Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming, Ch.

1: Introduction

Chapter 1 - Introduction

1. Videogames and gaming as industry, academic discipline, culture and social

activity

Over the past ten years, the study of videogames has become an area of considerable

academic growth. This is partly due to the fact that the gaming industry now forms

one of the major Creative Industries sectors in the USA, Europe and Japan and that

gaming as an activity occurs no longer amongst relatively isolated groups of society

but indeed across generations and social groups. A look at the latest ESA

(Entertainment Software Association, 2010a/b) statistics tells us that:

U.S. computer and videogame software sales generated $10.5 billion in 2009.1

67 percent of American households play computer or videogames and own

either a console and/or PC used to run entertainment software.

The average game player is 34 years old and has been playing games for 12

years.

The average age of the most frequent game purchaser is 40 years old.

42 percent of all game players are women. In fact, women over the age of 18

represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (33

percent) than boys age 17 or younger (20 percent).

In 2010, 26 percent of Americans over the age of 50 played videogames, an

increase from nine percent in 1999. [...]

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 Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming, Ch.1: Introduction

64 percent of parents believe games are a positive part of their childrens

lives.2

Arguably, the shift to a broader demographics of gamers in the past five years has

been largely due to developments in the latest generation gaming consoles, designed

to improve accessibility and user-friendliness. Popular examples include the Nintendo

Wii (released in November 2006) and its one-handed wireless controller, the Wii-

mote; controller-free, full-motion capture systems such as Microsoft's Xbox Kinect

(released in November 2010); and graphically enhanced mobile devices such as the

Nintendo 3DS (released in February 2011).

A greater-than-ever affirmative engagement on the part of politicians and public and

private funders has surfaced as well over the past five years. On 11 March 2008 the

German Cultural Council mailing list distributed the following abridged article from

Computerspielemagazin GEE:

A Revolution!

Following a proposal of the Bundestag (German Lower House of

Parliament), the Deutsche[r] Computerspielpreis (German

Computer/Video Game Award3) will be awarded for the first time in

2008. All of a sudden we can hear politicians discussing ways of

supporting good games instead of simply banning some of them.

This is mostly thanks to the effort of the German Cultural Council,

which over the past year has been campaigning in favour of

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 Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming, Ch.1: Introduction

computer games being accepted as an art form in its own right. []

(translation mine)

Similarly, the fact that, in 2003, the British Academy Video Games Awards were

introduced as an independent category of the BAFTAs suggests that governments,

educational and cultural organisations across Europe have begun to embrace

videogames as cultural artefacts.

During the first three decades of their existence (the 1970s to the 1990s), computer

and videogames were largely ignored if not denigrated by scholars and academia

more generally. Since the publication of Espen Aarseths groundbreaking book

Cybertext in 1997, the foundation of his journal Games Studies and the subsequent

work of researchers around the globe, however, videogames have become established

as an independent, interdisciplinary academic field. The research literature available

by now is vast, and approaches to games studies are based in a wide range of subject

areas, such as:

art and design studies, which examine elements of 'game art' such as

character and level design, and, more generally, the ways in which

videogames are made to appeal to certain audiences;

computer science, which looks at the mathematics of graphics and game

engine programming;

ludology (from Latin 'ludus' and 'ludere', meaning 'game' and 'to play'

respectively), which is the general study of games and gameplay;

narratology, which refers to the study and close analysis of narrative texts

and storyworlds across media;

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 Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming, Ch.1: Introduction

media studies, which looks at media institutions, aspects of media history,

production, reception and dissemination, policies and audiences, as well as the

ways in which media represent various kinds of social actors and practices;

cultural studies, which focuses on identities and ideologies and uses critical

approaches such as postcolonialism and gender theory;

business studies, which studies sales, markets and consumers;

psychology, which investigates cognitive aspects of gameplay, such as

emotions and social behaviour;

physiology, which studies the effects of gaming on the human body;

and education, which looks at how games and other forms of edutainment

(educational entertainment) can facilitate learning.

