Performativity in Art Literature and Videogames by Darshana Jayemanne

Stephanie C. Jennings is an assistant professor in the Higher of Didactics at Michigan State University, where she also serves as Director of the online Master of Arts in Pedagogy programme. Her research has primarily centered on issues of methodology in the field of game studies, often weaving together considerations of intersectional feminism, epistemological theories, and concepts of gameplay. Edifice from this work, she is currently pursuing projects that interrogate understandings of agency in game studies, gaming civilisation, and approaches to games-based learning.

 Jayemanne, D. (2017). Performativity in Art, Literature, and Videogames. Palgrave Macmillan.

Though the spheres of videogames research accept been swelling, proliferating, morphing, and diversifying, they've been doing so in an odd sort of stasis: floating in an enforced historical interruption, out-of-orbit in a conceptual enclosure, radiating exceptionalism. So many stubborn footling binary-bindings accept all the same been sealing things together, and we've withal been finding ourselves returning to a tight package of quibble-worn tools for our studies. Just things are changing. The stasis isn't sticking. More and more scholars are banging the tools on the bindings till they beginning to crumble. Some others are repurposing the tools, devoting them to disruptive tasks. And some are rocketing their scholarship along new vectors, sending it ricocheting off the walls of the enclosure till cracks appear and outside air finally bursts into the vacuum. We're finding, then, that the space beyond the walls isn't stifling, as we'd previously been warned information technology would be. Instead, it'south vivifying. Wandering into the spaces beyond, the spheres of videogames research are starting to have new shapes and are moving all about.

Darshana Jayemanne's Performativity in Art, Literature, and Videogames is an essential contribution to this ongoing animation. The book has much to give: a generative, comparative methodology; a vibrant and extensive lexicon for describing the qualities of videogames; many vivid case studies. Operation is its vital pivot bespeak. Although the field of game studies has tended to treat performance as "either an appearing of abstruse rules or a voluntarist creation of meaning by the player in each bodily play decision" (p. xiv), Jayemanne emphasizes that it is not and so easily sequestered or reduced. Videogame performances emerge between player and videogame—as well as beyond distributions of multiple players and networked streaming audiences—out of muddles of play potentiality. They do not class merely "a chain of bones units, but a circuitous multidimensional weave" (p. v). Jayemanne's proposed methodology is, thus, particularly equipped to handle the intricacies of videogames' tapestries of performance. It enables analyses of the ways that particular performances arise from a videogame'south performative multiplicity. As such, it is a valuable mechanism with which to identify the specificities of videogames and to understand how these features create meaning and experience.

But Jayemanne is careful to divert this exploration of medium specificity away from that radiant glow of exceptionalism that has lured in and then many game studies scholars. Indeed, the book's perspective is expressly "at odds with approaches that insist on the novelty of the videogame form" (p. ten). It is too, moreover, at odds with dominant approaches that over-privilege game as the prime number, if non exclusive, category that describes videogame forms and how players engage with them. Resisting these popular tendencies, Performativity is a dynamic procedure of locating videogames within far vaster and all as well often overlooked media histories and scholarship. Whereas much of the field has venerated concepts similar interactivity as proof that videogames represent radical breaks from other media forms, Jayemanne instead begins by tracing connections between videogame performance, the felicitous and infelicitous performative utterances of Austin's (2003) speech deed theories, and the framing devices of Ndalianis's (2004) Neo-Bizarre aesthetics.

To both illustrate and build out from these interrelationships, the book moves through shut readings of a sundry yet cohesive set of instance studies. Each of these features a gallery scene that effectively thematizes framing devices, those structures that communicate performative possibilities and the mechanisms past which they are judged. As Jayemanne explains of these galleries:

By recursively incorporating other artworks, stories or framing devices into their textual construction, these works comment on their own mode of presentation and generate feedback loops that nowadays challenges for audiences or readers that, in their quasi-ludic character, prefigure those of videogames…[T]hese readings thus show a prehistory of the sorts of processes and feedback loops that this volume argues are key to videogame performativity. (p. 23)

