Playing Dystopia

Front matter

erald Farca laying Dystopia Nightmarish Worlds in Video Games and the Player’s Aesthetic Response

[transcript | Studies of Digital Media Culture

Gerald Farca Playing Dystopia

Contents

Acknowledgements | 9

Hypothesis: The Video Game Dystopia as a New Strategic Enterprise of Utopia and Playful Trial Action | 16

State of Research: The Assumed Position Within Video Game Studies | 18 Method: A Creative Encounter Between Guiding Structure and Playful Expression | 23

PART I: TOWARDS THE VIDEO GAME DYSTOPIA Preface to Part I | 35 1.1 Utopianism | 40

1.2 The Literary Utopia of Sir Thomas More and BIOSHOCK INFINITE’s Columbia | 43

1.3 The Secret Wish Hidden Within the Dream | 52

1.4 Defining the Literary Utopia | 59

1.5 Towards the Video Game Dystopia | 62

2 Dystopia: Nightmarish Worlds as Distorted Anxiety Dreams | 65 2.1 Anti-Utopia or Dystopia? | 69 2.2 Anti-Utopia as a Rejection of Utopianism | 73 2.3 Variants of Dystopia: The Classical and Critical Dystopia | 74 2.4 Four Variants of the Video Game Dystopia: A Typology | 92 2.5 The Resistance of the One Free Man: City 17 as Orwellian Nightmare | 94 2.6 Dystopia’s Plot Framework and the Video Game Dystopia | 108

3 Warning, Effectiveness, and Targets of the Video Game Dystopia | 113 3.1 The Video Game Dystopia’s Primary Function as Warning | 115 3.2 The Video Game Dystopia’s Effectiveness in Issuing Warnings | 120 3.3 Targets of the Video Game Dystopia | 124 3.4 The Diversity of the Perspectival Network as Precondition for Dystopia’s Effectiveness | 150

Preface to Part Il | 155

4.1 Video Games as Forms of Representational Art and Fiction | 165 4.2 The Different Games We Play with Fictions | 170

4.3 The Implied Player | 194

4.4 The Game(world) as a System of Perspectives | 210

5.1 Playful Trial Actions in Dystopia | 253

5.2 Defamiliarised Worlds and Player Actions | 274

5.3 The Flux of Images and the Player’s Creation of the Aesthetic Object in METRO 2033 | 301

5.4 The Created Reality of Fiction and its Aesthetic Effect | 317

PART Ill: PLAYING DYSTOPIA Preface to Part Ill | 323

6 Night-Time Dreams and Wish-Fulfilment: The Struggle for Utopia in BIOSHOCK INFINITE | 325 6.1 The Utopia of Columbia and Basic Blank Structures to Lure in the Player | 329 6.2 The Shadows of Utopia: Strategies of Disneyfication and the Capitalist-Racist Dystopia of Columbia | 337 6.3 Elizabeth as the Figure of the Temptress and her Process of Emancipation | 349

6.4 The Route Through the Mazes of Ideological Perspectives | 354 6.5 The Guilt of Having Lost Utopia and Ways to Regain it | 362 6.6 Conclusion | 370

7.1 The Cordyceps Brain Infection as Fictional Novum and Instigator to Dystopia | 377

7.2 The Official Narrative: City Spaces of Violence and Conflict | 381

7.3 The Counter-Narrative as the Journey to Nature | 389

7.4 Conclusion | 401

8 Horizons and the Video Game Dystopia | 403 List of Abbreviations | 409

Glossary | 411

Ludography | 415

Acknowledgments

It has been quite a journey, and I want to thank a fair number of people in various countries for their support over these last few years.

I am greatly indebted to my supervisors, Prof. Dr. Martin Middeke and PD. Dr. Christoph Henke, for their invaluable help and inspiration during my Ph.D. studies and time at the University of Augsburg.

In addition, I want to express my gratitude to Espen Aarseth, Hans-Joachim Backe, and Susana Pajares Tosca for the fruitful conversations we had and their critical feedback on my work, and the entire team of the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen for involving me in a pleasant and creative ambiance.

