Introduction

Games are often described in terms that highlight their interactivity and the ways they encourage and shape performance – tendencies that are explored in this article under the term 'ludic performance'. In English, the word 'play' applies to both ludic and dramatic arts. Ludic performance has been an early and ongoing concern of game scholars, theorists, practitioners and critics. As Anna Anthropy has put it: "The experience we identify as a game has character [...] and if we're discussing an experience, then that implies that someone is there to have that experience, someone we refer to as a player" (2012, p. 44).

While it may seem that ludic performance places the emphasis on human players as performing and playful subjects, concepts such as performance and performativity have also enabled analysis of ludic objects and non-human entities such as animals (such as in Gregory Bateson's analysis of animal play) when they engage in behaviour that may be interpreted as play. Marcel Mauss, describing 'techniques of the body', outlines the powerful influence of material objects on the performing subject, in relating his experience from World War I: "The English troops I was with did not know how to use French spades, which forced us to change 8000 spades a division when we relieved a French division, and vice versa [...] Every technique properly so-called has its own form" (1973, p. 71). For Mauss, "we are everywhere faced with physio-psycho-sociological assemblages of series of actions" (p. 85): fully describing these assemblages necessarily ranges across scales and levels of analysis.

"Performativity" acquired impetus as a term of theoretical discussion following its use in the work of US ordinary language philosopher J.L. Austin, although it has gone on to be broadly influential outside the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. In the 1955 William James lecture series collected by his students and published as How to Do Things with Words, Austin outlines a theory of 'performative utterances' or what would later be termed 'speech acts' – that is, utterances in which something is done or performed. An example might be a verbally binding contract, which must meet certain criteria (say, having a competent witness present, adopting a specific sequence of words and so on) if it is to be felicitous (happy or successful). Infelicitous utterances would fail to accede to these criteria in some way or another and thus fail to perform the action. Austin's discussion pushed back on what he saw as positivist philosophy's preoccupation with propositions and the truth value of utterances; instead, he seeks to demonstrate that language is performative and capable of many effects beyond assertion.

While it may seem that Austin's theory is thus of considerable interest in theorising videogames, and he does discuss games and sports, in fact Austin himself would very likely class all videogame performances as parasitic – a species of infelicitous action. For Austin, an action such as signing a deed of sale for a house performs a more or less successful action in real life. But in a dramatic performance, the very same sequence uttered on a stage does not result in a real sale but merely mimics it. It is 'parasitic' on the real action. This relation of mimicry suggests that in Austin's typology, all videogame performances partake of the parasitic form of infelicity (Jayemanne, 2017), which means that the theory needs some adapting if it is to be used in game studies research.

Austin's discussion of doing things with words was widely influential in the humanities, but not without controversy. The question of parasitism was the topic of a debate between philosophers John Searle and Jacques Derrida, focusing on the question of whether it is ultimately possible to distinguish parasitic from normal utterances and what this means for thinking about the iterability and intentionality of the performative speech act. Austin and Derrida's work on performativity was also influential on Judith Butler's notion of gender performativity. Butler's discussions in texts such as Gender Trouble (1990) of the importance of performativity in the gendering of bodies have political, legal, ethical and ontological dimensions – "gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed" (p. 25). These classic discussions of performativity have been key references for a lot of game studies scholarship.

Questions of performativity have been given new importance and inflection with videogames and the rise of other playful technologies: many foundational videogames incorporated an idea of what players do in a game into their title ("Defender") or their character names (Mario was originally called "Jumpman"). We have also seen widespread transformations in ludic performance as social and online features have been introduced to digital games, shifting the focus of the gaming industry more intensively towards multiplayer designs where players negotiate each other's performances. However, where in game studies literature there is often a focus on extraordinary, elite or virtuoso performance, and analysis of the way that ludic contexts give new meaning to actions, other scholars have emphasised the ordinariness of a lot of videogame play, conducive of experiences of boredom, repetition, distraction (Tyack & Mekler, 2021).

