Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

Gaming is a fun book to read; it's written in an accessible and engaging style; it contains some really interesting ideas about gaming; but ultimately (and I'm not even sure this is a criticism), I'm not sure what to do with it. Part of what makes the book so refreshing and accessible is the provisional nature of the ideas it revolves around, even down to the vocabulary Galloway chooses to organize his points. Rather than delineating "elements fundamental to gameplay" and their constituent elements, for example, Galloway's first essay is a conversation in which four "moments" of gamic action come into existence as a way of discussing basic questions about the gaming situation. So although most of his essays conclude with a chart or diagram demonstrating a system of interrelated ideas, the author does a good job of making those ideas and components seem to arise naturally out of the progression of the discussion. In other words, Galloway can sidestep criticism of his taxonomies by stating them provisionally and developing them along seemingly natural conclusions.

I mention this strategy up front, because I think Gaming represents a different, Deleuzian New Media approach which readers may recognize from the writing of Lev Manovich, whom Galloway quotes frequently throughout the text. Though I'm not as fluent in the ideas of Deleuze as I would like to be, it's helpful for me to at least provisionally characterize Galloway's text in this way because it demonstrates how and why this book is different from Ian Bogost's Unit Operations. Though both arrive at similar or harmonious conclusions about how best to understand video games, the approach to the approach, if you will, is entirely different, though my sense in applying either to my own developing ideas is that they are equally valuable in distancing intellectual discussions of gaming from the hyperbole and formalism that dominated the "ludology v. narratology" era of game studies.

Because Gaming is more a collection of interrelated essays than a sustained argument, it makes sense to approach each essay individually.

1. Gamic Action, Four Moments

Here Galloway sets up his most interesting claim that underlies each successive essay to follow:

Note the surprise ending to the parade of prior media. One might expect the sequence to go something more like "image, moving image, interactive image," but by removing the image altogether, Galloway is free to discuss the entire basis of the medium without recourse to representational strategies of the image or the question of whether narrative can ever truly be interactive. This also follows Manovich, who Galloway quotes later as stating, "computerized visuality, while still a way of seeing, is no longer about light but is instead about space." To understand the relationship between the player and that space is to develop a vocabulary for the actions that obtain within that space, and Galloway eventually arrives at a cartesian plane of possible gaming moments: The x-axis moves between the operator's and the machine's actions, and the y-axis moves between diegetic and non-diegetic actions. The result is that some common gaming moments can be reliably plotted as shown in this diagram:

I generally distrust diagrams (ever since Dead Poet's Society), and one could argue that Galloway's diagram can only map the points it predicts or that it demonstrates that the discussion here really is about the gaming situation as an object. But I think that that hypothetical criticism misses the point. Galloway's approach here presents a way to initiate a discussion around action, but the entire argument doesn't hang on the validity of this model. Having said that, I do feel that the diegesis axis is somewhat clumsy, and Galloway is forced into a few backflips to keep his chart tidy. In short, it forces him to define game diegesis somewhat narrowly within the confines of certain kinds of games, and I think I disagree with where he eventually draws the line between diegetic and non-.

In any case, it's an interesting beginning, and the terms and relationships Galloway sets up here permeate the remainder of the essays, contextualizing them all within the idea of gamic action.

2. Origins of the First-Person Shooter

In his review of Gaming, Nick Montfort notes that the emphasis in this chapter on subjective camerawork in cinema avoids the obvious action-oriented antecedents to the FPS. Galloway does seem emphatic about making this association, and goes to great lengths to justify his central claim that "where film uses the subjective shot to represent a problem with identification, games use the subjective shot to create identification" (69). But I disagree with Nick that this point moves too far from the central argument about gaming action. The problem, it seems, with first-person or subjective camerawork is that the perspective suggests agency or the ability to interact. It is in these moments in cinema where the camera exposes itself as an agent of looking, and the audience is confronted with its own status as voyeur. In other words, it is the fact that the first-person perspective holds forth the possibility of action that makes it such an uncomfortable technique in cinema, but such a natural arrangement in gaming.

That said, I do feel that Galloway belabors this point somewhat, and even seems apologetic about such claims as "in film, the subjective perspective is marginalized and used primarily to effect a sense of alienation, detachment, fear, or violence." Except for its generality, this claim doesn't strike me as particularly controversial, though Galloway clearly thinks it is.

In any case, it is an important association that Galloway then reverses by identifying certain cinematic situations that adopt visual "patina" derived from gaming. Some obvious examples of this "gamic vision" include the Heads-Up Display subjective shots from Terminator and RoboCop. What these and related scenes illustrate is a necessity to foreground the constraint of the visual medium by juxtaposing it with the logic of gamic vision in which visuality is superceded by actionability in terms of space.