Many thanks go as well to the Oberseminar of Augsburg University, including Alexander Lehner, Christian Attinger, David Kerler, Martin Riedelsheimer, Adina Sorian, Despina Repa, Bettina Auerswald, Korbinian Stéckel, Timo Müller, and many more.

In addition, I am particularly grateful to Gundolf S. Freyermuth, Björn Bartholdy, André Czauderna, and the team of the Cologne Game Lab.

Moreover, many thanks go to Sebastian Domsch, Jens Müller, Susanna Layh, Hubert Zapf, Günter Butzer, Michael Nitsche (from my hometown Augsburg), Miguel Sicart, Markus Schulzke, and to the many colleagues and friends I met at international conferences: Victor Navarro-Remesal, Lars de Wildt, Jan Wysocki, Ea Christina Old-Gregg Willumsen, Daniel Vella, Sebastian Möring, Oli Tapio Leino, Hugo Montembeault, Arno Gérgen, Rudolf Inderst, Marc Bonner, Veli- Matti Karhulati, Souvik Mukherjee, Thomas Apperley, Tomasz Majkowski, Justyna Janik, Toh Weimin, Pawel Frelik, Feng Zhu, Astrid Ensslin, Joel Lehman, Anders Sundnes Lovlie, Ida Kathrine Hammeleff Jorgensen, Rune Kristian Lundedal Nielsen, Michael Debus, Sebastian Risi, Daniel Cermak-Sassenrath, Martin Pichlmaier, Anders Hartzen, Sebastian Zethraeus, Flaminia Grimaldi, Sigursteinn Gunnarsson, Alon Kaplan, Jennifer Killham, Kevin Lin, Julian Oberbeck,

Further, I want to thank three foundations that helped me partially fund this book: FAZIT-Stiftung, Oskar-Karl-Forster Stiftung, Stiftung Digitale Spielekultur.

Lastly, and most importantly, I wish to thank my parents for their continuous support and love.

Introduction

In FALLOUT 3 (Bethesda Game Studios, 2008), the player embarks on a journey into the dystopia of the Capital Wasteland. The gameworld awaits her! in turmoil and in anarchical structures and factions that divide the wasteland. This survival of the fittest is experienced by the player in various forms and can be narrowed down to a chain of events that confronts her with a far-reaching choice—which is representative for my deliberations in this study.

Relatively early in the game, the player is sent on a quest to Tenpenny Tower, a (supposedly) utopian microcosm within the larger dystopia of the gameworld. Tenpenny Tower is fenced in by a wall to protect it from the surrounding areas and is the home of Allistair Tenpenny, a formerly renowned businessman who grants entrance only to the wealthy and noble. He is especially suspicious of a race called the ghouls. After the apocalypse, they were deformed by the radiation fallout and are now avoided by most wasteland inhabitants. Meanwhile, the word has spread about the sterile illusion of Tenpenny Tower, and the ghouls regularly attempt to gain residence in it. Based on this premise and the perspectives (positions) it holds, the player becomes involved in the events and is set in a precarious situation. In order to mediate between the positions, several possibilities are thinkable and potential for the player to enact: 1) eradicating the ghouls; 2) killing the inhabitants of Tenpenny Tower; 3) solving the issue through diplomacy (which might nonetheless end in catastrophe); 4) doing nothing. The prospect for an ethical solution, as Miguel Sicart claims, are thus slim’—but becoming creatively engaged in the situation holds emancipatory potential for the player.

1 Throughout this study, I will use the personal pronouns she, he, her, him interchangeably and in alternation with each new chapter. There is no agenda behind the constellations, the aim is for readability while upholding a gender-inclusive use of pronouns.

