Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification 9780226630038

Citation preview

Experimental Games

Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification

Experimental

Patrick Jagoda

Games

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2020 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2020 Printed in the United States of America 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­62983-­4 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­62997-­1 (paper) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­63003-­8 (e-­book) DOI: https://​doi​.org​/10​.7208​/chicago​ /9780226630038​.001​.0001 The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago toward the publication of this book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jagoda, Patrick, author. Title: Experimental games : critique, play, and design in the age of gamification / Patrick Jagoda. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020018418 | ISBN 9780226629834 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226629971 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226630038 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Computer games. | Video games. | Computer games—Social aspects. | Video games— Social aspects. | Gamification. | Digital computer simulation. Classification: LCC GV1469.17.S63 J34 2020 | DDC 794.8—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov /2020018418 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

This book is dedicated to Irus, Ziggy, and Mark for their generosity in buying me my first video game console (a Nintendo Entertainment System that amounted to a substantial expenditure for them) when I was eight years old—but also for having the foresight to encourage me to think about the games I played and how I played them.

​Contents

List of Figures ix Prologue: Game Experiments xi Part I Framework  1 Introduction: Society of the Game 3 1 Gamification 41 2 Experimentation 73



Part II

Concepts  117

3 Choice 119 4 Control 153 5 Difficulty 191 6 Failure 221

Part III Design  251 7 Improvisation 253 Coda: Joy 283

Acknowledgments 287 Notes 291 Ludography 367 Index 375

​Figures

0.1 0.2 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 4.1

EVE Online (2003) 17 Every Day the Same Dream (2009) 35 Habitica (2013) 42 Candy Crush Saga (2012) 63 Candy Crush Saga (2012) 65 Stardew Valley (2016) 68 StarCraft (1998) 95 Braid (2008) 98 Braid (2008) 100 Braid (2008) 100 Braid (2008) 101 Braid (2008) 105 Braid (2008) 106 World of Warcraft (2004) 110 Super Mario Bros. (1985) 129 The Stanley Parable (2013) 131 The Stanley Parable (2013) 132 Moirai (2016) 138 Undertale (2015) 141 Undertale (2015) 141 Detroit: Become Human (2018) 150 Dys4ia (2012) 167 ix

4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6

x L I ST

Dys4ia (2012) 169 Problem Attic (2013) 173 Problem Attic (2013) 175 Luxuria Superbia (2013) 183 Passage (2007) 189 Passage (2016) 189 Doom (1993) 197 Dwarf Fortress (2006) 199 Game, Game, Game, and Again Game (2007) 205 Game, Game, Game, and Again Game (2007) 206 Loved (2010) 211 Loved (2010) 213 Loved (2010) 213 Space Invaders (1978) 217 SPENT (2011) 228 Thresholdland (2010) 234 Little Inferno (2012) 242 Little Inferno (2012) 248 the parasite (2017) 261 the parasite (2017) 261 the parasite (2017) 264 the parasite (2017) 265 the parasite (2017) 272 the parasite (2017) 272

O F F I G U R ES

Prologue

​Game Experiments

This book—Experimental Games—argues that games, including video games, serve as a form for staging, encountering, processing, and testing experience and reality in the twenty-­first century. More than this, I hope to advance the claim that games do not merely represent or simulate reality, but also serve as an experimental form that has the potential to alter the conditions of the historical present. Since the 1950s, through approaches that include economic game theory and behavioral economics, researchers have already analyzed games as experimental forms. But it is only since around the beginning of the twenty-­first century, through the substantial expansion of video games as a medium and gamification as a design philosophy, that the experimental capacity of games has more directly impacted a broader global population. Within that period, the very concept of an “experimental game” has further been complicated by the myriad meanings of what an experiment, as a form, has been in the past, is in our time, and might someday become. My method in this book encounters games at the intersection of media aesthetics on the one hand and social, political, and economic theory on the other. First of all, with the term “media aesthetics,” I mean to highlight the effects of games on sensation, perception, meaning making, and political affects. In this respect, the book focuses on medium-­specific affordances of digital games that distinguish them as both a unique analytical technique and an embodied mode of experiment. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman

xi

have offered the elegant definition of a game as “a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.”1 These medium-­specific qualities—formal systems, players, artificial conflict, rules, and quantifiable outcomes—enable particular kinds of experiments. In addition to these qualities that define all games, digital games introduce additional qualities such as navigable two- and three-­dimensional spaces, interactions with artificial intelligence, complex decision trees, or networked interactions with other players. Such qualities influence the kinds of experiments that can unfold in and through a game. My primary methods for tracking media aesthetics in this book include humanistic approaches such as close reading, as well as processes of critical making that draw from my own work as a game designer and digital media artist. Second, even as I undertake formal and medium specific analysis, I am simultaneously committed to the importance of understanding video games in a broader context that exceeds their own specific histories and extends to their social, political, and economic milieu. To achieve this end, I turn to methods that include critical theory and the intellectual history of games. Before delving into historical frames for thinking about the experimental dimensions of games and considering the experimental qualities of specific video games, I would like to take a step back to consider, for a moment, the ways that games have been represented as experiments in mass culture. To do this, let us consider a popular film and a television series. First, in David Fincher’s 1997 film The Game, investment banker Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) receives a birthday present from his younger brother (Sean Penn) in the form of a voucher that allows him to play an unusual game. After being subject to a battery of physical and psychological tests by a company called Consumer Recreation Services (CRS), Van Orton is notified that he is ineligible to participate in the game. Gradually, he discovers that CRS is an elaborate scam that has used the innocuous form of a game to steal his vast fortune. After several unsuccessful attempts to extricate himself from a growing conspiracy, Van Orton finds himself drugged and buried alive in Mexico. After surviving these trials, in the film’s climax, he finds himself on a skyscraper rooftop and, in a state of devastation and ruin, decides to jump off. Instead of hitting the ground, however, he lands on a massive air bag. In the epilogue, he learns that this entire experience was, after all, an elaborate live-­action game that incorporated his family, friends, and actors. The game was an experiment staged to test Van Orton’s decisions, give him an opportunity to work through his past, and help him achieve a more fulfilled life. A different type of game unfolds in a second case: Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s 2016 series Westworld, a television adaptation of Michael Crichton’s xii

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1973 film of the same title. The series explores a theme park built for wealthy patrons and populated by intelligent android hosts who are designed to satisfy every fantasy of the guests. Westworld raises the question about why a rich businessman would invest so much money in building this huge, state-­ of-­the-­art park—one that is frequently compared to an open world video game—that serves only a small number of guests. In the second season, the park’s creative director, Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), reveals, “The park is an experiment. A testing chamber. The guests are the variables and the hosts are the controls. When guests come to the park, they don’t know they’re being watched. We get to see their true selves. Their every choice reveals another part of their cognition. Their drives.”2 In the Westworld park experiment, the android hosts serve as a control and the human visitors are independent variables. It is not, then, the immediate revenue that matters to the chief investor so much as the information learned about the habits, decisions, and actions of the high-­profile guests who play within the park. Though one of these games seeks to benefit and the other to harm, The Game and Westworld have in common exclusive games built primarily for wealthy white men who, unbeknownst to them, become experimental subjects. These subjects appear as adult counterparts of the adolescent boys who came of age in the United States in the video game arcades of the 1970s and console-­equipped suburban dens of the 1980s.3 Even with a representational narrowness focused on white male anxieties, this film and television series signal a broader imbrication of games with lived existence: a blurring of the “magic circle” that cultural historian Johan Huizinga famously described as the boundary that demarcates a space of play, separating the activities of games from everyday life.4 Especially during the 2010s, video games advanced from specialist electronics available to a limited and privileged demographic to a form that saturates everyday life for a significant part of the world’s population. In this world, games have become, in McKenzie Wark’s formulation, “our contemporaries”—with an “our” that included, as of 2019, an estimated 2.5 billion video game players worldwide.5 Video games, in this world, have become an expansive medium (though one that is still woefully lacking in all manner of diversity) that includes games played across mobile, computer, console, arcade, virtual reality, and augmented reality platforms.6 The range of game genres—from puzzle-­platformers to first-­person shooters, from survival horror to rhythm games, from sandbox to multiplayer online battle arena games—is exponentially higher than it was in its inaugural years in the mid-­to-­late twentieth century. Beyond entertainment, the variety of audiences addressed by games becomes apparent through orientations signaled by terms such as “artgames,” “independent games,” “seri

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ous games,” “casual games,” “gamification,” “queer games,” “citizen science games,” and “e-­sports.” This book includes analyses of a variety of digital games, and thus contributes to the digital humanities. More than this, however, this is a text that imagines an experimental humanities. Experiments rely on science and art, often in equal measure. As the psychologist Lauren Slater observes, “experiments are fascinating, because at their best they are compressed experience, life distilled to its potentially elegant essence.”7 Though experiments compress experience, they are also something other than life’s “essence.” They are inherently artificial constructions that nudge and modulate reality’s constellation of potentials in ways that allow for observation that would have been otherwise impossible. Games, too, are artificial constructions that can compress particular experiences and model small subsets of the present world. That is, in a historical moment when the world is figured increasingly as a game—especially with the spread of digital and networked media—video games take on an unprecedented experimental significance. The experiments they enable unfold at the interface of technoscience and media art, code and affect, computation and human participation. As this book will demonstrate, not all games are experiments in equivalent ways. In a more direct sense, a simulation game may seek to model the real world with degrees of calculated external validity or an educational video game may attempt to change attitudes or behaviors within empirical constraints that can generate data about test subjects. However, in a world increasingly saturated by digital and networked media, even popular video games intended for entertainment purposes entrain players to particular modes of perception, action, and habit. Such games produce experimental situations, even if they often occur in largely uncontrolled conditions. Reciprocally, too, players regularly test a game’s possibility space, but they also find themselves in the midst of experiments to which they have not entirely, or at least consciously, consented. Though many of the cases throughout the book are not quite as dramatic as those depicted in The Game or Westworld, those opening popular media representations point to a world in which games exceed the status of specialist pastimes or even mass entertainments. The concept of experiment suggests a fuller understanding of the ways in which the contemporary world and games have become imbricated with each other. Video games, of course, are not experimental instruments that are wholly external to the world. In many ways that this book explores, games are aligned with contemporary technological, economic, and political thought. For example, the histories of computation, economic game theory, and behavioral economics, as well as management theories such as Taylorism, have xiv

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influenced contemporary game forms and cultures. For this reason, a better understanding of the broader milieu from which video games emerged remains an important historical project. This book is by no means a history of video games. Even so, it shows how particular types of games emerge from an intellectual history and the underlying cultural logics of the Cold War period—particularly through the rise of the broad paradigm of neoliberalism—and to dramatize what lessons such games, in turn, might offer about how to negotiate, navigate, and transform our contemporary world. These lessons remain more important than ever. Even in the middle of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues worldwide and brings with it a reduction in social activities that require physical presence, video games (alongside social networking, online gambling, and media streaming, but not older media such as feature films) have only experienced accelerated growth. I do not take for granted that digital and networked games somehow rise above the technical and economic logics that have informed their development. However, beyond a historical account, this book takes seriously the possibility that the types of experiments that video games have enabled, from the 1950s to the 2010s, might not be the only ones of which they are capable in the future. Thus, though I begin with an analysis and diagnosis of the resonance of games as metaphors and forms starting in the mid-­twentieth century, the majority of this book concerns what else might be possible if we think more carefully through the thick affective field of the present. In his constructionist educational writing about the use of computers in learning, Seymour Papert characterizes computers not merely as cognitive learning machines but as devices that gain their experiential and experimental force from “an affective component” that makes learning more engaging. Papert describes computers as instruments that “help people think” and, in an even more fundamental and paradigm shifting sense, influence “how people think.”8 As arguably the most popular contemporary expressive form that emerges from computation, video games introduce a mode of thought that is affectively rich and a site that encourages ongoing experimentation. Experimentation in games is increasingly figured as a process of identifying and solving problems within games (e.g., using trial and error to traverse the dungeons of The Legend of Zelda) or problems outside of games (e.g., using instrumentalized educational games created by companies such as Legends of Learning to improve classroom performance). In my earlier example, the game-­based experiment in The Game serves as a kind of therapy that solves Van Orton’s psychological problems in a fashion parallel to real-­ world play therapies and seemingly benign gamified apps that claim to shift human attitudes and behaviors. The experiment of Westworld represents a

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sinister data-­gathering experiment that solves a corporation’s social engineering problems—a scenario that finds numerous real-­world counterparts in the uncontrolled experiments built upon Facebook, Google, and Amazon algorithms, or Niantic’s use of the hit Pokémon GO augmented reality mobile game to lead players to sponsored corporate “PokéStops” and to harvest GPS coordinates and other personal data. In place of the experimental problem solving of such games that activate trial-­and-­error tests, this book imagines what games might look like if we instead approach them as media for more sophisticated problem making that embraces the complexities of a digital and networked present. What it means to make a problem through games is an active and developing concern in this book. Rather than systematizing or resolving problem making as a privileged concept, I hope to demonstrate a variety of approaches to it as a logic of experimental games that departs from the problem-­solving logic that pervades the present moment.

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I​ ntroduction

​Society of the Game What does the world look like from the point of view of gaming? Eric Zimmerman, “Gaming Literacy”

Everything in the future online is going to look like a multiplayer game. Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google)

Games are the most elevated form of investigation. Albert Einstein

Games took on a new importance in the United States during a Cold War moment awash in economic game theory, military simulations, and geopolitical competition. In his book Serious Games, published in 1970 during the Cold War’s détente period, engineer Clark C. Abt argued that games had become ubiquitous across both figurative and literal registers. He observes, “the wide use of ‘game’ as a metaphor for many social, economic, political, and military activities shows how much we assume about the formal similarity between games and real-­life activities.” Abt then enumerates areas in which game logic could be made operative: “Every election is a game. International relations are a game. Every personal argument is a game. And almost all business activity is a game.”1 Games, he insists, are more serious than the frivolous pastimes for which they are frequently mistaken. Moreover, the growing metaphorical reach of games gestures toward unrealized potentials of games as a medium for intervening in social, political, and economic issues. What Abt still introduced with some qualifications in 1970, building on limited observations in order to prescribe a suggested shift in perception toward game-­based thinking, has in subsequent decades developed into a norm. For economist Ken Binmore, writing in 2007, economic game theory points to a world that benefits from being modeled as a game. “Drivers manoeuvring in heavy traffic are playing a driving game,” he writes. “Bargain-­ hunters bidding on eBay are playing an auctioning game. A firm and a union negotiating next year’s wage are playing a bargaining game.”2 Binmore de3

ploys this expanded language of games from a world in which the expansion of finance has made stock trading games an even more central aspect of economic life. In the contemporary media ecology, the coverage of political electoral contests is often rhetorically and structurally indistinguishable from the coverage of professional and collegiate sports, even if the consequences are of drastically different kinds. Moreover, in culture, games have become a more prominent form than ever before. Since the initial airing of Survivor in 2000, reality television series have proliferated, entangling participants with game rules and objectives. Across popular novels, films, and television series such as Westworld (1973 and 2016–), Ender’s Game (1985, 2013), Game of Thrones (1996–, 2011–2019), The Hunger Games (2008, 2012), Black Mirror (2011–), Ready Player One (2011, 2018), and Kiss Me First (2018), we see the centrality of games of competition and chance to contemporary society.3 By the early twenty-­first century, the metaphorical cachet of games has been supplemented by games as a material form that increasingly pervades everyday life, especially in American culture. While Binmore’s list echoes Abt’s earlier enumeration, it takes on a different meaning from the context of the early twenty-­first century, within a world characterized by the increased production, distribution, and reception of video games and virtual worlds. It is worth noting that Abt’s pronouncement regarding the cultural rise of game form preceded even the first commercial video game arcade machine: Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney’s Computer Space that they shipped in 1971, just prior to establishing Atari, Inc. in 1972. Since that time, the video game industry has come to achieve faster growth than either the film or music industries. As of 2019, digital games engage an estimated 2.5 billion people worldwide, absorbing vast quantities of human money, attention, and time.4 Consider just a few other developments. Rockstar Games’s Grand Theft Auto V (2013) grossed $1 billion in its first three days, making it the fastest selling work of entertainment in history up to that point. Pokémon GO (2016) was downloaded 550 million times within the first three months after its release. In the first forty-­five days after its release, Call of Duty Black Ops (2010) gamers logged approximately 600 million hours of gameplay (the equivalent of over 68,000 years). Even as these titles represent mainstream videogames, independent games have also seen parallel successes, with Limbo, for example, selling just over 892,000 total units within its first two years. These astronomical numbers begin to suggest the scale of a cultural medium that demands ongoing analysis. The importance of games exceeds the admittedly remarkable quantitative measures of their growing centrality to contemporary life. At a qualitative level, the position of games has also been elevated above the status of 4 I N T R O D U CT I O N

pastimes and entertainments. This underlying sense of significance is registered, however playfully, through a variety of cultural works, such as Ernest Cline’s Armada (2015). In this novel, high school student Zack Lightman discovers that his beloved massively multiplayer online game titled Armada is actually a simulation created to train and track the most successful gamers in order to fend off an ongoing yet secret alien invasion. The novel imagines a vast conspiracy in which the video game industry has collaborated with the international “Earth Defense Alliance,” since the late 1970s, in order to prepare Earth’s population for a coming war. As Zack’s father puts it, in one of countless references to 1980s culture, “Wax on, wax off—but on a global scale!” (29). In many ways, the novel is a mashup of earlier works such as The Last Starfighter (1984) and Ender’s Game (1985) that also imagined games as training simulations for real-­world struggles. The novel’s fantasy aligns with other later cultural productions, such as the film Pixels (2015), in which videogame skills are similarly required to defend against an alien attack, and the television series Westworld (2016–­), in which visitors to a live-­action game park find themselves feeding an unprecedented corporate data collection scheme and facing fatal consequences. In all of these cases, video games operate as a crucial interface with the world. By analyzing specific games, this book will attempt to elaborate how we might understand the interface between games and the world in the twenty-­first century. “Just a Game”

In the early twenty-­first century, games have exceeded the circumscribed realm of entertainment and touched every aspect of life. Admittedly, the serious use of games has a longer history that dates back to uses of chess as a way of teaching military strategy in the Middle Ages and to the Prussian war games of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.5 The twentieth century saw a substantial expansion of this tradition of thought-­provoking and applied games. In 1939, historian Johan Huizinga wrote in his classic book Homo Ludens that games and sports are “played in profound seriousness” and that gameplay should be treated as a fundamental element of culture.6 In 1954, still prior to the emergence of digital games, RAND Corporation analysts Alexander McFarlane Mood and R. D. Specht described gaming as “a technique of analysis” that could be applied to areas such as warfare.7 As I noted, elaborating on the domains that games might impact, in 1970, Abt coined the term “serious game” and argued that “a game is a particular way of looking at something” and of solving problems.8 The cultural saturation of games and gamelike thought has already been

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observed by a number of scholars, particularly in the field of game studies. The extension of game mechanics to traditionally nongame activities across business, education, marketing, psychology, and war making goes by the name of “gamification.”9 A number of alternative terms exist for varied approaches to integrating games into everyday life, including “gamespace,” “ludofication of society,” “ludic society,” “ludic century,” and “gameful world.”10 This imbrication of games and reality is a historical development. But this development cannot be reduced to the narrative of technological progress that is coterminous with the development of digital computers, networked connectivity, and video games as a new cultural medium. Instead of introducing yet another term for this phenomenon, this book seeks to delve even deeper into this state of affairs, exploring the ways that games, as metaphors and forms, alter our understanding of contemporary social, political, and economic systems in the United States. In the realm of video games alone, we see this interface between games and the world clearly, for example, in the ways that first-­person shooting mechanics in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 (2018) support militarism and prompt engagement with the future of warfare or in the ways in which in-­game rewards and the leveling-­up system in Stardew Valley (2016) promote neoliberal values. Before turning to in-­depth examples of specific games in the following chapters, it is helpful to look back to the discipline of economic game theory— though it may seem distant from contemporary video games—as an important historical development for thinking about the intersection of games and reality. Essentially, game theory approaches economic phenomena via models or experiments that are structured as games. The prisoner’s dilemma (to which I return later in the book) is perhaps the best-­known game experiment that emerged from the exploration of this theory. In this scenario, first imagined by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher at the RAND Corporation in 1950, two prisoners (figured as players) are separated from one another by a prosecutor and forced to make a decision. They can either remain silent (in cooperative solidarity with one another) or defect (and betray the other) in order to receive different deals from a prosecutor that beget variable prison sentences. Through the latter half of the twentieth century, this scenario was repeated through theoretical and experimental variations, yielding different insights into competition and cooperation among actors. During the early Cold War, economists gradually began to adopt noncooperative game theory, believed to be the optimal strategy from the standpoint of rational self-­interest, especially as it was described within the Nash equilibrium solution. Economic historian Philip Mirowski describes the Nash equilibrium as revealing “the rationality of the paranoid” who occu 6 I N T R O D U CT I O N

pied the Cold War’s encapsulated world in which strategic thinking and noncooperation were elevated from a particular theoretical game model to an absolute way of life. John Forbes Nash Jr. was himself eventually diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. But game theory itself already revealed a structural paranoia within which games could be used to model anything. Admittedly, economic game theory takes “game” to refer to only one kind of game: namely, a simulation of real-­world conflict, utility, and decision-­ making. Nevertheless, as I will explore in chapter 1, there are historical links between the abstractions of game theory and the concrete development of actual playable games during the Cold War period. Even prior to that transition, however, game theory already posits a logic, which dictates that everything can be figured as a game. “When confronted with disconfirmations,” Mirowski writes, “the first inclination of the paranoid is always to enlarge the conspiracy: that is, expand the definition of the ‘game’ to encompass considerations previously external to the formal specification of the game.” Even within a multiplayer contest, game theory does not imagine the player communicating with other players, but instead requires the isolated simulation of possible moves. A player engages in “the complete and total reconstruction of the thought processes of the Other—without communication, without interaction, without cooperation—so that one could internally reproduce (or simulate) the very intentionality of the opponent as a precondition for choosing the best response.”11 And, insofar as all players are aware of the structure and rules of the individualistic economic “game” that exceeds the particular theoretical scenario, everyone—from the common citizen to the Cold War warrior—becomes a player. Game theory produces an epistemology grounded in games, even as it does not do justice to the experience of actual games in the world, including analog games from chess to Pandemic and digital games from Pong to Fortnite. To delve deeper into the relationship between games and reality, we might consider literary critic Mark Seltzer’s concept of “the official world” that describes “a self-­inciting, self-­legislating, and self-­depictive form of life” that characterizes the modern world, particularly in the wake of systems theory and cybernetics in the mid-­twentieth century. Though Seltzer does not analyze specific games, he finds, in game structures, the formal properties for approaching a dominant contemporary mode of thought. “As in the extremely formal conditions in the playing out of a game,” he writes of this contemporary thought type, “it is necessary to frame, demarcate, and report it— and in this sense see through it and reflect on it—in order to play the game, and to mark its distinction from the world that it, at the very same time, models.” In other words, Seltzer does not imagine an absolute confusion of

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game and world, or a virtualization of the world through game rules and mechanics—a common fantasy imagined in films such as The Matrix (1999) and eXistenZ (1999) and television shows such as Black Mirror (2011–­). What such a collapse misses, or underemphasizes, is the mediation of a game that is designed to produce a “doubling” (after all, even denizens of the Matrix construct are reminded, through occasional glitches, of the nonidentity of the virtual world and reality). Furthermore, a game introduces “contingency,” “self-­conditioning,” and “deliberate self-­complication.” Games are not merely alternative realities that become, by the early twenty-­first century, coextensive with the world; importantly, they are “at once models of the world and in it.”12 In a sense, this reminder of the separation of games from reality—that they are not merely “of” the world but also “in” it—does not make a game any less complicated as a form. To remind oneself, via an occasional sidebar, that something is “just a game”—a pickup basketball game that has become too physically intense or an online game that has gradually colonized the bulk of one’s social time—does not necessarily reduce the intensity of the doubling that the game has already introduced into one’s experience. Moreover, the arbitrariness of a designed game’s rules is not worlds away from the arbitrariness of moral systems, social norms, and even laws that make up the groundwork of the so-­called reality that stands outside of the particular game in question. None of this should imply that arbitrary rules, whether determined by a biased judge or an idiosyncratic game designer, cannot have material consequences. As anthropologist Thomas Malaby observes, it is in part the contingency of games that “allows them both to mimic and constitute everyday experience.”13 In other words, if games can serve as models of real-­world systems, they can also influence the experiences, attitudes, habits, and behaviors of players. This is by no means to echo, for instance, the crude and empirically dubious arguments—common to the moral panics surrounding video games that erupted in the 1990s or the aftermath of mass shootings in the 2010s—that violent games cause real-­world violence. Even without this deterministic belief that a game such as Mortal Kombat can program a player for violence, we can take games seriously as hypermediated interfaces and participatory processes. Games can realize (in the sense of make real) designed worlds that influence the social world—or, more accurately, a world that is perpetually changing in ways that undermine the grammatical work performed by the definite article “the.” This book explores various ways that games make realities, through particular design decisions, formal properties, and modes of play. Before focusing on games, including what I see as their crucial experimental qualities, I 8 I N T R O D U CT I O N

first turn to the broader context in which we encounter games: that is, the particular dominant social, political, and economic form that reality has taken during the era from the 1970s onward during which video games entered into popular consciousness and developed into a prominent cultural form. Context, I would like to argue, means everything in the case of games. To stage this context for games in the late twentieth century with adequate precision and the necessary qualifications, I now turn to the much-­discussed periodizing concept of neoliberalism. The Neoliberal Paradigm

Instead of treating media aesthetics as an isolated domain, I would like to ground the formal novelty of video games, from the outset, within a sociopolitical context. In the theoretical framework of this book, gamification (the term I use to signal a cultural development that exceeds a narrow design strategy of importing games into nongame activities) operates as a formal and cultural counterpart to neoliberalism. Beginning in the 1970s, we see the alignment of the rise of neoliberalism as an economic and political form and video games as a prevalent cultural form. To better understand the intersection between these forms, it is first necessary to establish the coordinates of neoliberalism. Without question, neoliberalism is a heuristic, and the constellation that this term names has changed since its inception. This polyvalent concept is often used to describe both an economic policy and a philosophy of governance, which has varied genealogies that stretch back to Friedrich Hayek’s writing and the growth of the Mont Pèlerin Society since the 1940s, Chicago school economic theories and concrete international experiments of the 1970s, Anglo-­American “free market” political reforms by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, and concurrent leftist critiques of market-­based policies and privatization that gave the concept greater coherence. In general, the term marks an observed departure from the policies of the Great Depression and the planned economy of World War II, amidst a growing crisis of liberalism. More constructively, it signals a substantially increased emphasis on the entity of the free market, individual entrepreneurship, private property rights, financialization, and practices of deregulation that transitioned from a marginal scholarly argument to a guiding societal principle in the late 1970s.14 Though supporters of neoliberalism often adopt a position of opposition to the regulatory state and in favor of free markets, an increased body of research has demonstrated the centrality of government intervention to the implementation of neoliberal policies.15 Political theorist Wendy Brown, building on insights made by Michel Fou

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cault in the late 1970s, elevates neoliberalism to a normative order of reason that encompasses these specific historical developments but also points to a broader phenomenon that crosses previously distinct categories of thought and policy. As Brown explains in her much-­discussed account, “neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities—even where money is not at issue—and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo oeconomicus.” This economization of everything and everyone stands in distinction to classical models of liberalism that still tolerate zones of life—the political, moral, and ethical, for instance—that maintain autonomy from economic concerns.16 Even if neoliberalism represents an expansion of the market model into all domains of life, it is not categorically worse, for all people, than previous movements within capitalism. Neoliberalism can be said to colonize all of life, for the majority of the world’s population, all the way down to microlevel and nonconscious interactions, through an expansion of the market model. Even so, earlier forms of capitalism already impacted every aspect of life for large parts of that population—including enslaved people under the transatlantic slave trade and plantation economy and colonized subjects under European colonization and imperialism. Nevertheless, even as it is undergirded by longer histories and more extensive world systems of capitalist accumulation, neoliberalism names a specific and historically distinct form of economic organization and political governance, one that resonates particularly well with game form, especially as it has developed during the rise of digital games.17 Beyond its economic and political periodization, the term neoliberalism also names a new social project and order of subjectivity. As numerous critics have argued, neoliberalism has had its most substantial everyday impact on the ways in which it has economized the social and created an interface between subjectivity (including that of the upper and middle classes in the US) and economics. Perhaps the pithiest and most famous articulation of this point is Margaret Thatcher’s pronouncement, in her 1981 interview with Ronald Butt, that “Economics are the method: the object is to change the soul.”18 What was a political aspiration for Thatcher has developed into a more generalizable principle of neoliberalism. Beyond wage labor, workers are increasingly encouraged to become entrepreneurs of themselves or, in the phrase popularized by Gary Becker beginning with his 1964 book of this title, “human capital.”19 As the sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato observes, the concept of “human capital” describes a double and simultaneous process of “subjection and exploitation” that asks every subject to draw “on all its ‘immaterial,’ affective, and cognitive resources of the self in all its activities” in 10

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order to become its “own boss and own slave, capitalist and proletarian.”20 Becoming one’s own boss, of course, also requires taking on forms of risk that have been to a greater degree distributed and mitigated by forms of collective insurance provided, for instance, by the Keynesian welfare state and other socialist forms of government. Even so, it is important to emphasize that the expansion of the category of human capital does not describe a radically new economic development so much as it marks a change in tone or emphasis, a strategy for sustaining alienation and class warfare by other means.21 In the neoliberal scheme, workers are increasingly figured as entrepreneurs who must develop themselves and their own value—through continued education, generation of new qualifications, self-­promotion on social media, and creative work that is subsumed within a free labor economy. One is expected to develop one’s own value, often without being paid a wage and while undertaking this self-­development on one’s own dime. Thus, unemployment becomes more than a time that is filled with job seeking; it transforms into a period of intensified shaping of human identity, habits, choices, and behaviors. Of course, previous forms of capitalism shape subjectivity in countless ways. But within neoliberalism, as Lazzarato puts it, “The production of subjectivity, of forms of life, of forms of existence, is not part of a superstructure, but rather of an ‘economic’ infrastructure.”22 In sum, neoliberalism expands “economic impoverishment” through new forms of precarious labor and an unprecedented control of wealth by the top 1 percent of the population, but it also entails “an impoverishment of subjectivity, a reduction in its existential intensity.”23 The coherence and continuity of neoliberalism has been called into question with the rise of rightwing nationalist governments and populist movements in the 2010s, including the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, Narendra Modi as Prime Minister of India, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as President of Turkey, and Vladimir Putin as President of Russia. Despite the political and economic instability that these developments have caused, the return to more overt forms of racism (including anti-­ immigration policies) is compatible with earlier neoliberalism, particularly in its emphasis on the rational actor’s engagement in constant competition. In his writing on neoliberalism, Michel Foucault already identifies the persistence and indeed centrality of racism within biopolitical governance and the logic of security that are so central to neoliberal management (and frequently its neglect or overt elimination) of life.24 Moreover, as Lazzarato observes in his account of neoliberalism, “Hypermodernity and neoarchaisms are not contradictory processes but the two complementary faces of the same mode of governing our societies.”25 Similarly, social theorists such

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as Silvia Federici have pointed out that the neoliberal period brings with it new forms of “primitive accumulation” and “labor exploitation” that introduce new gender regulation and sexual discrimination across “every aspect of the reproduction of labor-­power.”26 Later critics have also argued that the global COVID-19 crisis in 2020 has complicated neoliberalism and opened up possibilities for fundamentally new forms of governance, even with ample evidence of familiar disaster capitalism. As this brief overview suggests, neoliberalism names an economic orientation, a governance philosophy, a response to a cultural legitimacy crisis, and a worldview for the social. In the present context, I will argue that games simultaneously index and drive the development of neoliberalism. The competition, repetition, and quantified objectives that make up gamified designs, in both entertainment and applied games, correspond with some of the most pernicious aspects of advanced capitalism. To be clear, though my emphasis in this book is on neoliberalism, video games can also be understood through dimensions of economic production and consumption that are marked by terms such as Taylorism, post-­Fordism, postindustrialism, and advanced capitalism.27 Gamification, I argue, marks a condition of seepage or doubling through which game mechanics and activities influence work, leisure, thought, and social relations—key ways people interface with reality today. The games that inundate the present are action-­oriented mediations that shape everyday experience through neoliberal principles. Before continuing this theoretical analysis of the conjunction of neoliberalism and games, I turn to the other part of my method that is informed by the humanistic approach of media aesthetics. The question I address in the following section is this: If neoliberalism can be described as a new social, political, and economic paradigm that emerges in the late twentieth century, can video games be described as a new medium in this same period? The Society of the Game (or, The Work of Art in the Age of Gamification)

A medium-­specific framework for understanding the cultural importance of video games in our time cannot be separated from the sociopolitical context within which these games emerge and which they help to shape. As Frankfurt school critic Walter Benjamin maintains, economics and culture are both vital for making sense of any historical period. Putting this point in Marxist terms, he contends that the economic infrastructure or base is no more important than the cultural superstructure for understanding histori-

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cal conditions of production.28 Attending to “the developmental tendencies of art can therefore contribute to the political struggle in ways that it would be a mistake to underestimate.” Perhaps the most important role of an art form has to do with the ways that it resonates with the human “mode of perception” that is contemporaneous to it. Within Benjamin’s historicist framework, the ways in which this perception is organized and conditioned are neither naturalized nor static; they are contingent and change over time. For example, the “reception in distraction” produced by a mass medium such as film is a historically specific mode of perception, rather than simply a degraded form of concentration.29 For Benjamin, and many Marxist and cultural theorists after him, modes of perception that coemerge with particular media are inherently political and historical. In the mid-­1930s, the politics of aesthetics points, for Benjamin, in the opposed directions of fascism (which engages in an “aestheticizing of politics”) and communism (which responds by “politicizing art”).30 Of course, in a variety of ways that I explore in this book, video games depart formally, and therefore also politically, from film and other media on which he focuses.31 Nevertheless, Benjamin’s framework, alongside related methods emerging from the Frankfurt school, offers a useful starting point for approaching this newer medium. In other words, just as film both signals and conditions modes of reception that help people understand and intervene in politics in the early twentieth century, video games play a similar role in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries in part because of their resonances with neoliberalism. The high-­level differences between the medium of the video game and that of film are important and can be abstracted to clarify the broader cultural field of gamification. The novelty of gamification comes into relief if we set it in contrast with the concept of “spectacle” that Guy Debord developed to describe not merely film, but also television and all of image culture in the late 1960s society within which he was writing. Spectacle, for Debord, did not merely take the common meaning of “a collection of images.” Instead, it organized a sociopolitical theory of mediation that described “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”32 Most of all, spectacle generated the image of the apparent unification of a global society to cover over the underlying fragmentation and alienation that it produced. A direct experience of life, Debord argued, was increasingly being replaced by representations. Spectacle relied, in the mid-­twentieth century, on mass media communications that were “essentially one-­way” and depended on “the monopolization by the administrators of the existing system of the means to pursue



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their particular form of administration.”33 Much like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s earlier theory of the “culture industry,” spectacle described the ideological dimensions of cultural forms such as film, magazines, and television.34 If spectacle conveys “the total practice” of the “particular economic and social formation” of late 1960s capitalism, then gamification expresses the equivalent formation in the present.35 Games unquestionably have a history that long precedes the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries, but they achieved the status of cultural prominence (arguably even a kind of preponderance) only during the late twentieth century.36 If film and television were still, in the 1960s of Debord’s society of the spectacle, the quintessential mass media, then video games have (especially since the 1970s in hubs such as the United States and Japan but reaching a global scale beginning in the twenty-­first century) ascended to an analogous cultural status. Scholars such as McKenzie Wark, Mary Flanagan, Alexander Galloway, and Nick Dyer-­ Witheford were a few of the earliest thinkers to explore the joint aesthetic and sociopolitical significance of digital games for thinking through our contemporary historical moment.37 Games, for these critics, are not merely vapid entertainments or corrupted cultural objects that follow in the wake of the novel or cinema. Instead, they are paradigmatic forms that mediate the contradictions and dissonances of postindustrial life. Games, in this sense, serve as an organizing principle and novel commodity form. They are, as spectacle was for Debord, “both the outcome and the goal of the dominant mode of production” and “not something added to the real world—not a decorative element.”38 Despite some conceptual affinities, a society of the game differs substantially from the society of the spectacle. In contrast to the “mass media” that composed that midcentury global culture that Debord (and before him Adorno and Horkheimer) denounced, video games and virtual world gaming environments are fundamentally procedural, interactive, participatory, and increasingly networked. While the society of the spectacle was founded on separation and hierarchy, our networked world is predicated on a material infrastructure of interconnection in which media are not merely reproducible but “spreadable” and broadly distributable.39 In place of the one-­to-­many communication characteristic of spectacle (and traditional propaganda), the world depends increasingly on many-­to-­many communication. Digital media technologies encourage a novel mode of consumption predicated on so-­called user-­generated content and customization. To put this point in more technical terms, since the mid-­twentieth century, we have moved gradually from a dominant paradigm of “broadcasting” (e.g., the Big Three 14

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network television channels intended for a mass audience) to “narrowcasting” (e.g., the proliferation of cable television channels intended for specialized audiences organized around individual identities) to “pointcasting” (e.g., Netflix media categorized by personalized algorithms and intended for particular affects, moods, and situations).40 These shifts in technological platforms and communications models have corresponded with comparable changes in social, political, and economic life. If an earlier stage involved a transformation from “being into having,” and the society of the spectacle entailed, for Debord, a movement “from having to appearing,” then our moment suggests another notable movement from appearing to acting, in which action, interaction, enactment, expression, participation, and interpellation within an algorithmic environment are paramount operations.41 As even the briefest look at the proliferation of televisual content to streaming formats or the growth of online meme culture demonstrates, images remain essential to the media ecology of the present. Yet something profound has changed in our relationship to those images. In the 1940s, Adorno and Horkheimer were still able to celebrate the telephone, which “permitted the participant to play the role of subject,” in distinction to the culture industry’s radio, which “makes everyone equally into listeners” and offers “no mechanism of reply.”42 Yet, today, the prevailing aesthetic and cultural ideology—often captured through the ubiquitous and far-­reaching term “design”— provides myriad mechanisms of reply. This ideology depends more and more on activity enacted by users, players, or interactors within computational environments that operate as possibility spaces that both constrain and invite that activity. The quality of action, which is so central to games, differs from the society of the spectacle, in which the activity of capitalist production promotes consumer inactivity.43 Today, technology guides people not toward idleness or passivity but into a milieu of constant engagement. In the broadest sense, “interactivity” already plays a role in the novel and the film, both of which invite readers and viewers to engage in a cognitive interactivity of interpretation. Digital media, however, supplement such meaning making with new material forms of interactivity that take place across a wide spectrum that includes, on the one hand, minimal clicks, taps, swipes, or voice commands to Siri that lead down predetermined hyperlinked paths and, on the other, nontrivial choices made available through practices such as modding, remixing, content creation, metagaming, and networked relations with other users. While there are many forms of media art that might be dubbed interactive—from hypertext fiction to responsive installation environments—digital games have become the most popular and widely available. Earlier art forms open

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up to various activities and affects, but digital games are distinctive insofar as they can only be enacted, as Galloway has observed, through a combination of player and machine actions (even as video games also include myriad nonhuman and machine acts that do not depend on player input and sometimes do not even make themselves apparent to human players).44 To further emphasize the departure of the society of the game from the society of the spectacle, in the terms of media aesthetics, we can now turn momentarily back to Benjamin and his account of film to contrast this medium with the video game. As he contends, film’s reception amidst distraction represents an antithesis to the concentration demanded by certain nonreproducible artworks, such as paintings or sculptures, which preserve an “aura” within a particular space and time. By distinction, video games do not belong entirely to either mode of reception but can instead be read as a formal and experiential synthesis. On the one hand, video games are frequently experienced in chaotic settings, from the bustling 1970s arcade or the 1980s multiplayer home console setup to the chaotic 2010s Twitch​.tv online multiplayer chatroom or the e-­sports tournament arena. Beyond the distracting spaces of contemporary video games, the preoccupied reception of games is evident if one thinks of the onscreen anarchy (at least for amateur players) of a fighting game such as the four-­player Super Smash Bros.; the distraction-­inviting, side-­ scrolling hijinks of a hand-­to-­hand arcade brawler such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game; or the busy visual heads-­up display (HUD) of a massively multiplayer online game such as EVE Online (fig. 0.1). Beyond environments of hyperattention, there are also incremental and idle games, such as Cookie Clicker or Clicker Heroes, whose processes persist, without harm to the player’s score, even when one is busy or preoccupied. On the other hand, many video games require focused attentiveness and activity. Though there are exceptions, most games cannot be experienced ambiently, as if they were television sitcoms or police procedurals that can be taken in, even amidst domestic chores. Video games are demanding and often punitive in response to the smallest inattention. In an immediate sense, concentration serves the moment-­by-­moment running and jumping of a platformer such as Sonic the Hedgehog; the precise hand-­eye coordination of a first-­person shooter such as Destiny 2; the accelerations and turns of a racing game such as Super Mario Kart; and the complex menu manipulation of a time-­bound simulation game such as Stardew Valley. In longer term play, concentration is needed to gather resources, build military units, develop technologies, and construct cities in a turn-­based strategy game such as Civilization VI; to form and execute a military plan in a real-­time strategy game such as Age of Empires; or to develop an avatar and character relation 16

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Figure 0.1. EVE Online (CCP Games, 2003) game interface. Screenshot taken by Bryan Ward, “Fitting UI Concept Eve,” January 5, 2015, https://​www​.flickr​.com​/photos​ /rixxjavix​/16206751011.

ships in a role-­playing game such as Persona 5. In all of these cases, immersion and contemplation are prerequisites for continuation and success. In Chris Chesher’s formulation, a video game player adopts neither a cinematic “gaze” nor a televisual “glance” but a ludic “glaze” that entails a paradoxical condition of immersion that nonetheless promotes hyperattention among multiple focal points.45 Beyond their medium-­specific qualities to which I will return throughout this book, video games alter the contemporary social, political, and economic landscape. Consider the myriad gamified apps that promise to make typically boring tasks fun by transforming labor into an action-­oriented and interactive game. An app like Habitica uses points and in-­game rewards to increase user productivity, while Nike+ deploys quantification and avatars to promote exercise. Admittedly, it is not unreasonable to object that gamified products are, properly speaking, not “games” at all. Moreover, even many video games that operate as stand-­alone entertainment products rely on similar game mechanics and incentive structures that promote a neoliberal and economized relation to the world. Media critic David Golumbia has suggested that “we have simply and in some cases uncritically accepted the views that all video and computer games are games and that what we do when we use them is to play.”46 Golumbia is most critical of role-­playing games (RPGs) and first-­ person shooters (FPS) for their lack of genuine choice, fun, complex characterizations, and meaningful social engagements.

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To build on Golumbia’s point, we can turn to the popular fantasy-­themed massively multiplayer online role-­playing game World of Warcraft (WoW). This game blurs labor and games (the economic and the cultural) in ways that are exemplary of our historical moment. At its height, the gaming environment of WoW claimed a community of approximately twelve million monthly subscribers who inhabited its space for an average of twenty to thirty hours a week.47 High though these numbers may seem to nongamers, they feel far less surprising to players who have spent time inside WoW’s virtual environment (not to mention, in different ways, to players of later games such as Overwatch or League of Legends). In order to reach the maximum level, these players engage in the game’s repetitive mechanics—combat procedures that the game industry aptly calls “grinding” or “treadmilling”—that often prove addictive and are reinforced through the satisfaction of progress in this open-­ended world. In WoW, a labor model so similar to the grind of workplace production becomes central to a virtual world that exists, presumably, as a leisure activity. Participants in this world play at consumption and work to create opportunities for ongoing fun. My examples of both gamified apps and online role-­playing games appear even less anomalous if we take into account the increased importance of so-­ called immaterial production in the twenty-­first century. In this period, homo faber and homo ludens—maker and player—lose their distinct characteristics. As a number of critics have observed, within a regime of so-­called “immaterial labor,” work and play blur.48 Particularly in the contemporary condition of ubiquitous computing and always-on networking, users are invited to run a game app while taking a break from composing an email, waiting for a Lyft, or liking Instagram posts. Gamified apps, for instance, enclose different forms of training, labor, and behavior modification within a gamelike form. To return to WoW, this game exacerbates such tendencies by actively coproducing the contemporary subject. The game generates, in the player, a heightened experience of a dominant economic situation that it does not simply represent but to which gameplay centrally belongs. The game privileges mechanics that train players to become entrepreneurs of themselves who acculturate to its virtual space (at lower levels) by aspiring to a higher rank, following instructions, engaging in war making, and accumulating private property, and (at higher levels) by team building, managing a guild, optimizing combat strategies, and administrating resources. To be a player, in this world, means to be, first and foremost, a laborer and then possibly a manager.49 Even with this reduction or lack of playfulness in many so-­called games, the form and metaphor of games has established a cultural centrality. This centrality can be explained, at least in part, through the resonance of games 18

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with neoliberalism and the broader development of economic thought following World War II (a trajectory that I track in greater detail in chapter 1). To repeat: games both index and drive the development of neoliberalism. In this context, the differences between film and games become particularly important.50 I explore some of the medium-­specific qualities of what I call the “video game sensorium”—including game mechanics, procedural manipulation, navigable spaces, emphases on decision-­making, and interactions with artificial intelligence systems—in chapter 2. In the remainder of this introduction, I collate my previous discussions of neoliberalism and the video game medium to demonstrate some of the ways that video games align with neoliberalism, but also, more importantly, how they might be positioned to complicate and transform the world-­building program of neoliberalism from the inside out. Of course, games cannot serve as a solution to the major systemic and infrastructural problems that yield exploitation and alienation. Even so, I will argue that they offer unprecedented cultural means to experiment, pursue change, and play within the historical present and its specific technoscientific constraints. Neoliberal Games: Action, Competition, and Worldmaking

In order to introduce the precise conjunctions of neoliberalism and games, I would like to foreground three concepts that are central to both of these forms. Though this book develops several other key conceptual intersection points, I see these three concepts—action, competition, and worldmaking— as foundational to the argument that follows. The first of these concepts, action, is a central quality of all games. As Galloway observes, in a fundamental sense, “video games are actions.” As he adds: “Without action, games remain only in the pages of an abstract rule book. Without the active participation of players and machines, video games exist only as static computer code. Video games come into being when the machine is powered up and the software is executed.”51 If video games require specific actions and enactment of mechanics, from moment to moment, they also encourage ongoing activity. Consider that, in its first year after release, players of the competitive battle arena online game League of Legends (2009) collectively logged nearly 1.3 billion hours (or over 148,000 years) of gameplay.52 Between 2012 and 2018, players of the hit mobile game Candy Crush Saga engaged in a total of 1.1 trillion rounds of gameplay (212 billion in the United States alone).53 These two examples—of a multiplayer online game and a mobile casual game that invite very different types of actions—point to genres that are commonly reported for accumulating in

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credible time investments. However, it is additionally worth highlighting the considerable duration of even single-­player video games. Though video game play times are variable, depending on play style and expertise, websites such as howlongtobeat​.com offer averages based on player contributions. For comparison, a film typically lasts approximately two hours and a television season may last between ten and twenty-­four episodes (somewhere between five and eighteen hours total, not counting commercials, depending on the episode duration). To be sure, one can find numerous shorter video games that fall within, or even below, this same time span. However, the average times for some of the most popular video games from the 2010s reveal the difference from film and television: BioShock Infinite (main story: 11.5 hours, completionist: 26.5 hours), Super Mario Odyssey (main story: 12 hours, completionist: 57 hours), Grand Theft Auto V (main story: 31 hours, completionist: 78.5 hours), Fallout 4 (main story: 26 hours, completionist: 150 hours), Persona 5 (main story: 95.5 hours, completionist: 164 hours), and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (main story: 46 hours, completionist: 176 hours). Beyond a single completion of a game, players will often play their favorite games multiple times to the exclusion of other games or seek to master a replayable game (we might not call these players “gamers” so much as Overwatch enthusiasts, Candy Crush Saga addicts, or Fortnite professionals). Other players engage in open-­ended multiplayer modes after they have completed a comparatively linear single-­player story mode. Through all of these forms of time investment, games ask the player to act and make decisions for hours at a time. Given such long durations that depend on ongoing player participation, it is worth asking: What kind of subject do video games interpellate? Though the answer would be incomplete, we could offer the provisional answer: an acting subject. The major qualification would be that an immense number of people watch expert gamers playing video games—on YouTube, Twitch, and other streaming services—more often than they play them. To offer just one example, a few months after its release, God of War gameplay videos reached an estimated one billion views on YouTube in mid-­2018.54 However, in many cases, even a spectatorial audience participates actively by typing comments and questions in associated online chats. For both players and viewers, video games fill free time with both focused actions and ambient activities. The perpetual engagement that unfolds in the cultural space of video games resonates with a broader sociopolitical context. As Lazzarato emphasizes, “the objective of neoliberal policies is ‘full activity’” instead of “full employment” that is continuous and organized by “the permanent contract.” Wage labor comes to be replaced with “the precarious full activity of a grow 20

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ing section of the population and all age categories.” Crucially, much of that activity exceeds employment and unemployment itself becomes “the time emptied of employment that intermittents fill with things other than job seeking.”55 If we combine these demographic questions with the points about gameplay duration raised above, it becomes clear that video games provide an experience of activity for the unemployed and for precarious or intermittent workers: a tendency that has accelerated since the 2008 economic crisis.56 Far from random activity, so many games and gamified apps train players to become managers (World of Warcraft), soldiers (America’s Army), runners (Nike+), friends (Animal Crossing: New Horizons), and general entrepreneurs of themselves (Stardew Valley). Regardless of the success of these games in achieving these particular ends, almost all video games condition players to be more familiar with and interested in digital and networked media, requiring them to analyze information, multitask across crowded hypermediated interfaces, develop hand-­eye coordination, discover operational efficiencies, and submit to management techniques organized around digital rewards and punishments. A small number of gamers also become stars of streaming services who make a living from audiences (one 2017 report found that YouTube gaming video content had reached 666 million viewers, exceeding audience numbers of “HBO, Netflix, ESPN, and Hulu combined”).57 But most players must pay for games, downloadable content, and viewership subscriptions, settling for unpaid activity or (in cases of game beta testing) even free labor. The second concept that is foundational to both neoliberalism and contemporary video game play is competition.58 To emphasize a key point at the outset: not all games are competitive. Roger Caillois, for instance, proposes four key categories of games that foreground not only competition but also chance, role-­playing, and vertigo.59 Though I return to these other categories later in this book, it is important to acknowledge that the majority of popular contemporary video games sort out winners and losers. Beginning in the 1970s, arcade games provided intense challenges to push players toward a steady expenditure of quarters. Even with the proliferation of video game consoles in the 1980s and 1990s, the challenge of games remained generally high. The expansion of the game industry in the early twenty-­first century led to a growth in inclusive casual games available for nongamers.60 Despite a diversification of game genres and levels of access, competition remains the central mode of gameplay across categories of casual and hardcore games. Competition manifests in a variety of ways. Amidst casual games, Candy Crush Saga (2012) encourages asymmetrical competition through leaderboards, whereas Clash Royale (2016) focuses on real-­time competition between players. Many single-­player games such as God of War (2018) do not

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set players in opposition to one another but nonetheless introduce a range of win and loss conditions. Such games incorporate frequent possibilities for death, as well as challenging puzzles that yield collectibles and trophies, encouraging degrees of accomplishment that culminate in “completionist” and “speedrun” playthroughs that exceed the game’s primary interactive narrative. In the most overt way, a multiplayer and networked game such as Fortnite (2017) pits groups of players against each other in intense real-­time competition. This proliferation of competitive games has not occurred in a vacuum. Though competition is by no means a social relation unique to the period beginning in the late twentieth century, it takes an unprecedented centrality during neoliberalism.61 Whereas an earlier classical liberalism espoused by thinkers such as Adam Smith treats trade as an element of natural market relations, neoliberalism imagines a market that is actively created by rational subjects. Within this worldview, it is “not trade but competition [that serves] as the organizing principle of the market, and most notably competition between firms and workers.” Notably, Lazzarato even deploys game language in order to mark this distinction: “in the neoliberal conception, competition is not the result of a ‘natural play’ of appetites, instincts, and behaviors. It is rather a ‘formal game’ between inequalities—a game that must be instituted, and continually maintained and sustained.”62 To sustain competition, numerous processes, from the economic to the political to the cultural, must come into play. At the level of the individual subject, neoliberalism encourages perpetual competition as the way to develop one’s own human capital. To be an entrepreneur of oneself means to be a competitor. As in the prisoner’s dilemma that I described earlier, the game transforms the other into a rival with whom one does not communicate directly but rather, via playful or predatory means, defeats in order to maximize self-­interest. If liberalism seeks to mitigate (if not eliminate) a state of nature in which homo homini lupus (“man is wolf to man”) then neoliberalism pursues a different end, altering the naturalist is of this famous saying into a new constructivist imperative in which man must become wolf to man in order to thrive. Even during periods of unemployment—including part-­time, intermittent, and precarious labor— the figure of the entrepreneur must remain competitive, actively investing in her own knowledge, skills, and social networks. No mere consumer, the entrepreneur works to maintain a competitive edge and sharpen an appetite for victory. Even outside of full employment, this subject competes to build her brand, raise his status, and collect on their investment at a later date. The neoliberal subject strives to become a successful Instagram influencer, 22

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a YouTube star, a Kickstarter entrepreneur, a sponsored Twitch streamer, a podcaster with reach, or a competitive gamer on the e-­sports circuit. If we combine this second concept of competition with the first concept of activity, it is now possible to contend that neoliberalism and video games both promote competitive activity. Depending on one’s tastes, regular participation in head-­to-­head strategy games or multiplayer battle royale games maintain levels of competitive activity, even during periods of unemployment or underemployment. Beyond explicit games, gamified apps and loyalty programs also encourage competition for status or paltry rewards.63 As we will see in the discussion of behavioral economics in chapter 1, games can also serve as designed correctives that help convert irrational into rational subjects who compete to maximize their utility. Even if violent video games do not cause physical violence in their players, there is nonetheless an abstracted violence of competition, enforced inequality, and individual risk (that is not socially shared and distributed as with earlier systems of social welfarism).64 The third concept that is central to both neoliberalism and video game play is worldmaking. As I have already pointed out, the competition espoused by neoliberalism is not natural but created. This point extends to the broader global project or world-­building program of neoliberalism. Though neoliberal theory often proffers a theory of unregulated and natural markets, neoliberal practice reveals frequent top-­down interventions. For Mirowski, the quality of constructivism is arguably the single most important political innovation of neoliberalism: “The starting point of neoliberalism is the admission, contrary to classical liberal doctrine, that their vision of the good society will triumph only if it becomes reconciled to the fact that the conditions for its existence must be constructed, and will not come about ‘naturally’ in the absence of concerted political effort and organization.” Contrary to the laissez-­faire attitude central to liberalism, he adds, “The injunction to act in the face of inadequate epistemic warrant is the very soul of ‘constructivism,’ an orientation sometimes shared with the field of science studies, and the very soul of the Neoliberal Thought Collective.”65 The longer history of neoliberal thought reveals a flexible approach that relies on constructivist opportunism. We already see a foundational regulation in the Chicago school’s move from Keynesianism to a partial monetarism (a viewpoint that encourages centralized regulation of the money supply by banks). This regulation extends to further opportunistic constructions through international economic interventions by Western powers, such as the US support of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, the formation of supranational organizations such as the European Union, and the growth

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of nongovernmental entities such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This trend continues into the twenty-­first century with doctrinal contradictions (e.g., continued advocacy for deregulation alongside advantageous government reregulation during the Great Recession), unprecedented governmental interventions (e.g., the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 that enacted a massive bailout of Wall Street), and ideologically inconsistent alliances (e.g., the truce between US neoliberals and the extreme right in the form taken by the Tea Party in 2009). In these cases, neoliberal thought has chosen adaptability over fundamentalism, constructing multiple versions of itself for different audiences—what Mirowski calls neoliberalism’s “double truth.”66 In all of these cases, the market does not operate naturally or spontaneously; it is made, built, and managed. Games, perhaps better than any cultural form, capture processes of ongoing construction within formal rules—a point reinforced by Foucault’s usage of the phrase “games of truth” to describe protocols for the construction of truth.67 Indeed, the literature on business applications of gamification frequently invokes this power of games to create worlds that are made real and meaningful through play, spatial models, networked relations, and other medium-­specific qualities. Gamification advocates Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter, for instance, invoke historian Johan Huizinga’s notion of the “magic circle” that captures the singular space-­time of a game that suspends and changes the rules of everyday life: “Think of the power of the magic circle in a business context. You create a ‘world’ to serve your strategic objectives . . . and it becomes meaningful to other people such as visitors to your website or staff in your call center.”68 Thus, games and business enterprises both create worlds that encourage action and play demarcated by rules. With the arguable exception of abstract puzzle games, most video games create navigable spatial worlds using lines of code and pixels on a screen. Some popular AAA games aspire to graphical photorealism.69 Worldmaking extends to other realities with open world role-­playing games such as Skyrim and sandbox games such as Minecraft. In addition to worldmaking through game design and development, video game play depends on a conditioned resonance with artificially constructed systems. Video game play is not natural. Players learn rulesets anew, often rapidly, with each new game or genre. With the planned obsolescence of each generation of video game consoles and gaming laptops, players adapt to new controllers and master new hot keys or button combos. As the communication scholar David Myers observes, “video game rules and relationships undermine and deny conventional experience in much the same manner that poetic language undermines and denies conventional language.”70 In order to play a video game, players must 24

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quickly learn and internalize rules, objectives, button configurations on a controller, and conventions of social play. As we will see in cases such as the video game Stardew Valley, constructed worlds built atop overtly neoliberal values can become quickly naturalized during gameplay. Even as I will explore many instances in which video games participate in and feed the neoliberal program, my argument is not that the form is categorically complicit with this way of thinking. Beyond a critical diagnosis, I am interested in the more challenging question of how immersive and interactive game worlds can enable players to experiment with the reality of both the neoliberal subject and a world that is perpetually in flux. Computational Feelings and Affective Machines

If we are to elaborate how video games are and might become experimental technologies that are not mere technologies of neoliberalism, one more connection is unavoidable: the relationship between video games and computation. Though it might suffice to observe, in shorthand, that video games are software that is run on computational hardware, the two are far more interconnected—to some degree, even codependent. A narrative about inventor Charles Babbage, one of the key visionaries of the digital programmable computer, helps to illustrate this point. In the nineteenth century, long before the advent of video games, Babbage already realized the power of games. In his home, Babbage allegedly had on display two objects: the “silver lady” (an automaton that he purchased and which could mimic a simple human movement) and a part of his “difference engine” (a computational machine that he created for calculating polynomial functions). To Babbage’s surprise, visitors to his home regularly preferred to see the automaton, even as the difference engine was a far more complex and technically impressive technology. As Mirowski summarizes, “This experience convinced [Babbage] that hoi polloi would only be impressed with machines if they suitably mimicked some activity that an average human would recognize as resembling their own. What could that be for a device essentially devoted to calculation? After some rumination, Babbage decided that the most humanlike thing that a thinking machine like his Analytical Engine could conceivably do was—play a game!”71 Though Babbage never followed through on his ideas to use games from tic-­tac-­toe to chess to garner interest in computing machines, his vision, described in 1864, took a material form nearly a century later in 1962 with Steve Russell’s development of what is commonly considered the first modern video game: Spacewar!72 As a graduate student at MIT, Russell created the

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game on a PDP-­1 minicomputer that was available to him through a laboratory, supported by the US Department of Defense, for which he worked. Though it might have appeared frivolous by comparison to the lab’s core research, this game produced more excitement than most mundane academic or military projects created on early computers. Stewart Brand recognized this point in his Rolling Stone article, written nearly a decade later in 1972, when the game had become a phenomenon and video games were just beginning their first major decade. “Reliably,” Brand writes, “at any nighttime moment (i.e., non-­business hours) in North America hundreds of computer technicians are effectively out of their bodies, locked in life-­or-­death space combat computer-­projected onto cathode ray tube display screens, for hours at a time, ruining their eyes, numbing their fingers in frenzied mashing of control buttons, joyously slaying their friend and wasting their employers’ valuable computer time.” He adds, “Something basic is going on.” Indeed, even more than other early computational “killer apps” and demos, video games offered something basic through aesthetic and embodied experiences that were viscerally compelling. These experiences brought the possibilities of computers to life for a broad public, transforming them from complex calculation devices to the expressive media that we know today.73 The promise of this game was enough for Brand to announce, regarding a technology that had previously been reserved to specialists, “Ready or not, computers are coming to the people.”74 In the years that followed, personal computing took off and, in our time, has finally become something basic. Digital games were not merely window dressing that attracted people who might otherwise be uninterested in computers. From the beginning, these games also mirrored, animated, and experimented with fundamental affordances of computation. To an unprecedented degree, they made computers palpable and palatable as major technologies with which anyone might think. As game studies scholar Aubrey Anable puts it, videogames such as Spacewar! operated as “demonstration programs” and served as “computers’ ambassadors to the general public; they were used to make the machines seem friendly and accessible in an era before they became ‘personal.’ In this way, at their origin, video games were affective interfaces between computational processes and users, proxy systems that metaphorized in real time the cybernetic imbrication of mind, body, and code.”75 Whereas early video games often served as an affective means to the end of making computers acceptable to the mass public, they have since blossomed into a widespread and significant medium in their own right. In conjunction with contemporary scholarship on emotion and affect in video games, Experimental Games seeks more fully to understand and to pro 26

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pose ways to intervene in a society increasingly influenced by games.76 As art historian Jennifer Doyle observes, emotion and affect are “where ideology does its most devastating work. . . . where we come to know the contours of our selves, our bodies, our sense of soul—and this zone is always under constant policing and negotiation.”77 In terms of emotion, games can produce annoyance, anxiety, or rage quitting. They inspire everything from delighted curiosity to deep compulsion. They can condition orientations of flexible optimism. They can captivate players with creative feelings of apophenia or darker entanglements of paranoia. They can allow participants to think through complicated circumstances and to experiment with unfamiliar experiences. Game critics such as Miguel Sicart have argued for the centrality of “emotional designs” that create environments that surround us with “objects created with the intention of appealing to our senses and feelings.”78 Such emotional design can reinforce the ideological status quo but can also open up ways of navigating it. Though most existing scholarship in this area has focused on emotion and feeling in video games, beginning in chapter 2, this book also attends to the nonrepresentational dimensions of affect that video games open up.79 While emotion carries a subjective and personal content that can be fixed via psychological categories and narrativized via biographical and fictional accounts, affect is an experience of intensity that is nonconscious and relational. Philosopher Brian Massumi describes emotion as the most intense “capture and closure of affect” that recognizes its residue consciously and identifies an aspect of it linguistically.80 By contrast, affect captures the viscerality of abstraction as it moves through lived bodies and everyday experience. The ways in which video games channel such intensities offer opportunities to access, even play with, fields of affective flow that are enabled by digital and networked environments that often operate at subconscious and nonconscious scales. Even as I make local distinctions across this book among feeling, emotion, and affect, I do not rely entirely on the strain of affect theory developed by thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Brian Massumi, and Erin Manning (by way of Baruch Spinoza). These scholars often maintain a sharp difference between emotion and affect. By contrast, what Donovan Schaefer calls the “phenomenological traditions” of affect theory foreground “embodied histories” and draw less firm boundaries between conscious and nonconscious registers.81 This other strain—especially as it has unfolded in feminist and queer theory through the writing of scholars such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Kathleen Stewart—need not be opposed completely to the first. In fact, video games, with their reliance on computational abstraction and aesthetic concreteness,

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rational structures and embodied processes, operate as an ideal medium for bringing these strains of affect theory into conversation with each other. They demonstrate the many ways that digital media can move us, including through processes of sociopolitical subject formation as it unfolds under neoliberalism. Experimental Games

In the broadest sense, this is a book about the ways that digital games can and do operate as experiments. This may seem like a simple statement, but as I hope to show, the key terms in this proposition—“digital games” and “experiments”—are far from conceptually or historically simple. Various writers have already described games as promoting experimental ways of thinking. In the 1968 special volume Game, Play, Literature, which came out of Yale’s French Studies, the philosopher Eugen Fink announces that “each game is an attempt at existence, a vital experiment that encounters in the plaything the essence of unyielding reality.”82 In 1970, Clark C. Abt makes a similar point that games “provide a mode of experimentation with alternative strategies and tactics in a competitive and constantly changing environment.”83 Moving from games in general to video games in particular, the literary critic Colin Milburn argues, in 2018, that “the logic of experimentation is inherent to video games at every level, the procedures of exploration, testing the capacities of the game, discovering its laws and limitations, even if trying to break them.”84 Versions of this observation regarding the experimental qualities of games appear across writing about video games, but they are rarely examined in detail. This exploration of experimentation (a term that I deploy in ways that are not reducible to the more common scientific uses of the term) is the one that I will be conducting across the following chapters. To be clear, though I discuss a number of avant-­garde and art games through this book, I mean “experimental” to signal qualities that inhere in all games, not just ones inspired by modernist and postmodernist aesthetics or by political art. To put it directly up front, games operate as experiments insofar as they combine a stable foundation of starting conditions, rules, and objectives on the one hand with the contingency and possibility of play on the other. This balance encourages the provoked observation that is experiment: a designed repetition that produces difference. Most commonly, this repetition-­with-­ a-­difference that characterizes video games is translated into the consumer category of “replay value.” Nevertheless, this quality also gestures toward the more profound pedagogical value of games, insofar as they enable encounters with possibility or potential. If video games are co-­emergent with neo 28

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liberalism, they also point, through their own artifactual construction and artificial conflict, to the constructedness of that worldview. I would like to argue that learning not only how to play but also think with games makes one more sensitive to nondeterministic potentials that inhere in each situation and each body at every moment.85 As affect theorist Erin Manning observers, potentiality is “the insertion of difference in a moment of certainty” and an exposure of inherent “difference in systems that appear to be organized and unchanging.”86 Gameplay is a virtual activity, then, insofar as it entails the generation of potential and dwelling within possibility spaces. It is possible to begin thinking about games as experimental either from a formalist or play-­centric standpoint. To begin with formalism, games might be treated as models that enable experimentation that better demonstrates something about the operation of the world outside of the game. Of course, this idea of games as models applies more readily to certain types of games (e.g., simulation games, gamified apps, or games for change) than to others (e.g., many commercial games belonging to genres such as platformers, first-­ person shooters, or action/adventure games). Perhaps in a broader sense, all games can be approached as interactive models. After all, games reduce the complexity of systems and invite players to interact with those systems at a more manageable scale. To differing degrees of realism, Street Fighter II is a model of combat, SimCity is a model of urban construction, and Virtua Racing is a model of Formula One racing. In each of these cases, players can experiment with their avatar, the environment, and game mechanics, within the parameters of the game’s designed rules and objectives. Players engage in explorative trial and error. Across these trials, they have recourse to the safe failure that is built into most games. Moreover, in some of these cases, designer ambitions of visual and procedural realism provide some degree of real-­world mimicry. A formalist perspective that approaches video games as models or toys, however, limits a recognition of the type of experimentation that they might enable to the predesigned affordances that players might discover through probing or reverse engineering. This version of trial-­and-­error experimentation with a designed system remains important but brings with it serious limitations. An alternative approach treats games as processes or occasions for play. Both game studies scholars and game designers have elaborated a process-­oriented or play-­centric approach in recent years.87 Taking a social perspective on games, anthropologist Thomas Malaby argues that games are “grounded in human practice and as fundamentally processual.” Instead of reducing a game to determinative rules and finite goals, he adds, “as it is played, [a game] always contains the potential for generating new practices

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and new meanings, possibly refiguring the game itself.” Play, like experimentation, is an inherently uncertain activity that acquires its intensity and flow from contingency. Unlike the experimental logic of a finite game that invites experimentation until one has enacted all substantive preset permutations, the contingency that play mobilizes, and to which it responds, creates knowledge of “that which could have been otherwise.”88 Every session in front of a screen need not be an adoption of habit, but rather an opportunity to discover or generate difference. Instead of a formalist model, a play-­centric approach invites us to think of any game (to borrow Kurt Squire’s term) as a possibility space.89 It would be too easy to celebrate playful experimentation as the absolute alternative to a neoliberal paradigm of gamification. For this reason, this book remains cautious about a wholly romanticist impulse that would elevate play to a utopian status or celebrate games as critical objects of noninstrumental play that achieve distance from the social world.90 We see related modernist and postmodernist inclinations among game critics who leave open space for particular games that operate through a mode of cultural resistance or opposition—for example, Galloway’s “countergaming,” Mary Flanagan’s “alternative” or “radical” games,” Nick Dyer-­Witherford and Greig de Peuter’s “counterplay against Empire,” and even the more broadly adopted category of “serious games.”91 To be clear, I am not opposed to any of these terms—as a game designer I create games that belong to these categories and as a critic in this book I analyze such games as well. Even so, my own organizing concept of experiment introduces a somewhat different way of thinking about games that is more ambivalent (which is not to say apathetic). Experiment is less totalizing and systematic than “utopia” and at least sometimes less partisan than “resistance.” An experimental game lacks the rhetorical certainty inherent in game designer Jane McGonigal’s conviction that “reality is broken” but that, fortunately, games can “make us better” and can “change the world.”92 Arguably, some games can achieve such ends and resolve certain well-­defined problems. But experimental games, in my conception, are more modest, flexible, and exploratory. They can be as ephemeral as Rita Raley’s “tactical media”—though not always as pointed in their interventions.93 They can also be long-­lasting and coterminous with one’s everyday life, as with large-­scale alternate reality games that last for months or years and blur the outlines of the ludic magic circle. Regardless of scope, experiments usually occur in a series that conditions the world and a researcher’s observations through designs that question, scale, and configure—but also disrupt and create. Experiment is never entirely impartial; it involves the experimenter in a temporary interruption 30

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in the world that would not have occurred without designed intervention. Though positivistic science may separate experiments from the surrounding environment or world, seeking to “control” extraneous variables that interrupt the acquisition of knowledge, experiment is always a feature of the world that can never fully control emergent contingency. To be fair, any design requires a situational sovereignty. Even so, one can liken experimental design, in my sense, to a “teleonomic” tendency of context-­specific goal-­ directedness in which the process of exploration and feedback leads to regular reformulations of the goal, rather than a “teleological” commitment to an absolute and predetermined final cause. In other words, experiment can be vigilantly purposeful without being dogmatically purposive.94 In this sense, experiment need not impose an external will to control the world. To be sure, experiments are artificial and constructed, much like games that depend on artificial conflict. But in this very constructedness, experiment reveals the non-­natural and created qualities that inhere in the concept of “world” itself. For these reasons, this book is more aligned with positions taken by artistic collectives such as Fluxus and the Situationists, social scientists from Johan Huizinga to Thomas Malaby, and game designers such as Jane McGonigal and Mary Flanagan who treat games as experiments that are integrated with everyday life.95 While thinking through designed form, I also take seriously empirical practices of play that are central to social scientists such as T. L. Taylor or to Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux’s “metagaming” approach.96 Experimentation can happen when people build their own games on top of existing ones, but also when they experiment through the enactment of and interpretation of games. A historical problem that this book faces head-­on is that both neoliberalism and gaming draw on the affordances of experimental method. As I argue in chapter 2, since the late twentieth century, experimentation has transitioned from an activity once practiced by socially marginalized figures—scientists or avant-­garde artists—to a dominant principle of contemporary life.97 To think about how important the form of the experiment has become in our time, not only as an abstract form but also as an operational protocol, we need only think of the centrality of research and development to postindustrial capitalism and of playful experimentation to the culture of Silicon Valley. Within the periodization of this book, neoliberalism in particular has adopted an experimental bearing from its beginnings to such a degree that we might consider experimentation as one of its defining principles. The collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s created uncertainty about the future of the world economy. Though neoliberalism emerged from this vacuum as the dominant order—quickly naturalized as

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a system without alternative—its history reveals a nimble and probing approach to worldmaking that built on earlier colonial modes of experimentation. Such “trial and error” included the US supported coup by Pinochet in Chile that David Harvey describes as “a brutal experiment carried out in the periphery [that] became a model for the formulation of policies in the centre.”98 Such opportunistic and (only partially) controlled neoliberal experiments built upon earlier settler colonialism through forced nation-­building projects such as the Iraq War and responses of systematic neglect such as state inactions during Hurricane Katrina. Beyond a series of seized historical opportunities used to create and test techniques of governance, neoliberalism can also be said to be inherently experimental in its relationship to virtuality, in the sense of potentiality. Fundamentally, an experiment exceeds mere observation: it is an intervention into and reformation of a contingent space of possibility. To put this in a more polemical way, experiment is not discovery but an act of creation that includes hypothesis generation and the shaping of a field of potentiality prior to its actualization.99 As Lazzarato observes, drawing from Deleuze, the standardization of money in the nineteenth century already amounts to “a capitalist appropriation of virtuality insofar as it amounts to power over possibilities.” By the late twentieth century, this relationship to virtuality has reached a heightened state in which we enter into “an economy of possibilities, an economy in which finance assumes the power to name, delimit, and circumscribe the possibilities for a society and an epoch” and in which “a proliferation of choices, options, and possibilities [is] offered to consumers.”100 Beyond finance and consumer culture, the privatization at the core of neoliberal restructuring centralizes power over the field of possible actions taken by contemporary subjects. If neoliberalism already experiments with possibility fields, games in our time have the potential to be machines that tap into those potentials and engender change. As Manning again explains, “Engendering takes place in the magic moment between potentiality and actuality, where what is exposed is the actuality of the virtual and the virtuality of the actual.”101 Without promising utopian alternatives, games can remind us that the virtual is real and can become actual—and therefore that the world is inherently changeable. They do so, importantly, not through cerebral exposition but in visceral and affective ways. Digital games, in particular, take the stakes of this form to an even higher level as they enable experiments with life in a historical moment characterized by digital media, deep learning algorithms, and telecommunication networks—as well as the forms of distributed cognition and affective labor that these technologies occasion. Maintaining a critical ambivalence, 32

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we can characterize computational media as virtuality machines in multiple senses. As Katherine Hayles argues, such media carry with them an unprecedented capacity for change: In these terms, computational media have a distinct advantage over every

other technology ever invented. They are not necessarily the most important for human life; one could argue that water treatment plants and sanitation

facilities are more important. They are not necessarily the most transformative; that honor might go instead to transportation technologies, from dirt roads

to jet aircraft. Computational media are distinct, however, because they have a stronger evolutionary potential than any other technology, and they have this

potential because of their cognitive capabilities, which among other functionalities, enable them to simulate any other system.102

For Hayles, computational media introduce an unprecedented possibility for evolutionary change, both via computer technologies themselves and via the effects of those systems on human beings, in varied relations of symbiotic mutualism, unidirectional commensalism, and harmful parasitism. Though computational developments such as artificial intelligence or neural networks might indeed have a greater ultimate impact on the future of human life, the cultural saturation of video games makes them a more powerful exemplar of the period from the 1970s through the 2010s. We can add to Hayles’s formulation that the evolutionary potential and virtuality of computational media both augments and threatens neoliberalism. The duality is of course not unique to contemporary media. Speaking about technology as such, Martin Heidegger already observed, in his well-­known reading of Hölderlin, that technology entails both a saving power and a danger. In analyzing video games, this book holds onto this simultaneity—this intense ambivalence—as a way to question the present. As Heidegger writes, “The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become. For questioning is the piety of thought.”103 Video games, with their dangers and saving powers, expand the field of questioning, but as we will see in the chapters that follow, they also invite an active and uncertain experimentation that demands great care. Level Guide

If, as Hayles suggests, computational media carry with them the potential for change, they also have the capacity to generate new concepts. Concepts

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can operate as constructivist mechanics—in the specialist sense of “game mechanics,” the verbs or actions that a player enacts and experiments with in order to participate in and alter the state of play. Admittedly, video games are more commonly treated as works of entertainment, culture, or even art than as philosophical or political machines that yield concepts. But games are also platforms for generating combinations of moves, affects, tactics, strategies, rule variations, mods, and indeed concepts that did not exist prior to play.104 The chapters that follow are organized according to single-­word concepts that are central to the framework of neoliberalism but also serve as internal pressure points that suggest ways to exploit that worldview. These concepts include gamification, experimentation, choice, control, difficulty, failure, improvisation, and joy. Though I discuss video games that date back to the beginnings of digital game design, the more sustained cases through which I explore each of the book’s main concepts are all selected from the early twenty-­first century. This emphasis has to do with a noteworthy change in the production, circulation, and reception of video games that took place around 2007. This period saw the introduction of a wide range of new cultural, technological, and institutional practices that included the phenomena of “indie games,” “art games,” and “DIY game making,” in part because of the adoption of online distribution platforms such as Steam (2003, with Steam Community launching in 2007) and PlayStation Network (2006). These categories opened up many previously unavailable experimental avenues for games that exceeded merely economic motivations.105 Thus, this period saw the growth of an emergent game scene through, for example, a new focus on auteur game designers, the proliferation of game-­oriented art exhibits, and the growth of independent game conferences.106 As Felan Parker notes, the years between 2007 and 2009 also gave rise to a number of widely recognized art games, including Passage (2007), The Marriage (2007), The Graveyard (2008), Braid (2008), Flower (2009), and Every Day the Same Dream (2009) (fig. 0.2).107 This period also saw the expansion of mobile games, virtual reality, and augmented reality that made digital games even more important and formally diverse. At the end of this first decade of the twenty-­first century, game studies emerged as a viable academic field that expanded game pedagogy, supported by earlier work by scholars such as Espen Aarseth, Mary Flanagan, Henry Jenkins, Janet Murray, Noah Wardrip-­Fruin, and Mark J. P. Wolf. This range of changes makes the video game a completely different cultural object in 2020 than it was in 1970. To be clear, while this is a book about the ways in which video games are and can be experimental, it does not focus exclusively on the types of “experimental games” that we might call “avant-­garde games.”108 Given the cur 34

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Figure 0.2. Every Day the Same Dream (Molleindustria, 2009).

rent popularity of video games, it is not uncommon to encounter formally experimental games within what might previously have been considered a mass market media ecology. For example, Stardew Valley, about which I write in chapter 1, is an independently produced game with a number of experimental qualities that nonetheless sold more than 3.5 million units during 2016 and 2017. Similarly, Journey, a formally experimental networked video game, became the fastest selling game ever on the PlayStation Network in the US in 2012.109 Other games that I analyze are easier to categorize: an easy-­ to-­learn mobile game like Candy Crush Saga is unquestionably “commercial” and an inherently frustrating game with complex thematic qualities such as Liz Ryerson’s Problem Attic is undeniably “avant-­garde” in its formal and sociopolitical orientation. Regardless of these taxonomic differences, throughout my selected cases, I hope to do justice to the diversity of forms that digital games have taken, especially in the early twenty-­first century. Along with varying degrees of visibility, I explore numerous genres including single-­player, multiplayer, and networked real-­time strategy, platformer, simulator, first-­person shooter, role-­playing, puzzle, and alternate reality games. Beyond genres, each chapter offers close readings of specific cases as a way of foregrounding the experimental processes that are immanent to specific games and the modes of play they enable. The chapters in this book unfold in an arc but have also been written to be read in a modular fashion, allowing readers to focus on the game concepts that most interest them. Part 1 of the book, which includes this introduction, chapter 1, and chapter 2, offers an economic history and political framework for understanding contemporary video games and their experimental dimensions. Chapter 1 gives an overview of gamification as a historical paradigm that brings games to the forefront of social, political, economic, and aesthetic thought, particularly during the period of neoliberalism. This chapter insists that though the term gamification, and the design practice to

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which it refers, can be located squarely within the twenty-­first century, this paradigm has its roots in an earlier moment in the second half of the twentieth century. I extend the history of contemporary gamification from the 2010s back to three US contexts from the mid-­twentieth through the early twenty-­first century. These contexts, which critics rarely discuss in conjunction with one another, include the economic method of game theory, the world-­building program of neoliberalism, and the theories and applications of behavioral economics. Following this historical and conceptual argument, at the end of the chapter, I analyze two video games—King Digital Entertainment’s mainstream mobile game Candy Crush Saga (2012) and Eric Barone’s independently designed simulator Stardew Valley (2016)—that demonstrate how these historical contexts yield contemporary gamification. This analysis of gamification serves as the basis of my critique of how most people have come to frame or understand games in our time. Following this critique, chapter 2 turns to the concept of experimentation in order to establish a constructive foundation for the remainder of the book, which contends that video games enable experiments with life in a historical moment characterized by digital media and networks. Games can be understood as experimental in ways that accord with both earlier experimental art forms (such as the modernist novel or avant-­garde cinema) and with forms of scientific hypothesis testing (such as the randomized controlled trial). The unique experimentality of video games has much to do with the ways they condition experience and modulate affect as part of what I call the video game sensorium. This chapter builds toward an engagement with two cases: Blizzard’s popular real-­time strategy game StarCraft (1998) and Jonathan Blow’s independent platformer game Braid (2008). This concept of experimentation also informs my analysis of all of the games in the chapters that follow. Part 2 of the book, which includes chapters 3 through 6, explores four central concepts in game studies, attending in particular to how they have been informed by neoliberal thought and how experimental games can complicate them. Chapter 3 takes up the concept of choice that is central to contemporary economics and the medium of video games. Rational choice theory bases all economic activity on decision-­making undertaken by a rational subject. However, nonconscious decision-­making informs everything from relations on social media to trades across financial markets. Video games serve as an ideal medium for exploring this concept, insofar as the central operation of video game play is decision-­making, which becomes formally accessible via preset branching choices in an interactive narrative game or via the more open-­ended exploration and goal setting within a sandbox game. This chapter delves into the limits and possibilities of choice in a digital era by ana 36

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lyzing the varied theories of choice that underlie video games that include the first-­person interactive metafictional game The Stanley Parable (2013), the networked game Moirai (2013), and the role-­playing game Undertale (2015). My reading of these games moves from a model of rational decision-­making to one of experimental construction of freedom. Chapter 4 explores the concept of control that is significant to both video game interfaces and to contemporary systems of political power. In a variety of ways, video games train players to expect, enjoy, and explore systems of control through modes of rationalism, individualism, and efficiency. Alongside this impulse toward sovereignty (a term that I use to address both personal and political forms of control), digital games also make available alternative dynamics of nonsovereignty. In analyzing medium-­specific ways that video games can complicate a dominant concept of control, this chapter analyzes three queer and trans games. First, it attends to the interactive narrative techniques of Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia (2012), an autobiographical browser-­based assemblage of minigames that explores processes of gender transition. Next, the chapter analyzes the formal properties of Liz Ryerson’s Problem Attic (2013), another autobiographical yet considerably more abstract platformer game that explores power and powerlessness as they relate to identity. Finally, I analyze Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn’s avant-­garde, touchscreen video game Luxuria Superbia (2013), which uses multisensory stimulation and opaque feedback in a hands-­on exploration of sexuality that challenges conventional control schemes. Chapter 5 examines how video games serve as an instructive focal point for analyzing the concept of difficulty in our time. From a neoliberal perspective, experiences of difficulty are frequently approached as the affective residue of competition. As an alternative way of encountering the historical present, I propose three discrete types of difficulty that video games bring to the forefront: mechanical, interpretive, and affective difficulty. All three forms of difficulty, which are not reducible to competition, demand continued analysis, but I argue especially for the importance of attending to the third category of difficult affects and emotions. Affect allows us to think of video games not simply as solvable or resolvable experiences, but as processes of ongoing sociopolitical experimentation that cannot be reduced, as they often are, either to their representational or technological dimensions. This chapter includes close readings of two independent platformer video games: Jason Nelson’s Game, Game, Game, and Again Game (2007) and Alexander D. Ocias’s Loved (2010). These games demonstrate ways of approaching difficulty as an affective field that exceeds the narrow scope of competition. Chapter 6 turns from difficulty to the closely related concept of failure.

S O C I E T Y O F T H E G A M E 37

This chapter analyzes games that challenge the victory-­oriented form of gamification while also foregrounding the failure perpetuated by neoliberalism. The three games that I analyze include the Urban Ministries of Durham’s browser-­based role-­playing game SPENT (2011), Jörg Lukas Matthaei’s alternate reality game Thresholdland: An Expatriation in Ten Days (2010), and Tomorrow Corporation’s puzzle game Little Inferno (2012). These games shift attention from neoliberalism’s systems of choice and control to the everyday precarity, fragility, and structural inequality across intersecting zones of race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and ability. Together, they complicate the value and potentials of the failure states that undergird most games. Part 3 of the book, which includes chapter 7 and the coda, turns most explicitly from an analytical to a practice-­based register to explore what it means to experiment through game design. Chapter 7 turns to the concept of improvisation. This term has become popular across several domains, ranging from comedy improv to jazz performance, martial arts, and even business practice. I argue that games open up new ways of thinking about contingency, responsiveness, and performance, particularly within the digital environments that are now ubiquitous in many parts of the US. This chapter departs from exclusively screen-­based games and considers the mixed reality form of alternate reality games, which invite improvisational storytelling across digital and analog media. Further departing from the previous chapters, this final chapter considers a single case of a large-­scale alternate reality game, the parasite (2017), that I codesigned and executed at the University of Chicago. Drawing from methodologies such as critical making and emergent frameworks such as the experimental humanities, I contend that both gameplay and experimental game design may encourage improvisational and unexpected responses to neoliberalism. More than any other part of the book, this final chapter offers my design alternative of experimental games that stand in distinction to gamification. Finally, a short coda complicates the idea of fun that is omnipresent in discussions of game design. Here, I introduce the concept of joy, adapted from affect theory, to gesture toward an alternative approach to making games. Without dismissing fun altogether, I argue that the intensification signaled by joy—a maintenance of contrasts that cannot be resolved—might help us think beyond the economic concepts of pleasure, satisfaction, and gratification. All of these concepts seek to demonstrate how games can help not merely solve problems but also to make problems that are better defined and understood. The medium-­specific ways in which games make problems are a central and active concern throughout this book. I approach video games as not 38

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only a technological medium or artistic form but also, more profoundly, as machines for constructing new concepts in the early twenty-­first century. These concepts have the potential to create new ways of being, acting, and experimenting within (and perhaps beyond) our digital and networked ­present.



S O C I E T Y O F T H E G A M E 39

1

Gamification Everything is fair game for marketization.

