i think you're all crazy for getting rid of your optical drives: notes from a technophile luddite

asking around, it's clear that almost nobody has optical drives around their home anymore, unless they have a blu-ray player or a game console attached to a television. young people in particular simply do not have access to an optical drive in their life. in truth most people don't seem to care and won't miss them, convinced that streaming provides a convenient and inexpensive push-button, remote-control access to everything that matters. the removal of bulky optical drives from laptops makes them thin and sexy, because the market has been repeatedly convinced by Apple Computer that thin and sexy is the best thing for laptops to be. and look at that – Apple has a streaming store, one of the first big ones on the internet. how convenient that for almost ten years now they haven’t allowed their customers the choice to have an optical drive in their systems

forget the fact that independent media productions are almost universally locked out of the streaming services that people actually use (except youtube, a platform on which the only way to make any money at all is to be immensely popular). ignore the ability to trade media with friends or like-minded communities, to borrow media from libraries, purchase titles from around the world, or sell media on used markets when the user is finished using it. nevermind the fact that streaming services in fact have only a very limited archive of media currently available, and almost universally present little depth or breadth to their available media: no controversy, no history, nothing which is too weird or hard to understand, nothing from other times or other countries. just the same collection of corporate material found on walmart shelves and gas station discount bins three for five dollars. these are inconveniences, certainly, but the more significant reason that i think everyone should keep an optical drive around is control

it is important to recognise that tangible benefits do exist for media streaming, not the least of which are environmental in nature. while streaming services use more electricity than Netflix, Apple, or indeed almost everyone would like to admit, over a period longer than ten years optical media have a tendency to end up not on the shelves of domestic or public libraries but rather in landfills, and at many times in their lifespan their physical presence signals the expenditure of gasoline for shipping. it is encouraging that optical media are able to be industrially recycled, but since doing so costs money which municipalities are not paying, only the most dedicated and wealthy consumer would ever worry about the environmental footprint of their optical media use and take the time to expensively ship their garbage discs to recyclers. furthermore, from the point of view of media users it is far more convenient to select a film from a streaming archive than to go to a store or shop online for an optical disc. streaming services also allow access to a more broad community of users, as geographical isolation tends to cohabitate with media isolation. with access to streaming services, rural communities are less dependent on the habits or economic realities of their local retail store owners, for example. the immediacy of the archive provokes a false sense of media expertise, of falsely enjoying a position of privilege and control. “i’m no sucker,” says the Netflix streamer. “i am more in control over my media experiences than anyone ever before”

however, it is not likely that Netflix will ever pick up that interesting bela tarr film people sometimes write about. those interesting Iranian films from the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s which poetically blended fiction and non-fiction into potent political allegories are not likely to be bought by streaming services, given the chameleon nature of geopolitical happenstance. inspired by a friend’s recent binge of japanese underground cyberpunk films of the 1990s, a search online only leads to disappointment when learning that no current service offers even Tetsuo the Iron Man, which is a million times more visible than any of the other weirdo films mentioned by that friend. in fact Netflix has nothing at all approaching sections for art and experimental films, silent films or the early hollywood studio era, european modernism, Bollywood musicals, or guerilla documentaries from the margins of latin american and african post-colonialism. due to competing licensing concerns, Netflix isn't even the best place for blockbuster films, as the studios are slowly trying to each have their own smaller netflixes, presenting a future in which fans collect apps instead of movies or music