2 Miguel Sicart, Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013), 96-98.

Consequently, to resolve the issue and have the situation exert its effect, the player becomes involved in a multi-faceted form of play that oscillates between her literal interaction with a set of rules and navigation of the gameworld and a figurative one that comprises her imaginative games within it. In a mixture of imaginative acts and ergodic actions, therefore, the player approaches the issue and becomes psychologically and aesthetically (emancipatedly) involved in the action. To do so, she imaginatively closes the indeterminacies of the gameworld and sets the various elements and events in context. There are many blank spots and incomplete structures in FALLOUT 3—such as an inaccessible building or incomplete information about a character or a situation—and to fill in these particulars, the player draws from her real-world knowledge, that of other fictional worlds/games, and her experience so far in the game. This form of involvement is well-known in literature and film, but here it occurs simultaneously with the player’s navigation of the gameworld and her performance in it. As Henry Jenkins holds:

Narrative comprehension is an active process by which viewers assemble and make hypotheses about likely narrative developments on the basis of information drawn from textual cues and clues. ... As they move through the film, spectators test and reformulate their mental maps of the narrative action and the story space. In games, players are forced to act upon those mental maps, to literally test them against the game world itself.

Espen Aarseth has described this latter quality of video game play—which he calls the ergodic—as a sort of physical involvement between “ergon and hodos, meaning ‘work’ and path’,” where the player exerts “nontrivial effort ... to traverse the text [game]

and fills in the gameworld indeterminacies by creating signifiers and personal perspectives on the game. This may occur when she decides to solve a quest in a particular manner, chooses from different dialogue options, discovers new parts of the gameworld, or may be as simple as the choice of certain equipment.

3 Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2001), 16-17.

4 Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 126.

5 Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1997), 1.

Ergodicity, therefore, enables the player to manoeuvre and act within a gameworld through some sort of input device (such as a controller)—but this also presupposes “a disposition and readiness to act” on the player’s side, “not merely the action of pressing a button or pulling a joystick.”® Gordon Calleja thus rightfully claims that the ergodic requires “the player’s cognitive effort”

as she is planning her moves.® Still, this form of cognitive involvement is different from the imaginative involvement referred to above, as it is concerned with deliberations on ludic encounters and problem solving, whereas the latter also refers to the player’s engagement with a storyworld. Naturally, both forms are often intertwined, but a separation seems beneficial, as there are different things going on in the player’s mind in each situation of play.

Play, as such, involves the player in both imaginative and ergodic ways and draws on her real-world knowledge so that she can comprehend the gameworld and act within it. By doing so, play naturally interweaves gameworld considerations with those of the empirical world’—this is to say, while the player negotiates her options within the diegesis (ludic possibilities to exploration/interaction, gaining power/money by killing the ghouls, or solving issues in an ethical manner, and so on), her deliberations are informed by what she knows from the empirical world (familiar norms, conventions, processes, states of affairs, etiquettes, etc.). However, these elements are experienced differently in the dystopian gameworld, for the transfer to the fictional reality has distorted their appearance. By disrupting the vertical hierarchies of the empirical world elements, magnifying the differences, and reorganising them horizontally into gameworld perspectives/positions, they are partially freed from their usual interrelations. As such, the created reality confronts the player with a refracted mirror of what she knows and involves her in games of estrangement between what is familiar and unfamiliar. This state of matter may entice and bewilder the player at the same time, as it aggravates the referentiality between worlds, but, in doing so, it allows for the formation of hitherto unexpected connections between the dystopian gameworld and the opaque nature of social totality. Video game play, therefore, shows emancipatory potential so

6 Gordon Calleja, In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011), 41.

Ibid., 42.

Ibid., 41-42.

