In Off Center Episode 12, Scott Rettberg talks to game designer, academic, and author Doris Rusch about making games with meaning, existentialist psychotherapy, the resurgence of text-based games online, and embodiment: "Let’s talk about Zombie Yoga."
SR: Welcome to Off Center. I’m Scott Rettberg, the Director of the Center for Digital Narrative, and today I’m here with Doris Rusch. Welcome.
DR: Thank you.
SR: Doris, you’re a researcher at Uppsala University on game studies and game design specifically. Can you say a little bit about your background as a researcher and how you ended up in game studies and designing games?
DR: Yeah, absolutely. I have a background in the humanities, so a very traditional route from literature to theater to film and philosophy at the University of Vienna in Austria. And then when I wrote my dissertation — I studied online journalism and its emotional impact and how we can design for arts coverage — suddenly there was a new media component in storytelling using the different channels that the Web had at its disposal. So, I got into games a little bit more and thought, “That’s really interesting.”
SR: Were you a game player?
DR: Well, I had a boyfriend at the time who played games, that’s kind of the classic story, and he introduced me to a lot of really interesting stuff, like the old Diablo. I loved it, it was super fascinating, and I thought, “Well, I always wanted to do something new, something that doesn’t have a lot of academic baggage and is a new, emerging form.” But there was nobody around in Austria at the time that did something like this.
SR: This was like 2015?
DR: Yeah, around that. I decided to just look into that and wrote a research proposal and got funding from the Austrian government, and they required me to have an external partner somewhere, an international partner. So, I found the IT University of Copenhagen and they did game studies, that’s where Espen Aarseth was, and Gonzalo Frasca, who was like one of my big idols, and Jesper Juul. And I went and visited and did a workshop there, and then I also found Henry Jenkins at MIT, and I actually didn’t even know what that was at the time.
SR: All right.
DR: As a humanities person, what do I know about an engineering school, right? It’s just the best in the world. He and William Uricchio invited me to be a visiting scholar, so I did that, and it got me into games more and more, and I started designing.
SR: Of course, Espen Aarseth was from the University of Bergen, and, classically, the comparative literature department here wouldn’t let him teach games, so he quit and went to ITU.
DR: Yup, smart.
SR: So, you kind of had this background studying literature, studying media. How does that shift to actually engaging with the art of creation?
DR: Well, I only studied literature because there were no creative writing programs in Austria, but I’ve always seen myself very much as a maker. Like, I’m interested in theory in so far as it lets me do stuff in an informed and educated way. I have a lot of different curiosities, and I love to dive into things. My core question has always been: How can I apply this to something that’s useful to a broad audience? I’m not saying theory as theory isn’t useful. Please don’t take it the wrong way, but I just take great pleasure in the creative process. So, I made some films, and I made radio and all of this stuff. When I was done with my humanities education and had a chance to be at the GAMBIT Game Lab at MIT, a game design research lab, I started calling myself a designer before I had made my first game and just dove in, had no idea what I was doing, but figured it out as I went. People were patient and educated me, and I made stuff and that was great. Since then, that’s been what I’m doing.
SR: Excellent. Do you have a particular approach to games? I read a couple of your articles and you’ve written about existential transformative game design, and those are concepts that don’t come to mind when I think about commercial games, like Doom or something. Can you say a little bit about that concept, about existential transformative games and how you try to develop it through the indie games that you’ve made individually and through your collaborations?
DR: Yeah. I mean, the existential transformative game design framework didn’t come out of nowhere. I had about 12 years of engaging with games as a deep form of expression. I wrote a book about deep games, taught a bunch of courses. It’s how we can make games that illuminate the human experience, the bandwidth of the human experience. I explored that through a metaphorical approach to games about addiction, depression, anxiety, all the fun stuff, and at some point that really segued into, “Okay, what are the deeper questions here?” Because in the games for change and games for health space that this previous work landed me in, there was a core concern: How do you measure impact? How do you measure if this is making somebody more mentally healthy, whatever that means. And I got really frustrated with that, and I actually started studying at a clinical and mental health counseling master’s program because I wanted to know: What is this transformation that we ask games to do? And there I discovered the more deeply existential psychotherapy and Irvin D. Yalom and all of these works, and it just resonated with me; we can engage with the system and the framework of the game as an explorative space to wrestle with these big questions of why are we here? Who are we? How do we connect to others? And I was very intrigued by how we can harness the concept of psychological resonance to create something that people engage with without the designer already predetermining, "This is the change I want to see."
