Theory as (Virtual) Experience in Videogames

[NB: This is the prospectus for my thesis, a work in progress]

When we boot up a videogame, we find ourselves glimpsing, within a wholly artificial space, the merest flicker of the real. Participation in digital narratives provides a momentary look beyond the hyperreal slurry of our shared imaginary to the bedrock axioms upon which our postmodern world is built. Literary theory is one point of access to the real, supplying hermeneutics that teach us to distinguish real from simulacrum. Videogames take theory a step further, exposing players to theoretical concepts that can be emotionally experienced and felt in the body. Though videogames are often overlooked as literature, the act of participating in a narrative gives players a unique sense of game/player co-authorship. My thesis examines four videogames that demonstrate this phenomenon by concretizing a specific critical-theoretical frame, including postcolonial theory, psychoanalytic theory, and deconstruction: Through an exploration of these games, I hope to show how the medium, with its multiple rhetorical strata, rhizomatic structure, and ergodic characteristics, has the power to weave theory into a kind of praxis.

For the purposes of this thesis, I will define videogames as participatory, artificial dramas that occur in virtual space within some permutation of iterative time. As such, videogames suspend players in a liminal zone that straddles fiction and action, where the fiction is tied to player decision-making and physical input. This liminality means that games are transhuman experiences wherein our bodies and minds temporarily enter into a collaboration with technology for the purpose of bringing about specific results in virtual spaces. The zone between fiction and action is a fundamentally allegorical space, existing in two realms at once, meaning two things at once, and players are primed to interpret allegorical messaging while absorbed in the spatiotemporal complexities of a game. According to Maureen Quilligan, allegories ask us to read a text across multiple axes, and, while playing, we assume the position of both fictional interpreters and mechanical operators, developing, of necessity, “A sensitivity to the polysemy in words” which is “the basic component of the genre of allegory” (Quilligan 33). “[B]oth readers and characters,” she claims, “must learn to read the horizontal connections between words, not merely to make vertical translation of image into theme” (Quilligan 36). For players, the horizontal connections are multiform, for they not only interpret the relationships of word to word, but also to sounds, dynamic images, mechanical feedback, and contextual and environmental storytelling cues.

Often, the multimodal messaging of videogames creates conceptual paradoxes that challenge our interpretive prowess. Players put work into interpreting videogame allegories that is often quite extensive, such as with the games I investigate as part of this thesis: In Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry, players arbitrate the relationship between cultural memory and historical atrocity; Upper One Games’ Never Alone casts players as both themselves and the player character (PC), embodying Nuna but separate from her, learning about and from her culture; in Housemarque’s Returnal, an alien landscape transforms uncannily into an allegory for a disturbed human mind; and the haunted workplace in Remedy Entertainment’s Control grows into an allegory for late-capitalist alienation, forcing players to renegotiate their relationships to work, workplaces, and the structures of corporate power that contemporary capitalism reifies and lionizes.

Games, as legible allegories, forge the raw data of the phenomenological world into experiences that acclimate us anew to that world. They are like other media in this regard, but because they are undergirded by additional rhetorical layers, players experience them differently. As in other media, plot, character, setting, and dialogue are fed to players, augmented by musical scores, cinematic cut scenes, and environmental dynamics. But the narrative layer is merely the “skin” of the game, adorned with audiovisual set dressing. In Persuasive Games, Ian Bogost defines his coinage, “procedural rhetoric,” referring to videogame substrata, as “the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions”: It is comprised of the interactive layers of mechanical and haptic feedback that occur beneath the narrative (ix). This substrate is continuously making its own little subliminal arguments that mesh with, complicate, or contradict the story layer. Games’ additional rhetorical frameworks mean that they can access a wider range of the human affective spectrum than traditional media. In How Games Move Us, Katherine Isbister notes that, “Because players make their own choices and experience their consequences, game designers have unique powers to evoke emotions—such as guilt and pride—that typically cannot be accessed with other media” (56). Videogames are thus perfect testing grounds to explore and experience—not just to read about—our cultural allegories as phenomenological events that occur in both real world and game-world; real time and game-time. This is due to their unique textual configurations.

