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6.
Interpassivity and the Joy of Delegated Play in
Idle Games
Sonia Fizek
Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association
April 2018, Vol 3 No 3, pp 137-163
ISSN 2328-9422
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ABSTRACT
This paper examines the youngest video games genre, the so called
idle (incremental) game, also referred to as the passive, self-playing or
clicker game, which seems to challenge the current understanding of
digital games as systems, based on a human-machine interaction where it
is the human who actively engages with the system through meaningful
choices. Idle games, on the other hand, tend to play themselves, making
the player’s participation optional or, in some cases, entirely redundant.
Interactivity and agency – qualities extensively theorised with reference
to digital games – are questioned in the context of idling. In this paper
the author will investigate the self-contradictory genre through the lens
of interpassivity, a concept developed by Robert Pfaller and Slavoj Žižek
to describe the aesthetics of delegated enjoyment. This contribution aims
at introducing interpassivity to a wider Game Studies community, and
offers an alternative perspective to reflect upon digital games in general
and self-playing games in particular.
Keywords
idle games, self-playing games, interpassivity, delegated play,
interactivity, agency
INTRODUCTION: A VIDEO GAME THAT PLAYS ITSELF?
I am situated in a firelit room. The fire is roaring. The room is hot. The
wood piles up, so I stoke the fire to keep it so. A stranger shares the
space with me. She can build things. I disregard her for the time being.
Soon, a mysterious wanderer arrives with an empty cart and inquires
about wood. Shall I give him 100 logs and hope he will reciprocate the
gift and come back with more in a distant future? I do not trust strangers,
so I turn him away. The fire keeps roaring. The builder says she can
make a cart for carrying wood. And so she manufactures it in exchange
for 30 logs. The rickety cart will carry more wood from the silent forest
surrounding the firelit room. I can gather wood there. So, I gather. The
builder assembles a lonely hut. And another one. In no time a tiny village
grows, attracting more gatherers. No longer do I have to worry about
collecting the wood myself. The hut now stores 271 units of wood, and
they keep piling up.
The fire is flickering. The water is boiling. I am out of the game, taking
a short break to brew a cup of tea. While away, the log count rises to
3203 and still keeps going up. I come back to a fully stocked, warm
room, and a few reported noises breaking out of the storage. The builder
has stoked the fire. The gatherers have collected wood. The game has
138 ToDiGRA
played itself, undisturbed by my absence. Occasionally, it reminds me of
its existence, sending a flickering pop-up window with a beggar to be
turned down. Disconnected from the actual meaningful gameplay, I may
choose to do something completely else instead, tea-brewing being the
least spectacular of many other possibilities.
This introductory auto-ethnographic passage describes a short gameplay
session in A Dark Room (2013), an example of a relatively recent casual
video game genre – an idle (incremental) game (Figure 1).
Figure 1: A Dark Room (2013)
Idle games, also referred to as passive, self-playing or clicker games,
are characterised by automated gameplay, which makes the player’s
participation optional or entirely redundant. In other words, there is
minimal or no active engagement required from the player in order for
the game to progress. As illustrated above, the initial stages of most
idle games start with the player performing a simple task of clicking
in order to gain more in-game currency (e.g. logs, coins, cookies etc.),
which in turn allows them to acquire items or skills that automate most
Interpassivity 139
of the gameplay in the future. As the game unfolds incrementally, more
options emerge. Interestingly, idle games seem to have no end – “[t]hey
are ongoing, never-ending affairs” (Bogost 2010).
This niche game genre was brought to a wider audience in early 2015
in a Gamasutra article: “The rise of games you (mostly) don’t play”
(Parkin 2015). Idle games also gained worldwide recognition among
game developers and players alike after Anthony Pecorella’s talk at the
Game Developers Conference, titled “Idle Games: The Mechanics and
Monetization of Self-Playing Games” (Pecorella 2015).
Two years later, in February of 2017, another sort of self-playing game
was featured as part of a local gaming convention in North Carolina.
While the gamers and attendees of the event strolled through the venue,
gaming, participating in tournaments, “cosplaying”, eating, talking or
gazing, Civilisation 6 (2016) ran in the background: “Throughout the
entire day CIV 6 will be playing an all-bot auto-play game located on the
show floor (Playthroughgc.com). More recently, in April 2017, Museum
of Modern Arts (MoMA PS1) launched Emissaries (2017),a series of
life simulation works or self-contained ludic ecosystems by Ian Cheng,
who describes them as “a videogame that plays itself” (iancheng.com).
