( ! )

© 2003 Zach Whalen

[Seminar Paper submitted for ENG 6077 - Visual Narrative: Textual Displacement, Transformation, & Revision. Summer 2003. Dr. Donald Ault.]

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As game studies in general grapples with issues of game genres and degrees of interactivity and ludology in particular continues to make vague assertions about the actual rhetoric of games, there has yet to be (to my knowledge) a satisfactory explanation for how exactly three-dimensional games [1] successfully convey immersion in a fictional diegesis in the same way that novels or other fiction writing do. At any rate, discussions of the matter tend to be phenomenological or aesthetic in nature and ignore or gloss over the actual textual presence in games. Not only are games texts in the wide, Barthesian, sense of the word where every work is a manifestation of some type of text (Barthes 156) and not only do games "tell the user how to read them" with "rhetorical" elements like boundaries and navigational icons (Davidson), but games also contain actual appearances of text in on-screen instructions and feedback to the player. And it is my argument that these textual traces in the three-dimensional environment serve to configure a plausible immersion of the player within the diegesis.

Several authors have written about how the avatar or player-character helps mediate between the user and the diegesis[2], but the actual relationships of words on the screen to each other and to each may be an avenue of inquiry worth including in the overall discussion of what games do and why they are interesting. Within this paper, I hope to show how the textual presentation on the screen may have something to do with the comfortable immersion many players feel when absorbed into a game’s fictional world. To do this I will consider a particular textual gesture that appears in several of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poems and which I will refer to as ( ! ) . This gesture is important because Coleridge employs the figure at at least three different levels and its appearance in games also relates to levels or modes of textual presentation.

The fundamental premise or allowance for this kind of analysis of literature follows or extends Donald Ault’s idea of a holograph(em)ic reading of a text which encompasses a great number of ideas but which importantly links grammatological study of a text’s graphical trace and the holographic theory from physics . For the purposes of this paper, suffice it to say that Ault’s approach treats nothing as privileged and exposes allegedly trivial incidences of textuality (like, for instance, differences in punctuation between versions of a text) as integral if not to the intent of the author than to the received meaning of the poem or textual manifestation.

At any rate, I should make it clear that by tracing a particular textual element in games I am not attempting to prove that games are textual or that they are literature in the same way that Charles Dickens is literature. Both of those discussions are too broad to address within this paper and are, in my opinion, not very interesting questions to begin with. What I do hope to accomplish is a justification for and demonstration of a grammatological texture existing in videogames which may provide yet another way of understanding the immersive experience of play. While Coleridge is not an arbitrary choice, (there are perhaps other authors with similar textual gestures extant in video games) Ault’s holograph(em)ic technique is crucial to the very possibility of my analysis and Ault’s most clear delineation of the holograph(em)ic status of poems is in his reading of Coleridge’s “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison.” The reading of this poem also serves as a useful demonstration of holograph(em)ic presence. Also, the consequence or resulting view of the poem is central to connecting this analysis to videogames because the dominant image ( ! ) is present holograph(em)ically in the lime-tree bower.

Before I go further, however, it is necessary to explain a bit more about where I’m going, and it seems appropriate to explain this essay’s unpronounceable title prior to mentioning the widely varied works which contain "( ! )" in different guises and gestures. Simple parentheses ( ) and related punctuations such as [ ], { }, / /, serve as containers to hold text (words) separate from other portions of text. Consider the following example from an e-mail to my brother explaining what Derrida has to do with this paper:

“Here's an example from "Ousia and Grammé" (he's French) which is a response or note on Heidegger:”

The parenthetical statement, “(he’s French),” is separated from the rest of the text by exhibiting its own grammatical prerogative as a potentially complete sentence that is, nevertheless, overwhelmed by the sentence in which it lives without which it, that is, “he’s French” would be grammatically sustainable by semantically nonsensical in its lack of an antecedent for the pronoun “he’s.” Not only does this parenthetical statement exist co-dependently on its own plane (it’s own intersecting line in a grade-school sentence diagram), it exists in a separate breath from the larger sentence. In speech the parenthetical is signaled by a lowering of the voice, perhaps a gesture or roll of the eyes or some other body language to indicate “What comes here is different.” In relation to speech one could also point out the hierarchy of parenthetical statements within the sentence as the prepositional phrase “from ‘Ousia and Grammé’” exists outside of the “necessary” parts of the sentence, i.e. those which allow it to be grammatically correct and complete.

