Enjoyment With(out) Exception

Abstract

While considerations of gender predominate in scholarly accounts of why and how people derive pleasure from videogame play, the question of sex remains either undertheorized or conspicuously absent from the conversation. Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s formulae of sexuation, this article argues that the jouissance (enjoyment) of videogame play is sexed rather than gendered. It theorizes two logics of enjoyment in videogame play: enjoyment with exception and enjoyment without exception. Through an analysis of the videogame Inside, it argues that the logic of enjoying without exception undergirds the libidinal satisfaction of all videogame play. To accept that the enjoyment of videogame play is predicated on such a logic, however, means to accept the ontological failure of the sexual relation. Videogame culture is subsequently founded on a disavowal of the logic of enjoying without exception and a pathological identification with the logic of enjoying with exception.

Keywords:

• formulae of sexuation
• Lacan
• jouissance
• gender
• psychoanalysis
• Inside

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

I am deeply grateful to the anonymous reviewer, Christopher Boerdam, Ella Cattach, Ben Egliston, Brendan Keogh, Erin Maclean, Dan Padua, Thomas Sutherland, and Tony Thwaites for their generous feedback on earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to thank Salah El Moncef for his guidance throughout the publication process.

1 “Side-scrolling” refers to an aesthetic convention in certain videogame genres – “platformers” being the main example – wherein play unfolds horizontally along a two-dimensional plane. In side-scrolling platformers, players are typically tasked with moving an avatar through a side-scrolling environment by making use of the avatar’s running and jumping abilities. A puzzle-platformer such as Inside combines platforming mechanics (e.g., running and jumping) with puzzle-solving mechanics (e.g., pressing a switch to open a locked door).

2 It could be argued that the growing body of literature on the gendered implications of videogame play is more of a response to external social and political factors such as gamergate (a semi-coordinated harassment campaign that targeted female videogame players, journalists, and developers in the mid-2010s) than it is evidence of an ongoing disciplinary commitment to historicism. Gamergate has undoubtedly contributed to a growth of research in this area. However, the idea that the pleasures of videogame play are gendered had attained consensus in game studies long before gamergate, to the extent that gamergate was largely seen as a proof-of-concept for the idea. As will be argued, I do not deny that videogame play is gendered, but I see the gendering of videogame play as an epiphenomenon of a more fundamental structure of sexual difference.

3 Although neither Lacan nor Freud use the phrase “sexual difference,” I use it here because it is common shorthand in more recent psychoanalytic theories of sexuality.