And finally, David O’Reilly’s Everything (2017), a recent project, which,
apart from being an open-ended interactive experience and simulation,
has a self-playing mode: “Everything requires no player input – it will
play automatically if left unattended” (everything-game.com).
The above examples depict a recent trend and fascination with games
and game modes, which play themselves, or require minimum
engagement from the human player, with idle games as the most visible
commercialised genre. Self-playing games have left the gaming and
academic community puzzled. After all, until now games have been
primarily understood as objects to be actively engaged with, conflicts to
be resolved, and meaningful actions to be taken (Huizinga 1949/2002;
Caillois 1958/2001; Crawford 1982; Juul 2003; Salen and Zimmerman
2003). Digital games are supposed to be ergodic, requiring a non-trivial
140 ToDiGRA
effort from their participants, who in turn need to actively interpret the
activity as a game for it to be considered one (Aarseth 1997; Aarseth and
Calleja 2015). If anything else, games have been described as inherently
interactive (Crawford 1982; Ermi and Mäyrä 2005), and oftentimes in
contrast to non-interactive or less interactive media such as films or
books, however problematic such oppositions may be. In other words,
most digital games, staged in the medium of a computer, could be
described as “explicitly participational” (Manovich 2001, 71).
In most digital games, the role of the human player is to actively
participate in gameplay, while the role of the machine to enable, sustain,
and facilitate play; record its progress and communicate the outcome to
the player. In self-playing idle games, the human is a spectator rather
than an active player, and the activity of playing is, to a great extent,
delegated to the machine. This should not be entirely surprising in light
of Alexander Galloway’s definition, according to which digital games
are not only the actions of human operators, but equally so, those of
machines (Galloway 2006). Even more so, of machines, which do not
always act in response to human players, but independently of them
in the so-called “ambience acts” of the machine – the moments when
the digital game plays itself while waiting for the player to return and
continue where they left off (Galloway 2006). Ambience acts happen in
some games, for instance Grand Theft Auto III (2001), Final Fantasy X
(2001),which play themselves when the player walks away. However,
self-play is not the core of those games and, more importantly, all
the changes to the gameworld performed in the player’s absence are
of no importance once the gameplay recommences; the machine’s
micromovements have no effect. An idle game, on the other hand, is
based on, and designed around, the ambience act. The game plays itself
and the changes in the gameworld are permanent and significant,
whether the human player participates in their execution or not. The only
difference lies in the timing – without the human player’s input, the game
will progress much slower, but it will not stop.
Interpassivity 141
Galloway’s shift of perspective from anthropo- to an “algo-centric”
sheds some interesting light on idle games, but their core mechanics
of self-executed progression still remains highly problematic. After all,
most of self-playing games are designed with a human audience in
mind. How, then, are we to understand this ludic paradox? How do we
make sense of games that barely require human agency, effort and the
execution of meaningful choices, and yet ask for human attention? In
other words, what to do with games that we (mostly) don’t play?
This paper will address the above questions, mapping out a possible
avenue to study the emerging practice of self-play. The research falls
within a larger body of work on agency and interactivity in digital games,
digital media and virtual worlds. It also addresses the fundamental
questions of what constitutes digital games (Aarseth and Calleja 2015)
or the so-called “real games” in general (Consalvo and Paul 2013),
and self-playing games in particular. Some preliminary studies into idle
and zero-player games, as well as automatic play, have been initiated
within the game studies community (Björk and Juul 2012; De Paoli
2015; Deterding 2016; Fizek 2017a, 2017b), but the subject belongs to
a largely unexplored area. As Alexander King, a game designer, notices
in a blog article series devoted to idle games, “[d]espite this proliferation
and growing appeal, incremental games remain rarely discussed in
games media and criticism” (King 2016).
This study aims to fill that thematic void. In order to do that, I propose to
look at idle games through the lens of interpassivity, a concept revealing
the nature of delegated pleasure, developed first by Robert Pfaller (1996)
and later theorised by Slavoj Žižek (1997). Interpassivity sheds a new
light onto the peculiarity of self-playing games. I will argue that idling
may be understood as delegated pleasure derived from the act of
outsourcing gameplay onto the game itself. Idling leads to a momentary
escape from the responsibility of active play and, as a result, a dis-
identification with the player’s primary role as an active agent.