Philip Mirowski (Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste)

Game design is a bit of science, a bit of art, and a lot of hard-­ won experience . . . just like strategic leadership, managing a team, or creating a killer marketing campaign. Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter (For the Win)

Design is how we can be dominated by instrumental rationality and love it, too. Alan Liu (The Laws of Cool )

In the early twenty-­ first century, business, consumerism, crowdsourcing, dating, education, exercise, healthcare, labor, marketing, research, social media applications, and warfare—just to name a few areas—have all increasingly adopted the structure and logic of games. Consider a few examples. Habitica is a productivity app that stylizes or “skins” real life as a role-­ playing game that allows participants to choose a player class, fight monsters with friends, keep pets, level up, spend earned “Mana” to unlock special skills, and earn in-­game rewards for completing daily real-­world labor, self-­ improvement, housework, and educational tasks (fig. 1.1). Nike+ shoes use sensors to transform a tedious running routine into a daily contest by tracking exercise statistics, assigning achievement points, and allowing users to interface with cute avatars. The Arcade app gamifies work in order to motivate employees and incentivize key performance indicators (KPIs) by transforming corporate goals into minigames, points, likes, recognition stars, and prizes that can be activated by managers and coworkers alike. Phylo, a game released by Jérôme Waldispühl’s team at McGill University, asks players to help researchers with a common problem in comparative genomics—multiple sequence alignments—by participating in pattern recognition challenges. Foursquare, a popular smart phone service app, invites users to “check in” at various retail venues that enable progress toward the status of “mayor,” a designation that earns its bearer consumer discounts. All of these sites and apps (of which there are countless others) suggest that life in the early 41

Figure 1.1. Habitica (HabitRPG, Inc., 2013) interface, an example of gamification.

twenty-­first century is becoming increasingly permeated by games. Especially throughout the overdeveloped world, in which digital media, smart phones, and high-­speed Wi-­Fi access have achieved a ubiquitous status for many people, games have become an exemplary cultural form and a means to achieving success.1 Habitica and my other opening examples all belong to the design method of gamification that encompasses a broader realm of applied games. Commonly, the term “gamification” refers to the use of game mechanics in traditionally nongame activities. Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter, advocates of this approach in the world of business, track early references to “gamifying” online applications to the 1980s. This period saw the creation of games that claimed to improve skills in mathematics (e.g., Number Munchers), reading (e.g., Reader Rabbit), drawing (e.g., Kid Pix), geography (e.g., Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?), and other disciplines. The first contemporary usage of “gamification” comes up in 2003 (as used by game developer Nick Pelling in a short-­lived consulting practice) and has received a broader embrace since 2010.2 Though this buzzword only gained attention in the twenty-­first century, it has already found its way into a great deal of writing on business, marketing, psychology, and design.3 From business to education, designers have attempted to use video games as a digital problem-­solving platform that can immerse and motivate users. Indeed, during this period, we have seen “serious games” that seek to take on a range of problems from the spread of emerging infectious diseases (e.g., Plague Inc.) to refugee crises (e.g., Darfur is Dying) to political conflict (e.g., Peacemaker) to corporate business practices (e.g., McDonald’s Video Game). Such games usually combine an information-­centered knowledge acquisition approach with what Mizuko Ito calls “a behaviorist approach” that offers “external rewards (action games, eye candy, points, etc.) for completion of academic tasks.”4 Beyond particular games, numerous instances of game-­based learning programs materialized in the 2010s, including how-­to guides (Education Gamification Survival Kit— Education 2.0), charter schools with gameplay curricula (ChicagoQuest), and education-­oriented grant contests (the MacArthur Foundation’s Badges for Lifelong Learning Digital Media and Learning Competition).5 Adopters of gamification across different fields regularly proclaim it to be an unparalleled organizational and motivational technique. One leading proponent, Jane McGonigal, suggests that “reality is broken” and can be saved only through games that turn “a real problem into a voluntary obstacle” and activate “genuine interest, curiosity, motivation, effort, and optimism” among their players.6 Alongside beaming support for gamification as a cutting-­edge panacea, however, there has been some resistance to this concept and its

G A M I F I CAT I O N 43

widespread application in the form of points, badges, leaderboards, personalized content, and similar techniques. Curiously, much of the criticism has come from game designers. Gamification has been condemned, in these circles, for adopting only the least artistic aspects of contemporary digital games—their most superficial stats and visual elements, repetitive grinding, dopamine-­fueled goal orientation, and (in cases that yield rewards and punishments) achievement-­based operant conditioning. In a brief, polemical position piece published in the Atlantic, Ian Bogost contends that, above all, gamification is, in a philosophical sense, “bullshit.” Drawing from moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt, he explains, “bullshit is used to conceal, to impress or to coerce.” Gamification, for Bogost, engages in precisely this form of obfuscation insofar as it “takes games—a mysterious, magical, powerful medium that has captured the attention of millions of people—and makes them accessible in the context of contemporary business.” Condemning the rhetorical deceptiveness of the term, Bogost suggests the alternative term “exploitationware,” which decouples “gamification” from “games.”7 This chapter insists that though the term gamification, and the design practice to which it refers, can be located squarely within the twenty-­first century, this paradigm has its roots in an earlier moment in the second half of the twentieth century. In order to bring the greater historical and cultural significance of gamification into relief, this chapter approaches this concept not merely as a design strategy that gained popularity during a relatively short span of time, but rather as a form that economic, social, and cultural life has taken across an extended present.8 From this perspective, the games that inundate the present are not merely second-­order simulations or distortions of some a priori world. Instead, games are action-­oriented mediations that shape a range of encounters with the contemporary situation, especially in the way that they interweave economic principles with the experiences of everyday life. Gamification, I would like to argue, names a formal and cultural counterpart to neoliberalism. Forms of gameplay that range from idle play or background stat acquisition to focused engagement with mobile or console games condition a subject to accept the logic and practice the habits necessary to sustain competitive entrepreneurship of oneself. Beyond a particular design practice, I treat gamification as a major economic, political, and cultural paradigm in the United States. This paradigm did not emerge overnight in the 2010s and it is unlikely to disappear anytime soon, even if the term itself falls out of favor. Instead, this chapter insists on the importance of expanding the history of contemporary gamification, as it unfolds across four US contexts from the mid-­twentieth through the early twenty-­first century. These contexts, which are rarely discussed in conjunc 44

CHAPTER 1

tion with one another, include the economic method of game theory, the world-­building program of neoliberalism, the theories and applications of behavioral economics, and the rise of video games as a media form. Rather than offering a comprehensive history of games in all of these contexts, the following sections map out the key groundwork and connections that will enable the theoretical and aesthetic analysis at the core of this book. If neoliberalism has been the dominant paradigm for several decades then games are the material and metaphorical means by which that paradigm establishes and perpetuates itself. The following pages intertwine numerous threads in the intellectual history of economics that come to organize the culture of games in the early twenty-­first century. Games, in turn, offer insight into ways of understanding a world organized by neoliberal thought and (through the experimentation that I introduce in chapter 2) introduce ways of modulating and altering it. As the following narrative suggests, beginning in the 1940s, game theory establishes a theoretical framework for rationality that, by the 1970s, the program of neoliberalism extends from mathematics and economics to broader social consciousness. Continuing this process, behavioral economics, in its emergence as a prominent field in the 1990s and 2000s, offers a crucial corrective by introducing methods for integrating even the most inconvenient irrational human behaviors into an empirical technorationalism that serves as a foundation for a neoliberal world. All of these economic fields, as I hope to show, are already substantively informed by the metaphor and form of games. Nevertheless, it is only through the conjunction of these economic forces with the cultural and technological affordances provided by the contemporaneous medium of video games, which develop from the 1960s to the present, that the contemporary paradigm of gamification gains a substantial foothold by the 2010s. Following this historical and conceptual argument, at the end of the chapter, I turn briefly to two video games—Candy Crush Saga and Stardew Valley— in order to demonstrate, at a concrete aesthetic and experiential scale, how these major contexts converge in the paradigm of gamification with which I began. In many ways, these are not the obvious cases. Nevertheless, rather than rehearsing familiar examples of gamification, I turn to these particular games because they demonstrate just how widespread and popular a series of seemingly esoteric economic logics have become in contemporary culture. Instead of belonging merely to the more overtly instrumental realm of efficiency or exercise apps, neoliberal thought underpins a broader spectrum that includes massively popular entertainment games (Candy Crush Saga) and critically acclaimed independent games (Stardew Valley). Readers who are more interested in game studies or media aesthetics than in the intel

G A M I F I CAT I O N 45

lectual history of economics are invited to skip the next three sections and move to the game analyses in the final sections of this chapter. Game Theory

When published in 1944, mathematician John von Neumann and economist Oskar Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior was not just another entry to the already extensive popular literature about games. As historian Paul Erickson notes, the book stood apart from “hundreds of available pamphlets that hawked some new ‘system’ for winning at bridge, poker, and other pasttimes of the weekend card-­shark, who was the typical audience for a work on ‘games’ in 1940s America.”9 Notably, in his earlier work, von Neumann did express a specific interest in “parlor games.”10 However, his 600-­plus page book with Morgenstern did not offer strategies for succeeding at particular games. The preface to the first edition specifies that the book applies both to “games in the proper sense” (that is, parlor games and games of strategy) and to “economic and sociological problems.”11 The form of “games,” here, operates as a groundwork for creating a scientific language for understanding the entire social world by defining it through mathematical notation. For example, Morgenstern and von Neumann systematized strategic moves in a game such as bridge or chess by using sets, graphs, and matrices. Such dynamic games suggested the possibility of producing equivalent mathematical formulas to systematize interactions among economic actors.12 After an initially lukewarm reception, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior began to receive greater attention, following World War II, particularly among researchers at the RAND Corporation. A number of mathematicians explored game theory for several years, in part because of its positive association with von Neumann. However, the realization that the applications of game theory to the US military, a key funding source, were at best limited led to a decline of the theory’s use starting in the mid-­1950s.13 Even as the readership of Theory of Games and Economic Behavior grew, the book’s interdisciplinary ambition and difficulty kept it from traveling far outside of mathematics. Nevertheless, the emergent field of game theory was not tied to a single text. As Erickson contends, Robert Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa’s influential book Games and Decisions (1957) brought game theory outside of mathematics and into the social sciences and eventually into broader public consciousness. In particular, Luce and Raiffa’s contribution influenced the infamous applications of game theory to Cold War strategy beginning in the 1960s.14 Even as the uses of game theory lagged from the mid-­1950s until 46

CHAPTER 1

the mid-­1970s, the 1980s saw a resurgence—arguably even an unprecedented centrality—within economics and the social sciences. Since that time, the method has only grown in prominence. As political scientist S. M. Amadae puts it, reporting on the field in 2015, “Game theory is ubiquitous. It dominates academic curricula and economic models, and its application spans market practices, institutional design, and public policy implementation.”15 The field of “game theory” is often treated as separate or largely disconnected from the field of “game studies” and the cultural emergence of video games on which the present book is focused. For example, Werbach and Hunter note that the design practice of gamification is “easily confused with terms such as ‘serious games’ and ‘game theory.’” They warn their reader, “If you’re looking for the mathematical models immortalized in the movie A Beautiful Mind, you’re in the wrong place.”16 Contrary to this common view, for the remainder of this section I offer a brief sketch of the conceptual, historical, and operational connections between game theory (as a method of mathematical modeling) and games (as playable systems that introduce artificial conflicts, rules, and goals). Furthermore, I will contend that three key connections between these domains are a crucial part of the intellectual history that helps us make sense of the shape that video games took from the mid-­twentieth to the early twenty-­first century, especially in the United States. First, game theory elevated game form itself to an unprecedented prominence. Second, particularly in the moment of its initial decline in the 1950s, a game theory without sufficient real-­world applications came to encourage the exploration of wargaming and other forms of concrete gameplay practice that exceeded game theory’s analogical treatment of games as dynamic models of real-­world phenomena. Third, game theory made contributions to artificial intelligence, automata, and other areas of computer science that would later become central to video game design. The first major contribution of game theory to a broader culture beyond military strategists and academics in think tanks—a contribution so fundamental as to be easily ignored—is the extension of games from the status of hobbies and pastimes to a form capable of modeling every aspect of economic, political, and social life. Though it varies across particular texts, it is worth pausing on what precisely constitutes a “game” in game theory. For von Neumann, for instance, “any event—given the external conditions and the participants in the situation (providing the latter are acting of their own free will)—may be regarded as a game of strategy if one looks at the effect it has on the participants.”17 Here, von Neumann characterizes the relationship between real-­world events and games as analogical, where any event “may be regarded as” a game. Games thus operate as a tool or model for encoun

G A M I F I CAT I O N 47

tering complexity. In Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, von Neumann and Morgenstern express the relationship between games and economics in even tighter terms, offering not analogy but identity. “One would misunderstand the intent of our discussions,” they write, “by interpreting them as merely pointing out an analogy between these two spheres [of economics and games]. We hope to establish satisfactorily, after developing a few plausible schematizations, that the typical problems of economic behaviors become strictly identical with the mathematical notions suitable to games of strategy.”18 In this passage, the mathematics that underlie “economic behaviors” are “strictly identical” to those that underlie “games of strategy,” even if the two domains are not themselves yet identical. Such accounts of games are not restricted to the early years of game theory. As the approach expanded, the form of the game became more widely adopted and naturalized. If early game theorists still sometimes approach events analogously, as strategic games, the relationship is stated in increasingly more absolute terms. For instance, game theorist and economist Ken Binmore writes in 2007: Drivers manoeuvring in heavy traffic are playing a driving game. Bargain-­ hunters bidding on eBay are playing an auctioning game. A firm and a union negotiating next year’s wage are playing a bargaining game. When opposing candidates choose their platform in an election, they are playing a political

game. The owner of a grocery store deciding today’s price for corn flakes is playing an economic game. In brief, a game is being played whenever human beings interact.19

In this passage, all events in human social life take the form of a “driving game,” “auctioning game,” “bargaining game,” “political game,” or an “economic game.”20 The relationship between world and game takes on the quality not of resemblance but of something more akin to strong metaphor or absolute identity. If social systems operate like games, it is worth returning to the base meaning of the word “game” itself in the context of game theory. The historian of economics Philip Mirowski offers a succinct definition: “Games were best understood formally as programs run on a variety of architectures.” Indeed, given the roots of game theory in a concept of rational behavior that seeks to maximize utility, Binmore has described games as “essentially algorithmic” machines.21 Provisionally acceptable as this gloss may be, it does not encompass the numerous definitions of “game” that come up in this lit-

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erature. If this form can encompass so many phenomena for Binmore and other game theorists—from driving to economic games, not to mention concurrent usages of game concepts by researchers working with Monte Carlo simulations—this variability may seem to call into question the stability of the grounding concept of a game.22 Yet the instability of games did not mark a major weakness in the concept. Game theory emerged at a historical moment when Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem had already undermined David Hilbert’s earlier and longstanding program to create a set of complete and consistent axioms that could serve as a basis for mathematical logic. For this reason, games seemed an ideal concept for this new age, insofar as they inherently defied completeness. Mirowski notes, “there appears to be no unique object or attribute that formally characterizes all games.” From the early days at RAND, researchers found their way to “ontologically amorphous ‘games’ mutating into all sorts of collateral procedures, protocols, tools, and inquiries.”23 Indeed, in his 1960 game theoretical book The Strategy of Conflict, Thomas Schelling moves beyond the formal definition of games or their algorithmic procedures in order to consider, in passing, “the aesthetic properties, the historical properties, the legal and moral properties, the cultural properties, and all the other suggestive and connotative details.”24 Applications of the theory across the social sciences, most famously within empirical versions of the “prisoner’s dilemma” game, also made use of the social and psychological dimensions of games.25 Games developed into forms for classifying strategic situations among actors. Moreover, game theory provided a method for formalizing and predicting what actors might do in such situations. In his assessment of the popularity and lasting power of game theory, Erickson proposes that this is “the result of the theory’s interpretive flexibility and disunity, its ability to be selectively appropriated and reinterpreted for use in service of many different disciplines and agendas.” He also emphasizes “the internal diversity of the game-­theoretic corpus.”26 Beyond the success of game theory as a particular method, these midcentury developments also foreground the interest in game form decades before the mass popularity of video games in the United States and around the world. For mathematicians, games sometimes offered compelling ways of approaching complex problems, even if they did not always lead to satisfying solutions. Aside from their utility, however, games also resonated with the rationality and deception that characterized Cold War paranoia.27 Rationality, rule-­boundedness, and systematicity, which a version of games captured so effectively, seeped into the dominant language at RAND, in the mili-



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tary, and across a broader American public. As the historian Paul Edwards puts it, the Cold War promoted “a language of systems, gaming, and abstract communication and information that relied on formalisms to the detriment of experiential and situated knowledge. This language involved a number of key metaphors, for example that war is a game and that command is control.”28 Thus, game theory drew its vitality from the historical proliferation of this language and these metaphors, while simultaneously perpetuating them. A second major connection between game theory and a later video game culture comes through the mediating influence of both analog and digital war games. The application of gaming to the training of generals and politicians stretches back to early conceptualizations of chess and Prussian war games that were played on elaborate boards that prefigured present-­ day tabletop games.29 Such games saw a revival, in the US context, following World War II. As game theory faltered by the mid-­1950s, wargaming began to thrive at institutions such as the Johns Hopkins Operations Research Office and the Naval War College. Far from a separate endeavor that merely borrowed the language of games from game theory, wargaming brought with it many continuities—for instance, with earlier analytical efforts by von Neumann, Morgenstern, and RAND analysts. In fact, Mirowski points out that von Neumann himself “endorsed the computational-­simulation approach” and even helped George Gamow (a physicist and early game creator at the Operations Research Office) to gain “access to various computing machines” and to explore possible uses of computational simulations. Both the funding structures and personnel working on game theory came to inform midcentury wargaming design, even as this design work extended in new directions: “The effusion of gaming activity and research had the effect of pushing the whole complex family of ‘games’ in directions that it might not ordinarily have gone, had it been left exclusively to the coterie of pure mathematicians.” By the 1960s, as game theory itself proved insufficiently practical and fell gradually out of favor, the military influence propelled wargaming to an even more central status of research and experimentation. “It was hard not to notice,” Mirowski summarizes, “that the colonels had grown fonder of their little Panopticons of Bits than anything evoked by the formal theorems about game theory that their mathematicians were busy producing.” RAND analysts responded to this enthusiasm, helping to create games for military uses and for the study of logistical issues that could benefit from simulation, experimentation, and adjustment.30 Wargaming extended game theory’s promise of modeling into simulations that became compelling to nonmathematicians, in part because it

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supplemented formulas with human players who made observable decisions. Though I expand this point in the second chapter, wargaming also moved beyond modeling and introduced an experimental dimension to game theory. Erickson points out that experimentation was already part of the culture among early game theorists. He attributes this capacity in part to their interest in actual strategy games: “Among other things, the game theorists at RAND and elsewhere were frequent game players, taking up chess, Kriegsspiel, poker, bridge, or indeed inventing their own games and playing them against one another. Hence it was natural that the first empirical studies of game-­playing behavior would emerge from this group of people.”31 War games and other strategy games moved from what were sometimes called the “closed” or “rigid” games of mathematical game theory to “free” or “open” parlor-­style games. Whereas the former games (such as models based on John Nash’s equilibrium) attempted to model all possible moves and eventualities, the latter introduced human judgment, decision-­making, and creativity in a more central manner.32 War games thus built on game theoretical culture and objectives but moved them into a realm of greater human participation and experimentation.33 The third bridge between game theory and a later video game culture involves developments in computer science, particularly in the areas of artificial intelligence and automata.34 Wargaming certainly remains important to this intersection as well. While war games and simulations predominantly took the form of analog board and tabletop activities in their earliest versions, the concurrent research and development in computing led numerous cross-­fertilizations between game development and a computer that was developing from a complex calculator into an expressive medium. Important researchers interested in artificial intelligence, including Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, and Ross Ashby, wrote about gameplay as a way of modeling and testing artificial intelligence. Mirowski describes games as being understood as “one of the cleanest instantiations of the type of activity an abstract automata might engage in.”35 In fact, the program that is often considered the first within the field of artificial intelligence, the Logic Theorist completed by Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, and Cliff Shaw in 1956, was quickly followed by a chess-­playing program in 1958.36 It was in part the dissatisfaction with early game theory that spurred research in computer science and early artificial intelligence work. Though the history is a complex one, it would be fair to claim that game theory initially yielded to wargaming simulations, which in turn inspired further computational development. As Mirowski explains the influence of early interactive



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games, “Imaginary scenarios on machines begat the idea of machines displaying imagination, and in conjunction with the man-­machine interface in radar early warning systems, that inquiry begat artificial intelligence.”37 The conjunction between games and AI is already present in Alan Turing’s famous use of the “imitation game” (later called the “Turing test”), in 1950, as a tool to address the question “Can machines think?”38 Beyond this abstract connection, the intersection between game theory, games, and artificial intelligence is visible in much later experimental systems, such as IBM’s Deep Blue chess-­playing program (1996) and Google’s Go-­playing program AlphaGo (2015). Moreover, in contemporary video games the circuit from games to computer science research comes full circle, as human-­computer interaction and artificial intelligence take on an unprecedented importance to the evaluation of rules, operation of virtual environments, and behaviors of nonplayer characters. To clarify: through this brief historical excursus, I am not suggesting that game theory (an intellectual movement and research program) somehow caused the emergence of games as the dominant popular cultural form by the late twentieth century. Rather, the proliferation of games as a way of thinking among scientists, mathematicians, and technologists during the Cold War in the United States influenced an ideological and cultural receptiveness to games in the broader society. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that, even with the cachet that applied game theory achieved among military strategists during the Cold War and within the popular imagination, it was still largely a framework that was deployed at academic institutions and think tanks—not throughout mass culture. Undoubtedly, other key social forces were at play. For this reason, I now turn to a related but distinct paradigm that was contemporaneous with the rise of video games and gamification, one that came to influence every aspect of life in the United States and around the world: namely, neoliberalism. Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism borrows its key animating metaphors from games. While the longer and broader discussion of neoliberalism initiated in the introduction to this book informs the analysis that follows, this section offers a more specific account of the ways in which this order of reason has traveled through culture via a reliance on games. Following this overview of neoliberalism, and the subsequent exploration of behavioral economics, I will attempt to show how contemporary video games, in turn, adopt the logics of neoliberalism and contemporary economic thought. The remainder of the book will then 52

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offer a more detailed account of how game-­based experimentation unfolds at the intersection of neoliberalism and game form. The centrality of games to neoliberalism may appear more plausible when we consider Mirowski’s observation that neoliberalism is not solely an economic paradigm. Its “core insight” is that “the cultural and the economic should not be treated as substitutes, much less discrete spheres of experience, but rather, as integrated into a virtuous whole.”39 Despite the centrality of culture to neoliberalism, major analyses and criticisms of this paradigm, particularly within political theory, have largely maintained a level of abstraction or narrow policy application that limits an understanding of how it unfolds in everyday life.40 Beyond a simple lack of coverage, the relative inattentiveness to everyday neoliberalism precludes an understanding of the paradigm’s most important expressions, including the ways that its logic filters through civil society and mass culture.41 Throughout this book, I am arguing that video games play a powerful cultural role in enabling the transition into a neoliberal paradigm through the ways in which they impact player subjectivity, at the level of both rational decision-­making and affective activation. As I argue in the introduction, subjectivity is central to the operation of neoliberalism, and it is a key site at which this paradigm influences everyday life. Whereas earlier frameworks such as neoclassical economics and game theory can be said to describe and model rationality, neoliberalism goes a step further to prescribe this same type of rational behavior as the recipe for becoming the most valuable form of human capital. For this reason, Wendy Brown emphasizes that a focus on top-­down policymaking does not offer a thorough understanding of this worldview: “While neoliberal policy was often imposed through fiat and force in the 1970s and 1980s, neoliberalization in the Euro-­Atlantic world today is more often enacted through specific techniques of governance, through best practices and legal tweaks, in short, through ‘soft power’ drawing on consensus and buy-­in, than through violence, dictatorial command, or even overt political platforms.” Brown does not downplay the role of “policing and security” in this transformation but nonetheless insists on the importance of legal norms and ordinary practices—that is, forms of what Foucault calls governmentality—in perpetuating neoliberalism.42 I would like to argue that games, both as a cultural form and as a metaphor, have developed into a central form of the “soft power” that has enabled the rise and dominance of neoliberalism. The importance of games is already evident in the key source material from which Brown draws: Foucault’s 1978–1979 lectures at the Collège de France (collected under the heading The Birth of Biopolitics but more precisely, as Brown argues, pertaining to

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the emergence of neoliberalism). In these lectures, Foucault uses the metaphor of games approximately one hundred times. In a reading of F. A. Hayek’s version of neoliberalism, for instance, he offers the following gloss: In short, both for the state and for individuals, the economy must be a game: a set of regulated activities . . . but in which the rules are not decisions which someone takes for others. It is a set of rules which determine the way in which

each must play a game whose outcome is not known by anyone. The economy is a game and the legal institution which frames the economy should be thought of as the rules of the game.43

In this scheme, the game is the economy, the rules take the form of laws (which are predominantly formal rather than normative or prescriptive, teleonomic rather than teleological), and the players are individuals or enterprises.44 In these lectures, the metaphor of a game as a formal system pervades Foucault’s analysis. Even as he is not interested in games as such, this use of games invites a closer look at the centrality of the concept to neoliberalism. Foucault’s language gestures toward continuities between game theory and neoliberalism that can be described with greater precision. Most notably, both approaches give rationality a central position. Political scientist S. M. Amadae marks this linkage when she writes, “Neoliberal subjectivity arises from the intricate pedagogy of game theory that comes to the fore in the Prisoner’s Dilemma game and is interchangeable with contemporary paradigmatic instrumental rationality.” She goes as far as to argue that game theory researchers contributed to the rise of neoliberalism by engaging in both the “design and ratification of the blueprint for the neoliberal world order” founded on rationality.45 In other words, game theory introduced modes of thought and techniques of tactical action predicated on rationality. Over time, this approach elevated the assumption that rational behavior maximizes utility into the key economic theory that governs all human social interactions. At the same time, the form of rationality that supported the more abstract and mathematical versions of game theory did not translate directly into neoliberalism. Amadae explains this metamorphosis through the mediating influence of Cold War political developments. For her, game theory underwrites extensions of liberalism into nuclear policy during the early Cold War, while opening the door for neoliberal developments in the late Cold War and its aftermath. Arguably, it is game theory’s influence on thermonuclear war strategy that dramatizes this transition most clearly. The philosophy of 54

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strategic rationality moved from theory to practice through the underlying logic of nuclear deterrence and the policy of mutually assured destruction (MAD). Even as the Cold War ran its course without an actual nuclear war, the seemingly unemotional rationality underlying this system (essentially a mutual hostage-­taking of the majority of the world’s population by the US and the Soviet Union) depended on a capacity and willingness to enact mass violence. It is possible to observe that liberal philosophy still articulates a requirement—admittedly a requirement in theory, if rarely in practice— that “any single individual’s sphere of free action” must be “compatible with others’ similar spheres.” The distinct logic of nuclear deterrence eliminates this type of mutual regard—and indeed turns it upside down into a mutual destruction. By contrast to traditional forms of liberalism, which value rational integrity, consistency, and even sincerity, game theoretical scenarios such as the prisoner’s dilemma introduce unilateral strategy and deception. This latter approach posits that “rational actors will forge agreements premised on their ability to harm others, and will moreover break their word with impunity, even after others have kept theirs.”46 The policy of MAD cannot yet be said to be wholly neoliberal in nature, as it does not take game theory to its logical extreme.47 It is only in the historical US policy transition from MAD to NUTS (nuclear utilization targeting selection) that game theory makes the full transition, at a large scale of implementation, from liberalism to neoliberalism. NUTS took over from MAD as the dominant US nuclear strategy in the 1970s. This new policy—­ championed by James R. Schlesinger, Secretary of Defense under President Richard Nixon, in the 1970s and adopted by President Jimmy Carter via Presidential Directive 59 in 1980—enabled “treating nuclear warheads as conventional weapons without prohibitions for first use.” In other words, “Whereas MAD relied on bilateral deterrence, NUTS promoted asymmetric deterrence, escalation dominance, coercive bargaining, and hegemony.” At an unprecedented policy scale, NUTS replaced the mutuality of liberalism with the predatory logic of neoliberalism. As Amadae concludes, the articulation and execution of NUTS reveals the shared logics of neoliberalism and “nuclearized sovereignty,” both of which treat “persons as though they were interchangeable with nonhuman actors, or even as strategy profiles derived from expected utility functions.”48 These historical connections between game theoretical logic and neoliberal policy find further evidence in the proliferation of game form and gameplay as central tropes within neoliberal writing. In this sense, Foucault’s game metaphors belong more properly to a practice of mimicry than to one of diagnosis. The language of neoliberalism is awash with games and

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play. This is true, for example, in foundational works in this area by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. In The Road to Serfdom (1944)—a book that received a second life as a bestseller following the 2008 economic crisis— Hayek discusses an individual’s negotiation of legal and economic apparatuses by casually invoking the metaphor of a game. “Within the known rules of the game,” he writes, “the individual is free to pursue his personal ends and desires, certain that the powers of government will not be used deliberately to frustrate his efforts.” For Hayek, a game is not merely a figure that invokes a system; it is also a constellation of constraints that invites play. The play afforded by actual games is a sign of freedom. For this reason, Hayek criticizes totalitarianism for condemning “any human activity done for its own sake and without ulterior purpose.” Immediately following this abstract claim, he adds, “The principle extends even to games and amusements. I leave it to the reader to guess whether it was in Germany or in Russia where chess-­players were officially exhorted that ‘we must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess. We must condemn once and for all the formula ‘chess for the sake of chess’ like the formula ‘art for art’s sake.’”49 Hayek’s unattributed quotation comes from Nikolai Krylenko, who oversaw the Soviet chess association in the 1930s and already understood the political potential of sports and games. In distinction to totalitarianism, a neoliberal society creates space that invites games for the sake of games. Moreover, a guiding policy of individual freedom relies on the shared field of “the economic game.” Similar language emerges within another canonical precursor to neoliberalism: Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962). In this book, Friedman describes the free market as a “game” and argues that government plays a key part “as a forum for determining the ‘rules of the game’ and as an umpire to interpret and enforce the rules decided on.” Later, Friedman distinguishes between political or legal frameworks, as structures, and the everyday experiences of people within those systems. “The day-­to-­day activities are like the actions of the participants in a game when they are playing it; the framework, like the rules of the game they play.”50 The idea of government as an umpire in a game also appears elsewhere in Friedman’s writing. In Free to Choose (1980, cowritten with Rose Friedman), government participates in “facilitating voluntary exchanges by adopting general rules—the rules of the economic and social game that the citizens of a free society play.”51 Here, we see an analogy between the principles of voluntary, free play in a game with a neoliberal society that is not overburdened by government regulation. As we already see in the example of Foucault, critics of neoliberalism also regularly pick up on and turn to the form of games. In these accounts, the type of game being played is distinct. In place of the free market con 56

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cept that is central to both Hayek and Friedman, these critics represent a game that is considerably more constrained, competitive, and internecine. As opposed to Friedman’s free play and laissez-­faire economics, Pierre Bourdieu’s critique of neoliberalism describes a competitive and ultimately unfair game: “The money market is a field in which the dominant players—in this case the United States—occupy a position such that they can largely define the rules of the game.”52 Lazzarato delves even deeper into this metaphor of “playing the game of competition” in his account of neoliberalism. As he argues, “For neoliberalism, competition, like the market, is not the result of the ‘natural play’ of appetites, instincts or behaviours. It is rather a ‘formal play’ of inequalities that must be instituted and constantly nourished and maintained.”53 For Lazzarato, the usefulness of “game” and “play” metaphors (metaphors, we might add, that neoliberalism shares with the roughly contemporaneous movement of poststructuralism) has to do with the ways they foreground the formal properties of the neoliberal system. As the US government bailout of the financial system via the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 revealed perhaps most dramatically, under neoliberalism, the free market is a fantasy that is constantly propped up by controlled state interventions that create the market. Arguably the most important creation that neoliberalism introduces and upholds is the market itself. Yet for all of its centrality, the market is perhaps simultaneously the most slippery and imprecise concept within neoliberal thought. While there are myriad accounts of market operations—that is, “what it purportedly does”—there are few accounts of “what it actually is,” including in foundational works by the likes of Hayek and Friedman.54 The closest we come to a market ontology is via metaphor.55 Of course, earlier political economy already evokes the market through discussions of agents trading with each other through barter or exchange. But as I have been arguing in this section, the metaphor of games becomes as important as the figure of the market in the twentieth century. While neoliberal thought does not show consensus on the concept of the market, the metaphor of a game helps to persuade readers of the reality of the market and its generalizability to a social field that exceeds economics. The appeal of a game can be specific and visceral in ways that the abstraction of the market is not. For example, one can sense and feel what it means to have “skin in the game.” This is not true, of course, for game theorists for whom the abstraction of game form is precisely what made it so broadly applicable to all phenomena. However, the popular reception of specific games—available in earlier analog military war games as well as present-­day video games—carries associations of fun experience, fair play, and playful competition.

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To summarize the historical argument thus far, game theory introduces the form of games, as a basic building block of rationality, into social scientific consciousness. Neoliberalism, in turn, promotes rationality as the behavior of ideal subjects, promoting gameplay from a formal property of a mathematical theory into a key metaphor we live by today. This account may bring us closer to the gamification of the early twenty-­first century, but the tight focus of these theories on rationality neglects one other important element: the irrational and affective dimensions that are so central to video game play. Irrationality and affect already appear in the scenario of the prisoner’s dilemma. However, this aporia is only addressed systematically through the approach of behavioral economics, to which I now turn. Behavioral Economics and Gamification

The link between games and economics becomes even clearer by way of behavioral economics: the field that generates a great deal of the theory that undergirds gamification. At first glance, behavioral economics may seem to complicate the story I have been telling so far, appearing as a challenge to or even the obverse of game theory. At its core, this field stipulates that the perpetually rational figure of homo economicus that grounds neoclassical economics is an ungainly fiction. Prior approaches to economics maintain that, at least in aggregate, the market disciplines people who are irrational in their decision-­making or otherwise deviate from rational norms. By contrast, behavioral economics draws from experimental psychology to contend that models based on this type of recuperative rationality are empirically limited at best. Problems such as hindsight bias, sunk cost fallacies, and self-­ control problems all represent instances in which human beings do not act rationally or in a way that will maximize their utility.56 Though some game theorists might treat all economic actors as if they were strategic players in a game of which they are fully aware, in practice people are not capable or willing to solve the optimization problems that they confront in ways that are rational and unbiased. Challenges to the rationalism at the heart of neoclassical economics and rational choice theory are already present within early critiques of game theory.57 For example, in the early 1950s, mathematician Merrill Flood made substantial contributions to game theory but also quickly came to realize its limits of application to real-­world situations and its incapacity to account for human rationality. Within economics itself, as early as 1957, Herbert Simon looked forward to behavioral economics with his coinage of the concept of “bounded rationality.”58 While this concept was not fully theorized in 58

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this earliest version, it opened space for more substantial critiques of rationality. Arguably, the work that launched behavioral economics as a coherent field was Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s writing on “prospect theory,” a term they first coined in 1979. As another key figure in the formation of this field, Richard Thaler, points out, this theory countered the alleged ideal of rational choice and expected utility with an attempt to document instances in which people do not act according to their own self-­interest and to predict “the actual choices real people make.”59 Behavioral economics emerged as a small yet robust research constellation in the 1980s and burgeoned into a major field within the discipline of economics by the 1990s and 2000s.60 One of its major methodological developments was the movement from economic theory characterized by the types of principles and normative statements laid out by thinkers including Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek to empirical and experimental research that took as its object actual human behavior and decision-­making.61 With respect to game form, this shift in method represents a major departure. As Mirowski points out, von Neumann and early game theory focused on the form of games and their role as models to the exclusion of “play as a performative activity.”62 In other words, in early research, the structure of a game and the possible moves afforded by it trumped any attempt to understand processes of gameplay or how people might actually play a game in practice. It was only the emergence of wargaming practice, experimental game theory (e.g., the types of studies conducted by the “peace research” group at University of Michigan in the 1960s), and behavioral economics that began to bring processes of gameplay into view. To clarify, I am not arguing that behavioral economics represents a complete upending of neoclassical economics. This approach is not a revolutionary transition from the rationalistic focus on games that we find in game theory and neoliberalism to an interest in the type of free play that intersects with the humanistic and romantic imaginary.63 On the contrary, for all of their methodological differences and assumptions, there is a continuity between these approaches that is important for understanding contemporary techniques of gamification. The seamlessness of this connection becomes most apparent, for instance, in the work of Colin Camerer, an economist who developed the hybrid field of behavioral game theory in the early twenty-­first century.64 Even in his broader work about behavioral economics, Camerer and his collaborators argue that “the bounds of rationality” should be approached as “empirical questions subject to systematic analysis” and “cost-­benefit judgments.” That is, instead of attempting to prove that human rationality is a false ideal, once and for all, they argue that “relaxing

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the assumptions of perfect rationality represents a logical next step” in the “productive progression” toward a more complex and scientifically grounded economic theory.65 While qualifying and refining the concept of rationality, behavioral economics carries forward neoliberalism’s focus on wholistic subjectivity. Even so, by calling the coherence of homo economicus into question, this approach disputes the coherence of the subject itself, if not its centrality as the foundational agent of economic activity. Importantly, the unit of intervention for behavioral economics is no longer the individual. As political theorist John McMahon puts this point, instead of individuals, behavioral economics “addresses interests, utilities, cognition, decisions, choices, actions, consumption, preferences, behaviors and so on.”66 In place of the individual as a sovereign whole, behavioral economics addresses smaller units of thought and action. Here, we see a departure from Thatcher’s famous conviction that the goal of economics is to change “the soul.” In place of a consistent subject (or soul), a behavioral approach addresses an assemblage of attitudes, behaviors, preferences, desires, and situations. Beyond theory, behavioral economics begins to develop practical techniques and correctives for bringing people closer to the rationalistic norm. In their bestselling book Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein coin the term “choice architect” to describe designers who tackle decision-­making processes in real-­world contexts and sometimes push people in the direction of a particular choice. For people who are not already driven by rational decision-­making processes, Thaler and Sunstein suggest the importance of a paradigm of “libertarian paternalism” that nudges them in the direction of decisions that will serve them better.67 To put this differently, if neoliberalism is a constructivist and world-­making paradigm, then behavioral economics introduces techniques for creating and enforcing that particular world: global economic order that liberalism had not yet realized. As MacMahon contends, “behavioral economics acts as an educative force on behalf of neoliberalism.” In its reliance on scientific method and educational contributions that promise to improve people’s lives, behavioral economics borrows the “apolitical and pragmatic” posture of neoliberalism (an approach that still relies on a naturalized and largely unexamined concept of the market): “It understands itself as simply solving technical, empirical questions in a non-­controversial and ultimately non-­political way.”68 Behavioral economics introduced empiricism and experimental method to economics in the 1980s and 1990s and began to extend its reach to behavioral and policy change in the 2000s and 2010s.69 In the midst of this process, the field influenced the very technological application and design process 60

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that interests me here: namely, gamification. Whereas the game theory of the 1940s to the 1960s and even the early behavioral economics of the 1980s and 1990s imagined games as a form for modeling and predicting human behaviors, the “nudge” and “choice architecture” of behavioral economics and gamification in the 2000s and 2010s now design contexts for influencing and modulating the behaviors of its users. Actual video games and gamified apps, in other words, do not merely simulate behaviors in the abstract or offer general guidelines about minimizing irrational behavior; instead, many of them intentionally guide and shape those behaviors through designed experiences. As Camerer observes, even in behavioral economics experiments, “games are usually posed in abstract terms because game theory rarely specifies how adding realistic details will affect behavior.”70 Through gamification, design employs aesthetics (whether “realistic” or otherwise) to make palpable and palatable, even desirable, modes of rational choice and behavioral modification that are compatible with game theory. As media scholar Alan Liu puts it succinctly, in one of the epigraphs of this chapter, “Design is how we can be dominated by instrumental rationality and love it, too.”71 The intersections between behavioral economics and design can be located within a broader sociotechnological field in the early twenty-­first century, yet game form and what gamification advocates Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter call “game thinking” play a unique part in bridging these approaches.72 Games have been central to economic and political thought since the mid-­twentieth century, as it has moved through game theory, neoliberalism, and behavioral economics (not to mention Taylorism, post-­Fordism, or Cold War victory culture).73 For this reason, throughout this book, the term “gamification” signals something more than a twenty-­first-­century design application. More profoundly, I take gamification to be a formal equivalent of neoliberalism’s “normative order of reason,” as Brown puts it.74 Games simultaneously index and drive the development of neoliberalism, giving this abstract paradigm a concrete, material, and accessible cultural form. Economic and political analysis alone, of course, cannot account for the function of games in the early twenty-­first century. In my preceding analysis, I have focused primarily on the circulation of game metaphors and forms across different economic fields and paradigms. While this historical trajectory establishes a logic and a way of thinking about games since the mid-­ twentieth century, it does not yet tell us anything about experiences of playing actual games—let alone the inheritance that the medium of video games receives from these earlier developments. In order to show how such economic paradigms might find material distribution channels and unfold through actual gameplay, I now turn to two brief video game cases. Both

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of my selected games target different audiences in varied genres, but both perpetuate neoliberal thought in medium-­specific ways that relate to their mechanics, rules, objectives, and networked affordances. The first case is the mainstream puzzle game Candy Crush Saga (2012), intended for a casual player who accesses the game on a mobile device. The second case is the more complex, independent, open-­world simulation game Stardew Valley (2016), which was initially released for PC and then ported to various home consoles, first as a single-­player game and then with the addition of a cooperative multiplayer mode. In my reading, the simpler game of Candy Crush Saga operates as an insight into the expanded system of Stardew Valley. While the latter game gives the impression of a more nuanced system with a range of gameplay modes, it expands many of the overtly ideological dimensions of its mainstream casual counterpart. Both cases exceed the narrower and more familiar design approach of gamification exemplified by Habitica or Apple Watch’s Activity app but nonetheless demonstrate how a much larger number of contemporary games participate in the broader paradigm of gamification that I have described in the introduction and the opening sections of this chapter. Though the following chapters will explore games that complicate, challenge, and experiment with neoliberal values and normative standards of design, I begin with two games that embrace and exemplify these qualities. Candy Crush Saga (or, Neoliberalism at Your Fingertips)

In earlier economic game theory, games model or simulate a subset of the real world. In the early twenty-­first century, with rapid, real-­time computation, an obsession with quantification, and the proliferation of informational feedback loops, the model cedes to the immanent game logic signaled by the term gamification. In other words, many aspects of and systems in the world incorporate the logic of competitive games. This raises a crucial question: if games are traditionally provisional and temporary—that is, activities that often happen in the demarcated space-­time of Huizinga’s “magic circle”— what happens when games are everywhere and their boundaries are more blurred than ever before?75 For von Neumann and Morgenstern, games could still be said to serve a pedagogical role, insofar as they introduced mathematics and set theory to readers from a broad range of disciplines. If that is the case, we might ask: What is the pedagogy of gamification? Furthermore, how do contemporary video games bring together macroscale research frameworks such as game theory and ideologies such as neoliberalism with microscale experiences of everyday gameplay? 62

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Figure 1.2. Candy Crush Saga (King, 2012) gameplay.

The intersections among these scales begin to become apparent in the extremely popular game Candy Crush Saga (CCS). Released in 2012 by the developer King, CCS is available for browser-­based play, as well as smartphone formats such as iOS and Android. By 2014, the game was priced at an estimated 7.1 billion dollars and played by approximately ninety-­three million people a day. In 2018, the Candy Crush mobile game series, as a whole, earned over 1.5 billion dollars in revenue (more than even the iOS mobile versions of Fortnite and Pokémon GO). The game harnesses the common “freemium model” in which the initial app is free (and was downloaded by a half billion people by 2014) but requires players to engage in microtransactions, paying for additional lives, special content such as gold for one’s “Candy Bank,” and special boosters.76 The basic gameplay is extremely simple and resembles countless other “match three” casual games.77 Essentially, the player must swipe to align three candies of the same color in order to eliminate them from the field. As the game progresses, this basic task becomes more complicated as the player seeks more elaborate combos and encounters increasingly more challenging obstacles (fig. 1.2).

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Candy Crush Saga is a suggestive case insofar as it belongs to the broader worldview of gamification that I have been sketching out in this chapter, even as it does not fit neatly into gamification as a narrower design strategy. Gamified apps, after all, are often instrumental because they use elements of game design to train players and alter attitudes or behaviors. Fitbit, for instance, gamifies exercise. CCS, by contrast, seems to exist as an end in itself. It does not employ extrinsic motivation or seek to train the player explicitly to achieve a particular skillset. On its surface, CCS only teaches the player how to become a better player of CCS. And yet that lack of apparent ulterior motive also helps distill an underlying ideology of gamification that exceeds any particular discipline or content area. In this way, even as it stands out as one of the most successful casual games to date, CCS is more exemplary than singular. Another benefit of this case is that, as a puzzle game, it offers the minimum possible version of a “world” with a perfunctory narrative and navigable world selection space that focuses instead on rules, objectives, and actions. To put my argument telegraphically: in Candy Crush Saga, everything becomes economized. The game translates neoliberal values—its “normative order of reason” and competition, as Brown puts it—into a designed activity. One’s performance on any level of CCS becomes quantified via three separate metrics: a numerical score, a rating on a three-­star system, and the placement of one’s performance on a leaderboard (fig. 1.3). Like so many other contemporary games, CCS engages in what Nigel Thrift calls “qualculation,” which describes a culture characterized by faith in numbers, speed, an environment that handles various forms of counting for the subject, and an externalization of memory.78 A video game such as CCS does not only participate in qualculation but indeed makes it available and present (at the level of both rationality and affect) within the sensorium of the player. This is not to say that CCS has a manifestly critical function. Nonetheless, it takes elements of contemporary neoliberalism that are usually too abstract, distributed, or large-­scale to experience and makes them sensible via aesthetics and design that become available on a screen. Alongside its built-­in competition and “qualculation,” Candy Crush Saga captures another central dimension of neoliberalism: the drive of the economic person to enhance his or her own value. As Brown contends, “today’s homo oeconomicus is an intensely constructed and governed bit of human capital tasked with improving and leveraging its competitive positioning and with enhancing its (monetary and nonmonetary) portfolio value across all of its endeavors and venues.”79 In other words, under neoliberalism, it is not only states and corporations that seek to manage and improve their 64

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Figure 1.3. Candy Crush Saga (King, 2012) points and leaderboard.

value, but also individuals who create and curate their identities and brands. These identities of course exist in competitive tensions with others and become accessible to those others through the networked mechanisms of always-­on computing. In CCS, the leaderboard offers the option of connecting to Facebook. Via social media, the player can earn extra lives by recruiting and interacting with other players. One can also compare scores and compete with online friends. Through rewards and the engagement of competition, the player learns the benefits of being connected at all times. For instance, players must be online to spin a wheel that, once every twenty-­four hours, yields a free booster that assists with gameplay.80 CCS does not incorporate the dimensions of subject formation captured through character customization that accompanies other networked role-­playing games. Nevertheless, it encourages players to develop their own value and compare that value to others online. In temporal terms, Candy Crush Saga further makes palpable the ideology of neoliberalism. Functionally, CCS is a game without end or apparent outside. Though I have personally spent too many hours even getting past level

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100, the game’s wiki explains, “Candy Crush Saga currently holds a whopping 6,005 levels in 401 episodes on HTML5 version,” with the Flash version including “2825 levels and 189 episodes.”81 With so many levels, and episodic updates, one cannot win or complete CCS. For all but the most competitive players of CCS, the game becomes part of the background buzz of everyday life, a platform for passing time or making incremental gains during a commute, at lunch, or before bed. The underlying model, here, is one that more fully resembles Gilles Deleuze’s “societies of control” (which map roughly onto the historical span of neoliberalism) than it does Foucault’s earlier disciplinary society (which relies on confinement within institutions such as the school, factory, and prison). Where discipline depends on episodes with clear beginnings and ends, control societies rely on a serial and continuous experience with no clearly defined boundaries. It is worth repeating that if games once largely followed the limits of the “magic circle,” they too extend everywhere now as metaphor, form, model, and framework. Finally, perhaps the most important way that CCS translates the ideology of neoliberalism to an individual (or even a subindividual or dividual) scale is through its use of game form to promote habits in its players.82 To reiterate, neoliberalism shares with the framework of game theory an emphasis on rational choice. Even so, as I will argue at greater length in the next chapter, the most recent phase of neoliberalism is more concerned with nonconscious cognition. Regarding precisely these kinds of nonconscious neural effects of CCS, journalist Dana Smith writes: Initially, the game allows us to win and pass levels with ease, giving a strong sense of satisfaction. These accomplishments are experienced as mini rewards

in our brains, releasing the neurochemical dopamine and tapping into the same neuro-­circuitry involved in addiction, reinforcing our actions. Despite its reputation as a pleasure chemical, dopamine also plays a crucial role in learning, cementing our behaviours and training us to continue performing them.83

CCS delivers dopamine hits and may achieve addictiveness through many means, including a variable ratio schedule (or irregular reward schedule) that, through limited play time and a random draw of candy pieces, yields a desire for continued play. In her analysis of the addictiveness of CCS, Smith concludes that, despite its mobilization of dopamine, the game is ultimately harmless. Yet CCS, like so many video games and gamified apps, contributes to the formation of habits that evidently feed continued play of the game itself, while also mapping onto activities such as social media usage and career competition. As media theorist Wendy Chun contends, under neolib 66

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eralism, “individual habits allegedly separate the winners from the losers.”84 The habits that make a “winner” in CCS exceed mere skill in the match-­three gameplay. Indeed, to be a successful player, one must return to the game regularly, log in to be online, connect to social media, compete with other players, and constantly enhance one’s own value. Even if CCS is itself open-­ ended, one returns to this particular game, again and again, at least until one turns to one of its myriad clones, another game in the series, or a different game altogether. Stardew Valley (or, Becoming an Entrepreneur of Oneself)

It is possible that Candy Crush Saga, in its minimalistic design, will seem to some readers too abstract in its channeling of neoliberal mechanics, too limited in its construction of a world, or even too vague regarding the type of subject that it invokes. To be sure, countless other video games are more concrete in their use of game rules and development of behaviors that add up to what we might call a neoliberal lifestyle. Exemplary of this process is the widespread genre of simulation games, especially life simulation games and construction or management simulation games. In such games, the player oversees a world (e.g., a small business or a colony) or a simulated lifeform (e.g., a human person or a nonhuman pet) and tries to help them survive. For example, in the Rollercoaster Tycoon series (1999), players construct and manage an amusement park; in The Sims series (2000), they create and direct virtual people through their lives; and in the Football Manager series (2004), they manage finances and run a soccer team. Many simulation games display the values of neoliberalism and finance proudly on their cartridge covers, but it is worth reflecting on a case in which these values are incorporated in a subtler manner. Consider Stardew Valley: a simulation and role-­playing game designed and programmed by independent creator Eric Barone, which became a bestseller that earned in excess of twenty-­four million dollars in 2016.85 On its surface, this game could not appear more different from the addictive casino-­style action of Candy Crush Saga or any number of overtly capitalist management simulators. After creating an avatar (including name, gender, eye color, hair color, clothing, and other preferences), the player watches an introductory narrative. In this frame, you see your character working in one of a series of nearly identical cubicles (including one that is empty because of a “terminated” employee) at Joja Cola. A sign on the wall proclaims: “Life’s better with Joja.” Unable to bear this life of privatization, job insecurity, and a lack of meaningful collectivity, you open your desk drawer to reveal a letter from your now-­deceased

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Figure 1.4. Stardew Valley (Eric Barone, 2016).

grandfather. Earlier, your grandfather warned, “There will come a day when you feel crushed by the burden of modern life and your bright spirit will fade before a growing emptiness.” Now, this letter encloses the deed to a farm in Stardew Valley that promises a “change” that will bring “real connections with other people and nature” and a “new life.” Once the game begins, the player enters the finite but sizeable world of Stardew Valley seen from a 2.5D and 3/4 perspective with a heads-­up display that includes a number of menus, data bars, and dialogue windows (fig. 1.4). Though the gameplay mode includes occasional narrative cut-­scenes and automatically triggered seasonal events, it is largely nonlinear and open-­ ended. During a limited number of hours of each day (a maximum of eighteen in-­game hours that pass in about 13 or 14 real-­time minutes depending on the day), the player is able to explore the space, accumulate a museum collection of found objects, discover recipes and cook, age wines and cheeses, craft new objects, raise livestock animals and pets, develop friendships with villagers, get married and divorced, have children, upgrade a house, and accept various side quests. Additionally, the player can acquire and “level up” several skills, including farming, mining, foraging, fishing, and combat. Across this range of activities, Stardew Valley exceeds a conventional farming simulator and becomes a kind of expanded life simulator. At a narrative level, Stardew Valley may appear anticapitalist and environmentalist in its invocation of a slow and community-­oriented life that leaves the office cubicle behind. The gameplay, however, though open-­ended and inviting of multiple modes of engagement, suggests a different attitude that guides the player toward fashioning a neoliberal self. In place of the exploited 68

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laborer under earlier forms of capitalism (here, represented in part through the Joja Cola employee), the player of Stardew Valley is directed toward a perpetual investment in her own future well-­being.86 This investment begins with the fantasy of home ownership and expands into the management of an expansive capitalist enterprise. From the beginning, the player has the choice to explore at her own pace and via her own style but is also faced with numerous alluring forms of evaluation and accomplishment. The game introduces a leveling-­up system for skills, a scale of classes of tools that can be improved with the right resources, “bundles” of objects that one must assemble at the town’s Community Center to earn rare prizes, collect-­them-­ all challenges that invite collections of all artifacts or fish in the game, and scavenger hunts such as “Mr. Qi’s Challenge” that yield access to new areas. The player is rewarded for efficient use of time and diversification of skills. Moreover, optimal management of one’s farm, which quickly expands from a leisurely nature preserve into a small business, opens up the possibility of in-­game purchases and otherwise-­inaccessible adventures. Stardew Valley is something more than a representation of neoliberal life: it is a participatory training ground for the types of processes, modes of thinking, and habits necessary to survive and thrive within—and, in many active senses, to build—a neoliberal lifeworld. From her position beyond the screen, the player is given a rare perspective on and access to the fragmented and multiple subjectivity that this worldview helps to produce. As Mirowski observes, the entrepreneurial self of neoliberalism abandons the objective to “know yourself” with the renewed imperative to “express yourself.” Through the process of development, the neoliberal self “is perforce not learning about who she really is, but rather, provisionally buying the person she must soon become. She is all at once the business, the raw material, the product, the clientele, and the customer of her own life.” Indeed, this analysis resonates with the resident of Stardew Valley who expresses herself as a farmer, a miner, an adventurer, and so forth. In place of a true self or even multiple personas, the player of Stardew Valley takes on various roles that privilege activity to stable identity. Just as economic researchers informed by neoliberal thought might now combine “multiple selves” into “a single mega-­utility function” to address disciplinary problems, the player of Stardew Valley plays by collating their selves.87 In fact, far from being a completely open-­ended game, Stardew Valley leads, at the end of Year 2 of its duration, to an overall judgment on the play­ er’s breadth and depth across the range of possible activity.88 In order to achieve an optimal score within the two-­year window, the player must of course manage a core resource: time. Given the passage of time, and the finite

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number of hours one can be awake each day, the ambitious player must efficiently manage and use each moment before the final appraisal—the aptly named and benignly patriarchal “Grandpa’s Evaluation.” A successful run gives the player the “Statue of Perfection” that brings with it further advantages for achieving even greater forms of victory. Overall, Stardew Valley puts the player in the position of the neoliberal subject who must “manage to be simultaneously subject, object, and spectator.” Through the playing of the game, this compound fantasy position becomes literalized as the player simultaneously navigates the avatar-­subject, sees that figure as a third-­person object composed of a menu of skills, and maintains the privilege of a spectator watching the overall action on the screen. To put this in simpler terms, the player both develops and is the neoliberal subject—a duality inherent to entrepreneurship of oneself. More than a mere educative process, then, a life simulator game offers an aesthetic solution to the ontological problem of who “precisely is managing the menagerie” of selves, the “cast of characters,” or the “bundle of skills” that make up the neoliberal subject.89 This assemblage of selves, which is usually internalized by the subject, becomes externalized on the screen, enabling the player beyond the screen to operate as a kind of idealized cogito or metasubject. One has the option of playing Stardew Valley in a relaxed or open-­ended way, but everything in the world promotes instrumental actions and tight self-­management. Within video game play, perhaps the most calculated version of instrumental self-­development takes the form of the practice of “min-­ maxing.” In video game culture, this term describes a process by which the player seeks to derive an equation or algorithm to minimize inefficiency and maximize the acquisition of points and skills (or to turn to crowdsourced online wikis that accumulate shared knowledge about the most efficient modes of gameplay). Especially once one has settled into its world, rules, and range of minigames, Stardew Valley invites optimization at every turn. Given the limited time that makes up each day in the game, it is to the player’s advantage to chart their daily path, save and reinvest earnings, and plan ahead to complete the maximum number of objectives. Though a game such as Stardew Valley may appear as an extreme case of everyday neoliberal life, it is a short step away from the omnipresent gamified platforms of Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Such social media encourage the curation of a diversified self that can score points in the form of large quantities of friends, followers, likes, reacts, views, and comments. Perhaps one difference between such social media and Stardew Valley is that the latter gives the player open access to the fuller system that frames, parameterizes,

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and drives the neoliberal subject (even as it does not encourage an analysis of that system). Moreover, unlike a linear game such as Candy Crush Saga, Stardew Valley still gives the player a fairly wide range of choices, some of which exceed the allure of prizes such as the Statue of Perfection. Player forums and online discussions reveal a minority of players who adopt styles of play that are not reductively neoliberal. Some players create beautifully ordered or wildly disorderly farms that privilege aesthetics to utility. A different type of player suggests setting creative constraints so that one can play no more than one day in-­game to every one day in real life, thereby limiting the capacity to speedily binge-­play the game to an optimal score.90 Still other players choose to marry and divorce multiple times in order to experience the various possible relationship narratives that the game has to offer. As these examples suggest, and as we will see throughout this book, the limits of video game form and its history do not necessarily foreclose experimental modes of play. Conclusion: From Control Systems to Ludic Experiments

The trajectory that this chapter tracks may appear bleak in its destination or its resulting totality. It is possible to come away from the history I have sketched with an impression of games as technorationalist engines that feed a control system that can recuperate all anomalies or resistances. The paradigm of gamification described in the preceding pages is equipped with the formal framework of game theory, the world-­building program of neoliberalism, the empirical toolkit of behavioral economics, and the cultural medium of digital games. This worldview grooms a fragmented subjectivity that is dazzled by the pleasures of choice, self-­construction, and entrepreneurship of the self, even as it simultaneously gives itself over to the comforts of what Mirowski calls the more contained “algorithmic imperative” of contemporary computation that integrates human beings, machines, and networks.91 Without a doubt, matters may appear depressing at the macroscale of gamification and the abstractions that fortify its system of control. However, the next chapter shifts to a microscale that might be more recognizable, if not necessarily yet more manageable, for the imagination of vibrant alternatives to this system. Certainly, we cannot romanticize the micro over the macro, or the local over the global, as each scale merely offers different types of constructions.92 After all, it is not as if neoliberalism has not already penetrated various aspects of everyday life, as the cases of Candy Crush Saga and Stardew Valley suggest. Even so, approaching gamification as a closed



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totality or games as unchangeable formal systems does not yet account fully for what is experimental not only about video games but also about human subjectivity, perception, affect, and collective life. Though the chapters that follow retain a sober skepticism about alleged resistances offered by “countergaming” or the liberatory effects and utopian promises of alternative game cultures, they do not leap immediately to the opposite conclusion that games are nothing more than the master’s tools. Indeed, we have only scratched the surface of the board that makes up the contemporary sociopolitical landscape. Attending to experimental gameplay may yet reveal that gamification has not wholly preempted, but merely delayed, the broad emergence of gameplay practices and game creations that exceed both rationalism and behaviorism. In order to understand the unique playing field introduced by digital games, and its complication of simple binary notions of power and resistance, the next chapter builds toward a fuller understanding of the video game sensorium and an art-­science that undergirds games. It may be possible to imagine games less as virtual Matrix-­like management systems that drive neoliberalism than as differently-­virtual, potential-­generating, and experimental relations. Pursuing this hypothesis, the next chapter delves deeper into games. There may yet be ways to transform a video game console or handheld system into a Pandora’s box that even the seemingly omnipotent digits of the Invisible Hand cannot control completely.

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2

Experimentation Each game is an attempt at existence, a vital experiment that encounters in the plaything the essence of unyielding reality. Eugen Fink (“The Oasis of Happiness”)

There is no creation without experiment.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (What Is Philosophy?)

In a variety of ways, games serve as a medium for testing and producing reality in the early twenty-­first century. The previous chapter isolated and analyzed “gamification”—an economic, political, and social paradigm organized around the metaphor and form of games. As I argued, the formal and technical systems that undergird gamified mobile apps such as Habitica or Foursquare, as well as video games such as Candy Crush and Stardew Valley, correspond with and fuel neoliberalism. They do so through the promotion of processes such as activity, competition, and entrepreneurial habits. In order to better articulate the alternative potentials of games, some of which exceed gamification, this second chapter situates experimentation in the early twenty-­first century and examines ways that digital games both are and might still become more fully experimental. Transitioning away from my previous focus on macroscale economic systems, this chapter turns to the microscale of affect and perception as they unfold through video game aesthetics and play. While the emphasis of the following pages is on games, this chapter also builds up the constructive dimension of this book’s framework by complicating its other key term: the category of experimentation in its historically specific role from the late twentieth to the early twenty-­first century. Even as many of the cases that I analyze in this book belong to the categories of “art,” “avant-­garde,” or “experimental” games, I want to resist a merely taxonomic

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account of experimental games as a formal subgenre, marketing category, or loose political orientation. Most of all, I avoid using the category of the experimental as a modifier that assumes that the ways in which digital games are and might be experimental are already known or easily understood. Ultimately, there is something experimental about all games—not just the ones that scholars may find most intellectually challenging, formally novel, or politically generative. For this reason, when addressing the concept of experimentation, it is crucial to delineate among multiple phenomena ranging from behaviorist trials in closed psychology labs to neoliberal economic experiments practiced by the International Monetary Fund across open markets to improvisational processes of affective activation that unfold within distributed digital media environments. This chapter, then, establishes a conceptual foundation for the remainder of the book, which argues that video games enable experiments with life in this era of digital and networked media. As the first part of the chapter contends, games can be understood as experimental in ways that accord with both earlier experimental art forms (such as the modernist novel or avant-­garde cinema) and with forms of scientific hypothesis testing (such as the randomized controlled trial). While scholarship within the field of science studies has already explored ways in which earlier art forms have drawn from and intersected with scientific experimentation, video games have a unique relationship to experiment. Specifically, as I hope to show, video games appear at a historical moment characterized by an experimental economy within which experiment is no longer seen as a specialist practice but instead operates as a mainstream method for maximizing innovation. While digital games yield the type of gamified products underwritten by behavioral economics, which I analyze in the previous chapter, they also open up more generative ways of engaging, processing, and playing with the world. Beyond their instrumental applications, games can be addressed as a unique medium of experimental thought and learning. That experimentality has much to do with the ways in which video games condition experience and modulate affect through what I will call the video game sensorium. Through an analysis of experimentation in and through games, I build toward an engagement with two cases in the second half of the chapter. Briefly, I introduce the popular real-­time strategy game StarCraft as an example of how affect operates and informs how we think about the medium-­ specific dimensions of a video game. This game, and others like it, raise a number of important questions: How can the nonconscious effects of games create feedback loops that come to influence or help change conscious dimensions of human life, such as critical thought and judgment? More im 74

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portantly, if video games affect us, at least in part, prior to conscious cognition, what hope do those of us who play and create games have of resisting the powerful action-­oriented ideologies that such media purvey? And finally, how might the art of game design move beyond normative gamification and enable new forms of decision-­making and unanticipated patterns of activity? Though these questions might very well benefit from ongoing empirical research, they also become accessible and more precise if approached by means of humanistic methods such as close reading and critical theory. My second case grapples directly with these questions by means of a medium-­specific analysis of a video game. The independent platformer game Braid uses subconscious visual and audio cues and nonconscious qualities unique to games, such as rules and mechanics, to explore the very nature of experimental method in the post-­1945 era. This period saw an experimental acceleration stimulated by two world-­altering technologies that emerged from World War II: the atom bomb and the digital computer. A close reading of Braid begins to suggest, as the remainder of the book attempts to demonstrate, how games can be embraced as a hybrid form of experimental art-­ science. This approach moves us from the binary realm of problem solving that dominates fields such as economics, psychology, and engineering, and gestures toward an alternative experimental practice of problem making that derives from the humanities and the arts. An articulation of this experimental science, informed by both aesthetics and hypothesis generation, serves as a springboard into the chapters that follow. Experiment and Experimental Art

Within contemporary science, experimental research design stands in contrast to observational design. Observation begins with phenomena that can be accessed directly, if not always immediately, by human perception. Following this approach, observational research includes such qualitative methods as “phenomenology, ethnography, and grounded theory” as well as quantitative methods such as “cross-­sectional designs, successive independent samples design, and longitudinal designs.”1 Experimental research, on the other hand, entails the construction of cases that cannot be accessed directly and are unlikely to manifest without manipulation of variables. An experiment requires scientists to control extraneous variables, alter an independent variable, and study a dependent variable in order to better understand causal relationships (as opposed to mere correlations) among variables. In many fields, randomized controlled trials are considered the most rigorous form of experiment. Even so, experimental methods extend to a broader set

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of practices that entail manipulating or changing reality in order to understand it more thoroughly. It is important to emphasize that such practices have always been plural. From experiments of the Royal Society in the seventeenth century to the expansion of the scientific method in the late nineteenth century to the Big Science complex of the post–­World War II era, there was no such thing as a single standardized experimental method that every practitioner adopted to study all material phenomena. From the earliest conceptions of modern science, experimental method was an abstraction with countless variations. Given the instability and variability of the scientific method, it is not surprising that the movement of experimental concepts from science into broader cultures entails both formal and historical variation. For example, as literary critic Natalia Cecire observes, in the United States during the early twentieth century, “broad public assent to the abstraction of scientific method was a historical phenomenon that made it possible to construe new specific acts and discourses as experimental.”2 In his influential 1910 book How We Think, John Dewey argues that American education requires a unified “scientific attitude of mind” that is “marked by ardent curiosity, fertile imagination, and love of experimental inquiry.” The ideal mode of thought, for Dewey, is experiential and experimental. Even prior to any explicit training in the scientific method, for children, he writes, “Objects are sucked, fingered, and thumped; drawn and pushed, handled and thrown; in short, experimented with, till they cease to yield new qualities.”3 Experimentation, here, is not one method among many, but the primary process that constitutes thought and animates learning. During these same years, this American interest in the scientific method extended from academic disciplines such as psychology to educational curricula such as the Montessori program. Across the twentieth century, experimental frames also extended to nonscientific fields. The most notable areas, for my argument, are experimental literature and art. Though a more systematic theorization of experimental writing follows the rise of modernism, one notable earlier conceptualization appears in Émile Zola’s 1880 essay about the experimental novel within realism. Here, Zola draws from the medical work of Claude Bernard in order to propose that “experiment is but provoked observation.”4 Though Balzac’s novels, for example, may begin with observation, such descriptions serve merely as “the point of departure.” Following such an observational frame, Zola contends, “the experimentalist appears and introduces an experiment, that is to say, sets his characters going in a certain story so as to show that the succession of facts will be such as the requirements of the determinism

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of the phenomena under examination call for.”5 Unlike the scientist, however, the novelist retains control over both the independent and dependent variables (not to mention categorical and confounding variables).6 Like experimental method in the sciences, experimental writing has come to incorporate a variety of forms, techniques, styles, and aesthetic strategies. In the context of US literature, Cecire observes that qualities shared across experimental writing may include “formal disjuncture, a sense of political or ethical commitment, and an association, but not strict identification, with the experimental sciences.” The term “experimental writing” itself emerged in the 1940s, as a way of describing nontraditional poetry and prose within the context of late modernism. The term gained expanded usage by the Language poets in the 1970s.7 While earlier novels, such as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759), have retroactively been labeled as experimental, it is really the period from modernism (e.g., T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf) to postmodernism (e.g., Kathy Acker, Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, and Ishmael Reed) that produced the most substantial body of work understood explicitly to be experimental. Beyond literature, experimental work emerged across media, incorporating comparable formal and political disjunctures. For example, experimental film and video—created by numerous filmmakers such as Chantal Akerman, Stan Brakhage, Barbara Hammer, Yoko Ono, and Andy Warhol—adopted an interest in materiality and representational practices that challenge dominant ideologies.8 Alongside the transformation of earlier media, digital media also brought with them experimental modes during the second half of the twentieth century. Several decades before what we might think of as experimental video games, we see key developments in the broader realms of computational art and software art.9 As the art historian Edward Shanken contends, for several decades beginning in the mid-­twentieth century, art history resisted a genealogy that might unite computation and experimental art (particularly conceptual art): Widespread skepticism towards the military-­industrial complex after May 1968

and amidst the Vietnam War, the Cold War and mounting ecological concerns all contributed to problematizing the artistic use of technology—and the production of aesthetic objects in general—within the context of commodity capitalism. Conceptual art, on the other hand, with its assault on the modernist

object, became increasingly influential to a variety of au courant artistic discourses, including photography, performance and installation.10



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Despite this split between technological and conceptual art, as early as 1970, Jack Burnham curated an exhibition titled “Software” at the Jewish Museum and the Smithsonian Institution. In the catalog, he wrote, “Information processing technology influences our notions about creativity, perception and the limits of art. . . . It is probably not the province of computers and other telecommunication devices to produce works of art as we know it; but they will, in fact, be instrumental in redefining the entire area of esthetic awareness.”11 Though the broader development of experimental video games was several years away, Burnham’s formulation already captures the capacity of digital technologies to generate not merely new works of art but also completely different aesthetic coordinates.12 Experimental writing and art have already received considerable study by scholars in fields such as literary criticism and art history, but a broader interest in the experimentality of the popular medium of video games only begins to take shape in the early twenty-­first century. To better understand the experimental nature of video game aesthetics in general (as opposed to the departures from the norm represented by what we might call avant-­ garde games), it is first necessary to consider the experimental uses of both analog and digital games within military and corporate contexts. In these environments, to which I now turn, game designers come to experiment not primarily with technological systems but instead with social systems that concern human decision-­making, skills, experiences, and behaviors. “Gaming as a Technique of Analysis”

In order to think through the experimental capacities of games, it is useful to turn back to the post–­World War II moment: a period of the early Cold War during which important work was occurring in the fields of both economic game theory and computer simulation. This was already a moment in which experimental thought was being translated into computational research.13 In game studies, considerable research already exists about wargames and military simulations.14 Even so, this scene is an important one to return to, in this context, in order to understand the ways in which games are and can be experimental in our time. To zero in on this problem, I turn to an exemplary and paradigm-­shifting document from this era that theorizes the alignment of games and experimentation: A. M. Mood and R. D. Specht’s “Gaming as a Technique of Analysis,” which was published by the RAND Corporation in 1954. It is noteworthy that, in place of digital computers, Mood and Specht articulate a primary interest in “analog computers” at the outset of their article. 78

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More precisely, they emphasize that their concern “is not with computing machines that think, but rather with the thinker as part of a computing machine.” In the opening argument of this paper, Mood and Specht indicate that machines and models conventionally leave human variables out of their operation. Human beings certainly relate to a model—for instance, by designing it, inputting variables, and analyzing the resulting data. However, they observe, the model itself does not contain any real-­time human actions or behavioral contributions. In distinction to mathematical and computational models, Mood and Specht propose that a war game can also be treated as a different type of model. They take as their extended example the post–­ Civil War American “Kriegspiel” that was adapted from earlier Prussian war games. Unlike the Prussian precursor, the later American version “came closer to resembling a parlor game” insofar as it combined an “umpire” (what later role-­playing game participants might call a “DM” or “dungeon master” in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign or, generally, a “GM” or “game master”) with the roll of “a common die.” Instead of explaining away this supposed weakness, Mood and Specht insist that this American addition to war games is a crucial innovation for real-­world applications of games and for empirical thought. “This resemblance to a parlor game,” they note, “is essential if gaming is to be used as a technique of analysis. The game representing the problem must be easily playable and must be played numerous times by the same players so that they can develop a knowledge of the structure of the game and a feel for good strategies.” In other words, a game becomes an experimental platform only at the moment that it invites and transforms a player into a “human computer” who interacts with the nonhuman game with its rules, artificial conflicts, and objectives. Though Mood and Specht recognize that a game can harness human intelligence to solve abstract scientific problems, this form offers something even more important that distinguishes it from the computational model: an access to real-­time human decision-­making. Within gameplay, “the responses and interactions of the humans in our man-­machine model are themselves the principal object of study.”15 Games, thus, become a form for addressing complex operational, social, and political problems that exceed the realm of mathematics and computation alone. Crucially, Mood and Specht extend the concept of an analytical game by contending that “‘war gaming’ may be something of a misnomer.” In place of the classic applied game that focuses on military tactics and strategy, they propose that gameplay might have applications to a much broader field of problem solving, including in “training and educational programs.” Gaming, for them, becomes metonymic for incorporating human thought, affect, and action into an otherwise nonhuman model. In place of “war gaming,”

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they enumerate a series of terms drawn from P. M. Morse—including “the gaming technique” and “simulated operational experiment”—that emphasize the experimental application of games.16 Mood and Specht are clever enough to realize that it is not only that games constitute a form that includes previously underexplored experimental affordances; it is also important that games can be proactively designed in order to be fun. Preceding the broader “serious games” movement by several decades, they announce that “a game can easily be made fascinating enough to put over the dullest facts. To sit down and play through a game is to be convinced as by no argument, however persuasively presented.”17 Notably, the implication of this passage is that games are not an objective or fully controlled experiment—to be sure, we are far from the realm of randomized controlled trials here. Nevertheless, games represent something perhaps even more powerful to Mood and Specht: platforms with unprecedented affordances of persuasion.18 The military origins of contemporary gaming are important, but they do not represent the only context in which games are approached as experimental designs. Just sixteen years after the Mood and Specht paper, in 1970, Clark C. Abt published the book Serious Games. This book is an important precursor to the growth of the “edutainment” video games market in the early 1980s and the rise of the “serious games” movement in the early twenty-­first century, especially with the establishment of the Games for Change organization in 2004. The book also offers a substantial elaboration on Mood and Specht’s suggestion that games might exceed military applications. It is worth noting that the transition from military to multidisciplinary uses of games becomes visible even through Abt’s own career trajectory. After studying aeronautics and systems engineering as an undergraduate at MIT, he joined the Air Force in the mid-­1950s and first used war gaming to contribute to mission planning. Upon becoming dissatisfied with Cold War politics, Abt decided that he wanted to pursue arms control and disarmament. He earned an MA from the Department of Writing, Speech, and Drama at Johns Hopkins University. Later, he returned to MIT to complete a PhD in political science and became interested in US social problems, including education, urban and rural economic development, and technology planning. In 1965, he founded the company Abt Associates Inc. “to work on domestic nonmilitary problems combining the computer-­simulation and war-­gaming techniques.” Describing the genesis of his interest in games, he notes, [my work] “evolved out of my long dual fascination with scientific problem-­solving on the one hand and dramatic human conflicts on the other—with science and the humanities and how to combine them.”19 Upon initial inspection, Abt’s pacifist fascination with serious games ap 80

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pears to be oriented in direct opposition to Mood and Specht’s militaristic motivations. This political divergence, however, belies a deeper similarity between their understanding of the function and value of games. Notably, human experimentation is at the foundation of Abt’s motivation for creating serious games. “The need to experiment inexpensively and creatively is pervasive,” he writes. “Most people experiment with psycho-­social situations throughout their lives in ways having most of the elements of games.” For Abt, it is not merely that everyday experimentation has a resemblance or stronger analogous relationship to gameplay, but also that games themselves can yield better experiments. By teaching and learning through games, Abt suggests that one can engender “a laboratory environment” where “experiments can be made, hypotheses formulated, and new and better experiments planned.”20 The experimental nature of games, for Abt, involves contradictory elements. On the one hand, games are experimental because they provide players with the “laboratory feeling” of procedural order that includes rules, objectives, artificial conflicts, and quantified outcomes.21 In this way, games instill the type of discipline that a scientific researcher might practice when designing an experiment that controls for all possible contingencies except for the independent variable. Here, we might think of the game of chess that has set parameters that include a fixed number of players (i.e., two), standardized starting positions for all pieces (i.e., positions mirrored by the black and white sets of pieces), prescribed movements for each piece (e.g., the diagonal movement of the bishops or the L-­shaped movement of the knights), set objectives and conditions for the game’s completion (e.g., for a checkmate or a draw), and so on. On the other hand, Abt notes that games also “encourage imaginative freedom to experiment with alternative solutions.”22 To extend the example of chess, within strict rules, players can nonetheless engage in an extremely high quantity of unique games. Aside from scientific discipline, Abt thus acknowledges the need for open-­ended and emergent imagination. In game studies terms, Abt’s two dimensions of game-­based experimentation map onto Roger Caillois’s classic distinction between “ludus” or rule-­bound play and “paidia” or free play.23 Though there is an inherently experimental quality to games, Abt also recognizes the active need to design and craft games that enable compelling experiments that might otherwise be impossible or impractical in everyday life. In this way, Abt writes less as a theorist than as a designer who is interested in innovative applications of games. Indeed, much of Serious Games focuses on considerations of practical design and possible uses of serious games in areas such as education, government, and occupational training.

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Despite this practical orientation, I am arguing that both Abt’s book and Mood and Specht’s article rest on a provocative underlying concept that games are more than entertaining pastimes; they are nothing less than a unique medium of experimental thought and learning. A key quality that makes this medium of thought and learning unique to games is arguably their relationship to another key term: experience. To understand this point, we might consider Abt’s description of the shortcomings of social studies education in the United States: But in social studies, as conventionally taught, few if any experiences of what

is to be learned are made available. The students have no chance to experience or experiment with social, economic, and political issues, to make or write history, to solve problems of government, economics, and social organizations.

One major flaw due to this lack of experience is the absence of memorable surprise—the sudden exposure of error or success.24

For Abt, games are able both to model and to simulate a political system such as a feudalist fiefdom, a representative democracy, or a socialist republic in a way that gives a learner an experience (albeit a significantly simplified one) of its historical or organizational dimensions. In distinction to an expository account or descriptive model that pre­sents knowledge as a fait accompli, a game invites a player to participate in a process. Variations within a game’s process, which depend on decisions made by the players, may yield a range of results that imprint those players with experiences of “memorable surprise.” Beyond analog games and video games, all experiments produce modulations and shifts in experience. As provoked observations, experiments condition experience in ways that yield learning, even in the case of failed experiments. In fact, in his Keywords, cultural critic Raymond Williams even shows that the word “experiment” was, until the late eighteenth century, interchangeable with the word “experience.” He notes, “Experience, from the present participle, became not only a conscious test or trial but a consciousness of what has been tested or tried, and thence a consciousness of an effect or state.”25 Experience, for Williams, comes to encompass both knowledge learned from past encounters via observation and reflection, as well as a specific form of consciousness itself. This conjunction of terms offers a suggestion that what experimental artworks (including games) experiment upon through their designs is experience itself. Indeed, Williams even links experience explicitly to aesthetics when he observes that experience is “the fullest most open, most active kind of consciousness, and it includes feeling as well as thought. This sense has been very active in aesthetic discussion.”26 82

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Aesthetic works, as many theorists have observed, target and frequently rearrange sensation, experience, and perception.27 Though content, form, and medium offer shared grounding in an artwork, an experience of such a work is never wholly stable from one person to the next. The matrix of reception capacities of the human sensorium is also perpetually in flux—dilated and contracted, bored and shocked, obstructed and transformed by different types of aesthetic experience.28 In this way, it is the sensorium, and its countless variations, that serves as the ground for the types of experiments that art, literature, and media sometimes undertake. It is tempting to dismiss “experience” as an overused and hackneyed term. In the context of Mood and Specht’s military models and Abt’s applied games, the term “experience” may appear as a precursor of clichéd hands-­on educational curricula and the inward-­facing narcissism of social media that would develop in later years. Regardless of one’s judgment on this point, the role of experience in the context of game-­based learning serves as a reminder that the concept varies considerably across historical and cultural contexts. Jennifer Doyle puts it well when she contends that experience “is not an unquestioned zone of personal truth to which one retreats but a site of becoming, of subject formation—it is an ongoing process that produces the conditions of possibility for recognition, understanding, and difference.”29 Moreover, in the twenty-­first century, experience can no longer be limited to an individual knowledge of events marked as real because of their “natural” foundations. Increasingly, it expands into a knowledge of simulated media. In other words, experience becomes a feature of ubiquitous computing environments that connect people, objects, and algorithms via distributed networks and infrastructures, such as online virtual worlds or the physical Internet of Things. If experience is variable, changeable, and distributed, the following question becomes inescapable: What does experience—and therefore experimentation—come to mean in the context of twenty-­first-­century video games? To confront this question, I now turn to the historical and medium-­specific dimensions of experience and experimentation in our time. Though up to this point, this chapter has treated analog and digital games interchangeably, for the remaining pages, I focus my attention on the specific types of screen-­ based games that dominate our present-­day digital and networked milieu. The Experimental Economy

As the preceding pages have suggested, experimentation has historically signaled processes of discovery and creation, from the inductive reasoning

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and scientific method of Francis Bacon’s seventeenth-­century book Novum Organum to the various avant-­garde movements of the twentieth century that pushed against formal and sociopolitical conventions.30 In the early twenty-­first century, however, experimentation has moved from being a specialist scientific and artistic practice to a central quality of business practice and economic life. As the human geography scholar Nigel Thrift contends, contemporary capitalism is sustained by “two entirely opposed and closely linked directions which combine something that is often very close to barbarism with an increasingly sophisticated corporate vanguard which seems to be attempting to invent a vitalist capitalism.” The former direction, which Thrift articulates as an extension of Marx’s “primitive accumulation,” has to do with creating new markets—especially for energy commodities and natural resources such as oil—through aggressive economic policies, military occupations, regular assertions of force as with drone strikes, and full-­ blown wars. The latter orientation has to do with capitalism’s notable shift in emphasis from accumulation to forms of innovation and experimentation represented by increased research and development, emphasis on affective labor, and reliance on information technologies. Innovation, especially in the early twenty-­first century, has transitioned from an occasional technique or an intermittent “trawling for the new” to a “continuous process of interaction that now seems to be becoming characteristic.” Resonating with media culture, this “streaming ethos” of innovation transforms how we understand production, distribution, and consumption. In the production phase, for example, we now see the proliferation of all manner of techniques and infrastructures—from so-­called agile methodologies to innovation incubators—that conceptualize “the commodity as consisting of an iterative process of experiment.”31 In later work, Thrift builds on his insights about changes in commodification to posit that we are now in the midst of an “experimental economy” that is founded in economics but extends across the spheres of politics and culture. This world, for Thrift, is distinguished not merely by new production techniques, but also by five technological characteristics: continuous and networked media, gesture- and movement-­based interfaces that change physical environments, capacities to tag the world through “an informational overlay,” real-­time feedback to user decisions, and agency that is increasingly shared between human beings and technological objects. Instead of a world that is treated as certain or ultimately knowable, Thrift argues that digital media give us “the world as a surface in continuous motion, a world which depends on being able to construct a constant state of provisionality.” This is a world that engages in “a continual experiment in experiment.”32 84

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This obsession with “innovation” and “experimentation” differs from even earlier twentieth-­century interests with the role of “knowledge” or “creativity,” in the arena of business, in part through the updated emphasis on continuous and unending novelty. As Alan Liu has argued, the concepts of knowledge and creativity changed after World War II. Gradually, knowledge transitioned from an emphasis on historical awareness (including the possibility of knowledge for its own sake) into an instrumental pursuit of “new” and “just-­in-­time” data that drives the information economy. Similarly, creativity has come increasingly to serve profit-­maximizing processes of “creative destruction.”33 Since the concept of experiment is not identical across historical and disciplinary contexts, it is important to track how it operates in contemporary business environments. Stefan Thomke’s 2003 business administration book Experimentation Matters is in many ways representative of the version of experimentation that comes to inform management theory and actual US business environments. An experiment, Thomke notes, “encompasses success and failure; it is an iterative process of understanding what doesn’t work and what does.” With this definition, he sketches a genealogy between scientific and business experimentation, which might connect Louis Pasteur’s experiments that produced knowledge of vaccines to chemist Spencer Silver’s experiments that yielded products enabled by 3M’s Post-­It adhesive. Importantly, the relationship to knowledge—indeed, even the fundamental understanding of what knowledge is—differs in the transition from the history of science to that of contemporary corporations. Experimentation, when put in the service of business instead of science or knowledge, “matters because it fuels the discovery and creation of knowledge and thereby leads to the development and improvement of products, processes, systems, and organizations.” More precisely, the goal is to develop “new ways of creating value for firms and their customers.” Far from a paradigm shift motivated by isolated considerations in management or operations theory, Thomke explains that it is the emergence of new technologies—not only specialized technologies such as computer modeling and virtual simulations but also everyday applications such as programmable spreadsheets—that requires a shift to an experimental paradigm. He adds that new technologies make it so that “never before has it been so economically feasible to ask ‘what-­if’ questions and generate preliminary answers.” This process is true not only for companies but also for customers who are increasingly equipped with “toolkits” to modify, customize, and create their own products. Effectively run experiments, Thomke contends, make for better managers and more satisfied consumers, not just better-­informed scientists.34

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The objectives and uses of experimentation vary between business environments and scientific scholarship in a variety of ways, but there is arguably a more fundamental methodological difference between them. As I noted earlier, in fields such as medicine and public health, the benchmark of scientific experimentation comes in the form of randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Though RCTs are not restricted to artificial or closed laboratory environments, they do attempt to control for as many variables as possible in order to isolate the independent variable. By contrast, the type of research and development that interests Thomke requires expansion into less controlled environments. Businesses might still use rigorous scientific experimentation for product optimization or testing. At the same time, this degree of control is not always possible in the marketplace, as it might be in the university laboratory. In the marketplace, variables are complex and rapidly changing. As Thomke writes, “when independent and dependent variables themselves are uncertain, unknown, or difficult to measure, experimentation itself is much more informal or tentative.”35 Under these circumstances—what Thomke calls “real-­world experimentation”—the key technique becomes that of iteration. Iteration involves a process of modified repetition in which intuition about a solution is directed by observation and a serial manipulation of variables. Relevant to the larger argument of my book, the iterative design method has become the norm in the realm of game design (designer Tracy Fullerton, for instance, renames iteration the “playcentric” approach”).36 Importantly, for Thomke, iteration is not a specialized technique of any particular field, whether business or game design. Instead, he elevates it to a way of life. As he contends, “Iterative experimentation goes on all the time and is so much an integral part of innovation processes that it has become like breathing—we do it but are not fully aware of the fact that we are really experimenting.”37 Iterative experiment, in this formulation, is no longer a technique of scientific experts but an everyday practice, an episteme, an activity that is so second nature that it is now “like breathing.” That this comparison gives experimentation an autonomic, nonconscious, and life-­sustaining function is particularly noteworthy given perhaps the central object of the experimental economy: namely, affect. Affective Games

A key aspect of the experimental revolution that has come to undergird the global economy has been “the mobilization of the resource of forethought” and “the non-­cognitive realm and ‘fast’ thinking.”38 This capacity becomes important to everything from microscale business interactions to macro 86

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scale understandings of shifts within financial markets. Moreover, contemporary designers mobilize nonconscious registers through digital media to impact individual and collective human experiences, including attitudes and behaviors. The study of nonconscious cognition has certainly taken on an empirical dimension in recent years, stretching across fields such as cognitive science, neuroscience, and human-­computer interaction.39 In humanistic scholarship, this quality is often captured by the polyvalent term “affect.” Beyond its empirical dimension, affect has served a different conceptual function in an interdisciplinary scholarship that spans philosophy, media studies, feminist and queer theory, and human geography.40 Across these fields, it refers essentially to a “nonconscious experience of intensity” that differs from either feeling (which is personal and narrativizable) or emotion (which can be displayed and communicated). Affect, especially as it comes through in the philosophical trajectory that leads from Baruch Spinoza to Gilles Deleuze, is a capacity to affect and be affected by people, things, and atmospheres in the world. Moreover, it names a nonconscious sensitivity to “unformed and unstructured potential” prior to the moment that it is actualized or captured.41 Beyond a mere empirical quality, then, affect (in its more expansive humanistic sense) introduces an alternative way of thinking that exceeds the forms of logic and rationality that underlie traditional scientific and philosophical thought. As the philosopher Brian Massumi explains, affect might better be thought of as “a field of questioning, a problematic field, where customary divisions that questions about subjectivity, becoming or the political are usually couched in do not apply.” Instead of focusing on the subject (in the present book’s context, a gamer or game player) or object (a game, video game console, or another player), affect invites an analysis of relations, mediations, and felt transitions in which a body moves from one state into “a diminished or augmented state of capacitation.”42 If we approach any topic from the standpoint of affect, instead of philosophical categories such as “subject” or “object,” or even calcified categories such as “emotion,” we activate a way of thinking that departs from common sense and introduces new frameworks for approaching the world. Affect does not limit us to thinking about individuals or more properly (in Deleuze’s formulation) “dividuals.”43 Though affect might signal a small, even imperceptible, scale of analysis, it also points to a different way of thinking about political life. If there is any doubt about the early twenty-­first century political moment being characterized by affect, we need only think of forms of preemptive security that accelerated with the War on Terror, the circulation of “alternative facts” across the contemporary news ecology, tactics of

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“post-­truth” electioneering, the increasing impact of social media on people’s attitudes, and of course the behaviorally directed gamification that I discuss in the previous chapter.44 It would be naïve and reductively deterministic to argue that any of these trends are caused by technology. At the same time, the proliferation of algorithmic processes and artificial intelligence, which is increasingly capable of learning at speeds faster than conscious levels of human cognition, elevates affective politics to an unprecedented scale.45 The rise of deep-­learning algorithms, such as the software developed by Google Brain, helps us better understand how affect achieves a new centrality and takes on novel experimental properties in the early twenty-­first century. These types of algorithms depend as much on qualities of affect as those of a narrowly defined rationality. In place of the automatic decision-­making and binary logic that has long been associated with computational devices (including cultural extensions of computation in the form of expressive media), deep-­learning algorithms introduce a logic that is more closely linked to the search actions, behaviors, and preferences of users. Media theorist Luciana Parisi explains that “it is precisely the realization of the ontic limit of technoscience that pushed cybernetics and computation away from symbolic rational systems and towards experimenting with knowing how—that is, with learning how to learn—which is now central to the bot-­to-­bot curatorial image of social communication in the age of post-­truth and post-­fact.” It is crucial that computer science has discovered “nondeductive and heuristic methods of testing results that allowed algorithms to learn from uncertain or incomplete information.”46 In other words, in an unprecedented innovation, instead of neutralizing human uncertainty and nonconscious cognition, deep-­learning algorithms rely upon these qualities both as models of information processing and key zones of human-­computer interaction. One of the major advantages of affectively oriented algorithms is that they are capable of hypothesis generation that is akin to experimental thought. Parisi puts this well when she writes: As opposed to the heuristic analysis of data correlations among distinct sets, these interpreter algorithms do not just prove, verify, or validate hypothesis,

but must first of all elaborate hypothetical reasoning based on what other algorithms have already searched, in order to determine the possible meaning of

the missing information in the query. These deep-­learning algorithms work by searching elements of surprise—that is, unthought information—which can

only occur if the system is apt to preserve, rather than eliminate as errors, micro-­ levels of randomness that become manifested across volumes of data. In other

words, this meta-­digital form of automated cognition is geared not toward cor-

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recting errors or eliminating randomness; instead, it is indifferent to the en-

tropic noise of increasing data volumes insofar as this noise is precisely part of the learning process, and for this reason experimental hypothesis-­making must preserve indeterminacy so that it can bind information to ­surprise.47

Instead of confirming preset human hypotheses, deep-­learning algorithms are capable of learning to learn, and therefore of generating new and unexpected knowledge as they develop. Admittedly, the parameters of learning that programmers establish for algorithms such as recurrent neural networks cannot help but carry the biases of human programmers and system architects, including cultural beliefs about race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. Even so, within those all-­too-­human parameters, such algorithms can pursue learning and hypothesis formation that encounters, without eliminating, uncertainty. Like the games that, for Abt, confront student-­players with “memorable surprise,” algorithms use encounters with surprise to iterate more compelling hypotheses. For this reason, the development of these algorithms represents more than just a change of degree in terms of the number of experiments that can now be run (though that is also the case) but, more fundamentally, a change in kind of the way in which experimentation unfolds. Uncertainty, it is important to remember, is also a central quality of the experimental approach that Thomke advocates for twenty-­first-­century business environments. For him, uncertainty is linked to failure. “The reason why experiments inevitably fail as part of product development,” he observes, “has to do with the uncertain nature of the innovation process itself.” For the business manager like the deep learning algorithm, however, uncertainty is something to be engaged and harnessed for the opportunities it affords, rather than merely eliminated. Thomke insists that “experiments that result in failure are not failed experiments, although they frequently are considered so when anything deviating from what was intended is deemed ‘failure.’”48 Arguably, this way of thinking has longer roots in Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction” or its more euphemistic contemporary corporate articulation as “disruption.”49 Moreover, the design and innovation company IDEO has elevated this idea to a central operational philosophy: “Fail often in order to succeed sooner.” Importantly, this relationship to uncertainty and failure is one that departs from an earlier twentieth-­century technorationalism. The approach that I have been sketching out to affect, particularly as it is operationalized in a historical moment characterized by digital technologies and evolutionary algorithms, also offers new ways of thinking about video

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games and what makes them experimental. In the first chapter, I argued that games both index and drive the dominant worldview of gamification that characterizes our historical moment. Now, I can add that in a more microscale and concrete way, this paradigm comes across to players and is negotiated by them via affect across scales of dividual, individual, interpersonal, and collective human experiences with digital games. This aspect of gamification becomes apparent if we consider affect theory as, at least in part, a continuation of the earlier project of ideology critique. As Lauren Berlant argues this point, a fuller understanding of affect can help make sense of “how people’s desires become mediated through attachments to modes of life to which they rarely remember consenting, at least initially.”50 Gamification, though seemingly ambivalent in some of its applications, nonetheless points to a powerful way of being and thinking in the world. This paradigm is one which many players of a broad range of games (from casual games such as Candy Crush to hardcore online games such as World of Warcraft) take up and engage, often compulsively, without always being able to articulate their mode of consent to it. Even as it operates at scales that surpass consciousness, gamification helps shape dominant habits, pleasures, and ordinary experiences. In the humanities, affect theory has served to critique rationality and elaborate more robust theories of embodiment, perhaps most notably in feminist theory.51 Digital games offer a way of extending this critique, and they also complicate any neat binary between the rational and the affective. After all, digital games depend on the computational logic that underlies software and the rules that structure gameplay, even as they simultaneously tap into human affects in unique ways. As I hope to demonstrate, this complicated interplay between rationality and affect is part of what imbues games with such a powerful world-­making capacity. Moreover, this unusual combination of qualities is what makes video games, in the forms of play they occasion, experimental: a term that contains an ambivalence I hope to keep alive through this analysis rather than resolving into a more univocally certain condemnation or celebration. Building on this broad overview, I would like to demonstrate precisely where one can locate affect within digital game play and design. Thrift already observes that increasingly “affective response can be designed into spaces,” as becomes most apparent in contemporary museums, malls, and theme parks.52 To augment this observation, in our heavily mediated world, affectively oriented design extends beyond physical architectural spaces to screen-­based environments. Digital games, including gamified applications that assimilate certain qualities of games, are a particularly rich area to attend to affect insofar as they are the popular apotheosis of expressive com 90

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puting. Furthermore, digital games require player actions—a dynamic orientation of affecting and being affected by the software and (in multiplayer or networked games) by other players. In the realm of game design, perhaps the closest analog to a discussion of nonconscious affect comes through designer Steve Swink’s concept of “game feel.” As Swink explains, this concept encompasses such aesthetic, kinesthetic, intuitive, and sensory experiences as “the simple pleasure of control, feelings of master and clumsiness, and the tactile sensation of interacting with virtual objects might all happen within a few seconds of picking of the controller.” These experiences, which I would characterize as affective, are not instances of emotions or feelings as such— even as they certainly elicit both. For Swink, the three major building blocks of game feel are “real-­time control, simulated space and polish.”53 The first quality, real-­time control, is the “precise, continuous control over a moving avatar,” an exchange between game and player that takes place “in minute increments, below the level of consciousness, in an uninterrupted flow of command.” Affect plays an important role in the experience of real-­time control. Sub-­conscious and non-­conscious cues come into play in everything from arcade games such as Pong (1972) and Asteroids (1979) to computer and video game first-­person shooters such as Doom (1993) and Overwatch (2016). Admittedly, countless forms of conscious action, including strategy and puzzle solving, are equally important to video game play. However, experiences of a digital game precede rational or strategic thought. The real-­time control that helps a player become immersed in a game, for instance, depends on an image display rate that exceeds ten frames per second. Furthermore, a computer must respond within 240 milliseconds or less to a player input in order to maintain a feeling of continuity and immersion.54 The second major aspect of game feel is simulated space. Swink defines this quality as the “simulated physical interactions in virtual space, perceived actively by the player.” Here, he includes collision detection systems that define how a player’s avatar interacts with objects in the game world, as well as level design that determines where a player can and cannot venture. Third of all, there is polish, which includes “any effect that artificially enhances interaction without changing the underlying simulation.” This aspect may include dust particles in the virtual atmosphere, sound effects, a “camera shake” that accompanies an avatar being hit by an enemy or harmful object, and so on.55 Given that a player becomes quickly habituated to gameplay and a game world, all three of these elements of game feel have a greater impact on nonconscious than conscious cognition. Digital games can affect and modulate attitudes, behavior, desire, and

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habits at an affective, which is to say nonconscious and nonrepresentational, scale. Such powerful effects become evident in studies that suggest the effects of interactivity in games on shaping consumer preferences, the influence of video game flow state on intrinsic motivation and learning, the vast investments of time elicited by interpersonal relations in massively multiplayer online role-­playing games, or the addictive qualities of digital slot machines (what Natasha Schüll has called the “machine zone” that optimizes human flow states through ergonomic, environmental, and ambient aesthetic features).56 But in order to move beyond the most superficial diagnosis or critique, it is important to ask how these kinds of nonconscious forces can change conscious experiences in, perceptions of, and concepts that might alter the world. Indeed, a larger philosophical problem underlies this uncertainty and exceeds an affective approach to digital games. This concern is articulated clearly by political theorist Linda Zerilli, who contends that if affect is described as being nonconscious, and therefore outside of the realm of meaning and signification, then we might be hard pressed to explain how it could enable conceptual thought. Yet, as she further observes, concepts are never entirely rational or conscious in nature and, on the flipside, unarticulated engagements with the world are already conceptual even when they do not unfold at the level of consciousness. For example, Zerilli notes, “There is something fundamentally unconscious about the ways in which individuals conform to and thus reproduce gender norms. And yet the assumption that what is not conscious, present in the form of propositional knowledge, must be nonconceptual remains tethered to an intellectualist view of what conceptuality entails.”57 Even when sociopolitical norms, such as the pervasiveness of gender inequality or structural racism, are well known, and known to be problematic, affect plays a role in how such concepts are formed, spread, and altered. To better understand the formation of such concepts, we must consider the ways in which aesthetics and technologies influence human experience—and more precisely, how video games accomplish this task. The Video Game Sensorium

In their interplay between rationality and affect, as well as science and art, digital games are a medium that instantiates an action-­oriented and experiential mode of thought that enables both concept generation and experimental practice.58 And yet it is important to remember that video games are neither properly philosophical nor scientific tools; they are first and foremost artistic media.59 As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari caution, “Art thinks no less than philosophy, but it thinks through affects and percepts.”60 If art 92

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thinks through affects and percepts, it is consequently important to ask what aesthetic, affective, and perceptual dimensions characterize the conceptual and experimental capacities of digital games. To put this another way, video games are an art form that begins in the era of personal computing and proliferates at a historical moment in which we have moved to a regime of ubiquitous computing. As new media critic Mark Hansen puts it, ubiquitous computing foregrounds “the centrality of microtemporal and by definition imperceptible informational flows at the very heart of contemporary sensory experience”61 Though human beings may lack most direct access to the opacity of contemporary algorithms and networks, video games extend our perception into this media ecology and allow us to experiment with it through various forms of play.62 To better understand video games as a unique aesthetic and expressive medium requires a more intimate understanding of the new sensorium that they open up—that is, the specific experiences of spatiality, temporality, velocity, interactivity, participation, system perception, procedural activity, and networked sociality that video games make available.63 At a formal level, there are many qualities that make video games distinct from earlier popular artistic forms, such as print novels or television, and impact the sensorium of a human player. These elements include game mechanics, procedural manipulation, navigable spaces, immersive virtual worlds, emphases on decision-­making with feedback, interactions with artificial intelligence systems, mechanical difficulty, the possibility of failure, competitive and collaborative associations, contingency and randomness, and social participation via networked relations.64 These qualities of video games and gameplay carry both conscious and nonconscious dimensions that can influence the ways that we relate to the contemporary economic, political, and social world. To offer a brief example, the experience of failing at a difficult and quick-­paced boss battle in a game such as Cuphead (2017) might elicit a conscious emotional response of rage quitting after hours of unsuccessful investment, though it may also have subtler nonconscious effects that reinforce a heightened sense of agency about the fact that one actually has control over one’s outcomes. Moreover, the designed criteria that determine the player’s success or failure—rapid hand-­eye coordination and pattern recognition in the case of Cuphead or time and resource management in the case of Stardew Valley that I analyzed in the first chapter—implicitly reinforce particular capacities or value systems. Though the chapters that follow this one explore many of the dimensions of the video game sensorium that I have listed above in greater depth, I pause here to offer one suggestive example of the way in which video games regu

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larly distinguish themselves from other artistic forms and media. A common dimension of aesthetic experience through much of modernity—whether it concerns reading a novel, looking at a painting, or watching television—is the introduction of a dimension of slowness that stands in contrast to the breakneck speed of labor. This dimension of aesthetic experience is arguably operative under the conditions of both industrial and postindustrial life. As Berlant puts it, art traditionally gives “to the worker the privilege of slowness, of time to have a thought/experience whose productivity is subjective, connecting the sensorium to something that feels noninstrumental, absorbing, and self-­affirming.” From a sociopolitical perspective, aesthetic slowness is far from simple, because it brings with it the simultaneous qualities of “antibourgeois and antinormative activity” that is nonetheless “the privilege of the consuming subject.”65 Moreover, the tensions inherent to a broader range of aesthetic experience, from literature to film, cannot similarly be attributed to the experience of playing most video games. Notably, video games introduce elements of speed and instrumentality that disrupt an earlier “privilege of slowness.” There are exceptions of course, including avant-­garde “slow games” and so-­called “walking simulators.”66 However, the vast majority of video games introduce an element of speed across genres: the velocity of racing games such as F-­Zero or Gran Turismo, the hand-­eye coordination of platformer games such as Super Mario Bros. or Super Meat Boy, the coordinated marksmanship of shooter games such as Doom or Counter-­ Strike, the rapid generation of combos in fighting games such as Mortal Kombat and Tekken, the pattern reproduction of rhythm games such as Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero, the quick reflexes of party games such as Mario Party and WarioWare, and so on. Thought during gameplay is shaped by speed. As a limit case, consider competitive real-­ time strategy games such as Blizzard Entertainment’s popular 1998 game StarCraft (fig, 2.1). In this game, competitive e-­sports players have been able to produce approximately 300 actions per minute (APM) on average, and up to 600 APM at the heights of particularly competitive matches.67 Even much slower games entail an inherent simultaneity of thought and action that is not usually required to read a poem or to view a film.68 Of course, it is hardly controversial to claim that a slow analog game, for instance an untimed game of chess, requires tactical and strategic thought—the same is arguably still true of a faster analog game such as timed chess that involves considerably fewer mechanical manipulations than a real-­time strategy video game. Across such examples, game scholar and designer Katie Salen points out, “Gamers are nothing if not reflective in action.” Particularly in strategy games, “constant experimentation with the theories 94

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Figure 2.1. StarCraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 1998), a quick-­paced real-­time

strategy game.

one builds through play defines the modus operandi of gamers.”69 Notably, gamers do not only plan moves in advance but also must take action, moving beyond the unactualized reflection of philosophical thought experiment. Admittedly, the importance of thought within a rapidly unfolding game such as StarCraft might be less certain than in an analog strategy game such as chess. There is ample evidence of muscle memory and habitual reactions that are honed during practice, and even nongamers can imagine nonconscious sensations that unfold alongside the five to ten actions per second that expert players take. But does such sensation ever cross over into what we might properly call “thought”? As Brian Massumi contends, in his elaboration of affect theory, sensation involves “a directly disjunctive self-­coinciding” that is “always doubled by the feeling of having a feeling.”70 By means of this self-­ referential quality, sensation can no longer be treated as the other of thought. At the speed and simultaneity that video games usually demand, players engage in experiences that are, to turn back to Dewey’s language, both cognitional and cognitive: that is, players have experiences that might be described as “contemporaneously aware of meaning something beyond itself, instead of having this meaning ascribed by another or at a later period.”71 Thus, sensation and affect can be characterized as qualities of thought. Regardless of how precisely we characterize the role of affect in StarCraft, its gameplay—both the elements that are fully conscious and those that belong more to the realm of muscle memory—can be described as experimental in a few ways. At the start of this science fiction game, the player selects one of three races: the Terrans (human space colonizers), the Protoss (aliens

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with advanced technology and what are called “psionic” powers), or the Zerg (insect-­like aliens who operate together in a swarm). Through trial and error, the player learns about and tests the affordances of the selected race, including its strengths and weaknesses relative to the others. Players must learn to balance, for instance, the quantity of time spent constructing military units with the quality or strength of those resources. Across all modes of gameplay (including modes such as standard battle, capture the flag, or king of the hill for up to eight participants in multiplayer mode), gameplay includes base construction, resource acquisition and management, and eventually combat.72 Within the multiplayer mode, gameplay unfolds at the scale of a single battle in a world that is ephemeral and episodic. As Steve Choe and Se Young Kim observe in their reading of StarCraft, the point of the game is “not to accumulate resources, but to use them as efficiently as possible before the match is over.”73 Unlike a puzzle game, whether it be a point-­and-­click adventure such as Myst (1993) or a spatial rule-­manipulation game such as Baba Is You (2019), StarCraft does not ask players to engage in slow, experimental trial-­and-­error that yields a single correct answer. Instead, players experiment with tactics and strategies that must be modulated in response to actions taken by an opponent. As already noted, the gameplay and experimentation of StarCraft generally take place at incredible speeds, especially in the multiplayer networked mode. Players often use what are called “hot keys,” which are cued to particular combinations of functions, which exceed basic controls and make actions more time efficient. Given the episodic, rapid, and objective-­driven nature of this game, experimentation is largely limited to a process of learning and tracing the game’s system, its protocols, and its limits (what Alexander Galloway calls the process in which a participant “plays the algorithm”).74 To be fair, StarCraft introduces a large set of variables, particularly with the uncertainty that accompanies other human players and their strategies. At the same time, this game largely forecloses forms of experimental exploration, open-­ended community building, content creation, or participatory storytelling that are central to other games. While reflection about the game is of course possible, the game encourages more instrumental forms of tactical reflection during gameplay and strategic planning between rounds of battle (captured in part in the official StarCraft fan wiki with its over 7,000 pages of information and numerous player forums). By contrast, the game does not explicitly promote engagement, for instance, with its underlying colonialist and militarist representations or the informatic ideologies encouraged by its speed and play styles. Moreover, the game treats affective engagement and nonconscious cognition itself in a specific way—as a resource and limited 96

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quantity within gameplay, rewarding players who are better able to entrain their bodies to pick up on subtle cues and respond several times per second. In this competitive game, which brings with it forms of ableism inherent in many sports and games, affect becomes a means to the end of victory. The narrow parameters of gameplay and military objectives limit the experimentation suggested by more philosophical versions of affect that encourage questioning and problematizing subjectivity. Reflective thought amidst fast action offers only one pathway into the video game sensorium and its experimental potentials. Someone who experiments with and within the constraints of a game such as StarCraft can discover affordance of the game’s possibility space but is also changed by that experimentation through the forms of habit, attention formation, and thought that a correspondence with the game produces. Beyond the example of StarCraft and the quality of speed, video games bring with them a variety of other medium-­specific qualities that introduce (and sometimes instrumentalize) new affects and percepts that shape thought and come to constitute a new sensorium in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries. Though speed is important, the affective dimension of video games is not organized completely around this single quality. In order to animate more fully the affective foundations and possibilities of games—qualities of the experimental upon which the remainder of this book elaborates—I now offer a more extended case with a close reading of the video game Braid. In distinction to StarCraft, Braid adopts a multilayered pedagogy that demonstrates the medium-­specific ways that video games might more thoughtfully experiment with affect. In this game, the player is invited not merely to experiment within the game’s rules but also to think through the specific type of experiment that a video game is. Affective Procedures in Jonathan Blow’s Braid

Jonathan Blow’s single-­player video game Braid operates at a number of levels. It is both an experimental game and a procedural reflection on the risks and possibilities of experimental method in a historical era that becomes dependent broadly on technoscience and specifically on ubiquitous computing. This game invites the player to experiment in medium-­specific ways with affect as it unfolds in the playground of a video game. Though Blow developed Braid independently, the game became both a critical and commercial success when it was released through the Xbox Live Arcade in 2008, followed by PlayStation 3, Windows, and MacOS versions in 2009.75 Through its gameplay, Braid offers an ingenious twist on the classic 2D side-­

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Figure 2.2. The central mechanic of Braid ( Jonathan Blow, 2008), the dynamic

manipulation of time.

scrolling “platform” or “run ’n’ jump” game genre that originated in arcades and was popularized by the Nintendo Entertainment System console in the 1980s. Traditionally, these games rely on hand-­eye coordination and management of an avatar that jumps across platforms, traverses levels, collects items, and dispatches enemies. Braid explicitly alludes to classic platform games such as Donkey Kong (1981), Pitfall! (1982), and most of all Super Mario Bros. (1985). However, instead of testing a player’s digital dexterity with a controller, Braid privileges engaging spatiotemporal and procedural challenges. The central mechanic that it adds to the usual platform game repertoire is the dynamic manipulation of time (fig. 2.2). From the beginning of the game, the protagonist Tim

has the core ability to experiment with the reorganization of time. More than that, the player quickly discovers that Tim is functionally immortal. Whenever players make a fatal mistake or any action they wish to undo, they can hold down a button or key and reverse events. While in different worlds, Tim discovers still other experimental abilities that are critical to completing his trials. He can slow down or speed up temporal flow, synchronize or suspend different time streams, call on a shadow self that exists at a slight delay, and drop a magical ring that slows objects according to their proximity to its center. Each of these mechanics enables the player to experiment with the relationship between a mechanic and a particular level’s spatial attributes.76 As in any puzzle game, the player can engage in trial and error in order to complete a series of actions that make up a puzzle sequence with a correct outcome. More than that, however, these mechanics produce disquieting 98

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effects that accumulate slowly at a nonconscious or subconscious register, only becoming manifest after the game has been completed and is replayed in subsequent sessions. As the following analysis attempts to demonstrate, Braid uses game mechanics to make sensible the affective experimentation that gamers experience as subjects who simultaneously experiment and are experimented upon. On its surface, through both textual and spatial storytelling that exists outside of game mechanics, Braid appears to convey a fairly traditional narrative. A large part of the story comes through images of books that trigger blocks of text when the player passes across them. Here, Braid tells a simple story that initially resembles that of the classic Super Mario Bros. Tim travels from castle to castle, seeking a “Princess” who has been “snatched by a horrible and evil monster.” Admittedly, this chivalric fairytale frame breaks down even in the opening world. Unlike Mario, who sets out to save his princess and battle monsters, Tim is a postindustrial knight-­errant. He confronts guilt and a desire for forgiveness for an unknown wrongdoing that resists the teleological heroic redemption typical of the quest romance. As early as the opening screen, the game’s graphics, audio, and mechanics insinuate that something is amiss under the game’s surface. Though Braid departs from the rapid processing of StarCraft, it opens up an affective field through both nonconscious engagements of platformer gameplay and unconscious encounters with elements of the game’s multimedia environment that can be quickly absorbed by the sensorium but not immediately processed. The game’s unnerving details are subtle, easy to miss in an initial run-­through when a player is still learning the core mechanics and seeking progress. These signs become apparent, however, in replay. In its final moments, through the playable climax and epilogue, Braid suggests that Tim was a nuclear scientist. Furthermore, through text and a visual moment of nuclear eruption, the game reveals its core figure to be the atom bomb and the experimental technoscience that brought this weapon into existence.77 Long before Braid’s final series of more explicit textual revelations, however, the game hints at this post-­1945 historical context in a variety of ways— via text, images, audio, and game mechanics—but it does so obliquely. For example, in World 6, the background grows increasingly multilayered. In the backdrop beyond the playable foreground, ashen snowflakes fall, followed by layers of fiery colored cityscape, each darker and less distinct than the one before. These distant layers suggest an apocalyptic scene, a ruined city disappearing beneath smoke and flame. In a subsequent level of this world, gray platforms are decorated with clothing that map onto conventional figures or types: a cowboy and an astronaut outfit, as well as a Native American head

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Figure 2.3. Tim traverses the layered space of World 6 in Braid ( Jonathan Blow, 2008).

