As so many organizations have shifted to remote work during COVID-19, we are hearing inspiring stories from customers discovering new ways to connect, collaborate, and keep business moving. From Sydney, Australia, to Seattle, Washington, schools, hospitals, small businesses, and large companies alike have found inventive ways to enable remote work across their organizations. We want to share what they are learning. Each week we will be spotlighting customers in one impacted region around the globe. First up: the Greater China Region. My colleague Lily Zheng in Shanghai is sharing stories for customers who, faced with extraordinary and difficult circumstances, have found innovative new ways to work.

Since we last heard from Lily and team, the region has begun to move into recovery mode. “Many businesses reopened, and more and more people have started going back to work,” Lily reports. “In the past two months, Teams has certainly played an important role in helping our customers pass through the most difficult time.” Looking ahead, she says: “Teams can play an even bigger role in helping our customers boost their productivity and increase their business resilience.” Here are some examples of how organizations in the Greater China Region kept things moving over the past few months.

Education

With travel bans and health concerns keeping students, faculty, and staff at home over the past months, schools and universities have experienced a crash course in moving to remote learning. In February, the Peking University Guanghua School of Management used Teams to hold a digital school-opening ceremony with thousands of students. Meanwhile, Tamkang University, a private university headquartered in New Taipei City, Taiwan, quickly enabled distance learning for students in China, Macau, and Hong Kong by leveraging Microsoft Teams and cloud resources on their iClass Mobile Learning Platform. A total of 637 students and 1,041 teachers were set up to use the platform in 2,366 classes. Hong Kong Polytechnic University​ is conducting 120 to 160 concurrent teaching sessions daily through Microsoft Teams, with 10,000 to 11,000 students connecting simultaneously during peak times. And Wellington College International Tianjin, quickly established a solid e-learning program where students have been able to continue their learning journey with lessons conducted over Microsoft Teams.

Healthcare

The healthcare industry has faced extraordinary pressure during COVID-19. We’ve all seen news stories about medical supply challenges, but these organizations have experienced challenges in the IT space, too, including a lack of video conferencing solutions and heavy dependency on manual patient data inputting. Staff at the largest hospital in WenZhou, China, 2^nd Affiliated Hospital of WMU, for instance, were unable to communicate with personnel inside the quarantined area. They had never used Teams before, but quickly deployed it and were able to communicate with quarantined-area colleagues. The team at Zhongshan Hospital in Shanghai hadn’t used Teams before the outbreak either, but they put it to use to hold their first remote leadership meeting. “It only took a few days to get reports,” said Mr. Li, Chief of Information Management Center at Zhongshan Hospital, “and we were able to successfully hold our first leader’s meeting, which was well-received by the whole leadership team.”

Commercial

SF-Express is one of the best-known logistics companies in China. CIO Sheng Wang said, “Fortunately, we deployed Teams after we revamped our network branches [in] December of 2019. “It solves our needs for remote working, meeting, and training, and allows our staff to collaborate with high productivity.” DHL Supply Chain China also deployed Teams to handle its increasing remote collaboration needs.

The manufacturing industry has been hit hard by the impact of the outbreak, but also used it to discover new ways to digitally transform. Headquartered in Ningbo, China, Joyson Electronic has more than 100 bases in 30 countries and over 50,000 employees globally. “Microsoft Teams really helps Joyson improve our cross-regional and boundary collaboration productivity during the COVID-19 outbreak,” reported CIO Zong Jia. “We hold daily internal meetings, co-edit documents, and interview candidates on Teams.”

Over 50 percent of China International Marine Containers (CIMC) Group Ltd.’s business comes from export, which brings an urgent need for project-based management and real-time communications. CIMC has been using Teams to easily enable multiple collaborative team channels and remove restrictions imposed by different work locations. They’re finding it facilitates employee collaboration and has helped them complete their first successful step towards a modern workplace transformation.

