Abstract
The goal of the article is to present a new theory of the concept of gameplay, a term everybody uses without ample definitions and with little consistency. The aim is to provide an understanding of gameplay outlining the inherent complexities and convoluted layers of play and game which exist in the playing of a game. The theory is inspired by phenomenology and Martin Heidegger’s concept of Dasein. We do not intent to resolve the paradox that games are both objects and activities. Instead, we offer an analytical and methodological guide to the ontology of gameplay resting on an oscillating relationship between a double-layered structure of “here” and “there” in playing and gaming.
Introduction
This article supports a new theory of gameplay. Rather than to settle with a synonym for fun, player’s excitement during the playing of a game, or the more abstract relation between player input and machine output, we take the composite nature of the concept seriously: There is playing and there is gaming in gameplay. The challenge is to identify the exact undercurrents of such an internal symmetry and to determine the proper analytical and methodological framework for observations and conceptual refinements of what it means to play a game.
In what way is our take on the concept of gameplay a novel approach, and what are the benefits? First, it avoids the reductionism typically found in a number of attempts at defining gameplay that reduce it to either a vague psychological or mechanical term or substitute it with an equally near inexplicable term. Second, we argue that our approach inscribes an important aspect of dynamic into the very nucleus of gameplay. As we shall see in more detail, gameplay arises from—and “is”—the constant and rather subtle toggle between “here” and “there” (almost like a Freudian [1989] “fort/da”) and thus between what could be coined play-mode and game-mode. Third, and finally, since our explanation is firmly rooted in phenomenological philosophy, particularly that of Heidegger, a significant focus is on experience and sensuous recognition in the playing of a game. While this article tries to lay the ground for a theoretical comprehension of a complex and composite concept (and activity), it is our hope that it will also paw the way for further empirical studies of the in situ dynamics of performed, actualized, and experienced gameplay. In short, we claim that our conceptualization of gameplay is nonreductionist (as much as that can be achieved), dynamic, and transcendentally experiential. And, since the following is a theory of gameplay based on phenomenological assumptions, our proposed methodology can be described as a formal study of a sensuous phenomenon (namely that of playing an actual game).
In order to comprehend the crux of playing and gaming—and the two of them combined in gameplay—we must first understand and, in a way, make peace with the fact that the ontological and epistemological nature of gameplay is inescapably interwoven. To ask the ontological question about the being of gameplay, the way gameplay features or qualifies as a “thing” (Heidegger, 1967), is discerningly close to enquiring epistemologically about the practice of gameplay: What it feels like to “be” in gameplay. Throughout this article, we will use words like be, “being,” and “exist” (and composite terms such as “being-here” and “being-there”), but they should not be confused with the ongoing research discussion in game studies of concepts that investigate modes of emotion and perception like immersion, presence, and flow. It should be noted that we avoid reference to immersion, which we understand as “the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality” (Murray, 1997, p. 98; see also Frasca, 2008), 1 as well as the related term presence (Bolter & Grusin, 2000; Lombard & Ditton, 1997; McMahan, 2003). The same goes for the concept of flow, understood as the emotional state of engagement as a result of a set of relations between skill and challenge (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975, 1990; Chen, 2007).
Instead, our intention is from a phenomenological inspired point of view to address play and game using Martin Heidegger’s (2010 [1927]) notion of Dasein. Dasein is Heidegger’s phenomenological “subject” which he developed in his famed thesis Being and Time (Heidegger, 2010). It challenges the Cartesian subject–object distinction haunting close to all of western thought. Dasein can be difficult to grasp. Dreyfus (1991) has explained Dasein as a being-in-the-world that is being-present (here) with an openness toward a there. Similarly, Malpas (1999, 2008) describes Dasein as a being-in-the-world that presents itself in a place; it finds itself and acts in a “here-and-now” while at the same time being open toward a there.
We shall use Dasein’s ontological structure of being here and there to unlock play as being-here (Larsen, 2015) and game as being-there (Kampmann, 2003, 2011; Grimes & Feenberg, 2009). We argue that play’s being-here is tied to the situational player involvement of a more or less pure here-and-now experience: A realization of play as an act of being present in which the player experiences being. Play covers actions of here-and-now moments including negotiation with other players about the repertoire of play content but also the way the game is laid out as a series of interfaces (Jørgensen, 2013), the importance of place/space (Aarseth, 2000), mechanics (Sicart, 2008), obstacles (Costikyan, 2002), and physics (Schell, 2008). Games, generally speaking, are about the present (here-and-now) and how to get from this present to a desired future state (there). This gravitational disposition toward a future state frames what we understand as being-there. In other words, being-there is a projective state that covers the future game state (somewhat similar to what Gee [2003] in a smaller scale calls the projective identity of a game character). What is important is that it is a projective state in an actual, here-and-now state, simultaneously. We see being-there as a condition for gameplay and as a phenomenological activity that strives toward a desired game state (Sicart, 2008). The desire is directed toward achieving a specific score, developing a specific skill, retrieving items, weapons, armors, skins, reaching a higher level, killing opponents, discovering a particular place, or socializing with other players. The being-there feels intensely purposeful (McGonigal, 2011) making players search feverishly for the next there of the game.
