Book Review: This Gaming Life

Rossignol, Jim. 2008. This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities. University of Michigan Press.

I’d hoped this book would be an ethnography of three cities and their three gaming cultures. Instead, it uses two locations to discuss different aspects of gaming, while fomenting possible lines of response to some attacks made against gaming broadly. These attacks say that games are a waste of time, teach us the wrong things, and make players docile. A game player turned game journalist, Rossignol mounts a fascinating defense of games on exactly the grounds of wasted time. He argues both that to relieve boredom is a worthwhile function of gaming (saying something about boredom in present society), and that players get more or less out of games, depending what game they are playing, with whom, and for what reasons. Guitar Hero champs playing for a crowd before a concert, women Wii-boxing at an afterparty, players designing mods to turn old games into new ones, professional Korean gamer celebrities competing for money and fame, and entrepreneurs bringing the joint stock company's infrastructure of capitalist democracy to an online galaxy. Does gaming just rot your brain? Perhaps it can do more, and perhaps Rossignol can make good on his decision to turn from games as leisure (long nights of Quake) to games as work (culminating in this book).

Alongside other productive applications of the dominant orientations of ludology and narratology in video game studies, Rossignol attends to the euphoria of simulation to illustrate the basic kernel of pleasurable play that links his diverse examples. It's not the Princess, or the Kingdom, or Planet Earth that matters; it's running, jumping, rolling, shooting, dodging, and precision landings. Why is it those things? In his best moments, Rossignol sees how players, who vary in most every other way, cultivate such euphoria in their preferred games, making their own stories of alliance, betrayal, death, and friendship with their own style, reasons, time, ethos, mods, or companions. To call all of these people "gamers" is to recognize either just how empty the word has become, or in what a peculiar way the word "gamer" circulates now in Euro-American gaming cultures.

The closest thing to an ethnography of a city’s gaming culture, in Seoul (South Korea) another possible course the history of gaming might have taken, if it were not nerdy to game, if alcohol were a less popular diversion, if caffeine were more, if we used computers in Net Cafes rather than consoles at home, and games could get airtime on TV. Then gaming might be more about diligent management, repetition, accumulation, multiplayer network play, player-versus-player mode, and efficiency than about violence, virtuosity, drama, hilarity, and hanging out drunk for a few hours before going to bed (England). In South Korea, Starcraft remains the standard for real-time strategy games, even though it’s more than ten years old.

In Reykjavik, a convention brings together some of the more than two hundred thousand users who regularly populate the single multi-user galaxy of EVE Online. This is the ultimate sandbox game, for Rossignol, because the environment and game provisions do allow and deny certain activities, but there is no vision of success for each player, and no guarantee of stability for the overall world. There is opportunity and constraint. This invites comparison with Second Life, which seems to basically lack the scarcity, necessities, and consequences of EVE. Second Life is an infinite art gallery, a multi-user CAD program, where everyone can fly or teleport and no one has to die. No one mines the asteroids, no one works as an assassin, no one ever need suffer. Although we might consider Second Life a very open and free gaming culture, to the extent it’s a game at all, Rossignol admiringly prefers the scale and complexity of player actions in EVE. In this game, an individual user does not just play by the rules set up in advance by the game’s programming, but also plays on the basis of social, political, and economic organization that has emerged over the years in the player population. Rossignol notes that familiar usernames from his time with Quake 3 were sometimes spotted pursuing the more violent lines of work available in EVE (assassins, soldiers, or enforcers). Players themselves have made these occupations possible, and it is players themselves whose ethos guides their decisions in play.

At Carnegie Mellon, another project for incorporating humans and computers is afoot. Assistant Professor Luis von Ahn sets up games to repurpose human play into the work computers should do but can't. Humans playing games will label images, identify objects, and read distorted text from old books. Rossignol is a bit scared. This is not the function he envisions in gamers' experience of play. These are not familiar considerations for his understanding of the lifeways of gamers. For that reason, von Ahn’s work comes across as quite alien and rather threatening in this book. Is there work that players are doing for others just by playing? At this time, usually not. Gamers probably risk doing more harm with the appropriation of their surplus labor by their day job than with a mouse or controller. Still, Rossignol reviews just enough serious games to recognize gaming could be put to use, and sometimes is, despite the commercial paradigm of escapism. Although the inclusion of the serious games topic is welcome in the book, it feels peripheral to the ethnographic conjuration of gamer cultures which the overall project uses to question how we discuss or debate gaming. That is to say, Rossignol is interested in gaming and gamers, in all their variety, more than types of games that could someday be brought into existence.

