Article

Animated Frustration
or the Ambivalence
of Player Agency

Games and Culture

2015, Vol. 10(6) 593-612
The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1555412014567229
gac.sagepub.com

Daniel Johnson1

Abstract
Frustration is an everyday experience for many users of game media. Distinct from
related sensations such as difficulty, frustration is perhaps best characterized as
when the agency of the player becomes obstructed. This can lead to the feeling of an
ambivalent, uncooperative relationship with the game machine. This article will focus
on two examples to demonstrate some of the possible manifestations of frustration
in game media. The first, Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor, will deal with motion
control gestures that are misinterpreted by the game in a way that obstructs the
players ability to interact with the game. The second, Papers, Please, will consider
repetitive gameplay that limits the players actions. Drawing on recent scholarship in
animation studies, both cases will be approached as a form of what Sianne Ngai
describes as animatedness, the feeling of becoming an automaton and of having
ones agency frustrated by technology.
Keywords
frustration, agency, ambivalence, animatedness, repetition, affect

Frustration is something that many users will experience while playing game media.
The feeling that a game doesnt work or doesnt work as we might want or expect it
to is one that can disrupt the pleasures of play and even thwart a players chances for
success within a game. But these feelings of frustration also raise more general
1

University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

Corresponding Author:
Daniel Johnson, University of Chicago, 1115 East 58th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.
Email: djohn@uchicago.edu

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questions about how user agency can be obstructed by the game machine that a person is interacting with. Frustration with game media can occur through faulty hardware such as buttons on a controller that stick and do not respond properly, glitches
that disrupt a players actions within a game, or even design elements that upset the
players ability to pursue his or her goals. The range of experiences that can be
described as emotionally or affectively frustrating while operating game media are
thus quite diverse.
How, then, should we attend to feelings of frustration that arise while playing
game media? Rather than approaching this experience from the perspective of evaluation, this article will instead characterize frustration as part of the dynamic of how
game media respond to and represent player agency. Frustration is perhaps best
understood as something that intersects with but is distinct from related experiences
such as difficulty. Both contain subjective elements that can vary from one individual experience to another, but difficulty is perhaps more readily grasped as something which can be rewarding and part of a games way of motivating a player to
continue playing. In this sense, difficulty is integral to game media in that it provides
a way of balancing challenge, effort, and reward. It is part of the logic through which
we evaluate success. Frustration is conversely what is felt at those moments when
the desire for the game to execute the players agency in clear and precise ways
is disrupted in a manner that draws out an ambivalence of interaction between the
player and the game machine. It is felt at moments when we lose control or feel like
we are beginning to lose control, such as when an in-game camera moves without
our command to avoid elements of the game-world environment.1 With that distinction in mind, this article will approach frustration in game media from this perspective of confounded agency and its connection to the ambivalent affect between
players and game media.2

The Ugly Affect of Animatedness

This sense of frustration can be characterized as what Sianne Ngai has termed an
ugly feeling. What Ngai finds distinctive in ugly feelingsemotions such as
envy, irritation, and paranoia is their relationship with agency. She describes the
agency of ugly feelings as suspended due to the way they do not motivate those
who experience them to action but rather induce and intersect with inaction and deny
catharsis or a sense of virtue (Ngai, 2005, pp. 16). This is where we might distinguish frustration from difficulty in gaming, which Juul (2013) has described as having the potential to spur the player on to trying again and overcoming the challenge
at hand. This is not to say that frustration and motivation are mutually exclusive but
rather that what is specific about frustration in game media is the way that it resonates with feeling helpless and even wanting to stop playing. What is ugly about
frustration in gaming is the ways that it brings forth the material qualities of game
media in disruptive ways and how it obstructs or restricts the feeling of agency a
player has while playing. The immersive forms of feedback we normally experience

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while playing a game are what give pleasure (and are often connected to the way that
games represent success), but when feedback begins to signal a gap between player
and game, the experience becomes negative and frustrating. In this sense, frustration
is not received as part of the intended challenge that the game offers us but rather
something we perceive as unfavorable about the games design or presentation and,
at least sometimes, a reason to stop playing.
This sense of obstructed agency during play and of a loss of control is tied to what
Ngai describes as animatedness. For Ngai (2005, pp. 9199), this is when our
sense of agency has entered into an ambiguous relationship with technology, when
our bodily movements begin to feel involuntary, and when we feel that we are
becoming automatized in some way. Automatization is a familiar concept in regard
to the way critics and scholars have described mechanization of human bodies and
labor under modernity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But, in analyzing
contemporary game media, we might also consider the relationship between the
gamification of work with related sentiments of repetition and the ambivalent
affects of humanmachine interfaces. In developing her concept of animatedness,
Ngai turns to stop motion animation and its dynamic of agitated things that have
been rendered in jerky movements and the deactivated persons of production, the
unseen animators bringing these figures to life onscreen.3 The tension of animatedness is therefore tied to movement, the figuration of human agency in visual media,
and the relationship of a human actor with the production of those sensations. As this
article will discuss, these are also key qualities to understanding frustration in game
media.
One example that might demonstrate how this dynamic of agitated things and
deactivated persons resonates with game media is Dragons Lair, an arcade game
first released in 1983. Dragons Lair was a laserdisc game that featured full motion
hand-drawn animation by Don Bluth, a former animator for Walt Disney Studios.
The game used prerecorded video footage that the player could interact with in limited ways, essentially moving from chapter to chapter on the disk, as they successfully navigated their character Dirk the Daring through the games content. When
the game presented the player with a visual prompt to act in a certain way (such
as moving in one direction or executing actions such as swinging their sword), a successfully timed input to execute the command would show Dirk defeat the challenge
and then progress to the next video sequence (Figure 1). However, although the
visual presentation for the game was quite spectacular, the controls for the game
were rather minimal, namely, a simple joystick and button. The only actions the
player could perform would be to move in a single direction or perform a general
action that would fulfill a variety of tasks dependent on the situation. Choosing
the wrong direction or moving the joystick instead of pressing the button at the
prompt would produce a failed action, resulting in a character death animation and
returning the player to the start of the game to begin again. The timing given to successfully execute these commands was also quite limited and could easily result in
failure and again sending the player back to the beginning of the game.4

