Every Game is an Island

Endings and Extremities in Video Games

Riccardo Fassone

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501316623
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Étude des média

Despite the pervasive rhetorics of immersion and embodiment found in industrial and social discourses, playing a video game is an exercise in non-linearity. The pervasiveness of trial and error mechanics, unforgiving game over screens, loading times, minute tweakings of options and settings, should lead us to consider video games as a medium that cannot eschew fragmentation. Every Game is an Island is an analysis and a critique of grey areas, dead ends and extremities found in digital games, an exploration of border zones where play and non-play coexist or compete. Riccardo Fassone describes the complexity of the experience of video game play and brings integral but often overlooked components of the gameplay experience to the fore, in an attempt to problematize a reading of video games as grandiosely immersive, all-encompassing narrative experiences. Through the analysis of closures and endings, limits and borders, and liminal states, this field-advancing study looks at the heart of a medium starting from its periphery.

1

Two Non-definitive Definitions

What is a video game?

Doing away with definitions

The analysis of extreme areas and boundaries is not a new topic in video game studies. More specifically, the contested notion of “magic circle” sparked a long-standing debate in the field, whose effects can still be seen at work today in many theoretical works discussing video games. In their foundational treatise on game design, Salen and Zimmerman (2004: 95) claim that all playful activities are separated from everyday life¹ by “the boundaries established by the act of play.” In other words, playing means entering a physical, mental, and communicative space removed from reality and designed to generate and host play. The two scholars call this fictional space the “magic circle,” borrowing the definition from Huizinga (1955), whose book Homo Ludens acted as a veritable blueprint for game and play studies in the twentieth century. As noted by many commentators (Ehrmann 1968, Schrank 2014), Huizinga analyses play from the standpoint of a scholar very much in tune with a distinctly modern ethos, and characterizes it as radically separated from—even opposed to—productive activities such as work. It comes as no surprise that for the Dutch historian, play resides within a specially carved niche, a magic circle that protects it from the trivialities of ordinary life. The inherently post-modern sensibility of contemporary game studies led to a rich and fruitful debate (see for example Malaby 2007, Consalvo 2009b, Stenros 2012, and Zimmerman 2012) on the idea of play as a bounded, separated activity found in Huizinga² and rehashed by Salen and Zimmerman. While the extent and results of the debate cannot be discussed in this book, it should be noted that one of the recurring traits of this conversation is the insistence on the exceptionality of play. One of the reasons for the theoretical impasse in defining the boundaries of play is that play itself is very hard to define. While several attempts at tracing an ontology of play have been made (Suits 1978, Gray 2009, Eberle 2014), it might be true—as noted by Brian Sutton-Smith (1997: 1), one of the most influential scholars in the field—that “we all play occasionally, and we all know what playing feels like. But when it comes to making theoretical statements about what play is, we fall into silliness.” As for games, the mental or material objects through which play is formalized, a variety of definitions (Juul 2005) and even meta-definitions (Arjoranta 2014) have been proposed, tested, and discussed, often with the result of discovering that outliers and exceptional cases surpassed the norm.

For these reasons, despite being concerned with definitions, this chapter of the book will not offer a unifying definition of play, games, or even video games. This is not the goal of this book and, in all fairness, it is hard to see the point of such a grand endeavor. This chapter, instead, will build two operative, historically situated, inherently provisional definitions of video games that will allow me to single out the type of media objects I am interested in discussing, their characteristics, and some of the reasons why a research around endings and extremities could be well-suited to address the nature and design of these objects. However, before this, I should offer an explanation of why my research on video games will be based on what I have defined as two non-definitive definitions.

Video games change through time

The main reason for the difficulty of defining video games in a stable and unequivocal manner is that, like every technological artifact, they change through time. While this may sound rather intuitive, the notion of video games being historical entities, subjected to what Paul Ricoeur (2004) describes as “the work of history,” often seems to escape scholars, players, designers and, more generally, the wider community of people invested in the medium. What Raiford Guins (2014: 4) calls “the mutable taxonomic phases video games pass through,” namely, the modifications, adaptations, and shifts occurring in the five decades in which video games have been part of the shared landscape of audiovisual media, are often unaccounted for in studies dealing with the ontology or taxonomy of the medium. While we may agree on the fact that Spacewar!, Zork, Nintendo’s Game & Watch handheld consoles, Streets of Rage, and Jason Rohrer’s experimental game Cordial Minuet can all be described as video games, we should ask ourselves whether it is really fruitful to discard historical perspective in favor of the reassurances of taxonomy. This, of course, does not imply that all video game research should deal primarily with the history of the medium—this book, for example, is certainly not a history book—but rather that, if we are to define the object of our attention, we should be aware of its history and, more generally, of its relation with the wider history of media, even when this means trading stable definitions for more provisional ones. Discussing the lineage and features of adventure games, Espen Aarseth (1997: 97), one of the founding figures of video game studies, asks “does the novel start with Cervantes, Sterne, or the ancient Greeks? What was the first poem? Who wrote the first sonnet? The first detective novel?” A similar question might be asked about video games. Is Tennis for Two the first video game? Or does the fact that Higinbotham’s clever contraption is actually a modified oscilloscope make it unsuitable for such a title? Is it video enough? Is it game enough? Whereas, again with Aarseth (1997: 97), “most of these questions have no clear answer,” discussing and analysing games means engaging in a practice that acknowledges the existence of such questions, and recognizes taxonomic indeterminacy as a function of (media) history. For this reason, the two definitions of video game that I will offer later in the chapter are tied respectively to the history of computing and the history of game design, and the video games that will be analysed in this book will be consistently presented in the light of the media environment that produced them and the history that led to their design and release.

