Nathanicus Gamer Book Review: Literary Gaming by Astrid Ensslin

Nathanicus Gamer Book Review: Literary Gaming by Astrid Ensslin

Score 2/5

This book is about the analysis of the literary element of digital games that fuse the literary with the ludic. The author is careful in pointing out that this is not a use if literature in the laudatory sense, as in suggesting some particular token of game writing is comparable to the classics in quality. This is not a normative expression. Herein, literary is used to mean textual specimens of the verbal arts. One supposes it is indeed a worthwhile endeavor to appreciate the literary aspects of digital games. This is a sensible research program: a substrate-independent approach to the analysis and appreciation of textuality. This program is not novel in Ensslin’s work either. A typological exegesis of digital games as ludic literature has already been conducted by others prior to the publishing of this work. But it is a continuation of this literary analysis, especially in that it goes beyond typology to offer a spectrum of ludoliterature (L-L).

However, I want to point out that it does not ignore the ludology that is also aboard in digital games. We’ll avoid debating which property is central, because it is doubtful there are any definitive general answers on this. In fact, I will go so far as to say it is not entirely clear to me that reading texts from a paper-based form factor is necessarily a more passive activity than engaging with an interactive software system, given that people can and not infrequently do engage in a kind of live action role playing when they try to conform in some ways or other to their favorite literary personae. Let us not tarry on this point however. I will address it more fully elsewhere.

Any any rate, let us suffice to work with the definition of digital literature that it is the presence of linguistic and semiotic signifiers with discursive meaning in ludologically interactive digital media. I suspect that Ensslin would agree that is in some concentric circle of the dart board more proximal to the bullseye than the circumference. To put it crudely, these are systems that require us to interact with in some encoded input/output relation in order to advance the text.

Now that we’ve established some definitions, let us look at the philsophical foundations and analytic methodology. This work is informed by the philosophy of German idealism. Philosophical notions of ludus or play go back to Plato, footnote from there, and are modernized by Kant (surprise, surprise!). Kant’s notion of play seems to he a kind of mind-play from the interpersonal interactive engagement with artistic artifacts in the form of aesthetic appreciation. Schiller expanded on this notion, identifying play as important to the, shall we say “species-animal,” and remarking on its creative emacipatory qualities. Nietzsche situated play as a cultural form in the Dionysian, while anticipating the power dynamics of superlative play. Perhaps most significant of important contributions to the philosophy of play, Heidegger advanced “the concept of human reality as a (language-mediated) game of being.” This existential world play as a socio-political reality is an empirically testable hypothesis, as Dune: The Butlerian Jihad may prove prophetic in predicting that nerds with well-trained strategic minds honed by a youth engaged in strategy-sim games could become those superlative power players of Nietzsche’s Übermensch and take over the world we shall see...

Wittgenstein also had something of sorts to say on the matter, namely his chess game metaphor for language. Wittgensteinian language games pump the intuition that language use is about sociality as much as it is about semantics. Language use presupposes a network of social knowledge, as I imagine Searle might say. Ludology as a genus of cultural studies goes on to philosophically mature in the works of Huizinga and Caillois. Huizinga imagines that gamers in contest or cooperation (perhaps we’re always doing a bit of both) enter a “magic circle” that circumscribes and delineates their play space from the rest of the world. Critically, Caillois draws a technical distinction between paidia as unstructured play and ludus as rule-governed play which becomes important in the fundamental definitions Ensslin uses to train her gaze in the study of digital literature.

Ensslin tries to ground her categorical division on the dimension of a cognitive framework, more specifically in the kinds of attentional resources that must be devoted to it. There is a binary construction of deep attention, which we might primitively refer to as “laser focus,” and hyper attentions, which might best be described as intense attentional resources aimed at multiple foci. This cleavage represents a distinction between the kinds of attention devoted to traditional reading (the former, that is deep attention) and playing conventional computer games (the latter). As a categorization, it is more of a spectrum than a typology because these are more differences of degree than essential kind. I would feel a lot more comfortable about this cognitive framework if a serious cognitive scientist were cited to defend it rather than digital literary specialists.

