Cultures and discourses surrounding games can have an outsized impact on how people experience them. In Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman discuss different forms of culture as ways of understanding how games relate to their broader context:
For the purposes of game design, we understand ‘culture’ to refer to what exists outside the magic circle of the game, the environment or context within which a game takes place. (Salen and Zimmerman 2004, 508).
They describe open cultural contexts as being where “the exchange of meaning between a game and its surrounding cultural context can change and transform both the game and its environment,” (Salen and Zimmerman 2004, 538). Mia Consalvo has explored the role of videogame paratexts – including both official material and fan works such as guides and wikis can become more central to the experience of videogames than the videogames themselves, and that videogame paratexts serve “pedagogical functions” (Consalvo 2007, 22). Souvik Mukherjee argues that games can be understood as assemblages, which cannot be properly understood without considering them as multifaceted, richly-fractal entities, deeply informed by the cultures and communities surrounding them.
As assemblages, they are games, stories, political and economic platforms, simulations and fitness trainers among other things; moreover, they also plug into all these aspects as well as to the human player and to the machine (literally) in an intrinsic relationship. The Grand Theft Auto walkthrough (…) can be said to plug into the GTA assemblage, which includes the entire series of games, the individual gameplays of the players, the cheat-codes, the geography of the American cities in which the games take place, the design elements and much more. It would be difficult to leave any of these separate elements out of any critique or appreciation of GTA V or GTA: San Andreas because of the multiplicity of narratives and related play experiences they bring together. (Mukherjee 2015, 17).
The discourses found within complexly-overlapping games communities have a significant influence on the assemblages that game texts become part of. Games themselves set expectations for how players ‘should’ engage with them within their experiences, a process known as embodied literacies (Keogh 2018, 91) – expectations of the genre, format and content that can be carried between games and inform a player’s ludoliteracy (Davidson 2011). As a result of this process, games often assume that a ‘new player’ is not entirely new to the medium, which frames assumptions around what they need to be taught as they play.
Discourses within game communities and cultures inform both how ludoliteracies develop, are framed, and understood. It examines how game preferences are formed, and why certain games may be more valued than others (Keogh 2018, 79).
“Git Gud” is one such phrase that exemplifies this evolving culture. It has been popularised within game communities and cultures, and is often used to valorise and defend difficult challenges – potentially ones that are intimidatingly difficult to overcome. Dark Souls (Miyazaki and From Software 2011) provides an example of how “Git Gud” and the discourses surrounding it as an idea can shape the experience of gameplay. The first boss appears when the player’s character will not have a functional weapon, making attacking it almost futile, and there are cues to suggest the player should avoid fighting it as this stage and instead run past. However, players who have been lead to expect an appropriately ruinously difficult challenge based on “Git Gud” discourse may miss (or misunderstand) the cues to avoid it, assume that the futility of fighting the boss is not a hint to try a different approach, and instead simply conclude the game is too difficult for them.
In this case, the evolving assemblage of culture and discussion surrounding Dark Souls can give a different impression and expectation to players than what games seek to do in isolation. Noah Caldwell-Gervais (Noah Caldwell-Gervais 2022) produced an extensive video essay exploring his own encounters with exactly the same problem. He expected not to be able to succeed when playing because of not being “the correct kind” of player with the “right kind of skills.” However, instead he found that Dark Souls offered a surprising number of tools designed to reveal alternate paths for how players might respond to its challenges and modify their experience of play – including by managing the level of challenge they desired.
Another assemblage which formed around Dark Souls, framing how it is experienced, is that players created a “meta” by examining its systems and determining which classes were easier to play than others, what builds might be most optimal and how to maximise various kinds of enjoyment. Dark Souls was no longer simply a collection of rules or an individual play experience. Now, playing Dark Souls can be driven by the culture that surrounds it.
The discourses found within complexly-overlapping games community have a significant influence on the assemblages that game texts become part of, setting expectations for how the experience is ‘intended’ to function. This paratextual influence is powerful enough that it can subvert design features of the games themselves.
This volume will explore the outsized influence of community discourses on how games are experienced. This book invites chapter proposals that grapple with multifaceted ways that communities develop, discuss, read, and inform games and the cultures which form around them.
e can see these kinds of tensions in situations such as where game communities declare that using particular weapons, tools or abilities are “cheap,” “cheesy” or even “cheating,” despite their deliberate inclusion by game designers, or where these same designers, who include tools for mitigating or shaping the difficulty of an experience, are assumed to have ‘caved,’ abandoning their ‘true intentions.’