Against Keogh

I am sorry to be writing this. All of my attempts to write about games have been driven by the ambition to write about gameplay. I didn't want to write about how a game is made or marketed or whether you should buy it, only about playing it. Now I'm writing about writing about games. It is a dumb, low-value topic, but I found something even worse that needed a response.

EDIT: Keogh's paper has been moved to this URL.

The Short Version

Brendan Keogh equates how gamers treat casuals and/or non-gamers in real life to how humans treat Hollow Children in Binary Domain. There's no particular reason to make this comparison, he just does. He also takes for granted a gamer/casual divide that's nowhere near as clear as he imagines — the same person can play Starcraft 2 as a hardcore and Mortal Kombat X as a casual, and different Starcraft 2 players will have different ideas of the threshold between hardcore and casual — and pictures a monolithic gamer attitude in place of the actual kaleidoscope of communities scattered across the web and beyond.

The Long Version

"Through the course of Binary Domain's action-packed narrative, it becomes increasingly unclear who is human, who is machine, and who is somewhere in between."

You see it in folklore, in satire, and over and over in science fiction. It's a basic human anxiety, and its presence in Binary Domain's story is comparable to its presence in a film's story, but Keogh is going to use it as "evidence" that gamers are exclusionary.

"our everyday experiences are so ubiquitously augmented by technologies — even the act of playing Binary Domain by coupling with a virtual character through a videogame controller challenges any clear distinction between human and machine."

This is no more remarkable a human/machine interface than Keogh "coupling with" a virtual cursor to type this sentence into a word processor running on a personal computer. As he says, consumer electronics are commonplace. Their presence doesn't convey a special message. Keogh concedes this, but is trying to have his cake and eat it too by going on to exploit the unearned mystique of cybernetics and the unjustified social stigma of gamers.

I have to digress on my view of cybernetics. "Cyborg" suggests a very specific image in the narrow sense: someone with a robot arm, or an implanted device that allows for direct connection of the brain to an electronic interface. To me this is not especially unprecedented — humans have been using tools as body parts for a long time, starting with the clothing that allowed them to migrate to colder climates. (Someone once put it to me this way: "We never evolved out of the tropics, we just took the tropics with us under our clothes.")

Anybody who's worn shoes has been physically augmented, and it makes little difference to me if the shoes are not implants or electronics. Find yourself without shoes in the middle of a parking lot full of broken glass, or without glasses when you're trying to read, and see how lacking you feel. A removable body part can still be a body part. (For an example closer to popular ideas about cybernetics, consider a removable, non-electronic prosthetic for a hand or a leg.) If only an electronic implant counts, there are already pacemakers. If you're not a cyborg until your abilities are raised beyond human limits, I think we're in that ballpark.

It hasn't helped that Donna Haraway used the word and the metaphor in an influential paper. I'm not a feminist or a scholar, but it seems to me that Haraway's key point was that people are going to use the cultural resources they find around them for their own ends, and with that I would agree (for example, Chartists re-using concepts from Christianity). This has nothing to do, however, with the Robocop idea of a cyborg as a partially robotic soldier, or with nonhumans appearing human.

That a game would borrow a widespread and successful thematic concept from prior media means nothing in particular. Either a game is primarily a game and only needs to plug in whatever story works with its gameplay, or a game is primarily a story and made the same way as other stories in other media. If Binary Domain was an action movie, would it suggest that moviegoers divide the real world into human and inhuman based on whether they watch movies? Amusingly, Keogh is using the contention that gamer media demonstrates gamer othering to other gamers themselves, and benefiting from the extent to which this already happens in the academic study of games.

"This paper uses Binary Domain's complex anxieties towards technology as a lens through which to trace the histories of these constitutive modes of identifying with videogames, and to demonstrate the influence they have on shaping videogame forms and audiences"

This "lens" shit would be more accurately described as blinders. There's never just one variable in the social sciences (and when there is, it's poverty). A lens is just an announcement that you have a conclusion ready to go and will be ignoring anything that doesn't fit it. Oh my goodness, someone looked through the X lens and saw X. What a feat of inquiry.

