How do players understand video game hardware: Tactility or tech-speak?

Introduction

Video games owe their existence to digital technology: modern electronic consumer devices lay the material foundation for every single video game (Juul, 2005: 49–52), and every single game world is constructed through digital technology. Digital technology is also omnipresent in everyday gaming practices: it is part of input devices, such as mouses and keyboards, controllers or touch-screens on mobile devices; it is in output devices – mostly displays, and also speakers and the ‘rumble’ feature of most modern controllers – that present game worlds to players; it also enables Internet or local area connectivity, so that players can game together. Even in the 2000s and now in the 2010s, video game consoles are still essentially custom-built, highly specialised computers (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2009), whose technologies are specifically selected and combined to enable particular ludic experiences. Through the rise of ‘platform studies’ (e.g. Apperley and Jayemane, 2012; Apperley and Parikka, 2018; Bogost and Montfort, 2007), we have begun to see focused examinations of such individual games consoles and their technological – and cultural, social and economic – dimensions, such as the work of Montfort and Bogost (2009), Gazzard (2016) and Arsenault (2017), which interrogate the affordances and capabilities of these machines, and how gaming experiences are subsequently shaped. In turn, video game culture is often assumed to share a natural and strong connection with geek or computer enthusiast culture (McArthur, 2009; Simon, 2007), with concepts of technological competence and comfort being central to both (Kirkpatrick, 2004; Taylor, 2009). This remains a mainstay of the popular imagination surrounding digital game players.

Our focus in this article is on a particular register of language used to address, define and elaborate on these technological elements of gaming: terms and definitions variously understood as technobabble, buzzwords or tech-speak, but which we will term tech-speak for the duration of this work. ‘Tech-speak’ terms are ubiquitous within the realm of gaming – not only are they used by the games industry to describe the hardware and software required for gaming, but they are also often encountered by players during their everyday gaming activities. There are several reasons why such language and its purposes and impacts should attract our interest. First, we note that ‘traditional’ media forms do not (in the present day) expect users to engage with these sorts of concepts and discourses, making studying the role of tech-speak in digital games important for understanding the conceptualisation of digital games as a specifically new media form. Framing and defining certain promised technological experiences have been previously noted as part of game and game console advertising (Parisi, 2018), but other then-new technologies such as gramophones and typewriters (Kittler, 1999) were also in their day understood, in part, through technological terminology and discourses. Through such phrasing, a capitalist system encourages what Hayles (2008: 170) calls the ‘inflation of desire’, by attempting to ‘seduc[e] the consumer with power fantasies’, which are easily defined and quantified with tech-speak or its historical antecedents. Nevertheless, in the present day, such tech-speak is entirely absent in literature, and relatively absent for the most part in film and television: yet ubiquitous in gaming. Why? Following on from this question, we might also look to understand this ‘new-media-ness’ as manifesting specifically through the use of endlessly updated tech-speak, which emphasises the newness in digital gaming even 50 years after its creation as a media form. In many ways, digital gaming is a profoundly ‘mature’ media form, and certainly claims a higher profitability than music or cinema (Hoggins, 2019), and yet appears reluctant to settle into any kind of accepted normality for its existence as a technology. As Carey (2008: 197) puts it, ‘the future is a peculiar kind of speaker who tells us where we are going before we know it ourselves’, and the tech-speak of the games industry seems endlessly fixated on this ever-moving future. Examining tech-speak in gaming therefore allows us to examine numerous dynamics of discourse, technology and consumption; and how the idea of the new has become central, yet contested, within the digital games ecosystem.

Specifically, the research we present here shows that players actually rarely use tech-speak to discuss gaming technology, despite the centrality of technology to video games themselves, and to game advertising and marketing regimes. This runs strongly counter to what, as we will show, one might ‘expect’ from game consumers. Drawing on interview data examining everyday video game play (Pargman and Jakobsson, 2008) collected across two countries with very different sociocultural, historical and economic contexts of everyday gaming – the United Kingdom and mainland China (Hjorth and Arnold, 2013) – we demonstrate instead that tech-speak is almost entirely absent from participants’ remarks on both gaming hardware and other gaming-related topics in general. This observation – which seems to fly in the face of industry expectations and cultural expectations, as we elucidate in more detail shortly, and thus opens up a range of questions surrounding both marketing and culture surrounding digital games – suggests two routes of analysis. The first is to contrast our respondents’ comments against the tech-speak used in industry-created media discussions about video game technology, and to consequently explore potential explanations for why such terminology is actually overlooked by players despite its core marketing role. The second task is to examine more fully how gaming technology is conceptualised by players themselves, to understand how new technology as a concept or its use as an embodied experienced practice, contributes to the player–game relationship.

In the first case, we draw on Adorno and Horkheimer’s ([1944] 1997) work on enlightenment, as well as other theorisations about technology emerging from similar lines of thought. Adorno and Horkheimer remind us that terminologies are not as ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ as they might seem – socioculturally, politically or ontologically. Specifically, they point out that the more that a technology tries to take on such ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ appearance, the more this will in fact contribute to further mythicisation of that technology, for such language is never designed to truly enlighten. This framing is appropriate – rather than later theorisations which often focus more on consumption activities – because our research suggests the game industry’s communications of this sort are designed to have an enlightening effect. Following Adorno and Horkheimer, we will demonstrate that the terminology of technology is utilised by the games industry in a way that could be interpreted as primarily seeking to glamorise and ‘hype up’ technology (cf. Jarvenpaa and Makinen, 2008; Stahl, 1995), thus promoting further consumption. In doing so, technology is objectified, fetishised and mythicised, alongside with the terminology that defines and describes it. We will show that this contributes to the separation between the framing of ‘objective factual technology’ by the games industry and games media, and the terminology used by players to describe the ‘subjective tactile technology’ they actually experience. On this basis, we argue that the terminology, while it may be technically precise, may be interpreted as too abstract by users. The terminology promoted by the industry thus seems to contribute to a mythicised sense of technology for video players, shedding new light on how players perceive – or not – the material technologies they use.

