new media & society

Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications

Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore
Vol10(5): 793–801 [DOI: 10.1177/1461444808094357]

REVIEW ARTICLE

The paratextual pleasures

of reading about playing
video games
Reviewed by JEROEN JANSZ
ASCoR, University of Amsterdam

Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive

Power of Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2007. xii  450 pp.
ISBN: 978–0–262–02614–7, $35 (hbk)
Mia Consalvo, Cheating: Gaining Advantage in
Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.
ix  228 pp. ISBN: 978–0–262–03365–7, $35 (hbk)
Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (eds),
Second Person: Role-playing and Story in Games
and Playable Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2007. xv  408 pp. ISBN: 978–0–262–08356–0,
$40 (hbk)

For many gamers, engaging with the ‘paratext’ of digital games is as

enjoyable as playing the games (Consalvo, 2007).They like to read reviews,
strategy guides or walkthroughs and perhaps also like to read about future
developments in the industry or the controversial nature of particular games.
For academic game researchers, the paratext also may include intellectual
work about games and gaming. In the past decade, game researchers’
paratextual pleasures have been well served by MIT Press, which has
published a list of the leading books about digital games. Janet Murray’s
groundbreaking Hamlet on the Holodeck was published in 1998, as was the
collection From Barbie to Mortal Kombat (Cassell and Jenkins, 1998) which has
almost become a classic point of reference. More recent examples of significant
work include Rules of Play (Salen and Zimmerman, 2003), Half-Real
( Juul, 2005) and The Handbook of Computer Game Studies (Raessens and

793
New Media & Society 10(5)

Goldstein, 2005). MIT Press has turned out to be particularly fruitful in this
area of inquiry, with the publication of the three titles discussed in this review
article: Second Person, an edited volume from Pat Harrigan and Noah
Wardrip-Fruin, Ian Bogost’s Persuasive Games and Mia Consalvo’s Cheating:
Gaining Advantage in Videogames. All three books are well designed and
beautifully crafted, but Second Person beats the other two with respect to its
design features.The volume is richly illustrated, all the essays are presented in
an elegant page layout and the collection includes three fully playable – and
lavishly designed – tabletop role-playing games.
Persuasive Games and Cheating offer paratextual pleasures of a more
traditional and academic kind. Bogost and Consalvo deepen their theoretical
accounts by discussing numerous videogames in detail, thus enabling readers to
reconsider their own game experiences in the light of the theories proposed.
In addition, both books provide pioneering analyses of their subject matter.
Bogost’s application of rhetoric to games with political, commercial and
educational goals is unique and Consalvo provides the first comprehensive
account of cheating in digital entertainment games. A final, paratextual,
pleasure arises out of Bogost and Consalvo’s approaches to the relationship
between videogames and ordinary life. For them, playing a game is not an
isolated entertainment activity safely housed within the boundaries of the
magic circle. In contrast, playing a game, as well as cheating in play, leads us not
only to reflect on who we are as players, but also on who we are as (honest)
citizens. Bogost is explicit about the contextual impact of gaming when he
claims that games provide ‘new ways to interrogate the world’ (p. 340).
Persuasive Games is about videogames as both an expressive and persuasive
medium. In other words, it is about what videogames can accomplish. Ian
Bogost is the author of choice for this kind of work. In the past, he has
consistently combined his academic writing (for example, Unit Operations,
2006) with practical involvement in the wider game culture. For example, he
co-founded Watercooler Games (www.watercoolergames.org), which aims to
be ‘a forum for the uses of videogames in advertising, politics, education and
other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment’ and he is also a
founding partner of the studio Persuasive Games LLC, which produces
‘serious games’. In Persuasive Games Bogost explains in detail why he is
unhappy with the idea that some games are ‘serious games’. First, the
common opposition between serious and entertaining games suggests that the
latter do not communicate ‘serious’ messages. For example, Bogost discusses
how the entertainment blockbuster Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is actually
quite good at communicating a healthy eating message. In the urban
landscape of San Andreas, the only nourishment comes from fast food
restaurants. Eating moderately and including salads in your diet maintains
energy, but if CJ, the player-character, consumes high-calorie super-meals and