These "complex anxieties toward technology" don't belong specifically to Binary Domain, or Terminator, or Blade Runner, or even technology. As discussed above, a non-human passing for human is a very basic fictional concept, and you can just as easily find it in Dracula. But as the user of a lens, Keogh has decided that come hell or high water he will insist that plot details from Binary Domain have a deep and specific relevance to gamers as a whole. I could develop an equally valid and far-reaching conclusion about gamers through the Bubble Bobble lens (such as "gamers believe their humanity has been lost and they are now monsters, but can re-earn that lost humanity by helping each other" — this is actually better than Keogh's paper already, although still without foundation and absurdly reductive).

"Sega's Binary Domain"

More specifically, developed by Sega's internal Yakuza Team, famous for the Yakuza series. Be aware as Keogh describes the game that it was made by a well-established Japanese development team.

"What it means to be a 'human' is a notion constantly challenged by the pervasive presence of technology in our everyday lives. Pacemakers, prosthetic limbs, automobiles, GPS, internet connections"

No. This is not a challenge. A cyborg is augmented but still a human being. If you seriously think having a car or an internet connection puts your humanity in question, go revive the Khmer Rouge (although even they killed people with glasses not due to their augmentation, but because they were presumed to be intellectuals). If you are suggesting gamers think this... they don't. People wouldn't embrace electronic entertainment if they thought they were throwing their humanity away by doing so.

"To play a videogame is to both expand and constrain bodily ability through technological augmentations (controllers, motion sensors, touchscreens) and to both step into and become part of an integrated circuit of human and nonhuman actors (Giddings and Kennedy 2008)."

The same could be said for driving a car, but Keogh is not building a negative case against the character of drivers, only gamers. This also fits poorly with Keogh's ideas about gamers as "hackers" who prize freedom of movement, examined below.

"the dominant identities cultivated around the videogame form by marketing and enthusiast press discourses"

This makes it sound as though gamers are at the intellectual mercy of outside manipulators. If marketing and the "enthusiast press" were the last word, there would have been no Gamergate, no Mass Effect 3 complaints, no backlash against Skyrim mods on Steam going commercial, no widespread suspicion of DLC or anti-preorder sentiment (no, TotalBiscuit did not start it, although his participation is appreciated). In fact gamers are very sophisticated about how they interact with louder voices like press organs and PR campaigns, spreading messages they agree with and challenging ones they don't. It's not all one-way tastemaking as Keogh would have you believe.

Gamer identity has formed in spite of marketing and the so-called enthusiast press and is the fiercest critic of — and most substantive opposition to — both.

"empowerment, agency, and choice"

Games are an interactive medium. If there's nothing to do, or only one thing to do, or what you do doesn't matter, the game sucks. The interactivity is the point of the medium, and taking it away is like taking away the text of a novel or the sound of a song. 4:33 is a gimmick and a blank book has yet to be written. So of course games are going to be about giving the player things to do, making those things important to the game, and offering a choice among things to do and outcomes.

"strong space marines, efficient racing cars, god-like (and god-eyed) strategists. Such dominant understandings of how players engage with videogames see players less as integrated and participatory cyborgs and more as dominant hackers: using the technology to do what they want it to do, to make the choices they want to make, to beat the technology, to win."

This is a fine example of how for Keogh the cyborg metaphor is a smoke grenade that helpfully blurs distinctions so he can draw whatever conclusions he wants to draw. Somehow the concept of a cyborg is not masterful enough — despite being associated with surpassing human limitations — to be associated with visibly (and stereotypically) cybernetic cyborgs like Warhammer 40,000's Space Marines. Instead, Keogh invokes the hacker, conveniently forgetting that the hacker stereotype includes physical weakness, and he describes these categories as "masculinist". This ain't Saudi Arabia. Women can drive cars.

Keogh has been going on about the close interface connection between gamers and games, but now he reverses course to say that gamers don't integrate into gameworlds or participate in them. This is nonsense. "Immersion" and "viscerality" are highly prized among gamers (although the latter word has become overused). People want to inhabit gameworlds while playing, they identify with controllable characters while playing ("I missed the jump and died"), they develop reflexes and bodies of knowledge to assist them in playing. They interact. It's an interactive medium.

