Daniel Gardner

So good, so good, so good.

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Rudolf Inderst

Hi everyone and welcome back to New Books in Game Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. On this channel we explore new scholarship that unpacks what games mean, how they are designed, how they are played, and how they resonate far beyond the screen. I'm your host Rudolf Inders, professor for Game Studies at the University of Applied Sciences, Neue Ulm, Germany. Before we get started though, if you enjoy the show, please consider leaving us a five star review on Apple Podcasts or whichever platform you prefer. It really helps others discover us. And of course, feel free to share this episode with your community or gaming groups. And now let's dive into today's conversation. I'm very delighted to welcome Daniel Gardner, who joins us to talk about his book Thresholds of Digital Gameplay. Daniel, welcome to the show.

Daniel Gardner

Hello, welcome or thank you.

Rudolf Inderst

To begin, could you briefly introduce yourself and your research background? What drew you to the often overlooked interfaces, interactions and inequalities on the edges of gameplay?

Daniel Gardner

Yeah, I feel like it sort of makes sense to Start where I'm at now, sort of work my way backward and then kind of then come, you know, pendulum swing back towards the second part of that question. Right now I teach interaction and game design at Robert Gordon University in Scotland. I have a sort of mixed scholarly background. I did my PhD in HCI, but before that I was doing science technology studies in anthropology. Um, but I also, before that I came late to academics. I worked, I'm from the States and. And so it was just a. Financial stresses and other things sort of led to a very, you know, irregular path. So before that I was, I worked for years as a security analyst for IT systems and other sorts of stuff. But before that I, you know, helped manage a game store and before that I was an animator. So it kind of like been around all over the place with lots of little jobs in between. In part because of that irregular path and sort of some of the invisible curriculum stuff and things that sort of challenges that I ran into as I sort of moved into this space, but also sort of just a long running interest in sort of systematic and structural influences on the ways we can or can't just be in the world essentially that sort of fueled the interest in science technology studies which is very much about sort of networks of influence and really got into a sort of sub genre of sts which is like boring studies named by the late seasonally Starr, which is just the study of all the things that are sort of underneath the interesting cool stuff, but that actually really sort of often control what we are doing and seeing and being able to be and sort of highlights power asymmetries within our sort of everyday life. And that sort of informed everything. And it's why as I sort of moved into games somewhat game stuff accidentally, I still was sort of drawn to the stuff next to fun essentially. Not so much the really great gameplay stuff that I love in my own life of course, but sort of from a scholarly standpoint. I was drawn to the periphery and all these things that were underlying that and the ways that they enabled and often enforced functions very sort of observable transactions of authority, of power, of identity of all these other elements and very clearly and observably favored, you know, some groups over others and in different ways and with different contexts. Yeah, and so I mean that's sort of just kind of. It's been a theme, ongoing theme since the whole time. It's just manifests in different ways in the observation of different subjects.

Rudolf Inderst

Now your book argues that contemporary digital gameplay is only accessible by navigating an Ecosystem of interfaces that support its computational nature. What do you mean by its ecosystem? And why is it so central to understanding digital games today?

Daniel Gardner

Yeah, that's a big question. Okay, so I'll try not to just take over the rest of the session with just that. But the phrasing there comes from my STS background and sort of thinking in like networks of interaction and intra action, sometimes sort of in like phenomena within milieu which are also part of the phenomena. And like the ways that sort of nothing exists on its own. Everything exists in, within ecosystems of influence, agency, all that sorts of stuff. That's kind of where that phrasing comes from. But the reason I sort of highlight that in the book, and the sort of driving force behind a lot of that sort of central argument is that just, you know, games have always been computational. It's just that in the same sense that computer used to be a job title for humans and now it's an automated device. Now previously we used to have to do the computation, right? And still in tabletop games we still do, right? Like you go, oh, I roll my dice, I interpret that number, I do the math. And I now know that I do this outcome, right? That is a computational process. It's just very simple one. Whereas now everything is computational to an nth degree and a lot of it is automated. And with that, also with that softwareization of games, that digitalization of games, comes platforms, comes all these sort of interfaces and sort of infrastructures around. I'm going to have a visual thing for all the people who are listening. I have an example in the book where it's just like when you're moving a piece in a physical game, you reach out and you touch it. But in a digital game, you always have to have your controller in hand. In reality, you know, you. You can't touch anything. I mean, you had a guest a few episodes back. Maybe I'll see Cart. In one of his. In one of his writings, he has this reference to that meme about like press F to pay respects and how he makes this sort of refrain about like, we don't feel in games, we press F to feel, right? We. He makes this sort of comment that I think is a joke, but is not a joke, which is about like, you don't. The only thing, arguably the only thing we do with digital games is whatever we're doing with our bodies, which is never what we describe. When we say, oh, I played this game last night. You say stuff like, oh, I beat this boss, I completed this puzzle. But if you Were phenomenologically, you could equally make an argument of like, I moved my thumb this way, I moved my finger this way, but that's not fun. And that's not really the game. And there's layers of mediation that are happening there that we just often don't observe. I did talk at a presentation just last week recently where I did. I asked a volunteer come up from the audience to dramatize some of this in that I've had a chessboard on the table. And I said, okay, we'll make a move in chess. And so they made the move with their hand. I said, great, now, well, that's traditional. That's gameplay for thousands of years, right? We do the thing. And then I said, all right, let's dramatize digital gameplay. And I said, okay, go make a move again. But then I had to stop them. Oh, I'm sorry, you need a controller. So I gave them, like, you know, one of those extendable toy grabby hands that, like, you know, is on a stick with a silly hand that makes it really hard to, you know, the fluency with that sort of controller is probably not great. Its dexterity is not great. It begins to highlight the sort of dexterity mediation that occurs within a digital game. And said, okay, go ahead, stop them again. But. Oh, I'm sorry, you need to log in. Oh, now, you need to accept these terms of service. You don't have to read them. You just have to check the box to say that you did. Don't worry, it just says you don't own this game or any of the activities. And also, we're allowed to surveil all of your data and activity within the the game and yada, yada, yada. Oh, wait, hold on. You have to connect to the servers because, you know, you used to just be able to play games whenever you want, but now you need our permission. So you need to wait for our service to give you permission to play. Every time you play. Oh, wait, select a character. Oh, wait, you know, loading. And then once they actually started to get their hand on a piece, I interrupted them again for microtransactions, you know, and it's just like there are all these other sort of activities that no one would say that don't really fit into the common retelling of, like, what is games, but that are absolutely inherently part of the contemporary digital game space, essentially. Not that I'm here to argue how to define what is or is not game. That's sort of irrelevant, but certainly it's part of the activity of gaming and to bring us back the ecosystem with the digital and hardware ecosystem within which gameplay has become embedded in recent decades compared to the millennia before that or multiple millennia.

