Framing Uncertainty: Computer Game Epistemologies (Performance Philosophy) 1137595205, 9781137595201

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PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY

Framing Uncertainty Computer Game Epistemologies

Markus Rautzenberg

Performance Philosophy

Series Editors Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca University of Surrey Guildford, Surrey, UK Alice Lagaay Hamburg University of Applied Sciences Hamburg, Germany Will Daddario Asheville, NC, USA

Performance Philosophy is an interdisciplinary and international field of thought, creative practice and scholarship. The Performance Philosophy book series comprises monographs and essay collections addressing the relationship between performance and philosophy within a broad range of philosophical traditions and performance practices, including drama, theatre, performance arts, dance, art and music. It also includes studies of the performative aspects of life and, indeed, philosophy itself. As such, the series addresses the philosophy of performance as well as performance-asphilosophy and philosophy-as-performance. Editorial Board Prof. Emmanuel Alloa, Professor in Philosophy, University of Freiburg, Switzerland Dr. Luciana Da Costa Dias, Associate Professor of Aesthetic and Theatre Theory, Federal University of Ouro Preto, Brazil Prof. Lydia Goehr, Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University, USA Prof. James R. Hamilton, Professor of Philosophy, Kansas State University, USA Prof. Bojana Kunst, Professor of Choreography and Performance, Institute for Applied Theatre Studies, Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Germany Prof. Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, Professor of Theatre Studies, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany Dr. Fumi Okiji, Assistant Professor, Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA Prof. Martin Puchner, Professor of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA Prof. Alan Read, Professor of Theatre, King’s College London, UK Prof. Freddie Rokem, Emeritus Professor of Theatre Arts, Tel Aviv University, Israel Prof. Phillip Zarrilli, Emeritus Professor of Performance Practice, University of Exeter, UK Prof. Cosimo Zene, Emeritus Professor in the Study of Religions and World Philosophies, SOAS, UK http://www.performancephilosophy.org/books/

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14558

Markus Rautzenberg

Framing Uncertainty Computer Game Epistemologies

Markus Rautzenberg Folkwang University of the Arts Essen, Germany

Performance Philosophy ISBN 978-1-137-59520-1 ISBN 978-1-137-59521-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59521-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: crPrin Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Limited The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

Translation by Polly Dickson and Markus Rautzenberg

Preface

I remember vividly what one of my professors told me more than twenty years ago, when I began in (German) academia. I was about to write my master’s thesis and had decided on two topics, which on the surface could not be further apart. The first was ‘Ernst Jünger and the Philosophy of Anti-Rationalism’ and the second, ‘Aesthetics of Computer Games’. My professor was very interested in both topics, which was not the norm in 2002 to begin with, but he put his doubts about my computer game interests this way: ‘Nice topic, but I think, if you really want to do it, you have the choice between a possibly innovative piece of work on games or a career in academia.’ I very much appreciated his sense of humor but felt this was not really a joke. Even in 2002 the topic of ‘computer games’ was not taken seriously, to the point where a person could easily risk his or her career in academia over it, or so it seemed. To be honest, I struggled a little but in the end I really wanted to write about computer games from a philosophical standpoint because in 2002 there barely was a research topic called ‘game studies’, and particularly not in Germany. Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature was one of the few books that really opened up new perspectives on the medium, but at the time even what is today a more-or-less historic debate between ‘ludology and narratology’ was still a hot new topic. Despite my title at the time—“Mirror-Games. On the aesthetics of Screen-Games”—the most fascinating aspects of computer games for me did not, and do not, reside in aesthetics, but rather in the epistemic realm.

