Vol. 4, No. 2 (2010)
http://www.eludamos.org
Screening Play: Rules, Wares, and Representations in “Realistic” Video Games
Ian Reyes, Suellen Adams
Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture. 2010; 4 (2), p. 149-166
Screening Play: Rules, Wares, and Representations
in “Realistic” Video Games
IAN REYES AND SUELLEN ADAMS
Introduction
Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1955), a touchstone for the study of play, provides a
basic theory of how games operate in the life of “Man the Player.” The crux of his
position is ontological: the human being is founded on play. Though Huizinga insists
that play is the basis of human culture and informs all existence, his spatial concept
of play, positing that games establish a “magic circle” within the mundane, suggests
a divide between the everyday world and the world of games. Within the magic circle,
one becomes a different person in a different world, a player whose actions take on
new meanings warranted by the structure of the game’s space and, most importantly,
the game’s rules. However, Huizinga’s theory cannot be applied to video gaming
without a careful consideration of the material conditions that make the magic circle
of video games unlike that of other games.
The conceptual leverage point is found in the basic observation that the defining
element of video gaming is the game apparatus’ screening of player from played. In
sum, a video game is a type of screen game and, like all screen games, is played
upon and through an apparatus of interaction founded on separating players from the
field of play. More to the point, this separation is not an impediment to the game play.
On the contrary, it is the sine-qua-non of this type of play—screen-play—as such.
In highlighting the apparatus as the keystone for the magic circle of video gaming, we
displace players—the subject of ludology—and “text”—the subject of narratology.
This is not to deny the importance of players’ agency or the meanings of texts in
video gaming; rather it is to reconsider these with regard to the screening of player
from played inherent in the gaming apparatus. To better understand the situation of
homo ludens in these more mediated play spaces, we turn to Jacques Lacan’s
account of “split” subjectivity and retread it by explaining how it may well explain the
operation of a magic circle spanning three dimensions of screen-play: rules
(Symbolic dimension), representations (Imaginary dimension), and wares (Real
dimension).
In the end, we come around to the other space of Huizinga’s theory—the connections
with the non-game world—to show that the value of video game play is also found
beyond the apparatus, that the experience and enjoyment of video games are
affected in part by social reality and, in turn, social reality is being affected by the
experience and enjoyment of video games. Arriving at this point by first theorizing the
video game apparatus, however, highlights matters of video game design more so
than issues of audience or textual analysis. To illustrate this perspective, we
conclude by defining three ways to analyze video games in terms of “realism,”
proposing three types of video game realism: representational, simulative, and
inverse.
Eludamos Vol. 4, No. 2 (2010)
p. 149-166
Copyright © by Ian Reyes and Suellen Adams
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Huizinga and the Screened Circle
Jesper Juul (2008, p.64) characterizes contemporary critiques of Huizinga as being
concerned with dispelling the myth of the magic circle as a “perfect separation
between the game and that which is outside the game.” That is, game studies
typically stress how the magic circle can be understood as contiguous with, not set
apart from, the everyday. However, though the myth of separation may be a poor
conception of many types of play, and may be a narrow view of Huizinga’s position, it
nonetheless provides an apt description of video game play.
The most significant historical and material factor distinguishing video games from
others is that they are screen games, which is not to say that they are primarily video
screen based, but that they screen the player from the field of play. What this means
for homo ludens, in short, is that the player is displaced from where the game takes
place. By engaging the screen game apparatus, players complete a magic circle that
both incorporates and alienates the play of players. As Juul (2007) points out, the
limits imposed by video games are not unique. Rules, alone, for any game, have the
same limiting function. If there were no rules to limit the way players play, Juul
explains, there would be no game.
For example, soccer is only a game by virtue of rules limiting the use of hands,
prescribing a certain number of players and positions, constraining the action to a
specified field, and so on. Limiting the play of players, then, must not be thought of as
a problem for video games. The limiting qualities of screen games are the primary
conditions of possibility for screen-play as such. More so than any other type of play,
screen-play derives from limiting players’ input. Screen games are interactive by
virtue of the mediation of the magic circle, which sets in motion a play of “here” and
“there” not typical of unmediated games.
Screening play not only limits input, it also limits feedback by alienating the player’s
body from the game and, in so doing, focusing attention on the game world “behind”
the apparatus where the in-game action takes place. This is what any notion of video
games as “virtual reality” hinge upon, a mechanism whereby a person inhabits two
places at once, with one being more or less real than the other. Similarly, the concept
of “presence” in video games and other virtual environments (Lombard and Ditton
1997; Riva, et al. 2003) is only justifiable if there is a fundamental problem of
separation to be overcome. This is what the idea of “cyberspace,” more generally, is
built upon—the extension of real bodies into virtual spaces. So, again, to insist on the
role of the screen is not to insist on the centrality of graphic representation on video
screens but on the means and effects of screening, or of simultaneously separating
and mediating between the player and the played as part of the constitution a game.
