Physical Imagination and Video Games

I love playing video games, and lately I've been playing through a series of games on Madden '08 (the most recent of the Madden series that I have) on the "NFL Superstar" mode, which puts you in an over-the-shoulder camera view that is as close to a 1st-person game that I can think of in sports sims (not including driving sims and variants thereon, like snowboarding, skateboarding, etc). It allows the player to adopt the role of a character whom you then guide through a career in the NFL.

I have come to realise that I love most playing the positions, or styles, that involve hard hitting: my first (and to date most successful) "Superstar" was a defensive lineman with the same weight and height as yours truly, but rather more strength. My current character is a running back who again resembles me in height (is somewhat lighter than me, but has a huge arse - not sure why I thought that was a good idea, but it seemed fun at the time I created the character!) This running back does not do agility. When I see a defender coming at me, I ram heavily into him and more often than not the defender ends up on his backside (the next guy usually takes me down, but hey!) In short, it's all about hitting people hard, with my body.

At which point we note the language use mutating from third-person "My current character is..." into the first-person "...I ram heavily..." And that's what this post is about.

I have a very powerful imagination. Every hit I make on the Madden 08 video game, I feel physically, even though it only happens in the electronic calculations made by my PlayStation 2, and is represented as a slight trembling of the controller, sounds from the speakers, and a bunch of pixels on my telly. My brain uses these cues and constructs for me a full simulation of the sensations as it happens. My chest and legs, my arms, experience the slamming pain as the fictional, virtual, bodies collide. I don't experience psychosomatic bruising or anything like that, but I experience being winded, the thudding and stinging, the sharpness of the pain, all of it is conjured, and in my mind I am in that situation. If my virtual team mates don't block for me (when I'm the running back - if they didn't cover properly when I was the DL) I experience the emotions as well, as the great wash of anger amplified by the stimulation of pain, overtakes me, and I have been known to yell at the television as though I was on that field and yelling at a team mate whom I felt had not played their part. And as we line up for the next snap, I feel the determination and aggression as I anticipate further contact with the opposing players. When I smash through a tackle and break free to gain a few extra hard-won yards (especially if it moves the chains or, joy of joys, scores a touchdown!), I feel a fiery celebration and triumph - again, I'll snarl at the telly "Come on!", "Fuckin' 'ave that!" or similar declarations of triumph and challenge rolled into one (yes, I know that "Fuckin' 'ave that!" is more of a UK colloquialism, but I'm not channelling a USAian sportsman, I'm just entering into that virtual world with my personality and background intact!)

In short, my imagination is very physical. Even reading can have this effect on me, as I imagine the sensation of each character as they are centred in turn. It isn't quite as direct or visceral as a video game, because it takes a little more time to process a whole sentence than it does to process a picture and sound combination.

Listening to "Creep" by Radiohead, I experience a physical jolt every time when I hear the guitar stabs that build up to the chorus. Listening to metal in general, my body can imagine what it would feel like to be in front of the speakers, being blown away by the pressure waves of the sound. Music is physical for me, but even when I can't have the full physicality of it, my brain offers me some phantom of those sensations anyway.

Then, of course, there are "cyber-scenes" on instant messenger services or IRC; It can be quite scary to get so deeply involved in things that aren't really happening but are only in the imaginations of two people communicating via the internet, but my imagination makes it seem surprisingly real and physical.

Oddly enough, television generally doesn't do any of this for me - it remains resolutely a 3rd-person experience for me, even when the narrator is supposedly one of the characters in the story. I don't know why this is, but I would hazard a guess that it is a combination of two things (possibly more): firstly, there is no interaction with television, so it isn't like a video game, and it isn't like music either (which can be experienced live); secondly, television isn't a purely fictional medium - as well as stories, we also see the news, documentaries, cookery shows, interior decorating shows, etc. These are all about things that happen to real people who aren't me, and that don't involve make-believe, so I guess they train me not to see television the same way as I do video games. Thus, I can empathise with those other people, but not cast myself as them in the way I do my video game characters.

Going back to that sports sim thing with which I started this piece: I wish I could go back 10 or 12 years and tell my younger self how good the pain of contest feels, and tell myself to go out and get involved in some physical sport for real!