These future events, there’s, can be generated by the game itself (game-centric) or established as (or, rather, obtained from) the result of the player’s activities, intentions, and choices (player-centric; Märyä, 2008).
We stipulate that gameplay arises from the tension between being-here and “being there.” Thus, it is a composite of play’s here and play’s appropriation of space (Sicart, 2014), on the one hand, and the gravitational pull toward being “there, exactly there,” on a specific level, square or future situation in gaming, on the other. But there is more to play and game. Play is also equipped with a being-there, and in the same way games also contain a being-here. This means that there are two layers of being-here and being-there in play and games. There is a being-here and being-there at work in play and games. The relationship between play and game is a continuous toggle between play’s being-here and being-there and game’s being-here and being-there. We hypothesize that the relationship between play and games are reciprocally symbiotic. They extract energy from each other. Play is always on the path, perhaps even in danger, of turning into a game. Similarly, gaming risks turning into work by the disciplining power producing a hyperrationalized gamer subjectivity (Silverman & Simon, 2009). At the same time, however, gaming needs a certain amount of playfulness in order to stay open, addictive, and evocative and keeping hyperrationalization at bay. As we shall see in our discussion, the notion of gameplay involves a nonequilibrium between the “here’s” and there’s of playing games. We incorporate this double-layered structure of here’s and there’s in an analytical model of the ontology of gameplay.
One should be aware that the notion of “game” is entangled in a tricky ontologically and epistemically situation. Is a game a thing (artifact) or an activity (Leino, 2012; Stenros, 2017)? Or always both? We do not intent to resolve the object–activity polarity in the concept of gameplay but to use it as an analytical and methodological guide to unstitch the knotty tiers of gameplay and thereby to present a coherent and systematic take on how to understand “gameplay.”
Research Tradition
The term gameplay is likely one of the most widely used terms in the computer games industry and the study of games. Any reader of game reviews in journals like Gamesutra, Gamespot, or PC-Gamer have met the term or perhaps heard it while watching game reviews on YouTube or Twitch. Rarely, though, is the term defined. That is to be expected. Nobody reads game magazines and anticipates strict terminology.
Outside the channels of game reviews, game designers often refer to the term gameplay. Schell (2008) is, as he himself states, preoccupied with definitions. Unfortunately, the term gameplay is excluded from his analytical gaze. Instead, he refers to gameplay both in relation to new “technological possibilities” (p. 3), “gameplay experience” (p. 34), and “gameplay mechanics” (p. 44). There is nothing wrong in associating technology, mechanics, and experience with the term gameplay. It surely broadens the scope of our understanding of the term, but it does not explain what it means. Lead game designer at Blizzard, Rob Pardo (2014), presented 11 of Blizzards design values in a lecture at MIT. Gameplay was first on the list. When he tried to rationalize what he meant by gameplay, he more or less equated it with fun. By the way, fun is yet another difficult phenomenon to define (Koster, 2013).
In Tracy Fullerton’s (2008) influential work on game design gameplay is mentioned numerous times with various meanings. She concludes that it is important for games to have “great gameplay” (p. 1), “superior gameplay” (p. 2), “solid gameplay” (p. 2), and “gameplay that hooks them [players]” (p. 2). Here, gameplay is associated with player experiences, game stability, and coherence. Gameplay encapsulates the overall value of a game. Is it good or bad? It hinges on gameplay. Yet it is unclear what gameplay really means.
Game designer Scott Rogers (2014) associates gameplay with “interface,” “mechanics” (p. 77), and “progression” (p. 80). Rogers more or less sees gameplay as the act of simply “playing the game” while at the same time associating it with interface, mechanics, and game progression. Keith Burgun (2012), another game designer by profession, unearths mechanics as part of gameplay. In his view, learning how mechanics works is a crucial part of the elegance of a game, including the importance of figuring out how different elements fit and work together. It is not until his second book that he ventures into an attempt to define game mechanics, or as he prefers to call them (in the plural sense), since he is British, game mechanisms. They are comprised of “core action” and “core purpose” (Burgun, 2015, p. 37). In Mario, for instance, jumping is a core action done for the core purpose of traversing obstacles.
