#PerformanceMatters: SAG-AFTRA and Hollywood History

With SAG-AFTRA affiliated voice actors having begun their strike today, I thought a quick look at the history of cinema might be in order. Not to draw broad parallels, as many of these comparisons do -- I'm personally often loathe to make the comparison at all -- but to see what it could mean.

In this case, though, the cinema comparison is more industrial than artistic. Throughout the months of discussion of the possibility of the strike, a number of discussion points have circulated throughout the games enthusiast press. Primary among them, related to the union's demand for residuals, has relied on a thought experiment: would the presence or absence of voice actors be a selling point in a game? Are they stars in the same way that Hollywood produces?

We'll start with a quick rundown of the pre-Hollywood years of the movies, with the history largely taken from Roberta Pearson's essays "Early Cinema" and "Transitional Cinema" from The Oxford History of World Cinema. The former covers the years "from the beginnings up to about 1906," while the latter goes "from 1907 to the mid-1910s," or roughly the First World War (13). Pearson says of the early cinema that it was "concerned ... with the individual shot, preserving the spatial aspects of the pro-filmic event (the scene that takes place in front of the camera). ...The camera was kept stationary ... with viewers more interested in the cinema as visual spectacle than as story-teller." (16-7) This "cinema of attractions" was, in the transitional period, contrasted with a "cinema of narrative integration" which, among other things, "increased [the] use of editing ... decreased [the] distance between camera and actors ... [and] moved the actors closer to the camera. ... The decreased distance between action and camera not only enabled identification of the actors and the development of the star system, but also contributed to the increased emphasis upon individualized characters and facial expression." (29) The whole story is significantly more complicated, of course, involving advances that included the technical (cameras, film, etc), business (distribution practices, filmmaking practices) the artistic (shot-framing, editing, etc) and eventually the geopolitical (national subsidization of film, histories of trade, World War I). Broadly speaking, however, there is a very clear moment in which the seeds for cinema stars are born.

The birth of Hollywood itself can be explained in a relatively uncomplicated manner: Edison and other produces in 1908 banded together to create the Motion Picture Patents Company, whose business model relied on licensing fees for films and equipment for which the members held patents. By attempting to monopolize the showing of films, they created enemies who, only a year later, founded the Independent Moving Picture Company that distributed films to exhibitors who were not licensed by the MPPC. A court ruling MPPC illegal and a failure to stranglehold the market later, the IMPC became Universal and the lack of unions and the climate and abundance of locations around Hollywood made for the beginning of modern cinema history as it still continues today.

And that history is largely the history of the feature film. We're just over a century into it (depending on where you place the origin at, of course) at this point, and only a bit more background is necessary. This bit is largely from Douglas Gomery's "The Hollywood Studio System," also from The Oxford History of World Cinema. Gomery says it more or less right out: "Hollywood centred its promotional efforts on the star system. ... Stars provided an effective means of differentiating feature films ... Mary Pickford saw her salary increase from $100 a week in 1909 to $10,000 per week in 1917, ... the stars were quick to realize that, if they were so important to the studios, they had bargaining power of their own. Although many remained tied to exploitative contracts, some of the most successful broke loose from the system." (46) Pickford joined Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith in founding United Artists, an early alternative to the vertically-integrated Hollywood studio system which had already begun to dominate.

The development of the feature film also caused developments in business models; "as the demand for narrative films increased, speacialists were trained to assist the director," including painters for scenery and writers for plot and fashion designers, and eventually continuity editors and scriptwriters. Gomery is careful to note that "The Hollywood production system was not invented, but evolved in response to a number of felt imperatives, of which the most important was the need for regular and consistent profit." (48) That evolution did not take place solely on the side of production. Hollywood also ran distribution and, eventually, exhibition of films, cutting out any third parties possible. It didn't even take decades for the only real holdouts to be anemic governmental responses (think the Canadian Broadcasting rules that still apply today) or consequences of geopolitics (Japan's being closed to trade, the Soviet Union, etc).

There are some obvious potential parallels between this history and that of the videogames industry; the early lack of a defined division of labor (from MIT laboratories through, lets say, the NES), proceeding from novelty to narrative (Pong to Space Invaders to Wizardry to Final Fantasy), and the consolidation of industrial and marketing practices near-simultaneously (Console Wars with Mario and Sonic, studio association with directors or intellectual properties, etc). Zooming in on any one aspect involves a multiplication of discontinuities, of course, because the material conditions of a century ago are different in any number of ways from where they are now.

What's instructive here, though, isn't the parallels: it's the possibilities. Looking at early cinema makes it very clear that the century of history we have under the Hollywood system may have been the winner, and was certainly compelled by the profit motive most successfully, but that it came about due to a huge confluence of factors. Many of these are cloaked in a quasi-objectivity; scientific advancements in film production and audience interest in particular kinds of films especially. But the Hollywood takeover of exhibition was an intentional move, especially designed to move cinema into the world of the middle class rather than the proletarians it had been popular with initially. The star system was very much in line with that: once technical and artistic decisions had been made to centralize the actor/character, the humanist impulses of the middle class could be exploited by making celebrities of the actors who in turn would expend more of their income to continue seeing them.

And, even more than that, the cinema itself was not somehow objectively a place for stars. It took decades of industrial production to get to the point that individual actors were even of interest to producers or audiences. And it wasn't some coordinated effort on the parts of audiences to make that foundational to how we learned to watch movies, but a huge confluence of factors that included the mechanical, the artistic, and the economic, some intentional, some not.

SAG-AFTRA's reasons for striking are hardly even a quarter of a step towards making something like a move toward the development of a proper star system in videogames. Minor residuals certainly change the story significantly, in certain ways -- especially for those for whom the other aspects, like vocal strain and MoCap oversight, go less well -- and have the potential to open the door for themselves and others. That this is a union action, rather than the decree of executives responding to (and shaping) market forces, puts an emphasis on the "and others" there, as well.

More than anything, though, the outcome of this strike necessarily shifts the direction of the video game industry in one way or the other. Even with the possibilities of doors opening aside, it casts relief onto the particular decisions that have been made, and in so doing highlights those that will be. Whether your concerns are related to the construction of the gamer demographic or the production costs of high-budget titles, the potential of lost history or the representation of historically underrepresented groups in the creation or text of games -- or just about anything else -- this strike will shape the future history of those concerns. Because no matter how focused cinema seems now to necessarily be on the strength of individuals, especially in performance, it didn't have to be that way. And the same goes for games.

Reading ARGs

I've been thinking about how to read games for a while now, and so I figured I would write up a little thing that moves again in that direction. ARGs seem to me to exist very prominently among the many under-theorized types of games, so maybe setting some provisional rules down might help.

1) The ARG as text can only be read through whatever the most-final version of the most prominent, collective fan theory exists, in a relatively concluded state.

This comes in a variety of forms: the archived/mostly dead message board, the mostly dead subreddit or reddit.com/r/ARG or 4chan's /x/ (or whatever) thread, or, most commonly at this point, the locked Google Docs file. Any attempt at reading an ARG should, of course, attempt as much of a playthrough as is possible/feasible. Using the playthrough as a basis of reading is not enough, however. What remains of the ARG is the combination of its viewable/playable artifacts and its active interpretive community over the course of its creation.

2) Any estimation of an ARG must read it through its capacity to engage with the paranoid reading.

With The Lost Experience ARG as the genre's only canonical example, the interpretive standards of the ARG community were set nearly a decade ago. This has had some consequences. Most obvious among these are that 'viral' marketing ARGs, like The Lost Experience or Halo 2's "I Love Bees" campaign, are aesthetically indistinguishable from non-marketing ARGs like the Jadusable/BEN DROWNED/Haunted Cartridge ARG. On a technical level this is fairly obvious: all forms use a mixture of the same tools, such as websites and accounts on established platforms like email or social media. Many use similar techniques as well, such as burying pertinent information in non-UI aspects of these accounts. This includes password-protection of pages that need to be derived from, say, accompanying video as well as parsing the page's code for clues. The more important aspect is that it has defined the shape of interpretive possibility.