Rudolf Inderst

Yeah, that would be good old debate for the next time maybe.

Daniel Gardner

Yeah. I have a diagram in the book that sort of plays to this, which is I talked to a bunch of professionals in UI UX in the industry for the book and they describe all this stuff as like the shell. They often don't think of it as part of the game themselves. And the diagram sort of pokes fun at the magical circle and instead it presents a sort of administrative rectangle that sort of presents a lot of this stuff in sort of procedural and practical sense. But my favorite quote from these interviews was one of the people said, oh, nobody comes to the games for the menu. And I would ask how would you play a digital game without menus? And I don't know that you can. Right. There's. There's so many other things that are necessary in a very practical sense to interact with digital gameplay. And that's what that's. That's the best answer I have.

Rudolf Inderst

Yeah. But it actually, it builds a perfect bridge to the, to the next point because you, you examine elements that are peripheral to gameplay itself. Account logins, you just mentioned them. Controllers, menu settings and all the other practical functions or none not so practical functions, who's to decide? But why have these often overlooked elements become more central to gaming than we actually realize?

Daniel Gardner

Sure. I mean all the reasons before, I won't rehash all of that stuff.

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Daniel Gardner

But all that stuff plus. Right. Basically I think the reason that they often first often get overlooked is because so often we still sort of. There's still a lot of emphasis on the sort of theoretical traditions of games in play that sort of as theoretical constructs. Right. From a pre digital age. And we sort of. We really are. We really care about players for lots of really good reasons and we really care about like these things called games for lots of really good reasons. And we're just sort of for. And it's very sort of. It's focused on the fun parts. Right. And I think that that's why it gets overlooked. But I mean, but to your. The second part of the question about like the, you know, why have they become so central? Sometimes it's about games and very practical reasons, sometimes it's about broader things like account logins as the first example. Right. Easily the most mundane, but also the most pervasive. Right. And not unique to games in any in really any way, shape or form. But they aren't unique to game software. But if you think of them in the context of, in the history of games, they are distinctly different, right? Again, we never have until really 15 years ago, 20 years ago, nobody had a lot. Like I have an example in the book of like think about if 20, 20, 30 years ago you had to log in every time you took your chess set off the shelf, right? Or think of the moral panic if you found out that the big toy store was like surveilling all of the activity and chutes and ladders for all the kids playing it at all times, right? Like the moral panic of big toy store, like surveilling children playing a board game would be crazy. But that's what's happening with every single digital gameplay. And it started. And so the answer to the question of why it's become central, it started as like a basic security software best practice, but it's become more central now, not for fun reasons, but because companies are data companies and there's good stuff about that. It helps them balance games that are ongoing as a service and that's great. It helps competitive players sort of optimize play because they're able to sort of self track and sort of look at data that the game collects on them and reflect on that. And that's really great too. It helps moderate toxic behavior. If you didn't log in, you couldn't track toxic behavior over multiple gameplay sessions and so it becomes hard to police. So that's also a really good outcome. But underlying it also sort of comes from the platformization and sort of digital distribution of games and the ways that that surveillance helps to sort of support very sort of non consumer centered priorities in terms of the sale and sort of optimization of sale within that sort of marketplace to character creation. I mean I describe them at one point. I think I describe in the book the way that I actually, I think they're very much, very similar to like, you know, the end user license agreements that we sign in a different context, which is they're, they're, they're the performative terms of terms of use, right? Like in the ways that like no game will ever be perfectly inclusive, but the decisions that get made and the trade offs that get made in terms of not only who gets to be represented in these games at this point before gameplay, right? We haven't even started playing it most of the time. Sometimes character creation comes later, but as a norm, right? You create your character, then you play. And so before you are allowed to start playing. You must accept these limitations on and negotiate these limitations to sort of create the character that you think the game should be about. Which is also, I point out, like an interesting materialization of older philosophy about the interpretation of media with like Umberto Eco or Roland Barthes. The sort of death of the author. Right, is the actual, the most observable moment of co creation with the person who's doing it in a very sort of virtually material sense. But in that co creative negotiation, the limits that are imposed on it are sometimes deeply problematic. Sometimes they're funny, sometimes they're both. My favorite example I bring up in the book is actually from a pilot study. It wasn't even from the data collection for the book, which is from Guild Wars 2. Sorry to throw Guild Wars 2 under the bus, but it's hilarious. It's the example I always go back to which is that all of the sort of female designated characters in that game, besides the werecats, have an extra slider on their face customization that all of the male designated characters, except the little like alien children, I don't remember what the race is actually called, but they're like adolescent Yoda. They're not baby Yoda. They're not adult Yoda. They're like adolescent Yoda. The male designated characters of that race get this bar, but no other male designated characters get it. And it's a cheeks slider that when you slide on the one hand has like less puffy cheeks and when you slide it to the other side you get puffy cheeks. And so somewhere in that development of that game and over years of patches, a decision was made.