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I will start this paper with a brief ludic sketch, providing a historical
overview of the idle games genre. I will then open the analytical floor
with a question focused on the core of idling. This section will be
followed by an introduction into the concept of interpassivity, which will
then lead to a further discussion on the delegation of play.
THE BIRTH OF AN IDLE GAME
Idle games emerged as a satire of social games and an ironic response
to the mechanics of progression in role-playing games based on the so
called “levelling-up”, “grinding” or “gold farming” (Nakamura 2013;
Nardi and Kow 2010; Zagal and Altizer 2014), repetitive and oftentimes
laborious behaviours, which allow players to achieve new levels and
thus advance in the game. In idle games, grinding has become a core
hyperbolic mechanics, around which the entire gameplay revolves.
The history of idle games allegedly begins in 2002 with Progress Quest
(2002), an automated game, which cannot be affected by the player’s
actions at all, except for “rolling” the character at the initial stages and
setting two parameters – race and class (Figure 2). From that moment
on, the game plays itself. After delegating the action of play, the player
is welcome to enjoy the experience by watching, deriving pleasure from
the systemic changes, or knowing that the game keeps unfolding in the
background.
Interpassivity 143
Figure 2: Progress Quest (2002)
One of the most iconic examples of “grinding parodies” is Ian Bogost’s
Cow Clicker (2010), which was designed as a satire of games such
as FarmVille (2009), with minimal or no meaningful challenges for
players to engage in. Cow Clicker “distilled the social game genre down
to its essence” (Bogost 2010). Although Bogost designed the game
predominantly as a critique of “mindless” social games played on
Facebook, it soon turned out that Cow Clicker became immensely
popular, despite the designer’s early intentions.
Other titles followed, including Progress Wars (2010), Godville (2010),
and A Dark Room (2013),amongst many others. One of the most
recognisable idle games, which led to the popularisation and
commercialisation of the genre, was Julien Thienot’s Cookie Clicker
(2013). Even CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research)
144 ToDiGRA
developed its own educational version called Particle Clicker
(2014).
The growing appeal of idle games and their wide accessibility lured the
gaming industry, which started to monetise the newly emerging genre.
Currently, self-playing idle titles are amongst the most popular games
on Kongregate, one of the biggest online game portals, which claims
to attract tens of millions of players every month. Idle games are also
to be found on mobile platforms, such as iOS and Android. Many,
like AdVenture Capitalist (2015) and Clicker Heroes (2014), migrate to
Steam, or, even more surprisingly, appear as part of a consoles title offer.
Adventure Capitalist (2015) is now available on PlayStation 4. Both
platforms are usually associated with “real games” rather than free-to-
play clicker or social games.
Also, companies producing bigger console titles seem to be shifting their
attention towards the idle games genre. One of those is Bandai Namco,
a Japanese game developer known for its PlayStation 2 title Katamari
Damacy (2004). Encouraged by the growing market and appeal of
“idlers”, it released its spin-off for mobile platforms – Tap My Katamari
(2015). The game may be described as an endless runner with a
predominant clicker component typical for idle games. While the player
is away, the game keeps playing so that the player can return to the
gameworld filled with new coins, an in-game currency enabling the
purchasing of upgrades and thus advancement in the game.
Perhaps the most intriguing of all the recent examples of self-playing
games is Dreeps (2016), an RPG-inspired semi-automated mobile
“alarm playing game”, which only obliges the player to set the alarm
clock for the game’s character to wake up and embark upon a journey.
While the player is sitting at their desk at work, the game’s character
traverses fictional worlds, slays monsters and “lives” a life of their own.
The player may lurk into the game at any time, watching the in-game
world and the character progress independently. In the evening, the game
is metaphorically and literally put to sleep. The player sets the alarm
Interpassivity 145
clock for the “robot boy” character to wake up the following day and
continue the adventures. As the designers themselves state, Dreeps is an
RPG for those who do not have time for the actual playing:
You can have a look at the adventure on the phone put on your desk while
working, during snack time, just enjoy the game at your pace. If you woke
up with dreeps, the adventure will automatically continue as long as the
robot boy has enough HP, even if you don’t open the app. (dreeps.net)
Playing Dreeps, one cannot escape the impression that it is the latest
ludic incarnation of Tamagotchi, a digital toy created in Japan in the
1990’s, with the main difference being that the robot boy does not require
constant care and will not die, if unattended to. The constant attention
has evolved into an intermittent attention model, in which every in-
game and out-of-game moment is literally capitalised upon. The player
is rewarded, whether they are actively clicking or delegating their clicks
onto the game itself.
