The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strategies (review)

In the inaugural issue of Game Studies, editor-in-chief Espen Aarseth argued that the scholarly investigation of computer games should strive to exist as an “independent academic sector,” developing in related fields (he specifically named Media Studies, Sociology, and English), but ultimately free from the reductive tendency of sub-field status.¹ Eight years later a handful of graduate programs in game studies are attracting students interested in focusing their degrees, and the Digital Games Research Association (DIGRA), a professional organization of academics formed in 2003, has hosted three successful international conferences devoted to games. Despite these developments, game studies remains a discipline without a room of its own. The majority of scholars attending DIGRA conferences are from other fields and vary widely in the theory and methodology they bring to the academic study of games. Likewise, these scholars infiltrate the annual conferences of their long-established disciplines to present work that may share theoretical foundations with their colleagues, but they explore an unfamiliar object of study. This interdisciplinary bounty is building a body of work that may or may not succeed in fulfilling Aarseth’s dream; in the meantime the cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange is enriching the ground for whatever takes root.

The Meaning of Video Games does not help mark territory that may be clearly called “game studies”; quite the opposite. Steven Jones, professor of English at Loyola University Chicago, expands the possibility of how games might be understood within and between a network of cultural phenomena that includes television dramas, science fiction, gift books, Shakespeare plays, improvisational theater, and more. At the core of this contextualization is the assumption that, along with these recognizable cultural artifacts, video games are meaningful, and their meanings are created, circulated, debated, and manipulated in relation to “larger cultural and social meanings.”²

The first assumption Jones dispenses with quickly is the view that any textual study of video games will necessarily focus solely on narrative. He does not privilege the story of the game (plot, dialogue, character development) over the playing of the game (rules, devices, player choices). In this way Jones is neither a narratologist nor ludologist, and, following a brief recounting of the narratology versus ludology debate, he rejects the characterization of each by the other as unproductively simplistic. Instead, Jones proposes a “different kind” of textual analysis that retains a close reading of the story offered in the game through traditional elements like backstory and cut scenes, while simultaneously considering the procedures of game play, such as the interface and underlying code. Furthermore, Jones expands the game “text” to include pre-release marketing campaigns, production and design notes, online fan chat, trailers, reviews, spin-off books, player-created game modifications, official and unofficial web-sites—everything that might constitute “that cloud of extra media objects swirling around the game.”³ He binds this cloud of game-related material with French literary theorist Gérard Genette’s concept of the paratext: elements around and outside the main text that guide how audiences receive it. His purpose is to create “complex reception histories” which begin to capture the construction of the meaning(s) of games.⁴

Jones illustrates the dense relationship between paratext and text well in his reading of The Lost Experience, an alternative reality game created to promote the third season of the television program Lost. The unexpected but significant result of his analysis reveals how the core text of the Lost phenomenon is not necessarily located in the television episodes, the game, or the websites. In effect, these all serve as paratextual elements to each other at different times, depending on where and when viewers, players, or readers encounter them. This move situates the player, in the case of video games, in an active position, able to perform in and influence the vast “possibility space” of games.⁵ Player agency is extended in Jones’s exploration of Façade...