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Figure 1. A successfully timed input command in Dragons Lair results in an animated

sequence showing the player character Dirk the Daring defeat a dungeon monster.

Given this limited mode of interaction, in what ways is the player of a game like
Dragons Lair a deactivated person in relation to the games figuration of their
agency? There are a couple of perspectives from which we might approach this question and how it relates to broader issues of frustration. The gap of experience
between the restricted form of interaction the game employs and the spectacle of its
audio and visual presentation (which were all the more impressive in 1983) gesture
toward an ambivalence between player agency and machine interface, an ambivalence we might perceive as resonating with Ngais concept of animatedness. To elaborate further, the impressive visuals of Dragons Lair and its foundation in laserdisc
technology exaggerate this quality by transforming player agency into simply being
able to progress forward in a determined sequence of visual content, something that
we might compare to the quick time events of more recent game media that similarly appear to reduce player action to moving an already set sequence forward.
There is an affective gap between player action and the way it is expressed and represented within the game.5 This restricted form of play and frustrating controls are
where we can locate a sense of ambivalence in the interaction between player and
game.

The Ambivalence of Disobedient Machines

With this sense of ambivalence in use and experience in mind, a frustrating game
might therefore be characterized as a disobedient machine. This is when the integration of human agency into technology begins to diverge in materially experienced

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ways, or, in a more extreme sense, when the relationship between the human user
and game begins to feel incomplete or even adversarial. Following Ngais notion
of animatedness, Bukatman (2012, p. 135136, 146) has used the idea of a disobedient machine to describe traditionally drawn animation by identifying the ways that
animated figures can appear to turn on their creators and pursue their own desires
and agendas. Drawing on examples such as Winsor McCays Gertie the Dinosaur
(1914), Bukatman notes the tension between the vitality of the animated figure
which appears to come to life before our eyesand the mechanization of human
labor in producing this sense of movement. The expression of agency and life in the
animated figure seems to exceed that of the human agency that produced it even as
that agency begins to feel mechanical or automated.
To return to the metaphor of animation once more, the logic of executing player
agency in a game is one of figuration. This refers to the process of transforming one
action into a visual representation of another. The player pressing a button or moving
a joystick to cause their character to perform an action is not the same thing as that
action itself (as Dragons Lair demonstrates), but figuration is what links these two
actions together in a way that normally feels immersive and approaches a sense of
transparency.6 A frustrated notion of figuration can characterize the dynamic of
restricted gameplay and full-motion images of Dragons Lair, but it also brings us
back to Ngais notion of animatedness and the complicated interplay between
motion, human agency, and technology. It is through the process of figuration that
this dynamic becomes most problematic and material in its expression.
By seemingly interfering with the agency of the player, do disobedient game
media that present experiences of frustration emerge as agents of their own in these
situations? The negotiation of agency between the player and the game might feel
more contested that in media such as animation, but this confrontation is not necessarily so much the machine exerting agency of its own so much as the player losing
control over his or her means of expressing his or her control within the operational
logic of the game and its protocols. Actions begin to feel involuntary in motion control games that have poor (or extreme) sensitivity to user gestures, and player actions
feel meaningless in scripted sequences such as quick time events that have predetermined conclusions that ignore player-made decisions. This is especially pronounced
in games that require the repetition of similar actions over and over. There is a misalignment between the intended actions of the player and the way that the game
machine represents those actions. Control seems to shift away from the player,
although rather than being transferred to the game machine itself, perhaps into a state
of ambivalence that cannot be located in either the player or the game. It becomes
part of the realm of figuration.
In approaching this intersection between frustration, player agency, and
machineuser relationships, this article will focus on two examples of contemporary
game media that can serve as case studies for thinking about some of the ways that
frustration might be experienced. Focusing on a small number of case studies will
limit the amount of work this article can do toward developing frustration as a

