Chapter 1: The semiotic conditions of videogame authorship.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO

The Foundations of Videogame Authorship

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor

of Philosophy

Art History, Theory and Criticism

William Humberto Huber

Committee in charge:

Professor Lev Manovich, Chair

Professor Grant Kester

Professor Kuiyi Shen

Professor Stefan Tanaka

Professor Noah Wardrip-Fruin

2013

William Humberto Huber, 2013

iii

SIGNATURE PAGE

The Dissertation of William Humberto Huber is approved, and it is acceptable in quality

and form for publication on microfilm and electronically:

Chair

University of California, San Diego

2013

DEDICATION

With gratitude to friends, family and colleagues.

To Samantha, with deepest devotion, for her friendship, affection and patience.

To Rafael, for whom play is everything.

EPIGRAPH

Art is a game between all people, of all periods. – Marcel Duchamp

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Signature Page ............................................................................................................... iii

Dedication ..................................................................................................................... iv

Epigraph ..........................................................................................................................v

Table of Contents .......................................................................................................... vi

List of Figures ............................................................................................................. viii

List of Tables...................................................................................................................x

Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................... xi

Vita ............................................................................................................................. xiii

Abstract of the Dissertation............................................................................................ xv

Introduction .....................................................................................................................1

Chapter 1. The semiotic elements of videogames .............................................................7

Play as signification and interpretation.............................................................................................................. 17

Ludology and narratology .................................................................................................................................. 25

Revisiting semiotics in interactive media ......................................................................................................... 31

Semiotic registers ................................................................................................................................................... 40

Genre and interpretation...................................................................................................................................... 48

Styles of game design........................................................................................................................................... 66

Proceduralism and anti-proceduralism. ........................................................................................................ 77

Chapter 2. Signs in play: Fatal Frame II and modal dynamics ........................................ 80

Modes: aggregations of signs ................................................................................................................................. 80

Modes as configurations ..................................................................................................................................... 86

Fatal Frame II ............................................................................................................................................................... 92

vii

The dominant modes of Fatal Frame II ........................................................................................................ 96

In the mode for love: The Marriage as single-mode game ................................................................ 118

Game traversals and methodology .................................................................................................................... 124

Capturing Frames ................................................................................................................................................ 126

Modal rhythms ..................................................................................................................................................... 129

Modes are software; registers are conceptual frames. .............................................................................. 132

Ludic activation of the uncanny.................................................................................................................... 135

Semi-autonomous elements ............................................................................................................................ 137

From a theory of signs to models of authorship ..................................................................................... 143

Chapter 3. playing with space, playing with people ...................................................... 145

8-bit geo-space .......................................................................................................................................................... 146

Game-space and game-place. .............................................................................................................................. 149

Designed spatiality ............................................................................................................................................. 154

Game-spaces ......................................................................................................................................................... 162

Harvey’s model for the production of space............................................................................................ 165

Spaces of Final Fantasy ........................................................................................................................................ 171

Material space and the production of bodies ........................................................................................... 178

Representations of space (and place): producing worlds ................................................................... 186

Spaces of representation: Spira revisited .................................................................................................. 193

The matrix of spatialities revisited .............................................................................................................. 196

Final Fantasy XI: multiplayer games as constrained spaces ................................................................. 198

Virtual worlds of difference ........................................................................................................................... 202

Designed constraints .......................................................................................................................................... 206

Situational constraints ....................................................................................................................................... 211

Designing intersubjectivity in games ............................................................................................................... 217

Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 221

References ................................................................................................................... 232

viii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.: Kingdom Hearts video traversal. ....................................................... 45

Figure 2.: D-Day (1982 arcade game)................................................................. 54

Figure 3.: D-Day cabinet and controller.............................................................. 54

Figure 4.: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (1999) - Omaha Beach sequence ....... 58

Figure 5.: First-person view of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault .......................... 59

Figure 6.: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, sniper-scope view. ........................... 62

Figure 7.: Call of Duty 2 (2005) Cutscene from the assault on Pointe du Hoc

mission. ......................................................................................................................... 63

Figure 8.: Company of Heroes: Normandy landing sequence .............................. 66

Figure 9.: Braid a sole-authored independent game created by J. Blow (2010) ... 70

Figure 10.: B.U.T.T.O.N. Douglas Wilson and the Copenhagen Game Collective

(2009) ............................................................................................................................ 73

Figure 11.: The Graveyard. Tale-of Tales, (2008) ............................................... 76

Figure 12.: The Path. Tale-of-Tales. (2009) ........................................................ 76

Figure 13.: The two parts of H-LAM/T, from Barnes (1997) .............................. 83

Figure 14.: "A diagram representing the two active domains within the H-LAM/T

system." ......................................................................................................................... 84

Figure 15.: Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly. Montage of frames in non-

interactive mode. ........................................................................................................... 98

Figure 16.: Control schema for the dominant gameplay modes of Fatal Frame II,

from the instruction manual. ........................................................................................ 103

Figure 17.: Montage of frames in field (navigational) mode.. ........................... 105

Figure 18.: Montage of a sequence in viewfinder mode. ................................... 109

Figure 19.: Combat mode, with discreet signifiying elements highlighted. This

frame is from an instant during the process of combat in which one feature of viewfinder

mode which is usually stable—the focus ring—disappears briefly: immediately after a

shot has discharged. ..................................................................................................... 112

Figure 20.: The Marriage. Rod Humble (2006) ................................................. 119

Figure 21.: Distellamap: Combat. Ben Fry, 2005 .............................................. 123

Figure 22.: Missle Command, final screen. ....................................................... 126

Figure 23.: Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly (speed-run by Persona) – the

clouded regions are an artifact of his/her inconsistent recording technology. Completely

white frames indicate the end of combat. The speed-run footage was sample at the rate of

one frame per second. The entire traversal of the game by Persona took a little over two

hours. .......................................................................................................................... 128

Figure 24.: "The Iron Curtain," in-game item for Team Fortress 2 obtained

("unlocked") by playing Poker Night at the Inventory .................................................. 141

Figure 25.: Screenshot, Google Maps 8-bit for NES screenshot. ....................... 147

Figure 26.: 0.0,0.0 – The prime meridian meets the equator in Google "Quest" for

NES ............................................................................................................................. 148

Figure 27.: Player-created dungeon map. From Mizer, 2011............................. 176

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1.: Peirce's categories of signs. ................................................................. 38

Table 2.: Spatial experience in digital media .................................................... 156

Table 3.: Final Fantasy releases, 1987 to 2012.................................................. 181

Table 4.: Videogame spaces and Harvey's matrix of spatialities ....................... 197

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge Professor Lev Manovich for his support as the chair

of my committee and as my advisor. His guidance, feedback and advice has been of

immeasurable help. I was fortunate to be his student, and am grateful for his patience and

encouragement.

I also acknowledge the support and constructive criticism of the rest of my

committee: Professors Grant Kester, Kuiyi Shen, Stefan Tanaka, and Noah Wardrip-

Fruin. I owe particular gratitude to Jeremy Douglass for his conversation and help over

the past several years: one could not ask for a better colleague. I also thank Kate

McDonald, Steven Mandiberg, Maggie Greene, Ian Mullins, Tara Zepel, Eduardo Navas,

Daniel Rehn, and Laura Hoeger for their friendship and conversation over the years.

From the UC San Diego Department of Visual Arts, I want to thank Sheldon

Brown, Benjamin Bratton, Amy Alexander, ,Jordan Crandall and Adrienne Jenik. I also

want to thank Christine Turner for her many words of advice and encouragement.

In the USC Interactive Media Division, I would like to thank Tracy Fullerton,

Peter Brinson. Jeremy Gibson, Kristy Norindr, Sam Roberts, Kurosh Vajanihad, and Jeff

Watson for their engagement and support. I also want to thank Ian Bogost and Gonzalo

Frasca for their insight, constructive criticism, and friendship

The students I have had the honor of teaching at UC San Diego and the University

of Southern California Interactive Media Division deserve acknowledgement, for

challenging me to remain current and relevant.

xii

Chapter 1 includes material from research performed with the Software Studies

Initiative at Calit2, under the supervision of Lev Manovich and with the help of Jeremy

Douglass. It includes images which have been exhibited elsewhere by the author.

Chapter 2 includes material drawn from long-term research that has appeared in

previous work by the author, including a paper presented with Laura Hoeger at the

Digital Games Research Association conference in 2007. The material has been

extensively re-written; however, her contributions were invaluable. Some of the work

from the same project was also published as “Catch and release: ludological dynamics in

Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly” in Loading… The Canadian Journal of Game Studies,

Vol. 4 No. 6, 2010.

Chapter 3 includes material published inThird Person: Vast Narratives, edited by

Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 2008. Cambridge, MA. The material has been

extensively revised and re-written for this dissertation, largely in response to the

recommendations of members of the committee.

xiii

VITA

1998

Bachelor of Arts, University of California, Berkeley

2004-2007

Teaching Assistant, Visual Art Department. University of California, San

Diego

2007-2013

Adjunct Faculty. School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern

California

2009-2011

Associate instructor, Communication Department. University of

California, San Diego

2010-2011

Visiting Instructor. Southern California Institute of Architecture.

2013

Doctor of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego

PUBLICATIONS

“Understanding scanlation: how to read one million manga-translated fan pages.” (with

Lev Manovich and Jeremy Douglass) Image & Narrative, Volume 12, Number 1 (2011)

"Catch and release: ludological dynamics in Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly."

Loading... Joural of Canadian Game Studies. Volume 4, Number 6 (5 April 2010)

"Epic spatialities: the production of space in Final Fantasy games." Book chapter in Third

Person: Vast Narratives, ed. by N. Wardrip-Fruin and P. Harrigan. MIT Press,

Cambridge, Massachusetts 2009.

"Notes on aesthetics on Japanese videogames." Book chapter in Art and Videogames, ed.

by A. Clarke and G. Mitchell. Intellect Books, London 2008. Revised version in press.

"Fictive affinities in Final Fantasy XI: complicit and critical play in fantastic nations." In

Worlds in Play: international perspectives in digital game research, ed. by S. de Castell

and J. Jensen. Peter Lang Verlagsgruppe, New York 2007.

EXHIBITIONS

“Mapping Time” exhibit. Calit2 gallery, UC San Diego. 2010

"Video Game Traversal: Kingdom Hearts II" in "SHAPING TIME" exhibition. Graphic

Design Museum, Breda Netherlands2010

"Game traversals" in Text Fields exhibition, as part of Future of Digital Studies 2010.

University of Florida, Gainesville 2010

xiv

"Shape of Science" in Here, not There, at Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla 2010

1997 Bachelor of Arts, University of California, Berkeley

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

The Foundations of Videogame Authorship

William Humberto Huber

Doctor of Philosophy in Art History, Theory and Criticism

University of California, San Diego 2013

Professor Lev Manovich, Chair

Videogames have an ambiguous status as texts, in their dual nature as objects of

play and computer-mediated systems of representation. This has led to an impasse in

game studies, making it difficult to identify authorial voice, to make useful distinctions in

style of game design, and to account for the varieties of modes of reception.

This dissertation addresses the problem by proposing a model for the

interpretation of videogames based on the semiotic theory of Charles S. Peirce. This

model is the basis of a series of analyses of a range of videogames and other interactive

xvi

work on the dynamics of genre, style and authorship. While most of the research involved

the close play of games, using video transcriptions and tools to analyze game footage, it

also relies on interviews with game creators, industry reports, and discussions with game

players in both North America and Japan.

INTRODUCTION

This dissertation is an attempt to answer certain questions about digital games.

How do they “mean” things? What is the locus of their aesthetic effect? How do they

refer, in the sense that an image of a thing refers to that thing, or a film or novel refers to

that which exists in its diegesis? To what extent can we describe them as “authored,” and

to what extent “designed?” What does “style” mean for a playable form? What are the

conditions in their operation which makes them coherent to players as something which

can understand? Can the mechanics of a game produce allegory or metaphor, as per the

“allegorithm” or “control allegory” described by Alex Galloway?

Digital games have certain features which make them compelling objects of

study. They are highly multimodal, and their production incorporates writing, the design

of 3-dimensional objects and spaces, the production of cinematic sequences, animation,

sound engineering, and simulation. In the case of large-scaled game development, these

activities transpire within production chains chained together by networks, often on a

global scale. Lev Manovich describes games as “digitally native;” while music and

cinema have been changed through the widespread deployment of software in production

and the transcoding of music and film to digital media, the videogame constitutes

(arguably) a new form with novel conditions of reception. With origins in the Cold War

Alexander R Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (University of Minnesota Press,

2006), 91.

technologies of simulation and planning, they emerged in the early 1960s from the

computer labs of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Over the 1970s and 1980s

they would appear in the demimonde of entertainment arcades and on consumer

electronic platforms made for middle-class homes. Eventually disseminating throughout

digital networks, played on mobile devices, the ascendency of digital gaming and its

ubiquity in the childhood of many of those born since the 1960s have made the ideas of

play and participation in the arts commonplace.

Though still seen, perhaps, as a minor form, they include technologies, tropes and

literacies which can be deployed very flexibly. This dissertation is about a wide range of

works in different scales and in different registers of cultural activity. What follows

applies as much to small, incidental pieces—like Rovio’s Angry Birds (2008) or Zynga’s

Farmville (2009) which are played “casually,” in interstitial time—as to installation-

based work which anticipate a reflective or considerative mode of engagement, such as

C-Level’s 2002 Waco Resurrection; from locative works meant for public performance

or engagement, such as Blast Theory’s Uncle Roy All Around You, or Aram Bartholl’s

See Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso

Books, 2012). Bishop describes the emergence of participation as a utopian lodestone in 20

and 21

century art, and its recuperation in the modern era. She notes that when she began her research in 2003,

participation was still a relatively marginal aspect of contemporary art practice, but that by the time her

book was ready for press, play and participation had taken a central role in gallery-based art scenes, as well

as in public art spaces and museums.

street performances, to small, personal works of personal expression, such as Rod

Humbles The Marriage or the community-created role-playing games created by

dedicating amateurs using tools such as Enterbrains’s RPG-Tsukuru , to commercial titles

created by hundreds of workers, like Final Fantasy XIII, and Civilization V, each of

which may provide hundreds of hours of play for gamers.

Yet despite this range of effects and features, they are all rule-driven systems,

most of which use software to encode those roles. They are designed and engineered by

creators who implement these systems of rules in software, and then ascribe meaning to

the various elements which instantiate those systems. There is transitivity among the

fields of practice described above: members of C-Level have also released works meant

for internet distribution; Rod Humble has worked on my mainstream, commercial titles;

Aram Bartholl’s work plays off of the game industry; the amateurs and hobbyist who

make personal games using RPG Tsukuru often respond to and appropriate commercial

games, using a vocabulary of tropes and representations that they learned as fans and

players.

Contemporary authorship is a flexible and distributable function. Recalling

Foucault’s idea of an “author-function,”

in which the figure of the author is created

within each discourse according to the interests of its participants (and according to the

Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist

Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), 141–160.

power and ability to determine that function,) the flexibility is more dynamic when the

text’s materiality is mostly software-based. The material contribution to and constraints

on the dynamics of authorship are one of the themes of this dissertation. Organizations,

teams, collectives and corporations can fulfill the functions of authorship, especially

when the text is a very large collection of assets and algorithms, which is available from

anywhere on the globe during the production process. Audiences, technologies,

distribution channels, and legal realities (franchising, intellectual property agreements

and constraints) also shape the way that that authorship is conceptually produced and

deployed. This dissertation lays a foundation for survey of the ways that authorship can

be configured by reflecting on the videogame as a system which produces meaning and

makes reference to things outside itself, and which generates experiences that are

available for interpretation and reflection.

The first chapter of this dissertation is a foundational exercise, describing how

videogames operate as systems of representation. The chapter begins with a review of the

important theories of play and games, especially the writing of Roger Caillois and Brian

Sutton-Smith, and describes the nature of an impasse which exists in contemporary game

studies: the distinction between the video game/computer game as a system of activity

and as a system of representation (usually conceived as narrative, due to the healthy

representation of literary scholars in games studies.) The chapter suggests a route past

this impasse: a model of the game as semiotic in a broad, phenomenological sense. This

model is built on the semiotic theories of Charles Sanders Peirce, whose taxonomy of the

sign accounts for the breadth of signification across the modalities of human perception.

The Peircean model of semiosis enables us to consider how effect perceived by the player

during a game can be understood as (at least possibly) authored.

The second half of the first chapter develops this model by applying it questions

of genre and style, understood here as organizing schema for the authored systems which

constitute a game. In the first case, genre is understood in terms of nested literacy

developed in the ongoing relationship between players and producers, through which

themes, topics and images are configured. The history of the use of D-Day across various

interactive genres is used for illustration. Style is understood in terms of the

foregrounding of specific conceptual registers of game experience as the site for aesthetic

experience: as the “place” in the game in which meaning occurs.

The second chapter begins with a description of modes as components of the

game as a material sign-system. Modes are divisions of the software into different

configurations, and different systems of meaning. Players learn to recognize different

modes as distinct regimes for interpreting the sign elements at hand. As semi-modular

software-driven systems, they can be developed by multiple teams working in parallel

with each other. The modes produce a natural point of segmentation for the engineering

of the game as a software-based system. The phenomenal experience of play integrates

all the conceptual registers of the game as systems of meaning and activity in the real-

time decoding of software running in modes. The dissertation focuses on one game, Fatal

Frame II: Crimson Butterfly, to work out this analysis.

The third chapter focuses on two sites of meaning in different game-design

traditions: the creation of spatial experience, and the authoring of relational dynamics. A

framework is drawn from the critical geography of David Harvey in the first case, and the

possibility of a relational style of game authorship to the design of multiplayer spaces is

invoked in the second. Videogames are located within a broader array of digital media

and networks in its ability to provoke different types of spatial cognition, and produce a

sense of place. The chapter centers on one game franchise, the Final Fantasy games from

1987 to the present, and concludes with a study of the online, massively-multiplayer

version of the game.

The dissertation concludes by relating the foundational work in games as

meaning-systems to the question of authorship. A sequence of authorial modes, from a

non-authorial culture of digital game design in the 1970s to the contemporary model of

distributed and delegated authorship on a global scale is laid out. The conditions of

authorship are described in terms of the changing material possibilities of game design

and collective software development.

CHAPTER 1. THE SEMIOTIC ELEMENTS OF VIDEOGAMES

In this chapter, I will argue for a model of digital game-play

as a player’s

dynamic interpretation of the signs produced by a game: an inquiry into the conditions of

authorship, particularly in the case of games, needs to rest on a sound model of the

conditions of reception. This model draws from Peircean semiotics, genre theory, and

theories of software culture. Existing models of game-play—those which are based on a

primary distinction between the game as a representational systems and the game as a

system of activity—have limited our understanding of the nature of authorship for these

games and related forms, and do not account for the dynamism and variety of games

which are being produced and consumed. They are also ill-equipped to explain genre

evolution in interactive media. I will use this model to clarify genre in games, and to

analyze one game in depth.

The key contributions of this chapter are, first, a model of gameplay meant to

address problems which occur when the distinction between game-play and content is

presumed. This model takes a semiotic approach to the study of games. It suggests a

The model proposed here applies to works which would lie outside of many definitions of

“games,” “digital games,” “video games,” and such. and would also fit simulations, interactive art works,

and interactive fiction. It may even apply to interfaces for social media and web applications, although to

the extent that they are generally designed to be transparent, rather than to be encountered as texts as such,

would dilute the usefulness of this kind of analysis to those kinds of software-based objects.

concept of game modes and their relationship to registers of game-interpretation

(developed in chapter two.) It also presents a research methodology which allows

detailed visualization of hundreds of gameplay.

These theories of play are interpreted and discussed as theories of signification,

and describes how contemporary debates in game studies are a result of an incomplete

model of game semiotics. The next section reviews Peircean semiotic theory and

introduces the concepts of game modes, which are software-based configurations of

signifying elements, and game registers, which are conceptual models of the game

system interpreted by the player working their way through the game. The interplay

between mode and register, and the dynamics of signifiers within games, is worked out in

a discussion of game genre.

My larger project is to investigate the relationship between authorship and

playable artifacts. Authorship, in a conventional sense, is a circular concept: it defines

some objects (written texts, films, computer games) as products of the creative activity

which bring them into being (writing, filming, programming, etc.), and then determines

the authorial nature of that activity in terms of our assumptions about the producer’s

relationship (such as intentionality, dialogue, development of style, intra-discursivity) to

these products. To break apart this circularity, I start with a formal model of playable

artifacts (games, simulations and related work) as authored systems by describing their

operations as sign-systems. A semiotic model for videogames and playable media allows

us to account for the range of configurations of the “author function

”—those aspects of

the work singled out, for various reasons, as being the basis for an attribution of

authorship—that are found in videogame production.

Videogames and other playable software-based media have come into being only

in the latter half of the previous century. It is thus easier to answer certain ontological

questions, because we have access to most of the forms which that thing has taken, and it

is easier to recover older senses of what that thing was than it might if it dated before

living memory: we are spared from strenuous hermeneutics, because we have the arrival

of these objects in living memory. Yet it is surprising how quickly habits of thinking set

in: how we naturalize one mode of reception over another, how we describe our

Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 108. Foucault’s investigation into the (conceptual) history of the

idea of the author is useful but limited, in that it is still based on a privileging an idea of authorship as

related to the written word, even as the question of the auteur was being revisited in cinema: Francois

Truffaut’s essay on the auteur appeared in the pages of Cahier du Cinema only a few years before

Foucault’s. Foucault himself observes, “Up to this point, I have unjustifiably limited my subject. Certainly

the author function in painting, music and other arts should have been discussed, but even supposing that

we remain within the world of discourse, as I want to do, I seem to have given the term “author” much too

narrow a meaning. I have discussed the author only in the limited sense of a person to whom the production

of a text, a book, or a work can be legitimately attributed.” The useful components of Foucault’s model is

the observation of the flexibility of the idea of authorship to different aspects of the text and for different

deployments of it; while he mentions collective authorship—e.g., “the Church fathers”—he does not

address asymmetrical authorship, authorship within a production system, or the possibility of isolating

different aspects of the text and determining them as authorial.

experiences of these things in encapsulating terms. If someone were to say, “last night, I

played a game on my computer for three hours,” what do we imagine they’ve done?

What kind of time was spent in that activity? What sort of person—what sort of subject—

were they at the time they were playing? We can produce accounts of what it means to

read a book, especially a novel, an understanding based not simply on a social account of

reading, but of some engagement with a kind of text. We can do the same for someone

who goes to see a film, or even views a painting. These things aren’t stable or universal: a

contemporary schoolchild viewing a painting by Titian in a public museum is in a

different process of interpretation than that within the encounter by a 16

century

Austrian noblewoman with a portrait of Emperor Charles V hung in his own home for the

benefit of visitors in Augsburg. There may even be differences in the viewer’s

management of their own visual apparatus in each case: nonetheless, there is much that

connects the two experiences. Both are likely to understand the portrait as indexical, even

if they perceive different codes in each case.

It is less simple for our game player. We understood that they were doing

something we obliged them to be active somehow, but we also understand that they may

have experienced a narrative. If we ask them “what happened,” we could be told many

things: “I won,” “the villain was hiding in the castle,” “I got a high score,” “I unlocked a

level,” “nothing,” “I made some new friends and joined a clan,” “Dave cheated again,” “I

cried when my (the main character’s) child died,” “I played as Yoshi,” “the police framed

my friends for the murder, but I’m trying to find evidence that clears them,” “it turned out

I was responsible for the massacre,” “I helped some friends farm gold.” We could, in the

course of conversation, quickly establish the contexts of such explanations and induce

just what aspect of the activity was being presented in the recount, but it is striking how

many possible summaries of the outcome of the session of play could emerge—and all

the examples described can be described as originating in an encounter with the game as

a text. The transition from “what did you do?” to “what happened?” when asked of

someone who played a video game is the crossing of a chasm.

Game play—and the creation of games—is as old as anything human, and older.

Should we restrict ourselves to those games known from contemporary texts, and the play

of which is well understood, then the forerunners of the modern game of chess date back

at least to the Sassanid Empire (in modern-day Iran) in the beginning of the 7th century

CE, and possibly to the Gupta Empire (in modern-day northern India) at the end of the

. The earliest reference to the game we call Go is from the 4th century B.C.E., and

refers to an event in the year 548 B.C.E. A handful of physical artifacts or images of them

have been identified as ur-games older than these references: the Egyptian game of Senet

(c. 3100 BCE) and Mehen (c. 3000 BCE), the Mesopotamian Game of Ur (c. 2600 BCE),

Weiqi, Luobo and Chupu in China are interpreted as games with playable rules of one

sort or another. Even these conventional historical references are for systems of activities

that could be named, described and recorded: playful activity precedes human historical

memory: many animals recognizably play and cavort particularly in their juvenile stages,

and human play begins in infants before the production of speech.

Despite this hoary legacy, a premise of this chapter is that an important

discontinuity

occurs when a spectatorial media form becomes playable, when rules are

encoded into software to be executed in a computing platform

, and games become

discrete commodities or saleable services and experiences. The above description of the

antiquity of games is not meant to place the project of understanding the conditions under

which digital games are currently authored and interpreted within a universalized history

Although this dissertation privileges software-based game creation on the basis of the material

and ontological discontinuities that I describe, there are non-digital and hybrid-digital practices which are

historically and practically related. I will be discussing the complicated relationship between fiction and

mechanics in table-top role-playing games, and the relational-design elements of pervasive and alternative

reality games, in later chapters. In many cases, they prove the rule: the nature of inscription and the

productive systems of these forms are starkly different from the software-based variants. At the same time,

they also are influenced by the history of digital game design, and have similar issues regarding intellectual

property, incorporation of diegesis into game mechanics, participation in trans-media narrative franchises,

distributions of authorial labor, etc.

The question of “what is a computer” and “what is a platform” is a technical one. The latter

question is addressed in the formation of platform studies, esp. in Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, Racing

the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2009). See also Nick

Montfort, “Combat in Context,” Game Studies 6, no. 1 (2006),

http://gamestudies.org/0601/articles/montfort/. A computer need not be physical: it can be emulated in

software. It also need not be electronic nor digital: the earliest games created for the computer were written

for analog computers, and Charles Babbage conceived of games of skill playable on his Analytical Engine:

see H. P Babbage, “Babbage’s Analytical Engine,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 70

(1910): 517–526.

of game design. There is, nonetheless, a precedent for describing the design of any

game—a board game, a team sport—as one involving authorship, particularly for games

with distinctive rhetorical heft. That a game have a designer or origins in a specific place

is an idea we can find in Herodotus, who attributed to Atys, king of the Lydians, a game

designed to help the populace cope with a famine, and to select a fraction of the kingdom

to emigrate and colonize the region of Tyresenia (later Etruria, center of the Etruscan

culture

.) In 16th century Spain, Alonso de Barros’ Filosofia cortesana, a moral treatise

for courtiers, included the design of a board game which illustrates the finer points of

navigating the complex patronage system of Phillip II as the navigation through the sea of

suffering to the riches of the new world

. The popular board game Monopoly was an

iteration of a game designed by Elizabeth Maggie as an illustration of the land tax theory

of Henry George

, and 20

and 21

century artists have created “playable rule-sets” and

board games

. There are many examples of the design of games and sports being

attributed to authors, artists and designers: the possibility of designing them in software

Herodotus and George Rawlinson, The Histories (Digireads.com Publishing, 2009), 31;

described in Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change

the World (Penguin, 2011), 5–9.

Harry Sieber, “The Magnificent Fountain: Literary Patronage in the Court of Philip III,”

Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 18, no. 2 (1998): 93.

Elizabeth Magie, “Game-Board (The Landlord Game)” (Brentwood, MD, January 5, 1904).

See especially Mary Flanagan, Critical Play: Radical Game Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 2009), 63–116. I discuss some artist-designed games in chapter 3.

did not, in itself, create the possibility of an attributive relationship between a producer

and a game.

Yet the encoding of games into software is more than a simple translation, or even

a remediation, in the sense described by Grusin and Bolter

, by which current mediating

practice takes up and redeploys the work of the past, of a pre-digital form. Play forms did

not generally circulate as discrete mediated objects before they were captured into

software. Non-digital games are rule-driven practices managed socially and

institutionally: even the written rules of a game are more like a musical notation meant to

give guidance to a negotiation than they the rules themselves. In many games, the rules

are transmitted orally and by imitation and participation. The management of the rules,

their modification, suspension or augmentation becomes part of practice of a community

that plays.

A digital game moves those processes into software: the creation of

behaviors and design of representations to index those behaviors occurs when the

“representation” of a rule becomes the mechanism by which a rule is made actual as the

outcome of the working software (or when the operation produces its own representation

J David Bolter and Richard A Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 1999).

See, for example, Linda Hughes, “Beyond the Rules of the Game: Why Are Rooie Rules Nice?,”

in The World of Play: Proceedings of the 7th Annual Meeting of the Association of the Anthropological

Study of Play, ed. Frank E. Manning (West Point, NY: Leisure Press, 1983), 188–199. Hughes describes

how children play and adapt different rules of the playground game “Foursquare” depending on shifting

social and environmental conditions.

from within itself, as an effect of its computation.) There are borderline cases: e.g. table-

top war-gaming and simulation. What can be said of these cases is that other processes

are brought together in these liminal cases to roughly approximate what a digital game

implementation does easily: assembling material systems of representation (charts,

markers, figurines, landscape elements) to produce a visual system of playable fiction

that can maintain the state of the play and provide a basis for a system of calculation for

modifying it.

The determination of the category of “the game” has been a challenge for

ontology. Wittgenstein’s reflections on the nature of categorization, as not being a matter

of necessary and sufficient conditions (the Aristotelian definition of definition and model

of categorical membership) arose from the observation that there is no single feature

which all members which were element of the intuitively-understood set of “games” in

the English language shared; rather, categorical membership was a function of “family

resemblances,” a collection of features no one of which was either necessary or

sufficient, but which in aggregate would cause someone to recognize an activity or

artifact as a game.

Within game studies, a surprising amount of attention has continued

to be paid toward ontological questions (e.g, questions of “what is a game”, “what is a

Ludwig Wittgenstein et al., Philosophical Investigations (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

rule”, “what is a game fiction”)

often to establish a pedigree for the study of

videogames that would ground them in a much older “history of games.”

My motivation for revisiting these ontological questions is to reveal the

conditions of authorship for games and playable media

, and to do so in a manner that

does not privilege those genres and styles which clearly resemble forms for which those

conditions are already well-understood (i.e., those games which are at least superficially

similar to film, literature, etc.) Many conventional observations about videogames favor

one genre over another: presuming the existence, for example of an avatar or a narrative,

and implicitly exclude many games which are important to popular and critical discourses

of gaming. For a number of reasons, we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of a theory of

game authorship which arbitrarily deigns some works as ephemeral, especially when the

field of game production itself does not figure them as ephemeral.

Jesper Juul, Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 2005).

Ian Bogost, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 2006).

This phrase drawn from the name of UC Santa Cruz’s department dedicated to research and

education in game design and game studies.

Play as signification and interpretation.

Play, including the play of animals, has already been described as an act of

meaning-making. The mid-century cultural historian Johan Huizinga

describes play as a

significant function, occurring within a “magic circle

,” a demarcated space-time

separate from and partially autonomous of daily life. Within this magic circle, things are

assigned new interpretations: a mound of dirt becomes a pitcher’s mound in baseball, a

stick becomes a wicket in cricket, fifteen minutes constitutes a quarter of play in hockey,

touching an individual transfers the designation of being “it” in a game of tag. For

Huizinga, this creation of provisional meaning is the foundation of culture; the

interpretation of phenomena, the creation of new units of meaning and structures of

signification, is prefigured by the play-function.

Huizinga describes the unstable relationship between play and seriousness: the

former referring simultaneously to the realization of the “pretend” nature of the act of

play and to the levity that accompanies that realization, the latter to the suspense of that

realization and the gravity of commitment to the “as-if” of play. This unstable

relationship associates “play” with ritual and theater, as forms of play with varying levels

and moments of self-awareness of the fictive nature of pretending. In distancing himself

Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture [1933] (Kansas City, MO: Beacon Press,

1955).

The term “magic circle” has become a term of art in game design to describe both an imagined

autonomy for play-activity and the system of rules and operations which constitute the basis of play. These

two senses are sometimes conflated.

from models of play which are explained in terms of human development, whether

phenotypical or cultural, he argues for an autonomous compulsion for play that makes it

always prior to any utility or purpose. The magic circle’s separation from the spatial

practices and marked times of everyday life can be taken to be over-stated: in game

studies, the figure of the “magic circle” is often targeted for criticism, construed as

excluding the contingencies which produce play and playful subjects. Despite this, he

never describes the relationship between play and its contexts as arbitrary.

Huizinga emphasized the spatial aspect of play, but the “magic circle” is a

conceptual space of signification (reminiscent of David Harvey’s idea of spaces of

representation, discussed later) in which the “separateness” that Huizinga claims is

essential to play is produced. The creation of a rule of play is a kind of speech-act: the

claim that a mound of dirt is “second base” as part of determining a region of space as a

baseball field is not expository or propositional, but as a perlocutionary and declarative

act: the production of the grounds for playing baseball. The provisional sign-creation

calls for an interpretation-creation, which is fulfilled by the activity of playing the game,

not in the establishment of an imaginary about “second base.”

While embracing Huizinga’s focus on play insisted on placing the play-

experience (as an aspect of the aesthetic) in the center of its own research project, Roger

Caillois

sought to create a taxonomy of games: he includes a range of practices which

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

are “played” at, including lotteries, theater, ritual, skiing, (as a pleasurable activity) and

twirling. Caillois’ four-by-two matrix of game categories is an early case of an object-

centric perspective, treating particular games as cultural texts, rather describing play as

such in undifferentiated terms. Caillois proposed four categories of games: those of agon,

or competition and mastery; of alea, chance; of mimicry, or imitation, and of ilinx, or

vertigo.

Additionally, he places play along a graded axis between paidea and ludus: the

former is unstructured, spontaneous play in the manner associated with small children,

the latter being structured by explicit rules, restraint, institutions, and the regulation of

play. Spontaneous wrestling/tumbling matches between children is paidean agon, a

relatively unstructured, free-form play in which children establish who is stronger; a

state-run lottery is ludic alea, a highly regulated game-of-chance to select those who are

fortunate by no real effort on their own part.

Caillois’ categories continue to inform game studies work and theories of game

design. However, he is sometimes misunderstood as writing simply about games in

themselves, as if simply describing the rules of a game would be be enough to determine

its category. Instead, he is describing game-play as cultural performance, not games-as-

rules in the abstract. They could be better described as categories for cultural logics of

play. Caillois’ taxonomy fulfills a promise to Huizinga in this sense: each of these

Caillois does not exploit the distinctiveness of the English world “game,” and the object of the

predicate best translating “play” is jouer à un jeu - to play a played-thing: it can also be interpreted as

meaning “to act” (in a theatrical sense.)

categories is prior in play, at least conceptually, to the forms that the logics of these

categories assume in social and personal spheres, but the relationship between the game

as a formal system of rules and the game as the frame of play, as an interpreted and

interpreting cultural practice, is not well easily distinguished and requires us to observe

how the game is being used by its players.

As an example, the game of poker’s characterization as a game in Caillois’ system

is ambiguous. A description of the rules seems to make it difficult to interpret as a game

of mimicry—that is, as a game in which problems of identity and performance are being

worked. Nor is one likely to interpret the game of poker as one of ilinx, involving the

disorientation of the senses, playing with the ambiguity of senses and troubling the

phenomenological border between self and world. However, the two remaining

categories - agon and alea – are more viable candidates. While the mechanics of a game

can include elements from other categories, there is something exclusive about the logic

of play itself: the play of a game can by read as being underpinned by the need to resolve

one or another question. Agon occupies itself with mastery, with distinguishing the

virtuous player against rivals. The outcome of a game of agon reflects on the skill,

strength and cunning of the agonist. Alea, on the other hand, refers to chance; in Caillois’

interpretation, the chance elements of such games stand as synecdoche for the vagaries of

fate and the whims of deities; for the universe of realities, which are outside of human

effect or agency. If in playing a game of agon, a player is asking, “which one is the best?

