GAME GLITCHES (MACHINE ELVES)

In video games, there is one set of rules that are explicit and diegetic and another that is mechanically enforced and never described fully. The first set is how you would describe a game to someone else, or what would be in the manual, or the set of rules for a game that a video game is based on. The second set is what the game will actually let you get away with, what it will visit upon you, what will be the actualities of the game world. There is a discrepancy between these rules.

Glitches in games have changed with changes in technology, ways of rendering graphics, and types of gameplay. Once, players at consoles would complain that they’d been cheated if the game called something a hit that looked to them like a miss. If the game didn’t register a button pressed, something had gone wrong. The game was being cheap. These glitches show the game to be an object of player efforts, resisting them, and not just an instrument for them.

Other kinds of glitches have no impact on gameplay, but can end the game. Some events in a game are so routine they become invisible as glitches. Players game the system. In GTA, I like to jump on the roof of a moving car, shoot the car, and get a fast ride from a terrified driver.

Glitches show that the game is software grinding away behind the scenes. Yes. Glitches also show the nature of the thing with which a player had come into such an intimate relation.

The character of glitches, which soon becomes understood as the character of also that which was not a glitch, is arbitrary. Chosen. One cannot avoid a feeling of coherence or relation and totality to these arbitrary decisions. The game world is an orchestration of game elements in conspiracy to entertain and enter the player, to engage and influence the player. Glitches feel chosen, but that doesn’t mean players feel a person is tormenting their brain in a vat, or that there is a vast political conspiracy, or an economic necessity to their situation. What is the character glitches-as-choices create?

Terence McKenna writes in a different context of something he calls machine elves,

So beings are making objects, showing you objects, the objects are turning into beings and making other objects, these beings and objects, they jump into your chest - and then they jump back out. They jump into your body and disappear into your body, and then they jump back out, waving these things, just throwing this stuff in all directions. They are - the word that comes to mind is: they are Zany. It's like a Bugs Bunny cartoon, uh, gone mad. And all of this energy - they are elves. This is what elves are. It's this weird thing, where they love you - or they like you a lot, but you can tell that their sense of humor is Weird …
this place is... somebody very weird... it's their idea of a reassuring environment for a human being! It's like a playpen. It's this warm. well lit, secure, womblike environment, and when I break into it they these things, the elves and the toys, are toys! These are things to amuse me. The way you would hang, uh, cubes and blocks above a cradle... a playpen, you know? Because children are supposed to coordinate shapes and bright colors. That's what these things are: they are toys to try and get me to coordinate my perception in this place. It's a holding area of some sort - someone's created this and is watching me.

This is the sense of care and attention found in TiVo’s iconic tv/elf, and the kind of fun and playful neutrality Google’s web applications sport as visual style. With an awareness of the kind of visual-affective construction of games occurring at this level, the world of the video game more easily ceases to require an outside real world for it to be constructed as a stylized reference to. It is a set of colored blocks rather than a city.

The style of games implies machine elves. Beings that make objects, jump into you and back out, wave crazy things at you that, like toys in a crib, orient perception for the world. All for you, all at you. These weird things teach geometry, motion, the solidity of materials, a game’s physics simulation, camera angles, scripting, and how bodies move (e.g. in animations). These weird things are rarely specific to just one game, they are about as general as a FPS engine or a convention for group-selection.

Machine elves are not so much the actual set of processes previous to a video game as they are the thing-behind implicit in the video game as a mask. They are hallucinations occasioned by actions, but the beings are like elves, they cannot be caught and held. They are a virtual machinery, the processing apparatus invented to explain the miracle of a thing whose production must be explained: the character of glitches in games