3. Social Realism

An earlier form of this essay appears on Game Studies 4.1, but its real merit is obvious in the context of these other essays. Essentially, Galloway unpacks the idea of realism in gaming, distancing it from the so-called "realism" of high-end graphics that purport to be faithful representations of real world objects. Instead, since gaming is for Galloway an action and not an image, realism should be imagined on different terms. Again taking cues from cinema, Galloway argues that a better kind of realism for gaming would follow the model of neorealism in film (as described by Bazin and Reichlin) in which a film's neorealisticness depends on its narrative (e.g., the story of the unemployed father in The Bicyle Thief) and not its form (e.g., its degraded style). Galloway mentions games like September 12th as possibilities of a better realism in gaming because they engage social reality at a level in which the gamic action parallels the real-world action it comments on.

Again orienting his discussion on action, Galloway concludes that the true correspondence obtained in realistic gaming is a congruence between the "material substrate of the medium" and the gamer's social reality. The characteristics of this congruence is developed in the next chapter, but like many other points made in this book, I feel there is much more to be said on the matter. In particular, this approach to realism does seem to have much to contribute to the realm of serious games, which Galloway only touches on briefly.

4. Allegories of Control

In this essay and the concluding one, Galloway makes a compelling case for the expressive potential of video games. In outlining the allegories of control in gaming, Galloway claims that, to the extent that successful navigating daily life increasingly relies on selecting options from series of menus, gaming simply emulates this by enclosing it wihin the gaming action. The main example here is Civilization, which has been criticized ¹ for its Imperialistic politics. For Galloway, though, the problem with Civlization is not so much that it presents other nations and people groups as fodder for conquering, but that it condenses politics into a series of quantities that can be balanced and varied according to menu configurations. So Galloway does criticize the game, but mainly does so because it represents "an index for the very dominance of informatic organization and how it has entirely overhauled, revolutionized, and recolonized the function of identity" (102).

Going back to the previous essay, if gaming's potential for realism lies in its ability to emulate the actions of daily life, then gaming as an allegory of control demonstrates the sinister possibilities of informatic dominion. Galloway states this point in several ways, but it is worth quoting another instance:

To show a way for gaming to move beyond that homogeneity, Galloway concludes by discussing an agenda for "Countergaming."

5. Countergaming

Once again looking to film, Galloway seeks to do for gaming what Peter Wollen did for countercinema in outlining its seven theses. Galloway ends up with six theses for countergaming, one of which is hypothetical, but I'll agree with Nick Montfort that this chapter is Gaming at its best. Though the book as a whole claims to be a collection autonomous essays, it's hard not to read in this essay the culmination of ideas oulined in the first four. I won't go through each of the seven theses, but to put it briefly, countergaming involves establishing and then subverting formal poetics of gameplay. One theme in this that I was interested to notice was the foregrounding of apparatus -- in other words, games that "break." His main example in this essay is Jodi's untitled game inwhich the interface frequently breaks down or appears to reveal its underlying code. Similarly, countergaming can become visible in subverting representational modeling of objects with degraded artifacts. Note that this is not simply bad modeling or the modeling of abstract objects. Rather, the spatiality of objects is threatened by their exposed status as images.

I find this discussion useful not only for outlining a potential direction for artistic or activist game design, but also for providing a context for discussing more mainstream activity like Alternate Reality Gaming in which the game world is very much defined by its juxtaposition with its representation and underlying code, or more sinister-seeming accidents like actual rendering errors in game worlds.² These phenomena are not countergaming as such, but it is possible to understand the disruption of their presence better if we see it as a kind energy working against the dominant hegemony of the game structure. Such things break the framework of social realism and in turn comment on the hegemony of the RL structures they emulate.

I began this review by questioning whether Gaming would change the way I go about studying video games, and though I found the book intelligent and engaging, I'm still not sure what to do with it. I can say that I don't mean that as a critique, however, because (unless I'm mistaken), this collection of essays doesn't demand that of its reader. Galoway proposes alternatives to popular critical models , but these are mostly gestures toward a way of thinking about gaming rather than a declaration of How Things Are. It is finally this kind of approach, along with the approach to gaming as an action rather than games as objects, that is this book's most valuable export, and I'm increasingly convinced that this is exactly the kind of writing about video games that we need more of.

1. Christopher Douglas has a nice analysis along these lines in his article in Postmodern Culture. Rob Foreman addresses similar themes in another Meier-branded game, Colonization in his presentation at the 2006 UF Game Studies Conference.

2. This was worth a post of its own, but there's so much interesting stuff going on in Second Life, it's hard to keep up with. A couple months ago, Warren Ellis posted and BoingBoing subsequently Boing'd a SL snapshot of an avatar with error messages instead of eye graphics. One could probably write an essay or two about the uncanny effect of this image, but seeing it as an example of accidental countergaming, the game operator is invited to reflect on her game world and its diegetic structure.

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