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That is why a critique of the intensive violence or the disruptive content, for example, for me does not reach the substance of the problem. Sigmund Freud observed, not unrelatedly, that the tangible content of a dream cannot be analyzed without the underlying thoughts of a dream. What we should be concerned about is therefore the mode of world apprehension within computer games. We also need to explore the epistemic core that becomes visible here. The computer is not a mimetic but rather a generative device. This is what the computer as a medium shares with game and play. The generativity is where play and computers meet and point to something that is essential for an understanding of today’s mediatic state of things. Computer games wean and disburden from the experience of contingency, because digital computers cannot produce true randomness. Randomness however is necessary for contingency to exist. Because of a lack of contingency it is the pleasure of a discharge of affect that drives the game. This is not a threat to the player, because the sting of an unmediated experience of contingency has been removed. This is the point at which a critique of computer games should start. Perhaps far more important, though, is the fact that the incapability of contingency that governs even big data research is not conceived as a problem or conceptual frailty, but rather is promoted as being normal. This misconception leads to the alleged ‘normal’ being constitutive of the world in general. The opinion that everything might be possible, but that nothing is really necessarily so, is not a popular conviction in the exact sciences of today. On the contrary, the common belief is that it is only a matter of time until the perfect algorithm is discovered that will unveil necessity behind the curtains of what looks like contingency. I felt that what we have to understand is that the computer is not just a tool to simulate climatological phenomena, to mention one example. It is rather the decisive epistemic component that leads to our understanding of phenomena such as climate change. Under the prejudice of the digital computer as the end result of enlightened rationality, it might sound paradoxical to state that its epistemic power is in line with religious conceptions. Like in medieval theology before, big data and digital media today are more and more perceived as some kind of ‘book of nature’, where we just need to find the right key (or filter) to let knowledge reveal itself. I am not denying the possibility that computability and decidability,

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e.g. the proposal that computer simulation of the human brain may just be a problem of granularity, i.e. resolution, computing power and available memory. My point is that the fact that digital computers rely on decidability is no reason to conclude that everything that exists is computable. This sounds like a common-sense statement, but it has become surprisingly unpopular. Additionally, when I started working on computer games from a philosophical perspective at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the notion of ‘gamification’ would not have been understood as it is today. At that time, the term would have meant the dissolution of the real in favor of a postmodern ‘anything goes’, perhaps synonymous with a term like ‘aesthetisation’. While computer games became a very large industry during the early twenty-first century, nobody would have been able to foresee the pervasive extent of gaming today. In the age of big data, geotagging and self-optimization through ‘achievements’ and ‘rankings’, game studies need to consider a broader notion of what game-related fields of research may be. In the past we loved to pose ontological questions, and for a long time game studies were expected to deliver definitions, thereby answering the questions ‘What is a game; and what is its nature?’ but, at least for me, the more interesting way to approach this is to observe what kinds of questions arise when we think about games. This is what this book is about. Because, obviously, thinking about play and games is not just about different cultures and approaches to gaming but also about ludic principles as catalysts and prerequisites for thinking, feeling, understanding and other ways to create an understanding of the world. The ubiquity of ‘gamification’ (the application of game mechanics in nongame contexts), for example, allows us today to differentiate at least three distinct layers that in combination constitute ‘game’ as a specific mode of world apprehension today: 1. Self-optimization; 2. Risk management; and 3. Mediation of paradoxes.

All of these elements may be utilized to enhance the human condition both ethically and aesthetically, as Kant, Schiller and Huizinga have