There are very clear roles for the "hacker" archetype around games, but they're not the gamer at large. The hacker is, in descending order of status, the dev, the modder, the troubleshooter, and the cheater. But in the ordinary course of play, you are not a hacker, although you may be playing in the role of one (in the same way you might play in the role of a racer, a barman, or a princess).

Gaming is not hacking. Hacking involves considering the game as code. Gaming involves considering the game as a representation. The loser in Pong does not think of pixels turning off at one set of coordinates and on at another, but of the ball getting past the paddle. The traitor in The Matrix boasts of ignoring code-as-code and seeing only the intended virtual result; later he abdicates the hacker role of trying to crash or subvert the Matrix in favor of living within it on its own terms.

Winning is not a motivation in itself. If it were, games wouldn't be challenging. There's a sweet spot where success is possible but not assured. This sweet spot moves depending on individual skill, genre familiarity, patience, and so on, and games often offer variable difficulties to accommodate that. Increasingly, games also offer varying degrees of completion, with achievements, alternate endings, optional collectibles, and so on.

Some examples from my own experience:

1. I started Binary Domain on normal or hard (don't remember), got to a difficult point, and decided to put it on hold for a while to play other games. I haven't gotten back to it yet. My main interest in the game was the chance to see the work of Yakuza Team (which is otherwise a console-only shop, and I only have a PC). I am not a particular fan of shooters.

2. I played through Dishonored many times on the hardest difficulty, experimenting with different playing styles. I had a great time making it through the game without killing anyone, and again using only a minimum of the player character's supernatural powers. These challenges were suggested by the game's Achievement system; normally Achievements are stupid, but Dishonored uses them constructively. I enjoy stealth games, freedom of movement through complex environments, and variety in playing style.

3. I have not yet finished Spintires, but I am gradually working my way through every map on the hard difficulty. I've never played a game quite like this before, and there's also the technical issue of patches repeatedly breaking previous saved games.

4. I played Dwarf Fortress back in 2012 and hope to find time to experiment with the new version soon. The Dwarf Fortress community celebrates the game's open-ended march to doom with the slogan "Losing is fun!" There is no victory state, only the further challenges of continued survival. There have been similar games, often more accessible — a good example is Tilted Mill's Children of the Nile — but Dwarf Fortress has a unique approach. Neither I nor anyone else will win at Dwarf Fortress; this story captures the mood and structure of the game well.

5. I play Football Manager off and on. This game is wildly popular and its audience is a unique cross-section of gamers and sports fans. You do not directly control the players on the field, and nothing you do can assure that your team will win a game, only make it more likely. There is no formal difficulty setting of the easy/medium/hard variety, but which team you're in charge of will determine the nature of the struggle you face and the resources you can use. There is no final victory here either; the game can continue forever, presenting you with new challenges each season.

In short, gamers are playing to play, not to win. Playing can involve winning but doesn't have to. Winning plays different roles for different people in different games, including total absence from entire games. If Keogh was right about a hacker approach to games, everyone would just cheat, and games without win conditions wouldn't be popular. Even the top slots of score attack leaderboards record the "winning" player's score at the time they lost.

"Yet, with the rise of DIY or 'zinester' games at one end of the game design spectrum (Anthropy 2012) and casual and mobile games at the other (Juul 2010)"

What on earth is measured along this spectrum? What quality is it that is exhibited by DIY games the most, mobile games the least (as if these are necessarily separate categories), and Keogh's idea of a "gamer" game (Call of Duty, no doubt) a medium amount?

For that matter, if my examples didn't make it clear, an individual game can be played with different levels of casualness. A casual player can stumble their way through a fighting game's story mode, while a dedicated player can get into the competitive scene where the challenge level is sky-high. Even the Call of Duty games that stand for the great gamer boogeyman the ivory tower wants to kill have casual-friendly single-player campaigns.

"the core 'gamer' identity that values autonomy and mastery"

Gamers gladly accept restrictions and challenges in games if they enjoy the result. They may even add restrictions of their own, like the Thief community's "ghosting," in which levels must be completed without leaving any lasting trace of the player's passage. Gaming is entertainment, not Keogh's ideas of a pursuit of supremacy or total freedom. Dancing on mailboxes doesn't help people dominate World of Warcraft. Contra Keogh, gamers do participate in games.

