hold onto anything

Queer readings, radical ramblings. All writing © Alec as part of the Women & Identities in Games tutorial at Lawrence University, winter term 2018. About the Project

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Write the Way Into His Parts: Phallic Attainment in “Doki Doki Literature Club”

(IMPORTANT NOTE: MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR SPOILERS FOR DOKI DOKI LITERATURE CLUB BELOW! I talk about major plot twists, the twists to these twists, and all the wonderful ramifications that these interactions have on player identity. DO NOT READ THIS if you are interested in playing the game at all and haven’t yet touched it. You will have practically every bit of the plot spoiled for you. Seriously.)

This blog post will be an abridged sneak peek at, or the conceptual bones of, what I’m writing for my masculinities seminar this term. 

In "Masculinity in Video Games: The Gendered Gameplay of Silent Hill," Ewan Kirkland reminds us that "[t]he gendered video-game experience is not solely--or even primarily--an issue of visual representation but is expressed through game mechanics, structure, and goals, irrespective of or potentially working in opposition to character or avatar design" (Kirkland, 169). It is the latter premise, that these gendered mechanics can be "removed from the avatar" that got me thinking about Doki Doki Literature Club again. Yes, even beyond the overbearing heterosexual activity and historical girl-as-goal gameplay, I noticed a surprising feature in the later character interactions that I think needs more extrapolation.

Monika’s final arc places you, the player, in a precarious position: at a table, across from Monika, for what may just be all eternity. Upon my third playthrough, I realized why I was so uncomfortable with this prospect (besides the whole “trapped with a murderer for as long as I play this” thing). At no point during the final arc do you have any player input nor dialogue that was coded to be your own. Monika actively objectifies you in a way that mirrors the male gaze you have weaponized throughout the previous arcs: it is a gaze that is not subverted so much as played entirely straight by Monika. In a way, the player becomes the logical extreme of any visual novel relationship: the gendered object now materialized as a thing to be owned, a ludic goal reached by the other entity this time around. This notion of course lent the visual novel its “deconstructive” moniker (haha?), though there is little to support the claim that it actively “deconstructs” the genre. Indeed, if it’s true that Monika is “real,” then the third arc is merely an inversion of all that visual novels have come to be. You are finally faceless, speechless--and no matter what sentiment you express by doing so, something inside of you feels that you must scream. 

All of this is to say that Monika is not necessarily a case study in how a sentient property of a visual novel would feel after realizing the dimensions of their surroundings. Monika is more of a case study in one’s ability to invert a heterosexual matrix in linear, binary terms; how one might, after achieving “humanity,” gain power in the systems that they occupy. And in Doki Doki, the heterosexual romance really is the programming language that renders every facet of their beings visible. in the “real world,” where specifically male power is so prevalent, wielding that power through similar masculine means is a surefire way to retain dominance over one’s surroundings. It only makes sense, then, that the overwhelming desire, perhaps even limerent drive, to objectify the supposed agent is the end result of attaining this sentience: Monika needs to have control over the systems of domination that line Doki Doki’s inner workings, and becoming parallel to that male agent is one of the easiest ways to do so.