SR: Right. So, what sort of changes do you want to see, or do you think games could have power?
DR: What I’m really curious about is how we can afford people opportunities, both through the narrative of a game, but also the amount of agency we give them in the system of the game to really inquire: Is what I’m doing with my life aligned with my deepest essence, with my desires, with my longings. When I speak of longing, I don’t mean I want a new iPhone. I mean, what matters to me the most. So really, this existential level: How can we do this by posing questions in a game? I think Journey did a beautiful job with that. I also think that Walden, a game has done a beautiful job playing with a lot of these existential themes and raising these questions for people to explore on their own terms.
SR: So, I’m familiar with those two games, but probably a lot of listeners, when they hear Walden, they just think of Thoreau’s novel. But maybe could you say a little bit about those two games Journey and Walden and explain a little bit more about how that connects?
DR: Yeah. So, when I played Journey, I was intrigued and lost at the same time. I’m, as many academics, a really cerebral person—
SR: And this is a game where you are sort of wandering in the desert.
DR: Thank you, yes. It’s modeled after the hero’s journey, at least that’s what Jenova Chen, who was the lead designer behind, explained. So, you are thrown into an unknown environment, and you are on this journey towards some mountain, and that’s the end point. It’s like the journey of life, which in and of itself, birth, death, is very existential. It doesn’t get more existential than that in a way.
SR: You don’t know what’s on the mountain, right?
DR: You have no idea. If you play it in multiplayer, you can meet other people, or not. You can’t talk, you can just wave, which is nice, because there’s no trolling. And you discover these remnants of other cultures, and it’s very not combat informed. It’s very nonmechanical, it’s very flowy and floaty.
SR: And it’s not about winning even.
DR: No, it’s not. But also, how do we win at life? So, it’s really taking all of these quantification measures that so often govern our gameplay experience completely out of the equation and just posing questions: Why are we here? What are we doing? How do we deal with that uncertainty? And it got me to reflect on how I approach this in real life when I don’t know what’s going on. I had a similar experience with Walden, which I totally sucked at when I started playing, because I approached it as a game.
SR: "You need to get the fish and go to the house.”
DR: Exactly. It tells me that I have a cottage to finish and winter’s coming and my fuel storage always has to be full. And since you are in the shoes of Thoreau, you’re supposed to get inspired. That’s the whole reason you’re in the woods. You’re not a survivalist. It’s okay if you’re a bit cold and hungry, you just go to the city and get some pie from your family and you’re fine. And I was totally in red, uninspired, which also made me reflect about life. What boxes am I constantly checking off and where can I make room for that uncertainty of not having everything neatly stowed away, just to be in the moment. Just to fish for the sake of being by the water.
SR: For the sake of fishing—
DR: Exactly.
SR: Not catching the fish.
DR: Exactly. It’s different than Journey that just doesn’t have any points or anything. It’s really playing with the gaming expectation, but that makes it a beautiful metaphor for how we gamify our entire life. You’re so used to these metrics and measurements and somebody else having the parameters for us to live by and setting the standards and the structures and the rules. We follow that, but what if we have to question this?
SR: Yeah.
DR: What really inspires us?
SR: It would be really interesting to see how Thoreau would react to the present moment. I remember reading lines about trains and the destruction that they were going to bring to human existence. I wonder what he’d think about AI? One of the things when I was looking through your work, there’s serious games, games that are making some kind of ideological argument, or games for change, where people are using games to make evident certain aspects of things like climate change. But there’s a real focus in your work on games that could be described as therapeutic and even some of them kind of medically therapeutic. So, for example, I’ve seen that you’ve done work with scientists, games that are about, for example, recovering from sickle cell anemia or traumatic brain injury and these other medical conditions. So, I’m just interested in how those games and those collaborations come about, and what did you learn from working in that context with doctors and so forth?
