Christopher B. Patterson, Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games

Abstract

If “queer game studies” as a field has grown substantially in the last decade, Open World Empire in no small measure offers a much-needed queer-of-color intervention that presents exciting new challenges and avenues for study in the field of game studies as a whole. At its core, Open World Empire is a methodological text, pushing the boundaries of how to do game studies, one that offers a compellingly welltheorized and well-executed framework. Christopher B. Patterson provides crucial insight into a deeper, more compelling future for analysis and theory in game studies, merging thoughts from American studies, Asian American studies, and postmodern, poststructuralist, and queer theories. Open World Empire’s interventions in game studies are plentiful and potent. Patterson invites us to rethink and reimagine the core tenets of game analysis through the language of race, erotics, and globalization. In this two-part text, he encourages us to shift our perspective from the rules and mechanics of game design and from ideological critique of games’ content and cosmetics to the experiences of play as “intimate” encounters with others—racial, cultural, linguistic, technological. Patterson constructs an analytical frame that not only acknowledges but makes central the experiences of pleasure loss that players can experience as they invest time and resources. It shows game designers the moves they might wish to avoid when introducing loss into their game to avoid an overly strong reaction, like regret—that is, players will more likely avoid situations in which they have a higher chance for regretting their decision. This gives game designers a way to think about how they present choices in their games, ensuring that players can avoid such excessive responses where possible. Competence, as well, plays into such calculations, since the author suggests that the less informed about any situation players are, the more often they become skeptical when making a choice. This should lead designers to present choices that players feel more comfortable making. Taken together, these principles offer a tool kit that can help designers better understand the choices they create when designing a game. Engelstein’s timely work advances the discussion on player psychology in games and further explores the nuances of how players react when they encounter failure—a topic upon which MIT Press’s Playful Thinking series (see Jesper Juul, The Art of Failure) was launched. Over the last decade, game researchers and designers have become increasingly interested in player psychology and exploring the ways in which games encourage us to think, react, and feel the ways designers intended. Achievement Relocked is a great read for game designers, researchers, or enthusiasts looking to understand player experiences around loss and reward.