Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

Abstract:

The act of playing a video game can be, on a medial level, understood as an interplay of various and nested performative roles, each defined in terms of their other - avatar and game world, implied player and implied game, actual player and actual game, and so on. (Drawing these terms and roles from Reader-Response theory, particularly Wolfgang Iser, Wayne Booth, and Gerald Prince) These roles are locked into what can be understood as mutual interpollation - each one understandable only through the existence of the other in a particular performative role which is in turn defined by itself.

This paper looks at the intervention of the demo (in its various forms) into this sequence of dyads. The demo is a paratext, not just to the game, but to the hermeneutic of play, serving as an origin point for both player and game. It also, at times, comes in after in the form of speed run movies and ghost data, forming paratexts that reevaluate and comment upon the hermeneutic in other ways.

Text:

I am interested in a strange and minor paratext to video games – the demo. Although the definition will expand, I will begin with the demo as it first arrested me. In Super Mario Brothers, if the player turns on the game and does nothing, the game eventually shows two short clips of gameplay. In these clips, Mario moves around on the screen seemingly of his own accord, acting as he would if someone were playing the game. My goal is to understand the role of these two short clips in the game – what function they serve, and what their inclusion tells us about how to understand Super Mario Brothers, and, ultimately, how to understand video games in general.

These questions are best approached from the side, however. And so I will, having raised them, set them aside, and begin again with a declaration. Thus: the video game is always performative. On its simplest level, the game is always involved in action – that action being “playing the game.” More specifically, it is a double action, in that there are two bodies acting. The first is the medial body – a term that encompasses many things – a screen on which a particular pattern of light flickers, but also the configuration of machine and wire that feeds that screen, the bodies of objects represented on the screen, and the space through which those bodies move. But these bodies do not act unbidden – the nature of the dynamic of play is a contact between this medial body and human body – the player. The play of the medial body does not take place without a corresponding play of the human body. In fact, I would argue that this dyad – the connected player and game – is the core of the video game.

The point of contact between the two poles of this dyad is the controller. As McLuhan would have it, the controller is our appendage – but it is also an appendage of the game – reaching out from the screen (or its vicinity) and towards us. And just as McLuhan notes that a media is an amputation as well as an extension, the controller also represents an amputation of the game – a necessary incompletion of it. The game reaches out with the controller, inviting the interaction that will complete it. In short, it hails us.

Let us return to the scene of our dyad. Certainly the first scene of almost any game does serve as a hailing – “Press start to play” is a command, and the moment we press start, we have identified ourselves as players, accepting some set of responsibilities. But the game is also hailed when we press start. It becomes a particular object based on the player’s demands of it – a derived product of his actions.

Player and game, then, are only describable as derived products of each other’s actions. The problem is that there are many players and games in existence. For instance, the hinge clearly binds together the player-on-the-sofa and the console-on-the-table. But it also hinges together the two performativities created by the mutual hailing. Furthermore, it hinges together the avatar – the player’s representation on the screen – and the game world – the game’s representation.

This hanging of multiple mutually defined subjects upon a single hinge (namely that of play) evokes the distinctions within narratology and reader-response theory. Taken together, the two fields have given us a substantial litany of readers and authors, generally in matched pairs. The readerly side of these pairs is spelled out by Gerald Prince in his essay “Introduction to the Study of the Narratee.” He offers four – the ideal reader, the real reader, the virtual reader, and the narratee. Each of these can also be considered to have an equivalent author function. In an exceedingly brief format, the narrattee and narrator are characters in the text – the narrator is the person who speaks or writes the text, the narratee is the person to whom that text is fictively addressed. The implied reader and author are constructs of the text – the implied reader is the reader that catches the things that the text alludes to and draws the correct conclusions about it. The implied author is the person who put those things in the text. Actual readers and authors are relatively self-evident. Ideal readers and authors are fantasies – the ideal reader is one who fully understands every single aspect of the text, and the ideal author is one who fully controls every nuance and subtlety of the text. I will not indulge in a lengthy analysis of these concepts and their relation here, and will instead skip straight to some general points about them.

First, the reader and author sides of each step mutually define each other – specifically in the implied reader and author. That is to say that the implied reader is a role that is created through interaction with the implied author, and likewise the implied author is only formulated when the implied reader draws conclusions about him. And so on for each of the other roles. Second, the relationship between the actual reader and the implied reader is performative – that is to say that the implied reader is a role and identity that the actual reader takes on.

