As the medium of digital
videogames comes into focus as an object of study for a nascent critical discipline
(game studies), it is important to establish an evaluative apparatus which can accommodate
a means of human expression which seems to subvert traditional notions of coherency
relative to the production of meaning. In comparative terms, it is rather
straightforward to understand and interpret a literary or film text as being a
(more-or-less) unified field of knowledge production. The body of the text, as
it were, is authored and exists as a film or literary work. As argued below, videogames,
as interactive and participatory media, exist as texts in a manner that is entirely
dependent on the process of their consumption. In other words, the site of
production of meaning for such texts involves and incorporates the end-user,
the player who by means of their desire to play a game individually realises
the game as a text with the capacity to produce meaning. Fundamentally, digital
game texts involve the process of interpretation and performance of the text into
what Gilles Deleuze would describe as the fold in the surface of its Being. The
body of the videogame text invokes the properties of a circuit which mobilises
multiple sites for the production of meaning, then, rather than the univocal quality
of traditional art media which can be defined by the qualities which constitute
them as objects of study. In this context, for example, in evaluating Picasso’s
Guernica as an object of study for
the visual arts, a critic would focus on the qualities of the image as the
principle field in which this particular art object produces meaning. A
critical evaluation of, for example, the various groups of people who have
themselves found meaning from Guernica
would be a study about aspects of the human condition related to those people;
it would not, except perhaps in only an exceptionally abstract and generous analogical
definition, be about Guernica itself.
Surely, if videogames are to be understood as cultural texts worthy of the
mobilisation of critical endeavour relative to them as videogames, then their
definition as an object of study is fundamental to the establishment of game
studies.
We should perhaps be rather
tenuous when invoking Deleuze as an entry into understanding the ontology of
videogames. We should remain rather precise in the use of Deleuzian terms, as
when dealing with digital mediation it is easy to superficially read and apply
Deleuze in what can best be described in the manner of a visual analogy. Some
critics have already realized this theoretical fallacy, seeing Deleuzian plateaus in the various gameboards which
constituted arcade and computer games in the 1980s (Wolf 2003), in the polyvalent
identities exhibited by players of massively-multiplayer online role-playing
games (Filiciak 2003), or in the development of three-dimensionally-rendered
game spaces over the 1990s and 2000s (Wiemer, 2010; Chiel & Joost, 2003),
and Deleuzian automata in every
instance of artificial intelligence programmed into video game simulations
(Giddings, 2009). In a sense, it is perhaps rather too facile to adapt Deleuzian
terminology to the study of video games. And yet the use of such terms does not
really allow a detailed account of what video games are as texts or objects of
study. It is possible to agree on a few principles, however. Fundamentally, as
will be demonstrated over the course of this essay, video games exist as
numerical representations of machine behaviour which facilitate and provoke
specific processes of user interaction.
In addition to the obvious fact that digital games exist fundamentally as
numerical software objects, quantification in games occurs at numerous levels
within gameplay. Many games produced from the 1970s until the early 2000s kept
track of a player’s score. Points are awarded to the player in response to
their production of certain game effects – the destruction of an enemy target,
progression through a game screen, the acquisition of particular items which
may or may not directly assist the player in performing other game effects,
etc. The accumulation of points of course allows competitive play among
players, but more importantly is often a means by which a player improves their
own play. The motivation behind this self-improvement is obvious in competitive
play, but it is less so when gameplay occurs in solitude, or more accurately a
solitude described by Sherry Turkle as “a unique mixture of being alone and yet
not feeling alone” (1984, 139). This article will argue that the productive
output of gameplay depends on the love shared between a player and the
numerically constituted self which serves to interface the player’s body with
the field of numerical operation on which the game itself is played and as
represented to the player by means of their avatar in the game, and furthermore
that such a conception of a videogame text as both an actual and a virtual
entity subverts traditional notions of which reify a cultural object or practice
as an “object of study”.
If the digital game is a text, of what is this text constituted? Most
game studies scholars are in agreement that videogames constitute an entity
analogical with ‘text’, consistent with the broad conception of the term first
suggested by Roland Barthes (1968). Certain games do indeed exhibit narrative
characteristics which are readily open to critical examination using theories
adapted from the study of film or literature. However, the majority of
videogames do not function by means of traditional narrative representation.
