Games and Culture

ARTICLE
10.1177/1555412005281913
Krzywinska / Pleasures and Dangers of the Game

Games and Culture

Volume 1 Number 1
January 2006 119-122
© 2006 Sage Publications

The Pleasures and 10.1177/1555412005281913

http://games.sagepub.com
hosted at
Dangers of the Game http://online.sagepub.com

Up Close and Personal

Tanya Krzywinska
Brunel University

What are the pleasures and the dangers of the way that the study of digital games has crys-
tallized over the past 3 years? The author argues here that a pluralistic approach is
required if the full complexity of games is to be addressed and analyzed, and as such, tex-
tual approaches to the analysis games should not be dismissed no matter what the partic-
ular focus of attention. To understand a game’s design, the way it seeks to shape the
player’s experience and to make the game meaningful, it is essential to take account of the
formal features of a given game. Being up close and personal forces one to think through
the specificities of a game and what it is like to play that game. The author therefore advo-
cates a combination of a formal and phenomenological approach as a means of exploring
the complex relationship between game text and player.

Keywords: game play; textual analysis; phenomenology; power; pleasure

I ’m on my way to Iron Forge from the night-elf outpost of Astranaar; it’s quite a jour-
ney, involving running, catching a boat, and flying on a hypogryff. My bags are full
of booty robbed from the newly slain, and I’m looking to trade it for a stave with better
stats. Sitting astride the hypogryff, I type my elation to guild friends about the sensa-
tional experience of flying over the spectacular patchwork world of Azeroth in real
time. My mind teems with choices between tasks, sorting what has priority among a
host of competing demands. World of Warcraft continues to draw my thoughts when I
am not playing, perhaps more fully than I’d like; I find myself thinking about the game
when I should be focused on other things, and these thoughts are often present in my
conversations and lectures. The many hours I spend hunched over the keyboard, the
toleration of aching shoulders, the way the game has crept under my cerebral skin tes-
tifies to some of the powerful pleasures of digital games. It is the pleasures of playing
games—how they are generated through the particular configuration of a game and
what they speak of personally as well as in broader cultural terms—that drives the
engine for my particular interest in games. Keyed into this is consideration of what
makes a “good,” pleasure-generating game, which is of course contingent on a range
of cultural, formal, and industrial circumstances (including the cultural organization
of taste, gender, age, identity). What this approach to digital games offers is useful for

119
120 Games and Culture

the industry seeking to broaden its market and offer innovative products but also to the
academic and general community concerned with the impact of games on the social
and cultural landscape. It may be a personal approach, it may not be empirical or tech-
nical, but it is intent on understanding the lure of games and the subjective experience
of playing them.
With the evolution in digital games into mainstream media it is not perhaps surpris-
ing that academics from different disciplinary backgrounds have become interested in
theorizing, measuring, and developing them. In a recent column written for the Digital
Games Research Association’s (DiGRA) hardcore, Frans Mäyrä (2005) called for
universities to adopt game studies as a new discipline. Many of us welcome this type
of validation of our research, and I for one look forward to a time when I don’t have to
smuggle games into my film courses under the rubric of genre. What I fear however is
that if all game research is done within dedicated departments a kind of new orthodoxy
of approach will crystallize. This may be the price of the development of our subject. It
might mean blindsiding those who are for example engaged with philosophy or politi-
cal economy because they are not essential, apparently, to running practical game de-
sign programs. There must always be room in the research community for newcomers
from whatever background, who may bring ideas that challenge new orthodoxies.
A range of recent articles in a number of fora has focused on the state of play in
game studies (seemingly a more popular topic of interest than studies of individual
games). Laudably, many advocate learning from each other. Dialogue and argument
work to create a thriving and vibrant research community. In some cases, old debates
about the values of disciplinary approaches are resurrected; if the focus on games en-
ables old debates to be seen in a new light, it’s good news, but straight rehashing with-
out consideration of the specificities of games should be avoided. Divisions can prove
productive and positive but under certain circumstances become negative. The polar-
ization of debates into extremes produces divisive factionalism—sidelining work of a
dissimilar type in peer review is a form of grief-play perhaps. Polarization arises in
part from the institutional context of competition within which we work. The effect is
that subtleties are flattened out and the exploration of byways likely to be closed off,
particularly when they are speculative and involve experimental thinking. In short,
vistas become narrowed. Academia is now industry focused, funding hungry, and
biased toward empiricism and entrepreneurialism; as a result, speculative and idiosyn-
cratic work that values intellectual inquiry is becoming an endangered species. If ex-
perimental thinking is devalued, academia becomes a less interesting place to work
and study. All approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, and each formulate
issues and perspectives according to particular rhetorics. Power and pleasure are not
therefore simply a dynamic at work in the playing of games. Speculative approaches
have their place and are essential components in making game studies a rich, evolving,
and multifaceted entity. It is therefore imperative for a research body such as DiGRA
to remain committed to encouraging dialogue between researchers and ensuring that
all “flavors” of game research are represented, accommodated, and supported.
As a result no doubt of an arts background, my approach to games is based on the
analysis of the player/text relationship. Counter perhaps to the general trend, I regard
 Krzywinska / Pleasures and Dangers of the Game 121