Let’s return, then, to video games. I hold that the roles we found in the interaction of player and game mirror those found in narratology To wit:

The hinge of these dyads are the actions of play. These actions do not belong to either side of the dyad – they are rather the actions that constitute the performance of each side. In this context, we can finally ask the question of how we interpret a demo? It would be an easy misreading to suggest that the demo of a game is simply a movie in which the avatar represents a protagonist. A demo of Super Mario Brothers, however, is not a prototypical Super Mario Brothers Super Show. That is to say, our method of reading a demo is not to identify that Mario must be the protagonist because he triumphs over enemies, and then to note that he acquires a mushroom, thus growing in stature, therefore making the whole tale a bildugsroman, and perhaps a fable about the importance of eating mushrooms. How do we make the reading, then?

Let us note the peculiar characteristic of the demo, which is that it takes place within the formal structure of the game. That is to say that all of the non-diagetic material of the game – score, lives counter, health bar, level name, timer, etc – are still in the demo. Thus it is impossible to read the demo as anything other than a game. But if the demo is a game then it must contain the dyad. Some parts of this are easy enough – after all, the demo does appear as the game does when it is played. Thus we can readily take the demo as containing the author/game side of the dyad. Similarly, the fact that the game world is in motion means that the author/game side is performing its duly assigned roles, which means that the hinge of the dyad exists. But the player, rather obviously, does not exist – there is nobody at the other end of the controller.

On the other hand, the player must exist. After all, the organizing of the medial bodies is intelligible only by the distinction of things under the player’s control – Mario, the falling Tetris block, or the chainsaw, to point to several games – and things outside the player’s control – the goomba, the already fallen Tetris block, the cyberdemon. But to interpret the demo in such a way where the game is understood – which we must do – we have to be able to distinguish the game. And so in this act of distinction, we create a player. It is this player that I have named my paper after – Player ε.

The ε is the sign, within computer science, of the empty set – that set containing no members. Thus Player ε is the player without content – the player that is a player, but with none of the actual traits or aspects of the player. There is, in Player ε, only the consequences of the player – game and play – and no actual player. In one sense, then, Player ε represents the pure act of play – play without its attachment to the dyad.

But the pure act of play cannot possibly exist. Play is the point of contact between two mediated entities – game and player – each of which is only defined by its contact with the other. The demo thus introduces a momentary incoherence into the hermeneutic – a point in which the hermeneutic is functioning, but functioning impossibly. This impossibility is best summarized as follows: the game cannot exist without the player, and in the demo the game plays itself. The result is that the demo causes a looking-inward – a self-analysis of the hermeneutic.

In playing itself, the game is showing us the performative act of play – that is, it is showing us what performing the implied player entails. The demo thus occupies the strange role of an illocutionary act about an illocutionary act. It is illocutionary because, as with any text, it creates a dyad of reception between author and reader (In this case game and would-be player). But its content is to show an illocutionary act between the game and Player ε. We are to observe what it is that Player ε does, and then contemplate our own ability to slot into that role in relation to the game that Player ε’s existence has defined.

It is important to note that the demo cannot be essential to the slotting of an actual player into the implied player’s role. Simply put, most games don’t feature demos. In fact, on the NES, almost the only games that did were ports of arcade games which retained the demo mode that would automatically play on arcade machines to get people to insert quarters. Indeed, the act of interpreting the demo – of understanding that you could possibly “be” Mario – really requires that you already have considerable knowledge of how video games work. The demo can’t, in this case, be taken as the origin point for the implied player, or as the way in which the implied player is constituted. That is something that necessarily takes place in the game. Nor is it the case that the demo teaches the interpretive skills necessary to understand the process within the game by which the implied player is constituted.

It is prudent, at this point, to actually look at the demos of Super Mario Brothers. In them, Mario, who is visible on the title screen, runs under the title graphic and enters the game world proper. Each demo lasts eight seconds, and then the game resets to the title screen. If the player again does not press start, the other demo plays.

The first demo to play features Mario behaving illogically. He starts off well enough – he kills the first goomba in the game, and gets a mushroom, growing to Super Mario size. Then he jumps at a question block and misses it, jumping up along the side of it, then does not attempt to hit it again. After this, he behaves in a manner that could be described as confused – he tries to run into pipes for a second before jumping over them, and ends the demo turned around backwards and simply standing there for a second. In the second demo, he displays more skill – he hits the question block, and has no confusion about pipes. He quickly advances beyond where the first demo got to, before hitting a goomba and losing his mushroom. He stomps on the next goomba successfully, but then walks into the goomba after that just as the temporary invincibility from his being hit wears off, and he dies, ending the demo.

The inadequacy of the play displayed in these demos lends further credence to the claim that the demo is not an essential part of learning to play the game. Rather, in this case, Player ε is a reiteration of the lack that is already central to it. The game can create Player ε to finish the dyad and allow it to be played, but this creation is inadequate – degenerate. The game needs an actual player to complete it in a functional and proper way.