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Daniel Gardner

Men, male designated characters don't get to have puffy cheeks. Right. And it carries assumptions about, you know, certain. I don't know if there's like a deep lore reason for that. Right. Like I can't know that I'm not a lore head. You know, I don't know that, you know what that necessarily the reasoning behind that was. But it still is a, you know, a certain gendered assumption about like who and who in this game world, this fantasy game world where there are werecats, you know that men aren't allowed to have puffy cheeks and somebody needs to take the time to ensure that women. Women do is an interesting design choice in terms of deciding the permitted performance within that world. And so I find that as sort of a very sort of central transaction of identity performance that's occurring in a lot of games. Controllers just. I won't go over microtransactions but to sort of wrap up the answer, controllers for me is the most sort of interesting one in that, as I already discussed, nothing gets more central than the literally only physical way I can quote, unquote, touch digital gameplay is through this and everything else that, you know, we'll discuss today or have discussed. And yet they're called peripherals, right? Like they're literally in the retail space, they're called peripherals that a peripheral extra or an add on. But like you can't do any of this without them. They are the most central of anything. They can't get more central. It's the fulcrum between, you know, all of our past gaming experience must go through it. The focal point, not fulcrum, but it's the focal point that the prism through which all of our physical experience is diffracted into digital expression.

Rudolf Inderst

Now, for our listeners, this is a very, very, very nice, powerful, greenish Xbox controller, right?

Daniel Gardner

Yeah, right.

Rudolf Inderst

No, it's a nice one.

Daniel Gardner

Thank you. My last one broke, so it was the only one I could get.

Rudolf Inderst

You note that the games industry has also adopted usability testing alongside playtesting to evaluate how these interfaces influence accessibility and success. How do these two forms of testing differ and what does their coexistence reveal about how the industry views games altogether?

Daniel Gardner

Yeah, this is an interesting one too. I mean, they both serve incredibly important purposes. Even if the priorities of the two kinds of tests are potentially different, I argue where they maybe can be closer together than they currently are. They often are. They, they may or may not be the same department or different departments or different teams on the same department. And the different kinds of tests can happen at different parts of the development process, but in sort of a textbook scenario, right? One is about clearly measurable, like attention and efficient effective use and isn't necessarily unique to games. And one is about whether, you know, sure, the game system is communicated well enough, but that mostly whether players will ultimately enjoy it or really just care about it at all. And whether this sort of in game system is coherent, consistent and enjoyable. And so the priorities are slightly different, even if they often involve similar methods and can happen in different places. One is sort of essentially ambivalent to ui, right, and can be done in analog. And one is very UI centric and can be ambivalent to gameplay. But there's like a massive overlap. Right? But yeah, that's how I look at their thing. But I think, and I also think that the industry is increasingly keenly aware of like the sort of softwareization of games in A way that maybe game scholars is not, are not right. But I do think that, you know, one of the things that I sort of ran into and I think is unfortunate, one of the things I think is unfortunate I ran into this in the interviews with folks is that far too often in studios ui, ux, sort of in consideration of, you know, sort of the. As again, as I said before, the system that they often call the shell, right, not the game, the various menu systems, the character configuration systems, all these other, you know, peripheral UI and non ui, depending on your definition of, you know, heads up display or not heads up display, we'll say they're all maybe in the same, they're all in the same sort of, they all use the same UI grammar, right? Whether or not it's in the game or in the game menu or whatever. Often that design and testing falls very late in the process. And so one thing I argue is that if your digital game is embedded within these UI systems and that becomes part of the system at any point, it should be happening sooner is one of the arguments that I make that I think more of the industry needs to do. Funny enough, where I saw that happening was when I interviewed people who worked at mobile game studios, particularly Free to Play studios. Because you know, cynically, a lot of those studios don't care as much about the game, right? If anything, they care more about the menu because they're trying to design the experience, sometimes explicitly in the interviews,

