The performative aspects of videogames are not lost on those who consistently play them. Games, in general, can be a form of recreation, a show. Their immediate audio/visual stimuli lends itself perfectly as a spectacle for an audience of others to passively watch, from the AI controlled “attract” mode first present in early arcade machines to the maximum capacity audiences that clamor to see gaming tournaments and record attempts taking place at conventions and venues the world over.

Ian Bogost, in his Gamasutra article “Performative Play,” provides some fine examples of how some games are, in essence, bringing the duality between fantasy-world action and real-world implication to light in a more immediate and explicit way, through “performative mechanics.” This is certainly apparent with games like Wii Fit (2007) and Dance Dance Revolution (1998), which actually require specific physical interaction, but also shines through in more experimental games like Attent, designed to be played in office environments as a means of assigning value to internal memos and email, with the hope of actually increasing productivity and reducing unnecessary digital clutter (as anyone who has ever crossed items off of a personal “to-do” list knows how satisfying an organizational meta-game can be). While there is still a kind of “separateness of play,” to quote a Johan Huizinga term that Bogost uses—a way to escape inside of an alternate reality while still safely being grounded in the tangible one we are all familiar with—games that utilize or experiment with, or even comment on, the performative mode inherent in other types of media are evoking, as Bogost puts it, “a special kind of play for which outcome alone is an insufficient criterion.” Roger Travis, in his own series of articles on performance in video games, labels this relationship as “Performative Play Practices,” which he defines as an “intersubjective performance that takes place in a cultural zone demarcated for play (that is, as not having an effect on material circumstances, although that demarcation does not mean in actual reality that material circumstances are unaffected).”

Bogost and Travis have both written great pieces on performative play, and I don’t want to retread over already covered ground, but I would like to offer my own thoughts and examples of what I consider to be “modes of performance” and how they affect gaming culture as a whole.

Watching a videogame being played is certainly not the ideal manner with which to experience what the original developers intended, but it does allow for some different perspectives as to what nuances of design are at work and how exactly they relate to the “player” (the actual human controlling the game in this case, and not the “viewer,” who is simply watching the ends of an interactive process they can never truly be a part of). A first-person shooter, for example, is literally an “action” based game, in which the player’s input has an immediate and visceral impact on the surrounding characters and environment, and when that relationship is brought into question—say, an NPC who cannot be killed no matter how many shots are fired or what weaponry is used against them—the result is a jarring and immersion-shattering paradox. Does the spectator, the person sitting next to the player  vainly throwing grenade after grenade in an attempt to keep the laws of the environment consistent, see a broken game? Or simply another aspect that makes an already fantasy-driven world even more illusional? After all, the passive viewer has less invested by not physically inhabiting and controlling a character, so the consequences of a game’s actions, whether enacted by the player or being forced upon them, are simply lateral events in a game’s timeline, each with equal priority. When watching a videogame being played, the goal is simply to see what happens, like any other visual medium; it’s the responsibility of the “interactor,” the player, to decide exactly HOW the narrative reaches it’s conclusion, and whether or not they “win,” or at least generate an outcome that is in their favor.

So, what about the “Speed-Run,” the curiously popular method of record setting and breaking that is present in so many of our games, whether officially or not? There was a short period in which I was obsessed with them: not with trying to break any kind of record myself, but obsessed with merely watching them. Many videos downloaded from Speed Demos Archive—the unequivocal source and authority on gaming speed-runs—and many hours spent watching someone blaze their way through shooters like Half-Life (1998) and Metroid Prime (2002), platformers such as Yoshi’s Story (1997), and other genres of games (including, of all things, RPGs like the Final Fantasy series) created many small, intermediate spaces for me, discovered between the broad strokes of goal-oriented play. For it was between the milestones and scripted events in these games that I was able to see the personality of the player leave a malleable mark on an otherwise rigid and impenetrable reality. And yes, there was tea-bagging, but there were other wonderful “indentations” made along the way: Gordon Freeman, while waiting for the resonance cascade to open, dissipates tension by bounding around the test chamber; Samus Aran similarly uses her spare time waiting for locks to open and enemies to dissolve by practicing bomb jumping; and, in Super Mario World (1991), Mario cannot run into a goal without involving an acrobatic component, whether spin jumping, flying, or falling precisely onto a runaway Yoshi like some kind of rodeo trick rider.