The example studies include Willem van Haecht'due south 1628 painting The Cabinet of Cornelis van der Geest; novels such as Balzac's (1831) The Unknown Masterpiece, Pynchon'south (1965) The Crying of Lot 49, and Atwood'due south (2003) Oryx and Crake; and a powerful concluding assay of the videogame Life is Strange (Dontnot Entertainment, 2015). Jayemanne's selection is eclectic yet strikingly harmonious in its assorted gallery scenes, and it is all the more pregnant for its commitments to media artifacts that accept long floated outside of the field's primal realms of business organization. For example, while there is no shortage of scholarship that ties videogames to film—and, to a lesser extent, literature—at that place are far fewer instances of game studies research that explicitly contemplate fine art history. Some of the book'southward gallery scenes may therefore pose a challenge to scholars who are not well versed in art history and artful theories. I struggled with the chapter on The Cabinet of Cornelis van der Geest for this reason, given my own inexperience in these areas. Yet, I establish that this struggle made reading Performativity all the more valuable, as it incites a broadening of horizons against the insular habits that continue to pervade in the field.

In addition to its gallery scenes, the book contains an array of rich, lively examples from many different videogames. At that place are deep reads of videogames like QWOP (Foddy, 2008), God Manus (Clover Studios, 2006), and Planescape: Torment (Black Island, 1999). And there are so many snapshots of granular, passed-by videogame details: doors in Half-Life 2 (Valve Software, 2005); a narrow safety track impervious to enemy projectiles in Destiny (Bungie, 2014); and a glitchy, disappearing clot of mud in Mass Upshot 3 (BioWare, 2012), to proper name just a few. A especially memorable moment comes in the amusing, if a flake gruesome, test of framing that occurs during Roggvir's scripted execution at the commencement of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda Softworks, 2011), where players tin search the inventory of Roggvir's out-of-reach trunk by activating his severed head.

These enthralling illustrations exhale life into the book'south drove of novel, incisive concepts. Jayemanne'southward investigation of God Hand, for instance, buttresses a crucial discussion of serial aesthetics and salient features in videogames. Salient features are representational framing devices that "have performative ramifications" (p. 173); together, they contribute to the germination of serial aesthetics, which are visual articulations of the consistencies of virtual bodies. These communicate performative possibilities to players past signifying the transformations and forms of motion available to in-game bodies, many of which are frequently "tied to specific statistics and parameters" (p. 173). God Paw'southward salient features sally in the caricatured, over-exaggerated bodies of enemy combatants, whose humorous designs aid players "keep track of characters prone to dynamic move and transformation" (p. 165). Yet, these salient features construct a serial aesthetic that exemplifies and impacts gaming's problematic depictions of ability, sexuality, gender, and race. As Jayemanne explains, "the artful techniques of exaggeration, simplification, and emphasis have had distinctive effects on the way that bodies tend to be depicted and modeled in videogames" (p. 173), often reinforcing essentialist assumptions of departure. Those performative ramifications at the center of salient features are, therefore, important conceptual interventions in a field that has long held computation/representation as its cardinal structuring binary (Anable, 2018). That binary has elevated research that analyzes rules, mechanics, and lawmaking while subordinating the work of scholars who critique gaming'south noxious representational patterns. Fraying this artificial dichotomy, Jayemanne'south theories of performativity re-posit videogame form and content equally melded and co-informant.

Such is the case with many of the concepts that Jayemanne provides across the book. Always sensitive to historical situatedness, Performativity is also acutely aware of its ain positioning within the flows of game studies. While the book acknowledges the precedents of the field'southward numerous foundational debates, information technology deftly travels past the mires of wearied divisions, refusing to sink into places where then many studies still slog. Its achievement, then, is a holistic vision of studying videogames that is eager to sympathize them in all of their complexities and strange minutiae, rather than past staking claims in either/or models of analysis. In this fashion, it is an imperative participant in shifts that are steadily accelerating across the field.

