COGNITION
Cognition is that which is studied scientifically by cognitive science, defined succinctly as “the interdisciplinary study of mind and intelligence” (Thagard, 2012). The word “interdisciplinary” hints at the plausible assertion that, instead of a single cognitive science, there are in fact a range of cognitive sciences (emphasis on the plural). The title of the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS) signals this, and it refers to “the various disciplines that contribute to the cognitive sciences, including psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology and the social sciences more generally, evolutionary biology, education, computer science, artificial intelligence, and ethology” (Wilson & Keil, 1999, p. xiii). The word “contribute” is used because the disciplines mentioned are not at the outset defined as cognitive disciplines. Rather, the idea is that work conducted within all the mentioned disciplines can contribute to the overall endeavor of a science of cognition. MITECS uses the terms “cognitive science approaches” to designate such work, and concrete examples can be found in the way the adjective “cognitive” is used as a prefix, as in cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, cognitive linguistics, cognitive sociology, and so on. Beyond a preoccupation with questions of mind and intelligence, it might not be entirely clear what the criteria are for a disciplinary approach to qualify as cognitive, but we will proceed by introducing some fundamental topics and discussions in cognitive science. We will then move on to some concrete instances of work that identifies itself as cognitivist and relate this body of work to video games on both general and more specific levels.
Central Issues and Recent Developments
The field of cognitive science is self-consciously pluralist; many different approaches to the same issues exist within the field. It would be folly to try to summarize all the main topics here, but we can introduce a bit of common ground (for a general introduction to cognitive science the reader is referred to MITECS and the large number of textbooks available, such as Eysenck and Keane (2010) and E. E. Smith and Kosslyn (2007)).
Cognitive psychology is a central discipline, and most textbooks devote chapters to perception, attention, memory, language, emotions, problem-solving, and action. These processes are conceptualized as mental representations and the operations performed on them. One very prominent concept used to describe mental representations is that of schemas, which can be seen as the building blocks of mental representations. Schemas should be understood hierarchically, and range from fundamental image schemas (such as containers and paths) to larger gestalts that organize such comparatively simpler schemas into complex schematic structures such as compound objects (a chair), events (going to a restaurant), spatial layouts (a kitchen), scripts (ordering a meal, eating it, and paying for it), and stories (“Listen, something funny happened on the way to the restaurant … first … then … and finally …”) (Mandler, 1984; Schank & Abelson, 1977).
In the earliest phases of cognitive science, during the 1950s and 1960s, cognition was seen as a rather disembodied affair. Although no one seriously doubted that the brain was responsible for the instantiation of the mind, cognitive psychology was content with treating the mind on the basis of an abstract model of a computer (see Neisser, 1967). As such, cognitive science was intricately tied to the conceptualization and later invention, development, and actual production of computer technologies. One way to see historical developments within cognitive science is that this early disembodied computational model has been challenged, if not replaced, in several ways. An overarching issue has been that of defining the mind and intelligence and its place in a material world—what is the mind, where is it, and how should it be studied?
