Just another blind scholar describing the game elephant

I had a conversation recently about Narratology and Ludology. Yes, in 2018. For a debate that never took place, this one seems specially hard to kill*.

My main problem with this (quite unnatural) divide is that it forces us to dismiss whole parts of what make videogames different. Even when we acknowledge they are complex cultural artifacts made of varying and even clashing elements, we tend to put all but one of them aside: videogames are really about player agency, or they are mainly interactive narratives, or what makes them unique are the mechanics…

I have my own biases, of course, and that’s why I keep reminding myself that we game scholars are not that different from the blind men from the parable (probably of Buddhist origin), touching (parts of) an elephant and trying to describe it: an elephant is like a pillar, or an elephant is like a brush, or it is actually like a basket…

We are all touching the same thing. A huge, living, messy thing, and one that we cannot pull apart without breaking or killing. A videogame is made of mechanics, players, communities, images, sounds, virtual worlds, contexts and paratexts, technology, and even more. Let’s all celebrate that.

O how they cling and wrangle, some who claim
For preacher and monk the honored name!
For, quarreling, each to his view they cling.
Such folk see only one side of a thing.

(* Recently, Tom Apperley put it in clearer terms on his “On the persistence of game studies dull binary”. This so-called debate is not only misleading, it is a hindrance for the whole discipline.)