Game Life

Notes for Theses on a Concept of Phenomenon

© 2010 by Greg Macon, unless otherwise attributed

You are in first-person representation mode. (This means you are participating in a scheme of representation that makes it out as if you are acting directly, which would seem to presuppose you otherwise are not acting directly. But in -- and what does "in" mean in this case, what does it do -- a game -- and are we any more certain now what we mean by this term, after, that is, a certain electronic simulation, than we were before -- are you not acting directly? Are you not the first person when you are playing? I mean, rather, am "I" not the first person? How does one have first, second and third persons in action? Or is that just a manner of speaking? A representation? The immediate is mediated. There is always an "I" for an I.)

When all the monsters are gone. In early first-person shooters, particularly Quake, when you kill all the preset adversaries, you are left to wander through the empty "level," the particular map or represented topos. You're left with the scenery, dungeons or caves, listening to dripping water or howling wind. After the anxiety of avoiding and killing monsters, you're suddenly left -- well, alone. Missing your virtually malevolent company. Is it worse to be hated or ignored?

By-product experience, pseudo-random and virtual existentialism. One of the great developments of Grand Theft Auto is raising the by-product effects and the exploratory quality of the game as a major part, and appeal, of the activity, the experience. The pseudo-random recombining of reduced elements or processes creates unexpected associations, evocation, the way humor works, and these results are often humorous and thus reinforce GTA's social satire. This contained willy-nilly is at once disruptive of "real" order and ineffectual, the flatness and potency of symbol, but also as action. Life in a box: but which box contains the other?

You are in a tall office building, in a bathroom that's situated in the center of the building, sitting on the toilet. No one else around. The sound of wind moaning. This evokes the feelings you had while in the place of -- the game. The dungeons or ruins or caves of Quake. But where is that wind sound coming from? The elevator shaft. Floating, solitary, detached and fixed at once. A savory sense of the bereft, the aftermath, place re-presented, imbued, made character. Represented topography is contiguous in sensation. Evocation does not merely refer to experience. Experience is evocation.

As if making up were a container. What it presents as well as represents. For the simulation of some activity we don't otherwise have, we accept the cost in another kind of measure: that the simulation does not contain all or everything in real life, all its conditions. But what does it mean, not only to be put in this way, but to be struck this way by representation over and over? What does it imply, suggest?

Ich kenne keine andre Art, mit grossen Aufgaben zu verkehren als das Spiel: dies ist, als Anzeichen der Grösse, eine wesentliche Voraussetzung.
[I do not know any other way of associating with great tasks than play: as a sign of greatness, this is an essential presupposition.]
-- Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, "Why I Am So Clever," sec. 10 (translation by Walter Kaufman)

[I]t was not my object to define the place of play among all other manifestations of culture, but rather to ascertain how far culture itself bears the character of play.
-- Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing.
-- Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

Poiesis, in fact, is a play-function. It proceeds within the play-ground of the mind, in a world of its own which the mind creates for it. There things have a different physiognomy from the one they wear in 'ordinary life,' and are bound by ties other than those of logic and causality.
-- Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

Clicking: pushing the button, pulling the trigger. Virtual accomplishment. And here the etymology of "virtual" resounds with more, precisely, force. It may be that this "pure," that is, abstract, empty, representational, cause and effect serves as satisfaction more so than any "real." Like magic. "Pure" operation, becoming the end in itself. It's this tactile fixation, representing this greater impulse of affecting, this greater pulsion, that is exploited as much by computers, by vendors of everything for computers, a kind of addiction to the conceit of clicking as doing, accomplishing, affecting.

Mature manhood: that means to have rediscovered the seriousness one had as a child at play.
-- Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil sec. 94

Any game supposes the temporary acceptance, if not of an illusion (yet this word means nothing other than entering into play: in-lusio), at least of a universe that is closed, conventional and, in certain respects, fictitious . . . I choose to designate these manifestations by the term "mimicry," which means in English the imitation or resemblance [mimétisme], notably of insects, in order to underline the fundamental and elementary nature, quasi-organic, of the impulse that arouses them.
-- Roger Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes

"Cyberspace": as if a new imaginary space had been invented with computers. As if somehow the electronic ether were distinct from where occur the meaning of words on a page, or the images of a painting, or ideas, or (raising the bid of the uncanny here) the real life represented by actors on a stage in this one, or the action of the deception of moving images. Distinct, as if then, across a border? The border of the screen, the monitor? Thus contained by this, as if inside, where one would go outside in order to go to the inside of reading a book? "Cyberspace" is the tag of computer generations, the nerds, the wonks, but more the later waves of clamoring and pandering, claiming part of imaginary space -- idealization, the inter-state of the sign -- as their hood.

