In one of her later essays, Eve Sedgwick (2012) muses ‘sometimes I think the books that affect us most are… the books we know about – from their titles, from reading reviews, or hearing people talk about them – but haven’t, over a period of time, actually read’ (123). Unread, these books can remain ‘objects of speculation, of accumulated reverie’ (ibid.), proving enduringly provocative or inspirational even if what we extrapolate from them is wrong. Sedgwick’s observation, of course, does not apply solely to books – one might, for example, imagine ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ to be addressed to a person who’s just overcome some kind of dire tribulation, rather than someone with no options left; Sedgwick herself made hay with the fact that her essay ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’ was held up as an exemplar of all that was wrong with literary study not just before its critics had read it but before it had even been written (1994, 15).

As for books, films, songs and essays, so for games: video game titles can be both evocative and deceptive, all the more so because even when we know what a game looks like it is hard to determine how it will feel until the controller is in our hands. Personally, I have always been highly susceptible to the allure of Japanese games with so-called “Engrish” titles – Bulk Slash; Virtual On: Oratorio Tangram; Omega Boost. As Trevor Harrison (2008) argues, “Engrish” is characterized by constructions that might seem bizarre or just comically wrong to the native English speaker, but which are, in many cases, governed by an ‘internal logic’ based on creating unaccustomed and even outright paradoxical syntactical combinations productive of a certain connotative frisson (144-6). Prioritizing feeling, novelty and impact over straightforward sense, this strategy is a good fit for the kinds of visceral spectacle in which the games named above trade.

It is not just games’ titles that speak to us, for this is an industry in which developers and publishers often have recourse to buzz terms, bullet points and neologisms in order to convey how their product works and just what distinguishes it from its rivals. From Shenmue’s ‘quick time events’ to Red Faction‘s ‘Geomod technology’ to Forza 5’s ‘drivatars’ and Battlefield 4’s ‘levolution’ system, video games are in love with unwieldy coinages. A staple of back-of-the-box feature lists, such terms are easily ridiculed, but we might productively see them as constituting an understudied microgenre of game-writing – commercially motivated to be sure, but  also a key means of ‘paratextual’ mediation between developer and potential player (Genette, 1997).

Try as they might to entice us, however, such terms ultimately tend to be too vague, not to mention too empty, to truly tantalize. Fortunately there is another kind of gamic paratext that, while tailored to a different (in fact, an almost almost diametrically opposite) purpose, often proves more adept at piquing playerly curiosity: patch notes. Insofar as they list the problems that a particular software update will attempt to fix, cataloguing flaws, conflicts and oversights, these texts should provide a sobering counterpoint to the heady claims made by feature lists. In practice, however ironically, they often afford us intriguing insights into the nature of a game’s operation and appeal.

Skyrim (which title, we might note in passing, wags have suggested better befits a toilet cleaner than a fantasy role-playing game) provides a helpful case in point. The game was released on the eleventh of November 2011 in what was, even for the famously bug-prone Bethesda Softworks, a formidably glitchy state: dragons flew backwards; corpses arbitrarily dematerialized; monsters’ skeletons became lodged in solid walls. By the end of the month the game had been patched to version 1.2, and the patch notes that accompanied this update have since come to be regarded as something of a classic of the genre, exemplifying the power of such texts to synecdochically gesture at the complexities, the forms of emergent spectacle, the proliferating possibilities that made the game so engaging in the first place. Moreover, as Kenneth Goldsmith (2011) would no doubt point out, you only have to remove one line to make the list into an albeit rather unconventional sonnet:

UPDATE 1.2 NOTES (all platforms unless specified)

Improved occasional performance issues resulting from long term play (PlayStation 3)
Fixed issue where textures would not properly upgrade when installed to drive (Xbox 360)
Fixed crash on startup when audio is set to sample rate other than 44100Hz (PC)
Fixed issue where projectiles did not properly fade away
Fixed occasional issue where a guest would arrive to the player’s wedding dead
Dragon corpses now clean up properly
Fixed rare issue where dragons would not attack
Fixed rare NPC sleeping animation bug
Fixed rare issue with dead corpses being cleared up prematurely
Skeleton Key will now work properly if player has no lockpicks in their inventory
Fixed rare issue with renaming enchanted weapons and armor
Fixed rare issue with dragons not properly giving souls after death
ESC button can now be used to exit menus (PC)
Fixed occasional mouse sensitivity issues (PC)
General functionality fixes related to remapping buttons and controls (PC)

