On Player Freedom

1. A videogame is what one engages with in a playful manner on screen. It’s played on a video display: videogame, one word.

2. What isn’t a videogame isn’t interesting, nor how one defines play. It’s an assortment of relations with an activity characterized as playful. Play always changes, not necessarily in a playful manner.

3. A videogame may cost money, just as a video display. Play is always free.

4. Play is the opposite of a videogame produced with capital to generate profits; it’s an escape from money-making that stands in inherent relation to it.

5. Play starts with interaction. It’s an engagement with a videogame, not dissimilar from engagement with any kind of game. Starting a videogame and fiddling around with its packaging can be playful, thus be part of play. What isn’t playful or isn’t part of play is of no interest to us, just as the person who reads isn’t concerned with cooking unless it relates to their engagement which makes it part of that interaction. Play is arbitrary.

6. The person who decides to play a videogame relinquishes their freedom to its forces. Grappling with this relinquishment is part of play and of great interest to games scholars and videogame enthusiasts alike as attested with relating it to concepts of agency, flow, immersion, choice, etc. These are attempts to formalize and normalize the arbitrary activity of play. They can be helpful in thinking about play.

7. Freedom of the person who plays and what a videogame character has isn’t the same. These are often conflated when the person who plays gives directions to a character with an appendage (mouse, keyboard, controller) that gives a semblance of control they like to think they have over their life. How control has no bearing to personal freedom has no relevance to the topic at hand. What is characterized as control over a character breaks down once the character cannot follow directions given by the appendage. It happens if the appendage breaks, its battery depletes, the videogame software malfunctions and during character animations since the software cannot follow simultaneous directions at once. These breaks don’t shatter this notion of control but fragment it to categories that explain the breaks to keep the ideal alive. The ludonarrative divide is one such fragmentation where implications are formed into distinct categories to be elevated above other ones. Verticality reestablishes hierarchies to models (of control) in which control flows as part of play that takes control away.

8. The player is an abstraction that plays. Videogame developers and games scholars imagine it as an ideal for select scenes to explore ideas related to a person and non-person that’s alike and unlike them. We, the persons who play, experience videogames as the player in ways that’s similar and dissimilar to assumed communal values. This imagination relies on assumptions about characters, appendages and the malleable self that perceives.

9. Say that a character we sometimes give directions loses their freedom. We might say that the videogame took our freedom or how this loss made us feel. Is it the person who plays, the character being played, or the player who experiences what is characterized as loss of freedom? They don’t seem to belong in the same category, making our attribution to an experience shared by all three a category error. Let’s look at this scene in an order experiencing appear: the character experiences loss the person playing experiences that is explained as player experience. Is it how the scene is experienced or is it already looked through the nebulous concept of (player) experience? The character’s face expresses loss in coherence with the rest of the scene and this loss is also conveyed through the appendage. These simultaneous events form an experience.

10. Player freedom is desire to break free from play that forfeits freedom by becoming free of profit production which production promises freedom. It wants to achieve freedom through negation that at once appears as freedom and non-freedom to which it is tempted to negate until there’s no videogame left.