Introduction: Reconsidering Paratext as a Received Concept

Abstract

It is now 40 years since Gérard Genette's work introduced the term paratexts into literary studies, giving a unifying name to the many kinds of texts that serve as thresholds to other texts. The term and concept have migrated into the study of several other media forms, including video game studies, thanks principally to Mia Consalvo in Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Video Games (2007) and Steven Jones in The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strategies (2008). The term's meaning expanded in the process, which has been the subject of much debate since then. Over a decade later, the timing seems apt to take stock of the concept of paratextuality and consider new ways of adapting it. This introduction to a special issue titled “Video Games and Paratextuality” reconsiders Genette's reception in video game studies, and introduces a set of articles that together look beyond Genette.

It is now 40 years since Gérard Genette introduced the term seuils—translated into English as paratexts—into literary studies, giving a unifying name to the many kinds of texts that serve as thresholds to other texts. The term appeared in his 1982 book, Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré (translated into English as Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree) (1997a) and received systematic treatment in Seuils (1987), published in English as Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1997b). Like many scholarly coinages, the term paratext gave a name to a category of textual materials that was often overlooked in its discipline of origin, namely the reviews, blurbs, prefaces, author interviews, and other satellite texts that orbit printed books as they travel through the literary cosmos. Over the past two decades, the term and concept have migrated into the study of several other media forms (Desrochers & Apollon, 2014; Gray, 2010; Jara, 2013; Lunenfeld, 1999; Pesce & Noto, 2016; Stam, 1992; Stanitzek, 2005).

In video game studies, the term paratext was imported and adapted primarily by Mia Consalvo in her book Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Video Games (2007) and then by Steven Jones in The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strategies (2008). The term's meaning expanded in the process, which has been the subject of much debate since then. Today, over a decade later, the timing seems apt to take stock of the concept and consider new ways of adapting it, thanks in part to a recent theoretical review and citation study of paratextuality in video game studies by Jan Švelch (2020). His article helpfully clears some ground for video game scholars to step back and reconsider how and especially why they employ the concept of paratext. What critical work does it perform, and why does it matter?

The authors in this special issue of Games and Culture take up these questions in different ways. Overall, the theoretical and methodological problem we are grappling with is how to reconcile paratextuality as a trans-disciplinary concept with discipline-specific knowledge of the materiality of video games. In our collaborative writing and conversations, which unfolded as a friendly, collegial respite from pandemic isolation, we have regarded the differences in our critical approaches not as a problem to solve, but as a welcome chance to disagree, dissent, debate, and learn from each other. ¹ Although we embody a range of disciplinary backgrounds—including but not limited to literary studies—and each deploy different critical strategies in our adaptation of paratextuality, all four articles (and this introduction) attempt to disentangle the concept from Genette's original definitions. Other recent work in this area has tended to call for a more rigorous use of the term paratext, often accompanied by a critique of Consalvo's expanded definition of the concept (Dunne, 2016; Jara, 2013; Rockenberger, 2014; Švelch, 2020). However, it has become clear that debates over definitional fine-tuning may be missing a bigger picture.

Our aim is not to sort out the concept of paratext once and for all, as it were, by returning it to its literary origins. Indeed, those literary origins are part of the problem. As the articles here demonstrate, each in different ways, it is worth questioning some of the field-specific assumptions that have accompanied the term paratext from literary studies, namely the distinctions between peritexts (paratexts materially connected to the primary work, like a book's cover), epitexts (paratexts at some degree of physical remove, like a review), and that most deceptively straightforward of objects, the so-called text itself.