this relationship as central to ludology, and it ties into the address of broader questions
about games as cultural artifacts and agents. Any game has a set of “textual” features
and devices; a game is a formal construct that provides the environmental, stylistic,
generic, structural, and semiotic context for play. Images, audio, formal structures, the
balance of play, the capabilities of in-game objects and characters are all features that
operate “textually.” The concerted action of a game’s textual strategies facilitate, at
least in part, the generation of emotional, physical, and cognitive engagement, shaping
the player’s experience of game play and making it meaningful. To understand design,
the way it seeks to shape the player’s experience, and to evaluate the values of a game,
it is important to conduct a detailed textual analysis. Being up close and personal with
a given game forces you to think through its specificity, helping thereby to ensure
against the temptations of overgeneralization and testing the validity of top-down
analyses of “games” as a general category. Even empirical studies of gamers might
benefit from such analysis, necessary if they are to understand the role of differ-
ent player styles and the ways players might subvert “preferred” modes of play and
interpretation.
It is often assumed that the textual refers to the noninteractive aspects of games; this
appears to come from the understandable desire to look at games as games in their own
right. It is certainly the case that the functionality of games marks them off from other
media. The analysis of a game as text takes into account all formal aspects of a game,
including all those factors in play in the way that functionality operates in the games.
What we have here is a means of focusing intently on what is offered by the text to the
player, the extent to which a game enables the player to bring things to the game—
either in terms of play or interpretation—and the types and sources of pleasures on
offer. Games demand things of the player in ways that other texts do not, but the
performative doing aspect of games is always located in a particular “environmental”
context; these differ, as does the amount of freedom to play or interpret in a given
game. The analysis of the game as text means that it is approached as an aesthetic
form, but not in the same way as other texts. The focus is on the relationships between
text and player in terms of game play, design, style, reception, and cultural/semantic
context. To regard games as texts does not therefore mean simply that they are stories.
What I enjoy about playing games is the sense of being an agent in a textually rich
and coherent game world. Empirical studies are useful for finding generalizable facts
about gaming, but rarely are they able to capture the experiential breadth of being-and-
doing-in-the-game-world. My work aims to engage in detail with the ways that experi-
ence is constituted between player agency and textual determination, as well as taking
into account intertextual, cultural, and epistemological resonances that are likely to
come into play. This combination of textual and performative analysis is grounded in
phenomenology, which allows a very up-close and personal engagement with the
specificities of games and the ways they are keyed into much larger issues about the
way that fantasy and pleasure are configured and expressed. This type of approach
might produce strange fruit, fruit that might not prove to be generalizable or grounded
in objective analysis. Nonetheless, speculative engagement may well produce insights
not available via other approaches to games. This might help toward a more open
122 Games and Culture

understanding of what makes a game, why games are appealing, how they operate in
terms of identity, interpretation, and “effects” on behavior.
Research bodies such as DiGRA, designed to champion the value of game studies,
have a responsibility to promote and nurture a range of approaches, including “softer,”
more speculative approaches. It could be argued that an evolutionary process might be
at work—theories and approaches that yield little of direct use in technical terms to the
industry or attracting funding die out. But, this would not be good evolution because
it is based on a bias toward certain investments (discursive or financial). If lone re-
searchers in non–game studies departments or who don’t swim in the current of the
new orthodoxies are left without acknowledgement or community sustenance, then
the game studies of the future will be a far less rich and interesting place.

Reference
Mäyrä, F. (2005). The quiet revolution: Three theses for the future of game studies. Retrieved May 2005 from
http://www.digra.org/hardcore/hc4

Tanya Krzywinska is a reader in film and TV studies at Brunel University. As well as editing hardcore, she
is the author of A Skin for Dancing in: Possession, Witchcraft and Voodoo in Film (Flicks Books, 2000), Sex
and the Cinema (Wallflower Press, in press), coauthor of Science Fiction Cinema (Wallflower Press, 2000),
Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: Videogame Forms and Contexts (IB Tauris, in press), and coeditor of
ScreenPlay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces (Wallflower Press, 2002). She is currently editing Videogames/
Text/Player with Barry Atkins (MUP), has recently begun work on Imaginary Worlds: A Cross-Media Study
of the Aesthetic, Formal and Interpolative Strategies of Virtual Worlds in Popular Media, and is currently
developing an MA program in video game design.