Every, or nearly every, ARG that I have experienced (mostly second hand) has produced one of two (or, more often, both) interpretations, both of which I would classify under Sedgwick's idea of paranoid reading. These are:

a) Conspiratorial Interpretation: the ARG is best explained by reference to some set of conditions in the world -- usually assumed to be some sort of secondary world -- that are predicated on conspiracy. Whether explained through apocalyptic change, an abnormal acting of time (travel, split, &c), or the sudden empirical demonstration of the supernatural, these theories develop an interpretation of the gathered evidence that relies on some sort of potent, shadowy force (often something within the government or an especially shadowy, powerful private corporation) that is causing events to unfold as they are.

b) Psychological Interpretation: the ARG is best explained by reference to some (set of) psychological conditions experienced by the characters portrayed within it. These interpretations are -- in addition to being (near?) universally ableist as fuck -- premised on an understanding of the 'unreliable narrator' that still assumes the existence of objective information within the text. These are primarily non-secondary world theories, though not exclusively, and are often used to explain apparently supernatural or inexplicable behavior or phenomena through colloquial understandings of non-neurotypical experiences.

This mixture of history and technique have lead to these two being what I would consider the baseline of work for ARGs interpretive communities. Any reading of an ARG would therefore be required to explain not that these exist, but in what way they manifest or are explored beyond the most basic versions. A successful ARG might undermine these readings in exciting ways, or it might develop them perfectly.

This proposal, to be clear, is in the same spirit of suggesting that we might judge a novel by the believability of the motivations of its characters, or a film by the clarity of its story. There isn't an answer here, or a demand that things must be made in certain ways; it is obvious to me that this sort of proposal is immediately meant to be undermined. The difference, of course, is that ARGs don't have, as yet, any sort of explicit set of rules for reading, which means instead of breaking them they simply abide by those implicit.

3) ARGs should be read alongside creepypasta, fantheory/fanfiction, New Media projects, and alternative games as well as alongside marketing rhetoric.

Some crossover in these categories is already obvious; I Love Bees and The Lost Experience are explicitly creations of marketing departments, while Jadusable is an ARG that spawned out of one of the most popular creepypasta. Many ARGs make use of New Media/alternative games ideas and creators to develop their properties, and, if we allow for (1), any ARG is incomplete without the explicit involvement of something like fantheorists. The point in making this explicit is to say that not only do they share material linkages, but aesthetic techniques that can be explored by a reader.

In addition to sharing real, material labor (as in, people who have sold their labor time and expertise to (become the) creator of the piece in question), all of these forms are in some sense beholden to the labor of valorizing the internet as a medium. Creepypasta is already colloquially understood as "campfire stories for the internet," fantheories produce engaged affective communities around (mostly) corporate owned intellectual property on (mostly) corporate owned platforms, New Media is ideologically bound to the understanding that artistic practices are advanced using (mostly proprietary) technologies, alternative games are fundamentally tied to distribution platforms that develop through the internet. Marketing is the beating heart of the internet, from AdSense to Adblockers.

Those who want to read ARGs, either in this capacity, or as potential creators or simply as interested consumers, need to know at least a little bit about how the internet's campfire stories are constructed to teeter on the edge of realism, which is as reliant on platforms as on aesthetic techniques. They need to think also about how platforms and distribution models differ within the context of the internet, and about how production around intellectual property is navigated within fan spaces. And, of course, they need to think about how all of this is made, and funded; at least I think they do.

Distrusting Undertale

To cut the Gordian Knot immediately, my feelings are that Undertale's much-discussed combat mechanic – what folks refer to as the "bullet hell" or "shmup" or "WarioWare" segments, in which you dodge attacks in a 2D space – is good design, poorly executed. The hitbox on your SOUL (the little floating heart) feels, if not terrible, then at least bad. The requirements that are placed on its visual design by the work being done by the game's aesthetic means that it has a hard upper limit on the possibility of difficulty, past which the combination of dexterity and pattern recognition feels like pointless apophenia. The most relevant, though, in terms including what follows, what makes it good, and what makes it poor, is how – even as someone who very much enjoys (being completely terrible at) shmups – it remained completely unengaging throughout my entire time with the game.

The good design element of this seems potentially obvious; the degree to which Undertale incentivizes a 'pacifist' run is hard to overstate, but is also almost entirely done through things like dialogue and information written directly to the player's computer. The incentives for the "no mercy" run are more oblique; it relies on knowledge and expectations built of genre, intuitive mechanical prompts, and a desire to, in Michael Lutz' words, "investigate[] the metaphysics of it all." One might go so far as to argue that Undertale is a direct dramatization of Ludonarrative Dissonance (LND); pressing buttons and strategizing on how better to press those buttons suggests one route, while the words read suggest the opposite. But rather than resulting in a potential incoherence, both of these suggestions are folded into the broader text as complimentary aspects. The longer I sit with Undertale, however, the more I find this kind of reading to be suspect.

* * * * *

I would consider the Michael Lutz essay quoted above, "20 paragraphs on Undertale: a critique," nearly as much of a source text as Undertale itself for this post. His post makes a strong argument; I will quote his 5^th paragraph here in full, because I think it is the best encapsulation of the thrust of the argument:

Undertale has three well written stories, but i don’t think these stories hang together. the criticism (for me at least) arises out of an attempt to consider the project as a whole: games are structured like arguments insofar as they make a series of propositions that you-as-player agree or disagree to with an eye to how these things will pay off in the future timeline of gameplay. the game (as a system) offers incentives or disincentives for various choices, and in so doing belies its own (ie, the creators’) commitment to one path over the other. the branching narratives of a game form their own sort of system that belies an argument. in the case of Undertale, the game itself embraces the notion of its various plotlines coexisting (or potentially coexisting) simultaneously as a kind of quantum phenomenon expressed through metafictional gimcrackery. yet in considering all of its possibilites as a whole, the game’s argument tends toward incoherence.

Some unpacking of this, before we get back to Undertale itself; Lutz' critique, in my reading, boils down to an intentional reading of the game as a coherent, more-or-less self-contained text, and the problems that reading it in that way poses for the apparent arguments that it makes at the player. He supports this, crucially, by reading the metafictional elements as binding in this way, which seems to me a very strong reading; the way that Undertale carries decisions across apparently-discrete plays, or refuses to allow the player to undo certain things, and then also reintroduces those refusals into the narrative makes that reading seem nearly inevitable.

Lutz also cites Jake Muncy's "Undertale's Not As Peaceful As It Pretends," which is largely concerned with the way that Undertale communicates its own arguments. For Muncy, the communication breakdown is largely mechanical; Muncy asserts that she is the sort of player who "tr[ies] to play games the way they seem to want to be played," and that Undertale's mechanical obfuscations are such that Muncy is be able to understand the game's desire but be unable to act upon it. Muncy cites Aevee Bee's "The Tyranny of Choice," which, at least in my reading, is completely incongruous with Muncy's broader argument. I feel that I should say, before continuing, that I consider Muncy's article very good, regardless of this.

In "The Tyranny of Choice," Bee argues that systems as such are monological, no matter how much (or little) they produce or represent dialogue. In her words:

I believe systems are statements. Not always restrictive or exploitative of hateful, but always statements. Statements about what choices are allowed. Statements about the limits of freedom. Statements about what categories exist, and what it means to belong to them.

Bee intentionally conflates two uses of the word "systems" throughout the latter half of her article. Both refer to an abstraction that might be called rules: on one hand are the "systems" of videogames, which (I interpret as) a sort of fractal version of the jargon "mechanics," meaning either an individual action allowed to the player or a collection of the same (at any level), and on the other are the "systems" of social being, or the particular ways in which living in the world are organized according to the logics and requirements of the (to shift to my own interpretive frame, which I cannot claim she shares) mode of production. The conflation serves to allow Bee to explore a common quality to both: what might be called their capacity to enunciate, or, in her words, their status as statements.

Had Muncy's article continued with the analysis suggested by its opening line – "It was about an hour into Undertale when I lost my ability to trust it" – the use of Bee's "The Tyranny of Choice" would have made, to me at least, significantly more sense. If we assume that the "systems" Bee is discussing sit at the broadest level – an assumption made (perhaps too) easy by the conflation with societal systems – then the inability to trust Undertale should be a fundamental aspect of it as a statement, rather than a grievance to be aired. And this is a reading that I can see the merit of: Undertale is a game that does not trust its players, after all, that deems it necessary to regularly remind the player that it is skulking behind their back, and that constantly "subverts expectations," requiring the player to continually re-examine what they trust they know. This is largely viewed as a good thing, an argument for its freshness and importance and joy.

