Asocial Gaming, ‘Anti-effeminacy,’ Delicious Loneliness

Videogaming, for me, has more or less always been a solitary pursuit. Just as I’m delighted to live in an era when you can dance without needing a partner or having to know the steps, I really like playing games alone – or, at least, from the other side of a sizeable spatiotemporal gap; after all, you’re still playing with/against the designer(s) in some sense. Having spent the last couple of weeks jet-lagged and pretty much alone in a strange land, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to stay up into the wee hours plugging away at Ranger X or Front Mission. It’s been kind of nice.

The phrase that’s stuck when it comes to describing (or maybe justifying) this preference for singleplayer games and the state of cosily contented absorption they’re so good at inducing is delicious loneliness. I first heard it in a talk on Canadian cartoonist Seth, and I’ve since found that it occurs in Emily H. Hickey, Angela Carter and Arthur Symons.  There’s a pleasantly salacious charge to it, suggestive of the frisson Thomas Laqueur attempts to account for in Solitary Sex. Lacquer’s book asks why, in the wake of the ‘Enlightenment,’ masturbation (hitherto considered entirely innocuous) became the subject of impassioned moral crusades and extensive medical treatises. His answer is that the advent of humanism gave rise to anxieties regarding solipsism and subjectivity, fiction and fantasy for which onanism provided a handy scapegoat. In other words it was not masturbation per se that was scary for Enlightenment culture so much as the questions it raised about about sociality, identity and the capacity of art and imagination to produce virtual realities more seductive than the real thing.

This is the context from whence came the idea that novel reading is a dubious pastime, literature a pernicious machinery of distraction – or worse, corruption. And if it’s tough, nowadays, to imagine that wanking could ever have been considered a serious threat to public health and sanity (to the extent that, as Eve Sedgwick notes, by the 1990s popular medical discourse was reassuring people that it was okay not to masturbate) we’re still very much au fait with the idea that popular media can be addicting, desensitizing and misleading, that by offering us an escape into ersatz fantasy worlds they can compromise our grasp on reality and corrode our morals. In recent decades such fears have been focused on videogames, and it’s no coincidence that scaremongering news reports tend to cast gaming in a seedily onanistic light – as a matter of nerdy, basement-bound males acting out violent power fantasies when they should be outside talking to girls.  Here we see the same preoccupation with solitude, fantasy and perversely wasteful sexuality that characterizes the C18th tracts Lacquer quotes, and while the tendency to see gaming in these terms may be less widespread than it was, say, twenty years ago (when the advertorial collaboration between Viz and Sega reproduced below dates from) it remains pretty common.

In the attempt to shake this image the industry has, in recent years, pushed various forms of ‘social gaming,’ from online multiplayer games to games integrated into social media platforms to the Wii’s library of family friendly living room romps. This move has had some welcome and worthy consequences, proving that videogames can cater to different and more diverse audiences, that they don’t have to be hyperviolent, prohibitively complex, grimly serious or graphically sophisticated, that they can be about creation, co-operation and communication rather than competition. It’s also had some downsides, and many social games  - or at least the sorts of games that are made and sold as ‘social games’  - serve agendas and reinforce behaviours I’m not particularly comfortable with. All commercial games are, of course, made with profit in mind, but the makers of social games have pioneered some particularly cynical modes capitalizing on customers’ creativity and social ties, of cutting development costs, of cracking down on the second hand market, of winkling more money and/or data out of players. Then there’s the forms of antisocial gaming  - trolling, griefing, cheating, harassment – that such games open the door to.

These factors don’t really inform my preference for singleplayer games, but they do make it easier to argue for the legitimacy of asocial gaming, and even to convince oneself that there’s something rather queer, rather subversive, rather decadently Des Esseintesien about its elevation of solitude over society and the virtual over the actual, its ability to a support or produce a feeling of delicious loneliness.