Most commentators immediately seized upon the line about dead wedding guests, a teasingly terse clause that might have been custom-engineered to elicit awe, amusement and curiosity. While I had already sunk a good number of hours into the game by the time this text was disseminated, I was not, prior to reading these notes, even aware that it was possible to get married in Skyrim, and was still less able to imagine how the scenario of a corpse arriving at my avatar’s wedding would actually play out (would they be upright? Would there still be flesh on their bones? What differentiated a dead Nord from a living one?). If Bethesda had done an admirable job of hyping the game prior to release (harping particularly on the importance of the ‘radiant storytelling’ system that would generate a literally endless supply of quests) the scenario sketched in this one line arguably gives a much clearer sense of what makes Skyrim special than any developer interview or press release could – indeed, one wonders just how many players, upon reading the notes, purposefully avoided downloading the update in favour of booting up the game and going a-wooing.

I should perhaps make it clear at this point that by drawing attention to patch notes I am not attempting to prop up the by now rather tired argument that glitches have the potential to somehow cut through gaming’s illusionistic patina, putting us in touch with something more ‘real’. Instead, I want to suggest that in the patch note we might find inklings of a mode of writing capable of doing justice to gaming’s virtual dimension (in the properly probabilistic sense), of capturing the way in which players can simultaneously (or almost simultaneously) experience games as captivating fictions, technical achievements and bug-ridden pains in the neck. The rest of the list, while devoid of any single item quite so compelling as the dead guest clause, is interesting and instructive in other respects, and does much to suggest the multifaceted nature of both games and gameplay. Particularly noteworthy are its tellingly coy circumlocutions (PS3 performance issues are not fixed but ‘improved’; Bethesda would struggle to get this version of the game stable over an extended series of updates spanning several months) and its bracingly abrupt switches in register, from metaphysical considerations in one line to banal technical minutiae the next (“Fixed rare issue with dragons not properly giving souls after death /ESC button can now be used to exit menus (PC)”). In this last respect the document resonates with Ian Bogost’s (2012) comments on the list as an ‘ontographic’ technology, a mode whereby a ‘particular configuration [may be] celebrated simply on the basis of its existence’ (38). For Bogost, lists, which are functional first and foremost, offer a salutary corrective to more ‘literary’ modes of description, enjoining attention to specific details, to the fact that ‘no matter how fluidly a system may operate’ it will depend to some degree on the (often uneasy) collaboration of elements that remain, on a fundamental level, ‘utterly isolated [from one another], mutual aliens’ (ibid. 40). In Skyrim’s case we can see how the interoperation of different features and protocols within the game system supported an experience that some found captivating, others ‘broken’ and far from fluid.

As we might imagine, what is true of professional commercial products is also true of mods, with the important difference that the barrier to entry is lower than with full retail games: with no need to pay, owners of the original game have little reason not to download an add-on and see for themselves whether it lives up to the claims made in its maker’s blurb. Skyrim has a particularly active mod scene, one in which the cut-throat competition for downloads and upvotes has bred a discourse rife with inflated promises, unwieldy acronyms (W.A.T.E.R. = Water and Terrain Enhancement Redux), and much loose usage of the term immersive. Again, however, descriptions of bugs and glitches tend to paint a picture that is at once more reflective of the actual experience on offer and more capable of supporting speculation, fantasy and projection. It is not uncommon for modders to admit that they have no idea why users are experiencing particular problems, and such admissions – which are, in some cases, very detailed and frank – offer glimpses into the logical guts of the game that can be as dizzying as any polygonal vista. I leave you with some snatches from modder Araanlm’s notes on his Here There be Monsters mod, notes I find both cryptic and strangely romantic: “Somehow in doing this I managed to mess up the original location of Jormungandr, which was just north of Northwatch Keep. I moved him to a different island north of Orphan’s Tear, but the original location is still messed up and causes a crash to desktop… I’m not sure if the monsters can actually use [summoning spells] since they are not human NPCs.”

Araanlm (2013). Here There be Monsters. Steam Workshop. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=81166964

Betheda Blog (2011, November 30). Skyrim 1.2 Update. http://www.bethblog.com/2011/11/30/skyrim-1-2-update/

Bogost, Ian (2012). Alien Phenomenology, or, What its like to be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Genette, Gerard (1997). Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Goldsmith, Kenneth (2011). Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. New York: Columbia University Press.

Harrison, Trevor (2008). 21^st Century Japan: Anew Sun Rising. London: Black Rose Books.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1994). Tendencies. Durham NC: Duke University Press

– (2012). The Weather in Proust. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.