This elementary need for agitation and commotion appears at first as the impulse of touching everything, of grasping, tasting, sniffing, then of dropping every accessible object. It readily becomes the taste for destroying or breaking. It explains the pleasure of endlessly cutting paper with scissors, tearing stuff to shreds, making constructions collapse, crossing lines, bringing disorder to the games or occupations of others, etc. Soon comes the urge to mystify or challenge, by sticking out the tongue, making faces, or pretending to touch or throw the forbidden object. For the child it's a matter of asserting, of feeling herself to be cause, of forcing others to give her attention.
-- Roger Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes

If the principles of games correspond in effect to powerful instincts (competition, pursuit of chance, simulacrum, vertigo), it's easy to understand that they can receive positive and creative satisfaction only in ideal and limited conditions, those that propose in each case the rules of the game.
-- Roger Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes

At this moment I didn't feel shame or fear, but just kind of blah, like when you're sitting there and all the water's run out of the bathtub.
-- Holly (Sissy Spacek), "Badlands."

The boy's got no fight in him. I don't get it. He spends five hours a day playing violent video games -- what's the point if they don't have any effect on him?
-- Hank Hill (Mike Judge), "King of the Hill"

Sometimes it's best just to lose than to play the same old sorry game.
-- Daniel Johnston

He who criticizes or thrusts the game away, has already entered into the game.
-- Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

This figuration of "place" (idealization, evocation), has consequences for the meta-physical schema of "place," common to, for example, Locke and Kant as the idealization of presence: the reduction to "place" correlative to the distinction of thing and quality/attribute/predicate. The virtuality of digital representation produces levels, generations of representation, "virtual" folds in the virtuality of place no less real. The reduction is qualified -- displaced, but precisely as the indefinite of place -- by the very ideality of place itself. Formulation: place is an attribute of itself. (Thus, also, recursion.) "Thingness" is a matter of its own removal, emptiness, as "place," a matter of another scheme whereby essence is an aporia of thing and attribute via absence, impossible to reduce to one or the other.

The (as if) renewed sense of topos, of place, things, environment, atmosphere, after playing a game, as with watching a movie: imagining how you jump after seeing "Superman" (or reading the comic book); running all the way home after "Rocky"; being scared after "Jaws" even if not near a body of water; the way movement seems mapped out, schemed, intent, after a James Bond movie. Suggestibility, impression, figuration: the interaction of games and "acting." Acting over acting (cf. XS), how acting is already this conundrum of action and simulation. Pre-tending, holding before: place the sense of place.

Version, versus, adversion, inadversion, subversion. Turning. The game takes turns. Already parodic, lifted, carried over, metaphoric. The play of contention, the bracketing or suspension of result, effect, in another scheme: its sublimation. Play is the reverent irreverence «of» life, belonging to it, not merely about it. See how certain practices of various species, such as courtship displays or the formalization of contests, cross the lines of artifice/instinct, play/struggle and man/animal -- or culture/nature. How will one ever oppose this play outside the play of opposition?

The dream of immersion in the game can only take place outside it. The alternative it offers becomes another world, another cosmos, where the restrictions of this world do not apply. To become that other world would then be to have other conditions, rules, restrictions. This play of the surreal is the arc of longing that remains nonetheless, the ability of "it is" to take up "as if." This is why the game is so powerful, like religion, eschatology, mysticism, drugs, sex, another person. Or rather why they are so powerful, because they partake of this play.

There are no children in Liberty City.

