Video Game Frictions

This article offers a critical reading of the tensions between two contemporary regimes of game design: on the one side, seamless game design, which aims to smooth out the gaming experience by eliminating any form of rupture; on the other, a set of practices that can be grouped under the label friction-based game design, which embraces, provokes, or stages various forms of resistance. By analyzing several types of friction, the article identifies their effects on player experience (destabilization, disorientation, discomfort) and questions their critical potential. Friction is presented not as a flaw to be corrected, but as an aesthetic and political operator capable of shifting dominant norms of playability. In doing so, the study shows that these troubled—or troubling—games reveal the stratified, unstable, and manipulable nature of the digital medium itself, often concealed by fluidity-oriented design aesthetics.