Representing as Self and Other

Toby Gard, the creator of Lara Croft, suggested a distinction between two different types of playable character in video games: the avatar and the actor. The avatar, in his model, is a character that the player 'inhabits', projecting either their own personality or an invented personality onto the character. Silent protagonists, such as Gordon Freeman or Link, fall into this category. The actor, meanwhile, is a character with personality pre-created by the game's writer, a character of whom the player takes control. Examples include Gard's own Lara Croft, or Solid Snake. Gard also suggested that avatars should be tied to a first-person view, while actors should be tied to a third-person view, though I think the relationship between camera view and type of playable character can be overstated: Link is an avatar with a third-person view, while J.C. Denton is an actor with a first-person view, and both of them work just fine.

I'm also not convinced that the distinction is as binary as Gard first suggested. Is Mass Effect's Commander Shepard an avatar or an actor? The answer is that she's a bit of both. (Or he is, if you're playing it wrong.) The character is customisable, and the choices presented in the game are, as I've argued before, not 'true' choices that the player is expected to decide on, but questions about how the player interprets the character. Shepard has neither the flexibility of an avatar, nor the rigidity of an actor, but lies somewhere in between.

But what I want to delve into today is the parallel between Gard's concept of avatar and actor, and the psychological concept of 'self' and 'other'. Some playable characters are proxies for the player's 'self', acting as the vessel for the player to be transported into the game world. Other playable characters are, well, 'other'. The player relates to the character, but doesn't necessarily identify with them.

Take Mario and Sonic. After 30 years, we still don't really know who Mario is. He is a (white male) human with whatever personality the player invests him with. He is the 'self'. Sonic, on the other hand, has a personality (unfortunately). But even before he had a personality, in his heyday, he was still a blue hedgehog. Assuming that nobody playing the game is actually a blue hedgehog, he is the 'other'.

This all has a knock-on effect for diverse representation in games. We are comfortable with playing white dudes as the 'self', and we are comfortable with playing all manner of outlandish creatures as the 'other'. The joke has often been made that the industry is content to let you play as a dragon, but balks at letting you play as a woman. When we introduce a character who is a woman, a person of colour, gay, trans, gamedom gets confused. Is this supposed to be a 'self' or an 'other'? It shouldn't be that way: after all, we're content to cast white guys as the 'other' as well as the 'self' - we're content to play as white guys who have their own personalities rather than being a surrogate for ourselves. That's a function of white male defaultism.

Anita Sarkeesian made a video about why the Scythian from Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP is a positive female character. And Sarkeesian's right: the Scythian is a positive female character. But she's a positive female character in a very specific way. It may be an oversimplification, but I would say the two goals of feminism are to normalise women (which is to say, get away from thinking of male as the 'default' and female as the 'exception'), and to humanise women (which is to say, getting people to treat women as actual human beings). These goals are very closely aligned (to the point where I have had trouble explaining the distinction), but I think they are served in games quite differently. Normalising women is better served by allowing a female character to be the 'self' - as the Scythian is. Humanising women is better served by portraying a woman as an 'other' - after all, how do you demonstrate the humanity of someone who has no personality beyond what the player brings with them?

Neither of these things is 'better' or 'worse' (although casting a woman as 'other' does need to take care not to undermine the normalising effect of casting a woman as 'self' in other games). Both are necessary. But I can't help but wonder if it's possible to achieve both at once. On one hand, Mass Effect seems to manage it. On the other hand, ludonarrative dissonance is often caused by a playable character switching unpredictably between 'self' and 'other', as in Grand Theft Auto, where the cutscenes and missions present the character as an 'other', but the between-mission gameplay presents the character as a 'self'.

I've focused a bit on women here, but the same can be said for other non-'default' groups. We need positive examples we can identify with ('self') to normalise them, and positive examples we can relate to ('other') to humanise them.

There is a caveat that, as a white guy, I might be talking nonsense. But I do think that discussions of more diverse representation in games do necessarily need to talk about what particular kind of representation we're talking about, and what that means.

