we'd carve out more
spaces.” The act of designing a level through a process of spatial carving suggests that the game
is concerned with the function of that space and its impact on both the player and their
interaction with it. He continues, “[w]e carved the space from terrain as opposed to thinking
about it like corridors and walls. We started to feel the way we wanted it to feel. It was important
to us that like there was this buffer so before you hit a wall you knew you were off the beaten
path. We pushed the walls as far away as possible.” The game is designed, then, to be both railed
and open. Things are both walled off and seemingly accessible. Much of the game’s story—
especially its central reveal—revolves around issues of opened up or closed off space. A gatedoff government camp fuels the paranoia surrounding the mystery elements of the story. A locked
door keeps the player from exploring the depths of a cave until late in the game. Inside they
discover the skeleton of a child, clues to an accident, a death in the past. Who has access to what
spaces, who is fit to explore a site of trauma and memory, becomes one of the central themes of
the game. Issues of intrusion fuel the player’s concern and action for the first two thirds. Space,
in Firewatch, is allegorized, issues of mapping and exploration are narrativized.

25
Espen Aarseth claims in “Allegories of Space: the Question of Spatiality in Computer
Games that “spatiality is a main theme in computer games…[t]he defining element in computer
games is spatiality. Computer games are essentially concerned with spatial representation and
negotiation, and therefore a classification of computer games can be based on how they represent
– or, perhaps, implement – space.”32 Drawing on the work of Anita Leirfall and Henri Lefebvre,
Aarseth then proposes that “spatial representation in computer games” function “as a reductive
operation leading to a representation of space that is not in itself spatial, but symbolic and rulebased33” which suggests that games’ deployment of space functions as a fundamental component
of any gameplay experience. If games are both “representations of space (a formal system of
relations) and representational spaces (a symbolic imagery with a primarily aesthetic purpose)”34
then game space may distinguish, classify, and allegorize games and gamic representations of
space. A game may be understood by the kind of space represented or depicted. A multiplayer
online battle arena game like League of Legends or Heroes of the Storm is understood as much
through its spatial configuration (isometric and distant) and deployment (as arena for a capture
the flag-esque contest). In the case of the walking simulator, space is configured as seemingly
open and presented through a first-person perspective. It is deployed to facilitate environmental
storytelling (in which objectives and narrative data are mapped onto interactions with objects and
landscape).
In the case of Firewatch the act of what Aarseth calls the allegory of space that games
engage in becomes thematized. He states “[c]omputer games, finally, are allegories of space:
32 Aarseth, Espen, 154 “Allegories of Space: The Question of Spatiality in Computer Games” Cybertext Yearbook
2000, Eds. Eskelinen, M. and Koskimaa, R. University of Jyvaskyla. 2000.
33 Ibid., 163
34 Ibid., 163

26
they pretend to portray space in ever more realistic ways, but rely on their deviation from reality
in order to make the illusion playable.”35 An enacted narrative, Firewatch uses carefully crafted
feelings of openness and closedness, marked, literally in the landscape, in order to connect the
player to the accessible and the hidden, to the desire to explore some hidden secret or to hide
away from the greater, bigger world outside the path through their navigation through carved
spaces.
Firewatch tells the story of Henry, a seasonal fire lookout in Shoshone National Forest,
Wyoming. He is on the run; not from a mob hit, or space aliens, but from his present reality.
Henry’s wife, a successful professor, has developed dementia, and it has proved too much for
Henry to handle. So he leaves, up a mountain, away from it all, to be alone. In the game, Henry
is totally alone, at least visually, with the exception of two trouble-making teen girls who are
throwing a party in the park. He is also accompanied by, via walkie talkie, his supervisor and
another lookout, Delilah. Henry spends his time walking the park, attempting to enforce the rules
(no unsupervised fires, no fireworks) and monitoring the landscape for any danger. Henry is
positioned in a tower, high above much of the surrounding landscape, where he, and the player
character can take in the park’s surroundings. The player character and Henry navigate their
basic tasks through the use of the walkie talkie and an in-game, held in his hands, map Henry has
of the park (figure 1). There is no HUD (heads-up display) to clutter the frame. The player’s
visual field corresponds to Henry’s, except for the addition of the occasional text prompt, or
subtitles (if turned on by the player). Because of this, when the player gets lost, Henry gets lost,
and the player has to find both of their ways out of being lost (Figure 2). The player is given
verbal cues for navigation (Figure 3). This is thematized in the game when Henry is cut off
35 Ibid., 169

27
physically from his vision of the tower (after the lines of communication to the outside world are
cut off from the tower by an unknown actor) (Figure 4). Environmental cues are important
(Figure 5).

28

29
Figures 1.1-1.5. The player uses a map to navigate the park. They are given verbal
descriptions of interactable objects. Their walkie talkies become a key object of
communication, gameplay, and narrative. They find a cut wire. Lost, the Player uses
environmental cues to navigate. The QR code is of a playthrough segment which includes
Henry falling. His hands are losing the rope. It is, I would argue. a highly immersive
sequence. (password Locomotion)
This invites the player to invest deeply in the visual space of the game, to pay attention to
the topography of the environment, to look for landmarks, pathways, signs and previously
experienced routes. It also asks the player to explore, to learn the space as Henry does, in his
early days on the job.
The movement of the camera in this genre of game closely resembles the kind of
movement both Sobchack and Gallese consider to be most like what a person experiences when
they are walking around or when they are simulating or imagining another person walking
around. In Firewatch, this engrossing movement is exploited narratively to connect the player
more deeply to Henry and his experiences in the park. It allows the player to share the tension
Henry feels as he uncovers the secret past of the place, and it asks the player to share the pangs
of doubt and paranoia Henry fosters.

30
In addition to the movement of the camera, the pace of play in Firewatch in particular
and in walking simulators in general engenders a great deal of embodied simulation. These
games are slow, methodical, quiet. A lot of time is spent doing very little. The experience, while
active, is not the sort of frenetic, twitchy, fast experience that one may imagine in contemporary
games. The player is not asked to rush through an onslaught of bullets, to quickly dodge a
speeding car, or to dance in time with a musical number. Instead, they walk, slowly.
This slow methodical movement provides a rather still contextual bodily frame of the
experience. As Gallese, writing in a later piece on the position of the viewer in cinema, states
“the contextual bodily framing—our being still—additionally boosts our embodied simulation.
Our being still enables us to fully deploy our simulative resources at the service of the immersive
relationship with fiction, thus generating greater ‘feeling of the body.’36” His argument is that
when we are still and relatively inactive while engaged with artworks, we are less likely to either
be distracted by our own bodily movement and we are able to dedicate more brain-body
resources to the imaginative simulation of the thing we are beholding. This makes sense when
thinking of any immersive experience, the more attention we are able to give to it, and less else
we have going on either “physically” or “mentally” the more deeply we are able to experience
the time spent with it. If on the other hand, I am trying to, say, cook dinner while watching a
show about gardening, I am already planning and executing the cutting and carrying and frying
of ingredients so I will, therefore, be less capable—due to less resources at my disposal—of
imagining the sensation of pulling weeds, trimming a hedge, or sprinkling soil. His perspective is
one, to a degree, of resource allocation. He continues “[b]eing forced to inaction, we are more
36 Gallese, Vittorio “Naturalizing Aesthetic Experience: The Role of (Liberated) Embodied Simulation” Projections
Vol 12 Issue 2. Winter 2018. 56.

31
open to feelings and emotions. When relating to fictional worlds our attitude toward their content
can be characterized as a sort of ‘neotenic look’” this is similar, he suggests, to “the way we look
at the world during the early period of our development, in which, because of our poor motor
autonomy, our interactions with the world are mainly mediated by the embodied simulation of
events, actions, and emotions animated our social landscape.37” While the social and
developmental aspects of this position are important, they cannot be addressed here, but are
given time in another chapter. Instead of developing a vocabulary or grammar of experience
when watching a film or, in this case, playing a slow game, what is often happening, Gallese
suggests, is that the viewer is positioned to deploy that grammar and to engage with the fictional
space in an embodied reenactment of the action. Immobility, Gallese suggests, whether
involuntary or by choice “likely allows us to allocate more neural resources to the task at hand,
intensifying the activation of embodied simulation and, in doing so, making us adhere more
intensely to what we are simulating. This, in turn helps strengthen our empathic engagement.38”
Movement, it is argued here, interferes with the viewers ability to deeply engage and simulate
the action on the screen. This is, in Gallese, taken to an extreme: “perhaps it is no coincidence
that some of the most vivid fictional experiences we entertain , as those occurring during dreams,
are paralleled by the massive inhibition of the muscle tone in our body.39”This is, of course,
evocative of Robert Eberwein’s once seminal text Film and the Dream Screen which articulates
and theorizes the shared traits of cinema and dream states. This comparison, while less useful
here, is in need of further evaluation elsewhere.
37 Ibid 56
38 Ibid. 56
39 Ibid. 56

32
Bordwell and Turvey
The positioning of the camera, and camera movement, as central to the excitation of brain
activity, and embodied, human involvement in the cinematic experience has been met with some
sharp criticism. David Bordwell in a post on his blog “Brains, bodies, and movies: Ways of
Thinking about the Psychology of Cinema,” foreshadows later arguments made in the same
arena by himself and Malcolm Turvey which are skeptical of neurocinematics:
“Camera movement occupies a privileged place in Gallese and Guerra’s scheme. ‘The
involvement of the average spectator is directly proportional to the intensity of camera
movements.”’Yet what about the first thirty years of cinema, in which camera movement
is quite rare? Tableau cinema, as discussed in many entries hereabouts, was presumably
quite effective in moving audiences. If camera movement automatically steps up
engagement, why didn’t it become more common sooner? And are we talking only about
camera movements forward, which are the privileged examples cited from Notorious,
The Spiral Staircase, and other 1940s films?40”
His initial hesitation is grounded in skepticism around the special place of movement in Gallese
and Guerra’s work. There are, after all, plenty of films in which intense meaning is conveyed and
through which audiences have meaningful experiences that do not move much at all. And these
reservations certainly have merit. The deep focus sequence in Citizen Kane in which a young
Kane is seen sledding through a window in the background while his fate is being sealed in the
foreground, for example, is a famous example of a meaningful, low-motion film sequence. He
expands on this reservation: “and are we to assume a ‘progressivist’ conception of history, so
40 Bordwell, David “Brains, bodies, and movies: Ways of thinking about the psychology of cinema”
davidbordwell.net April 29, 2020

33
that the Steadicam is a step toward ‘better’ (=more engaging) filmmaking? Would all those
spectators aroused by crosscut last-minute rescues, from Griffith to Black Panther, have been
even more carried away if there had been more camera movements?41” Bordwell is arguing that
central to Gallese and Guerra’s (and by proxy Sobchack’s) claims about the camera is the
question of meaningfulness of experiences. This, to me, reads of a categorical confusion,
perhaps, or a misreading, at least. Sobchack and Gallese and Guerra claim that there is a bodily
correspondence between first-person movement and the spectator’s appreciation of that
movement. They do not suggest that other cinematic experiences cannot be rich or fulfilling.
Bordwell, even, acknowledges this, stating “Gallese and Guerra don’t assert that every shot
would be improved, immersion-wise, by adding camera movement. We also need, they claim,
more calm and stable orienting shots so that camera movements can create ‘peak moments’ for
maximum impact.”42 Bordwell’s issue with Gallese’s conclusions then come out of their
supposed diminishment of shots other than Steadicam shots. This is a legitimate concern and one
that deserves further attention. It may be an issue of one kind of shot being highlighted instead.
Malcolm Turnvey’s extended criticism of Gallese and Guerra, specifically, and “the
mirror neuron paradigm” in general is both less convincing and less reasonable. In another post
on Bordwell’s blog, “Can the Science of Mirror Neurons Explain the Power of Camera
Movement? A Guest Post by Malcolm Turvey,” Turvey undermines both the assertions and the
methodology of Gallese and Guerra. He does not believe that they are able to adequately
describe the role of camera movement in meaningful cinematic experiences and also “More
importantly” he “question[s] whether the neuroscientific evidence they lean on supports their
41 Ibid
42 Ibid

34
case.” He continues, “This may seem like nit-picking, but I think their appeal to neuroscience
contains valuable lessons about how students of film should–and shouldn’t–engage with
scientific research.”43

After outlining some past useful contributions of science to the study of film, Turvey
cautions readers to avoid the seductive authority of haphazard applications of scientific findings
to film studies and analysis. He is quick to assert that “Because of this authority, many nonscientists might assume that science is more settled than it often is, especially in a human science
such as psychology. Those of us who aren’t scientists could be tempted to think that a scientific
argument must be true because, well, there are scientific data to support it.”44 This position is
certainly defensible, and one I am sure Gallese and Guerra share with Turvey. Later, however,
Turvey articulates the current constellations of thought around the role of the brain/body in the
understanding of art as a “new scientific paradigm” of “mirror neurons.” This mirror neuron
paradigm, according to Turvey has become a substitute for legitimate, thoughtful, academic
analysis of film. Scholars need to take greater care not to make sweeping claims about a field
without fully understanding it. “Film scholars who appeal to the mirror neuron paradigm” he
asserts “have not engaged with criticisms of it. Hence, their neural explanations of cinema appear
to be supported by a scientific consensus that is in fact lacking, and they may not be drawing on
the best current science.”45
Here, rather problematically, Turvey falls into the same trap of overgeneralization he
seems to be contending with in his rebuttal of the emerging field. Certainly, I believe it is more
43 Turvey, Malcolm. “Can the science of mirror neurons explain the power of camera movement? A guest post by
Malcolm Turvey” davidboardwell.net May 3, 2020
44 Ibid
45 Ibid.

35
academically cordial and more accurate to assume not that peers in my field have ignored all
evidence which counters claims they are making. After all, many of these scholars have read
seriously into the claims around the role of the brain/body in the appreciation of art—many of
them are established neuroscientists, philosophers, film critics, and psychologists of art.
Certainly they are not all, merely and wholly seduced by the enrapturing force of macaque
monkeys grasping a banana, or the mirroring operations apparently in effect when a viewer
watches the result of a camera moving forward through space. If not a mass conspiracy to benefit
the neuroscientists in Parma and elsewhere, then it seems that Turvey is claiming these scholars
are unserious, lazy, or uncritical. Neither is that case, and I am sure he knows that. It seems a
strange sort of ad hominem that he resorts to in this instance then. He continues with a discussion
of macaque monkeys:
Yet, although Shaw writes that “it is a cliché that monkeys are good imitators,” Pinker
suggests that macaques do not imitate and they have “no discernible trace of empathy.”
This is despite their possession of mirror neurons. Thus, the mere presence of mirror
neurons or a mirror system in a creature cannot be evidence, in and of itself, for the
creature’s capacity for empathy. While it might provide one of the neural foundations for
empathy or contribute to its realization in some way, much more is needed than mirror
neurons or a mirror system for a creature to empathize. Their presence certainly doesn’t
“confirm” that we empathize with characters in film.46

In this instance, he is substituting one application of mirror neurons—the corporately-hyped,
morally-productive emotional contagion concept of empathy—while disregarding other uses of
46 Ibid

36
neuroscience in cinematic analysis. He cherry picks work from Steven Pinker, a notorious critic
of embodied simulation and mirror neurons, while not engaging with the wider scholarship from
scientists who agree with the findings of Gallese, which are, as everyone would agree, always
tentative and subject to falsification (as is the nature of scientific inquiry). Pinkers opposition to
the work of Gallese reveals a problem at the crux of Turvey’s argument: scholars within a field
or across fields often do not agree and that is a good thing, our fields should be rich with
difference and disagreement. Progress, if it occurs, comes out of the clash of ideas, and of
changes within and across disciplines.
Turvey’s primary criticism of Gallese and Guerra’s work on camera movement focuses
on one part of their argument. Two sentences present in Empathic Screen draw the most ire:
“’The involvement of the average spectator [in a film] is directly proportional to the intensity of
camera movements.’ This is because ‘the sense of participation in the camera action is
undoubtedly enhanced by the fact that its behavior is interpreted by both filmmakers and
spectators according to evident and automatic anthropomorphological analogies.’” The issue
present, for Turvey, is that, if true, the correlation between camera movements that resemble the
visual perception of a viewer moving through space and the immersive impact of that movement
would indeed “have profound implications for the study of film and filmmaking”, and it would
help us to understand as viewers, and make as filmmakers, immersive of at least one type and to
one degree, shots and scenes within a film. Turvey questions the kind of immersion claimed by
Gallese and Guerra, claiming it to be unclear, and counters that there are many kinds of
involvement. Gallese and Guerra do situate the kind of immersion they are discussing—it is, in
this instance, an immersion related to simulation. It relates to embodiment. This is clear if
Gallese is read within the context of his work, and if the chapter is read in the context of the

37
book. Certainly, he additionally claims, “…just as damaging to the theory are the countless
examples from the rich history of film of highly suspenseful, tension-filled, and in other ways
involving scenes that lack anthropomorphic camera movements or that contain nonanthropomorphic ones”47. In this instance, it seems as though Turvey has mistaken the character
of the claims being made by Gallese and Guerra: in my reading of the work, at least, Gallese and
Guerra make no claim that camera movement is the only way to create immersion, involvement,
or tension. They are, in my reading, highlighting the potential role of embodied simulation in the
immersive quality of this particular kind of camera movement. They would, not, I believe argue
that there are no other avenues to any other kind of physical, emotional, or other immersive
relationships to works of art.
Using the craning stairway shot from Notorious as a kind of counter example, Turvey
claims that even though this shot moves in a way that is impossible for humans to perform in
their bodies, it is still immersive (see figures). Upon watching the sequence, I just cannot agree
with Turvey’s conclusion—certainly it is immersive, but it is of a different type than what is
being discussed by Gallese and Guerra. Lastly, Turvey’s claim is that scholars are not careful
enough when drawing on scientific theory—that they propose arguments seemingly unaware of
the tenuous nature of their support. He concludes with a startlingly conservative position: “those
of us who are humanistic scholars of film should trust the knowledge we have gleaned from
decades of work on the cinema…[and] shouldn’t simply accept conclusions that contradict this
knowledge because they are supposedly scientific.”48 We should know after all, that
“anthropomorphic camera movements aren’t required for greater ‘involvement’ in a film.49”
47 Ibid
48 ibid
49 Ibid

38
Claiming that a kind of camera movement has an immersive effect is not the same thing as
requiring that movement for any immersive effect. Nobody is claiming that all immersion is of
one kind and only comes from camera movement—this is a strange sort of straw man unartfully
deployed to end a work.
Gallese, in a response to Turvey finds the need to clarify: this examination of camera
movement and embodied simulation are connected to experiments which “were originated by the
idea that it is possible to test whether and to which extent spectators’ bodily perception of the
film can be partly determined by their simulation of camera movements. The rationale being that
the more these movements mimic human bodily movements –as with the Steadicam– the more
they activate motor simulation in spectators’ brains, hence intensifying their reactions to them.”50
And continues with the obvious “We never claimed that spectators’ whole film engagement
amounts to simulating camera movements.”51 Equally problematic, though, is the confusion of
“mirror neurons” and “embodied simulation present in both Bordwell and Turvey’s criticisms of
neuroscience—as if to suggest that these distinctions do not warrant correct attribution from
outside scholars.
Returning to Firewatch, it would be absurd to claim that immersion and other player
responses to this game experience only occur because the players movement in it approximates a
camera movement which most resembles human locomotion and, thusly, creates a corresponding
network of neural activity. There are certainly other modes of immersion and interactivity in the
game.
50 Gallese, Vittorio. “Mirror neurons and cinema: Further discussion” davidbordwell.net August 16, 2020.
51

39
For instance, the game’s opening, using a question-and-answer format, traces the
backstory of Henry, reveals his motivations, and connects the player to him using only prompts
and response. Only words are used in the sequence. The fact that these question-and-answer
moments are intercut with a player-controlled Henry moving around his truck does not make it
true that the text sequences are not immersive and the movement sequences are immersive. Each
component part of the sequence contributes to the storytelling of the whole scene. The parts work
together to create a suggestive whole. Similarly, when a player-controlled Henry finds the
remains of the dead boy, the shameful memory of the father who still lives on the grounds,
haunting them and covering his mistake, it is not the movement of Henry that creates the player’s
emotional response. Rather, the revelation of the bones, visually, by a first person, moving player
contributes to the impact of the revelation. There is something enthralling, too, about Henry’s
rush to evacuation at the end of the game, smoke and dust filling the visual space, the slow pace
of a person rushing with the knowledge of quickly approaching flames—the abbreviated last stop
in the tower as Henry scans the room for what to take—that is more effective due to the way the
virtual camera in this case works.
In this instance, a naturalized aesthetics, informed by neuroscience and phenomenology,
seems to best describe at least my interaction with the game. I feel the rush of movement, the
panic of smoke and fire approaching. I feel connected to Henry’s perspective, and have, in many
ways, adopted his gaze. The way that the game moves contributes greatly to this adoption.