In our criticism of Genette, and our resistance to treating his book Paratexts as a definitive map or taxonomy, we take our cue from Genette himself:

above all, we must not forget that the very notion of paratext … has more to do with a decision about method than with a truly established fact. “The paratext,” properly speaking, does not exist; rather, one chooses to account in these terms for a certain number of practices or effects, for reasons of method and effectiveness or, if you will, profitability. The question is therefore not whether [a given example] does or does not “belong” to the paratext but really whether considering it in such a light is or is not useful and relevant. (1997b, p. 343, emphasis in original)

Pragmatism, not positivism, is what Genette advised his readers to follow in their application of paratext as a term. This lesson has apparently been overlooked in some of the disciplinary debates mentioned above, which tend to focus on how best to nail down the concept. If anything, paratext has become a useful concept precisely because it won’t stay nailed down, and lends itself to playful, exploratory, and imaginative thinking about the materials that game scholars might profitably study. As Jones and his co-author George Thiruvathukal contend in Codename Revolution, a broad and holistic conception of paratext “offers a way to think about how the value and meaning of video games can’t be restricted to just one layer of signification, analogous to ‘the text itself,’ whether that's the ROM, the code, what can be seen on the screen, or some other rigid idea of the game itself” (2012, p. 145). Definitional rigor is always essential for technical descriptions of cultural artifacts, and video games are no exception. But as Jones and Thiruvathukal suggest, the value of paratext is less as a technical category and more as an interpretive strategy. Švelch (2020) frames this approach well by suggesting paratextuality may be the more useful form of the term, in that it describes a quality of relationships among texts, and a vector for our attention as critics.

Our collective approach here is similarly pragmatic, and we are less interested in the term's origins than its possibilities. By paying attention to paratextuality, how might we discover new objects of study for games scholarship? How might paratextuality prompt us to understand video games and their social and technical contexts in new and useful ways? Asking these questions about video games takes us into refreshingly new territory for paratextual studies, but as much as we wish to move beyond Genette as the default focal point, it is necessary to unpack some of the conceptual baggage that accompanies the term paratext. ² The opportunities and problems that come with the term's definitional scope are given a cogent summary by Švelch, who classifies uses of paratext into three categories: the original definition; the expanded definition, associated with Consalvo's approach; and the reduced definition, advocated by those who feel Consalvo's approach is too expansive (Švelch, 2020). His mapping of the critical discourse is clear and necessary, but the resulting complexity and category-management also point to what is simultaneously the great strength and weakness of Genette's approach: encyclopedism.

Reading Genette—and reading others’ writing about Genette—can quickly begin to feel like playing an open-world game where myriad side-quests overwhelm the map. Indeed, the term paratext's potential scope may be gleaned from the encyclopedic table of contents in Seuils (1987) and Paratexts (1997b), in which Genette organizes his book's subject into 13 category-chapters, each with their own subheadings, totaling over one hundred distinct facets of the concept of paratext. As a work of literary structuralism, Genette's ramified, multiply nested table of contents gives us not so much a map as a legend for many possible maps, just waiting for researchers to draw them. Small wonder, then, that the concept of paratext has been taken up so readily by video game studies and other fields. However, as with all conceptual tools born of encyclopedic ambitions, the concept of paratext makes for an imperfect fit with the material world it seeks to catalogue.

Genette himself acknowledges that the map is not the territory. For example, at several points in Paratexts he emphasizes that his approach, writ large or small, should not be taken by the reader as exhaustive (1997b, pp. 33, 75, 91, 161, 404). Indeed, whenever Genette uses the words exhaust or exhaustive—or, more precisely, when his English translator, Jane E. Lewin, uses them—it is invariably to describe what his approach is not. No small irony, then, that Richard Macksey's foreword to the English translation makes the well-intentioned but inaccurate claim that Genette's “meticulous anatomies and taxonomic distinctions trace an exhaustive list of logical relationships and modal inflections” (1997b, p. xxi; emphasis added). Yet disclaimers and warning signals abound in Paratexts, from Genette's introductory caution that this is a synchronic “picture” and not a diachronic history (1997b, p. 13), to his passing confession that he did not check a fact about a certain book's preface himself because “the Bibliothèque Nationale is closed Sundays” (1997b, p. 213). It is hard to imagine a remotely serious scholar in video game studies or any other field getting away with a quip like this today, much less being considered an exhaustive researcher.