Bias and Objectivity

There's been a lot of talk about the objective review of games, as Gamergate (yes, we're still talking about them. God, I wish we weren't.) have decided to paint having opinions as an example of journalistic bias. Now, before we go any further, let's talk about bias. Bias is where you claim to hold a certain position and have something to gain from making people think you hold that position. When oil companies claim that climate change isn't a thing, that's bias, because they have something to gain from making sure that people continue to consume what they're selling.

Simply having an opinion and expressing it is not bias. Yes, even if it is an opinion you personally do not share. It is ok to like or dislike a thing, and even valuable to tell other people that you like or dislike it, in order to either recommend it or warn people away. And yes, as a reader of reviews, you might dislike something someone else likes, or like something that someone else dislikes, and that review might not be 'correct' for you. But the alternative is to buy the game anyway and then decide whether or not you like it, which hardly puts you in a better consumer position than having read someone else's opinions. What this self-styled consumer revolt is actually doing is advocating a situation where the consumer takes on more, not less, risk of going out of pocket on something shitty. But hopefully we're past the point now where I need to explain to anyone that Gamergate's pro-consumer stance is nothing more than a smokescreen for misogyny. I think most sensible people get that.

But bias isn't really the subject today. I don't even really want to talk about the impossibility of objective reviews, as other people have done that beautifully. I just want to pick up on one point where something can seem to be objective, but actually isn't.

TotalBiscuit, before he decided to put his considerable YouTube celebrity behind a misogynistic hate group and spout transphobic gibberish, made a video where he said that someone's opinion on a game is mostly subjective (and how that's reconciled with his supporting Gamergate is anyone's guess). But he did say that we can be objective about certain things, like optimisation. If a game is poorly optimised, he says, it's poorly optimised and that's that. Anyone who knows half a fraction of a thing about software development knows that this simply isn't true.

When you optimise a piece of software, three things happen. Firstly, the program runs faster. That's the point. Secondly, it becomes harder to make changes in the code. Thirdly, it becomes harder to extend the code. The more you optimise, the more costly and difficult it becomes to patch bugs. The more you optimise, the less extensibility you give to your program.

Would Skyrim have been a better game if it ran faster? Undoubtedly, but that's not the question. The question is, would Skyrim have been a better game if it ran faster at the cost of the bugfixes it received post-launch and the power of its modding interface? Whether that cost would have been worth it is a judgement call that depends on which factor you think is the more important. And the relative importance of those factors can only ever be subjective. You can disagree with the decision Bethesda made on this relative importance, but you cannot say it was objectively wrong.

Gaming is both one of the most hardware-intensive and one of the most performance-critical applications of computers. All games do need to be optimised to some extent. But precisely what extent that is depends on a whole load of other factors, many of which are subjective. The idea that more optimisation is always better is sophomoric and naive, and has no place in real-world software development.

The larger point here is that things in games are rarely simply "done well". They're very often done well at the expense of some other factor. Even with the inconceivably large budgets the top-end AAA games have, spending money on one thing means not spending money on another. Part of the art of game development is striking the right balance, but critics and consumers alike have differing views on what "the right balance" is, because they have different subjective priorities.

Being a Boy's Like Sucking on a Lemon

Yesterday, Lionhead Studios tweeted a silly image in honour (if that's the right word) of National Cleavage Day. The image was of a barmaid with an ample bosom holding up two jugs (get it?) of ale. Many quite rightly felt that this image, in the social context of the current climate of video games, was tone-deaf and stupid.

Of course, Gamergate disagreed, because of course they did. Lionhead removed the tweet, which of course caused Gamergate to explode about how SJWs were censoring artistic freedom. Which is missing the point, because we SJWs didn't even want them to remove it - that was all Lionhead. We wanted to have an open discussion about it (you know, open discussion? That thing Gamergate used to pretend they wanted?), and perhaps would have liked Lionhead to apologise for it. That's very different to censorship, but that's an aside to what I wanted to talk about today.