Figure 2.4. Tim completes World 6 in Braid ( Jonathan Blow, 2008).

dress, baseball cap, and police officer’s hat (fig. 2.3). Even later in this world, the player encounters a partially clothed child (an avatar of Tim) who is figured as a doll with potential outfits—the largest of which is a corporate suit, alongside a military uniform, a baseball outfit, and several others—in the background (fig. 2.4). These figures constellate a history of American empire that emerges with Western expansion (e.g., the cowboy, the soldier, and the indigenous person), crystallizes with the atom bomb and Cold War nuclear brinksmanship (e.g., the astronaut), and expands in a networked and informatic society (e.g., the corporate businessman). Though these figures are expressed as benign players and playthings (e.g., a baseball player)—mere 100

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Figure 2.5. Each world of Braid ( Jonathan Blow, 2008) ends with a nautical flag.

dressings for a doll capable of trying out multiple identities—they simultaneously take on a haunting presence, as ghostly garments without bodies. Particularly in light of Braid’s final disclosure, it becomes possible to read these figures as allusions to the horrifying imprints of those people killed by the atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki that left behind only shadows of incinerated human bodies on walls and pavements. Other visual icons point more directly to the game’s underlying meanings but require specialized information, conscious symbolic interpretation, and noninstrumental reflection, none of which are conventionally required of video game players. Each world ends, for instance, with a nautical flag (fig. 2.5). In one sense, these banners allude to the flags that mark the end of each level in Super Mario Bros. However, the careful player discovers that Braid’s flags are not identical to those that appear in the Mario games but rather nautical signaling flags used to communicate messages by the navy during moments of radio silence. Each of the flags in Braid, once deciphered, proves to be a warning. For example, the flag in World 2 (“N”) translates to “no” or “negative” and the one in World 5 (“X”) means “Stop carrying out your intentions and watch for my signal.”78 Instead of marking an achievement, as they did in the Super Mario series, these flags are now signs that dissuade the player from moving forward to subsequent worlds and to the ultimate discovery of the atom bomb.79 A video game such as Braid can be described as a process of interfacing with graphical representations or participating in an interactive story. However, from a medium-­specific perspective, a video game player might more properly be described as negotiating the imposed parameters of a designed

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system. To complete a puzzle-­platformer game, in particular, a player must functionally experiment with and reverse engineer its algorithm.80 Acutely aware of this quality of video games, Braid uses its nonrepresentational actions and procedures to explore the rules that emerged with the American development of the atom bomb and the digital computer. In this post-­1945 world, total planetary extinction by technological means became possible for the first time. This emergent technology threatened human survival and shook psychic life on a global scale. The bomb introduced a new category of disaster through its shocking instantaneity, unprecedented scope of destruction, and horrifying contamination of survivors—through both radiation and trauma. The weapon introduced an unprecedentedly wide gap between experience and action, emotion and consequence. With such changes, nuclear war has been pronounced by critics to produce “unspeakable” or even “unimaginable” effects.81 Braid avoids such mystifications and renders the experience and rules that compose the “atomic age” imaginable in another way—via ludic processes and video game procedures.82 Through the affects of video game mechanics, through which the player both affects and is affected by the game, Braid invites an encounter with the historicity of our ongoing atomic era and our complex dependencies on nuclear technologies.83 The game suggests that even if we insist on the unspeakability of the nuclear or the irreducible complexity of its emergence in the mid-­twentieth-­century world, it can still be accessed, however indirectly, via nonverbal processes. Unlike antinuclear novels and films, a video game does not simply depict nuclear catastrophe or speculate about it. Nor does Braid extend the Cold War impulse to simulate a scenario. It instead executes algorithms that reproduce the mechanisms of contemporary technoscience. Braid offers what Ian Bogost has called “procedural representation” by explaining “processes with other processes.” Processes, as Bogost observes, “define the way things work: the methods, techniques, and logics that drive the operation of systems.”84 Precisely in this sense, Braid is procedural. It uses gameplay processes—jumps, dashes, and especially temporal operations—to explore the logics that found a world produced by the bomb and the computer. A player’s sensorium can be said to expand in these rule-­bound moments. The game may move a player at nonconscious levels that include subtle affective intensifications and more apparent emotional shifts. To differing degrees, players may also become consciously aware of processes and procedures, protocols and limitations that characterize the historical present. Through play, techniques become both sensible and intelligible, approximating the experience of computer programming itself.85 102

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Rapidly though first-­time players of Braid may move, knowledge of the bomb may not reach them, consciously, until they encounter the iconic atomic flash that takes place in the final level—an event that is the game’s first explicit invocation of the atomic age. As Georges Bataille suggests in his compelling 1947 essay about Hiroshima, there is an unsettling connection between this particular event’s incomprehensibility and the unfathomable nature of history as such. In a reading of John Hersey’s masterpiece Hiroshima (1946), Bataille observes that unlike the victims of that first bomb, who could not yet imagine the nature of their fate and who, even in survival, were cast into a deeply traumatized unknowing, “Our case is different. We know.” The nature of this knowledge for those absent from Hiroshima but living in its shadow, however, is by no means straightforward. Unlike those caught in the microcosm of the emergent world that began within the bomb’s epicenter, most Americans learned from President Truman, on August 9, 1945, about the “historic event” of the atomic invention and its use. Unlike the methodical reporting of “the immediate experience of the catastrophe” in Hersey’s nonfiction novel, which seeks to capture something of the survivor’s experience, Truman’s announcement “situates the bombing of Hiroshima within history and defines the new possibilities that it has introduced into the world.” For Bataille, this speech is “historic” insofar as it introduces an event and pro­jects its “consequences into the future,” though it is not yet a revelation of the incomprehension of historical consciousness.86 The incomprehension of the event, in particular, is critical to the affective experience of Braid. As Jacques Derrida astutely observes, the “event” simultaneously “opens itself up to and resists experience.” He continues, “The event is what comes and, in coming comes to surprise me, to surprise and to suspend comprehension: the event is first of all that which I do not first of all comprehend. Better, the event is first of all that I do not comprehend.”87 In Braid, “that which” the player does not comprehend and that generates surprise, in the initial run-­through, is the nuclear situation and the periodicity that the bomb produces: a traumatic afterlife into the midst of which he or she is thrown. Even so, the game suggests a deeper layer captured by the second part of Derrida’s formulation. The gameplay is an experience that gestures toward the foundational state of being, the objectless fact “that I do not comprehend.” This revelation is the realization of its own historicity, affective capacities, and the emergence of video games as a medium of thought in the latter half of the twentieth century. To make sense of how Braid engages affectively with the history of the atom bomb and its own historicity as a video game, it is necessary to explain what the game does through its interactive gameplay. The nuclear situation,

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as Derrida notes, compels us to “re-­think the relations between knowing and acting.”88 In Braid, this relation is felt acutely. From the start, we act even as we cannot possibly yet know the consequences of our actions. The platform game genre makes action available, even requisite. We move forward through the first level, and then the next, left to right, completing the goals as quickly as possible, because this is how we, gamers, have been trained to play, time and time again. We experiment with the rules, mechanics, and objectives long before understanding the parameters or consequences of play. We expect, reasonably, that action will lead ultimately to victory, not to our world’s annihilation. Regardless, we act. Video games, after all, are not the passive activities they are often assumed to be. They demand activity. They absorb and obsess players. To be sure, playing Braid is a blast. But it is also active work that demands motivation and deep focus. A player who treats a video game like Braid as a passive entertainment or toy is likely to feel frustration and become incapable of progressing. At the same time, it is easy enough to concentrate only on the procedures that allow one to collect puzzle pieces, to pro­gress, and to beat the game. It feels natural to master the necessary hand-­ eye coordination to perform the mechanics, to pursue the objectives, and to keep one’s eyes on the prize: the Princess. There is violence at the core of video games, even in seemingly nonviolent experimental dimensions that inhere in their problem-­solving orientations, which Braid reveals through action, not exposition. This point is made most apparent in the ingeniously designed final level. In this finale, Tim runs across the bottom of an automatically scrolling screen that is no longer under the player’s control while the computer-­directed Princess keeps pace on the top half (fig. 2.6). He leaps across lava pits, climbs ladders, and waits for the Princess to pull levers that open doors and help him to outrun the pillar of fire always at his heels. Tim seeks to fulfill his promise and rescue the Princess from the monster, the brawny Knight, from whom she is ostensibly escaping. The level, following 2D game conventions, moves from left to right. Once Tim reaches the Princess’s bedroom, however, a bright flash fills the screen and the action changes. In order to complete the level, the player must now wind time back to watch the entire level in reverse. This time, the characters move uncannily from right to left, allowing the player to revisit all of their preceding actions in the opposite order. Instead of helping Tim, the Princess now performs these same actions to block his path. In this moving sequence, Tim becomes a villain who pursues the Princess, obsessively, as she seeks to evade him. Ultimately, she leaps back into the arms of the Knight whose presumably failed attempt at abduction we now understand, in reverse, as a successful attempt to save the Princess from Tim. During this 104

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Figure 2.6. Tim pursues the Princess in the final level of Braid ( Jonathan Blow, 2008)

prior to the epilogue.

final reversal, the player can only sit back and reflect on the consequences of Tim’s violence. The protagonist’s latent aggression is also the violence of the gameplay itself, which instrumentalizes the Princess, converting her into a mere condition of victory. Throughout the game, the Princess takes many forms, appearing through the game’s connotative plenum as the love object, the mother, the ultimate platform game trophy, the sovereign, the atom bomb, and “the end of history.” Tim’s relationship to the Princess, in all of these forms, can be characterized as patriarchal, imperial, and apocalyptic. Throughout its unfolding, Braid uses the affective and procedural qualities of video games to gesture toward a world informed both by nuclear arms and algorithmic procedures, but it also asks the player to engage in a subsequent reflection on that initial affective engagement. For example, in World 5, Tim encounters a new set of rules. He enters a level that, unlike all the others, remains unnamed, thereby suggesting a process not fully grounded in language. In every instance that he rewinds time, a shadowy doppelgänger (that can affect the surrounding world) carries out the exact actions that Tim performed just a moment earlier (fig. 2.7). Upon surveying the screen, the player discovers a key that must be carried across a treacherous pit filled with spikes. However, given the span of the trench, Tim is unable to make the jump on his own. The way to solve the puzzle is to jump, with key in hand, and reverse time at the very end of the arc. At that point, Tim must quickly climb to the other side of the pit and wait for his shadow self to repeat the action. When the shadow leaps across the pit, Tim stands on the other end and grabs the key. In the process, the shadow figure plum

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Figure 2.7. In Braid ( Jonathan Blow, 2008), Tim interacts with a shadow figure in an unnamed level of World 5.

mets to its death. To acquire the key and collect the puzzle piece, in other words, Tim must treat his shadow as a means to an end. While the fate of the figure is unknown, the solution to the puzzle, however satisfying the achievement, is fraught with unease. The instrumental act urges the player to experience and think, even if parenthetically, about the responsibility for consequences that action-­oriented games generally bracket or disregard. In this, Braid is not unique. A similar self-­reflexivity of and through game form plays out in video games such as Spec Ops: The Line (2012), Undertale (2015), The Beginner’s Guide (2015), and Jonathan Blow’s next game The Witness (2016), or in board games such as Brenda Romero’s Train (2009). The algorithmic procedure that structures the solution to the puzzle in World 5 resonates strongly with the central problem that Bataille sees with historical thought after Hiroshima. For him, the nuclear event prompts a new era driven by ceaseless action: “In truth, if one singles out Hiroshima for lamentation, it is because one does not dare to look misfortune in the face— misfortune’s profound nonsense, which is not only the result of the avoidable violence of war but a basic component of human life. As a consequence, one takes refuge in the world of activity, dominated by the principles of a virile reason.”89 Instead of processing the new form of horrific violence demonstrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, postwar American life more frequently took “refuge” in reason-­bound activity (a way of being that was authorized by the type of game-­theoretical logic I explore in the first chapter). The impulse that Bataille describes derives not from a mere circumvention of the concrete

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nuclear problem but from a more abstract worry for the future that became widespread in the postwar period. This drive to action has indeed fueled the global spread of American-­style capitalism, in both its economic and military capacities, since the mid-­twentieth century. By the early twenty-­first century, even as American hegemony wanes, we have entered an early phase of ubiquitous computing in which the entire world is converted into a platform that invites constant, quantified, and frequently compulsive activity. Braid’s pairing of a nuclear object with a video game object—not to mention the figure of the human Princess whom Tim also converts into an object—is hardly arbitrary. The American technoscientific and experimental apparatus assembled to fight World War II gave birth to the bomb, but it also produced a second technology that has, arguably, influenced our world in an equally dramatic manner: the digital computer. Emerging from the Manhattan Project, these two technologies have continued to reveal convergences through the Cold War years when computers were used to coordinate air defenses, early warning response systems, and C4I systems and to sustain the rapid growth of the military-­industrial complex.90 In the movement from mathematical computation to the proliferation of expressive digital media, the computer has proven to be more than a benign counterpart of the atom bomb or its redemptive coemergence. Video games—arguably the most popular of the expressive art forms made possible by computer technology—have become increasingly naturalized, especially in the overdeveloped world, but their history reveals more readily constructed and violent origins. This is already evident in early computer-­ run nuclear simulations and the game theory of the 1940s and 1950s. It is equally apparent in the first modern computer game: Steve Russell’s 1962 combat shooter Spacewar! In its themes and gameplay, this pioneering video game lays bare the military-­industrial research roots of the medium.91 The nuclear game—the competition for the bomb and the global dice contest and ongoing experiment of the arms race—already draws both metaphorically and materially on many of the fundamental features of a game. It includes rules (weapons protocols), an objective (strategic dominance), and a feedback system (the real-­time matrix of global monitoring). Perhaps the only core feature of a game that is not available is voluntary participation, which is made impossible with the construction of arms that threaten both incalculable accidents and calculated annihilation. Braid, which is acutely aware of gaming history, does not reproduce the Cold War game genres of the nuclear simulation and the war game.92 In addition to being facets of American life and postindustrial labor, in-



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terminable activity and reasoning are of course core pleasures of game form. From a cultural standpoint, the taste for activity that Bataille describes was also made manifest in the growth of game-­based leisure activities that served as postwar precursors to video games. These included the pinball machines, coin-­operated amusement devices, and novelty games such as the ones managed by Sega (Service Games) in American military bases from Hawaii to Japan in the 1950s.93 Bataille’s “world of activity,” then, is a total world that absorbs and blurs political, economic, and cultural dimensions of postindustrial life. Braid, which uses the action-­oriented mechanics of the platform game to enable the pursuit of achievements and progress, demonstrates the centrality of such activity to video game form in particular. While Braid still entails complicity with a greater “world of activity,” it is a complicity of which the player is made aware through participatory processes. The gameplay experience absorbs in a way that direct exposition alone, however lucid, fundamentally cannot.94 Though language is an important expression of human thought, we also operate procedurally. Computers externalize this aspect of thought. Video games in particular are well suited to using procedures to invite experiential engagement. Blow has even used the term “dynamical meaning” to convey the “idea of game mechanics communicating something emotionally and intellectually to a player, in a similar way that narrative does, through the very structure and interactions.”95 Unlike textual forms of narrative, such as novels, games invite interactive participation with a system that responds seamlessly to player input. Braid’s logical mechanisms, which foreground sequential progress and puzzle-­ solving, run contrariwise to its sensible features, which convey nuclear secrets through a pervasive affective atmosphere of anxiety. Even so, the sensible and the intelligible cannot be characterized as absolute opposites. Braid’s puzzle solving takes place as much through intuitive maneuvers and procedural experiments as it does through directed reasoning. Some actions become known only at a visceral level. In this sense, Braid’s procedural activity depends principally on affective processing. As I noted earlier, Massumi already offers an account of the doubling inherent in sensation, which suggests a mode of thought that accompanies affect. Berlant also puts this well when she observes that “not thinking” is “not the opposite of thinking.”96 There is certainly activity in Bataille’s sense, which compensates for an unknown present through an obsessive fixation on the future. Even so, Braid’s gameplay leads to a different type of activity: a processing of a historical present that exceeds pure reason. The present continues to be parameterized by scientific problems (nuclear weapons) and solutions (nuclear energy).

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But a historical sense of our age also depends on elements that are aesthetic, sensory, and affective. Along these lines, Braid’s video game form traces the phenomenal residue of a historical convergence between technoscience and aesthetics. Bataille reflects on the importance of the historical present through what he calls a “sovereign sensibility” that refuses to allow future prosperity to stand in as compensation for existing misfortune. This mode of awareness, which merges the sensible and the intelligible in the temporal span of the instant, serves as a response to the “goal-­oriented activity” of the atomic era. This “excessive” sensibility, as Bataille dubs it, is nonetheless “not unrelated to the birth of the atomic bomb.” While this mode is “doomed, from beginning to end, to a vanishing splendor,” he insists that “a movement that carries me beyond limits is more helpful than an oppressive worry and a fear of the future, which lead to eloquence and the common overemphasis on action.”97 A politics of the instant, which disappears in a flash, is of course unsustainable. Nevertheless, it challenges an account of the future as an objective, a zone to be mined through instrumental experimentation that yields better technologies or more optimized products. Thought, in Braid, spins out from the timespan of the instant. It unfolds as an interruption that is more than a prelude to immediate action. The instant becomes a break (“a pause” and potentially “a rupture”) that invites reflection on complexes of violence, guilt, complicity, and apathy. It opens up an explosive potential that was previously unavailable.98 In a game, as in life, an instant is sometimes all it takes to create a conceptual breakthrough that allows us, now, to see an arrangement of puzzle pieces in a wholly different light. Alternative Experiments: From Problem Solving to Problem Making

Braid maintains an instructive ambivalence through its relationship to experiment. The atom bomb is of course itself the result of an assemblage of controlled scientific experiments pursued under the banner of the Manhattan Project that was followed by the uncontrolled experiment of dropping the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to see how they would affect a living human population. Within Braid, the nuclear experiment thus serves a metonymic function, pointing to the myriad ways in which a logic of experimental problem solving has served forms of state and corporate power at the expense of marginalized people, from Josef Mengele’s horrific experiments on pregnant and disabled people at Auschwitz to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment that withheld penicillin from African American men in rural



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Figure 2.8. World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004) and its “world of activity.”

Alabama (we could easily add to this list Harry Harlow’s unsettling primate experiments that probed the psychology of attachment and myriad other experiments on nonhuman creatures).99 As I noted in the previous section, this logic of technoscientific experimentation, which privileges innovation and victory at any cost, finds a more benign counterpart in the competitive mode of video game play in which a desire to win a game overcomes the capacity to process warnings and signs that may appear incidental or irrelevant to that objective. Blow himself has remarked that his game Braid stands as a challenge to a video game industry that has historically had a narrow conception of experimentation, reproducing a small group of genres when the medium is capable of so much more.100 Representationally, we see this narrowness in the predominance of games designed by and for white, cis, straight, and able-bodied men. Procedurally, we see advanced capitalism’s experimental approach to artistic form and subject formation laid bare in games such as Blizzard Entertainment’s eminently popular World of Warcraft (fig. 2.8), which had not yet hit its peak subscriber number at the moment of Braid’s release. The blurring of work and play that is increasingly common in postindustrial society (an acceleration of “the world of activity” that Bataille already foresaw in 1947) is on display daily in those games in which players grind their way through repetitive tasks and undertake managerial responsibilities under the guise of play. The puzzle form and platformer genre’s orientation toward completion, which Braid both uses and criticizes, makes manifest an approach to games as experimental platforms for finding solutions to problems. The problem-­ solution framework takes a number of forms. Most commercial single-­player 110

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games are organized around the solution of problems, whether this means solving puzzles, overcoming obstacles, or recognizing patterns that enable one to defeat enemies or bosses. Outside of objectives within particular games, the rhetoric of gamification also elevates games themselves to solutions to problems in business, education, and other realms. For gamification enthusiasts, there is no problem that games cannot solve. Jane McGonigal, for example, advocates for “structuring real work like game work” because “reality is broken” and only games can motivate us to solve large-­scale problems.101 A way of thinking that reduces the world to problems and solutions is of course not unique to video games. Evgeny Morozov captures this logic with what he calls the broader ideology of “solutionism.” This ideology has been championed by Silicon Valley, even as it arguably has earlier roots in the very forms of modernity, empire, and technofetishism that become the multimedia unconscious—we might say the “braid”—of Braid.102 When solutionism celebrates and overextends a design and engineering perspective, all of the world’s problems seem to yield to technological solutions. As Morozov puts it, “Recasting all complex social situations either as neatly defined problems with definite, computable solutions or as transparent and self-­evident processes that can be easily optimized—if only the right algorithms are in place!—this quest is likely to have unexpected consequences that could eventually cause more damage than the problems they seek to address.”103 No matter how complex a problem might be, solutionism characterizes all problems as the symptoms of a narrowly defined inefficiency that can be overcome, for example, through mechanisms of quantification and self-­tracking. According to this view, experimentation is a flexible approach for finding solutions to problems. Video games are not unique technological expressions of solutionism, but they have become a central mechanism of this ideology in our time. The affective richness of video games offers considerable reason to move beyond a simplistic problem-­solution framework in thinking about game design and the experimental capacities of gameplay. This claim extends both to mainstream video games that promote unthinking and instrumental modes of problem solving (a tendency of which Braid already stands as an indictment) and games that promise to solve social problems (which are best illustrated by the genres of gamification and serious games). Here, I would like to follow and expand on an advocacy that Morozov gestures toward in the conclusion of his book. Writing about the culture of Silicon Valley, Morozov suggests that “one way to make design more self-­conscious and more sensitive to critiques of solutionism is to replace its fetish for psychology (and,

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increasingly, neuroscience) with a fetish for philosophy—both moral and political.”104 Another way to put this point, in the context of games, is that video games have taken too many of their experimental cues from fields such as psychology, neuroscience, economics, and finance—and not enough from philosophy and aesthetics. Through an overemphasis on psychology in fields ranging from public health to behavioral economics, games have often been evaluated as mechanisms for changing attitudes and behaviors.105 Causal research, including the most revered method of the RCT, seeks to discover whether “a particular program is helpful in solving a problem.” When a game is imported into a field such as health promotion, the mark of its effectiveness, as indicated by causal research, becomes “not only to predict, understand, and control behavior, but also to change behavior.”106 This approach should give us pause when researchers begin to apply it to game design and play. Given the links between design and evaluation, behavioral evaluations encourage an instrumental form of game design that is based on a reductive model of human thought and education. Though there are operational and pragmatic advantages to thinking in terms of the individual, especially in fields such as public health, it is worth remembering that the medium-­specific nature of video games depends on the mobilization of affect and systems thinking. In the variety of ways that I have been laying out in this chapter, video games open up a new sensorium and move us away from the broadcasting model popularized by radio and network television and the narrowcast‑ ing model developed by cable television—into the more recent “pointcasting” model of digital media.107 Within the regime of pointcasting, the “mass” of broadcasting and the “individual” of narrowcasting gradually lose ground to the Deleuzian “dividual.” In place of the “stimulus-­response” circuit of classical or operant conditioning that serves as behaviorism’s model of modification, the affective environments of digital media introduce a field of what Brian Massumi calls “priming.” This paradigm of priming, which I discuss in greater detail in chapter 3, shifts from modification to the more modest (but also more pervasive) goal of modulation, which entails nonlinear processes of “interference and resonance.”108 In this realm of modulation experiments, it is not a stretch to note that Las Vegas casinos and Facebook platforms for algorithmic development are currently, in behavioral (if not ethical) terms, decades ahead of university laboratories. Notably, the reason that Morozov gives for the preeminence of fields such as psychology over philosophy in areas such as game design is that they are “presumed to be more scientific than philosophy simply because they run

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experiments and tests.”109 But, however provocative the question may seem, what if we did not think of experiments as a method over which the sciences hold sole dominion? This may seem like a frivolous question, one that plays fast and loose with the concept of experimentation. Yet consider that even Nigel Thrift—a social scientist—argues that the work of social science in the digital world of the twenty-­first century should no longer focus on data collection and analysis that seeks merely to understand the world. As he observes, given the sophisticated data methods and unencumbered experimental programs pursued by corporations, including technological leaders such as Google, universities are no longer at the vanguard of quantitative social science. Though Thrift does not flesh out his alternative to this state of affairs, he calls for a radical transformation in how we understand knowledge: “an experimentalist orientation” or “art of experiment” that privileges “provocative awareness.” He imagines “an art-­science of giving rise to new developments.”110 Digital games, I contend, are perhaps the best test case for and the ideal form taken by the emergent contemporary art-­science of experiment.111 Certainly, gamification already transforms games into machines that posit, model, test, and instantiate propositions in an experimental fashion. Within this narrow approach, however, games usually serve as means to ends of scientific knowledge. Given the mutual dependence of technoscience and capitalism, games become an instrument for promoting neoliberal logics at an embodied level and literally influencing the flows of capital, for instance through bitcoin mining and skin gambling in video games.112 Without completely dismissing these developments, my claim is that games can be more than external tools that serve science. Games, differently conceived, can themselves serve as an alternative form of experimental art-­science that move us from the realm of problem solving toward problem finding or, more properly, problem making (a trajectory that I explore in greater detail in chapter 7). My conception of experimentation through games depends upon a different understanding of reality than we see within most contemporary game design. Within the current paradigm, many game and simulation designers claim fidelity to the so-­called real world as a way of grounding subsequent experimental activity. At a representational scale, this is true of popular video games such as Grand Theft Auto V, which received considerable critical acclaim for the technical feat of modeling the fictional city of Los Santos upon Los Angeles. At a procedural scale, this appeal to reality plays out with gamified products such as the Fitbit that claim accuracy in recording exercise, sleep, weight, and other variables in order to better motivate healthy



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behaviors. Within the broader regime of gamification, then, it is a progressive alignment of games with a shared and already existing real world that imbues them with potential experimental value. By contrast, the alternative concept of experiment that I am positing relies on a different sense of reality, which we can draw from the field of science studies, particularly the making of scientific facts elaborated by thinkers from Ludwik Fleck to Bruno Latour.113 The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard is exemplary here for the way he approaches science as a creative process that is not merely a discovery of the real world. In scientific experimentation, he observes, “one does not point to (montrer) the real, one demonstrates it (démontrer).” He describes science as “a realism at one remove” that “consists of realized reason, reason subject to experimentation.” Reason, in this view, is “realized” or made real through the act of experimentation; the experiment “demonstrates” a phenomenon in the sense of expressing it or making it evident. Indeed, for Bachelard, the hypothesis is not merely an educated proposition that is external from the phenomenon itself. As he notes, “The whole doctrine of the ‘working hypothesis’ seems to me destined to quick obsolescence. To the extent that hypotheses have been linked to experiment, they must be considered just as real as the experiments themselves. They are ‘realized.’ The time of the adaptable patchwork hypothesis is over, and so is the time of fixation on isolated experimental curiosities. Henceforth, hypothesis is synthesis.”114 From this latter perspective, experiment, including the formation of a hypothesis, is fundamentally an act of synthesis and creation. Through an experiment, one makes a meaningful problem, constructing a hypothesis and playing it out. This type of experiment is closer to the one that both the designer and players of Braid participate in together. Admittedly, even as this version of experimentation pushes against scientific positivism, it cannot consequently be claimed as a wholly anticapitalist notion. In many ways, a comparable concept already fuels the experimental economy that undergirds recent history. Corporations engage in constant experimentation through forms of human-­centered design and iterative development. Similarly, consumers are invited to join the experimental process via free labor extended toward social media content creation or video game beta testing—not to mention the perpetual forms of data collection that attend web browsing and mobile app usage. Even so, the instrumentalization of a creative experimental science in an environment rich in media technologies does not completely compromise or colonize its potentials. Experiments can be (and are) instrumentalized in service of an ideology of problem solving. At the same time, as the remainder of this book argues, video games can also 114

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point us toward more open, though no less urgent, processes of making better problems and problematics. Conclusion: Experiment Beyond History

Video games are not an arbitrary or minor case for understanding the historical present. They are one of the most widely palatable and accessible media that also relies on many of the same hypermediated interfaces, experimental algorithms, procedures, and networked environments—as well as the corresponding behaviors of hyperattention, rapid information processing, and distributed cognition—that now characterize everyday media experiences in the United States and many other parts of the world in the early twenty-­first century. Given these qualities, video games could be dismissed as inherently complicit with contemporary capitalism.115 Yet, the remainder of this book hopes to demonstrate that video games have experimental affordances that create alternative ways of being and acting. Experimentation is not simply a technique that creates future possibility but also a technology for manifesting unrealized historical potentials. If nothing else, the case of Braid demonstrates that experimentation can recognize the importance of history without maintaining an obsequious relation to it. Deleuze and Guattari put this well when they write: To think is to experiment, but experimentation is always that which is in the

process of coming about—the new, remarkable, and interesting that replace the appearance of truth and are more demanding than it is. What is in the process

of coming about is no more what ends than what begins. History is not experi-

mentation, it is only the set of almost negative conditions that make possible the experimentation of something that escapes history. Without history experimentation would remain indeterminate and unconditioned, but experimentation is not historical. It is philosophical.116

In this way, history becomes a ground for the experimentation that exceeds it. The events that are actualized through the unfolding of history can always be reassembled through the myriad unactualized potentials that made up the initial affective field of an event’s possibility, even if that field has retroactively been reduced to a single and static origin. The mediation accomplished by video game form is not a break with history, but it might be approached, in Fredric Jameson’s influential formulation, as “a projected solution, on the aesthetic or imaginary level, to a genuinely contradictory situation in the concrete world of everyday social life.”117

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That gamers can celebrate rationality, progress, and activity while opposing the prospect of nuclear war suggests a “genuinely contradictory situation.” That player-­consumers in the overdeveloped world can affectively support world peace or efforts to curb climate change without evaluating the ways in which everyday ways of acting contribute to systems of global antagonism and environmental breakdown suggests a similar tension. Games such as Braid not only make visible such tangles but also involve the player, complicitly and actively, in their provisional creation. Departing from Jameson’s idea, video games also offer platforms for something more than a mere “projected solution” to the contradictions of the present. In place of linear solutions, video games invite experimentation. They create possibility spaces that allow not only completion and victory, but also experiential play and metagaming that activate the nonhistorical space-­ time of what Friedrich Nietzsche called the “untimely.” For Nietzsche, untimely meditations enabled a “gay science”—or as the original German title, Fröhliche Wissenschaft, more powerfully conveys, a “joyful study” or, with the allowance of a creative deformation that resonates with this chapter, something more akin to a “joyful experimentation” that unfolds in the interstices of science, philosophy, and aesthetics. Such joyful experimentation stood in contrast to monumental histories and unmoving dogmas. Working from within the history of capitalism, with an eye toward untimely rabbit holes and exploits that appear in its midst, the remaining chapters of this book treat games as a key medium for constructing the concepts that enable this new type of experimental art-­science.

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​3

Choice This is the central problem: does “economic man” choose his ends by rationality alone? Margaret S. Archer (“Homo economicus, Homo sociologicus and Homo sentiens”)

Thinking begins in what may fairly enough be called a forked-­ road situation, a situation which is ambiguous, which presents a dilemma, which proposes alternatives. John Dewey (How We Think)

There’s a population or swarm of potential ways of affecting or being affected that follows along as we move through life. We always have a vague sense that they’re there. That vague sense of potential, we call it our freedom, and defend it fiercely. Brian Massumi (The Power at the End of the Economy)

Playing any game entails enacting a series of choices that carry uncertain outcomes. Though choice in games is frequently approached via formalist analysis of available branching pathways, this chapter situates decision-­ making in video games in the broader context of contemporary economics. In particular, the following pages examine ways that the concept of rational choice resonates across the field of contemporary economics and the cultural field of video games. It is important to emphasize the point already elaborated in chapter 1—namely, that there is a considerable mutual influence between neoclassical economics and neoliberalism on the one hand and games on the other. In many senses, the concept of rational choice is visible in the genres and mechanics that remain dominant within the paradigm of gamification. In the most basic sense, players make choices when allocating limited resources in a simulation game like Theme Park (1994), gathering resources within limited time in a real-­time strategy game such as Age of Empires (1997), or bidding in auctions in multiplayer games such as World of Warcraft (2004). Choices in such video games do not necessarily require careful and reflective decision-­making that entails variable narrative or ethical consequences (as for instance in the BioShock, Fallout, and Mass Effect series). Nevertheless, in all of these cases, the player seeks to maximize their business, empire, or guild—or at a more abstract level, which is arguably no less 119

driven by capitalist or colonialist logic, to win the game. Victory depends on making choices that maximize utility. In most games, utility takes the form of payoffs expressed through point systems, in-­game currency, items, or a character’s experience level. One is welcome to play the game in a variety of ways, but the normative and competitive mode of gameplay reinforces, even trains, the player to adopt a paradigm of rational choice. Despite the close alliance between contemporary economic thought and game design, this chapter does not settle for either a description or basic critique of the role of rational choice theory in contemporary video games. Instead, I focus on alternative ways that video games, as aesthetic objects, ramify the history of economics and might help us experiment with the cultural logics of rational choice. Arguably, the central way in which a player interacts with a video game is via decision-­making, which becomes formally accessible through mechanics and narrative contexts. Players make consequential choices through a range of interactions from preset branching factors in interactive narrative games such as The Walking Dead (2012) to sliding morality systems such as the karma scale that players can influence in role-playing games such as Fallout 3 (2008). Even as this chapter draws from such examples, it does not attempt to taxonomize or make sense of all of the varieties of choice in games. Nevertheless, it acknowledges the importance of decision-­making and the expanded freedom of movement in game spaces as an increasingly sought-after player desire, especially with the growth of open-­world games in the late twentieth century. As background to my ultimate analysis of choice and freedom in experimental games, it is important to understand how video games draw from the logics of rational choice. Rational choice theory is a framework for understanding human behavior that finds its roots in neoclassical economics. The approach was championed and expanded considerably by the Chicago school of economics in the latter half of the twentieth century and has since been broadly adopted by economists. According to this theory, in the process of making any decision, an individual faces measurable preferences and tradeoffs among which she must decide in order to maximize her utility. As such, rational choice theory replaces an older paradigm within which the economic actor is evaluated according to her efficiency (a value that rises to prominence in both Fordist and Taylorist techniques) with one in which she is driven by rational choice that does not require a consciousness of overall systemic efficiency.1 As this brief overview already suggests, rational choice theory operates initially at the scale of the individual. In the United States, the intellectual transition from welfare economics to the economized individual can be 120

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traced in part to Kenneth J. Arrow’s influential 1951 book Social Choice and Individual Values.2 Though the individual is the key unit within this economic theory, the concept of choice, understood as the cut within a field of alternatives, bridges the gap between individual agency and the collective market. Indeed, a key assumption of rational choice theory, and of neoliberal thought at large, is that beyond individual gains and losses, each actor’s pursuit of gains translates into the systemic flourishing of society at the macro scale.3 In other words, even as an economic actor pursues self-­interest or “satisfaction,” the rational nature of her decisions contributes, without her total or required understanding of this influence, to aggregate collective behavior and market outcomes. In the second half of the twentieth century, rational choice theory carried forward political and economic ideas established within earlier Enlightenment liberal thought and promoted rationality as the primary model for explaining economic behavior. Like the economic game theory discussed in chapter 1, the concept of rational choice gained appeal from the fact that it could be applied beyond the narrow sphere of economic optimization problems and used to understand any situation in which human actors make decisions. Gary Becker goes as far as to argue that the economic approach predicated on rational choice is “applicable to all human behavior.”4 Even sociologists Margaret Archer and Jonathan Tritter, who criticize the paradigm, simultaneously posit that “rational choice could plausibly lay claim to being the grand theory of high modernity.”5 Rational choice theory is important not only as a prominent theory within the history of ideas but also because of the impact it has exerted on everyday economic and political life, ranging from individual to transnational scales. As political scientist S. M. Amadae observes, “Despite the exact correspondence of the phenomenal rise of rational choice theory with the Cold War period, few theorists now appreciate the profound interconnections between the development of that apparently objective social science methodology and the ideological clash between the two superpowers.” Individualism and free choice became, in the period immediately following World War II, capitalism’s antidotes to the totalitarian threats introduced by Nazism and communism, as well as the major competing economic philosophy of Marxism. During the Cold War, political sovereignty became discussed increasingly “in terms of consumers’ choices rather than within the familiar language of citizenship.”6 During the twentieth century, rational choice grew in prominence as powerful organizations, from RAND to the IMF and the World Bank, used it to shape national and international policies. Even as the critique of rational choice theory in this chapter is largely

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conceptual, it is important to acknowledge the fundamental irony that this theory posits choice as the central mechanic of a system of capitalism that makes meaningful choices impossible for the majority of the world’s population. To push against rational choice theory as the dominant paradigm of decision-­making, and to better engage its internal contradictions, I approach choice from the standpoint of affect. Rational choice theory bases all economic activity on decision-­making undertaken by a rational subject. However, nonrational, irrational, and nonconscious decision-­making is central to everything from relations on social media to trades across financial markets. While competitive gamers may not associate these types of choices with video games, I argue that games have much to teach us about affective modulations of choice in the historical present. In a theoretical overview, I draw heavily from philosopher Brian Massumi’s book The Power at the End of the Economy, particularly as it frames the phenomena of choice blindness and priming within a digital media landscape. In part because Massumi’s ideas remain largely abstract in his philosophical articulation, video games offer a concrete aesthetic context in which to animate and interrogate this frame. For this reason, this chapter explores choice in single-­player video games through an analysis of the first-­person interactive metafictional game The Stanley Parable (2013) and choice in networked games via the experimental networked game Moirai (2013). Finally, I offer an extended reading of the critically acclaimed, single-­player, role-­playing game Undertale (2015) to put forward a more robust account of how an understanding of affect transforms the way we might think about and experiment with choice in video games. Priming Media

Before turning explicitly to video games, I would like briefly to consider the relationship between three of this chapter’s key concepts: choice, affect, and digital media. Rational choice theory, as the name implies, contends that individual rationality is central to how human choice operates. Moreover, choice becomes understandable and calculable through the category of preference. Margaret Archer explains that, in its transformation into an increasingly empirical and quantifiable science, economics has converted human “pleasures” into “preferences” in order to turn “an unobservable human quality into observable and measurable behaviour.”7 Preference, unlike pleasure, fits into a traditional science in which experimental conditions can be created to observe, with precision, how people make particular choices. Similarly, preference enables the creation of falsifiable models. For economists, unlike psychologists, the process that leads to a choice or the context 122

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of the preference is irrelevant; only the consistency of the outcome with the rational choice paradigm matters.8 By contrast to rational preference, many economists have implicated experiences such as pleasure as interfering with choice. For example, in Accounting for Tastes, Becker advocates modulation and control of emotions, rather than their elimination. He recommends choosing or phasing out emotions—in some cases buying influence or creating ideal conditions for the right type of love through marriage.9 Far from an anomalous position, the entire field of behavioral economics (discussed in chapter 1) goes even farther down this path by suggesting correctives that can rectify irrational emotions via rational programs, including gamified systems. Archer contends that this reductive process “subjects emotions to the process of rational choice itself” and “necessarily commodifies them.”10 Contrary to rational choice theory, some social scientists have made arguments regarding the importance of emotion to decision-­making.11 Though many of these criticisms are meaningful, in this chapter I would like to build on the frame established in chapter 2 in order to shift my own critique of rational choice theory from the realm of observable emotion into the realm of affect, as it is understood in humanistic theory. In his work, Brian Massumi explicitly analyzes the ways that nonconscious affect is important and unavoidable in the realm of rational choice and the operations of economic markets. “When markets react more like mood rings than self-­steering wheels,” he argues, “the affective factor becomes increasingly impossible to factor out.” To think about the role of affect within markets, it is useful to shift gears from economic theory to business practice. Historically, business and finance have both embraced affect, at least in the version where it is articulated as nonconscious cognition or intuition. Massumi points out that, during the 1990s, management philosophy and business motivation books began to mine a variety of nonrational concepts and contemplate their application to profit maximization. He writes, “This is the period in which capitalist enterprise became an ‘art’ of decision making. The management bookshelves were full of ‘creativity,’ ‘gut feeling,’ and ‘zen.’” This trend continued into the 2000s with myriad theories of “intuitive action” and reflections on how to “modulate the powers of nonconscious decision” that were considered crucial to microscale behaviors and macroscale economic systems.12 Massumi largely uses his discussion of the business world’s interest in affect-­adjacent concepts such as intuition and fast thinking to demonstrate that the apparent celebration of rationality and disavowal of irrational human modes by economics in the period following World War II masks a deeper reliance on such concepts. Though he never adopts the versions of nonconscious cognition discussed by social scientists such as Malcolm Glad

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well or Daniel Kahneman, Massumi does insist on the importance of affect to understanding human choice. He asks, if the rational actor is an economic fiction, “who or what decides?” Massumi’s answer to this question is that it is not the sovereign individual who generates the cut within a field of potential or the actualization that constitutes choice. Instead of rational calculation that is conveyed by means of a subject and active voice, “decision happens: affectively-­systemically, in the nonconscious processual autonomous zone where mutually exclusive states come together.” He adds, “The event decides, as it happens.” Even in this distributed model of choice, which does not privilege the individual, a self may participate “directionally” in a choice—as an adverb, rather than as a noun. If this characterization of choice feels too abstract or obscure, that unfamiliarity is arguably a testament to the very success of rational choice theory in constructing the sovereign individual decider as the figure of choice. But even if the language of affect theory offers a visceral abstraction that is far from everyday language, there is a more common word for this process. As Massumi puts it, “A doing done more through me, self-­relating, than by my I. That eventfully brings a creative moment to life in a way that registers as a change in me that is also world-­changing. That word is intuition.”13 Intuition, though it still privileges the individual who registers it, already marks the space of undecidability from which a decision emerges, either as an extension of an atmosphere or as the punctuated introduction of an event. Even outside of affect theory, the concept of rational individual preference has been undercut through empirical research on “experiential plasticity” and “choice blindness”—as well as “preference reversal” in behavioral economics. Numerous studies have now revealed that people often lack conscious awareness of their preferences or choices. For example, in one study that Massumi discusses at length, research subjects made a choice between two completely different flavors of tea and jam, respectively. Without their knowing, researchers reversed these flavors and ran a second taste test. In approximately two-­thirds of cases, the participants lacked awareness of the reversal and affirmed their preference of the other flavor. Such studies indicate that not only will participants in research studies frequently make choices that are other than those that they report to prefer, but that it also does not take much to nudge them into making consumer (and in other studies, even moral) choices that are directly opposed to their professed preferences.14 Importantly, Massumi cautions us against interpreting the results of choice blindness studies as wholly continuous with findings by classical conditioning in the late nineteenth century and operant conditioning in the

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early twentieth century. Regarding the tea and jam study, in particular, he observes: It is not assimilable to either of the two phenomena most often associated with the term, classical Pavlovian conditioning and Skinnerian operant condition-

ing. The first creates reflex associations between stimuli, while the second uses a rigid system of punishment and reward to reinforce or deter target behaviors. Both function in a highly controlled, closed environment and operate according to a stimulus-­response model. The conditioning in the examples just pre-

sented, on the other hand, were in uncontrolled, open environments. The tea-­ and-­jam survey was conducted from a stall in a supermarket, and in the moral

convictions survey passers-­by were recruited in a city park. In neither case was a stimulus-­response model employed. Rather, participants were brought into an interaction proposed to them in the open environment.

As opposed to closed laboratory experiments (recall the model of the randomized control trial discussed in chapter 2), the choice blindness and experiential plasticity studies unfold in comparatively open contexts. The participants themselves remain unconditioned—at least in the sense that Pavlov or Skinner would have understood that term. At most, “the situation and the encounter” are conditioned. Notably for my own argument, Massumi even uses a game metaphor to articulate the difference between conditioning and what he characterizes, in the open world experiments, as priming. In the latter case, the experimenter is “acting on the rules of the game, rather than directly on the players.” To bring Gilles Deleuze’s distinction into play, rather than molding an individual into a particular, normative, and constant form as conditioning might do, priming involves modulating a dividual through situational “cues” that orient, activate, or prepare responses within a broader spectrum of outcomes.15 The binary cuts of rational choice and preference thus leave out crucial dimensions of affective modulation. To connect this point explicitly to video games, consider once again the video game case of Braid from chapter 2. This game serves as an example precisely of environmental priming and modulation, rather than of conditioning and molding. In fact, Massumi’s distinction helps clarify another specific way in which Braid can be described as “experimental.” The game invites a gamer into a familiar “open” digital environment of a platformer game that is not highly controlled, instead allowing players to play worlds and levels in the order they select, without the risk of losing lives in the process. The game primes the player toward a particular play style and orientation toward ob-



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jectives, but it does not work on the player to pair an experimental stimulus with a neutral stimulus (classical conditioning) or to dole out the frequent punishments that characterize arcade games or previous platformers such as Super Mario Bros. (operant conditioning). One of the reasons that Tim’s violence in Braid is so difficult to see for many players until the game is over is because the player is invited into a known genre and a familiar situation that is then slightly adjusted to achieve a misrecognition (in this case, the revelation that Tim is the antagonist who is stalking the Princess and not the hero who is saving her). An important way in which Braid is experimental, then, has to do with its use of familiar game mechanics and constraints (rather than sharp rules) to prime the player and invite them into a pedagogical realization and subsequent reflection on the nature of games in our time. My ultimate question in this chapter concerns how video games can concretize the affective concept of choice that Massumi sketches out. As such, before returning to a series of game cases, it is important at this juncture to consider the historical influence of contemporary digital and networked media on human decision-­making. Such a position runs in the face of a great deal of critical theory that brings with it a strong skepticism that media technologies can expand or improve choice. This distrust burgeons with key Frankfurt school writings that focus primarily on aural media such as radio and visual media such as film and television. For example, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer describe the culture industry as “producing, controlling, [and] disciplining” consumers who “are regaled, whether on the screen or in the press, with human interest stories demonstrating freedom of choice” but in fact “remain objects.”16 Herbert Marcuse goes further to describe the “technological society” founded upon dogmatic rationality and characterized by various forms of administration and automation of labor, leisure, thought, and choice. For him, technological progress yields “a whole system of domination and coordination” which appears “to defeat or refute all protest in the name of the historical prospects of freedom from toil and domination.” While technology expands the apparent range of consumer choice “between brands and gadgets,” this sense of choice masks an underlying homogeneity. As he puts it, “Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear—that is, if they sustain alienation.”17 These mid-­twentieth-­century theories have influenced later ideology critique in both critical theory and media studies that examines the ways in which both technological infrastructures and superstructures limit the very decision-­ making and liberty that they promise to enable.18 126

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Analyses of technological societies and contemporary media reveal many instances in which technologies undermine a capacity for rational choice and freedom. Moreover, the rise of a “post-­truth” society exacerbates the problems already apparent within film propaganda and television advertising. Particularly within the early twenty-­first century, it has become more difficult than ever to imagine that rational choice might serve as the foundation to a world dependent on networked media that open users to the types of recommendation algorithms that Cambridge Analytica infamously used to analyze and microtarget Facebook users in order to influence the 2016 US election. Of course, the idea that digital and networked media undermine rational choice assumes that the neoliberal subject who can weigh available data en route to a utility-­maximizing decision was, as many economists would have it, once a fact. Instead of claiming that technology-­at-­large or contemporary digital media in particular eliminate choice, I am interested in a more nuanced account of how media technologies alter how we think about and make decisions, particularly if we understand choice as a cut within an affective field, rather than an act of pure individual agency.19 Though Massumi focuses, in his philosophical mode, more on affect as such than on media, he already offers the beginnings of a media theory of affect. If priming, unlike classical and operant conditioning, relies on open environments rather than closed laboratories, then digital and networked media provide an unprecedented means for priming choice and modulating behavior. Though they are closely related in the present, it is worth considering both of these categories separately. In analyzing each category, the next two sections focus on two video game cases: The Stanley Parable (for digital media) and Moirai (for networked media). These games do not merely serve as examples of digital and networked priming, respectively. Instead of manipulating their players into certain behaviors, these games have a pedagogical and reflective dimension that invites players, as collaborators, into the experiment that is cofacilitated through the activity of gameplay. Choice in Digital Environments: The Stanley Parable

First, let us consider how decision-­making, as both conditioning and priming of choice, occurs in digital environments. For my purposes, a digital, nonnetworked, and single-­player video game will serve as the best type of object for this analysis. Drawing from the categories of conditioning discussed in the previous section, this type of game could be likened to a closed laboratory experiment. Admittedly, the resemblance is bidirectional, as scientific labs can

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also be likened to games. Economist Richard Thaler even characterizes the closed lab experiments undertaken by behavioral economics founders Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky as “‘one-­shot’ games.” Critics have noted that such experiments “lure people in the lab into making a mistake,” in a linear and unrepeatable exercise, without giving them an opportunity to learn from that mistake, as they might in the “real world.” Though open learning environments offer something that closed laboratories do not, Thaler concedes that the former too often entail a somewhat artificial and controlled environment. He compares a context in which learning takes place to the world that Bill Murray’s character inhabits in the film Groundhog Day. In that film, the protagonist relives the same day perpetually, learning from mistakes and attempting alternative actions until the desired result emerges. Thaler’s passing example of Groundhog Day is notable, in part because that film already relies on a video game aesthetic that posits a replayable world that constructs a space of safe failure.20 Via this comparison, one could say that video game play, like most contexts in which one can learn through systematic experimentation, still unfolds in at least a partially closed environment. Though single-­player video game environments are largely finite and artificially constructed, I would argue that they can still approximate an “open” world. Take, for instance, The Legend of Zelda (1986). This game offers a navigable environment with 360-­degree movement in a 2D space. The player has the option of playing the game’s first eight dungeons (prior to the ninth and final dungeon opened by the Triforce of Wisdom) in various orders, even as elements such as relative difficulty and item requirements reinstate a modicum of linearity. Other video games introduce choice through elements of multilinearity in the form of limited alternative routes to a fixed endpoint (e.g., the warp zones in Super Mario Bros.), optional or earned quests (e.g., side quests in Donkey Kong Country 2), and inessential in-­world discoveries (e.g., the first Easter egg in Adventure) (fig. 3.1). Still other games offer more multilinear and open-­ended play through sandbox environments that encourage forms of play that exceed goal orientation (e.g., experimentation with the affordances of a fictionalized “Wild West” in the Western-­themed Red Dead Redemption 2) and foreground creative expression (e.g., building in the single-­player mode of Minecraft). Regardless of the particulars, nearly all video games invite players to dwell within and explore their worlds. Players choose not only creative routes to preset goals but also, via metagaming practices, ways of playing with game worlds that were not prescribed by the designers.21 Instead of molding players to engage a game in exactly one way, most games modulate player choices, behaviors, and habits within a limited range of actions. In any game, players are never free to do anything they want; 128

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Figure 3.1. Warp zones in World 1-­2 of Super Mario Bros. (Shigeru Miyamoto, 1985)

introduce multilinear paths through the game.

designers always create rules, ranging from direct constraints such as required sequences of moves to indirect constraints such as in-­game physics. Such rules limit what players can do. Already, however, the experimentation afforded by these video games exceeds the type of limited experiments— “one-­shot games”—run in social scientific labs. The aesthetics of video games are formed in significant part by the concept of choice, which is generally articulated in terms of individual decision-­ making. From this perspective, video games give a structure to choices and invite players to make them with differing consequences. Choice operates less as a moral or ethical litmus test (indeed, even in games with morality systems, players often make choices contrary to their own values in order

to experiment with the system) and more as a means for engaging and interpreting a game.22 In some senses, player choice mediates between game form and experiences of play. Miguel Sicart puts this point well when he observes that the open-­ended nature of gameplay in which one can explore the space created by the designer “allows players to inhabit the space with their values while they interpret the conditions of the space by selectively adopting the values proposed by the game as relevant to that experience.”23 In this formulation, a player is affected by the values and structures imposed by designers but can also negotiate those elements in relation to her own values and preferences. To return to the discussion of conditioned choice from the previous section, numerous digital games certainly engage in operant conditioning through the uses of rewards and punishments—for instance with fixed-­

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ratio reinforcement schedules in video games that award consistent points for successful play or with variable-­ratio reinforcement schedules in casino slot machines and randomized loot boxes in video games such as Overwatch. However, digital games without networked components can also operate in the mode of priming or modulation that Massumi discusses. Less linear games tend not to target specific behaviors in rigid ways. Instead of asking players to have precise responses to set stimuli or rewards and punishments, they often create tendencies through modulation. Gamers develop a set of approaches and tactics for approaching a new game, improvising within the rules and limits of the designed space. Gaming conventions train players to learn and apply such tendencies across perception and action, even when they are not essential to victory. For instance, players may be primed to move around the camera in a 3D game such as BioShock: Infinite to attain and maintain awareness of the surroundings. They might hoard items that they discover if the game has a crafting system as in The Witcher games or else quickly sell off items with fewer combinatory possibilities as in Persona 5. In other cases, they might develop a sense of curiosity about finding potential hidden Easter eggs, secrets, or extra elements such as the eight hidden stars in Braid or the six gems hidden on every floor of Luigi’s Mansion 3. Though examples of priming appear in most games, I would like to offer a more sustained analysis of a game that goes a step further by calling the player’s attention to such processes and experimenting with them. The Stanley Parable is an independent game designed by Davey Wreden, with the initial free version (a modification of Half-­Life 2 via the Source engine) released in 2011 and a more polished and expanded remake sold via Steam for Microsoft Windows and MacOS in 2013.24 In this single-­player game, you take the role of Stanley, employee number 427 of an unnamed company. In a nonplayable cutscene, the narrator (voiced by British actor Kevan Brighting) explains that Stanley is happy with his job. His work consists of sitting in an office, pushing buttons on the keyboard in the order and for the duration he is told to push them. One day, however, the orders stop arriving. This is the moment that the player receives control over the avatar. The game takes a first-­person perspective through a three-­dimensional space. Without visible hands or feet, the player adopts the position of a floating cogito. Unlike a first-­person shooter, the player does not engage in combat. She is allowed only to navigate the space and occasionally to interact with select elements of the environment. As the player moves through the company’s building, now seemingly abandoned by all other employees, the narrator describes her actions and movements as she performs them. At first, there is only one available pathway of open doors through the space. However, the player quickly dis 130

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Figure 3.2. A choice between two doors (and, in certain endings, a third door) in The Stanley Parable (Davey Wreden, 2013).

covers a room with two doors. The narrator observes, “When Stanley came to a set of two open doors, he entered the door on his left” (fig. 3.2). The disconnect between this prescribed verbal observation and the forking path of the spatial configuration foregrounds something new in the game: a seemingly meaningful choice about whether to obey the narrator and go to the left or resist and go through the right door. This moment of sharp choice, regarding which door Stanley will traverse, dramatizes the type of decision-­making that is implicit within and required for the execution of most video games. The Stanley Parable unfolds as an interactive metafictional reflection that offers multiple branching choices and leads to nineteen different endings. Throughout each iteration of the game, the player receives orders via narration but has the capacity to do otherwise, within limits (that is, the game is multilinear but not substantively nonlinear). At the simplest level, The Stanley Parable can be read as a satire of video games that promise freedom through interactivity but in fact condition players to engage in a narrow range of button pushes, actions, and pathways that all lead roughly to the same place. The discourse of expanded freedom of choice and exploration in games dates back at least to the proliferation of three-­dimensional games in the 1990s and continues through the marketing of open-­world games such as Grand Theft Auto V (2013) and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017).25 At times, The Stanley Parable’s critique of freedom in video games is relentless. For example, one of the pathways reveals that the company for which Stanley works has a hidden “mind control facility” that

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Figure 3.3. The mind control facility in The Stanley Parable (Davey Wreden, 2013). Screenshot taken by Jorge Figueroa, “The Stanley Parable,” March 1, 2014, https://​www​.flickr​.com​/photos​/jiff01​/12867350615.

surveils and conditions its employees, revealing that “freedom meant nothing” (fig. 3.3). Similarly, the game criticizes the arbitrary rewards and punishments that are a central motivating element of most video games. In one of its most metagamic attacks on operant conditioning, the game offers optional “achievements” that a player can unlock via the Steam platform. Most contemporary games include such additional achievements, usually outside of the goals of the game itself, which add extra value to gameplay. In the case of The Stanley Parable, the achievements are excessively arbitrary, asking the player for instance to “Click on door 430 five times” and “Go outside (Don’t play The Stanley Parable for five years).” Moreover, the game links its medium-­ specific critique of conditioning in video game design to a broader sociopolitical critique of neoliberal precarity. Some routes through the company lead the narrator to point out that Stanley might be “fired” and to chide the disobedient player, “in such a competitive economy, why had he taken that risk?” It is easy to stop short with an account of The Stanley Parable as pure satire, one whose target is a blend of rationality and behaviorism that forecloses meaningful choice in video games. Yet the game asks the player to do more than recognize the limits of rational choice in a preauthored space. She must also act and choose within those limits. Choice here is not about individual motive and agency. Even as the nineteen major pathways of the game can be treated as “puzzles” to be solved, they are not logic puzzles that demand sound reasoning or an algorithmic approach. The player discovers new fea 132

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tures of the space through an experimental process of trial and error. In some cases, the opening of new pathways happens through the inversion of reasonable engagement with the game via inaction. For instance, at the very beginning, if the player does not move for approximately two minutes, remaining in Stanley’s office instead of exploring what has happened to the company, the narrator breaks his silence, criticizes Stanley for his inability to choose how to act, and restarts the game. In another instance, deeper inside the building, Stanley enters a hallway that includes a broom closet. Though there is nothing of notable value or interest within the closet, the player can remain inside it. This decision gradually triggers the narrator to erupt in a series of invectives. If the player remains inside the closet, persisting through boredom and lack of event (aside from the narrator’s occasional mockery), the narrator will reset the game and board up the closet, so that Stanley cannot enter it again. The role of choice in The Stanley Parable is crucial to its status as an experimental game in the sense I have been developing throughout this book. Scientific experiment frequently relies on a narrow empiricism that, as Marcuse puts it, is organized around “operationalism in the physical [and] behaviorism in the social sciences.”26 From the perspective of behavioral economics, in particular, even irrational behavior should be corrected or rerouted by rational means. Yet Massumi advocates for a different experimental practice. As he observes, when reason enters into cooperation with affect, this opens up the possibility for a new “creativity” and room for maneuver. In his vocabulary, an experimental “corrective” departs notably from the supremacy of a course-­correcting sovereign reason. In place of top-­down modulation, an experimental space is one of “trial and error.” In common parlance, trial and error involves serial tests that seek the correct outcome. For a fictional example of this type of trial and error, we can return to the protagonist of Groundhog Day who replays the same day countless times until, at the end of the film, he gets the day “right” and can finally break out of the purgatorial cycle of repetition.27 This is exactly the type of trial and error that Massumi does not have in mind. By contrast, he posits a trial and error that involves “the iterative restaging of event conditions that progressively explore the reserve of potential in an event, as part of a continuing series of events, affectively interlinked at a distance.”28 This latter experimental posture explores an event’s multiple and coexisting potentials, without merely aiming at a calculative optimization of outcomes. One notable achievement of The Stanley Parable, in this context, is that it does not merely represent but also enacts this process of trial and error (on an admittedly finite basis). Amidst choices that activate various “trials,” the game does not treat “errors” as incapacities

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to reach an intended or privileged end. Errors instead serve as activations of previously unknown potentials. Choice, then, operates differently in the space of an experimental game than it does within a gamification that privileges or directs a player toward rational choice. Of course, it is possible, whether in a satirical or a sincere mode, to interpret The Stanley Parable as an allegory of control systems that recuperate any possible resistance to them. Every ending, after all, leads the game to restart, placing Stanley back in office 427. Indeed, only if the player follows every direction that the narrator offers is Stanley told that he is free: “No longer would anyone tell him where to go, what to do, or how to feel,” the narrator proclaims during this ending. “Whatever life he lives, it will be his.” As this pathway reaches an endpoint, the player loses control over Stanley, and the final moments unfold as a cutscene that can only be watched. According to this reading, which posits the rhetoric of freedom itself as a tactic of a control system that seeks obedience, no matter what choice the player makes, she is always routed into a preauthored pathway offered by the game’s system. Such an interpretation depends on a strong opposition between human players versus the game’s system and platform. Yet for all of the limitations imposed by The Stanley Parable’s multilinear design, the video game enables symbol manipulation and spatial expression that exceed binary decision-­making. Choice, here, cannot be reduced to a fantasy of unlimited freedom by a human individual at war with an unfeeling and inhuman technological system. The player’s role is more akin to what Katherine Hayles calls a “nonconscious cognitive assemblage” that integrates player, narrative, software, and hardware systems. From this perspective, choice becomes a distributed effect that exceeds the individual player’s agency in obeying or defying a narrator who stands in for the software’s choice architecture. In fact, The Stanley Parable actively interrogates the efficacy of individual rational choice in cases when it unfolds in a system that has been largely designed by someone else. While the outcome of any choice in the game may lead one down yet another predesigned track, rather than yielding the agency or freedom that a defiant player might seek, the player is primed to think about the meaning of those decisions. The moment Stanley steps outside of his office, the narrator observes, “All of his coworkers were gone. What could it mean?” Again, if Stanley finds his way into his manager’s office, the narrator observes, “Stanley was once again stunned to discover not an indication of any human life. What could it mean, Stanley asked himself.” At every turn, the narrator asks questions that he does not himself answer or else prompts Stanley to think about different aspects of his behavior. As doors open slowly between parts 134

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of the building, the player has ample time for reflection. This invitation for player-­generated meaning suggests a model of choice that is not predicated on free will, as with traditional ethical theories. The game’s decision-­making model more closely resembles what Hayles describes as one focused on “interpretation of information” that occurs in interactions between interpreter, interpretive systems, and the environment.29 In The Stanley Parable, choice becomes a mechanic of experimental practice. In his philosophical analysis of video games, Sicart calls such reflexive and interpretively rich engagement “ethical gameplay.” He calls for “ludic experience in which regulation, mediation, or goals require from the player moral reflection beyond the calculation of statistics and possibilities.” Gameplay, in this sense, exceeds in-­game goals or, in a multilinear game such as The Stanley Parable, a desire for completionism. An ethical engagement entails a pedagogy that requires “an understanding of games as objects with values embedded in their design.” Such an understanding is not merely an attempt at mastery, absolute comprehension of the design, or reverse engineering of what the designer created. Instead, players add something to the game beyond the role of consumer into which they are so often interpellated. In several senses, players undertake dynamic experiments through which they create the game they are playing, while also being shaped by it. In addition to executing the game by moving their avatar or altering variables, within the constraints established by the designers, they also contribute their own reactions and interpretations, only some of which are registered via the controller or keyboard input. Their choices trigger results that enable new interpretations.30 While ethical choice is a significant circumstance in video games, choice exceeds the realm of ethics—particularly in Sicart’s sense of a moral system that guides conduct. Experimental gameplay, in my sense, uses various types of choice to disrupt a continuous experience or a flow state, insofar as it requires players to think about the construction of systems in which they are temporarily participating—rather than merely being within or giving themselves over to those systems. Players are of course affected by any game, even as they think about or explore the parameters of its designed system (this is one reason that affect—rather than feeling—is an ideal category of analysis for video games, as affect includes the perception of its escape and containment, its potential and actualization). Digital games, even without networked connectivity, invite active experimentation. Such experiments often depart from the goal orientation of gamification. As Bernard Suits notes, games nurture a “lusory attitude” in which the player accepts rules and designed elements for no reason other than the fact that they make

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possible the activity of gameplay.31 Playing a game, in other words, can be an aesthetic experience in Kant’s sense of “purposiveness without purpose.”32 Even as games are increasingly applied to solve problems, one of the form’s unique capacities is its challenge to teleology. Games, of course, can be teleonomic, without being teleological: they include primings, orientations, and aims that may exceed absolute objectives. Their structures may only become meaningful in an emergent process of experimentation that embraces their constructedness. Such experimentation unfolds within a narrative or technical system, but it might also, as the next section suggests, happen in an even more open environment that includes other players. Choice in Networked Environments: Moirai

Networked media environments share many of the qualities discussed in the previous section, which I will not review here. However, games with networked affordances offer even greater opportunities for priming affect and modulating choice that are worth further attention. If choice is unavoidable in any digital game then it is also expression (a specific form of choice) that becomes obligatory in a networked game. Even without focusing on gameplay, a virtual world such as Second Life or IMVU invites participation via communication and expression among players who share a network. Players make numerous choices of movement, self-representation, affiliation, and enunciation even in a networked social space that includes few explicit gamelike activities. In a broader sense, the participatory act of expression is important to priming within emergent contexts. Unlike the set stimulus-­ response of classical conditioning or the reward-­punishment of operant conditioning, priming “induces participation, rather than imposing a form.” Through “incitation or triggering,” priming “brings something to life in the situation.” To put this another way, while conditionings target individuals, priming alters choice at the scale of the overall environment. Priming does not necessitate rational choice theory’s faith in the link between individual choice and market relations, but it does actualize choice at multiple scales. Networked technologies and social media applications invite and even produce “deliberation-­without-­attention” and the “choice blindness” effects discussed earlier.33 Whether scrolling through a Facebook newsfeed or falling into a Flipboard article k-­hole, the quality and duration of choices may exceed rationality or clear-­cut individual volition. Networked choice cedes to dividual tendencies that both affect and are affected by the platform in and through which choice is expressed. Though priming occurs in any networked game, an instructive case is Moi 136

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rai: a ludic experiment that foregrounds different types of choice enabled by a broader range of networked games. The game was created by the independent Australian team of Chris Johnson, Brad Barrett, and John Oestmann. It was released for free on GameJolt, itch​.io, and IndieDB in 2013 and then on the more popular Steam platform in 2016.34 In June 2017, the game was taken down because of persistent hacker attacks that the small development team did not have the resources to fend off. In this extremely short game, which may last anywhere from about seven to fifteen minutes, the player moves through a small three-­dimensional space, beginning in a town and wandering to a nearby cave where a woman named Julia has allegedly lost her son. During the exploration of the cave, a farmer approaches you with a knife and blood on his overalls. You can ask the farmer a series of three questions in any order about why he is covered in blood, why he has a knife, and what he has done in relation to moans that are echoing through the cave. The answers to these questions differ, depending on the particular playthrough. Following the responses, the player is given a choice either to “Let them pass” or to “Attack.” The player makes a choice, continues further into the cave, and discovers Julia dying deeper inside the cave. She explains that after finding her son dead, and having lost her husband, she has attempted suicide. Julia asks the player to help her end her life: another binary choice that the player makes. Exiting the cave, the player runs into a different farmer who asks the player the same three questions that she asked the previous farmer (fig. 3.4). The player has the opportunity to type in any answer she wants. Immediately after that input, the game ends. You are told: “It is up to the next player of this game to choose your fate. Just as you chose for the previous player.” After submitting your email address, you receive an email explaining whether the next player killed you or spared your life. It is worth remarking that Moirai is, from the outset, an unusual networked game insofar as the other player’s expressions and choices are not experienced in real-­time through chat or direct messaging. Formally, the game has less in common with most multiplayer online games than with avant-­garde networked games with asymmetrical interactions such as Between (2008) and We, the Giants (2009) or more mainstream games that allow players to leave messages for other players to discover during their own play, such as Dark Souls (2011) and Death Stranding (2019).35 On a first playthrough, the player is asked to make decisions without understanding the full context or the consequences of those choices. What may appear to be an arbitrary or repeatable choice turns out to determine the outcome of another’s story. Given conventions of a multiplayer game, the player is likely to assume that they are playing a single-­player game until the final moments. Yet the ex

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Figure 3.4. Leaving the cave in Moirai (Chris Johnson, Brad Barrett, and John Oestmann, 2016).

plicit prompts for expression—initially via a limited decision tree and then via an open input field—resemble the range of interface elements that prime choice within any networked game. One of the achievements of Moirai is that it complicates the idea of decision-­making in video games as a “safe” choice. This characterization of choice in games is common, particularly in discussing their experimental affordances. Game journalist Laura Parker writes that morality systems in games “allow people to imaginatively play with compelling possibilities in a safe manner, experiencing what it is like to be a very different person in a very different situation.”36 Sicart also adds that games can “involve players by engaging their moral being even in the context of ‘safe’ play.”37 In Moirai, choice may at first appear safe, insofar as it amounts to a replayable experiment in a closed environment. Subsequently, however, it turns out to unfold in the riskier realm of relationality, impacting not only another human player but also one’s own narrative. While this game can be dismissed as avant-­garde and unrepresentative of the majority of video games, it raises the question of how “safe” the experimental choices in any game really are. Human experiments and interpersonal choices always entail risk. Choice in Moirai impacts not only the game’s world but also subsequent players of the game who are limited by the decisions that the previous player makes. 138

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The fundamental lack of safety in a game like Moirai becomes even more apparent when we take a step back from the game itself and consider its reception context. Namely, on June 29, 2017, the designers of the game published a letter indicating that, henceforth, the game would be unavailable. As creators of a “small experimental game,” they explained that they did not have the resources to fend off persistent attacks by hackers. This event is merely one episode within a media ecology in which choices—to post content or publish video games, for instance—carry consequences and risks of disruption by hackers and online trolls.38 The frame of safety is relevant to decision-­making in video games, but also to how we think about rational choice. It is notable that even rational choice theory treats an individual’s choice as a type of safe space or protected bubble. Though not all varieties of economic game theory advocate predatory behavior over cooperative decision-­making, the best-­known model of the prisoner’s dilemma does support strategic choice regardless of the ethical costs or material consequences.39 That is, any individual’s choice, no matter how predatory, becomes allowable because of the assumption that the aggregate of all choices, even if they appear unethical, upholds the market. In this sense, individualism becomes a virtual and self-­enclosed space that influences the overall market, without leaving the individual with a clear sense of a model of or context for that influence. In order to explore rational choice theory’s lack of broader context, for any individual choice, I now turn to one final case: the video game Undertale. Contextualizing Choice: Undertale

Undertale is a role-­playing game, or RPG, that serves as a foundation for a more sustained critique of rational choice theory.40 The game was designed by Toby Fox and released for Windows and MacOS in 2015, Linux in 2016, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita in 2017, and Nintendo Switch in 2018. In addition to garnering widespread critical acclaim and analysis, the game exceeded one million sales in the first six months after its release.41 The game tells the story of an ancient war between humans and monsters. Following a human victory, the monsters are sealed underground. Many years later, at the start of the game, a human child (the player character) falls into this underworld. From the opening screen, the tone of the game is uncertain, pointing to a disturbing and repressed history. In the training level, the player is rescued by a monster named Toriel (a wordplay on “tutorial”) who serves as the caretaker of the ruins. The seemingly beneficent guide introduces the player to the world, offering a series of commands that she must complete in

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order to pro­gress. Already, the player is primed to obey. But the guide’s verbal beneficence is juxtaposed with a secretive atmosphere in which it is clear that important information and context are being withheld. The gameplay of Undertale follows familiar RPG video game conventions, with some variations in mechanics. The interface oscillates between two views. First, the player explores the world in a map view that allows avatar control from a 2.5D and 3/4 perspective (fig. 3.5). Second, the player intermittently enters a battle view in which she sees an image of the monster at the top of the screen. The battle mode occurs either when the player triggers a random enemy encounter during exploration or when the player enters a scripted event such as a boss battle. All enemy encounters combine a turn-­ based menu mode in which players make decisions about actions or attacks with a real-­time “bullet hell” format in which the player’s heart-shaped avatar must avoid enemy attacks (fig. 3.6). In the battles, the player has the option to attack, perform one of a list of nonviolent actions, use an item, or show mercy to the monster. In the first battle of the training level, the player is encouraged to stall for time rather than to fight. Even so, the conventions of an RPG dictate that the primary mode of interaction with a monster—particularly one that is attacking and threatening the player—is to attack. Moreover, as the player quickly discovers through trial and error, in Undertale killing an enemy yields “EXP” (which conventionally stands for “experience points” in RPGs) that contribute to growing “LV” (which conventionally stands for character “level”). Nonviolent actions are available and battles can be completed by withstanding enemy attacks. However, the amount of effort required to take this nonviolent route departs from the experience of other RPGs and does not make sense from the perspective of utility, especially given that the nonviolent player does not receive any stats reward of EXP and LV. Additionally, nonviolence requires persistence, even stubbornness, of continued nonattack actions. Oftentimes, monsters chide the player for not attacking, further reinforcing that nonviolence is a tactical blunder. Undertale carefully demonstrates that, just as preference-­driven homo economicus is not the preestablished actor but the produced result of rational choice theory, so the contemporary gamer becomes a product of learned video game conventions and habituated behaviors, such as attacking enemies in a role-­playing game.42 Yet this demonstration is subtle, leaving the intervention largely under the surface. That is to say, the game’s critique does not unfold primarily at a representational register. At its surface, the world of Undertale is filled not with horrific monsters but with whimsical creatures who have a cartoonish and pixelated look. Central characters such as the 140

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Figure 3.5. Map view exploration format in Undertale (Toby Fox, 2015).

Figure 3.6. Turn-­based format of battle in Undertale (Toby Fox, 2015).

skeleton brothers Sans and Papyrus engage in constant slapstick and punning. Yet the deadly possibilities of the world come to the surface in response to how the player handles battle mode. Even in the early portion of the game, Toriel reveals that each human being who falls into the underground eventually dies. If the player shows mercy and does not kill the guide in the first boss battle, the antagonistic and recurring character Flowey appears and observes mockingly, “In this world, it’s kill or be killed. So you were able to play by your own rules. You spared the life of a single person.” Instead of offering clear feedback as video games generally do, the tone of this comment only extends the game’s atmosphere of uncertainty. Alongside moments of ethical indeterminacy, Undertale unfolds like a conventional RPG in which the adventurer embarks on a quest through the world of the underground to discover Asgore’s castle and, with it, a pathway back to the surface world. It is only in the game’s final moment, just prior to the boss battle with Asgore, that Sans appears to reveal that the “LV” stat does not stand for “Level” or “Love” as previously suggested but for “Level of Violence” and that “EXP” stands not for “experience points” but for “Execution Points.” Far from a sudden plot twist, this revelation reinforces the player’s experience of the rules of the world and their choice up to that point. Instead of conditioning the player or even requiring violent action, as so many video games do, Undertale engages in priming that modulates player actions indirectly through adjustments of the atmosphere and rules of the game. Unlike a game like Braid or Spec Ops: The Line—both of which require the player’s complicity with systems of violence and oppression—Undertale offers a genuine choice to the player. The menu pre­sents a variety of action options and openly gestures toward the nonviolent possibilities in the tutorial level, even as it uses habit and formal conventions to guide the player’s decision-­making process in a more normative direction. Amidst its various choices, a specter haunts Undertale—the specter of genocide. All the choices that the player makes have implications and enter into a choice matrix that yields variations on three primary overarching paths through the game: the “Neutral” (in which the player kills at least one but not all monsters), “Pacifist” (in which the player kills no monsters), and “Genocide” (in which the player kills all monsters).43 Even before the three major routes become apparent, the choices to kill cumulatively unsettle the player. In crafting its affective atmosphere, Undertale introduces the quality of context that predates the player and substantial duration to decision-­ making. Choice, in video games, is often binary and instantaneous, as with the famous “moral” decision in BioShock (2007) to be “bad” (and harvest the Little Sisters) or “good” (and spare them)—a choice that exists largely to gen 142

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erate a different cutscene at the end of the game. Unlike this type of trigger-­ happy choice that occurs with a single click, Undertale’s decision-­making unfolds in a complex context and extended temporality.44 From the beginning of the game, the player is thrown into an uncertain present. The game’s present, however, should not be mistaken for rational choice theory’s adherence to what Archer and Tritter characterize as “the autonomy of the present tense.” Within a rational choice framework, the individual agent’s decision-­making is explained via their preferences. “Yet this presupposes the possibility of identifying preferences prior to their manifestation in a social context.” In other words, even as rational choice theory treats preferences as unfolding in a perpetual present, all preferences in fact have a social and cultural history. Moreover, preferences can change over time: a possibility that the rational choice approach tends to minimize, ignore, or foreclose. As Archer and Tritter put it in the terms of experimental research, “if preferences can never be the dependent variable, capable of transformation through accumulated experience and changing circumstances, then an agent lives in an eternal present, governed by preferences which are set in concrete.”45 In its assumption of a stable present, rational choice theory minimizes the unexpected emergences that come from changing preferences, rethought decision costs, and improvisatory actions taken by creative and self-­reflexive people who learn over time. By contrast to the autonomous present of rational choice theory, Undertale throws the player into a present that is palpably obscured by an unknown past. This present is one that we could characterize as a thick present or what Harry Harootunian calls a “historical present.”46 Undertale is not designed to encourage decision-­making based on immediate preferences but rather on an experimental process of coming to know the world. That process takes considerable time. Overall, a single full experience of the game is likely to take 6.5 to 19 hours on average—and the game is designed to encourage multiple playthroughs.47 Choice here only happens through trial and error, again of the variety described by Massumi as “the iterative restaging of event conditions that progressively explore the reserve of potential in an event.”48 The potential of Undertale’s “event” cannot be reduced to its three major routes. The game’s temporality exceeds the historical present into which one is thrown and depends on reflection that unfolds across an extended duration. Two of the major routes through the game—the Pacifist and Genocide—require not only a single decision point but a commitment to a choice trajectory that lasts for several hours. Because economists, as Archer observes, “typically deal with given preferences,” they also “freeze the frame in the present tense and generically take no interest in their source or forma

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tion.”49 However, preferences may contribute to contexts, and contexts also shape preferences. Context includes the historical and spatial environment in which one makes a decision, but also the process by which one decides and follows through on a decision.50 A substantial part of the gameplay of Undertale has to do precisely with exploring and gradually coming to understand the larger context of its world. In a sense, the more you learn about this world, the more you realize that your choosing is performed not by you but through you as an actor in a larger environment. Though this experience troubles and complicates individual sovereignty, it does not take away the player’s responsibility for the consequences of their actions. In Undertale, the logical extreme and ultimate consequence of rational choice is genocide. The conflation of rational choice and genocidal behavior may seem unintuitive, particularly given that rational choice theory emerged, in part, as a purported alternative to the two systems of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism that plagued the early-­to-­mid twentieth century and introduced unprecedented genocidal projects to national territories of Europe.51 Even so, in Undertale, genocide is not the absolute other of rational choice. In the game’s system, the player gains experience points and associated strength, as well as greater quantities of gold, by following a violent route. In other words, this self-­centered approach generates short-­term gains. With the genocidal elimination of all monsters in the game, this instrumental rationality satisfies a desire for the player’s completionism. Though attacking enemies may be the habitual default for anyone who has played other RPGs, it is important to point out that most players (who do not have prior knowledge of the game) will pursue it even though it is not the route of least resistance, yielding more difficult monster battles and a longer overall campaign. Genocide in Undertale plays more than a representational function in its signification of the most unethical action imaginable; the possibility of genocide also adopts a nonrepresentational dimension that unfolds through game mechanics and decision-­making. To put this in a more direct way, genocide in Undertale is not an account conveyed through exposition or spectacle but a choice that the player makes through an ongoing series of actions. The importance of action to thinking through and against genocide is made evident by sociologists Robert Fine and David Hirsch, who analyze the question of what goes into a decision to commit a crime against humanity or to contribute to genocide. Analyzing the Nazi Police Battalion 101, as described by Christopher Browning in Ordinary Men, Fine and Hirsh observe that most individuals who participated in killing Jewish people, on their first assignment, were resistant to the act and needed to be hardened to it. At least

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at the level of consciousness, choice did not come before acts of violence. Instead, “The ‘decision’ to commit crimes against humanity seems to have followed the first killings rather than to have preceded them.” To be clear and to avoid an easy misunderstanding—the precedence of action in no way absolves these killers of responsibility but instead shifts the focus of ethical evaluation from conscious rational choice to nonconscious and interpersonal affect. As Fine and Hirsch clarify, “The making of a mass murderer is a social process in which there is an interplay between the act and the actor in which the commission of the deed may precede both its signification and its justification by the actors involved.” The experience of Undertale follows a similar logic. Instead of expressing a preference through conscious choice, the player of this game makes a quick decision to attack and kill enemies based either on a loose sense of video game conventions or on a more habitual sense of the RPG genre. Choice operates as a constellation made up of routine, pattern, flow, quick experimentation, and other nonrational ways players approach games that they are playing for the first time. Choice is partially nonconscious, but action and experience change decision-­making processes and reveal “the malleability of preferences.”52 The precedence of action in decision-­making might be dispiriting from the perspective of rational choice theory, but it also introduces an empowering possibility that choice and freedom are experimental constructions, rather than selections made from finite and preset structural options. This point about a constructed freedom is of course already integral to thinking across cultural studies, including within scholarship in critical race theory and affect theory.53 As Massumi observes, a politics that is grounded in affect replaces “the personal freedom of choice of the individual subject of interest” with “the relational fabulation of affective facts.” Such a politics registers that “freedom is not chosen: it is invented,” even when that invention is experienced as discovery.54 Politics, in this sense, becomes an assemblage of experiments with impersonal freedom and affective involvement in systemic choices. If, as I argued earlier in this chapter, priming involves modulating a dividual through the shaping of situations and atmospheres, an affective politics goes a step further by introducing a pedagogical element that expands dividual sensitivity or care regarding each action and the atmosphere that contributes to an unfolding event. To be concrete about this, the player of Undertale is certainly primed to engage in violent actions, especially at the subtle level of internalized genre conventions that precede any material benefits (e.g., gold) to attack. However, the game exceeds its initial priming by using aesthetic cues (including text, graphics, audio, and mechanics) to



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highlight the violent network of complicities in which the player has chosen to participate and to invite the construction of different pathways and alternative freedoms. In its experimental capacity, Undertale allows one to play out different possibilities. The game entails a modicum of forgiveness, even as it never “forgets” what past choices you have made in previous playthroughs.55 Unlike a game such as Braid, which is utterly forgiving with its rewind mechanic, Undertale is a different type of experiment that registers not only decisions made within the present playthrough but also those made in past sessions of the game. Even with a reset and nonviolent playthrough of the game, Flowey chastises the player who has killed a monster in a previous game: “I know what you did.” Each player choice involves an experience of varied influences on one’s freedom, the freedom of others, and the game’s world. In a sense, the outcomes of different play routes in Undertale can be quantified in terms of novel narrative content that they unlock. Nonetheless, a key aspect of the experience of Undertale has to do with affect management that comes, for instance, with maintaining pacifist or genocidal actions for several hours. The game is not interested in the rational subject’s binary logic of preference: a quantitative logic that breaks down at any branch of a decision tree to a fundamental decision between pain or pleasure, inefficiency or utility, discontent or satisfaction. Instead, the game foregrounds what different affect theorists might call the qualitative dimensions of intensity, ambivalence, or even life within an impasse.56 Drawing from the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, Massumi observes that “what determines the intensity of an experience . . . are the contrasts it holds together.” This form of intensity, which is particularly available through aesthetic experience, introduces a mode of experiment that exceeds the adjudication of comparative outcomes. Such an intensity might occur during a bittersweet denouement of a narrative that generates pain tinged with pleasure. In Undertale, the intensity of the genocidal route might come from a gamer’s sense of completionist accomplishment at destroying every monster amidst a flow state enabled by a high difficulty level, coupled with the experience of affective uncertainty and guilt about the impact of one’s actions on the game’s world. The marker of intensity is that “the terms that are held together in their contrast, but minus their contrariety, stand in the incipient experience for copossible tendencies that elsewhere, in other experiences, will refuse to cohabit.” The simultaneity of these conflicting possibilities does not take the form of evident alternative pathways but floods perception as “lived hypotheses directly experienced in the genesis of the perception.”57 There are many cases of video games—for instance, in the BioShock, Mass 146

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Effect, Fallout, and The Walking Dead series—in which players consciously make a decision between menu items that map onto clearly demarcated alternatives. By contrast, in Undertale (as well as games such as Papers, Please), one does not select a route in so straightforward or literal a manner, especially upon an initial playthrough.58 Instead, one charts and maintains a path based on experiments with and recalibrations of the game system. Choices made throughout gameplay mark a variety of coexisting decision frameworks, some of which remain in irresolvable tension with each other and are returned to the player for ongoing reflection. As literary critics working within affect theory have demonstrated through myriad close readings, intensity is channeled through novels, short stories, and poems. To be sure, such aesthetic texts generate an affective field, but they are ultimately thought experiments. While still preserving elements of thought experiment through their narratives and media aesthetics, video games can more fully be understood as experimental actions. A reader of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway or Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is invited to reflect on and feel a protagonist’s regret. By distinction, the player of a video game such as Undertale commits acts that are not mandatory and therefore elicit an experience of regret for which the player, at some level, feels responsible.59 Importantly, the experimental actions of video games do not happen in a vacuum. Gameplay actions and mechanics in a game like Undertale unfold in a specifically digital environment. In other words, video games do not just teach people how to think about and make choices in general: they spur decision-­making, reflection, and experimental learning in and about the digital and networked environments that play a historically unprecedented infrastructural role in everyday life. Video games are commonly disparaged for being reductive simulations of the real world or else capable of teaching lessons that apply only to digital contexts. Yet the world of the early twenty-­first century is increasingly one where choice is a quality of human and nonhuman assemblages that carry both conscious and nonconscious dimensions. In our time, human choices unfold not only within institutions or social contexts (which already complicate the idea of individual decision-­ making) but also in relation to and dependency with drones, artificial intelligence, and algorithms that impact access to information. To return once more to the specter of genocide, this threat takes a distinctively contemporary dimension in Undertale. For writers such as Hannah Arendt and Zygmunt Bauman, genocide adopts a unique form during modernity that is shaped by political technologies such as bureaucracy and racism, as well as scientific technologies such as Zyklon B and the atom bomb.60 Yet if video games follow from and belong to a longer trajectory of modernity, they

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also resonate with more precise qualities of postindustrialism that this book analyzes under the rubrics of gamification and neoliberalism. The model of modernity’s industrialized death and bureaucratic mediation finds its horrific manifestation in the Nazi Holocaust or the German Empire’s earlier genocide of the Herero and Nama people in South West Africa. The virtual genocide simulated through Undertale arguably has more in common with killing that is mediated through human-­drone assemblages (even if it does not culminate in the PTSD that often attends drone piloting). One of the most terrifying visions of a specifically game-­mediated genocide remains Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game in which the titular protagonist is told that the military simulations he has been fighting were actual battles that culminated in the extermination of an alien species. Card’s vision feels even more feasible at the contemporary height of gamification than it might have at the time of the novel’s publication in 1985. In the novel, in-­game choice is defined by circuits of unknowing perpetuated by the world government (the aptly named “Hegemony”), as well as game design, weapons technologies, and modes of technological habituation. Though Undertale does not play out in a real-­world or near-­future scenario, it integrates the player into self-­ reflexive processes of thinking and choosing that are endemic to this era of gamification. Even as violence in a video game is in no way equivalent to (or arguably causal of) violence in the physical world outside of it, the violence in a game like Undertale (or Braid) nonetheless approximates the violence of abstraction: a pervasive logic that underlies the digitization of the world via computers or the bloodless dimensions of Cold War nuclear politics.61 Conclusion: Branching Trees and Metagames

Though economists often approach rational choice theory as a neutral and descriptive scientific theory, it is both normative and prescriptive. Rational choice involves an individualistic mode of choice that replaces a political commitment to democratic decision-­making with an economic orientation that subsumes all choices into a narrow neoliberal market logic. From this perspective, the individual is either rational or irrational. As explored in chapter 1, either this subject follows game theoretical rationality or else she must submit to behavioral economic interventions, including gamified applications, to correct her shortcomings. Though the core actor of rational choice theory is the conscious individual, the emergence of this actor during the Cold War entails an automatic and nonconscious mode of thought. As Amadae argues, under rational choice theory, “The volitional quality of choice is eroded in favor of strategic rationality, which was originally de 148

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signed as a logic of action that could provide a complete set of instructions needing no conscious implementation.”62 This algorithmic way of thinking and choosing extends beyond Cold War strategic rationality into the digital and networked world of the early twenty-­first century. In a variety of ways, algorithmic decision-­making finds its way into contemporary video games. Already economic game theory deploys “game trees” as a form of notation that uses nodes and branches to illustrate decision points, possible action pathways, and comparative payoffs. Putting this notation into practice, computer scientists who work on artificial intelligence also implement tree traversal algorithms to search through and analyze branching pathways. The Go-­playing program AlphaGo, for instance, deploys a heuristic Monte Carlo search that plays out different decision pathways to arrive at the optimal move in the game. Such tree traversal processes extend to artificial intelligence opponents in video games. In games, these processes usually happen under the surface. Nevertheless, they also take an aesthetic dimension, for instance through nonplayer character actions and attacks. Even more explicitly, certain games—particularly visual novel games such as Fate/stay night (2004), action role-­playing games with morality systems such as the Fallout series (1997–­), and interactive narrative games such as Life is Strange (2015)—externalize decision trees at dramatic decision points in the narrative. For the most part, such games offer clearly differentiated and limited choices that are made in an instant and are reducible to binary outcomes.63 Even implicit decision trees encourage experimentation with a video game’s existing narrative pathways, but certain games have taken a more explicitly pedagogical relationship to decision-­making in games. This departure from traditional game theoretical thinking finds an academic counterpart in Nigel Howard’s research, which began in the 1960s and culminated in the 1971 book Paradoxes of Rationality: Theory of Metagames and Political Behavior. In this book, Howard challenges standard game theory. He does not assume normative player preferences at the outset of a game theoretical scenario nor does he presuppose (in the way of economists such as John Forbes Nash Jr.) that players know the game well enough to know each other’s preferences. Howard takes an experiment-­based “metagame” approach that treats player decisions and behaviors as empirical phenomena, rather than functions in a mathematical system. In practice, his work demonstrates, players in game theoretical decisions do not always make rational decisions and even benefit from behavior that is characterized as irrational. In Howard’s method, any game splinters off from one optimal playthrough into a large number of possible games or metagames. Aside from the experimental chal

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Figure 3.7. Decision tree flowchart from Detroit: Become Human (Quantic Dream, 2018).

lenge that Howard poses to formalist game theory, his approach brings with it a powerful pedagogical dimension that promotes self-­reflexivity over time and introduces a changing feedback loop between player and game. In moving from theoretical to applied game theory, Howard emphasizes the importance of making actors conscious about the significance of their available choices and their empirical decision behaviors. “If a person comes to ‘know’ a theory about his behavior,” he writes, “he is no longer bound by it but becomes free to disobey it.”64 As this chapter’s exploration of nonconscious and interpersonal affect suggests, Howard may overstate the role of consciousness in game behavior. Nevertheless, the idea of bringing even nonconscious decisions to consciousness has an expressly pedagogical dimension that promotes learning and reflection. Video games, such as the Telltale Games model exemplified by The Walking Dead (2012), privilege narrative immersion that constructs a narrative around branching decision trees, but they do not pre­sent those trees to the player. An instructive departure from this model is Quantic Dream’s Detroit: Become Human (2018), an interactive narrative that explores android agency. Each stage of this game ends with a flowchart feature that deliberately interrupts immersion to show the player their taken and untaken pathways (fig. 3.7). In continuity with older interactive narratives, the game preserves immersion outside of metagame analysis, offering an explicit recommendation that the player experience the game in its entirety before experimenting with alternative pathways. Even so, the existence of those pathways is not hidden from the player, and a capacity for thinking through multiple possibilities is built into both the game’s narrative and its me 150

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chanics. Another game that explicitly pre­sents the player’s decision back to them, and emphasizes that it could have been otherwise, is the Supermassive Games interactive horror game Until Dawn (2015) that includes a “butterfly effect” system that appears at the end of each level and points to frequently unexpected consequences of player decisions. Both Detroit and Until Dawn invite players to think, at least for a moment, like game designers. Without arguing for either game as a radical alternative to mainstream video game design, it is possible to appreciate the departure of such games from the behavioral approach of gamification that seeks to prime or nudge a player in a particular direction, without giving them access to the system in which they are participating in both conscious and nonconscious ways. Both of these games give players enough access to their design systems to promote understanding and criticism. One limitation of both games is that the characters in them still reach endings that bifurcate into roughly “good” and “bad” outcomes. Yet it is also possible for games to treat choice in an entirely noninstrumental manner. Notably, the Frictional Games science fiction survival horror game Soma (2015) offers a philosophically inclined approach to decision-­making that privileges reflection and introspection to outcome. The protagonist Simon awakens in an underwater research facility in a melancholy, postapocalyptic world. As the game unfolds, Simon gradually learns that a comet has caused a planetary extinction, leaving only a handful of survivors in the remote facility in which he finds himself. In the course of his exploration, Simon meets a digital scan of a now-­deceased scientist named Catherine who has been working on the ARK project—a name that points both to an “Augmented Reality Capsule” and Noah’s Ark. The ARK is a simulated world, sustained by a supercomputer, which includes scans of every person who was part of the research facility. In the final moments of the game, Simon sends the ARK into space to preserve some version of humanity. In comparison to multilinear games such as The Walking Dead or Detroit, Soma is largely linear in its narrative. Even so, the game offers intermittent surveys that ask the player philosophical questions. For instance, in a sequence that follows the credits, a version of Simon awakens in the Edenic world of the ARK. Moving from first to third person, another question asks, “In Simon’s shoes, would you view the ARK as a possible escape route?” Further delving into the nature of consciousness, and the scans of Simon’s consciousness, the game asks, “How do you think your viewpoint changes throughout the game?” Rather than arguing that the ARK is a desirable project, one survey question asks the player, “How do you feel about the ARK?” and offers several choices, including that the project is “humanity’s best shot

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at survival,” “valuable as a record of human history,” or “essentially a futile project.” In place of utility optimization, the choices in the survey exist solely to promote reflection about unanswerable questions. By intensifying conflict, and not resolving it or even claiming the primacy of rationality over affective experience, this game asks the player to respond rather than merely to react, to participate and create rather than merely to interact with a finite system. It points to a robust experimentation that leads beyond the control schemes of digital systems.