while Spotify is smart enough to have licensed weirdos such as :zoviet*france: to their platform, the business model they offer to artists (aka no money at all) will not allow the next weirdo band to emerge, unless those weirdos happen to be independently wealthy. my guess is that if they are still around in twenty years, Spotify will be a frontend for Top40 artists whose new licenses give them copyright access to the archives of recorded music history for free 'as a service to their fans'. sure, weirdos and independent media could set up their own websites to allow consumers access, but the reality is that those attempts rarely work. as any independent media person could tell you, the vast majority of people simply will not go out of their way to access your independent media. in the early days of the internet david bowie and prince offered fans a direct sales model which in addition to music and video material also provided email and music licensing services, but not too many people used them. it is definitely tough for artists to sell to fans directly, however with optical drives at least there remains a possibility for such an exchange to occur. randomly go to a bar and be impressed by the band to the point where you buy a disc – it can be played in any optical disc player. some random street vendor in taipei is selling local music on disc – it can be played in any optical disc player. for a long time profits in the music industry were sustained by artificially inflated compact disc prices, and consumers were rightly pissed at being asked to pay $15 for 74 minutes of crap to hear the 5-minute song they actually wanted to purchase. but streaming and downloading music does not sabotage the profits of the record industry, whose artists are essentially multinational media investments backed by sufficient financial capital to use 'songs' and 'music' as advertisements for fan participation in a celebrity 'experience'. music fans who don't pay for music are not 'striking back at the industry'; they are failing to provide artists who aren't superstars with a revenue stream on which they can tour and produce music, rent an apartment, and buy food

now that optical drives are increasingly not owned by media consumers, the vast majority of optical disc content not transferred to streaming services will remain arcane mysteries except to the most dedicated of media scholars, existing as a hazy ‘there-be-dragons’ cloud of bytes locked behind an artificially antiquated viewing practice. after all, in both cases the viewing practice is the same; what has changed is the means of distribution, with new forms of distribution falling under the control of an increasingly smaller elite of corporate entities. after a number of years teaching film and media studies classes, it is clear to me that media content which is not immediately clickable simply does not exist for the streaming generation. content is somewhat secondary to convenience of access: students will click and watch a maya deren film on youtube, but will not watch an older version of Star Wars on DVD. perhaps such is inevitable, and the media consumption of the masses has always been of concern to media scholars, but i understand the termination of access to physical media as signalling something else, something a bit more consequential. not quite the tired end-of-history talk common to end-of-media discourse, but worry rather about a more precisely prescribed history to come

the point i wish to make here is much less about what is available on streaming services than what is made unavailable by the loss of optical media drives. as a Netflix subscriber myself – for the tv shows they produce – this article is not intended to convince anyone to drop their subscriptions. rather, i want people to reconsider the loss of an optical drive from their lives. optical drives are relatively open standards, whereas online streaming protocols are not. anyone incorporated or not can freely produce material (granted, within the confines of national obscenity laws) and distribute it to media consumers who have a technical platform capable of reproducing it. of course there exist a number of methods to restrict access to the optical disc as an open platform, most notably the numerous digital rights management (DRM) methods implemented for the protection of copyrighted materials. while optical drives attached to computers provide the greatest amount of flexibility for reproducing the contents of optical media, consumer optical devices such as compact disc, DVD, and blu-ray players are also relatively open platforms when the inexpensive and often freely-available protocols they use are adhered to. in other words, any musician, individual, or company may produce and sell any audio signal they want knowing that disc will be reproduced properly for all listeners so long as the disc conforms to the ‎IEC 60908 protocol for audio reproduction (also known as redbook audio for compact discs). currently there exists millions of individual media titles on optical disc formats and all of them can be reproduced by all users of optical disc drives. the paradoxical point here being made is that in practice optical drives are more open as a media distribution standard than is a digital network connection

no such analogy as independent music exists with streaming services. let us put aside the false binary of physical and non-physical media, for streaming services and file sharing and every other computational medium is a complex articulation of silicon chips, magnetic and electrical storage devices, network hardware, software protocols, and financial assets which all manifest as physical ‘things’ whose physical use and ownership have physical and non-physical implications on the media they deliver (the ‘internet of things’ is really just ‘more things on the internet’, the continued application of the physicality of networked computation to an increasing number of ‘things’). i watched as friends sold off their disc collection after ripping their music and movies to hard drives. after all, why keep the disc when it can be sold and my friend can keep watching their rip? consumers empowered by optical disc rips enjoy a false mastery over the consumer market however, as over the long term – say longer than ten years or so – that rip and sell strategy does not work unless my friend has a professional data management plan in place, ensuring yearly backups to new hardware with file integrity validation procedures. hard drives crash, operating systems and user activity often fail to keep data intact, and magnetically-recorded bits can flip polarity (1’s become 0’s and 0’s become 1’s) over time, and unless a person has expertise in long-term film management or is paying someone else to have that expertise for them it is almost certain that they will lose access to their data at some point, and probably much sooner than they expected. much as many users lost access to the files they kept on floppy disks but did not transfer to a hard drive before purchasing a computer lacking a floppy drive (Apple users who in the late 1990s purchased the first iMacs as perhaps the most famous example), users who expect permanence to their files often forget that those files exist as physical instantiations, with access requiring a performative interpretation by a specific hardware architecture. as this truth renders computational media highly volatile and fragile, it is best to embrace open rather than proprietary standards. the point, and one which for many readers will perhaps be overly belaboured, is that optical drives represent a significant open standard which we should not be so quick to abandon