Where is mastery? What is the value of my best efforts?” then a game of alea asks,

“What is my fate, my destiny? Do I enjoy divine favor?” To identify what cultural logic

is at work, one must see how the rules of the game are being interpreted by its players in

the context of play.

Many games, like poker, include elements both of chance and skill: the chance in

the fickleness of the cards as dealt; the skill in the exchange of bets to communicate and

to bluff, in the scrutiny of the player to discern the real situation of their opponents by

reading the signs of their countenances and bets. Its practitioners interpret poker as a

game of skill, over the course of a career, even if a single hand or series of hands may be

determined by chance. This is suggested by its professionalization, by the public

spectacles of televised poker matches, by a thriving niche of poker literature, by the

representations of poker players in film, television, and literature.

The professionalization of the sport notwithstanding, the legal status of poker in

the United States is often based on an interpretation of it as a game of chance. The

regulation of gaming (i.e., gambling) is generally left as a matter to state governments,

and without exception, the codes which regulate them distinguish between games of

chance and games of skill - essentially, between alea and agon - and restricts waging on

the former more aggressively than waging on the latter. The interpretation of the phrase

“game of chance” varies among jurisdictions: in some states, any element of chance is

enough to provide a basis for such a finding; in others, it is when chance is material to the

outcome of the game (which would, by most accounts, include poker.) In others, it is a

question of predominance

of the chance element.

A casual game of poker among amateurs - or against a computer system that bets

consistently based on ruled parameters - is a game of alea, as one simply hopes that the

cards which are distributed are favorable. Over time, the player’s relationship to the game

evolves: the cultivation of the player is a kind of apprenticeship in the relevant signs of

play, as the possible interpretations of signs within play expand to include signaling

behaviors, bluffs, etc. The player who learns these signs and how to produce (and avoid

producing) them no longer plays a game of chance, even if one hand or another’s

denouement is subject to the chance element. Such a player is an agonist, involved in a

competition to master the vocabulary of signs produced by the shuffle and deal of cars,

the bets, gestures and intonations of players, and their own affect and countenance. The

question, which is resolved by each hand of poker, for such a player, is about their own

abilities, not on their appointed destinies.

What this suggests is that the categorization of games proposed by Caillois—

agon, alea, mimicry and ilinx—are cultural logics of play, rather than simple categories

Information on legal status of poker from attorney Melinda Sarafan. The difference in legal

status between games of chance and of skill seems to be widespread; a Dutch court recently found online

poker to be a game of skill. It is interesting that Dutch law, as in many American states, reserves the right

to wager in games of chance to state-sponsored gambling, while wagering in games of skill is allowed to

the private sphere. See The Poker Law Bulletin for more.

for types of games. These logics are stances toward the interpretation of those signs

which are the basis of the play experience. The novice poker player plays a game of alea

because the signs to which he/she attends are those generated by stochastic processes;

they may bet literally, based on an appraisal of the value of the hand, hoping that others

have been less fortunate than he/she. The experienced player both attends to other signs

(the bets of other players and other cues about their intentions and beliefs) and interprets

the same signs

as the novice with a more deeply entrained system of interpretation (e.g.,

statistics based on known cards, etc.) Nonetheless, both players are playing the same

game; both adhere to the same rules of poker. Thus, the rules of poker themselves do not

determine the character of the play of poker in and of themselves.

That play is signification, and signification at the heart of play, was explored by

Gregory Bateson

, summarized in his oft-quoted observation, when considering the play

of young monkeys at a zoo, that “[t] he playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote

what would be denoted by the bite.”

For Bateson, play is predicated on meta-

communication: the session of play begins with the creation of an understanding among

In the Piercean sense of the material sign: some ambiguities regarding the application of

Piercean semiotics to games will be addressed later in this article.

Gregory Bateson, “A Theory of Play and Fantasy; a Report on Theoretical Aspects of the

Project of Study of the Role of the Paradoxes of Abstraction in Communication,” in Steps to an Ecology of

Mind, by Gregory Bateson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 177–193.

Ibid., 180.

its participants that the elements of play (the nip of monkeys) is not to be interpreted in

the same sense as usual: that they would become part of another articulation, referring to

the conventional interpretation of the bite, which denotes hostility, without denoting the

hostility itself. In playing, a fantasy world—a subjunctive world, in a way, suggesting the

“mental spaces” described by Gilles Fauconnier

—is co-produced by those who accept

the authority of the rules, for as long as they do. The collapse of the fantasy—the

evacuation of this provisional surplus signification—occurs when a player becomes a

spoil-sport, who, Huizinga says,

. . . shatters the play-world itself. By withdrawing from the game he

reveals the relativity and fragility of the play-world in which he had

temporarily shut himself with others. He robs the play of its illusion—a

pregnant word which means literally “in-play: (from inulsio, illudere or

inludere).

Both Huizinga and Bateson emphasize the priority of playful signification over its

mature forms: each sees juvenile play as the pre-condition for reference, for the

production of metaphor, for fiction, for ritual, and for abstraction.

Gilles Fauconnier, Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language

(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture [1933], 11.

Ludology and narratology

The study of games generally took place under the guise of cultural anthropology

and cultural history (e.g. Huizinga, Sutton-Smith

) sociology (Caillois) or psychology

(Bateson). Despite some early attempts to consider games themselves as material sign-

systems available for interpretation

(which, tellingly, began only after the digitization of

games) the play-activity has been the object of study for the social sciences, rather than

the humanities, Roland Barthes memorable interpretation of the cultural semiology of

professional wrestling notwithstanding.

The production and circulation of digital games afforded a new perception of

games as meaning-bearing, authored and received artifacts, and disciplines and methods

from other fields have taken them in as objects for study, interpretation and criticism. A

computer game is not simply the material complement to a game system, like a

chessboard or a football field or a deck of cars. It is even more than a documentation of

the rules of a game: it does not simply record the rules of a game in the way that a rule-

Sutton-Smith’s approach has been multidisciplinary: he has held important positions in the

American Psychological Association and has chaired the Anthropological Association for the study of play.

His initial work (B. Sutton-Smith and B. G. Rosenberg, “Sixty Years of Historical Change in the Game

Preferences of American Children,” The Journal of American Folklore 74, no. 291 (1961): 17–46.) was in

the field of cultural history.

Mary Ann Buckles, “Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame Adventure...” (Ph. D.

dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 1985).

Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 15–27.

book might, but enacts at least some, and often most or close to all, in software.

When

games are software, it is simple to see the game as a Ding-an-sich, at least conceptually

autonomous from any instance of play, even if they are seldom encountered except

through play. Digital games include systems of signs and representations set into

material, circulated, and archived. If software has dematerialized practices of image

making, sound making, and the written word, it has in contrast materialized the

production and execution of game rules.

The discipline of game studies developed over the 1990s and early 2000s. Starting

with monographs by Brenda Laurel

, Janet Murray

and Espen Aarseth

, journals like

Game Studies – the International Journal of Computer Game Research (2001—present),

the Games and Culture Journal (2005—present) Loading… The Journal of the Canadian

The question of which rules are not enforced by software has been addressed elsewhere,

especially in Stephen Sniderman, “Unwritten Rules,” in The Game Design Reader : a Rules of Play

Anthology, ed. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 476–502.

One can observe the long precedent of a material cultural of games – the design of boards and

tokens and cards and dice, the architecture of sports arenas and play areas, and the publication of rule

books, while recognizing the substantial discontinuity introduced by digital games.

Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theatre (Addison-Wesley Professional, 1993).

Janet Horowitz Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace

(Simon and Schuster, 1997).

Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1997).

Game Studies Association (2007—present), and Eludamos — Journal for Computer

Game Culture (2007—present) published articles about games, media and culture by

scholars from a range of home disciplines. The Digital Games Research Association

formed in 2003 has become the major international body for games design research and

games studies, producing a biannual international conference since then. Other

conferences important in game studies include Digital Arts and Culture, Meaningful Play,

the International Conference on Entertainment Computing, the Foundations of Digital

Gaming, the Philosophy of Computer Games Conference and the State of Play

conference series (which deals with the relationship between games and law.) Game

programs at the undergraduate and graduate level have been created at hundreds of

universities and colleges: some of the most notable include Masters and PhD programs at

the IT University of Copenhagen, The Georgia Institute of Technology, and the

University of California, Santa Cruz.

Within this emergent discipline, a series of formal and informal discussions grew

into a divide between ludologists, researchers who focused on the study of games as such

and called for the creation of a family of conceptual frameworks and interpretative

methodologies unique to the study of games, and supposed narratologists. The latter term

was applied by those who self-identified as ludologists to characterize those theorists

whose disciplinary approaches drew from literary studies or film theory, and more

specifically for those whose interpretation of videogames foregrounded narrative, fiction

and representation over the behaviors of games as formal systems. While the gap between

the positions of its participants was perhaps exaggerated for rhetorical effect, the debate

provided much of the energy for the early years of the field.

The soi-disant ludologists

included Gonzalo Frasca, Jesper Juul (both of whom distanced themselves from the more

dramatic formulations of the distinction,) Marrku Eskelinen and Espen Aarseth. Aarseth

may have set the tone of the debate when describing the work of Murray and Laurel:

‘Games are always stories,’ Janet Murray claims. If this really were true,

perhaps professional baseball and football teams would do well to hire

narratologists as coaches. And does she also mean that stories are always

games, or are games simply a subcategory of stories? There were games

long before stories (among animals, long before human verbal culture), so

to privilege stories over games as a ‘core human activity,’ as Murray does,

may not be a good strategy if we want to understand games and make

them better.

This often-cited debate illustrates the ill-fitting attempts to understand digital

games in the context of the humanities. Early writing on interactive entertainment and its

possibilities, noting the performativity of the medium, often understood these forms

within the context of theater or film, yet the residence of meaning within digital games

never seemed straightforward. The vicissitudes of the debate are less relevant than their

apparent denouement; game studies seem, superficially, to have dispensed with the need

to reduce the object of its analysis to one of its features. Nonetheless, the apparent

“Narratology is a category of interest to the computer game formalists. It represents the

authority against which they have rebelled.” - Gonzalo Frasca, “Ludologists Love Stories, Too: Notes from

a Debate That Never Took Place,” in Level Up Conference Proceedings (presented at the DiGRA 2003,

Utrecht: University of Utrecht, 2003), 92–99, http://www.digra.org/dl/db/05163.01125.

Espen Aarseth, “Espen Aarseth Responds,” Electronic Book Review, May 1, 2004,

http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/cornucopia.

decompression of the debate has not the problem of the relationship between the game as

a system of representation and as a rule-system: often, discussion on games in the wake

of the debate begins with recognition of the value and importance of the absent element.

In practice, however, criticisms isolate and privilege one element and pay only passing

respect to the other. Of the over 130 papers presented at the 2009 conference of the

Digital Game Research Association, about 30 could be said to be primarily based on the

reading or analysis of the game as a cultural artifact (rather than being ethnographic

studies, psychological and cognitive theories of play, design and engineering research,

etc.) Of these, about half privileged representational elements and relegated mechanical

and game-dynamical elements to the background, while the other half did the opposite.

Only Ian Bogost's keynote address at the 2009 Digital Games Research Association

conference, "Videogames are a mess," suggested an ontology which is resonant with the

temporal experience of play, proposing that games were irreducible to any one of their

features or frames of interpretation, and that a state of permanent bricolage was the best

critical stance for a game scholar.

Murray distinguished between a discipline of ludology as a term to describe the

study of games themselves, and a position she described as game essentialism, by which

all signifying elements of the game should only be read as tokens in formal game

systems

. Many ludologists did, in fact, seem to thus emphasize the continuities between

J. H Murray, “The Last Word on Ludology v Narratology in Game Studies,” in DiGRA 2005

Conference: Changing Views of Worlds in Play, 2005.

pre-digital and digital game design and play: little has been made (other than a passing

observation by Juul

) of the fact that, despite the antiquity of games, they have only

recently been made the object of the kind of critical inquiry we associate with other

cultural forms. Juul and others observe that computers are “very good” at managing rules,

and thus it is natural that game design and play migrate to computers. The idea that

computers are also channels of communication, engines of mediation and representation,

was overlooked.

Aarseth

distinguished between the (mostly) non-electronic and (mostly)

electronic literatures by seen the latter as ergodic: as a system which lay behind the

visible text. In Aarseth’s model, an ergodic text is one in which a distinction can be made

between scriptions, or strings of words and characters as they appear to the reader, an

textons, strings as they exist, latent, within the text. Not all ergodic texts are electronic:

Aarseth identifies the I Ching and the “calligrammes” of Guillaume Apollinaire as

ergodic texts.

As I am taking a broader sense of the sign than Aarseth does, including

visual, architectural, and even relational objects as signs which are “written” into the

games, I also identify certain other game-design practices as resembling the dual-nature

of the digital game more than the socially-maintained nature of most non-digital games.

If the “scripton” is too Saussurean, too literary, to explain the kinds of signs encountered

Juul, Half-Real, 21.

Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature.

Ibid., 9–10.

within a videogame, it is still useful to consider the distinction between the signs read by

the player and those within the system—either lying in wait for a possible but not

inevitable exposure to the player, or those which are designed internally, to be read by the

system itself, whatever its origin. The system does more than simply hold in reserve

signs, awaiting the reader’s prompt: it is reading the reader, producing its own model of

the reader/player’s intentions, disposition, and symbolic production.

Revisiting semiotics in interactive media

If we return to the moment in which someone tells us that, the day before, they

had played a videogame, there are some things we can say with reasonable confidence.

We know that they executed at least one instance of software on a computer, loaded from

some kind of storage (either on the computer or game console they have at hand, or one

on a remote server); that the software’s operation produced representations which the

player interpreted, and that the player responded to these interpretations to provide input

back to the game system’s processor; the processor interpreted these inputs as the

participation of the player into the game. Perhaps other players were doing the same, and

responding to signs generated by the computer’s response to the player’s input (and

identifying those signs as the player, making the mediation of the computer transparent.)

Douglas Engelbart’s work developing the core concepts for human-computer interaction in the

1960’s was based on this perspective. See Susan B. Barnes, “Douglas Carl Engelbart: Developing the

Underlying Concepts for Contemporary Computing,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 19, no. 3

(1997): 19–20.

Perhaps other players were in the same location as the player, and the signs which they

interpreted included those produced by each other: shouts, gestures, stares etc.

Much else may have also happened, in the subjective experience of the player,

among people with whom they were playing, in the computer systems, on the network to

which the computer was connected, and among players also connected to that network.

But I will argue that the basis of the player’s engagement with the digital game is the

interpretation of a stream of signs, almost always in the visual and usually in the audio

field, and sometimes in the haptic and proprioceptic ones. And at least some of those

signs, and often most, were encoded into the system in the game development process as

digital code. Visual signs include everything from icons, strings of text and numbers

(labels, scores, names, messages from other players, subtitles, intertitles), particle effects

indicating a dynamic process (an explosion, motion, impact), a 3-dimensional figure of a

human-like or animal-like character, a stylized red cross (indicating “health” in many

games, part of a complex convention alluding to an internal state in the system,) and

much more; the audio signs can be sound effects, music, speech (perhaps generated by

other players.) In digital game and in game-like interactive media, the dynamics between

these signs as the objects of interpretation by the player and as authored elements placed

within the software in the development process distinguish them from the kind of signs

interpreted by cinema audiences or readers of (non-ergodic) novels.

To develop a useful theory of the sign for interactive media, it is helpful to return

to the origin of semiotics and to clear away possible presumptions about its limits and

application. The two authors credited with the development of semiotics, Ferdinand de

Saussure (1857—1913) and Charles S. Peirce (1839—1914), each approach the problem

of the sign from the perspective of the problematics of their own disciplines.

Saussuaure’s model reflects a linguistic set of concerns focused on signification as a

conveyer of meanings, understood conceptually. It is a dyadic model: a sign consists of a

a signifier and a signified: the first is the object of apprehension by the perceiving subject

(e.g., the sound of a spoken word, the written characters on a page), the latter the concept

which arises in the mind of the subject in its encounter with the sign. The relationship

between them is described by Saussure as arbitrary: only convention determines the

signified within a community of signifying practice (language speakers, readers, etc.)

In contrast, Peirce’s interest in the sign was driven by his career as a scientist and

logician —and could thus be said to be closer to ancient medieval medical semiotics,

driven by concerns of diagnosis and the interpretation of the anomalies in the body

—

providing the basis for an understanding of the sign and its reception that embraces

phenomenological accounts of human sensation, apprehension etc.

A Sign is anything which is related to a Second thing, its Object, in respect

to a Quality, in such a way as to bring a Third thing, its Interpretant, into

relation to the same Object.

Phoebe Sengers and Bill Gaver, “Staying Open to Interpretation: Engaging Multiple Meanings

in Design and Evaluation” (presented at the 6th Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, New York:

ACM, 2006), 13, doi:10.1145/1142405.1142422.

Charles Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce: Principles of Philosophy, ed.

Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), 92.

My goal in this section is simply to produce a model for the generation and

reception of a cluster of signs which will allow us to understand gameplay as a decoding

process and game production as the creation of an assemblage of signs, rather than try to

outfit his labyrinthine system in its entirety. Peirce elaborated a complicated theory based

on a system of nested trichotomies, a theory which never fully stabilized over the years

he wrote:

the question of the sign would emerge and recede repeatedly throughout his

career. There are reasons to prefer his terms over those derived from the Saussurean

dyad, particularly when describe signifying systems which are not being interpreted in

any way that could be said to resemble natural language. His model divides a sign into a

primary trichotomy: the representamen (he also calls this the material sign, or,

confusingly as above, simply the sign), the object and the interpretant. The interpretant is

a conceptual entity, which includes all the conditions by which the object is determined

by the representamen.

The three elements of the sign relation were further broken down by Peirce into

triads. The triadic structure is a constant feature of Peirce’s philosophy and theories of

logic: often, they derive from his theory of phenomenological categories:

For histories of Peirce’s engagement with semiotic theory, see .L. Short, Peirce’s Theory of

Signs (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007); James Jakób Liszka, A General Introduction to

the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce, Advances in Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1996).

I was long ago (1867) led, after only three or four years' study, to throw all

ideas into the three classes of Firstness, of Secondness, and of Thirdness.

This sort of notion is as distasteful to me as to anybody; and for years, I

endeavored to pooh-pooh and refute it; but it long ago conquered me

completely. Disagreeable as it is to attribute such meaning to numbers,

and to a triad above all, it is as true as it is disagreeable. The ideas of

Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness are simple enough. Giving to being

the broadest possible sense, to include ideas as well as things, and ideas

that we fancy we have just as much as ideas we do have, I should define

Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness thus:

Firstness is the mode of being of that which is such as it is, positively and

without reference to anything else.

Secondness is the mode of being of that which is such as it is, with respect

to a second but regardless of any third.

Thirdness is the mode of being of that which is such as it is, in bringing a

second and third into relation to each other."

Peirce thus created a division of signs based on the phenomenological category in

which it occurs. The first of these was a trichotomy of the nature of the representamen. In

a Qualisign

, a quality (e.g., “redness”) within the sign-vehicle is the sign itself: an

example of this would be the color used on a paint chip in a paint shop to match a color.

A Sinsign is a thing which acts as a sign, which has an immediate relationship to the

object for which it acts as a sign: an example would be the smoke seen in the distance

Charles Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce: Reviews, Correspondence and

Bibliography, ed. Arthur Burks, vol. 8, 3th ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 39.

Peirce was inconsistent in the use of his terms, and his system shifted over the years. Qualisigns,

for example, were also called “tones,” “potisigns” and “marks.” I use the terms he used toward the end of

his career and by most contemporary Peirce scholars.

connoting a fire. A Lexisign is a sign whose relationship to the object is determined by a

law or procedure, including (but not limited to) social convention.

Another fundamental trichotomy is that which distinguishes the three ways in

which signs can denote their objects: as Icons in which the signs perceptibly resembles

the object in a way within the conventions of the interpretant to secure reference, as

Indexes, in which a one-to-one relationship between the sign and the object emerges from

the history of that object (e.g., a child is named: the naming fixes the sign as referring to

the particular, rather than to a class; smoke as a sign indexes a fire, being an effect of it)

and, Symbols (sometimes called, confusingly, Signs, which lack any internal structure to

link it to the object, but secure reference only by convention (i.e., arbitrarily.) The

inclusion of Qualisigns and Sinsigns, and Indexes and Icons, distinguish Peirce’s

approach from Saussure’s emphasis on the (linguistic) sign as arbitrary: while it is

possible to locate some arbitrary aspects in the interpretation of icons and indexes, they

can be described as (at least partially or selectively) non-arbitrary, that features within

those signs provide clues to their interpretation. This also allows that Peirce’s semiotics

not be limited to communication or ideation: that a sign can be interpreted, decoded, and

mediated into another without ideation (or even cognition) is a necessary component for

describing the signifying condition at work in playable forms, including videogames.

Peirce is interested in the possibility of reading any phenomena as a sign: this affords a

Charles Sanders Peirce and Nathan Houser, The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical

Writings, Advances in Semoitics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 291.

theory of authorship across multiple modes, when entities are designed and programmed

to be available for various types of decoding.

A third trichotomy distinguishes signs by their working within the interpretant (as

one of either firstness, secondness or thirdness.) Rhemes operate like proper nouns: have

the character of being simple terms (like a noun); Dicents are propositional signs, and

Arguments, which Peirce describes as corresponding to a syllogism.

While every sign can be located within all three of these trichotomies, only certain

combinations are possible. All Qualisigns are Iconic in their relationship to the object

(that is, the “redness” of a paint-chip one is trying to match to a hue of paint in a paint

store is a feature of the material, neither arbitrary as a symbol nor indexical) and

Rhematic in their relationship to the Interpretant: the “redness” of the red chip is neither a

proposition (that the chip is red) nor an argument (that the redness connotes something

not present or immediate.) A Sinsign cound be a Rhematic Icon (e.g., a diagram of a

single object) a Rhemetic Indexical Sinsign In all, Peirce develops ten classes of signs

(Table 1.)

Table 1.: Peirce's categories of signs.

Sign’s

own

phenome-

nological

category

Relation

object

Relation

interpretant

Specificational

redundancies

in parentheses

Some examples

(I)

Qualisign

Icon

Rheme

(Rhematic Iconic)

Qualisign

A feeling of "red"

(II)

Sinsign

Icon

Rheme

(Rhematic) Iconic Sinsign

An individual diagram

(III)

Index

Rheme

Rhematic Indexical Sinsign

A spontaneous cry

(IV)

Dicisign

Dicent (Indexical) Sinsign

A weathercock or photograph

(V)

Legisign

Icon

Rheme

(Rhematic) Iconic Legisign

A diagram, apart from its factual

individuality

(VI)

Index

Rheme

Rhematic Indexical

Legisign

A demonstrative pronoun

(VII)

Dicisign

Dicent Indexical Legisign

A street cry (identifying the

individual by tone, theme)

(VIII)

Symbol

Rheme

Rhematic Symbol (–ic

Legisign)

A common noun

(IX)

Dicisign

Dicent Symbol (–ic

Legisign)

A proposition (in the conventional

sense)

(X)

Argument

Argument (–ative Symbolic

Legisign)

A syllogism

The richness of this model allows us to identify many features as signs and

account for certain phenomena in the encounter with a new game or interface: the farther

Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce: Elements of Logic, ed.

Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vol. 2, First Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1932), 254–263. The table is closely based on a chart from a Wikipedia article: Wikipedia contributors,

“Semiotic Elements and Classes of Signs,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (Wikipedia, The Free

Encyclopedia, August 31, 2011),

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Semiotic_elements_and_classes_of_signs&oldid=447705007.

one moves down the list from Qualisign to Legisign, the more conventional and arbitrary

the sign’s meaning becomes. A game can use a color as a Qualisign: in a game of

Bejeweled, for example it is only the color of the units which are significant, and a player

will react attending only to color—though the behavior that is expected must be learned

and is context-sensitive and conventional, once a player understands that three items of

the same color in a row provide a score in the game, that player can attend only to the

color of an element in the game, and does not need to “learn” that the “redness” of one

icon is identical to the “redness” of the other—the equivalence of the quality is self-

apparent. A rhemtic iconic sinsign would be the motion of a dot on a radar screen (the

radar-screen as a system itself being a rhematic iconic legisign) corresponding to the

direction of movement of an opponent, as in a flight-simulation fighting game such as

Crimson Skies. A rhematic indexical sinsign could include both computer-generated and

(other-)player-generated cries indicated that they had been hit in a first-person shooting

game such as Halo – in the first case, the cry having been implemented by the game

developers as an affordance to the player both indicating that s/he had successfully hit an

opponent and providing some satisfaction in their success; in the latter, case, it could be a

cry of frustration at having been bested. (In the latter case, too, the cry would also

produce a dicent indexical legisign.)

The role of the pragmatics of play in providing the conditions of interpretation

should be understated. The range of possible sign-types in videogames is a consequence

of the nature of the kind of attention that a player pays to the game, and of the ambiguous

status of game elements A barrier in a racing game, or a computer-controlled opponent in

a fighting game, or the sound of a warning klaxon in a war game, are not simply the

fictive records of imagined, diegetic barriers, opponents or warnings: the barriers

constrain the player, the opponents fight the player, the warning is meant to be heeded by

the player (and not simply by the character that the player is playing.) The “world-

producing” capabilities of interactive environments activates sign-reading across the

spectrum of categories, because the practice of play is just that: a practice. The presence

of player that is motivated to decode in order to act introduces a pragmatics of decoding

very different from those of media forms like cinema, television, the novel, music etc.

Semiotic registers

Raymond Duval used the expression “semiotic register”

in the context of

mathematics education to describe the ability of a decoding subject (in his case, a learner

of mathematics) to recognize which interpretants are appropriate to a sign with multiple

possible interpretants

. The term has been deployed since then in a variety of contexts,

notably in Asif Agsa's study of language and social relations, in which a register was

understood as the immanent pragmatic context of utterance, produced by shared fluencies

Sémiosis et Pensée Humaine: Registres Sémiotiques et Apprentissages Intellectuels (Berne:

Peter Lang, 1995).

The reasoning through signs to their interpretants was also addressed by Peirce, who held that

icons, in particular, were decoded through a process of abduction, or hypothesis. That abduction constitutes

much of game-learning is at the heart of recent interest in games as models for learning: see James Paul

Gee, “Learning and Games,” in The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games and Learning, ed. Katie

Salen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 21–40.

in the language of that register (e.g., the "received pronunciation" of Oxford and

Cambridge-educated members of the English upper classes, the activity-driven

recognition of the appropriateness of imperative language, etc.

) I take the term up in a

broader sense that the sociolinguistic one, to refer to a conceptual entity produced by the

player’s attempt to understand and successfully play a game by organizing the signs

he/she encounters.

The idea of a multiplicity or plurality of sign-systems is not new, and is presumed

in the study of socio-linguistics and pragmatics, in iconography, etc., referring to the

ambiguity or indeterminacy of the sign or as a site of contestation of its political uses.

Here, however, I take the registers to be an implicitly understood condition in the

pragmatics of game-design and game-play. The dynamic nature of the digital sign allows

it operate in multiple registers, and to move from one register to another over time.

The conventional model of the videogame, partially as an outcome of the debates

which informed the formation of the field of videogame studies, creates a distinction

between the formal system of the game and the surface of representations featuring

characters, fictions, visual design elements, etc. However, if we consider work in either

of three fundamental positions: its creation, its passive existence as a “thing in itself”

(i.e., as unexecuted binary code) and its reception, in no case does this distinction hold

true. To begin at the end of this circuit from creation to consumption, consider the act of

Language and Social Relations (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), chap. 4.

play: a player (perhaps with others) launches a game according the conditions of the

platform on which it is being executed: the software at a certain point makes a

presentation to the player(s): a loading screen, a cinematic sequence, etc. The player may

not yet understand how to play the game, but s/he is already decoding: interpreting the

tone of the game, learning its scale, absorbing information which constitutes the narrative

(if any), and opening his/herself to the ongoing process of learning the relationship

between in-game cues, gamic action, and the levels of strategic, tactical and reflexive

model-making which make it possible to navigate the game.

These cues are constructed by the player from the same material signs (or

representamen.) Any given element – a three-dimensional model with textures, an iconic

gauge which gives analog representation of a digital value in the system, the

figure/ground distinction which makes one plane identifiable as a “surface” and thus

registers a collision with other objects in the game – can be decoded as communicating a

characteristic of a fictional entity, of positing an event in an unfolding, recounted or

implicit story (e.g., placing ruins in the background of a scene implicitly tells the story

“this building fell; there was something here that has fallen; there were forerunners to all

the ones we see now.” It – this same element, by whatever mechanisms of authorship and

production have inscribed it into the software being executed by the player – can also be

decoded by a range of interpretative mechanisms, from the “twitch” instinct of pre-

conscious reflex, a result of the player training his/herself to respond without reflection to

a stimulus, to a considered and reflective interpretation of the allegorical, metaphoric or

rhetorical heft of the sign. An object encountered in the visual field of the game can also

be interpreted in many ways within a given tactical register: treated as a threat to be

countered by placing a cursor over the figure and pressing a button (that is, “shooting” it,)

as a resource to be gathered, as an obstacle to be navigated around, as an index to a some

part of the game-system’s state.

The multiple possible registers of decoding become obvious when viewing a

game trailer: a video advertisement for a new game. As of this writing, the game Journey

by “That Game Company” has not been released: however, a trailer is available on

YouTube showing footage from the game. The nature of the advertisement is

intentionally ambiguous: there are human figures walking over sand dunes, past

expressionistic figures in the sand. The control scheme is unclear: we do not know what

genre this game is in yet, but are instead simply being shown the mood. The registers into

which this game will be decoded is in suspense: we do not know what elements on the

screen are “actionable,” whether one or more figures in the scenes are subject to direct or

indirect control, whether these elements contain game-specific information. We do have

an ambience, however: the stylistic positioning of the game (consistent with the

understated, naturalistic style and environmental motifs of That Game Company) is

indicated by the trailer, as is play experience which is thoughtful, slow and unstressed

(also consistent with previous titles.)

To facilitate the analysis of games, it is helpful to examine an entire traversal of

game from beginning to end in a single image. Figure 1 is a montage from a 30+ hour

play of the game Kingdom Hearts.

The montage is created from video recordings of

game-play sessions. This image represents 62.5 hours of game-play, in 29 sessions, over

20 days. Frames are organized in a grid in order of game-play from left to right, top to

bottom. Kingdom Hearts is a franchise of video games and other media properties created

in 2002 via a collaboration between Tokyo-based videogame publisher Square (now

Square-Enix) and The Walt Disney Company, in which original characters created by

Square travel through worlds representing Disney-owned media properties (e.g., Tarzan,

Alice in Wonderland, The Nightmare before Christmas, etc.). Each world has its distinct

characters derived from the respective Disney-produced films. It also features a distinct

color palettes and rendering styles, which are related to visual styles of the corresponding

Disney film. While the inserted image is too small for analysis, the original image is over

10,000 by 8000 pixels in size, making it possible to see the contents of each frame.

Squaresoft, Inc, Kingdom Hearts (Tokyo: Square, Inc., 2002).

Figure 1.: Kingdom Hearts video traversal.

Looking at the game at this scale allows us to consider the moment-by-moment

nature of gameplay. According to conventional models which treat game “content” as

relatively independent from mechanics and play, we would distinguish conceptually

between the game as a formal system of mechanics and the game as the story of a

character trying to rescue his friend. In terms of the former, Kingdom Hearts is

designated a game in the “action role-playing-game” genre : the player moves an avatar

through a 3-dimensional representation of space and navigates a series of menus. Doing

so builds a database of elements, and augments numerical values within that database.

Over the course of play, the opponents encountered by the player are associated with

database elements and higher numerical value. These opponents are dispatched by using

the controller to place the avatar in advantageous positions in the 3-dimensional space,

then both pressing buttons in the controller according to the game’s control schema (the

mapping of game-world procedures to human input options, such as buttons and

joysticks), at optimal moments, while selecting procedures from a database of procedures

that are abduced by the player as being optimal for the obstacles at hand.

If this description is almost impenetrable, it is a result of attempting to

communicate this game entirely in terms of the formal system of the game without

recourse to the metaphors and representations that the player is actually experiencing as

s/he plays. Even so, the above description breaks its own rules, because the metaphor by

which the game state is communicated to the player is the game that the player is actually

playing.

In fact, natural language does not distinguish between reports of mechanical or

systematic play-experiences from that of the game experience as the encounter with a

fiction, especially when the pragmatics of play is included. Instead, we say that in

Kingdom Hearts, “you play Sora”- already this is an abbreviation, of course. Your avatar

This is implied in Juul’s thought-experiment regarding the difference in experience tic-tac-toe as

a game of spatial positions – placing three markers in a row – with that of experiencing the game as a

challenge to select a sequence of numbers, described in Half-Real. However, Juul treats these as two

different games without identifying it as a question of representation within an interface; he recognizes that

the player that the game is playing is distinct from the formal system that is constituted by the activity of

the CPU.

in 3D spaces, the figure whose movements respond immediately to your joystick moves,

is called Sora; as immediately perceived by the player, Sora (as protagonist) is a product

of a function that draws and animates a model and displays it on a computer screen. Of

course, Tetsuya Nomura, the character designer and producer most closely associated

with the Kingdom Hearts franchise, is the credited designer of Sora. Sketches by various

artists were sent to committees

, which reviewed them before approving them; once a

conception of this character was approved (in which many considerations, involving

franchising, the perception of the market, the performance of previous characters, the

conceptual goals for the producers for the title, etc., weighed in) eventually the sketch

was turned into an articulated 3D model, animated by, at various times, the player’s

controller or by pre-scripted activity choreographed by animators and scripted for

interpretation by the computer.

One can still make a conceptual distinction between the fictional aspects of the

game and the interactive ones: in both the production of many games and in the reception

of them, such distinctions are often made in everyday discussion. What this suggests,

however, is that these two seemingly complementary interpretations of a game are

assembled by selective and filtered organization of a collection of signifying elements

with multiple possible referents, apprehended within semiotic registers maintained by the

player. The creation, maintenance and adjustment of these semiotic registers are more or

Nato Yoshioka, Interview with YOSHIOKA Nato, Chief Technologist and General Manager,

Research Center, Square-Enix Co, Ltd., August 11, 2010.

less effortless, reflecting the player’s understanding of the game-form he/she is playing

This understanding often begins with genre.

Genre and interpretation

With an integrated approach to the signs which constitute the experience of

perceiving a videogame, we can interpret genre and even style in videogame design and

production as distinct configurations of signs: templates for interpretation which create

boundaries of expectation.

Genre plays a distinct role in videogames. Theories of genre adapted from other

media forms—whether the historical models of genre development in the English novel

(e.g. Moretti)

or models based on formal and content analysis in film (e.g. Altman)

are ill-fitting from the outset. Altman suggests that film genre is the product of a

relationship between the syntax of a film and its semantic content: that a film which

features a lone and somber male protagonist confronting a nemesis in a frontier

environment can be read as a Western syntactically, even if the setting is colonial

Pennsylvania (or an abandoned mining colony in space.) Alternately, a film could be

characterized as a Western if it is set in mid-to-late 19

century western North America,

with characters recognizable as cowboys, bandits, sheriffs, etc., even though the plot and

mood is that of a romantic comedy with no serious gunplay elements. Genre history, for

Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (Verso, 2005).

Rick Altman, “A Semantic/syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” Cinema Journal 23, no. 3

(1984): 6 –18.

Altman, occurs when one of these two components of a film genre changes while the

other remains stable.

Altman’s model of genre resembles the distinction between ludological

(syntactic) and representational (semantic) elements described above. Interactive aspects

are privileged over those involving theme, setting or characterization in determining

genre membership.

The history of games can be framed as the emergence and development of new

genres and variations: these genres do not disappear, but their tropes and features change

over time.