Rouguathia (2017) is an interesting recent example of a fully-automated
roguelike idle game (Figure 3), whose aesthetics is a reminder of early
cellular automata or the so called zero-player games, their most
prominent example being The Game of Life (1970),designed by John
Horton Conway. Conway’s game was summoned in order to solve a
mathematical problem posed by John von Neumann on machines that
could reproduce themselves infinitely. The game is set up by a human
in its initial state, from which point on, it does not require any further
input and plays on its own. Fully automated idle games, such as the
abovementioned Progress Quest and Rouguathia, emulate this genre in
a social play context, displaying the pure mechanics of unfolding the
system into a complex web of interrelations.
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Figure 3: Rouguathia (2017)
The proliferation and increasing popularity of idle games seem to be
pointing towards the normalisation process of the acceptance of the
genre by a wider gaming community and what follows, the renegotiation
of what counts as a game (Consalvo and DePaul 2013; Deterding 2016).
Clearly, idle games have taken a visible place in the gaming landscape
and moved from the satirical peripheries into the centre of what
constitutes mainstream games. With idle games, the phenomenon of self-
play has gained visibility.
TOWARDS THE HEART OF IDLING
But why have such automatic games gained such popularity in the
first place? What lies at their heart and how come players so readily
externalise gameplay onto self-playing systems? There are numerous
paths to follow in order to scrutinize the nature and appeal of self-playing
idle games. Some of them include:
•The economy of attention through a gameplay model that
does not require constant presence from the players and hence
treats their attention as a scarce resource;
Interpassivity 147
•Recurring gratification by means of rewarding the player,
also for the moments of absence from the game;
•Compulsive gameplay based on the behavioural model, seen
on social platforms that encourage users to regularly check
the status of their accounts;
•Elimination of drudgery by automating and/or delegating all
the laborious and repetitive in-game activities.
The last point is particularly interesting within the context of the
analytical discussion led on those pages. It fits the early examples of the
genre, which provided a critical commentary on grinding as drudgery in
massively multiplayer online role-playing games, where bots and macros
have long been utilized to automate parts of the most laborious gameplay
(De Paoli 2015). In idle games too, routine activities may be “skipped
through delegation” (Bogost 2010). And since the entire gameplay is
stripped to those routine play acts, it may be assumed that the enjoyment
of the game as such is, to a great extent, delegated to “a technical device”
(Pfaller 2017, 19), in this case, to the game’s self-running algorithm.
It may be then the act of delegation of play, usually associated with
utter and intense absorption (Huizinga 1938), that lies at the heart of idle
games. Idling is a “falsely interactive” (Žižek 1997, 149) manifestation
of an otherwise highly interactive practice – the player falls under the
illusion of being active, while their true position, as embodied in the
fetish of the self-playing idle game, remains passive. If we expand upon
the elimination of drudgery argument with Žižek’s distinction between
“the Other taking over from the ‘dull’ mechanical aspect of routine
duties, and the Other taking over from me, and thus depriving me of,
enjoyment” (Žižek 1997, 147), we will end up with idle games,
depriving the player of gameplay.
Still, the core question remains unsolved – why are games based entirely
on such seeming deprivation of joyous play nevertheless considered fun?
In other words, to ask with Roland Barthes, “[h]ow can we take pleasure
148 ToDiGRA
in a reported pleasure” (Barthes 1975, 17), in this case, reported by the
game’s system? Those crucial questions lead us towards the interpassive
quality of idle games, a concept, which opens up an interesting
interpretation of the essence and appeal of idling.