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the

Daniel Gardner

menu experience that doesn't annoy the player enough to stop playing so that they'll keep interacting with the store, right? And so in those, a lot of those studios, gameplay and UI design is happening synchronously because they are, they are to, to those studios they are co equal because the game exists to get people to the marketplace. Whereas in a traditional game studio, I think thankfully, in some ways, of course, I don't think microtransactions and storefronts should be shoved down our throats in every game. You know, they are prioritizing game, the game design, yay. But I think that some of those studios maybe can take a deeper consideration that actually in the same way that maybe controller design is part of game design, UI design is part of game design. And like I think that the, you know, and you always see this with when you have sort of diegetic UIs, right? People get really excited. And I think the classic example of sort of one of the textbook examples always is always dead space, right? But there's lots of other examples and I think that that is an example. I don't know the story behind how that happened or how some of these other degetic UIs happen, but whenever you see that, it's always notable and cool because it's the exception rather than the rule. But I don't see any reason why you can't have blur that line between game and not game much more and to great effect to the outcome of games and gameplay and gameplay experience.

Rudolf Inderst

Yeah. Well, you also argue that embedding gameplay within websoft software, hardware and platform infrastructures impacts the medium itself, players and production, of course, in ways that have not yet been fully explored. And I really like to now listen to your answer because that's almost the most exciting questions, I think, from my perspective. Could you unpack what these impacts look like?

Daniel Gardner

Sure. Well, actually, besides, let me take back that. Sure. I'm not going to pretend to know them. All right, yeah, sorry. Sorry to disappoint there. I mean this goes back to that comment I made at the beginning.

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Right.

Daniel Gardner

And sort of my treatment of sts. Right. In, in I mentioned boring studies in Susan Lee Starr's ethnography of infrastructure. She talks, she has this quote, she sort of plays with a quote from some. Somebody else. I'm sorry, this person who's. I don't know who they are. I don't remember. Off thumb. Yeah, sorry, person. I think, I think it starts with an H. But she sort of plays with this quote about like, you know, if you study a city and you ignore its sewers and its power grid, then you are ignoring all kinds of elements of the distributional justice and planning power that happens in that city. But she turns it to. If you study. She's more concerned in this article with information systems. And if you study an information system and you don't study the standard, the cable standards, networking standards, all these, you know, other facets, you know, you again, you still under. You miss all sorts of nuances to do with the ways that sort of those competing systems dictate how you can and can't do with them at various levels. And so this brings us back to like the. That again, you know, more historically, game scholarship looks at games as media subject or players as human subject. But there is just a wide range of like sociotechnical intermediaries that influences the relationship those two subjects have or can have or are permitted to have with one another. And sometimes those intermediate intermediaries are automated. Sometimes they're like an actual company making decisions, you know, actively about how our relationships may be defined or actively, you know, Occurring. You know, we have more recently seen platforms as techno subjects and you know, developers as organizational subjects, which are both really good additions, but none of these actually operate other than the sort of intersubjects to one another. And so thinking really about the everyday intermediary and the gameplay experience I think is as a very practical and readily observable setting. And sight, I think is what I sort of refer to is where I'm really sort of thinking about in terms of under observed stuff. And so the impacts, getting to the impacts. Fire. There's a preface. The answer. Getting to the impacts. Right. I think it means that for players it means especially the farther you are from a sort of normatively defined industry, ideal player, whatever that means for a lot of companies. And sometimes that's able bodied, sometimes that's for character creation. It's too often maybe white, 30 something, brown haired, male, body fits all sort of thing. The farther you are from whatever in the context is a normatively defined player or player character or all these other things. The more that maybe a lens calibrated on these sort of points of intermediary influence allows the greater articulation of critique of feedback in an industry that is increasingly actually responsive to feedback in some I trying to be optimistic ways. So that's good. I think it also helps a lot for the ways that players who engage in increasingly popular sort of paratextual activities. You know, if you're streaming like a streamer is, I would say probably the average streamer is keenly aware of a lot of things that I'm talking about because they're having to operate their own, they're having to insert their own mediation of capture technology within sort of their gameplay setting. So they're having to negotiate with settings and different information inputs and outputs that are occurring between them and their gameplay, often in real time. So they're negotiating with this at a level that I think the average player just doesn't. But if you're trying to do that sort of activity, if you're trying to learn that sort of activity, being more keenly aware of these sort of intermediaries can only sort of improve that experience, help communicate that experience in a sort of more meaningful terminology for designers, I think to sort of rehash a little bit of what I said, I think it helps to negotiate or sort of explore new realms of sort of designing with interface in mind because it allows you to have these terminology for it really productively blurs the line between game and not game in a way that says, oh, I can Use that in game. I don't have to think of that as something that's not part of the game.

