GAME COMPOSITION: WRITING WITH(IN) DIGITAL GAMES

By

KYLE BOHUNICKY

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2018

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© 2018 Kyle Bohunicky

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To Melissa, Dave, and Chuck for reading and revising my gameplay

3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe my deepest gratitude to the committee for the innumerable contributions they have made to both the dissertation and to my development as a scholar. Their patience, insight, and shrewd judgement at critical junctures over the course of this project tempered my bouts of scholarly stubbornness and creative capriciousness, teaching me how to craft my writing into the manuscript you have before you. In particular, I thank Professor Dobrin, my director, for granting me what many graduate students working under scholars of similar renown rarely receive: space to play. Without his willingness to generously humor all nature of ideas, I doubt that I would have had the freedom to present what would eventually become this dissertation. Moreover, Professor Dobrin’s groundbreaking contributions to Writing Studies and Rhetoric and Composition need to be recognized as they made possible both my conception of writing as well as the conversations to which this project contributes. Without his direct and indirect efforts, this dissertation simply could not exist.

Professor Harpold and Professor Gries have both been guiding lights throughout the years—I would be lost without their direction as committee members and mentors. In 2009, Professor Harpold kindly agreed to meet and discuss opportunities for graduate work with digital media in UF’s Department of

English. This meeting with Professor Harpold, like those that were to follow, was both energizing and supportive, and his mentorship has been a significant source of inspiration for both my writing and research. I thank Professor Gries for first

4 introducing me to the field of Writing Studies and working tirelessly to create opportunities for my research and scholarship. It was with Professor Gries that I learned how to perform the vital work of a scholar including publications and conferences, and from her that I gained the skills to thrive within the academy. In the dissertation, as in all the projects that she has generously been involved with,

Professor Gries saw what my writing could become—I thank her for helping me work towards that vision. I would also like to thank Professor Stenner, who was a source of great inspiration for this project and a boon to the Digital Assembly during our many events. I’d also like to thank Professor Jeanne Rose and

Professor Sandy Feinstein at Penn State Berks Campus as well as Professor

Hester Blum and Professor Michael Bérubé at Penn State for their tremendous support and encouragement during my undergraduate degree. I’m here because of them.

To my parents and sister, who provided an endless supply of emotional support and good cooking, I owe a debt that can never be repaid. Teddi, Brian, and Jamie Bohunicky lifted me out of my hardest times, and they gave me hope when all seemed hopeless. I also thank my parents for providing my first game console and for being generous with “TV tickets.” This dissertation began in those early moments huddled in front of our old wood paneled Magnavox, laughing and learning as we stumbled through Hyrule together.

Of the many colleagues in UF’s Department of English and elsewhere who have supported and patiently endured my verbal and written meanderings, I am

5 greatly indebted to Melissa Bianchi for creating numerous opportunities to work and publish together. I also thank her for the insightful criticism, delightful cats, and darn good D.Va POTGs. I thank my aqua fiend Phil Bratta for keeping me honest, Sam Hamilton for the confidence (and for the yappy pup story), Caleb

Milligan for being there even when I wasn’t, and Jordan Youngblood for the A E

S T H E T I C. I thank Andrew Wilson, Samantha Grenrock, Mitch Murray,

Andrea Medina, Aaron Beveridge, Rebecca Fitzsimmons, Andrew Donovan,

Jacob Green, Jacob Riley, Laura Chilcoat, John Tinnell, Stephanie Boluk, Patrick

LeMieux, and Shannon Butts for offering their friendship and support.

Additionally, I couldn’t have made it without many of my friends (both irl and online) including David P. Anderson, Chuck Emig, Greg Gonzalez, Phil Corrado,

Cris Rivera, Kyle Varnadore, Joey Mock, Brent Lopez, Alexander Weiss, Chris

Smaha, Thomas Storey, Ryan Wakeland, Melissa Munkel, and Ryan Hickey.

I thank the Digital Worlds Institute and Professor James Oliverio for the ongoing support of my graduate (and post-graduate) work. Last, but not least, I extend my deepest appreciation to my two loving, wonderful, and snuggly cats:

Lily and Pancake.

6 TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF FIGURES ...... 9

ABSTRACT ...... 10

CHAPTERS

1 WRITING GAMES ...... 11

Methods Overview ...... 14 Theory Overview ...... 19 Theories of Writing, Games, and Play ...... 24 Proceduralism in Writing Theory ...... 31

2 DEFINING PLAY AND WRITING ...... 39

Defining Games ...... 43 Games and Language ...... 43 Games and Signs ...... 47 Games and Systems ...... 48 Games and Experiences ...... 51 Defining Play ...... 53 Play and Ambiguity ...... 53 Play and Games ...... 55 Play and Creativity ...... 57 Defining Writing ...... 59 Writing and History ...... 59 Writing and Play ...... 63

3 WRITING WITH(IN) PRE-DIGITAL AND EARLY GAMES ...... 66

Dadaism and Surrealism ...... 66 Dadaism, Writing, and Play ...... 67 Surrealism, Games, and Writing ...... 72 Writing and Wargaming ...... 76 Writing in Early Digital Games ...... 81 Leaving the Cave ...... 88

4 WRITING WITH(IN) DIGITAL GAMES ...... 94

Writing Models ...... 99 Representing Writing in ...... 101 Representing Writing in Ōkami ...... 107

7 Writing Tools ...... 110 Writing Spaces ...... 118

5 WRITING WITH(IN) GAMES ...... 131

Building a Theory of Post-Procedural Gameplay ...... 134 Popularizing Writing Games: Plays Pokémon ...... 140 Writing Genres ...... 151 Conclusion ...... 159

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 163

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 173

8 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

3-1 Screenshot of Day of the Tentacle Remaster (Lucas Arts, 2016). Graphic Adventure Lexicon in lower left-hand corner...... 92

3-2 Screenshot taken from Dungeons of Daggorath (DynaMicro, 1982). The player’s HUD display ...... 92

3-3 Screenshot taken from Colossal Cave Adventure (Crowther and Woods, 1977). The game’s display...... 93

4-1 Screenshot from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda Softworks, 2011). Reading a book in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim with bookshelves in background...... 127

4-2 Screenshot from Wild Woody (Shen, 1995). Game title screen...... 127

4-3 Screenshot from Type:Rider (Agat Films & Cie – Ex Nihilo, 2013) featuring a puzzle involving a typewriter requiring the player to land on specific keys...... 128

4-4 Screenshot from Mario Teaches Typing (Interplay Productions, 1992) showing how the game highlights the word that the player is trying to type, the digit she should use, and the progress she has made...... 128

4-5 Screenshot from Emily is Away (Seeley, 2015) displaying the chat interface. .. 129

4-6 Screenshot from Undertale (Fox, 2015) showing the Mettaton EX Fight with Writing Prompt...... 129

4-7 Second screenshot from Undertale (Fox, 2015) showing Mettaton EX Fight with Mettaton EX’s assessment...... 130

4-8 Screenshot from Super Mario Maker (Nintendo EAD, 2015) showing the design interface, which integrates elements from word processing-based interfaces such as Excel and MS Word...... 130

5-1 Aeuma’s “The Massacre of Bloody Sunday” (2014) showing the sacrifice of numerous beloved Pokemon through the release function in the in-game PC. 162

9 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

GAME COMPOSITION: WRITING WITH(IN) DIGITAL GAMES

By

Kyle Bohunicky

May 2018

Chair: Sidney I. Dobrin Major: English

“Game Composition: Writing with(in) Digital Games” proposes that games are tools for writing and that play provides a vehicle for the composition of multimodal texts. While Writing Studies and Game Studies focus on how gameplay allows designers to communicate ideas to, few have considered how players are repurposing games through gameplay to communicate and craft expressive media. Player communities on digital platforms like YouTube, Twitch,

Snapchat, and more regularly use games to compose personal and rhetorical documents. Little work has delved into the pedagogical and theoretical possibilities of these documents and the shift from print-centric writing interfaces like word processors to game- and play-centric writing interfaces. This dissertation, therefore, provides a language, method, and several theories to help scholars begin generating work in this area. Moreover, it suggests that scholars begin using games to author their scholarship, and it makes several recommendations for how this might be accomplished.

10 CHAPTER 1 WRITING GAMES

This dissertation contributes to ongoing conversations in Game Studies,

Rhetoric and Composition, and Writing Studies concerning the relationship between digital games and writing. Rhetoric and Composition as well as Writing

Studies have traditionally focused on writing instruction practices and theories of writing to better understand the history and function of writing. These conversations address pedagogy, rhetoric, and the print texts that players and designers produce in and around games (Bogost, Colby et al., Eyman and

Davis). They also address the roles of technical documentation producing and surrounding games. Additionally, they explore the writing that players produce in chatrooms and guilds, the pedagogical applications of games to writing instruction, and the semiotics of game spaces (Gee, DeWinter and Moeller,

Bohunicky and Bianchi, Luce). Game Studies, on the other hand, studies the design, use, and socio-cultural significance of digital and non-digital games, commonly commenting on their expressive capacities. While both fields might appear to be working towards different ends, over the past two decades a group of scholars in Rhetoric and Composition as well as Writing Studies have begun to bridge the gap between these fields. These scholars seek to understand the role that writing plays in and around digital games, and they also explore the sizeable amount of writing that players produce to discuss, collaborate, and document digital games. Ultimately, game studies in Rhetoric and Composition as well as

11 Writing Studies seeks to better understand the many different aspects of the relationship between writing and digital games.

Two scholars in this community, Douglas Eyman and Andréa D. Davis, recently introduced four ecologies to categorize the scholarly exchanges that have occurred between Game Studies, Rhetoric and Composition, and Writing

Studies over the past two decades. They classify these ecologies as the following: writing about games, writing around games, writing inside games, and writing games (8). The first ecology, “writing about games,” encompasses forms of writing that draw on various contexts including cultural studies, psychology/sociology, rhetorical analysis, etc. to analyze digital games (9). The second ecology, “writing around games,” describes writing produced by fan communities (including fan fiction, player guides, lore analysis, etc.) that elaborates on and develops different aspects of a specific . Third,

“writing inside games,” takes games as “writing spaces” where players use in- game tools like chat windows and direct messages to produce writing in various modes to communicate with other players and the game itself (10). Lastly,

“writing games,” includes writing that goes into the production of video games including documents, storylines, and technical documentation (11).

Each ecology serves to both characterize the types of relationships that have emerged between video games and writing as well as to make the case for the inclusion of video games in studies of writing.

12 Eyman and Davis add that their ecologies represent preliminary work, and they suggest that this work should point towards how game-based theory and pedagogy in Writing Studies and Rhetoric and Composition may spread and grow. Citing Lester Faigley’s argument that “we have no justification aside from disciplinary baggage to restrict our conception of rhetoric to words alone” (187), they suggest that one of the crucial ways in which this growth will happen is through the inherently multimodal and multimedia writing produced in game- and play-based contexts, which will result in new forms of writing that merge with other forms of symbol-based communication. Building on this suggestion, this dissertation proposes that studies of writing and communication begin exploring a possible fifth ecology that I classify as “writing with(in) games.” Writing with(in) games is distinct from the former ecologies as it seeks to include and study the artifacts players author through their gameplay. It also responds to the arrival of massively popular platforms like Twitch as well as channels on FaceBook,

YouTube, and other social media/gaming devices where players author media content through gameplay.

In this dissertation, I lay the groundwork for this ecology by outlining some of the key aspects in digital games that “writing with(in) games” might address.

These aspects include in-game tools for producing text- and symbol-based forms of communication, and it also incorporates games that are played through writing. In terms of objects, I incorporate player-produced gameplay artifacts that use games as platforms for authoring expressive content. Although these

13 artifacts lie on the fringes of “writing,” in many ways they are multimodal artifacts that build on the legacy of text- and alphanumeric-based forms of composition.

Players have begun to use their gameplay in a variety of critical and creative ways to write complex messages about personal and social issues within and around games, and Rhetoric and Composition as well as Writing Studies are positioned to produce valuable work with these artifacts.

Methods Overview

To help expand Eyman and Douglas’ ecological approach to game-based writing studies, my work in this dissertation attempts to identify and define writing with(in) games as an ecology. To accomplish this task, I adopt an exploratory approach to my project’s methods. By exploratory, I mean that much of the work here involves experimenting and testing various methods to see which best provide insight and understanding of the artifacts from which this ecosystem emerges. The only “new” method proposed here is closely related to my theory of

“post-procedural” game studies. Post-procedural theory argues for a shift from the design of a game (and the designer’s intention “within” that design) to what players make and do with games as creative spaces for invention and play. To accomplish this, I propose that post-procedural studies should ideally document

(rather than describe) players’ game play sessions by looking for player commentary within gameplay sessions and paratextual material. Insight should come from what players describe and do rather than how we read and interpret that material.

14 I place new in safety quotes because this method is loosely inspired by the practice of “tracking” in actor-network theory (ANT) with several crucial caveats I outline later. In Reassembling the Social, Bruno Latour explains that to practice

ANT,

you have ‘to follow the actors themselves’, that is try to catch up with their often wild innovations in order to learn from them what the collective existence has become in their hands, which methods they have elaborated to make it fit together, which accounts could best define the new associations that they have been forced to establish. (12)

My method plays fast and loose with actor-network theory and should not be considered to be practicing ANT. Bruno Latour’s focus in Reassembling the

Social is on the agency of non-human agents in melding together the “social”

(which he renames the collective), and he argues that ANT should maintain a collective- perspective that accounts for multiple agents. In Chapter 5, I use the concepts of tracking and “letting the agents speak for themselves” to focus on human players and their cybernetic interaction with non-human digital games.

Yet bigger questions about the collective go unanswered because my goal here is to remedy a specific problem in the primary methods of game-based writing studies. In these studies, most accounts of play and players within game-based writing studies ignore and silence the agency of players in favor of proceduralist accounts that focus on the particular design of a game. This is achieved through what I describe as “player abstractions.” Player abstractions are constructed by scholars, assembled from both first- and second-hand accounts of a game, to propose a hypothetical game play session disconnected from the material

15 realities of game play. Rather than citing a specific player, a player abstraction often begins with “The player…” without any attempt to connect this player to the realities of gameplay. While useful for demonstrating a specific reading of a game, this practice obscures the actual interactions players have with digital games and, most importantly, the artifacts that they produce through their gameplay. Moreover, it risks neglecting the meanings that players from various races, genders, classes, ages, cultures, etc. bring to bear on their game play session and create through their game play session. Thus, I use Chapter 5 to demonstrate what a tracking-based approach to game-based writing studies might look like by tracking various players and their interactions with digital games. I rely on players’ accounts, rather than my own readings, to determine how we might understand and study writing within digital games.

Outside of this method, I rely on relatively conventional approaches throughout my dissertation. I do so because establishing the presence of “writing with(in) games” is a significant task unto itself and introducing entirely new methods (while potentially necessary) may distract from the primary goal of the dissertation. My methods are large qualitative and attempt to “make visible” this ecosystem that is easily glossed over. To do so, Chapters 3 and 4 apply close reading, a method admittedly at odds with much of the work in Rhetoric and

Composition as well as Writing Studies. While writing theorists including Susan

Miller, Sharon Crowley, and Greg Ulmer have challenged the tools of New

Criticism (Crowley’s history of the battles between Literary Criticism and

16 Composition make this especially apparent), I modify my approach slightly.

Rather than use a formalistic approach to uncover some hidden authorial meaning (indeed, my theory of post-proceduralism is explicitly against such a practice), I adopt this strategy simply to demonstrate that digital games can and do have things to say about writing. Ideally, the notion that digital games can be used to theorize and make meanings about things like writing would be a given; however, scholars and popular audiences still regularly question whether games have anything to say at all (see deWinter and Vie’s “Sparklegate”). Formalistic methods, although not ideal, present a convenient way to demonstrate the possible meanings and uses for games and writing.

In addition to formalism, in Chapters 2 and 3 I historicizing writing in games and the study of games and writing. These chapters of my dissertation provide what some might see as “summary,” which understandably detracts from the force and insight of the project. Yet I offer these summaries for a very specific purpose: to unearth how various communities and cultures have been working with the relationship between writing in play for well over a century. While this may seem obvious to an art historian or a scholar of non-digital games, the relative newness of “digital” games tends to obscure the longer history of writing in games. Moreover, part of what I hope to show is the presence of this ecology within the fields of Rhetoric and Composition and Writing Studies by pointing to a longer (albeit neglected) history of this work.

17 In addition to these traditional methods of data collection and analysis, I adopt several contemporary approaches that include critical code studies and analysis of fan made artifacts. Writing with(in) games incorporates the artifacts that players author through their game play, so to determine whether a fan made artifact was appropriate for this project, I used a scale that measured how much the game play shown in the artifact A.) deviates from the “intended” game play and B.) results in some kind of expressive media. I use these variables to select player-produced media that present an unconventional re-purposing of digital games with a communicative goal. I measure the first variable using material such as instruction manuals and strategy guides. I assess the second variable through my own readings of gameplay combined with player-produced paratextual material hosted on websites, fan forums, and other surrounding sources that help to verify that these artifacts were working at some form of expression. If an artifact scores high in both variables, it found its way into my dissertation.

Finally, I provide several “light” descriptions of the coding for several digital games. I provide these overviews to explain how players create the many surprising and unconventional artifacts that I document within the pages that follow. The goal here is not to necessarily shed insight into the design of the game or its meaning, but rather to help clarify how gameplay accomplishes specific expressive ends and can be re-purposed by others.

18 Taken together, this collection of methods might at first appear to position my work well outside of research in Rhetoric and Composition or Writing Studies.

Part of the ambiguity over my disciplinary location likely stems from hybridizing

Game Studies with Writing Studies, which results in methods like close reading and code studies emerging in my project. Yet more likely is that Writing Studies and Rhetoric and Composition are in a moment of transformation from single authored texts produced in print, to collaborative artifacts that combine a variety of multimodal formats and platforms. As I explain in my theory section below, the definition of writing is undergoing significant transformations, and these changes will undoubtably change the methodological landscape of Writing Studies and

Rhetoric and Composition.

Theory Overview

Unlike my methods section, which is a scattershot collection of different methodological practice, the theory that supports this dissertation is drawn primarily from Writing Studies’ work with multimodality, digital technology, play, and games. I provide a more in-depth overview of supplimental theories and key terms in Chapter 2 of my dissertation. Here, I focus on those theories that are central to the formation of this project and that support some of my methodological decisions.

In 2014, the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA) issued a revised “Outcomes Statement” outlining the needs and goals of writing classrooms. Specifically, the CWPA writes that the statement emerges from

19 writing scholars’ research and theory as well as their experience teaching “the writing knowledge, practices, and attitudes that undergraduate students develop in first-year composition.” Given its scope and intent, the statement’s theories about writing and its integration in classrooms are standard fare and general enough to support writing instruction across the country; however, its “revision” marks an important shift in how writing is broadly understood. The 2014 revision expands their 2008 outcomes statement, which emphasizes process theory and

Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) objectives that result in service learning curriculum in writing classrooms. The CWPA briefly acknowledges digital technology, but this only comes at the close of their 2008 document,

writing in the 21st century involves the use of digital technologies for several purposes, from drafting to peer reviewing to editing. Therefore, although the kinds of composing processes and texts expected from students vary across programs and institutions, there are nonetheless common expectations.

The statement reasons that technology should facilitate the practices and pedagogies developed for traditional, print-based forms of communication.

Moreover, it suggests uses for digital technology that allow writers to continue performing the skills and techniques developed prior to digital technologies.

Thus, according to the CWPA’s findings in 2008, digital technology is merely a footnote in the theory and teaching of writing.

The 2014 revision significantly overhauls this position, offering a more nuanced theory of digital technology that is interwoven throughout the statement and the CWPA’s definition of writing. Whereas the 2008 statement previously

20 emphasized process, the 2014 revision focuses on the expanding modalities through which contemporary writers write. The statement recognizes the complex media ecology in which writing circulates and merges with other forms of media, and it suggests that conversations in WAC should address more than the needs of other disciplines—it should also speak to writing in various modalities and genres. These changes were largely inspired by what writers do and produce when they “write,” leading the CWPA to re-define composition and writing:

“composing” refers broadly to complex writing processes that are increasingly reliant on the use of digital technologies. Writers also attend to elements of design, incorporating images and graphical elements into texts intended for screens as well as printed pages. Writers’ composing activities have always been shaped by the technologies available to them, and digital technologies are changing writers’ relationships to their texts and audiences in evolving ways.

What the WPA describes here differs significantly from what Johndan Johnson-

Eilola criticizes as the stagnant, yet all-to-common, theory of writing in composition classrooms, which proposes that writing is “singly authored papers arguing a single, clear point forcefully over the course of five, neatly typed, double-spaced pages.” Here, writing blends with a variety of media production, caught in an inescapable play with a wide range of forms including sound, image, code, games, and more. And these configurations raise uncomfortable disciplinary questions: if writing is no longer just “words on a page,” then what, exactly, are fields like Rhetoric and Composition or Writing Studies researching, theorizing, and teaching writing?

21 In Toward a Composition Made Whole, Jody Shipka notes that despite disciplinary resistance and modal biases, multimodal theories of writing are not new. Shipka explains that in 1925 Harry Overstreet called for a more expansive theory of writing and its goals (6 – 7). And since the 1960s, teachers and scholars have sought to include film, comics, diagrammatic techniques, scrapbooks and other modes of writing into their understanding of writing (4 – 5).

In Writer/Designer, Kristin L. Arola et al. explain that these proposals constitute

“multimodal” theories of writing. Multimodal serves as a portmanteau of “multiple” and “mode.” Arola et al. explain that “mode is a way of communicating” that includes anything from the words on this page, to images, sounds, etc. (1). For

Arola et al. multimodal refers to communication practices that combine different ways of communicating, and they suggest that multimodal writing incorporates five components: visual, linguistic, aural, spatial, and gestural. The CWPA’s statement, adding to a century long conversation in Writing Studies acknowledging that writing encompasses modes beyond alphanumeric text, simply affirms that digital technologies create even more difficulties in segregating writing from other modes of communication. In digital contexts, writing is produced for non-linear spaces including the web, augmented reality, and virtual reality that merge it with a variety of media including games, images, video, music, etc. Although the CWPA might be tapping into a sentiment shared across the fields of writing studies and rhetoric and composition, their expansion of writing to multiple modalities demonstrates a significant step in widescale

22 recognition that our theory and praxis must adjust to accommodate these digital transformations.

In rhetoric and composition as well as writing studies, one outcome of pushing for writing as multimodal is a return to theories of play in writing. In At

Play in the Fields of Writing: A Serio-Ludic Rhetoric, Albert Rouzie cites several case studies from his and other writing classrooms that integrate digital and multimodal forms of writing. In each instance, Rouzie notes that play was critical to student writing,

No matter what virtual hell English instructors envision as the inevitable spawn of the computer (r)evolution, we are approaching a watershed in how we define writing and literacy: Writing instructors cannot afford to ignore the visual and reject the expanded sense of writing as authoring (or composing) brought forward by computer media. The play element in such composition is crucial to their meaning; by virtue of this element; writers compose differently to involve readers in an experience of the text. (195)

For Rouzie, play is more than just an effect or attitude; instead, it is a foundational component digital composition. Rouzie describes this as “playful composing” (47), echoing Jay David Bolter’s argument that “writing is the creative play of signs, and the computer offers us a new field for that play” (10). Rouzie’s theory of writing in digital space, and the work that his theory draws on, brings the concept of play and its relationship to writing back to the fore. In the sub- section that follows, I describe several play-based theories of writing that arise from work with digital technology and games.