This use of Player ε is, like the demo of Super Mario Brothers itself, an artifact of the arcade setting – its sole purpose is to compel people to insert quarters, press start, or otherwise begin playing. And it is fair to say that this can be said of more or less every demo at the start of video games – from Super Mario Brothers on. But the demo event does not have to be used simply for marketing purposes.

One oddity that shows the breadth of the demo as a form is the concept of ghost data. Ghost data is created when a player runs a time trial in a racing game. On subsequent attempts at the time trial, the player races alongside a translucent ghost racer. This ghost does not affect the race physically – the player cannot ram into him, for example – but runs an exact copy of the player’s previous run. The result is that the player is, after their first run, always competing against a demo.

On the one hand, the ghost data is a high water mark – not quite the ideal player, but, as the best that the actual player has ever done, always at the exact point where the line is between the implied player that he can perform and the ideal player that he fantasizes. Since this particular demo is also always received during an act of play (Since one does not just watch ghost data whiz around the track – one attempts to race at the same time), this demo becomes something more nuanced and dynamic than the marketing of the basic demo. When the ghost is in front of the player, it makes the gap between the player’s performance and the player’s desire manifest. But when the ghost is successfully passed, the nature of the racing game is that it disappears from view, since the player only sees just ahead of their car.

Thus in the act of passing the ghost, the player’s performance of the implied player visually erases that gap, removing the difference between the actual player and Player ε. The ghost data makes tangible the sense of surpassing the previous limit of the performance, giving the feeling of breaking through the constraints of a particular and flawed performance of the implied player into a sense, albeit a false one, of perfect harmony with the game. This perfect harmony is then, at the end of the race, literally encoded into the game as the next Player ε when the player’s run becomes the new ghost data.

Although more hermeneutically interesting than the 8-second movie at the start of Super Mario Brothers, ghost data is still concerned with the construction of the dyad of play as it applies to a specific instance of play with a specific game (albeit with a general “actual player” that we have not ascribed any characteristics to). The demo, however, does not have to be so limited in its scope. Its function is to show its audience not just or even primarily how to perform the audience role for a text, but to reveal a truth about that audience role. But truths can extend considerably beyond whatever is actually being demonstrated. Within game studies, we can see this in the example of speedrun videos.

Speedrun videos are videos of gameplay in which a game is completed as fast as possible. Some are done legitimately, and are simply VCR recordings of someone playing the game. Others are done with the assistance of tools like emulators that allow the game to be slowed down or rewound, making it possible to reliably pull off tricks that would be impossible for a human player to do consistently if at all. A well-known example is a movie of Super Mario Brothers 3 recorded by a player going by the name Morimoto. This play-through is around ten minutes long, and features a truly dazzling section in which the player obtains 99 extra lives through a series of perfectly timed jumps.

Although the legitimate plays have a similar aesthetic effect on the average player, it is these tool-assisted speedruns that are most interesting, in that they use Player ε to close the dyad of play off from actual players. In the tool-assisted speedrun, Player ε takes on the role of the ideal player – perfectly manipulating the game. Thus the game stops merely being a world for the avatar to interact in. Its limits and rules change in the face of the perfect control offered by the emulation tools. The dyad that results is inaccessible to the actual player who watches the speedrun movie. He cannot possibly enact the performance of Player ε, and thus cannot cause the game to be the game shown in the movie. The demo is thus not a demonstration of what is possible, or an invitation to a new type of play that the actual player can perform. Rather, it is a marking off of the boundaries of a type of play – a comment on what the limitations are of a particular implied player.

It is important to note that the speedrun movie is only interesting or really understandable if its audience is aware of the implied player they perform when playing the game normally. For an audience with no concept whatsoever of how playing Super Mario Brothers 3 normally goes, Morimoto’s speed run of it does not foreclose any possibility. It is only through the comparison of Player ε’s performance of the ideal player and the actual player’s recalled performance of the implied player that the gulf becomes evident. Despite this, it is also notable that the Morimoto video is a representation of Super Mario Brothers 3, but not a comment on it. Rather, it is primarily a comment about the inadequacy of human actual players in the completion of the act of play, and about the existence of aspects of play that are unreachable from a human subjectivity within that dyad.

We can see, then, that demos are not merely paratexts to individual texts – essentially high-tech versions of what Genette calls the “please-insert.” Speedrun videos show the possibility of demos as a paratext to an entire hermeneutic – a performance of a new mode of interpretive performance. Demo modes are comments on the dyadic nature of interpretation, showing the incompleteness of demonstrated play. In all cases, the demos reveal more about play in general than they do about whatever games are being shown - they provide occasion to enter and explore the construction and negotiation of the interpretive act, and particularly the act of performance that players and readers engage in when they fill their appointed roles in engagement with a text.

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