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Daniel Gardner

I can sort of. How do I incorporate this in a. You know, not everyone's going to necessarily need to, you know, suddenly be Hideo Kojima and using, you know, second controller ports as part of gameplay. Right. But that comes. That sort of insight comes from a recognition that gameplay is not limited to this sort of game world and that actually the humans are participating in it and the intermediaries can be used as a point of influence. So for designers, it can help with that. It also helps them to negotiate with the platforms that they are subject to as designers. Right. The controller I showed off, the beautiful green controller, that's not made by a game studio. I mean, Microsoft also makes games, but it's made by a platform manufacturer. And game designers are as subject to the limitations of that device as players are in their participation. While I was pursuing an interview, this is more of a casual conversation, I talked to an artist at a big game studio who we were having this longer informal conversation, and he was talking about a game that he'd worked on, a pretty big title that he couldn't tell me about which one, because NDAs. But he told me some of the details that were safe about this larger title that ended up getting a mechanic that was fairly central to early builds that players never saw had to get cut because they got it to work really well on PC, but they couldn't get it to really work within the constraints of console controllers. And so they just had to cut it because the physical limitations of interacting with that mechanic exceeded the physical interface. And so it allows designers to. Again, it builds a vernacular around sort of thinking through these intermediaries that sometimes they have control over in the terms of the software side and sometimes they don't in terms of like some of the hardware sides. And for researchers, it's all about bringing all that together into like, expanding the subjects that we can observe. And I try really hard throughout the book to say that, like, this stuff has actually often been observed in research scholarship, but it always falls to the periphery of analysis. It's rarely the subject. I don't think I talk about this in the book, but I noticed when I was doing indexing, I think, or citations, something when I was playing with the indexing to writing it, that I noticed that I was citing a lot of the pre pages in books and stuff. And so the best example to pick on Bonnie, because Bonnie Nardi, because I know her, is I cite A story she writes on like, you know, page I4 or IV or whatever of, you know, her World of Warcraft book. It's not part of the book, but it's this story she talks about struggling to make her character that frames so much of the activity that happens in the actual book. But if you only read the text and you don't read the pretext, you'll never read it.

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Daniel Gardner

So it's this peripheral to her analysis story that I find to be integral or TL Taylor's. I referenced TL Taylor's story about becoming a gnomish, as she puts it, and the sort of negotiation with the character. Right. That like frames all of the activities. That entire analysis is positioned as her as a gnome. And there's this story at the very beginning. And so for researchers, it sort of expands, helps position and all of that stuff and contextualize a lot of the transactions and negotiations that can occur with representation and identity performance, like those two, with accessibility, like with controllers, with basic access rights, ownership modification, all of that stuff with the authentication and authorization that occurs during access controls and installation. So the impacts are way too long answer to say that the impacts are really about giving sort of tools to both directly influence and design for better understand and negotiate with the things that are already influencing our gameplay experience from the periphery, but that, you know, we often ignore because they're mundane, pervasive, infrastructural, et cetera.

Rudolf Inderst

Now your investigation also focuses on, and this couldn't. It's not a good conversation without a really long quote. So focuses on, and I quote here, non gameplay centered material or mechanical attachments that surround and enclose gameplay while directing or mediating our experience of it. So I wonder what are some of the key examples you analyze and how do they alter the phenomena of gaming?

Daniel Gardner

I think because I've given such long answers to some of the ones, I can keep this one shorter, even though I agree it's important because what it really comes down to is the key examples are. The key examples from the book are access controls, character configuration controllers and microtransactions. Access controls has to do with the processes of authorization and authentication. And it really just comes down to the ways that data validation, surveillance and algorithmic control, the redefinition of ownership of the medium, the fact that we don't own anything anymore, not even the medium, the media upon which the medium is installed, which is an important distinction. Yeah, all sorts of arguments for preservation, uh, and. And just a fundamental redefinition of how Permission to participate in play works, right? Like 30 years ago, the only person who could tell me who whether I was allowed to play a game or not was my parents, right? Whereas now, you know, big publisher always has permission. They can, even if I've paid. You know, there's the current ongoing effects like the, the. I wish these, the stop killing games movement had happened before I published this book because it would have been really, really relevant to a lot of what I talk about in that chapter. But so yeah, I mean, access controls, it's in the, it's on the tin, right? They are integral to every element of how we actually literally and legalistically and access the medium of gameplay. And at a fundamental level, I make a joke in the book that even though I may not care or may not pay a lot of attention to like, you know, how, who may define what games are and what, how to define games, these are the, this is the place where the companies at least say or where the edge we. I won't define where the edge of game is, right? But in, but the companies do in these documents they say it's right here and we own it. Right? And so from a legalistic standpoint, it's, it's, you know, it's a, it's a really, really important. If we're going to understand the modern contemporary medium of digital gameplay, if we're not studying access controls as boring and mundane and pervasive as they are, we actually are ignoring a huge, huge key piece of the actual how we actually experience the medium. Again, character configuration, I already said, right, dictates the interpretation and co creation of the medium and in sort of this empirically observable materialization of previously only theoretical, you know, arguments about, you know, who is the author. I can't remember if I have it in the book or not. I can't remember if it got cut. But I love the example of like all the memes online of like, you know, my customized character in a cut scene is the perfect example, right? Like the author can't tell me that, you know, whatever. I can't put my interpretation of you know, a meme character into this very serious, you know, dramatic RPG or whatever, right? Like that. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's when the fan, the fan fiction becomes the fiction, right? The paratext becomes text in a, in an observable way. And it, and it only happens not because of digital games per se, but because of the, these interfaces on the side that sort of allow, that, allow that to happen. Allow. Allow publishers to allow us to do that, that sort of thing, and very meaningfully dictate who can play and who we can be in game worlds, who we can play as, whose stories can be about, which is really important for understanding other ways of being in the world, or even sometimes understanding our own way of being in the world by playing through sometimes different versions