Costikyan (2002) is one of the few game designers who actually confronts the term gameplay. He labels gameplay as “a nebulous, and therefore pretty useless term” (p. 9). In Costikyan’s view, gameplay must be broken down into “identifiable chunks” (p. 10) beginning with interaction serving as a dialogue between game and player (Crawford, 1982; Swink, 2009); goal as structuring decision-making; struggles (challenges), which signify hindrances toward the goal; structure shaped by rules; and, finally, endogenous meaning referring to games creating their own internal significance. The latter element corresponds to the fact that Monopoly money only makes sense in Monopoly, that is, you cannot use them in the local drugstore to buy milk.
Among computer game scholars, the concept of gameplay is broadly circulated but almost never accompanied by a clear definition, even when the concept takes on the role as a point of departure for formal game analysis (Lankoski & Björk, 2015). Aarseth (2003) recognizes gameplay as an umbrella term consisting of “players’ action, strategies and motives” (p. 2) in his outline of a game analysis methodology. Mäyrä (2008) approaches game analysis differently. He layers it in two; one referring to the “core” of the game, while the other covers what he calls the “shell.” The core contains the “game as gameplay” (p. 17) while the shell is about representation and sign system in a semiotic sense. Gameplay, then, concerns “everything a player can do while playing the game, and also the rules that govern these actions, the shell includes all semiotic richness modifying, containing and adding significance to that basic interaction” (p. 17). Here, Märyä merges mechanics (Sicart, 2008) and interface under the header gameplay.
Between Aarseth and Mäyrä, two different aspects of games are addressed, one stressing player experience and the other highlighting player actions during interaction with a game.
Gameplay can also be used to formally describe the act of playing a game (Elias, Garfield, & Gutschera, 2012) by emphasizing the length of play, dividing it into “atoms” (smallest units of play), game (start to end), “campaign” (series of games), and “match” (series of individual games agreed on for a victory). This viewpoint echoes Montola’s (2009a) understanding of game sessions as discrete units of playtime within the broader frame of gameplay understood as a social process.
Bayliss (2007; inspired by Dourish [2001]) dives into a difficult area when he centers on embodied interaction in association with gameplay. Bayliss focuses on meaning production rising from the dynamic between player and game. He is interested in the game’s interface, what it affords, and how it is mapped (Gibson, 2014; Norman, 2013). Interface has later been outlined as a gray area fusing game ontology with mediation (Jørgensen, 2013).
The effort to understand gameplay does not end here. Gameplay is often taken to include players’ “handling of the game” in a “situated social-cultural […] game environment” (Rambusch, Jakobsson, & Pargman, 2007, p. 158). Further, “gameplay is situated and takes place in social contexts created and shaped by individuals as well as by organizational practices” (p. 163). Similar points are represented by Eastin and Griffiths (2009) in their investigation of possible aggressive behavior rising from the social structure of gameplay; this description, loosely based on social constructivism, echoes a more recent study (Kirschner & Williams, 2014) that proposes a “gameplay review method” from players’ engagement. Here, gameplay serves as a scaffold for player engagement.
Table 1 sums up the presented perspectives on gameplay.
The term gameplay covers a wide range of topics and themes making it indeed, as Consalvo (2005) rightly observes, a “slippery term” (p. 11).
Approaching Gameplay as Both Game and Play
Gameplay can be approached by dividing the term, as mentioned in the introduction, into game and play aspects. Interestingly, each singular term is just as difficult—perhaps even impossible—to define as the composite term. Nevertheless, we propose such a differentiation combined with a synthetic collapse of the words game and play in order to approach an explanation of the heterogeneous complexities within gameplay.
For at least two decades, the concept game has drawn attention to itself. One of the key questions in especially formalistic game studies has been “what is a game?”. Attempts to answer this question have unearthed several, often disparate, perspectives along with the establishment of a new research field: game studies or ludology.
The question what is a game has been either a “curse” or a “blight” (Bogost, 2009). It has called for several descriptive and more or less formalist (or structuralist) attempts to define a game, as Stenros (2017) elegantly demonstrates when he in a recent article works his way through over 60 game definitions from the 1930s to the present. He attempts to outline key elements; traits of games as McGonigal (2011) calls them or characteristics as Elias, Garfield, and Gutschera (2012) would prefer.