Throughout the book we see evidence for Rossignol’s hopeful concluding remarks. He shows how games change lives and give some reason to live. Games change how we imagine the world, just as movies and novels have done. And, he foretells, the golden age of gaming is yet to come. We do not hear much of the negative side of this, perhaps because the negative power of games has always garnered more respect than any potential for good latent in them. This has always been a classic challenge of the gaming literature, and one the author handles well: how to use arguments that have vilified gaming to defend, praise, and uplift it.

NOT TO KILL IN GAMING

So it’s a violent video game. Yeah, I wonder too if it it’s going to habituate aggression, if it’s a way for players to indulge in something naughty, or if it’ll maybe be cathartic.

Video game violence offers something else than excitement, something a bit more unique. The opportunity to control a power that is totally outrageous. To kill a hooker, take the money, and never look back (GTA3). Not just to shoot in a gun range, or with paintballs, but with ridiculously overpowered weapons of the future (Unreal). To run and jump, with infinite endurance, killing creatures that, while able to hurt you, could also be left alone (Mario).

Some games make it a theme: hurting non-combatants takes away points! Others make it a point to cause carnage, giving points for needless collateral damage. Most allow more destruction than is necessary, without it influencing the score. What happens sometimes that not everyone likes to say in public is that the violence gets old. More killing? So boring.

To learn how to handle incredible power is X-men’s theme that seems most targeted at pubescent readers: the young mutant has to figure out how to deal. With his bones replaced by metal (Wolverine). With her skin sucking the life from any being it touches (Rogue). With lasers that shoot from his eyes (Cyclops). With the thoughts of others mixing with her own (Jean Grey).

It is so easy to kill in most games. Life is so fragile, your powers of destruction so inordinate for the task at hand, for the goals you supposedly have, to the pleasures that you seek in the game.

To kill a prostitute in Grand Theft Auto is excessive and maybe twisted, but to speed across town without killing five pedestrians is downright hard.

BUZZWORDS

They are words that buzz, rattle, loose their meaning, inspire connections based only on presence of this word, again and again: affect.

The word infests utterances, texts, keyword lists: postcolonial. Why not? It sounds hip, it sounds right, I don’t want to get cut out because I’m not up to date: best practices.

The word inflects the formation of arguments, provides orientation towards as well as away from: postmodern. It’s not certain yet whether the word is or is not appropriate, when its buzz is still fresh, two texts can even apply the word in opposite ways to advantage: mobility.

There is, so far, nothing to lose in using it, no real claim it can be identified with that someone will come along and prove wrong: memory. The word would need a more certain meaning, it is not yet in a state to be opposed: client oriented.

It turns out to describe surprisingly well what has come before, because its uneven universalization is a journey and because it is what we find interesting in our interpretation of most anything: trauma. The word doesn’t name something altogether new, it just has a more clear vision of what the thing is that we are naming: deliverables.

By its connective tissue, everything appears related, tagged the same, commensurable, related to the particular concerns of each in a community: temporality. All scholars turned out to have studying meaning, whether they knew it or not. Business was always about optimization, monetization, and the low hanging fruit.

Sometimes the word is more specific, it comes from somewhere and bears the mark of a tradition, a world of related concepts, a corridor of interpretation: rhizome. Sometimes that history disappears: win-win.

Yet the word means less and less. In its journeys, its character becomes diffuse, its mechanism uncertain, its reputation sullied: culture. Sometimes we don’t even realize that we are no longer talking about anything, that the thing to which the word once referred has left, even though the word still buzzes: power.

THE VARIABLE

The position I disagree with states that the number line is fundamentally visual and gridded. That it reduces variation to a set of possible points, cuts and divides, counts identical units, and that variables obscure what cannot be measured.

Imagine that the variable is being used to represent something in particular, a known unknown. It is then a deferred decision about what number to give something. Solve for x!

The variable that is the sign of this deferral, however, is a domain, a motion, a blurring together of possibilities, a potentialization of the expression that contains it. It is the solutions that are not yet ruled out, it slides around on different surfacing bodies in the process of being examined, it remains strictly agnostic about its nature, it allows for new possibilities in the expression it inhabits.

