{"id":1962,"date":"2014-06-11T16:01:54","date_gmt":"2014-06-11T14:01:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/?p=1962"},"modified":"2014-06-11T19:39:35","modified_gmt":"2014-06-11T17:39:35","slug":"impostor-syndrome-in-video-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/2014\/06\/11\/impostor-syndrome-in-video-games\/","title":{"rendered":"The Impostor Syndrome in Video Games"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is my sixth\u00a0monthly\u00a0Patch Wednesday<\/a>\u00a0post where I discuss a question about video games that I think is unanswered, unexplored, or not\u00a0posed yet. I will propose my own tentative ideas and invite comments.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The series is\u00a0called\u00a0Patch Wednesday to mark the sometimes ragtag and improvised character of video game studies.<\/em><\/p>\n

You pick up a video game, and everything about it is just right, the fiction, the subtle variations on existing game designs, the controls. The game is a perfect match to what you think of as\u00a0your very own and somewhat sophisticated taste.\u00a0But something refuses to click. You are not feeling it.<\/p>\n

This happens to me at regular intervals. For example, I think I value\u00a0tight, replayable, logical, small playfield and spatial\u00a0games, but I do not enjoy\u00a0Threes<\/em>\u00a0at all. Something must be\u00a0wrong with the game.<\/p>\n

In 2010, Jason Mittell wrote a thoughtful essay on disliking Mad Men<\/a>. He\u00a0describes how everything seems to be stacked in favor of the show being able to win over Jason:<\/p>\n

Mad Men<\/em>\u00a0is lodged squarely within my\u00a0<\/span>habitus<\/em>: along with other cable series from channels like HBO, Showtime and FX, it\u2019s part of the wave of \u201cquality television\u201d serial dramas that has raised the medium\u2019s cultural value in the 2000s (as Lynne Joyrich discusses in this volume), and served as the object of much of my own scholarly research and personal fandom over the decade (see Mittell 2006). The show is steeped in cultural references that resonate with my own background as a media scholar, flattering my otherwise esoteric knowledge of U.S. advertising and media history. Nearly every television scholar and critic with whom I interact loves the show.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He then analyzes particular traits of the show that he finds off-putting such as the unpleasantly sexist male characters, low emphasis on empathy.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, Oliver Sacks and Vilayanur S. Ramachandran\u00a0<\/span>talk about\u00a0the Capgras Delusion<\/a>, where a patient\u00a0is convinced that all their relatives and loved ones, even dogs, have been replaced by impostors who, the patient admits, look and act like the relative, but\u00a0at the same time certainly<\/em> is not that person.<\/p>\n

Capgras syndrome is often related to brain injury, and a\u00a0common interpretation is that while the patient was able to recognize faces as usual, they were unable to experience the emotional arousal that we usually experience in relation to familiar faces.<\/a> Hence the\u00a0experience that a person is an impostor – he or she looks like the real relative,\u00a0but does not\u00a0feel<\/em> like\u00a0the relative. The patient is not feeling it, and the relative appears alien for that very reason.<\/p>\n

The impostor syndrome in video games<\/strong><\/p>\n

Video games: and this provides a different\u00a0description of the impostor syndrome in video games (and television). We often approach a video game or some other work that\u00a0ticks off all the boxes on our personal lists. We may even be invested in the aesthetic criteria\u00a0on our personal list. And yet, we do not feel what we think we should be feeling. We rationally recognize the game, but our emotions fail to follow suit.<\/p>\n

We may then send ourselves\u00a0hunting for explanations, showing that\u00a0the\u00a0game we are playing will in some way fail to satisfy our criteria for what a good game is. This is not to discount Mittell’s discussion of\u00a0Mad Men<\/em>, but to point out that we often\u00a0want<\/em>\u00a0our articulated tastes to\u00a0be able to capture what we subjectively and emotionally enjoy. Whenever we feel that a particular work is an impostor, this is an incentive to find flaws in the work (the flaws may actually be there\u00a0but the impetus comes from a mismatch between articulated taste and emotional response).<\/p>\n

There are then two impostor syndromes here:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. When we think of\u00a0a game (or other work) as an impostor that only on the surface pretends to be a genuinely important work.<\/li>\n
  2. That we may\u00a0feel like impostors ourselves. In this case, we are closer to the common meaning of \u201cimpostor syndrome\u201d in that we may think\u00a0that we are only pretending<\/em> to understand what makes a game, TV show, or art work truly valuable. Yet we failed to have the genuine emotional response what we are supposed to have as\u00a0true connoisseurs.\u00a0We may feel\u00a0that we are frauds, hoping not to be found out.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    For Threes,\u00a0<\/i>I have been arguing for myself that I dislike Threes\u00a0<\/em>because\u00a0I dislike\u00a0the introduction of new tiles in the playfield, but is that really it?\u00a0It is likely that\u00a0we can never fully account for even our own tastes. We will continue to experience impostors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    This is my sixth\u00a0monthly\u00a0Patch Wednesday\u00a0post where I discuss a question about video games that I think is unanswered, unexplored, or not\u00a0posed yet. I will propose my own tentative ideas and invite comments.\u00a0 The series is\u00a0called\u00a0Patch Wednesday to mark the sometimes ragtag and improvised character of video game studies. You pick up a video game, and … Continue reading “The Impostor Syndrome in Video Games”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","category-patch-wednesday"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1962\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}