Screw the Grue: Mediality, Metalepsis, Recapture

I begin with an assertion that I consider an axiom of videogame studies. Gameplay is the expression of combinations of definite semiotic elements in specific relations to equally definite technical elements. The semiotic plane of a game's expression draws on the full range of common cultural material available to game designers and players: shared myth, conventions of genre and narrative form, comprehension of the relevant intertextual canons, etc. The technical plane of the expression-computational, electronic and mechanical systems that support game play-is the more restricted. Its elements are localized to a given situation of play (this software, this hardware) in ways that the semiotic elements of play seem not to be (Where do relevant cultural myth and the intertextual canon start and stop? Will this not vary according to the competence of the player?). Moreover, because the technical elements of play should demonstrate the consistency and stability fundamental to usable computing devices, they are deterministic and capable of only finitely many configurations. (For the present and the foreseeable future, we play in Turing's world.) The challenge of game design is to program the entanglement of semiotic and technical elements in an interesting and rewarding way. The expression of play activates this entanglement in well-defined and predictable combinations. The cultural-semiotic repertoire of videogame play can be measured, though the extent to which this could be limited to the videogame, strictly speaking, is doubtful. Games are rich cultural texts, drawing on symbolic domains well outside of a conjectured gameworld or a collection of user responses; an anthropology of gaming must reach beyond the material contexts of a specific episode of play. My focus in this article is on the technical end of entanglement and the points of contact between technical and semiotic elements of play. Though intuitively the player must imagine that some contact is necessary-the game's interface must engage the underlying game engine, which must engage the computer's operating system, and so on-the relation between a given technical element or elements and traits of the gameworld will not always be expressed in ways that are significant for the player, whose attention is, for the most part, on events and existents of the gameworld. Some technical elements may seem to have no effect on the game's expression; their influences, if any, can only be conjectured. (For instance, how is playing a text-based adventure game created for circa-1980 computers different from playing the …