DR: Good question. Also, throwback to a time where I was at DePaul University in Chicago and had my Deep Games Lab there. I’ve always been really intrigued by medicine, my father used to work in a medical context, so I’ve always been really intrigued by the human body and the systems that are at play there. And also, that it’s something so real. The sickle cell game actually came to me through our basketball team at DePaul University, because one of their star players had sickle cell disease and still managed to be a top athlete. His mission was to raise awareness that you can live a full life even if you have sickle cell. There was a private donor who gave us money to develop this game for the team, so I made contact with a sickle cell expert at the hospital in Chicago that was most known for this, and found a small team and we developed this game together with the patients and the parents of the kids that had sickle cell, and also social workers. We really focused on reeducating preteens and teens on self-care. So it’s not like a medical game in the sense of contributing knowledge to the medical field or treating anybody, but helping them understand, “Okay, if you get too cold or too hot, then there is a likelihood for a pain crisis or you have to take your medicine regularly to prevent these cells from clumping together.” So it was a platformer game that we made that had all of these elements in there, and it was set in this mythical journey environment. It used fantasy, but also these really established strategies that patients with sickle cell have to use to avoid pain crises as much as possible. So that was one of the things we did, and it was very interesting to work with that audience.
SR: Yeah, that’s really interesting and cool. I grew up watching Blue Demons games, so.
DR: Yes, exactly.
SR: That’s funny. In your game development collaborations, you’re described as a narrative designer and we’re sort of the Center for Digital narrative here, that you’re working with us on, and you’re often working alongside programmers, and I assume visual designers, illustrators, and others. And one of my questions, more broadly, what is a narrative designer?
DR: Yeah. It’s interesting that I’m described as a narrative designer. I love stories, and I have a background in studying and creating stories, but when I started on my games journey, I actually really embraced the systems part. So, I definitely started as a so-called ludologist and was also in my early career very scolded by a lot of people for being way too narrative focused in my approach. So, it’s like, “Yeah, systems, I have got to understand that.” But systems tell stories too, right? You engage with them, and you make up your own story. So, for me, there are established definitions for what narrative design is in games — and also depends on the size of the team and whatnot — but for me it’s about how we can create narratively evocative experiences through whatever means are available in the medium of the game. Games in real life, hybrid games, digital games, games with novel interfaces, arcades, whatever. How can we connect to themes that these games tackle? For me, it’s very important that they have some kind of a theme, how can we render that creatively, so people are stimulated in their imagination? It’s not just a straightforward, “This is exactly how it works in reality”, but always opening a door to an imaginary space, a metaphorical space, a symbolic space to get people to see things just a little bit differently, to leave behind what they think they know about something and enter fresh and discover on their own terms.
SR: Yeah, it’s funny because you go back to that narratology, ludology, and that you sort of felt like you had to protect your identity as being a real ludologist. I remember that moment, a moment that makes sense in a way, in that it was sort of saying, “All right, we need to have our own vocabulary for what a game is and how it’s different from story.” But I do think there was this kind of, in a way, overreaction to say, “No, we don’t”—
DR: Totally agree.
SR: And maybe, if I think about the word narrative designer, it just seems like it’s very carefully avoiding the phrase writer, you know.
DR: And I’m a writer, too. So, yeah.
SR: Yeah. But in a way, then when I also think about that, the idea that every game experience is sort of a potential narrative and that when I play a game, I’m going to come away with, even if it’s the same narrative structure, I’m going to come away with a different story from other people who play the game, so it’s sort of like the idea of this sort of potential storytelling machine in a lot of interactive narrative art.
DR: I feel like I’ve come full circle anyways to now being very narrative focused with the last projects that I’ve been doing with Andy Phelps on The Witch’s Way. That’s just all writing and text and telling a story. So, I embrace both.
SR: Tell us more about The Witch’s Way.
DR: Well, you asked me in the beginning about this existential transformative game design framework, and The Witch’s Way was one project that tried to put that into practice through our own creation. So, it’s an adventure game in a way, a text-based adventure game that asks the existential question of identity: Who are you? What’s your essence, what’s aligned, what is not, what do you have to get rid of? And it’s doing so in a sort of magical realism kind of way. You’re a witch, you don’t know it. You move to a little cottage in the woods, and you have to figure out your life. You have a year. It’s meant to be really fun and playful, not too serious, and taking a lot of Terry Pratchett references and working with the language of symbolism and imagery a lot. So, there are a lot of rituals that you have to discover and do to uncover what has kept you from pursuing your passions. And you meet this old, tired dog and then, spoiler, realize that’s your inner child and your inner playfulness and you reconcile with that. So, it was a really fun collaboration where I just got to write again and play with language, which I love, and Andy Phelps did a tremendous job hacking Twine and making the game savable and have chapters, and he illustrated it also. And now we are working on the second chapter, which is summer.