23 Theories of Writing, Games, and Play

Much of the conversation around digital games, play, and writing begins with the theory that games are symbolic systems. We find early traces of “games as sign systems” the 1980s with Sherry Turkle, who, although not specifically aligned to composition studies, presents several critical insights about the relationship between game play and literacy that appear frequently in composition studies’ work with digital games. In The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, Turkle mixes interviews with firsthand accounts from players to better understand players’ relationship with digital games. Her method reveals that players develop expansive gaming vocabularies as they interact with the symbolic elements within video games, noting, “Ultimately there are programs that stand behind the action. They can be deciphered; children speak of learning their secrets, recognizing them as worlds of complex behavior that in the end are rule-driven—like science fiction, like D and D, and, as they are starting to learn, like computers” (80). Here, Turkle theorizes games as complex semiotic systems signifying computational operations that players, through play, learn to interpret and respond to. The study of games, then, can and should examine how the symbols and signs within games signify processes and operations that players and the game can perform, and it also establishes that part of the challenge of a game is becoming literate in and rhetorical with vast sign systems (80). To win, players need to learn the meaning of certain symbols and signs. They also need to understand the relationships between those

24 symbols and signs, and (perhaps most critically) they must create/use those relationships during play in a way that allows them to achieve their goals within the game space. Play is thus theorized in Turkle’s work as an act of learning, and also an act of composing (if not writing)—one learns the meaning of the signs and symbols within the game space to create relationships with those signs and symbols (for example: “Mario collects mushroom to grow big”) that produce a desired effect within the game space.

But players who Turkle interviews largely describe learning and composing within the confines of the game space itself. As a result, her theory becomes deadlocked by what Johan Huizinga describes as the “ circle” in games and play. According to the “magic circle” account of games, a symbol like

Mario or a Space Invader only means something within the context of a game’s rule driven behaviors—an icon for a set of procedures and practices that has little connection to larger socio-cultural meanings. A more common form of this theory emerges from players who claim that what they do when they play a game has no impact on anyone or anything beyond the game. This description of games has precedent in Judge John F. Grady’s description of what made games “new” as medium in his ruling on the first IP case in video game history, “the player- controlled hitting symbol [on-screen paddle], which coincides with a hit symbol [a ball] and causes a distinct change of direction in the motion of the hit symbol”

(quoted in Nelson 160). Although both Grady and Turkle recognize that players may “compose” with these symbols through play, their descriptions limit player

25 composition towards goals within the game space, which means the

“compositions” players construct through play largely convey themes like mastery and competition. While this theory does allow criticism to begin thinking about play in terms of learning and semiotics, the artificial boundaries at play in Turkle’s interview means that framing the study of play in terms of “composition” or

“writing” would make little sense. Instead, in Turkle’s theory, play-based compositions likely resemble the player “text” that Chris Crawford describes in

Chris Crawford On Interactive Storytelling:

I entered the new level and saw a monster waiting for me. I ducked to the left and then blasted the monster. Another monster saw me and started approaching; I ran behind an obstacle, popped around the other side, and shot the monster. I ran to another obstacle, peeked around it, and saw five monsters. I threw a grenade into them. When it exploded, I dashed forward and mowed down the survivors. But there was another monster waiting just around the corner, and it caught me unaware, wiping out half of my hit points. I ran for cover, but he was right on my tail, I couldn’t shake him, and my gun wasn’t big enough to take him out, even though I shot him at least four times. He killed me. (46)

Turkle’s approach to learning and semiotics allows us to see the outlines of a story emerging from game play, but like Crawford’s story, it’s largely about rules followed and actions performed within the game space. For game play to construct stories as well as allow players to author their ideas and personalities, thinking about the semiotics of games and play needs to escape a “magic circle” mentality in which the relationships players construct through play only relate to the game space, its rules, and its operations. Language has the potential to say more than it means, and signs and symbols can never be stripped of larger

26 cultural and political connotations—symbols in games are no exception to this rule.

Later scholars in Rhetoric and Composition as well as Writing Studies including DeWinter, Eyman, and Rebecka Schultz Colby would theorize the meanings of game-based signs and symbols in terms of broader cultural themes such as gender, race, politics, etc. Yet this shift in the meanings and possibilities of these compositions first begins as composition studies starts responding to the rapid proliferation of digital technologies and the emergence of the internet in the

90s. Certain scholars in Writing Studies including Christina Haas and Gregory

Ulmer drew on these transformations to examine the influence of technology on writing. These studies focus on changes in the technology itself, leading to debates about how such changes would ultimately generate new forms of rhetoric and writing or lead writers back into oral traditions (Lanham, Flusser,

Aarseth). Cynthia L. Selfe and Gail E. Hawisher, rather than putting questions about writing to technology, instead turned to writers and found "striking connections between computer gaming and literacy activities in the late 1990s when we began our project of asking individuals to tell us firsthand narratives about their reading and composing practices, their development as readers and writers” (xv). In this early work, Selfe and Hawisher make a minor, but critical shift from Turkle’s approach. Rather than talking with players about their literacies within confines of the game space, Selfe and Hawisher direct their inquiry towards other areas, asking about how the actions within games can

27 connect to something they see as outside of the game: writing. This shift, and their findings, led them to theorize that lessons acquired through play extend to a variety of other subjects and topics. This theory would circulate to other fields, resulting games and education scholars like James Paul Gee and Kurt Squire building on Selfe and Hawisher’s theory of a permeable play space. Gee’s What

Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy answers the question of whether video games are a waste of time by exploring the variety of learning practices and forms of semiotic acquisition that players encounter while playing digital games. Gee’s text heralds myriad work on the pedagogical applications of digital games to the classroom such as Squire’s experiments with

Sid Meier’s Civilization III in a classroom to teach students about world history, or

Justin Hodgson’s re-thinking the design of the composition classroom as a game.

However, Selfe and Hawisher found their theory on an assumed division between writing and gameplay—in other words, the “stuff” players do in digital games. Selfe and Hawisher highlight this division when they note that their project asks “individuals to tell us firsthand narratives about their reading and composing practices, their development as readers and writers” (xv). Selfe and

Hawisher’s project, as described here, aims to bridge the gap between seemingly trivial activities like gaming and institutionally and professional valued activities such as written communication and literacy. In doing so, however, gameplay becomes means to an end—in this case, writing. This division between writing

28 and gameplay is echoed in their summary of their text Gaming Lives in the

Twenty-First Century. They write,

In Gaming Lives in the Twenty-First Century (2007), we argued agreeing with [James Paul] Gee, that far from distracting students from learning, as many cultural critics maintained, gaming had the potential to teach young people important concepts or to create environments within which they taught themselves and others such lessons: about reading and representing identity, about communicating and gauging authority and ethos, about collaborating and cooperating on projects using language tools, about reading and composing effective texts within specialized communities. xv – xvi

In this model, games are mimetic pedagogical tools that allow players to practice skills that they then apply to “real” pursuits outside of the game space—implying a division between what players create in games and the work they perform outside of games. Benjamin Miller, in “Metaphor, Writer’s Block, and ,” describes this the logic of metonymy in game studies, “Typically, that is, scholars have investigated the potential for in-game reading, writing, and communication…to inform out-of-game reading, writing, and communication”

(99). Although pedagogically useful, this model splits games/play and writing; writing happens around or after play, and game play is not (and, in some ways, must not be) a form of writing or composing.

Studies building from Selfe and Hawisher’s method theorize games and play as pedagogical service technology for the delivery of other values—values often amenable to classroom and administrative demands. Examples might include studying how students can, for example, play a game to learn about lake pollution, how to write for the workplace, or work in the food service industry;

29 instructors, on the other hand, may export game-like structures into the classroom in an attempt to make learning more fun or engaging (this is most commonly described as gamification). Gamification poses a particular problem, however, in how it controls optics. A “gamified” classroom suggests that other classrooms are not already gamified, encouraging scholars to imagine that their classrooms are somehow free of game-like qualities. Yet writing classrooms are always already a game. Syllabi are rules for accomplishing the various writing tasks that students are challenged to complete, and each task is judged against an evaluation scale that ranks and rates student work. Instructors and administrators set these rules in place prior to the player’s participation, and they enforce them by punishing those whose performance deviates from or challenges those rules. Instruction conveys these rules, placing the instructor in the role of computer hardware/software typically on which games are typically run. Once an instructor “fails” to deliver content in an engaging and efficient manner they, like gaming equipment, are quickly replaced and upgraded for different (often putatively improved) models. From the student perspective, these are games, like professional sports or gambling, that are played for real and have significant consequences for their players, which are used to constrain paidia or free play. Instead, student writers and instructors labor under highly ludic systems. Digital games are not an entertaining analogy; they are the classroom.

And the classroom is not alone in being inherently gamified. Many administrative components of the university, and perhaps the entire academic enterprise, also

30 mimic the rhetoric and design of games. Academics, for example, maintain scores through credentialing, a process that involves keeping count of total publications and conferences much like a post-match . Similarly, academics “level up” to later ranks once they’ve acquired “experience points” by completing enough service, teaching, and research. Given that the university is already gamified, gamification simply serves as a disguise for the capitalist cultures on which the university is built.

While useful for re-thinking the problems and prejudices of traditional pedagogical approaches to classroom learning, extreme forms of this approach can result in “edutainment” theories. Raph Koster describes this issue in A

Theory of Fun for Game Design, stating that the pleasure of “playing to learn” comes from the sense of mastery players acquire over the game system. Play

(and, by extension, learning) become a practice of conquest efficacious only because they provide a relatively linear journey to complete and total knowledge.

Additionally, the transference of skills described by Selfe and Hawisher also opens another possible direction for Writing Studies: what game designers, rather than players, communicate to players through their game design. This theory is best encapsulated by work with “procedural rhetoric” and Ian Bogost’s

Persuasive Games, which I describe in the following sub-section.

Proceduralism in Writing Theory

At the time of publication, Bogost’s theory of procedurality in Persuasive

Games did the impossible: it uncovered common ground between ludology and

31 narratology. While ludologists and narratologists were reportedly at odds over whether games should be studied as computationally rule-bound objects or narrative objects, Bogost’s work theorizes how computational and rule-bound aspects of digital games actively convey and enforce cultural values and beliefs.

The rules of SimCity, for example, are laden with ideas about society and culture that range from the effects of income disparity to how one should manage large populations of people that players engage with as they interact with the game.

Bogost theorizes, however, that the player’s interactions with a digital game are never fully open-ended. Instead, a game (and, by proxy, its designer) exerts influence on player actions through background processes that shape what and how players are capable of doing within a digital game.

Rather than “actions,” Bogost describes what players (and game software) do as “procedures”—activities that have expressive value because of the processes directing them. He explains procedures by citing how everyday actions like making a return at a retailer are determined by process,

While we often think that rules always limit behavior, the imposition of constraints also creates expression. In our example, the very concept of returning a defective product is only made possible by the creation of rules that frame that very notion. Without a process, it would perhaps never even occur to us that defective or unwanted products can be returned…When we do things, we do them according to some logic, and that logic constitutes a process in the general sense of the word [emphasis added]. (7)

Rules and processes are a sort of DNA for larger systems that bestow value onto those systems, and we experience that value by performing certain procedures such as scrolling through a Facebook feed or lesson planning. And systems,

32 especially computational systems, can be procedural, their operation stemming from complex sets of rules and processes.1 Bogost notes that “procedural systems generate behaviors based on rule-based models” (5), in other words, they “structured behaviors” (3) and encourage regimented ways of thinking and doing that follow some sort of pattern and can express creative or ideological content. In Animal Crossing, for example, players move into a new town and are immediately forced into purchasing a house by the unassuming real estate mogul

Tom Nook. After days of laboring to collect enough “Bells,” the in-game currency, players can finally pay off Nook and, if they choose, expand their house. Bogost notes that although this may seem like a choice, the game presents hundreds of in-game furniture items that, eventually, exceed the room in the initial home, requiring players to purchase upgrades for their house and once again fall into debt. This procedure, directed by the game’s rules, offers up various arguments about housing, consumerism, and debt (“Rhetoric” Bogost). Procedural rhetoric, then, focuses on how arguments are “made not through the construction of words or images, but through the authorship of rules of behavior” (29), locating meaning in the processes that the player merely reproduces as they play the game.

1 This distinction has a parallel in “process theory,” which teaches writing as a closed-capacity skill when in fact writing is an “open-capacity” skill. Closed-capacity approaches are built on a belief in predictability, “it seems as though most teachers assume that discourse functions in relation to the world in some predictable way” (Constructing Knowledges 78) and that writing is a recursive process in which writers can simply skip across several linear steps to produce writing. The same problems emerge in procedural approaches to games, where play, an open-capacity skill, is reduced to a highly regimented and seemingly predictable skill.

33 The method proposed by procedural rhetoric may appear at first quite similar to Turkle’s method. Both methods, after all, do focus on the expressive capacity of programs and processes; however, there’s a significant degree of agency granted to players and gameplay in Turkle’s model. Whereas procedurality focuses on how procedures convey various beliefs, Turkle’s synthesis of formal analysis with interviews locates meaning in the exchange between players and games. Player interviews are necessary for Turkle because players learn (and can learn differently) through their individuated gameplay sessions. Similarly, Selfe and Hawisher acknowledge this agency and diversity through their interviews with writers, emphasizing the specific role that games played in various individuals’ lives.

Procedural rhetoric problematically breaks from these models by re- locating meaning in the “rules of behavior” authored by game designers. In doing so, it theorizes that games can be analyzed by only focusing on their formal elements. Moreover, procedural rhetoric allows us to write about games as if the game exists outside of its playing and players. As I demonstrate in the procedural reading of Animal Crossing borrowed from Bogost, “players” are nothing more than fictional subjects used to fit the critic’s example. The game session described may have happened, but without actual player experience to support it, it remains a page from an abstract rulebook, one that may express different ideas than what in fact happens when players explore Animal Crossing.

34 The popularity of Bogost’s theory likely has much to with its similarity to other theories of writing and instruction within writing studies and rhetoric and composition. First, procedural rhetoric reproduces what James Berlin describes as “current-traditional” rhetoric within the study and instruction of writing. In

Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900—1985,

Berlin notes that current-traditional rhetoric advocates a Platonic understanding of reality in which truth exists outside of language. For those advocating a current-traditional rhetoric, language is regarded “at worst as a distorting medium that alters the original perception, and at best as a transparent device that captures the original experience so that it might be reproduced” (8). In this rhetoric, organization and grammatical correctness are the primary concerns as the goal of the writer is to “not distort what is to be communicated” (9), and problems only arise because of a faulty observer or a faulty use of language. In this model, writing’s ultimate goal is to produce as faithful a reproduction as possible, making surface-level concerns a primary focus.

In Bogost’s model, play is ensnared by a similar theory of communication.

For a procedural reading of a game to actually exist, the individual providing the reading must believe that play presents no degree of mediation in the meanings and ideas “embedded” in a game’s coding. Play must function, as writing does in current-traditional rhetoric, as a “transparent device” that gives voice to the meanings designed into game procedures surrounding the player. In a proceduralist framework, play is like language and writing—a distorting medium

35 that obscures the location of meaning and truth in the rules and processes coded into the game. Since these can only be conveyed through gameplay, play (like writing in a current-traditional framework) becomes reduced to a mechanical act of pure skill that can be abstracted in discussions about digital games.

Thus, rather than agents capable of producing critical media with this technology, the player and writer are both rendered mouthpieces for another’s thoughts and ideas. Instead of pursuing truth in the “realm of ideas” (“Rhetoric and Reality” Berlin 12) through one’s own perception, writing, like play, voices meanings outside of the writer/player. According to Bogost, game designers

“author code that enforces rules to generate some kind of representation, rather than authoring the representation itself” (4) which the player can then only but reproduce through their gameplay. Miguel Sicart highlights this problem in

“Against Procedurality,” noting that in “the proceduralist tradition, play is not central to understanding the meanings created by (playing) games, since it is the rules that create those meanings,” and the player’s play merely recreates designers’ beliefs. In the Platonic model, writers and players can only repeat, in a lesser form, the ideas of another, and this position is shared by the player in contemporary game criticism that sees her as authored by the designer rather than authoring herself and position within the game space.

As a result of Bogost’s theory, the idea that game play has an inventive function (as opposed to a subservient one) is rare to find in Writing Studies and

Rhetoric and Composition. Wendi Sierra, in “Playing with Play: Machinima in the

36 Classroom,” notes that very rarely does one find the concept of writing with video games aligned with play. Instead, procedural notions of video games have largely placed the creative emphasis on the side of game design rather than play: designers (and writers) write games, players simply play them. Moreover, many have depicted gameplay as largely route pattern matching through which the player merely need find the successful combination of inputs to win. Thus, how the field might produce a significant framework for studying the player as agent capable of producing creative works through her play is still very much an open question, one that has been largely co-opted by the recent shift towards

“procedural rhetoric.” In “Procedurality as Play: Movement in Games and

Composition,” Grace Hagood notes that, “In the past fifteen years, scholars have approached the study of digital games through a wide variety of lenses,” but

“since the publication of Ian Bogost’s Persuasive Games in 2007, rhetorical criticism of games has been dominated by a focus on procedurality, or how the rhetorical and computational structures of games create procedures through which meaning is made” (98). Bogost’s emphasis on game designers’ computational processes as the locus of meaning rehashes authorial models that ultimately “risks excludes [sic] the unpredictable multitude of choices that a player brings to bear upon the structure of games” (Hagood 98).

Hagood concludes her work calling for writing scholars to “reconsider how procedure functions in relation to play and purpose” (98). In the chapters that follow, I make this move by returning to the question of play and its links to

37 authorship within and through digital games. Ultimately, the outline of writing with(in) games that I offer in the remaining chapters of my dissertation attempts to consider what might follow procedurality. Yet escaping procedurality entirely is not the goal of this dissertation. While the following chapters do attempt to envision what might come next for writing studies and rhetoric and composition’s approach to digital games, they are in many ways indebted to and reference the approaches described in the previous section. “Writing with(in) games,” as an ecology, seeks a more encompassing approach that both recognizes games as socio-cultural artifacts authored by designers and acknowledges play as a player-product that authors specific content that may exceed the procedural arguments coded into the game.

38 CHAPTER 2 DEFINING PLAY AND WRITING

During the early 1980s and onward, enthusiast writers and game companies began filling newsstands with magazines devoted to the discussion, analysis, and curation of digital games. Titles including , Comptiq,

Computer Gaming World, , and others were some of the first to provide digital gaming with a vocabulary for talking about gaming media. Players turned to these magazines for more than the latest reviews—at a time when the broader culture was either disinterested in or promoting a “moral panic” over games (Mäyrä 65), the writings in these texts defined for players what games were and why they mattered. As Mia Consalvo notes in her analysis of early gaming magazines, the rhetoric of these magazines (including the language but also layouts and multimedia content) worked to define who plays, how much, and why (63 – 64). Much of this identity building occurred through the writing and language of contributors, whose industry and game analyses provided the community with a common tongue that would deeply shape this nascent medium.

One of the more obvious places where gaming magazines influenced broader understandings of games and their significance were review sections.

Review sections select several recently released games and provide a summary of their quality and a numeric scale that resulted in a reviewer “score” of the game. In the , one of the more popular gaming magazines,

GamePro, evaluated games on a scale of 1 – 5 spread across four separate

39 categories: Graphics, Control, Fun Factor, Sound. Other magazines provided similar scales that were used to assess games, and from these scales emerged early definitions of games.

Yet such scales, and their biases towards visuals as well as computing power, excluded aspects like story, multiplayer, mechanics, as well as socio- political issues from the definition of games. In A Game Design Vocabulary, Anna

Anthropy reflects on the problems of this practice, arguing that these uncritical but commercially popular terms for describing and assessing games significantly influenced (and continues to influence) gaming culture and the design of games.

She writes,

The fact is that although these categories may seem dated, we nonetheless allow them to inform the way we think about games. Instead of considering a game holistically, we mentally divide games into categories. It’s especially easy to do within a bigger group or studio, where all these categories may be separate jobs performed by separate people. But what something in a game looks like, for example, tells the player what to think about it, what expectations to have. “Graphics” are part of design. So is sound, and how the game controls, and every part of the experience of a game. We’re trained to think of all these parts of a game in isolation. (8)

The language we use, and categories we create, greatly impacts how we understand and define games, and these definitions have real ramifications for both players and the industry. As Consalvo notes, by providing these definitions, digital gaming magazines also imposed limits on the identities of players, often promoting the idea of the “power gamer” who plays only to master a game, which in turn affected understandings of games, shifting them towards spaces for escapism and power fantasies (20).

40 These concepts of players and games, in turn, set standards for the industry that would greatly influence (but not necessarily determine, see point- and-click adventure games for a counter example) their content. And these definitions have survived into our contemporary moment. With few exceptions, games without guns, combat, conquest, or gruff space marines are cast out as

“walking simulators,” non-games, or meme games. Similarly, designers who attempt to attempt to buck the trends and definitions established in gaming culture are excluded (often violently) from the industry.1 As Anthropy concludes, the language of the industry and culture exists to viciously insulate and preserve that culture. She notes, “The language that we use to talk about games constrains the way we think about them. We don’t have a vocabulary that can fit games that are as diverse as, say, a game about hormone replacement therapy that relates events that really happened to me and isn’t a struggle for victory or dominance. And so the language of games is a language of exclusion” (8).

Players’ language and brand loyalty attempts to display a common essence shared by members of the group and operates as criteria to classify others as outsiders who don’t belong.

Thus, games and language share a tricky and problematic relationship.

Much of the terms used to discuss games are either empty marketing lingo or designed to enforce unnecessary barriers. To help untangle these issues, this

1 See, for instance, Zoe Quinn or Phil Fish.

41 chapter provides definitions for several of my key terms, taking care to not only define what these terms mean but also clarify how they work in my project. My focus here shifts through is focused on the three central terms for my project: games, play, and writing. At the conclusion of the chapter, I bring together play and writing to offer a definition of what “writing with(in) games” might mean.

Before proceeding, I feel obligated to acknowledge Ludwig Wittgenstein and his oft-cited perspective on the definition of games. In his Philosophical

Investigations, Wittgenstein used games to criticize the imprecision of language in the philosophical pursuit of “essences” from which categories are constructed.

Essences refers to a feature that is considered essential to several or more things and used to group them together. To disprove this point, Wittgenstein asks readers to consider the case of games, which he proposes do not bear some core feature that ties them all together. According to Wittgenstein, each game varies from the next with certain shared qualities present in a few, but not all, games. He writes

Consider for example the proceedings that we call "games". I mean board- games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all?—Don't say: "There must be something common, or they would not be called 'games' "—but look and see whether there is anything common to all.—For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships… I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.— And I shall say: 'games' form a family. (31 – 32)

Thus, to call them all games commits a serious error. He suggests that we instead use “family resemblances” to discuss games. Family resemblances are

42 similarities that create close relationships—forming a sort of “ecology” or network of repetitions with difference. In the definitions that follow, then, I seek to present a network of family resemblances between various definitions and ultimately writing, play, and games. Rather than arguing that any one definition encompasses the totality of games, I draw on the following definitions to shed light on the “family resemblance” I propose between play and writing.