40
CHAPTER 2 More Tempest in Teapot Than Hamlet on Holodeck
Ian Bogost has been building a rather perplexing critique of story-based video games.
Most recently, in an argument from January of 2023 about the structural nature of games
disguised as a review of HBO’s The Last of Us, Bogost argues that “no serious storyteller would
select video games as their medium of choice, given how much better literature, cinema, and
television are at narrative expression. Just make a television show!52” He continues that this is
due to a structural limitation inherent to games in terms of storytelling “Games demand action,
and action, for better or worse, entails movement through space and collision with other objects
in that space. You move something (a starship, a Pac-Man, a grizzled veteran of the zombie
apocalypse) and hit or avoid something else (asteroids, Blinky, cordyceps-afflicted clickers).53”
This propensity for action and collision in games suggests that games are best at constructing and
simulating spaces in which players can move around and play with the ordinary and mundane of
life. I will address his particular version of games essentialism later in the chapter, but for now it
is important, I think, to consider this particular argument in its particular context.
One of the examples Bogost uses to discuss the limitations of video game storytelling
(and the subsequent challenges created by the limitations in the adaptation of game stories)
comes from early in the game version of The Last of Us: “In the game’s prologue, the player,
controlling Joel’s daughter, wanders around a whole house, getting their bearings, exploring
rooms, reading a note on the fridge, opening drawers, and learning the game’s verbs. It’s a
preposterous waste of time narratively, and one that the TV show not only doesn’t need but
52 Bogost, Ian. “Television is Better Without Video Games” The Atlantic. January 29, 2023. online
53 Ibid

41
cannot support.54” It is strange example because it neglects the way in which the game uses the
affordances of the medium to both craft a deep connection to Joel and to set up the narrative
stakes of the game. In the game the player initially controls Sarah, as Bogost states, exploring the
confined and quiet world she inhabits. The player goes through an evening with Sarah, one
which seems typical of her day to day. Once the outbreak happens, the active role the player has
in Sarah’s existence is quickly diminished. She and the player who identifies with her are put in a
more passive position, being pulled to the car by Joel and being driven to supposed safety. In
these moments the player can control Sarah’s view but cannot do much to act. The player can
take in the game world, the events that are unfolding, and can start to understand their place in it.
A car accident happens, and the player then controls Joel who is holding Sarah as he tries to
escape by foot to safety. He desperately wants to keep Sarah from harm, and so does the player
(the player, after all, just spend most of their time controlling this character and seeing the world
through her eyes). She is killed and Joel is broken. The stakes of Joel’s Children of Men-esque
journey (and its conclusion) feel greater and more intimate, I’d argue, than Cuaron’s precisely
because the game has engendered an intersubjective experience with both Sarah and Joel through
their embodied relationship to them (Figures 1-3). I will be discussing this intersubjective
experience from a neuroaesthetic perspective later in the chapter, but first I think it is important
to outline the contours of Bogost’s argument as it has taken shape over the course of ten years or
so.
54 Ibid

42

43
Figures 2.1-2.3: Player explores room with Sarah and sees a
television with the news. Player can only look on from Sarah’s
vantage point in back of car. Player controls Joel, frantically
carrying Sarah through zombie-infested streets. QR code is link to
video playthrough of sequence.
For an article in 2013 for the Los Angeles Review of books, Bogost decried the
storytelling immaturity of the game medium. His critique centered on the contemporaneously
celebrated and vilified (we will get to that later) Gone Home (2013). In it, Bogost discusses the
game in mini history of the medium’s move toward legitimation as a storytelling medium. The

44
key to this, he suggests, rests in the ability of the game to utilize environmental storytelling.
Environmental storytelling here means the ways in which a story is coauthored by a game player
and the spaces and stuff of the game world. The categories he considers are narrative threads,
situational and temporal context, and texture, or the “lived-in details of an ordinary home.55”
Narrative materials are made up of “letters, postcards, files, cassettes,56” while temporal and
situational context is created by “a Pulp Fiction ticket stub, VHS tapes, Magic Eye
autostereograms57,” and texture is composed of “tissue boxes, books, foodstuffs.58” He is correct:
the player receives story information by playing a cassette, for example, and hearing a voice tell
that information to them while they look through a room, for example. It is a fairly standard
narrative mechanism in contemporary games (the narrating voiceover somewhat akin to a radio
play or the beginnings of a noir film). Bogost suggests, though that “Environmental storytelling
is difficult because anything less than ontological fullness breaks the immersive promise of a
lived-in world59” and this is where things get a little trickier. Ontological fullness in the piece
seems to equate to there being lots of things haphazardly strewn about. As it is, the game is too
suggestive of a theatrical set, everything is just too precious and too important-feeling to be real
enough to be ontologically full60. Authenticity is a strange measure for artistic quality—after all
aren’t there great novels about love or loss that rely on artifice? Does a prop gun shown in a play
only to be fired later make the play of poor quality? It is an odd position and one that needs more
attention and time in a later chapter. The points about environmental storytelling feel more
55 Bogost, Ian. “Perpetual Adolescence: The Fullbright Company’s ‘Gone Home.”’ Los Angeles Review of Books.
September 20, 2013
56 Ibid
57 Ibid
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid
60 Ibid

45
prescient and purposeful here. Bogost, in this piece, is suggesting that games-- even at their
supposed peak of storytelling when using those methods best suited to do so (in environment and
object interaction)-- fall woefully short of the novel, the film, or the television show. Thus, they
should probably consider doing something else altogether than storytelling.
In April of 2017, in an article for The Atlantic, Bogost continues this line of reasoning
and suggests that video games should abandon attempts at story-telling and focus on other
projects more easily achieved due to the affordances of the form: “[o]n this measure [whether or
not games could tell stories as well as other media], alas, the best interactive stories are still
worse than even middling books and films. That’s a problem to be ignored rather than solved.
Games’ obsession with story obscures more ambitious goals anyway61.” For Bogost, the dream
of “interactive stories’ which function “like the Star Trek holodeck” should die, and game
designers, consumers, and scholars should produce, consume, and demand better games. Why?
Because, according to Bogost, interactivity is fundamentally at odds with storytelling even the
reduced forms of storytelling that he considers like “environmental storytelling.62”
Bogost’s criticism of interactive stories can be reduced to a few components: the central,
yet unfulfilled, promise of the holodeck as a failed metaphor for story-driven games; a mediumspecific argument about gamic affordances (to be generous) or limitations (to be more honest?);
and the alternative that games should be viewed instead as the aestheticization of everyday life.
Bogost’s claims about the metaphor of the holodeck, that it is “just a complicated dream of the
novel,63” serve as a rather obvious criticism of the work of Janet Murray, whose Hamlet on the
61 Bogost Ian, “Video Games are Better Without Stories,” The Atlantic, April 25 2017
62 Ibid
63 Ibid.

46
Holodeck became a keystone in the reception of videogames in the academy, and influenced
other thinkers on space and storytelling in games. While Bogost makes a legitimate point about
the problem of agency in games with stories, he perhaps comes to the wrong conclusion. Instead
of suggesting that, perhaps, a limited, Euro-Christian, view of agency that prioritizes action and
control is perhaps insufficient when describing a medium that involves the interplay of man and
machine,64 and that we need to construct a model that could accommodate the possibilities of a
variety of greater or lesser expressed subjectivities and agencies in the interactive moment,
Bogost suggests that this points to an inherent incompatibility between story and game—as if the
existence of interactivity assumes a kind of unfulfilled agency unless its actions radically shape
or control the fictional world. Similarly, his extended criticism of “environmental storytelling” is
fairly reductive65: “environmental stories invite players to discover and reconstruct a fixed story
from the environment itself.66” Environmental storytelling does not necessarily tell a singular,
fixed story and any given instance but can impart a mood, evoke an atmosphere, and help “give
structure to the…experience.67”
Medium Specificity
This argument evokes the problematic medium specific discourses that surrounded early
film. These arguments, which Noël Carroll, in Theorizing the Moving Image describes as having
64 Alexander Galloway’s Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture establishes gaming as an action-based medium,
composed of machine acts and human acts to different measure and degree. Galloway, Alexander R. Gaming
Essays On Algorithmic Culture Minneapolis, Minn. ;: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
65 Part of the reductive quality of the characterization may be attributed to the form of publication (The Atlantic
and not, say, a scholarly journal) and to the length of the piece (rather short to get into the conceptual nuances of
a term like environmental storytelling). Though it seems, over the course of several articles, that a rather coherent
position has emerged.
66 ibid
67 Jenkins, Henry “Game Design as Narrative Architecture” First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and
Game. MITP 2004 pg 123

47
“two components—an internal component” which compares a specific product to the ideal of
that product and “a comparative component which specifies the relation between one artistic
medium and other artistic media,”68 fall apart as either truisms or by lacking the ability to
adequately evaluate the quality of a work. There is certainly more to an artifact, Carroll would
argue, than whether or not “medium specificity is transgressed.”69 While many game critics
would contend that their point is that games are not a medium but rather a human experience
(and their argument is therefore not medium specific but rather ontological in nature), Bogost’s
argument certainly resembles, through a discussion of a specific kind of game that operates
through processes of computation, the problematic components of medium specific discourse.
Bogost’s claim is not new to games discourse, either. Rather, it is the latest iteration of a
debate that goes back to the moment that games entered academic discourse. Much of this early
debate came together and can be tracked in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and
Game which was edited by Noa Wardrip Fruin and Pat Harrington—though many other texts and
scholarly activities were certainly circulating or beginning to at the time of First Person,
including “Games: the New Lively Art,70” “The Game, The Player, The World: Looking the
Heart of Gameness71,” Hamlet on the Holodeck72
, pioneering work by Marsha Kinder, and many
others. The text of First-Person is structured in a claim/rebuttal format which exacerbated the
notion that grand debates were occurring all-around game studies at the time. While not
68 Carroll, Noël. Theorizing the Moving Image. 1996 Cambridge UP *
69 Ibid., 25
70 Jenkins, Henry “Games, the New Lively Art”
http://web.mit.edu/~21fms/People/henry3/GamesNewLively.html#_ednref7
71 Juul, “The Game, The Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness.” In Level Up: Digital Games Research
Conference Proceedings, eds Marinka Copier and Joost Raessens, 30-45. UtrechtL 2003. Retrieved from
http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/gameplayerworld/
72 Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck. 2016. The Free Press

48
necessarily a new contribution to the field, reading it was certainly surprising. These arguments,
in the academy, had seemingly been put to rest. We had moved onto better, richer ground.
Games had been legitimated as an art, which meant scholars could spend less time on
definitional issues (and laying stakes) and more time on nuanced issues in the field. But here it
was, a major games scholar arguing for the death of story in games (again). Bogost’s argument
did not trace the exact same terrain as those early pieces of scholarship, sure, but it certainly
resembles the concerns, stakes, and values of some of those earlier debates. What struck me
further was the fact that this piece, critical of walking simulators first and foremost, would
appear while the #gamergate movement was still targeting marginalized members of the gaming
community supposedly for not playing real games or critiquing them the right way. His piece,
unintentionally I am sure, echoed many of the cover claims laid by members of this movement.
Marriku Eskelinen rather more combatively, rejected the role of the “narratologist” in the
discussion of video games73. He opens “Towards Computer Game Studies” outlining the
relatively nascent state of computer game studies and thus the need to protect them from
“intrusions and colonisations from the already organized scholarly tribes. Resisting and beating
them (these established fields) is the goal of our first survival game in this paper, as what these
emerging studies need is independence, or at least relative independence74”. Eskelinen is
concerned, first and foremost, with what he sees as the intrusion into his field, his research by the
outsider who seeks to impose a preexisting doxa and dictum, to transplant practices and values,
from another system of study onto this emerging form. Leaving aside the highly problematic
colonization metaphor—though I believe it is illuminating—Eskelinen defends his field through
73 Eskelinen, Markku. “Towards Computer Game Studies” Electronic Book Review May 22, 2004
74 Ibid

49
an “exhaustive” application of classical narrative theorists to games in order to reveal the
limitations of this approach when applied to gaming.75 Relying primarily on readings of Girard
Gennette’s Narrative Discourse76 and Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse,77Eskelinen then
finds limitations in the view of games as narratives (they don’t need a narrative situation, they
are structurally different, etc). He states that games and narratives have “different existents,
different event structures, and different situations…[but] narratology is not completely
useless.”78 Much of the essay after situates Espen Aarseth as a primary games scholar and as
more valuable starting point for understanding the gaming situation, existence, and structure.
Eskelinen’s screed against the invasion he perceived of his field of study, his hobby, has
a parallel in the tone, attitude, and posture found in blog posts and forum-rants around the time
of #gamergate. I am certainly not suggesting that Eskelinen is advocating for violence against
those he feels are intruding79. I do think, though, that he kind of gatekeeping and culture policing
found in his work, the kind of fear of invasion—the worry that something dear to him will be
changed, corrupted, or tainted—foreshadows some of the anxiety found in #gamergate. The
ardent essentialist belief in a formal purity, I do believe, marginalizes some kinds of players and
some kinds of games because it is inherently exclusive and restrictive. These models often reflect
the preferences and values of their creators as much as they reflect the quality and characteristics
of the forms they seek to describe.
75 Ibid
76 Genette, Girard. Narrative Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1980
77 Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1978
78 Ibid.
79 Henry Jenkins put this more kindly, perhaps, in “Games the New Lively Art” which was written closer in time to
Eskilenin’s essay: “The ludologists fear that the narratologist want to impose an alien aesthetic sensibility onto
games and thus cut the medium off from its basic building blocks in gameplay.”

50
In a less strident tone Jesper Jull argues that games should be approached through “a
classic game model” which privileges the characteristics which Juul finds to be universal to
games while diminishing characteristics or components which are not necessarily universally
applicable. In “The Game, the Player, the World: Looking at the Heart of Gameness” he
establishes a six-pointed definition of game:
1. Games are rule-based
2. Games have variable, quantifiable outcomes
3. Value is assigned to these outcomes
4. The player invests effort in order to influence the outcome
5. The players are attached to the outcomes of the game
6. The same game can be played with or without real -life consequences80
This definition does not only characterize what things are games, it also characterizes what
things are not games. Juul specifically lists: “traffic,” “noble war,” “free-form play,” “hypertext
fiction,” “Ring-a-ring-a-roses,” “Conway’s game of life,” “watching a fireplace,” “and “movies
and storytelling81” as not games. The purpose of this definition is two-fold: “to show that games
do have something in common” and to stand in contrast with “another common one, namely that
of describing games as fictive worlds,” thus positioning the piece within the “ongoing
conversation in games, for game players, and for game designers.82” There is an inside/outside,
binary, logic at the heart of Juul’s description, even if he does consider some “borderline cases.”
A thing is either a game or it is not. This categorical rigidity is, ultimately, unsatisfying—
80 Juul, “The Game, The Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness.” In Level Up: Digital Games Research
Conference Proceedings, eds Marinka Copier and Joost Raessens, 30-45. UtrechtL 2003. Retrieved from
http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/gameplayerworld/
81 Ibid
82 Ibid

51
especially to someone that enjoys thinking of, say, the kinds of hypertext fiction left out of the
model. At a moment, too, when games were going through the process of legitimation in the
academy and elsewhere, Juul’s position appears too restrictive and too uninviting. Unfortunately,
Juul’s position also resembles too closely the positions taken later in games discourse, during
#gamergate, by people wanting to bar and remove people and objects that they felt did not
belong in their hobby. When pressed, many gamergaters would claim that they were not
concerned with women game designers or critics, but were instead concerned with “integrity in
games journalism83” or “fake games” winning accolades.84
What does and does not count as a game has consequences. Mia Consalvo and
Christopher A. Paul contend, in Real Games: What’s Legitimate or Not in Contemporary Video
Games85, that the things that are barred, through categorical and definitional boundaries, from
being considered real or legitimate, matter. They argue that “focusing on the notion of real
games provides an opportunity to shine a light on what is unspoken about contemporary
videogames” through this “we can learn a great deal about the foundational assumptions of the
game industry and game players86.” They contend that “the games we choose to put at the center
of our discussions matter; those games count in a way that others do not.87” Recentering the
function of legitimation in the variety of discourses that surround video games (from designers,
to players, to critics), reveals assumptions and values that are deeply embedded in each of those
83 See Krell, Bobby “Game Journalism and Lack of Integrity” Venture Beat, January 14 2013 which outlines some of
the preexisting conditions which allowed gamergaters to provide cover to their vitriol through arguments about
games journalism. These suspicions about the review press go back to at least the firing of a games journalist
supposedly because of a bad review of Kane and Lynch on Gamespot.
84 Crecente, Brian. “When is a Game Not a Game?,” Polygon, March 31 2014,
https://www.polygon.com/2014/3/31/5566098/gone-home-is-it-a-game traces some of the arguments at the time
85 Consalvo, Mia and Christopher Paul. Real Games: What’s Legitimate and What’s Not in Contemporary
Videogames. Real Games. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019.
86 Ibid xxxv.
87 Ibid 109

52
groups.88 Defining what counts as a game, or what counts as a good game, inevitably involves
defining, too, what does not count as a game, or what counts as a bad game. This has
implications as well on game players. If what one plays is not a real game, or is not a valorized
game, then the one that plays these kinds of fake games or bad games is, by association, not a
real gamer (or is a bad gamer). And though they contend that their text seeks to move past
“concentrating on what is real and what is not” because it is “unproductive,” the text itself is an
acknowledgment that these issues are sticky in games, that we have not moved past them in
either popular or scholarly space.
Similarly some of these older arguments can illuminate claims made today by current
scholars. Bogost’s claims in the work that this essay opened discussing do make sense if one
considers who he is as a thinker and the academic tradition of which his thought is a
continuation. Miguel Sicart, in “Against Procedurality” describes the “emergence of the
proceduralist ‘school’ from a historical perspective” might tempt one to “consider this theory as
a continuation of the formalist work laid out by the original ‘ludologists89’” Instead video games
are worth studying because “of their procedural nature” and “because they are processes that
operate in a way that is akin to how computers operate.90” This suggests that “proceduralism
takes a formalistic approach to the study of games, inherited from a particular understanding of
ludology, and turns it into not an analytical theory and a design paradigm by validating its
existence through its application on serious games” or “if proceduralism explains why games can
address serious topics, then procedural rhetoric is a valid theory for the understanding of
88 Ibid 109
89 Sicart, Miguel. “Against Procedurality.” Game studies 11, no. 3 (2011). 3
90 Ibid 3

53
games.”91 This positions procedural rhetoric so that it may argue “that it is in the formal
properties of the rules where the meaning of a game can be found. And what players do is
actively complete the meaning suggested and guided by the rules”92 because proceduralists “are
after all a class of formalists” and “the game is the rules, both in terms of its ontological
definition…and in its use function as an object that creates meaning in the contexts in which
specific users use it93” For Sicart, proceduralist arguments, while useful, are incomplete. They
lack what he calls a corresponding “orthogonal analysis of play that completes the arguments of
meaning by means of accounting the play experience…we need a theory of play that accounts
for, and complements, the proceduralist discourse.94” Sicart has repeatedly advocated for a
particular scholarly reinvestment in “play” as a conceptual and practical component of games95
(and to his credit, Bogost’s How to Play Anything, while expanding upon the notions of the
mundane and invention in the opening essay, does address, more thoroughly the concept of play
in contemporary games—though it does, nevertheless subvert play to procedure, to rules and to
constraints.) Yet Sicart’s project, more importantly, seeks to acknowledge the role of the player
in the act of play, to see the player as equally important to the game as the computer. The
Sicart/Bogost discussion, while appearing differently, may be read as an extension of the
ludic/narrative debate with proceduralism and play dividing the discourse in a similar way96. The
earlier discourses illuminate the component parts of the latter discussion.
91 Ibid 5
92 Ibid 6
93 Ibid 6
94 Ibid 19
95 See Play Matters MITP (2014), up through the more recent “Playing with Ethics”. In C. Lury, R. Fensham, A.
Heller-Nicholas, S. Lammes, A. Lammes, M. Michael, & E. Uprichard (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Interdisciplinary
Research Method Routledge and “Playing Software: the Role of the Ludic in Software Society” (2020) Information,
Communication and Society
96 This claim is, at least in this context, rather reductive. Certainly Bogost and Sicart should not just serve as standins for a previous academic discussion. Sicart’s theory of play is more informed by Huizingian notions than it is by,