that being said, it is indeed possible to discuss some issues related to a changed physicality. it is not possible to ‘lend’ or ‘sell’ streamed media after use, and it is not possible for content to be shared between services or with users who have not subscribed to any service, or with devices incompatible with the service. for example, for DRM purposes Netflix currently requires computer users to have very specific processor and operating system architectures in order to stream 4k video, chipsets so specific in fact that computer users who are not official ‘Microsoft Insiders’ as part of the Windows 10 operating system subscription model are not able to stream 4k content. Apple mac users cannot officially stream Netflix in 4k and are forced to either hackintosh a workaround or limit themselves to 4k selections in iTunes. streaming is a tenuous network of gardens walled by proprietary protocols and DRM efforts and held together by legal and financial discursive practices, whose commercial existence precludes any function as a stable personal archive or cultural repository. here's the thing about streaming that media consumers aren't considering: all those streams exist on servers owned by companies which are guaranteed to either 1) go out of business at some point, or 2) be acquired by a larger media conglomerate. when either of these eventualities happens, the licensing arrangements media consumers previously made with companies become null and void. long story short, consumers get to purchase their media access all over again, and in the process it is guaranteed that specific titles will become lost in the legal shuffle, unavailable once a user has reset their subscriptions

while this process (of legal ‘censorship’) occurs with formats previous to optical media (witness for example the loss on home video media due to music licensing arrangements of many sequences from the originally broadcasted episodes of WKRP In Cincinnati), but this process is exacerbated by the ease with which streaming services and other media companies change their relationships with their customers. for example, Netflix periodically removes content for reasons related more to marketing concerns rather than licensing issues. another example involves the digital game series No One Lives Forever (NOLF), well-produced parodies of James Bond and the 60’s spy tv show fad with a solid female protagonist and released by Fox Interactive on computers between 2000 and 2003. as the copyright for the series is enmeshed in a complex history of corporate mergers, bankruptcies, and acquisitions while the companies involved are not allowing anyone to license the game for sale while not themselves selling it (despite the games’ first-person action mechanics remaining commercially viable in 2018), the only way for anyone to currently play NOLF is to purchase a retail copy of the game on the collector’s market. while the game is neither easily nor inexpensively acquired, it is possible to do so only as long as one has access to an optical drive. more to the point, if you have an optical drive i can lend you my copy

drives remain quite inexpensive but are no longer as ubiquitous a retail presence as they were only a few years ago, and as computer optical drives and stand-alone consumer optical disc devices disappear from stores the inexpensive acquisition of an optical drive is going to change faster than optical media fans such as myself are probably prepared for. small companies, especially in the audiophile market, will continue to service optical drives for niche markets, but those niche markets will have to pay a luxury price for their rejection of the mass market. we laugh at the weird names of craft beer companies started by bearded millennials and then get mad at the expensive results (re: the PC of ontario 'buck a beer' electioneering promise), but as the mass market quickly abandons optical media over the next seven years the same trend will apply for currently-obsolescing media forms such as music, films, and software on optical media (and magazines, newspapers, and books in print media). at that point, it will be increasingly difficult for media to be shared among people without passing through one of the corporate media streaming keyholes, controlled by shareholders who do not wish controversial media content to affect their bottom line, even if some consumers are willing to pay extra for the controversy. at the inception of its streaming service, Netflix was notorious for censoring much of the content it was distributing. while the Blockbuster chain of video stores was known to have censored some of the films it offered for rental, viewers could readily acquire media from other sources and play them on the same video device as used for watching videos rented at Blockbuster; furthermore, they were able to purchase unedited versions of films – otherwise known as the standard retail release – directly from Blockbuster itself. there was no way for Blockbuster’s corporate interests to limit a user’s ability to use their device; equally, there is no way for Netflix, iTunes, or any other streaming service to keep users from watching other streams. media consumers are however limiting themselves to the contemporary business arrangements of a very small number of corporations when they chose hardware incompatible with previously-established open standards such as optical discs. in short, gilles deleuze was correct in describing a 'control society' in which lives are voluntarily mediated by access rights

