Paraludology Manifesto | For a renewal of discourse on video games
Critical critique of video game critics
Most of the time, video game critics do not concern video games. Their object is not the game, but the merchandise we play with. Too many reviews, analyses, and essays talk about video games only as objects, with internal rules and characteristics, creations isolated from the rest of the world.
However, we only play in situations that determine our experiences. The place from which we play, our state of mind when we turn on the screen, the equipment that receives our physical impulses: every gaming session is made up of all of these things.
Even within games, our gaming experience is based on the peripherals, the emergent or latent elements, the contexts and subtexts. Our social interactions surround our practices with digital resonance on Twitch or YouTube, while mods and add-ons shape our perceptions and interactions.
This article does not propose to invent a new method that would immediately take into account all aspects of video games. This article is a manifesto in favor of paraludology. Paraludology is simply a concern for the ludic paratext, an attempt to uncover the side aspects of the game that make it fascinating or despicable, a tension between the game medium and everything that constitutes it as such.
Paraludology offers the tremendous hope of finally being able to overcome the neglect of the activity of playing in video games.
Indeed, a game is certainly a set of rules, but it is also all the emotional connections that bind us to it. There are cascading meanings that flow throughout our games, fueled by game situations and ludic, admiring social interactions. The desire to play does not come from playing; it is patiently shaped within our aesthetic bubbles that form the worlds we inhabit.
I can do without a game to play: there’s no need for a set of rules to roll around in the chaos and lose myself in laughter. But without desire, without emotions or desires, play loses its meaning.
On n’a donc pas compris grand-chose au jeu quand on a épuisé l’analyse de ses règles et des contenus graphiques et sonores qui le remplissent. Un jeu peut être beau ou laid, déployer des artifices extraordinaires ou ennuyeux, des mécaniques inédites ou banales, un lore inexistant ou aussi profond que peuvent l’être les Wiki des pages communautaires : rien n’est dit si seules ses caractéristiques internes et objectives sont révélées.
So we didn’t understand much about the playing experience once we had exhausted our analysis of a game’s rules, of its graphics and sound that fill it. A game can be beautiful or ugly, feature extraordinary or boring effects, innovative or mundane mechanics, a non-existent lore or one as deep as community wiki pages: nothing is revealed if only its internal and objective characteristics are disclosed.
Paratext
A book consists of text, and within that text unfolds the literary game that connects the reader’s imagination to the words that guide them. But within the book itself are pieces of text that transform the work without actually being part of it. A summary has the power to transform an entire reading experience. Whether it promises or spoils, it shapes our expectations, which are the driving force behind our imagination.
The paratext also includes the title, the cover, comments from the editor or translator, footnotes, and the preface: all of these small notes mark our literary paths. The paratext is outside the scope of the work, a threshold that takes us from one world to another, from the gaze to the work, from the profane to the sacred.
The paratext is described as follows by literary theorist Gérard Genette in 1982: an “undefined zone between the inside and the outside, itself without any strict boundaries, either inward (the text) or outward (the world’s discourse on the text)”.
The painting often has its own paratext, too, in the form of a museum label that describes the work and connects it to the worlds it evokes.
This kind of small insert forms a concise set of instructions. We don’t look at a Van Gogh in the same way we discover a Monet. The paratext brings the painting to life, providing the context in which we perceive it. By situating the work within its movement, in relation to other references, in this case those of “post-impressionism” and therefore impressionism too, it invites me to compare it, to find its particularities, its style: this insignificant sign brings the work to life by situating it among everything that gives it meaning.
Like a thin layer of dust carelessly deposited by an author desperate to be understood one day, by a publisher eager for a box office hit, by an audience appropriating a laconic tirade from a work that has become commonplace, the paratext ends up covering an entire work and even changing its hue and color.
Games also have their paratext. The summary isn’t written in the game itself, but the Steam page knows how to fill us with all kinds of expectations.
For example, the Steam page for Inscryption contains a wealth of important information.
The cover image is the most important one. It is the one that circulates the most; it is not condemned to remain static on the game page. On the contrary, it is this image that most often constitutes the first contact with what it is supposed to describe. Inscryption thus easily indicates its horror theme and genre, the deckbuilder (i.e., a card game that allows us to create our deck of cards little by little).
The pitch is placed immediately below. It has its own rules, rhythm, and specifications. A good pitch provides as much information as possible in a minimum number of lines. It can be analyzed and dissected. This one even takes the time to use a metaphor (“ink black”) to connect all the genres and styles that the game attempts to bring together.
Below that is the game’s identity card. Its creator, publisher, release date. Each element tells me something about the game and gives me an idea of what to expect. There’s a good chance I’ve already played a game from publisher Devolver, so I’ll be expecting a certain editorial line from this game. The genres and styles, implied on the cover and explicit in the pitch, are revealed once again. They tell us what a game is about, the games it is inspired by, or the games it stands out from.