Defining Games

Games and Language

To help guide my thinking between games, play, and writing, I begin my definition of games with a text that, like my own, seeks to explore the relationship between games and other forms of communication: Ferdinand de Saussure’s

Course in General Linguistics. In his text, Saussure defines the operation of language by way of games, offering a definition that presents a useful starting point for this project. He writes,

But of all the comparisons one might think of, the most revealing is the likeness between what happens in a language and what happens in a game of chess. In both cases, we are dealing with a system of values and with modifications of the system. A game of chess is like an artificial form of what languages present in a natural form. (87)

Saussure, using the idea of game “states” (how a game looks after a player has taken their turn), explains that the value of a chess piece is determined by its position as well as its relationship to other pieces on a chess board. A pawn distant from the other player’s pieces has little value; however, a pawn that can take a knight increases in value. Saussure explains that “The value of the chess

43 piece depends on their position upon the chess board, just as in the language each term has its value through its contrast with all the other terms” (88). During each state, the value of the pieces on the board varies based on the arrangements of pieces that players create.

Digital games, too, operate under the same principle. The value of the , and other characters and objects within the game, change value based on their contrast and relationships. In Super Mario Bros., for example, placing Mario above a koopa troopa as opposed to on the same plane changes the value of these characters. In the first instance, Mario is in an advantageous situation, thereby increasing his value and the value of the position; in the latter, Mario is in a position with higher risk, thereby decreasing value. Similarly, a Mario that has no power-ups has a different value than one that has acquired a fire flower. As players play, they become literate in these changes and manipulate contrasts to influence and manifest various game states.

Thus, Saussure suggests that both games and language are “state machines” in which each action (in other words, change in value) produces a new “state” in the system. This state is responded to by, in the case of games, either another player or machine, thereby producing a new state. Thus, while both games and language work according to a core set of “rules” that organize the system, players and other players/machine collaborate on the construction

44 and direction of the system—presenting the possibility for unanticipated permutations (see Chapter 5).

Secondly, Saussure introduces the concepts of temporality and rules.

Each game state is only temporary, changing with each turn, but each turn must adhere to an invariable set of conventions that determine the value of pieces and the possible game states that players can create each turn. As players guide

Mario through the game’s stages, they produce new game states with each move that change the values of in-game elements. At one point, Mario might be on the ropes with no extra lives and no power-ups in a dire faceoff against Bowser; however, another playthrough might yield a different state in which Mario has a large stockpile of extra lives and little risk going up against this threat.

These game states not only change the value of the in-game elements at play, but they also change the meaning experienced in the game. In the former example, Mario manifests a desperate struggle against all odds and an overbearing tyrant; in the latter, Mario expresses a power fantasy. While the value and meanings of game states might fluctuate, they still are anchored by a core set of rules that attempt to limit the game states players can create and, by extension, the meanings that can be produced through each state. Saussure, again, “the values also depend ultimately upon one invariable set of conventions, the rules of the game…These rules, fixed one and for all, also exist in the linguistic case: they are the unchanging principles of semiology” (88). In non- digital games, players can agree upon different rules prior to the game to change

45 the values at play; similarly, as I demonstrate in Chapter 5, players can use glitches and modifications to re-negotiate this “core” set of rules. In doing so, the values and meanings again change. If players were to use a device to hack

Super Mario Bros. and grant Mario unlimited lives, the value and meaning of the examples provided previously would again change.

To summarize, value thus refers to the changing dynamics of elements in a game arising from their contrast to other elements within a game. Value can mean the “worth” of an element (a pawn that can take a king has more value than one that cannot), but it can also mean the possibilities of that element (the value of a sniper versus a hand-to-hand combatant in a team-based game).

Value also encompasses any fluctuation in the status of a game element once play has begun.

“Meaning,” on the other hand, refers to the larger symbolic and expressive elements that arise from changes in value. In the former example, the pawn taking the king might express proletariat struggle, while the pawn who cannot take the king perhaps expresses the exploitation of that class. Intention has no relevance to meaning. Like language, any combination of game state values presents the possibility of expressive meaning, and this possibility hints at how players might collaborate with game systems to author larger meanings beyond the core values at play.

46 Games and Signs

While Saussure’s descriptions focus on language writ large, in both digital and non-digital games, players interact with the game system and each other through a pre-determined set of signs. Signs share a close relationship with language in that players become literate in their possible values and work to produce “rhetorical” (in other words, effective) moves to achieve their goals in the game. As James Paul Gee suggests in “Semiotic Domains: Is Playing Video

Games a Waste of Time?,” games provide a language that players learn as they play the game--a language that is presented through a set of multimodal signs

(255). Signs refer to any element of a game with a modifiable status value (see previous paragraph) and that can construct meaning through changes in its value.

Signs are modality agnostic and include physical pieces, visual elements, bodily gestures, auditory cues, etc. DOOM, lauded for its architecture and environmental sound design, presents players with a complex sign management system. Visually, the game displays a variety of signs including signs for weapons, keys, enemies, collectibles, the player character, and her environment.

Auditorily, the game provides enemies with snarls and roars. Through diffusion, the game modifies the pitch and frequency of these sounds to provide players with a distant, non-visual sign for each enemy that echoes through the dimly lit halls of the Phobos Base.

47 Thus, throughout the course of play, players manipulate and modify these signs within the context of the game to manifest new game states, and by proxy, new meanings to which the machine responds. Writing tools, especially digital writing tools, also provide a space for the manipulation and modification of signs.

While writing once referred specifically to alphanumeric signs, the research cited in Chapter 1 demonstrates that both Writing Studies and Rhetoric and

Composition view writing from a multimodal perspective that involves the play of many different types of signs. This shift brings writing on digital platforms and the creation of game states closer together than perhaps previously considered.

Games and Systems

Thus, from Saussure and through Gee, we arrive at an understanding of games as a modifiable system of signs in which changes to the value of an element changes the overall game state and produces meaning. This idea of games as a system for handling various states and their associated meanings is common in the writings of other designers and scholars.2 In Rules of Play, Katie

Salen and Eric Zimmerman define game as “a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome” (80).

Here, Salen and Zimmerman forward the idea of games as a system, which they draw from cybernetics studies’ idea of a self-regulating feedback loop that consists of three parts: a sensor, a comparator, and an activator. The sensor

2 See, for instance, Jesper Juul’s Half-Real, “A game is 1) a rule-based formal system; 2) with variable and quantifiable outcomes; 3) where different outcomes are assigned different values; 4) where the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome; 5) the player feels emotionally attached to the outcome; 6) and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable” (6–7).

48 component provides a measurement of the game state, the comparator component compares this measurement to a specific value and determines whether an action must be performed, and the activator creates a change if there is a deviation from the specific value. The two types of systems they describe are negative systems, in which the game state is brought back into fixed and steady state, and a positive system, in which the game state is propelled further from the set state. These elements situate games as cybernetic systems, describing how the game hardware itself “plays” along with the player and introduces various forms of game states in response to those created by the player. Thus, modifications in value and meaning production are not solely created by players, but authored collaboratively through a feedback loop between player and machine.

In addition to the idea of a feedback loop, Salen and Zimmerman also describe several other aspects of the game system: players, artificial, conflict, and rules. For Salen Zimmerman, it is necessary to have something that drives the system forward and experience its outcomes, and they describe this force as the “player.” Drawing on Johan Huizinga’s work with the magic circle (and indirectly referencing Plato’s criticism of games and writing), they argue the system must contain a degree of artifice in which the events are perceived and experienced as constructed. This artifice serves as the context for what Salen and Zimmerman define as “conflict,” which they describe as a contest

(competitive or collaborative) to reach some kind of goal that keeps the player

49 and machine circling through the feedback loop. Finally, player responses to the conflict are guided by a set of rules that determine the starting value of game pieces and what game states can be manifested with those pieces—in other words, how the system can be operated.

Salen and Zimmerman’s depiction of a game system finds common ground in Bernard Suits’ work The Grasshopper: Games, and Utopia. His work offers the following depiction of game systems, describing them as the “attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules, where the rules [lusory means] prohibit use of more efficient in favor of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude]” (54 – 55). Like Salen and Zimmerman, his definition focuses on the immateriality and ahistoricity of the system, presenting play as an activity that is entrenched in the feedback loop and set apart from “real life” because, as Roger Caillois describes in Man, Play and

Games, “Rules themselves create fictions” (8). Rules to refer to those guidelines that determine how the system functions—specifically, how players are allowed to operate the system, the effects of certain actions, how mechanics work etc. In determining these operational qualities of the game system, rules also add a symbolic element to various elements of the system. For example, suddenly slapping someone’s hand might be taken as an act of aggression, but in a game like freeze tag where a hand slap can unfreeze a teammate it becomes endowed with positive associations. Similarly, rolling dice outside of a game system has

50 little significance; however, once those dice rolls are placed within a game system, they begin to take on new meaning such as in a game of Dungeons and

Dragons where rolling the dice might make the difference between life and death for a player’s character.

Of course, obvious complications emerge with these definitions. Just because has rules that the player willingly agrees to participate in and temporarily shift her focus to the game doesn’t mean that the quarter she pilfered from her family has no significance. Similarly, by Suits and Salen and

Zimmerman’s definitions, e-sports players who make careers out of their game play would no longer be participating in a game. Rather than seeing games as

“magic circles” where personal as well as socio-cultural and political elements no longer have relevance, clear evidence exists to show that games are permeable spaces. For this reason, my project is less interested in the idea of games as escapist media. Instead, what I take from Salen and Zimmerman as well as Suits is the idea that the production of game states and meanings emerges through a feedback system between a player and another player (human or non-human) in which they work towards a specific goal.

Games and Experiences

In Rise of the Video Game Zinesters, Anthropy, writes, “A painting conveys what it’s like to experience the subject as an image; a game conveys what it’s like to experience the subject as a system of rules” (3). Unlike Saussure, who views games simply as modifying values and generating states from a system,

51 Anthropy suggests that these changes happen within the context of an experience. While this experience may be explicitly stated in the form of a narrative or in paratextual materials, it can also come from rules themselves (as noted in the previous section). In particular, the player is asked to consider the subject matter of the game and the experience that it offers before and in relation to any changes they make to the system3. In a role-playing game like World of

Warcraft, players create a character that belongs to a specific race and faction in the world of Azeroth. Although no rules dictate it, players will often play characters according to the fictional lore defining their race’s alliances, personalities, hobbies, and culture. Similarly, as I described in Chapter 1, Animal

Crossing presents players with the experience of debt. Although players do not have to purchase items and can choose to live a non-consumerist lifestyle in the game, most players do end up experiencing Animal Crossing as a debt simulator because it is encouraged through rules, narrative, and paratextual materials.

Although more examples could be included here, both games demonstrate that the overall experience plays a significant role in players’ production of game states and how they choose to change the values of certain game elements.

3 Anthropy, again, “Since games are composed of rules, they’re uniquely suited to exploring systems and dynamics. Games are especially good at communicating relationships; digital games are most immediately about the direct relationship between the player’s actions or choices and their consequences. Games are a kind of theater in which the audience is an actor and takes on a role—and experiences the circumstances and consequences of that role” (20).

52 While the definitions so far have focused on games as systems in which player modifications to the values and meaning of the game are guided by the overarching subjects they experience through the game, I conclude this section with a recent re-consideration of experiencing digital games. In Metagaming

Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux write that “Rather than continue to conflate mechanics with rules and videogames with games, what if videogames were not considered games in the place, but equipment for making metagames” (9). While the concept of a metagame is important for their project, I’m most interested in the idea that digital games might actually be equipment. Rather than just offering subjects for players to experience, perhaps games allow players to construct experiences and (as I consider in Chapter 5) entirely new subjects not intentionally coded into the game. Saussure’s comparison between games and language hints as this notion as language itself is also equipment for making.

Thus, building on the definitions in this chapter, I suggest that digital games are equipment for creating meaning.

Defining Play

Play and Ambiguity

But how do players operate games to create meaning? In this section, I suggest that they do so through play. Like the opening to the previous section, I begin here with another boundary work that explores the relationship between play and writing: Rouzie’s At Play in the Fields of Writing. Rouzie writes that

“Game signifies a rather controlled, rule-bound activity opposed to the looser,

53 freewheeling improvisations of play. Games may be playful, but the restrictions of game play set it apart from the improvisational freedom of some kinds of play”

(40). Rouzie’s distinction implies that play can be separated from game as play does not necessarily require the presence of structural elements like rules and a goal. Instead, play, as Caillois suggests in Man, Play and Games exists on a spectrum between ludus, or rule-bound play, and paidia, or free play (27).

Caillois writes,

At one extreme an almost indivisible principle, common to diversion, turbulence, free improvisation, and carefree gaiety is dominant. It manifests a kind of uncontrolled fantasy that can be designated by the term paidia. At the opposite extreme, this frolicsome and impulsive exuberance is almost entirely absorbed or disciplined by a complementary, and in some respects inverse, tendency to its anarchic and capricious nature: There is a growing tendency to bind it with arbitrary, imperative, and purposely tedious conventions, to oppose it still more by ceaselessly practicing the most embarrassing chicanery upon it, in order to make it more uncertain of attaining its desired effect. This latter principle is completely impractical, even though it requires an ever greater amount of effort, patience, skill, or ingenuity. I call this second component ludus. (13)

In competitions, or agon-istic games, paidia takes the form of “unregulated athletics” such as jogging, whereas sports like Boxing, Fencing, Football, etc. align closer to ludus. Similarly, in games of mimicry, paidia can be found in masks and imitation, while ludus is present in theater and spectacles (Salen and

Zimmerman 308). Spinning around in a circle may not necessary be a game, but it still does constitute an act of play.

Defining player, however, is difficult. In The Ambiguity of Play, Brian

Sutton-Smith describes the challenges associated with defining play. Sutton-

Smith opens his text with a Wittgenstein-esque move, explaining that when it

54 comes to defining play, “There is little agreement among us, and much ambiguity” (1). He proposes that this confusion over the term can be attributed to seven rhetorics that discussions of play tend to fall into. These rhetorics, he suggests, emerge because play is inaccessible and constantly shifting through various value systems (8). Sutton-Smith thus defines play as ambiguous, and he explores ambiguity’s potential to generate rhetorics. For Sutton-Smith, this creative element comes from play’s mobility and ability to create tangles and contradictions in thought.

Play and Games

If play is ambiguous, then perhaps we need to look to specific instantiations of play. In Rules of Play, Salen and Zimmerman propose three primary categories for play: game play, ludic activities, and being playful. Game play specifically refers to activities within structures or objects that have been already classified as “games.” Salen and Zimmerman write that “Game play is the formalized interaction that occurs when players follow the rules of a game and experience its system through play” (303), meaning that any interaction occurring within a game can be categorized as a mode of play. Ludic activities are playful activities that do not specifically occur within the structure of a game, what Salen and Zimmerman describe as “non-game behaviors” that are still categorized as “playing” such as playing in water or playing with a pencil. Finally, being playful refers to an attitude or approach to various activities and tasks.

Examples of this category might include wordplay, which is a way of being playful

55 with language, or costumes/role-playing, which is a way of being playful with identity.

These three categories are guided by Salen and Zimmerman’s definition of play that draws on the initial idea of play creating a gap or ambiguous space that generates a structure. They write, “Play is free movement within a more rigid structure” (304). Using the example of “free play” in a gear or steering wheel,

Salen and Zimmerman explain that play is a condition created by a more rigid structure, the rules of which afford a degree of freedom. Salen and Zimmerman write,

The play itself exists only because of the more utilitarian structures of the driving-system: the drive shaft, axles, wheels, and so on. The "rules" created by these elements make the free movement of play possible. Play emerges from the relationships guiding the functioning of the system, occurring in the interstitial spaces between and among its components. Play is an expression of the system, one that takes advantage of the space of possibility created from the system's structure. (304)

In a digital game, for example, players are presented with a rule-bound and limited degree of action with which to interact, re-arrange, and modify the signs in the game space. Within this structure, however, players have room to experiment and tinker with various re-combinations and arrangements. This experimental room is what Salen and Zimmerman categorize as play, and the way that play manifests (as a product of a game or system’s limits) expresses important ideas about that game/system. Thus, we see another form of “playful composition” in that play takes on a degree of creativity and expression. While some have argued that the creative and expressive components of play are linked purely to

56 what the designer/game system intends (see Chapter 1), others have suggested that play can be expressive of more than just the beliefs encoded into the game.

Play and Creativity

In particular, Ernest Adams, in Fundamentals of Game Design, suggests that play can express the player’s personality and interest as much as it can express the personality and beliefs of the game/game designer. Adams’ categories of expressive play include self-defining play, creative play, and storytelling, each of which is established on the notion that play is generative.

Avatars and their cosmetic design as well as their “attribute points” provide players with a way to play with identity, possibly generating an avatar that simply reflects them, or creating an avatar that represents a belief or political element removed from the player’s personal beliefs. Similarly, many games provide players with design tools and “sandbox” environments for them to build in such as SimCity and . Here, play and creativity are entirely bound up in each other—the play is the creation and vice versa. Player-produced “modifications” to game files, for example, serves as a “meta-game” unto itself in which players labor is transformed into a site for play. Finally, “storytelling play” comes closest to the ecology of writing with(in) games. Adams writes, “Some players enjoy creating stories of their own, using features provided by a game, which they can distribute online for others to read” (123), citing features in both The Movies and

The Sims that allow players to turn their play into an avenue for creating media with the video and image editing tools provided by the games. Given the rise in

57 third party platforms for capturing, curating, and circulating game play, any game becomes a potential platform for writing stories, arguments, and personal experiences. In many ways, these platforms should encourage us to recognize that all games (not just those with editing tools) are tools for authoring media.

Combining the definitions of play with the definitions of game presented previously, I propose that “game play” refers to 1) a set of human- and computer- oriented practices that 2) manipulate the value of signs and symbols to 3) generate game states and larger meanings 4) within the context of a rule-bound system. These practices involve physical input such as pressing buttons, twisting knobs, moving joysticks, tapping styli, clicking mouse keys, squeezing directional pads. As players do so, they (along with the machine) re-arrange, modify, and manipulate signs and symbols within the context of the game. This interplay between human and computer through various signs constitutes the “play” that we see represented in some form whether visually on a screen, aurally through headphones, tactually through haptic feedback, etc. This collaborative modification of the symbolic space leads to associations between various signs and symbols within the game that can both solve a game’s puzzles or comment on issues in the game space. Collecting a “Blue Key” in Doom and using it on a door, for example, is an association that leads to new areas for a player to explore; similarly, refraining from using weapons on enemies in Doom is an association that has socio-political implications. Thus, when I refer to “game

58 play,” I refer to this interaction with and through signs and symbols within a game space.

Defining Writing

The primary definition of writing that guides this work comes from Raul

Sánchez’s The Function of Theory in Composition Studies. Sánchez explains that writing involves “manipulating [the] form” of various characters and signs and not “effecting meaning (i.e., attaching the descriptive figures of the symbolic order to their described counterparts in reality)” (58). In Sánchez’s work, writing is the manipulation and modification of various symbols and signs through a variety of tools, “arranging the graphic figures of the symbolic (as I am doing now, or, as

I will have been doing when you read this) in an act of believing/pretending to

‘mean’” (58). As writers write, they modify and construct relationships between various symbols and signs in an act that believes/pretends to mean to some non- present other. Writers, to borrow terminology from my previous sections, change the value of the signs they produce on the writing surface through the sign’s contrast with another sign. These contrasts attempt to generate some type of meaning that changes with each new additional contrast.

Writing and History

Georges’ Jean’s Writing: The Story of Alphabets and Scripts, traces the origins of writing to Mesopotamian accounting systems. Jean suggests that writing emerged as a technology primarily in response to the pragmatic needs of a community that needed flexible way of documenting financial transactions,

59 agricultural ownership, social standings, and instruction (13). Drawing on these examples, Jean’s definition puts forth a representationalist account of writing, noting that writing “cannot be said to exist until there is an agreed-upon repertoire of formal signs or symbols that can be used to reproduce clearly the thoughts and feelings of the writer wishes to express [emphasis added]” (12). This bears similarities to the definition provided by I. J. Gelb in A Study of Writing. Whereas

Jean suggests that writing arose from the need for social accountability and to facilitate specific kinds of interaction among community members, I. J. Gelb argues that writing originates from objects used for memory aids. Some of these mnemonic systems include Incan quipu writing4, Native American wampums5, and Yoruba cowrie mussels6. While complex, these devices were ultimately limited by several factors including where they could be found and their flexibility for adapting and transforming to other needs.

To overcome these issues, Gelb notes that mnemonic systems transitioned from using entire objects to making markings on objects typically (but not always) created through several practices including drawing, painting, scratching, cutting, or incising. Locating the origins of writing in these proto- writing techniques leads Gelb to argue that “Writing is clear a system of human intercommunication by means of conventional visible marks” (12). Mostly

4 Strings and knots of various lengths and color used to keep accounts of objects and individuals.

5 Shell beads could be used as money, ornaments, and colored to represent various messages.

6 One mussel denotes defiance and failure, two placed together denotes relationship and meeting, two placed apart denotes separation and enmity.

60 noticeably, Gelb’s definition suffers from both an anthropocentrism that neglects the operation of marking practices by other species and ableism that ignores written systems such as braille. Additionally, Gelb’s definition does not emphasize that signs and symbols necessarily “reproduce” the thoughts and feelings of a writer. While both share agreement that writing refers to the use of a system of signs and symbols driven by some kind of communicative desire, how that system works differs greatly. Moreover, ambiguity emerges in terms of what the writer creates. Whereas Gelb notes that writers create “marks,” Jean extends what a writer produces to signs and symbols. This means that whereas Gelb would likely see Incan quipu knots or the Yoruba cowrie mussels as forms of proto-writing, Jean’s definition would incorporate these non-inscribed signs and symbols as forms of writing.

In When Writing Met Art, Denise Schmandt-Besserat addresses the potential expansiveness that Jean’s definition creates. Her work, which serves as a model for much of this dissertation, traces the impact that writing had on art including pottery painting, architecture, statues, and other art objects, as well as the impact that art had on writing. Although Schmandt-Besserat does not offer a direct definition of writing, her analysis offers another way of understanding it.

She writes, “I will argue that before the invention of writing, compositions typically consisted of geometric or animal motifs that were juxtaposed, dovetailed together, or placed in rotating arrangements that symbolized an idea or evoked a story. But after writing, as the process of copying the dispositions of signs on a

61 tablet was introduced, Near Eastern art became linear and thus could tell a story”

(1). Whereas Gelb defines writing as a system of marks used to communicate, and Jean defines writing as a set of symbols and signs used to communicate,

Schmandt-Besserat’s defines writing as a set of techniques for modifying and manipulating signs and symbols. Schmandt-Besserat notes that writing introduced the following techniques to the arts: linearity, size, location, hierarchy, order, direction, ground lines, and sequencing. Prior to the introduction, pottery painting in Mesopotamia and the Near East displayed four main characteristics,

“the designs covered the entire circumference of the vessels; the designs were repetitious; lines divided the composition by separating the various patterns; and compositions were meant to be apprehended as a whole. Mesopotamian geometric motifs alternated to create handsome overall designs. The Susa tumblers played with contrasting vertical and horizontal lines and circles” (21).