These games must also be accounted for, lest digital game studies bifurcate its
object of study into games which demonstrate overt narrative qualities and
therefore function akin to a film or a novel and involving a similar field in
which knowledge and meaning are produced, and games which operate more like
puzzles or intellectual diversions and whose production of meaning operates
within the field already within the jurisdiction of anthropology or sociology. Narrative
then, as will be further elaborated below, is a rather complicated entity for
video games.
We must remain cognizant of the entire history of digital gaming when
trying to formulate a sense of the ontology of the medium. As such, attempts to
produce an “aesthetic theory” of gaming which derives from the cinematic
tradition (Brooker 2009; Wills 2008; Martin 2007; Galloway 2006; Buse 1996) or
from literary and cultural studies (Golumbia 2009; Nitsche 2008; Andrews 2007; Kücklich
2006; Atkins 2003; Rockwell 2002) must be seen to, as it were, maintain their
place and not come to unjustly dominate our definitions. While it is certain
that critical approaches and models borrowed from cinema studies have a place
within game studies and allow insights into aspects of visual representation in
digital games, they cannot be understood to have encompassed all of digital
gaming within one critical framework. The most significant weakness with such
theories is that they cannot account for digital games which employ very
limited or no graphical representation – for example, many of the first extant digital
games were played on mainframe computers which lacked visual displays and which
provided user interfaces by means of printout or repurposed electronics
engineering equipment – or which were designed entirely to accept language-based
input from the user and provide language-based representational output, such as
evidenced by the genre of games typically referred to as text adventures.
In any case, theories derived from cinema studies prove most useful and
illuminating when used to interpret games which render their visuals within a
three-dimensional game space, as games of such design embody their virtual
cameras in much the same way as the shots which compose traditional cinema and
television demonstrate the real and embodied nature of their actual cameras
(Nitsche 2008). On the other hand, theoretical approaches grounded in literary
studies, which were first applied to digital games precisely to accommodate and
understand language-based digital games such as text adventures, are
increasingly strained by forms of digital play which allow the users to generate
their own narrative scripts from within the field of the game itself. In other
words, games such as Grand Theft Auto IV
or The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, which
present fictional worlds in which a majority of the narrative emerges
contingent with gameplay, are well-served by critical approaches derived from
cinema theory, while games such as A Mind
Forever Voyaging or Ultima IV: Quest
of the Avatar can be readily parsed using literary theory (although more
often than not the actual narrative of many games, especially from the early
period of gaming, are often interpreted to be of relatively poor literary
quality based on the simplicity of the actual prose found within the game).
Furthermore, if digital games are to be included along with texts from
other media which produce meaning in terms accepted as art by the critical establishment which is already engaged with
them, then it is likely that a conception of auteurship will have to find a place within gaming studies. Games
from the early period of the medium (chronologically, roughly from the 1950s
until the late 1980s) were likely to have been authored by one individual or a
small group of people who retain control over what may be considered as a
unified text. However, many games have followed production processes and
hierarchies evident in the production of other large-scale industrial arts such
as film, and as a result involve hundreds and in some instances thousands of
individuals who contribute an element of the whole. Theories adopted from the
study of established media such as literature and film can accommodate texts
which have multiple authors, but may prove inflexible relative to their
capacity to qualify a videogame text as art. This latter aspect is due in part to
the fact that except in the case of games designed around linear, “cinematic”
narrative events, such as Dragon’s Lair
or Fahrenheit (also known as Indigo Prophecy in North America), the
production of meaning in videogames is not to be found in narrative elements
alone.
As two brief examples, Castronova (2005) and others (Golub 2010; Steinkuehler
2008, 2006) have demonstrated the capacity of massively-multiplayer online
games to foster productive educational, social, and economic activity within
the cultural communities which develop around them, while Leopard (2010) and
others (Nieborg 2010; Orvis et al 2010) suggest consequences both inside and
exterior to player communities from the pedagogical use of game software for
military purposes. We should add that videogames are themselves often elements
in the production of new modes of cultural production (Chien 2007; Lowood 2007);
indeed, Banks and Humphreys (2008) go so far as to suggest the possibility that
user co-creators threaten the market viability of professional creative
workers. However, it remains a fact that the agency granted to the player over
narrative is of greater significance to the limitations of adapting theory from
literary and film studies to the videogame as text. However, players are never
granted sufficient freedom and agency to entirely author their own text. Indeed,
digital gaming involves a bit of a ruse. While the promise offered to the
player is one of freedom and agency, it is the player’s actions as
circumscribed by the rules governing the world which will determine and ground the
field of meaning produced by the videogame as text and which can be understood
by the word ‘narrative’. What then can literary or film theory make of the
value of meanings produced by a text which has no discernible author, or whose
rules governing play (the closest thing to digital games) are modified by
player activities?
