Gordon Calleja and Ivan Callus
Digital games may have been considered cultish or adolescent two decades ago, but interest in them is now mainstream and ranges across diverse social and cultural groupings. Their appeal is now so broad and pervasive, and their inventiveness and their claim on a distinct aesthetic so compelling, that they demand attention from across the academic spectrum, prompting the rise of the multidisciplinary field of game studies.
The first volume of the journal Games and Culture (2006) offered a number of perspectives on the question “Why Game Studies now?” The contributors’ academic backgrounds reflected the variety of disciplinary perspectives that can – perhaps should – be applied to games. Certainly the last five years have seen an unprecedented expansion in research on games (Bryce and Rutter 2006), characterized by a multidisciplinary dynamic that reflects games’ centrality to distinct and novel departures in studies of media theory, mind, cognition, aesthetics, and the socio-cultural. This diversity of approaches has led to theoretical differences over the analysis of games.
There is fundamental and significant disagreement even when determining what kinds of activities can be classified as games, and what disciplines and methods are appropriate to their study. For while common usage applies the term “game” to a wide range of activities, more precise conceptualization is essential. It is common, for example, to call virtual worlds like Second Life (Linden Lab 2003) “games,” even if it is clear to the casual visitor that they bear few, if any, specific game objectives. Thus various games can be accommodated within Second Life, which is not in itself a game – just as a piazza is not a game, though games might be played there. This distinction is quite sharp in the case of virtual social worlds like Second Life, but also in other virtual worlds that contain more evidently constraining rule-based structures, like EVE Online (CCP Games 2003) or any other Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG), where the slippage between what we generally call games and what it is exactly that certain contemporary digital artifacts have developed into is more fraught. If we take a stricter analytical view on what constitutes a game, this slippage occurs also in single-player games like Half-Life 2 (Valve Software 2004b) or Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar North 2008), where the nature of the interaction with projected worlds problematizes comparisons with non-digital games. Indeed, are these games in the same way as contests in tiddlywinks or chess, table-tennis or baseball? Do analytical frameworks established for the study of games apply to digital as well as non-digital examples?
These are just some of the fundamental questions that game studies has addressed, at least since the founding editorial of the first academic journal on digital games, Game Studies. Espen Aarseth there proclaimed 2001 as the first year of “Computer Game Studies as an emerging, viable, academic field” (Aarseth 2001). His claim rests on three noteworthy events of that year: the first conference dedicated to the study of digital games, the first related postgraduate programs, and the first issue of a peer-reviewed online journal dedicated to games. Aarseth’s assertion that game studies needs to be established as a discipline related to, but independent of, other disciplines like media studies, literary studies, sociology, or computer science, among others, is a proclamation of academic independence, based on the conviction that theories developed in other disciplines cannot be applied unproblematically to digital games. That is because, as Aarseth had already argued in Cybertext (1997), digital games have characteristics intrinsically different from media texts studied in other disciplines. Gonzalo Frasca’s (1999) application of a key term, “ludology,” to define a “discipline that studies game and play activities” did not dispel the need for game definitions that distinguish the factors that constitute the crucial difference between digital games and other media forms, or for engaging with what Juul (2003) called the “heart of gameness.” Comprehensive reviews of histories of game definitions have in fact been made by Juul himself (2005), and by Salen and Zimmerman (2003). Their conclusions are worth summarizing.
For Salen and Zimmerman, “A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome” (Salen and Zimmerman 2003: 80). They isolate six critical elements: system, players, artificiality, conflict, rules, and quantifiable outcomes, and suggest that all games are intrinsically systems. A system is “a set of things that affect one another within an environment to form a larger pattern that is different from any of the individual parts” (50). Players are indispensable to the game, which is experienced by interacting with its system. The third element, the artificial aspect of games, envisages a mode of experience different from everyday life. This is related to the concept of the “magic circle” coined by Huizinga (1955) in Homo Ludens. The fourth element, conflict –“all games embody a contest of powers” (80) – encompasses both competition and collaboration with other players, as well as with a game system (as in solo games). Rules enable play through defining what players can and cannot do, while quantifiable outcomes or goals mean that in the end a player has won, lost, or at least received some sort of numerical score or assessment. This element distinguishes games from generalized play, which may not have a quantifiable outcome.
Meanwhile, in his “classic game model” (Juul 2005: 22) Juul proposes a definition applicable to digital and analogue games:
A game is a rule-based system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels emotionally attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are negotiable.