Videogames are built upon rhizomatic structures, often organized around liminal nodes that players navigate with an emergent sense of agency, such as a hub, lobby, or in-game pocket dimension. Such nodes literalize the Deleuzeguattarian contention that rhizomes are where “semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very diverse modes of coding… that bring into play not only different regimes of signs but also states of things of differing status” (A Thousand Plateaus 7). Rhizomatic structures democratize frameworks that are otherwise built on hierarchies, inviting players to participate in and, in a sense, to coauthor videogame narratives. In traditional fiction, one author owns the words and gets final say on how the work is used and, to a lesser extent, how it is received. Videogame companies, of course, are built on hierarchical org charts, like most human organizations, but game structures are almost always built on rhizomatic templates that invite experimentation and emergent strategy, even when their stories are linear—or, if I may, “arborescent.” Game maps and level design schematics are both rhizomatic, for instance, and many games allow players to traverse their stories, temporalities, and spaces in bespoke ways that cut across logic and authorial intent, choosing when and on what terms they will experience and interact with the story. The “metagame,” moreover, as imagined by Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux’s Metagaming, is inextricable from game narratives, and further democratize the medium: This refers to the discourse that surrounds games, the emergent, rhizomatic communities that animate games through online walkthroughs, lore speculation, speedruns, game modding, and streaming. Players make choices based on the metagame, and their in-game choices are interpreted by the servers of game developers: This metadata is then used in the creation of patches, expansion packs, and future franchise releases. Few other media have such a responsive feedback loop between creation and consumption.

Traversing games is often hard work, and this work is not always undertaken for pleasure. In Cybertexts, Espen Aarseth refers to videogames as “ergodic” texts whose narratives require “non-trivial effort to traverse” (2). Ergodic literature is interactive, depending on reader/player participation or enaction, embodying a tension that is “a struggle not merely for interpretative insight but also for narrative control” (Aarseth 4). Indeed, many gamers discuss actively disliking much of play—especially the tedium and frustration of repeated failure, which is an in-built component of gaming—but enjoying the sense of slow mastery over digital patterns and systems. There might be a profound reason games are so ubiquitous at this cultural moment having to do with the way our reality is increasingly mediated by machines. In Image Objects, Jacob Gaboury argues that in the contemporary world, computer images are fusing with physical objects in our minds such that they are no longer quite separate (think of the way we conflate the iWatch with the pixels on its screen; or a physical desktop with a virtual one). Games might be a way to negotiate this slippage, the “collapsing of the space between the digital and physical, that embody the and/both quality of our world” (195). This ontological slippage is an allegory for the postmodern condition.

Alexander Galloway’s Gaming and MacKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory argue that part of the satisfaction of play is mastering ludic patterns, and then learning to turn this ergodic effort back on the wider world. They argue that the work we do playing videogames helps us navigate a reality that is increasingly gamified—A neoliberal, technology-infused wasteland in which we are both product and consumer—which enmeshes us such that there is no “outside.” Wark terms this wasteland “gamespace.” Galloway and Wark argue that our allegories and our reality are, in a sense, merging, united within the digital systems that increasingly steer and monitor our lives. Galloway calls the reciprocity between allegory and algorithm the “allegorithm” (89). In Western civilization’s key allegory, we mistake shadows on the wall for reality. We might see videogames as performing a system upgrade on Plato’s cave, transforming it into the “allegorithm,” which asks us to toggle between ontological systems. But not to escape: There is no escape. Just to learn to tell the difference. All the war sims on the market, for instance, highlight how war and war reporting are increasingly indistinguishable from games; the graspable rules and scripted fair play of games alerts us to their lack in the “real” world; and we feel the possibility of authentic forms in neither the ludic algorithm nor in life, but in the gap between them. Galloway argues that,

The gamer is… learning, internalizing, and becoming intimate with a massive, multipart, global algorithm. To play the game means to play the code of the game. To win means to know the system. And thus to interpret a game means to interpret its algorithm (to discover its parallel “allegorithm”) (Galloway 90-1).

These allegorithms are all around us in the ludic ways we are asked to navigate our lives. Wark begins her book with the provocative question, “Ever get the feeling you’re playing some vast and useless game whose goal you don’t know and whose rules you can’t remember?... Welcome to Gamespace” (1). Siri makes hands-free phone calls; Alexa orders goods for us; our cars are beginning to drive themselves; a wrist computer tells us how many steps we’ve taken in a given day; my son’s school uses software that doles out rewards and punishments using sounds and visuals from a casino; an app soothes us to sleep at night. Games are built atop mechanical systems with which the player collaborates, exerting agency that might awaken a thirst for agency outside of the game. Wark thinks we need games to show us what agency we would like to have in the wider world.