So beyond these questions of sentience and systems lies Kirkland’s original questions: how do mechanics become gendered, whether in opposition or apathetically towards avatar representations? Monika’s ludic overriding of your, the player’s, agency is one possible manifestation. By the end of her arc, she has robbed you of the ability to communicate openly (using words that aren’t provided to you via forced dialogue prompts or rigged poem minigames), and even the ability to choose how to progress through the game (you cannot progress, period). Kirkland reminds that these these constructs, even ones as subtle as the "exploration of space" (in this case the ability to linearly progress) have been coded as masculine within game titles (170). And because Monika herself serves as the agent of these happenings within an already gendered system, one can take these actions as her way of attaining masculine dominance within it -- or, perhaps more symbolically, the "phallic property" presented by Freud and friends (like Buchbinder, 75). As a matter of fact, it may serve me well to employ the phallic metaphor for its literal parallels. Buchbinder calls the phallus "the abstract representation of male power" for its historical signification as a "male thing" (which, it should be noted, is a heavily outdated and never-quite-right philosophy; surprisingly, genitalia does not designate gender!).Most noteworthy in this symbol is that the phallus is "always to be attained, but ultimately unattainable" to motivate "the desire for power within the patriarchal economy: there is always the hope that the promissory note represented by the penis will be honored[...]" (75).In this way, the phallus is a symbolic property that represents maleness and all the power that goes with such an identity -- the kind of thing Monika seeks in both literal and metaphoric terms. The player's avatar is a default male (showcased in Sayori's second CG and hinted at throughout the text); however, even Monika alludes to the fact that you could be "anything at all." What this means for my interpretation of Monika's actions, then, is that Monika's phallic properties in the literal and symbolic form of you, the player AND protagonist, are simultaneously unattainable; that the power she seeks in controlling the male character and the player, who can be anything, mechanically reinscribe the wholly idealistic form of what the "phallus" actually is. She cannot obtain you, for you are a real person outside of the game's screens: however, she cannot obtain your avatar, as it is simply the two-dimensional programmed reproduction of what you are. The literal phallus in the form of the male avatar and the metaphoric phallus achieved by controlling you are both out of her reach, ultimately proving the futility of such an endeavor. To conclude these Sparknotes-style ramblings, Kirkland's original dissociation of gender representations and mechanics becomes relevant when one picks apart the relations within a game system. In a visual novel like Doki Doki Literature Club, the game mechanics are, to a degree, inseparable from the heterosexual matrix that is reflected in these highly gendered avatars as well. But complicating that very idea is the notion of agency: who has control over these mechanics, and how did they achieve that power? I hope to move forward with this newfound appropriation of the (highly outdated) phallic metaphor in the context of heteronormative gameplay. (Works Cited: Buchbinder, D. Studying Men and Masculinities. Routledge, 2012.  Kirkland, Ewan. "Masculinity in Video Games: The Gendered Gameplay of Silent Hill." Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 24.2 (2009): 161-83.)

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Cites of Memory: Reconceptualizing Virtual Subject Positions

My RefWorks account has gone from being completely empty to holding fifteen unique citations on furry culture, video games, and ethnographic research. And some of the best ones – the most provocative, the most gripping, the most reckless – have left me in a state of relative disappointment come their conclusions.

What I am finding most valuable about them are their Works Cited pages -- a testament to both the amount of amazing work some of these critical theorists have done (Briagotti into Haraway into Deleuze and Guattari? Y’all are the best) and myself for becoming wise enough to look at citations. In a nutshell, I’ve consumed more food for thought than I’d ever need to hibernate through the next term. But here I am, still typing away, because I have questions to answer.

Kyrie Caldwell’s “‘This Is My Story:’ Representation and Change in Final Fantasy X-2″ was a heartening subject-positional piece that taught me a few bits about my own relationship to video games and culture. Despite my preexisting biases for her work, I’d actually never read this piece in its entirety -- perhaps because of my lack of first-hand knowledge of FFX-2 -- so my revelations were altogether new. At one point during the description of her adolescent years, she mentions falling in love with strategy guides for the "vibrancy" of their pages: "My conception of games has always been the bright colors and animations that brought to life the worlds within, due in no small part to the concept art, character models, and screenshots reproduced in the printed 60 materials I poured over daily and to which I am still drawn" (Caldwell, 60). The amount of love put into those books, realistically just another mode of vicarious living, always gripped me in a way unintelligible until that connection was made. Of course strategy guides and all manner of game materials would mean so much to me outside of the games: they’re externalizations of my favorite virtual experiences, and signs that others have tread those same paths and the ones yet to come.

I cannot stop thinking of these manuals and guides through Pierre Nora’s concept of the “site of memory” -- that phenomenon in which, when memory must be archived in a modern world that values the devaluation of history, memory becomes a tangible construct associated with a particular spatial structure (Nora, 8). If video games are sites of memory, as argued by Dennis Washburn in his own take on Final Fantasy X’s construction of narrative, then these spots of varied association must be, too. And that argues intriguingly that the differences between these books -- that which we can carry around in backpacks and flip through like magazines, picking out sphere grid patterns as if they were merchandise -- and these games are, on the collective level, rather small. 

I’m alluding to a thought that I will proceed to develop over the course of the next few weeks: what does it mean for video games to be collective sites of memory? How does the “site of memory” take hold within discourse? What happens as a result of their being sites of memory? And while I may not be researching strategy guides in particular, they’re a good starting place for understanding that concept of the memorial: they’re representative of the subject positions we create when interactions with these games occur, and the potential for even the most “objective” works within video games (please, drown me with weapon stats!) to become interpretive tools for understanding the virtual worlds within those subject positions.