while desktop and laptop computers could eventually alter sufficiently to the extent that they are no longer useful as media consumption devices (looking at you, phones), it is likely that whatever happens to computers as work and leisure tools most homes will incorporate servers into their structure, much as they incorporated other once-separate technological functions such as delivering water and regulating heat. as a person is no longer likely to purchase or build a house without a furnace or central plumbing, future homeowners will likely view home servers as mandatory components of their domestic lives. given that such servers would likely follow developments from present server technologies, optical drives will indeed have a place in such computer platforms, if people want them to be there

do not ditch your streaming service subscriptions, but equally do not rush to ditch that bluray drive under your television, or choose a laptop, tablet, or other computational platform with no ports to attach external optical drives. for myself, it’s media apocalypse bunker time: next time i build a computer, i'm going to buy four or five extra optical drives and put them in storage. a drive lasts about ten years (smoke-free environments are key to the lifespan of electronics...), and properly stored those drives should keep future generations happy that we have been outlived by our libraries of media

[image from Wasteland 2 copyright inExile Entertainment]

Bound in Time: Timehunter and the Art of Playing Roles

          The title of this talk suggests that I will be examining the role-playing genre in gaming, and indeed after a slightly circuitous route I will indeed get there. First, I have to spend some time elsewhere. The idea for this paper comes from the commonly-experienced reality that there is never enough time to complete all that we want to finish in life. Now that I have begun to study gaming, I am noticing that my use of time is following the precedent of my experience with cinema studies. Namely, the more that I study the medium, the less time that I have to experience the source texts themselves. In retrospect, my mother was warning me of this trend when throughout my childhood she told me that I was wasting time playing videogames. As any game player knows all too well, the real quest at the heart of any gaming narrative is the quest for more time to play. Desire left unchecked by responsible time management is often seen as an anti-social vice, harmful to both the individual and society as a whole. (Here, I must refer anti-gaming moralists to the fact that play is inherent to learning among mammalian species.) By its very nature, gameplay encourages the binding of a human subject to an “irresponsible” use of their time. One more turn, one more quest, one more dungeon, we tell ourselves as the clock passes midnight and gameplay increasingly encroaches on sleep. We are always in a sense trying to avoid the consequences of time by means of a quest accomplished or a plot thread advanced. Already we have begun to play roles that bind us in time: the human player who must complete the game;  the academic whose occupation distracts them from their muse; the child whose desire for pleasurable experience requires conscription into proper social channels.

          Which brings me to the textual example which serves to structure this paper. To materialise the ‘bondage’ process – in other words, the binding of a body to an external object – I wish to interrogate the art of digital role-playing by means of an non-digital example of fetish gameplay. Timehunter by Japanese composer Masami Akita, released under his Merzbow persona in a limited edition in early 2003, can be seen as analogous to videogame subjectivities. In order to properly experience this musical object, one is expected to consciously assume the role of professional listener by scheduling time as the composer intends using the yearly scheduler in which the audio is packaged.