54
It is the role of the player and their relationship with the characters played that I think is
the most significant omission from Bogost’s argument then and now. Returning to the most
recent piece on The Last of Us, he contemplates the roles of exterior actions and the interior life
of characters: “What a character thinks or feels still must be communicated by language, and that
requires either dialogue or artifacts—like the found note on the fridge—or both. Listening,
watching, and reading require the player to become a viewer, and changing modes has
consequences.97” What he is suggesting is that players simply do not have access to the inner
lives of characters, they can understand their bodily movements (and control those movements)
much easier than they can understand, communicate, and control their characters interiority. We
fundamentally do not understand characters, Bogost is arguing, without language. This, is
problematic, firstly, because it assumes that player subjects and subjects of stories exist as
isolated, existential islands, inaccessible and unreachable without linguistic communication. If
there is to be empathy, it seems, it must be made literal and literary. I would suggest that this is
an incomplete view of agency, subjectivity, and empathy, but I will only be addressing the first
two portions of that problem here (I consider empathy more closely, as an expanded, embodied,
notion of existence and interaction in a different chapter of this dissertation).
The Holodeck Problem
Firstly, I think it is important to return to the idea of the holodeck and the intellectual
fervor and excitement it created in the early moments of game studies. Janet Muray’s seminal
text, Hamlet on the Holodeck appeared as a standard-bearer of early videogame studies. It
say theories of environmental storytelling, and Bogost is certainly indebted to Janet Murray in his formulation of
proceduralism. I am, rather, pointing to the ways in which these kinds of conversations may inform our reception
of ongoing and future debates about the essential components of games or play or process.
97 Bogost, Ian “Television is Better Without Video Games.” The Atlantic. 01/29/2023

55
managed to merge, in convincing fashion, the cultural codes and practices of previous,
comfortable media with the promise and excitement of emerging technologies and artforms. One
of the key moments in the text, as far as impact and impression are concerned, is the discussion
of the centrality of agency in the aesthetic experience of electronic media. The feeling of agency,
for Murray, is something expected when interacting with a computer, but it is something
withdrawn or absent in traditional narrative environments. She states, though, that “[b]ecause of
the vague and pervasive use of the term interactivity, the pleasure of agency in electronic
environments is often confused with the ability to move a joystick or click on a mouse…activity
alone is not agency.98” Agency for Murray requires more than action: it requires that actions
have meaning, consequence, and control. She considers “a tabletop game of chance, players may
be kept very busy spinning dials, moving game pieces, and exchanging money, but they do not
have any true agency. The players’ actions have effect, but the actions are not chosen and the
effects are not related to the players intentions.99” A large amount of the aesthetic pleasure found
in games then, for Murray, comes out of a feeling of agency as fulfilled. From this pleasure,
Murray imagines a narrative literature that is able to tap into the unbridled freedom of agential
excess and control. What if, one must imagine, there is a story in which one is able to act and
have their actions matter? Narrational limitations are frowned upon, multiple solutions are
celebrated, and the computer and computer-based media seem to fulfill a promise of narrational
freedom.
If this idea of agency and narrational freedom is central to how one standardizes
excellence in video games, then it is no wonder that it is difficult to achieve something of a good
98 Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck: the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York Free Press. 1997. 128
99 Ibid. 128

56
game story. As Bogost suggests in his critique of What Remains of Edith Fitch?, when the needs
of player agency are combined with a story that an author wants to tell a set of limitations or
interferences will develop. It is difficult if not impossible to tell a specific story while giving the
interactor that story total freedom or control. To use Bogost’s example, “[t]he one serious effort
to…” create a holodeck-inspired, interactive narrative “…was an ambitious 2005 interactive
drama called Façade…It worked remarkably well—for a video game. But it was still easily
undermined. One player, for example, pretended to be a zombie, saying nothing but ‘brains’ until
the game’s simulated couple threw him out100.” For the dream of agency akin to the holodeck
seemingly promised by computer-based media this is, indeed, a problem. There is, Bogost and
others would suggest, a fundamental incompatibility between narrative control and ludic
freedom.
What if, perhaps, we alter our understanding of agency? Or, what if we reconsidered the
origin of aesthetic pleasure in games altogether? I would posit that some of the aesthetic pleasure
we get from games does not come from fantasies of total freedom and control but, rather, that it
comes from an embodied, intersubjective, explorational mode of play that games (and other
artforms) engender. This intersubjective experience is made possible by the human propensity,
due to embodied simulation, to share motoric and bodily experiences with real and non-real
subjects (and, sometimes, objects).
Tacoma
Fullbright’s 2017 Tacoma, their follow-up to Gone Home is positioned rather uniquely as
a case study for this alternative approach to gamic aesthetic pleasure. Like the holodeck, Tacoma
100 Bogost, Ian. “Video Games are Better Without Stories”. The Atlantic. April 25, 2017

57
takes place in a futuristic setting aboard a spaceship (well a transfer station) which has been
inhabited long term by a crew people. The player experiences the story through Amitiyoti
“Amy” Ferrier as they move through the now seemingly vacant spacecraft while seeking to
uncover the cause of the station’s vacant state, uncover artificial intelligence data, and some
other equipment from the station. This experience is shaped by the player and player character
following holographic memories of the crew members as they went about their daily lives in the
moments leading up to what one assumes is a moment of crisis, an accident, or something else
which caused the emptiness of the craft. The story information is gathered through both these
followings and also through interactions with crew member holographs at specific moments in
each potential scene or sequence. For example, at the beginning of the game the player can
decide to watch a sequence one member, EV. St. James preparing a talk for a person or group
elsewhere. She appears as color-coded, semi-translucent, slightly polygonal humanoid forms
moving through a room down the hall from an office and a dining area. While she is speaking,
the player is able to also view two other members, in another room, flirt with and flatter one
another while they negotiate the next year and their future afterward (see figures 5-7). These
intimate moments become available to the player after they sign a code into the system to boot
up the fragment of the former crews’ existence. This sequence involves the player character
signing a set of symbols, performing a linguistic act through her hands, in order to access the
pertinent narrative information. The player is repeatedly reminded of the embodied nature of this

58
particular story and of the important place of their own and Amy’s hands in the retrieval of that
story information.

59
Figures 2.4-2.6 show the player activating and interacting with one of the
hologram crew members (E.V. St James) as she prepares a talk. The player is
able to access biographical and other personal information through a pop-up
interface. The QR code is a link to the sequence (password: tacoma)
An earlier sequence is key to understanding the way the game is telling its particular
story—and serves as a window into understanding the ways in which the game provides aesthetic
pleasure. After initially boarding the ship, Amy—and the player character with her—is asked by
the station’s AI to “register their body-positional data with Tacoma’s AR tracking system101”
(see figures 7-9). In this sequence, I argue that the player character mimics the role that the
player traditionally finds themselves when playing a game. They are asked, upon entering a new
101 Tacoma. Fullbright. 2017

60
and slightly fantastical space, to don interface equipment and engage with the artificial, virtual
material around them. To top it off, the game asks the player to perform a set of tasks while the
player character waits for the system to load onto their handheld computer.
More interesting is the way in which the game combines different interactive, storytelling
modes in order to reveal both the external and internal stories of its characters. The characters
reveal both useless and key narrative information through contact and also through an
understanding of movement. The position of the crew members, their walking patterns, the way
they move through various rooms of the transfer station conveys much of what is happening in
the narrative—what happened to make the crew evacuate the station—but also, and more
importantly, what day to day life was like aboard the vessel. In the case of Tacoma, storytelling
mechanics transcend readily available visual and aural information. Readily available and
obvious ephemera scrawled with key notes and insights or tape recordings of the big fight right
before a familial fracture are replaced with action, embodiment, and movement.

61

62
Figures 2.7-2.9: The game askes the player and player character to register their
body positional data in order to access Tacoma’s AR system. The game
thematizes its mechanics to reflect on its mode of storytelling. This will be an
embodied story about bodies in space. QR code links to video of sequence
(password: tacoma).
In “Naturalizing Aesthetic Experience: The Role of (Liberated) Embodied Simulation,”
Vittorio Gallese contends that “[o]ur visual experience of the world is the outcome of
multimodal integration processes, in which the motor system is one of the key players.102” The
brain, then, contends with visual stimulation through the previsual motor cortex, this includes,
especially, information that contains action thought possible to correspond to the perceiver’s
normal function as the perceiver. This is to mean that the activation and expression of
correspondent excitement or activity is amplified or more accessible when actions depicted
102 Gallese, Vittorio. “Naturalizing Aesthetic Experience: The Role of (Liberated) Embodied Simulation”
Projections vol 2 issue 2 winter 2018 54

63
correlate to actions previously experienced. He argues further that the “haptic dimension of
vision and the metaphorically prehensile characteristics of the eye double and become literal.
Contact is no longer just simulated; it is current. The ‘skin-screen’ doubles the tactility of vision
by virtue of its being the potential object of manual contacts103” This skin-screen, in the context
of Tacoma exists as thin, semi-translucent human-shaped sets of polygons, interactable,
penetrable, and transmissible. The player-character must literally mimic the body of the character
they are following and move into that body in order to access the private information of the
character: what they messaged recently, notes for a conversation, journal-like entries.
Tacoma takes inspiration less from contemporary neuroaesthetics and more from the
environmental storytelling of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More (2011-present). In interviews with
Rolling Stone104 and Shall We Play a Game?105 Fulbright co-founders Steve Gaynor and Karla
Zimonja discuss the feeling they were trying to get with the game (and how it was different than
what they were trying to evoke with Gone Home. Gaynor states, “That was where we took
inspiration from the immersive theater production Sleep No More. Which is this production
where you as the audience are sharing the space with the performers, on three or four stories of
this hotel that they've reconstructed. The performers are moving through the space – it's all
pantomime and dance – and you as an audience member are just kind of wandering through it106”
This sense of following shaped much of the mechanics of the game. He continues: “You as the
103 Ibid 57
104 Suellentrop, Chris. “Steve Gaynor on ‘Tacoma,’ ‘Sleep No More’ and What it all Means. August 31, 2017.
https://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/features/sleep-no-more-walking-simulators-and-tacoma-w498642
(No longer available on Rolling Stone. Is accessible through webcapture a
http://web.archive.org/web/20171009172145/https://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/features/sleep-no-morewalking-simulators-and-tacoma-w498642
105 Shall We Play A Game “Tacoma’ & ‘Gone Home’ designer Steve Gaynor” Posted 12 September, 2017. Retrieved:
podbay.fm/p/shall-we-play-a-game/e/1505245086.
106 Ibid

64
viewer can obviously only be in one place at one time. So you follow the first person to see
where they went. You have no idea where the other people went. But then you realize that the
evening is three hours long, but the performance loops three times over the course of the
night.107” They tried to incorporate the sense of looping into the game in the form or a rewind
mechanic. The player and player character are able to rewind the sets of actions they have
followed and replay them as well as the same acted time in other locations on the ship in order to
better see what is happening all over. This provides narrative opportunity in a similar way as
Sleep No More in that the iterative loop plays a key role in the game’s storytelling. It is different,
though, in Tacoma, in that there is an additional layer of information available to the character
and in that the observed actors (in this case the crew) are not aware of the viewer’s presence.
Gaynor concludes, “[w]e wanted to have that Sleep No More feeling. We had to get partway
there before we realized what we were really trying to do”108. I would contend that the additions
available to the game but unavailable to the play create a more intimate feeling of following and
connection.
Because of the way in which physical movement and space is matched (and ultimately
co-occupied), Tacoma articulates a story of intersubjectivity or intercorporeality. It is the
exaggerated storytelling version of what Gallese et al have contended is the function of mirror
neurons in relation to notions of intersubjectivity.
“The discovery of mirror neurons gives us a new empirically founded notion of
intersubjectivity, first and foremost conceived as intercorporeality—the mutual resonance
107 Ibid
108 Ibid

65
of intentionally meaningful sensorimotor behaviors. Our understanding of others as
intentional agents does not exclusively depend on language, but also on the relational
nature of action. In many situations, we can directly grasp the meaning of other people’s
basic actions thanks to the motor equivalence between what others do and what we can
do. Intercorporeality thus becomes the main source of the basic knowledge we entertain
of others. Motor simulation instantiated by neurons endowed with the MM is probably
the neural correlate of this human faculty, describable in functional terms as ‘embodied
simulation109’”
Gallese here is gesturing toward an embodied, intersubjective relationship between not only
humans and one another but also between humans and visual objects. He continues, “Through
the lens of neuroscience, we can now look at the human aesthetic–symbolic dimension also from
the dimension of bodily presence110.” Here, drawing from Gumbrecht, he distinguishes between
“meaning” and “presence” in aesthetic reception. He states “[w]hen presence predominates,
world objects chiefly acquire their sense by virtue of their intrinsic sensorimotor inherence to
perceivers111.”
Tacoma transforms this neural mechanism into a storytelling operation. It allows the
player to perform what happens when one engages with art on a level removed from this
engagement. The player, with Amy, interacts with and observes memories of a set time before
their arrival, they don’t have agency in the traditional sense as they have no control over the
outcome of these events, rather they share a space with, move with, and co-occupy a world with
109 Gallese, Vittorio. “The Problem of Images: A View From the Brain-Body.” Phenomenology and Mind n. 14. 2018
pp 73-74
110 Ibid 77.
111 Ibid 77

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the observed, abstracted forms around them. This does not limit the feeling of freedom within the
game, nor does the player and player character’s movement through the space interfere with the
story as it is available to them. Rather, these movements are vital to the games storytelling
ingenuity and central to the aesthetic pleasure drawn from it. Gallese continues:
“Contemporary neuroscience shows that what we see is not the simple “visual” recording
in our brain of what stands in front of our eyes, but the result of a complex construction,
whose outcome is the result of the fundamental contribution of our body with its motor
potentialities, our senses and emotions, our imagination, and our memories. We must
definitely abandon the outdated concept of solipsistic and “purely visual” vision. Vision
is a complex experience, intrinsically synesthetic, that is, made of attributes that largely
exceed the mere transposition in visual coordinates of what we experience any time we
lay our eyes on something”.
Gallese is, if anything, affirming the work of scholars like Vivian Sobchak, Laura Marks, and
WJT Mitchell with his experimental neuroscientific approach. Like Mitchell, it seems, his work
has led him to a consideration of the problem of images—their problematic visuality, the
strangeness of their construction at human hands, and the opaqueness of meaning and structure
they seem to bear when approached. It is strange to see such a strong analogue for this current
theoretical work take place aboard a star craft so much akin to the holodeck in Star Trek. And
yet here we don’t find a fantasy of control and agency. Instead we find a promise of cohabitation
and intersubjective exploration. This, perhaps is a lost promise of games, something different
than any sort of better with or without—a strange connection between player and object, player
and character, player and polygon.

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Chapter 3 Finishing a Swan--Co-Authoring, Agency, and Constraint
The Unfinished Swan (2012), even by walking simulator standards, is an unambiguously
experimental game. The game opens by telling the story of a young person, Monroe, who, after
their mother’s death, is sent to an orphanage. Monroe’s mother was an artist, a painter, who
never finished a piece. Monroe is sent to an orphanage and informed that they can only keep one
of the paintings left to them by their mother. Monroe selects a painting of a swan, unfinished,
without a neck. This introduction is presented in a storybook style, complete with black ink
illustrations (Figures 1-4). Monroe awakens one night to find a door that he had “never seen
before,” and discovers that his beloved swan has left the painting and ventured away into,
presumably, wherever the mysterious door leads. On the other side of the door, Monroe is met
with a blank canvas, an apparently empty nothing extending in all directions as far as the eye can
see. The player then takes control of Monroe with nothing in view but a cursor.
Instead of the type of cursor typically found in first person videogames, the action button
here fires ink rather than bullets. As the ink flies, the player finds the previously empty space
filling with previously unseen details: benches, steppingstones, pathways, walls, plants, and all
sorts of other things (Figures 5-16). A whole town is rendered visible, devoid of life, but visible
in structure.
As the character moves through the space, they are consistently oriented to their target.
The swan has, it seems, left little yellow footprints everywhere they have been. These prints are
unpaintable by the character, lasting even if targeted by plops of ink. Being a different color,
yellow--as is often the case in games—serves a guiding function for the player. One is frequently

68
Figures 3.1-3.4. The game’s storybook opening which tells Monroe’s story so far.

69
Figures 3.5-3.16 (cropped): Monroe is met with a perfectly white space, an infinite
emptiness that becomes full as the player character and Monroe fire balls of ink into the white

70
abyss. What was blank space, is suddenly full—of park benches, steppingstones, walkways and
walls.
able to orient themselves through the discovery, pursuit, and rediscovery of yellow markings
throughout the game space (Figure 13 and 16). Following these yellow traces, the player comes
to find a whole world unfold before them.
This world is the construction of a mysterious, sleeping king, also an artist, who had
constructed the world Monroe finds himself in and all its residents. Lonely, the king painted
Monroe’s mother into existence. After giving birth to Monroe, though, she fled. The king then
turned his attention to the town, but the townsfolk abandoned him. He then decided to forge in
his likeness a large statue—which remained unfinished as he slipped into a deep slumber. Before
departing (into another kind of death), the king passes his paintbrush to Monroe, signaling the
latter as an heir. Monroe then completes his mother’s painting of the swan and adds his own
touches to the image.
The game’s story is about art and the role of the artist. This is true too of its mechanics—
the player reveals the game world by painting it into existence in the beginning after all. More
than a simple allegorical message about the positive role of art in society or in families (both of
which have a place in the game), The Unfinished Swan also asks some complicated question
about the role of the designer and the role of the player in the construction of game art. It
performs, too, a kind of mapping out of an art/artist/audience relationship and complicates that
relationship through its mechanics. A bit on the nose, the game suggests, frequently, that things
remain unfinished before they are engaged with—but rather than rehashing, say, the role of the
reader from Eco or Barthes, it also suggests something about the nature of experience, the role of
the body and action in the construction of experience. And it suggests something, I believe about
the role of authorship within a constrained expressive landscape. Much of the rest of this chapter

71
will be dedicated first, borrowing from cinema, with authorship, and then with updating notions
of constraint and agency in games through first an examination of competing but similar
discourses on experient-constructed experiences (namely transactionism and enactivism). It will
then turn to extant theories of affordance and constraint and map these back onto Unfinished
Swan.
Authorship
Andrew Sarris famously remarked “a director must exhibit certain recurrent
characteristics of style, which serve as his signature. The way a film looks and moves should
have some relationship to the way a director thinks and feels.112” Here he inextricably linked
auteur theory less to the quality of films produced by the director and more to the consistency of
personality and style which form a pattern in the director’s work. Auteurs can make bad films
and non-auteurs can make good films but one knows an auteur-produced film when one sees it:
its recognizability, its distinction, is the quality that matters most. This is not to suggest that
quality is unimportant for auteurists, quite the contrary is true. It simply means that personality is
the determining factor and paramount—something existentially-linking creator to work, felt in
the film, left there by the director for the savvy viewer to find, to collect and categorize, and to
discuss with other like-minded cinephiles. Certainly, auteur theory, especially at its peak critical
value, was more complicated than simply, say, finding a dominant style or personality across a
creator’s set of films, but it is in the history of this discussion of personality and style—up to
contemporary revaluations of the idea in terms of creator/experient contact.
It is in this artist’s fingerprint, their signature, that much of classical auteur theory staked
its terms, values, and views of aesthetics. In “The Practices of Authorship,” David Gerstner
112 Sarris, Andrew. “Notes on Auteur Theory in 1962” Film Culture (Winter 1962-1963)