The representation of violence. Another qualification for objecting to the game, right off the bat, right out of the gate, the matter is prejudicial: a violence attributed to the game without consideration, and thus another kind of violence done to the game. But who with a violent kneejerk, a violence kneejerk, will ever hear this? Nothing more subtle, no nuance of even moral machination, conditioning, "teaching a lesson," instrumental representation, will be considered by a dismissive assessment of the game, an outright objection -- an outrage. Adversarial, by the way, antagonistic, violent opposition to the game.

To pursue the objection, not for the sole purpose of overturning, but even in its scheme, to see how it runs, to see where it goes, as one does in general in taking on the premise of a game. To play it out. One might find, among other things, such tricks being played, more or less, inadvertently or shrewdly, not on one's sensitivity, not only on one's sensitivity towards violence, as moral outrage or repulsion, but also as the taste for it, destructiveness, revenge. For domination, winning, extinguishing. More broadly, a taste for causality, for holding the moral controls.

A more complicated implication -- it's always a matter of folds -- of the moral, following this objection to games, to representation, is whether morality or immorality is prior, practically or logically. Which conduct comes first, good or evil? And how would it be represented? It is not so much what the game represents that is dangerous. Authority reserves for itself triumph and violence, even the profit of its display. It is the matter of how it is represented, the subversion.

Losing (onself in) control. Wanting to be immersed, lost in an imaginary world, a game or story, is a kind of desire for loss of control, the way drugs are. There was a sensationalism about this in the movies of the 60s and 70s, as Pauline Kael commented, for example, in her review of "El Topo." The hyperbolic CG action that is merging movies and video games is, more than the latest height of bang and flash making its monkeys, immersion in this abstraction of control, a dependency on the semblance of it. Video games have taken on, for the most part, the worst aspects of movies, becoming more pulpy, heavy-handed narratives (cut scenes, music, dialogue) the more they try to increase this sense of immersion, while movies become video games you can't operate -- you can't control.

This paradox of control is already there in other forms of play, the paradox of the toy, its exceeding feat (fait accompli, thus fact, but as grasp, satisfaction, end of desire, precisely object): if it's inert, a stand-in for imagination like a puppet, dependent on me, I want it to be autonomous, have a life of its own; if it's too independent of me, an automaton (thus application to live creatures) I can't manipulate it. But this is also the double helix paradox of narcissism, of egocentric blindness, of the self. The devouring "I" is dependent on others even for the notion that it is not. I am caught in this scheme of simulation of myself even "before" any other.

One hypothesis, one speculative play at this subject-object phenomenon -- narcissism, distinction, desire, immersion -- is Roger Caillois's temptation by space. His double dihedral: dihedral of action and dihedral of represention. The perceiving creature, or agent, is not the origin of coordinates, but one point among others. (Thus consequences for autonomy: even the subject is neither free nor contingent enough.) There is no absolute place, as developers and designers know, how they have to reduce this indefiniteness. "Cyberspace" is not only a conceit with respect to "other" fictional space, but as that in turn is of all space, all place. Thus the perpetual game of I -- locating -- itself.

From the groundless comes all claim and power, in the general sense (to be able), but as that resorts to the restricted (cf. etym.: master, husband), the claim to ground. The distillation of this in ego, increasingly abstracted acquisition, is now virtual territoriality, the proprietary projection on cyberspace (personal and commercial the sides of the coin). Boundless becomes the form of desire, the ideal of the I, in this new way, a more empty exchange. The boundless underlying is the condition of the claim of a self: location, the grasp of self, the underlying, ultimate powerlessness. The ego desires a form of this void it would suffocate in. Eternity, says Borges, the form of desire × Levinas's infinite, the thought of what exceeds it (thought, thinking, thinker: the cogitatum that includes the cogitatio).

Dreams of relations, dinosaurs, generations, strata. Dissemination propels in time, versions, perversions propel with change. Rehearsal. Is what is not and is not what is. "Lives," times, doing over. What time means for these iterations to occur, and how it makes every "thing" a matter of this iteration, meaning a time rather than a thing, place or presence.

It's only that the game is in life that one lives on without it, and by virtue of that knows that in the game, the end of life is not the end of the game. To be this other figure, the operator, the player who survives, who lives to fight another day, who is reborn, can start over, who can save and cheat the conditions of the program, is also to know that death has no effect to what doesn't survive it.

GAME OVER