This is the game studies bedrock upon which I build this thesis. Though I employ discrete literary theoretical lenses in each chapter and hew closely to their hermeneutics, my larger goal involves the function of games in the current textual ecology, and to demonstrate their crucial role in this strange cultural moment. Games, I argue, make theory physically and emotionally legible, and they can be used accordingly. My first objects of study, to which I apply a postcolonial (and, to a lesser extent, eco-critical) lens, are Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry and Never Alone. The former takes on the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and features a formerly-enslaved black man in the 18th Century Caribbean who frees other enslaved persons from sugar plantations, prisons, and auction blocks, and orchestrates a slave revolt. While the game’s narrative and mechanical systems hint at the potential of the medium for anti-colonial resistance, it is nevertheless a game created by and for the global North, and embedded within much of its anti-slavery rhetoric is the incongruous neocapitalism that enriches its game developers. The autoethnographic game Never Alone, meanwhile, created by the Cook Inlet Tribal Council, is a kind of apotheosis of the postcolonial (and autoethnographic) videogame project. Through its procedures, it endeavors to express distress about cultural and environmental degradation and to model Iñupiaq survivance in a world that has grown environmentally and culturally out of balance. Both games make us feel: The anguish of slavery on the one hand and the world-changing benefit of cooperating with the natural world on the other. Crucially, both use mechanical arguments to force players to confront toxic human systems and suggest paths of remediation. Freedom Cry offers players a power fantasy of confronting a particularly savage period of history, initially encouraging players to answer violence with violence but ultimately demonstrating the futility of violence. Never Alone likewise eschews violence, but it does so by denying players the mechanic in the first place. Its systems, moreover, offer an alternative to Western paradigms of domination. In order to win, players learn to interpret and respond to nature’s patterns, conceiving of themselves as part of an interconnected network of natural systems, each with its own soul, mood, and personality. The game mechanics require players to collaborate with the natural world to bring it back into balance.

My second object of study, to which I apply a psychoanalytic literary lens, also suggests paths toward remediation after creating intense discomfort in players, this time on the level of individual psychology. Housemarque Studio’s roguelike shooter Returnal deploys the generic tropes of science fiction and horror to force players to experience the fear and isolation of psychosis. The game plays with our double-vision as players, making a gameplay virtue of the way our brains split into two—and often more—discrete selves while playing. Most often, players are unconscious of the doubling of their bodies and identities, but Returnal, by rendering the doubling explicit (and explicitly uncanny), smuggles very sophisticated psychoanalytic literary theory into the grammar and topoi of the traditional third-person shooter. Returnal repurposes gaming tropes not merely in the service of generic convention, but, more significantly, to express the therapeutic concepts of defense mechanisms and repetition compulsions; the tripartite formulation of self as comprised of ego, id, and superego; and the role of a therapist in helping an ego strengthen itself. For 15-20 hours of gameplay, players understand themselves to be helping the player avatar escape a hostile alien planet, only to realize that the environment is Selene’s own mind and that the automated sentries and hostile fauna on the surface of the planet are defense mechanisms and the monstrous vestiges of trauma that she has externalized. The player feels her role within the game shifting from that of PC proxy to a sort of therapist, helping Selene decode her memories and strengthen her ego against monstrous internalized manifestations of her past, her guilt, and her self-poisoned narrative, until she can rewrite it on her own terms. The game is a concretization of psychoanalytic theory, for even the protagonist knows, by game’s end, where she is and what she needs to do to get better.