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4

Control The establishment of control was the essential precept in a nuclear world: passive resignation would never suffice; laissez-­faire was out of the question. Each and every facet of the quandary nudged RAND further in the direction of machine rationality. Philip Mirowski (Machine Dreams)

To exist, from the point of view of control, is to be digital. Seb Franklin (Control )

Both politics and pedagogy emerge from within the disturbing encounter of these various modes of being incomplete, contradictory, and out of control. Lauren Berlant (Sex, or the Unbearable)

The Cold War introduced the unprecedented danger of thermonuclear war that could wipe out not merely the United States and the Soviet Union but also result in total human extinction. For the US military-­industrial complex, as well as researchers at institutions such as the RAND Corporation, this omnicidal threat called for a response that would regain control via tools that derived from the rationalism of game theory, operations research, cybernetics, and computation. At the geopolitical scale, such control was captured through schemes that included the Department of Defense’s constellation of “C4I,” or “Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence.” These approaches sought to modulate a complex military and political situation through such technical and strategic operations as situational awareness, logistical planning, personnel organization, resource management, mission execution, surveillance, reconnaissance, transmission of orders, and the collection and interpretation of intelligence data.1 As the historian Philip Mirowski argues, a systems-­level commitment to control also had profound impacts on the smaller scale of the individual self. Though individualism thrived in nineteenth-­century Western thought— across discourses from the political philosophy of liberalism to neoclassical economics—starting in the mid-­twentieth century cybernetics undercut this paradigm and its core figure of an internally coherent, consistent, agential, autonomous, and individual self. The destabilization of the individual, for Mirowski, is in fact “easily the single-­most salient consequence 153

of the development of the computer in the postwar period.”2 The effect of nuclear command and control systems, then, was not exclusively one of imposing top-­down control or even panoptic disciplinary power over individuals—though these were certainly qualities of the paranoid global situation that unfolded after World War II. This control addressed a more decentered and distributed subject. By now, much has been made of the concept of a distributed systems of control in the latter half of the twentieth century, particularly in conjunction with Gilles Deleuze’s short, paradigm-­establishing 1990 essay, “Postscript on the Societies of Control.”3 In Deleuze’s account, the period following World War II saw a gradual phasing out of Foucault’s individual who, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, passed from one closed institution to the next: the family home to the school to the army barracks to the factory and occasionally to the hospital and prison. In place of such “disciplinary societies,” the period after World War II saw the emergence of “societies of control” that transitioned from closed “molds” to open-­ended processes of “modulation,” from the enclosure of the “factory” to the networked “corporation,” from the limited space-­time of the “school” to “perpetual training,” from the “signature” to the “password,” and so on. Notably, the target of these new techniques of control shifted from “individuals” to fragmented units that Deleuze calls “dividuals.” Dividuals are still seen, tracked, and made complicit in their own self-­regulation (as in Foucault’s prison-­laboratory of the panopticon), but this regulation now takes place via increasingly complex algorithmic processes unleashed across allegedly participatory social networks. In this new paradigm, dividuals are treated as shifting assemblages of thoughts, desires, tastes, attitudes, behaviors, identifications, and affects, rather than as enclosed social atoms.4 One of the many scholars to build on Deleuze’s paradigm of control is Seb Franklin, who argues that this worldview, particularly as it established and expanded alongside cybernetics, is “fundamentally digital” even as the logic is not limited to digital computers. “The logic of control as episteme,” he argues, is based on the idea that “information storage, processing, and transmission (as well as associated concepts such as ‘steering’ and ‘programming’) not only constitute the fundamental processes of biological and social life but can be instrumentalized to both model and direct the functional entirety of such forms of life.”5 Digital and networked technologies establish a continuous mode of control by collecting, storing, analyzing, and distributing information. They constitute the dividual as a subjective unit that can be known, primed, modulated, and transformed. This dividual is both interpellated and controlled through subtle and often benign-­seeming mechanisms 154

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such as the pointcasting of Netflix’s subgenres or targeted advertisements prepared by Facebook’s proprietary algorithms. This chapter approaches video games as a significant cultural medium of control in the period from the mid-­twentieth to the early twenty-­first century. Despite this starting point, I am not interested in arguing merely that video games are ordinary cultural counterparts of the larger control society. This type of diagnosis is important, but it has already been undertaken, and executed well, for instance in Alexander Galloway’s analysis of the video game Civilization III in his book Gaming where he demonstrates how video game play synchronizes with the sociopolitical control that characterizes the informatic age.6 Though Deleuze’s vision of control is important to this chapter, it is also not the only type of control that will be of concern in the following pages. Building on these foundations, I focus on a dimension of this problem that is often an afterthought or coda-­like final gesture of critique: namely, the question of how video games might respond to, experiment with, oppose, or complicate techniques of control. As I hope to show, control (both as avatar manipulation during gameplay and sociopolitical modulation) aligns with some of the values that are the building blocks of both gamification and neoliberal culture, including rationalism, efficiency, and self-­entrepreneurship. Alongside this impulse toward sovereign control by an individual, digital games also make available dynamics of nonsovereignty. Among art games, such an experience becomes available in the glitch-­heavy and essentially unplayable games created by the art collective JODI, including SOD (a 1999 mod of the popular 1992 game Wolfenstein 3D) and Jet Set Willy Variations (a 2002 mod of a game, Jet Set Willy, released for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer in 1984). On a slightly more popular stage, a loss of agency and shakeup of intention becomes apparent in the so-­ called genre of “fumblecore,” including games such as QWOP (2008), Surgeon Simulator (2013), Octodad: Dadliest Catch (2014), and Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy (2017) that foreground the experience of a body that is out of control— or perpetually on the brink of lost control.7 The experience of playing such games may oscillate from a comical sense of the uncoordinated body to the frustration of an interface that refuses to be “user-friendly.” A category of digital games that effectively animates not only the formal but also the sociopolitical dimension of nonsovereign play (and indeed demonstrates how the two are intricately interconnected) is what have been called queer games. These games use technical systems to explore nonnormative ways of being, often within domains of gender and sexuality.8 Following overviews of control and nonsovereignty in games, this chapter attends to three queer video games that confound and transform the concept in

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medium-­specific ways. First, I perform a reading of the interactive narrative techniques of Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia (2012), an autobiographical browser-­ based assemblage of minigames that explores processes of gender transition. Second, I analyze the formal properties of Liz Ryerson’s Problem Attic (2013), another autobiographical yet considerably more abstract platformer game that explores power, powerlessness, and the problematics of consent as they relate to marginalized identity. Third and finally, I turn to the Tale of Tales (aka Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn) avant-­garde, touchscreen video game Luxuria Superbia (2013), which uses multisensory stimulation and opaque feedback in a hands-­on exploration of sexuality that challenges conventional control schemes. Each of these games uses different mechanics, genres, and affects to approach and scramble—that is to say, make problems for—the concept of control. Game Feel

In a variety of ways, video games train players to expect, enjoy, and explore systems of control. Consider the very basic fact that, at least when playing a console video game, one interacts with the game via a “controller” that may include buttons, dials, joysticks, directional pads, motors that generate haptic feedback via vibrations, and so on. Beyond a now-­standard controller, various consoles and games have offered unique controllers ranging from the Magnavox Odyssey “light gun” (1972) to the Microsoft Kinect motion controller (2010). Such input devices enable the player to interact with the screen-­based space of a game. Beyond the hardware level, control unfolds on the screen itself, most notably via the movement of an avatar, the on-­screen mediator that changes the state of the video game.9 A sense of control over the elements on a screen, the systems underlying the interface, or one’s performance relative to the game’s objectives may even elevate, for some players, into a desire for mastery. Of course, in any game, a player cannot do absolutely anything that they want, even if they are the able-bodied subject that most games assume. The rules and constraints of a game system give the activity order and enable play. At the level of gameplay, control over player actions is exercised through rules. In a board game such as Settlers of Catan or a sport such as baseball, rules are enforced by other players or by an umpire. In the case of video games, rules are, at least in an initial interaction, enforced by code. Beyond rigid rules, games also involve constraints. As game designer Brian Upton notes, “The word ‘constraint’ is more open-­ended. It encompasses formal rules, but it also includes guidelines, suggestions, and inclinations. Anything that privi 156

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leges one line of action over another is a constraint.”10 In video games that feature navigable worlds, it is arguably not rules as much as constraints that the player internalizes and navigates as she learns the systems within which play unfolds. A well-­lit hallway in a first-­person shooter may encourage a player to walk down it, instead of stumbling around in a dark room, but it does not absolutely prohibit a completionist player from exploring every dark space in search of secret items and Easter eggs. Beyond absolute restrictions, as well as limitations that are inherent to a game’s platform or physical limitations of human players, constraints are qualities of the world that tend in one direction but may also carry multiple affordances. To take another example from first-­person shooter games, weapons carry constraints. Not only do weapons have particular preset range and power limitations, but they also privilege the act of shooting enemies. Even so, weapons may also carry other affordances that are discovered by avid gamers and speedrunners, and even incorporated in more intentional ways by designers into subsequent games. Famously, players began to use the Rocket Launcher in Quake (1996), as well as the Type-­50 Directed Energy Rifle (or “Concussion Rifle”) in Halo (2001), in order to engage in actions ranging from “strafing” to explosive “rocket jumping” that helped them gain unprecedented elevation and mobility. Insofar as video game constraints modulate ranges of behavior and even encourage new types of creativity, instead of molding strict conduct, they are medium-­specific elements that resonate with Deleuze’s historical paradigm of control societies. Video game constraints impose control upon players by training them, at the level of sensation, perception, and habit, to conform to or strive for particular actions that will help them succeed at the game’s objectives. Many analyses of game control, whether in respect to rules or to constraints, unfold along formal or technical lines, but as I already suggested, control also has sociopolitical dimensions that are related to formal constraints. In his application of Deleuze’s concept of control to video games, Galloway argues that video games are notable for the ways that they make control systems visible and available to the player: “Video games don’t attempt to hide information control; they flaunt it.” In the Civilization games, for instance, a player is “learning, internalizing, and becoming intimate with a massive, multipart, global algorithm.” For Galloway, “To play the game means to play the code of the game. To win means to know the system. And thus, to interpret a game means to interpret its algorithm (to discover its parallel ‘allegorithm’).” My reading of Stardew Valley, in chapter 1, for instance, represents a medium-­specific analysis that charts the way that the control systems of neoliberalism unfold at the algorithmic scale of game mechanics, feedback, and interface processes in a life simulator game. While a close read

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ing of a novel might focus on narrative or sentence structure, a similar analysis of a game must account, at least in part, for its algorithm. In a game, control is not always hidden at great depths, requiring conventional ideological critique to unearth it, but functions at the level of its algorithmic processes and heads-­up display, “coterminous with the entire game.”11 Understanding a game’s constraints, as they play out through elements such as controllers, avatars, mechanics, and objectives, helps us delve deeper into the worldview or ideology that undergirds it. Control operates not merely at the structural level of gameplay—for instance, the logics, rules, and constraints that parameterize a tactical or strategic approach to succeeding at a game’s objectives—but also crucially at the affective level. To understand this idea, we can return to a concept that I introduced in the second chapter—designer Steve Swink’s concept of “game feel.” Game feel describes aesthetic, kinesthetic, intuitive, and sensory experiences with a video game, including his three categories of real-­time control, simulated space, and polish.12 Most crucially, the term marks a player’s feeling of connection to a game space and control over her avatar in that game. In the context of this chapter, it is important to add that though Swink’s elaboration of game feel is meant to be politically agnostic and practical in nature—importantly, the book Game Feel is primarily a design textbook— the concept also carries ideological dimensions. As he observes, game feel is simultaneously foundational and invisible: “In digital game design, feel is the elephant in the room. Players know it. Designers know of it. Nobody talks about it, and everybody takes it for granted. It’s not hard to understand why; if a game designer’s done his or her job correctly, the player will never notice the feel of a game.”13 In many ways, however inadvertently, this description exemplifies the Marxist notion of ideology. In Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation of this concept, ideology has more to do with doing than with knowing. That is, a social ideology such as patriarchy or a political ideology such as fascism need not be founded on the idea of false consciousness—that is, the presumption that people “do not know what they are really doing.” Instead, in any ideology from Marx’s commodity fetishism to contemporary gamification, it is more accurate to say that “they know that, in their activity, they are following an illusion, but still they are doing it.”14 In the present instance, game feel is very much known by both players and designers. It becomes sensible in the process of playing any video game, yet it is usually taken for granted, seldom discussed, and regularly pursued because of the satisfaction it produces. Even if game feel is invisible yet ever-­present, it is still worth asking: Why is it ideological—let alone an ideology that is worth questioning? Swink’s articulation of game feel offers a preliminary answer. It is significant that 158

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he moves quickly, in fact on the very first page of his book, from the generalized concept of game feel to the specific and normative category of a “good-­ feeling game” that the book seeks to describe. Swink further describes this type of game as one that “lets players do what they want when they want, without having to think too much about it.”15 At a design level, this type of game requires “intuitive controls.” Furthermore, it leads players into a world that is “simple, easy to understand, and provides clear incentives, rewards and feedback for effort invested. It’s safer than the chaotic and arbitrary nature of everyday life.”16 Games, according to this understanding, make their worlds more intelligible through the designed experience they make available to players. Most games condition players to expect instant feedback, frequent rewards, and (with sufficient practice) the possibility of mastery. This idea privileges a normative range of mechanics, challenges, and affects that becomes central to the worldview of gamification, as I am using that term in this book to describe both gamified apps and a broader range of mainstream video games. As the preceding overview already suggests, a key word that comes up repeatedly in descriptions of game feel—from moment-­to-­moment player movements and mechanics to broader features of the world such as level and objective structures—is “control.”17 The specific form of control that contributes to a “good-­feeling game” closely resembles what in psychological literature about child development is often called “perfect contingency.” As cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll explains, this concept describes “a situation of complete alignment between a given action and the external response to that action, in which distinctions between the two collapse.” For Schüll, the tight feedback loop between action and response is best characterized by Las Vegas slot machines and other forms of machine gambling in which devices link player actions with “immediacy, exactness, [and] consistency of response.”18 As Swink’s design principles and preferences suggest, however, a broader range of digital games depend on these very same values: the pleasures of the instant linkage between the push of a button and a response or regular payoff of reward or punishment.19 In the basic version of Breakout (1978) for the Atari 2600 console, the button initiates gameplay and serves the ball, while the joystick controls the position of the paddle on the screen. In a game such as Marvel’s Spider-­Man (2018) for the PlayStation 4, the player has access to exponentially more moves and combos, including various possibilities for movement, air combat, and situational puzzle engagement. Regardless of the complexity of the control scheme, both video games align action and response. Except in cases of unexpected glitches, a button push yields a near-­instant counterpart on the screen, usually a response that

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reinforces the player’s sense of agency, power, and control over the interaction. In a variety of ways, video games train players to expect perfect contingency and desire total control. However, as I now attempt to show, they need not do so. Queer Games

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud considers the “play of children” as a way to understand the human psychic apparatus. He famously describes the first game that he witnesses his eighteen-­month-­old grandson invent. This game involves casting “a wooden reel with a piece of string wound round it” away and then drawing it back in. The game proceeds between moves of “fort” and “da”—“go away” and “return” or “disappearance and return.”20 According to Freud, the invention and play of this game enables the child to move from a state of passivity (regarding the absence of his parents) to one of activity in which he is an agent with control and mastery over an unpleasant situation. In a rereading of this sequence, Lauren Berlant instead interprets this game as “a scene defined by a play with multiple consequences and risks—for example, the risks of possessing, ambivalence, being in control, being out of control, being alienated or dissociated, and/or the pleasures of cycling through these.”21 Though Berlant’s reading focuses on the fort/da game in particular, it offers a framework for treating games in general as more ambivalent scenes of play that are not reducible to structures of control and mastery. From a game studies perspective, we can support this point by observing that the umbrella category of “games” encompasses a diverse range of forms. Sociologist Roger Caillois suggests a spectrum that runs from structured forms and rule-­bound games (what he calls ludus) to less structured and processual activities of free play ( paidia). Within this spectrum, Caillois demarcates four overarching categories that offer a useful heuristic for thinking about a broad range of games: games of competition (agon), chance (alea), role playing (mimesis), and vertigo (ilinx).22 Much of the discussion within game studies focuses primarily on games of competition and chance, which include competitive sports, gambling activities, and most video games and board games. Moreover, role-­playing receives attention within the fields of theater and performance studies, as well as game studies accounts of interactive narrative and role-­playing games (RPGs). In many accounts of games—arguably, this is most true of competitive games that maintain the formal parameters of ludus—control and mastery are core concepts. They help us think through an athlete’s self-­control of her body under a game’s constraints of 160

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time, space, and physics; a chess player’s capacity to outthink an opponent and maintain control over a game several moves beyond the present one; or the competitive StarCraft player’s capacity to fuse strategic and tactical plans with bodily control that maximizes actions per minute. Similarly, in games of partial chance, elements that are controllable through skill become crucial, even overdetermined, when players compete for stakes of money or reputation.23 Games of role playing, too, may depend on directorial visions, narrative structures, a self-­control that allows an actor to stay “in character,” and (in a video game) the control one has over an avatar.24 Arguably, the least theorized of Caillois’s game categories, and the one that is least dependent on control, is that of ilinx. Caillois describes these play activities, such as kite flying or whirling dervishes, as inducing “a state of dizziness and disorder.” Such play activities, which are hardly “games” in the common usage of that term, are “based on the pursuit of vertigo” and are therefore more often excluded from modern life, at least at an overt level, compared to other categories of games. Ilinx can be dangerous in its “attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind.” The language that Caillois uses to describe this category is notably embodied and concerning bodily effects. As he puts it most directly, with ilinx, the player “gratifies the desire to temporarily destroy his bodily equilibrium, escape the tyranny of his ordinary perception, and provoke the abdication of conscience.”25 As opposed to heavily rule-­bound games, such as chess or Super Mario Bros., which privilege rationalistic thought or algorithmic mechanics, games of vertigo invite irrationality and send bodies into states of uncertainty and flux. It is worth noting, too, that ilinx is not a completely distinct category of game, but also marks experiences that are part of games of competition, chance, and mimicry.26 For example, though the aforementioned Super Mario Bros. is a rule-­bound game of skill that invites players to compete against a series of algorithmic challenges within largely linear platformer levels, it also includes moments of vertiginous falls, loss of control amidst an excess of enemies, and a dizziness of rapid platformer play—not to mention possibilities for discovering multilinear pathways and creating metagames. Though ilinx operates as a formal game category for Caillois, it is also possible to approach it and expand its significance as a sociopolitical concept. One way of demonstrating this other valence of ilinx is to consider the relationship between games of vertigo and the concept of “nonsovereignty.” Sovereignty is a term that already gestures toward both political and personal control—and makes its way, via political theory, into rational choice theory and neoliberal economics.27 As Berlant and Lee Edelman contend, “nonsover

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eignty” refers to “the subject’s constitutive division that keeps us, as subjects, from fully knowing or being in control of ourselves and that prompts our misrecognition of our own motives and desires.” Additionally, “nonsovereignty invokes a political idiom and tradition, broadly indicating questions of self-­ control, autonomy, and the constraints upon them.”28 Nonsovereignty, then, marks control as a problem not merely for the individual (or even Deleuze’s “dividual”) but as a problem of relation among people and things. Beyond games that largely complicate control in terms of the single player’s physical degree of hand-­eye coordination, there are video games that activate nonsovereign relations in both single- and multi-­player contexts. An example of a single-­player game that foregrounds the feeling of nonsovereignty is Fumito Ueda’s Shadow of the Colossus (2005). In this slow, somber, and atmospheric game, the player controls Wander, a young man who makes a deal with a supernatural entity called Dormin in which he is asked to murder beautiful, and often benign, colossi in order to bring his love, Mono, back to life. The killing is justified by the video game’s action-­ adventure genre and the quest for restored love within the couple form, but the game marks the act’s ambivalence through its mood. The player must exert certain types of self-­control in combat, while losing the capacity to guide the game’s overall purpose, as Wander grows haggard and feels increasingly enslaved by Dormin in the process. Moments of victory against the colossi punctuate long sequences in which Wander rides across desolate landscapes that are devoid of enemies on his horse and reflects on a quest over which he has minimal control. Though Shadow of the Colossus simulates a relation of nonsovereignty through its single player gameplay, multiplayer games enable such relations between players who interact with each other in real-­time relations. An example of a networked game that foregrounds and actively experiments with a nonsovereign relationality is Jason Rohrer’s multiplayer game One Hour One Life (2018). This game takes away a player’s control by throwing her into an online multiplayer world in which she begins as a helpless infant (who may be cared for or abandoned by other players). If she is cared for, the player grows into an adult and may live into old age within a limited lifespan. As with many multiplayer online games, this world persists even when the player is not present, further limiting control. This game, thus, explicitly raises questions of governance and political order, as well as worldmaking, while limiting a player’s capacity to control, or even substantially guide, those collective processes. Admittedly, One Hour One Life is an art game that uses its game mechanics and constraints to make nonsovereign relations a required starting condition of play. Even so, numerous popular multi 162

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player games create possible situations between players that introduce risks to personal identity and accumulated resources and uncontrolled moments of losing or losing oneself. The video game genre that perhaps most consistently explores both formal and sociopolitical nonsovereignty is the queer game. In addition to LGBTQ+ representation, game studies scholars Adrienne Shaw and Bonnie “Bo” Ruberg characterize queerness as “the desire to live life otherwise, by questioning and living outside of normative boundaries.”29 A game such as Merritt Kopas’s browser-­based, single-­player Lim (2012), for instance, contains no explicit LGBTQ+ content. This game is made up entirely of abstract squares on a pink background. The player’s avatar is a square that flashes a rainbow of colors as you direct it through a maze. When you encounter other squares, however, they besiege you and attack with violent intensity until you press the “z” key in order to blend in. At this moment, the avatar turns to a single color that blends in with the others. In place of a distant view that gives the player a perspective on a larger portion of the maze, the camera automatically zooms in to a disorienting close-­up view that is accompanied by a disconcerting buzzing sound and a shaking that grows gradually in intensity. On occasion a violent assault pushes the player outside of the pathways of the maze in which the game unfolds, leaving her free to flash a diversity of colors, albeit in a state of isolation. Particularly in moments when she is under attack from other squares, the player is likely to experience frustration and lost control. Though the game can be read as an allegory of challenges that accompany identity-­oriented passing, its queerness operates at a level of greater abstraction organized around nonrepresentational game mechanics. Incorporating the oppositional valences of queerness but moving beyond them, Edmond Chang defines “queergaming” as related to “the possibilities of noncompetitive, nonproductive, nonjudgmental play, as well as the uncertainty and inefficiency of glitches, exploits, and other goofiness and the desire for queer worlds as opportunities for exploration, for different rules and goals, and even for the radical potential of failure.”30 As Chang’s list suggests, many of the qualities of queer games challenge the exact qualities of gamification and neoliberalism that I laid out in earlier chapters. Even so, queerness is not merely a negativity that positions itself against contemporary systems of power. As Berlant notes, it can also be approached as a pedagogy or “an attentiveness and will to make openings from within the overwhelming and perhaps impossible drive to make objects worthy of attachment.”31 This queer transformational capacity, which does not always manifest as something so coherent as an alternative world, is not the neu

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tralization of nonsovereignty but a sensitivity and channeling of that very disturbance of control. In order to animate the dynamics and varied pedagogies of nonsovereignty in video games, the remainder of the chapter analyzes three queer games: Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia, Liz Ryerson’s Problem Attic, and Tale of Tales’s Luxuria Superbia. Dys4ia (or, Medium-­Specific Nonsovereignty)

Dys4ia is a 2012 browser-­based work that follows transgender designer Anna Anthropy’s process of transition. Though Anthropy has been a prolific creator of hundreds of games including Mighty Jill Off (2008), Queers in Love at the End of the World (2013), and Triad (2013), this game achieved a kind of instant canonicity, especially among audiences interested in serious and queer games.32 Anthropy describes the game, in a textual preface, as “an autobiographical game about my experiences with hormone replacement therapy.” In a disclaimer, she notes that the game is personal and is “not meant to be representative of every trans person.” Formally, the game operates as an interactive narrative that moves among four levels that are entitled “Gender Bullshit,” “Medical Bullshit,” “Hormonal Bullshit,” and “It Gets Better?” Each level includes a linear series of autobiographical minigames that are accompanied by short lines of text. The game alludes to the conventions of classic arcade-­ style games that depend on rapid and real-­time control, including Tetris, Breakout, and Pac-­Man. In its rapid movement from one screen to the next, Dys4ia also invokes the genre of party video games such as the popular Mario Party and WarioWare series that feature series of short-­duration minigames. Unlike the whimsical themes of most arcade and party games, Dys4ia works through the difficulties and frustrations associated with the social, medical, and hormonal aspects of transition. The title itself marks a mode of dissatisfaction that already departs from the expectation of fun promised by most video games. The term dysphoria signals the condition of “gender dysphoria,” the formal diagnosis in the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-­5 for “people whose gender at birth is contrary to the one they identify.”33 It also marks an experience that the player is likely to experiment with (if never completely share) at the affective level of gameplay—namely, one of anxiety, frustration, misalignment, and difficulty that departs from the normative features of gamified design that interpellate a controlled and agential subject. This game engages in another notable departure from a majority of video games in its commitment to the narrative genre of autobiography. Women’s autobiography only began to gain widespread and lasting legitimacy in lit 164

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erary criticism in the 1990s, a moment at which feminist scholarship theorized autobiography as a category that exceeds literature and finds expression across myriad genres, forms, media, and everyday practices.34 As Laura Marcus argues, it is this inherent hybridity of autobiography that makes it a “valuable resource in a variety of argumentative strategies in relation to such topics as subject/object, self and identity, private and public, fact and fiction.”35 Though Dys4ia belongs in some sense to the genealogy of women’s autobiography, it participates more directly in two subgenres that did not gain broader legitimacy until the early twenty-­first century: namely, transgender and video game autobiographies. On the one hand, Dys4ia joins an early twenty-­first canon of autobiographical works by transgender artists, including films such as Gwen Haworth’s She’s a Boy I Knew (2007), memoirs such as Janet Mock’s Redefining Realness (2014), and installations such as Mary Bryson and Chase Joynt’s Resisterectomy (2012). On the other hand, it joins the genre cluster of autobiographical, biographical, news, and documentary video games, such as Mary Flanagan’s [domestic] (2003), Susana Ruiz’s Darfur is Dying (2006), and Peter Brinson and Kurosh ValaNejad’s The Cat and the Coup (2011) that emerged at roughly the same moment.36 Dys4ia challenges several principles of gamification through its embrace of nonsovereignty. Though this ethos resonates at the level of production and distribution (i.e., the game is a kind of video game zine not distributed by a large company), my analysis focuses on the formal, aesthetic, and mechanical dimensions of the work. To demonstrate more precisely how Dys4ia operates, I turn to a close reading that highlights three medium-­specific qualities of its design: the rules that govern gameplay, its game mechanics, and the avatar that the player maneuvers through the game. Admittedly, these elements are closely related and interdependent in the experience of gameplay, but I separate them out, heuristically, for clarity. Though the other games I analyze in this book experiment with these medium-­specific qualities, Dys4ia is notably pedagogical in how it introduces and complicates them. In each of these three domains, Anthropy upends certain principles that frequently contribute to what Swink calls a “good-­feeling game.” First, Dys4ia emphasizes nonsovereignty through its use of game rules. Traditionally, game rules serve to demarcate the possibility space of a game.37 As a game such as chess demonstrates, the design of the board, the rules for the starting positions, and the movement possibilities of the pawns, bishops, or the queen are simultaneously restrictive and enabling of a nearly infinite number of unique matches. Digital games operate similarly, except that rules are enforced by the game’s software, rather than by human players or referees. Importantly, rules may increase the difficulty of a game for an un

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skilled player, but they also establish the conditions within which a player might pursue mastery. Rules in digital games may include elements that are as explicit as a level timer in Super Mario Bros. (1985) or the enforcement of turns in Civilization V (2010). They may also include implicit elements such as the walls that limit mobility in the maze that structures Adventure (1979) or the maximum jump height that is defined by the physics of Mirror’s Edge (2008). Regardless, in a game that is considered well-­designed and good-­ feeling by normative industry standards, the game rules must allow for the skilled player to be capable of reaching a local objective, progressing, or winning. By contrast, Dys4ia uses its rules to convey a sense of nonsovereignty that Anthropy experienced during her process of transition, including in her sense of her own body, social interactions with strangers, and negotiations with the medical establishment. The first screen of the game’s first level begins on a discouraging note, displaying the line, “I feel weird about my body” (fig. 4.1). In a level that lasts a mere five seconds, the player attempts the simple task of maneuvering an asymmetrically shaped geometric object through a gap in a wall. Invariably, because of its awkward proportions, the block does not fit through opening and the game immediately moves to the next screen. According to standard principles, creating a spatial configuration that makes it impossible for the player to complete a presented objective would constitute bad design. However, in this game, the built-­in failure deliberately marks a discontinuity between Anthropy’s presurgical body and sense of self. Even before the player attempts to move through the gap, the misalignment is signaled through elements of two different popular arcade games: the geometric object resembles a Tetris block while the wall resembles the barrier from Breakout. The juxtaposition of the minigame’s space and the implicit objective of moving to the other side of the wall suggests, at least at a quick visual glance, that the player should be able to move to the other side of the wall. The impossibility of maneuvering the block through the gap generates a feeling of asymmetry and frustration instead of the satisfaction that accompanies accomplishment or success in most games. Similar experiences emerge in other minigames that concern ordinary experiences with clothes that do not fit and shaving that ends in drawn blood. Another way in which Dys4ia’s built-­in rules elicit frustration is the game’s temporality. The entirety of the game lasts for approximately six to seven minutes and each of its vignette-­like minigames lasts for approximately five to ten seconds. Most video games teach the player a series of rules (often during a training level or transitional puzzles that layer new rules onto previous ones) that serve as the basis for subsequent gameplay. Unlike these games, 166

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Figure 4.1. First screen of gameplay in Dys4ia (Anna Anthropy, 2012).

Dys4ia requires the player to learn a new set of rules every few seconds. The speed of transition is likely to make a first-­time player feel disoriented. As soon as the player learns a particular rule or mechanic, that process is interrupted in an unexpected transition to the next level. This rapid seriality leaves the player feeling out of control and at the game’s mercy, an experience that mirrors, at an admittedly abstract formal level, Anthropy’s Kafkaesque maneuvering of the medical establishment and her embodied experience with the estrogen hormone estradiol that leaves her, she reports, feeling out of control: threatening liver damage, causing uncomfortable nipple sensitivity, and draining her energy. Though mastery is possible in the games to which Dys4ia alludes, such as Breakout or Pac-­Man, that capacity is not possible in Dys4ia itself, given the brevity of minigames that interrupt the practice needed to feel comfortable with any configuration of rules. The short duration of each minigame also accomplishes another end: it foregrounds the fundamental role of rules to any game. Many games habituate the player to their rules quickly and then promote a sense of unreflective immersion. Dys4ia underscores rules as a central concept that governs not only video games but also the psychiatric and medical establishment’s regulation of gender. As legal scholar Dean Spade observes, the current medical

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model for adjudicating transgender people and facilitating gender-­affirming surgery, for instance, “establishes a structure for addressing violations of gender rules that individualizes, privatizes and depoliticizes the meaning of those transgressions. It is ‘in the minds of the ill’ that gender problems exist, not in the construction of what is ‘healthy.’”38 Anthropy animates similar forms of regulation in Dys4ia. In one level, she searches for an inviting clinic: one, as she notes, that “doesn’t force me to take a psych exam.” In the accompanying interactive sequence, the player moves a pencil through a list of questions. These questions, to which the player repeatedly answers “yes” with the click of a key, ask: “Are you a woman?” “Are you sure?” “Are you really sure?” until the pencil finally breaks below a line that reads “I don’t believe you.” Overall, in opposition to discursive and institutional rules that seek to establish deviant versus healthy gender expression, Dys4ia uses rules in the service of critique as well as the production of alternative constraints.39 Second, Dys4ia foregrounds nonsovereignty through its mechanics. Game mechanics are a set of actions by which a player interacts with a game. These actions take the form of verbs, such as “jumping” in a platformer like Super Metroid (1994) or “shooting” in a first-­person shooter like Destiny (2014). Notably, they serve as the key site of the game feel category of “real-­time control.” Though mechanics are often difficult to master in relation to a game’s system of rules and obstacles, they still fundamentally give the player a sense of agency and sovereignty through the seamless feedback loop between inputs (e.g., button pushes on a PlayStation 4 controller or accelerometer-­ enabled swings of a Nintendo Wii remote controller) and outputs displayed on a screen. Many games use mechanics to generate a sense of autonomy, control, and power in the player. That feeling becomes exhilarating in a game such as Sonic the Hedgehog (1991) in which the player can achieve incredible speeds as she sprints across an open stretch of a level or in a first-­person shooter such as BioShock Infinite (2013) in which a player fires weapons and slides rapidly across Sky-­Line via the avatar’s wrist-­mounted Sky-­Hook. Many of the mechanics that Dys4ia makes available are less satisfying because they diminish, rather than augment, the player’s sense of agency and control. In the “Medical Bullshit” level, for instance, the player encounters a screen labeled “Waiting Room” that reads “At last, I’m at the clinic” (fig. 4.2). Your avatar takes the form of a purple humanoid blob that represents Anthropy. In the corner, the timer counts down from the number 5 until it is time for you to see the doctor. The player can move around the space of the waiting room. Rather than feeling enabling, however, this movement mechanic makes the space feel claustrophobic as you are unable either to leave the room or move into another room. In a sense, the movement mechanic 168

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Figure 4.2. The “Medical Bullshit” level of Dys4ia (Anna Anthropy, 2012).

is irrelevant (as it does not affect the world in any way) and the player relies entirely on a waiting mechanic. The experience may feel interminable as this screen (at approximately twenty seconds) is one of the longest in the game and, by this point, the player has been habituated to expect vignettes that are much shorter. Dys4ia features several minigames about uncontrollable defensive feelings and the weight gain that accompanies hormone use, which involve mechanics that require the player to do things that elicit feelings of clumsiness, discomfort, awkwardness, nonbelonging, and failure. Such affects are not common in video games, especially when the player does not have an opportunity to redeem herself. Instead of merely representing these affects through textual descriptions or illustrative images, the game induces them in the player through mechanics. As Anthropy explains in an interview about Dys4ia, “This was a story about frustration—in what other form do people complain as much about being frustrated? A video game lets you set up goals for the player and make her fail to achieve them. A reader can’t fail a book.”40 Such frustration plays out through the difficulties inherent in embodiment, which Anthropy emphasizes most in the “Hormonal Bull

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shit” level. This decision complicates a common assumption in the scholarly turn to the body that began in the late twentieth century, including in some feminist theory. As Nigel Thrift has observed, some of this work assumes that “bodies are bodies-­in-­action, able to exhibit a kind of continuous intentionality, able to be constantly enrolled into activity.” In fact, “Embodiment includes tripping, falling over, and a whole host of other such mistakes. It includes vulnerability, passivity, suffering, even simple hunger. It includes episodes of insomnia, weariness and exhaustion, a sense of insignificance and even sheer indifference to the world. In other words, bodies can and do become overwhelmed.”41 Dys4ia animates a later turn in feminist scholarship that attends to the nonsovereign body. Instead of merely naming such experiences, it simulates and induces them in the player. Third, Dys4ia explores nonsovereignty through the player’s avatar. An avatar is any figure that the player uses to interact with a game world, which might include a graphical icon, an object, or a character. Thus, an avatar might be as simple as the vertical paddle in a game of Pong (1972) that simply moves up and down or as complicated as a customizable character in an action role-­playing game such as Mass Effect (2007) that the player creates based on myriad combinations of elements from categories such as gender, narrative history, psychological profile, and military specialization. The field of game studies has already produced many discussions about the precise relationship between a player and an avatar, often drawing from the cinema studies language of identification.42 Frequently, both popular and scholarly writing about games frames the creation, customization, and control of an avatar in positive terms. Avatars, after all, serve as mediated extensions into a designed world which often allow for experimentation with different identities and ways of being. Admittedly, identity play raises various issues about playing a role in a virtual culture or oscillating among physical and screen-­ based worlds. Even so, avatars, especially as they operate in networked games and virtual worlds that allow for significant customization and performance possibilities, are generally treated as enabling or extending a player’s experience of the world.43 It is important, then, that the avatar does not augment a player’s agency in Dys4ia. The game’s unstable relationship to its avatar complicates traditional autobiography, which according to literary critics Martine Watson Brownley and Allison B. Kimmich often positions writers “as autonomous individuals in control of themselves and their lives.”44 Though the capacity to compose an autobiographical work surely requires some degree of sovereign subjecthood, autobiographies also usually reveal difficulties and struggles that their writers undergo. Moreover, feminist autobiography, in particular, rarely 170

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reproduces the sovereign and masculine “privilege of self-­possession.”45 As an autobiographical game, Anthropy’s work complicates not only literary autobiography but also the player’s relationship to the avatar. In addition to James Paul Gee’s tripartite identity scheme of virtual, real-­world, and projective identities, Dys4ia also introduces the possibility that one is playing as Anna Anthropy herself.46 Rather than a mere virtual inhabiting of a character, this avatar position is complicated by many factors, including Anthropy as an actual person, as the designer of the game, and as a dynamic historical subject who is undergoing a process of transition within the game.47 Arguably a more persuasive reading is that we are not playing as Anthropy but, in an admittedly mediated and asynchronous way, playing with her.48 As opposed to writing the self or one’s own life—the imperative of traditional literary autobiography—an autobiographical video game requires an active and ongoing collaboration among at least three parties: the designer, the player, and the computer. In any digital game “both the machine and the operator work together in a cybernetic relationship” to enact the game.49 Dys4ia is admittedly linear or on-­rails in its unchangeable sequence, but it does not move forward without the player’s participation. If performance is always an element of autobiography, by virtue of style and an audience, it becomes even more central in the medium of a video game. Rather than offering criteria for adjudicating among these possibilities of the avatar’s function, and the many valences of violence and relationality that inhere in the genre of an autobiographical video game, Dys4ia keeps them all in play. The game, however, includes another important design decision. Namely, there is no single avatar that is constant or fixed. Unlike a first-­ person game (including virtual reality) that eases identification by aligning the player’s perspective with that of the avatar, Dys4ia offers a third-­person view.50 Moreover, that view rarely produces the same avatar. Throughout the game’s short sequence, the player expresses herself on the screen as a puzzle piece, a shield, a razor, a cephalopod-­like creature, a sun, a magnifying glass, a pencil, an HIV test swab, an insurance card, a pill bottle, a cursor on a user interface, a cell phone, a butterfly, parts of the human body (e.g., an arm, breasts, a mouth), and a variety of human forms (from a vague blob shape attempting to put on a shirt to a small figure that traverses a map). Occasionally, figures repeat, but almost every minigame brings with it its own avatar. Across these avatar types, a complete body is rarely present, and when it is, it remains distorted. In some ways, this bodily instability belongs to the type of “queer pedagogy” that Lauren Berlant reads in Todd Solondz’s Palindromes (2004) and Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There (2007), films that feature multiple actors portraying a single character without lending that character bodily

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stability along lines of race, gender, age, and body type.51 Dys4ia’s swift transition between human and nonhuman actors, and shards that offer at best a partial identification, frustrate the precision, consistency, and control that characterizes the ideology of gamification. Video games such as Dys4ia offer an active, participatory, and relational way of thinking. They experiment with the boundaries of normativity and the disorganizing forces that rage beneath its supposedly ordered facade. Dys4ia ultimately dwells in the transitions and uncertainty that are a regular, rather than anomalous, feature of the present. Even the title of the final level comes in the form not of a discovery or revelation but of a question: “It Gets Better?” We see Anthropy growing more confident and more comfortable with her body. “My tits are getting bigger,” she notes. “And my girlfriend can finally touch my nipples again.” At the same time, she continues to struggle with hair that does not entirely disappear, blood pressure problems, and people who continue to launch transphobic slurs at her. On the very last screen of the game, we are left with flux rather than closure as a rapidly shifting Tetris-­style block approaches a gap in a wall with no promise of fitting through. Because games are increasingly ubiquitous, embedded into everyday life, and affectively oriented, they have even more potential to shape our imaginaries at the level of habits, bodily orientations, and conscious concepts. In a game such as Dys4ia, in particular, the player has a chance to engage in the difficult mediation between experience and forms of inequality that are structural and systemic.52 Even so, formally, Dys4ia is still a linear game in which nonsovereignty is likely to unfold more in a representational manner (it is, after all, an autobiographical game) than in nonrepresentational ways that induce a state of nonsovereignty in the player herself.53 As a contrast to Dy4ia’s gameplay, I now turn to a different queer game that expresses its lack of control in largely nonrepresentational ways. Problem Attic (or, Nonrepresentational Problematics of Control and Consent)

Problem Attic is a free browser-­based, single-­player 2D platformer game released by Liz Ryerson in 2013. From one perspective, Problem Attic can be approached as a queer rereading of the earlier platformer game Braid that I analyze in the second chapter. Even in its title, Ryerson’s gestures intertextually to Braid’s final level (the “attic” of the house that makes up the game’s central hub) and offers a critique of the limits of that game’s white cis male perspective (“problematic”). As in most platformers, the player controls an avatar— 172

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Figure 4.3. The abstract visual style of Problem Attic (Liz Ryerson, 2013).

at the beginning of the game, a pixelated human-­like figure—who can move left and right and jump across platforms. The visual style of Problem Attic is highly abstract, reminiscent at times of Piet Mondrian’s abstract geometric paintings (fig. 4.3). As Ryerson has noted, the game was influenced by glitch art, early Atari and Commodore 64 games, and the type of medium-­specific formal experimentation evident in films such as David Lynch’s Inland Empire. At the level of gameplay, the game draws from and transforms classic platformers such as Super Mario Bros. and Jill of the Jungle, as well as abstract art games such as Yume Nikki.54 At the beginning of the game, the player appears in a hub world that is made up of distinctly colored zones. Each zone contains a portal, but not all zones are accessible from the start. The player enters distinct rooms and navigates around obstacles in order to escape these spaces. The overall game is divided into three “acts” (in both the sense of a theatrical “act” as a unit of dramatic analysis and a configuration of “action” in a module of an interactive game) that return the player to familiar spaces, though always with different rules or mechanics. For all of its continuities with other platformers, so little about Problem Attic actually resembles the real-­time control of the conventionally good-­ feeling game. In terms of both the interface and the gameplay, the experience is frequently outside of the player’s control. The game does not allow for the fantasy of some universal subject, such as the frequently invoked

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“gamer.” It insists on the specificity of bodies that engage with video games.55 Visually, even tracking the position of the avatar in many rooms can be difficult, as foreground and background blur. The player frequently moves the avatar behind a barrier, causing it to disappear from view for a time or to reappear in unexpected locations. In terms of gameplay, the experience is kinesthetic and frenetic, even hypnotic if one overcomes its frustrating difficulty. The dominant gameplay mode is one of Caillois’s ilinx. By mainstream video game standards, the game’s interaction design could be dismissed as faulty or flawed, insofar as so many elements on screen have neither use nor exchange value, remaining out of the player’s comprehension or active manipulation.56 Even more control is lost in sequences during which the player is pushed around by hostile “crosses”—enemies that attempt to push and trap you. In still other moments, such as a sequence early in act 2, the gravity of the hub world reverses, causing the avatar (who is made temporarily more abstract, no longer humanoid) to fall upward. Such uncontrollable elements are likely to strike players accustomed to mainstream games as unfair. Indeed, the experience of playing the game may last over one hour for an expert player who is already familiar with the game or over several hours for a first-­time player, and it remains unbeatable for the majority of people.57 In fact, to foreground the profound nonsovereignty of the experience, of all of the games I discuss in this book, Problem Attic is the only one I could not complete without the ongoing aid of online walkthrough videos.58 The nonsovereignty evoked by Problem Attic extends to its themes and moods. In an artist’s statement, Ryerson has observed that the game concerns “the fear and negative emotions” that people experience and push “into a very dark corner of our consciousness, like old junk we want to forget about collecting dust in the attic.” The closest that she comes to naming the explicit themes of the game comes in the varied list of “issues of gender roles, rape culture, and the destruction of the environment.”59 Indeed, the game often suggests that it is grappling, in largely nonrepresentational ways, with the trauma of rape or violent assault. For example, early in the game, the player enters a level with a red, flashing background that suggests either the interior of a body or an abstract hell (fig. 4.4). Within this level, a single cross follows and targets the player, as she seeks a safe path around the room and to the exit. While previous levels may be difficult, the unprecedented speed and aggressiveness of this cross suggests a dynamic of a perpetrator and victim. This feeling comes across as much through the precarity and difficulty of executing the mechanics as it does through hostile graphics and soundtrack. A traumatic reading of Problem Attic may further account for its abstract style. The multiple forms of the abstract avatar take on added significance if 174

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Figure 4.4. A nonrepresentational approach to trauma in Problem Attic (Liz Ryerson, 2013).

we consider Jennifer Doyle’s observation that the rape survivor, in contrast even to a person targeted by police violence, appears in in media stories as “an anonymized figure, a rumor and an abstraction.”60 In Problem Attic, the avatar moves through a series of discontinuities marked not only through visual abstraction but also through inconsistencies of gameplay and game physics, including changes in the jump height and the direction of gravity. The changes within the game point toward traumatic dissociation of identity (we do not know who we are), memory (we do not know why we are in this context or what its past is), and perception (our awareness of the environment, its rules, and its features is constantly changing). Furthermore, alongside the changes in the avatar’s capacities, the movement among different avatars throughout the game suggests depersonalization and an out-­ of-­body experience.61 If the game’s complication of conventional notions of control is the consequence of trauma, Problem Attic succeeds at using video game form to negotiate the double risk undertaken by the trauma studies scholar of either overidentifying with a traumatized person’s experience or else of objectifying it through analysis.62 On the one hand, though critics have for instance misidentified video games such as Dys4ia as “empathy games,” the jarring experi

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ence of Problem Attic utterly resists any bourgeois desire to engage in identity tourism and walk a proverbial mile in another’s shoes. On the other hand— and this is where a singularly traumatic reading becomes unsustainable— the game resists any representational reduction to an autobiographical narrative of a precise traumatized event. Admittedly, one could map a Freudian psychoanalytic distinction between the “acting out” of melancholia and the “working through” of mourning onto the experience of Problem Attic.63 A representational and teleological reading of the game would see the protagonist encountering repressed material, reliving and discharging it through actions, and reenacting the trauma (that is, acting out) in the opening two acts and gradually reinvesting in a life project (working through) in the third act. Such a reading might be supported by the fact that even the very crosses that operate as the game’s primary enemies must also be used, increasingly as the game continues, to make it across chasms or to rise to unreachable parts of the screen. Even as Problem Attic could plausibly be approached as a game about working through trauma, I want to suggest that, at least in isolation, such an interpretation is too representational, ignoring both the extent of the game’s formal abstraction and, more importantly, its medium specificity as a video game. Beyond its specific use in trauma theory, the distinction between “acting out” and “working through” suggests different medium-­specific ways of approaching a video game. On the one hand, a player who acts out a platformer such as Problem Attic can be said to engage in a form of mimicry that depends on reverse engineering its algorithm. This player discovers enemies and obstacles positioned by the designer and overcomes them through puzzle solving and hand-­eye coordination mediated through the controller. A player who acts out a game such as Super Mario Bros.—really, what we conventionally mean when we say that someone is playing a video game—may find it difficult but ultimately fair in its design. In a game such as Problem Attic, which is less legible in terms of its rules and goals, a player with these expectations is likely to anticipate fairness but instead discover frustration. On the other hand, a player who works through a game might be said to understand the affordances and possibilities of its algorithm in a critical fashion that exceeds mere problem solving. To be clear, to work through a game could entail a thoughtful interpretation via a close reading, but it could also come in the form of the type of deep internalized knowledge that a successful speedrunner develops through the experience of playing a single game hundreds of times and learning its features, tricks, and glitches. In working through a video game, a player cannot remain a passive consumer. This point requires additional medium-­specific emphasis because, after all, any video 176

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game requires action. As such, to work through a video game entails thinking of it more as a designer than as a gamer. In the case of Problem Attic, a first step toward working through this game requires overcoming its unforgiving difficulty, for some players even a sense of unfairness, and making an unreasonable commitment to understanding its rules and objectives. Given its nonrepresentational commitments, I would argue that Problem Attic is not “about” sexual violence in the same way that Braid cannot be said to be “about” the atom bomb. Here, it is worth remembering that the game’s title signals not only the spatialized “problem attic” that is a site of trauma but also a more abstract and irresolvable “problematic.” The key problematic, I would argue, is one of power and (non)sovereignty. In a reflection on Problem Attic on her blog, interactive fiction designer Emily Short observes that most video games give the player incredibly high degrees of power and control. Though she identifies games that take away essentially all agency from the player, she singles out Problem Attic as an even rarer game that exists in the complex “space between power and powerlessness” in which “the player has little power but is still implicated in the system.”64 Giving depth to this condition of minimal power, the website that initiates Problem Attic offers a single, direct clue about the game’s meaning, noting that it concerns “prisons—both real and imaginary.” For a humanistic scholar, the invocation of “prisons” may immediately conjure associations with Foucault’s concept of the disciplinary society. Indeed, the experience of imprisonment, of starting anew in new spaces and institutions, amidst new rules, is not entirely lacking in the game. Even so, the fully digital space of the video game, and its invitation to action and interaction, puts us much closer to Deleuze’s control society in which computers are the exemplary machines. Even for Deleuze, prisons do not fade away but transform into “the prison system” or prison-­ industrial complex. In place of “molds” as “distinct castings” of enclosure and containment, Deleuze describes the “modulation” of the control society that operates as “a self-­deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other.”65 The world of Problem Attic transforms continuously, presenting the player with new challenges to which she must adapt, without offering any sense of how close she is to the end. Problem Attic makes the problem of control in video games affectively palpable, in a way that is abstract yet also intensely visceral, through the relation of consent. Though the game’s hostile crosses and unfair sequences may, through a traumatic reading, evoke a lack of sexual consent in particular, they also signal the relationship to a broader sense of consent that is inherent to playing any game. Indeed, one of the foundational qualities of play, posited by Johan Huizinga and extended by Roger Caillois, is its voluntary

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nature.66 In any game, a degree of consent is built into the player’s (at least) partial agreement to the rules. In Problem Attic, in particular, consent invokes the particular parameters of control under neoliberalism. The relationship of neoliberalism and consent is a complicated one, in part because it can be seen as operating differently at a macro- and microscale. At the macroscale, neoliberalism, contra liberalism, relies upon coercion. Political scientist S. M. Amadae, for instance, contrasts philosopher John Rawls’s reliance on the language of “consent and voluntary compliance to secure government” under liberalism with economist James M. Buchanan’s “staunch defense of coercive force” under neoliberalism.67 Liberal philosophy (if not practice, as institutions such as the transatlantic slave trade demonstrate) requires a compatibility between freedoms of an individual and others that is founded on mutual consent. By contrast, neoliberalism (as exemplified by the nonconsensual hostage taking of entire populations via the policy of nuclear utilization targeting selection) advocates strategic use of coercion.68 At the microscale of affect, neoliberalism can be said to use and abuse, rather than eliminate, consent to persuade subjects of its mode of control. Indeed, though Deleuze does not theorize consent in the context of his writing on control societies, the concept is key to differentiating the disciplinary and control societies. In the digital and networked life of the control society, we are subjected constantly to moments of consent, for example via ubiquitous terms of service agreements that people customarily accept without reading. Though the consequences of such agreements may rarely manifest themselves, the fleeting and increasingly habitual act of consent, in such instances, is crucial to negotiating relations of control. Berlant is again helpful in understanding such relations when she reminds us that hegemony under neoliberalism does not operate primarily through “domination and subordination” but through desirable forms of pleasure and attachment. Instead of a top-­down relation of power, consent introduces a more distributed complicity and maintenance of control. “As citizens of the promise of hegemonic sociability,” Berlant observes, “we have consented to consent to a story about the potentialities of the good life around which people execute all sorts of collateral agreements.”69 This relation of control, which oscillates between coercion and consent at different scales, is central to the experience of Problem Attic. Though the game has much to say both about neoliberalism and the related mechanics of control in Deleuze’s sense, its relationship to consent is more intimate and contextually specific to the experience of playing a video game. To better understand this precise context, it is useful to turn to a short but incisive 178

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essay about games, “Play and Be Real about It,” written by game designer Mattie Brice. In this essay, Brice follows Steve Wilcox, who argues that “play is actually an exercise in understanding contexts,” and fellow game designer Anthropy, who emphasizes that “context is everything.” Brice takes this argument a step further and contends that contextual play might better be understood through the framework of kink. Kinky sex, for instance the interplay between a domme and a sub, entails “the active recognition of consent.” Contrasting this specific form of consent with the capitalist coercions of the mainstream video game industry, she writes, “Instead of games as objects to manipulate, kink shows bodies and minds in codependent situational contexts based completely on the participants’ relationships with real life.”70 For Brice, the framework of kink is not just structural but fundamentally relational in its constantly shifting dynamics. As the earlier chapters of this book contended, neoliberalism privileges technophilic video game products over experiments with play, thereby denying meaningful connections between playfulness and constructions of reality. In a sense, most mainstream video games allow for only the most reductive and literal forms of consent, because they tend toward the homogeneity of clear genre conventions and clean design that consumers expect in advance. However, if “consent is its own context,” as Brice suggests, that context cannot merely be binary—given or not, at one moment in time, in the manner of computational if-­then logic. In this sense, despite fantasies of simple binary decision-­ making and controllable contexts within a neoliberal society, consent and play are never wholly predictable or risk-­free. That is, consent must actively be negotiated within each new context, as it invariably changes and therefore entails inherent risk. Within play activities, participants cocreate and actively negotiate consent within the space-­time of the “magic circle” where play unfolds. Players realize, either consciously or subconsciously, that this circle is porous and never entirely separate from realities, histories, and identities that precede and exceed its provisional boundary. No matter the initial entryway into a game, consent becomes muddied in moments of racist, sexist, or homophobic attacks that take place in networked video games or through a player’s realization that a fun pastime has gradually transformed into an addiction that now exerts influence upon everyday life. In the type of play that Brice imagines, whether kinky sex or nonsexual make-­believe play, the terms of consent are actively discussed in advance, experimented with, and sometimes redefined.71 Though all games entail consent in the initial invitation to play that a player can accept or reject, many of the experimental games that I focus on in this book rely on a queer proposition: an active and ongoing consent that

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is renegotiated throughout the play experience at the level of rules, mechanics, or genre. The maintenance of ongoing consent becomes particularly important in alternate reality games (to which I turn in chapter 7) that do not announce themselves explicitly as games at the beginning of the experience. But already in the case of Problem Attic, the connection of gameplay to sexual play is more than mere analogy; it takes on an affective resonance. “When people consent to inhabiting the potential for change that sexual events require,” Berlant observes, “they are mainly consenting to enter a space whose potentially surprising consequences are kept to a minimum.”72 Through attachments to optimistic expectation, people regularly find ways to manage the disappointments or unpredictable instabilities of consensual sex in ways that minimize surprise. In normative contexts, such management may include a reliance on unchanging physical routines, circumvention of verbal communication via invocations of conventional romance, or reversion to familiar genres of pillow talk. By contrast, in the ideal manifestations of kink and its alternative models of consent that Brice elaborates, play is not understood, even upon its episodic completion, as self-­apparent but brings with it “aftercare” (in the case of kink) and debriefing (in the case of a complicated game).73 This account of control and consent that runs contrary to neoliberal norms begins to offer one explanation of why Problem Attic was so poorly received and largely ignored (compared to an art platformer such as Braid), particularly by mainstream gamers. In its earliest moments, Problem Attic asks the player to consent to a system of control that grants the player a bare minimum of control over their movement and environment. Beyond its difficulty, the game’s conceptual complexity requires thought, reflection, and analysis. Such operations require a great deal on the part of the player, in large part because the game’s processes exceed the standard contract that a video game makes with its players when it invokes a fantasy (that is not unlike heteronormative sex) of pure entertainment without uncomfortable transformation. Indeed, even if a player commits to reflective aftercare, it is difficult to imagine that such a process could be entirely reparative, given the extent of that game’s radical negativity and interpretive instability. To conclude this reading of Problem Attic, it is important to emphasize that the game is not merely a theoretical diagnosis or computer simulation of the control society, but more properly an experience of and experiment with systems of control. Though the game is not explicitly autobiographical, Ryerson’s identity as a trans woman influences the ways that the experience communicates the problematic of consent via the specificity of a marginalized position. Again, this is no “empathy game.” Yet the game’s formal perspective 180

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is unmistakably that of a marginalized dividual subject. Though the player may search for the profound punctum of the traumatic event, Problem Attic ultimately leaves us with something more akin to the ordinary dislocation and confusion that characterizes the structural injustice and marginalization of our neoliberal era and of the longue durée of capitalism.74 The game does not invite either retreat or celebration from this system but, through its artful design, pre­sents the problematic signaled by consenting to parts of a system that guarantee a deeper coercion. The avatar position of Problem Attic is unquestionably that of a marginalized actor who is made complicit in their own imprisonment and objecthood. Formally, it is significant that the game is a two-­dimensional platformer that uses a third-­person view in which one sees one’s avatar as a precarious and nonsovereign actor that navigates prisons and systems of control. Instead of the immediate view of the popular first-­person shooter genre, the player witnesses the scene of seeing, controlling an avatar (both an object and an extension of self) who endures a control system from the inside. This third-­person relation to oneself cannot be reduced to traumatic dissociation. I would argue that the game’s tension between becoming-­ object within an inhuman system of control on the one hand and striving for agency on the other has more in common with W. E. B. Du Bois’s distinct concept of “double consciousness.” This social and perceptual condition is one in which a marginalized person is “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” Though this condition entails a confusion, it opens up other possibilities for opposition that come from multiplicity: “the black man’s turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like weakness. And yet it is not weakness—it is the contradiction of double aims.”75 Within a broader (though closely related) transnational context of imperialism, Frantz Fanon makes a similar point when he marks the “crushing objecthood” of colonization that makes ontology, let alone sovereignty, unattainable for people of color. He contends that the white gaze introduces “a third-­person consciousness” in which “consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity.”76 Without losing the embodied specificity and real-­world historical horror of Du Bois’s and Fanon’s theories of dehumanized consciousness and embodiment, it is possible to observe that Problem Attic reflects these insights at a formal level. The game maintains a formal double consciousness insofar as it is a platformer that attempts to do something that many players believe that platformers should not do. It aspires to be a difficult art work—or more

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precisely, a scene of contextualized play that demands careful and ongoing consent. This capacity of the game has been dismissed by many as a weakness of a cheap and poorly designed independent production. Admittedly, Problem Attic, as the name again suggests, does not solve problems but only problematizes a scene. However, as W. E. B. Du Bois also notes, there is great value in a shift of perspective from marginalized people having problems to “being a problem” for a dominant society.77 While Problem Attic remains in the generative space of critical negativity—of being a problem—the next game to which I turn approaches nonsovereignty through the substantially different relation of positive flow. Luxuria Superbia (or, Nurturing Nonsovereignty)

Both Dys4ia and Problem Attic embrace negativity and what Sianne Ngai has called “ugly feelings.”78 For Berlant and Edelman, negativity is a queer orientation that points to “the psychic and social incoherences and visions, conscious and unconscious alike, that trouble any totality or fixity of identity.” In its challenge to normative stability, negativity is “the relentless force that unsettles the fantasy of sovereignty.”79 Though negativity is a critical force, it can also form the ground for pedagogical processes and constructive politics, both in theory and in practices of protest. A recognition of negative affects opens up possibilities of and desires for alternative patterns not only of conscious thought and action but also of nonconscious habit and behavior. While negativity remains an underappreciated and generative affective modality, it is not the only one that enables nonsovereign disruptions of control within video games. The 2013 game Luxuria Superbia operates in a completely different mode. This game was created by Tale of Tales—the name adopted by the artistic duo of Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn. Though the game can be played on PC or Mac via a keyboard, its full experiential range is arguably only accessed by playing on the touchscreen interface of an iPad.80 Importantly, the game does not initially announce its scene or meaning at the level of text (thus differing from the more direct overview that I offer here), but rather invites the player to experience and discover it at a largely nonrepresentational level. At the beginning of the game, the player enters a garden in which they select a flower. Upon selection, the player travels through an endless tunnel that represents the flower (fig. 4.5). By touching and holding different grooves across the flower, using up to ten fingers at a time, the player seeks to give “delight” to the flower by imbuing its buds with color. The flower responds through visual and audio cues, as well as occasionally via text (e.g., an invitation to “Touch me”). Unlike most 182

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Figure 4.5. The endless tunnel interface of Luxuria Superbia (Tale of Tales, 2013).

games that encourage quick completion of levels or objectives, the accompanying instructions to the game promote a prolonging of play. “Try to stay in a colored flower as long as possible,” the instructions counsel; “be careful not to finish too quickly.” As one moves through increasingly challenging tunnels, one sees that certain buds are “cold” and often white in color. While such buds must be avoided, from the standpoint of accumulating immediate points, they can also be stimulated to “prevent the flower from going over the edge.” In the final sequence of each level, what the instructions call the “climax,” we see “the buds jump up and down with excitement” and can “touch them to make them explode.” Following this completion, the player is invited to “feel free to let go and let the climax subside for a more playful game.”81 Even without the explicit instructions, Luxuria Superbia is exceedingly sexual. The experience of the game is akin to sensing, reading, and responding to another person’s body, intensifying their pleasure. Yet the game does not fit neatly into the uses and purposes of sex that are conventionally discussed within the video game industry. For instance, in her book-­length exploration of sex in video games, designer Brenda Brathwaite observes that sex may serve one of several purposes in video games, which she divides into categories of stimulation and entertainment, sexual education, and realism.82 Notably, Luxuria Superbia does not centrally serve any of these purposes (even as it might coincidentally stimulate and entertain). To understand what the game does, it is important to think through how it approaches sex beyond representation. Much like Problem Attic, Luxuria Superbia operates primarily at a nonrep

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resentational level. In other words, the game is not simply “about” sex in a thematic way nor does it “contain” sex as a reward or aesthetic effect. Sexual experience in this game, I would like to argue, offers an affective route into experiencing and thinking through nonsovereignty. As Edelman notes, sex points to “the encounter with what exceeds and undoes the subject’s fantasmatic sovereignty.” Sex signals an experience that is at one’s limits or overwhelmingly ecstatic (in that word’s broader meaning of being outside of oneself)—and therefore also uncertain, risky, sometimes transformative. As Berlant puts it, “sex is not a thing of truth but a scene where one discovers potentiality in the abandon that’s on the other side of abandonment.”83 In a state beyond control, one comes to a knowledge that is, in turn, comparably uncontrollable. Edelman and Berlant’s approach to sex brings us much closer to its role in Luxuria Superbia. Yet, as I noted, this game does not venture into the realm of negativity that is important to them. For Edelman, for example, contrary to the optimistic fantasy of sovereignty, “sex affords a privileged site for encountering negativity—a negativity that registers at once the insistence of enjoyment, of the drive, and of various disturbances that inhere in relation itself.”84 Though negativity is an important route to disturbing normativity, againstness is not the only lesson of sex or the only expression of nonsovereignty. Luxuria Superbia taps into a quality of video games that could not be further from negativity: namely, flow. “Flow,” a term coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, describes a heightened and optimistic form of happiness that is often evoked by playing video games, especially as the player pursues a top score or a win condition that is neither overly easy nor impossible to achieve. This engaging state of “total involvement with life” often brings with it a deep concentration and attachment to reaching a challenging objective. Within games, this attachment need not be normative or rational, as in Clifford Geertz’s concept of “deep play” or Gregory Bateson’s “dark play.” Nevertheless, as described by Csikszentmihalyi, flow comes to resemble individual sovereignty, as it depends on “achieving control over the contents of our consciousness.” Both control and mastery, or at least involvement in one’s own life, come up as dimensions of “flow” or “optimal experience.”85 Luxuria Superbia, then, combines the uncontrolled experience of sex and relationality with the controlled flow of a goal-­oriented video game. Through this combination, the game stages the specific dynamic of nonsovereignty as it unfolds in a digital environment. One’s partner, after all, at least in the single-­player mode of this game, is not another human player but rather the assemblage of algorithms determined by the developers. In this way, it is pos 184

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sible to read the game as a literalization of Galloway’s point about the ways that video games foreground control and encourage an embodied intimacy with algorithms. If we restrict ourselves to the visual dimensions of Luxuria Superbia, the game’s interface (e.g., the explicit score) and algorithms (e.g., the relationship between player actions and a growing score) can be read as elements of the control society. Even at this level, however, the visual interface of Luxuria Superbia is sparse when compared to many video games. Given the game’s abstract graphics, the player can at most intuit the parameters of the algorithm without receiving precise feedback. Rather than training one’s hand-­eye coordination in a strict fashion, the player feels her way through each flower and its tunnel-­like representation. To say that the player feels her way through every level also takes on a literal dimension in this game given its touchscreen interface. In other words, even as the game is digital, in the sense of being based in binary code and computational technologies, it is also digital, in the sense of relying on fingers for its execution. A significant dimension of game feel, and the sense of real-­time control in both quantitative and qualitative ways, has to do with the relationship between the player and the input device. The standard console video game, of course, privileges thumbs, which are responsible for controlling joysticks and buttons. The thumb commonly symbolizes power (e.g., to be “under someone’s thumb” means to be under their control) and conveys sovereign confidence (e.g., Bill Clinton’s famous gesture of emphasis). In practice, a two-­thumb control scheme also allows rapid response times. In contrast to this kind of control, Luxuria Superbia requires the entire hand. For digital media users—from seasoned gamers to nongamers who are nonetheless accustomed to the thumb-­centric manipulation of their smartphones— the coordinated sliding of ten fingers is likely to feel awkward. The tactility of Luxuria Superbia leads to a departure from the physical relationship that one conventionally has to a video game, generating a sense that one is sexually gratifying one’s electronic tablet. Importantly, the experience is not one of simulated sex—either in the sense of the Commodore 64 single-­player rhythm game Sex Games or the multiplayer and networked sex available in virtual worlds such as Second Life. Particularly in single-­player sex video games, one is firmly within the ontology of the digital that seeks to make the world discrete, knowable, and documented. To be sure, Luxuria Superbia is a digital game. However, genre convention and a sense of medium specificity do not prepare one, in this case, for the uncertain encounter that unfolds. In this encounter, one is asked to experiment with the mechanics and the range of responses, as if feeling around in the dark for and with a new sexual partner.

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The controller itself, or the interface in a broader sense, becomes fundamental to the experience of Luxuria Superbia in a way that differentiates it from the other games discussed in this chapter. Though the affordances of the play space are limited, its duration varies significantly and depends on the player’s capacity to alter the quality of their touch in intuitive response to feedback. Instead of molding the environment (as in a puzzle game with one correct response), the player modulates in conjunction with the environment. As cultural theorist Erin Manning puts it, “Tactility is fraught with an ambiguity we cannot resolve.”86 The opacity of touch derives in part from its close relationship to affect, the experience of affecting and being affected by forces outside ourselves. Though the multiplayer mode of Luxuria Superbia involves another person, even the single-­player version foregrounds affect. After all, affect does not depend on a human other but is the residue of an encounter between any two bodies, including the assemblage of graphics, audio, and code that make up the algorithmic partner. Luxuria Superbia invites an understanding of bodies as relational, unfolding entirely in the in-­between space represented by the game’s abstract tunnel. Though the space is in a sense pregiven by the game’s design, its particular symphony of responses is evoked through the interplay between the player’s body and the designed system. In Manning’s terms, “The body does not move into space and time, it creates space and time: there is no space and time before movement.” Indeed, change within the system’s state does not happen except through motion, represented by the perpetual movement into the tunnel but expressed through the player’s arrangement and rearrangement of their fingers on the screen. Instead of an avatar as a body on a screen, the player becomes an assemblage of flows, forces, and trajectories. One’s own gender and that of the other represented by the on-­screen space become indistinct and fluid as the encounter unfolds. In Manning’s sense, gender can be said to be “ontogenetic” rather than “ontological” in this game.87 It may emerge as a nonessential element during play, but fundamentally it is the dynamic of interplay and relation that matter. If Luxuria Superbia can be said to put the player in a virtual environment, it is not primarily a virtuality of a simulated or artificial space rendered by technology—that is, of the type that was a common component of Cold War control. The game leans more heavily on another meaning of virtuality that points to potential states. Rather than encouraging speed and efficiency, the game invites the player to remain in the process and state of incompleteness for an extended period. Even as the game builds toward the actualization of climax, it encourages an appreciation of uncontrolled middles. If anything, climax marks the end of play. Like a child who invents episodes of a 186

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story to avoid bedtime or (perhaps more appropriately within this context) a lover delaying orgasm to prolong heightened excitation, the player of Luxuria Superbia holds onto the space of experimentation and play.88 With a digital device in hand, the player may think not only of the scene of sex but also of digital media: its forms, interfaces, and modes of worldmaking. For some players, this strange, titillating game may trouble the touch interface itself, moving it away from the binary choice of swiping left on dating and sex apps like Grindr and Tinder. Even more fundamentally, Luxuria Superbia may defamiliarize digital media, which smartphones have, in just a few years, naturalized for many as control platforms that provide an app for any need. Admittedly, the residue of algorithmic control and gamification remain in more than vestigial forms within the interface and objectives of Luxuria Superbia. Regardless, the game gestures toward nonsovereign becoming and encounters that are digital in nature but do not take control as their beginning and end. Notably, the game introduces the polyvalence of touch and even gesture into an otherwise digital environment. In the single-­player touchscreen version of the game, movement never quite achieves the true open-­endedness of gesture that complicates discrete written language. A fuller range of expressive and disruptive gestures enter into a networked video game such as Journey (2012), which introduces an interaction between two networked players who undertake a journey together. Though the path of that journey is linear and similar in each playthrough, it builds in possibilities for emergent play, insofar as the two players are not allowed to communicate through text or voice chat but can only rely on their mutual movements and gestures enabled by the game mechanics. As secondary forums about that game suggest, these indistinct gestures prompt a rich expression of affective relations, even more than interpretation.89 This reaching toward another person who exceeds the game’s objectives suggests forms and flows of life that emerge from algorithmic control but may also exceed it. Conclusion: From Control to Worlding

The Cold War brought with it an atmosphere of paranoia and proliferation of conspiracy theories that find their cultural exemplars in narratives such as Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and conspiracy thriller films such as John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962). In depictions of individuals who find themselves in the midst of complex political plots, such works betray an underlying desire for comprehension and control of complexity. Without entirely eliminating the impulses of this earlier mode, the present era of digital media and networks introduces a varied tendency

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toward transparency and proliferation of open secrets that comes across in a pervasive atmosphere of post-­truth or the publicly known data modulations by corporations such as Cambridge Analytica. Video games, which substitute dividual flows in the place of individual control, are key aesthetic counterparts of these broader cultural operations. If the medium of video games remains for many commentators largely within its adolescence, the games I have analyzed in this chapter offer a glimpse of a different age of experimentation that exceeds mere trial and error with a user-­friendly system. If this chapter does not commit extended paranoid or symptomatic readings of its featured games—readings that would unpack the ideological baggage and medium-­specific limits of video games—it is partially to suggest that video games and their corresponding media environment can also encourage a criticism that renders alternatives. Each of the games discussed here comes from independent designers and DIY production processes. These queer games emerge from the same ecosystem that, for example, yields textual Twine games and free video game design tools that substantially lower the bar for players to become designers and for designers to become critics who transform through processes of making. Consider designer Mitu Khandaker’s 2016 modification of Jason Rohrer’s well-­known 2007 art game Passage, which seeks to evoke an entire lifetime within a five-­minute exploration experience. In the original game, the player guides a blond male avatar who explores a maze (fig. 4.6). At the beginning, the player has the option of attaching to a female partner. With or without the partner, the player then accumulates points by either collecting treasure chests or exploring the world. Regardless of the choices made or path traveled, across five minutes, the avatar gradually shifts to the right side of the screen, ages, and dies. In Khandaker’s mod, the player’s avatar becomes a woman of color and the partner is a woman (fig. 4.7). In place of the treasure chests, the player now locates family members. Though these changes may seem largely superficial and representational—what designers would call a “reskinning” of the game—they also challenge the alleged universality of the game and seek to imagine how the experience of mortality might feel different from a space-­time of queer relationality.90 It is notable that the occasion for Khandaker’s creation was a symposium about Rohrer’s work for which she quickly generated this mod. In other words, this game served as an alternative form of criticism—or critical making—that opted not for a masterful interpretation but instead a construction of an alternative world that she invited the other conference participants (Rohrer and myself included) to try out. The video games in this chapter belong to a mode of critical making 188

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Figure 4.6. The five-­minute art game Passage ( Jason Rohrer, 2007).

Figure 4.7. A modification of Jason Rohrer’s Passage (Mitu Khandaker, 2016).

that, as the modifier “critical” suggests, do not constitute a total alternative to critique but nonetheless privilege experiences of responsive making to acts of straightforward interpretation. Furthermore, such practices push against impulses of Cold War centralization and neoliberal control. In place of these impulses, critical making introduces moods of flexible optimism: a positivity without positivism (or in some cases an applied negativity) that embraces safe failure.91 World creation through game design—whether through an analog, digital, or mixed reality game—is a unique mode of experiment. It departs from the types of experiments championed by the military-­industrial-­university complex that seek controlled knowledge that, more often than not, bolsters sovereignty, molds populations, or modulates dividuals. The opening enabled by such game experiments is different from expressivity, which is more commonly heralded as the primary accomplishment of a platform such as Twine. Without ignoring the important expressive benefits that networked media have brought to marginalized people— including platforms that support the publication of many of the queer games mentioned in this chapter—it is important to point out that a compulsion for self-­expression is also built into social media, which rely fundamentally on the sharing of opinion and identity for their content. As Galloway puts it, “What of today’s digital class? It has no choice but to speak, continuously and involuntarily.”92 Indeed, the likes, emotes, and comments that so many critical academics (myself included) use on a daily basis are also affordances of the control society.

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It is possible to observe that expression is a necessary but not sufficient starting condition of worlding that complicates partitions between subjects and environments. Yet this formulation implies that we already have clarity on the parameters of worlding—or at least that it is somehow a single process with an optimal formula. Nor can we allow worlding to drift into some kind of romantic liberal proposition. The Ku Klux Klan and the alt-­right, for example, have been perfectly competent at building worlds that make space for the communal hatred of millions. Or, to take the worldview that serves as the more central concern with this book, neoliberalism already undertook a pervasive contemporary project of constructivist world building in the mid-­twentieth century. Through the twentieth century, then, we have seen several extensive modes of worlding that have yielded myriad modes of alienation. Though video games so often resonate with neoliberalism, the fundamental form of the game is far from exhausted in this historical moment. With sober balance and a playful mood, this form pushes the limits of what worlding might yet become. As anthropologist Thomas Malaby puts it, games rely on “nondeterminative rules” that create a world for a collective to inhabit (it is important to note that most predigital as well as networked games are created for multiple players). This simultaneous embrace of play and structure, in a participatory spirit, is what characterizes any game’s mode of worlding. As Malaby notes, “Games are distinctive in their achievement of a generative balance between the open-­endedness of contingencies and the reproducibility of conditions for action.”93 An equilibrium between open play and rules is, of course, already a feature of the distributed sovereignty that makes up the control society. But perhaps this is in part what a game designer would call a balancing problem. A control society taps into play but simultaneously saps it of its potential for uncontrolled transformation. This potential becomes sensible in the playing of a game such as Problem Attic that reaches for a different relationship to play in relation to the commercial and independent games it references, borrows from, and pushes against. Even so, that potential might easily be misunderstood as mere mechanical difficulty by a player who lacks the literacy or capacity to reflect on the game’s playful forms of interpretive and affective difficulty. This is the issue to which I turn in the next chapter about the forms of difficulty that games make available to players. The reduction of play to fairness and transparent control is a contingency: one world among many. As such, it is worth asking: If we begin not with technorationalistic control but with values of nonsovereignty—not just at the scale of an individual or dividual but across an entire system—what kind of worlds could we build together? 190

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5 Difficulty The interest, which we have in any game, engages our attention, without which we can have no enjoyment, either in that or in any other action. Our attention being once engag’d, the difficulty, variety, and sudden reverses of fortune, still farther interest us; and ’tis from that concern our satisfaction arises. David Hume (A Treatise of Human Nature)

Losing is fun!

Dwarf Fortress tagline

It is difficult to describe what is difficult. Sarah Ahmed (Living a Feminist Life)

In a 1978 essay, George Steiner observes that “the subject of difficulty in poetry, in art” became a major aspect of aesthetic experience in the late nineteenth century. By the twentieth century, this aspect extended to new forms of visual and aural expression. At the same time, Steiner concludes, “Neither aesthetic theory nor general public feeling have coped with it satisfactorily.”1 Critics grapple with aesthetic difficulty most often in analyses of literary texts and avant-­garde art. In the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries, however, the media landscape changed considerably, introducing digital media that have further complicated discussions about difficulty. Most notably, this period saw the emergence of a medium that depends, fundamentally and in a variety of senses, on difficulty: namely, the video game. Video games constitute an instructive case for analyzing and experimenting with aesthetic difficulty in our time. At the most basic level, any game depends on artificially designed obstacles to which it invites players to attend and respond via mechanics, procedures, and processes.2 In the historical period contemporaneous to the emergence and expansion of neoliberalism, games have played an important role in maintaining a connection between experiences of difficulty and a neoliberal value of competition. As political theorist William Davies observes, “The great appeal of competition, from the neoliberal perspective, is that it enables activity to be rationalized and quantified, but in ways that purport to maintain uncertainty of outcome.” Competition, across domains from education to busi191

ness, introduces activity that is, at once, “empirically and mathematically knowable, but still possessed of its own internal dynamism and vitality.”3 Indeed, competition does not merely allow for the possibility of inequality but normalizes and legitimates it through the guarantee of differential outcomes and resultant hierarchies.4 Within this worldview, if the subject is the entrepreneur of him- or herself, the other is always a competitor. The affective experience of competition can be registered through a sense of difficulty, whether one encounters a difficult opponent or a challenging undertaking. Competitive games, including the majority of contemporary video games, serve as a cultural counterpart to neoliberal competition. These games train subjects to compete, to register variable levels of difficulty, and to enjoy competitive activity. In that process, games transform difficulty from a sense of unequal results to an experience of challenge that is perceived as constructive and fun. This chapter shifts emphasis from the well-­trodden terrain of competitive games to that of difficult play. From an aesthetic perspective, difficulty is not merely the affective residue of competition that must be resolved en route to success or victory. Difficult poetry, for example, may introduce irresolvable modes of “complexity, density, indeterminacy, opacity, and abstraction” as well as affective challenges of discomfort, frustration, or uncertainty regarding negotiations of difference.5 Difficult video games entail all of these modes and signal various ways of thinking through the impasse of a historical present in which games have become a cultural dominant.6 As Marc Goodwin observes, following Theodor Adorno, “the problem of difficulty [is] a particular response to objective historical conditions.” In the realm of video games, the types of experiences that are perceived as difficult at a particular moment, as well as the ones that enter less explicitly into cultural consciousness, can help animate the effects of neoliberal governance and digital media on the contemporary sensorium. Like the avant-­garde music that interests Adorno, an experimental video game represents “an attempt to come to terms with its own conditions of composition” that includes design, development, gameplay, and circulation.7 Video games remain commodities, but they have also started to filter into realms of art and political advocacy in ways that complicate their status. In US culture in particular, difficulty is increasingly introduced in the form of the artificial challenges of gamification—the use of game mechanics in nongame activities as diverse as business, education, the military, and consumer culture.8 Given the pervasiveness of game metaphors and form throughout culture, it is important to make sense of how this central experience of gameplay, in its many forms, influences players. 192

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Though competitive games are unquestionably the dominant form of games in US culture and constitutive of the paradigm of gamification, a careful analysis suggests alternative ways of engaging with difficulty that exceed neoliberal competition. In order to complicate the concept, I put forward three discrete types of difficulty that video games bring to the forefront. First, the interactive and participatory nature of games introduces a type of challenge that depends on performance and skills, which I call mechanical difficulty. Second, certain games share those difficulties that are common to poetry and artworks, which I explore under the broad rubric of interpretive difficulty. Third, through varied medium-­specific affordances, video games evoke emotions and generate affects in players that include experiences of anger, boredom, curiosity, complicity, pleasure, and uncertainty, as well as a variety of intensities that accompany gameplay. This final form might be called affective difficulty. Though I do not propose to account for all forms of difficulty that video games make thinkable and palpable, this tripartite structure offers an analytic starting point that helps disentangle difficulty from competition. Among these three categories, which appear in roughly the order of critical attention that they have received from most to least, the mechanical is in primary conversation with game studies and culture, the interpretive with literary criticism and art history, and the affective with the interdisciplinary constellation of affect theory. As these types of difficulty are largely heuristic, they intersect in a variety of ways. To demonstrate precisely how each form of difficulty works, the chapter considers numerous games and offers close readings of two games: Jason Nelson’s Game, Game, Game, and Again Game (2007) and Alexander D. Ocias’s Loved (2010). All three forms of difficulty demand continued analysis, but I argue especially for the importance of attending to the third category of difficult affects and emotions. While the field of game studies is becoming more adept at accounting for elements such as aesthetics (graphics, audio, and interface design), ludic structures (rules and objectives), interactive dimensions (mechanics), and artificial constraints (mechanical difficulty), it has not yet, with a few exceptions, done justice to the complicated ways that games generate and alter affects.9 Certainly, writing about this form of difficulty is challenging because games affect players in countless ways. Age, gender, ability and disability, skill developed through experience, and a host of other factors can influence whether someone finds a particular game difficult—and for what reasons.10 A fuller sense of affect in games, however, is necessary to better understand and potentially intervene in a society increasingly influenced by games. As Jennifer Doyle observes, emotion and affect are “where ideology does its most devastating work . . . where we come to know the

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contours of ourselves, our bodies, our sense of soul—and this zone is always under constant policing and negotiation.”11 Thus, affective difficulty might help us better understand the ways that games structure and limit practices of play in the early twenty-­first century. At the same time, affective difficulty is not merely a sign of ideological limitations that is collapsible, for instance, into a system that promotes competitive activity. For me, the category of affective difficulty encompasses both emotion (a subjective and personal content that can be fixed via psychological categories and narrativized via biographical and fictional accounts) and affect (an experience of intensity that is nonconscious and relational). Though most scholarship in this area has focused on emotion and feeling in video games, I also want to gesture toward the nonrepresentational dimensions of affect that video games open up.12 In this latter sense, affect captures the viscerality of abstraction as it moves through lived bodies and everyday experience—a process that takes a unique form in a world increasingly dependent on a digital infrastructure and its built-­in abstractions. An experience of affect is always layered, belated, and seemingly bottomless. It is never easy, always difficult. Because affect describes a body’s transition among different states of capacitation, this term allows us to trouble the type of binary problem/solution framework that animates forms of technological fetishism, including fixed ways of thinking about serious applications of games via instrumental approaches of gamification. Another way to put this is that affect allows us to think of video games not simply as solvable or resolvable experiences but as processes of ongoing experimental problem making that cannot be reduced, as they often are, either to their representational or technological ­dimensions.13 Mechanical Difficulty

When one speaks about a game’s challenge, this quality often has to do with what I call mechanical difficulty.14 Though this term might refer to a broader set of activities—including sports, surgery, and lock picking—it carries a number of unique connotations across video-­game cultures. In his account of literary difficulty, Charles Bernstein writes about “handling difficult poetry.”15 What is a metaphor in the context of poetry becomes literal in the case of video games, which require hand-­eye coordination and depend on forms of play that are digital in more ways than one. At the same time, literary and ludic texts often exhibit meaningful similarities in their mechanics. Game studies researcher Espen Aarseth, for instance, analyzes formal overlaps between novels such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962) and text adventure games 194

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such as Will Crowther’s Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), which both fall into his category of ergodic literature that requires “nontrivial effort” of a reader.16 As Bernstein observes about poetry, difficulty does not imply abnormality, since a significant portion of poems bring with them interpretive challenges.17 One can say the same of mechanical difficulty in video games. As game designer Greg Costikyan notes, “Games are supposed to be, in some sense, ‘hard to use,’ or at least, nontrivial to win.”18 In Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s definition of a game, one of six core elements is artificial conflict. Drawing from earlier game theories by David Parlett, Chris Crawford, Elliot Avedon, and Brian Sutton-­Smith, they note, “All games embody a contest of powers. The contest can take many forms, from cooperation to competition, from solo conflict with a game system to multiplayer social conflict.”19 A necessary element of a game, then, and one that may motivate continued play, is the required familiarity with the designed system and a cultivation of physical or strategic skills that enable success or mastery.20 The concept of mechanical difficulty in video games can be approached through three lenses that I will discuss briefly in this section: the formal, the historical, and the sociological. First of all, mechanical difficulty can take many forms. Though a complete taxonomy of such challenges would be most useful to game designers, enumerating some of these varied types might also be important for game analysis within the humanities and social sciences. For instance, mechanical difficulty in many arcade-­style games is not oriented toward a terminal goal, offering play without absolute end. Video games from Space Invaders (1978) to Flappy Bird (2013) mark their difficulty (in both cases distinct from complexity) in terms of a score and leaderboard that accounts for the player’s capacity to accumulate points, avoid obstacles, and outperform other players. By distinction, many other video games do promise an endpoint but pre­sent various challenges to reaching that aim. Such games may include an excessive number of enemies (e.g., Bastion [2011]), “boss” characters with sophisticated artificial intelligence or advanced abilities (e.g., Shadow of the Colossus [2005]), randomly generated obstacles that cannot always be avoided via skill (e.g., Spelunky [2008]), arbitrarily or sadistically difficult level design (e.g., I Wanna Be the Guy [2007]), weak avatars with low health bars (e.g., Hotline Miami [2012]), a built-­in expectation of frequent death (e.g., Cuphead [2017]), “permadeath” or significant punishments for death (e.g., Diablo II [2000] on “hell” mode), a lack of password options and limited checkpoints (e.g., Battletoads in Battlemaniacs [1993]), no continues (e.g., Dragon’s Lair [1990]), reversals of gameplay expectations (e.g., Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels [1986]), and deliberately awkward controls (e.g., Octodad: Dadliest Catch [2014]). For many players, such challenges pro

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mote engagement and the refinement of skills.21 Alongside difficult single-­ player games, multiplayer video games derive their challenge from the presence and skills of other players in a competitive format (e.g., Super Smash Bros. [1999] or Counter-­Strike [2000]). There are other categories of mechanical difficulty that exceed formal analysis. Here a second approach, historical analysis, may be useful. Contextualizing difficulty serves as a useful method in game studies. For instance, the cultural importance of mechanical difficulty in electronic games becomes clear if we consider pinball, a precursor of video games. In 1942, Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia persuaded the courts to ban electronic pinball machines in New York City because of their association with organized crime and gambling. Pinball did not again become legal in the city until 1976 when, as Steven L. Kent explains, the New York City Council held a hearing. A key argument in favor of legalization came from Roger Sharpe, who wrote about pinball and was also a skilled player. As Sharpe himself recounts, “Along with my testimony, I was supposed to give a demonstration to show that the game was based on skill, not chance.”22 In this case, the council’s decision to legalize pinball depended precisely on the presence of mechanical difficulty that more closely aligned this electronic game with sports than with chance-­based gambling games. The alleged challenge of pinball (and later video games) became a factor in its perceived cultural legitimacy. Policy makers reclassified the game as an activity that promoted learning and skill development, thus marking it as an activity with cultural value rather than a vice that invited predominantly repetitive actions. Later serious games, such as surgery simulations designed to produce better surgeons, have relied on a similar argument. As the story of pinball legalization suggests, difficulty can operate as a marker of social acceptability and value for certain games. Over time, it has also developed into a cultural feature that gamers themselves desire, sometimes even demand, of video games. Designers have added variable difficulty settings to meet this appetite. Some video games, in the early to mid-­1970s, offered a flat mechanical difficulty that would remain roughly constant from player to player and session to session. However, in 1977 the Atari Video Computer System introduced switches that enabled changing the “difficulty level” of a game to either beginner or advanced mode.23 Though subsequent consoles did not all include such options built into the hardware, video-­game software has increasingly included options that map onto easy, normal, and hard modes. Some games include a greater number of difficulty distinctions and even incorporate unique category titles. For example, the infamous first-­person shooter Doom (1993) includes a five-­part difficulty menu 196

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Figure 5.1. Difficulty setting menu in Doom (id Software, 1993). Screenshot taken by

Stormspirit 86, “Doom 1 (1993),” August 13, 2010, http://​www​.youtube​.com​/watch ​?v​=​jP2jI0BVG0w.

that incorporates a sadomasochistic vocabulary, including “I’m Too Young to Die,” “Hey, Not Too Rough,” “HurtMePlenty,” “Ultra-­Violence,” and “Nightmare!” (the last of which warns, on a subsequent screen, that it “isn’t even remotely fair”) (fig. 5.1). Alongside such selectable categories, other games include dynamic difficulty with artificial-­intelligence opponents that adapt to the player’s performance in real time or between game sessions (for example, Left 4 Dead [2008]).24 A third approach to the analysis of mechanical difficulty is a turn to sociological and cultural analysis that considers the constitution of digital gaming publics. Beyond formal and historical considerations, there are countless personal or idiosyncratic reasons that particular players might find a game difficult. Such reasons develop alongside sociotechnical and legal apparatuses that privilege certain bodily capacities while neglecting particular debilities. Indeed, games can only be understood in a situated context that involves genre conventions, controller types, player expectations, abilities, cultures, and access to communication networks. Mechanical difficulty constitutes individual subjects but also importantly produces and delimits publics in a variety of ways. The broadest scale at which such difficulty encourages inclusivity within emergent publics might be the way that games resonate with and promote fundamental literacies. The advent of digital technology has brought with it literacies that exceed traditional forms of reading and writing. Video games,

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in particular, introduce a host of new experiences and ways of knowing that Salen, Zimmerman, and others have called “gaming literacy.”25 Many of the abilities marked by this category relate to the process of understanding and navigating the forms of mechanical difficulty that I discussed above. Game designers, researchers, and educators have argued that games foster the types of skills needed for thinking and working in the early twenty-­ first century. For instance, games cultivate curiosity, motivation, effort, and optimism about the possibility of completing a challenge. Gamers are also positively disposed toward collaborations that allow them to engage in cooperation, coordination, and cocreation.26 Through the difficulties that they create, games allow, even encourage, learning through risk taking and trial and error. Instead of being something to avoid, difficulty becomes a key aspect of the way that video games operate as models and microcosms of contemporary education. Some advocates of the research constellation of digital media and learning have attempted to tap into the motivating capacity of games in order to redesign a broken educational system. In this context, games are often seen as inclusive, even when they challenge their players. At a smaller scale, mechanical difficulty can also contribute to the maintenance of existing gaming publics and subcultures. In the 2010s, the video game ecology has seen a resurgence in games that pride themselves on inaccessibility and mechanical difficulty. Games that are intentionally designed to be mechanically difficult and limiting in their access have many genealogies. One can certainly turn to earlier arcade games, such as the notoriously difficult Defender (1981) or Robotron 2084 (1982).27 However, an arguably more important development may have been the release of the 1980 computer game Rogue. This game drew on role-­playing and text-­adventure games but also introduced features such as randomized content, procedural level generation, and permanent death. Rogue initiated the genre of “roguelikes” that continued in the following decades with games such as NetHack (1987) and The Binding of Isaac (2011). The randomization in these games kept them perpetually fresh and increased their replay value. These games appealed primarily to hardcore gamers. The continued popularity of roguelikes, at least among devotees, also benefited from the comparatively low resources necessary to create them. Following Dark Souls (2011), the emergent genre of the ultradifficult “souls-like” action game has also surged in popularity. Though they started as a niche interest, sadistically difficult games, or even ones that are impossible to win, have become popular with an increased number of players. As game designer Paul Morse notes, game culture experienced a “renaissance of roguelikes” in the early twenty-­first century.28 Some self-­proclaimed gamers embrace mechanically difficult games because, as 198

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Figure 5.2. Dwarf Fortress (Tarn Adams and Zach Adams, 2006). Screenshot taken by

Rodolphe Courtier, “Dwarf Fortress Miasma,” February 21, 2009, http://​www​.flickr ​.com​/photos​/rcourtie​/3298841065.

Super Meat Boy (2010) creator Edmund McMillen has polemically observed, “no one likes being talked down to.” Of his own games, he adds, “I feel like a lot of games nowadays treat you like a little kid. They assume you’re dumb, incompetent. But I respect you enough to know that you know how to play a video game.”29 It is worth noting, however, that the “you” invoked in this statement includes only expert gamers—or at least people familiar with gaming conventions who are equipped with necessary abilities and have developed sufficiently advanced medium-­specific skills. Exemplary of a subcultural embrace of mechanically difficult games is Dwarf Fortress, an independently created, single-­player, roguelike construction game that was first released in 2006 by creators Tarn and Zach Adams (fig. 5.2).30 In the “Fortress Mode” of the game, players construct and defend fortresses that are doomed to be eventually overthrown by ambushes, sieges, and other threats. Though the game uses extremely simple ASCII art graphics, includes an unforgiving learning curve, and makes available a complex world that would be incomprehensible to casual participants, it has garnered a dedicated player base. Instead of complaining about difficulty, these players have embraced comparatively more interesting, often comical, ways of failing at the game, even coining the tagline “Losing is fun!”31 In this game, difficulty motivates players simultaneously to improve and to devise increasingly more striking ways to fail. While Dwarf Fortress, a single-­ player game, encourages a second-­order community interested in analyzing and sharing discoveries, massively multiplayer online games even more explicitly require players to band together and form lasting guilds with others in order to face challenges, level up, and ­progress.

