Gaming 102: How I Study Games
Or, a beginner's guide to taking the fun out of playing
I would give my soul
For a girl like you at once
Put your hands up
Let me see you shake your hips
Electric Callboy, “Hypa Hypa”
You know that feeling when you’re at the club and you see an astoundingly hot person?
Maybe not. I guess most of us are gamers. But imagine someone begins to dance with you.
Revere the games you play similarly. Dance with them a little if they let you. Don’t rush anything. Give them time, and enjoy the moment. Let them reveal themself.
Play Moore is a newsletter that introduces ideas in videogame studies scholarship to a wider audience. Basically, I’m an English professor, and I overthink every game I play. If you’re new here, then welcome to our band, and be made at peace!
In Gaming 101, I gave a few reasons why games are worth studying and teaching. Here, in Gaming 102, I’m going to give you a few terms and some questions to get you started. These terms and concepts are important, I think, in enjoying our play as much as possible. This is not an exhaustive list of scholarly terms or of important questions; it’s pretty close to the first day of my 200-level class, but with a lot less syllabus and admin talk.
A few terms
Text
Videogames are texts, and we can analyze them with the same critical tools used in literary, film, and media studies. We can examine the rhetoric of their instructions, the prosody of their dialogue, the sound design, the camera, the settings, the characters. “Text” does not only apply to written words.
The game is something that exists on its own without our preconceptions. We can try to approach it on its terms, regardless of developer intent or personal beliefs (more on this later). There are some things that all people playing will encounter, and we can look at those things. Themes pop out to us. Characters grab our attention. Writing pulls us in.
This works best with narrative-heavy games, of course. The Last of Us, God of War (2018), Telltale games, Night in the Woods, and Firewatch have been my favorite to teach so far. I like these games because they have firm story structures while giving the player some room for interactivity on different levels.
Across those differing levels of interactivity, narrative games function as texts. But that isn’t to say that games are only texts.
Ergodic
You probably haven’t seen this word before, but I promise it will make sense. Espen Aarseth uses it to describe the nature of computer games in his seminal book Cybertext (1997).
“Ergodic,” in the realm of literary studies, basically means a process that changes every time you encounter it because it requires nontrivial effort from the audience to engage with and understand. It is not always the same, even in its building blocks (the required interactivity creates different realities).
This is not (exactly) the same as the ergodicity within physics and mathematics. Ergodic literature was coined independently from the same Greek words: ergon (work) and hodos (path/way). For us, it’s a path that requires work.
There are example of ergodic literature from before videogames were invented: Tarot readings, the I Ching, and choose-your-own-adventure books are all ergodic. More recent examples include S. by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorset and House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (I highly recommend the latter; I haven’t read the former yet).
Non-ergodic literature is that which is always the same and only requires trivial effort: most normal books, films, and superficial experiences of visual art. The thing exists fully on its own and doesn’t ask you to do anything in order to exist and present itself.
Videogames, as we tend to think about them, are ergodic by their very design.1 Even very simple games require a semiotic action (an action that creates meaning) from the player that is distinct from “reading.”
No two experiences with the same videogame will be the same on a textual level. The Last of Us will take Jackson 13 hours and 4 minutes to complete, and Amelia 13 hours and 5 minutes, and Amelia’s second run 14 hours and 36 minutes. These are all different texts. In my playthrough, when I walked through that hallway, my Joel was three inches to the right of where your Joel was. That’s a different text, too.2
Games are not records like other media. They do not preserve what has happened. They present a world or an initial state and allow the player to create—to reveal, as we say in interactive fiction—the story. While they get close, a let’s play (even one with no commentary) is not quite the same as playing the game yourself.
Phenomenology
Phenomenology is the study of how we construct reality around us through our senses. A “phenomenon,” technically speaking, is something that appears to our senses—that is, something we can see, feel, smell, etc. An appearance, or maybe a performance. It’s distinguished from “noumenon,” or the true inaccessible inner reality of something.
As I go through the world, as I live my life, I take in perceptions, and I make meaning out of those perceptions. You do, too. It’s how we learn.
Games are not real, and we all know that. The same way that characters in book aren’t real—just collections of ideas hidden behind symbols printed on a page, which I can interpret because I was taught how to.
Think about games with that player-centered power in mind. Your decision to hit “next” is powerful. You reveal the narrative, and you create the world.3 Yes, we can analyze games like we can novels and films, but this extra dimension of sensory reception and interaction means that we need new tools, new frameworks.
So, when we play, we make meaning that doesn’t exist without us.
Revelation
The final book of the Christian scriptures, usually attributed to a John of Patmos, is called Revelation because he is sharing a vision he had, a work of prophecy revealed to him by divine intervention, as he claims in the beginning of the work. The word “revelation” does not mean “end of time” (it’s the translation into Latin of the Greek word apocalypsis, which means “unveiling”). It’s a dream vision, baked in symbolism and poetry.
Game scholars use the verb “reveal” and the noun “revelation” to describe the way a player encounters a narrative within a game. The term comes out of the interactive fiction community, which focuses on text-parser games, but we can (and do) apply it slightly more broadly.
Take what Nick Montfort says in the beginning of his book Twisty Little Passages:
For one thing, the puzzles of interactive fiction function to control the revelation of the narrative; they are part of an interactive process that generates narrative. Roland Barthes offered, in The Pleasure of the Text, an erotic concept of the reading experience. The text reveals itself in a sort of striptease.
A reader who skips boring passages, according to Barthes, is like a man at a stripclub who storms on stage and removes the dancer’s clothes, bulldozing her boundaries and removing her autonomy. Don’t do that. Gross. The pleasure is in waiting for the story to be revealed in due time. She’s the professional.
