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• 1 media/Video-Game-Controllers-Collection-Free-Stock-Vectors-Small.jpg 2018-07-21T12:54:45-07:00 Chapter Two 20 Background Theories plain 2018-08-13T13:10:23-07:00

  From the time Walter Benjamin opened discussion on the implications of the “mechanical reproduction” of artwork through the medium of photography (Benjamin, 2008, p1) in 1944, digital cultures have been ascending into the mainstream sphere.  Benjamin was particularly interested in how the ‘aura’ of an artwork was transmuted in the process of its reproduction, and whether its cultic value was lost in the translation; even from this early period well before the advent of the videogame, some of the underpinning theory was already knitting together.  Among many other subjects, Benjamin (2008, p37) wrote about the photographer Eugene Atget, who captured deserted Parisian streets around 1900, and his “incomparable significance”. Atget was unusual in that his photographs were often of little known streets and subjects, and often at times during which they were deserted, so capturing a particular sensation of Paris that draws the viewer in.  “They already call for a specific type of reception” (Benjamin, 2008, p36). Atget’s reproductions were therefore something new; in effect, a kind of virtual reality in which the viewer sees something other than is originally there. The use of similar methods of immersion appear in many aspects of digital cultures, and are a particular strength within art house narrative games.

  In his 2017 book The Patterning Instinct, Jeremy Lent develops a rationale for the relationship between language, social development, and the human tendency toward pattern recognition.  The trait for pattern recognition is well documented, as is its use by artists to develop meaning within abstract works; this tendency can easily be seen when playing the children’s game of cloud gazing for shapes.  Lent reasons that a human primal instinct for competition was later offset by the socially led desire for fair cooperation, positing that development of the human prefrontal cortex in response to the need for greater social integration led to development of an intrinsic sense of fair play.  Lent uses as an example the Ultimatum Game. Experiments using the Ultimatum Game through both direct and digital mediums have found that people will lose, rather than allow another not to play fair, creating an odd but effective way to deal with those who will not play by the rules. “Intrinsically ambivalent, with our primate competitive drive and more recent cooperative instinct pushing in opposite directions” (Lent, 2017, p190), leads to a desire to satisfy two opposing inclinations.  This suggests these opposing forces could potentially be fulfilled through gaming; effectively, play and particularly video games allows the gamer to exercise their senses of both competition and fair play within the same arena, or even to analyse the consequences of purposely not engaging in fair play. Lent also discusses language in terms of mimetic forms of communication: “based on the group sizes early humans probably lived in, they would have had to spend 30-45% of their day grooming to maintain social cohesion, probably an unsustainable amount of time.  Gradually, mimetic forms of communication; gestures, grunts, and other vocalisations would have become more significant…finally developing into language” (Lent, 2017, p210). As well as furthering the boundaries of interaction in terms of rules, narrative art house videogames often utilise bespoke communication methods and emotes, which in some MMOs become far more important than spoken language. For example, new emotes are often unlocked or gifted as a performance award in The Elder Scrolls Online, and for regular players of the game, a highly skilled player could be recognised by the emotes they use in group player areas.  Language is effectively a symbolic visualisation linked to art and other understandable symbolic gestural forms and products, as are tools such as emotes.
  

   

  Gaming and play as a social more have always been an area of sociological interest, perhaps because human understanding of requirements to survive would not include ‘play’ as a required element in the same way as food, shelter, and other basic animalistic needs.  Despite this, all animals engage in play, and the reasons bruited for this therefore include theories such as the need to learn about interaction and engagement, learning to hunt and kill, and building social connections within a single cohesive pack or group. In 1938, Johan Huizinga wrote Homo Ludens (‘Man the Player’), in which he turned this concept around, and made the act of playing itself the most important aspect of, and basis for, other elements of life: “the fun of playing, resists all analysis, all logical interpretation” (Huizinga, 1949, p3).  Videogames did not exist when this essay was written, and Huizinga used his principles to reason through such difficult areas of society as modern warfare, but the concept still relates. Players entering a societal contract within which they will engage in a game, stems from a clear understanding of the rules that will govern the interaction to follow:.  

