What kind of fun is that?!

Isn’t it strange that we, as people, decide to provide ourselves with so many negative emotions like sadness, fear or frustration?

written by Gola Marcin, Game Director

Polish version here

Both games and other media from the entertainment sector serve, in general, to provide fun — joy, satisfaction and a sense of fulfilment. People rely on cultural materials to relax, feel better and have a nice free part of the day. Sitcoms on Netflix, a talent show on TV or a casual game on a console — these are great time fillers to take your mind off the problems of everyday life. But movies, books or games are not only happy and joyful things. A lot of saddening dramas, terrifying horrors or games that give a sense of ineptitude and frustration have been created, are being created, and will certainly continue to be created. What’s more, not only are they created, but they are willingly received by the audience. Isn’t it strange that we, as people, decide to provide ourselves with so many negative emotions in our free time?

I have a theory as to why this is so. Negative experiences in art give us a buff — a temporary reinforcement of our abilities. Experiencing the opposite of fun in a controlled environment, i.e. in art, works on us like a magic potion in an RPG.

Fear

First, let’s shine some light on fear. Why do we watch horror movies, why does a large part of society like to be scared?

Let’s start with the core — why are we afraid? From an evolutionary point of view, fear is essential for us to survive. Any creature that did not have the impulse to run away or hide from a threat (for example a larger predator) would sooner or later probably die out. Therefore, humans react to fear in a so-called fight-or-flight reaction, which prepares the body to fight the danger or to escape immediately.

At the time of danger, the amygdalae in our brain send a signal to the pituitary gland to feed the body with adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH). We start to breathe faster, the heart rate increases, the less important blood vessels narrow and the key ones — around the internal organs — widen. The blood glucose level increases and our muscles become tense. We are ready to fight or run away. At this time! The hippocampus responsible for information processing verifies the stimulus received. Is the danger real? If it is only a movie or a game and not a real predator, the reaction of our body is calibrated accordingly. But what was instilled is ours…

It turns out that we were not in danger, but for a moment we were faster, stronger, our senses were particularly sensitive to the environment (and not to our everyday problems). This injection of superpower is enough for many to desire fear. But that is not all that this emotion has to offer.

When we are dealing with a culture based on fear, a frequent procedure to provide a greater sense of threat is to play with the recipient’s abject reasoning.

Abductive reasoning consists of questioning facts known to us in order to draw appropriate conclusions. If we know that all canaries are yellow, and at some point we meet a black canary, we must question the information we have so that our image of the world does not collapse. So we assume that not all canaries are yellow, but most of them are. When suddenly all the canaries we meet are black, then we must again verify our vision of reality. Maybe it was us who saw an exceptional yellow canary, and not all of them are? And if in every book on Ornithology it will be written that canaries are only black, then maybe we will start wondering if this yellow bird we saw was a canary? Have we seen such a bird at all, or did someone just tell us about it? At the end of the chain of abductive reasoning there is always the doubt of one’s own cognitive abilities. This is precisely the moment that psychological horrors want to lead us to. So that we are not sure of anything, even ourselves. This makes us helpless and frightened. An example is the disturbing thriller Shutter Island.

What is interesting about perceiving fear as a positive thing is how our brain is constructed. Well, it is constructed in such a way that we learn all the time. So every time we see something that shouldn’t happen, a warning system is triggered that provides an injection of dopamine. This is to draw our attention to inaccuracies in the environment to verify our knowledge or see the danger. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter with many functions in our body, but the most important thing at this point is that the increased amount of dopamine in our body is felt as pleasure, stimulation and motivation. This is why we like it when our reality is put to the test — thanks to this, our body gets substances that are also released in such moments as when we are taking drugs, having sex or receiving an unexpected reward.

So we can conclude that we like to be afraid because we bring our body to a state of readiness, which we do not need at this point, and when we realize this, we have a great sense of control. It’s as if, at the maximum level in an RPG, we are going back to an earlier location and fighting the once horrifying opponents.

Fear Potion:

• + 10 to strength
• + 10 to endurance
• + 10 to perception
• + 5 to well-being
• Duration — a few seconds
• Cooldown — a few minutes

Failure

It is said that nobody likes to lose. Well, that’s not true. Let’s imagine a game we’re going through for the first time, and none of the levels gave us any difficulty. Or a crime story so obvious that from the very beginning we are able to solve the mystery of the murder and identify the killer. Such works are perceived as boring and non-engaging, and yet they are devoid of defeat.