SR: Great. Coming back to form, what are the advantages and disadvantages if you think about something, say a game that you develop in Unity or something like that, where there’s a lot of assets and a lot of interaction design of various kinds, to something that’s more what you’re describing, more textual, uses Twine, this storytelling platform. It sounds like maybe that gives you, as a creator, a bit more immediacy into the work.
DR: Absolutely. I used to love working with teams, and bigger teams — even though it’s a pain in the butt — it’s also beautiful and wonderful to get all of these different inputs. And I had that luxury when I was at DePaul and ran my own lab, and then I came to Uppsala University and that infrastructure just wasn’t there in the same way and I didn’t quite know how to figure that out. So, I thought, “Well, I want to keep making stuff. What can I do? I can write.” So, I just turned that into an advantage, because I can do it from 4 to 6, every day I sit and write and at some point, Andy and I touch base and say, “Here it is, go work your magic.” And he does and it’s fabulous for me right now. There’s so much more freedom to just go play and explore and put my thoughts down and then have in the back of my mind, “How could I challenge Andy, what could I give him to make this interesting.”
SR: Yeah, it’s funny. It’s sort of a surprising turn, I think, in terms of the popularity of Twine based games or textual games, which were really one of these earliest forms of computer games, but also earliest forms of electronic literature. And it does seem like, you know, my kids play Twine games, right? And a whole culture has grown up around them. That’s, in a way, kind of unexpected, when you come from this sort of commercial games era that takes up so much of the entertainment industry and then all of a sudden there’s this flowering of, in a way, the apparatus of these types of games is very similar to the kind of games that we had before graphics chips were in PC’s.
DR: Right.
SR: What do you think about that cycle of return there?
DR: I do think that our most powerful graphics card is our imagination and that there is something really sweet and beautiful about these smaller projects because they do have a chance to be way more personal, for better or worse, and accessible. It’s just opening up that whole game creation, storytelling domain to people, to contribute and take part in this sharing of these stories that are not as commercially driven, that can be quirky and weird and different and just tickle us in different ways.
SR: Let’s talk about Zombie Yoga.
DR: Oh yes, let’s.
SR: So, I love this concept, this was a game that you worked on about ten or 12 years ago, right? What drew you to draw together these two elements of zombie and yoga?
DR: Well, the zombies are not your traditional zombies. There is no gore, they are these shadow creatures. Really, the title Zombie Yoga just came to me, and I thought, “That’s cool, I like it.” And people responded so positively to it and were so curious. So rather than saying something like, “Yoga to liberate your inner child by fighting your fears that are metaphorically represented”, I just said Zombie Yoga. The zombies are representations of your inner fears and they dissolve into smoke when you hit them with your light ball, which is your inner light. It’s a Kinect game, so you actually do four different yoga poses, the ones we got to work for the Kinect and that people can reasonably be expected to perform without having to be yogis. The origin of this very strange game was that I did a Tai Chi class, and we did an exercise called Push Hands, which is a partner exercise where you try to sort of break into somebody else’s space, and I felt very emotionally bombarded, emotionally more than physically. And of course, like everything that makes me really excited inwardly, I need to turn it into a game.
SR: Yeah.
DR: So, I decided this has to be a game where people can physically explore things that are emotionally resonant. And so the idea of Zombie Yoga was born. I also dreamed about it, which is always a good sign that I have to make a game. And then, yeah, we made this Kinect game, and you do four different yoga poses to direct your light ball and go down a spiral where you heal different kinds of wounds in your past. You reconcile with loss with a mother figure that has been problematic and a loss of playfulness. And every station opens up a bone cage that is at the center, at the bottom of the spiral, and there is a baby in there. It’s pretty intense. Every station where you reconcile something from your past opens up that open cage, and in the end, you dance with your inner child because you’re playing a dancer.
SR: Unless the zombies get to you.