But the changes in interactive genre in games aren’t comparable to the kind

For a discussion on genre, see William H. Huber, “Ka as Shomin-geki: Problematizing

Videogame Studies,” in Level up. Digital Games Research Conference (Utrecht, 2003), 4–6; Mark J P

Wolf, The Medium of the Video Game (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 113–133. Wolf attempts

to create a catalog of game genres recognizable at the moment of publication, while in my paper, I suggest

that the privileging of interactive genre categories may not be ideal for critical game studies. Nonetheless,

interactive regime is still the basis for most folksonomies and practical applications, from the organization

of fan-wikis to the shelf-organization of retail spaces.

A good example is the history described in Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Jonas Heide Smith, and

Susana Pajares Tosca, Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction (Taylor & Francis, 2008),

50–96. This history identifies interactive genres emerging in the 1960s, diverging and transforming over

time with new technologies, audience literacies and the competitive pressure to differentiate each new title

from predecessors and competitors. For an attempt at an exhaustive catalog of the interactive genres which

had emerged by the time of his research, see Wolf, The Medium of the Video Game, 113–145.

of changes that Altman describes, at least not without substantial adjustment. The

differences between game genres are more dramatic: each genre is an assemblage of

literacies and mappings, of scales of operation and rhythms. Some of these elements are

conventional: others are foundational, making the game coherent to a player who is

learning, or know how, to play games within that genre. If genre in film can be

understood as an implicit contract between the producers of the film and its audience, a

contract which can be fulfilled by either syntactic or semantic elements, then genre in

games—at least syntactic (interactive) genre is more exhaustive contract. It is a promise

that certain genre-based literacies and convention will adhere to the game provided, that

the enskilments which the player has cultivated of their career of play within that genre

will provide them with at least some utility within the new work. (This is particularly true

in those games which promise some difficult, challenge and perhaps competition for the

player: games which play within an aesthetics of frustration.) Because game genre is a

tightly-knit collection of conventions about the interpretation of key signs—

interpretations that in many cases are automatic and reflexive, involving control schemes

and motor-memory, genre evolution is a dialogical relationship between the producers of

games and those audiences in which the habits of user interaction of the latter constrain

the pace of change: emerging literacies of interaction can become elements in the design

of subsequent games, which players learn and master, producing newer literacies.

We can work out interactive (or, per Altman, syntactic) genre by taking as a

reference point a fixed theme, and describing how the elements of that theme are

reconfigured and signified across multiple genres. The invasion of German-occupied

Normandy by Allied forces on June 6, 1944 (“D-Day” in popular memory, although the

term is general and applies to the first day of any military operation) has been represented

visually and narratively through a fairly well-consolidated family of images, sounds, and

descriptions. The photographs of Robert Capa and film footage produced for news reels

provided a vocabulary of images which would be quoted and recreated in film (The

Longest Day

, Saving Private Ryan

) and television (Band of Brothers), in

documentaries and narratives, which in turn provided the visual semantics for games

about the invasion and its aftermath. While themes, editing conventions, cinematographic

techniques and even tone have changed in the cinematic renderings of the episode, the re-

working of the theme in games—particularly, but not only digital games—demonstrates

the close relationship between the functional conditions of a somewhat stable set of

representamen within interpretants that are constrained by (interactive/syntactic) genre.

These representamen include the view of the cliffs of the Normandy shore from the

landing craft, over the headgear of nervous GIs; the movement of bodies through the

tetrahedral and “hedgehogs,” the structures constructed from I-beams used to prevent

easy landing; the arrays of bodies streaming quickly to the edges of the ramparts; the

over-the-shoulder view of German artillery crews looking out over the English channel,

and the maps used to depict the forces and their landing sites up and down the Normandy

coast.

Ken Annakin et al., The Longest Day (20th Century Fox, 1962).

Steven Spielberg, Saving Private Ryan (Dreamworks, Paramount Pictures, 1998).

An early ludic depiction of the historical event was the table-top wargame

D-

Day, originally designed by Charles S. Roberts for the Avalon Hill company in 1961:

Play takes the form of 50 game turns, each representing one week of real

time, during which the Allies must establish a beachhead, breakout,

organize a Patton-like dash across France, and sustain 10 divisions across

the Rhine in the face of heavy German opposition. This was the first

wargame to feature a hexagonal grid.

The high level of abstraction of the experience of conflict, as units were indexed

by cardboard chits marked by statistics representing the movement and combat strengths

of each of them, accompanied an innovation in the ludic representation of space (a

hexagon, which allows facings on units on six sides and affords flanking strategies more

closely resembling actual combat conditions.) The withdrawal of the affective power of

conflict, and the detached perspective of would-be generals taking turns making strategic

decisions, makes it easier to allow players to take the position of the strategists of the

Wehrmacht without activating a sense of complicity. The term “D-Day” itself in the title

of the game refers not to the historical date of June 6, 1944, but to the challenges and

configurations of force at the moment that the invasion began. The game introduces a

play of counterfactuals at that moment: strategies different from those recorded to have

D-Day is a setting for a number of board games, on a range of scales: I used the two board

games D-Day and Axis and Allies as examples of the use of D-Day as a setting for a fairly focused strategic

simulation in the first case, and as a signifier for the initial moment in the invasion of German-occupied

Europe by Allied forces as a problem in multiple possible worlds in the latter.

BoardGameGeek, LLC, “D-Day | Board Game,” BoardGameGeek, 2011,

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/12168/d-day.

been pursued can be taken, with different results. The scale of the game, limited to a

depiction of the operations within France in 1944, contrasts with that of another board

game, Axis and Allies, a globally-scaled, turn-based game designed by Larry Harris, Jr.

and published in 1981 by Nova Games.

Axis & Allies places the entire world into the

possibility of play. In D-Day, as in any game based on an interpretation of a historical

record, the counterfactuals “in play” are constrained: one cannot, for example, invade or

call for aid to a country not represented in the game board. In Axis & Allies, the afforded

counterfactuals include the invasion of South America or Mexico, the occupation of

Hawaii by Japanese forces, and other very hypothetical, contractual conditions. The chits

and markers used in Axis & Allies do not index historical units, but represent abstract

aggregations of military strength (only distinguishing naval, air and ground forces from

each other) and economic power. The spatial boundaries on the game map upon which

the pieces move are not fixed distances, but are national borders (or zones of naval

influence and traversal for seafaring units. Axis & Allies begins at the moment of greatest

Axis expansion: the first problem for an Allied player is securing a foothold on the

European continent, after having amassed forces (usually) on the British Isles. In other

words, “D-Day” signifies the first offensive move of the game, and the opening

BoardGameGeek, LLC, “Axis & Allies | Board Game,” BoardGameGeek, 2011,

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/98/axis-allies. Axis & Allies developed into a franchise of both

board and digital games, in the latter case migrating from turn-based to real-time strategy. Axis & Allies:

D-Day resembled the Avalon Hill D-Day described above in scale of time and size, albeit with a simpler

game mechanic.

configuration privileges a maneuver analogous to that of the historical invasion: a single

crossing of the channel and a battle for an Allied presence in France. “D-Day,” usually,

isn’t a setting—it’s a broad signifier for the initial challenged confronted by the Allied

player.

Figure 2.: D-Day (1982 arcade game)

Figure 3.: D-Day cabinet and controller

Digital games depict D-Day with more breadth of expression, both ludologically

and visually. In 1982, an arcade game also named D-Day (Figure 2, Figure 3) was

released in Japan by Olympia, a minor producer of arcade games with generally

derivative designs. This game, unusually enough, places the player in the position of the

Axis powers, facing out over the English channel and firing at incoming airplanes, ships,

tanks and other vehicles. The game is played on a single joystick with one button. This

control scheme is consistent with many other games in this genre

(the “shooter” or

“shmup,” and more specifically, those with a stationary gun.) The player will likely

recognize the historical reference of the title and identify the key elements rather quickly;

if the player has never played before, a simple tap on the controller and press of the

button will indicate that the small, red line at the bottom of the screen is the player-

controlled gun. As trucks, tanks and planes cross the screen, the player will quickly

realize they are targets. The player will lose one of three lives (“guns”) when either a

bomb from the airplane drops without being shot down, or when one of the vehicles,

which are usually moving horizontally across the screen, turns toward the player and

drives through a clearing in the shrubs. The player will soon learn that the silhouette of

barbed war and rampart are decorative; the shrubs, however, protect the player. For the

player of a game of this genre, the important elements to identify are the site and limits of

The hardware platform for the game also determines its control schema. A game played on a

Playstation 2 console will have a control schema different from a version produced for a home computer,

although there is generally close to an isomorphic mapping from one to the other, and relative stability

within a genre given the same hardware platform.

the player’s activity (firing a gun,) the identification of threats, and the rhythms of

activity which contain them both.

In 1998, Steven Spielberg co-produced and directed the film Saving Private Ryan.

The film begins (after an opening sequence set in the Normandy American Cemetery)

with the invasion of Omaha Beach. Tom Hanks’ character, Captain John Miller, is first

filmed as nervously anticipating the landing while standing with his squad in a landing

craft: some of his colleagues, overcome by fear, vomit or pray or cry. As German artillery

and machine guns fire upon the invasion force, the chain of command breaks down. The

sequence depicts bodies in trauma: bullets tracing through the water, explosions

deafening, and Miller slipping into and out of shock. Staggering through corpses and men

holding their devastated limbs (over 20 amputees were employed to create the scene, with

over 1500 members of the Irish Reserve Forces

), Miller reaches the foot of the cliffs,

surviving the initial phase. As the invasion stabilizes and the infrastructure of military

command is established in Normandy, the plot for the film develops. The landing

sequence has a dramatic autonomy, joining war-time newsreels, the photographs of

Robert Capa and the 1962 Ken Annikin film The Longest Day as part of the collective

visual reconstruction of the historical event.

Conor Feehan, “How We Made the Best Movie Battle Scene Ever,” Independent, June 7, 2006,

http://www.independent.ie/unsorted/features/how-we-made-the-best-movie-battle-scene-ever-91583.html.

The year following the release of Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg produced the

game Medal of Honor: the game was released for the Sony Playstation platform on

Veteran’s Day, November 11, 1999

. The game is in the First Person Shooter genre: a 3-

dimensional space depicting a first-person view (generally a medium-length shot) in

which the player’s character must use the game controller to move about the 3D space,

acquire items, select appropriate weapons and ammunition, avoid detection by enemies,

and fire at them when necessary.

The player’s character was Lt. Jimmy Patterson, a

pilot working for the OSS (predecessor of the CIA) who parachutes behind enemy lines

in the hours before the Normandy invasion, and who must complete various objectives.

Medal of Honor became a franchise of games which stayed within this genre, each

featuring a different main character; until the release of the 2010 title

, all were set in

either the Atlantic or Pacific theaters of World War II.

Medal of Honor Wiki contributors, “Medal of Honor,” Wiki, Medal of Honor Wiki, August 4,

2011, http://medalofhonor.wikia.com/wiki/Medal_of_Honor.

For an excellent critical history of the first-person shooter, see chapter 2 of Galloway, Gaming:

Essays on Algorithmic Culture.

The 2010 game is set in contemporary Afghanistan.

Figure 4.: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (1999) - Omaha Beach sequence

Figure 5.: First-person view of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault

While the first two titles in the Medal of Honor series deal with events

complementary to those depicted in Saving Private Ryan, the third—Medal of Honor:

Allied Assault—includes missions set in the invasion itself. Many of the shots from the

landing sequence in the first act of the film are remediated in the landing sequence in

Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, including the inter-titles (Figure 4) which often indicate

a “historical” time and place. However, the sequence is entirely in a first-person view.

One can hear the whispered prayers of other soldiers as the landing craft approaches the

shore, and see the bullets track through the water. Never, however, do we see the face of

the protagonist or any view of the action outside the first-person view. The cliffs of

Normandy only come into focus as the player approaches them. A compass is super-

imposed on the top-right corner of the screen, beneath which game information scrolls:

sentences such as “You have a new objective,” “You have acquired the explosives,”

“Game saved,” and “You have completed an objective” scroll up. (Figure 5) New

messages are added to a queue in the bottom and scroll upward, toward the compass: the

player learns this convention for identifying the sequence of messages. On the bottom

left, a vertical green bar acts as a health gauge: an iconic visual representation of a

numerical value, the character’s “health”—this numerical value is a highly conventional

abstract representation of the overall well-being of a human. As the health decrements,

the upper region of the health gauge turns red: the use of the colors green and red to

express health and injury respectively is also conventional.

In Peircean terms, it is an

iconic rhematic legisign, not a symbol: a diagram which represents part/whole ratios

which correspond to the numerical values which represent “health.” Just above the health

gauge are strings of text which transcribe the dialogue produced by non-player characters

in the game, allowing the player to refer to recent statements as if reading a screenplay.

Because non-player characters give the player the objectives for the mission, those

statements require somewhat more persistence in the player’s attention than might be

obtained if the dialogue were only presented as audio.

In some genres, especially fighting games such as Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, the color

red in the context of a gauge also used to indicate the availability of a special attack: there is frequently a

relationship between a state of crisis created by low health and the ability to create powerful attacks. These

negative feedback mechanics give players who are at a disadvantage an opportunity to turn the tables.

The bottom-right of the screen contains a vertical row of stacked rounds of

ammunition and a small caption describing the weapon that the character is said to be

holding. One of the core mechanics of the game (and the genre of first-person shooters)

involves situating an opponent in the center of the camera and pressing a button (often

the left mouse button in PC versions of the game, the “X” button in Playstation games

released for the US and European markets, and the “O” button in Playstation games

released for the Japanese market.) The efficacy and range of the shot—and the radius of

damage of an explosion—are a set of variables attached to the action of firing a weapon,

and the icons on the screen are the basis of an abduction by the player about the efficacy

of their currently-selected weapon

. Figure 6 is a variant of the usual first-person view,

activated when a player selects a long-distance sniping weapon and then enters “sniping

mode,” which places a crosshair in the middle of the screen, zooms the camera to objects

in the far distance, and masks the peripheral of a circle, imitating the view through a

range-finder. (A discussion of “modes” in games follows in a later section.)

For an example of implementation details, see Vaughan Young, Programming a Multiplayer

FPS in DirectX, 1st ed. (Hingham, MA: Charles River Media, 2005), chap. 9.

Figure 6.: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, sniper-scope view.

Other first-person shooter games have portrayed or included “D-Day.” An

interesting contrast can be made with a segment of the game Call of Duty 2 (Figure 7)

While also strictly conforming to a first-person view, and giving the player the ability to

control the orientation of the camera during the sequence, this game presents the player

with the names and roles of other soldiers in his landing craft. This has the effect of

rendering them less anonymous: the deaths of colleagues in Medal of Honor are

portrayed as generically tragic, but those in Call of Duty each have a more individualized

pathos. The labels do more than produce this kind of narrative effect, however. Call of

Duty emphasizes a squad-based approach to the first-person shooter: the player is

supported and complemented by a group of non-player (and, in multiplayer versions,

other-player) characters with different abilities and uses. This element is not deeply

explored in the game: in fact, the game-system keeps one’s allies alive for most missions

without substantial assistance from the player. Yet even within a well-defined genre such

as the first-person shooter, small differences in signification within the game interface

indicate real variations of emphasis in the game’s representation of its topic, within the

genre’s scale and situation.

Figure 7.: Call of Duty 2 (2005) Cutscene from the assault on Pointe du Hoc mission.

The 1982 D-Day is an example of an arcade/shooter treatment of the theme of the

historical/conceptual “D-Day”; Medal of Honor and Call of Duty 2 are first-person

shooter games. Another game, Company of Heroes, is a game in the real-time strategy

(RTS) genre. The modifier “real-time” distinguishes games from those which are

strategic in nature, from the 19

century simulation Kriegspiel, used to train the Prussian

officer corps, to the aforementioned Avalon Hill D-Day and Nova Games Axis and Allies

table-top games. A real-time strategy game weds the strategic, managerial scale of these

other games to the urgency and mental athleticism of an action game.

Real-time

strategy games are played in a bird’s-eye, isometric perspective. The player uses a

controller—usually a mouse—to select groups of soldiers and move them across the

battlefield to engage other opponents. The player is not identified with any one unit or

individual: the soldiers are resources, whose losses are to be minimalized to maintain

operational effectiveness (and, often, a better score for the game.) In Company of Heroes,

the most important entity is the squad—a collection of several soldiers—and the loss of a

squad is more detrimental to one’s play objectives than the loss of a few individuals

within squads. Death signifies something different within a tactical register of play

between the two genres, although the cinematic elements of the game often aspire to

imbue both types of destruction with the same pathos found in Saving Private Ryan (or

the 2006 miniseries, A Band of Brothers.)

Many of the visual elements familiar from the history of the representation of D-

Day also occur within Company of Heroes. However, they play different roles, while still

activating a reference to the history of their depiction. The hedgehogs which acted as

For a popular history of the genre, see Bruce Geryk, “GameSpot Presents: A History of Real-

Time Strategy Games,” GameSpot, accessed August 9, 2011,

http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/all/real_time/.

foreboding architectural elements in Saving Private Ryan and as points of temporary

shelter from gunfire in the first-person shooter games act instead both as obstacles around

which a player must direct his units and as places to assemble squads. Where the overlays

of Medal of Honor denoted the immediate firepower capacities and state-of-health of the

player’s character, those in Company of Heroes denote the screen-elements which are

under player control, their orientation, efficacy, aggregation and status (Figure 8.) RTS

interfaces are usually more complicated than those of FPS games: the virtuoso navigation

of a complex interface with a rich vocabulary of player activity characterizes the play

experience. One might call them “allegories of control,” recalling Alex Galloway’s

critical study of a different genre

, the 4X (“explore, expand, exploit, exterminate”)

genre, and especially the Civilization series of games. However, 4X games are turn-

based: a player can take as long as she/he likes to make a move. The virtuosity which a

4X game demands is over the database of elements and operations itself: of an

understanding of the behavior of the system and various optimal paths for play. If the 4X

game is about the conceptual control through the system’s “back-end,” the RTS game is

about the mastery of interface, and the migration of the insights into the system from

consciousness to reflex and motor memory. The genre deploys signs similar in form to

those deployed in first-person shooter games, but which call for different types of

interpretation. This difference is not simply the ambiguity of any sign observed by post-

structuralist critics: a player quickly and assuredly registers the sign into its appropriate

Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, 85–106.

context for interpretation by successfully playing the game. The interface—that is, the

surface by which the player encounters the game

—arranges the elements and presents

them to the player so as to cue him/her into their appropriate use.

Figure 8.: Company of Heroes: Normandy landing sequence

Styles of game design

If genre produces very specific and constrained interpretations for the signs and

elements which constitute a game, then style in game design is about the privileging of

certain features of the game as the basis for the aesthetic experience of play. Two games

See Montfort, “Combat in Context.” Montfort describes five levels of context for the analysis of

games: platform, game code, game form, interface, and reception/operation. The interface is the mechanism

by which the player approaches the “game form,” the goals, activities and narratives of the game

constituted by the game code.

of different styles may share a genre, and thus much of the syntax as described above;

however, one game might place its priorities on visual experience (and then take a

position on visual aesthetics); another may place priorities on the relationships created

between players, and another on the rhetorics of representation and simulation in the

game. This is a somewhat idiosyncratic use of the term “style:” if the commitment by

authors to a style was more predictable, and the discourse on style more explicit, we

might even describe them as movements. There is some precedent in game studies for

describing style in my more categorical sense.

Ian Bogost distinguished an emerging style of independent games he described as

“proceduralist.

” These games, including Rod Humble’s The Marriage, Jason Rohrer’s

Passage, and Jonathon Blow’s Braid (Figure 9) shared certain features, according to

Bogost: procedural rhetorics, in which “the player’s experience . . . results from

interaction with the game's mechanics and dynamics, and less so (in some cases almost

not at all) in their visual, aural, and textual aspects,” introspection as the sought-for

mental state of the player; abstraction of instantial assets, that is, a visual aesthetic

uninterested in verisimilitude; subjective representation, a non-literal poetics of gamic

metonymy, and authorship, a commitment of the artist to the statements produced by the

game. These characteristics are not all of a sort: introspection is clearly something that

the designer wishes to provoke, rather than being a feature of the game itself, whle the

“The Proceduralist Style,” Gamasutra, January 21, 2009,

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3909/persuasive_games_the_.php.

abstraction of instantial assets is a tactic that is an outcome of the aesthetic priorities of

these games.

These games are different from each other, though they do share the status of

being authored independently of the commercial game development studio system by

small teams or single individuals. Braid is a “platformer” game: the player moves an

avatar through a two-dimensional space viewed to the side, pressing a button (either the

space bar on a keyboard or a specific button on a controller) which allows the avatar to

jump onto platforms. The game also makes (ludo-fictional) time into play

: one button

allows the player to rewind events in parts of the screen in order to accomplish the goals

for each level. None of these elements in themselves are characteristic of the Bogost’s

proceduralist style: instead, it is the conditions of interpretation of these elements which

produce the style.

The art of Braid is rendered in the style of an illustrated storybook, evoking John

Tenniel’s illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland or E. H. Shepard’s

illustrations for Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows and A.A. Milne’s Winnie-

the-Pooh. The player’s avatar is a well-dressed young man, initially shown standing in

Braid was by no means the first game to use time as a variable play element: commercial titles

such as Prince of Persia and Viewtiful Joe already incorporated this game mechanic. Notably, both these

games are also platformers (the former a 3D-platformer, the latter a 2D-platformer with a cel-shaded visual

style.) Perhaps the laterality and spatial-cognitive features of the genre evoke time-based media and affords

designers and players alike the possibility of controlling time as if it were a media itself.

front of a burning city. As he heads into his home, he heads into a room filled with books

on pedestals, which explain the context for the game: the character Tim is trying to revive

a relationship with a lover (“the Princess,” in an allusion to the cliché of rescue and in

particular to the Mario World series of games) whom he either spurned or who spurned

him. He is motivated by regret, and seeks to undo what he has done. The time-reversal

mechanic is a procedural reflection of his regret. Tim travels from room to room within

the house which he once shared with the princess, each of which is a portal to a series of

world-levels common to the two-dimensional platformer genre. Within each he has two

broad goals: to recover jigsaw puzzle pieces and to traverse to the far side of the level,

ultimately reaching a castle. (In a direct quotation of the Super Mario World games, when

he reaches each castle, he is told by an increasingly coy dinosaur that “the Princess is in

another castle.”) The music played varies from a gentle, sprightly light classical

soundtrack to a more somber ambient one; as the temporal mechanics become more

complicated (in some levels, the motion of the avatar from left to right, except in certain

regions of the screen, maps onto the temporal dimension: that is, when the player moves

back toward the left, all the other moving elements on screen also move to the left) the

soundtrack reinforces the technics by incorporating sounds associated with acceleration,

deceleration and reversal (e.g., the sound of a reel tape being advanced quickly;

soundtracks played backwards, etc.) The focus that is played on these mechanics—on the

jumping, the manipulation of time—are then readable as having an “aboutness” to them.

While the control schema of the game (the binding of a button to jump, another to move

time forward or backward) and the operation of material signs secure its membership in

the genre of platform games, it is other signs (including signs which are relationships

between signs) which indicate the aesthetic and rhetorical goals of the game.

Understanding how to navigate Braid corresponds to literacy in the interactive genre of

platformer with a time-based mechanic; understanding how to interpret Braid as a game

within a style-discourse corresponds to the recognition of the relationship between that

literacy and the registers of interpretation which remain outside of those on which genre

membership is dependent.

Figure 9.: Braid a sole-authored independent game created by J. Blow (2010)

We can interpret the proceduralist style as set of signifying practices and

frameworks: the authorship of the game, whereby the developer associates specific

aspects of the work as the site of their authority: thus, in a game in the procedural style,

the register of interpretation is produced in which procedures perform the work of being

“about” the world. Although all games have procedures, games in the proceduralist style

call the player to interpret its procedures directly, as the locus of aesthetic experience for

the game. To support this, in game design in the proceduralist style, the designer

produces assets which are iconic or symbolic, rather than indexical, to be decoded in a

denotative or diegetic (Bogost’s “abstraction of instantial objects.”).

We can imagine other styles of game design

: what I would term a relational

style in game design (after Bourriaud’s concept of “relational aesthetics

”) which might

include Douglas Wilson’s B.U.T.T.O.N

, Nintendo’s Wii Sports, virtual worlds such as

Final Fantasy XI, and music-and-rhythm games like Rock Band. A game in the relational

style would be one in which the interpretation of the game was deferred to the (usually

social) context of play. Despite the apparent delegation of meaning to players, these

games consist of authored affordances meant to facilitate certain interactions between

participants; the signs of the game would thus be decoded in an interpersonal register

which was still fundamentally gamic.

In private conversation with Ian Bogost, he stated that he had intended to produce a series of

articles about different game styles, and he and I have discussed relational and expressionist styles as being

also currently active in the field.

Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon: Les Presses du réel,

2002).

Douglas Wilson et al., B.U.T.T.O.N. (Brutally Unfair Tactics Totally OK Now), Xbox Live

Indie, PC (Copenhagen: Copenhagen Game Collective ApS, 2010).

In B.U.T.T.O.N., players race to interpret a simple, one-line command through

the use of a single button; the signs of play include the instruction printed on the screen,

the countenance and posture of other players (including their status: as friends, strangers,

etc.,) the button itself, the score, etc. (Figure 10) The nature of these mechanics make it

possible for players to play very unfairly—grabbing another’s controllers, distracting

them, physically preventing them from moving and otherwise promoting behaviors

which, for most games, would violate what Stephen Sniderman calls the “unwritten

rules” of gameplay

. B.U.T.T.O.N. is more dramatic than other “relational” games in its

foregrounding of the role of consensus in creating the play experience, but other games

share the location of the aesthetic within the relationship between the players through

joint attention on the signifying system of the game. Though any game which features

competition (Caillois’ games of agon) can be said to feature another player, in many

multiplayer games, other players are ludologically constrained to straightforward

procedures: for example, a first-person shooter like Call of Duty may have an extensive

multiplayer element to the game, but other players’ are understood primarily as

opponents, their relationship determined by the lusory

goals of play: often, the players

Sniderman, “Unwritten Rules.”

The “lusory attitude” is the stance by which a player accepts the goals of the game. If the player

does not assume a lusory attitude—that is, does not recognize and pursue the goals that the game has

valored—they aren’t playing the game, but using it in some other way (or playing with it, rather than

playing it.) For more on the lusory attitude, see Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia

(Calgary: Broadview Press, 2005).

only encounter each other as players, as anonymous opponents or allies. In games of a

relational style, the relationship between the players’ itself is an active contributory

element to the experience, and even to the meaning, of the game.

Figure 10.: B.U.T.T.O.N. Douglas Wilson and the Copenhagen Game Collective (2009)

In some ways, the distinction between these styles – one focused on the crafting

of an object that is meant to compel the attention of the player for thoughtful, considered

play, the other a design meant to create a basis for an experience understood in terms of

the relationships formed between players, recalls trends in recent art practice which

challenges a model by which the meaning of a work of art is seen as having been

deposited within the work

, to be unpacked by viewers with the appropriate education

Described as “the conventional, ‘banking’ style of art (to borrow a phrase from the educational

theorist Paulo Freire)—in which the artist deposits an expressive content into a physical object, to be

and literacy (or players with various levels of skill at both play and interpretation: the

difficulty of many proceduralist games demands player with both ludological and cultural

literacies.) Although it may seem that the meaning of play has been remanded to the

players in a way that takes that experience outside of the authority of the designer, the

constraints created by the designers--constraints encoded in rule systems, in direct

communication to the players, and in the affordances provided by the material system on

which the game is played—give us a basis for describing it also as an authored

experience

Bogost distinguished the games of the Dutch group Tale-of-Tales, such as

Graveyard, (Figure 11) and The Path (Figure 12), as not being well described as

proceduralist, although they are ambitious art-game works in their own right. In

Graveyard, the player controls an elderly woman, who slowly walks to the end of a path

of a cemetery. At the end of her walk, she sits down as a song about the death of one’s

loved ones plays. The Path is a retelling of the story of Little Red Riding Hood in a

gothic style, using somber music and dreamlike imagery to produce the effect of a

haunted, menacing environment. In contrast to the games described as proceduralist, we

can describe these games as participating in an expressionist style. Bogost observes that

withdrawn later by the viewer” . . . Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in

Modern Art (University of California Press, 2004), 10.

The relationship between authored constraint and player motivation will be explored more

deeply in a subsequent chapter.

the intensity of the experience of these games comes not from a reflection of the poetics

of the procedure, but from the visual and virtual-spatial power of chiaroscuro lighting

effects, solemn expectation, sound engineering, etc. As many commercial games could be

characterized as operating within an expressionist visual style, it might be called the

dominant style in the field of game production: games are marketed as (and development

budgets reveal an occupation with) meticulously rendered visual spaces meant to produce

mood, which imbues the activity of play with it significance. Rather than, as in the case

of Braid or Rod Humble’s Marriage, referring to the problematics of intimate

relationships through mechanics such as rewinding time, running to- or from- the love

object, etc., it is the iconography, the color pallets, the architecture of these virtual

spaces, coupled with diegetic, atmospheric and non-diegetic sounds which give these

games their rhetorical heft. This is not to say that interaction or mechanics play no role in

either games like The Path or commercial first-person shooters liked Doom 2. In the

former, the player must decide to disobey the game in order to win it; in the latter, the

game is ultimately experienced as successful based on its ability to provide a platform for

genre-determined activities (shooting, evading.) Yet in both cases the aesthetic success of

each game relies less on the player’s reflection of its mechanics, and more in the visual

and auditory experience of a richly-articulated and designed space.

Figure 11.: The Graveyard. Tale-of Tales, (2008)

Figure 12.: The Path. Tale-of-Tales. (2009)

Thus if (interactive) genre in games provides the conditions for the

comprehensibility of the signs of the system, style describes the criteria of design success

or failure and the conditions for interpreting the relationship between the game and the

world outside the game. Interactive genres create registers for interpreting the signs

experienced during play; the styles described (and we can conceive of many others,

including those we might describe as being in a kinesthetic style) promote certain

registers as aesthetically important, and thus, perhaps, as authorial.

Proceduralism and anti-proceduralism.

The differences between the proceduralist and relational approachs to design

emerged in a debate which emerged on the DIGRA electronic mailing list. Douglas

Wilson, creator (with the Copenhagen Game Collective) of B.U.T.T.O.N., along with

Miguel Sicart and T.L. Taylor, designed a PhD course at IT University Copenhagen

called Against procedurality, which critiqued models of interpretation (or design or

aesthetics – it was unclear at various times what the object of the critique was) which

opposed itself to a position which located all meaning within the procedures of the game

itself. The course was announced in the GAMESNETWORK mailing list for the Digital

Games Research Association, provoking a response from Ian Bogost, who was identified

as a member of a proceduralist tendency along with Chris Crawford, Michael Mateas,

Janet Murray and others. The position against which the course’s premise was designed

was one by which the rules and behavior of the game could secure its meaning

autonomous of the conditions of reception: at play were different claims about the

suitability of models of game authorship.

The debate aside, in many ways this is a complementary tension to that which

informed the divide between approaches to the study of games which focused on rules

and those which were occupied by representations (whether narratives, fictions or other

representational components.) In comparison to the earlier ludology/narratology debate,

this is a more sophisticated set of tactical misreadings: what are being played against each

other are readings that focus on the materiality of the artifact and interpretation and

strategies that focus on deployment. Just as prescriptive and descriptive positions became

clouded in the earlier debates, so a similar conflation developed as questions of style and

aesthetics were wed to those of analysis and interpretation. The claim by ludologists that

games needed to be understood as rule-systems (a position described as a formalist game-

essentialism by Janet Murray) leads to a privileging of abstract games as paradigmatic:

The paradigmatic game for this view of game studies is Tetris. According

to the formalist view Tetris can only be understood as a abstract pattern of

counters, rules, and player action, and the pattern means nothing beyond

itself, and every game can be understood as if it were equally abstract. A

critic who focuses on players’ reports of the game as a metaphorical

enactment of a life experience . . . is accused of a lack of professionalism,

because the only legitimate approach to games is a focus on their abstract

formalism. . . . Because the game essentialists want to privilege

formalistic approaches above all others, they are willing to dismiss many

salient aspects of the game experience, such as the feeling of immersion,

the enactment of violent or sexual events, the performative dimension of

game play, and even the personal experience of winning and losing. To be

a games scholar of this school you must have what American poet Wallace

Stevens called “a mind of winter”; you must be able to look at highly

emotive, narrative, semiotically charged objects and see only their abstract

game function. Indeed to the true believer in game essentialism, even the

voluptuous Lara Croft is perceived as merely another game counter, an

instrument for engaging with the rules.

To the extent to which these problems persist, we must go back to foundations

and reconsider the objects – and their unfolding in play – themselves. People do not

Murray, “The Last Word on Ludology v Narratology in Game Studies.”

purchase and play “formal systems”, nor do they consume raw “narrative” or even

databases of representations: they purchase or acquire videogames, and then consume

them in sessions of play, whether alone or in a group. They interact with “highly emotive,

narrative, semiotically charged objects.” The next section will examine one game title in

detail as a system of sign-objects.

CHAPTER 2. SIGNS IN PLAY: FATAL FRAME II AND MODAL DYNAMICS

In this chapter, I describe the role of modes in games in producing the registers by

which games are interpreted. After a discussion of the conceptual history of interactive

computing, providing the foundation of the player-software relationship, I analyze game-

play in one game, Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly.

This analysis consist of isolate the

distinct, identifiable modes of the game, and exploring their relationship with the

registers of player interpretation. There is also some discussion of the game’s uncanny

aesthetics and the construction of the game as a member of the survival-horror game

genre, as aspects of the game which emerge from the player’s encounter with its modes.

Modes: aggregations of signs

In the previous chapter, I used the term register to describe the contexts of

interpretation used by a player to interpret the signs they perceive while interacting with a

game. Complementing them are modes, which are created by the game system as

aggregations of the material signs that are inscribed in them. The relationship between

these two concepts was prefigured concurrently in the pioneering work of Douglas

Engelbart in his initial conception of interactive computing, and in the development of

computer games in the 1950s and 1960s.

Tecmo Ltd, Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly, Sony Playstation 2 (Tokyo: Tecmo, Limited,

2003).

Videogame play is a form of interactive computing: it depends on a relationship

between users and computers that is more than one in which computers are simply

machines which produce calculations. The interactive computing model was the product

of a particular line of speculation about the possible configuration of computer systems,

one which was given its most exhaustive conceptual grounding by Douglas Engelbart.

Drawing from his work as a RADAR operator in the US Navy and his reading of

Vannevar Bush’s essay, “As we may think,” in which Bush described the Memex, a

cross-indexed system of annotation and linked references

, Engelbart conceived of the

human-computer relationship as a system of intellectual augmentation which transferred

certain cognitive and symbolic functions to the computer

, producing a hybrid system he

described as the H-LAM/T system (Human using Language, Artifacts, and Methodology,

in which he is Trained)

. There are two stage-components in the development of his

system that have implications for our model of the reception of computer games (figure

1). The first is the division of cognitive labor, in which high-level conceptual work such

as organization, procedures, customs, and methods, managed by skills and knowledge

Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic, July 1945,

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/3881/.

Douglas C. Engelbart, “A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man’s Intellect,”

Computer-supported Cooperative Work: a Book of Readings (1988): 35–66.

