Against "Video-Gamey"

Pragmata's Form Meets Function

What would we call a “video-gamey” video game if we did not already know what a video game is?

IGN, in its review of Pragmata, calls it “a video game-ass video game.” The phrase is meant to signal the presence of gaming sensibilities that are impossible to ignore—systems and structures that would collapse if removed from the act of play and placed into any other medium.

But unless we go further, that designation does not tell us why it matters or if it’s even any good. Do all video games not appear video-gamey? The start screen, the pause button, the save file, the life lost to a mistake. These are not exceptions; they are the conditions of the form. To point at them is not to say anything about the work. It is only to confirm that it belongs to the category we already knew it occupied.

To review a video game and call it a particularly video gamey video game is maybe not a good critical approach. Shall I also confirm that the novel contains sentences?

The problem in Pragmata is not that this language is necessarily wrong. It is identification, not analysis.

The game splits player action between Hugh and Diana, and it does so through two incompatible modes of control. Diana operates by parsing enemy machines—she exposes weak points by navigating a grid-like interface, inputting cardinal directions through discrete commands. Each move is either correct or incorrect. There is no gradation.

Hugh, by contrast, moves and aims through less-precise analog input. He runs, jumps, and shoots with a looseness that allows for drift, hesitation, and error. The player is tasked with operating between two different logics. One system is exact and robotic. The other is approximate and human.

This difference is the point of the entire game. It’s also why Pragmata is so excellent.

The hacking sequences are not a detachable layer or a concession to game design convention. They are how Diana understands the world. Her interaction with machines is not expressed through movement or aim but through navigation of systems that reduce action to cold and precise decisions. The interface is a representation of her capacity. It determines what she can do and how the player can think through her.

The player is asked to align with two different forms of agency—one grounded in continuous adjustment, the other in binary resolution. The effect is not just “video-gamey” mechanical variety. It is a shifting identification between the imprecision of a human and the certainty of a machine.

And this is where the positive use of “video-gamey” becomes especially frustrating. Pragmata is praised in many reviews this way because it feels good to play and because these systems click in a “satisfying” way. But instead of explaining that alignment the language at our disposal stops at recognition and calls it a virtue. You could perform the exact same appraisal after watching some videos of Pragmata.

“Video-gamey,” then, is not analysis. It is identification. It’s safe. Nobody has ever been wrong about a video game being a video game. It reports back the obvious and leaves the work untouched. Our task is not to point at mechanics, but to account for what they do. Not to say that a game feels like a game, but to show how it feels at all.

The work is already there.

Are we?

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Thanks for reading all that.
a copy of Pragmata was provided by Capcom PR