Games are unique in that the order of the revelation might be different for each person and with each experience (remember: ergodic). For interactive fiction, that revelation comes through the solving of puzzles. Montfort continues:
The pleasure involved in interaction is not simply that of reading… The person who reads and writes to interact is the “operator” of a interactive fiction in cybertextual terminology (Aarseth 1997); in general computing terms, this person is the “user.”… the actions of reading, writing, playing, and figuring out are all involved in such operation or use.4
When we interact with a game, we should revel in its revelation. Remember the epigraph above. Take time for it to happen, and take it as it comes. Enjoy the puzzle-solving, the figuring out.
I think those are enough terms for now. Want me to cover any more? Anything here I can explain further?
The methods of game studies
Let’s talk about process. Studying games and interrogating our experiences with them sounds like work that ruins the fun. We’re killing pleasure for the sake of sounding smarter than we are. We’re ruining relaxation for elitist dogma. Whatever people are saying these days.
I think we become better players, better enjoyers, and even better people by analyzing what we engage with. The analysis here shouldn’t be ripping apart your favorite media for the sake of an essay. I am not in the business of killing pleasure. I only mean that we should pay attention and think critically because the media we love deserve it.
I’m not going to get in too deep with hyper-specific academic frameworks and methodologies of game analysis. I get bored of that stuff, too. Let’s start with some of the questions I ask my students and I ask myself for game studies in general:
What is a game?
What genres or modes can we distinguish? Why do they matter? What even is genre?
What is the difference between the player and the player-character? Which pronoun should I use when I describe the gameplay? What about games in which you control multiple people?
What does agency look like?
And here are questions I ask when I encounter a new game. These questions will usually lead you to the major themes:
How does this game teach its mechanics? What knowledge of games does it assume in the player?
In what order does information get revealed? Why is some information prioritized?
What do I feel in response to what I’m seeing/hearing? What actions do I want to take, and what actions are expected of me?
What are some of the symbols or visual effects I’m noticing? How might they communicate certain ideas, and what do I take away from them?
What choices do I have? What choices have been made for me? What might those say about what this game is? What is the game telling me?
Wrestle with these, and you’ll be in a fun place.
Data
Follow what the data show.5 Start with your perceptions (the phenomena in front of you), and construct a meaning out of them. You’ll have to bring part of yourself and your preconceived notions to your experience, and that’s fine. But focus just on what the game is showing.
Try not to apply language to the game that the game doesn’t use for itself. Use the game’s own language to talk about it. You can infer some from genre conventions, but otherwise let the game be the game.
And try to follow the data where they lead. That might not sound like advice you’d normally get from an English professor, but this is what careful arguments require, even when they come from some specific lens.
No, not anything can be a right answer if you argue for it. Some conclusions are wrong. Don’t cherry-pick data that support you.
A good exercise is to find data that don’t support you. Think about how your argument must change to fit those data in.
Your arguments don’t need to be fool-proof, and they don’t have to be so absolute as to require all people to agree. But they should be consistent for you.6
The point of analysis
We all analyze all the time, whether we know it or not. We’re taking in data, and we’re interpreting them. We’re making meaning.
One of my challenges for increased enjoyment and more specific, fulfilling conversations is to avoid evaluative language when I can. In the beginning, don’t say the game is good or bad (I struggle with this one a lot). No claim can be universal, so be specific. If a game is disappointing you, try to nail down exactly why rather than simply admitting, ‘oh well, it’s a bad game.’ Once you get those reasons, then you can get evaluative.
When doing reviews, obviously, you need to evaluate the game. That’s the idea: tell me whether the game is good. Your evaluation should come with plenty of thought. Every review I’ve read in the gamestacker community here has done so.
(Side note: check out other Substackers who do videogame stuff [I call us “gamestackers”] because they’re all wonderful; start with Good Game Lobby and Margot Plays Video Games.)
The point of analysis is to help our daily lives, I think. Ask questions, stand by your hot takes, and follow data wherever they lead. Those conclusions are often more interesting than the preconceptions you came in with.
Gaming 102 ends. Next in this series will be Gaming 230: The Cultural Study of Videogaming.7 I’ll talk about what games to do us, how my tradition of scholarship views gaming as a practice, and why it matters.
Be at peace.
Kinetic novels are the only exception I have found so far, and they really are only videogames because they have some visual presentation and take place on the same platforms and with the same softwares as other videogames. Their interactivity (press “next” to see the next thing) is about the same as flipping a page in a book. I would call it “trivial,” and so allow it to be non-ergodic. Differing run-times will still be true, but I don’t think that’s as important.
Many might point out that even books are different because everyone who reads it will bring different things to the text, but that gets into a different concept. Right now I mean that the text itself changes in a game in a way that it can’t in other media. There are no two identical readings of the same book, but the book is the same. With games, the way the game itself appears (this gets to the next term) differs with the playing.
For you have become like gods.
Montfort, Twisty Little Passages, MIT Press, 2003, pg 3.
I like “data” as a plural word. If you prefer “data shows,” that’s fine, but I think “data show” sounds cooler.
For a quick example, look at The Last of Us Part II. I might make a few mad with this one. Many online detractors believed that the main lesson from the game was “revenge bad,” or something similar. From an academic perspective, I disagree. You don’t need to like the game—not by any means—but this specific argument I don’t think holds water. The data don’t support it.
What, did you think the numbers would go in order? Pfft.
I have an academic streak to myself and I loved this break down of how to study games. It is inspiring to pick up some more academic texts around video games. 🎉💚 thanks for sharing your approach and knowledge and also for the lovely shout out. 🥰
Loved reading this article!! Nice way to start in the day.