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1 Introduction

Gameplay is a term often used in discussions about computer games as referring to, broadly speaking, that which happens when the player plays the game. In colloquial reference, which can be witnessed for example on any web forum devoted to the topic of computer games, gameplay is sometimes seen as a direct consequence of the rules of the game, but equally often it is understood in a somewhat more vague sense as the overall “feel” of the game. Qualities of gameplay seem to be inherited, to some extent, from the involved computer game, meaning for example that some games can have “better gameplay” than others. However, it is not hard to imagine an argument between two computer game aficionados concerning the qualities of gameplay in a particular game, leading to the conclusion that the game in question in fact has good gameplay, but not everyone is skilled enough to be able to experience it. Thus, looking at the colloquial uses of the term, we can assume that the phenomenon of gameplay involves qualities of the player, the activity of play, and the game artefact. In this chapter I seek to establish a footing for the concept beyond its colloquial use, behind which I assume, based simply on the popularity of the term, to be a discernable phenomenon.

Within the discourse of computer game studies several definitions of gameplay have been proposed but no consensus has been reached. Often the definitions attempt to reduce gameplay into interactivity or consequences of rules in the particular game. Salen and Zimmerman (2003, 303) (whose definition I will discuss in more detail later on) for example, define “game play” as the “the formalized interaction that occurs when players follow the rules of a game and experience its system through play.” However, if we want to be faithful to the hybridity of gameplay suggested by the term’s colloquial use, such reduction is unacceptable.

Quite an illustrating example of the irreducibility of gameplay to the rules is the observation of Frasca (2007, 174), that in the (non-computer) game Twister, “sexual performance is not required by rules. However, due to the gameplay, it is likely that a player will end up being ‘too close’ to another player body.” Were we to describe Twister solely based on what we can learn from looking at the game’s rules and/or its material existence, we would miss what some players might consider the key attraction of the game. However, we could not reduce it to the activity or attitude of play either – the game, as it exists in the world, cannot be ignored. If a particular Twister mat is slippery, the game of Twister as played (including the exchanges between and experiences of the players) is rather different from a game of Twister played with more traction.

While we can observe reductive undertones in the uses of the term gameplay within game studies, game design writing can be criticised of mystifying the term. Game designers Rollings and Adams (2003, 199) hint at a certain vagueness surrounding the term gameplay, as they remark that the term is “extremely difficult to define because there is no one single entity that we can point to” as an example of gameplay. When looking at how a game design writer Saltzman (1999, 16) compares “gameplay” to “the glitz and glitter poured into games these days”, Juul (2005, 56), points out that Saltzman depicts gameplay as “the secret ingredient that makes (games) worth playing.” Not unlike game designers who can design great gameplay without having to define it, empirical-scientific research on gameplay can proceed without much conceptual explication of the term. Within the discourse of empirical games research (e.g. Dekker and Champion 2007; Nacke and Lindley 2008), it appears to be feasible to consider gameplay as referring to the temporally and spatially delineated empirical phenomenon which comes into being in the experimental settings.

Since its inception, central tenet of computer game studies has been the acknowledgement that the playability of computer games, as referring to the necessity of the player’s involvement in the constitution of the game as played, sets them apart from many traditional forms of media (e.g. Aarseth 2001). If we want to sustain computer game studies as an endeavour that acknowledges the unique aspects of computer games while seeking to shed light not only on computer games as designed artefacts but also on the ways in which they become intertwined with human experience and practice at the time of playing, it is necessary to arrive at an understanding of this amalgamation of subjectivity, process, and technology which is constituted when the computer game is played and which we have might approximate as “gameplay”. Philosophically inclined conceptual analysis, such as the work in this chapter, cannot confirm, for example, whether gameplay ‘exists’ as a discernable empirical phenomenon but by focusing on the dynamics in the relationship between the parts constituting the whole it can dissolve some of the difficulty of defining gameplay and by doing so demystify the term without reducing it into any of its constituents. As a premise for the analysis in this chapter I assume that the difficulty in defining “gameplay” and the vagueness that it results are indications of the ontological hybridity of the phenomenon the term attempts to refer to. This I intend as meaning that gameplay incorporates elements that belong to mental and physical domains – qualities of experience, activity, and materiality, to be more specific.

Initially considering gameplay as a composite of the terms game and play, I argue that in order to see significance in the notion of gameplay it is not necessary to dwell upon the subjective characteristics of that to which play refers – whether it is for example “source of joy and amusement” (Caillois 2001, 6), an “oasis of happiness” (Fink 1968), or a “disposition” implying readiness to improvise in an uncertain situation (Malaby 2009, 211). Instead, we can consider play as a “placeholder” for an activity and attitude to be filled empirically if necessary.