The second task is to investigate how technology was talked about by the participants, and the meaning-making processes reflected in the experiences and perspectives they related. In this article, we address one particular case study of this, which reinforces our first point. Specifically, we examine potential logics behind two statements that seem to fly in the face of what one would ‘expect’ players to perceive about gaming technology. One was made by our Chinese participants, who argued that games consoles were able to offer superior graphics to PC (personal computer) gaming. This is an intriguing and controversial claim within a contemporary games sector and gaming culture that routinely emphasises the technical (broadly) and graphical (specifically) superiority of ‘PC gaming’ (cf. Jurgelionis et al., 2009). We consequently argue that this case reveals that gaming technology is not perceived or understood through terminology or ‘facts’, but rather experienced tactilely in actual use, against the backdrop of one’s previous experiences, which are in turn framed by players’ socioeconomic backgrounds.

In the other claim, one participant suggested that his two screens of identical size were sufficient for PC gaming but not for console gaming. We will argue that this can be best explained through theorising and situating the different spatial relations between a player and the screens. Simply put, a monitor would ‘feel’ smaller for console gaming, because a player would typically sit much further away from the screen than she would when play games on PC. This illustrates the importance of continuing to put gaming – an activity that is often described as overly ‘virtual’ – back into the physical space where it takes place, which is a part of a player’s everyday life, routine and spaces (cf. Giddings, 2009; Hjorth and Richardson, 2014; Hollet and Ehret, 2015). In both cases, we follow from our previous study of game-purchasing choices as part of ‘everyday’ game-purchasing experience (Johnson and Luo, 2019), which highlighted the importance of quotidian player practices in understanding lived game consumption. We thus aim to show that these contrasts with industry discourses are an important further element of understanding everyday, ordinary, tactile video game use, in contrast to what advertisements would have us believe is essential.

Finally, and more broadly, we believe player understandings of technology are also important for making sense of numerous dimensions of video games as leisure items, purchased goods, and most centrally, as new media technologies. In particular, it prompts us to reconsider how the games industry markets its wares; what sorts of elements inform player choice of both purchase and play and how do players see the machines they spend their time with? These questions lie at the very heart of the player–game relationship, which is in turn one of the most common aspects of modern media–audience relations. We will examine these questions by showing that ideas and concepts of ‘technology’ are not absent in participants’ remarks about digital games; however, what is missing is the terminology promoted so heavily by the industry – which to say, the tech-speak that serves to turn technology into a mythicised form. It was not that our participants did not understand technology, although some of them were certainly less technically fluent than others. Instead, even if they did not consider themselves to be well-versed with the terminology of technology, they still understood ‘technology’ well – but as a foundation of their personal, individual and tactile relationship with video games as a natively interactive medium. We hope that through examining this, we will shed new light on understanding how media technologies, especially those framed as ‘new’, are experienced subjectively in a modern consumer’s everyday life.

The objectification of technology

We begin by considering the games industry and the theoretical concepts we believe important to bring to bear in this analysis. First, it is well-acknowledged that the games sector and its media manifestations are strongly shaped by contemporary global capitalism (Consalvo, 2006; Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2009; Johnson and Luo, 2019, etc.), which seeks an everlasting expansion of both production and consumption (Lewis, 2013). Unlike video game consumption which has always been replete with attempt to limit piracy and ensure official game purchases (Depoorter, 2014; Goode and Kartas, 2012), gaming hardware consumption is not contingent on whether game piracy is rife, because players need hardware to play games even if those same games were originally pirated, and gaming hardware is extremely challenging to pirate compared with software packages. As such, differences in economic contexts usually reflect what kind of hardware a player purchases, rather than whether a player would purchase hardware at all (in contrast to the case of software piracy, as piracy almost completely obviates the unit cost).

As such, we might easily imagine that most media content promoting gaming technology glamorises technological change like most other commercial media coverage on technology (Campbell, 2015; Lewis, 2013; Stivers, 2001). Most technological developments across all sectors are framed as improvements, such as lower energy consumption or longer battery life, better (faster) hardware and so on. Sure enough, gaming technology is also presented as something that will guarantee a ‘better’ gaming experience – as Lewis (2013: 137–139) points out, media industries are themselves compelled by consumer capitalism to urge users to replace ‘old’ technological items with ‘new’ ones through the promises of better quality. This is in service to a consumer-oriented capitalist drive which understands ever-expanding consumption as an indication of ‘growth’. Yet the actual improvements, these new technological items bring is increasingly marginal (Campbell, 2015: 38; Lewis, 2013: 139–140) – or at the very least, not at all proportional to the additional volume of financial investment required for the ‘upgrade’. As such, tech-speak here is used to translate technological advancement to potential consumers: in other words, if the upgrade is not tangible, it must be made readable.