I had a discussion with someone who was complaining that Lionhead was pandering only to straight dudes. That I took on board, but as a straight dude, it's also not flattering to be reduced to a boob-liker. To be fair, I do like boobs, but out of everything that makes up who I am, for that specifically to be chosen as the thing that would appeal to me felt manipulative and insulting. I wasn't, in making this point, trying to say "but what about the menz?" - I was trying to demonstrate that the tweet was doubly stupid because it excluded a large number of people and wasn't particularly flattering to the people it was including.

On reflection, I was right to feel manipulated. It was, "Here's some boobs. You like that, don't you? That's what you want." It was a condescending pat on the head for conforming to expected masculine norms. Where does that expectation come from? It comes from patriarchy.

I remember hearing about some feminist developers who complained that there are already a lot of games for men because there are a lot of games about shooting and racing and sports. I don't want to cast aspersions on how 'truly' feminist they are, but the idea that that is What Men Want is a deeply patriarchal attitude that they've internalised. At the time, I resented the fact that they thought that games with more substance, nuance and/or complexity were an exclusively female domain.

I still don't like the idea, but now I see it for what it is. It's an example of how the patriarchy harms men. The patriarchy sees male as default, and female as an exception. That idea contains a lot of advantages for men, and it's a large part of where male privilege comes from. But in gaming terms (which is, after all, what this blog is about), as soon as something breaks away from the default (and might thereby be more interesting), it's suddenly Not For Men, because male is default.

In fact, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is a game with not one, but two male-coded words right there in the title, and, one could argue, a game that is brimming with masculine themes, and yet it "feels" like a game for girls because the masculine themes it covers do not conform to patriarchal expectations of masculine norms, nor do the tone or mechanics remotely resemble the games men are "supposed" to like. (Incidentally, it also happens to be one of my favourite games - go check it out.) Brothers is an exceptional game in two senses of the word: it is both excellent, and an all-too-rare departure from the patriarchal default.

The restrictive expectation to conform to masculine norms, whether that be of behaviour or, as in this case, taste, is certainly an area where patriarchy is harmful to men. And when it's compounded by an industry that seeks to maximise profits by targeting a 'default' audience, at the same time reinforcing masculine norms to keep that 'default' market stable, it's also harmful to gaming.

Playgrounds of the Mind

I admit to being something of a veteran of OKCupid. One thing I've noticed about online dating, one of the biggest pitfalls, is that the profile you see is necessarily not an accurate representation of the person behind it. I'm not talking here about people deliberately misrepresenting themselves: Even people who strive to be as true as they can in their profile will end up with little more than a sketch. There is a temptation for the online dater to see a profile, which always leaves something to the imagination, and fill in the blanks with their own ideals. That can lead to unwarranted feelings and overattachment, which can very easily lead to hurt, and certainly lead to a lot of the creepy behaviours we all have a car-crash fascination with when they're shared by the recipients on Twitter.

But what is a danger of online dating can be a benefit to video games. I often feel like this same phenomenon is precisely what makes Final Fantasy VII so dear to so many people's hearts. We have characters with double-digit polygons, who have no voices and communicate entirely in (poorly translated) text. These highly abstract characters are, by virtue of their technical limitations, necessarily playgrounds of the mind, where the player's imagination has a lot of freedom to fill in the blanks as they'd like, enriching their attachment to and involvement with the characters. In Mass Effect, my Shepherd is probably different to your Shepherd because of the way I customised her appearance and the choices I made in the course of the game, but Final Fantasy VII - whether intentionally or not - leveraged the most powerful customisation engine that exists: the human imagination.

Incidentally, this is a large part of the reason I didn't like Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Here we had a film that made Final Fantasy VII's characters suddenly startlingly realistic. The film told me what these characters looked like, how they sounded, and what their mannerisms were. It not only didn't allow me to use my imagination to fill in the blanks; it trampled roughshod over all the investment I'd put into engaging with the characters in the game. This is also why I never want to see a remake of Final Fantasy VII. I can't help but feel a remake would take a game beloved precisely for its abstraction and fill in the blanks for you, denying you the power of your imagination. Even Cloud's appearance in Kingdom Hearts - itself hardly a paragon of detail - felt like it diminished the opportunity for engagement.