794
 Jansz: The paratextual pleasures of reading about playing video games

does not work out at the gym, he becomes obese, thereby seriously impairing
his ability to run and fight. Second, Bogost asserts that serious games are
biased towards the existing social order and the established interests of
political, corporate and social institutions.Third, serious games almost
exclusively focus on game content as a means of communicating messages
and thus neglect the educational potential of play.
Bogost proposes the alternative label ‘persuasive games’, which is intended
to include all types of videogames (entertainment, serious, educational) that
assert arguments and influence players. It also includes critical videogames
‘that speak past or against the fixed worldviews of institutions like
governments or corporations’ (p. 57). Finally, ‘persuasive’ emphasizes that
communicating serious information through videogames is a process.To
underline this, Bogost introduces ‘procedural rhetoric’ as an approach to game
analysis. He defines it as a new field in the art of persuasion, which is
concerned with the practice of authoring arguments through processes.The
concept is specifically targeted at computational systems, because the
functions of procedural rhetoric are executed by way of rule-based
representations and interactions rather than through the spoken or written
word or via images. An interpretation of games, employing analyses from the
established field of visual rhetoric, is insufficient for Bogost because the
images contained in them (the graphics) are subordinate to the process of
playing the game.The anti-advergame The McDonald’s Videogame is discussed
to illustrate how procedural rhetoric unfolds. In order to succeed, the game
requires its players to use questionable business practices and to neglect
environmental concerns. Inevitably, players are confronted with the game’s
argument about the inherent problems in the fast food industry.
The chapters in Persuasive Games are organized into three sections of
comparable length. ‘Politics’ is the first. I agree with Bogost that ‘as a
culturally relevant, procedurally replete medium, videogames offer a
promising way to foreground the complexities of political issues for the
layperson’ (p. 143). Bogost substantiates this by discussing examples of
persuasive games with political aims. September the 12th, for example,
confronts players with the consequences of Bush’s ‘War on Terror’. Players are
supposed to kill terrorists.They can succeed by firing missiles, but this
inevitably causes collateral damage in the Middle-Eastern village. As a result,
ordinary citizens in the game turn into terrorists and players need to increase
the frequency of their fire to kill their ever-increasing numbers.The aim of
the creators of September the 12th is to encourage players to wonder
whether Bush’s military strategy is the appropriate one.The detailed
discussion of the procedural rhetoric of political games about, for example,
the conflict in Darfur, the assassination of John F. Kennedy or nuclear war, is
an important asset to this book, but it could have done without Bogost’s

795
New Media & Society 10(5)

lengthy discussions of political theory and politics in general. It may be

interesting to discover that a member of the Serbian resistance movement
assisted the developers of A Force More Powerful, but a report about Balkan
politics in the early 21st century is superfluous.
The second part of the book is concerned with the commercial
applications of persuasive games. Bogost describes how the advertising
industry accepted videogames with little prior reflection, because they
consider them to be ‘just another medium to be accessed and exploited as
part of the larger media ecology’ (p. 152).This led to a rich diversity of
advergames, including some that are hilarious and others that are of poor
quality. Overall, our advocate of persuasive games is rather sceptical about the
commercial value involved. Bogost surmises that the current enthusiasm
about product placement in entertainment games may come to an end when
marketers realise the constraints presented by the subject matter of most
games. The Sims is one of the few games with few such constraints; its sense
of the everyday offers numerous options for the placement of ordinary
products. Of course, the details of cars can be embedded easily in race and
rally games, but introducing a new model Honda as a prize for the best
snowboarder in SSX 3 seems somewhat forced. It would be very strange to
see a World of Warcraft avatar drink from a Coca-Cola can. Splinter Cell:
Pandora Tomorrow provides the best example of a well-placed product. Its
protagonist, Sam Fisher, needs his Sony Ericsson cellphone to plan and
execute his covert operations.The emphasis on functionality is ‘a sure sign of
a procedural rhetoric at work in an in-game product’ (p. 196), because it
communicates ‘here’s what you can do with this device’ rather than focusing
on the gadget’s appearance, as is common in James Bond movies, for example.
The third part of Persuasive Games covers the learning potential of games.
In a critical assessment of earlier educational games, Bogost explains why
these have not yet delivered as much as they promised. Most educational
games aimed to produce a positive learning effect by immersing players in
specific game content and ignored the learning potential of the activity of
playing. In contrast, Bogost emphasizes that games teach through their procedural
rhetoric: players develop strategies for learning and problem-solving by
‘reading’ the game’s rhetoric.The interaction with specific real or imagined
processes in the game finally contributes to the player’s procedural literacy,
which is primarily concerned with learning how to learn.
The theoretical contribution of Persuasive Games comes largely from
Bogost’s ability to maintain a consistent dialogue between theory and
practice. Bogost’s critical assessment of examples is the supreme way to gain
an understanding of what he means by the procedural rhetoric of persuasive
games. Surprisingly, the book is silent about the access, use and effects of
persuasive games. Bogost seems genuinely surprised that people ask him