"Tomas forwards technicity to account for the 'different systems of identity composition' that emerges in 'cyborg-dominated culture'"

But Keogh said that gamers are hackers, not cyborgs. Now he's bounced back to cyborgs because words mean whatever he wants them to mean at that moment.

"Concerns of technicity intersect with concerns of gender, ethnicity, and class"

They don't have to. Everywhere I see technology breaking these barriers down, and only people like Keogh building them back up. To hear these snowflake fucks tell it, Tetris can tell if a white man is playing and dispense 4x1 blocks accordingly. These are the new segregationists, flying in the face of everyone else's freewheeling experiences, warning against "cultural appropriation" and classifying everyone and everything by race and gender.

The truth is that people on the internet are interacting all the time across barriers of gender, ethnicity, and class, even if they don't know it, even if they would choose not to. The truth is that a global market for entertainment is growing and nobody has to stay excluded. The truth is that you don't have to be a man to play Deus Ex, or a woman to play Orcs Must Die 2, or Chilean to play Abyss Odyssey. It does not and should not matter, but Brendan Keogh is trying with all his might to make it matter, and to blame us, the gamers, for it.

While I appreciate the value of a word for how someone integrates technology into their life, and the breadth of variations that might encompass, "technicity" is a trick coinage that smuggles the associations of "ethnicity" into discussions of technology use. Even if this is one valid consideration in investigating technology use, it shouldn't be baked right into the word where it can pass unexamined and never be absent. I can't think of a good alternative off the top of my head (techation?), but there must be one.

"Videogames, this paper's analysis will demonstrate, privilege the hegemonic power of the 'hacker' technicity that underlines the 'gamer' identity while marginalising those videogames and their players that value technological engagements beyond the strictly ludic ones of goal-based mastery and challenge."

"Analysis," my ass, more like wild and unfounded speculation in line with Keogh's personal prejudices against gamers. Nothing is quantified; qualitative material isn't even consistent.

The most generous reading of this passage is that people who can make videogames ("hackers") get to make videogames ("hegemony") because they can make videogames ("privilege"). Well no shit. Yes you need to have some level of what might be described as "hacker" skills to make a game. That level isn't always high, but it's not zero; even tools like Twine and RPG Maker can be difficult to learn from scratch. This is an ace use of social justice language to make the obvious sound like oppression ("axe-having privileges axe-havers over woodcutting"), but if people want to make games, of course they will have to learn how.

You don't need to make games to play them, though. Personally, I don't think I have what it takes to learn game development, but I still enjoy playing games — which, as I have established, is not a "hacker" activity. I am an example of a gamer who doesn't need or pursue significant "hacker" skills. Anybody reading this on a computer or smartphone can do the same if playing games interests them. It's a very open medium and it doesn't require any social capital to experiment with. You don't need to join a bowling team or get a corporate sponsor. There are enough good free games that if you have the hardware, you don't even need to make further purchases, although depending on your tastes you may want to.

"The past five years has seen the emergence of a variety of videogames that conflict with traditional modes of understanding the videogame form"

Or rather, in the past five years a group of people wanting to steal credit for the idea of subversive experiments about games has formed. But there is precedent.

"This squadmate, ironically, suggests that the assemblage of flesh and machine that allows the character to perform so admirably (playable character, virtual camera, and a corporeal player entangled with videogame hardware) might be a cyborg."

Surely torpedoing Keogh's notion that gamers are hackers and not cyborgs because they are good at games. Or no, actually Keogh does not address how this contradicts that. Like I said, the qualitative isn't consistent. "Cyborg" can be applied to one set of things in one place and another in another.

"Binary Domain aligns itself with a long lineage of science fiction works in a variety of genres."

Finally Keogh acknowledges that Binary Domain is using familiar ideas and not something unique to games, but he doesn't get to the point of comparing Binary Domain's use of these plot elements and what he's using that to say about gamers with — for example — Blade Runner's plot and what he's not using that to say about film audiences. Gamers are singled out for vilification over a common thread that runs through games and non-games alike.