What to do with Genette's mixed messages? It is worth remembering that while Genette's Paratexts may have been taken up by many disciplines, he was not writing for one in this book, nor even writing from within one in any formal sense. Notwithstanding Genette's career-long affiliation with narratology and literary studies, and his book's systematic ambitions, Paratexts is best understood as part of an older tradition of writing, namely the collector's somewhat random tour of their shelves. We should read Genette not as Macksey or some recent video game scholars seem to do—as a scientific taxonomist—but as a learned flâneur and essayist, like Walter Benjamin in “Unpacking My Library” (1968 [1931]) or Alberto Manguel in The Library at Night (2007). Such writers are not systematizers or mapmakers, but insightful observers who walk the territory and notice things others would miss. (John Saklofske's and Steven Jones's comments on deep mapping in their contributions to this special issue would seem particularly apt for this metaphor, too.) Barker expresses some of this spirit when he suggests (in an otherwise pointedly critical article) that for all of Genette's “weird completism” we can still “celebrate the detail and thoroughness that he shows”; as Barker puts it, Genette “invites us to do paratextual analysis carefully, and in ways that draw out their full preparatory and guiding role” (Barker, 2017, p. 241, emphasis removed). Barker's insight here is an important one for textual scholars working in video game studies: we may or may not embrace Genette's encyclopedism, but his attention to the details of objects very much aligns with textual scholarship and video games scholarship alike (especially where they converge in detail-rich studies such as Young, 2016, and Altice, 2015).

Pragmatically, then, the question to prioritize is not the original meaning of paratext, in Genette's or anyone else's definition, but rather what the term can do for us. Both Consalvo's and Jones's book-length studies afford their authors the scope to answer this question by applying the concept of paratext broadly and insightfully, using it to illuminate neglected aspects of video games and their reception. Consalvo in particular uses the category of paratext to accomplish what may be called recovery work for the products of alternative systems of cultural production, of the kind that assist players in cheating and related activities. As she points out, “This system isn’t the game industry but is closely related to it. To call it peripheral dismisses or ignores its centrality to the gaming experience” (2007, p. 8; cf. Consalvo, 2017). As Genette himself suggests in his introduction to Paratexts, “this work consists of bringing into focus categories that, until now, have been disregarded or misperceived” (1997b, p. 14). Thanks in large part to Consalvo—and to the video game archivists, professional and pro-am, who make this kind of historical scholarship possible—a whole field of supposed gray literature such as guidebooks, walkthroughs, and Easter-egg websites has become viable material for scholarly analysis (see Švelch, 2020, for representative instances).

In the field of video game studies today, it is difficult to imagine any kind of historically contextualized understanding of a given video game without recourse to these ephemera, and without paratext as an available concept. For example, Marcus Carter's (2015) article on EVE Online (CCP Games, 2003–2014) expands the concept of video game paratext to include propaganda materials created by the game's factions—materials which, again, might easily be overlooked by game scholars without this conceptual framing. His article also unpacks the concept of paratext as received from Genette and Consalvo, and helpfully cites other studies which do the same with other facets of video games (Carter, 2015, p. 315). Carter's article also serves as an example that can stand for many others, all of which follow Consalvo's strategy of using paratext as a critical strategy to recover the ephemeral, and to shed light on the overlooked. ³

What, then, could video game scholars do with paratextuality if we ceased to worry so much about triangulating the concept with a work of literary structuralism published well over a generation ago? After all, Genette was hardly the first to notice the literary phenomena we now call paratextuality; his contribution was to give the phenomenon a name that stuck, and to account for it in ways that have proven useful to others (to echo his own advice, quoted above). Where, then, can video game scholars turn if they are interested less in debates about Genette's legacy, and more in paratextuality as an important condition of the materials they study, teach, and care about?