I believe that these small, improvised—and not so improvised—moments provide the timbre for the overall performance that takes shape in these speed-runs and playthroughs (whether tool-assisted or not), and the true “musicianship” of the player is laid bare for all those willing to watch…even if, at first, it is just that lone participant themselves. When you have such a fixed world with specific rules and goals (which are heightened even more during a speed run, in which the only real goal is to progress through a game’s codified timeline as quickly as possible), the only way for any sort of individuality to come out is via these simple, non-consequential performances that bring forth an awareness that yes, this character is simply an extension of my own actions, and I can still enable them even though the game is not allowing me to create my own narrative otherwise.

Not that a story is a required component for a performative mode of gaming. In fact, “Sand-Box” genre games—pioneered by the Grand Theft Auto series and the clones it inspired—have their own credibility and fan base simply because they encourage a type of performing that isn’t part of a narrative discourse at all. While there are only so many things that main protagonist Niko Bellic can actually do during the missions and events that propel the plot of GTA4 (2008) forward, there is also the equally alluring option to simply abandon the story altogether, and play-act with the kind of freedom and tool-set that any other videogame developer, whether they were designing a game that was linear or not, would envy. Liberty City, by its very nature of being made fully available to the player without any mandatory or concrete goals, becomes the largest interactive stage of its kind.

Another recent title that uses performance as a method of gameplay is Brendon Chung’s Gravity Bone (2008), a freeware PC game that I first heard about on the RebelFM podcast. Here, however, the player is performing not only for themselves, but also for an audience that THEY THEMSELVES ALSO BECOME at the conclusion of the game’s narrative. While Gravity Bone has the player acting out the part of a spy/detective named Citizen Abel and the various roles that he must, in turn, act out throughout the course of the game (investigator/waiter/photographer), the “performance” is simply a means to reach the game’s tragi-comedic end, an end that is both surprising and inevitable. By the conclusion of Gravity Bone, one discovers that the seemingly non-linear manner with which you are thrust into this fictional universe is simply a ruse, as all actions funnel into the true heart of the game, which is to witness and reflect on a hardened spy’s final moments, an end that he/we never saw coming. At that instant, the performer becomes the audience member, helpless and passive once again, and those fluctuating moments in between, the methods of “play,” of existential happening within an interactive world, are made all the more important to us.

As videogames are becoming more advanced and struggle to break free of that salient “game” signifier that suggests a type of win/lose simplicity, their methods of storytelling continue to search for a definition, a way to condense their complexities into a vocabulary that is both complete and recognizable. This has, of course, proven to be an extremely difficult task, as both major components of modern games—story and play—seem to be constantly shifting and evolving due to the technological tether that constantly binds everything together. Roger Travis suggests that “story” and “play” are two components that, more or less, make up the same framework of “performance,” which has been around since the first fantasy worlds of fiction were introduced (although one is not quite the other, and vice versa). We can also see that Ian Bogost’s definition of “performative play” takes on many forms and applications, from speed-runs to the sand-box genre to indie titles like Gravity Bone that subvert the very idea of narrative performance in the first place. While these examples are but a few that continue on the ideas postulated by Bogost and Travis, they all at least point to a conceptual debate in game design that’s poised to bubble over with the screaming arrival of videogames as a mass-market media: how does gameplay affect the cultural connotations that lie, implicitly or not, within the game design itself? In this respect, every performance is an important one, and all the game’s a stage.

Related Links:
Persuasive Games: Performative Play
Ian Bogost’s Personal Site
Roger Travis’ Performative Play Practices
Speed Demos Archive
Gravity Bone

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Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on April 6th, 2009 :: Filed under Features
Tags :: Attent, Dance Dance Revolution, Grand Theft Auto IV, Gravity Bone, Half-Life, Ian Bogost, Interactivity, Metroid Prime, Roger Travis, Super Mario World, Video, Wii Fit
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