Reading Robyn Warhol’s wonderful Having a Good Cry has made me think slightly harder about this preference, and about the ways in which I prefer to account for it. In particular her discussion of serial novels and e-mail as kindred forms of ‘anti-effeminate technology’ has gotten me wondering whether my game playing couldn’t be thought of in similar terms. Warhol’s point of departure here is Ellen Ullman’s suggestion that e-mail caters to a “male sort of loneliness”’ which is woven into the culture of computer programming, and which Ullman, herself a computer engineer, understands as the legacy of teenagehoods spent their ‘tinkering’ with gadgets rather than ‘socializing.’ Stemming from feelings of ‘ambivalent loneliness,’ e-mail expresses a desire to connect, but also to ‘mediate’ that connection in such a way as to set ‘limits on the quality, the intensity, and the content of the relationships it brings into being.’ Warhol agrees with this analysis of e-mail - and, indeed, demonstrates its applicability to other cultural forms – including, however unexpectedly, the novels of Anthony Trollope. She prefers the term “‘anti-effeminate’” to Ullman’s “male,” however, reasoning that - as Ullman herself proves - women can feel these notionally ‘male’ feelings too, and arguing that such feelings should be understood not in terms of innate biological dispositions but in relation to the cultural gendering of emotion, the ‘textual technologies’ we use to evoke, classify and evaluate different patterns of embodied response.

The book has prompted me to think about how gender factors into my preference for asocial gaming, a preference probably not unconnected to my perhaps questionable fear of being tagged ‘a gamer’. This fear is slightly contradictory: on the one hand, it has to do with the idea playing videogames undermines one’s claims to being a real man (bound up as games still are with ideas of arrested development, sexual inadequacy, compensatory fantasy and solitary escapism); on the other, it has to do with the idea that a passion for videogames compromises one’s claims to be a real feminist/antihomphobe/advocate of non-violence (bound up as games still are with macho conflict, cheap titliation, homophobia and misogyny). Games are too manly, or not manly enough, or both. Either way, there’s a part of me for which gaming remains a slightly shameful hobby, and I’m still not sure whether having opted into the postdoctoral study of games mitigates or intensifies this shame (Warhol raises a similar point w/r/t academic studies of soap opera and Hollywood cinema).

I’ve also found that the consolations of asocial play can be considerable when I’ve been stood up, turned down, bereaved – when, that is, I’m feeling emasculated, or subject to putatively emasculating/effeminate feelings (grief, embarrassment, regret, doubt, self-pity). To select one of the examples it’s less blush-inducing to recount, I can remember, in the wake of my nan’s death (and while dead nans are forever the stuff of high school poetry contests, this was like two years ago), really wanting to play the Alaska bit of Metal Gear Solid 4.

Some context: MGS4 is a weirdly soppy, anxious, nostalgic game, and this section in particular is heavy with an overblown and complex sort of melancholy which I’ll try and unpack as economically as possible here. For one thing, we’re at a point in the (ludicrously incoherent) plot where a succession of rilly terrible things has just happened. The first three acts crescendo, then there’s this interlude of comparative quiet as the hero, Snake, is dropped into a snowy wilderness. For another, this environment - a military base called, with typical MGS portentousness, Shadow Moses - is familiar from the decade-old first Metal Gear Solid game, which debuted on the original PlayStation in 1998. There’s a nostalgic frisson to seeing it again, remodeled to take advantage of the PlayStation 3’s added graphical grunt. There’s also, however, a certain sense of loss or waste involved. In 1998, Shadow Moses possessed an incredible sense of place - of, as the game’s title boasted, solidity. Snake left footprints in the snow, his breath condensed in the freezing air, rats scuttled through the air ducts, icicles depended from the gantries and the place was patrolled by guards who were, by the standards of the era, unusually intelligent and discursive. The base felt alive. MGS4’s Shadow Moses, by contrast, is deserted but for a staff of robots. Dilapidated and assailed by blizzards that periodically obscure your vision, it feels like a ruin. A constant succession of flashbacks, in-jokes and allusions recall the first game – there’s even a mask you can make Snake wear the makes him look like his fuzzy, blocky PS1 incarnation - but rather than underlining how far we’ve come since 1998 these scenes, if anything, suggest the industry has been resting on its laurels. Ten years on, technological advances may have allowed developers to elaborate, refine and expand existing templates, but we’re still waiting for another quantum leap like the shift to 3D.