In respect to such a chaotic agglomeration of interpretive traditions, it
is tempting to revert to a simplistic equating of critical polyvalency with what
can be read as the virtue of the polyvocal in Deleuzian thought. Digital gaming
involves the simultaneous production and consumption of meaning, as a player
“authors” a path within a space of play whose physical and logical constraints
have themselves been authored, both directly (game mechanics and rules of play,
scripted events) and procedurally (game physics, artificial intelligence). As
such, we can see that narrative involves transformation of one property or
value into another, all within the field of numerical operations. Furthermore,
it is possible for players to engage in game activities which are either not
intended or explicitly outlawed by the game designers and yet which are of
productive value to the player (Schott & Yeatman 2005).
It is therefore possible to render as virtualities the planes on which
videogames, and indeed computer interaction more broadly, operate and situate
them within the Deleuzian “virtual discourse [as] précis” (Sussman 2000, 977).
The body of the gamer can be understood as a polyvocal and osmotic surface, a
site where meaning is both produced and consumed simultaneously (in the sense of production and consumption existing
as mutual contingencies) and specifically
(in the sense of the production and consumption being limited by the
constraints imposed by the set of rules governing play as well as the player’s
own capacity to interface with the game software). It is upon the surface of
the body of the gamer that the multiple meanings inherent to
videogames-as-texts are instantiated as the individualised production of
meaning. In turn, the meaning produced by a player may be taken up by other
players, within a new context which may or may not reference the meaning
instantiated by the original player. No individual instantiation of these fields
of possibility governing the production of meaning invalidates the authenticity
of the software program or its capacity to represent authorial intention.
In this context, for example, Sanford, Merkel, and Madill (2011) conclude
that videogame play can produce meaning through a polyvalent distribution of
power structures within play, as the adolescents involved in their study were
able to simulate leadership roles and situations representing power relations. Indeed,
the play of power is often thematically central to both the critical
perspective on digital gaming as well as to the actual narratives which are
produced through video game play and which can be understood to be the “text”
as interpreted through critical traditions modelled after literary and film
studies. Michele D. Dickey (2007) suggests that the capacity to produce meaning
derives from an induction of motivation from game narrative to player. Players
want to perform functions otherwise understood as work, as the motivation to
perform such labour is contingent with their desire to realise agency within the
narrative. Dickey’s conception of an induced-motivational narrative produced by
a game text can therefore be understood as narration produced over the course of
gameplay itself.
As Atkins (2003) points out, game spaces are more readily understood as
fields of possible activities which produce narratives which emerge in a
more-or-less individual manner contingent with the flexibility of the rule sets
which govern gameplay as well as the creative ingenuity of the player, rather
than as a linear performance of what can be termed “plot” in other narrative
media. As such, Atkins’s theory of narrative as a process which emerges
contingent with the possibilities of play allows for the inclusion of game
texts such as strategy or puzzle games, which do not function by means of the
discovery or elaboration of a story.
More importantly, however, Atkins hints at a larger narrative phenomenon
which is elaborated in this present essay. When game players perform diegetic
and non-diegetic activities in the service of play, they are trying to achieve
an idealised and somewhat utopic state for their avatar. Atkins describes
“perfect readings” (47) of games in which the player works to maximize one or
more of the attributes which determine “virtuous” gameplay: completing the game
as quickly as possible or “without error” (understood as the lives or health of
the avatar representing one session of play); completing as many of the
scripted narrative instances as possible within a game (in the case of games
with discernible “story points” which may or may not be actuated by the player
in the routine course of gameplay); or collecting all of the items or
performing all of the activities which improve the avatar’s capabilities within
the game space. I wish to presently elaborate upon Atkins’s conception of
“perfect readings” in gameplay, as they provide a great deal of illumination
into the virtual entity which stands at the heart of digital mediation. Atkins
describes perfect readings as precise narrative conceptions of gameplay which
acts as a script to be run by the player; indeed, for this purpose they are
often published within “strategy guides” and on gaming websites. In effect, a
perfect reading is the agglomeration of diegetic and non-diegetic activities
which will ensure the production of a specific structure of meaning which has
been granted social status by others who play the same game: achieving the most
points in Pac-Man, for example, or
efficiently navigating one’s way through a dungeon level in Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad
Overlord.
