Martti Lahti, "As We Become Machines: Corporealized Pleasures in Video Games"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader)

- William Gibson's concept of cyberspace has become a privileged metaphor, emerges from video games, not the Internet
- Video games exemplify cyborg relationship (esp. fast action-based games)
- New, complex relationship between body, technology and subjectivity
- "Corporealization of the experience of playing"
- Anchored in the body, not transcendent
- There is always a bodily dimension to immersion
- Early games: screen demarcates the entire world; later games: screen represents how much the player can see (point of view); 3D games: moving "into" the computer/the space beyond the screen
- FPS games encourage players to imagine bodily presence/sensations via sound effects and visuals for body damage, gun-hand, etc. (what about the presence of the avatar's gradually-more-bloody face in Wolf 3D and Doom? A graphic, visceral but "other" representation of the avatar)
- Far Cry 2 uses bodily damage in a similar way to encourage embodiment (pulling bullets out of arms, etc.)
- "Fully subjective" experience
- Camera angle control mitigates the mapping of subjectivity onto an avatar (Grodal would disagree, first-person identification can occur even in a third-person game)
- FPS games erase the boundary between the real and virtual worlds -> delirium (in the sense of intense excitement and engagement, presumably) stands in for actual movement
- Tactile interfaces (rumble packs, joysticks, etc.) and computer set-ups extend the computer, which surrounds us (these ideas evidently anticipate the Wii)
- Real bodily experience
- Virtual mobility + sensory feedback + incorporation into a larger system = cybernetic loop
- In-game affect extends into player's space (moving your body while playing a driving game, for example)
- Virtual and physical corporeality are "continuous and complimentary"
- Seeing the avatar in cut scenes acts as both a mirror to let us visualize our virtual "selves" and as ideological positioning ("That is me on the screen")
- Cyborg envy - desire to merge with the machine, with the avatar
- Female avatars are less frequent in first-person games (to-be-looked-at-ness)
- Character selection screens present a "supermarket" of aestheticized bodies divorced from their real-world contexts
- Is Deus Ex really any different than other games that allow you to customize your character/abilities, just because in the fiction of the game upgrades are cybernetic?
- "Games commodify our cyborg desires," mechanization of the body as in industrial capitalism (repetition of actions and pursuing/earning unlocks, progression, cutscenes)
- Safe way to transgress gender/race without acknowledging or contemplating real world power relations and ideology
- Disjuncture between avatar as exotic fantasy self and a truly subjective perspective (being someone else vs being yourself)
- Lahti wants to re-materialize and re-activate theories of media spectatorship/engagement by reincorporating the body and contexts of play
- "We remain flesh as we become machines"

Torben Grodal, "Stories For Eye, Ear and Muscles: Video Games, Media, and Embodied Experience"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader)