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argued, but at the same time they are used in the ‘games’ of global capitalism where all of our lives are ‘at stake’. For Schiller, self-optimization would have taken the form of a pedagogical system of playful education. In today’s work environments, elements of gaming are often used as superficial gratification systems that mimic playful competition in order to make people work or consume more efficiently. Risk management is the only part of games that is of interest to the mathematical theory of games, and this in turn is the basis for the market-predicting algorithms upon which the global markets of today are based. Standard & Poor’s and their colleagues do nothing but ‘play games’ with the populace’s future, and that is indeed a core ingredient of gaming itself. Games are all about predicting the future, regardless of whether this future is the immediate one or a hundred years from now. Uncertainty is both at the core of what is fun about games, and the reason why mathematical game theory rules economic theory of today. It is all about living with contingency. The mediation of paradoxes seems to be the last remaining resort of human freedom, and the place where the arts at last come into their own, but this is again just one side of the story. By making connections perceivable that would otherwise be incompatible, the risk of loss or the destruction of known boundaries is indispensable for games to work. By letting markets collapse and deliberately ‘raising the stakes’ in the process, profits are maximized and wars are won. In an effort to conceptualize a truly interdisciplinary approach to a philosophy of computer games that would have to bring all these aspects of gaming into the equation, we have to consider that the notion of the intrinsic humanistic quality of games may be purely romantic. Instead we have to decide how to approach games as one of the great cultural resources of humanity. Gaming and playing does not mean passively to embrace indifference; on the contrary, it is an active encounter with difference and computer games in particular, being digital media, allow us constantly to practice navigating uncertainty. Historically, game studies and their subject matter, what I call the ludic epistemology of today, are heirs to postmodernity in that they do not fit well with intellectual laziness and superficial relativism, and especially not with essentialisms. The following chapters that consist of unaltered articles (previously published only in German) on the subject from a timespan of over seventeen years of working philosophically on computer games deal with horror as well as concepts of uncertainty and paradoxes, a theory of computer games as a theory of caves (speleology), ludic mediality, the game

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Portal as an experimental ensemble, or how videogames became obtrusive, to name a few topics. The book is written from the perspective of (continental) philosophy and media theory. Playing games is a way to be in contact with the world, a contact that does not allow for quick answers and handy definitions. It might be a mad world out there, but the dance of paradoxes is not just something to be feared but rather something to be explored, and games as framed uncertainties allow just that. Therefore Framing Uncertainty will be the overarching topic that holds all chapters of the book together, because notions of framing as well as uncertainty are what computer games are all about. ‘Framing’ as in ‘framing a picture’ but also in the sense of ‘to be framed‘ because what computer games do (among many other things) is to betray us about, and at the same time shelter us from, the existential threat of contingency by domesticating it within the ‘magic circle’ of game rules and computational technology that excludes contingency by replacing it with mere uncertainty. Essen, Germany

Markus Rautzenberg

Contents

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Through the Looking Glass: Aisthesis and Semiosis in Computer Games Introduction ‘Where the Game Ends and Reality Begins’ Aestheticization and the Dissolution of Reality Aisthetik Versus Aesthetics Behind the Looking Glass: The Medium of the Video Game Searching for Traces: Reflections on the Definition of Media The Media of the Video Game 1: The Magic of the Symbolic. The Computer as a Universal Discrete Machine The Media of the Video Game 2: Mirror Games. The Digital Image Between the Symbolic and the Imaginary The Media of the Video Game 3: In the Wonderland of Paradoxes. The Video Game as a Form of the Medium of the Game A Distance, as Near as It Might Be: Immersion in Video Games Conclusion Noise, Disturbance, Perturbation: The Interplay Between Transparency and Opacity as a Gameplay Device in Silent Hill 2 Ecstasy of Absence

1 1 1 4 8 11 11 21 32

44 54 66

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The Uncanny, Noise, the Real Mist Radio Noise Effect The Aesthetics of Silent Hill 2 and Its Sequels References

78 83 85 86 87 88

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Not-Ready-to-Hand, or How Media Become Obtrusive References

91 100

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Ludic Mediality: Aesthetic Experience in Computer Games Intensity of Representation Aesthetic Experience in Computer Games? Game and Mediality

103 107 112 115

Caves, Caverns and Dungeons: Speleological Aesthetics in Computer Games References

119 135

Just Making Images: Evocation in Computer Games Experimental Ensembles Digression: The Term “Evocation” Being in the Picture: Environmental Storytelling Phantasmal Media Theatricality and Monstrance of the Phantasm Aperture Science

137 137 139 142 148 150 153

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Index

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CHAPTER 1

Through the Looking Glass: Aisthesis and Semiosis in Computer Games

This chapter is a translation of a small book on the topic of computer games issued as one of only two academic monographs on the topic in Germany in 2002, therefore it has both historical as well as theoretical value as it is an early attempt at a theory of computer games as a medium sui generis in German academia. Applying phenomenological, semiotic and psychoanalytic approaches, this part is very much influenced by a specific kind of German media theory that was, and remains, interested in the ‘materialities of communication’, i.e. the medium itself. This perspective today is very well known outside Germany too, as a blend of philosophy, philology and a fascination with all things technical. ‘Philosophy’ in this case means continental philosophy.