This in turn generates a fetishism of new technology, which leads us to our core theoretical concepts. Deriving from Marx’s notion of fetishism, Dean (2008) and Hornborg (2014) have both argued that the way modern society understands and presents technology is a form of fetishism in-and-of itself. In their respective works, they propose that what objectification and the mythicisation of technology entails is a discursive de-politicisation of technology. This process serves to hide the fact that technology (or ‘machinery’) is developed, deployed and promoted by capital to reinforce an existing unequal political and economic order (Marx, 1999). In our case, it is to attract and convince more consumers to invest in gaming technology: both the technological advancement and the improvement are presented as objectively certifiable fact, and thus are not only desirable as they guarantee a better experience, but they also merit the higher cost because of it. Since it is ‘objectively’ better, a consumer should always be interested in such improvement, and to go out and buy it right away. Ultimately, the terminology – the tool that supposedly enlightens us about technology – changes experience into numbers that do not convey the subjective, tactile experiences players actually have, and such abstractions sever the links between the ‘objective’ materialistic side and the subjective tactile side of a technology: which is to say, the links between what the industry presents for consumption, and what players actually experience during their acts of play. As Adorno and Horkheimer ([1944] 1997) put it,

Abstraction, the tool of enlightenment, treats its objects as did fate, the notion which it rejects: it liquidates them. Under the levelling domination of abstraction (which makes everything in nature repeatable), and of industry (for which abstraction ordains repetition), the freedoms themselves finally come to form that ‘herd’ which Hegel has declared to be the result of the Enlightenment. The distance between subject and object, a presupposition of abstraction, is grounded in the distance from the thing itself which the master achieved through the mastered. (p. 13)

This ‘subsumption of particulars’ takes the form of ‘scientific and rational language’ (Witkin, 1998: 13) as reflected in such terminology. Through this extract, Adorno and Horkheimer help us understand that the industry’s objectification process that created tech-speak – abstraction – is destined to contradict its supposed goal: enlightenment. This is because it was never meant to address objects in-and-of themselves, but instead to standardise them in ways that allows this supposed ‘enlightenment’ to be replicable. In the case of gaming, the industry draws on objectification/abstraction to convey the notion that the improvement brought by newer hardware is repeatable regardless of the context: a piece of hardware with 30% higher specifications is guaranteed to produce a 30% ‘better’ result (whatever that might actually mean), no matter how or where it is used. Comparable objectifications and abstractions have been made before, such as an emphasis on the promised haptic nature of handheld and touch-based gaming devices (Parisi, 2018), Xerox’s marketing of their initial copier which promised an abstracted idea of specifically office use within firm boundaries (Gitelman, 2014), or IBM’s advertising construction of what ‘computerized space’ (Harwood, 2011: 157) should look like, into which their computers should be purchased and then installed. These abstractions and similar constructions of anticipated use and experience thus appear to manifest in many different kinds of ‘new’ technology, where the (ongoing) quantitative and iterative ‘newness’ of the devices in question becomes reified into particular ways its proponents use to frame and market its apparent benefits.

However, in gaming such higher specifications are a constant and ongoing matter: new hardware that can achieve new and impressive results is constantly being developed, sold in PCs and integrated into new generations of gaming consoles. In turn, the older hardware – which was once the newest hardware promising the most exciting experiences – are put to one side; all the promises of tech-speak are thus temporally bounded. Such practices have been widely discussed in different contexts and from different perspectives, in relation to notions such as ‘planned obsolescence’ whereby products are specifically designed to have a limited lifespan in order to encourage new purchases (Guiltinan, 2009), and ‘upgrade culture’ (Ashton, 2011), which refers to a cultural drive for desiring the ‘latest thing’ or the best possible ‘upgrades’ for one’s products or technologies. Adorno and Horkheimer’s theorisation of enlightenment is therefore worth revisiting in these contexts because it indicates that the higher the level of abstraction there is, the wider such a divide between subject and object would be. This is because ‘enlightenment’ is never meant to truly illuminate objects, for it is constructed under and through ideologies that were never interested in that objective. As Adorno and Horkheimer ([1944] 1997: 27) point out,

The more the machinery of thought subjects existence to itself, the more blind its resignation in reproducing existence. Hence enlightenment returns to mythology, which is never really knew how to elude.

Using these conceptual tools, we will therefore look to argue not just that technology in gaming is objectified and fetishised; it is also mythicised through marketing and advertising, because the terminology was never designed to address the gaming technology through the perspective of subjective experience, but to present the technology as an independent, self-contained system, whose benefits and therefore value can be immediately “understood” by a consumer. In this way the very terminology that is supposed to enlighten us about technology, to help us understand technology, plays a pivotal role in mythicising it and making it gradually less and less clear what such tech-speak terms might actually denote for the average (or even the particularly gaming-literate) consumer. This helps us understand why our respondents used these terms so rarely: there is little perceived correlation between tech-speak and the technologies themselves, and thus the terminology has relatively. As such, if not through tech-speak, how do players actually talk about gaming technology and how do they actually experience it?

What is tech-speak?