Finally, I examine Control, a game that is informed by and infused with postmodern deconstruction. It offers players a power fantasy of cleansing the specters of late-capitalist alienation from a modern workplace. Rather than Freud’s psychological unheimlich, we find ourselves in a site of sociological unheimlich. The game echoes its crowdsourced origins, a Creative Commons group storytelling venture called the “SCP Foundation,” which is charged with “securing, containing, protecting” paranormal phenomena. I employ Derrida’s “ellipses” and “hauntology”; Deleuze’s “rhizome theory”; Baudrillard’s “hyperreality”; and Vidler’s “architectural uncanny” to decode the authorial cacophony at the heart of the game. This Finnish game is a searing critique of American capitalist priorities, hierarchies, and systems. In “The Precession of Simulacra,” Jean Baudrillard calls our attention to “the primitive (mise en) scène of capital: its instantaneous cruelty, its incomprehensible ferocity, its fundamental immorality” (463). Control literalizes such mise en scènes by imagining the workspace as haunted by cruel and incomprehensible manifestations of corporate greed and expressions of power. The player avatar, Jesse Faden, traverses a frightening Brutalist workspace that has been infected by an entity that warps spaces and infects office workers so that they become zombies that chant, in unison, corporate buzzwords and surreal Dadaist phrases like “A copy of a copy of a copy / the picture is you holding the picture / leave your insides by the door.” Jesse’s “bosses” are otherworldly entities from another dimension, known only as “The Board,” who control her from out of a huge, inverted pyramid. They speak in muffled voices with inscrutable, inexact translations on the screen below, in speech that conflates cosmic horror and corporate double-speak, saying such things as “you will never work/exist in this Torn/Cosmic Reality again” and referring to the office building as “the House/Prison you occupy.” Players are never sure if these entities are Jesse’s pawns or her Svengali. The game is a visual metaphor of Baudrillard’s “hyperreality,” which he conceives as “the infinity of capital folded back on its own surface” into a kind of Möbius strip (465). In The Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler maintains that the “alienation of the individual” is expressed in the scale differences between skyscrapers—expressions of capitalist domination—and the anonymous workers who are automatons within and around them. This difference would not be so acute without “the real economic and social estrangements experienced by the majority of [a city’s] inhabitants” (Vidler 4). Control renders corporate spaces as full of hidden hazards, including inscrutable power structures; the dehumanizing insatiability of capitalist logics; and the way modern workspaces tend to become “pathological.”

I conclude with a few other lenses I hope to use for future projects, ideally when I continue this work at the doctoral level, such as queer theory, with which I hope to explore player embodiment and the implicitly queer game metaphor of adopting different skins and trying on different subjectivities; affect theory and the way games engage more emotional layers than other media—especially exploring their potential role in pro-social endeavors; and feminist theory as applied to both the misogyny in metagaming contexts and the way female subjectivity is explored in game spaces in new and exciting ways. I hope to demonstrate the ways in which videogames are a critical subject for academic inquiry, for the alchemical way they can turn theory into praxis, and, through simulation, reveal what is most real—or at least reveal the reality that is lacking in the world around us. Such practice is critical at our current moment, when the increasing gamification of the real world—in our work, our media, even our wars—are transforming into videogames all around us.

Works Cited

• Aarseth, Espen. Cybertexts: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Johns Hopkins U. P., 1997.

• Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Simulacra.” Simulacra and Simulation, Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. U. of Michigan P., 1994, pp. 453–81.

• Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2010.

• Boluk, Stephanie and Patrick LeMieux. Metagaming. U. of Minnesota P., 2017.

• Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi, U. of Minnesota P., 1987.

• Galloway, Alexander. Gaming: Essays On Algorithmic Culture. U. of Minnesota P., 2006.

• Guattari, Felix. The Three Ecologies. Translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. Continuum, 2000.

• Housemarque Studios. Returnal. Playstation 5 Version, Housemarque, Climax Studios, Distributed by Sony Interactive Entertainment, 30 Apr 2021.

• Isbister, Katherine. How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design. The MIT Press, 2017.

• Quilligan, Maureen. The Language of Allegory. Cornell U. P., 1979.

• Remedy Entertainment. Control. PS5 Edition, Distributed by 505 Games, 2019.

• SCP Foundation. “Main” by The SCP Foundation Wiki, Source: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/main. Licensed under CC-BY-SA. Accessed 29 Nov 2022.

• Ubisoft Montréal. Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry. PS4 Version, Ubisoft, Inc., 2014.

• Upper One Games. Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa). Version 4.3.7, Upper One Games, E-Line Media, iOS Platform, 2014.

• Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. MIT Press, 1999.

• Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory. Harvard U. P., 2007.