We hope you’ve found it helpful to read about some of the innovative ways our customers have transformed their organizations during this difficult time. We have seen how schools have moved quickly to remote learning in virtual classrooms, and are continuing to hold important meetings, with Teams. We’ve seen how healthcare workers, faced with communication barriers brought on by COVID-19, have used Teams to connect. And we’ve seen how commercial enterprises are bringing distributed teams together and are bringing formerly in-person-only meetings—including job interviews—online. As the Greater China Region enters a new phase of its COVID-19 experience, we look forward to learning about how they apply what they’ve discovered in the days to come. We’ll be sharing more inspiring customer stories here soon, so check back often.

Last weekend, news surfaced on social media that Sony had begun to take action against certain uploads and projects in Media Mocule’s latest title, Dreams. In particular, Nintendo-themed ones.

A user named @Piece_of_Craft shed some light via Twitter, explaining how they had supposedly been contacted by the legal and business affairs division of SIE Europe, as Nintendo had reportedly “objected” to the use of the Super Mario IP in the game.

Now, according to an update on GamesIndustry.biz (thanks, GoNintendo), it’s been confirmed Sony is working to take down even more Nintendo-themed creations. Here’s its exact statement:

Sony Interactive Entertainment is notifying the affected users that an IP Infringement Notice has been received from Nintendo and that the content will be removed. We cannot comment on volume of content to be removed, this is done on an individual case by case basis.

Seemingly it’s the end of the road for all of those Super Mario recreations in Dreams. Even if creators attempt to upload them, from now on projects will be moderated and removed for containing copyrighted material.

It was fun while it lasted, but anyone wanting to play a 3D Mario title with cutting edge graphics is perhaps better off sticking with Super Mario Odyssey on the Switch.

Do you want to plot numerical data? And do it in a beautiful, engaging, and scientifically sound way? And do all of this in a few simple lines of code? You’re in the right place!

A great way to plot numerical data is the matplotlib boxplot. It displays the median, the interquartile range, and outliers of the data.

How can you visualize your data with the boxplot?

1. Get that data into an array-like object – list, NumPy array, pandas series, etc.
2. Pass it to plt.boxplot().
3. Call plt.show().

As a result, matplotlib will draw a lovely boxplot for you.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt plt.boxplot(data)

plt.show()

The boxplot clearly shows the median of the data (orange line), the upper and lower quartiles (top and bottom parts of the box) and outliers (the circles at the top and/or bottom of the ‘whiskers’ of the plot).

There are quite a few things we can do to improve this plot – we don’t even know what the data represents! – so let’s dive into a more detailed example.

Try It Yourself:

You can play with a simple example here in our interactive Python shell online. The resulting plot will be stored in a .png file in the online project (just click on “files”):

Matplotlib Boxplot Example

The boxplot is an essential tool you should use when when exploring datasets. The matplotlib boxplot function accepts a lot of keyword arguments and so can seem quite intimidating if you look at the docs. So, I’ll cover the most essential ones that you will use most often.

Boxplots show the distribution of numerical data, in particular they show if it is skewed and whether there are unusual observations/outliers. They are very helpful if you are dealing with a large amount of data and want to see a visual summary – in this way, they are similar to histograms. They give you ability to compare multiple distributions at the same time because you can plot many boxplots on one Figure. This is not really possible with histograms – any more than 3 and it starts to look crowded.

As this is an article about how to best work with boxplots, I will not go into detail about how I generated the datasets. However, if you want to follow along, I am using Seaborn’s tips dataset and you can find more info here.

Let’s assume you are a waiter/waitress at a restaurant and you have recorded the total bill in USD for each table you waited from Thursday – Sunday last week. You want to visualize this data to understand which days, if any, are the best to work. The total bill for all the days is stored in total_bill and the total bill for each day is stored in the variables thu, fri, sat and sun respectively.

Let’s plot total bill and add some info to the axes and a title.

plt.boxplot(total_bill)

plt.title('Total Bill ($) for All Days Last Week')

plt.ylabel('Total Bill ($)')

plt.show()

This looks much better and it is now easy to understand what the boxplot is showing. We can see that the median bill for each table is about 17 USD and that the interquartile range (upper quartile – lower quartile) is from 24 – 14 = 10 USD. There are about 8 outliers where the bill was more than 40 USD and the lowest bill was about 3 USD.

