Every Game is an Island: Endings and Extremities in Video Games 9781501316616, 9781501316647, 9781501316630

Citation preview

Every Game is an Island

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Every Game is an Island Endings and Extremities in Video Games Riccardo Fassone

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC 1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Riccardo Fassone, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fassone, Riccardo, author. Title: Every game is an island : endings and extremities in video games / Riccardo Fassone. Description: New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016034475 (print) | LCCN 2016052646 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501316616 (hb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501316623 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501316630 (ePDF) Subjects: LCSH: Video games–Design. | Video games–Psychological aspects. Classification: LCC GV1469.3 .F37 2017 (print) | LCC GV1469.3 (ebook) | DDC 794.8–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016034475 ISBN :

HB : ePub: ePDF :

978-1-5013-1661-6 978-1-5013-1662-3 978-1-5013-1663-0

Cover design: Catherine Wood Cover image © Shutterstock Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

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Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

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Introduction A book about extremities Structure of the book

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Two Non-definitive Definitions What is a video game? The exceptionality of video games Computer-mediated games Designed procedural experiences

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7 11 17 23

Game ↔ Game Closure Caesura Endlessness Openness

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Game ↔ Metagame Fragmentation Metagaming Immersion Holism

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Game ↔ Games Uniqueness Ephemerality Modularity Serialization

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86 98 106 115 127 129 138 145 154

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Contents

Conclusions From the outside in

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Bibliography Ludography Filmography Index

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187 191 193

List of Illustrations 2.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8

The map of Super Metroid (Nintendo) Idle animation in Commander Keen IV (id Software) User interface of Angry Birds (Rovio) Combat screen in Breath of Death VII: The Beginning (Zeboyd Games) Knights of Pen and Paper: a mundane setting (Paradox Interactive) Knights of Pen and Paper: a transfigured setting (Paradox Interactive) Aesthetic immersion in The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (Starbreeze Studios, Tigon Studios, 2004) The diegetized HUD of Aliens: Colonial Marines (Sega, 2013) flOw (Thatgamecompany, 2006) Perma-death in One Single Life (FreshTone Games, 2011) One Single Life’s jump simulator (FreshTone Games, 2011) Garry’s Mod’s FLATTYWOOD (FacePunch Studios) Aesthetic consistency in literary series (Author’s rendition—Books from Mondadori series) Sega Vintage Collection (Author’s rendition—Golden Axe and Sonic the Hedgehog, Sega) The Namco Retrogaming Series: New Rally-X (Namco Bandai) The Namco Retrogaming Series: Dig Dug (Namco Bandai) Nostalgic framing in Final Fight: Double Impact (Capcom, 2010)

51 91 92 102 104 104 113 114 117 142 144 153 156 160 161 162 164

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Acknowledgments This book is the result of almost five years of research; it has survived a couple of hard disk failures and the author’s questionable backup habits. It has traveled over the desks and through the offices of many universities, libraries, and research centers. Most importantly, it has been greatly enriched by the discussions with the brilliant scholars and friends who have read various versions of it and offered their generous insights. I am sincerely indebted to Peppino Ortoleva for our invaluable discussions, and to Ruggero Eugeni and Giacomo Manzoli, who commented on an earlier version of the book. I am also grateful to Giulia Carluccio for her mentorship and willingness to discuss the highs and lows of my research. This book benefited from the support and friendship of my colleagues at the University of Turin, Italy. I am greatly indebted to Giaime Alonge, Silvio Alovisio, Alessandro Amaducci, Cristina Colet, Giuliana C. Galvagno, Vincenzo Idone Cassone, Mariella Lazzarin, Giulio Lughi, Andrea Mattacheo, Ivan Mosca, Sarah Pesenti Campagnoni, MariaPaola Pierini, Antonio Pizzo, Matteo Pollone, Gabriele Rigola, Hamilton Santià, Mattia Thibault, and Andrea Valle. I am grateful to Ian Bogost, Giovanni Caruso, Gabriele Ferri, Stefano Gualeni, William Huber, Simone Natale, Michael Nitsche, Paolo Ruffino, Mauro Salvador, and Miguel Sicart, whose comments helped me write a better book. A heartfelt thank you to my editors at Bloomsbury, Mary Al-Sayed, Michelle Chen, and Katie Gallof, and to my proofreader Angela Arnone. Finally, my thanks to my families: the one I was lucky enough to get, and the one I chose. The paragraph Authoritative Video Games in Chapter 1 is a revised version of Fassone 2015; Bodily pleasures. Game over as spectacular device in Dead Space 2 in Chapter 2 is a translated and revised version of Fassone 2012; the section on immersion in Chapter 3 is a complete reworking of Fassone 2009; the section on serialization in Chapter 4 is a revised version of Fassone 2014. I thank the editors and publishers of these works for allowing me to use them.

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Introduction

A book about extremities Ryu’s closure Video game players often cherish fond memories of the games they have played. When asked, they have vivid recollections of a final boss who refused to hit the ground, an apparently unsolvable puzzle, an epic battle against a friend. Often players will recall reaching the final level and beating the game, an exhilarating moment that most will identify as the peak of their playing activity. In my case, this happened with Street Fighter II , a favorite video game whose characters, iconic caricatures of martial arts fighters, rugged US Marines, and confusing genetic experiments, have become staples in contemporary video game culture. While most people played Street Fighter II in an arcade, I happened to play the MS -DOS version of the game, an underwhelming adaptation developed by U.S. Gold in 1992. Despite the impossibly slow pace of the game, I managed to defeat all of the computerized opponents of the game as Ryu, a dark-haired Japanese martial artist. Finishing a game can be a bewildering, paradoxical experience. On the one hand, the digital antagonist that players struggle with for hours is now conquered; on the other hand, the pleasure of playing is gone, the terra incognita of gameplay has been discovered. For video game players, chasing closure inevitably means destroying the world of the game, as “their joyful pursuit of that end means the death of their pleasure” (Salen and Zimmerman 2004: 258). Despite this poetic paradox, my experience with the slightly broken version of Street Fighter II I played as a ten-year-old was one of closure. After winning the final challenge, I was presented with a short non-interactive sequence hinting at the destiny of Ryu. I saw the young karateka walk away from the award ceremony towards the dusk, a closed caption reading “Ceremony means nothing to him. The fight is everything.” The game provided me with a pragmatic and a dramatic closure at the same time: there were no more fighters 1

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Every Game is an Island

to defeat, and my hero was walking into the sunset, an ending trope that resonates with genre stereotypes of both the samurai and the western film. In my case, Ryu’s final sequence truly made “stasis or the absence of further continuation, the most probable succeeding event” (Herrnstein Smith 1968: 34). Although the last round of the fight against M. Bison—Street Fighter II ’s final boss—and the short celebration of victory that follows stand as iconic closure in the minds of most players, this is not the only ending they encountered during their play. They lost a few matches before defeating M. Bison and were presented with a static rendition of Ryu as a defeated fighter; they crossed the border between agency and spectatorship several times while watching cutscenes between fights; they accessed configuration menus to adjust settings or pushed the pause button to mentally devise an effective strategy before deploying it. They encountered a number of endings, borders, and extremities. While beating (or finishing, a dualism that in itself calls for analysis) a game may constitute a memorable moment of closure, it happens within the frame of an inherently fragmented experience, one that in most cases contains a vast number of endings. This book is about endings, extremities, boundaries, and thresholds found in video games. The dramatic ones—for example Ryu’s remarkable closure—and the more trivial ones, such as the pause function, or the border crossing of the frame of configuration found in most games.

Every game is an island and no game is an island Every game is defined by its borders, its endings, and its extremities. Often, playing a video game feels like pushing against those borders. Training for frame-perfect execution in Street Fighter II , or bumping into an invisible wall in Far Cry 2 require players to engage with the finiteness of the video game, its nature of contained simulation, an island surrounded by cliffs and rocks, whose jagged borders are the object of this work. Every game is an island, because, as I will claim throughout this book, every game cannot be but closed and finite. Even games claiming to be open world and offering players utmost freedom are framed by the limitations of their digital nature. On the peculiar island that is Prison Architect, for example, an open-ended game that requires players to build and run a prison, the player cannot decide to build a cinema for the inmates. The option is just not there, it falls outside of the contained simulative space offered by the game code. This sort of liminal experience, this constant engaging with the game’s finiteness, its endings, and its extremities, is what characterizes video

Introduction

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game play for me, and what I am interested in describing in this book. In this sense, this book’s inquiry on the characteristics of endings and extremities is also a probe used to discuss a more general theory of video games emerging from their nature of closed, insular, artifacts. On the other hand, no game is an island. Every video game is a piece of audiovisual media existing within a wider ecosystem of (digital) media. Video games constantly engage with this external space. Sports games, often released in annual installments, constitute long series within which repetition and innovation stand in a delicate balance. Expert players are able to tell, and exploit, the minute modifications implemented in every new version of their favorite game. More generally, video games are often grouped by genres, on the basis of their mechanics (platform game, survival game, beat ’em up, etc.), or because of thematic consistency (horror, sci-fi, etc.). Every video game belongs somewhere within genres, series, and canons, and although this affiliation often shifts due to historical, social and technological contexts (Street Fighter II is a fighting game, and an installment of the Street Fighter series, and a “classic” game, and a game released by Capcom, etc.), no game can be considered a standalone vacuumsealed entity. Furthermore, due to the nature of digital media, every game can be modified, integrated, amended, and revised at the level of code. In other words, while during gameplay a video game is indeed an island whose endings and extremities can be explored by the player, as a media artifact, a video game is more of a “puzzle piece” (Juul 2008) in the mosaic of contemporary digital media. Moreover, video games often entertain a complex relation with other media forms. In this book I will often use cinema as a reference in describing the ways in which video games employ certain rhetorical strategies. I believe this is a fruitful comparison to draw in this specific context for two reasons. The first, although rather banal, should be stated: I have a background in film studies and film history, and I approached video game studies through the work of scholars that had made a similar leap before me. This means that my approach to audiovisual media is inevitably shaped by my interest in the ways in which cinema visually defined the twentieth century and influenced the modes of signification of newer media. There is a second reason for my interest in using some of the tools of film studies to discuss games. Namely, that games themselves often allude to other media, cinema being the most obvious, in the way they present narrative worlds, use montage techniques, and refer to known genres. This, of course, does not imply that the medium of the video game derives from cinema (if anything, just like cinema, it might derive from a longer tradition of

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Every Game is an Island

spectacular media), but rather that, in some cases, the theoretical and critical tools devised by film theory may prove useful in the analysis of video games. Furthermore, the specific topic of this research—the discussion of endings and extremities—has been tackled in the past by scholars working in the field of film studies (and, as I will discuss later, literary studies also), whose works will form a relevant theoretical corpus for my book.

Against currentness This book uses a series of case studies to discuss the forms and implications of endings and extremities in video games. Every game I will analyse was chosen on the basis of its relevance to the topic at hand, and for being either an example of a general tendency or a unique, exceptional case. What I purposely tried to avoid is discussing a game because of its currentness or its supposed innovative qualities. In an interview published after the release of GoldenEye 007, the 2010 remake of the game published by Rare in 1997, Activision executive Julian Widdows (Q&A Julian Widdows, Executive Producer, Activision Blizzard 2010) claims: “I don’t tend to go back to games that are 13 years old. It’s an evolutionary medium and we keep building on the successes of previous games.” Technological teleology seems to be the driving force of the video game industry. There is no reason to revisit an older game, since newer ones are inherently better; an evolutionary rhetoric that can be observed in the promotional and critical texts surrounding video games, and that is certainly synergic with the discourse of perpetual obsolescence found in the larger technological sector. Game studies usually do not shun this form of currentness; in fact, they sometimes embrace it. It is hard to judge if this is because of a voluntary adherence to the industry’s discourse, or because being current and analysing the newest games grants more visibility to published papers and articles. The examples found in this book are, for the most part, old games or games that have long fallen out of the promotion cycle. This choice does not derive merely from the fact that these games rather than others better support my argumentation and make for clearer examples; it is also, and maybe especially, because I am convinced that there is no tenable theory that can do away with history. As I will explain in more detail later, while this is not a history book, nor a book on the history of a specific genre or type of games, it is a book that acknowledges the history of the medium by refusing to crush it with a rhetoric of constant currentness and permanent evolution. In this book, games are analysed as artifacts that bear some historical weight, and may

Introduction

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be interrogated through the lens of history. This is not a book about how far the game industry has come, nor does it wish to offer any speculation or prophecy about what is to come. This is a book that analyses the endings, boundaries, and extremities found in video games produced in the last fifty years or so. To a degree, the same holds true for theory. Since its inception in the mid-1990s, the discipline1 of game studies has produced a vast body of theoretical, critical, and historical contributions. While some of these texts and methods have been disproved or rejected, as it is common in any research field, others seem to have just been surpassed without much thought, often in favor of more current approaches. Every discipline relies, at least partly, on trends and buzz words, since their adoption often grants easier access to research funds and makes publication and dissemination of results easier. Nevertheless, consistently with my previous claim on the history of games, in this book I will also use video game theory historically. Of course, this does not mean that this book will not acknowledge and discuss some of the more recent contributions to the field, but rather that it will attempt to establish a connection between what is current and what used to be in game studies, with the intent of tying in some of the threads explored by those who have studied video games in the last twenty years.

Structure of the book Three levels and some wordplay This book is divided into four chapters. In the first, I offer my understanding of what a video game is, and present a methodology through which I propose to discuss the endings and extremities found in this peculiar media form. I will describe video games as computer-mediated games and as designed procedural experiences. In the three subsequent chapters I look at these extreme areas from different perspectives that I will call game ↔ game, game ↔ metagame, and game ↔ games. Chapter 2 describes how endings and extremities are scripted into what I will call the diegesis of the game, the area in which the fictional world of the game is represented and where “proper” gameplay happens. In this chapter I will discuss medium-specific devices such as the game over and the pause function. Chapter 3 describes the borders and thresholds separating gameplay from what I will call the metagame: the area where various configurative operations take place, and where the player interacts with the game at a higher

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Every Game is an Island

level by manipulating its settings. This chapter will describe and discuss the form and function of different interface materials. Finally, Chapter  4 analyses the relations between a game and other games. Concepts such as modularity and serialization will help me describe the ways in which a video game interacts with the wider environment of digital games and digital media in general. Each chapter follows a path that moves from closedness to openness. In other words, each chapter begins with those instances in which endings and extremities are present and visible, and moves towards the analysis of cases in which they are masked, amended, or bypassed. In order to help the reader navigate this structure, I have subdivided each chapter through the use of single words that correspond to the general theme of each subdivision. Some of these words are used commonly in game studies. Notions such as immersion and modularity have a long history in digital media studies, and I will revisit them through the historical lens that I described earlier. Other words such as ephemerality or holism may seem less intuitively related to games, but will guide my reasoning and, hopefully, offer a novel insight on some of the features of the medium. The following table sums up the structure of chapters 2, 3, and 4 of the book, and offers a synoptic aid for readers interested in specific topics. Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Game ↔ Game

Game ↔ Metagame

Game ↔ Games

CLOSEDNESS

Closure Caesura Endlessness

Fragmentation Metagaming Immersion

Uniqueness Ephemerality Modularity

OPENNESS

Openness

Holism

Serialization

Notes 1 For simplicity’s sake I am describing game studies as a discipline. It should be noted that, due to the relative novelty of game studies, its status as a proper discipline within the humanities is a matter of debate. Deterding (2014), characterizes game studies as an “interdiscipline,” in which several methods and approaches may converge.

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Two Non-definitive Definitions

What is a video game? Doing away with definitions The analysis of extreme areas and boundaries is not a new topic in video game studies. More specifically, the contested notion of “magic circle” sparked a longstanding debate in the field, whose effects can still be seen at work today in many theoretical works discussing video games. In their foundational treatise on game design, Salen and Zimmerman (2004: 95) claim that all playful activities are separated from everyday life1 by “the boundaries established by the act of play.” In other words, playing means entering a physical, mental, and communicative space removed from reality and designed to generate and host play. The two scholars call this fictional space the “magic circle,” borrowing the definition from Huizinga (1955), whose book Homo Ludens acted as a veritable blueprint for game and play studies in the twentieth century. As noted by many commentators (Ehrmann 1968, Schrank 2014), Huizinga analyses play from the standpoint of a scholar very much in tune with a distinctly modern ethos, and characterizes it as radically separated from—even opposed to—productive activities such as work. It comes as no surprise that for the Dutch historian, play resides within a specially carved niche, a magic circle that protects it from the trivialities of ordinary life. The inherently post-modern sensibility of contemporary game studies led to a rich and fruitful debate (see for example Malaby 2007, Consalvo 2009b, Stenros 2012, and Zimmerman 2012) on the idea of play as a bounded, separated activity found in Huizinga2 and rehashed by Salen and Zimmerman. While the extent and results of the debate cannot be discussed in this book, it should be noted that one of the recurring traits of this conversation is the insistence on the exceptionality of play. One of the reasons for the theoretical impasse in defining the boundaries of play is that play itself is very hard to define. While several attempts at tracing an ontology of play have been made (Suits 1978, Gray 2009, 7

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Eberle 2014), it might be true—as noted by Brian Sutton-Smith (1997: 1), one of the most influential scholars in the field—that “we all play occasionally, and we all know what playing feels like. But when it comes to making theoretical statements about what play is, we fall into silliness.” As for games, the mental or material objects through which play is formalized, a variety of definitions (Juul 2005) and even meta-definitions (Arjoranta 2014) have been proposed, tested, and discussed, often with the result of discovering that outliers and exceptional cases surpassed the norm. For these reasons, despite being concerned with definitions, this chapter of the book will not offer a unifying definition of play, games, or even video games. This is not the goal of this book and, in all fairness, it is hard to see the point of such a grand endeavor. This chapter, instead, will build two operative, historically situated, inherently provisional definitions of video games that will allow me to single out the type of media objects I am interested in discussing, their characteristics, and some of the reasons why a research around endings and extremities could be well-suited to address the nature and design of these objects. However, before this, I should offer an explanation of why my research on video games will be based on what I have defined as two non-definitive definitions.

Video games change through time The main reason for the difficulty of defining video games in a stable and unequivocal manner is that, like every technological artifact, they change through time. While this may sound rather intuitive, the notion of video games being historical entities, subjected to what Paul Ricoeur (2004) describes as “the work of history,” often seems to escape scholars, players, designers and, more generally, the wider community of people invested in the medium. What Raiford Guins (2014: 4) calls “the mutable taxonomic phases video games pass through,” namely, the modifications, adaptations, and shifts occurring in the five decades in which video games have been part of the shared landscape of audiovisual media, are often unaccounted for in studies dealing with the ontology or taxonomy of the medium. While we may agree on the fact that Spacewar!, Zork, Nintendo’s Game & Watch handheld consoles, Streets of Rage, and Jason Rohrer’s experimental game Cordial Minuet can all be described as video games, we should ask ourselves whether it is really fruitful to discard historical perspective in favor of the reassurances of taxonomy. This, of course, does not imply that all video game research should deal primarily with the history of the medium—this

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book, for example, is certainly not a history book—but rather that, if we are to define the object of our attention, we should be aware of its history and, more generally, of its relation with the wider history of media, even when this means trading stable definitions for more provisional ones. Discussing the lineage and features of adventure games, Espen Aarseth (1997: 97), one of the founding figures of video game studies, asks “does the novel start with Cervantes, Sterne, or the ancient Greeks? What was the first poem? Who wrote the first sonnet? The first detective novel?” A similar question might be asked about video games. Is Tennis for Two the first video game? Or does the fact that Higinbotham’s clever contraption is actually a modified oscilloscope make it unsuitable for such a title? Is it video enough? Is it game enough? Whereas, again with Aarseth (1997: 97), “most of these questions have no clear answer,” discussing and analysing games means engaging in a practice that acknowledges the existence of such questions, and recognizes taxonomic indeterminacy as a function of (media) history. For this reason, the two definitions of video game that I will offer later in the chapter are tied respectively to the history of computing and the history of game design, and the video games that will be analysed in this book will be consistently presented in the light of the media environment that produced them and the history that led to their design and release. A second reason for the taxonomical indeterminacy of video games is that in most cases, when we want to discuss them we may really be thinking about wildly different things. For example, a software engineer may characterize video games as a specific type of software; a player as a subset in the larger category of games (in which they may include sports, tabletop games, party games, etc.); a patron of the arcades in the 1970s and 1980s as an electronic relative of a pinball machine; an executive in a large studio as another form of big budget entertainment, akin to blockbuster movies; an independent game designer as an artistic form of expression. Video games are all of this and possibly more. And, as media history teaches, they are destined to become something else as the pressures and tensions imposed on them by designers, producers, critics, scholars, and, more importantly, players, mold them into new forms. Reducing this multiplicity of definitions to a single duality is a hard task, but what might be said is that video games are always, “ontologically both objects and experiences” (Sicart 2009: 29–30). A video game is a specific material construct, a designed piece of software, and, at the same time, when played, an actualized play experience, an ever-evolving dialogue between a player and a machine. These enigmatic pieces of code, existing somewhere between the technological and the playful, can be described as a

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subset of games, a specific category of the broader class of ludic objects and, at the same time, as self-contained, designed audiovisual objects, whose functioning relies on a set of computer-executed protocols that, when experienced by the player, present them with an array of audiovisual information. In this sense, video games are both video games and video games, meaning that they are at the same time designed audiovisual media objects, and peculiar instances of play.

What I mean by “video game” As I have said, in a discussion about video games, we may find ourselves caught in a conundrum of definitions. It is hard to characterize video games as a single entity both because they change through time, and because different subjects may characterize them as a multiplicity of things, a state of indeterminacy generated by their inherently ambiguous nature of digital objects and playful experiences. For this reason, instead of asking what a video game is, I will answer to the more manageable question of what I mean by “video game.” Or, more precisely, what kinds of objects I am picturing in my mind when I write about video games in this specific context. I will offer two theoretical definitions of video games in the second part of the chapter, so, for the moment, let me answer two more trivial questions. What kinds of video games is this book about? And, in turn, what parts of those video games am I interested in? In the first case, the answer is straightforward: for the most part I will discuss single-player video games or single-player versions of video games that can also be played with other human players. Although I will occasionally point to online multiplayer games or MOBA s3 with the intent of drawing a comparison, single-player video games will be the main focus of this book. The reason for this choice will be explained in full throughout the book, but for the moment it might suffice to say that analysing or discussing multiplayerfocused games in a rigorous fashion requires using methods derived from the social sciences such as in-depth interviews, questionnaires, and tools of ethnographic and social research in general. This is mainly due to the fact that the communities of players interacting with multiplayer games are usually more interesting than the design of the games itself. The so-called “meta,” namely the set of emergent strategies, practices, assumptions, and beliefs produced and shared by a community of players of a game like Dota 2 greatly surpasses the formal properties of the game in complexity and interest.4 On the other hand, an analysis of endings and extremities in games that relies on the methods and tools

Two Non-definitive Definitions

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of the humanities may benefit from narrowing its field of action to include games in which the dialogue between the human player and the machinic counterpart is more direct and traceable. Later in the chapter I will discuss the notion of “model player,” a semiotic construction that, I contend, is a useful tool for discussing single-player video games. As an addendum to the previous point, I should note that this book will provide a discussion and a critique of endings and extremities that I will later characterize as procedural, or, in simpler terms, based for the most part in their design and in their ability to generate or sustain certain forms of play. As Giddings (2014: 91) points out: “The analysis of video games as a computer-based medium demands the description of a very special category of non-humans, software entities and agents depicted as individual characters, as collectives, or as aspects of the virtual environment itself, but all acting with a certain degree of autonomy.” This book will discuss this peculiar class of digital objects with the intent of analysing how they relate to notions such as ending, extremity, and boundary. Despite the attention devoted to design elements and formal properties of video games, this book is not only about the mechanical interaction of these objects, nor is it a description of the causal relationships between a player’s actions and the reactions of the system of the game. Rather, this book is about how what I will call designed procedural experiences can be imbued with their designer’s ideas, politics and rhetoric, and how they can then provide players with a range of play experiences. In other words, I am interested in how games and players communicate and, specifically, in how border-zones, endings, closures, and extremities seem to act as those areas in which game-player communication happens. Moreover, I will confront the ways in which video games and video game design elicit other forms of communication, exceeding the tight feedback loop between a game and its player. This book conceives video games as media in the most basic sense of the term: objects whose purpose is “to store and to expedite information” (McLuhan 1994: 158), and argues that this peculiar process of communication-through-play happens more significantly and visibly when the borders of play are reached.

The exceptionality of video games Digital exceptionalism Video games are both games and pieces of digital audiovisual media. They project designed worlds for the player to inhabit, and they generate and sustain

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Every Game is an Island

play through game mechanics. This irreducible duality will form the backbone of this book and shape most of the theoretical assumptions and analytical tools I will use to discuss endings and extremities in games. As for video games being digital media, and belonging to the wider ecosystem of digital media, I will often refer to Bogost’s (2006, 2007) notion of “procedurality” to discuss the ways in which they carry and produce meaning, and to Galloway’s (2006) research on diegetic and non-diegetic space in video games to compare the ways in which film and video games deal with narrative. Both these theoretical stances will be addressed later in the book. On the other hand, the idea that video games are also games in the broader sense, which will inevitably shape my understanding of the medium, is in need of a radical, but essential, revision. I will call my understanding of video games-as-games “digital exceptionalism.” What I mean by this is that video games are an exceptional subset of games, since—because of their nature of digital objects—their rules must be stored, upheld, and executed by a computer. When playing a video game, we are always playing with and against a digital machine, an entity whose peculiar characteristics make it a unique sort of playful companion. A video game offers its player a world to inhabit or, in more minimalist cases, a series of rules and properties to interact with, but it is at the same time a piece of software in charge of executing certain procedures that ensure the consistency of that world or rule set. To quote Triclot (2011: 33, my translation), “the machine is in charge of respecting the rules, making the necessary calculations, and, at the same time, ensuring some form of objectivity or neutrality of the playfield. . . . The world of the game is embodied in the logic of the machine,” or, in a more radical formulation, a “game program is thus not only a set of instructions, a kind of law code for the world of the particular game, that I have the duty to follow when I am in the company of computers, but at the same time also a police agent that precisely monitors my actions” (Pias 2011: 179). Video games are exceptional because they require players to entrust their play to a non-human digital entity, whose role is to handle game progress by storing, upholding, executing, and enforcing its rules. In this sense, the exceptionality of video games when compared to analog games is both quantitative and material. It is quantitative, because given the encyclopedic capacity of digital media (Murray 1997), the number of rules and procedures that can be executed by a video game greatly exceeds that of any analog game.5 While Conway’s experimental Game of Life, or even the simple Frogger, may be theoretically reproduced using pen and paper and manually implementing

Two Non-definitive Definitions

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a given set of rules, it is impossible for more complex video games to be abstracted to a definite, manageable set of rules, or be reproduced by translating their coded nature into distinct procedures. Even a game as (relatively) simple as Burger Time requires its supporting computer to execute an enormous number of procedures every second, making it virtually unreproducible outside a digital environment. It should be noted that here I am implying an inclusive version of the notion of rules, one that includes “components (pieces/player characters/etc.), procedures associated with components (moving them or manipulating them in other ways), environments that define the physical boundaries of a game, theme that gives the game a subject matter, and interface which is used to access the game” (Järvinen: 2003: 68). Video games are exceptional also because of their material construction; if one assumes that computer code is in fact the material of which video games are made, one cannot avoid noticing how this peculiar building block of the digital age presents itself and acts differently than any other material of which analog games may be made of.

The inflexible code In his book Play Redux, David Myers sums up exactly the exceptionalism of video games. According to Myers (2010: 5), “computer games, of all types of games and play, are most securely situated in the formal properties of a digital game code, which is much more measurable and more determinable than that code’s pre-digital analog: game rules.” So far, with Järvinen, I have described rules in video games as the staggering number of procedures that a computer running a game is capable of managing. Myer’s theory offers a better characterization of this dynamic. The fact that in video games procedures are coded into a series of strings of software language, namely the game code, makes rules at the same time potentially very numerous and invariably measurable. The code of a given game is finite, and countable; it is a digital object whose properties and behavior are set by the developer in order to generate a self-sustaining, closed playful artifact. Of course, players can decide to modify a series of parameters within the game, but these adjustments are themselves part of the rules a game imposes on the player. One can adjust the difficulty settings of a game, but—in most cases—not the color of an enemy’s clothing; one can decide to set a game of NBA 2K16 in Atlanta’s Philips Arena but, unfortunately, not in the rundown playground of a city in northern Italy. Those options are just not

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Every Game is an Island

present in the finite, measurable rule-giver that is the game code. Certainly, game codes are expanded and amended all the time, both by game developers through patches and updates, and by players through mods and hacks, but during play the game code is usually completely invisible to the player, and its finite number of rules is at work for the whole of the play session. In this perspective, the numerous essays and books describing video games as inherently open to the creativity of the player seem to ignore that, to put it bluntly, video games are open until they become irremediably closed, namely until the player hits the edge of the inflexibility of code. In an article discussing the need to consider video games as radically different expressive forms than written narrative or cinema, Gonzalo Frasca (2003: 227) highlights an apparently convincing separation between media: “After all, as we learned from classical Greek drama, stories and fate go together. No matter how badly literary theorists remind us of the active role of the reader, that train will hit Anna Karenina and Oedipus will kill his father and sleep with his mother.” The author then proceeds to remark how video games are ontologically different from other media, since in an ideal Oedipus: the Video Game the player may be given the option not to kill Oedipus’s father. From this perspective, traditional narrative media’s strict teleology is questioned by the video-ludic notion of agency (Dow et al. 2009, Murray 1997), according to which a player is more of a performer (Eskelinen and Tronstad 2003) than a reader. Frasca’s idea that the train will still hit Anna Karenina, although simplistic, is impossible to disprove. On the other hand, the author’s theory according to which video games offer an alternative to this teleology is less convincing. One could say that no matter how badly a ludologist advocates the player’s unbound freedom, Lara Croft will not be able to open the closed door of an ancient palace in Venice in Tomb Raider II , nor will Mario ever convince Donkey Kong to stop throwing barrels at him. Computer scientist and theorist Joseph Weizenbaum (1976: 115) describes this inherent inflexibility of computer code in poetic terms: The computer programmer, is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. Universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs. Moreover, and this is a crucial point, systems so formulated and elaborated act out their programmed scripts. They compliantly obey their laws and vividly exhibit their obedient behaviour. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.

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In other words, Lara Croft will never be able to enter an eighteenth-century building in Venice unless the game designer allows her to do so by designing an openable rather than an un-openable door. In this sense, as noted by Myers, video games are exceptional because—consistently with their computational nature— they are a form of game that cannot escape measurability, a status that makes them not only inflexible, but even authoritative.

Authoritative video games The notion that video games are authoritative pieces of software, imposing their inflexible procedures on players, paints a bleak picture of the medium. Far from being an instrument of creativity and personal affirmation, video games seem to belong to the realm of dystopia; artifacts built to coop free play into a measurable, regulated, even oppressive activity. This dystopian tale is certainly not devoid of interest. On the one hand, one could argue, as Bateson (1956) does in a symposium devoted to discussing the nature of play, that strict rules impoverish playful behavior, since they do not allow for any form of metacommunication, or negotiation among players, two of the defining features of play in Bateson’s theory. On the other hand, the digital nature of video games may induce us to think they are merely “performance-evaluating artifacts” (Karhulahti 2015) disguised as games, or controlling machines for which “we are the tokens, not the players” (Wark 2014: 164). I will offer a slightly different interpretation of the digital inflexibility of video games, contending that instead of being authoritative pieces of software, they are in fact games about authority. This remark will help me further characterize video games as media objects, capable of storing and presenting information and, ultimately, allow communication between different subjects, both human and digital. In his work on play, Bateson (1956, 1972) describes it as a form of metacommunication. All play acts contain two sets of messages, one denotative (for example, in the case of mammals observed by Bateson “this is a bite”), and one metacommunicative (for example “the bite was playful”). In Bateson’s view, then, play is invariably a form of communication and a most refined one at that, since players need to exchange simultaneously at least two messages at all times: one denotative and one meta-referential, namely “this is play.” As noted by Nachmanovitch (2009: 15), one of Bateson’s most acute commentators, play is always “meta to” something. Play is always about something. If video games are an exceptional type of game, and video game play is, in turn, an exceptional type of play, its exceptionality can also be found in its meta-referent. In what it is ultimately about.

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In his book Persuasive Games, Ian Bogost (2007: 5–7) presents a situation in which the authoritative nature of computational procedures is evident. Bogost proposes the case of someone who buys a defective DVD player and returns it to the store after the warranty period has expired. Whereas at a retail store, human clerks may decide arbitrarily to extend the warranty period in order to avoid fuss or with the intention of offering a better service, a computerized agent—for example the return and refund system of an online retailer—will enforce its computerized procedures and refuse to refund the product. Bogost claims that computerized systems act as impassible bureaucrats, enforcing what Weber (1992: 123) defined as the “iron cage” of bureaucracy, a rationalist mechanized machine that exercises its power through procedures. Bogost’s use of the Weberian concept of the iron cage is central, since it implicates the closed nature of procedural systems. The refund and return system of the online retailer may be expanded in order to encompass more human-centered procedures, but its closed nature of upholder and executor of rules will remain. The iron cage only gets slightly larger. In Weber’s words (Weber 1946: 212), the change is in “the intensity of the administration,” not in its nature. Video game players engage in playful activities with and within procedural systems. If play is always about something or, rather, is contained within a psychological frame that makes it meta to other activities, one might contend that engaging playfully with a digital game means building a frame around the iron cage of digital bureaucracy. If the playful nip of Bateson’s observations denotes the bite, then the playful subservience to computational procedures denotes—and at the same time is about—the daily interaction with the bureaucratic authority of computational machines. In this perspective, the player of a video game, possibly more than the theorist, is a procedural critic who navigates and interprets sets of arbitrary rules upheld by a computational system that often acts in opposition to their actions. While most video games will attempt to naturalize this interaction by constructing seemingly unbound, open worlds, players will eventually encounter—by accident or by design—the limitations of those worlds, experiencing the authority of game code. Being a player of video games does not consist in exploiting a possibility space, as argued by proponents of a theory of open play, but rather in exploring the impossibilities of a designed system, its borders and limits, the idiosyncrasies of its rules in order to play with—and around—authority. For this reason, observing the boundaries of this authority may help us discuss the complexities of what I will characterize as computer-mediated games and designed procedural experiences from a useful vantage point.

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Computer-mediated games Interaction? A first, fundamental, definition of what we mean by video game could read: video games are a peculiar category of games that require the use of a computer6 to be run and played. While admittedly simplified, this definition may help us clarify some of the specificities of the medium, by answering a number of questions about what video games are and the kind of relationship they entertain with the player. Video games are often said to be interactive, meaning that playing a video game implies creating a feedback loop with a machine. This definition has been often challenged as being too broad (Aarseth 1997, Moulthrop 2004) and unspecific; nevertheless, the notion of interactive computing can prove useful for crafting the operative definition of video game that will be used throughout the book. In Where the Action Is (2001), human-computer interaction scholar Paul Dourish draws a history of interaction that allows him to clarify how the evolution of computers has shaped the way users interact with them and how different styles of interactions have influenced the design of computational media. According to Dourish, this sixty-year history of interaction can be divided into four phases: electrical, symbolic, textual, and graphical. In the electrical phase, human-computer interaction was dictated by “the individual details of the circuitry of any particular computer” (Dourish 2001: 7), while later, with the introduction of assemblers and other early programming languages, a higher-level form of interaction, adaptable to different computers with different electronics, was established. The textual and graphical phases refer to a further refinement of symbolic interaction, that was encoded in written language and, later, in visual metaphors such as the window or the folder. In discussing the textual phase of human-computer interaction Dourish (2001: 10) writes: Arguably this is the origin of “interactive” computing, because textual interfaces also meant appearance of the “interactive loop”, in which interaction became an endless back-and-forth of instruction and response between user and system. . . . The other significant feature of the textual interface paradigm is that it brought the idea of “interaction” to the fore. Textual interaction drew upon language much more explicitly than before, and at the same time it was accompanied by a transition to a new model of computing, in which a user would actually sit in front of a computer terminal, entering commands and reading responses. With

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Every Game is an Island this combination of language use and direct interaction, it was natural to look on the result as a “conversation” or “dialogue.”

By characterizing this model of interaction as a conversation or dialogue, Dourish seems to refer to the process of tightening of the command/response loop involving the user and the computer. Before textual interaction, the machine had to be instructed beforehand with all commands; with this new configuration, however, the command/response dialogue became immediate. In other words, with the advent of textual interaction, users started dealing more radically with the cybernetic functioning (Wiener 1948, 1950) of computers, by becoming part of an iterative feedback loop.

State machines and cybertexts While some video games, commonly called textual adventures or interactive fiction (Montfort 2003), use only textual material, most video games represent graphically simulated fictional worlds. In this sense, the transition from textual to graphical interaction described by Dourish may seem more relevant to the analysis of video games. Nevertheless, the birth of interactive computing driven by real-time feedback within a textual environment may prove more useful in this context. As a matter of fact, a great number of foundational theories of video games start their research from the interactive nature of the medium, resorting to a fundamental definition of video games as machines generating a real-time informational loop with the user. Jesper Juul uses the term “state machine”—an expression borrowed from computer science (Gill 1962)—to refer to the cybernetic nature of computer games. According to Juul (2005: 60): A game is a machine that can be in different states, it responds differently to the same input at different times, it contains input and output functions and definitions of what state and what input will lead to what following state. . . . When you play a game, you are interacting with the state machine that is the game.

In 1997, Espen Aarseth (1997: 3) introduced the notion of cybertext, “a machine for the production of a variety of expression.” Aarseth’s cybertexts are a category of texts, based for the most part in digital media, that need to be at least partly actualized by the user, who interacts with the text and, in turn, receives feedback from it. The Norwegian scholar uses the Chinese oracular text I Ching and Apollinaire’s Calligrammes as examples of early cybertexts, and discusses a

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number of computer games such as Adventure and Lemmings, implicitly stating that the computer environment is inherently more suited for the production and consumption of such texts. Aarseth then describes the type of relation that is established between a cybertext and its user as ergodic; Aarseth (1997: 1, emphasis added) defines the concept as follows: “In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text.” By defining the effort of the reader as nontrivial Aarseth manages to set apart a specific kind of interaction from a more generic understanding of the term; to Aarseth, while all texts require an effort to be traversed, for a text to be considered ergodic, this effort must be nontrivial. While most of Aarseth’s essay is formalistic in nature and uses clear-cut categories and taxonomies, his notion of non-triviality is certainly more nuanced and vague. According to Aarseth (1997:40): While some signification systems, such as painted pictures and printed books, exist on only one material level (i.e. the level of paint and canvas, or of ink and paper), others exist on two or more levels, as a book being read aloud (ink-paper and voice-soundwaves) or a moving picture being projected (the film strip and the image on the silver screen). In these latter cases, the relationship between the two levels may be termed trivial, as the transformation from one level to the other (what we might call the secondary sign production) will always be, if not deterministic, then at least dominated by the material authority of the first level.

Here Aarseth posits a separation between the text as an existing object in itself (e.g., ink and paper) and the text as an actualized experience (e.g., a novel being read aloud). Many scholars have argued against such distinction (Eco 1979, DeCerteau 1984, Worringer 2007), postulating that the reader contributes decisively to the completion of the text, but Aarseth uses this stance to describe his idea of non-triviality inductively. While reading a book aloud constitutes a trivial form of interaction, guided for the most part by the specific configuration of the text itself, completing a graphic adventure game requires the user to engage actively in a competition against the text, which poses itself as openly reluctant. While, as we have argued, Aarseth’s formalist argument cannot be accepted fully, since it implies a strong and rather artificial divide between texts and practices, his more nuanced idea of nontrivial interaction as one of the foundations of computer-mediated games is certainly useful. Interacting playfully with a computer, in other words, constitutes an ergodic practice, where players play with and against their computerized partner, which acts as an oppositional entity. If, with Juul, we had come to classify computer-mediated

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Every Game is an Island

games as state machines, Aarseth’s theory of ergodicity allows us to proceed further and add the notion of opposition: computer-mediated games are oppositional state machines. The value of this integration can be recognized from a rather banal example. Both an ATM and the game Dig Dug can be described as state machines: they both accept inputs from a user and provide them with feedback, thus generating a cybernetic feedback loop; they both require interaction with the user in order to work properly; they can both be in different states. Nevertheless, while the ATM is somehow subservient, Dig Dug is reluctant or oppositional, in that it compels players to try different strategies, forcing them to fail a number of times before accomplishing their goal. We can provisionally define Dig Dug, and computer-mediated games in general, as oppositional state machines, since they derive their gameness (Juul, 2003) from presenting players with challenges that need to be overcome by working against the machine.7 While this definition intuitively applies to most of the games I will analyse in this book, namely single-player video games, a short clarification on the nature of this opposition is in order. In the case of Dig Dug, the machine challenges the player to overcome a specific form of opposition: players have a precise goal— clearing the level of all enemies—but are obstructed by the very design of the levels and the unpredictable behavior of the enemies. In other cases, for example in games of pure dexterity, machine-opposition is conveyed through the physical interface of the game, that needs to be manipulated by players in perfect synchronicity with the game’s prompts. Or, in the case of classic graphic adventures such as Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, opposition comes in the form of logic or narrative puzzles that require the player to recognize the correct pattern within a branching structure.