After the introduction of writing, however, several new techniques emerged: repetition is replaced by linearity, space was allotted to specific characters to denote their importance, the location of characters also signified their significance, the introduction of adjectives and adverbs through dress and action denoted status and rank, size and position helped to illustrate rank, and orientation to other objects and characters indicate interaction. Thus, writing can be defined as more than just signs and symbols, it also refers to a specific set of techniques for the manipulation and modification of those signs and symbols.

62 Writing and Play

Whereas the previous definitions of writing emerge from the tools and techniques that defined writing’s past and continued to influence into our contemporary moment, these definitions skim over how writing works—in particular how the production and interaction with signs interfaces with both the sign’s referent and potential meanings. To describe this operation, Jacques

Derrida uses the term “play.” He does so for play’s associations with “distance, difference, dissimulation, and deferment,” over ““, identity, immediacy, and temporal and spatial presentness” (Dissemination viii). Galloway notes the centrality of play to Derrida’s apparatus. Specifically, Derrida, “writes about how things ‘come into play,’ and refers to ‘the play of the structure,’ or the ‘play of signification,’ or even simply ‘the play of the world.’ Or in Dissemination, he writes of the ‘play of a syntax’ or the ‘play’ of ‘a chain of significations.’ So at a basic level, play is simply how things transpire linguistically for Derrida, how, in a general sense, they happen to happen” (25). Derrida’s definition of play emerges in contrast to his concept of “totalization,” noting in “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” that totalization is the desire for a system or theory that provides a complete explanation of everything. Philosophers and linguists have, suggests Derrida, recognized that their philosophical and linguistic systems are not absolute truths but rather constructed systems. Derrida argues that to be a structure or system requires a “center” to which all the elements in the structure refer or point and, through these connections, allow the structure to

63 maintain its form. This center and its connections, however, limits the arrangement and movement of elements in the structure, which is what Derrida refers to as “play.” Derrida writes,

The function of this center was not only to orient; balance, and organize the structure—one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure. No doubt that by orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a structure permits the freeplay of its elements inside the total form. And even today the notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself. (1)

Although the center “closes off” play, it also makes play possible in the first place.

Centers cause stability, they attempt to make things fixed and close down the possibility for an endless chain of possible meanings or references.

Derrida uses the Christian faith as an example, noting that God serves this function by being placed at the center of all things and being made as the cause of all things. All events, actions, decisions, etc. make reference back to this center, and this center sets a limit to the possible (or, at least, the permissible).

Removing this center would throw this system into a state of play in which new arrangements and possibilities emerge. Derrida then shifts from this definition of play as the “free movement” of elements within a system that generates new and unexpected outcomes into a discussion of the deconstructive practice, which attempts to take a system or structure and put its elements back into play by disrupting the center. Using Claude Levi-Strauss’ work on the binary oppositions that rest at the center of culture and myth (male/female, light/dark, culture/nature, etc), Derrida enacts deconstruction by demonstrating how these categories (in

64 particular nature and culture) are in fact not oppositions at all but rather much of the same. This is why, for Derrida, writing is play—is a system without a center pinning down its operation and ensuring absolute meaning. Writing never connects to the referent that would center it; instead, writing is constantly referring to other signs that refer to other signs—in effect, writing operates through a state of infinite play of signs on signs on signs each substituting for each other. With writing, as with game play which never reproduces itself exactly but rather generates various states that always differ (even if in subtle ways), we are in the realm of the supplement, in other words: the sign that takes the place of the center. Game states are a supplement of the “ideal” or perfect playthrough, and this is why they can operate in an expressive capacity. Just as writing produces an endless chain of signs, gameplay produces an endless chain of sign game states and meanings.

Through these definitions, we arrive at a definition of what it might mean to write with(in) games. While Chapter 1 considers “writing with(in) games” as an ecology for scholarship and critical work, in this Chapter I have considered the possibility of using games themselves as equipment for writing. Thus, I propose that writing with(in) games involves the operation of a system through a pre- determined set of multimodal signs that results in the creation of states that have the potential to mean more than whatever values are ascribed to the signs.

65 CHAPTER 3 WRITING WITH(IN) PRE-DIGITAL AND EARLY GAMES

Saussure’s definition of games through a comparison with language hints at the rich connections occurring between games, writing, and play prior to the emergence of digital technologies. From literary experiments in the French Avant

Garde, to artist collectives like Fluxus that designed participatory artworks through writing-based games, there is a largely untapped area of study that pre- exists (but would greatly influence) the digital. In this chapter, I provide an overview of some of these intersections. In doing so, I consider what they might mean for game-based writing studies as well as the future of writing in digital games.

Dadaism and Surrealism

In this section, I explore the writing games of Dadaism and Surrealism. I suggest that these games led to the rise of “associative” and “diagrammatic” writing practices, both of which would be critical to digital game-based writing.

Associative writing emphasizes the use of various non-linear techniques to create artifacts that express through connections and links between signs.

Diagrammatic writing, on the other hand, uses the values accorded to various spatial regions on a writing surface (footer, header, bottom of the page, etc.) as a mode of expression. Although both modes are influential throughout the history of writing, their full potential (especially for digital games) is perhaps best realized in artist books and concrete poetry.

66 Associative and diagrammatic writing styles primarily arose from the

Dadaist’s and Surrealist’s suspicion of rational discourse and their belief that it posed a grave threat to art and society. They felt that concepts like “progress” and “logic” in bourgeois art were used to support global strife and exploitation.

For both groups, “the carnage of war was proof enough that the rationalism and order of civilization was an illusion. Rather than preventing mass destruction, many believed that the acceptance of reason as the supreme authority in matters of opinion, belief, or conduct had, in fact, enabled and justified the slaughter of millions” (MoMALearning). To counter these concepts, Dadaists and Surrealists turned to play. Specifically, they played language and writing games, and through these games they attempted to forge new social orders and communities both utopic and transgressive.

Dadaism, Writing, and Play

One of Dadaism’s defining works, Fountain, is a urinal submitted by Marcel

Duchamp to the Society of Independent Artists. Scholars have interpreted this work through a variety of frameworks including queer masculinity (Franklin), psychoanalysis (Hopkins), femininity (Camfield), and others. The initial reaction to Duchamp’s submission, however, was quite the opposite. In “Object Choice:

Marcel Duchamp's Fountain and the Art of Queer Art History,” Paul B. Franklin writes that when the American Society of Independent Artists received the work,

“A major brouhaha ensued…Unaware that Duchamp had masterminded the scheme, the board of the Society overrode their edict of ‘no jury’ and voted to

67 exclude Fountain from the exhibition, publicly proclaiming that this common plumbing fixture ‘may be a very useful object in its place, but its place is not an art exhibition, and it is, by no definition, a work of art’” (32). Fountain engaged in an act of playful composing, as described in Chapter 1, by moving a set of signs and their associated connotations from one space into another. One expects to find a urinal in a restroom, and it has a certain value and meaning within that space; however, once that object is moved into a new space, those values and meanings transform, enacting and creating a play that makes possible various interpretations of the work.

Another key strategy of Dadaism’s insurgent artworks that would later become popularized in digital games were non-linear arrangements and organizations that challenged conventional patterns of reading, making, and thinking. Xtine Burrough, in “Add-Art and Your Neighbors’ Biz: A Tactical

Manipulation of Noise,” notes that Dadaists such as Tristan Tzara and Kurt

Schwitters used “merz” as a revolutionary tactic for making that worked in opposition to logic (83). Schwitters’ notion of “merz” often incorporated junk, garbage, and detritus found in the streets into his artwork to blur the boundary between art and life. Schwitters’ works are effectively networks of associations between materials repurposed from the refuse and waste of society, and they rely heavily on the semiotics of writing space to add an affective and rhetorical dimension to the art works.

68 Schwitters created expressive, political, and personal artifacts from cultural and material trash through his associative techniques. Schwitters’ ability to arrive at new insight or understanding are perhaps best summarized by Tzara’s set of rules for “making” a text,

To make a Dadaist Poem/Take a newspaper./Take a pair of scissors./Then cut out each of the words that make up this/article and put them in a bag./Shake it gently./Then take out the scraps one after the other in the/order in which they left the bag./Copy conscientiously./The poem will be like you./And here you are a writer, infinitely original and/endowed with a sensibility that is charming/though beyond the understanding of the vulgar. (Surrealist Games 36)

Similarly, Roger Roughton provides even pithier instructions for creating surrealist media, “Take a newspaper, magazine or book: cut and paste at will”

(Surrealist Games 39). Much like digital games, which provide the player with a pre-made discourse that they manipulate to produce new game states, Dadaist and Surrealist games involve the modification of preconstructed materials to generate art. Dawn Ades and Matthew Gale write that in doing so, Dadaists attempted to “break the direct link between words and meaning” by shifting away from linear reading practices and emphasizing visual and spatial experiences.

“Kleine Dada Soirée,” for example, was a poster designed by Kurt Schwitters and

Theo van Doesburg for their “Dada Campaign” through Holland (Figure 1-2). The reading experience is non-linear and throws into chaos the orderly and logical process typically associated with writing. In doing so, it blurs the lines between text and image, asking to both be read for its many jokes that populate the margins of the work, “Dada is against the future, Dada is dead, Dada is idiotic,

69 Long live Dada!” (MoMALearning), and to be experienced visually as a force of chaos disrupting established orders and syntaxes. Similarly, Raoul Hausmann’s

“ABCD” (Figure 1-3), combines text with pictures to create a reading experience that signifies through the arrangement of signs on the page and their placements.

Works such as Schwitters’, Doesburg’s, and Hausmann’s practice “collage technique,” which uses cut or torn-and-pasted media to subvert practices “that had long defined artistic practice, like craft, control, and intentionality”

(MoMALearning). Rather than linearity, these works signify through what

Johanna Drucker defines as “Diagrammatic Writing.” According to Drucker,

Diagrammatic Writing “spatializes semantic value, using the graphic features of spatial organization to express the semantic value of relations. Diagrammatic reasoning argues for graphic organization as a meaning producing system, one in which the organization of elements must be read in relation to each other” (23).

Perhaps the most crucial shift here is what such practices do to writing surfaces.

This form of writing relies heavily on the semiotic properties of writing spaces to create various emotional and rhetorical experiences rather than on the words themselves. For the Dadaists, writing surfaces were spaces of play, which was directed by two key elements: the relationship that one sign/symbol established with another, and the semiotic properties of certain spatial regions on a writing surface. By playing with signs and symbols in this fashion, these practices transform writing surfaces such as a page or canvas into a writing space in which various locations and forms of navigation take on specific values and

70 significance. Thus, the Dadaists practiced what players would later perform with digital games, shifting away from linear representations of signs and symbols and encouraging collage, diagrammatic writing, and the construction of relationships between signs in non-linear spaces.

The Dadaists’ techniques of creating provocative and expressive media through the blasphemous associations created by re-arranging the order of various signs and symbols took the form of three specific styles: collage, assemblage, and photomontages. Collages and photomontages involve cutting and tearing photographs and paper into fragments and then re-assembling them into a surface. Assemblage is a three-dimensional work that does much of the same but with a variety of objects clumped together in unusual and rhetorical forms. The goal here is to actualize the virtual potentialities dormant within media and constrained by the accepted logics of invention by encouraging writers to play with various combinations of text, image, and object.

Through Fountain and other works of play, the Dadaists (and, later, concrete poets) launched their own battle against the tyranny of rationality and logic. These techniques differed from Surrealism in terms of how they approached play. As described in Chapter 2, Caillois proposes that play operates on a spectrum between “paidia” and “ludus.” Paidia refers to freeform and open- ended actions, whereas ludus refers actions that are structured by rules and goals, and this opposition highlights a critical division between freeform Dadaist play and rule-bound Surrealist play.

71 Using rule-bound activities, Surrealism constructed associative chains that they believed lead into and actualized the unconscious. Dadaists, however, invoked open-ended forms of play to go for the throat of language and logic, literally inventing their name by taking a knife to a dictionary (Ades and Gale).

Although uncanny and strange, Surrealism would ultimately focus on recovering the mental world that psychoanalysis had exposed by re-composing it for writers through games and rules. Dadaism, on the other hand, embraced the destructive chaos of play by breaking, bending, and re-inventing social rules and conventions in an aggressive attack against logic and rationalism—key techniques that many players use when playing digital games.

Surrealism, Games, and Writing

While the Dadaists experimented with the open-ended chaos of play and what Caillois describes as paidia to rupture the apocalyptic drive of rationalism and logic, Surrealists turned to the ludic qualities of games to invent heuristics that produced unconscious expressions and insight. In Manifestos of Surrealism,

André Breton explains that writing is typically mediated by the writer’s conscious, which restricts writing to the realm of reason,

We are still living under the reign of logic: this, of course, is what I have been driving at. But in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism that is still in vogue allows us to consider only facts relating directly to our experience…Under the pretense of civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be term superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices…If the depths of our mind contain within it strange forces capable of augmenting those on the surface, or of waging a victorious battle against them, there is every reason to seize

72 them—first to seize them, then, if need be, to submit them to the control of our reason. (9 – 10)

Games and play, on the contrary, liberate creativity from the yoke of critical faculties and inhibitions, allowing writers and designers to give voice to those experiences and thoughts deemed irrational. Thus, the Surrealists turned to games, particularly their rule-bound qualities, as a strategy to tactically resist any conscious and linear decision making. Although Breton hesitates to provide any formal definition of these Surrealist writing heuristics, he notes that

Surrealist methods would, moreover, demand to be heard. Everything is valid when it comes to obtaining the desired suddenness from certain associations. The pieces of paper that Picasso and Braque insert into their work have the same value as the introduction of a platitude into a literary analysis of most rigorous sort. It is even permissible to entitle POEM what we get from the most random assemblage possible…of headlines and scraps of headlines cut out of the newspapers. (41)

The guiding objective of Surrealist writing is association over linearity, chance and unexpected connections that traverse beyond the veil of reason. Breton achieves just this as he assembles together random newspaper headlines, such as “A burst of laughter/of sapphire in the island of Ceylon/The most beautiful straws/HAVE A FADED COLOR/UNDER THE LOCKS” (41), to demonstrate that the Surrealist method emphasizes the generation of insight through seemingly random associations as opposed to order and hierarchy. Mel Gooding notes that

“Surrealist games and procedures are intended to free words and images from the constraints of rational and discursive order, substituting change and indeterminacy for premeditation and deliberation” (10). The emphasis on association resulted in epiphanic artifacts that suspended logical, linear, and

73 rational processes to allow the unconscious to briefly reveal its discomforting aesthetic and reason.

Whereas the Dadaists sought to counter the horrors of the bourgeois through play, the Surrealists accomplished this task through games. They harnessed rules to craft heuristics that enabled the unconscious to flood the act of writing. Rules, or instructions for action, can facilitate procedures that alter a writer’s ability to control and manage the production of signs. As explained in

Chapter 2, rules are those instructions or “commands” that define the boundaries of actions and constrain what one can and cannot do in a game. The Surrealists recognized the generative potential of rules, mobilizing them as a technique to generate new artistic forms in writing and visual arts. The Surrealists described these rule-bound activities as games, one of the most famous being “The

Exquisite Corpse,” which is a collaborative writing game grouped into what

Gooding describes as “Chain Games.” Chain games are “games to be played collectively, and can be played by anyone. The strange conjunctions, humorous or poetic, that they generate give them their point” (24). The rules for The

Exquisite Corpse are as follows: three or more players site around a table and, hiding their paper from the view of other players, each write down a definitive or indefinite article and an adjective. After writing down these words, players fold and pass the sheets. The next player who receives the sheet cannot see what the previous player wrote and must write noun, once again folds the paper to conceal the noun, passes and repeats the process with a verb, then another

74 definitive or indefinite article and adjective, and concludes with another noun

(25). Afterward, the papers are unfolded and the sentences are shared and enjoyed by the players. Much like Tzara’s and Roughton’s rules for producing writing, The Exquisite Corpse also relies on a set of rules that inform play with a set of symbols that produces insight and meaning from the chance associations with chains of signs.

While The Exquisite Corpse relies on chance and surprise, it uses cutting, disordering, and splicing as techniques for generating associations between words. Penning a word is just as significant as folding and circulating the paper on which the word appears. And unlike other modes of writing, The Exquisite

Corpse generates through collaboration, requiring players to depend on the signs produced by another to generate creativity and insight. Question and Answer, another Surrealist writing game, similarly relies on the exchange of signs from another to produce interesting and unanticipated texts. Gooding writes “The procedure is similar to that of [The Exquisite Corpse]. A question is written down, the paper folded to conceal it from the next player, who writes an answer. The paper is unfolded to reveal the result. Remarkable facts emerge” (26). Here, the unexpected interaction between two sets of signs (and the exchange between two writers) harness chance and accidents to create the possibility for an automatic writing that produces the new and creative. Moreover, these writing practices primarily rely on play as an action of re-arrangement and linking signs through random and chance encounters. This experience of swapping and

75 arranging signs with an unseen collaborator to produce new experiences, insights, ideas, etc. is a cornerstone of computers as well as text adventures and interactive fiction in the late 1970s and early 1980s and would have a significant influence on digital games, search engines, and other digital practices as we know them today.

Writing and Wargaming

While avant garde movements through the 1960s and onward continued to experiment with games and writing (see Fluxus or Oulipo), popular gaming also bridged these two forms. For wargaming communities in the 1950s and 60s, writing served as the community’s proverbial life blood, allowing players scattered across the United States to wage war against other. In both

“Opponents Wanted” columns and “Play-by-Mail” system, gameplay underwent a translation. Players took the elements of in-person play (mechanics, moves, metacommentary) and translated it into writing. Whereas Dadaism and

Surrealism made writing games, or games built specifically around the affordances of writing, wargaming communities demonstrated that non-written games could be adapted and supported by writing. This would be a critical discovery for later game designers like William Crowther who merged the properties of digital games with text- and writing-based gameplay.

Wargaming communities also initiated another important shift from their forerunners. Formerly, in Surrealist and Dadaist game- and-play-based practices, writing was a technique of navigating and constructing chains of signs to expose

76 experiences repressed by rationalism. As I describe in Chapter 2, writing differs to other words and establishes meaning through contrast, and the Dadaists and

Surrealists placed writing into various experimental rulesets to create “slippages”

(or, glitches, see Chapter 5) that generate insight and subversive experiences.

Play-by-mail, rather than constructing an interior network, would drive the network (and its players) outward. Now, game-based writing worked in a

McLuhanian-sense, providing players with extensions of themselves through which to accomplish tasks and achieve victory over opponents. As I explore in the final section of this chapter, wargaming’s adaptation of writing would be a founding principle of digital writing-based games that asked (and deceived) players to view their writing as an extension of themselves into digital software.

Wargaming is a genre of strategy-based board and tabletop games that allowed players to simulate historic battles through complex rule systems, intricate maps with varied terrain, and detailed game pieces called “miniatures” designed to replicate infantry and artillery. Wargaming is a precursor to both

Dungeons & Dragons and contemporary interaction design. In chess, the rules focus interaction primarily between a player and another player (or a player and herself). While the board itself does play a significant role in the gameplay experience, its presence is abstract and could be transposed into any fictional battlefield. In wargaming, space and environment matter significantly. The

“board” often features various terrains with mountains and valleys molded into the board, trees and other fauna represented by miniatures, and model buildings

77 that represent towns and other locales for players to visit. This detail isn’t superfluous--the board’s landscape in wargaming has serious consequence for players, requiring players to form strategies that work with the landscape and avoid landing them in a perilous position. Wargaming features rules for determining the value of terrain as well as elements like ranged combat expand the interaction beyond just player to player. Moreover, whereas a game like chess does not invite the player to adopt a persona, wargaming frequently invited roleplay as a important element of the game.

Wargaming descends from the 18th century Kriegsspiel, which was designed for the German military as a pedagogical device for teaching principles of military command (Peterson 2). In 1912, H.G. Wells popularized wargaming as a form of entertainment with his game entitled Little Wars. Little Wars introduced the idea that miniature models would represent units and terrain. It also established that a set of rules would be used to guide movement and interaction between pieces on the board. As Jon Peterson notes in Playing at the World, “To

Wells must be credited the invention of miniature wargame rules marketed in book form to the general public, through his seminal Little Wars…he cared less about instructing officers than he did about entertainment or ‘playability’” (16).

Following Wells, Charles Swann Roberts II founded Avalon Hill with the launch of his wargame Tactics. Tactics brought with it new innovations such as the ability for a player to move all her pieces at once and the use of dice (a later staple of

Dungeons & Dragons) to resolve combat between units. Tactics helped establish

78 the popularity of wargaming, eventually resulting in the wargaming system known as Dungeons & Dragons as well as inspiring players including theorist and philosopher Guy Debord, who created the wargame Le Jeu de la Guerre, to build their own games.

At the time of Tactics’ release in 1954, wargames enjoyed niche popularity but lacked any cohesive organization identity. Without modern information networks for players to coordinate meet-ups and events, the emergence of a wargaming “community” depended on the publication of enthusiast magazines such as The General and Spartan. Like the magazines discussed in Chapter 2, these publications helped to provide players with a vocabulary and perspective on the hobby that could be shared by other players. Moreover, they provided columns similar to the General’s “Opponents Wanted.” Opponents Wanted published reader-submitted “want ads” that “formed a rendezvous service to assist gamers in discovering local adversaries and organizing these pockets of wargames into clubs” (Peterson 6). As Peterson notes, the rhetoric of these want ads was largely adversarial, often taunting other players to battle in order to capture their attention. The writing also tended to err on the side of roleplay and persona as players would write in the character of famous (and infamous) military leaders. Peterson notes that some players went so far as to form SPECTRE, the evil organization in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, and issued wargames that would determine which wargame club would have the right to “control” an entire state (7). Eventually, new groups formed around the idea of collaboration instead

79 of contest, “more mature ‘neutral’ clubs that focused on completing games, honing skills and enriching the hobby, rather than squabbling over imaginary, irresolvable territorial disputes” (9).

As Anastasia Salter argues in What is Your ?, wargaming and

(specifically) Dungeons & Dragons mark the origins of the digital game industry.

Specifically, Dungeons & Dragons signals a shift to “storytelling-based gaming, in which progress is slow and focused on the narrative…storytelling games would find their way onto the PC, first in forms not so difference from a Dungeons &

Dragons game module written in text awaiting the player’s cocreative input” (19).

The elements of roleplay present in wargaming eventually lead to the complex story- and world-building for which Dungeons & Dragons is known. In addition to these elements, however, the play-by-mail system also served as an early precursor to the design of interactive systems within digital games. Specifically, these written “calls” were used to reveal the presence of unseen players, games, and game-worlds for others to partake in, effectively providing a remote

“navigational” function for players. These calls also allowed players to expand and drive their game-worlds in new directions. Once a game was initiated by mail, a moderator would receive the orders and perform moves for players.

Players also used incontestable information like daily prices on the stock market to represent dice rolls (Peterson). This system forecasts the shift to text- and action-based games in which a computer program would handle player input and produce output.

80 Game-based writing within the wargaming community anticipates many of the changes that would occur with the rise of digital games. Text-based inputs for navigating game-worlds and creating stories bridging together various areas

(represented in text, of course) finds its start in the responses posted in

Opponents Wanted. Similarly, the text-based moves and systems for managing these moves remotely bear significant similarities to the conditions of writing with a parser described in the following section. Overall, wargaming moved game- based writing away from exposing inner lives to a device for extending the body into new and unknown environments. In the following section, I explore early initiatives in writing-based games and consider their impact on game-based writing in our contemporary moment.