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general concept for thinking about game media, but it is hoped that a greater sense of
precision in analyzing the relationship between agency, figuration, and player
machine relationships can be achieved this way. The first of these is Steel Battalion:
Heavy Armor (From Software, 2012, Xbox 360), a science fiction vehicle combat
simulator that incorporates both the traditional Xbox 360 controller and the Kinect
motion control system into its player interface. However, similar gestures being used
for multiple motion input commands renders the games control schema unstable,
with the players actions often being misread by the game in ways that makes it
almost impossible to control the game. The second example is Papers, Please (Lucas
Pope, 2013). In this game, the player assumes the role of an immigration agent in a
fictional, Eastern bloc country during the Cold War. Gameplay consists of repetitive
tasks that mimic the bureaucratic tasks that the character is assigned. This mode of
play emerges a kind of affect labor in which decisions feel serialized and often
appear to have little immediate consequence, a dynamic which can also be experienced as a restriction of the players ability to interact with the game.
These case studies will demonstrate different forms of frustration and ambivalence in gaming but will be loosely united through the ways they trouble the act
of play through disruptions of player agency. They, in disparate ways, gesture
toward the ambivalent gap between human players and game machines, which can
often appear to be working in harmony but are frequently interrupted by problems
such as input commands that fail to align player action with character action and
scripted events that negate the significance of player choice. Frustration will therefore be approached as the material, experiential quality of this ambivalence. These
two examples are not meant to exhaust frustration as a concept for thinking about
game media and the act of play but rather introduce a set of tools and perspectives
for thinking about issues such as player agency in playing games, repetitive play
forms, and the ambivalent affect of game media.7

Unseen Gestures
Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor (hereafter Steel Battalion) is a first-person perspective
science fiction vehicle simulation game. The player is placed in charge of piloting a
vertical tank that walks on two legs rather than moving on treads and leading a
crew of ammunition loaders and communications officers. The game divides player
control between the traditional Xbox 360 controllerwhich is used to manipulate
the controls for the tank such as steering and firing weaponsand the Kinect motion
control devicewhich is used to facilitate the player characters interactions with
the inside of the tank, such as turning to face other crew members so that they can
be communicated with, opening hatches, and raising and lowering the viewfinder for
the artillery. Gameplay consists of fighting enemy infantry, vehicles, and other vertical tanks within short missions that are connected by narrative interludes. Mixing
the conventional controller with the Kinect sensor is an innovative approach to this
type of gameand one which built off of the conceit of the elaborate physical

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Figure 2. Example of Kinect motion controls in Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor. The player
extending a hand upward can lower and raise the periscope to get a better view for aiming or
changing between view modes. The window-in-window image in the upper left is part of the
Kinects infrared display to show the player how his or her actions are being read by the
sensor.

controller its predecessor (2002) was packaged with. However, despite this innovative use of the Kinect, the game was poorly received due to issues with the input system received by the infrared sensor.
There are multiple complications with the Kinect-based commands a player
might wish to use within the game. These include more general issues with the
Kinect, such as an unpredictable sensitivity to a players distance from the device,
the height of the sensor in comparison to the player, and even ambient qualities such
as lighting that might interfere with the sensors ability to accurately read the players motions. But more specific to Steel Battalion is an overlapping of similar gestures that are used to activate different in-game actions (Figure 2). As a result, when
the player intends to input one command he or she will often find the game interpreting that action as another. Furthermore, because the visual feedback the player
receives from the Kinect is limited and unreliable, learning how to navigate its seemingly illegible sensitivity to different elements takes more time and patience than
many gamers were willing to give. This frustrating element of the games control
systems results in errors that force the player to replay a stage over and over again.8
For example, if a player wishes to have his or her in-game character turn his head
to face another member of the mech-tanks crew, he or she is supposed to raise his or
her right or left hand and make a waving motion, signifying the desire to turn or
rotate the optical perspective of the camera/character. However, this motion is very

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similar to those used for other actions, such as accessing a control panel within the
tank, pulling the activation level to start the tanks engine, or opening the protective
shutter at the front of the tanks chassis. This shutter frequently needs to be opened
or closed to offer a better view of the surroundings and offer protection against
incoming enemy fire. But because of the similarity between the gestures used for
these two different commands and the Kinects confusing range of sensitivity to
player movements, a player cannot reliably expect the game to understand what
he or she is trying to perform with any sense of regularity. Even an experienced
player will still face bad input results that thwart his or her intended commands.9
This is also true for gestures that are less similar, such as the command gesture for
instructing your character to lean forward and look out of the viewfinder space
revealed when the front shutter plate is open (pushing toward the Kinect with both
hands) being misinterpreted as opening or closing the front shutter plate (which only
requires one hand).
The result of this confusion between gesture commands is an experience where
the player feels almost as if he or she was losing control of his or her own body.
Many reviewers focused their criticisms of the game on this part of its control system, with some going so far as to claim these problems rendered the game unplayable. Cork (2012), for example, describes the way that nearly every gesture is either
ignored or misinterpretedoften with game-ending repercussions. Shoemaker
(2012) notes that the game itself is not particularly difficult, observing how the
Artificial intelligence (AI) scripts that operate enemy infantry, artillery, and tanks
are unimaginative and predictable, typically remaining stationary while taking the
occasional pot shot at the players own tank. It is rather the combination of slow
movements of the players tank and the faulty Kinect controls that renders the game
frustrating, producing a sense of difficulty that is not rewarding to overcome but
simply an exercise in wrestling with the games interface. Online video content surrounding the game also focused heavily on the control set up and its myriad problems, with lets play video makers and related forms of YouTube content trying
to incorporate images of frustration into their coverage. This includes simply turning
the camera away from the game and onto the player (so as to show the gestures and
lack of response from the game) or even using picture-in-picture images of themselves playing with the Kinects infrared projector view that could highlight the gestures they were using during play.