Stenros (2017) points to an inherent tension in game definitions rising from discrepancies between understanding games either as objects (systemic artifacts) or as socially negotiated activities. This division echoes the two predominant ways of approaching games from either a game- or play-centric perspective. The first perspective, broadly speaking, represents descriptive formalist endeavors to answer the question what is a game? (Burgun, 2012; Caillois, 2001; Costikyan, 2002; Fullerton, 2008; Huizinga, 2014; Juul, 2003; Salen & Zimmerman, 2004; Schell, 2008; Suits, 2005; Upton, 2015). Such efforts are preoccupied with ironing out objective attributes of games like goal, challenge, conflict, outcome, chance, choice, rules, mechanics, and quantifiable outcomes; while the second play-centric perspective centers on the heterogeneous aspects in the activity of engaging with a game (Bartle, 1996; Corneliussen & Rettberg, 2008; De Koven, 2013; Isbister, 2017; Rutter & Bryce, 2006; Yee, 2014). Embedded herein are themes like identity, effort, attachment, desire, attitude, organization, sociality, emotions, and play, just to list a few.
Trying to answer the question what is a game? from either a game- or play-centric perspective runs into “related” problems. Game-centric definitions often define games too narrowly thereby leaving out too many games like The Sims Series (Maxis, 2000–2006; The Sims Studio, 2006–), Minecraft (Mojang, 2009–), or Journey (Thatgamecompany, 2012). In other cases, definitions seem to be too broad including just about everything that exhibit similar traits, such as viewing education as a game, since it contains progression from one semester to the next, a clear goal (exams) with quantifiable outcome (grades); in addition, grades serve as feedback in response to the students’ effort and so on.
From a play-centric perspective, the occupation of journeying a car through Liberty City in the Grand Theft Auto Series (Rockstar Games, 2001–) or disregarding quests in a strategy game can both be viewed as a form of play activity within a larger game system. From a constricted game-centric point of view, ignoring missions in favor of mere touring for fun would not be regarded as proper gaming activity. Players, though, often say the opposite. They play GTA no matter whether they are driven by progression or concerned with the existential playfulness of being “in play.”
Aarseth and Calleja (2015) are aware of these difficulties of defining games in the intersection between formal and societal–psychological scrutiny. The move to solve the problem is by inventing a super category called cybermedia to which games belong. In their understanding, cybermedia rests on signs (semiotics), material medium (hardware), and mechanical system (different engagement modes allowed by the system) all engaged by people (players if they discursively regard themselves as such). This assessment is inspired by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (2001) claim that concepts such as games cannot be analytically demarcated and that such attempts only include parts of what people refer to as games. Or, as Aarseth and Calleja write in their conclusive remarks, “so instead of a definition of games, we merely have to point to a discursive practice whereby a phenomenon in the larger and definable category cybermedia is being tagged as such” (p. 8). Simply put, a game is a game if players say so in the context of cybermedia.
Gameplay and Play
How should we understand play? Salen and Zimmerman (2004) have proposed a short yet thought-provoking definition, which says that “play is free movement within a more rigid structure” (p. 304).
The definition points to elements worth investigation. The first concerns “free movement,” which the authors align with the “free” movement of a steering wheel before the system or the car begins to turn. What we have here is an observable link between play and space. Play happens in “interstitial spaces” (p. 304), thereby placing play as an activity rising from spatial possibilities inside a defined structure. Thus, Salen and Zimmerman suggest three categories of play:
The first is Game Play (in two separated words). This is what happens when players set game rules in motion and can be said to be a rudimentary understanding of gameplay that focus on the distinction between a game in and out of motion.
The second is Ludic Activity that should be understood as a ball bouncing “against a wall. This play activity has a less formal structure than a game” (p. 304). The focus is on players’ experience and efforts to locate free movement within the boundaries of a system. This point is echoed by Malaby (2009) when he stresses the indeterminateness of play, as the challenge to navigate uncertainty (Costikyan, 2013).
The third is Being Playful and represents, by and large, players’ “inner” attitude during the activity. Salen and Zimmerman give an example of free movement while performing trivial tasks like walking down the street. This category signifies play as a mode of human experience and outlines play as a disposition “characterized by a readiness to improvise” (Malaby, 2007, p. 209).
Salen and Zimmerman’s categories Ludic Activity and Being Playful (along with Malaby’s “disposition”) both signal indeterminateness, uncertainty, and improvisation when navigating some sort of rigid structure, in this case a game. In the same vein, Malaby (2009) contrasts form and mode in play: Form implies structure while mode stresses the playful disposition toward any activity.
All categories are subject to the overarching idea that play is transformative in the sense that play has the power to “overflow or overwhelm the more rigid structure in which it is taking place, generating emergent, unpredicted results.” (p. 305). The critics wisely avoid mentioning creativity thereby dodging an overt subscription to the rhetoric of imagination outlined by Sutton-Smith (2001), or any other understanding which regard play as a function for something else, such as evolution of language (Bateson, 1987); abstract thought (Vygotsky, 1978); learning (Piaget, 1962); development of language, consciousness, theory of the mind (Kaufman, 2012; Singer & Singer, 2005, 2013); acquisition of symbols (Fein, 1978); and connection between cognition, emotional and social development, self, and others (Paley, 2009a, 2009b), just to mention a few (see Larsen, 2015).