"how videogames, from the start, became naturalised as masculinist"

The earliest games were part of a very different environment, particularly in terms of who had access to hardware that could run games. That age is over. I know who's interpreting games as male now, and it's Keogh. If you are not a man, and you want to try playing a game, go ahead. This will not cause you to become a man. I'm not a gender essentialist and neither are games. Nobody is standing in your way on your gender's account, much as Keogh would like that.

"The focus on player agency that potentially prevents videogames being evaluated as texts"

Keogh invokes this in a list of supposed hacker-isms of gaming, but it's more interesting as a stumbling block for someone like Keogh who wants to evaluate games as texts. It's true that many games have stories, and in some games story seems to be primary, but as someone curtly described it on a forum once, "gameplay is what games a game a game." The important stories about games, the game-specific kind of stories, are the ones that are created during play. A game can include a conventional story in the same way a game's art assets can include a painting and its soundtrack can include a song, but it is the game itself, what is played, what the player can do, that is the game.

This attitude is not unique to (video) games; it's also a popular issue in pen-and-paper role-playing games, where players complain about lack of choice ("railroading") if they encounter it, and the wide-open nature of the medium's ability to respond to player involvement is seen as a great strength.

"the celebratory tone often invoked when discussing corporate technological advances"

Again, not unique to games at all. We live in a capitalist society and corporations are how much of our resource use is organized. It is only natural that the things around us should be created by capitalist structures, even if we don't like capitalism. Similarly, the dissident in the USSR might duplicate forbidden literature on a state-owned mimeograph machine made in a state-owned factory, and travel by state-operated bus to distribute it, but that isn't the dissident's endorsement of the system being protested, merely his presence in it. People use the cultural tools available to them for their own ends. Gamers are going to be interested in games whether they're released by Ubisoft or the Politburo Subsidiary Council for Virtual Jumping and Stabbing.

"user-generated content such as mods as somehow more liberating than conventional videogame play"

I don't think anyone would argue that this is uniformly true, or that the specific advantage of mods is that they are "liberating." (After all, isn't the ultimate "liberation" to simply stop playing?) Mods can be great, though, and part of that is that they don't have to answer to corporate masters. A big expensive game has a rigidly timetabled development cycle (that falls out of its timetable repeatedly before it's done), and after a certain point a game is probably not going to get any more updates, but modders can toil for years after release on an ever more polished and rich mod like Silent Hunter 3's Grey Wolves. A major company may have its hands tied by quirks of the market, like the prudery that left clothes on people in Skyrim even after their last articles of clothing were removed, but modders swept in and made things like Schlongs of Skyrim, a surprisingly detailed male nudity package. It's funny that in one set of commas Keogh associates corporate development with his "hacker" villain, and in the next he puts non-corporate development right alongside it.

"This is often explicitly gendered, too, such as Aarseth's (2004) comment that what Lara Croft's body in Tomb Raider looks like matters far less than what he can do with it, privileging the agency and actions of the player in a computational system over the gendered representational strategies of the videogame."

Aarseth says Lara Croft's gendering isn't enforced on the player. Keogh takes this to mean games are more gendered, not less. Or is he assigning a male gender to player action and a female gender to game setting? Either way this is stupid. Tomb Raider was never intended to require a particular player gender, and it doesn't.

"Just as the hacker is concerned with mastering complicated systems and ultimately beating the form of the computer, so too is the gamer concerned with mastering complicated systems of mechanics and ultimately beating the form of the videogame."

I could just as easily say that the cyborg is concerned with self-augmenting, becoming more effective, and adapting to more challenging situations.

"Writing in 2002 to defend the oft-dismissed videogame cut-scene"

Not that anyone should. Cutscenes are ungame smuggled into games. Gamers will accept some restriction as part of a game system, but balk at the total restriction cutscenes impose. Want a cutscene? See a movie. Stopping a game to show the player a cutscene is like stopping a movie to show the audience a sculpture. (Art students, please do not steal this idea and pretend it's good.)

"Klevjer explicitly claims ludology to be 'partly rooted in the dark arcade of the late 70's and early 80's, partly rooted in hacker culture'(193). That the study of videogames in many institutions still finds an uneasy home between humanities and computer engineering departments points towards the everydayness of these tensions."