72
collects a myriad of signature and pen metaphors from a large cast of critics: “Deleuze…claimed
that there is ‘no room for metaphor’ in Astruc’s ‘camera-pen’…Derrida argued that ecriture was
an act of inscription facilitated not only by the stroke of a pen but through ‘cinematography.’113”
He states, too, that “[a]s Astruc would have it, cinema…is its own creative properties that when
fully realized through the authorial hand of the film’s maker the critic may distinguish ‘between
the man who conceives the work and the man who writes it114’” The pen-camera, and the
scripterly acts of inscription that it affords the director-auteur provides in this instance an avenue
for considering their unique character as creator of work.
Often auteurship existed as a commodity to be sold. Along these lines, Dana Polan
reminds us that “there has been [at the time of this writing] attention to the ways ‘auteurs’ are
often constructed, called into being, by institutional forces and discourses and according to
precise institutional needs. That is, instead of the director being opposed to the system,” they are
“now seen as a function – a marketable commodity, for example—generated by that system.115”.
Hitchcock especially, as an example, exploited his status as a brand—even propagating the
image of his silhouette as a logo of quality entertainment, packaged for the discerning consumer
and the thrill seeker alike. I will be returning to this marketable branding of the artist and the
artist’s film later in the chapter and will consider it in terms of work on audience belief, ‘liking
feelings” and “beauty feelings” in emerging work on the brain. It is the experience of
accompanying the author, or of having good taste and appreciating an auteur’s work, or of seeing
oneself in the work of the auteur that makes them desirable as a commodity, too. Games, and
113 Gerstner, David. “The Practices of Authorship” in Authorship and Film Eds Gerstner, David A. and Janet Staiger.
Routledge. New York. 2003 16
114 Ibid 6.
115 Polan, Dana. “Auteur Desire” Screening the Past. 1 March, 2001

73
Unfinished Swan in particular, sell this commodity of taste. Unfinished Swan is a classy, indie
game, one about artists, made by artists for a discerning and artistic consumer.
Continuing his discussion of desire and authorship, Polan suggests: “What does the
auteurist want? In large part, I would suggest, the auteurist wants to create meaning by an
imposition of will.116” He finally concludes “there is no need to study the film director but there
is also no need not to study the film director. Indeed, to look at what happens to individuals as
they attempt to negotiate the space of society is one way to enrich social theory and, in this
respect, we can push for a study of the work of directors that is fully and finally historical in the
richest sense of the term.117” In many ways, Unfinished Swan thematizes the desire to impose a
will: first in the story of the king and his pursuit of being remembered, of being adored through
his willing into existence first a wife, then a child, then a city, then a statue. There is also the
order of authorship present between player/player character and game space. The player, too,
will into being, through painting—a kind of auteurist brushstroke—the revelation of the world.
The player and player character co-author the experience through a will, but are also reigned in
by the affordances of the space—the architecture of it. The Unfinished Swan tells the story of a
great arrogance, the king is shown discerning, himself, what is good taste, what colors belong in
his garden, but even then the garden resists and pushes back against the king. His story is told,
too, through an authorial format, pages from a picture book reveal much of the kings story
throughout (Figures 17-28).
The shape of these affordances and constraints are suggestive of a few different kinds of
readings. I would suggest here that principles from neuroscience can greatly inform the kinds of
116 Ibid
117 Ibid

74
authorial experience which takes shape, quite literally, in the game. Specifically, Gallese’s
contention about art can be helpful.

75
Figures 3.17-3.28. The Player greedily fills in the white space with thick ink, finding a
note about the king’s desire to keep things white. These textual components are pages in
a book.
Gallese argues in “Naturalizing Aesthetic Experience” that cognitive neuroscience can
empirically investigate art and aesthetics using different approaches to address a number of
different issues and questions including:
1. It can use artistic expressions to understand how the brain works
2. It can localize the brain—and/or reduce to its functioning—aesthetic concepts (beauty,
the sublime, etc.)
3. It can study the brain to explain art
4. It can study the brain-body in relation to artistic expressions in order to understand the
constitutive elements of aesthetic experience and the genesis of aesthetic concepts118
.
He continues by stating that “[s]tyle is basically what strengthens our relationship with a work of
art, what allows us to orient (or lose) ourselves within imaginary worlds of fiction. Style is a way
to manipulate the mediation to establish a peculiar intersubjective relationship between us and
the work of art.119” It is through the production of style, that The Unfinished Swan transports the
character and the player character into another world. The unfinishedness of the swan, and the
compelling empty space invite the player to engage. The scrawling ink, bold and black against
the white space, acts not only in defiance of the king’s edict on the beauty of white, but is also
striking and unique. Similarly, the adaptation of the shooter mechanic, a stylized twist on the
FPS genre, suggests that this game is unique, special and will be a meaningful experience for the
118 Gallese, Vittorio. “Naturalizing Aesthetic Experience: The Role of (Liberated) Embodied Simulation”
119 Ibid.

76
player. The player is asked to engage, bodily, through stylistic choices made by the designers and
implemented in the game world.
Drawing on his work on mirror neurons, the shared manifold hypothesis, and embodied
simulation theory, Gallese argues that neurocinematics is opposed to oculocentric understandings
of cinematic art: “[w]hen watching films, what we see is not only the simple “visual” recording
in our brain of what stands in front of our eyes—that is, images moving on a screen—but the
result of a complex construction whose outcome requires the fundamental contribution of our
body with its motor potentialities, our senses and emotions, our imagination, and our
memories.120” He further argues, “[n]euroscience has swept away the ‘oculocentric’ concept of
‘purely visual’ vision, empirically grounding a new model of visual perception. Vision is a
complex experience, intrinsically synesthetic, that is, made of attributes that largely exceed the
mere transposition in visual coordinates of what we experience any time we lay our eyes on
something. The expression ‘laying the eyes on’ indeed betrays the haptic quality of vision: our
eyes are not just optical instruments but are also ‘hands’ touching and exploring the visible,
turning it into something seen by someone.121” The eye’s work, then, in conjunction with the
human motor system, mirror neurons, and our capacity to simulate spatial and physical
experiences, can be expressed as a physical extension and expression of the person engaged in
viewing. Consistently touching, the eye works as an invisible hand mimicking action, for
example, a hand grabbing, facial touching, the wry upturned lip of an actor’s performance. In
The Unfinished Swan, the oculocentric, visual space is a space that is empty. Acting, moving,
navigating the space requires motion, the body. The character throws paint to perceive the world
120 Ibid
121 Ibid

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around them. They then move through that world in order to constitute it—moving and throwing
and then, and only then, seeing. The space is authored by the player. The space is also enacted.
Enactivism and Transactionism
Pia Tikka in “Enactive Authorship” constructs a kind of “second-order authorship” in
which “the author is in charge of the systemic and algorithmic creation of an enactive narrative
medium.” It “is a system with emergent, self-organizing behavior, driven by a recursive two-way
dynamic in which the system receives psychophysiological feedback from the experient, which
modifies the narrative, which in turn influences the embodied response of the expedient”. This
model does not suggest “full control of the narrative in the cybernetic sense of first order
control…[but rather] the author is the creator and controller of a system in which narrative
events take place in an emergent manner, eventually outside of the author's control, albeit within
the limits and functions set by the author.” In such a system, ‘the second-order author assumes a
perspective to the system as a whole.’” Similarly, “[s]econd-order authorship is the key to
contrasting the dynamics of enaction with that of interaction: While interaction always
assumes direct influences between persons or things (e.g., human-computer interaction),
enaction allows also mediated relations, such as in the case between the author and the
experient.122”
She continues, on simulation, “The concept of simulation is a means to describe how the
author and the experient project their own experiences onto others in order to understand
(recreate, reconstruct) their intentions and actions.123” This holds the author's imaginative
perspective to another person's film viewing experience via the situatedness of the protagonist. It
122Tikka, Pia. “Enactive Authorship” Projections Vol 16 Issue 1. 2020
123 Ibid

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also refers to the film viewer engaged with and simulating the protagonist's situatedness,
motivations, desires, and so on. In this sense, the protagonist is taken as an anchor, an
embodiment of the second-person embodied simulations of both the author and the viewer124.”
This does not mean that this position is passive. According to Tikka, “according to the
enactive mind approach a living organism is never passive versus active, instead, it is enactive by
default125” It is always making sense, building meaning, and understanding its position in the
world, how it is situated in relation to other things and beings. Film-viewing is not totally
dissimilar in this case from living in the world away from film, in being situated in “actual” life.
Of course, and obviously, film is not the same as lived experience in every detail, watching a
film is not identical to living a moment. For example, if I were to experience an auto accident,
my car colliding at high speed into another person’s car, my airbag inflating and thankfully
hitting me in the face, my seatbelt tightening and securing me, I would not find that experience
identical to watching a film, first person or not, of a person experience a car accident.
According to Micheal Wheeler the dominance of the mind or brain in cognitive science
gets in the way of the possible extensionability of the creative act. As he puts it, rightly, “In its
orthodox form, contemporary cognitive theory has a neuro-centric bias. This bias isn’t irrational.
For example, cognitive science has taken great strides forward precisely by working on the
assumption that the brain is where the action is.”126 The brain-bias found in much of
contemporary cognitive science is increasingly difficult to defend. More and more, the human is
necessarily viewed as an organism operating as a system of impulse-responses, intentions,
124 Ibid
125 Ibid
126 Wheeler. Michael. “Talking About More than Heads: the Embodied, Embedded, and Extended Creative Mind.”
Creativity and Philosophy. Routledge. 2018 1

79
extensions, embodiments, and embeddedness, rather than a “brain with a body” as the
cognitivists would typically posit or a “body with a brain” as the phenomenologically motivated
would contend. Or as Wheeler more aptly puts it: “the path of creation is revealed to be routinely
constituted by dynamic arrays of body-involving and environment-involving processing loops. In
other words, the creative mind is embodied, embedded, and extended.127”
Furthermore, both the audience and the author, whether individual, collective, or
functional, operate within an embodied-bounded rationality paradigm which would suggest that
“Our own planning and problem solving involve behavioral responses that depend on the
behaviours of others. To put it simply, it is not the brain per se, but the brain–body, by means of
its interactions with the world of which it is part, that enacts our cognitive capacities.128” If one is
to take seriously the possibility that rationality is wrapped up in an embodied being in the world,
then it is difficult to suggest that the constraints of embodied experience of the world do not
effect or determine ones thinking of or understanding of their position in the world. This is as
true of cinematic experiences as it is of one’s lived everyday experience. The aesthetic
experience is naturally similar to the mundane in this sense. In Unfinished Swan the normal
rendering of space in games, through the player’s movement through it, is thematized. The
mundane, normal action of play, normally invisible to the player, is made visible—one does not
normally think about the town square of a western shooter, for example, appearing only when it
is explored—but in The Unfinished Swan one cannot help but think of this ordinary operation.
127 Ibid 13
128 Viale, Riccardo, Shaun Gallagher ,and Vittorio Gallese. “Bounded Rationality, Enactive Problem Solving, and the
Neuroscience of Social Interaction” Frontiers in Psychology. May 2023

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Henry Jenkins in “Game Design as Narrative Architecture” contends that traditional
game/narrative arguments are too constrained by their preoccupation with “the rules and
conventions of classical linear storytelling at the expense of considerations of other kinds of
narratives.”129 Similarly, these claims pay too little attention “to the process of narrative
comprehension.” Finally, they disregard “whether narrative elements might enter games at a
more localized level” and changes to the cultural “storytelling environment” created by
transformations on the level of media production, distribution and consumption. For Jenkins,
some of the changes to narrative brought about by transformations to the media landscape can be
better articulated through a study of space and spatiality represented in and formed by these new
media objects. Reframing issues of narrative through spatial terms allows media makers and
users to engage with narrative content through four primary concepts “evocation,” “enactment,”
“embeddedness,” and “emergence.”130 By evocation, Jenkins seems to mean the ways in which
spaces are infused with narrative content and evoke specific, often preestablished, perspectives,
feelings or fantasies. In considering enactment he formulates space as structuring narrative
experience through the character’s movement through them. Narrative and narrativity are
embedded into environments insomuch as they provide cues that trigger narrative-making
activity on the part of the player—like a note found on a shelf expressing lost love, or a child’s
toy lost and worn in a field. Finally, emergence constitutes the ways in which story information
may be scattered through a space in a less programmatic way, allowing the player to do a lot of
the creative activity of building these stories on their own.
129 Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture” Retrieved from
http://homes.lmc.gatech.edu/~bogost/courses/spring07/lcc3710/readings/jenkins_game-design.pdf
130 Ibid.

81
While Jenkins’ discussion of enactment is not identical to Pikka’s, he is drawing a similar
conclusion as the one found in the text discussed previously. Similar conclusions, too, are found
in Daniel Reynolds work. In this case, though, these conclusions come not from media studies or
cognitive psychology, but from philosophical pragmatism.
Daniel Reynolds in Media in Mind claims the unusual use of the first-person mechanic in
The Unfinished Swan “compels the players not only to be active in their creation of a perceptible
game world, but to be conscious of the labor involved in that activity.131” Because the game
foregrounds the “work of perception” it is able to remind the player that “players of all video
games actively create perception when they explore game spaces and probe the properties of
game worlds.132” Because games require skill to play, and an active engagement with joysticks
or mice or touchscreens, or other interface devices, those actions are required to experience and
to perceive the world of the game at any moment. Reductively, this points to the obvious quality
of games: they are played to be experienced, but at the same time, this is suggestive of an
allegorical relationship between The Unfinished Swan, games in general, and, more broadly and
profoundly, our being in the world as humans. Reynolds continues: “by inhabiting and moving
through the world…we embark on a series of differentiations, dividing light from dark, soft from
hard, loud from quiet, object from non-object…[o]ver time these differentiations build on one
another and become more specialized” taxonomies emerge, and differences between things are
negotiated and solidified133
.
131 Reynolds, Daniel. Media in Mind. Oxford UP. 2019. 21
132 Ibid. 21
133 Ibid 21-22

82
While on the one hand the construction of different, discrete, objects from these
taxonomies can result in the erection of “legible conceptual boundaries between things,
boundaries that help us to impose order on our surroundings and thus to exert control over
them134” Reynolds also suggests that this formation of thinking veils the “primordial
entanglements” that exist between ourselves and all things.
While I agree that the construction of discrete boundaries serves an epistemological
function, his conclusions about entanglements fall short. They simply don’t go far enough. His
proposed model for consuming media, “Transactionism,” on the other hand, provides another
window into thinking about games in a productive way. “Perception”, he claims, “is not
something we do to media, nor it is something that media create in us. It is a quality of shared
activity among users and media.”135 His “transactionism” shares traits with Pia Tikka’s version
of enactivism.
Where Tikka stresses the constrained nature of the audience’s creative act in her work,
Reynolds sees an exchange occurring between player and game (in this case) or between subject
and the continuous whole in which they are a part of. Tikka’s enactive authorship model, and
Reynold’s vision of transacionism’s role in game/player relationships are both helpful when
considering how to update models of gamic constraint, and gamic agency as it is exists within
the bounds of player engagement and limitations in gamic action. There is a kind of agency at
work in The Unfinished Swan, and a kind of tension in that agency between the constructed game
space and the role of the player to fill out that game space. It is a tension of the king, sitting in for
134 Ibid 22
135 Ibid 24

83
the designer, who has made a white world, and the player who is throwing about a bucket of
paint in defiance of the king (but is only able to do so by design).
Agency and Constraint
Karen Tanenbaum and Theresa Jean Tanenbaum both suggest, in “Agency as
Commitment to Meaning: Communicative Competence in Games” that agency is an oft
misunderstood, or at least poorly defined, term in game studies and game criticism. This creates
difficulties because, as they suggest, “agency has long been considered one of the key pleasures
of interacting with digital games.136” They then list a taxonomy of agencies as discussed
frequently in and around games criticisms. This list includes:
1. Agency as choice
2. Agency as freedom
3. Agency as illusion137
They then substitute, after critiquing each for their respective difficulties in the current game
environment, a separate set of bounds around the concept of agency. They propose that agency
be defined in terms of commitment and meaning. They conclude
[b]y shifting attention to the meaningful mappings between player intention and system
response, our definition provides theorists and designers with a tool for developing game
experiences that are simultaneously narratively rich and interactionally satisfying. In this
136 Tanenbaum, Karen and Theresa Jean Tanenbaum. “Agency as Commitment to Meaning: Communicative
Competence in Games.” Digital Creativity. Vol. 21, No. 1. (2020). 11
137 Ibid 12-13

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way, we contend that our reframing of agency helps to reconcile the purported tension
between narrative and interaction.138
This tension is discussed in more detail in the chapter of this dissertation which deals with
Tacoma embodied simulation. Here I am more concerned with their discussion as it connects to
issues of meaningful interaction within systems which inherently constrain. Or, to put it
differently, consider how their argument is strengthened theoretically, by borrowing conclusions
from enactivist, transactionist, and bounded embodied rationality based conceptual frameworks.
This is similarly of interest to discussions of constraints as they relate to the current
gaming landscape. Constraints, both on the game designer’s ability to construct, and the player’s
ability to make meaning out of games, are increasingly viewed as dynamically important to game
design processes—they are less considered with viewing the players role in navigating the gamic
text. If the player is a coauthor in the constructed experience of the game space, then certainly
there must be a translatable theory of productive authorial constraint that can be applied to the
player as well. Players, after all are consistently constrained in their play –whether by design, as
in walls in a game world, or by choice, as in players refusing to kill NPCs in a playthrough of an
action game such as Metal Gear Solid, or Red Dead Redemption 2. This is, perhaps, another area
where considerations from Reynolds, Tikka, and Gallese et al, may be helpful. The player
engages with the story and gameplay material within a framework generated by the designers.
Their actions are framed by what is possible and probable. And from within that framework, they
are able to engage in a variety of activities. They often, push up against the bounds of
acceptability in terms of constraint.
138 Ibid 16

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Players do not always play as one would expect or “intend” though. Adapting Stuart
Hall’s encoding/decoding model for games and interactive technology, Adrienne Shaw
summarizes
On the ‘decoding’ end, there are three ways an audience member might decode any given
message. This first is dominant or preferred readings, in which the message is decoded
with the same meaning as was intended when it was encoded. Second, negotiated
readings involve a mixture of preferred and resistant readings. Third is the oppositional
reading in which the audience member decodes the message in the opposite way as was
intended by the producer139

Shaw then puts this encoding/decoding model into direct conversation with James Gibson’s
notion of affordances, suggesting that “[a]ffordances then are highly interpretive, as deciphering
the use of objects and environments is related directly to the subject position of the organism.140”
This model was subsequently updated by Donald Norman who considered the interaction
between humans and machines and who contended that “Gibson assumed there were too many
open possibilities in how objects in the environment could be use. The original theory” according
to Norman, “did not take into account the way objects themselves encouraged some sorts of uses
over others.
Shaw then adapts, rather successful, Hall’s encoding/decoding model to include issues of
affordances in interactive media (Figure 29)
139 Shaw, Adrienne. “Encoding itand Decoding Affordances: Stuart Hall and Interactive Media Technologies” Media,
Culture and Society. 2017. Vol. 39, Issue 4.
140 ibid

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Figure 3.29. Shaw attempts to consolidate Hall and Gibson’s models into a framework
which takes seriously the structural differences generated by direct interactivity,
machines, and system-design (Diagram from Shaw’s text)
This is reflected in discussions which have been ongoing around the walking simulator
genre since its inception. Steve Gaynor, the since rightfully ousted founder of Fulbright
discussing Gone Home at GDC 14 (an annual game developers conference), suggests that this
relationship is at the heart of issues which surrounded Fullbright’s work. He states that Gone
Home’s gamesness is what gives it any meaning at all…if it wasn’t a game, it wouldn’t mean
anything at all.”141 Certainly the game doesn’t adhere to the classic game model, as Gaynor
explains: “The arguments are: there’s no combat. there’s no story branching or player builds,
141 Would You Kindly, “Steve Gaynor: Why is Gone Home a Game?” Youtube, September 14, 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haNPnr03mrg

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there’s no failstate, or it’s a short game, you are not going to get 30 hours out of it.”142 These
aspects of the classic game model, to some degree, align with player expectations about what
AAA games feel like. Gaynor acknowledges that “these are the things that set it apart form a
modern, mainstream video game…but I think Gone Home has very much in common with
games throughout the ages. With game experiences that we’ve had…it comes in different
forms.”143 These other experiences include, “variability of player experiences…the idea that no
two players experience is exactly the same…[a] central focus on player agency driving what
happens and what the player’s experience of the game is” and “[a] spirit of playfulness within the
themes and ruleset of the game.”144 For Gaynor then, the classic game model isn’t open enough
to acknowledge the gameness of Gone Home, a separate diagnostic is needed, one that will allow
for “all of these things” which “define what games are.”145 In order to better understand the
experience of something like Gone Home, then, one may look to Fullbright’s goals for the game.
These goals center around dialogue construction and facilitation. “We can establish a dialogue,”
he states, “It’s a dialogue between yourself and this kind of unpredictable thing that is happening
between you and this space between the game. It is a dialogue between you and the game. But
therefore, also between you and the designer of the game. It is a mediated discussion.” This
suggests that games, for the team at Fullbright, can also be designed to create something of a
conversation between player and system. Rules, level design, AI interactions, variability, a
degree of player agency, and playfulness, are deployed in service of this more primary objective.
142 Ibid.
143 Ibid.
144 Ibid.
145 Ibid

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In “Moving Toward Emotions in Aesthetic Experience” Cinzia Di Dio and Vittorio
Gallese suggest that “the motor system” which is highly integrated into aesthetic appreciation “is
not only triggered when observing others performing an action. But also by elements in the
environment withing which we move and toward which we act.146” This is evocative, they
suggest of affordances, “there can be many ‘affordances’ in the environment that may lead to
different courses of action” but “to react quickly and efficiently to environmental opportunities
(or even jeopardies), our brain develops associations between environmental elements and
prototypical actions and movements likely to produce the most desirable outcome147” What this
outcome is may differ, in the case of games, player to player, but they are “indexed by an
individual’s feeling of physical and psychological comfort induced by the physical context
withing which actions are lived148.” This is true of both the “real” and representational worlds,
and “[a]rchitectural settings can orchestrate environmental elements to trigger an embodied
simulation of human behaviors together with their rich emotional layers.149” Di Dio and Gallese
conclude that “[t]he magnetism exerted on us by the places where we feel good can now be
penetrated—at least in part—thanks to the notion of embodied architecture and its
neuroscientific investigation.150”
In “Architectural Affordances: Linking Action, Perception and Cognition” Zakaria
Djebbara and Klaus Gramann argue that the shape of space “resonates” with the human body and
that because this happens “is precisely what a term like ‘architectural affordances’ reflects…the
146 Di Dio, Cinzia and Vittorio Gallese. “Moving Toward Emotions in Aesthetic Experience” Brain, Beauty, and Art:
Essays Bringing Neuroaesthetics in Focus. Eds. Anjan Chatterjee and Eileen R. Cardillo. Oxford UP. 2022. 25
147 Ibid 25.
148 Ibid 25
149 Ibid 25.
150 Ibid 25.