If this rueful attitude is particularly pronounced in the game’s fourth act, a sense of worry and wistfulness pervades the whole production. For an exclusive title meant to showcase the power of a shiny new console (literally shiny: the first PS3 had a buffed metallic chassis) MGS4 was strangely, even ominously preoccupied with obsolescence, finitude and death. Presented with all that extra processing power, director Hideo Kojima put it to use making his hero look lined, haggard and decrepit – a stark contrast not just with his more youthful PS1 and PS2 incarnations but also with the PS3’s polished façade. This Snake’s tendency toward retrospection and self-doubt, his suspicion of a new technological order which is sweeping old certainties away, seem to echo Kojima’s attitude at the time of the game’s development: pre-release interviews address his fear that ‘If the evolutionary roads like the PS3 are closed off, the industry will no longer grow,’ articulating doubts as to the long term viability of the console business which, five years down the line, have been at least partially borne out: the Xbox, an American upstart, has broken Sony’s monopoly on TV-based gaming, consoles in general are thought by many to be going the way of the dodo in an era of smartphones and tablets and the Japanese videogames industry has become increasingly insular, focusing on simple, traditional titles for a domestic audience where, in the 1990s, it seemed to turn out an unprecedentedly ambitious, globally influential epic every few months. I’m exaggerating of course, but this is the kind of exaggeration to which MGS4’s sentimentality and grandiloquence render one prone. In any case, I hope I’ve given some context for the game’s mournfully OTT atmosphere, an atmosphere into which the passage of time, the vicissitudes of technology and commerce and all manner of other non-gamic influences factor, and which is neatly encapsulated in the somewhat Friedrich-esque tableau of a figure with his back to us advancing into the heart of a raging blizzard.

As is probably apparent by now, I’m a sucker for the particular sort of ultra-Japanese macho melodrama MGS trades in. But it’s not quite right to say that the game’s doom-laden atmosphere is what prompted me to reach for MGS4 when feeling extra bummed-out and bereft. Rather it was the way that the game’s melodramatic flourishes throw into relief the way that, on a mechanical level, videogames are totally neutral, unfeeling, objective. The game’s artists might have made Snake look worn and jaded and vulnerable, its writers may have given the voice actor lines that attest to the heavy psychological burden of his traumatic past, but if I mess up and Snake ‘dies’ I know he’ll be instantly resurrected, and won’t manifest any awareness that he was just ‘killed.’ The avatar’s animation might suggest weariness and decrepitude, but he’ll still follow my joypad prompts punctually. And this is because while the game’s designers might intend for a title to evoke a certain emotion, the game itself simply doesn’t care. It won’t go easy on me if I’m feeling blue, nor will it push me out of spite. The computer just follows its orders. It gives me a list of things to do and it acknowledges my doing or failing to do them, completely ignoring the spirit in which and the reasons for which I’ve opted to try and do them right now. As Robert K. Jacob points out, ‘computer input and output are quite asymmetric,’ so while the PS3 throws all manner of data at me as I play (sounds and pictures, text and haptic feedback, music etc.) it receives comparatively little information in return, registering only the electrical pulses I’m sending it via the joypad and disregarding things like my posture, my facial expressions, my sighs of contentment and groans of frustration (though of course biometric feedback systems are beginning to change this…). I play secure in the knowledge that our interaction won’t have any real-world consequences, that the system can’t be disappointed or delighted or bored as a ‘real’ co-player can, that I don’t have to feel beholden or implicated or compromised or any of the other things I might, however reasonably, have felt were I playing with someone else. In short it was the tension between the systematic and the schmaltzy that rendered the game so appealing – and the something similar goes for my other go-to at this point,  Demon’s Souls, wherein the aesthetic layer is all amped-up eldritch fantasy while the mechanical layer is about discipline, repetition, patience.