From this standpoint, video screens are not necessary components of screen-play
(nor, for that matter, are computers).
Most video game histories begin with Spacewar! (Russell 1962), one of the first
computer games. Such historiography stresses the newness of video games by
supposing that the computerized aspects of the game are the hallmark of this kind of
play. In fact, many video game studies use the term “computer” games instead,
arguing that this emphasis on the computer rather than the video aspects of the
game more accurately represents the object of study. However, the genealogy most
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relevant to video games as a type of screen-play begins prior to cathode ray tubes
and microprocessors.
In this genealogy, video games are the descendents of gaming apparatuses such as
bagatelle, roulette, pinball, foosball, and pachinko. In all of these, the design of the
apparatus and the rules of the game keep players physically outside the field of play
and channel their control through limited inputs. That is, prior to video screens upon
which one plays, there were glass screens through which one played, and prior to
that there was de facto screening by rules limiting direct intervention into the world
defined by the gaming apparatus. So, on the point of limiting input and feedback,
rules as such can, and should, be thought of in these terms. Reiterating Huizinga’s
position, to play a game is, in all cases, to play with regard to certain limits, or rules,
that make game-playing more, or differently, pleasurable than free-play. It is the
rules, for example, that make it meaningful when someone moves a ball from one
place to another using certain methods and/or tools. Yet screen games also
concretize and condense these methods and tools in the design of the apparatus.
For screen games, the key is for a player to learn to interact with the limiting
apparatus in order to produce an outcome with value within the world of the game.
What makes video screen games different even from non-video screen games is that
the rules for video games are mostly hard-wired into the screening apparatus. The
rules for playing non-video screen games rest largely on a social contract. Although
multiplayer and online video gaming, which will be addressed later, may introduce
more social, less wired rules, the players of video screen games cannot so easily
play by improvising new means of interaction. Lifting a pinball machine, for example,
produces in-game effects, whereas lifting a computer screen does nothing in-game
(though it may, on some systems, affect the feel of interfaces using monitor-mounted
motion-detecting receivers).
Yet Huizinga’s theory, while clear about this kind of separation as a defining aspect
of the magic circle, needs to be articulated with a perspective more capable of
accounting for mediate subjectivity if it is to be applied to video games. Video game
players, who become such when alienated from the game world, share this alienation
with other media subjects—like film and television viewers—and may be theorized
similarly. One of the most well worn theories of mediate subjectivity comes from
psychoanalytically influenced cinema studies—so called “Screen theory”–a tradition
concerned with understanding how the cinematic apparatus manages to involve
spectators in the imaginary world of a film despite, and because of, the screen’s
material separation of spectators from the world of cinematic representation.
Lacan and the Magic Knot
In Seminar XX (1999, p111), Lacan introduces the model of the Borromean knot
(Figure 1) in order to illustrate the logic of symptoms stemming from discourses
which, in effect, ask the subject to refuse what is offered because “that’s not it.” The
model is meant to explain the topology of sexual desire, fantasy, and enjoyment as
they take place well outside what one could comfortably call “reality,” though it may
just as well describe the erotics of screen games which, as a categorical distinction,
always offer alternate realities founded on such a move. Screen-players cannot be
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inaugurated into the magic circle of video games without first engaging and
disavowing the screening apparatus as the locus of play. The interactivity of video
games comes from the apparatus’ capacity to, in effect, convince players that what
they are offered—controller, disc, console, monitor, speakers—is not “it,” that the field
of play lies elsewhere. Without this opening rejection, one does not enter the magic
circle of screen-play.
Figure 1: Lacan’s Borromean knot
As Andrew Cutrofello (2002) explains, Lacan relies upon figures such as this knot
precisely because he is theorizing a space of subjectivity where the Real and reality
do not coincide necessarily. It is where the subject cannot be pinned to a point in
physical space but, instead, exists in a liminal dimension of shared language,
meanings, and inter-corporeality found in the spheres of Imaginary and Symbolic
existence: “it literally requires us to assume that all of phenomenal ‘reality’ has the
character of a dream whose hidden ground—the real—can only ‘appear’ as a
problematic x, as a signifier, as a stain within aisthesis” (Cutrofello 2002, p.163). This
“stain” is situated at the center of the knot. The a, standing for autre (other), marks
failures to sustain a sense of reality, virtual, or otherwise. The point of illustrating
Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary as three overlapping circles is to show the way each
is separate from the other yet necessary for the operation of the whole. However, to
grasp how this diagram illustrates a knot, and is not a simple Venn diagram, and to
better understand why such a thing would matter, it is necessary to understand how
each circle depicts an element integral to the screening of video game play.
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For Lacan, human desire, and therefore social reality, is founded and sustained by
the links and breaks between these three registers of subjectivity—Real, Imaginary,
and Symbolic—derived from Sigmund Freud’s conceptions of the Id, Ego, and
Superego. Though each may be considered distinct for analytic purposes, they are
actually three aspects of the same basic mechanism of desire, which, despite its
apparent simplicity, supports almost inconceivable variation. However, this is so only
if these three elements exist simultaneously. If one link is removed, the knot unravels
and, in terms of play, the magic of the circle(s) vanishes.