With the empirical world, I refer to the extratextual surroundings (outside of the gameworld) and to what is usually meant when saying the ‘real world’, the ‘actual world’, and so on.

fundamental to the dystopian genre and equals the appreciator’s experience in non-ergodic art, which also “resists translation into referential meaning.” "°

Play, in this sense, can be “pleasurable but risky, and potentially harmful,” "' as it “disruptively reveal[s] our conventions, assumptions, biases, and dislikes.” !? This quality of play is expressed in the resolution of the Tenpenny Tower quest in whatever form, when the player compares the enacted events (the perspectives she encounters and co-creates, which foreground certain empirical world elements) to what she knows from the real world and composes creative connections between both worlds. The image of Tenpenny Tower that emerges in the player’s mind thereby allows for the establishment of links to and associations with the empirical world—whether these revolve around the policy of building a wall to protect the United States of America from Mexican immigration and to marginalise ethnic minorities, or the cultural swing to the right in parts of Europe, where countries such as Poland and Hungary refrain from accepting Syrian refugees for fear they would pollute their immaculate Utopias. Such free-floating implications stand not simply in metaphorical nor allegorical relation to the empirical world but result from an intricate experience in the gameworld and the negotiation of its contents. In addition, they hold the potential to influence the player’s in-game actions, and through this test run in virtuality, she may explore solutions (or attenuations) for similar crises in the empirical world. Of course, imaginings and consequent actions differ from player to player and the cultural surroundings they are familiar with, but they are nonetheless outlined by a game’s structure—that is, what the player encounters and how it is arranged.

It is this dialectic between (dystopian) game, player, and culture (world) that will be the object of scrutiny in this study and which is responsible for affecting the player in a lasting manner. Representational art—including literature, film, theatre, and games—involves the participant in creative games of fictionality in different ways. These are informed by the artwork’s guiding structure and the participant’s freedom of imagination and action, and require a specific approach from her. This is because she not only tries to make sense of the work at hand, which was encoded in its transition to the fictional realm, but also because in doing so, the participant composes creative connections to the empirical world in a process of decoding that is filtered through her self and set in motion by her attempts to close the blanks between the work’s perspectives. Wolfgang Iser has described

10 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, trans. Wilhelm Fink (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1978), 11; cf. 61, 99, 184.

11 Miguel Sicart, Play Matters (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014), 11.

ce this process for the literary text as the reader’s “attempt to ideate [vorstellen] that which one can never see as such” and that “the character of these images consists in the fact that they bring to light aspects which could not have emerged through direct perception of the object.”!? Therefore, playing dystopia (and video game narratives in general) comes close to—though it also differs in important respects—the reader’s involvement in the literary text. For, in contrast to ideology,

14 and this allows

“heuristic fiction proposes trial runs for approaches to what is, “the reader to see everyday norms and conventions, social habits of thinking and feeling, in a different light ... [and] to explore, in a kind of trial action in a virtual environment, the consequences of breaking and transgressing norms without having to fear sanctions in real life.”!

Such a playful engagement with fictional worlds is of great benefit to the philosophy of Utopia!® and its manifestations in fictional narrative form: the genres of utopia and dystopia. These magnify the distance between empirical and fictional worlds even further as they involve the reader/appreciator in paradisiac or nightmarish worlds, respectively, and in an “exploration of alternatives in a way that supports or catalyzes social transformation.”!’ In this study, I will focus on dystopian fiction, which is said to evoke a specific effect in the appreciator. By

14 Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology, trans. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1993), 143; emphasis added.

15 Ingo Berensmeyer, Literary Theory: An Introduction to Approaches, Methods and Terms (Stuttgart: Klett Lerntraining, 2009), 79; emphasis added.

16 Following Baccolini and Moylan, I use capitalisation to refer to the philosophy of Utopia (utopianism) and Anti-Utopia and to specific Utopias—a certain imaginary, virtual, or real place that fulfils the necessary aspects of a Utopia: for instance, the Utopia of Columbia in BIOSHOCK INFINITE (Irrational Games, 2013) or the island of Utopia in Thomas More’s eponymous narrative (1516). Lowercase will be used for Utopia’s manifestations, such as real-world practices or fictional experiments: the literary utopia/dystopia, those of film/theatre, and the video game utopia/dystopia. (Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, “Introduction. Dystopia and Histories,” in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, ed. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan [New York: Routledge, 2003], 11.)