796
 Jansz: The paratextual pleasures of reading about playing video games

about how many people played The Howard Dean for Iowa Game, and whether
there was a correlation between playing and financial contributions to the
campaign. For him, ‘the most interesting results the game produced had
nothing to do with the number of plays … or contributions generated.
Rather, those came from conversations about the game’s procedural rhetoric
itself ’ (p. 327). Clearly, Bogost prefers interpretive analysis and does not want
to quantify what was accomplished. I could accept this from a humanist
scholar but, in his final pages, Bogost seems to defend a different position
when saying that media, including videogames, ‘influence and change us.They
contribute to the type of person each of us becomes, each text, each film,
each song, each game making a mark, a unique inspiration or aversion’
(p. 339).This explicit theory about media effects could have been sustained
easily by discussing data about the effects of serious messages in games
(see for example, Lieberman, 2006; Schneider and Cornwell, 2005).The scant
attention paid to the effects on players is a missed opportunity in this
comprehensive volume.
Cheating presents a detailed and well-argued report about the practice of
cheating. Parts of the book were published previously in academic journals or
presented at conferences, but the earlier contributions are reworked here into
a coherent whole.The analyses are based on a rich array of sources. Mia
Consalvo interviewed ordinary players of different games as well as people
from the game industry. She also carried out documentary research about
(early) game magazines and their place in game culture, and conducted an
online ethnography of cheating by playing her avatar, Leiya, in Final Fantasy
XI (FF XI). As an aside, she confesses that she did not cheat seriously in
FF XI, despite her earlier inclinations to do so in a rather different game,
Solitaire.
Consalvo aims to stay close to the actual experiences of gamers in her
analysis. Her claim that cheating is a dynamic practice, very much determined
by the specific context of play, is repeated so often that it almost becomes a
kind of mantra.The informal and context-dependent definitions of cheating
are presented and categorized in Chapter 4.The definitions share the notion
that cheating creates an unfair advantage for the player. In its purest
definitional form, cheating refers to anything other than completing a game
in a solo effort. For the adherents to this purism, even calling a friend for help
is barely accepted and strategy guides and walkthroughs are all considered to
be cheating. A second definition is concerned primarily with breaking the
game’s rules. Using external codes and altering the game code itself is seen as
cheating, but using guides and walkthroughs is not.The third type of
definition is the most lenient: cheating exists only in relation to another
player. People can fiddle with their own personal computers or consoles, as
long as doing so has no consequences for other players.

797
New Media & Society 10(5)

An intriguing question is why players cheat. Consalvo’s interviews and her

ethnography point to a straightforward, dominant response: ‘because I was
stuck’.The game may be too difficult to make progress or the player is not
able to spend any more time on trying to do so. Some players use cheats
structurally to save time and to take them beyond boring parts of the game.
A second reason for cheating is a purely ludic one: ‘Being playful – running
around with ninety-nine lives or a bobble head – can be immensely satisfying
for its own sake’ (p. 104). For some people in online multiplayer games, these
ludic pleasures are tied up with disturbing other players.They cheat in order
to be ‘a jerk’ or ‘an ass’ and to see how other players react. Because this kind
of ‘grief play’ (p. 102) spoils the pleasure of others, generally ‘grievers’ are
banned from online games once they are discovered.
Knowing about and using cheat codes, strategy guides and walkthroughs
contributes to what Consalvo calls ‘gaming capital’ (p. 18).This extends
Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital into the domain of gaming, and captures

how being a member of game culture is about more than playing games or even
playing them well. It’s being knowledgeable about game releases and secrets …
which game magazines are better and the best sites for walkthroughs on the
Internet. (p. 18)

