Game Studies - Queering Control(lers) Through Reflective Game Design Practices

  • “the peripherals which players use as extensions of their bodies and minds to operate videogames — are a key entry point into the project of altering the hegemonic status quo of mainstream game design.” ⤴️
  • “practices are also ableist in their construction, assuming a standard player for a standard control scheme” ⤴️
  • “game design best practices in the industry often focus on the status quo, rather than individual instances of representation.” ⤴️
  • ""the way in which a complex layering of technological, commercial and cultural power structures have dominated the development of the digital game industry” ⤴️
  • “by default, violent, misogynistic, and exclusionary” ⤴️
  • “some of these critiques address hardware and controllers as a site of entrenched hegemony (Fron et. al 2007, Bagnall 2017, Boluk & LeMieux 2017).” ⤴️
  • “agency in-game is not exclusively linked to the physical interface itself. The liminal space formed between the physical interface and the software must be addressed as part of the control provided to a user/player (Galloway 2012, p. vii).” ⤴️
  • “controllers, their physical, tactile feedback and materiality, and the feedback that players receive from them through the software” ⤴️
  • “most games for the SNES anticipate bi-dexterous players (with two mobile hands able to act independently)” (2017, p. 36).” ⤴️
  • “players who did not fit this category often had to turn to unofficial, “hacked” controllers, if they were to play at all” ⤴️ - illegalising a body
  • “Bagnall suggests that the hardware of computer and console games itself reflects phallocentric “prescriptive heterosexual ideology” that forces gamers to “enact heteropolitics” through their use (2017, p. 141).” ⤴️
  • “a joystick or analog stick is a penis analogue (Pozo 2015, Bagnall 2017).” ⤴️
  • “Hacked or custom alternative controller projects like the Joydick are frequently made with no intent to bring a design object to mass market (Pozo 2015). Rather, as instances of countergaming, they are a comment on and reaction to the status quo.” ⤴️
  • “Alternative controllers represent a desire to see, make, and play with something that does not exist within the standard set of interfaces, and there is queer, intersectional feminist, political potential in that speculative possibility space.” ⤴️
  • “how we can make use of related intersectional feminist and critical design practices in our queering practices” ⤴️
  • “inclusive, actionable theories of queerness in games must include intersectionality as a core concern, or risk reproducing the same hegemonic structures” ⤴️
  • “interrelations between different identity positions and experiences are complex and create shifting dynamics and subjectivities which operate within larger, interrelated systems of privilege and oppression.” ⤴️
  • “Intersectional feminism acknowledges lived experiences and systemic pressures as acting simultaneously upon us and our relationships to others.” ⤴️
  • “To be an intersectional feminist thinker means to acknowledge and consider questions related to power, privilege and oppression, including race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, physical ability, mental health, nationality, and power relations and dynamics. It means to interrogate our first impulses and assumptions as well as establishing one’s own position within these systems (Davis 2017, p. 47-50).” ⤴️
  • “consciously design from an intersectional feminist perspective, with an eye to their own positionality, through enactment of intersectional feminist principles within the design process (as related to power dynamics within the team, project management, etc.),” ⤴️
  • “Designers may choose not to address subjects and areas with which they do not have lived experience and knowledge, may engage consultants who do have this lived experience and do careful, thorough research, or may choose to collaborate with someone who does have that lived experience so that this person can “speak” for themself (understanding that one person cannot speak for a whole group).” ⤴️