The element of freedom in Salen and Zimmerman’s understanding of play relates well to Huizinga (2014) and Caillois’s (2001) definitions; both stress that play is a free activity. Similarly, Gadamer (2006) points out that play is a mode of being that do not simply belong to subjectivity. Being in play is not something we choose by volition. Play takes hold of us and is performed through the players, but it is not something we can control by command. Thus, Gadamer seems to point to a transcendental structure of play as something that can grab us from “outside” beyond our conscious control. 2 This more or less correlates with Salen and Zimmerman’s view of outside. Here too play happens in an interstitial space, a space which is rooted somehow between the actual, physical place of play and the locus that play itself forcefully but playfully colonizes; spaces that are thus simultaneously present and absent. Thus, in Gadamer’s view, play almost seems to be an agency of its own transcending the will of its players.
Gadamer further explains the dynamics of play by incorporating Buytendijk’s (1933) description of to-and-fro movement devoid of any goal that would bring an end to the play activity. Not only does play exist in interstitial spaces, it also rests on a particular structure of movement. This dialectic feature makes it possible for play to renew “itself in constant repetition” (Gadamer, 2006, p. 104), but the activity is not generated for its own purpose because when we play we always play something—and that something is very often a game. In Gadamer’s phenomenological depiction of play, it is the game that orders and shapes the movement where play can happen, but it happens as an experience that grabs us from the outside beyond our explicit intentions. The latter is not far from Sicart (2014) when he describes play as appropriative taking over the unfolding activity and the place in which play situationally finds itself as the result of players negotiating rules and setting up communities around play.
As Gadamer points out, play carries yet another interesting feature, which is that when in play we cannot say we are in play since it would disturb the experience and bring us “out of play.” Self-reflection kills play. It is only before and after the distinct duration of a play session that play lends itself to characterization. During play, we are under the control of play.
Understanding play this way describes a particular activity that takes place with a “to-and-fro” movement in an interstitial space with indeterminateness and improvisation in relation to some sort of structure. Furthermore, players cannot consciously force the activity into being by sheer will. Such an account of play leaves out the imaginary aspect (Caillois, 2001; Huizinga, 2014; Paley, 2009a; Rasmussen, 2003; Sutton-Smith, 2001) normally associated with make-believe (Walton, 1990). In turn, make-believe can be regarded as a dyad comprised of “two separate yet interconnected layers” (Larsen, 2015, p. 185). The first layer constitutes the actual locality (a specific here), while the other layer consists of the assigned mental content—the pretended aspect (the projected there). The dyad structure manifests itself in three different ways: (1) If the play object is absent, it can instead be represented by, say, an imaginary soccer ball. (2) A physically present object may act as a placeholder for the imagined content (Vygotsky, 1978), a broomstick acting as a horse. (3) The physical object is replaced by the player itself (implying self-referentiality), let’s say I’m a troll. In all three instances, the imagined object (Harman, 2011) holds primacy over the physical objects. Note, however, that this structure merely outlines the formal structure of make-believe, not a specific content or personal motivation for play.
Being-Here and Being-There
A quick but obviously abstract way to think of (and “build”) a game is to consider it a troika of squares, values, and goals (Elias et al., 2012). These three parts are the basic building blocks of a game, any game in a ludological sense, in addition to which a “video game” implies automatized calculations, a rule and interaction set, a screen, and a number of haptic interactions (Juul, 2005). The interior of a game consists of “parametrical edges,” meaning that the players (often represented by avatars or pieces) are either inside or outside of the game’s edges (Kampmann, 2007; cf. Pedroni 2013). Think of the discretely arranged squares in chess or Tic-Tac-Toe. To conceptualize a game in a physical-abstract way is to think of it as composed of these edges or transitions; whereas to envision a game by means of possibilities for interaction and modes of winning is to think of it as consisting of squares, values, and goals. Player-centrically speaking, where can I put my pieces? In what way do the rules restrict my behavior, interactions, turns? Is it a zero-sum game? And so on.
What sets a game apart from pure play (Callois’ paidea) is the existence and awareness of squares that refabricate the nondiscrete, open scenery of play formed by the mutual contracts and storytelling activities of the participants into a systematized (computational) and structured (strictly rule and interaction based) “board.” The formal passage from play to game is also the route from playground to game board (there are no pieces on a playground; instead, there are elements or physical things). Specific qualities are then assigned to the squares, so that they now have values, points, scores, numbers, and meaning. This demonstrates how subtle and inescapably the point of observation shifts from the “what is”-question of formalism to the “what can I do”-question of player studies.