17 Ruth Levitas and Lucy Sargisson, “Utopia in Dark Times: Optimism/Pessimism and Utopia/Dystopia,” in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, ed. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan (New York: Routledge, 2003), 13.

involving her in imaginative trial actions and letting her explore playfully a reduced and estranged version of social totality (in the fictional storyworld), the dystopian narrative functions as a warning to humankind. It reveals troublesome trends hidden within empirical reality while, at the same time, it investigates potential solutions to the nightmare!’—and, thus, represents a “heuristic device ... an epistemological and not ontological entity.”!? Consequently, and in a “disruption (Beunruhigung) of the present,””° Utopia evokes an aesthetic response in the appreciator that enlightens her through fictional trial actions and drives her to ethical action in the real world.

HYPOTHESIS: THE VIDEO GAME DYSTOPIA AS A NEW STRATEGIC ENTERPRISE OF UTOPIA AND PLAYFUL TRIAL ACTION

The main purpose of this study is to explain why these claims apply so well to the video game dystopia (VGD), and to explore the player’s aesthetic response to nightmarish gameworlds. I will argue that the video game dystopia describes a new strategic enterprise of the utopian philosophy. By sending the player on a journey through hell but retaining a hopeful (utopian) core, it involves her in a playful trial action (or test run) in which she may test, track, and explore in detail an estranged gameworld and an alternative societal model through imaginative and ergodic means. This venture into the fictional reality of dystopia shows potential to warn the player about negative trends within empirical reality and to explore emancipatory routes that may transform the gameworld. It thus serves the player as a subversive example and inducement to effect social change and transformation in the empirical world.

This aesthetic response is meticulously outlined by dystopia’s implied player, which can be described as the affordance and appeal structure of the game that

18 Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000), 96-97, 106-107; Fatima Vieira, “The Concept of Utopia,” in The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, ed. Gregory Claeys, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), 6, 17; Hans Ulrich Seeber, Die Selbstkritik der Utopie in der Angloamerikanischen Literatur (Minster: LIT, 2003), 33, 45-46.

19 Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979), 52.

20 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other

Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 228.

holds all the predispositions necessary for the game to exercise its effect by endowing the player with a certain role (or roles). The effect I am referring to is well-known to the appreciator of representational art or the reader of literary texts and describes an aesthetic effect experienced in and through the act of play. Consequently, becoming involved in a dystopian game, the empirical player steps into a dialectical communication (a creative negotiation to discover the truth)?! with the implied player, whose roles she accepts but, at the same time, exposes to scrutiny. These are embedded/virtualised in an entire system of perspectives (positions) that compose the game and its world and which the player co-creates through ergodic action. As the connections between the perspectives remain indeterminate (or are negated), the player is urged to close the blanks between them. She thus experiences art’s aesthetic effect through acts of ideation and creates the revelatory connection to the empirical world in a continual revision of composed images and meanings.

This analysis of play’s underlying structure shows the benefit of comprehending the player’s involvement in dystopia—and video game narratives (VGN)—on a profound, structuralist level that anticipates participation. In other words, considering the specific mediality of the video game medium in relation to non-ergodic forms of representational art will help explain the structure that affords play in the first place and which drives the player to catharsis and aesthetic response. Such a player necessarily shows an open-minded attitude towards the work of art she is confronted with, and given the plethora of player types (that all savour play for different reasons: for ludic, narrative, or world pleasures, and so on), the emancipated player becomes a necessity for my deliberations. For this player type describes an empirical being who is willing to engage with the implied player on a complex level, to indulge in potentialities and imaginings that are evoked, while not blindly accepting any truths.”

What is more, by scrutinising the tripartite dialectic between (dystopian) game, player, and culture (world), the study will illuminate the relationship between

21 The term dialectic as it is used here implies a negotiation/discourse between two or more parties (in this case: game, player, culture) that engage in a reasonable yet subversive argument to discover unspoken or general truths about life and the world. This use resembles the way Aristotle defines dialectic in The Art of Rhetoric (367-322BC), where it is described as similar though not equal to rhetoric. (Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts [Megaphone eBooks, 2008], http://www.wendel berger.com/downloads/Aristotle_Rhetoric.pdf).

