How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gamer: Reframing Subversive Play in Story-Based Games

Abstract

Much like books have “implied readers” and films have “implied viewers”, games have “implied players”. The ways in which these implied players are constructed have material implications for how games are designed and studied. In this paper I explore a pervasive narrative about the ways in which players seek to subvert the desires of game designers and storytellers. This narrative of the subversive player has informed extensive research and design in both commercial games and scholarly interactive narrative research. I argue that addressing game designs to an implied subversive player intentionally misrepresents the complex processes of meaning making that occur during play, creating an artificial conflict between the player and the designer that is harmful to the development of rich narrative in games. I propose a way of understanding subversive play as part of the process of building the literacies needed by the player to better enact the narratives of the designer, rather than subvert them.