This book is situated in one of the most fledgling areas of games studies:

communication and discourse. The past few years have seen videogames enter the

academic fields of sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and communication studies.

However, to my knowledge, a comprehensive, systematic study of the linguistic and

multimodal discourses of videogames and gaming does not exist as yet.

Despite the above mentioned growth of academic, cultural and educational interest,

the gaming industry still lacks respectability amongst many academic disciplines.

Richard Bartle, co-creator of 'the first text-based multiplayer computer game', or

'MUD' (multi-user dungeon), commented, upon being awarded the inaugural Online

Game Legend Award at the 2010 Game Developers Conference Online: 'If I'd

achieved similar things in film directing, I'd be Lord Bartle by now. But games aren't

treated with the respect they deserve' (quoted in the Times Higher Education
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 Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming, Ch.1: Introduction

Supplement, 26 August 2010, p. 23). Clearly, film and cinema studies experienced

stigmatization of similar extensions during its fledgling years, when film was still

considered a 'new medium'. Like any forms of popular new media, videogames are

generally associated with deviant subcultural movements and tend to evoke 'moral

panic' (overreactions vis-a-vis the assumed negative effects on young people in

particular) on the part of politicians, educators and parents, who criticize their violent

and stereotyping content - most effectively, in the media (Shuker, 2005, p. 166;

McDougall and O'Brien, 2008, p. 61; Cohen, 1972). Games are regularly censored,

banned and critiqued by some, and simultaneously revered, consumed and modded

by others. The fact, however, that they are media and therefore cultural artefacts

cannot be denied, and dedicated scholars and scientists across disciplines are now

jointly developing a rapidly growing research culture. This increase in academic

interest has been reflected in the foundation of international subject organisations

such as DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association) and Women in Games;

dedicated research centres such as the Center for Computer Game Research at the IT

University Copenhagen, the Experimental Game Lab at the Georgia Institute of

Technology, and SMARTlab London; subject-specific peer-reviewed journals such as

Game Studies, Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, and Games and Culture; and,

not least, a noticeable growth in undergraduate and postgraduate provision demanded

and supplied in the area of games research.

Videogames constitute one of 'the most influential form[s] of popular expression and

entertainment in todays broader culture (Jones, 2008, p. 1). If we bear in mind that,

at the same time, of course, games are produced by human beings with certain (mostly

commercial) intentions, we have to acknowledge that games are definitely not

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 Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming, Ch.1: Introduction

neutral (Everett, 2005, p. 323) in their ideological make-up. They both create and

serve the needs of a mass audience of gamers, most of whom are (still) male and

based on the privileged side of the digital divide, i.e. they have both the financial and

technological resources required to consume games and their associated hardware and

software products (for instance a Broadband connection, consoles and handheld

gadgets). Ideologies arise from and manifest themselves in discursive practices,

'which systematically form the objects of which they speak' (Foucault, 1972, p. 49). In

other words, systematic examinations of videogames and gaming as communicative

and discursive processes are needed to shed light on the ways in which racial, sexual

and other stereotypes are created and perpetuated. What is also important, however, is

the ways in which gamers interact and communicate, how they construct identities

and communities discursively and negotiate the meanings of videogames between

them.

1.2 Researching the Language of Gaming

The term language has been used widely in communication, media and cultural

studies to denote semiotic systems more generally rather than only verbal

communication in its narrowest sense. The language of architecture, for instance, is

no doubt a mostly visual and haptic way of communicating, whereas the language of

film constitutes a multidimensional semiotic system of representation covering visual

effects, camera angle, soundtrack, mis-en-scne and verbal language. Before we turn

to wider semiotic uses of language, however, let us first take a look at the original,

verbal meaning of the term. As Martinec and van Leeuwen (2009, p. 24) point out,

language has been defined in many different ways. Depending on whether linguists

take a more formal or a more functional view, language is to them either (primarily) a

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 Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming, Ch.1: Introduction

system of (phonological and graphological) signs, or indeed a way of communicating

meanings and pragmatic intentions. Similarly, Crystal (2007, p. 400) lists the

following historical yet still widely used definitions of language:

Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating

ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols.