When gaming capital is shared with other players, it may help to build the
player’s reputation as a well-informed gamer or cheater.
Consalvo’s cultural history of cheating concentrates on the role of the
industry, rather than on the activities of individual hackers. In the late 1980s,
Electronic Gaming Monthly and Nintendo Power were the first to publish tips
for (young) players. By the mid-1990s, independent firms published hint
books and strategy guides.The guide for Myst was one of the first
commercial successes.The game industry initially ignored the guide and cheat
business, but this changed when game developers started to recognize the
value of publishing licensed guides in tandem with the related game.
According to Consalvo, ‘having a guide is seen as building credibility, as it
lends an aura of quality to a new game release’ (p. 53). Nowadays, there are so
many guides offering so many paratextual pleasures that actually playing the
game has become almost superfluous. Consalvo also describes how the
production of electronic devices for cheating became a para-industry. For
example, GameShark and The Game Genie refigure the game or the console to
enhance the number of lives in the game. Ultimately, these devices enable
players to write their own rules, which adds a fundamentally new aspect to
cheating.
The increase in cheating did not go unnoticed.The industry tried to
develop strategies to counteract what they considered to be malpractice,
particularly in online games where cheating often disadvantages other players.
Blizzard, for example, tried to police the selling of illegal items in their online

798
 Jansz: The paratextual pleasures of reading about playing video games

game Diablo II.This prompted a backlash from players who were extremely
unhappy with the measures that the company had taken. In 2003, Blizzard
had to close more than 131,000 accounts.The company learned from this
drama and has now developed more sophisticated ways of preventing cheating
in World of Warcraft. Specialized firms now produce programs with telling
names such as Cheating-Death and Punkbuster, which enable online gamers
to play on cheat-free servers. Consalvo wonders whether this is the
appropriate way to prevent anti-social cheating. She puts her trust in measures
that involve players in the discovery of improper behaviour. For example,
player police officers operate in the Finnish online game Habbo Hotel, and
they have the power to report and punish offenders, which makes them allies
in fighting unfairness rather than potential offenders themselves.
Cheating features a bold combination of different research methods, each
deployed to capture different aspects of the phenomenon. Consalvo must be
praised for completing this interdisciplinary quest. After all, interdisciplinarity
is often applauded among game researchers, but few put this enthusiasm into
practice. Consalvo employs interpretive methods from the humanities to
describe the development of the paratextual industry and uses qualitative
social scientific methods to gather information about whether and how
players cheated and how they reflected on their practices. Player interviews
and a game ethnography are rich sources, but Consalvo’s selection of
empirical material is rather limited.The quotes and observations in the book
are good illustrations but, at some points, they are not enough to keep up
with Consalvo’s arguments in detail. Nevertheless, Consalvo’s analytic powers
and her concise style of exposition guarantee that her overarching argument
about the pleasures of cheating is a convincing one.
Second Person, edited by Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, is a natural
sequel to First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, which was
published by the same editors in 2004. First Person appeared in the heyday of
confrontations between ludological and narratological analyses of games.
Ludologists stress the unique character of games as playable media, whereas
narratologists stress that games have a lot in common with other narrative art
forms such as literature and film, because playing a game often means
developing characters and stories. First Person was meant to engage
narratologists and ludologists in an imaginary panel discussion by presenting
essays written by the advocates of each perspective, along with commentaries
and replies.The result was a cacophony of voices which were difficult to
disentangle for readers unfamiliar with the details of the debate. Now, in
Second Person, Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin seem to distance themselves from
the earlier debate by explicitly stating that ‘the contributors are not interested
in questions such as “What is a game?”’ (p. xiii).They also adopt ‘playable
media’ (p. xiii) as a general category, to point towards their general concern