In fact, one could also remove “or note” as it simply dis(re)places “response,” or while we’re at it, “which is a response to Heidegger” isn’t essential either and we are left with “Here’s an example.” Then again, where is this example, and do we need to know that it’s “an” example as opposed to no example? Doesn’t the word example alone constitute both the existence of an example and the idea of “example.”

At any rate, rebuilding the sentence back from it’s basic structure: “Here’s an example” adds new dimensionality to the sentence with each layer of extraneous phrasing. I use the word “dimensionality” because each parenthetical element is crucially modifying (by way of its depending on) the originally sentence. One could even go so far as to state that the insertion of parenthetical material into institutes divides the narrator into two as the text “He’s French” in speaking could legitimately originate from someone else entirely other than me. The result, therefore, is a divided narrator speaking (possibly) from both another place and without the same progression of time. It is as if the parenthetical text is inserted after the utterance of the primary sentence and the parentheses frame a separate temporal reality. Consider another example:

“We had to pay over $600 (!) in taxes.”

In this case, the speaker, understandably, wishing to avoid the vocal intensity of end-punctuating his sentence with an exclamation point still wishes to convey the shock of the perceived large amount of cash. Inserting the exclamation point parenthetically allows for this conveyance but it exists outside of the spoken range of the sentence. “( ! )” is an exclamation point carefully protected within two parentheses rather like a carefully hidden warning sign. It is perhaps a trace of body-language or a gesture but its insertion at this point does not alter the deliver of the sentence itself but, rather, comments on the existence of the sentence at all. It is as if the elliptical exclamation is “Can you believe that I had to write that I spent $600?” The writer/speaker in this sense divides himself with the insertion of the parenthetical exclamation. The sentence itself is still altered and in an irrevocably determinate manner while, in fact, the parenthetical statement is itself unpronounceable, utterly silent.

Therefore, while there are plenty of interesting things to think about with a divided narrator, the fact that division comes across so easily despite the paradox of the parenthetical exclamation indicates something sneaky about writing itself, a particular "inside-outness," and while it may presumptuous to assert that Coleridge intended all along to exploit this ‘punctuative’ conundrum, it’s presence both graphically and figuratively in his writings indicates something about why they tend to be so darn interesting. This anomaly in Coleridge reveals a particular type of embedded structure which can be compared usefully to the writings of William Blake, the contemporary novel House of Leaves, and perhaps most interestingly, 3-D video games .

To begin with, Ault’s analysis of “Lime Tree Bower” draws on a pattern in the poem’s punctuation to generate a representative image which reinforces the narrative trajectory in the poem [3]. Here is Ault's presentation of this reading which develops as follows.

First, here is the text lines 70 - 73 of Coleridge's "This Lime Tree Bower My Prison" as they appear in Stillinger's edition:

Homewards, I blest it! deeming, its black wing
(Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light)
Had cross'd the might orb's dilated glory
While thou stood'st gazing; or when all was still, (Coleridge "Lime-Tree Bower" lines 70 - 73)

The "it" in this selection refers to a "the last rook" which the narrator imagines flying over his absent friend's head into the setting sun. Not only is this event "dually present" in the diegesis of the poem (imagined by 'Coleridge' who is trapped in his bower while the event is actually happening somewhere else) it is also "dually" or "extra" present in the text in both the imagery of the poem and in the materiality of the printed text itself. Some color coding helps reveal this hidden message:

Homewards, I blest it! deeming, its black wing
(Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light)
Had cross'd the might Orb's dilated glory
While thou stood'st gazing; or when all was still,

Now, moving downward through the poem (i.e. forward in time) we are left with

!
(Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light)
     Orb's dilated glory

The "Orb" can refer to both the sun and the eye (contracting as it gazes on the sun). The repeated "nows" in line 71 each replace one another in their paradoxical sub-sequent attachment to both the present "now" of reading and the present "now" of observation and writing. Thus, at least three temporal "Nows" are configured in each "now" in the line and the one replaces (annihilates, displaces) the other. Reading sequential "now vanishing in light" replaces "now a dim speck," but as they cannot simultaneously be true, sequentiality does not matter. The result is that the parenthetical phrase (Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light) is a contraction of several moments which opposes the next line's "dilated glory." Similarly, the "O" of the orb is a contraction of the "expanded O" of the parentheses themselves: (__). There are, therefore, opposing forces of expansion and contraction contained into these lines.