Stupefying Animatedness
To refer back to an idea introduced previously, these moments of miscommunication
between the player and the Kinect device can be taken as an instance of the game
machine becoming disobedient. Indeed, the experience of playing the game can
feel like a battle with the control schema, which constantly appears to refuse to cooperate with even simple commands. However, if we are to approach this suspending
of player agency as a sign of the ambivalence of control shared between the human

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user and the machine, we might consider an alternative suggested by David

Auerbach who has described computers as stupid due to their lack of sophistication in interpreting human commands. By this Auerbach means that although
computers often appear to be capable of performing almost any type of function,
they often do not know what type of function they should perform in a given situation.10 He uses the semantic understanding of search engines as an example for
thinking about how computers (which he uses as shorthand to refer to a variety of
software systems) interpret user input in narrow ways that often fail to understand
the real intention behind a given command or requestsemantic understanding is
often advanced, but holistic understanding is comparatively lacking, leading to a gap
between how the user understands his or her input commands and how the computer
or program understands them.11 Crowdsourcing of interpretive labor (Wikipedia)
and relying on meta-data to streamline results in more reliable ways (Google, Amazon.com) have emerged as ways of side stepping some of the problems of computer
stupidity in many mundane tasks, but in many other activitiessuch as gaming
computers continue to fail to cooperate as we might expect. Steel Battalion and its
problematic control system is one case for approaching this issue of uncooperative
game media that feels stupid and, perhaps more importantly, stupefying.
For Auerbach, the stupidity of computers is found in the way they understand (or
fail to understand) human language. Hence his focus on tasks such as search engine
queries. However, if we extend this to considering things like gesture that have been
assigned a game-command function, Steel Battalion is a stupid game. But we should
not understand that as merely a pejorative in evaluating this title. Rather, what is stupid about the Kinect functionality in this game is its inability to successfully resolve
the ambiguity of physical gestures that resemble one another. This is compounded
by the way the game requires the player to sit during most moments of gameplay.
Centering so much of the players body in a limited amount of space restricts the
Kinect sensors ability to differentiate between gestures even further. As a result, the
game loses its ability to interpret with precision or discern overlapping commands,
producing mistranslations of human action that lead to a sense of animatedness in
which the players attempts to control the game are misfigurated by the game
machine. This can even be seen in how the game tried to render the arms and hands
of the player character in relation to those of the player, with the characters limbs
frequently twitching and flickering as it tries to decide what position they should be
held in based on information collected by the Kinect sensor.
To return to the question of user agency in a broader sense, what this quality of
stupidity in the game results in is that the users actions begin to feel involuntary.
Not in the sense that their body is acting without their control but that through the
games frustrating way of misinterpreting those actions, the player has to constantly
correct his or her own bodily movements through repetitions of the same gestures.
Those actions begin to lose their intended meaning and become part of some other
kind of performance activity in which the player is no longer in control. Although
we might joke that this results in a reversal in which the player is no longer

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controlling the game but the game is actually controlling the player, there is a sense
in which the human user is figuratively mechanized or even automatized by the way
the humanmachine interface dismantles the logic of subordination and reciprocity
that informs how game controls are organized. To put it in other words, the form of
embodiment that the humanmachine interface would normally suggest is transformed in a way that obstructs the agency of the human in favor of the
machinethe ensemble of human and technological actions.12 If we think of the act
of play as a kind of animation or animatednessin which the player performs a
certain kind of life or vitality into the game world or sprite characters, the contested
agency of the frustrating game experience is one in which the animation is being performed by and upon the player in an entwined, ambivalent way that, rather than giving life to the figures within the game, mechanizes the player through acts of
repetition and misfiguration.13
To extend this affinity between animation and gameplay further, we can turn to
how Crafton (2013, pp. 58, 59) has described the multiple registers of agency that
can be perceived in traditional animation. He observes how animated figures appear
to possess a free agency of their own through the way that they move but that this
is also a figuration of the animators control and even the perceptual agency of the
viewer. Game media can sometimes behave in a similar way, in that while most ingame actions by the player character are performed by the player (and essentially
reperformed by the avatar or character), the in-game representations of physics are
often slightly off in a way that makes in-game, player-operated actions slightly
excessive of what the player expected or intended; hence the inherent ambivalence
of such machines. This is also true for the Kinect, which does not perform a literal
one-to-one mapping of the players gestures. But to return to animation, for Crafton
(2013, p. 70), the complicated distribution of agency between animated figure, animator, and audience means that both the animated figures and the animators themselves can each claim a kind of autonomous agency. Autonomy seems to recede
in the case of a game like Steel Battalion, which simultaneously relies on player gestures to direct in-game actions but also mistranslates those gestures in a way that produces something different. The game appears as both subordinate to the human
users actions and approaches a horizon of autonomy through its frustration of the
agency of the player.
The frustration of Steel Battalions Kinect controls comes through this seeming refusal to perform as expectedwe try to tell the game to do one thing, but it does something
else. Through these ambivalent, affect gaps between our actions and the way the game
figuratively represents them, we are reminded of the limitations of our ability to control
a game and our ability to interface with its control schema. This ambivalence in interfacing with the game can also be found in scenarios where the decisions that players
make begin to lose a sense of significance and in which the act of play becomes repetitive and work like. The frustration of becoming automatized again seeps through,
but perhaps in a more mundane, irritating way than the spectacular aggravation of
Steel Battalion. This dynamic will be the focus of the next section.