DR: Yeah, but then you just restart. You will liberate your inner child.
SR: This game, like a lot of the ones that you mentioned, it seems like embodiment is a really important element. A lot of people associate games with sitting hunched in front of a screen, are you in some ways trying to bring the body back in and to sort of get us out of that?
DR: Yeah, I’m totally shocked that the body is something that needs to be brought back in, but it definitely is. I’ve seen that in my own journey, how easy it is to just live in the head. If we only live in the head, we get very disconnected from that sense of what feels right because we just don’t feel as much.
SR: Yeah.
DR: So that has been a full personal exploration, and it started way before Zombie Yoga, but that was the actual first attempt to create something that brings these two worlds together. It’s been with me ever since I’ve worked with dance and movement therapists and tried to really marry my love for physical exploration with narrative and mythology and ritual and symbolic enactment. It’s so powerful to perform a symbolic action, and yet I felt so limited in the digital game space. So, finding ways to have more hybrid play, use technology to enhance and augment our understanding of our physicality and really fuse them together is definitely a research area that I want to dive in more and more.
SR: Yeah, so a symbolic action, an action that’s almost metaphoric, but that it actually has a kind of physical, psychological effect.
DR: Yeah. The concept of Psychomagic, as Alejandro Jodorowsky coined it. Splitting a watermelon in two is a very powerful action — and if you then imagine it as somebody you have a problem with — this splatter of a watermelon, it’s powerful, and it is better to do it—
SR: On a watermelon than on a head?
DR: Exactly.
SR: I hope so. Coming back to that whole game story question that’s guided a lot of the structuring of game studies, one of the things I noticed when I started teaching courses on game studies after a while, and I should just admit that I’m not an avid gamer myself; I’ve written a couple of things about games, but I always feel like I’m a little bit behind on the homework because I haven’t played enough games, you know? But one of the things I noticed in reading the literature in recent years is the growth of things like what they call walking simulators, games that are strongly narrative driven where the reward of the game is more revelations of the story. So just a general question for you: How do games tell stories in modes that are sort of specific to games that we don’t find in other narrative forms?
DR: I learned most about that from Janet Murray and her, by now maybe a bit dated, Hamlet on the Holodeck. I got really, really inspired by that when I read it many years ago. I still think that there is a lot to the concepts that she explains in that book of the maze or the labyrinth as a storytelling platform. You can walk around the space and the narrative architecture of that as Henry Jenkins calls it. So, the exploration part seems still really relevant to me. Now, how do we bring all this into the mechanics and rules? You have the systems part that also expresses something, we know the concept of procedural expression or procedural rhetoric that Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca have talked about a lot. So, it’s these things coming together, and then with virtual reality, you can be in a physical space, and you can bring your body into that, so we have yet another component where we can experience and sense. I’m also really inspired by Kaho Abe’s work on using sensors and wearables, and all of that is also emerging from tech.
SR: More haptic.
DR: Yeah, and her background is in fashion design, right? So, bringing that in, these are amazing opportunities and there is not one future of narrative in games, there are so many. It’s whatever you want it to be, that allows us to explore experiences that are evocative and get our imagination going. So the walking simulator is one sweet niche that has been developing that’s really tapping into the explorative spatial component, stripping it off the points and the franticness, and also allowing a whole new audience to engage with games and enjoy games and not be held back by, “Oh, I don’t have the dexterity to do this.”
SR: Right, it’s not about the finger athleticism, thumb clicking.
DR: The older I get, the more I suck at these things because I don’t have the practice.
SR: Right, exactly. Or the time, really, to get to level 52. I sort of miss just going to the arcade and putting a coin in and being challenged for, you know, 5 to 10 minutes of adrenaline.
DR: Yeah, for sure.
SR: And then going home. You know, one of the things that I thought exciting about your work, and you describe this a little bit, was the idea that in your scholarship, you have a lot of references to game studies and media studies, but also the psychology and psychotherapy, all the way back to Jung, to the present, neurobiology and cognition and theories like Joseph Campbell, who are kind of connecting story and psychology. So, there’s a lot of connections to narratological ways of thinking and really exciting interdisciplinarity, I guess you’d say, which is one of the things we’re trying to think a lot about with the Center for Digital Narrative. What happens when we bring these different perspectives together? You mentioned that you had the idea of theory as being a framework for creation: How do you think bringing all those elements together has transformed your process or the way that you think about creative making?
