Games Within Games

Originally posted 2/17/2004. I’m bumping it up because I like this post and because Sarah just sent me this piece about an MMOG built within the “agora” (Wagner James Au’s term) of Second Life. Thanks, Sarah!

“Subgames” embedded within games: totally cool and arguably becoming much more prevalent. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic has a couple of subgames, most notably Pazaak, and iirc, Kari mentioned an old 80′s game embedded within Animal Crossing. And then there’s SimCity (as Slice City) within The Sims.

So how can we talk about this? Since we’re talking about computer games, it’s fun and possibly useful to refer to it in terms of recursion, but it’s also possible to think about it in terms of Dallenbach’s mise en abyme and textual mirroring.

// Begin embedded reading notes

Lucien Dallenbach. The Mirror in the Text. trans. Jeremy Whiteley with Emma Hughes. Chicago: U Chicago Press, 1989.

In The Mirror in the Text, Lucien Dallenbach takes a look at Andre Gide’s coinage of “mise en abyme” to refer to Hamlet’s play-within-a-play and other examples of, in Gide’s words, “in a work of art… thus transposed, at the level of the characters, the subject of the work itself” (7).

Dallenbach expands the concept of the mise en abyme, bringing in the idea of the mirror: a text-within-a-text that destabilizes within and without:

the spy-mirror has less the role of integrating an ‘external’ reality into the novel than of abolishing the opposition between within and without, or rather achieving a sort of oscillation between them. (31-32).

Dallenbach identifies three types of mirroring or duplication…

(a) simple duplication (a sequence which is connected by similarity to the work that encloses it);
(b) infinite duplication (a sequence which is connected by similarity to the work that encloses it and which itself includes a sequence that… etc.); and
(c)aporetic duplication (a sequence that is supposed to enclose the work that encloses it).

… and combines them: “…a ‘mise en abyme’ is any internal mirror that reflects the whole of the narrative by simple, repeated or ‘specious’ (or paradoxical) duplication” (36).

“Fictional” mise en abyme makes the container legible: “In simplifying the complexity of the original, the fictional counterpart converts time into space and succession into contemporaneity, thereby increasing our ability to ‘take it in’” (56). It also can act as “an ‘isotopic shifter… thereby pluralizing meaning” (57); it can bring to light nuances that the fiction may otherwise obscure.

This mise en abyme can function as a generic shifter; since the embedded work is often of a different genre, it can give the work a “bi-generic structure” (72).

// End embedded reading notes

I’ve been thinking about comics represented within comics, both materially (people inside a comic book reading comic books) and semiotically (internal comics representations clearly marked as divergent from their outer system, like Art’s indy-comic prison vignette in Maus), and trying to pinpoint exactly why this occurs so frequently. It seems like these embedded objects and structures indicate not only the containing artifact itself, but its serial or generic history: the mirror reflects the comic’s position as part of a larger material and narrative system.

This is especially true, imho, in mainstream superhero comics, where the fundamental seriality, incompleteness, and openness to “crossover” make the mirror’s relationship to the containing narrative very different: the mirror is not so much contained or internally generated as it is inserted from an external or “meta-diegetic” imagined space. An aporetic duplication that indicates the system external to the enclosing narrative. This is closest to what Dallenbach calls the “mise en abyme of the enunciation”: the embedded form does not reflect the encloser but rather a larger system or history of production and reception that encloses both.

Could we consider these embedded games in a similar way, as indicators of a history of games that informs the container, a sign of the genealogical “gameness” of the increasingly complex structures that contain them? If so, I like the range of oscillations: The Sims (Slice City) indicates a history of brand as well as genre, and encloses a macroscopic city view within a local and human one. KOTOR (Pazaak) puts on a more divergent spin: the card game’s placement within this complex interactive fiction (or role-playing, depending on your terminological preference) structure shows us the wide variety of experiences we categorize within “game,” from the rudimentary structures of card games to the sophisticated system of the RPG.

I love that I wrote “KOTOR (Pazaak)” up there. That makes so much sense out of context.