Abstract
It is something of a comfortable obfuscation to frame game studies as an emerging discipline, 1 one that is still trying to “carve out a niche” or “find its way” in and against the broader purview of the humanities at what many have publicly claimed is a moment of institutional crisis (Winterhalter, 2014). Framing game studies in this mode is a way of affording it a certain insurance against larger, sweeping changes in higher education that might seek to marginalize scholarship on something as “non-serious” as video games; to shutter curricular offerings that don’t directly line up to specific career paths; or to subsume games studies into larger, more established, and often less nimble disciplines such as computer science or mass communication. 2 As such, a game study is regularly cast as a field with unique relevance to better-funded science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs and related technological fields (e.g. Malaby and Burke, 2009) or to pedagogy more broadly via concepts such as gamification (e.g. Peng and Alhabash, 2013). Even within the humanities, game studies has often been connected to higher education buzzwords like “the digital humanities” or “MOOCs” so as to frame the field as a future-looking discipline, one with the potential to serve as a model for what attractive humanities programs might offer across their curricula. In short, game studies are often caught up in a defensive rhetoric that markets the field as a kind of early 21st century cure to a perceived late 20th century decline in the relevance and reach of the humanities.
Among the ideas shared by Kirkpatrick’s Computer Games and the Social Imaginary, Juul’s The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games, and Costikyan’s Uncertainty in Games is that, rather than being a fledgling discipline with tenuous connections to prior research, the study of digital games is instead very much indebted to the cultural logics and academic traditions of the 20th century from which they originated. That is, all three authors reveal through their examples, references, and histories, how the first few decades of digital games (from roughly the 1960s to 1990s) did much to set the groundwork for almost all important aspects of contemporary gaming and the way we study it; this includes game design, game industry practices, gamer culture, the language of games, how people think about games, representation in games, and the relationship of games to other kinds of media and human experience more broadly. Each author draws considerably on both critical scholarship and examples of games from the second half of the 20th century to frame their central themes. While they are each also interested in contemporary games and what the future of studying games may yield (and as such incorporate references to and analysis of contemporary game studies scholarship), they approach their distinct subjects from perspectives that are firmly entrenched in an established tradition of inquiry in the humanities. In other words, rather than serving as exploratory gestures into novel subjects (as might be typical of scholarship in a premature or emerging discipline), these books function as evidence that sophisticated analyses of digital games can be (and have been) productively built on more than a century of existing research into topics that have long been of interest to scholars in the humanities.
The books by Juul and Costikyan, at first blush, may appear otherwise. The two are the first published as part of MIT Press’ new “Playful Thinking” series which, according to the series forward, is meant to “share some of the playfulness and excitement with the games they are about” and to therefore be accessible to audiences including, but “by no means limited to, academics, game makers, and curious players” (Juul, p. ix). Both books accomplish these objectives; however, their cartoonish (and clever) cover illustrations, their short length, and their strong emphasis on providing readers with relatable examples instead of challenging them with the intricacies of complex theory almost betray the depth of consideration afforded in each to two subjects that have long been of interest in the humanities: Failure (in Juul) and Uncertainty (in Costikyan). Both authors offer gaming (with an emphasis on video games) as a site to interrogate what initially seems to be a kind of paradox of human experience: we generally seek to avoid failure and reduce uncertainty in all areas of our lives so as to escape the emotions associated with both, yet we spend increasing amounts of time playing games that function on these principles and produce those emotions. Neither Juul nor Costikyan is content to attribute this to a distinction between the “seriousness” of life and the “consequence free” arena of play; instead, they provide a range of explanations and case studies that collectively engage past research on failure and uncertainty while extending and problematizing that scholarship through the vehicle of games.
