A new issue of dichtung-digital edited by Patricia Tomaszek came out a few days ago. I have an article in the issue which analyzes Molleindustria’s game Every Day the Same Dream. I am still making my way through the other articles in the issue, but I am completely impressed by what I have read so far. Definitely worth checking out. Other contributors include Eduardo Navas, Davin Heckman, Roberto Simanowski, John M. Vincler, Scott Rettberg, Nele Lenze, Martina Pfeiler, and an elegant editorial introduction from Patricia.
Let me say upfront that I am mostly a fan of Alex Galloway’s work & I am particularly impressed by the political projects he and his collaborators produce. Yet, on the theoretical side (and especially in relation to video games) I hesitate when I read some of his positions and arguments.
One thing that has always nagged me was the dichotomy of ideology critique and what he calls informatic critique–the former occurring in a vertical, allegorical fashion based on a depth model of interpretation and the latter being horizontal, a process of scanning the surface of a text, and largely in relation to his previous work on the flexible structures of protocol through which control is asserted.
Of course, the attack on the depth model of interpretation is a primary facet of postmodernist thinking, but in (Marxist) authors such as Jameson, Eagleton, Perry Anderson, and even Linda Hutcheon (to some extent) the abandonment of ideology critique is a frightening symptom of critical thought. Indeed, part of Jameson’s critique of postmodernism is that signs are detached from reference, from “deep” history, where signifiers circulate unattached to anything “below” them such as signifieds, or god forbid, an anchor of reality. Thus, in postmodernism everything is upfront and out in the open; nothing is hidden; interpretation does not excavate deeper meanings let alone the political unconscious.
In terms of video games, this is exactly the approach Galloway takes to games in his chapter of Gaming called “Allegories of Control.” He will say things like, video games present their politics in “relatively unmediated form” (an abandonment of the key Marxist concept of mediation?); or, games are “politically transparent;” or, a longer example:
“As I have alluded to in Jameson, the depth model in traditional allegorical interpretation is a sublimation of the separation felt by the viewer between his or her experience of consuming the media and the potentially liberating political value of that media. But video games abandon this dissatisfying model of deferral, epitomizing instead the flatness of the control allegory by unifying the act of playing the game with an immediate political experience. In other words, The Sims is a game that delivers its own political critique up front as part of the gameplay. There is no need for the critic to unpack the game later.”
Whereas Civilization for Galloway acts as a transparent surface display of the totality of informatic control – its interlocking algorithms, the flexibility of various paramaters that players can investigate, adjust, and change – The Sims is a direct display “of life lived as an algorithm.” It’s all there right before us in these games which act as indexes to the form of control and societal structures–postmodernist, post-industrial, informatic (call it what you will)–that exists around us. One doesn’t need to unpack how Civilization represents history, because it is right there in the mirror before us–as mathematical, informatic models which ultimately act as the erasure of history itself. One does not need to deeply interpret The Sims because it is right there before us as “an immediate political experience:” the revealing of our contemporary lives as insipid, repetitive, algorithmic tasks as we play the game itself. I actually have no qualms with these analyses, they point back to the structures of control (stemming from Deleuze) that Galloway has extrapolated in his work on protocol. But this sense of immediacy of the political, a privileging of surface over depth, seems like a unnecessary (postmodern) annihilation of ideology and the work of interpretation needed to think through it, which, in my opinion, still remains an important political task. In fact, perhaps a task I am trying to do right now in seeing through how Galloway’s notion of “informatic critique” is working ideologically itself.
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My original intent in starting this blog was to provide a public place for thinking through my dissertation, for providing a salvage yard of sorts where I could place some of my current thoughts–odds and ends which might prove useful or not for the dissertation. Hopefully they will also be useful for others interested in thinking critically and theoretically about video games. I plan on posting more regularly in the future.
So, with that said, this first post about games arises from a recent re-reading of Espen Aarseth’s “Genre Trouble“ a key text in the ludologist vs. narratologist debates (as they have unfortunately become to be known). In particular the following quote spurred my thoughts:
Games are not “textual” or at least not primarily textual: where is the text in chess? We might say that the rules of chess constitute its “text,” but there is no recitation of the rules during gameplay, so that would reduce the textuality of chess to a subtextuality or a paratextuality. A central “text” does not exist — merely context. Any game consists of three aspects: (1) rules, (2) a material/semiotic system (a gameworld), and (3) gameplay (the events resulting from application of the rules to the gameworld). Of these three, the semiotic system is the most coincidental to the game. As the Danish theorist and game designer Jesper Juul has pointed out (Juul 2001b), games are eminently themeable: you can play chess with some rocks in the mud, or with pieces that look like the Simpson family rather than kings and queens. It would still be the same game. The “royal” theme of the traditional pieces is all but irrelevant to our understanding of chess. Likewise, the dimensions of Lara Croft’s body, already analyzed to death by film theorists, are irrelevant to me as a player, because a different-looking body would not make me play differently. When I play, I don’t even see her body, but see through it and past it.
Thus, game studies would ideally focus on the rules and gameplay–though the latter would seemingly require some analysis of representation or the “semiotic system” given that gameplay emerges within the relationship between gameworld and rules. Though the example of Lara Croft is immediately intriguing (and has caught the eye of many others) what leap into my mind upon this rereading was the dismissal of semiotics and the use of the chess example, given that Ferdinand Saussure (founder of semiology) uses practically the same chess example to illustrate his rationale concerning the inauguration of semiotics. Of course, Aarseth’s use of the word “semiotic” is really a codeword for narratives and visual representations which frame the game system within a gameworld; less a reference to actual semiotics (and Saussure for that matter), the word is intended to indicate a certain brand of theory – perhaps of the poststructuralist flavor – and practitioners of this theory who mindlessly port their training (developed through the study of literature or media such as film and television) to the field of game studies. (Incidentally, Aarseth explicitly denies the privileged usefulness of semiotics proper to the study of electronic texts in his book Cybertexts). Nevertheless, Aarseth’s choice to frame the other of game studies as semiotics is intriguing given that the methods of the ludologists to create a stable foundation for game studies share traits with Ferdinand Saussure’s attempt to ground the field of semiology. Indeed, Saussure claims that “language must, to put it correctly, be studied in itself; heretofore language has almost always been studied in connection with something else, from other viewpoints.” If one replaces “language” with “games” one arrives at Aarseth’s basic qualms concerning the state of game studies and the unreflective porting of theories derived from literature & film to games. But, let’s look at the chess examples Saussure uses.
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