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shape of space contributes to the shape of our thoughts and reflections” and that, for example,
when unnecessary limitations are placed on spatial experiences one may feel “robbed of the
necessary affordances to interact with the environment” this becomes “frustrating and negative”
as an experience151. It is my contention that this is the form The Unfinished Swan takes—as an
architectural play space which invites the player to become an author of the second order. It is in
the space of it, slowly revealed, that the player experiences a story both laid out for them and by
them, revealed by their engagement and yet constrained by the bones structured in place. This
experience is the story, told again in its mechanics. There is a personality, a style present. To
return to Andrew Sarris and to perhaps challenge his quote with an update: “The [this game]
looks and moves should have some relationship to the way a [designer and player] thinks and
feels.”
151 Djebbara, Zakaria and Klaus Gramann. “Architectural Affordances: Linking Action Perception and Cognition”
Brain, Beauty, and Art: Essays Bringing Neuroaesthetics in Focus. Eds. Anjan Chatterjee and Eileen R. Cardillo.
Oxford UP. 2022. 233

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CHAPTER 4 Navigating Memory Palaces/Memory Ruins in Ether One
Ether One152 (2014), developed by White Paper Games and released first on PC and then
later on Sony’s PlayStation 5, is mechanically similar to many of the other games discussed so
far in this dissertation. And like many of the other games discussed, it also thematizes its
mechanics in fascinating ways. The game asks the player to work as a “restorer,” a person who is
able to move through the minds of others—specifically those who have suffered from
debilitating, degenerative, form of dementia, memory loss, or other brain disease/mental illness
linked to memory and identity. The player, moving through the space of the mind of the other,
navigates a changing landscape, solves puzzles and problems within the memories of the other,
and unfolds and connects the fragmented, unevenly distributed, non-linear narrative of the
person’s life up to the point of the restorer’s access. The player, and player character, seeks to
restore the memory of the patient they are working on.
In Ether One, the player experiences the memories of the subject they are investigating
through the exploration of them as spatially represented and configured. These lean, especially at
the beginning of the game, toward representations of the spaces and times that are being
remembered as a kind of memento-simulacrum.
This makes sense when considering the way memory appears to work. The human
capacity for memory is connected to the hippocampus which is also responsible for our ability to
navigate space successfully. As Hassabis, Chu, Rees, et al. discuss in “Decoding the Neural
Ensembles of the Hippocampus”, “hippocampus underpins our ability to navigate, to form and
152 Ether One. White Paper Games. 2014

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recollect memories, and to imagine future experiences.”153 They came to this conclusion by
studying subjects within a VR environment using fMRI imaging. They found that “that highly
abstracted representations of space are expressed in the human hippocampus.”154 Further, they
concluded “, demonstrating that highly abstracted representations of space are expressed across
tens of thousands of coordinated neurons in the human hippocampus in a structured manner. In
so doing, we have shown that, contrary to current consensus, neuronal ensembles representing
place memories must be large, stable, and have an anisotropic structure.”155 Likewise, “Spatial
representations of the type investigated here have been suggested to form the scaffold upon
which episodic memories are built…but the precise mechanism by which the hippocampus
achieves this is still unknown.”156 Episodic memories, they contend, are dependent on highly
complex spatial models within the brain. Space and memory are, at leas as demonstrated by this
and other studies, inextricably linked.
Jennifer Groh, putting it differently, in Making Space: How the Brain Knows Where
Things Are states that while, “[y]ou can walk across your kitchen, out the door, down the street
to the nearest café, and back again without difficulty,” the process for doing so “involves
sophisticated algorithms for keeping track of where you are and where you want to go.”157
Humans, she reminds us, “navigate in a…purposeful and sophisticated fashion…we tend to
know where we are at any moment, and we take deliberate action to go from one particular place
153 Hassabis, Demis et al. “Decoding neuronal ensembles in the human hippocampus.” Current biology : CB vol.
19.7 (2009): 546-54
154 ibid
155 Ibid.
156 Ibid
157 Groh, Jennifer. Making Space: How the Brain Knows Where Things Are. Harvard UP, 2014 178

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to another.”158 She continues, “knowing where we are is not just a matter of what we perceive
from a particular spot, but also of knowing how we got to that spot”159
To disrupt one’s sense of space requires more than just blindfolding a person and leading
them to a new location: “I would have to be blindfolded so I couldn’t see during the journey, but
that wouldn’t be quite enough. Someone would also have to spin me around a few times to make
me dizzy, and they would have to transport me rather than allowing me to walk under my own
power. This would disrupt my sense of direction and my sense of how far I have traveled, two
critical pieces of how we know where we are.”160 Knowledge of place, and travel, is built not
only out of visual sensory data. Knowledge of where one is, and where one is going, is embodied
knowledge—built out of a collection of information perceived with the eyes, ears, limbs, skin.
But Groh confirms Hasabi’s position as well: “The hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped area
underneath the outer portion of the cortex, plays a role in both memory and spatial sensing.
Neurons in the hippocampus of rats [for example], have receptive fields for the rat’s own
position in the environment.” She continues, “the pairing of spatial sensing and memory suggests
that not only does memory help us build our spatial sense, but that our spatial sense may in tern
help us to build memories.”161 The interrelated nature of navigation and memory draws to mind
the mnemonic device of the memory palace: the mental navigable storehouse of information
where one may access more readily easily lost or discarded information.
This is, of course, nothing really new. Cicero, for example, famously discussed the spatial
quality of memory, and the construction of “memory loci” as devices for holding large amounts
158 Ibid 178.
159 Ibid 179.
160 Ibid 179
161 Ibid 196

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of memory. It is difficult to decipher the effectiveness of this memory strategy, and outside of the
bounds of this chapter, but it is fascinating to see the dream of the memory palace reappear
through pop culture throughout the ages. The shape they take often reflecting the technological
and cultural moment from which they arise. The library, the archive, or the database depending
on whom is speaking and from what historical vantage point.
More recently, these memory loci have been translated into game and virtual spaces. On
the popular level, a cursory search of reddit including the terms “memory palace” and “VR”
brings up a whole slate of results from “Memory Palaces in VR on Oculus Quest!162” to “Help:
I’m looking for a VR app that can help me create a ‘mind palace’163”, VR subreddits contain a
surprising number of memory loci requests, apps, or suggestions. Each of which has a surprising
amount of engagement. In many of these, people are seeking ways to construct virtual mnemonic
devices using already existing games and technologies. For example, in one, a person discusses
their experience using No Man’s Sky, the massive, procedurally generated interplanetary
exploration game released by Hello Games in 2016, to place and configure their memory objects.
In another, users discuss using Miro, Sketchfab, and other browser-based organization and object
systems to build out an interconnected platform of memory things.
Attempts at memory augmentation have been made in the experimental VR space as well.
In “Optimized virtual reality-based Method of Loci memorization techniques through increased
immersion and effective memory palace designs: a feasibility study” Moll and Sykes trace the
history of the memory palace and attempt to adapt the methodology to virtual reality164. They
162 https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusQuest/comments/fa9jcu/memory_palaces_in_vr_on_oculus_quest/
163
https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusQuest2/comments/stbydl/help_im_looking_for_a_vr_app_that_can_help_me/
164 Moll, B., Sykes, E. Optimized virtual reality-based Method of Loci memorization techniques through increased
immersion and effective memory palace designs: a feasibility study. Virtual Reality 27, 941–966 (2023).

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ultimately found that more work is needed to adapt method of loci to VR space.
More promisingly, in “A Virtual Reality Memory Palace Variant Aids Knowledge Retrieval
from Scholarly Articles”, the authors suggest, through a literature review and an experiment that
“using a virtual reality-based memory palace variant greatly increased the amount of knowledge
retrieved and retained over the baseline, and it shows a moderate improvement over the other
image-based memory palace variant.165” In each instance, the construction of a personalized VR
space proved difficult. In both studies, participants suggested that greater personalization would
have been appreciated and perhaps helpful in the creation and retention of memory.
Fallout 4 and the Memory Den
Midway through Fallout 4 (2015), the player character is tasked with exploring the
memories of one of the game’s antagonists as a way of discerning the location of the compound
in which the leader of an oppositional organization lives (The Institute). The player uses the
technology at a local “memory den” to accomplish this task. In the memory den, the player is
teleported to a space stylized first as neurons, each of which acts as a pathway leading the player
through episodically presented memories, each represented spatially (FIGURES 1-8). The
etched-out spaces narrativize the key moments in the villain-to-be’s life. It also fills in the gaps
between the players past and the current resent. The visual connective tissue of these memories
are the neurons. They are also connected through voice over indications. These spaces serve not
only as useful narrative spaces—revealing bits of the past, as a more interesting mode of
exposition—but they also connect the player and player character to the subject whose memories
are being explored and interrogated. In this instance, the memories revealed are traumatic or
165 Yang, F and J. Qian, J. Novotny, D. Badre, C. D. Jackson and D. H. Laidlaw, "A Virtual Reality Memory Palace
Variant Aids Knowledge Retrieval from Scholarly Articles," in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer
Graphics, vol. 27, no. 12, pp. 4359-4373, 1 Dec. 2020

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otherwise sad, softening the leader of The Institute (and making the big reveal of the character’s
connection to the protagonist land easier when it happens later).

96

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Figures 4.1-4.7. Using the “memory lounger” (8) in the memory den. The player is able
to explore the memories of their now deceased adversary. Neurons act as bridges between
memories and locations. Coincidentally, the game narrative sets this exploration up as a
way for the player character to learn the location of one of the game’s potential big bads.
The sequence also serves to allow the player to empathize, perhaps, with Kellogg, the
man previously responsible for the death of the player character’s spouse and the
kidnapping of their child.
The memory den sequences in Fallout 4 are strange—being inside a dead person’s brain,
skipping across their memories using neuron bridges is odd. They are also fairly uniform. Each
memory takes place in a sliced-up room, with characters from the memory engaged in
discussion, and filling out a history with exposition. When a sequence is finished, and a room
fully explored, the player need to only find the next bridge and cross it to the next memory. The

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structural linearity of the sequence is unfortunate insofar as the game approaches so nearly a
fascinating representation of memory, the body, and navigation only to come up short. If,
perhaps, the exposition was replaced with a different mode of recounter then the game could
have done something truly unique.
Ether One
Ether One on the other hand maps memory onto a space through a series of remembered
locations, fully realized, but strangely devoid of life—the player only encounters objects which
indicate life had been in these locations such as notes and projectors, baubles and trinkets of the
mundane experience of inhabiting a space. These spaces certainly serve a storytelling function—
and sometimes that function, too, is expositional—but they also do more. They transform—
sometimes from ruin to repair like the lighthouse at the end—they invite the player to explore
and to take from each location something of import and to return these items, and their contained
memories, to alternative spaces which allow the memories to be preserved and renegotiated.
One of the first stops in the game, Devlin Mine, contains a mine shack, on a hill.
Connecting the building to the mine is a locked door which is opened through a puzzle solved by
the player. Once the player has access to the location in its entirety, they are able to engage with
the variety of objects therein. There is a bottle which can be broken and used to cut some pipes in
the shaft, a manual, a typewriter and miner’s plate, a projector, and a journal among other things.
These objects are used in the game’s puzzles. They, also, contain memories—they are
imbued with the life of the owner in a special way which we will return to later in the chapter.

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Figures 4.8-4.10 While other walking simulators contain a lot of object interaction, the
puzzles in Either One are dependent on the careful selection and use of objects scattered
through the gamespace
This is more typical of Ether One and the first of many differences between this game
and something like Fallout. It is positioned as a puzzle game: it is also narratively driven and
experimental in other ways. Objects are highly important to the game’s structure and to the
game’s story. Midway through the experience, the player discovers that, rather than restoring the
memories of a patient in the institute, the player character, himself, is the subject of an
experimental dementia treatment. Structurally, the game justifies this therapy, and the game
space constructed, by linking the subject’s dementia to a traumatic event they experienced in the
mining town of Pinwheel (the location in which all of the memory spaces are contained). The
player (and player character) is tasked with solving puzzles and finding and activating a series of
projectors both of which exist as metaphors for the character’s therapy sessions. The objects that

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fill the space, then, carry a significance, mechanically as well as narratively, outsized even in a
genre which is full of object interactions.
The objects in Ether One are carefully situated in a navigable space. These spaces are
rich with meaning: the harbor, mine, and lighthouse (Figures 12-15) each suggest,
metaphorically, a movement in a story, but also in a mind. The surface of the harbor space
suggests that the player is merely approaching, scratching the surface of, the story of the game
and the memories of the character. It is also a port, a point of landing. The movement into the
mines, rather obviously, suggest a movement into the depths or recesses of the mind, they are
also the site of a tragedy and representative of the trauma experienced by the main character and
the town as a whole. The lighthouse, first in ruin, when repaired by the player character
engenders their ascent, and also serves as a signal outward, re-enabling to a degree the
connection the player character has to others in their life (namely, in this instance, their deceased
wife and their living son). Finally, if the game is played to completion, the player is able to
journey out of the representational space of Pinwheel and return to the care home where they are
receiving treatment. In order to complete this cycle, the player must solve a series of puzzles and
must explore the various locations of Pinwheel, discovering links between the space, the objects
therein, and their lost memories of both. The reconstruction of the space, by the player, through
their exploration of it, and the rearrangement of the objects within it, comes to represent the
player character’s acceptance of the traumatic event. Naturally, this is far from how trauma and
PTSD function in regular life. Oddly, though, the game does present a form of therapy pretty
similar to effective technology-enabled exposure therapies currently used. For example,
Bravemind, developed at USCs Institute for Creative Technologies functions through the VRenabled reenactment of traumatic events which is operated by a therapist using a control panel

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outside of the virtual space166. USC describes Bravemind as “…allow[ing] clinicians to gradually
immerse patients into virtual environments representative of their traumatic experiences in a
controlled, stepwise fashion by providing the capability to control multi-sensory emotional
stimuli and monitor the intensity of the patients’ stress responses via advanced brain imaging and
psychophysiological assessment techniques167” In Ether One and in Bravemind, the space is
representational, but controlled. In order to be effective, they must approximate to a degree the
spaces they represent.
166 https://medvr.ict.usc.edu/projects/bravemind.html
167 Ibid

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Figures 4.11-4.14: The harbor, mines, and lighthouse (in ruin and then restored by the
player)
Of course, Videogame spaces and VR spaces—of which Ether One and Bravemind both
are a type—are, of course, not identical to the spaces available to our bodies in the “real,”
material world. Demonstrative of this are the common complaints related to motion sickness—
headaches, nausea, disorientation—and virtual reality. This sickness is believed to be caused by
the disconnection between the information received by the eyes and the information received by
the ears when one moves forward in a VR space. Specifically, the eyes perceive a movement that
would indicate forward motion and at the same time, the utricle and the saccule, pockets in the
ears filled with liquid and very small rocks, do not perceive that motion. Jennifer Groh describes
the phenomenon quite well: “the itricle and saccule are filled with a fluid, but here this fluid
contains tiny rocks called otoconia, Greek for ‘ear stones…’” these stones “…are too heavy to be
moved by the fluid itself. Instead, they move when the head changes its orientation with respect

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to gravity, or when the head accelerates in a straight line.168” The Eyes in VR may be convinced
that one is moving forward, but the ears have conflicting information. This creates confusion.
This confusion makes a person sick.
Strangely enough, though, as is the case of trauma, VR has proven an effective tool for
the rehabilitation of malfunctioning vestibular systems—of which the utricle and saccule are two
components. In a meta-analysis of publications on VR and vestibular rehabilitation, Heffernan,
Abdelmalek, and Nunez, found that while higher quality studies were needed, the existing
literature shows a “[r]eduction in vestibular dysfunction symptoms 0–3 months postintervention” as “the primary outcome. Secondary outcomes included long-term symptom
improvement and side effects.169”Similarly, Stankiewicz et al. “found that virtual reality
vestibular rehabilitation in patients with vertigo due to peripheral vestibular dysfunction was as
effective as conventional rehabilitation, with significantly increased levels of patient
satisfaction.”170 And likewise, Başoğlu et al. found that ”implementing a VR-based VRT
protocol may be an efficient option to improve posture stability and the quality of life in patients
with PVH. In addition, VR-based vestibular rehabilitation therapy has shown to be effective for
PVH patients in the mid-term.”171 It must be pointed out, though, that none of the successful
studies aimed to rehabilitate dysfunction in the utricle and saccule but were focused on spinning
and other kinds of motion which have a stronger bodily corresponding visual input. After all, one
168 Groh, Jennifer. Making Space: How the Brain Knows Where Things Are. Harvard UP. 2014. 182
169 Heffernan, Austin et al. “Virtual and augmented reality in the vestibular rehabilitation of peripheral vestibular
disorders: systematic review and meta-analysis.” Scientific reports vol. 11,1 17843. 8 Sep. 2021
170 Stankiewicz, Tomasz et al. “Virtual Reality Vestibular Rehabilitation in 20 Patients with Vertigo Due to
Peripheral Vestibular Dysfunction.” Medical science monitor : international medical journal of experimental and
clinical research vol. 26
171 Başoğlu, Yuşa et al. “Effectiveness of virtual reality-based vestibular rehabilitation in patients with peripheral
vestibular hypofunction.” Turkish journal of medical sciences vol. 52,6 (2022): 1970-1983.