The cybernetic player Having established that at a foundational level a video game is a computermediated game that stands in opposition to the player, a short digression on what it means to be a player of this sort of game is in order. Discussing video games, Lev Manovich (2001: 222–3) writes: As the player proceeds through the game, she gradually discovers the rules that operate in the universe constructed by this game. She learns its hidden logic, in short, its algorithm. Therefore, in games in which the game play departs from following an algorithm, the player is still engaged with an algorithm, albeit in

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another way: She is discovering the algorithm of the game itself. I mean this both metaphorically and literally.

To Manovich, playing a computer-mediated game means gradually discovering the deep functioning of the algorithms operating within the game system. The player learns to respond to an inflexible algorithm and, consequently, needs to uncover the enigma presented by the algorithm itself in order to master the game. This mechanized player is defined by Giddings and Kennedy (2006) as a “cyborg player,” who is supposed to communicate deeply with the machine and interpret its stimuli at an algorithmic level. This mechanistic view of video game play is substantiated by Manovich’s example (2001: 223): “For instance in a first person shooter such as Quake the player may eventually notice that, under such and such conditions, the enemies will appear from the left; that is, she will literally reconstruct a part of the algorithm responsible for the game play.” To a certain degree, Manovich’s player is not interacting with the projected fictional world of the game, but rather seeing through a deceitful mise-en-scène, searching for an elusive algorithmic plot operating behind the scenes. This analysis immediately rings true to a player who is accustomed to the highly repetitive routines of the enemies in Quake, a brand of video game foes that can be easily outsmarted. Nevertheless, Manovich’s portrait of the cybernetic player can be countered by numerous examples where—due to the randomization of routines or the use of sophisticated artificial intelligence—predicting sequences and patterns proves nearly impossible. Take as an example the game BioShock. From a generic standpoint the game appears similar to Quake; it is a first person shooter in which players need to fight their way through hordes of enemies, often navigating narrow corridors. One of the distinctive features of BioShock is the presence of Big Daddies, enormous armored monsters who live in the meanders of Rapture, the game’s fictional underwater city. While fighting a Big Daddy may seem similar to engaging with the enemies found in Quake, no repetitive pattern can be found in the behavior of BioShock’s armored giants. Often the player will need to attack a Big Daddy repeatedly—in most cases dying and respawning a number of times—and instead of relying on fixed routines, will need to devise a strategy based on the contingent behavior of the enemy. This is due to the game’s reliance on complex AI , which makes the strategies and movements of the enemies hardly predictable by the player, who cannot hope of cracking the complex algorithmic routine of the game, but rather needs to proceed intuitively. This seems to disprove Manovich’s theory of an algorithmic player in favor of a more nuanced view of the play experience, such as that held by Nitsche (2008: 25):

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Every Game is an Island Players of a video game do not look at the underlying code but at dynamically generated audiovisual and tactile results based on it. They look at the mediated plane and see the performance of the code. The code itself stays hidden behind elaborate virtual worlds and interfaces, and the only time one might encounter it is when an error crashes the program and a debug message points to certain lines of broken code. Players do not have to understand the logic of the code but of the mediated game world.

The player’s understanding of the game’s functioning is shaped by the experience of the mediated output, consisting of the audiovisual presentation and the perceived behavior of the in-game objects. This non-mechanistic dynamic is described by Arsenault and Perron (2009) as heuristic; according to the “magic cycle” theory proposed by the two scholars, the cybernetic interaction between game and player may be seen as a cycle in which the player heuristically discovers the game world by engaging with its affordances and constraints. The player’s experience is complicated by their subjectivity intervening in decoding the stimuli offered by the video game: His [the player’s] mental model will never represent the gameplay as a computer set of instructions or calculated formulae (the enemy’s movement from left to right is not thought of by the gamer as “Enemy1.PositionX = PositionX+1”). Therefore, the notion that a gamer’s experience and a computer program directly overlap is a mistake. Arsenault and Perron 2009: 110

But rather (2009: 114): At first, right after the game’s output, he must analyse the information available to him (while keeping in mind as well the potential future states of the game) through his perceptual and cognitive activity, which relies on the bottom-up (data-driven) and top-down (concept-driven) processes. If the unfolding of the action is new and it is difficult to predict what will come next, the gamer will rely more on images, sounds and/or force-feedback in trying to make sense of such a situation. The bottom-up process will be dominant. But if the beginning of the action matches a general knowledge schema (context) or a generic schema (learned from past experience of other texts—co-texts), the top-down process takes the lead and the gamer will look for a confirmation of his expectations.

From the player’s vantage point, playing a computer-mediated game means interacting cyclically with a series of outputs and proceeding heuristically, adapting previous knowledge of the game (genre-related patterns, apprehended

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tactics, etc.) to constantly evolving conditions. In this sense, players interact with what could be dubbed as the explicit component of a video game, which is that portion of the game rules (enforced by the code) progressively actualized on the screen. In easier terms, one might say that while the oppositional nature of the game is hard-coded into it, players never face the deep algorithmic nature of the software. Instead, they confront its effects on the simulated world of the game. In this perspective, the difference highlighted by Giddings (2014: 57) between “mechanical” and “machinic” play is very significant. On the one hand, Manovich’s theoretical cybernetic players act as parts of a mechanism and are as cybernetic as their digital opponent. On the other hand, I claim that playing with and against a computer means entering a dialogue with a machine that disguises its binary inner functioning through the projection of a simulated world. In this sense, video game play is “machinic” in that it presupposes the formation of a machine—composed of the computer and the player—that runs on the ludic tension created by the opposition between the two. This bio-technological machine8 is the site where what I will call designed procedural experiences take place.

Designed procedural experiences The project of experience In his book on media semiotics, Ruggero Eugeni (2010) describes his approach to media studies as experience based; according to Eugeni it is possible to investigate media as experience-creating devices. The author’s interest does not reside in the actual, embodied experience of the single user or viewer, but rather in what he defines as the experiential project created by a text. In other words, Eugeni’s research does not answer ethnographic questions—what pattern is adopted by specific subjects in their routine of media consumption? How do they interact with a media text?—but aims at analysing the ways in which a media product elicits a certain response, a “reconstruction of interpretative processes . . . that originate from perceptive materials that elicit and guide them” (Eugeni, 2010: 59, my translation). Eugeni understands media texts as designed experiences, authored projects that suggest a series of ideal paths of interpretation through their affordances and constraints. A similar notion, of which I will offer

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Every Game is an Island

an analysis later on in the book, is adopted by Gordon Calleja within the field of video game studies. Calleja describes digital games as capable of creating a form of “experiential narrative” (2009), while in a later essay he clarifies and expands this stance by pointing out that “game environments, on the other hand, are forms of designed experience which, although they may include story elements, are subservient to the overall experience of the player” (2011: 116). Both scholars define media experience as the peculiar interaction between a set of characteristics found in an artifact and the response of the interactor, who perceives, interprets and, in the case of video games, acts upon it. In this book I will adopt this experiential frame, since, as I will later argue, notions such as ending and closure emerge from the interaction between the game’s affordances and the player’s understanding and interpretation of them. While Eugeni’s media-experiential approach and Calleja’s concept of experiential narratives are both based in an understanding of contemporary media texts as narrative objects, I will apply a similar frame to what I will call procedural experiences. In this perspective, my understanding of video games as procedural artifacts derives from Bogost’s (2007: 3–11) notion of “procedurality.” Whereas other media forms convey concepts and ideas linearly, video games require players to interact recursively or iteratively with the rules that model a complex system, and operate in a procedural fashion. Procedures are authored by game designers and developers, who imbue them with meaning; at the same time, procedures are enforced and upheld by the game’s technological apparatus, that dictates the affordances and limitations of interaction. I will thus define video games as designed procedural experiences. However, since this definition is relatively new within the field of game studies, I will propose my understanding of the three terms by which it is formed, in order to build an operative frame that will encompass my analysis.

Design What does it mean to posit that video games are designed objects? And, to push this question even further, what does it mean to conceive video games as objects that produce a designed experience for their player? Architect and designer Charles Eames (Eames et  al. 1989: 14) famously defined design as “a plan for arranging elements in such a way as to accomplish a particular purpose.” This formalistic definition of design does not refer to good design—as most design manuals do—but rather addresses the very act of designing an object as the

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finalized construction of something that serves a purpose. In this sense it could be argued that all human-made artifacts are, in fact, designed objects,9 as they are arrangements of elements that serve a purpose. In this very basic sense, video games can be rightfully described as designed objects, since they are humanmade artifacts created with the purpose of supporting play. Scholars have proposed different theories about the final purpose of rule-based games; for example Koster (2005) argues that generating fun should be the intent of game design, while philosopher Bernard Suits (1978) claims that games have the paradoxical purpose of producing fabricated difficulties for the players to overcome. Another notable voice in the debate on design is that of Donald Norman. In Norman’s conceptualization of the features of good design, affordances are the building blocks of an object designed for a purpose. Norman describes affordances as features of an artifact that cue the interactor into understanding how to use it (1988: 9): Affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things. Plates are for pushing. Knobs are for turning. Slots are for inserting things into. Balls are for throwing or bouncing. When affordances are taken advantage of, the user knows what to do just by looking: no picture, label or instruction is required.

In other words, affordances are features that help interactors build what Norman (1988: 39) describes as a “mental model” of the working mechanics and intended use of an object. The conflation of the designer’s conceptual model and the user’s mental model creates a system image; that is, according to Norman, a mental construction of the operational dynamics of an object that users build upon their observation of the object and their experience of previous interactions with similar objects. Norman’s notion of good design is built upon the designer’s ability to generate consistency in the process that connects the user’s mental model of an object, the resulting system image, and the actual usage of the object. Norman’s design precepts cannot be taken at face value when describing video games as designed objects for two reasons: 1. 2.

Ease of use is not necessarily a feature of good video game design (Juul and Norton, 2009). Certain video games present players with an experience of such complexity that a working system image of the functioning of the game cannot be produced and thus intended styles of usage cannot be described.

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While the first reason will be discussed later in the book, when tackling the issue of interface-based games, the second claim deserves some clarification. Games like Fallout 3 are commonly referred to as open-world games, meaning that they allow players to navigate a tridimensional world freely, without non-negotiable constraints (time limits, constant danger, discrete stages, etc.). Specifically, in Fallout 3, the player is cast in the role of a survivor of a nuclear war exploring a post-atomic wasteland. The ultimate goal of the player is to find the avatar’s father, but, as the game’s website claims, the premise of Fallout 3 is “Limitless Freedom!–Take in the sights and sounds of the vast Capital Wasteland! See the great monuments of the United States lying in post-apocalyptic ruin! You make the choices that define you and change the world. Just keep an eye on your Rad Meter” (Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition 2009). Bethesda’s description of Fallout 3—and a more general, pervasive rhetoric of open-world video games— overtly depicts the game as an explorative experience, where freedom is key and the game designer’s intervention in orienting the player’s choices is minimal. Nevertheless, even expansive, free-roaming titles such as Fallout 3 can be described as designed objects possessing affordances and constraints that cue the player’s traversing of the game. To substantiate this claim, it is necessary to re-discuss the very notion of affordance. In 1986, cognitive psychologist James J. Gibson (1986: 127) claimed to have “made up” the noun affordance, deriving it from the verb to afford, in order to describe “the complementarity of the animal10 and the environment.” Gibson’s affordances are “what it [the environment] offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill”; before Norman applied them to design theory, Gibson had described affordances as the features an environment offers to living creatures inhabiting it. Later in his treatise, when describing urban or anthropized spaces in general, Gibson points out that affordances are found in both natural and artificial environments; for example “[the city] is not a new environment— an artificial environment distinct from the natural environment—but the same old environment modified by man. It is a mistake to separate the natural from the artificial as if there were two environments” (1986: 130). Gibson’s understanding of affordances is ecological, as the psychologist claims they are environmental features that support or restrain the possibility of engaging in certain activities. Seen in this ecological perspective, Fallout 3’s nuclear wasteland is not a tabula rasa that the player can freely explore, but rather an authored environment full of designed affordances and constraints that elicit certain specific practices. This is evident since the beginning of the game: after a tutorial

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conducted inside a closed area called the vault, the player is forced to leave the underground bunker and explore the surrounding environment. While the player is certainly free to roam the post-apocalyptic desert that surrounds the vault, the environment is clearly built in a way that incites to take a finite range of predetermined paths. The player is often confronted with natural scenarios that restrain their faculty of roaming freely (e.g., they are surrounded by mountains, lakes or rocks) or present affordances (roads, paths, openings) that invite them to proceed in a certain direction. Furthermore, the player needs to interact with computer-controlled characters that, by asking to perform missions on their behalf, significantly influence game progress by making certain choices more relevant than others. Moreover, the progressive acquisition of skills and weapons (in jargon, the process of leveling up) compels the player to engage certain enemies (found in specific areas within the game world) before others, thus practically dividing the world of Fallout 3 into separated territories. The coupling of micro and macro affordances—together with devices such as narrative clues or para-ludic instructions (manuals, tutorials, etc.)—is the main tool that game designers use to create what could be defined as the model player, a fictional player that responds to the designer’s cues and suggestions, thus exploiting most the features of game design. The idea of a model reader is not new in literary studies (Eco 1979, 1989); for Eco, the model reader is one implied by the text, capable of interpreting it and filling in its blanks (Eco 1979: 120). Eco’s model reader, although constructed, is not at all passive, and is required to cooperate with the author in order to generate meaning. For Eco, texts are lazy machines that the reader needs to set in motion by exerting an interpretative force. Even more radically, Wolfgang Iser (1978) claims that the reader is actually a performer, since “literary texts initiate ‘performances’ of meaning rather than actually formulating meanings themselves” (1978: 27). Whereas for Eco, texts are machines that need cooperation in order to work properly, for Iser texts are mere potentialities in need of actualization from the reader. The model reader (or, in Iser’s terms, the implied reader) is one who is fabricated and speculative, capable of creating meaning from the encounter with a text. In the same way that a model reader is constructed by the author of a novel, a model player originates from an act of game design, since the construction of the affordances and constraints of the game world during the game design process implies a player capable of interpreting and acting upon them. Iser’s idea of the reader as a performer is no longer a metaphor when applied to the model player, since the player of a video game is indeed supposed

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to perform within the game in order to interpret and interact with the designer’s cues. The construction of a model player is defined by Janet Murray (1997: 79) as the act of “scripting the interactor,” that is designing a video game in such a way that it will be traversed meaningfully by players who are able to interpret (for example by means of personal play literacy) its affordances. A model player is certainly a rough approximation of the empirical, embodied player, who will often play less-than-model game sessions or even act subversively upon the game; nevertheless, within the realm of video games, describing a series of model players while reflecting on game design features seems to be a viable solution to the question of how to analyse an inherently contingent practice such as that of gameplay. The emergence of meaning that derives from the interaction between a designed object (or an authored environment) such as a video game and its player can thus be studied through the analysis of procedures regulating gameplay.

Procedures In Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997), Janet Murray describes the four fundamental features of digital media: spatial, encyclopedic, participatory, and procedural. By defining digital artifacts as capable of executing procedures, Murray refers to the fact that computers are uniquely suited for the implementation and execution of rules. Consequently, Murray describes authorship within digital media as the author’s chance to define procedures for the interactor to initiate and execute. In Murray’s view, procedures are not found only within interactive digital artifacts (video games, interactive simulations, etc.), but within any kind of computerassisted simulation. John Conway’s Game of Life, a theoretical model for a procedural simulation of artificial life created in 1970, is based on a series of rules whose constant interaction creates ever-evolving patterns. Martin Gardner’s article about the game (1970: 120) explains the functioning of Conway’s invention precisely: The basic idea is to start with a simple configuration of counters (organisms), one to a cell, then observe how it changes as you apply Conway’s “genetic laws” for births, deaths, and survivals. Conway chose his rules carefully, after a long period of experimentation, to meet three desiderata: 1.

There should be no initial pattern for which there is a simple proof that the population can grow without limit.

Two Non-definitive Definitions 2. 3.

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There should be initial patterns that apparently do grow without limit. There should be simple initial patterns that grow and change for a considerable period of time before coming to end in three possible ways: fading away completely (from overcrowding or becoming too sparse), settling into a stable configuration that remains unchanged thereafter, or entering an oscillating phase in which they repeat an endless cycle of two or more periods.

In brief, the rules should be such as to make the behavior of the population unpredictable. Conway’s genetic laws are delightfully simple. First note that each cell of the checkerboard (assumed to be an infinite plane) has eight neighboring cells, four adjacent orthogonally, four adjacent diagonally. The rules are: 1. 2.

3.

Survivals. Every counter with two or three neighboring counters survives for the next generation. Deaths. Each counter with four or more neighbors dies (is removed) from overpopulation. Every counter with one neighbor or none dies from isolation. Births. Each empty cell adjacent to exactly three neighbors—no more, no fewer—is a birth cell. A counter is placed on it at the next move.

Gardner describes Conway’s Game of Life as a “solitaire game” that can be played with a checkerboard and counters, and belongs “to a growing class of what are called ‘simulation games’—games that resemble real-life processes” (1970: 120). Conway’s simulation game is a perfect example of what Murray defines as procedurality within digital media; when implemented in a computer, Game of Life acts as a clear representation of the medium’s procedural nature. Rules are implemented simultaneously at each stage and generate constantly evolving patterns, whose results are different every time the simulation is initiated since the starting conditions are randomized. Conway’s mathematical model for simulating life is an example of an understanding of the notion of simulation that does not necessarily include the presence of an interactor. Game of Life needs to be started externally, but, thanks to the iterative nature of its rules, evolves as a self-sustaining entity. Although it is not a video game, Game of Life exemplifies procedural authorship very well: Conway implemented a set of rules whose interplay results in different representations. Video games are certainly procedural in Murray’s sense, since they present players with binding rules with which they must interact, but unlike Conway’s experiment, they demand sustained player input. Ian Bogost’s research (2006, 2007) on procedurality moves from this assumption in order to understand

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Every Game is an Island

how video games can convey meaning for human players to interpret through rules and procedures. According to Bogost interacting with a procedural medium means choosing which procedures need to be actualized from time to time, determining a subjective pattern amidst the noise of multiple coexisting possibilities and potential outcomes. In evoking subjectivity as a defining trait of gameplay, Bogost (2007: 42) refers to the fact that playing a video game means approaching “the myriad configurations the player might construct to see the ways the processes inscribed in the system work.” A procedural approach to video games, then, considers the player as a subject inscribed within and interacting with a procedural environment, that presents a number of choices and rules; the subjective understanding of this space of possibility (that Bogost defines “simulation fever” [2006: 106]) is at the center of the meaningmaking process generated by video games. Bogost’s procedural reading of the medium infers that video games derive their expressive potential from the interaction between the design of their rules and mechanics, and the player’s understanding of the affordances and limitations offered by this simulated environment. For example, Donkey Kong and Diablo are two games that differ in most regards, from narrative references to play mechanics, from visual perspective to operating platform. Nevertheless, in both cases the process described by Bogost is clearly at work: procedurality in Donkey Kong is a matter of few simple choices (go left, go right, climb ladders, jump), while the space of possibility of Diablo is certainly wider, since players can decide to explore the dungeons of the game in a rather idiosyncratic fashion and choose whether to face an enemy or run past it. Nevertheless, in both cases the game affords players a confined, designed space (both literal and metaphorical) within which they can make complex choices in order to interact successfully with the game’s rules. But while Donkey Kong’s limited set of choices11 makes a clear-cut case for the construction of a rather univocal model player, Diablo’s “myriad” (but still finite, since they are defined within the code of the game) possibilities force us to recognize potential (or even likely) patterns within randomness, constructing different model players in order to be able to grasp the area of meaning-making that is formed at the intersection of rules and players. The inferential nature of procedural criticism, that creates model players through which it analyses a video game’s process of meaning-making and its rhetoric, has been often criticized for being excessively focused on the role of the author or game designer at the expense of the empirical player. Specifically,

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Miguel Sicart, in an article titled Against Procedurality (2011), accuses what he calls the “procedural rhetoric school” of hyper-formalism. In his diatribe, Sicart writes: For the proceduralists, a game means what the rules mean, and understanding what games are is to understand what their rules describe. Players are important, but only as activators of the process that sets the meanings contained in the game in motion. The rules constitute the procedural argumentation of the game, and play is just an actualization of that process. Furthermore, games create meaning thanks to their formal nature, and that meaning is completed when players engage in the processes of the rules of the game. Meaningful play is playing following the rules, and the meaning of a game comes from the meaning of following the rules.

Sicart’s understanding of proceduralism is that of a discipline that treats games as static sets of rules, to which the players need to comply in order to create play. In other words, proceduralism is “a determinist, even totalitarian approach to play” and supports “an understanding of play, and leisure, as mechanical understanding of processes”; according to Sicart, proceduralists are interested in authority rather than authorship. Sicart’s position seems to conflate two major currents in game studies: on the one hand, the ethnographic approach (Boellstorff 2006, Pearce 2006, Malaby 2007, Consalvo 2009a); on the other hand, the advocates of play as a free, irreducible and ultimately creative activity (Fink 1988, DeKoven 2002). Both schools of thought construct play as emergent and unpredictable, implicitly arguing that the only way to discuss games is through the observation of actual player behaviors. While this approach has produced a number of fundamental contributions to game studies, I contend that a procedural approach is the most suited for discussing the expressive and communicative features of video games and, more specifically in the case of this book, the ways in which video games construct, signal, and represent their endings and extremities. I base my claim on three main arguments: 1.

2.

My research does not aim at describing the act of playing in its entirety. My goal is to describe some of the mechanisms of meaning-making that are activated in specific play situations within the circumscribed corpus of single-player video games. Sicart’s position eventually abolishes any distinction between analog and digital games. While in some circumstances this could result in a broadening of the understanding of play, in my case taking this stance

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would imply denying the fundamental identity of video games as procedural, audiovisual, and computer-based media. Depicting proceduralism as radical formalism or mechanism elides its affinity with media studies. While it is true that video games elicit and inspire play, and can be studied as play-generating devices, analysing their procedures allows me to trace connections with other procedure-based digital media forms. In other words, while Sicart’s anti-proceduralist stance aims at linking the study of video games with the study of the activity of play, my aim is to discuss them as a specific subset of digital media.

A corollary to this last claim is in order. It might be said, with a simplification, that while Sicart’s interest in video games is based in their ability to generate an arguably unique form of play, my book considers them as media artifacts that possess distinct expressive, stylistic, technological, and material characteristics that place them within the wider ecosystem of digital media. As I said earlier in this chapter, this book offers an exceptionalist theory of video games based in proceduralism, whereas Against Procedurality argues for a continuist theory of video games. What allows both positions to be acceptable are the different vantage points from which they consider games. In my case, discussing video games as digital media whose inner motions and simulative capabilities may generate play allows me recognise the ways in which meaning is inscribed in them through the authoring of their procedures. This, Sicart argues (and I tend to agree), at the expense of an understanding of play as something that is “everything about a player engaged in a game, and less about the rules of such game” (Sicart 2011). On the other hand, by focusing on the player’s activities and behavior, and on the admittedly elusive “creative, performative properties” (Sicart 2011) of play, a non-proceduralist theory of video games tends to underplay their existence as designed objects and their relation with other similar artifacts.

Experience But now here I am with my first authentic video experience, going for the last brick like any kid in an arcade, palms wet, pulse racing, mouth dry, nerve endings interfaced in nanoseconds, the knob itself throbbing, electronic reflections going straight for my spinal cord. I mean way up there with the bottom of the ninth, and it’s a long fly ball to left field, it’s going, going. . . . Answer the phone before it’s gone? Are you kidding? And it was worse and better than that. Hollywood gets you to cry, TV cop serials flip your blood pressure up and down along with the best that

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Parke Davis and UpJohn can offer. A few hours in front of the tube any night of the week and you had to jog the next morning to recover. But now Atari had it, the ultimate adrenaline. Lay out a half dozen lines for just a couple of bucks? A bargain. Sudnow 2000: 43

In the book Pilgrim in the Microworld, David Sudnow narrates his long-lasting addiction to the video game Breakout, in which players need to bounce a ball against a number of rows of pixels in order to destroy them all. Sudnow’s retelling of his experience with the game is deeply personal and intertwines vivid imagery from gameplay (“I mean way up there with the bottom of the ninth, and it’s a long fly ball to left field, it’s going, going”) with contextual notes (“Answer the phone before it’s gone? Are you kidding?”), and reflections on the materiality of the medium (“Lay out a half dozen lines for just a couple of bucks? A bargain”). In his quasi-Joycean prose, Sudnow seems to subscribe to Robert Warshow’s (2001: xl) idea that the critique and history of popular culture should be conjugated in the first person singular, rather than in the third plural; that is to say that “a critic may extend his frame of reference as far as it will bear extension, but it seems to me almost self-evident that he should start with the simple acknowledgment of his own relation to the object he criticizes; at the center of all truly successful criticism there is always a man reading a book, a man looking at a picture, a man watching a movie.” The approach of both authors to their object can be defined as experiential, since it is clearly born out of the “immediate experience” (Warshow 2001) of a designed media object. This strain of criticism and, more generally, a focus on the embodied experience as hermeneutic resource has seen a resurgence in recent years, especially within fields such as film, media, and game studies (Hansen 1991, Williams 1991, Sobchack 1992, Casetti 2008, 2009, Calleja 2009, 2011, Eugeni 2010). Despite the popularity of what could be defined an experiential approach or an approach to media-as-experiences, the usefulness of the very term experience—which is in itself polysemic and ambiguous (Casetti 2009)—is still a matter of debate. I have chosen to interpret video games as designed procedural experiences, thus implicitly accepting to give a better definition of my understanding of the term “experience.” With this goal in mind, I will start by offering a few definitions of the term when pertaining to media. One could understand a media experience as: 1.

Something that is born out of an object (or, in this case, a media object), that for its peculiar form and configuration should be lived or perceived rather than read or interpreted, thus eliciting at the same time a more

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complex and more immediate response from the audience. This definition of experience as a complex embodied relationship with an object is at the basis of most research in the field of user experience (Garrett 2002, Kuniavsky 2003), a discipline that aims to establish design patterns that elicit specific responses from users and, more generally, prefigure a certain kind of experience for the interactor. According to Casetti (2009) and Tryon (2009), a similar logic is at work in contemporary popular cinema, whose attention on multi-sensorial stimuli conveyed through spectacular technologies such as IMAX , Digital 3D, etc., can be attributed to an understanding of film viewing as a synesthetic experience in which immediate, physical reactions (shock, awe, arousal, etc.) are dotted around the interpretation of the text. This understanding of experience as something emerging from a precise design arrangement can be arguably seen at work also in artworks such as Peter Greenaway’s Leonardo’s Last Supper (2008), an art installation in which Greenaway superimposes Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper fresco with a series of digital transformations and lighting effects with the intent of reconfiguring the painting’s meaning and perception. Greenaway’s work on the painting involves a number of visual and aural stimuli; this multiplication of representative techniques—along with the costly entrance fee—made Holland Cotter (2010), art critic for the New York Times, claim that the installation is “a big, expensive, technological-bells-and-whistles-tothe-max dud, which is something. The experience of it—and with a $15 admission fee, it is being marketed very much as an Experience—begins even before you get to Leonardo.” Greenaway’s interpretation of Leonardo is thus constructed as an experience both because it is supposed to generate awe and surprise, and because of its exclusive, once-in-a-lifetime nature. A way of conceptualizing every cognitive act that pertains to one’s relationship with the surrounding environment. In the case of a media experience, this relates to the way in which a subject apprehends, interprets, and socially recirculates (Eugeni 2010) an output coming from a media text. This definition of experience can be applied to every encounter one has with the surrounding world, and is the cornerstone of a phenomenological approach in which media are characterized as specific types of phenomena encountered by a subject. Using this idea of experience as an analytical and critical tool when discussing media means embracing both Warshow’s emphasis on the I in criticism and Dewey’s

Two Non-definitive Definitions

3.

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(1929: iii) even more radical idea that “there is in the character of human experience no index-hand pointing to agnostic conclusions, but rather a growing progressive self-disclosure of nature itself.” That is, experience can be described as the result of the continuous encounter of a subject with the world. In the case of technologically mediated experience, a number of studies, with very different approaches, have discussed such a phenomenological understanding of the practices of media consumption (Thompson 1995, Crick 2011); in all cases, the emphasis rests on the notion of media consumption and/or interaction as a practice in which texts, context, and an embodied subject interact continuously. Experience as sedimented, existing knowledge, as in the common expression “to be experienced.” In this sense, experience is not considered a synchronous, progressive process, but rather a tool that is accessible at any given time and helps subjects navigate their environment. In media consumption, this notion of experience can be thought of as the user’s personal encyclopedia (Eco 1975), an ever-accessible basin of acquired knowledge regarding the use of a specific media device and/or the conventions of different media forms.

While pertaining to different notions of experience, these three definitions can be summed up fruitfully in an approach that regards experience as a central component of video game criticism and theory. Defining video games as designed procedural experiences, then, means conceptualizing them as objects that produce experiences, that can be understood phenomenologically, and that interact constantly with the player’s experience of previous games. Once again, Calleja’s (2009, 2011) notion of experiential narrative is helpful. Calleja’s proposal seems to derive from the need to bridge the gap between narratologists and ludologists that spawned a number of heated debates in early video games study (Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin 2004). In Calleja’s theory, while pre-existing narratives may be inscribed in video games (for example John Marston’s inescapable fate in Red Dead Redemption), when traversing the game the player uncovers emergent narrative threads that Calleja defines as alterbiographies, events that are presented over time to the player’s avatar in the game world and can be retold subsequently in a linear narrative form. While the idea of experiential narratives works consistently in games with a strong narrative focus, it is admittedly unfit for the description of different forms of video games. In this respect, Calleja (2009: 2) admits that “it seems largely uninteresting to

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discuss the narrative of a game of Tic-Tac-Toe and one would be right to be suspicious of a narrative framework that claims to be constructively applicable to such a wide spectrum of activities and media objects as basketball, Tic-Tac-Toe, Battleship, Chess and The Sims.” Not all (or very few, actually) games contain strong, consistent narratives, but, as I have noted when describing procedurality, all games may be said to require some form of manipulation from the player. In this sense, games produce experiences in a more radical sense than that implied by Calleja’s narrative theory: they present the player with a world to be manipulated and ordered. This process of manipulation of the environment resonates with Heidegger’s understanding of the human experience as embodied and manipulative. In Being and Time (2010: 67) the German philosopher claims that “the closest kind of dealing is not mere perceptual cognition [Erkennen], but, rather, a handling, using, and taking care that has its own kind of ‘Knowledge’ [‘Erkenntnis’].” In other words, experience is not a cognitive or perceptual phenomenon, but rather, when it is linked to one’s immediate perception of the world (“the closest kind of dealing”), is an embodied, processual, and operative one. On a basic level, then, video games present players with a contained world that needs to be manipulated, de facto constituting an experience where things are handled and used. The act of manipulating a procedural object significantly solidifies Heidegger’s notion of experience as embodied and processual, by immersing the player in an ad hoc world that not only produces an “alterbiography,” but, more significantly and more radically, demands to be manipulated in real time. This focus on sensory immersion could lead us into the trap of what later in the book will be discussed as the immersive fallacy: a view on video games that portrays them as devices that aim at the total sensory immersion of the player in a simulated world. To overcome this potential theoretical shortcoming, Casetti’s experiential theories on contemporary cinema provide useful tools. When describing the distinguishing traits of the filmic experience, Casetti (2009: 56) writes: Indeed, filmic experience is arguably both that moment when images (and sounds) on a screen arrogantly engage our senses and also that moment when they trigger a comprehension that concerns, reflexively, what we are viewing and the very fact of viewing it. We have, then, a stretching of attention while facing something that strikes us, whilst we also have a “knowing-how” to look and a “knowing-that” we are looking, which make us protagonists of what is happening to us.

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In this quote, Casetti argues that while the filmic experience in itself is one of immersion, a bracketing of a mediated world, it is also—and sometimes predominantly—one of media-consciousness: we are at the same time immersed in a film and engaged with the technological, material, contextual, and contingent features of the medium of cinema. This is certainly true also for video games: if on a superficial level video games seem to supply the player with an immersive world to manipulate, the very fact of playing with a video game implies a secondlevel experience, that of interacting with a specific medium, and confronting its technological and material constraints and affordances. In Heidegger’s terms (2010: 66) media experience—that is the act of encountering and manipulating a media object—is both and at the same time “zuhanden” (ready-to-hand, immediate and transparent) and “vorhanden” (present-at-hand, consciously mediated). Paradoxically, the most immersive video games that can be experienced at the moment are those that highlight this tension more dramatically. Think, for example, of video games played via virtual reality technologies such as Oculus Rift: while the sensory experience of the game is arguably immediate and transparent, the unnatural feeling of wearing a bulky headset cannot but reveal the materiality of the medium. While representation strives for transparency, the embodied experience of playing a virtual reality game is very much one of physical awareness of a technological apparatus. Video games can thus be deemed experiences because they represent a navigable, manipulable world for the player to inhabit and explore. At the same time, they do so through a series of material devices with which the player needs to interact. Video games require the player to submit to a double logic of immersion and recognition or, as Casetti (2009: 57) writes “an excess and a recognition: it is thanks to these two elements that we ‘live’ a situation, recuperating contact with what we are viewing; and that at the same time we frame it, giving it a meaning. It is thanks to these two elements that we face things; and that at the same time we enrich our lives to the extent that we may confront new events.” Framing video games this way implies the use of the other two definitions of experience that I offered previously. On the one hand, both immersion and recognition of the medium require previous experience with similar texts and contexts; both the mediated world of a video game and its technological and material interface require the player to be able to grasp their affordances. For instance, not having any previous knowledge of a Nintendo Wii controller and how it is supposed to be used will result in poor or involuntary manipulation of the game environment. Player literacy can be acquired through manuals, tutorials,

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previous play sessions, oral teaching, but is nevertheless necessary to the experience. A player needs to be experienced in order to be able to experience. On the other hand, as I argued earlier, a model player can be constructed in order for the researcher to be able to grasp the procedural expression and rhetoric of a game, but it is necessary to notice that an empirical, non-model, embodied player, actually experiencing the game, is at the basis of any model player. That empirical player, in the case of a research such as mine, that does not use first-hand ethnographic resources, is the researcher himself. My experience as a player of the games I will analyse is a fundamental element in the more complex idea of games-as-experiences that has been delineated thus far. My understanding and experience of video games will necessarily constitute the starting point of the readings and discussions that I will offer; “a man reading a book, a man looking at a picture, a man watching a movie,” a man playing a video game.

Notes 1 Notions such as “everyday life” and “real life” are commonly found in discourses and texts on play. Significantly these periphrases are almost invariably in quotes, as if expressing a subtle embarrassment in describing what “real life” is. According to Ehrmann (1968: 32–3), one of Huizinga’s most acute commentators, this derives from a “fundamentally rationalist view according to which human activities relate, on the one hand, to dreams, gratuitousness, nobility, imagination, etc. and on the other to consciousness, utility, instinct, reality. . . . Each of these terms, loaded with meaning and tacit implications, evidently needs quotation marks to sustain itself (is it the sign of unacknowledged uneasiness if these authors use them abundantly whenever they are concerned with ‘ordinary life,’ ‘reality,’ and all their synonyms?) and to sustain the assault of efforts to question, to define, to analyze—effort which, to be sure, are never undertaken”. 2 Roger Caillois (2001: 6) in Man, Play and Games, another cornerstone of early play theory, seems to agree when he writes: “play is essentially a separate occupation, carefully isolated from the rest of life, and generally is engaged in with precise limits of time and place.” 3 Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas, multiplayer games in which usually two teams engage in a strategic battle of turf control. 4 Ethnographic accounts of the practices and beliefs of online gaming communities can be found in the works of T.L. Taylor (2006, 2012). 5 It should be noted that as the number of procedures executed by a computer grows, the player is unlikely to perceive them as discrete rules. For example, the movement

Two Non-definitive Definitions

6

7

8

9

10 11

39

of a character in space, or the way in which physics affects objects, while being regulated by discrete rules at code level, are usually perceived as naturalized by the player. I am using the term “computer” widely here, referring to a number of microprocessor-driven machines and, in the case of early arcade games or home consoles, discrete-circuit based machines. While competition or opposition is certainly not sufficient a feature to define a rule-based game, most authors agree in considering it necessary. For example Gadamer (1975: 96), in his admittedly maximalist theory of games, writes “Every game presents the man who plays it with a task. He cannot enjoy the freedom of playing himself out except by transforming the aims of his behavior into mere tasks of the game.” My understanding of the complex machinic entity formed by the computer and the player is akin to that of Claus Pias (2011: 180), that describes this entity as a “Deleuzian machine . . . formed as [sic] all sorts of different things (humans, images, sounds, computers, etc.) that become connected through recursion and communication and acquire the ability to function as components of the machine.” While this seems intuitively true for everyday objects and tools, it is an object of debate when it comes to artworks. Stephen Davies (1991) describes as “functional” those theories that conceptualize art as having a precise function, but these are far from being prevalent in current debates around the ontology of art. Artists such as Cesare Pietroiusti have challenged the idea of functional (or purposeful) art with their works. Pietroiusti owns a website called Pensieri non funzionali (non-functional thoughts), derived from a 1997 booklet, where he suggests a number of purposeless performative works of art. For example “Examine carefully all the poles of a city street. Also, measure their inclination” (Pietroiusti 1997, my translation). Gibson here does not discriminate between animals and humans, since he claims his notion of affordance is applicable to both. It might be said that in Donkey Kong choices are limited to the point where expert players often play mnemonically rather than procedurally. In other words, instead of progressively adjusting their strategy to the game’s behavior, expert players can actually predict it since they have built a mental model of the game’s functioning that is sufficiently close to the actual algorithm. This strategy is made especially clear in the documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.

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2

Game ↔ Game Do video games end? Should we conceive video games as artifacts that can and, maybe, should be completed? Or are they multifunctional and ultimately open objects? In other words, which of the many meanings of ending applies to video games? In this chapter I will focus on in-game extremities and borders by discussing those instances of ending that are found within the simulated world of the video game and pertain to that world. I will discuss endings located in the areas of a video game that players identify as the proper game, as opposed to other non-diegetic spaces such as configuration menus, loading screens and arguably more remote outskirts of the experience of playing a video game such as its paratexts (manuals, box arts, etc.). My definition of “in-game” will be informed by Galloway’s work on diegesis in video games (Galloway 2006), which defines video games as a medium of action, one in which the operator is called to act on the software so that the video game does not “remain only in the pages of an abstract rule book. . . . Video games . . . exist when enacted” (2006: 2). Later in the essay, the author claims that “in video games there are actions that occur in diegetic space and actions that occur in non-diegetic space” (2006: 6–7). In Galloway’s definition, “the diegesis of a video game is the game’s total world of narrative action. . . . While some games may not have elaborate narratives, there always exists some sort of elementary play scenario or play situation” (2006: 7).1 This understanding of the diegesis as the narrative world in which the game is set—be it as simple as two paddles and a ball as in Pong or riddled with intricacies as in Deus Ex—implicitly postulates the existence of a non-diegetic space that resides outside the game world. According to Galloway, non-diegetic space in video games is represented by those areas in which operations such as configuration or setup occur. Pause or loading screens, setup menus, and the various circumstances in which the game world is left in a state of suspension in order for the player to perform meta-ludic operations are thus considered nondiegetic. Moreover, devices such as onscreen maps, gauges, cursors, or indicators are considered non-diegetic, since they do not belong to the game world, but act 41

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as tools for player orientation within it. In other words, the diegetic space is defined through its negative space of non-diegesis, a magmatic area of representation where various meta-operations are performed. It should be noted that while a clear-cut distinction between the diegesis and its negative space is tenable in theory, ambiguities are very frequent in practice. As we will see, games featuring anthropomorphic characters or, more generally, a naturalized or realistic depiction of the world usually apply unambiguous representational strategies. In DOOM non-diegetic elements such as gauges and meters are grouped in the bottom portion of the screen; in Grand Theft Auto IV they appear, when needed, in clearly designated screen regions. Abstract games seem to be more ambiguous, as distinguishing between the entities that populate the game world and those that act as indicators may prove harder. What constitutes the diegetic world of Tetris? Is it contained within the area where the tetrominoes fall? Or is the scoring system part of that same diegetic world? These tensions between gameplay and meta-operations or, more generally, between the represented world of the game and its indicators, will be the subject of the game ↔ metagame chapter, but for now it may be useful to maintain that the diegesis is a relatively stable entity, with reasonably well-defined borders. Galloway’s intuition of the existence of a separation between the diegetic and the nondiegetic is complemented by the author’s categories of gamic and non-gamic actions. While gamic actions are performed by the player in order to affect the game’s outcome, non-gamic ones are performed with the intent of adjusting parameters that do not directly influence gameplay. In other words, while shooting an enemy in DOOM is a diegetic gamic action, adjusting the screen brightness in the same game is non-diegetic and non-gamic. On the other hand, tweaking the abilities or equipment of a character in Borderlands before engaging in battle is a non-diegetic gamic action, since it takes place outside the simulated game world, but affects the game’s outcome. In this chapter I will use Galloway’s distinction to establish a starting point for my analysis of endings within the game ↔ game level. This level of analysis will focus on endings and borders found within both the diegetic and the gamic space. Medium-specific devices such as the game over and more traditional narrative tropes such as closure are often used with the intent to segment or delineate this space. This chapter will describe and discuss definite, clear-cut instances of ending (closure and game over), and then move to more openended scenarios, in which the diegetic/gamic world seems to be experienced seamlessly by the player.