(Edward Sapir, 1921)

A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which the

members of a society interact in terms of their total culture (George Leonard

Trager, 1949)

a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out

of a finite set of elements (Noam Chomsky, 1957)

the institution whereby humans communicate and interact with each other by

means of habitually used oral-auditory arbitrary symbols (Robert A. Hall,

1964).

The key notions shared by these definitions are communication, system of arbitrary

symbols, and human interaction in society as an institution. This implies that language

analysts need to look at the ways in which verbal signs are composed and used to

express social meanings. The term most often used for language in use is discourse,

and analyzing discourse and the social meanings and ideologies it carries involves an

examination of those institutions that use language to mediate and communicate their

and other social agents ideas of the world to distinct target audiences most

characteristically, the media and their cultures of production and consumption.

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 Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming, Ch.1: Introduction

Media discourses have been studied critically by a large number of discourse, media

and communication analysts, linguistic anthropologists, stylisticians and semioticians

(e.g. Fairclough, 1995b; Bell and Garrett, 1998; MacDonald; O'Keeffe, 2006; Talbot,

2007; Machin and van Leeuwen, 2007). Numerous studies have been published on the

language of specific types of mass and/or interactive media, such as the press and

other news media (Bell, 1991; Fowler, 1991; McLoughlin, 2000; Reah, 2002;

Conboy, 2007; Cotter, 2010), television (Hunt, 1998; Marshall and Werndly, 2002)

and new media (e.g. Shortis, 2001; Boardman, 2005; Martinec and van Leeuwen,

2008; Rowe and Wyss, 2009). Similarly, book-length publications on the language of

narrative media such as fiction (e.g. Fludernik, 1993; Sanger, 1998; Lodge, 2002),

comics (e.g. Varnum and Gibbons, 2001; Saraceni, 2003) and film (e.g. Metz, 1974;

Edgar-Hunt et al., 2010) abound. What has been done very little, however, is an

examination of language as used in and about videogames - an area commonly

considered part of new media yet too large and idiosyncratic in its social, economic

and cultural practices to pass under this broad and increasingly elusive label. The aim

of this book is to begin to fill this lacuna, as well as to inspire further studies that will

refine the areas outlined and that will address those aspects of the language of gaming

that this study cannot cover in any greater depth.

Having defined language as a system of arbitrary symbols and a way of

communicating in given contexts, let us take a broader look at how human beings

interact. As we know, communication is hardly ever mono-modal (cf. Kress and van

Leeuwen, 2001). Even in spoken and written communication, non-verbal elements

such as body language, voice, pitch and intonation, and any other semiotic modes

such as images, typeface and background noise and soundtrack contribute either

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 Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming, Ch.1: Introduction

covertly or overtly to the expression and understanding of semantic content.

Furthermore, in so-called mediated discourse (Scollon, 2001), the distinctive medial

and textual qualities of the medium in question, for instance newspapers, books,

websites and TV broadcasts, play a significant part in the communication process and

in the way information is received, processed and interacted with. In this respect,

videogames constitute one of the most complex and multi-faceted media that exist in

our contemporary media ecology. Being digital artefacts, they combine all formerly

analogue modes: written and spoken language, sound, music, still and animated image

are encoded digitally and we interact with them via a computer interface and a variety

of hardware. Further to this, videogames are highly explorative and non-linear. Rather

than providing a linear narrative, they offer virtual worlds, or landscapes, inviting

players to explore and navigate using diverse audiovisual and haptic resources.

