The term exoludic is something I’ve used from time to time, and in our recent courses I’ve heard the term extragamic used in discussion of elements of a game that come from outside that game. I pushed back against extragamic because as a nobody noncademic I have firm opinions on words but mostly because I was already using exoludic and ludic ties into existing, widespread uses of game study and terminology while gamic ties it to the slightly loaded word ‘game.’
Yes, I have firm opinions on that.
Anyway, as to what exoludic means it’s the term used for elements that relate to or pertain to a game that are not part of the game. In literary analysis it can be seen as hypertext or subtext, but a ludic element operates within the context of the systems of the game. That is to say, it isn’t enough for information to change an interpretation of a game element to be exoludic (this means that), but rather for the element from outside the game to change how the games’ systems behave.
Now there are two ways I can go from here. Without going into more term wankery (and I do not expect to keep these terms around for longer than this blog post), there is soft exoludic, where influencing how the player chooses to behave thanks to an external element qualifies, and there is hard exoludic, where something outside the game provides an actual direct mechanical effect that integrates with the games’ systems. It might be easy to think of soft exoludic as a huge group and hard exoludic as a small one, but they’re both about the same size.
Specifically, soft exoludic elements include things like strategy guides. They include things like conversations with friends or chat rooms or modding communities or costume contests. In World of Warcraft, a minor game economy has sprung up around hoarding elements of a particular level rangei n the hopes of finding a rare-but-inconsequential piece of armour that has a particular appearance, nowadays, creating an exoludic incentive that changes player behaviour. In Diablo 2, the knowledge that other players might want gear influenced my behaviour and led to me hoarding and stockpiling hardware for my friends. This wound up being a huge thing, too – I never finished that game’s hardest difficulty levels, instead focusing on farming Nightmare Mephisto Forever. And of course, From Software has made a prize of its exoludic design, where talking about Souls games is as much a game as playing Souls games. People learn, they strategise, they develop plans and they even develop new languages to try and convey what they want to in the conversations they have about the game. I genuinely feel that Dark Souls and ilk, by dint of being so vast and unguided, are very good games at utilising that soft exoludic element. Hell, look at how people who beat those games like to act, as if they’re part of an exclusive club of rarified, special, stronger gamers, as if they didn’t just Finish A Thing Made To Be Finished.
A hard exoludic element is trickier to point at because in a lot of cases the games that have deliberately played with this are often a bit… bleak. Particularly there’s Asphyx, which is a game where your breath capacity plays into the game’s systems. This creates a sense of urgency, too. There’s also the crippling tabletop game Dog Eat Dog, where the opening question at character creation is Which player has the most money? An uncomfortable place to start, yes. Still, there are plenty of other hard exoludic elements that influence how we play videogames. In World of Warcraft, I favoured the tank classes because their survivability and reliability worked well to overcome the occasional heavy lag spikes I suffered because of where I lived. The monolithic system requirements of Far Cry 3 led to a friend of mine playing that game in constant stealth mode, knowing that any encounter of four or more entities would crash his computer. And there’s also the way that a friend’s poor vision made the night-time segments of Dying Light completely impossible, changing them from a risk/reward situation to a panicky, terrifying plan-ahead-or-die experience. In each case, these elements changed the game, though in ways the developer didn’t exactly intend.
In the end most hard exoludic elements are function of infrastructure and accessability. Sometimes we use them deliberately but mostly, these exoludic elements are coming up and becoming part of games without them meaning to. I know there are games I have finished despite their failure to engage me because my friends wanted me to. I know there are games I have quietly set aside despite my enjoying them because my friends’ distaste for them.
There’s more to the game than what’s in the game.
And because of all this, inspired in part by a friend seemingly sad that they liked playing From Software games with some foreknowledge, please, don’t feel bad. You are playing the game as it was intended – the Souls and Bloodborne style games are made to be spectacle in an era of streaming, made to generate stories of failure in a world of social media, and are filled with opportunities to scribble your words around the world. The game of Dark Souls is one thing but the game of talking about and pre-warning about Dark Souls is another – and both are fun.
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