Riccardo Fassone - Every Game Is An Island: Endings and Extremities in Video Games

The map of Super Metroid (Nintendo)

Idle animation in Commander Keen IV (id Software)

User interface of Angry Birds (Rovio)

Combat screen in Breath of Death VII: The Beginning (Zeboyd Games)

Knights of Pen and Paper: a mundane setting (Paradox Interactive)

Knights of Pen and Paper: a transfigured setting (Paradox Interactive)

Aesthetic immersion in The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (Starbreeze Studios, Tigon Studios, 2004)

The diegetized HUD of Aliens: Colonial Marines (Sega, 2013)

flOw (Thatgamecompany, 2006)

Perma-death in One Single Life (FreshTone Games, 2011)

One Single Lifes jump simulator (FreshTone Games, 2011)

Garrys Mods FLATTYWOOD (FacePunch Studios)

Aesthetic consistency in literary series (Authors renditionBooks from Mondadori series)

Sega Vintage Collection (Authors renditionGolden Axe and Sonic the Hedgehog, Sega)

The Namco Retrogaming Series: New Rally-X (Namco Bandai)

The Namco Retrogaming Series: Dig Dug (Namco Bandai)

Nostalgic framing in Final Fight: Double Impact (Capcom, 2010)

This book is the result of almost five years of research; it has survived a couple of hard disk failures and the authors questionable backup habits. It has traveled over the desks and through the offices of many universities, libraries, and research centers. Most importantly, it has been greatly enriched by the discussions with the brilliant scholars and friends who have read various versions of it and offered their generous insights.

I am sincerely indebted to Peppino Ortoleva for our invaluable discussions, and to Ruggero Eugeni and Giacomo Manzoli, who commented on an earlier version of the book. I am also grateful to Giulia Carluccio for her mentorship and willingness to discuss the highs and lows of my research.

This book benefited from the support and friendship of my colleagues at the University of Turin, Italy. I am greatly indebted to Giaime Alonge, Silvio Alovisio, Alessandro Amaducci, Cristina Colet, Giuliana C. Galvagno, Vincenzo Idone Cassone, Mariella Lazzarin, Giulio Lughi, Andrea Mattacheo, Ivan Mosca, Sarah Pesenti Campagnoni, MariaPaola Pierini, Antonio Pizzo, Matteo Pollone, Gabriele Rigola, Hamilton Santi, Mattia Thibault, and Andrea Valle.

I am grateful to Ian Bogost, Giovanni Caruso, Gabriele Ferri, Stefano Gualeni, William Huber, Simone Natale, Michael Nitsche, Paolo Ruffino, Mauro Salvador, and Miguel Sicart, whose comments helped me write a better book. A heartfelt thank you to my editors at Bloomsbury, Mary Al-Sayed, Michelle Chen, and Katie Gallof, and to my proofreader Angela Arnone.

Finally, my thanks to my families: the one I was lucky enough to get, and the one I chose.

The paragraph Authoritative Video Games in is a revised version of Fassone 2014. I thank the editors and publishers of these works for allowing me to use them.

Video game players often cherish fond memories of the games they have played. When asked, they have vivid recollections of a final boss who refused to hit the ground, an apparently unsolvable puzzle, an epic battle against a friend. Often players will recall reaching the final level and beating the game, an exhilarating moment that most will identify as the peak of their playing activity. In my case, this happened with Street Fighter II, a favorite video game whose characters, iconic caricatures of martial arts fighters, rugged US Marines, and confusing genetic experiments, have become staples in contemporary video game culture. While most people played Street Fighter II in an arcade, I happened to play the MS-DOS version of the game, an underwhelming adaptation developed by U.S. Gold in 1992. Despite the impossibly slow pace of the game, I managed to defeat all of the computerized opponents of the game as Ryu, a dark-haired Japanese martial artist. Finishing a game can be a bewildering, paradoxical experience. On the one hand, the digital antagonist that players struggle with for hours is now conquered; on the other hand, the pleasure of playing is gone, the terra incognita of gameplay has been discovered. For video game players, chasing closure inevitably means destroying the world of the game, as their joyful pursuit of that end means the death of their pleasure (Salen and Zimmerman 2004: 258). Despite this poetic paradox, my experience with the slightly broken version of Street Fighter II I played as a ten-year-old was one of closure. After winning the final challenge, I was presented with a short non-interactive sequence hinting at the destiny of Ryu. I saw the young karateka walk away from the award ceremony towards the dusk, a closed caption reading Ceremony means nothing to him. The fight is everything. The game provided me with a pragmatic and a dramatic closure at the same time: there were no more fighters to defeat, and my hero was walking into the sunset, an ending trope that resonates with genre stereotypes of both the samurai and the western film. In my case, Ryus final sequence truly made stasis or the absence of further continuation, the most probable succeeding event (Herrnstein Smith 1968: 34).

Although the last round of the fight against M. BisonStreet Fighter IIs final bossand the short celebration of victory that follows stand as iconic closure in the minds of most players, this is not the only ending they encountered during their play. They lost a few matches before defeating M. Bison and were presented with a static rendition of Ryu as a defeated fighter; they crossed the border between agency and spectatorship several times while watching cutscenes between fights; they accessed configuration menus to adjust settings or pushed the pause button to mentally devise an effective strategy before deploying it. They encountered a number of endings, borders, and extremities. While beating (or finishing, a dualism that in itself calls for analysis) a game may constitute a memorable moment of closure, it happens within the frame of an inherently fragmented experience, one that in most cases contains a vast number of endings. This book is about endings, extremities, boundaries, and thresholds found in video games. The dramatic onesfor example Ryus remarkable closureand the more trivial ones, such as the pause function, or the border crossing of the frame of configuration found in most games.

Every game is defined by its borders, its endings, and its extremities. Often, playing a video game feels like pushing against those borders. Training for frame-perfect execution in Street Fighter II, or bumping into an invisible wall in Far Cry 2 require players to engage with the finiteness of the video game, its nature of contained simulation, an island surrounded by cliffs and rocks, whose jagged borders are the object of this work. Every game is an island, because, as I will claim throughout this book, every game cannot be but closed and finite. Even games claiming to be open world and offering players utmost freedom are framed by the limitations of their digital nature. On the peculiar island that is