Undertale's lack of trust, or its untrustworthiness, is an aspect of its statement. This is why, or reflected in, how the bounding box in the battle defense sequence will occasionally mutate or bring new affordances. It is reflected in the ultimate ending, in the emergence of "chara" who Lutz calls the "real villain" and "radically evil" in a world where both of those things are constantly denied.

This is, I think, where I differ from Lutz' argument; his claim that "games are structured like arguments insofar as they make a series of propositions that you-as-player agree or disagree to with an eye to how these things will pay off in the future timeline of gameplay" is meant to underscore how he approaches "the project as a whole," but this seems to me to be an approach to the (to return to Bee's terminology) statement as a whole. That is, Bee sees the system itself as monological, but affords space for the act of play (and interpretation and so on) as dialogical. As I read it, Lutz, much like Muncy, takes issue with the system as dialogue. I tend more toward how I read Bee's essay: a game itself, for purposes of interpretation at least, can be polyvocal, but it can never be anything but a monologue. And I would go even further: as a monologue, a game cannot contradict itself, at least insofar as a contradiction is conceived of as an endpoint; it can only modulate itself in ways that reveal or obscure its character.

* * * * *

The argument that posits Undertale as an expression of LND – an argument that, I should be clear, I have not encountered (to the best of my knowledge) but that I was at one point inclined to make – brings up a host of issues, all of which I find it difficult to address. The main one, though, is linked to the question of trust; if Undertale is fundamentally claiming its own untrustworthiness, then what would LND even look like?

Clint Hocking originally formulated LND in terms of two contracts: the "ludic contract" and the "narrative contract," and used it to critique not just how Bioshock (could) read differently than it played, but how its ultimate twist glossed over that difference in a way he found insulting of the player's trust in the game. In his words:

[Bioshock] openly mocks us for having willingly suspended our disbelief in order to enjoy it.

The feeling is reminiscent of the Ikea commercial where we are mocked for feeling sorry for the lamp. But instead of being tricked by a quirky 60 second ad, we are mocked after a 20 hour commitment for having sympathy for the limitations of a medium. The ‘twist’ in the plot is a dues ex machina built upon the very weaknesses of game stories that we – as players – agree to accept in order to have some sort of narrative framework to flavor our fiddling about with mechanics. To mock us for accepting the weaknesses of the medium not only insults the player, but it’s really kind of ‘out of bounds’ (except as comedy or as a meta element – of which it appears to be neither).

His parenthetical feels almost prescient; what could be dissonant in Undertale is charming, rather than 'out of bounds,' largely because it is metafictional and/or comedic. The language of contracts – and "willingly" and "tricked" and "agree" and "accept" – is revealing. Even LND, that headiest of jargon, a concept that I think primarily concerns craft rather than interpretation, is predicated on trust and dialogue.

To make, quickly, a Derridean aside: in positing a binary, LND as a concept is fundamentally concerned with unity. It makes no sense without the trace of holism, without the presupposition that not only is the text itself singular, but that each of its constituents elements are as well, and that they can be extricated and examined in their relation to the core unity. This is why I think of it in terms of craft: it is an aspect that can be workshopped, rather than one that speaks to the world, the reader, the mode of production, and so on. "Systems as statements," on the other hand, in explicitly excluding the possibility of reading a system itself as dialogical, seems to me to suggest the very possibility of that kind of speaking.

I find the LND reading of Undertale suspect because I agree with Lutz' reading of its metafiction, and because I find Muncy's problems with the game absolutely accurate. This is why I can claim the shmup segments of Undertale are well designed, while still refusing the argument that they are somehow morally righteous (or even engaged) or that they can be defended by claiming one need only 'get good.' They work because they are a breach of trust, because Undertale itself neither trusts you nor wishes to be trusted, no matter how much it wishes to convey its message of friendship. Were the game fundamentally a dramatization of LND, it would be not only a game described in terms of craft, trust would be a simple prerequisite, and nothing more.

9/16; minor changes

24 Theses on The Beginner's Guide

A suggestion: aside from the obvious way of reading, these theses may be read as three separate essays. The top of each section as one, the middle as another, and the bottom as the third (so, e.g., thesis seven follows from thesis four follows from thesis one; nine follows from six follows from three). This is not mimetic.

1. Everything worth attending to in The Beginner's Guide is handled better in Problem Attic.


2. Complicity is a hollow eggshell. A thin protective layer around a pocket of air.


3. My Let's Play.



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4. Cara Ellison names Return of the Sunfish and How Do You Do It? and Twine and Kojima; Brendan Keogh names Papers, Please and This War of Mine and Alien Isolation; Kris Ligman names Braid; Jed Pressgrove names Off-Peak; Emily Short names The Magic Circle and Anna Anthropy and Stephen Lavelle (Increpare) and Michael Brough and Pippin Barr and Robert Yang and Porpentine and Tale of Tales; Austin Walker names Counter-Strike and Mario Maker; Carolyn Michelle names Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Inquisition; Tyler Wilde names Her Story; Hayden Dingman names Ken Levine and Sid Meier and Tim Schafer and Cliff Bleszinski; Bob Mackey names Sunset and Undertale; Christopher Byrd names The Old City: Leviathan; Cameron Kunzelman names Kitty Horrorshow and Brendon Chung; Jeffrey Matulef names Journey and Rez and El-Shaddai. In no sense is this exhaustive.


5. The pocket of air the eggshell protects is the flimsy, worthless theorization that bubbles up words like "immersion" and "interactivity."


6. I call (3) a critical Let's Play because I made it in conversation with criticism surrounding The Beginner's Guide, and because it owes its existence to the work being done in the field by folks like Lana Polansky, Heather Alexandra, Liz Ryerson, and Zolani Stewart. The main difference being that the bulk of critical Let's Play work is done by adding the creator's voice to provide context and interpretation, whereas my own is an attempt of removing a voice or two to provide the same.



* * * * *



7. The most obvious connection between Problem Attic and The Beginner's Guide is that the former is "a game about prisons, both real and imaginary" (the creator's description) while The Beginner's Guide is a game about a designer who makes games about prisons (at least some of the time) that are aggressively interpreted at the player as both real and imaginary.


8. I am using "complicity" in this context as an affect, a reaction to primarily narrative elements that is written onto the body. That the narrative elements are primary does not mean they are foundational, however; the fundamental experience of complicity in this sense is tied to an understanding of the medium of videogames as one that privileges interactivity.


9. The initial point is, ultimately, so obvious as to be dubiously useful. The first video begins with my own navigation of the start menu. I set up the gamepad that I will use for the bulk of the play; I then go into the Audio submenu, and use the given option to turn off the Narration. This element, which is absolutely central to every single interpretation of the game so far, also happens to be an optional element.



* * * * *



10. Kris Ligman's reading of The Beginner's Guide's similarities to Braid evokes Ryerson's postmortem of Problem Attic, "The Other Side of Braid." Ryerson writes (in the third person): "If Braid was from the perspective of a white man with a lot of power and resources, her game, Problem Attic, was supposed to be from the perspective of a protagonist with no power, with very little ability to escape or make sense of their situation."


11. The privileging of interactivity is productive of affects other than complicity, of course. Frustration, triumph and boredom stand at the center. Reflection and disassociation. Complicity is unique only insofar as it is the affect that is just as tied to formal properties, but requires that it be narrativized to be explicitly enacted.


12. Playing The Beginner's Guide without narration brings about few surprises. The curation frame is more limited, but still obviously present in the intertitle cards/loading screens; any time the narrator would offer to do something, it no longer happens, but other 'changes' remain intact. You must crawl up the stairs and wait in the prison, but the lampposts are still where they were and the housekeeping still ends when it did.



* * * * *



13. Criticism of The Beginner's Guide occasionally takes an aside to note that certain aspects of the game, and specifically its reception, benefit from material privileges in both broad and narrow social senses. This is not an aside.


14. Interactivity is already a constellation of ideas and practices. Quoting Brendan Keogh quoting Espen Aarseth: "[Aarseth] notes that 'interactive' is a weasel word that 'connotes various vague ideas of computer screens, user freedom, and personalized media, while denoting nothing… To declare a system interactive is to endorse it with a magic power.'"
    
    In a more generous reading, interactivity is shorthand for these things, alongside manual dexterity and skill, granted and stolen powers of expression and obedience, a certain influence over the universal temporality of a text, and a(n ideological) real material influence that is mostly seen in cultural reflections like mod scenes. In short, complicity.