  • “consent as an intersectional feminist issue that affects our day-to-day interactions with others and that requires active, ongoing engagement” ⤴️
  • “Although deeply and necessarily interrelated, queer theory is distinct from intersectional feminist theory and has its own traditions” ⤴️
  • “queerness contains its own collection of axes and intersections. On its own, the term “queer” is definitionally-difficult because, as Annamarie Jagose argues, “It is not simply that queer has yet to solidify and take on a more consistent profile, but rather that its definitional indeterminacy, its elasticity, is one of its constituent characteristics” (1996, p. 1).” ⤴️
  • “complexity and richness that is multiple and multimodal.” ⤴️
  • “the word itself “twists,” with a twist that allows us to move between sexual and social registers, without flattening them or reducing them to a single line.” ⤴️
  • “After Ahmed, I take queering as a verb to mean to reorient, redirect, to deviate (2006, p. 161).” ⤴️
  • “As a queer designer, my queerness is bound up and entangled within my identity in a bidirectional relationship, where my queerness shapes other aspects of my experience which in turn shape my queerness.” ⤴️
  • “Critical Design is a broad category of design practices which are used for talking about, designing around, and troubling the status quo, as well as engaging with social issues (Dunne & Raby 2013, p. 34-36). It stands in opposition to Affirmative Design (Ibid.). These two categories, Critical Design and Affirmative Design, form a spectrum whose targets and signposts are continuously moving as the design status quo changes. What was critical today may be read as affirmative tomorrow.” ⤴️
  • “Related forms of design practice that are critical include speculative design (Auger 2013), ambiguous design (Gaver, Beaver, & Benford 2003, Sengers & Gaver 2006) and, more specific to games, critical play (Flanagan 2009) and reflective game design (Khaled 2018).” ⤴️
  • “Speculative design is a set of related practices which “remove the constraints from the commercial sector that define normative design processes […] and use fiction to present alternative products, systems or worlds” (Auger 2013).” ⤴️
  • “ambiguity and a multiplicity of interpretations are a desirable outcome of design:” ⤴️
  • “we can create contexts and situations that encourage certain effects.” ⤴️
  • “brings player subjectivity into the picture while acknowledging that designs still possess embedded potential to create meaning.” ⤴️
  • “Flanagan’s Critical Play investigates “games designed for artistic, political, and social critique or intervention, in order to propose ways of understanding larger cultural issues as well as the games themselves” (2009, p. 2).” ⤴️
  • “The Reflective Games framework explicitly connects the Critical Design literature described above to game design” ⤴️
  • “Reflection, for the purpose of this discussion, is “the mental process that occurs when we encounter situations that cannot be effectively dealt with using previous experiences and solutions” and is acknowledged in educational psychology as an important part of learning (Khaled 2018, Boud et al. 1985, Mezirow 1990).” ⤴️
  • “The Reflective Games framework is a way of thinking about and designing games that encourages reflection for both creators and players.” ⤴️
  • “In “Questions over Answers: Reflective Game Design”, Khaled suggests that games have an opportunity to be true “reflection machines” as a form that could lend itself quite easily to creating reflective experiences (Ibid).” ⤴️
  • “Khaled’s Reflective Game Design framework refers to four design patterns for encouraging reflection. These are: “Questions Over Answers”, “Clarity Over Stealth”, “Disruption Over Comfort”, and “Reflection Over Immersion” (Khaled 2018, p. 22-24).” ⤴️
  • “also encourages us to recognize common design choices as patterns, where individual choices exist in relationship to each other.” ⤴️
  • “countering the idea of “stealth learning”, which is to say learning divorced from the context in which it is intended to be used (Ibid).” ⤴️
  • “guidance for analyzing existing queered games and for designing new ones” ⤴️