(Juul 2005: 36)
Again, the definition is built on six elements: rules, variable and quantifiable outcome, valorization of outcome, player effort, player attachment to outcome, and negotiable consequences. Juul argues that because rules can be computed by a machine or enforced by human participants, they are the common factor linking digital and non-digital games. Games are therefore “transmedial,” as confirmed by the ability of certain games to migrate across media. Chess can be played with classic pieces, marked bottle tops on improvised boards, or on a computer. In Juul’s account, the rules constitute the system of relations which is the game, and these rules are independent of the media instantiating them. They also create the possibility of a variable and quantifiable outcome – a state of affairs that is objectively final at the end of the game and valorized by the players involved. Some of the possible outcomes are objectively better than others and harder to obtain, and are valued for their emergence from player effort. This effort will tend to result in an attachment to the outcome of the game – winning, for instance, can be savored – although this element is less determining than the others and depends on players’ attitudes. Finally the consequences of the game are negotiable: games can be assigned consequences reaching beyond their domains, and the consequences can be modified across sessions.
Juul provides a diagram that maps a number of activities in three concentric circles: games, borderline cases, and “not games.” Traffic, hypertext fiction, and free-form play are examples of non-game activities. Pen and paper role-playing games, games of pure chance, and open-ended simulations like Simcity (Maxis Software 1989) are borderline cases because they do not satisfy all six categories of the classic game model. Juul’s discussion does not clarify what the difference between the status of borderline games and non-games implies for game analysis, since both are considered activities that fall outside the classic game model. However, Juul is clear that the latter is no longer adequate:
The classic game model is no longer all there is to games. With the appearance of role-playing games, where a game can have rules interpreted by a game master, and with the appearance of video games, the game model is being modified in many ways.
(Juul 2005: 52)
The usefulness of this model is therefore not in creating a strict taxonomy of what constitutes a game and what does not; rather, “it provides a bare-bones description of the field of games; it explains why computers and games work well together; it explains why games are trans-medial and it points to some recent developments in games” (Juul 2005: 54). Juul’s work lays the foundation for a formalist perspective on traditional games while highlighting how digital media challenge this conception. By admitting that this model has its limitations in the context of contemporary developments in digital games, Juul implies that game researchers need to ask how video games deviate from this model. Indeed, what aspects of games like Half-Life 2 (Valve Software 2004b), The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Bethesda Softworks LLC 2006) or World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment 2004) are omitted when the classic games model is applied to their analysis?
In its attempt to respond to such questions, game studies has sometimes been riven by the so-called “narratology versus ludology” debate. Ludologists argue that although narrative is an important aspect of games, it is not their principal quality. Consequently, a direct application of narrative theory to the analysis of games cannot yield a sufficiently well-rounded account. The opposing camp argues for a more central role for narrative in the analysis of games. As the question of narrative – once one has dug beneath the surface claims made in the “tired debate,” as it has been often called (Steinkuehler 2006; Tosca 2003) – detracts attention from the more considerable epistemological and methodological conflicts between ludologists and various other clusters of interest, it might be helpful to see this debate as a clash between formalist approaches to the study of games and the variety of other theoretical paradigms that might be brought to bear.
Other underlying tensions remain. The view that game studies is a separate discipline, or the perception that games require specific analytical theories that take into account their game structure, or “gameness,” has been resisted by some media studies theorists. A reviewer of Juul’s book states:
Designers, gamers and writers have gotten along without the crystalline purity of an idea of gameness or a neo-structural account of the relation between rules and fiction; perhaps the job of the academic aesthetician is to generate informed, sensitive evaluations of particular games on their own terms rather than abstract prescriptions. Apart from delaying the advent of an academic criticism that might be useful to those designing games, or learning how to, one is left wondering what precisely is at stake in this late bloom of ludology.
(Wilson 2006)
Wilson summarizes the tension on the two axes of difference referred to earlier: diversity among the games being discussed and disciplinary methodologies used to study them. If the breadth of variety in the artifacts that are called games is unquestionable, attempts at defining common characteristics by Juul and by Salen and Zimmerman are an important step in the development of a theoretical framework for the study of games. However, a critical issue remains. Can digital and non-digital games be fully accommodated within any one analytical framework?
