The Performance of Gameplay: Developing a Ludoliteracy

Drew Davidson's essay argues that the most effective way to understand a game is to play it, and that repeated play develops "ludoliteracy," the capacity to analyze how games work by engaging with them. Davidson frames gameplay as a form of performance and examines it across three levels. The first concerns spectatorship: games such as Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Dance Central, and Child of Eden are engaging to watch as well as to play, particularly in group settings or when players' bodies are part of the control scheme. Davidson's anecdote about watching Uncharted 2 with his wife, and how difficulty settings affected her enjoyment of the story, illustrates how performance shapes the viewing experience.

The second level draws on theatre and improvisational acting rather than film. Davidson suggests that games, like live performance, establish a spatial and conceptual context in which agency is enacted in the immediate present, and that designers function somewhat like playwrights, building frameworks within which players explore a game's possibility space. The third level concerns practice: both game development, which proceeds through iterative prototyping from concept to release and patching, and player mastery, which develops through cycles of challenge and reward, are treated as performative processes. The essay is a short, reflective position piece rather than an empirical study, and it draws its examples from a small set of mainstream titles across consoles, without survey data or systematic methodology. Davidson concludes that cultivating ludoliteracy supports deeper analysis, better game design, and a richer critical culture around games as they become a larger part of popular media.