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For all of its inclusive and productive potentials, mechanical difficulty can also serve as an occasion for exclusion and the destruction of player publics. In response to games created for hardcore and skilled players—a trajectory that stretches from 1970s arcade games to 1990s console games—a diversifying game industry in the 2000s yielded a proliferation of inclusive casual games that are less difficult and therefore available to nongamers. This trend has yielded popular mobile games such as the Candy Crush series (2012), as well as consoles such as the Nintendo Wii (2006), which was marketed explicitly for family and social play rather than specialist engagement.32 Additionally, casual play has increased with the meteoric rise of social media games such as FarmVille (2009), Words with Friends (2009), and Angry Birds Friends (2012). Though casual games achieved unprecedented popularity in the 2000s, there are historical precedents for casual gameplay with game consoles such as the Atari 2600 (1977) that were targeted at intergenerational play, as well as different versions of popular home computer games such as Microsoft’s Solitaire (1990) and Minesweeper (1990), as well as Tetris (1984). The game industry’s concerted push against the exclusive nature of mechanically difficult video games in the 2000s has arguably been motivated by a realization about the ways that extreme challenge may limit the potentially astronomical market share of video games. Alongside the proliferation of casual games, however, mechanical difficulty persists as an exclusionary mechanism that divides gamers and nongamers (who may still be nonexpert “players”). The ongoing negotiation of gamer identities came to a boiling point with the notorious GamerGate controversy of 2014 and the debates that it motivated about who belongs to the video-­game public. During GamerGate numerous women, including blogger Anita Sarkeesian and game designer Zoë Quinn, received rape and death threats—many of them detailed, graphic, and vicious—by gamers seeking to defend their privileged cultural space from outsiders.33 While such negotiations are not explicitly about mechanical difficulty, player publics and prestige economies often form around concepts that have to do with skill, performance, and savvy. Though the case of GamerGate reveals the exclusionary affordances of mechanical difficulty, it is worth adding that this event also served as a catalyst for the emergence, expansion, and popularization of new publics organized around categories such as serious games or queer games.34 As these formal, historical, and sociological accounts suggest, mechanical difficulty is not simply a problem to resolve or a process to overcome in order for progress to occur.35 More robustly, this form of challenge can serve as a lens through which game studies scholars might attend to the processes and experiences of difficulty, as well as the types of communities that such 200

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challenges produce. In other words, methodologically, mechanical difficulty becomes less a form of interference or obstruction of desired transparency than a facilitator for understanding player publics. If difficulty is an experience that players so often seek out, it may serve as a critical dynamic through which to analyze the cultural and social impact of video games. Before turning to affect in games, which leads back to questions about publics and interpersonal relations, I first turn to another form of challenge that is more often discussed in literary circles but which is also crucial to understanding video games: interpretive difficulty. Interpretive Difficulty

The broader category of what we might call interpretive difficulty plays a part in even the most mundane and everyday processes of meaning making. Challenges of interpretation might pre­sent themselves with an activity that is as basic as deciding on a driving speed in response to a speed limit sign, choosing which public bathroom to use relative to one’s gender, or making sense of a media strategy adopted by a presidential candidate. Each of these decisions entails the interpretation of a complex legal, social, or historical context. There are a host of difficulties that accompany evaluating each of these situations and acting upon that interpretation. In a more specialized sense, the study of literary and artistic texts has long served as a zone of concentrated hermeneutic analysis, especially through the development of close reading methodologies. Steiner details four types of interpretive difficulty that may affect readings of poems or other literary texts. As these categories remain important to analyzing video games, they are worth reviewing up front. First, there are contingent difficulties that depend on a dearth of factual knowledge but can often be wholly resolved by looking up a word or seeking out information about basic historical events. Second, there are modal difficulties in which a reader understands a poem without wholly comprehending it, as when one can parse the meaning of poetic lines but lacks a sense of the historical context within which a tone or genre emerged. Third, Steiner describes tactical difficulties that involve deliberate or stylistic obstructions that may take the form of either idiosyncratic constraints or political tactics. Finally, one may encounter ontological difficulties through which a poem defamiliarizes fundamental concepts. These complications cannot be resolved by consulting a reference text. They “confront us with blank questions about the nature of human speech, about the status of significance, about the necessity and purpose of the construct which we have, with more or less rough and ready consensus, come to perceive as a poem.”36

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Together, these four categories mark ways in which poetic works, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Claudia Rankine, may prove challenging to readers.37 It may appear, particularly to readers not steeped in game culture, that video games could not possibly pre­sent the same types of interpretive difficulties as poems. As I hope this book demonstrates, this is not the case. Even the most commercially oriented games pre­sent interpretive difficulties for a player attempting to traverse them. Consider Nintendo’s hit video game Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990). In the World 1 fortress of this game, the player encounters, for the first time in the entire Mario series, a spiked ceiling that drops down toward Mario or Luigi, threatening to crush the avatar. Without precedent, and in the limited time that the ceiling descends, the player must interpret the level design and react, ducking down within a gap in the ceiling that provides temporary safety. Subsequently, even though another safe space is not visible, the player must jump over two pits, anticipating that such a space will become available on the right side of the scrolling level, before the avatar is crushed. In this case, a player interprets the video game differently than a reader might interpret a poem, attending not to language or meter but instead to mechanics and spatial elements. The moment of interpretation that I described in Super Mario Bros. 3 depends both on the retention of memory about the video game’s core mechanics and the avatar’s kinesthetic capacities in previous levels, as well as future-­directed protention that anticipates possible level design variations that have not yet been encountered.38 Interpretation takes place during the regular course of playing any video game. However, a noteworthy change in the reception of video games took place around 2007 and made possible a deeper analytic appreciation of this medium. To put this differently, interpretive difficulty in video games became possible within a particular historical context and the set of problems and possibilities that this context made visible. As I contend in the book’s introduction, the period around 2007 saw the introduction of a wide range of new cultural, technological, and institutional practices from online distribution platforms to the growth of art and independent games. Such factors have promoted a form of game production and quality of play and criticism that has led, in the 2010s, to a broader consideration of games as literary or artistic.39 Though both of these designations tend to introduce vague value judgments, they also encourage the recognition of key intersections—for instance, between poetry and video games. Certain new media critics such as Joseph Tabbi have sought to maintain a clear-­cut distinction between literature, on the one hand, and “visual, oral, and computational media” on the other. Tabbi marks this boundary most sharply be 202

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tween literature and games, noting that unlike the interactive dimension of games, literature’s complexity depends on “constraints that are peculiar to language.”40 Other critics, including some writing before the emergence of a widespread video game culture, have instead insisted that there are meaningful affinities between literary and ludic objects. This line of analogy dates back at least to Jacques Ehrmann’s 1968 structuralist volume of Yale French Studies on “Game, Play, Literature.”41 Such intersections between games and literature demonstrate the ways that Steiner’s categories of difficulty are still operative in game studies. Admittedly, interpretive difficulty has not been quite as critical to game culture across its history as it has been to literary culture. For instance, despite a number of careful and exemplary analyses, scholars working on games have more often treated particular games in a superficial fashion or simply relied less on techniques of close reading that exceed basic descriptions. The contingent and modal interpretive difficulties presented by games often require knowledge of different corpuses and production contexts than those of the literary and traditional art worlds. Nevertheless, tools adopted from literary criticism, as well as art history, are helpful for grappling with the interpretive difficulty of video games. To suggest how this works, I will take a closer look at Jason Nelson’s Flash-­animated Game, Game, Game, and Again Game (2007). Despite its interpretive difficulties, the game has been played online over eight million times. In an artist statement that gestures toward the various genealogies from which he draws, Nelson describes the work as “a digital poem, retro-­game, an anti-­design statement and a personal exploration of the artist’s changing worldview lens.”42 Visually, the game is, as Jessica Pressman has observed, an example of “born-­digital works [that] exploit the aesthetic of bookishness,” reworking print-­based and hand-­ drawn art to a digital context.43 Mechanically, the game adopts the genre of a platform video game or “platformer” in which an abstractly shaped avatar (two target-­like concentric circles, colored red and black, with limb-­like wavy lines emerging outward) moves and jumps across platforms in a series of fourteen single-­screen levels.44 This game serves as an ideal case study because it allows us to isolate a high interpretive difficulty that exists alongside a minimal mechanical difficulty. Particularly for a player familiar with platformer conventions, the movement through levels should prove undemanding: the game includes relatively few enemies and obstacles, avoids substantial punitive measures for the avatar’s death, and gives the player an unlimited number of lives. However, the game is, from its beginning, invested in interpretation. The opening screen announces the “object of game” to be double: “move around”

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and “think.” This objective is, in theory, vexed insofar as it may prove difficult to navigate this novel environment while simultaneously giving over sufficient attention to reading and thinking about its textual and visual elements.45 At the same time, as designer Katie Salen has observed, “Gamers are nothing if not reflective in action.”46 In Nelson’s game, however, the player is not asked to be reflective only about the rules or objectives as they relate to progress. The interpretive difficulty has to do with this game’s materiality. For example, the name of each level (which often includes a lengthy subtitle) vanishes almost immediately after it appears, complicating the reading experience. The slow reflectiveness that is both possible and encouraged in print-­based poetry is not available in this experience—or more generally in video game play in which goal orientation may challenge or interrupt contemplation.47 Onscreen distractions appear constantly with a chaotic layering of text, images, animations, and videos, which produce a palimpsest that expands as each level unfolds. To make sense of the difficulties of Game, Game, Game, and Again Game, it is helpful to turn back to Steiner’s types of interpretive difficulty, even as the medium of video games requires some adjustments to how these categories operate in ways that depart from poetic hermeneutics. As the description of the game already makes evident, the work brings with it possible contingent difficulties. As with opaque poetry, which requires “homework” that is “interminable, as there is always more ‘to look up,’” this game is awash with references and contexts.48 The allusions do not come primarily from any traditional literary canon, even as the piece includes parodies of biblical syntax. The quotations are, predominantly, of video game design conventions. For example, in the first level (titled “the fundamentalist or obsessively charmed by the sun”), the avatar moves to the right of the screen to discover a precipitous drop that leads to a burning sun at its base (fig. 5.3). Though the sun appears to be a pitfall that will result in the avatar’s death, it quickly becomes apparent that the only way to the next level is down. To reinforce this dilemma, a phrase at the bottom of the screen notes, “there are no other possible”—followed by a series of cycling words that include “beliefs,” “choices,” “futures,” and “paths.” The implicit reference in this level design is to the leap of faith. This well-­known video game industry term refers to unfairly constructed moments in early platform games that required players, forced into an exploratory mode, to jump blindly into pits—and often lose lives in the process. In Nelson’s game, when the avatar jumps down the cliff, at the very last moment before she reaches the sun, an arrow-­shaped platform appears without warning, saving the player and leading her to the next level. This deus ex machina foregrounds the lack of choice that is so often built 204

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Figure 5.3. A leap of faith in Game, Game, Game, and Again Game ( Jason Nelson, 2007).

into a medium that purports to be about decision-­making and interactivity. By understanding this reference, a seemingly chaotic screen gains meaning. Alongside such contingent difficulties, a player may face modal difficulties that challenge comprehension and persist even if she or he understands each line of text or visual reference at face value. For example, the cluttered aesthetic draws from an artistic tradition of horror vacui that stretches from illuminated British medieval manuscripts and Islamic arabesque art to twentieth-­century underground comix and graphic design (fig. 5.4).49 This muddle overwhelms the player’s capacity for meaning making from the start. Comprehending the precise purpose of a horror vacui aesthetic in this context, however, requires a sense of interface design principles that were standard to Adobe Flash products as well as to websites created with industry standard software. Though such artistic software promises a broad range of choices, it tends to privilege certain design schemes and to promote a particular aesthetic not only in video games but also in new media art more broadly. As Nelson observes in an interview, this design philosophy brings with it “the built illusion of clean lines and definitive choice, cold narrow pathways of five colors, three body sizes and encapsulated philosophy.” For this reason, the levels of Game, Game, Game, and Again Game may seem (like the title itself) filled with visual redundancies, distractions, and unneces

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Figure 5.4. The cluttered aesthetic of Game, Game, Game, and Again Game ( Jason Nelson, 2007).

sary sources of multimedia confusion. By common game design standards, the screen may seem poorly organized to facilitate player navigation or flow, instead privileging frequent self-­interruption. In fact, the noisy composition and hand-­drawn aesthetic (images produced on paper with charcoal and colored pencil) “breaks the artwork away from both the oppressive control of software and much of design culture.”50 Thus, to tackle modal difficulties, a player needs to make sense of a broader new media design context, as well as the affordances of games as interactive art. Steiner’s third category of tactical difficulties is also at play in Nelson’s game. The work includes a self-­reflexive critique of video games and gamified systems. For example, following the convention of platformer video games, the game enables a progression from one level to the next. At the same time, the concept of progress grows confusing through a score display that includes characters that shift according to player feedback but do not communicate quantitative results that might inform the player. The game thus eschews the teleological and competitive orientation of most video games. This point becomes most evident on the final screen where the player can choose between a target that reads “small winnings” and another that promises “REALLY, REALLY LARGE WINNINGS.” If the player selects the latter, she 206

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unlocks a video in which the narrator tells “the story of life” that involves an absurd and surreal account of a series of ordinary household objects. The mock-­somber tone of this video clashes with the epically triumphal conclusion of many platformer video games such as Super Mario Bros. A carefully engineered game experience cedes to playfulness and improvisation. Thus, the unreadable score display and seeming non sequitur of the final video, which may prove to be interpretive difficulties, have tactical dimensions that complicate assumptions about video games that gamers may have internalized through years of play. Finally, Game, Game, Game, and Again Game brings with it ontological difficulties. In literary contexts, this type of difficulty might unfold, for instance, in the face of longstanding challenges introduced by the arbitrary relation between signifier and signified, or by lability and variation across reading practices.51 With video games, there are medium-­specific equivalents. Indeed, there is a kind of ontological tension, if not outright paradox, in the form of the critical art video game itself. After all, video games emerge from the military-­industrial-­entertainment complex, are complicit with an instrumental problem-­solution framework of contemporary technoscience, and contribute to the action-­oriented competition that underlies neoliberalism. As such, the possibility of using video game procedures and mechanics to challenge these same systems introduces ontological difficulties regarding immanence and transcendence, as well as the possibilities of technological experimentation. Nelson struggles with such difficulties by taking the player through a series of levels that evoke different “belief systems,” introduced through figures such as “the real estate agent,” “the capitalist,” and “the life coach.” In the final level, the very moment of successful completion, the game turns self-­reflexively to the competitive bias inherent in game-­design ideology by announcing that “belief is not win, win, win.” Instead of rejecting video game form or insisting on distance from it, this game explores its value through the very act of gameplay. All of these types of interpretive difficulty offer guidance for analyzing video games and putting them in conversation with both literary and visual artistic forms. They also offer insight into a changing media ecology that now includes art games. However, the limitation of the kind of interpretive process that I have demonstrated in this section is that it may lead a player largely to decode or unpack a game’s meaning, as if it were merely something that was entirely encoded by the game’s designer. In fact, the ways in which a game is played—the variations of strategies, tactics, styles, contexts, experiments, and metagames built atop the original game—introduce additional interpretive challenges. When we move from a formal game to its various

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modes of play, video games also bring with them another, less discussed type of affective challenge to which I now turn. Affective Difficulty

Video games evoke affective difficulties, which differ from both mechanical and interpretive challenges. Furthermore, they may introduce intensities that test or even unravel the player amidst play. While players and critics often imagine resolving other types of difficulty, affective difficulty is irresolvable. It may intersect with the mechanical pleasures of victory or interpretive engagement, but it also activates, to borrow John Vincent’s list of reactions to difficult poems, experiences of “boredom, disenchantment, fear, shame, and even disgust” that video games make possible.52 Games can produce annoyance, anxiety, flow, or something as common as rage quitting. They inspire everything from delighted curiosity to deep addiction. They can require orientations of flexible optimism. They can captivate us with connective feelings—apophenia—or darker entanglements—paranoia. They can allow us to think through complicated circumstances, empathize with others, and experiment with unfamiliar experiences. Furthermore, the difficulties that might accompany such experiences are augmented by the layered ways in which affect is shaped by and enters into conversation with historical and disciplinary factors.53 Certain games create affectively dense fields through aesthetic and formal means, while also generating difficulty, in large part, because of what players themselves bring to these games—and take away from them. If affect describes visceral abstraction as it moves through lived bodies, then video games might offer the opportunity to access, even play with, fields of affective flow that are enabled by digital and networked environments. Doyle contends that difficulty in art, which is inseparable from feeling, emotion, and affect, does not operate identically across media: “Comparing different forms—novels, music, films, and visual art—one might ask why we are prepared to accept the value of feeling bad when we read a novel, for example, but are less prepared to do so when we go to a museum.”54 A novel, in other words, is likely to immerse, move, and undo its readers in different ways than a sculpture in a gallery space. To offer a contrast that is more relevant within the present context: while an activity such as film reception, for Walter Benjamin, takes place amidst distraction, video games might be said to invite a different receptive field characterized by absorption and flow.55 The field of affect studies often turns to literary texts and visual media but less frequently to the medium specificity of video games. Similarly, both 208

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popular and scholarly criticism about games tends to be attentive to areas such as game aesthetics, narrative, and mechanical difficulty, but less often to affect.56 It is worth repeating that affect and emotion are not identical terms. Brian Massumi describes emotion as the most intense “capture and closure of affect” that recognizes its residue consciously and identifies an aspect of it linguistically.57 Though the specificity of affect within video games, prior to and in excess of emotion, matters to me elsewhere, in this chapter I would like to keep the related terms feeling, emotion, and affect in play as I elaborate the umbrella category of affective difficulty.58 Arguably in part because of the abstraction of affect as a concept, both critics and designers have paid greater attention to emotion in video games. For example, play theorist Miguel Sicart argues for the centrality of “emotional designs” that create an environment in which we are surrounded “by objects created with the intention of appealing to our senses and feelings.”59 Katherine Isbister promotes a similar design technique by arguing that “games can actually play a powerful role in creating empathy and other strong, positive emotional experiences.”60 Even so, emotion—let alone affect—remains largely unarticulated or bur­ ied for many game designers, reviewers, and critics. Though the field of game studies has expanded interpretive engagement with games, analyses tend to be cerebral and formalist in ways that limit engagement with the experiences of video game play. This tendency mirrors the attitude that art criticism often adopts, more broadly, according to Doyle. Art historical meaning making frequently calls for a “regulation of affect” and a “cool, distanced, and anti-­emotional” stance. Emotion, in the context of analysis, becomes a “self-­ indulgent and naïve practice.”61 Video game creators and scholars who have sought legitimacy for the medium, especially as it has developed into an object of academic inquiry, have sometimes fostered a similar critical distance. The fact that emotion remains marginalized in discussions of games has much to do with the disciplining mechanisms that are at play in the emergence of any analytical discourse that seeks to achieve legitimacy. In such cases the scientific demands of seriousness and rigor are sometimes juxtaposed, as Doyle again notes, with the antisentimental (and often masculinist) framing of emotions that can only be “vicarious and inauthentic.”62 This skepticism may be even stronger in conversations about video games than other forms of art insofar as their status as simulations or models marks any experience that one may have in a game as being at least one step removed from the so-­called real world or everyday life. The palpable mediation of video games, then, is often dismissed as yielding primarily inauthentic emotions.

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When emotion receives attention in game studies, it is often in cases of individualized and personal emotion in the form of fun or the common invocation of moments such as Aerith’s well-­known death in Final Fantasy VII that have moved gamers to tears.63 Yet these examples rarely invoke relational or participatory dimensions of a game’s affective difficulty. By contrast, the artworks that Doyle analyzes, many of which come from performance art, prove difficult because of the ways they convert the “viewer” into a “witness” or a “participant.”64 The broader turn to participatory art and “relational aesthetics” has changed the fine art world since the 1990s without becoming completely central.65 In video games, however, participation is not an alternative form of engagement, or one style among many. As Alexander Galloway observes, games are fundamentally action-­oriented and can only be enacted through a combination of player and machine actions.66 As such, the quality of affective difficulty—affecting or being affected by a game—­ cannot be as unexpected as when a viewer is asked to participate in a gallery or theater space that, at least traditionally, marks a sharp distinction between spectator and artwork or performer. At some level, a video game is always and fundamentally relational and cannot proceed without involvement on the part of one or more players. Though affective difficulties arise across most video games, they are often more explicitly framed and interrogated within experimental games. An instructive case is Alexander D. Ocias’s Loved (2010), another browser-­based, single-­player platformer game created in Flash.67 In this game, affective difficulty is prominent as both the core experience and object of inquiry. In fact, even the title gestures toward this type of difficulty. In its primary usage, the word loved operates as an adjective or adverb that marks “the object of love or affection.”68 However, the word also has an inherently relational quality to it. In other words, it does not make sense as a description of an individual state of being, gesturing instead toward a relationship. The first difficulty of the game Loved, then, is its titular invocation of a relation. Namely, gameplay does not offer any clarity about the identities of the lover and the beloved. Loved evokes emotion from the player by refusing a “user-­friendly” correspondence between input and output and simultaneously generates affect by privileging abstract experiences and intensities that are not organized primarily by plot. The game begins, simply, with white text on a black background, accented with an atmospheric and unsettling audio track that builds in anticipation and volume. The first question (with hyperlinked choices italicized) addresses “you” the player: “Are you a man, or a woman?”69 Regardless of the choice, the interrogating voice responds with a contrarian correction. In

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Figure 5.5. Commands issued to the player in Loved (Alexander D. Ocias, 2010).

other words, the choice of “man” yields the response “No, you are a girl” and “woman” yields “No, you are a boy.” In effect, this introduction inverts the traditional process of avatar creation and character building that grounds the agency of role-­playing games (RPGs) and other video games. Indeed, this exchange specifically refuses binary gender selection, one of the most personal forms of identifications that a player is likely to have, thereby unsettling them from the start. The follow-­up question (“Will I teach you how to play? Or not?”) turns from identity to medium specificity, leading to disparaging responses whether the player requests instructions (“You do not deserve it”) or turns them down (“You will fail”). Following these questions, the screen changes to a simple black and white scene in which the player’s avatar—a shadowy creature with distinctive ears that looks like a bipedal animal or demon—appears. Following this introduction, the player uses the arrow keys to move this avatar across the level from left to right. As you reach different obstacles, new text appears occasionally with instructions or commands (fig. 5.5). The text that that appears initially as the player begins to move through the level resembles a standard video game training level. Even so, the voice seems deliberately cold and distant. If you try to click on the screen, instead of using the arrow keys to move, the player’s interlocutor notes dismissively, “Not that, you will control nothing.” If you click a key that does not correspond to a possible action, it retorts confrontationally, “You are wrong.” After a series of instructions, however enigmatically worded or arbitrary they may seem, the player comes across another pit. At this point, the interlocutor



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makes a request that promises to harm, rather than help, the player. “Throw yourself into the barbs,” the voice commands. If the identity of the interlocutor is a curiosity from the start, it is this demand that first raises the possibility that the speaker may be a sadist. The player faces a choice, but neither the meaning nor the consequences of that choice are evident. If the player follows the command and falls into the barbs, she or he dies and returns to the previous checkpoint, while also receiving the sneering praise of either “Good girl” or “Good boy” (against the preference of initial gender identification). If she or he does not follow, the voice offers a chastising response: “Ugly creature.” The voice of the interlocutor is sadistic while the willing player, regardless of which decisions she or he makes, enters into a masochist’s contract. This contract is invoked several times, as when the interlocutor asks, “Do I own your body or your mind?” Following the forced binary choice, the voice responds with the follow-­up commands “Dance for me” or “Beg for me.” It is useful, here, to recall Gilles Deleuze’s observation that, aesthetically, Marquis de Sade offers “mechanical, cumulative repetition” while Leopold von Sacher-­Masoch relies on “dramatic suspense.”70 In this case, at the level of gameplay, the player of Loved must identify with the masochistic suspense and uncertainty that cedes control to the sadistic interlocutor. The choices that the player makes throughout Loved influence the ending of the game that she or he reaches. Experientially, these decisions relate to mechanical, interpretive, and affective difficulty. Mechanically, the game is difficult for several reasons. A single hit to the avatar caused by contact with a barb or enemy yields instant death and returns the player to the previous checkpoint. Moreover, the controls, though simple, often resist precise movements, especially given the game’s physics, which feel less manageable than in many action-­oriented platformers. In perverse relationship to the loose jump controls, in particular, several sequences in the game require exact movements to make it through tight spaces. Even the game’s mechanical difficulty, though, has possible affective counterparts insofar as it requires the player to manage her or his frustration while persisting with the goal of making progress through the world. The charged decisions to obey or resist also have effects on the difficulty of gameplay. If the player follows the directives of the interlocutor, the world becomes less colorful. Red blocks, for instance, transform into black-­and-­white objects that take the shape of pixelated barbs and identifiable enemies. While the world loses its color, the obstacles become clearer and easier to navigate (fig. 5.6). On the other hand, if the player breaks the rules, she or he not only receives insults but also sees the appearance of colorful blocks that, over the course of the game, threaten to take over the screen. Thus, resistance infuses the world with color but also 212

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Figure 5.6. An obedient playthrough of Loved (Alexander D. Ocias, 2010).

Figure 5.7. A disobedient playthrough of Loved (Alexander D. Ocias, 2010).

makes the game more difficult to traverse as it threatens to dissolve into abstraction (fig. 5.7). In addition to its mechanical challenges, Loved also foregrounds its interpretive difficulty. The player is invited to make sense of the identity of the interlocutor, the motivation behind the string of commands, and the dynamic of domination and submission into which she or he enters. One possible reading is that this relationship serves as an allegory—or, more precisely (to use Galloway’s neologism), an “allegorithm” that achieves layering

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through mechanics rather than figuration—of the relationship between a game system, on the one hand, and a gamer on the other.71 This particular experience of navigating the avatar through the world of Loved, then, invokes the conventional contract into which game designers and gamers regularly enter. Video games usually offer a limited number of initially hidden algorithms—a series of tasks required to complete the game—that must be discovered and reverse-­engineered by the player. To play and complete a video game of this type means to learn the operations and logic of its particular model of the world. This process is often procedural and logical. Then again, as Deleuze demonstrates through his reading of de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, “reasoning itself is a form of violence.”72 In this case, the game promises robust choice and creative expression when, in fact, all choices funnel down to one of two endings that have been wholly scripted in advance by the designer. The first ending of Loved arrives if the player remains obedient through most of the game. Here, the interlocutor announces, “I am so happy you are mine.” The voice then asks, echoing the game’s initial question: “Are you a boy or a girl?” Instead of disrespecting the player’s choice, the voice now offers an even fuller confirmation of one’s selected gender identification. So, for example, if the player chooses “boy,” he is told, “No, you are a man.” The voice also insists, contrary to the taunts expressed during gameplay, “I loved you always.” This textual exchange then opens up into a final level. In place of a camera perspective that stays locked on the avatar, a slightly wobbly camera unsettles this final screen and calls attention to what is a decidedly mediated rather than seamlessly immersive experience. The level, which is free of obstacles, leads to a pedestal and a coin. Once you take the coin, the game ends abruptly. This ending can be read as a critique of the types of gamified mechanisms that motivate players extrinsically and recognize achievements via awards, badges, and in-­world items. The other ending that comes from a disobedient playthrough exceeds the payoff of mechanical difficulty and the satisfaction of interpretive difficulty. This ending foregrounds the affective difficulty that has been present throughout the game. After the final challenging sequence, the interlocutor asks, “Why do you hate me?” The next question, which offers a choice, reads: “Where will you go? Will you be close to me?” A choice to “go” leads to a plea of “I beg you to stay.” The choice of “close” yields the suggestion, “We can begin again.” Either way, the textual sequence leads to a final level in which the avatar can only walk right down an endless passage that includes no obstacles. If the player moves right far enough, the game ends suddenly, midmovement, without explanation. Unlike the first ending, the game does 214

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not recognize the player’s achievement, nor does it offer any form of narrative closure. In reaching this second ending, the player is unlikely to feel as if she or he has freed her- or himself from the tyranny of the on-­rails gameplay of Loved or outmaneuvered the game system. The final claustrophobic passage does not offer the pure or liberating freedom that is often, at least in the romantic imagination, associated with free play (in distinction to rule-­ bound games).73 At most, the game grants a difficult freedom that departs from either mechanical difficulty or cerebral interpretive difficulty. This irresolvable challenge is allegorized through an eventless final level that leads to interruption without return to flow or denouement: masochistic suspense without the relief of climax. This ambivalence is present throughout the game, of course, in a series of choices that provoke strong feelings but refuse to make transparent any criteria for decision-­making. Alongside the objective of moving forward through the obstacles of the game, the player must also make sense of how she or he feels about the aggressive and deprecating comments, ranging from backhanded compliments to outright insults, that the interlocutor launches. Whether the player obeys the instructions or resists them, there is no way around affective management (short of a random playthrough that disregards the text). Even the resistant player is likely to reflect in the midst of action about the significance of resistance, especially since that choice has consequences that that are reinforced through the aesthetic changes to the interface. The affective difficulty of Loved, however, is not entirely connected to the gameplay. For example, late in the game, the interlocutor interrupts gameplay to ask, “Are you excited or frightened?” If the player chooses “excited,” the response is “So am I.” If the choice is “frightened,” the sadistic response is: “Then it will only be more enjoyable.” Notably, this choice does not influence either the graphics or the gameplay. It does, however, remind the player of the complicated emotions that she or he is likely experiencing. Moreover, the fact that the player is negotiating nonconscious affects, and not simply narrativizable feelings or outward-­facing emotions, is expressed through the dissatisfaction that comes with this reductive binary choice. At this point of the game, the player may be feeling both excited and frightened but also frustrated, anxious, unsettled, curious, entertained, disappointed, indignant (if she or he is resisting the interlocutor), protected (if she or he is obeying the interlocutor), and so on. Moreover, a choice of either hyperlinked pathway may not easily correspond with any linguistically expressible feeling or emotion. To offer one example, the player who chooses to obey may be seeking a feeling of safety or protection from the interlocutor who seems to have

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a god’s-­eye-­view perspective and absolute control over the game. Another possibility, however, is that a player who obeys is doing so out of a feeling of curiosity or desire for narrative completeness and simply seeks to unlock the second ending to the game. Yet another possibility is that the obedient player is appropriating what Deleuze calls “masochistic humor” that seeks to make apparent the consequences of the law that has been imposed on her or him by pushing it to its most absurd and disorderly extremes.74 In this way, the player’s experience may be one of hyperbolic subversion via absolute obedience. The affective difficulty and irresolvability of Loved serves as a reminder of the importance of the feelings, emotions, habits, perceptual frames, nonconscious intensities, and contexts that players themselves bring to video games. As Bernstein suggests, a difficult poem signals “a problem not with you the reader nor with the poem but with the relation between you and the poem.”75 This relational way of thinking is equally pertinent to video game emotions and affects. We can characterize a single-­player video game many ways, but a plausible framing would be of a field of affective experiences with a ludic system of rules, arbitrary obstacles, and objectives as well as a narrative system of text, graphics, animation, and sound. Writing about games often foregrounds the work that players put in to beat a game (mechanical difficulty) or the challenges of meaning making (interpretive difficulty). However, playing a game also involves working through challenging affects: not merely through emotions or preferences that players bring with them to a game but also in relations that arise between game systems and players. Admittedly, most games do not dramatize the affective relations of games as explicitly or self-­reflexively as Loved. Even commercial and AAA games, however, entail affective difficulties that may emerge from difficult choices in interactive fiction games or interpersonal exchanges in massively multiplayer online games. As I suggest, in the conclusion of this chapter, a fuller embrace of affective difficulty may help transform a public constituted by gamified apps while making possible new conditions of circulation and novel understandings of media literacy. Conclusion: Difficult Play

Difficulty expands our understanding of video games as objects, but it also opens up ways that we might think about processes and affects of play. In his 1938 book Homo Ludens, cultural historian Johan Huizinga describes play as an activity that engages in “absorbing the player intensely and utterly.”76 Especially given the centrality of the notion of fun in the contemporary US, 216

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Figure 5.8. Playful tension in Space Invaders (Taito, 1978), screenshot taken

from emulator.

it is easy to imagine play as depending on absorption or immersiveness. And yet play, whether in the form of schoolyard make-­believe, a sports contest, or video game play, also relies on forms of difficulty that complicate or disrupt absorption. As the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott observes, play is inherently precarious in its oscillation between imagination and materiality.77 Children regularly face difficulties with following rules or establishing an imaginary flow in a session of make-­believe. Adults may also encounter difficulties in negotiating the affective costs of victory and loss in competitive play. Indeed, Mary Flanagan goes even further to highlight “the dark side of play, including bullying, abusive situations, and frightening circumstances.”78 Related instances lead us to the concept of “dark play” (described by Richard Schechner, following Gregory Bateson), which demarcates conditions in which “some of the players don’t know they are playing.” This form of play may include “fantasy, risk, luck, daring, invention, and deception.”79 From a different perspective, absorption and difficulty can be seen as compatible, even mutually coproductive, in experiences of play. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s psychological concept of “flow” demonstrates how difficulty can encourage absorption.80 As Chad Raphael and his colleagues observe, the concept of flow that has become so central to an understanding of video game entails “challenges that fully engage our skills, without overmatching them.”81 Tension and discomfort, then, may accompany and even motivate play. For example, Taito import manager S. Ikawa speculates, in a 1982 interview, that the draw of Space Invaders is that it “gives you a feeling of tension.”

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As the game unfolds, he notes, “A little neglect may breed great mischief”82 (fig. 5.8). In this way, anxiety and difficulty (the mechanical sort but also the interpretive and affective types) may come to constitute play instead of dissipating it. Difficulty may contribute simultaneously to immersive forms of play as well as to modes of frustration, interruption, disruption, and subversion. Video games offer a compelling context in which to think through the aesthetics of difficulty and the mechanics of difficult play in a historical period increasingly dependent on and organized around digital media and networking. The present ubiquity of this cultural form suggests the need for new forms of learning. For example, in developing traditional forms of literacy, students have long been taught from an early age how to read and analyze short stories, poems, plays, and novels. Video games, which are even more ubiquitous in the lives of many of these same students, are more often approached as consumer or entertainment products. While high school students regularly learn to read poetry and write about it, they do not commonly (at least yet) have the opportunity to analyze and design games.83 One of the benefits of recognizing the different types of difficulty inherent in games, then, might be to expand media and gaming literacies to allow students to engage in more robust ways, beyond competitive relations, with a medium that influences their lives but is rarely engaged or understood. Here, in a pedagogical context, we might think of difficulty not simply as a problem to overcome but an ambivalent space from which to experiment with our historical present through critical play. In this formulation, difficulty becomes an active practice rather than a mere obstacle. Though games and their difficulties have cultural significance, it is important not to overstate the impact of video games or any digital technologies in our time. As Wendy Chun has suggested, we must remain wary of “the larger project of rewriting political and pedagogical problems into technological ones, into problems that technology can fix.” She adds, “This rewriting ranges from the idea that MOOCs [massive open online courses], rather than a serious public commitment to education, can solve the problem of the spiraling cost of education . . . to the blind embrace of technical skills.” The technological fetishism at play in MOOCs, and broader conversations about remote learning that have accompanied the spread of COVID-19 in 2020, is also present in certain articulations of gamification that frame serious games as engineered solutions to social or educational problems. In both of these cases, the introduction of new technologies is not in itself sufficient to transform learning.84 Whether in regard to the dynamics of play or to game-­based learning in 218

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our time, there is a virtue in promoting pedagogies and sociopolitical benefits of difficulty, especially in a culture that celebrates easy-­to-­use technologies and broadly accessible media. As the political theorist Jodi Dean observes, even in politics digital and networked media generate an easy “fantasy of participation.” Referring to social media and effortless access to news, she writes, “The technological fetish ‘is political’ for us, enabling us to go about the rest of our lives relieved of the guilt that we might not be doing our part and secure in the belief that we are, after all, informed, engaged citizens.” Moreover, technological fetishism “reduces the complexities of politics—of organization, struggle, duration, decisiveness, division, representation, and so on—to one thing, one problem to be solved and one technological solution.”85 In both education and politics, then, innovators often treat new media and novel communication technologies as if they were omnipotent, imbued with an excessive capacity to simplify and solve complex human problems. A twenty-­first-­century world defined increasingly by game metaphors and the design techniques of gamification introduces a host of difficult social, cultural, economic, and political problems. Video games are neither the source of these problems nor the solution to them. Even so, they constitute a unique medium for thinking through and affecting our historical present from the inside. Video games can make better problems. They are important, particularly in a US culture that too often promises easy solutions such as simplified self-­help regimens and diets, easier school curricula, human resource training modules aimed at cultural issues, and countless “user-­ friendly” technologies. Perhaps counterintuitively, then, video games could make our lives just a little more difficult—and therefore a little richer.



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6 Failure Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Samuel Beckett (Worstward Ho)

No matter how you design your game or its intended audience, there will be a fail state. Josh Bycer (“How to Design Failure in Video Games”)

The queer art of failure turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable. It quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being. Jack Halberstam (The Queer Art of Failure)

Failure is a central property of almost any game. Different games include win conditions, quantifiable outcomes, optional objectives, and narrative endings that a player can either achieve—or not. Not only do players regularly fail at games, particularly those that include elements of competition and chance, but inherent to the form is the expectation that failure is likely at some point during play. As game studies scholar Jesper Juul observes, in practically all games “failure brings about something positive” in the form of motivation and learning but, at the same time, the experience is “always potentially painful or at least unpleasant.”1 Other researchers have gone even further to suggest that it is not just the outcome but the process of failure in games that entails positive experiences. Such pleasures including a heightened sense of agency, amusement at one’s own missteps, playful schadenfreude upon watching epic fail videos of other players on platforms such as YouTube, experimentation with a game’s boundaries, and the transgressive delight attendant to playing deliberately against a game’s intended purpose.2 Of course, given the diversity of game genres, experiences and dynamics of failure differ considerably across cases of single-­player games from Solitaire to Super Mario Bros., cooperative multiplayer games from Pandemic to Left 4 Dead, and competitive multiplayer games from chess to Fortnite. Bonnie “Bo” Ruberg offers an even more fine-­tuned catalog of game genres in which failure becomes central: “games that are difficult to master, games that can never really be completed, games that insult us, games that make us feel like fail221

ures to coax us into learning, fair games, unfair games, games of skill, sadistic games, cathartic games, suicide games.”3 The ways in which such games formulate rules and controls relative to the quality of failure becomes a crucial element of analysis that enables greater understanding of a designed system and its expressed values. Beyond formalistic discussions about failure as a condition of gameplay, there is a growing literature that examines the aesthetics and politics of failure in games.4 In an analysis of several art games, including Pippin Barr’s Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment (2011) and Messhof’s Pipedreamz (2010), Aubrey Anable observes that games can help players explore “how we feel failure.” She argues that such games “modify the affective charge around failure and disturb shame’s internalized trajectory.” She adds, “To flail with failure, as we do in these games, is to spasmodically disrupt the quiescence of the impasse and to become attentive to the relationships among our failings, our feelings, and the systems with which we interact.”5 Importantly, for Anable, this type of aesthetic and affective experience of failure is not identical to the embrace of utopian or radical politics. For instance, it is not clear how games might concretely contribute to the project of Jack Halberstam’s “queer art of failure” that opens up alternative ways of being and world making that promise to challenge neoliberalism.6 Given the connections between digital games and neoliberalism that I have been charting through this book, coupled with the centrality of failure to games, it is important to ask what (if anything) game aesthetics can contribute to politics in our time. This chapter explores the ways that video games promote medium-­ specific and affectively-­charged thought about failure, fragility, and precarity that are historically specific to the period of neoliberalism. Following a review of how neoliberal thought approaches failure, I turn to an analysis of three games. Instead of emphasizing a value of winning, these games convey the structural, procedural, and experiential aspects of failure that are typical characteristics of capitalism for the majority of people living in the early twenty-­first century. The first game, SPENT (2011), thematizes failure through a role-­playing framework that is founded in an educational optimism implicit in most “serious games”: that is, the hope that the situation represented inside the game can be overcome outside of it. The second game, Thresholdland (2010), uses transmedia play both on and off screens to approach failure as an integrated play style that challenges success as a fundamental value. Finally, the third case, the puzzle game Little Inferno (2012), uses a participatory satire of consumer culture and environmental destruction to create an atmosphere of pessimism in which failure cannot be recuperated into eventual success. While each of these three games adopts a different 222

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digital game genre (the role-­playing game, the alternate reality game, and the puzzle game) and tackles a different topic (poverty and homelessness in the United States, immigration struggles in Europe, and global environmental devastation and consumerism in the near future), they all actively grapple with different dynamics of failure. Even as each game has limits that I will explore, these games are valuable cases insofar as they mark explicit links between the small scale of the affective experience of failing to win a game and the larger scale of socioeconomic failures. Each game makes problems for gamification as both a widespread design strategy (Ian Bogost’s “exploitationware”) and a fundamental mediation of social reality in our time. Neoliberal Failure and Precarity

Before returning in greater detail to game-­based failure in an analysis of three cases, I would like to think with greater precision about the historically specific shape that the concept of failure takes in the period of neoliberalism. In the United States, long before the 1970s, failure has served as the condition of an unrealized American Dream: a condition that is unacceptable unless it is readily recuperated and converted into success.7 Within the neoliberal paradigm, however, the meanings of failure have changed at scales that include the individual and the world market. Particularly since the early twenty-­first century, business theory and microeconomics have adopted an increased interest in productive forms of failure that operate less as a motivation for overcoming obstacles than as an experimental method that has inherent value. Though this idea is not new, business gurus and managers have elevated entrepreneurial thinking that allows an individual to pursue learning through rapid trial and error. For example, Anjali Sastry and Kara Penn borrow the title of their management self-­help book, Fail Better, directly from the Samuel Beckett epigraph that initiates this chapter. Additionally, business researcher Leah Weiss observes that “‘fail better’ achieved meme status in Silicon Valley, where it captured the spirit of the aggressive optimism and ‘disruptive’ thinking beloved by startup business culture.”8 Though in these formulations, failure is still a means to an end, it becomes less an impetus for self-­correction than the very source of novel ideas. Beyond an abstract individual mantra, failure has become a quality that can be managed and optimized. Business administration researcher Stefan Thomke explains that emergent technologies, including increasingly more detailed simulations, enable unprecedented opportunities for rapid iterative experiments. Such technologies can contribute to substantial profits,

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he argues, because “the faster the experimentation-­failure cycle, the more feedback can be gathered and incorporated into new rounds of testing.” For Thomke, failure moves from an individual resource to a process that can profit entire companies and eventually benefit consumers. In behavioral economics, critiques of nudge theory—the method of using design and positive reinforcement to alter attitudes and behaviors that was popularized by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein—have even developed around the idea that the approach is too successful in helping people achieve profitable and healthy habits. As public policy scholar Adam Thierer puts it, nudge theory “ignores or devalues how ongoing experimentation and experience—including the possibility of failure—facilitates greater learning, innovation, resiliency, and progress.”9 These social scientists see trial and error, as well as experiences of failure, as routes to meaningful discovery, rather than as harms that must be regulated by policy makers or designers of social interventions. For scholars such as Thierer, the primary challenge becomes the process of managing and scaling failure. Beyond individual behavior and group management, some economists have elevated failure to a fundamental principle of the world market. For example, drawing from Austrian economic theory, Steven Horwitz and Jack Knych argue that even more than any benefits to individual learning is “the irreplaceable role failure plays in the social learning process of the competitive market.” Allowing governments to limit failure or taking measures to “cushion its blow” eliminates the learning that is necessary to achieve optimal resource allocation.10 According to this view, the macrolevel resilience of the economy depends on microlevel failures of individual agents. One of the most vocal proponents of failure at the larger systemic scale has been Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who, across a series of books, has argued for a principle of “antifragility” that characterizes economic markets. As he puts it, the sacrifice of fragile units is crucial for the maintenance of a larger system’s antifragility: “The fragility of every startup is necessary for the economy to be antifragile, and that’s what makes, among other things, entrepreneurship work: the fragility of individual entrepreneurs and their necessarily high failure rate.” For Taleb, the necessity of local fragility and failure characterizes not only economic systems but all systems. For example, “the organism itself might be fragile, but the information encoded in the genes reproducing it will be antifragile.”11 Beyond mere “resilience,” which allows a system to regain homeostasis after an unexpected shock, Taleb characterizes “antifragility” as the capacity to improve and grow in the face of disruption. In essence, Taleb’s argument fuses evolutionary determinism with neoliberal market principles. Importantly for the context of my argument in this 224

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chapter, Taleb refers to processes of individual failure and systemic success as a game—and not just any type of game but a specifically competitive contest. “Nature prefers to let the game continue at the informational level, the genetic code,” he announces. “So organisms need to die for nature to be antifragile—nature is opportunistic, ruthless, and selfish.” Notably, for him, not all failures are equally generative. For example, the 2008 financial crisis was the result of an unethical system that allowed a small group of “non-­risk-­ takers” with practically “no personal exposure” to achieve “antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others.” Taleb blames this crisis on an unequal playing field that allowed some people to have no “skin in the game.” That antifragility operates as a game has much to do, for Taleb, with the human capacity to face uncertainty (without understanding it in advance) by acting. “We are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility,” he announces. “I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.”12 For all of the celebrations of failure, these interrelated business and economic discourses mask the systemic failure that is not a mere resource but arguably a foundational quality of neoliberalism and the structural inequality that this system perpetuates. This form of failure often goes by the name of precarity, a term that captures, for instance, the historical movement toward greater workforce casualization in postwelfare states.13 As Judith Butler explains, the ontological category of “precariousness” exceeds historical parameters, insofar as any life is inherently precarious and “can be expunged at will or by accident.” In distinct usage, the political category of “precarity,” which takes on greater resonance in the late twentieth century, marks a historical condition in which “certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death.”14 As political theorist Wendy Brown puts it, the “too big to fail” that characterizes an elite minority of financial institutions brings with it the correlate of a vast majority that is “too small to protect.”15 For Elizabeth Povinelli, neoliberalism—or what she calls late liberalism to mark a continuity with the preceding period—expands precarity through modes of “making die” (e.g., official wars, drone strikes, or capital punishment), “letting die” (international sanctions or imperial neglect), and “making live” (biopolitical controls over areas of health and reproduction or laws governing marginalized populations).16 Neoliberalism has expanded capitalism’s centuries-­ old structural inequality with unprecedentedly wide global wealth disparity gaps and, in the process, has introduced mechanisms that normalize failure and make precarity affectively ubiquitous across classes. Structurally, the introduction of

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permanent insecurity proceeds via the conversion of the collective risk of an earlier welfare state to individualized risk. The maintenance of a sustainable state of precarity continues not only through neglect and dispossession but also, as sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato emphasizes, through coordination and modulation—for instance, policies that establish a minimum wage— that define a “threshold below which there is a risk of ‘civil war,’ a breach of the social peace.” Affectively, fear and anxiety come to characterize even the most banal aspects of everyday life during the neoliberal period. Of course, as Lazzarato notes, “The insecurity of the unemployed and the precarious is certainly not the same as that of the employee of a large multinational, with employee savings and profit-­sharing schemes.” Even so, “there is a differential of fears that runs the entire length of the continuum.” As later he adds, neoliberalism tolerates sustainable levels of precarity much like disciplinary societies allowed for persistent levels of illegal activity.17 In this system, a series of failures transform into the omnipresent precarity that is no longer linked to a failed event but instead marks an atmosphere of failure. For Povinelli, “failure” is not an absolute, objective, or naturalized state, but rather “a socially mediated term for assessing the social world.” The conversion of failure from event to atmosphere makes it even more diffuse and therefore more susceptible to opportunistic maintenance of inequality. Within a neoliberal worldview, “any social investment that does not have a clear end in market value . . . fails economically and morally.”18 In other words, failure becomes a marker of how thoroughly economized any element, desire, or action has become. In this way, failure operates as an affective means of distributed social control that reinforces the centrality of the free market to all thought and decision-­making. In what follows, I do not suggest that video games do, can, or should play a single function relative to the atmosphere of failure and field of precarity of which I have just offered an overview. It is worth emphasizing that neoliberalism is not a homogenous system or thing. The term instead marks, as Povinelli characterizes it, “a series of struggles across an uneven social terrain” that help create parameters of contemporary sociality.19 Within such a heterogeneous space, video game aesthetics and affects enable varied maneuvers and shape myriad forms of subjectivity. Through repeated failure, video games may, frequently in a nonrepresentational or oblique manner, teach some players to bear failures and others to sharpen their competitive capacities. In most games, the affective processing of failure is important. The video game player, like Taleb’s antifragile entrepreneur, has the capacity to circumvent slow reflective thought, to act quickly, to tap into affective processing, and to intuit in the midst of an unfolding process. The games 226

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I ­analyze in this chapter suggest that this form of processing need not be treated as the other of thought, even as game-­based thought does unfold at the level of actions, reactions, tactics, and habits. Crucially, as Anable observes, video games pre­sent players with “repeated scenes of our failures in interactions with computational processes” and “transport our everyday digital failures into the realm of play.”20 Though video games may seem incommensurate with the everyday economic and social struggles across uneven social terrain that I described in this section, they serve as a cultural counterpart to experiences of precarity and economic ruin. Moreover, video games, as we will see, invite experimentation and play with failure at the interface between the economic and the technical that allows them to be more than a symptom of the present world. Gaming Failure in SPENT

In a reflection about agency in games, interactive fiction designer Emily Short observes that there are games that take away all power from the player in order to make pedagogical points about oppressive systems or marginalized subject positions. While admiring many such games, she notes that they let players too easily “off the hook” as soon as they recognize that there is nothing to be done in this situation. In place of such games, she puts forward a thought experiment about a more realistic game that offers limited power but not a complete lack of it (like the platformer video game Problem Attic, which I analyze in chapter 4). She wonders “whether there’s a possible game about the citizen power that is so slow and so often unsatisfying that one is tempted to just give up.” She admits that this would be a deeply frustrating game: “Who wants to play a game in which the majority of your actions sink in silence, never yielding any perceivable consequence, and yet the game harangues you for your failings if you don’t keep plugging on? What if the only win is that things don’t get as much worse as they might have otherwise? What if the only win is that the protagonist feels slightly less guilty at the end?”21 Indeed, even if such an experimental game were not entertaining or fun, what might it look like? One game that attempts something resembling the type of thought experiment that Short puts forward is SPENT (2011). Created by the advertising agency McKinney for the Urban Ministries of Durham nonprofit organization, SPENT is a role-­playing game that, as of 2018, was played online by over 4.5 million players worldwide.22 This game, which lasts approximately ten minutes per session, makes use of decision-­making branches and social media to explore the consequences of homelessness and underemployment

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Figure 6.1. SPENT (McKinney, 2011), a roleplaying game about poverty and homelessness

in the United States.

in the United States. The game begins with a second-­person interpellation that uses text to put players in the position of an American who suddenly finds him- or herself homeless: “Over 14 million Americans are unemployed. Now imagine you’re one of them. Your savings are gone. You’ve lost your house. And you’re down to your last $1000. Can you make it through the month?” Should players accept this challenge, they begin by making a decision among three jobs—restaurant server, warehouse worker, and office temp—each of which has advantages and disadvantages related to hourly wage, variability of hours, and labor stresses (fig. 6.1). Working at the warehouse, for instance, pays the highest wages ($306 a week after taxes) and promises regular hours, but it also entails heavy lifting and repetitive packing. After acquiring a job, a number of difficult financial choices ensue. For instance, players have the option of purchasing health insurance with a $275 monthly premium, even as it costs nearly a week’s wages. With each choice, the game explains both the positive and negative consequences, frequently citing statistics regarding related real-­world conditions. The month unfolds with a series of challenging choices about union participation, insurance, housing, transportation, utility bills, college loans, nutrition, and parenting. SPENT uses its affordances as a role-­playing game to put players in the position of a single parent who is struggling to survive a month in precarious conditions. While other artistic forms such as novels or films represent characters, most video games invite players, as Nick Dyer-­Witheford and Greig de Peuter put it, to “temporarily simulate, adopt, or try out certain identities”— or at least particular activities or situations associated with those identifies.23 SPENT, in particular, uses role playing to stage the experiential dimension 228

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of the required choices that produce variable outcomes but invariably yield an atmosphere of difficulty and failure. Though there is a score that is captured through the quantity of money one has at any given moment and then at the end of the month, the score is secondary to the role-­playing experience itself. For example, in one version of the simulated month, a neighbor offers the player a hand-­me-­down coat because hers is in tatters. The decision in no way alters the score, but the player must then face potential feelings of pride or shame, either taking the coat or braving the winter without one. At other moments, the affective quality of the game—conveyed through images, text, audio, and actions—becomes more central than the score. One screen, for instance, simulates a call from a bill collection agency in which an agent asks repeatedly whether the player is currently at home. The player has to decide whether to respond (and pay an unresolved bill) or to hang up (and risk paying a substantial fine in the longer term)—a choice that is made more difficult by the insistent audio. Through its multimedia features, SPENT attempts to produce feelings of uncertainty, fear, and insecurity in the player. While SPENT’s role playing takes place through an audiovisual interface, the game’s nonrepresentational experience depends even more on a medium-­specific quality that most distinguishes video games from other forms: procedurality. As Bogost has explained, “Procedural representation explains processes with other processes. Procedural representation is a form of symbolic expression that uses process rather than language.”24 Indeed, SPENT approaches a variety of real-­world processes through procedural mechanics. For example, if a player decides to seek employment as a temp, he or she must first pass a typing test, an indexical challenge that actually tests whether you can type a sentence at a rate of fifty-­five words a minute or faster. This stressful trial is not identical to the process of an actual interview or timed evaluation, but it positions itself in an allegorical or, via the more precise neologism, in an “allegorithmic” relation that channels the original process through another algorithmic one.25 In SPENT, life in the contemporary US is figured allegorithmically as a losing game. The expectation in most video games is that, through the right choices and actions, a player can improve their character and situation. SPENT departs from this model by putting the character in a precarious situation. In many cases, players run out of money before they complete the month or finish with just enough remaining to pay the next month’s rent. Faced with choices that are almost exclusively undesirable, players quickly learn to pursue temporary survival rather than absolute victory. As opposed to the pleasurable, if repetitive, interactivity that serves as a central promise of gamified designs, most of the actions taken in SPENT are both ordi

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nary and tense; they are rarely empowering or rewarding in the extraordinary ways that are more common in video games that award experience points, special abilities, and powerful items to successful players. Most decision points in the game result only in options that are, for a variety of reasons, disadvantageous.26 For example, the player is told, “Your family pet is sick and won’t get better without treatment. What do you do?” Your options are to pay for treatment (which costs a substantial $400), to have the pet put to sleep (which costs $50), or to allow the animal to suffer (which costs nothing but might be ethically difficult). This type of scenario interweaves two varieties of failure that video games make available: what Juul calls “real failure” that involves attempting to win a game but losing and “fictional failure” that entails loss suffered by a character within the game’s fictional world.27 SPENT simultaneously simulates loss in the player and depicts a precarious life that is fictional but brought closer to the player through the second-­person “you.” With the above decision, one can allow one’s pet to suffer in order to save money, thereby increasing chances of surviving the month financially, but even this type of gameplay will never enable the player to thrive or feel as if long-­term survival is possible. SPENT is not experimental in the sense of offering players fundamentally different results through replay and variation, but it does open up experimental modes of thought through its affective and experiential dimensions. Even factoring in its minimal and streamlined interface, SPENT operates primarily through procedural mimesis. The game strives to reproduce the everyday experience of life under neoliberalism through its processes and decision-­making activities. Even as it represents precarity, an issue that is absent from most digital games, SPENT’s stark reality effects are, at least at face value, not as transgressive as, for instance, the avant-­garde cinema of the 1960s (especially New Wave films) was in its response to Hollywood conventions. The simulation of everyday life activities, as Alexander Galloway correctly cautions, has also been “a staple of commercial gaming since Ralph Baer modeled tennis, hockey, and skiing in the early 1970s.”28 Similarly, most military and commercial games have long relied on a representational realism that seeks to map a stable world or to model it accurately. SPENT, however, does not use the extraordinary future-­oriented “scenarios” of early game theory or the wish-­fulfillment models of many video games but rather reproduces affective experiences that are overwhelmingly common in our historical present. Instead of relying on graphical realism, as so many commercial digital games have done, SPENT’s reality effects privilege an experimental process that raises questions about subject formation, empathetic engagement, and sociopolitical action. 230

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To place SPENT in a larger context, the game belongs to a category of “serious games” or “persuasive games” that use medium-­specific affordances of gameplay to move their players to think, and ideally act, differently upon sociopolitical issues. Such games see themselves as blurring their game world with the so-­called “real world.” Indeed, in his classic study of human play, Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga coined the term “magic circle” to describe the division between games and everyday life. Game theorists Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman build on the concept of the magic circle, describing it as the “boundary—or frame—that defines the game in time and space.”29 Games, whether analog or digital, posit specific rules that give them distinct spatiotemporal coordinates and distinguish them from the protocols of life outside of the game. While SPENT certainly does the same, it also foregrounds its ambiguities of play, reminding players that their simulated decisions have real-­world correlates and belong to the fundamentally unjust game of capitalism. The line between game and reality becomes most porous at the game’s finale, which leaves the player with several links. One link leads directly to PayPal and gives the player an option to donate five dollars “to provide a day’s meals for someone living SPENT.” Another link urges players to “get involved” and sends them to the Urban Ministries of Durham website, which encourages volunteer work and participation in service projects. Finally, players can link to social media, including Twitter and Facebook, and share their impressions of the game, thereby drawing a greater number of players to it. In this way, the game moves fluidly between fictional and nonfictional layers, suggesting not simply a life that is structured like a game but also a game that can, however modestly, mediate present-­day life in the US in a critical fashion. Even as failure within the game is never recuperated into success, SPENT was developed expressly to decrease failure outside of the game’s magic circle. It is important, however, to emphasize that the affective results of failure in the game, as they translate from the game to the life outside of the game, are not as certain as the game’s design or initial discussions of it might suggest.30 In her analysis of video games that require or foreground failure, Anable writes that their algorithmic dimensions are able to “modify the affective charge around failure and disturb shame’s internalized trajectory” and make players more “attentive to the relationships among our failings, our feelings, and the systems with which we interact.”31 SPENT offers a compelling case for testing Anable’s hypothesis that posits a connection among aesthetic, affective, and cognitive learning effects. Though the claim is provocative, the complexity of affect requires us to look beyond the representational layer of such games. In fact, a 2016 psychological study of 227

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participants over the age of eighteen showed that people who played SPENT did not show “increased positive attitudes, emphatic concern, and support for government-­funded antipoverty policies.” The researchers, Gina Roussos and John F. Dovidio, hypothesize that the reason for this had to do with “stigma controllability.” From this perspective, they suggest, a game about poverty that contains differential outcomes that map onto choices—even a game that emphasizes the structural dimensions of failure—may introduce or reinforce a belief that poverty is personally controllable. That is, choice as the main mechanic in the game suggests, even if subconsciously, to some players that people can make better or worse choices that constitute the primary variables that determine their financial success. It is worth noting that even though the player can end the month with different quantities of money, no outcome in SPENT is likely to feel wholly satisfying or successful. Even so, the very presence of choice was sufficient to leave a substantial number of players unaffected by the game’s intended effect. By distinction to players in the study, people who watched another person play the game did show increases in empathy and support for antipoverty legislation. Observation of the game enabled a greater focus on the process and content about systemic inequality, without emphasizing the role of agency with a comparable experiential intensity.32 This discussion of SPENT is not meant to suggest that a game-­based encounter with precarity cannot lead to a change in attitudes, beliefs, habits, actions, or behaviors in the world outside of the game. At the same time, promoting dialogues between fields such as game studies and psychology suggests that any experimental game is not just a formal black box, but an ongoing process of experimentation that invites and enables movement from a game to empirical processes of play that exceed game form. Serious games do not merely rewire players. They are embedded within a world in which deep-­rooted beliefs about poverty, for example, have already been established for many players who have varied political views, beliefs in meritocracy, and affective dispositions. This context also means that many serious games will never be picked up and played by people who spend their time on mainstream video games and prefer to avoid the frustration or interpretive and affective difficulty that serious games entail. Though SPENT uses medium-­specific qualities of games, it also demonstrates the complexity of interactions and circuits between video games and everyday life. In part, studies such as the one by Roussos and Dovidio suggest that an interdisciplinary design approach, which takes into account not only aesthetic but also psychological, social, and political factors, is crucial, particularly in the realm of games that attempt to undercut structural failure and transform an atmo 232

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sphere of precarity. Especially because games are not yet as fully studied or understood as well as many other cultural forms, the mediating role of education is important in introducing people to better ways of interpreting and experimenting with games. In the particular case of SPENT, we see that failure is far from a default condition that prefigures improvement and success. To put it another way, failure, too, must be learned. Failure as Play Style in Thresholdland

Thresholdland: An Expatriation in Ten Days (2010) was a game created by performance artist Jörg Lukas Matthaei and his European design team. Before addressing the role of failure in the game, it is important to understand this unique game’s form. Thresholdland drew from biographies of undocumented immigrants in Vienna and invited primarily white native Austrians to join an expatriation role play in which they lost their rights as Europeans, along with access to employment and health insurance. The game departs formally from screen-­based games that are run on computers, video game consoles, or mobile phones and are mediated via graphical user interfaces. Unlike all of the games that I have discussed thus far in this book, this game can be said to belong to the socially oriented, transmedia, and mixed-­reality forms of “pervasive games” or “alternate reality games” (ARGs).33 Thresholdland was a one-­ time event, executed in June 2010, which used the physical world as its platform and created a ten-­day narrative that was experienced through intense daily live events, video clips, mobile phone apps, a core website, and email exchanges among players.34 Missions that allowed progress through the game challenged players to make difficult decisions, to complete discomfiting tasks, and to solve puzzles. Overall, the game conveyed a single narrative and coherent game experience, but did so through several different media.35 Unlike the other games I discuss in this chapter, Thresholdland was in no sense a casual game. It required a sustained performance (inhabiting an identity for up to ten days), extensive spatial exploration (physical movement from digital media devices to different locations in Vienna), and a social sense of play (that incorporated different media and forms of communication). In this pervasive game, players became storytellers and designers rather than simply users who were expected to fulfill set algorithms to achieve victory. Thresholdland drew from many artistic forms, including performance art and documentary theater, but it was most heavily influenced by video game and live-­action role playing (LARP) game culture.36 Through artificial conflict, set rules, and quantifiable objectives, the game used design to reduce and segment the complexity of the multifaceted issue of immigration in

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Figure 6.2. A scene from the transmedia game Thresholdland (photograph courtesy of

Jörg Lukas Matthaei, 2010).

order to make it more thinkable to participants.37 At the beginning, players met at a physical location and were divided into three role-­playing teams, substantively different experimental and experiential roles that offered divergent perspectives. These teams included “runners” (immigrants and refugees), “guards” (police and private individuals committed to keeping foreigners out of Austria), and “mediators” (members of NGOs invested in creating a dialogue between immigrants and native Austrians). Each team was given access to a section of the Thresholdland website, and each player produced a personal character profile. In addition to role playing, which was introduced through an online hub and sustained through chats with other players, participants encountered referees and coaches who played crucial parts throughout the game (fig. 6.2). These nonplayer accomplices

were actual immigrants (both undocumented and naturalized) who had, in earlier years, entered Europe without documentation and found their way to Vienna. Participating immigrants came from Afghanistan, Chechnya, Ivory Coast, Mongolia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Russia, among other countries. These veterans of the immigration experience taught runners tactics needed to survive and instructed guards about how to catch and deport runners. Moreover, these participants forced players into experiences of both identification and estrangement that accompanied numerous face-­to-­face encounters. Through its game form, Thresholdland required players to form communities and travel together to spaces they might otherwise never have encountered. Through its challenges, it produced novel experiences of pre 234

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sumably familiar urban environments. Locations that are rarely visited by white Europeans became essential in the game. The first event, for instance, took place at the central bus station in Vienna—a frequent point of entry for foreigners and one from which undocumented workers regularly travel in search of work. On one day, players were sent to a Viennese shelter that primarily houses political refugees from Africa. On another day, when the runners became “sick” within the game’s role play, mediators had to travel to a health clinic for undocumented immigrants at the city’s outskirts. Throughout the game, players entered social spaces, both online and in the physical city, which felt unsafe to many and in which actions required to pro­gress felt uncertain. Unlike SPENT, Thresholdland was not primarily a “serious” or “educational” game in which right and wrong decisions or values were clearly reinforced at every turn. Players made difficult ethical decisions, but these were opportunities for self-­reflection more than message-­driven interactive modules. The play that the game encouraged was characterized by numerous social ambiguities that blurred the game’s challenges and its underlying reality. While not always pleasurable, the game invited an ongoing negotiation of the rules that was both thought provoking and actively playful. For example, in the aforementioned visit to the health clinic, mediators were given the task of acquiring medicine for the “sick” runners. The medicine (represented in the form of codes that would heal the runners within the game’s diegesis), however, could only be acquired from a Russian doctor who spoke minimal German, making communication difficult for most players. Eventually, the doctor would explain that in order to give players the medicine, he needed to see their papers. The complication, at this stage, was that all players were told, when they began Thresholdland, that their papers must remain sealed or else they would automatically be disqualified from participating in the remainder of the game. Thus, mediators were forced into making an ethical decision: they could either betray another participant (though remain in the game themselves) or make a sacrifice to save another player. After this encounter, players were eventually given a second option of donating blood to receive the codes they needed while still remaining in the game. This series of community-­oriented challenges repeatedly broke down the lines between the game and the reality toward which it gestured. In other missions, mediators sheltered runners overnight in their actual homes, while guards solved puzzles to find the locations and interrogate the runners.38 While each mission depended on rules and objectives, the events were not completely prescripted. Many players, in fact, grew angry over unfair missions. Some participants objected to suspensions of the “magic circle” that

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produced uncomfortable experiences that no longer felt as if they were part of a game, as typically understood. Other players grew uneasy about the very idea of playing a game that repeatedly intersected with the experience of actual immigrants. Even beyond its mixed-­reality platform, Thresholdland’s design departed from single-­player video games through its emphasis on multiplayer social play. Approximately five hundred players joined Thresholdland on its first day, and over three thousand people participated online alongside the primary players.39 One of the consistent opportunities for play came with the establishment and expansion of the social network that made up the player base. Participants had to decide whether to compete or collaborate with others on different missions. Social relations also expanded well beyond the player community. For example, on the first day following their “expatriation” into the game, players who had not yet met and could not identify one another were told to meet in a Viennese park near the Danube at which a variety of ethnic groups traditionally meet to play soccer. In a picnic game that required players to smuggle food among park locations and to find out which other players were runners, guards, and mediators, players would often accidentally approach people who were not part of the game, engaging in unexpected exchanges. As Thresholdland emphasizes, games are increasingly played and understood as social phenomena. The social qualities of games (including pervasive games but extending to genres such as two-­player fighting games, multiplayer online battle arenas, and massively multiplayer online role-­playing games) transform how we understand and analyze them. Education researcher Caroline Pelletier has argued that games cannot be approached entirely as self-­contained entities that can be comprehended through structural or formal analysis alone. Instead, “games are enacted as objects of meaning” that must be understood as “ways of construing ideas, beliefs, and experiences, emerging from particular social relations.”40 A quality of Thresholdland that makes it a useful case for this chapter is the way that it encouraged social relations through the experience of failure in the game. Winning this pervasive game was not the result of gamified grinding that rewards players for some base degree of interaction or of casual gameplay that might fill unoccupied time during a commute. As the Thresholdland website announces, “Very few will actually make it—just like in real life.”41 Out of the approximately five hundred players “expatriated” on the first day, a mere five avoided deportation and other loss conditions by the end. In this way, the fates of most players were structurally parallel within the game’s narrative (if in no way experientially comparable, given that there was always a way out of the game) to the type of precarity that characterizes the 236

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lives of immigrants or asylum seekers that are not deemed worthy of care or dignity. Importantly, Thresholdland’s approach to precarity and failure unfolded across a series of ordinary encounters. Beginning at a different scale, the game sought to convey an everyday experience of precarity through its ten-­ day duration. It combined some events of a heightened intensity, though common occurrences, with ordinary moments of waiting, anticipation, and reflection that were nonetheless not free of the game’s central crisis state.42 As critical geographer Nancy Ettlinger argues, in a world that strives for prediction and certainty, “precarity” names “a condition of vulnerability relative to contingency and the inability to predict.”43 In Thresholdland, this precarity came across through the topical focus on immigration but also through its game form. Games frequently place players in systems characterized by chance, contingency, and uncertainty.44 By setting Thresholdland in the midst of everyday life—through its status as an “alternate reality” or “pervasive” game—Matthaei increased the chances for contingencies of everyday life that could inflect and infect the experience of gameplay. Through its emphasis on social interplay between players, as well as players and actors, the game also tapped into the precariousness that characterizes play itself. As psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott has observed, play taps into a duality that intensifies “the precariousness of the interplay of personal psychic reality and the experience of control of actual objects.”45 In the case of Thresholdland, rather than trivializing the seriousness of undocumented immigrant experiences, the game invited participants to think through the constructed qualities of unjust immigration policies and to encounter this injustice through role play and the negotiation of unfair rules. Overall, in this game, contingency mattered far more than ability. More than an outcome of a preset game, failure in Thresholdland operated as a play style: a set of techniques, orientations, adjustments, improvisations, and integrations made by players that enabled them to participate in a precarious role play that shaped the texture of the game’s formally enforced failures.46 The game posited an alternate reality that players inhabited, for up to ten days, alongside their everyday lives. In most video games, the on-­screen magic circle can be opened up whenever a player is ready for some play time and closed down precisely when a player wants.47 By contrast, Thresholdland unfolded around the players for its duration, pulling them back into the magic circle, sometimes even at inconvenient times. The game staged experiences that made palpable the constructedness of social and legal norms. It became a platform for negotiating what constitutes success versus failure within the game of transnational capitalism—and for learning

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to desire alternative values. Nevertheless, the game did not disavow its status as a game or attempt to substitute its alternate reality for nongame reality. Thresholdland recognized that the duality of play—the player’s ongoing alternation between imagination and materiality—opens up a capacity for immanent thought and transformation. Admittedly, many contemporary video games include rigid systems of scoring and quantifiable outcomes. Even so, the way in which people play games is capable of determining the very terms by which winning and losing, success or failure, is determined. Some games (e.g., card games like 1000 Blank White Cards or alternate reality games that are radically responsive to player actions like the game S.E.E.D. that I codirected) can even alter fundamental rules and objectives in the very process of play.48 In such cases, play becomes more than a mechanism for mastering existing rules or mechanics. It instead serves as a method for determining what failure could or should constitute in that singular and specific situation or context. Play, in this case, is not just about learning how to complete a predetermined game but learning how to make a different game. The capacity to open up a consciousness of and experimentation with rule making has always been a feature of game design and visible in variations across gameplay, but it takes on added significance in the neoliberal era. As I have been emphasizing throughout this book, neoliberalism itself is built upon constructivism. Regarding failure, in particular, Brian Massumi contends that within contemporary economic markets “the very question of what counts as a ‘success’ or ‘failure’ is subject to affective interference.” Far from a straightforward cost-­benefit analysis, “the very definition of ‘success’ oscillates between affective and economic determinants.”49 Games adopt a unique role in introducing distance from and promoting experimentation with the affective modulation and ongoing construction of values, such as success and failure, which are built into neoliberal markets. We can concede that most games require players to accept and play within their rules, rather than actively inviting players to establish their own. Even so, players in a world where games operate as a cultural dominant move among numerous games, each with a different set of rules and values. Each new game—now bridge, now Pokémon GO, now Overcooked, now Fortnite—requires consent to frequent changes in perception and orientation toward discrete rule sets, each of which yields a different world. As Jack Halberstam puts it, bringing game-­based failure into closer alignment with his concept of the queer art of failure, “we might think of gaming as a world where we don’t just try to change what we think, but how we think.”50 Even most scholars who argue in favor of games as a key cultural space for practicing Halberstam’s queer art of failure suggest that game-­based failure 238

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can be recuperated into a kind of success, often as a resistance to normativity.51 The degree to which games that take critical approaches to failure, including SPENT, Thresholdland, and the queer games I discuss in chapter 4, can serve as meaningful resistance requires greater investigation, along the interdisciplinary lines I suggested at the end of the previous section. After all, failure in video games can often reinforce normativity, for instance through the conditions created by griefers, trolls, or PKers (player killers). But even if failure does not result in a substantial transformation of one’s consciousness or beliefs through something like a game’s procedural rhetoric, it can be valuable as a deliberate method. To be clear, this type of experimental method might offer the most value in enabling a player to think through a game’s specific design, its particular form of constructedness, rather than reality or the world as such. Failure, then, invites players to think systemically and act creatively, not merely as player-­consumers but also as potential designers of their own participatory worlds. One of the most promising suggestions for experimental uses of failure comes from Ruberg, who contemplates the value of “failing in the way that a game does not want,” even while acknowledging that determining a design orientation and its intentions is not always simple or straightforward.52 There are many ways and styles in which failure against a game might happen. For example, it can happen through accidental or staged comedic epic fails or through tactics of critical play that seek to understand a game’s ideology. Such practices of failure also become a regular approach of speedrunners who explore a game in queer ways in order to discover glitches and exploit its system. For the speedrunner, of course, failure largely serves as a route to eventual success: a way of shaving time off of their runs in order to achieve a record. But failure can also be a play style that channels ways of thinking like a designer or of exploring a game’s structure through both its intended and unintended elements.53 Arguably, Thresholdland did not provide an invitation to fail in ways that exceeded the design team’s intentions. Nevertheless, it asked players to dwell within states of fragility. As feminist theorist Sara Ahmed puts it, fragility is an embodied state that entails being “easily breakable” or coming up against one’s own breaking point. Avoiding the dominant media frames of undocumented immigrants as either “criminals” or “victims,” Thresholdland explored the capacities of immigrant fragility. As the days continued, the game—like a Freudian game of “fort und da” that wears and tears at its string with each cast away and return—brought players increasingly closer to their breaking points. For Ahmed, to be fragile or precarious means to have less support.54 However, while interpellating individual players at its start, Thresholdland

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also created opportunities for collectivity and mutual support amidst vulnerability. So few players officially won the game, and yet the experience of losing spurred reflections on the numerous forms of defeat and the loss of security to which undocumented immigrants are regularly subjected. In the game, individual defeat also took the form of sacrifice, in which players had to give up hard-­earned points to help other players or to complete certain puzzles. Even in the midst of challenges and depressing outcomes, loss and fragility gave rise to an assemblage that gradually began to privilege the collective completion and community experience of the game to individual outcomes. The crossing of a “threshold” became not merely the simulation of crossing national boundaries and the achievement of expatriation, but also the transition from independent to group play. The fragility highlighted, even celebrated, by a game like Thresholdland departed from the neoliberal version of the concept—for instance, the one that takes centrality in Taleb’s usage, in which fragile individuals or companies are a means to the end of an antifragile economy. Similarly, the game did not merely recuperate failure in order to demonstrate the players’ capacity for individual resilience. Under the conditions of neoliberalism, the concept of resilience is a constructed social good that is often used as a technique of governance. An illustrative neoliberal cultural strategy in this respect is a wholesale critique of “trigger warnings” in classrooms and media environments, as well as “safe spaces” on university campuses. This critique often entails an intolerance for nonresilience within groups ranging from queer students, disabled students, and students of color to a broader set of millennials. For such critics, fragility and nonresilience become failures of individual capacity and will. Such charges, however, serve as a smokescreen for a structural precarity that has been generated by that same system. As an affective governance technique, “resilience” becomes “the requirement to take more pressure; such that the pressure can gradually increase.”55 It becomes a naturalistic alibi for all manner of labor abuses and exacerbated inequalities. Thresholdland wore down its players but did not subsequently expect a resilient resurgence from them. Rather that settling the crisis of immigration that it staged, through either a competitive resolution or narrative denouement, the game undertook an experiment with individual and collective fragility. It operated as a magic circle that was both a part of everyday life for ten days and ultimately apart from it. As the game did not culminate in qualitative (e.g., focus groups or extended interviews) or quantitative (e.g., survey) research, we do not have an extensive account of its precise effects on players. Nevertheless, it served as an opening in which failure, precarity, and fragility could be adopted as play styles. Unquestionably, this experi 240

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ment was temporary and artificial in nature. It was not, nor did it attempt to be, a simulation of actual immigrant hardships. The game’s ephemerality and artificiality, however, is a limit that it shares with all experiments. Moreover, it is not a simple matter to judge the outcome of the game’s experiment as either a success or failure. As political theorist William E. Connolly argues, “we do not know with confidence, in advance of experimental action, just how far or fast changes in the systemic character of neoliberal capitalism can be made.”56 This uncertainty and potential is why experimental action remains so important in our historical moment. Experiments with styles of failure, for both game designers and players, entail tactics and postures that I have not elaborated here. Some of these might include mimetic role playing that achieves greater empathy toward the precariat, parody that attains critical distance from an economic condition that has become otherwise naturalized, performative acceleration that pushes an unacceptable inequality and fragility to such extremes that the center cannot hold, or embodied imagination of forms of life foreclosed by neoliberal norms. In the case of any game, there is never a guarantee that experimental play will yield what one expects or desires in advance. Otherwise, it would be a demonstration and not an experiment. Even so, a ludic orientation allows the player to learn about sociopolitical structures and affects. Moreover, it introduces a hope for change that might otherwise have been entirely unfounded. Thresholdland ended in a comparatively optimistic mood, suggesting that immigration policy could and should be changed. In contrast, my third and final case offers a very different atmosphere of pessimism in which a pervasive failure unfolds in a world that has already foreclosed the possibility of success. The Collapsing World of Little Inferno

Little Inferno (2012) puts the player in a self-­contained world. At the beginning of the game, you find yourself at home, looking on at a brick fireplace. At the center sits a metallic mechanism. Gears spin behind this mechanism, with a smiling face that rests ambiguously, eyes closed, at the edge of an undecidable expression that can be read as peaceful or self-­satisfied, snug or smug. On the iOS version of the game, a note appears with the instruction: “Touch & hold anywhere to make a fire.” Holding down your finger on the screen sparks a flame. Dragging your finger over to the note burns it up and initiates the game. Promptly, a letter arrives from Miss Nancy, CEO of the Tomorrow Corporation, who reveals that you have just purchased your “brand new Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace.” The Tomorrow Corpora

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Figure 6.3. The entertainment fireplace interface of Little Inferno (Tomorrow

Corporation, 2012).

tion, much like the face at the center of its proprietary “entertainment fireplace,” gives off an air of uncertainty that oscillates between boon and threat. Even as representation tells only part of the story about any game, it is worth inquiring what Little Inferno is about. In the most superficial way, it is a game about burning objects. The fireplace, after all, is the game’s primary interface. Nonrepresentationally, burning is also the key action taken in the game. Once you have scorched the introductory letter, along with the terms and conditions for the product, another letter arrives to announce that even as you have “already burned all of your things,” there is no problem because “you can always buy more with your brand new catalog.” Alongside the fireplace screen, the catalog becomes the other key interface of the game. Every time the player opens the catalog, it triggers upbeat music and a view of all available products. This directory, and to a large degree the game itself, unfolds through a series of puns and wordplays. For example, an early item is a stack of “Letter Blocks” that is glossed with the description: “Optional profanity blocker accessory for easier parenting” (emphasis mine). Another item, the “Wooden Bicycle,” is said to go “from 0 to kindling in 60 seconds or less.” The Little Inferno, then, truly operates according to a razorblade business model. That is, the entertainment fireplace is a given appliance that requires the purchase of numerous other products that can be burned (fig. 6.3). In addition to whatever entertainment value one might derive from this burning and its associated animations (e.g., the “Alarm Clock” item goes off and “Someone Else’s Credit Card” proliferates cash as they burn), charred items generate gold coins that one can spend on even more items. Furthermore, 242

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completing each catalog unlocks the next one, with each of the seven collections carrying a theme such as “Chimney Stuffer,” “Totally Recalled Toys,” and even a metacategory about video games titled “1st Person Shopper.” Why would players be interested in what seems to amount to a burning simulator? Indeed, Little Inferno received positive critical reviews and a number of independent game award nominations, and by 2018 it had sold over one million copies.57 To be fair, the game as I have described it thus far already resembles a substantial number of successful video games that build upon simplistic actions and repetitive grinding. This mode of gameplay is common not only in games explicitly designed for nongame training or education that would fall under the “gamification” design label but also a large number of casual “freemium” games that introduce repetition as a way of encouraging players to spend money to reach more meaningful parts of the game. Departing from these more mechanistic games, however, Little Inferno requires players to go off of autopilot and complete 100 thought-­ provoking “combos.” These puzzle challenges operate like riddles with a pun-­ infused hint. For example, the “Movie Night” combo can be solved by burning a “Television” alongside the “Corn on the Cob” (which produces popcorn as it burns). Another “Cold War” combo requires one to burn “Uncle Sam’s Blam Blams” alongside the “Russian Nesting Doll” object. The player’s ability to solve each combo depends on a capacity to interpret the clue and to have a working knowledge of all the catalog items. It is worth noting that the puns are unidirectional, with each combo clue leading to an exact solution, without inviting player creativity regarding multiple interpretations. So, for example, the “Legal Charge” combo can only be solved by burning the “Legal Briefcase” and “Someone Else’s Credit Card,” even if another item—say, the “Dynamite Daisy” stick of dynamite—might be imaginable as a substitute. In this way, the game proceeds largely via a closed puzzle logic. At this point, one correction or complication to my initial characterization is necessary: despite the closed and limited nature of the game’s interface, Little Inferno is not entirely (at least at a narrative level) a self-­contained world. The earliest hint of this fact arrives with the name of the “Tomorrow Corporation” that turns out to be both the name of the game’s real-­world developer and of the corporation that is at the center of the game’s diegesis.58 Early in the experience, the game gestures toward a world outside. One begins to communicate with Sugar Plumps, a neighbor who is also sitting in front of her fireplace and burning things. The exchange takes place entirely via letters. However, as with a monologic epistolary novel, we only ever see letters from Sugar Plumps’s side. Given the accelerated (though nonromantic) intimacy of the exchange, the connection comes to feel like a friendship

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in an online virtual world. The exchanges extend to mutual gifts in which, for instance, you send Plumps the “Jar of Fireflies” when she runs out of her own objects to burn and she sends you a “Paper Heart.” Though she is seemingly your only friend, she gestures toward a larger world and toward the popularity of the Little Inferno system. As she observes, “Everyone I know has one and everyone I don’t know has one too!” After completing the first catalog, your sense of the world expands even farther out through a rare report about the outside world. At this transitional moment, you receive a breaking weather report, from “over the smoke stacks, over the city,” which indicates that there is going to be “another cold one” and a reminder (though the player reads this for the first time) that every day is “colder than the last” even as this “can’t last forever.” The Weather Man advises his audience, “Build a nice cozy fire and stay warm inside, folks!” In this first communication and the ones that follow, the Weather Man gestures toward the dystopian global situation that exceeds the player’s small world: this enclosed entertainment environment of a little inferno that operates as an allegory of a television or iPad screen. Of course, even by the arrival of the first weather report, this news should not entirely be news, given the preceding acts of destructive consumerism and the tone of pathological corporate positivity (a frame that seems to pun on Bob Dylan’s famous lyric, from “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” that “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”). Little Inferno approaches failure in a fundamentally different way from the games I have already mentioned or discussed in this chapter. In games such as SPENT, the player is put in a position from which she is certain or likely to fail because of the impossibility of making an optimal choice. Moreover, in games such as QWOP and Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, the game mechanics put the player in a position in which she fails, at least initially, because of a difficult control scheme. By comparison to such games, Little Inferno is eminently forgiving, giving even the unskilled player, who mindlessly burns their way through items without solving any of the combos, many chances to gain additional coins and try again. Moreover, by distinction to Thresholdland, failure does not develop into a play style that invites exploration of the game’s possibility space. Given the core puzzle mechanic, the game unabashedly offers one correct answer to each of its combos (even if it allows players to approach those puzzles in various orders). One can certainly approach the game as a kind of open-­ended sandbox in which one incinerates different combinations of items. Nevertheless, failed actions do not fundamentally alter the designed game or the player’s trajectory in it. Unlike these other games, Little Inferno traffics primarily in what Juul calls 244

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the “fictional failure” of a narrative world and its characters, rather than the “real failure” of a game that keeps its players from completing or winning it.59 Though the latter type of failure receives more attention because of its medium-­specific quality, the former is important (even from the perspective of medium specificity) insofar as it influences the experience of the game’s participatory and multimedia narrative. Through its interlocking parts, the game produces intense affects of failure by gradually introducing an atmosphere of futility and doom. Below the surface of its cartoonish visual aesthetic, failure is everywhere in Little Inferno. The game’s puns prime the player to look for multiple meanings, as with the aforementioned “Letter Blocks”: the first set of which offered, in my first playthrough, five letter blocks that could be reassembled to spell out F-­A-­I-­L-­D (a failed spelling of “failed”).60 Some of Little Inferno’s failure, however, is closer to the surface. The game reassures the player but repeatedly undermines that reassurance. At the beginning, Miss Nancy notes, “But don’t worry. Your Little Inferno is not like other games. There are no points. There is no score. You are not being timed. Just make a nice fire.” Immediately after this assurance of the casual consumer game at hand, she adds, “And stay warm in the glow of your high definition entertainment product! But you can’t do that forever! There is bound to be an end!” This reminder of finitude—a game and a warmth that cannot last forever—arrives in an exclamatory series infused with manic excitement. Not long after, Sugar Plumps marks the thin line between joy and danger even more explicitly, when she observes that “burning stuff is pretty fun” but “the instructions said there’s SOMETHING EVEN MORE DANGEROUS than fire. But I burned them. So we’ll never know.” A similar low-­grade sense of danger pervades the entire game. Thus, in Little Inferno, one inhabits a doomed world—that is, a world that is condemned in an oblique way—that carries histories and logics that are obscured from the player, except in the creeping resemblance of its world to contemporary real-­world catastrophes of environmental devastation. The broad target of Little Inferno’s critique departs from games such as SPENT or Cart Life that explore the fragility of economic systems and the precarity that neoliberalism enacts upon the majority of the world’s population. Even so, the game links the systemic failures of neoliberalism to the fragility of other complex systems. As Connolly observes, economic markets are “merely one type of imperfect self-­regulating system in a cosmos composed of innumerable, interacting open systems with differential capacities of self-­ organization set on different scales of time, agency, creativity, viscosity, and speed.”61 The key relationship to which Little Inferno gestures is that between economic and environmental systems. The bidirectionality of this relation

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ship is clear in the world outside of the game. On the one hand, rampant consumerism increases garbage that leads to consequences such as marine debris (e.g., the great Pacific garbage patch) and landfills that release methane, increase CO2 emissions, and contribute to the ongoing climate change catastrophe. On the other hand, ecological disasters invite forms of economic exploitation (e.g., the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka that created a shoreline buffer zone in which resorts could seize land from poor fishing people).62 In Little Inferno, the material junk that one orders from the catalogs burns and builds up as visible detritus along the bottom of the fireplace. Though the player only sees their own fireplace, the narrative gradually reveals the scale of consumption and gestures toward the larger climate disaster that is happening outside of the player’s home. That Little Inferno addresses systemic failure as a game is important for a few reasons. One plays the “game” of the Little Inferno entertainment system, knowing all the while that the world beyond one’s comprehension is on the brink of collapse and likely beyond the point of saving. Despite the outcome of this game, one has failed before even beginning. The fair and forgiving object-­burning game is embedded within an unfair and unwinnable game of the world within which it is embedded. Play, in this experience, amounts to an activity of weathering the unbearable. The game’s satire reminds the player that there is only a small distance between the diegesis of the Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace and the present world in which one is playing Little Inferno on a mobile device. The experience oscillates between the diegetic and the nondiegetic, fictional catharsis and avant-­garde alienation, immersion and modernist distancing, absorbing gamification and critical play.63 The game does not merely gesture toward the pleasures of gameplay; it reproduces them. Moreover, it converts these pleasures into anxiety or, more profoundly, in its parody reveals the anxiety that is always already inherent in the pleasures of gamification. Beyond the formal specificity of its immanent critique of gamification, Little Inferno also adopts a medium specificity. As a “casual game,” it is available on one’s smartphone or tablet. On the App Store, for instance, the game appears alongside so many other games that offer a way of passing time during a boring commute or opting out of an anxious situation. If the fireplace is the centerpiece of one’s domestic space in the game’s world, a video game becomes, in a sense that is more than metaphorical, a contemporary environment for life in the wider world. As media theorist John Durham Peters puts it, “Media are our infrastructures of being, the habitats and materials through which we act and are.”64 Media of any historical moment ground consciousness and lived experience. As Bernard Stiegler makes this point 246

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in even stronger terms, media technologies take an epiphylogenetic role in which human interiority is invented through exteriorization.65 Under neoliberalism, casual games resonate with the precarious affects of casual labor, providing a resting spot, an outlet, a habit, a closed habitat, a temporary home for the energies of unemployment and underemployment. In our time, digital and networked media play a grounding role, with video games as one of its most pervasive forms. Little Inferno both uses and mocks the mechanics of gamification that have become the habitats for so much of contemporary life. For instance, when one completes all of the combos, the game announces, “You have achieved Platinum Rainbow Elite Status in the Tomorrow Corporation Combo Loyalty Program!” Your time and effort are rewarded with a novelty Tomorrow Corporate mouse pad: an object no less arbitrary or vapid than most of the prizes or badges offered by most freemium games. Instead of inviting total immersion or conditioning the player to its reward structure, however, Little Inferno punctures its experience with the ubiquitous doomed mood of its collapsing world and the failure that underlies any immediately gratifying victory that the player might achieve. The self-­contained world of the smartphone or tablet screen on which one is playing the game can no longer be associated with unadulterated comforts of habituation. This technological device, like the Little Inferno fireplace that is its microcosm inside the game, becomes complicit with the world’s destruction. This happens indirectly through the video games played on this device that operate as a form of empty escapism from engaging with global problems. It also takes place directly and materially, for instance through the status of electronic devices as a key material source of e-­waste that contaminates groundwater or through the coltan used in many of these devices whose mining contributes to pollution and soil erosion. Formally, the ending of Little Inferno gestures toward the dangers of media as habitats for life that affect our perception and actions. Indeed, it is only when the player decides to burn down their home (Little Inferno fireplace included) that the game shifts, however briefly, from a first-­person perspective to a third-­person side-­ scrolling dialogue-­driven adventure (fig. 6.4). For the first time, the player steps outside, leaving their warm habitat and encountering a different climate: a cold world. Even when players step outside, however, they find no redemption or salvation through some fuller understanding of their media habitat. This is not the enlightened thinker’s journey out of Plato’s cave—including the many forms that this allegory takes in the study of media, from the scene of cinematic viewing that recurs in film theory to the digital media immersion of The Matrix in which Neo gains enlightenment by traveling from the virtual

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Figure 6.4. The endgame sequence of Little Inferno (Tomorrow Corporation, 2012).

to the real world. In game terms, individual completion of Little Inferno does not allow one to shake a sense of global failure. When one finally meets Miss Nancy, in person at the Tomorrow Corporation, her vacuous positivity cannot recommend a way forward. If you ask her, “How long has it been snowing?” she responds: “It’s been snowing for as long as I can remember! And it’s been getting colder. Every day, colder than the day before. That can’t last forever!” When she explains that someday the city will freeze over, one can counter with the dialogue choice: “That’s horrible! Shouldn’t we do something?” Yet the game, steeped in activity up to this point, eliminates this problem-­solving impulse as quickly as it offers it. The player cannot do something or indeed anything that changes this outcome. Doing without thinking is, in other words, the problem itself. Following this exchange, Nancy herself escapes from the world via a rocket ship—a gesture toward real-­world escape hatches such as Elon Musk’s Mars colonization plan or custom-­designed doomsday bunkers being constructed by the billionaire class. The protagonist meets the Weather Man and rides off in his balloon in order to witness the world’s end. In place of victory or self-­discovery, then, the ending of Little Inferno pre­sents an unrelenting pessimism of decline that is scarcely offset by the cartoonish graphics. Failure, here, is not a means to an end. Even the activity that the game requires for its completion—a rabid consumption passed off as a competitive completionism—comes to feel, by the end, like a repetition compulsion. As philosopher Eugene Thacker writes, “Failure is a breakage within the heart of relations, a fissure between cause and effect, a fissure hastily covered over by trying and trying again.”66 The game authorizes individual agency only with 248

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the purchase and destruction of objects, not with a causality that redeems a longer history of destruction. In the analysis throughout this book, I have approached experimental games as games that find or make problems. In opposition to the California ideology, such games do not posit design as a means of problem solving. As an experimental game, Little Inferno undertakes a radical experiment that unfolds largely at the level of affect. This is not an optimistic problem-­ solving game that seeks to change human behaviors related to the oil and environmental crisis (e.g., World Without Oil) or to combat climate change (e.g., Climate Challenge). Little Inferno’s experiment, which some might read as politically irresponsible or nihilistic, is to embrace pessimism: to produce and maintain an affect of doom without respite, at least for the duration of the game. This is not the pessimism of the contemporary figure of the climate change “edgelord”: an individual who aestheticizes bleakness and, sometimes giddily, laments the inevitability of the coming climate apocalypse.67 This game’s pessimism unfolds not as the extended position of an online debater or forum troll, but as a process of discovery amidst action. In the game, the player attempts to traverse the mounting disaster—but ultimately cannot. As Thacker again writes, “In raising problems without solutions, in posing questions without answers, in retreating to the hermetic, cavernous abode of complaint, pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real.”68 Instead of embracing hope and acting as if it will make a difference, Little Inferno tries but does not see a way forward. One feels the downturn of the surrounding world and is given no meaningful agency. The ineffectiveness of one’s actions is so total that one cannot even cause that doom. One just fails, more or less slowly, alongside the other inhabitants of this cold world. In its narrative denouement, the game does not offer guidance about what to do with this hopeless situation and this eventual failure. Indeed, the ending of this action-­ oriented experiment is too conclusive to allow any hope of future success. Conclusion: The Right to Fail

Failure in Little Inferno entails the recognition that contemporary systems— of neoliberalism, of consumerism, and of climate change—have gone too far. Denying the logic of games, there can be no more trial and error, no extra life, no more course correction. We cannot try again with the hope of a different outcome. The game’s underlying pessimism thus teaches us something about failure in our time. Perhaps it is not enough simply to deny that failure is the best teacher—in opposition to the management self-­help gurus who (bor

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rowing from the surfaces of Beckett) suggest that we “fail better.” One can indeed fail better. Failure, however, is not a binary state. One does not merely fail or succeed. The manner in which one does and can fail matters. Among the many crimes of the neoliberal era is the foreclosure of more generative and more forgiving forms of failure—at least for the vast majority of Earth’s human population. Failure only remains a creative process for the owner and managerial classes. Under neoliberalism, even a large number of people previously protected from experience of precarity by their education or social status are faced with the precarity and insecurity that was, at least for a few decades after World War II in the United States, restricted, in varied ways, to people of color, immigrants, women, the working class, and other marginalized groups. In a society without a safety net for many who fall outside of a shrinking subset of even the most privileged 1 percent, few are granted the right to failure. In a sense, failure does open up the possibility of another world as it traverses the reality of the present world’s impossibility. Our contemporary condition of virtuality constantly teaches us that if this world fails, one can always try another one. Moreover, experiments are constructions that bring into being worlds that did not previously exist. If the present book is to be believed, games can be treated as experiments. Even so, some games of failure ask us to entertain the possibility that another world might not be possible. In those cases, if we cannot stomach the unsatisfying withdrawal of radical pessimism or allow for its unethical consequences, we can always step away from the screen. We can wave off feelings that this playable little inferno is not the world. This, after all, is a game. Just a game. Right?