This essay presently seeks to expand such a definition to include the
“reading” of a game as the interior game state which the player anticipates for
their avatar and for which all their diegetic and non-diegetic activity intends.
While players actively engage in realising the narrative of the game through
play, their actions are responses not only to the state of the game temporally
contingent with their actions, but also with an anticipated game state to which
they are directing their activities. The player conceives of an ideal game
state to which their actions within the game world attempt to confirm. In other
words, players engage with a narrative not only at the level of its
contemporary temporality (narrative and play being mutually contingent, and in
a sense cohabitating the present), but simultaneously in terms of a past and a
future. As Simons (2007) suggests (in another context, and thus without
developing the idea in depth), play also involves the production of a narrative
of anticipation and expectation, a space of possibility into which meaningful
activity can realise possibility as actuality. Fundamentally, these activities
are at the heart of simulation, as players endeavour to realize in the present
a state of game play beneficial to their avatar, which we can understand as an
achievable possible outcome for the production of meaning.
In this sense, the player interfaces with their avatar by means of an
imagined future instantiation of their avatar, realized as always-already
capable of realising its own future, or in the terms so often mobilised to
describe game narratives, of conquering an enemy or “completing” the narrative
which structures a particular game. Simulation involves a memory for prior
states of the dataset and a means of anticipating future data which are as yet
unrepresented (or, as Alain Badiou might say, which exists in Number, but not
yet in number; see below). This internal narrative of anticipation finds
meaning in a present which realizes it as a virtuous and beneficial leveraging
of the future-as-present. If the player anticipates incorrectly, then this
“perfect” present is realised corruptly as a failed attempt at this possible
future.
Some games exist through rule sets which allow the player to repeat their
attempt until they succeed (often manifesting as a player having lost one of a
number of “lives”), while games which employ rule sets which impose a linear
chronology approximating and simulating “normal” human experience of time force
players to continually recreate and adapt their narratives of anticipation
without diegetic recourse to repetition.
Failure and success are equally remembered as narrative events. In a sense,
this multiply-voiced narrative reflects the conception of the present as
provided by Deleuze in
Cinema 2 as
being “split ... in two heterogeneous directions, one of which is launched
towards the future while the other falls into the past” (1989 81). As a
consequence, we can again be seen to be dealing with a virtuality, and indeed
one which for Deleuze constitutes the actuality of the (our) present. Is it
here, then, that we find the true ground upon which knowledge and meaning is
produced by the videogame as text: an actuality which disguises itself as a
virtuality?
Indeed, when considered from the point of view of the virtual game text,
an assumed virtual entity makes practical sense. Software designers have to
translate the bodily actions of a user into specific numerical inputs which
then translate into software actions representing the intentionality of a
hypothetical (generalised) user. In this regard, software engineers are always
working with a virtual user in mind. It stands to reason then, in a manner
typical of a Deleuzian paradox, that the text of the videogame involves an
actual game text and an actual player who can only interact with each other by
appealing to the virtual versions of each other.
The scholar of digital gaming media is mildly at odds then to ascribe
coherence and the mantle and distinction of “art” to a virtual entity which it
constitutes as an object of study. If meaning within a text is dependent on its
coherence as an object to produce meaning, then our argument is tautological:
all gaming will inevitably produce data which can be seen as meaningful when
understood within the frame of reference (game state) which produced it. As
such, since the functional output of games is precisely the amount of pleasure sustained
and experienced by the user, then within the tautology created by game theory pleasure
responses alone constitute the “value” of the game as text. In terms of our
contemporary notions of meaning as produced by the objects of studies of the
humanities, we are not looking at art but rather the mechanistic production of
meaning functioning in a manner contingent with Deleuze’s desiring-machines. To
this extent then, we can forgive those vocal critics of videogame play who
suggest that digital games are simply software machines whose output is
addiction to the game itself; to such thinking, game studies should be
contingent with the study of addiction and mental health.