Although both “Playful Thinking” books share certain goals, the chosen approaches to exploring their topics are nonetheless distinct. Juul’s book considers the notion of failure from chapters that are set up to align with select fields of study that have already grappled with the term in earnest (specifically philosophy, psychology, game design, and fiction). For example, at one point early in Chapter 3 (which deals with the psychology of failure), Juul (2013) engages Abramson, Seligman, and Teasdale’s 1978 research on the principle of learned helplessness to set up a basis for understanding how humans attribute causes to different kinds of failure and, subsequently, how those forms of attribution might help understand the constitutive function of failure for players in games like SEGA’s Super Real Tennis or Nintendo’s Brain Age (pp. 51–54). This approach, linking existing disciplinary research on failure to case studies of specific games, is indicative of much of Juul’s text. 3
It is a method that is perhaps most rewarding when he discusses several recent studies that he designed to test how players respond to games that force various kinds of failure upon players. In one example, in the chapter on “Fictional Failure,” Juul observed individuals playing The Suicide Game, an experimental title that forces players to successfully kill their player-characters to win the game. Juul’s interest in the experiment was, in part, to gauge whether players might perceive the game as a tragedy because of its narrative outcome (approaching something like a video game version of Othello or Anna Karenina). He found that, ultimately, “the graphics and the tone of the game appear to make the act of self-destruction less disconcerting than it otherwise would have been,” that factors like “setup, presentation, and gameplay strongly influence our experience of a tragic ending” (Juul, 2013: 99), and thus the game fails to produce tragedy largely because it “does not present the psychological reasons for the protagonist wanting to commit suicide, and it presents itself in a somewhat ironic tone” (Juul, 2013: 107). Through a chapter-length analysis of both this experiment and of several other games with tragic narrative elements, Juul (2013) concludes that the paradox of fictional tragedy is ultimately stronger in games than in other media because “we experience a more direct feeling of responsibility” (p. 113) and thus “gamers give us nowhere to hide” (p. 114). The Art of Failure makes it a point to show how games provide a compelling set of artifacts for further understanding the paradox of failure and, along the way, how so much of what we have already come to understand about that paradox through existing psychological, philosophical, and literary research might help us understand something more about the appeal of games.
In contrast to Juul’s discipline-by-discipline approach to the study of failure, Costikyan spends most of his book on uncertainty creating a taxonomy of the sources of uncertainty in games. He does this first (Chapter 4) by outlining how different kinds of uncertainty exist in examples of games as varied as Super Mario Bros., Monopoly, and poker and second (Chapter 5) by working from a source of uncertainty (e.g. “player unpredictability” or “analytic complexity”) back to their implementation in the design of specific games (e.g. Empires and Allies or Starcraft). These complementary chapters, which make up the bulk of the book, establish a nuanced perspective on uncertainty that is delineated through carefully described categories and sub-categories of the concept. The examples, in particular, serve as useful vignettes that illustrate how each type of uncertainty functions both alone and in coordination with the others to create and hold player interest. Through establishing this groundwork in the book’s central chapters, Costikyan (2013) ensures that reader is well equipped for the latter portion of the book, which offers a rich discussion of how game designers might capitalize on, merge, or otherwise consider his categories of uncertainty with a clear sense of how “combining different sources of uncertainty, or injecting a novel source of uncertainty into an otherwise well-understood genre, can create highly original games” (p. 112).
Whereas Juul draws heavily on 20th century psychology, philosophy, and literary scholarship to underpin his writing about failure, Costikyan takes as his jumping off point the work of French sociologist Roger Caillois, who is seen as an important early figure in the study of ludology and who famously responded to Johan Huizinga’s foundational work Homo Ludens by critiquing the centrality of competition to Huizinga’s notion of ludus (Bogost, 2006: 116; Wark, 2007: 116). Part of Caillois’ seminal 1961 volume Man, Games, and Play specifically touches on the principle of uncertainty. Costikyan cites him at the outset of Chapter 3:
Play is … uncertain activity. Doubt must remain until the end, and hinges upon the denouement … Every game of skill, by definition, involves the risk for the player missing his stroke and the threat of defeat, without which the game would no longer be pleasing. In fact, the game is no longer pleasing to one who, because he is too well trained or skillful, wins effortlessly and infallibly. (Caillois in Costikyan, 2013: 9)
The principle expressed in this Caillois’ selection—that uncertainty exists in all games—is largely the principle that Costikyan devotes his book to explaining.
The fact that both authors of these two “Playful Thinking” volumes are compelled to ground at least some of their arguments in scholarship that predates digital games is explained, in large part, by much of Graeme Kirkpatrick’s book. Computer Games and the Social Imaginary situates the emergence of video games and all associated with it—including game studies, gamer culture, and game industry practices—in late 20th century struggles with capitalism, associated counter-culture movements, and the emergence of new technologies. In other words, Kirkpatrick makes a compelling case that, despite the relative newness and undeniably rapid technological advancement of digital games, their appeal, their design logics, their economics, and their cultural status are closely connected to the range of socio-political issues that confronted the society in which they were initially developed.