We turn now to addressing the core linguistic register of this article: what is ‘tech-speak’? Dominic Arsenault (2017) has examined this concept in impressive depth in his recent work on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, where he identifies three distinct ‘discursive stances and practices’ (p. 60). These he defines are as ‘technobabble’, ‘buzzwords’ and ‘techno-literacy’. In the first case, when new games consoles were seen as being far-off in the future, Arsenault (2017) notes that technological discourses functioned as a ‘dizzying, superficial flash of light’, involving the ‘brandishing of factual information and data without context’ (p. 61). This is technobabble – the use of technological words to impress and startle without conveying any information, and indeed, sometimes even deliberately written in an obfuscating manner. Buzzwords, meanwhile, Arsenault (2017) defines as terms which can be used ‘without anyone having any idea whatsoever as to what they actually mean’ (p. 64); the terminology is at least likely correct, but the reader is unlikely to know what they mean, but certain terms – RAM, bytes and so forth – become known as important terms to maximise (i.e. more RAM is better than less RAM). Techno-literacy, on the other hand, means actually explaining a technology – in the case of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), these sorts of discourses that focused on describing what terms mean, and why they might matter to the player, demonstrated that ‘it was to be a technological – and more specifically graphical – powerhouse’ (Arsenault 2017: 66). Although the intention and the presentation of technological knowledge in each of these cases are different, all three fall under what we will more broadly term ‘tech-speak’ – the use of technological terminology that is inevitably exclusionary to some readers or viewers, and terminology that might be put to any of the three above purposes (obfuscation, impressing the reader, and actual translation of knowledge). Our interest in this article is not specifically in these distinctions between three specific registers, but rather how the use of technological language of any sort is received by video game players.

Outside of Arsenault’s work, however, we would note that there is very little research into tech-speak, its registers and its potential impacts on marketing, consumption and so forth. Indeed, a significant body of literature frames what is more commonly called ‘text speak’ – the abbreviation or otherwise transformation of language on social media applications, often by young people – as ‘tech speak’, rather than the register of supposedly explanatory language we discuss here. However, the literature on ‘buzzwords’ shows us much more. For example, the work of Cornwall (2007: 472) proposes that the buzzwords within the area of development policy ‘gain their purchase and power through vague and euphemistic qualities, their capacity to embrace a multitude of possible meanings, and their normative resonance’. This is a rich description of the impressive impacts and almost solidity that vague and unclear terms of this sort can deploy and also their ability to speak to many different ideas and audiences. Yet at the same time, buzzwords are meant to sound ‘intellectual and scientific, beyond the understanding of the lay person, [and] best left to experts’ (Standing, 2007: 517). This second role does not contrast with the first as we might think it would, but rather reinforces the first, leading to a form of terminology which obscures while actually claiming accuracy and precision.

To find tech-speak in gaming, however, we look primarily to the games industry, and gaming media which surrounds it. Both of these outlets routinely examine gaming technology, and this is usually related to the reader through tech-speak. For instance, Microsoft recently emphasised that its then upcoming Xbox One X console boasted a ‘6 teraflop GPU’ during the 2017 Electronic Entertainment Expo, one of the biggest video game trade shows. ¹ Similarly, in a fairly routine piece of comparative analysis assessing the quality of playing Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (Naughty Dog, 2015 [2009]) on PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, ² tech-speak is woven into almost every single paragraph. The article discusses the roles and values of 1080p (graphical resolution), anti-aliasing (smoothing graphical images), fps (frames per second), v-sync (vertical synchronisation, which means synchronising the game’s frame-rate with that of the monitor), 16×AF (16-to-1 the anisotropic filtering, improving the look of some three-dimensional in-game objects when viewed from unusual angles) and split memory. Presumably, those terms – in a public-facing, player-facing article – are clearly intended to help players to decide whether or not the updated version (on the PlayStation 4) is worthy of their time and money. This use of tech-speak only becomes more complicated when a PC rather than a games console is utilised as the platform for digital play. Using a PC for gaming necessitates a certain level of technical knowledge on the part of the player, whereas consoles are far more technologically standardised, in the sense that each ‘generation’ of consoles typically only consists of few variants produced by their respective manufacturers. ³ PCs, by contrast, exhibit a far greater diversity – in fact, at the time of writing, a single PC manufacturer can offer far more variants than all ‘current-gen’ consoles combined, as shown in Figure 1. ⁴

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Figure 1.

Dell ‘Alienware’ gaming desktop range: each of the three main product lines contains at least five minor variants; for more details, see https://www.dell.com/en-uk/gaming/alienware-desktops (last accessed 22 August 2018).

Moreover, as shown in the figure, the differences between one offering and another are indicated solely by tech-speak. Many players even go so far as to build their own custom PCs for gaming (as did some of our participants, specifically 11 out of 50). However, this requires further understanding of even more tech-speak, as demonstrated in this 2015 PC building guide produced by one of the more popular PC gaming website, PCGamer.com. ⁵ Having a solid grasp on gaming tech-speak is also necessary beyond engaging with PC hardware, because PC gaming also requires a certain technological knowledge of software. As shown in Figure 2, the option tabs in PC games carry extensive and often convoluted sets of options enabling players to tweak how their technology brings the game into being, many of which are contingent both on players understanding their meaning, and on understanding the capacities of whatever combination of technology they are running the game on.

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Figure 2.

Graphics setting option available in ‘final fantasy 15’ (2016).

