Note: I am using an eBook edition of How to Do Things with Videogames. Quotes are referenced with eBook locations, rather than page numbers, as these were not available to me.
Games as Media micro-ecology
In How to Do Things with Videogames, Ian Bogost discusses games as media micro-ecologies. Bogost argues that medium-oriented theories about games are overgeneralizing, and miss out on the specific ways in which games enter everyday life. “We can think of a medium’s explored uses,” he writes, “as a spectrum, a possibility space that extends from the purely artistic […] [to] purely instrumental uses” (127). Bogost claims that understanding a medium involves studying both its formal qualities and its particular uses.
To study games, then, he turns to media ecology, which examines how media “work individually and together to create an environment for communication and perception” (162). Through this lens games become technologies that engage human activity in a variety of way and in diverse contexts. They do not constitute an intellectual realm apart from ordinary life, but rather interweave with it. Media ecology understands technology as relational.
Microecologies have to do with the relational dynamics of specific situations. The connections drawn by media ecology become configurational, and the contingencies of a given configuration become as significant as the general dynamics at work. The macro manifests in the micro. As microecologies, games both operate within the conditions of everyday activity and subtly influence it. The Super Smash Bros. franchise, for example, constitutes at once a media work designed to provide a certain kind of accessible yet deep playful competition, a heavily branded consumer product marketed to Nintendo fans using popular characters, a console game made for play in the home, and a piece of software that can foster certain social interactions amongst friends. As part of a microecology, Smash Bros. is shaped for and by the situations in which it is played, while itself playing a role in shaping those situations.
Bogost’s framework
Starting from his understanding of games as microecologies, Bogost develops an analytic framework for their study. If games exist in dynamic relationships to the contexts in which they are played, understanding a game means understanding those contexts, and how the game figures into it. Through this lens play becomes a form of use, and games functional objects.
Understanding games, then, involves an understanding of a particular game’s content as it relates to the game’s function in a given situation. His own analytic process tends start by identifying a function – something like “art”, “titillation,” “relaxation”, etc. He then considers the demands of that function – what does it mean to titillate? Next he examines various games that might be said to fulfill such a function, and looks at how they engage the player in such a way that the function might be said to be fulfilled. (That said, games are not always “about” play – his analysis is sometimes more concerned with, for example, whether people buy a game, than whether they play it.) By comparing several games with respect to the same function, Bogost draws conclusions about the effectiveness of various qualities.
Chapter 13: Relaxation
In this chapter Bogost considers how games can allow us to relax, using Zen meditation as an operational model of relaxation. He raises the following three points:
1. Games can relax us through repetitious, undemanding tasks. There is something meditative, for example, about the no-stakes play of Bejewelled’s “Zen Mode”, which allows players to tap and swipe colourful jewels endlessly, without worrying about scores or losing.
2. Games might also enable meditation through meandering – by providing calm, extensive spaces to explore. Proteus, which involves exploring a peaceful virtual landscape without any kind of challenge or goals, may provide such an experience.
3. Challenges, conflict, loss states, fast motion, and other elements requiring attention and focus break relaxation. Many games intended to be relaxing fail because they fall back on these (more conventional) structures, Bogost raises the example of thatgamecompany’s Cloud, which promises soothing, meditative cloud-drawing play, but requires precise and careful control in order to progress.
Representative quote: “The outcomes […] matter less than the acts that created them. [These games] are akin to doodling on a napkin, or skimming through a magazine, or knitting in front of the television” (1434).
Discussion question: What do you think of Bogost’s idea of relaxation? What other games could we discuss if we were to alter it?
