Despite the pervasive rhetorics of immersion and embodiment found in industrial and social discourses, playing a video game is an exercise in non-linearity. The pervasiveness of trial and error mechanics, unforgiving game over screens, loading times, minute tweakings of options and settings, should lead us to consider video games as a medium that cannot eschew fragmentation. Every Game is an Island is an analysis and a critique of grey areas, dead ends and extremities found in digital games, an exploration of border zones where play and non-play coexist or compete. Riccardo Fassone describes the complexity of the experience of video game play and brings integral but often overlooked components of the gameplay experience to the fore, in an attempt to problematize a reading of video games as grandiosely immersive, all-encompassing narrative experiences. Through the analysis of closures and endings, limits and borders, and liminal states, this field-advancing study looks at the heart of a medium starting from its periphery.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
INTRODUCTION
A BOOK ABOUT EXTREMITIES
Ryu's closure
Every game is an island and no game is an island
Against currentness
STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK
Three levels and some wordplay
1. TWO NON-DEFINITIVE DEFINITIONS
WHAT IS A VIDEO GAME?
Doing away with definitions
Video games change through time
What I mean by "video game"
THE EXCEPTIONALITY OF VIDEO GAMES
Digital exceptionalism
The inflexible code
Authoritative video games
COMPUTER-MEDIATED GAMES
Interaction?
State machines and cybertexts
The cybernetic player
DESIGNED PROCEDURAL EXPERIENCES
The project of experience
Design
Procedures
Experience
2. GAME <> GAME
CLOSURE
The finite model of an infinite universe
An archaeology of digital closure
Finishing the game
Closure in Super Metroid
CAESURA
Continue?
Prescribed ending
The death and rebirth of game over
Game over and over: A rhetoric of repetition
Bodily pleasures: Game over as spectacular device in Dead Space 2
ENDLESSNESS
Playing indefinitely
A compact history of infinite games
From arcade to casual
The utopic castle: Battlezone
OPENNESS
Video games as toys
Expressive players and simulation savvies
Super Scribblenauts The winged guitarist
3. GAME <> METAGAME
FRAGMENTATION
Overlooked and underrated
Player-operated breaks: PAUSE
Machine-operated breaks: LOADING
Is this life reality? Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem
METAGAMING
Playing outside the game
The legacy of dice
Knights of Pen and Paper: role-playing revisited
IMMERSION
The utopia of total immersion
Immersive fallacies
Immersion, metacommunication, incorporation
Through the eyes of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay
HOLISM
Flow: a scholarly tradition
Designing for flow?
Total interface: Uplink
4. GAME <> GAMES
UNIQUENESS
In search of the golden cartridge
Curiosity and A Slow Year Distancing strategies
A game I will never play Chain World
EPHEMERALITY
Reconsidering OSGONS
Catharsis and procedures
Review your choices: One Single Life
MODULARITY
Opera aperta 2.0
Mods and modules: Game engines as branch systems
The flex of the wrist: Garry's Mod
SERIALIZATION
Playing nostalgia
Xbox Live Arcade: series and/as archives
Sub-series, meta-games
Old new games: Final Fight Double Impact
5. CONCLUSIONS
FROM THE OUTSIDE IN
Mom's heart
Games are about ending
Moving forward
BIBLIOGRAPHY
LUDOGRAPHY
FILMOGRAPHY