Matplotlib Boxplot Multiple

Boxplots let you compare the distributions of different datasets. So, you will almost always want to plot more than one boxplot on a figure. To do this, pass the data you want to plot to plt.boxplot() as a list of lists.

# Create list of lists

all_days = [thu, fri, sat, sun] # Pass to plt.boxplot()

plt.boxplot(all_days)

plt.show()

Here I combined all the individual datasets into a list of lists all_days and passed that to plt.boxplot(). Matplotlib automatically places the four boxplots a nice distance apart but does not label the x-axis for us. Let’s do that now.

Matplotlib Boxplot Labels

To label each boxplot, pass a list of strings to the labels keyword argument. If you have several labels, I recommend you create this first before passing it to plt.boxplot().

# Create data and labels first

all_days = [thu, fri, sat, sun]

labels = ['Thu', 'Fri', 'Sat', 'Sun'] # Plot data and labels

plt.boxplot(all_days, labels=labels)

plt.ylabel('Total Bill ($)')

plt.show()

Great, now we can see that each boxplot represents the total bill for each day of the week and which day is which.

Make sure your list of labels is the same length as the number of boxplots and that you pass them in the order you want them to appear. If you don’t want to label a particular boxplot, pass an empty string ''. Finally, you can also pass ints and floats if you desire.

all_days = [thu, fri, sat, sun] # Second label is an empty string, fourth is a float

labels = ['Thu', '', 'Sat', 999.9] plt.boxplot(all_days, labels=labels)

plt.show()

Your boxplots look much better now but the matplotlib default settings are quite boring. It’s important to make your visualizations engaging and one of the best ways to do this is to add some color.

Matplotlib Boxplot Fill Color

To just fill the color of the box, you first need to set patch_artist=True. Why is this?

Under the hood, plt.boxplot() returns a dictionary containing each part of the boxplot and these parts are Line2D objects. However, by definition, these do not have an edgecolor or facecolor – lines just have one color.

To color inside the box, you must turn it into a Patch object which, by definition, has a facecolor.

To modify the box, use the boxprops (box properties) keyword argument. It accepts a dictionary and the key-value pair you need is 'facecolor' plus a color.

# Turn box into a Patch so that it has a facecolor property

plt.boxplot(total_bill, patch_artist=True, # Set facecolor to red boxprops=dict(facecolor='r'))

plt.show()

Note that if you don’t set patch_artist=True, you will get an error.

# Not setting patch_artist=True gives an error

plt.boxplot(total_bill, # Set facecolor to red boxprops=dict(facecolor='r'))

plt.show()

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

AttributeError Traceback (most recent call last)

<ipython-input-97-d28bb5a14c71> in <module> 2 plt.boxplot(total_bill, 3 # Set facecolor to red

----> 4 boxprops=dict(facecolor='r')) 5 plt.show() AttributeError: 'Line2D' object has no property 'facecolor'

If you also want to change the color of the line surrounding the box, pass the additional argument color=c for some color c to boxprops.

# Turn box into a Patch so that it has a facecolor property

plt.boxplot(total_bill, patch_artist=True, # Set facecolor and surrounding line to red boxprops=dict(facecolor='r', color='r'))

plt.show()

Perfect, now you know how to change the box’s color, let’s look at changing the other parts.

Matplotlib Boxplot Color

You can change any part of a boxplot to any color you want.

There are a 6 parts you can color:

1. box – the main body of the boxplot
2. median – horizontal line illustrating the median of the distribution
3. whiskers – vertical lines extending to the most extreme (non-outlier) data points
4. caps – horizontal lines at the ends of the whiskers
5. fliers – points above/below the caps representing outliers
6. mean – horizontal line illustrating the mean of the distributions (by default not included)

In the above image, I’ve labelled the first 5 parts but have not included the mean as it is not often used with boxplots.

Each of the parts can be modified by a <part>props keyword argument, similar to the boxprops one above.

