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women have always been gamers—andthe ways women assert this identity—feellike the heart of the text and the key forthe eventual next steps Cote will lay out inher conclusion. Beyond this deeper interpretative work, Cote also seems to havestronger footing here, falling less into hertendency in the first half of the book toundercut her statements with “probably”
and “potentially.” One sticking point: it
is not always clear to me where Cote isfocusing on issues women have as womengamers versus issues women have as gamers—and what it means for these to coexist
as distinct entities. Her final chapter offersa poignant, refreshing perspective on how
women gamers’ identities shift over time,
although her framing of the entire chapter
around GamerGate seems slightly awkward and forced.
Overall, though the book struggles
to weave all the pieces together, Cote haspresented an efficient and powerful historyof what it means to be a female gamer andhow all present in the gaming realm canpave a way forward. There do seem odd
gaps in the discussion. For instance, Cotetwice brings up the “second shift” in relation to women’s household work, but she
never addresses in detail the skewed labor
women take on while establishing and protecting their gamer identities. Her exploration of prior research in the first half of thebook could be greatly condensed, which
would allow more room for interpretation in the vital second half of the text.
Regardless of these quibbles, Cote’s voice
emerges strong. Because the work leansoften into compilation and reflection, it isa solid resource for anyone who has notpreviously delved into gaming sexism. For
anyone already well versed, this book does

not seat itself as a particularly revelatory
text, but its collection of proof and detailof the feminine gamer identity makes it aworthy read for those who want to further
gaming equity in the near future.
—Christina Xan, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC

Performativity in Art,
Literature, and Videogames
Darshana Jayemanne
London: Palgrave Macmillan. 2017.
Introduction, list of figures, list of tables,bibliography, and index. 331 pp. $159,paper. ISBN 9783319853963
Darshana Jayemanne’s Performativity
in Art, Literature, and Videogames has
seemingly modest aims: to explain howgames create experiences. However, as
Jayemanne demonstrates, this is anything
but simple. Neither games nor play arehomogenous. There is variability in bothplayers and games that makes typological approaches to video games unwieldy.
Additionally, games scholarship has generally taken either a player-centered or a formalist approach—in other words, a focus
on the individualistic act of play or the formal construction of games as a medium.
As Jayemanne notes, the tendency to overprivilege either leads to overstating each’simportance. This is the gordian knot that
Jayemanne cuts through by developing
the concept of “performative multiplicities” as well as a corresponding methodology, which he describes as a “comparativeapproach to the analysis of videogame performances . . . that is capable of accounting

Book Reviews

for the many ways that particular performances arise from [gaming’s] multiplicity”(p. 2). This approach promises to accountfor the heterogeneity of games and playwhile also accounting for all the actors
involved in videogame play.
In the first chapter, “Videogames
as Performances,” Jayemanne forefronts
video game’s ability to produce performances by characterizing them “as anarchive that is accessed, modified, andmanipulated in a very particular way:
playful performance” (p. 2). This description emphasizes the mutual productionof performances through interactions
between player and game. But a complication emerges in defining “performance.”
What exactly is the unit of analysis? Contrasting with Ian Bogost’s concept of “unitoperations,” from Unit Operations, which
separates video games into discrete unitsof analysis based on a game’s programming, Jayemanne argues that “videogames themselves are multiplicities, andeach videogame performance is a kindof count-as-one . . . performances ariseout of multiplicity as a dynamic internal
to and constitutive of the game” (p. 19).
Jayemanne draws attention to the factthat units of analysis are never discrete
nor obvious. They are caught up in what
Jayemanne dubs “the muddle” of play,
indicating “a state in which we do not yet
know what constitutes a performance” (p.
15). Drawing from J. L. Austin’s theorization in How to Do Things With Words ofspeech acts as performative actions andfrom Angela Ndalianis’s work on framing
devices in Neo-Baroque Aesthetics andContemporary Entertainment, chapter 2,“How to do Things with Images,” begins tobreak the multiplicities of play into units

demarcated by frames. The early sectionsof the book are, in my estimation, the mostlucid and generalizable. Jayemanne elucidates the fine details and complications
that arise when studying games that areoften left unstated, and by bringing themto light (and providing language) future
analysis can be sharpened.
At the same time, this project isnothing if not ambitious, and this ambition may overextend its scope by placing
video games into an overly broad discussion of art and literature. Chapter 3, “Whatis Rhyparography? The Ambiguity of theFraming Device,” for example, launches
into an analysis of Van Haecht’s painting“The Cabinet of Cornelis van der Geest”
to show how frames serve as a means tonavigate complex media and also to draw
attention to outside spaces. Chapter 4,“‘Fanciful Microscopy’—Framing Devicesand Uncertainty in Pynchon’s the Cryingof Lot 49,” continues the analysis of framing devices with an extended treatmentof The Crying of Lot 49 that introduces
uncertainty into the concept of the frame.
Later, chapter 8 “Physical Wit: Games andthe ‘Tactile Unconscious’” is dedicatedto a reading of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx
and Crake that demonstrates how Walter
Benjamin’s writings on distraction can beunderstood to produce felicitous embodied engagements with video games. Popular and academic discourses surrounding
video games tend to overemphasize what
is unique to the form, ignoring priortheorization as well as the ways videogames remediate existing media forms.
Jayemanne’s forays into art and literatureserve as a corrective to this tendency. At
the same time, these chapters-long investigations may have been better served by

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more directly connecting to video games
because it can be unclear how the language
and concepts applied to art and literaturefunction in regard to video games.
Still, over the course of the book,
Jayemanne expands on the concept of theframe as a device that is produced throughboth player engagement and game design(particularly in the analysis of Half-Life inchapter 5 “Anterior Motives—From Subjective Shot to Portal’s Figure of Reversal”). Frames are not a formal quality of agame. Instead, they arise out of the muddleof player and game world. The insistenceon video games as “a muddle” from whichplay arises is one of the most important
aspects of Performativity in Art, Literature, and Videogames. Player’s orientation
toward games become central to how thedesigned elements of games produce play.
The importance is most stark in chapter
6, “Performative Multiplicities” in whichthe author develops a “ludology for losers,”
which extends an analysis of play practices
that can be subsumed under an “aesthetics of infelicity.” Specifically, discussionsof glitches and the “fog of war” found inreal-time strategy games are offered toshow how poor play, broken games, andincomplete information are central tovideo game performances. Gaming culture, broadly, is obsessed with expert play;however, if we are to account for the multiplicities of video game performances thendeveloping language to engage with theways players and games fail is imperative.
The remaining sections address issuesof embodiment that arise from gaming’s
serial frames and the unstable temporalitythat video game’s shifting frames produce.
Each of these sections builds off the priorwork in interesting ways culminating inan extended analysis of the game Life Is
Strange that serves as a demonstration of
the methods Jayemanne unfolds over thecourse of the book. Finally, Jayemanneends with a short, yet extremely useful,conclusion that clearly explains his methodology in a bullet-pointed list, one whichhelps cut through the—at times—jargonladen prose that comprises much of thebook. This section is clearly written andilluminates the core threads. It also serves
as a guide for analyzing video game performances, which is sure to be useful foranyone who takes seriously the complicated phenomena of videogame play.
—Madison Schmalzer, Ringling College of
Art and Design, Sarasota, FL