This sort of play definitely fits Warhol’s description, with the games console operating as a ‘anti-effeminate technology of feeling’ insofar as it helps us avoid giving way to – or at least being seen to give way to - patterns of response our culture codes as effeminate. I’d argue that it would be wrong, however, to dismiss this type of play as nothing more than a poor substitute for or means of avoiding ‘real’ consolation and company (which is not to deny that it can also be that). It would also, I think, be wrong to see the feelings it can elicit simply as a matter of the production of an intended effect (catharsis, poignancy, wistfulness) being undercut or sabotaged by our catching a glimpse of the algorithms underpinning it. Yes, there are tensions, asymmetries and contradictions here - between the sentimentality of the game’s diegesis and the objectivity of its underlying systems, between the powerful affects to which games can give rise and their inability to register any but the most concrete and unambiguous forms of response -but rather than one element cancelling the other out, you often see forms of juxtaposition and interplay that are moving on their own account, capable as they are of reflecting and eliciting feelings of ambivalence and self-consciousness. As Gone Home – a brilliant asocial game that aims to foster distinctly ‘effeminate’ affects – demonstrates, games can be a great medium for exploring loneliness, aloneness and the separability of the two, for thinking about technology in terms of the mediation or deferral of contact, for dissecting the impetus toward asociality.

(Friedrich sunset from here, Viz image from the late, lamented UK Resistance)

Queering the Pitch

Been doing some film editing lately. Watching HDTV, too, which sometimes exposes editors’ having gambled on a long shot being long enough that no one – at least at standard def – would notice that the actors’ lip movements don’t in the least correspond to the words on the soundtrack. Michel Chion says we want to marry voices to their sources, to see mouths. In this respect the tricks of facial orientation filmmakers use so that any words can be synched to an image track are a bit like the rhetoric of Nuts magazine cover photography, whereby breasts are angled or draped so that the nipples remain just out of sight, as if they were something impossible and fantastic. These images are meant to inspire in viewers a desire to warp the image plane or rearrange the body so that the hidden secret would be visible - a desire that, as Linda Williams notes, porn panders to by contorting performers according not to comfort or verisimilitude but a logic of ‘maximum visibility’ (Hardcore 48).

Increasingly, cheesecake photos employ Photoshop not merely to smooth over blemishes or reproportion bodies but to combine, Zeuxis-style, elements from multiple photos, a process that is often taken to the point of defying conventional anatomy. Synthetic cubism is one reference point, but I was also reminded of these bodies in the Tate’s recent Gaugin show. One of the nice thinks about showing his carvings and ceramics alongside the paintings is that you realise the latter look not merely spatially ‘off’ but as if pictorial space was a sort of resistant material with its own obstinate grain or torque, only partially malleable into the forms Gaugin wants it to assume.

As the earliest artist yet to be exhibited at Tate II, part of the show’s remit was to argue for Gaugin’s importance to later, modern-er art. Certainly, the extent to which he allows desire to deform virtual space marks him as an ancestor of recent painters (Kilimnick, Joffe, Peyton et al) who’ve sought to reproduce the dissipated or decadent styles of attention characteristic of fan art – in which ‘good bits’ might be larger or more worked up while blurrings or disconnections, lapses in concentration and spots of boredom, sully other parts of the image/experience.

Those works (that is, both the fans’ stuff and that of the painters reflexively cribbing their style) tend, of course, to be based on prior images that, translated through fans’ desiring, variably co-ordinated or skilled bodies, come out distorted, sometimes unrecognizably. At the same moment as Gaugin was sailing to the tropics Michael Field (the alias of ‘poets & lovers’ Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) was working on Sight & Song, a poetic ‘translation’ of some of the pair’s favourite paintings. According to Ana Parejo Vadillo the collection operates according to a ‘two-phased aesthetic’ (Passengers of Modernity 192): the poems offer ‘objective’ descriptions of the images before submitting them to subjective, often sexualized re-readings. What Vadillo doesn’t comment on is the frequency with which these re-readings involve recalibrating the spatial relationships between the bodies that the pictures represent.