I applaud the effort to root the classification schema for games in a human biological context. But I’m not at all sure I would’ve drawn the division this way. My concern is that it draws an arbitrary distinction between interactive digital literature and more conventional digital gaming software systems. My intuition tells me, properly conceived, a robust analytic framework could cover all of these forms of digital interactive fiction as L-L objects.

Now for the interesting part: the application (though after understanding the approach it is harder to take it seriously). I tried to look first at games that I recognized and have played. Ensslin discusses Samorost, a narrative puzzle game with a silent text that requires the player to learn the patterns of the gameworld’s internal logic in order to advance. In discussing Samorost 2 (which I played and enjoyed), Ensslin remarks on how the player’s actions (simply trying to protect a garden from alien bandits) initiate the sequence of events that drive the game’s central tension, rather than some exogenous backstory. This is indeed an unconventional narrative element that truly does splice interactivity with textuality. The Samorost games are uninstructed play. Rather than functioning through an avatar, the player functions as a sort of naive guardian angel benevolently trying to guide the main character through an interactive world that is a strange cocktail of fantasy, sci fi, and realism. To my lights, these two games blur the analytic distinction between different poles of interactive fiction.

Ensslin then spends some time on The Princess Murder, which apparently self-consciously introduces ludic mechanics in order to explicate how problematic they are. In this game more traditional interface game devices are introduced into in order to critique YOUR (the player’s) need for them. This makes ludic elements part of the narrative, and this subsumption could probably serve to show the primacy of the literary aspects of this digital fiction, I would surmise. The game also seeks to problematize the gamer’s need to solve the challenges of the narrative through senseless killing, which the not-overtly-feminist AAA Metal Gear Solid series does as well as any game could under the direction of the always brilliant Hideo Kojima, while also having compelling graphics and effects. Proximal to this discussion is a nod to Progress Quest, a game which parodies the focus on obsessive management systems that traditional RPGs have. Once the player does some initial character customization, Progress Quest becomes a “zero-player game” (which isn’t really a game at all, is it) that progresses without further player input. Games as management systems that create some passivity in separating the player from direct player action, like the emerging class of auto-battlers, can in many ways be more ludic than literary. This tells me that interactivity and ludicity are not a direct linear function. All that gives Progress Quest its literary character is its design intent to parody passive ludicity in more traditional games. Grouping games on this spectrum seems hard to manage.

As an exploration of some of the more interactive titles, the book moves along to The Path. Ensslin classifies The Path as a “literary auteur game.” What makes these games literary is perhaps an appreciable artistic imprint. Though I’ve not played it, what I can gather is that The Path is a Myst-style game that has a chapter structure and an in-game LiveJournal. It has a player character that changes based on the chapter, so these changes are driven by the narrative rather than the presence of roleplaying elements. The textual expression of the game is primarily through monologues, which reflect the development of the character at various stages of the game. This makes it sound to me like a rather linear affair. In a more sophisticated manner of looking at it, I think we might realize the analogy between digital textuality and traditional literature should not break down when narrative linearity does, and this is what makes games a potentially richer medium than a codex made of ink and dead trees.

My basic judgment about this is that I support the L-L research program but cannot support the way it is operationalized here. The fatal flaw of this research is that it cherry picks digital literature examples that fit neatly within the analytical framework, rather than building a robuster analytic framework and then applying it to more culturally significant games. I suspect this is by design, as a means to create a safe space for certain kinds of digital literature, especially these game-like systems with some sort of supposed subversive, message, that are less problematic than traditional video games—a research program in pursuit of a social program. It is a vigorous mental exercise to try to understand this research framework and identify its flaws. And there are some interesting and overlooked obscure games that it draws attention to. Yet, beyond that I find it hard to recommend this book.