In recent years, another game used abstraction to allow the player to fill in the blanks with their imagination, and its characters were beloved, if not by so many, at least as much as were Final Fantasy VII's. I speak, of course, of Thomas Was Alone, where, forget double-digit polygons, each character was one polygon. And although the game was fully voiced, it was narrated by King of Lovely himself Danny Wallace, rather than acted by an ensemble cast, which again took a step back from the level of direct representation. Mike Bithell has done (I assume) intentionally what Squaresoft did (I assume) accidentally, and created characters who invite the player to engage with them by using their imaginations to fill in the blanks, thereby creating involvement and personal meaningfulness.

This may also go some way to explaining the appeal of anime-influenced visual styles. Granted, that particular art style is not to everyone's taste, but to those who like it, it appeals not just because it has more kawaiis per desu than any other style, but also because anime is abstraction-in-a-box. It is a style that - at first through necessity, and then through design - has been honed to encourage viewers to get personally involved by filling in the blanks with their imagination.

All of this is not to say that abstraction is all you need. There is an art to abstraction. In Christine Love's Analogue: A Hate Story, for example, it is important that Hyun-ae and Mute are abstract enough such that you can engage with them using your imagination, but not so abstract that they can be whoever you want them to be. This was writ large in the sequel, Hate Plus. Mute died, which evoked similar feelings in fans as Aeris' death in Final Fantasy VII, but whereas in Final Fantasy VII, Aeris was taken from you by the big bad, Mute's death was a suicide. An act of her own agency transgressed the mental image of the character players had themselves built up. This was used to great effect, but it could just as easily (and was, by some quarters) be seen as a betrayal. "What has Sephiroth done to my Aeris?" became "What has Christine done to my Mute?" The dynamic of attachment and loss is incredibly powerful - too powerful for some players to deal with - but would have been a damp squib without the abstraction that allowed that attachment to form in the first place.

There is a storytelling principle called "show, don't tell", but I feel it's mis-worded, particularly for such a visual medium as video games. It's very easy for a video game developer to say, "Well, we are showing, and with tens of thousands of polygons in HD no less!" Yes, that's true, but the spirit of "show, don't tell" might better be explained as "imply, don't make explicit". Janet Murray, in her seminal book on interactive storytelling, Hamlet on the Holodeck, partially rejects Samuel Coleridge's notion of "willing suspension of disbelief", preferring instead the term "active creation of belief", and this is, I think, where I'm coming from. Creation of belief that does not engage the imagination is inherently less active.

If you're telling a story, and especially if you're making a video game, the onus is on you to give your audience something to do. And that goes beyond pressing buttons to control the action - your game's interaction with the player doesn't begin and end at their fingertips. It is, and must be, interacting with the player's imagination.

The Poetics of People

One of Marie-Laure Ryan's "conditions of narrativity" is that a story must be about individuated existents. To put it more simply (but less accurately): A story must have characters. It must be about people doing something, otherwise it's not a story.

Narratologically, characters are broadly divided into three components. They were previously thought to be three types of character, but hybrids are not only possible, but common enough that it makes more sense to think of them as three components of character.

• Aesthetic (or Synthetic): This is the character insofar as how it contributes to the plot, or the other narrative effects for which it is employed. This can be thought of as character in service of story.
• Mimetic: This is the character as a representation of a human (or otherwise) being. It is not a real person, but one that may "pass for real". A character who is believable or realistic will have some thought put into this component.
• Illustrative: This is the component of a character that deals with the ideas or themes the character symbolises or represents. Not how the character serves the story as such, but how the character serves the meaning or message of the story.

A well-rounded story will strike a good balance between these components, but what that balance should be may depend on genre. When Aristotle wrote his Poetics, plot had primacy (or at least Aristotle thought so), and characters therefore necessarily emphasised the aesthetic component. Character-driven stories gained in popularity over the intervening centuries, though, and the peak of emphasis on the mimetic component can be found in the novels of the Victorian and Regency eras. The use of the illustrative component is both as old as the hills (Aesop, the Bible) and relatively recent (Orwell).

