Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Gaming/Deleuze/Badiou

                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.[1] 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.[2] 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.[3] 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)[4]  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).[5] “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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[1]  It is interesting in this context to think of how computers themselves predict the future, namely at the level of the logical processor itself. A mathematical field of possible future user states is stored by the processor in memory called a cache. A successful realisation of one or more such future states is called a ‘cache hit’, while a future state which does not actually come to pass as a result of user activity is called a ‘cache miss’.

[2]  Of course, in games of this nature a player may “cheat” the imposition of this simulated subjectivity by manipulating the game state non-diegetically, the most obvious example being the loading of a game state saved previous to the “failed” game event.

[3]  In this context, it is interesting to note the official response to video games enacted by the South Korean and Chinese governments in response to the perceived social consequences of excessive videogame play. In both countries, governmental controls of varying severity were put in place to monitor and regulate the time citizens spend playing games online. Gaming is an issue of public and personal safety.  

[4]  We should note that as demonstrated by three-dimensional motion-sensing devices such as the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Corporation’s Kinect product that such gestures are not limited to being enacted upon actual material devices. Indeed, in September of 2011 Apple was awarded a patent for the rights to specific gestural control of virtual objects; the patent, in other words, grants private property rights over specific gestures which interact with what Galloway would describe as software diegetic space.

[5]  Please note that the convention of using an uppercase letter to signify the infinite (transfinite) set, which Badiou represents as the void or empty set (Ø) standing for infinity and thus containing every instance (finitude) or possibility.

Monday, October 03, 2011

A question and comment for Tim Hudak and the people who want to vote for him

Hi Tim. 

I'm curious about your platform. As I see it, if prisoners are going to be doing jobs that are normally done by municipal workers, while the PCs intend to shrink the public service, then the PC platform will raise the unemployment rate as many jobs will be lost.

The idea that employers will lay people off because of "higher taxes" is simply wrong. Are you trying to say that, for example, the Ford Motor Company will stop selling cars in Canada if we return the corporate tax rate to 1990s levels; they'll just pack up and go home? Nonsense. Corporations will remain operating in Canada so long as their product or service is profitable. However, the corporate tax rate only positively affects their profitability. Corporations pass their higher taxes along to the consumer in terms of higher prices. Higher prices do lessen demand for the product slightly, but corporations have mitigated the loss through higher revenue. Companies do not lay people off because of a tax hike, because such would affect their productivity negatively. They would not then be able to "bounce back" with improved market conditions, nor would they be able to react to the actions of their market competition.

Furthermore, numerous studies have already looked at the link between tax rates and employment and have determined that there is no statistical correlation. Taxes go up, employment stays about the same; taxes go down, employment stays about the same. 

The idea that tax cuts lead to job growth has also been demonstrated as false, using market principles. If I build bikes at my factory, I will hire employees when I need more bikes to be built for customers. More bikes will be built when demand for bikes is higher. As a corporate tax cut does nothing to stimulate demand for the product, my company will not sell more bikes. Instead, the tax cut will allow me to be more profitable. As a consequence, my business will not invest these profits into new hires, as I am not selling more bikes than I used to be selling. In fact, there are costs associated with overproduction, as well (warehousing, etc). Unless demand for bikes increases, my business will not hire a new employee. And with so many people newly unemployed by the loss of public sector jobs, there will be fewer people able to purcahse my bike, which translates into lower demand for my bikes. 

Allowing small businesses to be more profitable stimulates the broader econnomy by provoking more money to be spent local to the business (ie: in Ontario); in other words, small business people tend to spend their profits on goods and services in their communities. However, such does not occur when tax breaks are given to larger and multinational enterprises. Their profitability gains realized through tax cuts manifest as shareholder dividends, the vast majority of which are international in nature. Such money is not likely to be spent in Canada, let alone Ontario. 

In reality, once the corporate tax rate is competitive with other jurisdictions, further corporate tax cuts simply add to corporate profitability at the expense of revenues needed for social services and governmental programs. This process has been demonstrated time and time again over the course of the last fifty years. Canada currently has the same corporate tax rate as many "third-world" resource exporting countries, and Ontario is also exceptionally competitive with competing jurisdictions. In fact, it's the lowest tax rate of any developed industrial nation. Surely, as corporate tax cuts do little to stimulate the consumer economy, they do not need to go any lower.

So my question is the following: since corporate tax cuts will not magically produce jobs, what do you intend to do to keep Canadians -- especially the tens of thousands of public sector employees you plan on reducing -- working and paying taxes?