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Glory to Arstotzka
Lucas Popes Papers, Please is an independently produced computer game that was
released for Windows and Apple OS in 2013 and Linux in 2014. Rather than being
an action-oriented game in which the player is able to move a character or vehicle
through a three-dimensional game world, the majority of Papers, Please restricts the
player to a single, cramped spacethat of an immigration booth at the border of an
imaginary Eastern European country during the Cold War. Interlude sequences will
show the player newspaper headlines, short narrative sequences, and explain the
effect of their daily earnings on their households well-being. Interactive elements
of the game, however, are generally limited to what happens within the confines
of the immigration booth and the player characters encounters with those trying
to enter the fictional country of Arstotzka.
In comparison to Steel Battalion, the game mechanics and controller interface of
Papers, Please appear quite simple. Most actionssuch as selecting documents that
have been passed to the player character, opening and closing the booth gate, and
operating the stamps used on passportsare handled through moving the mouse cursor and clicking on the desired object. Additions to the player characters booth that
allow some of these functions to be hot-keyed to the keyboard can be unlocked
and purchased through the course of playing the game, but the mechanical elements
of play remain quite limited.14 As such, although the game does not have issues of
frustration arising from controller complexity as a game like Steel Battalion can,
restrictions on the players ability to interact with the game world introduces new
ways of considering how obstructions to player agency can be felt. That being said,
an important distinction to be made between Papers, Please and a game such as Steel
Battalion is that the experience of frustration is one that is deliberately woven into
the act of play as part of the games mixing of work and play activities.
The narrative premise of the game puts the player in the position of performing
repetitive, tedious tasks as an immigration agent. Gameplay consists of checking
passports, work visas, and other documents for their authenticity. This includes considering elements such as expired dates of issue, accuracy of the issuing city, and for
inconsistencies between the documents and the individual presenting them (Figure
3). Based on this information, the player must then decide to either accept the individual for entry or deny them passage. Mistakes in judging a documents veracity
will result in warnings, and beginning with the third mistake made on a single day,
the player characters take home wages will be docked for each individual wrongly
admitted or denied. Nonplayer characters such as would-be immigrants and guards
will attempt to bribe the player to gain entry, earn extra income from detaining
suspicious-looking entrants, or even plot a conspiracy to overthrow the government
of Arstotska. Getting caught taking bribes or passing materials for nongovernment
factions can result in fines and even lead to a premature game over ending. Many
nonplayer characters that appear in the game are procedurally generated and have no
long-term impact as individuals (save any penalty that may come from wrongly

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Figure 3. A procedurally generated interaction with a nonplayer character in Papers, Please.

At the top of the screen we see a birds eye view of the outside of the booth and surrounding
area, while the lower area shows both the booth window (left) and desk with documents
(right). In this case, the nonplayer character is attempting to pass through the booth with an
expired entry ticket.

admitting or denying them entry), but there are many who are scripted and have
recurring roles that play into the larger narrative concerns of the game. These are not,
however, always obvious when first encountered.
Papers, Please can be a frustrating game, but perhaps in a way that is more obviously allegorical or even critically engaged than Steel Battalion. Reviews of the
game and its general reception account for this and take its frustrating elements into
consideration.15 The content of the game is, in one sense, a simulation of bureaucratic work, so many of the tasks that the player will be asked to do to progress
through the game will be tedious and unrewarding. Many encounters with nonplayer
characters will be very similar, with the character appearing and offering his or her
documents, which must then be checked against an ever increasingly complex system of contingencies. These must all be handled manually by the player by operating
stamps, filing away reference materials, and taking and returning documents. The
presentation of the game amplifies this experience, due in large to the affinity
between the limited aesthetics of the game and its restricted mode of gameplay. Text
appears pixilated and can be difficult to read, causing even simple tasks such as confirming the accuracy of an issuing city for a passport more time consuming that they
feel like they should. And unless the player has a good memory or takes notes, referring to in-game documents that must be retrieved, opened, and searched for the right