  Were it otherwise there would be no need to lay down the pacta sunt servanda principle, which explicitly recognizes. that the integrity of the system rests on a general willingness to keep to the rules (Huizinga, 1949, p208).

   

  In terms of understanding gaming, the most important factor is to understand the concept of interactivity, a term routed in the wider remit and original development of the digital cultures field.  Manovich (2002, p55) describes the term interactivity to be arguably useless in terms of digital cultures, finding it “too broad to be truly useful”. The principles of gaming narrative are inherently reliant on the interactivity of the game in question, and so the interactivity described here refers to the affect of a player’s immersion, and therefore to the “psychological processes of filling-in, hypothesis formation, recall, and identification” (Manovich, 2002, p57) that allows us to comprehend the mechanics and events played out through the game.  A narrative can be read, spoken, experienced, or played, but to be played, particularly within the outlined borders of a videogame universe, it is a series of factors combined that allow a player to experience the narrative devices that a designer has intended the player to find. In short, visual surroundings and clues, audio and musical developments and changes, the games’ own guidance system, and the player themselves. This is where the game overlaps with art, theatre and literature, and on the modern argument of whether videogames are themselves an art form.  “All classical, and even moreso modern, art is “interactive” in a number of ways. Ellipses in literary narration, missing details of objects in visual art, and other representational “shortcuts” require the user to fill in missing information” (Manovich, 2002, p56). Developing Baudrillard’s Modernity argument that modernity was the moment of liberation, and today all we do is simulate the moment of liberation, Dixon (2007, p73) wrote that “not only is the viewer inside the work of art, but they are operating it, possibly even modifying it, in real time, and being modified by it in return”.

   

  Academic understanding of gaming and the place of narrative within it draws simultaneously on the philosophical structure of language, and suggests a solution for language limitations.  As already established, words and understanding can stumble and change, particularly when used within a digital cultures sphere. The limitations of language leads to consideration of the work of philosophers such as Deleuze and Guattari in their work on multiplicity; alongside art productions such as Samuel Beckett’s “Not I” (Beckett, 1972) and Italo Calvino’s “Cybernetics and Ghosts”, and other essays of the “The Uses of Literature” (Calvino, 1986, pp3-27).  Their acknowledgement that language can become both inadequate and limiting is borne out by other philosophers such as Wittgenstein, who tried to alleviate these limitations by reimagining the use of word meanings: “the meaning of a word is in its use in the multiplicity of cultural practices and social activity” (Carino, 2017, p19). Deleuze and Guattari's view of a book within the theory of multiplicity suggests that a book cannot operate singly, but is in fact an assemblage, that requires the links, through the reader, to other sources of information in order to have meaning.  “There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made. Therefore a book also has no object. As an assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection with other assemblages and in relation to other bodies without organs. We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p4). In terms of information links, the internet resembles Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of multiplicity and the rhizomatic far more simply than does a book. By considering nodes of information as nodes within a rhizomatic chain of unfettered linkages, it is possible to visualise an interconnected section of the internet as a single multiplicity, or more specifically, to imagine an MMORPG as a single assemblage constituting a multi-authored book.

   