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Closure The finite model of an infinite universe Closure is a powerful rhetorical device. It satisfies or defies expectations regarding the end of a plot and, more generally, conveys a sense of completeness both to the story being told and the very act of storytelling. While a more colloquial use of the term may refer to all instances of life where a definite endpoint is reached, an understanding of closure as a semiotic entity in narrative is at the center of several studies found in different disciplines. In what could be provisionally called traditional storytelling (a term used as broadly as possible here to refer to otherwise very disparate objects such as a nineteenth-century novel or a 1940s’ Hollywood movie), closure is used as a means of harmonizing a story by tying its threads in one coherent knot and resuming stasis. When addressing closure in narrative media—be it fables (Richter 1974), literary fiction (Kermode 2000), or film (Carroll 2007, Neupert 1995)—most scholars agree on its architectural quality, as if it served as a bearing wall in an elaborate building. This functionalist reading of closure is certainly due to the structuralist lineage of some of these studies, but also—and maybe more significantly—to the fact that the texts analysed in the studies generally use closure as a rather straightforward, conventionalized semiotic device. In highly-structured narratives such as classical Hollywood films, a definite teleological slope can be observed, so that when closure manifests itself, it usually does so in a transparent manner, effectively turning the story being told into “the finite model of an infinite world” (Lotman 1977: 210), a well-crafted snow globe. According to Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1968: 34), “closure, then, may be regarded as a modification of structure that makes stasis or the absence of further continuation, the most probable succeeding event.” For Carroll (2007), closure is achieved when the reader or viewer feels that every question posed by the text has been properly answered, thus making any supplemental storytelling superfluous. In narratives organized according to strong causal relations and relatively transparent plot development, closure is a full stop and is, in essence, a rhetorical device that usually acts simultaneously on two levels. As a component of the plot, it provides answers to open questions (“will Rick leave Casablanca with Ilsa?”, “will the three police officers find the old man’s body under the floorboards?”); as a meta-narrative device, it communicates the end of the story that is being told. Formulas such as “they lived happily ever after” or visual conventions such as fading to black in a

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movie, serve the meta-narrative purpose of conveying a sense of resolution and act as an interface that separates a specific act of narration from the continuum of common life. The efficacy of closure is thus produced by its ability to resonate at the same time with the reader’s questions and expectations, and their understanding of the progression of the very act of storytelling. Both what is told and how it is told enter in teleological resonance. While some forms of storytelling seem to have a relatively consistent way of conveying closure through codified semiotic devices, teleological wholeness is often eschewed by what Peter Brooks (1984: 314) describes as “our most sophisticated literature”—possibly referring to twentieth-century European avant-gardes and American novels of the 1950s and 1960s—where it is replaced by transiency, so that “when ending comes, it is more in the nature of stalemate than victory. The story could be continued, it could belong to another story, one might invent a sequel” (1984: 314.). Closure becomes transient, unstable, illdefined. The same seems to be true in post-classical cinema; in his taxonomy of endings in feature films, Richard Neupert (1995: 75) describes the “open story film” as one whose story is left “partially unresolved and thus significantly incomplete,” and tellingly chooses The 400 Blows, a quintessential modern movie, as a case study. Examples of modern and post-modern works avoiding, re-framing, or re-discussing closure abound in different media forms. From Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1993), a novel composed of several beginnings and no resolutions, to Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games (1997), in which a couple of deranged serial killers manipulate the very fabric of the film in order to avoid a potentially (relatively) happy ending, the notion of closure passed down to video game designers by twentieth-century media production is uncertain to say the least. A shattered snow globe—a visual trope found, rather tellingly, in Citizen Kane, a film about unstable closures, if ever there was one— unable to contain a finite world. For this reason, in order to discuss the use of closure in video games, an intermediate step may be needed: while narrative hypertexts may no longer be all the rage in digital media studies, they may help us bridge the gap between “our most sophisticated literature” and video games.

An archaeology of digital closure Afternoon, a Story is a work of electronic literature, a narrative hypertext that readers navigate by clicking on single words or sentences in order to access different areas of the story. While the general premise of the narrative is fixed—a

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man witnesses a tragic car crash—the unfolding of the text can be said to be significantly different every time Afternoon, a Story is accessed, since the branching nature of the events progressively allows the reader to discover various paths within the complex architecture of Joyce’s work. Electronic literature has often been compared to other non-linear forms of narrative, from experimental novels—for example Cortázar’s Hopscotch: a Novel—to popular pastimes such as choose-your-own-adventure books. In some of these peculiar instances of print literature, the reader is required to progress in a non-linear manner through the book and configure their own story through a set of choices. Nevertheless, these experiments are still bound to the book medium, whose material constraints practically obstruct non-linearity. In other words, books are finite objects and even “if there is no spectacular denouement, no distribution of awards and punishments, no tie-up, through marriages and deaths, of all the character’s lives, there is a textual finis – we have no more pages to read” (Brooks 1984: 314). Joyce’s Afternoon, a Story, created through the programming language Storyspace, is not bound by the material constraints of print-on-paper, and for this reason has been the object of a number of essays discussing the suitability of the medium of computer to storytelling. Among these, J. Yellowlees Douglas’s (1994) research on Afternoon, a Story is particularly significant here, since it addresses the themes of closure and ending in electronic literature. The author presents four different forays into Afternoon, a Story, through which she proposes to discover empirically which form of reading is required in order to reach a sense of closure within the recursive and often labyrinthine paths found in Joyce’s work. According to Yellowlees Douglas (1994: 172), within hypertextual narrative, the sense of an ending is “tied equally to reading strategies translated directly from reading print narratives and to strategies which embrace the text as an interactive narrative existing in virtual, three-dimensional space.” Yellowlees Douglas’s understanding of hypertext fiction is tied both to its narrative lineage and to its spatial nature (Bolter 1991, Landow 1997); in order to find closure in Afternoon we need to be both hermeneuts, interpreting the text as if we were reading a book, and cartographers, using Joyce’s work as a territory that needs to be mapped. Discussing Joyce’s work, Espen Aarseth (1997: 93–4) moves one step forward and argues that the reader of this hypertext not only needs to conflate hermeneutic and topographic reading, but is indeed “a meta reader, mapping the network and reading the map of her own reading carefully. . . . We might label Afternoon a

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reluctant narrative or an antinarrative or a sabotaged narrative, terms typical of modernist poetics. But perhaps the best descriptive term for Afternoon is game of narration.” While Yellowlees Douglas’s understanding of the ending of Afternoon, a Story remains tied to its resemblance with printed literature, Aarseth broadens the spectrum of possible interpretative tools by evoking games as a potential comparison. To the Norwegian scholar, hypertexts are proper games of narration, because they require a meta-reader, who is capable of mapping the network of their reading; to Aarseth reading Afternoon, a Story does not require oscillating between two separate styles of fruition (the hermeneutic and the topographic), but rather playing with narrative, an act which, as we have seen, implies the superimposition of a meta-frame that conflates the two. The subject confronted with Afternoon, a Story is not a reader and a cartographer, but rather a player, who is capable of interpreting the narrative and navigating its topography at the same time. By describing Afternoon, a Story as a game of narration, and its reader as a player, Aarseth seems to refer to a process similar to that described by Bateson when discussing play: Joyce’s work requires to be read literally—as if it were a traditional piece of narrative—and meta-referentially, knowing that the linearity of narrative is disrupted by the very nature of the electronic text. In order to find closure within a game of narration such as Joyce’s hypertextual work, it might not be necessary to both read through and explore it, but rather to experience some sort of playful consonance of the two.

Finishing the game Aarseth’s reading of Afternoon, a Story as a game of narration effectively creates a bridge between hypertextual narratives and video games. In both cases, a software, or a software-like finite-state machine, requires procedural cooperation from the user in order to progress; in both cases the user needs to be simultaneously engaged as an interpreter and a player to be able to both understand and map their progress. In discussing closure and endings in video games, is this affinity sufficient for us to describe video games as narrative objects? A significant starting point for this discussion can be found in an essay written thirty years prior to the birth of the video game studies by poetry scholar Barbara Herrnstein Smith. In her book Poetic Closure. A Study of How Poems End (1968: 2), Herrnstein Smith writes: We tend to speak of conclusions when a sequence of events has a relatively high degree of structure, when, in other words, we can perceive these events as related

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to the existence of a definite termination point. Under these circumstances, the occurrence of the terminal event is a confirmation of expectations that have been established by the structure of the sequence and is usually distinctly gratifying. The sense of stable conclusiveness, finality, or “clinch” which we experience at that point is what is referred to here as closure.

Herrnstein Smith characterizes closure as a phenomenon arising when certain textual configurations resonate with the reader’s expectations, and consequently create what the author describes as a “clinch,” a consonant effect between the present state of the narrated events and the expectations the reader has built up to that point. Later in the essay, Herrnstein Smith points out that closure is not an effect exclusive to narrative texts, since a number of other human experiences are capable of providing a sense of closure, either because they are designed as neatly organized sequences or configurations, or because a sense of finality is imposed upon them: It would seem that in the common land of ordinary events—where many experiences are fragmentary, interrupted, fortuitously connected, and determined by causes beyond our agency or comprehension—we create or seek out “enclosures”: structures that are highly organized, separated as if by an implicit frame from a background of relative disorder or randomness, and integral or complete. Not only works of art are thus distinguished, of course; other events and activities, such as games, may exhibit the qualities just described. A game of chess or football has integrity and a relatively high degree of structure; it also concludes and not merely stops. 1968: 2, emphasis added

Herrnstein Smith’s analysis is particularly significant here, not only because it evokes structured games as potentially teleological, but also because it extracts the notion of closure from its narratological habitat and adapts it to the wider— and significantly more chaotic—arena of human experience. In other words, to Herrnstein Smith (whose work nevertheless offers a rather formalistic analysis of endings) closure is what Frank Kermode (2000: 4) describes as “a need in the moment of existence to belong, to be related to a beginning and to an end”: a pivotal moment of life that is often reproduced in narrative, but is nevertheless imposed upon reality by humans when organizing their actual experience. Closure is thus both a designed feature of an object, meant to evoke a sense of completeness, and an inescapably phenomenological occurrence. While rhetorical, textual, and structural strategies used by designers and authors to provide closure may be described, the very phenomenology of closure is

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obfuscated to the scholar by its experiential nature. Your closure may not be mine, my sense of wholeness may differ radically from yours. Nevertheless, as noted by Herrnstein Smith, objects that have a high degree of integrity and structure—such as video games—seem to be able to prompt the experience of closure more reliably than other, less organized experiences of human life.2 The problem is, then, to identify the constitutive parts of a video game that elicit closure. Is it in the story? Or in the gameplay? In an article discussing the unique temporality of video games, Aarseth (1999) describes the process of gameplay as regulated by aporia and epiphany. The player confronts a challenge or an obstacle in the game—an aporia—and attempts to overcome it, eventually reaching a state of epiphany. This dualism is found recursively in gameplay, until the player reaches the final epiphany of beating the game. According to Aarseth (1999: 39) aporia and epiphany are “the prenarrative master-figures of experience, from which narratives are spun.” By describing the two muses of gameplay as prenarrative and experiential, Aarseth adopts an implicit ludological perspective: epiphanies (or closures) are not found in a pre-scripted narrative, but rather experienced by players at their own pace. In an endless game like Sim City, players set their own goals: recovering from a flood may be a player’s final epiphany, while it could be a minor success for another. Aarseth’s dualism is a plea against a (slightly caricatural) narratological reading of video games as inflexible oriented systems in which the experiences and emotions of players are triggered by designed narrative effects. While useful, Aarseth’s categories are undoubtedly influenced by the necessity to establish a ludological vocabulary that could offer sufficient theoretical grounding and, at the same time, act as a response to scholars on the other side of the ludologynarratology debate. For this reason, I will complement Aarseth’s dualism with another set of categories: closure and caesura. While Aarseth’s aporia and epiphany are eminently experiential, to the point that—one might argue— instances of both can only be described through speculation or ethnography, “closure” and “caesura” are the terms I will use to describe the ways in which aporia and epiphany may be embedded in games as designed elements. With Herrnstein Smith, I have described closure as the “clinch” between the expectations built by an artifact and their resolution, an architectural quality that suggests wholeness, completeness, and finality. In the next section I will take a closer look at how closure is embedded in the game Super Metroid. Before proceeding to the case study, it is worth explaining the notion of caesura, which I will use to complement Aarseth’s experiential aporia. In poetry, caesura denotes

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a pause in the middle of a line, a rupture of the flow of the poem; similarly, in musical notation, a caesura is a specific pause (expressed by the symbol //). In both cases, caesura is often used to disjoint two segments of a composition dramatically or heighten the effect of a phrase by interrupting it abruptly. Despite being a specific figure in poetry and music, the notion of caesura is often used metaphorically on other contexts. Famously, Walter Benjamin wrote about the role of caesura in Hölderlin’s poems (1996b: 18–36), and, later, used the word allegorically in his work on Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1996a: 354), and in one of the writings of the Arcades project (1999b: 475, Benjamin 2004). More recently, novelist David Peace described the situation of post-Second World War Japan as being “in caesura” (2009: 17), in a state of unexpected and painful suspension, caused by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the military occupation of the country. In the same manner, in the section on caesura I will extract this notion from its usual context and apply it to the peculiar forms of sudden and prescriptive disruption of play found in video games.

Closure in Super Metroid Super Metroid is the third installment of the Metroid series, which debuted on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1986. Released in 1994, Super Metroid retained most of the features of its two predecessors—Metroid and Metroid II: Return of Samus—but was adapted for Nintendo’s 16-bit console, Super Nintendo, released worldwide between 1990 and 1992. In Super Metroid the player controls Samus Aran, an intergalactic bounty hunter whose job is to contrast the evil Space Pirates and, in the process, destroy all hostile lifeforms on various planets. Upon accessing Super Metroid the player is confronted with a non-interactive sequence in which the diachronic events are explained: through a series of tableaux and captions, we understand that after defeating the evil Mother Brain on two different planets (coinciding with the fictional worlds of the two previous games), the bounty hunter is now delivering a specimen to a team of scientists working on the Ceres space colony. After the delivery, while piloting her spaceship away from colony, Samus receives a distress signal from the planet and flies back to help the scientists. After this introduction, the player can control Samus, an anthropomorphic sprite represented in a bidimensional perspective that can, at this point in the game, jump, run, duck, and shoot. On planet Ceres the player discovers a pile of dead bodies and is confronted by a dragon whose attack they must resist before being able to make their way back to the spaceship

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and leave the colony, now about to explode. Samus then flies to planet Zebes, where the proper game starts. This initial sequence has two main purposes: it establishes a backstory upon which all of the player’s action are based (Samus needs to find the dragon that attacked her on Ceres and regain the specimen) and, at the same time, instructs the player on how to approach actual gameplay in a relatively safe environment. After leaving Ceres, the player is thoroughly informed of both the narrative principles of the game and of the procedures for interacting with Super Metroid. The Ceres colony acts both as a preface and a tutorial to the game. Fast forward about ten hours of—often infuriatingly frustrating—gameplay, the journey of Samus comes to an end. Having defeated the last boss, the heroine needs to escape planet Zebes in less than three minutes by making her way back to the spaceship and taking off. At this point, the planet explodes, launching Samus’s vessel in outer space; the game informs the player of the time they spent completing it and, after showing credits and end titles, eventually restarts. Super Metroid certainly produces a story, although of an arguably minimalist kind: the player’s journey as Samus starts off with a planet to explore and traverse, and ends with that planet exploding into small fragments. In this sense, the narrative trope used to provide closure to the journey is not at all dissimilar from that of Ryu’s lonely march towards the Sun. In both cases, the game is literally over, since there is nothing left to conquer; an end times narrative that, in the case of Super Metroid, culminates with the quintessential apocalyptic trope, the literal end of a world. Paratextual devices, such as end credits and informational captions about the time and percentage of completion of the game, actively reinforce this strategy of narrative closure. Mission accomplished, Samus. While Super Metroid’s ending seems to portray a unified version of in-game closure (the game ends as its story ends), the ten hours of gameplay preceding this narrative catharsis tell a different story. When cast in the role of Samus Aran, the player of Super Metroid can explore planet Zebes in a non-linear manner: this means that, unlike other platform games such as Super Mario Bros, Super Metroid does not compel its player to proceed from point A to point B (usually in a left to right direction), but lets them explore the game world in a more personalized fashion. While the general purpose of the game remains that of finding the hiding place of the final boss, the player immediately understands that this is not located at the end of a straight line, subdivided into a number of increasingly difficult stages, but somewhere on planet Zebes. Indeed, the player will often find themselves roaming, trying to find an unvisited area or a spot they might have

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missed in previous explorations. While not being overtly broken into different stages, gameplay is indeed segmented, since some areas can be reached only after having acquired certain power-ups (higher jumping capabilities, etc.). In this sense, free exploration seems to be somehow regimented by a set of compulsory and accessory goals: while certain areas, where power-ups are found, need to be explored in order to finish the game, others are accessory and only a player willing to complete it may be inclined to look for them. The coexistence of teleological play (playing in order to reach the end screen) and completist play (playing in order to explore fully, both spatially and procedurally, the game’s affordances) is certainly not exclusive to Super Metroid and can be seen as a constant tension in video games. In Super Metroid both strategies are encouraged at the same time, thus generating a compelling ambiguity. The narrative agenda of the game promotes linearity: the player is cast as a hero on a finalized journey and the sporadic use of time constraints reinforces the boundaries of this oriented path. From start (the player is invested with a mission) to finish (planet Zebes is destroyed), the narrative of Super Metroid is consistently oriented towards the promised catharsis. On the other

Figure 2.1 The map of Super Metroid

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hand, a number of diegetic and paratextual devices promote a more inquisitive approach: maybe Super Metroid should not be traversed, but rather completed; it should not be finished, but rather beaten. Although more refined graphics, smoother sprites and better sound were generally perceived as the most relevant innovations brought by Super Metroid to the series (Slate 1994), a number of other new features appear more relevant in our analysis of closure within the game. Among the many additions brought by Super Metroid to the franchise, that of having a procedural, iterative map is often overlooked. The in-game screen presents the player with a map in the topright corner; this map constantly updates as the player moves forward in the game, discovering new areas. In certain rooms, players will find sub-maps allowing them to access a complete map of the area they are visiting. While the onscreen map serves as an always-on compass for the player, the complete map—which is accessed in pause mode, by pressing START—gives the them a more detailed view of a whole region of planet Zebes. Moreover, when acquiring this map, the player is able to see both discovered rooms and hallways (in pink), and those that still need to be investigated (in blue). This map updates procedurally along with the player’s progress in the game, and blue areas turn to pink as soon as they are discovered: progressively, entire areas appear or open up as a response to the exploration of the player. In this sense, the game’s mapping system acts both as an externalized situational map (Eugeni 2010: 310), helping players navigate their surroundings and keep track of their location, and as a gauge representing a percentage of progress. Maps in Super Metroid work as indicators of potential goals, effectively embodying both a topographic tool, guiding the player in its exploration, and a peculiar type of metric, informing completist players of their progress. The refined mapping system used in Super Metroid can be seen as the device where different affordances of closure are layered and solidified. The map-as-map helps players traverse the world of the game, progressing sequentially through several gated areas, while the map-asgauge provides clues on how to explore planet Zebes in its entirety, in pursuit of what is known, in game vernacular, as a 100 percent run. In Super Metroid, as in many other similar games, several instances of closure are stratified in order to accommodate various styles of play and to provide satisfaction to different sets of questions. But playing-to-finish and playing-to-complete (or a less platonic hybrid of the two) are not the only modes of traversing Super Metroid. On YouTube it is possible to witness a number of attempts at speedrunning, a practice that consists in getting to the end screen of a game in the shortest possible time,

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using a mixture of hand-eye coordination skills and extreme knowledge of the game’s affordances and behavior (Lowood 2006). This sort of practice eschews both the narrative and the completist focus, by focusing on pure time-based performance. In the case of Super Metroid’s various speedruns, closure seems to be found not in reaching the end screen and witnessing the destruction of planet Zebes, nor in exploring every bit of it, but rather in participating in a metagame built around Super Metroid and encouraging players to compete against each other, thus actively adding a vernacular ranking system and modifying the game’s objective and closure conditions. In this sense, while Super Metroid features several designed instances of closure, ranging from the apocalyptic destruction of planet Zebes to the completist metagame, other experiences of epiphany have been superimposed on the game’s structure by the emergent interpretation of its affordances.

Caesura Continue? When progressing through a video game, players need to adjust their strategies to what is commonly called the game’s difficulty curve. The game gets harder as it unfolds, and players are forced to refine their skills, often through trial and error. Breaking the loop of failure provides players with a sense of release and tangible progression. At the same time, designing arbitrary obstacles—arguably one of the core components of the practice of game design—allows developers to script closure into their games, by contrasting it with repeated instances of what I termed caesura. In the previous section I described closure and I will now tackle its polar opposite, the unresolved state of game over, an experience that most players of video games know all too well. At least, I do. My experience with the final boss of Super Castlevania 4, for example, is precisely one of caesura and closure. When facing Count Dracula, the final opponent in the game, I witnessed the dreaded game over screen a number of times. This screen prompted me to continue (provided I had enough lives left) or enter a password to revert to a previous save state. My experience with Count Dracula was one of reiteration, but each time I faced the impossibility of defeating the vampire, I learned something about his behavior and patterns, thus building an increasingly more accurate mental map of the game’s functioning. I was killed by Dracula over and over, but finally reached my epiphany and defeated the boss. My experience of

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failure provided me with enough knowledge of my enemy. Re-encountering the game over screen over and over had taught me how to play Super Castlevania 4; a number of aporias had led to my epiphany. In this light, game over appears as a pedagogic feature of video games, a way of digitally assessing the player’s skills before letting them proceed to the next phase. While this is certainly a notable feature of game over, that in some cases justifies the use of video games as tools for skill acquisition, I aim to describe game over as something more than a digital Skinner box. I will discuss game over as a medium-specific feature of video games, characterizing it as an example of prescribed ending, one that is not present, in this form, in any other medium. After this theoretical assessment of game over, I will offer a short history of its presence and influence in game design. Finally, I will confront game over as a rhetorical tool and a space of negotiation between the player and the spectator of video games.

Prescribed ending Earlier in this book I described video games as oppositional state machines, pieces of software that both require interaction from the user and make it difficult for the user to reach a prescribed goal. Opposition is one of the founding principles of rule-based games; what Roger Caillois (2001: 9) defines as the “uncertain” nature of games points in fact to games requiring an effort from the player in order to be successfully played. The player’s effort to overcome the fictional difficulties presented by the game’s rules (Suits 1978) can be seen as an attempt to confront an oppositional state of affairs. This is even more evident in video games, where, as discussed, rules are upheld computationally, and in most cases cannot be negotiated. Game over can be described as the machine’s complete and final opposition, a form of cybernetic caesura in which interaction is suspended and usually can only be resumed at the price of reverting to a previous state. Game over is indeed an end state, but one that differs essentially from those found in other media. Media scholar Valentina Re (2004: 108, my translation) defines four kinds of endings within narrative texts: “material ending, the ending as finality/sense (thematic ending), the ending as stylistic and discursive closure (formal ending), the ending as perceived by the reader (pragmatic ending).” Later in the text, Re admits to using a syncretic approach in defining these four instances of ending, since they relate to different understandings of the notion of text. Whereas the material ending derives from the physical existence of the text, both the formal

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and the thematic ending clearly refer to the practice of textual analysis, while the pragmatic ending seems connected to the study of reading and consumption practices. Nevertheless, these four hypotheses on textual teleology, being intrinsically multidimensional and multidisciplinary, may apply to a wide range of media. Re specifically refers to the novel and the feature film in order to debunk the idea that modern narratives completely eschew endings; the author claims that, although modern films often refuse closure, they do indeed end, at least in a way that she describes as “metatextual” (2008: 114, my translation). Even if the ending cannot be always superimposed over a perceived closure, a “farewell from a fictional world” (2008: 113, my translation), it does exist as a material, thematic, formal and/or pragmatic feature of the text. In the light of Re’s analysis of endings, how should we consider game over? Is it merely a pragmatic instantiation of the end? Is it just a roadblock that practically obstructs the player’s way, which can be assimilated to the pragmatic ending of a book (the reader has reached the last page) or a film (two hours have gone by)? Or is it something different and more complex? I would argue that game over can be seen as a prescribed ending, one that happens in medias res, sanctioned by the software itself and affecting the player’s progress in the game. While Re’s notion of the pragmatic ending is deeply rooted in the text’s material constraint (pages end, film runs out or deteriorates, etc.), my idea of a prescribed ending derives from a precise design strategy being implemented in the game. Game over does not just happen, it is a demonstration of the authorial (or even authoritarian) strength exercised by the game on its player. This medium-specific form of ending, which makes the presence of a digital authority all the more apparent, and relies on the oppositional relation between the player and the game, can be further defined as transient, normative, and functional. Game over is transient, because it is in most cases reversible; it does not prevent the player from re-playing the game and eventually overcoming its difficulties. Cases of nontransient game over are found in games featuring perma-death, a situation in which game over is in fact permanent. In most cases this means the player’s character will not be revived and they will have to start over from the beginning of the game. This form of permanent death is commonly found in massively multiplayer online games, where it serves the purpose of increasing the attachment of the players to their characters, which are perceived as fallible and precious. Other, more extreme, cases of permanent game over can be found in games such as One Single Life, that can literally only be played once. Nevertheless, in most cases, game over is transient; later in this chapter I will try to demonstrate

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how this very transiency is used by game designers to create meaning through gameplay. Game over is normative, since it is imposed upon the player by the game. It represents a non-negotiable full stop within the emergent syntax of gameplay. While different games apply different levels of punishment associated to game over, in every case it implies play coming to a halt and some form of setback or penalty. As suggested by Galloway (2006: 27–8), game over is possibly “the most emblematic non-diegetic machine act,” the epitome of every opposing act devised by the machine. Furthermore, as apparent from Galloway’s description, game over is normative in the sense that it dictates the rhythm and pattern of an oscillation between diegesis, the exploration and engagement with the world of the game, and non-diegesis. Finally, game over is functional on many levels. On the one hand, it is an extreme but effective piece of feedback offered to the player. Through a game over screen, the game communicates to the player their (transient) inadequacy or delimits the actions that the player is allowed to take and those that will result in the player losing the game. One evident example of this effect of game over is the player’s negotiation of the environment in games that require spatial exploration. In Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, the player is free to roam the streets of a city designed to portray the look and feel of 1980s Miami. If the player’s avatar tries to swim into the ocean, the game shows a game over screen. Although roughly implemented into the game, this instance of game over is indeed a functional piece of feedback: no swimming in Vice City. Game over can also be functional as a tool for the player to monitor and reflect upon their performance. In this sense, it can act as a break between play sessions that offers the player an opportunity to rethink and adjust their strategy. Game over indeed “creates a critical, reflective space in which action and performance may be scrutinized” (Newman 2004: 89).

The death and rebirth of game over “When was the last time you were really distraught about seeing a game over screen?” (Orland 2007) asks Kyle Orland in an article titled The Slow Death of the Game Over. In his pamphlet Orland traces a history of game over starting from the assumption that over time this peculiar feature of video games “has slowly morphed from a full stop to a perfunctory pause in most games; from a period to a comma in the constantly unfolding gameplay story.” The author laments the death of game over as a truly punishing feature of digital games, one that often led players to frustration but at the same time gave birth to displays of exceptional

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skills and fierce competitions among top scorers. Orland’s article reads partly like a sincere (but rather anachronistic) mourning for a long lost era in video game culture and partly as a historical recapitulation of the evolution of game over from full stop to a more nuanced interpunctuation between different phases of gameplay. Orland’s piece, written in 2007, predates the renaissance of arcadelike indie games fostered by the commercial success of Super Meat Boy, a genre that often employs punishing mechanics as a nostalgic nod to bygone eras in video game history. While the timeliness of Orland’s article is now less than relevant, the historical discourse found in the text calls for some consideration. The author claims that the reason behind the prevalence of hard3 game over in older games was indeed a material one: since in the 1970s video games were found mostly in the arcades, they needed to be harder and more punishing in order to assure shorter play sessions and higher incomes. Orland then proceeds to demonstrate that the rupture between hard and soft game over was epitomized by DOOM , whose peculiar save mechanics made game over almost irrelevant to the player experience. Since players were allowed to save anywhere in the game by simply pressing the F5 key, dying in DOOM was a mere annoyance, for players could re-spawn their avatar immediately by pressing F9.4 DOOM made compulsive saving a potent antidote to hard game over. While Orland’s material cause to the death of game over is certainly convincing, his case for DOOM ’s save system being the culprit of this revolution is less substantiated. Id Software’s game introduced players to saving practices that would later become common in first person shooters, but if we are to subscribe to the argument of the death of game over being due to technological, social, and material causes, we should date this event earlier. In the late 1970s, home consoles started appearing on the market; the Atari VCS , launched in 1977, is the symbol of the first wave of home consoles, whose tremendous popularity was destined to decline following the market crash of 1983 (Wolf 2012). While a number of early VCS games were adaptations of arcade hits (among these, a notoriously disastrous version of Pac-Man released in 1982), other titles showed game mechanics and design features that did not belong in the arcade. Pitfall!, developed by the third-party company Activision, is one of these cases. Players maneuver Pitfall Harry, a bidimensional explorer who must find treasures in an insidious jungle. Harry can jump to avoid obstacles (rolling logs, pits, etc.) or hostile animals (scorpions, crocodiles, etc.), and can explore the jungle in different fashions: he can proceed left or right, or access a subterranean area to circumvent certain obstacles. Unlike DOOM , Pitfall! does not allow

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players to save at will,5 but presents them with a time limit: they must complete their mission within twenty minutes. Players start the game with 2,000 points, a sum that will be eroded by every encounter with an enemy; a state of game over is reached when all three lives afforded to the player are lost. Activision’s game represents a revolution in this sense just as much as DOOM. Pitfall!’s game over mechanic is largely more forgiving than that of other games of the time: the points system, acting to all intents and purposes as an energy gauge, leaves some room for experimentation and discovery, since coming into contact with an enemy does not result in instant death. Furthermore, Pitfall! is a multi-screen game, meaning that players can freely roam an environment that is larger than the one represented in one single screen; this allows for a certain degree of exploration and free will, two features that were largely absent in fast-paced arcade games of the time, and that engender a less segmented experience. Finally, with its rather extended time limit of twenty minutes, Pitfall! encourages more deliberate exploratory play, in which avoiding an ever-impending, supremely frustrating death is only one of the player’s preoccupations. Game over, here, is not a lingering accident, as in most arcade games of the time, nor a trivial detour as in DOOM , but rather the potential ending of a prolonged exploratory session of gameplay. In describing Pitfall! Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort (2009: 113–14) claim that: Although no one would call the game an “open world game” in the style of The Legend of Zelda or Grand Theft Auto, there are gestures towards this type of experience. . . . Pitfall! features a large world that cannot be contemplated all at once. It offers a variety of actions built from a few core possibilities, each of which provides a unique experience and demands a different skill. And finally, it gives the player choices—even if limited ones—about where to go and what route to take to get there.

With Pitfall!, and other games designed for early home consoles, game over started being expanded rather than punctual, delayed in time through devices such as energy meters, time constraints and power-ups; one of many possible machine acts, rather than a final, sudden, arbitrary sanction. This “trend toward smaller punishment for failure” (Juul 2013: 71) is certainly due to longer play sessions, allowed by the domestication of video games fostered by early home consoles, and a general shift in the economy of the medium, which started moving from coin-operated cabinets to smaller machines found in living rooms and dens, a change that, as I will clarify later, deeply affected game design on many levels.

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While “the slow death of game over” started happening long before the heyday of PC first person shooters, its sudden rebirth could not be foreseen by Orland. The emergence and global success of a diverse scene of independent developers between 2008 and 2010 fostered the adoption of more experimental and, at times, openly nostalgic practices of game design. While modern first person shooters such as BioShock, consistently with their genealogy, were devising ever more creative ways of obliterating game over, independent designers reintroduced hard caesuras as viable figures in the lexicon of game design. On the one hand, games such as Super Meat Boy, by mimicking the unforgiving design practices of early platform games, promoted a resurgence of games based on recursive trial and error. On the other hand rogue-like games, a genre of video games derived from Rogue, in which players have to explore procedurally generated dungeons and need to start anew every time they die (Garda 2013), reinstated the pervasiveness of hard game over as a feature found in niche segments of the video game market.

Game over and over. A rhetoric of repetition. Despite its hard or soft nature, and its degree of relevance, one defining characteristic of game over is its transiency. It is never definitive and its reiteration creates a looping play experience, that is constantly interrupted and resumed, be it through a quick key stroke or at the cost of a quarter. Few games can be traversed without ever encountering a game over in one of its forms, since failure and success (possibly an expanded, overtly existential, version of the aporia/ epiphany duality) are at the core of the experience of playing a rule-based game (Loftus and Loftus 1983), and the game over screen is a feedback system designed to convey the notion of failure (Juul 2013). Features such as transiency and repetitiveness can be used with rhetorical and communicative purposes, thus affecting the emotional outcomes players attach to this peculiar communicative device. Although in most cases losing a life does no longer mean materially losing a quarter—an infuriating experience for any player—game over can still be used as an effective tool for meaning-making. Arguably, the player of DOOM will not be particularly upset by a game over screen, but this does not mean specific emotions cannot be attached to it in other cases. New York Defender is a simple flash game produced in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Players must defend the twin towers from planes crashing into them, maneuvering a viewfinder to shoot down approaching aircraft. Every time one of the planes is

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hit, the player gains points; conversely, planes that are not hit will crash into the towers. When a tower is hit twice, it crumbles to the ground, and after both towers have collapsed the game presents the player with a game over screen composed only of a button reading “again.” New York Defender is an unwinnable game; wave after wave, airplanes will not stop being flown into the towers. Players can only amass points, but every game will result in the “again” screen being displayed. Clive Thompson (2002) argues that the game makes the player “feel powerless,” since, much like Gonzalo Frasca’s experimental game September 12th, it portrays the war on terrorism as essentially unending and ultimately pointless. An unwinnable game about defending one of the symbols of the United States certainly projects a bleak shadow. But New York Defender’s “sense of tragedy” (Lee 2003) also derives from the game’s specific approach to game over. A game that cannot be won is certainly not unheard of; in fact, an enormous number of classic arcade games adopted this design perspective. Players could only collect points and, then, participate in a wider metagame in which they compared their own high scores. New York Defender not only draws its visual style from arcade games, but significantly engages with this specific feature of the genre: that of being historically tied to a looser, largely vernacular, metagame of score comparison. Game over in New York Defender is made relevant by the fact that, in contrast with shared genre norms, there is no room for this socialization of play: no rankings, no high-score screens, no top scorers. While the game’s bleak sense of tragedy is certainly tied to its infinite cycle, that renders players unable to ever succeed, a peculiar use of game over seems to reinforce this stance. In evoking a shared knowledge of the functioning of unwinnable video games—that at least points should matter—only to later refuse it completely, the game’s game over mechanic evokes a deeper sense of impotence and pointlessness. New York Defender’s use of reiterated game over, unmitigated by any sort of metagame, is ultimately rhetorical because it serves to stress the punctuality and situatedness of a defining moment of contemporary history by negating its relation to any larger process of inter-player socialization. In playing New York Defender, one is always alone, and always in caesura. Another game that makes explicit use of game over as a rhetorical device without necessarily addressing social or political themes is Super Meat Boy. In this game, every level requires players to guide Meat Boy, a red cube with wide eyes and a gapped grin, to the rescue of his girlfriend Bandage Girl. The play field is riddled with lethal obstacles such as jigsaws and deadly spikes. Each time Meat Boy touches one of the obstacles, the level resets and the player

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is forced to start from the beginning. In Super Meat Boy the device of game over is used to signal a punctual, normative, and inescapable extremity. It only takes a hit for Meat Boy to die and for the player to be instantly sent back to the start of the level. This hard implementation of game over as loop-generating device (players usually go through a long series of failures before completing a level) is consistent with Super Meat Boy’s rhetoric of antagonism between the player and the machine: Team Meat’s work is a “hardcore” game (Dillard, 2009), a definition typically used to describe unrewarding, punishing games that appeal to expert players. On the surface, one of the rhetorical goals of the implementation of game over in Super Meat Boy is to project a nostalgic aura: the game promises to be as hard and punishing as some of the infamous arcade games of the 1970s and 1980s. In fact, the game is advertised as a self-conscious throwback to old school gameplay: “Super Meat Boy brings the old school difficulty of classic retro titles we all know and love and stream lines [sic] them down to the essential no bull straight forward [sic] twitch reflex platforming” (Super Meat Boy, 2010). On the other hand, this nostalgic appeal is somehow contradicted by the game’s looping dynamic, in which the relevance of game over is substantially weakened by its ephemerality. It takes less than a second to restart the game after a game over, and since every level is very compact, the systematic dismemberment of Meat Boy never really sets the player back. This, of course, adds to the fact that, differently from arcade games, in Super Meat Boy no real-money expenditure is required from the player in order to recover from a game over. In this sense, Juul’s assessment of Super Meat Boy being “part of a small trend that does not involve the long-time suffering of the protagonist, but rather fascinates through the immediate joyful discomfort of witnessing (bodily) destruction” (2013: 100) seems more accurate than Microsoft’s promotional claim. In Super Meat Boy, game over is used more as a spectacular device than as a nod to “old school difficulty”; the pleasure of seeing the little meat cube dismembered by chainsaws and spikes compensates for the frustration of a (minor) setback. This strategy is reinforced by a non-interactive sequence triggered at the successful completion of a level, that allows the player to re-watch all of the protagonist’s gruesome deaths. This simultaneous re-enactment of all Meat Boy’s demises, shown in an often dizzying superimposition of every attempt at beating the level, is designed to recall both the looping nature of the player’s experience, by visually quantifying the amount of deaths they had to go through, and effectively provide closure to the bodily spectacle of gory deaths provided by every level.