If all games share a set of common characteristics, then theories created for the analysis of non-digital games such as board games, card games, and sports should be applicable to digital games such as console, computer, and mobile games. But there is considerable disagreement on that. For example, Bryce and Rutter direct harsh criticism at game studies theorists seeking to found a distinct discipline, noting that qualities described as unique are not in fact specific to games at all:
Wolf stresses the aesthetic content of digital games to suggest that research into digital games “adds new concepts to existing ideas in moving image theory, such as those concerning the game’s interface, player action, interactivity, navigation, and algorithmic structures” (2001: 3). However, this emphasis on discontinuity prevents any significant comparison with other new technologies. Digital games (or rather their design and play) may well draw on the issues Wolf highlights but are they really unique in doing so? Do many of these issues have equal relevance to other forms of multimedia design, head-up display in fighter planes (or racing driver’s[sic] helmets) and programming structures in general?
(Bryce and Rutter 2006: 7–8)
A head-up display (HUD), it should be explained here, is an interface designed to aid processing of information in the context of a very immediate material environment with terminal consequences, while digital games are virtual environments that include the interface but are not reducible to it. Making a case for the analytical equivalence between fighter-plane HUDs and digital game interfaces confuses two categorically different objects: the game’s interface is only one component of the media object in question, while the HUD fully constitutes the object studied.
Meanwhile, Bogost makes it clear from the outset that he does not feel it is appropriate to create a methodology for game analysis without separating digital from non-digital games:
When I speak of videogames, I refer to all the varieties of digital artefacts created and played on arcade machines, personal computers, and home consoles. Although videogames follow in the long tradition of parlour games, table games, pub games, and the many varieties of board games evolving from classic games like chess and Go, their necessary relation ends at this bit of common history.
(Bogost 2006: xiii)
Following Bogost, we agree that digital games require specific theoretical models that account for their digitally mediated nature. This becomes particularly important when considering issues relating to the textuality of digital games. Bryce and Rutter sideline media specificity when they argue that this mediation can take forms other than digital:
As a games-related example, think of a simple shooting gallery game, such as one of the numerous Flash and shareware games that can be found on the Internet. As a game, this could be compared and contrasted with a game in which rocks are thrown at cans staked along the top of the fence. It may be clear that the digital game is a technological simulation of the low technology version of the game. In the digital game, technology replaces the physical action of throwing. However, by replacing the rocks with the shooting of an air rifle, we can mediate the throwing action with technology without going digital.
(Bryce and Rutter 2006: 8)
Equating shooting of an air rifle with moving cross-hairs on a screen and pressing mouse buttons to “shoot” targets made entirely of “flickering signifiers” (Hayles 1999: 30) ignores the crucial fact that one is an activity in the material world, while the other is a simulation of such an activity engaged through a representational medium. The shooter of an air-rifle and the mouse clicker are fully aware of the different contexts of their actions, making the two activities of a completely different experiential order. Applying the term “mediation” to digital game-play or rifle shooting ignores the crucial differences between a mediated activity in a wholly designed, representational space and a mediated activity in the material domain. It does therefore seem, on balance, that games, or virtual designed environments, can support orders of experience and interaction that are not quite prefigured or configurable in non-digital contexts, where apparent analogies to what might be replicable when “going digital” underplay understanding of the specificities of the affordances and challenges, not to say the phenomenology, of the remediation possible in games and virtual environments.
Like Bogost, Crogan advocates an approach that treats digital games as distinctively different from non-digital games. He proposes a middle-ground method that brings together theories that treat game aspects of digital games in conjunction with work done in related fields:
I nevertheless believe that the ludological insistence on the game as game points to something very significant about the specificity of games in comparison to narrative-based media works. … I propose to pursue a line of inquiry that departs from an acceptance in broad terms of the ludological approach, namely that narrative is insignificant to understanding what is of most concern for analysing a computer game as a game, that is, as a work that is played.
(Crogan 2004: 14)
Although Crogan states that in the ludological approach “narrative is insignificant,” it is worth noting that when Frasca proposed the term “ludology,” in the context of discussion of digital games (not games in general), he intended it to be used in conjunction with other theories, not in rejection of them: “Our main goal was to show how basic concepts of ludology could be used along with narratology to better understand videogames” (Frasca 1999). Correspondingly, Juul’s work has addressed narrative structures in games, even in a book like Half-Real, which is often cited as a bulwark of “reductionist” ludology. As Juul asserts, his title refers to digital games as a hybrid of the game structures embodied in the rules and the fictional elements associated with textual elements:
In the title, Half-Real refers to the fact that video games are two different things at the same time: video games are real in that they consist of real rules with which players actually interact, and in that winning or losing a game is a real event. However, when winning a game by slaying a dragon, the dragon is not a real dragon but a fictional one. To play a video game is therefore to interact with real rules while imagining a fictional world, and a video game is a set of rules as well as a fictional world.