Writing in Early Digital Games

In 1976, William Crowther released the original Colossal Cave Adventure for the PDP-10 mainframe. Later, with the help of Don Woods, the “canonical” version of the game was released in 1977 with several additions including a scoring system and high fantasy elements. Since that time, Colossal Cave

Adventure has seen a variety of re-releases both commercial and fan made with the most recent being a version produced as a promo for AMC’s 80’s tech culture drama Halt and Catch Fire. Colossal Cave Adventure has thus remained a cultural touchstone for both digital games and popular culture more broadly, re- surfacing in a variety of forms including a series of “twisty little passages” proxied through and sketched by Stranger Things’ virus infected Will Byers in season 2.

81 Colossal Cave Adventure’s lasting cultural influence can be attributed to many factors, but perhaps most significant is that it let people explore first-hand the kinds of experiences that Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart, and Theodor

Nelson had hypothesized that digital technologies would afford.

Prior to Colossal Cave Adventure, digital networks primarily facilitated military, business, and educational purposes; digital games, on the other hand, were single-screen affairs typically found in arcades touting mechanics-driven experiences that were meant to capitalize on difficulty and mastery. Players had on-screen proxies in the form of Pac-man, Q*Bert, and a wide-array of different spaceships, but the barebones diegesis rarely reminded players overtly that they were their characters. Colossal Cave Adventure merged these areas, producing a network of textual lexia that allowed for “users” to become a character within its winding networks. Rather than just a symbolic proxy in the form of a pixelated spaceship or paddle, Colossal Cave Adventure used second person to entangle players as a member of this expansive network, and its semantics and syntax transform as players perform actions within its textual network. With Colossal

Cave Adventure, players encountered many of the compelling aspects of pen and paper roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons1 including a responsive narrative world in which they were a character who had a significant role to play in changing the conditions of this world. Instead of blasting invaders, eating

1 See Montfort Twisty Little Passages, “Adventure was influenced by Dungeons and Dragons and it is often referred to as a ‘version’ of that game (Crowther himself has called it that)” (10).

82 ghosts, or ponging balls, however, players played by actively constructing a textual network by writing key terms like “lamp” or “north.” Whereas many games came pre-built, Colossal Cave Adventure tapped into the DIY ethos of computing in the 70s and 80s2 by encouraging players to build the network by configuring relationships between “linking words” and the lexia within the game’s database.

Thus, Colossal Cave Adventure remains significant because it didn’t just allow players to imagine the future of life in digital spaces, it invited them to write it.

While most games at the time were pulling in players and quarters through flashy graphics and agon-istic experiences, Crowther and Woods achieved this feat entirely through a text-based design. Game play occurs through a series of textual exchanges between players and the game software. Typically, the game opens with description of the world that informs what players type to begin the game. In Colossal Cave Adventure, the game opens with some variation of the following passage, “You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.” In addition to placing players within a specific setting, this lexia provides several cues for players to interact with the text and, by proxy, the game world. By describing the player’s surroundings, Colossal Cave Adventure suggests that players can navigate and move about the world and that they can

2 See Montfort et al. 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10.

83 interact with objects in that world such as houses and doors. In Twisty Little

Passages, Montfort explains that player interaction typically involves taking

some action that will affect that world. Commands to pick up objects are typical, as are commands to look at things…The letter w is an abbreviation for go west, one of several abbreviations commonly used by interactors and recognized by works. Commands to move in one of the compass directions can be abbreviated to the first letters of that direction, which is convenient, because moving around to difficult locations is done very frequently. (17 – 18)

As the player writes responses to lexia, the game provides changes or entirely new lexia that create a sense of progression and exploration through the game world. This textual exchange, and the construction of relationships through specific linking words, serves as a defining feature of Colossal Cave Adventure and other games that qualify as “a text-accepting, text-generating computer program” (Montfort 23); in other words, interactive fiction.

Despite its pacing and text-based graphics, Colossal Cave Adventure managed to compete against its graphically intense quarter-munching counterparts and withstand the test of time. Much of Colossal Cave Adventure’s success can be attributed to the interactive qualities of its text, and its influence can be seen in many of the principles of interactivity and play that inform contemporary software and game design. What becomes critical here is Colossal

Cave Adventure’s “call and response” logic, which requires the player to write various symbols to interact with the game. Although contemporary games do not require players to explicitly write words like “North” or “Get lamp,” these actions are symbolized through button inputs that serve as a form of abbreviation that

84 many later text adventures experimented with as terms like “West” were abbreviated to “w.” For many games, “West” has simply been abbreviated to pressing the left arrow key, thereby retaining the same writing-based procedure but merely changing the semantic register.

Supporting these textual inputs are a series of processes such as conditionals that cue transformations in the text. While the player sees a text- based input and output, what she in fact controls are a variety of calls to processes that then visualize a text-based entry within the database. So, although she writes, what she writes is not simply text per say, but rather series of calls to the software that takes her writing and translates it into a process.

Writing causes the software to perform a non-diegetic action that produces a diegetic act, giving the player the sense that the game is a space of virtual potentialities that the correct “magic word” will materialize. Thus, what differs between a game of Colossal Cave Adventure and word processing software is that in a text adventure the software itself has more of a presence in the writing, adding text in response to that which the player has already composed.

Beyond navigational inputs, most games also grant players a “palette” of symbols which they can use to manipulate and produce signs within the game.

The small selection of words that Colossal Cave Adventure’s players could use to change the symbolic conditions of the game re-appear in graphic adventures only a few years later such as the Lucas Arts point-and-click games or Infocom’s

Déjà vu, both of which feature on-screen tables with key verbs that players can

85 click on to interact with the game-world. Whereas players had to guess at these words in Colossal Cave Adventure, a graphic adventure like Day of the Tentacle features a text box that defines the player’s lexicon and encourages them to build associations rather than invent terms (Figure 3-1).

This shift anticipates predominately image-based games like Sonic the

Hedgehog, which map the table of key terms provided in graphic adventures to the game controller. Like graphic adventures and text adventures before that, players have access to a limited lexicon they can use to re-arrange and modify the symbols within a game. In Anna Anthropy’s “level design lesson: to the right, hold on tight,” she describes these symbols as “verbs,” explaining that,

certain rules give the player liberty to change the state of the game (the “game state”) in specific ways: i [sic] like to call these “verbs,” as in the part of speech. if [sic] mario is the subject of most of the sentences in super mario bros.’s story, then “jump” is the verb that most often follows – jumping is so crucial that it gets its own button on the control pad.[1] the [sic] idea of jumping into a box to open it or onto an opponent to defeat it makes little sense out of context, but since the player’s foremost means of interacting with the game is through the verb JUMP, all of the game’s elements have been designed as potential objects of that verb.“mario [sic] jumps into a block.” “Mario [sic] jumps onto a goomba.” “Mario [sic] jumps on top of a pipe.” “Mario [sic] jumps across a pit.”

Like Colossal Cave Adventure’s key words, these “verbs” are a set of techniques that change the conditions of signs and symbols within a game. Even though players do not manipulate textual lexia, they verbs allow them to change properties and relationships between signs. So even when players aren’t necessarily creating text-based input, their gameplay is constructing “texts” within the game. As Anthropy demonstrates, players write sentences just with a broader

86 palette of symbols. In her sentences drawn from Super Mario Bros. gameplay,

Anthropy exposes what Marie-Laure Ryan, in “Beyond Myth and Metaphor: The

Case of Narrative in Digital Media,” defines as a narrative “trace.” She explains,

What justifies us in calling movies and drama narrative is the shape of the mental representation formed in the mind of the spectator; if this spectator were to translate his mental image into language, he would produce an act of narration-a diegetically presented narrative. A dramatic narrative is thus a virtual, or potential diegetic one. With games we can extend virtuality one step further. The player perform actions which, were he to reflect upon them, would form a dramatic plot-though this plot is not normally his focus of attention during the heat of the action. Games thus embody a virtualized, or potential dramatic narrativity, which itself hinges on the virtual diegetic narrativity of a retelling that may never take place.

Even though contemporary players might not produce text-based symbols, their gameplay still involves writing symbols into the game, and these various arrangements and associations produce a narrative trace that can be re-read.

Colossal Cave Adventure, unlike many popular arcade games at the time, displays this principle by allowing players to both view linking words that they had written and how those words create lasting transformations in the game.

Moreover, Colossal Cave Adventure’s model of writing proposes that writing is not simply an act of laying down signifier after signifier, but a collaborative effort in which a set of signifiers generates and transforms those signifiers produced by an unseen (and potentially non-human) co-author. And this exchange happens with a player who is a part of, not a part from, the text, blending the distinction that writing, writer, and writing space are divisible entities.

87 Leaving the Cave

Although we might move in many directions from Colossal Cave

Adventure, our path through the representations writing in digital games leads us into a relatively obscure, but historically and theoretically significant, first-person role-playing game that bears the trace of early text-based games like Zork and

Rogue, but also anticipates the transformations that writing-based gameplay will undergo with the rise of the image in games. Released in 1982 just as consumer computers were becoming capable of increasingly complex graphics displays,

Dungeons of Daggorath is considered one of the first games to experiment with gameplay in the first-person perspective. The game’s barebones narrative provides players with a Tolkien-inspired dungeon crawl in which they can slay trolls and bedeck their characters in powerful loot. Experiencing and participating in this narrative, however, required players to juggle two separate screens

(Figure 3-2). At the top of the screen, players are provided with image-based representations of their surroundings in the game space. Below this screen, players have a text-based input box in which they can write commands to interact with the images in the upper screen. Whereas Colossal Cave Adventure provided players with chunks of text in respond to their commands, Dungeons of

Daggorath supplies images and symbols that can move and interact with the player even without them entering in a command. Yet the logic remains relatively unchanged: the game still relies on a “call and response” structure in which players write key commands to create connections in the game space without a

88 clear sense of what their outcome may be given the game’s basic (AI). In Dungeons of Daggorath we encounter two key transformations that lead to gameplay as we understand it today: the division between image and writing, and the abstraction of writing to shorthand inputs.

First, Dungeons of Daggorath’s division between image and writing anticipates gaming’s cinema envy that would define the “Full Motion Video”

(FMV) game genre and the predominance of in digital games throughout the 90s to the point of eliminating player-driven exploration and reducing gameplay to little more than a series of timed button presses in sync with a video. In Dungeons of Daggorath’s interactive fiction forerunners like

Colossal Cave Adventure, the textual lexia that describe the game environment and player actions is open and indistinguishable from the gameplay area (Figure

3-3). Early text adventures situate writing as an osmotic force that creates motion and activity in the game, which the game itself recognizes and re-states in its output to the player. As Figure 3-3 demonstrates, the phrase “open mailbox” written by the player is absorbed into and echoed by the game world itself (i.e. the world responds with “opening the mailbox”). The player’s writing is not divorced from the world but is invoked and actively participates in its construction. Moreover, the writing is not framed, but dwells in the same background and uses the same font as the game world, thus suggesting an intimate entanglement as feedback from the writer/rhetor’s material, spatial, and environmental surroundings.

89 Dungeons of Daggorath, however, decisively severs this link between writing, play, and game world not just by blocking writing off from the space of the game world, but by featuring a beating heart in the text box. This heart, which acts as a health meter that increases and decreases in beats depending on whether the player’s character is taking damage does serve as an important link between player and game world, providing the player with another means of haptic feedback; however, the heart is only connected to the player’s character and, loosely, the enemies that the player encounters. While an associative element is still at play here, it is significantly narrowed from the shared space provided by text adventures, anticipating the shift from text to symbol-based communications of later digital games.

Like Colossal Cave Adventure, Dungeons of Daggorath also relies on written commands that the player users to create unexpected and surprising changes in the images they encounter. Yet Dungeons of Daggorath makes one important change: all commands are condensed to a form of shorthand. Typing

“M,” for example, causes the image area to move forward, drawing hallways, enemies, equipment, and passages that were previously at a distance into the foreground. Navigating the game world requires a series of typed commands including “M” for “move forward,” “T L” for “turn left,” and “T R” for “turn right.”

Like Colossal Cave Adventure, the text serves as a diegetic wrapper for underlying computational procedures; Dungeons of Daggorath, however, visual interface and game space introduces more variability in the output of those

90 processes. Will “T L” turn my character towards the exit, or will it put me in front of an enemy? Is the object on the ground a shield or some sort of weapon?

Dungeons of Daggorath’s challenge arises from managing the multitudinous effects of text commands on the game space and how processes translate into actions and objects that translate into words that enable new actions that are set back to the game software.

Similar to the translation of text input from text adventures to graphic adventures, elements of Dungeons of Daggorath’s design would resurface in role playing games like Dragon’s Quest, Phantasy Star, and Final Fantasy: Mystic

Quest; however, many of these games replace text input with a menu from which players can select as opposed to words like “attack” or “defend” to do battle and explore the game space. Such transformations resulted in writing shifting from an operational component of digital games to a largely representational one. In the following chapter, I explore how writing was adapted into various tools that players could both interact with and use within digital games. Occasionally, these tools would appear as metaphors for functions, such as Resident Evil featuring a typewriter that players use to save their game. Other times, these tools would allow players to communicate with each other. This shift away from invention to representation, although limiting the role of writing within digital games, still has much to offer Writing Studies and Rhetoric and Composition, and in the following chapter I consider what these representations might say about writing.

91

Figure 3-1: Screenshot of Day of the Tentacle Remaster (Lucas Arts, 2016). Graphic Adventure Lexicon in lower left-hand corner.

Figure 3-2: Screenshot taken from Dungeons of Daggorath (DynaMicro, 1982). The player’s HUD display

92

Figure 3-3: Screenshot taken from Colossal Cave Adventure (Crowther and Woods, 1977). The game’s display.

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CHAPTER 4 WRITING WITH(IN) DIGITAL GAMES

In the previous chapter, I demonstrated writing’s influence on computer gaming and considered how it created a significant departure from the hardware and design of arcade and console games. Early computer games drew their haptic interface from typewriters, and player input was stylized to resemble writing. In “Continuous Paper: The Early Materiality and Workings of Electronic

Literature,” Nick Montfort explains that computer games’ text-based interfaces evolved from early “print-out” versions of games like Hunt the Wumpus and

Mugwump. Montfort writes, “Early interaction with computers happened largely on paper: on paper tape, on punchcards, and on print terminals and teletypewriters, with their scroll-like supplies of continuous paper for printing output and input both,” showing that the physical materials of writing (not just the screen) were significant to the design and vocabulary of early digital games.

Print-out games, and their progeny described in Chapter 3, rely on writing’s sequential and cybernetic properties to produce an experience of space, play, and progress. Writing assumes an addressee, both a future and a figure “to come” who engages and responds, and this space is filled by the position of the player and the machine in the feedback loop constructed through writing.

Moreover, writing orders both in the sense of imposing order on the vastness of the page and the chaos of signs as well as commands thought and action like a script or perhaps a virus hijacking the host’s body. As the computer responds to

94 the players’ input, both player and computer interchange and transmit writing— the player not only acquires key words, but she also adapts her writing to the machine just as the machine is designed to respond with writing adapted to her.

While we might regard this intermingling as merely playing at writing, I suggest that the collaborative dynamics between player and machine represent an alternative model for writing.

Montfort, depicting an ecological model of writing in which digital and non- digital writing are deeply entangled, claims that early computer games involved a

“continuous series of textual exchanges” between players, machines, and paratexts. Arcade gaming and home consoles, on the other hand, replaced text- based exchanges with controller inputs that used a joystick or a “directional compass” featuring cardinal directions and several face buttons for performing actions within the game. Console manufacturers imported this haptic lexicon from early arcade machines’ directional stick and button inputs. This hardware was designed to accommodate fast-paced, reflex-based gameplay. Unlike the possibilities provided by 104 key keyboards, which allowed players to perform complicated key commands and type full words, controllers constrained player input to minimal amount of keys to privilege the speed and immediacy of play.

Instead of writing out “jump” or “move left,” players using a controller input these commands simply by pressing the “left arrow” or “A” button.

As player’s haptic vocabularies transformed, so too did digital games’ display shift (likely unconsciously) from textual- to image-based representations.

95 Although digital games began on text- and paper-based print-outs, the integration of screens and images in the 80s would appear to further divorce digital games and writing. Formerly, players poured over lines of text to find important words or immerse themselves in the game world by corresponding with a parser through textual exchanges. This correspondence would often manifest on physical materials through writing, as Montfort describes,

Players also used paper in their adventuring. Tracy Kidder noted that one Adventure player's desk held "roughly drawn maps. They consisted of circles, inside of which were scrawled names such as Dirty Passage, Hall of Mists, Hall of the Mountain King ... Webs of lines connected the circles, and each line was labeled, some with points of the compass, some with the words up and down. Here and there on the maps were notations — “water here”' “oil here,” and “damn that pirate!”

Gameplay happened across media, with players plotting their moves in print and then, after reflection and consideration, composing them digitally in response to the computer. Arcade games, console games (and later computer games), instead provided players with pre-designed signs and spaces. Rather than translating and re-creating these elements in writing, players were now provided with visuals, allowing them to shift their focus to game play and mechanics.

Of course, exceptions absolutely exist. Infocom’s line of graphic adventures still required the use of writing and paratextual materials to keep track of player progress. Even visual masterpieces like original The Legend of Zelda still demanded that players turn to writing to chart their progress through the immense game world. Yet as Salter also argues, the shift from keyboard to controller and the inclusion of signs that could be moved and directly interacted

96 with had significant consequences for the kinds of experiences offered on consoles and in arcades versus on computers. Perhaps one of the more significant changes would be the illusion that digital games had moved away from their origins in writing.

In this chapter, I take issue with the idea that writing has “disappeared” from digital games and argue that games are still rich sites for conceptualizing and exploring games. While Chapter 1 highlights that Rhetoric and Composition has also performed similar work, this chapter distinguishes itself from the pedagogical research of Rhetoric and Composition by considering how digital games represent writing. Much of the conversation in Rhetoric and Composition

(see Chapter 1) explores games as spaces where players can gain writing skills by using in-game chat channels to communicate and coordinate gameplay. I build on these discussions by demonstrating that chat channels are not the only aspect of digital games where writing plays a significant role. Moreover, I argue against limited conceptions of reading and writing oriented around print-based media. Here, as in my previous chapters, I attempt to show that reading and writing are much more expansive actions that go beyond linear sequences of alphanumeric text.

For example, Resident Evil, a popular horror game released across a decade plus of gaming consoles and hardware, features typewriters scattered throughout the techno-gothic game environment. These typewriters appear in

“safe” rooms that players can use to rest, restock equipment, and save their

97 game. Players save by interacting with the typewriter, and their files appear in a roll of typewriter paper. This representation could easily provide a stepping stone for instructors, theorists, and students alike to engage larger questions about the role of writing technologies in our understanding of memory and data storage.

We might ask why typewriters only appear in safe rooms and what their proximity to storage containers tells us about writing. We could examine their placement on the maps to think more broadly about the timing and sequence of when (and where) writing occurs. We could also engage with questions of memory and technology, exploring why a game released in the 90s on a disc- based system about a future where science has genetically engineered bio- mutants still includes typewriters as the means for players to back-up their progress. Finally, we might consider the broader role of icons and semiotics within digital games as they relate to literacy, game play, and game design.

To take another example, ’ IV and

Grand Theft Auto V as well as Atlus’ Persona 5 prominently feature cellphones on which players compose and receive text messages. In the Grand Theft Auto series, cellphones allow players to progress the game story, manage missions, and complete other tasks. In Persona 5, the cell phone not only allows players to communicate with other characters, it is also how players access their “persona.”

Personas are reflections of the users’ personality, often manifested as masks that the player character will wear. Here, again, we might consider why the writing device that players use is what leads to their personas and mask-like

98 manifestations. Like Resident Evil, these connections between narrative, game play, and writing create the opportunity to pose and explore questions related to writing.

Thus, in the following sections, I explore how writing has maintained a continued presence in both computer and console games and what this might offer to Writing Studies and Rhetoric and Composition. I split this chapter into three primary sections: writing models, writing tools, and writing spaces. In the first section, I consider how games “model” writing. In particular, I’m interested in how designers and players translate writing into and through gameplay, and I consider what “writing-as-gameplay” might offer to the study of writing. In the second section, I shift my focus to tools for writing that games provide players to communicate with other players. Whereas much conversation has occurred around chat boxes and text windows (writing spaces that most closely resemble

“traditional” forms of writing), this section explores a non-traditional adaptation of writing tools and describes how this transformation is important to the study of writing. Finally, I conclude the chapter with a consideration of “writing spaces,” environments in which players produce and manipulate writing, and I examine how digital games are providing new contexts for players to write.

Writing Models

Like Resident Evil, Grand Theft Auto IV & V, and Persona 5, many games feature “models” of writing. These models can include 2D and 3D designs of writing technology for aesthetic or operational purposes, representations of

99 writings such as text and books, and scenes depicting the act of writing. The term

“model” is used to signify their design (as in 3D modeling) as well as how writing and ideas about writing are presented. Rather than a static representation, these models afford interaction, and through these interacts emerge ideas about writing that players, then, re-produce (in other words, “model”) within the game. It also plays with the idea that the model only emerges from players’ interaction with them, suggesting that players “write” models as they play the game.

The books that line the shelves of stores and homes in Bethesda

Softwork’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Figure 4-1) are perhaps one of the most popular models. In the game, players can purchase or pilfer the hundreds of books scattered about the continent of Skyrim. Some of the books provide lore and history, others increase skills in magic or sneaking, and some even provide a dimensional portal to the realm of Hermaeus Mora. Hermaeus Mora, a Cthulhu- esque elder god, resides in an inky black world of tentacles and twisty passages composed entirely of books melded together into strange structures. Completing his quests yields the Oghma Infinium, a book that, when read, provides a significant boost to the skills of a player’s choosing. Through engaging with the texts in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and uncovering the Hermaeus Mora questline, players are thus given the chance to inscribe their desire upon their character through the choice of skills.

Digital games feature many other models of writing. For example, we might consider tools for inscription such as the anthropomorphic pencil with an attitude

100 “Wild Woody” (Figure 4-2) to the playable punctuation marks in Type:Rider

(Figure 4-3). On the other hand, writing might appear as an in-game activity, such as in Mario Teaches Typing (Figure 4-4) or as AOL instant messaging conversations in Emily is Away (Figure 4-5). While there are many different models of writing in digital games, in this section I examine two games that model the act of writing. While both games offer representations of writing tools, they go a step further in providing players with a context in which to use those tools and produce writing as an element of the game. The first game, Undertale, situates writing as a tool for discipline and subject formation, whereas the second, Ōkami, explores the inventive and playful qualities of writing.

Representing Writing in Undertale

In Toby Fox’s 2015 indie hit Undertale, players guide a human child through the perils of the “Underground,” an area sealed deep within the earth by a magic barrier. The Underground is populated by monsters who once were allies with humans but cast out following a great war between the two species.

Bitter and vindictive, the Underground’s denizens develop a plan for revenge. By collecting seven human , the monsters plot to undo the magic barrier keeping them barred beneath the surface. As players stumble into these unfolding events, they may choose to kill or protect those living in the

Underground.

Given the narrative’s opening complication, Undertale unsurprisingly plunks players into combat scenarios against many of the monsters living

101 Underground. Undertale handles combat via a battle system in the vein of most of its role-playing game (RPG) counterparts. Similar to Dungeons of Daggorath, enemies appear in front of players, and players have the option to attack, use items to heal, or flee from battle. Unlike many RPGs, however, players also have the option to talk with monsters using the “Act” ability and resolve combat through nonviolent means using “Mercy,” which can spare the monster’s life.