  Consideration of the multi-authored nature of social games leads to an acknowledgement of the importance of the interactivity of gamers collaborating in gameplay.  The work of Marcel Mauss on the morality of gift-giving, and the concept that gifts constitute a societal contract in his 1925 short book named The Gift was the foundation of social theories of reciprocity and gift exchange, and later informed the work of philosophers such as Baudrillard and Derrida.  “The importance of reciprocity in the gaming community is simultaneously difficult to define and incredibly important, and appears to fall more in line with Mauss’ discussions on ‘contractual sacrifice’ (Mauss, 1967, p2), in which support is given with the expectation both that gameplay will be extended and expanded with increased social interest in its continued development, and that in supplying support, later support can be expected to be received in return, either on the same or other games” (Taylor, 2017b).  The concepts and processes of societal barter and exchange are important both when analysing the modding community, and when examining the development of the gaming culture within society. Gamers support other gamers in play development, and in return, game server life is extended on favoured games. These concepts are similarly important in the consideration of big data collation, as discussed in chapter one. While big data is being collected on gamers, game use, servers, and gaming economies, it is also being hacked into and collated by the modding community.  Here its intended usage is different; modders hack the game servers to access content that allows the creation of new additions that players desire within their favourite games, but developers have no interest in adding; a classic example is the mod that added giant chickens to Skyrim, with chicken invulnerability being an insider joke within the game.
  At this point, the narrative elements of gaming, always relished by game fans, must be given a developmental background.  To give an overview of the entire history of narrative and storytelling would be far too broad for the remit of this discussion, and so the focus will be narrowed to a brief overview of some of the narratological voices in videogames as links to the most recent narrative developments.  The concept of playing games with language is certainly nothing new. Using examples such as the experimental literature group OuLiPo and the Nouveau Realistes, Charlie Gere postulates that in the mid-twentieth century, the emergence of digital cultures and the changing social landscape it encountered and pervaded met a similar change in development in the arts and literature, trying to make sense of the concepts and concerns of ideas such as “Cybernetics, Information Theory, General Systems Theory, Structuralism and Artificial Intelligence” (2008, pp75-111).  The OuLiPo, founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, was a gathering of writers and mathematicians who created written works using creative writing techniques, often creating new methods of writing that were based on mathematical problems, in addition to using already established techniques; this marriage of literature and mathematics to create a story is reminiscent of digital narratives.  The Nouveau Realistes were similarly founded in 1960, and sought to bring life and art closer together by working as a single collective using items taken from modern life within their communal art pieces. This group developed the still popular artistic method of decollage, in which the artist for example incorporates images from such sources as popular magazines into paintwork, then decollages (removes them), leaving just the shadow or partial image behind.  “The work these artists were doing reflected the concerns of a world in which information and communications technology and related concepts were becoming increasingly important...Such work was of great importance to the post-war art scene and has crucially determined not only the shape of current artistic practise in relation to digital media technology, but also the more general development of digital media” (Gere, 2008, p76); they certainly also connect to the concepts of narrative via binary coding:

   

  Narratives cluster around the four great artifices of the digital age: virtual communities, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and artificial life.  In narratives of virtual communities, people who have never met face-to-face are drawn together to participate in the global tribe through the media of electronic mail, online chat, computer role games, and video conferencing in ways similar to how conventional communities form, but without depending on spatial proximity, and in ways that obscure the divisiveness of issues of appearance and status (Coyne, 2001, p2).  

  Instead, the rules of interaction and gameplay take over; fair play is rewarded across the board, while trolling and attacks on new players very quickly teach a gaming noob, for example, not to leave all their hard earned Robux in an open Roblox shop. Two narratives are simultaneously connected in any game involving more than a single player; firstly, the world-interaction and play-generated narrative within the player’s own game, and secondly, the narrative interaction between the players within that server who are playing within the same world.  

   

  Significant debate in the academic discourse of videogaming in the past has revolved around ludology and narratology, and the schism between the two.  Simply put, ludologists focus on the effect of gaming, both positive and negative, on individuals and society as a whole, while narratologists examine and analyse gaming narratives.  Following negative commentary on the effect of children and propensity to violence in the early era of PC and console gaming, particularly in terms of first person shooters (FPS) such as Doom, that was later found to be unsubstantiated, the most widely accepted method of videogame examination was through the narratological route.  This seems to have led to a massive expansion in gaming narrative development, and may be the reason behind the burgeoning popularity of small independent games companies releasing narrative rich products.  It also led to the slowed development of ludological understanding, which has now begun to accelerate, with many game-related academics focusing on gaming culture generally rather than specialising in a narrow field, in order to try and close the gap between the two fields; it has also led to the sorely needed input of academics who are also videogame players, with some further moving into the videogame design market.  Narratologists such as Janet Murray and Espen Aarseth arguably fall into this area of study, and with concepts that are important to the theoretical development of this discussion. “The ludology/narratology debate caused me to think about games as preceding narrative as a building block of human culture and cognition” (Murray, 2017, p13).

