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Paratextualizing Games: Investigations on the Paraphernalia and Peripheries of Play
Gaming no longer only takes place as a ›closed interactive experience‹ in front of TV screens, but also as broadcast on streaming platforms or as cultural events in exhibition centers and e-sport arenas. The popularization of new technologies, forms of expression, and online services has had a considerable influence on the academic and journalistic discourse about games. This anthology examines which paratexts gaming cultures have produced - i.e., in which forms and formats and through which channels we talk (and write) about games - as well as the way in which paratexts influence the development of games. How is knowledge about games generated and shaped today and how do boundaries between (popular) criticism, journalism, and scholarship have started to blur? In How does the paratext change the text?
406 pages, Paperback
Published November 27, 2021
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May 29, 2025
Benjamin Beil, Gundolf S. Freyermuth, and Hanns Christian Scmidt present an edited collection on paratexts and games. Paratext is maybe most simply defined as anything that influences our reading of the text but can be justifiably considered as outside of it--a videogame's paratexts can be anything from developer interviews to title screens.
The collection here is divided into roughly four parts: there's an extended introduction, a section on paratexts and histories, another on performance, and a final one on peripheries. The book begins with Freyermuth's lengthy history of text and paratext, largely through the lens of McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy. He goes through the concept of the text up to modern digital texts, the history of play and text in other mediums, and the concept specifically in relation to the development of videogames, and the section concludes with the more traditional role of the introduction, outlining the rest of the book. It's somewhat unusual for an account of paratext to delve this deeply into text history, and it sets a tone for the rest of the book.
The first section is "Histories," and emphasizes the degree to which games on history or games with their own histories can draw on paratext. Beil's essay on Assassin's Creed focuses on the paratext of the more recent games' discovery tours and their potential value (or lack thereof) as historical guides. Souvik Mukherjee follows, situating the videogame map within larger discussions of cartography and colonial power. Richard Cole looks at the paratexts around Age of Empires and how they influence the reception of the series, with particular attention paid to its manual. (As someone who's spent considerable time investigating game manuals as paratext, I appreciated this.) And Rene Glas rounds out the section with a discussion of the Super Mario Maker series, and how they function as a sort of paratext for the larger Mario series and its history in general.
In general, I enjoyed the "Histories" section; in particular, Mukherjee's discussion of maps connected to areas outside of game studies in ways I found really interesting, and Glas's discussion of the Mario series adds to an area of study that's been underdeveloped. But for the most part, it's all pretty usual territory for paratext and games studies. The second section is a little different; "Performances," by nature of its subject matter, explores how paratext changes when the focus is shifted to active participation, and it stretches the term beyond its common use. There are some essays in this section where I appreciate the extension work they're doing; there are others where I'm generally uncertain if paratext is still the best term or approach. Brandis and Bozkurt's "Player Agency in Audience Gaming" looks at cases where streaming audiences can make direct choices in gameplay and what terminology is best suited for that project. Nicholle Lamerichs' "Material Culture on Twitch: Live-Streaming Cosplay, Gender, and Beauty" looks at how fans perform their relation to texts on Twitch, particularly cosplay streamers using it to make everyday creativity more visible; as Lamerichs argues, it's the paratext of the game, the paratext of the streamed commentary, and the paratext of the fan memory, their sense of "being there" at key moments. (This essay in particular was the one that challenged my conception of paratext.) Katarzyna Marak's "Benefits of Including Let's Play Recordings in Close REadings of Digital Game Texts" looks at how Let's Play can be sources for understanding games, and Milosz Markocki's "Fame or Infamy: The Influence of Let's Play on Independent Game Developers" pursues a similar direction, looking specifically into how these Let's Plays can influence developers over time. The section concludes with Rudolf Inderst's "'Here Comes a New Challenger': Will Video Game Essays be the New Champion of Game Criticism?" which looks at the video essay as a tool of film criticism, and how these theories can be adapted to the video essay on games. Video essays have proven to be pretty challenging for academic journals to incorporate, but its benefits for an audiovisual medium such as videogames are pretty clear; I can certainly attest to the value of some really excellent video essayists out there.
The final section, Peripheries, explores a wide variety of subjects. Mark J. P. Wolf's "The Impending Demise of Video Game Packaging: An Eulogy" is somewhere between an academic paper and a personal essay, and provides a fairly personal history of the game package and its influence on play. In Regina Seiwald's "The Ludic Nature of Paratexts: Playful Material in and Beyond Video Games" looks at the paratext of the minigame, arguing for some types and varieties. Ed Vollans' "'[Para]Textually Here: Paratexts and Presence in Games" argues for viewing paratexts more as a textual network, emphasizing the trailer. And in one of the more ambitious essays of the collection, Giovanni Tagliamonte and Yaochong Yang argue that the isekai manga and anime genre has become increasingly game like, to the point where a major subgenre of it deals with games and their potential to both control and be controlled by players. And, wrapping up the collection, Hanns Christian Schmidt writes on the paratexts of The Division, including its ARG and surprisingly complex in-game paratextual narratives. It's kind of a return to roots for paratext after the more far-reaching essays, and I appreciated it for that.