Like any other human-made product, videogames carry complex layers of meaning,

which always reflect a certain set of ideologies about society, power and, more

generally, the projected game world. Meaning as conveyed through videogames

derives partly from their specific ludic (playful, rule-based) and interactive qualities,

and partly from the unique ways in which they both simulate and represent fictional

worlds and narratives through image, sound, and, not least, human language.

However, there is more to the meaning of videogames than just the game itself and its

specific textual make-up. What is equally important is the ways in which games draw

on and relate to other texts and discourses surrounding them, as well as the

language(s) used by gamers to negotiate their culture of consumption. Indeed, the

ludic nature of gameplay often leads to quasi-playful, subversive activities such as

cheating in order to win and communicating in ways that are considered inappropriate

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 Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming, Ch.1: Introduction

in many other social context, such as proliferating various types of swear words,

screaming, shouting and laughing hysterically.

This book concentrates on two major aspects of videogame-related 'language', or

communication: the ways in which videogames and their makers convey meanings to

their audiences, and the ways in which gamers communicate and negotiate meanings

between themselves. More specifically, this involves various levels of discourse,

including:

(a) language about games and gaming used by gamers across different media and

communication platforms,

(b) language about games and gameplay used by industry professionals, such as

game designers and developers,

(c) language about games and gaming used by journalists, politicians, parents,

activists and other media stakeholders,

(d) language used within games as part of their user interfaces, scripted dialogues,

instructions and backstories, and

(e) language used in instruction manuals, blurbs, advertising and other 'peritexts'

(Genette, 1997; see Chapter 4).

These levels of discourse are by no means exhaustive. Nor can the types and elements

of language used in them studied in separation from each other. Rather, there is

significant linguistic overlap between individual levels of discourse as they cross-

reference each other in a diversity of intertextual and interdiscursive practices.

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 Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming, Ch.1: Introduction

To emphasize the complex representational, social and discursive situation that

videogames are embedded in, this book is called 'The Language of Gaming' rather

than 'The Language of Videogames'. The latter would not sufficiently cover the

multiple layers of language and discourse surrounding the artefacts themselves, the

way they are used and interacted with, and the ways in which they are being referred

to by diverse members of society. In fact, we might argue that each individual

videogame 'speaks' its own language and if at all, we ought to talk about the

'languages of videogames' in the plural. Similarly, this study concentrates on games

and gaming activities in English rather than any other language, which opens up

another gaping lacuna regarding linguistic and discourse analytical approaches to

games studies. Be that as it may, 'the language(s) of videogames' - elusive and fluid

though the concept may be - inevitably forms part of the 'language of gaming' as it

underlies any physical, cognitive, social and linguistic interaction with games as

media artefacts.

Yet is there a single language of gaming? A lot of people would negate this question.

Surely, the ways of interacting with and communicating about videogames are highly

varied, and defining a common code would appear as a sheer impossibility. However,

natural languages are characterized by varieties (dialects, sociolects, registers etc.) as

well, and communication happens by activating select sets of such varieties depending

on specific communicative contexts. Gaming in the sense of playing computer games

is a distinct human activity, and as long as human beings agree roughly on the

possible range of activities they engage in when they're gaming and the range of

technologies they use while doing so, we can attempt an approximation to the

communicative processes related to and afforded by these artefacts.

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 Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming, Ch.1: Introduction

Whilst refraining from contending that there is a single and unified language of

videogames and gaming, my aim is, instead, to identify and illustrate what seem to be

typical, idiosyncratic lexical, morphological, pragmatic, conversational, multimodal

and other discursive features and processes that have emerged in the past decade in

the social sphere of videogaming. Clearly, this is a considerable undertaking, as the

complexity and fluidity of the language of gaming makes it impossible and indeed

undesirable to capture this phenomenon holistically. Therefore, this book takes an

eclectic approach. It highlights some aspects of the language of gaming whereas

others are deliberately sidelined for future examination. Areas that will be covered

include videogame genres and textuality; lexical and morphological aspects of gamer

language; the pragmatics of rule books and gamer interaction; specific gaming-related

discourses and their pragmatic presuppositions, multimodality in interface design and

gamer interaction; and, finally, the narrative language of gaming.