Given the staggering amounts of money – potentially into the hundreds of millions – major game studios (Villapaz, 2013) and console manufacturers (Semeraro, 2017) spend on marketing which often includes tech-speak, it appears this register is considered central to the desired success of their adveritising efforts. In looking to understand this present profusion of gaming tech-speak and its centrality to advertising and – supposedly – the consumption of games, one might suggest the use of these terms can indeed bring about ‘enlightenment’ about the natures and capabilities of the technologies in question. As convoluted as this tech-speak appears, it is nevertheless present in an effort to convey something relevant and technical to players. Ideally, by learning those terms and the technological traits or characteristics they linguistically stand in for, a player could start to comprehend the complex inner workings of gaming technology, and therefore, maximise their gaming experience by calibrating hardware and software accordingly. Even in a relatively technologically static gaming environment such as console gaming, ⁶ those terms nevertheless should help players to make whatever purchase choices best suit their needs. As such, we would naturally expect experienced players, such as participants of our study, to be using such terminology to address gaming technology and less-experienced players to at least display some awareness of and engagement with these terms. However, much to our surprise, even the most technologically literate players interviewed rarely used any of these terms at all, even when specifically asked about what made certain pieces of hardware especially good, or especially poor, at providing gaming experiences. Explaining this disjuncture, and its importance, is the central objective of this article.

Research design

The data for this article were collected during a project designed to investigate players’ relationships with video games ⁷ as a medium. The goal of the project was to focus on players’ motivations for gaming, the practice of gaming and players’ understandings of gaming skill. We have previously published findings from this work regarding players’ conceptions of game purchase as a practice (Johnson and Luo, 2019) and the different justifications they deploy to explain which games they buy, when, and why. For this research participants were invited to what is known as a ‘gaming-interview’ (Schott and Horrell, 2000; cf. Shaw, 2013): this means that a session of video game play is followed up by a semi-structured interview. All of these took place in late 2014 or early 2015. This distinctive method is designed to create a more relaxed environment for respondents than that of the conventional interview – although they naturally cannot replicate truly ‘natural’ environments – through allowing the respondent and the interviewer to get to know one another somewhat beforehand via the gaming session and de-emphasising many of the traditional accoutrements of the interview process: the consent form, the tape recorder and so forth. It is hoped that doing such will place respondents at ease, and make it clear that the respondent is talking to a fellow ‘gamer’ with appropriate domain knowledge, thereby potentially enhancing the depth and detail of responses. For this project, each semi-structured interview lasted approximately 60 minutes; a total of 50 participants – who self-identified as video game players – were recruited via opportunity sampling. Among them were 20 Chinese nationals (10 self-identified as female and 10 as male) and 30 from Western countries (11 self-identified as female and 19 as male) with all in this latter category studying in the United Kingdom at the time of the interview. All participants were between the age of 20 and 35, and almost all in both countries were university students. Only three were mature students and early career professionals, and so the vast majority had grown up within a few years of each other, allowing the respondents to all comment on gaming practices and developments within the same periods of time (the last two to three decades).

Participants were self-selecting and their nationalities and genders were self-defined; the only two ‘variables’ intentionally adjusted during data collection for were gender and nationality. To a certain extent, this particular demography was generated by the central self-selecting anchor of being ‘someone who plays video games (of any sort)’ – much in the same vein as Gray’s (2016) call for an Audience Studies focused more on the so-called ‘average’ consumer than the die-hard, and inevitably more visible, fan. Nationality was introduced as a variable to take advantage of the sizable population of Chinese postgraduate students at the university where this research was conducted. Given the differing gaming contexts in these countries, this was identified as a way to compare two large and well-developed gaming markets, and shed further light on how the experience of gaming technology could be influenced by cultural and economic backgrounds. This aspect of the project was enabled by the first author being a Chinese citizen who has been playing video games continuously for more than two decades – in addition, he has been travelling between Western Europe and China for over half a decade, and at the time of these interviews, had been living in Europe for about 4 years cumulatively (seven at the time of the writing of this article). This supported and enabled the analysis by allowing participants to be offered the choices between being interviewed in Chinese or in English (one Chinese participant choose to be interviewed in English), enabling respondents to comment in whichever language they preferred. Equally, the author’s first-hand experience of gaming in China resonated with their experiences and allowed more comprehensive analysis of Chinese participants’ remarks with greater knowledge and nuance.

In assessing the importance of the particularities of the distinct cultural and economic contexts our respondents hailed from, we would particularly note the presence of the so-called ‘console ban’ in mainland China from between 2000 and 2015, during which games console were nominally unavailable within the country (Ashcraft, 2010). This proscription emerged from fears that games consoles would have negative effects on young Chinese; upon the ban’s removal, it was announced that relevant companies would be able to build and sell games and their consoles throughout the country. However, throughout the period of the ban, a thriving grey market (Jou, 2012) subsisted within the country, with the ‘ban’ being enforced with varying levels of rigour across locations and contexts; this means that many Chinese do actually have significant experience with contemporary consoles, as well as handhelds. In the United Kingdom, meanwhile, we see a significant market for PCs, consoles and mobiles, although more of a market for games consoles than many European countries where PC gaming often dominates. Nevertheless, the lack of any kind of ‘ban’ – enforced or otherwise – combined with the UK’s traditionally strong games industry have generated a very mature market for gaming products within the country.

In these semi-structured interviews, a wide range of topics were discussed, including motivation, gaming habits, respondents’ understandings or concepts of gaming skill and others. As above, this article specifically focuses on the participants’ comments about their gaming platforms and the technologies that underpin them, prompted by interview questions such as ‘What is good and bad about the PlayStation 4?’. By asking such questions, the goal was to pursue an open and minimally biased enquiry for investigating how players understand their relationships with their gaming hardware. What struck them as important, what struck them as unimportant, and what elements of their technological use – either positive or negative – were foregrounded over others? Players often have strong opinions and associations with particular consoles (or PC-based play), and we believed these enquiries would yield detailed views regarding hardware. Just as importantly, we also aimed to understand the concept of ‘gaming technology’ from players’ perspectives by inviting them to give detailed remarks on many of these issues. What precisely do they understand as being gaming technology, and how does it affect them? A sample of this size and its subsequent analysis gives us the ability to compare a substantial number of respondents from two different socioeconomic gaming contexts, and in doing so, begin to unpick the lived experiences of players when it comes to gaming technology. Thematic coding was employed to analyse interview data, with the themes and codes reiterated several times as analysis proceeded and new lines of understanding presented themselves. We now begin by considering the rarity of tech-speak in our interviews when questioned on technology, and how this observation allows us to problematise the player–technology relationship in greater detail.