So we like to lose, the only question is how we are going to do it. To get to the heart of the matter, attribution theory comes to your aid. It tells us how we find cause and effect relationships. It is used in education to eliminate the feeling of hopelessness in students while learning. Therefore, in the moment of failure, we have three aspects with which we try to find the cause:

1. Internal or external — was it my own fault that I lost?
2. Constant or unsteady — will I always fail in this case, is there a chance that I will succeed?
3. Global or specific — am I just bad or am I bad at this?

The worst thing we can suffer from is the combination of internal, permanent and global failure, e.g. “I will never go through this logical puzzle, because I am too stupid”. Here comes the feeling of helplessness and hopelessness, which we want to avoid. However, if we take the opposite parameters, i.e. external defeat, unstable and detailed, it turns out that we approach this failure in a completely different way. Let’s imagine that we lost in a multiplayer shooter because the opponent found a better weapon in random conditions (battle royale) and beat us in a long distance duel. As a player, I realize that I failed now, but in the future the opponent may be less lucky than I am, and I can also enter a training mode to practice sniper shots. This look at failure motivates us to try again.

But why does one failure motivate us and another kills us? The solution to this puzzle is dopamine again. We already know that it does us good, I also mentioned that it appears while waiting for the prize — and this is the case. If we are fighting a duel that is evenly matched and we feel that we can win, we are already beginning to enjoy the upcoming prize (hence the saying “don’t count your chickens before they’ve hatched”). The dopamine starts to be released. It does not matter whether we win or not. It is important that we expected to win. If we do not believe in our chances of success, the loss is not sweetened with dopamine, so there is nothing pleasant about it.

I would like to emphasize once again that winning and losing is not only a domain of games. The interpretation of a movie or a book is similar to the fun our brains experience when we spend time playing on a console. When we receive a story, we try to predict what is about to happen, we think about the fate of the characters, we want everything to be coherent and close. If the story is too obvious, there is no uncertainty in us, and therefore no reward of satisfaction from being right. If there is no reward on the horizon — there is no dopamine. On the other hand, if the story ends with a completely illogical plot twist, we not only feel the worst failure possible (the one we couldn’t avoid) but also disappointment or irritation. Writing a story is the art of finding a balance between leading the audience into the field and maintaining the coherence of the story.

Let’s take an example to illustrate it better: Blade runner 2049 (there will be a spoiler) — the first part of the film is based on the idea of giving the viewer the feeling that our main character is a legendary android’s child (never saying it directly), so that in the second part of the film it turns out that both we and “K” were wrong. What’s more, proper retrospective editing proves to the viewer that we received enough information to guess that it wasn’t so. If this were missing, the plot twist might seem so strange that the viewer might feel resigned — “I don’t want to analyze it, because it doesn’t make sense anyway”.

Blade runner 2049 bases its entire narrative on this treatment. However, if we look at most successful stories, we find these treatments almost everywhere:

• While designing the characters — a great and seemingly brutal criminal in The Green Mile, turning out to be a man with a golden heart.
• While describing the location — a seemingly idyllic kindergarten in Toy Story, which turns out to be warped by the despotic power of Lotso.
• During the dialogues — the Joker telling a completely ridiculous joke in the evening program.

I think that while analyzing the story, it is worth distinguishing between the failure of the hero and the failure of the recipient. Even though as a reader, player or spectator I can have my favorite character, even if he is the main character and even though I support him from the bottom of my heart, it will still be more important and rewarding for me as a recipient than for him to win.

Take American History X (again a spoiler) as an example. When the main character’s brother dies at the end of the film, it is a waste of all the work that Derek put into Danny’s rehabilitation. It is true that without the last scene the film would have ended nicely and in line with the viewer’s last expectations, but the failure of the fictional characters gives coherent closure. Thanks to this, the film transitions from naive and aspirant to a serious one and shows the flaws of the world as it is. After Danny dies, this piece is better composed as a whole than without this event. Imagine that American History X ends:

• Happily — the audience “went through the story”, it had enough twists to be satisfactory. We get the final subtitles — the audience stops watching.
• Tragically (this is, how it really ends) — we get the final subtitles but our experience of the film does not end. We end up anticipating what will be next in the story, and we start interpreting what the story means. Could Derek have done something else, are these problems still present in the real world, or can we remedy them somehow?

Not only does this ending prolong our engagement with the story — the main character’s defeat also leads to victory for the viewer, providing an ending more consistent with the viewer’s expectations. The audience is not necessarily aware of this fact at first sight.

Potion of defeat:

• + 100 EXP
• + 10 to motivation
• + 10 to reflection

Sadness

Who hasn’t taken the bus while listening to sad music looking out of the window like in a music video?