Introduction ‘Where the Game Ends and Reality Begins’ A computer game released recently in the USA was promoted by its developers in the following way: You only use 12% of your brain. Mind if we play with the rest? Welcome to Majestic, the suspense thriller that infiltrates your life and leaves you guessing where the game ends and reality begins. Majestic is an episodic online entertainment experience set against the backdrop of a grand and sinister conspiracy—an unfolding mystery adventure that uses the Internet

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Rautzenberg, Framing Uncertainty, Performance Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59521-8_1

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as a canvas for its story, weaving you through both real and fictional experiences in real time. Highly personalized and naturally paced, Majestic tailors your experience specifically to you as it dynamically changes the content of Web pages, emails, faxes, voice mails and chat conversations in order to immerse each player at the very heart of a developing story. Majestic players assume the leading role in their own adventure, interacting with other characters, uncovering clues, searching for answers, collecting and using digital objects and resolving challenges to progress through the experience. Unlike other forms of entertainment, Majestic actively pursues and interacts with you based on events developing within the fiction, creating a uniquely suspenseful entertainment experience.1

The in-game content of Majestic revolves around a plot whose subject is an international conspiracy. It might, at first glance, be categorized under the ‘adventure’ genre.2 What differentiates it from conventional computer games is that we are no longer dealing, in this game, with software installed locally, available for purchase in a shop, and offering an enclosed virtual space of play. Its interfaces are the real communication methods of the digital age: from chat rooms to Internet forums to communications sent by email or mobile phone. For a monthly fee, the player is given tasks and is passed the alleged clues of a conspiracy over the anonymous channels of the World Wide Web. These are spread either by real actors or by intelligent ‘bots’.3 The goal is to create an atmosphere as real and as paranoid as possible, in which the borderlines between fiction and reality are increasingly blurred. This thrill is the real content of the game. Following the events of 11 September 2001, with the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon and other sites, the publisher Electronic Arts considered itself obliged to delay the release 1 Promotional text of the software developer Electronic Arts for the game Majestic. The link to the website this citation was taken from is no longer available. 2 The content of an ‘adventure’ video game is to solve puzzles set by gaming software in order to ‘progress’ within a story. These puzzles consist of the logical combination of information and/or virtual objects, to develop solutions which then themselves lead to further branches of the plot and thus also to new puzzles. 3 ‘Bots’ are intelligent programs which act according to a particular principle and, for

example, write entries in Internet forums, send emails with a particular content at predetermined times, or can even communicate in real-time chats with the player. A broad presentation of these particular forms of ‘artificial intelligence’, on the basis of numerous examples, can be found in Sherry Turkle: Leben im Netz. Identität in Zeiten des Internet, Frankfurt/M 1999.