Given their treatment by humans, monsters are typically unwilling to agree to concord at first. However, by carefully navigating the discussions that arise from using the “Act” ability, players can persuade monsters to a peaceful resolution.

Undertale thus complicates the conventions of RPGs by inviting players to engage in a textual exchange between themselves and their enemies rather than relying brute force to achieve victory. Undertale allows players to choose from a series of written commands that appear when “Act” is selected. These commands can include “compliment,” “flirt,” “mock,” etc. with the game providing a textual description of the character’s action after a command is selected. A similar response is, in turn, provided by the game for the enemy. Players can use this response to choose a more effective response depending on whether they want to pursue a peaceful or hostile resolution.

This is a dramatic shift from most modern RPGs, one that I would contend can be read as a product of the game’s emphasis on writing and rhetoric.

Typically, battle systems in RPGs serve as a shallow hook for character growth, visualizing change and development on a purely statistical level using a

102 mechanic called “experience points” (“exp” or “xp” for short). Players accumulate experience points by doing battle, and when enough are collected, they raise the stats on the player’s character (for example, increasing the player’s life total or the damage they do when attacking) allowing them to face tougher foes.

Character development, in these models, is self-centered and driven by a need to harm and oppose those who would challenge the protagonists. Undertale, however, uses battles as moments for character growth on a personal and narrative level. Battles are sites for players to learn about the backgrounds and values of characters other than themselves, providing opportunities to befriend that character by making savvy rhetorical choices. More than that, they are sites where players encounter and produce writing that has consequence, albeit predominantly in shorthand.

But Undertale features one battle in which the player is given the chance to produce rather than choose their textual response. Figures 4-6 and 4-7 depict the

“Essay Prompt” portion of the battle with Mettaton EX. Mettaton EX is an entertainment android and star of the Underground’s only television program.

Mettaton EX is obsessed with assessment, and his battle requires players to perform actions during the battle that raise the “viewer ratings” (shown in the upper left-hand corner of Figure 4-6) to over 10,000. Players can raise ratings by performing certain actions such as swapping equipment mid-battle, consuming certain types of food in their inventories, or choosing between “boasting” or

103 “posing” as they endure Mettaton EX’s attacks. Each action receives a numerical score that is then added to the player’s ratings meter.

A few rounds into the battle, Mettaton EX turns to a staple of assessment

(especially for human children such as our main character): the “Essay Prompt.”

As Figure 4-6 illustrates, Mettaton EX’s essay prompt asks players to write a response to “Why [sic] do you love most about Mettaton.” While players might see this as a moment to produce creative, humorous, and incisive writing about

Mettaton EX’s homicidal attitude, the battle simply scans for specific words.

While players can write a detailed response in full sentences, the game only grades players’ writing based on key phrases such as “legs,” or “Toby Fox” (the game’s designer) and the amount of words written in the box. These terms, and their inclusion in player writing, increases the player’s grade both by increasing the response’s length and for appealing to Mettaton EX’s interest. Using insults or swearing, or writing a short response, however, decreases the rating because, as Mettaton EX reminds players, “This is a family friendly show.”

Playing this segment of the game allows players to experience several key theories about writing. At a pedagogical level, the battle is rife with satire. The player is asked to write an assessment-based interpretation of Mettaton EX

(“Why do you like about Mettaton?”) and, when completed, the assessment turned around on the player by Mettaton EX to evaluate them. Mettaton EX frames this writing assignment as though it has value to both the player and

Mettaton EX through the use of an assessment system that awards earn high

104 marks for favorable words and low marks for crass or offensive language. The irony, of course, is that players’ writing never mattered. Mettaton EX doesn’t engage with the writing beyond reading it for a superficial display of shared

“taste,” values, and word count. One either demonstrates that they share a mutual appreciation for Mettaton EX and its preferences, or they are reprimanded. Here, writing is simply a tool for showing identification and obedience, offering a strong criticism of similar pedagogical models.

Sharon Crowley, in Composition in the University, observes that these

“taste tests” masquerading as “writing assignments” are not about writing or writing instruction (42). Instead, such exercises are a form of what Michel

Foucault defines as a “moral technology” that functions to, “map, measure, assess, and certify the emotive and experiential aspects of subjectivity” (Eagleton

97). Its objective is not the writing per say, but rather it uses writing as a mechanism that, on the one hand, re-asserts the position of the subordinate writer whose creativity is ultimately limited by models of writing defined by preference- and taste-based assignments and assessment which trivialize writing and ensure that player behavior remains in line with forms of thinking and acting that resonate with the overarching narrative.

Moreover, this writing prompt relates to the gameplay. Undertale’s silent protagonist is a blank slate written by how players choose to approach the game’s battles. I describe this as writing because while the essay prompt bears all the superficial trappings of writing (it is text, it requires typing, it is assessed,

105 etc.), it bears none of the more significant connections to writing that we find in

Undertale’s gameplay. In Undertale, players write their character by through how they choose to interact with and modify the signs in the game space, and that these inscriptions are both recorded by the game and have significant consequence. If, for example, players kill a central character and try to restart the game to undo this action, they encounter a character at the start of the game who reminds them of their action and informs them that it cannot be undone.

Moreover, by choosing to converse with monsters and grant them mercy, or by saving some and killing others, the player character is aligned with “pacifism” and

“neutrality” respectively. If, however, players opt to vanquish every monster, they become aligned with “genocide.” Each of these three paths creates significant differences in the narrative, atmosphere, and gameplay. Killing all the characters transforms would be allies into deep enemies and dramatically changes all the music in the game, showing players that how they interact with these signs (and how they use them) has significant consequence. Similarly, the pacifist and neutral playthroughs close key portions of the story and hide aspects of other characters’ lives and backgrounds that cannot be accessed until the playthroughs are completed. This can be seen when encountering Mettaton, as the route players choose determines his form and the type of battle. Neutral and pacifist grant players access to the battle with Mettaton EX and the essay prompt, which rewards both neutral and friendly responses while punishing

106 violent or negative ones. In this sense, then, the prompt functions to reinforce the neutral or pacifistic subjectivity players have cultivated up to this point.

Representing Writing in Ōkami

While Undertale represents the act of writing, we also encounter game- based writing in the form of tools and devices for writing. Ōkami, a 3D game released for the PlayStation 2 and re-released for several other consoles including the Nintendo Wii, is an adventure role-playing game in the style of

Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda series. In Ōkami, players play as the Shinto goddess of the sun who appears in the form of a wolf named . Controlling

Amaterasu, players must defeat the demons that have overrun Nippon by solving puzzles, doing battle, interacting with townsfolk, and collecting various upgrades.

The game features a “cel-shaded” style, which Aaron Kashtan notes

is directly inspired by traditional cel animation. The key distinguishing feature of the technique is that in place of three-dimensional modeling of light and shadow, cel-shading renders objects in a limited range of flat colors. Optionally, cel-shaded objects may be rendered with dark outlines. In short, then, cel-shading produces objects that appear to have been drawn with ink and paint, rather than rendered algorithmically. (387)

Ōkami, while drawing directly on the visual vocabulary of other cel-shaded games including Jet Set Radio and Viewtiful Joe, uses heavy black outlines reminiscent of sumi-e, a form of East Asian ink painting, and a paper filter that produces the sense that the game occurs entirely on the surface of a rice paper scroll.

Ōkami’s style is not superficial, however, and it connects to the primary game play mechanic called the “celestial brush.” The celestial brush is a

107 calligraphy brush that players acquire and use in various situations throughout the game to win battles, solve puzzles, and collect items. To use the celestial brush, players hold the R2 button (PlayStation 2 version), which pauses the gameplay and flattens it into a roll of parchment using a paper overlay that turns the game screen into a tan sepia and tilts it backward as though it is resting on a table. Above the paper-ized screen hangs a brush that can be applied to the parchment layered over the game space and used to draw various signs and symbols through the use of the joystick. After the player is done and releases the button, the symbols will be applied to the game space producing various effects and changes.

Thus, the brush and Ōkami’s visual style tightly entwine, and because of this connection between game play mechanic and the world that it seemingly produces, Ōkami suggests that there is no separation between writing and world.

This theme is reinforced during Ōkami’s cutscenes, which show a calligraphy brush (presumably the player’s) drawing objects, characters, and the world into existence. As a game, this overlap works. Although players are meant to see the game world as just that—a living, breathing world full of real people—games are collections of signs produced by an art team or designer. While Ōkami clearly taps into , it also represents the act of game creation and game design. Ōkami presents writing, game play, and game design as synonymous.

108 Finally, the myriad uses of this tool point towards the variety of ways that writing technologies can grow and develop as well as how symbol production can go beyond merely “representing thought.” Throughout the game, players acquire various “bush techniques” that can create different effects in the game space by drawing a specific symbol on the paper-ized game. There are 12 brush techniques in total. These techniques include “Sunrise,” which requires players to draw a circle in the sky thereby creating the sun and changing the in-game time from night to day, “power slash,” which requires players to draw a sharp diagonal line to inflict damage and cut objects in the game space, “fountain,” which requires players to draw a straight line ascending from a pool of water to create a water fountain that can serve as a platform, or “Bloom,” which requires players to draw a circle around plants and trees to restore life to them.

These writing techniques serve several purposes. Using them, players can alter time, erase other inscriptions, and inflict harm. Players also use writing to restore life to the world around them. In doing so, Ōkami converges writing and gameplay. As Kashtan notes,

When the player uses a brush technique successfully, he or she leaves a permanent trace on the game‘s diegetic world, a trace which often remains visible for the remainder of that playthrough of the game. In Zelda, when the player uses a bomb to destroy a wall, s/he is merely manipulating an item that already existed in the gameworld. In Ōkami, by contrast, the player accomplishes the same effect by drawing a circle on the wall with a slash through it (the Cherry Bomb brush technique), creating a bomb which then explodes and destroys the wall. By drawing on the gameworld, the player changes it. (395)

109 Ōkami thus suggests that there is little difference between the production of signs with ink and paper and the production of signs in a game space. While writing spaces such as paper or word processors clear away space for writing and suggest that the writer’s creation emerges ex nihilo, Ōkami offers a pre-existing space filled with symbols in which the play is not the author, but another collaborator working on their endless revision and remix. Here, we are surrounded by writing that has come before us and will remain after we have written.

Writing Tools

In online games, chat boxes are the primary means by which players write and communicate with other players. Chat boxes are spaces within an online game where players can write out text-based messages to other players, and typically they resemble a miniaturized form of a word processor. Typically, players find these translucent rectangles in the lower left-hand or right-hand corners of the game. Chat boxes are mean to be as unobtrusive as possible and provide players with a quick and efficient means to direct and coordinate gameplay. In doing so, however, they often model many stereotypes about writing as less serious, if not subordinate to, other forms of communication such as speech or, in this instance, gameplay (Miller 9). Writing is not only quarantined but, in certain games, actually made invisible—implying that it interferes with, rather than contributes to, gameplay.

110 Namco Bandai’s , however, plays with the online chat box in some interesting ways. Dark Souls is a series of three games from FromSoftware beginning with Demon’s Souls. Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, and Dark Souls 2 were released for the , PlayStation 3, PC, and Dark Souls 2 and Dark

Souls 3 were released for the , PlayStation 4, and PC. Like many role- playing games, the Dark Souls series is set in a fictional medieval world with gothic fantasy themes, and it gained significant recognition for its immensely challenging gameplay, bleak world, labyrinthine game space, and opaque narrative.

Beyond its genre tropes, Dark Souls subverts the writing spaces found in online digital games in a productive and provocative way. In an online role- playing game like , chat boxes transparency feature that fades out the chat so that writing doesn’t intrude in the game space; others, such as

Overwatch, make the chat disappear entirely from the game unless a player presses the enter key. These windows partition writing from gameplay, preventing the mingling between text and game world that a game like Colossal

Cave Adventure or Ōkami provides.

In Dark Souls, however, players do not use chat boxes. Instead, players communicate through “bloodstains” and an item called the “soapstone.” Dark

Souls is largely a single player experience, yet the game connects to a network that keeps tabs on every instance of the game running worldwide. Whenever a player dies in her instance of the game, a record of her death is stored on the

111 network and made publicly available in the form of a “bloodstain” in the exact spot where they died. This bloodstain then appears in every other currently running instance of the game. When another player sees the bloodstain and activates it, it cues an ethereal figure that plays the final moments of the player’s life in real time. Although the bloodstain does not show what killed her, it provides a heuristic for players to read the environment and deduce upcoming events.

Whereas players would typically warn other players in a chat box by writing

“watch out! enemy ahead,” players write through the decomposition of their bodies, using them as tools for writing.

The soapstone, on the other hand, is a tool that allows players to inscribe messages on the game world itself. On any flat surface that player avatars can walk on, they can select the soapstone and leave behind a glowing orange scrawling that is circulated to all other players’ games in the exact spot where it was placed. When selected, the scrawl brings up a message that can be a hint, a joke, a lie, any variety of messages. Because both bloodstains and soapstone inscriptions are littered across the surface of the game world, communication is unavoidable (unlike the easily hidden chat box or dialogue window), and the game’s difficulty encourages collaboration and communication through the writing system that it provides.

Thus, messaging in the Dark Souls series works a bit differently than other online role-playing games. Whereas chat functions are an inherent part of most online roleplaying games and provided to players upon immediately starting the

112 game, Dark Souls requires players to find the soapstone to leave messages. This shift suggests that one must discover a means of inscription rather than inherently possessing it. To write, players must first page through several menus looking for pre-set words that other players can read to make sense of their surroundings. While players may imagine a way that they want to phrase their writing, those thoughts are mediated by the means provided from the game.

Players’ writing thus comes from the outside rather than within, and the words offered by the menu persuade how they write. Moreover, pre-set words make precision impossible, and many of the words are very general to facilitate a writing system that can be used in every area of the game. As a result, players are challenged to look for words that resonate with the environment and the player’s experience thus far, and they must negotiate the multiplicity of meaning that spatiality, location, and proximity create. Writing here is presented as an act of navigating menus generated by the and combining pre-made arrangements of words. Like Ōkami, Dark Souls’ soapstone offers a model of invention that uses remix rather than creatio ex nihilo. Players must also envision the multiple possibilities of play. If players are likely to have acquired pieces of equipment that will make the event easy or obvious, then leaving a message is unnecessary. If players cannot be prepared for what is coming, this adds urgency to a message.

Placement is also an important in the writing that players produce. If a player leaves a message in a large cluster of other messages, it may not be

113 seen; however, if a player sets it off to the side, players ignore it. Thus, Dark

Souls challenges players to anticipate her writing’s proximity to other writing. And this also plays in the meaning that other players create from that message. If a player leaves their message too far from the area, the message won’t make sense to players; conversely, if a player leaves the message in an area players will encounter after the event, it will not be helpful.

Given that players cannot write anything but are instead limited to a discrete set of word choices, they must be sensitive to what Derrida refers to as

“play” in writing. Players must attend to slippage in words that allow them to signify multiple meanings to readers. This slippage must be coordinated with the surrounding context, suggesting that the environment and situation controls writing rather than individual intention. Yet even if players choose to ignore the content, the density, placement (near the entrance of a room as opposed to in the center, a cluster of messages by an otherwise inconspicuous wall) and types of messages (for example, a lot of bloodstains) communicate to players and inform their behavior. Through these properties, Dark Souls suggests that writing is the act of using symbols to configure various relationships between other bodies, other symbols, and the world itself.

These messages trace the contours of a fleeting moment of play and associated sensations that another player might never experience in the same way, remnants of the “narrative trace” that Laurie Marie-Ryan identifies in digital games. For the thousands of other players who do not directly experience the

114 game space in the same way, such notes create an affective, ambient mesh in the game space. Moreover, the emplacement of these messages in the game space is temporary, and the messages themselves continually disappear and are replaced by new messages endlessly re-inventing the region in which they appear. The transient appearance of these messages does not create semantic meaning, but rather emphasizes regularities of connection that have been established between it and its surroundings—its rhythm of when and how it tends to relay into the other messages and the game world. The messages are also left in a non-linear fashion that does not scroll from the bottom to the top of the screen, but instead are distributed across the game space. This interaction between the in-game writing system and the game world forces a deviation of semantic meaning that creates pores for envisioning alternative experiences of the game world. Writing in the Souls series is an experiment in circulation rather than producing meaning, and this system is reflected in the game’s narrative, which tells a story of a world emptied of meaning.

The writing system offers players with a flicking hope of collaboratively making sense of, or “mending,” the game world, especially so because the narrative explicitly denies this. However, the emplaced writing system leads players to directly encounter the failure of signification and meaning-making, how symbols do not always say what they mean or mean what they say, and especially in a writing environment that does not make linear connections apparent. Moreover, the player is positioned not as that which makes meaning or

115 sense of these messages, but that which forges connections between the messages—especially those that are in response to other messages. Since there is no interface for connecting these messages like the chat box in MMORPGS like World of Warcraft or Guild Wars 2, they depend on assembly through the player, positioning her as a circuit or relay for their movement and interaction.

Instead of reading just for meaning, the writing system in Dark Souls challenge players to read messages not in terms of content but in terms of their circulation and placement. This creates a feeling that all meaning is divergent and wandering, the pure movement of the shadows of other players and their spectral traces briefly intersecting with the players game world, offering sensations that almost spike into meaning but quickly dissipate into the network.

In Demons Souls, the player upgrades her character’s abilities by speaking with The Maiden in Black. Each time the player speaks with the Maiden to upgrade her abilities, the Maiden comments obliquely on her progress, “Soul of the mind, key to life's ether. Soul of the lost, withdrawn from its vessel. Let strength be granted, so the world might be mended. So the world might be mended.” The player is encouraged to see her progress as “mending” and repairing the world. This is important because the game world is nearly emptied of meaning. Recreated numerous times without reason or history, the player and other characters who occupy this world are afflicted with the dark sign, a curse that turns them “hollow” and draws them to struggle over “souls” that grant health, attunement, adaptability, and more. The structure of the game, however,

116 resists the Maiden’s suggestion that strength mends the world. Unlike most games that end once the player overcomes the challenges in the game, each game in the Souls series features “new game +” mode, which restarts the player at the beginning of the game. The completion of the game and the subsequent quest to acquire strength to “mend the world,” always returns to its undoing, presenting a loop that throws the desire for power and its potential as an element for resolution into question. Strength cannot mend these worlds, but only fragment them further. Writing, however, extends through the world and tethers it together.

Dark Souls 2, released five years after Demons Souls, is set in a world that contains vague similarities in terms of lore and spatial design. The “new game +” mechanic is present as well, but in this game the mechanic is narrativized with the dark sign and many of the non-playable characters who occupy the town

Majula who have gone mad due to the endless repetition of the world. Taunting players at the close of Dark Souls 2, the ancient dragon observes “The curse of life is the curse of want, so into the fog you gaze in search of answers” but the game has none to offer throughout its endless repetitions. Instead, it offers players a writing tool that networks together their experiences and suffering, allowing them fleeting glimpses of what might be and encouraging them to make sense of the world from these fragments. Where strength and force fail, writing emerges to unify players and spread their awareness of this experience.

117 Writing Spaces

I conclude this chapter, and forecast my final chapter, with a consideration of writing spaces in games. My first section of this chapter focuses on objects and actions that bear a direct resemblance to writing, asking how the similarities and differences could be used to theorize writing. Section two expands this notion of “resemblance” by addressing an inscription technology that has connections, but no direct analogue, to writing or writing technology. Dark Souls’ soapstone is an amalgam of writing technologies and practices (chalk, graffiti, eco- and ambient writing, etc.), and from this concoction emerges an alternative form of writing that has been translated into a mobile social application as well as practices for communicating on social media.1

In this section, I consider games where inventive actions that players can perform transform the game into a writing space. Rather than seeking out spaces that resemble what we commonly associate with writing (and there are many) such as word processors or classrooms, I suggest that games do not need to feature recognizable writing spaces to still function as such. There is no single writing space in games—given that games provide a system of signs with which players convey both value and meaning through the possible relationships afforded by mechanics and rules, any game space can become a writing space.

Thus, this section serves as a transition into my final chapter by considering

1 See Soapstone: http://soapstone.io/

118 Nintendo’s Super Mario Maker and the expressive artifacts that players author through it.

Released for the Nintendo Wii U and the Nintendo 3DS in 2015, Super

Mario Maker is a game about game design, but it is also a game about writing (in particular, writing spaces). As the title suggests, Super Mario Maker puts players in the role of game designers, giving them tools to build and test their own two- dimensional side-scrolling levels derivative of the original Super Mario Bros.2

Whereas many game design tools like Unity or Gamemaker require various levels of coding proficiency, Super Mario Maker provides players with a blank canvas and a variety of “objects” to build their own stages. Super Mario Maker offers players an accessible and speedy design process through “drag-and-drop” design, which works in a manner similar to raster graphics editors like Abode

Photoshop or MS Paint. Although the interface metaphors remain consistent between these window, icon, menu, pointer (WIMP) interfaces and Super Mario

Maker, the game includes a much different iconography. Rather than a “pencil” or

“paintbrush,” players can select ground for Mario to run across, enemies for

Mario to avoid, power-ups for Mario to collect, and many of the other hallmark objects that the game series has featured over the past 35 years. To create a stage, players simply click an icon, “ground” for example, move the ground icon

2Super Mario Bros. is an iconic video game released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985. The game stars two brothers, Mario and Luigi, who traverse two-dimension levels full of enemies, platforms, power-ups, and pits on a trite quest to rescue Princess Peach from Bowser who has kidnapped her and locked her away in a castle.

119 onto the stage, and press a button to place it in the stage. Multiple items and objects are added in the same fashion (see figure 4-8). Similarly, to create a

“brick,” players click the “brick” icon, hold a button and move the analogue stick in a direction to place multiple bricks in the game space.

As players design stages, comparisons between Super Mario Maker and writing begin to emerge. On the surface, there appears a gestural and procedural familiarity between arranging cells on a spreadsheet, placing letters in a document, re-organizing slides in a power point and erasing ground to create a nearly impossible pit in Super Mario Maker. But while the objects move, act, and affect play, they also do more than function as mere hurdles; instead, Super

Mario Maker exposes how object and level design attempts to communicate with players through various arrangements of signs and symbols. In A Game Design

Vocabulary, Anthropy and Clark argue,

[W]e can’t design the player or her behavior. We design the rules that shape her experience, her choices, her performance. Rules are how we communicate. Verbs are the rules that allow her to communicate back. The game is a dialogue between game and player, and the rules we design are the vocabulary with which this conversation takes place. (15)

Whereas for Bogost theorizes design as deterministic, Anthropy and Clark instead depict design as dialogic. In this model, players’ actions and interpretations are not strictly determined by the designer’s intent, but rather the player is engaged in a dialogue with the designer from which may emerge unexpected and unintended uses/interpretations of digital games. Players are provided with verbs and signs, but the value and meanings created from this

120 system will differ from player to player because, as Anthropy and Clark recognize, games do not program the player or her behavior.