The insertion of the "!" is important as the anchoring focal point. In a sense, it represents our (readerly) point of view as we simultaneously consider three concurrent oppositions: "Now" and "now", here [the lime tree bower] and there [wherever Charles is gazing from], and expansion and contraction. These three oppositions combine graphically to produce the final image:

Fig. 1- Orb's dilated glory

This image seems to resemble an eyeball or a sun with a "dim speck" vanishing into it. Even more importantly, it represents the perspective of "having read," looking back into the poem "through" the "orb" in line 73 to the "!" in line 71.

Furthermore, the presence of the image "( ! )" seems to be a recurring pattern in Coleridge as I'll explain below, and its recurrence at crucial moments in other poems may indicate the Coleridge intended to implant this type of image. Whatever his intention, the implications for textuality presented in this holograph(em)ic reading indicates something like what we mean when we call a text "deep" or important [4] .

This particularly powerful essence in Coleridge is the beginning of an understanding on the issue of inter-textuality in his own work. The author's intention is, however, irrelevant in the sense that the implications are not about how Coleridge communicates meaning but how a a text itself conveys/contains meaning. The recurrance of the "( ! )" at the very least represents the existence of the ability of these Coleridgean texts to contain "inside-outness" in the sense that the explanation point both expands beyond and yet remains contained by the parentheses [5]. A few more examples from Coleridge help illustrate this point.

In "Kubla-Kahn" the figure of expansion-contraction occurs in the description of the beginnings of the river Alph. In this case the outermost container is the "walls and towers" girdled round "twice five miles of fertile ground." The river itself is even further embedded inside a deep romantic chasm where "a mighty fountain momently was forced" (line 19). There are other potential containers in this poem, for if one considers the geography of Xanadu, it may be read that the fountain is inside the "pleasure-dome" while the river runs underground into an sunless sea [ ]. Furthermore, the the mysterious Abyssinian maid appears (accompanied by the first intrusion of "I") immediately after the fountain is enclosed, as it were, by the "sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!" (line 36). And in fact the poem seems to break entirely at this point except that the "vision" in line 38 seems to include both the damsel and the "sunny dome" when that vision is revived in the hypothetical future of the narrator. In other words, we have a vision whose geography may look something like this:

 

 

Fig. 2 - Geography of Xanadu: "Kubla Kahn" lines 1 - 36.

 

The intrusion of the narrator, however, disfigures this embedded geography in his revelation that he (Coleridge?) does not remember like the Coleridge of the introductory "Fragment.". Furthermore he says that if he could remember it, he would have to embed it within three circles. The introductory fragment which appears in Stillinger's edition also disfigures even this narrator because the "I" is included in the vision that the "the author" makes up to replace the initial vision which he has forgotten. Yet another figure of embedded circles appears in the excerpted fragment from "The Picture" as the reflected visions disappear in "a thousand circles spread."

The point or trajectory of this encircling event is that the container is destroyed in the act of containing and that which is contained (fountain, "I", "Kubla Kahn") expands to be larger than it's container(s). Furthermore, this reading identifies a particular feature of the text related to the materiality of its presentation. "Kubla Kahn" is not as neatly punctuated as "The Lime-Tree Bower" but the shape of the poem generally separates the major "geographical" divisions. Also, the product of the embedded reading resembles a structure to the poem that subtly creates the depth and, perhaps, part of the allure of the poem, and certainly, the final word from the "I" appears to erupt from deep within the "hidden" chambers of the poem culminating in a narrative formulation of the poem's figurative, geographic image of "inside-outness."