Paratext itself is a fairly old concept at this point, and it's old in the context of game studies as well--the popular accounts are generally Mia Consalvo's 2007 Cheating or Steven E. Jones' The Meaning of Videogames. This account of it--especially the essays on creativity, video essays, and isekai, really re-opened my eyes to its potential and limits. It's a very long book, but that's largely to its advantage. There's a lot of space for illustration, and for some essay collections, it feels like the essays are over before they start; there's room enough for the arguments to really lay out their concepts. It doesn't feel long, which is impressive for a text weighing in at 500+. On the negative side, some of them feel more like an exercise in setting up terms or situations than really staking an argument, but all of them offer an interesting, unique take on their subjects.
The collection here is divided into roughly four parts: there's an extended introduction, a section on paratexts and histories, another on performance, and a final one on peripheries. The book begins with Freyermuth's lengthy history of text and paratext, largely through the lens of McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy. He goes through the concept of the text up to modern digital texts, the history of play and text in other mediums, and the concept specifically in relation to the development of videogames, and the section concludes with the more traditional role of the introduction, outlining the rest of the book. It's somewhat unusual for an account of paratext to delve this deeply into text history, and it sets a tone for the rest of the book.
The first section is "Histories," and emphasizes the degree to which games on history or games with their own histories can draw on paratext. Beil's essay on Assassin's Creed focuses on the paratext of the more recent games' discovery tours and their potential value (or lack thereof) as historical guides. Souvik Mukherjee follows, situating the videogame map within larger discussions of cartography and colonial power. Richard Cole looks at the paratexts around Age of Empires and how they influence the reception of the series, with particular attention paid to its manual. (As someone who's spent considerable time investigating game manuals as paratext, I appreciated this.) And Rene Glas rounds out the section with a discussion of the Super Mario Maker series, and how they function as a sort of paratext for the larger Mario series and its history in general.
In general, I enjoyed the "Histories" section; in particular, Mukherjee's discussion of maps connected to areas outside of game studies in ways I found really interesting, and Glas's discussion of the Mario series adds to an area of study that's been underdeveloped. But for the most part, it's all pretty usual territory for paratext and games studies. The second section is a little different; "Performances," by nature of its subject matter, explores how paratext changes when the focus is shifted to active participation, and it stretches the term beyond its common use. There are some essays in this section where I appreciate the extension work they're doing; there are others where I'm generally uncertain if paratext is still the best term or approach. Brandis and Bozkurt's "Player Agency in Audience Gaming" looks at cases where streaming audiences can make direct choices in gameplay and what terminology is best suited for that project. Nicholle Lamerichs' "Material Culture on Twitch: Live-Streaming Cosplay, Gender, and Beauty" looks at how fans perform their relation to texts on Twitch, particularly cosplay streamers using it to make everyday creativity more visible; as Lamerichs argues, it's the paratext of the game, the paratext of the streamed commentary, and the paratext of the fan memory, their sense of "being there" at key moments. (This essay in particular was the one that challenged my conception of paratext.) Katarzyna Marak's "Benefits of Including Let's Play Recordings in Close REadings of Digital Game Texts" looks at how Let's Play can be sources for understanding games, and Milosz Markocki's "Fame or Infamy: The Influence of Let's Play on Independent Game Developers" pursues a similar direction, looking specifically into how these Let's Plays can influence developers over time. The section concludes with Rudolf Inderst's "'Here Comes a New Challenger': Will Video Game Essays be the New Champion of Game Criticism?" which looks at the video essay as a tool of film criticism, and how these theories can be adapted to the video essay on games. Video essays have proven to be pretty challenging for academic journals to incorporate, but its benefits for an audiovisual medium such as videogames are pretty clear; I can certainly attest to the value of some really excellent video essayists out there.
The final section, Peripheries, explores a wide variety of subjects. Mark J. P. Wolf's "The Impending Demise of Video Game Packaging: An Eulogy" is somewhere between an academic paper and a personal essay, and provides a fairly personal history of the game package and its influence on play. In Regina Seiwald's "The Ludic Nature of Paratexts: Playful Material in and Beyond Video Games" looks at the paratext of the minigame, arguing for some types and varieties. Ed Vollans' "'[Para]Textually Here: Paratexts and Presence in Games" argues for viewing paratexts more as a textual network, emphasizing the trailer. And in one of the more ambitious essays of the collection, Giovanni Tagliamonte and Yaochong Yang argue that the isekai manga and anime genre has become increasingly game like, to the point where a major subgenre of it deals with games and their potential to both control and be controlled by players. And, wrapping up the collection, Hanns Christian Schmidt writes on the paratexts of The Division, including its ARG and surprisingly complex in-game paratextual narratives. It's kind of a return to roots for paratext after the more far-reaching essays, and I appreciated it for that.
Paratext itself is a fairly old concept at this point, and it's old in the context of game studies as well--the popular accounts are generally Mia Consalvo's 2007 Cheating or Steven E. Jones' The Meaning of Videogames. This account of it--especially the essays on creativity, video essays, and isekai, really re-opened my eyes to its potential and limits. It's a very long book, but that's largely to its advantage. There's a lot of space for illustration, and for some essay collections, it feels like the essays are over before they start; there's room enough for the arguments to really lay out their concepts. It doesn't feel long, which is impressive for a text weighing in at 500+. On the negative side, some of them feel more like an exercise in setting up terms or situations than really staking an argument, but all of them offer an interesting, unique take on their subjects.
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