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To validate and justify interpretative work to students in my first-year literature classes, I assert that reading is a valuable universal skill, that we “read” people and situations every day and infer subtle nuances, innuendo, and ironies from a variety of different signs.  This same possibility—that reading isn’t limited to the interpretation of written language—propelled me through doctoral explorations of William Blake’s composite art.  I later became interested in the interdisciplinary foundations of digital humanities (DH) and digital game studies for the same reason, attracted by new and diverse reading practices that confronted the complexities of the human cultural record.  This diversification of reading methods initially prompted some critical resistance towards DH from traditional disciplines, and subsequently provoked similar reactions from within the DH community towards the perceived problematic of digital games.  Patrick Jagoda’s “In the Shadows of the Digital Humanities” acknowledges this problematic, but defends its potential, asserting that “we need critical and creative experiments that complicate long-held assumptions that may limit our ability to think and thrive” (211).  The same experimentalism that inspired the richness of DH-related work over the last few decades is used by Jagoda to promote game-based research that highlights praxis, making, inhabitation, and experience.

However, Jagoda’s work fails to explicitly call out an assumption that fuels the uneasy dissonance between DH and game studies and continues to cause rifts in game scholarship: the idea of reading as the principal mode and method of encountering the world.  While DH features an inclusive collection of methods, its diversity preserves the common assumption that literal and metaphoric forms of reading (as ways to understanding, knowledge and meaning) remain at the core of humanities practice.  For example, as Andrew Goldstone points out, Franco Moretti’s idea of distant reading “positions him as an opponent of orthodox reading rather than as someone who refuses reading as a master concept” (639).  In contrast, digital games as a mode of inquiry embody such a refusal, resisting the dominance of literary modes of experience, and offering a space where reading isn’t necessary.  Games challenge the doxa of reading, introducing difficulty via atextual encounter and experience; not just interpretative difficulty, but an experiential dissonance triggered by problematic relationships between action, consequence, and understanding.  The perceptual and performative disorientations that characterize Remedy’s Control (2019) and Bloober Team’s Layers of Fear (2016) exemplify this problematic in action, performatively directing us toward Ian Bogost’s assertion that “perhaps the worst hegemony is the…hegemony of thinking…that there is some clear and certain ruleset for intellectual discourse…that maximizes progress or justice…—and that we ought to reconcile and resolve that commonality, [and] boil it down to the average of its various components.”  Jagoda avoids this, suggesting that “digital games…demand new ways of perceiving and working” (191).   Extending his notions, this paper asserts that games are not just a problematic for DH, they are a problematic for the literary studies paradigms that still dominate DH perception and practice.  Inhabiting games is a possible antidote to DH’s persistent literary habitus.