Bearing in mind the complex discursive situation of videogame interaction, the major

questions this book seeks to address are:

1. How can core ludological, linguistic and discourse analytical theories be

combined to enable us to study the language of gaming systematically and

comprehensively?

2. Given that games are cultural artefacts, what aspects of textuality need to be

considered when analyzing the language of gaming from a macro-perspective?

3. What characterizes the language of gaming from a microstylistic point of

view, in particular the use and formation of lexical items, metaphor and

meaning?

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 Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming, Ch.1: Introduction

4. What are the salient pragmatic uses of the language of gaming, in terms of

illocutionary forces, politeness and performativity?

5. What discourses are dominant amongst gamers and how do they relate to the

subversive nature of game culture as well as wider contexts of videogame

production and consumption?

6. How does multimodality contribute to the construction and understanding of

complex meaning in gameplay and how does it lead to certain types of gamer

(inter-) action?

7. How do the fictional worlds of videogames emerge through selective

'narrative' devices and player interaction?

8. Finally, what social, political, economic, cultural, ethnic, gender and/

linguistic values, identities and ideologies, as well as social and power

relations are conveyed by the language of gaming?

While questions one to seven will be dealt with sequentially by individual chapters,

question eight will be addressed to varying degrees by all of them. This reflects the

fact that ideologies in the sense of personal and institutional belief systems permeate

all aspects and layers of discourse, and since videogames are particularly complex

artefacts with equally complex discourses surrounding them, critical analyses can be

applied throughout. Due to spatial constraints, I will have to exclude, or only mention

in passing, a number of further, similarly important areas, such as in-house

communication between game design and development professionals, in-game chat

(as is habitual particularly in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), the

discursive patterns of specific paratextual genres such as walkthroughs and

playthroughs,4 as well as the programming code level.

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 Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming, Ch.1: Introduction

Another inevitable limitation of this book is the highly dynamic nature of its subject

area. After all, the relative fixity of print is bound to clash with the rapid evolution

and fluidity of digital media. Therefore, any attempt at proposing an analytical

framework for the social practices of gaming needs to allow for perpetual innovations

and radical technological transformations in interface design, graphics, player agency

and interactivity. Indeed, a great number of recently published books (e.g. Carr et al.,

2006; Dovey and Kennedy, 2006; McDougall and OBrien, 2008) have proposed

comprehensive analytical frameworks that seek to cover all aspects of games that

make them a unique interactive, cybernetic, representational and cultural medium. I

do not intend to add yet another all-encompassing specimen to this list but rather wish

to narrow my focus to one particular, under-researched aspect of videogames: the

language of gaming in the sense of linguistic and multimodal discourse features as

they are visible and audible in interface design and discourses surrounding games and

gaming.

1.3 The structure of this book

The structure of this book reflects the research questions posed in the previous

section. Chapters 2 and 3, titled Approaches to Discourse Analysis and 'Games and

Language' respectively, lay the theoretical and analytical groundwork to this book.

Chapter 2 outlines a range of discourse analytical approaches insofar as they can be

considered relevant for the analysis of the language of gaming. Chapter 3 follows by

examining some major commonalities between games and language which inspire a

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 Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming, Ch.1: Introduction

joint focus on how gaming operates interactionally and discursively. This is

succeeded by a survey of relevant theories of games and gaming with a specific

emphasis on games as rules, texts, social practice, culture, entertainment industry and

carriers of ideologies. The thus introduced concepts and approaches recur throughout

this book as a basis for more focused analyses of the language of gaming.