Some of the central discussions have targeted the relationships between the mind and the brain, the mind and the body, and the mind and its environment. Neuroscience has seen an explosive development over the last 20 years, and has powerfully influenced psychology in general and cognitive psychology in particular, making them pay more attention to the hardware of the mind (or wetware, as it is sometimes called). Not everyone, however, agrees with the bon mot that “the mind is what the brain does”—the issue here is one of possible reductions to brain states, an issue that is hotly debated especially in the philosophical cognitive community. Another issue which has become more prevalent is that of embodiment. Here, the criticism has been that cognitive science has largely ignored the role played by the body in cognition. One result has been an increasing emphasis on the significance of embodiment for mental representations and their deployment in language and metaphor, as seen in the seminal work of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and subsequent work (see Gibbs, 2006). Related, but also importantly different, lines of criticism has been offered by ecological psychology (Gibson, 1979; Neisser, 1976), where minds are seen as integrated in active organisms, and schemas both structure cognitive activity and are updated and modified by this activity in a continuous loop or “the perceptual cycle.” Contemporary phenomenology (Gallagher, 2005; Gallagher & Zahavi, 2008) and philosophy inspired by biology and robotics (Clark, 1997) have argued along similar, but again not identical, lines that mind cannot be separated from the “lived body” and/or the biological organism, and which is more often than not seen as fundamentally intersubjective, and socially constituted. A third criticism is that offered by distributed cognition, where cognitive operations are seen as something that belongs not just inside individual heads but rather to distributed systems (Hutchins, 1995). This could be seen as a specific take on a more general idea, namely that mind is always embedded in an environment (Haugeland, 1998), both material and social—individuals will use their environment, for instance to offload complex tasks to technology or fellow cognizers. The last two lines of criticism, those of embodiment and embedding, come together to inform the position of situated cognition, which has gained traction within cognitive science (although it is arguably more popular within philosophy than empirical psychology). As described in a recent handbook, the situated position argues that mind is fundamentally embodied, embedded, and situated (Robbins & Aydede, 2009). The position also entails that mind is to some extent extended beyond the organism (Clark & Chalmers, 1998), but this is a question which is still hotly debated (see select chapters in Robbins & Aydede (2009) and Clark (2010)).
A moderate version of the situated cognition position should be attractive to scholars of video games. The position directs our attention toward not just cognitive operations “inside the head” but also toward embodied, embedded, and situated individuals and their interactions with their material and technological environment. Video games are played by active, embodied individuals, and many of them involve the specifics of the human body in complex ways—think ergonomics and controllers, for instance. Video games are also complex technologies that utilize computation, a process that has been seen as a central component in human cognition—computers are arguably the dominant tool used in cognitive offloading in contemporary societies. Related to this, video game use is situated in an environment that includes complex technologies as well as other humans, with whom players can communicate and interact.
The Mind and Its Contexts, Explicitly and Implicitly
In accordance with situated cognition, we will assume that a cognitive science approach can be applied fruitfully not just to the mind narrowly understood, but also to the cognitive environment. This would include the popular and mass arts, such as novels, film, and video games, where we find complex objects that are designed explicitly to capture and sustain attention and interest and evoke emotions. Cognitive theory has already made considerable inroads here, and sub-disciplines exist that use the prefix cognitive to denote their particular approaches, such as cognitive narratology and cognitive film theory (see Herman, 2002, 2003; and Bordwell, 1985). Since film has been and is still predominantly a narrative medium, there are considerable theoretical overlaps between these two approaches. Sternberg, in an article on cognitive narratology and its relationship with cognitive science in general, writes that for cognitivism in its broadest formulation “the disciplinary object of study intersects with everything in human experience” (Sternberg, 2003, p. 304). This is a very large garden for cognitive theory to cultivate, and situated cognition has certainly not made it smaller. One problem when applying cognitive theory to the arts is noted by Sternberg, namely the tendency for scholars to write within their own disciplinary circles—perhaps to avoid getting lost in the underbrush of the garden cum wilderness of human experience in toto. A main charge against cognitivism is thus the danger of “atomism”—several isolated approaches all dealing with much the same thing in relative ignorance of each other—but overgeneralization is another one. Hence, even if cognitivism can be applied to all of human experience, one cannot just assume that cognitivism on its own will suffice. In other words, a cognitive theory of video games will need to pay attention to both cognition and video games and these theories need to be properly integrated, lest we press forth with ill-fitted prêt-à-porter theories where finely tailored ones are necessary.
As a final point in relation to the potential and actual breadth of cognitivism, one might distinguish between explicit and espoused cognitivism on the one hand and implicit cognitivism on the other hand, where the latter is compatible with cognitivism without claiming so explicitly. Primarily due to brevity but also clarity of argument, this essay will deal almost exclusively with explicit cognitivism, but two things should be noted. First, scholarship on video games may exhibit a mix of explicit and implicit cognitivism. Second, even if the topics may not appear to be the province of cognitive science, other essays in this Companion describe and discuss phenomena that have been analyzed within cognitive approaches, for instance conventions and culture (Zerubavel, 1997).