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of the game Majestic indefinitely because, in the game, references to terrorist organizations operating on a global scale are the predominant theme. Because the fictitious news reports within the context of the game made use of the same communications channels as did ‘real’ news distributors, the perceived difference between a staged event within the framework of the game and the broadcast of a catastrophe on CNN was so blurred that Electronic Arts considered the continuation of Majestic unacceptable. The causes for this ought not simply to have been the shock of 9/11 and related, understandable, reasons of respect. What was truly unsettling ought to have been the perceived reversal and shaking up of the relationship between reality and fiction, conventionally assumed to be dichotomous. While the terrorists had, during a time of technological upgrade, with nothing more than a pair of box-cutters and crumpled airplane manuals in their bags, aimed not so much at real people but at connotatively loaded signs (the World Trade Center and the Pentagon being the symbols of a despised Americanism), and with their destruction had so deeply shaken the West as had scarcely any other event since the 1940s, Majestic pushed its way into the real everyday life of its players as a fictitious scenario. And so, as reality obtained its most brutal entrance into the symbolic field of Western high capitalism, the developers of Majestic became aware of the dramatic scope of their seemingly harmless project by means of its exact mirror image. If fiction has come far enough to reach into the real life of the player and the real, to make itself heard, can reach its furthest magnitude only through entering into the symbolic field, the much-invoked ‘agony of the real’ has entered a stage that calls urgently for new reflection. It is no accident that this example owes its clarity to the comparison with a video game. Key terms such as ‘derealization’, ‘aestheticization’, ‘loss of reality’ or indeed ‘the agony of the real’ are set to work in phenomena that conspire together in concentrated form in the medium of the video game, making it a rewarding field of analysis. Curiously enough, this medium is either largely ignored within media-theoretical discussions, or is perceived only as a peripheral phenomenon. While the scientific confrontation with the medium of the video game is limited to a few, predominantly US, contributions, mostly as ‘uses and gratifications’ and ‘stimulus—response’ analyses, a curious silence surrounds this phenomenon within cultural—theoretical media discussions. This is surprising, considering that a concrete analysis of this medium as a

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medium could yield information about concepts such as virtuality, derealization or perception in the age of digitalization. Such key terms are commonly used, but only in a very diffused way in the public discussion about ‘new media’, and rarely with methodical reflection. The description of a concrete phenomenon such as the video game could, as a kind of side-effect, lend this terminology greater clarity. An investigation of the phenomenon of ‘virtual reality’, however, is in no way lacking in the growing literature on the subject of media theory over recent years.4 What is surprising is the fact that, in all the talk of human—machine systems, data suits, disembodiment or the plunge into virtual worlds, mainly abstract concepts of this ‘virtual reality’, as depicted in the novels of William Gibson (Neuromancer) or in the concepts of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration agency (NASA), are drawn upon as standards for comparison; models which are not yet realized, are not yet available to the wider public, or which belong entirely to the world of science fiction. Yet there is no need to look so far afield, for the phenomena in question here are already reality in the medium of the video game, and they can be found as near to us as the closest Gameboy-playing child. Aestheticization and the Dissolution of Reality The broad disregard for the medium of the video game within cultural– academic discourse has, we may surmise, many reasons. For one, a relevant, specialized knowledge of the object is to a large extent absent. The sheer mass of electronic entertainment software, and of its genres, forms and technical developments, has become impossible to survey. There is, moreover, the extremely accelerated development of hardware, leading to the situation that contemporary video games of recent release share only basic fundamental characteristics with their predecessors, even if the latter

4 Representative of this are the following essay collections: Florian Rötzer (ed.): Digi-

taler Schein. Ästhetik der elektronischen Medien, Frankfurt/M 1996; Sybille Krämer (ed.): Medien—Computer—Realität, Frankfurt/M 2000; Gianni Vattimo, Wolfgang Welsch (eds.): Medien-Welten Wirklichkeiten, Munich 1998, as well as Ars Electronica (ed.): Philosophien der neuen Technologien, Berlin 1989, and the bibliographies included within it.

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might be only five years older, and that the contents and forms of presentation can change radically, when we also consider the introduction of larger and larger storage media within a short time period. Furthermore, there is a certain resentment directed towards the field of investigation represented by electronic entertainment software, arising from the ‘predominance of the economic over aesthetics in the area of mass media’.5 This circumstance emerges with particular distinction, of course, in the field of video games, which are developed solely for commercial ends in the framework of an entertainment industry that has grown to be starkly differentiated. The ‘commerciality’ of the video game, however, inscribes itself into a process that is inherent to the age of the media revolution and particularly to the emergence of new multimedia systems such as sound film, television, or indeed the computer. The field of video games fits as a clear representative into a phenomenological complex defined by Gianni Vattimo with the terms ‘dissolution of reality’ and ‘aestheticization’: What we call ‘dissolution of reality’, and the boundaries of which we are looking to find, is that phenomenological complex we also describe as ‘aestheticization’. The general aestheticization of existence—from advertising or the value of an item understood more as status symbol than as useobject, to ‘tailor-made’ information—is only the end-point of a development which is one with modernity, and in which what has been achieved in the area of aesthetic experience has, in an emblematic way, anticipated revolutions or at least symbolized them; revolutions which later came to be true on a general, social level.6