Scholars have used a focus on performances and performativity to link game studies with fields of inquiry such as (inter alia) cybernetics, gender studies, critical race studies, postcolonialism, process and materialist philosophy, literary and dramatic theory and sociology. From a scholarly point of view, while performance is implicit in many accounts of play, not all studies of play and games focus on performance in their research questions or specific performances as case studies. Conversely, ethnographic accounts of games and gameplay often involve close analysis of specific performances by individuals and communities of players as a core element of the method. Ludic performance will thus focus on studies that explicitly foreground the description and analysis of particular engagements with games or pose performance with games as a theoretical question in its own right. This discussion will also not include quantitative studies using statistical or clinical methods, as this scholarship is better covered by other authors in the encyclopedia.

Even with these caveats, however, the topic of ludic performance is quite difficult to fit into a brief article, and an overall framework is needed. A focus on performance was evident in the practice of artist Dick Higgins, whose work will help structure this article's treatment of the material. Higgins coined the term 'intermediality' implying a cutting-across of subject-object categorisations and ways of thinking. He was a key figure in Fluxus, a movement known for happenings and performances, and his book Computers for the Arts (1970) contains both programming and aesthetic reflections. Reading the modular poem "hank and mary", created using Fortran IV to recombinantly produce variations of the terms "hank", "shot" and "mary", art historian Owen Smith understands Higgins' work in contrast to the 'art-and-technology' movement of the 50s and 60s which had a focus on the presence and novelty of computers. However, the use of code is also a departure from combinatory poetic works which centre the artist and conventional modes of aesthetic experience. Higgins:

made use of a tool that had become paramount for many as the manifestation of the dehumanization and mechanization of modern life – the computer as tool of and for Big Brother (the 1970s IBM model of centralized control, a compilation of information for purposes of strategic command and control, and the subsequent control of all related aspects of life), but he did not accept this role for computers in the arts. Rather than accept the Orwellian vision of centralized computer control Higgins, it can be argued, envisioned another use – a use in which the mechanisms of computation were put to work to de-center control through the creation of non-hierarchical compositional formulas or codes. The resulting work of computationally generated randomization is no longer a coherent text in the modernist sense. (Smith, 2013)

The links between performance and play are such that any treatment may appear ad hoc, but Higgins' work and aesthetic theory of intermediation provide some guidance for this article in outlining the way that performance has appeared in game studies. Higgins' intermediation brings together aesthetic theory, intertwined notions of freedom and constraint, and the distribution of action among human and non-human ludic performance. In the present article, the notion of ludic performance will be broken down into areas that draw on the foci of intermediation: the topic of performing arts (relations between digital games and other art forms due to a focus on performativity), thick descriptions of play (close analyses of specific game performances, and connections with the political question of who is playing) and nonhuman performativity (including and accounting for materialities of play, speculative realisms and computational action).

Performing Arts

Arts and games have both been seen as bounded or framed spaces, in which actions can acquire new meanings. The power of performance in these spaces has been considered highlighted, intensified – actions both acquire new gravitas and command our attention in new ways (terms such as the magic circle and immersion gesture towards these potentials). The prestige of performing arts and the depth of thinking and scholarship helped scholars in thinking about playful interaction with computers, and this work influenced early discussions in game studies. As Ruth Rettie wrote in 2004: "most virtual reality environments have the special status Goffman gives to theatrical performances, where we are willingly 'transformed into collaborators in unreality', these are 'voluntarily supported benign fabrication(s)'" (p. 136).