- Video games are simulations of the "basic modes of real life experience"
- Grodal claims that cognitive psychology is better equipped than semiotics for understanding games
- Stories as "body-brain-internal" processes that need to be compatible with that platform
- Stories are innate, not (just) socially constructed, and they structure non-mediated lived experience as well as mediated/fictional events
- Story does not equal fiction, necessarily
- Higher vs lower-order goals (survival vs wealth)
- Story as flow, emotional-relational reaction patterns, not "logic"
- Continuous interaction between perceptions, emotions, cognitions and actions
- Different forms activate different parts of this flow
- Consciousness is storylike, non-verbal
- Games simulate our first-person "story" experience (ie: consciousness), "full experiential flow"
- Visual-motor links (hand-eye coordination?)
- Verbal storytelling (or written language) is one media-specific form of story experience, and so language-based approaches cannot account for other forms, such as games
- Semiotic meaning is rooted in concrete perception/motor patterns
- Stories pre-date language
- Games rely on non-verbal skills
- Story/narrative are not the only way we experience the world (and games can activate other experiential modes, presumably)
- "Canonical story," linear progression (gels with our mental machinery)
- Third-person is an expansion of first-person (extrapolate from our own experiences)
- Stories as "retelling" vs taking place in an unfolding present
- "Games often focus on the 'how' of a story." (Like film noir and mystery novels, which are also often compared to games?)
- Problem with conflating story experience with verbal (re)telling (which is a story medium)
- "Story simulation"
- Interactivity relates to motor skills
- Video games are closest to our basic embodied story-experience
- Player needs skills to navigate/advance the story
- Games require more detailed cognitive maps and motor skills (a mental map of Liberty City, or the ability to aim an in-game weapon)
- Play, rather than games, is innate in human beings (games are a form of play and can be a form of story)
- Play is only play without real-life intentions/risks (so gambling, physical combat sports do not qualify? This seems problematic.)
- Play(fulness) as a feature of all/many fictions
- Repetition (reversibility) of games, exploration of patterns and rules
- Genre as a "game" of sorts (perhaps a nomic game, in which the rules are not fixed)
- "Fictions are about the concerns of anthropomorphic beings."
- "System-based" vs "manifestation-based" experiences
- Stories and games are overlapping categories
- Interactivity means that the player/user can change the audiovisual elements on a computer via motor action and the interface
- More elaborate simulation = more interactivity (not too sure about that...)
- We interact with the real world
- Agency/interactivity = making a difference in experience, not necessarily about actual change (as in the utopian view of interactivity)
- First-time players may experience a game as a linear, unfolding "route" or story, while experienced players may see a designed "map" of multiple possible linear routes (Grodal suggests this is mimesis vs art - but this seems like a questionable distinction)
- Linearity as fundamental to real world experience (causality as a survival mechanism)
- Simulation of freedom in video games
- All stories are a series of virtual forks, branches - games actualize this
- Games contain multiple stories, each linear (as experiential processes)
- Video games as "stories in the making"
- Aesthetics of repetition, learning
- Unfamiliarity/challenge -> mastery -> automation
- Games usually evoke flight-or-flight related emotions rather than passive ones
- Social stories/simulations "would be more attractive to women" (I've had several Sims families that would disagree with you there, Torben)
- Lyrical-associative experiences (procedurality? Most so-called artgames seem to deal in these kinds of experiences)
- The canonical first-person narrative experience is mobilized differently by different media/platforms
- "Untold" (experiential) stories vs "told" stories
- Grodal makes the naive assumption that only the latter can be understood as art (ie: only a designed experience/object can be art... how unimaginative!)

Bob Rehak, "Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and The Avatar"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader)

- Avatars in games both simplify and complicate conventional psychoanalytical approaches to technological mediations of identity (such as cinema)
- "Sites of continuous identification in a diegesis"
- Rehak is drawing on 1970s psychoanalytic film theory (so-called "Screen theory")
- Spectatorship/participation
- Player-avatar is the key relationship (a heterogeneous, not 1:1 relationship, similar to hand-glove)
- "games as powerful interpellative systems"
- Avatar as both self and other
- Significance of avatar death and "rebirth" (as well as pausing, saving, quitting)
- Technological staging of ego-confirmation cycle
- Graphical realism, first-person perspective, etc. indicate an obsession with the avatar as a stand-in for a real person
- Avatars map/reflect (bodily) control, if not necessarily actual appearance
- Avatar as acted on object vs acting subject (puppet vs costume?)
- Play with identity, presence, subjectivity
- Violent destruction of avatars = aggressive response to our reflection, as per mirror stage (what about avatars that cannot die?)
- Wolfenstein 3D as the "moment" of avatarial maturity... Rehak sees an evolution towards more human(oid)/embodied forms of avatars, but this is hardly universal. (Presumed teleology towards more life-like avatars.) Other forms of avatars (not to mention games without avatars) remain prevalent if not dominant
- Avatars have been shaped by our psychological needs and by technological possibility
- Avatars become more "lively" over time
- Importance of repetition/cycles in both games and psychoanalysis
- Immediately responsive graphical interface as a reflection of the player/user's agency
- Effacement of the self in order to transfer (a reduced, diluted) agency to the avatar
- Shift from mechanical (Space Invaders) to anthropomorphic avatars (Pac-Man)
- Pac-Man's oral incorporation versus the anal expulsion of Space Invaders (Seriously?)
- Implied body in first-person perspective (this implied body can sometimes only be fully seen by other players)
- "Tourist mouse" aesthetic of Myst and similar games
- Correlation between the lack of a visible/implied avatar in Myst and the absence of player death (this seems dodgy, considering in otherwise very similar games the player can die)
- Rehak claims Quake is centred on the preservation of bodily integrity, but what about when the game elements overtake the fictional/representational aspects of the game, when it becomes simply about gaining points and winning?
- Avatars see and are seen
- Avatarial reflection as a source of pleasure in games, among other sources
- The avatarial relation as a structure of seeing
- Point-of-view camera/first-person perspective as subjective narration
- Games achieve a sense of literal presence where film cannot
- Ideological positioning and suture occurs in games as much as in other media
- Interfaces are ideological and discursive (transparently so), hailing and interpellating the user, who misrecognizes themselves as a whole, unified subject
- Not totally deterministic (more like TV than cinema, many distractions and fragmentations - but these are not universal forms of viewer experience)
- The relation between player and avatar is always already a contested space of potential resistance
- Avatars don't have to have a semblance of physicality, but when they do we are fascinated by them
- We take our bodies with us into the game
- Ambivalence and fragmentation of our selves extends to our media/art and imaginary worlds creating endless cycles of identification and rejection that mirror our real-world psychological existence