   

  Returning to the ideas of immersion and the two narrative elements within videogaming of player-player, and player-virtual-world, Murray writes extensively on the importance of immersion through the power of narrative within novels and literature, and particularly on the importance of maintaining the virtuality of the world entered in order to not inadvertently obliterate the balancing act maintained in order to support the immersion “we need to define the boundary conventions that will allow us to surrender to the enticements of the virtual world” (Murray, 2017, p129).  This is perhaps why narrative-rich videogames are so enticing: they supply the immersive narrative, the unwritten rules of play supplied by the societal contract entered into, and then supplies the option to break the rules inherent in testing an alternate life from safe ground to ascertain the consequences. In order to play a videogame however, there needs to be a player input, but “sometimes playing a videogame just feels like too much work. There’s a reason, after all, why some of the academic crowd follow Espen Aarseth in calling games “ergodic literature”: it’s from the Greek ergon, work” (Poole, 2018).  Aarseth’s theories are grounded deeply in scientific narrative analysis, but draw similar conclusions at a simplified level as the aesthetic findings here; firstly that player input serves as the element of interaction (the element of work) that leads directly to the sense of immersion, and secondly that games could arguably be classified as a form of literature; though Aarseth approaches games generally from a play and simulation perspective as opposed to a narratological approach. “Images, especially moving images, are more powerful representations of spatial relations texts, and therefore this migration from text to graphics is natural and inevitable” (Aarseth, 1997, p102).  While strong, Aarseth’s theories in 1997 did not account for continued participation without game interaction, but this also has its place; players who cannot be bothered to play now watch instead, through gaming channels on platforms such as Twitch and YouTube; this has led to an audience that learns about the game as well as plays it, provides an alternative form of player-player interaction, and is even more diverse through the accessibility of the medium. Successful game streaming has led to a prevalence of gamers in the YouTube top twenty hall of fame, supporting Robert Pfaller's theory of interpassivity.

   

  The emergence of the Ludic Aesthetic is linked to the changing narratives generated by modern developments within the existing player base, which incorporates all people who may be playing or participating, irrespective of race, gender, religion or any other personal attributes other than the intentions, inclinations and personalities of that group of players.  “Since digital games have existed, their creation has been dominated by a small part of the population: generally white male engineers...it should be terrifying that an entire art form can be dominated by a single perspective, that a small and privileged group has a monopoly on the creation of art” (Anthropy, 2012, p210). Gamers who are not young white males or, at least, white males that have grown up gaming and game developing, have to take more care online than the ‘privileged’ group that Anthropy (2012) draws attention to throughout her text.  “In 2014, there was an escalation of online harassment against women involved in gaming. In a phenomenon that came to be known as #Gamergate, female gamers, reviewers and developers were targeted by often-anonymous participants within the games, on a number of websites, and through social media” (Barnes, 2018, p173).  To a middle-aged female gamer, news such as this bears no element of surprise. The advertising campaign for Battlefield V mounted in May 2018 features a woman with a prosthetic arm as the lead character within a World War One setting.  So far the outcry against this ‘historical inaccuracy’ has led to the YouTube release video receiving 327,000 likes pitted against 439,000 dislikes; the openly acknowledged audience of the Battlefield franchise are young males, and this is certainly the most vociferous element of this gaming group.  Yet, the gaming industry now acknowledges the fact that 50% of its players are known to be women; indeed, there are women-only platoons playing on old servers on Battlefield 3, 4, and 1 on both PC and console; joining these groups means leaving the usual gamer anonymity to prove to the group administrators that you are in fact female, before you are admitted.
  