Playful interactions with technology have been understood as analogous to theatrical performance. One key example is Brenda Laurel's Computers as Theatre (2013), which draws on dramatic theory and analogies to explore human-computer interaction. Laurel's experience in the game industry and interest in digital games lead to them often appearing as examples, even though the book's concerns are wider than videogames. Laurel describes the idea of a "Whole Action" – "I'm looking at a larger granularity than a single touch, swipe, or keypress. Events with such short duration cannot assume dramatic form in themselves, since time is an intrinsic factor in producing a dramatic shape. If we are looking for coherent wholes, we need to think about the whole actions of a human's interaction with a computer: for example, playing a chunk of a game, searching for information, doing the taxes, or writing a letter." (p. 81). For Laurel, thinking about dramatic performance is a means to bring together smaller-scale engagements with computers to enable analysis of a 'larger granularity'. The theatrical metaphor of the stage serves as an aggregate in which particular human-computer actions find and create their context.

Angela Ndalianis (2004) brings digital games into proximity with performance through the concept of 'neo-baroque aesthetics'. A key term is 'virtuosity', which refers to the technical skill foregrounded by baroque works of art, architecture and sculpture: the artist performing as master of the craft. However, importantly, Ndalianis also ascribes virtuosity to those who navigate such vertiginous works. This capability is linked to baroque traits of 'seriality' and 'polycentrism', which help to guide and influence virtuoso performance within the production of the baroque space. Ndalianis' discussion of neo-baroque aesthetics in relation to digital culture including videogames thus brings performative questions into relation with specific design techniques, linking to games through their use of complex regimes of framing and interactivity. Darshana Jayemanne (2017), drawing on Ndalianis' linkage of performative and aesthetic qualities, constructs a methodology for analysing the 'performative multiplicities' that comprise ludic performances.

Other key examples of scholarship that draws on performing arts research to understand ludic performance in digital games can be found in the work of Emma Westecott, Gonzalo Frasca and Gina Bloom. Westecott has drawn on the history and theory of puppet theatre to outline "the player character as performing object", and "[t]he liminal relationship between player and player character in the flux of play" (2009). Westecott, drawing on scholarship on the puppet theatre, identifies a 'dual address' that enables considering player avatars as both shaping and enabling engagement in videogame play. Frasca (2001) has connected digital games and design with a semiotic account of action, and explored an ethical dimension of game design by engaging with Boal's concept of the 'Theatre of the Oppressed' as well as the concept of the 'spect-actor'. Bloom's Gaming the Stage (2018) weaves together analysis of traditional games with early modern theatrical culture in England, construing ludic performance in the theatre as 'playable media' and exploring the potentials of technologies such as the Microsoft Kinect to create 'mimetic interface games' with their own theatrical modes.

Who is Performing? Thick Descriptions of Play

Accounts of ludic performance are also notable in their close analysis of actual situations and scenarios of performance within games. This has led them to draw on techniques such as ethnography and 'thick description' (following the term of Clifford Geertz (1973)) which have complicated or challenged purely theoretical models of play. These explorations of how ludic performance is conditioned and produced for specific players have also brought powerful critiques not only of games, but of game studies as a disciplinary formation with provenance and theoretical grounding in certain traditions.

A key study is Nakamura's Cybertypes (2002), which, while it employs a range of methods and frameworks, draws gaming into proximity with wider internet cultures, in part through ethnographic research on LambdaMOO and what performing in that space meant for players of ethic and racially diverse backgrounds.

Asianness is co-opted as a passing fancy, an identity-prosthesis that signifies exotic sexual availability when female, and anachronistic dreams of combat when male. Self-identification as a samurai or geisha is diverting, reversible [...] Discourse about race in cyberspace is conceptualized as a bug, something an efficient computer user would eradicate since it contaminates her work/play. (Nakamura, 2002, pp. 47-49)

Analysis of ludic performance by racialized subjects is also the subject of Kishonna Gray's Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming (2020), which identifies the complexity of black gamers' ludic performances. Like Nakamura, Gray challenges the 'limited conception of space' that often inform understandings of virtual and online worlds as a neutral space that is free from social and cultural determinants, insisting that "race and place are coproduced through many dimensions: race and class, urban and suburban, gender and sexuality, public and private, bodies and buildings" (p. 90). Gray's research reveals many instances in which black users' play is systemically conditioned, such as during voice communication: "The medium of communication in videogames [...] is therefore important in analyzing the othering process. In voice-based communities, auditory communication (and hence linguistic profiling) leads to othering" (p. 152).