Miroslaw Filiciak, "Hyperidentities: Postmodern Identity Patterns in Massively Multiplayer Role-Playing Games"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader)

- "Computers subtly model our way of thinking about the world."
- Affinity between postmodern theory and computers/digital games
- Rules of MMORPGs as analogous to the rules of real life in (post)industrial societies
- MMOs as a communication as well as entertainment medium
- An "experimental arena" for postmodern situations/identities
- We can manipulate, multiply our selves
- Filiciak makes a shifty claim that 9/11 has caused more people to stay at home and thus play online games... evidence, please?
- Character creation: freely creat oneself (especially one's appearance)
- Avatars as a first-person "I"
- MMOs allow us to adapt our selves to meet social/cultural expectations (ie: beautiful, thin, muscular)
- Transference (unconscious) of real-world characteristics to avatar
- Game success/advancement encourages long-term investment in one avatar
- Filiciak greatly overemphasizes the freedom of players in a game and the liquidity of player/avatar identity - these are always already produced within a very specific, rigid system of rules, just like in the real world
- No one self is more "true" or essential
- The self is determined in relation to others
- Masks -> avatars
- "Man cannot be anybody other than what is required by his environment." (Laing)
- Constant construction of the self
- Filiciak overstates the fragmentation of contemporary existence and institutions
- Identity as a rhizome -> hyperidentity
- Games offter the opportunity to play with identity
- A pleasurable, often wilful blurring between reality and the subjective reality of experience
- Menial tasks in-game can be fun (and this is written before World of Warcraft!)
- Fetishization of the screen
- Being visible on-screen = being real
- Internet discourse is akin to public rhetoric (speeches, etc.), we are always aware of and performing for an (imagined) audience
- Filiciak can't seem to decide if MMORPGs are a metaphor for the self, a "playground" for experimentation, or an actual space for the articulation of the self (I've weighed in on the differences between these three possibilities in an essay on Foucault's aesthetic self-creation and expansive gameplay)

Alison McMahon, "Immersion, Engagement and Presence: A Method for Analyzing 3-D Games"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader)