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and then,

Daniel Gardner

yeah, controllers, as I said, or before, literally every other interaction with digital space. It's the only way that our organic meat selves can touch digital game worlds. And even then, touching is an illusion, right? We're only ever touching this controller. We're never touching the digital space. Maybe with when VR is perfected and haptics are perfected, we'll trick ourselves much more effectively. But currently we're never really touching those digital game modes. We're only ever touching the physical devices. It defines every aspect of gameplay, participation, game design constraints, accessibility, et cetera, et cetera. And then microtransactions, which I haven't talked about much yet, and the chapter on them is more of a pilot, but I mean to reference the theoretical discussions I otherwise largely avoid, it laughs at, but also reinforces the magic circles, right, by importing and exporting resources in and out of game for a price. And so, you know, it is micro. The transactions themselves are not gameplay at all. They don't, you know, they're. They are corruption. They corrupt the magic circle. And, you know, like, we call them microtransactions, but it's the same as fixing a boxing match, right, or. Or a football match or whatever. It's, you know, it's like I have a. I think I make a joke in there about, like, why should I do the esoteric magical ritual of buttons and directions to summon changes in the gameplay when I can just, you know, slip the publisher A20 and, you know, I get a new costume or I get a new superpower, right? Like it's bribery by any other, you know, a bribery by any other word is still corruption, right? In a sense. And, you know, whether it's acceptable corruption or not is obviously case by case. And whether it's, you know, inherently bad, I think is a mistake to say. But I do think that, like, there are almost everyone studying microtransactions is looking at, for good reason at, like, the gambling, like, you know, harms and stuff like that. And I think that that's really meaningful. But there are actually surprisingly few people who are just looking at, like, how does this actually fundamentally change our experience of gameplay, you know, On a very practical level. Like, also theoretical, but. But even at a very practical level, it's fundamentally different in ways that are still very highly under. Under observed. And I'm working on similar stuff on that.

Rudolf Inderst

Ooh, sneak preview.

Daniel Gardner

Yeah, we'll see. I got to get somebody to give me money for it, right?

Rudolf Inderst

Oh, money. Oh, how boring. Boring.

Daniel Gardner

Well, if I could pay participants or give participants money to spend on gains out of my own pocket, I would, but I don't make quite those bucks.

Rudolf Inderst

Yeah. Yeah, all right. Good excuse. Dear listeners, before we continue, if you're involved in running an academic program in game design or game studies, this podcast may be an ideal place to share. Share your vision. Our listeners include scholars, educators, students and professionals alike across the field. Consider placing a short promotional segment to connect with this thoughtful international audience passionate about games and microtransact games and research, of course, that is so, Daniel, you specifically examine access controls, character configuration, microtransactional storefronts. We have talked about this, but maybe continuing along this line, how do these interfaces direct or mediate our experience of gameplay? Now, here we go. And what kinds of relationships do they establish between players and games?

Daniel Gardner

Yeah, I'll try to focus more on the relationships because I think I maybe sort of overstepped some of the questions. Again, I've sort of. I'll ramble, but yeah, I'll try to focus on the relationships. The. I mean, access controls. Right again. Or they are. They dictate accesses on the tin, but relationship wise, they redefine ownership. That's one of the most meaningful ones. And they redefined. Ostensibly, they redefine our access to gameplay, but also especially through authorization of licensing agreements. In terms of use, actually, they redefine the relationship publishers can have with us. I sort of use that example of like big toy store observing kids. But like actually the. The main thing you authorize when you sign a licensing or click a checkbox for a licensing agreement is not that you'll, you know, be a good kid when you play the game. It's actually you're authorizing. They're authorizing you, but you're also authorizing them to access your data, to surveil your activities, to do all these other things. In many ways, it redefines the relationship we have with game companies to be a data subject more as much. As much a data subject as a player in a very meaningful way. Access controls. And this is true of more than just games, right? Access controls are as much about data validation as they are about security, if not more so in our increasingly data driven society, access controls are essentially the only way that your activity across multiple sessions is linked together and legible to any sort of data processing. Because if you never signed in, your data points would never be linked together. It's the index, it's the title and the index of your file within their sort of data archive. Right. And whether that's between different games by the same publisher or increasingly who's surveilling you the most is the platform. Right. Like Steam doesn't just know that, you know for one game, it knows your activities across all the games. Right. And so, you know, the access control is as much about defining and validating that relationship as data subject as a sort of linkable entity within their larger surveillance and algorithmic network as it is about making sure the wrong person doesn't access and of course in controlling ownership. Right. Because again, in the same sense that you used to be able to let people borrow your games, you can't do that anymore. Right. And so it's defining how, not only how we are explicitly defining how you can and can't behave in game, it's also defining how you can and can't behave in the real world in the sense that like the terms of continued access are that you are no longer allowed to let your friend borrow your game.

Rudolf Inderst

Right.