According to Lacan, the Symbolic is aligned with influences such as language and
law—or rules, basically—preceding and exceeding the Imaginary, which, for video
games, should be understood as the realm of representation. The Real, which is
related to but not reducible to empirical reality, is the realm of the apparatus in real
life, outside the game, consisting of the requisite “wares” (hardware, software, and
bodied human player) that support the other two registers but are separate from them
because they are the “not it” of the in-game experience. Simply put, for video games,
the magic knot consists of three components: rules, wares, and representations.
Together, these constitute the apparatus of incorporation and alienation, or
screening, characteristic of video game play (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Video game knot
Missing from Lacanian theory, however, is a coherent account of play. On this, it is
significant that Lacan’s theory of the object is derived from Freud (1989), whose
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theory of objects was illustrated as a matter of pre-subjective play in his analysis of
the fort/da game. As Lacan (1998, p.63) explains,
It is the repetition of the mother’s departure as cause of a Spaltung [split] in the
subject—overcome by the alternating game, fort-da, which is a here or there, and
whose aim, in its alternation, is simply that of being the fort of a da, and the da of
a fort. It is aimed at what, essentially, is not there, qua represented.
Video gamers are also described as “split” between narrative and play (Ryan 2005)
and as subject to “engaged disengagement” with hardware/software components
(Ihde 1990; Nielson 2010). With video games, players are both split (or disengaged)
and reconsolidated (or engaged) as subjects of the game via images, sounds,
narratives, rules, feedback, platforms, controllers, and codes cooperating to construct
the magic circle in a world apart. Of special interest for understanding screen-play is
Lacan’s clarification, that this play between places is aimed at something “not there”
in the representation. In order to motivate screen-play, something has to go missing.
For video games, the missing element, which does not appear in the game as
represented, is the Real, that is, the wares, which can only go missing when knotted
with the Imaginary and the Symbolic.
Wares are the Real dimension of video games, the hardware, software, and human
player in real life, which are outside the world of the game yet essential to it. Because
of their causal connection, however, these rejected elements are never absent; they
remain at the heart of the matter, absorbed into the player’s experience of the game.
Audio and video (and sometimes haptic output) make up the Imaginary dimension, or
what film theorists would call the “diegesis,” the representational aspects of the
virtual game world. Lastly, the Symbolic dimension is where rules come into play,
lending meaning to the audio-visual representations of the Imaginary and providing
feedback on the interaction between wares. These are not only analytic categories
but also the three key components without which a video game cannot be. Without
wares, there is no one and nothing to play. Without representations, there may be a
game to play but it is not a video game. Without rules, it may be play but it is not a
game.
Together, these domains support considerable diversity. Hardware controllers can be
touchpads, trackballs, analog sticks, motion controllers, balance boards, and so on.
Speakers can be mono, stereo, or surround. Visual monitors can be CRT, LCD, LED,
or 3D, handheld, boxed, or projected. Software can be programmed using various
computer languages and delivered using myriad media. Even the domain of
representation is open to wide variations, not just in aesthetic style but also in
emphasis, such as video games for the blind (e.g., Rail Racer [Martin 2007]), which
rely wholly on audio avatars, cues, and feedback. The lesson of the Borromean knot,
therefore, is that, through these three, knotted components screening player from
played, the whole of video gaming experience is possible and, if one component is
not there, there is no video gaming. So, with these basics in mind, we move on to
explain what this means for video game studies.
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The Loci of Video Game Play
In general, video game studies have much to say about Imaginary matters—graphic
art, virtual bodies, presence effects, narratives and their meanings—elements which
new media studies derived from filmic and televisual analyses. However, these
features of game play are ancillary and partly independent from the Symbolic and
Real spheres, which are equally (if not more) definitive of what it is to play a game
rather than merely watch or “read” it.
The Imaginary, as the realm of representation, only offers points of interest for
screen-players when they overlap with the Real to produce play entities (e.g., where
apparatus and representation coincide in an avatar) or with the Symbolic to produce
meaningful action (e.g., audio-visual information revealing the game world’s
affordances or narrative). There are also essential gaming features, such as
conditions for winning and losing (including scoring and leveling), that have next to
nothing to do with the Imaginary but everything to do with the Symbolic and Real.
These are found where rules and wares intersect. These inner lobes of the knot
(Figure 3) represent the field of play, while the remainder represents what is given by
design. In other words, these are the loci of different types of interactivity
distinguishing video games from other, more passive media entertainments.
