Abusing the Player, and Making Them Like it Too!

This paper, co-authored by Douglas Wilson and Miguel Sicart of the IT University of Copenhagen, argues against the prevailing assumption in game studies and design that games should be built for the player's pleasure, empowerment, and comfort. Drawing on the conventions of independent and experimental games, the authors propose "abusing the player" as a deliberate creative and aesthetic stance, in which the designer intentionally disrespects, antagonizes, or punishes the player. The central claim is that such abusive design is a legitimate and under-explored practice capable of enriching the political and ethical dimensions of gameplay.

The argument rests on a critique of two dominant ideas: that game design is primarily a formal discipline concerned with balance and the equilibrium between frustration and pleasure, and that it is essentially the art of pleasing players, a view the authors trace to popular accounts of casual games and motion-controlled systems such as the Nintendo Wii. In place of these, the paper reframes game design as an aesthetic craft in which the designer's presence and intent become visible to the player, who must contend not only with the system's logic but with the designer as an implied author behind each choice.

The authors catalogue several modalities of abuse, each illustrated with existing games and with hypothetical designs developed as thought experiments. These include physical abuse, exemplified by Painstation and Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors; aesthetic abuse, illustrated by Flywrench; deception, as in Eternal Darkness; embarrassment, as in Dark Room Sex Game; and arbitrary or deliberately antagonistic design, as in Kaizo Mario and I Wanna Be the Guy. The paper also argues that these techniques can be combined synergistically. The work is conceptual and analytical rather than empirical, drawing on theoretical sources including Foucault's writings on power and discipline, Eco's semiotics of reading, and Dunne's account of critical design, and it is presented as a contribution to the Proceedings of DiGRA 2009.