- Shift towards 3D and first-person perspective as the dominant in popular games situates them closer to Virtual Reality (VR) theory and practice
- McMahon will critique the notion of immersion (it's too vague, break it down into specific terms and recast)
- "Immersion" can refer both to diegetic/narrative immersion and nondiegetic/game immersion (in the rules, strategy, etc.) - these are two different things subsumed under the same term
- Related concept of presence, the feeling of "being there" is used interchangeably with immersion
- Realism is not necessary for immersion/engagement/presence
- Conditions for immersion in VR - meets user expectations; allows non-trivial interaction; consistency
- Good quote: "devising a winning (or at least spectacular) strategy" - not all gameplay is geared entirely towards success (expansive gameplay, role-playing etc.)
- Immersion is generally associated with narrative and fiction
- Engagement is generally associated with gamplay, "deep play"
- (It could be argued that these are flip sides of the same coin.)
- Presence (sometimes) involves embodiment
- McMahon wants to judge games according to the degree of immersion, engagement and presence (assuming, therefore, that these are aesthetic ideals for most/all games)
- Mark J. P. Wolf suggests that 3D first-person games follows the conventions of Classical Hollywood Cinema, but this is not at all the case - Classical Hollywood Cinema involves purposive cutting, framing, mise-en-scene, none of which are present in the same sense in 3D first-person games Rather, these games seek to produce the same effects (invisibility, continuity, contiguity of space, etc.) through very different means!
- The first-person shooter "gun-hand" convention is not traditionally relevant to gameplay (serves instead to draw the player in), but more recently the option of aiming down the ironsights of a 3D-rendered gun has changed this
- 3D first-person shooters are often understood to have pioneered immersion, engagement and presence (and are even cited/used/preferred by VR and AI engineers and technicians)
- Presence is the experience of a mediated environment as unmediated
- Elements and factors that contribute to a sense of presence include social interaction, realism, "transportation," immersion, actors and intelligent environments
- Quality of social interaction, the feeling of being "with" other players (communication, interaction, collaboration, togetherness)
- A player might view his or her avatar as "me" or as a character in the world
- Social realism vs perceptual (audiovisual) realism
- (Social realism is not the right term here - McMahon is not just talking about how characters and people act believably in the game, but how the environment as a whole functions in a believable manner - systemic realism? Environmental realism? There's got to be a better way to say that.)
- Presence in a space is constructed via "perceptual opportunities" both designed and emergent
- "Transportation" and telepresence - is the user transported to a place? Is the place transported to the user? Do multiple users share a common place?
- How does teleportation/quick travel affect the sense of presence (as opposed to contiguous navigation/transportation)?
- Perceptual vs psychological immersion (blocking out external stimuli (VR helmet) vs mental absorption)
- Interaction with the mediated environment is important for presence
- Synthetic social actors that act meaningfully within an environment (ie: bots, AI, NPCs) can create a sense of presence (as opposed to "canned" characters that to not seem to act)
- Users tend to respond realistically to synthetic social actors
- An "intelligent environment" - the machine seems to be human or to have personality (beyond simply acting meaningfully)?
- McMahon argues that immersion and engagement are in fact both aspects of the larger concept of presence, the sense of which can be created by many diverse elements and varies greatly
- Presence results from an interaction between form/content/system and the individual player
- This conception of presence can be used to study 3D games both quantitatively/analytically or qualitatively/aesthetically (McMahon doesn't really give an example of the former or explain how such a study might work)
- Surely this isn't limited to 3D games? At least some 2D and text-based games must deal in presence (albeit in a different manner)
- McMahon's example is a brief study of Myst III: Exile
- Non-interactive conversations reduce presence; high social/perceptual realism; environmental intelligence is recognizable in the puzzles (a sort of "personality" that demonstrates intelligent design); teleportation is integrated into the fiction; low perceptual immersion but high psychological immersion; many "attractors" and secrets/surprises that draw the player into the game and onwards
- Contrast to Diablo II, which cultivates a completely different kind of presence made up of other elements
- This isn't so much a method as a theoretical approach or framework - a perspective for the analysis of 3D games that could be integrated into any number of methods

Mark J. P. Wolf, "Abstraction in the Video Game"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader)

- Concerned primarily with abstraction in the visual imagery of games
- Restrictions of early game technology forced designers into abstraction
- Later technological progress allowed for more realism/representation
- Wolf sees an untapped potential in abstraction
- Weak analogy to action painting (assuming a connection between abstract art and early game graphics, highly suspect)
- Implied avatar (invisible or offscreen) vs "surrogate" avatar (visible or onscreen)
- Wolf uses the term "player-character" rather than avatar (still early in the history of digital game studies... when does the term avatar become universal?)
- Scott McCloud's notion that abstraction/simplification allows for identification (creates a vacuum)
- Gradual formalisation of conventions and increasing complexity
- Abstract graphics are not as useful for demonstrating the power of new technology
- Discussion of the medium specificities of the Atari 2600's graphics
- Representational box art contextualizes abstract graphics (Wolf claims this is somehow disingenuous or a betrayal of the more "pure" abstraction of the "real", which is completely ridiculous. Cultural objects are always received in context of other discourses, even the most abstract of paintings has a title, is displayed in a gallery, etc.)
- Throughout, Wolf seems to blur the distinction between "representation" and "realism" (almost all the examples of abstraction in games he cites are examples of abstract representation, not total abstraction)
- Another silly analogy, this time to the Lacanian mirror stage, as if learning the rules of a new game is somehow similar
- Empathy/identification vs abstraction
- Abstract games as a genre (Tetris, other puzzle games)
- Wolf seeks "new possibilities for abstraction" (which in many ways has been realized by indie/artgames movements and renewed nostalgia for 8- and 16-bit gaming culture)
- Bizarre notion that texture maps are abstract, but the 3D models they are mapped onto are representational? The logic being that some abstract art features splatters, rust, corrosion and so on, and so do some texture maps in games like Doom? Absurd!
- Simplicity vs complexity in abstraction (goes both ways, contra McCloud)
- All games, because they simulate rule-based systems, are abstractions
- Perceptual vs conceptual abstraction
- Wolf idealizes abstraction in a very modernist-essentialist-medium-specificity sort of way, and makes some pretty shifty (or just plain strange) claims throughout

Walter Holland, Henry Jenkins, and Kurt Squire, "Theory By Design"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader.)