Figure 3: Loci of play
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Espen Aarseth’s (2005) analysis of doors, for instance, illustrates the relationship
indicated by the Imaginary and the effect of the Real upon it. Aarseth ponders how
few doors found in video games serve a purpose other than graphic “texture”; they
are only part of the decor of a room’s interior or of a city street and cannot be played
with. A functioning door, however, is what the player might call a “real” door because
it is part of the Imaginary that is in-play. For games with a strong exploratory
component, discovering which elements of the Imaginary game environment may be
affected by inputs from the Real can be a major focus of game play, especially for
novices. Learning, for instance, which doors coincide with the Real and which are
purely Imaginary are crucial first steps in becoming a competent player of the game.
Juul’s (2007) concept of “abstraction,” by contrast, falls into the category of Imaginary
aspects informed by the Symbolic. For Juul, abstraction is a form of
limitation/affordance found where video game rules meet video game “fiction,” or
representation. It is “the level on which the player can act: the actions available to the
player” (Juul 2007, p.511). Using restaurant games as an example, Juul compares
Cooking Mama (Majesco Games 2006) to Diner Dash (Gamelab 2004) in order to
show that even though each is part of the same type of representational world, the
rules afford only certain actions to the player, which makes the games very different.
That is, video games may represent the same type of game world, such as a
restaurant, but playing in that world has everything to do with the way rules call for
certain actions (e.g., cooking) and not others (e.g., serving customers).
The reflection of rules through representation can also be conveyed through
narratives cluing players how to interpret and act within the representation. How does
a player recognize the difference between allies and enemies? Which direction
should the player travel? What is the goal for this level? Certainly, not all games rely
on narrative for this sort of information—which can equally be conveyed by an
instruction manual—but narratives, when part of a game’s design, lend an additional
layer of meaning to the game by explicating connections between what players
see/hear/feel and what that means in terms of the game’s rules. More generally, the
intersection of rules and representations is, borrowing from Claudia Gorbman’s
(1987) work on narrative film, “metadiegetic.” As Gorbman explains, metadiegetic
material is not part of the diegesis though, for the audience, it is explicitly connected
with it, such as a motif that plays whenever a key character appears (e.g., Darth
Vader and the “Imperial March” [Williams 1980]). Motifs are common in video games,
identifying key characters, places, and events, and thus helping players to interpret
the meaning of their play. Non-musical, motif-like sound effects are also part of the
Imaginary’s Symbolic attributes. Sound effects generated by play acts deemed
significant by the rules (e.g., scoring points, picking up an item, or taking damage)
also count as metadiegetic cues as to the meaning of play.
Although, for film, there is no clear visual analog to metadiegetic sound, metadiegetic
graphics are common in video games. When a player’s avatar has an icon over its
head in order to disambiguate it from other objects in the Imaginary (e.g., the green
diamond from The Sims, ID tags in MMOs), or when an object flashes to indicate
damage, players encounter visual elements that are not truly part of the game world.
These objects serve less to enhance a sense of virtual reality and serve more to
visually indicate what the rules deem to be meaningful interaction with Imaginary
objects. Another way to think of metadiegetic cues is that they are not seen/heard by
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characters within the diegesis. They do not reside within the game world, only in a
level of meta-representation intended to provide feedback to the player. In this
regard, the most common metadiegetic visual cue is the player’s score, which can be
visually indicated as points, a health meter, gold pieces, a leaderboard, or another
metric.
However, the Imaginary dimension of the Symbolic includes only those aspects of
the rules that are communicated to the player. Where the Symbolic meets the Real,
one finds conditions that may or may not be reflected in the Imaginary. This is where
rules are most like pure software code—algorithms for processing player inputs—and
where the game takes place outside the representations of the Imaginary.
If the Imaginary’s intersections with the Real and Symbolic are where a game’s
virtual reality is encountered, then the Real dimension of the Symbolic, which stands
wholly apart from the Imaginary, is where the reality of the game is not virtual at all.
As Aarseth (2005) argues, although video game players may play in virtual worlds,
the winning and losing of those games is real. While not all games are clearly won or
lost, the conditions for advancing the game, or simply the criteria by which the game
evaluates the quality of player’s play, is registered by the Real components of the
Symbolic. This includes conditions for scoring points, earning experience, levelingup, and unlocking content. Some video games have an almost one-to-one correlation
between these types of statistics and Imaginary feedback, such as in Red Dead
Redemption (Rockstar San Diego 2010), which shows cumulative player stats for
everything from number of enemies killed, to the types of weapons used to make
those kills, to the amount of in-game distance traveled by foot, horse, or coach.
With this rich coordination of Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real, games such as Red
Dead Redemption are not simply won or lost. They may be played with any number
of aims, such as to kill as many enemies as possible using only a double-barreled
shotgun while riding on a stagecoach. Again, at this level of analysis, these are not
only Imaginary, in-game achievements, but things the player has achieved. This is
not to say that the player has actually killed anyone, but rather that the player has
truly accomplished certain game goals, such as terminating virtual foes. Many of
these real achievements are now tracked through out-of-game services such as
Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, and the Rockstar Social Club, where video gamers
can access metadata about their play statistics and compare themselves to friends
and other players around the world.