And what of Hollywood (and, by extension, the Hollywood-aping medium of video games, which is what we're really talking about here). By and large, it's gone back to Aristotelian Poetics. One could argue that that's a cynical move that allows low-risk manufacturing of stories according to a proven formula, and that might not be wrong, but what I'm more interested in is what effect emphasising the aesthetic component has.

If we unpack what the aesthetic component means, it means characters being used to serve a story. And that's not wrong, but it does have some problematic side-effects. First of all, it leads to characters being valued for their dramatic usefulness. Secondly, it creates situations where any character who has the desired technical effect will do. Right away, then, Aristotelian Poetics is a formula that creates a need for, respectively, instrumentality and fungibility, which are two of the key components Martha Nussbaum identified of objectification (it's arguable that denial of subjectivity is also present: at the very least subjective experience of characters is conveniently ignored when it doesn't suit the plot). Particularly against a cultural white-male-default backdrop where women and people of colour have "known technical dramatic effects" in stories, this is a problem.

This also gives a clue as to what calls for "more realistic" female characters means. The "But escapism!" argument isn't one I'm unsympathetic to. Realism is boring. However, what we are talking about isn't necessarily realism per se, but about paying more attention to the mimetic component of female characters. 'Realism' is a strawman (albeit one perpetuated by the people calling for it not having the technical language to explain what they mean): what we're really talking about is merely less one-dimensional characters. And if you're against that, then I don't know what to tell you.

For Everyone is Not For Everyone

Andy Warhol once famously said, "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes."

The Scottish musician, writer and former blogger Momus less famously (appropriately enough) said, "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people."

One of the almost-legitimate criticisms raised by GamerGate is a dissatisfaction that the apparatus of games journalism is out of touch with popular opinion. But is that really true, or is "popular opinion" something that, for all we take it for granted, isn't a real thing? This bears examination.

Mitu Khandaker-Kokoris is, sadly, GamerGate's latest target. In addition to the heartfelt sympathy I extend to anyone who is targeted for harassment, it just so happens that her game, Redshirt, is a great example to pry this question open. This is a satirical game about working on a space station and using social media to improve your relationships with your co-workers. In her response to the GamerGate conspiracy theories, Mitu notes that reaction to the game was very divided. She humbly attributes this to it being her first game, and an ambitious one. I disagree. I think it's great, and I think the reason for the division in the response to it is not because it's imperfect (which, if we're honest, would more likely have led to a consistently lukewarm response), but because it's simply Not For Everyone. It is good at what it does, but not everyone is going to care about what it does.

This is one of the articles of faith of a GamerGater. Since they are gamers, games must be for them. They refuse to believe that this assumption is nonsense, and anyone challenging this assumption is immediately painted as an 'invader'. GamerGate questions how people can like "walking simulators", but rejects the only legitimate answer: "Because they are not you." "Well, that must mean they are not real gamers, because I am a gamer, right?" Because GamerGate believes in the cultural homogeneity of the gamer identity, they feel justified in projecting their own values and perspectives as "popular opinion".

A lot of people opposed to GamerGate have said that gaming is mainstream now and that we won. They're wrong: gaming has in fact become post-mainstream. The explosion of gaming is getting closer to the "elective affinities" Momus wrote about in music. Gaming is still about identity, as is any cultural affinity, but where GamerGate is wrong is that our identities are shaped by and reflected in what kinds of games we like, not whether or not we like games.

Arthur Chu wrote convincingly about parallels between GamerGate and the violent reaction of 'white' rock to 'black' disco in the 70s. While it's politically on point, where gaming as a medium is now is parallel to a rather more recent phenomenon in music. The 70s were just the start of the idea of 'choice' being present in the music industry, a more extreme - and racialised - rehash of mods vs. rockers. Over time this binary choice has given way to an array of genres, which have then had to be split up into sub-genres (I don't like Metallica but I like Dimmu Borgir: How can metal be a genre I identify with?). The democratisation of music production using computers and music distribution using the internet has broken that up even further. Things like the Music Genome Project are, essentially, an attempt to use computing power to keep track of a musical taxonomy that has become too complex to be modelised within the human brain.