Barnes, “Douglas Carl Engelbart: Developing the Underlying Concepts for Contemporary

Computing.”

secured by training (which could be understood as including enculturation for the

relevant symbolic practices involved) are activities of the human, while mediation,

portrayal, travel, view, manipulation, retrieval, computation and communication are the

activities of the tool-system. While Engelbart recognized the artefactual nature of

intellectual work (the use of paper and pencils, systems of calculation, etc.) before the use

of computational technologies, he predicted that a move to new information technologies

would produce changes in organization and workflow, requiring retraining:

People develop a repertoire of subprocess capabilities or tools that they

select and adapt to execute higher order activities. For example, a

mechanic must know what functions his or her tools can perform and how

to use them. Similarly, the intellectual worker must know the capabilities

of his or her tools and understand the suitable methods, strategies, and

rules for making them work. When an intellectual worker writes a

document, the process of writing is used as a subprocess or tool for higher

order activities, such as organizing a committee, creating a report, or

preparing a legal brief. The shift from pencils and paper to digital tools,

such as word processing, changes information handling and the skills

required to use new technological artifacts. Thus, people would need to

learn how to work with these new tools.

Ibid., 18–19.

Figure 13.: The two parts of H-LAM/T, from Barnes (1997)

This re-ordering of symbolic (and thus semiotic) work to a tool-system produces

the second stage-component, as augmentation becomes the delegation of sign-processing

to the tool-system: a dual-domain system for managing and organizing signs, and

interactive computing is the real-time and iterative relationship between those two

domains (figure 14). The human system and the tool-system (computer) each produce a

model of the world based on their various channels of input: “energy” moves between

each of these systems and the world, modifying the models. This energy transfer

includes the human-computer interface, an exchange of information based on mutual

models of the conceptual/systemic model of the other (that is, the human has a model. In

the case of the human, the model is a conceptual one, a tentative understanding (or

abduction) of the system-state of the computer; in the authored tool-system, the model is

expressed as the input stream registered by the system and its interpretation in the

conditions of the program. In simpler terms, interactive computing produces two

complementary and interdependent systems of semiosis

Figure 14.: "A diagram representing the two active domains within the H-LAM/T system."

I would not call the relationship between user and computer dialogical, in that I don’t think the

computer can yet be said to constitute a subject. At times, however, it can produce quasi-subjects: entities

which can represent the user within a dynamic system of representation, that representation itself being an

object of user activity. The depth and range of the representation within the computational entity will rely

both on programmatic complexity and the granularity of sensors and input devices.

Barnes, “Douglas Carl Engelbart: Developing the Underlying Concepts for Contemporary

Computing,” 19.

Computer-based gaming developed in tandem with interactive computing.

Engelbart’s essay was published the year after the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) at

the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released Space War, the program for the PDP-

1 computer widely (if inaccurately) cited as the “first video game.” The goals of the

TMRC were not, initially, to create a computer-controlled opponent to a player, but to

create a fictional play-space to allow players to compete with each other, in a game

setting inspired by the developers’ fondness for the space-opera pulp novels of E.E.

“Doc” Smith. Computer-based opponents had already been developed to play turn-based

games such as tic-tac-toe (the 1952 game “OXO”, written by Alexander Douglas for the

EDSAC computer) and chess (Leonard Torres y Quevedo’s “El Ajedricista,” a

clockwork-calculating automaton first demonstrated in 1915, which played rook-and-

king end-games) but these kind of interactivity did not involve the feedback-loop using

collaborative human-machine cognition described by Engelbart. While the TMRC’s

Space War was always a two-player, Computer Space (1971), an arcade adaptation of the

game designed by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney and manufactured by Nutting

Associates, offered a computer-based opponent. The opponent—actually a pair of enemy

craft—would target the player.

The distinction between a simple exchange of input and output (that is, the

computer as calculator, in which data is fed to a computer, and the computer left alone

until the calculations are completed) and interaction as a relation between two signifying

systems (the user and the computer) may have a gray area: at times, it may simply be a

matter of speed. However, computation as calculation, the mode of computing which

precedes interactive computing, doesn’t produce the kind of human attention in which a

user attends to the output channels of the system. In “true” interactive computing, the

computer itself is an interlocutor. By no means is this the only model for either games or

digital mediation in general: the popularity of social platforms such as Facebook may be

seen as closer to the design goals of the TMRC, in which the system is foremost

understood as a channel of communication between participants.

We will see, later, that

even participatory models of computer-supported activity derive from interactive ones.

Modes as configurations

As a complement to the use of the term “register” to describe the provisional,

conceptual contexts for decoding signs produced by the player, the term “mode”

describes a software-based configuration of signs (and affordances for player activity)

active in the game. This use of the term should be distinguished from others.

Conventionally, the term "mode" when used to describe a game designates

variations in the style and structure of the game system as a whole: e.g., "mulitplayer

mode", "capture the flag mode", "cooperative mode", etc. The game Quake III there are

four basic game modes, which in strict terms

are really four different games: “Free for

My next chapter will discuss the question of games which foreground sociality over player-to-

system interactivity.

See Jesper Juul, “The Game, the Player and the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness,” in

Level Up: Digital Games Research Conference Proceedings (presented at the DiGRA 2003, Utrecht:

Utrecht University, 2003), 30–45. Juul describes the characteristics of a game in a “classic” game model.

All” (FFA) (also called classic deathmatch), where each player competes against the rest

for the highest score; “Team Deathmatch” (TDM), in which (usually) two teams of four

compete for the highest team frag (kill) total; Tournament (1v1), a deathmatch between

two players, usually ending after a set time; and Capture the Flag (CTF) a team-based,

played on symmetrical maps where teams have to recover the enemy flag from the

opponents' base while retaining their own. These kind of modes as variations are a super-

set of the notion of modes I use here.

“Modes” are also a term used broadly in human-computer interface to describe

changes in the status of the computing system which alter the nature of user input: an

example is the Caps Lock key, which sets the keyboard in a mode to transmit different

character codes to the computer (usually producing, in the interface, the upper-case

version of the character, although this depends on the software environment at the

moment: keyboard keys can be used to navigate 3D spaces, to launch macros, or in any

way configured by the programmer). The idea of “mode” from conventional game

discourse shares with the HCI use of the term its relationship to the idea of configuration,

which creates conditions of significance for the user’s input. By including within the

sense of the game mode the various configurations within the playing of a single game, I

bring the game-centered term closer to that from HCI.

Each variation of Quake III—each mode—must be understood as a distinct game, with different conditions

for winning, different constraints and affordances, etc.

Mode is also sometimes used as a synonym for “modality,” the sensory channel

by which a human (or other sensing system) apprehends its environment. We do not

intend this sense of the term. Many of the modes I describe in the game Fatal Frame II

are identifiable by the player within the visual modality (that is, the computer

communicates the activation of a given mode by drawing the appropriate signs on the

visual display)—and, conversely, auditory and haptic content can be deployed to

constitute a mode. The integration of multiple modalities to produce meaning-bearing

artifacts has already been called a characteristic of digital production:

To rehearse the obvious, it is possible now to easily integrate words with

images, sound, music, and movement to create digital artifacts that do not

necessarily privilege linguistic forms of signification but rather that draw

on a variety of modalities—speech, writing, image, gesture, and sound—

to create different forms of meaning.

Though we might challenge the implication that de-privileging linguistic forms

was difficult or uncommon before the development of digital media, we can agree that

working with software makes the integration of modalities much easier. Contemporary

software methods produce programs which contain modalities as effects, as possible

channels of output for entities that are unified within the system itself. An “object” as

apprehended by the player—say, a representation of an animal that the player’s avatar

encounters—is an entity which has been instantiated from a discreet segment of code.

Within the code of the system, the entity also acts as a discreet object (usually an object-

Glynda A. Hull and Mark Evan Nelson, “Locating the Semiotic Power of Multimodality,”

Written Communication 22, no. 2 (April 1, 2005): 224 –261, doi:10.1177/0741088304274170.

of-objects, one which produces a series of sub-objects within itself). The visual output to

the screen, the audio files containing the sounds associated with the entity, its position, its

state within the game (as something wounded, or valuable, or dangerous) are a network

of values and child-objects and outputs coordinated by the computer program, which

binds different output channels together to create what is perceptual a unified, multi-

modal entity. The “modes” of the game-as-software systems are not the same as the

modalities described by some media theorists

as constituting “multi-modal discourse.”

Gunther R. Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen, Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of

Contemporary Communication (Arnold, 2001); Hull and Nelson, “Locating the Semiotic Power of

Multimodality”; Kay L. O’Halloran et al., “Digital Semiotics” (presented at the 10th IASS-AIS World

Congress of Semiotics, A Coruña, 2009).

A history of a fantasy of multimodality could begin with Wagner’s conception of the

Gesamtkunstwerk, the synthetic and totalizing work of art which produced experiences of the sublime by

overwhelming the senses and the imagination, an idea which appears in much work in especially the late

and post-Romantic period in theater, music and architecture. In cinema, on the other hand, the introduction

of audio was treated by many as a dilution or corruption of the form, rather than its completion: e,g.: "A

film in which the speech and sound effects are perfectly synchronized and coincide with their visual images

on the screen is absolutely contrary to the aim of the cinema. It is a degenerate and misguided attempt to

destroy the real use of the film and cannot be accepted as coming within the true boundaries of the cinema;

"from Paul Rotha, The Film Till Now: A Survey of the Cinema (London: J. Cape, 1930), 308. That a

multimodal cinema represents a decadence is an idea that would re-appear in French postwar cinema,

beginning with Isidore Isou’s call for a discrepant cinema, “where images and sound are servered from

each other.” (McKenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the

Another use of the term “mode” comes from rhetoric (and adapted into literary

theory: e.g,, Northrop Frye’s theory of modes in his Anatomy of Criticism). Without

entering into a meta-discursive history of the idea of the mode, the usage in theory of

rhetoric does resemble ours, being conventional systems which establishes coherence

within a motivation: the expository mode, for example, frames the utterances within it in

the motivation of creating a propositional belief or knowledge in the understanding of an

auditor (generally figured as not contesting the authority of the utterer to do so); a mode

of argument may use similar utterances, but frame then within a different power dynamic

in which the utterer seeks to persuade the auditor, overcome objections, and perhaps

produce a different behavior. This sense of mode (as well as Frye’s) resembles my idea of

mode as being a configuration of a system for interaction in that it creates an enframing

syntax for interpretation. Our sense of the term, however, foregrounds the machinic

elements of the systems which generate the conditions of interpretation.

Registers are conceptual, though they are assembled from the elements on the

screen at any given instant at play. These elements include the representations which

indicate the momentary affordances of the mode (to heal, to shoot, to navigate, to detect

the presence of foes, etc.) The nature of videogames as software-based artifacts makes

many of its semiotic elements relatively stable (vis-a-vis film or video) over the course of

Situationist International (London: Verso, 2011), 14.) Such a history would show the ebbs and flows of the

idea, through virtual reality and the current activity in transmedia storytelling, but the modal logics I’m

describing aren’t exactly part of that history.

engagement: when an event occurs (shooting something, jumping) or a graphical element

is drawn on the screen (a health bar, a target, etc) it is usually produced from a database

of digital assets that are used repeatedly. This makes it easy to identify the presence of a

game mode by analyzing the digitized footage of gameplay with image analysis tools as

described earlier. Any given mode may afford certain registers more than others: for

example, in navigational (field) mode, present in most games in which three-dimensional

avatars move through space, the dominant registers are those rely on spatial and

kinesthetic cognition: surfaces, orientations, the apparent ability of a door to open or a

surface to be climbed, etc. The textures of these spaces, denoting aged wood, or moss-

covered rocks, or hidden nooks, are also available to the player, signifying diegetic

information relevant to the fictions of the game. Reducing the navigational mode to a

simple, straightforward operational register would be incorrect. The system could be

continuously operating within a navigational mode, yet the player’s mental activity move

between a range of registers as they understand the activity as the movement of a

fictional character’s movement through a diegetic space, then attending to the collection

of objects deigned useful for the game tasks (ammunition, health), then identifying

features which indicate a possible threat and adopting a tactical stance to respond to it.

Yet some operational registers will be more available than others.

Fatal Frame II

Genre and style

broadly predict the ordering of registers of interpretation: in the

end, however, only a close playing of each game will reveal the conditions by which it

can be decoded and the signifying techniques used to produce its various effects. The

rest of this chapter focuses on a single title: Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly.

The game is usually assigned to the survival horror genre

. As a genre category,

“survival horror” is unusual: while most of the other genres, such as “first person

shooters,” “platformers,” “role-playing games” identify interactive regimens, “survival

horror” connotes specific themes, moods and setting as well as mechanics, control

“Style” in games can refer to conventional visual aesthetics styles, such as cartoon aesthetics,

gothic horror, gritty “realist” aesthetics, etc. However, I intend a more formal use of the term, taken from

Bogost, “The Proceduralist Style.” Casting Bogost in terms of my model, style in game design includes the

proceduralist style, per Bogost, it is in the register of the game mechanics, in the operations of the elements

as functional units, that games like The Marriage produce a poetics which reflects on interpersonal

dynamics; in games such as The Path, by Tale-of-Tales, the rendering of scenes and characters, the

transitions between scenes, and the atmospheric music (evocative of horror games) secures the allusion to

its referents—I would describe this as an expressionist style, even when the visual aesthetics do not

necessarily correspond to art-historical expressionisms.

See the public game catalog at “Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly,” MobyGames, n.d.,

http://www.mobygames.com/game/ps2/fatal-frame-ii-crimson-butterfly. MobyGames lists the game, in its

rather complex genre-tagging system, as being in the Action genre, and as a Puzzle-solving and Survival

horror game.

schema and the relationship between the player, computer-controlled opponents, spatial

features, and even camera. Survival horror games deploy a range of interactive dynamics:

in some, such as the games in the Resident Evil, the player is usually equipped with

weaponry, and in many ways the game is similar to first-person shooter games, albeit

with narrative and settings similar to those of horror cinema. Other games, such as

Eternal Darkness, use game mechanics and operations which are attuned more closely to

the themes and settings of supernatural horror: in Eternal Darkness, the player’s sanity

deteriorates over the course of exposure to the chthonic forces arrayed against them,

leading to distortions in the visual image and auditory track.

According to MobyGames, an online, public database of videogames which lists

credits, versions and platforms of videogames:

Survival horror is typically a 3rd person perspective game in which the

player has to survive an onslaught of undead, human, animal or monster

like opponents, usually in claustrophobic environments. Horror film

elements are used liberally. The player is typically armed, but not nearly

as well-armed or armoured as a player in a first person shooter game. The

player's goal is generally to escape from an isolated house or town that is

inhabited mostly by zombies and monsters through shooting and puzzle

solving.

The game is part of a franchise of games on various platforms, which began with

the 2001 release of Project Zero on the PlayStation 2. Keisuke Kikuchi conceived of the

game, as an employee of Tecmo, Ltd., which developed and published it. Kikuchi was

Moby Games contributors, “Genre Definitions,” MobyGames, accessed August 24, 2011,

http://www.mobygames.com/glossary/genres/.

the design lead for the first three games, and was the co-lead for the fourth. The game has

been well received critically, and has become a staple in academic videogame criticism

(along with the Silent Hill and Resident Evil series

100

) even if in some ways it is

idiosyncratic as a member of the survival horror genre. The game Fatal Frame II sold

well, reaching 9

place on the sales charts in Japan after its release in November of

2003.

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Eighty-five people/entities are credited in the production of the Japanese version

of the game, with an additional 29 credited for the creation of the US version. Of the

original eighty-five, 9 individuals in 8 roles are given credit in shorter lists and entries:

the director, the two product managers, the program manager, the chief programmer, the

visual art designer, the chief stage designer, and the chief movie creator.

Videogame content franchises take several forms and can be structured according

to different logics. Some, like Pokémon, were conceived from early in their production as

trans-media intellectual properties, with characters, themes, settings, and narratives which

are distributed as movies, television shows, toys, card games, comics and videogames in

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Laurie N Taylor, “Video Games: Perspective, Point-of-view, and Immersion” (University of

Florida, 2002), http://www.laurientaylor.org/research/taylor_l.pdf; Bernard Perron, “Sign of a Threat: The

Effects of Warning Systems in Survival Horror Games,” in Proceedings of the Fourth International

Conference on Computational Semiotics for Games and New Media (COSIGN 2004) (Split, Croatia:

University of Split, 2004), http://www.cosignconference.org/downloads/papers/perron_cosign_2004.pdf.

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Enterbrain, Inc., “集計期間:2003 年 11 月 24 日～2003 年 11 月 30 日,”

ファミ通

.com,

December 10, 2003,

http://www.famitsu.com/game/rank/top30/2003/12/10/120,1071046099,19049,0,0.html.

what the Japanese culture industry describes as a media mix strategy.

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Others, such as

the Final Fantasy series of role-playing games created by Square, Ltd (now Square-Enix,

Inc.) and the Quake games developed by iD software, are series of games which share a

handful of tropes, iconic elements, or gameplay elements to create a relationship between

its individual titles on various media and platforms, without sharing a narrative or a

fictional world. Square-Enix describes their strategy for creating franchises as the

production of polymorphic content,

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the design of character and world concepts

independent of the multiple media forms, such as film, novels, games, merchandise or

comics, in which they might be expressed and marketed. Others, such as Microsoft’s

Halo series, and the Mass Effect series created by Bioware, are original game-based

narrative series: in both these cases, the publishers have decided to increase the revenue

provided by the franchise by producing feature-length films, but these films are

understood as remediations of the game-original content, whereas the Square-Enix

strategy does not privilege any one form for presenting the characters and worlds of the

franchise over others. Likewise, although Pokemon was originally a handheld game title

published in 1996, much of its reach as a media franchise has been through its television

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“The media mix is a heterogeneous but integrated web of reference manifesting in multiple

material forms.” Mimi Ito, “Technologies of the Chilhood Imagination: Media Mixes, Hypersociality, and

Recombinant Cultural Form” (2007): 32, http://documents.irevues.inist.fr/handle/2042/23561.

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Ichiro Otobe, “Innovations in the Video Game Industry” (presented at the Autumn 2007-2008

Seminar/Public Lecture Series Topics in International Technology Management Innovation Systems and

Processes in Asia, Palo Alto, CA, 2007), 16, http://asia.stanford.edu/events/fall07/slides/otobe.pdf.

shows, collectible card games, and film, and even its fans may not know which was the

original or “canonical” source of settings and characters.

The Fatal Frame series maintains its coherence as a franchise both in its diegesis

and in its game mechanics. While some ancillary merchandise has been licensed by

Tecmo, the franchise is “video game native,” with no announced plans to release produce

films, novels or the like. The game titles are a series of loosely inter-related returns-of-

the-repressed, atavistic hauntings, possessions and assorted traumatic memories and re-

experiences involving a constellation of characters with various types of relationships to

each other. The core game mechanical component has remained stable throughout the

series: the use of the camera obscura, a device strongly reminiscent of the paranormal

technologies of the Victorian era, with the power to record and dispel ghosts. There are

other spectral technologies in the games, including the spirit radio, which can overhear

the murmurs and exclamations of the dead. The auditory channel in the game does not,

however, have the same rich ludic-diegetic function as the visual one. When the auditory

does have a ludic function, it is generally extra-diegetic. A distinctive musical phrase

indicates a nearby opponent; another suggests that the player is on the correct path to

solve a puzzle. There are the usual sound effects which confirm that an interface element

has been selected, familiar to users of graphical computing environments.

The dominant modes of Fatal Frame II

In Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly, the camera obscura replaces traditional

forms of weaponry used in most other horror games, and is at the center of the most

important player activity: the simultaneous documentation and exorcism of spirits. The

use of the camera takes up much of the playing time (in addition to the typical navigation

of 3-dimensional spaces). The moment in the game when the protagonists discover the

camera is crucial both in the development of the narrative—the camera reveals the

existence of the ghosts which populate the village—and the game’s activity. The camera

obscura is visually foregrounded at the moments of peak excitation, when the player is in

greatest peril of failure, during that activity which makes the most demands on the

immediate attention of the player throughout the course of the game. This action is

different from the practice of navigating the space of the game. A trade-off is made

between freedom of motion and freedom of view: when the player is in a navigational

mode, the (game) camera is completely controlled by the game system; when the player

is in camera obscura mode, the player has full freedom of rotation for a 360º view, but is

unable to move forward or backward. The player must choose between the freedom to

see and the freedom to move. The visual apprehension of the game, even in its most

diegetic moments and modes, is subject to the transition between these modes. In other

words, neither of these modes is simply either fictive or operational, ludological or

narrative. They always put multiple registers into play.

The modes of any game are revealed in the process of playing, although they are

often transparent to a player, particularly when those modes are conventions of a well-

understood genre of play. I have identified the following modes in the game Fatal Frame

II (and an illustrative montage of representative frames accompanies each description).

Providing a kind of limit on the spectrum of interactivity, the non-interactive

mode (Figure 15) is a mode in which the player has almost no ability to interact with the

system (except on a meta-game level, by pausing the game or turning it off) while the

system plays back pre-recorded content. Sequences of play in this mode are usually

called cutscenes, a term which suggests that they are seen as interrupting the expected

dialogue between player and system, although as Rune Klevjer observes:

A cutscene does not cut off gameplay. It is an integral part of the

configurative experience. Even if the player is denied any active input, this

does not mean that the ergodic experience and effort is paused. A cutscene

is never truly ‘cinematic’, no matter how poorly implemented it may be. In

any case, it can not avoid affecting the rhythm of the gameplay. For

example, in the arcade-inspired James Bond Under Fire . . . the numerous

but short cutscenes provide moments of release from the intense action.

They create a characteristic in which the regular interruption/release is

always expected. As a play you quickly learn the code, constantly being

thrown rapidly in and out of bodily ergodic effort.

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Figure 15.: Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly. Montage of frames in non-interactive mode.

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Rune Klevjer, “In Defense of Cutscenes,” in Computer Games and Digital Cultures 2002

Conference Proceedings (presented at the CGDC 2002, Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2002), 195.

During a cut-scene, a player may even put down the controller and adopt the

posture of a film-viewer: the player may stare at the screen, instead of remaining in what

has been described by Chris Chesher as the “glaze”

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of player-vision which dominates

those modes in which the player may be required to respond. Yet while the player is not

able to produce input during a cutscene, it would be incorrect to say that the only register

which comes into play is a fictive one. The player may be called to attend to various

narratological, aesthetic, or game-diegetic elements (e.g., clues for the solution of

puzzles) while looking at a cutscene: in Chesher’s terms, the game is still a “glaze text”

even if its audiovisual regime temporarily resembles that a “gaze” text (i.e., cinema).

The non-interactive mode in many games seems to use modified conventions of

cinema, although generally they are animated sequences. Fatal Frame II uses “full motion

video” (FMV) along with animated models for its cutscenes. FMVs are high-resolution

video recordings of animation or, occasionally, film (Fatal Frame II uses animation). The

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Chris Chesher, “Neither Gaze nor Glance, but Glaze: Relating to Console Game Screens,”

SCAN: Journal of Media Arts Culture 1, no. 1 (January 2004): article 5. “The audiovisual regime of the

glaze is characterised by at least three distinctive characteristics: spectacular immersion, interactive agency

and mimetic simulation.” Chesher describes the glance as the dominant audiovisual regime of television,

and the gaze as that of cinema. However, since those three characteristics are not always at work during a

videogame—the cutscene, by definition, removes interactive agency—either of the other two regimes

might come into play. Insofar as a game conventionally holds an uninterrupted monopoly on player

attention, is not a broadcast media, and has generally non-episodic content, I am inclined to think of gaze,

rather than glance, as the dominant visual regime of the cutscene.

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very high resolution of the image, the naturalism in the movements, and often a

letterboxing effect (the reduction of the viewing space on the top and bottom of the

image, as if a widescreen film were being projected) indicate a FMV in a cutscene. A

cutscene can also use an animated model created by the assets of the game. In Fatal

Frame II, three sensory channels are used during these sequences: visual, auditory and

force-feedback vibrations sent to the game controller.

The cutscene has played a distinctive role in game studies as the point around

which the so-called “ludology versus narratology” argument seemed to break. Klevjer’s

article is a response to a radical ludological position, exemplified by Markku Eskelinen’s

claim (quoted by Klevjer) that stories in games “are just uninteresting ornaments or gift-

wrappings to games, and laying any emphasis on studying these kind of marketing tools

is just waste of time and energy.”

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Klevjer uses the cutscene as the point to respond to

this extreme position:

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Markku Eskelinen, “The Gaming Situation,” Game Studies: The International Journal of

Computer Game Research 1, no. 1 (July 2001), http://gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/. The radical

ludologist position relies on a categorical maneuver, foregrounding the continuity between digital games

and non-digital games while minimizing the mediational aspect of digital technologies, seeing them

generally as supplementary to the translation of rules into programs and as a digitization of the sorts of

assets used in non-digital games, such as player pieces, boards, settings, etc. Klevjer also criticizes

Eskelinen for ignoring the discursive modes which do not focus on mechanics, and for uncritically applying

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Still, a good cutscene has other qualities than just being ‘rhythmically’

well-implemented. Notably, it may work as surveillance or planning tool,

providing the player with helpful or crucial visual information. Another

rather well-established convention is the ‘gameplay catapult’, building up

suspense and creating a situation, only to drop the player directly into fast

and demanding action-gameplay.

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The cutscene in Fatal Frame II does both of the kinds of work described above by

Klevjer, providing important clues and cues for the player (thus working in an operational

participating in the production of suspense and urgency which is discharged in more

demanding forms of play. In the case of this title, there is no letterboxing. The player will

recognize that they have entered into a cut-scene by the absence of other display

elements: the compass, mini-map, and various gauges super-imposed on the field of view

will disappear. The graphical quality of the image improves dramatically, with camera

and lighting effects. Usually, the camera’s angle, movement and level of zoom will all

change from those used in other game modes; in these senses and in the style of editing,

the visual scene in these sequences could be called “cinematic.” However, as even here a

player may be scanning the visual field for operationally useful elements, left in the

visual scene by the designers in order to support gameplay, it would still be incorrect to

reduce the visual codes of these sequences to those of cinema.

“concepts and categories developed to investigate non-computerized play.” (Klevjer, “In Defense of

Cutscenes,” 192.)

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Klevjer, “In Defense of Cutscenes,” 195.

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Two other modes dominate most of the game: they, along with one other, are

identified and described as modes

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within the printed documentation included with the

game disk (Figure 16). All games have one or more control schemes: the mappings

between input devices of some sort and systematic representations of player activity

within the game’s mechanics. While modes are not identical to their control schemes,

they are closely linked to them: each mode configures the player’s activity in some way,

providing a grammar (specifically, a repertoire of verbs) of playing activity within the

fictional space of the game. The non-interactive mode described above offers a minimal

control scheme, allowing the player only to turn off the system. In other modes, schemes

can be complex, and their mastery by the player becomes pivotal to the traversal of the

game. The operation of the mode and schema produce to functional ontology for the

game as an interactive system, understood not only in a conceptual sense, but also in the

practical sense. The player affirms the ontology of the game every time she/he

instinctively presses a button to produce an expected effect.

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Cinematic mode is not defined as a mode in the game manual, because it is a kind of “zero

case” in which the user has no role outside of spectatorship: it requires no documentation.

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Figure 16.: Control schema for the dominant gameplay modes of Fatal Frame II, from the instruction

manual.

The first of the three explicitly named dominant game modes is field mode

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(Figure 17), in which the player's interaction with the controller moves the avatar through

the rendered three-dimensional space of the game, constitutes the majority of most

players' experience of the game. The depth and nature of player attention demanded in

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In a previous essay, I referred to this as navigational mode, but am here reverting to the name

of the mode used in the game’s instruction manual for both this mode and viewfinder mode.

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this mode varies from inattention (the player may not be attending at all) to impatient

movement through well-learned access spaces, to high tension and close scrutiny to

details in the environment. It may not be far off to describe this mode as the canvas for

the others; the default spatio-temporal posture in the Lost Village. In Fatal Frame II, this

is a timeless mode; one generally invites danger only if one moves. There is not a direct

link between diegetic time and play time. Entering this mode and doing nothing would

set the conditions for what Alex Galloway calls an ambient machine diegetic act, in

which the computer sustains the fiction of the world in a state of “charged

expectation

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,” awaiting player activity.

When the player triggers certain conditions, the camera’s position shifts in space,

often changing the relative orientation of the avatar to the camera. The avatar acts more

like cursor, following the absolute position of the joystick controller, than as a remote

object in a virtual space. Note the long, blue health bar and the smaller filament in the

lower-right-hand corner. The filament indicates the proximity of a dangerous (red glow)

or harmless (blue glow) spirit

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Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, 11.

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Figure 17.: Montage of frames in field (navigational) mode..

Within this mode, it is possible to come across elements which indicate

actionability—for example, an avatar might approach a region of the screen, and a visual

object appear, illuminated in a way presenting a high contrast to its background to both

foreground it as prominent and as conceptual alienable from the background in which it

appears. These includes items which can be added to one of several inventories

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objects

which allow the player to save her/his progress, objects which will move the player to a

new space (doors, staircases), signs of threats, etc. The behavior of the game in

reproducing navigable space is one common in many horror-based games designed

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While each inventory provides a mode of its own, adding something to an inventory does not

necessarily bring the new mode into presence. In Fatal Frame II, a “modal” window briefly appears

indicating what item has been added to the inventory, which can be dismissed by pressing any button,

returning the player to the field mode.

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during the late 1990s and early 2000s: the camera angle is fixed and the player’s

movement is bounded within a restricted area, unless the player interacts with an object

that allows egress (doors, trails, stairs, etc.) Field mode is not an open 3D environment,

but a succession of closed ones

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. The game is thus in the fixed version of a third-person

perspective in this mode, one by which the spatial deixis of the avatar is orthogonal to the

orientation of the player’s gaze. (Alternative third-person views are a tracking

perspective, by which the view of the player is at a constant distance from the avatar—

usually behind its head or over its shoulder—and a constraint-based view, which

calculates optimal placement for the camera, based on a range of parameters). The

control scheme for the field mode in Fatal Frame II is absolute with respect to space:

moving the joystick controller forward will move the avatar to the rear of the scene;

moving it back will move it to the foreground, etc. The orientation of the avatar is not

mapped onto the control scheme. Space shifts are generally very fast when the player is

moving in one direction, but slower when the player is looking within a scene for items

or important features.

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A version of the game produced for Microsoft’s Xbox platform, called the “director’s cut,” was

released in 2004, and included an “FPS mode,” allowing the player to experience the game in first-person

view, and thus control the camera, for the entire game. The gap between field and viewfinder modes in this

version is accordingly reduced to a swap-out of “HUD” (heads-up display) superimposed graphical

elements.

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Fatal Frame 2 deploys an architectural notion of the division of space into

navigable regions. The player/avatar perceives and works within spaces that become

operational units in themselves; if the player realizes that she/he forgot an important item

in a previous area, the navigation back to that area is better understood as a re-tracing a

sequence of action elements, rather than unrestricted movement on a two-dimensional

plane. This spatial configuration resembles that of adventure games from the late 1980s

and 1990s, such as Grim Fandango

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, at least in terms of the player’s conceptual

construction of the space of navigation.

Earlier in this chapter, I describe the camera obscura as a franchise-signature

element: the entire Fatal Frame series incorporates this camera. In a flashback cutscene

sequence that is triggered when the player finds the camera, the player learns from its

inventor that it “takes pictures of impossible things.” The camera is discovered in the first

chapter

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of the game, in the first of a series of buildings that the player explores. Once

the player has the camera in their inventory, a short sequence (in interactive mode) plays,

revealing the (fictional) history of the camera, followed by a series of windows

describing its use:

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Tim Schafer and LucasArts, Grim Fandango, version 1.01, Microsoft Windows (San

Francisco: LucasArts, 1998).

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The game is divided into 9 chapters, with an unlockable 10

chapter (described a “non-

canonical” in that it contradicts the events described in the sequel to the game) if one plays the game in

“Hard” or “Nightmare” levels of difficulty.

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The Camera Obscura is a special camera that allows you to exorcise spirits

by taking photographs of them. When you face a direction where a spirit

is, the filament at the bottom-right of the screen

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, or top of the

viewfinder

116

, will glow.

Once you've located a spirit, raise the camera with the [circle] button

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When you've found a spirit, centre it in the viewfinder screen and press the

shutter button (the Right trigger) to take a photo of it.

(Default

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settings.)

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After this sequence, viewfinder mode (Figure 18) is available whenever the

player has the camera (in an unavoidable event later in the game, the player loses the

camera and must re-locate it: viewfinder mode is unavailable until the camera is found),

and is accessed in field mode when the player presses the circle button: pressing the

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From field mode, the filament is in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.

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If the player is already in viewfinder mode, the filament will be at the top of the screen: it is a

bridge-element between the field and viewfinder modes.

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This assumes that the player is in the field mode.

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The mappings between controller buttons and player-driven events can be changed by the

player. The customizability of input is an important feature in genres which offer competitive play and

demand deep mastery of complex mechanics, such as many first-person shooters and real-time strategy

games. It is a less important feature for single-player action-adventure survival-horror games like Fatal

Frame II, particularly on platforms with well-established control scheme conventions, governed by license

agreements between developers and platform vendors.

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Tecmo Ltd, Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly. Chapter 1: this text appears as an intertitles

after a full-motion video (FMV) flashback cutscene sequence, depicting the folklorist who left behind notes

and fragments discovering the power of the camera.

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circle button while in viewfinder mode returns the player to field mode.

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The avatar's

point-of-view is synchronized with the player's point of view, as the fictive camera

becomes the player's camera-eye. Navigational motion is arrested; the player has, instead,

complete 360-degree freedom of motion in the round.

Figure 18.: Montage of a sequence in viewfinder mode.

The stable visual elements that identify this mode are the translucent focus ring

which is superimposed over the visual plane and the icons on the top row of the image,

indicating the type of film currently loaded in the camera, the number of frames of film

left, and other indicators of the operational state of the camera in the context of the scene.

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This is the convention in the North American and European releases of the game. Button

mappings are not arbitrary with the Playstation platforms: there is an order of precedence,

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The display reproduces the effect of looking through an antique camera, with a filament

above a viewfinder window resembling that of an actual bulb, although the actual visual

elements are still based on digital-era graphic conventions and affordances: the use of

sepia tones does not hide the anachronistic elements (e.g., graded bars to indicate

diminishing resources; textual information about the type and quantity of film), and the

contemporary literacies of game-players are too valuable to sacrifice to any effort to

efface those anachronisms.

There are two dominant variations of viewfinder mode: the more minimal

“searching” view, in which the player is scanning a scene for a sign of a spectral entity,

and an “exorcism” or combat view, in which the player has identified a spectral entity

and is trying to record it and exorcise it. Often, one begins searching when, in navigation

mode, the filament in the lower-right hand glows blue or red: the player will then enter

into viewfinder mode to locate the ghost. When no ghost is within the viewfinder’s

window, the graphical elements remain minimal.

When the specter is not dangerous, the player is often challenged to try to capture

an elusive, fleeting figure; the play of the moment is one of timing, reflexes and good

guesswork. When the specter is a hostile one, the player must avoid harm, find an optimal

position to take a picture, equip the optimal enhancements and film. Film acts as

ammunition, a resource which must be managed: more powerful film-types are generally

best reserved for the more powerful opponents. (Film and camera configuration is

managed in another mode).

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Combat mode (Figure 19) distinguished by the inclusion of specific visual

indicators

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to the camera mode described above. The captured frame in the figure has

been annotated to highlight discreet signifying elements in the scene. The frame is from a

moment of combat, after the player has pressed the X button to discharge the camera (in

other games, this would be mechanically comparable to firing a weapon).

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Each of these elements could be located within Peirce’s systems for categorizing signs. The

health bar of the opponent consists of an iconic sinsign—the mapping of the color of the gauge to an

integer stored in the system: the “health” of the opponent. That integer is itself another sign mediating

between the computer system and the fiction of the world, in which it acts as a rhematic indexical sign,

being the health of this opponent. The entire gauge as such is an iconic legisign: the convention which

maps it onto the health status of the opponent is learned by the player as part of the production of genre

literacy.

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Figure 19.: Combat mode, with discreet signifiying elements highlighted. This frame is from an instant

during the process of combat in which one feature of viewfinder mode which is usually stable—the focus ring—

disappears briefly: immediately after a shot has discharged.

