Of the seventh generation video game consoles, Nintendo’s Wii has some of the shoddiest hardware, a position Nintendo is used to after the showing the GameCube gave in the sixth generation. That isn’t the arena Nintendo’s competing in; no, the Wii is competing in design and philosophy. But what the Wii has going for it most of all might be as simple as the controller.

The Wii takes a populist approach to video games, and hopes to reach non-gamers with a simple, intuitive interface, obviously inspired by Apple’s iPod. The result is a wireless controller that can be held in one hand, as opposed to the two-handed controllers traditionally used by console video games. The latest title in Nintendo’s classic Legend of Zelda franchise, Twilight Princess, will actually use movements from the Wii controller in the game. Of course, when the opportunity exists, it can be diffiult to restrain such active, physical participation with the game, even where it is not necessary.

Penny Arcade’s 13 November 2006 comic, “You Know It To Be True“

This has a powerful psychological effect, and one that gets us to a much more basic and important topic—the nature of emotion. William James, one of the founders of psychology as we know it, wrote a famous essay in 1884 titled, “What is an Emotion?”

What kind of an emotion of fear would be left, if the feelings neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible to think. Can one fancy the state of rage and picture no ebullition of it in the chest, no flushing of the face, no dilatation of the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous action, but in their stead limp muscles, calm breathing, and a placid face? … A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity. I do not say that it is a contradiction in the nature of things, or that pure spirits are necessarily condemned to cold intellectual lives; but I say that for us, emotion dissociated from all bodily feeling is inconceivable. The more closely I scrutinise my states, the more persuaded I become, that whatever moods, affections, and passions I have, are in very truth constituted by, and made up of, those bodily changes we ordinarily call their expression or consequence; and the more it seems to me that if I were to become corporeally anaesthetic, I should be excluded from the life of the affections, harsh and tender alike, and drag out an existence of merely cognitive or intellectual form. Such an existence, although it seems to have been the ideal of ancient sages, is too apathetic to be keenly sought after by those born after the revival of the worship of sensibility, a few generations ago.

In other words, James inverted the normal consideration of emotion and expression. We even refer to the “expression” of an emotion, that we reveal in our body language an emotion that is wholly mental in its nature. The underlying assumption is Cartesian dualism—the notion that mind and body are seperate entities. This places emotion in the mental sphere, evidenced outwardly only by the physical “expression” of it. We smile because we are happy, for instance.

Of course, more recent medical research has reinforced the earlier, animist understanding, that mind is a function of the body; less a noun than a verb, it is something the body does. It is the body that feels, not the “mind.” In other words, we are happy because we smile—which is exactly what the facial feedback hypothesis suggests.

Critics are generally quick to point out, essentially, “the poker face,” as counter-evidence, but “micro-expressions” suggest this may not be quite so simple.

Ekman calls that kind of fleeting look a “microexpression,” and one cannot understand why John Yarbrough did what he did on that night in South Central without also understanding the particular role and significance of microexpressions. Many facial expressions can be made voluntarily. If I’ m trying to look stern as I give you a tongue-lashing, I’ll have no difficulty doing so, and you’ ll have no difficulty interpreting my glare. But our faces are also governed by a separate, involuntary system. We know this because stroke victims who suffer damage to what is known as the pyramidal neural system will laugh at a joke, but they cannot smile if you ask them to. At the same time, patients with damage to another part of the brain have the opposite problem. They can smile on demand, but if you tell them a joke they can’t laugh. Similarly, few of us can voluntarily do A.U. one, the sadness sign. (A notable exception, Ekman points out, is Woody Allen, who uses his frontalis, pars medialis, to create his trademark look of comic distress.) Yet we raise our inner eyebrows all the time, without thinking, when we are unhappy. Watch a baby just as he or she starts to cry, and you’ll often see the frontalis, pars medialis, shoot up, as if it were on a string.

Perhaps the most famous involuntary expression is what Ekman has dubbed the Duchenne smile, in honor of the nineteenth-century French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne, who first attempted to document the workings of the muscles of the face with the camera. If I ask you to smile, you’ ll flex your zygomatic major. By contrast, if you smile spontaneously, in the presence of genuine emotion, you’ ll not only flex your zygomatic but also tighten the orbicularis oculi, pars orbitalis, which is the muscle that encircles the eye. It is almost impossible to tighten the orbicularis oculi, pars lateralis, on demand, and it is equally difficult to stop it from tightening when we smile at something genuinely pleasurable. This kind of smile “does not obey the will,” Duchenne wrote. “Its absence unmasks the false friend.” When we experience a basic emotion, a corresponding message is automatically sent to the muscles of the face. That message may linger on the face for just a fraction of a second, or be detectable only if you attached electrical sensors to the face, but It’s always there. Silvan Tomkins once began a lecture by bellowing, “The face is like the penis!” and this is what he meant—that the face has, to a large extent, a mind of its own. This doesn’t mean we have no control over our faces. We can use our voluntary muscular system to try to suppress those involuntary responses. But, often, some little part of that suppressed emotion—the sense that I’ m really unhappy, even though I deny it—leaks out. Our voluntary expressive system is the way we intentionally signal our emotions. But our involuntary expressive system is in many ways even more important: it is the way we have been equipped by evolution to signal our authentic feelings.¹