Gray's account of race and ludic performance is also situated within wider dynamics of culture and political economy: "Black streamers may not be allowed access to the spaces and industries controlled by their white counterparts, but they are not silent [...] Many black streamers act as agents of social change, regardless of their intent. They participate as social agents, regardless of their intent. The mere presence of their marginalized bodies disrupts the norm of the space designed for privileged bodies" (2020, p. 91). We might also note cases in which intellectual property regimes have arisen in regard to specific performances, such as the lawsuit surrounding the 'Carlton Dance' as it appeared in Fortnite (Epic Games & People Can Fly, 2017).

Similar complexities are identified by Tara Fickle in The Race Card; From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities (2020), through the analysis of gold farming as 'ludo-orientalism'. Fickle notes that the action of companies like Blizzard to sanction gold farming was predicated on a similarity to the automated, repetitive action of bots, which in turn were closely related to accusations of ruining the 'fun' of an MMO game. She argues that the ludic performance of gold farming is racially produced: "From one perspective, gold farmers [...] simply satisfy a demand created by wealthy players. But from another view [...] gold farmers could arguably be said to have necessitated the rule-breaking act of gold buying on the part of Western players' (p. 186).

Thick descriptions of ludic performance have also helped scholars conceptualise and analyse emerging formats such as new game genres, e-sports and streaming. Here too, close attentiveness to the complexity of performance reveals pressures and conditions in which play is produced – connecting thick description of performance with fields such as gender and queer studies which bring their own critiques to the field of game studies and normative theoretical claims about how we should interpret videogames and who 'the player' is. One example is Bo Ruberg's (2019) discussion of queer movement in videogame space and time, and use of 'chrononormativity' in the analysis of highly distinctive forms of game performance: speedrunning and walking sims. Amanda Cote (2017) has explored how many women's ludic performance necessitates developing methods for ameliorating harassment. Scholars including Mia Consalvo (2017) and Christine Tran (2022) have studied how the ludic performances of 'e-girls' on platforms such as Twitch.tv are produced and conditioned as gendered labour. Other examples of scholarship that have involved thick description include studies of ability (Carr & Puff, 2019), children's play in digital worlds (Carr & Puff 2019; Giddings, 2014; Grimes. 2021) and esports (Boluk & le Mieux, 2020; Witkowski, 2018).

Much of this scholarship has worked to 'complicate the distinction between agency and coercion' (Phillips, 2020, p. 168) as it pertains to the structuring principles of play in digital games. Phillips' discussion of avatars combines theoretical discussion with close attentiveness to what it means to perform as Chell (Portal (Valve, 2007)), Bayonetta (PlatinumGames, 2009) or FemShep (the female version protagonist of the Mass Effect series (e.g., BioWare, 2007)) – entangling cultural, technical and aesthetic registers. Discussing the disappointment of FemShep as an avatar which attempts to negotiate and accommodate difference through an expansive possibility space, Phillips argues that "Each player discovers the truth about choice in Mass Effect in different ways: struggling with an avatar interface that centers whiteness, thinness, able bodies, and binary gender; cringing through queer sex scenes generated from heterosexual encounters; making life-or-death choices for colonized people; remaining in the closet until the developers give the option to come out. When these moments of friction intersect with someone's identity, it is hard not to feel the sting of disappointment" (Philips, 2020, pp. 168). However, although FemShep is a "makeshift shelter for the marginalized [...] she is an inextricable component of my own and other gamers' experience with identity and politics in videogames" (pp. 169). Commander Shepherd – an attempt in videogames to create an 'everyperson' and a focus for a widely imagined array of player fantasies and subject positions – acts as a litmus test for ludic performance's political and affective limits.