A simpler, but very similar geographical moment appears in "The Picture" a poem which with it's quotation in the introductory fragment is intimately linked with "Kubla Kahn." Both deal with seeking something that is denied but somehow achieved, both use water as a unifying image, and both deal with shifting layers of embedding, but the significant difference is that the embedding in "Kubla Kahn" appears primarily in the narrative mode and the figurative mode is slightly less important. The geographic moment of note where the figure ( ! ) makes its obligatory appearance occurs in lines 139 - 144:

. . . How bursts
The landscape on my sight! Two crescent hills
Fold in behind each other, and so make
A circular vale, and land-locked, as might seem,
With brook and bridge, and grey stone cottages,
Half hid by rocks and fruit-trees. (Coleridge, "The Picture," lines 139 - 144)

In this instance, the image is even more similar to the actual parenthetical exclamation--two crescent hills, "( )," enclose gray stone cottages and "smoke from cottage-chimneys, tinged with light" (line 149), "! ! !." One column of smoke leans toward the waterfall, so maybe the landscape would look like ( | \ !!! ), but the important point is the figure of a container where the contained items expand.

Again, the contraction and expansion relates to the sexual insertion of phallic symbol into a vagina-like enclosure, but it also occurs at the moment in the poem where the perspective shifts radically to enclose the entire scene (including the narrator) within a picture being drawn by an unnamed girl. Thus, the expansion may also relate to birth and the "inside-outness" of the "( ! )".

Picturing this poem with a bracketed structure reveals the following pattern of asymmetrical embedding:

Fig. 3 - Asymmetrical narrative embedding in "The Picture"

This embedded structure is a simplified presentation of what's so odd about the poem "The Picture:" the now of the narrator and the narrated become confused and conflict with one another to the extent that the narrator is narrator events right as they are happening, i.e. right as we are reading about them and he is writing about them. There are several subtle shift within the poem, but they more or less amount to hypothetical conjectures of the narrator until the key transformation takes place where the narrated, enclosed sequence expands to include everything including the original narrator who is now replaced by a new narrator which is a transportation of the secondary narrated persona.

I've represented the personas in this poem by referring to their pronouns. It might, perhaps, be more clear to assign names or identities to them, but the point of interest is best illustrated with the ambiguity that Coleridge seems to be playing on. The primary bracket is of I - I where the initial first person narrator is represented as brackets containing all the other levels that he creates or is aware of. The first enclosed bracket, He - He, is an example, one of a few, where the narrator describes what he himself is not by imagining an opposite or contrary persona in the third person. These musing's each end with "I" snapping back to "reality" or his place-time, as it were, except for the reflected scene at the pool, the portion which also appears in the note to "Kubla Kahn."

This pool scene does not end by shifting back to "I's" reality. "I" directly addresses "He" with the lines "Ill-fated youth! // Go. day by day, and waste thy manly prime // In mad love-yearning by the vacant brook, " (lines 106 - 108). The stream reappears briefly, then transforms, as it were, into the valley which resembles the "( ! )." It is at this point that the "He" becomes "I" or, as I have labeled it above, "I ' " (I prime) and the initial narrator becomes contained (entrapped) within a picture drawn by the new, external "she," "she ' " (she prime) who has drawn the picture of the poem's original narratory and to whom I' seeks to restore the picture. It is something like Baudrillard's "precession of simulacra" where the simulation precedes the reality it simulates and exists in a new, unbounded space without any totalizing narrator (Baudrillard 2). And it is certainly an example of "inside-outness" dictating the structure of the poem itself. Again, this bracketed rendering of the poem is not "the answer" or hidden meaning of the poem. It may be, in a sense, arbitrary, but it at the very least indicates both that such a reading is valuable to understanding the structure of a text and that the particular image of ( ! ) is operating intertextually within the Coleridge project.