Kirkpatrick’s (2013) book begins with a discussion of the conceptual power of technological media (including computer games) in contemporary models of the social imaginary and, subsequently, of how those models understand the relationship of technological media to the free agent in the public sphere (pp. 2, 5–21). Specifically, Kirkpatrick is interested in how, as society has developed and adopted new computer technologies, it came to theorize, problematize, and differently understand the purpose(s) of play and of games in contemporary life. (As constitutive? As a requirement? As illegitimate? As a challenge to the system? As synonymous with labor? As emancipatory?) Much of the book explores these questions through distinct, interrelated case studies (e.g. the early history of the medium, the emergence of gaming culture, shifts in game industry practices, etc.) that work collectively to set up a concluding chapter that offers several arguments about gaming’s past, present, and future political dimensions through the lens of aesthetics. Although the subjects will likely be familiar to many who regularly read game studies scholarship, the approach Kirkpatrick takes to them are refreshingly novel. For example, in Chapter 3, he traces the history of game reviews in early game-related magazines such as Computer and Video Games (1981–1995) to understand when and why the term “gameplay” emerged (initially in 1983), how its meaning shifted over time (“The meanings of ‘gameplay’ are determined in the struggles of players to understand and appraise their experiences” (Kirkpatrick, 2013: 80)), and how its shifting definition connected to the emergence of an “authentic” gamer identity.
Computer Games and the Social Imaginary is a very different book than those on failure and uncertainty: it is rich with careful interrogations and thoughtful explanations of dense sociological, philosophical, and critical theory from a range of fields encompassing media studies, history, cultural studies, and economics among others; while the breadth and depth of research represented in the book may be challenging for the more general audiences that MIT’s series courts, for scholars familiar with the relevant trajectories of 20th century intellectual traditions, Kirkpatrick’s book is immediately engaging. For those who wish to consider this tradition in and against the development of video games as a medium and gamer culture more broadly, it is an immensely satisfying volume. It is well researched, well argued, and one of the finest books to date on the subject of digital games.
In Kirkpatrick’s (2013) last chapter, he brings together some earlier points about both the psychological characteristics of self-identified gamers and the history of cultural perceptions of gaming as a social activity:
the preoccupation with making games something more than games is in fact constitutive for the medium. This is to say, as computer gaming culture has grown in confidence and become more mainstream, it has still not managed to secure complete confidence in its own legitimacy as a “pastime” with intrinsic value … there is still a question mark over the activity. (pp. 186–187)
As he explains elsewhere, since the act of gaming itself has a long association with leisure, adolescence, and public controversy, many gamers continue to struggle to claim a larger cultural legitimacy for their play from those outside of their immediate subculture. To put it another way, gamer culture is a culture of uncertainty, wherein there is the potential for a kind of social failure.
As suggested above, concerns with legitimacy, uncertainty, and failure are not only concerns of these authors but are themes that can be found echoed in certain scholarly and institutional framings of game studies as a discipline. Following Kirkpatrick’s excellent mapping of the place of games in the social, it may be that part of this lingering defensiveness about and regular reframing of the field are conditioned responses to the larger cultural attitudes toward the medium itself, attitudes which are certainly not absent from academia. Following Costikyan’s emphasis on the allure of the uncertain, it may be that promoting a developmental rhetoric of “emergence” fosters a sense of uncertainty about the field that makes game studies itself seem like a playful, original, effervescent field of study, one that is thus attractive to gamers turned scholars (and not necessarily closely connected to existing research traditions). Following Juul’s (2013) explication that games are those “shiny surface[s] of harmlessness … where we can struggle with our failures and flaws,” might this constant play with the field’s function and scope serve to render game studies itself as a kind of game and thus “an illusive space … to be protected?” (p. 124).
All three of the books considered in this essay offer carefully crafted arguments about games that, collectively, make a strong case that the contemporary study of digital games is one that is mature, nuanced, and firmly rooted in much of the same 20th century history and theory that has been the purview of the humanities for much of the recent past; their quality argues that this should continue to be the case.