22 Henceforth, I will speak of the empirical player in terms of an emancipated player if not indicated otherwise.

gameworld and empirical world in terms of fictionality and from a phenomenological point of view. Fiction, as such, is construed as a semantic phenomenon and as a functional approach that involves the player in an aggravated communication with the dystopian game—whereby I primarily follow Walton, Doležel, Iser, and their counterparts from science fiction/dystopian studies, Suvin and Moylan.” Moreover, this conception of fiction does not contest the ontological dimension of the gameworld as a virtual artefact but organically integrates it.

STATE OF RESEARCH: THE ASSUMED POSITION WITHIN VIDEO GAME STUDIES

The benefits of these deliberations to video game studies involve first of all the establishment of a framework to categorise and describe the VGD as a genre. Such a work has not yet been done,” although there are several articles and conference proceedings that mostly focus on close playings of dystopian games” (often discussing the BIOSHOCK” series), while few attempt to categorise the VGD as a

23 Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1990); Lubomir Dolezel, Heterocosmica: Fictional and Possible Worlds (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1998); Iser, Act; Imaginary; Suvin, Metamorphoses; Moylan, Scraps.

24 Frelik argues that “to date [2014] there has been little critical work on how video games in general and specific gaming genres in particular engage and transform traditional genre codes as derived from fiction and film.” (Pawel Frelik, “Video Games,” in The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, ed. Rob Latham [Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014], 229).

25 For example: William Gibbons, “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams: Popular Music, Narrative, and Dystopia in Bioshock,’ Game Studies 11, no. 3 (December 2011) http://gamestudies.org/1103/articles/gibbons; Joseph Packer, “The Battle for Galt’s Gulch: Bioshock as Critique of Objectivism,” Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds 2, no. 3 (December 2010): 209-224, https://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Ar ticle,id=10275/

26 BIOSHOCK (2K Boston, 2007), BIOSHOCK 2 (2K Marin, 2010), BIOSHOCK INFINITE (Irrational Games, 2013), BURIAL AT SEA: EPISODE 1 and 2 (Irrational Games, 2013- 2014).

narrative genre.” By doing so, the results of this study will be of additional importance to utopian studies in a transmedial environment, which invite the utopian inclined researcher to “stay open to new forms [of the genre] as they emerge” but that “will require new critical formulations.”?® What is more, the practical areas of game design and writing benefit from the established framework, as it guides the designer while creating a dystopian game. Finally, my claims on fictionality and the description of a certain subtype of games I will refer to as the video game narrative (which includes the VGD) address central concerns of video game studies, which I will outline in the following.

Throughout the brief but intense history of video game studies, a heated debate concerning the ontological dimension of the medium and its ways to communicate meaning has been conducted and is still ongoing (see also chapter IV). In this regard, three central issues have emerged that revolve around the following questions: 1) should video games be described in the tradition of non-digital games, or as forms of narrative, drama, or film, and so on;” 2) are gameworlds fictional or virtual realities; 3) how is meaning created: a) in the interaction of interrelated elements that necessitate the player’s intervention or b) through game rules that afford different kinds of processes?

Whereas the first area of investigation has been partially answered in that scholars nowadays describe what is usually called a game” (or a certain, widespread subtype of games) as hybrids between traditional games and participatory

27 For example: Marcus Schulzke, “The Critical Power of Virtual Dystopias,” Games and Culture 9, no. 5 (July 2014): 315-334, http://gac.sagepub.com/content/9/5/315; Sebastian Domsch, “Dystopian Video Games: Fallout in Utopia,” in Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post-Apocalypse: Classics — New Tendencies — Model Interpretations, ed. Eckart Voigts and Alessandra Boller (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2015), 395-410.

28 Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, “Conclusion. Critical Dystopia and Possibilities,” in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, ed. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan (New York: Routledge, 2003), 247.