Dialoguing, of course, still has the possibility to create meaning, but that meaning is collaborative. In Anthropy and Clark’s model, designers communicate with players and attempt to persuade them to take certain routes/perform certain actions through the rules, mechanics, and spatial organization and arrangement of signs within the game. If designers hope to signify to players that the next jump is deadly, but the door on the upper ledge will lead them to safety, they could add a vertical row of shiny coins leading towards the door. Nothing here forces the player to take the coins (indeed, the player might protest what she views as the commodification of her labor and avoid the coins entirely), but, like any rhetoric, the suggestion remains one that the player might act on. Perhaps, however, the design might want to trick the player by having the pit actually lead to the exit and the door to doom. The player might interpret the coins a glistening icon of greed and hubris, or she might simply read it as poor design. Regardless, design creates dialogue, and dialogue creates the possibility for a multitude of meanings.

In Super Mario Maker, players get to create their own dialogue with other players through the semiotics of game design. These semiotics include coding, spatial architecture, visual and diegetic design, sound design, player actions, etc.—practically everything that goes into the construction of a digital game.

Anthropy’s “to the right, hold on tight,” demonstrates that game design guru

121 Shigeru Miyamoto approached the semiotic design of stage 1-1 in the original

Super Mario Bros. not just as dialogue, but as a genre of writing: the instruction manual. Fearing that players would lose or dispose of the physical manual,

Miyamoto and his team used the design of stage 1-1 to build player’s literacy and teach players everything they needed to play the game without having to read the manual. Yet most players, playing stage 1-1, never recognize that they’re actually playing an instruction manual, and at no point does the game explicitly remove the player from gameplay to communicate this operation to her. Instead, she reads, and constructs this message, through her gameplay.

Gee, examining a similar experience in Nintendo’s plant simulation game

Pikmin, argues that the dialogic element of games is build on game’s semiotic

“domain.” Gee explains,

“Semiotic” here is just a fancy way of saying we want to talk about all sorts of different things that can take on meaning, such as images, sound, gestures, movements…All of these things are signs (symbols, representations, whatever term you want to use) that ‘stand for’ (take on) different meanings in different situations, contexts, practices, cultures, and historical periods…By a semiotic domain I mean any set of practices that recruits one or more modalities (e.g., oral or written language, images, equations, symbols, sounds, gestures, graphs, artifacts, etc.) to communicate distinctive types of meanings. (233)

Composing the semiotic domain of a digital game requires that designers consider the expressive potential of all their design choices down to even the menu screen that players are provided with. On top of the individual meanings that might be made with the processes, visual design, layout, etc., the relationships between these elements also contribute to a game’s communicative

122 potential. For players, the challenge and reward arise from actualizing this potential by playing the game and figuring out how signs work and relate to one another in a specific domain. Super Mario Maker provides players a taste of this, using the interface of productivity software to let them construct their own domains which players read and to which they respond.

Super Mario Maker, as a surface for communication and play, explores the fine line between game design and writing. Super Mario Maker’s makers write multiple messages through the arrangement of symbolic icons. Some use icon arrangement to lure players into traps or guide them towards safer routes, others such as “Theorymon” use the game tools as a narrative mechanism, telling stories about the dark and morbid realities of life in the Mushroom Kingdom. In

“The Goomba: A Sad Tale of Madness,” the player is transformed into a goomba, an insignificant and common foe in the Super Mario Bros. series. As she progresses through the stage, she witnesses goombas walking off cliffs into pits of lava and she encounters a remixed version of stage 1-1 of the original Super

Mario Bros. fallen into decay and in which all the goombas have been replaced with ghosts. Throughout the stage, she is both forced to return to and confront her actions in the original Super Mario Bros. as well as participate in the mass slaughter of other goombas eventually killing herself in the process.

To understand the meaning, not just the values, of “The Goomba: A Sad

Tale of Madness’” semiotic domain, players should be literate in the original

Super Mario Bros. This literacy allows her to recognize the design as directly

123 citing a number of moments from the series designed to both disturb her and inspire introspection. Even though there is no explicit “narrative,” we still can read what this player wrote because as Jesper Juul argues in Half-Real, “We can…treat the fictional world as a fixed set of signs that the game presents” (2).

Super Mario Maker allows players to re-organize and alter Super Mario Bros.’s signs, actively allowing players to write their own narratives through the interface it provides.

Once players have completed a stage, they can then upload it to

Nintendo’s servers where other players from around the world can access and play the stage. Some stages are nostalgic for the stage 1-1 design of Super

Mario Bros., others are creative narratives that attempt to tell a story using the arrangement of objects in the game space, and more than a few are sadistic mazes with impossible jumps, hidden enemies, and sudden deaths. Once players upload, other players can, while playing the level, leave “comments” that players can inscribe anywhere in the stage. Using the Wii U’s tablet gamepad, players can pause the game and choose to leave behind a short message or drawing at their current position. This message is also recorded to the game’s servers so that whenever another player passes that same point, the message or drawing will automatically pop-up on their screen. These messages are responsive to play, opening and closing based on a players’ proximity to them, and are marked by a small, grey icon with a face. These messages often contain many messages left behind by players who attempted, surpassed, or failed the

124 current stage. These messages contain criticism of the stage design, drawings that comment on the stage, or advice for how to overcome the many challenges presented by the stage.

The comment function converges graffiti, social media, and geocaching by allowing players to tag messages on other players’ stages. During play, these messages will then appear for the stage’s designer and all other players who attempt to complete the stage, further transforming the environment into a surface for written and graphic communication. While many of these signs narrow down the uncertainty of spatial and procedural communication by commenting on how to complete the stage, an equal number offer embedded advice for how to improve the stage’s design and its ability to communicate with other players. Super Mario Maker’s stages thus become a site for peer review and critique, encouraging players to view the game space as a place for communication and further conveying the idea of constructing a semiotic domain.

Super Mario Maker ultimately raises the question of whether game design might be seen as a form or offshoot of writing, and it presents a strong counter- point to Bogost’s deterministic depiction of game design by challenging players to effectively communicate to other players through the stages that they build. While

Chapter 5 flips this perspective to consider how players are using game play to perform similar expressive work, the problem of classification is not easily settled.

On the one hand, player’s use of non-alphanumeric signs in multilinear arrangements bears no visual resemblance to writing. Yet, like writing, players

125 must think critically about arrangement and how the placement (and associations) created between various signs creates both value and meaning for players. Moreover, these combinations run into the same problems of meaning- making as writing, allowing players to mis-interpret or derive unintended readings from what the designer has produced. Super Mario Maker, at the very least, demonstrates the strong family resemblance between game design and writing.

In the following chapter, I consider whether this resemblance might also extend to game play.

126

Figure 4-1. Screenshot from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda Softworks, 2011). Reading a book in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim with bookshelves in background.

Figure 4-2. Screenshot from Wild Woody (Shen, 1995). Game title screen.

127

Figure 4-3. Screenshot from Type:Rider (Agat Films & Cie – Ex Nihilo, 2013) featuring a puzzle involving a typewriter requiring the player to land on specific keys.

Figure 4-4. Screenshot from Mario Teaches Typing (Interplay Productions, 1992) showing how the game highlights the word that the player is trying to type, the digit she should use, and the progress she has made.

128

Figure 4-5. Screenshot from Emily is Away (Seeley, 2015) displaying the chat interface.

Figure 4-6. Screenshot from Undertale (Fox, 2015) showing the Mettaton EX Fight with Writing Prompt.

129

Figure 4-7. Second screenshot from Undertale (Fox, 2015) showing Mettaton EX Fight with Mettaton EX’s assessment.

Figure 4-8. Screenshot from Super Mario Maker (Nintendo EAD, 2015) showing the design interface, which integrates elements from word processing-based interfaces such as Excel and MS Word.

130

CHAPTER 5 WRITING WITH(IN) GAMES

In a recent discussion about copyright on DIGRA’s Gamesnetwork listserv, several contributors debated players’ ownership of gameplay data. Oliver Steffen opened the e-mail discussion, “Player as copyright holder of screenshots?,” asking whether it might be legal to use a screenshot of a game because “it is an image of an individual game state that was individually achieved by a player. So basically, the player is the author - and the owner of the rights - of a particular game state and of its screenshot(s).” Legally, notes Scott Nelson in “Intellectual

Property Pong: Three Classic matches that Affect Your Play Today,” the U.S. courts ruled against such reasoning in 1982 and 1983 when both Midway and

Williams both took Artic International, Inc. to court over the sale of modified versions of Galaxian, Pac-Man, and Defender. Midway and Williams claimed

Artic International produced versions of their games so similar that, in the case of

Defender, “its ‘high score’ screen ‘contain[ed] the initials of employees of

Williams, including its president, who initially achieved the highest scores’”

(Nelson 163). Artic International, however, countered that games were produced through gameplay. As players play, their inputs (and the results of those individuated inputs) creates a unique series of images, sounds, and situations.

US Code grants exception to works that are “transitory” in this fashion, reserving copyright only for those works that are “fixed,” meaning “sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a

131 period of more than transitory duration” (quoted in Nelson 163). Although Artic

International argued games did not pre-exist their play and were therefore not open to copyright, the court ultimately ruled in favor of Midway and Williams, stating that “there is always a repetitive sequence of a substantial portion of the sights and sounds of the game” (quoted in Nelson 163).

Despite the court’s ruling, Artic International’s claims have seen support in the rapidly growing game streaming and documenting community. Through platforms like Twitch and YouTube, players can now record and curate their gameplay sessions to share with others. Players have begun to view gameplay through the lens of television programming, developing streaming personas and constructing stylized forms of gameplay to attract and sustain a large following.

Moreover, players must compete with other players who stream the same game, increasing the need for techniques and gimmicks exclusive to their channel. The diversity and amount of streams on a single game counters Midway and Williams reasoning that a substantial portion of a digital game is simply repetition—these players (and their large fan followings) are demonstrating that you never play (or, perhaps record) the same game twice.

In this chapter, I pursue the claim, enacted by these recordings, that games (and their meaning) are constructed through play. Following the work of several game documentarians, I consider what this perspective might mean for both Game and Writing Studies. I suggest that rather than discussing games conceptually—as abstract rule-sets—with fictional players who effectively

132 respond to every output from the game, writing-based game studies should approach games as played artifacts by looking at the varied and individual instances of game that are composed each time a player plays a game.

Moreover, writing-based game studies should adopt the perspective that digital games are produced from the myriad instances of play and do not pre-exist collaboration between player and machine. This raises a significant problem for pedagogical interpretations of games as many of these approaches are built on a top-down model of instruction in which knowledge is transferred from the machine to the player. Instead, knowledge (and meaning) should be regarded as arising collaboratively through the gameplay sessions that machines and players construct. I believe that as the rapid growth and popularity of player-produced media including twitch streams and Let’s Plays demonstrates, what players compose through their play constitutes creative expression and can usefully be examined through the lens of Writing Studies.

Thus, I conclude this project by considering the future of the ecology proposed in Chapter 1: Writing with(in) Games. In Chapter 1, I suggest that players have begun using games as tools for writing complex and personal artifacts, and this chapter explores some of those artifacts. Specifically, I open with a consideration of several theories that frame this approach to game play. I then shift into a discussion of one of the most iconic post-procedural artifacts,

“Twitch Plays Pokémon,” and considers how this highly documented event enacts a mode of writing. Finally, I conclude by describing several genres that

133 can be used to categorize and describe post-procedural artifacts with key examples for future work in writing-based game studies.

Building a Theory of Post-Procedural Gameplay

As I describe in both Chapters 1 and 2, Writing with(in) Games takes a post-proceduralist perspective on game play. Specifically, it challenges the determinism of procedurality by maintaining that players and machines collaboratively author artifacts through play, and these artifacts may greatly deviate from the intent of the game designer. “Game,” in this relationship, simply represents an adhesive structure of mechanics and rules that facilitates interaction between player and machine. Yet this structure and its construction does not determine what meanings arise as players and machines interact. As I attempt to show through relationships between gameplay and writing documented in this dissertation, the play between players and machines is what generates this meaning. As a result, I suggest that digital gameplay might be productively engaged as an emergent form of writing connected to a much longer history of game-based writing. While I have worked to provide examples that establish this history, the post-procedural theory underlying this claim remains relatively obscure. This section attempts to remedy that.

As I suggest in Chapter 2 by way of Saussure, any actions within a game space that affect the value of an entity within that space also affects its meaning.

This idea, I propose, is built on the notion that there is no inherent meaning to entities within the game space. This notion runs counter to Bogost’s notion of

134 procedurality, which argues that the designer encodes her meaning into the game through the procedures that she programs into the game. Instead, I argue that those meanings are composed through the diagrammatic and associative relationships constructed through play. This composition takes the form of

“actualization,” which Laurie Gries explores from a Circulation and Writing

Studies perspective in Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach to

Visual Rhetorics.

In her text, Gries suggests that when we envision the “life” of an image, we typical imagine a relatively linear progression (whether it be design, distribution, critique, social change, etc.) from point A to point B in which a fixed thing stays fixed (whether it begins in the realm of ideas, the digital realm, or on a ream of paper). Images are doubly vexed by their classification as a “still” art and research approaches that treat images as “desperately static” things fixed only in the present of their viewing (26 – 27). This perspective is implicitly shared by the proceduralist perspective, which views the meaning of the game permanently fixed by its coding—a language that does, and only does, what it says. Yet games, like images, are rarely this stable and constantly undergo various re- interpretations, sudden appearances, and multitudinous remixes that undo the sense of static meaning or “still life.”

Perhaps one of the most legendary examples of digital games’ mutability is

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari. In E.T., players control E.T. and attempt to gather pieces of a phone to call his home planet. Following negotiations with

135 and Universal Studios, Atari secured the rights to E.T. for around 21 million USD (Harmetz), which was one of the highest licensing fees at the time. Despite Atari’s hopes for the game, E.T. would be remembered as a massive commercial failure. Many of the arcade-inspired titles released on the

Atari emphasized quick, reflex-based gameplay that often gave players the ability to “shoot” or “consume” an object in an act of or to increase their power. E.T., however, eschewed these conventions and, following the characterization of E.T. in the film, put the player into the role of a small, slow moving, and defenseless character who spends much of its time avoiding humans and pits. Unlike other games where players can shoot or consume, the primary verb players are provided in E.T. is “collect,” resulting in a much more passive experience exaggerated by the pacing and movement in the game. The game’s goals are obscure and unexplained, resulting in the player often wandering around without direction and falling into one of its many notorious pits. In short, E.T., true to the film’s titular character, provides an experience of disorientation and disempowerment.

For players raised on a very specific gaming vocabulary, however, this experience was nothing short of a disaster. Rather than encouraging sentimental reflection on the suffering of an outsider, E.T.’s procedures resulted in frustration, anger, and disappointment. As a result, the meaning of E.T. had little to do with

Spielberg or the lead designers’ vision; instead, it served as a grim reminder of

136 the problems with film-to-game adaptations and the perils of crunch in the game industry.

The largely negative reviews, poor sales, and overproduction of cartridges led to the rumor that, in 1982, Atari had buried the remaining E.T. cartridges in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. This rumor was bolstered by reports from locals and regional newspapers describing trucks full of Atari equipment dumping their contents into a landfill in California, not New Mexico. In 2013, Fuel

Industries produced a documentary unearthing the legendary New Mexico landfill in search of the rumored E.T. cartridges. Although the dig excavated only hundreds, and not the rumored millions, of E.T. cartridges, it did bring concrete proof to the legend. Moreover, it once again transformed the meaning of the game. E.T., which began as a big-budget Hollywood-to-console production, would end up connected to issues of waste and environmentalism. E.T.’s long and troubled history demonstrates that regardless of what the coding says, the meaning of games is never fixed nor static.

Of course, the contemporary meanings associated with E.T. were likely unforeseen at the time of its release in 1982. Instead, these meanings emerged as players played and interacted with the game and as the game interact with other actors such as the environment and landfills of California and New Mexico.

E.T. thus demonstrates that meaning within digital games is evental and unanticipated rather than implicit, operating through “a virtual-actual process in which any given thing, better thought of as a multiplicity, ‘changes in nature as it

137 expands its connections’ though its constant production with time and of space”

(Gries 31). As games interact with various agents, new potentials that may not initially be pronounced begin to materialize. Gries uses the terms “virtual” and

“actual” to elaborate on this process, “actual, here, pertains to an image’s concrete, physical manifestation, virtual refers to an image’s undeterminable unique potential that is immaterial yet not inconsequential” (37). In other words, the virtual is a set of untapped possibilities in any media (not just images) that manifest as something new once actualized. E.T. highlights the unintentional actualization of meanings through the game’s interaction with other agents; however, this event is neither new nor unique to E.T.—as described in Chapter 2,

Dadaist and Surrealist play- and game-based art deliberately plays with the virtual and actual to generate both shock and insight.

Throughout this dissertation, I’ve referred to these actualizations constructed through play as “artifacts.” A more precise term, however, would be

Terry Harpold’s concept of “historiations.” Harpold explains that digital media allow for the recording of readers’ narrative drives or “paths” through media. In many video games, those paths are both recorded during play as well as stored in the form of “save files” that can be returned to later. Non-digital media similarly allows for the interactive play between reader and text; however, such navigations are largely performed by the reader and rendered to the margins of the page as notes, lines, scribbles, and other markings left by the reader. Their representation with and in the text is the task of the reader. Digital media, on the

138 other hand, internalize historiations and reconfigure based on the influence of a reader’s interaction with that media.

Harpold defines these individual paths and their trails actualized as players manipulate games as “historiation.” He explains,

Each moment of the reading encounter is the inconsistent aggregate of other moments, stimulated—consciously and unconsciously—by marks and patterns of marks (and relations of marks too inchoate and variable to be qualified as “patterns”) that evoke others and thus generate meanings that are specific to the encounter. I propose to characterize these operations, which are bound to, and capable of anticipating and generating new responses to, visual-textual traits of the reading surface, by the term historiation [emphasis added]. (56)

The term “historiation,” although drawing on a variety of connections, alludes to the decorated initial letters of medieval illuminated manuscripts described as

“historiated.” These initials were often enlarged and depicted scenes or figures from the text itself (or of the scribe) using a variety of techniques that “mark a text’s divisions, to signal its intertexts, and not infrequently to suggest parallel or alternative interpretations of it” (56 – 57), functioning as an early form of fan art.

Historiated letters, like scribbled marginalia, inscribe subjective encounters with a text actualized from both the text and reader’s histories of reading. Whereas the non-digital author had to inscribe these histories herself, digital technologies including social media, search engines, and (for our purposes) digital games preserve and recollect both memorable and non-memorable narrational activities that emerge from a reader/player’s gameplay. Digital games use a variety of memory to back-up modifications that players make to the signs within the game, and platforms like Twitch and YouTube have provided even more resources for

139 players to document their historiations. As I demonstrate in the following section,

Twitch streams provide documentation of players’ historiation and the various meanings it actualizes within a game.

Popularizing Writing Games: Twitch Plays Pokémon

In 2011, Justin Kan and launched “Twitch,” a digital platform for players to live stream their gameplay. Built on their general-interest digital streaming platform, “Justin.tv,” Twitch quickly surpassed the success of

Justin.tv with nearly 45 million unique viewers tuning in to watch players stream a variety of content including e-sports, personal streams, gaming-related shows, and conversations between players, designers, and critics. Whereas services like

YouTube allow users to post pre-recorded videos for viewers to watch and comment on at a later date, Twitch allows players to stream live video feeds of game play for viewers to comment on in real time. When streaming, players include both a live feed of their gameplay and (typically) a live feed of themselves to capture their reactions and responses to the game play. Streamers also often interact with anonymous viewers who can send them messages via a live chat feed. Building on this collaborative and participatory approach to streaming,

Twitch will soon launch “Extensions,” which are interactive overlays that users can click to see more information about items and products in the streamer’s gaming set-up and additional details on the various elements of the game he or she might be streaming. Twitch thus encourages participation and interaction,

140 and this design philosophy has transformed Twitch into a platform for curation, conversation, creativity.

One such example of Twitch’s creative uses emerged in early 2014, the same year that Twitch was acquired by for $970 million USD. On

February 12, an anonymous programmer launched a stream titled “Twitch Plays

Pokémon” (TPP). TPP is a crowd-sourced playthrough of Nintendo’s Pokémon

Red, which is a single player game released for the Gameboy and Gameboy

Color in 1998. In Pokémon Red, the player controls “Red,” the game’s lead character, and assists him on his quest to become Pokémon league champion by capturing, battling, and trading in-game creatures called “Pokémon.” Outside of player-versus-player competitive battling and trading, Pokémon Red was designed as a strictly single player affair. The game’s challenges, narrative, level design, and progression are capable of only supporting a single player and would quickly become unbalanced (and incoherent) by the presence of another player in the game world.

Despite such hurdles, TPP injected a multiplayer function into Pokémon

Red. Yet TPP did so in an atypical fashion. Multiplayer, meaning “played by more than one player,” is typically designed for either “local” or “global” multiplayer.

Local multiplayer involves multiple players sharing a single console or computer by connecting two to four (and, in some cases, even more) controllers to the console via physical ports or wireless. Once the controllers are connected, each player receives their own controller and corresponding avatar with which they

141 may either assist or hinder the gameplay of other players. Global multiplayer provides a similar experience without requiring players’ physical presence in the same room. As the name suggests, players can play together around the world using their own console or computer and logging into a server on which the game is hosted. Whereas local multiplayer can only allow for a limited amount of players due to physical space and hardware capabilities, global multiplayer allows for millions of players, each of whom has their own avatar, to play together.

TPP, on the other hand, is a strange hybrid of single player and global multiplayer. Like single player, the game features only one avatar. But like global multiplayer, it allows millions of players to play together. Unlike single player, which involves one player controlling a single avatar, and global multiplayer, which provides individual avatars for each player, TPP grants its millions of players simultaneous control over one single avatar: Red. It does this through a creative adaptation of Twitch’s live chat interface, which runs in tandem with any stream viewers who might be watching. The emulator running the TPP version of

Pokémon Red features a script that “listens” to text sent to the chat room for specific messages such as “B,” “A,” “Down,” “Start,” “Up,” “Left,” “Right,” etc.

After viewers type and send these messages to the chat room, the script relays them to the game as in-game commands. By typing “Start” in chat, viewers achieve the same effect of pressing the “Start” button on a GameBoy and pull up the game’s pause menu.

142 Of course, placing control in the (often anarchic) hands of millions of viewers created challenges not encountered in a single player playthrough of

Pokémon Red. Doorways and cliffsides pose an especially troublesome challenge. Due to lag and delays between when a player enters a command and when it reaches the chat, many other commands appear both before and after. A precise input can be usurped by a series of random inputs that interfere with players reaching a specific goal. Take, for instance, a doorway. Red is one square to the left of the doorway, and a single “Right” input would move him a square over and place him directly in front of the doorway. Several possible issues can arise. If seven players, for example, realized they needed to move

Red to the right to enter a doorway and all sent “Right” to the chat at the same time, Red would move seven squares to the right. On the other hand, a player might intentionally try to subvert progress by entering a command such as

“Down” that would move Red off a cliff below the doorway and undo all the progress that the chat had made. Others might pop open the menu by sending

“Start” to the chat thereby causing the following input to navigate the game menu and not the game world. In each instance, inputs are mixed with millions of other inputs sent to the chat simultaneously. With this one avatar in the hands of millions of people simultaneously sending hundreds of inputs to the avatar, players (and the stream’s designer) worked to coordinate gameplay to overcome the game’s many challenges.

