An Interview with Agata Waszkiewicz

To begin, maybe you can outline your research background and discuss how you became a games scholar and what led you to where you are today.

It was something that happened by chance. Like many scholars who specialize in games studies, I did not start out in that area. However, I think I have a different starting point from many such scholars because my MA is in psychology. I had intended to follow that path and my psychology degree did not have anything game-related. One day it just so happened that that I came across a podcast that discussed the psychology of games and video games and something clicked. I was drawn to this subject and I knew at this stage that I wanted to do a PhD but my psychology degree did not have anything game-related. So I took an open university class in audiovisual cultures at a different department. And I remember this starry-eyed moment in that class on VG games and realizing that is something that you can do. The combination of the podcast and the class helped me to see the direction that I wanted to go. I was able to approach the professor in the course and tell him that I was interested in doing a PhD in games studies and he told me he would be willing to be my supervisor, even though we both lived in different countries. It was a very exciting time. I did my PhD in the English department with American Studies Focus. So my PhD degree is situated in literary studies and now I’m also working at a different university, but with a similar profile at the Department of American Literature and Culture.

You have previously spoken about having to unlearn certain viewpoints or perspectives from your training in psychology. As a practicing games scholar do you ever conversely look back on instances where you were gaming as a leisure activity and pinpoint instances where you were acquiring some of the analytical skills you use today?

I think that in a lot of ways this kind of analytical thinking has always informed my gaming, even before I decided that this is what I’m going to be doing. But that’s kind of what I love about video games more than any other medium. I love fiction and I was always very drawn to books. I did not interact with novels as critically as I instinctively interacted with games.

I had major health issues in my teens that caused some restrictions for me and I started to watch a lot of YouTube videos about games, and I began to know more about games than my friends who did play regularly, I began to acquire a broader framework of references to draw from.

Often scholars with an interdisciplinary background have extremely interesting and nuanced insights because they make connections across a broad range of fields. Your book Metagames: Games about Games is a great example of that in practice.

I do agree that an interdisciplinary approach definitely influences how you do game studies as well which I find fascinating. I am a games scholar in a literary studies department which has meant that my perspective continues to evolve. With a current project that I am starting, for instance, I am delving into into film studies. I have been joking that right now I am doing film studies with a video game angle. Which is completely different from what I have done before.

The Metagames book is based on my PhD dissertation. The dissertation was primarily focused on postmodern video games. Part of the argument is that narrative elements in certain video games embody the postmodern medium. But then, as I expanded the project after the PhD, I grappled with the term postmodern. It is a fascinating concept, but also a tricky term in general, especially when combined with a meta-perspective. So the focus shifted somewhat to meta-representations in games and I started to look at it as this broader category, and adopting approaches from literary studies. In the book, I have looked at some of the most common meta-devices used in post-modernism, modernist, and avant-garde literature, and how they would translate to the very different medium of games. I find that I keep getting pulled into the things that are definitely video games but are still very much attached to literature.

This perhaps an opportune time to mention another project that you are working on that concerns poetry and video games?

In the primary project that I am currently working on I am exploring poems that are inserted into video games. These are works that are designed and manufactured to be video games as opposed to poems that were gamified for an interactive format. But there are specific examples of poems that appear in video games like Ghost of Tsushima or Alan Wake Two. In these examples, we can see these poems can function as puzzles or as kinds of mini-games.

Has this research topic altered your perceptions of poetry?

It is very funny because I am not an ardent practitioner of the things that I’m writing about. I have previously written a book called Delicious Pixels: Food in Video Games but I hate cooking so much. I don’t cook it at all, at all. In the same vein, for the majority of my youth, I avoided reading poetry. It was only in the past few years that I developed more of an interest and began to read more poetry. I even began to write some myself, really beginning to play with poetry.

Often I explore topics that are quite new to me which can sometimes feel like going on a quest for knowledge. This particular project has definitely changed my perception of poetry because I’m more interested in it now, I know much more about it now both as a writer and a reader.