         There is an obvious fetish character to the packaging. A faux-leather bound daily planner, which contains folders for writing tools, a calculator, and important documents, allows the entry of scheduling data by the listener. Importantly, the artist has scheduled when the listener is intended to play each of the musical pieces. For example, at 9:17 on the evening of Thursday, May 1, 2003, the entire first CD is meant to be played, while at 3:25 on the morning of Tuesday, December 2, 2003 the  first track from the third CD is to be played. Merzbow‘s music is digitally processed noise intended to be experienced through loudspeakers (not headphones) at high volume levels. This aesthetic is often interpreted as unlistenable to naive, immature, or unprepared listeners. As such, a listener who dutifully follows the listening schedule as Merzbow intends will have to wake up in the middle of the night or early morning, or interrupt the nine to five work day, to play what is often misunderstood as antisocial music. I myself fully committed to the year-long listening project, although since at the time I was employed by a record label, my own performance of the role of listener did not render me into a social pariah.

         The desire for a rationally predictable future is a desire to control the body: here is where I will be at this time, and this is what I will be doing. Certainly the fact that it is a tangible physical object uncommon to musical products itself renders Timehunter into a fetish; that it was released in less than a thousand copies worldwide furthers the desire to possess the object. With acquisition comes the playing of a role. The identity which is meant to be assumed by the listener is folded into the object itself. The daily scheduler invokes the lives of professionals, who must rationalise their expenditure of time for reasons bound to their careers. Thus, a listener of Timehunter performs the role of professional listener: an educated and informed listening subject who seeks to experience existence by means of binding aesthetic excess into a quantifiable, predictable, and ultimately Cartesian framework for understanding. Merzbow intends Timehunter not as a criticism of the desire to control and rationalise time in such a manner. In fact, this release, and his body of work more generally, attempt to critically navigate the pleasures released through such control.

         Much like the computer role-player, to whom I will return in a moment, the listener binds their pleasure to the completion of the performance of a role as dictated by a communal fiction. Timehunter investigates the power relationship between the subject, who experiences the piece by participating in its authorship, and the producer of the work, who requires agreeably subservient subjects in order for the work to be realised. Furthermore, the piece was chosen as the critique which it forwards is a celebration of the pleasure of its fetish within both positive and negative terms, which mirrors the guilt many role-players feel after an extended commitment to their pleasure.

         Broadly speaking, the ontology of gameplay centres on a similar assumption of identity and performance of a fiction. A person plays a role as represented by their screen avatar. This relationship is inherent to every game, whether the avatar signifies an individual agent (a character or vehicle) or a function or process wherein the avatar is abstracted into the game interface itself (witnessed in many strategy and puzzle games). However, for the purposes of clarity and brevity I will focus presently on role-playing games (RPGs). The genre itself is a reification of the relationship between player and game, as the assumption and development of a fictional and virtual identity is the fundamental gameplay mechanic. When playing such games, one is assuming two roles – that of the character or party of characters directed by the players actions, and the role of the penitent, bound relatively motionless for hours in front of a computer or television screen. A body bound – such is the foundation of bondage.

         So while I apologise for the image invoked, let me describe to you how I bound my own body to the pleasures of gaming. I must admit that despite my youthful appearance, I come from the first generation of video and computer gaming in the home. However, my experience with console gaming is limited to the Atari VCS from 1977 and the Nintendo Entertainment System from 1985. My expertise is with home computer systems which, due to their capacity to write data onto storage media, were able to allow game progress to be saved long before consoles were able to do so. Of course, early computers were notoriously difficult to use, and many computer gamers can attest to the quest-like nature of getting some games to even run – for those of you who knew computer gaming in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the quest for memory management was often a troubling and frustrating endeavour.

         The first role-playing game that I played was Temple of Apshai, released by a now-defunct company called Epyx for multiple computer platforms in 1983. The primitive character development intrigued me, but my captivation with the genre did not really happen until I played The Bard’s Tale in 1985. This game was not the first attempt at recreating the experience of playing Dungeons and Dragons – the quintessential pen-and-paper role-playing game, which I began to play after learning RPG conventions in computer games, including computer RPG franchises such as Ultima, Wizardry, Might & Magic, and Fallout.