   

  The giant game developers have their established audience thoroughly immersed, but they are aware that new games, and perhaps even a whole new structure of interaction, will be needed to entice or hold the rest of the population; finding a way past bias is of course nothing new, in literature as in gaming.  “Before the novel could tell the stories of women who did not wind up either happily married or dead, it would have to change in form as well as in content” (Murray, 2017, p4). Anthropy (2012) writes about the changes that will need to be made to games in order to include the unacknowledged gamers, and ends in focusing on the development of art styles from gamers and the gaming community in the form of zines that comment on socio-political mores.  It was originally the intention to utilise Barnes (2018) to inform the digital research undertaken for this discussion, however Barnes’ stance, ultimately similar to Anthropy (2012), better places it here within the background theories relevant to a changing aesthetic within the broader social culture, as it examines “the roles that the institutions that own the platforms we comment on have in creating an inclusive and harmonious commenting culture, as well as the roles we have individually and collectively in mitigating anti-social behaviour” (Barnes, 2018, p174).  It is acknowledged throughout these texts that access to gaming is more difficult for any other than the already accepted and acknowledged ‘privileged’ group, and yet the number of gamers outside this structure are increasing. Perhaps some of the answers can be found in the aesthetics and narrative of the games themselves.

   

  Is media theory based on a new aesthetics?  Yes, it is, if you define aesthetics as the ‘theory  of perception’. The eye absorbs five gigabytes per second.  This is such an enormous amount that the biggest mainframes can only barely equal it.  With the eye, one can absorb much more information than with any other sense or intellectual capacity.  This means that information processing must be visual in the future, because the eye possesses the potential for processing large quantities of information in a meaningful way (Bolz, 2004, p25).

  From my personal perspective, games are virtual world representations of the fantasy stories and gamebooks that I spent the 1990s immersed in: an avid reader can see the world inside a novel; to me, a well-written game is a visual novel, but with a storyline that I can choose either to follow or wander away from in order to create a new narrative.  The Ludic Aesthetic draws on the principles of network aesthetics as outlined by Patrick Jagoda:

  a network marks a form mediated by myriad works of art...that a literary novel, a popular videogame, and a museum-based piece can at all be discussed in a series suggests a blurring between categories of high and low, and between avant-garde and popular forms, which began during earlier eras of modernism and postmodernism but has reached a new apex with digital media that make most cultural forms accessible via a single technological device (2016, p18).

  Jagoda considers the novel a narrative, and a videogame a procedural, device of network aesthetics, but this discussion represents the concept that both of these media forms can be, and are, narrative devices.

   

  As highlighted by Jagoda (2016, p19), there is an issue with the term ‘network’ in that it is so broad as to lose its “descriptive edge” (2016, p19), with its ability to be as wide or narrow a multiplicity as an examiner cares to argue, based on the pattern recognition and therefore interactivity discovered.  Whilst the Ludic Aesthetic is based on events occurring across a wide-scale network that touches on all forms of entertainment from television and film to performance art and videogames, the concept itself is in fact rather narrow.  Linked to Sianne Ngai’s (2015) attempts to categorise rising social habits and values into aesthetic modes, the concept of a social aesthetic that turns forms of interaction and development into a mode of play in order to facilitate interest, expenditure, and sometimes even comprehension may seem insignificant, but there are political connotations: “how the concept of ‘aesthetic’ has been transformed by the performance-driven, information-saturated and networked, hypercommodified world of late-capitalism...This is because...[the aesthetic]...is about capitalism’s most socially binding processes: production,...circulation,...and consumption” (Ngai, 2015, p949).  This leads us to an assessment of the cultural evidence.

  
  Next: Chapter Three: Evidence of a New Aesthetic
  
  Or return to: Index
  
  Previous: Chapter One: Results of the Digital Research