Often these shifts seem dictated by the poets’ own ‘orientation’ in gender/sexuality terms: a couple of the poems (including one on Boticelli’s Primavera, of which Gaugin’s Nave Nave Mahana migh be read as a softcore remake) position us within the pictorial space occupied by female models, so that left and right are reversed (or ‘inverted’ – as Victorians said of homosexuals). Others trace sightlines that put female bodies squarely in the way of female eyes – eyes that, cued by Field, it is easy to read as harbouring an other-than-Platonic intent.

Of course, I’m probably doing unto Field what they’ve done unto Tintoretto, Giorgione et al: warping the original in the hope of teasing out a latent sexual secret. Nonetheless, their ‘two-phase’ translations of 2D canvases into space of utopian possbility remains intriguing as an instance of viewers interacting with and realigning images and bodies in order to realise multiple, competing storylines.

It might seem fanciful or trite to compare this to the process of playing a videogame, but I think its legitimate – especially in the case of games like Fez or Paper Mario, where progress often entails a form of perceptual ‘frame-shifting’, a switch between reading forms as 2D or 3D – just as, by imagining the males in Tintoretto's The Rescue occupy a different picture plane, we can choose to see the newly-liberated female captive gazing not at her (male) emancipator but at the body of the woman in the centre of the boat.

This game is a bit like looking at the duckrabbit, the famous emblem of epistemological relativism that can be seen either as a quacking duck or a windblown bunny, but not as both simultaneously (see also those images of preening coquetttes who turn into beshawled and decrepit crones). Re-reading the bit in Proust where Charlus is introduced for an upcoming book group, I was struck by the idea that there might be readers who wouldn’t yet know about the character’s (or, for that matter, the author’s) sexual orientation. Could you read (what now seemed to be) such an absurdly innuendo-saturated account of the character and come out of it blithely convinced he was straight?

Both Fez and Paper Mario have cartoony visual styles that riff on the videogame's transition from sprites to polygons, speaking to an audience old enough to have had to use their imaginations to ‘fill out’ games’ pixel-flat worlds. But there’s no reason games with similar mechanics couldn’t adopt entirely different aesthetics or communicate other messages.

The photographer Matt Stuart takes pictures that (a bit like the Elstir paintings Proust describes, also in vol. II) are angled so as to produce bizarre trompe l’oeil conjunctions. While I don’t really like his images (I’m turned of by the way they render the world wondrous and then knowable, dazzling their viewers by transforming ‘everyday’ London into a spectacular space rich with human variety, romance and humour and then flattering them by allowing them to decode and master this initially puzzling plurality) they are, in a way, games and suggestive as such of the potential for forms of visual play based on opening contingent arrangements of forms and bodies onto new meanings.

What the Odds Are

Lost my wallet last week. Does things' being irrevocably gone seem more freakish & unjust given how replaceable/recoverable/immaterial so many things are circa e-capitalism? I realised I felt on some level aggrieved at there being no text field I could type 'wallet' into like I'd do w/ a misplaced file in my hard drive or locating a pub to conduct a date in...

Always found interesting celebrity's basis in proliferation & ubiquity, as in not just the circulation of productions, merchandise, accounts and images but also the shuttling of the people in question across timezones & places (in one capital & Balenciaga tuesday, another & Junya Watanabe Thursday nevertheless on red carpetting & reprising a pose) so that it becomes an almost incredible coincidence you'd be spatiotemporally proximate (even if you've paid, say for a gigticket, to be so - & hence fans' OMFG!ing & spazz-outs). There's a kind of eggs-in-one-basket-averse logic that's touchingly close to pharaohs commissioning statues covered in inobliterably deep-graven cartouches as insurance against their souls being left homeless -tho now its about mobility rather than monumentality, quitting the White house to conduct nuclear war from the presidential doomsday plane etc.

The star/fan dynamic, its radical assymetry (the amount of geographical, neural, discursive space celebrities monopolise, how they can't be expected to invest imaginatively or emotionally at all in people who whether idly or trulymadlydeeply do in them) has - as an erstwhile mopily pretentious suburban teen for whom being a fan of devout fans (Richey Edwards, pre-solo Morissey w/ his fondness for Wilde, who once strewed Bernhardt's vector off a Folkestone ferry with lillies) was central, self-fashioningwise - always fascinated me.