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spins ones body or turns ones head when looking and spinning in VR. One does not move
forward or backward nearly as much.
Navigation
This said, the way one moves through a gamespace is still dependent on the perceptions
and actions of the brain-body. Navigation is still, strikingly I believe, similar to how one moves
through the “real” material world.
Not everyone navigates the same way—and this can have a striking effect on the way a
person adapts to play. For example, players that rely on non-spatial memory when playing action
games are at risk of losing plasticity in their hippocampus.172 Studies of first- and third-person
action games (primarily first person shooters and third person shooters), demonstrate a high
degree of variability in terms of the effect on the brain when considered in terms of hippocampal
plasticity and memory. In particular, games with GPS overlays of minimaps allow players to rely
less on landmarks, pathways, and other learnable environmental cues, and therefore discourage
the navigation/memory interplay inherent to games which encourage spatial memorization
strategies for navigation. Games could be designed differently and geared toward increased
hippocampal gray matter in players. West et al. hypothesize that
One way to achieve this might be to change an action game’s design. For one example,
most modern action video games are rich with environmental landmarks that could be
used for hippocampus-dependent navigation; however, they also often include an
overlaid head-up display which displays an in-game GPS to direct players to their next
172 West, G.L., Konishi, K., Diarra, M. et al. Impact of video games on plasticity of the hippocampus. Mol
Psychiatry 23, 1566–1574 (2018)

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location or event (for example, the locations of items or enemies). Because of this,
players can easily choose to navigate with a response route-following strategy without
relying on the relationships between landmarks, fundamental to the spatial strategy. It
therefore remains possible that action video games designed without such in-game GPS
or wayfinding routes overlaid on the game’s display for the player to follow could better
encourage spatial learning during action video game playing.
The connection between spatial navigation, memory, and gray matter density of the hippocampus
is becoming clearer. It is becoming increasingly clear that we need to revisit some of the
discussion about space from other fields. This will only serve to enrich our understanding of the
operation of games and the effects of exploratory games on the brain and body.
Kevin Lynch, for his part discussed the “imageability” of a city as key to a person’s
experience of it. He describes as the elements of the city image: “paths,” “the channels along
which the observer customarily, occasionally, or potentially moves”; “Edges,” “the linear
elements not used or considered as paths by the observer…boundaries between two phases,
linear breaks in continuity;” “Districts,” which “are the medium to large sections of the
city…which are recognizable as having some common, identifying, character;” “Nodes,” or
“strategic spots in the city” which act as points of “break” or “convergence” in paths; and
“landmarks,” of which “the observer does not enter” but which serve “as reference” for location
and other information173.” For Kevin Lynch, a highly clear or legible city heightens navigability.
Through the “consistent use and organization of definite sensory cues from the external
environment” wayfinding is possible. And this “organization is fundamental to the efficiency and
173 Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. MIT UP 1960 47-48

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to the very survival of free-moving life.” Many people, most certainly, do not like the feeling of
being lost. The ordering of space, therefore, has an appeal.
To this note, Gyorgy Kepes, Lynch’s mentor at MIT, went further. In The Language of Vision he
states:
Man is a dynamic being struggling individually and socially for survival. To survive he
must orient himself to his surroundings. He must measure and order the visual impacts of
his environment to correspond with nature. He must communicate his findings to his
fellow men for the mutual reinforcement of their actions. He asserts himself in the
material world by means of his sensory equipment as well. Thus the control of nature
includes the domestication of nature through the eye, the visual assimilation of spacetime events.174
For Kepes, imageability and, consequentially, navigability, are not luxuries of city living but are
key to human and civilization survivability and growth. This perspective seems to have been
instrumental in the development of Lynch’s thinking. Paths, edges, nodes, and landmarks, all
play an important role in the constructed game space of Ether One, they provide the player with
the opportunity to imagine the interconnected nature of the gamespace, enabling them to
effectively navigate the space of memory and trauma (Figures 16-19).
174 Kepes, Gyorgy. Language of Vision Dover. 1995. 66.

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Figures 4.15-4.18. The lighthouse, the final destination of the game, also serves as a
dominant landmark, structuring much of the surrounding space. This surrounding space is
full of recognizable features including the pathways and edges here. The gamespace is
highly imageable, and thus highly memorable and navigable. Fitting for a game about
memory, fragmentation, and reconciliation.

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Like dance, games often require a set of preformed movements and gestures, in sequence. This is
as true for fighting games as it is true for walking simulators. Sequencing movements is key to
gaming. In a discussion of dance in “The Mind, the Brain, and the Moving Body: Dance as a
Topic of Cognitive Neuroscience” Bettina Bläsing and Beatriz Calvo-Merino argue that dance,
similar to games, have an effect on the hippocampus. “Dancers possess enhanced memory skills
and acquire cognitive tools and techniques for facilitating movement learning and recall in their
training,” they argue, continuing that “[e]vidence exists that dance training enhances the capacity
for conscious control of procedural memory concerning the body and motor skills and that it
might bring about specific abilities with regards to implicit memory and somatic declarative
memory.175” In the case of Ether One, this dance is between player and space, forced to
remember, with no mini map in sight.
Many games ask the player to navigate increasingly complicated sorts of spaces. Some
empower the player with all sorts of aids—minimaps with icons, lines that literally direct one
where to go, color coded points of interaction. Players will, though, adapt to the kinds of tools at
hand as they blunder though whatever space they are engaged in.
175 Bläsing, Bettina and Beatriz Calvo-Merino. “The Mind, the Brain, and the Moving Body: Dance as a Topic of
Cognitive Neuroscience.” Brain, Beauty, and Art: Essays Bringing Neuroaesthetics in Focus. Eds. Anjan Chatterjee
and Eileen R. Cardillo. Oxford UP. 2022

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CHAPTER 5 Empathy Machines and Edith Finch
In What Remains of Edith Finch I feel like I am a cat. I also feel like I am an owl. I also
totally move around like a sea monster, seeking out my next fleshy human prey I swing on a
swing set, fly though space, claustrophobically pack myself into a disaster shelter (and open the
same damn can of food every day), and I explore a big old house full of so many stories. It is a
narrative experience of empathy about the ways in which art transforms experience (see Figures
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Figures 5.1-5.2. The secret of What Remains of Edith Finch is found in how it thematizes
the empathic function of art. The loveliness hidden in books and all sorts of other things.
The game asks the player to be engaged in ways deeper than what one thinks of often
when consuming or interacting with a media object. It asks the player to act as though they are
many different characters, drawn out in the middle of their stories, for brief moments of time just
before they, it seems, die. It also comments on the fact that it is engaging with just this sort of
deeply connecting storytelling, and it demonstrates a metacritical awareness of the tasks it is
building, the stages it sets, and the sort of art that it wants to be when being played. It suggests
that one can empathize with characters through a text, rather quickly, and will be satisfied with
relatively brief encounters. The story is framed by a character sitting on a ferry, reading the diary

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of a character who the player will spend most of their time with, who then, herself, experiences
the lives of her relatives through their own bits of writing or other ephemera. It is a nesting doll
of empathic stories.
But Empathy is a strange and slippery thing. On the one hand arresting and exploiting
empathic responses to work—especially in media studies--drives so much artistic and scholarly
work today. On the other, it seems we—in multiple professions—are not quite in agreement on
what exactly “empathy” is: to whom, through whom, to what type, and to what degree does one
experience the world, experience, dreams, sorrow, pain, or joy of the other through a work of
art? Do all works of art operate the same way when it comes to eliciting a shared response? Are
games especially good at eliciting empathy? In games, like in other arts, there is little consensus
on what the phenomena is, how it operates, and what effects and outcomes experiences of
empathy produce.
What is Empathy?
Jane Stadler, writing about cinema, categorizes the various things related to empathy as:
1. Sympathy
2. Vicarious experience and “embodied and imaginative simulation that cinematic
narratives facilitate”
3. “Emotional contagion”
4. “Ethical deliberation from perspective-taking”
5. Compassion and other “moral emotions176”
176 Stadler, Jane “Empathy in Film.” Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy. Ed. Heidi L. Maibom. New
York: Routledge, 2017 pp 317

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This list, I’d gather, is not exhaustive, and even more troubling, the concepts listed don’t
necessarily align, and may, in fact conflict. In games, too, the concept of empathy has become
increasingly contested in recent years. Quickly, the critical community has pushed the proverbial
breaks on rhetoric around the “empathy machine”: the good-citizen making, morally-educating
box of experiences in which new media and emerging technologies can for once claim
themselves as arbiters of good as well as profit.177 The empathy machine version of VR is an
experience-on-demand, ethically-geared, technology of productive affect. One simply has to don
a headset to dive into the life of another, becoming them enough to escape the self and to do
better, make better choices, and be kinder and more compassionate. These critical discourses
have emerged from wholesale, bank-breaking, utopian-dreaming funding efforts around VR,
empathy, and social and political change, personal growth, citizen-making, and all-around
human betterment178. The criticisms highlight a less visible world of military and corporate
capital, strategic training, capitalist overreach, and corporate fantasy. But I find, too, these
discussions rather miss the point when it comes to the interplay between much new and exciting
work, and the viewer, or the experient of this work.
But how can we maintain any position around empathy, its relation to late capital, venture
capital excess, and its relationship to art of any kind if we don’t have a functional definition of
what empathy even is, let alone the limitations of experience involved in works which deal
heavily in deep involvement. The purpose of this chapter, then. is to discuss the extensions and
limitations of empathy in games and VR. An analysis of What Remains of Edith Finch frames
that discussion and functions as a case study for a one conceptual framing of gamic empathy.
177

178

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What Remains of Edith Finch179
, Giant Sparrow’s 2017 follow up to Unfinished Swan,
tells a series of interconnected stories about eccentric members of an ill-fated family as
experienced by their only living relative (and heir to their large, unwieldy, disaster-stricken,
mysterious house). The player character explores the Finch house, carrying a key to the home
and the journal of Edith Finch. The story is told through the player character’s filling out of the
journal and their use a key (and many others) willed to them to access the previously locked
rooms of the many deceased members of the Finch estate. The journal is read by what is assumed
to be Edith’s voice-over, but the player character is able to access many of the other member’s
stories by rummaging through their rooms and reading some bit of literary paraphernalia found
in a special spot in each bedroom. The structure of the player’s experience is thus two-pronged:
the exploration of the house by way of the player character, and the exploration of the last
moments of the deceased members of the house by way of the storytelling objects within the
story. For example, the player recalls Calvin Finch’s final moments after discovering his
brother’s diary in their shared, childhood room. Once opened, the diary reveals that Calvin,
daringly, swung his swing all the way around the tree it was attached too and managed to fly off
into the sea (Figures 3-7). Whether an exaggerated tale of child neglect or magically-real
depiction of Calvin’s flight into the unknown is uncertain and, frankly, not entirely relevant to
the much of the experience the game lays out.
More important to the experience is the player’s transportation into the shoes of Calvin,
on the swing, preparing for take-off. The controls, unexplained, shift to a timed back and forth
motion of the two joysticks on the game pad. These motions simulate the movement of Calvin’s
(or anyone’s for that matter) legs on the swing and recall for many players the moments spent in
179 What Remains of Edith Finch. Giant Sparrow. Annapurna. 2017

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childhood picking up a rudimentary sense of motion and physics, felt in the body through
acceleration, speed, and height.

118

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Figures 5.3-5.7 Calvin swings on the swing set before launching and soaring away. The
player feels the weight of the body, the movement of legs, the nostalgia of summers on
swings.
The left stick controls Calvin’s left, cast-wrapped, leg, and the right, his right leg. The player
pushes the sticks back and forth, rhythmically, with gravity and movement. The narrative
continues in text and voiceover as the player successfully moves the sticks. The player actions do
not control anything else but Calvin’s legs, they are isolated in the sequence. This asks the player
to focus on the simple movement, back and forth, of legs. The limits of this expression of the
body in childhood—you simply cannot go fast enough to safely fly around the top of the swing
set or tree branch--are circumvented in the game and Calvin is, briefly, able to swing all the way
around the branch before launching, victoriously into space. This moment defies normal
movement but is convincing precisely because it adhered so strongly to the way a swing normal
works beforehand. This allows each moment of this experience to be remembered, felt in, I
argue, the body of the player precisely because the game is able to successfully narrativize the
empathic relationship which forms between player and player character.

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Empathy is a fraught term, wrapped up in glossy headlines about humanistic virtual
reality, the positive impacts of socially good art, and also theoretical discussions of character
engagement, spectator positioning, and ethics. It can easily become confused. Returning, then to
Stadler’s taxonomy of empathies in film can serve as a useful starting point in a discussion about
empathy in games—while there may be debatable differences in the two media forms, those
differences don’t matter so much in this particular discussion—as it highlights the myriad of
meanings stuffed into “empathy” as a term.
In “Empathy in Film” Stadler contends that the history of empathy is an aesthetic history
primarily180, and that the term emerged in art history rather than, say, psychology, sociology, or
other studies of humans and their relationships with one another181. She contends that the earliest
use is an aesthetic one by Robert Vischer in 1873, before, for example, it was used by
psychologist Theodor Lipps in 1903.182 In this instance empathy referred to the capacity the
observer/engager has of “‘feeling into’ an aesthetic object, a natural vista, or another person’s
subjective experience in order to develop an experiential understanding of other minds and
works of art183.” This is a continuation of the discussion earlier in the volume in which Derek
Matravers argues that the roots of our current understanding of the term “empathy” lie in
romanticism. Johann Gottfried von Herder used the term “‘Einfühlung’ as was argued “not
talking about psychological projection (which would take us close to one important aspect of the
180 Stadler, Jane. “Empathy in Film” .” Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy. Ed. Heidi L. Maibom. New
York: Routledge, 2017 pp 317
181 Ibid 317
182 Ibid 317
183 Ibid 317

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modern use) but was using the term metaphorically; for ‘an arduous process of historical
philological enquiry184’” He continues, this does
“take us close to at least some elements of the modern meaning of the term: ‘in order to
interpret a subject’s language one must achieve an imaginative reproduction of his
perceptual and affective sensations’ and ‘the interpreter should strive to develop his grasp
of linguistic usage, contextual facts, and relevant sensations to the point where this
achieves something of the same immediate, automatic character that it has for a text’s
original audience when they understood the text in light of such things.185”
Two notes are particularly important. Firstly, the understanding of the state of the subject
is secondary or in accompaniment to the understanding of their condition otherwise. And two,
the affective sensations are, here at least, highlighted as a key component to understanding the
nature and function of empathy. Empathy in this instance, is something perhaps embodied, or a
matter of a shared state. In order to understand the other, anything about them from language to
experience, one must be able to reflect the other in a meaningful way. These aesthetic notions of
empathy as highlighted by Matravers (as reflective and automatic) are closer to the study of
empathy as, maybe, it is best expressed in contemporary neuroscience.
In “Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex” Vittorio Gallese et al. describe the
discovery of mirror neurons in the macaque monkey when they were engaged in or exposed to
“goal-directed hand and mouth movements186.” Important to this early work, also, is the
184 Matravers, Derek. “Empathy in the Aesthetic Tradition” Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy. Ed.
Heidi L. Maibom. New York: Routledge, 2017 pp77
185 Ibid 78.
186 Gallese, Vittorio et al. “Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex.” Brain (London, England : 1878) 119, no. 2
(1996): 593

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necessity for both agent of action and object of action to be present for activation to occur (the
monkeys’ neurons would not respond, for example, to just an object or to just an action). So, for
example, one could not just show an apple to a macaque and expect mirror neurons connected to
gripping to activate. One would also need to demonstrate gripping of said apple for matching
neurons to fire. Specific actions, outlined here, created a stronger response than others:
“grasping, manipulating and placing” were most pronounced187. Similarly, actions by hands and
mouths created a stronger correlation that other actions. In a later piece “Mirror Neurons and the
Simulation Theory of Mind Reading” Gallese and Alvin Goldman argue that mirror neurons
corroborate some of the central claims of “simulation theory188” of mind-reading which positions
mind reading as “incorporating an attempt to replicate, mimic, or impersonate the mental life of
the target agent. Simulation theory is placed in opposition to “theory theory” which posits mind
reading as “…thoroughly ‘detached’ theoretical activity” with no connection to bodily modeling
or physical simulation. Ultimately, for Gallese, the closest existing definition (at the time) for
embodied simulation is “the technique of imitating the behavior of some situation or
process…by means of suitably analogous situation or apparatus, esp, for the purpose of study or
personnel training”189. It is a process that seeks to enrich one’s understanding of a situation or of
another human being’s condition.
Later, in “The ‘Shared Manifold’ Hypothesis: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy,”
Gallese elaborates upon, and connects, his previously developed contributions to social
cognition, embodied simulation, mirror mechanisms, and the shared manifold hypothesis. In
187 Ibid 593
188 Gallese, Vittorio. “Mirror Neurons and the Simulation Theory of Mind-Reading.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2,
no. 12 (December 1, 1998): 49
189 Gallese, Vittorio. “The ‘Shared Manifold’ Hypothesis: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy” Empathy and Mental
Illness, eds Tom F D Farrow and Peter W R Woodruff. Cambridge UP (2007) 450

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order to better address how “our social mental skills enable us to retrieve the mental contents of
others.190” Gallese asserts that recently discovered neural mechanisms “mediat[e]…between the
multilevel personal knowledge we hold of our lived body, and the implicit certainties we
simultaneously hold about others.191” These mechanisms force a revaluation of existing theories
of social cognition, of boundaries and thresholds of empathy, and of the constitutive
characteristics of self/other relationships. The embodied simulation theory, mirror neurons, and
the way theory of mind functions in Gallese’s model leads him to extend the concept of empathy
“in order to accommodate and account for all different aspects of expressive behaviour enabling
us to establish a meaningful link between others and ourselves192”. This enlarged notion of
empathy opens up the possibility of unifying under the same account the multiple aspects and
possible levels of description of intersubjective relations.193” For Gallese, the shared manifold
“can be operationalized at three different levels: a phenomenological level, a functional level,
[and] a subpersonal level194”. The phenomenological level posits individual subjects as similar to
or equal with other subjects in a society. The functional model “enables models of self/other to
be created” through “as/if modes of interaction” which allows subjects to understand the
behavior of other subjects. The subpersonal level describes the intimate interaction between
people at the level of mirror-neuron engagement and “matching neural circuits” 195
.
Mirror neurons activate, according to Gallese’s and others’ work, not just when humans
see other real, living breathing human beings perform an action. They also activate when one
190 Ibid.44.
191 Ibid 449
192 Ibid 462
193 Ibid 461
194 Ibid 461
195 Ibid 462

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views an action taking place in a piece of media. They are, in fact, vital to our process of
understanding and engaging with visual objects of all sorts (though he is more concerned with
film that other media forms). Embodied simulation “coincides with the concept of empathy in
many respects, but, in fact, goes further…(it) underlies important aspects of the construction of
our spatial maps, influences our relations with objects, and forms the basis of our faculty of
imagination196. For example, when an audience member sees a person in a film reach out for and
grasp a door handle, a key, a weapon, or, say, a light switch, our brain simulates that action and,
correspondingly, excites the portion which corresponds with this action even if they do not
literally grasp grab with their own bodies. The brain simulates this process.
The unchecked optimism around mirror neurons’ capacity for generating empathy and
intersubjectivity became easily entwined with the most recent wave of VR (and VR experiences)
being marketed as an “empathy machine197”. Many of these arguments go too far, assuming that
empathy can radically rewire the brain and force people with otherwise bigoted beliefs to
suddenly and miraculously—in an almost Ebenezer Scrooge fashion—reconsider and repent.
This sort of application of Gallese’s work, especially mirror neurons, often posits too narrow a
view of empathy instead of the complicated, expanded view proposed in his work on the shared
manifold hypothesis. This has led to a fundamental misreading, I believe, of some of the
outcomes which may be expected from exposure to experiences which, according to Gallese,
evoke empathy. Similarly, many of these arguments argue that empathy necessarily creates
behavioral change—that it acts as a kind of intervention. They suggest that if one would
196
--. Empathic Screen Oxford UP 2019. pg9
197 Jeremy Bailenson in Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality is, How it Works, and What it can Do, for
example, qualifies that the function of empathy in changing behavior is debatable, but does not second guess the
capacity of VR to evoke the kind of limited model of empathy he presents. Similarly, a significant portion of the
book is dedicated to the structure of empathy.