(Juul 2005: 1)
Like Crogan, Juul is here attempting to bridge the divide between the textual/ representational and the “essentialist” notion of “gameness.” This move is also related to exploring the divergence of digital games from the classic game model, discussed earlier. When he states that digital games problematize the classic game model, he is foregrounding the need to weave the textual and representational aspects of games with their rule-based, coded structures. That is a crucial assertion of the nature of digital games as more complex media artifacts that can be partly described, but not wholly subsumed, under a game definition – precisely because they afford a wider potential for action and expression than is possible in the more traditional games that provide the basis for the classical game model.
One way of overcoming the limitations of formal definitions of games is proposed by Malaby, who argues that the analysis of games demands a processual perspective: “One of the first things we must recognize is that games are processual. Each game is an ongoing process. As it is played it always contains the potential for generating new practices and new meanings, possibly refiguring the game itself” (Malaby 2007: 8). The term “processual” refers to the potential of change in every engagement and favors a dynamic and recursive view of games. Malaby stresses the importance of replacing rules as a starting point for game analysis. He points out the different nature of game rules from social or bureaucratic rules. The latter are “intended to reduce unpredictability across cases” (8), while game rules “are about contriving and calibrating multiple contingencies to produce a mix of predictable and unpredictable outcomes (which are then interpreted)” (9). Malaby formulates games as processes that create carefully designed unpredictable circumstances that have meaningful, culturally shared, yet open-ended interpretations. Therefore both the game practice and the meaning it generates are subject to change.
Malaby goes on to define games in terms of four types of “contrived contingency”: stochastic, social, performative, and semiotic. Stochastic contingency refers to the random elements in games. This ranges from dice rolling to the weather at a football game. Thus stochastic contingency can be designed into a game, such as the rolling of dice in board games, or be extraneous to the designed intent of the game, such as the weather in an open-air game. Social contingency refers to the unpredictability of the choices and decisions made by other players, whether in collaboration or opposition. Making informed deductions about the actions of other players is a key element in most games. Performative contingency refers to the execution of actions by game participants, and is thus related to the ability to carry out intended actions. This can cover anything from the gaming ability of a Counter-Strike Source (Valve Software 2004a) player, to the simple act of counting the right number of spaces in a game of Monopoly (Darrow 1935). Finally, semiotic contingency refers to the unpredictability of meaning that is involved in interpreting the game’s outcomes.
As Taylor (2006) and Malaby (2007) have noted, recent developments in networked gaming, particularly in the case of MMOGs, raise further issues on contingency in game studies. The kind of flexibility built into Malaby’s model therefore becomes both useful and necessary for media artifacts that evolve so rapidly and change not only in the style of representation but also in the scope of activities they afford. And therein lies the biggest challenge in devising methodologies for game analysis. The difference between a game like Pong (Atari Inc. 1972) and Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar North 2008) can scarcely be traced on a single continuum of evolution. The latter transcends conventional understanding of games to deliver, instead, an intricately detailed simulated city, inhabited by thousands of individually designed inhabitants and supporting a span of activities ranging from adrenaline-pumping car chases and fire-fights to casual clothes shopping, flirtation, and a series of embedded mini-games. An environment like Grand Theft Auto’s Liberty City has several self-contained games within it that are only one feature of the whole package one gets when inserting the “game” into the console. Reading the future of game studies, then, becomes a real challenge, not least because the very notion of “gameness” is processual, contingent on the development of new platforms and their multiple affordances.
To conclude, the future of game studies must be intimately linked to three considerations. The first is the evolution of games themselves, as their creators continue to make ever more cutting-edge use of new affordances in technology and design. Consequently, the critical work occasioned, say, in New Media Studies necessarily finds itself both catalyzed and exceeded by those developments, even as the specificity of games, their particular challenges to the protocols of critical discourse and of established conceptualities become more evident to commentators. One might then expect the timeliness and integrity of game studies, as a discipline, to be vindicated. However, that vindication will not be straightforward. This cues the second consideration. As game studies acquires greater penetration in institutional settings, the field can expect to find itself experiencing the same kinds of polemics about its own disciplinary status and its place in academia that were once instigated by literary theory or cultural studies and – lest we forget – by sociology or even English, none of which encountered, in the different eras of their coming to acceptance, unopposed recognition within the academy.