on reflecting

Section titled “on reflecting”
  • “Khaled notes the importance of “Questions Over Answers,” saying, “[Reflection] concerns deep consideration of problem spaces and is premised on questioning and revisiting our existing assumptions” (Ibid.).” ⤴️
  • “ambiguity is a desirable quality for reflective games, as it provides interpretive space for the player to work through their own thoughts on a subject” ⤴️
  • “Players presented with unproblematized situations that they are in agreement with and information that they are already familiar with are unlikely to reflect.” ⤴️- “What makes for an entertaining game does not necessarily align with the qualities that best promote reflection through games” ⤴️
  • “the perfected flow state is not one that promotes reflection (Khaled 2018).” ⤴️
  • “queer potential in games that are “No Fun” (2015).” ⤴️
  • “It is in [these gaps], which resist flow and immersion, that reflection upon the queered, reoriented nature of the experience can occur.” ⤴️

on (hyper)mediation/immersion

Section titled “on (hyper)mediation/immersion”
  • “Immersion is a highly desirable quality if design objectives mainly concern escapism. But reflection is precisely not about escapism: it concerns revisiting our previous beliefs intentionally and with a high degree of self-awareness.” ⤴️
  • “acknowledging and incorporating the “fourth wall”, even if this conflicts with the experience of “being there”. (Ibid)” ⤴️ - mediation
  • “normative ways of managing control in games are all about invisibility and seamlessness.” ⤴️ hypermediation
  • “creating visible gaps and seams in the experience” ⤴️
  • “flow, game feel, control literacy, procedural rhetoric, and materiality and embodiment. Collectively, these aspects, each drawn from game studies and related fields, cover most facets of control and controllers in games, and can be used to discuss how their manipulation affects control, what control communicates to players, and what is enabled as a result. These five aspects bleed into the narrative and programmatic materials of games, as control(s) cannot always fully be divorced from the content and themes of a game.” ⤴️
  • “Brian Schrank points out in Avant-garde Videogames “Games or cultures that foster flow allow people to be perfectly subjugated within their systems. When a system is designed with optimal flow, people forget that they are being subjugated: their doubts and distractions are kept to a minimum, and all human labor is positively absorbed into the system” (2014, p. 57).” ⤴️
  • “these norms tell us, the player should feel totally immersed and involved in the game. They should enter the flow state and be able to comfortably play for hours at a time.” ⤴️
  • “As Halberstam suggests in The Queer Art of Failure, “Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (2011).” ⤴️
  • “At times, actors switch roles, removing their “identity” and exchanging it, highlighting the fictional, constructed nature of the game.”
  • “In order to achieve a certain game feel, perhaps the in- game effect of a certain control input needs to be sped up or slowed down, or perhaps an animation needs to be smoothed, or perhaps a change in audio feedback is needed.” ⤴️
  • “the player will only notice game feel if there is something wrong” ⤴️
  • “Glitches and aspects of design that feel “glitchy” are one potential site for disrupting game feel.” ⤴️
  • ""to support glitch autonomy may mean not revealing whether a glitch is intentional or not, preserving a certain sense of wonder as to where it came from,” ⤴️
  • “deliberate choices meant to make the game feel systemically unfair, procedurally representing the invisible forces of systemic oppression in the workplace.” ⤴️
  • “our intent was to cause players to wonder whether the system was against them or if their own performance was inadequate, a reference to the gaslighting that marginalized people might experience in the workplace.” ⤴️
    • but how to do this without you reenacting the power dynamics, without you reactivating suffering? disrupt it outside of the player, don’t have the player directly affected by it, but feeling second-hand discomfort?
  • “players may not have quite the right technique, and might accidentally flick their wrists too hard, or over-accentuate their next motions in their frustration. This can lead to the player violating their partner’s boundaries, and the game can lock the player out for hours at a time, potentially days, depending how seriously boundaries have been violated” ⤴️
    • but is this with a human partner or a virtual being? because that’s a whole different paradigm of relationships and consent doesn’t necessarily apply in the same ways
  • “Players are used to being catered to and to being in control: being able to reload, reset and try again with few consequences.” ⤴️
    • i’d argue as players are tech users outside of games they are now very much used to being not in control at all
  • “This technological failure recalls Halberstam’s thoughts on queer failure, in that failure can offer creative and surprising ways of being in the world (2011).” ⤴️
  • ""control literacy” to refer to the player’s ability to pick up and use a given controller or any other set of learned conventions for controlling a game.” ⤴️
  • “These design conventions make it easier for those players who are familiar with them to gain competencies more quickly than players who are not” ⤴️
  • ""The amount of both manual dexterity and game-playing experience required … makes play inaccessible to those who aren’t already grounded in the technique of playing games.” (Anna Anthropy 2012, p. 15).” ⤴️
  • ““such control systems demand their own highly-specific skillset”, which can be quite exclusionary (2008, p. 909).” ⤴️
  • “One solution to the exclusionary impacts of complex, standardized controls is to level the playing field by making an interface that no one is familiar with but that is relatively easy to learn to use. This is common with alternative controllers,” ⤴️
  • “While perhaps not every game needs to remap its controls in this way, it is worth considering who these defaults include and exclude.” ⤴️

procedural rhetoric

Section titled “procedural rhetoric”

  • “Procedural rhetoric is the idea that rules and processes have meaning and ideologies embedded within them that can be learned and read by an audience (Bogost 2007).” ⤴️

  • “Miguel Sicart argues that “proceduralists” situate the meaning of a game wholly in “the formal properties of the rules” and that this disregards the importance of play and players, reducing their interpretive role to “actively complet[ing] the meaning suggested and guided by the rules” (Sicart 2011). According to Sicart: Proceduralists believe that those behaviours can be predicted, even contained, by the rules, and therefore the meaning of the game, and of play, evolves from the way the game has been created and not how it is played;” ⤴️