On the other hand, there need not be such clear and copious feedback. Consider the
less action-oriented, more narrative-centered Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream 2010).
This game is more of an interactive story that does not clearly indicate a score or
even the player’s health meter, though player characters can take damage, die, and,
unlike fighting games, not re-spawn, creating dramatic turns in the story. In fact, in
Heavy Rain the only Imaginary indication of what is happening at the Real level of
the Symbolic is indicated through changes in the narrative. Whereas dense statistical
feedback may motivate players of Red Dead Redemption, it is the ambiguity between
narrative progress and input that makes Heavy Rain compellingly innovative.
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The Other Locus of Play
The last part of the knot to be addressed is the center, a, or, as it has been
explained, the “stain” leftover by the screening apparatus. Because disavowal of the
apparatus is an absolute requirement for entering the magic circle of screen games,
the trace of this fundamental rejection cannot be regarded as exterior to the game
world. Failure to reconcile (or fully knot) wares, rules, and representations manifests
in encounters with the object a, or, in more Freudian terms, returns of the repressed.
The repressed objects of video game screening may be witnessed in glitches and
unintended outcomes experienced when bad game design, lack of skill, or faulty
controls turn the erotics of video gaming, founded in the denial of the apparatus, into
frustration when the player is unavoidably confronted with the game’s mediation.
While these returns may upset a player’s sense of immediate presence,
identification, or being “there” in a virtual world, they are indispensable to certain
types of “bad” screen-play. First, players themselves can be bad at a game, lacking
overall skill or knowledge of the specific play logics. Alternately, play can be
technically bad, resulting from problems such as glitchy graphics or poor controller
mapping. Play can also be ethically bad, such as cheating. This is not to say that
glitches, cheats, and learning to play cannot be fun or are not part of the game.
Rather, they are other to playing the game as such. This is not an absolute alterity,
as real life outside the game may be, but an other internal to the game, a little, other
object (objet petit autre) forged within the game through the knotting of particular
rules, wares, and representations.
Lacanian theory, applied to media, typically casts this other object as a rupture in the
Imaginary, a point within the representation where the mediation of the
representation becomes apparent (e.g., dirt on the lens of a camera or a boom mic
dropping into the frame). Such glitchy events momentarily break the illusion of virtual
reality. Yet representations, due to their mediation, always contain a modicum of
otherness that, when successfully repressed, “lures” audiences to the text, gives
them room to be active, and makes them, in effect, part of the representation (Lacan
1980). Though explained through terms such as “break,” “rupture,” “failure,” and
“lack,” this concept describes something that is present, necessary, and desirable for
engaging audiences and players alike. Huizinga posits something similar in his
consideration of rule-breaking.
Huizinga emphasizes that games must have rules in order to be played and, once
the rules are broken, the magic circle is dissolved. There are two ways, in his theory,
to break the rules and destroy the circle. One is to quit prematurely, to walk out on
the game, or to otherwise be a “spoil sport” (1955, p.11). The other way is to cheat.
Interestingly, Huizinga finds that society has a more lenient attitude toward cheaters
than toward quitters. The reason, he explains, is that cheating “still acknowledges the
magic circle” (p.11). Yet when rules are but one of three key domains for play, and
when they are hard-wired into the apparatus, the idea of cheating takes on new
dimensions.
Given the extent to which rules are programmed into video games, it may seem as if
the only way to cheat is to hack the game’s hardware or software, which may not be
cheating so much as creating another game. In many video games, however, no
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hacking is necessary: cheats are routinely incorporated into the official options for a
game, creating a curious situation in which there is the intended game, and then
there are versions of the game for cheaters. Clearly, there should be a distinction
made between official cheats that are built-in to a game’s standard options—in which
case they are not truly “cheats” but different permutations of the rules—and unofficial
cheats, including hacks and “exploits,” or using glitches to gain advantages
unintended by the game’s designers. For single-player games, however, it is hard to
say who is cheating whom. Arguably, there has to be someone else in order for a
player to cheat. In multiplayer environments, however, cheats take on another, more
ethical tone, and therefore seem more like real cheating. In a multiplayer context,
these cheats cannot be seen as simply creating a different game, they are creating a
situation where one player—the cheater—is playing the same game with an unfair
advantage.
A new vocabulary of cheating has emerged among multiplayer, online gamers. Such
cheats include “lagging”—hacking network hardware to slow down the cheater’s data
output over the network—and “wallhacks”—hacking software to provide cheaters with
the ability to see through walls. These are relatively cut-and-dried instances of
gaining an unethical advantage. Not only are these cheaters not playing with the
same hardware and software as their opponent, other players often have no way to
tell that these hacks have been applied.
Most online video game cheats are, however, more social than technical, and
therefore more ethically murky. That is, they tend to obey the letter but not the spirit
of the law. These include “boosting,” or enlisting the help of other players to gain
experience and level-up quickly (e.g, agreeing to take turns killing one another until
both players level), and “camping,” which is when players in online shooters hide in a
easily defended but highly trafficked area (usually near where opposing players respawn after dying) to prey upon opponents in a defenseless moment of (re)entry.