Element (a) is the “health bar” of the opponent: the spirit is near “death”

(exorcism, in terms of the game’s fiction). This element only appears in combat with an

aggressive ghost. This information is available only when the player has equipped the

“measure” function, as described below. “Health bars” are a metaphor nested in a

metaphor: they are regions of screen-space that are decoded one-dimensionally: a line,

although of course they are actually two-dimensional regions—elongated rectangles

which are often shaded to produce the effect of fluid meter, such as a barometer. The

health bar denotes a number, or more accurately a relationship between two numbers: one

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integer which represents the plenary health of the opponents, an undamaged state; the

other the condition of the opponent at any instant.

There are two conventions of depiction for health bars. In one, the length of the

region is constant, and the bar only indicates the ratio of the two numbers: a stronger

opponent with a higher health will be represented by a slower decrementing of the bar. In

the other, the region also indicates the absolute value of the health of opponents (and the

protagonist): those who are “stronger” (that is, the integer representing their maximum

health is relatively high) will have their health represented by a longer region. Fatal

Frame 2 follows the latter convention.

When the battle begins—that is, when the integer denoting its current health is

identical to that of its fullest possible health—the entire region will be drawn in a rich

saturated color with high brightness relative to the background (in the case of element a,

a crimson tone. The player’s health bar, element h, is blue). As the current health

decreases, the area which is brighter will shrink, being replaced with a muted, more

neutral tone: a negative space indicating the growing gap between the entity at its most

vital and the entity’s current status. Visually, the fluid meter metaphor is an analog

representamen of a digital object (the integer denoting “health”

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Following the chain of signification further, the sign of the health bar, within an interpretant of

the broad experience with meters like thermometers and catheters and the behaviors of fluids in general,

activates a fullness/emptiness metaphor directing it to the relationship between the integers standing for full

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“Health” is part of the conceptual model the player has of an aspect of the game:

it has its own history, with origins in Kriegspeil, a war simulation in the early 19

century in game form used for the training of Prussian officers. The use of a single value

to represent the well-being of an entity originally was meant as an abstraction not of its

vitality, but of its fighting capacity, and this connotation does persist in many games,

which often are ambiguous in characterizing defeat as death, or as mere incapacitation.

(In the early 1990s, two arcade games in the fighting genre—Mortal Kombat and Street

Fighter—took contrasting positions in this depiction: Mortal Kombat was notorious for

its grisly animations of the final blow, with decapitations, impalings, and the tearing out

of living hearts as the coda to a one-on-one battle; Street Fighter and most games of the

genre depicted defeat as a mere K.O., a knock-out.) In Fatal Frame II, the depletion of a

health bar means different things for ghosts than it does for the player: in the fictive

mode, the ghost is thought to have been exorcised, while the player is presumed to have

been slain by the ghost (and will be obligated to resume play from a saved session—a

and current health. Those integers are sustained by the computer, and while they produce the fiction of an

entity with such-and-such well-being, they are themselves a decoding of a sequence of bits—zeroes and

ones—interpreted within the framework of encoding system used in most contemporary computer systems

as standing for an integer, based on the value of a header, or other sequence of bits. The sequence of bits is

also an interpretation of a range of differential states: a bit is a differential in amperage in the working

memory of a computer, but is an interpretation of magnetic polarity on some storage media, or of the

existence of a pit or plateau, read by a laser, on a CD or DVD.

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task which incorporates other game modes, including a meta-gamic navigation of

representations of saved files).

Element (b) is the filament, both diagetically and ludologically equivalent to the

small filament in the lower-right hand corner of the screen in field mode.

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The filament

glows when a ghost is near, more brightly when the camera’s focus ring is centered on

the position of the ghost. (The filament in field mode has the same behavior, with regard

to the facing of the character.)

Element (c) is a stylized text-box, using a linotype font in a sepia color to connote

a 19

century “steampunk” aesthetic, stating the film type described above. The number

to the right of the film-type is the number of shots available in that film type. Element (d)

is a contextual element, available to the player, but not a discrete, stable element like the

others: it is an indication of the orientation of the player on the game map; in this case, it

indicates that the player is in what is called the “brazier room” in the “Kurosawa house,”

a building in the Lost Village. The graphical information here also helps the player orient

her/himself with other features of that space (opponents, doors, windows, etc.) Element

(e) is the opponent itself. The player must frame the opponent optimally within a focus

ring to take a shot that can reduce its health, and move the bar in element (a) as low as

possible. If the opponent gets too close to the player without a picture being taken, the

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The activation of the filament in field mode both presages and calls for the more strongly

foregrounded presentation of the filament in viewfinder mode.

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camera will cut away to a third-person view, showing the ghost shaking or strangling the

player, reducing her health.

Element (f) indicates the augmentations and configuration of the camera obscura.

As the player progresses through the game, she/he will find “spirit orbs,” obtained by

battling ghosts. This spirit orbs become a kind of internal currency for a system of

upgrades to the camera. The orbs can be used to augment the camera’s basic functions or

those unlocked by finding “equipment.” This upgrade-management mechanic is common

to games in many genres, and adds combinatorial depth and strategic planning to the

game experience, while extending the domain-mapping of photography as metaphor.

Element (g) serves a decorative and connotative function: it is a small plate with the

words “SHADOW OBSCURE.” Element (h) is the health bar of the player: minding the

integer to which this sign refers is of both immediate and medium-term interest to the

player, who will seek apply items from her/his inventory to increase their health value. If

the blue bar should drop to the bottom, the character will die, and the player will have to

resume play from a saved position

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. Of all the signs in this frame, only one—element

(h)—can be understood as working within a single, fictive register of play experience.

All the others participate in multiple registers, and often allude to other modes.

124

There are modes dedicated to the management of saved game images, and the catalog of saved

games stored in the game-system is itself another player-register.

117

Each of these elements is produced by the coordination of multiple work

processes, stored in an asset library that allows workers in different roles to edit, copy

and use them.

125

More importantly, they are discrete objects, constituted by digital code,

with associated behaviors (the fighting algorithm of an opponent, the creaking of steps as

a character climbs them), which allude to values (such as the relative position of objects,

ranges of effects, and health values for the avatars and opponents). In most contemporary

game development, the programming languages used to create both the engines on which

the games run and the games themselves are object-oriented languages like C++ and

Java. These languages make it easier to write modular code: visual, auditory and code

assets can be checked out of asset libraries, enabling teams of hundreds of artists,

designers and programmers to concurrently work on the same game.

However, even in highly abstract games made with simple tools by sole authors,

these elements operated in multiple registers, within modes, in much the same way. A

brief comparison with an independent, experimental game created by a single designer

will demonstrate this.

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The specific software used to manage the asset library in the case of Fatal Frame II: Crimson

Butterfly was not revealed by the developers. Often, the libraries are managed by asset pipeline tools

developed in-house. Production digital asset management software is also built into game development

engines such as Unity Pro, which includes an asset server.

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In the mode for love: The Marriage as single-mode game

Rod Humble’s 2006 independent game The Marriage

126

is a procedural reflection

on monogamous, asymmetrical heterosexual relationships. Ian Bogost describes the game

as a paradigmatic example of the proceduralist style: process-intensive, designed for an

introspective reading, using abstraction in graphics, and representing subjective inner

experience.

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In The Marriage, players click on one of two squares—one blue, one pink—in

order to attract green circles to them. (Figure 20) Contact with green circles makes the

squares grow larger. There are only four visual elements in the game: a blue square

connoting a male partner, a pink square connoting a female partner, colored circles which

connote positive external factors (other people, work, activities), and black spots

connoting destructive/traumatic events. The size and opacity of the squares change based

on their interactions with each other, with other objects, and with the player’s mouse

cursor. Reflecting a normative model of gender difference, the blue and pink squares

react differently to certain procedures. Placing the mouse over either square triggers them

to move closer to each other (both move toward the mouse cursor), but makes them

smaller. Placing the mouse cursor over any circle causes it to disappear, and causes the

126

Rod Humble, “The Marriage: a Computer Game by Rod Humble,” August 2006,

http://www.rodvik.com/rodgames/marriage.html.

127

Bogost, “The Proceduralist Style.”

119

pink square to get smaller. When the two squares collide (or, as he describes it, “kiss”

128

)

the blue square diminishes in size and becomes more transparent, while the pink square

grows slightly and becomes more opaque. Contact with a colored circle causes the blue

square to become more opaque and to grow in size, but only causes the pink square to

grow in size slightly. Black circles cause both squares to shrink significantly. Without

any contact with the blue square, the pink square will slowly grow more transparent over

time. If either square either shrinks or becomes transparent to the point of disappearance,

the game ends.

Figure 20.: The Marriage. Rod Humble (2006)

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Rod Humble, The Marriage (game), Microsoft Windows, 2006,

http://www.rodvik.com/rodgames/marriage.html.

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Humble is explicit about the intension of the work and its metaphors:

The game is my expression of how a marriage feels. The blue and pink

squares represent the masculine and feminine of a marriage. They have

differing rules which must be balanced to keep the marriage going.

The circles represent outside elements entering the marriage. This can be

anything. Work, family, ideas, each marriage is unique and the players

response should be individual..

The size of each square represents the amount of space that person is

taking up within the marriage. So for example we often say that one

person’s ego is dominating a marriage or perhaps a large personality. In

the game this would be one square being so large that the other one simply

is trapped within the space of it unable to get to circles and more

importantly unable to “kiss” edge to edge.

The transparency of the squares represents how engaged that person is in

the marriage. When one person fades out of the marriage and becomes

emotionally distant then the marriage is over.

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In other media forms, this kind of explicit allegorical mapping may seem like

excessive hand-holding for an overwrought metaphor; insofar as allegory by procedure is

still the exception in the field of independent videogames, some allowances might be

extended to the author for his explanation. For us, the conventional and normative

rhetoric on human intimacy and asymmetrical need is less interesting than the registers in

which it is articulated.

There is clearly only one mode: the screen shown in Figure 20, with some

changes depending on the stage of the game, is the only one that the players encounter.

There are still, however, multiple registers: that of the lusory (the game as a set of

129

Humble, “The Marriage: a Computer Game by Rod Humble.”

121

objectives and mechanics, described by the rules—described by Bernard Suits

130

) and the

representations, but the interpretants for those signs in the lusory register. The visual

region (square, circle) and color are the material signs, the object is the behavior that

results when certain kinds of interaction occur, and the interpretant is the rule-set which

maps the latter onto the former. The ruleset in toto is itself a sign, with the object being

the domain of human relationships (as understood by Rod Humble) and the interpretant

being the conventions and behaviors—and the explicit guide written by Humble—which

connotes them (or, in the latter case, denotes them).

The Marriage was created by Humble alone:

“The Marriage “came out of a long weekend I took with my wife down to

Carmel. It was created that evening on my laptop as I listened to the waves

of the pacific below. All the game mechanics were completed that evening

although I spent weeks afterwards tuning and polishing. The game was

also made “in process” as it were. I simply could not design this game on

paper before hand. It had to be done by exploring , discarding and

balancing game elements during creation. This feeling way of game

creation felt right. It was like carving with the grain of the wood or

painting with the brushstrokes rather than against them.

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Though created in 2006, it has much in common both visually and in terms of the

conditions of its production with the games developed for the Atari VCS in late 1970s

and 1980s, with simple assets, the close association of code and visuals, and the lack of

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Suits, The Grasshopper, 55.

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Humble, The Marriage (game).

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differentiation of production roles and moments. The gap between the conception and

realization of the material signs (the circles and squares) and their behaviors within the

procedural system (attracting, repelling, shrinking, growing, become translucent,

becoming opaque) is negligible.

This tight coordination between the elements that operate in these registers for

smaller games is also made apparent in Ben Fry’s distellamap visualizations of the

assembly code which produced Atari VCS games such as Adventure and Combat (Figure

21). Fry’s image reveals how the machine code which instantiates the game calls upon

graphical elements that are also embedded in that code, to display them on the screen.

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Just a play of a game of The Marriage occurs within a single mode, so does play within a

game of Combat

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The operation of the Atari VCS and its graphic procedures are described in Montfort and

Bogost, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System.

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Despite the lean code used to produce the game, Combat is, in fact, about 27 different games,

chosen by the player from a loading screen, which, in strict terms, can be considered a meta-game mode.

However, any given single game is played within a single mode: the different “games” are modifications of

parameters of the core game design, and were created by the addition of variables and modifiers, not in

parallel development processes. Combat is given a “vertical” analysis in Montfort, “Combat in Context.”

Montfort describes the nested dependencies that produce the experience of the game, from the platform

(Atari VCS) to the code, to the game’s form, interface and reception. Our approach begins with the

interface—which contains both the elements made available to the player by the system and the affordances

for responding to it—and accesses the other levels of his analysis from them.

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Figure 21.: Distellamap: Combat. Ben Fry, 2005

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Game traversals and methodology

The modes of Fatal Frame II described above were produced by capturing the

videostreams of the full traversals of the game. A traversal is what is more prosaically

called “playing a game to the end.” Just as the reading of a novel may take place over

multiple reading sessions, the traversal of a game can take place of a series of game

sessions. A new traversal is started in many games after the “new game” button is pressed

to reserve space in the system’s memory for recording a game-state. In practice, a player

can branch off multiple traversals of a game, exploring different tactics, strategies, and

unlocking different content: thus, the traversal can be understood as a conceptual entity

centered on a specific save file until the player reaches an recognizable conclusion. A

traversal is an artifact of an extended instance of reception, a transcription of the "putting-

into-play" of the game software's assets and algorithms by a player. Espen Aarseth

describes texts as having traversal functions, “a mechanism by which scriptons are

revealed or generated from textons and presented to the user of the text.

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” A traversal

can thus be seen as the output of this function treated as a whole. In many cases, the

game’s fictional registers are best understood through recounting a canonical traversal.

Many games do not have traversals distinct from sessions. Some do not indicate

any kind of closure or completion. Multi-player games, puzzle games, and games which

foreground the play-activity over fictional/narrative ones can be studied in terms of series

of sessions which produce increasing expertise without constituting a traversal, but in

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Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, 62.

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those cases the full vocabulary of signifying elements, the panoply of modes and

registers, will also be available within a single session. While one might suppose that the

presence of a strong fictive register predicts a finitude for a game, this is not the case.

Most of the arcade games of the 1970s and 1980s closed with events that, as fictions,

simply indicated failure. Missile Command, designed by Dave Theurer and published by

Atari, Inc in 1980, always ends with the destruction of the cities in a nuclear explosion,

which the player simply tries to forefend against for as long as their abilities allow.

Nonetheless, the time between the drop of the quarter to start a game and the final screen

(Figure 22) and, if applicable, the entry of the player’s initials into a leaderboard, could

be described as both a session and a traversal. For arcade games, a single session of play

may contain multiple traversals; for many console and computer games, played in

player’s homes or offices, a single traversal (which may require many hours of play) may

consist of several sessions. This is the case for Fatal Frame 2 for most, though not all,

players.

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Figure 22.: Missle Command, final screen.

Capturing Frames

Analyzing video transcription of game play

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from four different players'

traversals of the game revealed differences in the relative frequencies of modes between

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Video capture equipment was used to capture the video signal sent from the game console to

the screen, producing a linear recording. This recording was then processed to produce a linear series of

still frames, sampled at regular rates (one frame per second, 4 frames per minutes, etc) as appropriate for

the analysis at hand. For purposes studying the modal transitions in Fatal Frame 2, we generally used two-

frame-per-second (fps) sampling. 15 fps sampling was used to "zoom" into the dynamics of shorter play-

segments.

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different play styles. Three (one undergraduate and two graduate students) were fairly

typical players in terms of genre and platform literacy and enskilment. The fourth was a

speed-run performance uploaded to YouTube by a player under the pseudonym

Persona

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. A speed-run is a session of game-play in which the player seeks to complete

the game in as little time as possible: it is a virtuoso performance of game-play, and

players compete with each other to achieve ever-shorter play times. A speed-run is thus a

single traversal occurring within a single session.

In general, the relative ratios and paces of transition between modes for the three

researcher-players were comparable, despite the range of ability and familiarity with the

game and its genre between them. The speed-run traversal (Figure 23) was different, with

significantly less time in navigation or combat modes for any given section of the game.

The speed-runner was, of course, interested in minimizing the duration of any mode as

much as possible. Cinematic sequences are, however, of fixed duration; thus, they

constitute a greater percentage of the speed-runner's full traversal when compared to the

other players. The speed-runner has essentially removed a semiotic register entirely: any

given sign or icon is treated only as a cue to a well-rehearsed, somatized activity. This

supports an interpretation that sees the material signs as modally authored, but the

authorship within registers as being more dialogical.

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Attempts to contact the player were unsuccessful; according to his now-defunct web site,

apparently he/she lives in Singapore.

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Figure 23.: Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly (speed-run by Persona) – the clouded regions are an

artifact of his/her inconsistent recording technology. Completely white frames indicate the end of combat. The

speed-run footage was sample at the rate of one frame per second. The entire traversal of the game by Persona

took a little over two hours.

In the speed-run, the player has learned optimal strategies to eliminate

unnecessary expenditure of time. White frames indicate that an enemy has been defeated:

the defeat of an enemy is accompanied by a bright, white flash which fills the screen

completely. This element can also be used as an indicator for a (successful) battle. The

player is certainly aware that the activation of these elements also performs a fiction, the

ghost story sustained by the fictive register, but represses the engagement with that

continue to operate, however: the transcribed footage of the player’s traversal ironically

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shows a greater ratio of frames in the cinematic mode than those of the other players. The

modes which are of the greatest import to the speed-run player—those involving combat

or navigation—are those which he wishes to dispatch the most quickly. One cannot rely

on the relative ratios of modes to determine which registers are of priority to the player.

Modal rhythms

Informational and operational modes oscillate over the course of play. The

cinematic sequences during which the player is not called upon to act releases the

compression created when the signs of the uncanny accumulated during operations are

instead released into another kind of reading. This release is never complete: even as the

player is transfixed by the phantasmic spectacle on the screen, the sequence may contain

clues and indications which the player will need to progress through the game. The result

is a somaticization of the reading of the range of signs.

The perception of hazard is, in fact, greater than its reality, because the same

signifier can come into play in various registers and modes. In the visualization of mode

transitions during a typical play-session, what is striking is how little actual combat or

near-combat activity there actually is: most of the activity occurs as cinematic material or

in navigating the space of the game.

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The low ratio of actual threats to the connotation

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This segment, from a long game-session by Laura Hoeger, was fairly typical for the student

players. The cinematic mode dominated the "speed-run" player's modal ratio for an obvious reason: it is the

one mode which cannot be shortened by optimal play. This produces the superficially counter-intuitive

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of jeopardy is a simple mechanism for creating suspense (and a lingering aesthetics of

paranoid perception.) One detail which emerges after sorting through the transcripts of

play sessions is the player's management of the codas and discontinuities of the play

experience. Not only do players use save-points in the ways we might expect - to save

progress to avoid having to repeat a passage, or in order to end a session - but menus are

also called up to freeze play to take a break, as a pause mechanism. These patterns of

saving and pausing are the player's mechanism for managing the tempos of the game

experience, in the interstices between intense and semiotically dense sequences of play in

navigational and combat modes.

Modes encode the possibility of other modes, and the player's experience is

marked by an indeterminacy: where are they? What is expected of them? We can see this

ambiguity at work by looking at entirely typical screens and isolating dominant signifiers

within them. A typical frame from a player's navigational mode (Figure 7) features

Mayu, the character/avatar (b) navigating a passageway. The filament (c) would begin to

glow if there were spectral activity in this scene in the direction toward which the avatar

(but not the player's camera) is facing. The region (a) is an area in which, at certain points

in the game, a ghost could well appear, if the avatar turns in that direction. At the moment

of this frame, however, these are mere possibilities. In fact, at this point, Mayu is

exploring the deserted Kurosawa house. The filament remains at the periphery of

result that the content of a speed-runner's game traversal transcription will be largely cinematic, rather than

interactive.

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attention, in the background, denoting that the player has the camera obscura equipped

(at a later point in the game, this object is lost and the filament does not appear on the

screen) and connoting the Edwardian techno-aesthetics of the dawning years of the 20th

century.

A moment of greater player excitation (figure 8) occurs as the player-character (b)

encounters a ghost which is not yet in the visual field (a), indicated by the red filament

(c); that the filament is glowing red indicates that the ghost is hostile and must be

dispatched by the player. The blue gauge (d) indicates that the player has already taken

some damage, and must attend to their health-state or risk losing the game and being

obliged to restart from a save point. We should take note of the transition between the

above mode and the one illustrated here and observe that this is not a transition between a

representational or fictive state and an operational one. The scene which did not indicate

combat or jeopardy was also operational: however, that operation is navigation, rather

than conflict. The subsequent scene contains a range of signifiers which must still be

decoded in a fictive register: the identity of the ghost, the nature of the box in which it

appeared, etc. The transition between those modes is a change in excitory states which

manage the tempo and tone of the experience of the game.

The screen in mid-combat (Figure 19) reveals a rich range of icons and

representations, which the player is compelled to decode appropriately in an operational

quantity of a given type of film (c) that is left in the camera (different film types have

different efficacy - the player learns over the course of a game to conserve the most

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effective film types for the most difficult battles). The ghost (e) appears after examing a

window (d) - after the combat is completed, some information about the nature of the

ghost will become available to the player. At this moment, however, such considerations

are deferred. Other icons indicate with what augmentations the camera has been equipped

(f). The element on the bottom of the frame (g) is decorative: it also connotes the late-

Victorian/early-Edwardian spiritual-technology motif. The player is probably not

attending to it at the moment of this frame, although it shares visual features with

elements (b), (c), and (h).

After dispatching a ghost like the one in Figure 19, the player might either open

their menu and restore their health, or return to a navigational mode, continuing the

exploration of the architectural spaces in which the game is set. Expository texts, which

explain the motivations and histories of the ghosts that the player encountered, are

selected and read within the menu screens. The "menu" is usually considered the least

narratological and most operational aspect of a typical console game, yet it may contain

the most explicit fictive exposition. The mode does not constrain the possible registers of

player interpretation.

Modes are software; registers are conceptual frames.

Modes are features of software: they are structural components of the game as a

software-based artifact. The idea of a register—drawn from socio-linguistics

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as well as

138

See Agha, Language and Social Relations.

133

educational psychology

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—is here understood as a conceptual context, rather than a

material one. It is a model of something towards which the signs that are being decoded

is directed: more than a simple referent, a register is an epistemic frame for interpreting

signs.

The so-called ludology-vs-narratology debates described in the first chapter

resolved into a kind of truce—or even a consensus—between the two camps, but this

consensus was an awkward one. In this consensus, theorists from one of these approaches

would give a kind of lip-service to the value of the other, observing that while the game

dynamics and genre logics of a game might be important, they were nonetheless choosing

to focus on characters, representation, and identity, or on the other side, while

representations and fictions were part of the game experience, a soi-disant ludologists

would still deal with the game system strictly in terms of mechanics. The implicit model

was one by which game representations were stretched over a skeleton of game

mechanics. The problem with this model is that it accounts for neither how games are

created (as systems of signs configured into modes in game development) nor how

players receive them (as an object of a range of interpretations into inter-related and

transitive models.)

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Raymond Duval, “A Cognitive Analysis of Problems of Comprehension in a Learning of

Mathematics,” Educational Studies in Mathematics 61, no. 1 (2006): 103–131.

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The fictive aspect of a game is not, in fact, a skin (though many games can be

skinned—that is, given different visual aesthetics and immediate referents, which can be

taken as a kind of co-authoring) but rather is a conceptual model—a semiotic register—in

which many of the signs they are decoding are interpreted. These signs are also being

interpreted into other registers, and, indeed, each register can produce signs interpreted

into others.

The playing subject generates its registers, which are co-determined by the game

software, but not necessarily completely determined. Some are fairly inevitable, though

the may be given low priority by the player: the gameplay as the production of a series of

events, as the creation of a narrative, is in some sense inescapable, though it might not be

of any real concern or interest to a given player. The speed-run player described above

could be said to be producing the effect of the narrative resolution epiphenomenally, as

his working through the field and viewfinder modes at the fastest possible speeds

suggests his suppression of any but the most operational registers of interpretation for

each and every sign; they will be decoded not by the production of an imaginary about

the game, but by the quick responses somaticized into muscle-memory by repetition. In a

sense, however, his suppression of the referential aspects of the game elements is part of

the aesthetic strategy for the game itself, and its production of a variety of uncanny

experience particular to horror games.

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Ludic activation of the uncanny

In Freud's 1919 essay on the uncanny

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built up through an analysis of E.T.A.

Hoffman's short story, The Sand-Man, he describes it is an effect of multiple decodings

of the sign: a privileged one, (the Heimlich, the homey, familiar reading of an event) and

a hidden one, discomforting, menacing, alien. The transitivity between a reliable

decoding of a familiar sign and its destabilization (when a human figure in motion is

revealed to be a doll, or a corpse; when a shadow takes a human form; when speech is

distorted back into noise) is more than a simple matter of suspense—it is the latency of

interpretation that triggers the experience. Ernst Jentsch, in the original essay to which

Freud was responding, observed that “the effect of the uncanny can easily be achieved

when one undertakes to reinterpret some kind of lifeless thing as part of an organic

creature, especially in anthropomorphic terms, in a poetic or fantastic way.”

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For both

Freud and Jentsch, it is the undecidability of interpretation, which produces the

Unheimlich.

A ludic version of the uncanny exists: an interplay of registers and their mutual

inhibitions and excitations over the course of gameplay (in coordination, of course, with

more conventional tropes of uncanny depiction.). If we accept multivalence in the

decoding of signs as characteristic of the uncanny, then the ludological uncanny can

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Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition, Volume 17, vol. 17 (Hogarth, 1955).

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Ernst Jentsch and Roy Sellars, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906),” Angelaki: Journal

of Theoretical Humanities 2, no. 1 (1997): 13–14.

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spread this multivalence across the range of semiotic registers of the game, according to

the ordering of those registers by the modes of gameplay. Thus, in navigation, a player

will see the filament burn blue: this presages a shift to another mode, that of the camera

(a player-directed mode switch); the space which was traversed when the filament began

to glow becomes a space for a new, undetermined reading in the fictive register, which

will be deferred until the operation of manipulating the camera is completed. If a

cutscene then begins, then the operational decoding is the one which is repressed, while

the supernatural explanation for the event in the fictive register enters the foreground.

When the filament glows red, then the next, presaged mode is likely to be combat

(flight is almost impossible in this game except as a temporary delaying tactic);

conventional methods of foretelling may have already imbued the now-visible visage of

the attacker with a reading in the fictive register, yet contemplation of this element must

be deferred and repressed all the more until the threat is dispatched. Neither signs, nor

modes, nor modalities, nor registers are resolvable completely into each other: since a

single sign may be reproduced in multiple modes, and a sign can traverse multiple

modalities (for example, the player bumping into an object might simultaneously be

“performed” by the computer as a single routine which both produces a sound and

generates a vibration in the player’s game controller) registers are not determined by the

modes used to constitute them, and the movement between them is delegated to the

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player. As conceptual entities into which signs are encoded and within which they are

decoded, they lay in wait when not engaged in the foreground

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Semi-autonomous elements

Not only are the semiotic elements of videogames available for interpretation in

multiple registers, but as software-encoded objects, they can be produced and distributed

semi-autonomously from the game as a whole. Lev Manovich describes this modularity

as an element of new media:

Media elements, be it images, sounds, shapes, or behaviors, are

represented as collections of discrete samples (pixels, polygons, voxels,

characters, scripts). These elements are assembled into larger-scale objects

but they continue to maintain their separate identity. The objects

themselves can be combined into even larger objects -- again, without

losing their independence.

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Briefly discussing the modular augmentation can shed light on the dynamics of individual

elements, because these elements are produced and distributed in a process separate from

the production and distribution of the original game.

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While this model is meant to be a general one, Fatal Frame 2 extends it into the text of the

game-fiction itself, in its play of twins and avatars. I address this in more depth in Laura Hoeger and

William H. Huber, “Ghastly Multiplication: Fatal Frame II and the Videogame Uncanny,” in Situated Play

(presented at the DiGRA 2007 Conference, Tokyo: DiIGRA, 2007), 152–156,

http://www.digra.org/dl/db/07313.12302.pdf.

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Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 51.

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There is a precedent for the modular extension of content in game design: the

production of supplementary rules, errata, and expansions, and even the practice of

variations in games like chess and poker

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. In the mid-20

century, wargame magazines

would frequently include rules for incorporation into existing military simulation games,

to enhance the sense of realism (if not the playability of the game) with rules to account

for weather, for weapon types, for command and control factors, for morale, etc. These

practices would be carried on in pen-and-paper role-playing games such as Dungeons and

Dragons, and a cottage industry prospered in the 1970s and 1980s, as publishers such as

The Judges Guild produced rulebooks and settings to supplement the core rulebooks

published by dominant game publishers such as TSR and the Game Design Workshop.

That the game as a form so easily embraces supplementary economies supports the

observation that “gaming” was always suitable for computational expression.

We can distinguish between different types of modular extension of a published

or distributed game title. The patch is software meant to replace and correct errors in

software, but can also be used to introduce new behaviors and objects in a game. The

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Poker is still what chess once was: a family of variants without an absolute center. The modern

form of chess became relatively stable after a series of publications by Spanish writers. The modern game

of chess, originally a variant called the “mad queen,” become the mainstream version c. 1475 (David

Hooper and Ken Whyld, The Oxford Companion to Chess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 328.)

The cultural and literary history of medieval chess, and its relationship to rule variants, is covered in depth

in Jenny Adams, Power Play: The Literature And Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

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option to distribute patches to games is a feature of the platform which the game targets:

until the most recent generation of videogame consoles, systems such as the Atari VCS,

the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sony Playstation did not support the patching

of games, which were distributed on read-only media and could not store changes in the

state of the game’s software. Home computers, however, ran games on media which

could be changed, and games targeting them might be patched using magnetic tape, and

later floppy drives. The online distribution of patches preceded widespread access to the

internet, as BBS systems and commercial online services such as Prodigy and

CompuServe also distributed updates for games like the 1993 first-person shooter Doom,

published by iD Games. Publishers would also make patches available for consumers to

download using modems, dialing a server directly and transferring files using protocols

such as XMODEM, YMODEM and ZMODEM. As continuous internet connections

became commonplace, the patching of games became automatic. Multiplayer games built

on client-server architectures would patch elements of their games in both the client and

the server, and updates would be distributed automatically as players logged in.

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The interplayer dependencies of many massively-multiplayer games makes changes in the rules

system sometimes controversial: the next chapter will address questions of multiplayer reception of a game.

The effects of changes in rules on the social interactions of communities of players is described in Vivian

Hsueh-hua Chen, Henry Been-Lirn Duh, and Hong Renyi, “The Changing Dynamic of Social Interaction in

World of Warcraft: The Impacts of Game Feature Change,” in Proceedings of the 2008 International

Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, ACE ’08 (New York: ACM, 2008),

356–359, doi:10.1145/1501750.1501834.

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patch was more likely to change the behavior of existing game elements than to introduce

new ones, but this was not always the case.

Another category of extensions of already-released games are levels (including

maps) which usually leave the mechanics of the game intact, but provide new settings

and environments for play. These may be made freely available by the publisher, sold as

a product to extend the value of the original product, or created by third-parties (whether

commercial or hobbyist.) Recent (as of 2012) trends in game publishing business models

for certain genres make the core game engine freely available, and charge users for levels

and maps. iD games, producers of Quake and Doom, have frequently released the source

code for their older game engines into the public domain, while retaining intellectual

property rights to the levels, maps and artwork. Multiplayer racing games Simraceway

and Trackmania allow users to download and play the basic game without charge, and

then sell racing courses and cars.

Downloadable content (DLC) is the higher-level category for software meant to

extend an extant game which is distributed online. Team Fortress 2, a multiplayer team-

combat first-person shooter game developed by Valve and released in 2007, is free-to-

play, but allows the player to participate in an economy of in-game items

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which

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An exhaustive chronological list of in-game items is available at TeamFortress Wiki

Contributors, “Item Timeline,” Official TF2 Wiki | Official Team Fortress Wiki, June 17, 2012,

http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Item_timeline. A list of those items created by the user community is at

TeamFortress Wiki Contributors, “List of Community-contributed Items,” Official TF2 Wiki | Official

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change both the appearance of the game and its behaviors. Players could obtain some

items by playing in other games, such as “Iron Curtain,” (Figure 24) a weapon that could

be obtained by winning poker games in TellTale Games’ 2010 Poker Night at the

Inventory (a single-player poker game with comic characters.) As the owner and

producer of the online game distribution system Steam, Valve profits when its 3

party

partners sell games to consumers: thus the online game-item economy strengthens the

positions of its ecosystem.

Figure 24.: "The Iron Curtain," in-game item for Team Fortress 2 obtained ("unlocked") by playing

Poker Night at the Inventory

Team Fortress Wiki, July 12, 2012, http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/List_of_community-

contributed_items.

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Developers are not the only producers of these semi-autonomous game elements:

user-generated content can extend and transform existing games, and even turn them into

entirely new ones

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. Counter Strike was created by Minh Le and Jess Cliff in 1999 as a

modification of the Valve first-person shooter game Half-Life, and was released as an

independent title (using the game engine from Half-Life) by Valve the next year. This

kind of total modification of a game inverts the authorial relationship: the original game

simply becomes a kind of kernel, a set of elements (though functionally vital ones,

providing behaviors and interactive frameworks) in a new work. Le and Cliff were

subsequently hired by Valve.

More to the point regarding the autonomy of small, authored elements, Valve has

produced an application called “Steam Workshop,” which allows users to generate assets

for inclusion in games. Most user-designed elements are decorative in nature, and do not

alter the behaviors of the game systems themselves. Yet they are part of a lively economy

of gift-items which plugs into the Steam network. This kind of dissemination of

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The culture of mods and modding has, oddly enough, been given considerable more attention

in game studies than authorship itself has. Henry Jenkins’ extensive coverage of participatory culture—

Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Media Consumers in a Digital Age (NYU Press, 2006); Convergence

Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (NYU Press, 2006). —discuss communities of fan-

programmers from an ethnographic perspective. A more exhaustive typology is laid out in Hector Postigo,

“Of Mods and Modders Chasing Down the Value of Fan-Based Digital Game Modifications,” Games and

Culture 2, no. 4 (October 1, 2007): 300–313, doi:10.1177/1555412007307955.

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contributory authorship allows talented player-producers to showcase their work, and in

some cases, also find employment within Valve.

From a theory of signs to models of authorship

One can think of software-based works not as fields of light captured by a

machine-eye (as in cinema) but as aggregates of objects. These objects can be produced

in modular processes which are somewhat independent of each other: The modularity of

production introduces variability into the authorship of videogames, both materially (in

that the various tracks of design, development and production can be distributed among

many different creators and teams) and conceptually, as certain registers—and thus the

signifiers that work in them—will be given importance of place in the presentation of the

work to its publics.

The model of videogame semiotic operations in these first two chapters treats the

videogame as being produced and located within modes, but apprehended by players with

registers. The relationship between these two organizing principles for the signifying

elements in a digital game accounts for the range of possibilities for locating the authorial

position in the game. No theory of authorship which does not account for the striking

variety of forms produced under the umbrella of “videogame” creation will be very

useful unless we identify the mechanisms, contextually sensitive to genre, style and

format, through which players understand and interpret what designers have inscribed

into the game. Absent this specific account of the production of meaning in games,

models of authorship are likely to be associated only with those elements (story, writing,

visual design) which are already well-understood as authorial, as critics and theorists

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privilege those registers which most resemble the forms for which such a model is

already well-articulated.

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CHAPTER 3. PLAYING WITH SPACE, PLAYING WITH PEOPLE

The first chapter of this dissertation built a theory of the videogame as a

signifying system out of C. S. Peirce’s theory of semiotics, and then works out theories of

style and genre; the second chapter applied that model more closely to a single game,

Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly and extended it with a close look at the modes of

software which make up the game as a traversal object experience by a player over time.