Daniel Gardner

And all sorts of other elements of, you know, historically what we, how we just a lot of us played games for the first time, it's like, oh, you know, I'm thinking about buying it, can I borrow yours or whatever. Or you know, like, hey, you buy that game, I buy that this game and you know, we'll trade when we're done. There's all sorts of like now archaic practices that are no longer viable within the confines of access controls.

Rudolf Inderst

Yeah. And as a matter of fact, I was just thinking about this the other day because I was thinking, think, thinking back to the great LAN LAN parties of the older days where you have to actually move your PC tower and your, and your old monitor. So maybe this is also something that's coming back because now I don't only give, I'm not able to actually pass you my new Call of Duty something, something I will have to give you actually. My whole PS5.

Daniel Gardner

The swap PS5.

Rudolf Inderst

Yeah, the whole package. So you give me your Xbox One or Xbox series X for one week and there you go, here's my PS5 and here's all of course, here's also my account data because you need that, of course.

Daniel Gardner

So this is, I love that I Love that. So instead of you buy this game, I buy this, I buy that game, you buy PS5, I'll buy an Xbox and we'll just trade off every other week, you know, on the cool new games and it's going to be great. And then we can both. We can. Oh man. And you know what's great about that too is it really screws up the data collection because we're going to both be both accounts. Right. So that, you know, obviously no one's monitoring, nobody's specifically monitoring individual players, but it become. Their data becomes noisier.

Rudolf Inderst

Right.

Daniel Gardner

Because it would oscillate, you know, as, as consoles shift temporary ownership. I love that. Yeah, I, yeah. I mean there's so much about, yeah, there's so much about the sort of loss of physical media as well, just in general that I could go on about. But yeah, no, access control is the most boring one, but it's in many ways the most impactful. From a sort of multi dimensional stance. Controllers and access controls are probably the, have the biggest reach in terms of intermediaries in that sense.

Rudolf Inderst

Yeah. Speaking of broader shifts now, because my next question really points in this direction. You portray also these developments within broader shifts towards an increasingly networked and data driven world. So how do the thresholds you analyze connect to these larger social and technological transformations? That's actually a very, very small question. You can, you can't ramble about these things. It's impossible.

Daniel Gardner

Right. I mean, I think I alluded to some answers to this question already but I mean, it takes what I was just talking about with access controls and really sort of accepts the fact that again, these processes aren't unique to games. Right. Like in much the same way that I think big game studios are struggling because of like, you know, I've been talking about the digitalization of gameplay, but the industry's struggling with the corporatization of game design.

Rudolf Inderst

Right.

Daniel Gardner

And so you see increasingly you see people in charge of big studios who are making business decisions rather than game design decisions. And with that you see trends. The trends are less unique and more predictable. And so, I mean these features of authorization and authentication in particular, for example, it's just they alter how we are able to interact with game software in ways that should concern game scholars because again, they are unique to the multiple millennia long tradition of playing with stuff, but they aren't interesting because they are unique to games. If you come at it from a broader angle, they should interest game scholars because it's new to games, but they shouldn't Their implementation in games is not interesting to somebody who studies broader digital context. But there are, but that also just highlights too that their attachment to something is like frivolous as games should actually highlight their reach and that there are other sorts of peripheral or perioperative sort of influences by these other sort of infrastructural systems across larger sociotechnical systems. You know, the, a lot of the same things I've said is this is, you know, to put this in the most mundane way, everything I've just said is true of like every social media, right? Like the joke. The joke is that, you know, for a long time, Facebook, the joke was they're not a, they're not a social media company, they're a data company. And then they changed their name to Meta just to like, I guess be transparent. That's the only justification I can think of is because literally everything you type in a Facebook post is metadata to their actual data. Funny enough, right? Like you are literally just your clicks, your likes, your everything else. Those are all the data. This stuff is metadata. But so, I mean, the same is true of a lot of, across digital platforms. You can sort of apply very similar arguments into the ways that you own or don't own or are allowed to use, not use, preserve, et cetera. I mean, everything's going to subscription models. You know, if Microsoft holds true on their plans to create the next operating system into a subscription, that means they're literally, even if you own your hardware, you can't use it unless you pay the ransom, the monthly ransom to have your operating system function, right? And so, you know, that's the easiest one to expand out. But I mean, similarly, right, Controllers, right? Like, just because I'm using a game controller as an example, I just usually use a mouse and keyboard, right? You can think about the ways that, you know, different keyboard and keyboard paradigms and standards across the world influence the ways that we're able to interact. You know, somebody as somebody who sort of crossed an ocean and has had to learn a new keyboard, you know, layout in recent, in recent years, I can sort of attest to just how, you know, even if my fingers all have pretty good motor control at the same time, like that really fundamentally changes the way that I interact with word, right? Or any sort of typing context. Because again, the physical interaction, the physical mediation of my, my digital interactions has, has changed in a way that, that influences that, that paradigm. And there are some folks that are talking about that in some ways in terms of like the fluency of physical interactions and things like that. But it's, it's still about the ways that it. The way the base baseline interaction with media like the. We still very often treat digital contexts, regardless of whether it's games or not, as sort of very immediate.

Rudolf Inderst

Right?