In her paper concerning with the role sound in gameplay, Jørgensen (2008) points out that

gameplay is not a feature designed into the game alone, but an emergent aspect of interaction between the game system and the player’s strategies and problem solving processes. In short, gameplay is how the game is played, delimited by the game rules, and defined by the dynamic relationship that comes into being when the player interacts with these rules

I agree with Jørgensen (2008) regarding gameplay being constituted in the relationship between the player and the game. However, it seems uncertain to which extent we can, in our descriptions of computer game play, apply terminology and descriptive devices specific to traditional games. In my attempt to untangle gameplay, it becomes necessary to demonstrate that the technological specificity of computer games compromises many of the descriptive devices – such as “rules”, “winning” and “losing” – with which gameplay has been conceptualised previously but which originate in analyses of traditional or ‘transmedial’ (Juul 2003; Tavinor 2009, 21) games. Furthermore, drawing on Gadamer (2004), Wittgenstein (1973), Aarseth (2007), Juul (2003) and Kirkpatrick (2007), I argue that given the prominent role of materiality in shaping computer game play, a stringent application of the notion of “game” to describe computer game play does not seem sensible either, especially if the notion is understood as it has been established to describe traditional non-computer games.

From these premises and by drawing on post-phenomenological philosophy of technology (Ihde 1990; Verbeek 2008), I articulate the computer game as a technological artefact which makes players responsible, in an existentialist sense, for the freedom it endows them with. From this analysis gameplay appears as a self-sustaining activity in which at stake is the continuation of the activity itself. This risk is what distinguishes gameplay from freeform play. I describe how the game artefact not only makes the risk manifest in a material form but also regulates the qualities of play by shaping the intentionality of the player’s experience. By unpacking the interrelations between the game as an immaterial structure, the material game artefact as a technology, and the activity and experience of play, this analysis helps untangle the hybridity hindering the use of the notion of gameplay. In this process, interesting questions considering the role of the computer game artefact arise. Is gameplay upon a computer game significantly different from the gameplay upon a stack of cards? How about a pinball machine?

2 Game and Play in the Concept of Gameplay: A Curious Coupling

In the following passages I shall interrogate the conceptual linkage between the notions of game and play. They are concepts which often make best sense when used together. Humans, especially children, often play without there being any pronounced game involved, but attempting to find out whether a previously unseen object unearthed at an archaeological excavation is a game or not requires one to find out whether it can be played. Reading contemporary game studies may lead one to think that play and game are not only interrelated but also interchangeable as concepts. This assumed affinity implies that we can use the qualities of one to explain the other, as for example Juul (2003, 31–32) has done in the literature review leading to his “Classical Game Model”: in a table summarizing earlier definitions of a game, Huizinga’s notions of play (Huizinga 1998) sit commensurately next to Crawford’s opinion of what a game is (Crawford 1982). In the following I shall briefly consider certain methodological implications of assuming a conceptual affinity between game and play.

There are indeed cases in which it may be lucid and productive to assume game and play as almost synonymous. For example, if the ‘system’ of the game favours player two, player two will most likely be favoured when the game is played. For a multitude of purposes, to which I will return in a while, this “most likely” may be the highest necessary resolution and the sufficient level of detail. However, while a game may appear imbalanced to an ‘objective’ analysis, almost anything can happen when the game is actualised through play. Players who, apart from playing the game, are able to do other things with and to it, may cheat or spike each other’s drinks. The allegedly advantageous position of player two may be embodied by an infant who can barely tell X from O on a PlayStation controller. Flaws, like overheating GPUs and network congestions may occur in the infrastructure facilitating play. A swarm of grasshoppers may appear, distracting the players.

While the notions of play and game are certainly inseparable in number of ways, and the difference between them may in some contexts be deemed trivial – so trivial that in some languages they are encompassed in the same word – the grounds on which we can describe details of the two from a scholarly point of view are decisively different. The grounds that may justify a statement about a game (e.g. the rules favour player two) are not enough to justify a similar statement about a playing of that game (e.g. player two gets favoured) and an assumption, based solely on an ‘objective’ analysis of the rulesFootnote 1 of the game, that player two would be in fact favoured, would not be sustainable but imply an attitude of determinism.

However, like I pointed out, there are cases where it makes pragmaticFootnote 2 sense to assume certain things about players and playing situations without making a fuss about the determinism implied. Computer game designers assume that the players will give the game a certain degree of attention and are capable of grasping the user interface and proceeding with logical thinking. Without assumptions like this it would be impossible to practice game design, but there seems to be a limit to what can be feasibly assumed. Like Smith (2007) suggested after his empirical studies of multi-player gaming situations, assuming that the players would want to win the game would not always be sustainable. For example, a game carefully adjusted for play geared towards winning would perhaps not yield interesting experiences to those who bring other kinds of desires into play.