Cognitive Universals: Expectations and Hypotheses
A key tenet of cognitive approaches within narrative theory is the interplay between narrative operations and cognitive operations—narratives are designed for human minds. Sternberg (2003) argues that this lineage can be traced all the way back to Aristotle’s Poetics. This formal-functionalist approach (see also Bordwell, 1985, 2004, 2008) holds that a primary function of a given work’s narrative form is to help—or creatively hinder and play around with—the construction or reconstruction of narrative content by readers and viewers. In order to sidestep a reasonable complaint from ludologically-inclined readers, it is necessary to draw very general points from the formal/functional cognitivist position, that is, points general enough to apply to other things than stories and the tellings thereof. One of these is the idea that narratives are fundamentally constructed to manipulate the expectations of audiences over time. This conceptualization of processes involving expectations and the forming of specific hypotheses (Bordwell, 1985; Sternberg, 1978, 2003) is readily applicable to video game play. Players have expectations of games and their design structures and these expectations structure the ongoing construction and testing of hypotheses in a loop of interaction. This interaction between game and player will typically be based on players’ recognition of game genres and conventions associated with these (see Chapter 10, this volume, on conventions, and for a cognitive view on genre, see Frow, 2006).
To give more structure to this interplay between work and mind, Sternberg has proposed three universal cognitive dynamics that are characteristic of the way narratives play with expectations of readers; namely suspense, curiosity, and surprise (Sternberg, 2001, 2003). These cover situations where the reader of narrative is oriented toward the future and the past in different ways, as prospection, retrospection, and recognition, respectively. The latter terms are taken from phenomenology, and it should be pointed out that they are always fused as a precondition for temporal experience—we are always comprehending the now of the present in terms of both its past and future. The terms are meant to emphasize one aspect of experience over the others, and, with due diligence, this triad is readily applicable to gameplay understood as a cognitive and experiential process unfolding in time.
Starting with suspense, Sternberg writes that “[s]uspense arises from rival scenarios about the future” (2003, p. 327). We can see this as a predominant cognitive orientation toward specific and possibly mutually exclusive possible future scenarios arising from the interplay between game design, player actions, and strategies. Players can be invited to form quite specific hypotheses about the structure of the game and its progress on many levels—most obviously with regards to plot structure and possibilities of failure and success of player actions tied to specific goals. Curiosity is related to, but more general than, suspense: it allows players to progress with less constrained and less specific expectations, but constrained nonetheless—predominantly by local game conventions and more global genre conventions. Although players will be working on the basis of hypotheses and expectations, they might simply be interested in ascertaining what comes next in terms of mechanics, quests, goals, and plot development. (Here, I am departing from Sternberg’s usage of curiosity, since he uses it more narrowly to describe the distinctly retrospective operations used in many narratives, where key information must be retrospectively fitted. Narrative games may employ such retrospection to great effect, as seen in Bioware’s line of role playing-games as well as System Shock II, 1999 and BioShock, 2007.) Players will be more oriented toward collecting information and piecing together an understanding in hindsight—harvesting data for better hypotheses. Surprise is, of course, when the structure of the work confounds our specific expectations by introducing some element that has not been hinted at up to that point—a sudden introduction of new mechanics, an explosion blowing up the escape submarine, or a whole castle turned upside down to be traversed again.
The strength of this tripartite framework is its broad applicability. Since it targets cognitive phenomenology in general, it covers several levels of analysis, and potentially all of them; in Sternberg’s own words, “the three master effects/interests/dynamics cut across all generic variables” (2003, p. 328). It is general enough to cover a multitude of instances of how game design can be designed for cognitive operations, and it ties in directly with the previously mentioned work on conventions and genre. This broad conceptualization is, however, also a clear weakness: it does not deliver any kind of formal framework to analyze game design itself. In other words, it identifies protension and retrospection as important cognitive orientations of players, but it does not describe what these scenarios about the future might be about or what kinds of information might be involved in retrospection. The framework needs to be fused to categories relevant for analysis of game design and game structure, for instance core mechanics, challenges, boss fights, progression structures, level layouts, or quest arcs and rewards (the reader is referred to the existing literature as well as the requisite essays in this Companion on the formal (Part II), cultural (Part V), and sociological (Part VI) aspects of games).