15. The one real surprise, though, was that the narrator's ending of Whisper was excised entirely; the player does not experience the "death" animation in the beam; only the floating.



* * * * *



16. Problem Attic feels, at times, uncomfortably mimetic of precisely the privileging of interactivity. There is a constant sliding back towards a reading of the game that centers its ludothematic harmony; how its punishing mechanics are extensions of or reflections on its difficult themes. This isn't untrue of the game, but it also largely does not matter, except insofar as that argument might be a rhetorical tool to bring the game into conversations that require their interactive shibboleth for entry.


17. Despite its synthetic qualities – what one might decide is its unique polyvocality, if one were being incredibly generous – interactivity is largely a useless rubric in thinking about, playing, or otherwise doing anything with videogames. It erases approaches to them as texts, per Keogh, and as situated within history equally.


18. The implication of this lacking animation is fairly obvious: by turning the narrator off, the experience of playing The Beginner's Guide is significantly closer, if not totally identical, to the "original" games created.



* * * * *



19. Jed Pressgrove castigates The Beginner's Guide as being "a sob-story expansion of [Mattie] Brice's 'Death of the Player' essay," while a number of other critics reach for their Barthes. Strangely, none bring up Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation," which seems particularly appropriate. According to Sontag, "[t]he interpreter says, Look, don’t you see that X is really - or, really means - A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C?" The Beginner's Guide's narrator is a masterclass in this particular style. Didn't you know that prisons mean depression? That machines mean depression? That questions mean depression? The game's dramatic irony is that it is flipped onto his character, of course, in the end; the interpreter forgot to know thyself, and in doing so committed some reprehensible acts. The historical conditions that Sontag identified have finally been personified, in a nicely metatextual videogame.


20. Interactivity distills all potential affect down to the feeling that an argument has been lost.


21. Which itself does little more than to shuffle the narrative pieces. Perhaps Coda's accusation that the narrator kept inserting lampposts wasn't literal, but was in accordance with the reading the narrator had given of them to begin with. Coda, in other words, might not have been referring to the in-game objects, but to interpretation as such, per (19).



* * * * *



22. The impulse that drives (16) is interpretive. Which is to say: despite interactivity's erasures, it is no more against interpretation than the conspiracist. The validity of (1) rests not within metaphor, but execution.


23. The Bioshocks and the Spec Ops' didn't suck out the yolk; they simply pointed to the shell.


24. "The only way to win is to stop playing" is only because interactivity is feeling complicit.

In Praise of Evoland 2

Pastiche is ... the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language[,] ... a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter[,] ... blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs[.] ... This situation evidently determines what the architecture historians call 'historicism,' namely, the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusions, and in general ... the increasing primacy of the 'neo.' (Jameson, Postmodernism 17-8)

Evoland 2 is Final Fantasy with a circumscribed scope, a Zelda set in thriving cities, Earthbound without the pathos. It is Secret of Mana reduced to its ostensible innovation in action, arriving twenty two years too late.

And then, on top of that, it is River City Ransom where punching feels like shit, it is DonPachi with a massive hurtbox, it is Street Fighter II with loose controls, Guitar Hero on a gamepad, Gradius with one gun, Final Fantasy Tactics with incompetent enemies, Magic: The Gathering with no decks and boring cards. It is even briefly, which is to say for an unbearable eternity, a turn-based, match three Puzzle Fighter. And the list goes on. For twenty hours. And these are only the things it explicitly references.

As if to add insult to injury, Evoland 2 is also one other thing: absolutely crucial.

* * * * *

Games, an art form only about 30 years old, has no such canon of great works. Maybe that’s due to the youth of the medium. But let’s say we had such a list: Would we still have easy access to them all? Would they be archived in such a way that we could still play them, or might their platforms, their technology, have aged out of relevance, lost to the winds?

If contemporary games discourse has a trace (in the Derridean sense), then that present absence, the negation that gives it meaning, must be the archive. Not history or institutional knowledge, not curation or preservation or accessibility – though each of these things is, in its own, often deep way, a problem. Neither is it, though the cyclic discussions of games preservation tends to lean in this direction, the corpus. The collection and maintenance of all hitherto existing games, no less than the development of pedagogical norms and the determination of the great works, needs doing, and is not so much ignored as quietly militated against by the very institutions that these projects will all one day be tailored to benefit.

To crib a bit: "By [archive] I do not mean the sum of all the texts that a culture has kept upon its person as documents attesting to its own past, or as evidence of a continuing identity; nor do I mean the institutions, which, in a given society, make it possible to record and preserve those discourses that one wishes to remember and keep in circulation." That is, the archive which is the trace of the discourse isn't the Special Collection in the back of some library, but "that which determines that all these things said do not accumulate endlessly in an amorphous mass, nor are they inscribed in an unbroken linearity, nor do they disappear at the mercy of chance external accidents[.] ... [The archive] is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements."^*

The archive is, in other words, the condition of possibility of discourse. It is why these cyclic discussions, as of preservation, can happen. Jackson, quoted above, says also that "[g]ames critics seem to have the same arguments, the same discussions every five years or so," while quoting Ian Bogost lamenting the short collective memory of the field. Bogost seems to focus on the churn, while Jackson isolates an interest in history; both, however, take the field's existence, which is to say its ability to capture dispersed rhetoric into an object both coherent and fragmented, for granted.

* * * * *

The assumption implicit in what you're saying is that a work's formal structure isn't as relevant as what it accomplishes. This is a completely valid point of view, but not, I think, all that useful for sorting something into a genre. But I accept that many simply don't care about sorting that way.

The irony of Evoland 2 is that, for all the particular, important ways that its pastiche falls flat, it nails what is perhaps the most important aspect of the broadest genre it cannibalizes. Evoland 2 takes the single unifying affect that is most fundamental and most particular to the class of games that it plays upon and distils it. The result of this distillation is, unfortunately, 100% pure tedium.

Tedium can be, for games, an effective material. Chrono Trigger nearly announces that it is built upon it. Early in the game, prior to any real plot, the player wanders through a festival. One of the available diversions is a relatively easy battle with a singing robot. Fighting the robot gives Silver Points, which can be exchanged for cash, which can be used to buy a sword that is, for at least the next few hours of the game, pretty overpowered. Which is to say: in what is effectively the game's prologue, the player is highly incentivized to engage in what is essentially a mockery of the most mechanics-heavy aspect (the battle system) to the point of reducing it to rote memorization. It's tedious; and so, as a tutorial, incredibly effective. The player will spend the next tens of hours accumulating and exchanging, accumulating and exchanging. Because of that tedium, though, she will notice the particular contours of things that otherwise would not have worked. The particular ways the story shifts, the rapidly-normalized eruptions of whimsy, the subtle reframings of that cycle of accumulation and exchange in all aspects of the game, even the peculiar joy of enacting that cycle: none of these would mean anything without the backdrop.

Aeris' death doesn't matter unless you've been bored out of your skull – in a very specific way – first. The original Evoland's parody of this moment drove that home; for Final Fantasy to work, the mere existence of its identifiable signifiers is nowhere near enough. The game has to be sufficiently tedious and, crucially, requires that the tedium be the basis on which the impressive scope of the game is founded.

* * * * *

The only difference now is that the material grounding no longer leaves the possession of the corporations who sell the immaterial work, and when it is no longer financially profitable for them to maintain access the work, they will take it away again. It is curatorship by capitalism, preservation by profit, and it is turning the history of videogames into a scorched earth.

Claiming the archive as trace is a way of saying that games discourse, no matter how critical of the technological fetishism of the industry it might be, is trapped in a dead model of history. The "scorched earth" of video game history, which at this point is a little more like a pockmarked map, is at this point still as fundamentally a progressive history as any succession of console generations or scientific clarification.

The dispersion of statements – not even to mention the peculiarity of their enunciation, their status as events – and, more crucially, the means by which they are brought to bear upon each other, how these statements that are events are not just keys in a narrative but moments that transform others and themselves along certain lines of knowledge; this is the anxiety that underpins the ways in which games are discussed.