When we move from ground to board, from play to games, teleology (after the Greek word for goal, telos) becomes immensely important. The telos of a game is a force, a reference point for the deliberate combination of discrete calculations that initiate meaning and purposefulness.
Yet obviously there are play elements within a structured game board. There has to a be a here posing as the result of the appropriation of a place within the possibility space of reality prior to a projected reference point of a there. This latter there is important for games, or, rather, for the playing of a game. It creates the ability to go there, to move away from play’s situational here. This tension between play’s here and game’s there is fundamental in gaming.
To further elaborate on the outlined tension, it is fruitful to draw inspiration from systems theory found in the field of sociology (Luhmann, 1995). Gregory Bateson (1987) views the central mark of play as the participants’ ability to invest in something that is both real and, at the same time, not real.
Bateson’s (1987) prime example is monkeys fooling around. They bite, and they do not bite. In fact, monkeys produce that particular bite which is simultaneously a bite and not a bite, they bite the not-real bite for real. The distinctive awareness here, says Bateson, is neither the predicative nor transformative quality of the bite (the bite “is”; the bite “stands for”) but rather the word “not”—as in “this is not a bite” and “this is not a nonbite,” at the same time. Empirically speaking, a monkey’s playful bite should not be hard, but not too soft; not soft, but not too hard. In doing so, monkeys create a metacommunicative channel saying: “This is play.”
If we apply the monkey example to human players in Counter-Strike (Valve, 1999–), we can see how players really put an effort into killing other players, and yet players are aware, since this is part of playing’s metacommunicative messaging, that in reality the opposing team is merely pixels and virtual trickery.
The most important feature of play is without a doubt to be here, that is, to be present. One has to accept the situational activity of play. The other players mock those who do not adhere to the play contract (Suits, 2005), those who resist play’s metacommunicative messages, and the latter group will be banned from play. They are, as Gadamer writes, “Spielverderbers.”
The arena that encircles play, and in which play finds itself both physically and psychologically, is widely known as a “magic circle” (Huizinga, 2014; Juul, 2008; Salen & Zimmerman, 2004). By stepping into this circle (Montola, 2009b; Stenros, 2014), one abandons reality or, strictly speaking, nonplay (Kirkpatrick, 2004). As we all know, the practices of everyday life, work, leisure, and family duties threaten to obstruct the existence of the magic circle, but a set of unique rules exists within the codified domain of play. The worst aspect of playing is without a doubt interruption because it is a termination of the “sacred” duration of the temporality of being within the consecrated spatiality of the circle. The best, thus, is when all the hard fun just goes on and on (see Gadamer, 2006).
The Two Faces of Dasein—Introducing a Tripartite Methodology
The oscillation between here and there in play and games cues well into the dynamic of Martin Heidegger’s Dasein to which we shall now turn. Heidegger’s etymological reworking of the word Dasein designates the normative, authentic, preontological existence of Das Man, but at the same time, it is a concept explaining Dasein’s capacity to be, to exist, as well as to ask about the being of being itself (Seinsfrage). According to Heidegger (2010), Dasein is different from all other things because it relates to its own being. Or as Heidegger writes, “Dasein is a being which is related understandingly in its being toward that being [Sein]” (Heidegger, 2010, § 12, p. 53). It is essential that we do not see Dasein’s relatedness to its being as an attitude or way of being. Rather […] the “essence” [“Wesen”] of this being lies in its to be. […] Thus, the term Dasein, which we use to designate this being, does not express it’s what—as in the case of table, house, tree—but rather being [Sein]. (§ 9, p. 41).
Dasein’s relation to its own being should not be mistaken for subjectivity or some sort of psychologism. It is far more fundamental since Dasein’s essence since it relates to the transcendental condition of its being-in-the-world (Dreyfus, 1991). Dasein cannot escape its ontological circumstance of being-in-the-world. Dasein ought not to be confused with a conscious subject (Heidegger, 2010). It is preferable to think of Dasein as a “being there” or a being here and there; being in one place, and at the same time being open to another place (there) (Malpas, 1999, 2008). This is important in relation to gameplay. First, when we consider the play-side of Dasein, we should pay attention to “Sein!”—as in Dasein, that is, “look! here’s being!” (which would be da is Sein, in a peculiar German–English hybrid). Or, exactly here is a fun and interesting place to do stuff. Second, when we look at Dasein from the game-side, we focus on “Da!” in Dasein, that is, “there’s being!”.
In other words, Dasein’s play mode stirs toward the inherent apparition of being itself (like when we are completely engulfed by being) while Dasein’s game-mode centers on a specific point in which Being will occur (as a projected state).