Likewise, the number line is not itself points or emptiness between marks of the grid, but is composed of a misty homogeneity, an uninterrupted solid, a smooth space of movement, a stripe of traffic of motions running in many directions at once, or a very austere fractal. At all levels it resembles itself, between 1 and 100 or between 1.001 and 1.100, yet lurking within it are irrational numbers, occasions of discontinuity, and an unpreventable slippage into numbers that are imaginary.

This is a virtualization of numbers, into the shady realm of a number line. It is a radicalization of a particular value by its substitution with a variable. If we were to understand a particular number as the product of this process, as the actualization of these maneuvers, numbering does not obscure motion, substance, or transformation between points, but tracks it.

This does not mean, however, that the number line is always right and variables never make mistakes, just that they do not cut up and segment quantities as a matter of course.

Book Review: Without Criteria

Shaviro, Steven. 2009. Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and aesthetics. Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press.

To make the early 20th century process philosopher Alfred Whitehead relevant to contemporary social theory, this book reads him alongside Immanuel Kant and makes good use of Gilles Deleuze’s interpretations of the two. Steven Shaviro’s work has always exemplified the use of theory as a toolbox for projects around the house, more serious undertakings, and sometimes to modify the toolbox itself. Without Criteria falls into the third category, using strangely little in the way of cultural particularity to forge powerful tools from some things that have fallen out of fashion in mainstream theory. It is in this way that, through Shaviro, Whitehead can offer a shocking metaphysics in the most milquetoast of terminology.

In Whitehead, Shaviro finds confirmation for many theoretical moves that previous writing couldn’t sustain beyond provocations. These topics are well organized into chapters that gather and organize disparate material to translate Whitehead’s dry words into Shaviro’s iconoclastic concepts. Unfortunately, the project takes us no closer to judging or responding without criteria (defined in the book as the ability to conceive what is new in its own terms), but one does learn to use different, less complete, more delicately flavorless terms for the cognizant prehension of actual occasions – for thinking about things. However, this vision of Whitehead does much of the same work as speculative realism (relax about discourse, focus on actual occasions) without asking us to forget our own position and priorities.

Here is the metaphysical scheme. The central metaphysical concept is atomistic (everything individual), panpsychist (everything decides for itself) and non-anthropocentric. Whitehead describes all enduring objects as prehending other events. Enduring objects are also defined as “societies,” which are basically like an insect colony, and composed of actual entities or actual occasions, which are atomistic. By means of prehension, things take into them the affect of other things. Causality is not purely deterministic and physical, because particular potentials (“eternal objects” because they do exist but are not temporary) can intervene in what we could otherwise call the causal chain.

In this interstice, Shaviro identifies life by its cognition, by its affective uncertainty, and by its consequent capacity for newness. What are eternal objects? These potentials resemble Platonic forms and necessarily emerge from actual entities without being defined by reference to particular entities. For example, bravery, an equilateral triangle, and yearning. ‘Causal efficacy is always already at work in the depths of bodies’ (36), but potentials (e.g. yellowness) ‘play a transcendental, quasi-causal role in the constitution of the actual world’ (42). Because these potentials are not guaranteed, they prevent deterministic predictions. Potentials may mediate prehension, but they also might not. Life enters at this uncertainty, and Without Criteria’s broad interpretation of life both reeks of vitalism and offers it a fresh defense. Every enduring object that prehends may use eternal objects to do so, and thus is capable of creativity, of deciding for its own reasons. This is its mental pole, and also evidence that it is alive. Even a stone has a mental pole, though its is minor. At the level of viruses, bacteria, slime molds, and insects, Shaviro undoes determinism with prehension.

Effectively this is an extrapolation of – or alternate basis for – Shaviro’s earlier claim that meaning subsists only in response (Doom Patrols, Chapter 10). The position strongly denies semiotic theory by refusing to explain where responses come from or how they tend to behave, and resembles the fundamental postmodernist preference for ongoing, contested interpretation over consistent or certain meaning. Again, this was a major theme in The Cinematic Body, where Shaviro described how psychoanalytic and ideological film criticism had exaggerated and determined in advance the effects movies could have on those who watched. That argument was troubled by the fact that there are traditions and conditions of interpretation that make the production of meaning predictable. With Whitehead, this stabilization of meaning can be accounted for in terms of beauty, which is why aesthetics is fundamental to the processual occurrence of what we call the world.

