5.2.4. Tendencies and attunement

5.2.4. Tendencies and attunement

During the review of perspectives on digital gaming practice in game and player studies, I mentioned that this research project differs from prior work in the area in (among other things) one fundamental premise: that neither the player nor the game artefact are tabulæ rasæ when the act of play begins, but are rather co-constituted both in the moment-to-moment act of gaming, and across a longer period of time. In light of the study results and findings, it is time to elaborate on this premise.

Even a novice player, who has never played digital games, engages in the first play session with some sort of background knowledge, be it about gaming as a culture, about digital games as designed artefacts, or about play as a mode of being and relating to the world. In effect, this means that there is no such thing as not having a ludic habitus – there are only spectra of degrees and types of ludic habitus, varying from person to person and on the basis of their own, individual experience with games, gaming, and broader and related fields of practice. Broadly speaking, as each player plays digital games – moment by moment, minute by minute, day by day, year by year – their ludic habitus develops on all three tiers. Their perceptual models of game design elements and their configurations expand and evolve, their taste patterns either specialize for certain genres or become more diffuse and broad, and their action competencies develop in a manner akin to physical training. This process is the long-term equivalent of what Sicart (2009) calls player subjectification: it is the development of the player as a historical entity, taking place through many repeated loops of learning and, to an extent, through other forms of participation in the field of digital games.

On the player side of the story, the degree of these changes varies highly from one person to the next, from one time frame to another, and depending on the games that one gets to play. For some players, a single digital game, played at the right time, might be deeply influential to their ludic habitus, forever altering how they understand and practically relate to digital games46 . For others, the same game could only solidify further their existing patterns towards digital games –perhaps because they thought it looked and played exactly the same as some other games they might previously have encountered, or simply because they found it personally underwhelming.

46 As a personal aside, I have been fortunate enough for two games to have such an impact on me: Final Fantasy VIII (Square, 1999), and NieR: Automata (Platinum Games, 2017). I am also friends with people who absolutely detest both of them.

Here, it bears repeating that Bourdieu sees habitus as durable systems of dispositions –they display relative stability, which enables one to relate to, and function in, the corresponding domain of practice. When discussing how players play digital games, we can understand this durability in two ways:

1) Firstly, the elements of one’s ludic habitus – perceptual models, taste patterns, action competencies – have their own durability, the extent of which varies from one player to another. Without this fundamental durability, it would be impossible to be a long-term player of digital games – one would, in effect, have to learn to play from scratch with each new game. 2) In addition to this, there is also another kind of durability, one that characterizes one’s ludic habitus as a whole. This durability supports the player’s engagement with digital games with a high degree of consistency and on a deeper level than the perceptual, appreciative, and actionable schemata. In the third player study, this durability was discussed under the heading of tendency, understood as persistent patterns of engagement with digital games. The gamut of player tendencies was dubbed the ludic habitus spectrum, and described as ranging from the reactive (favoring perception and interpretation over direct action) to the proactive (favoring direct action over perception and interpretation).

The overall tendency of one’s ludic habitus is the general trend of how it is employed in concrete acts of digital gaming practice, emerging on the basis of a player’s individual tendencies to perceive, appreciate, and act in certain fashions when playing games. In simple terms, this overall tendency is the ratio of thinking to acting during play, in essence underpinning a player’s playstyle and in-game behavior. I use the term “tendency” in order to signify that what is being discussed here are relatively durable inclinations, rather than fixed, deterministic properties of ludic habitus.

One’s ludic habitus does not operate alone in digital gaming practice, but in response to the design elements and configurations of the given digital game which may necessitate a different tendency to the one the player is used to employing during play. For example, a puzzle game without time constraints such as The Witness (Thekla Inc., 2016) would require very little of the player in terms of quick, direct action, but comparatively plenty in terms of perceiving and interpreting the world of the game. Conversely, an FPS like Quake demands good reflexes and timely actions, not leaving the player with much time to think in the process. These design configurations can also be understood as tendencies in their own right, but on the side of the game and its corresponding generic subfield, rather than the player and their ludic habitus. Much

like one’s ludic habitus and its components are relatively durable, yet can change over time, so too does the design of artefacts within the field of games change through the historical rise, consolidation, and eventual evolution of design patterns and configurations, input methods, and mapping conventions which characterize different generic subfields. Genres appear, trend, and either evolve or disappear – and their players are changed in the process of playing them as well.

