In his opening chapter, Alexander Galloway seeks to provide an “interpretive framework” with which to study various types of videogames centering around two basic classifications: diegetic versus nondiegetic and operator versus machine. Galloway places great emphasis on the dangers of diminishing the role of the machine in producing the overall effect of the game, stressing that the game succeeds through a collaboration between “organic and nonorganic actors”, which, in its most basic form, can be said to refer to the operator and the machine. This suggested to me that the machine was almost like a player in the game, as opposed to being considered simply the medium for play. With this in mind, I found Galloway’s disagreement with Huizinga and Caillois over the significance of cheating in games to be particularly intriguing; Galloway proposes that cheats are a form of nondiegetic operator acts which are just as important to the game as diegetic operator acts like shooting or jumping, while Huizinga and Caillois maintain that cheating threatens the integrity of the playing experience. By considering the machine as a player in the game, a cheat almost seems to be a manifestation of the concept of agôn, brought about by the competition between the player and the machine as the player strives to defeat the machine. Upon revisiting Caillois’ own descriptions of agôn, in which he stated that it requires “sustained attention, appropriate training, assiduous application, and the desire to win” (Caillois 15), I realized that his description of agôn doesn’t sound so drastically different from what many dedicated “gamers” experience when they work to “beat the game”. Considering this idea of competition, cheating can be considered an available tool used by the operator to beat the machine. In this way, Galloway’s assertion that cheating is an integral part of the game can be justified; putting it in Caillois’ terms, it is merely another action performed by the operator to prove his or her superiority over the machine.
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This question of cheating also made me think of what Caillois said about the cheater not being nearly as threatening to the game as the nihilist who refuses to play. Do you think the same logic holds true when talking about videogames (as opposed to, say, card games)?
I would definitely agree that the same logic would apply to video games because video games often require the user to accept an alternative reality that is very different from true reality. Thus, people who regard the game as trivial and refuse to play would be extremely damaging to the game world because of the fact that a video game is based on the user accepting the general premise of the game. Therefore, the power of dismissive thinking is greater with video games than for games such as card games, where there is not such a leap of imagination required in order for the game to progress.