INTERPASSIVITY: THE AESTHETICS OF DELEGATED
ENJOYMENT
A “little theory” (Pias 2000) of interpassivity was first developed in
the 1990s by Robert Pfaller and Slavoj Žižek as an opposition to, and
an inverse structure of, the concept of interactivity, prevalent in the
contemporary art discourse of that time. While interactivity assumed that
the observers must act in order to complete the work of art, interpassivity
relieved them, not only from active creating, but also from passive
observing – “[t]he artwork would be an artwork that observes itself”
(Pfaller 2003). In other words, while the interactive media invite the
observer to participate productively in their reception and take over parts
of the artistic effort, the interpassive media take the effort of participation
away. Thus, media, supplying the very process of their reception, are
referred to as interpassive (Pfaller 1996, 71).
According to the logics of interpassivity, pleasure is something
experienced passively and it may be passed over to other people or
technical devices. As Pfaller explains:
Interpassivity is delegated ‘passivity’ – in the sense of delegated pleasure,
or delegated consumption. Interpassive people are those who want to
delegate their pleasures or their consumption. Interpassive media are all the
agents – machines, people, animals, etc. – to whom interpassive people can
delegate their pleasures. (Pfaller 2017, 55)
The prefix -inter is of utmost importance here. Similarly to interactivity,
it signifies a transfer. In the case of interactivity, it is activity that is
transferred from the product to the consumer (or from the work of art
towards the audience). In the case of interpassivity, it is passivity that
Interpassivity 149
is transferred from the consumer to the product (e.g. a work of art that
observes itself relieving the audience of this task) (Pfaller 2017, 19).
As a typical example of an interpassive medium, Pfaller and Zizek refer
to a video recorder, which watches the films for or instead of the observer
while they can devote their time to something else. Other examples
illustrating interpassivity include the Tibetan prayer wheel, the Greek
chorus in ancient theatre, or canned laughter in American sitcoms (Žižek
1997, 34). In all those cases, the act of praying, the emotional catharsis,
or the laughter are delegated onto someone or something else. Canned
laughter provides an interesting contemporary media phenomenon,
which gives the TV viewer an illusion that the laughter has been
outsourced to a fictional audience. Another intriguing instance of
interpassivity points towards the behaviour of some intellectuals in
libraries when they copy text from a book and, feeling relieved, go home
with a sense of satisfaction, as if the photocopier had read the pages
instead of them: “They literally play reading by means of the machine”
– the machine looks at every page in a linear process (Pfaller 2017, 56).
The examples are numerous, some divided not only in terms of historical
periods, but also the type of activity involved. The common denominator
lies in the observer, who enjoys through the medium, and may indulge in
other activities at the same time. Interpassivity allows one to stay passive
through the other:
… to accede to the other the passive aspect (of enjoying), while I can remain
actively engaged (I can continue to work in the evening, while the VCR
passively enjoys for me…) (Žižek 1997, 149).
The above interpassive situation leads to a crucial question – why does
the observer, who chooses to observe (e.g. watch a comedy), find it
relieving not to actively watch the film or laugh at it (in the case of
canned laughter), but rather enjoy it through a medium of some sort?
What follows – “why does the observer experience the relief from their
own indulgence as pleasant?” (Pfaller 1996, 71). Or in other words, “[i]s
150 ToDiGRA
enjoyment not something which, precisely, cannot be done through the
Other?” (Žižek 1997, 147).
In the case of an interpassive medium, the transferal of pleasure may be
interpreted as a jouissance (mis)perceived as one’s own – we think we
enjoyed the show or the game, but the Other (e.g. the video recorder,
the bot, the automated game system) did it for us or rather instead
of us. In an interpassive situation, the subject degrades the other to a
pure instrument of their (non)pleasure. Such outsourcing or “extension”
(McLuhan 1964) no longer signifies extending the pleasure itself, but
leads to a paradoxical situation where pleasure does not need to be
experienced at all (Pias 2000). It is lived out by the interpassive medium.
INTERPASSIVE GAMES AND DELEGATED PLAY
The concept of interpassivity, originally introduced within the context of
art, has travelled into many other domains, such as media studies, film
studies and political science (Feustel, Koppo, Schölzel 2011). It has even
arrived in areas as seemingly remote as marketing and business, as an
analytical tool used to explain consumption patterns of ethical brands
(Walz, Hingston, Andehn 2014). In video games research, interpassivity
has remained virtually unnoticed. It has been merely sketched as an
analytical possibility to understand the avatar-player surrogate
relationship through the Žižekian interpretation of Jacque Lacan
(Falkowska 2011; Wilson 2003; Thorne 2016). Pfaller’s foundational
work has been overlooked altogether.
