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)

Demakes as Procedural Caricature?

Wondering if there's some interesting purchase to be had on videogame demakes via the idea of 'procedural caricature'.... Bergson talks about caricaturists seizing on features/characteristics that bespeak 'recalcitrance,' immobility, the machinic; demakes take caricature from the realm of synchronic representation to that of diachronic simulation, hyperbolically approximating the most sailent (or ridiculous) routines, procedures, mechanics.... Normally the gag is pretty cheap - made in the service of making us feel fond and nostalgic, or smug and superior. There's fascinating potential in parodic software though - seems like this is sort of what Pippin Barr's latest project is getting at...

Lawnmower Inferno II: The Proustening

Incidentally, intrigued to see Clouzot apparently picking up on Proust's tendency to associate paranoid jealousy with optical illusions (surely not coincidental that L'Enfer's Marcel and Odette), something I've talked about here in the past...

Lawnmower Inferno

So this week Lovefilm engineered one of those unexpectedly felicitous double bills, serving up Lawnmower Man alongside Inferno, a documentary about the disastrous and abortive shooting of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s L’Enfer. What turned out to link the two was SFX, with both films using lurid colours and lysergic patterns to communicate a loss of innocence: in Lawnmower Man a holy fool becomes a megalomaniacal cyberbeing, while in L’Enfer a husband is beset by surrealistic visions of his wife’s infidelity. Seeing the two in tandem, I was struck by the fact that, effectswise, they’re essentially coming at things from opposite angles: if Lawnmower Man’s animated sequences see computers clunkily attempting to replicate organic forms, one of the most moving things about Inferno is watching Clouzot’s team inventing ingenious and laborious analogue processes that produce results now reminiscent of nothing so much as the presets available in digital playback and editing software... Ripples, meshes and mirror images, hallucinatory composites and freakish colour schemes are conjured from rotating arrays of lights, sheets of water, layers of plastic and cellophane, sequins and ungents, wires and mirrors. Determined to turn a lake blood red, but unable simply to hit cmd+i, Clouzot dickies with the colour timing, has the make-up department paint the actors a cadaverous grey-green and commissions two sets of costumes - one for each side of the colour wheel.

 In both cases, and even more than in the typical effects-led film, there’s an excessive, flagrantly artificial quality to the SFX sequences. Not content to humbly serve the story, they demand attention on their own terms, as technical achievements. As if acknowledging this, Lawnmower Man’s title screen offers the option to watch just the computer-generated bits, skipping the film that frames them altogether. With L’Enfer, meanwhile, it’s almost as if Marcel’s hallucinations (which are the only scenes that take place in colour) literally refused to be integrated into a finished film, the flimsy narrative architecture designed to support them buckling under the weight of their sensory charge. While the documentary does a decent job of interweaving a sketch of L’Enfer’s plot with the story of its production (a story climaxing with the shock resignation of leading man Paul Reggiani and Clouzot’s subsequent heart attack) these contexts start to seem irrelevant faced with the sheer charisma of the surviving footage. I found myself wishing that they’d just given us a menu of these fragments to watch in whatever order we pleased rather than subordinating them to the (albeit fascinating) history of the project - which desire led to me capping and gif-ifying the bits of it I have.

In this respect, these films also highlight the weird irony of the DVD, a storage medium that allows for random access but which (at least in the case of DVD movies) masquerades as a film strip, surrendering images in a linear sequence. You could argue, in fact, that both movies fail because they attempt to tell A-B stories about things that are inherently non-linear: if it’s no surprise that Lawnmower Man can’t turn the internet and the videogame into material for compelling non-interactive entertainment, it’s perhaps strangely apt that Clouzot couldn’t work a profusion of rushes, alternate takes and freestanding optical experiments into a viable feature film: after all, Marcel’s paranoia can itself be understood as a state of narrative crisis, whereby the proliferation of terrifyingly plausible possible pasts and futures foils any attempt to reach a definitive understanding of what has happened or might happen. Trawling tumblr suggests that both films are fated broken up and strewn, contextless, across a thousand microblogs - but maybe that’s poetic justice?