Perhaps we could understand digital games as being good or bad – within
whichever context we may have given the flexibility of these terms relative to
“art” as a field of possible definitions and understandings – for properties
other than simply their capacity to produce pleasure in a player-subject. Were
an apparatus to exist which contained all of the individual productions of
meaning, and by means of comparison produced a matrix for evaluation, we might
then have been given the appropriate context for the evaluation of meaning.
More importantly, only with such an interpretive apparatus will the object of
study intended by critical methodology adopted by game studies from established
critical disciplines extant around other art mediums be properly understood to
have avoided a condemned status as a non-entity in relation to the video game.
Fundamentally, the ontology of videogames as texts currently remains rather
problematically understood.
In this context, critical traditions which examine the numerical
consequence of gaming should be understood as being located tangential to the
“truth” of the object of study for videogame theory, or at least as
representing truths of greater significance than critical applications of
literary or film theory to game studies. As stated above, the “truth” of the
videogame text is not merely that which is represented on a video screen, and
therefore not merely that which is available as an object of study for critical
traditions inherited from literary and film studies. Nor is this “truth” to be
located solely within theories of play or function exterior to the field in
which such play occurs. This “truth” is therefore not merely that which is
available as an object of study for sociology, anthropology, economics, etc.
To further complicate our understanding of the object of study for video
game theory, it is possible to locate the player simultaneously and at all
times inside and outside of the text. In this capacity, Galloway (2006),
expanding on a commonly-used element of film theory, describes actions as
occurring both within and without of the diegetic space of the game. Actions
which occur in the diegetic space of a game is what we can recognize for our
purposes as the game’s narrative. As such, diegetic activity can be understood
as constituting the object of study for game studies theories derived from
literary or film studies; for such critical approaches, it is this agglomerate
activity which constitutes the “text” of the game proper. However, as Galloway,
Nitsche (2008) and others (Bogost 2007, 2006; Mackey 2007; Wolf 2001) have
demonstrated, diegetic activity does not account for all instances of meaning
production in videogames.
Indeed, Nitsche suggests that the space of three-dimensional games, which
“is a hybrid between architectural navigable and cinematically represented
space” (2008, 85), necessitates control of an embodied camera which may or may
not be separate from the avatar represented within a game’s diegetic space. In
this context, a player controls both the avatar and the means of framing and
representing that avatar within a visual space (and thus within images which as
an agglomeration may constitute an object-of-study). Non-diegetic activity involves
player interactions with the interface of the game: the specific gestures used
by players and enacted upon game controllers (joysticks, keyboards, mice, etc)
and which affect diegetic activity,
accessing menus to save or load a game, or hacking or altering the game to
cheat or produce game-states not intended by the game design, and conversations
with other players which do not involve game conversation (or, in other words,
role-playing). It is of course through a player’s gestures and performance of
the game interface that an avatar is manipulated in the course of gaining
points for beneficial game actions. The player understands that they are “outside
of the text” when they perform such actions, and they are acutely aware of the
importance of non-diegetic activity in relation to the diegetic activity that
they wish to perform. Although it is outside the scope of this present essay to
render the subject in its proper depth, it is interesting to note that
presently (2011) many companies are expanding their intellectual property
rights into this non-diegetic space; for example, Apple, HP, and other
companies have been awarded numerous patents governing the particular motions
that a user may make when interfacing their hand with a computerised surface. This
legal constitution of the user, as “not really being themselves,” at the point
of interface between actuality and virtuality is simply the recognition of the
fact that in relation to digital mediation there is always a third member at
play.