This embedded type or reading is, like the holograph(em)ic reading, derived from Ault's bracketed rendering of Blake's The Four Zoas where, for example, "Night the Ninth" can be viewed as a simple embedding and "Night the Fourth" is an asymmetrical or deceptive embedding. It is important to note that in each example, "The Picture," "Kubla Kahn," and the Zoas, the existence of embedded structure is predicated on a different formulation of interiority or exteriority. While Ault likens his brackets to control structures in computer programming [6], the "Kubla Kahn" structure is a simple geographical presentation and "The Picture" is conceived as interiority in the sense of being described (and, therefore, circumscribed) by a different imagination, realms of knowing in other words. The original "He" for example, is never aware that he is being narrated until he takes of the poem. The overall aspect of embedding relates to Ernest Schachtel's explanation of psychological development as a process of embedding experience of negotiating anxiety and security as a function of embedding. His theory is a bit Freudian in its association of security with a womb-like protective, "intrauterine" state (Schachtel 49), but an interesting confluence with Blake occurs in Schachtel's description of negotiating anxiety.

According to Schachtel, the act of walking "requires faith in the future" and as such "contains in it the fundamental human situation and its elements of risk, anxiety, and faith" (Shachtel 48). Each step, as it were, implies and contains within it its opposite, corrective step which prevents falling. The process of creating a bracketed reading from a text is similar in the sense that identifying an opening bracket does not always lead to identifying a closing bracket. In fact, as in "The Picture," the bracketing is deceptive, so one must make an arbitrary designation on the "faith" that the bracket will in fact prove to enclose something. It is, therefore, rather like Tharmas "fleeing from the battle...//...outstretching an expanse where neer expanse had been" (FZ [Nt 4] 50.4-5). This also corresponds to any reader reading any text.

When we read something like A Tale of Two Cities, for example, where the sense of symmetry is extremely thorough, we begin to expect that as "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times" surely if "it is the age of wisdom" it is also "the age of foolishness" (Dickens 1). We also grow to expect that despite all of the turns and distractions of sub-plots, Sidney Carton, as the diametric opposite will show up to tie up the loose ends at the conclusion of the novel and deliver the ultimate moral. Thus, moving forward through the text becomes a comfortable stroll where we expect each step forward to resolve in a counter-step. Blake's Four Zoas or Coleridge's "The Picture" as well as any number of "non-linear" post-modern texts move awkwardly or more slowly through an instable spaces that does not always conclude or manifest a closing bracket at all.

Furthermore, this sense of unease can be compounded in the sense of "unheimlich" or uncanny as a function of the state of "Being-in" in "the existential 'mode' of the 'not-at-home'" (Heidegger 233). In this case, he is making an observation about the state of anxiety as a result of one's embedding and identification of "there" as also, uncomfortably, here. Borges is fond of a technique whereby he builds several layers of traditional story framing to contain at the center an impossible situation or point that contains and refigures the entire story. In that cases like these, ("The Aleph," "Book of Sand," for example) the bracketed structure may actually be represented as a mobius strip or toroidal shape which represents an infinite repetition of eruption and insertion. [7]

This spatial anxiety coupled with the developmental anxiety of Shachtel begins to explain something of why certain texts are more disturbing or frustrating to read than others. These two notions by clarifying a spatial relationship within the affective content of written text also implicate the reverse (linear immersion in simulated "deep" three-dimensional space) working in the opposite direction. In other words, texts can be uncanny by dissolving a sense of Being-in or disrupting expectations of forward-moving brackets, but games must directly overcome exactly those problems in order to maintain a continuity between the user, the apparatus, and the game's diegesis.

To sum up so far, written texts yield to a type of reading where the materiality of the text creates image that enhance or correlate to the meaning in the poem. This type of reading in Coleridge reveals a structure of embedding and bracketing dominated and often signalled by the image or concept of a paranthetical exclamation point. This enclosed eruption correlates to sexual imagery as well as narrative trajectory and, moreover, provides an explanations of how texts operate through a number of possible bracketing structures which can by inherent or overt. Video games operate with a similar embedding structure and make that navigation apparent and approachable by the player by means of the material presence of text on the screen appearing, as it were, to float between the viewer's position and the three-dimensional diegesis of the game.

As part of my point is that all games[8] operate with these principles, examples abound. The following demonstrations of textual embedding are not chosen because of their exceptional demonstration of this embedded characteristic but because of their immediate availability on my PC.

In my experience, there seem to be three modes of text in games each appearing as distinct from the others in order to achieve three different aims: status feedback, apparatus negotiation, and narrative advancement. For brevity I will refer to these as ontological, mechanical, and diegetical. The ontological element consists of on-screen information in the form of icons or status which provide the player with information that cannot easily be represented graphically in a 3-D or "naturalized" setting.