799
New Media & Society 10(5)

with the playing of games and other systems.The editors confirm my

impression that the overall emphasis of the essays is nevertheless narratological,
when they say that ‘the fundamental concerns of this book are role-playing
and story’ (p. 109).
The first section of the book is about tabletop role-playing and
storytelling systems that do not require a computer.The second addresses
fictional worlds that are based on computational powers. It includes essays
about videogames such as Prince of Persia:The Sands of Time, whose creator,
Jordan Mechner, discusses how he tackled the scripting process and
convincingly shows how this game could succeed in creating a cinematic
experience.The third section is called, somewhat jokingly, ‘Real Worlds’. It
includes a diverse collection of essays about the possible social impact of
playing games. Some contributors address the serious issue of politics. Bogost
and Frasca, for example, present their persuasive game for the 2004 American
presidential candidate Howard Dean. Other essays focus on the impact of
entertainment games and include Nick Fortugno’s discussion of the real-
world consequences of live-action role-playing in his essay about A Measure
for Marriage.The most intriguing contributions in this section are those about
alternate reality games, which run online and aim to engage players in real-
world missions.The game I Love Bees provides an interesting example of the
procedures involved. In her chapter on this game, Jane McGonigal describes
how, in early August 2004, a set of 210 unique GPS coordinates linked to a
particular time on 24 August appeared without any explanation on the
webpages of I Love Bees.This resulted in enthusiastic online speculation
about what these geographical places meant and what would happen at the
particular time. On 24 August, dozens of players attended at each location
and waited to see what would happen when the clock reached the specified
time. A nearby payphone rang, delivering specific instructions and the game
continued.Two things are particularly interesting about this case: players
interpreted the appearance of GPS coordinates as a command by turning up
and they were well prepared for anything to happen.They had brought their
laptops, mobile phones and cameras with them and had support teams of
friends ready at home to enable them to undertake and coordinate any kind
of action.
Second Person is a diverse collection of short essays.This may be attractive
to readers who are seeking a quick introduction to the manifold approaches
to role-playing games in game studies, art and design. However, the price of
this diversity is rather high, because the collection does not succeed in
offering an analytic framework for academic research about role-playing
games. It is also unfortunate that the editorial introductions to the three
sections are too shallow to contribute significantly to such a framework.

800
 Jansz: The paratextual pleasures of reading about playing video games

The three books in this review are all well suited to engendering
paratextual pleasures for academics who play and study digital games. Bogost
and Consalvo succeed in drawing readers into a convincing line of argument
with respect to persuasive games and cheating.
Second Person invites readers to enjoy themselves by flipping through the
pages and cherrypicking the best essays.Together, the three volumes stimulate
reflection about one’s own experiences in play and research, as well as on the
general nature of contemporary game research. As a result, the books
contribute to the development of game studies as an academic discipline.This
must be applauded, but it is not enough.The core messages about, for
example, the diversity of game types, the fundamentally social nature of much
of gaming and the richness of player experiences, including the fun of
cheating, must be taken out of the ivory tower and placed into the public
realm to counter prevalent misconceptions, such as ‘games are all about
violence’, ‘gaming draws people away from what really matters in society’,
‘gaming inevitably results in social isolation’ and ‘games are addictive’. It is
worthwhile to consider that the rhetorical battle about games should be
fought not on television, the internet or in the press, but on familiar terrain: a
persuasive game about the controversial status of digital games in
contemporary society.

References
Bogost, I. (2006) Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Cassell, J. and H. Jenkins (eds) (1998) From Barbie to Mortal Kombat. Gender and Computer
Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Juul, J. (2005) Half Real.Videogames between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Lieberman, D.A. (2006) ‘What Can We Learn from Playing Interactive Games?’, in
P.Vorderer and J. Bryant (eds) Playing Video Games: Motives, Responses and Consequences,
pp. 379–95. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Murray, J. (1998) Hamlet on the Holodeck:The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Raessens, J. and J. Goldstein (eds) (2005) Handbook of Computer Game Studies. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Salen, K. and E. Zimmerman (2003) Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Schneider, L.-P. and T.B. Cornwell (2005) ‘Cashing in on Crashes via Brand Placement in
Computer Games:The Effects of Experience and Flow on Memory’, International
Journal of Advertising 24(3): 321–43.
Wardrip-Fruin, N. and P. Harrigan (eds) (2004) First Person: New Media as Story,
Performance and Game. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

801