Following these remarks, we can reposition Dasein directly into gameplay. While play is Da-sein emphasizing the present sense and the phenomenological quality of being, games are Da-sein that highlight the temporal openness toward a future there as a particular mode of existence. Somehow games do not (only) install a desire in players to dwell within the being of being-present, as in play but instead shift the attention toward the “being-there-ness” (Larsen, 2012). This being-there-ness springs from the mixture of the game’s formal qualities and the activity that brings these qualities to life. Hence, gameplay translates into an equation:
Another way of putting it would be like this:
To clarify this, we propose a philosophical methodology to describe three levels of gameplay: analytical, phenomenological, and oscillatory level.
On the analytical level game and play are deliberately separated from each other using a deductive logic (see Figure 1). This level serves as the necessary base of possibilities for the actual dynamics of gameplay and posits that game (or gaming) equals Dasein while play equals—or stands for—DaSein. Note, however, that the analytical level implies a game that are frozen in time; no one has yet played the actual game, that is, accentuated or “played out” the various instances of here and there.
States and displacements in the dialectics of gameplay.
On the phenomenological (or epistemic) level, things start to get messy. No “analytic” dotted line is visible here; once play happens and a game is being played, clear-cut distinctions between the two can no longer be made. Instead, players or gamers may tune into the “play-mode” of a game or the “game-mode” of a game.
Out of this, a third level arises: an oscillatory, nonequilibrium level. We now see a constant oscillation back and forth between game and play. Here gameplay addresses shifting states between game-mode and play-mode. We have thus moved from the ontological, pure level (the first level) where we were able analytically to differentiate between game and play, to a third level in which the players’ actual and perceived instances of gameplays’ here and there take place. This level will be scrutinized more fully in the next section.
The Dynamic Nature of Gameplay
Differentiating and underscoring the oscillation between play-mode (DaSEIN) and game-mode (DAsein) outlines the two modes and their unstable and dynamic relationship. But this is just the first layer of a two-layered structure of gameplay. The second layer is equally unstable in its oscillation between the two modes. It arises from the inherent dyadic structure of play and game.
Play can be perceived as a being-here, such as being in a place, somewhere specific, or simply the actual location where play takes place. However, play is also a being-there, understood as a representation or materialization of the mental as-if (make-believe) content that directs play (Larsen, 2015). This dynamic of being-here and being-there is the very heart of play. Play’s there, however, should not be mistaken for a game’s there, conceived as a (meaningful) move toward a significant “something,” the desired game state. Rather, it means that the experience of play is centered on a physical absent as-if content. The “let’s pretend” in as-if is making absent things present by way of make-believe. The real things “disappear” or fall into the background leaving the near-ness in the hands of the as-if content.
The exact opposite is the case in games. Games can like play be viewed as a dyad divided between a here constituted by the experience when engaging or interacting with the game and a there understood as a future desired state. This state is characterized by absence since it is not yet realized. Hence, the here-ness in game centers on the immediate experience of the game by here-and-now interactions. As such, the here in games is constituted by the actual content, whereas in play such content falls into the background acting as a placeholder for the actual yet physical absent play substance. In short: Games constitute a dynamic between the actual experience of playing here-and-now and the desired future not yet realized state.
Explicitly injecting Heidegger’s Dasein makes it possible to view the here in games as the present content while it’s there functions as the absent, yet not present or realized state. In play, we find the reversed relationship, where here is an absence of a physical present content, while there holds the actual ontological presence (the as-if [make-believed content]) in a strict philosophical way.
When game and play are viewed together this way, the concept of gameplay becomes an entangled model containing unstable, oscillating dynamic relations: A here, denoting present content in games, may connect with there, in play (present content [make-believe]; while a here in play (absence as disappearance) merges with there (absent, not yet realized state) in games.
Obviously, the modeling of here and there and the interaction between them are presented in a static way in Figure 2. Reality is far more complicated: During the actualization of gameplay, the four aspects interconnect in an oscillating dynamic. The player’s experience may rapidly shift from being focused on the game’s here to the game’s there, or play’s there or here, or it may result in a combined mixture of relatedness.
The analytical, phenomenological, and oscillatory level of gameplay based on the dynamics of Dasein.
Transitions and Displacements Within Gameplay
When we investigate the dynamics of the actual perception of playing a game, we move from the ontological to the ontic realization. Below is a visualization of the dynamic, ontic relations between the here and there of gameplay, and the gameplay states which are thus actualized (Figure 3): To fully grasp Figure 3, some unpacking is needed. Our model works from the basic assumption that each state of gameplay occupies either a formal (or game-centric) state or a perceived (or player-centric) state. That is, these states can be viewed and analyzed from the perspective of the game or the gamer. The phenomenological goal is to obtain a formalistic description of the sensuous experience of actualized gameplay, rather than a formal account of the game system that (partly) provides this experience (cf. Kirkpatrick 2011). Viewed game-centrically, each of these states belongs to a game or play modality (with corresponding here and there). However, once again, these states shift rapidly during actual gameplay, and therefore they contain transitions, that is, when the states “cross” the border of games’ here-and-there and play’s here-and-there. We call these crossing features displacements.