Consider this example from the ground-breaking first-person-shooter, Half-Life (Valve/Sierra).

Fig. 4 - Half-Life "ontological" text display

The heads up display of the viewer provides information that cannot be represented as originating in the naturalized "real" world of the game because the information relates directly to the status of the player:

Fig. 5 - A selection of weapons.

Fig. 6 - The player-character's health and defense status.

Fig. 7 - Ammunition supplies for the player-character.

These are typical components of the ontological head's up display, and as they relate immediately to the player-chacter, this information provides the player with immediate feedback of the player-character's position in the three-dimensional environment. Many games, in fact, display a map of the area with the player-character's position marked on it. Half-Life provides a convenient demonstration of this as an embedding tactic because the ontological display is only available when the player-character, Gordon Freeman, is wearing his special protective suit. The game begins with a regular (un-suited) Gordon, and the player does not have any textual feedback to provide the standard immersion and clues as to how to proceed.

The second, mechanical, order of textual presentation actually occurs rarely in Half-Life (this is actually one of the points fans of the game make to explain its uniqueness) but it refers to the messages coming, as it were, from the game directly to the player, bypassing the player entirely. These instructions appear to float in mid-air in front of the player, but they are not part of the game's actual world. Unlike the ontological display, however, the player-character is not aware of the mechanical display:

Fig. 8 - Instructions to the Player

In this case, the player is the second person whereas in diegetical text or dialogue, Gordon Freeman is addressed in second person. This example is especially appropriate because Gordon does not have a use key, he has a finger. Yet to push a button as Gordon we have to push a button on the keyboard.

The final mode of text in games is positioned as originating in the diegesis and directing itself to the player through the player character. Though this also contains information about how to play the game, it's direction at the player-character requires that it relate to accomplish the goals of the game's story. In other words, diegetical text might say "Find the golden key to enter the gate" whereas mechanical text simply tells how to move in the first place. Diegetical text, therefore, is tends to convey the story of the game and is, therefore, often teleological in its trajectory. It is also much more broadly construed as mechanical information is more related to the immediacy of experiencing gameplay.

Half-Life, appropriately, nearly always supplies this type of information audially through the dialogue of non-player-character's, so it does not contain a good example for comparing the material differences between these modes of texts. Another game, No One Lives Forever 2 (Fox Interactive), provides a useful example of diegetic text. Information that is directed at the player-character, Cate Archer, is distinctly different in its presentation on the screen [9]. She hears dialogue from other characters who instruct her on her missions, but she also receives direct memoranda from her superiors like the example below:

Fig. 9 - Instructions to the Player by way of player-character.

(Click on image for full-sized screen)

The boundaries of the message are the edges of the note, separating it from and contextualizing it within the diegetical 3-D environment. This appears as opposed to mechanical information which appears, as in Half-Life, to float uncontextualized in front of the player-character:

Fig. 10 - On-screen "mechanical" text in No One Lives Forever 2.

The effect of these layers of textuality is to present the user with a viable interface with the world of the 3-D diegesis. Games that choose (or fail) to remove or seriously alter one of the textual modes are often criticized for being disorienting or difficult to play. American McGee's Alice (Rogue Entertainment/EA Games) whose narrative depends entirely on the problems of navigating a dark, fantastical world is initially rather frustrating because of its lack of typical textual information. Specifically, mechanical text is entirely absent and the viewer is only given an awkward ontological display and diegetic riddles which don't often help very much:

Fig. 11 - "When the Remarkable Turns Bizarre, Reason Turns Rancid." Helpful "advice" from the Cheshire Cat.

The uncanny effect is entirely intentional, though perhaps a bit over(under)stated, and the game designers have thwarted the traditional textual embedding to create this effect. The "Being-in" is not constituted with the same markers and the resulting "not-at-home" is either uncanny or annoying depending on the player.

