Playing With Feeling: Introduction
What has bothered me since the first day we started discussing video games was the fact that the discipline of video game studies seemed to be divided on core issues, like whether or not to count games as art, whether to focus on the narrative aspects or keep to the physical actions of playing the games and so on. For the most part, I asked myself, “Why not both?” or I wondered why there was a divide in the first place. I felt like it made it difficult to discuss the nuances and in-betweens of games when a good deal of scholars and scholarship leaned on one side or the other. In providing strict lines, scholars have made it easy to talk about certain issues, while at the same time making it exceedingly difficult to talk about others. Audrey Anable, in her introduction chapter, addressed this and seeks to discuss and question games and game studies in this in-between space by focusing on affect and the smaller, often ignored games.
Though I do not think very highly of mobile games like Candy Crush, I understand what Anable means when she talks about it being a part of culture along with video games being, “Ways of experiencing the time and space of contemporary life that are different from those provided by other screen-based mediums” (page xiii). If culture is ordinary, then the “ordinary” games that “ordinary” people play, like free mobile games made more for passing the time than engagement, are just as important as large scale, big budget games that only the elite “gamer” community might play. In fact, they might even be more important, because they’re the types of games that the most people play, and the thing that connects the people standing in a train station waiting for their commute to work.
Another thing she touches on that I agree with and have thought a lot about is the issue of video games and video game scholarship and how they deal with diversity and representation. In splitting the divide between ludology and narratology, there’s no room and no need for discussing the problems and effects of stereotyping people of color or queer people in video games, just as there are discussions on those topics with other mediums like shows and movies. Queer and feminist theory allow her to tackle these problems in video games, and to discuss the ways the community had pushed against these things in favor of technology or narrative value. It is a problem that has persisted and will continue to persist unless people are allowed to talk about it.
In discussing video games and their affect she allows herself to explore games in a way not many other scholars have, the in-between the action of playing the game, the technological advancements that have been made to allow us to play these games, the narratives and the art in video games as a whole. If video games are, “forces that inform our emotional states” then they are worth talking about in terms of affect, and I look forward to how she tackles these harder to handle questions and how this book will have a larger effect on the discussion of video games (page xvii).