However, if Inscryption constantly invokes the ludic devices of deck builders, it is precisely because its originality lies in the differences that set it apart from other games of its kind. Its entire Steam page is designed to invoke familiar mechanics, which it then tramples on with the glee of Mario crushing Goombas.
As the game progresses, Inscryption gradually ceases to be a card game and becomes a horror game in its own right. Its originality lies in creating expectations that it then subverts.
Inscryption, without the accompanying paratext, no longer makes any sense. The variation it offers on the theme of a genre is incomprehensible if you have never played a card game before. It only exists within the world of games, to which it constantly refers.
Material and factual paratext
Le paratexte est en fait un type de relation entre l’œuvre et le milieu qui la révèle. Aucune œuvre ne peut exister sans le milieu qui la fait naître et qui lui donne son sens.
The paratext is in fact a type of relationship between the work and the environment that reveals it. No work can exist without the environment that gives rise to it and gives it meaning.
This environment can be material: the museum creates the work, gives it its place and its function. Opera and theater are never completely separate from the dedicated venues that host them. Similarly, the office setting elicits particular emotional and physical responses that are not the same as those elicited by slouching on the sofa. Each environment continues to transmit its legacy, long after it has disappeared, through the ludic arrangements it has inspired. Thus, the arcade, born in the hustle and bustle of the fairground and the shopping mall, keeps the excitement of its origins alive far beyond its birthplaces and continues to fill our keyboards with frantic inputs.
It is these persistent and recurring interdependencies between gaming experiences and the environments that give rise to them that Mathieu Triclot discusses in his book La Philosophie des jeux vidéo (The Philosophy of Video Games). He was keen to show the extent to which certain gaming experiences are influenced by their historicity:
“Experiences function in ecosystems: they develop, stabilize, and enrich themselves when they find a set of favorable conditions; they wither, sometimes abruptly, when the environment is altered, displaced, or transposed.”
If the environment is a form of systemic paratext that gives rise to specific experiences, there are other forms of material paratext that are much less decisive. For example, factual paratext can transform the gaming experience simply through the knowledge of a fact.
For example, you don’t play Celeste in the same way when you know that Maddy Thorson, its creator, has projected much of her own journey as a transgender person into her character’s story. Madeline’s journey, gradually climbing the immense Mount Celeste, thus takes on an additional metaphorical dimension. The game’s overall theme remains one of self-acceptance, finding a community, and determination to overcome difficulties; but in light of this fact, Celeste also becomes a testimony, the story of a transgender person recounting certain aspects of their journey.
The paratext does not detract from the meaning, but rather adds to it.
Cultural paratext
The milieu of art is also cultural: for a work to come into being or to function as a work, it must mobilize imaginations that work with it. Art history is not so much the study of works as it is the study of the thoughts that established them as such. All art, in all periods, presupposes a theoretical framework without which it cannot function.
This is particularly evident in the work of the art philosopher Danto. For him, art only functions in the art world, a space shaped by institutions such as museums and schools, and by authorities such as critics.
The paratext is what transforms the indiscernible, or, in Danto’s words, “transfigures the banal.” Without the small signs next to the painting, without the grand lyrical flights of art critics or storytellers, the work is simply part of the flow of everyday experiences.
What makes this urinal a little more than its brothers and sisters is the paratext. The signature, the date, and its location in a museum, on the one hand. On the other hand, the discourse and interpretations produced by viewers, critics, and the “art world.”
You have to be able to identify what is original about a creation in order to enjoy it, and even to distinguish it from similar works. Every time we talk, discuss, or complain about a game, we are contributing to the cultural paratext that allows us to collectively define what is worthy of attention.
The slow collective construction of a conversation
The exercise of taste, in any art form and for video games, is therefore a social practice. Aesthetes, essayists, storytellers, and critics must above all be figures of dialogue and conversation.
Firstly, because the production of discourse on games is the result of prior collective dialogue. Each analysis is produced in a situated context, enabled and shaped by a social environment, political ideologies, and aesthetic or philosophical concepts that form the cultural paratext of their judgment.
Secondly, because the discourse produced by these figures transforms the objects they claim to describe. The work has no existence outside the world and the perceptions that constitute it. However, it can only be perceived when immersed in all its paratexts, transformed by them. Each discourse concerning a work or a game must therefore be read as a particular way of depicting the world that hosts the work or game; an attempt to influence the direction, tone, object, form, or purpose of the conversation.
Playing within the ludic paratext
We therefore understand that the discourse surrounding works shapes the experiences they provide us with. Video games are not quite like other works of art. The experiences we have within them elicit physical and cognitive activity that revolves around the paratext.