A second reason for the taxonomical indeterminacy of video games is that in most cases, when we want to discuss them we may really be thinking about wildly different things. For example, a software engineer may characterize video games as a specific type of software; a player as a subset in the larger category of games (in which they may include sports, tabletop games, party games, etc.); a patron of the arcades in the 1970s and 1980s as an electronic relative of a pinball machine; an executive in a large studio as another form of big budget entertainment, akin to blockbuster movies; an independent game designer as an artistic form of expression. Video games are all of this and possibly more. And, as media history teaches, they are destined to become something else as the pressures and tensions imposed on them by designers, producers, critics, scholars, and, more importantly, players, mold them into new forms. Reducing this multiplicity of definitions to a single duality is a hard task, but what might be said is that video games are always, “ontologically both objects and experiences” (Sicart 2009: 29–30). A video game is a specific material construct, a designed piece of software, and, at the same time, when played, an actualized play experience, an ever-evolving dialogue between a player and a machine. These enigmatic pieces of code, existing somewhere between the technological and the playful, can be described as a subset of games, a specific category of the broader class of ludic objects and, at the same time, as self-contained, designed audiovisual objects, whose functioning relies on a set of computer-executed protocols that, when experienced by the player, present them with an array of audiovisual information. In this sense, video games are both video games and video games, meaning that they are at the same time designed audiovisual media objects, and peculiar instances of play.

What I mean by “video game”

As I have said, in a discussion about video games, we may find ourselves caught in a conundrum of definitions. It is hard to characterize video games as a single entity both because they change through time, and because different subjects may characterize them as a multiplicity of things, a state of indeterminacy generated by their inherently ambiguous nature of digital objects and playful experiences. For this reason, instead of asking what a video game is, I will answer to the more manageable question of what I mean by “video game.” Or, more precisely, what kinds of objects I am picturing in my mind when I write about video games in this specific context.

I will offer two theoretical definitions of video games in the second part of the chapter, so, for the moment, let me answer two more trivial questions. What kinds of video games is this book about? And, in turn, what parts of those video games am I interested in? In the first case, the answer is straightforward: for the most part I will discuss single-player video games or single-player versions of video games that can also be played with other human players. Although I will occasionally point to online multiplayer games or MOBAs³ with the intent of drawing a comparison, single-player video games will be the main focus of this book. The reason for this choice will be explained in full throughout the book, but for the moment it might suffice to say that analysing or discussing multiplayer-focused games in a rigorous fashion requires using methods derived from the social sciences such as in-depth interviews, questionnaires, and tools of ethnographic and social research in general. This is mainly due to the fact that the communities of players interacting with multiplayer games are usually more interesting than the design of the games itself. The so-called “meta,” namely the set of emergent strategies, practices, assumptions, and beliefs produced and shared by a community of players of a game like Dota 2 greatly surpasses the formal properties of the game in complexity and interest.⁴ On the other hand, an analysis of endings and extremities in games that relies on the methods and tools of the humanities may benefit from narrowing its field of action to include games in which the dialogue between the human player and the machinic counterpart is more direct and traceable. Later in the chapter I will discuss the notion of “model player,” a semiotic construction that, I contend, is a useful tool for discussing single-player video games.

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

The exceptionality of video games

Digital exceptionalism

Video games are both games and pieces of digital audiovisual media. They project designed worlds for the player to inhabit, and they generate and sustain play through game mechanics. This irreducible duality will form the backbone of this book and shape most of the theoretical assumptions and analytical tools I will use to discuss endings and extremities in games. As for video games being digital media, and belonging to the wider ecosystem of digital media, I will often refer to Bogost’s (2006, 2007) notion of “procedurality” to discuss the ways in which they carry and produce meaning, and to Galloway’s (2006) research on diegetic and non-diegetic space in video games to compare the ways in which film and video games deal with narrative. Both these theoretical stances will be addressed later in the book. On the other hand, the idea that video games are also games in the broader sense, which will inevitably shape my understanding of the medium, is in need of a radical, but essential, revision. I will call my understanding of video games-as-games “digital exceptionalism.” What I mean by this is that video games are an exceptional subset of games, since—because of their nature of digital objects—their rules must be stored, upheld, and executed by a computer. When playing a video game, we are always playing with and against a digital machine, an entity whose peculiar characteristics make it a unique sort of playful companion. A video game offers its player a world to inhabit or, in more minimalist cases, a series of rules and properties to interact with, but it is at the same time a piece of software in charge of executing certain procedures that ensure the consistency of that world or rule set. To quote Triclot (2011: 33, my translation), “the machine is in charge of respecting the rules, making the necessary calculations, and, at the same time, ensuring some form of objectivity or neutrality of the playfield.… The world of the game is embodied in the logic of the machine,” or, in a more radical formulation, a “game program is thus not only a set of instructions, a kind of law code for the world of the particular game, that I have the duty to follow when I am in the company of computers, but at the same time also a police agent that precisely monitors my ...