There is also “griefing,” or playing for no purpose other than to ruin other players’ fun.
Though this may not truly be cheating, as it is unconcerned with creating a winning
advantage, it may be unethical, as it makes a game of interfering with other players’
ability to play the game as they choose.
None of these actions are prohibited by the rules of the game, but this vocabulary of
cheating has evolved as players attempt to voice the emergent ethics of play in
online gaming communities. If the three loci of play represent players’ interaction with
the game as designed, the middle—the gap that separates and joins all three—is
where other types of play take place. The extent to which the game apparatus is
negotiable beyond its programmed limits is found here, in a locus within the game yet
outside the purview of its makers.
Screen-players traverse the loci of play, sometimes skirting, sometimes falling into,
and sometimes drawing from the gap, or internal limit, left over from the primary
repression of the gaming apparatus. Effects such as seamless identification between
player and avatar, the alternation between aggravation and amazement when
learning to play an unfamiliar game, the boredom of “grinding,” outrage at cheaters,
and, of course, the jubilation of winning, are experienced through this structuring of
the apparatus. In order to demonstrate how the above may be applied and to suggest
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areas for future study, we move on to untangling some of the issues of realism
pertaining to video game studies.
Three Realisms: Representational, Simulative, and Inverse
Drawing from Huizinga, Raph Koster (2005, p.38) explains the need to inform video
game design with elements of the real world in order to make more compelling
games: “To make games more long-lasting, they [developers] need to integrate more
variables (and less predictable ones) such as human psychology, physics, and so on.
These are elements that arise from outside the game’s rules and the ‘magic circle’.”
Koster stresses the idea that game design, when done well, works upon references
(either direct or abstract) to the world outside, which are absolutely necessary to lend
meaning to the play. Further, while it is true that Huizinga puts much stock in the
magic circle as an exceptional, other space, he also supports the notion of homo
ludens by insisting on the value of play beyond fun, as an edifying, world-making
experience. With this in mind, we will now show what our Huizingian reconceptualization of a Lacanian architectonic suggests about the connections
between video games and the world outside. We will describe three approaches to
studying video games in terms of realism, two supporting Koster’s design principles
and one supporting a more recent vision of design from Jesse Schell.
The first is representational realism, or realism of the Imaginary. In the most basic
sense, this pertains to realistic sounds and graphics. However, if realism is part and
parcel of designing good games, then the history of video games is inexplicable if
one supposes that this is where compelling games come from. For example, without
supposing an ignorant or unsophisticated player, it is nearly impossible to explain
how 8-bit games, incapable of audio-visual verisimilitude, could ever be popular.
Further, beyond the marketing hype, even today’s best video game graphics fail to
achieve true, photographic realism.
Still, this is a weak understanding of realism and a diminished application of what the
Imaginary perspective on games may involve. A stronger understanding of Imaginary
realism is found in what T. L. Taylor (2006) terms “persistent environments.” Taylor
contends that the persistence of online, multiplayer video games such as Everquest
(Sony Online Entertainment 1999-2009) and World of Warcraft (Blizzard 1994-2010)
are alluring in large part due to their persistence through time. In other words,
representational realism is not solely about graphics and sounds but how a game
constructs a sense of place and time. Even an offline game such as Animal Crossing
(Nintendo EAD 2001), though representationally primitive even in its day, can
achieve a high degree of realism by using time-sensitive processes to create the
experience of a persistent world. Animal Crossing made good on its tag-line, “The
real-life game that’s playing even when you’re not,” by utilizing the console’s internal
clock and calendar to create an illusion that the game’s non-player characters were
still “there,” playing without the player, even when the console was turned off. In
these cases, realism comes from the sense that the magic circle is not broken when
a player leaves; as in real life, absence does not mean the end of the world.
The second type of realism, simulative realism, derives from the Symbolic. What
matters for simulative realism is the way rules model real life systems. A realistic
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game, from a simulative standpoint, would be one with rules abstracted from real life
systems (e.g., driving a car on a race track, multi-national military conflicts). For these
to pass as realistic, the measure is not the accuracy of their representations but the
accuracy of the rules for play.
As Katrin Becker and J.R. Parker (2006) argue, “all games are simulations, but not all
simulations are games.” So, all games have simulative aspects, but there may be
significant differences between simulative games and what may be thought of as
“pure” simulators. Learning to ride horses in Gallop Racer (Tecmo 2000-2006) hardly
counts as preparation or training for actual horseracing (though it offers a fine
education in gambling). This is unlike non-game horse simulators, such as those
from the Racewood company, which look a lot like arcade games. They feature a lifesize model of a horse in front of a large video screen, but offer no virtual betting and
no scoring per se as they are designed for the sole purpose of training and exercising
professional jockeys. More to the point, using a Racewood simulator is likely more
arduous and less fun than the more abstract, yet simulatively realistic, Gallop Racer.