While we can describe the design practice justifying the reduction of play as a human activity into a set of predictions and assumptions, there are equally sensible reasons for a similar degree of reduction concerning games, too. For example those conducting large-scale survey studies, can be, by way of their methodology, unable to account for details in individual game artefacts influencing the humans they study. This is suggested by Malliet (2007), who observes that “in most theories on the psychological or social effects of video games, only minimal attention is paid to the role of video game content as a moderating variable”. As their focus is on psychological effects, the researchers in the effects tradition, according to Malliet (2007), often introduce game content into their equations by indirect means such as surveys, which reduce games even to a single property of being either “violent” or “non-violent”.

As a premise for the further argumentation we may acknowledge that computer game play, as involving humans engaged (to a varying degree) in activities upon artefacts, is multifaceted and even best practices for studying this side can imply assumptions that lead to reduction on that side. There seems to be a curious coupling between games and playing, located somewhere between ontology and language, and for different purposes the terms of this coupling are best negotiated in different ways. While I will not attempt an exhaustive analysis of all their interrelations, in this chapter I strive to establish a notion of gameplay within which the two terms can coincide in peace.

3 Gameplay as an Activity and an Attitude

Now I shall discuss the notion of play in an attempt to establish a conceptual access to the phenomenon without reducing its subjective qualities into approximations.

Consider two individuals handling pieces of laminated cardboard. By observing that activity for a while, we can recognize that the subjects are actually playing. Perhaps we know the rules of Uno (1971) and see that the individuals are behaving according to the rules of that particular game. Or perhaps we haven’t heard of Uno, not to mention seeing it being played, but our attention is caught by patterns we are familiar with from the context of play, like moving a whole stack of pieces of laminated cardboard aside when a certain kind of piece was placed on top, or asking “Is is it my turn or yours?”. Based on paying attention to what the two individuals are doing, observing the events in sufficient detail, we can conclude that what they are doing is play. For this conclusion, it is not necessary to concern ourselves with what the players are thinking and feeling.

This is the kind of perspective to playFootnote 3 we can read also in Gadamer (2004, 105), whom we might consider as the first ludologist given his focus on ‘games themselves’ rather than on for example the players. Gadamer emphasized the “primacy of play over the consciousness of the players”, meaning that play itself was more important than what goes on in the minds of those engaged in it. For him, the significance of play was to be found from play itself, which he characterised as a to-and-fro movement. From this perspective, “it makes no difference who or what performs this movement” (Gadamer 2004, 105) and thus the players can be kittens, rays of light, or individuals capable of cogitations. Even though Gadamer acknowledges that play needs its players through whom it can achieve its presentation, in order to understand play we do not necessarily have to understand the players, and vice versa, by understanding play we do not necessarily understand the players. Vikhagen (2004, 5) suggests that for Gadamer’s notion of Spiel, “the player’s role is secondary, or more like a catalyst, a way to instigate play’s own purpose.” For Gadamer, the meaning of play stands detached from the (conscious) behaviour and attitude of the players. Like Rodriguez (2006) puts it, instead of saying “X and Y are playing”, Gadamer would say that “there is playing going on.” From the Gadamerian perspective, play appears as an activity or a process distinguishable from the player’s subjectivity.

Also Salen and Zimmerman (2003, 303–305), when, in Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, attempting to define what play is, pick up the idea of play as an activity. They differentiate between “Game Play”, “Ludic Activities” and “Being Playful”. “Game Play” is the narrowest of their categories, the “formalized interaction that occurs when players follow the rules of a game and experience its system through play.” “Ludic Activities”, then, are play activities, which include not only games, “but all of the non-game behaviours we also think of as ‘playing’,” such as “a kitten batting a ball of yarn[…]” or kids throwing a frisbee. The third category of Salen and Zimmerman (2003, 303–305), “Being Playful” refers “also to the idea of being in a playful state of mind, where a spirit of play is injected into some other action.”

This seemingly harmless model conceals a methodological hindrance. When looking at an activity unfolding, we can easily establish its status as “Game Play” by means of external observation. Assuming that it is play we are looking at and that we have an adequate sample, patterns will emerge which are enough to convince us that the interaction is “formal.” This is not unlike the previous example about recognizing that individuals are playing Uno rather than playing around with pieces of laminated cardboard. Regarding the second category of Salen and Zimmerman (2003, 304), “Ludic Activities”, again by observing we can see if the participants, for example the kids with the frisbee, are “testing the limits and boundaries” of the structures within which the activity unfolds and “finding ways of moving around and inside them.” For example, we can observe that they apply a sophisticated curve in their throws in order not to hit an adjacent tree, not to mention the throws they make with eyes closed, from behind their backs, and so on. Recognising something that fits into either of the two categories, “Game Play” and “Ludic Activities”, is perfectly possible based solely on observations from an external viewpoint.