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Bodily pleasures. Game over as spectacular device in Dead Space 2. In January 2011, Electronic Arts was preparing to launch its flagship science fiction shooter Dead Space 2, the sequel of a successful game released in 2008, that effectively matched third-person action-shooting mechanics with an eerie Alien-esque atmosphere. The launch campaign for Dead Space 2 featured a series of YouTube videos titled Your Mom Hates Dead Space 2. In the short videos, a group of women are shown sequences from Dead Space 2 that feature Isaac Clarke, the mining engineer turned alien hunter starring in the game, being tortured and methodically dismembered by hordes of horrible mutant creatures. The YouTube commercials alternate between Clarke’s many deaths and the reaction shots of the horrified women. The tagline for the campaign reads: “Your Mom Hates Dead Space 2,” a clear allusion to the transgressive nature of the experience of playing Dead Space 2, and, incidentally, an unneeded demonstration of the industry’s imagined target-audience. The terrified protagonists of Your Mom Hates Dead Space 2 are presented with a montage of sequences lacking any form of narrative progression. The gruesome videos of Isaac Clarke being killed seem to represent an extreme example of what film scholar Linda Williams (1991: 5) calls “body genres,” a type of film whose main features are “an apparent lack of proper esthetic distance, a sense of overinvolvement in sensation and emotion.” The violent manipulation of the viewer’s emotions produced by these genres (horror, pornography, melodrama, etc.) is here amplified by the lack of exposition. In the absence of any narrative context, the women witnessing Clarke’s deaths have access only to what Williams dubs as the “body spectacle” (1991: 4), the spectacular manipulation of the body typical of body genres. The reiteration of death sequences, compressed and brought to its logical extreme in Your Mom Hates Dead Space 2, is one of the founding features of slasher films, a sub-genre that enjoyed broad popularity in the 1980s with franchises such as Halloween, Friday The 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. The formula used by these films is based upon the antagonism between a solitary killer and a closed community, usually taking the form of a group of youngsters (Dika 1990). Slasher films clearly portray the ambiguity between narratives and spectacle that informs popular cinema. Henry Jenkins (2004: 125) claims that this ambiguity is indeed a founding tension of most popular spectacles: The pleasures of popular culture often center on spectacular performance numbers and self-contained set pieces. It makes no sense to describe musical

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numbers or gag sequences or action scenes as disruptions of the film’s plots: the reason we go to see a kung fu movie is to see Jackie Chan show his stuff. Yet, few films consist simply of such moments, typically falling back on some broad narrative exposition to create a framework within which localized actions become meaningful.

This oscillation is found in a number of prototypical slasher films such as Halloween, in which the tension between “broad narrative” and spectacular killings is very evident. The death sequences found in Halloween (see, for example, the killing of Bob [John Michael Graham]) epitomize a trend within slasher films towards the creation of finite areas, defined by a precise rhythm and grammar where the spectacle of the body emerges as opposed to a generally plain and repetitive narration. Homicides in slasher films are thus modular and formulaic, since they are both potentially autonomous and significantly standardized. Back to Dead Space 2, only as players this time. In playing the game, the relevance of the sequences portraying Clarke’s death cannot be overstated. The gruesome dismemberments of Clarke stand as elaborate set-pieces in the flow of gameplay. They are highly complex, often involving a series of sequential amputations; they are spectacular and intense and, most importantly, players get to see many of them. In a sense, Dead Space 2 recreates through the reiteration of game over the repetition and variations found in the portrayal of death in slasher films. The victim is always Clarke, but the reiterative nature of the gameplay experience forces the avatar to suffer a variety of serial deaths. If the spectacular homicides found in Halloween embody a radical example of the oscillatory movement between story and spectacle typical of popular cinema, the gory deaths of Dead Space 2 seem to foreshadow another oscillation. According to Andrew Darley (2000: 157), in the extremities of the experience of gameplay—such as the death of the avatar and the following game over—“not only are the conventional limits of the game itself revealed . . . but so is its preprogrammed character: the element of control and choice it seems to offer is revealed as illusory.” Dead Space 2’s gruesome game over sequences bring to the fore the peculiar tension between the procedural practice of playing and its abrupt suspension, namely the morphing of the player into a spectator. In the game, this shift is signaled by a wide array of liminal devices: each time Isaac Clarke is killed by a necromorph, the non-interactive death sequence is introduced by a movement of the virtual camera that clearly communicates to the player their loss of control over the avatar. Moreover, the sonic environment

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is enriched by a number of auditory cues, such as a high-pitched frequency that signals the cessation of Clarke’s cardiac activity. At the end of the death sequence, before the player is presented with the menu, the screen turns red, clearly marking the end of the spectacular sequence. Game over in Dead Space 2 is thus the site of an abrupt oscillation between gameplay and spectacle; the basic mechanic of game over—the machine exerting its authority upon the player—is expressed via an elaborate non-interactive gruesome scene. If an oscillation between two states is the essential process engendered by game over, one may inquire about the relation between these states. A convincing hypothesis on this liaison can be derived by framing genre-related formulas (the gruesome death, the monstrous enemy, etc.) as compensatory devices. In his treatise on genre in cinema, Film/Genre, Rick Altman (1999: 155) introduces the notion of generic economy: Whereas [Freud’s] psychic economy governs relations between the reality principle and the pleasure principle, generic economy relates cultural criteria and generic pleasures. . . . Each time viewers choose the generic fork over the lawful path they experience pleasure in a quantity measured by the distance separating cultural expectations and generic transgression.

Altman’s claim is exemplified in slasher films, in which the death sequence stands as a radical deviation from shared cultural norms in favor of transgressive generic pleasure. The notion of generic economy can be applied, although allusively, also to the use of the death sequence in video games. Altman himself derives the notion of generic economy from Freud (1990: 145), whose text Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious offers an economic theory of humor, in which the pleasure found in jokes arises from an economical management of one’s inhibitions. In the same manner, Altman claims that narrative genres allow for a similar economic homeostasis: generic transgressions are pleasurable inasmuch they allow viewers to momentarily buffer themselves from cultural and social expectations. Altman’s theory of genres is more cybernetic than economic; transgression and normativity stand in a relation of negative feedback, in which one always compensates the other. Nevertheless, an allusive use of this notion may provide some insight into Dead Space 2’s peculiar use of gruesome game over sequences. As we have seen, when players encounter death in the game, they are forced to abdicate control over their avatar; this loss is then compensated by a gain in their possibility to witness the transgressive representation of the violent death of the character onscreen, triggering a sudden

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oscillation of their role as players, towards that of viewers. The loss of control is thus associated, in a compensatory fashion, with the activation of the viewing pleasure through the use of a highly recognizable generic formula. The pact between game and player is temporarily suspended, and the generic pact (Casetti 2002) of horror is sealed. One could think that the real punishment for the victims of Your Mom Hates Dead Space 2 is not that of being forced to watch Clarke’s grotesque dismemberment, but rather the impossibility to experience the oscillation between gaining and losing control that ultimately informs the pleasures of gameplay.

Endlessness Playing indefinitely While most video games present their players with occasional game over screens, not all games contain a recognizable, sanctioned ending point. A significant number of video games do not establish winning conditions for the players to pursue: from arcade classics like Battlezone, to FarmVille, from Space Invaders to endless runners such as Canabalt, some games refuse to finish and just cannot be ultimately defeated. A player of Space Invaders will never see the end of the hordes of swarming aliens attacking the earth, nor will a virtual farmer in FarmVille reach a state in which they will be able to quit cropping and retire on the seaside. In a certain way, players of this sort of infinite games will only either lose against them or, more trivially, stop playing. Although both games that end and games that don’t can be found in different phases of the history of video games, both phenomena could be considered as historically situated and dependent on a number of affordances and constraints found in specific time periods. The first part of this section will attempt at defining these conditions, while tracing a history of early endless games. Later, I will focus on the relations between this specific breed of video games and their players, addressing the different strategies used by game designers to motivate players towards playing an unwinnable game. Before moving to the case study, I will analyse the features of contemporary endless games by referring to the debated notion of casual gaming (Juul 2010) and tracing its connections to arcade games. The case study presented in this section is Battlezone, an endless video game whose peculiar relation with realism gave birth to a number of legends and myths pertaining its teleology.

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A compact history of infinite games While not exactly a rarity, endless video games today are usually overshadowed by more complex, cinematic, story-driven titles. Big budget blockbuster game sagas such as Assassin’s Creed or Mass Effect derive part of their success and appeal from their narrative scope; if contemporary video games really suffer from “film envy” (Zimmerman 2002: 125), these triple-A sagas are indeed the most affected. From promotional materials (trailers, ads, etc.), to the amount and nature of technological resources used, everything in narrative-driven, big budget video games point toward the more respectable and institutionalized medium of cinema (Fassone et  al. 2015). Endings—happy or otherwise—are required for these video games in order to tie their often intricate plots and strengthen their bond with contemporary Hollywood films, whose narrative trajectories often feature strong, definite closures (Bordwell 1982, 2006). A telling case of a steep teleological slope leading to a highly controversial ending is that of the Mass Effect saga, whose final chapter, Mass Effect 3 featured an apocalyptic closure that, despite being apparently in tune with the game’s allegiance to the genre of space operas, was perceived by players as disrespectful of their time and emotional investment (Clarkson 2013). The tendency of high-budget home console and PC games towards teleology seems to fit within what Jesper Juul (2010: 20) unceremoniously dubs “a small historical anomaly.” In Juul’s view, complex, story-driven, demanding games marketed to hardcore players constitute a detour in the history of a medium whose specificity should be found in simplicity rather than complexity, cybernetics rather than narration, rules rather than themes. While Juul’s claim is based on the resurgence of casual games in recent years, and their evident connection with arcade titles from the 1970s and 1980s, dismissing a large sector of the video game industry as a historical anomaly is maybe too bold a claim. Nevertheless, Juul’s radicalism serves the purpose of reminding us that it was not always like this. Poet and scholar Ernest Hilbert (2004: 60) recalls the dread he felt when approaching the Asteroids arcade machine as a child: The room also had Asteroids, a form of shoot-em game, which seemed bleak and desperate to me. There was simply no way out. It kept getting faster. Acceleration was a universal quality of games, but to make matters truly terrifying asteroids were hurled from every direction at once. It was too much. It made me queasy to watch someone play for any serious length of time.

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Asteroids is one of the better-known examples of the golden age of arcade video games; released by Atari in 1979, it was a monumental success, and, with over 70,000 units installed in bars and arcades worldwide (Vanderbilt 2003), it managed to eclipse Space Invader’s popularity. Asteroids is not only a testament to the success of arcade video games in the late 1970s, but also—and maybe more importantly—a prototypical example of the era’s predominant style of game design. Just like many other arcade games of the time, Asteroids simply “kept getting faster,” until the player eventually could not manage the game’s speed any more. Asteroids, an endless game in a time of endless games, in which “acceleration was a universal quality of games,” helped establish unwinnable games as the predominant form of video games found in arcades. Why was non-teleological play—a practice that could sound pointless to video game players who grew up during the “historical anomaly” of the 1990s and 2000s—prevalent in the arcades? I will advance three hypotheses to account for the pervasiveness of this specific configuration of the medium in its public days, before it became a largely private or, better, domestic affair. The first hypothesis is of historical nature and derives from a rather minimal definition of arcade proposed by Bolter and Grusin (2000: 102): An arcade hall is a collection of mechanical, mechanical-electronic and fully electronic games, in which the electronic versions remediate the earlier mechanical forms such as pinball. All the games together create a frenzied atmosphere of light and sound.

To Bolter and Grusin, video games remediate earlier games such as pinball, by incorporating some of their features and re-framing them through technological update. One of these features is undoubtedly the unrelenting antagonism of pinball machines whose unforgiving tilted boards test player resistance rather than their willingness to complete a game. Both seasoned players and novices will eventually be defeated by the machine. Video games often materially replaced pinball and other electromechanical machines in the arcade rooms. According to Wolf (2008: 35): By the late 1960s, pinball games had already seen their peak but were still common and popular, and other electromechanical arcade games were gaining new ground. Electromechanical games were coin-operated games that had no microprocessors or monitors, but ran by the use of motors, switches, relays, and lights. Many of them were housed in upright wooden cabinets with their controls on the front, located just below a viewscreen behind which the game’s action

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Video games were more reliable and less prone to malfunctioning, and eventually replaced the very machines they were remediating. But, to a degree, it is possible to speculate that the merciless, oppositional nature of earlier mechanical machines was transferred to arcade games; this hypothesis is strengthened by the fact that some notable manufacturers of pinball machines, such as Bally and Williams, were more than ready to jump on the video game bandwagon, thus perpetuating a number of industrial and creative practices devised during the pinball days. If, as Erkki Huhtamo (2005: 4) claims in an article devoted to the reconstruction of an archaeology of electronic games, “electronic games did not appear out of nowhere,” it might be argued that pinball machines, the unforgiving, unwinnable staples of arcade rooms, should be considered as highly influential ancestors in the genealogy of arcade video games. A technological reason is also likely to have influenced early video game design. Hilbert’s intuition about acceleration being a foundational quality of early video games can be explained, at least partially, by the limited resources video game designers had to adapt to. Most early arcade machines were equipped with very limited quantities of RAM , which made developing complex, multilevel games a very hard task. Repetition and acceleration were, to a degree, enforced by technological constraints, for they implied a more rational use of the available memory, since accelerating the movement of existing objects is usually more economical in terms of process intensity than creating new objects. Even when, around 1975, video game hardware shifted from being TTL -based to being microprocessor-based,6 a shift that according to Donovan “turned the video game development process on its head” (2010: 41), RAM was still very expensive and relatively scarce, thus making the production of complex, storydriven, teleological games a nightmarish technological challenge. Lastly, the prevalence of unending video games throughout the 1970s can be attributed to the peculiar economy of the arcades. Unwinnable games effectively favored replayability, by compelling players to return to previously played machines in the attempt to outscore other players, or better their own records. This same process characterized most pre-video games arcade machines, which could not be beat, but rather externalized competition by pitting players one against the other in the pursuit of the highest score.

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From arcade to casual Some of the features that defined arcade games, such as the simplicity of their interface design, a tendency towards endlessness, and design practices influenced by those of earlier non-electronic arcade machines, have re-emerged recently in what are commonly called casual games. The release of Nintendo’s Wii game console in 2006 seemed to usher in a new era for what Tristan Donovan defines “all access gaming” (Donovan 2010: 333). Donovan’s concept describes a general shift of the industry towards easier, friendlier, less sophisticated games, in explicit opposition to the widespread perception of domestic video games being a form of entertainment aimed at highly specialized, socially incompetent, slightly obsessive male adolescents. According to Donovan, this paradigm shift involved all actors in the field: from hardware engineers to interface specialists, from marketers to game designers. Around 2006 a whole industry seemed to move from a discourse centered around mastery and dominance to one of casualness and inclusiveness. This industry-wide movement has been analysed by Jesper Juul in his book A Casual Revolution (2010), whose most radical thesis is that video games have always been friendly and easy to use, except during the period (circa 1980–2000) in which the widespread use of personal computers as gaming machines ushered in a generation of so-called hardcore games designed for equally hardcore players. With the introduction of consoles such as Nintendo Wii, and the migration of game developers to platforms such as Facebook or iOS , simpler, more immediate games seemed to be back in fashion.7 Endlessness is a recurring feature of contemporary casual games. From Facebook based games such as FarmVille or Monster World to mobile games such as Temple Run or Super Hexagon, a number of casual games do not make players work towards an end or, simply, cannot be beaten. Is this resurgence of unbeatable games also a sign of a return to more traditional practices of game design? Juul (2010: 2) seems to think so, since he claims that “this is the moment in which the simplicity of early video games is being rediscovered, while flexible designs are letting video games fit into the lives of players”; furthermore, later in the book the author claims that Build-a-Lot’s design complies to the now classic theory of good interface design in video games proposed by Shneiderman (1987). But is it possible to explain some of the recurring features of casual games—especially their endlessness—through a hypothetical lineage dating back to early arcade games? Take Temple Run as an example. In the game the player controls an explorer trying to make his way out of an ancient temple infested with mischievous monkeys. By using touch controls the player can

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make the explorer jump, dash, or strafe in the attempt to avoid obstacles such as fallen trees or gaps in the temple’s floor. Temple Run is an infinite game, and eventually the explorer will fall to his death or be captured by the bloodthirsty monkeys. Temple Run is a remarkably simple game, and an explicit nod to the design features of early arcade games: intuitive controls, almost nonexistent learning curve, peer-to-peer competition represented by the game leaderboard presented to the player after every session. In the case of Temple Run, endlessness seems to serve the same purpose it served in arcade games: because the game is unwinnable, players will engage in a socialized competition—whose potential is maximized by online leaderboards—thus prolonging the longevity of the game. A radical difference can be found in the economic model on which casual games such as Temple Run are based. While they are usually free to download, they often present players with in-game purchases in the form of micro transactions that allow players to use power-ups or select different characters or scenarios. Once again, endlessness serves the economic purpose of compelling players into re-playing the game and, consequently, visit the in-game store and be presented with in-game advertising. On the other hand casual endless games such as FarmVille 2 do not take advantage of the simplicity of earlier games in their game design strategies. In the game, players take a top-down view on a farm and are required to plant seeds, harvest the crop, and generally perform a number of chores related to the economy of their farm. Since FarmVille 2 uses Facebook as a platform, players are encouraged to trade seeds, plants, animals, and other materials with their contacts on the social networking website, mutually contributing to the growth of the respective farms. Players can also purchase add-ons through the in-game store, using real money. FarmVille, FarmVille 2 and the legion of -Ville games which were spawned by Zynga’s success clearly belong to a different category of unending casual games, which could be defined as social networking based world simulators. Players of Zynga’s game are encouraged to explore their bucolic idyll in order to experience real-time interactions with the avatars of their Facebook friends and tend to their crops; in other words, FarmVille 2 is endless since it needs to be perceived as essentially consubstantial to the social networking experience provided by Facebook. Playing FarmVille 2 means both approaching a simulation—by means of a simple to use casual game—and connecting with friends, two activities that do not require specific imposed teleologies in order to be compelling. Furthermore, FarmVille 2’s “always-up, always growing mentality” (Hamilton 2012) requires players to engage in a

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metagame of time management. Crops take time to grow, but if left unattended for too long they wither and eventually die on the vine. While the simple interaction and relatively straightforward presentation of Zynga’s game may remind of older design practices, the nature of its temporality stands in stark contrast to that of the alleged forefathers of modern casual games. While arcade games based their profitability on fragmentation, requiring players to restart over and over in order to obtain a high score, FarmVille 2’s always-on model demands carefully timed attendance: a game that never ends, so that players may never leave.

The utopic castle: Battlezone Released in the arcades in 1980 by Atari, Battlezone is often referred to as being revolutionary for several reasons. Most evidently, Battlezone was one of the earlier games to use vector graphics (often referred to as wireframe graphics); vector-based graphics use primitive geometrical entities (points, lines and simple polygons) to draw objects on a screen. Although, in the case of Battlezone, this resulted in a very simplified representation of reality, the aptness of this graphical style to draw diagonal lines allowed designers to create a rough sense of optical perspective and, consequently, offer players the then-novel thrill of a subjective tridimensional viewpoint. Battlezone casts the player as the driver of a tank in a battlefield filled with enemy vehicles. To reinforce Battlezone’s sense of engagement, some of the cabinets produced for arcade halls and bars featured a periscope that efficiently blocked all non-necessary visual stimuli, enhancing the player’s sense of immersion. Battlezone’s use of an innovative first person perspective links Atari’s games to first person shooters, a genre whose spectacular popularity in the 1990s lead scholars to reconsider subjectivity in video games (Bell 2003, Eugeni, 2011). As one of the first instantiations of first person perspective in video games, Battlezone inevitably triggers the question of what it means to be subjectively engaged in a video game. Does seeing the world differently (in an arguably more naturalized manner) mean perceiving one’s role in the world differently? Is the first person-player a different entity from the third person-player of a game like Donkey Kong or the disembodied player of more abstract games such as Tetris? According to Crogan (2011), first person shooters cast the player as an entity cybernetically constructed for targeting, that is taking aim and conceptualizing enemies as targets in the mediated world of the video game. This specific positioning of the player-as-targeter is at the core

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of a number of discussions around the impact of simulative media within the military environment (Weber 2005), in which video games play an undeniably large role. Significantly, a version of Battlezone called The Bradley Trainer was used by the US Army in a military training program. According to Ed Rotberg (interviewed in Hague 1997), who worked on the game as programmer: There was a group of consultants for the Army—a bunch of retired generals and such—that approached Atari with the idea that the technology for Battlezone could be used to make a training simulator for the then new Infantry Fighting Vehicle. The idea was that such a simulator could be made into a game that would encourage the soldiers to use it. They would learn not only the basic operation of the IFV technology, but would also learn to distinguish between the friendly and enemy vehicle silhouettes.

Casting the player as a subject acting within a tridimensional environment not only creates a situation in which “the player envisages . . . the other as a particular and particularly generalizable kind of enemy” (Crogan 2011: 88), but also significantly reduces the distance between the player’s experience of their bearings in the real world and in the mediated world. In this perspective, Battlezone can be seen as one of the signals of the ending of what Wolf (2003: 53) describes as “the Golden Age of abstraction in the video game,” a time in which, according to the author, due to technological limitations, video games were for the most part abstract representations, that merely hinted at their real counterparts and were largely “sold based on their supposed connections to the narrative contexts shown on the games’ boxes or through their connections to known franchise” (2003: 59). Aesthetically, Battlezone is a revolutionary game for many aspects, but as a game released in 1980, it shows strong ties to earlier arcade games; most interestingly, Battlezone is an endless game. Players will eventually be hit by one of the enemy tanks and lose their last life. The most they can do is strive for the highest score on the machine. Despite endless games being very common in 1980, something about Atari’s product made users think this was not supposed to be one of them. According to Lyle Rains (in Burnham 2003: 216), senior executive at Atari at the time of the release of the game: One letter came in from a Battlezone fan who said that if you drove far enough you finally got to the volcano, and if you drove over the top of the volcano, you could go down into the crater. And he said that inside the crater there was a castle, and that you could go inside and explore the castle. Of course, none of this was true.

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On the one hand, the game’s open-world setting, in which players could move around freely, triggered speculations on the possibility of reaching different areas, somehow anticipating what would later become a common feature of more modern open-world video games. On the other hand, the possibility to visit a castle seems to point at players conceptualizing the game as having a definite teleology both spatially (there is somewhere the player needs to go) and procedurally (there is something the player needs to do there). While the game provided neither of the two, but rather relied on the convention of increasingly hard, unwinnable gameplay, it might be inferred that the peculiar nature of the playing experience provided by Battlezone somehow induced players into thinking this sort of directed traversing was justified. This is possibly due to Battlezone being a less abstract game than most of its predecessors. The relatively novel use of first person perspective within a simulated environment that generated the unlikely meeting between Army technologists and Atari engineers, certainly prompted speculations in expert players who, up to that point, were for the most part accustomed to highly stylized, if not completely abstract, representations of real events. While, as Galloway (2006: 73) notes, given the scarceness and roughness of its graphics, Battlezone cannot be deemed truly realistic (although one may object that the notion of realism is relative not to reality, but to current modes of representation),8 the fact that it presents the player with a world that, at least in its geometric qualities, is consistent with their experience of reality, seems to have something to do with the anonymous player’s reverie of climbing the volcano and exploring a castle. Battlezone is one of those cases in which fiction actively shapes the player’s interpretation of the rules. Despite the game’s primitive realism, its resemblance with common and more traditional media experiences (first person view, Euclidean perspective, etc.) such as cinema, and, to a degree, with the natural perceptual experience of reality, possibly compelled players into imagining the world of Battlezone as logically consistent. While one could accept the infinitely increasing difficulty of Asteroids, a game that, to a degree, looks and feels like a pinball machine, Battlezone was the first major video game to question the very nature of tridimensional simulation. Should we believe in infinitely spawning tanks? Where do missiles come from? Why is there a volcano if it cannot be reached? Although Atari’s game certainly helped bring forth a generation of first person shooters, its major contribution to the history of video games might have been that of questioning their conventions concerning teleological realism.

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Openness Video games as toys No video game is ever truly open. During a session of pen-and-paper role play, players can explore the boundaries of the world they are creating for themselves, and essentially expand the game in any direction. This is due to the fact that, while bound by more or less stable rules, for the most part the game is taking place in the minds of the players. Moreover, in conventional role play, rules can be—and often are—modified, rewritten, broken, or amended by players in search of a more free-form play style. In this sense, openness is a prominent feature of this kind of games, since they are not bound by hard-coded technological rules and, because of their nature, often tend to intermingle with real life. Digitally mediated simulations found in video games, on the contrary, are essentially defined by their closedness, a quality found not only in games that impose strict success conditions on players, but also in those video games that adopt a rhetoric of openness. While players of a pen-and-paper role-playing game have no hard boundary to their imagination, the technological nature of a video game dictates the space of possibility and action afforded to the players. Bogost (2006, 2007) claims that video games can, and in fact do, simulate complex situations and invite players to reflect on different possible outcomes given certain conditions. They do this by compressing (or, rather, encoding) the portrayed reality into a constrained simulation, and notably what is left out (namely what lies beyond the limitations and borders of the games) contributes to shaping and revealing the game designer’s more or less conscious ideological positioning. As noted by Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2009), a striking example of this dynamic is found in the way the games of the Grand Theft Auto series simulate life in an urban environment. In a game such as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the city is portrayed as a territory segregated along racial lines, a feature that invites players to engage in a ruthless turf war. By “building segregation into its urban sandbox” (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009: 167), Rockstar shaped a simulated city that encourages certain forms of play. What is left out of this process (one might speculate what a version of the city of San Andreas based on the lifestyle of affluent white communities would look like) constitutes the negative space of simulation, a ground against which the figure of the simulated world is measured. Video games, being no different from other forms of simulation, are inevitably abstract (Juul, 2007a), not only visually, but more importantly in the way they replicate real-life processes.

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The innate closedness of video games apparently creates a striking paradox: how can a video game be open-ended, how can it replicate the experience of an actual sandbox—a metaphor often used to describe certain genres of video games—if it is inevitably constrained by hard-coded boundaries? A tentative answer to this question is that the open-endedness of sandbox games is aesthetic rather than ontological. Whereas video games are closed systems, bound by a code executed by a computer, some video games are designed as if they were completely open to the creativity of the players, since their lack of contingent goals and clear success and failure conditions encourages experimentation and a more exploratory approach to gameplay. A very vocal proponent of this kind of games is game designer Will Wright, whose major successes—Sim City, Sim City 2000, The Sims, and Spore—all simulate complex environments, presenting players with the type of open-ended interaction discussed earlier. Wright often describes his video games as toolboxes or open-ended experiences, while Salen and Zimmerman (2004: 82) suggest that “a computer game program like Sim City does not have explicit goals and in a way is more like a toy than a game.” Wright himself refers to his games as toys. Discussing the design of his first significant success, Sim City, he claims: They [the publishers] were expecting more of a traditional game out of it. I wanted it to be more open-ended, more of a toy . . . Because we weren’t formally defining success, the first thing players had to think about was what kind of city did they want to create. What is success? Is it a big city? Low crime? Low traffic? High land value? This puts more meaning into that possibility space. Interviewed in Donovan 2010: 190

Wright’s use of the notion of “possibility space” in referring to Sim City may tie directly into psychologist D.W. Winnicott’s definition of “potential space,” the area between the individual and the environment in which one’s cultural experience takes place; according to Winnicott, toys are the main way in which children make sense and navigate this space (2005: 128–39). In this perspective, Wright’s claim that his games act like creative objects for players to tinker with seems to be founded in a psychological understanding of toys as instruments of discovery. This complex discourse, that conflates toys and digital games, implicitly transferring the qualities and uses of the former to the latter, often evolves into a peculiar ideology of openness, in which toy-like features in video games are considered inherently progressive, and often opposed to regressive, supposedly more traditional forms of gameplay. In a 2006 editorial Wright explains this duality rather explicitly:

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Every Game is an Island Games cultivate—and exploit—possibility space better than any other medium. In linear storytelling, we can only imagine the possibility space that surrounds the narrative: What if Luke had joined the Dark Side? What if Neo isn’t the One? In interactive media, we can explore it. Like the toys of our youth, modern video games rely on the player’s active involvement. We’re invited to create and interact with elaborately simulated worlds, characters, and story lines. Games aren’t just fantasy worlds to explore; they actually amplify our powers of imagination. . . . Early computer games were little toy worlds with primitive graphics and simple problems. It was up to the player’s imagination to turn the tiny blobs on the screen into, say, people or tanks. As computer graphics advanced, game designers showed some Hollywood envy: They added elaborate cutscenes, epic plots, and, of course, increasingly detailed graphics. They bought into the idea that world building and storytelling are best left to professionals, and they pushed out the player. But in their rapture over computer processing, games designers forgot that there’s a second processor at work: the player’s imagination. Wright 2006

Wright’s editorial denotes a peculiar sort of anti-authorial politics: blockbuster video games express a repressive approach to design, in which “world building and storytelling are best left to professionals,” and implicitly claims that openended video games re-balance this inequality by putting creative tools in the hands of the players. This claim echoes the writings of philosopher James P. Carse, whose book Finite and Infinite Game condenses in a series of aphorisms a duality between finite games—seen as expressions of carnality, mundanity, and strict social rules—and infinite games, that in Carse’s view are linked to the life of the spirit (1986). Both Wright’s and Carse’s positions can be seen as ideological conceptualizations of open-ended games as substantially infinite potential spaces characterized by playful engagement. In other words, games such as Spore or The Sims, that do not arbitrarily impose success conditions but rather let players build their own sub-games within a larger metagame, seem to confirm Carse’s (1986: 8) theory according to which “finite games can be played within an infinite game, but an infinite game cannot be played within a finite game.”

Expressive players and simulation savvies Is this peculiar ideology of openness the only way to describe the nature of play in open-ended video games? If the paradigm of player creativity constructed by Wright seems to ideologically erase the author’s relevance within a simulation,

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what other theoretical tools should be tested? Many different terms have been used to make sense of gameplay within authored simulations that do not require the player to pursue definite goals, but rather let them set their own goals and course of action. Pearce (2009) defines the nature of play in virtual worlds and online multiplayer games9 as “emergent”; Pearce’s argument is based on the assumption that players exploring authored worlds and, in the case of MMO s, confronting other players, will display emergent behaviors, which can be consonant, dissonant, or subversive to the constraints and limits imposed by the world. Pearce’s observation of emergent behaviors takes place within what Juul describes as games of emergence (2002, 2005), in which “a small number of rules . . . combine and yield large numbers of game variations, which the players then design strategies for dealing with” (Juul 2002). Juul’s class of games of emergence contains both traditional non-digital games (tabletop, card, strategy games) and complex authored simulations whose naturalistic mechanics allow for complex, often unpredictable gameplay. Juul postulates games of progression as opposed to games of emergence; games of progression require players to advance past a series of challenges born out of multiple strict rules that actively limit the their possibilities within the game. While, in Juul’s view, no pure examples of both categories may be found outside theory—since every game is in fact a hybrid of the two—open-ended games may be said to be a rather extreme example of games of emergence. Alessio Ceccherelli (2007, my translation) revamps Juul’s categories of emergence and progression when writing of “horizontal” and “vertical” gameplay; while vertical gameplay is teleologically oriented, horizontal gameplay is exploratory in nature. Interestingly enough, Ceccherelli does not claim the existence of ideal types of games corresponding to the two categories, but rather defines horizontal and vertical as possible styles of play, effectively bridging Pearce’s idea of emergent behavior, found in players, and Juul’s description of games as being either emergent or progressive. Furthermore, Ceccherelli confronts the issue of teleology and claims that games with a definite teleology, in which the player is invested with a mission or goal and reaches success by achieving it, may elicit a horizontal approach. According to Ceccherelli (2007: 65, my translation): In resource management and role-playing games, the main plot (we may call it the fabula) is paradoxically thin, but the game is characterized by an excess of narration. In the former, the player builds the diegesis by making choices, thus making their characters or cultures advance. In the latter, the main plot (the mission) is split into many different sub-missions that strengthen and deepen

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Every Game is an Island the understanding of the characters. In both cases, the end is present as something remote, that can be continuously delayed.

Ceccherelli’s semiotic take on these genres frames their teleology as essentially irrelevant, since the exploration of the limits and affordances of the simulation is what really matters to the player. The ending, as happy as it may be, is continuously delayed in favor of a deeper understanding of the nature of the world that the player temporarily inhabits. This approach to gameplay, which is made even more evident by completely open-ended games such as The Sims has been described by Juul (2007b) as “expressive.” According to Juul (2007b: 197) “games without goals or with optional goals can accommodate more playing styles and player types, in effect letting players choose what kind of game they want to play”; at the same time, it should be noted, the design of the simulated worlds of these open-ended video games can’t help but reflect some of the assumptions and ideological standpoints of their makers. In The Sims, for example, accumulating wealth is assumed to be a positive activity, since the acquisition of money and goods is the main process through which the sims—the simulated humans of the game—achieve and maintain happiness. In this sense, openended games establish what Juul (2007b: 198) describes as “a path of least resistance,” a way for players to conform to their functioning. On the other hand, players may want to subvert the mechanics of a given simulation on the assumption that they portray an ideology they do not subscribe to. It is the case of Alice and Kev. The Story of Being Homeless in The Sims 3, a blog detailing the results of an experiment conducted by Robin Burkinshaw, in which the author manages two sims in such a way that they end up being homeless and desperate. Burkinshaw’s blog posts about the lives of Alice and Kev read like creative exercises in (cyber) social realism, but more interesting is her statement regarding the nature of The Sims 3. Burkinshaw (2009, emphasis added) writes: This is an experiment in playing a homeless family in The Sims 3. I created two Sims, moved them in to a place made to look like an abandoned park, removed all of their remaining money, and then attempted to help them survive without taking any of the game’s unrealistically easy cash routes.

Working against the simulation, as Burkinshaw does, can be described as expressive play, a practice that uses the tools provided by the game in order to make a statement regarding the game itself, in this case about the capitalist ethos of The Sims 3. Exploring the limits of an open-ended simulation is indeed an expressive act, as remarked by the exceptionally precise words of an anonymous

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computer science student interviewed by Sherry Turkle (1995: 72): “The more you understand how simulations work, the more sophisticated a consumer you become. Sure, for some people [The Sims games are] just play-along, but if you use your brains while you play, you become simulation savvy.”

Super Scribblenauts. The winged guitarist. A game that peculiarly questions the nature of open-ended games and the extent to which one can become simulation savvy is Super Scribblenauts. In the game, players control a small anthropomorphic character who is confronted with various mini-environments full of hidden objects and logic puzzles. At the beginning of each stage a caption instructs the player on the goal or goals that need to be achieved in order to progress to the next level. Stage 3–9, for example, casts the player in a desert in the company of an archaeologist; the caption reads “give the archaeologist what he needs to locate the lost ziggurat.” To solve the enigmas, players need to type words in the game interface in order to have different objects appear onscreen. The ziggurat level, for example, can simply be solved by typing in the word “map”: a small map appears onscreen and can be dragged into the hands of the archaeologist, who will then discover the ancient temple. After the discovery of the ziggurat the game prompts players to find something hidden under the building; I decided to type in the word “shovel” and conjure up a shovel to have my avatar dig a hole in the ground. This led me to find bones that needed to be arranged and assembled as a skeleton, so I produced “glue” for the archaeologist to use. This, in turn, led to the completion of the level, signaled by the appearance of a star (a “starite” in the game) above the head of my avatar. Despite having already completed the stage, I decided to revisit it and experiment with the game’s dictionary. I typed in the word “whip” and created a whip for the archaeologist to use, hoping to produce an unexpected Indiana Jonesian twist in the life of my unremarkable companion. Then I decided to experiment even further, so I typed “Mozart” and had a figurine resembling the composer appear onscreen. At this point, committed to breaking the game, I typed “winged guitarist”, which resulted rather literally in a flying guitar player. While structurally different from the open-ended games I have described so far, Super Scribblenauts is an interesting case of openness which deserves some thought. On the one hand, the game has a conclusion, since after having completed every stage, one could reasonably assume to have beaten the game. On the other hand, the surprisingly comprehensive dictionary of Super Scribblenauts

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(other satisfying experiments included “Cthulhu,” the Lovecraftian divinity, “curry,” and “choir”) makes the inquiry of the game’s potentialities an engaging gameplay option. This exploratory mode of engagement is in fact elicited by the game, that awards points to players adopting creative solutions for solving stages, or finding unused dictionary entries. Reviews and accounts of playing Super Scribblenauts produced by players are often centered around unusual or puzzling findings within the game’s encyclopedia; for example Clark (2010) reports creating a “psychotic headless horse,” an ominous creature made possible by the modular semantics of the game’s dictionary. Janet Murray writes that digital media are inherently “encyclopedic,” since their ability to store data makes them exceptionally suited for creating databases of information. Murray (1997: 84) writes that “just as important as this huge capacity of electronic media is the encyclopedic expectation they induce.” Super Scribblenauts takes this assumption literally, by confronting the player with an actual encyclopedia (or a bestiary, given the existence of both a winged guitarist and a psychotic headless horse) of substantives and adjectives that can be combined. The hidden dictionary of Super Scribblenauts is also a database, a paradigm that can be actualized in a number of different syntagms. This combinatory process resonates with Manovich’s (2001: 231) theory according to which “[in digital media] database (the paradigm) is given material existence, while narrative (the syntagm) is downplayed. Paradigm is real; syntagm virtual.” Every time players type a word in the game’s interface, they access the game’s database and pull an entry from it, actualizing it into the game. While promising almost infinite capacity and complex modularity, the encyclopedias and databases found within digital media must be finite in order to be operational. The necessary finiteness of a game’s resources generates two opposite authorial strategies: on the one hand, Wright’s rhetorical erasing of the limits of the simulation; on the other hand, the focus on these very limits presented by Super Scribblenauts. In this sense, the fact that Super Scribblenauts places such a strong emphasis on the existence of this hidden database characterizes 5th Cell’s game as a reversal of the ideology of openness. While The Sims hides the finiteness of its paradigm with the intent of creating an apparently naturalistic rendition of social reality, Super Scribblenauts challenges players to explore the limits of the database, by presenting them with challenges that can only be solved by finding the right entry within the encyclopedia. In other words, Super Scribblenauts contains two sets of challenges, of which one is vertical and consists of the teleological traversing of the game; the other is horizontal, consisting of the

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continuous interaction of the player with the game’s database and the interrogation of its limits. Is this expressive play? In Super Scribblenauts the denouement of simulative limits described by Turkle’s student as being the reward of simulation-savvy players is turned into a proper game mechanic, a shift that in itself represents an acknowledgment of the player’s role as interpreter of the limits of a simulation. For example, the reiterated use of the game’s dictionary imposed on players by the very mechanics of Super Scribblenauts will eventually lead them to bump into one of the game’s ambiguities. If players can choose from a plethora of complex, at times convoluted adjectives such as “gargantuan” and “grotesque,” why can they not use the adjective “gay”? The exclusion from the game’s database of a number of commonly used words for what can be broadly defined as political reasons is a literal demonstration of the ground-figure relationship that exists between a simulation and its negative space. Not being able to conjure up a gay guitarist inevitably leads to questioning the rationale supporting the design of the Super Scribblenauts database. But while most open-ended games will purposely erase such inconsistencies, in order to highlight their mimetic qualities with real life, Super Scribblenauts somehow acknowledges them by allowing players to test the borders and confines of the game constantly. If video games are to be thought of as toys, their intrinsic finiteness is what makes them significant since, as Sicart (2014: 57) claims, “much of the joy in interacting with these procedural toys comes from testing their very propness as we figure out where the seams are.”

Notes 1 Galloway’s use of the notion of diegesis in what he defines as a medium that needs to be enacted apparently contrasts with a traditional understanding of διήγησις (diegesis) as opposed to μίμησις (mimesis), where the former refers to narrating, and the latter to enacting. The author’s use of the term seems to be derived from the narratological current of film studies (Chatman 1980) rather than from literary theory. 2 It should be noted that not all authored media experiences are meant to provide closure, and that conceptualizing them in opposition to a supposed openness of “natural” experiences constitutes a false dichotomy. For example Bolter (2013: 121) discusses what he terms “aesthetics of catharsis” and “aesthetics of flow,” as two main modes of media production. While objects designed according to aesthetics of

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Every Game is an Island catharsis are pivoted around their final resolution, other media products may adopt a more open-ended aesthetic of flow. I am referring here to hard game over as those instantiations of game over that completely obliterate the player progresses. Orland admits that softer forms of game over are widely present in contemporary games. Triclot (2011: 18, my translation) describes the F5/F9 dynamic as a fundamental connection between video games and personal computers: “The main point is that the F9/F5 dynamic expresses the very nature of the computer medium found at the heart of play.” It might be said that saving features in video games became widespread with the migration of the medium to the personal computer, whose hard disks could store unfinished games. TTL (Transistor-Transistor Logic) technology defines a class of digital circuits based on transistors, widely used in early computers and other electronic equipment. Microprocessors are single integrated circuits incorporating the functions of a computer CPU. The shift from the former to the latter was a huge technological change for the video game industry, since in most cases electronic engineers were substituted by computer programmers who had an expertise in the programming languages used to control microprocessors. Juul’s thesis is sound, but may benefit from a historical addendum. While in the 1990s and 2000s the practice of computer gaming was certainly pervaded by an aura of impenetrability and mastery, in the early days of personal computing, it was video games that contributed to defining the computer as a friendlier, relatively accessible machine, progressively dispelling the cultural trope that framed computation as something that required esoteric knowledge of the inner working of a room-size mainframe. Video games helped users reorient their attitude towards computers, contributing “to the idea of computing as something that everyone can do and which can be pleasurable, even life-enhancing” (Kirkpatrick 2013: 65). This is true both of proto-arcade games—think of William Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two, that used the specialized Donner 30 computer and an oscilloscope to simulate tennis in the Brookhaven National Laboratory—and of games produced by hobbyists for early home computers. For the reasons described above, most of these early games ran endlessly and had no real narrative progression, but instead acted like computational toys or mimicked the functioning and design of arcade hits of the time. In this perspective, while it may be true that contemporary casual games have contributed to the resurgence of “all access gaming,” it should be noted that computer games historically acted as a form of contact language between non-professional users and early domestic computers. Interestingly, Wilson et al. (2011) claim that casual mobile games such as Angry Birds served a similar purpose in helping users get accustomed to portable devices featuring touch screens.