DR: Huh.
SR: Easy question.
DR: I’ve definitely had a lot of fun, and by giving myself the freedom and permission to be a bit of a dabbler. I draw on neurobiology and I’m not a neurobiologist, and I think people who really are versed in that field might be disturbed by some of the things that I just shamelessly draw on and explore in the games that I make. And yet my goal is not to make a contribution to neurobiology, right? So, I think it’s okay. It definitely has expanded my capacity to tackle different topics by just becoming good at reading up on very different domains and using that to inform the game design process. And I always say, I think quite carefully, “This is my inspiration” not, “this is a totally super well-established theoretical background." I mean, yes, there is theory in there and I’m trying to not suck, but I say, “This is inspiration and I’m rendering it creatively and I see what happens with that.”
SR: Yeah.
DR: And these two strands of psychology and story have always been with me because when I first enrolled, I enrolled in psychology and literature. So, that has always been a thing.
SR: You kind of come back to it.
DR: Yeah, really. And it is the story of the soul that I’m after.
SR: And myth and magic seems to be very important to you.
DR: Yeah, absolutely. Myth is an expression of the soul, through not just psychological, but also environmental concepts. I think they’re deeply informative of how we relate to ourselves and others in the non-human world. These days I’m a huge fan of Martin Shaw and how he uses romanticism as activism and tells stories back to nature and in the sense of place. When I look at this and then I look at the somatic training that I’ve been in at Strozzi Institute, where it’s all about the body, but it’s also about the body as entangled with all other living creatures. So that sense of meaning and purpose and relatedness and in how we weaved that into a love story for aliveness, it all comes together in how I see and create games, to play and make things for others to explore that loving aliveness and entanglement.
SR: Great. Final question: So you really believe that games can be transformative, and I guess one thing I think about as I watched, for example, my kids during the pandemic and all the other kids in the world where the games did have a different function all of a sudden. But I’m still not sure, are they coming to games for that kind of transformation? And we often hear a lot about the sort of potentially damaging effects of gaming, which are also, you know, real. But is this sort of a way of flipping that around, of trying to use games to bring Gen Z, to bring kids, to bring us, back into the world?
DR: I have really made it a point to try to extend invitations rather than impositions. I’m not trying to get anybody to do anything or transform. I want to create work that is meaningful to me and that I do think has a chance to reach others, if and when they’re open and ready for it. And if not, then that’s fine too. And transformation, we have actually no idea how people really transform, it’s so complex. Sometimes it can be the word of a lover and it transforms you forever because you were ready, and it hit at the right time, or you can create the most profound thing intentionally with lots of testing and some people are just completely immune to it because it’s not the right time for them, or maybe never will be. That’s fine. So, I think it’s good that we have these offers and invitations out there and for as many people as possible to give themselves permission to create and share and be open and vulnerable about what they care about, and it will fall on fertile ground for some. And I think it’s fantastic to just have many things existing next to each other.
SR: Yeah. And to play.
DR: And to play.
Listen to the full episode of Off Center.
References
Blizzard North. 1997. Diablo. Blizzard Entertainment. Microsoft Windows.
Id Software. 1993. Doom. Id Software. Microsoft DOS.
Jenkins, Henry. 2004. "Game Design as Narrative Architecture." In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 118-130. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Jodorowsky, Alejandro, director. Psychomagic, A Healing Art. Satori Films, 2019.
Murray, Janet H. 1997. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. MIT Press.
Phelps, Andy. 2022. The Witch’s Way. HTML5.
Rusch, Doris. 2012. Zombie Yoga. Xbox Kinect.
Rusch, Doris. 2017. Making Deep Games: Designing Games with Meaning and Purpose. Routledge.
Thatgamecompany. 2012. Journey. Sony Computer Entertainment. PlayStation 3.
Thoreu, Henry David. 1854. Walden. Ticknor and Fields: Boston.
USC Game Innovation Lab. 2017. Walden, a game. USC Games. Microsoft Windows
This research is partially supported by the Research Council of Norway Centers of Excellence program, project number 332643, Center for Digital Narrative and project number 335129, Extending Digital Narrative.