Ever since Pac Man, video games have obeyed a few basic principles: A player sits down in front of a screen and presses a few buttons with his or her thumbs. Perhaps there’s a joystick involved, or maybe the index finger has to do some work, too. But the body is essentially still. The only moving parts are the eyes and the fingers.
The Wii changed everything. Unlike every other game console, the Wii controller isn’t built around a confusing alphabet of buttons. Instead, Nintendo uses some nifty bluetooth technology to translate our body movements directly onto the screen. When we swing our arms, a baseball bat moves. When we make a jabbing motion, Super Mario lands a punch. It doesn’t matter if we’re bowling or golfing or imitating Jimi on Guitar Hero: the video game console requires that our body is always moving. We might even break a sweat.
This physicality is the Wii’s real innovation. It’s also the reason why Microsoft is so heavily invested in Project Natal/Kinect which, like the Wii, requires users to move about the living room. While Nintendo and Microsoft argue that their wireless controllers make game play more intuitive – you no longer have to remember arcane sequences of buttons – their interfaces actually do something much more powerful: By involving our limbs in the on-screen action, the Wii and Kinect make video games much more emotional.
To understand how the Wii turns stupid arcade games into a passionate experience, we have to revisit an old theory of emotion, first proposed by William James. In his 1884 article “What is an emotion?” James argued that all of our mental feelings actually begin in the body. Although our emotions feel ephemeral, they are rooted in the movements of our muscles and the palpitations of our flesh. Typical of his work, James’ evidence consisted of vivid examples stolen straight from real life, such as a person encountering a bear in the woods.
“What kind of an emotion of fear would be left,” James wondered, “if the feeling of quickened heart beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose bumps nor of visceral stirrings, were present?” James’ answer was simple: without the body there would be no fear, for an emotion begins as the perception of a bodily change. When it comes to the drama of feelings, our flesh is the main stage.
For most of the 20th century, James’ theory of bodily emotions was ignored. It just seemed too implausible. But in the early 1980s, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio realized that James was mostly right: Many of our emotions are preceded by changes in our physical body. Damasio came to this conclusion after studying neurological patients who, after suffering damage in their orbitoprefrontal cortex or somatosensory cortex, were unable to experience any emotion at all. Why not? The tight connection between the mind and body had been broken. Even though these patients could still feel their flesh–they weren’t paraplegic–they could no longer use their body to generate feelings. And if you can’t produce the bodily symptoms of an emotion–the swelling tear ducts of sadness, or the elevated heart rate of fear–then you can’t feel the emotion. As Damasio notes, “The mind is embodied, not just embrained.”
How might such a neurological process unfold? Let’s say we are playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 on the Wii. Unlike other game consoles, which leave us stranded on the couch, the Wii actually makes us move. If we want to kill off the Goomba, we need to run around, twirl the remote, and, once we’ve maneuvered close to the evil character, jump on top of him. We are no longer just twiddling our thumbs.
In order to prepare for all this combat, the brain automatically triggers a wave of changes in our “physical viscera,” such as quickening our pulses, flooding our bloodstream with adrenaline, and contracting our intestines. While even stationary entertainment can lead to corporeal changes – that’s why the pulse quickens when watching a Hitchcock movie – the physical activity involved in fighting off the Goomba, exaggerates these effects, because our active muscles need oxygenated blood. Although we might look a little foolish, the game has managed to excite our flesh, and that means our emotions aren’t far behind.
All these bodily changes are then detected by the orbitofrontal cortex and somatosensory cortex, which connect them to the scary sensation (the Goomba) that is causing us to move in the first place. As Damasio puts it, “the essence of feeling an emotion is the experience of such [bodily] changes in juxtaposition to the mental images that initiated the cycle.” The resulting state of consciousness–an emulsion of thought and flesh, body, and mind–is our feeling of fear. It is an idea that has passed through the vessel of the body. We are suddenly terrified of a cartoon Shitake mushroom.
For decades, video game designers have been obsessed with visual realism, as if the eyeball was the key to our emotional brain. But accurate graphics have diminishing returns. At a certain point, we don’t need more pixels – we need more physicality. For the first time, video games are taking advantage of their specific medium, exploiting the features that other entertainments (such as movies and novels) are missing. No other form of culture, after all, depends on the verb “to play”. (We play video games – we don’t watch or read them.) But here’s the thing about playing: it’s much more captivating when the play itself is a physical act, when we play not just with the mind but with the body.