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8 Galloway argues that Battlezone’s mode of representation is “realisticness” rather than “realism”, since the game attempts to narrow the gap between the player’s spatial understanding of the real world and its representation onscreen. This form of aesthetic realism, which can be opposed to Wolf ’s notion of abstractness, is used here as an operative concept, but is less philosophically informed than both Galloway’s “social realism” (2006: 70–84) and Aarseth’s “ludo-realism” (2014: 491). 9 Obviously massively multiplayer online games (MMO s) pose a different set of problems, since their focus on social interaction makes emergent behaviors less predictable.

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Game ↔ Metagame Despite what game designers and critics often maintain, in most cases playing a video game is a deeply fragmented, discontinuous, inconsistent experience. John Devore’s minimal description of Wizorb, a simple game that combines mechanics derived from Breakout with role-playing elements, as “a brick breaker in the same vein as Arkanoid, but with a splash of RPG elements added in” (2011), seems sufficient to define Tribute’s minimalist exercise in game design. But is it? As I launch the game, I am confronted with a title screen prompting me to press START in order to access a second menu, where I can choose to resume a previously saved quest, start a new one, or access the game’s configuration menu in order to modify parameters such as volume of music or game language and controls. Eventually I am presented with what a player would consider the actual game, an elaborate take on the pinball paradigm. After playing for a while, real life interferes: my phone rings and I need to press ESC to pause the game. When I get back to Wizorb I press ESC again to resume playing, but almost immediately lose a ball and witness a game over screen. I am now presented with a new menu, via which I can decide whether I want to restart the game, quit, or move to the map, a sub-section of Wizorb showing my progress, or to the village, an area where I can buy new spells and accept short missions from the inhabitants. Only two minutes into the game, I have traversed several different states: proper gameplay, configuration screens, setup menus, and a number of interstitial states. In my short experience with Wizorb I have been subjected to changes of state operated on me by the game (the passage from play to configuration following a game over) or by me on the machine (pressing ESC so I can answer the phone). Moreover, I have encountered different levels of gameplay, ranging from what could be described as the game’s core mode of interaction—the pinball-like stages—to instances of gameplay designed to produce a remote effect on play such as the village scenes. I also have modified the volume of the music, the language of the game, the sensitivity of the controls, thus engaging in a series of meta-operations designed to affect the outcome of proper gameplay positively. 85

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These meta-operations and their positioning within the wider ecology of digital play will be the subject of this chapter. Earlier in the book, I used Galloway’s notion of diegetic and non-diegetic space to approach the analysis of borders and thresholds found within gameplay. In this chapter I will broaden the scope of the discussion and address the separation between diegetic and non-diegetic game areas by describing not only the player operations that allow these borders to be crossed, but also the instances in which this crossing is enforced by the machine. In other words, this chapter will discuss the pervasive presence of devices designed to perform metaoperations on gameplay within video games, and their relevance to the player’s experience. Since in some cases these devices are masked or fused within proper gameplay in order to provide as seamless a playing experience as possible, I agree with Galloway (2006: 8) in some respects when he writes that it is “difficult to demarcate the difference between diegetic and non-diegetic acts in a video game, for the process of good game continuity is to fuse these acts together as seamlessly as possible.” In agreement with Galloway’s concern on the difficulty of separating gameplay from its interface, Juul and Norton (2009) claim that the dividing line between interface and gameplay in video games is a mythical construct, since in most cases it is possible to find crossover elements for the two categories. This chapter will tackle this ambiguity and analyse the ways in which it is incorporated into current and past design practices. For example, the idea of creating interfaceless games that should flow seamlessly is a prevalent notion in the game design community, and has generated a number of interesting masking strategies that will be analysed here. On the other hand, I will demonstrate how the relevance and prevalence of non-diegetic areas in video games has often been approached by game designers as a resource to be exploited in order to create interesting estrangement effects. As in the previous chapter, I will start with examples in which the demarcation between game and metagame is clearly visible, proceeding to instances in which it is deleted or disguised.

Fragmentation Overlooked and underrated In the last chapter I analysed the relevance and meaning of what I called diegetic thresholds. As I said earlier, these borders separate different areas of gameplay,

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but are nevertheless located within the diegetic context of the game world; a cutscene triggered by a specific event can certainly be said to fragment the player’s interaction with the game, but its existence—while bothering some players—is justified by its effect on the player’s understanding of the features and status of the game world. The game over example highlighted a specific, rather extreme kind of diegetic border, that informs the player of a peculiar condition of the game world but also abruptly interrupts their interaction with it. In this chapter I will argue that a different kind of border, often overlooked by scholars and critics, should be investigated, since it represents a constitutive part of the complex experience of playing a video game. I refer to what could be defined as the threshold between diegesis and configuration, which separates proper play from those instances in which gameplay is temporarily suspended and secondlevel operations of configuration are implemented by the player or the software. Pausing the game to access one of its menus—for example to adjust the volume of sound effects or music—is a common case of voluntary access to this area of configuration, while witnessing the appearance of a static loading screen in the middle of a play session is an example of a machine-operated crossing of this dividing line. As the earlier Wizorb example showed, the very act of playing a video game is usually dotted with interruptions of different size and relevance, a condition of fragmentation that is in itself relevant and deserves some scrutiny. In reviewing the literature regarding the different states a player crosses while playing video games, one would be surprised to find that while diegetic breaks such as cutscenes (Klevjer 2002) and full motion videos (Perron and Therrien 2009) are often analysed, very few scholars have focused on the relevance of interstitial nondiegetic elements. This might be due to the fact that while the use of cutscenes may be considered as a deliberate authorial choice, the presence of a configurative level both explicit (adjustments and setup operations) and implicit (loading states and background operations acted by the software) is considered unavoidable, due to the technological nature of the medium. Newman (2004: 84) seems to allude to this status quo when he writes that “because computer memory is required to store architecture and graphics as well as the rest of the game program, and because that computer memory is finite, games are necessarily split into portions that can be loaded and stored in the console or PC ’s memory.” A certain degree of fragmentation, then, seems to be essential to video games, since the modular nature of their architecture requires the creation of what Newman describes as “portions.” But is acknowledging the relative inevitability

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of these intermissions sufficient for scholars to claim that they should not matter in the debate on video games? Once again, Newman (2004: 83) provides an implicit answer to the question when he writes that “there is a valorization of seamlessness in the video game development community and designers lament loading times and technological limitations of even the most potent of today’s PC s and consoles.” In other words, a certain prevalence of a designer-oriented perspective found within game studies, coupled with a rhetoric of technological advancement, may have prevented the emergence of a more complex reading of the medium as composed by both its affordances and its intrinsic limitations. In this chapter I will focus precisely on these non-diegetic instances of interaction with a video game in order to discuss their relevance in practices of meaningmaking and their pervasiveness within the experience of gameplay.

Player-operated breaks: PAUSE Video game historians (Donovan 2010, Kent 2001, Wolf 2008) agree on the fact that some of the most outstanding features of video games became part of the habits and customs of the users after the domestication of the medium, namely after its transformation into a pervasive household object. In other words, some of what Lisa Gitelman (2006: 5–8) describes as “the protocols” of the medium were established in the age of its domestication, roughly between the late 1970s and the mid-1980s. According to Gitelman, every medium implies a number of protocols, a fuzzy set of expected behaviors, technological affordances and limitations, and regulative norms that pertain to the way users interact with it and change through time with the emergence of different forms of interaction. In the case of video games, one of the most significant shifts in play practices deriving from domestication is the implementation of a pause function. Playing a video game at home became an experience that could be interrupted at will, a modification of the protocols of the medium that quickly became the norm for domestic play, significantly affecting the ways in which video games were designed and played. While the practice of playing a game in the arcade was essentially shaped by its seamlessness—a feature that, it should be noted, allowed for a faster turnover—home video games progressively became more complex affairs, split into longer sessions and requiring considerable amounts of time to be completed. In this new context, being able to pause the often frantic pace of the game became an essential feature. In this perspective, the option to pause the game, usually by pressing a specific button not used during proper gameplay, can

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be said to derive from the domestication of video games and the subsequent reorientation of game design towards deeper game mechanics and prolonged play. In other words, if playing a video game in an arcade represented a closed experience, relatively impermeable to the stimuli of real life, playing at home implied the asynchronous integration between play and more trivial activities, usually offered by the existence of a pause button. The act of pausing a video game arguably constitutes one of the few unilateral operations that the player performs on the machine. As I mentioned earlier, video games can be seen as oppositional pieces of software, but pressing the pause button is an act that allows for no opposition. The inclusion of the option to pause one’s interaction with a medium is also identified by David Bordwell as a consequence of a domestication process in the case of cinema. According to Bordwell (2007): As everybody knows, a DVD offers more interactivity than a movie you watch in a multiplex. In a theatre, the movie rolls on, unaffected by anything you may do. But with a DVD you can pause the film, run fast forward, skip to a particular second, shuffle chapters, even play the thing in reverse. Most minimally, the DVD offers greater convenience. You can halt the film so you can answer a phone call or zip back to replay a bit you might have missed.

In the case of video games, it may be hard to maintain that the adoption of a pause function subverts the power relations that are proper of the medium. According to Marsha Kinder (1991) it is from the peculiar fluctuating distribution of power afforded by the medium that video game players derive their pleasure. Differently from cinema, in the case of video games the pause function is integrated within a system of interaction that naturally accommodates a series of fluctuations in the power and authority afforded to the player. While Bordwell describes pre-domestic cinema as an experience that required a subject in charge of the screening, and a viewing subject whose role is that of a “receiver” of the film, the oppositional nature of video games allows for a more subtle distribution of power between the machine and the player. Nevertheless, what can be said is that domestic fruition of a video game implies the construction of a higher-level form of power, one in which the player has the ultimate option to temporarily pause the game. This temporary suspension of gameplay, arbitrarily enforced by the player, is described by Galloway (2006: 12) as follows: Pausing a game is an action by the operator that sets the entire game into a state of suspended animation. The pause act comes from outside the machine,

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Every Game is an Island suspending the game inside a temporary bubble of inactivity. The game freezes in its entirety. . . . It is non-diegetic precisely because nothing in the world of the game can explain or motivate it when it occurs.

In other words, pausing a game is a form of border crossing that the player can perform within the game without any sanction from the software. While apparently trivial, the operation of freezing the game in its entirety is really a relevant indicator of the existence of a clearly defined—although usually internalized and thus naturalized by players—separation between the diegesis of a game and the non-diegetic areas that surround and complement it. The case of the so-called idle animations may be useful in clarifying the relevance of this membrane. One example is Commander Keen IV , a bidimensional side-scrolling game in which the player controls a young boy lost on a planet inhabited by weird and mean creatures. While the game cannot be defined contemplative (at least not in the sense a game such as A Slow Year may be said to be contemplative), the world of Commander Keen IV moves at a relatively slow pace. In fact, players can in some cases decide to stop exploring the surrounding environment without risking a sudden attack from one of the creatures living on the planet. In this case, an idle animation is triggered; if players leave their avatar in the same spot for some time, it will start showing signs of impatience and, eventually, will sit on the ground and read a book. This sort of automated behavior is used by designers to signal a situation of diegetic stasis; the game has not stopped working, but rather its whole world is waiting for players to make their move. While the avatar in Commander Keen IV is performing his idle animation, a series of other minor animations keep cycling onscreen. For example, drops of water dangle, and living trees blink and smile. On the other hand, pausing the game in Commander Keen IV prompts the appearance of a screen that asks players if they want to quit the game and return to DOS or keep playing; no animation is triggered nor does the avatar show comic reactions to the player’s indecision. The whole game is in a state of suspension. While essentially similar in their effects on the game, the two instances of stasis that can be experienced in a game such as Commander Keen IV are separated by a well-defined dividing line. On the one hand, the idle animation serves as a reminder of the internal consistency of the world in which the game takes place: a diegetic space that continues to exist even in the absence of any input from the players, implicitly stating that even non-interaction can be considered as a valid option within the game. On the other hand, is a unilateral act of rupture performed by the player, who voluntarily leaves the game world, reasserting their (temporary) dominance over it. Comparing these two cases of

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Figure 3.1 Idle animation in Commander Keen IV

suspension brings us back to Bordwell’s claim that pausing is indeed an act of reaffirmation of power within media consumption. While the diegesis constructs the fiction of a self-sufficient lively world, by crossing the line and accessing a non-diegetic space, the player eventually claims their role as ultimate master of the playing experience. In some cases, the uniqueness of the act of pausing the game is highlighted through a series of visual clues that clearly signal the difference between activating the pause mode and simply waiting. Two very different games such as Angry Birds and Farenheit1 use a similar approach to pausing. In the case of Angry Birds, the option to pause is present onscreen during gameplay through a conventional symbol derived from audio and video editing. In Farenheit, pressing START on the controller activates the pause screen, which is composed of three symbols: one for resuming play, one for quitting, and one for accessing the options menu. Both the PLAY and STOP symbols are on buttons that explicitly refer to those used in other media contexts. The use of conventional PAUSE and PLAY symbols in the two games clearly indicates a process of incorporation of previous media interfaces in the context of video games.

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Figure 3.2 User interface of Angry Birds

Despite this apparent similarity, I argue that the meaning of the interface design of the two games could not be more different. In the case of Angry Birds, the immediate accessibility of the PAUSE button strengthens the game’s intrinsic interruptibility; the identity of Angry Birds as a casual game is thus reinforced visually by the relevance of the PAUSE button and its extreme accessibility. Farenheit, on the other hand, by presenting the player with a PLAY button, uses a converse rhetoric. By remediating a common feature in audiovisual media, Farenheit suggests its direct affiliation to the more reputable medium of cinema and while it does not deny the player the option to pause the game, it encourages continuous viewing by using the visual device of the PLAY button. In this case, the use of symbolic conventions derived from an older medium seems to reinforce Farenheit’s authority as a mature, movie-like video game, a feature often mentioned by the developers. In his post-mortem of the game, developer David Cage (2005) wrote: I like to call this game an “Interactive Drama”, which in my mind suggests the fact that the player acts and interacts in a narrative and emotional experience. The concept of the game is quite simple: put the player in the shoes of the hero

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of a movie and let him decide what he wants to do. His actions will have consequences that will modify the story. For me, this game is unique in many ways: it aims to show that it is possible to create a game that is entirely storydriven without loosing [sic] interactivity. It also tries to create an emotional experience based on characters, relationships and moral choices, a game with a more adult tone.

In the case of Farenheit it could be argued that a peculiar use of a common game design trait such as the pause function is a way of underscoring the supposed maturity of the game by associating it with a previous, arguably more respected medium. The PAUSE button implemented in video games after their domestication can thus be characterized as both a functional and an expressive feature. As a functional device, it allows for the integration of gameplay into other mundane tasks, and constitutes a radical fluctuation in the distribution of power by enabling the player to suspend interaction at will. As an expressive feature, the pause function can be adopted by game designers to signal a state of constant interruptibility—as in Angry Birds—or to strengthen a game’s aesthetic bonds with other audiovisual media.

Machine-operated breaks: LOADING . . . Pausing a video game can be seen as the ultimate act of authority the player enjoys over the software. At the other end of the spectrum, one finds machineoperated breaks: non-negotiable necessary or accidental interruptions of gameplay that somehow reveal the game’s inner workings and disrupt the seamlessness of play. Glitches, crashes, sudden resets, and other malfunctions are unavoidable machine-operated crossings of the diegetic border. The eventuality and idiosyncrasy of these unscripted events prevent scholars from treating them as a valuable subject for investigation; just like when a projected film flickers and eventually stops, games can malfunction and reveal the artificiality of the simulated world by showing its guts. An experimental game like GlitchHiker synthesizes the fallibility of games through its uncommon and self-destructive mechanics. Presented at the 2011 Global Game Jam, the game addresses the theme of extinction by questioning the nature and relevance of glitches and internal errors in video games. GlitchHiker could be played by a finite number of players, since every unsuccessful game would introduce more glitches and inconsistencies in the game world; after a certain number of play sessions,

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GlitchHiker quietly died, overwhelmed by errors and malfunctions. Videos of the game’s short life found online show the amassing of glitches that affect the graphics, the interface, and the controls in a progressive unveiling of the game’s broken inner workings. A second part of the game, called the SYSTEM , resided on a remote server and administered GlitchHiker’s decline, effectively acting as a metaphor for the game’s code, since it represented a non-diegetic area that was progressively revealed by glitches. In this perspective, Vlambeer’s work procedurally identifies the functioning of a machine-operated break such as a glitch; the crossing of the border separating the diegesis and the peripheral non-diegetic area is represented by the continuous dialogue between the proper game and the remote section of the SYSTEM , whose progressive emergence announces the fallibility of gameplay. A less sporadic instance of a machine-operated break can be found in the loading screens that appear during gameplay in a number of games. As noted by Newman, these are essentially due to the technological constraints of the medium; video games with complex animations and extensive explorable environments often need to pre-load parts of a stage in order to cope with the amount of data that need to be handled in real time. In most cases, this leads to a fragmentation of gameplay, since the player is required to wait while the next area or stage is pre-rendered. When allowed by the game’s internal architecture, loading screens are placed in contexts in which interrupting the flow of the game results in a minor disruption of gameplay. In most sport games, for example, loading routines happen before matches and during the halftime break, two moments in which an interruption does not constitute a significant detriment to gameplay. In more narrative-oriented games, loading screens are often used to convey contextual information to the player. In Max Payne for example, static images are used during loading periods to introduce each chapter of the hardboiled story of a renegade police officer. In other cases, during the loading sessions the player can still act within closed environments. In Dead Space 2 most of the loading happens while the player is on an elevator that carries their avatar between levels. Since the player will not face enemies nor engage in other computationally intense activities during the elevator ride, while loading takes place in the background, they are still free to control their character. In the case of Dead Space 2, this masking of the loading screen seems to reinforce a general inclination towards immersion that permeates the game. In other cases, loading screens are replaced by mini games that keep the player engaged by avoiding total inactivity,2 as in the case of Rayman Origins, in which players can still

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control their character during loading periods and rehearse moves in a relatively compact environment. In other words, since loading screens constitute an inevitable burden for players to endure, it is possible to recognize two tendencies in game design. On the one hand, in Max Payne the intrinsic stillness of these moments is used to establish the pace of the game; since Remedy’s work alternates between fastpaced action sequences and more contemplative parts in which the player is required to read excerpts from a graphic novel, the punctuation offered by this device is used to divide the story into recognizable, independent chapters. In Dead Space 2, on the other hand, the removal of loading screens is obtained through the use of a diegetic stratagem—that of the elevator—justifying through narration the relative inactivity of the avatar. Both the pause function and loading screens fall into a category of threshold objects that separate proper gameplay from its outer metaplay shell. As I have said earlier, these devices have become part of medium protocols and, in time, have become naturalized, expected features of any video game. Because of the universality and intended unobtrusiveness of these bordering devices in contemporary games, it is often hard to describe their specific functions and characteristics. For this reason, this chapter’s case study, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, was chosen because it shows a tendency to experiment with the blurring of the game ↔ metagame membrane. By circumventing player expectations through rhetorical figures such as the metalepsis, the game shows the artificiality of devices such as loading screens, save/load functions, and other configurative material relating to the metagame. In this sense, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem serves as what Martin Heidegger (2010: 75) describes as a “disruption of reference”: by showing these devices in an unexpected and counter-intuitive fashion, and having the player face their potential malfunctioning, the game reveals something about them that would have been impossible to grasp otherwise.

Is this life reality? Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem The Holy Mountain is one of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s better-known filmic works. The film is composed of a series of symbolic tableaux drawing visual and narrative inspiration from different religious and esoteric traditions. Jodorowsky’s film is often cited as one of the most accomplished example of psychedelic underground cinema of the 1970s, inspired both by Kenneth Anger’s

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experimental shorts of the previous decade and by the aesthetics of coeval B movies. In the last scene of the film, a group of men gather on top of a supposedly holy mountain in order to discover the deeper meaning of their existence. One of the men—Jodorowsky himself—suddenly utters: “Is this life reality? No, it is a film. Zoom back, camera.” As if obeying Jodorowsky’s order, the camera zooms back, revealing a group of technicians gathered around the actors and, in the background, an entire film crew working on stage props and materials. The Holy Mountain’s final coup is an extreme example of what Gerard Genette defines as “metalepsis” (1980), a term used to describe those situations within a narrative in which the author deliberately enters the story or extracts one of the characters from it, thus dissipating the illusion of a self-sufficient narrative world by showing its fabricated nature. In a later essay, Genette summed up his definition as follows: By “metalepsis” I mean any kind of transgression, whether supernatural or playful, of a given level of narrative or dramatic fiction, as when an author pretends to introduce himself into his own creation, or to extract one of his characters from it. Genette 1997: 469

While here Genette refers explicitly to written narrative, his 2004 essay Métalepse: De la figure à la fiction, applies the concept to a number of other media products, including films such as Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo. The surprising finale of Jodorowsky’s movie can certainly be interpreted as a metalepsis whose effect is that of an unexpected estrangement of the viewer, who is suddenly confronted with the artificiality of the film. Moreover, the fact that the film’s director utters the enchantment by which the cinematic apparatus is revealed, strengthens the effectiveness of the metaleptic device. While both Allen’s and Jodorowsky’s works admittedly fall in the broad category of self-reflexive, conscious explorations of the medium of film within which the use of metalepsis can be read as an authorial statement, this rhetorical device is often also used in genre films. One notable example, which brings us closer to our case study, is the Italian episodic horror Black Sabbath. Comprising three autonomous episodes, Bava’s film also features a series of introductions to each segment, hosted by Boris Karloff, who addresses the audience directly in each introduction. In the final segment, by means of a tracking movement not dissimilar from that of The Holy Mountain, the camera reveals that the actor had been on a rather small set the whole time. Technicians and other members of the crew run in circles,

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waving tree branches to simulate a horse ride through the forest, while a man in plain clothes operates a fan that sadly produces the winds of Transylvania. Bava’s metalepsis, though used in the context of a B movie, is not less striking than Jodorowsky’s; even more so, considering that the effect of showing Karloff as an actor playing a part rather than as a character in a story considerably threatens the horror effects of the film through a rather ingenious act of self-parody. In other words, this latter example of metalepsis aims at deconstructing the genre’s intended effects of dread and terror by revealing the mundane working of the filmic apparatus. The game Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem employs a similar technique to that used by Bava by creating a short circuit between the diegetic and the configurative, but surprisingly achieves opposite results. The player controls Alexandra Roivas, the niece of the eccentric historian Edward Roivas. After her grandfather is brutally murdered, Alexandra explores his mansion searching for clues; during the exploration, the player discovers an ancient book that tells the grotesque (and at times rather convoluted) story of a demon lord who will soon rise to dominate the earth. The player is then cast in the role of different characters who, through the ages, have possessed the book and summoned the spells it contains. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem is a rather literal take on the survival horror trope: the player needs to explore different environments and confront an array of monstrous enemies in a state of relative deprivation of supplies, but its episodic structure—in itself reminiscent of Bava’s anthology—and its peculiar use of machine and player-operated breaks calls for deeper analysis. The game applies a first metalepsis in its use of encased narratives: Alexandra reads a book whose characters are controlled by the player, who, at the end of every chapter will regress to a previous narrative frame and control Alexandra again. This first strategy, although cleverly used in the game, is certainly not unheard of in contemporary video games.3 However, the first metaleptic effect is reinforced by another, more surprising, design choice. Player-controlled characters in the game can be harmed by enemies in two ways: physical damage if hit with a sword or bitten by a zombie; psychological damage if they witness gruesome or unexplainable scenes. In this case, the character’s “sanity meter” signals a loss of sanity. When most of the character’s sanity is depleted, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem activates an intriguing form of metalepsis. The game starts simulating malfunctions both of the player’s console and of the TV set by resetting the volume, presenting the player with false error messages, distorting colors and sounds. In other cases, instances of typically player-operated breaks such as

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hitting PAUSE to save game progress, turn into unexpectedly horrific experiences. During my experience with the game, while I was saving my progresses I found myself witnessing the message “All save files were successfully deleted,” a dreadful sight for a player who, at that point, had spent over ten hours playing Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. Luckily, it was one of the game’s frequent metaleptic effects, a sudden incursion of its oppositional mechanics in the conventionally safe area of a PAUSE screen. In other cases, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem uses the reverse strategy. For example, during gameplay I saw my TV set switch off; in this case, the area of gameplay was invaded by the machine performing what is typically considered an action reserved for the player, that of turning off the game. Both examples refer to a common strategy of systematic border crossing between the diegesis and configurative operations. Video game historian Carl Therrien (2009: 38) dubs Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem “tricks” as “hallucinatory sequences,” a definition that refers to their transiency and relative harmlessness. While in the game they are presented as such (the player’s avatar often mutters “this can’t be real . . .”), I argue that these direct interpellations of the player are better interpreted as systematic disruptions of their understanding of game conventions. In other words, while by using the device of metalepsis, Bava consciously hampered the horrific potential of his film and at the same time reaffirmed his authorial control over the medium, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem reaches the converse result by depriving the player of their most naturalized form of control, that of the basic meta-rules of machine interaction. This certainly enhances the game’s horror effect, but more importantly questions the player’s sense of control by reassigning authority within the player-game relationship. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem can be described with Laurie N. Taylor’s effective periphrasis (2009: 52) as a game that “use[s] the interface as part of the overall gaming experience” in order to generate an arguably medium-specific sort of horror via loss of control.

Metagaming Playing outside the game Galloway (2006) defines as “gamic” actions those operations that have a direct effect on and within the simulated world of gameplay. In his words, then, adjusting the screen resolution of a video game is not a gamic action, since it affects the player’s experience but does not reflect within the game’s world. On

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the other hand, rotating a falling tile in Tetris is a gamic action, because it fundamentally modifies the status of the simulated environment by interacting with its internal rules. In the following section I will discuss the relevance and features of non-diegetic gamic operations. With this definition I refer to those actions, usually reserved for the player, that affect the simulated world, but are performed in a non-diegetic space. These actions usually happen in games: in which the act of configuration itself is the very site of gameplay. These are games oriented around understanding and executing specific algorithms. All resource management simulations, as well as most real-time strategy (RTS ) and turn-based games, are designed in this manner. . . . These actions of configuration are often the very essence of the operator’s experience of gameplay – simple proof that gaming may, even for limited moments, eschew the diegetic completely. Galloway 2006: 13

A revealing example of this specific kind of gameplay may be found in the popular video game Battle Chess. If one were to consider only the rules of the game, Battle Chess could be described as a straightforward digital adaptation of the game of chess. Two players compete against each other in a regular game of chess, which takes place on a virtual board represented onscreen; every piece moves according to the same rules used in a real game of chess. What sets Battle Chess apart from other computer-based chess games, is the superimposition of a diegetic level: every time a player moves a piece, a short animation revealing that the piece is actually alive is triggered. Pawns move like soldiers, the rook turns into a rock monster, while the queen advances regally towards her destination. Moreover, when a piece is captured, a longer and more complex animation depicts a battle that results in the killing of the captured piece. Battle Chess’s use of unrefined and at times comic animations can be interpreted as little more than a gimmick, but in this context serves the purpose of illustrating how a game can be played for the most part in its non-diegetic areas. Every relevant decision in Battle Chess is made beforehand and then instructed to the game; at that point, the diegesis of the game comes to life, triggering an animation that cannot be stopped or interacted with by the player. In other words, playing Battle Chess means interacting with a world that only exists pre- or post- any of the player’s actions. Interplay’s game exemplifies a sort of asynchronous play that characterizes games in which gamic actions are performed elsewhere, outside what Aarseth (2004: 48) describes as “the material/semiotic system” of the game. While Battle Chess is certainly an extreme example, a wide variety of games use this strategy of asynchronous interaction: role-playing video games, for

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example, usually require players to perform a variety of operations in this offline fashion. Interacting with one’s inventory, assigning different abilities to an avatar or a party of warriors and, in the case of turn-based games, battling enemies and foes often happens in a liminal area. The world of the game is in a state of stasis (in many cases, accessing the player’s inventory coincides with pressing the PAUSE button), but the player is required to make important decisions that will affect the game’s outcome. In other cases, such as The Incredible Machine, the player is required to configure the whole of the diegetic world before being able to put it in motion, engaging in an artificially constructed—since it is not constrained by any technological limitation—form of asynchronous gameplay.

The legacy of dice In an article devoted to the emergence of narrative-based games in the 1970s, game designer and scholar Greg Costikyan (2007: 5) writes: Before 1973, if you had said something like “games are a storytelling medium,” just about anyone would have looked at you like you were nuts – and anyone knowledgeable about games would have assumed you knew nothing about them. . . . But in the early 1970s, two things happened: Will Crowther’s Colossal Cave and Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson’s Dungeons and Dragons.

Costikyan identifies Colossal Cave and Dungeons and Dragons as the two main vectors of the integration between gameplay and storytelling that would later become a stable feature of commercial video games and fuel one of the most heated debates in games studies. I will analyse Colossal Cave in Chapter 4 (under its subsequent name of Adventure), so for now I will discuss Costikyan’s claim regarding Dungeons and Dragons. Dungeon and Dragons is a role-playing game in which a variable number of players are cast in the role of fictional characters who need to complete a series of missions. In a game of Dungeon and Dragons, players usually sit around a table, and one of them, designated as the Dungeon Master, is in charge of conducting the game and narrating the events of a fictional adventure. The other players are the adventurers, and their objective is to devise efficient strategies and solutions for the quests offered by the game master. To do so, players roll dice whose outcomes interact with a series of factors and coefficients determining the hero’s abilities. For example, if a player is confronted with a task that can be accomplished through charisma, they will roll a D20 (a die with twenty sides) and then compare the result with their level of charisma

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(for example 15) to decide if the action was successful. Dungeons and Dragons derives from a previous game titled Chainmail, a war game-influenced take on role playing, in which players controlled armies of miniatures on a battlefield. According to Costikyan (2007: 5), Dungeons and Dragons proved revolutionary because: It dispensed completely with the need for miniatures, a board, cards, or other physical game assets. It transpired entirely in imagination – turning the tightly constrained nature of all previous games on its head. If you could imagine it, and the gamemaster was willing to go along, it could happen. This opened an exciting vista of vastly more free-form and flexible games.

Dungeons and Dragons effectively crystallized a kind of free-form, cooperative, socialized storytelling often studied by historians and anthropologists (Ong 1982; Thompson 1978), and turned the practice of crafting emergent, multilinear narratives into a more or less formalized game. While the improvisational element is retained in the relative freedom assigned to the game master and in the loose rule set, Dungeons and Dragons derives its stability as a recognizable game from two main strategies: the creation of a consistent story world, rather similar to Tolkien’s Middle Earth, within which—at least theoretically—all games are set, and the adoption of an array of materials used to both define (dice, coins, etc.) and keep track of (pen-and-paper) game progress. Costikyan focuses specifically on the free-form nature of a game of Dungeons and Dragons, but devotes less attention to the playing materials and to the rules that determine their use. He cites them almost casually when he writes that “the rules of the game provide a structure for resolving the player actions: rules for combat, magic spells, skills and so on” (Costikyan 2007: 9, emphasis added). On the other hand, I argue that the presence of these materials and shared constraints (rules for combat, magic, etc.) allowed the footprint set by Dungeons and Dragons to become one of the foundations of what I will define as games of configuration. Dungeons and Dragons’s management of player interaction with the imagined environment is regulated by a series of rules whose application determines the inner working of the world. Luck, for example, is determined through the throw of a die; the ability of a character to guess the final words of a spell by sheer luck is thus not usually decided by the game master but by an external random system regulated by dice. In this sense, Dungeons and Dragons can be said to be split into configurative moments and proper gameplay; a typical game will alternate between narrative portions—in which the game master acts as a

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Figure 3.3 Combat screen in Breath of Death VII: The Beginning

storyteller—and configurative areas, during which the game master simply upholds the rules. I define as games of configuration those video games in which this essential dichotomy between configuration and gameplay is present and visible to some degree. A video game such as Breath of Death VII : The Beginning, a humorous take on fantasy sagas and a tribute to 1980s’ role-playing video games, shows this process clearly. The game is distinctly divided into two sections. The player can move their avatar around freely, exploring the world in which Breath of Death VII: The Beginning is set. In this phase, everything the player does essentially happens in the diegesis, so it might be said that every action is both diegetic and gamic. During this phase, the game is frequently interrupted by a series of captions that emulate a game master’s storytelling. The second section is initiated when the player encounters other inhabitants of the game world. These encounters often result in combat, an activity that is performed asynchronously; the diegesis freezes, while a screen depicting the current enemy and its features is loaded. In this phase, the player can decide which tactics to use, how to attack the enemy, which weapons and spells are the most appropriate for the task, essentially replicating a process found in pen-and-paper roleplaying games. While no dice are involved, these configurative areas in which actions relevant to gameplay happen outside the diegesis seem to descend from Dungeons and Dragons’s turnover of synchronous, uninterrupted storytelling, and randomized configurative phases. In games of configuration such as Breath

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of Death VII: The Beginning, crossing the border between the diegesis and peripheral, non-diegetic areas is a required operation that allows players to interact properly with the game. In other words, configuring the game world by freezing it in order to manage existing resources, is the main act of gameplay. In this sense, Costikyan’s notion of “resolving the player actions” proves extremely useful, since it highlights the asynchronous relationship between the configuration of player actions and their subsequent actualization or resolution within the game world that is at the heart of games of configuration.

Knights of Pen and Paper: role-playing revisited Knights of Pen and Paper is a turn-based role-playing video game that portrays both thematically and procedurally the direct lineage that connects traditional role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons and a number of video games of configuration. In the game players are confronted with a simulation of a session of a pen-and-paper role-playing game; the screen presents them with a table around which a game master and a party of players are sitting. As the game progresses, different backgrounds portray the environments evoked by the game master, while enemies are depicted as static images behind the table where the party is sitting. Knights of Pen and Paper performs the revealing task of framing the history of role playing. As I argued earlier, turn-based role-playing video games overtly derive their mechanics from traditional role playing; Paradox Interactive’s game condenses this historical bond into a single video game. As a matter of fact, Knights of Pen and Paper is both a turn-based, role-playing video game and a simulation of a pen-and-paper role-playing game. The latter level frames the former, thus revealing a specific take on role playing as a medium. Rather than synthesizing a mixture of two types of games designed for different media, Knights of Pen and Paper uses this framing strategy to assert the existence of a continuity between the experience of playing a traditional role-playing game such as Dungeons and Dragons and that of interacting with a turn-based roleplaying video game. In his article, Costikyan (2007: 5) claims that one of the most revolutionary features of Dungeons and Dragons is that of casting the player in the role of a single adventurer, a well-defined, rounded subject instead of an army of faceless minions. This form of incorporation is typical of role-playing games and usually translates into role-playing video games, where players are required to choose

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Figure 3.4 Knights of Pen and Paper: a mundane setting

Figure 3.5 Knights of Pen and Paper: a transfigured setting

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their hero and balance or determine their abilities before starting their quest. Knights of Pen and Paper’s syncretic approach leads to a different outcome: the player controls every member of the party of adventurers and the game master. At the beginning of the game, the player is required to choose a number of participants for the session (the minimum is two adventurers and one game master). These avatars possess a dual identity, as a specific type of player in the first-level simulation (namely the role-playing game that takes place around the table) and as part of a specific class within the second-level simulation. One of my characters, for example, is both Mr. John when sitting around the table, a plain white-collar type, and a Paladin, a noble warrior, within the encased portion of the game. This simultaneous double determination of the avatars serves the purpose of presenting the game as a simulation of a session of traditional role playing; the player is not controlling one character, their character, but a more complex environment in which different characters act on two different levels. Describing Knights of Pen and Paper as a simulation of a session of traditional role playing, rather than as a humorous take on the genre of turn-based fantasy video games, helps clarify the direct relation between games of configuration and pen-and-paper role playing. By embedding a regular turn-based roleplaying video game into a wider simulation, Knights of Pen and Paper is forced to represent procedurally the oscillation between configuration and real-time gameplay that defines games of configuration. The way the game deals with this multiplication of layers is through stylization. When facing an enemy (i.e., when dealing with the second-level simulation), the player is confronted with the usual array of visual clues that indicate the necessity for them to perform operations of configuration. Buttons, gauges, and statistics fill the screen, thus creating the affordances for a more meditative form of gameplay, involving deeper configuration. The player can choose among different spells, attack types, and healing potions, or attack one of the several enemies presented onscreen. On the other hand, the more superficial simulative layer—that of the informal gathering of friends around a table—is portrayed as mundanely as possible. Avatars interact through comic-style balloons often detailing rather banal conversations about takeaway pizzas and role playing with younger brothers. While this feature of the game can be seen as consistent with the generally humorous tone of Knights of Pen and Paper, it also serves the purpose of denoting the ontological difference of this level. While the combat simulation is a highly structured, complex configurative practice, the simulative frame is relatively

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more free-form and loose. This distinction serves two purposes, the first and more evident being the simulation of the double nature of a pen-and-paper roleplaying session, where players constantly shift between their present tasks as adventurers and the more trivial topics of their personal lives. Nevertheless, the emphasis on this separation can also be interpreted as the acknowledgment of a specific feature of video games of configuration, of which Knights of Pen and Paper is both an example and an effective procedural critique. Once again, as in the case of Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, a movement of analysis or critique on less visible features of contemporary video games such as the multiplication of meta-ludic envelopes (Ash 2015) in games of configuration is made possible by a conscious process of framing. In Knights of Pen and Paper the threshold separating game and metagame is brought to the fore via precise stylistic, procedural, and thematic choices, and analysed through and within the very act of play.

Immersion The utopia of total immersion In Hamlet on the Holodeck Janet Murray (1997: 98) proposes a definition of immersion that reads: Immersion is a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water. We seek the same feeling from a psychologically immersive experience than we do from a plunge in the ocean or swimming pool: the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different as water is from air, that takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus.

What Murray is describing is an eminently sensory notion of immersion. The metaphor of being submerged in water is used as a representation of the experience of being surrounded by a fully consistent reality that substitutes itself to common perception. Applying this paradigm—derived from the notion of presence used in early studies of virtual reality (Rheingold 1991)—to video games is a problematic task. The very history of the medium, from bulky arcade machines to multipurpose next-gen consoles admittedly contradicts Murray’s definition. Video games requiring players to wear devices (gloves, helmets, goggles, etc.) that generate that sort of immersion are a rare and, at times, unfortunate breed. The first question one could ask is why, despite the pervasive

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rhetoric of immersion found in discourses around the medium,4 an attempt at reproducing this sort of sensory experience via game design is still rarely found outside of proofs of concept or failed experiments like Nintendo’s Virtual Boy. The Virtual Boy, a portable console consisting of a pair of goggles and a controller produced by Nintendo in 1995, promised an experience that would resemble that of virtual reality. Unsatisfactory sales figures (about 140,000 units were sold in the US [McFerran 2009: 60]) forced the company to focus on the production of the more lucrative Nintendo 64. In the same year, the release and planetary success of the Sony PlayStation sanctioned the end of the utopia of living room-sized virtual reality by establishing the supremacy of traditional game consoles. The success of PlayStation prefigured that of its successor, PlayStation 2, whose role as a home entertainment hub widened the technological rift between console gaming and virtual reality. In his book Trigger Happy, Steven Poole (2000: 24) tells a revealing anecdote regarding the launch of PlayStation 2, released to market in 2000. According to Poole, days before the release of the console, Sony executives repeated the mantra that PlayStation 2 was destined “to own the living-room.” Less than a decade later, consoles of the following generation accomplished the hegemonic intent of PlayStation 2 by becoming media hubs capable of playing DVD s, CD s, Blu-ray discs and digital audio and video contents of various nature. While the discourse of virtual reality of the 1990s described video games of the future as immersive, standalone devices that would require absolute concentration from the user, the successful paradigm of multipurpose console refashions the medium as more elastic and ductile. The first reason of the divorce of virtual reality and home gaming is thus both technological and industrial: video game consoles did not strive for complete sensory immersion of the player, but rather for a multiplication of media experiences. The second reason for this divorce is again suggested by Poole (2000: 77) when he writes: Counter-intuitively, it seems for the moment that the perfect videogame “feel” requires the ever-increasing imaginative and physical involvement of the player to stop somewhere short of full bodily immersion. After all, a sense of pleasurable control implies some modicum of separation: you are apart from what you are controlling. . . . You don’t want it to be too real.