- Pursuing the function of theory in the (relatively) early stages of digital games as a medium, and as the medium develops
- Analogy to early film theory, articulated by participants/practitioner-creators, not academics
- Abstraction and distance of theory in academic film studies comes later
- Digital game theory at a threshold, what is the relationship between academic theory and design practice?
- Theory emerges from practice at times of change or uncertainty
- "Vernacular theory" of game designer/theorists (Zimmerman, Wright, etc.)
- MIT Comparative Media Studies mandate for "applied humanism," using humanities principles to tackle real-world problems
- Games-To-Teach projects
- Games must be placed in context of learning more generally (no magic bullet)
- Games, as "microworlds" act as a context for learning
- Goal is to enagle the learning that already occurs in games to work with formal education
- The chapter aligns MIT with early experiments in film theory/practice
- Close collaboration with the industry, policymakers, educators, etc. (similarly close relationship is found elsewhere in Jenkins' work on transmedia storytelling, can be problematic)
- Extensive discussion of specific games by MIT students - how useful or interesting are these insights beyond practical educational application and game design? Do we understand what games are, how they work, their socio-cultural function any better?
- Emphasis on forward-looking, somewhat utopian humanistic change, rather than on understanding how things are currently
- Strange/unnecessary use of the word "remediation" - not just a synonym for adaptation
- Suggestion of an affinity between digital gameplay and scientific method (experimentation, testing hypotheses, etc.)
- Claim that these projects are of use not only to practitioners but also to academics, but I don't really see how
- Academics (of the abstracted, distanced variety) serve a fundamentally different cultural function than the theory/design/practice described by Jenkins et all, but this distinction is glossed over

Mark J.P. Wolf & Bernard Perron, "Introduction"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader)

- Perron and Wolf position the volume as a milestone for the discipline, even though it is still emerging, emphasizing the diversity of approaches.
- "Video" versus "computer" games - not identical terms, they choose "video games" because they feel it implies the right things (personally I prefer the more platform-agnostic "digital games")
- The introduction traces a brief history of so-called video game theory
- Early stages: ethusiasts, hobbyists, programmers
- The rise of the arcade and industry writing/reviews
- Home computer magazines and strategy guides
- Early histories of the industry and the medium
- Chris Crawford's design-oriented theory
- Psychology/affect-oriented approaches
- Concepts of new media and multimedia (importance of the CD-ROM)
- Placing games in an industrial context (political economy, franchises)
- Importance of the web, online communities of gamers/game theorists
- The first school for digital game design (DigiPen institute in Vancouver)
- France: LeDiberders on games and art/aesthetics, much attention from the Cahiers de Cinema
- 1990s nostalgia for older games, arcades
- Aarseth is positioned as the first serious academic video game theorist (conspicuously, no mention of Murray as part of the historical survey... she does not appear until later in the introduction)
- Debates about games and gender (both theoretical, industrial and cultural)
- More theoretical approaches to journalistic criticism, aesthetics (Trigger Happy)
- Society for Cinema Studies expands to include Cinema and Media Studies
- Pretty suspect list of essential "firsts" that differentiate video games from other media: algorithmic, real-time play, hand-eye coordination (really?), player-controlled surrogates (an argument could be made that each of these pre-date video games)
- International perspectives (mostly European, apparently little academic work on games in Japan)
- Video game theory as a field, rather than "video game studies" more generally (but nevertheless includes a wide range of approaches, not all of which are theoretical per se)
- Looking to demarcate an agreed-upon, shared terminology for video game theory
- Problems of definition (why does anyone still bother with definition?), irreducibility of video games as a concept
- Essential features of "all" video games: algorithm, player activity, interface, graphics (probably accurate, but who really cares? Different forms and media exist on a continuum and overlap constantly, as they note elsewhere in the chapter)
- Claim that Murray and Manovich are saying the same things with different vocabularies
- Interested in the "possibilities and potential" of video games and recording the history of what games are and have been... is that really all there is to it? I don't really see why the possibilities and potential of the medium matter to video game theory. Shouldn't the emphasis be on understanding them, now, as a (cultural, technological, social, aesthetic, formal, experiential etc.) phenomenon, not pushing them forward towards some grand future or documenting a nostalgic past?
- They end with the notion of "games embodying theories." Worst idea ever - there's a place for theoretically-minded art (although more often than not it ends up being terrible, as evidenced by way too many student films), but it's hardly equivalent to the actual work of theory.

Directed Reading 2010

"The History and Epistemology of Digital Game Studies" starts now.