This chapter evaluates spatiality as an authored effect in games. Two postures to the

authoring of games are described: one which is centered on the creation of an

experienced space, the other which extends this space-centered approach by creating or

intervening upon relations between players.

I set out two precedents to the emergence of game design as a space-creating

practice: first, that of the general spatial aspects of non-digital play, mentioned in chapter

one and extended here. This is adjoined to a history of the computational representation

of space—a series of practices which are generally coeval with the history of computing

itself. I then focus on the production histories of games within the Final Fantasy series of

games, produced by Square, Inc. (renamed Square-Enix after a 2003 merger) from 1983

to 2010 with allusion to the framework laid out in the previous chapters. The series is a

franchise which has survived changes in the scale of production and multiple platforms,

and provides a lens for considering how changes in the scale of production and digital

technologies have changed the design of the experience of virtual space. A study of the

first multiplayer online game in the franchise, Final Fantasy XI, follows it, and provides

a basis for considering the possibility of game design as relational authorship.

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8-bit geo-space

Since the year 2000, different divisions of the search-engine and internet-ad firm

Google release demos and promotional videos about hoax products for April Fool’s day.

These pranks play just outside the realm of plausibility: one of the pranks produced in

2012 was an “updated” version of their Google Maps product (Figure 25), an 8-bit port

designed to be run on the Nintendo Famicom (call the Nintendo Entertainment System, or

NES, in North America.)

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“Google Maps 8-Bit for NES” reproduced much of the

functionality of their widely-used map and location services web application, but with the

simple, iconic graphics and 53-color palettes used in game consoles in the mid-1980s.

Like many of Google’s April Fool hoaxes, the humor plays off of the discrepancy

between the seemingly “state-of-the-art” technology in Google’s location-based services

(such as Google maps) and the dated aesthetics and graphical conventions of 8-bit

rendering, a discrepancy which is recast by the rhetoric of promotional marketing as a

technological advance. The joke relies on nostalgic recollection for these older interface

styles, particularly among users who played with Nintendo and other 8-bit systems in

their childhood.

148

Alex Chitu, “Google April Fools’ Day 2012,” The Google Operating System, March 31, 2012,

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/03/google-april-fools-day-2012.html.

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Figure 25.: Screenshot, Google Maps 8-bit for NES screenshot.

Google’s Japan office produced the affectionate tribute to the veteran game-

platform, but the piece wasn’t created by Google alone. Japanese game publisher and

developer Square-Enix, which (under the name Squaresoft, Inc.) started as a developer

targeting the Famicom, collaborated with the Google Japan team by hiding monsters and

fortresses drawn from their games throughout the piece: Google’s offices in Tokyo and

Mountain View, California were shown as besieged by dragons and monsters, and at the

intersection of the equator and the prime meridian (0° Latitude, 0° Longitude)—a spot off

the west coast of Africa—viewers using the 8-bit “quest” application could find a castle

containing a dragon. (Figure 26) Google Maps indicates the source of the geographic

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information provided for each search, and in this case, the caption of the bottom-right of

Figure 26.: 0.0,0.0 – The prime meridian meets the equator in Google "Quest" for NES

While Google “Quest” is playful ephemera, it shows that the style of spatial

representation of a 25-year old game platform was easily recognized by broad sectors of

the audience, evoking nostalgic recognition among game players. There were other

possible points of reference for Google to select to evoke the style and mood of the 1980s

(not the least of which would have been the actual technologies for navigation at the

time: the folding map, the road atlas, etc.), but visual strategies used for producing

fantastic play-spaces was effective for the many users of Google Maps who had grown up

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with Nintendo platforms. There is a space-producing element to the creation of digital

games, one that has begun to influence other forms of space-production.

As a complement to the previous chapter, rather than focusing on one game as a

signifying systems which organize elements within modes, I will look more broadly over

the development of a single franchise, the Final Fantasy games, produced from 1987 to

the present day. There are two large sections in the chapter: the first

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uses the history of

Square-Enix’s Final Fantasy franchise as a lens for reflecting on how games create

spatial experiences, using a framework proposed by David Harvey for distinguishing

between different human practices which produce space. The subsequent section is a

study and reflection of the massively-multiplayer game Final Fantasy XI, which relies on

many of the same tropes as the rest of the franchise, but produces a starkly different set of

effects as a multiplayer game.

Game-space and game-place.

Videogame spaces have the characteristics of both play-spaces and computer-

mediated spaces. These two origins produce a range of effects, which require a robust

model of spatiality.

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A revised version of this section appeared as William H. Huber, “Epic Spatialities: The

Production of Space in Final Fantasy Games,” in Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 373–384.

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Cultural historian Johan Huizinga described play as transpiring in dedicated

spaces: “Play is a voluntary activity that takes place outside ordinary life. It proceeds,

within its own proper boundaries of time and space, according to fixed rules in an orderly

manner.

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” Huizinga is describing a kind of legislation of daily life by rule-based

declaratory practices (and it is in fact let a little unclear whether he claimed that the

designation of a space for play was pre-condition for the activity of play, or—more

likely, and more coherent with observed practice—play itself designates a space a

provisionally re-interpreted.) The setting-aside as a space for play is clearly what is at

work in the creation of a ball-court or pitch, for games such as the Mesoamerican ball

game:

As played by the Aztecs in sixteenth-century Mexico, the ballgame was

enacted and understood on several levels: as a sandlot sport, indulged in

by most adolescent boys; as a public game, eagerly gambled on by avid

spectators; as a sort of gladiatorial ritual, in which captives might be

killed; as a reenactment of cosmic conflict between Venus and the sun;

and as a game that the gods themselves might play.

The game itself may have taken many forms. Among most Mesoamerican

peoples, formal games were played in a special kind of building, the

ballcourt, generally formed by two parallel structures, often with

supplementary walls or structures that demarcated an end zone. The

playing surfaces encompassed a ground surface in the shape of an open or

closed letter / as well as the vertical or sloping side walls. Points were

scored either by driving the ball into an end zone or other designated area

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Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture [1933], 11.

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or by hurtling the ball through a high, relatively small ring placed in a side

wall.

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The creation of specialized architectures of play in public space may be co-extant,

and partially produce, the more institutionalized versions of play: professional sports

leagues, for example, both produce the conditions by which stadiums are designed,

funded, and produced, and at the same time rely on them. Yet these more institutional

forms of play develop, according to Caillois, from those which are more spontaneous and

tumultuous:

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the movement from paidea, the unstructured and improvised play of

children, to ludus, the stabilization of rules and institutions of play, is co-extant with the

process of cultural development itself. If this is correct, it suggests that play and its

provisional designations made upon spaces, precedes and produces institutional and

persistent designations of spaces as meant-for-play and in-play. In fact, we can observe

children transforming and designating spaces interactively: a floor will be declared “hot

lava” as children leap across furniture; a tree will be chosen as “home base” and a natural

or built feature, such as a hedge or sidewalk, will be declared a boundary in a game of

tag.

151

Mary Ellen Miller and Stephen D. Houston, “The Classic Maya Ballgame and Its Architectural

Setting: a Study of Relations Between Text and Image,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics no. 14 (October

1, 1987): 47.

152

Roger Caillois, “The Definition of Play and the Classification of Games [1958],” in The Game

Design Reader : a Rules of Play Anthology, ed. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 2005), 141–142.

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If play produces the spaces in which it transpires, games also create playable and

visible representations of space. Specific references to real-world spaces have been

produced by non-digital play in the past: a chess game represents a space of war, in a

generic sense. The board game Monopoly specifically refers to early 20

century Atlantic

City, New Jersey, and hundreds of variants of the game exist which place the game

elsewhere, from Berkeley, California to South Africa. War-games designed as military

training tools and simulations in the late 18

century and onward would both reproduce

tactically relevant terrain in a generic sense—a hilltop, a stand of trees, a river—as well

as representing specific sites of conflict, historical or speculative:

The first game to break away from chess, however, was invented by

Helwig, Master of Pages to the Duke of Brunswick in 1780. This game

included 1666 squares, each coded for a different rate of movement

depending on the terrain the square represented. Playing pieces now

represented groups of men instead of a single soldier, and each unit was

rated for different movement (infantry moved 8 spaces, heavy cavalry 12,

for example). There were also special rules for such things as pontooneers

and the like. In 1795, Georg Vinturinus, a military writer from Schleswig,

produced a more complex version of Helwig's game. He modified it in

1798 by using a mapboard that depicted actual terrain on the border

between France and Belgium

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Wilbur E. Gray, “Playing War: The Applicability of Commercial Conflict Simulations to

Military Intelligence Training and Education” (Joint Military Intelligence College, 1995), 10. This was

during the occupation of the region by French forces, and the beginning of the Peasant’s War, a local

uprising after sovereignty over the region had been ceded by Austria to Napoleon in the Treaty of Campo

Formio in 1797.

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Game-play as a material activity has two initial realms of operation: the first is the

space that contains the play itself: a café in which a game of cards is played, the field in

which children will throw a Frisbee®, the living room in which a group of friends play

Little Big Planet. The play will also create and delimit spaces internal to it: the

chessboard, the bases of a baseball diamond, the shores of France in a historical war-

game about the D-Day invasion, the discard pile in a game of cards. While the processes

behind the first kind of play-space designation are straightforward, the two do meet each

other in the creation of the boundary of play: that designation is a game-rule which

establishes the space in which game-rules apply. The mechanisms for producing these

designations vary, along the paidia-ludus scale, from immanent negotiation to

institutional practices (the publication of rulebooks, the decisions of committees) and

material production practices (the design and printing of the world-map on a game of

Risk, the physical manufacture of a chessboard.

While there is some resemblance between those space-making practices in non-

digital games and their counterparts in digital ones, the distance between the two domains

of game-play is still considerable: the practices that produce playable spaces contribute to

the catalog of spatializing effects, but their status as interactive, software-based objects,

which render graphics onto screens and accept user input, is more immediate.

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Designed spatiality

Lev Manovich characterizes digital media as creating a “general trend of

computer culture to the spatialization of every cultural experience.

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” While Manovich

was specifically referring to a visual spatialization—such as Art+Com’s spatialized

representations of historical film footage set in a 3D rendering of Berlin—this

spatialization is older than the evolution of computer graphics. Electronic computation

has long been a spatial practice: the ENIAC computer was commissioned by the US

Army in 1943 to determine the ballistic trajectory of artillery, producing a modeled space

(the path of ordnance) in anticipation of a real one.

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Science-fiction author William

Gibson coined the term cyberspace to refer not just to a fantasy of an inhabitable and

navigable virtual space, but also to networked databases of socially and politically vital

information:

Cyberspace is a metaphor that allows us to grasp this place where since

about the time of the Second World War we've increasingly done so many

of the things that we think of as civilization. Cyberspace is where we do

our banking, it's actually where the bank keeps your money these days

because it's all direct electronic transfer. It's where the stock market

actually takes place, it doesn't occur so much any more on the floor of the

exchange but in the electronic communication between the world’s stock-

exchanges. So I think that since so much of what we do is happening

digitally and electronically, it's useful to have an expression that allows

154

Manovich, The Language of New Media, 87.

155

William T. Moye, ENIAC: The Army-Sponsored Revolution (Adelphi, MD: US Army Research

Laboratory, January 1996), http://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/comphist/96summary/.

155

that all to be part of the territory. I think it makes it easier for us to

visualize what we're doing with this stuff.

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Many factors can contribute to the effect of place: scalable inter-subjectivity, 2

person address to the user, human-scaled temporality, the primacy of visual description

(whether rendered or narrated), navigability and persistence. Not all of these need be

activated to produce a sense of place, but we can compare a range of computer-mediated

activities and distinguish between those which do so, and those which do not. Those

qualities which produce the sense of space (from which place-making can arise) become

apparent:

156

William Gibson, I don’t even have a modem., interview by Dan Josefsson, Television interview

for “Rapport,” November 23, 1994.

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Table 2.: Spatial experience in digital media

Less spatializing

More spatializing

 Internet messaging (Google Talk)

 Email

 Person-to-person videoconferencing

(Skype)

 Computer-assisted drawing

software (AutoCAD, Inventor)

 Arcade games (Tetris

 Music/rhythm games (Guitar Hero,

Rock Band, DJ Hero)

 Single-player 4x games

(Civilization)

 Single-player real-time strategy

games (Age of Empires)

 Chat-rooms (AOL, IRC)

 Online forums

 Group videoconferencing (e.g.,

Google+ Hangouts)

 Architectural fly-throughs

 MUDs /MOOs

 Text-adventures (e.g., Colossal

Caves/Adventure, Zork)

 Multiplayer and single-player first-

person shooters (Team Fortress,

Halo, Quake)

 3

-person action games (e.g.,

Grand Theft Auto)

 Massively-multiplayer puzzle-

games (Yo-Ho-Ho Puzzle Pirates,

Club Penguin)

By “generating a sense of place,” I mean that the interaction with the application

activates enough of the elements of spatial cognition in such a way as to motivate the user

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to locate themselves within the conceptual space created by the application, as a subject.

This is not to say that no “space” could be identified to be at work in some of the less

spatializing practices: software like AutoCAD or the Unity game engine integrated

development environment (IDE) create 3D models that can be rotated or navigated with a

cursor, and in the latter case, at any moment, the user could be said to be “at” a set of

coordinates. But it is an absence of constraints on that location and the lack of address to

the user at that place that greatly diminish the sense of being “at” that point in space.

A comparison between reading messages from a mailing list from within one’s

email client (whether locally hosted, like Mail.app and Outlook, or web-based, like

Gmail) and reading and writing messages on a web-hosted forum reveal some of the traits

which contribute to a sense of place. In both cases, the user is reading and responding to

messages in threads. In the case of the former, however there is no binding between the

content of the messages and the specific software instance used to access them: an email

message may have been written in Microsoft Outlook, which stores a database of mail

messages on the user’s hard disk, but read in a web-based mail client such as Gmail or

Yahoo mail, or read in a mail application on a smartphone. A web-based forum, in

contrast, has a single “address.” The messages are stored in a server, and while it is

possible to subscribe to the discussion and read them on a local client, there is still a

canonical visual style and formal presentation, which relies on the software used to

manage the forum. The discourse is persistent, discussions growing even when the use is

not attending to them. A forum on a given topic gives this address an identity. Users on

forums frequently use the vocabulary of place deixis, referring to the forum as a “here”

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(and other forums as a “there”) to describe the activity of other participants in the forum,

terms which are generally not used to describe one’s email inbox. Indeed, the best marker

of a “spatializing” computer-based practice may be the casual use of space/place deixical

address, and other metaphors of place, by its users.

Many computer-mediated practices that don’t involve the depiction of a space

visually still produce sense of space and place. Text-based online-chat “rooms,” from

AOL chat to IRC, reveal a sense of co-presence in its users, “changing the way

satisfactory relationships are conceived even among people who have never met

physically

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” according to a study of the psychology of online behavior. What produces

a sense of space in the digital is not only a portrayal of space, but the affordance of a

computer-based system to enable users to engage in an activity whose nearest analog was

already spatialized. The “chat room” produces the effect of a space not simply because

users can exchange messages with each other—a mail correspondence affords this, as

does telegraph—but because it reproduces some key features of a public meeting space,

such as a pub or salon: discourse occurs instantly, new discussants can enter and older

ones leave, and the conversation seems to persist even when a user leaves it. The most

available analog for this form of computer-mediated group communication is a place-

specific practice, and thus it invokes the senses of space and place in its participants. In

157

R. Peris et al., “Online Chat Rooms: Virtual Spaces of Interaction for Socially Oriented

People,” CyberPsychology & Behavior 5, no. 1 (February 2002): 43, doi:10.1089/109493102753685872.

159

the terms Benjamin Bloom’s domains of educational activity

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, the sense of place can be

produced by cognitive and affective, as well as psychomotor, domains.

The effect of place can arise when a representation of space is experience in a

human scale of time and motion. This distinguishes the activity in a first-person shooter

such as Halo, or an action/adventure game such as Grand Theft Auto, from genres in

which processes occur in much larger time-frames. Real-time strategy (RTS) games (the

name notwithstanding) compress scales of time and space: the player hovers above a field

of dozens of bodies and equipment, selecting and herding them to their positions. A

minute of play may correspond to hours or weeks. Most RTS games collapse processes

which, in real terms, take months and years (the recruitment of forces, the building of

infrastructure, the design of new technologies) into the few seconds of play it takes to

select a structure from a menu and place it on a map.

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Computer-mediated practices can also provoke a sense of place in the user, even

in the absence of a visual representation of space, when there are a series of procedures

which produce different configurations of objects in space-like containers. This is evident

in many times of interactive fiction and in text-based “virtual worlds” such as MUDs

(multi-user dungeons) and MOOs (MUDs, objected oriented.) In these sorts of works, a

158

Benjamin S Bloom, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives; the Classification of Educational

Goals, by a Committee of College and University Examiners. (New York: D. McKay, 1956).

159

The point is not to illustrate that real-time strategy games are absurd if taken as literal

simulations—they do not pretend to be, using warfare as a metaphor in the way that chess does, in order to

inform an engaging activity—but to explain why games within the genre does not generate senses of place.

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user would frequently be given a description of a setting, and a prompt for textual input.

The description of the setting will change when the player inputs a string of text which

indicates motion in one direction or another. The following is a transcript of the initial

turns of a play of Colossal Caves Adventure

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, the original text-based adventure game

from 1977. —the “>” character indicates user input:

AT END OF ROAD

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building.

Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down

a gully.

> enter building

INSIDE BUILDING

You are inside a building, a well house for a large spring.

There are some keys on the ground here.

There is tasty food here.

There is a shiny brass lamp nearby.

There is an empty bottle here.

> get all

set of keys: Taken.

tasty food: Taken.

brass lantern: Taken.

small bottle: Taken.

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Will Crowther and Don Woods, Colossal Cave Adventure (ADVENT), PDP-10 (Palo Alto, CA:

CRL, 1977).

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stream: The bottle is now full of water.

well house: That's hardly portable.

spring: That's hardly portable.

pair of 1 foot diameter sewer pipes: That's hardly portable.

> enter sewer

The stream flows out through a pair of 1 foot diameter sewer pipes. It

would be advisable to use the exit.

exit

AT END OF ROAD

> look

AT END OF ROAD

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building.

Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down

a gully.

IN A VALLEY

You are in a valley in the forest beside a stream tumbling along a rocky

bed.

> down

AT SLIT IN STREAMBED

At your feet all the water of the stream splashes into a 2-inch slit in the

rock. Downstream the streambed is bare rock.

The procedures by which the game is experienced produce the effect of place by

presenting each space as a single screen of content, revealed sequentially in response to

text strings which denote motion in space. Text input becomes movement; description

becomes place.

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Game-spaces

Videogames have been understood and analyzed as a spatial practice from the

earliest years of game studies

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, distinguished from other screen-based representational

practices and emphasizing that its spaces are not simply represented, but also

experienced, understood and navigated. Henry Jenkins placed videogames against a

history of boys’ play-spaces in the 19

century United States.

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His use of the idea of

space was not simply an allusion to obvious reproduction of space that occurs in many

games: his was a historical argument, claiming that videogames served a social and

development function for boys in the United States (and elsewhere) by compensating for

the loss of open, undeveloped outdoor spaces, in which they could play without adult

supervision, experiment with peer-oriented social organization, and learn about their

physical environments. Both the loss of public space and anxieties about child safety

mean that suburban and urban children (specifically, boys) must settle for virtual open

spaces, both as places to explore and as contexts for learning how to socialize with each

other.

161

Spatial experience in interactive fiction games is discussed in Buckles, “Interactive Fiction:

The Computer Storygame Adventure...,” 18–20. Buckles’ dissertation is the earliest known scholarly work

on videogames.

162

Henry Jenkins, “Complete Freedom of Movement: Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces,” in

From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, ed. Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 262–297.

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Jenkins’ sense of palliative nature of virtual spaces for children isn’t unique to

him. Many game designers, particularly those in Japan, have said that they were

motivated to create their games by a sense that the varieties of childhood experiences

they had enjoyed were unavailable to today’s Japanese children. Satoshi Tajiri, the

developer of Pokemon, and Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Donkey Kong and the

Zelda series, have made claims like this:

The place where I grew up [in Machida, a western Tokyo suburb] was still

rural back then. There were rice paddies, rivers, forests. It was full of

nature. Then development started taking place, and as it grew, all the

insects were driven away. I was really interested in collecting insects.

[Later, Tajiri's father tells me the other kids used to call Satoshi "Dr. Bug"

as a child.] Every year they would cut down trees and the population of

insects would decrease. The change was so dramatic. A fishing pond

would become an arcade center.

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In the production of contemporary computer games, the authoring of space

frequently precedes the creation of other components of the development process. The

first authoring tool developed by Japanese game developer Square, Inc., was the creation

of a map editor to support the creation of world-levels for the game Final Fantasy IV.

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Both spatial and temporal phenomena are co-produced by the design of procedurality, but

the models and context of the system are usually created first. This evokes a work by

Cory Arcangel 2002 art piece Mario Clouds, in which he edits out the procedural

elements of a level of Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers. The resulting work is a sequence

163

Tim Larimer, “The Ultimate Game Freak (Interview with Satoshi Tajiri),” TIME Asia,

November 22, 1999.

164

Described in an interview with HN, 2010.

164

of clouds moving across a screen, without the figure of Mario, without the platforms and

opponents, indeed without any interaction from the user whatsover. The game itself gives

a player two minutes to traverse across the space of the game before the game expires.

What is missing from the game is only slightly more uncanny than what is present: a

spatio-temporal dynamic still recognizably that of Super Mario Brothers.

Henry Jenkins claims that the design of a playable space is the central

narratological concern of games, and sees this as a continuation of spatial design in non-

digital games:

Game designers don't simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt

spaces. It is no accident, for example, that game design documents have

historically been more interested in issues of level design than plotting or

character motivation. A prehistory of video and computer games might

take us through the evolution of paper mazes or board games, both

preoccupied with the design of spaces, even where they also provided

some narrative context.

165

His article is a general defense of attention to narrative aspects within

videogames, rather than a theory of spatiality itself. He identifies three ways that game

spaces produce narrative: evocative spaces use references to known stories in other forms

in a way analogous to the design of theme-park rides (Jenkins uses Disney’s Haunted

Mansion ride as an example); enacted narratives, in which a series of local events

performed by the character, each a kind of micronarrative (his term) produce the

165

Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” in First Person: New Media as

Story, Performance, and Game, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

2003), 1–15, http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/games&narrative.html.

165

complete narrative of the game, and emergent narratives, stories generated from the

condition of the game in its play, though never authored as such. The kind of stories

which emerge from games like The Sims, or the after-action reports which remediates the

play of military games into pseudo-documentary narratives of a campaign, are

emergent.

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As useful as Jenkin’s model is, it doesn’t account for the player’s actual

experience of space in the games: how a player navigates spaces, reflects on them,

interprets them, or relates the experience of space in the game to their experience of space

outside of it. His model does correspond to the immediate location of place-making

elements in games, but not to the conceptual ones, either in production or in reception. I

propose starting with a theory of space and spatial experience itself, and then considering

how those experiences are evoked in software-based games by authors and designers.

Harvey’s model for the production of space

An undifferentiated hermeneutics of “videogame space” cannot manage an

analysis of these spatialities with any real precision. It is within genres, franchises and

specific titles that we can unwind strategies and methods by which space is produced,

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After-action reports (AAR) are popular re-tellings of games, often posted onto forums

associated with a given title. The turn-based strategy game Europa Universalis III has supported a robust

community of AAR writers, cataloged in “Duke of Wellington” (forum pseudonym), “EUIII LibrAARy,”

Paradox Interactive Forums, November 8, 2008,

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?282740-EUIII-LibrAARy.

166

represented and engaged. The Final Fantasy franchise of role-playing games can provide

a container for conceiving the practices of spatial authorship and play of videogames,

over the 30+ years that the franchise has existed. The franchise consists of dozens of

games on a range of platforms, as well as ancillary and derivative products such as

manga, anime and merchandise. The producers of the game have aspired to create ludic

Gesamtkunstwerk in the core titles of the game: as such, it offers a diversity of

spatializing practices.

The theory of space proposed by critical geographer David Harvey in his article

“Space as a Keyword”

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is well-suited to the task of creating a framework for the

analysis of spatializing effects in videogame design. Harvey extended a tripartite model

of the types of spatiality he developed in the early 1970s by intersecting it with another

tripartite model proposed by Henri Lefebvre

168

, to produce a matrix of concepts for

understanding space and spatial-temporality. Harvey intended his model as a general one

for understanding the role of political and economic forces in society in producing human

167

David Harvey, “Space as a Key Word” (presented at the Marx and Philosophy Conference,

London: Institute of Education, 2004). Harvey writes: “If I focus on Lefebvre here it is not because, as so

many now suppose in the sphere of cultural studies, that Lefebvre provides the originary moment from

which all thinking about the production of space derives (such a thesis is manifestly absurd), but because I

find it most convenient to work with Lefebvre’s distinctions in my own geographical practices.” I would

make the same observation about Harvey.

168

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell,

1991).

167

discourse and activity about space, particularly in urban contexts. My appropriation of his

framework is more modest—perhaps a little perverse—yet it may also be relevant to his

work insofar as the digital technologies that work with space supplements or even

supplants earlier strategies for conceiving of and working in space.

169

The first element of Harvey’s initial model is absolute space, typically

characterized as Newtonian or Cartesian space. This is space as a fixed system of

coordinates, which exists without reference to the objects that are then conceived as

populating or traversing it: space is a container or field, understood by an outside viewer

not itself located within that space. It contrasts with relative space, most powerfully

expressed as Einsteinian space “Space is relative in the double sense: that there are

multiple geometries from which to choose and that the spatial frame depends crucially

upon what it is that is being relativized and by whom.”

170

It is in temporal terms that the

most basic distinction between absolute and relative space is drawn: Harvey writes, “(t)he

idea of simultaneity in the physical universe, (Einstein) taught us, has to be

abandoned.”

171

Only in absolute space can one talk of space without time. Relative space

relies on spatial framings which can be brought into some tension with other spatial

169

Ffor example, navigation software which uses global-position satellite (GPS) data replaces the

use of paper maps: this turns what used a process of telescoping perception, from the impression of a plan

to the identification of line of navigation, into a series of commands generated by a computer voice-

synthesis module.

170

Harvey, “Space as a Key Word,” 3.

171

Ibid.

168

framings: the internal space of a train coach, for example, which is both a static frame of

spatial reference for the inhabitants of the coach even as it is traversing another space on

land.

The third of Harvey’s concepts is that of relational space, which he associates

with Leibniz’s critique of Newton:

(T)he relational view of space holds there is no such thing as space or time

outside of the processes that define them. (If God makes the world then He

has also chosen, out of many possibilities, to make space and time of a

particular sort.) Processes do not occur in space but define their own

spatial frame. The concept of space is embedded in or internal to process.

This very formulation implies that, as in the case of relative space, it is

impossible to disentangle space from time. We must therefore focus on the

relationality of space- time rather than of space in isolation.

172

While relative space can be expressed as a contra-position of absolute spaces in

time, relational space is created by time-bound processes themselves. Harvey, as a

geographer of urban spaces and differential global development, understands “process”

mostly in historical, economic, and socio-political terms, but we can exploit a different

idea of “process” in this regard to foreground authorial and programmatic aspects of the

production of software-based space: the procedure is inscribed in a program. Among the

operations which Harvey positions as embedding relational spaces within them are those

of collective memory: the idea of Hiroshima, the “Orient” and the “West,” of Ground

Zero, Nanking, and Abu Ghraib.

172

Ibid., 5.

169

Harvey is interested not in determining whether space is “really” absolute,

relative, or relational, but seeing how all these conceptualizations are implicit in human

social practice. In his recent work, he extends his three conceptions of space by

transecting it with another triplet, posited by Henri Lefebvre, which foregrounds

experiential (rather than conceptual) categories

173

. Lefebvre describes space as a

phenomenon produced in three different modes of human activity. Material (or

experienced) space, Harvey describes as “the world of tactile and sensual interaction with

matter,” as produced and traversed by the immediate actions of bodies and objects. This

mode of spatial phenomena includes a range of practices, from our immediate, bodily

interactions with stairs, bridges, walking surfaces, and so forth, to environmental and

microscopic experiences of space. Representations of space are spaces produced

conceptually by human representational practices, including cartography (especially

administrative and cadastral,) narratives of landscape, simulated space, scientific models

of space, spatial metaphors, painterly spaces, and (according to Harvey) cyberspace.

Spaces of representation are “the lived space of sensations, the imagination,

emotions, and meanings incorporated into our everyday lives and practices.”

174

These

include the various affective, interior and situational conditions under which humans

represent space, including memory, imagination, anxiety, fantasy, loss, shame, nostalgia,

173

Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 38–41. Lefebvre distinguishes between spaces as

perceived, as conceived, and as lived, all reveal by and as social practice. He is less concerned with the

conceptual content of these three kinds of space.

174

Harvey, “Space as a Key Word,” 8.

170

trauma and desire. The practice of representing space is drawn as much from these

internal states as from the experience of material space. While, at first, this seems like the

most elusive of the phenomenological categories, one can recall what it is like to revisit,

after a long absence, the place of one’s childhood, or a place of personal or collective

trauma, to capture how distinct this mode of spatial production is from those which are

either material or simply representational, and how it determines much of the perceptual

and navigational experience of these spaces.

Harvey organizes these types of space into a three-by-three matrix, transposing

his original conceptual modes of space onto Lefebvre’s phenomenological ones. The

resulting grid allows us to speak, for example, of absolute material (or experienced)

space, such as that created by walls, bridges and other physical, body-navigable features;

relative spaces of representation, such as that produced by the frustrations and anxieties

of a commute through dense traffic, and “relational spaces of representation,” which

includes, in his words, “surrealism; existentialism; psychogeographies; cyberspace.” It is

through this 3x3 matrix of spatial categories that we will parse the spatial elements of the

Japanese console role-playing game series Final Fantasy. Harvey implicitly positions

computer-generated spaces in his matrix as representations of space: when one is

addressing space at the level of city, nation and world, this is understandable. But the

procedural nature of gamic interaction produces the entire matrix of spatial experience,

not just the representation of space: the transference of somatic identity and place-deixis

to the avatar even engages a virtual-material space. In their procedurality, games activate

the spectrum of spatial categories.

171

Spaces of Final Fantasy

The Final Fantasy series of games spans four primary platforms in its mainline

history, with other platforms targeted for ports, adaptations and derivative works.

Platform differences account for the broadest divergences in the visual, tactile and

conceptual experiences of space within these games, but there are noticeable differences

in the use of space between games which target the same platforms, reflecting the

specific aesthetic and narrative goals of each.

The series began with Final Fantasy (ファイナルファンタジー: the English

phrase has always named the series in all its markets), released in Japan in 1987 by a

then-struggling Square, Inc. The publisher had already released a handful of unsuccessful

titles for the Nintendo Famicom, and the title reflected the belief of the game’s director

and original creator, Hironobu Sakaguchi, that it would be the company’s last release

before being forced to liquidate. The game became a paragon of the Japanese role-

playing game genre, along with then-rival Enix’s Dragon Quest title, released a year

earlier.

175

The genre which emerged from these two titles was both a continuation of, and

a response to, the Western computer-based role-playing genre. Especially influential was

the Ultima series, first produced in the early 1980s for the Apple II and other personal

175

Cėsar A. Berardini, “An Introduction to Square-Enix,” January 2006,

http://features.teamxbox.com/xbox/1554/An-Introduction-to-SquareEnix/p1/.

172

computers. In particular, the third title of the series, Ultima III: Exodus had a strong

influence on the developer of Dragon Quest.

176

The Ultima games, and other western computer-based role-playing games, were

adaptations of the non-digital practice of pen-and-paper role-playing games such as

Dungeons and Dragons, which had become popular in the late 1970s. Pen-and-paper

role-playing games (RPGs) emerged from miniature wargaming hobbyists, who grafted a

narrative and fantastic sensibility onto a medieval-themed, one-to-one

177

scale military

simulation. Within this relatively brief history—though military simulation as both a

hobby and as an element in military practice has a history dating at least as far back as the

late 18th century, the passage through Dungeons and Dragons to Final Fantasy

encompasses less than 15 years—the migrations of the space of practice accompany a

transformation in the practice of space.

Pen-and-paper role-playing games use grid paper to generate adventure maps. In

games such as Dungeons and Dragons, a game-master either prepares an event-filled

space with latent content by drawing maps, annotating them to indicate what antagonists,

inhabitants and resources they contain, or uses charts to generate the fictional place by

rolling dice, or some combination of the two approaches. The grid-space is then used in

conjunction with game-rules that dictate rates of traversal, effective ranges for weapons,

176

The chronology is detailed in Matt Barton, Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer

Role-Playing Games (Wellesley, MA: A K Peters, 2008), 208–220.

177

That is, one game-unit represented one simulated combatant, rather than a group or organized

unit of combatants.

173

line of sight, and the like. In a session of play, the players report their intentions in

navigating these spaces and responding to what they find: often, they will also be

generating a map of the terrain covered, both as a tactical tool and as a discourse-object

to manage the collective production of an imagined space. The game referee and author

of the session (the “dungeon master” or “game master”) will tell the players what they

“see.” This is a distributed process, described by Mizer as “a polyphonous set of

overlapping utterances.

178

” His analysis of the negotiated creation of fictional space

includes this transcript of players:

1 DM OKAY. You find yourself in a la::rge room. At this point it

2 extends east and west farther than you can see:. And it goes

3 ↑north↑and ↓south↓ to the limits of your vision: (.5) which

4 is be-tween forty and sixty feet without pacing off. (1)

5 NICK [So we can't see anywalls at all right? heheheh]

6 DM [It's like an east to we:st-east to west] corridor: forty to

7 sixty feet=

8 CHRIS [Right.]

9 NICK =I DREW A DOT.

10 CHRIS [That's us.]

178

Nicholas Mizer, “Hey Grimm, I’m Not in the Room, Right? Negotiations of Space and Place in

Dungeons & Dragons” (presented at the American Anthropological Association Conference, Montreal,

2011), 13.

174

11 TOM [Okay.]

12 NICK WE'RE THERE.

13 ALAN Basically we're outdoors with a ceiling [right now.]

14 TOM [So::]

15 ↑East↑ and west [are about sixty feet to either side.]

16 DM [Are-yeah. Um:]

17 [Ceiling a-ppears] to be:

18 NICK [No wait-he s-] We can't see any walls.

19 TOM He said east and west are [about] sixty feet to either si:de

20 DM [No.]

21 Y-y-no.

22 TOM [Oh::]

23 ALAN [That's] as far as we can see.

24 DM Yeah.

25 ALAN We're outside with a ceiling.

26 GREG How high is the ceiling?

179

Though Mizer doesn’t use the term, this process is an instance of distributed

cognition. Ed Hutchins’ landmark study of naval navigation described the coordination

between crew members on the bridge of a U.S. Navy vessel maneuvering a ship through

the San Diego channel

180

. Just as the D&D players use pen, paper and overlapping

179

Ibid., 13–14.

180

Edwin L. Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

175

utterances to confirm, modify and collectively produce a functional model of a fictional

space, so do Hutchins’ navigators use radio telemetry, drafting tools, calculators and hand

calculations to collectively produce a functional model of a physical space.

These players create material objects—hand-drawn maps (Figure 27)—used to

support the calculations that constitute the simulation, such as the relative positions of

opponents, the lines of sight, distances travelled within a cycle of time, etc. When these

calculations are performed on a computer, players no longer directly perform this

representational practice

181

. Instead, the visual representation of space is constrained by

technological considerations, and the perception and cognition of space becomes a matter

worked out in concert with the game system’s interface.

181

There are interstitial practices, by which computer systems are used to perform calculations

within the context of pen-and-paper games, or—particularly for text-based role-playing games such as the

early Zork games—in which players produce their own hand-drawn cartographies of the game spaces as

mnemonic and tactical aids.