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​7 Improvisation Improvisation engenders new concepts. Erin Manning (Politics of Touch)

Freedom is not chosen: it is invented. It is invented—in a way that is not easily distinguishable from a discovery. Brian Massumi (The Power at the End of the Economy)

Video games frequently offer closed worlds composed of set rules, limited objectives, and finite spaces. Alongside various constraints, however, games enable processes of improvisation that can be used to construct a more open worlding process from the inside out. Though the concept of improvisation has not been as central a term in game studies as a field—especially as compared to choice, control, or failure—it has been important, for example, in scholarship that seeks to understand the emergent narratives of tabletop games and live-­action role playing games.1 Despite being undertheorized in writing about digital games in general, improvisation does play a crucial role in video games that invite players to create emergent variations in actions, tactics, strategies, goals, and play styles. Improvisational actions occur regularly when players use any vehicle at hand for an emergent police chase in a Grand Theft Auto game (1997–­), making the most of a Sultan sedan, Mammoth Patriot Stretch SUV, or even a fire truck; experiment with newly released League of Legends (2009–­) champions who might be OP (overpowered) relative to the other champions in the game; or create new ways to complete assassination missions in the stealth game Hitman (2016). In more extreme cases, specialized or adventurous players might construct strange speedruns that require them to play a game in ways that require adjustment and improvisation that exceeds the original implicit rule set (one particularly extreme example would be completing a Super Mario 64 sixteen-­star speedrun where

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every star collected is replaced with a Super Mario World eleven-­exit speedrun while using Dance Dance Revolution dance pads for control).2 Beyond gaming, improvisation has been theorized as key to numerous domains, ranging from improvisational theater, comedy improv, jazz performance, martial arts, acceptance-­based psychotherapies, linguistic studies of verbal improvisation in everyday conversation, and business practice.3 More than a performance genre, improvisation is thus a development practice, experimental process, and creative capacity. Across domains, improvisation depends on the logic of the “yes, and” relation among participants. As Earl Vickers puts it, “In the yes, and practice upon which much of improv is based, a performer accepts (says ‘yes’ to) the reality of whatever suggestion (or ‘offer’) is made by another performer, then adds (‘and’) to that offer, thereby building a scene together.” In other words, improvisation is a form of “interpersonal experimentation” that substitutes an acceptance of a proposed reality—indeed an experiment that might not lead anywhere meaningful—in place of resistance to change.4 One of the features of improvisation that has made this technique so readily adaptable to a variety of disciplines and practices is its capacity for problem solving. Viola Spolin, an important originator of contemporary theater games and improvisational theater, writes that improvisation involves “setting out to solve a problem with no preconception as to how you will do it; permitting everything in the environment (animate or inanimate) to work for you in solving the problem.”5 In this relatively open-­ended problem-­ solving process, the participant welcomes mistakes, errors, and failures as gifts. As Vickers puts this point, in a different context, the attack of an opponent in aikido becomes “an opportunity to restore harmony.”6 Similarly, in still other forms of improvisation, unexpected occurrences are accepted, augmented, redirected, or modulated. This way of conceptualizing improvisation as problem solving can easily be applied to competitive games. In a discussion of analog theater games, Spolin already contends that “any game worth playing is highly social and has a problem that needs solving within it—an objective point in which each individual must become involved, whether it be to reach a goal or to flip a chip into a glass.”7 Competitive games incentivize improvisatory actions that might throw off an opponent, increase the chances of victory, and sometimes even alter the perception of fundamental constraints in ways that change how the game can be played in future iterations. Yet the role of improvisation might not operate in the same way in noncompetitive games—for instance, cooperative multiplayer games, or the activities of chance, role playing, and vertigo that make up Roger Caillois’s broader taxonomy of games.8 In a more 254

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fundamental sense, the very meaning of playing a game, for some theorists, is incompatible with the idea of problem solving. For example, Bernard Suits argues that a central quality of play is a “lusory attitude” that promotes play for its own sake, instead of for an external end.9 This version of purposeless gameplay stands in contrast to the instrumental drive of gamification that converts games into productive mechanisms for solving problems in management, health and wellness, and education. From the perspective of a lusory attitude, players accept rules and objectives because of their arbitrariness and engage in play even if it offers no solutions to problems, only the forward trajectory and completion of the game or play activity in question. This chapter argues that in order to realize a generative experimental potential, it is beneficial to shift the dominant approach to games from a perspective of improvisation as problem solving to one of improvisation as problem finding or problem making. R. Keith Sawyer captures this distinction clearly when he observes: A “problem-­finding” painter is constantly searching for her or his visual problem while painting-­improvising a painting rather than executing one. In con-

trast, a problem-­solving style involves starting with a relatively detailed plan for a composition and then simply painting it; “problem-­solving” because the

painter defines a visual problem for herself or himself before starting, with the execution of the painting consisting of “solving” the problem.10

Gamification—both as a specific instrumental design approach and in my broader sense in this book of a form that economic, social, and cultural life takes in the present—assumes that games operate as problem-­solving forms. A gamified app seeks to solve the problem of insufficient exercise by motivating activity through points and leaderboards. A video game such as Candy Crush invites the player to reverse engineer the designer’s algorithm and solve the problem of each level’s puzzle. Even a serious game, such as SPENT, which I analyze in chapter 6, seeks to solve (or at least influence) the problem of underemployment and homelessness in the United States. Players can improvise solutions within all of these games, but the problems are clearly defined and the solution develops, more or less algorithmically. Though the concept of improvisation as problem solving is surely appealing in some contexts, its limits become apparent if we track its correspondence to neoliberal thought. It is meaningful that, under neoliberalism, improv classes find a captive audience among business and finance professionals.11 One reason that this instrumentalization of improv is so positively received by this audience surely has to do with its introduction of affective

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vitality—a sense of bodily potentials—into an otherwise inhuman economic domain. At a conceptual level, improvisation is also celebrated, in part, for its value in bringing intuition and adaptability to bear on the problem of future uncertainty. The reliance of the neoliberal economy on debt and on the indebted subject (the neoliberal shadow of entrepreneurial human capital) already seeks to establish a more certain relationship to the future. As Maurizio Lazzarato observes, “Granting credit requires one to estimate that which is inestimable—future behavior and events—and to expose oneself to the uncertainty of time. The system of debt must therefore neutralize time, that is, the risk inherent to it.” For Lazzarato, debt is not only an economic technique but also a political one, insofar as it anticipates and minimizes uncertainty in the behavior of governed subjects. Finance and credit engage in “reducing what will be to what is, that is, reducing the future and its possibilities to current power relations” in order to calculate and control uncertainty.12 Insofar as neoliberalism depends on a subjective economy that promotes entrepreneurship of the self, debt comes to shape the beliefs, choices, and actions of subjects. Credit excites, mobilizes, and exploits a subject’s affective sense of an indeterminate and changing world. Improvisation thus becomes appealing because it offers a method to sense and seemingly control uncertain and unactualized potential. It solves problems of future unknowns. I would like to argue that the concept of improvisation that experimental games put forward is one of what Sawyer calls problem finding, and which I would inflect differently with the constructivist designation of problem making. To solve a problem through improvisation means using emergent tools and techniques to execute a preset plan. By distinction, problem making is a process of experimenting with both processes and objectives. To make a problem means to remain open to values, worldviews, criteria of success or failure, or ways of living that might not be available at the outset of a creative process. Problem making, then, operates as an experimental process that limbers up thinking, increases sensitivities, and opens participants up to coexisting potentials. Affect, which has been central to the framework of this book, is nondeterministic and indicative of an indeterminate world. As such, a problem-­making process cannot seek primarily to manipulate possibility for a predetermined end—or, to put it in the language of gameplay, to “min-­max” it for optimal profit. As such, this process is not about reaching set outcomes but about constructing new, and often temporary, objectives. As I noted at the outset, many digital games provide entertaining or instrumental closed worlds. Nevertheless, I contend that games can engage improvisational play that opens up new ways of thinking about contingency, responsiveness, and performance, particularly within increasingly ubiqui 256

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tous digital and networked environments. I acknowledge that this claim is as much prescriptive as descriptive—and that it comes from a perspective that is as much that of a game designer as that of a media scholar. Admittedly, even a quick foray into Reddit threads about video games reveals numerous forms of improvisation undertaken by players who create nonnormative ways of engaging games. For all the creativity and artistry of many such approaches to games, however, such modifications, design practices, and alternative play modes do not represent the fundamental way that games are created, marketed, and played by the majority of players in our time. In pursuit of an expanded vision of improvisational games, this chapter departs from exclusively screen-­based games and considers the mixed reality form of alternate reality games, which invite improvisational storytelling across both digital and analog media. Tabletop games and live-­action role playing games also offer compelling examples of the phenomena I discuss in this chapter, but I focus on alternate reality games because, unlike most examples of these games, they incorporate and rely on digital and networked media environments, which sets them in relation to my earlier video game cases. Further departing from earlier parts of the book, this final chapter considers a single case of a large-­scale alternate reality game, the parasite, which I codirected, designed, and executed with a large team at the University of Chicago in 2017. Drawing from methodologies such as critical making, this chapter suggests that it is not merely gameplay but also game design and development that is crucial to understanding experimental games. Following an overview of the alternate reality game as a form and the parasite as a case, I explore games as an immanent and improvisational process of problem making that can offer unexpected alternatives to neoliberal thought and action. Departing from the individual improvisation of a virtuoso player or creative speedrunner, the case on which I focus instead highlights the possibilities of multidirectional collective improvisation among players and designers over an extended period of time. In the following pages, the case of the parasite serves less as an example of some ideal game form than as an occasion for thinking through an alternative method of experimental gameplay and putting forward a model of a ludic laboratory. Like improvisation itself, I think alongside this project for what it can teach us about process more than product. Alternate Reality Games

Though improvisation is sometimes assumed to be an entirely open-­ended process of invention and response, practitioners and theorists alike have ar

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gued that it simultaneously depends on deep knowledge of structure and practiced familiarity with rules. In other words, without constraints, there is no possibility for risk taking that generates unexpected variation.13 Improvisation can emerge from within or through any structure, even as some forms arguably promote greater degrees of freedom than others at particular historical moments. Among games, the alternate reality game (ARG) is a form that, in the early twenty-­first century, has promoted substantial improvisations. ARGs are narrative-­driven transmedia games that unfold across a series of different media, involve multiple players, and do not explicitly announce themselves as games, thereby maintaining uncertainty about their formal status.14 Some of the best-­known examples of such games include The Beast (Microsoft 2001), I Love Bees (42 Entertainment 2004), and Potato Sack (Valve 2011). Such games communicate fragmented narratives that can be spread across media platforms and the transmedia affordances of contemporary networks, rather than what we might call the multimedia capacities of screen-­based video games.15 That is, an ARG might migrate from an email to a website to Instagram and TikTok to live-­action performances to a Twitch stream, thereby integrating itself into the ordinary media flow.16 In this way, an ARG encourages the analytic distinctions of medium specificity while simultaneously encouraging a more capacious comparative media studies approach. ARGs can be characterized as collaborative problem-­making processes. They build upon ordinary social media, technical platforms, and game genres in order to make available new pathways (and an awareness of those pathways) to encourage immanent analytical thought and transformation of a game’s structure from the inside out. ARGs thus take improvisatory methods and allow them to unfold in the context of digital and networked media. Experimentation, here, is founded not only on form but on interactions, both planned and spontaneous, among participants. ARG designs often cannot be resolved by a single player or even a small group, offering challenges and inviting play styles that require diverse expertise to traverse.17 Given that such a game is distributed across online platforms and space, understanding an ARG from the perspective of individual pleasure or fun only offers a partial perspective. A fuller sense of such a game requires an understanding of collective improvisation. Aside from its transmedia and collective dimensions, the unique aspect of an ARG is the fact that it does not announce itself as a game.18 Indeed, even as they include rules, challenges, and objectives, ARGs might be said to have as much formally in common with experimental performance, interactive fiction, or scavenger hunts. Yet the aesthetic insistence that “this is 258

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not a game” opens up game form in important ways. In order to understand the social and affective force of ARGs, we can posit a comparison and contrast between the ARG and the practical joke. In Mark Seltzer’s characterization, “The practical joke is a self-­induced and self-­exposed game about being taken in by games, and the observation of that process.” As a game about games, the practical joke “stages a small world and then proceeds to discredit it by exposing the credulity that holds it in place—showing that one (the concealed-­from one) has been taken in by taking the game as serious or real.”19 On its surface, this account could be applied to ARGs, which are also staged and self-­observing small worlds that blur lines between designed gameplay and ordinary social performance. While the constructed frame of a practical joke and an ARG carry superficial similarities, the ethos of the latter’s improvisational unfolding is substantially different. After all, in the end, the practical joke is “a game about the distinction between game and world—and the reentry of the distinction into the game is its object and outcome.” This reentry depends on “the ecology of embarrassment” that “registers on the body, its crucial observer, and (in the poker sense) its ‘tell.’”20 By contrast, an ARG does not seek the embarrassment that registers the sharp distinction between the savvy in-­crowd that recognizes the event as a game versus the naïve outsider who misrecognizes it as reality. The practical joke ends in a violent gesture that normalizes the boundary between game and reality through the shock of shame. An ARG does not expose a duped individual. Its target is broader: the experiential exposure of consensus reality as a normative construction—an arbitrary, if materially ingrained, perceptual convenience upheld by shared belief and sustained by habit. ARGs can be said to blur the distinction between game and world. More precisely, they reveal games to be experimental processes that are capable of modulating and changing the world within which they participate. Certainly, some ARGs incorporate debriefings or postmortems. However, ideally at least, such reflective events do not exist merely to mark the distinction between game and world but to invite players to reflect on the permeability of those terms. Both participation in and reflection on an ARG remind players that a reality that is constructed or a world that is made is no less real for its original artificiality. More than any other factor, it is the ARG’s approach to improvisation that makes it stand apart from the practical joke. A practical joke must often unfold like a Rube Goldberg machine of precise environmental modulations that lead an unwitting participant into a misrecognition that the jokester then reveals in the final frame break. An ARG is far less controlled and precise. The ARG player is invited, at varying levels, into the co-­construction of

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the world. For instance, Sean Stewart identifies three modes in which ARG improvisation can be seeded or invited by designers: “power without control,” “voodoo,” and “jazz.” Briefly, “power without control” allows players to add to a narrative in limited ways without asking them to change the experience in substantive ways; “voodoo” asks players to make minimally constrained creative contributions that designers can ignore or incorporate into the shared experience; and “jazz” invites collaboration through which players can substantially alter the world in which they are participating.21 In the final mode of jazz, designers watch and listen closely, taking seriously creative misrecognitions and apophenia through which players observe patterns and potentials that were not intended or “designed” into the experience. Particularly in this final mode, a world can no longer be understood as the closed prefab scale model. In its ideal form, it transforms into a space of cocreation that introduces degrees of freedom that did not preexist collective invention. the parasite

On Sunday, July 23, 2017, something unexpected occurred. However, to adequately explain why this event was situationally surprising, and why it threatened the collapse of a world that had been intricately constructed up to that point for months, requires some context. On May 8, a group of incoming students, who would soon begin their first year at the University of Chicago, had discovered a postscript buried at the end of a long email from the dean of students that welcomed them to the university and looked forward to their arrival on campus that would occur a few months later in mid-­ September. This postscript included a URL followed by a puzzle (fig. 7.1). For students who correctly deciphered the code (or received the solution from classmates), they discovered a website seemingly hidden within the University of Chicago website architecture that offered the advice: “There is only one question you need to ask. What is the parasite?” (fig. 7.2) This link led to a transcript from a disciplinary committee meeting that included large quantities of redacted text. This transcript appeared in a series, with new portions appearing once every eleven days. The transcribed dialogue—between a student and an administrator—revealed the existence of a secret society called P. S. that had existed on the University of Chicago campus since 1896. As students gradually learned, the secret society operated not according to the common logic of self-­reproduction (e.g., hazing practices) but rather that of self-­obsolescence in which the collective embraced experimentation and change even if it ran contrary to the interests of current members. These 260

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Figures 7.1 and 7.2. “Rabbit holes” that initiated the parasite experience (P. S. 2017).

documents also revealed that P. S. organized itself around a mysterious room that appeared at the university only once every eleven years. In a public GroupMe chat room, students debated the origin of the postscript, the website, and the transcript. Theories included the idea that this was a communication from an actual secret society, a hack perpetrated on the University of Chicago website that might need to be reported, a prank played by the University of Chicago administration, or an orientation activity of unknown origins. Yet the available documents revealed nothing definitive about the parameters or origin of this emerging event. In July, students came to realize that the secret society (status still unconfirmed) was asking them to follow a series of transmedia trails in order to discover 121 objects and to return them to the mysterious room that was due to materialize in 2017. The first cluster of transmedia challenges that players encountered in July included puzzle chatbots on a shared Discord channel, emoji-­based Snapchat interactions with a member of P. S., physical letters from the secret society sent to a random group of students, an online challenge requiring students to find the physical location of dead drops at varied physical locations, and a YouTube video with instructions about how to play a card game titled the “Great Game” (that was also mailed to all incoming students). Though the players were not at all certain about the nature of the secret society and trails emerging all around them, the parasite was, from a different perspective, an ARG designed for approximately 1,750 incoming students

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that unfolded before and during the first-­year undergraduate orientation at the University of Chicago. I codirected the game with two colleagues who were coming from backgrounds in theater and performance studies (Heidi Coleman) and sociology and gender studies (Kristen Schilt), respectively. The game was codesigned and developed in close collaboration with university students (e.g., Peter McDonald), staff (e.g., Ashlyn Sparrow), and local professional artists (e.g., David Carlson). The thought in this chapter is indebted to months of interactions with this remarkable group of collaborators.22 For the designers, the game began as an experiment in recreating orientation in a way that would shift it formally from a lecture-­based sequence, and to help students develop capacities linked to collaboration, diversity, inclusivity, accessibility, and digital media. Another major motivation of the game was to give underrepresented students (e.g., first-­generation students, students of color, and LGBTQ+ students) tools to better understand, make use of, and possibly transform the university setting into which they were entering. Beyond these broader goals, each challenge or experience in the game had a more specific learning objective that asked students to think about capacities such as time management, help seeking, close listening, conflict resolution, and learning through failure. Among the initial ARG trails released in July was a Twitch livestream that showed an encoded puzzle, written by a masked secret society member, which appeared on a chalkboard in a location unknown to the incoming students. The code on the board was updated each time the growing player collective made progress. The designers of this ARG expected that through collective intelligence and effort the players would solve the puzzle and thereby discover one of the 121 objects that was associated with this trail. Indeed, these initial trails existed largely to build interest in the ARG, to train participants in different play styles that would be viable pathways through the experience, to build initial player infrastructures (e.g., a wiki for documenting gameplay), and to establish communication platforms (e.g., a GroupMe and Discord). Instead, players decided that, along with solving the code, they wanted to discover the physical location of the chalkboard. The players of the parasite undertook an improvisation with unexpected results. Later in July, our team of designers learned, via a GroupMe chat, that a small group of first-­year students had analyzed the blurry corners of the livestream footage that we had put on Twitch. In consultation with students who were already at the university, they learned that the footage was likely drawn from the woodshop at the university’s Logan Center for the Arts. The space itself was not accessible without a specialized ID card (that none of the

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incoming students possessed), but there were windows on two floors that would allow players to look into the woodshop and observe what we were preparing, thereby potentially ruining one of the notable surprises of the ARG: an in-­progress version of eleven book-­based sculptures that made up a secret room called the RUUN that the players were meant to discover upon their arrival to campus in September (figs. 7.3 and 7.4). Some of the players, we learned, were on campus early and were planning to run reconnaissance at the Logan Center on behalf of the collective. Within minutes of finding out their plans, we initiated our own improvised response. The design team secured permission from the building manager and covered over the windows into the shop with a rapidly constructed fictional public art exhibit. Just in time, the designers created sketches and covered the windows, so that visiting students could not see the construction project within the woodshop. The design team felt relieved and pleased with this quick improvised response to the player attempt to gain access to our game design space. The players, however, were not finished. A few days later, on a Sunday when the design team was not on location at the development space, two students arrived at the Logan Center with one student’s mother. The parent convinced a security guard that she and the first-­year students with her needed to inspect the woodshop because of safety concerns regarding work that the students might conduct during their time at the university. As a result of this playful ruse, the visiting players were able to go into our development space and take photos of some of our early work to share with their online community—even though they did not yet know precisely what they were looking at. Most concerning was the fact that these players photographed a list of the 121 objects that made up the full collection of privileged objects in the ARG, including an AOL floppy disk, a redlining map of Chicago, a Gwendolyn Brooks tape cassette, and a copy of Michel Serres’s book The Parasite. Up until that point, we had not planned to make the object list available in advance. Now, this unexpected play required substantial rerouting and rewriting. Instead of shutting down this emergent play, however much it complicated the design team’s plans, we decided to play back in an elaborate fashion. In response to this break-­in, the team created a new character—whom we named the Engineer. The Engineer was tasked, by the secret society, to investigate the break-­in. Over the next few weeks, this character distributed a series of eleven letters encoded in different cryptographic schemes that told the story of a rogue character who had allegedly broken into the workshop alongside the players. Thus, not only did the player improvisation create new puzzle



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Figures 7.3 and 7.4. The final RUUN book sculptures of the parasite in September 2017

(P. S. 2017, photographs taken by Freddy Tsao).

content and characters that did not preexist the action, but this episode also altered the eventual ending of the ARG that had to be rewritten once the list of objects was made public. The overall experience of the parasite would be impossible to outline in a single chapter, but it contained over a hundred trails, experiences, and performances. The ARG included a fake online preorientation course filled with transmedia puzzles, an augmented reality challenge that incorporated collections at the university’s Smart Museum of Art, an online multilinear Twine narrative that mapped onto the university campus, a full Dungeons and Dragons campaign that served as a game-­within-­a-­game allegory of the ARG in which the players were participating and which some students played remotely via Google Hangouts, and a screening of a modified silent film at the Rockefeller Chapel accompanied by a live organist who embedded pop songs that players had to identify via a Twitter feed. Though far from the video games I have analyzed throughout this book, this ARG made use of many of the same multilinear storytelling structures, participatory gameplay, networked sociality, and screen-­based media experiences that are central to contemporary video games. Rather than delving deeper into an account of the parasite itself—as a game designer’s postmortem might do—the remainder of this chapter uses this game as an occasion to explore the ways that digital games can produce critique and action that is immanent to contemporary digital and networked environments. In order to suggest how the parasite encouraged improvisation with what might otherwise be treated as tran-



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scription errors or mistakes, and promoted a more robust problem making, the next section considers the precise ways in which the parasite can be approached as a game-­based experiment. Experimentation from Cultural Probes to Collaborative Problems

If the improvised gameplay of an ARG is experimental, what kind of experiment can it be said to enact? As I have emphasized throughout this book, the word “experiment” can mean many things depending on the historical context, method, and medium in question. For example, Robert Boyle’s seventeenth-­century “spring of the air” experiment is fundamentally different from the twentieth-­century randomized controlled trial used to test the efficacy or safety of a drug. In a different register, Émile Zola’s late nineteenth-­ century account of the experimental novel is substantially distinct from the emergence of the experimental video game in the early twenty-­first century. For this reason, it is important to be precise about how the type of ARG that I am describing can be said to be an experimental game. In past writing with ARG collaborators, we have borrowed Nigel Thrift’s idea of a “cultural probe” in order to capture the experimental affordances of an ARG.23 This is a helpful idea to think alongside with but also one that I would like to complicate further in the present context. In his work, Thrift imagines “an art-­science of giving rise to new developments” that serves as an alternative—one guided by artistic making more than traditional scientific thinking—to the twenty-­first century’s “experimental economy” that I discuss in chapter 2.24 He borrows a term for his version of the concept from designer William Gaver and his colleagues: the “cultural probe.”25 In the work that led to his coinage of the term, Gaver created packages for residents of three senior centers that included various materials such as postcards with open-­ended questions and disposable cameras with prompts that invited expressive photographs. He then asked participants to send these “probe” materials back to the design team to provide idiosyncratic data that would serve as a foundation for imagining a new media environment within senior communities. This cultural probe did not introduce a preset solution but provoked speculative experiences and then engaged the responses it provoked even when they exceeded predicted parameters.26 Thrift uses Gaver’s design philosophy to imagine a “provocative awareness” that has historically motivated the creative arts and design but that could increasingly contribute to the social sciences in order “to produce frames that can produce uncertain outcomes, to be able to incorporate surprise.”27 For Gaver, cultural probes are not only tools of human-­centered design but can also serve as instruments 266

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of social change by promoting ongoing dialogues. Imagining broader applications of such instruments, Thrift identifies performance art and “radical game design”—two categories under which ARGs could conceivably fall—as promising models for cultural probes that can be realized within social scientific research. While an ARG experiment can be conceived of as a “cultural probe,” the term and concept introduce problems that distract from what distinguishes their experimental potentials. To its credit, a cultural probe (as imagined by Gaver and Thrift) involves a bidirectional communication between designers and participants that circumvents the largely unilateral approach of traditional research interventions. However, a “probe” remains a violent metaphor. In broader usage, a probe can be a surgical instrument such a data-­gathering endoscope that is used to observe the body’s interior or a spacecraft that ventures into planetary orbit or engages in surface exploration. To probe is to study and scrutinize from a distance via a mediated instrument: to test and gather proof regarding a phenomenon. This term already belongs to the histories of positivist science and colonialist exploration of unknown territories, as well as to the Cold War’s own conception of games as techniques for approaching the threat of nuclear war via game theory.28 If the term is suggestive of an experiment, it is of invasive poking and prodding. At its extremes, an experimental probe might evoke James Marion Sims’s nineteenth-­century surgical experiments on enslaved Black women, sans anesthesia, in pursuit of a cure for vesicovaginal fistula or the mid-­twentieth-­century Tuskegee experiment of untreated syphilis that was conducted on impoverished Black men, without appropriate informed consent or treatment.29 A probe, in other words, offers safety to the creator or scientist doing the probing but not necessarily the person or terrain that is being probed. Admittedly, there are other connotations of probes that are less unsettling. For example, in certain contexts, a “probing question” can be generative even if it produces psychological or social discomfort in the process. Moreover, this usage of the term carries descriptive benefits insofar as ARGs introduce disorientation and discomposure, if not downright violence, through the edgy negotiation of its “this is not a game” aesthetic between designers and players. That is, ARG designers do not offer complete transparency about the form or scope of the experience from the outset, but rather attend to the creative thinking that accompanies player uncertainty and lack of complete knowledge in order to cocreate the emerging experience with players. Even as the concept of a probe is not entirely objectionable, there is no need to hold onto whatever modicum of generative ambivalence remains in this

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concept. Instead, I would like to argue that what makes an ARG experimental has less to do with the ways it functions as a probe than with how it functions as a problem. A problem promises less certainty of resolution than a probe. Of course, one can solve a problem. But something that distinguishes humanistic and artistic thinking from most scientific and mathematical thinking is that the former disciplines make problems (or, more clunkily, “problematize”) rather than solve them. In this vein, improvisation is a way of making problems through real-­time affective encounters and responses. To consider how an ARG might collaboratively make a problem rather than send out a cultural probe to solve a problem, the case of the parasite is again helpful. When our team first began the project, we imagined that our core goal was for the ARG to contribute to greater “diversity” and “inclusion” at the university. These were not our terms, but they represented the most legible vocabulary at the time for entering into conversations with administrators, faculty, staff, and students across the University of Chicago whom we might not regularly reach. Moreover, some of the activities in the final ARG addressed diversity and inclusion explicitly—for instance through an event at the Center for Identity and Inclusion that sought to make the center’s resources visible to incoming students. This layer of the game sought to build on the university’s stated commitment in the years preceding the ARG to increasing the numbers of students receiving need-­based financial aid, as well as Black and Latinx students (for instance through the launch of the “No Barriers” program that eliminated student loan requirements from need-­based aid and enhancements to the “Odyssey” program that assists students from families with limited incomes). Though diversity and inclusion are important categories, our discussions with colleagues around the university reinforced our sense that these terms often signaled quantifiable inequities without addressing more qualitative dimensions of the campus climate. These qualitative dimensions included, for instance, fears about sexual harassment, sexual violence, microaggressions, and everyday inequities toward underrepresented students that accompany the transformation of an institution from a homogeneous to an increasingly heterogeneous population. This climate, which is by no means unique at the University of Chicago, can be conceptualized as the residue of the political legitimacy crisis of liberalism that began in the 1950s and 1960s amidst worldwide anticolonial struggles and the US civil rights movement. Political theorists including Elizabeth Povinelli, Wendy Brown, and Patchen Markell have argued that, by the 1970s, this political crisis transformed into a cultural crisis. As Povinelli observes, “In the wake of the liberal state’s recognition of past harm, the crisis would no longer be a crisis of liberal legitimacy but a 268

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crisis of how to allow cultures a space within liberalism without rupturing the core frameworks of liberal justice.” During this period, the US began instituting formal and informal policies as a strategy for addressing the challenges of difference across categories of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. Some of these cultural policies took the form of concepts like “multiculturalism” and “diversity” that mandated certain forms of state-­based cultural recognition of minority and marginalized groups. Amidst meaningful gains, many of these policies also sought to carve out “a space for culture to care for difference without disturbing key ways of figuring experience—­ ordinary habitual truths,” alongside core frameworks of liberal governance and economic transformations of neoliberalism.30 As Povinelli has argued, this form of governance commonly adopts a logic of consensus that relies on two contradictory claims. She argues that “in cases of cultural conflict the problem of difference is solved through public reason and in these same cases moral reason must draw red lines across which difference cannot proceed, or a bracket must be put around the difference so that it can be removed from public debate until that time its challenge can be managed.”31 On the one hand, in theory, liberalism posits that in cases of cultural conflict the problem of difference is solved through rational public discourse and the affordances of free speech. On the other hand, in practice, this form of governance suggests that, for the sake of ongoing consensus, it becomes necessary to “bracket” some forms of difference until we reach a time when they can be “managed” (here, we might think of the “Black Lives Matter” movement becoming too challenging for many white liberals and politicians during the 2016 US national election and prompting the “All Lives Matter” hashtag backlash). In moments when these two imperatives clash, Povinelli argues that the state no longer engages in cultural recognition and shifts the burden and responsibility to marginalized members of society. In response to this history, the parasite ARG gradually shifted from seeking to solve (in an admittedly modest and partial way) some of the problems of campus climate that were signaled with the terms diversity and inclusion to attempting to better understand, encounter, respond, and modulate—this is to say, experiment with—the problems of dissensus and difference at a private university.32 Two versions of dissensus, in particular, came to characterize every aspect of the ARG narrative, design, and gameplay. A first, more colloquial, meaning of dissensus describes processes of assessment and adjudication that emerge from the noncorresponding or messy intersections that characterize difference. Unlike a liberal tolerance that depends on separation and neglect, dissensus calls for intense closeness without a guarantee of

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agreement or resolution.33 At an interpersonal scale, dissensus benefits from the “yes, and” of improvisation—one that need not be grounded in optimism or result in acceptance, even as it requires a processual receptivity. In the parasite ARG, the secret society called P. S. practiced and modeled this type of dissensus for the players. Instead of assimilating new members into its preset mold, P. S. was made up of groups who remained in close conversation, even as they held divergent interpretations of what the mysterious room at the narrative’s center meant, for instance from a humanistic versus scientific perspective. This lack of agreement about the nature of the room also enabled the design team to remain open to reciprocal improvisations through interplay with the players that frequently transformed the narrative. The second meaning of dissensus with which we experimented came from Jacques Rancière’s specific theoretical usage. Instead of “a confrontation between interests or opinions,” Rancière approaches dissensus as “the demonstration (manifestation) of a gap in the sensible itself.” This sense of dissensus manifests, for instance, through “political demonstration [that] makes visible that which had no reason to be seen; it places one world in another.” Rancière illustrates this point by distinguishing a politics of dissensus from the police imperative to “Move along! There’s nothing to see here!” Politics involves the transformation of “this space of ‘moving-­along,’ of circulation, into a space for the appearance of a subject: the people, the workers, the citizens” and “a dispute over the distribution of the sensible.”34 When understood as dissensus, politics can be conceptualized as a creative process. As Rancière notes in other writing, the arts are explicitly political not in their content but in how they converge and diverge from actions of dissensus: in artistic “bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parceling out of the visible and the invisible.”35 In Rancière’s sense, the dissensus of the parasite ARG emerged from its immanence to the university. Rather than an augmentation that was placed atop the regular orientation, the game was an occasion for pushing against the habits of “moving-­along” and instead trying out a different distribution of the sensible. In place of the practices of the usual business of orientation, as a series of quickly forgotten lectures and legally mandated sessions, we foregrounded the collective intelligence of and collaboration among the student-­players. In place of clear itineraries through an orienting process, we encouraged self-­organization of players online (prior to the university orientation) and in physical space (during orientation). In place of a series of static locations to be previewed (now the library, now the gymnasium, now the dorms, now the arts center), we encouraged an active perception of and play with each of the university’s spaces. In sum, instead of the preset and largely 270

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linear game of orientation, we asked students to cocreate their own game. To demonstrate how precisely we engaged in collaborative problem making, the next section thinks more carefully about how the parasite’s status as a game enabled collective inventions of freedom. Inventions of Freedom: Contextual Games and Open Experiments

The selection of the parasite game’s site as a university orientation was not merely coincidental or opportunistic. From one perspective, annual orientation events may appear utterly routinized and institutionalized—and indeed they can become so in practice. From another perspective, however, a university orientation is a unique space of possibility that occurs in a liminal space in which participants are no longer high school students but not yet quite college students. This space bursts with the potential for creation. Designing within the constraints of this event, our team’s goal was not to augment orientation but to rethink it as a game. As Gaston Bachelard observes, “thought changes in form when it changes its object.”36 Even as the parasite took place during the university orientation, and indeed shared some of its goals (e.g., helping students to better identify key resources on campus), this experience attached to another and unexpected object: a game. In fact, even this status of “game” was not stable or guaranteed. Following the model of politics-­as-­dissensus discussed in the previous section, the experience called for a mutually negotiated distribution of the sensible and the appearance of new subjects—not just the bored or intoxicated students who might appear at any or indeed every orientation but also secret society members called “Reticulites” in red robes and masks, creatures called “Rens” in black jumpsuits and gas masks, and self-­constituted groups of “Seekers” trying to find the 121 objects (figs. 7.5 and 7.6). The experiment of the parasite was in large part the crafting of an invitation that would attract the arrival of new subjects, rather than the interpellation of a prefigured and narrowly defined subject. If a private university traditionally serves as a host that offers its temporary visitors (students) the benefits of its culture, resources, and reputation, we were interested in what those visitors (especially those considered to be more or newly “diverse”) might offer the university—and how, with the right invitation, these visitors might feel more galvanized to change the university. In order to clear the space for this latter possibility, we sought to create what Thrift calls “new unorientations rather than correctives” and what Sarah Ahmed theorizes as an “orientation” founded in “queer phenomenology.”37 The ARG’s confusion of institutional norms was necessary in order to pose an open invitation for

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Figures 7.5 and 7.6. The Reticulites (photograph taken by Jean Lachat) and Rens (photograph taken by Heidi Coleman) of the parasite (P. S. 2017).

collaborative change in which we asked students, in Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s sense, to “be in but not of” the university. As they put it: This much is true in the United States: it cannot be denied that the university

is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the uni-

versity and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to

join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.38

Our aim was not to be subversive intellectuals or to participate in a subcultural romance of resistance so much as to work through the university in order to generate an alternative world—not in an imagined future but in the very present of the game’s play. In pursuing this end, we borrowed (even for the ARG’s title) the concept of parasitism from thinkers such as Michel Serres and Rita Raley. In a way that resonated with our transmedia aspirations, Raley in particular puts forward the category of “tactical media.” These ephemeral digital and networked performances include “practices such as reverse engineering, hacktivism, denial-­of-­service attacks, the digital hijack, contestational robotics, collaborative software, and open-­access technology labs.” Instead of seeking total revolution or the purity of outside, such works operate as “parasitic media” that are immanent to the media infrastructures of the early twenty-­first century and designed to modulate and reroute them.39 In this way, the parasite ARG sought to make the world around both designers and players feel unfamiliar, indeterminate, and thus transformable. In experimenting with parasitic media, this project adopted the specific form of a game and the specific relation of play. However much we depended on these terms, our relation to them was simultaneously critical and fluid. Our sense of games approximated the approach taken by game critic and designer Mattie Brice, who contends that contemporary culture has become more interested in video games (narrowly defined) than in play. A number of contemporary video games are “preoccupied with tech progressivism and late capitalistic practices that bank on ripping out the sutures that connect reality to play.” In other words, video games are marketed, and often consumed, as entertaining pasttimes or fun escapes from reality, rather than instruments for engaging and reconstructing reality. Even so, Brice emphasizes the historical contingency of such commodified video game experiences (which closely resemble the broader category of “gamification” of which I offer a critique earlier in the book). Borrowing from game designer Anna

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Anthropy’s idea that “context is everything,” Brice argues that play is fundamentally “an exercise in understanding contexts.”40 She imagines games that allow players to feel and experiment with contexts through their bodies and affective relations with each other. Following Brice and Anthropy, the parasite was a game attentive to context—specifically, the context of a university orientation. Its experiment was neither closed nor controlled, departing from the model of the randomized controlled trial. As Brian Massumi has argued, the scientific method’s insistence on controlled experiments has to do with “disallowing field-­ interferences by isolating which contributory factors will be allowed to express themselves, so that they can be effectively treated as independent variables, making them more manipulable.” He adds that “from these basic building blocks, complexity is then built back up toward—as if the world were an edifice rather than an unspecified whole of flow.” This way of gathering knowledge is perfectly compatible with and productive of contemporary capitalism’s product testing and distribution, as well as the consumer subject whose efficacy is grounded in individual choice. This point can also be put in terms of the distinction between gamification and experimental games. On the one hand, gamification regularly focuses on the individual subject, both in the consumer pleasures of entertainment games and in the learning objectives of serious games and gamified apps. Following behavioral economics, such games privilege changes in personal attitudes, behaviors, and decision-­making. Furthermore, the effectiveness of such games is often studied through quantitative research that involves surveys distributed to individual players. By contrast, what I am calling experimental games focus on changing collectives within a broader environment. They actively welcome “field-­interferences” that are unique to a particular context and use the art-­science of game design to incorporate and improvise with unexpected emergences. From this perspective, experiment does not seek “an independent variable extracted from the event” but instead “an immanent point-­ modulation of the integral field” that generates change or difference from the current state of the field.41 In opposition to the individualistic and closed experimental model that serves as a dominant form within both contemporary neoliberalism and science, Massumi sketches out an affective politics. This approach resonates with the forms of play that our ARG promoted by connecting players to one another and encouraging shared world making, even or especially if it challenged the consistency of the ARG world as the designers had constructed it up to that point. Massumi imagines such a politics as including the following qualities: 274

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It would define decisional autonomy as the cooperation of the orienting in-

fluence of situational conditioning and the spontaneity of tendential self-­ modulation, practicing at their dynamic intersection a political art of decision.

It would seriously experiment with the notion that freedom is impersonal: that it is at its highest power when decisions move through me, rather than being legislated by my all-­too-­cognitive, self-­deceivingly “rational” I. It would involve

care and sensitivity—care for the event of encounter, sensitivity to dividual-­ transindividual complexity. . . . It would experience itself more as collaborator than master of these forces. It would practice strategic self-­surrender to them.

An advantage of this affective experimentation over the scientific method is that it makes the participant more attentive to environmental potentials and opportunities for sociopolitical change. Whereas behavioral economics, for instance, promises a method that can improve rationality and help the subject make better choices (e.g., about their health or their monthly purchases), this affective mode seeks freedoms. As my second epigraph from Massumi indicates, “freedom is not chosen: it is invented.”42 Inviting this process of invention is the driving force of experiment, as I have been exploring it throughout this book. By making a player more attentive to context and collective transformation, an ARG promotes the invention of freedoms that did not precede the moment of play. The episode of players breaking into our design woodshop, inclusive of the subsequent rounds of mutual improvisation, offers a sense of the kind of context attentiveness and fluidity that I have in mind. Another illustrative example comes from a different project: the S.E.E.D. ARG that I codirected in 2014 with the intention of introducing underrepresented youth to STEM knowledge and careers. At the start of the third and final week of this game, the players—a collective of about seventy high school students— began to devise an unexpected protest that would unfold a few hours from the time we learned about it. This protest concerned an event within the game’s world: the incarceration, without due process, of a beloved character by a group perceived as the game’s villains, the Temporal Archivists.43 Even as it derived from the game, we learned that the protest would nonetheless unfold in a public venue: an environment that included nonplayers. With some of my collaborators, I describe this event in detail in other writing, but in the present context, the important point is that this protest was initially player-­driven.44 As a design team, we had a choice to make. On the one hand, if we wanted to treat this ARG purely as a game-­based intervention into STEM learning—indeed the project involved both quantitative survey and qualitative focus groups as part of its evaluation—the protest

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would have to be nipped in the bud or else it would risk altering the game’s curriculum whose effectiveness we were testing. In essence, this route was required if we hoped to preserve anything resembling an independent variable that would enable us to replicate the process in other contexts. On the other hand, if we wanted to honor the specificity of this game’s context, we would have to allow the protest to unfold in some form. Indeed, in our discussions, we recognized that the player desire for protests had to do with the specific context of the summer of 2014, a moment in which the Black Lives Matter activist movement was gaining national coverage, especially following the deaths of two Black men, Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Moreover, the majority of participants were Black youth. Instead of sticking to the closed experiment of the ARG as originally planned, we opted for a “yes, and” response to our players and used a group of mediating actor-­mentors to stage an impromptu teach-­in about effective protests and to allow the protest to unfold. In the end, the protest resulted in a negotiation between the players and the Temporal Archivists. The terms negotiated required the design team to rewrite, quickly and completely, the final days of the game, including the gameplay and the narrative. In the worlds of both S.E.E.D. and the parasite, gameplay unfolded as an engagement with context, environment, and contingency. Attempts to impose control—to keep the games on track—gradually ceded to a network of collective responses. Though both of these games held onto many of their original learning objectives and planned events, over time, as players began to feel more like cocreators of the unfolding world, tight mastery of events increasingly transformed into a collective and collaborative improvisation. In some ways, these games shared the ethos of sociologist Patricia Clough’s “Ecstatic Corona” project in which a group of collaborators spent time together conducting a hybrid ethnography and performance in the gentrifying neighborhood of Corona in Queens. Clough describes this work as “spending time together without a plan, an unending rehearsal, or a rehearsal of a rehearsal” that served as an occasion for alternative relationality. For Clough’s group, their project entailed a “slowing down in the midst of ever faster and faster tempos” of digital media.45 Though the parasite shared this project’s openness to surprise and rerouting, our experiment did not slow things down, but instead doubled down on the rhythms and speeds of hyperattention and transmedia movements that characterize the contemporary technological environment. In other words, our ARG was an experiment in inventing difference and change from a position immanent to digital and networked media.

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Conclusion: Critical Game Design as Concept Generation

Throughout the book, I have attempted to show how games can push against the social, economic, and political contexts from which they derive and within which they participate. In concluding this chapter, I would like to use the preceding analysis of improvisation and experimentation in the parasite to think about how experimental games can contribute to the invention of new concepts and ways of being that unfold in but are not entirely of the neoliberal era—and perhaps whatever future paradigm mutates from the contemporary habitat of the preceding decades.46 This book has explored ways that games reveal concept-­generating capacities. Many of the games I have studied explore, modulate, and transform concepts that have gained priority within neoliberalism. In a game like Problem Attic, control becomes nonsovereign play; in Loved, competition yields to affective difficulty; in Thresholdland, failure takes the form of structural fragility. Perhaps more than the other modes examined in this book, improvisation imbues experimental games with the capacity to engender and experiment with new concepts.47 Games do not discover or elaborate concepts, but in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s sense, they create them. For players, games are platforms that use mechanics to generate moves, affects, rule variations, mods, tactics, strategies, and indeed concepts that did not exist prior to play.48 But game design is also a process of problem making and concept generation that interrogates and constructs every aspect of a context into which improvisational players subsequently enter. A number of makers and scholars have gestured toward different versions and scales of this process—for instance, through terms that include “critical play,” “experimental humanities,” and “critical making.”49 These terms gesture toward processes beyond analytical approaches to digital media. They name engagements with and creations of materiality through experimental design. Yet these engagements are not a practice opposed to theory. As Gaston Bachelard argues, “Experimentation must give way to argument, and argument must have recourse to experimentation.”50 In this remark, Bachelard is envisioning a new science—and yet the statement captures, equally well, a crucial dimension of the art-­science of experimental game design. And then the specific form of alternate reality games promotes an ongoing and self-­reflexive design—an oscillation between theory and practice, creation and response—that complicates any absolute distinction between designer and player. Games are experimental in a sense that exceeds either an extension of the scientific method (especially in a controlled sense that isolates independent variables) or a recreation of the type of demonstration undertaken

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through a form like the experimental novel (in which the novelist ultimately maintains control over both independent and dependent variables). Game experiments such as the parasite borrow elements from both of these precursors. From science, games borrow a capacity for hypothesis testing and encounter with uncontrollable variables. From linear art forms such as the novel, games borrow the capacity of problem making without solution. Beyond these trajectories, the scientific and artistic, game experiments also add methodological multiplicity. Bachelard again notes that “when the object under study takes the form of a complex system of relations, then it can only be apprehended by adopting an appropriate variety of methods.”51 One could argue that other art forms and media, outside of games, already apply various methods to complex systems. The postmodern novel, for example, already undertakes this type of operation through the passage among multiple genres and styles. Consider, for instance, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972). This novel draws from forms such as the film script, academic text, illustrated narrative, American musical, Afrofuturist speculation, and much more in order to tackle the problem of the hegemony of white history and to imagine a more expansive African diasporic thought. Even as “the object under study” changes in this case, the improvisation that takes place between author and readers happens at a greater remove of space and time. Though a literary text invites change through interpretation, a game allows trial and error, and sometimes more substantive experiments, through real-­ time actions, modifications, and metagames. The ARG is not the only formal path into experimental games. Nevertheless, its movement across multiple media, combined with a commitment to collective real-­time improvisation of an emergent reality, demonstrates what a broader range of games might be capable of achieving. In the case of the parasite, the field of study indeed included a complex system of social relations that would likely have been neutralized if we had sought to control them. To better understand the problems inherent in concepts such as diversity and inclusion, and then dissensus and difference, at a private university in an early twenty-­first-­century United States, a controlled design or single method would not have sufficed. The game’s designers turned to any tool at their disposal—truly a collective and action-­oriented bricolage—in order to conjure its problem, generate new concepts, and make its emergent world with the players. Given this kind of responsiveness, this precise experiment would not be perfectly replicable at another private school, public university, community college, or high school. The ARG would require at least some modifications and adjustments to respond to those alternate institutional and historical contexts. Even as replicability is a core scientific value, 278

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I do not see the lack of this quality as a weakness of the mode of experiment that I am describing, even if it introduces challenges of ongoing adaptation in thought and design.52 The experimental mode of the parasite was directly responsive to the constructivism that undergirds neoliberal thought. Lazzarato points out that neoliberalism constructs reality in the specific image of its imagined market. For example, the “end of history” discourse that was prominent in the 1990s proclaimed “that the possible does not overflow the real but is equal to it; more precisely, the possible amounts to what is on offer on the market.”53 From this perspective, reality is like a bounded game that reduces the world to an already-­existing playing field and subjectivity to a given that enables choice in the sense of preset branching options and minimal customization. Beyond mere simile, neoliberalism can be said to adopt game form. It is worth remembering that video games frequently promise freedom but offer only choice. For instance, in writing about the Grand Theft Auto game series, which claims to offer infinite freedom in an expansive and dynamic world, Ian Bogost observes, “Those who argue that one can ‘do anything’ in Liberty City are mistaken: the game constantly structures freeform experience in relation to criminality.”54 More than this topical parameter, such open-­world games produce an illusion of freedom, while limiting player actions through rules and mechanics. In this respect, the constructivism of video games and neoliberal governance share much in common. ARGs take as their starting condition the understanding that digital and networked media contribute to the parameters of constructivism in our historical present. Importantly, in their immanent and parasitical relationship to that present, these games do not oppose the benefits of constructivism on the grounds that this concept is always already tainted by neoliberalism. To elaborate this point, we can think of an ARG as a historical event. The event of the ARG includes a dialectical movement that brings together the creation of starting conditions of the world by designers (thesis), the discovery of and response to the “alternate” reality by players (antithesis), and the cocreation of potentials that exceed the preexisting givens of consensus reality (synthesis). In other words, as I have been emphasizing throughout this chapter, the ARG itself is not a product but a process of collective consciousness, imagination, and realization of a world. In theory, the parasite could have continued indefinitely, putting forward new clusters of narrative, puzzles, and activities. In practice, this ARG ended on September 23, 2017, in the form of a concluding live event at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. The clarity of this ending was meant to emphasize that although the process of constructivism unfolds at all times,

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it becomes especially visible during an event. In Lazzarato’s sense of an art of experimental politics, “The event is the condition of the occasion for a political ‘constructivism’” that “returns the world and subjectivity to us.” The event reminds us, if only for a moment, that “the world is relatively ‘plastic,’ malleable, and constituted from a multiplicity of points of view and a multiplicity of heterogeneous relations.” In this sense, the “alternate reality” of the ARG is not another world but rather an instantiation of the very process that makes other worlds affectively available at all times. An ARG is a perpetual oscillation between the actual and the potential that makes players aware of this flux. While this game form borrows from the self-­reflexivity of postmodern literature, it is more than an adaptation of earlier forms. ARGs make a contribution to political aesthetics in the ways they invite players into an ongoing improvisation that opens up the closed loop of textual reflexivity that we find, for example, in paranoid fiction. Importantly, even as an emergent digital performance form, an ARG does not merely imbue the social world with the qualities of art that add depth or texture to it. Lazzarato expresses this point well in his rereading of Félix Guattari’s concept of the “aesthetic paradigm”: It is important to mention that the “aesthetic paradigm” does not express a will to aestheticize the social; it does not proceed from art insofar as it is an insti-

tution but rather seizes the techniques of art, its processes of creation, and its practices in order to make them evolve in other domains, putting them to work outside, at the limit of, or transversally to the space designated by art as an

institution. It is necessary to speak of “artistic” techniques and practices, since

art, like “culture,” is integrated into the apparatuses of valorization and the government of publics and populations.55

In the case of the parasite, the project did not seek to “aestheticize” the university in the sense of transferring the qualities of art to an institution of higher learning. Art was itself a problem that the game sought to stage. We began with an awareness that, in the early twenty-­first century, art is no longer a discrete domain that can be relegated to museums and or cordoned off in exhibition spaces. The version of art or aesthetic practice designated by the term “design” has become ubiquitous, not only naming the creation of digital games but increasingly encompassing a broad range of human interactions with the technologies, devices, environments, and communities that shape everyday life. In a world in which art inflects experience design, web design, urban design, graphic design, fashion, and numerous other areas, an ARG can at most experiment with “techniques of art”: conjuring, improvis 280

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ing, and modulating a world already permeated by aesthetics. At times, such parasitical constructivism, which is resonant but hardly complicit with neoliberalism, begins to look like a social alchemy that might still have efficacy in our troubled times. At the very least, it is a game that invites the invention of new collective forms of play.



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Coda: Joy Just play. Have fun. Enjoy the game. Michael Jordan

In the world of game design, fun is taken as a given. It rules as an assessment of artistic quality. A game has to be fun, we say. In fact, that sentiment, that statement, is one that could easily be made by an adolescent boy on an internet forum or by Nintendo’s CEO in a keynote before 20,000 game developers at our annual conference. Ian Bogost (“Fun,” UX Week 2013)

Joy is a [human being’s] passage from less to a greater perfection. Baruch Spinoza (Ethics)

As a game designer, a question that I frequently encounter about games that I am working on is the following: “Is it fun?” This question makes particular sense from the standpoint of a consumer who is trying to decide whether to spend their money, often as much as $60, on a newly released AAA commercial video game. But the question takes on a different note of uncertainty, even skepticism, when asked about the types of games that I create: that is, ones that have an artistic, critical, or pedagogical dimension. For instance, when working on the parasite alternate reality game that I discuss in chapter 7, students and faculty who learned about the project for the first time consistently asked whether it was fun. In fact, making the game fun was one of our explicit design goals. The designers realized that creating a largely unenjoyable or frustrating game would risk a premature end to our shared experiment. Far beyond this ARG, the question of fun has been pervasive in my design work at the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and Weston Game Lab at the University of Chicago. Yet, as Ian Bogost has asked of fellow game designers, “If ‘fun’ just indicates that a product is sort of any good, then I guess it’s a reasonable sentiment but it’s also a kinda mercilessly vacant one, right?”1 Bogost’s intention is not to strike “fun” from the vocabulary of game designers and players: an undertaking that would be both humorless and Sisyphean. More importantly, even if fun is a comparatively vague or weak concept, there is a value, in Wai Chee Dimock’s words, to “a weaker, lower-­level kind of theorizing.”2 283

Such theory seeks not to generalize, formalize, predict, taxonomize, or impose a teleology, but rather pursues the more modest undertaking of tracking a concept through a particular social, cultural, or historical context. Fun may have become an ultimately “vacant” term that marks an incipient affect or a hazy first-­order observation. This word may yield either a vicious tautology or a proliferation of inconsistent referents. Nevertheless, it can still serve as a starting place that points toward elements of games and play experiences that are worth engaging in more complex ways. In his work, Bogost delves deeper into the cultural meanings of the omnipresent word fun.3 Without dismissing fun either, I would like to conclude this book by gesturing toward an alternative concept that does not play a central role in game studies: joy. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer advocate for a movement from “fun” (“a medicinal bath which the entertainment industry never ceases to prescribe”) to an austere “joy.”4 In Baruch Spinoza’s earlier and precise philosophical usage, which interests me most here, joy is not the opposite of fun nor is it a mere synonym for happiness.5 In fact, Brian Massumi sets Spinoza’s concept of “joy” in opposition to an economic concept of “pleasure”: “Spinoza’s term is best: joy. Joy is much more than a pleasure. It registers the invention of new passions, tendencies, and action-­paths that expand life’s powers, flush with perception. It registers becoming. It is an immediate thinking-­feeling of powers of existence, in passionate intensification and tendential increase.” Unlike the self-­interested economic utility expressed through “satisfaction” or “gratification” and realized through consumption, joy marks a collective improvisation, affective intensification, or bodily vitality of the type that I have attempted to identify in the creative play occasioned by experimental games. Joy opens up new sensitivities, capacities to affect and be affected. By contrast, the satisfaction that organizes both liberal and neoliberal economics can be described as “deintensifying.” Massumi describes deintensification as follows: “Instead of holding the contrariety of contrasts in tension, it suspends the tension—thus losing the contrasts. It relieves tension, stilling tendency in a moment of entropic equilibrium that seems to offer succor in the oscillating seas of the stormy economic field of relation.”6 Importantly, experimentation, in my sense of improvising and making a problem, does not work this way. It requires one precisely to hold onto contrasts and tensions, amidst relations of dissensus. In this way, experimentation carries the potential to yield an alternative notion of games that exceed the superficial pleasures and instant gratifications of so many commercial games championed by the contemporary video game industry. Since the mid-­twentieth century, what I have been calling gamification 284

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has yielded a worldview predicated on a narrow conception of games. The form that games have largely taken, especially in their predominant commercial manifestations, has come to assure the solution, resolution, and relief of antagonisms. Commercial games are often meant to be easy to learn and keep playing. As this coda’s epigraph from the basketball superstar and successful business icon Michael Jordan notes, “Just play. Have fun. Enjoy the game.” From this perspective, games are not meant to complicate but rather to simplify—a sense that is perhaps best captured by the category of “casual games.” Indeed, outside of circles of game designers and professional players, games in our time are frequently marketed and approached as engaging recreations, leisure activities, and relaxing pastimes. And, to be sure, the ceaselessly economized world of neoliberalism that proliferates precarious, overworked, and indebted subjects demands such breaks. Even so-­ called serious games are meant to be more fun than the lectures, trainings, or activities that they seek to replace. For so many people (myself included), some days would be unbearable without the treat of playing a few minutes of Legendary: Game of Heroes on my smartphone or Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on my Nin­tendo Switch. Whether one is facing the anxiety and shame of unemployment or intermittent labor cycles, or the exploitative overwork and always-­ on connection of a steady career, video games offer the opportunity to check out or to just not show up for a moment—if never quite to escape entirely. The fact that video games offer a break from daily life, often substituting their own repetitive grinding in place of the everyday grind of life under neoliberalism, is not in itself a problem to be decried or resolved. But as this book has suggested, this might be a problem to think through and construct anew. Games are capable of so much more than what the majority of people experience when they play video games today. A fuller realization of the experimental capacities of games promises to transform a constructivism that dead-­ends in temporary satisfaction and permanent precarity with a realization of a fuller spectrum of possible realities. As I observed, games offer breaks in the sense of pauses, but they can also enable breaks in a different sense of ruptures. The construction of rules, objectives, possibility spaces, and other elements of a game—as well as different game cultures and publics—allows designers and players to enter into experiments together. One of my own attempts at a robust example of such an experiment is the parasite alternate reality game, but this case only gestures toward the potential of what else games might still become. To explore this possibility, we will need not only more literate players but also people who continue to experiment with games as designers. To experiment through design does not always mean creating polished and professional products. Design also has value as a process of ex

J OY 285

perimenting with the affective affordances of mechanics, the structures of formal systems, and the emergent possibilities of player activities through techniques of rapid prototyping and iterative design. Even in light of the thought-­provoking designs explored throughout Experimental Games, games have largely offered an impoverished range of virtual realities. If approached as an experimental art-­science, I believe that games can yet enable a more intense and joyful realization of virtualities. This book has sought to make a modest contribution to this other alternate reality game.

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Acknowledgments

This project would have been absolutely impossible without the sustained and meticulous close readings of multiple chapter drafts by Bill Brown, Alenda Chang, Christopher Goetz, Jim Hodge, and Ashlyn Sparrow. I’m also grateful for comments, advice, and ongoing conversations about particular chapters, in the years leading up to publication, with Mason Arrington, Riss Ballard, Brooke Belisle, Lauren Berlant, Stephanie Boluk, Jim Chandler, Kris Cohen, Nan Da, Leah Feldman, Frances Ferguson, Jake Fraser, Jacob Gaboury, Elaine Hadley, Tim Harrison, Ian Jones, Keith Jones, Patrick Keilty, Patrick LeMieux, Peter McDonald, Tom Mitchell, Dan Mor­gan, Soraya Murray, Richard Neer, Scott Richmond, David Simon, Salome Skvir­sky, Avery Slater, and Noah Wardrip-­Fruin. Beyond the written page, I am also grateful to all of the people who have played games with me during the time I have spent working on this book. Though the stereotype of lone gamers playing video games persists, most games are played together with others: in living rooms, dorm rooms, game labs, and across networked connections. In my case, I played very few of the games analyzed in this book by myself. I cannot possibly name each person with whom I have played a game over the last few years. But for their playful and collaborative spirits, I would especially like to single out Kristen Schilt and Ashlyn Sparrow for the many hundreds of hours of thoughtful and thought-­provoking gameplay that we have shared. I am also grateful to Lau-

287

ren Berlant, Stephanie Boluk, Ian Horswill, Patrick LeMieux, and Peter McDonald for significant gameplay sessions during this period that have influenced my thought. In fall 2018, I played and discussed numerous video games with the sixty students in my “Critical Videogame Studies” class and my three teaching assistants: Zoe B. Hughes, Clint Froehlich, and Jordan Pruett. Insofar as this book comes from my experience as a game designer as well as that of a player, I have relied on the discipline and ingenuity of my design collaborators, especially Heidi Coleman, Marc Downie, Ashlyn Sparrow, and Sandy Weisz. At the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab, I am always thinking about games alongside Melissa Gilliam and Mason Arrington. The construction of the Weston Game Lab, which expanded design at the university during the period in which I wrote this book, was also essential to my thinking. For that, I thank Brad and Shellwyn Weston. At the University of Chicago, I would especially like to thank my colleagues in the English and Cinema & Media Studies departments. A research leave allowed me to write this book. For that year of fellowship, I would like to thank the Franke Institute for the Humanities, as well as the faculty and graduate fellows who responded to my work during that year. Additionally, the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago provided support for the publication of this book. For the core of funding that allowed me to codirect the parasite alternate reality game that is my primary case in chapter 7, I am grateful to the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society and the College at the University of Chicago. I also appreciated the opportunity to pre­sent early versions of these chapters as talks and to engage in vibrant conversations at Northwestern University; University of California, Davis; University of Oslo; University of Wisconsin—Madison; University of Iowa; University of Michigan; University of Rochester; University of Texas at Austin; Vanderbilt University; Yale University; the University of Chicago Center in Delhi; and the University of Chicago Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. People who always ground and sustain me, without needing to read a single draft, are my family, especially Irus, Ziggy, David, Mark, Kristen, and The Team. For his careful attention, throughout the review and editorial process, many thanks to Alan Thomas. Also, I appreciate the patience and advice from Randy Petilos and the work of the staff at the University of Chicago Press. For editorial help with chapter proofs, I thank Lauren Beard, Théo Evans, Peter Forberg, Cate Fugazzola, Julianne Grasso, Gary Kafer, Gabriel Ojeda-Sague, Kristen Schilt, and Alicia Sparrow. My index was prepared by Scott Smiley. I’m immensely grateful to my brilliant RAs Evan Wisdom Dawson and India 288

AC K N OW L E D G M E N TS

Weston, as well as Caterina MacLean for her careful assistance in preparing so many elements of the final manuscript. A section of chapter 2 draws from “Fabulously Procedural: Braid, Historical Processing, and the Videogame Sensorium,” originally published in American Literature 85, no. 4 (December 2013), 745–79, © 2013 Duke University Press, all rights reserved, republished by permission (www​.dukeupress​.edu). An earlier version of chapter 5 appeared as “On Difficulty in Video Games: Mechanics, Interpretation, Affect,” originally published in Critical Inquiry 45, no. 1 (Autumn 2018), 199–233, © 2018 by The University of Chicago, all rights reserved. And sections of the introduction and chapter 7 draw from “Gamification and Other Forms of Play,” originally published in boundary 2 40, no. 2 (Summer 2013), 113–44, © 2013 Duke University Press, all rights reserved, republished by permission (www​.dukeupress​.edu).



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Notes

Prologue 1

Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 80. Katie Salen’s later work can also be found under the name Katie Salen Tekinbaş.

2

Westworld, season 2, episode 7, “Les Ecorches,” dir. Nicole Kassell, originally aired on June 3, 2018.

3

Though I do not elaborate this reading here, both The Game and Westworld play out paranoid cultural fantasies of emerging threats to the privilege of white cis masculinity. Both works borrow elements of mid-­to-­late twentieth-­century conspiracy films and explore them in the context of an increasingly digital and networked world. For more on the conjunction of masculinity and video game culture, see Carly Kocurek, Coin-­Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Kocurek’s book explores how videogames and arcades in the 1970s and early 1980s enabled a specific form of American masculinity. Admittedly, the early twenty-­ first-­century video game market has increasingly expanded beyond the narrow demographic of white male players. However, these roots continue to inform the inequities and ongoing lack of difference across game culture and particularly among large studio AAA and popular video games.

4

Johan Huzinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-­Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).

5

McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). The present book is strongly inspired by Wark’s conceptual approach to video games. In Gamer Theory, she thinks through concepts such as allegory, boredom,

291

and complexity in and through games. For an estimate of the number of gamers worldwide (of which there are many versions), see Tom Wijman, “The Global Games Market Will Generate $152.1 Billion in 2019 as the US Overtakes China as the Biggest Market,” Newzoo, June 18, 2019, https://​newzoo​.com​/insights​/articles​ /the​-­­global​-­­games​-­­market​-­­will​-­­generate​-­­152​-­­1​-­­billion​-­­in​-­­2019​-­­as​-­­the​-­­u​-­­s​-­­over takes​-­­china​-­­as​-­­the​-­­biggest​-­­market/. 6

The lack of diversity in games has been widely documented through numerous surveys and studies, including not only in terms of video game players but also video game designers, developers, and journalists. For one key scholarly account of inequality in video games, see Kishonna L. Gray and David J. Leonard, Woke Gaming: Digital Challenges to Oppression and Social Injustice (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018).

7

Lauren Slater, Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2004), 2.

8

Seymour Papert, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1993), xix, 3, and 4.

Introduction

292

1

Clark C. Abt, Serious Games (New York: Viking Press, 1970), 5, 9.

2

Ken Binmore, Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1.

3

In addition to popular examples, game metaphors have also made their way increasingly into the discourses of various academic disciplines. The centrality of games to economics is a chorus that recurs throughout this book, but it’s worth noting that this language appears in the field of game design itself. Tracy Fullerton, for instance, writes that “Games are everywhere, from how we manage our money to how we form relationships. Everyone has goals in life and must overcome obstacles to achieve those goals. And of course, there are rules. If you want to win in the financial markets, you have to understand the rules of trading stocks and bonds, profit forecasts, IPOs, etc. When you play the markets, the act of investing becomes very similar to a game. The same holds true for winning someone’s heart. In courtship, there are social rules that you must follow, and it’s in understanding these rules and how you fit into society that helps you to succeed” (Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games [Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2008], 7–8). This language is also visible in a seemingly more distant field such as literary criticism. Rita Felski, for instance, uses games to understand a central methodology of literary criticism and humanistic thought: “Critique, in other words, is a form of addictive and gratifying play: a language game in a quite literal sense. Like most games, it combines rules and expectations with the possibility of unexpected moves and inventive calculations. To read in this way is to maneuver against an imagined opponent, to engage in determinate and precise calculations of strategy, to perform a role equipped with certain requirements. Such gamelike qualities do not void other dimensions of reading, but they are often especially salient in an academic context, where scholars are rewarded for ingenious forms

N OT ES TO PAG ES x iii–4

of puzzle-­making and puzzle-­solving” (The Limits of Critique [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015], 110). 4

Tom Wijman puts the number of worldwide gamers at 2.5 billion: “The Global Games Market Will Generate $152.1 Billion in 2019 as the US Overtakes China as the Biggest Market,” Newzoo, June 18, 2019, https://​newzoo​.com​/insights​/articles ​/the​-­­global​-­­games​-­­market​-­­will​-­­generate​-­­152​-­­1​-­­billion​-­­in​-­­2019​-­­as​-­­the​-­­u​-­­s​-­­over takes​-­­china​-­­as​-­­the​-­­biggest​-­­market/. For another estimate, see: Dean Takahashi. “Newzoo: 2.4 billion people will game in 2019, thanks to mobile,” March 5, 2019, https://​venturebeat​.com​/2019​/03​/05​/newzoo​-­­2​-­­4​-­­billion​-­­people​-­­will​-­­game​-­­in​ -­­2019​-­­thanks​-­­to​-­­mobile/.

5

For a thorough history of early war games and serious applications of games, see Jon Peterson, Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People, and Fantastic Adventures, from Chess to Role-­Playing Games (San Diego, CA: Unreason Press, 2014).

6

Johan Huzinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-­Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 6.

7

Alexander McFarlane Mood and R. D. Specht, “Gaming as a Technique of Analysis” (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corp., 1954), 5.

8 Abt, Serious Games, 5. 9

For “gamification,” see numerous design texts, including Robert Hunter, The Gamification Handbook: Everything You Need to Know about Gamification (Brisbane, Australia: Emereo, 2011). Also see Byron Reeves and J. L. Read, Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009); Gabe Zichermann and Joselin Linder, Game-­Based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty through Rewards, Challenges, and Contests (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010); and Gabe Zichermann and Christopher Cunningham, Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2011). For a more critical exploration, see Sebastian Deterding, Dan Dixon, Rilla Khaled, and Lennart E. Nacke, “From Game Design Elements to Gamefulness: Defining ‘Gamification,’” in MindTrek ’11: Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments (2011): 9–15; and Patrick Jagoda, “Gamification and Other Forms of Play,” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture 40, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 113–44. For an extensive history and analysis of gamification and its many rhetorical deployments, also see Sebastian Deterding, “The Ambiguity of Games: Histories and Discourses of a Gameful World,” in The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications, ed. Steffen P. Walz and Sebastian Deterding (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 23–64.

10

For “gamespace,” see McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). For “ludofication of society,” see Steffen P. Walz, Toward a Ludic Architecture: Framing the Space of Play and Games (Pittsburgh, PA: ETC Press, 2010). For “ludic society,” see Stenros Jaakko, Montola Markus, and Mäyrä Frans, “Pervasive Games in Ludic Society,” in Proceedings of the 2007 conference / Future Play (New York: ACM Press, 2007). For “ludic century,” see Eric Zimmerman and Heather Chap­lin, “Manifesto: The 21st Century Will Be Defined by Games,” Kotaku, September 9, 2013, https://​kotaku​.com​/manifesto​-­­the​-­­21st​-­­century​



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-­­will​-­­be​-­­defined​-­­by​-­­games​-­­1275355204. For “gameful world,” see Steffen P. Walz and Sebastian Deterding, eds., The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).

294

11

Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 343, 359, 343–44.

12

Mark Seltzer, The Official World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 1, 9, 92, 93, 97.

13

Thomas Malaby, “Beyond Play: A New Approach to Games,” Games and Culture 2, no. 2 (2007): 107.

14

The properties of neoliberalism are of course more numerous and varied than my brief gloss allows. For a fuller definition of neoliberalism and accounts of the historical transition at which I gesture here, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market, trans. Richard Nice (New York: The New Press, 2006). Also, S. M. Amadae offers a succinct account of this movement’s features in the following gloss: “Neoliberalism has a number of agreed-­upon facets. All value is commodified and financialized. Work and gradual wealth accumulation are replaced with speculation, risk management, and casino finance. Elite institutions spread the ethos of neoliberal agency and public policy. Citizens experience an increasing disparity in access to resources, income, and wealth. Consumers accept the inevitability that there are winners and losers, counter to the belief that markets will bring progressively improving living conditions for everyone. Experts denounce the possibility for collective action and meaningful democratic will formation, or even the existence of a public interest. Government and business incentivize compliance with performance metrics and regulations formulated to achieve social order. Individuals experience responsibility in terms of pay-­as-­you-­go access to conditions necessary to sustain life. Entrepreneurs accept predatory practices to promote profit, circumventing mutual exchange. New practices of coercive bargaining are resolved through binding arbitration and debt bondage instead of public courts of justice and normative conduct oriented toward mutual exchange and reciprocal respect” (Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015], 7). Several of these features intersect with the ethos of both competitive games and games of chance. Though I am using the term neoliberalism as it describes a recurring set of beliefs and practices, I take seriously Philip Mirowski’s historical caution that the paradigm emerged piecemeal across numerous institutions and is “a living, mutating entity,” which “makes it hard for people who are not historians to wrap their arms around the phenomenon, and prompts those seeking a three-­by-­five card definition to throw up their hands in defeat” (Machine Dreams, 51–52).

15

For a historical text that emphasizes the integration of political and economic forces to neoliberalism, see Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). Beyond either governments or corporations, other research has also emphasized the centrality that bottom-­up forces have had in shaping neoliberalism and introducing variations across national contexts. See, for instance, Verónica Gago, Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).

N OT ES TO PAG ES 7–1 0

16

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 20, 31. Though Brown argues that neoliberalism is “normative” and extends “everywhere,” she does not claim that this order of reason is homogeneous or identical in all places. In another article, she clarifies, “A paradox, then. Neoliberalism is a distinctive mode of reason, production of subjects, ‘conduct of conduct,’ and scheme of valuation. It names a historically specific economic and political reaction against Keynesianism and democratic socialism as well as a more generalized practice of ‘economizing’ spheres and activities heretofore governed by other orders of value. Yet in its differential instantiation across countries, regions, and sectors, in its differential intersection with extant cultures and political traditions, and above all, in its convergences and uptakes of other discourses and developments, neoliberalism takes diverse shapes and spawns diverse content and normative details, even different idioms. It is globally ubiquitous yet disunified and nonidentical with itself, in space and over time” (“Sacrificial Citizenship: Neoliberalism, Human Capital, and Austerity Politics,” Constellations 23, no. 1 [2016]: 4). Other critics have also argued that neoliberalism exceeds a purely economic register. Cultural critic Elizabeth Povinelli, for example, treats neoliberalism (or as she calls it “late liberalism”) as “a pragmatic concept” or “a tool” that activates “a series of struggles across an uneven social terrain” that produces “the conditions for new forms of sociality and for new kinds of markets and market instruments.” Shifting from economic to cultural terrain, this period entails “the governance of social difference in the wake of the anticolonial movements and the emergence of new social movements” (Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism [Durham: Duke University Press, 2011], 19 and ix). Povinelli’s term “late liberalism” names “a belated response to the challenge of social difference and the alternative social worlds and projects potentially sheltered there” that unfolds beginning in the 1970s (25). Late liberalism operates as a governance strategy that must take the place of laissez-­faire liberalism in the face of increased social resistance. Though I agree with this cultural reading of the period, I retain the term “neoliberalism” because of its more common usage.

17

It is worth noting Sarah Brouillette’s argument that many accounts of neoliberalism ignore or minimize the longer history of capitalism, as well as the importance of the “labor-­capital relation” within neoliberalism (280). Rather than dismissing the usefulness of the term altogether, Brouillette emphasizes the importance of historicizing it within a broader history of capitalism. For more see “Neoliberalism and the Demise of the Literary,” in Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture, ed. Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2017).

18

Margaret Thatcher, “Mrs. Thatcher: The First Two Years,” interview with Ronald Butt, Sunday Times, May 3, 1981.

19

Gary S. Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964). For an expansion of the mechanisms by which neoliberalism shapes human capital, see Maurizio Lazzarato, “Neoliberalism in Action,” Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 6 (2009): 109–33.

20

Maurizio Lazzarato, Experimental Politics: Work, Welfare, and Creativity in the Neoliberal Age, trans. Arianna Bove, Jeremy Gilbert, Andrew Goffey, Mark Hayward, Jason Read, and Alberto Toscano (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 33.



N O T ES T O PAG ES 1 0 –1 1 295

21

One critique of Wendy Brown’s version of neoliberalism unfolds precisely on this point. As Annie J. McClanahan observes, “Theories of human capital, unlike theories of, say, alienation, are themselves profoundly capitalist, insofar as they remake the subject in capital’s image. They thus do little to capture either labor on a global scale or the condition of the US under- and unemployed. Moreover, ‘human capital’ is not a critical category. Exploitation and alienation and class, by contrast, are meant not only to describe a historical condition, they are also meant to serve as a way to ruthlessly critique them—and in the case of class, also a way of actually acting outside dominant conditions” (“Becoming Non-­Economic: Human Capital Theory and Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos,” Theory & Event 20, no. 2 [2017]: 514).

22

Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 34.

23 Lazzarato, Experimental Politics, 149. There are countless books about wealth

inequality under neoliberal capitalism. For one extensive and broadly circulating account of excessive wealth concentration in this period, see Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-­First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).

24

Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975– 1976 (London: Penguin, 2003).

25 Lazzarato, Experimental Politics, 62. As he further puts it, “Racism (internal,

toward immigrants, and external, toward other civilizations) is one of the most potent phenomena of ‘repugnance’ and ‘malevolence’ that contributes to the constitution and the fixing of the territories, the ‘identities,’ and the ‘values’ that ‘capital’ lacks. In practice, the government of conduct today in all the capitalist West is structured by this phenomenon, which emerging at the end of the nineteenth century, has undergone an explosion and a neoarchaic reconfiguration with the growing power of neoliberal economic policies” (64). It is worth adding that neoliberalism interacts with older religious systems in complex ways. For example, for an account of how neoliberalism and evangelicalism interrelate in the United States, see William E. Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

296

26

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2014). For a later analysis that considers feminism and gender within an anticapitalist framework that includes an understanding of neoliberalism, see Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (London: Verso, 2019).

27

For an account of the relationship between Taylorism and gamification in regard to labor productivity, see Jennifer deWinter, Carly A. Kocurek, and Randall Nichols, “Taylorism 2.0: Gamification, scientific management and the capitalist appropriation of play,” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 6, no. 2 (2014): 109–27. For an account on post-­Fordism, postindustrialism, and gamification, see P. J. Rey, “Gamification and Post-­Fordist Capitalism,” in The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). This chapter explores the ways in which gamification (as a design practice) appropriates economic activity at the levels of production and consumption in order “to accumulate wealth for the capitalist” (281). Rey briefly considers the “flexible

N OT ES TO PAG ES 1 1 –1 2

strategy of subjectification” and the “fluid mechanism of disciplinary power” that gamification employs (279). Building on this frame, I consider in greater detail the role of neoliberalism as it extends to the social, political, and cultural levels. Several texts also explore the relationship between gamification, labor, and play. See, for instance, Julian Kücklich, “Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry,” Fibreculture Journal 5 (2005). For an exploration of games and global capitalism, see Nick Dyer-­Witheford and Greig De Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). For a broader exploration of game politics, including their role in contemporary capitalism, see Liam Mitchell, Ludopolitics: Videogames against Control (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2018). 28

This approach has been expanded upon by theorists belonging to both the Frankfurt and Birmingham schools, as well as the contemporary field of cultural studies.

29

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 19–20, 23, and 40.

30

Ibid., 42.

31

Though I am taking a comparative media approach and emphasizing difference here, as a way of highlighting what is unique about video games, there are also various ways of thinking about film and video games in continuity. For instance, as Benjamin notes, far from an inherently alienating or comprehensively dehumanizing operation, film can enable insight and open up unprecedented room for play: “On the one hand, film furthers insight into the necessities governing our lives by its use of close-­ups, by its accentuation of hidden details in familiar objects, and by its exploration of commonplace milieux through the ingenious guidance of the camera; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of a vast and unsuspected field of action [Spielraum]” (“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 37). Play is a key concept that comes up throughout this book and is of course not unique to games—let alone video games. For an extended discussion of Benjamin’s relations to play that opens up ways of thinking about cinema and video games together, see Miriam B. Hansen, “Room-­for-­play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” October 1, no. 109 (2004): 3–45.

32

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 12. Debord actively resisted the term media, especially in his later Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (London: Verso, 1988), as a popular replacement of the more politically charged spectacle. Media, for Debord, describes a unilateral strategy of propaganda used to communicate orders. Drawing from later work in media studies, I treat media in a more multilateral, archaeological, and epistemological fashion. For this sense of the term, see W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). As Mitchell and Hansen have observed, “Media form the infrastructural basis, the quasi-­transcendental condition, for experience and understanding.” They “make knowledge possible in a given historical moment” and “broker the giving of space and time within which concrete experience becomes possible” (vii).



N O T ES T O PAG ES 1 2–1 3 297

33 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 19–20. 34

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). Horkheimer and Adorno use the term “culture industry” to emphasize the top-­down management of a system that does not yield a true mass culture. They argue that film spectators experience a “withering of imagination and spontaneity” through a passive engagement with a cultural product that “positively debars the spectator from thinking” (100).

35 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 17. 36

The culturally dominant status of video games is linked in large part to their economic success. Taking into account the combined growth of console, PC, portable, and online games, estimates suggest that games were already a $56 billion business in 2010. In late 2010, a single game, Call of Duty: Black Ops, earned approximately $360 million in a single day, breaking the all-­time record for one-­ day sales across all entertainment media. For more, see “All the World’s a Game,” special report, Economist, December 10, 2011, htttp://​www​.economist​.com​/node​ /21541164. Estimates for 2019 put video game revenues at $152.1 billion worldwide (Tom Wijman, “The Global Games Market Will Generate $152.1 Billion in 2019 as the US Overtakes China as the Biggest Market,” Newzoo, June 18, 2019). It is worth noting that given the vast quantity of free-­to-­play games, sales revenue is only one marker of the cultural reach of video games.

37

As McKenzie Wark puts it in Gamer Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), “Games are our contemporaries, the form in which the present can be felt and, in being felt, thought through. From this vantage point, the whole of cultural history can be rethought” (225). Also see Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Nick Dyer-­Witheford and Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); and Mary Flanagan, Critical Play: Radical Game Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).

38 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 13.

298

39

Interconnection is far from an unproblematic idea that automatically yields collectivity. I explore the myriad tensions and internal contradictions of the networked dimension of contemporary society in greater detail in Patrick Jagoda, Network Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). For one account of the early twenty-­first century distribution environment that is made possible both by a web infrastructure and by media culture, see Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013).

40

To insist on differences between the earlier moment of radio, film, and broadcast television and the era of video games is not to claim that the latter are absolutely new or that they wholly replace the earlier obsolete forms. In fact, it remains a critical and ongoing task to problematize the “newness” of so-­called new media—a quality that too often goes assumed, fetishized, or celebrated without adequate attention to the precise continuities and discontinuities suggested by the digital. I take the term “pointcasting” from Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004).

N OT ES TO PAG ES 1 3–1 5

41 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 16. I use interacting here as shorthand for a

broad range of activities that include interfacing with new media, enacting software, creating or customizing digital environments, and engaging in networked relations with other people.

42

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 95–96. That digital media, including video games, introduce new means of participation does not mean that they lack the ideological dimensions of the earlier culture industry. Even so, the ways in which that ideology is different from what preceded it is one of the key issues that this chapter takes up.

43

As Debord explains, “There can be no freedom apart from activity, and within the spectacle all activity is banned—a corollary of the fact that all real activity has been forcibly channeled into the global construction of the spectacle” (The Society of the Spectacle, 21–22).

44 Galloway, Gaming, 2. 45

Chris Chesher, “Neither Gaze nor Glance, but Glaze: Relating to Console Game Screens,” Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture 4, no. 2 (August 2007). A comparable conceptual tension arises when we return to Benjamin’s aura itself. At face value, video games may appear as an extension of film’s technological reproducibility. Video games, after all, take the form of reproducible software that has, across their history, been conveyed to a mass market via video game ROM cartridges, floppy disks, compact discs, game cards, downloadable files, and other storage formats. In this sense, similarly to film, video games lack an aura and, given their digital and computational genesis, lack reference to any original that has an indexical relationship to the physical world. On the other hand, if we treat a video game not as a finite quantity of code but as an object that has meaning only upon enactment, then every playthrough of a game is unique, at the very least a repetition with a difference. Given that a video game, like a basketball game or a tennis match, unfolds through real-­time play, it can be said to capture the “here and now” that Benjamin attributes to an artwork’s aura (Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 21).

46

David Golumbia, “Games without Play,” New Literary History 40, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 179.

47

The data about usage time differs across surveys and studies but falls in the range of twenty to thirty hours a week. The top player of the expansion WoW: Cataclysm reportedly played 149 hours in the first week of its release in 2010.

48

I use the term “immaterial labor” to name a change in emphasis in labor, rather than a lack of materiality or embodied effects that such labor entails. For more on this term and related concepts, see for instance Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Michael Hardt, “Affective Labor,” boundary 2 26, no. 2 (1999): 89–100; and Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 18, no. 2 (2000): 33–58.



N O T ES T O PAG ES 1 5–1 8 299

49

Along with Golumbia’s “Games without Play” essay, see Hilde Corneliussen and Jill W. Rettberg, Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A “World of Warcraft™” Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). In particular, Rettberg’s essay, “Corporate Ideology in World of Warcraft,” explores this blurring of work and play. Also see Alexander Galloway, “The Unworkable Interface,” New Literary History 39, no. 4 (Autumn 2008): 931–55. While I agree with the substance of these critiques of WoW, I also believe that virtual world spaces are open-­ended enough to enable meaningful play and sociality that are not absolutely recuperated by the capitalist logics that structure their core game designs. In my experience, once players have proven themselves by acquiring enough experience and property, they have greater freedom to engage in the more creative and complex aspects of gameplay. Of course, this model of development and progress is itself a feature of contemporary capitalism. Nevertheless, I would suggest that in a game space that includes millions of players and their creative energies, this structure is not totalizing. For a broader exploration of the blurring of work and play in contemporary knowledge work, especially in digital media contexts, see Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

50

For Benjamin, one of film’s greatest discoveries is of what he calls the “optical unconscious.” The camera, in conjunction with editing techniques, brings with it “resources for swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object.” In this way, film can reveal deeper structures and features of reality: “With the close-­up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended.” Such expansion and enlargement “brings to light entirely new structures of matter,” and slow motion “discloses quite unknown aspects” of movements. Video games might borrow some of these techniques of film, but they also open up a completely different set of tools and modes of experience. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 37.

51 Galloway, Gaming, 2. A possible exception to this point would be a limit case

such as video game like David O’Reilly’s Mountain, which allows observation but essentially no interactivity or meaningful actions. For a fuller account of this game, see James J. Hodge, “Sociable Media: Phatic Connection in Digital Art,” Postmodern Culture 26, no. 1 (2015).

52

It is worth nothing that this number does not include the substantial quantity of additional people who watch League of Legends and other e-­sport games rather than playing themselves.

53

Carly Stern, “Sweet! Candy Crush reveals that users have played 1.1 TRILLION rounds of the popular game since it launched—with 70,000 MILES swiped every day,” Daily Mail, March 23, 2018, http://​www​.dailymail​.co​.uk​/femail​/article​-­­5518 933​/Candy​-­­Crush​-­­Saga​-­­statistics​-­­total​-­­games​-­­played​-­­highest​-­­score​.html.

54

Shabana Arif, “God of War on Track to Become Fastest Game to Reach 1 Billion Views on Youtube,” June 1, 2018, http://​www​.ign​.com​/articles​/2018​/06​/01​/god​ -­­of​-­­war​-­­on​-­­track​-­­to​-­­become​-­­fastest​-­­game​-­­to​-­­reach​-­­1​-­­billion​-­­views​-­­on​-­­youtube.

55 Lazzarato, Experimental Politics, 28, 101. 56

300

See, for instance, Mark Aguiar, Mark Bils, Kerwin Kofi Charles, and Erik Hurst,

N OT ES TO PAG ES 1 8–2 1

“Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men,” Working Paper Series 23552 (Stanford: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2017), https://​scholar​ .princeton​.edu​/sites​/default​/files​/maguiar​/files​/leisure​-­­luxuries​-­­labor​-­­june​ -­­2017​.pdf. This paper contends that a work decline among men between ages twenty-­one and thirty correlates with the increased organization of leisure time around video game play in the early twenty-first century. 57

Zarmena Khan, PlayStation Lifestyle, October 21, 2017, http://​www​.playstationlife style​.net​/2017​/10​/21​/gaming​-­­content​-­­audience​-­­reaches​-­­666m/. Here, I appreciate Anne J. McClanahan’s point that an account of neoliberalism such as the one offered by Wendy Brown foregrounds the experience of privileged subjects, including tenure-­track university professors. As she writes, “I still worry that entrepreneurialism and financialization are not the best ways to describe the experience, or the consciousness, or the actual material status of what I would take to be the more exemplary subject of the present: an underemployed part-­timer, probably working in the service sector, buying her groceries on her credit card and cashing her paychecks at a check cashing service, renting rather than owning her home, barely able to survive day to day and thus unlikely to see any of this precarity as an interest-­bearing investment in her own future” (“Becoming Non-­Economic: Human Capital Theory and Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos,” 513). I am arguing that, especially post-­2008, the underemployed part-­timer and the gamer have a higher likelihood of being the same subject, increasingly not merely in the United States or Europe, but worldwide. Later in this book, I also focus on issues of precarity, fragility, and failure that are more central to McClanahan’s account than Brown’s writing. In different ways, and for different subjects, video games can represent a temporary escape, an intensification, and a complication of precarity.

58

I am focusing here on the centrality of games of competition within neoliberalism. However, this is not the only historical context in which this convergence has occurred. As Sebastian Deterding remarks regarding a very different socialist context, “Looking for a way to motivate workers without capitalist monetary incentives, Lenin proposed ‘socialist competition’: individual workers, groups, and whole factories were awarded points for their performance, earning commendations, banners, and orders for surpassing certain point thresholds or beating other groups” (“The Ambiguity of Games,” 27).

59

Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961). Among these other three categories, only games of chance remain economically dominant in the early twenty-­first century, as evidenced by the success of slot machines and other forms of gambling in places like Las Vegas. Even so, most video games that incorporate chance still maintain some dimension of competition and difficulty that requires player skill. Important scholarship on the primacy of games of chance in the broader contemporary culture has come largely from anthropology, including Thomas M. Malaby, Gambling Life: Dealing in Contingency in a Greek City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), and Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

60

Jesper Juul, A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), and Steven E. Jones and George K. Thiruvathukal, Codename Revolution: The Nintendo Wii Platform (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).



N O T ES T O PAG E 2 1 301

61

Competition also plays a central role within game theory. For more on this point, see S. M. Amadae, Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 74. I develop the relationship of game theory and neoliberalism in greater detail in chapter 1.

62 Lazzarato. Experimental Politics, 7.

302

63

For more on this form of competition within gamification, see Gabe Zichermann and Joselin Linder, The Gamification Revolution: How Leaders Leverage Game Mechanics to Crush the Competition (New York: McGraw-­Hill Education, 2013).

64

Beyond gameplay itself, the video game industry has frequently gone under fire for promoting excessive competitive activity among its designers and other employees, demonstrating how vulnerable even the most sought-­after members of the creative class are within neoliberalism. See, for instance, the anonymously posted and infamous “EA: The Human Story,” November 10, 2004, https://​ea​-­­spouse​.livejournal​.com​/274​.html. For an analysis of this document and its implications for video game industry labor, see Nick Dyer-­Witheford and Greig de Peuter, “‘EA Spouse’ and the Crisis of Video Game Labour: Enjoyment, Exclusion, Exploitation, Exodus,” Canadian Journal of Communication 31 (2006): 599–618. For a critique of digital labor that encompasses but also exceeds video games, see Nick Dyer-­Witheford, Cyber-­proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex (London: Pluto Press, 2015).

65

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London: Verso, 2013), 53.

66

For a longer list of ideological contradictions, see Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 51. For a discussion of “double truth,” see 68–83.

67

See, for instance, Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as Practice of Freedom,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Volume 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1998), 281–302. Though it would require an extended historical approach to expand this argument, it is worth at least suggesting that from a historical perspective, games produce a synthesis between two modes of thought that were dominant, though often opposed, in the period following World War II: neoclassical economics on the one hand and operations research and systems analysis on the other. Games, in other words, combine a respect for rules that appeal to economic theory and a constructivist and action-­oriented approach that characterized postwar military operations—and came to characterize neoliberalism, as it developed from a heterodox theory to a mainstream practice.

68

Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter, For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business (Philadelphia: Wharton Digital Press, 2012), 39.

69

These big-­budget productions have grown less profitable and less central to the video game industry in the 2010s. Consider, for instance, that despite past profitability of such games, particularly single-­player AAA games have seen diminished profits. See, for instance, Dave Their, “Yes, AAA Single-­Player Games Are Dying, and That’s Fine,” Forbes, October 18, 2017.

N O T ES T O PAG ES 2 2–24

70

David Myers, “The Video Game Aesthetic: Play as Form,” in The Video Game Theory Reader 2, ed. Bernard Perron and Mark J. P. Wolf (New York: Routledge, 2009), 52. Video games can be said to construct reality in a way that extends to all media. For example, Mark Hansen follows Friedrich Kittler to argue that “media conditions our situation” by “giving the empirical-­technical infrastructure for thought” and “specifying a certain technical materiality for the possibility of thinking” (“Media Theory,” Theory, Culture & Society 23 [2006]: 298). Video games shape technical materiality through dimensions of their hardware, software, and design.

71 Mirowski, Machine Dreams, 34. 72

There were computer games prior to Spacewar!, including Claude Shannon and Alan Turing’s parallel work with a computer that could play chess in 1950, as well as Christopher Strachey’s checkers program MUC Draughts (1951), A. S. Douglas’s tic-­tac-­toe game OXO (1952), William Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two (1958), and MIT student experiments such as Mouse in the Maze (1959).

73

I draw this underlying point from a longer study of intersections among media studies, visual studies, and aesthetics. Tara McPherson, for example, argues that “computation has long been deeply intertwined with visuality, aesthetics, and the sensory” (Feminist in a Software Lab: Difference + Design [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018], 17). For an extended analysis of how video game aesthetics promote and work in concert with hardware used for military and other ends, see Timothy Lenoir and Luke Caldwell, The Military-­Entertainment Complex (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

74

Stewart Brand, “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death among the Computer Bums,” Rolling Stone 7 (December 1972), 50–57.

75

Aubrey Anable, Playing with Feeling: Video Games and Affect (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 24.

76

The field of affect studies often turns to literary texts and visual media but less frequently to the medium-­specificity of video games. Similarly, both popular and scholarly criticism about games tends to be attentive to areas such as game aesthetics, narrative, and mechanical difficulty, but less often to affect. Some of the existing work on games and emotion includes Katherine Isbister, How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016); Aki Jarvinen, “Understanding Video Games as Emotional Experiences,” in The Video Game Theory Reader 2, ed. Bernard Perron and Mark J. P. Wolf (New York: Routledge, 2009); “Ico: Creating an Emotional Connection with a Pixelated Damsel,” in Well Played 1.0: Video Games, Value, and Meaning, ed. Drew Davidson (Pittsburgh: ETC Press, 2009); and Doris C. Rusch, “Emotional Design of Computer Games and Fiction Films,” in Computer Games as a Sociocultural Phenomenon: Games without Frontiers, War without Tears, ed. Andreas Jahn-­Sudmann and Ralf Stockmann (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Much of the work on games and emotion has come from game designers and has also concerned the space of sports spectatorship. There has been less scholarship that concerns the intersection of games and affect (as opposed to emotion), but some of this work includes Patrick Jagoda, Network Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Anable, Playing with Feelings; and Patrick Jagoda and Peter McDonald,



N OT ES TO PAG ES 24–2 7 303

“Game Mechanics, Experience Design, and Affective Play,” in Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers (New York: Routledge, 2018). 77

Jennifer Doyle, Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), xi.

78

Miguel Sicart, Play Matters (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 20. In Beyond Choices, Sicart also describes games as “emotion-­making devices” ([Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013], 39).

79

I am drawing this account of affect from several sources. For an extended distinction among feeling, emotion, and affect, see Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect,” M/C Journal 8 (December 2005), journal​.media​-­­culture​.org​.au​/0512​/03​ -­­shouse​.php. For fuller overviews of contemporary affect theory, see Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), including his distinction between emotion and affect (28). Also, see several discussions in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

80

Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 35.

81

Donovan O. Schaefer, Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 40.

82

Eugen Fink, “The Oasis of Happiness: Toward an Ontology of Play,” in Jacques Ehrmann, Game, Play, Literature (New Haven: Yale University, 1968), 23.

83 Abt, Serious Games, 89.

304

84

Colin Milburn, Respawn: Gamers, Hackers, and Technogenic Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).

85

As a humanist and an artist, I am not arguing for the empirical version of this claim. Though a great deal of research already exists regarding the educational benefits of particular games, the pedagogy of potential inherent in games would be more difficult to document. Even so, I try to point to particular moments where this pedagogy becomes possible and palpable, particularly in chapter 7 where I attend to the parasite alternate reality game that I cocreated.

86

Erin Manning, Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 6.

87

For a play-­centric critique of formalism in video game theory, see for instance Miguel Sicart, “Against Procedurality,” Game Studies 11, no. 3 (2011), http://​game studies​.org​/1103​/articles​/sicart​_ap. For a robust account of practices of play in video games, see Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux, Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). For a play-­centric approach to game design, see Tracy Fullerton, Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games (Boca Raton: CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, 2014).

88

Thomas M. Malaby, “Beyond Play: A New Approach to Games,” Games and Cul-

N OT ES TO PAG ES 2 7–3 0

ture 2, no. 2 (2007): 96, 102, 106. Instead of treating them as contained pastimes, Malaby likens games to social life: “games are, like many social processes, dynamic and recursive, largely reproducing their form through time but always containing the possibility of emergent change” (104). 89

Kurt Squire, “Open-­Ended Video Games: A Model for Developing Learning for the Interactive Age,” The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning, ed. Katie Salen, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 171. To be clear, Squire uses the term “possibility spaces” to describe open-­ended simulation games in particular. However, insofar as all games can be played in numerous ways or engaged via metagaming practices, I use Squire’s term in a more expansive sense here.

90

For an account of games as utopian forms, see Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1978). For an account of the modernist position regarding games, see Sebastian Deterding’s discussion of the “liminoid” position in “The Ambiguity of Games: Histories and Discourses of a Gameful World,” in The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015), 26.

91

For these concepts, see Galloway, Gaming, 107–26; Dyer-­Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 193; and Flanagan, Critical Play, 1, 15. For analyses of game-­based resistances by marginalized players and designers, see Woke Gaming, ed. Gray and Leonard.

92

I am drawing here from the title of Jane McGonigal’s book Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (New York: Penguin, 2011).

93

Rita Raley, Tactical Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

94

An early use of the term “teleonomy” comes from Colin Pittendrigh, “Adaptation, Natural Selection, and Behavior,” in Behavior and Evolution. ed. A. Roe and George Gaylord Simpson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 390–416. I borrow the term here to emphasize a difference from “teleology” but do not intend to translate this article’s biological context, wholesale, into my own discussion of games. For a discussion of “purposive” versus “purposeful” behavior, see Hayne W. Reese, “Teleology and Teleonomy in Behavior Analysis,” Behavior Analyst 17, no. 1 (1994): 75–91. In his discussion of self-­organizing systems, William Connolly also analyzes the related concept of “teleo-­dynamic” organization. For him, a “teleo-­dynamic” element “exceeds blind causality without being tethered either to simple intentionalism or to ontological finalism” (The Fragility of Things: Self-­organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism [Durham: Duke University Press, 2013], 8).

95

In particular, see Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-­Element in Culture (New York: Roy Publishers, 1950) and Thomas Malaby, “Beyond Play: A New Approach to Games,” in Games and Culture 2, no. 2 (2007): 95–113.

96

See T. L. Taylor’s work from Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006) to Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). Of the social sciences,



N O T ES T O PAG ES 3 0 –3 1 305

anthropology has arguably been most attentive to play practices across both analog and digital games. Also see Boluk and LeMieux, Metagaming. 97

Mark Seltzer uses this historical frame to proclaim that “the experiment is the defining form of observation, and the observation of observation, in the modern age” (The Official World, 28).

98 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 9. 99

I explore this idea in greater detail in chapter 2 through the thought of Gaston Bachelard.

100 Lazzarato, Experimental Politics, 25.

306

101

Ibid., 90.

102

N. Katherine Hayles, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 33.

103

Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), 35.

104

I am expanding here on Alexander Galloway’s proposal for building “conceptual algorithms” that can contribute to “thinking about video games” (Gaming, xi). I also elaborate the conceptual potential of video games in my “Introduction: Conceptual Games, or the Language of Video Games,” Critical Inquiry 45, no. 1 (2018): 130–36.

105

A broader cultural debate about games as “art” became widespread in both popular and scholarly discourse in the 2000s. For popular entries, see Jack Kroll, “‘Emotion Engine’? I Don’t Think So,” Newsweek, March 6, 2000, http://​ www​.newsweek​.com​/emotion​-­­engine​-­­i​-­­dont​-­­think​-­­so​-­­156675; and Roger Ebert, “Video Games Can Never Be Art,” Roger Ebert’s Journal, April 6, 2010, http://​www​.rogerebert​.com​/rogers​-­­journal​/video​-­­games​-­­can​-­­never​-­­be​-­­art. For scholarly contributions, see Ernest W. Adams, “Will Computer Games Ever Be a Legitimate Art Form?” Journal of Media Practice 7, no. 1 (2006): 67–77; and Aaron Smuts, “Are Video Games Art?” Contemporary Aesthetics 3 (2005), www​ .contempaesthetics​.org​/newvolume​/pages​/article​.php​?articleID​=​299. For a taxonomic overview of art games, see John Sharp, Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).

106

See Anna Anthropy, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012). Also see Emma Westecott, “Independent Game Development as Craft,” Loading . . . 7, no. 11 (2013), http://​ journals​.sfu​.ca​/ loading​/index​.php​/ loading​/article​/view​/129.

107

See Felan Parker, “An Art World for Artgames,” Loading . . . 7, no. 11 (2013), http://​ journals​.sfu​.ca​/ loading​/index​.php​/ loading​/article​/view​/119​/16.

108

For more on the formal and sociopolitical qualities of these types of games, see: Brian Schrank, Avant-­Garde Videogames: Playing with Technoculture (Cam-

N OT ES TO PAG ES 3 1 –3 4

bridge: MIT Press, 2014). As Schrank explains, “Avant-­garde games are distinguished from mainstream ones because they show how the medium can manifest a greater diversity of gameplay and be creatively engaged in more kinds of ways by more kinds of people. They redefine the medium, breaking apart and expanding how we make, think, and play with games. The avant-­garde democratizes games and makes the medium more plastic and liquid.” Moreover, “For videogames, the avant-­garde is the force that opens up the experience of playing a game or expands the ways in which games shape culture” (3). 109

I analyze Journey in Patrick Jagoda, Network Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Chapter One 1

Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker observe, “Digital media seem to be everywhere, not only in the esoteric realms of computer animation, but in the everydayness of the digital (e-­mail, mobile phones, the Internet). Within First World nations, this everydayness—this banality of the digital—is precisely what produces the effect of ubiquity, and of universality.” For more, see The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 10.

2

Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter, For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business (Philadelphia: Wharton Digital Press, 2012), 25.

3

Robert Hunter, The Gamification Handbook: Everything You Need to Know about Gamification (Brisbane, Australia: Emereo, 2011). Also see Byron Reeves and J. L. Read, Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009); Gabe Zichermann and Joselin Linder, Game-­Based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty through Rewards, Challenges, and Contests (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010); and Gabe Zichermann and Christopher Cunningham, Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2011).

4

Mizuko Ito, “Education vs. Entertainment: A Cultural History of Children’s Software,” in The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning, ed. Katie Salen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 94. It is notable that Ito calls children’s software of the 1980s and 1990s “an experimental media category” (89).

5

During this period, an exemplary version of gamified education that used the rhetoric and form of games (without focusing on a particular game) was the “multiplayer classroom” developed by Lee Sheldon. This organizational model, based on massively multiplayer online role-­playing games (MMORPGs), such as World of Warcraft (WoW), operated as an “applied” game, “played out in real-­ time in the real world of the classroom with students as players and the teacher as Game Master.” For Sheldon, the multiplayer classroom is not merely characterized by the use of game-­based language. His pedagogical techniques, such as grouping students in collective “guilds,” place young people in environments that are familiar, engaging, and collaborative along the same lines as the video games and social media that organize their lives. In his college courses, Sheldon explains, students do not earn grades but rather “level up” and accumulate “experience points.” They do not take quizzes but “defeat monsters.” They



N OT ES TO PAG ES 3 5–4 3 307

do not write papers but instead “craft.” They do not prepare presentations but undertake “quests.” For more, see Lee Sheldon, The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game (Boston: Course Technology/Cengage Learning, 2012), 6 and 26.

308

6

Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (New York: Penguin, 2011), 311.

7

Ian Bogost, “Gamification Is Bullshit,” Atlantic, August 9, 2011, http://​www​.the atlantic​.com​/technology​/archive​/2011​/08​/gamification​-­­is​-­­bullshit​/243338/. As he explains, the rhetorical power of the term gamification derives “from the ‘-­ification’ rather than from the ‘game.’ -­ification involves simple, repeatable, proven techniques or devices: you can purify, beautify, falsify, terrify, and so forth. -­ification is always easy and repeatable, and it’s usually bullshit.” I largely agree with Bogost’s critique. Nevertheless, I am interested in expanding the usage of the term gamification throughout this book.

8

Gamification in many ways blurs the virtual space of the game and the physical world. In this way, it shares certain similarities with Jean Baudrillard’s concept of “simulation.” Gamification, however, suggests something other than a model that precedes the real. Like simulation, gamification disrupts any clear-­cut distinction between the real and the virtual. Unlike simulation, which for Baudrillard has no ultimate relation to reality, gamification suggests a mediation of reality that operates through a transparent layering of protocols, interfaces, platforms, software, and hardware. For more on simulation, see Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).

9

Paul Erickson, The World the Game Theorists Made (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 26.

10

See John von Neumann, “Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftsspiele,” Mathematische Annalen 100, no. 1 (1928): 295–320.

11

Von Neumann and Morgenstern, “Preface,” Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953 [1944]).

12

I am not suggesting that game theoretical models were the first models in economics. Early economic probability models, for instance, stretch back to the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, the totalizing ambition of game theory, at least in some of its versions, to model every human behavior exceeds such earlier models.

13

Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 322. Even so, in the 1950s and 1960s, game theory survived in computer science and operations research work (488). It also thrived outside of the US in places like Israel (494). As Mirowski explains in detail, game theory saw a resurgence in the 1970s: “John Harsanyi appeared bent on turning Nash noncooperative theory into some grand philosophical dogma aimed at reviving literal utilitarianism; William Hamilton and John Maynard Smith started subjecting poor unsuspecting animals to its rigors; Reinhard Selten began doing gaming experiments with his students; David Kreps started promoting various Nash equilibria as expressing various commonsense eco-

N OT ES TO PAG ES 4 3–4 6

nomic notions; a small cadre of Europeans sought to explore the ways in which game-­theoretic solutions could be construed as dovetailing with Walrasian themes; and Robert Aumann was everywhere at once” (480). 14 Erickson, The World the Game Theorists Made, 162. Even as social scientific applica-

tions of game theory expanded in the 1960s, earlier work at the RAND Corporation by Merrill Flood, Melvin Dresher, and Albert W. Tucker in the 1950s already yielded formulations of the “prisoner’s dilemma” game that would become so visible in academic discussions of Cold War strategy.

15

S. M. Amadae, Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 286.

16

Werbach and Hunter, For the Win, 26. In fact, the kind of thinking that John Forbes Nash Jr. contributed to game theory strikes me as crucial to understanding contemporary gamification.