Nakamura (2021) has also returned to critique ludic performance in the form of 'virtuous VR', tracing how the VR industry has framed performance as an act of empathy: "While earlier VR addressed desires to substitute a virtual environment for the 'real' world in order to better appreciate parts of it inaccessible to 'ordinary experience' [...] VR 2.0 positions itself as a technology of feelings" (p. 51). To perform in such works is to empathise with marginalised and precarious groups through immersion: not to merely inhabit an alternate reality, but to be changed by it. However, for Nakamura "this is identity tourism for the 21^st^ century, but with a difference" (p. 54). In games that lack systemic empowerment for the marginalised in the infrastructures of game production, transformative claims for such technologies in fact produce uneven development, marginalisation and oppression as privatised experience ('toxic embodiment'). Here, ludic performance mediates a lack of power to act in the world: "fixes for imperialism, hypercapitalism, racism, and sexism are more difficult to envision in everyday life. Hence, the intense need and desire for these VR titles to tell us how to feel about the suffering of racial others' ways of viewing. Feeling takes the place of doing precisely because there seems to be no viable liminal space between the two" (Nakamura, 2021, p. 61).

Nonhuman Performativities

The third theme of ludic performance encompasses studies that seek to research and conceptualise the capabilities of matter and objects vis-à-vis the play situation. In digital games, the activity of computers is an ongoing area of inquiry, however thinking about ludic performance with regards to objects goes beyond this to connect game studies with fields such as platform studies, object-oriented ontology, posthumanism, new materialism and media archaeology. These accounts do not necessarily entail disavowing the human player, but may instead involve expanding on the entanglements, assemblages and the 'mess' of play. Discourse that highlights the role of objects in play goes back to classic discussions of toys, that have figured with regard to their effect on human players (such as Baudelaire's account of viewing a child 'looking for the soul' in his toy, Kleist's discussion of determinism and freedom in the marionette theatre or Mauss' aforementioned "Techniques of the Body").

A key example is N. Katherine Hayles, who bridges literary theory, cybernetics and other fields to critique Austinian notions of performative utterances from a materialist perspective: "Code that runs on a machine is performative in a much stronger sense than that attributed to language [...] [R]egardless of what humans think of a piece of code, the machine is the final arbiter of whether the code is intelligible" (Hayles, 2005, p. 50). This strong structuring effect does not however mean that ludic performance is completely determined by computational structures. Thomas Apperley (2006) has proposed two genres of game interactivity depending on how tightly enmeshed player action is with computational processes (the constant activity of simulation versus the distal actions of strategy games). Wendy Chun (2011) has described 'new ways of going astray' afforded by interaction with computer apparatuses. Alexander Galloway (2006) has identified a typology of 'operator' and 'machinic' acts that together give the overall structure of ludic performance in videogames. David Parisi (2018) has examined the haptic potentials and history of game technology. Procedurally generated storytelling highlights the capabilities of computers within the area of narrative games.

A focus on the complexity of performative engagements between the human player and the machine is also evident in Brendan Keogh's (2018) phenomenological account of distributed play with a videogame apparatus: "The particular literacies demanded of different input devices create different embodied experiences [...] Videogame experience depends on a hybrid sensorial engagement of using a motor gesture to push a button while looking at a screen depicting moving images of virtual objects and spaces while listening to sounds and music" (p. 110). Scholars have also connected videogame performance with new materialisms, as in Justyna Janik's use of Karen Barad's (2003) notions of posthuman performativity, agential realism and intra-action, or Sonia Fizek's (forthcoming) discussion of zero-player games and distributed play drawing on similar resources. Scholars have also examined computer-mediated multispecies play, incorporating animals, plants and other living beings into ludic actor-networks (Westerlaken & Gualeni 2016.