176

Figure 27.: Player-created dungeon map. From Mizer, 2011

The Japanese reception of computer-based role-playing games differs from the

experiences of players and designers in North America, in that there is little sign of a

culture of table-top fantasy role-playing games in Japan before the production of

computer-based games. Dungeons and Dragons itself was translated into Japanese

177

in1985, the same year that Dragon Quest was released, and the Ultima and Wizardry

games were already in widespread Japanese distribution by this time. While the acronym

“RPG” denotes pen-and-paper role-playing games in the US and other Anglophone

regions, it denotes computer-based games in Japan, and the pen-and-paper games are

referred to as テーブルトーク RPG (“table-talk RPG”, or TRPG.)

182

Thus, the

representation of space associated with the RPG in Japan has been primarily computer-

based from the outset: the creation of space as a practice performed by a collaborating

group of players in the sense described by Mizer were not part of the experiences or

expectations of the domestic Japanese market, but character-driven, fantastic stories of

manga and anime were. The “roles” of role-playing in Japanese role-playing games are

roles as function, and the player-driven theatrical aspects of pen-and-paper role-playing

are instead replaced by story practices, which owe as much to cinema and television as

they do to military simulation. This is the historical context for the development and

domestic reception of the original Final Fantasy games.

Using Harvey’s and Lefebvre’s categories for the production of space, the

platform produces, first, absolute and relative material space. Along with the genre-

specific conventions for the control schema and the conventions of narrative world-build,

platform also contributes considerably to the structuring of material space. That it does so

with a symbolic, representational system (programming, digital and digitized artwork) is

182

Shunichi Furutani, “What Is TRPG?(TRPG ってなに？),” TRPG.net, 2003,

http://www.trpg.net/WhatisTRPG.html.

178

an inversion of the typical characteristics of spatial relationships, but this is the nature of

the production of spatial phenomenon authored by computer software: the representation

of space in a computer is directly actionable, rather than referring to either another lived

space (as a map refers to its territory) or a fictional space.

Material space and the production of bodies

When videogames produce graphical and processual representations of space,

they produce them within the constraints created by the hardware and software platforms

on which the games run. The initial Final Fantasy games produced space within the

constraints and affordances determined by their target platforms. The first three titles in

the mainline Final Fantasy series

183

were created for the Nintendo Famicom (re-branded

as the Nintendo Entertainment system, the NES, in North American and European

markets) in 1987, 1988 and 1990. . The Famicom was an 8-bit video game console

system, developed by Nintendo Japan and released in 1985. It was capable of producing a

video display of 256 pixels by 240, and displaying 53 colors

184

. The Famicom lacked true

3D display capabilities (except by isometric projection) – that is, it lacked a processor

which could process models drafted for display in three axis (x, y, and z) on a timescale

suitable for player experience.

183

Only the first title was originally released outside of Japan.

184

Patrick Diskin, “Nintendo Entertainment System Documentation v 1.0” (NESdev, August

2004), http://nesdev.com/NESDoc.pdf.

179

The next three titles in the series were produced for Nintendo’s follow-up

platform, the Super Famicom or Super NES system, and released between 1991 and 1994.

Confusingly, Final Fantasy IV was released as Final Fantasy II in North America, and

Final Fantasy VI was released as Final Fantasy III, while Final Fantasy V was not

originally released outside of Japan—for the purposes of this chapter, I will use the

Japanese numerations. The latter-generation console provides more processing and

graphical power than its predecessor: the Super Famicom was built around a Ricoh 5A22

processor on a 16 bit core with a 21 MHz clock rate, while the original Famicom used a

MOS 6502 8-bit processor with a 1.79 MHz clock rate, essentially processing half the

data at any given cycle at about one-tenth the speed. In addition to the greater processing

speed, the Super Famicom featured a picture processing unit (PPU) which allowed the

system to produce scenes and images with several thousand colors, compared to 53 colors

of the earlier console. The earlier console could display up to 64 sprites

185

at time without

reloading the screen, with each sprite being up to 8 x 16 pixels; the Super Famicom could

display 128 sprites of up to 64 x 64 pixels. While the Super Famicom could produce an

interlaced resolution of 512 x 448 pixels, few games would use that resolution, and most

would be produced using the 256 x 224 progressive scan resolution: the same as the

earlier model. What this all means is that individual elements in the display field could be

more detailed and more animated in the Super Famicom games, but the backgrounds and

185

A sprite is a two-dimensional image which is rendered separately from the rendering of the

scene, like a game piece on a board.

180

fields of play were generally shown with the same resolution, though with greater color

variation and a much more variegated palette. The fourth through sixth Final Fantasy

titles exploited the affordances of the SNES to create graphic imagery at higher

resolution and with the richer color palette, but the general style and schema of depiction

was relatively stable: pixel-based spites performing looped animations on a static

background, punctuated with top-down maps. Video game platforms are systems of

computer processing power and graphical display, as well as systems of interface that

give players a specific vocabulary for interaction. The sequels for a given platform (e.g.,

Final Fantasy II and III) generally made only incremental changes from the original

design. The Nintendo Famicom and Super Famicom games (I—VI) used three types of

displayed spaces: city/dungeon scaled space, in which the display screen bounded a

scaled region analogous to one or two city blocks; battle space, in which the characters

would be depicted individually; and countryside/landscape space. Transitions between

them were well-marked. The player would move their avatar onto an icon marking either

a town or, often, a cave entrance. Some event would usually presage the transition to

battle-space, such as dramatic music. Within any given scale, the navigation of spaces on

Nintendo platforms is generally continuous.

Final Fantasy VII was released in 1997 globally: beginning with this title, the

franchise would synchronize its numeration, and the publishers would pursue globally

coordinated marketing and release strategies. This and subsequent titles in the franchise

were developed for the Sony PlayStation family of videogame consoles. These systems

181

all had dedicated processors for the display of 3D models, supported disc-based storage,

and promoted as creating a cinematic and “immersive” experience.

186

With the added

technological capacity came an increased need for labor: the greatest increases in the

scale of production accompany shifts in platforms (Table 1).

Table 3.: Final Fantasy releases, 1987 to 2012

Game

Year

187

Platform

188

Credited

contributors

189

Final Fantasy I

January 1987

Nintendo

Famicom/Nintendo

Entertainment System

Final Fantasy II

December 1988

Nintendo

Famicom/Nintendo

Entertainment System

Final Fantasy III

April 1990

Nintendo

Famicom/Nintendo

Entertainment System

Final Fantasy IV

November 1991

Nintendo Super Famicom/

Super Nintendo

Entertainment System

22 (“special

thanks” to 21

others)

Final Fantasy V

December 1992

Nintendo Super Famicom/

186

The PlayStation system was developed in response to a failed business partnership between

Sony and Nintendo: see Edge Staff, “The Making of: PlayStation,” Edge Online, April 24, 2009,

http://www.edge-online.com/features/making-playstation/.

187

Year and month of first release on initial platform in Japan.

188

These are platforms for initial release: most of the games would be ported to other platforms

several times.

189

Information collected from MobyGames (http://www.mobygames.com), the standard database

of information about videogames.

182

Game

Year

187

Platform

188

Credited

contributors

189

Super Nintendo

Entertainment System

Final Fantasy VI

October 1994

Nintendo Super Famicom/

Super Nintendo

Entertainment System

43 (“special

thanks” to 17

others)

Final Fantasy VII

January 1997

Sony PlayStation

140+ (including

several outsourced

agencies)

190

Final Fantasy VIII

February 1999

Sony PlayStation

105+ (included

several agencies)

Final Fantasy IX

July 2000

Sony PlayStation

330 for production

120+ for post

production

(including several

contracting

agencies)

Final Fantasy X

July 2001

Sony PlayStation 2

485+ production

Numerous outside

contractors

Final Fantasy

191

May 2002

Sony PlayStation 2,

Microsoft Windows,

Microsoft Xbox 360

[unavailable]

Final Fantasy X-2

March 2003

Sony PlayStation 2

330+

Final Fantasy XII

March 2006

Sony PlayStation 2

560+

Many aggregated

credits

Final Fantasy XIII

December 2009

Sony PlayStation 3,

Microsoft Xbox 360

880+

Includes legal

team, designers of

Crystal Tools

190

Beginning with Final Fantasy VII, business units and roles, such as marketing and customer

service, would also get credited in game material.

191

Online games such as Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV have continuous production and

support cycles, with different staffing needs and organizational structures from those of single-player

games.

Table 3. continued

183

Game

Year

187

Platform

188

Credited

contributors

189

Multiple outside

contractors for

motion-capture and

other functions

Final Fantasy

XIV

September 2010

Microsoft Windows

[unavailable]

Final Fantasy

XIII-2

January 2012

Sony PlayStation 3,

Microsoft Xbox 360

[unavailable]

New roles and job functions appear in the credits of each new generation of game

titles. Increases in graphic performance creates a greater demand for artists, and just as a

map editor was the first in-house tool developed in SquareSoft, used to produce maps that

utilized the thousands of colors which became available on the new platform, in the

development of Final Fantasy IV (the first title for the Super Famicom) so too was a map

designer—Yasushi Matsumura—first credited on that title.

192

Nobuo Uematsu was

credited as a sole composer for most of the titles created for the Nintendo platforms, in

which music was synthesized on the 6502 microprocessor: composition was essentially

programming, and no performers were engaged. The Sony platforms provided the storage

and playback capabilities which allows games to play pre-recorded music, and thus for

192

MobyGames contributors, “Final Fantasy II (1991) SNES Credits.,” MobyGames, accessed

November 3, 2012, http://www.mobygames.com/game/snes/final-fantasy-ii_/credits.

Table 3. continued

184

Final Fantasy XIII, multiple sound engineers, pop singers, and the Warsaw Philharmonic

Orchestra all receive credit.

193

Final Fantasy X was the first of the franchise’s titles to be produced for the Sony

PlayStation 2. The platform afforded the designers increases in storage capacity: while

games for the original PlayStation were shipped on compact disks, with a single title

taking up as many as 4 CDs, the PlayStation 2 included a DVD player

194

. The system also

provided greater processing power and video resolution than its resolution, particularly

for rendering 3D models. The PlayStation 2’s computational architecture revolves around

the “Emotion Engine,” described as “a combination CPU and DSP Processor, whose

main function is simulating 3D worlds.”

195

The world-spaces of the PlayStation-based games, particularly those created for

the PlayStation 2 and later, are implemented as a series of zones: characteristic spaces

which often also have an architectural, aesthetic unity. The PlayStation’s architecture

dedicates considerable resources to graphical display. Because they used read-only discs

(CDs, DVDs and most recently Blue-Ray discs), rather than cartridges. the continuous

spaces within a given style of space found in games for the Nintendo platforms are not

easily produced on Sony platforms: content is loaded from spinning discs, which is a

193

The publishers of the Final Fantasy games release soundtracks of the games as ancillary

merchandise, including remix albums and solo piano arrangements.

194

DVDs can store about 10 times as much data as CDs.

195

Jon Stokes, “Sound and Vision: A Technical Overview of the Emotion Engine,” Ars Technica,

March 2000, http://arstechnica. com/reviews/1q00/playstation2/ee-1. html.

185

slower process than loading it from a read-only memory (ROM) cartridge. Instead, as a

spatial transition occurs, the required data is loaded into the working memory of the

PlayStation. As the load times to these transitions could be noticeable as the disks would

spin, it was more effective to turn these transitions into temporal and narratological ones:

the movement from one area to another produces “chapters.” Moving into a new region

moved the calendar forward, while remaining within one created a perpetual “now.”

While zone-transitions become less continuous, transitions from travel to battle

would become more continuous as the representations of characters in the navigational

screens increased in resolution and scale. Beginning with Final Fantasy XII, the

transition from distinct navigation-interface to conflict-interface was replaced by a more

continuous experience. Conceptually and ludologically, the modes are still distinct: the

game indicates that combat mode is at-hand by drawing of lines of hostile force,

indicating that a combatant was targeting a character

196

. Thus, there are two trends in the

history of the game franchise: the convergence of relative spaces, as movement from one

place to another is depicted within the same mode as the approach and engagement of an

opponent (where in earlier games these moments were depicted in separate modes) and

the division of space along geographic (zones as aesthetic and landscape ideas) and

temporal line (zones as chapters.)

196

The temporalities of battle in the games would go through various changes as well, and would

act as a differentiator between titles. However, these design differences were less dependent on platform

considerations.

186

Representations of space (and place): producing worlds

At least four of the worlds of the Final Fantasy games are named, and in the

naming of the worlds, sub-franchises have been created. The world of Ivalice, for

example, was introduced in the game Final Fantasy Tactics, and revised and reused for a

number of other games, including Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story. These

fictional worlds are often themed and modeled after regions and periods of human

history: in recreating Ivalice for Final Fantasy XII, teams of world designers traveled

through Turkey to study its architecture and design.

197

The entire line of Final Fantasy

games does not share a single setting: instead, a collection of elements and mechanics

unite them, including creatures (“chocobos,” “moogles”), character classes (“red mages,”

“dragoons”) and technologies. The sub-franchises extend the appeal of titles to the

audiences which embraced the initial titles set in those worlds, and are part of the Square-

Enix strategy of “polymorphic content,” the creation and accumulation of narrative

properties which can be deployed on multiple platforms, and appear in film and print

publication, over several years. The more traditional idea of a “sequel”—a continuation

of a story using already-known characters and settings—is at work in the “minor

versions” of the main line of games: Final Fantasy X-2 is a continuation of the story of

Final Fantasy X, and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children

198

is an animated feature set a

few years after the events of the game Final Fantasy VII.

197

IGN Staff, “Final Fantasy XII Q&A,” IGN, November 20, 2003,

http://www.ign.com/articles/2003/11/20/final-fantasy-xii-qa.

198

Tetsuya Nomura, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, Feature, Anime (Square Enix, 2005).

187

The fictional setting of the Final Fantasy X was a departure from the preceding

titles. Final Fantasy VI, VII and VIII in particular, and to a lesser extent Final Fantasy IX,

featured worlds of fantastic technology and “steampunk,” retro-futurist aesthetics, gritty

urban environments, and projectile weaponry. They were also identified as having

architectures that evoked a European sensibility. The designers of Final Fantasy X—

particularly producer Yoshinori Kitase and character designer Tetsuya Nomura—

associated a move to a more traditional fantasy ambience to an aesthetic turn away from

“the West” and pursue an Asian ambience and themes.

199

Final Fantasy X is set in a world called Spira, which is dominated by a religious

institution called Yevon. Spira endures a cyclical cataclysm: the destruction of any center

of population greater than a village by Sin, a huge, armored monstrosity which came

from the ocean. The doctrines of the church of Yevon teach that Sin was punishment for

the technological and scientific aspirations of earlier generations of Spira’s inhabitants. It

is revealed later in the game that this was not the case, and that the religious institution

itself was complicit with the destruction wrought by Sin

200

199

Kitase Yoshinori et al., Interview with Final Fantasy X developers, interview by Enterbrain

staff, January 19, 2001, http://www.mmcafe.com/news/news01-9-01.htm.

200

Tensions between magical/religious and technological ideologies are common themes of Final

Fantasy narratives. Other common tropes are memory and trauma, friendship and isolation, and complicity.

Addressing these issues exhaustively is beyond the scope of this chapter: for a deeper treatment, see Fabio

Calamosca, Final Fantasy: Vivere Tra Gli Indigeni Del Cyberspace (UNICOPLI, 2003). These tropes are

188

The establishing sequence is set in the city of Zanarkand, a fantastic-technological

metropolis with an immediately apparent vibrant popular culture and broadcast media.

The avatar which the player controls is a character named Tidus, an up-and-coming

sports superstar, on his way to a professional “Blitzball” match. The spatial

representations are on a local, urban scale, although these are somewhat constrained:

there are few open urban spaces in Final Fantasy games, and instead, there are

interconnected zones of passage, resembling the Situationist topographies of Paris as a

system of nodes. Final Fantasy games are not open simulations of urban space in the way

that Sim City or even Grand Theft Auto are, at least not on the scale of the single avatar

moving through them.

This scale of player-space relationships persists—that is, a broader geographical

representation of space is not yet presented—when the initial apocalyptic event, the

destruction of the city of Zanarkand, destroys this space before it can be explored or

understood. The player must simply run in one direction, while learning how to operate

the basic combat mechanics of the game; after a brief set of battles, the player is

transported to another time-place, and is left with an unsatisfied curiosity about

Zanarkand, the setting of initial play. From this new place

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, the player begins a process

well-represented in other forms of Japanese cultural production, including literature, film, television, and

manga.

201

Within the diegesis, the relative status of these spaces rather elusive. Later in the game it is

revealed that the initial space did exist in the “historical” past of the moment. The instance of it experienced

by the player, as the character, Tidus, was a phantasmal space generated by the collective memory of those

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of narrative and spatial traversal which resembles and reflects that of the genre at

franchise: “forward” progression through space (that is, from the known and “cleared”

region to the unknown; to another place directed by the conditions of the game) which is

slow and fraught with challenges.

The game is divided into zones. The first time the player enters a new zone, the

game announces that a new chapter has: the temporal dimension is managed by the

navigation of space (one can backtrack one’s steps without reversing the movement of

the syuzhet. Upon entering a new zone for the first time, the name of the zone (“Besaid,”

“Kilika,” “Zanarkand Ruins”) is flashed across the screen, along with a panning shot of

the zone’s typical landscape. These markers serve to indicate to the player that they are,

indeed, making progress through the storyline.

Players need not make this progress immediately. Most Final Fantasy games

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adhere to the level-up conventions of the role-playing game genre, which it shares with

table-top role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. Characters are a bundle of

statistics that simulate traits and abilities, and these statistics are modified by the

experience of the character. In practice, every battle that a character fights provides it

with “experience points.” By earning experience points, a character will “level up,”

destroyed in the original cataclysm. Perhaps this reflects a desire by the game’s authors to embrace the

illusory values of jidei-geki.

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Final Fantasy II removed the job-specific leveling system with an open-ended skill system.

Table-top role-playing games have also sought to replace the leveling convention with a skill-acquisition

one: Runequest (Chaosium, 1978) is a notable early effort.

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becoming stronger, more difficult to destroy, and become capable of various feats of

combat, magic, and the like that were previously inaccessible to it. The result is a kind of

statistical Bildungsroman. It is possible, although time-consuming, to repetitively kill

weaker opponents in the game to increase one’s level in such a way as to make the

traversal of zones trivial. The “experience points/level” mechanic is nearly ubiquitous to

this genre of games, and exceptions to this mechanic are often noted for just this

reason

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Final Fantasy games often include mini-games: a mise en abîme by which the

characters encounter and play games within the diegesis: one might call it “diegetic

play,” analogous to “diegetic sound” in film. Final Fantasy IV features “Tetra Master” as

a pervasive mini-game: a card game popular on the continent throughout which the

characters traveled. These mini-games have their own modes and interfaces, and are often

developed semi-autonomously by dedicated designers and artists as part of the

development effort. Frequently, these games are depicted as professionalized, with in-

game tournament-level play occurred in designated arena. The mini-game in Final

Fantasy X is a fantastic variant of water polo called “blitzball,” played in suspended

globes of water

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. It is possible to play blitzball as a stand-alone sports game, along with

league management mechanics that involved recruiting players throughout the world of

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The Zelda series of games published by Nintendo, among others, does not use this mechanic,

relying instead on changes in player inventory to differentiate abilities and constraints.

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Tidus is a professional blitzball athlete, as was his father.

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Spira. The player can recruit, manage and compete with a blitzball team during the

indefinitely extensible period before the game’s denouement, the period in which the

world is most freely accessible.

The tactic of “leveling up,” of seeking out story-irrelevant combat in order to

improve the statistics of the players’ avatars

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occurs outside of the fictional temporal

progress of the game, which is driven forward by movement into new zones. The passage

through geographic space creates the tempo for the passage of fictional/historical time.

Playing Tidus, the player is displaced several times before being given more

latitude over their own navigation. After this first cataclysmic displacement, he finds

himself swimming and wandering through half-submerged ruins. He is later picked up by

a ship over which he has no control, and is eventually again thrown ashore to a strange

place, without any information or understanding of the relative position (in time or space)

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Most Japanese RPGs differ from most western RPGs by representing a group, rather than an

individual, as the unit of play. This could be interpreted broadly as a cultural difference—the well-worn

and perhaps overstated observation of the importance of the group over the individual in Japanese culture

(the observation leaves too many questions about the construction of the self and subjectivity unanswered,

and fails to accounts for narratives and games which do foreground heroic individuals)—but it is also an

adaptation of the dynamics of the tabletop RPG, which foregrounds group tactics and coordination, to the

computer/console. Representing a party of characters, rather than a single character, as the unit of play is

truer to the origins of the RPG, as well creating tactical play options that do not arise in an action/adventure

game with a one-to-one-to-one player/avatar/character relationship. In any case, in Final Fantasy X,

experience points are awarded to the entire party, but the player determines what skills and abilities will be

augmented for each character.

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of this place with regard to those traversed earlier. As play and story progress, the player

begins constructing a coherent model of the spaces of Spira, of the relative positions of its

regions and cities. In most Final Fantasy games, new modes of transportation become

available to the player at critical moments of the story. These modes of transportation

have become brand-icons of their own. One is the chocobo, a large, flightless yellow bird

that is ridden as a mount, which has appears in most Final Fantasy games since Final

Fantasy II. Players who have access to a chocobo are able to navigate spaces more

quickly through which they had “walked.” A player riding a chocobo avoids the random

combat which otherwise besets players moving on foot through the games’ terrain.

Another of these iconic modes of transportation is the airship, which reduces space to

connected nodes—the player flying in an airship simply arrives at a new region with

traversing the zones between. Acceleration in Final Fantasy is frequently about what the

player avoids, rather than what the player experiences. Each mode of transportation

presents certain landscapes as navigable and impassible: in Final Fantasy III, the player

will get access to different airships which may allow access undersea, yet be unable to

cross over a mountain. Toward the end of the game, the player has access to a flotilla of

airships that account for every possible terrain.

Velocity compresses the experience of place and creates by-passed landscapes, or

spaces of transition. As the player moves quickly through a space she which one once

moved slowly, she may experience a sense of mastery: one based not on defeating

opponents, but on not even encountering them. A landscape that was novel becomes a

marking-place for the relative position of the player and the destination.

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Spaces of representation: Spira revisited

Final Fantasy X was a commercially and critically successful game, and Square,

Inc. decided to produce a sequel, Final Fantasy X-2, released in 2003. Much of the

software and resources of the original game were re-purposed for the sequel: as indicated

in table 1, the has a somewhat smaller production teams than the initial game, and a

cursory examination of the credits for Final Fantasy XIII-2 suggests that this is a trend.

This game is also set in Spira; the protagonists of the sequel are three young women, two

of whom were lead characters of the original game. Tidus, who vanishes at the end of the

first game, is a memory, and the loss of Tidus motivates Yuna, one of the three women;

he only appears toward the end of the game.

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A short film, created as bonus content for one of the later editions of the game

acted as a narrative bridge between the two titles and provided the internal impetus for

producing the sequel

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. While the two titles are set in the same world and feature many

of the same characters, the tone of the world and even the dynamics of play are

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Eventually, Tidus is revealed to be a phantasmic re-imagining of a historical blitzball player,

Shuyin, who was killed in a long-past war. In an optimal traversal of the game, however, the player can

actually revive Tidus and reunite him with Yuna.

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Jeremy Dunham, “Final Fantasy X-2 Developer Interview,” IGN, November 24, 2003,

http://www.ign.com/articles/2003/11/25/final-fantasy-x-2-developer-interview. Aside from the obvious

commercial motivation, the sequel was meant to offer the possibility of overcoming the tragic overtones of

the conclusion of the first game with the possibility of a non-tragic ending. The use of sequels to overcome

tragic loss would be repeated by the producers of the Final Fantasy series when they released a number of

products which continued the story of Final Fantasy VII.

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dramatically different. Whereas Final Fantasy X begins with a mysterious world which is

slowly, painstakingly uncovered through pilgrimage, the sequel, set two years after the

end of the events of the first game, immediately places the protagonists in control of an

airship, with full access to a world which is completely familiar to players of the first

game. The space of representations has changed from one created by foreboding,

expectation and cataclysm to one dominated by a lighter sense of play, by often comic

sensibilities, despite the dramatic conditions of near-apocalypse which inevitably appear.

Yuna was the primary love-interest in the first game: she is a summoner who had been

intended as a sacrifice to mollify the destructive anger of Sin.

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Having survived what

was meant to be her moment of world-saving self-sacrifice, and now is faced with a new

kind of existential crisis: what to do with the rest of her life, after her world-historical

moment.

The music of the sequel, too, dramatizes the shift in mood. Whereas the first title

favored orchestral program music, the sequel tends toward popular, jazz, and even funk-

inflected sounds. In light of the conscious “turn to Asia” that motivated the directorial

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Every 20 years, a new summoner would “become” Sin, and then be replaced after two more

decades. This cycle was ended by the player’s activities in the first game. If the interpretation of the two

games as an allegory for the predicament of Japan before and after the Pacific War holds, one could see Sin

as representing the colonialist model of hegemony, with the quest to play Yuna as Sin connoting Japan’s

imperialist project and the dream of the Greater East-Asian Co-prosperity Sphere. This reading would then

interpret her survival—her not becoming Sin—as the collapse of that project and the accompanying end of

Western colonialism in the East Asia/Pacific regions.

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team of these titles, it is easy to see allegorical references to the experience of Japan

during and after the Pacific War. If the turns of complicity and ironies of memory, the

slow construction of spaces through travel evoke the national memory up to and through

the war period, the sequel suggests the giddy consumerism and conflicted identities of the

postwar period.

The three protagonists begin the game not as sports heroes, but as pop stars. At

least so it seems: the pop idol whose performance in what was the sports arena in which

Tidus played turns out to be an imposter, Leblanc, disguised as Yuna. Leblanc had stolen

a device called “the Garment Grid,” which allows its user to change their wardrobe

instantly. These wardrobe transformations are also the mechanism by which the player

shifts from one player-role to another (e.g., from an attacking role to a support role.) If

the first game was one of almost modernist melancholy and historical inevitably, the

latter is one of post-modern irony, of playful subjectivities. Final Fantasy X-2 celebrates

the ecstatic freedom of a culture of the commodity and the spectacle, in no small part

because it is still based on the absence of the state of war. That this peace accompanies a

false, masked identity presages a narrative in which dissembling and misrepresentation

plays a fundamental part.

The differences in tone between the two games are inseparable from the

differences in the experience of the games as spaces. The sequel begins in a well-

understood world: movement begins as a return, a “checking in” to the state of a place.

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The matrix of spatialities revisited

David Harvey’s matrix was designed to provide an interpretive frame for human

spatiality in general, and particularly for the geo-political, the political-economic, and the

urban. Re-purposing this matrix to track space-making activities in video games may

seem somewhat perverse, but it is not without precedent. Edward Castranova, an

economist and sociologist of virtual worlds, describes them as “radically manufacturable

places that can be shared by many people at once,”

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and called the preferential attention

given by many gamers to them as an “exodus.” Computer-mediated spaces aren’t simply

representations of space: they provoke the full gamut of spatial experience, at least as an

imago.

I am applying this matrix at a specific scale, to those produced immediately by

the game itself. It does not include the living room or desktop of the player, or the

environmental context of play. Such a scale of inquiry might be worthwhile, and

complement our analysis by becoming a general theory of spaces of gaming, obscuring

the ways in which the game as an authored system produces these spatial effects. We do,

however, include the player-avatar dynamic. We see character/avatar/player relations as a

deictic displacement across multiple modes (that is, as the way in which the “as if” of the

game fictions can recruit the player into space-production) rather just a representational

strategy. Attention to only the fictive space of the game would diminish the materiality of

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Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games (University

of Chicago Press, 2005), 8.

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the spaces produced. This “middle ground” lets us consider the production of spatial

experience as a kind of authorship: an idea that will be expanded and revised in the next

section.

Table 4.: Videogame spaces and Harvey's matrix of spatialities

Material space

(experienced space)

Representation of

space

(conceptualized

space)

Space of

representation

Absolute space

Rendered 3D space;

physics; buildings,

trees, grass, road;

barriors, walls,

rivers that affect

navigation.

Map displays; inter-

titles;landscape

features.

The game world and

its fiction as an

object of

contemplation; the

game world as

traversed by a

habituated player.

Relative space

Modes of

transporation and

acceleration:

chocobo space,

airship space; scaled

space. Spatial

relationship as

proximity to target

or adversary

Airship destination

menus; nodes and

linkages; zone

transitions; hidden

and revealed spaces

(secret doors,

corridors);

minigame (blitzball)

spaces.

Affective play-

spaces: melancholy,

anxiety/tension –

sense of

threat/excitement in

high-risk zones and

boss fights; shifts of

attention motivated

by changes in level

of threat and

comfort; cut-scene

spaces

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Relational space

Relationship

Narrated space;

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Collective and

210

This kind of space is thematized within Final Fantasy X through various tropes: the

“dreaming” of Zanarkand by the disembodied spirits of its former residents, the massive space of the

interior of “Sin,” who is both nemesis and a region of its own, and even the.

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Within Final Fantasy X, and X-2, one of the NPCs,a wandering scholar named FFX, Maechen,

periodically meets the party and reveals various historical and “scientific” aspects of Spira.

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Material space

(experienced space)

Representation of

space

(conceptualized

space)

Space of

representation

between “battle

space” vs.

“traversing space”

within a mode; the

pace of threat as

player seeks to

either traverse

quickly or mines an

area to accumulate

experience.

the diegetic

accounting of the

spaces of the world

by in-game

characters;

aestheticized space;

rendered

architectures and

landscapes with art-

historical references

(e.g.

Turkey/Ivalice.)

personal memories

of spaces, both

player-produced and

authored. Multiple

representations of

space (pre- and

post-cataclysmic.)

Diasporic spaces

and spaces of return.

Material space (experienced space) is, in game terms, the features that produce the

possibility of spatial cognition and the perception/fiction of a physical space; the space

“experienced” by the avatar. This space is most subject to the constraints and affordances

of the platform. The representation of space in games is very much like other

representations of space: it can include maps understood as maps, labels on regions, and

interface elements which indicate navigability and impassability. The spaces of

representation are those aspects of the game system which take some stance—affective,

memorial, documentary—to the representation of space.

Final Fantasy XI: multiplayer games as constrained spaces

The spatial effects described above are authored and designed in a fairly

conventional sense: they are produced by a team of creators with various systems of

authority and delegation to generate a fairly stable software-based experience. The

experiences of place which occur emerge from the player’s commitment to the project of

Table 4. continued

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the game, attending to its tasks and the objects which attain them and visually consuming

the sculpted and animated assets of the computer-sustained world.

Final Fantasy XI is both a virtual world and a massively-multiplayer role-playing

game: the latter is a subset of the former. Virtual worlds are based on networked

software, and almost always rely on client-server architecture.

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They rely on spatial

metaphors and usually involve the visual rendering of a shared space inhabited by the

avatars of multiple players. They are persistent: they continue to operate whether or not

any given computer user is accessing it. This is a consequence of the client-server

architecture: the “world” is a set of databases and procedures and state running on a

server, which the client software, running on the player’s computer, refers to in order to

produce a representation of a small subset of that state: the visual information and

systematic behaviors that produce the “there-ness” and “then-ness” of the player’s

presencing in the virtual world. This is a kind of spatio-temporality unlike that of a

single-player game, which instantiates a world only when the user runs it.

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A virtual world can be implemented as part of a time-sharing system or other system by which

multiple users interact on a single computer: this is the original model for games such as Oubliette (1983),

which ran on the PLATO system. Peer-to-peer virtual worlds are still generally experimental, although see

Erica Naone, “Peer-to-Peer Virtual Worlds,” MIT Technology Review, April 16, 2008,

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/409912/peer-to-peer-virtual-worlds/. Client-server architectures

are overwhelmingly the dominant model for provisioning virtual worlds.

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Massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are virtual worlds

with additional constraints: they have all the features that I described above, as well as

game logics and genre-oriented settings and themes. The largest current MMORPG game

is World of Warcraft, a game with about 10.2 million active users as of 2012

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. The most

heavily-trafficked virtual world that is not a massively-multiplayer online role playing

game is Second Life, by Linden Labs, which peaked at 90,000 concurrent users in

2009.

214

This section examines one of the two members of the Final Fantasy game

franchise which are also massively-multiplayer online role playing games. These games

exist in a different sort of temporality than the other, single-player games. Because they

participate in a persistent and global time, they can, as spaces and places themselves,

intersect with external events, and put players into direct relationships with each other.

213

Adam Holisky, “World of Warcraft Subscriber Numbers Remain at 10.2 Million,” WoW

Insider, May 9, 2012, http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/05/09/world-of-warcraft-subscriber-numbers-remain-at-

10-2-million/.

214

Tateru Nino, “Second Life User-concurrency Spends Year in Slow Decline,” Massively,

December 25, 2009, http://massively.joystiq.com/2009/12/25/second-life-user-concurrency-spends-year-in-

slow-decline/.Due to the different business models and reporting practices between the producers of the

two virtual worlds, equivalent figures are difficult to come by—as a free-to-play game, there is nothing

corresponding to a “subscriber” in Second Life—but the total concurrent usage for World of Warcraft

hovers around a million players: over ten times the number of Second Life players.

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On April 9, 2005, the Tokyo-based servers which hosted the game Final Fantasy

XI came under a distributed denial-of-service attack, an onslaught of network requests

from a botnet of compromised computers. This attack made it impossible for the

thousands of players of the game to play for several days, until Square, Inc., the

developer and publisher of the game, adjusted its network’s routing schema and took

other corrective measures. Immediately before and after the attack, players of the game

reported seeing slogans such as “Resisting all Japanese goods. Long live the People’s

Republic of China” in the “search strings” of “RMT” players.

215

The “search string” is a

small comment, up to about 240 characters, drafted by a player for their character:

another player on the system can type /sea <name> and read the comment. It is usually

used to determine the goals and aspirations of players as they play, and to determine

national identity and linguistic competencies among the international player-base.

“RMT” means ‘real-money trade’, the exchange of in-game currencies or goods for real-

world money. Tolerated in some massively-multiplayer online role-playing games,

encouraged in others, it was both proscribed by the terms of service for Final Fantasy XI

215

Allakhazam members, “DDoS Attack to POL and SE,” Forum post, Allakhazam.com: Final

Fantasy XI, April 15, 2009,

http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/db/forum.html?forum=10&mid=1113583164674215299&num=46.

202

and discouraged by Square-Enix, and was unpopular for a variety of reasons among most

players.

216

Virtual worlds of difference

Final Fantasy XI was not the only target for this attack: a similar series of DDOS

attacks were launched against the web server for the Yasukuni shrines.

217

Controversial

visits to this war memorial by then Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro, and

revisions to national school curricula minimizing the responsibility of Japan for its

activities during the Pacific War, had triggered anger among many Korean and Chinese

citizens. On the same day, April 9, over 1000 protestors attempted to storm the Japanese

embassy in Beijing, pronouncing slogans such as “Boycott Japan,” and calling for an end

to attempts to allow Japan a permanent seat on the UN security council, and over 10,000

protesters marched in protest in Shanghai, breaking the windows of the Japanese

consulate. The slogans repeated by the protesters echoed the written comments in the

search strings of the putatively Chinese players.

218

The servers of Final Fantasy XI were

marked by the protesters as Japanese space.

216

Ge Jin has been working on a documentary about the conditions, experiences and motivations

of Chinese RMT gamers. Ge Jin, Chinese Gold Farmers (In production, 2008).

217

R. Gandhi et al., “Dimensions of Cyber-Attacks: Cultural, Social, Economic, and Political,”

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 30, no. 1 (spring 2011): 28 –38, doi:10.1109/MTS.2011.940293.

218

Philip P. Pan, “Japan-China Talks Fail to Ease Tensions,” Washington Post, April 18, 2005,

sec. World news.

203

Two months earlier, in February of 2005, Square-Enix had cancelled the accounts

of about 800 people for engaging in behavior that violated the terms of service. Although

it was never explicitly stated by the producers, many players assumed that most of those

accounts were held by Chinese RMT players. This would be the first in a series of

account suspensions and revocations, which would lead to a series of account

cancellations and suspensions over the next several years.