17

John von Neumann, “On the Theory of Games of Strategy,” in Contributions to the Theory of Games 4 (1959), ed. Tucker and Luce, trans. Sonya Bargmann, 13 (emphasis mine). Similarly, in 1954, economist Martin Shubik characterizes the relationship between parlor games and “situations involving conflict and cooperation met with in society” as an “analogy” (Readings in Game Theory and Political Behavior [New York: Doubleday, 1954], 4).

18

Von Neumann and Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, 2.

19

Ken Binmore, Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1.

20

In fact, some of the categories are converted into game theoretical categories for the study of “auction games,” “bargaining games,” “ultimatum games, “stag hunt games,” and so on.

21 Mirowski, Machine Dreams, 511. Also see Ken Binmore, Essays on The Foundations of

Game Theory (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 1990), 153.

22

For more on the history of Monte Carlo simulations, see Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 762.

23 Mirowski, Machine Dreams, 130–31, 314. 24

Thomas Schelling. The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). Schelling notes that such details “Can serve to focus the expectations of certain participants on certain solutions” (113). He cautions against privileging mathematical details that might not be as salient for players who are not mathematicians.

25

Even as early as 1954, Martin Shubik shows that games are a particularly strong fit for the social sciences in “Introduction to the Nature of Game Theory,” in Readings in Game Theory and Political Behavior (1954). He writes, “The treatment of games makes it clear why these models rather than mechanistic models provide a more profitable method of studying social systems. In many parlor games,



N O T ES T O PAG ES 4 6–4 9 309

players with partly opposing interests act in the framework of a well-­defined power system under certain conditions of distribution of information among the players. They are often able to exercise direct power, bluff, seek information, form coalitions, double-­cross, and bargain. These phenomena appear to be far more natural in application to the basic formulation of social science than do such mechanistic phenomena as gravitation, mechanistic laws of motion, and the other aspects of Newtonian mechanics” (4). For an extensive analysis of social behavior via games, see Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986). For a classic account of the pervasiveness of games across social relations, in psychology, see Eric Berne, Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships (New York: Ballentine Books, 1954). 26 Erickson, The World the Game Theorists Made, 9 (emphasis in original). 27

Philip Mirowski even suggest that games and game theory might have contributed to these affects of paranoia at RAND: “Game theory did have a profound effect on RAND, but it could not be summed up as any simple catechism concerning its mathematical legitimacy. Rather, it fostered a particularly labyrinthine mind-­set concerning the relationship of finely honed rationality to deception and illusion” (Machine Dreams, 326).

28

Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 15.

29

Jon Peterson, Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People, and Fantastic Adventures, from Chess to Role-­Playing Games (San Diego, CA: Unreason Press, 2014).

30 Mirowski, Machine Dreams, 362, 363, 480. 31 Erickson, The World the Game Theorists Made, 125. 32

For a discussion of “closed” versus “open” games, see Mirowski, Machine Dreams, 364.

33

For a fuller history of war games, including during the Cold War, see Peterson, Playing at the World. For more on the cultural movement from explicit war games to role-­playing games, such as Dungeons and Dragons, see Aaron Trammell’s PhD dissertation, “The Ludic Imagination: A History of Role-­Playing Games, Politics, and Simulation in Cold War America, 1954–1984” (Rutgers University, 2015).

34

Though I am not discussing cybernetics explicitly in this section, Seb Franklin offers a relevant discussion of the links between economic game theory and cybernetics in Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 51–57.

35 Mirowski, Machine Dreams, 142. 36

310

Allen Newell, J. C. Shaw, and H. A. Simon, “Chess-­Playing Programs, and the Problem of Complexity,” IBM J Research and Development 2, no. 4 (1958): 320–35. Mirowski expands on this context in Machine Dreams, 461.

N OT ES TO PAG ES 4 9 –5 1

37 Mirowski, Machine Dreams, 315. 38

Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 49 (1950): 433–60.

39

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste (London: Verso, 2013), 104.

40

I am not arguing that deep dives into the everyday of neoliberalism do not exist. See, for instance, Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). In invoking the everyday of this paradigm, I do not have in mind a number of excellent books and articles that offer close readings of representations of and formal invocations of neoliberalism in contemporary literary texts, for instance Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture, ed. Mitchum Huehls and Rachel G. Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017). Though valuable contributions to understanding the cultural dimensions of neoliberalism, the focus on the category of literature in such investigations does not yet reach the broader cultural everyday as it unfolds within image and new media cultures, including at the level of behavior and habit.

41

The question of civil society here is not secondary but central to what makes neoliberalism distinct from previous worldviews. As Maurizio Lazzarato puts it, “An important aspect of the neoliberal transformation of the social is the recruitment of civil society to serve its objectives. Foucault has pointed to the central role of the new homo oeconomicus in this, a figure thought of in terms of the individual as an ‘entrepreneur of oneself,’ maximizing himself or herself as ‘human capital’ in competition with all other individuals” (“Neoliberalism in Action,” Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 6 [2009]: 111).

42

Wendy Brown. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 35, 47.

43

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 173.

44

Foucault deploys the metaphor of games in other contexts as well. For instance, in 1973 lectures at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, he characterizes discourse itself “as games, strategic games of action and reaction, question and answer, domination and evasion, as well as struggle.” For more, see “Truth and Juridical Forms,” in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 2002), 2. Wendy Chun discusses Foucault’s characterization of the economy as a game in a discussion of the widespread treatment of computer code as a law that automates the privatization of governance. This link between neoliberalism and digital media accords with the argument I am making here about neoliberalism and video games. For more, see Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 29.

45 Amadae, Prisoners of Reason, 61, 146. Even accounting for different genealogies

and uses of neoliberalism, Amadae notes that both “neoliberalism” (as a leftist critique of contemporary capitalism) and “neoliberal institutionalism” (as an international relations concept grounded in game theory) “share a common foundation: the assumption that strategic rationality governs all purposive agency” (xix).



N O T ES T O PAG ES 5 2– 5 4 311

312

46

Ibid., 13, 26. Of course, there is much more to say about the differences and continuities between liberalism and neoliberalism. A fuller account, for which I do not have space here, would have to compare the everyday experiences, tensions, and contradictions within each system. For a thorough account of both cognitive and affective experiences of liberalism, see Elaine Hadley, Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-­Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). This book offers differences, for instance, between Jeremy Bentham and J. S. Mill’s conceptions of liberalism, as well as differences between liberal theory and practice.

47

Within its logic, game theory “breaks with the classical liberal tradition because it has no provision for respecting human dignity or the negative virtue of avoiding injuring people” (Amadae, Prisoners of Reason, 23).

48

Ibid., 67, 71, 223.

49

Friedrich August Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge, 2001, first published 1944), 76, 166, 238.

50

Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 15, 25. Friedman also later explicitly calls this the “economic game” (34).

51

Milton Friedman and Rose D. Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1990, first published 1980), 30.

52

Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1998), 38. Elsewhere, in his writing on cultural capital, Bourdieu also draws on game metaphors. In “The Forms of Capital,” he writes about “games of society” and the “economic game” and invokes examples of actual games such as roulette (in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J. Richardson [New York: Greenwood, 1986], 241).

53

Lazzarato. “Neoliberalism in Action,” 128, 117.

54

Ibid., 55.

55

For instance, Hayek likens the market to an information processor. For an extended analysis of this metaphor, see Bruce Caldwell, Hayek’s Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

56

As economist Richard Thaler puts the critique succinctly, “The idea of model‑ ing the world as if it consisted of a nation of Econs who all have PhDs in economics is not the way psychologists would think about the problem” (Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015], 97).

57

Admittedly, even prior to this moment, as early as the late 1930s, Paul Samuelson had drawn from psychology’s program of behaviorism, initiated by John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner, in order to study revealed preference within economic choices. For more on this prehistory of behavioral economics, see Floris Heukelom, Behavioral Economics: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Though it did not yet constitute “behavioral economics,” the RAND

N OT ES TO PAG ES 5 5–5 8

Corporation and the Ford Foundation also became interested in the behavioral sciences during the Cold War. For a fuller account of this early exploration of behaviorism and experimental methods, in the context of game theory, see Erickson, The World the Game Theorists Made, 137–39. 58

Herbert A. Simon, Models of Man: Social and Rational (New York: John Wiley, 1957). Technically, bounded rationality did not give rise directly to behavioral economics, as we think of it today. Nevertheless, this concept was a key precursor with connections to computer and simulation work that undergird later gamification. As Mirowski argues, “The key to attaining an understanding of bounded rationality is to apprehend that its genesis was essentially simultaneous with [Herbert] Simon’s induction into the world of artificial intelligence, and that it was intended from the beginning not only to stake out his independent position in opposition to game theory and neoclassical economics but also simultaneously to construct an alternative to von Neumann’s nascent theory of automata” (Machine Dreams, 460). Simon used bounded rationality to develop a concept of simulation that was focused on machine imitation (via the Turing test).

59 Thaler, Misbehaving, 29. For the original paper, see Daniel Kahneman and Amos

Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk,” Econometrica 47, no. 2 (March 1979): 263–92. In his critique of total rationality, Thaler refers to the “rational fool” (145). In sociology, Harold Garfinkel also critiques social science for relying too heavily on game theory’s treatment of players as “unreflexive dopes” who rely completely on rationality (Studies in Ethnomethodology [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1967]).

60

Another way of describing this transition is that in the 1980s, researchers sought to identify anomalies or shortcomings within the rational foundation of neoclassical economics, whereas in the following decades researchers were able to propose a more constructive program. “One can distinguish two phases, or ‘waves,’ in the modern (post-­1980) history of behavioral economics. The first wave identified a variety of disparate phenomena that were all anomalous compared to rational choice predictions, but which otherwise had little in common. As a result, early critics of behavioral economics often complained that it was just a laundry list of departures from rational choice. The second wave is now gathering force and it represents a scientific consolidation that addresses this critique. Precise functions that add one or two free parameters to standard rational theories are being applied to explain important anomalies and make fresh predictions” (Colin Camerer, Samuel Issacharoff, George Loewenstein, Ted O’Donoghue, and Matthew Rabin, “Regulation for Conservatives: Behavioral Economics and the Case for ‘Asymmetric Paternalism,’” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 151, no. 3 [ January 2009]: 1215–16).

61

Heukelom actually defines early economics as being antiempirical. He writes: “John Stuart Mill’s (1806–1873) famous definition of economics (Mill, 1844) and its arguments in favor of an economics that reasons from characterizations that aim to capture the essential aspects of the economic world without being directly amenable to empirical validation or refutation” (Behavioral Economics, 10). The grounding of economics in theory demonstrates how substantial the shift to empirical observation and experimental practice was. In addition to behavioral economics, fields such as econometrics introduced empirical work into the field via statistics.



N O T ES T O PAG ES 5 8– 5 9 313

62 Mirowski, Machine Dreams, 144. 63

In his overview of gamification, Sebastian Deterding contrasts a “rhetoric of feedback” surrounding games that serve rational actors with a “rhetoric of nudging” that assumes an irrational, or at most rationally bounded, subject (“The Ambiguity of Games: Histories and Discourses of a Gameful World,” in The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications, ed. Steffen P. Walz and Sebastian Deterding [Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015], 23–64). By contrast, I would like to argue for a much greater continuity between these perspectives, especially as they apply to games.

64

In particular, see Colin F. Camerer, Behavioral Game Theory: Experiments in Strategic Interaction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). As Camerer puts it in this book, “Behavioral game theory is about what players actually do. It expands analytical theory by adding emotion, mistakes, limited foresight, doubts about how smart others are, and learning to analytical game theory.” Moreover, “Behavioral game theory is one branch of behavioral economics, an approach to economics which uses psychological regularity to suggest ways to weaken rationality assumptions and extend theory” (3).

65

Camerer, Issacharoff, Loewenstein, O’Donoghue, and Rabin, “Regulation for Conservatives” 1222, 1218.

66

John McMahon, “Behavioral Economics as Neoliberalism: Producing and Governing Homo Economicus,” Contemporary Political Theory 14, no. 2 (2015): 147.

67

Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 3, 5.

68

MacMahon, “Behavioral Economics as Neoliberalism,” 148, 145.

69

McMahon offers the following example of policy-­level implications: “The Obama administration, for example, has pursued a range of policies influenced by behavioral economists. Behavioral economists in the administration have been influential in the design of the Making Work Pay tax cut in the 2009 economic stimulus bill, the individual mandate of 2010’s health-­care reform bill, various aspects of the Dodd–­Frank financial reform bill, retirement savings programs (about which more is detailed in the next section), and other policies and regulations” (“Behavioral Economics as Neoliberalism,” 145).

70 Camerer, Behavioral Game Theory, 7.

314

71

Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

72

Werbach and Hunter, For the Win, 11.

73

The use of games in nongame areas certainly owes much to earlier developments in organizational theory and economics. For an elaboration of this history and its impacts on gamification, see Jennifer deWinter, Carly A. Kocurek, and Randall Nichols, “Taylorism 2.0: Gamification, Scientific Management and the Capitalist Appropriation of Play,” in Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 6, no. 2

N OT ES TO PAG ES 5 9 – 6 1

(2014): 109–27. As deWinter, Kocurek, and Nichols argue, gamification at least in part extends Frederick Winslow Taylor’s influential early twentieth-­century techniques of scientific management. Like Taylorism, gamification optimizes productivity by standardizing processes and relying on data, but it also stands apart in the ways that it blurs play and work. In referring to “victory culture,” I am referring to arguments such as that made by Tom Engelhardt in The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (New York: Basic, 1994). Engelhardt traces a discourse of competition and victory from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 announcement that the attack on Pearl Harbor will lead to a response and end in “absolute victory” and “inevitable triumph” through the early Cold War (3). Though Engelhardt focuses on political and cultural coordinates, competition also takes the place of exchange as a central tenet of neoliberalism. 74 Brown, Undoing the Demos, 9–10. 75

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-­Element in Culture (New York: Roy Publishers, 1950). A fuller reading of Huizinga would require an acknowledgement and demonstration of the ways that that the “magic circle” is always already permeable in his understanding of the relationship between play and “ordinary life.”

76

This data about Candy Crush Saga comes from Dana Smith, “This Is What Candy Crush Saga Does to Your Brain,” Guardian, April 1, 2014. Also see Eddie Makuch, “Here’s How Much Money Candy Crush Makes Compared to Fortnite and Pokémon GO on Mobile,” Gamespot, January 9, 2019. It is also notable that around 80 percent of the users of Candy Crush Saga are female. See “Your Installed Apps Reveal Your Gender and More!,” Mobile Computing and Communications Review, http://​spirit​.cs​.ucdavis​.edu​/pubs​/conf​/spme14​.pdf, 3.

77

See, for instance, Bejeweled, Diamond Twister, Goober’s Lab, and Jewel Quest. For a fuller list, see L. Gual’a, S. Leucci, and E. Natale, “Bejeweled, Candy Crush and Other Match-­Three Games are (NP-­)Hard,” 2014 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games, 3.

78

Nigel Thrift, Non-­Representational Theory: Space, Politics, and Affect (London: Routledge, 2008), 98.

79 Brown, Undoing the Demos, 10. 80

This incentive for regular and renewed engagement is comparable to the forms of gamification offered by more frequent use of the Foursquare app. A similar process unfolds via Southwest Airlines’s gamified system that offers benefits to customers who check in as close as possible to twenty-­four hours in advance of their flight.

81

Candy Crush Wiki, http://​candycrush​.wikia​.com​/wiki​/Levels (accessed on December 20, 2019).

82

For an essay that brilliantly links Candy Crush Saga to habit formation, see Scott Richmond, “Vulgar Boredom, or What Andy Warhol Can Teach Us about Candy Crush,” Journal of Visual Culture 14, no. 1 (2015): 21–39.



N O T ES T O PAG ES 6 1 – 6 6 315

83

Dana Smith, “This Is What Candy Crush Saga Does to Your Brain,” Guardian, April 1, 2014.

84

Wendy Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 11.

85

See Evan Lahti, “Stardew Valley Made Way More Money than Call of Duty on Steam, and Other 2016 Sales Insights,” PC Gamer, January 5, 2017, https://​www​ .pcgamer​.com​/stardew​-­­valley​-­­made​-­­way​-­­more​-­­money​-­­than​-­­call​-­­of​-­­duty​-­­on​ -­­steam​-­­and​-­­other​-­­2016​-­­sales​-­­insights/.

86

Niels van Doorn describes this type of process as one of neoliberal human capital that is guided toward being “a rational subject who aims to benefit from the future exploits generated by her own capital.” For more, see “The Neoliberal Subject of Value: Measuring Human Capital in Information Economies,” Cultural Politics, an International Journal 10, no. 3 (2014), 358.

87 Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 92, 108, 115. 88

This two-­year period may last anywhere between twenty-­five and forty hours, depending on play style and planning time spent between days.

89 Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste,108, 110. 90

Will Welles, “You’re Playing ‘Stardew Valley’ Wrong: A Guide to the Correct Way to Play,” Player One, October 30, 2016, http://www.player.one/youre-­playing-­ stardew-­valley-­wrong-­guide-­correct-­way-­play-­565848.

91 Mirowski, Machine Dreams, 483. 92

For an extended discussion of the construction of both scales, see Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­Network-­Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Chapter Two

316

1

Ralph J. DiClemente, Richard A. Crosby, and Laura F. Salazar, “Choosing a Research Design,” in Research Methods in Health Promotion (San Francisco: Jossey-­ Bass, 2015), 78.

2

Natalia Cecire, “Experimentalism by Contact,” Diacritics 43, no. 1 (2015): 14.

3

John Dewey, How We Think (Boston: D. C. Heath & Co., Publishers, 1910), iii, 31–32.

4

Émile Zola, The Experimental Novel, and Other Essays, trans. Belle M. Sherman (New York: The Cassell Pub. Co., 1893), 3.

5

Ibid., 8.

6

Literary critic Mark Seltzer puts this well when he notes, “What, after all, is the new ‘experimental’ novel, from Zola on, but a machine for conducting experi-

N OT ES TO PAG ES 6 6–7 7

ments? One in which the species conducting the experiment and the one submitting to it are one and the same?” (The Official World [Durham: Duke University Press, 2016], 25). 7

Cecire, “Experimentalism by Contact,” 13, 11. In fact, even the partial genealogy I rehearse here could be supplemented by numerous additional coordinates. Cecire observes, “Moreover, the experimental as a literary-­historical category often seems to demand a Whig history, somewhat on the model of the history of poetic inventions about which Ezra Pound once fantasized, and which Pound explicitly warrants by analogy with the sciences: a linear progression of ‘innovations’ beginning with Francis Bacon (as Matias Viegener suggests) or, alternatively, with the word ‘experiment’ in William Wordsworth’s 1801 preface to Lyrical Ballads, or with Émile Zola’s use of the term in the 1880s” (11).

8

See, for instance: Experimental Film and Video: An Anthology, ed. Jackie Hatfield (Eastleigh: J. Libbey Pub., 2006). Since my emphasis is experimental games, I offer only a few initial coordinates that leave out, for instance, experimental theater (e.g., Antonin Artaud, Augusto Boal, Bertolt Brecht, and Suzan-­Lori Parks) and experimental music (e.g., John Cage, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Brian Eno). These areas, and many others, open themselves up to medium-­ specific analysis of what constitutes experimentality in that particular medium.

9

In this particular usage of “experimental games,” I am referring to the emergence of avant-­garde and art games. Nevertheless, it is important to recall that even the first contemporary video game, Spacewar! (1962), could be categorized as “experimental” insofar as it was the outcome of programmer experiments with computational technologies.

10

Edward A. Shanken, “Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art,” Leonardo / Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology 35 (2002): 436.

11

Jack Burnham “Notes on Art and Information Processing,” in Software Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1970), 11.

12

Of course, the earliest computer games of the 1950s and 1960s were highly experimental, especially because computers were not created to run digital games. In referring to the broader development of experimental video games, I am signaling the expansion of this category, within a more diverse and mature video game field, in the first decade of the twenty-­first century.

13

John Dewey’s earlier concept of experimental thought in How We Think sees a technological extension in an influential July 1945 essay, “As We May Think,” published by Vannevar Bush, then the director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development. On the eve of the end of an unprecedented war driven by technoscientific competition and experimentation, Bush thinks through the aftermath of violent conflict and an emergent Big Science epitomized by the Manhattan Project’s invention of the atom bomb. Bush argues that these scientists must “carry on their war research in their familiar peacetime laboratories.” As a way of both organizing and pushing forward technoscience, Bush proposes a device that he calls the “memex” within “which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.” Essentially, build-



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ing upon wartime computing work on large-­scale calculation, Bush imagines a device resembling the personal computer that enables more flexible associative thought (via protohyperlinks) and ongoing postwar experimentation (he calls our technoscientific civilization an “experiment”). For more, see Vannevar Bush, “How We May Think,” Atlantic, July 1945. 14

In particular, see the thorough edited volume Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming, ed. Pat Harrigan and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016); and Timothy Lenoir and Luke Caldwell, The Military-­ Entertainment Complex (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). See also the discussion about the relationship of economic game theory and wargaming at RAND during the early Cold War in Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). I explore these connections in greater detail in the first chapter of this book.

15

A. M. Mood and R. D. Specht, “Gaming as a Technique of Analysis” (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, October 19, 1954), 1, 2, 3–6. One could argue that this scene changes with the introduction of deep-­learning algorithms in the twenty-­first century. At the same time, insofar as a model concerns human actions and behaviors, even artificial intelligence does not entirely negate the variable of human contributions to complex systems.

16

See P. M. Morse, “Trends in Operations Research,” Journal of the Operations Research Society of America 1, no. 4 (August 1953): 159–65.

17

Mood and Specht, “Gaming as a Technique of Analysis,” 12, 6, 13.

18

For a fuller articulation of the rhetorical and persuasive affordances of games, see Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).

19

Clark C. Abt, Serious Games (New York: Viking Press, 1970), xix, xvii.

20

Ibid., 11, 28.

21

Abt himself only identifies “objectives and procedures.” I am extending his account by drawing from Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s definition of a game as “a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome” (Rules of Play [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004], 80).

22 Abt, Serious Games, 28. 23

Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961).

24 Abt, Serious Games, 43. 25

318

Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 116. Williams tracks this association through French. In another entry, Williams extends the association between these words to another when he notes that the word “empirical” in English derives from the Greek words for “experience” (empeiria) and “skilled” (empeiros) and “trial or experiment” ( peira) (116).

N OT ES TO PAG ES 7 8–8 2

26

Ibid., 126, 127. Later, Williams notes that experience exceeds a model of thought predicated on rationality alone, insofar as it pushes “against forms of thought which would exclude certain kinds of consciousness as merely ‘personal’, ‘subjective’ or ‘emotional’” (127).

27

Perhaps most useful here is Jacques Rancière, who famously describes aesthetics as a “distribution of the sensible.” Artwork has an impact on subjectivity insofar as it configures and modulates experience (Aesthetics and Its Discontents [Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009], 23). Though not a theorist of aesthetics per se, Marshall McLuhan makes the related point that artists use media to alter experience and perception: “It is the artist’s job to try to dislocate older media into postures that permit attention to the new. To this end, the artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience, even though the majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed in their old perceptual attitudes” (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man [Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press, 2003], 278).

28

On this point, see Nigel Thrift, Non-­Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (London: Routledge, 2008), 2.

29

Jennifer Doyle, Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 146.

30

For an introduction to the formal and political avant-­garde tendencies alive in late twentieth and early twenty-­first-­century video game design see Brian Schrank, Avant-­garde Videogames: Playing with Technoculture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).

31 Thrift, Non-­Representational Theory, 30, 33, 35, 39. 32

Nigel Thrift, “Lifeworld Inc.—And What to Do about It,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (2011): 8–11.

33

Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 6. While there are many theories of knowledge that emerge in the philosophical field of epistemology during the twentieth century, I am more interested in the broader cultural understanding of knowledge in the United States, including how it is impacted by economic factors, during this period. Though an acceleration of the information economy occurs during the second half of the twentieth century, Liu also offers a longer trajectory of knowledge work that stretches from automating (late nineteenth century through 1950s) to informating (late 1950s through 1970s) and finally to networking (post-­1982).

34

Stefan H. Thomke, Experimentation Matters: Unlocking the Potential of New Technologies for Innovation (Boston: Harvard Business School, 2003), 2, 1, 2.

35

Ibid., 92.

36

Tracy Fullerton, Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games (Amsterdam: Elsevier Morgan Kaufmann, 2008), 2. As Fullerton later explains, “By ‘iteration’ we simply mean that you design, test, and evaluate the results over and over again throughout the development of your game,



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each time improving upon the gameplay or features, until the player experience meets your criteria” (14). 37 Thomke, Experimentation Matters, 6–7. 38 Thrift, Non-­Representational Theory, 32. 39

See, for instance, Rosalind W. Picard, Affective Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). For a more popular account of the nonconscious via the lens of neuroscience, see Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior (New York: Vintage Books, 2013). For a humanistic theoretical discussion of nonconscious cognition, see Katherine Hayles, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

40

Bridging empirical and theoretical registers of affect, Lauren Berlant observes that we need to attend critically to “what the senses do empirically; what feelings are made out to mean; and which forces, meanings, and practices are magnetized by concepts of affect and emotion” (“Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 [2004]: 446).

41

Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect,” M/C Journal 8, no. 6 (2005), http://​ journal​.media​-­­culture​.org​.au​/0512​/03​-­­shouse​.php.

42

Brian Massumi, “Of Microperception and Micropolitics,” The Politics of Affect (Malden: Polity, 2015), 48.

43

See, for instance, Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Negotiations, 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 177–82.

44

For more on this contemporary “post-­truth” landscape, see Lee C. McIntyre, Post-­Truth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018).

45

For an extended exploration of the importance of affect within digital media environments and media politics, see Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). For the relationship between affect and networked media, see Wendy H. K. Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016); and Patrick Jagoda, Network Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

46

Luciana Parisi, “Reprogramming Decisionism,” e-­flux 85 (October 2017), http://​ www​.e​-­­flux​.com​/journal​/85​/155472​/reprogramming​-­­decisionism/.

47

Ibid. Notably, Brian Massumi describes micropolitics as having a similar relationship to uncertainty and incompleteness. As he notes, “The goal is not to overcome the incompleteness. It’s to make it compelling. Compelling enough that you are moved to do it again, differently, bringing out another set of potentials, some more formed and focused, others that were clearly expressed before now backgrounded” (“Of Microperception and Micropolitics,” 80).

48 Thomke, Experimentation Matters, 24, 2.

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49

Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: Routledge, 1943).

50

Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 52. Moreover, this type of mediation constitutes “an ideological relation, whether these modes of life actually threaten well-­being or provide a seemingly neutral, reliable framework for enduring in the world, or both” (52).

51

See, for instance, Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); and Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).

52 Thrift, Non-­Representational Theory, 187. 53

Steve Swink, Game Feel: A Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation (Amsterdam: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers/Elsevier, 2009), xiii, 10, 2. Later in the book, Swink discusses the experiences of game feel more systematically under the rubrics of “the aesthetic sensation of control; the pleasure of learning, practicing, and mastering a skill; extension of the senses; extension of identity; [and] interaction with unique physical reality within the game” (10).

54

Ibid., 4, 3, 35–36.

55

Ibid., 4, 5.

56

For the nonconscious effects of video games, see for instance Haiming Hang and Susan Auty, “Children Playing Branded Video Games: The Impact of Interactivity on Product Placement Effectiveness,” Journal of Consumer Psychology 21, no. 1 ( January 2011): 65–72. For more on the relationship between game-­based flow state on the one hand and motivation and learning on the other, see Davin Pavlas, Kyle Heyne, Wendy Bedwell, Elizabeth Lazzara, and Eduardo Sala, “Game-­ based Learning: The Impact of Flow State and Videogame Self-­efficacy,” Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 54th Annual Meeting (2010). Admittedly massively multiplayer online role-­playing games often inspire huge time investments through reinforcement schedules and leveling-­up systems. Even so, beyond organizational forces such as guilds, interpersonal affect and interfaces that support affective interplay play a role in maintaining ongoing player bonds in such games. For more, see Joël Billieux, Jory Deleuze, Mark D. Griffiths, and Daria J. Kuss, “Internet Gaming Addiction: The Case of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-­Playing Games,” in Textbook of Addiction Treatment: International Perspectives (Milan: Springer Reference, 2015), 1515–25. For more on the nonconscious and affective dimensions of Las Vegas gambling environments and slot machines, see Natasha Dow Schüll. Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). Even with these empirical examples, taken from the social sciences, it is important to note that the precise connections between video game play and affect or nonconscious cognition are not yet extensively studied in the humanities or well understood in general.



N O T ES T O PAG ES 8 9 –9 2 321

322

57

Linda M. G. Zerilli, “The Turn to Affect and the Problem of Judgment,” New Literary History 46, no. 2 (2015): 268, 280. Though I focus on nonconscious affect in this chapter, Zerilli’s articulation also points to unconscious processes of concept formation that may involve rational wishes or fantasies that manifest outside of consciousness (but not signification) and enable concept formation.

58

Games give us access to both conceptual and experimental modes. First, games can be framed as a mode of thought that is conceptual or theoretical insofar as they rely on provisional generalization. When designers create video games, they engage in worldmaking by creating underlying models that do not prescribe a limited or linear experience but instead govern the parameters of possibility spaces. For instance, if a game is modeling an urban system, its designers must make certain decisions about how to configure the city space and its possible encounters. This point is equally true whether a game concerns an open-­ ended adventure in an urban space (e.g., the Grand Theft Auto or Max Payne series) or a serious topic such as urban underemployment in the United States (e.g., SPENT or Cart Life). Though some games (especially the genre of “sandbox games”) may appear infinitely open-­ended, they always rely on a variety of built-­ in concepts and founding generalizations that enable play. Second, as I have been arguing, games can be characterized as a form of thought that is experimental and experiential insofar as they encourage provoked observation that takes place in both the design and gameplay phases. In design, experimentation takes place through development, playtesting, and iteration. In gameplay, players experiment through a variety of actions, including the formation of strategy, exploration of the possibility space, and exploitation of the game’s affordances through metagaming practices. For an extended study of metagaming, in particular, see Stephanie Boluk and Patrick Lemieux, Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

59

Admittedly, the claim that video games operate as a mode of conceptual thought may appear counterintuitive. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, for instance, posit a difference between the realms of philosophy (which concerns concepts), science (which concerns propositions), and art (which concerns affects and percepts). Yet video games stand out for the depth of their interdisciplinarity and the way they engage all of these ways of thinking. After all, video games are almost always created by collaborative teams. To create a serious health game, for example, I often work with public health and humanistic content experts, programmers, visual and musical artists, storytellers, level designers, and researchers. Admittedly, Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge that thought takes place across domains. They note that some novelists, for instance, “use all the resources of their ‘athleticism’” that cut across art, philosophy, and science (What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson [New York: Verso, 1994], 67).

60

Ibid., 66.

61

Mark Hansen, “Ubiquitous Sensation,” in Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing, ed. Ulrik Ekman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 70.

62

For more on the opacity of digital media and the role of human experience in this era, see James J. Hodge, Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).

N OT ES TO PAG ES 9 2–9 3

63

My usage of “sensorium” here follows Miriam Hansen. In her discussion of the centrality of film to modernism, Hansen argues, “the cinema not only traded in the mass production of the senses but also provided an aesthetic horizon for the experience of industrial mass society.” As the present book contends, video games provide a comparable “aesthetic horizon” for the experience of our postindustrial society. For more, see Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 70. Video games open up a sensorium and a different range of aesthetic politics than print does, for example. Marshall McLuhan defamiliarizes the specialized linearity and individual experience of print, particularity in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010).

64

Analyses of these concepts come up across game studies and many of them will be explored in the later chapters of this book. For one of the earliest formal analyses of digital environments and aesthetic principles of digital media, all of which map onto video games, see Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (New York: The Free Press, 1997).

65

Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” 449.

66

See Ian Bogost, A Slow Year: Game Poems (Highlands Ranch, CO: Open Texture, 2010). Also see Jake Shapiro, “On the Advent of ‘Slow Games,’” Gamasutra, November 7, 2012.

67

Kevin Wong, “StarCraft 2 and the Quest for the Highest APM,” Engadget, October 24, 2014.

68

Rhetorically, one can say that reading a book of poems requires the turning of pages or that viewing a film requires cognitive actions. Indeed, as limit cases, it is easy enough to find reading and viewing practices that entail more elaborate actions. For example, poetry can be read aloud or slam poetry can be performed in notably embodied ways. Similarly, cult classic films such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show or The Room invite audience call-­and-­response. Even so, books and films can be consumed in comparable physical passivity, whereas action (often elaborate action) is a prerequisite of gameplay.

69

Katie Salen, “Gaming Literacies: A Game Design Study in Action,” Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia 16, no. 3 (2007): 302.

70

Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 13.

71

John Dewey, “The Experimental Theory of Knowledge,” Mind (1906): 299.

72

Though my arguments about nonconscious affect are best illustrated through the competitive multiplayer modes of Starcraft, the single-­player narrative mode is also substantial and lasts about twenty-­five hours across the main narrative (and thirty-­one hours for completionist playthroughs).

73

Steve Choe and Se Young Kim, “Never Stop Playing: StarCraft and Asian Gamer Death,” in Techno-­Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media, ed. David Roh, Greta Niu, and Betsy Huang (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers



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University Press, 2015), 123. In other words, resources have use value within the limited space-­time of the battle and “accumulated capital retains no exchange value” (123).

324

74

Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 94.

75

I offer an earlier analysis of this game in Patrick Jagoda, “Fabulously Procedural: Braid, Historical Processing, and the Videogame Sensorium,” American Literature 85, no. 4 (2014): 745–79. Whenever relevant, I describe the controls for the PC version of the game. On the Xbox 360 version, for example, the player would hold down the X button instead of the Shift key to reverse the flow of time.

76

For more on the temporal manipulations of Braid’s mechanic, see Christopher Hanson, Game Time: Understanding Temporality in Video Games (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018). Also see Dušan Stamenkovic and Milan Jacevic, “Time, Space, and Motion in Braid: A Cognitive Semantic Approach to a Video Game,” Games and Culture 10, no. 2 (2015): 178–203. Though my understanding of the mechanic resonates with these accounts, I am more interested in unpacking the affective and political dimensions of Braid’s medium-­specific design.

77

I offer an extended reading of the game’s final exposition about its nuclear secret in “Fabulously Procedural,” 756–59.

78

Marine Waypoints website, www​.marinewaypoints​.com​/learn​/flags​/flags​ .shtml.

79

From the beginning, then, Braid offers premonitions and anticipatory symptoms of the atom bomb, an object that it only foregrounds in the game’s final moments. It is worth noting that analyses of the first atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima often emphasize the impossibility of predicting this unprecedented event. However, as Paul Saint-­Amour (“Bombing and the Symptom: Traumatic Earliness and the Nuclear Uncanny,” Diacritics 30, no. 4 [2000]: 59–60) points out, in 1945, Hiroshima was teeming with rumors of a coming disaster. Inhabitants of the city used the word “bukimi” to mark the “weird, ghastly, or unearthly” but also “ominous” and “uncanny” nature of Hiroshima’s improbable evasion of aerial bombing at that late date in the war and the looming possibility of annihilation. Rather than mitigating the horror of the event, Saint-­ Amour argues that “a certain preparation for trauma may amplify . . . the ensuing post-­traumatic syndrome” (64). In fact, for the citizens of the Cold War, “a more overt and permanent variant of the uncanny frisson felt in Hiroshima before the bombing” became “a structuring condition of everyday life” (61). The repetition, rather than singularity, that characterizes such perpetual anticipation plays out, formally, in Braid’s mechanical repetitions and sequential accumulation of puzzle pieces (a compulsive “acting” if not quite an “acting out”). Much of Braid’s gameplay requires a bracketing off of the game’s premonitions for the player who wishes to advance. Just as the Cold War nuclear subject sees the possibility of nuclear annihilation everywhere, so the contemporary gamer (as distinct from a casual or critical player), in another kind of repetition compulsion, sees the opportunity for games and advancement everywhere.

80

In this characterization of games, I follow Wendy H. K. Chun, “On ‘Sourcery,’ or Code as Fetish,” Configurations 16, no. 3 (2008): 315.

N OT ES TO PAG ES 9 6–1 0 2

81

William Chaloupka points out that in the encounter with nuclear weapons, “it has been commonplace to assert that we are in the realm of the ‘unspeakable.’” Those who oppose nuclear weapons “implicitly admit that nuclear war is a representation, then put that image in a rhetorical context that evokes (represents) the most profound absence possible” (Knowing Nukes: The Politics and Culture of the Atom [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992], 8). In Graphic Women, Hillary Chute argues that “graphic narratives” complicate this common language of the “unrepresentable,” especially in visual encounters with trauma (Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics [New York: Columbia University Press, 2010], 2). I would argue that video games sometimes accomplish a similar feat through graphics but also through audio and mechanics.

82

I take the phrase “atomic age” from John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York: Knopf, 1946).

83

For the ways that video games engage with history, see Daniel Reynolds, “What is ‘Old’ in Video Games?” in Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History, ed. Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B. R. Elliott (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). Beyond historical representation, I am also interested in the self-­referential historicity of which video games are capable.

84

Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 9, 3.

85

As Katherine Hayles observes, “Code always has some layers that remain invisible and inaccessible to most users” (“Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-­Specific Analysis,” Poetics Today 25, no. 1 [2004]: 75). While the layered processes of code are not directly accessible to the player, my contention is that Braid makes these “levels” indirectly sensible through its ludic processes.

86

Georges Bataille, “Concerning the Accounts Given by the Residents of Hiroshima,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 222, 224, 225.

87

Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, and Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 90.

88

Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives),” Diacritics 14, no. 2 (1984): 23.

89

Bataille, “Concerning the Accounts Given by the Residents of Hiroshima,” 229. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello offer an extended account of constant capitalist activity with their notion of an “ethic of toil” (The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott [New York: Verso, 2018]).

90

It is telling that Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, is remembered for two major contributions to American technoscience. First, he oversaw the production of the atom bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. Second, in the final months of the war, he took an active part in reorienting postwar scientific efforts toward a new technological horizon in which he presciently imagined specialized computing unfold-



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ing into ubiquitous digital media. Bush, who was troubled by the Cold War and wanted to leave behind its destructive developments, saw new media as moving science toward the creation of generative connections among people. For a careful history of the development of computers during the Cold War and their relationship to the policies and ideologies of the era, see Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

326

91

See, for instance, Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-­Witheford, and G. De Peuter, Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing (Montréal: McGill-­ Queen’s University Press, 2003).

92

For the voluntary nature of games, see Roger Caillois’s Man, Play and Games (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001). Caillois expands, here, on Johan Huizinga’s thought about play as a free activity (Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-­ Element in Culture [Boston: Beacon Press, 1955]). For an elaboration of this quality of games—as well as objectives, rules, and feedback systems—see Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

93

Steve L. Kent, The Ultimate History of Videogames: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond (Roseville, CA: Prima Pub, 2001), 331–43.

94

Sigmund Freud stresses this point when he writes, “To have heard something and to have experienced something are in their psychological nature two quite different things” (Sigmund Freud and Peter Gay, The Freud Reader [New York: Norton, 1989], 580). In psychoanalysis, of course, the analyst cannot simply tell the analysand the source of the repression but must instead initiate a mutual and dynamic process that builds toward a traversal of fantasy.

95

Jonathan Blow, “Jonathan Blow: The Path to Braid,” interview with Simon Parkin, Gamasutra, September 12, 2008, www​.gamasutra​.com​/view​/feature​/3786​ /jonathan​_blow​_the​_path​_to​_braid​.php.

96

Lauren Berlant, “Thinking about Feeling Historical,” Emotion, Space and Society 1, no. 1 (2008): 5.

97

Bataille, “Concerning the Accounts Given by the Residents of Hiroshima,” 230, 231, 233.

98

Berlant explores the affordances of such ruptures in detail: “Such interruption slows and makes more reflexive the activity of the nervous system that perpetuates itself endlessly in reciprocal activity with the world; most importantly, though, it counters the intuitive sense that the world proceeds independently of the human activity that makes it” (“Thinking about Feeling Historical,” 6).

99

This point is particularly well developed by Natalia Cecire. She writes, “Reading experimentalism historically allows us to appreciate the powerful scope of its intellectual and political ambitions as well as to apprehend—now that ‘innovation’ is unambiguously the byword of power—the ways in which its responsiveness to state violence was always in part a complicity. This is a complicity in which all professional scholarship continues to share, universally but not at all

N OT ES TO PAG ES 1 0 7–1 1 0

trivially, because epistemic virtues have a history of being conflated with virtue in general” (“Experimentalism by Contact,” 25). 100

Jonathan Blow, “Jonathan Blow: The Path to Braid,” www​.gamasutra​.com​/view​ /feature​/3786​/jonathan​_blow​_the​_path​_to​_braid​.php.

101

Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), 36.

102

For a connection between the problem-­solution framework and empire, see William V. Spanos, America’s Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). In a Heideggerian reading of American empire, Spanos describes a “universal instrumentalism” that is “a Man-­centered thinking for which everything in time and space is seen as a ‘problem’ that the larger comparative ‘picture’ renders susceptible to a final and determinate solution” (191).

103

Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems That Don’t Exist (London: Penguin Books, 2014), 5. In this critique of the problem-­solution framework, I am not including the category of the philosophical “problem.” Deleuze and Guattari write that, in philosophy, “All concepts are connected to problems without which they would have no meaning and which can themselves only be isolated or understood as their solution emerges” (What Is Philosophy?, 16). This meaning of “problem” and “solution” has more to do with the process of “problem finding” or “problem making” that I discuss later in this chapter or the philosophical concept of the “problematic” developed by Louis Althusser.

104 Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here, 338. 105

See, for instance, C. A. Anderson and B. J. Bushman, “Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggressive Behavior, Aggressive Cognition, Aggressive Affect, Physiological Arousal, and Prosocial Behavior: A Meta-­analytic Review of the Scientific Literature,” Psychological Science 12 (2001): 353–59; Tom Baranowski, Richard Buday, Debbe I. Thompson, and Janice Baranowski, “Playing for Real: Video Games and Stories for Health-­Related Behavior Change,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 34, no. 1 (2008): 74–82; D. A. Gentile, C. A. Anderson, S. Yukawa, N. Ihori, M. Saleem, L. K. Ming, et al., “The Effects of Prosocial Video Games on Prosocial Behaviours: International Evidence from Correlational, Longitudinal, and Experimental Studies,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 35, no. 6 (2009): 752–63; S. M. Coyne, L. M. Padilla-­Walker, L. Stockdale, and R. D. Day, “Game on . . . Girls: Associations between Co-­playing Video Games and Adolescent Behavioural and Family Outcomes,” Journal of Adolescent Health 49, no. 2 (2011): 160–65; H. T. Hou, “Exploring the Behavioral Patterns of Learners in an Educational Massively Multiple Online Role-­playing Game (MMORPG),” Computers & Education 58, no. 4 (2012): 1225–33.

106

Salazar, Crosby, and DiClemente, “Choosing a Research Design,” 88.

107

Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004).

108 Massumi, The Politics of Affect, 66. The behaviorist approach still depends on the



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individual subject. As Massumi puts it, “If we say, ‘I contract habits and then habits rule me,’ or ‘We can remobilize habit for futurity,’ we are positing a subject, us or me, prior to and separate from the process of event-­formation that habit is so central to. ‘I’ do not contract habits. Habits contract to form me” (65). 109 Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here, 338.

328

110

Thrift, “Lifeworld Inc.,” 8, 19. I like the sentiment carried by the phrase “experimental humanities” though also acknowledge that it may be too provincial or closed off to transdisciplinary collaborations that might include the physical and social sciences, as well as the arts.

111

Though Thrift does not develop the claim, he does mention in passing that “radical game design” is an “interesting development” in the imagination of “cultural probes” (“Lifeworld Inc.,” 20).

112

For commentary on game-­based thinking in bitcoin and cryptocurrency usage and circulation, see Frances Ferguson, “Bitcoin: A Reader’s Guide (The Beauty of the Very Idea),” Critical Inquiry 46, no. 1 (Autumn 2019): 140–66. Also see ongoing work about bitcoin mining or gambling practices with skins by scholars such as Stephanie Boluk and Patrick Lemieux.

113

See, in particular, Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, trans. Frederick Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); and Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).

114

Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 12, 5, 6.

115

Even if games are indeed complicit with contemporary capitalism, all forms of complicity are not identical, and purity brings with it countless dangers of its own. Jacques Derrida offers an important reflection on complicity in Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). He observes that “even if all forms of complicity are not equivalent, they are irreducible. The question of knowing which is the least grave of these forms of complicity is always there—its urgency and its seriousness could not be overstressed—but it will never dissolve the irreducibility of this fact” (40). In the context of this book, even games that seek to complicate or resist transnational capitalism can never escape complicity with it. And yet not all forms of complicity are equivalent, and the work of adjudicating among them constitutes critical intellectual work. For more on the relationship between intellectual responsibility and complicity, see Gayatri C. Spivak, “Responsibility,” boundary 2 21, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 19–64.

116

Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 111.

117

Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 225.

N OT ES TO PAG ES 1 1 3–1 1 5

Chapter Three 1

S. M. Amadae further marks the difference between these paradigms with a comparison between two famous carceral models: the panopticon (the prison proposed by Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century) and the prisoner’s dilemma (the game of cooperation and defection first framed by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher at RAND in the mid-­twentieth century). Amadae notes, “An inmate in a Panopticon is centrally observed and is subject to external punitive measures that reform his actions.” In promoting self-­regulation, this prison also maximizes efficiency, enabling the application of this model, as Michel Foucault famously argued, to other institutions such as the school, the factory, and the army barracks. By contrast, the prisoner’s dilemma, which derives from game theory and exemplifies rational choice theory, “does not embody any such unified or hierarchical effort to achieve efficient outcomes” but instead “represents society as an individualist enterprise in which other agents are partners in a strategic game to achieve personal goals.” For more, see S. M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 293. For Michel Foucault’s reading of the panopticon as a political technology, see Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House, 1977).

2

For a close reading of Arrow’s Social Choice and Individual Values, see Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy. She argues that the text makes four key assumptions that subsequently shaped mainstream economics: “that science is objective; that it yields universal laws; that reason is not culturally relative; and that individuals’ preferences are both inviolable and incomparable” (84).

3

While individual choices are subsumed into the aggregate of the market, neoliberalism nonetheless introduces techniques of moral judgement upon those who fail to succeed within a market logic. As Elizabeth Povinelli observes, neoliberalism (or late liberalism) depends on a notion of will as “a way of holding those who suffer accountable” (Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism [Durham: Duke University Press, 2011], 33). As this present chapter argues, an idea that people are able to will themselves into upward mobility, for instance, ignores the layered nature of choice which always includes historical context and nonrational factors.

4

Gary S. Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 8.

5

Margaret S. Archer and Jonathan Q. Tritter, eds., Rational Choice Theory: Resisting Colonization (London: Routledge, 2002), 1.

6 Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy, 15, 4. 7

Margaret S. Archer, “Homo economicus, Homo sociologicus and Homo sentiens,” in Rational Choice Theory: Resisting Colonization, ed. Margaret S. Archer and Jonathan Q. Tritter (London: Routledge, 2002), 37.

8

Robin M. Hogarth and Melvin W. Reder, Rational Choice: The Contrast between Economics and Psychology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

9

Gary Becker, Accounting for Tastes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,



N O T ES T O PAG ES 1 2 0 –1 2 3 329

1998). For additional criticism of irrational emotions relative to rational choice see Jon Elster, Strong Feelings, Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 10

Archer, “Homo economicus, Homo sociologicus and Homo sentiens,” 42.

11

To offer a few examples: sociologist Simon J. Williams argues that there is a “need for more complex, multidimensional models of decision-­making in which emotions, alongside habit, customs and moral values, play a part” (“Is Rational Choice Theory ‘Unreasonable’?: The Neglected Emotions,” in Rational Choice Theory: Resisting Colonization, ed. Margaret S. Archer and Jonathan Q. Tritter [London: Routledge, 2002], 70). Additionally, computer scientist Rosalind Picard argues that “we all know from experience that too much emotion can impair decision making, but the new scientific evidence is that too little emotion can impair decision making” (Rosalind W. Picard, Affective Computing [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000], x). Even behavioral economist Richard Thaler argues in favor of taking emotions seriously, in part because John Maynard Keynes himself “thought that emotions, or what he called ‘animal spirits,’ played an important role in individual decision-­making, including investment decisions” (Richard H. Thaler, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics [London: Penguin Books, 2016], 209).

12

Brian Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 2, 21, 22. In the following paragraphs, I both summarize and quote Massumi, whose work is crucial to what follows in the chapter. Regarding the prominence of nonconscious cognition and decision-­making, there are many bestselling and influential books that make versions of this argument. See, for instance, Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (New York: Little, Brown and Co, 2005); Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide (Boston: Mariner Books, 2009); and Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). Far from a passing fad, such books continue to be published to the present day with titles such as Lynn A. Robinson, Put Your Intuition to Work: How to Supercharge Your Inner Wisdom to Think Fast and Make Great Decisions (Wayne, NJ: The Career Press, Inc., 2016). To be clear, even as a great deal of writing about rational choice does emphasize consciousness, Gary Becker himself specifies that choice need not be conscious when he observes that “the economic approach does not assume that decisions units are necessarily conscious of their efforts to maximize or can verbalize or otherwise describe in an informative way reasons for the systematic patterns in their behavior.” He adds, “Thus it is consistent with the emphasis on the subconscious in modern psychology and with the distinction between manifest and latent functions in sociology” (The Economic Approach to Human Behavior [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976], 7).

13 Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy, 19, 20, 21. Though I am focusing

on Brian Massumi here, there are a number of other affect theorists who make similar arguments about nonsovereign choice. For example, in conjunction with the philosophies of Baruch Spinoza and Lauren Berlant, and against Carl Schmitt’s political theory of decision, Michael Hardt observes, “The fact that the power of the world outside of us so far surpasses our own power means that we are affected by others much more than we affect the world or even autonomously affect ourselves, and thus, our capacity for sovereign decision-­making is

330

N OT ES TO PAG ES 1 2 3–1 24

minimal too” (“The Power to Be Affected,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 28, no. 3 [2015]: 216). 14 Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy, 24, 25. For the choice blindness

study that Massumi analyzes, see Lars Hall, Petter Johansson, Betty Tarning, Sverker Sikstrom, and Therese Deutgen, “Magic at the Marketplace: Choice Blindness for the Taste of Jam and the Smell of Tea,” Cognition 117, no. 1 (2010): 54–61. For a later account of choice blindness, in the context of facial recognition, see M. Sauerland, A. Sagana, K. Siegmann, D. Heiligers, H. Merckelbach, and R. Jenkins, “These Two Are Different, Yes, They’re the Same: Choice Blindness for Facial Identity,” Consciousness and Cognition 40 (2016): 93–104.

15 Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy, 28, 29. 16

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 115, 118.

17

Herbert Marcuse, One-­Dimensional Man, 2nd edition, with an introduction by Douglas Kellner (New York: Routledge, 2002), 28, xlii, 9, 10.

18

These texts are too numerous to list here. For an account contemporary to Marcuse of how technology limits human choice, see Jacque Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Knopf, 1964). For a later popularized version of the Frankfurt school critique, see Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). For an account of how technology impacts thought about choice and freedom amidst networked media, in particular, see Wendy H. K. Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). Chun argues that, by the early twenty-­first century, “freedom” became an ideological alibi used by a security-­ obsessed US that couples control and freedom in order to generate “an algorithm of power” (250).

19

For key theory of media affects, see Richard A. Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

20

See, for instance, L. B. Jeffries, “‘Groundhog Day’ and Video Games,” Pop Matters, June 21, 2010, https://​w ww​.popmatters​.com​/127235​-­­groundhog​-­­day​-­­and​-­­video​ -­­games​-­­2496177188​.html. Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell describe this film’s narrative technique as “multiple-­draft” plotting (“Observations on Film Art: Forking Tracks: Source Code,” May 3, 2011, http://​www​.davidbordwell​.net​ /blog​/2011​/05​/03​/forking​-­­tracks​-­­source​-­­code/). For other films that draw from the safe failure of video games, see, for instance, Run Lola Run (1999), Source Code (2011), Edge of Tomorrow (2014), and ARQ (2016). Also see the television series Russian Doll (2019). For Thaler, decision-­making only resembles this scenario for “small stakes” choices such as most meal or clothing purchases (which many people have numerous opportunities to practice, repeat, and learn from) and not “large stakes” choices such as home purchases or career selections (which most people have fewer opportunities to practice and that entail higher failure costs) (Misbehaving, 49–51).

21

For numerous examples of such metagaming practices, see Stephanie Boluk and



N O T ES T O PAG ES 1 24–1 2 8 331

Patrick LeMieux, Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 22

For more on how video games communicate meaning through their decision-­ making structures and procedural dimensions, see Ian Bogost, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); and Mary Flanagan, Critical Play: Radical Game Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). For an extended analysis of ethical choice in video games, see Miguel Sicart, The Ethics of Computer Games (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). For a discussion of the importance of choice to motivate play, from a design perspective, see Brian Upton, The Aesthetic of Play (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).

23

Miguel Sicart, Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 15. Though I focus on the concept of control in another chapter, it is worth noting that choice and control are closely connected. As Karen Schrier notes, “Providing choices in games has been found to increase motivation and perceived control. Having just the right amount or type of choices can help people feel autonomy, agency, and a sense of control in games” (Knowledge Games: How Playing Games Can Solve Problems, Create Insight, and Make Change [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016], 90).

24

I am working with the expanded 2013 Microsoft Windows version in the analysis that follows. Even with the initial free release, the Steam version of the game sold 100,000 units in just the first three days after becoming available (Kyle Hilliard, “The Stanley Parable Has Sold More than 100,000 Copies Since Launch,” Game Informer, October 20, 2013, http://​w ww​.gameinformer​.com​/ b​ /news​/archive​/2013​/10​/20​/the​-­­stanley​-­­parable​-­­has​-­­sold​-­­more​-­­than​-­­100​-­­000​ -­­copies​-­­since​-­­launch​.aspx).

25

For an analysis of the language of “freedom” in the marketing of 1990s video games, see Chris Carloy, “‘True 3D’: The Form, Concept, and Experience of Three-­ Dimensionality in 1990s Videogames,” PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2018.

26 Marcuse, One-­Dimensional Man, 14. 27

A similar process is at play in many Choose Your Own Adventure novels that offer both clearly “bad” endings in which the protagonist fails or dies and a smaller number of “good” endings in which optimized decisions yield success. A videogame that follows a similar teleological approach is The Sexy Brutale (2017), which adopts a form comparable to that of Groundhog Day.

28 Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy, 100. 29

332

Katherine Hayles, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 2, 35. For an account of how choice, at the level of game mechanics, encourages interpretation and meaning-­making, see Patrick Jagoda and Peter McDonald, “Game Mechanics, Experience Design, and Affective Play,” in The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers (New York: Routledge, 2018), 174–82. For an account of distributed decision-­making within a capitalism increasingly informed by big data

N OT ES TO PAG ES 1 2 0 –1 3 5

methods, see Viktor Mayer-­Schönberger and Thomas Ramge, Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data (New York: Basic Books, 2018). 30 Sicart, Beyond Choices, 24, 27. 31

Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2014), 41.

32

Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernhard (London: Macmillan and Co., 1892, first published 1790).

33 Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy, 30, 31. 34 Since Moirai was a free game, and appeared on several platforms, I have not

been able to find total player numbers. It is possible that more people have watched the game being played on YouTube than have played it themselves. As of December 27, 2019, there are several videos of the game, with the top YouTube video playthrough of the game having 2,002,554 views (Markiplier, “I CAN’T EVEN . . . | Moirai”).

35

I write about both of these games in Network Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). I also write about another game, Journey (2012), at greater length. Unlike the other games mentioned here, however, two players are copresent in Journey, though their relation is limited in another way: through the lack of a text or voice communication interface.

36

Laura Parker, “Black or White: Making Moral Choices in Video Games: Why Are Moral Choices in Games So Black and White?” Game Spot, November 24, 2009, http://​www​.gamespot​.com​/articles​/black​-­­or​-­­white​-­­making​-­­moral​-­­choices​-­­in​ -­­video​-­­games​/1100–6240211/.

37 Sicart, Beyond Choices, 6. The frequency of comments about the safety of experi-

mentation is of course not unique to games. The literary critic Wayne Booth, for instance, writes: “In a month of reading, I can try out more ‘lives’ than I can test in a lifetime” (The Company We Keep: The Ethics of Fiction [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], 485).

38

Chris Johnson, Brad Barrett, and John Oestmann, “Thank You and Farewell,” Moirai Steam Community Page, June 29, 2017. For more on the risks of online trolling, see Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).

39

Amadae notes, “the standard assumptions used to operationalize strategic rationality in many contexts do, indeed, routinely reinforce the strategy of profiting by displacing costs on others without any discussions of either moral accountability for actions or subjects’ possible preference for mutual cooperation over unilateral defection” (Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015], 45–46).

40

This section approaches Undertale from a philosophical perspective. However, it is also possible to apply experimental methods to study the qualitative dimen-



N O T ES T O PAG ES 1 3 5–1 3 9 333

sions of choice in video games. See, for instance, Glena H. Iten, Sharon T. Steinemann, and Klaus Opwis, “To Save or To Sacrifice?: Understanding Meaningful Choices in Games,” CHI PLAY ’17 (2017): 495–502. 41

“Undertale Sells 1 Million Copies,” February 3, 2016, https://​steamcommunity​ .com​/app​/391540​/discussions​/0​/412446292754754372/. Undertale has also produced more scholarly analysis than many games analyzed in this book. For instance, see Liam Mitchell, Ludopolitics: Videogames against Control (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2018); and Alexandra Karin Müller, “Undertale: Violence in Context,” MA thesis, Simon Fraser University, 2017.

42

Early on, the game offers a parody of preference in which Toriel interrupts the player’s progress several times to call and ask about their preferences, for instance regarding whether the player prefers butterscotch and cinnamon flavors. Regardless of the responses, Toriel makes a pie for the player.

43

There is also a “Hard Mode” that can be initiated by naming the human character “Frisk” at the start of the game. I do not include this mode in the above analysis because its variations are minor and exist largely for the sake of completionist or hardcore players.

44

By distinction, Toby Fox’s next game Deltarune (2018), which takes place in the Undertale world, is more direct about presenting the possible choice of nonviolence and the context within which one would commit to that choice to the player.

45

Archer and Tritter, eds., Rational Choice Theory, 10, 11.

46

See Harry Harootunian, “Remembering the Historical Present,” Critical Inquiry 33 (Spring 2007): 471–94.

47

I draw these numbers from the “How Long to Beat” website that has counted up over 1,000 playthrough times, ranging from an average playthrough of the main game trajectory through a completionist campaign.

48 Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy, 100.

334

49

Archer, “Homo economicus, Homo sociologicus and Homo sentiens,” 46.

50

Though economic game theory generally deals with decisions made within a game scenario, some offshoots of it also offer alternate approaches that take decision-­making context into consideration. See, in particular, Nigel Howard, Paradoxes of Rationality: Theory of Metagames and Political Behavior (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971). Howard introduces a “metagaming” approach that does not begin with preferences or utilities at the outset of a game theoretical scenario. Moreover, Howard explores the ways that a player’s knowledge of their own behavior in a game—both the game’s rules and its contexts—can alter their behavior over time. For more on the importance of context and quality in decision-­making, see Mark D. White, The Manipulation of Choice: Ethics and Libertarian Paternalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

51

I qualify this statement as “national territories of Europe” because of earlier

N OT ES TO PAG ES 1 3 9 –1 4 4

imperialist campaigns and genocides, such as the German genocide of the Herero and Nama people in Southwest Africa from 1904 to 1908. 52

Robert Fine and David Hirsh, “The Decision to Commit a Crime against Humanity,” in Rational Choice Theory: Resisting Colonization, ed. Margaret S. Archer and Jonathan Q. Tritter (London: Routledge, 2002), 192, 196–97 (emphasis mine), 197.

53

For examples of arguments in critical race theory that seek to rethink freedom, see Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Of course, countless texts in this field historicize and theorize various theories of freedom that exceed the type of choice constructed by rational choice theory.

54 Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy, 54. 55

For an extended account about the ways that Undertale registers all player actions, see William Hughes, “Undertale Dares Players to Make a Mistake They Can Never Take Back,” AV Club, December 9, 2015, https://​games​.avclub​.com​ /undertale​-­­dares​-­­players​-­­to​-­­make​-­­a​-­­mistake​-­­they​-­­can​-­­neve​-­­1798287299.

56

For the remainder of this section, I focus mostly on the category of intensity. For a fuller articulation of ambivalence, see Patrick Jagoda, Network Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 224–28. Also see Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner, The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017). For a rich analysis of the category of “impasse,” see Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), especially 199–200. Berlant discusses “impasse” as an encounter with “the duration of the present” that can be adapted to, but not overcome, through a “gesture or undramatic action that points to and revises an unresolved situation” (199).

57 Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy, 69. Massumi further explores the

relationship of intensity and art: “Whitehead defines the achievement of intensity as definitive of the aesthetic dimension of existence (Whitehead 1978, 109, 197, 213, 244, 279–80). Art would then be the practice of packing an experience with contrasts and holding them in suspense in a composition of signs: contriving for the affective wave packet not to collapse, for an intensive interval” (70).

58

For an analysis of the richness of choice in Papers, Please, see Cory Johnson, “What Games Can Learn from the Engagement Layers of Papers Please,” Gamasutra, December 10, 2014.

59

For more about regret in video games, see Brice Morrison, “Meaningful Choice in Games: Practical Guide & Case Studies,” Gamasutra, November 19, 2013. Also see Patrick Jagoda, “Game Design Sketchbook: Regret,” in The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer, ed. Patrick Jagoda and Michael Maizels (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).

60

See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: George Allen, 1951); and Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1996).



N O T ES T O PAG ES 1 4 5–1 4 7 335

61

It is important to acknowledge the argument, made by Elaine Scarry, that violence in a game lacks the finality of violence in the physical world that culminates in the irreducible body in pain (for more, see The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987]). Even so, in writing about the violence of abstraction, I am thinking, for instance, of the underlying type of logic of modularity and segregation that Tara McPherson identifies as belonging both to the US social sphere and to the UNIX operating system (Feminist in a Software Lab [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018]). For more on the economic and cultural logics underlying computation, see David Golumbia. The Cultural Logic of Computation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Furthermore, the violent logics underlying Cold War politics, even in cases that did not spur violent conflicts, have been well documented. Beyond the nuclear dimension of Cold War politics, for an analysis of the violent logics that fueled the later War on Terror, see Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (Lagos: Malthouse Press Limited, 2006).

62 Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy, 148. 63

Key predecessors of such video games include electronic literary works from hypertext fiction (e.g., Michael Joyce’s afternoon: a story [1987]) to interactive fiction (e.g., Emily Short’s Galatea [2000]). I explore the connection between electronic literature and video games, including their decision-­making capacities, in greater detail in Patrick Jagoda, “Digital Games and Narrative,” in Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. Matthew Garrett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 231–47.

64 Howard, Paradoxes of Rationality, xx. For an expansive theory of

“metagames” in the realm of video game play, see Boluk and LeMieux, Metagaming.

Chapter Four

336

1

The term “C4I” is an extension of the earlier “C2” (“Command and Control”). There are numerous other variants of the term, including “C5I” (“Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Collaboration and Intelligence”). For a fuller account of C4I, see “National Research Council (US). Committee to Review DOD C4I Plans and Programs,” Realizing the Potential of C4I: Fundamental Challenges (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1999).

2

Philip Mirowski. Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 445.

3

For a more elaborate and extended exploration of distributed sovereignty, see the work of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, including Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004); and Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). For an analysis of distributed sovereignty and control in the context of networked and digital technology, see Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

N OT ES TO PAG ES 1 4 8–1 5 4

4

In this summary, I am drawing from Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992): 3–7.

5

Seb Franklin, Control: Digitality As Cultural Logic (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), xv, xviii.

6

Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

7

For more on “fumblecore,” see Ian Jones, “Do the Locomotion: Obstinate Avatars, Dehiscent Performances, and the Rise of the Comedic Video Game,” Velvet Light Trap 77 (2016): 86–99. Also see Kirk Hamilton, “Octodad: Dadliest Catch: The Kotaku Review,” Kotaku, April 22, 2014, https://​kotaku​.com​/octodad​ -­­dadliest​-­­catch​-­­the​-­­kotaku​-­­review​-­­1512040710.

8

For the most comprehensive collection on this topic, see Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw, Queer Game Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Also see Bonnie Ruberg, Video Games Have Always Been Queer (New York: New York University Press, 2019).

9

An avatar can, of course, take many forms, ranging in abstraction from a simple paddle in Pong (1972) to a pixelated plumber in Super Mario Bros. (1985) to a more detailed and almost infinitely customizable figure in Second Life (2003).

10

Brian Upton, The Aesthetic of Play (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 18.

11 Galloway, Gaming, 90–91, 92. 12

Steve Swink, Game Feel: A Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation (Amsterdam: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers/Elsevier, 2009).

13

Ibid., xiii.

14

Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 31, 33. Though I use Žižek’s distillation here, for the sake of clarity, this idea appears throughout Marxist thought. See, for instance, Louis Althusser when he develops this idea in the context of Pascal’s famous wager: “Besides, we are indebted to Pascal’s defensive ‘dialectic’ for the wonderful formula which will enable us to invert the order of notional schema of ideology. Pascal says more or less: ‘Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.’ He thus scandalously inverts the order of things, bringing, like Christ, not peace but strife, and in addition something hardly Christian . . . scandal itself. A fortunate scandal which makes him stick with Jansenist defiance to a language that directly names reality. . . . I shall therefore say that, where only a single subject (such and such an individual) is concerned, the existence of the ideas of his belief is material in that his ideas are his material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject” (“Selected Texts,” in Ideology, ed. Terry Eagleton [New York: Routledge, 2013], 105–6). Originally, this passage appears in On Ideology.

15

Though this articulation may appear to be a definition of freedom as such, it is arguably closer to a tagline for a particularly neoliberal version of freedom.



N O T ES T O PAG ES 1 5 4–1 5 9 337

16 Swink, Game Feel, 1, 67. 17

In addition to the above articulation of real-­time control, Swink writes, for instance: “The aesthetic sensation of control is the starting experience of game feel. It is the pure, aesthetic pleasure of steering something around and feeling it respond to input” (Game Feel, 12). An account from outside of game studies that accords with this sense of the desire for control of interfaces is sociologist Jack Katz’s analysis of road rage as a reaction to different varieties of lost control in “Pissed Off in LA,” in How Emotions Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 18–86.

18

Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 172. She notes that generally, children older than three months prefer imperfect contingency, a slight misalignment. However, “autistic children are an exception; they remain distressed when an exogenous entity does something that demonstrates vitality of its own, and they are especially intolerant of social contingency, or the unpredictability of another’s perspective or intentions” (172). Video games seem to be another area in which players prefer a form of perfect contingency.

19

Many of the properties of slot machines are already present in games such as Candy Crush Saga that I analyzed in the first chapter (right down to the attractive food items such as fruit and candies that populate both the gambling and casual game displays at a representational level). For a comparison between Candy Crush and gambling games, see Dana Smith, “This Is What Candy Crush Saga Does to Your Brain,” Guardian, April 1, 2014.

20

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. from the second German edition by C. J. M. Hubback (London, Vienna: International Psycho-­Analytical, 1922).

21

Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 79.

22

Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961).

23

To be fair, games of pure chance push against narratives of control. From a formal perspective, Caillois notes, a game of chance “seems an insolent and sovereign insult to merit.” Within agon, a person’s “only reliance is upon himself,” whereas in alea, “he counts on everything, even the vaguest sign, the slightest outside occurrence, which he immediately takes to be an omen or token—in short, he depends on everything except himself” (Man, Play, and Games, 17–18). Yet questions of self-­control are brought back into accounts of chance through card counting in a game such as blackjack as well as a cultural conversation about gambling addiction.

24

To think about how important control is to role-­playing games, including in instances when that control is lost, see Julian Dibbell’s much-­discussed article, “A Rape in Cyberspace,” The Village Voice, December 21, 1993.

25 Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, 12, 23, 44. Caillois selects the word ilinx because

it is “the Greek term for whirlpool, from which is also derived the Greek word for vertigo (ilingos)” (24). In an essay about the ontology of play, Eugen Fink

338

N OT ES TO PAG ES 1 5 9 –1 6 1

extends some of these qualities of ilinx to play as such. He observes that “play can contain within itself not only the clear apollonian moment of free self-­ determination, but also the dark dionysian moment of panic self-­abandon.” See Eugen Fink, “The Oasis of Happiness: Toward an Ontology of Play,” Yale French Studies 41, “Game, Play, Literature” (1968): 25. 26

For example, David Myers characterizes video games in general as “a means of anti-­control, a conscious—or at least a willful—attempt to lose consciousness, to let the artifices of awareness and self slide in favor of a more direct and immediate engagement of body and mind” (The Video Game Theory Reader 2, ed. Bernard Perron and Mark J. P. Wolf [New York: Routledge, 2003], 61).

27

For example, the work of mathematician Kenneth J. Arrow links individual sovereignty with political and economic sovereignty, especially his book Social Choice and Individual Values, 2nd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951). As S. M. Amadae notes: “Arrow is part of the school of thought upholding individuals’ preferences as the only possible legitimate measure of individual or collective well-­being.” Arrow follows earlier economics, which “first borrowed the ‘sovereignty’ metaphor from political theory as a way of describing consumer choice.” In turn, Arrow moved the concept of “consumers’ sovereignty” from economics back into the realm of political considerations about citizen sovereignty under democratic governance and its relation to free markets. For more, see S. M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 107.

28

Berlant and Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable, viii. For an earlier articulation of nonsovereignty, see Hannah Arendt’s 1958 book The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 235–36, 244.

29

Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw, eds., Queer Game Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), x.

30

Edmond Y. Chang, “Queergaming,” in Queer Game Studies, 17. It is worth noting that this account of queer games can be brought into conversation with Rita Raley’s broader category of “tactical media.” Raley notes, “tactical media requires a certain openness, a surrendering to chance or the ‘postmodern roll of the dice’; even more, it requires that its practitioners cede control over its outcomes” (Tactical Media [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009], 8).

31

Berlant and Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable, 19.

32

The game was created by Anna Anthropy but also includes music from Liz Ryerson. Of the three games that I focus on in this chapter, this is the one that received the most media attention. Anthropy herself has expressed frustration at the game being treated as an “empathy game” and for receiving more attention than the hundreds of other games that she has created. Though Anthropy’s wider oeuvre demands additional study, I have selected Dys4ia as a case in part because of the attention that it received and the likelihood that a greater number of readers will be familiar with this game.

33

American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.) (2013). Previously, this diagnosis came under the label of “gender identity disorder.”



N O T ES T O PAG ES 1 6 1 –1 6 4 339

340

34

One volume that contributed to the revitalization of autobiography in literary criticism was James Olney’s Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). Women’s autobiography did not enter widespread conversation until the 1990s, even as the form has a long history that runs in the Anglo American world from Margaret Cavendish’s autobiography (the first English woman to publish an autobiography in the seventeenth century) through the comics autobiographies of creators such as Phoebe Gloeckner (Martine Watson Brownley and Allison B. Kimmich, eds., Women and Autobiography [Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1999], xi and xii).

35

Laura Marcus, “The Face of Autobiography,” in The Uses of Autobiography, ed. Julia Swindells (London: Routledge, 1995), 14. Also see Laura Marcus, Auto/Biographical Discourses: Criticism, Theory, Practice (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1998).

36

For more on autobiographical video games, including Dys4ia, see Stefan Werning, “The Persona in Autobiographical Game-­Making as a Playful Performance of the Self,” Persona Studies 3, no. 1 (2017): 28–42.

37

For more on the idea of a game’s possibility space, see Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 42.

38

Dean Spade, “Mutilating Gender,” The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 319.

39

For more on ways that structural inequalities have led to nonsovereign experiences for transgender people in different historical eras, see Kristen Schilt, Just One of the Guys? Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), especially chapter 1, “Framing Transgender Difference: Pathology, Diversity, Biology.” For more on the constraint introduced by collision detection in Dys4ia, see Noah Wardrip-­Fruin, “Beyond Shooting and Eating: Passage, Dys4ia, and the Meanings of Collision,” Critical Inquiry 45, no. 1 (2018): 137–67.

40

Anna Anthropy, cited in Ben Kuchera, “Dys4ia Tackles Gender Politics, Sense of Self, and Personal Growth . . . on Newgrounds,” Penny Arcade, March 16, 2012, http://​penny​-­­arcade​.com​/report​/article​/dys4ia​-­­tackles​-­­gender​-­­politics​-­­sense​ -­­of​-­­self​-­­and​-­­personal​-­­growth​-­­on​-­­newg (accessed July 2016).

41

Nigel Thrift, Non-­Representational Theory: Space, Politics, and Affect (London: Routledge, 2008), 10.

42

Also see Bob Rehak, “Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar,” in The Video Game Theory Reader, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York: Routledge, 2003); and Rune Klevjer, “What Is the Avatar?: Fiction and Embodiment in Avatar-­Based Single-­Player Computer Games,” PhD dissertation, University of Bergen, 2006. For more on the relationship of identification in cinema versus game studies, see Ian Bryce Jones, “Enough of a World: A Phenomenology of Videogame Weltichkeit,” PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2015.

43

See, for instance, Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg, eds., Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft® Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

N OT ES TO PAG ES 1 6 5–1 70

44

Brownley and Kimmich, eds., Women and Autobiography, 1.

45

Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury, and Penny Summerfield, eds., Feminism and Autobiography: Text, Theories, Methods (London: Routledge, 2000), 2.

46

Regarding ways of approaching avatars, James Paul Gee posits three simultaneous identities that a player might inhabit while playing a video game. These include a “virtual identity” that has to do with developing a character within the game world, a “real-­world identity” that involves bringing one’s own demographic profile and history into the gameplay experience, and finally a “projective identity” that enables the creation of a character that exists at the interface of the virtual and the real but also allows for experimental and speculative emergences. For more, see James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 48–54.

47

For an analysis of the genre of autobiographical games via Mary Flanagan’s [domestic] and [rootings], see Cindy Poremba, “Play with Me: Exploring the Autobiographical through Digital Games,” DiGRA ’07—Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play 4, University of Tokyo, September 2007.

48

For a compelling account of the different models of identification in video games, see Adrienne Shaw, “Does Anyone Really Identify with Lara Croft?,” in Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 55–96.

49 Galloway, Gaming, 5. 50

Though I do not delve into virtual reality games in this book, it is worth noting that first-­person shooter games adapted for virtual reality hardware, such as Superhot VR (2016) or Doom VFR (2017), may promote even greater bodily identification with an avatar through tighter immersion. Dys4ia resists identification and immersion via its short duration, third-­person perspective, nonrealistic graphics, and use of a standard computer interface. Anna Anthropy interrogates and criticizes first-­person perspective and immersion even more directly via her game Realistic Female First-­Person Shooter (2012).

51

Lauren Berlant, “A Properly Political Concept of Love: Three Approaches in Ten Pages,” Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 4 (2011): 683–91. See especially 688–90.

52

This synthesis is central to Kristen Schilt’s account of transgender studies in Just One of the Guys?, 3.

53

To be clear, I do not see the limited interactivity or choice in Dys4ia as a flaw in the game’s design. Moreover, this quality contributes to a certain experience of nonsovereignty that is contrary to mainstream game design. As Naomi Clark notes, through this minimal choice, “dys4ia manages to destabilize one of the rarely questioned tenets of what a game must have to be considered a game” (Naomi Clark, “What is Queerness in Games, Anyway?,” in Queer Game Studies, 6).

54

Liz Ryerson, “Thoughts on Problem Attic,” Gamasutra, June 3, 2013, https://​www​ .gamasutra​.com​/blogs​/LizRyerson​/20130603​/193523​/thoughts​_on​_Problem​ _Attic​.php. Also, Problem Attic is in conversation with Braid. For more on this



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point, see Liz Ryerson, “The Other Side of Braid,” Boing Boing, July 30, 2015, https://​boingboing​.net​/2015​/07​/30​/the​-­­other​-­­side​-­­of​-­­braid​.html. For an earlier game by Liz Ryerson, which began experimenting with some of the elements of Problem Attic, see Responsibilities.

342

55

For a critique of the ways in which mainstream games and game controllers assume universal subjects and a universal body, see Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux, Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). For a more extensive complication and troubling of the figure of the “gamer,” see Amanda Phillips, Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2020).

56

Brendan Vance offers perhaps the best account of how Problem Attic’s design is misunderstood if we rely entirely on conventional industry standards. See Vance’s blog entry “Fashion, Emptiness and Problem Attic,” November 2, 2013, http://​blog​.brendanvance​.com​/2013​/11​/02​/problem​-­­attic/. Vance also discusses the elements without use in the game in his excellent YouTube walkthrough of the game: “Revisiting Problem Attic,” November 11, 2014, https://​www​ .youtube​.com​/ watch​?v​=​A4lr3U1OsKQ.

57

I make this judgment based on frustrated forum comments and watching my own students regularly fail to complete the game when I assign it.

58

It is a testament to Problem Attic’s difficulty that there are so few videos depicting its full gameplay. I am especially grateful for (and impressed by) videos from Ian Bryce Jones (https://intermittentmechanism.blog/2017/04/09/a-­practical-­guide-­to-­problem-­attic/), Brendan Vance (https://​www​.youtube​.com​ /watch​?v​=​A4lr3U1OsKQ), and John T. (https://​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=​ TLhROYweJ98). Though I do not focus on the game’s difficulty, I return to the concept of difficulty, in a more systematic fashion, in chapter 5 of this book. Problem Attic demonstrates all three categories of difficulty—mechanical, interpretive, and affective—that I discuss in that chapter.

59

Ryerson, “Thoughts on Problem Attic.” In a later piece of writing, Ryerson adds, writing of herself in the third person, “She wanted to make something about rape, to do it from a survivor’s perspective, because that’s all she could think about anymore. But her work would go beyond that: it would be about con­fronting people’s barriers and constructions around themselves and their identities, and how constricting and suffocating those could be (“The Other Side of Braid”).

60

Jennifer Doyle, Campus Sex, Campus Security (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 12.

61

R. J. Frey, “Dissociative Disorders,” in The Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine, 2nd edition (5 vols.) (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Group, 2001).

62

Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 99–100.

63

See, for instance, Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, and Joan Riviere, Papers on Technique (1911–1915 [1914]) (London: Hogarth Press, 1964).

N OT ES TO PAG ES 1 74–1 76

64

Emily Short, “Problem Attic (Liz Ryerson),” November 20, 2015, https://emshort. blog/2015/11/20/problem-­attic/.

65

Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 7, 5.

66

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-­Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).

67

S. M. Amadae. Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 176.

68

Though the prisoner’s dilemma begins with choice (though not voluntary participation, given a scenario in which choice is forced upon actors who are already imprisoned), it also belongs to a broader neoliberal logic of mutual harm. For example, neoliberal policies that seek to encourage private ownership are enforced through rules and punitive policies meant to maximize game theoretical utility.

69

Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 185.

70

Mattie Brice, “Play and Be Real about It: What Games Could Learn from Kink,” in Queer Game Studies; in the preceding two paragraphs, quotations are taken from 78–81.

71 Ibid. 72 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 146. 73

Brice, “Play and Be Real about It,” 81.

74

On the distinction between trauma versus ordinary disturbance, Lee Edelman offers the following characterization of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work: “She proposes instead that we attend to the possibility of ‘making peace with’ or ‘being in the room with’ what she calls the ‘mess’ of affective intensities by engaging that mess in its ordinariness instead of as inherently traumatic” (Berlant and Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable, 64).

75

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903).

76

Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness,” Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto, 2008), 82, 83. On this comparison between Du Bois and Fanon, I am indebted to a conversation with Keith Jones. Though I am drawing from concepts developed around race, I would contend that they extend, albeit in nonidentical ways, to the experiences of other marginalized people, including a game like Problem Attic, which is arguably more centrally concerned with gender and sex. Though I do not have the space here to discuss those intersections, for a deep discussion of the racialization of gender and gendering of race, see C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

77

Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Brent Hayes Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 7.



N O T ES T O PAG ES 1 7 7–1 8 2 343

78

Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

79

Berlant and Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable, vii–­viii.

80

The importance of the touch interface becomes evident in the game’s trailer, which does not depict only gameplay screens but also shows players in the midst of playing the game via multiple interface, with closeups of fingers on a tablet and on multiple joysticks.

81

Tale of Tales website, Luxuria Superbia, http://​luxuria​-­­superbia​.com.

82

Brenda Brathwaite, Sex in Video Games (Charles River Media, 2007), 8–10. The closest category that Braithwaite discusses that might be applied to Luxuria Superbia is “abstracted sex.” However, for her, this category includes a different kind of abstraction than what I hope to identify in this game. She is primarily gesturing toward in-­game reproduction that abstains from representing process, as in Zoo Tycoon 2 in which the player breeds animals or The Sims, which includes sexual activity without representing it directly (5–6).

83

Berlant and Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable, 2, 56.

84

Ibid., 2.

85

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), xi, 2, 3. For more on “dark play,” see Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002), 92, 119.

86

Erin Manning, The Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 71.

87 Manning, The Politics of Touch, 71. To understand the importance of touch within

a designed environment, also see Ellen Lupton, Skin: Surface, Substance, and Design (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 31, xiii, 105.

344

88

Marsha Kinder elevates this stalling approach to a theory of narrative. She writes, “Because of its pivotal position at the infant’s first entry into narrative, the sleep-­bargaining genre becomes a metaphorical analogue for the whole project of narrative—a meta-­narrative like the Arabian Nights, which indeed may be a sophisticated elaboration of the genre” (Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993,] 19). In his reading of Kinder, Dan Fleming captures a dimension of video games that is even closer to my observations about Luxuria Superbia. In analyzing “children’s video games,” he observes their “abrupt beginnings, vastly extended middles and always remote finales” (Powerplay: Toys as Popular Culture [Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996], 171).

89

I provide an extended reading of these forums, and affect in Journey, in Patrick Jagoda, Network Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 166–77.

90

Mitu Khandaker, http://​mitu​.nu​/2016​/04​/22​/modding​-­­passage/. For an expanded reading of Passage, see Patrick Jagoda, “Passage,” in The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer, ed. Michael Maizels and Patrick Jagoda (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).

N OT ES TO PAG ES 1 8 2–1 8 8

91

I expand substantially on the position of “critical making” in Patrick Jagoda, “Critique and Critical Making,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 132, no. 2 (2017): 356–63.

92

Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012), 143.

93

Thomas Malaby, “Beyond Play: A New Approach to Games,” Games and Culture 2, no. 2 (2007): 106.

Chapter Five 1

George Steiner, “On Difficulty,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 36 (Spring 1978): 276.

2

Two key texts about procedures and processes in video games include Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); and Noah Wardrip-­Fruin, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).

3

William Davies, The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition (Los Angeles: Sage, 2017), 41.

4

Competition exacerbates and manages existing differences across categories such as race. As Maurizio Lazzarato observes, “The logic of competition has transformed into the logic of ‘security’ war, and into racism both internal and external to a nation-­state, whose authority it would like to reassert. The new Homo economicus who takes on the task of economic and social innovation transforms very quickly into a bringer of destruction and restoration” (Experimental Politics: Work, Welfare, and Creativity in the Neoliberal Age, trans. Arianna Bove, Jeremy Gilbert, Andrew Goffey, Mark Hayward, Jason Read, and Alberto Toscano [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017], 61).

5

Charles Altieri and Nicholas D. Nace, eds., “Introduction,” in The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018), 1.

6

I take the phrase “historical present” from Harry Harootunian, “Remembering the Historical Present,” Critical Inquiry 33 (Spring 2007): 471–94.

7

Marc Goodwin, “Adorno’s Dilemma: On Difficult Writing and Sophistication in Anthropology Today,” Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 99 (2011): 38, 42. Also see Adorno, “Difficulties,” in Essays on Music, trans. Susan H. Gillespie, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 644–80.

8

See Patrick Jagoda, “Gamification and Other Forms of Play,” boundary 2 40 (Summer 2013): 113–44.

9

Some existing work on games and emotion includes Katherine Isbister, How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016); Aki Järvinen, “Understanding Video Games as Emotional Experiences,” in The Video Game Theory Reader 2, ed. Bernard Perron and Mark J. P. Wolf (New York: Routledge, 2009), 85–108; Charles Herold, “Ico: Creating an Emotional Connection



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with a Pixelated Damsel,” in Well Played 1.0: Video Games, Value, and Meaning, ed. Drew Davidson (Pittsburgh, PA: ETC Press, 2009), 3–12; and Doris C. Rusch, “Emotional Design of Computer Games and Fiction Films,” in Computer Games as a Sociocultural Phenomenon: Games without Frontiers: War without Tears, ed. Andreas Jahn-­Sudmann and Ralf Stockmann (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 22–31. Much of the work on games and emotion has come from game designers and has also concerned the space of sports spectatorship. There has been less scholarship that concerns the intersection of games and affect (as opposed to emotion), but some of this work includes Aubrey Anable, Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018); Patrick Jagoda and Peter McDonald, “Game Mechanics, Experience Design, and Affective Play,” in The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers (New York: Routledge, 2018), 174–82; Patrick Jagoda, Network Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Aubrey Anable, “Casual Games, Time Management, and the Work of Affect,” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 2 ( June 2013), http://​adanewmedia​ .org​/2013​/06​/issue2​-­­anable/; and Lennart Nacke and Craig A. Lindley, “Affective Ludology, Flow and Immersion in a First Person Shooter: Measurement of Player Experience,” unpublished paper, April 2010, http://​www​.researchgate​.net​ /publication​/41022381​_Affective​_Ludology​_Flow​_and​_Immersion​_in​_a​_First​ -­­​_Person​_Shooter​_Measurement​_of​_Player​_Experience.

346

10

Though I do not delve into (dis)ability in this chapter, it is an important dimension of the forms of difficulty that I discuss. The treatment of concepts such as ability and control within games, via the lens of disability studies, is still comparatively understudied. An important meditation of this topic is Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux, “Blind Spots: The Phantom Pain, The Helen Keller Simulator, and Disability in Games,” in Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 121–70. This piece explores the overreliance of video games on sight, or what they call visual “hypertrophy” (126). For an exploration of the role of bodies in gameplay, see also Diane Carr, “Ability, Disability and Dead Space,” Game Studies 14 (December 2014), http://​gamestudies​ .org​/1402​/articles​/carr. Disability has also been taken up by experimental game designers, such as Eddo Stern in his sensory deprivation computer game Darkgame (2006), which seeks to include vision- and hearing-­impaired players and was created in conjunction with the Los Angeles Braille Institute.

11

Jennifer Doyle, Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), xi.

12

I am drawing this account of affect from several sources. For an extended distinction among feeling, emotion, and affect, see Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect,” M/C Journal 8 (December 2005), http://​journal​.media​-­­culture​.org​ .au​/0512​/03​-­­shouse​.php. For fuller overviews of contemporary affect theory, see Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), including his distinction between emotion and affect (28). Also, see several discussions in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). Beyond these texts, I am also drawing on work from theorists such as Lauren Berlant, Erin Manning, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Kathleen Stewart, and Silvan Tomkins. I expand on my usage of affect in the third part of the chapter.

N OT ES TO PAG ES 1 9 3–1 9 4

13

Another useful term here is game researcher Kurt Squire’s concept of “possibility spaces” (Kurt Squire, “Open-­Ended Video Games: A Model for Developing Learning for the Interactive Age,” in The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning, ed. Katie Salen [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008], 172).

14

Within the category of mechanical difficulty, I am combining the procedural and subjective qualities of mechanical challenge. Poet J. H. Prynne offers a valuable distinction between these qualities when he writes about “resistance” versus “difficulty.” On the one hand, “resistance is a quality that manifests itself to me only in the context of process, though I can obtain less vivid sensations of resistance from imagined process, or from process reported to have occurred to another subject.” By contrast, difficulty is “the subjective counterpart to resistance: I experience difficulty when I encounter resistance” ( J. H. Prynne, “Resistance and Difficulty,” Prospect 5 [Winter 1961]: 28). For Prynne, difficulty precedes resistance but is also closely related to and dependent upon it.

15

Charles Bernstein, “The Difficult Poem,” in Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 3.

16

Aarseth’s neologism “ergodic” derives from the Greek words ergon and hodos that mean “work” and “path,” respectively. As he explains, ergodic literature is literature regarding which “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text.” Aarseth suggests that both a literary text and a football game can be ergodic (Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997], 1, 95). While this is true, it is valuable to explore different types of difficulty.

17

See Bernstein, “The Difficult Poem,” 4. For a full consideration of forms of difficulty in poetry and what the editors call “comparative difficulty studies,” see Altieri and Nace, “Introduction,” 2.

18

Greg Costikyan, Uncertainty in Games (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 16.

19

Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 80.

20

Difficulty, here, overlaps with Costikyan’s central category of “uncertainty” in games. For more, see Costikyan, Uncertainty in Games, 71.

21

Other games, however, may also feel unfair or poorly developed because of unnecessarily baroque world designs (such as Super Pitfall [1986]), arbitrary solutions to puzzles (such as The 7th Guest [1993]), or unresponsive controls that produce significant mechanical challenges (such as Dark Castle [1986]).

22

Quoted in Steven L. Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond—The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001), 89.

23 Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games, 107. Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost

offer an extended discussion of the Atari VCS difficulty settings. In addition to individual challenge, they discuss the use of the switches for “handicapping”: “By featuring difficulty switches, the Atari VCS offered itself for use by pairs of



N O T ES T O PAG ES 1 9 4–1 9 6 347

players who might be older and younger siblings, children and parents, novice and expert” (Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009], 32). 24

For more, see Robin Hunicke and Vernell Chapman, “AI for Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment in Games,” http://​www​.cs​.northwestern​.edu​/​~hunicke​/pubs​ /Hamlet​.pdf.

25

See Salen, “Gaming Literacies: A Game Design Study in Action,” Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia 16 ( July 2007): 301–22; and Zimmerman, “Gaming Literacy: Game Design as a Model for Literacy in the Twenty-­First Century,” in The Video Game Theory Reader 2, 23–32.

26

See Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (New York: Penguin, 2011). Also see Cathy N. Davidson. Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century (New York: Penguin, 2011).

27

For an excellent discussion of Robotron 2084 and its difficulty, see Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games, 220–22.

28

Quoted in Mike Mahardy, “Roguelikes: The Rebirth of The Counterculture,” IGN, 4 July 2014, www​.ign​.com​/articles​/2014​/07​/04​/roguelikes​-­­the​-­­rebirth​-­­of​-­­the​ -­­counterculture.

29 Ibid.

348

30

For an extended analysis of Dwarf Fortress, see Boluk and LeMieux, “Dwarven Epitaphs: Procedural Histories in Dwarf Fortress,” in Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era, ed. N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 125–54. Admittedly, roguelikes and role-­playing games such as Dwarf Fortress are still embraced by comparatively small, if devoted, player groups. Even so, they are not anomalies. A number of games, across genres, are designed to be unforgivably difficult and embraced as such by their players. These works coexist with casual games and are often a direct response or alternative to them. This includes the critically acclaimed commercial hit Super Meat Boy (2010), an independently produced platform game. The same is true of the hit mobile arcade game Flappy Bird (2013) and its many imitators, which included extremely simple and notoriously difficult gameplay (with a mechanic of moving a bird up or down as it makes its way between green pipes). Many browser-­based games also attract players through the promise of unparalleled difficulty. These include The World’s Hardest Game (2008), which has recorded over seventy-­five million plays and yielded several sequels.

31

See, for example, “40d:Losing,” Dwarf Fortress Wiki, http://​dwarffortresswiki​.org​ /index​.php​/ l:​Losing.

32

For more on this development, see Jesper Juul, A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); and Steven E. Jones and George K. Thiruvathukal, Codename Revolution: The Nintendo Wii Platform (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).

N OT ES TO PAG ES 1 9 7–2 0 0

33

For a firsthand account, see Zoë Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight against Online Hate (New York: Hachette, 2017). For responses to exclusive and discriminatory gamer publics, see, for instance, Kishonna L. Gray, Gerald A. Voorhees, and Emma Vossen, Feminism in Play (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). For more writing on inclusive gaming publics and more expansive representation in games, see Jennifer Malkowski and TreaAndrea M. Russworm, Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017).

34

The category of serious games dates back to Clark C. Abt’s Serious Games (New York: Viking Press, 1970). However, it has seen expansion with organizations such as the Serious Games Initiative and Games for Change. For more on queer games, see Queer Game Studies, ed. Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

35

There is an important parallel between the mechanically difficult games that I have been discussing (in both their inclusive and exclusive dimensions) and Steiner’s analysis of difficult poetry. As he explains, by a certain account, literary difficulty becomes “an interference effect between underlying clarity and obstructed formulation.” He likens this attitude to “the classical and Cartesian reading of opaqueness, a reading whose inference is necessarily negative” (Steiner, “On Difficulty,” 263). Such a negative account is reductive, for Steiner, insofar as it ignores more complicated dimensions and experiences of interpretive difficulty that I discuss in the next section. It is worth noting, however, that negative treatments of mechanical difficulty can be equally limiting, insofar as they presume that gameplay challenge is merely an obstacle to be overcome or an unpleasant means to a rewarding end. In fact, mechanical difficulty (not only in video game play but also in the execution of a gymnastics routine or performance of a violin concerto) can also make possible feelings of pleasure, amusement, fascination, or ambivalence—not merely the satisfaction attendant to overcoming an obstacle.

36

Steiner, “On Difficulty,” 273.

37

Ibid., 267–74.

38

I am borrowing here from the phenomenological language of retention and protention that is elaborated by Edmund Husserl in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. John B. Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990).

39

For one excellent analysis of the relationship between literary and high art and video games, see Noah Wardrip-­Fruin, “Playable Media and Textual Instruments,” dichtung digital 1 (Spring 2005), http://​www​.dichtung​-­­digital​.de​/2005​/1​ /Wardrip​-­­Fruin​/index​.htm.

40

Joseph Tabbi, “Electronic Literature as World Literature; Or, the Universality of Writing Under Constraint,” Poetics Today 31 (Spring 2010): 38, 39.

41 See Yale French Studies 41 (1968). For a later analysis of literature and digital

games, in particular, see Astrid Ensslin, Literary Gaming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).



N O T ES T O PAG ES 2 0 0 –2 0 3 349

350

42

Jason Nelson, Game, Game, Game, and Again Game, Electronic Literature Collection Volume 2, http://​collection​.eliterature​.org​/2​/works​/nelson​_game​.html.

43

Jessica Pressman, “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-­First-­Century Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 48 (Fall 2009): 467.

44

The game announces thirteen levels but pre­sents both a level 12.5 and a level 13, making for fourteen levels total.

45

In some cases, observers of games may be more attentive to the subtleties of a game than the players themselves, who may be focusing, first and foremost, on game progress. See, for instance, Michael F. Young et al., “Our Princess Is in Another Castle: A Review of Trends in Serious Gaming for Education,” Review of Educational Research 82 (March 2012): 61–89. As they summarize: “DeHaan and Kono (2010) established additional evidence of this effect: University undergraduate observers were taught very effectively by the video game, learning more than twice as much vocabulary as the players themselves (DeHaan, Reed & Kuwada, 2010). We posit that this may be the result of increased cognitive load for the player of the game as more attention may be required to play than to watch, and this split of attentional resources could limit the amount of learning experienced by a player of the video game compared to a bystander” (75).

46

Salen, “Gaming Literacies,” 302.

47

The inability to control the speed of textual delivery is also at play in works such as Young-­Hae Chang Heavy Industries’s Dakota (2002). For a reading of that text, including its relentless rate of textual delivery, see Pressman, “The Strategy of Digital Modernism: Young-­Hae Chang Heavy Industries’s Dakota,” Modern Fiction Studies 54 (Summer 2008): 302–26.

48

Steiner, “On Difficulty,” 266.

49

For an account of “horror vacui,” see William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler, Universal Principles of Design: 125 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach Through Design (Beverly, MA: Rockport Publishers, 2011), 128.

50

Nelson, “Game, Game, Game, and Again Game. . . . ,” interview by Giulia Simi, Digicult 27 (September 2007): 17, 18. For more on the aesthetics of Adobe Flash, see Anastasia Salter and John Murray, Flash: Building the Interactive Web (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).

51

Steiner notes that there are several approaches to achieving ontological difficulty. For example, a writer might “become esoteric” in order “to break the chain of exemplary inheritance,” as Stéphane Mallarmé attempted in his deliberate departure from the writing of Victor Hugo. Additionally, a writer might take the opposite strategy and “return to an archaic past,” as Martin Heidegger does in his return to the pre-­Socratic history of Being found in the fragments of philosophers such as Heraclitus (Steiner, “On Difficulty,” 274). Arguably, Nelson attempts both strategies in his game through an esoteric style that combines contemporary video game play conventions with a hand-­drawn aesthetic that disrupts conventions of vector graphics and pixel art in video games.

N OT ES TO PAG ES 2 0 3–2 0 8

52

John Vincent, Queer Lyrics: Difficulty and Closure in American Poetry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 12.

53

Building on Doyle’s work, affective difficulty in video games, then, might be said to derive from challenges in at least three domains. First, there are institutional politics, such as the influence of the video game industry, independent developers and artists, reviews and scholarship, and platform constraints, as well as histories of design, development, preservation, and distribution. Second, there is the difficulty of historical context within which we might consider the cultural, social, and political importance of games as material objects and occasions for social play. Third, we have affective reception itself, which includes the feelings and intensities that players sense when they experience and explore game form. For a further elaboration of the categories of these institutional, historical, and affective categories, see Doyle, Hold It Against Me, 23.

54

Ibid., 7.

55

For Benjamin’s discussion of film reception amidst distraction, see Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). For an elaboration of flow theory, which is relevant to video games, see Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 2008).

56

Even play theory occasionally privileges the symbolic and structural to the affective, as when Eugene Fink contends that “human play is the symbolic act of representing the meaning of the world and of life” (Eugene Fink, “The Oasis of Happiness: Toward an Ontology of Play,” in Yale French Studies 41: “Game, Play, Literature” [1968]: 28).

57 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 35. 58

For an elaboration of ways to read affect within video games, see Jagoda and McDonald, “Game Mechanics, Experience Design, and Affective Play.” In this chapter, I follow Doyle, who notes, “I also avoid naming, once and for all, the difference between an affect, an emotion, and a feeling” (Doyle, Hold It Against Me, xiv). Though I do think the differences between these terms matter, including in analyses of art, a strict focus on affect precludes valuable early contributions made to this discussion by critics who blur these terms.

59

Miguel Sicart, Play Matters (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 20.