Cameron Kunzelman (2018) has analysed a very small unit of ludic performance – the click – to focus on the speculative possibilities opened up and enacted by digital games. Kunzelman explores how the minimal gesture of the click appears in the Ludum Dare game Impetus. In this game, a single button click was necessary to keep the fictional astronaut Impetus alive. Initially clicked by the developer team, "when the time came for them to sleep, they had to hope that the Ludum Dare community of game creators and fans of the game on Twitter would sustain it through the next day" (Kunzelman 2018, p. 475). Upon waking, the developers found that "[m]ore than 25000 timer resets, or individual human clicks, had generated more than 30000 additional seconds of Impetus' life" (p. 475). For Kunzelman, the radical openness of the design confers a speculative dimension on the humble ludic performance of the click: one that, in comparison to more traditional videogame possibility spaces, is speculative in a way that (via Hume's 'Problem') evokes Quentin Meillasoux's rendering contingent of contingency itself.

Conclusion

Ludic performance has been a concern of a range of researchers working across many disciplines. These studies have brought new knowledge to challenge notions of active subjects and passive objects, as well as rethinking theories of what games are and what they may be (such as Fickle's discussion (2020) of contextual ludo-orientalism in gold farming, which informs her critique of the cultural perspective of influential thinkers such as Huizinga and Caillois). Beyond the tendency of this work towards inductive method, close analysis and theory of ludic performance affirm the complexity and diversity of playful phenomena. Performance and performativity, then, are far from limited to framed situations such as the videogame, the stage or the artwork, and have a much broader remit in the human sciences. Or, if such discussions begin with the particularity of a performance, the attempt to fully characterise it tends to lead to more general questions that can clash with theoretical positions and frameworks.

To reiterate, the categories above have given structure to this article itself, but it should be remembered that the idea of intermediation from which they are derived entangles all of these senses of technologically mediated ludic performance. Westecott's (2009) theoretical approach, for example, draws on theatrical and puppeteering accounts, but also invokes materialist notions of nonhuman modes of participation in the play situation. Phillips' (2020) account of Commander Shepherd construes the avatar both as nonhuman program, and as a site for identification and theatricality. Gray (2020) charts how black players navigate dehumanisation and objectification in their ludic performances. In these discussions on what it means to perform in a videogame space, then, we can see the ongoing salience of Higgins' idea of intermediation and the weaving together of multiple perspectives.

Videogames are sites for the creation of new performative modalities, and contemporary debates around 'metaverses' suggest that this will intensify along with the increased social context of performance emphasised by scholars such as Nakamura (2020). Sophisticated analysis of what it means to perform in these virtual worlds that have been so facilitated by ludic performance will be important to future scholarship. There has been the rise of experimental and competitive modes such as speed-running, multi-species play with digital games, political and artistic performances within videogame spaces such as Fortnite, and distributed forms of community play which obviate the idea of the 'player' as a performative agent itself, as can be seen in analyses such as those of Kunzelman (2018) and Fizek (forthcoming; and phenomena such as "Twitch Plays Dark Souls"). Through existing studies such as those discussed here, game studies has a wide range of tools to understand the ever-increasing intermediations of ludic performance.

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Author Information

Darshana Jayemanne is a Lecturer in Art, Media and Computer Games at Abertay University and the author of Performativity in Art, Literature and Videogames (Palgrave MacMillan 2017). This book's title names many of his main research interests and develops a media studies approach to performance in digital space and time, as well as youth safeguarding and creativity in virtual worlds. His work has appeared in Games & Culture, The Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Fibreculture Journal, and Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture. Recently, he has co-organised the Game Engines Beyond Games Symposium and is convenor of the Keywords in Play interview series about diverse games research. He was a jurist for the Excellence in Narrative Awards at the 2019 and 2020 Independent Game Festival Awards.

Citation Information

Jayemanne, D. (2022). Ludic Performance. In Grabarczyk, P. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Ludic Terms (Spring 2022 Edition). URL: https://eolt.org/articles/ludic-performance

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