* * * * *

Evoland 2 is all tedium, no transformation. It is the sort of game that begins to surprise you because it can't possibly be so unsurprising at such a constant clip. You first wonder why it is that you are bothering seeking out some useless collectible; not long after that, you wonder why it is you are bothering with a story with even less weight than an item literally called a "Collectible Star." In the case that "you" is "me, the writer of this," then you circle back around; you 100% the game even though it takes the developer over a week to patch out a bug preventing the completion of the (awful) card game. You do this out of spite, but also because you grind the Lode Sword out of Gato. Because you have enough history with these games to know that tedious repetition is sometimes sufficient as synecdoche.

But the synecdoche needs the scope, needs the desolation or the pathos or the whimsy. Tedium is not a suitable grounding for the play of random stylistic allusions, at least not insofar as these themselves are meant to allow for play. The first (commercial) Evoland dug a hole and lay in it, petulantly refusing to do any more; Evoland 2 never stops digging.

All of which is a way of saying that, in the most infuriating possible way, Evoland 2 gets it right. And right, crucially, in a way that can't or won't be conveyed in the discourse, as long as it remains written. Evoland 2 is its own archive, an experience of the condition of possibility that, beyond genre or developer or publisher or mechanics, conditions the possibility of a diversity of statements – games – to become legible as a discourse. An experience that breeds only resentment.






* Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 128-30.

Short on Games: July 2015

Grassfires of Veldstar

Porpentine's Grassfires of Veldstar (that's a direct download link) is an action puzzler, a series of suggestions of stealth with a rude timer, a crystal hunter masquerading as an avoidance simulation. It's really fun, in that immediate reset upon death, you're really just memorizing (intelligently constructed) arbitrary bullshit, goddamn this is cute kind of way.

I can expand on that bit that seems less than enthusiastic here: it's only arbitrary bullshit insofar as I consider all puzzles arbitrary bullshit. What Veldstar does is make each "life" last ten seconds; you start a level, the clock starts to count down. Your moves are entirely based on cues: the fire starts at the top of the level, so you run down. The bombers' shadows enter house left and move horizontally, so you do as well, vertical movement to avoid the shadows that become dropped bombs. The tiles themselves are relatively clear as to whether or not they are impassable, and if there is a lack of clarity you test them and die and reset and try something different.

This last is, in practice, what the game actually consists of; you see the fire above, you run down. A wall below, you try left, it's blocked you die, you start over, do the same but go right, the timer runs out just before the crystal, you don't run down quite as far this time, make it to the crystal, repeat. The gamey hook is those frustrations, but also how you are holding up right as time runs out and you let go but the inputs have a bit of lag so you respawn and immediately, unbidden, rush directly into the fire and die again and push through.

More complicated obstacles are introduced as well, hidden bombs and laser pylons, the latter of which provide a fantastic little set piece. Mostly it's just fun to die again and again and work through these microfrustrations. Also it's really cute.

Helix

I'm pretty garbage at all of Michael Brough's games, though none I've played more so than Helix. It's where you're an almost Osirian eye who circles other things which pops them, which gives you points. You don't want them to touch you. If they do you lose all your points and have to start over.

The catch, of course, being that this is an iOS game, is that to move you must trace little circles on your tablet or phone. As the game opens, it shows a finger in the bottom right corner and suggests that you touch anywhere to begin. Once you do, an indicator shows up, some arrow letting you know something is coming from offscreen right there. It does, you dodge it, and a little line appears. If you fill the line around, it pops. It's the kind of game that's perfectly great to while away with, but that also hints at it's own existence within an oeuvre.

Given that the game is legitimately gated by skill -- though I feel compelled similarly to say that the joy of it is immediately apparent -- I can make no particular claims as to how it progresses or where it might resolve. Helix does feel, however, very much as fascinated with abstraction and space as the other of Brough's games I've played (namely 868-Hack and Corrypt. All three use touch controls in abstracted ways; where the latter two are tile-based, however, the subject at hand is fluid. The circle motion seems, in certain ways, a natural progression of the "flick a direction wherever" input methodology of a game like Corrypt. If any part of the device can emulate a button or a joystick or a pointer, why not let it? And, more importantly, if the fundamental input method is going to be one of emulating, of recapitulating former control schemes, why not run with that in ways that incorporate the abstraction of the collapsing of the visual and tactile space?

Which is also why that visual space must be metonymized. The little arrow that signals the first enemy once your finger touches the screen is a suggestion. The black background with its patterns is unchanging, but it is also in (a) space, part of a larger whole. But then, too, the boss(es) problematize this even farther, materializing as static that fades in to the screen without movement. There is movement from the outside in, which also passes through, but there is also movement inside. Static movement, in a sense; the metaphoric incursion of another dimensional plane into the two in which this is played.

All of which gels, in a way, with, especially, Corrypt, which (seemingly) functions at least partially as the clef to his work. Without knowing much about how the game goes past the first boss, it's hard to say whether Helix is in a way "about" that hidden space or that extra dimension, but it very much seems to be. Or, at least, that is a read based on the impressions I have given that assumption.

Chain Blaster

In Chain Blaster, you fight the same six or so waves of enemies repeatedly, each time through making them slightly faster, adding a few bullets. It's an hour of attrition to get to the minutes where the points even matter. For a vertical shmup, this is one (facet of the) Truth; the faster the scrolling, the more apparent the lie, the stasis.

It's a series of fifteen minute chunks, repeated mindlessly until it isn't and then it's over. And then another hour or more if you were close enough. The aesthetics are the blandest of cyber, the frustrations macro. Everything, even death, wiped out by persistence, until persistence is the cause, and then an hour fifteen and you aren't even on the board. I love it.

Structure Does Matter

This was originally published on a now-defunct tumblr in November of 2013. I'm reposting it here with significant edits because I took the tumblr down but I still think this is worth reading for those interested.

0. Introduction

The Dungeon Master is not a storyteller. Within the context of Dungeons & Dragons, this is the role she is usually attributed. Beyond D&D, the term tends to be generalized as the Game Master or Master of Ceremonies; I will refer to the same role, or at least the duties of filling it, as a facilitator. I refer to the D&D term first because it is central to my argument: that the structure of the game matters at least as much as its systems.

Against the storyteller model, I would like to propose an alternative. From this alternative, I will attempt to draw out certain structural properties of Tabletop Roleplaying Games. That alternative is this: The Dungeon Master is the reader. She reads the actions of the players, when brought to bear against the game rules and the proposed setting. She reads, also, the social dynamics, though in this she is not unique.

That the DM is a reader leads to certain critical positions that remain largely unexplored within the theorization of this genre of games. The first is that structure does matter. From this, a discussion of alternative theorizations, primarily Ron Edwards' Big Model, can be undertaken. Following that discussion, the main points can be developed: what constitutes the mode of production of a game, and what constitutes its play.

The essay ends with an exploration of the implications of this theorization on a broader social. Given that the whole relies heavily on the Marxian articulation of the dialectic -- particularly in the form of the Abstract, the Negation, and the Negation of the Negation -- this exploration takes place within the bounds of that articulation.

I. Structural Difference

Any discussion of the merits of D&D must begin by reckoning with the theoretical work done on a forum called The Forge. I feel it worth mentioning that I did not participate in the activity and have approached the body of work there without any real guidance. What follows is not particularly kind to these theories, so I would like to lead by saying that certain theorists from that school, particularly Vincent Baker, have articulated things that I think are very crucial. I will, in particular, refer to Baker's definition of "system," also called the lumpley principle, which is defined as follows: "System (including but not limited to 'the rules') is defined as the means by which the group agrees to imagined events during play."

However, I think I find in their theory a very different teleology than the one that they champion, specifically in their praxis (i.e. storygames), which seem to me to move towards the collapse of structural distinctions between the participants in a way that, while perhaps interesting to play and powerful in terms of reframing the dialogue about what tabletop games are and can do, still fundamentally misses the mark as to how that structural difference functions.

Using a dialectical analysis, I hope to clarify what it is about this structural difference that makes it productive of play in the tabletop setting. When I talk about the dialectic, I mean it as follows: a preexisting abstraction is negated, and that negation is subsequently negated, producing a new thing. This new thing is fundamentally marked by the process and will tend to become an abstraction which itself enters into another dialectical process.

In the case of D&D, the initial abstraction is what we tend to call the DM; that is, not the person who is called that, but the structural role, which is comprised of certain types of authority, a degree of managerial accountability, a familiarity with a system, and an initial level of scenario control. This is perhaps not an exhaustive list.