Because both player and game come into acts of digital gaming practice with their respective “baggage” – ludic habitus and its tendencies on the one hand, design configurations and their histories on the other – the meeting between the two is not always agreeable. In the second study, Arthur and Joe (Inglenook, the Puzzle-Solvers) quickly shifted their gameplay focus solely to the puzzles, and disregarded other design aspects and modes of engagement in the game. They expressed criticism of the design of Inglenook, finding it visually baffling, mechanically basic, and boring to play. Arthur’s and Joe’s situations are examples of a lack of attunement between one or more aspects of one’s ludic habitus and one or more design elements of the played game. In their case, Inglenook was unfamiliar on the perceptual level, unchallenging on the action level, and unremarkable on the appreciation level. In simpler terms, it was not their kind of game.

On the other hand, when a game’s design and its historical precedents resonate with the player and their own history of gaming experiences, the two can be said to be in attunement. This was particularly the case with Scott and Adam (TestingHouse). For both of these players, the design of the game they played challenged their perceptual models related to its generic subfield (first-person horror games), enough to engage their meta-interpretation and for them to frame TestingHouse as a genre commentary on violence in games. Though the game was not challenging on the level of skills, it facilitated a style of play that these two players found personally appealing – namely, it enabled them to progress without the use of violent means. In the case of these two players, TestingHouse was experimental and subversive on the perceptual level, accommodating on the action level, and thematically meaningful on the appreciation level. In equally simpler terms, it was their kind of game.

“Attunement” should be understood in light of both the different tiers of one’s ludic habitus and the different design layers of a digital game – including its generic subfield background. The two examples above, of attunement and lack thereof, are relatively clear-cut; more ambiguous relations between player and game are much more common. Attunement is a matter of degree, changing over time and through play (or, to use Vahlo’s (2017) enactivist terminology, through the cyclical process of exploration of the game’s possibility space and

coordination of skills and knowledge into actions). Attunement can be strengthened in a moment of discovery at any point between the game’s launch and exit windows (Arsenault & Perron, 2008) – as in the second study, when some of the participants started understanding Inglenook as a distinct kind of game – but it can also exist to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the player and the game. As an illustration, let us remember the game design students in the first study, playing the control game prototype. All four of these players found the control game –and its related subfield – familiar, implying a level of attunement between their ludic habitus and the design conventions of the platformer generic subfield47 , which the game wholeheartedly utilized. However, this familiarity led to a lack of personal interest in the control game on behalf of these players. Their perceptual models and action competencies had already had plenty of experience with similar games, and, as a result, all four designers in the study preferred the experimental game over the control game, because the former brought something new into the mix and subtly challenged their ludic habitus. Therefore, we could say that the ludic habitus of these players were, collectively, more attuned to the experimental than the control version of the game; the simple design changes (omission of jumping mechanic and the resulting differences in level layout) were enough to create a more personally meaningful play experience for these players.

This point provides the last element needed to offer a proper definition: attunement is situational alignment between one or more tiers of ludic habitus and one or more aspects of the designed game artefact, which contributes meaning to the play experience. The extent of this meaning can range from the more basic logical understanding and familiarity (e.g. knowing the design configuration of a certain game, and having the competencies to play it with certain input methods) to deep, personal relevance (e.g. returning again and again to a favorite game, with every act of play feeling right and significant).

With this concept defined, it is – at last – time to present the final illustration of digital gaming practice that has been developed as part of this project

47 This degree of attunement can also be framed as familiarity with the design grammar of the platformer (to use Gee’s (2003) term) or with the conventionalized platformer gameplay gestalt (to use Lindley’s (2002) term).