The available keyword arguments are:

boxprops, medianprops, whisperprops, capprops, flierprops, meanprops

For example, write this to set the color of the median line to red

medianprops=dict(color='red')

They all accept the color keyword argument and the value can be any matplotlib color string. The only different one is flierprops which also accepts markeredgecolor to color the line around the outliers.

Finally, remember to set patch_artist=True if you want to change the fill color of the box.

Let’s look at an example where I turn the entire boxplot red. Since there are so many keyword arguments to pass, I will first create a dictionary and use the ** operator to unpack it in my plt.boxplot() call.

# Set color to red

c = 'r' # Create dictionary of keyword aruments to pass to plt.boxplot

red_dict = {'patch_artist': True, 'boxprops': dict(color=c, facecolor=c), 'capprops': dict(color=c), 'flierprops': dict(color=c, markeredgecolor=c), 'medianprops': dict(color=c), 'whiskerprops': dict(color=c)} # Pass dictionary to boxplot using ** operator to unpack it

plt.boxplot(total_bill, **red_dict)

plt.show()

First I created a variable c to hold the color string in. This means that if I want to change the color to green, I only have to change one line of code – c = 'g' – and it will change the color everywhere.

Then I created red_dict where the key-value pairs is a string and dictionary. The first key is patch_artists=True and the other keys are the <part>props keyword argument. Finally, I created a boxplot of total_bill and colored it red by unpacking red_dict with the ** operator.

If you want to brush up on your dictionary knowledge, check out my article the ultimate guide to dictionaries.

The red plot is much more engaging than the standard matplotlib colors. But, because the median line was the same color as everything else, you lost some information it was showing. One way to rectify this is to set to median line to black with'medianprops': dict(color='k') in red_dict. The result is shown above.

Matplotlib Boxplot Width

To change the width of a boxplot, pass a float to to the widths keyword argument in plt.boxplot(). It represents the fraction of space the box takes up on the figure.

If you have one boxplot, the scalar represents the percentage of the plot the box takes up.

plt.boxplot(total_bill, widths=1)

plt.show()

Here the box takes up 100% of the width as widths=1.

plt.boxplot(total_bill, widths=0.1)

plt.show()

Here the box only takes up 10% of the space as widths=0.1.

If you plot multiple boxplots on the same figure and pass a float to widths, all boxes will be resized to take up that fraction of space in their area of the plot.

# Boxes take up 100% of their allocated space

plt.boxplot(all_days, widths=1)

plt.show()

Here each boxplot takes up 100% of the space allocated as widths=1.

# Boxes take up 80% of their allocated space

plt.boxplot(all_days, widths=0.8)

plt.show()

Here each boxplot takes up 80% of the space allocated to them as widths=0.8.

You can set the width of each boxplot individually by passing a list to widths instead of a scalar. In [83]:

plt.boxplot(all_days, widths=[0.1, 0.9, 0.5, 0.8], labels=['10%', '90%', '50%', '80%'])

plt.show()

Here I have labelled the amount of horizontal space each box takes up. Although it is possible to do this, I do not recommend it. It adds another dimension to your boxplot but isn’t showing any new information. I personally think that widths=0.8 looks best, but you are free to choose any size you want. Just make sure that your boxplots are the same width so as not to confuse your reader.

Matplotlib Boxplot Horizontal

To create a horizonal boxplot in matplotlib, set the vert keyword argument to False.

plt.boxplot(total_bill, vert=False)

plt.show()

Conclusion

That’s it, you now know all the basics of boxplots in matplotlib!

You’ve learned how to plot single and multiple boxplots on one figure. You can label them whatever you want and change the color of any of the 6 parts to anything you can imagine. Finally, you’ve learned to customize the width of your plots and plot horizontal ones as well.

There is still more to be learned about boxplots such as changing the outlier marker, adding legends, sorting them by groups and even working with them and the pandas library. But I’ll leave that for another article.