Lawnmower Man images from:

http://www.virtualworldlets.net/Worlds/Listings/LawnmowerMan/LawnmowerMan1-Falling.jpg

The Surface of the Moon

Scratched CD (image from wikipedia)

So I wanted to write something about Neil young’s Harvest Moon, a record that I’ve become peculiarly attached to over the past couple of years. I say peculiarly not because the album isn’t generally highly thought of (it is), but because I tend to have a pretty low tolerance for bluesy, folksy Americana with lyrics about Harleys, hound dogs, and prairie grass. So why do I like this LP? I think it’s because, while it initially comes across as ‘timeless’ and ‘effortless’ (or, as a more cynical listener might say, rote and generic) you can, if you listen more closely, hear Young wilfully and not always successfully struggling to divorce himself from the here and now, an effort which invests the record with a weird tension that I find both fascinating and moving. When Young claims he’s just doing what comes naturally (‘Here I am with this old guitar / Doing what I do’) he’s being at once basically truthful and deeply disingenuous, and the graft that’s gone into making everything sound assured, serene and spontaneous imbues what might otherwise have seemed like a pastiche with a King Canute-type pathos.

As wikipedia will tell you, Harvest Moon is generally considered a sequel to 1972’s Harvest, and was recorded in the early ‘90s, in the wake of a bout of tinnitus Young incurred while cementing his status as patron saint of grunge. Heard out of context, however, you’d probably think it dated from around the same time as Harvest - indeed, I’ve had conversations with people who love and have long owned the record but had no idea that it was released in 1992. For one thing, this presumably means they missed out on the superb photo of Young and band in the booklet packaged with the CD version I have (which photo I tragically can’t find online): not only is everyone looking pretty ravaged, but the preponderance of tie dyed tees and denim cut offs locates us squarely in the 1990s. For another, it suggests they haven’t listened too closely to the lyrics: opener Hank to Hendrix, for example, namedrops Madonna (‘From Marilyn to Madonna / I always loved your smile / Now we’re heading for the big divorce / California style’).

The Madge reference highlights the tension that make the album so interesting for me: is la Ciccone being conjured as avatar of all that’s wrong with contemporary culture (as she is in Roger Kimball’s adorably flustered postscript to Tenured Radicals), or is Young positing an equivalence? Does the comparison impose continuity on pop cultural history (yesterday, Marilyn; today Madonna - plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose), or is it meant to describe a trajectory from the authentic to the ersatz? Such moments highlight the contradictions inherent in adopting a reactionary stance* - the problem, for example, of reconciling the desire to believe certain things are natural and essential and will always be with the conviction that right now we’re going to hell in a handbasket - and disrupt the attempt to keep things cosily nostalgic. We become uncomfortably aware that someone probably had to invent Harley Davidsons and guitars at some point; that they used to be - ugh! - new.

Speaking of technology, later in Hank to Hendrix there’s a verse that I can only hear in terms of Young’s notorious antipathy to digital music formats (so inveterate is Young’s hatred of CD and MP3 that he’s begun touting his own file format, ‘Pono’ - named, naturally, for the Hawaiian word for “righteousness”). It goes:

Sometime it's distorted
Not clear to you
Sometimes the beauty of love
Just comes ringin' through.

The same theme’s engaged in more explicit terms in the closing track, Natural Beauty. Here which Young sings about having ‘heard a perfect echo die / into an anonymous wall of digital sound’ before asserting ‘a natural beauty should be preserved like a monument to nature.’ It’s here that the consonance between what’s happening sonically (the desire to create something hushed, pure and lilting, catalysed by tinnitus and rendered tougher by the quavering reediness of the ageing Young’s vox) and what’s happening lyrically/thematically (the desire to conjure a mythic never-never-America, compromised by Young’s inability to avoid references that locate us in the abject present) are strongest.

Ironically, what the results most remind me of is a hard disk drive - a device that, incidentally, has more in common with a ‘proper’ analogue record player than you might think. Sealed off in a hermetic container in the bowels of the computer, the HDD comprises a series of platters made from highly finished aluminium or silicon, onto which data is written in clusters comparable in size to blood cells and anthrax spores. Read by drive heads that skim micrometres above them on cushions of air, these platters are exquisitely vulnerable to smudges, scratches and faults - and in this respect they resemble Young’s artfully evoked fantasy USA. Listen carefully (as a paranoid audiophile, searching for evidence of digital signal compression, might) and a series of flaws - the catches in Young’s voice, the ‘anachronistic’ references to digital media and MTV - compromise the comforting idea it’s still 1972, tarnishing the illusion.

