Making Sense of Scale in A Short Hike and Assassin's Creed Mirage (UGC0725006)

 In 2020 Twitter user @Jordan_Mallory tweeted "I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding" This critique of the extensive play lengths and exploitative labour practices common in big budget "Triple-A" single-player videogames (Bulut 2020;Dyer-Witheford and de peuter 2009) offers a useful prompt to consider how the increasingly public conditions of videogame production may relate to cultural notions of size and scale, and inform our understanding of what a commercial videogame looks like, costs, and can fit into the everyday lives of players. this paper examines two such "shorter" videogames-A Short Hike (Adamgryu 2019) and Assassin's Creed Mirage (Ubisoft Bordeaux 2023)-from the conceptual vantage of scale in order to highlight how, as a subject of discourse, scale has played a significant role in mediating our understanding of videogames as both cultural from and commercial product  

To build a novel methodological bridge between the philosophy of scale, videogame productions studies and the textual analysis of videogames. Notations of scale structure our conceptions of capitalism, computation, and ecology, and have pervaded videogames discourse throughout the medium's history. The subject of scale and its guiding significance in contemporary culture has received significant resent scholarly attention in media philosophy and science and technology studies( Dicaglio 2021;Horton 2021; Bratton 2015; Hondroudakis 2023) but is thus far little explored in videogame research.

 Yet, as much research in the game studies field considers videogame production and consumption through the saturating lens of global capitalism (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009) and emphasises close analyses of game-related discourses, cultures, and practices (Kline et al. 2003; Murray, 2020; Shaw 2010), the current lack of scholarship on how scale relates to existing critical efforts to study videogames as texts and connected notions of labour, value and temporality represents a significant research gap.  Building on the existing application of Ngai's aesthetic category theory to games studies (Kunzenlman 2020;Blakey 2024),I use these central case studies and their contrasting positions within a contemporary “field” of videogame production (Keogh 2023) to examine how players, critics and researchers make sense of intentional brevity in a medium that has long treated expansion as its cultural and commercial signature. 

This paper subsequently argues that scale has already mediated many efforts by players, marketplaces and scholars to make sense of videogames. Controversial yet ubiquitous descriptive categories such as “indie” (independent) and “Triple-A” (Keogh 2023; Ruffino 2023) may be understood as essentially scalar terminology, while policy documents that position videogames as a “growth” industry and the adoption by designers and the use of conceptual terms such as “microworld” and “possibility space” among designers and academics affirm scale as a central discursive preoccupation around which cultural narratives about videogames have historically converged (Anthropy & Clark 2014; Keogh 2015; Sudnow 1983). Paying close attention to common-sense notions of scale across discourses of videogame purchasing, selection, play and beyond thus offers a valuable conceptual space for researchers to consider other large and small entanglements of play, media, labour and everyday life.   

Making Sense of Scale in A Short Hike and Assassin's Creed Mirage 

Rory Manning Graham

The University of Sydney

rgra0649@uni.sydney.edu.au