In academia, maybe, where people hate games and gamers and constantly try to tar them with whatever negative label they can find or invent. In the industry the art and the craft of games* seem to be working pretty well together, and gamers experience them combined.

* I'm not entirely happy with this phrase, but you know what I mean and it's terse. Don't mine it too deeply for implications about what is an art and what is a craft; they aren't intended.

Keogh could stand to explain this supposed tension between arcade culture and hacker culture. Which group is it that supports cutscenes? I didn't put my quarter down to watch someone else's story, but Keogh's win-at-all-costs hackers wouldn't either. You can't win a cutscene. I guess QTEs have been trying to change that, but the trouble with QTEs gets back to agency, choice, and consequences — if there's only one option, it's not much of a game. A good game waits in suspense for the player, because it cannot predict what happens after the player's involvement, because the player's involvement makes a difference.

"As a consequence of its historical construction as masculine and its alignment with the hacker technicity that favours technological competency, mechanistic virtuosity, and systems literacy, discourses around videogames (both scholarly and popular) have  produced what Dovey and Kennedy note is "an 'ideal' player subject that is naturalized as 'white', 'male' and 'heterosexual'""

None of this is stopping you if you happen not to be those three things or have those three aptitudes. My "technological competency" is low, and my "mechanistic virtuosity" and "systems literacy" vary a great deal from game to game and are typically unexceptional. In a multiplayer game, people aren't likely to be able to tell how straight or white or male I am, and in a single-player game (which I strongly prefer), there's nobody but me around to care.

Again: there is no social barrier. You do not have to make friends with any particular kind of people to start playing games. You can probably find a gaming subculture that you will fit into. If you want to play a game with friends, all you need is interested friends. You might meet new people in a game who don't like you, but that's just people being people. Games themselves don't even know how to socially exclude you.

"Dan is an archetypical white, heterosexual, macho American male"

Remember, this is the work of a Japanese developer. The game takes place in a half-ruined, dystopian, post-apocalyptic Japan, and the main characters are an international military squad — foreigners. Japan's history includes an American military occupation, so a foreign soldier character being American makes sense. By analogy, an American-developed Binary Domain could have taken place in a half-ruined, dystopian, post-apocalyptic United States, with the international special forces squad led by someone English. Playing as an American character isn't stopping Japanese audiences from enjoying Binary Domain any more than playing as a Japanese character is stopping American audiences from enjoying the Yakuza games.

(What really annoyed me about being stuck playing as Dan is that his primary weapon, an assault rifle, is general-purpose and rather generic. I had initially assumed you could switch between characters in the squad, and I wanted to try out their greater variety of weapons, but was disappointed to find that you cannot do this. My expectations may have been influenced by killer7, another Japanese game with a playable white man named Dan — in that game, there are several playable characters.)

"Rust Crew squadmate Faye Lee is a stereotypical, quiet, and slim"

Why, oh why, didn't they send the fat special forces team?

"not that Faye is a robot (a reveal that both Dan and the player come to expect)"

Shit, I was sure Dan would be a robot. At least Cain is probably a robot.

The way Keogh frames this, you'd think the moral of the story is that robots can't be tolerated and Faye gets killed right away, but from what I hear the player character takes Faye's side and protects her from anti-robot violence. It's also worth noting that one of the squad members in the game is openly a robot. My understanding is that while the New Geneva Convention and the Rust Crew's mission are pretty robot-negative, the real antagonist is whatever malign power controls the network of renegade robots and can activate the Hollow Children as sleeper agents. They play the death of the Hollow Child in the underground market as tragedy, or at least that's how I interpreted it. Just because there are characters in a story advocating the destruction of all robots doesn't mean that's the story's overall message.

"The hybrid people suggest, further, that despite being constituted solely by organic material, you may also be, simultaneously, a product of flesh and machine — an everyday cyborg."

I'll go a step beyond that — mechanized agriculture makes global population on the current scale possible, so we're all in a sense cyborg-born.

"Where the hacker strives for autonomy and dominance over the machine, the cyborg embraces the fact it is always already in part shaped and mediated by the machines it integrates with."