The model which considers the DM as the storyteller agrees up to this point, but neglects the way in which these structural qualities are themselves functions of the dialectical process of play, instead seeing them positivistically; because of these structural qualities, the DM is an authority, a manager, someone with experience and control. The players, then, are the objects of the game, the audience, being managed and dictated to.

But play happens not through inversion but negation, and this seems obvious in the case of any campaign which proceeds past character creation; the DM immediately has to consider backstories, allegiances, availabilities, interests, and so on, and this becomes the true shape of the game. The players, then, are the initial negation, that which concretely opposes and undoes the abstraction.

The easiest way to see this is in the frequency of the frustration of the DM's position as storyteller: she prepares a scene, the players subvert it (un)intentionally, drawing out an insignificant conversation or proceeding down an unforeseen path, and so the majority of the DM’s prep goes by the wayside. The DM can respond to this in one of two ways: she can insist on the abstraction, railroading the players, or she can work within the negation, improvising or reworking prep elements to fit within her now negated material.

In practice, the DM usually finds some sort of balance between these two reactions. The storygamer praxis seems to consist of an attempt to set up the former possible response as a structural failing and the latter as the true locus of play. Therefore, they extrapolate, and end up in a place where the DM’s structural difference is negated; without a human occupying the structural role of DM, the former reaction cannot take place, and the latter is guaranteed.

Again, this is interesting on its own terms; however, it also precludes the subsequent processes which, in my estimation, are the true strength of something like D&D, or at least are what keep someone like me, who has no particular interest in things like roleplaying or worldbuilding as such, engaged.

The final step, then, is the negation of the negation, or the sublation; the final move, by which the players themselves are negated, and the new thing is instantiated. There are a number of things that could be thought to play this role, and I think it worth a brief detour to list them below:

1. The improvisation of the DM. As referenced earlier, this is fundamentally a reaction to the initial negation; as such, it contains the seeds of the negation of the negation. It, however, does not negate the players in itself, nor does it “move through” them. It remains within the hierarchical structure which the “storyteller” model privileges.
2. The various way in which the players assume responsibilities formally accorded to the DM. This appears in multiple ways; players attempting to exploit the rules, players taking over scene building responsibilities, players organizing the sessions, players actively or passively refusing to engage on either a micro or macrocosmic level; all of these and more seem, at least at first glance, to indicate a moving past the first negation. Again, however, this takes the structure as fixed; it democratizes the play to a certain extent (whether productively or poisonously), but ultimately serves to reify the abstraction. This, in fact, is the only way that the DM goes from abstract negatable quantity to tyrant, and it is also, unfortunately, one of the most intuitive and apparently-interesting ways to play the game.
3. The “contents” of any game/campaign. This is the most obvious answer, and gets closer to the real movement without quite identifying it. This is sometimes called the Shared Imagined Space in storygamer lingo; it is the sort of thing that recaps are made of. What is important is that it is created by all participants in the game, rather than being imposed by DM fiat. While this constitutes a move through negation into the creation of the positive, it only accounts for one aspect of the sublation; it fails to account for the negation of the negation.

Rather than these, the negation of the negation is the negation of the players. The most common examples of how this works would be metagaming or reflection. This is what I am claiming: the play of D&D is, ultimately, the spaces in which roleplaying stops. This is accomplished by way of a dialectical engagement with its ingrained structural difference.

II. The Big Model

For those unfamiliar, the Big Model is a diagram which came out of the Forge/storygame crowd’s theorization of RPGs.

In the diagram, the largest circle is labeled the “Social Contract,” and consists of all the stuff outside a game that creates the conditions for play (travel, social dynamics, availability, etc.). In this section I am going to articulate why what I have detailed above is more than a simple recapitulation of this model.

According to Ron Edwards, the creator of The Forge, the Social Contract is the “big box” that encompasses the play of RPGs. In the model, it is where the arrow labeled “Creative Agenda” begins. The short version of my claim is this: framing the social as a container fundamentally misprises play and results in a necessarily hierarchical, fixed structure, even in cases where the mechanics work explicitly against this. Also I am going to drop the “Contract” from here on because it seems bad.

The key idea in this theory, which posits itself against the Big Model theory, is that DMing is itself the beginning of a dialectical process, the result of which is the negation of roleplaying. Another term for this negation could be the social.

While it would be a peculiar sort of ignorance to argue that social conditions don’t represent the material conditions on which RPG gaming is based, it is equally ignorant to argue that they subsequently function in the sort of cod-Freudian way that The Forge theorists tend to, pointing to issues in play as inevitably symptoms of a dysfunctional group sociality, generally under the rubric of a divergent Creative Agenda.

The Creative Agenda, in the Big Model, is a way of formalizing the knowledge that individuals approach play with different interests. It does so in order to claim that any given group functions similarly. Broadly, the claim inherent to the diagram's guiding arrow is that any given gaming group will tend towards one of three broad camps. Implicitly, it is primarily used to indicate that any sort of social dysfunction in any given group that is not obviously preceding the game arises from conflicting desires within the group.

There is something like a class-based antagonism going on here, of course; The Forge was primarily a space for game designers, whether professional or amateur or aspiring, to work through their theories, and so they have a vested interest in preserving a reliance on the means of production.

The Creative Agenda is nothing much more than a system-specific recapitulation of a tripartite psychoanalytic model, a way of providing a scientistic basis for the reconstruction of motivations or inclinations based on an understanding of a socially-determined individual. If the Big Model lacks an explicit oedipal myth, this is only because Oedipus permeates it so wholly as to be invisible. Everyone has their initial subjectivating trauma; whether that manifests as a recurring dream about wolves or a particular GNS predilection, the talking (playing) cure will reveal all.

Positing that the social is the material conditions of roleplaying games is to say that, yes, they take place in the frame of the social, but that previous theorizations neglect to account for how that social is the material which is acted upon by the transformative labor of play. Reducing the social (by way of the Creative Agenda) to the Lacanian Real or Freudian unconscious works well enough if that’s your goal, but recognizing the way in which this kind of play organizes sociality into a productive labor is central to navigating the particular way in which gaming structures at the same time as it is structured.

III. Modes of Production

Storygaming is an attempt to alter the relations of production without addressing the means of production. As such, its attempts to reorganize games structurally succeeds in the sense of changing how any particular game treats the material of the social; however, this success is based on the false premise that the models it builds are a rejection of the hierarchical model that precedes, and with a deep misunderstanding of the way in which this particular kind of play is a pleasurable extension of, and mimetic reflection on, labor, and its own structuring of the social.

Dialogue surrounding roleplaying games is deeply concerned with a sense of creation. If there is a single value that could be universally attributed to this type of play, it would take a strong argument to claim anything else. The object of creation, of course, generally remains unarticulated. So, what is it?

The obvious answer here is "a fiction." This is where the "DM as storyteller" model comes from; RPG play is a structured social interaction with the aim of producing a (shared) fiction. This idea is also why so many awful fantasy books get likened to D&D campaigns; the author is a (real or presumed) Dungeon Master translating (poorly) her campaign to the written word.

The Big Model theorists have a slightly better term for the product of the campaign: the Shared Imagined System, or SIS. This gets closer to the way that the act of play produces not a fiction in and of itself, but a space in which fictions occur. Rather than a rote fantasy novel, then, sitting together to play a game is (at least on one level) the act of collaboratively producing a universe in which those fantasy novels might be set. While this gets significantly closer to describing what it is like to actually play a tabletop roleplaying game, it keeps the drawbacks of assuming that one necessary byproduct of this type of play is actually fundamental to it.

One way to say this is that, for all that SIS opens up, it remains excessively design-focused, conflating play itself with the goals of the creation of a system. The practical consequence of this theory then works against its stated aims: working with the understanding of the SIS leads to an attempt to democratize role of facilitator. But that democratization fails to abolish it, instead generalizing it. When no one has the structural role of the DM the end result is simply a distributed facilitation, not a generalization of play.

The reality is that RPG play has, as its product, social relations. Again, it isn't that the social dynamic is the thing which conditions play and can be accessed through it, as though play were a simple analogue of the unconscious; play itself is productive of social relations, and they modify themselves in accordance with the means by which they were produced (system in Baker's sense) to better reflect those means, and (in doing so) are rapidly outmoded by the development of those means, often to the point of obsolescence or outright antagonism.