You mentioned some lightbulb moments that eventually led you to game studies. That seems to overlap with many people’s experiences of falling in love with poetry: when they come across a poem that speaks to them and it then opens up a new world and indeed a new field in some cases.

Yeah, absolutely. I have so many instances of people who come to their specialty after coming across a topic in a classroom or discovering it by accident. Of course, there are people who purposefully go in a certain direction and remain there but often the thing that you pursue that fascinates you is something that you find by accident

I think that this is one of the attributes of some of these playable puzzle-like poems. The hope is that people who usually avoid poetry and find it difficult, inaccessible, or boring will discover these games and realize that that is not true, and they will hopefully start to seek out more poetry.

In some of your work, you have explored this concept of coziness and its opposite, an experience of being unsettled. Based on your personal taste and preferences, what are the games that make you feel cozy and what are the games that make you feel unsettled? However you interpret those concepts.

It is true that I am drawn to the two sides of these two completely different things, the cozy and the unsettling, and how they interact. Sometimes they overlap even within my own gaming exploits. For example, I very rarely listen to music while I’m gaming but I have been known to watch a horror show while playing a cozy game at the same time.

I do enjoy cozy games a lot as well as many other genres. Occasionally though I do enjoy the concepts of certain cozy games more than the actual experience of playing them. Some cozy games can become too repetitive, and attention starts to wane. But the process of discovering them is exhilarating. Like many gamers, I find it very enjoyable and nostalgic to occasionally replay old favorites.

I have written a text on cozy games which is now in the peer review process, and in that work, I discuss the difference between cozy games and a comfort play. That felt like an important distinction to make because every time I gave a talk about cozy games and described what cozy games are, somebody from the audience would tell me “But I play Dark Souls, and like that is a very cozy experience for me.” Or “I play Diablo Three which I find very cozy.” But there is a distinction. Dark Souls is not a cozy game but at the same time, it can be a form of comfort play. Comfort games are familiar to you and that makes you feel at ease, even if the subject matter is difficult and dark. A personal example would be Alan Wake Two because of the impact that it had on me. It is not a cozy game in any shape or form but I have a lot of strong positive emotions associated with that game, despite the fact that in general, I do not play a lot of horror-orientated games. I usually prefer psychological tension or supernatural spookiness rather than full-on horror. So that is a form of comfort play for me.

When it comes to unsettling, I think that a lot of meta-games can actually be unsettling. Which can either be deliberate or unintentional. In the instances where the meta aspects are intentionally unsettling, the aesthetic of the game can also contribute to that effect. Whereas cozy games are frequently very artistic, cute, and designed to look very polished. Conversely, meta-games can intentionally be very unappealing and sparse, very pixelated, with very simple graphics. But this is not necessarily because the game designer lacks skill. It is because the game designers want players to be unnerved, creeped out, even terrified.

There is a report on Cozy Games —which I often refer to as a manifesto because that is what it is to me— written by Project Horseshoe’s workgroup. It is a beautiful, exhaustive, astute report that covers literally everything that encompasses cozy games. There is a sentence in this report that states that coziness is best described when compared and contrasted with other things. For example, you know that you’re cozy when you are sitting with your cup of cocoa with marshmallows in it in front of the fire and with a blanket. When you add a raging storm on the other side of the window into the scenario, that enhances that feeling of coziness. Coziness benefits from contrast. Many games are simply cozy, right? But you they are cozy games because games like Dark Souls exist. Dark Souls is a good example of situational coziness. There are moments of coziness within this game that overall is not cozy at all. The bonfires within the game for example. They offer your safety, you have this moment at the fire when everything else is just gonna shut and it’s gonna eat you and it’s terrifying.

We can see that the popularity of cozy games came from the over-saturation of games that were violent, threatening, difficult, frustrating, and so on. There is no light without the shade.