Digital games, seen as the epitome of interactivity, could not provide a
fertile analytical ground for a concept, which questions their very core.
With idling, however, we have arrived at a point where interactivity
alone does not suffice anymore as a predominant conceptual framework.
Idle games, discussed throughout this paper, seem to be the first video
game genre to epitomise the delegation of pleasure and embody the
interpassive relationship between players and the game.
Interpassivity 151
Games such as the abovementioned Cookie Clicker (2013) (Figure 4),
Clicker Heroes (2014) and Godville (2010) do something other than
invite the player to an interactive spectacle where their participation
is the necessary condition for the game to go on. Play emerges as
a substitutive act – the player, represented by the automatic clicker
algorithms, may take absence from the game. In the early stages of
Cookie Clicker, I wilfully delegated the cumbersome task of cookie
production to “Cursors” and “Grandmas”. Having earned enough cookie
currency, I proceeded to set up “Farms”, “Mines”, “Temples” and
“Wizard Towers” to further multiply my cookie realm. Every now and
then, I come back to the game in order to unlock further upgrades, check
statistics, and browse through my expanding collection of achievements.
The random “golden cookie” boost encourages me to come back to
the game in order to increase the cookie meter and manually click
alongside the automatically proceeding gameplay. The game may slow
down without my presence, but it will not come to a halt. I flip between
the tabs of the internet browser, constantly going in and out of the game.
This intermittent interaction pattern, emerging as a result of delegated
play, defines the active moments between automated gameplay sessions.
The gameplay is reversed, as if the “load” screen was the actual game
and the gameplay a moment to “wind up” or “load” the game.
The lineage of idle games, to a certain degree, can be traced back to
the 19th century street barrel organs, played by rotating a handle in a
cyclical motion, and thus delegating the actual task of playing the organs
to the “programmed” cylinder. The tasks of an idle gamer resemble those
performed by barrel grinders. After all, both consist in delegating the
otherwise highly absorbing and oftentimes complex activity of play to a
machine, which needs to be “ground” from time to time in order to keep
playing.
152 ToDiGRA
Figure 4: Cookie Clicker
In an idle game, the player’s agency collapses in a subversive act of
play delegation. The player makes an attempt to click themselves away
from the responsibility of being the sole agent. Paradoxically, with every
delegated click comes an enacted click of the player, and so the agency
and non-agency dance in an eternally unfolding embrace. In an idle
game, the click – the most basic action that has defined computer use
since the invention of the mouse in the 1960s – may no longer be
associated solely with agency, activity and freedom. Instead, it becomes
a sign of “human tragedy”, of entering the game as a service prison from
which one may never escape (Bogost 2010). The click seems to have lost
its empowering dimension, if it ever had one. Idling and self-play subvert
digital games as entertainment forms, relying on active participants and
engaged players. Interpassivity deconstructs interactivity-centred
discourse and lays bare the illusory nature of interactivity.
It could be argued that every digital game, to a certain degree, is idle.
Idling points towards the phenomenon of automation, originally
denoting a machine with a self-contained principle of motion (Truitt
2015, 2). A digital computer is in many ways precisely such a machine.
Therefore, most games, staged within the medium of the computer,
involve some level of automation, such as calculating gathered props,
lost lives, or the player’s proximity to an enemy NPC (non-player
Interpassivity 153
character). Unlike board games, where all such computation must be
done manually by the human player, in a digital game most of the
processes are automated and hidden from the player’s view. This type
of automation is well known to an average gamer. What is much more
mesmerising is the sort of automation projected onto the representational
layer of the game, bringing the “aesthetics of agency and control (or the
loss of these)” (Giddings 2005) to the forefront. Many examples of idle
and self-playing games I have drawn upon in this paper tend to partially
or entirely automate those parts of gameplay, which have been, until
now, reserved for humans.