The first two categories, into which phenomena can be classified based on external observation, can encompass playing carried out by all kinds of actors, including non-humans. The ‘play’ that is portrayed by the first two categories, appears epistemologically commensurate with Gadamer’s Spiel, meaning that the definition does not rest on the properties of thinking and feeling (human) subjects. However, the third category, “Being Playful” warrants a shift of perspective as it requires us to consider what is going on in the subject’s mind. Thus, in the model of Salen and Zimmerman (2003) two aspects of play that call for different approaches – the activity and the attitude – are confused as one. The separateness of the two has been already established since Caillois (2001, 43), who distinguished between the “purely formal qualities” and the “various psychological attitudes that govern play”. Allow me to elaborate on the need for different approaches for the two aspects of play.

Regarding play as activity, the events which we can observe and grasp, like “a kitten batting a ball of yarn” (Salen and Zimmerman 2003), or asking “Is it my turn or yours?”, or shuffling and dealing cards, together (eventually) make up what the definition refers to: the activity of playing (a specific game). For example, the activity of playing Monopoly (1935) consists of taking turns, throwing dice, moving tokens across the boards, exchanging play money for property, and so on. If we assumed a priori the activity’s ontological status as playing, and attempted to arrive at its description, we could observe the activity for a while and provide an account of the playing of Monopoly that would consist of descriptions, abstractions and conclusions of what we observed: a game where the players move between properties, occasionally pick up cards, and so on, according to a particular logic.

If we were concerning ourselves with play as an attitude instead of as an activity, the relation between our direct observation and the phenomenon under scrutiny would be somewhat different. That which we could grasp by means of external observations – like the gleeful smile on the face of someone who managed to avoid a loss that seemed to have been determined already – would be just symptoms of the attitude, not anything making up what the term refers to, that is, play as an attitude (e.g. feelings of amusement, happiness, a particular relation to the one’s spatiotemporal existence, etc.). This demonstrates that the notion of play could also be seen as attempting to describe an inherently subjective phenomenon, meaning that when giving an account of playing we would be describing a state of a living subjectivity – the plans, motives and desires entertained by an individual at the given time.

Malaby (2007, 96), too, is aware of a distinction between play as a “form of activity” and “a mode of experience”. Drawing on Stevens (1980) and Malaby (2007, 100) argues that one cannot sit on two chairs simultaneously:

if we are using the notion of play to signal a state or mode of human experience […] we cannot simultaneously use it reliably as a label for a kind or form of distinct human activity. (Something that allows us to differentiate between activities that “are play” and those that “are not”).

Malaby (2009, 211) proposes a play as a disposition that “makes the actor an agent within social processes” and implies the actor’s willingness to improvise in an uncertain situation. I agree with Malaby (2009) that it is sensible to see play as a disposition, as a particular kind of stance toward the world. However, I would insist emphasizing that the disposition is private: perhaps my attitude of play bears no resemblance to your attitude of play, even though their symptoms could be described as similar. In this light, any definition of play which seeks to address the subjective qualities of the phenomenon while simultaneously claiming inter-subjective plausibility appears as an approximation to which we have perhaps arrived by means of synthesizing empirical evidence about the contexts and alleged symptoms of particular kinds of dispositions.Footnote 4

If we considered play as an activity (as in the second option in Malaby (2007, 100)), individuated to the extent that we can distinguish it from other activities and further differentiate one kind of play from other kinds of play, we would be already closing in on the significance to be found in the applications of the notion of game. Gadamer (2004, 110) suggests that the playing of a game is a way for “an activity to become a work” and thus gain independence from the subjects engaged in it. He refers to this as “transformation into structure.” Due to the transformation we can have a particular ‘individuated kind of play’ which allows us to ask “Do you remember when we played hop-scotch?” instead of asking “Do you remember when played so that we drew the figure on the asphalt and […]?”, and, which we do not hesitate to call a ‘game’.

Undeniably also the activity of computer game play can be described as having a “structure” in the Gadamerian sense; playing Half-Life 2 implies losing oneself (cf. Gadamer 2004, 103) ‘into the game’ not unlike playing Hop-scotch does. However, in comparison to non-digital games, many of which can be facilitated by any “found” materials, the technological materiality of computer games seems to have a more prominent role. I will return to this shortly, but allow me first make a brief speculative remark concerning the role of play in the notion of gameplay.

Perhaps, in our quest to understand the notion of gameplay, we should acknowledge the impossibility of arriving at a simultaneously exhaustive and inter-subjectively plausible description of play. Rather than trying to make do with approximations about subjective intricacies of play, we could perhaps stop at what we can observe without problems: that depending on the perspective from which we look at it, play appears as an activity or an attitude. This would be to consider play as a “placeholder” within the notion of gameplay, to be filled empirically on a case-by-case basis in all the individual instances of the term’s application.

4 From Metaphor to Materiality

I pointed out earlier that we can describe structures according to which turns of events unfold and to which players have to adjust their behaviour in both digital and non-digital games. However, seeing the ways in which computer game play is structured as on par with the ways in which non-digital game play is structured, would be to overlook the influence of (technological) materiality in the structuring. In other words, a Gadamerian “structural” account of computer game play must be complemented insights on how the technology makes the structure manifest in a material form. Allow me to illustrate this with an example of Qualat, a game in the family of games known as Mancala.

