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.