The aesthetic concept here owes everything to Kant’s theorization of beauty, which Shaviro opposes to Kant’s more commonly discussed writing on the sublime. The sublime transcends and escapes, but the beautiful is attractive and approaches perfection. Shaviro makes most of this opposition in the book’s conclusion but it will be in his Age of Aesthetics project that we can expect to see a defense of beauty, epitomized by commercial art, against the sublime, championed by high art. Beauty, for Whitehead, is immensely practical. Beauty occurs in the moment of reception and forms the subject who experiences it: both the subject (formed by this experience) and the object (characterized in this manner) adapt to one another in beauty. The bee is struck by the flower, rendered as a bee attracted to a flower, and the flower is understood by the bee in a limited and particular way. Effectively this event explains the rather neat and self-organized character of so much usual experience (my legs are mine and attached, a bush’s roots grow deeper into the soil, a line forms at Burger King for lunch). Beauty is the engine of mutual adaptation.

Ultimately a suggestive book for those who might apply this philosophy to other tasks, the usefulness of a few concepts is overstated by their name. Creativity, in this book, has an extremely general meaning, which is perhaps not very helpful in understanding that creativity which distinguishes itself from regular practice. Likewise the book treats beauty as a technical process rather than a virtue, characteristic, or ideal meaningful for anyone in particular.

Although the text is clear in its intention to excise the human center of anthropomorphic understandings of the world, it does this as if it were a rather simple manner of reconfiguration that would have been possible long ago. This leaves intact much of the infrastructure of the (officially not-privileged) human. I read this as a hope for the vector of a not particularly human theory into the future, as a line of flight. And in this regard, it does break from other humanist traditions which revere the infinite power of language or deny the tendency of an atomistic world to do its own work in its own terms.

Shaviro concludes by refusing to defend Whitehead from deconstruction and other attacks on metaphysics. Philosophical schemes are not right or wrong; rather they are an open and provocative discussion of the interpretive means by which the world becomes things we can discuss. If Whitehead offers us a system of ideas for discussing objects, we can use it at our own risk, and for our own benefits. In Shaviro’s book, Whitehead offers a set of tools that work well together, but also promise to do good things for whatever projects we’re working on next.

EVIDENCE OF GLASS

I know that I can see through glass. I know that it’s transparent. I know that that transparency has a materiality and character. I find that character placid, familiar, and clean.

Windows don’t only remediate views or art. They are not a substitute for a mountain vista or a landscape painting. They are a kind of wall, or break in the wall, whose visual impression on us is not an image. The visual impression of reflectiveness, glare, shine, a slight warbling in older glass, a tint, a bit of dust or dried rainwater. Evidence of glass.

IDENTIFICATION

“I watch gangsta flicks and root for the bad guy / turn it off before it ends because the bad guy dies”
-50 Cent

Sometimes I’m watching a movie and realize that I hate the main character, definitely. And whatever bad things might happen to this character, bring them on. Especially likely in horror movies.

Not in all cases is identification a procedure securing a self that is mine, although appropriation and belonging are important terms in its function. Identifying can also be a kind of empathy or sympathy, sensitivity, solidarity, or means of evaluation. Identifying with a police officer shows the difficulty and banality of violation and enforcement of “the law.”

Identification gives you a new perspective: the Grand Theft Auto games show me a stereotype of who I am, what kind of car I drive, and what music I listen to – but they also show me how to navigate a city during an outrageous high speed chase.

Identification can strike you but without guiding you: I want good things to happen for Chameleon Street, but that doesn’t always mean I want to act like him.

Identification may work by inspiration rather than mimicry: I feel like MIA is onto something and want to know more about her, but don’t quite identify with her image in “Paper Planes.”

I know Scarface is a bad guy, but I’m sorry to see him die. But I don’t care when his colleagues fall. I identify with the movie’s sense of how the world turns. I have never adopted the perspective of Batman, but my understanding of his interests do preoccupy me. I can identify with a project (ending this senseless war), a person (the main character), a tone (dark sarcasm in Dr. Strangelove), or a style (gangster movies). Can I identify against something as well (the “Jew Hunter” Hans Landa of Inglourious Basterds)?