Now I would like to analyze why we look for things that upset us? I will not write here about sadness addiction and self-destructive tendencies caused by different experiences. I would like to think about why healthy, cheerful people with a smile on their faces spend those few golden coins to watch something in the cinema that upsets them.

There are several reasons for this. First of all, oxytocin. Man is an empathic creature. When we see someone’s harm, we try to help them. Such a reaction is caused by the just-mentioned oxytocin, also called the love hormone. It doesn’t only contribute to feelings towards the people closest to us, but it helps to establish healthy social relationships. So when we see a tragedy, whether real or fictional, our brain releases the chemical responsible for empathy. We turn off the game or end the film and we are still “soaked in love”, thanks to which, as in the case of fear, we have a temporary superpower — the power to make social connections.

In general, research shows a close relationship between the empathy of the recipient and the pleasure of receiving sad impulses from art. The more someone cares about others, the more they tend to describe sad music as beautiful. This is all the more interesting because when we consider the most touching scenes in cinematography, they are usually not tragic events, but watching characters reacting to these events — the elderly man from Up! sitting with a balloon in the church after his beloved wife’s funeral; Cooper in Interstellar watching the recordings of his children, who have great sorrow for him; Simba trying to wake up his dead father. The events themselves do not sadden us as much as watching other characters being saddened by these events.

People surveyed when checking the correlation between pleasure and sad music often pointed out that they use this type of music to put themselves once again in a situation they couldn’t cope with. Putting yourself in a sad mood allows you to think about events with a similar emotional charge as they happened. Moreover, it allows you to understand the point of view of other people who experienced the tragedy. We often do this unconsciously, but empathy pushes us to make our lives worse by wanting to help others — a phenomenon often observed with addictions or children falling into bad company, just wanting to spend time with their peers they care about.

In addition, as in the case of fear caused by games or films, the feeling of sadness is somehow controlled; we are aware that it is not a real threat to us and has no influence on the events in our lives.

Sadness Potion:

• + 10 to charisma
• + 10 to social interactions
• 10% chance to remove mood-distorting effects
• + 20 do empathy

Mirror Neurons

Finally, I would like to write about the mirror neurons that make all previous deliberations even more meaningful. These neurons were discovered during experiments on monkeys (their presence was also confirmed in the human brain, but there were far fewer experiments on humans). Quite by coincidence, studying the brain activity of macaques, one of the scientists noticed that identical neurons react to a man lifting a banana, as well as when the monkey did it itself. Further research has shown that these neurons “fire” not when the object is raised, but rather when the monkey correctly interprets the researcher’s desire to raise the object. The whole experiment became most interesting when the subjects were doing different things with the fruit. Sometimes they bite and sometimes put it in a box. Then the scientist took a banana in his hand, and since the monkey was not able to clearly determine the intentions of man, both areas of neurons (both those responsible for biting the fruit and putting it into the box) were arousing activity. When the scientist has already done one of the activities, such as biting a banana, these neurons deactivated. The others were charged.

What does this mean? It means that mirror neurons discharge when you perform or observe the activity that charged them — and they charge by identifying intentions.

What does this mean? It means that yawning is contagious. It means that when we only hear a piece of a song, we “play” it over our heads. It means that it gives us the physical relief of looking at the things we were expecting. It also means that the constant ineffective reading of intentions causes anxiety and frustration, and when we finally release the charged neurons, we feel relief.

If there is a song in your head, there is no problem listen to it on YouTube to relieve yourself. If we have seen someone who we think was going to train and suddenly feel like exercising, there is no problem for us to do it. But what if we are afraid that a sick person close to us will die? Or if there is so much anxiety and fear that we are starting to get stressed out that a group of teenagers at the gate will use violence against us?

Let’s say the mirror neurons responsible for violence are activated. We can deactivate them with violence or by watching it. Because we live in a civilized society, it is unacceptable to take to the streets and beat someone to relieve us. Then she comes. The Deliverer. Art.

Potion of unsavoury sights:

• The hero experiences catharsis.

Summary

If we think about it, we are drawn to unpleasant things, because we are junkies — we are intoxicated by substances produced by our bodies; substances that are supposed to be released in completely different circumstances than when receiving art.

Is this wrong? One rabbi will say yes and another rabbi will say no. From the perspective of the creators, however, this knowledge is very useful. We do not create unpleasant pieces to spoil the day. On the contrary! By skillfully manipulating the chemistry of the human body, with the help of art we are able to turn something nasty into a positive experience. I believe that responsible and conscious creation is extremely important in the work of a game designer, director, screenwriter and all creative roles in the team, because it allows us to precisely design the experience and take care of the recipient.