But ultimately, cozy games are not realistic. It is much safer than anything that you can experience. Broadly speaking, people are drawn to cozy games because we live in stressful, turbulent times. So in cozy games, you know that whatever you do, it’s gonna be fine. It’s like an ultimate fairy tale.

Do you have some advice for anyone who doesn’t play games but harbors some curiosity about gaming?

I truly do believe that there is a video game for everyone. If you are willing to engage with that there is something for you. If you aren’t interested in shooter games you don’t have to play them. If you enjoy challenging games that have an element of physical embodiment you can try VR games. If you like fun and lighthearted games there is something there for you. If you are driven by engaging stories there is a wealth of options. For me, games are such a beautiful, engaging, versatile, medium.

I’ve always been very narrative oriented but for me with games, it’s always the question of the ludic aspect. Games can tell stories in certain ways that novels, comics and films cannot.  For me, the games that I personally like the most are the games that use the medium to such a full extent that can only be fully realized in a game. They open up new possibilities in more ways than one. For instance, I love games that incorporate climbing movements. Climbing is something that I really love and enjoy but something that I cannot participate in due to the nature of my disability. I cannot play most sports but I can in video games. The same is true of Beat Saver which is a delightful VR game that also allows me to do certain things that I would not be able to do otherwise. It lets me have such an exciting experience of playing in my living room and embodying the movement in a kind of way that I can experience. There are many such examples of video game experiences that you just cannot have in the same way in different media.

Finally, how do you envision game scholarship will continue to evolve in the upcoming years, particularly within Poland?

Poland has a lot of game scholars right now, even though we don’t really have that many universities where you can study games. There are a couple of exceptions and programs that are combined with game design. There is an increasing amount of game scholars. There are a couple of places where you can study games, but it’s often combined with courses in game design. But we also don’t have a lot of these, a couple, but not they’re not that’s not definitely, like a massive thing that is going on in Poland. But we have quite a few scholars, especially around Kraków and other places.

The Central and Eastern European Games Studies Conference does take place in Poland quite often. It is a big country so logistically that also makes it easier. More and more students are also becoming interested in game studies and want to write about games, which is exciting. However, because of how the system is at present, it is more difficult now to get into a PhD program than it used to be. That might hinder the number of Ph.D.s writing about games. In a European context, I think Poland is, especially associated with games studies because there are quite a big percentage of specialists there.

I hope that this continues and that there will be more programs. I would love to see an MA program in games studies, for instance, it would be really cool to be involved in something like that.  That being said, I also truly do believe that it is of benefit for game scholars to have an MA in something else, even culture studies more generally. Even though game studies has of course its own theoretical frameworks, it would be very easy to embark on a degree in culture studies with a focus on games.

If hypothetically we got to a point where the majority of the games studies scholars come from games to these programs that would change the landscape significantly. Video games are so diverse and there are so many angles. It is fun to go to a conference and see psychologists, philosophers, lawyers, and historians. That diversity brings various perspectives with it.

I definitely keep hoping that video games continue getting more and more recognition, but also on a general cultural level not necessarily an academic one. I think that COVID contributed to more people exploring games, especially with cozy games and games like Animal Crossing. Now even people from my parent’s generation, people who are not themselves gamers, are more supportive and more knowledgeable. They understand that video games are not what they fought in the 90s, it is not solely shooters, killing, and violence.

The shift has been such that a few years ago a video game This War of Mine became the first game that was permitted into a high school syllabus. It is not mandatory but it is now on a list of things that can be used to teach in school, which sets a precedent.

Perceptions are changing and that is probably what we need the most. Because for those of us doing games studies outside of a dedicated games studies department have experienced these moments when we had to present our work, or the title of our thesis, and have a professor directly say something along the lines of “I don’t like video games, I don’t get video games.” Or “I’ll never read your dissertation, I just don’t care about this topic.”

If there was more validation, if these subjects were viewed more highly on a larger scale then that would be also a little easier, I think. I hope things get better, that is the dream.

 

Metagames: Games about Games, by Agata Waszkiewicz, is published by Routledge.