Thus games can alter the typical schema of embedding to make the game more or less satisfactorily immersive [10]. So what does this have to do with Coleridge? Coleridge uses embedding to contain an emergence or insertion, the ( ! ) image. This image can also metaphorically describe the insertion of the player into the fictional environment of the game or the extraction of an immersive game experience from the apparatus of the game. In other words, the bracketing schema of the poems in this example (particularly "The Picture") resemble not the entire trajectory of a game's narrative but the act of playing the game at each moment. In either case, the same textual model of material, narrative, or figurative hierarchy is present and the games which consistently utilize comprehensible models or patterns of hierarchy are often more successful at engaging the player.

Understanding the principle of embedded textuality holograph(em)ically or otherwise begins to address questions about what is happening in the act of writing or in creating a game that "works" as a simulated environment with a purpose (story). At any rate, the bizarre may become remarkable after all.

--( ! )--

[1] I should clarify which kinds of games I am writing about from the beginning. While several genre of games exhibit the characteristics I'm describing in this paper. The textual relationships are most obvious and interesting in the genre of first- or third-person-shooter. Most any game that develops a story and asks the user to immerse him or herself in the story utilizes a hierarchy of textual information which serves to "embed" the player within the created environment.

[2] cf. Diane Carr's "Playing with Lara" and Derek A. Burrill's "'Oh Grow Up 007': The Performance of Bond and Boyhood in Film and Videogames" in Screenplay: cinema/videogames/interface Ed. Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska, for discussions of the fetishistic aspect of this relationship.

[3] The poem thus far has enacted a pattern of expanding and contracting viewpoint. For example, the speaker is trapped in his (limited) bower, but his imagination of what his friends is seeing is larger than the landscape itself as they see it.

[4] While this theory (and this paper) may have implications for aesthetics or even a poetics of gaming, it is not my intent nor do I think it is possible to judge a game on "aesthetic" (in the sense of artistic quality) grounds. While I would not count myself among the "ludologists" in the debate on how to approach game studies, I recognize that a game's playability and "coolness" is the factor which drives its success and production. "Aesthetically" interesting games (like The Last Express, for example) are often not successful commercially, and, therefore, studying those games do not adequately address games' status as cultural phenomenon.

[5] The expression "inside-outness" receives appears in several different meanings in this paper, but in general it refers to "unheimlich" presence and in specific it describes texts, brackets, narrators, or any other containing feature which contains something larger than itself. For example, the novel House of Leaves Mark Z.Danielewski contains several embedded layers of voice, separated by font, page-formatting, and footnotes. It is a book about a book about a documentary about a house whose inside measures larger than its outside. Also, at the nadir of Will Navidson's (Navidson is filming the documentary) journey through the now deformed and labyrinthine house, he is reading a book called House of Leaves which is described as the book we are reading.

[6] From what little I know of computer programming (Perl) a control structure is a command or set of commands where everything between two identifying characters is treated to the same process or control. for example, to test a list and see if a particular pattern appears, the expression, m/cheese/ , tests for the pattern "cheese." According to the rules of Perl, if everything else appears in the right places, the forward-slashes, "/", can be replaced by any other punctuation as long as they match (Schwartz and Phoenix 115).

[7] The toroidal shape appears rather like a donut with a continuous "inside-out" motion:

 

[8] Again, all games that use text(words) operate with the same textual hierarchy. It is simply much more subtle and complicated (and ambiguous) in games like Tetris.

[9] NOLF:2 makes a specific effort to separate the player from the player-character by referring to her in the third person in the set-up for each level. Presumably, this is because the game designers assumed that most of their audience would be male, but it raise interesting questions about avatar-player identification that are not adequately or appropriately addressed in Diane Carr's essay on the fetishization of Lara Croft.

[10] In this paper, I have used the term "immersive" rather loosely, but I generally mean the sense of "being-there" which a game achieves, the sense of actually being in a nuclear reactor fighting aliens, or whatever. "Immersive" also can be used to describe an involved reading experience where the reader loses track of time and contact with the "real" world. In this sense, the term "engagement" is better suited for describing a similar experience with a game because of the task-driven nature of the game.

Works Cited

American McGee's Alice.(PC) v.1.0 . Developed by EA Games. Published by Rogue Entertainment. US, 2000.

Ault, Donald. Narrative Unbound: Revisioning William Blake's The Four Zoas. New York: Station Hill Press, 1987.

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