The mode of production of RPG play, then, is taken here to be the coordination of the system (the experiential set of mediative technologies which the players have reached consensus on at any given moment) with the social relations (the ways in which players form ad hoc modes of normative social behaviors conditioned by the experience of play). Because both of these aspects are subject to constant performative restatement, there is no concrete way of elaborating them into a totalized system.

Despite the failure of any game to elaborate a totalizing mode of production, the function is the same, even if it remains intensely local. The confluence of system and social relations through play produce hegemonic structures, social relations in which certain subjectivities are privileged and others are not. Because the products themselves are immaterial, and because the means of production themselves are performative and beholden to an exterior (but interpellated) set of social relations, the question of how to engage meaningfully with the means of production without simply recapitulating or generalizing them needs to be asked. My own tentative answer, very much pending reconsideration, is in moving toward (as I lay out in Part I) an understanding of the dialectical structure of this mode of play, and combining that with an understanding of the way play mimics labor.

IV. Bodies at Play

Understanding the dialectical movement fostered by the structure of Dungeons & Dragons is useless without taking account for the way it is enacted by bodies at play.

In theory, D&D takes on a capitalist structure: as the facilitator, the DM's primary responsibility is in controlling the application of the system. In practice, however, she is the primary object of negation; her control of the means of production is exclusively established such that it can be negated in actual play. This negation, as discussed above, is again negated, by the players accidental or purposeful abstention from roleplaying; this itself is the actual play.

If this is all more or less dictated by the structural organization of the game, then fine; but it is not a fully automated process. One can't simply observe any of this by reading a rulebook; the form demands a specific kind of engagement to produce this objective conclusion.

In every instance of the structural movement detailed that produces play, as well as in the specific formulation of the RPG mode of production, what is central is the way that the engagement of the group of people with the current aspect of the process (players and DM alike) develops the system along the dialectical path. This engagement is also known as "people actually playing the game."

The way in which play is analogous to labor, in the case of D&D, is very straightforward; the people playing use the means of production, rented out to them at a price, as a way of creating a product, for which they are compensated. That the product is identical with the compensation is simply a way of saying that this particular form of labor is not alienated; the utopian implications here are both obvious and probably useless in an actual critique of capital.

That this labor isn't alienated does not mean it is morally good; the production of social relations that games like D&D encode are often destructive and violent. This has reasons that are structural both on the game's terms and in terms of the society in which the game exists; there are also innumerable individual, non-structural reasons. None of this is of particular concern to this analysis.

What is important is to identify, broadly speaking, the actions that take place around the table, or in prep activities, which themselves are acts of labor, in order to better understand experiential play given this analysis. This begins before the rules, even, in genre itself.

This first type of work is a sort of topological knowledge; this is essentially the difference between a skilled and an unskilled laborer/player. What is important is not a knowledge of genre goals or conventions as such, but a familiarity with what is actually essential about genre: that it exists as a way to reproduce its own conditions. This knowledge is rarely articulated, of course, and especially rarely in ways that aren't the repetition of established tropes, but the topological knowledge of the genre – for D&D, this is doubly "fantasy" and "roleplaying game" – is the driving force behind the player's ability to work efficiently with its systems toward productive ends.

Knowledge of particular tropes from a specific genre can actually impede play; in the case of D&D, this most clearly takes the form of a particular character opting for the role of the fantasy hero and attempting to mold the game accordingly. But the same situation isn't always destructive; if the player recognizes that this trope isn't necessarily an end in itself, but simply a way of actualizing the Fantasy genre and perpetuating it, and plays it accordingly, the Hero archetype can be a productive member of the group.

The second type is another form of knowledge, which is particularized in the DM, as familiarity with the system. Part III of this essay deals with the ways in which this apparently structurally resembles not labor, but capital, and why that structural resemblance is not the case in practice.

The third type is establishing the initial abstraction. This overlaps the second type, but is typified in the game's "prep" work. In reality, this is a type of prestidigitation; the DM (generally speaking) performs work outside of the physical context of the game ostensibly in order to, as wisdom has it, facilitate her ability to tell a story. Really what the DM does is to establish the pretense of having labored (which often leads to actually performing the expected labor). This is a way of establishing the abstract authority held by the DM in a concrete way; the player's "know" that the DM has "put in work" ahead of time, and so, striving to honor that, will then put work in themselves. The players, as the negation, will necessarily void this work; the DM then pretends that this negation never happened.

The fourth type is establishing the negation. This is also called character creation. Generally this is the first moment that play takes place. However, it doesn't simply cease after the character sheet has been filled out; any time during play that the player makes a decision as or for their character (whether it is altering the character's motivations based on newly discovered facts within the fiction, or standing up after having been knocked prone during battle), this particular form of labor is being done. So while the archetype of this might be character creation, it could equally be called roleplay itself.

The fifth type of labor is the negation of the negation. This is the product of the game, its social relations, as exemplified by metagaming.

Establishing that these five actions are types of labor, and how they are exemplified, is crucial to understanding the dynamics of the actual dialectical movement of the game. If we persist under the idea that the work of playing a roleplaying game is parasitical upon the play, we fundamentally mischaracterize the game itself.

V. Workers at Play

Labor under capitalism is an abstraction; the quantity which translates time into money. The worker sells her labor time to the capitalist, and the capitalist invests according to perceived productive capacity. The capitalist mode of production structures social relations according to relations of production; to live socially is to bring your productive capacity to bear on time.

But play is not profit, no matter what good intentions child psychologists have when they metaphorize. It is, of course, one of the premiere components of reproductive labor, which itself is at least as crucial to the functioning of capital in both the short and long term as its more identifiable counterpart; and is, itself, irresistibly drawn back into the flow of capital, in the form of either new or (in the case of play) rejuvenated bodies. To argue for play alone, then, is to argue for reproduction of capitalist systems, whether that argument takes the form of play-as-escape or play-as-enriching-experience.

The worker at play is a clause that doubles itself; it can be read either as the Worker, who is at play; or as the one who works at playing. In the former case, the category of worker is figured as a stable identity. This could be diachronically speaking, but is more probably synchronic, using a discrete temporal frame to nominalize an action into an identity, and referring then to an action taken while inhabiting this identity. In the latter, the play is the subject, the fixed thing, and the 'worker at' is a description of the kind of action being taken upon it.

For capitalism to function as a mode of production, the former interpretation is a, if not the, crucial component of short-term, day to day reproductive labor. The worker works, primarily, but not exhaustively; because the worker, no matter that labor is an abstraction, refers always to a body, and the body's productive capacity (at least in terms of generating products as well as surplus value) is limited. The worker must also sleep, and shit; and increasingly, as the mode progresses, play.

It is the latter interpretation which fits the dialectical mode of play exemplified by games like Dungeons & Dragons, however, and this interpretation, while not necessarily disruptive of capital nor unsubsumable by it, nevertheless does not reproduce it, at least not in the same way. It reproduces the mode of production's social relations only, and imperfectly.

While "to work at playing" could very easily be appropriated as a propagandistic term for, say, the environmental blurring of a workplace like Google or a videogame studio, it is always only ever a figure of speech, or an elision. To invest the form of labor into the act of play is to reproduce labor, of course, both in the act of bodily rehabilitation and as an abstraction; but it also refuses commoditization, and the logic of surplus value.

As ideological reproduction, there is a crucial gap in the form and the action. Baker's notion of Reward System is useful in illustrating how it is the work of the designer, above all else, to obscure or bridge this gap, providing (as he says) the basis of an answer to the question of how play functions as its own reward by recourse to the highest possible repeated system that (to return to my own language) justifies the reproduction of the abstraction of labor in the context of a leisure activity.

VI. Conclusion

All of which returns us to the necessary basic assumption: that the DM is not the storyteller, but the reader. Whether from the perspective of the reproduction of labor or from the development of a campaign, this assumption, along with an analysis of the mode of production, leads to a way of approaching and enacting D&D that is broadly overlooked.

When the play-structure of D&D is altered, while preserving the structure of production (facilitators working from purchasable rulebooks), any theorization that does not account for this assumption begins to exhibit deformations between the theory and the praxis. This is why a game like The Quiet Year -- for all its positives (there are a lot of positives and you should absolutely play it) -- has a sense of stasis to it beyond the movement of the mechanics. The stunted dialectic persists as an absence.