Chapter 4 looks at 'Genres, Macrostructures and Textuality'. It examines videogame

genres and discusses the extent to which individual genres offer themselves to textual

analysis. This is followed by an exploration of those ludic and textual elements that

videogames share more generally, although even here a basic binary typology is

needed to distinguish between elementary types of videogames. The chapter then

turns to the complex textual nature of games and gaming, which operates in terms of a

textual ecology. In this context, I introduce the concepts of intertextuality,

intermediality, transmediation and paratextuality, which operate to create a complex

network of discursive relationships and cross-references. The chapter closes with a

case study analysis of Final Fantasy XI (Square Enix, 2008), a Massively Multiplayer

Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) that exhibits a rich and open-ended textual

ecology.

A shift from a macro- to a microstructural view is taken in Chapter 5, which is

dedicated to 'Words and Meanings'. It deals with distinctive lexical and morphological

characteristics of videogame discourse, and how the makers and users of videogames

create and use a their own specialized vocabularies to refer to what are indeed highly

specialized activities related to design and gameplay. More specifically, I examine the

subtle differences between ludological jargon, gamer slang (or 'ludolect') and

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 Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming, Ch.1: Introduction

techspeak and examine their relationship to the somewhat better documented

characteristics of hacker language. This will then lead on to an investigation of the

word formation processes underlying the idiosyncratic nomenclature and technical

terms that characterize gamer slang. Bearing in mind that words are used in context, I

shall explore metaphors 'we play by' (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) and how they both

reflect and shape the way different members of society think about playing games.

The chapter ends with two case studies, the first of which takes a corpus analytical

look at different types of gamer language. The second case study, which is also

corpus-based, demonstrates how a micro-level analysis of personal pronouns can be

combined with Critical Discourse Analysis to yield insights into how gender roles are

constructed in relation to videogame characters.

Moving from lexical to pragmatic meaning, Chapters 6 and 7 focus on 'metaludic'

communication in the sense of the pragmatic uses and discourses used to refer to

videogames and gaming. They look at specific types of contexts in which videogames

and gaming are negotiated and debated, by gamers, game designers and producers, as

well as stakeholders whose voices appear in general media discourses, such as

newspaper journalists, celebrities and parents. The focus of Chapter 6 ('The Linguistic

Pragmatics of Gameplay') is on the ways in which communicative actions (speech

acts) are performed in the language of gaming. This is followed by a conversation

analytical approach to live gamer discourse. I explore how gamers refer to elements

within the gameworld and surrounding gameplay while they are placed in the deictic

frame of reference afforded and dictated by gameplay. Of further interest in this

chapter are the ways in which gamers set up their own social and communicative rules

as communities of practice, and at the implications this has on concepts of politeness

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 Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming, Ch.1: Introduction

and social acceptability. In Chapter 7 ('Metaludic Discourses'), I then look at a

number of dominant discourses used by gamers and other social actors with specific

interests in games and gaming to perform group-specific identities and examine how

gamers stylize their language to express emotional engagement. The chapter is

rounded off with another case study, which explores how the controversial videogame

franchise, Grand Theft Auto (GTA) has been discursively constructed as a cult through

both promotion and moral panic across different types of media.

To underscore the importance of a wider semiotic and medium-specific approach to

the discourse analysis of the language of gaming, Chapter 8 looks at multimodality in

videogames and gamer interaction. As well as discussing existing research into the

multimodality of new media in general and videogames in particular, I highlight the

need to move multimodal analyses of videogames from filmic cut scenes to more

comprehensive analytical frameworks, which include haptics, interactivity and

immersion. This is followed by an investigation of multimodality in gamer discourse

and a multimodal analysis of three semiotic areas dominating videogame mediality:

interface semiotics, the iconization of rules, and the semiotic representation of in-

game communication. The chapter closes, once again, with a case study, in which I

focus on the multimodal (phonological and audiovisual) construction of racism and

linguicism in the real-time strategy game, Black and White II.