Jones's own critique of Genette in The Meaning of Video Games acknowledges many of the inherited disciplinary problems mentioned above, but it also invites us to look beyond Genette to the field of textual scholarship, pointing readers to foundational work by W.W. Greg, Fredson Bowers, G. Thomas Tanselle, D.F. McKenzie, Jerome McGann, and David Greetham (Jones, 2008, pp. 7–9). ⁴ Despite its association with English departments in North America, textual scholarship has never been limited to the study of literature (in English or other languages), and in the hands of its best practitioners, it more closely resembles media studies—but as a descendent of philology, and in a form attuned to the production, transmission, and reception (and creative appropriation and radical mutation) of texts, with a critical vocabulary that marries technical detail and interpretive insight. The notion that textual scholarship deals only with literature, and then only in the form of idealized editions of printed books, is a misapprehension worth correcting (and one which the field itself could do more to dispel). The Meaning of Video Games demonstrates the potential of textual scholarship's applicability beyond literature, and specifically its potential to make a difference in our understanding of the materiality of video games. ⁵ Subsequently, some promising studies have made connections between video game studies and textual studies (Altice, 2015; McDonough, Kirschenbaum et al., 2010; McDonough, Oldendorf et al., 2010; Schneider, 2019; Young, 2016). There is, however, much work to be done at the intersection of textual scholarship and video games (and indeed all kinds of games). The authors in this special issue also draw upon textual scholarship in different ways, though in the spirit of that field we also combine it with other influences and ideas.

Regina Seiwald's article, “Beyond the Game Itself: The Paratextuality of Video Games,” takes a systematic approach to thinking about video game paratexts, drawing on post-structuralist narratology to theorize paratextuality in relation to interactivity, digitality, ephemerality, and authorship. Arguing that games cannot be essentialized as merely their playable content, Seiwald unpacks differing degrees of paratextuality in examples drawn from sandbox games, narrative games, and first-person shooters.

Jon Saklofske's article, “To the Center of Nowhere: Deep Mapping Digital Games’ Paratextual Geographies,” takes up ideas from the traditional field of scholarly editing and more recent discussions of deep mapping in the digital humanities. Through a detailed discussion of two primary examples, No Man's Sky (Hello Games, 2016) and the Retro Games Commodore 64 emulator, Saklofske juxtaposes the practices of mapping and editing in the context of video games, and questions the political and epistemological stakes of paratexts and their representation in critical practice.

My own contribution, “Behind the Scenes at Aperture Science: Portal and Its Paratexts,” delves into the Portal games (Valve, 2007, 2011), which I examine through the lens of textual studies. Although Portal and its sequel are well-known and influential games, their story is not limited to what we might call the games themselves, and is also told via the interactive website ApertureScience.com—now defunct thanks to the demise of Flash, though not irretrievably so. I consider what this particular paratext means for understanding both the Portal games and the complex materiality of born-digital artifacts.

Steven Jones's response article, “In And Out of the Game, As Usual,” returns to his book The Meaning of Video Games (which in part inspired this collaboration). Beginning with an act of literary reading (with Anna Karenina on her patio), Jones then explores the paratextual dimensions of Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo, 2020) and Aglet (Onlife, 2020). As he deftly shows in his readings, the thresholds between games and the world were made to be crossed. To again evoke the cartographical metaphors that run through much of our work, Jones aptly shows how exploration need not lead invariably to the staking of claims, or the colonization of territories and disciplines alike.

Together, these articles would seem to fulfill the predication that Georg Stanitzek made in his 2005 discussion of paratexts and media: “it can be foreseen that the research which has been inspired by Genette's work will eventually return to its starting point in order to refine the theory” (2005, p. 36). Returning to Genette's work as a starting point reminds us that paratextuality offers a way to discover new facets of video games as complex and changing cultural phenomena. But starting points (like pandemics) are preferably viewed in one's rearview mirror, receding into the distance. Where the concept of paratext comes from matters less than where it's gone, and where it's going now. As Jones and Thiruvathukal suggest, paratext's “shifting and uncertain threshold … [and] dynamic and often-concealed border” is “where things get interesting, because it's where the meanings of games are made” (2012, p. 145). In that spirit, this special issue of Games and Culture explores the pathways radiating outward from Genette's work in the present, and follow them to places in video games where things get interesting.