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After the closure of Nintendo of America’s headquarters and the Nintendo store in New York, the company’s repair centers have now had to shut up shop due to preventive measures put in place to stop the spread of the coronavirus outbreak. Here’s the full statement:

Due to preventive measures put in place for the COVID-19 coronavirus, and in accordance with federal and local guidelines, our repair centers are closed until further notice. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your understanding. Once repair services resume, we will work as quickly as possible to get you playing again.

Please note that, during this closure, products sent in for repair may be returned to you as undeliverable.

If our repair center has already received your product, it will remain there until repair services resume.

Repair centers over in the UK appear to still be operational, with the company revealing it was still “working hard” to maintain standards, but warning about potential delays:

We are working hard to maintain high customer service standards during the current challenging times, but please understand that there may be delays in responses to messages and processing repairs.

We would like to express our concern and support for all those affected by the COVID-19 outbreak during this challenging time. Thank you for your understanding and for your patience.

So, if you’ve got a Switch or something else you’re waiting for to be repaired, you might just have to wait a little bit longer.

This week’s Super Smash Bros. Ultimate spirit event is focused on all things pink. Yep, starting this Friday, and running for a total of three days, is a brand new cherry blossom spirit event. This in-game event lines up with the trees blossoming in Japan right now.

During this one, you’ll be able to acquire spirits like Amy Rose from Sonic the Hedgehog, Clefairy from the Pokémon series, Paula from EarthBound and even that mildly annoying bunny from Nintendo Badge Arcade on the 3DS.

Will you be participating in this week’s spirit event? Leave a comment below.

The team at Unity today unveiled a beta version of their new Unity Game Simulation service, which they pitch as an affordable way to remotely simulate (via Google Cloud servers) large volumes of player interactions with your game.

Specifically, Unity claims you’ll be able to upload a build of your game (via the Unity Editor) and simulate thousands of concurrent player interactions, at variable speed, using servers running on Google Cloud.

The company is quick to position the new platform as a complement to human playtesters, rather than a replacement, though it also advertises Unity Game Simulation as a way for devs to “get more quantitative testing coverage at a fraction of a playtester’s hourly rate.”

Curious devs can find more details about the platform and how to start using it over on the Unity Game Simulation corner of Unity’s website. A free trial version is currently available for Unity devs to check out, though the company reserves the right to charge devs who exceed (otherwise unspecified) “certain limits” during use.

Forced to recount the litany of sins that we have committed in the virtual world to a priest, the average video game player might not exit the confessional booth for some time.

It’s not just the body-count, which, for even the mildest-mannered of players, is of genocidal proportions. There’s also the colonialism we have promoted in Civilization, the social manipulation we’ve engaged in while puttering about in Animal Crossing, the fornication meted out in Leisure Suit Larry, and the thievery of, well, Thief.

We brush off most virtual transgressions as playful tomfoolery. The casualties of our gamely actions are, after all, no different to fallen tokens in a boardgame (nobody grieves the toppled pawns in the grisly aftermath of a chess match). But as technology renders the virtual worlds conjured in video games with ever greater fidelity, old questions are being asked with new urgency.

Should any actions be disallowed within the seemingly consequence-free context of a video game? Should any scenarios be considered taboo? Moreover, does photorealistic rendering, or the full body trickery of virtual reality, challenge the golden rule that no subject should be off-limits to an artist?

These questions are challenging a new generation of virtual reality designers who are working in a medium where the effects on the human brain are yet to be charted, let alone understood. In 2016 Michael Madary and Thomas K. Metzinger, two researchers from the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germany, published a paper in which they point to evidence of “a lasting psychological impact” after subjects return to the physical world.

 

“Does photorealistic rendering, or the full body trickery of virtual reality, challenge the golden rule that no subject should be off-limits to an artist?”

“The power of VR to induce particular kinds of emotions could be used deliberately to cause suffering,” they write. “Conceivably, the suffering could be so extreme as to be considered torture.” As a result they recommend “careful screening of subjects to minimize the risks of aggravating an existing psychological disorder or an undetected psychiatric vulnerability.”

As Scott Stephan, currently at FoxNext VR (and formerly a designer at L.A.-based studio Wevr) puts it, the way that human beings process virtual reality games and experiences is “not through the eyes of a person using their critical media-viewing faculty but through the eyes of I, the self, with all of the very human, systems-level, subconscious voodoo that comes along with that.”

