Even those who dabble in effects studies admit that gaming involves doing something active that is not seen in television viewing:
To begin with, television is a passive medium; viewers have virtually no control over what takes place on the screen. Video games, in contrast, represent an active medium. Television does not require the viewer to pay constant attention to it, whereas video games require total concentration. (Provenzo, 1991, p. 66)
To claim that the salient active component of playing a game manifests in the game’s requirement for total concentration is to narrowly construe the meaning of play as reflexive response to fast-paced stimuli—a position that might have been understandable in the 1970s and 80s when most (though not all) popular videogames were action-oriented, but falls apart completely in a world that has long contained the likes of Zork, SimCity, Myst, Final Fantasy, Portal, Skyrim, Gone Home, Firewatch,
Stardew Valley, and (of course) Minecraft, to name just a few games that clearly do not require
constant and total concentration and are even known to prominently feature quiet, meditative moments.
However, even as we acknowledge that reading a book or watching a film demands that the media consumer do something, it still seems that games require the player to do something more. Espen Aarseth (1997) has argued that digital games are “ergodic texts,” which makes them a different sort of thing from other media texts. Ergodic texts are simultaneously objects and processes (Aarseth,
2001). They are understood to exhibit two key characteristics: in order to be used, they require intentional, non-trivial effort on the part of the user (even a tranquil effort or a divided attentiveness imply intentionality); and rather than presenting a linear narrative, they provide a possibility space to be explored and navigated. These characteristics give rise to additional user functions:
[T]he central user function of literature or film is interpretive . . . The interpretive function is obviously present also in the case of games. In addition, game players are required to perform explorative functions, as in deciding which path to take, and configurative functions, as in choosing and creating parts of the game. (Sotamaa, 2009, p. 67; emphasis original) Golding (2013) suggests that instead of a configurative function, games require a “navigation” function. He argues that configuring is strategic, requiring top-down knowledge: “to configure is to imply a holistic knowledge of a text; an operator at a switchboard, or a city planner with a map” (2013, p. 44). A player’s actual lived experience, he argues, is more like de Certeau’s figure of the street-level walker/wanderer, who navigates by tactics rather than configuring by strategies.
Following Sotamaa, Sihvonen writes that “all computer games are inherently configurative and participatory in that they ‘emerge’ as a result of the players’ inputs, offering feedback, rewards and further challenges” (2011, p. 39). She further emphasizes, drawing on foundational ludology theory from Aarseth, Frasca (1999), and Juul (2001), that interactive engagement with a digital game is not just about being able to perceive the game world, but about being able to manipulate it and perceive the results of those manipulations (Sihvonen, 2011, p. 109). Thus gameplay is driven by a recursive feedback loop: the player explores the possibility space, discovering both simulation rules (Sicart, 2009) and signifying possibilities in the feedback that the game returns in response to their exploration; they then reconfigure their gameplay in response to this new information, which results in a new pattern of exploration and new feedback from the machine. This symbiotic player/machine loop drives home the point that the player is never solely a function of the game, and games cannot be understood in isolation from their players (Sicart, 2009; Sotamaa, 2009, p. 68).
As de Certeau (1984) established and Sotamaa (2009) reaffirmed (see above), the interpretive function is already present in the reading of conventional texts. However, Jenkins’ (1992) study of the creative products of television fandom also invites the explorative and configurative functions into the realm of conventional media consumption, although in this case they would appear to be elective functions, limited to a subset of users, not required as Sotamaa asserts they are for games. Sihvonen’s claim (above) that a game’s text “emerges” from a player’s interaction with the world foreshadows a way for understanding play as co-constructed between player, machine, and game- designer, of an ephemeral linear text (2011, p. 31). The player’s navigation through an ergodic text produces a linear text similar to the “wandering lines” of de Certeau’s nomadic readers (1984, loc. 130); the traces of a navigation in ergodic space make explicit the work that players and game rules do to configure the shape of those wandering lines.
But is that work a kind of co-authorship? Does the reader/user/player do a kind of writing? Tremblay, Colangelo, and Brown think so (2014). They address Minecraft specifically, arguing that the product—the collection of binary code authored and compiled by Notch and Mojang—needs to be understood as a kind of language or grammar. Minecraft gameplay is
ultimately derived from Minecraft’s code, but in largely the same way that every work of literature—this essay included—is derived from the rules of a language. Thus, the specific gameplay produced, just like a work of literature, is, as Joyce (1986 [1922]) phrased it, ‘an actuality of the possible as possible’ (p. 21)—the act of playing, like the act of writing, takes what existed only as potential and brings it into actuality. It is thus the player who is the “author” of the game. (Tremblay et al., 2014, p. 77-78)
Tremblay et al. find themselves in the position of having to speak to a pre-existing assumption that games are like books, static objects authored by an identifiable entity and then distributed to users. But there is another way to arrive at play-as-writing: if we remember that games are, after all, software, and think of playing a digital game not as consuming a media product, but as a kind of computing activity. Daniel Punday (2015) demonstrates that writing has proven to be a pervasive and captivating cultural metaphor for all manner of computing activities (that is, human
interactions with a computer), from configuring, programming, and data entry, to calculation, communication, and online research. Punday cautions, however, that the analogy is fraught with tension and contradiction. What of, for instance, the researcher’s inscribed “trail” through the archive, the one Vannevar Bush (1945/1995) imagined as an output of his Memex? Does it (Punday asks) create anything new (2015, pp. 6, 150)? Is it a form of writing? The answer certainly has implications for how we understand the wandering trails described by de Certeau, too. De Certeau, for his part, specifically said that textual poachers were “far from being writers,” as writing
“accumulates, stocks up” (1984, loc. 2532).
But gaming does not seem to even get consideration under the fraught rubric of computing as writing, since it seems to stand apart from these other acts of ‘true’ computing. Perhaps it is simply a binary calculation: if a game programmer is already understood as a writer, then a game player must be a reader. In any case, game designers can hardly be faulted for trying to mobilize comparisons to literature and authorship in order to lend legitimacy to their oft-maligned medium (for instance, Punday notes that the Miller brothers, creators of Myst, preferred to describe
themselves as authors rather than programmers or directors [2015, p. 148]). But the extension of the “writer” mantle to those who make digital games may paradoxically lock out those who play. More likely, the tendency to think of play as reading or watching, rather than writing, reflects forty- plus years of games being produced, packaged, and sold like books and movies. It was not always the case—the distinction between maker and player was once much blurrier (discussed further Subsection 2.3.2, below).