The Video Game Is a Gag

T he history of video-game criticism has been a history of media comparisons.To conceptualize the emerging medium, develop a critical vocabulary, and stake a disciplinary claim, early scholars of games argued for many different guiding metaphors.Video games have been regularly compared to theater for their highly structured yet improvisatory performances and multimodal environments.1The prevalence of text-based adventure games led to many early comparisons with novels and poetry, a link sustained by the waxing of post-structuralism and narratology in 1990s English departments.2Cinema has offered ways of thinking about mise-enscne, genre, and camera framing.3Even links to other playful activities-sports, board games, puzzles, toys-are media propositions about the best model for understanding video games.More recently, the causality and direction of these comparisons have gotten more complex.Where the 1980s and 1990s primarily saw games adapt films to profit from their cultural capital, increasingly films today adapt videogame franchises and more broadly take on aesthetic qualities of games.Similarly, Henry Jenkins has discussed the transmedia strategies that media companies use to tell a larger story across action figures, films, comics, webisodes, television, and video games.Games are no longer just remediating other media; they are also involved in many kinds of exchange.Three recent forays into that media comparison all invert the arrow of that comparison to suggest ways that games reveal unexpected possibilities in other media.Emily Louisa Smith's "Fallout of Shakespeare: Playing and Video Game Theater" follows a troupe of actors who perform plays using avatars in Fallout 76 to explore what postapocalyptic recontextualization means for the flexibility of adaptation.In "Video Games and the Novel," Eric Hayot draws from the history of media comparisons to argue that the contemporary meaning of the novel as a genre cannot be disentangled from the whole system of narrative media, including video games.Finally, in "I Can't Hear You: Gestures, Stereotypes, and Brushings Against the Player in DOTA 2," Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux turn to a moment in 2019 when the esports competitor Sbastien Debs taunted the audience by cupping his hand to his ear.Boluk and LeMieux unpack the layers of that gesture as it links DOTA 2 to sports, and both to international diplomacy and racial stereotyping.en gl ish lan g u a ge n o t es