Answers will be forthcoming over the next month (EEE!), but I want to provide a basic framework beforehand by arguing for the transitive properties of video game positions. That is, try to imagine video games as not simply entities, but locations within which we nestle; strategy guides not merely data collections, but as travel booklets and brochures for brighter futures; and, ultimately, that video games could be more like pit stops in our quest for what Rosi Braidotti calls “the cultivation of affirmative relations” (Braidotti, 413).

Because -- well, speaking of stops, we’re going to have to make a few this week.

ALL ABOARD THE PHANTOM TRAIN!

(Works Cited:

 Braidotti, Rosi. "Nomadism: Against Methodological Nationalism." Policy Futures in Education 8.3-4 (2010): 408-18. 

 Caldwell, Kyrie E. H. "“This is My Story”: Representation and Change in Final Fantasy X-2." Well Played 4.3 (2015): 56-68. 

 Nora, Pierre. "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux De Mémoire." Representations.26 (1989): 7-24.)

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Fur Real This Time: Thoughts on Representation & Furriness in Night in the Woods

This post may be on the shorter end out of attention deficiencies and the deep-seated desire to get all my classwork done before 4.2 drops (KEFKA! KEFKA! KEFKA!), but also because the question of how furriness impacts self-image has been on my mind for more than a minute at this point, and I still have few answers.

A transformational event (please, don’t read a pun into that) occurred this last New Years, on which I went to a small-scale furry NYE party with some longtime best friends. I’ll admit that we left it early in part because of differing preferences in party beverages (it was a dry con, okay?), but it sparked some serious questioning about my disidentification from group cultures and what properties “allow” me to identify with others and as particular selves. More explicitly, the event reminded me that I wanted to explore how identification with something that is “not me” externally could even more easily facilitate something that “is me” internally -- though this problem was instantly subsumed within preexisting anxieties surrounding group cultures, especially one with so much personal baggage as the furry community (we were all [s]omething [a]wful, once). 

Adrienne Shaw’s “Diversity Without Defense: Reframing Arguments for Diversity in Games” builds upon her pro-diversity arguments from Gaming at the Edge that capture the importance of representation and player identification at the systemic level. Instead of thinking of diversity as a way to sell products to people (and hence people as products), diversity should be a way to make identities visible to consumers regardless of consumers’ hegemonic statuses. If all gamers were to fit a hegemonic masculine mold, for example, placing others at the forefront of their games would expand the types of people with which those gamers could interact, thus normalizing all races, genders, sexualities, and others historically underrepresented in the medium. 

Something that has been on my mind ever since reading Gaming at the Edge, however, is an argument summarized in this latest piece of Shaw’s: despite her interviewees occupying all manners of subject positions, “seeing people like them in the media they consumed was not the primary driver of their media choices” (Shaw, 2017). Indeed, one informant noted that Kratos, the grizzled and chiseled protagonist of the God of War series, “could be a bunny rabbit for all I care.” The importance of this example, according to Shaw, is that if Kratos can be a bunny rabbit, then why not a bunny rabbit -- or even a Black transgender man? Such a decision need not be informed by market data that shows Black transgender men’s preferences for games that use just one button. If Kratos can be virtually anything to consumers so long as the game is good, then diverse games have nothing to lose and everything to gain. 

So... Bunny rabbits, huh? I didn’t encounter any rabbits in my first playthrough of Night in the Woods (a playthrough, mind you, that lasted thirteen hours), but the furry nature of Night in the Woods does argue a new way of looking at representation. It’s obvious from the jump how marginalized identities and even politics matter in Night in the Woods. Gregg has his boyfriend Angus; Mae has her neurodivergency; the whole town has a capitalist problem and Mae routinely reminds the player that all cops are bastards (yes, even her aunt Molly). But what’s so striking about this representation is the ability for a player to still identify with these characters regardless of their not-human features. Despite the rabbit being a counterpoint to identity representation’s importance to changing gameplay, the rabbit can also be seen as a way of validating a player’s identities without relying on the antecedent tropes of humans.

I hypothesize that furry representations of marginalized identities, such as the queer ones that Mae and Gregg exemplify, allow games to personify those identities outside of their stereotypical conceptions. Furry characters and the culture surrounding them have created their own typographies of identity: what is masculine, what is feminine, what is sexual, what is safe-for-work. These contexts make new meanings when “furry games” are close-read (such as Night in the Woods; what’s the difference between furry!bearness and human bear culture, as one example?), but furriness can also be used as a character design tool to materialize in radical ways identities that have not broken out of conventional molds yet. I imagine, as a surface-level example, the stereotype of the non-binary character, represented as a white pixie-cut androgynous person so often that the archetype has become a point on a newly formulated “gender trinary.” Mae arguably has the beginnings of a pixie cut, but it is a part of her furriness -- not only in this case her literal fur, but her entire existence as a cat.  What would a non-binary furry character look like in Night in the Woods? Would they rely on similar tropes, or would the intricacies of each species birth new possibilities of what being non-binary can look like?