The effect is strangely reminiscent of Borges’ story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote - an account of a writer who attempts not merely to translate or copy Cervantes’ masterpiece, but to recreate it ‘word for word and line for line.’ For Borges’ narrator, Menard’s 20th century Don Quixote ‘infinitely richer’ than Cervantes’ (identical) 1602 version. This is because what are, in the mouth of a seventeenth century Spaniard, mere rhetorical commonplaces, doxa and formulae, become, coming from ‘a contemporary of William James,’ audacious, ‘astounding’ conceits. Likewise, to release Harvest in 1972 is one thing, but to release Harvest Moon in 1992 is quite another. While I’m aware that championing futile acts of heroism is an activity with dubiously conservative overtones, I find I’m with Borges when it comes to which is more fascinating.




*Young’s, of course, traditionally been way too interested in and conflicted about the technologically and culturally new to be tagged as a straight up luddite (witness Trans)...

Glitch/Fart/Flash

It begins not with a bang, but with a parp: in their book On Bathos Sara Crangle and Peter Nicholls trace the dawn of modern bathos to a farting corpse in Pope’s Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741). Initially, bathos simply meant something like nadir. Only in Eighteenth century England does it start to acquire the sense of, as the OED has it, ‘a ludicrous descent from the elevated to the commonplace in writing or speech; anticlimax’. As Crangle and Nicholls suggest, this descent or deflation often has to do with material things, and especially corporeal things, making themselves suddenly and shamingly obvious. In a flash - or with a flatulent toot - we switch from the sublime to the ridiculous.

I was reminded of this celebrated literary fart while playing Pippin Barr’s browser game All's Well that Ends Well. Barr presents players with a simple objective: they have to pilot their aircraft across the screen, avoiding salvos of oncoming missiles. The only problem is that there are far too many missiles, moving far too quickly, for the player to have the slightest chance of success. Eventually it becomes apparent that you can make it across, but only by dying repeatedly; each time the avatar ‘respawns’ it is, in accordance with time-honoured videogame convention, impervious for a second or so, and by exploiting this fact it's possible to inch across the screen. Do this, however, and you’re presented with another, almost identical scenario, pitting a star ship against an asteroid belt. Clear this screen (and, again, this can be done by holding down the ‘d’ key) and other, increasingly surreal versions of the same situation await - flying chair versus flying station wagons, flying station wagon versus flying giant broccoli stalks, missile versus Easter Island heads etc. When (through sheer persistence rather than skill) the player does clear a screen, their ‘success’ is qualified by the pile of wrecked avatars littering the landscape below.

As Barr notes, ‘[t]he idea is of repeated death and of memories of that death, like the corpses left behind in many other video games. But pushed to an extreme for a particular effect.’ That ‘particular effect’ is, of course, a bathos effect; the game’s overblown introductory text (‘You are the brave pilot of a high-tech spy plane... May God protect you’) is immediately undercut by the tinny pop that accompanies the plane’s first collision, which it doesn’t take much imagination to hear as a kind of fuzzy digital fart. His Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment, a suite of unwinnable minigames based on the torments of Tantalus, Sisyphus, Prometheus et al (rapidly alternate between the ‘g’ and ‘h’ keys to dislodge the eagle eating your liver, to roll a boulder uphill etc.) follows a similar trajectory. If Barr’s games mock the way that videogames tend to handle death, then they also suggest how good they are at generating bathos.

In his introduction to Christie in Love (1970), playwright Howard Brenton suggests that the play’s police officers are essentially stock characters, and to be played as such. However, very occasionally ‘they have ‘sudden lights’, unpredictable speeches beyond the confines of pastiche. As if a cardboard black and white cut-out suddenly reaches out a fully fledged hand. It’s a bathos technique... It is very cruel’. Players of videogames will be more than familiar with situations like that which Brenton describes. There are moments when AI functions adequately, and there are even moments when it can seem to have ‘sudden lights’ but there are also all those moments at which the limitations of the code ‘behind’ the AI characters become glaringly apparent.

In Skyrim (which I recently had to review and which, despite my violent aversion to the Tolkeinesque, was pretty fun - nice skies) it’s not uncommon for the illusion of a coherent world to be undercut by the redployment of a speech sample you’ve heard a thousand times before, or a character’s sudden schizoid switch in demeanour (these moments, in fact, are weirdly evocative of Hedayat’s disquieting use of repeated phrases and gestures in Blind Owl).