Many parameters of video games are underdetermined by their creators. Players are therefore free to do what they want with them. They set their own goals, strategies, and meanings. Each game accommodates radically divergent and sometimes contradictory ways of playing. Each playstyle in turn evokes opposing representations and values, while conveying them by showing itself within the game spaces. All the more or less emerging practices that flourish within a game freely create radical innovations.
Thus, speedrunning, which consists of finishing a game as quickly as possible, the addition of mods and add-ons, complementary software that transforms the game, e-sports competitions, role-playing, and other community inventions leave each player free to choose what they want to do with a game. Although their experiences are rooted in the works that are video games, they are emancipated from lines of code or game design rules.
The so-called freedom of players
Mais c’est mal comprendre la nature normative du paratexte que de parler alors de la “liberté” dula joueureuse. Les choix des joueureuses et leurs innovations émergentes ne viennent pas non plus de nulle part : elles sont déterminées par des normes de jeu, elles-mêmes construites par le paratexte.
But it is a misunderstanding of the normative nature of the paratext to speak of the “freedom” of the player. The choices made by players and their emerging innovations do not come out of nowhere either: they are determined by gaming norms, which are themselves constructed by the paratext.
In all our gaming practices, there is something that plays for us.
This something urges us to choose one path over another because we have detected an affordance that only makes sense in relation to a grammar learned little by little through contact with other games.
It’s that something that takes over during certain competitive games, causing angry egos to overflow with insults. It’s what makes you choose between gently exploring an open world and methodical, aggressive confrontation.
This something dictates its standards to us through small, latent injunctions.
This something is the ludic paratext and paraludie.
Paraludie
The term “paratext” is somewhat misleading. It encompasses elements that are too diverse to be grouped together in a single text. A menu, a loading screen, or a let’s play are difficult to describe in words, yet they too create representations that set the standards for our games.
Beyond the text lies paraludie. It too determines how a game is played without being part of it, but unlike the game pitch, the summary, or all the vague embellishments on Steam pages, paraludie is not expressed in clear terms.
At the very threshold of the game, the paratext is no longer written: it plays. It manipulates, moves, and carries us away. Sometimes, on the contrary, it freezes time, stopping the game until it transforms it.
Thus, the loading menu or home screen is a paraludie: an intermediate space in the game that conveys intentions and sets the scene for the gaming experience. The controller is put down, but the screen reads like a statement of intent, a commentary, a whisper in the silence.
Limbo home screen corresponds to the end of the game, and once the game is over, we recognize the macabre remains of our character’s body.
Dark Souls loading screen piques our curiosity by introducing us to items and their descriptions, which are full of fascinating lore.
This paraludie, this threshold of the game space, comments on and reinvents the experience of play.
Conversely, in the case of add-ons and mods, these small pieces of software that transform games, paraludie is played without actually being part of the game.
Some modifications are thematic, mechanical, or aesthetic: they change certain graphics, the appearance of a character, or the power of an attack.
Here, a mod gives breasts to Withers, the divine character from Baldur’s Gate 3.
But these changes sometimes also determine the entire gaming experience, for example by adding a mini-map or GPS to the screen, or by rendering certain ways of playing obsolete and useless in favor of other playstyles.
Thus, in MMORPGs, some add-ons have an effect even when they are not installed. We have to deal with paraludie.
On the right, the cluttered interface of World of Warcraft during a raid. Add-ons have made players more efficient, so the game has become more difficult, ultimately making this software indispensable.
Multiplayer games have gradually acquired an arsenal of small tools, some more invasive than others, that allow players to closely monitor each other’s performance. In World of Warcraft, for example, with a single click you can find out everything about a potential ally: how long they’ve been playing, their recent performance, the quality of their equipment, and so on. So, whether we like it or not, our gaming life is on display for all to see, and the monitoring of everyone by everyone irrevocably transforms the way we play, both together and alone. In dungeons or raids, we force ourselves to maximize the group’s chances of success by poring over the virtual resumes of our comrades. Even when playing alone, we still have to strive to perform well so as not to fall behind under the scrutinizing gaze of others.
Paratext in the form of guides, which suggest builds, i.e., optimal ways to construct a character, also establish essential gaming norms. Deviating from the norm in a competitive game immediately results in social and authoritarian sanctions.
Even in single-player games, certain ways of playing are favored over others. The endless and exhausting debates about Elden Ring summons are a good example: because a certain part of the community felt that a powerful tool made the game too easy, its use was criticized in numerous streams, guides, and videos. These injunctions concerned users of magic, summons, and bleeding in turn.
Regardless of the actual purpose of the injunction, in these cases, the injunction aims to unite, to create a group and a distinction, to convey certain glorified values at the expense of others.