A fundamental mechanic in Mancala games is the picking-up a handful of little stones from one of the several pits on the board and ‘sowing’ them into subsequent pits. These games were, and perhaps still are, played by herdsmen using goat droppings in place of stones (called til when used as playware for Qualat) and hand-dug holes in the dry ground as pits (Pankhurst 1971). In his chapter in the The Study of Games (Avedon and Sutton-Smith 1971), Culin (1971, 94) offers an account of Mancala, and suggests of its material dimension that it uses a “board with cup-shaped depressions and a handful or so of pebbles or shells.” Culin (1971, 95) also recollects hearing that

Children frequently play the game in holes made in the ground when they have no board, a device also resorted to by travelers who meet by the way.

Of all the differences between materialities of goat droppings and computer games the most important to our analysis here is that the latter not only has the ability to transform as a consequence of its player’s choices, but is also expected to do so. If a dry goat dropping gets crushed in the hands of a herdsman, it is an unfortunate accident comparable to a power failure when playing Tetris (1985) in that in both cases the materiality prevents the game from continuing. The “found materiality” used in a game of Qualat does not have the ability to transform itself in relation to the turns of the events unfolding according to the game’s structure. The material game artefact of Tetris, on the other hand, will transform itself to the extent that it prevents the game from continuing if the blocks touch the top of the container. This is always the case, it is hard-coded in the binary executable file whose run-time behavior corresponds to what we know about how the game of Tetris plays out.

The prominence of materiality as structuring computer game play has certain ramifications to our attempts of untangling the hybridity within the notion of gameplay. Namely it renders some of the presuppositions which in the context of games like Qualat would be perfectly justified as questionable if not unexamined. Allow me to elaborate on this claim in reference to Aarseth (2007, 130), who paraphrases how Gadamer (2004, 106) understood players as subordinate to the structure of the game (“Whoever ‘tries’ is in fact the one who is tried.”):

By accepting to play, the player subjects herself to the rules and structures of the game and this defines the player: a person subjected to a rule-based system; no longer a complete, free subject with the power to decide what to do next.

I am sympathetic to Aarseth’s reading of the player’s freedom being altered at the moment of beginning to play. For example, I cannot play a game of solitaire with a traditional stack of cards without knowingly subjecting myself to the rules of the game and agreeing not to be distracted by any extra-ludic temptations I may face. Without the conscious decision of doing so, which involves knowing the rules of the game and being capable of the necessary behaviours, the stack of cards remains yet another feature in the contingency of the world. However, the nature of the event of ‘subjecting oneself to the rules’ of the game becomes somewhat ambiguous if we consider it in the context of single-player computer games. Juul (2003, 43), writing about the relation between traditional games and computer games, observes that:

while computer games are just as rule-based as other games, they modify the classic game model in that it is now the computer that upholds the rules. This adds a lot of flexibility to computer games, allowing for much more complex rules; it frees the player(s) from having to enforce the rules, and it allows for games where the player does not know the rules from the outset.

Thus, we can play computer games by trial and error – metaphorically speaking by banging our heads against the wall until a hole appears where previously was a wall. In some cases this qualifies also as a literal description: for example, while in Wolfenstein 3D many of the doors to secret rooms containing treasures and weapons are hidden behind rugs hanging on the wall, there does not seem to be any general rule by understanding which the player could fathom out the locations of hidden doors, e.g. that underneath all rugs with a particular kind of image, or underneath all rugs with a particular kind of image situated next to a chandelier, there would always be a door. Thus, a viable method of finding hidden doors is to hold down the key used to open doors while moving the camera/weapon perspective (the FPS avatar) along the walls in a 45 degrees’ angle.

The concept, or a metaphor, of game has complex descriptive abilities. When we apply it on the phenomena we have come to know as single-player computer games we get as if for granted the whole system of categories with which to describe the properties of the phenomenon under study. We can name the person in front of the computer as “the player” and the patterns we may observe in the run-time behaviour of the computer system as “rules”, for example. However, thanks to the materiality enforcing the structure of the game, with patience and perseverance the player can to a large extent compensate for and perhaps even substitute the lack of prior knowledge of the game’s genre or rules. Like Consalvo (2007, 85) observes, “the game embodies the rules, is the rules, that the player must confront.” However, it is perfectly possible that through the procedure of trial and error, the player never achieves an understanding of any regularities in the behaviour of the game artefact to justify the term ‘rules’. The ontological status of ‘rules’ is ambiguous especially in the context of complex computer games whose ‘systems of rules’ we would have hard time describing exhaustively. In single-player computer game play, it requires benevolent interpretation to ‘see’ rules in the behaviour of a computer executing code. This is unlike traditional games, in which the enforcing of the “structure” is the player’s task, and knowing the rules is a sine qua non for the activity. In this light, it does not seem unjustified call for revisiting the ways of applying the game metaphor for the description of single-player computer games.