Another weakness is that some important dynamics seem to fall outside of the triad suspense/curiosity/surprise, especially once we acknowledge that these might be determined by both game structure and by players’ agency—an open question for most media research. The first dynamic is that players do not just form hypotheses and let a system of narration confirm or disconfirm them as the narration progresses—players test hypotheses by performing intentional actions. As such, it is through interaction with the game system that hypotheses are formed, tested, and revised in a continuous, looped process of gameplay (see Arsenault & Perron, 2008), where players decide how and when to test their hypotheses, even if games obviously can and do manipulate players to form specific hypotheses and hint at ways to test them. Second, playfulness is not addressed (see chapters in Part III of this Companion). In more psychological terms, the mode of action identified by Apter (1982, 1991) and others as paratelic (that is, non-goal-related playful behavior-for-its-own-sake) is missing here. One aspect of the playful character of some gameplay sessions should nonetheless be captured fairly well by player curiosity, namely the act of merely “playing around,” exploring whatever secrets the game system might reveal at several levels of analysis. Finally, there is the potentially repetitive nature of gameplay on several levels, from key mechanics of player actions to the replaying of certain levels and whole games. Many game sessions are performed not for the sake of new information but as repetitions of progressively skillful and refined playthroughs—unfocused curiosity and surprise will give way to a distinct and refined protensional attitude. The idea of flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) seems related to this last kind of process. To summarize: When combined with a suitable game analysis framework, these cognitive universals yield a broadly powerful, but somewhat crude, tool to ascertain some fundamental aspects of the cognitive interplay between game and player.
Cognitive Specifics: Aspects of Video Game Structure and Their Functions
In addition to the very general perspective laid out with respect to the cognitive universals suspense/curiosity/surprise, aspects of cognitive narratology can be useful in its specific form as narratology. This framework can thus be applied directly to games that have narrative aspirations, with the requisite caveats and substantiations: It is obvious, for instance, that many video games do use narrative strategies, but these depend heavily upon the interplay between game and player as information is distributed over time. Cognitive film theory has been closely allied to cognitive narratology, but it has also dealt with issues more specific to film as an audiovisual medium. Cognitive film theory is useful for understanding audiovisual representation in games (King & Krzywinska, 2006), and can thus be used to analyze cut-scene structure (Klevjer’s (2002) study of cut-scenes is not explicitly cognitive, and might not even be implicitly so, but is not incompatible either). Also, cut-scenes may carry narrative substructures such as dialogue—one study points out that film theory has not paid very much attention to dialogue even on its home turf (Smith, 2002), so this still seems a bit of a blind spot. Dialogue is a key component of many games, but it can obviously serve different functions than in film—it lays out tracks for suspense/curiosity/surprise, but often these tracks split into quest structures and/or arcs of progression, which may yield mutually exclusive outcomes depending upon player agency (for an analysis of how this can tie in with narrative and character engagement, see Jørgensen, 2010).
