GAME 340

How To Do Things With Videogames, Chapter 16: Exercise

“Exercise is boring. We hate doing it, and we make excuses to avoid it. And when we do exercise, we usually try to drown it out with something more pleasant” (110)

“We know we ought to exercise, but we wish it were less miserable to do so” (110)

“Unlike music and television, all videogame experiences require physical action. Not much action, in most cases, but action nonetheless” (110)

“‘Exergames’ hope to make the interactive demands of videogames greater, such that they might reach the levels and rates of activity required for a workout while replacing sedentary leisure activity with active leisure activity” (110)

“Exercise was an accident of necessity. In developed societies, most individuals are freed from the daily imposition of finding enough sustenance for the next day or week. We’re able to reinvest that time in intellectual, spiritual, or material pursuits” (111)

“But even early high-density societies preserved physical fitness as an important trait, more intertwined with daily life. Sport is one way organized societies developed their physical attributes, and sports in the ancient world were often tied to ritual and social values such as sacrifice, war, and individualism” (111)

“In contemporary society, when we think of sport we usually think of spectator sport, like football or boxing matches. These activities probably share more in common with arena fighting, like ancient Roman gladiatorial combat, and carnival contests, like medieval English Shrovetide football, than they do with everyday ritual. Such sports were primarily intended for entertainment and spectacle, roles they still play” (111)

“exercise has become reparation. Morning jogging and afternoon trips to the gym compensate for days at the computer and evenings in front of the TV” (111)

“Like so many other aspects of industrial society, we have found ways to measure our exercise so as to maximize performance and minimize time” (112)

“The obsession with exercise as enumerated personal physical performance has become so widespread that even players themselves have adopted physical performance as a primary metric for the success of these games” (112)

How To Do Things With Videogames, Chapter 17: Work

“When games invite us inside them, they also underwrite experimentation, ritual, role-playing, and risk taking that might be impossible or undesirable in the real world. When videogames take over our television screens or black out our computer desktops, they act as portals to alternate realities. When we play games, we temporarily interrupt and set aside ordinary life” (117)

“But that’s not really anything unusual. We do the same thing when we curl up in an armchair with a novel, or when the lights go down in a theater, or when we plug in our earbuds on the commuter train” (117)

“another, rarer kind of gameplay action, one that performs some action outside the game at the same time as it does so in the game. The performative offers one way to understand such actions. In these cases, things a player does when playing take on a meaning in the game, but they also literally do something in the world beyond the game and its players” (119)

“But exergame actions affect only the player, and only in an incremental, nearly invisible way … Stronger examples of performative physical interfaces would act on something more completely, and they would also have the potential to act on more than just the player himself or herself” (119)

“What does playing a game do to people in the world? In the case of entertainment games, such a question is often understood to inquire about the effects of violence on players or about how players find and evaluate meaning in games. In training, advertising, and learning games, the question asks how players take knowledge they learned in a game and apply it in their daily lives. The motivational (and sometimes compulsive) aspects of games suggest other ways gameplay can influence behavior” (124)

“Performativity in videogames couples gameplay to real-world action. Performative gameplay describes mechanics that change the state of the world through play actions themselves, rather than by inspiring possible future actions through coercion or reflection” (124)

How To Do Things With Videogames, Chapter 18: Habituation

“the ‘easy to learn, hard to master’ aphorism doesn’t mean what you think it does” (126)

“Familiarity is thus the primary property of the game, not learnability; it’s familiarity that makes something easy to learn” (127)

“Wii Sports is really just Pong warmed over, offering simple abstractions of well-known sports that are themselves quite complex to learn, but which large populations have managed to understand over time. We become habituated to them” (127)

“habituation builds on prior conventions” (127)

“Games can also produce their own conventions, which become familiar enough to be adopted later in the same way that Pong adopts table tennis” (128)

“the maxim ‘easy to learn’ is misunderstood. Mechanical simplicity is less important than conceptual familiarity” (128)

“Parker is concerned with material, not conceptual, durability, when he says that a game should be able to be played time and time again. While such resilience does imply some reason to want to play again, it does not imply any kind of invitation toward mastery whatsoever, whether practical or sublime. The game’s allure must simply inspire multiple plays, not necessarily multiple unique plays, or multiple plays approaching an ideal. As Orbanes explains, Parker Brothers valued durability. ‘Make it last’ became a company creed. Indeed, the matter of quality of material and manufacture helped make Parker Brothers games appealing as artifacts, not just as games” (129)

Commentator’s Note: Compare live games that are built to be sunset, games that are delisted from digital catalogues, and so on. Very little care for “lasting” games in the video game space.

“Most people don’t really care if they master Pong or pool—or Tetris or chess, for that matter. Instead, people like to be conversant in these games so that they can incorporate them into various practices, moving beyond the phase of learning the basics and on to the phase of using the games for purposes beyond their mechanics alone” (130)

“idealizing the sublime mastery of the sort the chess master or pool shark pursues may even serve as an undesirable characteristic for ordinary players” (130)

“Here’s a surprising notion that might explain both familiarity and habituation in games: catchiness” (131)

“Cultural connections help habituate ideas. They give them form, acclimatizing listeners—or players—to the social contexts in which ideas might be used” (132)

“Game designers talk openly about how to make their games ‘more addicting,’ but ‘catchy’ is certainly a better verbal frame than is ‘addicting.’ Indeed, why would anyone choose to call their craft ‘addicting,’ a descriptor we normally reserve for unpopular corporeal sins like nicotine?” (133)

“Mastery, it turns out, is a highly specialized carrot that works only in extreme circumstances; indeed, the ludic sublime is probably a very rare terrain” (133)

“Bushnell’s Law is not useless or base, but it has been universally misunderstood. It doesn’t explain the phenomenon we have assumed it does. Instead, it suggests that games can culture familiarity by constructing habitual experiences. They do so by finding receptors for familiar mechanics and tuning them slightly differently, so as to make those receptors resonate in a gratifyingly familiar way” (133)

How To Do Things With Videogames, Chapter 19: Disinterest

“By making firearms boring, NRA Gun Club might actually perform the rhetoric many have previously laughed off as politicking and fabrication: the responsible handling of firearms. One might even go so far as to say that NRA Gun Club owes most of its rhetorical power to the commercial FPS. The very obsession with the fantasy of gunplay common to commercial videogames creates an empty space in which the fantasy of responsible gun handling takes more coherent form than it might do in any other medium: at the end of the day, being a marksman might just not be very interesting” (137)

“We should simulate torture not to take the place of real acts but to renew our disgust for them” (140)

Commentator’s Note: This chapter feels like a real flop. “Disinterest” is a poor theme, when the chapter is really about violence. It gestures at the “disinterest” toward violence that games create when said violence is casually or callously depicted, but Bogost doesn’t really make a compelling argument. We should depict torture… so that we are disgusted by it? Really? I need more than this. It clarifies my feelings about the chapter on Titillation. Bogost’s detached liberalism is extremely frustrating.

How To Do Things With Videogames, Chapter 20: Drill

“good games captivate us with sophistication of thought and action” (141)

“some games just don’t take on topics that interesting. They’re regimens more than experiences. Tools more than art. Drills more than challenges” (141)

“Airlines perform the appearance of safety to comply with regulations while imposing the lowest cognitive and emotional burden possible on the passenger so as to suppress fear and agitation” (144)