According to the author, the difference between immersion in virtual reality and in video games is qualitative. Whereas virtual reality relies on a sensory model of

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immersion, players of contemporary video games require some degree of control over their interaction with the simulated environment other than its mere physical navigation. In other words, playing a video game requires a degree of metacommunication that is not found in Murray’s holodeck or Rheingold’s virtual reality paradigms. Poole’s skepticism on the feasibility of gameplay in virtual reality environments is conditional: the author suggests that “for the moment” the promise of interfaceless immersion cannot be fulfilled, implying that technological advancements and the evolution of game design may eventually converge in actualizing one of the most persistent discourses in the history of the medium. When read in this perspective, Poole’s book—written in 2000—seems to prefigure the second wave of consumer virtual reality that started appearing in the last decade. In 2012, the California-based virtual reality company Oculus, launched a Kickstarter campaign for the production and distribution of Rift, a virtual reality headset that would allow video game players to experience the sort of total immersion promised by similar technologies in the 1990s. In 2014, Sony announced Project Morpheus, later renamed PlayStation VR , an add-on virtual reality module for Sony gaming consoles. Since none of these products are available on the consumer market at the time of writing, it is hard to say whether the second wave of domestic virtual reality will prove successful and promote significant changes in the practice of video game design. Nevertheless, rather than embracing the all too familiar enthusiasm towards the paradigm shift offered by a technology that “will let you live the dream” (Firth 2013: 19), one could speculate whether the debate of total immersion is simply the effect of utopian striving towards the “technological sublime” (Marx 2000: 195) found in discourses surrounding the medium. Murray’s ideal holodeck, Rheingold’s futurology, and Poole’s mitigated skepticism may be found, with slight adjustments, also in the discursive production surrounding the current virtual reality craze. In this sense, immersion may be seen both as a theoretical discourse dealing with specific configurations of media aesthetics, and as a more general cyclical catch-all term for an imagined future of video games—and, one might argue, digital technologies in general—in which interfaces will become obsolete. This latter, more general concept will be one of the focuses of the section titled “Holism”, found at the end of this chapter. For the moment, I will offer some thoughts on a theory of the aesthetics of immersion and its fallacies in describing video games and their players.

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Immersive fallacies The debate around the notion of immersion has profoundly characterized media studies in the last two decades. One of the reasons behind this interest may be found in the inclination of producers of digitally generated images towards photorealism, a tendency often noted by critics and scholars (Darley 2000, Masuch and Röber 2005, Cannon 2007, Carbone and Giordano 2011) that generated what can be defined as a visual regime (Crary, 1990) whose main trait is simulative illusionism. Manovich (2001: 178) describes this race towards perfect illusionism as mainly driven by the industry: The industry frames each new technological advance in image acquisition and display in terms of the ability of computer technologies to catch up and surpass the visual fidelity of analog media technologies. On their side, animators and software engineers are perfecting the techniques for synthesizing photorealistic images of sets and human actors.

The use of immersion and illusionism as industrial rhetoric of evolution is certainly not limited nor exclusive to its digital actors. The attempt to create engrossing, immersive environments and promote the physical incorporation of the viewers is at the heart of many cinematic technological shifts. From Cinerama (that, in turn, descended from nineteenth-century panoramas) to the colossal scope of IMAX , the history of cinema as a dispositif or apparatus (Baudry 1970, Kessler 2006) whose ways of creating meaning are inevitably tied to a technological state of affairs, is rich in experiments aimed at creating immersive environments. Situating the status of video games within this theoretical and industrial perspective means, to a certain extent, debunking pervasive notions about immersion by highlighting their fallacies and, at the same time, analysing the nature of immersive devices at work in video game design In their treatise on game design, Salen and Zimmerman (2004: 451) reflect on the tendency noted by Manovich, explicitly defining it as a fallacy: When we play a game, we feel engaged and engrossed, and play seems to take on its own “reality”. This is all certainly true. But the way that a game achieves these effects does not happen in the manner the immersive fallacy implies. A game player does become engrossed in the game, yes. But it is an engagement that occurs through play itself. As we know, play is a process of metacommunication, a double-consciousness in which the player is well aware of the artificiality of the play situation.

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Salen and Zimmerman’s objection to the fallacy claims that its absolute reliance on aesthetic and visual regimes marginalizes and eventually suppresses other elements of play that can capture and engross the player. On the one hand, this description of total engagement resonates with Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) notion of flow, a state of cognitive and psychological immersion that will be discussed in the next section. On the other hand, the scholars’ disregard for the immersive fallacy relies on the metacommunicative nature of play, a class of activities that imply constant awareness of “the artificiality of the play situation.” This second, more pragmatic objection, when applied to video games, is in need of a partial refinement.

Immersion, metacommunication, incorporation The authors’ definition of play as a metacommunicative activity is derived from a number of earlier theories such as Goffman’s description of the social membrane defining play (1959) and Bateson’s claim that play is essentially framed by meta-messages acting at different levels (1972). Gordon Calleja’s notion of “incorporation” addresses the apparent incompatibility between immersion and metacommunication by severing the ties with a merely sensory understanding of immersion. Calleja (2011: 25) addresses the emphasis of the game industry towards total, interface-less immersion when he writes: “There are echoes of cyberpunk romanticism here and perhaps an unstated ideal desire to delve, Neo-like . . . into a virtual reality that replaces the realm of physical existence.” Calleja proposes his notion of incorporation as radically different from the utopian and romantic discourse on sensory immersion; instead, the author proposes to define incorporation as a complex experience, in which what Salen and Zimmerman define as “the artificiality of the play situation” is processed cognitively through a series of synchronic and diachronic mental acts. Calleja’s incorporation, a notion that stands at the core of the author’s “player involvement model” (2011: 35), is a process that takes place both during gameplay and in other moments of the player’s life, for example when they are engaged with the game’s paratextual materials such as manuals, posters, trailers, etc. In other words, according to Calleja (2011: 169–70): Incorporation can thus be described as an intensification of internalized involvement that blends a number of dimensions. It is a synthesis of movement (kinesthetic involvement) within a habitable domain (spatial involvement) along with other agents (shared involvement), personal and designed narratives

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(narrative involvement), aesthetic effects (affective involvement), and the various rules and goals of the game itself (ludic involvement).

Calleja describes incorporation as a synthesis of different processes happening during the player’s encounter with a simulated environment. While a more traditional notion of immersion is maintained in the author’s emphasis on the exploration of a habitable domain, different and more nuanced aspects of the experience of playing a game are present in Calleja’s definition of incorporation. Calleja’s model is taxonomic in nature, as it seeks to divide the experience of playing a video game into a series of sub-experiences pertaining to different states of gameplay, ranging from primary kinesthetic involvement to the progressive apprehension of a complex narrative ecosystem. While the author’s work undoubtedly helps disentangle the notion of immersion from the pseudomythical construction found in several descriptions of virtual reality and other experiences of complete incorporation,5 its taxonomic intents do not fit within the scope of this book. Nevertheless, Calleja’s understanding of immersion as a multilayered phenomenon, that does not pertain exclusively to the realm of the senses will inform my analysis of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. More specifically, I will focus on the ways in which the game promotes player immersion and a sense of habitation of a consistent world through two strategies, that I will call aesthetic immersion and macrotextual immersion.

Through the eyes of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay In earlier chapters I argued that the experience of playing a video game implies a fluctuation among different states of control. Players traverse various levels of sensorial solicitation and adopt different strategies of interaction depending on the contingent instance of play they are facing. These fluctuations certainly influence the level of immersion experienced by the players; Manovich (2001: 207) addressed this transiency as a natural condition of the fruition of new media: “During one segment, the computer screen presents the viewer with an engaging cinematic narrative. Suddenly the image freezes, menus and icons appear, and the viewer is forced to act – make choices, click, push buttons.”6 This duality between action and inaction, visible versus invisible interfaces, is often discussed in studies analysing the convergence of video games and film (Klevjer 2002, Morris 2002), but, as I said earlier, it can be found consistently also in nonnarrative video games, given the relevance of configuration and setup operations within the medium. The oscillation between transparency and opacity is due to

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a number of concurring factors, both intended and unintended. Glitches, freezes, stuttering frames all hamper immersion by revealing the artificiality of the game world; on the other hand, onscreen gauges, HUD s,7 pause menus and various other informative and configurative devices form a hyper-mediated frame around gameplay. I will call aesthetic immersion the form of immersion that derives from the suppression or limitation of the use and appearance of these devices. This kind of immersion can be found especially in first person shooters and other genres of video games that promote uninterrupted gameplay and naturalistic tridimensional perspective. The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay is one such game. While rather similar in its gameplay and general premises to other games of its generation, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay uses strategies of aesthetic immersion that are worth analysing, since in the case of this game the search for transparency clearly informed several peculiar visual and aesthetic design choices. As a matter of fact The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay seems to participate in and to a degree anticipate a trend in game design leaning towards the marginalization of extra-diegetic material during gameplay that has become rather pervasive in games produced in the last decade. The game casts the player in the role of Riddick, a convict of the Butcher Bay penitentiary, a futuristic prison for the most ruthless criminals of the galaxy. Riddick’s mission is to escape the facility and exterminate both its most vicious inmates and the brutal guards in the process. The player explores Riddick’s world through the eyes of the character, with occasional cutscenes portraying the game’s protagonist in third person. While most of the features of the game, from the first person perspective to its rather standardized sci-fi scenario, are common in shooting games, the radical reduction of the player’s HUD requires some further analysis. Playing as Riddick in The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay means confronting a screen that for the most part is devoid of non-diegetic signaling devices. While during combat a small gauge tracking the player’s energy level appears in the upper-left corner, for the most part the game does not present the player with any other onscreen information. This aesthetic strategy of radical transparency is complemented by the incorporation into the diegesis of elements that are usually non-diegetic. The most notable example of this internalization can be found in the way The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay handles ammunition. All of the firearms the player can use in the game are equipped with a small screen that informs both the player and their avatar of the remaining ammunition. While the function of this meter is exactly that of a more common

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Figure 3.6 Aesthetic immersion in The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay

onscreen gauge, its conversion from a non-diegetic to a diegetic object effectively reinforces the game’s sense of aesthetic immersion. One significant effect obtained through aesthetic immersion is a sense of visceral engagement. Stripped of most non-diegetic devices, Riddick’s point of view is presented as embodied; the avatar’s vision blurs when he is hit by enemies or during violent attacks, the peripheral areas of the screen are often superimposed with small retinal veins, and, significantly, Riddick’s most notable superpower—the ability to see in the dark—is experienced by the player seamlessly through a change in the temperature of color on the screen. In other words, this sort of interface-less interaction seems to realize the theoretical claim according to which “first person point-of-view is used very successfully in games . . . to create a sense of the player’s embodiment within the game space, and is recognized by game designers as contributing to a more visceral game experience” (Morris 2002: 89). The dissimulation of usual interface material through absorption into the diegesis can be seen at work, in different forms, in various similar games. In Aliens: Colonial Marines, a different stratagem is used: while Riddick’s vision is perceived as “natural” since it is stripped of every superimposed apparatus, players of Sega’s

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Figure 3.7 The diegetized HUD of Aliens: Colonial Marines

game are confronted with a proper HUD, in which the avatar’s health and remaining ammunition can be seen. In this case, they are rendered diegetic through narrativization: the player’s HUD is actually the avatar’s HUD, since characters in the game are wearing a helmet that projects a visual interface informing them of their bearings and vital signs. This solution is visually enhanced by the grainy texture and shaky movements of the interface, which reiterate the game’s attempt at tightening the sense of player embodiment into their avatar. The contextualization of specific immersive strategies within a wider narrative system is at the core of what I will define as macrotextual immersion. In their article The Pleasures of Immersion and Interaction, Andrew Hagardon and J. Yellowlees Douglas (2004: 196) claim that immersion in video games derives at least in part from the player’s sense of engagement within a wider narrative context: Highly normative schemas enable readers to “lose” themselves in the text in what we might call an “immersive” affective experience. When immersed in a text, readers’ perceptions, reactions and interactions all take place within the text’s frame, which itself usually suggests a single schema and a few definite scripts for highly directed interaction.

According to the authors, one of the features of an immersive experience within an ergodic medium is the presence of a narrative schema; interacting with simple and recognizable genre structures enhances immersion, since it requires a less

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intense hermeneutic effort from the player. Games like The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and Aliens: Colonial Marines actively employ these immersion strategies through stimulation of the player’s generic encyclopedia. In both cases, the backstory of the games derives from pre-existing intellectual properties (the films Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick, and Aliens) that work as reference material for players and establish the scope of the narrative universe within which the narration takes place. In the case of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, the player’s avatar is designed to resemble Vin Diesel, the actor who played Riddick in the films of the series; moreover, the game uses the voices of some of the actors who worked in the two films. This sort of contextualization through continuous references to texts found in other media reinforces the player’s familiarity with Riddick’s world, thus generating a solid schema that facilitates the immersive experience of the player. The two games do not simply connect to the intellectual property they are based upon, but more generally refer in their semantic and syntactic generic traits (Altman 1984) to a wider basin of science fiction products, that range from novels such as Demon Seed (Koontz 1973) to films such as Escape from New York and Fortress.8 In this perspective, defining this sort of cross referencing as macrotextual immersion means claiming that, in video games, immersion is often derived from a series of influences or direct nods to other texts belonging to different media that are supposedly found in the player’s personal experience as a viewer or reader. The use of these formulaic elements actively promotes immersion by reducing the player’s need for meta-analysis and allows them to engage with the game’s deeper mechanics while at the same time managing to interpret a rather familiar narrative setting. While this process may be seen as “dumbing down” the game’s narrative potential, its relevance in honing the player’s multifaceted experience of immersion could be interpreted as one of the reasons why formulaic narration is still extremely relevant within certain areas of video game design.

Holism Flow: a scholarly tradition Perusing a video game design manual or a game studies essay, readers will often find what is usually described as Csikszentmihalyi’s flow diagram, a rather intuitive scheme portraying the nature of optimal experience, in which a

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desirable flow channel is situated between anxiety and boredom. This diagram originates from Mihali Csikszentmihalyi’s essay Flow. The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990) in which the psychologist describes his understanding of flow as a transient mental state during which individuals reach the consciousness of optimal experience, a perfect match of goals, means, and feedback that can be found while performing activities considered pleasurable or satisfactory. According to Csikszentmihalyi (1990: 37), flow can only be temporary, since we are often subjected to “psychic entropy,” described by the author as “a condition of inner disorder . . . a disorganization of the self that impairs its effectiveness.” When engaged in a pleasurable activity, we may reach a state of optimal experience, which Csikszentmihalyi (1990: 39) describes as the opposite of psychic entropy: The opposite state from the condition of psychic entropy is optimal experience. When the information that keeps coming into awareness is congruent with goals, psychic energy flows effortlessly. There is no need to worry, no reason to question one’s adequacy. But whenever one does stop to think about oneself, the evidence is encouraging: “You are doing all right.” The positive feedback strengthens the self, and more attention is freed to deal with the outer and the inner environment.

Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of flow is essentially phenomenological, since it pertains and relates strictly to the subject’s psycho-physical experience while performing a certain activity.9 While the author claims a certain universality for his theories, at the same time he acknowledges that the experience of flow is highly subjective and in most cases is elicited by activities that most subjects would not find captivating or engaging at all. One of Csikszentmihalyi’s interviewees, Rico Medellin, claims that his most intense moments of optimal experience were found while performing rather repetitive tasks during his shifts in a factory. Csikszentmihalyi (1990: 39) describes Medellin’s job as follows: The task he has to perform on each unit that passes in front of his station should take forty-three seconds to perform – the same exact operation almost six hundred times in a working day. Most people would grow tired of such work very soon. But Rico has been at this job for over five years, and he still enjoys it. The reason is that he approaches his task in the same way an Olympic athlete approaches his event: How can I beat my record?

Csikszentmihalyi’s absolute disregard of Medellin’s working conditions and social context is certainly problematic and would require an in-depth analysis

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Figure 3.8 flOw (Thatgamecompany, 2006)

that falls outside the scope of this book, but the case of a factory worker experiencing flow while on the job reveals the subjective nature of this experience, that may be elicited by the most disparate activities. Why, then, despite Csikszentmihalyi’s total neglect of video games or media in general, was such a complex and even politically ambiguous10 theory transformed into an unquestioned tool for both authors of design manuals and game scholars? Where does the fascination with flow come from? And why should it be questioned?

Designing for flow? The notion of flow is not unheard of in media studies. Raymond Williams (1974) uses the term to describe the peculiar functioning of television and the meaningmaking processes of its viewers. Williams describes the flow of television as antithetical to more ritualized media practices, and characterizes broadcasting as a specific technological and cultural form. Despite the relevance of Williams’s theories within television studies and wider audiovisual media studies, video game scholars have adopted Csikszentmihalyi’s psychological notion of flow as an almost unquestioned reference. Sherry (2004: 339), for example, claims that “some might comment that Csikszentmihalyi seemed to have video games in

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mind when he developed the concept of flow,” referring to the presence in video games of clear goals, feedback systems, rewards, and other features that Csikszentmihalyi associates with the experience of flow. One of the most vocal proponents of applying Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow to game design is designer and scholar Jenova Chen, who advocates the use of a psychological tool set to aid developers design games that induce flow. Chen’s design philosophy (2007: 34) prescribes: To provide an enjoyable interactive experience for the widest variety and number of users, a game’s, and more generally any end-user technology’s, design should follow a four-step methodology: ● ● ●

●

Mix and match the components of Flow; Keep the user’s experience within the user’s Flow Zone; Offer adaptive choices, allowing different users to enjoy the Flow in their own way; and Embed choices inside the core activities to ensure the Flow is never interrupted.

Of these four rules, the fourth is what seems to have led Chen and other designers to what I would define as a holistic game design strategy. The idea of embedding choices inside the core activities of gameplay conflates Csikszentmihalyi’s description of flow as opposite to the fragmentation of psychic entropy with a more vernacular understanding of the concept as a form of design that privileges uninterrupted experiences over fragmented ones. In other words, the design method proposed by Chen predicates that, in order to avoid interruption in the state of flow, all choices afforded to the player, both gamic and non-gamic, should be found within the game’s diegesis. Chen’s appropriation of the notion of flow transforms Csikszentmihalyi’s concept from the description of a phenomenological cognitive status to a series of game design precepts that should both provide the player with an experience of flow and, at the same time, achieve aesthetic fluidity and wholeness by removing interruption and fragmentation. Chen’s flow manual is complemented by the designer’s own video games, of which the aptly named flOw is a relevant example. In the game the player controls an insect-like creature that feeds on other smaller specimens in order to progressively evolve. flOw is a variation on the theme of Snake, a casual game found in early Nokia mobile phones in which players control a snake that progressively grows in size after eating pixels that randomly appear on the play field. Chen’s take on the template is consistent with a design theory of flow: walls

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are removed and the creature can move around freely, as no harsh punishment is administered when the insect is hit by other larger organisms inhabiting the world of flOw. Moreover, Snake’s geometric world is replaced by an aquatic environment in which different creatures swim weightlessly and rather gracefully. Consistent with Chen’s precept of embedding “choices inside the core activities to ensure the Flow is never interrupted,” the game does not provide any nondiegetic interface other than a pause screen that can be activated by pressing START. But while this interface-less design successfully conveys an idea of constant flow, the controls of the game arguably tell a different story. In the attempt to bypass the highly symbolic form of interaction offered by joypad controls, Chen designed the game in such a way that players would only need to tilt the controller back and forth in order to have the creature move onscreen. Paradoxically, this approach relocates the necessity for a learning curve from gameplay to the manipulation of the game’s peripherals, since tilting the PlayStation 3 controller instead of pushing its buttons requires some adjustment from the player. In other words, whereas the game being played onscreen is devoid of any interface material, Chen’s choice of apparently naturalizing the game’s controls works counter-intuitively for players, who find themselves unable to use their haptic encyclopedia when interacting with the game. Despite this shortcoming, while an aesthetic sense of fluidity is certainly present in flOw, it remains to be seen if its holistic, interface-less approach, achieves the goal of producing a state of flow in the player. Is flOw a successful experiment in holistic video game design? Is it a game that might produce the cognitive state of flow? While the latter question can only be answered through unfounded speculation in this context, tackling the former will help me frame the question of interface-less design as one located within a wider set of discourses around digital media. In discussing the history of transparency in media, Lisa Gitelman (2006: 6) argues that: Self-evidence or transparency may seem less important to video games, radio programs, or pulp fiction than to telephones, yet as critics have long noted, the success of all media depends at some level on inattention or “blindness” to the media technologies themselves (and all of their supporting protocols) in favor of attention to the phenomena, “the content,” that they represent for users’ edification or enjoyment.

In Gitelman’s terms, a certain transparency, a progressive naturalization of the user’s activity, is necessary for a medium to achieve a status of significant social diffusion. Just as most telephone users progressively became “deaf ” to the

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compression of the human voice operated by telephone communication, players have adapted to the arguably less than transparent interfaces—both physical and semiotic—of video games. Seen in this perspective, Chen’s attempt at designing a game with a higher degree of transparency by removing most non-diegetic materials and implementing movement-based controls, rather than achieving a media-holism of sorts engenders a relocation and a paradoxical opacization. On the one hand, the interface materials, rather than disappearing, are relocated to the controller, becoming mostly tactile instead of semiotic. While onscreen flOw indeed projects an idea of suspended, graceful motion, playing the game requires players to adjust to the unfamiliar interface offered by the Dualshock PlayStation controller, that needs to be tilted instead of used as a more “transparent” game controller with buttons, pads, and joysticks. This relocation, in turn produces a sort of opacization of the interface. If, in theory, mapping real-world movements to the simulated movement of the organism onscreen may seem to make the interface less visible and obtrusive, the material properties of the Dualshock resist this design choice. This relocates the interface elsewhere within the general protocol of gameplay: opaque elements are not present onscreen, but a specific kind of haptic opacity is found in the game’s controls. The peculiar use of the device as a motion-based controller, while interesting in its own right, counters the premise of flOw by standing as a significantly opaque interface in the context of a design project that strives for transparency.

Total interface: Uplink Chen’s take on video game holism consists of an almost complete removal of onscreen interface elements and non-diegetic player operations in order to achieve uninterrupted gameplay and, arguably, limit entropic disruptions of the player’s flow. Despite Chen’s view of gameplay as a prototypical flow experience, claiming that playing a video game should ideally be a practice devoid of any entropy is problematic. If confronted with a number of theoretical stances regarding the medium—some of which may be said to be foundational for the field—Chen’s theory proves hardly tenable. I have discussed extensively both Aarseth’s proposition of the duality of aporia and epiphany as a fundamental tension within the medium, and Bogost’s definition of procedural interaction as the construction of a pattern through noise, and although the two stances may result incompatible to some degree, they both allow for and even require a certain degree of entropy to exist within gameplay. Through the analysis of said

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theories, I have defined playing a video game as the act of confronting an oppositional machine or, to revert to the terms of the debate at hand, as the attempt to deal with and derive meaning from machine-generated entropy. In other words, a certain amount of entropy, the possibility of disruption and, consequently, the impossibility of absolute mastery, is implicitly accepted by players when confronting the specific kind of ludic machine that is a video game. In this sense, Chen’s removal of entropic materials, both at the level of the interface and at the level of gameplay, while aimed at fostering the player’s experience of flow, paradoxically deprives games such as flOw of a basic part of their gameness. Ironically, entropy is reinstated in Chen’s game by its unpractical controls, which force players to reconsider their previous knowledge regarding the PlayStation 3 controller. This blurring of interface and gameplay as vectors of entropy in flOw evokes Juul and Norton’s (2009: 110) paradox of a fictional version of the game of chess in which the two trade places: The distinction between interface and gameplay is clear in chess because we already know what that game is. As players, we already have an expectation about what should be the difficult part of the game, and what should be the easy part. We expect that the strategy of deciding where to move the chess pieces is difficult, but we expect the concrete act of moving the pieces to be easy. But if we had no prior experience with chess, it would not be obvious what should be the easy and difficult parts of the game. Perhaps we could imagine a game called “chess” where the interaction instruments were deliberately made obtuse. Could there be an alternative version of chess where the basic strategy was simple, but where it was difficult to move the individual pieces . . .?

In a certain sense, Chen’s game is exactly that version of chess: while the player always knows what to do, the disconnect between the game’s materiality and its rules, makes it hard to properly execute the right moves. In other words, in the attempt to efface what Galloway (2008: 938) describes as “a liminal transition moment,” that is the visible site of an interface-mediated transition, flOw simply relocates it somewhere else, namely in the game’s materiality. What if the interface became the very site of gameplay, in a paradoxical version of video game holism that completely does away with any form of fictionalized diegesis? Or, again with Galloway (2008: 947), what happens when “the non-diegetic takes center stage”? Introversion Software’s Uplink addresses this question by taking a decidedly different approach to holism. Instead of suppressing the visible signs of interface operations (buttons, menus, nondiegetic information, etc.), it multiplies them until they become the game itself.

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When launched, the game confronts the player with a black screen presenting only two options: “About Us” and “Register as an Agent.” No other explanation is given, nor are the conventional options or help menus present in the game’s introductory screen. This peculiar choice descends from Uplink’s nature of hacking simulation: in the game, the player acts as a hacker working for an international pirate group, stealing classified documents from encrypted databases. While not extremely common nor particularly popular, hacking simulators have dotted the history of video games and, more specifically, of home computer games. Arguably the first hacking simulator, Activision’s Hacker, released in 1985, took advantage of the popularity of films such as WarGames and of the visibility of homebrew computer culture in the early 1980s. More importantly, it established the genre as one striving for a unique sense of holism: instead of simulating a physical environment and casting the player in the role of the hacker, the game entirely replaced the player’s computer operative system with a faux hacking console. This unique feature was exploited in the official presentation of the game to the press, during which Activision’s representative Jim Levy feigned a computer malfunction before revealing to the crowd of reporters that “that, ladies and gentlemen, is the game” (Bateman and Yakal 1985: 32). Released over fifteen years after Hacker, Uplink could not rely on the same novelty effect, but followed the exact same principle. Playing Uplink essentially means manipulating pieces of a graphical user interface in order to achieve specific goals such as stealing data from a server or transferring money between bank accounts. Within the game’s operative system, players are required to enlarge and move windows, send and receive e-mails, launch applications, connect to hubs, effectively replicating the common use of a home computer in the early 2000s. Uplink’s adoption of an operative system as the only gameplay asset may be characterized as an attempt to achieve the same results as flOw through opposite means. While flOw’s goal is to do away with interfaces through the naturalization of gameplay and the suppression of configurative material, Uplink, with a lineage of other hacking simulators, consistently pursues the same utopic goal by abandoning symbolic interaction. If pressing the left mouse button in some video games translates into firing a weapon, in Uplink this operation has no symbolic meaning, since it simply means pressing the left mouse button. Players no longer use game-specific controls, but rather apply their knowledge of computer controls to a game. Stylistically, it might be said that Uplink achieves immediacy through the aesthetic of hypermediacy typical of computer interfaces. In their book Remediation, Bolter and Grusin (2000)

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claim that digital media inevitably present their interactors with an oscillatory movement between immediacy (the apparent absence of interface material) and its opposing state of hypermediacy. In other words, computer users seamlessly move between the removal of all interface materials, for example in tridimensional games, and their multiplication in media objects such as a web page. Bolter and Grusin’s McLuhanian approach to digital media (in which every piece of media always contains another medium, be it the naturalized tridimensional perspective or the hyper-mediated environment of hypertexts) is especially relevant in the case of hacking simulators. In Uplink, hypermediacy acts as a peculiar kind of immediacy: the simulated world is not the arguably immediate space of real life, but the hyper-mediated environment of computer interaction, one that can be entirely replicated by and within a computer. In this perspective, the most immersive computer games are those games that are about computers rather than being merely played through them. Paradoxically, since interface is all there is in Uplink, one might conclude that Introversion’s work is as close to being an interface-less game as can be conceived at present.

Notes 1 The game is also known as Indigo Prophecy in the United States. 2 In 1995, video game developer and distributor Namco obtained a patent for what was described as “auxiliary games.” This rather vague definition characterized the use of secondary mini games for players to use during loading times, a practice that Namco developed with games such as Ridge Racer. The filing of a patent—although dubious, as noted by Hoppe (2015)—for a practice of this kind highlights the relevance of interstitial moments such as loading times and the necessity for producers and developers to minimize them through masking strategies. The patent expired in November 2015. 3 It could be said that this form of metalepsis has become relatively common also in mainstream triple-A games. Franchises such as Assassin’s Creed and big budget games such as Saints Row IV base a consistent part of their narratives on similar effects of encasement. 4 The equation between the tridimensional gaming experience and virtual reality can be found in a number of essays and articles. Sociologist Gianfranco Pecchinenda (2010), for example, seems to conflate simulation and illusionism when linking the rise of first person perspective in video games and the use of virtual reality in medical training. While Renata Gomes (2005: 2) defines immersion in video games

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as an eminently sensory experience when she writes that “immersion and presence are two sides of the same coin. Within the character-oriented games, being a character is, above anything, entering the spatial universe of the game through her or his body.” Mythological constructions about total sensory immersion abound in the discourses on visual media of the twentieth century. From Wertenbaker’s short novel The Chamber of Life (1929), a veritable prophecy on virtual reality, to André Bazin’s (2005: 17) discussion of “the myth of total cinema,” all the way to cyberpunk novels and films, the complete substitution of physical reality through artifice is one of the most persistent myths of contemporary media cultures. Manovich’s theory can be supported by the analysis of recorded sessions of media consumption. In the case of video games, such a technique is used by Huber (2010) to argue for the existence of different modes of interaction dictated by the various configurations of their visual presentation. A head-up display is a superimposed display, often residing in peripheral areas of the screen, that present various data such as health status, remaining ammunition, player’s location, etc. It is an extremely common feature in a wide range of video games. The relevance of the influence of popular film genres in the development of video games is a well-known but often overlooked example of cross-media hybridization. A glaring example is DOOM , a game whose narrative was conceived as “a cross between Evil Dead II and Aliens, horror and hell, blood and science” (Kushner 2003: 101). The author himself often stresses this phenomenological approach. For example, when describing his method he claims that “This representation of consciousness is phenomenological in that it deals directly with events—phenomena—as we experience and interpret them, rather than focusing on the anatomical structures, neurochemical processes, or unconscious purposes that make these events possible” (Csikszentmihalyi 1990: 26), while later he describes the circularity of the flow experience in explicitly phenomenological terms: “If attention, or psychic energy, is directed by the self, and if the self is the sum of the contents of consciousness and the structure of its goals, and if the contents of consciousness and the goals are the result of different ways of investing attention, then we have a system that is going round and round, with no clear causes or effects. At one point we are saying that the self directs attention, at another, that attention determines the self. In fact, both these statements are true: consciousness is not a strictly linear system, but one in which circular causality obtains. Attention shapes the self, and is in turn shaped by it” (1990: 34). Throughout the essay, Csikszentmihalyi seems to completely neglect the existence of poverty, discrimination, and social or political struggle in the West and, more

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specifically, in the United States. He rather simplistically blames existential discontent for the predominance of “psychic entropy.” For example, he candidly writes (1990: 12): “If Diogenes with his lantern twenty-three centuries ago had difficulty finding an honest man, today he would have perhaps an even more troublesome time finding a happy one. This general malaise is not due directly to external causes. Unlike so many other nations in the contemporary world, we can’t blame our problems on a harsh environment, on widespread poverty, or on the oppression of a foreign occupying army. The roots of the discontent are internal, and each person must untangle them personally, with his or her own power.”

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In his book on twentieth-century media culture, Peppino Ortoleva (2009) defines media as a proto-concept, a term borrowed from Robert K. Merton (1984) that characterizes media as complex, often contradictory entities whose definition cannot be but loose and provisional. According to Ortoleva (2009: 225, my translation): Every medium is always all of these: at its foundations, it is a technological fact, a tool or a set of tools that carries a message through time and space; then a set of rules (both institutional and emergent) that allow the tool to work and actually carry the contents; finally, a communicative model, that can be loosely defined, and with it a series of languages and expectations—both private and social—that have been built through time around the medium.

Ortoleva’s definition of media as complex, layered, multifunctional objects also applies to video games. One of the “technological facts” that throughout the history of video games has actively shaped our understanding of the medium and its uses in the world is the intrinsic openness. By defining video games as open in this context I am not referring to the window of possibility they provide to the player, but rather to their internal (or, as Ortoleva says “technological”) functioning as pieces of software. While both arcade units and commercial home console cartridges were essentially unmodifiable pieces of hardware, that in some cases could be repaired if broken, but left no room for user tweaking or tinkering, video games running in 1970s’ university mainframe computers were generally perceived as open objects by their interactors. Due to their technological nature of eternally integrable strings of programming language, the absence of clear copyright laws pertaining to computer games, and the distinct attitude of the community of software engineers and computer scientists towards modification and appropriation, video games developed on mainframe computers and later on personal computers, were often seen as freely modifiable objects. 127

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Two rather anecdotal, but telling accounts may help clarify this assumption. In 1975, William Crowther started developing a computer program called Colossal Cave. The program was a text adventure, requiring players to explore a cave— Crowther himself was a speleologist—by feeding the computer simple textual commands such as “go south.” Later that year Crowther released the game on the ARPA net system, a progenitor of the Internet. In 1976, a year after the release of Crowther’s program, Don Woods, a young computer programmer working at Stanford University, discovered Colossal Cave on one of the school’s computers and started working on the source code, modifying it to his taste. Woods renamed the game Adventure and began re-distributing it, crediting Crowther and himself as the developers. Adventure later became known as the mother of the text adventure genre and underwent several remakes and adaptations to different platforms.1 In 1993 id Software released DOOM by uploading it to the bulletin board (BBS ) operated by Software Creation, which acted as a distribution hub for independent game developers of the time such as id Software. DOOM ’s developers John Carmack and John Romero decided to release the game along with its source code, so that players could spot bugs and tweak the software. Players did more; according to historian David Kushner (2003: 167–8): On January 26, 1994, the hackers got all the more real. A student at the University of Canterbury New Zealand named Brendon Wyber uploaded a free program called the Doom Editor Utility, or DEU. Wyber had created the program with the help of an international online coalition of gamers who, through bone-breaking hack work, had found a way to break apart Doom’s code. . . . The DEU was a watershed. Suddenly, all those with the gumption could make a level of a game. They didn’t need to be programmers or artists or anything. If they wanted they could just tweak what was there.

The cases of Adventure and DOOM demonstrate the widespread tendency within the larger community of users and producers of video games to consider the medium as something that calls for modification, integration, emendation, and recombination of its parts. Furthermore, several scholars have argued for the relevance of practices such as modding and versioning in the context of video games, characterizing these techniques of modular expansion as integral to video game culture (Christiansen 2012, Sotamaa 2005). This long-lasting disposition towards tweaking may be considered a “habitus” (Bourdieu 1977) of the larger game community, a set of practices born out of some of the features of the medium, which have been internalized and somehow naturalized by its users

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and producers and, in turn, actively started shaping and engendering game design practices. In Bordieu’s view (1977: 72), considering video games as expandable objects, of which different iterations can (and should) be developed, is both a “structured structure,” an informal norm established through the social use of the medium (“an international online coalition of gamers”) and a “structuring structure,” since it fundamentally influences our conceptualization of video games, and, one could argue, of digital media in general, as potentially expandable, modular objects. For video games, this essentially means they can be easily integrated by a software engineer and in some cases even by players, provided the code is accessible. While this is only theoretically true for video games sold in hard copies (game cartridges, console proprietary formats, etc.), the advent and diffusion of digital distribution has made integration and modular expansion easier for the industry and, in specific cases, for the players. In this chapter I will analyse the effects of this tendency both within the industry—by discussing patches, downloadable contents, and remakes—and within the wider game culture, where bottom-up practices such as modding and skinning often emerge. As in the previous chapters of the book, I will start with examples of closedness (such as uniqueness and ephemerality), and move towards more open cases (modularity, serialization). This chapter will be informed by a more systemic approach to video games, that considers single media products as part of a wider ecosystem (Fuller 2005). In this perspective, this chapter of the book will purposely map out relations and identify thresholds between different games, in an attempt to demonstrate that no game is an island, at least from the vantage point of a wider media system, but rather a part of an economic and technological environment (Dyer-Wihteford and de Peuter 2009) where practices of contamination, modularity, and recombination between different objects are always present. In this sense the game ↔ games perspective will allow me to draw significant connections between a single game and its environment (or, more precisely, the relations with other games derived from or inspired by it) and vice versa, and observe how video games as objects exist in the larger space of the video game medium.

Uniqueness In search of the golden cartridge In 1990 Nintendo announced a competition for its fans in the United States. The Nintendo World Championships consisted of a series of promotional events

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held in several American cities. During the events, expert players competed against each other, trying to obtain the highest score in three Nintendo Entertainment System games: Super Mario Bros, Rad Racer, and Tetris. The Nintendo World Championships were based on The Wizard, a moderately successful film released a year earlier in which a young video game genius faces a dangerous trip through the United States to compete in a game battle. Nintendo produced 116 cartridges to be used in the competition; of these, twenty-six were painted in gold, instead of the gray normally used for Nintendo cartridges of the time, and were given away as prizes in various secondary competitions. The Nintendo World Championships golden cartridge is arguably one of the most valuable single video game cartridges of all time and at the time of writing, not all of the twenty-six copies produced in 1990 have surfaced, with bids from collectors reaching $100,000 (Orland 2014). Nintendo’s golden cartridge is often defined as the “holy grail” (Kohler 2011) of game collectors, a definition that sums up its mythical status of (quasi) unicum, a condition that clearly sets it apart from most video games of its era. According to Donovan (2010: 171), in 1989—a year before the release of the golden cartridges—Nintendo branded products accounted for 23 percent of all toys sold in the US , a figure that clearly characterizes video games not only as a cultural craze of the 1980s and 1990s, but as one of the most pervasive media objects to be sold in the same period. Other notorious facts of more or less vernacular video game history unequivocally demonstrate the volume of manufactured objects being released by the video game industry at the time. It was not only Nintendo producing video games in surprisingly large quantities; other companies, such as Atari, adopted the same strategy, only to find themselves buried in their own cartridges after the video game market crashed in 1983. According to a news report published by the New York Times on 28 September 1983 (Atari Parts Are Dumped 1983), “the company [Atari] has dumped fourteen truckloads of discarded game cartridges and other computer equipment at the city landfill in Alamogordo, N.M. Guards kept reporters and spectators away from the area yesterday as workers poured concrete over the dumped merchandise.” Before 2014, most versions of the story reported that the merchandise dumped by Atari was for the most part cartridges of E.T. The ExtraTerrestrial, a game Atari had started producing in 1982, that had failed spectacularly on the market. Media archaeological studies (Guins 2014) and documentaries such as Atari: Game Over were able to establish, however, that the Atari dumping included cartridges, controllers, and other hardware produced in

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excess. Both the account of Nintendo’s pervasive presence in the entertainment market in the late 1980s, and of Atari’s burial of its mass-produced cartridges suggest that the medium of video games (at least during the 1980s and 1990s) relied on the production and circulation of massive amounts of physical goods, be it game platforms (according to Nintendo, more than 61 million NES consoles have been sold since release) or software, in the form of cartridges, tapes, floppy disks, or other supports. Such a comprehensive circulation of physical goods explains the importance of rare cartridges such as Nintendo World Championship among collectors. Small runs, unique objects, limited productions somehow seem to retain an auratic status not only because they are uncommon specimens, but also—and most importantly—because they represent the end result of the very uncommon practice of manufacturing small batches within a definitely mass-oriented industry. In his work The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin (2010: 17) defines his notion of aura within the realm of art with an elegant naturalistic similitude: “If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.” In Benjamin’s writing, the aura is produced by a gap between the observer and the observed, “the unique phenomenon of a distance” (2010: 17); according to Benjamin, with the introduction of mechanical (especially photographic) means of reproduction, the aura that connoted artworks started disappearing, since the distance produced by the situated nature of the work (its being uniquely in one place, at one time) was obliterated by its reproducibility. While Benjamin overtly theorizes the applicability of the notion of aura outside the realm of art,2 my use of the author’s theory is more allusive, and rests on the idea of a distance (both spatial and temporal: elsewhere Benjamin [1999a: 518] defines aura as “a strange weave of space and time”) being at the heart of the notion of uniqueness in video games. In the case of Nintendo’s golden cartridge, two sets of distances can be seen at work in defining the auratic quality of this object. On the one hand, the obvious gap between the cartridge and the player. A rare object, produced in twenty-six copies, sought after by collectors, certainly stands as essentially unattainable by the average game enthusiast, whose usual pleasures are available on store shelves by the millions. Another form of distancing operating here, then, is that from the common manufacturing practices adopted by the game industry. Video games such as Nintendo World Championship stand in opposition to one of the

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dominating industrial practices of their time, that of mass manufacturing standardized goods. Similar practices of auratic distancing are often adopted by contemporary game designers to infuse their games with a notion of uniqueness. Curiosity – What’s Inside the Cube? and A Slow Year, two experimental games that significantly evoke a sense of auratic distance, will help me test a Benjaminian theory of distancing.