In all this, game studies is potentially undermined by what may well be most compelling about it: its apparent freshness but also its comparative innocence. Game studies seems to mediate an uncomplicated vista on the very possibility of the “new” that had been almost entirely discredited, within various perspectives in the humanities, by those positions that held that ours is a time of ultimately quite sterile “postality.” A dependence on ironic revisitation, jadedness in regard to art and culture, cynicism about the possibility of the avant-garde: these are some of the familiar attributes of the postmodern, almost all of which have been predicated on critiques of familiar art forms and cultural practices and on a stance towards cyberculture that remains largely disengaged from and sometimes oblivious to its modalities. Games, however, tend to problematize all that. They do so not through some pointed deployment of their thematic or formal texture, but quite often by nothing more than the uncomplicatedness of their appeal, the beguilements of their own surface textures, their invitation to an unreflected engaging experience that is bigger on goals and mechanics than on “meaning” or adherence to an “aesthetic.” Undoubtedly, they can be breezier about their own attunement to the digital age and their place in it than many of the forms they coexist alongside in the twenty-first century.
Additionally, games posit different ways and tempos and communities of seeing, reading, and interacting – and, indeed, of play itself. They thereby enable a quite novel focus for conventions of critique and analysis, suggesting that distinct critical idioms and protocols more directly appropriate to games ought to be devised. That is because games subvert too many aspects and preconceptions of originality, intertextuality and intermediality, virtuality, authorship, aesthetics, reader/audience-response, and the phenomenology of fiction to make the claims of postmodernism or the procedures of traditional criticism quite adequate or viable in their regard. Quite fundamentally, they also collapse the work–play distinction (see Taylor 2006). Commentary on games’ diverse emphases on collective authorship, on networked engagement involving potentially innumerable concurrent players, on multisensory stimuli and multimediatic dimensions, to name but a few characteristics, are not straightforwardly containable or articulable within the discourse of those claims or procedures. Therefore games might well compel a distinct kind of critique whose formulation and development would be one of the primary objectives of game studies.
The problem for games studies is that games do suffer from an image problem. This goes beyond routine debates on games’ encouragement of violence and dissociation. Certainly within academia, the values of scholarship and the rewards of a certain kind of disciplinary cachet are not intuitively associable with the field. Nor is it immediately clear, to those who have never played them, that games might mediate some kind of technological sublime. To such an uninitiated perception, games rather exemplify the depthlessness and waning of affect that Fredric Jameson famously identified in the postmodern. This view is not helped by characteristic game storylines and iconography being overinvested in cultures and subcultures that might come across as adolescent. It is true that some virtual environments that are coextensive with games are overdetermined by the fantastical topographies and demographics of Middle Earth-like landscapes, or, alternatively, by the trigger-happy immediacy of first-person shooters or the occasional vapidity of Sims-like scenarios.
That impression, however, is likely to be quickly allayed by any initial encounter with games. In any case, there are games that look set to richly exploit the logic and frameworks uniquely afforded and pioneered in this most contemporary of media. Portal (Valve Corporation 2007) is, famously, one such game. Its gameplay makes the most of a counter-intuitive physics to which only the virtual worlds configurable in games could give instantiation, while nobody who has even sampled user-created content in LittleBigPlanet (Media Molecule 2008) is likely to be condescending in regard to the potential of games. Any such stance is allayed further by the encounter with games (or environments) created by independent producers, like Dear Esther (The Chinese Room 2008), or others that appear to privilege the paidic over the ludic (Caillois 1962), like Flower (ThatGameCompany 2009).
In this respect, the third consideration becomes irresistible. Quite simply, games are too important to be left to luminaries and practitioners within game studies. That might sound like a provocation to the purists within game studies who would advocate that only commentators with clear affiliations to the field, or aficionados of games and their parallel and fictional worlds, can meaningfully and informedly pronounce upon it. But the gradual coming to canonicity of game studies will mean that the other disciplines will draw themselves to it, collaborating with it or appropriating aspects of it. That cannot be bad, especially since games offer such intriguing vistas to narratology, anthropology, critical and cultural theory, psychology, media studies, philosophy, and sociology. This, then, will have been yet another episode in the familiar, timeless tale of the recuperation of the marginal or the popular. Indeed, the recuperation looks to be already in place, as indicated by many of the studies quoted here, or by the monographs on games published by some of the more prestigious academic publishers – or by this very entry in a Routledge Companion, especially if it does not appear incongruous in the company of the other articles.
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