Gamer Trouble Book Club #1: O Gamer My Gamer

Reading: Introduction. Confessions of a Troublemaker. Gamer Trouble at the Turn of the Ludic Century. Gamer, Interrupted. Exploring Gamer Trouble.

It’s taking all my willpower to not write out a bunch of gamer and/or trouble puns right now. Without getting radioactively corny, the introduction to Asst. Prof. Amanda Phillips’ book, Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture, is a provocative and accessible easing-into of the concepts and strategies they’ll be employing throughout the book, as well as a quick history lesson of both the word gamer and of the different strands of thought that have led game studies, Phillips, and ourselves to this precise point in time.

To be honest I didn’t expect Gamer Trouble to hit quite so hard in just the introductory section. Typically with academic books like this (at least that I’ve noticed), the author will spend time discussing the work in their field that brought them here, which Phillips does, and outline the chapters going forward, which, again, Phillips does do, but there’s a certain polemical tone to everything in this that I’m absolutely here for. And the fact that Phillips isn’t afraid to talk about shit in the industry and in the academic space around game studies that I’ve seen other writers and scholars make a point to shy away from extremely rules.

Part of this has to do with how Phillips is using the word trouble. They of course say right at the top that they intend to “make trouble” for gamers, but in other contexts they use, trouble is meant to stand in for “interrogate,” “investigate,” “complicate,” “problematize.” Phillips is troubling game studies and the culture of video games itself in the same way one might trouble a particular puzzle in a game: by watching how everything works normally, then getting messy and picking it apart.

What I was most surprised by in the introduction was the preview discussion of the ludology vs. narratology debate. The way I’ve always seen this debate presented (or at least how it’s been presented to me) is that there was an argument – mostly online – between some scholars who thought it was more worthwhile to study games from a technical-mechanical perspective (ludology) and other scholars who thought that games-as-stories was more worthwhile, and eventually everyone came to a position of “agree to disagree,” and went on their way.

This is clearly a pretty middle school-level-ass understanding of the debate, but any time I’ve seen someone bring it up in the spaces I’ve been a part of, people who were either there or came up directly after the dust settled mostly respond with ughhhhhhhs. Needless to say, I’ve never seen it described the way Phillips describes it here:

Much like #GamerGate, narratology versus ludology is described quite differently based on which side one feels an affinity toward. On the one hand, Janet Murray describes it as an “academic turf war” in which so-called ludologists sought to carve out territory for the study of games as systems by labeling other critics “narratologists^[1]Murray, Janet Horowitz. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Page xii. Updated edition, The MIT Press, 2017.” who only seek to understand games as stories. On the other hand, Essen Aarseth describes the ludologist intervention as “a reaction to sloppy scholarship” unfairly characterized as a ban on narrative approaches to games by those who “are less astute readers, scholars and interpreters than their training gives them occasion to presume.^[2]Aarseth, Espen. “A Narrative Theory of Games.” Proceedings of the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games – FDG ’12, ACM Press, 2012, p. 129. DOI.org … Continue reading”

I am here more interested in the affective consequences of narratology versus ludology than the particulars of the conflict (which are subject to analysis elsewhere in this book) because this scholarly kerfuffle has had profound effects on those beginning their training in game studies, although we have only been able to discuss this in informal support networks. Feminist scholar Emma Vossen has detailed the repercussions of the lingering debate on women and nonbinary graduate students working in the field, noting the gendered timbre of the argument (emotional, “sloppy” narratologists vs. rational, precise ludologists) and offering her own experience as someone who delayed her entrance into the field for a long time because of its perceived hostility to the perspectives of women.^[3]Emma Vossen (2018). On the Cultural Inaccessibility of Gaming: Invading, Creating, and Reclaiming the Cultural Clubhouse. UWSpace. http://hdl.handle.net/10012/13649

Page 17-18, Phillips, Amanda. Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture. New York University Press, 2020.

The ludologists ultimately ended up winning the debate in the end. As Phillips points out, their work looked more palatable to a neoliberal academic infrastructure. And they were kind of sore winners, if I’m interpreting Phillips properly: ludologists basically shut out anything that remotely whiffed of narratology by simply refusing to cite these works in their own papers. “…the first two decades of game studies scholarship was dominated by formalist perspectives that not only shied away from cultural critique of video games, either about gender or race, but also minimized the impact of women in the field,” Phillips writes on page 19; this has all led to major academic pushback in the form of Kishonna Gray’s social media hashtag “#CiteHerWork,” Mia Consalvo’s call to arms against toxic gamer masculinity and TreaAndrea Russworm’s call to action for game studies to explicitly stand against white supremacy.

Another part of what makes Gamer Trouble so spicy to me is that part of its mission is to basically dissect shit like gamergate and examine what led to it being such a fucking terrible moment in gaming’s cultural history – a black hole, almost – that we all inevitably gravitate back to it even as we often refuse to discuss it in tones louder than a whisper. Phillips aims to do this by putting gamergate in its proper historical context, at least to start. It’s not, as often as it’s characterized as such, the violent and sudden meeting of gamers and feminists like a reaction between pure sodium and water. Instead it’s a violent and continual cycle of tension, harassment and gatekeeping going back to the earliest days of the Internet. Again – it might be a blindingly obvious point, but the value of books like Gamer Trouble is the explicit historicization: for people who haven’t been around since the early 90s or even the early 2000s, having dates, times, and places to put to these cyclical events of violence is vital to understanding the present moment and what the future holds in store.

It’s going to be a wild ride, but this is the official beginning of the Gamer Trouble book club! Check out this post for more info, and join the Discord to chat with other folks also reading the book! Come hang out!