Ethos, Pathos, Logos: Game Texts as Texts, Part I
Game books are books. It seems silly to open with this fact, but the state of discursive practice in this sphere is such that I suspect it is required. Game books are books.
Let's take a step back. Let's say you and I just met. I'm from a few states over, just moved to your town. We're nine years old. We just met, maybe I'm your neighbor, and while playing outside we decide, in the way that children do, that we will play Hide and Seek. I close my eyes, count to 100, and you hide from me. You decide to hide inside your house. It's especially fun for you, because you can peer out of the window and watch me fruitlessly search for you outside. After a time, you see that I'm visibly frustrated and having a bad time, so you appear and announce that you won that round. But I'm livid. You can't hide inside! It's against the rules! Hide and Seek is an outside game, at least when you're playing outside.
Of course, our problem is one of expectations. I simply play Hide and Seek differently than you do. And with some up-front negotiation, we could have arrived at a mutually agreeable set of rules for this game of Hide and Seek that we are to play together. Perhaps we'll try it differently another time. This is all very normal, a normal part of playing games with other people. We establish norms that enable us to play coherently with one another, either before or during play (or, in all likelihood, both before and during play). This is not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about how we establish those norms in the first place.
Let's suppose that we were especially precocious children, and we wisely set the bounds of our specific Hide and Seek game before we began playing. I might say, "Hiders must hide outside, because we are playing outside." You might object. It's fun to be able to hide inside when you're playing outside. You mount your argument, and you provide evidence for it's value. You support it with case studies from previous games you've played, with appeals to the thrill of voyeurism for the hider, the thrill of increased uncertainty for the seeker. You note that the added complexity of the landscape of play keeps the game from becoming repetitive. Perhaps I'm convinced. Perhaps I serve up my own set of arguments and counter-arguments. Perhaps we decide we will try it both ways and draw conclusions together.
A game book is a book. It is not a game. It is, perhaps, about a game. If it's any good, it makes a set of arguments about how to play that game. I sit down with a game book, perhaps as a representative of a group of players I intend to play with, and I allow the book to describe a game to me. Perhaps it's a game I know already, or perhaps it's one I don't know. I certainly know games like it. Further, I allow the book room to convince me of its version of this game. If I'm an especially savvy reader, I assess possible counter-arguments, I think through the implications of the game described in this book. Perhaps I arrive at a compromise. Perhaps I decide to try it multiple ways, and draw my own conclusions. The game is whatever I play. It was never in the book, because the book is a book.
Stay tuned for Part II, in which we discuss some broad ways in which game books can attempt to be persuasive.