Rather than thinking of simulative realism in terms of correspondence between
playing a game and doing the real thing, Frasca (2003) offers another approach to
simulative games, focusing on how they can convey ideologies through rules alone.
Following this approach, the most ideologically disturbing aspect of a game such as
Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar North 2010) is not the way it depicts any particular
race, gender, or sexuality—these are mostly Imaginary issues—but the way the rules
defining lose conditions are structured: it is always better to force the police to kill you
(because your avatar will re-spawn with all the equipment it acquired) than it is to let
them arrest you (because you will lose that equipment). Understanding simulative
realism is about more than new avenues for ideology critique, however. It also
squares with Brian Sutton-Smith’s (1997) theory of play as education/development,
and does so in a way that does not confuse simulative games with pure, non-game
simulators.
Simulative realism is a requirement for “serious” games ranging from classics such
as Math Blaster (Davidson 1987), a game designed to teach basic arithmetic, to
more contemporary efforts such as PeaceMaker (ImpactGames 2007), which
challenges players to resolve the conflict between Palestine and Israel. Of course,
there are non-game math simulators—calculators—and there are non-game
simulators to predict the outcome of military conflicts, and these are better suited to
real world applications. The lessons of simulative games tend to be more conceptual
than pragmatic. Simulative games, because they are made for play and not for work,
tend to be better suited for producing conceptual, not pragmatic, outcomes. Yet this
is not to say the two may not be linked. Simulative realism, as an educative and
ideological force, is behind unintended pragmatic outcomes, such as the influence
the Madden NFL series (EA Tiburon 1989-2010) has had on actual NFL football. Not
only is this simulative football series used to predict the outcome of real lineups, it is
also, as Chris Suellentrop (2010) reports, changing the way NFL players come to
understand, and therefore play, real football. Most notably, Suellentrop identifies
unusual clock management techniques, such as running circuitously toward the end
zone to strategically waste time. Such outcomes of simulative realism speak to the
potential for real world outcomes not through practical training but through new forms
of consciousness inspired by simulative game play.
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There is another type of realism that shows a different way the world outside of video
games may be affected by screen-play. This last type, inverse realism, pertains to the
Real. Inverse realism is found in reversals of ordinary screen-play experience. The
most basic example of inverse realism can be linked to apparatuses that allow
motion control and visual recognition, such as Nintendo’s Wii or Microsoft’s Kinect,
which make the separation of player from played dissipate somewhat. More radical is
Jane McGonigal’s (2008) vision of how video game designers can contribute to
designing a better society.
[R]eality is fundamentally broken, and we have a responsibility as game
designers to fix it, with better algorithms and better missions and better feedback
and better stories and better community and everything else we know how to
make. We have a responsibility as the smartest people in the world, the people
who understand how to make systems that make people feel engaged,
successful, happy, and completely alive, and we have the knowledge and the
power to invent systems that make reality work better.
This is echoed by Schell (2010). Observing the kind of micro-transactional game
commerce popular on social networking sites, Schell argues that these principles,
pioneered by the new game industry, will affect everyday life: “We're, before too long,
going to get to the point where every soda can, every cereal box is going to have a
CPU, a screen and a camera on board it, and a wi-fi connector so that it can be
connected to the internet. And what will that world be like?” Living in that world, in
short, will be like playing video games across many micro-apparatuses. The
inconspicuous cloud-gaming will inform day-to-day, non-game activities, and the
experience will be like George Orwell’s 1984 but more fun, with hegemonic consent
generated through leaderboards and unlockable achievement bonuses. Schell’s
vision includes:
[E]ye sensors that can tell when you're watching the ads, certain ads, especially,
because you're going to get points for them. And your remote has a little screen
on it and a little camera so you can be on live chat with other people you know
are watching this show and play these games and get all these points while you
watch television. That will be a very natural thing to do. Then, finally ... oh, the
day is over. You're going to bed. You sit down with your new Kindle 3.0, which, of
course, has the eye-tracking sensor in it that can tell what you've read and how
much you've read of the book. And it is important to read the whole book
because, then, if you leave a review on Amazon, you'll get super bonus points if it
knows you read the whole book through.
This is the inverse of Koster’s principle for good, realistic game design. Here, in
Schell’s account, it is reality that derives significance from video games. This should
not be misunderstood as a simulacrum because it is not about the influence of the
Imaginary, rather it is about the Symbolic.
Moreover, although McGonigal and Schell sound as if they are forecasting a distant
future, consider that inverse realism is already a trend in the music industry.