The final chapter focuses on the narrative language of videogames. On the one hand,

it explores the ways in which videogames construct fictional environments using

specific narrative devices. It discusses the prima facie problematic nature of applying

a narrative approach to videogames and explores some of structural elements which

17
 Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming, Ch.1: Introduction

render videogames in terms of exploratory storyworlds rather than stories per se. This

includes ideas relating to plot, character, space, time and point of view. I discuss the

controversial phenomenon of cutscenes, which are akin to cinematographic media yet

are used by game makers for specific psychological and aesthetic purposes. The

second part of this chapter then turns to the subversive phenomenon of literary art

games. I discuss an example of how so-called indie (independent, non-commercial)

game makers subvert the commercial language of videogames by foregrounding

specific interactive, immersive and semiotic elements. This chapter demonstrates,

amongst other things, the hybrid nature of digital interactive media and the shifting

boundaries between literary and ludic art.

1.4 Choice of games and methodology

Finally, let me say a few words about my choice of games and my research

methodology. In selecting games for close analysis, the researcher is faced with the

dilemma of technological dynamism: unlike books, games are software applications

that are made for corresponding hardware and software. Hardware, such as consoles,

graphics and sound cards, and systems software such as Windows XP, Vista and 7,

for instance, tend to change and be replaced by new releases sometimes as rapidly

as over the period of one or two years. One of the effects of this dynamism is that

gaming software can become obsolete or (partly) unplayable a few years after it has

been launched arguably one of the most effective sales strategies of this industry.

For discourse analysts and videogame researchers, this means that a canon of more

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 Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming, Ch.1: Introduction

or less fixed artefacts is unfeasible and needs to be replaced with a flexible, dynamic

approach to texts and technologies.5

The gaming market depends on the predilections of its users, and large target

audiences are key for producing blockbuster games. As this book is written for

students and researchers, I have therefore designed a triangulated methodology for

compiling a corpus of games. Part of this methodology is ethnographic in nature and

intended to identify those contemporary videogames that the main target audience

(students) of this book is likely to be most familiar with. The other part of this

methodology is top-down and based on a number of theories about existing game

genres.

In autumn 2009 I carried out a survey amongst 39 undergraduate videogames students

(56% male) at Bangor University to find out which games are most widely known in

this user group. To prevent any bias towards popular genres such as adventures and

shooters, the respondents had to identify exemplars across a comprehensive typology

of games as outlined by Wolf (2001; for a detailed discussion, see Chapter 4). The

students in the survey ticked a wide range of 'familiar' games, but some seemed more

commonly known than others. Table 1.1 lists respondents' top ranked videogame

(series) across a range of different genres, adapted from Wolf (2001).6

Abstract games Tetris (originally Pajitnov and Gerasimov, 1984)

Adaptations The Simpsons Game (Electronic Arts, 2007)

(Action) adventures Grand Theft Auto ('GTA'), especially GTA 4 (Rockstar

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 Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming, Ch.1: Introduction

North, 2008)

Artificial life The Sims series (Maxis, 2000-2009)

Combat Tekken series (Namco, 1994-2009)

Driving and racing Mario Kart series (Nintendo, 1992-2010)

Educational games How Old Is Your Brain? (Nintendo, 2005-2007)

Gambling games Blackjack Online (for instance at 777.com)

Management simulations SimCity series (Maxis, 1989-2007)

Maze games Pacman (originally Namco, 1980)

Platform games Super Mario Bros series (Nintendo EAD, 1987-2010)

Puzzle and quiz games Sudoku online (for instance at www.websudoku.com)

Rhythm and dance Guitar Hero series (Harmonix and Neversoft, 2005-

2010)

Role Playing Games Final Fantasy series (Square / Square Enix, 1987-2010)

Shooters Halo series (Bungie et al., 2001-2009)

Sports games FIFA series (EA Sports, 1993-2010)

Strategy games Age of Empires series (Ensemble Studios, 1997-2007)

Table 1.1: Respondents' top listed videogames

The videogames research that forms the basis of this book was done on select games

of the above series (sampled mostly in terms of topicality, availability and platform

compatibility). They were complemented as appropriate with the above mentioned

top-down approach. Thus, to provide a more comprehensive survey, I have added to

the above list a number of videogames that have been examined, analyzed and/or

critiqued by other researchers in the field. Some aspects of the research reflected in
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 Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming, Ch.1: Introduction

this book, for instance in the sections on conversational interaction and literary art

games, are based on videogames selected by myself, or by the respondents of my

empirical research.