Daniel Gardner

In a sort of bolter and grusen way. When they are all hypermediated, it's just hypermediation that is meant to look. It's. It's immediate hyper. Immediate hypermediation, right? It is right in their, in their terminology in that hypermediation is supposed to be highly visible mediation and it's not, but it is a lot of mediation that is made to look like not a lot of mediation. And sometimes that's good and sometimes that's really bad. And that's sort of another sort of key sort of through line through a lot of the chapters, which is that like, you know, sometimes it's nice to make an interface seamless and decades of HCI and good design that's supposed to melt into the background. Like sometimes that's nice. I want to just be able to do the thing. But if the thing that I'm trying to do is sign away my rights to my data and ownership, then maybe it can be a little bit more visible. Or maybe if we're assuming certain fluency with certain kinds of interactions, it's really actually best to bring those made invisible mediations to the forefront to really sort of highlight the negotiations that are happening for a lot of folks or the ways that those interactions break down or cause undue influence on different forms of design development or player experience in this case.

Rudolf Inderst

Yeah, one guess is it would definitely symbolize somehow the gravitas you were just mentioning. These acts of giving away your rights so easily, so seamlessly, so fluid. We're coming close to one hour, so I will have one last question. And of course this is important for the book lovers out there because for scholars, students and practitioners listening, what do you hope readers will take away from thresholds of digital gameplay? What new questions or frameworks do you hope the book provides for thinking about games, interfaces and player experiences?

Daniel Gardner

So for the first question, what I hope they'll take away from it is actually really modest. I really just hope that some folks will read this and find an appropriate lens for studying a lot of these under examined phenomena. Or my best case scenario is that somebody reads this and goes, oh my God, this thing in my. This. I've been doing this project recently and there's been this thing in my data nagging me that I didn't know really how to deal with it. And this gave me a tool to do that. Because actually the only reason I wrote this book and the sort of dissertation that preceded it was out of frustration because I was trying to do a different study entirely. And I kept running into that thing I just said, which is I had this thing in my observations. But I was like, it's not, it's not this, but it's not that. I can't find anyone who's talking about this thing. I don't even know what this thing is. And that led to years of sort of branching out to different sorts of kinds of observation to sort of triangulate this phenomenon. And it didn't really know what I was looking at. And I wouldn't have had to do all that. And I could have done the project I wanted to do if this book had existed. And so if anyone, you know, that's what I kind of hope. That's my sort of ideal hope that readers will take away from it is like, oh, hey, cool, this is a handy tool that I can put in my toolbox. Nobody has to fundamentally change their methods or their research subjects, but it allows them to sort of, oh my God, this is so much easier to say. The thing I wanted to say, perfect. Yeah. I tried to keep it really practical, right. Just providing that sort of analytical lens for observing the current contemporary phenomena of gaming just more holistically. And then, yeah, I mean, to the other question, what new questions or frameworks do you hope was it. I mean, to some extent, yeah, I mean to some extent I tried really hard. To some extent, I argue it's not new. Like this is, I have a bad salesmanship salesman right here. Is that actually throughout the book I'm constantly saying, actually other people almost said this like, you know, instead of, instead of arguing that I'm filling a gap, I'm highlighting how collectively little bits of scholarship close the gap without realizing it. Right. So maybe some of those scholars I cite, I hope that what they hope they get at it is that they introduce a framework they didn't realize they had. Right. Which you know, seemingly unintentionally. But I guess in another way too, to some extent it's sort of like recycling or salvaging 40 year old analysis by Jeanette who plays a very central role in the book. He's still the primary source for discussions of paratext in games. But at least one other scholar, I'm not the first person to say this, Daniel Dunn, I think is in Australia. He pointed out before me that sort of paratext is Genette's umbrella for all the stuff that's sort of around text, but that since the late 90s, early 2000s, we've primarily studied as game scholars, we've primarily studied Epitext, which is promotional material, fan productions, et cetera, calling it paratext, when Jeanette had this other category of Paree text, which is in the space of the same volume. So it's separate but inseparable from the text and this text model that's really sort of common in games. And so I hope, I guess the book in that sense is a resource for folks trying to study a lot of really very common phenomena that sort of haven't really had enough attention, but also in some ways were masked by the way we sort of used old analysis as a community in a lot of ways. And so they haven't had a lot of attention and so that, you know, they don't have to write a whole book just to justify other projects they might actually want to do. Yeah.

Rudolf Inderst

Well, that's a good one. Daniel, thank you so much for joining me today and for sharing this important, I mean, your important book. So thanks again for coming and stopping by.

Daniel Gardner

Well, you're kind to say so thank you very much for having me.

Rudolf Inderst

Dear listeners, I hope you enjoyed this very episode. If you're an author or editor working in game studies or game design research and would like to discuss your latest work, feel free to reach out@rudolf.in-googlemail.com you can also find me on LinkedIn under Rudolf Indust. And BlueSky, or even TikTok under AmStudies. And please, for heaven's sake, leave X. And one last reminder, if you want to support the show, head over to gamestudiesmerch.de and check out our lovely Game Studies hoodie. It's the perfect time of the year for a warm and cozy hoodie. Until next time, keep playing and of course, keep thinking. Goodbye.

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