TheSixtyOne.com is like MySpace Music with a video game component: users are
issued “missions,” such as listening to a song from a genre they do not usually listen
to or playing the same song three times in a row. Completing missions on
TheSixtyOne earns points, so users can level-up to increase their standing and
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influence within the music network, and unlock content hosted on the site. A more
mainstream-oriented, avatar-driven, and child-friendly version of this inverted realism
may be found in Music Pets, a Facebook application that similarly awards points for
socializing about music online. These are just two of the new media strategies
seeking to rejuvenate music promotion and consumption by using screen-play as a
new marketing paradigm. Other industries are following suit. Foursquare, a geosocial
networking application for mobile communication platforms, uses GPS to track users
or, rather, enables users to track themselves and report on their location and
activities through social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Users are
awarded points and virtual badges, with the ultimate goal of becoming a “Superuser”
and unlocking new application functions. The real purpose of Foursquare, however,
is for brick-and-mortar business to offer incentives to potential customers and entice
them into promoting goods and services through their personal networks.
Through the lens of inverse realism, it is plain to see that play-screening is fast
becoming a common cultural interface. In studying video games from this angle,
however, it would be wise to ask why video games are appearing as a key innovation
in consumer culture writ large. To be sure, games have proven useful promotional
tools in cross-media synergies (e.g., the Spider-Man franchise spanning comics,
television, film, and video games) and advergames (e.g., Burger King’s series of
Xbox titles [Blitz Games 2006], John Deere’s American Farmer [Gabriel
Entertainment 2004]). However, inverting the process is quite different, making
consumption itself a kind of game.
Inverse realism, in the commercial vision, creates another, Symbolic layer to social
reality, and bolsters Imaginary self-representations by consolidating potentially
invisible purchases and consumer preferences with more visible social media. But is
this the only possible use? Consider how different, yet more vague, McGonigal’s
vision is from Schell’s. Exactly what is “broken” in reality? For Schell, it is promotions
and marketing. But is there a way to “make people feel engaged, successful, happy,
and completely alive” that does not involve reconsolidating consumerism around new
media? If unlockable achievements, leaderboards, leveling, and experience points
are commercially portable aspects of video games, are they equally portable for prosocial purposes? What other, more socially than commercially positive cultural
change could inverse realism service?
Conclusion
The limit of our analysis, particularly for investigating inverse realism, comes from
focusing on the apparatus of screening without examining video game culture more
broadly. Games do not rise and fall on the merits of their individual design alone.
They are created and played within historical and material contexts that could well
supersede the experience of the game as played. Nonetheless, a perspective on
inverse realism goes to show ways that game design can be part and parcel of social
engineering projects.
Beginning with Huizinga’s idea of the magic circle as a world apart from the
everyday, we have argued that video games are best understood as a contemporary
version of games founded on the screening of player from played. Noting that players
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are both alienated from and incorporated into screen games, we drew from Lacan to
articulate the interactive dimensions of this distinctly mediated play. Central to this
articulation is the reciprocal determination of rules, wares, and representations
comprising the video game apparatus. Turning from a consideration of the apparatus
as a world apart and toward an understanding of the apparatus as a world also
contiguous with the outside, we suggested three ways to think about video game
realism: representational, simulative, and inverse.
Of these three, only representational realism rests on a unidirectional influence of the
non-game world upon the game. Simulative and inverse realism, on the other hand,
point to two different ways the magic circle, or knot, affects and is affected by social
reality. Whereas simulative realism is already the subject of game studies concerning
education, training, and media effects more generally, inverse realism is still
emerging and deserves closer attention.
Games cited
Blitz Games (2006) Burger King Series. King Games (Xbox).
Blizzard Entertainment (1994-2010) World of Warcraft Series. Blizzard Entertainment
(PC, Mac, Linux).
Conduit Labs (2010) Music Pets. Conduit Labs (Facebook).
Davidson, et al. (1987) Math Blaster. Knowledge Adventure (PC).
EA Tiburon (1989-2010) Madden NFL Series. EA Sports (PC, Mac, Sega, Nintendo
systems, PlayStation systems, Xbox systems).
Gabriel Entertainment (2004) John Deere: American Farmer. Destineer (PC).
Impact Games (2007) Peacemaker. Impact Games (Mac, PC).
Martin, S. (2007) Rail Racer. Blind Adrenaline Simulations (PC).
Maxis (2000-2007) The Sims Series. Electronic Arts (Mac, PC, Xbox, PS2,
GameCube).
Nintendo EAD ( 2001) Animal Crossing. Nintendo (GameCube).
Quantic Dream (2010) Heavy Rain. Sony Computer Entertainment (PlayStation 3).
Rockstar North (Console) and Rockstar Toronto (PC) (2008) Grand Theft Auto IV.
Take-Two Interactive (retail) and Steam (online) (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3,
PC).
Rockstar North and Rockstar San Diego (2010) Red Dead Redemption. Rockstar
Games (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3).
Russel, S. (1962) Spacewar! (PDP-1).
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Sony Online Entertainment (1999-2009) Everquest Series. Sony Online
Entertainment (PC, Mac).
Tecmo (2000-2006) Gallup Racer Series. Tecmo (PC, PlayStation 2).
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