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in: Conference Proceedings of the Philosophy of Computer Games 2008, ed. by
Stephan Günzel, Michael Liebe and Dieter Mersch, Potsdam: University Press 2008, 308-323.
http://pub.ub.uni-potsdam.de/volltexte/2009/2750/ [urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-27509]
Eduardo H. Calvillo-Gámez and Paul Cairns
Pulling the Strings
A Theory of Puppetry for the Gaming Experience
The paper aims to bring the experience of playing videogames
closer to objective knowledge, where the experience can be as-
sessed and falsified via an operational concept. The theory focu-
ses on explaining the basic elements that form the core of the
process of the experience. The name of puppetry is introduced
after discussing the similarities in the importance of experience
for both videogames and theatrical puppetry. Puppetry, then,
operationalizes the gaming experience into a concept that can
be assessed.

The Experience of Playing Videogames
The experience of playing videogames, or the gaming experience,
is the topic of discussion of this paper. Here, we present a theory
that aims to operationalize the concept of the gaming experience.
The theory is grounded in a concept called puppetry. It was obtained
by using a bottom-up approach (Calvillo-Gámez et al. 2008), starting
with narratives that reviewed videogames until a theory was formu-
lated using different types of iterative coding mechanisms in order
to find those common elements (Strauss/Corbin 1998). In this paper,
instead of focusing on the methodological formulation of the theory,
we take a top-down approach. We present the theory and discuss
the different elements that form it. In justification, we will discuss
both the importance of having a theory that operationalizes the gam-
ing experience and the use of the theatrical concept of puppetry to
describe the experience of playing videogames.
After presenting the basic definitions that will be used in this
paper, we divide our discussion into three sections: First, we pres-
ent puppetry in the concept of theatre. The aim is to highlight the

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The Magic Circle
similarities that it has with videogames, in particular the idea that
puppetry is defined in terms of its experience and not of its physical-
ity. Next, we present a theory of puppetry to describe the gaming
experience. We do not discuss the origins of the theory, but just the
theory itself. We argue that the experience of playing videogames is
centered on the control and ownership of the player towards the vid-
eogame. The final discussion is about the importance of operational-
izing the concept of the gaming experience, and how puppetry takes
the first steps towards this operationalization by identifying a clear
set of hypotheses grounded in latent and observable variables.
We focus on the importance of operationalizing the concept of ex-
perience as we are interested both in understanding the experience
and having a falsifiable theory about it. Experience is by definition a
subjective term: an individual tells of the lived experience according
to that person’s own accounts (McCarthy/Wright 2004). And there
are no objections from us regarding that perception. However, if we
are to study the concept of experience, we need to be able to op-
erationalize it under scientific grounds. When individuals play the
same videogame and have good experiences, they are able to share
them among other players under a common framework of what con-
stitutes a good gaming experience. We are looking for that common
framework in which the experiences are shared. The experience
might be personal, but the framework in which the experience is
built is general. We write this paper under two influences, that of our
own discipline of Human Computer Interaction and that of objective
knowledge according to Popper (1997).

Basic Definitions
User experience is a relatively new concept within Human Computer
Interaction (HCI). Preece et al. (2002) define experience as how the
interaction feels to the users. They succinctly address experience
leaving it as a vague term full of subjectivity: an application taps into