         From there, twenty-five years of developments in computer RPGs and computers themselves kept me engaged with the genre, although I will admit presently to being a curmudgeonly grandfather who preferred how things were in “the olden days”. More than anything, I miss the material artefacts which accompanied role-playing games in the era of limited graphical representation and storage capability. Games such as The Bard’s Tale and Wizardry lacked automap functions which were to become commonplace in the 1990s, and thus required players to physically map their progress through the geography of the game. (In this capacity, I assumed the role of thief as I continually raided the supply room in my grade school for graph paper on which I charted my various gaming journeys.) Many games used printed journals, code wheels, “fantasy” language translation charts, and printed maps to both immerse the player in the fiction of the game world, and to serve as copy protection against the many computer gamers who perform the role of pirate. What I like most about these physical gameplay devices is that they remind the player that they inhabit a body which takes a certain amount of space and performs certain actions with certain consequences – I can remember spending an entire weekend in 1989 playing the second game in The Bard’s Tale series; my hand was sore from creating maps representing dozens of square kilometres, and I had difficulty finishing my classroom schoolwork the Monday following my binge. And yet, despite the responsibilities and time constraints of adult life, there are times when I would like nothing more than to bind myself to a role-playing game for days at a time, despite the complaints from friends and loved ones that I will never see them.

          Players will often commit an exceptional amount of time to develop their avatar through repetitive behaviours scripted by game designers. One slays orcs in order to more readily be able to slay orcs in the future. Players complete quests in order to gain the experience necessary to advance character traits in order to complete future quests. As with any pleasure, the pleasures of the immediate involve the anticipation of the pleasures of the future. It is here that I wish to return to the aesthetics of Merzbow’s Timehunter, in which the pleasures of future events are relative to the immediacy of the musical piece along with the scheduling of anticipation. In abstract terms, then, pleasure is a temporal phenomenon which bridges both the absence and the presence of external stimuli.

         This process is most readily apparent with the microeconomies extant in several massively multiplayer online role playing games. Players invariably need more time for gameplay than their physical life allows, while game companies continually seek to enslave players to monetise the amount of time that people are willing to commit to their games. As a result, a labour economy has emerged wherein money is exchanged for character development; one website, for example, stipulates that any World of Warcraft character can be raised to the highest level for a few hundred dollars. Fundamentally, the subjective dynamic inherent to gameplay is akin to the performance of power and subservience inherent to a bondage fetish. The addictive consequences of role-playing games, which are often elevated by popular news media as a crisis for the digital age, suggest that the slavery inherent to digital bondage is entirely consensual.

         The pleasure experienced by players is contingent with the amount of time that they are able or willing to commit to the pursuit of ‘a good performance’, itself the optimal version of the role the player believes is expected from the game’s designers. And as some of you may already have experienced, it is typical for role-playing games to require an exceptional amount of time to complete. Most of the “classic” computer RPGs can consume anywhere from several dozen to several hundred hours to complete the narrative. In the case of Massively-Multiplayer Online RPGs, where there is no linear narrative to “complete”, the end of the game is contingent with  the termination of one’s desire to play. It is this precise function – the transmutation of desire into commitment through pleasure experienced as both immanence and anticipation within a social relation of power – that I wish to address, for it is here that we encounter the dialogue between the real and the fictive.

          A conceptual evaluation of time is fundamental to any analysis of the subjective relationship between people and the games they play. Digital gaming foregrounds time in numerous ways. Players marginalise the time experienced by their physical bodies and render it into a narrative space experienced by the avatars they control. Gameplay is then a quest for pleasure gained as time is spent. And yet pleasure is an immediacy and an immanence – the location of a subject at the limnal space between the boundary of their body and an exterior object which realises pleasure as a bodily experience. Bondage is a means by which pleasure is rationalised as the impulse for self-control of the body with the internalisation of an exterior object which conscripts unbound pleasure to a usage precisely bound. It is an agreement between the possibilities for the self-creation of identity by the bodily subject and the conscribing influence  of forces external to the subject. Of course, bodies cannot but be bound in time. With perverse pleasure then – and a nod and a wink to my mother’s remonstrations – I wish to propose that the image of a body largely immobile in front of a computer screen, immersed in the game which they are controlling, is the contemporary terminus of the quest in Western philosophical discourse for the liberation of the human subject.