Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

Interesting topic, Zach... pehaps the paratext in games could be the control scheme in general? After all, indexes, paginations and prefaces and the like help a reader navigate a text.

I recently gave a paper looking at Austin's "performative utterances" and thinking about games as "performative images". Austin believes that there in order to fully understand a performative such as "I name this child Socrates" it is necessary to take into account the total context of the message (its immediate reference to a given child, its performance by someone authorised to perform a naming ceremony, etc). There was a famous interchange between Derrida and Searle over performatives and whether a total context could be determined at all - that's a little beyond what I was talking about, but it might be interesting reference in terms of the critique of Genette's 'logocentrism'.