Kirkpatrick (2007, 75) suggests that an analysis of a computer game must take play as its starting point, but points out that it would be wrong “to pursue the prioritization properly afforded to play exclusively in the direction of an analogy with traditional games.” Further emphasizing the disparity between computer games and all games, he suggests that “what is distinctive to the computer game form can only be partially understood by examining its game character.” However, if we assume that there indeed is significance vested in the colloquial usage of the notion of gameplay and our task here is to understand it, perhaps we should be less stringent. Wittgenstein (1973, §66–71) suggested that a search for that which is in common between all the games we know, ranging from board-games and card-games to children’s games and olympic games, will never arrive at a core gameness but has to content itself on the level of “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities”. Wittgenstein (1973, §67) calls this family resemblance. Wittgenstein (1973, §66) suggests that to give someone an account of what a game is, we could

describe games to him, and we might add to the description: “This and similar things are called ‘games’.”

Thus, instead of concentrating on the similarities that are not there, our effort of establishing the notion of gameplay in the context of computer games beyond its colloquial use should perhaps focus on that which the activity of playing a game and the activity of playing a computer game have in common.

5 Computer Game as a Technological Artefact

Previously I have suggested that in order to grasp the ways in which the materiality of the computer game artefact shapes the phenomenon of gameplay, we need to move beyond the traditional game metaphor. In the following passages I shall attempt a more detailed account of the kinds of shaping that are taking place, seeking to grasp the hybrid nature of the phenomenon. I begin by establishing the materiality involved in gameplay through the concept of a technological artefact (cf. Ihde 1995) and proceed to describe how the game artefact shapes play in terms of both activity and attitude. In this analysis, risk (cf. Gadamer 2004, 160) appears the ancestral trait linking computer game artefacts to the family of games and the game artefact as making the risk manifest in a material form. Through an example of flashbang grenades, a common feature in many FPS games, I illustrate how the experience of play can be described as being co-shaped in terms of its both form and content in the symbiotic relationship between the player and the material game artefact.

Seemingly the simplest possible way to arrive at a notion of computer game play that takes into account the materiality would be to assume the involvement of an object we decide is a computer game as a definitive feature in the play activity we then decide to call computer game play. But even if we decided we could live with the implied assumption of there being a category of things called “computer games”, our analysis would be compromised by the ambiguity of the artefacts we may call computer games. All objects can be used for a multitude of purposes: bottles can be opened with mobile phones, computer games can be used as vehicles for self-expression in the form of machinima. Also, if the involvement of “a computer game” was our only criterion, we would miss out on the nuances within the play activities involving computer game artefacts and could not distinguish between playing a game and playing with a game. This ambiguity can be approached from the point of view of Ihde’s technological artefacts. Ihde (1990, 68), a post-phenomenologist and a philosopher of technology, observes, leading to his notion of a technological artefact, that animals make occasional use of objects they find in nature, such as thorns and sticks. Even though humans do the same, for humans these objects do not remain as thorns and sticks, but turn into spears and tools. In this process, Ihde sees them being shaped and manufactured “into technological artifacts”. Ihde (1990, 68) defines a technological artefact as something which “becomes what it ‘is’ through its uses”. Ihde (1990, 70), discussing the problem of defining and describing technological artefacts, continues that:

If the ambiguity of the object is one side of the problem, then the other side is that virtually any object may become a technology – at least, if it can be brought into the range of human praxis.

An interesting question concerning with the relation between technological materiality and playful human praxis is whether we can describe features countering the ambiguity – whether some objects more than others are suitable for the purposes of ‘being played’. Allow me to approach this question by drawing on Gadamer (2004, 106), who refers to play/games as “risks” for the player: the player “enjoys a freedom of decision which at the same time is endangered and irrevocably limited.” He continues that

even in the case of games in which one tries to perform tasks that one has set oneself, there is a risk that they will not ‘work’, ‘succeed’, or ‘succeed again’, which is the attraction of the game.

Could we find material correlates for “success” and “failure” in the context of computer game play? We already observed that the descriptive devices with which we can describe traditional games are not necessarily applicable for describing computer game play. As a computer game can be played without knowledge about “rules” and “goals”, we cannot attach our definitions of success and failure to such concepts. We cannot take winning and losing as the yardstick either, because not all computer games can be won and not all players desire to win. However, we can safely assume of the player that she desires to play, because otherwise we would know her by some other label.