First, it is important that Vattimo links the ‘dissolution of reality’, which he analyses as the result of an intellectual—historical development closely bound to the emergence of modern mass media, to ‘aestheticization’, a key term which generally has negative connotations. The consequence of this pairing is a further revaluation and a new accentuation of the concept of aestheticization, which now appears to be the consequence of a discourse to which the formerly unquestioned concepts of a self-transparent

5 Gianni Vattimo: Die Grenzen der Wirklichkeitsauflösung, in: Vattimo, Welsch (eds.): Medien-Welten…, p. 24. 6 Vattimo: Die Grenzen…, p. 20.

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subjectivity have become questionable and the necessity of a plural interpretation of what is understood as ‘reality’ or ‘truth’ has become evident: ‘We all know more or less explicitly that the world is a “game of interpretations” and no more (we might think of Heidegger’s “mirror-play” of the world). This is what I have characterized in the title of this essay as “dissolution of reality”.’7 In relation to the phenomenon of aestheticization, and bound to this fundamental prerequisite, the crucial point of Vattimo’s argument consists in his hypothesis that the complaint about the increasing ‘aestheticization of existence’, which consists in the preference for artificial, virtual worlds at the cost of the apparently ‘real’, misses its point in a significant way. The ‘aestheticization’ denoted here as a signum of modernity responds to the catastrophic ‘Shocks’ of the wars and social transformations of the end of the nineteenth century and of the twentieth century, with a revision and destruction of ‘classical’ aesthetics by means of the unreconciled affirmation of the conflict-ridden and the dissonant, as well as of the revaluation of difference and of the singular, without hope for a synthetic ‘resolution’. This substance, which is prefigured in the art of modernity, contains ‘emblematically’ the reference to a tendency which today—in the train of the most recent media revolution, digitization— reaches its maximum spread, but which is characteristically skewed by the above-mentioned ‘predominance of the economic over aesthetics’. That is, because the ‘aestheticization of existence’ is subject to the rules and demands of the market, it lingers behind the level of reflection expressed in the art of modernity, and sacrifices its insight into the conflict-ridden nature and dissonance of existence and the perception associated with this of a regression towards a vulgarly idealistic, pseudo-classical aesthetics of reconciliation.8 The discomfort regarding the progressive ‘aestheticization of existence’ results, therefore, not from the ineluctable fact of this aestheticization itself, but rather from the frustration regarding an aestheticization which is not radical enough:

7 Ibid., p. 19. 8 The ‘Riefenstahlization’ of a certain advertisement aesthetic serves as an extreme exam-

ple, which flagrantly adapts Leni Riefenstahl’s pseudoclassical monumental aesthetics of a ‘Triumph of the Will’ (Davidoff advertisement, ‘Let me see you stripped’, music video of the group Rammstein).

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What we notice about the widespread aestheticization, and what calls for a ‘limit to the dissolution of reality’ is the absence of any kind of conflictuality. And this absence has an explanation, which we may summarize under the key term ‘demands of the market’.9

And ‘What is at stake in the “unreality” of media is not the loss of reference to reality, but rather the fact that too much reliance is given, unjustifiably, to reality.’10 This conflict between a level of reflection already attained (the aestheticization and ‘dissolution of reality’ as an effect of aesthetic modernity) and its simultaneous subversion in the mode of the most commercial gloss of contemporary mass media (predominance of the economy) contains both the justification for the above-mentioned resentment within the theoretical conception of the phenomenon of the video game and the call for a serious investigation of it. For in scarcely any other medium are both of these divergent aspects united in such an exemplary way. On the one hand, the ‘de-realizing’ models and immersive strategies of virtual reality are found nowhere in such an advanced form as they are in the medium of the video game; at the same time, however, video games are just as subject to the ‘demands of the market’ as is advertising. While advertising has been taken seriously for some years as a cultural phenomenon, a circumstance initiated not least by the semiotic analyses of Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, and is analysed correspondingly, the field of video games remains as yet largely unobserved. While, in very recent times, we may well see a tendency within the feature sections of magazines indicating a change in the public perception of the phenomenon of the video game,11 a well-founded, cultural—theoretical confrontation with this medium—one that would make a serious

