It is hoped that by developing such vocabulary and measurements, many games, past, contemporary and future may be usefully analysed in relatively stable terms. These axes help to describe the balance of a videogame’s ‘gameness’ with its ‘metaphor’, premise or, to borrow Juul’s term, fiction. The word level has been chosen here as it most readily applies to videogames, but is also related to the discreet, iterative puzzles in crosswords or soduku games. The second axis describes the game’s structure, from strict level-based situations to sprawling open-world scenarios. Of course all games are rooted in their code, but very few do not attempt to cloak this system in some kind of metaphor, from invading aliens to guitar notation. This axis describes how far from pure code or mathematics the videogame’s aesthetic exterior is. The first is the ‘thickness of metaphor’ utilized by a game. Two axes will be suggested to place various videogame titles in relation to one another. The existence and strength of these abstractions will place the games on axes of measurement. This play is as opposed to the unmitigated experience of real life, as directed by an auteur of some sort. These tropes are analysed in their capacities to simultaneously distance the videogame from reality, but to make possible the playing of the game. This paper highlights and discusses the function of several tropes and artefacts found within contemporary videogames. Thus, this chapter will argue that critically oriented games must build not only strive for feminist, postcolonial narrative representations of characters, but also take into account the ways in which the affordances and histories of game design architecture can warp progressive narrative elements. In order to preserve “physical realism” and to satisfy the demands of gaming architecture, designers shape playable women characters like Elizabeth as weakened men, leading to the material and performative propagation of misogynist media tropes. While magical feminist characters in written literature serve to countermand these embedded masculinist, imperialist values, the material-discursive and historical processes performed by game engines actively resist the implementation of real-time, postcolonial gameplay. These logics better afford game mechanics that rely on Newtonian calculations of power and force, such as gun-based combat. Physics engines control objects in the gameworld via rationalist, rule-based, hierarchical logics. This chapter argues that Elizabeth’s postcolonial, “magical feminist” character design, which can be read as an alternative, non-positivist, anti-imperialist framing of power, became undermined by the material-discursive agencies of game engines. During interviews with Burial at Sea’s development staff, designers emphasized their desire for players controlling Elizabeth to have a gameplay experience that was authentic to her character, rather than playing as “Booker in a dress.” Unfortunately, the resulting game featured an Elizabeth stripped of her quantum powers, whose major gameplay mechanic was hiding from enemies. While Booker shoots his way through the gameworld, Elizabeth phases through time and space, confounding enemies by revealing multiple configurations of parallel worlds to them, and unraveling the mysteries of the game’s plot by exploring alternative world histories and events. In earlier episodes, Elizabeth, a nineteen-year-old woman with the ability to move between quantum realities, magically navigates the gameworld in a manner radically different from the game’s gun-toting playable character, Booker DeWitt. Vossen Burial at Sea: Episode 2, the last in a series of post-game downloadable content (DLC) for Bioshock Infinite, casts the player in the role of Elizabeth, a major non-playable character in the game’s previous installments.
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