While the first wave of cognitive film theory was mostly interested in narrative structure (Bordwell, 1985), a second wave incorporated work on emotions (see Tan, 1996; Grodal, 1997; Plantinga & Smith, 1999; and Smith, 2003). Cognitive theories of emotion see emotions as tied to cognitive appraisal of situations relevant for goal-related actions. This means that the structure of emotions will necessarily differ when dealing with interactive works such as games—intentional actions are performed, not just perceived and interpreted. This approach within cognitive film theory has been employed to analyze the difference between modes of spectatorship and the resulting emotions (Frome, 2006; Perron, 2003). Further, narrative structures and their connections to rudimentary actions and emotions across film and games have been investigated (Grodal, 2003) and film theory and genre theory has informed work on horror games (Perron, 2005, 2009, 2012). Järvinen’s (2008) work on games and emotions has bypassed the path of cognitive film theory, but has applied similar cognitively-oriented theories of emotions to game structure, and work originating directly in emotional psychology (such as Tan, 1996) has been applied to film and games. In addition, Tan’s proposal for an overreaching emotion of interest has direct relevance for the previous discussion of cognitive universals (especially curiosity). Core cognition (a conceptualization of universal, and possibly innate, features of the mind originating in developmental psychology), has been used to examine prominent design patterns in game genres such as platform and action games (Gregersen, forthcoming). The concepts of embodiment and embodied agency have informed work on the relationship between players and avatars, both in terms of deep commonalities in embodied interaction as well as differences, the latter of which can be tied to genre by way of generic interaction modes (Gregersen, 2011; Gregersen & Grodal, 2008). Klevjer (2007) employs cognitive film theory and phenomenology to deliver a detailed investigation of the avatar and its functionality in games. Finally, schema theory has also been proposed as an overall approach to games and cognition, where game-specific schemas and scripts are proposed in a framework that cuts across perception, emotion, and actions (Lindley & Sennersten, 2006, 2008).
In addition to this work, which is generally formal/functionalist in nature, more empirical and experimental approaches to video games exist. These studies are conducted as part of media psychology and presence research that investigates motivations and reactions of viewers—or players, when the stimulus condition involves games. This work covers a range of specific topics across action, motivation, and emotion (for examples see (Nacke & Lindley, 2009; Nacke, 2009; Ravaja, Saari, Salminen, Laarni, & Kallinen, 2006; Vorderer & Bryant, 2006; Klimmt, Hefner, & Vorderer, 2009). A related approach has been to investigate the possible positive effects of video game play, with a focus on traditional subjects of cognitive and perceptual psychology such as hand–eye coordination and spatial reasoning tasks (Green & Bavelier, 2006), a tradition that has followed video games for quite a while (Greenfield, 1984). Finally, one of the dominant modes of investigation within media psychology has been the inclusion of video games into the ongoing research on media violence that is based mostly on experiments or survey data. While some of this work is explicitly cognitivist, it will not be dealt with here, not least because the amount of work is staggering and the conclusions and policy implications are somewhat controversial outside of the researchers’ own circles; the reader is referred to (Millwood Hargrave & Livingstone, 2009) for a recent and sober review of the overall issues from a sociological viewpoint.
Coda: Cognition and Computers—Not a Casual Acquaintance
As already mentioned, cognitive science has predominantly used a very specific model to understand the mind, namely the computer. Although this model has been challenged, as described above, both the digital computer and processes of computation have played and still play central roles in cognitive science approaches within philosophy and psychology as well as in artificial intelligence research. Both our contemporary sciences, including those of the mind, and our everyday intuitions about the mind, have arguably been tied directly to the development of computers—and thus, to some extent, to video games. Apart from the massive diffusion of video game technology in society, development of computers has always had ties to games: The history of artificial intelligence research overlaps considerably not just with computer programming but with computer game programming. An important poster child and yardstick for machine intelligence has been the various (super)computers programmed to play chess and other games (chess has even been referred to as having played a similar role for (early) artificial intelligence as the fruit fly for modern genetics (Schaeffer & van den Herik, 2002)). Differences between artificial intelligence as a research program and the game design sub-discipline notwithstanding, several kinds of artificial intelligence programming (path-finding, decision models, etc.) find practical use in the design structure of many video games (see Chapter 11 in this Companion). Early and foundational military uses of computational simulation were those of mechanical physics, ballistics but also rational behavior in systems designed to simulate armed conflicts (Avedon & Sutton-Smith, 1971); again, and not withstanding their many differences, there are clear affinities between this and the genre of strategy war gaming. These connections are certainly worth exploring further, but they have not been the focus here. Rather, this essay has outlined both general and specific applications of cognitive theory within the field of video game studies. Given the range of cognitivism, especially in its situated version, and the diffusion of game technologies into society, many fruitful avenues for cognitive video game research seem viable. The challenges of both atomism and overly general applications obviously remain.
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