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information will be necessary, using up more time and leading to more strained
reading.
The player is also given limited space to arrange his or her desk, so as documents
begin to pile up, finding places to keep distinct pieces of information can become a
source of irritationall compounded by the fact that all documents of a given type
have the same cover when they are not being examined. The management of space
and discrete files thus approaches becoming overwhelming at times, which is again
exaggerated by the pressure to accomplish tasks as quickly as possible so as to bring
home a livable wage. Working in tension against the pressure to complete tasks as
quickly as possible is the consequence of decisions the player will make. Long-term
elements such as choosing an option that will punish the player further down the narrative treesuch keeping a stash of money rather than burning itcan result in
game over screens that force the player to go back to the beginning of a previous day
and replay until they find the point at which they can begin anew.
What kind of game is Papers, Please? It shares many elements with simulation
games, such as the use of allegorical scenarios for its content, the emphasis on management of in-game objects, and a real-time system of dealing out costs and
rewards to the player. But we can also think of it as a type of affect labor game, one
that inhabits the overlapping space between work and play and intersects with the
trend toward gamification of work and the extraction of labor from leisure activities.
It is particularly through the conflation of play with low-wage, low-skill work that
relies on repetitive and routine heavy activities centered around human interaction
that Papers, Please resonates with this notion of affect labor and, more generally,
contemporary develops within service industry economies.16 There is a resonance
between the repetitive tasks this type of game employs with the scripted interactions
common in fields such as customer service that rely on sequencing of actions that
Deborah Cameron has described as top down in their organization (Cameron,
2008). In the call centers that Cameron analyzes, this sequencing of speech is one
that is designed by managers and other superordinate agents who then direct workers
to perform these routines in their day-to-day interactions with customers. As with
Papers, Please and its ambivalent playermachine relationship or repetition, this gestures toward a transference of agency away from the individual and toward the institutionalized structure of command and routinized actions that must be performed
over and over.

Affective Agency
David Auerbach has written on Papers, Please in comparison to games such as The
Walking Dead (Telltale Games, 2012a), which he analyzes within the logic of quick
time events. Quick time events are narrative sequences in gamesoften rendered
with the games normal graphics engine rather than as a cut scene using fully rendered imagesthat allow for a limited amount of player interaction, typically in the
form of prompts to press a button at a certain point to trigger the next part of the

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narrative sequence. Dragons Lair might serve as a precursor to this trend in more
recent titles, such as the opening sequence of Uncharted 3: Drakes Deception
(Naughty Dog, 2011). This sequence features a bar fight in which the player is told
to press certain buttons to initiate dodges, punches, and other actions within the
fight, although they are not controlling the characters movements or more general
responses. This type of gameplay is, as Auerbach (2013) describes, not one that
allows for an expression of player choice but rather provides a way of advancing the
story based on limited types of player action. You can press the correct button at the
right time, which will advance the sequence, or fail to match things up, which will
usually result in a repetition of a similar segment that leads the player to the same
prompt. Auerbach notes that quick time events introduce player agency into narrative sequences of games but qualifies this by noting the type of agency they allow for
is not the one based around player choice or player-initiated decision making. It is
rather part of a logic of scripted forms that can be advanced but not changed or at
least not changed in significant ways. The inevitability of events such as character
death at the conclusion of The Walking Deadwhich uses the vibration function
of the controller to make the player feel the emotional trauma of pulling the triggeris taken as a model for thinking of how quick time events can initiate narrative
immersion and the feeling of player agency even when the game is limiting the type
of experience the player can have.17
This can be contrasted with the way that Papers, Please integrates a limited form
of player agency into its narrative conceit of bureaucratic labor. Although The Walking Dead presents an intricate narrative with far-reaching emotional consequences
for the player, the narrative of Papers, Please is one that generally happens around
the player character and even sometimes without the players immediate knowledge.
The player has many choices to make, and some of these affect the larger stakes of
the games narrative universe. These decisions, however, often appear inconsequential at the time they are made due to their obscurity within the behind the scenes
game of political chess being waged by government agents and terrorist spies. On
one hand, this means that while The Walking Dead and games like it that rely on
quick time events attach emotional stakes on what are essentially inconsequential
decisions (i.e. you get the same ending no matter what you do), Papers, Please offers
a far more restricted form of emotional payoff, despite the potentially meaningful
choices the player might be deciding between.
Papers, Please uses a restricted framework to organize how the player can interact
with the game world they inhabit. In contrast to the open world games of the
Grand Theft Auto series and similar titles, Papers, Please offers no horizon of
playthe world is dully colored, with nothing available to the player beyond the
inside of the booth and the surrounding area. It mechanizes the act of play through
repetitive acts that, by playing out roughly the same, instill the feeling of seriality of
anonymous segments that blend together. Take documents. Check for errors. Deploy
stamp arm. Reject or accept. Retract stamp arm. Return documents. Call next in line.
Repeat. This repetition is frustrating not only because of its seemingly laborious

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nature of mixing work with play, but because it mechanizes the players ability to
act. The act of play becomes an act of administration, of laboring.
This too presents a form of animatedness for us to consider. However, unlike
Steel Battalions more explicit misfiguration of player control through the faulty
gesture commands of the Kinect, Papers, Please relies more on the automatization
of player action, the mixing of work and play, and the dynamic through which those
qualities trouble the feeling of user agency. In other words, rather than spectacularizing the agitated things that inhabit stop animation for Ngai and which we can
perceive in the stupidfying controls of Steel Battalion, Papers, Please focuses on the
deactivated persons of those who live with repetitive work and obstructed agency.
The seriality of each instance of player choice contrasts with the more obvious
drama of Steel Battalion and contributes to a different way of understanding frustrated agency and ambivalence in humanmachine interfaces. The perspectives
from which these two games evoke affects of frustration are thus quite different even
as they share qualities of thwarted player agency, repetition, and a figurative
mechanization of the player.