Not only did my selection of games follow a triangulated method, but so did my data

retrieval. To approximate a comprehensive picture of the multi-faceted language of

gaming, I compiled a 'paratext' corpus ('GameCorp') of written and spoken language

samples, which comprises the following subcorpora (Table 1.2). Further details of

GameCorp are discussed in Ch. 5.5.

Subcorpus Texts (N=) Words (N=) Average words per text (N=)

Videogame magazine 168 206,546 1229.44

articles (incl. reader

comments)

Gamer fora threads 5 15,418 3083.6

Gamer chat threads 6 30,302 5050.33

Live conversations 5 28,450 5690

during gameplay ('oral')

Total 184 280,716 Mean average: 3763.34

Table 1.2: GameCorp design in terms of texts and word counts.

All chosen texts date from 2009 to mid-2010 and feature linguistic and multimodal

representations of meta-games and meta-gaming as outlined in items (a), (b) and (c)

Section 1.2: (a) language about games and gaming used by gamers; (b) language
21
 Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming, Ch.1: Introduction

about games and gameplay used by professionals, such as game designers and

developers; and (c) language about games and gaming used by journalists, politicians,

parents, activists and other media stakeholders. Items (d) interface semiotics and (e)

peritexts will be studied from an exclusively qualitative angle and covered mainly in

Chapters 8 (multimodality) and 4 (textuality).

Thematically, the language samples in GameCorp revolve about specific aspects of

videogames and/or gameplay. Clearly, to further substantiate the analyses and results

reflected in this book, further quantitative and qualitative research will be needed.

That said, important insights into dominant lexical, pragmatic and discursive aspects

of the language of gaming can be gained even from this relatively small, specialized

corpus.

1
Recent sales figures indicate that the videogames industry has begun to outperform the Hollywood

movie industry (Chatfield, 2009).

2 For comparable albeit slightly dated UK demographics, see Pratchett (2005). According to the

Association for UK Interactive Entertainment, UKIE (formerly known as the British Entertainment and

Software Publishers Association), during the first half of 2008 the UKs interactive entertainment

software industry saw an increase of 42% compared to the first half of 2007, with a total of over 31.3

million units sold for an overall amount of 738 million (see ELSPA press release of 14 July 2008 at

www.elspa.com/?i=7584&s=1111&f=49&archive=, date accessed 05/12/2008).

3
The German word Computerspiel translates both as videogame and computer game. Given that

the majority of commercial console games are also available for PC and Mac and some even for

handheld devices, I shall use the videogame, or simply game as cover-all terms.

22
 Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming, Ch.1: Introduction

4
Playthroughs are a specific type of player narrative, in which players demonstrate - typically via

online video (with an added soundtrack and with or without voice-over) - their own individual,

successful gaming experiences. As such, playthroughs are considerably less directive and more

representational than walkthroughs, which are user-generated instructions about efficient and strategic

gameplay, often sequenced in line with the levels of the videogame in question and most typically

found in written or in voiced-over video form.

5
Against the odds, attempts have been made at constructing videogame canons (see, for instance,

Ransom-Wiley, 2007). Whilst most retro-games have been recreated and can be played - mostly free

of charge - online, important aspects of mediality related to the original artefacts often cannot be taken

into consideration in diachronic, or 'canonical' games studies.

6
Even my adapted version of Wolf's original, comprehensive typology (see Chapter 3) had to be

abridged further due to the fact that some genres listed by him and their concomitant examples were

unknown to the respondents.

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