So in the hacker mode people might mod, cheat, code, configure, optimize, etc., but it's in the cyborg mode that people work with what's there, entering the deliberately unfinished experience of a game, accepting its restrictions and learning its rules, and becoming the element that completes it.

"takes as inherent those values in videogame marketing and design that are simply a dominant norm"

Once again gamer culture is described as top-down and bottom-up elements are ignored. No medium has the kind of feedback that games do.

"Dear Esther and Gone Home are exemplary of nascent modes of videogame design that do not offer the pleasure of mastery and control"

No, Dear Esther and Gone Home are examples of people trying to shoehorn their art projects into the game label just because they run on computers. Being in the Unreal Engine doesn't automatically make something a game (I believe Dear Esther was Source and Gone Home was Unity, but the point stands).

This gets into a debate people have about terminology, and this is not the only place I've seen it. In the pen-and-paper RPG world, from time to time there are arguments over whether something like Fiasco is an RPG. The subtext always seems to be that either it's good and an RPG, or it's bad and not an RPG. Advocates are really married to pushing it into that existing category, but I always wonder, what if it's good (Fiasco is good, by the way, if you enjoy making up stories with your friends), but we should find a new word for what it is?

I may or may not start a Twine project in the future; I've resisted calling it a game because it's not really what I would expect of a game. Instead, I describe it as an "adventure," after the Choose Your Own Adventure books that resemble the talk-tree structure of Twine. Similarly, I often see people adhere to a (mostly tacit) distinction between visual novels and games, and an explicit one between kinetic novels (with no choices at all) and visual novels (with at least some choices). Calling it not a game doesn't mean that it is necessarily bad, although as my first attempt it probably will be. But it is okay for something not to be a game. I'm reading China Mieville's The Scar right now, and if I had to evaluate it as a game, it would be absurd — no interactivity beyond turning the pages. But if I am free to consider it as what it is, which is not a game, it's a great novel and I will be pushing it on people later.

I haven't had positive experiences with what we might call "disputed games" yet, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily bad. This does not make them games, though. Uncharitably, I would say people want to hitch their wagons to a star, but the star does not shine for wagons. They want to tear the star down from the sky and harness it to their wagons, but the star shines on regardless. They tell us not to look at that star, but we'll still take our bearings by it. These people need to build their own star where they are and let it be that star which pulls those wagons.

Every new word is dumb to start with, and only takes on the characteristics of what it describes in retrospect. I've listened to hundreds of podcast episodes and never owned an ipod. So this is going to sound stupid and insulting and like I am trying to cheat disputed games out of their precious, value-conferring gameness, but let me suggest "lectro," for "electronic exhibit." This is a big potential category and a lot of it already exists. Any computer-incorporating museum and gallery displays qualify. You don't need any particular level of freedom or interactivity, and certainly not of challenge. The Path has been called a shitty game, but if you want to call it a shitty lectro, you'll have to consider it on the merits it's actually trying to have, not the things that set it apart from being a game. If you'd never seen a cat before, and your dog gave birth to a cat, you'd see catness as a horrifying birth defect. Approach things in their own categories rather than trying to make a square peg fit in a round hole.

I've got pretty high praise for a couple of lectros. Stellarium displays the sky at any given time and place, calculating the movements of the stars. Only useful in a narrow range of situations, certainly not a game, but it's really cool and worth messing around with. Similarly, Universe Sandbox simulates the motion of celestial bodies, and you can edit things freely, seeing what might happen if the moon and Jupiter switched places. Some people have already thought about gravity and orbits this way; my own understanding was limited and this added some color to it. As games these things are strangely crippled and lacking. As lectros they are whole.

"Casual games, such as Candy Crush Saga (King 2012) or Kim Kardashian: Hollywood"

I think this video is a strong case against the latter.

I generally avoid games which have microtransactions for a reason that will doubtless be called "masculinist" on some pretext or other: I don't like it when gameplay is tangled directly in real-world purchasing decisions. It takes me right out of enjoying a game to consider whether I want to use my own actual money to make a purchase, and these games are deliberately designed to bring the player to that crossroads early and often. People complaining about AAA games often target their consumerism, but in a F2P game you are still performing your actual, real-world, own-self consumerism inside the game. I see gaming as an escape and F2P makes things I'm trying to escape follow me.