Curiosity and A Slow Year. Distancing strategies. Curiosity – What’s Inside the Cube? is a video game developed by 22Cans for mobile devices as a promotional paratext for the game Godus (Fassone and Salvador 2013). When starting Curiosity – What’s Inside the Cube?, players are confronted with a cube; by zooming in on the cube, players can tap portions of its surface, essentially peeling layers off the figure. According to Peter Molyneux, the main developer of the game, the cube contained about sixty-nine billion “cubelets” players could tap. In a rather minimalist version of a MMO game, Curiosity had every player in the world tap the same cube, a unique digital entity existing for all players at the same time. Curiosity’s strategies of distancing can thus be summarized in two words: exclusivity and ephemerality. Curiosity is an exclusive game, since only one cube exists for all players to tap on; in other words, since every player of Curiosity peels the same cube, none of them actually owns the game. Downloading the game on one’s mobile device means gaining an interface to a shared virtual artifact that every player can modify. In-game purchases allow players to tap more rapidly and efficiently and even re-build layers of previously peeled cubelets to hamper the progresses of fellow players. The cube is thus a shared entity, remote from all of its players, who work on it cooperatively. The exclusivity of the game comes from the premise expressed by Molyneux in a number of interviews published prior to the release of Curiosity; on these occasions the designer clearly stated that only one of the thousands of players of the game would have been able to beat Curiosity. The content of the cube would have been revealed only to the person tapping the last cubelet; according to Molyneux (interviewed in Tanz 2012) “what is inside the cube is life-changingly amazing by any definition,” but, quite conveniently, this amazing reward will only be revealed to the one player that will ultimately conquer the game. The designer’s grand claim about Curiosity’s exclusivity (a video game that players need to share, but that only one person can win) was complemented by a

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strategy of secrecy that surrounded the production and release of the game. In the same interview, it is speculated that “Molyneux hasn’t told anyone what’s in the cube—not his wife, not his son, not even his coworkers,” thus reinforcing both the sense of exclusivity surrounding the game and the auratic role of the designer as an artist working in absolute solitude. On 26 May 2013, the game ended, and a single player discovered the secret hidden inside the cube, which consisted in the possibility to participate in the design of Molyneux’s forthcoming video game Godus by acting as a god to every player of the game for a limited period of time. Trying to access Curiosity one day after its completion I was presented with a caption reading “The cube has been opened. Thanks for taking part in our experiment.” Curiosity’s temporary existence was over; a game that had kept its distance from players by residing in a remote, shared space for about six months, was now ultimately unreachable. Just like most promotional material, Curiosity’s ephemeral appearance was tied to the release of Godus, the product for which Molyneux’s bizarre take on mobile MMO s was supposed to act as a form of non-conventional advertising. Nevertheless, in the case of Curiosity, ephemerality was not merely functional, but rather a part of a more complex distancing strategy. While the exclusivity of the game was granted by its unique winning condition, its ephemerality rested on the premise of the cube being a finite object, progressively eroded by the work of players, whose constant clicking made this peculiar virtual object increasingly removed from the community that had shaped it in the previous months. Another game that adopts a set of what I have defined as distancing strategies is A Slow Year by Ian Bogost. Bogost (2010) describes his game as follows: A Slow Year is a collection of four games, one for each season, about the experience of observing things. These games are neither action nor strategy: each of them requires a different kind of sedate observation and methodical input. The game attempts to embrace maximum expressive constraint and representational condensation. I want to call them game poems.

Bogost designed the game in 2010 for the Atari 2600, a game console released in 1977 which had not seen the release of a commercial game since 1984. A Slow Year is divided into four chapters, one for each season, and requires the player to perform rather simple actions such as catching a falling leaf or blinking while contemplating the slow flow of a river. A series of peculiarities set Bogost’s game apart from a number of art games produced by independent developers: the game is based on a specific, commercially defunct platform, it was released in

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extremely limited runs, and the reception of the game almost immediately transformed it into an objet d’art. Bogost released the game in two versions: one featuring a book of procedurally generated haikus, a CD containing an Atari 2600 emulator for PC and MAC , and an emulated version of the game; the other featuring the actual Atari cartridge and the book contained in a leather-bound enclosure. The latter is a numbered, signed special edition, priced at $500, a tag exceeding even that of the most baroque limited editions of successful big budget video games. Surprisingly, Bogost (interviewed in McCollough 2011) confesses that “whether or not I’ll find an audience for this work is an open question! Interestingly, sales of the $500 limited edition have been far easier than sales of the $20 paperback book”; while a number of contingent reasons may have contributed to the popularity of the $500 version of A Slow Year, I contend that this was also—and possibly especially—due to Bogost’s strategies of distancing. Bogost’s use of Atari 2600 and his insistence on the platform’s limitations3 seem to reverberate in the focus given to the material existence of A Slow Year. While the $20 version featured an emulated version of the game, the limited run presented the game in what is arguably its most authentic form: a plastic cartridge contained in a case featuring what McCollough (2011) defines as a “faithful reproduction of Atari 2600 graphic design tropes, including an engrossing (and bizarre) painting that somehow manages to hyperbolize the 4 kilobyte world of the game into a 1980s transcendental fugue.” The limited edition of A Slow Year contextualizes Bogost’s game as a unique object by augmenting the relevance of the material and paratextual apparatus, a feature that distances the game from the way Atari 2600 games are commonly experienced today, namely through emulators such as Stella.4 Bogost somehow eschews the technical reproducibility of his game by encasing what an Amazon reviewer tellingly describes as “the authentic version” in a closed format such as that of the cartridge, and surrounding it with a wealth of paratexts. In a way, Bogost seems to be trying consciously to revert the process of withering of the aura described by Hansen (1987: 183) in a commentary on Benjamin’s essay: To repeat the by now familiar argument: the technical reproducibility of existing works of art and, what is more, its constitutive role in the aesthetics of photography and film have created a historical standard which affects the status of art in its core. With the elimination of qualities that accrued to the artwork as a unique object—its presence, authenticity and authority, its “aura”—the standard of universal reproducibility shatters the cultural tradition that draws

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legitimacy from the experience of art, thus baring the entanglement of art and social privilege.

Bogost’s game ironically addresses what Hansen dubs as “the entanglement of art and social privilege” by choosing a complex platform to work with and packaging the authentic version of the work in peculiarly prestigious casings (both the leather-bound hardcover and the uniquely auratic cartridge). Nevertheless, rather than referring generally to those who possess social privilege, A Slow Year’s form of distancing from the usual distribution methods of video games seems to nod at a specific enclave of savvies who constitute what Bourdieu (1984:70) would have called the video game “mondains,” the men of the world who pursue “the infinitesimal nuances which make up the “je ne sais quoi” and the delicate perfection of savoir vivre,” with whom the auratic quality of Bogost’s work resonates more clearly.

A game I will never play. Chain World. At the 2011 Game Design Challenge, an event taking place during the Game Design Conference in which video game designers compete to present the best game about a specific theme, Jason Rohrer premiered a Chain World, which won him the first prize. The theme of that year’s competition was “Bigger Than Jesus,” a slogan that inspired designers to imagine games that would tackle issues of religion and spirituality. In his presentation Rohrer explained how Chain World was inspired by one of his main beliefs, namely that “we become like gods to those who come after us.” Rohrer’s game embeds this assumption into its very nature, since it is a Minecraft mod installed on a custom-designed USB stick of which only one copy exists in the world. The player of Chain World can modify the world of the game at will, but is supposed to follow what Rohrer defined as the game’s canon, a set of rules that limit the behavior of the player possessing the USB stick. Chain World’s canon (Meer 2011), as compiled by Rohrer is: 1. 2. 3. 3a. 3b. 4. 5.

Run Chain World via one of the included “run_ChainWorld” launchers. Start a single-player game and pick ‘Chain World’. Play until you die exactly once. Erecting wooden signs with text is forbidden. Suicide is permissible. Immediately after dying and respawning, quit to the menu. Allow the world to save.

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6. 7. 8. 9.

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Exit the game and wait for your launcher to automatically copy Chain World back to the USB stick. Pass the USB stick to someone else who expresses interest. Never discuss what you saw or did in Chain World with anyone. Never play again.

After his presentation, Rohrer offered the USB stick to an audience member, who would have been the second player of the game, Rohrer himself being the first. Chain World’s approach to uniqueness in game design is akin to that shown by Curiosity, although its take on distance is definitely more radical. In Rohrer’s vision, Chain World should have been a unique artifact whose very existence— rather than its actual gameplay—would have stood as a way of questioning the limits and inherent features of the distribution of video games. By hampering participation and diluting it through the game’s nomadic life, Rohrer seemingly aimed at replicating the diffusion of knowledge in an oral culture rather than the mechanisms upholding a religion. Moreover, the existence of a physical device, the USB stick, that in practice stops the game spreading, hints at Rohrer’s intention to produce a social experiment of sorts, a semi-secret game that, rather than spreading virally like the mysterious The Game,5 would be handed down as a sacred artifact. The USB stick itself, in a conscious attempt to foreground the sectarian nature of the game, was decorated by Rohrer to look like a piece of esoteric paraphernalia. According to Fagone (2011) “he sanded off the memory stick’s logos, giving it a brushed-metal texture that reminded him of something out of Mad Max. Then, using his kids’ acrylics, he painted a unique pattern on both sides, a chain of dots that resembled a piece of Aboriginal art he had seen.” Rohrer gave Chain World to a man at the Game Developers Conference: Jia Ji, a game designer and charity fundraiser from Hawaii, who then proceeded to reinterpret Rohrer’s vision of the game. After acquiring the USB stick, Ji listed the possibility of playing Chain World on eBay, claiming that the proceeds of the auction would be used for charity. Moreover, Ji launched the website chainworld. org, where he listed the people who had expressed their interest in playing Rohrer’s game; among these were game scholar Jane McGonigal and designer Will Wright. Ji’s reinterpretation of Rohrer’s game-as-cult imprint redefined Chain World’s uniqueness. Whereas in Rohrer’s original intentions the game was supposed to be a slowly evolving world reserved for one player at a time, in the form of a secret ludic heritage, Ji’s initiative turned it into a more traditional art object, re-establishing the object’s artistic aura in the form of a tendency to

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sanction social privilege and financial status. This switch was noted and harshly contested by game designer Darius Kazemi (2011), who directly questioned Ji’s move in a heated article: This is a load of bull. I presume that game designers are able to figure out the consequences of rule systems they design. Yet I wonder whether you realize what system you are setting up by grafting these rules onto Jason’s game/religion thing? You are doing two things: 1. 2.

Selling the right to play the game to the highest bidder Somehow reserving the right for famous people to play the game

This is insane. You’re basically saying that the way to participate Jason’s [sic] in project is to have expendable cash, or be famous. There is absolutely nothing reverent about that. It is completely counter to the tone of the talk that Jason gave at GDC [Game Developers Conference]. The fact that the money goes to charity is irrelevant: if you are trying to say that you want the game to go to the person who does the most “good” by donating money, that is such a myopic view of goodness that it makes me quake with anger. Have you considered that there are people who should play this game who maybe don’t have a bucket of expendable cash they are sitting on?

Kazemi’s claim to the senselessness of Ji’s initiative is motivated by the perceived switch in the form and nature of distancing that this implied. In Kazemi’s view, Rohrer’s work was supposed to be a sort of secret cult among game enthusiasts who—according to the canon—expressed interest in the game, thus proving their belonging within the small imagined community (Anderson, 1983) of “people who should play this game who maybe don’t have a bucket of expendable cash they are sitting on.” According to Kazemi, Ji had stolen the game from the savvy “mondain” (Bourdieu 1984: 69–70) and given it to a wider population who only earned the right to play Chain World through financial backing. But setting Kazemi’s argument aside for a second, one could interpret Ji’s move as a denouement of the auratic qualities of unique or rare items within video game culture: the winner of the auction, nicknamed Positional Super KO, apparently received the USB stick from Ji, but did not send it to Jane McGonigal, the potential fourth player of Chain World. It is not known if Positional Super KO — who in the meantime revealed herself as a woman living in one major American city—kept the artifact to herself or disposed of it, but the history surrounding Chain World seems to suggest that its days as social and ludic experiment may be over, while its life as a more conventional art object has begun.

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Ephemerality Reconsidering OSGONS In video games replayability can be considered both a feature and a practice. On the one hand, producers often design and develop games that can be traversed through various routes or in different modes. On the other hand, players often replay portions of a game in order to be able to overcome particularly insidious obstacles, while in other cases they may find themselves re-playing the whole game to reach a different outcome. Players of Resident Evil, for example, will be confronted with both events: they will most likely fail a number of times in order to progress in the game, and may want to replay the whole experience to be able to witness one of the game’s multiple possible endings. Interpreted in this perspective, ephemerality or transience can be described as a condition found in every play session, since in most games the player’s avatar life is a transient, temporary phenomenon, that ends and restarts by pushing START. Video games as objects, on the other hand, are certainly not ephemeral, since players can (and will) return to them, replay them and, in most cases, keep them shelved for future replays. In 2001 Gonzalo Frasca published an article that questioned the very nature of the medium; Frasca addresses notions such as replayability and persistence by claiming that video games should pursue ephemerality in order to provide players with the experience of tragedy, something that, at the time, Frasca thought was unattainable for the medium. The title of the piece, Ephemeral Games: Is it Barbaric to Design Videogames After Auschwitz? (Frasca 2001), with its Adornian undertones immediately qualifies Frasca’s approach to video games. According to the author (2001: 172): Currently, videogames are closer to Tolkien than to Chekhov; they show more influence from George Lucas than from François Truffaut. One reason is primarily economical. The industry targets male teenagers and children and everybody else either adapts to that content or looks for another form of entertainment. However, I do not believe the current lack of mature, intellectual content is solely due to marketing reasons. I argue that current computer game design conventions have structural characteristics which prevent them from dealing with “serious” content.

Frasca’s vision of video games as puerile, shallow entertainment recalls Adorno’s thoughts on cinema. It is not just the nature of the contents carried by the

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medium, but the very form of its social and technological existence that prevents the diffusion of worthy messages. In fact, Adorno (2005: 212) condemns both the escapism and ideological stances promoted by cinema: The admission that films disseminate ideology is itself disseminated ideology. It is accommodated administratively in the rigid distinction between synthetic daydreams on one hand, vehicles of refuge from everyday life, “escape”; and on the other well-meaning products that spur us on to correct social behaviour, “convey a message”. Their prompt subsumption under escape and message expresses the untruth of both types. The scorn for escapism, the standardized indignation at superficiality, is nothing but the pitiful echo of the old-established ethos that fulminates against gambling because in the dominant practice it cannot play the game.

Frasca’s take on the argument is based on the assumption that video games cannot convey what the author dubs as “seriousness” since their persistence and replayability shield players from suffering the consequences of their actions. Even games dealing with complex and “serious” subject matters such as war cast players in the role of ever-resurrecting and usually over-powered soldiers, who will not endure the tragedy of dying at the front, since every death will be but a bump in the player’s journey through the game. Frasca then proposes the foundation of a new genre of video games, that he dubs OSGONs (One Session Game Of Narration). In this theoretical subset of games, players would have only one chance at exploring the game’s world and make significant choices within it; after the avatar’s death the game would self-destruct or erase itself from the player’s hard drive. According to Frasca (2001: 175), OSGONs would allow for tragic storytelling within games, since they would counter the assumption that “actions in videogames are reversible. Therefore, there is no room in them for fate or tragedy. It is always possible to go back and play until you reach a happy ending. For this reason, videogames allow players to fool death itself ”; in Frasca’s ephemeral games, however, “the player would have to carefully choose her actions and decisions and face the consequences of her actions, just like in real life. This would allow designers to deal with more ‘serious’ topics” (2001: 180).

Catharsis and procedures Frasca’s theoretical proposal is certainly thought provoking, but contains a few fundamental fallacies in its mechanistic connection of ephemerality and tragedy. What Frasca seems to imply when proposing the design of OSGONs is that

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irreversible actions engender catharsis, which would in turn lead players to a deeper understanding of the serious issues that video games should tackle. This causal connection between ephemerality and tragedy in games rests on what I consider to be two major misconceptions: 1.

2.

that only finalized, teleological storytelling (significantly Frasca proposes “games of narration”) is a suitable medium to confront serious or tragic issues and, consequently, that the form of reiterative interaction found in video games promotes a shallower, less dramatic, reading of the portrayed situations.

As for the first objection, it may be useful to consider that when comparing video games to other media such as film and literature, Frasca chooses rather surprising examples. The distinction between supposedly low (Lucas, Tolkien) and high (Truffaut, Chekhov) culture proposed by Frasca may in fact be rather easily read as a distinction between more traditional, finalized (one could say pseudo-mythic) storytelling and open-form, modern narration. In both Truffaut’s films and most of Chekhov’s writing catharsis is usually eschewed or deeply problematized, and more radically, endings are ambiguous and hardly resolutive. On the other hand, popular literature and classical Hollywood cinema, as I have claimed in previous chapters, rely for their dramatic efficacy on definite closures. Frasca’s assumption that only cathartic narratives can tackle complex topics is immediately countered by his choice of examples, a series of modern authors whose positioning towards their readers or viewers is certainly not that of a discerning moral guide. But it is not only Frasca’s problematic choice of examples that hinders the supposed cathartic drive of the speculative genre of OSGONs. Another, more medium-specific remark is in order. A number of scholars and commentators have attributed to the reiterative nature of the playing experience exactly that expressive potential that Frasca claims only OSGONs could attain. David Bolter (2013) compares what he defines as two competing aesthetics within the media ecology: the aesthetic of catharsis and the aesthetic of flow. The former can be found at work in popular cinema and literature and relies on teleological storytelling, while the latter characterizes video games and other forms of visual digital media6 and is defined by a prevalence of the user’s control through interaction with a simulated environment. While Bolter never directly confronts the issue of “seriousness” within video games, he dismisses the predominant focus on catharsis as a privileged tool for meaning-making—a position that

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Frasca seems to fully embrace—as “the trope ‘life as cathartic narrative’ ” (Bolter 2013: 128), a fallacy that derives from the widespread use of this rhetorical device, which can be found “in every ‘human interest’ story on television news, every self-help manual of the kind that truly top the bestseller lists, and for that matter in the contemporary readings of at least the American versions of Christianity and Judaism” (2013: 128). In other words, what Frasca characterizes as a causal relation between ephemerality and catharsis, Bolter describes as a teleological rhetoric influencing several cultural assumptions and a number of successful texts. If the aesthetic of catharsis via ephemerality invoked by Frasca is a naïve simplification of the multiple processes through which contemporary media may engage with complex questions, how do video games tackle such issues? In his article, Frasca uses the Holocaust as an example of a historical event that video games will never be able to portray fully unless they embrace some form of ephemerality in order to represent tragedy. Frasca argues that the only games dealing with the matter are underground neo-Nazi productions, among which he describes “one game available from many European BBS during the early nineties, [in which] the player was offered the role of a concentration camp administrator and had to coordinate mass murders” (2001: 182). While I fortunately never played the game described by Frasca, I contend that the sort of simulation described by the author may indeed be characterized as a game capable of seriously depicting the atrocities of the Holocaust. According to Ian Bogost (2007), the possibility for games to confront serious and even tragic issues lies in their aptness to represent complex systems and allow the players to explore the different outcomes linked with different sets of actions. If video games can attain “seriousness” it is precisely because they are replayable, nonephemeral media products; by granting players with multiple chances to test the rules and boundaries of a simulation, they allow them to grasp the complexity of layered, multifaceted situations. In this perspective, Frasca’s horrifying Holocaust simulator would paradoxically work as a moral piece on the abjection of mass extermination. By casting players in the role of the director of a concentration camp, the game would force them into recognizing the hideously standardized nature of the operations conducted within the camps and at the same time, by presenting them with a failure every time they try to act humanely (e.g., not complying with the game’s rules), it would force them to face the inhumanity of the Nazi Final Solution.7 In other words, what Frasca fails to see when theorizing ephemeral games is that the position of the player in a video game is not necessarily that of a fictional character within a story, but rather that of an actor

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within a complex system who, in some cases by the mediation of their avatar, is able to reflect and often question the rules of the simulation, provided the game can be replayed indefinitely.

Review your choices: One Single Life While Frasca’s claim to ephemerality being a function of catharsis or tragedy is hardly sustainable, one may find a rare breed of games that embrace this design principle but, interestingly, produce ironic or even parodic results. One Single Life, a title released on mobile platforms, is one of the rare games to feature the form of ephemerality proposed by Frasca in his article. In the game, the player controls a man who needs to jump from the top of one building to another. The game grows increasingly difficult with every stage, as buildings are set further apart or at different heights and jumping from one rooftop to the adjacent one turns into a nightmarish challenge. Players can only perform two basic actions within the game: tap on the screen to make the avatar start running and tap again to have him jump between the buildings. Every level requires players to perform one single jump before moving on to the next stage. One Single Life, as

Figure 4.1 Perma-death in One Single Life

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implied by the title, supplies players with one try for each level; in the game, death is permanent. This means that when returning to the game after having failed once, players are confronted with a large banner stating the stage in which their death happened, and the rank they reached (in my case, I was deemed “worthy” by the game). Some reviewers have dubbed One Single Life an experimental game (Brown 2011), since it admittedly aims at subverting one of the most persistent tropes in video games, that of replayability. But is Fresh Tone’s game really an ephemeral piece of software as described by Frasca? Or is it a commentary on ephemeral games? One of One Single Life’s most puzzling features is the “jump simulation,” an area in which players can test their skills risk-free before attempting the jump. Every level is thus split in two: players can train in the jump simulation—which is identical to the actual level, save the grid-lined aesthetics—and then spend their only existential quarter on trying the jump, as stated by the game, “in the real world.” Some commentators have dismissed the implementation of a training area as a step back from the game’s radical design premise. Brad Nicholson (2011), for example, claims that: What troubles me about One Single Life is that it doesn’t embrace its design. It gives you an infinite amount of chances to test a jump in a grid-lined virtual room before you take the actual plunge, which robs the jump of its impact and kills some of the tenseness that builds up before your little avatar begins his run. Also, if you play through the credits, the game gives you an extra life.

Nicholson’s complaint is based on an understanding of the game that is akin to that shown by Frasca with regard to OSGONs. Nicholson claims that no real tragedy is involved in One Single Life, both because every action can be rehearsed indefinitely before being attempted in the “real world,” and because the game betrays its moral positioning by supplying players with an extra life. Nicholson’s reading is well grounded and certainly sound, but I propose a different interpretation of the game’s problematic relation with ephemerality. I would characterize One Single Life as ironic rather than tragic, and in this perspective I claim that both the simulation mode and the extra life granted to the player after the credits concur into the realization of this rhetorical goal. More specifically, I contend that One Single Life stands as an ironic commentary on one of the predominant discourses around play. One of the dominant theories, both in the academia and within social discourses, concerning the utility of child’s play claims that play represents a

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Figure 4.2 One Single Life’s jump simulator

form of rehearsal for activities to be learned and executed later in life. For child psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1966: 67) for example, child’s play acts as a tool for emancipation from constraints and as a way to attribute meanings to objects and events encountered daily. Sutton-Smith (1997: 35) defines this wealth of theories as “rhetorics of child play,” and cites studies such as Lieberman’s (1977) and Dansky’s (1980) as examples of this scholarly tendency. In other words, the notion of play as rehearsal or as an educational path to the tasks of adult life is rather pervasive. My aim is certainly not to discuss this theory and its relevance to psychology, but rather to characterize it, as Sutton-Smith (1997: 8) does, as a rhetoric “in its modern sense, as being a persuasive discourse, or an implicit narrative, wittingly or unwittingly adopted by members of a particular affiliation to persuade others of the veracity and worthwhileness of their beliefs.” My claim is that One Single Life, by essentially dividing its gameplay into two areas—one where actions are performed as rehearsals, and the other where they are performed as the real thing—more or less consciously stands as a commentary piece to this rhetoric. Fresh Tone’s game may be seen as a series of encased simulations: within the simulation of jumping from a rooftop to the next, the

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player finds a simulation of that simulation, which streamlines it both stylistically (the grid-lined background, the absence of details) and procedurally, by removing the incumbency of death. In this sense, the ephemerality of the game’s “real world” is framed by this simulation of the second degree that marks a sense of progress (or, to be even more allusive towards the rhetoric of child play, of growth). Deciding to face the actual game and leave the simulation feels like a rewarding step into simulated adulthood. This crossing of a border also implies joining a peer group, since every time a player decides to play a level “in the real world,” they can access the data containing the percentage of players who made it that far. One could claim that playing One Single Life is a thrilling experience of responsibility because of the existence of a “safe” mode, rather than despite it, as Nicholson seems to imply. This premise is somehow ridiculed by the game itself, rewarding players who get to the end of the credits sequence with an extra life. This further mise en abyme of the game’s principle shatters the foundation of the simulation of the game’s real world by framing it parodically as just another game. Despite its minimal interaction dynamics—jumping may be said to be one of the most ubiquitous actions performed in video games—One Single Life is a very complex experiment in play theory. While it is certainly one of the most accomplished examples of an OSGON , One Single Life’s encased modes of interaction seem to negate the very possibility of achieving tragic or cathartic effects in ephemeral games. Furthermore, the game’s threshold between the consequence-free rehearsal mode and the ephemeral “real world” allows players to confront and reflect upon the “rhetoric of child play” and its relation with the adult practice of playing video games.

Modularity Opera aperta 2.0 As I sit at my desk to write the introduction to this book, I find myself surrounded by the evidence of a lifetime of videogaming. Aside from the library of CD s, DVD s, Blu-Ray discs and cartridges, countless joysticks, joypads and handheld systems litter my workspace. My bookshelves groan under the weight of books about every aspect of video games from artwork, design and production through scholarly criticism and analysis . . . On my desk, a bobble-headed Super Mario, a plastic Pikachu filled with curiously flavourless Japanese sweets, a cuddly Link

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from The Legend of Zelda, are just some of the game-related toys spread throughout my office and home . . . Oh yes, and I am wearing a Legend of Zelda T-Shirt. Newman 2008: vi

James Newman opens his 2008 book Playing with Videogames with a lengthy description of the game-related objects sitting on his desk and populating his office. What Newman is describing is the wealth of ancillary material that surround the medium of video games since its birth; from Pac-Man mugs to Gears of War T-shirts and toys, popular and less popular video games have spawned a multitude of different objects that transcend the life of the game onscreen and project it into the real world. Jonathan Gray claims that the proliferation of paratextual material around popular media contents multiplies our possibilities of understanding the meaning of the primary texts we experience (Gray 2010). Gray’s book is an exploration of the use of paratexts in film, and its primary thesis is that paratexts guide our fruition of an audiovisual text to the point of completely reorienting our understanding of it. In this perspective, the paratextual apparatus produced by the industry and the grassroots appropriations of textual meanings compete in redefining a text’s reading. Gray (2010: 16) admits that, while his study focuses solely on paratexts found within the film industry, “of course, the music, videogame, online and print industries have their own thriving examples.” This is certainly true in video games, a medium that, as suggested by Newman’s list of objects, is particularly prone to this proliferation of ancillary material. The multiplication of paratextual or secondary material in the form of toys, posters, T-shirts and gadgets is not the only form of dissemination and expansion that the fictional worlds of video games undergo. In other words, video game worlds are not expanded only by sets of ancillary products, but, more radically, constitute one of the epitomes of modularity in media. According to Manovich (2001), modularity is one of the founding features of digital media, since their reliance on ever-integrable programming protocols make the addition of new parts a relatively easy task in most cases. This is certainly true for video games, a medium in which the praxis of modification and integration is so common that the very practices of designing and playing games are fundamentally informed by it. In his discussion of the founding features of digital media, Manovich claims that modularity within new media forms is of a fractal nature, meaning that just as they can be integrated at the level of the code, they can also usually be expanded at higher levels through the use of larger modules. According to Manovich (2001: 30):

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Just as a fractal has the same structure on different scales, a new media object has the same modular structure throughout. Media elements, be they images, sounds, shapes, or behaviors are represented as collections of discrete samples (pixels, polygons, voxels, characters, scripts). These elements are assembled into larger-scale objects but continue to maintain their separate identities. The objects themselves can be combined into even larger objects – again, without losing their independence.

Take Half-Life 2, a science-fiction-themed first person shooter. Since its first release in 2004, the game has been available in a number of formats and can now be found on Steam, a platform for the digital distribution of PC games. During a decade of existence, Half-Life 2 was integrated both microscopically and macroscopically by different parties with different intents. While a certain number of patches released by Valve aimed at solving bugs and design issues, adding no visible module to the game itself, but rather slightly modifying its behavior by working on the game’s engine, other releases acted as real, tangible expansions. For example, Valve’s update document released on April 19, 2006, reads: Half-Life 2 Fixed bug where NPC s would ignore hintbrushes that should block line of sight Source Engine Fixed really long game directories not being able to upload game statistics Fixed listen server host not being able to hear sounds from bsp. zip files Fixed demo smoother not being able to select samples in certain demo files Fixed partial-HDR exploit in DX 7 allowing wireframe materials.

Valve’s technical document reports both the modifications executed on the video game and those executed on the Source Engine (Valve’s proprietary game engine), a difference that, as I will explain later, has significant relevance. While mostly invisible to the players, these minuscule fixes work on the game by integrating it at its lowest level, that of the source code, thus preventing errors and crashes from happening in certain circumstances. On the other side of the spectrum stand visible, player-relevant integrations, often called mods: radical modifications of a video game that dramatically affect the visuals and/or the rules and behavior of the game world. In most cases, both the official producers and the players produce mods with different goals and means. On the one hand, downloadable episodes such as Half-Life 2: Episode One integrate and modify

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the game’s larger canonical narrative; on the other hand, player-produced mods usually aim at using the game as a platform for the development of different and at times largely unrelated new games. The website Moddb.com lists 1079 mods for Half-Life 2; these variations on the theme of Valve’s game range from GoldenEye: Source, a complete restyling of Half-Life 2 made in order to recreate the atmosphere and gameplay of GoldenEye 007 to the experimental “narrativedriven first person game” The Stanley Parable, that was later transformed into a standalone, commercially available game.

Mods and modules. Game engines as branch systems. In The Open Work, Umberto Eco explores the various forms of openness found in modern artworks, eventually stating that there is no such thing as a closed work, an expressive artifact that can produce meaning in the absence of a reader or, more generally, a user. Even in literature, what Eco (1989: 11) describes as “the theoretical, mental collaboration” of the reader is required if any literary work is to function and generate an instance of meaning-making. Later in the book, the author confronts information theory by discussing Wiener’s use of the theory as a tool for imagining human-machine communication (1948). Eco here defines the notion of “branch systems” (1989: 49), a term he uses to describe those systems whose very nature suggests some form of internal order and recursiveness that allows for complex but predictable interactions. Eco’s main example is the tonal system in music, which differentiates itself from natural sounds by being regulated by precise relations between the sounds that enhance its predictability. According to Eco (1989: 50): the tonal system also introduces, within its own organization, certain criteria of probability that allow one to predict, with moderate certainty, the melodic curve of a particular sequence of notes, as well as the specific place in the sequence where the tonic accent will fall.

In the following paragraph I will consider game mods as the product of a peculiar branch system found within certain contemporary video games: the game engine, a codified matrix that is able to generate different but somehow predictable results when manipulated. A game engine is a system designed to allow programmers to develop video games, sidestepping the need for low-level programming languages. Engines usually contain a series of instructions that generally apply to the functioning

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and behavior of the video game’s fictional world. Aspects of the game such as the laws of physics (gravity, collision, etc.), the specific ways in which the game renders images, the artificial intelligence applied to its actors, the way sounds and lights are handled at software level are usually found within the engine. For a game developer, working with a game engine means importing and assembling distinct components into an existing environment whose rules are defined in advance. This form of game design and development is, in a way, consistent with Eco’s notion of a branch system, since game engines work as contextualization tools that significantly reduce the amount of entropy that programmers need to face when approaching the production of a game. Game engines conveniently segment almost all of the visual and procedural aspects of a game into manageable modules that can be moved from one game to the next. GoldenEye: Source’s protocols for the handling of lighting and shading effects, and other similar resources are essentially identical to those found in Half-Life 2, since the same game engine—Valve’s Source Engine—was used to produce the two games. As noted by various scholars (Kushner 2003, Bogost 2005), game engines were first made popular by the explosion of the first person shooter genre in the early 1990s. With the release of DOOM , this form of modular programming became one of the most successful industrial standards in video games. DOOM was based on the Doom Engine, a game engine that upheld most of the operations performed by the game and that could be used to develop other first person shooters. In the years following the release of the game, the engine was licensed to third parties, that produced their own games through it, and later it was released freely with a non-commercial use license. After the release of the Doom Engine, a variety of other engines were produced, and a great number of commercial games now use these ubiquitous systems for at least a part of their development. Specialized engines can be used in conjunction with other enginelike software in order to perform specific operations within the game; SpeedTree, for example, is an engine that specializes in the rendering of realistic trees and vegetation, and its uses range from skateboard games such as Tony Hawk: Shred to hunting simulations such as Deer Hunter Tournament. In an article about the political economies of games and the power relations that operate within them, Sam Hinton (2005) points out that due to the complex hardware and software systems employed by contemporary designers, modifying an existing game today is a harder task than it was in the past. Hinton’s assumption is based on the fact that the graphic and operational complexities of major contemporary video games often descend from extremely evolved technologies

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and convoluted algorithms, while old games were generally the result of more primitive programming. Moreover, big budget games today are developed by teams of hundreds, while most of Atari’s or Amiga’s classics came straight from one programmer’s desk. Hinton’s assumption is based on common sense, but is hardly tenable. The pervasive use of game engines—in most cases released for licensing coupled with dedicated APIs8—significantly reduces the need for low-level programming through the implementation of a paradigm of modularity both within the engine (where objects can be combined at will) and among the engines. Video games of the 1970s and 1980s, on the other hand, were usually developed by a single programmer for exactly the opposite reason: working from the ground up with proprietary languages often resulted in esoteric work flows, which made the reverse engineering of games extremely complex. In other words, the proliferation and use of game engines as industry standard seems to have solidified Kittler’s theory of the use of high-level programming languages as a consequence of the diffusion of a specific kind of computer culture, privileging abstraction over materiality and mediation over direct access. According to Kittler (1995): The so-called philosophy of the computer community tends to systematically obscure hardware by software, electronic signifiers by interfaces between formal and everyday languages. In all philanthropic sincerity, high-level programming manuals caution against the psychopathological risks of writing assembler code.

Modern game engines incorporate what Ian Bogost (2006) terms “unit operations”: repeatable, modular instances—for example the way the water reflects light in a game or the type of AI attributed to non-playing characters— that act as the building blocks of video games. The constitutive modularity or, as Bogost (2006: 59) describes it the “componentized, unit-operational” nature of modern game engines, that abstract most of the heavy lifting of low-level programming, leads to a series of consideration about game design that I will synthesize as follows: 1.

2.

By abstracting specific, reusable components that can be re-contextualized at will, game engines generate what Bogost (2005: 130, my translation) defines as “trademark aesthetics,” aggregates of discrete, repeatable parts whose expressive and aesthetic traits descend from copyrighted intellectual properties that are leased or licensed. This process makes both integration and re-design of a specific game easier and more convenient, since the foundations of the work are already in existence.

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3.

4.

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Given the diffusion of these tools within the game industry, standardization in design and programming is one of the prominent features of big budget game design. In this case, standardizing means that only certain features within a game engine can be tweaked, while others should be accepted as a status quo. On the other hand, given the game engine is provided by its makers to the public, non-professional developers have the chance to either modify existing games or develop new games from an existing engine. As noted by Morris (2003), this form of modularity has led to a diffusion of both the skills and the opportunities for players to engage in what she defines as “co-creative” practices.

In the light of these theories, I will analyse Garry’s Mod, a Half-Life 2 mod that reflects specifically on the use of game engines and on their nature of digital branch systems for the production of video games, and on the fractal nature of modular game development.