9 Vattimo: Die Grenzen…, p. 22. 10 Ibid., p. 22. 11 For example, Ulrich Raulff, writing in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung: ‘In the last four decades of its existence, the video game has found many critics, but not the criticism it is due. That must now change. In the feature section of this newspaper, video games will from now on be treated as legitimate objects of criticism, no different from books, exhibitions and CDs. A series on “new games” will be a regular criticism, in which critics of technology and aesthetics will participate, as well as anthropologists and researchers into dreams and brains. “The time has come to treat play seriously”, wrote Jacques Ehrmann in 1968. This statement is more relevant now than ever. We want to give our attention to the game’ (Accessed from http://www.sueddeutsche.de/index.php?url=/kultur/themen/ 25379/index.php, 3 January 2002).

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attempt to approach its object and not immediately disqualify it as part of the marginalia of the ‘culture industry’, or satisfy itself in pointing out the influences of other media or forms of aesthetic expression—is as yet entirely missing.12 Approaches towards a critical description which aims first to tap into this medium and to accentuate it in its singularity, will therefore be demonstrated in this work. Aisthetik Versus Aesthetics An analysis which approaches the phenomenon of the video game in terms of traditional cultural studies will, however, encounter numerous clichés and redundant narrative and representational forms, which might make an engagement with video games seem, at first glance, to offer little reward. Indeed, the narrative elements of most video games make use of simple schemata, perpetuated repeatedly, which derive from the field of low-brow entertainment.13

12 Steven Poole’sTrigger Happy (London, 2000) represents one of the few attempts in the direction of a cultural—theoretical survey of the video game. The author is a specialist journalist, who inclines in large part to a more popular—theoretical apology for the video game, with the result that the theoretical approaches he draws upon in his argument are frequently referred to in simplified form. 13 A survey or at least a somewhat stable list of genres of interactive entertainment software on the basis of criteria beyond advertisement-strategic practices of characterization is missing. A step in the direction of a first survey was taken by Albert Brante in Brante: Virtuelle Welten, in: C. Schwender (ed.): Kursbuch Neue Medien 2000, Stuttgart, Munich 2000. However, the field of video games is limited to the following genres, which have been differentiated in the course of a now over-20-year-long history of the commercial video game in domestic use (for the following list I thank Kay Bennemann, MA Phil., in conversation): (1) ‘Thought and skill games’ (combination and logic games. Examples: Tetris and Dr. Mario); (2) ‘Jump and run’ (games bound by a rudimentary frame plot, in which the aim is to overcome obstacles, and in which deductive skills and dexterity are demanded of the player. Examples: Super Mario and Rayman); (3) ‘Adventure and roleplaying games’ (narrative-orientated games in which pure dexterity-based game structures are forgone in favour of immersing the player in a virtual ‘world’ which is as believable as possible. Examples: Monkey Island and Final Fantasy); (4) ‘Action games’(the content of the game is dominated by combat with virtual enemies in the frame of fight-driven, aggressive game plots. Examples: Quake and Tekken); (5) ‘Simulations’ (by far the most expansive genre. Fundamentally, these games aim at the re-creation of complex procedures which are also to be found in ‘reality’. These might be the simulation of an economic system (examples: Sim City or Railroad Tycoon); of a vehicle (examples: Flight Simulator and Gran Turismo); or of diverse types of sport (examples: PGA Tour Golf and the Fifa series). All named genres are rarely to be found in their ‘pure form’. In the main, games