Only on my terms

In going into this research, the centrality of tech-speak in gaming advertising meant, we expected our respondents to use tech-speak terms confidently and regularly. As discussed above, technological terms are ubiquitous in gaming marketing and to a lesser extent in many areas of gaming culture, and it did not seem unreasonable to assume that players, especially those who use PCs as their primary gaming platform, would encounter or deploy such terms on daily basis. This frequent interaction with gaming technology was mentioned by some of our participants, such as:

ARed: The strength of the PC is definitely much larger, you can customise you PC to have the specs you want. [. . .] But it is quite difficult to get into: there are only a small amount of people are willing to inject that amount of money and time and effort into it. So that is why a lot of people prefer consoles, just because they are a lot more accessible.

AP34: When a game comes out on PC, you really want to get the latest cards, items or whatnot. That NVidia 2GB 960? That was ‘so last month, man’! It doesn’t even run Crysis smoothly now.

JJones: Most people say you have to fiddle with the hardware, but I quite like that part. And sometimes you have to look up configurations for games, especially for old games. You have to tweak them a lot, just to make them work properly. [I] do like the fiddling a lot.

These show that technology (however understood) is often at the forefront of players’ thoughts about their gaming habits, and consequently, technology is a key part of understanding the everyday lives of contemporary video game players. However, our participants – regardless of their cultural background and their usual gaming hardware and platforms(s) – rarely drew on such terminology to address technology during interviews. Even those who regarded PCs as their primary gaming platforms, being the vast majority of Chinese participants and some UK participants, almost never used tech-speak to explain their preferences, choices or practices. This is particularly striking given that, as discussed above, they will almost inevitably have been navigating both tech-speak and technological issues almost certainly far more often than console owners. In fact, several participants declared a clear lack of interest or knowledge in technology. Some examples of this include

DCRedfield: I am pretty much clueless about how PCs work, and which parts are for the use of which parts, which one to buy, which part to replace [. . .]. Like, I am not really good with computers.

DSonic: I was never into PC gaming really. I am not very computer literate – of course there is Word and Microsoft Office and all that, but I am not really good at tech-side of things. I just never had the time, money and effort to make a PC.

SGao: In fact, in terms of computers [I am] quite illiterate, other than gaming. Meaning basically [when it comes to] what kind of functionality a computer would need, or in other words how this computer should be set up, I do not know much.

XHChi: I do not know much about hardware. [When upgrading a PC] often I will ask my friends for help, those who study computer science.

The above remarks are interesting on two levels. On one hand, these participants– who all strongly identified themselves as video game players – are distancing themselves from digital technology. This gesture is noteworthy because video game players could be assumed to be well-versed with digital technology, due to the inherent connection between the video game medium and digital technology. Instead, it seems that they are not making the connection between gaming and other domains of ‘geek’ or ‘nerd’ knowledge, specifically a deep understanding of computers and digital technology. On the other hand, these data indicate that a potential lack of comfort and familiarity with gaming technology appears to be not exclusive to the demographics often disadvantaged or marginalised by modern technology and gaming, such as elderly players, female players or players with disabilities (e.g. Hayes, 2008; Pearce, 2008; Thornham, 2011). To stress this point, these four excerpts all come from male participants, which is to say the demographic traditionally understood as possessing a strong interest in technology and other elements of geek culture (cf. Busse, 2013). As such, the perception that young, male, able-bodied gamers are much more in touch with technology than their more marginalised fellow-players may be far less accurate than commonly assumed.

This therefore suggests a disjuncture between how gaming technology is explained to players through tech-speak, and how participants actually understand the technology. In other words, the discourses produced by the industry and the media are not the discourses being reproduced by consumers, and in some cases, it seems that these are not even being consumed at all. Given how universal the use of tech-speak is within the games industry when advertising and marketing to players, this is a potentially significant observation; it seems that many players resist adopting the terminology that is ‘supposed’ to define gaming technology, with some declaring they pay little attention to these discourse despite their high visibility. To unpack this disjuncture, it is necessary to examine how gaming tech-speak has shaped the notion of gaming technology as a whole; which is to say, what precisely is it that players are not talking about?

Feel the technology

To answer this question, we should first return to the previously mentioned commentary on the technical differences between the PS3 and PS4 versions of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. We noted that the terms deployed could be intended to help players assess whether or not to pursue the ‘upgraded’ version. Through this tech-speak the industry is able to argue that the ‘remastered’ version of the game on the PS4 will offer a better gaming experience than its earlier incarnation, due to the newer technology present in the newer hardware. Technology thus becomes objectified: regardless of the intention of the authors, tech-speak presents technology as a case of neutral ‘facts’, whose superiority or inferiority is transmitted through numbers (e.g. 1080p is better than 720p, but 4k is the best, and 8k is coming soon). As Adorno and Horkheimer point out, in doing so, the technology is presented as an objective yet mythic power that in our case supposedly guarantees a better experience and a better gaming future. This is closely related to the concept of ‘numerical objectivity’ and the relatively modern concept (Deringer, 2018) that numbers and mathematics offer unfettered access to reality (Stark, 2019). Through these sorts of discourses, technology is turned into something objective, without subjective dimensions, and therefore a set of material artefacts experienced in the same ways, supposedly, by all consumers.