Everywhere, paralysis marks our gaming experiences.
Paraludology
Paraludology is the study of that something that plays in our place. It is an attitude that arises once we understand that a game is not so much a work of art as a social field governed by norms. It is the only way to study our gaming experiences by situating them in the world.
Paraludology therefore focuses its attention on the essential aspects of playing experiences.
Example of paraludology: Queer Game Studies, as described by Bo Ruberg, is presented as a study of the ways in which dominant structures determine the agency of players, an exploration of gaming experiences, the diverse experiences that anchor them, and their ability to challenge these structures. These understandings of games, diverse in their content and form, share a common focus on the powers exercised by games and within games. Such a perspective requires a step back, a point of view that ceases to embrace the game-object-work in order to perceive all its unthought aspects: the multitude of something that have created in place of creators, that play in place of players, and that organize games and the world with them.
The subject of paraludology is always elusive, because the boundary between paraludie and play is always blurred. Paragaming is a threshold, a passage from one world to another, from everyday life to virtual heterotopia. Even the distinction between paragaming and paratext is unclear. An add-on sometimes adds text to the game, while text can easily give rise to ludic practices.
“WE ARE ALWAYS PLAYING. WE ARE ALWAYS IN CONTEXTS. CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING.” Let’s take seriously—the capital letters invite us to do so—these sentences by Mattie Brice written in her article Play and Be Real About It. Context is the place of play; to play is to undertake to understand, know, and engage with a new context. By playing, we extract ourselves from the world to anchor ourselves, to reterritorialize ourselves, elsewhere and differently. Playing for real means engaging with this new context: showing empathy. Paraludology is also a way of putting concern for context—that is, empathy—not only at the center of discourse about games, but also at the heart of the activity of playing.
The subject of paraludology is infinite. On the one hand, we see the finished game as a work of art; on the other, our gaze is drawn to a boundless horizon: the world in which the game exists.
Each situation intersects with others that determine it. We mentioned earlier the surveillance standards imposed by software paraludology within MMORPGs. But if this software has gradually become established, it is under the influence of competitive and elitist gaming standards, themselves shaped by virile, exclusionary, and sexist values.
The object of paraludology is video games with everything that is usually left out.
Paraludology is therefore the story of gaming experiences as they are lived within heterogeneous and conflictual communities.
Not much has been said about League of Legends or Overwatch when it comes to their rules, format, universe, or message. So we’ve gotten into the habit of distinguishing a game from its community. “Overwatch is a good game, but its community is toxic, which sometimes makes the gaming experience unpleasant.”
As if a game’s community could be separate from the game that hosts it.
As if a game’s community could be homogeneous and uniform.
The rules of World of Warcraft are “contextual, contested, heterogeneous, ambiguous, and contradictory,” writes T.L. Taylor in her essay Play Between Worlds. Let us expand on her point: the rules of all video games are contextual, contested, heterogeneous, ambiguous, and contradictory. They are riddled with tensions, gaming norms, and injunctions of all kinds. They draw on other works and are created from a certain perspective, in a certain material context.
I don’t know if paraludology will ever exist, but I am sure that studying, analyzing, and exploring the contexts that shape gaming experiences will give us much more food for thought than poor aesthetic analyses of the objective characteristics of games.
The elimination of context has been a tool of fascism, and a goal of the far right in general, to replace the complexity of the social and material world with ready-made facts, isolated from the world that gave rise to them. More generally, the bourgeois and ideological depoliticization of cultural objects has always been a means for the ruling classes to operate distinction and its naturalization with a single stroke of magic. As long as art consists only of works, taste can remain a birthright rather than a field of social struggle.
This is why paraludology cannot be a simple study of discourse, paratexts, and paraludies: it too is part of this lively conversation. If paraludology is to exist, it must intervene in the debate, attempting to influence the course of events rather than taking a position above the experiences it describes.
So welcome, to those of you who are joining the battle.
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Jüles Delétoile
Bibliographie :
- Genette, Gérard, Seuils, 1997
- Consalvo, Mia, Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames (MIT Press, 2007)
- Taylor, T.L, ‘Does WoW Change Everything?: How a PvP Server, Multinational Player Base, and Surveillance Mod Scene Caused Me Pause’ (2006) Games and Culture 318.
- Taylor, T.L, ‘The Assemblage of Play’ (2009) Games and Culture 331.
- Taylor, T.L, Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (MIT Press, 2006)
- Danto, La Transfiguration du banal
- Triclot Mathieu, Philsophie des jeux vidéo
- Ruberg Bo, Queer Game Studies
- Brice Mattie, Play and Be Real About It
- Folding Ideas on Youtube, Why It’s Rude to Suck at Warcraft