Stephan refuses to include any threat bigger than a small dog in VR scenarios; anything larger, he says, and the experience shifts from the kind of enjoyable frights of a rollercoaster to something that is earnestly terrifying. “In VR, players are always careful not to collide with other scale models of human characters,” he says. “It’s clear sign of a closure in the gap that has occurred between brain, body and fine motor-skills.”

As VR designers (and, in the case of the doctors who are using VR to treat soldiers suffering from PTSD, the medical profession) begin to consider the effects of actions taken in virtual spaces on the brain’s fight/ flight systems, it follows that we must also consider the effects of our virtual crimes on the heart, and what continued exposure to the kinds of power fantasies in which games have traded since their inception might mean.

Epic Games’ Robo Recall

Epic Games’ Nick Donaldson describes his VR game Robo Recall, in which you play as Blade Runner-style robotics contractor removing defective robots from circulation, as being the very definition of a power fantasy. “One of our design pillars of the game was to make you feel like Neo from The Matrix, so we allowed the player to catch bullets, teleport all over the place, and throw things with superhuman strength,” he says.

Donaldson defines the video game power fantasy as a virtual context in which “a person is able to do something that they wouldn’t have the means or ability to do in real life.” It’s a definition to which video games have long cleaved, giving players, across the decades tens of thousands of opportunities to live the lives of soldiers, space marines, professional football players and race car drivers.

“Power fantasies are relatively easy to create in video games but have big emotional pay-outs,” says VR game designer Shawn Patton. “Mastering a vocation in real life is very difficult. Training your mind and body, that takes a long time. Video games allow you to be the best adventurer, fighter, detective, assassin, athlete, or soldier in a matter of hours.”

Donaldson agrees that it is human nature to want to engage in power fantasies, and they may be even more appealing to young people, whose agency in the world is necessarily limited. “Who doesn’t want to experience something they’ll never get to do in real life- to be just like that super hero they saw in a movie, you know?” he says. “Being capable and powerful is a great feeling, both in real life and in a game.”

In life, with power, so the saying goes, comes responsibility – a lesson which, only in 2017, is being learned by some high-profile men who have abused their positions. In the context of the video game, unless a designer actively implements punitive systems to discourage the player from certain behaviors, there is no responsibility or consequence for what might be considered abuses of power in a real-world context. Trying to reconcile the player agency with moral boundaries is a knotty design conundrum, one that can lead to fiction-spoiling compromises, such as in the Fallout series, where players can attack and kill any character they meet save children, who are weirdly rendered invincible.

Westworld (2017)

The theme, long a provincial concern for video game makers and commentators, has, in recent months, gone mainstream. Westworld, HBO’s recent and lavish remake of the 1973 film of the same name, is set within a giant Wild West-themed amusement park staffed by costumed cyborgs that are indistinguishable from humans. Entry to the park is expensive and, as a result, customers expect to be able to behave however they want within the boundaries of its magic circle.

Visitors sleep with the park’s robotic staff, shoot them down in cold blood during scripted missions and, generally, exercise complete free will without the threat of consequence. Like video game NPCs, the park’s staff are no more than objects created in humanity’s image; Nobody is earnestly hurt, abused or imperilled by the players’ actions, and like the murdered video game NPC, the cyborgs are repaired and restored the moment the stage is reset.

As well as examining the question of robot rights, Westworld examines what effect unrestrained power fantasies might have on those carrying them out. Shooting a robot sex worker that is indistinguishable from a human woman in the chest at point blank range may be functionally no different to, say, throwing a toaster into a trash compactor, but does the action not morally degrade the human being in the equation in some way?

“Games have been capable of depicting violence in high fidelity for a while now, so this isn’t really new territory, but it’s definitely something we think about,” says Donaldson. “Given the extra immersive qualities of VR, we made a conscious effort to avoid having humans to shoot in Robo Recall.”