However, we can usefully contrast with against JJohn’s remark on the relative disadvantage and advantage of home console gaming and PC gaming:

I own an Xbox 360, a PlayStation 2, and a Nintendo DS, what else . . . that’s it. But I don’t really play games on them anymore; they are just standing in the room. [Interviewer: Why?] PC games are just better, and cheaper, with better graphics, better frame rate, and with Steam you can just get [games] so cheap. There isn’t really a point – and my TV isn’t really that big anyway.

Through this above comment, we can now turn to considering how players do understand their gaming technology. Specifically, despite knowledge of computing and technological terms at his disposal, JJohn justified part of their disinterest in consoles by noting an absence of a sufficiently large TV, although without specifying that size. They evidently regarded the size of display as a crucial factor to their potential enjoyment of console gaming. However, in an unrecorded conversation during an interview interruption, JJohn explained that their TV and computer display are actually the same size: 21 inches. In other words, the same technology was yielding very different result to him in different gaming scenarios. What might explain this discrepancy? Although JJohn did not elaborate much further on this reasoning, TKratos’ remark on the same topic (console gaming in contrast to PC gaming) sheds some light on the topic for us:

[Console gaming] is just like, you sit in your couch, play your games, it is very relaxing. It is not as tense [as PC gaming], you feel more free while sitting in the couch. When playing PC you are more constrained to your desk and stuff. [. . .] Gaming with console is [. . .] just comfortable.

This comment illustrates that the distances between a player and their TV, and a player and their gaming PC monitor, are usually different. Games consoles only rarely come with integrated displays; instead, they need to be connected to existing display devices, which usually means a television (Murphy, 2009). As mentioned by TKratos, gaming on console usually means sitting in a couch or sofa in front of one’s television; this means a player will usually sit relatively far away from the screen. On the other hand, PCs are often placed on desks, requiring users to sit relatively close to their screens – the same screens that will display games to players when PCs are used as gaming platform. As such, the relative distance difference could help explain why a certain size of display acceptable for PC gaming appears to be insufficient for home console gaming: whether the same technology was enjoyable or not is based on its immediate spatial context. These findings also resonate with prior research considering the relationship between gameplay and the physicality of that same play, which is closely related to the tactility we discuss here. Behrenshausen’s (2007) discussion of the material aspects of playing dance games, Giddings’ (2009) examination of what he calls ‘consumption identities’ and the subjectivities of players, and Hollet and Ehret’s (2015) study of the ‘felt-experience’ of new media – specifically digital games – are all excellent companions to our findings here.

The above might seem like a trivial observation about the distance one sits from a screen as derived from a passing comment – and on one level it is – but it does allow us an initial window into seeing how players actually understand technology: not through objectifying or abstracting terms, but rather tactilely in the social, material and spatial contexts of their everyday gaming experiences. In this regard the technology of this particular monitor is far less important than how it is deployed within the lived environment. To develop this idea further and beyond thinking solely about the positioning of the television within the home, we will now examine a more complex and striking example. This is difference between Chinese participants’ and their Western peers’ remarks about the graphical quality between gaming PCs and home consoles. Succinctly, our Chinese participants suggested that home consoles are capable of producing a better visual quality, whereas Western participants argued that PCs are the more graphically capable. In terms of tech-speak, there is no doubt that Western participants’ views are ‘factually’ correct and PCs can be made far more ‘powerful’ than games consoles, but we wish to demonstrate here instead that the conclusion of Chinese participants’ is just as defensible in the context of their everyday gaming activities. This shows us again that participants are not thinking about their engagements with gaming technology in terms of the tech-speak foregrounded by the games industry, but rather in terms of their own personal narratives of gameplay and the technologies – structured and stratified by culture, wealth, geography and so on – that enable it.

On the surface, considering graphical capabilities of both types of platforms, the conclusion drawn by Western participants is a reasonable one. A home console’s computing power is pre-determined at the point of manufacture, since the hardware is fixed after it was set into mass production. By contrast, the nature of the custom-built gaming PC offers the possibility of new and powerful hardware (feeding and responding to both planned obsolescence and upgrade culture), hence creating a platform capable of generating immense raw computing power and boosting its graphical capability. Moreover, most PCs can be upgraded when new hardware becomes available, making PCs certainly ‘better’ in terms of objectified tech-speak. As several Western participants noted, in Western gaming culture, gaming on a PC is often facetiously referred to as denoting one’s membership of the ‘PC Master Race’ (Kendrick, 2015; Kiley, 2016; Svartsjö, 2017) among players as a result of its superiority in computing power, whereas console players are jokingly referred to as ‘console peasants’, given the relatively ‘poor’ computing power their hardware can yield. Obviously, this is a problematic discourse built upon classist and ethno-supremacist political phrasing, but it shows that even if the meaning of the tech-speak is rarely considered by players, it does factor into cultural understandings of gaming experience.