Animating Agency
As we have seen, each of these games produce affects of animated frustration in particular ways. Frustration can arise from faulty controls that obstruct the players ability to control the game while minimalist gameplay that limits what the player can
accomplish. The temporality of frustration that players might feel is also quite different. In Steel Battalion, frustration is felt in sudden, punctuated moments when the
nonalignment between player action and figurative representation within the game
interfere with our ability to interact with the game as desired. Papers, Please is frustrating in a constant wayperhaps similar to what Ngai would describe as irritation
due to the repetitive elements of playing, the tedium of navigating its limited control
scheme, and its opaque system of narration. It is something we might feel as a constant, continuous state that envelops us rather than momentary interruptions. As
such, not only is the type of frustration that players will experience differ between
these titles, but also the way that players will experience it also varies significantly.
There are, however, similarities that should be recognized. Repetition is something that haunts each game and contributes to its production of frustration, whether
it be forcing the player to repeat similar gestures in Steel Battalion until the game
recognizes what the player is trying to do or the bureaucratic working play of Papers,
Please. This sense of repetition is also how frustration has been reclaimed as humor
in online communities, such as in lets play videos that edit together strings of
failed gameplay in rapid succession or live broadcasts on Twitch.tv and Hitbox.tv
that feature players trying over and over to complete the same level or goal within
a game. We can even see this type of laughing at frustration in televisual media such
as the Japanese variety show GameCenter CX (Fuji, 2003) or YouTube series like
The Angry Video Game Nerd, which focus on characters being flustered by

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difficult games and frustrating, uncooperative game technologies like faulty controllers and tangled wires needed to hook an obscure console up to a cathode ray tube
television set. These types of visual entertainment aredespite their humor
perhaps also frustrating in an abstract sense in that they blur the line between
play and labor in a way that is increasingly tied to online leisure activities. This
is not to diminish the ways in which these types of media recover frustration as
laughter, but we can also consider this as an extrapolation of the relationship
between frustration and suspended agency in the sense that their producers
transform their own playing of games into a kind of work or job but also in their
translation of the audiences attention into revenue based on viewcounts and
advertising returns. That the very act of viewing through online media players
such as YouTube can be appropriated as labor might signal another way in
which agency becomes obscure or frustrated in contemporary media culture.
This transformation of play or vision into labor follows a similar logic to an
increasing reobjectification of the player. A game like Steel Battalion transforms the
players body into an almost reverse puppet, both being commanded by the players
gestures but also approaching a feeling of animating the player through the need to
continuously reperform key gestures. The repetitive, bureaucratic work play of
Papers, Please also envelops the player in rigid, mechanical, and limiting forms of
play that figurate the player as a cog in a machine, anonymous and insignificant.
Schaffer (2007) has claimed that animation can function as a profound allegory
of the relationship between humans and machines due to the dynamic between the
controlled labor of production and the wild, almost rebellious forms of movement
and life that animated figures possess.18 This article hopes to pose a similar way
of thinking about games as machines, which intersect with, overwhelm, and expand
the experience of human agency in disparate ways that might also show us something about the relationship between humans and machines. Through these moments
of obstructed or suspended agency of players, games become uglyor even stupidifyingthrough their ambivalent qualities that interface human users with technological forms in ways that do not align as expected.
What should be isolated in the analysis of frustration in game media is this
ambivalence between the player and the game, the space where agency becomes
thwarted, and how the figuration of the game runs wild in spite of the players best
efforts, leading to a sense of animatedness. This sense of animatedness is indicative
of the feeling that we are losing controlnot just over the games we play, but over
other parts of our social and technologically mediated lives. Frustration is therefore
not just a sign of games functioning in uncooperative ways that can annoy and discourage a player but of the affective dynamic produced through the interfacing of
human agency with the logic of the game machine.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.