Paul Virilio's (in The Aesthetics of Absence) great on Howard Hughes' 'taste for ubiquitous absence,' his deploying his wealth first to become inordinately visible, then to disappear, always keeping prospective re-appearance up his sleeve (H.H. reputedly 'supported, at great expense, a harem' that he never visited, it being 'enough to know that he had the power of going there & the young women whose pictures he had were awaiting his arrival').

Common to the visible/invisible eras, Virilio argues, is Hughes' desire to be everywhere/nowhere (same diffs) that was expressed through attempts to homogenize space, first via media exposure, aeronautics, global circumnavigation speed records (which kinda = taking playboy globetrotting/jetsetting to the nth degree) then by living alone, nude & becysted in 'rooms... narrow & all alike, even if they are worlds apart' with screeens showing his movies in lieu of windows ('the windows were all shaded and the sunlight could no more penetrate... than the unanticipated image of a different landscape... suppressing all uncertainty, Hughes could believe himself everywhere & nowhere, yesterday & tomorrow, since all points of reference to astronomical space or time were eliminated').

Its w/ reference to the visible-invisible parabola Virilio says Christ is 'the inverse of Hughes,' tho its true in a more fundamental way; Elaine Scarry's said its very possible to miss how boggled by J.C.'s thereness, his amenability to being seen and spoken, people in the gospels get; in contrast to the omniscience/-presence of Jehova (who tautologically am the great I am), Jesus' 'predicative generosity' means 'consent to be at a given moment confined by some attribute... to be, though everywhere, apprehensible at every given moment as only somewhere rather than everywhere.'

While on a deistic tip, I love fan-art - of which one-time celluloid Hughes Leo Di Cappie has occasioned his fair share - for that religiosity porn also often has. Hence the violation of the above otherwise tonally harmonious collage w/ some pencillings of total baldwin Channing Tatum.

(autistically detailed tatum from here, monochrome hatshepsut here, teenyboppers here, Giottan J.C. & co. here, Caravaggian J.C. & co. here)

Rom-hom-horror

I finally saw Ring, which, gratifyingly, was pretty great.  Bar the cursed VHS conceit I knew zero about the plot, which ended up really reminding me of some of the ghost stories crotchety lesbian aesthete Vernon Lee was writing in the late 1800s. Those are almost all about how brainwork and research establish dangerous, selfhood-compromising links w/ the dead. They've got this deeply queer and melancholy  quality; all the protagonists feel estranged from their own time, like they'd only be understood by these dead figures they fixate on. As Terry Castle's argued there's a pretty venerable literary tradition where ghosts are readable as i.e. thwarted sapphic passions. Lee belongs to it, but it was unexpected to find that Ring does too...

There's that amazing bit where - having exhaustively researched Sadako, psychically tapped her memories then tres symbolically dredged the well she was flung down - the main character, a female journalist, has this cathartic embrace w/ Sadako's sodden corpse. The whole mediate, queerly fraught relationship is totally Lee and the hug's really moving - more so, say than when yr supposed to be happy for Molly Ringwald and the yuppie guy at the end of  Pretty in Pink.

///BONUS queer non-sex scene from a film of the last decade///

Also I watched Iron Man the other day, and was really reminded of Zizek's contention Edenic sex would be dispassionate, mechanical, basically rectological during the bit where Gwynnie has to deftly manipulate the circuitry inside the prone RDJr's chest cavity, and it's a totally above-board clothed scene in which she's basically fisting him... Bits of that movie (inc. Ghostface aka Tony Stark contributing to the OST, drolly) were pretty interesting, really.

(singer Sargent's portrait of his buddy Vernon Lee from paintingall.com, Sadako's toilette from obrasilero.com, Nanako Matsushima's Shelley Duvallesque gawp (always cast big-eyed, slightly mucoid-featured potential victimesses = rule 1 in telepathic horror) from windowtothemovies.com)