Then there are the weirder glitches. Just how surreal these can be is suggested by a bullet point in the notes for the game’s first patch, which besides promising to remedy framerate issues and blurred textures also claims to have

Fixed occasional issue where a guest would arrive to the player's wedding dead

In attempting to talk about downright weirdness of some of Skyrim’s glitches I kept defaulting to the idea that it was almost as if the disc was dreaming or delirious, as if we were getting a glimpse into its subconscious – kind of like sharing a bed with someone who talks in their sleep (which I do). The term brainfart (for which the OED, alas, doesn’t have a definition, though wikipedia is pretty fascinating on the subject) springs - as it were - to mind.

As Skyrim proves, glitches can be fascinating - we get a glimpse of how the game, as an assemblage of interacting systems, works, and this is often more compelling than the illusion it’s trying to sustain (Noah Wardripp Fruin calls this ‘the TaleSpin effect’, after a venerable computerised story generator that produced narratives far less interesting than the processes it used to compose them). But glitches can also be strangely shaming, as can the experience of in-game death. Both can trigger the bathetic realisation that we’ve been fooled into responding to a game as if it were something more than a simulation. This is the sort of alienation Graeme Kirkpatrick describes in his account of Resident Evil 4’s QTE sections. For him the graphic button prompts that flash up on screen ‘and the sudden quickening of events seems to conspire to produce a sense of ridiculousness. In the midst of playing the game... we are suddenly offered the spectacle of our own activity as something childish. We see ourselves pressing a brightly colored plastic button on an infantile toy’. He reads this realisation of his own absurdity through Bergson’s theory of laughter, which suggests that we laugh in order to draw attention to and censure ‘the encrustation of the mechanical upon the living’.* For Bergson, laughter is supposed to jolt us awake when we fall into automatic or quasi-mechanical behaviours (like tapping buttons in front of a screen) - an idea that has obvious ties to Pope’s comedy, rooted as it is in his anxious fascination with the possibility that we’re just digestive tracts with delusion of grandeur.
The glitch, like the flash of ‘sudden light’ or the fart that brings us crashing back down to earth, entails a rapid but profound switch in tone/scale/register. In their ‘Notes on Glitch’ Manon and Temkin emphasise ‘the momentary or punctiform nature of the initiating impulse. A glitch is a “surge,” “a sudden short-lived irregularity in behavior” (OED), whose aftereffects are at once shocking and effusive. The garish appearance and obstreperous sound of glitch art betokens its origination in this way: a tiny variance has triggered major damage.’ Perhaps games can harness both the dramatic potential Brenton sees in bathos and the thought-provoking power of glitches and interruptions?

Arguably some already do. If Silent Hill 2’s AI-controlled Maria occasionally seems a little stiff or suspiciously dopey, for example, this only adds to the impression that - like Solaris’ simulacral wife-substitute Hari, who she in so many respects resembles – she’s something between a person and a piece of code, a machine and a memory.** Hari’s repeated deaths and resurrections mirror the logic of videogames, while the sequence where, panicked at having been separated from Kelvin, she tears through a metal door is, to the gamer, more than a little evocative of AI companions’ dodgy pathfinding routines.

While we might be expected to pity Hari, pathos keeps slipping into bathos - her immortality imbues her suicide attempts with something of the existential slapstick of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon, and our emotional response is all the more complex for it.

Moreover, in Solaris as in Silent Hill 2 there is something ridiculous in the willingness of the heroes to believe they can have their wives back, despite the overwhelming proof that they are merely imperfect copies or self-induced delusions. And of course their suspension of disbelief mirrors that of the viewer/player, who as Kirkpatrick insists, is always vulnerable to having the ‘ridiculousness’ of their absorption in a fiction/simulation made bathetically clear to them.

There is then evidence that games might be uniquely suited to exploring bathos and immortality, that they could put a fresh twist on a set of tropes and figures – or, as Bogost might have it, ‘unit operations’ – that underpin everything from the myth of Sisyphus to Groundhog Day, and in so doing address their inflection by technology. There is also evidence – and this is something we mustn’t forget – that Alexander Pope was indirectly responsible for The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps.***

* He also links this revelatory flash to Walter Benjamin’s notion of jetzeit, the implications of which for animated gifs are explored in an intriguing piece by Daniel Rourke

** It might be worth noting that Alan Wake and Shadows of the Damned both borrow this ‘haunted by repeated visions of beloved dying’ trope, and for that matter that SotD lays luridly bare the strain of fetishistic misogyny it’s bound up with

*** Though as a mitigating factor this means he can claim to have had a hand in Nothing Really Matters – for me one of Janet’s finest hours

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.