The analytical level combined with the two faces of Dasein. This is the abstract or ontological level of our methodology.
Each dialectical relationship between here and there represents a formal “stack” as a specific formation of here and there within an equally specific gameplay state. Player-centrically viewed, every transition from wanting to obey the scheme of the game and focusing on the play of playing a game, represents a displacement of the “slices” of the stack.
This means that the ontic mode of gameplay possesses emergent qualities: One slice, no matter how ideal or pure, cannot account for the total experience of playing a game, and the sum of displaced, transitioned slides cannot entirely explain the formal property of gameplay. Rather, gameplay hovers in between. This is a testimony to the fact that neither game formalism nor player centrism are sufficient alone to attest the dynamics of gameplay.
This model, however, does not exclude the fact that game-mode and play-mode have quite unequal endpoints as well as different teleologies. Gaming seems to be all about desired game states, while playing favors being-here. Their teleology differs from each other; gaming and playing “exist” for different reasons.
Hidden Essence—and the Ontology of the Ontic
Is there a hidden essence in the ontology of gameplay? If so, this essence would, in Husserl’s terms (Husserl, 1973), translate into the eidos (idea) of the thing-in-itself that is the game. But, as our analysis above have hinted at, rather than to look for such essence, a primary or invariant super quality of “games,” a phenomenological take would instead zero in on the gameness of the game being played while it is being played. The focal point of studying a game phenomenologically is thus to look at the way in which all the possible features of oscillating game-modes, play-modes, and trajectories towards there and here show themselves in an ontic perception (see Figure 3).
This does not mean that we should not search for the very ontology of this perception (ontic mode), the being that lies beneath it. On the contrary, pace Heidegger and his Seinsfrage, we may perfectly do so, as long as we are intensely aware that the ontological mode is a purely analytical (and therefore effectively unrealistic) level, as we described earlier in Table 1 and Figure 4. The boundary between what things (games) are and how they appear in gameplay, once everything is set in motion and, quite literary, played out, evokes in a very practical manner the quarrel of the ontological versus the ontic. What reveals itself is the simple but almost numinous fact that there has to be a pure state of gameplay before there can be any perceived stack and displacements of slices. The effort of returning to this ideal, pure state and perform, as Husserl wanted (albeit without mentioning games at all), an “eidetic reduction” in search of a true ontology behind our perception—in our case of gameplay—is nonetheless impossible since our access, phenomenologically viewed, is always through the stack.
The internal dialectics of here and there in gameplay.
As we hinted at earlier, our proposal is therefore not a philosophical “proof” paving the way for a final heart of gameness. Also, it is not an unveiling of the truth an sich of gameplay. Rather, it is a prolegomenon to a transcendental–methodological framework for the temporal and multilayered interconnections of game/play and here/there in gameplay operating from a deep, ontological-abstract level to an ontic-epistemic level of analysis.
Conclusion
We have seen that gameplay is indeed a “slippery” or “nebulous” concept. In helping to understand what the term actually covers, we divided it into its two parts, play and game, and distilled play as “here-ness” and game as “there-ness.” This phenomenological approach bridges game formalism and player centrism, or game objectivity and player activity. By associating game’s there-ness and play’s here-ness with Heidegger’s Dasein (here-and-there), we developed a tripartite framework for understanding the sophistications of gameplay. The framework consists of three levels: (1) an analytical, (2) a phenomenological, and lastly (3) an oscillatory, dynamic level. Each level covers important aspects of gameplay pointing to the spatio-temporal, multilayered interconnections that thrive in gameplay. Thereby, we showcased the inner workings of gameplay ranging from the ontic to the ontological level of analysis.
Why do we call it playing a game, rather than gaming a game? In a way, the latter would be analytically more correct if we follow our speculations in the above. First, it would be an awkward vernacular. Second, as we saw, play features as a kind of tongue-tied premise in games, while game always serves as a potential—maybe even a threat—in play: Once play gets organized and planned, gaming arises. The life of a game is also the evolutionary death of play, as an object, that is, but certainly not as transcendental premise for play during gameplay. Third, does “playing a game” imply a play in a game with its rules, goals, and parametrical edges? This would suggest a flexibility in the otherwise imperative obedience installed in the player when she ties herself, willingly, to the confines of the game. Yet it could also mean that in playing a game we must adopt a playful obedience that guides us toward the system and structure that is the game.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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