Relations of Control: Walkthroughs and the Structuring of Player Agency

Videogame walkthroughs provide instructions on various elements of gameplay in relation to specific digital games, and exist as text-based documents and, to a lesser extent, as recorded moving image game footage. We focus here on written-walkthroughs for the purposes of depth, while recognising the specific and significant position that moving image walkthroughs hold (see Ashton, forthcoming). Player-produced walkthroughs, freely and widely distributed online, point to the broader social contexts that inform and structure player agency. In this article, we emphasize three perspectives on these documents. First, walkthroughs can be approached as a means of recording and codifying playing styles, thereby legitimising specific approaches or strategies. Accordingly, we highlight glitch hunting and the Pokémon series to illustrate the diversity of these playing styles and the significance of the walkthrough as a form of ludic archival document. Second, walkthroughs as textual codifications of gameplay potential can encourage new styles of engagement with authors and performers by outlining opportunities for play, and illuminating strategies and techniques previously unknown to the reader. Importantly, as we shall demonstrate, walkthroughs not only investigate and interrogate game texts – exploring their every narrative turn and spatial aspects in minute detail – but also frequently present techniques that take advantage of weaknesses and flaws in the ruleset or code of the game in order to offer new gameplay options. In this respect, as James Newman (2008) suggests, walkthroughs can be understood as a form of reverse-engineering that renegotiates the player-designer relationship and encourages (perhaps even demands) deliberately investigative, resistant and deviant strategies of gameplay. These modes of engagement frequently involve playing beyond performative norms and technical limits. The walkthrough, then, is both a document of the game as designed and a record of investigations into the vagaries and imperfections of its implementation and how these may be enacted and exploited. Third, we suggest that the prefigurative potential of walkthroughs may be seen as having a regulatory quality and, therefore, represents a key mechanism for shaping the way videogames are played. Noting research on the social contexts of gameplay, we situate the prefigurative qualities of walkthroughs in the context of the presentation and performance of expertise.