***

It’s revealing that Americans often talk about ‘beating’ a video game, in a way that nobody would talk about ‘beating’ Moby Dick, or Schindler’s List. The inference is that games are things to be defeated, and victory is, in most spheres of life, won via a dominant exercising of power. But the terminology isn’t only clumsy, it also limits the medium, tying players and designers alike to an idea that every game must designed in such a way that it can be won. This artificial narrowing confines the artistic imagination: what about games that explore failure, death, loss, pain — the kinds of insurmountable challenge and set-back that are commonplace in existence

Since the early 2000s, the rise of the so-called disempowerment fantasy has become a regular feature of the underground game-making scene. Games such as Darfur is Dying placed players in the shoes, not of a marine, superhero or secret agent, but of a displaced Sudanese child, caught in the impossible situation of scavenging for water while evading capture.

Richard Hofmeier’s Cart Life

More have followed, including breakout hits such as Cart Life, in which you play as a succession of down-and-out characters living in poverty in contemporary America, and Papers, Please, in which you balance the twin pressures of your impossible job as a border agent, and your starving, sick family. That Dragon Cancer examines the rigors and stress of living with a terminally ill child and, in doing so, presents a puzzle without a solution, a game about surrender, not dominance.

“Just as games are able to put you into the shoes of a powerful hero, so they allow you to experience the life of someone working day-to-day or a border agent witnessing stories of oppressed people,” says Donaldson. Games such as Darfur is Dying “invite us to step into the smaller, more uncomfortable shoes of the downtrodden rather than the larger, more well-heeled shoes of the powerful,” Georgia Tech professor Ian Bogost writes in his book How to Do Things with Videogames. The academic Ian Bryce Jones identifies freedom, interactivity, and achievable goals as the three pillars of the video game power fantasy. Disempowerment fantasy inverts these pillars. “[They] deny player freedom, emphasize their lack of interactivity, and include goals that cruelly cannot be achieved,” he writes.

 

“We’re starting to transgress the traditional boundaries of media consumption. We’re not putting images on a screen, we’re not providing you with the useful comforts of abstraction, we’re putting you there and, in many ways, tricking you into believing it’s true.”

It’s tempting to argue that the disempowerment fantasy could be a solution to the concern that VR could make tyrannical monsters of us all. But just as there are risks to the video game power fantasy, there are risks and limitations to the disempowerment fantasy. In reality, a trafficked woman or child slave is robbed of the ability to make autonomous decisions. Games that tackle these difficult situations risk implying that real people in these situations need only make the correct sequence of decisions to escape their circumstances – a criticism which has already been levelled at David Cage’s forthcoming Detroit: Become Human, whose design appears to suggest that domestic abuse is something that can be overcome via a decision tree.

There’s also the issue in VR, of the psychological risks associated with putting players in situations where a powerless avatar’s safety is imperiled. “I’m not going to go as far as to say that you could be traumatized by a VR experience, but the fear is fear and not the abstract, fun, roller-coaster-kind-of fear,” says Stephan. “It doesn’t mean that you can’t push boundaries or do extreme content, but I do think it means that you have to really, really think about how people are going to interact with your content and how they might feel about it.”

Stephan believes that, regardless of the long-term success of the current VR boon, the rules have somehow changed, “We’re starting to transgress the traditional boundaries of media consumption,” he says. “We’re not putting images on a screen, we’re not providing you with the useful comforts of abstraction, we’re putting you there and, in many ways, tricking you into believing it’s true.”

The complications of the disempowerment power fantasy may remain a peripheral issue for most game designers. In the foreseeable future Patton thinks it’s unlikely that the traditional video game power fantasy will retreat from its position of dominance and focus in the medium.

“Blockbuster games, like movies, have to follow tried and true formulas because they have to make money,” he says. “If enough serious games make money, then certainly we’ll see blockbuster games that attempt to cash in on that, but only if it’s a sure thing.”

For now, game designers continue to wrestle with the old questions of how to create video games in which players aren’t problematically flattered through power fantasies, or empowered to behave in ways that degrade the spirit. And while they do, the uncanny valley closes, and the stakes raise.