  • “Sicart’s assessment of procedural rhetoric suggests a false dichotomy. As structures that facilitate play and encourage certain actions over others, the rules of a game cannot help but contain arguments.” ⤴️

  • “The rules of a game provide a frame upon which the player can reflect through play, but emergent and house-ruled play is common.” ⤴️

  • “Ambiguity and multiplicity of interpretation, as the critical design practices literature tells us, is not only a likely outcome of design. Ambiguity can indeed be a desirable outcome, one that provides additional nuance and depth for our designs (Gaver, Beaver, & Benford 2003, Sengers & Gaver 2006).” ⤴️

  • “design always supports or critiques the status quo (Dunne & Raby 2013).” ⤴️

  • “Players are given a great deal of power. The average game tells us we can run without getting tired, that we can leap high into the air, executing identical jumps each time, and that we will have no trouble activating complex machines at the push of a button or two” ⤴️

  • “To quote Mattie Brice, “Gamers are set up to be colonial forces. [Playing video games is] about individuality, conquering, and solving. Feeling empowered and free at the expense of the world” (2016).” ⤴️

  • “Resisting the urge to design a solvable problem and to give the players more agency disrupts normative play (and the comfort that comes with that), privileging shared experience, reflection and the stories of the marginalized people over all else.” ⤴️

  • “Standard, mass-produced game controls are objects of plastic, rubber and metal, with electronic circuitry inside.” ⤴️
  • “smooth, pleasingly porous feel. It’s almost like skin"" ⤴️
  • “most mass-produced game controls target the same body parts and senses: the eyes, the ears, and the hands. It is clear that for accessibility reasons, controls must engage with bodies in alternative ways.” ⤴️
  • “Since we can alter and augment our analog experiences of play through the use of technology, we can and should think about what games can do if we take materiality and embodiment under serious consideration.” ⤴️
    • “Common control schemes prioritize smooth, seamless experiences that are designed to be self- effacing and encourage subjugation into the flow state. These norms within game design best practices tacitly support other hegemonic practices.” ⤴️
  • “Let players be bored, or frustrated, or, with their informed consent, any number of the other emotions that are part of the spectrum of human experience beyond the limited set that flow and industry best practices encourage.” ⤴️
  • but how do we get informed consent for gameplay whilst determining and activating emotions on our own terms? is it enough to say you can quit this game to revoke consent? how can we really be informed in how we’ll react to things?
  • “Let them remember that they have bodies, and encourage them to think about that embodiment.” ⤴️
  • “Let them interact with something other than plastic.” ⤴️

useful game examples

Section titled “useful game examples”
  • The Truly Terrific Traveling Trouble-shooter - inside a suitcase
  • “a radically-soft game about emotional labor and otherness” ⤴️
  • “Their soft, yielding tactility was important to our design, suggesting a vulnerability and an openness that contrasts with the hard shell of the suitcase that houses them.” ⤴️
  • “A tablecloth, embroidered with the game’s grounds, serves as a kind of portable stage, a physical boundary between the “real” world and the fiction of the game. This boundary is an entry point into a speculative possibility space: a queer, intersectional feminist world where emotional labor is valued and technology is soft and used for care.” ⤴️
  • “This game is deeply physical and embodied. The physical properties of the human-plant relationship are not deliberately engineered, and form the unique character of the relationship between each plant and human.” ⤴️
  • “In reality, neither the player nor the designers can access the consciousness of these plants to determine whether or not they enjoy being touched, although there is growing attention to the science of plants, their sensory organs, and how they communicate with and experience the world (Gabbatiss 2017). Still other research talks about how some plants may benefit from or “enjoy” being touched, while others are harmed by it (Dye n.d.). The stroking interaction, which feels so qualitatively different from pressing a button, queers control by asking players to ponder impact of their actions on a normally tacit non-human entity, and consider what its consciousness might be like.” ⤴️
  • “intimate, sensual possibilities that might exist between humans and non-humans, whether those are other living organisms or what normative political ecologies would consider inanimate objects or “things” (Bennett 2010, Haraway 2008).” ⤴️