And gaming is in the same place. It's easier than ever to make and distribute a game, now. Notwithstanding the "just because you can doesn't mean you should" effect that gave us thousands of godawful Myspace bands, that democratisation is necessarily going to lead to a broadening and diversification of games. It's inevitable. Of course it starts with indies, because that's the nature of democratisation.

When Michael Jackson died, Momus wrote - in keeping with what he had written nearly two decades previously - that he was not only the King of Pop, but the Last King of Pop. Not only was the man dead; so was the paradigm of artificial universality ("it don't matter if you're black or white!") on which he built his career. Call of Duty is gaming's Michael Jackson. Modern Warfare may have been the title that brought gaming fully into the mainstream, but there is no place for "the mainstream" in the internet age, and Modern Warfare 3 was the last flagging vestige of the main stream giving way to a network of rivulets. It's ok to like Call of Duty, though the fact that I have to grit my teeth to say that, or a casual inspection of any gaming-oriented internet forum, will reveal that it, too, is Not For Everyone. Not any more.

So when we say that "gamers are over", what's really over is this "synthetic unity" of gaming. When we say that "videogames are for everybody", what we mean is exactly the opposite of "every game is for everyone" (which is why nobody is trying to force anything down your throat). When we say that "I need diverse games", we mean that we want to be able to exercise elective affinities rather than merely taking whatever a bunch of rich guys in suits have decided we ought to like.

It's also worth noting that GamerGate's "Not Your Shield" campaign is, even ignoring everything else wrong with it, entirely about retrenching the synthetic unity of homogenised defaultism, of asserting 'normal' on something that cannot adequately be captured by a single label. For all that it is used by Gamergate to make high-minded claims about diversity, its core statement is that diversity doesn't have any material meaning, that "it don't matter if you're black or white". This "colour-blindness" that is so often touted as virtuous is about being swallowed up by the prevailing, 'default' culture, not about celebrating multiculturalism.

This is something the industry has to adapt to. The overcapitalisation of AAA titles cannot weather the fragmentation of the mass market into the archipelago of elective affinity. Games that expect five million sales (and even more so those that need that number just to break even) are insane in a climate where it's increasingly easy for a customer to simply choose a different game, to elect a different affinity.

Journalists and critics, on the other hand, have already adapted to this (with much celebration, I might add). Momus predicted this, too: He said that what Melody Maker considered "the best new band in Britain" would be quite different from what Soul Underground considered "the best new band in Britain". The same doubtless goes for Metal Hammer, Mixmag, Jazzwise... Journalists - particularly cultural criticism journalists - should not have to apologise for writing from a certain perspective and for a certain audience. In the GamerGate lexicon, 'clickbait' is a codeword for "things other people want to read," but when Leigh Alexander addressed game developers to say that stereotype 'gamers' don't need to be their audience, she could just as easily have been addressing game journalists.

There are, of course, many worse aspects to GamerGate than the assumption that games should be for them, but their entire veneer of legitimacy (or what remains of it) rests on this faulty premise. Take that veneer away, and we can start dealing with the real problems, because any real gamer knows you don't shoot at the boss' core while the shield is up.

The Dialectics of Videogames

This is something I've been meaning to post for a while. I've talked briefly about dialectics in video games before, but that was in a sort of different context.

Socrates (Image credit: Eric Gaba)

So, I understand that for most people, the word 'dialectics' is probably big and scary. Let me break this down with a short and oversimplified history of dialectics. Dialectics was allegedly invented by Zeno of Elea (he of the infamous Archer's Paradox), but was really made famous by Plato and Socrates. They gave us what we call (for rather obvious reasons) Socratic Dialogue. In Socratic Dialogue, one party adopts a position, which we call the thesis, while the other adopts the opposite position, which we call the antithesis. There are formal rules for how the dialogue proceeds, but suffice to say it is the goal of the antithesis to find a flaw in the thesis, and the goal of the thesis to defend itself. Socratic Dialogue is, therefore, a means of evaluating the strength of a thesis. If a thesis is strong, the antithesis will fail to find fault with it. If the thesis is weak, the antithesis will defeat it, and you should go and think up another thesis.