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experience more art featuring more diverse people, they would somehow unlearn what are often
deeply embedded, entrenched, ideological positions. It may be cynical, but I am deeply
suspicious of such claims.
Lisa Nakamura, in an important counter-critique to the utopian idealism surrounding
empathy, argues that empathy serves capitalist, feel-nice, white-washing function in its
contemporary moment. She states “precisely because VR’s most popular applications are video
games and porn (that) in order to carry a more utopian promise of social connection, it needed to
be identified with a new visual genre: VR for social good.198” This feel-good social function
recalls, for Nakamura, the feelings around the emergence of many recent social and media
technologies: the internet, an and social media.199 For Nakamura, “empathy” has become the
working, sellable, commodity of VRs work toward legitimation and cultural prestige. She states
“[t]hese platforms have produced hundreds of titles about unfree and marginalized humans:
refugees, the disabled, the incarcerated, people of color, and other bodies that cam be virtually
occupied by users as a temporary way to feel something ‘good’ as moral cover during both a
move toward regulation and a backlash against the internet and racial terror in the US200.” Mirror
neurons have been particularly positioned in this conversation as the site in which VR can make
us better, more complete, more morally good humans (as long as we fund VR projects and buy
VR products). Nakamura’s criticism is pointed at Nonny de la Peña’s One Dark Night which
chronicles the final moments of Trayvon Martin’s life from within a VR experience. The piece
was celebrated and discussed in popular press at the time of its release. Engadget called it one
198 Nakamura, Lisa. “Feeling Good about Feeling Bad: Virtuous Virtual Reality and the Automation of Racial
Empathy” Visual Culture Vol. 19(1): 47-64. 49
199 Ibid 50
200 Ibid 53.

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way of reconstructing events that lack video evidence.201 The New York Times pointed more
directly to the experience’s relationship with empathy in their interview with the creator, asking
“you say it’s meant to draw empathy. Do you acknowledge that videos of shootings can be
interpreted in multiple ways, and that this piece is subject to such questions?202” Empathy, either
way, serves as a constructed center of the piece in question, though it seems perhaps, a bit
removed from de la Peña’s goals which are aligned with those of documentary as equally as they
are to empathy construction. Both are important to de la Peña, but the former is often overlooked
in the excitement to discuss the latter. Though Nakamura does address the role of the witness in
her criticism, I don’t think it accounts for the quality of problem that Nonny de la Peña’s work
encounters.
More similar to Nonny de la Peña’s work, perhaps, is Kenneth Goldsmith’s recitation of
Michael Brown’s autopsy report at Interrupt 3, a poetry event at Brown University. Here
Goldsmith’s poem, a “remix” of the autopsy report, which, as is his trademark style, was read
with trance-like diction until the words flatten and become sounds and shapes and ritual. In the
ensuing uproar, Goldsmith requested that recordings of the work be pulled from youtube, that he
did not editorialize but rather remixed the words for poetic effect, and responded with a sincedeleted statement on his personal Facebook page203. The problem with the Goldsmith piece is
closer to that of One Dark Night in that the issue is not about what is felt and how by the work’s
consumer, but who is handling what material documents of the event, how they are displayed, to
whom, and for who’s benefit. Goldsmith has benefitted from controversy at several points in his
career, usually over the question of intellectual property and the ontological traits of poetry. His
201 Cooper, Daniel. “Documentarian recreates Trayvon Martin's shooting in VR” Engadget. April 23, 2015
202 McPhate, Mike. “California Today: In Virtual Reality, Investigating the Trayvon Martin Case” Feb. 24, 2017
203 Gorton, Thomas. “Kenneth Goldsmith talks about reading Mike Brown's autopsy.” Dazed. Mar. 17. 2015.

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work, The Day, for example, remixes an issue of the New York Times into weird and wonderful
stanzas of text:
“D8 l the new york times tuesday, september 11, 2001
Metropolitan Forecast
today Less humid, sunshine
High 79. Noticeably less humid air will filter into the metropolitan region on. Brisk winds
from the northwest. High pressure building east from the Great Lakes will promote mainly sunny
skies. Daytime readings will peak in the lower 80’s.
tonight Clear, lighter winds
Low 62. Skies will be clear overnight as high pressure crests near the Middle Atlantic
Coast. Humidity will remain low, and temperatures will fall to around 60 degrees in many spots.
tomorrow Mainly sunny
High 76. Sunshine and just a few clouds will fill the sky. Breezes will turn and blow from
the south ahead of a cold front approaching from Canada.204”
Here the impulse of the poet to take a set of text not originally their own has a playfully rogueish quality. The legal boundaries of ownership and the aesthetic boundaries of poetry are both
tested, but in an ethically acceptable way. More interestingly, though, the work serves as a kind
of documentary of the news object. A recording of something else, re-presented as a poem. The
appropriative logic of Goldsmith’s work, the sort of algorithm he applies to texts to re-present
204 Goldsmith, Kenneth. “Metropolitan Forecast” The Day. Retrieved from
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/52692/two-poems-from-the-day

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them as original works, is what created the justified uproar around his autopsy reading. It is one
thing, ethically, to repurpose the pages of the New York Times for poetic effect. It is another to
repurpose the death of a young Black man at the center of a national outcry around police
brutality. The secondary, but also important, issue with Goldsmith’s reading is a location issue,
but I will return to that later in the chapter.
The Empathy Machine
de la Peña’s work is not necessarily the problem text that, it seems to me, Nakamura is or
should be pointing at in the context of empathy and “feeling good about feeling bad.” Works
which seem more troubling, in the context of empathy at least, are those that fall under the
category of “empathy machine” works. The “empathy machine,” while frequently discussed in
regards to VR, has been applied to other media as well. Roger Ebert, during his walk of fame
induction speech, discussed film as a kind of empathy machine,
Movies are the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts. When I go to a great
movie I can live somebody else's life for a while. I can walk in somebody else's shoes. I
can see what it feels like to be a member of a different gender, a different race, a different
economic class, to live in a different time, to have a different belief.
This is a liberalizing influence on me. It gives me a broader mind. It helps me to join my
family of men and women on this planet. It helps me to identify with them, so I'm not just
stuck being myself, day after day.205
The thinking employed by Ebert—that art could have a morally-charged, “liberalizing influence”
on the experiencing subject—is the same kind of thinking that circulated around games and VR
205 Ebert, Roger. “Ebert’s Walk of Fame Remarks.” Rogerebert.com 2005 https://www.rogerebert.com/rogerebert/eberts-walk-of-fame-remarks

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in the mid 2010s (and still does today). Why shouldn’t someone want to experience the lives of
others, to become more compassionate, and to better understand difference? This seems a goodnatured question—but it is also fundamentally insufficient to living an engaged, compassionate,
moral life. It substitutes passive virtuous experiences for political action, protest, financial
support, or any number of other active engagements with the different “other.”
In Ebert’s case, it is fairly easy to see his words within their context: a celebration of a
life’s work with a medium, an admiration for one’s place in movie journalism and film history, a
kind of awe at the moment. There aren’t gross financial attachments or pleas for funding
associated with his speech. Chris Milk, on the other hand, discussed the value of VR as an
empathy machine, to a packed TedTalk crowd, in 2015 in the following terms: creating a “world
you inhabit,” a “I am going to show you not a view into a world” when you sit there in her room
watching her…you’re not watching it through a window, you are sitting there with her. You look
down, you are sitting on the same ground that she’s sitting on.206” Because of this, he argues,
“you feel her humanity in a deeper way. You empathize with her in a deeper way. And I think
we can change minds with this machine.207” With the crowd roaring, he then discusses taking his
VR experience to the World Economic Forum in Davos. Chris Milk’s claims about the mindchanging, empathy-generating qualities of Virtual Reality are less forgivable than Ebert’s, in part
because this experience is not an experience he is writing about or discussing intellectually, it is
an experience he is selling. A product, eventually geared toward Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta,
eventually, too subject to a court battle over monopolistic reach. It is also problematic because
206 Milk, Chris. “How Virtual Reality can Create the Ultimate Empathy Machine”. Youtube. TED. Apr 22, 2015
207 Ibid.

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the product sold is not as advertised—it is built on a fantasy of 208total transportation. One may
experience something akin to being on a floor with a person thousands of miles away, but one
does not get dirty from the sand, they don’t feel the heat of the sun, and, more importantly, they
can at any time take their headset off and find themselves safe at home, far far away from the
precarious subject they thought they spent an afternoon with.
Chris Milk’s entire talk can be viewed through the above QR Code or at
https://youtu.be/iXHil1TPxvA?si=A_H8EwCK5kBbhwCf
Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated this particular problem with the promise of VR as an
empathy machine in 2017. Hurricane Maria had just ravaged Puerto Rico. Zuckerberg, ready to
demo the magic of Oculus (his newly launched VR headset and platform), took a tour of the
flooded countryside from atop Facebook headquarters, using the “magic” of the headset and an
NPR 360 degree video of the flooded streets209. The absurdity of the event, and the images of an
208 Reuters. “Meta Battles U.S. Antitrust Agency Over Future of Virtual Reality.” Retrieved from New York Times.
Dec 8, 2022
209 Hagaid, Geogie. “Mark Zuckerberg uses Spaces VR app to tour Puerto Rico.” Youtube. Oct 10, 2017

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avatar Zuckerberg wading through the flood, commenting on the incredible quality of the
experience was not lost on the public. (Figures 8-9) The publicity stunt was met with immediate
criticism, forcing an apology from the Facebook Founder. It was clear that, to the public, he
could have done more, as a multibillionaire, than put a headset on and tour Puerto Rico. It is as
clean an example available of the pitfalls of the VR empathy machine.

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Figures 5.8-5.9. These almost need no comment. But the insensitivity of
experience and thoughtlessness of the PR moment seems a much more fitting
example of what Nakamura is critiquing in her essay on empathy and white,
liberal good feelings.
Does this mean, then, that empathy should not be a goal of any art? Do the failures of
Milk and Zuckerberg mean that we should no longer strive for any shared experience, imagined
perspective taking, or cohabited experience? I think forgoing empathy is a mistake. When an

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experience is presented not in a coopted or appropriated, I believe the experience can serve as, at
least an important kind of life writing, and at best a way to access, even briefly and incompletely
a different experience than one normally inhabits.
The 2013 interactive fiction game Depression Quest by Zoë Quinn, Patrick Lindsey, and
Isaac Schankler first came to public attention in the midst of the Gamergate controversy
beginning in August of 2014 and culminated in threats against her life and privacy210. The
treatment and exploration of depression within the game—its objectives, mechanics, tone, etc.—
while lost in the noise around the controversy will be given center stage here.
The homepage/artist’s statement of this ergodic, interactive, text proposes two congruent
purposes: “to illustrate as clearly as possible what depression is like, to it may be better
understood by people without depression” and that “in presenting as real a simulation of
depression as possible, other sufferers will come to know that they aren’t alone, and hopefully
derive some measure of comfort from that211.” These statements suggest that the objectives of
the game align closely with common goals of organizations that seek to address various health
crisis: raising awareness and community building. The second stated goal may also be read as
one of empathy generation in that, by seeking to present an accurate simulation of depression,
the game also places players without depression into a situation where they may better
understand the feelings experienced and the obstacles faced by those that do have experiences
with the sometimes-debilitating condition of depression disorder. This seems to be the stated
audience of the game. Further, Depression Quest also promises to split a portion of its proceeds
210 Parkin, Simon “Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest” New Yorker. Last modified September, 9, 2014. Accessed
September 24, 2018 https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/zoe-quinns-depression-quest
211 Quinn, Zoë. Depression Quest. Accessed September 20, 2018. http://www.depressionquest.com/dqfinal.html

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with The National Suicide Prevention Hotline and asks its players to donate regardless of their
experience with the game itself212. This presents a third purpose: to coordinate the game-playing
experience with a fundraising effort on behalf of a third party.
While the efforts to raise awareness and funds are commendable, the simulation
component of the game provides for a more fruitful, and unique, paths for inquiry. Simulation,
here, operates through a combination of formal, textual, decision making on behalf of the author
and game mechanics that both highlight the players role in decision making—or, in some cases a
lack thereof—and continually remind the player of their player character’s current mental state.
On the textual level, the game stresses an intimate relationship with the player. Mimicking
gamebooks and other choose your own adventure texts, Depression Quest is presented in second
person point of view. It begins “You are a mid-twenties human being. You have a significant
other named Alex who you are rather fond of, that you have been seeing exclusively for the past
few months.213” The second person pronoun “you,” the gender-neutral description of the player
character as a “mid-twenties human being” and the coupling of the player character with the
gender-neutrally named “Alex” all appear to invite players of a variety of backgrounds and
identities to align with the player character. This indicates that, while open to many audiences,
the game appears to target, specifically, an age category comparable to the player character’s.
More background, including gender, can be viewed if the player interacts with the hyperlinked
name of their partner, though this can be avoided if the player wishes to leave out these
additional details.
Likewise, the mechanics of the game work additively with its formal, textual features to
create more empathy for those that suffer from depression. These mechanics work primarily on
212 ibid
213 ibid

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two levels: the fluctuating availability of hyperlink options (and through them textual pathways)
that subtly correspond to the player character’s mental state and the status bar at the bottom of
each page which, more overtly, signals the player character’s mental state. As the player
character’s depression overwhelms them, the number of available options, and consequently
narrative choices, diminishes rapidly. Rather than this loss being made invisible, the game
signals this lack of choice by presenting the now-unavailable choice as both functionally
inoperable (the link literally does not work) and stylistically marked with a strike-through. This
invites the player character to contemplate, and regret, the choice that may have been. The
melancholy of lost possibility permeates much of the gameplay experience.
The formal, mechanical qualities of the game, along with its textual components, invite
the player to understand an experience they are perhaps otherwise unfamiliar with. Importantly,
this experience is created and presented by a person who has a stake in the representation of
depression, with a specific goal in mind around understanding, empathy, and acceptance.
Of course, memoirs and memoir-like game experiences alike may have different goals
with respect to eliciting empathy and understanding. anna anthropy’s dys4ia (2012), for example,
contains many of the characteristics of the “empathy game,” including a documentary mode of
reportage, mechanics which match or simulate an experience, and a protagonist positioned in
otherness or alterity. In this instance, the game follows anthropy’s experience with hormone
replacement therapy214. It presents, often, the frustration of navigating that experience and the
felt lack of understanding and access present in the world around the protagonist. These
moments are chronicled through a series of low-budget, low-graphic, mini games, reminiscent
214 anthropy, anna. dys4ia. https://freegames.org/dys4ia/

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of, perhaps, WarioWare, a series of games made by Nintendo (and while potentially queer, not at
all documenting something as difficult and complicated as HRT). Often the games (Figures 10-
12) present impossible challenges, or thematize, graphically, the many indignations of the
experience.

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Figures 5.10-5.12. Some examples from dys4ia. In these cases, frustration is present in
both mechanics and textual components.
anthropy’s position on the game has varied. Released initially in 2012, the game quickly
became labeled an “empathy game” by the popular press. anthropy, subsequently pulled the
game, only to reupload it toward the end of 2023. In a blog post which corresponded to its
rerelease, anthropy, stated that the game was pulled in part because anthropy “ended up believing
the narrative the gaming press spun about it: That it was an educational game, an ‘EMPATHY
GAME,’ a shallow work that flattened and commodified the experience it was representing for
the consumption of cis people eager to pin an Ally medal to their chests.215” This reveals a
complicated history of the relationship between developer and game. It also makes claims about
the industry of empathy games, a critique of the commodification of experience, and a cynicism
directed toward folks engaging in a kind of empathy tourism. The post ends “Protect trans kids.
Protect trans futures.216” anthropy, is suggesting, perhaps, that the game may have a role in these
protections. The game, while mechanically engaging in frustration, does not readily engage the
body—which is something this chapter is invested in.
This conversation is invested in the role of mirror neurons in the construction of a
physical, embodied, motoric empathy. Going back to the discovery of mirror neurons in the
macaque monkey it is important to note that the responses measured in the study were physical
responses. It is even more important to note that it was observations of hand movement which
triggered mirror neuron responses. The hands, it seems, are particularly reflective, to put it one
way. Whether monkey or human, hand movements activate a mirror response. This makes sense
215 anthropy, anna. “On dys4ia’s return.” On dys4ia's return - dys4ia by anna anthropy (itch.io)
216 Ibid.

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on the level of learning and of social integration and interaction—we want to act like our peers,
understand their physical relationship to their surroundings, and be able to operate similarly if
needed. This makes less sense if mirror neurons are connected to empathy in the techno-utopian,
VR utopian model of thinking. What do hand movements do to help us feel righteously awful,
after all?
But I think it is good to linger a bit on the magnitude of hand-movement imitation
potentially available in virtual spaces. In “Action, Observation or Imitation of Virtual Hand
Movement Affect Differently Regions of the Mirror Neuron System and the Default Mode
Network” the authors contend that “the simple visual hand-motion stimuli in an imitation task
can modulate the activity of cerebral regions belonging to the MNS [mirror neuron system], the
AON [action observation network], and the DMN [default mode network]; areas of the motor
network including the dorsal and ventral PMC [premotor cortex], the IPL [inferior parietal
lobule], and areas involved in visually guided movement and attentional load such as the da-Pcu
[dorsal anterior precuneus].217” The action-observation network is the network of regions in the
brain which support the understanding of our visual perception of actions as we see them occur
in others. The default mode network is responsible for daydreaming and other non-attentionbased functions. Its association with social evaluation is particularly important in this instance.
The premotor cortexes role in planning movement (important here) suggests that there is a thin
line between movement observation and movement planning. And the IPLs role in social
cognition and human interaction along with da-Pcu suggests to an even greater extent that social
cognition and visuospatial processing and self-spatial monitoring are also activated to an extent
217 Brihmat, Nabila, Mohamed Tarri, Yann Quidé, Ketty Anglio, Bernard Pavard, Evelyne CastelLacanal, David Gasq, Xavier De Boissezon, Philippe Marque, and Isabelle Loubinoux. "Action,
Observation Or Imitation of Virtual Hand Movement Affect Differently Regions of the Mirror Neuron
System and the Default Mode Network." Brain Imaging and Behavior 12, no. 5 (10, 2018): 1376.

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when observing hand movement (whether virtual or real). This is, frankly, amazing. It appears, at
least at this moment, in at least one corner of neuroscience, that there is a rather strong case for a
physical, motoric empathy between individual humans but also between human consumers of
media and the media objects they are consuming.
This is not, of course, to suggest that physical, embodied, or motoric empathy can
substitute for or be confused with human actions in non-digital, real spaces. In “Perceptual
Uncertainty and Action Consequences Independently Affect Hand movements in a Virtual
Environment” for example, the authors argue that the imbalance between actual consequence and
virtual consequence means that virtual interaction will never wholly simulate the same action in
real space. They state “our results strikingly demonstrate that even when exact perceptual
correspondence between natural and simulated environments is achieved, action correspondence
does not necessarily follow due to a disparity in the expected consequence of actions in the two
environments218” This means that even if we create direct visual correspondence between a
virtual space and a real one we will not be fully embodied in that space if we know that we are
not engaging with a real, physical space. And this makes sense. Naturally, I am not suggesting
that anyone confuse similarity for identicality. Empathy, in whatever form it is discussed, is
always approximate, operating closer to the level of metaphor than of ontology. This does not
mean that it is not powerful or integral to our understanding of art or one another. In fact it seems
that art is able to engender successful simulations of interaction within the brains and bodies of
the beholder. The possibility of physical simulation may be key to understanding at least
218 Giesel, Martin, Anna Nowakowska, Julie M. Harris, and Hesse Constanze. "Perceptual Uncertainty
and Action Consequences Independently Affect Hand Movements in a Virtual Environment." Scientific
Reports (Nature Publisher Group) 10, no. 1 (2020).