I want to find potential answers for these questions in ethnographic studies of fur culture, specifically research on the generation of fursonas and culturally specific archetypes/stereotypes within furry communities. Additionally, I want to explore how gender and sexuality emerge in these archetypes, or have been used to create new ones: can furry identities break away from preexisting “identity markers” of these marginalized personhoods and make new ones, or even avert identity markers altogether? I can answer some of these questions anecdotally, but I want to make scholarship that furthers these questions through data and close-reading of furry media. Such research may even solve some of my own identity dilemmas, and help me understand the process through which we come to know ourselves beyond the flesh.

(Work cited: Adrienne Shaw, “Diversity Without Defense: Reframing Arguments for Diversity in Games,” Kinephanos: Journal of Media Studies and Popular Culture, Special Issue July 2017: Gender Issues in Video Games. Accessed 18 Jan 2017 in-browser here.)

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Decisions, Derisions: Creating a Framework of Agency For “Doki Doki Literature Club”

[WARNING: Pretty major spoilers for Doki Doki Literature Club in the first paragraph! I redacted a few key words though to keep you relatively safe.] 

I spent most of today frantically scrambling page after page of notes about Sayori. I had a nice large list of critical questions: “does Sayori have agency?” “where is she ‘fridged’?” “does her [REDACTED] before the second arc denote an agentic self outside of [REDACTED]’s control when juxtaposed with the bad ending?” ..........

As you can imagine, the process has been exhausting. However, I had a revelation (if a kind of stupid one) when decompressing on the way to work: I had so many questions to ask about the ludo-narratological meanings of her actions that I didn’t even define what I was looking for. I’ll be using the rest of this post to outline some basic frameworks that I’m generating to better work through these questions. 

Firstly: “Character agency” in the game context is dependent on the simulation’s rules, mechanics, and ludic goals, all of which construct a world that non-player characters interact with, (dis)identify from, and engage the player within. In no typically developed simulation (Doki Doki Literature Club included) can, nor SHOULD, NPCs be seen as having the free will to choose their actions as player characters can: for example, I cannot justify Sayori’s [REDACTED] in every arc of Literature Club by writing into her the “free will” to perform such an action as a human might. Such an approach overrides the literal technological construct of the game (she’s programmed to do that, mods notwithstanding) with the fallacy that she somehow exists outside of that construction. However, I can argue that a character displays agency in how they interact within the constructs of that world, specifically with the player. 

The reason I can do this is because "agency” for both PCs and NPCs refers to how they can navigate, and thus make meaning out of, the ludic structure of the simulation. Ludus games are built around what Gonzalo Frasca calls the “ ‘organic whole’ -- a closed product that can only be explored within secluded set of rules defined by the author,” and have extremely clear success and failure states (Frasca, p. 8). “Play” in a game with ludus goals may not be as open-ended as games with loosely defined win-states (think Super Mario Bros. versus The Sims: the goal of saving the princess is far more definable from the jump [heh] than the world-generating latter software); however, the ideological meanings of play are still enacted on multiple intersecting levels in titles with ludus goals. 

Frasca provides three of these levels (p. 9). First, we have the representational elements of play, such as narrative, the characters, cutscenes, etc., and what they mean in the traditional literary sense. The second level involves what Frasca designates “manipulation rules,” which involve anything the player is able to enact in the game world (driving over pedestrians in Grand Theft Auto is a pretty fun well-cited example). The third level are the aforementioned ludus rules: what a player needs to do to achieve the win state. There is a fourth level -- meta-rules, which dictate modifications and other non-canonical contributions to the titles -- but we’ll get to that slightly later. For now, this typology argues that all facets of a game, up to and including the linear win conditions of the game, creates the matrix, the simulation, the title in which we create meaning. Awesome!