In a very Deleuzian sense then,
we can understand a body, or perhaps a fold of the body, as being reconstituted
in numbers in order for those numbers to perform actions upon the software with
which the user is interacting. Turkle’s expressed feeling of not being alone
when using a computer is then true: one is joined by a virtual self
(same/other). A human interacting with a software entity is therefore in
Deleuzian terms a bifurcated entity: a body (actual) which controls a virtual
self in software. This virtual self manifests most often as an avatar in a game
or virtual environment, but it can also be seen to exist abstracted as agency
within a menu or other digital interface (one does not turn up the volume on
their portable digital audio player in a function similar to raising one’s
voice; one navigates the interface of the mp3 player in such a manner as to
change the volume). It is perhaps here that we can locate what Badiou describes
as the importance of intuition for Deleuze: “The power of the One qua thought
is ... precisely this: there is only one intuition. Such is the profound
ontological meaning that Deleuze gives to a well-known remark of Bergson,
namely, that every great philosophy is nothing other than the insistence, the
return, of a unique intuition” (2000, 69). The virtual self is understood, perhaps,
in this regard as an entity which is mutually intuited by the software and by
the player. Any sense of meaning or knowledge produced by the game text is
merely a simulacrum of meaning otherwise discernible as truth produced by an
inaccessible and original (true) text.
However, this essay wishes to side with Alain Badiou’s critique of
Deleuze and of the virtual, for the rather simple reason that if either the
game software or the player were in any sense virtual, then the video game as
text would not have the capacity to materially affect the actual body of the
software user. Pleasures and labours experienced by the player would therefore
be simulacra of “real” experiences of the same. As a consequence, studies which
interpreted the actuality of elements of human existence and behaviour from a
critical examination of video game play (the impact of representations of
violence in videogames on the development of aggression in children, for
example) would not be able to properly validate themselves except as studies of
simulacra. Badiou’s critique is grounded in his conception of truth, which
emerges as precisely the framework which actualises and instantiates Being as
the possibility for the production of knowledge (being). He criticizes Deleuze
for relying on a fundamental indiscernibility which stands at the heart of the
virtual. Indeed, it is chance which governs the particular instantiation of
Being as being: “To maintain univocity, it is therefore necessary to maintain
chance, divergence, and the improbable, even under the conditions of the
infinite” (2000 73). Fundamentally, Badiou finds fault in such a “radical
contingency of Being” (75), principally because it is mathematically illogical
within set theory: chance does not logically figure as a property of a void
set, but seems, rather, to be a function of what he describes as recurrence.
Recurrence is a process suggestive of computational order, or meaning
(events of being within Being) emerging from non-meaning by means of procedural
rules: “the return of the same can be considered to be a hidden algorithm that
would govern chance, a sort of statistical regularity, as in probability
theory. Short series might give the appearance of arbitrariness and divergence.
... But we can observe that it simply requires a sufficiently long series for
these divergences to become muted, and for the law of the Same to tend to
prevail between events of identical probability” (71-2). An interesting
connection between enumerative quantification and ontology emerges in Badiou’s
philosophy by means of set theory, and this connection proves illuminating for
game studies. Indeed, Ian Bogost has already applied Badiou’s philosophy to
game studies by means of what he describes as unit operations which he understands to “serve as a ligature
between computational and traditional representation” (2006, 13). In Number
and Numbers (2008; first published in 1990), Badiou concludes that
mathematical logic is the foundational logic behind all instantiated existence,
and indeed that “all thought necessarily deploys itself today in a retreat with
regard to the reign of number” (213).
Fundamentally, existence is the schism which lies between the assurance
of absolute knowledge (the infinity of Being) and the impossibility of that
knowledge being understood and represented by a finite system (a particular
instantiation of being).
“Mathematics establishes ontology as the historical situation of being” (212).
In other words, the rendering of meaning is a precise consequence of processes
and systems of thought which have quantification as the ontological foundation
for thought itself as “that which designates, beyond numbers, the inconsistent
multiple – eternity of Numbers”. For Badiou, the virtual “implies
an essential indetermination of that for
which it serves as a ground. ... The more Deleuze attempts to wrest the virtual
from irreality, indetermination, and nonobjectivity, the more irreal,
indetermined, and finally nonobjective the actual (or beings) becomes, because
it phantasmically splits into two. In this circuit of thought, it is the Two
and not the One that is instated. ... just like finality, the virtual is
ignorantiae asylum.” (2000, 53).
Actuality produces truth (meaning) as a consequence of a relationship of
immanence to an actuality, and not, as Deleuze suggests, as a relation of
intensity with virtuality.