"the freedom of movement taken for granted by players in many blockbuster games closely parallels the freedom of social movement possessed by the predominately white, straight, and male creators of those games."

I guess there was no freedom of movement in the works of Dani Bunten or Roberta Williams. This might be the most strained metaphor in this entire piece, and yes, I'm including gamer-as-noncyborg.

I'm going to lay down a suggestion here that I think ought to bind everyone: don't judge the creator's demographic categories, judge the work. No one should imagine that they are passing their race or gender on to the games they make, making "white games" or "male games." If I get a chance to play your game, I don't need to check your race before I decide if I like it.

"Mainichi (Brice 2012)"

Trust Keogh to plug this game. Brice, by the way, has a Patreon funding what she calls "Death to Video Games."

"This is perhaps most relevant of all to the renaissance of interactive fiction games seen through the development software Twine"

"Interactive fiction" is another good term for what I've been calling "adventures" and "visual novels." But it's no coincidence this genre had a long drought. As games developed, text adventures seemed more and more like mere puzzles, where the goal was to try every possible action in the hopes of stumbling on the one correct action the creator had predetermined, and the parser was more obstacle than interface. Point-and-click adventures suffered from some of the same problems, and also some new ones (like "pixel hunting").

"The domination and mastery of the hacker requires machine-like ability, while the cyborg exists, has always existed, in a direct relationship to the hacker from its inception."

Or the "hacker" is at least equally well described as a "cyborg" and Keogh has been saying nothing all along.

"the metaphor of cyborgism to explain the playable character's improbable and exceptional physical strength and dominance in the world."

Keogh struggles to present cyborgs as a universal game symbol here, when the real widespread phenomenon being observed is that player characters get powers. These powers are as likely to be explained by magic or preternatural skill as by technology, and even in the case of technology, they're as able to be equipment as implants. The rise of "RPG elements" has made a gradually unlocking tree of powers standard in games, allowing players to flexibly tailor the options available to them ingame. To his credit, Keogh acknowledges that his "cyborgs" can be magical, but this broadens the term to uselessness. It's supposed to simultaneously mean Robocop-style cyborg soldiers, nonhumans passing for human, avant-garde techno-feminism, anti-gamerness, anti-hackerness, and now any sort of "augmentation" from "powerful potions" to "an elven wraith."

"when Galloway claims that 'no gameplay is actually happening' at the moment the player stands on a virtual streetcorner to watch the sunset"

This is a fair point as far as it goes. Player inaction can be part of gameplay. This is often the case in stealth games, where the player may wait for an opportune gap in guard patrols before moving.

"It allows for understandings such as Golding's (2013) that see the player as navigating from within, rather than configuring from above, not unlike Haraway's feminist objectivity that insists we always see from somewhere (1988, 882)."

Keogh is way behind hardcore gamers here; there's a common feeling that it is somehow better to figure out a game yourself than go outside of it to consult a strategy guide, FAQ, external map, etc. That said, I think the validity of both approaches should be recognized, and it's about what the player personally wants at the moment. There have been many times I've relied on maps to find those last few collectibles, but also other times where I've continued experimenting on my own when stuck rather than see how other people did it.

"point towards how 'human' is a socially constructed concept with fluid but constantly policed borders."

A better comparison would be the boundary between song and spoken-word, or short story and novella, or movie and short. This is especially true as a common objection to what I earlier called "disputed games" is their length (often length vs. cost).

"no argument for either as 'wrong' or less accurate"

Fucking lies, this paper is completely anti-gamer. I don't exclude women, couldn't if I wanted to, enjoy games regardless of whether the people who created them or the characters within them match my own gender and ethnicity, and if I don't think a disputed game is a game, I'm perfectly willing to let it be an undisputed something else. I go from casual to hardcore myself from game to game, even session to session and ingame goal to ingame goal. We are all cyborgs, or none of us are.

I am a gamer. Stop smearing me.

Edited 06/13/15 to provide the new URL of Keogh's paper.