143 As roughly 1,165,140 players1 attempted to defeat the Elite Four and become Pokémon League Champions over the span of several weeks in 2014,

Twitch and mainstream news outlets took notice. In an article published on CNN,

Larry Frum quotes Matthew DiPietro, Vice President of Marketing for Twitch, as stating that “This is one more example of how video games have become a platform for entertainment and creativity that extends way beyond the original intent of the game creator.”2 DiPietro, unintentionally anticipating Boluk and

LeMieux’s claim that games are platforms for making other games, suggests that games can be used as a tool or platform to create “entertainment” and media writ large. Although DiPietro’s comments target specifically the creativity of the designers behind TPP, they also speak to players who wrote to the chat and overcame the game’s many challenges. Their gameplay both transformed TPP into a global cultural phenomenon, but it also made it a media artifact that was re-interpreted through a variety of paratextual media including fan fiction, fan art, video series, cosplay, and more.

To deal with and make sense of the chaotic gameplay that arose over the

16 days of concurrent gameplay, players produced an immense amount of fan- made media that read and re-interpreted the gameplay. Not only did Pokémon

Red provide a platform for the creation of a new gameplay experience, it was

1 Guinness World Records (http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-participants-on-a- single-player-online-videogame/)

2 http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/18/tech/gaming-gadgets/twitch-plays-pokemon/index.html

144 also a platform for the creation of new narratives, themes, and ideas that were non-existent in the single player experience. And these elements were actualized through TPP’s historiation of Pokémon Red, fans would immortalize them in the fan media described previously. TPP’s gameplay authored these media, allowing players to design new narrative experiences from a relatively static framework because of the potential flexibility of signs at play within digital games.

One of the primary examples of producing media through gameplay was called the “cult of Helix.” Helix here refers to an item that players can collect called the “Helix Fossil.” The game classifies the Helix Fossil as a “key item” that can only be used in a specific, story-driven moment later in the game when they can revive the ancient Pokémon, an “Omanyte,” to which the fossil belongs. Prior to this moment, however, any attempt to use the fossil triggers an in-game prompt that reads “This isn’t the time for that.” Players find this fossil in an area called “Mount Moon.” Within the mountain’s complex cave systems, players eventually stumble upon two fossils, the Helix Fossil and the Dome Fossil, and can take only one. TPP’s players chose the Helix Fossil, and after collecting the fossil, the chaotic hive mind frequently caused Red to open the game menu, select it, and trigger the prompt throughout his journey. Pureownege75 and davidjl1233 describe how this activity was interpreted by players,

Red, while constantly stumbling through the menus, often times selected the Helix Fossil, as if he is attempting to consult it for advice. Whenever Red attempted to use it, the phrase “This isn’t the time for that” would

3 https://www.reddit.com/r/twitchplayspokemon/wiki/historyoftpp_gen1

145 appear. It was also unable to be tossed, giving it an immortal status. Because of this, the Helix Fossil was turned into a god of sorts by the fans, praising it whenever good fortunes came their way. Praise Helix and Based Helix are common religious cries among the fans. Naturally, with the Dome Fossil the exact opposite of the Helix Fossil, the Dome Fossil was treated as the devil. If anything goes against them, it is often times stated to be the doings of the evil Dome Fossil.

While a single player run might see the player select the fossil once or twice prior to its transformation, TPP’s chaotic inputs caused players to repeatedly end up in the game’s item menu and select the item hundreds of times. Sam Barsanti notes that players interpreted this action through a narrative framework, describing it as “Consulting the Helix Fossil.”4 Barsanti writes “The idea was that the player character…would get lost—as evidenced by his tendency to walk around in circles and not get anything done—so he’d ask the Helix Fossil what he should do next.” Given the frequency and the locations at which this would occur (specifically before a crucial battle or tough area), this action was read as a form of “consultation”—in particular, with a higher power that would guide the players through their trials. Barsanti, again, recalls that

Since Twitch Plays Pokémon was consulting the Helix so often, the community came to attribute positive developments to its influence. After several days of this, the Helix was promoted from “magic advice giver” to “messiah,” which is certainly a reasonable leap to make. Cries of “Praise Helix!” arose from the chat whenever things went well, and it became so integral to the adventure that some people thought bringing the fossil to the Pokémon Laboratory was more important than actually beating the game.

The specific style of playing Pokémon Red not only produced a meta-game, but it also generated an entirely new narrative experience. Game play provided a way

4 http://games.avclub.com/praise-helix-the-strange-mythology-of-a-crowdsourced-p-1798266812

146 for players to modify the meaning of signs within the game and create new relationships between its signifying units. These relationships, a trail of the path that TPP took through Pokémon Red, actualized new meanings and media from the game.

Players’ gameplay shared an important relationship with visual media. As players composed these trails through the game, they also immortalized them through fan art documenting the tone and thematic elements of these events.

One such event was dubbed “Bloody Sunday” and involved the permanent release of 12 Pokémon depicted in Figure 5-1. Although Aeuma’s “The Massacre of Bloody Sunday” mistakes the phonographic hieroglyphic writing system for pictograms, it does capture the story as well as the thematic and emotional qualities produced in this moment. In the image, we see a human body with a

CRT monitor for a head impaling a “Raticate,” a mouse-type Pokémon, while

Flareon, a fox-type Pokémon, watches. Below this scene are 11 other Pokémon, set off from the event and located on to the margins of the image almost as if to represent their passing and not the Pokémon themselves. Behind, a dark symbol rises bearing the impression of the Dome Fossil at its center.

As Aeuma’s pictographic remix of the events on Bloody Sunday makes clear, these 11 Pokémon and the impaled Raticate are the 12 Pokémon that were lost on that day. The event and media that emerged from Bloody Sunday were a result of TPP’s frenetic gameplay and from how Pokémon Red stores

Pokémon that players capture. Pokémon Red only allows players six Pokémon to

147 accompany them into battle. These six Pokémon are known as the player’s

“party.” Any extra Pokémon that players capture are automatically sent to an in- game “storage bank” called the “PC.” The PC is a computer in the game that players can access to view victory stats, access items, and swap Pokémon in and out of their party. Players can also choose to “release” Pokémon while viewing them in the PC. “Releasing” a Pokémon so permanently removes it from the game, freeing up storage space but preventing players from ever accessing that specific Pokémon again. While this option poses little risk to a single player controlling the game, in the hands of millions this option becomes a serious risk to players’ Pokémon and progress.

While TPP attempted to avoid the PC, trolls and necessity often brought them into a deadly dance with this digital foe. Prior to Bloody Sunday, several key Pokémon had already been lost to the release feature, including TPP’s powerful starting Pokémon, and these losses associated any activity with or around the PC with a strong sense of dread and fear. Moreover, the PC had become home to the reviled “False Prophet,” the Flareon in Aeuma’s art. Flareon evolves from Eevee, a Pokémon with multiple evolution paths into various types of Pokémon. To get Eevee, however, TPP sacrificed a significant amount of time, all of their in-game money, and ended up releasing a beloved Pokémon (as well as withdrawing one that had had the ability to return them to the start of any dungeon or building they were exploring and effectively erase their progress). In addition to these sacrifices, TPP purchased the incorrect stone and accidently

148 evolved Eevee into the wrong Pokémon, transforming what had once been a source of hope into despair and earning Flareon the name “False Prophet.” The

False Prophet was eventually banished to the PC, where he ruled over the all the other deposited Pokémon as a Luciferian figure.

Later in the TPP stream, the players decided to capture “Zapdos,” a legendary and extremely powerful Pokémon that would allow them to easily clear the game’s final challenges. Through a combination of skill, coordination, and pure luck, TPP’s tens of thousands of players managed to work together and capture Zapdos without fleeing from the battle or accidentally killing it.

Unfortunately, TPP had six Pokémon in its party, and when a Pokémon party has more than six Pokémon, any additional Pokémon are automatically sent to the

PC. Thus, Zapdos was sent to the PC, forcing TPP into a risky gamble that could potentially release all of their Pokémon and end their game early. Pureownege75 and davidjl123 recount the fallout from the event,

The team had an exceptionally difficult time retrieving Zapdos. 12 pokemon [sic] were released, the most notable being Cabbage, BigDig, and Dux, the rest were just Safari Pokemon [sic]. This left the team with nothing to use Cut. Furthermore, although Zapdos was withdrawn, Bird Jesus and The Keeper were both Deposited…They continued to attempt using the PC, eventually withdrawing both Bird Jesus and The Keeper, but in the process, Zapdos was deposited, meaning no progress was made. They decided to go to the DayCare one last time, which was successful, and deposited Rick Gastly. They did this, so that they could safely withdraw Zapdos with an empty slot in their party, without having to deposit anything. The plan was a success, however those 12 who were lost would never be forgotten. This terrible day was known as Bloody Sunday by fans.

Through their gameplay, TPP authored this infamous event and inspired hundreds of fan media depictions of it and its consequence (including some that

149 take a Milton-esque approach to the events around Eevee/Flareon, depicting him as a sympathetic Luciferian figure). Both Bloody Sunday and Lord Helix demonstrate that gameplay itself can function as a form of authorship that, with the pre-set signs and systems coded into a game, builds new narratives and media that go well-beyond a game’s initial thematic and narrative trappings. TPP re-scripted player inputs as images invoking both Egyptian and Christian imagery found nowhere in the game to express the experience of play.

Although not strictly visual, the gameplay that TPP produced actualized the various virtual potentialities contained by Pokémon Red, and these actualizations were then “fixed” through the use of various fan media preserving their evental nature. Much of the fan media surrounding the game translates these actualizations into a variety of other media forms to make them more pronounced and permanent, but it was originally the gameplay’s interaction with the signifying potential of the signs within Pokémon Red that modified the meaning of the game to actualize these ideas and narratives. Thus, gameplay takes on an element of composition as it historiated meanings from various configurations of the symbols within the game. While this form of “writing” may not have a direct analogue in the history of writing or media production, it follows similar practices that expose the connections between gameplay and other forms of media creation including writing.

150 Writing Genres

TPP is not the only experiment with digital games as a platform to author media content. In fact, several scholarly journals have attempted to harness gameplay itself as a mode of authoring criticism about digital games. First Person

Scholar’s (FPS) 2015 Twitch channel, for example, serves as a reminder of the difficulties that such work faces. The nigh barren channel faced problems spanning technical (audio levels, unclear cuts, recording quality, etc.), ludic

(using gameplay as a mode of criticism), and discursive (how to talk about games live). On the other hand, Not Your Mama’s Gamer (NYMG), a multimedia hub for intersectional feminist engagements with games and gaming communities, is a thriving example of critical post-procedural work that merges both academic and professional voices in the field. NYMG publishes a variety of materials including articles, podcasts, and gameplay-based critiques of games that use play to put critical questions to games and larger social issues.

Outside of academic communities, players have led the post-procedural movement in the form of videos called “Let’s Plays.” As described in the previous section, Let’s Plays are recordings of gameplay that feature the gameplay of one or more players accompanied by voiceovers commenting on the game or related topics. Let’s Plays focus on the social aspect of gaming, offering both personalities and styles of play that are meant to reproduce the feeling of indirectly playing alongside friends or family. As a result, Let’s Plays frequently

151 (and sometimes unintentionally) provide in-depth analyses and criticisms of digital games.

Players like VaatiVidya have emerged from this genre, creating in-depth videos analyzing the narrative and lore of specific game series. VaatiVidya’s videos about FromSoftware’s Dark Souls often feature drastically slowed down gameplay to draw attention to certain characters, landscapes, and objects in the games, and his dialogue mimics the storytelling style of Dark Souls, offering a performative oral re-play of the games rather than a strictly academic or technical analysis. Whereas VaatiVidya’s videos are short and dramatic, Noah Caldwell-

Gervais offers long form critical analyses of various narrative and design choices.

Although both players practice similar forms of criticism, the expression of that criticism varies greatly and provides insight into their experiences playing these games.

Although many Let’s Plays rely almost entirely on dialogue to practice criticism, with gameplay largely serving as a visual aid or source material to support their points, several have used gameplay itself as the primary mode of documentation and criticism. VideoGameDunkey’s YouTube channel, for example, features videos showing unconventional forms of play that frequently go against expected forms of play to elicit humor. But beyond generating a comedic effect, his subversive playstyle also exposes critical insight into both the design of games and the structure of player communities, often revealing the interior logic of various games by playing against their design. In a recent video

152 on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, for example, Dunkey crouches Link on a slight incline directly in front of an enemy archer. While we might expect the archer to land a direct hit, several arrows pass harmlessly over Link’s head, showing us much about how player targeting, environment, and AI work in the game. Yet outside of his review videos, Dunkey’s dialogue rarely comments on these design features, typically offering only crude or humorous commentary.

Instead, Dunkey’s commentary relies almost entirely on gameplay itself to express critical insight into a game’s design.

Given the range of post-procedural artifacts, I offer here several genres for describing and creating these types of media. I do so to begin locating sets of recurrent elements that can be used to “identify” and create post-procedural media. Moreover, these genres can provide the beginnings of a vocabulary for discussing and analyzing different types of media. These genres, however, should not be taken as absolute or prescriptive, but rather as a starting point for engaging with and producing post-procedural criticism. The genres I address here are the following: instructive, subversive, expressive, professional, and fictional.

The instructive genre is a technical genre of gameplay using play to relay information about the game space to viewers and players. Here, play is slow and deliberate, exploring areas and engaging in events that a skilled player would skip over in order to present as total and accurate documentation of the game world as possible. The subversive is a critical genre of gameplay using play to

153 critique or challenge the technical and representational elements within a game.

Subversive elements include forms of play that specifically resist the choices and actions designers want players to make, and it can also include more extreme forms including playing with glitches and game breaking bugs. Expressive play is a genre of gameplay that uses the semiotic elements of the game space

(sounds, procedures, images, objects, etc.) to express some meaning that exceeds those coded into the game itself. This might be deeply personal, such as dropping items by a non-playable character’s body to mourn the loss, or it might be argumentative such as actively avoiding certain actions to resist the ideologies coded into a game’s procedures. Player-produced media in the professional genre seeks follow the rules of the game as closely as possible, attempting to embody the ideal player. Professional genres often appear in tournaments where players compete to be the best at a game. Finally, the fictional is an inventive genre of gameplay using play to create new genres and stories out of the pre-existing technical and representational elements within a game.

These genres do not represent the full spectrum of player-produced content, and they can overlap into hybrids that mix various elements of their genre. Hybrids might include “speedrunning” in which the player’s goal is to complete the game as fast as possible (professional) using tricks and exploits

(subversive) or “Let’s Play’s” in which the game play is a highly-personalized artifact (expressive) documenting some aspect of a game (instructive). This

154 collection of genres bears the standard academic caveats: it is neither total nor is it final, it is porous and open, it is not future-proof, etc. These genres, and those to come, however, hopefully provide a place to start understanding and studying games through the artifacts that players produce with them.

Consider Mojang’s Minecraft, which has seen a wide range of player- produced content including player-produced narratives and alternative gameplay modes, to in-game media and items. Two playthroughs that stand out are

Cameron Kunzelman’s “Kill the Pig” and Brendan Keogh’s “Towards Dawn.”

Kunzelman’s piece explores the problems of playing Minecraft while vegetarian, exposing the very real conflict that emerges between the procedures that designers code into games and player’s own values as one begins playing a game. In many ways, the gameplay he describes might be seen as a prototypical post-procedural form of criticism. When Kunzelman began playing Minecraft, the game was in an early alpha state lacking many of the features that it has received since its official release. At the time, notes Kunzelman, health existed in the game and could be restored with “food items.” While the game provides many meat-based food items, Kunzelman, a vegetarian, sought alternatives, “I had previously experimented with farming…A little water, and little ingenuity, and a lot of tool usage would give you a nice plot of land. Creating enough wheat gave you access to bread, a filling meal that would give you something like six hearts of health” (56). Later updates added a hunger mechanic represented by a row of ten drumsticks at the bottom of players’ screens. Kunzelman describes it

155 ominously, “Then hunger came. It is very much like real life. You run, you get hungry. You mine, you get hungry. You traverse mountains, you swim oceans, you get hungry…when all of your food stores are drained, your body begins to give way. Your health drains. It is a slow death” (56). For Kunzelman, this mechanic proved a constant reminder of finitude, one enhanced by his decision to carry his ethics into the game space. Despite the looming threat of starvation,

Kunzelman refrained from killing the plentiful animals roaming Minecraft for meat.

He writes, “I admit that this behavior is odd. Why would I end a life in the game, losing progress and experience, rather than kill and eat one of the pigs or cows in close proximity to me? The decision to eat animals—and it is always a decision— often seems like a foregone conclusion to us…My ethics dictated the space of possible actions. It was unthinkable for me to kill an animal in the game” (56).

The proceduralist framework leaves little room for a player’s ethics to dictate the space of possible actions and rather defers to the designer as dictating player ethics. Kunzelman, however, pursues a form of gameplay consistent with this ethics despite the challenges that Minecraft may pose against them. His gameplay, then, very much fits into both subversive and expressive genres, constructing a counterargument through a personal act of resistance that openly defies the ideology coded into the game’s procedures (and on brazen display in the drumstick icons).

156 But the game eventually caught up with Kunzelman. Building a house in an area of the game where wheat would not grow, Kunzelman found himself in a situation where he had to kill a pig,

I hit it once. It squealed and snorted and tried to run. I chased it. I hit it with a shovel and it tried to run, panicked, and didn’t make it very far. I hit it until it tipped over and pieces of meat flew out of its body. I’m haunted by it. I’ve killed hundreds of AI humans in video games. I have executed civilians. I have ended civilizations. I’ve cleared out a fictional Dubai of all living beings. I’ve made a wasteland of digital worlds and preemptively struck with nuclear weapons.

Kunzelman’s playthrough exposes the ideologically fraught experience of restoring hunger points in Minecraft in a way that does not simply reproduce the meanings coded into the game. Whereas a proceduralist player would simply kill the pig and move on (or, at the very least, a description of this mechanism would present such an image), Kunzelman resists, contemplates, and suffers through this experience. This is not “farming,” it cannot be reduced to the same experience of mining for minerals with a pickaxe. Kunzelman’s gameplay materializes how this is an act of murder that may allow others to witness the pain that animal consumption creates. The actions here are not simply about what the designers of Minecraft intend to convey, but what Kunzelman realizes and experiences—something that cannot simply be glossed over. Quitting the game after this experience, Kunzelman here produces an expressive and subversive document that both resists the ideological content coded into the game and comments on it.

157 We can find a similar instance of post-procedural criticism Keogh’s

“Towards Dawn.” In this artifact, Keogh creates a self-imposed permadeath mode in Minecraft in which he avoided the game’s central loop of mining for resources, dying, and recovering resources. Rather than setting up shelter and settling into a specific area of the game, Keogh spent fifty-eight days walking his avatar into Minecraft’s vast, procedurally generated wilderness, becoming lost and unable to retrace his trail were he to die. Keogh writes, “The miner [Keogh] realised [sic] that his head had been in the sand (and the dirt and the stone) for far too long and that he was missing out on an entire world around him. So he set out to make amends. No more would he waste his days beneath the surface. He would head east, towards the sun, and see everything his world has to offer.”

Like Kunzelman, then, the game becomes a site to create an experience directly opposed to what the rules and processes would lead one to believe.

“Towards Dawn” inspired a blog in which Keogh wrote about his journey.

Keogh explains the blog as a product of the gameplay, noting that “my character’s life became increasingly valuable, I felt increasingly pressured…to record every step of the journey…I was the only person who would ever walk through this world and, when I died, no one else would ever see it again.”

Keogh’s gameplay is both expressive, offering a personal statement of what it means to live, survive, and die, as well as fictional, creating a narrative and alternative play mode within the game. It also exposes despite the procedural interpretation of Minecraft as a game focused on building shelter and cities, it

158 also accommodates nomadic styles of play that challenge such interpretations.

Keogh’s artifact argues against a life spend amassing wealth and sheltering oneself from the world, and instead embraces finitude and precarity.

I anticipate that objections to post-procedural criticism may be lodged due to the open-ended nature of Minecraft actively encouraging creative and expressive forms of play despite the strong set of rules that still do guide how what players do within the game space. Future post-procedural studies will look to other games to consider the critical artifacts that are can be produced through gameplay. Games including Doom or , which do attempt to impose a set of ethics through the processes and rules in the game, may be productive sites for subversive and critical post-procedural work. Similarly, Let’s

Plays on YouTube offer many documents of creative and critical forms of play.

With any luck, post-proceduralism will encourage game critics to begin drawing played games into their writing and begin to consider games as sites for producing criticism.

Conclusion

Many scholars from various fields have arrived at and produced frameworks for attending to the post-procedural “player-as-author,” including

Janet Murray’s narratological holodeck, Espen Aarseth’s cybertextual player,

Chris Crawford’s interactive storytelling, etc. Most recently, Carly A. Kocurek and

Jennifer DeWinter note that this concern with the play-as-author extends to a much wider swath of game studies, which “emphasizes the agency of the player

159 in cocreating [sic] a game through play. No game is the same because no play session is the same” (“Miyamoto” xii). Whereas procedural rhetoric would ignore such concerns and instead focus on how players give voice to the meanings that designers code into the procedures of a game, the post-procedural content that defines the ecology of writing with(in) games looks to how players use games to articulate their beliefs, values, and stories. Post-procedural content should not be interpreted as a complete break from procedurality, but rather an amalgam of positions. It maintains Bogost’s belief that designers intend to express meaning through game design, but it also recognizes that nothing guarantees that this

“intended meaning” will be what players produce through their play.5 Instead, drawing on Boluk and LeMieux’s approach to games as equipment for making

(8), post-procedural content revises games into technologies for players to author their own creative and critical content. It encompasses critical discourse about games through players’ personal encounters with the medium, perhaps best demonstrated by Fight Books’ series, which “takes a critical, historical, and personal look at a single game.” In working with post-procedural content, contributions to Writing with(in) Games shifts mediums, pursuing a mode of criticism that is composed through play. With tools like YouTube, FRAPS, and

Twitch readily accessible, contributions to writing with(in) games will not only produce critiques in text, but also through their gameplay. Games themselves

5 See also Sidney I. Dobrin’s description of paralogic in which there exists no guarantee that meaning making and discourse production can be reduced to a set of modular processes (Constructing Knowledges 77).

160 can become sites for doing the critical work that has for too long been strictly the domain of print, and players can still write competent and complex arguments through gameplay itself. But regardless of form, these approaches must start with play and players.

161

Figure 5-1. Aeuma’s “The Massacre of Bloody Sunday” (2014) showing the sacrifice of numerous beloved Pokemon through the release function in the in-game PC.

162

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Kyle Bohunicky received his Ph.D. from the University of Florida’s

Department of English in Spring 2018. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida’s Digital Worlds Institute. His PhD work at the University of Florida’s Department of English focused on digital game studies, writing studies, media studies, and ecocriticism with forthcoming and published essays appearing in Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and

Environment, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, and chapters appearing in Computer Games and Technical Communication, Doing Visual Studies: One

Image, Multiple Methodologies, and Game Criticism. His dissertation explores the creative and critical dimensions of digital game play from a Writing Studies perspective.

At the Digital Worlds Institute, Kyle plans to continue his dissertation research by exploring and creating techniques (and technologies) for documenting and archiving gameplay. His teaching combines his interests in writing and digital games through courses in “Writing for Interactive Media” and

“Digital Storytelling,” both of which explore how to write for and with the ever- growing area of AR, VR, digital games and other interactive technologies.

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