CONCLUSIONS: BEYOND INTERACTIVITY
Interpassivity provides a compelling perspective to look at games in
general, and self-playing idle games in particular; one which reaches
beyond interactivity, a concept that, despite its critique (Aarseth 1997;
Manovich 2001), has remained largely unchallenged in the domain of
games. As I have mentioned, in philosophy of art, art theory and practice,
the seemingly empowering quality of interactivity was questioned and
critically evaluated (Pfaller 1996). In Games Studies, the situation has
been very different. After all, human-computer interaction is the core
quality through which digital games are defined. It is the theories of
action and interaction (Kaptelinin and Nardi 2006) that contribute to a
grand narrative of our relationship with technology. In video games, the
myth of interactivity is oftentimes strongly associated with the dream of
freedom, especially in sandbox-type genres where the player is promised
to be able to move freely in open worlds and influence their
surroundings. As Espen Aarseth noticed as early as 1997, interactivity is
“a purely ideological term, projecting an unfocused fantasy rather than
a concept of any analytical significance” (Aarseth 1997, 51). Also, Lev
Manovich in Language of New Media found interactivity to be too broad
a concept to be truly useful, if not entirely redundant (Manovich 2001,
71).
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And yet, when confronted with such genres as idle or zero-player games,
game scholars still seem to be puzzled, mostly because the heart of
gameness is no longer defined through the human-computer
communication dynamics, which places the human as an active agent in
dialogue with technology:
[u]nless players have some agency to affect the outcome of a game and can
intentionally exercise it, they are not really … playing a game. (Björk and
Juul 2012)
Interpassivity opens a new interpretative perspective. It provokes
questions reaching beyond the seemingly emancipatory dimension of
interactive media. Looking at games through the interpassive lens of
play delegation may contribute to a deeper understanding of activity,
passivity and the role of the player. It untangles many contemporary
paradoxes such as zero-player gaming or idling. In idle games, the player
assumes a role of a playing subject, but to a large degree escapes the
pressure of the actual play, giving up their agency and delegating it to
the clicker algorithms. The game still progresses and its progress relies
on the human player’s decision to externalise the act of play onto a
technical device, and thus delegate the pleasure derived from playing the
game. Interpassivity sheds a new light on this peculiar practice of play.
It seems a particularly fruitful, if not a necessary, contribution to game-
related research. Without interpassivity, we cannot fully understand all
the facets of the playful communication between the human and the
machine, which lies at the core of digital gaming and what follows,
idling.
It also opens up many other thematic fields, apart from idling discussed
in this paper, which could be understood as instances of delegated play.
For example, the usage of bots and macros in MMORPGs or the role
of the player in movie games (also called interactive movies) relying
mostly on cinematic sequences rather than pure gameplay (e.g. Heavy
Rain, 2010). An interactive movie may as well be seen as an interpassive
game, which consists more in spectating, witnessing and delegating,
rather than enacting. From an interpassive perspective, the well-
Interpassivity 155
established and discussed cut-scene may be interpreted as a delegated
gameplay component in its own right rather than a mere disruption of an
otherwise interactive experience or an embodiment of a visual narrative
technique belonging to the previous medium – “an interpassive act …
not only brings back a part of bygone pleasure, but constitutes a new,
original one” (Pfaller 2017, 43). Finally, the recent worldwide practice
of watching others stream their gameplay at Twitch.tv becomes much
clearer when perceived through delegation and interpassivity. Twitch
broadcasting defines a ludic pleasure derived from looking over the other
player’s shoulder. In all the interpassive examples of games, hands-on
actors do not need to be the key figures of agency (Taylor 2012, 183).
I would like to conclude this paper with a playful lyrical commentary,
quoting a verse “Aber wir lassen es andere machen” written by a German
poet Theodor Fontane and recalled within the context of interpassivity
by Robert Pfaller.
But we have others do it instead
A Chinese (200 years ago or more)
Visited France and went to the ball
And some asked whether he knew it?
And others whether he himself would do it?
“We call it dancing”, replied he nodding his head
But we have others perform it instead.
And the word still rings a bell
Remaining for all to retell
I stare at runs, I glare when others hunt
But when people turn to me and ask blunt:
“Why don’t you join? Why stand by side?
My reply is: “Everything goes with its own tide.
Chasing luck. All this only but troubles my head,
I’d rather others did it instead.
Theodor Fontane (1905, author’s own translation)
156 ToDiGRA
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to Markus Rautzenberg for pointing me towards the
concept of interpassivity, which helped me form the analytical core for
reading idle games. I would also like to extend my thanks to Rembert
Hüser and Florian Sprenger for giving me the space to present early
stages of this research at Goethe University Frankfurt in front of a
stimulating audience. Last but not least, I am thanking Anne Dippel for
her endless support and invaluable criticism.
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