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partially how one is able to comprehend art at all, let alone be moved, scared, shaken, or
awestruck.
Returning to Kenneth Goldsmith, the rightfully maligned poet, is perhaps fruitful to this
portion of the discussion. His poem “Fidget” which documents every movement of his body over
a period of a day—from 10 am. To 11 pm. on June 16 1997—, is a better document of empathy
when considered through the lens of embodied simulation, the underlying mirror mechanisms at
work, and a more expansive notion of empathy.
Eyelids open. Tongue runs across upper lip moving from left side of mouth to right
following arc of lip. Swallow. Jaws clench. Grind. Swallow. Head lifts. Bent right arm
brushes pillow into back of head. Arm straightens. Counterclockwise twist thrusts elbow
toward ceiling. Tongue leaves interior of mouth, passing through teeth. Tongue slides
back into mouth. Palm corkscrews. Thumb stretches. Forefingers wrap. Clench. Elbow
bends. Thumb moves toward shoulder.219
The poem is simultaneously expressive and evocative of the body. It tracks the minute
movements of the human form. In doing so, it also invites the reader to think through their own
body, to feel the expression of twisting arms, to test their mouth against the tension of clenching,
to map the movement of thumbs and elbows against the text on the page. It is a text consumed
with documenting, with tracking, and in this documentation, it is readily translatable to the
reader. More appropriately, too, it is the body of the poet under examination and documentation
rather than the body of the other, dead in the street, mocked by the coroner. It reveals the power
219 Goldsmith, Kenneth. Fidget Coach House Books. 2000. Pg 8

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of text in evoking an experience, in starting the hum of the imagination, in occupying a
perspective, and a body, and a form.
queers in love at the end of the world (2013), also by anna anthropy220, is similarly
suggestive through text. The game, developed with Twine—the same platform used for
Depression Quest—situates the player at either a literal or figurative apocalypse with seconds
left to act out ones love for an anonymous other. The timer translates the tension of the moment.
The player has seconds to speak, to act, to hold, before everything is wiped away in a flash and
they are forced to begin again at the beginning. The replaying, looping, mechanic allows the
player to reengage with the game text, speeding up their interactions with blue hyperlinks as they
appear on the screen, hoping, maybe, to reach some satisfying ending with the one they love.
This mechanic invites the player to engage intensely. It becomes heart-racing. This mechanic, if
read differently can be viewed as a mapping of regret, or the what-ifs built into anything’s
ending, of the cycling thoughts, returning to some key moment, where time mattered so much,
and where it felt impossible to say or do the right thing or enough of it. The tension is held in the
body, performed by the player. The game expresses a beautiful power of the medium, to really
transport and to ask one to reconsider their own regrets through the frantic mashing of a mouse
button or a thumb against a touch screen.
In many cases, artworks have addressed this sort of power head on. There are many cases
in which works themselves serve as transportation devices for the reader/watcher/player and
open whole knew experiential connections for the narrator or the player character. What Remains
of Edith Finch is this sort of experience. It understands, to a degree, the narrative power of
220 anthropy, anna. queers in love at the end of the world. 2013. https://tinyurl.com/3s98rsw4

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embodied empathy. Its entire narrative is structured around the possibility of physical
transportation into the final, most personal, most isolated moments of a person’s life—the
moments before their death. In each instance this transportation is enabled by the presence of an
artistic piece or other representational work which is connected to the character. In each instance
this transportation is enabled by the presence of an artistic piece or other representational work
which is connected to the character. For instance, when the player character reads into the last
moments of a young girl who appears to have died from eating something bad for her, they are
transported into her shoes, after being sent to bed without supper, searching for something,
anything to eat. The player then eats some toothpaste, some hamster food, some scary-looking
berries and attempts to eat a bird at the window. The character then finds themselves
transmogrified into the shape of a cat better able to chase the bird. Aiming then, from branch to
branch, the player must pursue the bird, hunting for their prey. Upon catching the bird, the player
finds themselves again transformed, this time into a bird of prey circling a dry, gray field,
searching for a rabbit or some other small thing to devour. This relationship changes again: a
shark rolling into the sea. Finally, the player finds themselves in the body of a sinister,
mysterious, sea monster, hunting humans on a ship and eventually creeping into the room of a
young girl, dreaming of being a monster. The embodied-empathic narrativization of the
character’s death, like Calvin’s, connects the player to the character in these final moments
physically. Here it highlights the role of imagination but is also suggestive of limitations to
contemporary thinking about empathy: the player happily places this girl in harm, and eventually
arrives to eat her even after sharing a space with her and sympathizing with her plight for food.
This is not to suggest that the player rushes toward every death in the game with no
regard to character safety. When the player finds, for example, Walter’s accounts of his final

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moments, they find a character holed up in a shelter under the house, expecting to die from the
houses persistent shaking, but, bound by routine, opening cans of peaches and consuming their
contents at 12:00 every day on the dot. The iterative structure of the scene suggests that the
character has been in the shelter for far too long, we repeat the task of opening the can of
peaches, again with just two joysticks operating the can opener. Until Walter, one day, decides to
leave. As Walter exists the shelter, he states, inspirationally, that he is ready for anything that life
will bring to him. But as he exits the house, via tunnel, the player is surprised to see what seems
like the light of a train which brings swift conclusion to Walter’s soliloquy.
In this instance the connection between player and character, through the repetitive
movement of the joysticks, and the corresponding repetitive movement of the can opener, serves
a structuring, narrative function. The connection between Walter and the player allows the player
to experience the drudgery of Walter’s everyday life in the shelter, to understand his need for
escape, and to relish the brief moments he has in leaving. There is a richness of experience in the
connection between player and character here—something poetic, transcending the normal
boundaries of “what games should do.” It is a distinctly aesthetic pleasure but one derived from
the embodied, empathic, intersubjective connection between player and character.
I am not suggesting that the only function of empathy in a text should be an aesthetic one.
I am not suggesting that we return to Vischer’s original thoughts on the term and stick there. I
believe that, outside of aesthetic purposes, empathy can play a role in moral betterment, that it
can have a function in citizenship betterment. My critique is aimed, more broadly, at the
attempted commodification of this moralizing function by giant technology conglomerates who
do, almost always, more harm to humans, animals, and the planet than any individual could
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Media-engendered empathy as a tool in the hands of the skilled artist or activist is, I
believe, where productive, non-hypocritical, uses can be found. An example can be found in
micha cárdenas’s well-known work, Becoming Dragon.221 In the work, cárdenas simulates the
year-long waiting period that trans people are subjected to before they are allowed to begin
hormone replacement therapy through a 365-hour performance which took place in Second Life,
the once-popular social game. In the performance, cárdenas, takes on the role of a dragon,
modifying her voice as well as her looks. Viewers were given access to the performance both
through the stereoscopic projection of the in-game footage and through the visibility of
cárdenas’s lived body. Even as a recording it is striking. It asks the onlooker—virtual or live—to
imagine the wait, to understand even the difficulty of 365 hours. The intended viewer was not
playing the experience, with a headset on, they were not in the virtual space. They were asked to
imagine that experience, though, to understand what it was like. To be compassionate for another
individual, in another circumstance, and to see an injustice within a system. This case, and many
more like them, are so much more powerful than some made-to-be-sold product. It is in these
kinds of cases where empathy can serve a moral function and, perhaps, a push toward change.
221 cárdenas, micha. “Becoming Dragon, 3 Minute Documentation,” Vimeo. March 26, 2009
https://vimeo.com/3874238 documents the performance piece in an abbreviated video.

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Conclusion: Where else then does this wandering go?
Thinking about the role of the brain/body and body/brain in the construction and
reception of perception, by a thinking agent, in the context of visual art in general and games in
particular, opens a variety of research pathways. Neuroaesthetics can be viewed, too, as a
synthesizing method. In the dialectics of brain/body, it reifies the concept of the “organism” as a
model viewer or reader or audience member. Similarly, it negotiates scientific and humanities
approaches and sits as a third-culture working model. And while each chapter of this document
pursues a line of reasoning, a set of arguments, and a reconsideration of previous positions in
game studies, these positions open separate sets of research questions which need more
consideration and work.
Chapter one of this document situates the walking simulator as a key genre in the
application of neuroaesthetics to games as neuroludology. While I argue, in it, that the
Steadicam-esque camera movement found in the genre contributes greatly to the level of
immersion that is constructed by each individual game, this chapter complicates the work done
by David Bordwell, as a matter of principle, and other to untangle specific cinematic actions
from prescribed effects. To put it differently, Bordwell, and many other after him, rightfully took
to task the simple prescriptive view of the cinema in which x kind of movement or lighting or
angle always produces y kind of effect in the audience member. Of course, he is generally
correct, there are just too many examples of shots and angles and color combinations which
negate this prescriptive kind of thinking. All meaning in is a product of a confluence of things,
and context is preternaturally swaying when impact is considered.
But perhaps there is a bit of a middle ground here too. A growing number of experiments
do suggest that specific camera movements, in this case the Steadicam moving camera, do aid in

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the elicitation of immersion and other related feelings and sensations—including tension,
suspense, fear. This is, naturally, variable and case specific. This line of thinking, founded on
neuroscientific experiments, should be pursued further in both film and video games in order to
reconsider the poetics of cinema and game art. The truth is perhaps somewhere between the
paradigm Bordwell helped to establish and the one that he was responding to.
The debate between Bordwell, Malcolm Turvey on the one hand and Vittorio Gallese and
Michele Guerra on the other—as outlined in the chapter—is indicative of the kinds and degree of
schisms still present between science and humanities, but it is one which, I believe, can be
fruitfully navigated as much as any interdisciplinary negotiation can be (if not more). This work
took one attempt at that negotiation, but there are still other possible throughlines and sites of
negotiation available.
The second chapter reconsiders discussions around medium specific game arguments and
recontextualizes the narrative/ludology debate through the lens of neuroaesthetics using an
emerging argument by Ian Bogost to demonstrate the continued relevance of said debate and as a
test for one application of Gallese’s work on embodied simulation and intersubjectivity. Tacoma,
discussed in the chapter, thematizes the kind of intercorporeal storytelling which is suggested at
by Gallese in his work on embodied simulation. Tacoma is situated here, too, in the tradition of
immersive or interactive theater—such as Sleep No More. This kind of theater, this kind of
storytelling, operationalizes intersubjectivity and embodied simulation, whether live and in a
warehouse or digital and on a screen played with a controller.
There is, of course, more work to be done here as well. Interactive and immersive theater
are still in need of much theorization. Thinking around each would benefit from formal, poetic,
considerations as well as these definitional or ontological properties are still poorly understood.

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This work should consider theories of intersubjectivity and embodied simulation in particular in
order to be complete.
Furthermore, if Bogost continues his line of thinking—on in which the strange movement
of things on a screen—then it is important to maintain a line of research which keeps intertwined
story and stuff, space and narrative, both with contemporary work and through renewed interest
in Henry Jenkins and Espen Aarseth’s work on space in games. Bogost is certainly correct in his
thinking that objects moving through space is of central importance to what games are, but he
downplays, perhaps too much, the possibility of story being wrapped up in and through that stuff
and space.
The following chapter, on authorship, enactivism, transactionism and embodied bounded
rationality sets up a renewed discussion of authors and the authorship function within interactive
works. Issues of constraint and agency are central to the arguments of this chapter, but they are
relevant to any instance of human/machine cocreation. Discussions of constrained, machineassisted, creation are becoming especially relevant today with the explosion of language learning
models, machine learning, and generative AI. With dedicated AI art products like Midjourney
readily available, the rise of ChatGPT as a writing assistant, and the integration of AI processes
in seemingly every bit of traditional content creation software (from Adobe Suite to Microsoft
Word), discussions around authorship are paramount. This chapter begins to theorize some of
these discussions, but there is still so much work to be done.
In order to understand the changing nature of art, the artist, and the artistic process, it is
important to think interdisciplinarily, across, in order to frame, adequately, the changes at hand.
Looking then at how authorship has been viewed by pragmatist philosophers, cognitive
scientists, neuroscientists, and film scholars, then can perhaps be a good starting point to any

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serious discussion. Technology shifts, such as the rapid emergence of functional, generative AI
here, can often reveal incomplete or fragile points in previous thinking. In this instance, the
meaninglessness studying authors, the problematic nature of auteur theory, and the death of the
author are perhaps now out of sorts with the reality. This, maybe was the case then as it is now
but the lack of presence of something like an AI allowed scholars to avoid, brush over, or put
faith in these incomplete positions.
The human and the machine are becoming increasingly bound up with one another. The
promises of augmenting, repairing, or outsourcing mental functions with the help of machines
are increasingly present, even if the possibility of their fulfillment often remains spurious.
Trauma treatment and resiliency training as well as memory repair are two lines which have, at
least so far, born fruit. The application of VR to trauma therapy and to memory repair is
thematized in Ether One, which makes this game a particularly good test case for discussing, as I
have done in chapter four, the interrelated nature of memory and navigation and the neural
functions and brain regions which underly and enable both. As a continuation, to a degree of the
discussion of space and storytelling as present in chapter two, this chapter takes a different
approach to “neuroludology” as a method—it leans heavily on the scientific literature around a
particular region of the brain and attempts to situate the function of that region within a
discussion of art and aesthetics.
This chapter also addresses the increased presence of brains as represented in games—
both in Ether One and Fallout 4. Much more work can still be done on this odd relationship
between brain and game. Games have a history of representing or imagining a brain. Brain Age:

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Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!222, the series of games introduced by Nintendo for the
Nintendo DS beginning in 2005, were a huge hit and positioned the game as having a
particularly beneficial relationship with the player and the player’s cognitive health. Other games
imagine mental health conditions, differences, and illnesses and situate the player as
experiencing these different sets of neural activity, chemical compositions, traumatic intrusions,
and more. Some games, too, position the player as in an active brain such as Fallout 4. There is a
history to this relationship that is ready for exploration and theorization.
“Empathy” is already undergoing this reinvestigation. While I demonstrate that the term,
as used, is commonly ill-defined or misunderstood, functioning as a shorthand, catchall for any
variety of things, it is still useful aesthetically, psychologically and, yes, even morally. The
difficulty with empathy is perhaps that it is so frequently commodified, packaged and sold to
consumers who are eager to see something good or hopeful come out of the technological
landscape. Afterall, the giant, global, tech giants have transformed everything else in our lives,
can’t they do the same for our moral educations? For our capacity to be better citizens? I have
doubts.
I do not doubt, however, that in the right hands—in the hands of activists and artists—
that the embodying capacity of, say, VR can serve a useful moral purpose. More to the point,
though, is that an understanding of empathy, in an expanded capacity which comes from
understanding the human as a brain/body (or organism), is vital to an understanding of art,
communication, and human and non-human sociality. We understand art through an empathic
interaction—through an intersubjective process of embodied simulation. The expressions and
222 Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!. Nintendo. 2005.

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limitations of embodied simulation as it relates to individual works of art needs more study, more
work, more careful attention. Some works intentionally engender greater intersubjectivity. Some
intentionally interrupt the processes which allow for immersion, connection and empathy. The
former, perhaps, seek to form meaningful connections between audience and object. The latter,
perhaps, fosters a sense of increasing difference. Artists of all media have an innate or otherwise
sense of the connections that they are creating or preventing in their work—embodied simulation
as a concept can help them to explain this process. It can help the critic, too, to articulate and
understand a work. I hope, in a greater and more important way, that renewed attention to
empathy—from whatever perspective—will allow us to understand one another a little bit more.
We could all use more compassion, and I still believe that compassion comes from work born
out of understanding.
C.P. Snow, in his own perhaps imperfect way, asked for greater understanding, too.
There are rifts between many of our academic disciplines, and while this is a product of the
siloing process of specialization among other things it still seems an unnatural hinderance to
truly productive scholarship. Snow’s answer, as is often the case regardless of the discipline, was
to ask humanities professionals to behave and think more like scientists. His solution was, and
this is perhaps reductive, to make scientists of everyone. The answer from a humanities
professional should not be to ask everyone to be humanists. It should be something rooted in a
sincere quest for dialogue and understanding—of mutual growth and betterment. I am uncertain
that the present conditions of academia make this possible.
Where there is hope, as I see it, is in the recent moves within some disciplines toward
interdisciplinarity in both axiomatic assumptions about the world and methodological approaches
to their research. In my own discipline, Media Studies, I see an increasing number of scholars

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working on the edges—or even outside the bounds—of what is traditionally perceived as “our
field” or “our processes.” This is beyond refreshing.
Outside of interdisciplinary work, there are wonderful crosspollinations happening in
collaborative environments. Partnerships between artists and humanities scholars and scientists
produce increasingly insightful work. Vittorio Gallese (an acclaimed neuroscientist) and Michele
Guerra (a humanities scholar with a degree in art history, and as of this writing, mayor of Parma,
Italy) produced remarkable, I believe revelatory, work. This dissertation could not have been
completed without their trailblazing efforts in the fields of cinema and neuroaesthetics.
This document, too, is an attempt to think bigger than boundaries, to explore the edges of
a particular set of experiences. To get lost in them. We move so fast, so often. Walking
simulators—and I hope my method of reading them, too—slow us down for a little bit. They ask
us to be patient, to meander, to be maybe even a little bored. In preparing this manuscript I found
myself lost, over and over again, in some sort of woods (whether literal as in Firewatch, or
representational as in Ether One). I was often, due to deadlines or something else, frustrated. The
game, there too, served as often an apt metaphor for life.

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Epilogue
These pieces are an attempt at a poetic experience within a VR headset (or in the virtual
space of an interactable computer or cell phone screen, depending on how the piece is accessed).
The poems are composed of room scans, object scans, video, and a textual component--stretched
out as the sky. The work asks the viewer to explore medium specific boundaries and questions
the capacity of VR for elegiac work. Included below are six images from the two pieces,
component parts of the first poem, and a qr code link to each work. The first work contains a
written component of my own, the second contains a stanza from Rilke—also unsatisfyingly
about death—cut up and reappropriated, out of reach.
The first poem, “Collision” addresses the incomprehensibility of the experience of loss. It
attempts to spatialize the sense of things being out of place, of disruption of the day-to-day
experience, and the intrusive quality of mourning. The kitchen table, a domestic space of the
everyday, is made unfamiliar with the car bursting through the window, and the walls, ceiling,
and floor cut out to reveal the textual component of the piece. This written component exists all
around the viewer.
The second poem, “Continuation” similarly chops up the home and introduces text into
the physical space of the living room. The text, from the ninth of Rilke’s Duino Elegies,
normally about the joyous embrace of the possibility of life in the face of existential dread and
the permanence of death, is obscured—leaving “irrevocable” and a few other choice sections
accessible to the reader. The Rilke piece suggests that the irrevocability of life makes it worth
experiencing, the work here suggests that other things, too, are irrevocable.

154
The meaning of the poem is challenged in the work by the overwhelming and intrusive
nature of grief—which, in this case, serves as a counter to Rilke’s consolation-oriented beauty of
the lived experience of the everyday. In addition, it includes a looping video of the poem’s
subject. The video, a gif image of the person grieved was taken when she was at her happiest in
life, embodying, in a way, Rilke’s sentiment in the poem referenced.
Instructions for use:
1. Scan the QR code on your phone or enter the url into a browser.
2. If accessing though QR code tap the link that appears when scanning.
3. Once the page has loaded tap or click “start.”
4. Explore the visual space by moving your phone around (phone), or moving using “W, A,
S, D” and mouse (computer), or, best of all, loading the experience through a VR headset
or Google Cardboard phone accessory.
Components of first piece:

155

156
Figures 6.1-6.3 Images from VR poem, “Collision”

157
Figure 6.4 the sky of the first poem

158
Figures 6.5-6.6 Car and table
The collision
https://try.reach.love/browse/mcdermott.russell/edf2adc0-df31-11ee-b646-8ffddf6c6593
Second:

159

160

161

162
Figures 6.7-6.14 Various Views from the second poem and the poem’s sky.
https://try.reach.love/browse/mcdermott.russell/e80abcb0-e7c7-11ee-b646-8ffddf6c6593

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Machines of the un/real: mapping the passage between the virtual and the material in the attraction

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Creator McDermott, Russell (author)

Core Title Six walks in digital worlds: walking simulators, neuroaesthetics, video games, and virtual reality

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema and Media Studies

Degree Conferral Date 2024-08

Publication Date 06/27/2024

Defense Date 05/22/2024

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Tag agency,cognitive science,embodied simulation,Empathy,immersion,interactivity,intersubjectivity,medium specificity,mirror neurons,navigation,neuroaesthetics,OAI-PMH Harvest,phenomenology,video games

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Advisor Callahan, Vicki (committee chair), Seiter, Ellen (committee chair), Benzon, Kiki (committee member), Jenkins, Henry (committee member)

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