So what does this “matrix” have to do with NPC agency? Well, my framework dictates that agency for both player and NPC in a game like Doki Doki Literature Club is fully constructed by how the characters interact with and against the ludus goals of the title. A player’s agency is traditionally defined in the play state by the extent to which they can interact with objects, characters, the main storyline, and other representational elements. In other words, agency is generally defined by how many “manipulation rules” are in play at any given time. For an NPC, however, interaction in the literal input-based sense is mostly invalid: arguments of agentic character design instead stem from the (ironically) programmed choices they make in the representational elements. Thus, for an NPC in a ludic world, “manipulation rules” are not about what an NPC can enact within a simulation, but instead about how an NPC acts with or against the representational materials and goals set by the game itself. As such, an NPC gains characterizable agency when they interact with the world around them as an identifiable (or “individual”) being with or against the ludic world’s reason for existing: to be an “organic whole,” with rules and goals that facilitate play for a player and make literal meta-meaning for the characters themselves. 

On that note, I can say that NPCs may not have manipulative agency, but how they interact with the world’s win-states through representational material constructs an agentic identity as it relates to the player’s own agency. Instead of arguing for the “free will” of a character, we can ask how a character might subvert, propel, derail from, or even terminate completely a ludus goal -- actions (or maybe even performances?) that constitute that character’s identity as meaningful within the larger whole of the matrix. To summarize, it is not a character’s intrinsic ability to perform actions that makes them agentic: it is what those actions mean in relation to the player’s manipulation rules and reasons for playing, and the ultimate goals of that matrix, that makes a character agentic within their specific ludological frame. 

So... that was a lot! Do I have any concluding thoughts on this theory and its process? Absolutely not: it’s a work-in-progress that will evolve most likely by the time I hit publish. But something I’ve learned from this process is how to stop asking “what can I use to argue that X = X?” and instead theorize why X is the way it is in the first place. I spent so much time trying to nitpick how to construe individual character’s actions in Doki Doki Literature Club as “agentic” that I lost sight of how exactly agency should be defined in relation to those actions. I’m excited to implement this framework in my next close-playthrough of the aforementioned title!

(Works cited: Frasca, Gonzalo. “Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology.” Video/Game/Theory. Edited by Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron. 2003. Accessed in PDF form here.) 

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Hello to [the] Your First Video Game: A Personal Reflection on My Scholarly Beginnings

I’m finding the writing process for this blog harder than other platforms because of one issue I hadn’t considered when making it: my audience. 

How much do those reading this know about me? How much will I insult my instructor if I copy-and-paste the syllabus goals with every post? I am simultaneously overconfident about my plans for this blog and hitting backspace every time I try to post on it.

I figure it might be easier to be explicitly clear about my research from the jump. Every week, I’ll be responding to this course’s assigned readings by connecting them to games of analytic interest -- specifically Night in the Woods and Doki Doki Literature Club -- to further hone my feminist and queer perspectives on game mechanics, games as cultural artifacts and close-reading conduits, and, ultimately, what games studies mean to me. 

The latter question has been especially pressing as this course begins, as its importance surpasses any other project I’ve undertaken in my academic career. When I was young, about fifteen or so, I knew I would one day have an opportunity like this one. I had no idea how, but I was destined to figure it out. My dreams of entering the games studies circuit were fostered by countless presenters at the late Games+Learning+Society conference in Madison, Wisconsin; modeled by the research of colleagues and close friends Kyrie  Eleison Caldwell and Sean Seyler; and thrown into overdrive by the classic work of Tom Bissell and his adventures in virtuality. And here, now, listening to the instrumental of “Your Reality” and pondering ever so lightly how mine reached this point, I begin to understand what Caldwell and co. told me just a few years ago as I failed to find an undergraduate program at which I felt at home: “you just kind of make it up as you go along.”

Sebastian Deterding's "The Pyrrhic Victory of Game Studies: Assessing the Past, Present, and Future of Interdisciplinary Game Research" concludes with the thought that games studies are “increasingly coalescing into a relatively closed community within it, composed of humanities and cultural studies scholars with homogenous epistemic cultures.” The split between “games studies scholars,” mostly comprised of film studies, comparative literature, and art and design scholars, and the vocationally focused game design programs have created “more of a narrow multidiscipline than the broad interdiscipline [games studies scholars] set out to become.” The quantification of interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and economically validated game studies fields reminded me of those early days of college searching: without a holistic understanding of what games studies was or even did, I picked a new keyword every week (”comparative literature!” “COMMUNICATIONS.” “narrotology, maybe.” “lu...dology?”) and sought out a (usually liberal arts) school that could foster that keyword the best. Yes, foster the keyword: the dream I had was so undefined, as if faded over months of sleep and never recorded in the bedside journal, that I was gambling my future on whatever “theory/method coupling” seemed right to me at the moment. I wonder if seeing these issues from the academic bird’s-eye view of Deterding would have given me any insight into Caldwell’s suggestion to MacGyver my future rather than reverse-engineer it, but I doubt it. I would have seen Deterding’s conclusion, his call to coalesce sociology, media philosophy, and the vocational education of game design to dissolve that “closed community,” and would have asked my inspirations the easiest way to guarantee a spot at that table. 