If “it’s always there” and no poker face is perfect, then we might go a step farther, and consider that James might very well have been right; it might not be that the face involuntarily expresses our genuine emotion, but that our genuine emotion arises from our involuntary expressions.

This comes back around to the Wii with the observation Jonah Lehrer makes in Seed’s “A Console to Make You Wiip.” Amidst some basic misconceptions on the Wii’s technical details that call into question whether he’s actually played it, Lehrer stumbles on a much more important point.

This is the Wii’s real innovation. While Nintendo argues that the wireless controller makes game play more intuitive—you no longer have to remember arcane sequences of buttons—it actually does something much more powerful: By involving your body in the on-screen action, the Wii makes video games more emotional. …

For most of the 20^th century, James’ theory of bodily emotions was ignored. It just seemed too implausible. But in the 1980s, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio realized that James was actually right: Most of our emotions are preceded by changes in our physical body. Damasio came to this conclusion after studying neurological patients who, after suffering damage in their prefrontal cortex or somatosensory cortex, were unable to experience any emotion at all. Why not? The tight connection between the mind and body had been broken. Even though these patients could still feel their flesh—they weren’t paraplegic—they could no longer use their flesh to generate feelings. And if you can’t produce the bodily symptoms of an emotion—the swelling tear ducts of sadness, or the elevated heart rate of fear—then you can’t feel the emotion. As Damasio notes, “The mind is embodied, not just embrained.”²

Damasio’s research goes even further in deconstructing Cartesian dualism. His book, Descartes’ Error, is one of the most significant science books published in the past several decades, in that it led the scientific charge against Cartesian dualism—a shift in scientific thinking for which the full implications have yet to be worked out.

Emotions are based on internal body environment which act as inputs into the brain, just as visual or auditory information is an input to the brain from the external environment. Indeed, in evolutionary terms, the brain is primarily an organ for homeostasis—a centre which collects and collates feedback on body states, and acts to maintain constancy of the internal milieu. This concept vastly clarifies the role and nature of emotions, and allows them to be studied using the full force of integrated modern neuroscience. …

Emotions are also vital to the higher reaches of distinctively human intelligence. Contrary to some popular notions, emotions do not ‘get in the way of’ rational thinking - emotions are essential to rationality.³

If that’s true, then the Wii may have an edge over the rest of the seventh generation that goes far deeper than flashy graphics or better hardware—it may not always require you to become physically involved, but it lets you, in a kind of feedback loop for emotion in games: you stand up and begin gesticulating as the game becomes competitive; that physical involvement makes you feel the emotions of the game; you make even more intense movements in reaction, with an escalating feedback loop of emotional involvement.

This is the irony of the Wii: although it can’t compete with the visual realism of Sony and Microsoft, it ends up feeling much more realistic. When I was testing out the Wii, I was surprised by how the new controller completely altered my gaming experience. Because my body was forced to move as if I were actually fighting off some nasty monster, or swinging a golf club, or ducking a punch, my brain was convinced that I was really inside the game. I was no longer just a hapless guy sitting on the couch. The Wii breaks down that annoying wall separating you from the television screen.

Of course, all this emotion can have its drawbacks. Just imagine how bad you’ll feel when the Gooper Blooper kills off Mario. Because you’ve spent the last few hours inhabiting Mario’s body, his death will be difficult to shrug off. While our brains know that Mario is only a cartoon, our bodies are much more gullible. (As James noted, our feelings also linger longer in the body than in the mind.) Sometimes we just want our video games to be pleasant distractions, without the melodrama that comes from having our bodies involved. That’s why we have the Playstation and Xbox: they only get our thumbs excited.⁴

If the key to art is the emotional involvement of the viewer—”the ax that breaks the frozen sea within us,” as Franz Kafka put it—then we can see how literature, plays, and so many of the traditional art forms succeed in spite of their medium. If all this is true, the Wii just might be the first platform where the medium actually helps a game to become art.