Metaphors We Game By - Part I

This will be a two-part article. In part one, I’ll introduce the concept of metaphor as it’s understood in cognitive linguistics. The second part will consist of a more critical look at the metaphors below, including a discussion of how the concepts they entail inform debates that are currently raging in the world of video game criticism. You may need to read this a couple of times to fully get the concept - I certainly did!

One of my all time favourite books on linguistics is “Metaphors We Live By”, in which Professors George Lakoff and Mark Johnson examine the links between metaphors, language and thought. This article on metaphor in gaming follows the template set out in the first three chapters of their book.

Lakoff and Johnson argue that, rather than being merely a literary device, metaphors are used when we talk about almost everything, and that they influence the way we conceptualise the world. In their own words, metaphors are:

[…]pervasive in every day life, not just in language, but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. (Metaphors We Live By, page three)

I’ll explain this idea using a video game metaphor, GAMES ARE COMPETITION (like Lakoff and Johnson, I’ll be capitalising the metaphorical concepts in this article). This metaphor can be seen reflected in the phrases I would have used as a kid to talk about playing Sonic The Hedgehog 2:

I beat Sonic 2
Sonic 2 was too tough for me
Emerald Hill Zone was not very challenging
It was a battle to get all the Chaos Emeralds
I fought my way to the Death Egg Zone, but then lost

It's a little known fact that Dr. Robotnik's PhD was actually in cognitive linguistics (Picture: Steam)

We can see from the choice of words that I think of Sonic The Hedgehog 2 not just in terms of the literal battles that take place between Sonic and Robotnik (yes, Robotnik, not bloody Eggman) during the game, but in terms of a metaphorical competition between myself and the game. The metaphor GAMES ARE COMPETITION, then, is not only the way we speak about games, but also the way we play and even think about them. We play games to ‘win’ them. We compete for high scores and race to acquire achievements/trophies before our friends. When I played God of War: Ascension and got stuck at the Trials of Archimedes, I began to get frustrated because I felt like I was losing. It was a shot to my pride because I was viewing my experience in terms of the GAMES ARE COMPETITION metaphor. 

Lakoff and Johnson point out that metaphors are culturally specific, and they invite readers to imagine an alternative culture where metaphors, and therefore the concepts that inform the ways people talk and think, are different. I’ll try to do that here, as it makes the link between metaphor and thought easier to understand. Imagine that the metaphor in our culture was GAMES ARE PRESENTATION, rather than GAMES ARE COMPETITION. Let’s go back to my playthrough of God of War: Ascension. Again, I’m struggling with the Trials of Archimedes. Again, I’m frustrated. However, this time I’m not feeling the hit to my pride, I’m just annoyed that I’ve yet to see the later sections of the game. Divorced from the concept (and therefore the language) of competition, I may complain that I ‘didn’t’ get to the end, rather than saying that I ‘couldn’t’. Rather than saying that I ‘lost’, I may simply say that I ‘stopped playing’. My conception of gaming would be more passive, and the language I use to discuss it less adversarial, in line with the alternative metaphor. The way I speak about games would become far more similar to how I speak about movies.

Lakoff and Johnson go on to talk about the ‘systematicity’ of metaphor (apparently, we’re supposed to accept that ‘systematicity’ is a word because they're professors of linguistics). This means that a given metaphorical concept entails various others that  follow logically from the original. So following on from GAMES ARE COMPETITION, we may have GAMES CAN BE WON AND LOST, GAMES ARE ENTERTAINMENT, and GAMES HAVE RULES. I'll call these 'entailments'. Keep these in mind, because I’ll come back to them in part two.

Leading on from the ‘systematicity’ of metaphor, Lakoff and Johnson talk about how a metaphor hides some aspects of a concept while highlighting others. As they put it:

In allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept […], a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor. (Metaphors We Live By, page 10)

To illustrate this, let’s go back to our alternative metaphor, GAMES ARE PRESENTATION. This is a plausible metaphor, but one highlighting the role of the player as a passive recipient of what the game offers, hiding the adversarial side of the relationship between the player and the game emphasised by GAMES ARE COMPETITION. The tension between different metaphors informs much of the debate surrounding video games at the moment. Again, this is something we’ll come back to in part two.

Click here to read part two.

Reference

Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark (1980[2^nd ed. 2003]), Metaphors We Live By, Chicago and London, Chicago University Press

@ludolinguist