These dramatic events accompanied a number of longer-simmering divisions

among the players. Many would complain about the performance of their colleagues, or

criticize in-game activity. Cross-national characterizations were often fraught with

acrimony and resentment. Rather than producing space of rapprochement and

camaraderie, the game seemed to accentuate differences between groups of players. The

game is an authored space, which strongly determines specific work-play practices for its

participants; the constraints of this space are experienced in the context of differentially

structured play time, creating different player motivations, which bring players into

conflict with each other at a meta-game level.

Final Fantasy XI (abbreviated as FFXI by many) went online in the year 2002 in

Japan, and was released in America about a year and a half later. At its peak at the

beginning of the year 2005, there were over 550,000 players in Japan, North America, the

Commonwealth Pacific, and Europe: these are the regions in which the game was

officially released. After stabilizing to about 500,000 players, the subscriber numbers

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have declined, and the most recent analysis estimated around 350,000 subscribers in the

2010.

219

While never as popular as World of Warcraft in most of the world, in Japan it

eventually become very successful, after a slow introduction, with numerous product tie-

ins. Square-Enix CEO Yoichi Wada has reported that Final Fantasy XI was the most

profitable of all the Final Fantasy titles.

220

Certain design decisions were important to creating the kind of experience that is

Final Fantasy XI. There are currently about 32 running game servers, but these servers

are not distinguished from each other by geography, language, or play-style. In contrast,

World of Warcraft is hosted on servers (called “realms”) that serve specific regional

markets, and with different rules of play: players who have the American version of the

software client cannot play on European or Chinese servers. Some World of Warcraft

servers allow for players to attack and kill other players (called “player vs. player”, or

“PVP”), while others do not. A minority of realms are designated as “role-playing”

realms, in which player are encouraged to participate in ways enhance the fiction of the

game, by speaking (that is, typing) using in-character voice. The differences in play-

experience in these different servers are substantial, and these differences are primarily

219

Ibe Van Geel, “MMOData.net: V3.9 Ready, Working on V4.0,” MMOData.net, August 29,

2012, http://mmodata.blogspot.com/2012/08/v39-ready-working-on-v40.html.

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Colin Moriarty, “The Most Profitable Final Fantasy of All-Time Is…,” IGN, June 24, 2012,

http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/06/24/the-most-profitable-final-fantasy-of-all-time-is.

205

enforced by software. As a result of regional constraints, most World of Warcraft servers

are semi-officially monolingual.

But it was an explicit design goal in Final Fantasy XI that players from different

nations and, to lesser extent, with different play styles

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, be allowed to play together in

the same game worlds. All Final Fantasy XI game servers are available for the global

market, and there is no difference in the configuration of game rules among them. One

consequence of this is that FFXI servers tend to “follow the sun,” with players able to

find other players online at all times, whereas World of Warcraft servers have observable

peaks and valleys of activity. The game’s client features auto-translation tools which

enable players from different language groups to play together: an English-speaking

player might begin typing a commonly-used phrase, such as “Defeat this one first!” After

typing a few characters, the player could press the tab key, and be given a number of

possible phrase completion options. Selecting those options surrounds the player’s text

with colored brackets; other players using Japanese, French or German clients see “これ

を先にやっつけて！” “Eliminez d'abord celui-ci !”or “Schlag den hier zuerst!”,

respectively. Experienced players are familiar with which phrases are available to them,

and use an extensive vocabulary to play with others with whom they could not otherwise

221

“To lesser extent” insofar as there is simply little support for PVP, but there are otherwise

components oriented to a range of play styles in the game, and they are equally available on all servers.

206

communicate.

222

Not only is this consideration part of the mechanics, the theme of

cooperation in the context of cultural difference is a recurrent theme of the game, both in

its fictive register

223

and its mechanical ones. Final Fantasy XI is almost impossible to

play alone, and finding other players with whom to cooperate is crucial to the game

experience. The relationships into which the players are put with each other could be

regarded as both rhetoric and affordance: a relational aesthetic enacted by the rule

system.

Designed constraints

While the game itself affords a range of activities to players, most activities are

contingent on a core practice common to many role-playing games: that of gaining

experience points to advance job levels. This obligation produces constraints which befall

upon all players, whatever their motivations and interests; they are mechanistically

universal play constraints, emerging from designed elements of the game. The job level/

experience point convention is a genre-specific mechanic which massively multiplayer

role-playing games share with other types of computer-based role-playing games. This

222

The content and operation of the auto-translate function is documented in great detail in

FFXIclopedia contributors, “Auto-Translator: In-Depth,” FFXIclopedia, September 6, 2009,

http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Auto-Translator:_In-Depth.

223

I discuss the relationship between the themes of international cooperation and real-world

international players in William H. Huber, “Fictive Affinities in Final Fantasy XI: Complicit and Critical

Play in Fantastic Nations.,” in DiGRA 2005: Changing Views: Worlds in Play (presented at the Digital

Games Research Association International Conference, Vancouver, BC: Simon Fraser University, 2005).

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convention has its origins in table-top and pen-and-paper fantasy role-playing games such

as Dungeons and Dragons, which itself developed from the practice of table-top

miniature military simulation,

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which distinguished certain forces as having more

combat experience, and thus more combat efficacy. What in military simulation served to

denote and recognition of the benefits of combat experience has evolved into an abstract

currency of experience, gathered as if a resource through player-documented procedures

in massively-multiplayer online role-playing games. These procedures are usually

routine, repetitive and predictable, and constitute what is called the level grind by

English-speaking players.

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Experience points are earned almost exclusively by defeating computer-based

non-player opponents in battles that are generally un-winnable without the assistance of

other players: as a player’s level advances to the point such that a foe becomes easy to

dispatch without assistance, that foe will no longer provide experience. When the

distributed denial of service attack struck, the highest attainable job level was level 75:

the level limit has since been increased to 99. Reaching the 75

level of any job requires

224

For an exhaustive history of Dungeons and Dragons, with considerable detail on the origins of

its mechanics, see Jon Peterson, Playing at the World (Unreason Press, 2012).

225

A reflection on the appeals of “the grind” was presented in Douglas Thomas, “2,443 Quenkers

and Counting, or What in Us Really Wants to Grind? Examining the Grind in Star Wars Galaxies: An

Empire Divided” (presented at the Digra 2005, Vancouver, 2005). In his abstract for his talk, Thomas

writes that “(g)rinding represents a kind of mastery. Because of its algorithmic nature, grinding demarcates

a certain class of players and provides tangible markers of achievement.”

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the player to garner a total of 944,600 experience points

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. While in some rare occasions

a player can gain as many as 6,000 to 10,000 points in an hour, a rate of about 3000 to

4000 points per hour is typical, and even this only in a full party of 6 players. This means

that, at the very, very minimum, with no other consideration for auxiliary mechanics or

requirements, developing a single player-character to the upper echelons of ability

requires about 300 hours of focused, active play. In practice, however, this is a

conservative figure.

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The level grind was not designed to be repetitive and potential tedious, but is an

emergent phenomenon as players document and share efficient, predictable and low-risk

procedures for achieving in-game goals. This play-labor might be understood as an

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Final Fantasy XI features a “sub-job” system, by which each player must also provision a

minor job function to supplement the major one. That minor job will be equipped at half the level of the

main job. Thus, a player with a main job at level 75 would need to have a sub-job at least raised to the 37

level. Accounting for nothing else in the game, leveling one job to level 75 required 801,350 experience,

and raising another to level 37 would require 143, 250 experience points.

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There is a command called /playtime which reveals how much time has been spent logged into

the game server. A playtime of several hundred days—that is, several thousands of hours—is not

uncommon.

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aesthetic experience in its own right, as a kind of deferral of pleasure in the service of a

progressive career

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The result of these mechanics is an extensive interdependency of players. Skilled

play rewards everyone in the party: incompetent or irresponsible play, or failure by a

single player, can result in the death of some or all characters. The death of a character

leads to the loss of experience points – at times undoing as much as 2 hours of the

player’s efforts. Insofar as this is a fantasy game world, death is temporary: a player who

has been“K.O.’ed” can easily be brought back. However, the resulting interruption stops

play for 5 to 10 minutes at a minimum, as the player is in a “weakened” state. It is

somewhat frustrating for the entire party, and very frustrating for the player to whom it

happens. The specific mechanics of game combat mean the player character who has

been “K.O.ed” may not be the one who was responsible for the party’s failure. This

makes the inter-player acrimony all the more pronounced.

The mechanical interdependence of play-work pressures players to maintain an

adequate level of performance to contribute to the collective success of the group. This

creates a number of important constraints. Two primary factors determine the “power” of

the player, which is understood as the ability to withstand attacks, to deal out damage, to

use more powerful spells, and otherwise operate within the division of labor created by

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Thomas describes the pleasure of the grind as the exercise of Freud’s reality principle. The

condemnation by many players of RMT customers, who use real money to bypass elements of the grind,

seems to confirm that a work-ethic principle is also at play.

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the game rules. The first is, as described above, the experience level. The second is the

“equipment” which each player wears and uses, whether it is weaponry, clothing, food,

magical items, etc. As a player advances in level, they are able to equip more powerful

items. These items may be produced by other players in what is called a crafting system,

or won in certain battles. Without going on at length about the mechanics of item

generation in this game, it is enough to observe that this process requires participation in

the in-game economy, and is comparably as time consuming as the process of getting

experience points itself.

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The unit of currency in the game is called the “gil,” an imaginary currency which

is common to all games in the Final Fantasy series. The equipment that a player needs in

the first few levels of play are typically in the low thousands, and can be earned with

relatively little effort; at the upper limits, the amount required can reach the millions.

While some “gil” is won simply by accomplishing quests, missions and in the process of

killing certain monsters within the game, this income stream is inadequate for most

purposes. There are a variety of strategies for generating high gil revenue streams –

crafting, farming, resource extraction—but they are all time-consuming activities,

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“Participation in virtual worlds is, at the moment, participation in a market for games.” Edward

Castronova, On Virtual Economies, CESifo Working Paper (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University

Bloomington - Department of Telecommunications, July 2002), 8,

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=338500. Castronova analyzed the virtual economy of

Everquest, and found it to be comparable in scale to many small countries.

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sometimes repetitive or risky (although seldom both), and they are subject to market

pressures, and involve the exchange of goods for gil in the Auction House. This adds to

the time commitment required to play the game well, and places the virtual-economic

interests of different players against each other.

All players play in the same mechanics (though, of course, they can play different

characters in different jobs.) However, not all players approach the game from the same

context of play. The next section addresses the meta-game player positions. To do this, I

describe some of the player types, the taxonomies and characterizations made of players

by other players, which seem to recur in the online forums.

Situational constraints

It has been clear since early in the history of massively multiplayer games that

different players were playing with different motivations. The first attempt to characterize

players according to motivation was made by Richard Bartle, a designer of some of the

first online virtual worlds

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. He distinguished between “achievers,” who are motivated to

accomplish tasks and overcome challenges in the game; “killers,” who seek to use the

master of the game to demonstrate their ability to defeat (or, sometimes, help) other

players; “socializers,” who see the game’s multiplayer functions as an opportunity to

build friendships and interact with other players; and “explorers,” who seek to understand

230

Richard Bartle, “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs,” Journal of MUD

Research 1, no. 1 (1996), http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm. Bartle’s model was studied in Nick Yee,

“Motivations for Play in Online Games,” CyberPsychology & Behavior 9, no. 6 (2006): 772–775.

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and document the game as a whole. These player-types are also stances toward the play

experience. Bartle developed his model specifically for one sort of game—the text-based

MUD (multi-user dungeon), with the understanding that the stances toward the game of

each type are contingent on the dynamics of the game itself: a game which does not give

players the opportunity to battle each other is less likely to produce a player-type which

would find that sort of play compelling, although the meta-motivation, the desire to

project power/control/dominate other players, may still find some expression. The

portability of these types of categories beyond the genres in which they were identified is

limited, and the emergence of graphically rich games with extensive audio and visual

assets produces at least one other axis of motivation—the aesthetic. A player motivated

by aesthetic concerns who may either wish to experience the content of the game

(perhaps a variant of Bartle’s “explorer,” but in a different register) or may wish to use

that content for their own work, whether as cosplay (in which players and fans dress up

as their favorite characters) or in-game role-playing or the creation of machinima (the

creation of animated films using games.)

But player communities have created their own player types, which do not map on

to the Bartle types at all. The player-created taxonomies of other players emerge from the

expectations and noted differences among them, and are documented in the forums in

which players discuss, analyze and complain about their experiences. In the English

language forums, the primary distinction is not between the Bartle types per se, but rather

between casual and hardcore players: between players who invest substantial amounts of

time to the game, and those whose involvement is more intermittent, perhaps less

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structured and consistent, and so forth. While at times these terms are directed against

other players in ways that indicate a kind of friction, players do self-identify with both

categories, suggesting that these types are not derogatory per se.

These categories manage expectations: a casual player is unlikely to be able to

engage in those activities which require 8 to 14 hours of committed play (and these

activities do exist.) When friction does occur, these types are often conflated with other

characterizations. Hardcore players, perhaps frustrated with the lack of commitment and

availability of casual counterparts, describe them as unreliable, uncommitted, and lazy:

First, you have your casual endgame player. They’ve got a job pretty high,

maybe even two. They’ve probably been playing the game for a decent

amount of time, but they never really took it that seriously. Maybe they

have a wife and kids or a job that takes up a lot of time so they only get to

be on a few hours a night, not quite long enough for major events. Maybe

they just refuse to let FFXI approach becoming a job and don’t do

anything in the game that they don’t terribly like. Either way, they’re a bit

flighty as far as endgame players go – you never quite know when they’ll

have a busy few days and only be on for a half hour here and there, or just

disappear entirely for a week or more.

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They generate a critique which focuses on the in-game performance of the player.

Casual gamers who encounter expectations that they cannot meet may criticize the very

emphasis that the hardcore gamer places on in-game achievement, often pointing to the

demands of their out-of-game life as an indication of healthier priorities, real-world

success, and so forth. (Sometimes this defense of lower commitment is called the “I have

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“ereblog, “EreRant #7,” Ereblog, April 11, 2008,

http://ereblog.livejournal.com/16232.html#cutid1.

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a life” excuse.) What emerges is a presumption—and narratives that support them—that

the more committed players are generally younger than their casual counterparts.

There are somewhat different typologies circulating in Japanese bulletin

boards.

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The most dedicated types are called “haijin,” or “disabled/crippled person”

players, are extreme shut-ins with few commitments or engagements in the real world:

. . . what they call "Haijin" ... Basically an addict. Usually have quit their

full time jobs, neglected friends, family all of Real Life. Yet they are uber

players ingame, multiple lvl 75 jobs, a few KIRIN deaths to their name,

and have multiple multimillion gil equipment....from Noble's Tunic to

Joyeuse.

They don't like eachother. The Kanji, or the Chinese characters used to for

the word "Haijin" is literaly, "Wasted Person".

Most of them are college age or older. Probably in their mid 20s all the

way to 40s.

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They differ from the English-language characterization of a “hardcore” player in

that there is not a presumption of a surplus of leisure time due to youthful freedom from

responsibilities. They may, indeed, be older (corresponding to the worst examples of

hikikomori, or shut-ins) or they be freeter—chronically underemployed people of varying

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The analysis of player types in Japanese-language forums is drawn from the observations of a

native informant who participates in them: Miki Yamada to William Huber, “From Uchipu - FFXI Post,”

January 28, 2005.

233

Hellriser, “Plz Check This Out ~ ~ Copy from Other Server,” Allakhazam.com: Final Fantasy

XI, January 29, 2005,

http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=35&mid=110702475290124990&h=50.

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ages who work at temporary or part-time jobs. The more casual gamers are sometimes

described as mattari, mild slacker-types, whose motivations are more exploratory

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and

who may “sabotage” a party. Another category—sometimes a derogatory one, though

there is some self-identification—is the “global-kun”, the xenophile player who actively

seeks out non-Japanese groups and friendships.

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Some differences between Japanese and North American typologies can attributed

to structural differences in the two societies, specifically regarding differential

availability of leisure time. Japanese universities are less demanding than American

counterparts, while the Japanese secondary education system is more demanding.

American high school students in many public school districts have a surplus of leisure

time which diminishes with age; Japanese youth have more structured schedules until

they complete their secondary education and complete their university entrance

examinations. After these examinations, there is a surplus of leisure time available until

they enter a full-time career. This is admittedly a crude sociology, and would require

more rigorous analysis before it could be put forward with any authority, but the claim I

am making is that structural, rather than simply cultural, factors are significant in

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“Death don't mean much to them, but the joys of entering a new zone they've never been to,

and enjoys the social activities. They would be the most likely ones to first explore the Promyvions,

LOVES map quests, and enjoys doing various quests in general. Most casual players would probably fall

into this category.” Yamada to Huber, “From Uchipu - FFXI Post.”

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Hellriser, “Plz Check This Out ~ ~ Copy from Other Server.”

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producing players, and that the production of players is inseparable from the production

of leisure time.

When characterizations cross linguistic or national divides, they become less

granular. Some Japanese players include statements in their comments that they are

uninterested in participating in parties that use English. This has caused some friction

between Japanese and, particularly, American players. According to a number of sources,

Japanese players dislike the play style of American players. One of the producers of

FFXI notes that American (to a lesser extent, European) players do not evince the same

commitment to long-term play sessions as Japanese players, and enter parties less

prepared. American players, in turn, accuse Japanese players of elitism. There are other

factors at work which distinguish Japanese and American players: the average American

player is 22 years old, while the average Japanese player is 27 years old. Also, Japanese

players are in a single time zone, while English language players range across over a

dozen time zones. As a result, the windows of available leisure time vary more widely

among English-language players. And, while my own inclination is to minimize

primarily cultural explanations when structural or historical ones are available, there are

differences in etiquette and communication between Japanese and Western players:

despite sharing many of the commodities of play—game platforms, games—different

cultures of play persist.

The relative esteem generally accorded to Japanese players is one of the elements

that mark Final Fantasy XI as a Japanese space—in the view of the players, as well as the

protestors. The Final Fantasy franchise is consistently among the best-selling games in

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Japan, and its aesthetics are consistent with other Japanese role-playing games

(emphasizing very richly delineated characters, hybrid visual references, progressive

narrative structure, well-articulated game-worlds, and so forth.) We see that the

categories of player experience emerge from the interaction of two factors: the

affordances created by the authored space of the game, and the real-world circumstances

of the player. I have given little attention to a distinctive player-position, that of the

China-based professional player. Yet even among leisure players, the real-world

circumstances which shape their stance to play-time and play-work are the product of

social relationships which determine the relative value of their play-work time. Players

collectively might be seen as secondary co-authors of the experiences of the game, but

seldom in ways that could be considered deliberative or autonomous.

Designing intersubjectivity in games

Neither space nor intersubjectivity are usually thought of as being authored as

such. We may see it as designated, designed, or produced, but authorship usually refers to

some relationship between a text (however that is understood) and an entity, whether an

individual or an aggregate or even a process. The ambiguous status of the digital game as

both a system for supporting an activity and a system of inscriptions producing

representations and simulations places its spatial aspects into the domain of the authorial,

at least in the senses we describe at the beginning of this dissertation. Multiple senses of

the spatial can be generated in the practice of the development of games, from the most

straightforward representations of a space, using various projective and cartographic

techniques, to those senses of space which are clearly relational: the space which

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obligates its inhabitants in one way or another, placing distinct demands on them, and

revealing the differences them. Spatial game authorship become design within the

relational style when these spaces host differently-situated players.

In the 1990s, art historian Nicholas Bourriad published an influential essay on

something he identified as relataional art, a possiblity in the field of aesthetics which

opens up after the Second world War:

The possibility of a relational art (an art taking as its theoritcal horizon the

realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion

of an independent and private symbolic space) points to a radical

upheaval of the aesthetic, cultural and political goals introduced by

modern art.

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Bourriaud identified a series of projects, focusing on those of the 1990s, in which

this aesthetic was mobilized. While the term is used to describe a range of projects with

very different goals and motivations, they all seem, as Claire Bishop describes it, to “use

people as a medium.

237

” A vigorous debated opened up among certain art theorists and

critics

238

about the ethical and aesthetic value of these practices (and especially about the

236

Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 14.

237

Bishop, Artificial Hells, 39.

238

Grant Kester, “Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework for Littoral Art,” Varient 9 (1999):

2000; Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art; Grant Kester,

“Response to Claire Bishop’s ‘Another Turn’,” Artforum (May 2006); Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and

Relational Aesthetics,” October (2004): 51–79; Claire Bishop, ed., Participation (London: Whitechapel,

2006); Bishop, Artificial Hells.

219

relationship between ethics, aesthetics and politics, and the relationship between those

categories and avant-garde activity.)

A reverse, mirror-version of this discussion transpired within game studies. In a

2008 column for Gamasutra Magazine, later expanded and included his collection “How

to Do Things with Videogames,” Bogost proposed bypassing the stale question of the

cultural status of games and its relationship to categories of art by considering, instead,

the question of style within game design. As described in chapter one, his conception of

“style” was an argument about the nature of form in game design: the proceduralist style

was described as locating “meaning” within the procedures and mechanics of the game,

rather than in the creation of atmospherics, writing, character design, or virtual

architecture. He included within this style games such as Rod Humble’s “The Marriage,”

Jonathon Blow’s “Braid,” and Jason Rohrer’s “Passage.” They shared certain

characteristics: what he calls the “abstraction of instantial assets” (somewhat incorrectly:

the assets are iconic and stylized, rather than abstraction, and it is not really accurate to

describe the iconic as abstract without some qualification; in as much as play requires an

index to an activity, actual pictorial abstraction--working in the pure picture plane-- may

only be possible in backgrounds and details); “authorship,” (both discursively and in

terms of voice: the game is figured as a personal expression from the designer to the

audience); introspection (the context of the delivery of the game, the language used to

prime the player’s interaction, and the aesthetics of any opening animations and music

call the player to, at least at some point in their interaction with the game, perhaps

immediately after, reflect upon the processes of the game and integrate them back onto

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inner experience.) These characteristics are recognizable, and not controversial in as

much as they do seem to inform an approach to game design that aspires to a kind of

poetics of play. These poetics rely on a certain configuration of the player, particularly

insofar as the game is calling for an introspective posture: the player is presumed to be

alone, pensive, thoughtful. The art-gamer is called to a mode of reception we associate

with the reading of literature, the viewing of an art-house film, the viewing of a painting

in a traditional art museum, in which the attention of the viewer winnows out distractions

and settles into the object, withdrawing from peripheral activity (especially social

demands.

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) To the extent that a game does not call forth this mode of reception—to the

extent that, like Final Fantasy XI, it produces conditions in which players can make

demands on each other, can pursue the lusory goals of the game only in collaboration

with others, and are given tools to facilitate communication (even across languages), it

can be described as a co-producing and co-authoring the relationships among its players.

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In the documentary film Indie Game, Jonathon Blow is depicted as visibly disappointed at a young

man’s carnivalesque reception of Braid. It is implied that an experience of the game which does not

center on the recognition of the “personal statement” of the designer is a defective reception. In

Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky, Indie Game: The Movie, Documentary, 2012.

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CONCLUSION

Since the creation of Space War in 1961, the conditions in which video games

have been produced have gone through a series of changes. These changes are coeval

with trends in the development of the technologies upon which the games are played, the

computational tools used to produce them, the availability of a widening range of

software tools, programming languages, and development methodologies which were

created in response to these new tools. They also accompany the transformation of global

networks of work and capital, the attempts by much of the global culture industry to

buttress and expand the structures of intellectual property legislation, and the growth of

use-produced content (e.g. fan fictions, mods, remixes, and mash-ups.)

In these five decades, new modes of authorship for these games have emerged,

consolidated, and then been displaced by subsequent ones. The idea of authorship has

served as a kind of lodestone for the above analysis of games and meaning. By

characterizing the game in toto as a system of created representation produced in order to

be decoded in multiple registers of interpretation allows us to tentatively consider how

those systems were authored. The problem of “authorship” –and its fussier cousin,

auteurship—has enjoyed a fraught history since Roland Barthes described the fading,

receding presence of the author in the modernist text, even as Andrew Sarris and Andre

Bazin, each in their own way, sought to isolate certain key figures in the production of

film in the studio system as authoritative (Sarris) or mobilize the idea of authorship to

free film-makers from the most suffocating constraints of that system (Bazin.) Games

have generally not enjoyed a status as authored items, with some telling exceptions.

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Michel Foucault’s idea of an author function suggests that authorship appears as

relevant to a field of cultural activity when there discursive needs for that role: to assign

blame or responsibility for a text, to characterize a trajectory or development of a style, or

even to ascertain legal rights. I described the emergence of digital games in the beginning

of this dissertation as discontinuous in many ways from the traditions of non-digital

games: the design of a non-digital game mostly relies on the conceptual production of a

rule-system which is sustained in the language and activity of the game participants,

aided by materials and designated spaces of play. The production of digital games relies

on the transcription of those rule-systems into computationally mediated software-based

systems which manage their behavior, their appearance, and their representationality.

They are reproduced and disseminated over networks—retail or electronic—in the

conventional commercial model. When videogames became viable as goods in the

marketplace, the conditions which could sustain variform configurations of authorship

appeared. But this market-driven basis for authorship was not autonomous of the

material and technological circumstances in which digital games were developed.

The history of game authorship can be divided into a sequence of periods in

which a new model would see widespread deployment (though the older models do not

necessarily become impossible—even today, designers create and distribute games much

in the way that they were created in the 1970s.) The decade following the development

of Space War in 1961 could be described as ““non-authorial” phase, in which the game

itself was not treated as conceptually distinct from the platform on which it ran. They

were novelties: the source code for Spacewar was shared among researchers at university

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computer labs around the world. The development of the game was promoted as a way to

demonstrate the capabilities of the system on which it ran: the tech demo was a kind of

performance in which the virtuousity and expertise of programmers and engineers would

be demonstrated to impress visitors—and often funding sources—to research

laboratories. Although publics might hold dramatic expectations and excitement about

the possibilities of computing, they were often disappointed when they saw mid-century

computers at work, doing very little that was visually interesting. The team which created

Spacewar believed that an effective demo had certain features:

"A good demonstration program ought to satisfy three criteria:

1) It should demonstrate, that is. it should show off as many of the

computer's resources as possible, and tax those resources to the limit:

2) Within a consistent framework, it should be interesting, which means

that every run should be different:

3) It should involve the onlooker in a pleasurable and active way—in

short, it should be a game."

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No established workflow existed for the design and production of computer

games: Spacewar was designed and developed in workshop conditions. The goal of the

project was the creation of a demo, not a product—and, of course, the amusement of the

creators and their friends.

Computer game design and development became a segment of the culture

industry in the 1970s. The first half of the 1970s could be called a “pre-authorial” phase

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J M Graetz, “The Origin of Spacewar,” Creative Computing, August 1981, 61.

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in which the conditions by which computer games as semi-autonomous content had not

yet consolidated, although preludes to a more recognizable form of authorship did appear.

Will Crowther’s Adventure was released in 1975 as the outgrowth of a personal project

he had begun the previous year. An avid spelunker, player of Dungeons and Dragons,

and programmer, he wrote the game to reach out to his daughters in the wake of his

divorce. Like Spacewar, the game spread through a network of researchers, students and

enthusiasts. Despite its apparent resemblance to earlier “literary machines”

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and the

personal motivation of the designer, it was not generally received as an author’s

statement or concept. Since then, the biographical aspect of Crowther’s work has become

part of the game’s ongoing reception, but there was no institutional mechanism or

apparatus to establish this relationship between producer and product at the time of its

release.

A more classical mode of auteurship, in which a game would be associated with

one or, at most, a few individuals (with those works produced by the same individual

then being identified as sharing stylistic features) emerged in the mid-1970s. The first

wave of game consoles in the early 1970s, such as the Atari Pong system, did not afford a

241

Nick Montfort, Twisty Little Passages: An Approach To Interactive Fiction (Cambridge MA:

MIT Press, 2005), 66. Montfort describes the literary lineage of interactive works similar to Adventure but

which were circulated in a literary context, such as the work of the French experimental literature group

Oulipo While Oulipo was challenging and testing the limits of the authorial using aleatoric techniques and

arbitrary constraints, Crowther’s work was.

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clear-cut distinction between the games as content and the game consoles as platforms:

like the game arcade cabinets of the time, the design and engineering of a new game

depended on a thorough understanding of the hardware, and generally involved the

design of specialized circuitry for each game.

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In this context, the design of the game as

a text, semi-autonomous of the platform on which it ran, was proposed neither by the

owners and managers of the companies for which these items were made, nor by the

engineers and designers themselves.

In 1976, the California-based electronics company Fairfield Semiconductor

International released a new console, the Fairfield Channel F, which used cartridges with

programmable ROM (read-only memory) chips, instead of circuitry. Designers could

create libraries of games by programming these chips without re-engineering the

circuitry. The Atari VCS, released a few months after the Channel F, also used

programmable ROMs for its games, and a business model emerged by which the costs of

the development of a platform would be offset by licensing fees collected for each work.

The ability to create “titles” that used, rather than simply extended, the game

hardware was not the only original development of the Channel F. While previous

consoles such as the Magnavox Odyssey and the Atari Pong only supported play between

human players, the Channel F provided enough computational power to support

242

An extensive study of the Atari VCS system and the conditions in which games were

developed in the 1970s is in Montfort and Bogost, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System.

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computer-based artificial intelligences against which a single human player could play. A

game that is only playable with another player does not activate the sense of text: when

the “other player” is the computer, it acts like a surrogate for the designer. The ludic

opposition plays a role analogous to that of an authorial voice: the player’s relationship

with the computer as opponent is both the kind of dialogical relationship which

constitutes interactive computing as described by Douglas Engelbart (cf. the second

chapter of this dissertation) and an engagement with the author of the challenge. While

the design of games to be played between human players may ultimately fall under the

rubric of architecture, the design of a game in which a player is set against a computer—

generally those which also have more diegetic content—produced among players a sense

that the game itself was a locus of meaning, rather than acting as a foundation for a

meaningful experience with their friends or family.

This did not translate immediately into the creation of auteurism within the field

of game production, however. The programmers and designers at Atari who were

responsible for some of the most successful games were still uncredited either in the

games themselves or in the accompanying material which was packaged with the game

cartridges. Warren Robinett, the designer of the game Adventure, famously included a

secret level in his game, in which a player could see his name. The conditions under

227

which this “easter egg”, the secret room, would be discovered were obscure enough that

it wasn’t actually discovered until Robinett had left Atari.

243

The policy at Atari was to consider the game designers and programmers as

workers-for-hire, rhetorically as well as organizationally. While the company’s work

culture was described as collegial and open in its earlier years, financial difficulties

forced its founder, Nolan Bushnell, to sell the company to Warner Communications in

1977. In 1978, Bushnell was forced out of the company. Ray Kassar, the new president of

Atari, maintained the policy of leaving designers uncredited, including David Crane, one

of Atari’s most prolific designer of successful titles:

When we looked closely at that memo, we saw that as a group we were

responsible for 60 percent of their $100 million in cartridge sales for a

single year,” Crane recalled. “With concrete evidence that our contribution

to the company was of great value, we went to the president of Atari to ask

for a little recognition and fair compensation. Ray Kassar looked us in the

eye and said, ‘You are no more important to Atari than the person on the

assembly line who puts the cartridges in the box.’ After that it was a pretty

easy decision to leave.

244

Crane and three of his colleagues left Atari in 1979 to join Activision, a new

company formed by music industry executive Jim Levy. Activision would focus on the

243

Warren Robinett, “Adventure as a Video Game: Adventure for the Atari 2600,” in The Game

Design Reader, ed. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006), 711–712.

244

Jeffrey Fleming, “The History Of Activision,” Gamasutra, July 30, 2007,

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1537/the_history_of_activision.php; Montfort and Bogost, Racing

the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, 99–100.

228

development and publication of games for Atari (and other) platforms, rather than

producing its own platform. This business model accompanied a different approach to the

crediting of work to designers: each designer was given prominent credits in the booklets

which accompanied each game, and would be presented to the game-playing audience as

distinctive artists, each with their own style. Along with this promotion of individual

producers as auteurs, Levy coordinated the design of all of Activision’s box art,

maintaining a consistent identity (and palette, “using only the most saturated colors in its

games, developing a consistent, distinct style for labels and boxes, and including the

Activision logo (but not any programmers’ names) on every game screen.”

245

Individual

authorship was promoted within a sphere of collective corporate identity: game-play and

screen-design ascribed to the former; color and packaging to the latter.

From the late 1970s into the 1980s, more work was produced under this authorial

model. Electronic Arts was founded in 1982 by Trip Hawkins, who left a position at

Apple as a director of marketing to run the firm. Hawkins went farther in producing a

culture of auteurship than Activision did, releasing games in packaging with promoted

the names of the designers as prominently as the games themselves. Trade publications

and magazines, such as Creative Computing Magazine (1974—1985), BYTE Magazine

(1975—1998), Compute Magazine (1979—1994), and later Nintendo Power in the US

(1988—2012) and Famicom Tsūshin (Later Famitsu: 1986—present) in Japan featured

articles describing the designers responsible for the most popular games of their period.

245

Montfort and Bogost, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, 100.

229

By the early 1990s, many commercial games required more labor than one

individual could provide, or, eventually, even manage without delegation. As the scale of

production increased, new modes of authorship emerged: a period of “collective

authorship” took shape as teams of designers, and then studios, would be recognized as

the site of style (and accountability.) Different roles within these larger teams would be

credited with more or less priority in creating the success of these games. Among the

most successful titles of this period, SquareSoft’s Final Fantasy, was produced in 1987

for the Nintendo Famicom platform. Four designers, one programmer, two writers (one

of whom, Hironobu Sakaguchi, also was credited as the lead designer/planner), and a

composer are all given named credits for their contributions to the game. These roles

have acquired the kind of complementary auteurist status that Sarris would attribute to

key roles in the creation of narrative films (scriptwriters, cinematographers, editors, and

actors,)

Contemporary game production is now highly distributed, sometimes

geographically, sometimes temporally, and often organizationally. Over 400 people are

credited for the development of the 2006 videogame Final Fantasy XII. 70% of the

credited workforce is assigned a role in the production of art (the visual and audio assets

of the game); 20% to game design, and 10% to engineering. In addition to industry-

standard tools like Maya, Softimage, Photoshop, OTPiX and iMageStudio, the team used

in-house developed tools, plug-ins and add-ons which reflect the specific workflow

involved in producing the game. In a recent presentation at the Game Developer’s

Conference 2008, the coordinator for programming for Final Fantasy XII, general

230

manager Taku Murata stated that new tools being developed for future cross-platform

development need to maintain a “detailed division of work.”

246

This call for software to

create well-defined production roles was accompanied by a need for tools that reflected

the aesthetic priorities of Square-Enix’s artistic directors.

The periodization of configurations of game authorship I describe above isn’t

exclusive: it is still possible to produce works as a solitary designer, and toys which

embed game-logics into industrial design are still produced and distributed. But each of

these models becomes possible at certain junctures in the history of digital games, and for

a time becomes a dominant model for the industry, until new developments in

technology, in labor relations and consumer markets make each subsequent model viable.

Yet through all these transformations, from Space War to Final Fantasy XII, the

semiotic conditions of authorship have been stable in some regards. While the processes

which produce the elements which players interpret have expanded by immense

proportions, the dynamics of player-to-game semiosis have shown the more gradual

development produce by the slowly nesting literacies of game players (literacies which

need to be recapitulated by new generations of players.) Future work on specific

moments and possibilities digital game authorship should pivot off of this framework.

246

Brandon Sheffield, “Q&A: Square Enix’s Murata Talks Crystal Tools, Unreal Engine

Initiatives,” Gamasutra, April 15, 2008, http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=18246.

231

What remains to be seen is whether the idea of play, and its relationship to meaning, has

been indelibly marked by its capture within software.

232

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