Allow me to try to describe how “success” and “failure” appear from the perspective of someone who desires to play. Some of my choices as a player of a game will allow me to do other (perhaps new) kinds of things in the game. As a consequence, whether direct or indirect, of some other choices of mine, however, continuing playing the game might be rendered as an impossibility. We can observe that while playing takes place, the computer evaluates, in relation to a pre-defined criteria, the choices the player has made and decides on opening-up or delimiting the player’s possibilities to choose. Depending on the design of the particular game, some choices may allow the player to do previously impossible things, while other choices may lead to an abrupt ending of the situation, cause the player to become a non-player even if she was not aware of the existence of the criteria against which her actions were evaluated. At the overlap of the game artefact’s resistanceFootnote 5 toward the player’s actions, and the player’s willingness to confront the resistance in her attempt to remain a player, there is room for us to operate with the concepts of failure and success.

When the scope encompasses the player who desires to play, the ambiguity that puzzled us in the notions of success and failure vanishes. The notion of failure refers to a choice with consequences that delimit the player’s degree of freedom in the game and thus most likely decrease the long-term chances of the player remaining a player of the game. Given her desire to play, the player would deem her inability to remain a player a failure. Correspondingly, success refers to a choice which, while not necessarily opening up any new possibilities to choose, does not contribute to delimiting the degree of freedom either. Thus, a successful choice is what ensures that the player remains as a player at least until a new choice is to be evaluated, in other words a choice that makes it possible that the activity continues to sustain itself. A successful player is someone who is able to decide whether she should continue playing. An unsuccessful player is someone who is unable to retain the freedom for this decision, and finds out that such a decision was made on her behalf by the materiality of the game artefact. In other words, surviving the resistance put forward by the game is already an accomplishment. With these notions we are equipped to account for successes and failures also in computer game play which cannot necessarily be described with the terminology of traditional games.

Given that I desire to play, the materiality of the game artefact imposes on me a freedom of choice of which I am responsible in my choices. Elsewhere I have (Leino 2009) referred to this as the gameplay condition and suggested that the player’s choices, actions, and achievements inherit their meanings from the gameplay condition: clearing several successive uni-coloured lines in Tetris is, while relatively meaningless in relation to the assumed goal of the game, an achievement in relation to the gameplay condition in Tetris. (This is not unlike we experience aspects of our life meaningful in relation to the human condition.) The intricacies of the gameplay condition in the relationship between a player and a particular game are intricacies of the ways in which the game artefact shapes the activity of play.

Thus, rather than subjecting herself consciously to the rules of the game, as Aarseth (2007, 130) suggests the player does when beginning to play, the player appears as being subjected to the gameplay condition. Endowing their users with a degree of freedom while simultaneously making them responsible for this very freedom is what differentiates game artefacts from other technological artefacts. Game artefacts, thus, are technological artefacts which impose the gameplay condition on their users.Footnote 6 Interestingly, we can see that the notion of a game artefact is not exclusive to digital games, as a pinball machine imposes a gameplay condition on its users as well. A stack of cards or the “found” objects we may use to play Qualat do not have the material means to do so, thus we can only play with them.

6 Co-Shaped Intentionality in Gameplay

So far we have observed that the game artefact shapes the gameplay activity by making the risk (cf. Gadamer 2004, 160) involved in gameplay materially manifest. However, game artefacts can shape also the subjective aspects of gameplay, which we might approximate as the attitude of play in contrast to the activity. Remembering that we established play as a “placeholder”, it is obvious that there is a limit to the degree of detail we can achieve through a non-empirical analysis. However, from our current perspective, we can say a few words about the ways in which this shaping takes place.

To facilitate this, I will briefly introduce some of the terminology employed by Ihde (1990, 72–80) in an explanatory project he calls “a phenomenology of technics”, through which he seeks to explain how technologies contribute to human experience of the world. Ihde describes technologies like eyeglasses and telephones as “embodied technics” that situate in-between the human and the world and become transparent in their “position of mediation”. Some technologies, like a thermometer behind a window, invite us into “hermeneutic relations”, meaning that they present the world to us only if we engage them in a process that resembles reading. In addition to these “hermeneutic” and “embodied technics” there are also technologies which, like Verbeek (2008, 389) puts it, are the terminus of the experience. These are the technologies with which we enter into alterity relations, which Ihde (2003, 528) describes as “relations in which the technology becomes quasi-other, or technology ‘as’ other to which I relate.”Footnote 7

While there would be a lot more to say about how computer games in general situate in human-technology relations, and how these relations gradually develop over time perhaps as factors of skill and habituation,Footnote 8 I will discuss the example of flashbang grenades to illustrate that an account of the phenomenon of gameplay is not possible without embracing its ontological hybridity. Flashbang grenades are a common feature in first-person shooter games. They are weapons which inflict only marginal damage on avatars, but work in a somewhat more indirect manner. I take my example from Far Cry (2004), in which as a consequence of a flashbang grenade explosion near the player’s avatar, the image on the screen is replaced with a semi-transparent snapshot of the moment the grenade exploded. As time goes by, the transparency of the snapshot increases until it has completely faded away. If we describe the consequences of the flashbang grenade explosion merely as change in the picture presented on the screen, we miss the whole point about the event’s significance within gameplay. Instead, ‘I became blind for a while’ is a more fitting description. This description seems initially problematic because throughout the episode I could perfectly see for example my left hand on the keyboard and the right moving the mouse. It is indeed problematic, but only if we take I as in isolation from Far Cry . If we want to attain a description which resonates with the first-hand experience of gameplay, that is, to describe the I as someone whose sensory capabilities were temporarily damaged by the flashbang grenade, we need to consider subjectivity being co-shaped by both the human and the material game artefact. This implies going beyond the paradigm of mediated intentionality.