Performativity'south final chapter helpfully, thoroughly outlines many possibilities for its methodology's time to come use. Absolutely, I am nigh excited nigh its implications for the future of shut readings of videogames. Though close readings are still uncommon, and in many ways scorned, in game studies (Ruberg, 2019), the attitudes surrounding them are changing. However, as more than scholars determine to try their hand at close readings of videogames, they may find that the field'south tight parcel of quibble-worn tools is far too prohibitive to meet their needs. Performativity is hither to begin answering those needs. The volume presents videogame scholars with a solid-yet-flexible foundation with which to undertake close readings of videogames from myriad angles. Its elaborate vocabulary grants many fresh, subtle ways of describing what occurs when nosotros play videogames. Moreover, its cybernetics-oriented methodology can dialogue productively with other recent scholarship that has asserted the significance of intimate game-player mingling in the structure of videogame experiences (Anable, 2018; Keogh, 2018; Ruberg, 2019).

Performativity is a challenging read. It is, in fact, quite demanding. It is difficult to assimilate its conceptual offerings without chewing on them commencement—and, I assure you, there is a lot to chew on here. Jayemanne deals with many complex ideas, and engages with the piece of work of other scholars in ways that not but crave a working familiarity with their concepts, but a skilful command of their slightest details. Even if you lot believe that you lot accept that working familiarity, you may withal find yourself scrambling to re-accustom yourself with these cited works earlier progressing farther in the volume's analyses. A standout example in my own reading was the pivotal chapter on the tactile unconscious of gaming, which describes how players become bodily habituated to performing the responses that videogame's framing devices prompt. To historicize this procedure in relation to other media forms, Jayemanne puts numerous concepts from the works of Walter Benjamin (2006) into dialogue with 1 another: distraction, shock, innervation, mimesis, play. This chapter is intricate and potent—simply it does non dwell on detailed explanations for any of these concepts, compelling me to revisit and re-contemplate Benjamin'due south writings in order to appreciate the nuances of its arguments. For use in classes, I would therefore recommend providing students with some initial contextualization to ensure that they take the conceptual grounding necessary to explore the connections that Performativity draws between gaming and other media theories.

Amid the frantic torrent of multitasking that is academic life, I thought information technology was refreshing to engage with a book that refuses to exist rushed. I cherished being asked to boring downwardly. In fact, I don't remember that the book can exist grasped in an initial reading. I've returned to it multiple times afterward to review underlined sections, to re-read passages, to take more notes—and still I experience like I've only kind of skimmed the surface. I think, ultimately, that I will only brainstorm to fully comprehend Performativity by using it. But through the application of its methodology and its conceptual cornucopia will it really reveal itself and all that it holds.

References

Anable, A. (2018). Playing with feelings: Video games and impact. Academy of Minnesota Printing.

Atwood, Thousand. (2003). Oryx and Crake. Anchor Books.

Austin, J. L. (2003). How to do things with words. Harvard University Press.

Balzac, H. (2001). The unknown masterpiece and other stories (R. Howard, Trans.). New York Review Books.

Benjamin, W. (2006). Selected writings: 1938-1940. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Bethesda Softworks. (2011). The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim [Videogame]. Bethesda Softworks.

BioWare. (2012). Mass Upshot 3 [Videogame]. Electronic Arts.

Black Isle Studios. (1999). Planescape: Torment [Videogame]. Interplay Entertainment.

Bungie. (2014). Destiny [Videogame]. Activision.

Clover Studios. (2006). God Mitt [Videogame]. Capcom.

Dontnot Entertainment. (2015). Life is Strange [Videogame]. SquareEnix.

Foddy, B. (2008). QWOP [Videogame]. Bennett Foddy.

Keogh, B. (2018). A play of bodies: How nosotros perceive videogames. MIT Press.

Ndalianis, A. (2004). Neo-Baroque aesthetics and contemporary entertainment. MIT Press.

Pynchon, T. (1996). The crying of lot 49. Vintage Classics.

Ruberg, B. (2019). Video games have ever been queer. New York Academy Press. Valve. (2005). Half-Life 2 [Videogame]. Valve.

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