29 For different positions on the game medium, see Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, eds. First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004).

30 The term video game or game (which I use interchangeably) designates a vague umbrella term that includes different phenomena, ranging from games such as TETRIS (Nintendo, 1989) to GRAND THEFT AUTO V (Rockstar North, 2013). It can therefore be misleading and should rather be used in a metonymic way. (Calleja, In-Game, 3; Espen narratives,*' the nature of this new genre and its specific modes of discourse remain unclarified.

Issues two and three, however, evoke more controversial arguments. This discrepancy is based on two positions that aim to describe the ontology of games from either a “ludo-fictionalist” perspective, “inspired by Kendell Walton’s radical and influential Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990)”*? that regards the gameworld and its objects as props in imaginative games of make-believe” or from a “ludo-realist” point of view.” This latter perspective perceives the gameworld as a virtual artefact and as closer to the empirical world.’ Consequently, the potential for confusion here is substantial when not clarifying one’s terms in a precise manner and pinpointing the concept of fiction/virtuality one is employing.

In addition, the innumerable attempts to determine the meaning-creation in games have proceeded similarly. An important school in this respect is the proceduralist approach inspired by Ian Bogost’s influential theory on procedural rhetoric, which argues that the emergence of meaning in games resides in formal structures and rules that give rise to interrelated processes—in other words: “The art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions rather than the spoken word, writing, images, or moving pictures.”*° This approach is challenged by

J. Aarseth, “A Narrative Theory of Games,” Proceedings of the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (2012), 130, 133, http://dl.acm.org/cita tion.cfm?id=2282365).

31 For example: Aarseth, “Narrative”; Calleja, In-Game; Marie-Laure Ryan, Avatars of Story (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Sebastian Domsch, Storyplaying: Agency and Narrative in Video Games (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013).

32 Espen J. Aarseth, “Ontology,” in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York: Routledge, 2014), 491.

33 For example: Ryan, Narrative; Avatars; Domsch, Storyplaying; Grant Tavinor, “Art and Aesthetics,” in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York: Routledge, 2014), 59-66; “Fiction,” in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York: Routledge, 2014), 434-421; The Art of Videogames (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

34 Aarseth, “Ontology,” 491.

35 For example: Calleja, In-Game; Espen J. Aarseth, “Doors and Perception: Fiction vs Simulation in Games,” Escritas Mutanes, 2006, http://www.luisfilipeteixeira.com/fi leManager/file/fiction_Aarseth_jan2006.pdf

36 Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010), ix.

scholars who draw on the traditions of arts and aesthetics and describe the meaning-making process in terms of a dialectic between game, player, and culture. Thereby, a game’s layers (system of rules and semiotic world elements) are engaged by a player in different modes of involvement.” In this conception, “procedurality” is seen as “necessary but not sufficient” to describe the act of play.** “The message is not in the mechanic or the fiction but in how both are put together—in the dissonance between action and meaning. The mechanic is not the message. The gameworld is not the message. Play is the message.’””

It is needless to say that such an approach leaves the realms of ontology (at least partially) and enters a discussion of phenomenology and cognitive sciences. Of specific interest here is Gordon Calleja’s influential work on player involvement that describes the relation between player and game as a form of incorporation that sets the player in a limbo state between virtual and empirical world. Calleja thus builds on the long discussion of immersion and presence in video game studies*’ and describes the player’s multifarious involvement in a game through kinesthetic, ludic, narrative, affective, shared, and spatial participation.*! Various studies have continued in this phenomenological direction*?—-not to men-

37 For example: Aarseth, “Ontology”; Cybertext; Calleja, In-Game; Sicart, Beyond; Play; Domsch, Storyplaying; Susana P. Tosca, “Amnesia: The Dark Descent: The Player’s Very Own Purgatory,” in Analyzing Digital Fiction, ed. Alice Bell, Astrid Ensslin, and Hans K. Rustad (London: Routledge, 2014), 109-123.