Notes
1. In some cases, these sorts of involuntary game machine events can actually be exploited
by players. The slowdown that occurs at certain points of the Super Nintendo console title
Super Ghouls n Ghosts (Capcom, 1991) is one such example which, while interfering
with the players ability to interact with the game for most, actually allowed skilled players to avoid enemy attacks and time their own attacks more reliably.
2. Loading screens, being forced to wait in matching-making lobbies during online play, and
issues of latency and disconnection in online games are other areas for considering frustration in game media. Those are unfortunately beyond the scope of this article, which is
focusing on experiences of frustration within ordinary states of gameplay.
3. In Ngais argument, this is also tied to racially or ethically marked characters in literature and
visual media. This articles use of her concept will shift the way the term can be deployed to
think about humanmachine relationships. Bukatman invokes this concept in regard to animation in Poetics of Slumberland, which also informs how this article is repurposing Ngais
scholarship for thinking about game media (Bukatman, 2012, pp. 2021).
4. The conversion of some arcade games to home console has complicated this quality of
games such as Dragons Lair. On one hand, home consoles often allowed for save files
or featured passwords that would allow a player to skip ahead in the game. This relieved
the player of the need to constantly replay the same early stages over and over to pick up
where they last left off. On the other hand, games that were designed with an arcade controller in mind did not always feel intuitive on a home console, which did not always have
the same number of buttons, frequently used a directional pad instead of a joystick
(although joystick controllers were often available), and sometimes had less computational power to render game sprites and environments.
5. Galloway (2012) describes what he calls interface effects in a similar way, noting how
social life often feels increasingly incompatible with its own expression in contemporary
visual media. Ngai and Galloway are writing about similar concerns in visual and narrative materials but from different perspectives. That begin said, Galloways conceptualization of the interface as a process rather than a thing and as a threshold between different
realities offers a provocative model for considering how usermachine interfaces in game
media shape player agency in particular ways.
6. Crafton (2013, pp. 2236) uses figuration to describe animated performance and the dramatic irony of an animated figures composited performance that has been brought
together by the labor of the animator, the voice of the actor, and the vitalizing mode of
watching assumed by the audience.
7. An earlier version of this article also included a discussion of genre expectation in games
and how the frustration of player agency could be felt through moments when games
diverge from or betray player expectations. This was centered on sandbox-style games

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8.

9.

10.
11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

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such as the Elder Scroll series that, through elements such as side quest diversions and
exploration of the game world, granted players the ability to interact with the game space
in what feels like an unfettered way. The imposition of time limits in missions in Dead
Rising 2 (Capcom, 2010) was used as a model to consider how player agency could feel
restricted by diverging from genre conventions, creating a tension between offering the
player the experience of an open-world environment while also denying them the ability
to actively enjoy it (lest they risk running out the mission clock). Tulloch (2010, 2014)
has discussed the relationship between player agency and rules in games and interactivity
in game media.
This is compounded by the load times a player must sit through while waiting to restart
and the generally short amount of time one actually plays a single mission. Missions
rarely last more than a few minutes when successfully completed (failure also happens
quickly), but the game will still take dozens of hours to complete for most players due
to being forced to replay failed missions, the near-constant quick-time events and cut
scenes that break up the action, and the numerous loading and menu screens.
Especially difficult to control is the games use of the viewport screen, which is accessed by
having your character lean forward to look at the armored shutter at the front the tank. The
game is played with the player sitting down for most actions, but the Kinect is unable to
distinguish between different sitting postures and will continuously move the player in and
out of viewport mode even when the player is not making hand gestures and sitting still.
Auerbach (2012a). Ian Bogost (2012, p. 15) also describes machines as dumb and
insentient in the way to human interaction.
In a separate piece Auerbach describes a similar effect with text-based adventure games,
which he characterizes as appearing to understand English in a restricted way. However,
he also notes that this appearance of understanding is essentially a ruse in that the
grammatical forms the game could make sense of were quite limited (Auerbach, 2012b).
Here I am glossing on Felix Guattari and Giles Deleuzes concept of the ensemble in
Chaosmosis (1995, p. 33) and A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(1987, p. 327329).
Jones discusses the defamiliarization of avatar/player relation in recent slapstick games,
focusing on motor tactics and a hyperbolic control over avatar bodies in games such as
Octodad: Dadliest Catch (2014). These games gesture toward a similar difficulty in contro, but invite reactions of humor rather than frustration due to their presentation (Jones,
2014).
Within the game these are explained as upgrades to the player characters booth. However, because the keys that are used to operate them are placed so far away from one
another they are not immediatelyor intuitivelyuseful. This is part of the games
humorous take on bureaucracy, which even in its improved forms feels awkward and
obstructive.
See, for example, Hornshaw (2013) and Hoggins (2013). Hornshaw notes the way responsibility is expressed through the games method of punishing and rewarding the player,
while Hoggins notes the ways it flirts with failure while juggling its moral dilemmas and
dramatic stakes through the players actions.

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16. For more on affect labor see Hardt (1999)

17. Auerbach (2013) compares the emotional intensity of quick time events such as the
one found in The Walking Dead with a general decline in the emotional involvement
in other realms of technologically mediated life such as warfare. Considering technologies such as drones, he observes that while the armed forces seek to remove soldiers
from realities in which sudden bursts of empathy and humanity might interfere with the
strict differentiation of friend and foe, using technology to vastly increase geographical
distance between friend and foe, QTEs seek to plant a greater immediacy into an artificial
situation and thus manipulate the players emotions in the opposite direction. Fiction is
becoming more emotionally loaded even as reality is becoming less so.
18. Schaffer, W. (2007). Animation 1: The Control Image. In A. Cholodenko (Ed.), The illusion of life II: More essays on animation (p. 463). Sydney, Australia: Power Books.
Quoted in Bukatman (2012, p. 136).

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Author Biography
Daniel Johnson is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago in the departments of Cinema
and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations. His article Polyphonic/
Pseudo-synchronic: Animated Writing in the Comment Feed of Nicovideo was published
in Japanese Studies.

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