Zen Players, Zen Games: a project about Zen Modes, McMindfulness, and videogames
This is a personal project, something I had been wanting to do for a long time and started working on some three years ago.
I wanted to explore this because, in addition to my PhD in Game Studies, I have training on East Asian Studies — when I started using philosophy to understand in-game ethics, I missed the Chinese and Japanese thought I had learned. The realisation that Zen Modes had become a common feature of game design encouraged me to finally pursue this investigation.
Right now, it is composed of four parts:
- Zen as/in play (an introduction)
- Zen Modes in games
- Zen and Buddhism as analytical tools for games
- Zen gaming and player practises
What is it about?
What is Zen? Scholars, philosophers and even Zen practitioners do not seem to agree on an answer, even going as far as stating that it resists definition (“Zen cannot be locked into a concept nor understood by thought”, Deshimaru, 1982: 6). In spite of that, several recent games, such as Bejeweled 3 (PopCap Games, 2010), Mini Metro (Dinosaur Polo Club, 2015), Alto’s Adventure (Snowman, 2015), Plants vs Zombies (PopCap Games, 2009) and even Fruit Ninja (Halfbrick Studios, 2010), have featured a so-called “Zen Mode”, an alternative ruleset for gameplay that complements and offers an alternative to the main design of the game. In this project, I analyse the design patterns of these Zen Modes, and compare them to Zen as a philosophy and an ethics system and to ludic practises related to Zen such as go, koan and haiku, as well as to the popular idea of Zen in the West that some have labelled as “McMindfulness” (Purser & Loy, 2013).
But the extent of this project goes beyond these Zen Modes. In parallel to them, I propose the use of Buddhist ethics as a game analysis tool, in particular of the design of ethics systems in games. Authors like Sicart (2009, 2013) and Zagal (2011) have shown that games can encourage ethical reflection in players, and proposed several frameworks to analyse ethical gameplay. The contribution of my model is a focus on the binomy of suffering and compassion, central to all schools of Buddhism (like Mahâyâna, to which Zen belongs). Suffering and compassion, in their Buddhist sense, can be helpful to describe play structures, player behaviour, and the rhetorics of the medium. Moreover, it can provide analytical tools like the ones I propose here, “dependent arising gameplay” and “compassionate play”.
Why am I working on this?
Because, as I said, Zen Modes have become a staple of the industry, and their use (and abuse) is ripe for cultural analysis. And because Zen and Buddhist thought can illuminate how games, of any kind, create meaning through interaction. (But my first motivation, as I said, was applying what I already knew of Chinese and Japanese thought to videogames.)
What have I done so far?
· Regarding the (game) pain of others: Suffering and compassion in videogames
A presentation for the Concerns About Video Games And The Video Games Of Concern conference at ITU, in January, 2016, where I first explored the main ideas of the “Zen as analytical tool” part of the project.
· Press X to Recognize the Other’s Suffering: Compassion and Recognition in Games
A presentation for the Videogame Cultures — 8th Global Meeting by Inter-Disciplinary.net, at Oxford, in September, 2016.
· What’s Zen about Zen Modes? Prajna Knowledge versus Mindfulness in Game Design
A presentation at the 10th Philosophy of Computer Games conference in Malta, in November, 2016. This was my first look at Zen Modes and their Zen elements (or lack thereof).
· Zen in the Art of Gaming
A presentation at the Central and Eastern European Game Studies 2018, in October, 2018, which I prepared together with Espen Aarseth.
Anything else?
The design of contemplative games and/or the act of playing games in a contemplative manner is not exclusive to Zen or Zen Modes, but it is related to them nonetheless. I’ve been exploring this informally as “slow games” and “slow gaming” respectively. I wrote a piece on that for the magazine O, of the creative studio of the same name, called “Slow gaming, notes for a contemplative game”, which you can read in English and in Spanish.
As a way of cataloguing every use of Zen in videogames that I find, and doing so in the open, I created a Twitter account called Zen Mode (@ZenModeVG), in which I’ve included, so far, games with Zen Modes, games where the player sits down in meditation/Zazen postures, games with Zen themes and/or motifs, games where sitting down is a mechanic, Zen garden in games, Zen and puzzles, Buddhist fighter-monks, and Karma meters.
What’s next?
My main goal is to turn all this into a book, though I want to write a paper before that as a stepping stone. Meanwhile, I have a lot of games yet to add to the Twitter account.