60 Isbister, How Games Move Us, xvii. 61 Doyle, Hold It Against Me, 8, 71. 62

Ibid., 80.

63

Perhaps the most common affective quality that is invoked in game criticism, especially in popular media and industry discussions, is fun. Fun becomes a catchall concept that, in a single breath, both accounts for the centrality of



N O T ES T O PAG ES 2 0 8–2 1 0 351

affect in games and dismisses any in-­depth discussion of it by converting it into a binary term (by which I mean: “Is this game fun or not?”). Though it might signal affective experience, the term more often marks a more stable and structured emotion. Fun remains an overused word in game industry circles. To clarify, my point is not that game designers should not strive for the types of engagement that are often invoked through the word fun. Instead of dismissing fun in video games, a mature video game criticism needs to develop a richer vocabulary of complex intensities that produce tensions and contradictions in conjunction with myriad forms of excitement and engagement. Understanding the pleasures that video games afford (beyond the emotional register marked as fun) is critical to making sense of the historical present from which they emerge and that they help to coproduce. Arguably, though fun describes an emotion, it takes on a greater complexity when considered as a relational affect. Along these lines, Bogost reframes fun not as a quality of a system but instead a “sense of discovering something in a thing” (“A Conversation with Ian Bogost: Fun. It’s [Probably] Not What You Think It Is,” interview by Jesse James Garrett, Adaptive Path, July 22, 2013, http://​adaptivepath​.org​/ideas​/a​-­­conversation​-­­with​-­­ian​ -­­bogost​-­­fun/). Fun, for Bogost, is an emergent property that depends on interactions between players and games or among players in the midst of a game. Fun, then, is not an aesthetic element such as composition or color but a relational and emergent property. I elaborate this point in this book’s coda. 64 Doyle, Hold It Against Me, xvii. 65

See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002); and Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012).

66

See Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 2.

67

It is worth observing that Ocias is not an industry developer but rather an artist who creates interactive installations, 3-­D animations, and video games.

68

Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “loved.” Loved can also be used as a noun that marks the “beloved.”

69

For this and subsequent references to Loved, see Loved, dev. Alexander D. Ocias (2010).

70

Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, in Deleuze and Leopold von Sacher-­Masoch, Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 34.

71 Galloway, Gaming, 91. Also see McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press, 2007). As Wark explains, “If the novel, cinema, or television can reveal through their particulars an allegory of the world that makes them possible, the game reveals something else. . . . For the gamer, the game produces allegory as something algorithmic” (44).

72 Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, 18. 73

352

I draw this distinction from Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961). Caillois writes about the distinc-

N OT ES TO PAG ES 2 1 0 –2 1 6

tion between paidia (free play) and ludus (rule-­bound games); see, for example, his elaboration of this distinction on p. 27. 74 Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, 88. 75

Bernstein, “The Difficult Poem,” 5.

76

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-­Element in Culture (New York: Roy Publishers, 1950), 13.

77

Winnicott comments on the precariousness of play. He writes, “The thing about playing is always the precariousness of the interplay of personal psychic reality and the experience of control of actual objects. This is the precariousness of magic itself, magic that arises in intimacy, in a relationship that is being found to be reliable” (D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality [New York: Routledge, 2005], 64). It is important that, for Winnicott, this precariousness, even when tinged with anxiety, remains satisfying in most cases.

78

Mary Flanagan, Critical Play: Radical Game Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 4. Here, Flanagan is drawing in part from play theorist Brian Sutton-­ Smith.

79

Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002), 119.

80

See, for instance, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play (San Francisco: Jossey-­Bass Inc., Publishers, 1975).

81

Chad Raphael, Christine M. Bachen, and Pedro F. Hernández-­Ramos, “Flow and Cooperative Learning in Civic Game Play,” New Media and Society 14 (December 2012): 1323.

82

Quoted in Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games, 118.

83

Here, I am discussing games as an object of analysis and a medium for contemporary cultural education. However, it is possible to make an even stronger case for game-­based learning. For example, game designer Raph Koster treats game play and fun as nearly synonymous with learning in A Theory of Fun for Game Design (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media Inc., 2014). Also, for an attempt to map out game analysis and literacy approaches, see Clara Fernández-­Vara, Introduction to Game Analysis (New York: Routledge, 2015).

84

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities—Part 1,” Center for 21st Century Studies, January 9, 2013, http://​www​.c21uwm​.com​/2013​/01​/09​ /the​-­­dark​-­­side​-­­of​-­­the​-­­digital​-­­humanities​-­­part​-­­1/. I also elaborate this argument in Patrick Jagoda, “Gaming the Humanities,” differences 25, no. 1 (2014): 189–215.

85

Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 30, 37–38, 38.



N O T ES T O PAG ES 2 1 6–2 2 1 353

Chapter Six

354

1

Jesper Juul, The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 9.

2

It is worth noting that players reportedly fail at videogame tasks about 80 percent of the time. Nicole Lazzaro, an expert on game emotions, has made the counterintuitive suggestion that gamers frequently enjoy failing at games. Lazzaro and researchers at the M. I. N. D. Lab in Helsinki, Finland, tested heart rate, skin conductivity, and electrical activation of facial muscles during gameplay and found that “players exhibited the most potent combination of positive emotions when they made a mistake.” Animations following failure often served as “a vivid demonstration of the players’ agency in the game” ( Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World [New York: Penguin, 2011], 66). In other words, a fair chance of success made failure acceptable, and a demonstration of agency (through loss) yielded optimism.

3

Bonnie Ruberg, “Playing to Lose: The Queer Art of Failing at Video Games,” in Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games, ed. Jennifer Malkowski and TreaAndrea M. Russworm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 204.

4

For extended analyses of the sociopolitical dimensions of failure in games, see Patrick Jagoda, “Gamification and Other Forms of Play,” boundary 2 40, no. 2 (2013): 113–44; Patrick Jagoda, “Improvisational Aesthetics,” in Network Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), especially 209–16; Aubrey Anable, “Games to Fail With,” in Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 103–29; and Ruberg, “Playing to Lose.”

5

Anable, “Games to Fail With,” 119, 120.

6

Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). Anable explicitly argues, “It is unclear in Halberstam’s formulation how failing and its negative affects can meaningfully intervene in neoliberal structures that seem to thrive on failure” (“Games to Fail With,” 120).

7

Within the longer history of capitalism, failure is already a central preoccupation at both the individual and systemic level. Moreover, Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction,” which predates neoliberalism, already gestures toward the twenty-­first-­century recuperation of failure as not only a positive individual quality but also the central engine of systemwide innovation. For more, see: Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1942). Numerous writers develop the historically specific form that “creative destruction” takes within neoliberalism. For example, Naomi Klein uses the term “disaster capitalism” to describe this period’s “orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities” (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism [New York: Picador, 2007], 6).

8

Anjali Sastry and Kara Penn, Fail Better: Design Smart Mistakes and Succeed Sooner (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014); and Leah Weiss, “You Can’t ‘Fail Better’ If You Don’t Reflect on What You Learned,” Entrepreneur, March 13, 2018.

N OT ES TO PAG ES 2 2 1 –2 24

9

Stefan H. Thomke, Experimentation Matters: Unlocking the Potential of New Technologies for Innovation (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School, 2003), 13; Adam Thierer, “Failing Better: What We Learn by Confronting Risk and Uncertainty,” in Nudge Theory in Action: Behavioral Design in Policy and Markets, ed. Sherzod Abdukadirov (New York: Palgrave Macmillan [Palgrave Advances in Behavioral Economics], 2016), 65–66.

10

Steven Horwitz and Jack Knych, “The Importance of Failure,” Freeman 61, no. 9 (November 2011): https://​fee​.org​/articles​/the​-­­importance​-­­of​-­­failure/.

11

Nassim N. Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (London: Penguin Books, 2013).

12

Ibid., 67, 6, 377, 4. Also see Nassim N. Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (New York: Random House, 2018). Similarly to Taleb, Adam Thierer elevates fragility and failure to a naturalistic imperative, a key part of “the process of evolutionary, experimental change” (“Failing Better,” 71). Though I do not discuss “resilience” in detail, this concept has become central to economic and systems thinking. For a popular account of resilience, see Andrew Zolli and Ann M. Healy, Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).

13

For a discussion of neoliberal precarity, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000) and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004). For a fuller expansion of precarity in and beyond neoliberalism, see Nancy Ettlinger, “Precarity Unbound,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 32, no. 3 (2007): 319–40.

14

Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 25. An earlier version of the discussion about “the precariousness of life itself” appears in Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2006), 134. For an expansion on the persistence of power predicated on death and killing, see Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.

15

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2017), 72.

16

Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 134.

17

Maurizio Lazzarato, Experimental Politics: Work, Welfare, and Creativity in the Neoliberal Age, trans. Arianna Bove, Jeremy Gilbert, Andrew Goffey, Mark Hayward, Jason Read, and Alberto Toscano (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 40, 16, 39. The emphasis on security and insecurity in neoliberalism take an even more explicit form with Michel Foucault’s concept of “security” and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “control.”

18 Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment, 23. 19

Ibid., 17.

20 Anable, Playing with Feelings, 103.



N O T ES T O PAG ES 2 24–2 2 7 355

21

Emily Short, “Practice 2015: Hamilton, and the Power Fantasy,” November 15, 2015, https://emshort.blog/2015/11/15/practice-­2015-­hamilton-­and-­the-­power -­fantasy/.

22

SPENT, http://mckinneydev.flywheelsites.com/campaigns/spent/ (accessed on June 29, 2020). The game has also led to over $70,000 in donations.

23

Nick Dyer-­Witheford and Greig De Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 192.

24

Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 9.

25

Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 91.

26

The only times that the game offers choices that do not entail a monetary or emotional cost are rare occasions on which a player can engage in self-­ betterment (e.g., learning basic skills necessary to tutor one’s child instead of paying a tutor) or participation in a larger community (e.g., finding a running partner to stay healthy). Whenever a community option is selected, a new window opens to a user’s Facebook account and allows sharing of links about SPENT.

27 Juul, The Art of Failure, 25. 28 Galloway, Gaming, 122–23. 29

The concept of the “magic circle” derives from Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-­Element in Culture (New York: Roy Publishers, 1950). This term’s meaning is expanded considerably by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman in Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

30

Popular discourse about serious games often includes broad claims about the realism of such games. For example, Zachary Sniderman describes SPENT as “a realistic impression of what it’s like to deal with homelessness and poverty.” He then adds that the game “guides users through what it feels like to be homeless” (“New Website Guides You Through the Homeless Experience,” Mashable, February 8, 2011). Notably, these claims to realism are primarily affective and experiential rather than applied to the ways that the game renders its world through visual and auditory means.

31 Anable, Playing with Feelings, 120. 32

356

Gina Roussos and John F. Dovidio, “Playing Below the Poverty Line: Investigating an Online Game as a Way to Reduce Prejudice toward the Poor,” Cyberpsychology 10, no. 2 (2016). For a similar line of thought about failure yielding a sense of greater agency, see Juul, who, drawing from the theory of learned helplessness, argues that “it is only through feeling responsible for failure (which we dislike) that we can feel responsible for escaping failure (which we like)” (The Art of Failure, 54). Another study of 5,139 high school students across four states found that playing SPENT could have some positive effects. This study found that students who played SPENT received higher affective learning scores

N OT ES TO PAG ES 2 2 7–2 3 2

than a group that read a first-­person narrative about homelessness (the control group) and sustained them after three weeks. Here, affective learning included elements of “immersion, flow, engagement, procedural rhetoric, and ethos” (“Spent: Changing Students’ Affective Learning Toward Homelessness Through Persuasive Video Game Play,” CHI 2014, April 26 to May 1, 2014, 3425). 33

Jörg Lukas Matthaei, Thresholdland: An Expatriation in Ten Days (Schwellenland), http://​w ww​.matthaei​-­­und​-­­konsorten​.de​/en​/projekte​/schwellenland/. Additional information about the game was acquired through an extensive audio interview and email exchanges with Matthaei that took place between January and April 2012.

34

Digital media were used for various purposes in Thresholdland, including rule setting, narrative exposition, communication among players, and progression through the game. Players, for instance, had to send digital photographs proving completion of certain tasks in order to receive permission to move on to subsequent levels.

35

I discuss the form of alternate reality games in greater detail in the final chapter of this book. For additional analysis, see Sean Stewart, “Alternate Reality Games,” http://​www​.seanstewart​.org​/interactive​/args/. Also see Jeffrey Kim, Elan Lee, Timothy Thomas, and Caroline Dombrowski, “Storytelling in New Media: The Case of Alternate Reality Gaming, 2001–2009,” First Monday 14, no. 6 ( June 1, 2009), http://​www​.firstmonday​.org​/ htbin​/cgiwrap​/bin​/ojs​/index​.php​ /fm​/article​/view​/2484. For an extensive study of this form of gaming in its first decade, see Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros, and Annika Wærn, Pervasive Games: Theory and Design (Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2009).

36

Matthaei, for instance, has insisted on Thresholdland’s status as a game. While I cannot explore it in greater detail here, there are nevertheless numerous links between performance art and digital media art. As Johannes Birringer notes, performance is inherently “transmedial” in a way that includes but also exceeds its most common forms of theater or cinema. For this reason, digital processes, including “interactive programming and physical computing, sampling and real-­time processing, sensory feedback, animation, data streaming and distributed networks (telepresence),” are being increasingly integrated into performance to “produce new physical experiences and perceptions, which are the result of the hybridization of virtual and real spaces” ( Johannes Birringer, “Interactive Environments and Digital Perception,” in A Performance Cosmology, ed. Richard Gough, Judie Christie, and Daniel P. Watt [London: Routledge, 2005], 87). Also see Steve Dixon and Barry Smith, Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).

37

I am drawing here on Salen and Zimmerman’s definition of a game as “a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome” (Rules of Play, 80).

38

Still other activities included a dating game that explored myths surrounding falsified marriages and a frightening simulation of the process of trafficking undocumented immigrants across borders.

39

These numbers are based on the people who signed up for the game on the first



N O T ES T O PAG ES 2 3 3–2 3 6 357

day as well as unique hits counted on the primary Thresholdland website (author interview with Matthaei).

358

40

Caroline Pelletier, “Games and Learning: What’s the Connection?,” International Journal of Learning and Media 1, no. 1 (2009): 89.

41

Thresholdland: An Expatriation in Ten Days, http://​matthaei​-­­und​-­­konsorten​.de​ /en​/projekte​/schwellenland/.

42

Lauren Berlant observes that “the promise of the good life no longer masks the living precarity of this historical present” of neoliberalism. She describes “a steady hum of livable crisis ordinariness” that characterizes precarity for the majority of the population in the present. See Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 196.

43

Ettlinger, “Precarity Unbound,” 320.

44

For an extended formalist account of ludic uncertainty, see Greg Costikyan, Uncertainty in Games (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). Costikyan’s taxonomy includes categories such as performative uncertainty (linked to “physical performance”), solver’s uncertainty (linked to one-­time puzzles), player uncertainty (affects of players on each other), analytic complexity (games as difficult strategic choices), and so on.

45

D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 2005), 47.

46

For an extended analysis of play style, including in digital games, see Peter McDonald, “Playfulness 1947–2017: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Games,” PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2018. Also, for other elaborations on concepts of play style, see Thorsten Botz-­Bornstein, “Hermeneutics of Play—Hermeneutics of Place: On Play, Style, and Dream” in Hermeneutics, Space, and Place, ed. B. Janz (New York: Springer Publishers, 2016); and Eric Hayot and Edward Wesp, “Style: Strategy and Mimesis in Ergodic Literature,” Comparative Literature Studies 41, no. 3 (2004): 404–23.

47

This point is particularly true of casual mobile games that are often designed to be played for short periods that can be repeated during flexible moments in one’s day. Of course, a game’s magic circle is always permeable. For instance, players may technically be able to leave a game at any given moment but may feel social obligation to remain for longer periods, because of pressure from coplayers or guilds in online games. Similarly, time-­sensitive or limited events may draw players back into a standard screen-­based game at inconvenient moments. Even so, the blurring of the magic circle line is particularly pronounced in pervasive games such as Thresholdland.

48

For more on the improvisation in S.E.E.D., and the substantial changes that were made in the process of playing this game, see Patrick Jagoda, Melissa Gilliam, Peter McDonald, and Ashlyn Sparrow, “From Alternate to Alternative Reality: Games as Cultural Probes,” in Alternate Reality Games and the Cusp of Digital Gameplay, ed. Antero Garcia and Greg Niemeyer (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).

49

Brian Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 23.

N OT ES TO PAG ES 2 3 6–2 3 8

50

Jack Halberstam, “Queer Gaming,” in Queer Game Studies, ed. Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 188.

51

For instance, Bonnie “Bo” Ruberg writes, “Far from being a merely inconvenient and inconsequential obstacle on the road to success, video game failure matters and can be leveraged as a form of resistance” (“Playing to Lose: The Queer Art of Failing at Video Games,” 208). Halberstam also discusses failure as a possible way of resisting the wealth accumulation fantasies of capitalism (“The Arts of Failure” in Queer Game Studies, 202. I would also include Bernard Suits’s much earlier argument in The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), as an argument in favor of gameplay as a utopian activity that challenges the instrumentality of capitalism.

52

Ruberg, “The Arts of Failure,” 204.

53

For more on speedrunning as a play style, see Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux, Metagaming. Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). They contend, “Speedruns, or ‘fast playthroughs of video games,’ are metagames that encourage the discovery and manipulation of mechanical exploits not immediately evident to the player or accepted as legitimate forms of play (Speed Demos Archive 2014)” (15).

54

Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 168, 238.

55

Ibid., 189.

56

William E. Connolly, The Fragility of Things: Self-­organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 36.

57

Tomorrow Corporation, “HEY KIDS! Little Inferno Sold 1 Million Copies!,” https://​tomorrowcorporation​.com​/posts​/ hey​-­­kids​-­­little​-­­inferno​-­­sold​-­­1​-­­million​ -­­copies.

58

Tomorrow Corporation is listed as a division of the Experimental Gameplay Group.

59 Juul, The Art of Failure, 25. 60

The letters of the blocks vary each time you purchase them. The second stack, for instance, contains the word P-­A-­I-­N within it, signaling an atmosphere of suffering below the surface of children’s blocks.

61 Connolly, The Fragility of Things, 25. 62



For more on this capitalist disaster, see Klein, The Shock Doctrine. See especially chapter 19, “Blanking the Beach.” Klein characterizes this development that followed the catastrophe as essentially a second tsunami of disaster capitalism that exacerbated existing inequalities and accelerated gentrification. Also, I do not mean to suggest that the relationship between economic and environmental systems is merely bidirectional. Invoking complexity science, Connolly represents fragility as exceeding any particular causality. For example, in discussing N O T ES T O PAG ES 2 3 8–24 6 359

the 2010 BP Gulf of Mexico oil disaster and capitalism’s deployment of fracking technologies, Connolly maps the consequences to seemingly distant “extended droughts, storms, and floods connected to climate change that press upon the agricultural capacities of the world in the face of rapid population growth” as well as “the potential ramifications between earthquakes, tsunamis, dense populations close to the sea, and nuclear power plants in sites of seismic instability, a combination that could become amplified into volatile clashes between citizen activists and neoliberal forces” (The Fragility of Things, 33). 63

For a fuller account of how contemporary videogames can achieve this kind of duality, see Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012), 44.

64

John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 15.

65

Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, vol. 1 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). Stiegler speaks about “technics” more broadly, but I am thinking especially of Mark Hansen’s extension of Stiegler to digital media in “Media Theory,” Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2006): 297–306. Another way of putting this is that prior to text (privileged by the linguistic turn) or images (the pictorial turn) are technics and media (the media turn).

66

Eugene Thacker, Cosmic Pessimism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 14.

67

The term “edgelord” gestures toward a more general online figure. But for more on climate change edgelords, in particular, see Mike Pearl, “Climate Change Edgelords Are the New Climate Change Deniers,” Vice, October 10, 2018, https://​ www​.vice​.com​/en​_us​/article​/pa9vg8​/climate​-­­change​-­­edgelords​-­­are​-­­the​-­­new​ -­­climate​-­­change​-­­deniers.

68 Thacker, Cosmic Pessimism, 5.

Chapter Seven

360

1

See, for instance: Celia Pearce, “Role-­play Improvisation and Emergent Authorship,” in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, vol. 2, ed. George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Also see Ben Medler and Brian Magerko, “The Implications of Improvisational Acting and Role-­playing on Design Methodologies,” Proceeding CHI ’10 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2010), 483–92. A great deal of important writing about improvisation and games has also occurred at the intersection of theater and performance studies and game studies.

2

I did not make up this category for comic effect—and it is hardly the most unusual speedrunning category that one might find on a forum such as Reddit. See u/PeekingBoo, Reddit, “[“WR”] Super Mario 64 16-­Star Speedrun where every star collected is replaced with a Super Mario World 11-­Exit Speedrun . . . w/ DDR

N OT ES TO PAG ES 24 6–2 5 4

Dance Pads . . . in 4:34:​44,” https://​www​.reddit​.com​/r​/speedrun​/comments​ /5k3jc6​/wr​_super​_mario​_64​_16star​_speedrun​_where​_every/. 3

Improvisation in game studies often emerges in analyses of play. For more on improvisation in improvisational theater, martial arts, and psychotherapy, see Earl Vickers, “‘Yes, and’: Acceptance, Resistance, and Change in Improv, Aikido, and Psychotherapy” (Figshare, 2015), https://​www​.sfxmachine​.com​/docs​/yes,​ _and​.pdf. Vickers observes, “The twentieth century saw the development of some new and ostensibly unrelated disciplines that nevertheless embody strikingly similar concepts relating to acceptance, resistance, and change. These disciplines include improvisational theatre (‘improv’), the martial art Aikido, and various acceptance-­based forms of psychotherapy, including Ericksonian hypnotherapy as well as therapies incorporating mindfulness meditation” (1). For more on improvisation in music and everyday conversation, see R. Keith Sawyer, “Improvisation and the Creative Process: Dewey, Collingwood, and the Aesthetics of Spontaneity,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 149–61. In this article, Sawyer notes, “The few treatments that exist have been ethnographic descriptions of musical and verbal performance genres. In music, in addition to a recent focus on jazz, European and American writers have written widely on the Indian raga, the Javanese gamelan, the Arabic and Turkish maqam, the Iranian dastgah, and group African drumming. Studies of verbal improvisation are primarily found in the branch of linguistic anthropology called the ethnography of speaking. These researchers focus on public verbal performance in a variety of cultures; most of these performance genres incorporate improvisational elements” (151). For more on the sociopolitical significance of improvisation in experimental “free” jazz, see George Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). For more on improvisation and business, see Bob Kulhan and Chuck Crisafulli, Getting to “Yes And”: The Art of Business Improv (Stanford, CA: Stanford Business Books, 2017).

4

Vickers, “‘Yes, and,’” 2.

5

Viola Spolin, Improvisation for the Theater: Third Edition (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 383.

6

Vickers, “‘Yes, and,’” 14.

7 Spolin, Improvisation for the Theater, 5. 8

Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961).

9

Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2014), 35–36. Suits offers a short definition that contends that “playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” (41).

10

Sawyer, “Improvisation and the Creative Process,” 153.

11

For example, Second City Works (the “professional services arm of the world-­ renowned Second City comedy theater”) uses improvisational methods for corporate and organizational training. For more, see https://​www​.secondcityworks​ .com/ (accessed December 27, 2019).



N O T ES T O PAG ES 2 5 4–2 5 5 361

362

12

Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 45, 46. Elsewhere, Lazzarato notes that “the effects of the power of debt on subjectivity (culpability and responsibility) . . . allow capitalism to construct a bridge between the present and the future” (Experimental Politics: Work, Welfare, and Creativity in the Neoliberal Age, trans. Arianna Bove, Jeremy Gilbert, Andrew Goffey, Mark Hayward, Jason Read, and Alberto Toscano [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017], 37).

13

Finding new pathways through constraints is one way that gameplay is understood. Brian Upton, for instance, notes, “Learning how to play is a matter of constructing a minimal workable set of internal constraints. Sometimes that means memorizing rules, or discovering them through trial and error” (The Aesthetic of Play [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015], 32–33). Different games offer different degrees of improvisatory freedom.

14

I offer an overview of alternate reality games in this section. For additional discussions of the form and key cases, see Antero Garcia and Greg Niemeyer. Alternate Reality Games and the Cusp of Digital Gameplay (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018). Also see Dave Szulborski, Through the Rabbit Hole: A Beginner’s Guide to Playing Alternate Reality Games. (New Fiction Pub, 2005). For a fuller account of the participatory aesthetics of ARGs, see Christy Dena, “Emerging Participatory Cul‑ ture Practices: Player-­Created Tiers in Alternate Reality Games,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 14, no. 1 (2008): 41–57. For an exploration of forms related to alternate reality games, including pervasive games and live-­action role-­playing games, see Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros, and Annika Waern, Pervasive Games: Theory and Design (CRC Press, 2017).

15

I expand on the distinction between “multimedia” and “transmedia” in Network Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), especially 189–91.

16

Though ARGs are a particular game form, storytelling in the context of “always-­ on computing” or “ubiquitous computing” has found recent representations in films such as Unfriended (2014) and Searching (2018).

17

Roger Caillois posits a distinction between two forms of play, “paidia” and “ludus.” He writes, “Such a primary power of improvisation and joy, which I call paidia, is allied to the taste for gratuitous difficulty that I propose to call ludus” (Man, Play, and Games [New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961], 27). Though an ARG is improvisational, that improvisation is usually organized around difficult and arbitrary gameplay challenges. At the same time, the central role of collective and social play in these games pushes against the strictly parameterized competition of many contemporary video games.

18

Jane McGonigal, “This Is Not a Game: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play,” presentation, Digital Arts and Culture Conference, RMIT University, Melbourne, 2003, https://​janemcgonigal​.files​.wordpress​.com​/2010​/12​/mcgonigal​-­­jane​-­­this​ -­­is​-­­not​-­­a​-­­game​.pdf, accessed December 27, 2019.

19

Mark Seltzer, The Official World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 33, 34.

20

Ibid., 134.

N OT ES TO PAG ES 2 5 6–2 5 9

21

Sean Stewart, “Collaborating with the Audience: Alternate Reality Games,” http://​www​.seanstewart​.org​/collaborating​-­­with​-­­the​-­­audience​-­­alternate​-­­reality​ -­­games/, accessed December 27, 2019.

22

In addition to my codirectors Heidi Coleman and Kristen Schilt, these contributors included Laura Ashlock, Corrie Besse, Mollie Braley, Ben Carcerello, Dave Carlson, Derek Chan, Daniel Cohen, Christine Fleener, Arianna Gass, Hugh Graham, Julianne Grasso, Omie Hsu, Bill Hutchison, Rachael Koplin, Daniel Lipson, Jesse Martinez, Grace McLeod, Peter McDonald, Ben Nicholson, Liam Philiben, Jenny Pinson, Jordan Pruett, Samantha Rausch, Nathan R. Rohrer, Sarah Ann Saltiel, Zoë Smith, Ashlyn Sparrow, Sandy Weisz, India Weston, and Dav Yenkler. Various University of Chicago staff also made invaluable contributions to the world of the parasite.

23

As with all of my writing about ARGs, I am indebted to my collaborators. For previous writing on cultural probes and ARGs, see Patrick Jagoda, Melissa Gilliam, Peter McDonald, and Ashlyn Sparrow, “From Alternate to Alternative Reality: Games as Cultural Probes,” in Alternate Reality Games and the Cusp of Digital Gameplay, ed. Antero Garcia and Greg Niemeyer (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).

24

Nigel Thrift, “Lifeworld Inc—And What to Do about It,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (2011): 19.

25

William Gaver, Andrew Boucher, Sarah Pennington, and Brendan Walker, “Cultural Probes and the Value of Uncertainty,” Interactions 11, no. 5 (2004): 53–56.

26

William Gaver, T. Dunne, and E. Pacenti, “Cultural Probes: Novel Interaction Techniques to Increase the Presence of the Elderly in Their Local Communities,” Interactions ( January/February 1999): 25.

27

Thrift, “Lifeworld Inc,” 18, 19–20.

28

See, for instance, Anatol Rapoport, “Formal Games as Probing Tools for Investigating Behavior Motivated by Trust and Suspicion,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 7, no. 3, (September 1963): 570–79.

29

For a theoretical account of the James Marion Sims experiment that focuses on race and gender in the work, see C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). For more on the Tuskegee experiment, see Susan M. Reverby, Tuskegee’s Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

30

Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 26, 16.

31

Ibid., 31.

32

For concepts of dissensus, we drew, for instance, from sources such as J. Hillis Miller, “The University of Dissensus,” Oxford Literary Review 17, no. 1/2 (1995): 121–43, and Ewa P. Ziarek, An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).



N O T ES T O PAG ES 2 6 0 –2 6 9 363

364

33

For a critique of the concept of tolerance, see Kristen Schilt, Just One of the Guys? Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

34

Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), 38, 37.

35

Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 19.

36

Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 54.

37

See Thrift, “Lifeworld Inc,” 19. Also see Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 2.

38

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013), 26. In the preface to the book, Jack Halberstam offers a formulation that captures our relationship to the University of Chicago orientation when he writes, “The disorientation, Moten and Harney will tell you is not just unfortunate, it is necessary because you will no longer be in one location moving forward to another, instead you will already be part of ‘the “movement of things”’” (11). In their sense, then, this game was a space of “disorientation” and of “study” outside of institutional norms. It is also worth noting that Harney and Moten characterize the undercommons as an ongoing experiment. As they put it: “And the plan is to invent the means in a common experiment launched from any kitchen, any back porch, any basement, any hall, any park bench, any improvised party, every night. This ongoing experiment with the informal, carried out by and on the means of social reproduction, as the to come of the forms of life, is what we mean by planning; planning in the undercommons is not an activity, not fishing or dancing or teaching or loving, but the ceaseless experiment with the futurial presence of the forms of life that make such activities possible” (74–75).

39

Rita Raley, Tactical Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 6, 9. Though tactical media focus on “symbolic” elements, the parasite ARG was more invested in the affective dimensions of the contemporary transmedia environment. Raley’s sense of parasitism also resonates with Elizabeth Povinelli’s idea of “immanent critique” that modulates affect within specific spatial and temporal arrangements (Economies of Abandonment, 16). Alongside Raley, we also borrowed our underlying theory of parasitism from Michel Serres, The Parasite (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

40

Mattie Brice, “Play and Be Real About It: What Games Could Learn from Kink,” in Queer Game Studies, ed. Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 79, 78.

41

Brian Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 49, 54.

42

Ibid., 35–36, 54.

43

The players all understood that this character was not being incarcerated in

N OT ES TO PAG ES 2 70 –2 7 5

a legal fashion or that they had entered the actual criminal justice system. Even so, some of the players did not know exactly how the character was being detained or what the consequences of this detention might be. As with other aspects of the game, the line between game and reality was blurred. 44

For a fuller account of this in-­game protest, see Jagoda, Gilliam, McDonald, and Sparrow, “From Alternate to Alternative Reality”; and Philip Ehrenberg, Patrick Jagoda, and Melissa Gilliam, “S.E.E.D.: Creating and Implementing an Alternate Reality,” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 22, no. 2 (2018), http://​kairos​.technorhetoric​.net​/22​.2​/praxis​/ehrenberg​-­­et​-­­al​/index. This game was a followup to an earlier ARG, The Source (2013), which was also created to explore STEM career pathways for underrepresented youth.

45

Patricia Clough, The User Unconscious: On Affect, Media, and Measure (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2018), 149.

46

This book deliberately focuses on the paradigm and worldview of neoliberalism that accompanies the early decades of video games. Future analyses will benefit from thinking through scholarship that considers what comes after neoliberalism, including McKenzie Wark’s Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (New York: Verso, 2019).

47

I am gesturing here to the first epigraph in which Erin Manning observes that “Improvisation engenders new concepts” (Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007], xviii).

48

I explore the idea of game in concepts in greater detail in Patrick Jagoda, “Introduction: Conceptual Games, or the Language of Video Games,” Critical Inquiry 45 (Autumn 2018): 130–36.

49

For more on “critical play,” see Mary Flanagan, Critical Play: Radical Game Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). For more on “experimental humanities,” see Ed Finn, What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). For more on critical making, see Matt Ratto, “Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life,” Information Society 27, no. 4 (2011): 252–60; and Patrick Jagoda, “Critique and Critical Making,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 132, no. 2 (2017): 356–63.

50 Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, 4. 51

Ibid., 12.

52

To be clear, I am not saying that an ARG like the parasite could not be run at a different university (including a less resource-­rich institution) or could not be adapted to a different age group. Such an adaptation could reuse many of the resources from the original game but would also require designers to become conversant with the histories, regulations, and norms of the new institution or participant group.

53 Lazzarato, Experimental Politics, 95. 54



Ian Bogost, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (Cambridge, MA: N O T ES T O PAG ES 2 7 5–2 7 9 365

MIT Press, 2008), 157. Bogost extends this comment to Grand Theft Auto V, which covers an estimated 49 square miles of simulated space, when he observes that the game creates the appearance of affordances that it in fact lacks (Yannick LeJacq, “Grand Theft Auto V Isn’t as Grand as You Think,” Wall Street Journal, September 26, 2013). 55 Lazzarato, Experimental Politics, 93, 94, 121, 193.

Coda

366

1

Ian Bogost, “Fun,” presented at UX Week 2013 (August 20, 2013), http://​open transcripts​.org​/transcript​/fun/.

2

Wai Chee Dimock, “Weak Theory: Henry James, Colm Tóibín, and W. B. Yeats,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 4 (2013): 733.

3

Ian Bogost expands his critique of “fun” into a thoughtful redefinition of the term in Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games (Washington, DC: The Perseus Books Group, 2016). In summary, he argues, “We think fun means enjoyment, and that we want enjoyment above all else. But we’re wrong. Fun is the aftermath of deliberately manipulating a familiar situation in a new way” (57). For Bogost, fun can ultimately entail challenge and novelty, rather than pleasant ease. I admire Bogost’s redefinition, though it still captures only a subset of so-­called fun activities, insofar as everyday usage of the word “fun” still frequently refers to more banal and passive undertakings that may engage someone without depending fundamentally on novelty. In my usage, “joy” may overlap with Bogost’s usage of fun in its inventive, explorative, and attentive dimensions. But following from Spinoza and affect theory, joy also means to capture a wider spectrum of affects than even an expanded sense of fun allows.

4

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 112. In this passage, Adorno and Horkheimer analyze laughter, in particular. Though I do not agree that “laughter” or “humor” always represent a “malicious pleasure elicited by any successful deprivation,” the broader distinction between “fun” and “joy” is relevant to my own discussion of the potentials of experimental games.

5

Spinoza discusses the concept of joy extensively in Benedictus de Spinoza, The Essential Spinoza: Ethics and Related Writings, ed. Michael L. Morgan, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006).

6

Brian Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 71 and 72.

N OT ES TO PAG ES 2 8 0 –2 8 4

​Ludography

Though I offer more focused analyses of only a few games in each chapter, a much larger range of games informed the concepts that I analyze throughout this book. The following games do not make up a comprehensive list of my archive, but they are representative of it. These games (which do not include classic games such as chess that also informed my thinking) are mentioned explicitly within the preceding pages. [domestic]. Mary Flanagan. 2003. [rootings]. Mary Flanagan. 2001. The 7th Guest. Trilobyte. 1993. 1000 Blank White Cards. Riff Connor and Nathan Phoenix. 1996. Adventure. Atari. 1979. Age of Empires. Ensemble Studios. 1997. America’s Army. US Army. 2002. Angry Birds Friends. Rovio Entertainment. 2012. Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Nintendo. 2020. Asteroids. Atari. 1979. Baba Is You. Arvi Teikari. 2019. Bastion. Supergiant Games. 2011. Battletoads in Battlemaniacs. Rare. 1993. The Beast. Microsoft. 2001. The Beginner’s Guide. Davey Wreden. 2015. 367

Bejeweled. PopCap Games. 2001. Between. Jason Rohrer. 2008. The Binding of Isaac. Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl. 2011. BioShock Infinite. Irrational Games. 2013. BioShock series. Irrational Games. 2007–­. Braid. Jonathan Blow. 2008. Breakout. Atari. 1976. Call of Duty: Black Ops. Treyarch. 2010. Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. Treyarch. 2018. Candy Crush Saga. King. 2012. Cart Life. Richard Hofmeier. 2010. The Cat and the Coup. Peter Brinson and Kurosh ValaNejad. 2011. Civilization series. Sid Meier. 1991–­. Civilization III. Firaxis Games. 2001. Civilization V. Firaxis Games. 2010. Civilization VI. Firaxis Games. 2016. Clash Royale. Supercell. 2016. Clicker Heroes. Playsaurus. 2014. Climate Challenge. Red Redemption. 2006. Colossal Cave Adventure. Will Crowther and Don Woods. 1977. Computer Space. Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney (pre-­Atari). 1971. Cookie Clicker. Julien Thiennot. 2013. Counter-­Strike. Valve Corporation. 2000. Cuphead. Studio MDHR. 2017. Dance Dance Revolution. Konami. 1998. Darfur Is Dying. Susana Ruiz. 2006. Dark Castle. Silicon Beach Software. 1986. Darkgame. Eddo Stern. 2006. Dark Souls. FromSoftware. 2011. Death Stranding. Kojima Productions. 2019. Defender. Williams Electronics. 1981. Deltarune. Toby Fox. 2018. Destiny. Bungie. 2014. Destiny 2. Bungie. 2017. Detroit: Become Human. Quantic Dream. 2018. Diablo II. Blizzard Entertainment. 2000. Diamond Twister. Manger Enterprises. 2008. Donkey Kong. Nintendo. 1981. Donkey Kong Country 2. Rare. 1995. Doom. id Software. 1993. 368

LUDOGRAPHY

Doom VFR. id Software. 2017. Dragon’s Lair. Elite Systems. 1990. Dungeons and Dragons. TSR. 1974. Dwarf Fortress. Tarn and Zach Adams. 2006. Dys4ia. Anna Anthropy. 2012. EVE Online. CCP Games. 2003. Every Day the Same Dream. Molleindustria. 2009. F-­Zero. Nintendo EAD. 2004. Fallout series. Bethesda Softworks. 1997–­. Fallout 3. Bethesda Softworks. 2008. Fallout 4. Bethesda Softworks. 2015. FarmVille. Zynga. 2009. Fate/stay night. Type-­Moon. 2004. Final Fantasy VII. Square. 1997. Flappy Bird. dotGears. 2013. Flower. Thatgamecompany. 2009. Football Manager. Sports Interactive. 2004. Fortnite. Epic Games. 2017. Foursquare. Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai. 2009. Game, Game, Game, and Again Game. Jason Nelson. 2007. Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. Bennett Foddy. 2017. God of War. Sony Interactive Entertainment. 2018. Goober’s Lab. Ganz TM. 2010. Grand Theft Auto series. Rockstar Games. 1997–­. Grand Theft Auto V. Rockstar Games. 2013. Gran Turismo. Polyphony Digital. 1997. The Graveyard. Tale of Tales. 2008. Guitar Hero. Harmonix. 2005. Habitica. HabitRPG, Inc. 2013. Half-­Life 2. Valve Corporation. 2004. Halo. Bungie. 2001. Hitman. IO Interactive. 2016. Hotline Miami. Dennaton Games. 2012. I Love Bees. 42 Entertainment. 2004. IMVU. Will Harvey. 2004. I Wanna Be the Guy. Michael “Kayin” O’Reilly. 2007. Jet Set Willy. Matthew Smith. 1984. Jet Set Willy Variations. JODI. 2002. Jewel Quest. iWin. 2004. Jill of the Jungle. Epic MegaGames. 1992.

L U D O G R A P H Y 369

Journey. Thatgamecompany. 2012. Kid Pix. Craig Hickman. 1989. League of Legends. Riot Games. 2009–­. Left 4 Dead. Valve Corporation. 2008. Legendary: Game of Heroes. N3TWORK Inc. 2016. The Legend of Zelda. Nintendo. 1986. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Nintendo. 2017. Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment. Pippin Barr. 2011. Life is Strange. Dontnod Entertainment. 2015. Lim. Merritt Kopas. 2012. Limbo. Playdead. 2010. Little Inferno. Tomorrow Corporation. 2012. Loved. Alexander D. Ocias. 2010. Luigi’s Mansion 3. Next Level Games. 2019. Luxuria Superbia. Tale of Tales. 2013. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Nintendo. 2017. Mario Party. NDcube. 1998. Mario Party series. NDcube. 1998–­. The Marriage. Rod Humble. 2007. Marvel’s Spider-­Man. Insomniac Games. 2018. Mass Effect. BioWare. 2007. Max Payne. Remedy Entertainment and Rockstar Games. 2012. McDonald’s Video Game. Molleindustria. 2006. Mighty Jill Off. Anna Anthropy. 2008. Minecraft. Mojang. 2011. Minesweeper. Microsoft. 1990. Mirror’s Edge. EA DICE. 2008. Moirai. Chris Johnson, Brad Barrett, and John Oestmann. 2013. Mortal Kombat. Sony Interactive Entertainment. 1992. Mountain. David OReilly. 2014. Mouse in the Maze. MIT. 1959. MUC Draughts. Christopher Strachey. 1951. Myst. Cyan, Inc. 1993. NetHack. The NetHack DevTeam. 1987. Nike+. Nike, Inc. 2006. Number Munchers. MECC. 1990. Octodad: Dadliest Catch. Young Horses. 2014. One Hour One Life. Jason Rohrer. 2018. Overcooked. Ghost Town Games. 2016.

370

LUDOGRAPHY

Overwatch. Blizzard Entertainment. 2016. OXO. A.S. Douglas. 1952. Pac-­Man. Bandai. 1980. Pandemic. Z-­Man Games. 2008. Papers, Please. Lucas Pope. 2013. the parasite. Patrick Jagoda, Heidi Coleman, Kristen Schilt, and P. S. 2017. Passage. Jason Rohrer. 2007. PeaceMaker. ImpactGames. 2007. Persona 5. Atlus. 2016. Phylo. Jérôme Waldispühl, McGill University. 2010. Pipedreamz. Messhof. 2010. Pitfall!. Activision. 1982. Plague Inc. Ndemic Creations. 2012. Pokémon GO. Niantic. 2016. Pong. Atari. 1972. Potato Sack. Valve Corporation. 2011. Problem Attic. Liz Ryerson. 2013. Quake. id Software. 1996. Queers in Love at the End of the World. Anna Anthropy. 2013. QWOP. Bennett Foddy. 2008. Reader Rabbit. The Learning Company. 1983. Realistic Female First-­Person Shooter. Anna Anthropy. 2012. Red Dead Redemption 2. Rockstar Games. 2018. Robotron 2084. Kid Viz. 1982. Rogue. Glenn Wichman and Ken Arnold. 1980. Rollercoaster Tycoon. Chris Sawyer Productions. 1999. Second Life. Linden Lab. 2003. S.E.E.D. Patrick Jagoda, Melissa Gilliam, and Game Changer Chicago Design Lab. 2014. Settlers of Catan. Klaus Teuber. 1995. Sex Games. Landisoft. 1985. The Sexy Brutale. Tequila Works. 2017. Shadow of the Colossus. Fumito Ueda. 2005. SimCity. Electronic Arts. 2014. The Sims. Electronic Arts. 2000. Skyrim. Bethesda Game Studios. 2011. SOD. JODI. 1999. Solitaire. Microsoft. 1990. Soma. Frictional Games. 2015.



L U D O G R A P H Y 371

Sonic the Hedgehog. Sega. 1991. The Source. Patrick Jagoda, Melissa Gilliam, and Game Changer Chicago Design Lab. 2013. Space Invaders. Taito. 1978. Spacewar! Steve Russell. 1962. Spec Ops: The Line. Yager Development. 2012. Spelunky. Derek Yu. 2008. SPENT. McKinney. 2011. The Stanley Parable. Davey Wreden. 2013. StarCraft. Blizzard Entertainment. 1998. Stardew Valley. Eric Barone. 2016. Street Fighter II. Capcom. 1991. Superhot VR. SUPERHOT Team. 2016. Super Mario 64. Nintendo. 1996. Super Mario Bros. Nintendo. 1985. Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels. Nintendo. 1986. Super Mario Bros. 3. Nintendo. 1990. Super Mario Kart. Nintendo. 1992. Super Mario Odyssey. Nintendo. 2017. Super Mario World. Nintendo. 1990. Super Meat Boy. Edmund McMillen. 2010. Super Metroid. Nintendo. 1994. Super Pitfall. Pony Inc. 1986. Super Smash Bros. HAL Laboratory. 1999. Surgeon Simulator. Bossa Studios. 2013. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game. Konami. 1989. Tekken. Bandai. 1994. Tennis for Two. William Higinbotham. 1958. Tetris. Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov. 1984. Theme Park. Bullfrog Productions. 1994. Thresholdland: An Expatriation in Ten Days. Jörg Lukas. 2010. Train. Brenda Romero. 2009. Triad. Anna Anthropy. 2013. Undertale. Toby Fox. 2015. Until Dawn. Supermassive Games. 2015. Virtua Racing. Sega AM2. 1992. The Walking Dead. Telltale Games. 2012. WarioWare. Nintendo. 1994. WarioWare series. Nintendo. 1994–­. We, the Giants. GIANTS Software. 2009. 372

LUDOGRAPHY

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?. Brøderbund Software. 1985. The Witcher. CD Projekt Red. 2007. The Witness. Jonathan Blow. 2016. Wolfenstein 3D. id Software. 1992. Words with Friends. Zynga. 2009. World of Warcraft (WoW). Blizzard Entertainment. 2004. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. Blizzard Entertainment. 2010. The World’s Hardest Game. Snubby Land. 2008. World Without Oil. Ken Eklund. 2007. Yume Nikki. Kikiyama. 2004. Zoo Tycoon 2. Blue Fang Games. 2004.



L U D O G R A P H Y 373

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by f refer to figures. Aarseth, Espen, 194–95, 347n16 Abt, Clark C., 3–4, 5, 80–83, 89, 349n34 action: affective difficulty and, 210; attentiveness, concentration, and, 16–17; Bataille’s “world of activity,” 106, 108, 110; as central concept in games, 15, 19–21; competitive, 23; conscious, preconscious, and unconscious, 91, 182; constraint and, 156–57; experience vs. language and, 108–9; experimental, 147, 241; Galloway on, 16, 19, 210; in gameplay vs. books and films, 323n68; genocide and, 144–45; intuitive, 123; neoliberalism and, 20–21; perfect contingency and, 159; platform genre and, 104; precedence of, 145; rationality and, 54–55; reflective thought and, 94–95, 97, 204, 215; video games as experimental actions, 147 actions per minute (APM), 94 Adams, Tarn, 199 Adams, Zach, 199 addictiveness, 66 Adorno, Theodor, 14–15, 126, 192, 284, 298n34, 366n4 Adventure (Atari), 128, 166 aesthetics: Benjamin on politics of, 13; choice and, 129; difficulty and, 191–92; experimentation and, 82–83; failure and, 222; gamification and, 61; Guattari’s “aesthetic paradigm,” 280; media aesthetics, xi–xii, 9, 12, 16, 45–46, 147; media studies, visual studies, and, 303n73; Rancière on, 270, 319n27; slowness, 94;

technoscience and, 109; video game sensorium, 92–97 affect: art thinking through, 92–93; Braid and affective experimentation, 97–109; computing, affective component of, xv; defined, 87; difficulty, affective, 193–94, 208–16; emotion and feelings vs., 27, 209, 351n63; experimentation, affective games, and nonconscious cognition, 86–92; gamification and, 90; learning, affective, 356n32; massively multiplayer online role-­playing games and affective interplay, 321n56; negativity as queer orientation, 182; neoliberalism and, 178; nonrepresentational dimensions of, 194; the parasite and, 364n39; play theory and, 351n56; pleasure vs. preference, 122–23; politics, affective, 88, 145–46, 274; problem making and, 256; rational choice theory and, 123–24; rationality and, 90; reception, affective, 351n53; scientific method vs. affective experimentation, 274–75; SPENT and, 231–32; tactility and, 186; thought and, 95 affect theory, 26–28, 90, 95, 303n76 agency: android agency in Detroit, 150–51; choice and, 121, 127, 134; Dys4ia and, 168, 170; fumblecore and, 155; Loved and, 211; sensorium and, 93; short on power, powerlessness, and, 177; SPENT and, 227–32. See also choice and decision-­making Age of Empires (Ensemble Studios), 16, 119

375

agon (competition) games category, 160, 338n23 Ahmed, Sara, 27, 191, 239, 271 alea (change) games category, 160, 338n23 algorithmic decision-­making, 149 AlphaGo, 149 alternate reality games (ARGs): about, 30, 233, 258; collaborative problem making, dissensus, and, 268–71; concept generation, constructivism, and, 277–81; consent and, 180; contextual games and open experiments, 271–76; as cultural probes, 266–68; dialectical movement in, 279; examples of, 258; as form, 257–60; the parasite as, 260–66, 268–74, 278–80; “power without control,” “voodoo,” and “jazz” modes, 260; S.E.E.D. as, 238, 275–76; The Source as, 365n44; Thresholdland as, 233, 237–38 Althusser, Louis, 327n103, 337n14 Amadae, S. M., 47, 54–55, 121, 148–49, 178, 294n14, 311n45, 329nn1–2, 333n39, 339n27 America’s Army (US Army), 21 Anable, Aubrey, 26, 222, 227, 231, 354n6 Angry Birds Friends (Rovio), 200 Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo), 21 Anthropy, Anna, 156, 164–72, 273–74, 339n32 Arcade app, 41 Archer, Margaret S., 119, 121, 122–23, 143–44 Arendt, Hannah, 147 Armada (Cline), 5 Arrow, Kenneth J., 121, 329n2, 339n27 artificial intelligence (AI), 51–52, 197, 318n15 art-­science, experimental, 113 Ashby, Ross, 51 Asteroids (Atari), 91 Atari Video Computer System (VCS), 196, 347n23 attentiveness, 16 Aumann, Robert, 309n13 aura, 16, 299n45 autobiography genre, 164–65, 170–71, 340n34 autonomous present, 143 avant-­garde games, 34, 307n108 avatars: control and, 156; in Dys4ia, 170–72; in Loved, 211; in Passage, 188; in Problem Attic, 174–75, 181; range of forms of, 337n9; virtual identity, real-­world identity, and projective identity, 341n46 Avedon, Elliot, 195 Baba Is You (Teikari), 96 Babbage, Charles, 25 Bachelard, Gaston, 114, 271 Bacon, Francis, 84 Barone, Eric, 67 Barr, Pippin, 222 Barrett, Brad, 137 Bastion (Supergiant Games), 195 Bataille, Georges, 103, 106–10 Bateson, Gregory, 184, 217 Battletoads in Battlemaniacs (Rare), 195 Baudrillard, Jean, 308n8

376

I N D EX

Bauman, Zygmunt, 147 Beast, The (Microsoft), 258 Becker, Gary, 10, 121, 123, 330n12 Beckett, Samuel, 221, 223 Beginner’s Guide, The (Wreden), 106 behavioral economics, 58–61, 275, 313n60 Bejeweled (PopCap Games), 315n77 Benjamin, Walter, 12–13, 16, 208, 297n31, 299n45, 300n50 Bentham, Jeremy, 329n1 Berlant, Lauren: affect theory and, 27, 90, 320n40, 321n50; on control, 153; Hardt and, 330n13; on impasse, 335n56; on negativity, 182; on neoliberal hegemony, 178; on “not thinking,” 108; on precarity, 358n42; on queer games and nonsovereignty, 160–63; on queer pedagogy, 171–72; on ruptures, 326n98; on sex, 180, 184; on slowness, 94 Bernard, Claude, 76 Bernstein, Charles, 194–95, 216 Between (Rohrer), 137 Binding of Isaac, The (McMillen and Himsl), 198 Binmore, Ken, 3–4, 48–49 BioShock (Irrational Games), 142–43, 146–47 BioShock Infinite (Irrational Games), 20, 119, 130, 168 Birringer, Johannes, 357n36 bitcoin, 113, 328n112 Black Lives Matter movement, 269, 276 Blow, Jonathan, 97, 106, 108, 110 Bogost, Ian, 44, 102, 229, 279, 283–84, 308n7, 347n23, 352n63, 366n3, 366n54 Boluk, Stephanie, 31, 346n10, 359n53 Booth, Wayne, 333n37 bounded rationality, 58–59, 313n58 Bourdieu, Pierre, 57, 312n52 Boyle, Robert, 266 Braid (Blow): affective and technoscientific experimentation in, 97–110; clothing and conventional figure types, 99–100, 100f ; finale of, 104–5, 105f ; nautical flags in, 101, 101 f ; priming vs. conditioning and, 125–26, 130; Problem Attic and, 172, 177, 180, 342n54; problem-­ solution framework and, 115–16; reflection in, 105–6, 106f ; time, manipulation of, 98, 98f ; Undertale compared to, 142 Brand, Stewart, 26 Brathwaite, Brenda. See Romero, Brenda ­Brathwaite Breakout (Atari), 159, 164, 166, 167 breaks as pauses and as ruptures, 109, 285 Brice, Mattie, 180–81, 273–74 Brinson, Peter, 165 broadcasting–narrowcasting–pointcasting shift, 14–15, 112 Brouillette, Sarah, 295n17 Brown, Michael, 276 Brown, Wendy, 9–10, 53–54, 61, 64, 225, 268, 294n16, 295n21, 301n57

Browning, Christopher, 144–45 Brownley, Martine Watson, 170 Bryson, Mary, 165 Buchanan, James M., 178 Burnham, Jack, 78 Bush, Vannevar, 317n13, 325n90 Bushnell, Nolan, 4 business experimentation, 85–86 Butler, Judith, 225 Bycer, Josh, 221 Caillois, Roger, 21, 81, 160–61, 174, 177–78, 254, 338n23, 338n25, 352n73, 362n17 Call of Duty: Black Ops (Treyarch), 4, 298n36 Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 (Treyarch), 6 Camerer, Colin, 59–61, 314n64 Candy Crush Saga (King), 19, 21, 35, 62–67, 63f, 65f, 90, 255, 338n19 Candy Crush series (King), 200 capitalism: choice and, 122; complicity and, 115; debt system and, 362n12; disaster capitalism, 12, 354n7, 359n62; experimentation and, 84, 110; failure and, 354n7; neoliberalism and, 10, 295n17, 296n21; Stardew Valley and, 68–69. See also neoliberalism Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman), 56 Card, Orson Scott, 148 Carlson, David, 262 Carter, Jimmy, 55 Cart Life (Hofmeier), 245, 322n58 Cat and the Coup, The (Brinson and ValaNejad), 165 Cavendish, Margaret, 340n34 Cecire, Natalia, 76, 77, 317n7, 326n99 C4I (“Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence”), 153–54, 336n1 Chaloupka, William, 325n81 chance: Caillois’s alea category, 160, 338n23; competition vs., 21, 301n59; control narratives and, 338n23 Chang, Edmond, 163 change: of attitudes and behaviors, xiv, 112, 232; Berlant on sexuality and, 180; cultural probes and, 266–67; field-­interferences and, 274; games for change, 29, 80, 349n34; Halberstam on how we think and, 238; Hayles on capacity for, 32–33; Manning on engendering and, 32; McGonigal on games changing the world, 30; nonconscious forces and, 92 Chesher, Chris, 17 Chicago school of economics, 9, 23, 120 Choe, Steve, 96 choice and decision-­making: about, 119–20; algorithmic decision-­making, 149; choice architecture, 60–61; choice blindness effects, 124–25, 136; conditioning and, 124–26, 129–30; decision trees and metagames, 149–52; digital and networked media influence on human decision-­making, 126–27; in digital environ-



ments, 127–36; distributed model of, 124; experimentation and ethical choice, 135–36; freedoms vs., 275, 279; intensity and, 146–48; in Moirai, 136–39; neoliberalism and, 329n3; in networked environments, 136–39; preference and, 122–23, 143; priming, 122–27, 130–31, 136–37, 142, 145–46; rational choice theory, 58–59, 120–22, 139, 143, 148–49; in SPENT, 228–30, 232; in The Stanley Parable, 130–35; trial and error, 133–34, 143; in Undertale, 139–48. See also agency Choose Your Own Adventure novels, 332n27 Chun, Wendy, 66–67, 218, 311n44 Chute, Hillary, 325n81 Civilization series (Meier), 157 Civilization III (Firaxis Games), 155 Civilization V (Firaxis Games), 166 Civilization VI (Firaxis Games), 16 Clark, Naomi, 341n53 Clash Royale (Supercel), 21 classical conditioning, 124–26, 136 Clicker Heroes (Playsaurus), 16 Climate Challenge (Red Redemption), 249 Cline, Ernst, 5 Clinton, Bill, 185 Clough, Patricia, 276 Cold War, 49–50, 107, 121, 148–49, 153, 187, 326n90 Coleman, Heidi, 262 collaborative problem making, 268–71 Colossal Cave Adventure (Crowther and Woods), 195 competition: Caillois’s agon category, 160, 338n23; difference and, 345n4; difficulty and, 191–92; neoliberalism and, 21–23, 57, 191–92; in video games, 21–23 complicity, 108–9, 115, 142, 326n99, 328n115 computation, 25–26 Computer Space (Bushnell and Dabney), 4 concentration, 16–17 concept generation, 277–81 conceptual mode of thought, 322nn58–59 conditioning, classical and operant, 124–26, 129– 30, 136 conflict, artificial, 195 Connolly, William E., 241, 245, 359n62 consciousness, double, 181–82 constraints, 156–57, 258, 362n13 constructivism, 23, 279–81, 302n67 contingency, perfect, 159–60, 338n18 contingent difficulties, 201, 203, 204–5 control: Anthropy’s Dys4ia, 164–72; Callois’s spectrum of structure and categories of games and, 160–62; choice and, 332n23; coercion and consent, 178–80; controllers, avatars, rules, and constraints in gameplay, 156–58; Deleuze’s paradigm of, 154–55; game feel, ­ideology, and perfect contingency, 158–60; mastery and, 160–61; nonsovereignty dynam­

I N D EX 377

control (continued) ics, 155; nuclear command and control systems and destabilization of the individual, 153–54; queer games and nonsovereignty, 161–64; real-­time, 91, 185, 338n17; Ryerson’s Problem Attic, 172–82; stigma controllability, 232; Tale of Tales’s Luxuria Superbia, 182–87; worlding and, 187–90 controllers, 156 control societies, 66, 157, 177–78 Cookie Clicker (Thiennot), 16 Costikyan, Greg, 195, 358n44 Counter-­Strike (Valve Corporation), 94, 196 COVID-­19 pandemic, xv, 12, 218 Crawford, Chris, 195 creative destruction, 85, 89, 354n7 Crowther, Will, 195 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 184, 217 cultural probes, 266–68 culture industry, 14, 298n34 Cuphead (Studio MDHR), 93, 195 Dabney, Ted, 4 Dance Dance Revolution (Konami), 94, 254 Darfur Is Dying (Ruiz), 43, 165 Dark Castle (Silicon Beach Software), 347n21 Darkgame (Stern), 346n10 dark play, 217 Dark Souls (FromSoftware), 137, 198 Davies, William, 191–92 Dean, Jodi, 219 Death Stranding (Kojima Productions), 137 Debord, Guy, 13–15, 297n32 debt system, 256, 362n12 decision-­making. See choice and decision-­making decision trees, 149–51 deep-­learning algorithms, 88–89 Defender (Williams Electronics), 198 deintensification, 284 Deleuze, Gilles: affect theory and, 27, 87; on art, 92–93; concept creation and, 277; on conceptual thought, 322n59; control paradigm of, 154–57, 355n17; on control societies, 66, 157, 177–78; on de Sade, 212, 214; on experimentation, 73, 115; Lazzarato and, 32; on masochistic humor, 216; on modulation, 125; on problems, 327n103 Deltarune (Fox), 334n44 de Peuter, Greig, 30, 228 Derrida, Jacques, 103–4, 328n115 de Sade, Marquis, 212, 214 Destiny (Bungie), 168 Destiny 2 (Bungie), 16 Deterding, Sebastian, 301n58, 314n63 Detroit: Become Human (Quantic Dream), 150–51, 150f Dewey, John, 76, 95, 119, 317n13 deWinter, Jennifer, 314n73 Diablo II (Blizzard Entertainment), 195

378

I N D EX

Diamond Twister (Manger Enterprises), 315n77 difference and diversity, alternate reality games and, 268–69 difficulty: about, 191–94; affective, 193–94, 208–16; contingent, 201, 203, 204–5; interpretive, 193, 201–8; mechanical, 193, 194–201; modal, 201, 203, 205–6; ontological, 201, 207, 350n51; play, game-­based learning, and, 216–19; tactical, 201, 206–7 Dimock, Wai Chee, 283–84 disability, 346n10 disaster capitalism, 354n7, 359n62 disciplinary societies, 66, 154, 177, 226 dissensus, 269–70 dividuals: affect and, 87; choice and, 125, 136; neoliberalism and, 66; pointcasting and, 112; priming and, 145; society of control and, 154–55 [domestic] (Flanagan), 165, 341n47 Donkey Kong (Nintendo), 98 Donkey Kong Country 2 (Rare), 128 Doom (id Software), 91, 94, 196–97, 197f Doom VFR (id Software), 341n50 double consciousness, 181–82 Douglas, A. S., 303n72 Dovidio, John F., 232 Doyle, Jennifer, 27, 83, 175, 193–94, 208–10, 351n53, 351n58 Dragon’s Lair (Elite Systems), 195 Dresher, Melvin, 6, 309n14 Du Bois, W. E. B., 181–82 Dungeons and Dragons (TSR), 79 duration, 20 Dwarf Fortress (Adams and Adams), 191, 199, 199f, 348n30 Dyer-­Witheford, Nick, 14, 30, 228 Dylan, Bob, 244 Dys4ia (Anthropy), 156, 164–72, 167f, 169f, 182 economic game theory. See game theory economics: behavioral, 58–61, 275, 313n60; neoclassical, 53, 58–59, 120, 302n67 economy, experimental, 83–86, 114, 266 “Ecstatic Corona” project (Clough), 276 Edelman, Lee, 161–62, 182, 184, 343n74 edgelords, climate change, 249, 360n67 education, gamified, 43, 307n5 Edwards, Paul, 50 Ehrmann, Jacques, 203 Einstein, Albert, 3 embodiment and nonsovereignty, 170 emotion: affective difficulty and, 193–94, 209–10; choice and, 123; designs, emotional, 27; failure and, 354n2; feelings and affect vs., 27, 209, 351n63 Ender’s Game (Card), 4, 5, 148 Engelhardt, Tom, 315n73 epistemology. See knowledge Erickson, Paul, 46, 49, 51

ethical choice, 135–36 Ettlinger, Nancy, 237 EVE Online (CCP Games), 17f Every Day the Same Dream (Molleindustria), 34, 35f experience: experimentation and, 82–83; intensity of, 146–48; language vs., 108–9; Rancière on aesthetics and, 319n27 experiential plasticity, 124–25 experimental humanities, xiv, 277, 328n110 experimentation: affective games and nonconscious cognition, 86–92; alternate reality games and, 258, 266–71; art-­science of experiment, 113; beyond history, 115–16; borrowing from scientific and artistic precursors, 277–78; Braid and, 97–111; capitalism and, 84, 110; choice and, 135–36; closed vs. open, 274–75; conceptual and experimental capacity of digital games, 92–93; definition of “experimental,” 28; deintensification and, 284; in design vs. gameplay, 322n58; economy, experimental, 83–86, 114, 266; experience and, 82–83; experimental games, 28–33; failure and, 224, 238–39, 241; game theory and, 51; hypotheses and, 114; innovation and, 84–85; joyful, 116; laboratory experiments likened to games, 127–28; Little Inferno and, 249; modulation experiments, 112; neoliberalism and, 31–32; problem solving, problem making, and alternative experiments, 109–15; with rule making, 238; in science, literature, and art, 75–78; scientific method vs. affective experimentation, 274–75; Slater on experiments, xiv; systematic, 128; technoscientific, 101–10; utopia and resistance vs., 30; video games as experimental actions, 147; video game sensorium and, 92–97; war game and serious games, 78–83; worlding and, 189 expression, 136, 138, 190 Facebook. See social media failure: about, 221–22; as experimental method, 239; fictional vs. real, 245; Little Inferno and, 241–49; neoliberal failure and precarity, 223– 27, 250; queer art of, 221, 238–39; right to, 249–50; SPENT and, 227–33; Thresholdland and, 233–41 Fallout series (Bethesda Softworks), 119, 147, 149 Fallout 3 (Bethesda Softworks), 120 Fallout 4 (Bethesda Softworks), 20 Fanon, Frantz, 181 FarmVille (Zynga), 200 Fate/stay night (Type-­Moon), 149 Federici, Silvia, 12 feeling, emotion, and affect, 27, 209, 351n63 Felski, Rita, 292n3 feminist autobiography, 170–71 field-­interferences, 274 film: action in gameplay vs., 323n68; Benjamin on



video games vs., 12–13, 16, 299n45, 300n50; experimental, 77, 173; formal differences from video games, 93; interactivity and, 15; queer pedagogy in, 171–72; safe failure in, 128, 331n20; transgender autobiographies, 165 Final Fantasy VII (Square), 210 Fincher, David, xii–xiii Fine, Robert, 144–45 Fink, Eugen, 73, 338n25, 351n56 Fitbit, 64, 113–14 Flanagan, Mary, 14, 30, 31, 165, 217 Flappy Bird (dotGears), 195, 348n30 Fleck, Ludwik, 114 Fleming, Dan, 344n88 Flood, Merrill, 6, 58, 309n14, 329n1 Flower (Thatgamecompany), 34 Football Manager (Sports Interactive), 67 formalist models, 29 fort/da games, 160, 239 Fortnite (Epic Games), 20–21, 22, 63, 221, 238 Foucault, Michel, 9–11, 24, 53–56, 66, 154, 177, 311n44, 329n1, 355n17 Foursquare (Crowley and Selvadurai), 41, 315n80 Fox, Toby, 139 fragility, 225, 239–40, 245, 359n62 Frankenheimer, John, 187 Frankfurt, Harry, 44 Franklin, Seb, 153, 154 freedoms vs. choices, 275 freemium model, 63, 243 Freud, Sigmund, 160, 176, 326n94 Friedman, Milton, 56–57 Fullerton, Tracy, 292n3, 319n36 fumblecore, 155 fun, 216–17, 283–85, 351n63 F-­Zero (Nintendo EAD), 94 Galloway, Alexander: about, 14; on action, 16, 19, 210; “allegorithm,” 213; on Civilization, 155, 157; on control, 157, 185; “countergaming,” 30; on digital class, 189; on everydayness of the digital, 307n1; on playing the algorithm, 96; on representational realism, 230 Game, The (film; Fincher), xii–xiii, xv, 291n3 Game, Game, Game, and Again Game (Nelson), 203–7, 205f, 206f game feel, 91, 158–60, 321n53, 338n17 GamerGate, 200 games: Caillois’s categories and spectrum of, 160– 61, 338n23, 362n17; cultural rise of, 3–5; definition and qualities of, xii, 357n37; “game” in game theory, 47–49; history of serious use of, 5–9; as material form, 4; as social phenomena, 236. See also video games Games and Decisions (Luce and Raiffa), 46 Games for Change, 80 game studies: affect and, 193, 209–10; on avatars, 170; categories and dimensions of games, 81, 160–61; difficulty and, 193, 196, 200–201, 203;

I N D EX 379

game studies (continued) game theory vs., 47; improvisation and, 253, 361n3; joy and, 284; psychology and, 232; scholars and research in, 6, 26, 29, 34, 78, 163, 194–95, 221 game theory: behavioral, 59–60, 314n64; behavioral economics and, 61; Binmore on, 3–4; “game” in, 47–49; gamification and, 46–52; noncooperative, 6–7; nuclear policy and, 54–55; rationalism, critiques of, 58 gamification: affect and, 90; behavioral economics and, 58–61; Candy Crush Saga and, 62–67; definition and history of term, 6, 43; examples of, 41–43; game theory and, 46–52; good-­ feeling games and, 159; improvisation and, 255; neoliberalism and, 45, 52–58, 296n27; problem solving and, 111; “real world” and, 114; simulation and, 308n8; spectacle and, 14; Stardew Valley and, 67–71; support and resistance, 43–44; Taylorism and, 315n73; worldmaking and, 24 “Gaming as a Technique of Analysis” (Mood and Specht), 78–80 Gamow, George, 50 Garfinkel, Harold, 313n59 Garner, Eric, 276 Gaver, William, 266–67 Gee, James Paul, 171, 341n46 Geertz, Clifford, 184 genocide, 142–45, 147–48 Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy (Foddy), 155, 244 Gladwell, Malcolm, 123–24 glaze, ludic, 17 Gloeckner, Phoebe, 340n34 Gödel, Kurt, 49 God of War (Sony Interactive Entertainment), 20, 21–22 Golumbia, David, 18, 300n49 Goober’s Lab (Ganz TM), 315n77 good-­feeling games, 159 Goodwin, Marc, 192 Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar Games), 4, 20, 113, 131 Grand Theft Auto series (Rockstar Games), 253, 279, 322n58 Gran Turismo (Polyphony Digital), 94 Graveyard, The (Tale of Tales), 34 Groundhog Day (film; Ramis), 128, 133, 332n27 Guattari, Félix, 73, 92, 115, 277, 280, 322n59, 327n103 Guitar Hero (Harmonix), 94 Habitica (HabitRPG, Inc), 17, 41, 42 f, 43, 62 Halberstam, Jack, 221, 222, 238–39, 354n6, 359n51, 364n38 Half-­Life 2 (Valve Corporation), 130 Halo (Bungie), 157 Hamilton, William, 308n13

380

I N D EX

Hansen, Mark, 297n32, 303n70, 360n65 Hansen, Miriam, 323n63 Hardt, Michael, 330n13 Harlow, Harry, 110 Harney, Stefano, 273, 364n38 Harootunian, Harry, 143 Harvey, Auriea, 156, 182 Harvey, David, 32 Haworth, Gwen, 165 Hayek, Friedrich A., 54, 56–57, 312n55 Hayles, Katherine, 33, 134–35, 325n85 Haynes, Todd, 171–72 heads-­up display (HUD), 16 Heidegger, Martin, 32–33, 327n102, 350n51 Hersey, John, 103 Heukelom, Floris, 313n61 Higinbotham, William, 303n72 Hilbert, David, 49 Hiroshima, 103, 106 Hirsch, David, 144–45 Hitman (IO Interactive), 253 homo economicus, 58, 60, 64–65, 140, 345n4 Horkheimer, Max, 14–15, 126, 284, 298n34, 366n4 horror vacui aesthetic, 205 Horwitz, Steven, 224 Hotline Miami (Dennaton Games), 195 Howard, Nigel, 149–50, 334n50 Hugo, Victor, 350n51 Huizinga, Johan, xiii, 5, 24, 31, 62, 177–78, 216, 231, 315n75 humanities, experimental, xiv, 328n110 Hume, David, 191 Hunter, Dan, 24, 41, 43, 47, 61 ideology, 158–59 Ikawa, S., 217–18 ilinx (vertigo) games category, 160–62, 174, 338n25 I Love Bees (42 Entertainment), 258 immaterial production and labor, 18, 299n48 I’m Not There (film; Haynes), 171–72 improvisation: about, 253–57; alternate reality games and, 257–60; constraints and, 258, 362n13; contextual games and open experiments, 271–76; critical game design as concept generation, 277–81; cultural probes and collaborative problem making, 266–71; “power without control,” “voodoo,” and “jazz” modes, 260. See also metagaming approach; parasite, the IMVU (Harvey), 136 Inland Empire (film; Lynch), 173 intensity, 146–48, 335n57 interpretive difficulty, 193, 201–8 intuition, 124 intuitive controls, 159 Isbister, Katherine, 209 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 147 iteration, 86, 131, 133, 319n36

Ito, Mizuko, 43 I Wanna Be the Guy (O’Reilly), 195 Jameson, Fredric, 115–16 Jet Set Willy (Smith), 155 Jet Set Willy Variations (JODI), 155 Jewel Quest (iWin), 315n77 Jill of the Jungle (Epic MegaGames), 173 JODI, 155 Johnson, Chris, 137 jokes, practical, 259 Jordan, Michael, 283, 285 Journey (Thatgamecompany), 187, 333n35 joy, 284–85 Joy, Lisa, xii–xiii Joynt, Chase, 165 Juul, Jesper, 221, 230, 244–45, 356n32 Kahneman, Daniel, 59, 124, 128 Kant, Immanuel, 136 Katz, Jack, 338n17 Kent, Steven L., 196 Keynes, John Maynard, 330n11 Khandaker, Mitu, 188 Kid Pix (Craig Hickman), 43 Kim, Se Young, 96 Kimmich, Allison B., 170 Kinder, Marsha, 344n88 kink framework, 180 Kittler, Friedrich, 303n70 Klein, Naomi, 354n7, 359n62 knowledge: art-­science, 113; contingent difficulties and, 201; control as episteme, 86; deep-­ learning algorithms and, 89; epistemology, 319n33; experience and, 82–83; experiential and situated, 50; game theory and epistemology, 7; improvisation and, 258; information economy, 85; iterative experiment as episteme, 86; min-­maxing and, 70; speedrunning and, 176; uncontrollable, 184 Knych, Jack, 224 Kocurek, Carly, 291n3, 314n73 Kopas, Merritt, 163 Koster, Raph, 353n83 Kreps, David, 308n13 Kriegspiel, 51, 79 Krylenko, Nikolai, 56 labor and games, blurring of, 17–18, 246 La Guardia, Fiorello H., 196 Latour, Bruno, 114 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 10–11, 20–21, 32, 57, 226, 279– 80, 296n25, 311n41, 345n4, 362n12 Lazzaro, Nicole, 354n2 League of Legends (Riot Games), 18, 19, 253 leaps of faith, 204–5 learning: affective, 356n32; game-­based, 218–19, 353n83 Left 4 Dead (Valve Corporation), 197, 221



Legendary: Game of Heroes (N3TWORK Inc), 285 Legend of Zelda, The (Nintendo), 128 Legend of Zelda, The: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo), 20, 131 LeMieux, Patrick, 31, 346n10, 359n53 Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment (Pippin Barr), 222 liberalism: difference, crisis of, 268–69; game theory and, 54–55; neoliberalism and, 10, 22–23, 55, 312n46; Povinelli’s “late liberalism,” 225, 295n16, 329n3 Life is Strange (Dontnod Entertainment), 149 Lim (Kopas), 163 Limbo (Playdead), 4 literacy, gaming, 198 literature, experimental, 76–77 literature vs. games, 202–3. See also novels; poetry Little Inferno (Tomorrow Corporation), 241–49, 242 f, 248f Liu, Alan, 41, 61, 85, 319n33 Loved (Ocias), 210–16, 211 f, 213f, 277 Luce, Robert Duncan, 46 ludus (rule-­bound games), 160, 353n73, 362n17 Luigi’s Mansion 3 (Next Level Games), 130 lusory attitude, 255 Luxuria Superbia (Tale of Tales), 182–87, 183f Lynch, David, 173 machine zone, 92 magic circle: blurring of, xiii, 30, 62, 66, 358n47; concept of, 24; permeability of, 315n75; Salen and Zimmerman on, 231; SPENT and, 231; Thresholdland and, 235–36, 237, 240, 358n47 Malaby, Thomas, 8, 29–30, 31, 190, 304n88 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 350n51 Manhattan Project, 107, 325n90 Manning, Erin, 27, 29, 32, 186, 253, 365n47 Marcus, Laura, 165 Marcuse, Herbert, 126, 133 Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (Nintendo), 285 Mario Party (NDcube), 94 Mario Party series (NDcube), 164 Markell, Patchen, 268 Marriage, The (Humble), 34 Marvel’s Spider-­Man (Insomniac Games), 159–60 Marx, Karl, 84, 158 Mass Effect (BioWare), 119, 146–47, 170 massive open online courses (MOOCs), 218 Massumi, Brian: on affect, 87, 145; on choice, 123– 26, 143; on creativity, 133; on emotion, 27; on failure, 238; on habits, 328n108; on intensity, 146, 335n57; on joy and deintensification, 284; on micropolitics and uncertainty, 320n47; The Power at the End of the Economy, 119, 122, 253; on priming, 112, 130; on scientific method vs. affective experimentation, 274–75; on sensation, 95, 108 Matrix, The (film; Wachowski), 8, 246–47 Matthaei, Jörg Lukas, 233, 237, 357n36

I N D EX 381

Max Payne (Remedy Entertainment and Rockstar Games), 322n58 McClanahan, Annie J., 296n21, 301n57 McDonald, Peter, 262 McDonald’s Video Game (Molleindustria), 43 McGonigal, Jane, 30, 31, 43, 111 McLuhan, Marshal, 319n27, 323n63 McMahon, John, 60, 314n69 McMillen, Edmund, 198–99 McPherson, Tara, 303n72, 336n61 mechanical difficulty, 193, 194–201 metagaming approach, 31, 116, 128, 132, 149–50, 334n50 metaphorical reach of games, 3–4, 292n3 Mighty Jill Off (Anthropy), 164 military games. See wargaming mimesis (roleplaying and mimicry) games category, 160 Minecraft (Mojang), 24, 128 Minesweeper (Microsoft), 200 min-­maxing, 70 Mirowski, Philip, 6–7, 23–25, 41, 48–53, 59, 71, 153– 54, 294n14, 308n13, 310n27, 313n58 Mirror’s Edge (EA DICE), 166 Mitchell, W. J. T., 297n32 Mock, Janet, 165 modal difficulties, 201, 203, 205–6 models, games as, 29 modulation experiments, 112, 125 Moirai (Johnson, Barrett, and Oestmann), 136–39, 138f Mondrian, Piet, 173 Montfort, Nick, 347n23 Mood, Alexander McFarlane, 5, 78–81, 83 morality systems, 138 Morgenstern, Oskar, 46, 48, 50, 62 Morozov, Evgeny, 111–12 Morse, Paul, 198 Morse, P. M., 80 Mortal Kombat (Sony Interactive Entertainment), 94 Moten, Fred, 273, 364n38 Mountain (O’Reilly), 300n51 Mouse in the Maze (MIT), 303n72 MUC Draughts (Strachey), 303n72 Mumbo Jumbo (Reed), 278 Musk, Elon, 248 mutually assured destruction (MAD), 55 Myers, David, 24, 339n26 Myst (Cyan, Inc), 96 Nabokov, Vladimir, 194 Nash, John Forbes, Jr., 7, 309n16 Nash equilibrium solution, 6–7, 51, 308n13 negativity as queer orientation, 182 Nelson, Jason, 203–7, 350n51 neoliberalism: action and, 19–21; affect and, 178; Amadae on features of, 294n14; behavioral economics and, 60; Candy Crush Saga and,

382

I N D EX

62–67; capitalism and, 10, 295n17, 296n21; casual games and casual labor under, 246; centrality of games to, 53; choice and, 329n3; civil society and, 311n41; competition and, 21–23, 57, 191–92; consent and, 180; constructivism and, 279; debt system and, 256; difficulty and, 191–92; experimentation and, 31–32; failure and, 222, 223–27, 238, 250; fragility, resilience, and, 240; gamification and, 45, 52–58, 296n27; improvisation and, 255– 56; liberalism and, 10, 22–23, 55, 312n46; the market in, 57, 279; paradigm of, 9–12, 294n16; Povinelli’s “late liberalism,” 225, 295n16, 329n3; Problem Attic and, 178; racism and, 11, 296n25; rationality and, 53–55; Stardew Valley and, 67–71; subjectivity and, 10–11, 22–23, 54, 68–71, 301n57; worldmaking and, 23–25. See also capitalism NetHack (The NetHack DevTeam), 198 Newell, Allen, 51 Ngai, Sianne, 182 Nichols, Randall, 314n73 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 116 Nike+ (Nike, Inc), 17, 21, 41 Nolan, Jonathan, xii–xiii nonconscious cognition, 66, 87–92, 123–24 nonconscious cognitive assemblages, 134 noncooperative game theory, 6–7 nonsovereignty: about, 161–63; Anthropy’s Dys4ia, 164–72; digital games and dynamics of, 155; queergaming and, 163–64; Ryerson’s Problem Attic, 172–82; Tale of Tales’s Luxuria Superbia, 182–87 novels: affective difficulty and, 208; affective intensity and, 147; Card’s Ender’s Game, 4, 5, 148; Choose Your own Adventure, 332n27; Cline’s Armada, 5; Cold War and, 187; competition and chance in society and, 4; Deleuze and Guattari on, 322n59; epistolary, 243; experimental, 76–77, 266, 278, 316n6; formal differences and overlaps with video games, 93, 194–95, 278; Hersey’s Hiroshima, 103; inter­ activity and, 15; Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, 278 nuclear utilization targeting selection (NUTS), 55; visual novel games, 149 nuclear weapons, 101–9, 153–54, 324n79, 325n81, 325n90 nudge theory, 60–61, 224 Number Munchers (MECC), 43 Obama administration, 314n69 observers, 350n45 Ocias, Alexander D., 210 Octodad: Dadliest Catch (Young Horses), 155, 195 Oestmann, John, 137 official world, concept of, 7–8 One Hour One Life (Rohrer), 162–63 1000 Blank White Cards (Connor and Phoenix), 238

ontological difficulties, 201, 207, 350n51 operant conditioning, 124–26, 129–30, 136 operations research, 302n67 optical unconscious, 300n50 O’Reilly, David, 300n51 Overcooked (Ghost Town Games), 238 Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment), 18, 20, 91, 130 OXO (Douglas), 303n72 Pac-­Man (Bandai), 164, 167 paidia (processual free play), 160, 353n73, 362n17 Palindromes (film; Solondz), 171–72 Pandemic (Z-­Man Games), 221 panopticon, 154, 329n1 Papers, Please (Pope), 147 Papert, Seymour, xv Paradoxes of Rationality (Howard), 149–50 parasite, the (Jagoda, Coleman, Schilt, and P. S.), 257, 260–66, 261 f, 264f, 265f, 268–74, 278– 80, 364n39 Parisi, Luciana, 88–89 Parker, Felan, 34 Parker, Laura, 138 Parlett, David, 195 Pascal, Blaise, 337n14 Passage (Rohrer), 34, 188, 189f Pasteur, Louis, 85 Pavlov, Ivan, 125 PeaceMaker (ImpactGames), 43 Pelletier, Caroline, 236 Pelling, Nick, 43 Penn, Kara, 223 perception, modes of, 13 perfect contingency, 159–60, 338n18 Persona 5 (Atlus), 17, 20, 130 Peters, John Durham, 245 Phylo (Waldispühl et al.), 41 Picard, Rosalind, 330n11 pinball, 196 Pipedreamz (Messhof), 222 Pitfall! (Activision), 98 Pixels (film; Columbus), 5 Plague Inc. (Ndemic Creations), 43 platform genre: early conventions of, 204, 206; experimentation and, 102; history of, 98; operant conditioning and, 126. See also Braid; Game, Game, Game, and Again Game; Loved; Problem Attic; Super Mario Bros. play: difficulty and, 216–19; the parasite and, 273– 74; play-­centric approach, 29–30; play theory, 351n56; precariousness of, 216–17, 353n77 “Play and Be Real about It” (Brice), 180–81 player publics, 197–201 pleasure vs. preference, 122–23 poetry: affective intensity and, 147; difficult, 191– 95, 201–4, 208, 216, 347n14, 349n35; experimental, 77, 317n7; intersections between video



games and, 202–3; thought, action, and, 94, 323n68 pointcasting, 15, 112, 155 Pokémon GO (Niantic), xvi, 4, 63, 238, 315n76 polish, 91 Pong (Atari), 91, 170, 337n9 possibility spaces, 30, 116, 165–66, 271, 305n89 postmodern novels, 278 Potato Sack (Valve Corporation), 258 potentiality, 29, 32–33 Pound, Ezra, 317n7 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 27, 225–26, 268–69, 295n16, 329n3, 364n39 Power at the End of the Economy, The (Massumi), 119 practical jokes, 259 precarity: livable crisis ordinariness, 358n42; neoliberal failure and, 223–27, 250; SPENT and, 230, 232–33; Thresholdland and, 236–37 preference, 122–23, 143, 334n42 Pressman, Jessica, 203 priming, 112, 122–27, 130–31, 136–37, 142, 145–46 prisoner’s dilemma, 6, 22, 49, 54, 139, 309n14, 329n1, 343n68 Problem Attic (Ryerson), 35, 156, 172–82, 173f, 175f, 190, 227, 277 problem-­solution framework, 110–11, 207, 327n103 problem solving vs. problem making: about, xv–xvi, 109–15; alternate reality games and, 258; collaborative problem making, 268–71; improvisation and, 254–56; problem finding, 113, 255–56, 327n103 procedural representation or rhetoric, 102, 229, 239, 357n32 prospect theory, 59 Prynne, J. H., 347n14 psychology, fetish for, 111–12 publics, 197–201 Pynchon, Thomas, 187 Quake (id Software), 157 qualculation, 64 queer games and queergaming: Anthropy’s Dys4ia, 164–72; defined, 163; fort/da games, control/ mastery, and Caillois’s categories, 160–61; Kopas’s Lim, 163; negativity and, 182; nonsovereignty and, 161–64; Ryerson’s Problem Attic, 172–82; Tale of Tales’s Luxuria Superbia, 182–87. See also Ruberg, Bonnie Queers in Love at the End of the World (Anthropy), 164 Quinn, Zoë, 200 QWOP (Foddy), 155, 244 Raiffa, Howard, 46 Raley, Rita, 30, 273, 339n30, 364n39 Rancière, Jacques, 270, 319n27 RAND Corporation, 5–6, 46, 49–50, 309n14, 310n27, 312n57

I N D EX 383

randomized controlled trials (RCTs), 75, 86, 112, 274 Raphael, Chad, 217 rationality: affect and, 90; behavioral economics and irrationality, 58–61; bounded, 58–59, 313n58; Deleuze on reasoning as violence, 214; neoliberalism and, 53–55; rational choice theory, 58–59, 120–22, 139, 143, 148–49 Rawls, John, 178 Reader Rabbit (The Learning Company), 43 Realistic Female First-­Person Shooter (Anthropy), 341n50 real-­time control, 91, 185, 338n17 Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games), 128 Reed, Ishmael, 278 reflection, 94–95, 105–6, 150–51, 204 Rey, P. J., 296n27 Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek and Friedman), 56 Robotron 2084 (Kid Viz), 198 Rogue (Wichman and Arnold), 198 Rohrer, Jason, 162, 188 Rollercoaster Tycoon (Chris Sawyer Productions), 67 Romero, Brenda Brathwaite, 106, 183, 344n82 [rootings] (Flanagan), 341n47 Roussos, Gina, 232 Ruberg, Bonnie “Bo,” 163, 221–22, 239, 359n51 rules: control and, 156–57; in Dys4ia, 165–68; equilibrium between open play and, 190; neoliberalism, failure, and, 238; subcategories of, 129 Russell, Steve, 25–26, 107 Ryerson, Liz, 35, 156, 172–73, 180, 339n32, 342n59 Sacher-­Masoch, Leopold von, 212 safe play and safe failure, 29, 128, 138–39, 189, 331n20 Saint-­Amour, Paul, 324n79 Salen, Katie, xi–xii, 94–95, 195, 198, 204, 231, 318n21, 357n37 Samuelson, Paul, 312n57 Samyn, Michaël, 156, 182 Sarkeesian, Anita, 200 Sastry, Anjali, 223 Sawyer, R. Keith, 255, 256, 361n3 Scarry, Elaine, 336n61 Schaefer, Donovan, 27 Schechner, Richard, 217 Schelling, Thomas, 49, 309n24 Schilt, Kristen, 262 Schlesinger, James R., 55 Schmidt, Eric, 3 Schmitt, Carl, 330n13 Schrank, Brian, 306n108 Schrier, Karen, 332n23 Schüll, Natasha Dow, 92, 159, 338n18 Schumpeter, Joseph, 89, 354n7 scientific experimentation, 75–76 Second Life (Linden Lab), 136, 185, 337n9 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 27, 343n74

384

I N D EX

S.E.E.D. (Jagoda, Gilliam, and Game Changer Chicago Design Lab), 238, 275–76 Selten, Reinhard, 308n13 Seltzer, Mark, 7–8, 259, 306n97, 316n6 sensorium, video game, 92–97 “serious games” movement, 5, 43, 80–82, 231–32, 349n34, 356n30 Serres, Michel, 263, 273 Settlers of Catan (Teuber), 156 7th Guest, The (Trilobyte), 347n21 sex and sexuality in games, 183–87, 344n82 Sex Games (Landisoft), 185 Sexy Brutale, The (Tequila Works), 332n27 Shadow of the Colossus (Ueda), 162, 195 Shanken, Edward, 77 Shannon, Claude, 51, 303n72 Sharpe, Roger, 196 Shaw, Adrienne, 163 Shaw, Cliff, 51 Sheldon, Lee, 307n5 Short, Emily, 177, 227 Shubik, Martin, 309n17, 309n25 Sicart, Miguel, 27, 129, 135, 138, 209 Silver, Spencer, 85 SimCity (Electronic Arts), 29 Simon, Herbert, 51, 58–59, 313n58 Sims, James Marion, 267 Sims, The (Electronic Arts), 67, 344n82 simulation: economic game theory and, 7, 50, 62; gamification and, 308n8; neoliberal lifestyle and simulation games genre, 67; representational realism and, 230; space, simulated, 91; wargaming and, 50–52, 78, 80, 107 Skinner, B. F., 125 Skyrim (Bethesda Game Studios), 24 Slater, Lauren, xiv slot machines, 159, 338n19 slowness, 94 Smith, Adam, 22 Smith, Dana, 66 Smith, John Maynard, 308n13 Sniderman, Zachary, 356n30 social media: alternate reality games and, 258; Candy Crush Saga and, 65, 66–67; casual play and, 200; choice blindness and, 136; free labor and, 114; modulation experiments and, 112; “post-­truth” society and, 127; self-­expression and, 189; social engineering and, xvi; SPENT and, 227–28, 230, 231, 356n26; Stardew Valley and, 70 societies of control (Deleuze), 66, 154–55 society of the game, 12–19 SOD (JODI), 155 soft power, 53 Solitaire (Microsoft), 200, 221 Solondz, Todd, 171–72 solutionism, 111 Soma (Frictional Games), 151–52 Sonic the Hedgehog (Sega), 16, 168

Source, The (Jagoda, Gilliam, and Game Changer Chicago Design Lab), 365n44 Southwest Airlines, 315n80 sovereignty, 161, 339n27. See also nonsovereignty Space Invaders (Taito), 195, 217–18, 217f Spacewar! (Russell), 25–26, 107, 317n9 Spade, Dean, 167–68 Spanos, William V., 327n102 Sparrow, Ashlyn, 262 Specht, R. D., 5, 78–81, 83 Spec Ops: The Line (Yager Development), 106, 142 spectacle, 13–16, 297n32 speed, 94–97 speedrunning, 239, 253–54, 359n53 Spelunky (Yu), 195 SPENT (McKinney), 227–33, 228f, 239, 244–45, 255, 322n58 Spinoza, Baruch, 87, 283, 284, 330n13 Spolin, Viola, 254 Squire, Kurt, 30, 305n89 Stanley Parable, The (Wreden), 130–36, 131 f, 132 f StarCraft (Blizzard Entertainment), 94–97, 95f, 161 Stardew Valley (Barone), 68f ; about, 62; competition and, 21; concentration and, 16; control and, 157–58; as experimental, 35; gamification, neoliberalism, and, 67–71; sensorium and, 93; world-­game interface and, 6; worldmaking and, 25 Steiner, George, 191, 201–6, 349n35, 350n51 Stern, Eddo, 346n10 Sterne, Laurence, 77 Stewart, Kathleen, 27 Stewart, Sean, 260 Stiegler, Bernard, 245–46, 360n65 stigma controllability, 232 Strachey, Christopher, 303n72 Street Fighter II (Capcom), 29 subjectivity: autobiography and sovereign subjecthood, 170–71; entrepreneurial, in Stardew Valley, 68–71; neoliberal, 10–11, 22–23, 54, 68–71, 301n57; nuclear command and control systems and destabilization of the individual, 153–54; virtual identity, real-­world identity, and projective identity avatars, 341n46 Suits, Bernard, 135–36, 255, 359n51 Sunstein, Cass, 60, 224 Superhot VR (SUPERHOT Team), 341n50 Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo), 94, 98–101, 126, 128, 129f, 161, 166, 173, 176, 207, 221, 337n9 Super Mario Bros. 3 (Nintendo), 202 Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels (Nintendo), 195 Super Mario Kart (Nintendo), 16 Super Mario Odyssey (Nintendo), 20 Super Mario 64 (Nintendo), 253–54 Super Mario World (Nintendo), 254 Super Meat Boy (McMillen), 94, 198–99, 348n30 Super Metroid (Nintendo), 168



Super Pitfall (Pony Inc), 347n21 Super Smash Bros (HAL Laboratory), 16, 196 Surgeon Simulator (Bossa Studios), 155 Sutton-­Smith, Brian, 195 Swink, Steve, 91, 158–59, 165, 321n53, 338n17 Tabbi, Joseph, 202–3 tactical difficulties, 201, 206–7 tactical media, 273, 339n30 tactility, 185–86 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 224–25, 226, 240 Tale of Tales, 156, 182 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 315n73 Taylor, T. L., 31 technological fetishism, 219 “technological society” (Marcuse), 126–27 technoscientific experimentation, 101–10 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game (Konami), 16 Tekken (Bandai), 94 teleology and teleonomy, 31, 54, 99, 136, 305n94 Tennis for Two (Higinbotham), 303n72 Tetris (Pajitnov), 164, 166, 172, 200 Thacker, Eugene, 248–49, 307n1 Thaler, Richard, 59, 60, 128, 224, 312n56, 313n59, 330n11, 331n20 Thatcher, Margaret, 10, 60 Theme Park (Bullfrog Productions), 119 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (von Neumann and Morgenstern), 46 Thierer, Adam, 224, 355n12 Thift, Nigel, 64, 113, 170 Thomke, Stefan, 85–86, 89, 223–24 thought and thinking: alternative ways of, 87; Bush’s “As We May Think,” 317n13; conceptual and experiential modes of, 322nn58–59; Dewey’s How We Think, 76, 317n13; experimental, 28, 76, 317n13; fast, 86; game-­based, 3; game thinking, 61; nonconscious cognition, 66, 87–92, 123–24; not thinking, 108 Thresholdland: An Expatriation in Ten Days (Lukas), 233–41, 234f, 244, 277 Thrift, Nigel, 84, 90, 266–67, 328n111 time: Dys4ia and, 166–67; manipulation of, in Braid, 98, 109; speed, 94–97; speedrunning, 239, 253–54, 359n53 touchscreen interface, 182, 185–87, 344n80 Train (Romero), 106 transgender artists, 165. See also Anthropy, Anna; Dys4ia transgender autobiographies, 165 trauma, 174–77, 343n74 Triad (Anthropy), 164 trial and error, 133–34, 143 Tritter, Jonathan, 121, 143 Truman, Harry, 103 Tucker, Albert W., 309n14 Turing, Alan, 51–52, 303n72 Tversky, Amos, 59, 128

I N D EX 385

ubiquitous computing, 107, 362n16 Ueda, Fumito, 162 uncertainty: Costikyan’s taxonomy of, 358n44; credit and, 256; Massumi on micropolitics and, 320n47; nonconscious cognition and, 88–89; in Undertale, 142 Undertale (Fox), 106, 139–48, 141 f University of Chicago, 260–65, 268, 269–73. See also Chicago school of economics Until Dawn (Supermassive Games), 151 Upton, Brian, 156, 362n13 utility, maximization of, 120 ValaNejad, Kurosh, 165 Vance, Brendan, 342n56 van Doorn, Niels, 316n86 Vickers, Earl, 254, 361n3 video game autobiographies subgenre, 165 video games: action and, 19–21; Benjamin on films vs., 12–13, 16, 299n45, 300n50; competition and, 21–23; as cultural dominant, 14, 298n36; durations of, 20; experimental significance of, xiv; genres of, 35; military-­industrial research roots of the medium, 107–8; platforms, genres, and audiences, xiii–xiv; qualities of digital games, xii; as relational, 210; society of the game, 12–19; worldmaking and, 23–25. See also games Vincent, John, 208 violence: of abstraction, 148; Cold War politics, violent logics of, 336n61; Deleuze on reasoning as, 214; trauma in Problem Attic, 174–77; Undertale and genocide, 142–45, 147–48. See also wargaming virtuality, 32–33, 186, 250 virtual reality, 341n50 Virtua Racing (Sega AM2), 29 von Neumann, John, 46, 47–48, 50, 59, 62, 313n58 Waldispühl, Jérôme, 41 Walking Dead, The (Telltale Games), 120, 147, 150

386

I N D EX

wargaming, 50–51, 78–80 WarioWare (Nintendo), 94, 164 Wark, McKenzie, xiii, 14, 291n5, 298n37, 352n71 We, the Giants (GIANTS Software), 137 Weiss, Leah, 223 Werbach, Kevin, 24, 41, 43, 47, 61 Westworld (TV; Noland and Joy), xii–xiii, xv, 5, 291n3 Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? (Brøderbund Software), 43 Whitehead, Alfred North, 146, 335n57 Wiener, Norbert, 51 Wilcox, Steve, 180 Williams, Raymond, 82, 318n25, 319n26 Williams, Simon J., 330n11 Winnicott, D. W., 217, 237, 353n77 Witcher, The (CD Projekt Red), 130 Witness, The (Blow), 106 Wolfenstein 3D (id Software), 155 women’s autobiography, 164–65, 340n34 Woolf, Virginia, 147 Words with Friends (Zynga), 200 worldmaking: conceptual thought and, 322n58; control and, 189–90; gamification and, 24; in video games and neoliberalism, 21–23 World of Warcraft (WoW ) (Blizzard Entertainment), 18, 21, 90, 110, 110f, 119, 300n49 World’s Hardest Game, The (Snubby Land), 348n30 World Without Oil (Eklund), 249 Wreden, Davey, 130 writing, experimental, 77–78 Young, Michael F., 350n45 Yume Nikki (Kikiyama), 173 Zerilli, Linda, 92, 322n57 Zimmerman, Eric, xi–xii, 3, 195, 198, 231, 318n21, 357n37 Žižek, Slavoj, 158, 337n14 Zola, Émile, 76–77, 266, 316n6 Zoo Tycoon 2 (Blue Fang Games), 344n82