Yet, to understand the remarks of Chinese participants, we must turn to the context of their previous experiences with gaming technology. The majority of Chinese participants did not have immediate access to home consoles, because none of the three major console manufactures has a strong presence in the Chinese gaming market due to the relatively high cost of the hardware and software ⁸ and the distinctive trajectory of contemporary Chinese console gaming (Liao, 2016). The idea of ‘console versus PC’ is in turn far less prominent. Thus, for these respondents, the gaming session before the research interview was their first time ever gaming at length on a console, specifically with The Last of Us (Naughty Dog, 2013) on PlayStation 3.

This experience – situated within their own gaming histories, not within objectified gaming tech-speak – was important to them. This is because Chinese participants who play ‘mainstream’ games usually do so on the general purpose laptops, which according to them (and first author’s personal experiences) were quite common among their colleagues at the Chinese universities where they finished their bachelor degrees (especially when many attend universities thousands of kilometres away from home). Dedicated gaming laptops are rare because of their high cost – already expensive in the West, they are relatively even more expensive in China due to the difference in incomes. Only one of our Chinese participants – who was studying in a UK university at the time – had ever owned a gaming laptop. Given this socioeconomic difference, the gaming graphics they saw on their own laptops thus constitute their impressions about the graphical capability of non-console computers as gaming platforms. While it is unlikely any general purpose laptop of early 2010s will have computing power inferior to a PlayStation 3, it is also unlikely for such a laptop to produce superior gaming graphics to what is offered by The Last of Us. Therefore, by comparing one of the best on home consoles, and the lower tier on PC, it was only natural for them to come to the conclusion that home consoles have ‘superior’ graphics.

This case occurs because players’ understandings of the graphical capability of a platform are not informed only by the technical specifics written in tech-speak, but foremost by their personal experience (namely what they see). As Silverstone (1999) puts it, ‘[media] experience is framed by prior agendas and previous experiences’ (p. 10). In this case, the agendas behind a player’s engagement with the gaming technology is clearly not to learn the terminology to ‘properly’ address the mythicise power, but to enjoy the games they like to play. Participants indicated that they experience gaming technology through the capability of facilitating a better – ‘smoother’ in terms of visual – gaming/play. Meanwhile, the Chinese participants’ previous gaming were usually carried out on general purpose, non-gaming laptops. Against such a backdrop, their first close quarter encounter with The Last of Us left them an impression of the home console technology that is rather different from what the ‘objective evaluation’ of this technology, through tech-speak, might suggest. Tech-speak is overruled by lived experiences of gaming that determine relative quality: context is key, and yet advertising has little to say on that front, leading to a significant divide between the product as mythicised and the product as experienced.

Conclusion

Technology is an integral component of the relationship between video games and their players. As we have seen, the games industry focuses on the use of abstract terminology to address it, which we called ‘tech-speak’. This is a register of language and in turn of discourse which is designed to ‘dazzle the reader’ (Arsenault, 2017: 62). This terminology emphasises numbers, facts and figures, objectivity and the idea that these numbers and terms translate unproblematically into superior gaming experiences. However, our interview participants rarely resorted to industry-provided terminology when asked to discuss gaming technology; instead, they addressed it by reflecting on how they experience the technological objects – tactilely, emotionally, personally and so forth – according to their play histories, backgrounds, incomes and settings. This is a finding with significant potential importance for our understandings of both the games industry and game players, and which we hope and believe can lead to further studying of the purchasing and playing habits of players, and how those intersect – if at all – with the purchasing and playing habits the ever-more opaque (Schreier, 2018) and arguably venal (Smith, 2018) games industry seeks to inculcate in its customers.

In this article, we have therefore argued the divide between how the games industry and how actual players address gaming technology emerges because the terminology provided by the industry fails to capture the actual experience of using technology. This tech-speak used by the games industry objectifies and mythicises technology, separating the object and subject while emphasising the repeatability of experiences irrespective of setting or context, despite the absolute centrality of setting and context to gaming experience. This framing suggests that the outcome of a set of technology could be replicated in any context and experienced by players in unified ways – and yet our respondents demonstrated this is not the case. Instead, we have shown that technology is perceived by participants through the gaming experiences it provides, and the types of gaming activities these technological artefacts enable and encourage. Meanwhile, their experiences of the technology in gaming were also framed by a range of different factors, such as previous experiences, motivations for gaming or understanding of the role of the video game medium in their everyday lives; the terminology the games industry providers players with cannot come close to capturing this subjectivity, despite such subjectivity being at the core of gaming experience.

In a broader sense, we hope this article also warns (cf. Sotamaa, 2007) against ‘assuming’ the existence of an idealised player and will continue the ongoing move within game studies to considering more ‘material’ questions such as gaming technology, gaming context and gaming production and purchase. These data show once more that the meaning of games is not isolated from their contexts of play, being instead shaped by language, culture, finance and previous experience. Technology is deeply situated, contextual and since gaming is the new technological form of entertainment par excellence, players’ perspectives are consequently deeply shaped by their experiences and contexts. Just as games cannot be seen as isolated texts without eliding much of their complexity, gaming hardware cannot be seen as isolated artefactual material, a mere simple substrate on which the richness of play takes place. Both are instead far more deeply entangled. Our respondents thus resist the universalising idea of technological specifications, and instead experience games and their ‘technological’ aspects as being deeply individual, personal and changeable, in opposition to a mythical and reified image of these machines. There is still much work to be done both within and surrounding the area of platform studies when it comes to games, but we hope this article will contribute to this growing project of understanding gaming technology, and the deep ways it shapes our gaming experiences.