The flex of the wrist: Garry’s Mod “I made it easy to dance to this / But can you detect what’s coming next from the flex of the wrist?” Eric B. is President, the first single of the hip-hop duo Eric B. & Rakim, released in 1986, contains this rather unintelligible rhyme. While the first verse, “I made it easy to dance to this” sounds stereotypical for a rap song of the era, the second line remains puzzling. One may assume that Rakim’s verse on “flexing the wrist” has to be interpreted as a reference to Spider Man, the Marvel superhero who shoots spider’s webs out of his wrist. While working on modularity in video games, I incidentally came to the conclusion that the rhyme found in Eric B. is President could be interpreted differently. A common example of modular composition can be found in hip-hop’s sampling techniques; by gluing together drum rolls, bass lines, and effects from different songs, deejays like Eric B. can produce repetitive patterns for MC s like Rakim for rapping to. The most prominent sample found in Eric B. is President, for example, is a drum pattern borrowed from James Brown’s 1974 Funky President (People It’s Bad). In this perspective “detecting” what comes next by looking at Eric B.’s wrists could refer to predicting the sample the deejay will pull from his vinyl deck, the wrist being the main tool of a deejay for scratching. The idea of predicting “what’s coming next” evokes Eco’s notion of branch system, a hierarchically ordered system in

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which entropy is reduced by means of predictability. Sampling in hip-hop is an example of an emergent branch system, since the presence of a continuous drum loop dictates the use of samples that can be accommodated rhythmically on the groove, thus restricting the number of possible choices. Moreover, Eric B.’s sampling—and the wealth of similar practices found in early rap music in general—falls under Bogost’s category of “trademark aesthetics,” since the samples used in the song are usually portions of copyright protected music that are used modularly to produce a new artifact. One could go as far as saying that Eric B. is President’s engine is the rich heritage of 1970s American funk music, out of which the artists have chosen to sample James Brown’s Funky President (People It’s Bad). A game like Garry’s Mod, similarly to Eric B. & Rakim’s inventive use of the heritage of contemporary African American music, demonstrates the expressive power of trademark aesthetics, modular design, and sampling by letting the player play with the very notion of game engine. The game, released in 2004 as a modification of Half-Life 2 and subsequently turned into a standalone application, may be said to strip bare Half-Life 2 of most of its gameplay. In Garry’s Mod there are no enemies, no endpoint, no backstory, no hidden rooms, no non-playing characters; in the game’s purest version, accessed by clicking on “Start Single Player” and loading the gm_flatgrass map, the player is confronted with a first person view of a desolate land, the only objects in sight being a cubic building and a sign reading FLATTYWOOD in the distance. Despite not being able to perform any of the actions expected from a first person shooter (there is no one around to shoot, to begin with), players of Garry’s Mod can move around freely, jump, strafe, and duck; moreover, by pressing the Q key, they can access a menu that presents the various operations available. The menu is populated with a list of objects that can be freely used to populate the flat world of the game; moreover, the player is presented with various construction tools that facilitate the design of articulated buildings. Lastly, the player can evoke non-playing characters (human, animal or robotic) with whom to interact, and assign them different behavioral routines. One way to conceptualize Garry’s Mod is to relate it to the open games that I analysed earlier. The metaphor of the video game as toy that many commentators use for games such as The Sims or Sim City may apply, on the same premise, to FacePunch’s game. Robert Purchese (2013), for example, subscribes to this thesis when he writes that “Garry’s Mod takes Valve’s Source code and the various assets from Valve’s games and then plonks them all in a big toy chest and says there you

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Figure 4.3 Garry’s Mod’s FLATTYWOOD

go, do what you will with them.” In Purchese’s view, Garry’s Mod is a peculiar sort of toy—or collection of toys—derived from Valve’s game engine Source and, consequently, from the games produced through it. This connection with both the game engine and the other games is significantly strengthened by the fact that among the assets the player can use to populate the world it is possible to find characters, objects, and weapons that distinctly belong to the Half-Life series. In a way, then, Garry’s Mod can truly be defined as an open-ended, toy chest version, spin-off of Half-Life 2. Other scholars argue that this form of modding that comprises a process of full re-design of the game and its transformation into a less goal-oriented artifact turns players into potential remix artists by providing them with the tools for practices of artistic postproduction (Bourriaud 2002). Clarke and Mitchell (2003: 338), for example, claim that “videogames have increasingly become an area of creative inspiration and exploration,” a thesis that rests on a reading of player production within environments such as Garry’s Mod as a specific form of folk art developed within the field of video games, enhanced and sustained by the practice of modding existing games and turning them into creative artifacts. In describing Garry’s Mod take on modularity, I suggest we focus on the game’s relation with the game engine through which it was produced and with game engines at large. When pressing Q while playing Garry’s Mod I was confronted with a menu whose visual metaphor is clearly that of an operative system such as Microsoft Windows; Garry’s Mod main operational tool, the objects menu, is constructed through what Manovich (2001: 68–73) would define as the “cultural interface” of computer-assisted work. Visually there is

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nothing playful about the Garry’s Mod interface; on the contrary, the construction of the game seems to point to a work-like aesthetic of cascading windows and tabs that evoke the routines of a game programmer’s day at the office. From an aesthetics standpoint the game does not really privilege its reading as a toy or as an instrument for art, but as a rather serious tool for software experimentation. It is certainly possible to produce silly results by tinkering with Garry’s Mod, but the software’s identity as analytic exploration of the inner motions of an existing video game is established rather clearly by its almost clinical interface. This consideration allows me to claim that Garry’s Mod does not really present players with a world they can furnish and explore, but quite consciously hands them an abstracted game engine to tinker with. The ability to test the world’s physics, its lighting effects and even its inconsistencies (players can choose to walk through walls and even through the ground) presupposes a player of the second degree, whose interest is in experimenting with the modular functioning of a game rather than with an open world. In this perspective, Garry’s Mod is not a toy chest as much as it is a game engine simulator, a magnifying lens over a tool whose use is normally reserved to professionals. Once again, modularity is fractal. Just as the Source game engine used to program Garry’s Mod implied forms of modular, componentized programming, the abstraction of Source realized through Garry’s Mod presents players with the same modularity in the form of objects that can be added, subtracted, stacked, and used in various ways. Garry’s Mod represents Manovich’s notion of fractal replication perfectly in digital media, since it stands as a higher-level abstraction of a tool used to produce video games.9

Serialization Some definitions Whereas the concept of modularity describes the way in which different components within a single media product such as a video game are assembled, serialization refers to the practice of grouping a number of distinct products in a series by highlighting some of their common traits. The following section will address the idea of the series in relation to video games and explore some of the ways in which the process of serialization is reshaping our vision of the history of this medium. I will argue that one of the ways in which designers, producers, and distributors deal with the history of video games is through serialization,

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namely through the production of arbitrarily constructed series of previously independent products. A preliminary disambiguation on the use of terms such as series or serialization is required. Some media seem to be more inclined than others towards serial production; the episodic TV series, the dilated film franchise, fragmented and dispersed narrative threads within the serial comic are all excellent examples of a strategy that can often be traced back to the origins of these media. This type of serial strategy has been defined by Umberto Eco as the “return of the identical” (2005: 196, see also Eco 1985: 168), a storytelling strategy where narrative elements such as characters, situations, or goals are presented multiple times in order to create a sense of familiarity with the reader and, at the same time, manipulate or leverage the reader’s previous knowledge of the series. Video games do participate in this strategy in ways that are often borrowed from other media. A serial approach is used in franchises, such as Final Fantasy or Halo, in games sold in episodes, such as those produced by Telltale Games or Penny Arcade Adventures, or in games such as Atari’s Alone in The Dark that replicate some of the narrative strategies of the TV series format such as recaps and cliffhangers. In this case serialization is a process that involves the repetition and multiplication of narrative elements and the creation of threads that are expanded over long periods of time and broken down into pieces, eventually creating a series. The type of series I will discuss here, although related to the aforementioned concept, is simultaneously simpler and more radical, and can be described by a wider, and looser definition such as this: A group of separately published works related in subject and/or form, issued in succession (numbered or unnumbered) by a single publisher or distributor, usually in uniform style, each bearing, in addition to its own title, a collective or series title applied by the publisher to the group as a whole. The individual volumes or parts may not share the same author or editor, nor is it necessary for them to be published at regular intervals. Reitz 2004: 651

Corpora of texts consistent with this definition can easily be found in the literary market. Series such as these are usually composed of separately published novels, related in genre and/or format, and bearing a collective series title. Two notable cases are the Italian science fiction series Urania, published since 1952, and the French crime series Série noire, dating back to 1945. The single texts

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Figure 4.4 Aesthetic consistency in literary series

appearing as episodes in the series are not connected by a consistent narrative or by a set of recurring characters, but are independent, unrelated novels that share common traits (genre affiliation in the case of Urania and Série noire) and are subsequently serialized. In most cases, these literary series are composed of texts that had already been published separately (such is the case of American novels translated and re-printed both in Urania and Série noire), and had had a previous circulation in other contexts. In these cases, the series constitutes a space where existing texts are collected, assembled, and at least partially re-signified as parts of a larger whole. This process, however, is not transparent nor innocent, since texts often need to be adapted in order to fit into the series standard. In some cases, this practice involves the use of ancillary materials to convey the rightful affiliation of a text with a series. These materials, described by Gerard Genette (1997: 16) as “publisher peritexts,” are often designed with the intention of highlighting the similarities between the present text and the others in the series. Discussing these second-degree materials, Genette writes: I give the name publisher’s peritext to the whole zone of the peritext that is the direct and principal (but not exclusive) responsibility of the publisher (or perhaps, to be more abstract but also more exact, of the publishing house)—that is, the zone that exists merely by the fact that a book is published and possibly republished and offered to the public in one or several more or less varied presentations . . . We are dealing here with the outermost peritext (the cover, the title page, and their appendages) and with the book’s material construction (selection of format, of

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paper, of typeface and so forth), which is executed by the typesetter and printer but decided on by the publisher, possibly in consultation with the author.

The affiliation of a text to a series is thus communicated through aesthetic peritextual markers that connect different texts. In some cases, more radical means are used in order to create consistency within the series. One notable example is that of the Giallo Mondadori Italian literary series of crime novels that was known to publish abridged versions of English and American texts. Translators often omitted certain paragraphs to make the novel fit a given number of pages, carrying out a format-related restriction; in other cases, violent or morally ambiguous parts of the novels were censored to cater to the readers of the series (Spurio 2011).

Xbox Live Arcade: series and/as archives With the introduction of online distribution services and the re-circulation of older video games on modern platforms, a number of these strategies started being used in the presentation and distribution of video games, inevitably exerting a peculiar influence on historiographical and archival practices related to this medium. The processes of serialization that take place in online marketplaces such as Xbox Live or PlayStation Network are prime examples of this tendency.10 Within these platforms, games are often divided into different series in a grouping process that may be explicit (the series has a title and distinct aesthetic markers) or implicit (no common title is given, but other hints—such as a common set of semiotic features—are provided). Moreover, in digital stores, serialization is often temporary, ranging from ephemeral “deals of the week” to other, more persistent, forms of grouping. In other words, in the context of the digital distribution of video games, serialization is not always overt nor it is necessarily irreversible. Nevertheless, on a functional level, serialization strategies serve as tools for the user to browse the marketplace effectively, exploring it through subsequent refinements, in a continuum of series and sub-series. This model significantly influences and shapes the ways in which games—especially older or classic games—are presented today, and triggers some speculations on the means and effects of their (re-)circulation. The ways in which existing games are re-presented when serialized in digital marketplaces and the modifications that they inevitably undergo in order to fit within a serialized canon highlights the transformative nature of the process of serialization. One of the most popular and diverse series hosted in an online marketplace was the Xbox Live Arcade Series. The Xbox Live Arcade service was launched in

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December 2004 for the original Xbox console and then re-launched one year later on the Xbox 360. Since 2005, games started being released on Wednesdays only, thus reinforcing through chronological regularity the idea of serialization that seems to have shaped the sales strategy of Xbox Live Arcade. In late 2013, with the release of Microsoft’s Xbox One, the series was absorbed into the console’s general marketplace, much to the discontent of developers who had worked within the framework of the series (Nunez 2013). On the one hand Xbox Live Arcade acted as an online distribution service, selling products that would not be competitive in the mainstream market, but that would cater to various niches. In distributive terms, it was an example of what Chris Anderson defines the “long tail” dynamic (Anderson 2008), an economic scenario where niche products are sold through very effective distributive channels such as online marketplaces in order to maximize their exposure. Nevertheless, I argue that its economic model is not the only relevant aspect of a service such as Xbox Live Arcade. One of the most striking features of this series was the massive presence of older games. Ever since its inception, the service hosted in equal parts new titles that would not fit the AAA canon, and older or classic games. While exclusive games such as Super Meat Boy helped cement the reputation of the online service as a go-to marketplace for players enjoying independent video games, the selection of classic titles featured on Xbox Live Arcade characterized it as more than just an alternative distribution site. As a collection of old video games (and, consequently, one might speculate, as a mean of canonization), Xbox Live Arcade is an interesting object for analysis, since its serializing processes undeniably exerted a transformative force on the games that were included in the series. On a superficial level, by becoming a part of a series such as Xbox Live Arcade, games from the past undergo three main processes: 1.

2.

They are properly serialized, since, as I will demonstrate in the next section, they are uniformed in their appearance and technological functioning, and are released regularly over time. They are archived, since, after release, they are all available at the same time and can be browsed and downloaded. Xbox Live Arcade’s aim was certainly not one of preservation of historical games, and very few efforts were made by Microsoft in the attempt to conform to basic archival practices. Nevertheless, Microsoft’s online delivery service can be said to use a basic preservation strategy. One in which old games find what Jacques Derrida

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3.

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(1995: 10) describes as “domiciliation,” a place where “they dwell permanently, . . . [an] institutional passage from the private to the public.” They are actively re-modeled to fit the bill of Xbox Live Arcade. This process is particularly interesting as it reveals some of the ways the video game industry deals with the past of the medium and various connections between historiography and re-circulation of older games.

Sub-series, metagames One common practice found in Xbox Live Arcade was the creation of sub-series, that would regroup games in smaller series in order to suggest a more specific identification of common traits. These series of the second degree were sometimes made explicit, as in the case of Sega Vintage Collection. In this case, the affiliation of the games to the sub-series is revealed by an opening menu that is common to all games and by the logo of the collection. This type of framing aims at creating a familiarity among the games, thus breeding a series within the wider and looser series of Xbox Live Arcade. In other cases, sub-series are not named, but their existence is conveyed through common representational traits. Such is the case of what may be titled the “Namco Retrogaming Series.” The games included in the series, for the most part arcade titles released in the early 1980s, are re-modeled in order to convey a sense of aesthetic consistency to players. Opening menus are rendered in a consistent graphic style (the diagonal lines of menu items, the positioning of the title in the top-left corner, etc.), while the games are enclosed in a frame that explicitly evokes that of an arcade machine. This strategy of cosmetic remodeling involves re-designing some of the peripheral parts of the games, such as the menus, so as to convey the affiliation with a sub-series. Since no explicit sign of a process of serialization other than this aesthetic framing is used by Xbox Live Arcade, the strategy behind the “Namco Retrogaming Series” is one of soft serialization, in which the publisher and the user share the onus of creating the cultural form of the series. On the one hand, the publisher provides graphic and, more broadly, semiotic clues; on the other hand, the user perceives and recognizes them even in the absence of more explicit indicators such as a collective title for the collection, thus building the notion of series. My act of arbitrarily naming the series “Namco Retrogaming Series” may be seen as a consequence of this cooperative, pragmatic form of serialization. Another strategy that operates on many of the older games collected in Xbox Live Arcade is one of technological update. This process may have different

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Figure 4.5 Sega Vintage Collection

forms. The most evident of these is that of the full remake; in these cases, the remaking process is often signaled in the title, with the addition of words such as “Rearmed” (e.g., Bionic Commando Rearmed) or “Special Edition” (e.g., The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition). These remakes not only involve the update of graphics and sound, but may include a full re-design of levels and/or the addition of new features. Other games may be defined as updated ports. In these cases, only graphics and sound are updated. These games always provide the possibility to switch to a classic mode that restores the original graphics and sound. This process of double vision (and double hearing) is an actualization of what Dan Harries describes when analysing film parodies. According to Harries (2008: 24) “spectators of film parodies must then simultaneously engage with both the foregrounded text (the parody) and the backgrounded target.” Remade or updated games sold on Xbox Live Arcade do not possess the ironic quality of a parody, but certainly participate in the regime of doubleness that is present in

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all remaking practices. While the continuous movement between the hypertext and the hypo-text is mentalized by the film viewer (who can mentally conjure the original), the actual possibility to switch between the two in video games externalizes the peculiar duplicity of this practice. A third remodeling process is that of contextualization. In other words, old games are put into a context that defines and situates them as belonging to the past, to a supposedly golden era of video game history and, more generally, identifies them as objects of nostalgia. One way of creating a context is through the description of the game offered by the distributor. In the case of Galaga Legions, one of the two versions of Galaga found in the series, for example, the short description reads: The original Galaga captivated players all over the world, and now . . . it’s back! . . . Prepare to be hit by the second stick of nostalgic dynamite for Xbox 360 Live Arcade by the same team who brought you Pac-Man C. E.! Galaga Legions 2008

Figure 4.6 The Namco Retrogaming Series: New Rally-X

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Figure 4.7 The Namco Retrogaming Series: Dig Dug

The explicit reference to nostalgia plays a significant role in defining and positioning supposedly classic games, thus creating a separation with new games released on Xbox Live Arcade. On the one hand, then, contextualization is used as a tool for disassociating existing games from new games released on this platform. On the other hand, paratextual materials such as the description quoted above are tools for suggesting the historical relevance of the games that are ported or remade.

Old new games. Final Fight: Double Impact. Another contextualizing tool can be found within the presentation of some games. One striking example is that of Final Fight: Double Impact. The game, originally released by Capcom in 1989 as Final Fight, was one of the most popular examples of side-scrolling fighting games of its generation and, as it is

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made clear by the many video tributes found on YouTube, it is widely remembered as a genre-defining video game. A blog entry such as Final Fight: A Tribute to the Mad Gear Troops, found on the gaming website VGJunk, clearly shows the pervasiveness of a nostalgic attitude towards games of the past found within the wider game culture. The author claims that “Final Fight defined a genre and gave us many memorable characters” (Final Fight: a Tribute to the Mad Gear Troops 2011), and later, addressing the first stage of the game, he goes as far as defining the events narrated in the game in legendary terms: “Every legend must start somewhere.” The relevance of nostalgia in video game culture and of a nostalgic attitude elicited by certain games and, more in general, by a distant era in video gaming, is a documented phenomenon (Sotamaa and Toivonen 2011), and in some cases it can resemble the processes and practices deriving from nostalgia found in other media. Specifically, what a game like Final Fight: Double Impact shows is the “use of nostalgia” (Dika, 2003) made by the developers of the revamped game, that is the construction of a nostalgic discourse through practices of grouping and serialization. The first, most striking feature of Final Fight: Double Impact is the presence of what could be defined as a context activator, a specific visual device through which the player is informed of the game’s status of classic arcade adaptation. Players can choose to experience the game enclosed in a visible frame, that of an arcade machine, and even select a “full arcade” mode in which the frame is present and the simulation of an old CRT screen is active. Both the arcade framing and the CRT simulation are of no practical use to the players—if anything, they make the game less playable by reducing its performances. In fact, they seem to act as what Nitsche (2008: 44) describes as “suggestive markings,” semantic elements whose function is to evoke precise meanings. While Nitsche’s claim refers to narrative elements being solidified in the form of visible markings (writings on walls, journals, etc.) in video game worlds, I argue that Final Fight: Double Impact’s arcade frame and CRT simulation are supposed to evoke the complex experience of playing a game of the late 1980s in an arcade hall. The game itself is fashioned in a way as to become part of a wider metagame requiring players to play as if they were using an arcade machine. The notion of the video game as a platform for a wider experience of confronting a serialized past is reinforced by the process of serialization taking place in this version of Final Fight. The product sold on Xbox Live Arcade as Final Fight: Double Impact actually features two distinct games (Final Fight and Magic Sword); the player can choose between the two titles by selecting one

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Figure 4.8 Nostalgic framing in Final Fight: Double Impact

coin-op machine in the main menu. Again, through a process of grouping of two admittedly similar games, Final Fight: Double Impact is presented as the vector of a more complex experience. Final Fight and Magic Sword, unified by a consistent visual presentation and a precise semiotic framing, become a site of activation of the nostalgia of playing an arcade game within the context of an arcade room. This type of visual presentation and the complex nesting of contents at work in Final Fight: Double Impact, a classic game sold in a series that ultimately contains two serialized games, configures the serialized video game play experience as a potential site for nostalgia. Nevertheless, Final Fight: Double Impact’s “use of nostalgia” is not just what Taylor and Whalen (2008: 3) describe as a “reconfiguration of the old within the new . . . that combines the past and the present in a way that can cause the past to become a fetish.” While a fetishist undertone is certainly present in several displays of video game nostalgia,11 Final Fight: Double Impact’s work on the past of the medium involves the playing experience more than the game itself. While this peculiar product is certainly something old (a classic game) refashioned in a new context (Xbox Live Arcade), its presentation alludes to a more complex discourse of authenticity. Final Fight:

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Double Impact allows players not only to replay a game of the past, but affords them the options to approximate the situated, unique experience of playing that game in its supposedly authentic context. On the one hand, a fictional CRT screen distortion overrides high definition graphics in order to elicit the player’s nostalgia for the technological experience of the arcade; on the other, the bundling of Final Fight with Magic Sword alludes to the arcade as a physical site where different games can be played in one session. In this perspective, Final Fight: Double Impact represents a significant conflation of serialization and nostalgia. As a part of the series of Xbox Live Arcade games, it co-exists with other old games in a common virtual site; as a distinct media object within the series, it alludes to its affiliation with the wider, more intangible canon of the classics, a series of games that are the subject of the fetishization of what is arguably an authentic play experience.

Notes 1 A complete account of the development of Adventure can be found in Montfort (2003: 85–93). 2 According to Benjamin (2010: 14): “The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object. One might subsume the eliminated element in the term ‘aura’ and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art.” 3 Bogost (2010) claims: “I did not choose it as a platform for this work arbitrarily, nor in the interest of retro nostalgia. The Atari applies certain constraints that contribute the ideas I wanted to get across with this work.” 4 Stella is the best known emulator of the Atari 2600. It is available for Windows, Linux and MacOS , and can run an enormous number of Atari releases. 5 The Game is a viral game that apparently spread through the Internet in 2002. It is a mind game that consists of three rules: 1. Everyone in the world is playing The Game. A person cannot not play The Game; it does not require consent to play and you just cannot stop playing. 2. Whenever you think about The Game, you lose.

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3. Losses must be announced to at least one person (either by using a statement such as “I lost The Game” or by alternative means).

6

7

8

9

10

11

Thus, according to the rules, both I (the writer), and you (the reader) have just lost The Game. Bolter claims that the aesthetic of flow is most commonly found in digital media, but admits that early examples of this tendency may be found in works such as those produced by twentieth-century American minimalist composers. The rhetorical strategy of having the player manipulate a system that is instinctively perceived as perverted is not a mere theoretical fantasy, nor is necessarily employed with the intent of creating propaganda for those actions as in the case of Frasca’s simulator. Games such as Sweatshop HD , in which players need to successfully run a sweatshop, or Papers, Please, a game about manning the immigration office of a socialist regime, are prime examples of this tendency. While the structural inclination of video games to depict complex environments makes them particularly suited for this kind of paradoxical casting, the same strategy may be found in other media as well; Jonathan Littell’s novel The Kindly Ones (2009), by showing the Second World War through the eyes of an SS officer, seems to subscribe to the same rhetoric. For an in-depth discussion of the subject, see Poole (2013). API stands for Application Programming Interface. An API is usually composed by a series of specifications regarding the interactions between different software components. Game engines are often complemented by specific API s that instruct programmers on the use of their modular components. Players of Garry’s Mod have created several sub-games that can be played within the main game. Among these, the multiplayer game Prop Hunt is an interesting testament to the game’s radical approach to modularity. In this version of the game, a player must “disguise” themselves as one of the props of a scenario, while other players must find them by destroying props that look suspicious. While this chapter focuses mainly on online distribution, it should be noted that similar practices were used by producers and distributors also before the advent of digital-only markets. “Platinum” and “Greatest Hits” collections of games released for PlayStation consoles in the late 1990s and early 2000s are a prime example of serialization in the market of boxed games. This recurring discourse is especially present in video game review shows found on YouTube, such as Classic Game Room, where significant attention is devoted to gaming paraphernalia such as controllers and other accessories.

Conclusions

From the outside in Mom’s heart While writing this book I played The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth a lot. This is an apparently simple game, in which the player controls Isaac, a scared child hiding from his mother, a religious fanatic who is told by divine voices to kill her offspring. The basement where Isaac finally finds shelter is populated by mysterious creatures, possibly the product of the child’s imagination, and monstrous fragments of his mother: a ringed hand falling from above, trying to murder Isaac, feet squeezed into high heels, eyes, mouths, a womb. Isaac’s terrifying underground journey is a veritable Freudian nightmare, but equally a striking parody of the carefree playfulness of classic video game characters such as Mario or Sonic. Isaac is a traumatized child living in a world of grotesque religious symbols, mutant spiders, and homicidal parents. Unlike Isaac, I did not have to confront my Oedipal fears, but I did start conflating the writing of this book and my experience with the game. Much like Isaac, I was trying to make it out alive (and in time). I decided I was going to finish writing the book and beat The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth at the same time, in the attempt to have one exorcise the other. I finished the book, but I did not stop playing Isaac. In fact, while writing the book I found out that Isaac is not a game that ends, but is rather a game about the multiplication of possible endings, their dispersion and, eventually, their suppression. After defeating Mom’s heart, one of the many final bosses of the game, for the first time, I felt that I was experiencing some of the things I was writing about in this book, namely the dissonance between a prescribed ending and a self-imposed goal, the constant tension between beating a game and wanting to play it again. I wanted to see the ramifications of Isaac’s nightmare, collect all the objects hidden under rocks or locked behind doors, defeat Mom’s heart again and again. I wanted to indulge in Isaac’s multitude of possible 167

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endings, cycling through partial victories and infuriating losses instead of pursuing a final state of unquestionable resolution. In their game design manual, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (2004: 258) discuss a striking paradox ingrained in the experience of playing a game. The two scholars claim that: A game’s goal defines its endpoint; once it is reached, the game is over. In this sense, a game’s goal is the death of play, the mark of the end, foretelling the moment the magic circle will disappear. There is a curious poetic quality to the struggle of game players as they make their way through the system of a game, playing to no end but the one provided by the game itself, even as their joyful pursuit of that end means the death of their pleasure. Until, of course, the next game begins.

While I was very much willing to finish writing this book, I did not want Isaac to conform to the self-destructive nature of all playful activities. Play tends to annihilate itself as it unfolds; when a goal is reached, when one player wins, when a game is beaten, there is no more play left, only an inert game.

Games are about ending While it is true that there is no play beyond its endpoint, it might also be true that there can be no (digital) play without a series of endpoints, borders, and limits. In this book I have tried to analyse and discuss this paradox, by looking at games from the outside in, and claiming that video games are best understood as objects that are not only bordered by a series of endings, but inherently defined by these very extremities. Be it the narrative ending of Super Metroid, the seemingly endless, but actually finite, encyclopedia of Super Scribblenauts, or the prosaic invisible wall found in many a game, players of video games are accustomed to adjusting to limited possibilities, finite states, imposed goals, and rules. In this book I argue that a procedural theory of video games, that conceives them as both designed objects and as machines that generate experiences, is dependent on the idea of finiteness. Video games can be interpreted as procedural artifacts because the code they execute, the story they tell, the world they project, and the freedom they allow, are all limited. This book was born from the desire to recognize, describe, and make sense of these limits. Thus this book argues that video games are about endings, and that endings are a key to interpreting what video games are about, how they produce and convey meaning. This book also argues that video games are complex objects,

Conclusions

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whose borders and extremities are found both in the worlds they project onscreen, and elsewhere. This assumption is at the heart of the triangular structure of this book. A video games is—at the same time—a diegetic ruled environment with which the player interacts, a digital object that needs to be operated through manipulation and metaplay, and a media product that exists in an economic and social sphere, alongside other similar objects. This is, of course, an arbitrary and, to a degree, artificial structure, as the three layers bleed into each other very often. Nevertheless, this tripartite argument served a double purpose. On one hand it helped decouple proceduralism and formalism; the study of procedures and designed experiences does not need to limit itself to in-game occurrences. There are procedures, rules, limits, and endings to be found outside gameplay, in the areas of configuration and metaplay, and even further away from the supposed center of the game, in the way it relates to other games, and media in general. On the other hand, starting with the game ↔ game level and progressively moving away from it helped me argue for a larger interpretation of game design. While this periphrasis usually refers to the design of interaction mechanics and rules of behavior of the game system, I have tried to demonstrate that objects like menus, pause screens, introductory sequences, and serialized releases are no less designed than the games themselves.

Moving forward I have argued elsewhere (Fassone 2015) that digital games are playful, authoritative systems that help us get acquainted with the limits and impositions of digital authority. By playing video games we rehearse and frame playfully our everyday interaction with supposedly serious digital systems, from ATM machines to automated passport checks, from home banking websites to word processing software. Digital artifacts, being based on computer code, execute predictable procedures, and are inflexible partners in any form of negotiation: we all have memories of a piece of software that just would not execute that specific task. If play is indeed an “inexhaustible resource” (Ortoleva 2012), then digital play is something we may call up in order to make sense of our daily interactions with digital artifacts. The playful authority of digital games may allow us to reflect upon and reframe the real, often oppressive, authority of digital bureaucracy. In this perspective, working on the limits and boundaries of digital play, on the hard-coded inflexible rules of video games, putting the possibility space

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aside for a while, to focus on the spaces and areas of impossibility, may help us discuss digital games and their relation with digital culture at large. If, again with Ortoleva (2012), “play-as-resource cannot be separated from the other side of the ludic activity: play-as-paradox,” examining the aforementioned paradox of self-destructive play may help us create a new vocabulary to discuss digital games and their relevance. This book is largely a recon operation. An attempt at mapping an often overlooked area of the landscape of video game production and culture: the peripheries of digital play, the zones in which play ends and configuration begins, where the thing we call a video game latches onto something else, or morphs altogether into something we may not call a video game. My goal with this book was to suggest a number of areas game and media scholars may want to explore when discussing digital games, and the purpose of the tripartite structure of the central part of the book is precisely that of segmenting those areas. The question that emerges from this exploration is that of the interaction between the authoritative, prescribed endings, and the degree of freedom and possibility players negotiate with the game. I wanted to continue exploring the basement as Isaac, and the game encouraged me to do so. In other respects, the game was not so permissive. The strict implementation of statistics and random number generation in The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth creates a tangible sense of disempowerment: I am forced to accept whatever I am given. This oscillation between limits and freedom, prescribed endings and self-managed goals, articulates a complex relation with digital authority that calls for further inquiry. If this book will serve as a base camp for that exploration, then it will have reached its goal.

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Ludography A Slow Year (Ian Bogost, 2010) Adventure (William Crowther, Don Woods, 1976) Afternoon, a Story (Michael Joyce, 1987) Aliens: Colonial Marines (Sega, 2013) Alone in The Dark (Atari, 2008) Angry Birds (Rovio, 2009) Assassin’s Creed franchise (Various developers, 2007–13) Asteroids (Atari, 1979) Battle Chess (Interplay, 1988) Battlezone (Atari, 1980) Bionic Commando Rearmed (Capcom, 2008) BioShock (2k Games, 2007) Borderlands (Gearbox Software, 2009) Breakout (Atari, 1976) Breath of Death VII: The Beginning (Zeboyd Games, 2009) Build-a-Lot (HipSoft, 2007) Burger Time (Data East, 1982) Canabalt (Adam Saltsman, 2009) Chain World (Jason Rohrer, 2011) Commander Keen IV (id Software, 1991) Cordial Minuet (Jason Rohrer, 2014) Curiosity – What’s Inside the Cube? (22Cans, 2012) Dead Space 2 (Electronic Arts, 2011) Deer Hunter Tournament (Southlogic Studios, 2008) Deus Ex (Ion Storm, 2000) Diablo (Blizzard North, 1996) Dig Dug (Namco, 1982) Donkey Kong (Nintendo, 1981) DOOM (id Software, 1993) Dota 2 (Valve, 2013) Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (Silicon Knights, 2002) E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (Atari, 1982) Fallout 3 (Bethesda Softworks, 2008) Farenheit (Quantic Dreams, 2005) FarmVille (Zynga, 2009)

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Ludography

FarmVille 2 (Zynga, 2012) Final Fantasy franchise (Square Enix, 1987–) Final Fight (Capcom, 1989) Final Fight: Double Impact (Capcom, 2010) flOw (Thatgamecompany, 2006) Frogger (Konami, 1981) Galaga (Namco, 1981) Galaga Legions (Namco Bandai, 2008) Garry’s Mod (FacePunch Studios, 2004) Gears of War franchise (Epic Games, 2006–11) GlitchHiker (Vlambeer, 2011) Godus (22Cans, 2014) GoldenEye 007 (Rare, 1997) GoldenEye 007 (Activision, 2010) GoldenEye: Source (Team GoldenEye: Source, 2009) Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar North, 2008) Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Rockstar North, 2004) Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (Rockstar North, 2002) Hacker (Activision, 1985) Half-Life 2 (Valve, 2004) Halo franchise (Bungie, 2001–) Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (LucasArts, 1992) Knights of Pen and Paper (Paradox Interactive, 2013) Lemmings (DMA Design, 1991) Mass Effect franchise (Bioware, 2007–12) Max Payne (Remedy Entertainment, 2001) Metroid (Nintendo, 1986) Metroid II: Return of Samus (Nintendo, 1991) Minecraft (Mojang, 2009) Monster World (Wooga, 2010) NBA 2K16 (Visual Concepts, 2015) New Rally-X (Namco, 1981) New York Defender (Stef & Phil, 2002) Nintendo World Championship (Nintendo, 1990) One Single Life (FreshTone Games, 2011) Pac-Man (Namco, 1980) Papers, Please (Lucas Pope, 2013) Penny Arcade Adventures (Hothead Games, 2008) Pitfall! (Activision, 1982) Pong (Atari, 1972) Prison Architect (Introversion Software, 2015)

Ludography Quake (id Software, 1996) Rad Racer (Square, 1987) Rayman Origins (Ubisoft, 2011) Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar San Diego, 2010) Resident Evil (Capcom, 1996) Ridge Racer (Namco, 1993) Rogue (Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, 1980) Saints Row IV (Volition, 2013) Scribblenauts (5th Cell, 2009) Sim City (Maxis, 1989) Sim City 2000 (Maxis, 1993) Snake (Taneli Armanto, 1997) Space Invaders (Taito, 1978) Spacewar! (Steve Russell, 1962) Spore (Maxis, 2008) Street Fighter II (Capcom, 1991) Streets of Rage (Sega, 1992) Super Castlevania 4 (Konami, 1991) Super Hexagon (Terry Cavanagh, 2012) Super Mario Bros (Nintendo, 1985) Super Meat Boy (Team Meat, 2010) Super Metroid (Nintendo, 1994) Super Scribblenauts (5th Cell, 2010) Sweatshop HD (Littleloud, 2012) Temple Run (Imangi Studios, 2011) Tennis for Two (William Higinbotham, 1958) Tetris (Vadim Gerasimov, 1984) The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (Nicalis, 2014) The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (Starbreeze Studios, Tigon Studios, 2004) The Incredible Machine (Jeff Tunnell, 1993) The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition (LucasArts, 2009) The Sims (Maxis, 2000) The Sims 3 (The Sims Studio, 2009) The Stanley Parable (Cakebread, 2011) Tomb Raider II (Core Design, 1997) Tony Hawk: Shred (Robomodo, 2010) Uplink (Introversion Software, 2001) Wizorb (Tribute Games, 2011) Zork (Infocom, 1980)

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Filmography A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise (various directors, 1984–2010) Aliens (James Cameron, 1986) Atari: Game Over (Zak Penn, 2014) Black Sabbath (I tre volti della paura, Mario Bava, 1963) Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) Escape from New York (John Carpenter, 1981) Fortress (Stuart Gordon, 1992) Friday The 13th franchise (various directors, 1980–2009) Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 1997) Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) Halloween franchise (various directors, 1978–2009) Pitch Black (David Twohy, 2000) The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups, François Truffaut, 1959) The Chronicles of Riddick (David Twohy, 2004) The Holy Mountain (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973) The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (Seth Gordon, 2007) The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen, 1985) The Wizard (Todd Holland, 1989) WarGames (John Badham, 1983)

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Index A Slow Year 133–5 Aarseth, Espen 9, 18–20, 45–6, 48, 83, 99 acceleration 66–7, 69 Adorno, Theodor 139 Adventure (see Colossal Cave) affordance 26–7 Afternoon, a Story 44–5 Alejandro Jodorowsky 95–6 Altman, Rick 64 Angry Birds 91–2 aporia 48, 54 Arsenault, Dominic 22 Asteroids 66 Bateson, Gregory 15, 46 Battle Chess 99–100 Battlezone 65, 71–3 Benjamin, Walter 49, 131, 134–5, 165 BioShock 21, 59 Black Sabbath 96–7 body genres 62 Bogost, Ian 16, 24, 29–30, 58, 74, 133–5, 141, 149–50, 152, 165 Bolter, Jay David 67, 81–2, 122–3, 140–1, 166 Bourdieu, Pierre 128–9, 135, 137 branch systems 148–51 Breath of Death VII: The Beginning 102–3 Brooks, Peter 44 Burkinshaw, Robin 78 caesura 48–9, 53 Cage, David 92–3 Calleja, Gordon 24, 35–6, 110–11 Casetti, Francesco 36–7, 65 catharsis (see ephemerality and tragedy) Ceccherelli, Alessio 77–8 Chain World 135–7 Chen, Jenova 118–19 cinema 3–4 closure as a general phenomenon 47–8

in hypertextual narrative 45 as rhetorical tool 1–2 in storytelling 43–4 in Super Metroid 52–3 vs transience 44 code 13–15 Colossal Cave 100, 128 Commander Keen IV 90 Costikyan, Greg 100–1, 103 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihály 110, 115–17, 124–5 Curiosity – What’s Inside the Cube? 132–3 cybertext 18–20 Darley, Andrew 63 Dead Space 2 62–5, 94 death repetitive 63 as spectacle 62 design 24–5 Diablo 30 diegesis diegetic layer 99 diegetic thresholds 85–7 in video games 41–2 Dig Dug 20 digital authority 15–16, 169 distancing strategies 131–5 Donkey Kong 30, 39, 71 Doom Engine (see DOOM) DOOM 57–8 128, 149 Dourish, Paul 17–8 Dungeons and Dragons 100–1 Eco, Umberto 27, 148, 155 endlessness and casual games 69–71 history 66–8 and narratives 72–3 ephemerality and irony 143–5 and tragedy 139–41 epiphany 48, 53–4

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194 ergodic literature 19 Eric B. & Rakim 151–2 Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem 97–8 Eugeni, Ruggero 23, 71 exceptionalism 11–13 exclusivity 132–3 experience definitions 32–8 as experiential narrative 24, 35–6 as experiential project 23 filmic 37 Fallout 3 26–7 Farenheit 91–3 FarmVille 65, 69 FarmVille 2 70–1 film genres 64–5 Final Fight: Double Impact 162–5 first-person perspective 71–3, 113 flow 110, 115–18, 124–5 flOw 118–20 fragmentation 86–8 Frasca, Gonzalo 60, 139–41, 166 Galaga 161–2 Galaga Legions (see Galaga) Galloway, Alexander 41, 56, 73, 83, 86, 89–90, 98–9, 121 Game of Life 28–9 game over history 56–9 and learning 53–4 as prescribed ending 54–6 as rhetorical strategy 59–61 as spectacle 62–5 Garry’s Mod 151–4, 166 Genette, Gerard 96, 156–7 Gibson, James J. 26 Gitelman, Lisa 88, 119 GlitchHiker 93–4 Goldeneye 007 4 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas 74 Grand Theft Auto: Vice City 56 Gray, Jonathan 146 Grusin, Richard 67, 122–3 Hacker 122 hacking simulators 122

Index Hagardon, Andrew 114 Half-Life 2 147–8, 152 Hansen, Miriam 134–5 Heidegger, Martin 36–7, 95 Herrnstein Smith, Barbara 43, 46–8 Hinton, Sam 149–50 hypermediacy 122–3 hypertextual narrative 45–6 immersion aesthetic 112–14 vs control 107–8 as fallacy 36, 109–10 as industrial rhetoric 106–7 macrotextual 114–15) incorporation 110–11 interaction critique 17 history 17–18 interface 86, 120 Jenkins, Henry 62–3 Juul, Jesper 3, 18, 58, 61, 65, 66–7, 69, 74, 77–8, 86, 121 Kazemi, Darius 137 Kittler, Friedrich 150 Knights of Pen and Paper 103–6 Kushner, David 128, 149 loading screens 94–5 machine-operated breaks 93–4 magic circle 7 magic cycle theory 22–3 Manovich, Lev 20–1, 80, 109, 111, 146–7, 153–4 Mario Bava 96–7 Max Payne 94–5 metalepsis 96–8 model reader 27 modularity and game engines 148–51, 153 and mods 147–50 and paratexts 146 in sampling 151–2 Montfort, Nick 58 Murray, Janet 28–9, 80, 106

Index New York Defender 59–60 Newman, James 56, 87–8, 94, 145–6 Nicholson, Brad 143 Nintendo World Championships 129–30 Nitsche, Michael 21–2, 163 non-triviality 19 Norman, Donald, 25 Norton, Marleigh 121 One Single Life 55, 142–5 open-world games 26 openness vs. closedness 74–5 and the database 80 as ideology 75–6 and inconsistency 81 Orland, Kyle 56–7 Ortoleva, Peppino 127, 169–70 OSGONs (One Session Game of Narration) 139–42 pause function aesthetic markers 91–3 history 88–9 vs. idle animation 90 as power 89–90 Perron, Bernard, 22 pinball machines 67–8 Pitfall! 57–8 play emergent 77 expressive 78 horizontal vs vertical 77–8 mechanic versus machinic 23 non-teleological 67 purpose 25 player cyborg 21 empirical 38 model 27–8, 30, 38 Poole, Steven 107–8, 166 prescribed ending 54–6 procedures/procedurality 11, 24, 28–32, 168–9 Quake 21

Re, Valentina 54–5 realism 73, 83 replayability 68, 138, 143 Rohrer, Jason 135–7 role-playing games analog 74, 100–3 analog vs digital 103–6 Salen, Katie 1, 7, 75, 109–10, 168 serialization and the archive 158–9 definition 154–5 in digital marketplaces 157–8 in literature 155–6 and nostalgia 161–5 and sub-series 159–62 Sicart, Miguel 31–2, 81 Sim City 48, 75, 152 situational map 52 slasher films 62–4 state machines 18 Street Fighter II 1–3 Sudnow, David 32–3 Super Castlevania 4 53 Super Meat Boy 57, 59–61, 158 Super Metroid 49–53, 168 Super Scribblenauts 79–81, 168 Sutton-Smith, Brian 144 taxonomy 8–10 Temple Run 69–70 The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth 167, 170 The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay 112–15 The Holy Mountain 95–6 The Sims 76, 78, 152 toys 75 Uplink 121–3 vector graphics 71 video games arcade 66–9 casual 69–71 in computer history 82 of configuration 99, 101–37 definition 7–8, 10, 17, 20 mass production 129–31

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196 as open media 127–9 as oppositional machines 19–20, 54, 89, 121 progression vs emergence 77 as toys 74–6, 81, 130, 152–4 Warshow, Robert 33 Weber, Max 16 Williams, Linda 62

Index Wizorb 85 Wolf, Mark J.P. 67–8, 72, 88 Wright, Will 75–6 Xbox Live Arcade 157–9 Yellowlees Douglas, J. 45–6, 114 Zimmerman, Eric 1, 7, 66, 75, 109–10, 168

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