The particular instantiation of a possibility Badiou describes as an event, and “it is always from an event
that a truth-process originates” (2008, 27). Indeed, the agglomeration of these
truth-processes can be read as a game’s narrative: a linear and hieratic
ordering of Badiou’s philosophy thus allows for textual objects (unities, One)
which instantiate multiple sites and configurations for the production of
meaning, each of which can be seen to signify and produce significance for the
unity of the textual object. Badiou thus allows existence to be understood in
the manner of a Deleuzian multiplicity without the problematic dependence on
virtuality in Deleuze’s philosophy. Instead of the virtual at the heart of
digital game media, Badiou’s philosophy would position the creation of meaning
as contingent with the apparatus by which videogames are situated in a process
of relation to the player (within Players) and to other forms of text as
mediation (videogame as text in relation to Texts). He reads into Deleuze that
“beings are local degrees of intensity or inflections of power that are in
constant movement and entirely singular. And as power is but a name of Being,
beings are only expressive modalities of the One. ...What is fundamental is that Being is the same
for all, that it is univocal and that it thus said of all beings in a single
and same sense, such that the multiplicity of senses, the equivocal status of
beings, has no real status. ...Univocity requires that the sense be ontologically identical for all the
different beings” (2000, 25). This univocity can be seen precisely to be Number itself.
We can therefore accept the actual videogame text and the actual player
as sets contingent with the virtual representations of the other required by
each, and thus accept Agency-over-Number as the object of study which defines
game studies. In Badiou’s terms, any critical tradition which severs play from
the production of narrative is a tradition which is dealing with an incomplete
set; such a situation is artificially and thus misleadingly narrow. Seen in
this light, for example, ethnographic (Penny 2010; Golub 2010; Taylor 2008;
Turkle 1984) and economic (Castronova 2005) studies of player communities would
present interpretations of the production of meaning by videogame texts which
is of greater significance to the Heideggerian “essence” of videogames as texts
than do close readings of game narratives as texts akin to novels or films
(Lastowka 2009; Wills 2008; Buse 1996). In Badiou’s terms, such critical methodologies
are better at framing (situating) their object of study within a field which he
can logically acknowledge as “truth”. Again, we seem left with a polyvalent
critical discourse with no agreed-upon subject upon which the discipline of
study is grounded. Perhaps it is more accurate to invoke in this context the
playful misreading Slavoj Žižek gives to the Deleuzian notion of “the expansion of a
concept” (2004, 293) and suggest that the fundamental narrative “unit” of
digital gaming involves an action which modifies a number. With this rather
simple conception, we have located one minor ground upon which we can construct
the assurance of a comprehensive body of critical theory: narrative, then, as
an idea which in its ontological context involves agency over number.
However hard it may be to avoid invoking conceptions of the virtual when
discussing digital mediation, should one side with Badiou’s demonstration of
the ontological illogicality of Deleuze’s philosophy, Deleuze’s ideation of a
field of multiple sites of contact, where occur simultaneous feedback process
of consumption and production, remains a compelling one for the field of video
game studies. We are left with a small tool with which to tackle a rather
complex problem. The answer to what extent a videogame can be interpreted as a
text is the extent to which we can understand meaning to have been created by
means of an extended process of change over numbers. Broadly speaking, studies
of this nature are engaged with an object of study which is interpreted as a
means by which knowledge is produced. Should the knowledge itself be of
sufficient signification, then the textual object which served to create it
will be elevated to the status of “art”. As occurs with many objects thusly
labelled, their value has often been abstracted or wholly distanced from their
commercial function. Perhaps here we can find some hope for videogames as an
artistic medium, and in just one sense agree with Badiou’s critical of any
possible interpretive value of the purity of number: “We must say ... nothing made into number is of value. Or
that everything that traces, in a situation, the passage of a truth shall be
signalled by its indifference to numericality. ... this indifference is a
necessary subjectivity” (2008, 213-14). Thus it is possible to see in Badiou not
a thinker who ultimately and logically rejects scientific and remunerative quantification,
but rather who one remains grounded in scepticism surrounding the subjective
expressions of number as Number. Hopefully the discipline of video game studies
will learn the same, and prove itself able to find poetry in its object of
study and save itself from the burden its dependence on Number. Only in such a
manner will the study of videogames find a true champion for the discipline.
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