Therein lies a self-referential issue I have with the problem of interdisciplinary identification: on the most practical level, one that I experienced in my early days of higher education, there is no solution to the problem that is the proposed solution. In an ideal world, I would have liked a solid understanding of these game studies components because I saw them in action. I asked myself (and others) at Well-Played sessions how I could get paid by close-reading games (I’m so glad, if extremely surprised, no one responded with a snappy “you don’t”) -- because what is an interdisciplinary field if you cannot in some way categorize its facets and pedagogical inspirations? It’s hard to reconcile how much “easier” it would be to go into “games studies” when even that moniker made little to no sense to me. This article (or at least its evidence; it is clear that Deterding’s desire for cohesiveness [figure A] is contrary to my next claim) is a fascinating example of how the breakdown of scholarship at the highest of higher educations facilitates no understanding of how to break into its world at the freshman level. In other words, if I had read this in the keyword-obsessive summer before my senior year of high school, I know I would have ultimately picked one of the article’s own buzzwords (”OMG THERE’S LUDOLOGY AGAIN! WE’RE GOING WITH THAT!”) and defeated the article’s call for homogeneity -- as what constituted “games studies” was still too far beyond what I academically understood at the time to feel comfortable going into it.

(Figure A) The above, for example, are solutions to the problem that would have made my break into academia much smoother, and less reliant on right-place-right-time philosophies. From “The Pyrrhic Victory of Game Studies: Assessing the Past, Present, and Future of Interdisciplinary Game Research.” Sebastian Deterding. Games and Culture Vol 12, Issue 6, pp. 521 - 543. First published September 1, 2016.

This sounds like a simple non-argument without a proper point of comparison, and I’ll concede that my issue could have been solved with proper (and simple) designation of what games studies actually is. Yet I found a perfect point of retroactive validation in the first chapter of Jonas Heide Smith,‎ Susana Pajares Tosca's textbook Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction. Their four-point breakdown of video game study -- the game, the players, the culture, and "ontology" -- which correspond to four different types of analysis (figure B) made a still-extant insecure part of my sixteen-year-old self feel reassured by his desire to learn all of them. 

Figure B - “Four Major Types of Analysis.” From Egenfeldt Nielsen, S.., J. Heide Smith, and S. Pajares Tosca. Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction. Routledge, 2008.

It seems I’ve covered a lot of contradictory points in a few short paragraphs, but my reasoning is rather simple. I’m hyper-aware of the fact that there could be kids still struggling to understand how they might break into games studies, and need the most basic intellectual foundation upon which they may rest a future. To this end, I can say that studying what has interested me -- the visual arts, gender, feminist, and queer theory, and history of all kinds -- has provided me with a more-than-appropriate framework for studying video games. And I hope that on some level, our definition of “games studies” does not radically dissolve individual humanities identities. This “closed community” of humanities scholars that Deterding critiques may be borne of those four major types of analysis, but I didn’t know the latter even existed when I was trying to find the former. The knowledge I now possess of how to MacGyver this field is a privilege only in contrast to how ill-defined “games studies” as an “interdisciplinary field” was to me at the time. The closed communities must be open to visibility, especially at that aforementioned “freshman” level, but they should not lose their identities as interlocking methodologies that are available outside of a Platonic form of games scholarship. I wanted a path, so I made my own, but the structure to do so should have been clearer to me earlier. 

Sounds like a lot, huh? Of course it is! And that’s why I’m kicking off my blog with these deep-running contradictions and this confused psycho-scrubbing: to show that this blog is the end result of years of worry, anxiety, and, well, making it up as I go along. To have this kind of platform, to showcase my theoretical side in a space upon which my name is attached? That’s progress. 

And, hey: if you were just like me (I’m sorry, ‘cause I wouldn’t wish that on anyone), struggling with what games studies is or what it means, I hope that this little corner of analysis, self-reflection, and citation does you as much good as it does for me.

Now, about those video games...