We're going to skip over 2000 years of history now and go straight to the 19th century, and the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Georgie gave us another form of dialectics, which we (again, for obvious reasons) call Hegelian Dialectics. Like Socratic Dialogue, Hegelian Dialectics begins with a thesis and an antithesis, but it's perhaps fair to say that Hegel saw dialectics as more generative than evaluative. Rather than using the tension to test the strength of the thesis, Hegel rather saw the tension between thesis and antithesis as culminating in a process we normally call sublation (although we're talking about Hegelian Dialectics, we actually use a lot of terms where Hegel himself actually used different terms, but they basically mean the same thing). Sublation does not represent the triumph of thesis over antithesis or vice versa, but the creation of a new, third position, called the synthesis.

G.W.F. Hegel

We could also talk about Karl Marx and dialectical materialism, but the difference between dialectical materialism and Hegelian Dialectics isn't really relevant to our purposes.

So what does this have to do with videogames, and why am I writing it on a videogame blog that is especially concerned with stories?

Well, I propose that games qua games are Socratic, and stories are (often) Hegelian, and because of that, they require different methods of resolution.

If we consider a game, where the point is to win, in dialectical terms, it seems obvious to say that the player represents the role of the thesis, and that the opponent or other challenges represents the antithesis. A player wins a game by not allowing the challenges to find flaw with their playing: by not allowing the antithesis to find flaw with the thesis. (This is slightly different from Socratic Dialogue, because the antithesis is often waits for the player to come to it, but whatever. The player can only win the game by facing the antithesis' challenges.) The strength of the thesis is directly correlated to the player's playing ability.

In a story, the story tension is indeed set up by the tension between thesis and antithesis, but is resolved not by the virtues of either side, but by some change to a new position: the synthesis. If one side was inevitably going to win anyway, there is no tension. Now, yes, the protagonist often beats the antagonist in a story, but usually because of some change in the protagonist such that the protagonist is no longer playing by the thesis they presented to begin with. In this case, the protagonist doesn't so much represent the thesis as resolves the story by switching from the thesis to the synthesis. This is pretty much what we mean when we talk about a character arc: the character changes over the course of the story. Here I would say that I think the Socratic-style dialectic of the protagonist merely overcoming the antagonist's challenges without any real change is a perfectly valid story - it is, at the very least, something I would be content to call a story - but I'm not convinced it's often, if ever, a good one.

I don't want to put words in Ernest Adams' mouth, but I get the feeling that, when he talked about the disanalogies between gameplay tension and dramatic tension, this is what he was driving at, particularly when he talks about dramatic novelty and the need for change.

Likewise, with reference to when Jesper Juul talked about the distinction between immediate desires and aesthetic desires, I would propose that our immediate desires are by and large Socratic (in the sense that we want the thesis to win) while our aesthetic desires are more Hegelian (in the sense that we want an interesting resolution).

Inevitably, we're going to have to talk about Mass Effect 3's (pre-extended-cut) ending here. I don't want to get too hung up on what I think about the ending, or why people liked or hated it. The story of the trilogy is, essentially, about cycles, and specifically Hegelian cycles, so it's rather appropriate the the three ending options were the thesis (destroy the Reapers like you set out to do), the antithesis (siding with the Reapers in the hope of controlling them) and the synthesis (which was, helpfully, even called the synthesis ending). To my mind, the thesis and antithesis endings are your typical 'good' and 'bad' game endings. Like in Streets of Rage (or was it Streets of Rage 2?), where, upon meeting Mr. X, you can choose to either beat him up to get the 'good' ending, or join him to get the 'bad' ending. This is complicated a little bit by the fact that the 'good' ending in Mass Effect 3 was portrayed as a Renegade choice, while the 'bad' ending was portrayed as a Paragon choice, but let's discuss that later. Then you have the synthesis ending, where the story is resolved by some change, as stories, as we've established, usually are.

In summary, a win in a game often means the triumph of the thesis, while a resolution in a story often means replacement of the thesis with the synthesis. One of the great challenges for narrative-heavy games is reconciling the two. A good place to start might be Raph Koster's idea that Narrative is not a Game Mechanic.