If this analysis is "for" anyone then, and this separates me wildly from the Forge theorists/designers discussed, then it is for the player, rather than the designer. Instead of attempting to offer a better model by which to design and sell these games, in other words, I would like for this to, if it is to be applied to any aspect of the process of these games, be available to those who play them intentionally. Against the critic as pet and quality assurance; but simultaneously against the player as needing to be pandered to.

Above all, an assertion that if Edwards' contention that System Does Matter holds any weight, which I believe it does, then the corollary contention, that Structure Does Matter, must no longer be ignored.

Videogame Currency and Reproductive Labor

The labourer consumes in a twofold way. While producing he consumes by his labour the means of production, and converts them into products with a higher value than that of the capital advanced. This is his productive consumption. It is at the same time consumption of his labour-power by the capitalist who bought it. On the other hand, the labourer turns the money paid to him for his labour-power, into means of subsistence: this is his individual consumption. The labourer's productive consumption, and his individual consumption, are therefore totally distinct. In the former, he acts as the motive power of capital, and belongs to the capitalist. In the latter, he belongs to himself, and performs his necessary vital functions outside the process of production. The result of the one is, that the capitalist lives; of the other, that the labourer lives. (VII.XXIII.11)

Tim Rogers identifies 13 types of currency in his review of The Sims Social. These are:

The three "apparent currencies"

• Simoleons
• Social Points
• SimCash

The "output currency"

• House Value

The "videogame staple"

• Experience points

The "[un]thought through"

• Lifetime Points

The "meta-currency"

• Quest Items

The "mightier meta-currency"

• Facebook wall posts

The "brain-benders"

• Energy
• Real Money
• Time

The "sub-currencies"

• Mood
• Needs

I'm assuming that Rogers means "currency" in the broad sense: a medium of exchange. Even with this definition, three categories stand out: the "output currency," the "videogame staple," and the "sub-currencies." The final stands out because (and here I note that I have not played the game, and am treating Rogers' essay as a text unto itself) it at no point lets the user "buy" anything. These "sub-currencies" are a closed circuit with an output that translates abstractly into one of the "apparent" currencies.

The initial stand out simply can't be used (in the context of the game as such) as a medium of exchange: it is the game's leaderboard.

Rogers explains how the middle – the "videogame staple," experience points – is a currency like this:

Earn experience points to level up. Level up to gain access to more items in the shop. You’ll need to be level six to buy a particular thing, and level seventeen to buy another. In short, experience points are the “currency” with which you “buy” the right to buy other things with your other currency.

Assuming, still, that the term is meant broadly – which is to say, not as a synonym for money in the sense of a universal medium of exchange or even a legal tender – this, too, is functionally a closed circuit with an arbitrary output into another form of currency, although this time at another remove. The "sub-currencies" result in a higher return on investment in the use of energy to produce an "apparent currency;" the "videogame staple" is an expression of the expenditure of energy which enters its own loop, unable to be spent outwards. It "buys" the ability to buy (using other currencies), but cannot be spent. The emphasis here should fall on the "it."

The real universal currency in this game, of course, is "energy," which is a wage. Or rather, it is a quantification of time into an exchangeable object. Everything within The Sims Social is an expression of "energy," up to and including spending "real-world monetary currency" into it – whether in direct conversion or as a circumvention. Which, given that this extraludic money is likely a (portion of) a wage itself, makes sense: your choices are M-C or M-M'. Sort of. But this isn't about how The Sims Social works.

Rogers' essay provides a context for the issues I have with the general impulse to see in the RPG process of grind-get experience-level up a mirror for the process of production under capitalism. This is something that has bothered me for a while, but it took Stephen M. Beirne's "Level 99 Capitalist" to clarify my issues with it. Beirne claims, similar to Rogers on experience points, that:

Mechanically and systemically, levelling up usually constitutes this: as the player achieves ludic goals, they’re rewarded with points or toys to increase their proficiency at completing future ludic goals. It’s a cute little economic process devised around accruing and storing wealth, since that’s what experience points represent: a quantitative measure of one’s power and successes, an abstract currency to be traded for self-improvement, although ‘self-improvement’ in this regard mainly extends to ‘improving one’s ability to collect currency.’
...
Capitalism is founded upon an exchange of labour for wealth, where labour is the product of a labourer to be bought and used by others in pursuit of their own wealth. In terms of a videogame, labour would be the activities involved in generating the player’s wealth, such as combat in Final Fantasy IX and questing in Skyrim....
In this exchange of labour for wealth, you farm baddies to be able to better farm baddies.

Here, again, experience points are formulated as a kind of currency. That they cannot be spent, indeed can only spend themselves, is likewise glossed over. It is in Beirnes subsequent claim – specifically, the metaphor he chooses that, to my mind, beautifully and productively undermines the whole theoretical framework of his argument – that I determined my nagging issue:

Baddies in this sense are little more than little packets of experience points waiting to be freed up and collected by the player. As one ingests food for physical nourishment, we slaughter enemies and absorb their remains. [emphasis mine]

The claim I'm making here, in full: the critique of video games (as texts) is a critique of reproduction, not of production. I mean this all the way down. From the act of play to the parsing of code to the critical engagement itself, what is occurring is not production (in the sense of the application of labor power to the means of production to produce products), but the reproduction of that labor power. This is inseparable from the process of production in the long view, but at a granular level requires different (theoretical) tools to be made graspable.

Following on the epigraph, Marx continues:

The capital given in exchange for labour-power is converted into necessaries, by the consumption of which the muscles, nerves, bones, and brains of existing labourers are reproduced, and new labourers are begotten. Within the limits of what is strictly necessary, the individual consumption of the working class is, therefore, the reconversion of the means of subsistence given by capital in exchange for labour-power, into fresh labour-power at the disposal of capital for exploitation. It is the production and reproduction of that means of production so indispensible to the capitalist: the labourer himself. The individual consumption of the labourer, whether it proceed within the workshop or outside it, whether it be part of the process of production or not, forms therefore a factor of the production and reproduction of capital; just as cleaning machinery does, whether it be done while the machinery is working or while it is standing. The fact that the labourer consumes his means of subsistence for his own purposes, and not to please the capitalist, has no bearing on the matter. The consumption of food by a beast of burden is none the less a necessary factor in the process of production, because the beast enjoys what it eats. (VII.XXIII.13)

The title of this chapter of Capital is "Simple Reproduction," and the quotes pulled cover that. What subsequent theorizing has done is to add the category of reproductive labor. That is, that this reproduction, of the worker herself and of the class of workers, is not exempt from the labor process. Time spent cooking is time spent performing reproductive labor, as is time spent fucking, as is time spent gaming.

The base level truth of this is, I hope, fairly obvious: I play games after work, they alleviate (or enhance, but in a different way) my mental exhaustion, and then I go back to work. Reproductive labor is how the loop is closed.

And here is where this argument's loop will close (though the tail will go on): this is the real significance of my pointing out the "closed circuit currencies" discussed by Rogers and Beirne. Experience points, with some notable exceptions, are not a medium of exchange, even when they include, say, the ability to manually affect certain statistics or qualities of the player avatar. They are still not being exchanged. The apparent qualities of the process of leveling up – for Beirne, analogous to accruing wealth – are, despite mechanical consequences, purely aesthetic. Rogers claims that damage is the "output currency" of the RPG while Beirne – per Austin Walker's response – focuses on the player's soul as the ultimate output point. Experience points are, as tabletop RPG theorists have been saying for ages, a pacing mechanism. That is, they are a way of gating time.

Because of Energy, this makes Rogers' inclusion of experience points in the general category of currency make some sense, even as it (in my estimation at least) ultimately fails to stand up to close inspection. For time to become currency, the wage relation is required as an organizing principle of social relations. The difference between RPGs and Social Games, at least at the level of political economy, is precisely this: the social game turns what was a convention of incorporating manipulable numbers directly to the player into a proper economism. What before was a set of interlocking numbers simulating an economistic totality is plugged into a form which takes as its organizing principle the actual mode of production's organizing principle. Rogers, in a parenthetical, notes that "'RPG Elements' is what they tend to call an 'economy' now, in a game." On the face of it, this is true; but deeper, it is that prior to Energy, games could only gesture toward an economy by sleight of hand. And that sleight of hand persists, even as the new economic order has finally been discovered.

Which isn't to say that social games are the true mirror of capitalist production, and that the object of inquiry need only be changed. They remain as fundamentally about reproductive labor as any other genre of the form. Per Marx, it doesn't matter what the beast eats; only that it sustains her.