Following Verbeek (2008, 391), we may observe Ihde’s range of human-technology relationships as a spectrum on which technologies range, based on their distance from the human, “from being ‘embodied’ to being ‘read,’ to being ‘interacted with’ and even being merely ‘background’.” However, Verbeek (2008, 391) also suggests that “prior to the embodiment relation there are human-technology relations in which the human and the technological actually merge rather than ‘merely’ being embodied.” This is what he calls hybrid intentionality. Despite Verbeek’s insistence of “physical alteration”, we can meaningfully describe the player-game relationship, however somewhat mundane compared to body modifications, as hybrid intentionality. The flashbang grenades exemplify the observation of Verbeek (2005, 130), that “mediation does not simply take place between a subject and an object, but rather co-shapes subjectivity and objectivity.” In this line of description, the gradually fading afterimage hampering my vision after a flashbang grenade explosion in Far Cry is a result of my experience being co-shaped by the Far Cry game artefact. As such it is different from, for example, the way how my ears ring after failing to steer clear from a flashbang grenade explosion in Call of Duty 4 (2007). However, what unites these two examples is that in both cases the modalities of intentionality are subordinated to the structure of the game enforced by the game artefact.

While we can observe that different game artefacts co-shape the intentionalities of their players in different ways, it is impossible to atomize phenomenon of gameplay to separate the influences of the player and Far Cry in the player-game relationship like I can separate the influences of myself and my eyeglasses by simply taking them off and seeing what the world looks like without them. In other words, there is no ‘bare way of seeing’ into Far Cry to which I could revert at will,Footnote 9 any more than there is any ‘bare Far Cry ’ I could perceive through a mode of observation of my own free choice.Footnote 10 If we seek to describe gameplay without reduction or approximation, it is essential that we pay attention not only to the structure enforced on the activity of play by the game artefact, but also to the ways in which the material game artefact regulates the constitution of both that which is experienced and the ways of experiencing.

7 Conclusive Remarks

In light of the argument presented here, it seems that underneath the colloquial use of the notion of “gameplay” we can indeed describe a phenomenon encompassing experiential, processual and material qualities. The ‘hybridity’ of gameplay does not refer to a mere simultaneous occurrence of material, processual, and experiential qualities, but to an inextricable intertwinement of qualities across ontological domains. For example, to consider flashbang grenade explosion as a feature in the gameplay of Far Cry requires making reference to ‘becoming blind’. This particular way of experiencing, in turn, lends its significance from the game’s structure which dictates that the ability to perceive one’s surroundings is required from those desiring to play. Furthermore, this structure is made tangible by the game artefact, whose material existence always escapes the attempts of grasping it completely. This kind of intertwinement, experienced by the player as a significant unitary phenomenon in the immediacy of the playing situation, perhaps, constitutes the ‘feel of the game’ often mentioned around colloquial applications of the term ‘gameplay’. Thus, the inability of Rollings and Adams (2003, 199) to point at “a single entity” as an example of gameplay is understandable.

We can observe that if we refrain from reducing gameplay into for example its material constituents, a general non-empirical analysis is confined to operate with quite a few placeholder concepts, hampering its pursuit of detail. However, this can be also considered as a confirmation of the assumption that there is no ‘gameplay in general’ underneath the meta-level description of an activity which seeks solely to sustain itself and ensure its further fruition, as the qualities of a particular instance of gameplay depend on the qualities of both the player and the game artefact. Thus, the colloquial reference to ‘good gameplay’ in a particular game as a quality independent of individual players appears as describing the demands of the game artefact, and its meaningful application requires making assumptions about an ‘average’ player to fill in the blanks. For some purposes, we might consider inheriting these assumptions from stereotypes of different kinds of players (e.g. Bartle 1996). Assumedly, it would be easier to arrive at a consensus about a game having good gameplay to, for example, “explorers”, than it is to judge whether a game simply has good gameplay.

Whereas the traditional game metaphor seems to work best with “transmedial games” (e.g. Juul 2003, 40; Tavinor 2009, 21) which can be played on almost any found materials, including a computer, I suggested that for the analysis of computer game play as a specific kind of play it could be useful to complement the description with attention to the ways in which materiality is involved in computer game play. With the brief analysis of the symbiotic relationship between the game artefact and the player I have demonstrated how the game artefact and the player co-shape both that which is experienced and the ways of experiencing, supporting the description of gameplay as an ontological hybrid.