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This circumstance is explained by the above-mentioned ‘demands of the market’, which voice themselves, in the case of video games, in a product policy which, on superficial examination, in orientating itself towards a young target audience makes little attempt at ‘conflictuality’, but rather, at first glance, serves more regressive and escapist tendencies. And yet this is not to take the specificities of the medium into account. References to older forms of media, and comparisons between video game and film or forms of literary narration, say very little about what is specifically new in the medium being treated. After all, a medium such as film, in its early years, was little more than a fairground attraction, against which similar prejudices were shown as are brought today against the video game. If we want to bring the medium in its singularity into view, it is necessary to find a theoretical approach which does not preoccupy the object too terminologically, and which simultaneously allows video games to be discussed as an advanced medium of ‘aestheticization’ and the ‘dissolution of reality’. Moreover, it is necessary, in turn, to take the term ‘aestheticization’ seriously and to ground it in the concept of aisthesis. An aesthetics defined as a ‘theory of perception’ (Walter Benjamin) invokes a pre-idealistic position opposed to a development which disqualifies the senses, the body and perception associated with the body in favour of discursive sense. Karlheinz Barck describes the culmination point of this development as follows: Hegels Ästhetik is the summation of this development. It raises the ideality of sense to the absolute norm against the materiality of the senses . ‘The eradication of sensuous materiality’ (Ästhetik) becomes the ruling force in the tradition of philosophical aesthetics (fixed on truth and meaning), which still takes effect today.’ The shift of the place of art from the body to the head, that is, a bodiless head, is one of our most lethal traditions. In the place of senses and their functions arrive sense and meaning. With this, perception too is de-materialized, made blind, and discriminated against.14

If it is precisely this aesthetics, in whose vulgar form the ‘aestheticization of existence’ falls behind because of the ‘demands of the market’, then a are a combination of many elements of different genres, such that a clear categorization is often difficult, if not impossible, to make. 14 Karlheinz Barck: Anstatt eines Nachwortes, in: Karlheinz Barck, Peter Gente, Heidi Paris, Stefan Richter (eds.): Aisthesis. Warhnehmung heute oder Perspektiven einer anderen Ästhetik, Leipzig 1998, p. 462.

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theoretical approach cannot start on this level either. An Aisthetik, however, which shifts the focus of its consideration from the level of sense to that of the senses , and which thus engages with the survey of the organization of perception in confrontation with a medial phenomenon, may at least escape the blind spot of an ultimately limited, purely hermeneutic content analysis. At least since Walter Benjamin, an Aisthetik which has the changes and organization of perception in view is closely coupled with a reflection on media. If it is true that ‘the manner in which the human sense perception is organized … is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well’,15 then media have a critical involvement in this organization of human sense perception. Not for nothing does Benjamin describe in his essay ‘The Artwork in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ just those historical transformations in human perception not only in the face of works of art themselves, but rather on the basis of their medial conditions in the age of photography, and particularly of film. It is not just the content transported by these media that matters here, but the methods of medially induced forms of perception which are mediated by means of montage and of technical reproducibility. A description of a medium must orientate itself towards this perspective, to avoid the risk of losing sight of its object—the medium itself. Should the narrative and aesthetic contents of the video game, as a relatively new epiphenomenon of the media-induced aestheticization and dissolution of reality, still seem so banal, the confrontation with virtual worlds and the forms of perception related to them are not. On the contrary, it is in the form of the video game that we encounter the culmination of developments which first became virulent when a multimedia system on a digital basis was made possible via the computer. All aspects of the ‘digital revolution’ are found here in concentrated form, and it will be shown in the course of this work that it is no coincidence this happens in, of all things, the form of the game. ‘Elements of an Aisthetik of the video game’ means, then, a first approximation to the medium in the mode of a survey of forms of perception and interaction, as they are experienced through the video game— and only through the video game. For this, it is first necessary to define

15 Walter Benjamin: ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Benjamin: Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn, Schocken, New York 1968, p. 222.

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more closely the medial status of the video game, because on closer consideration the video game emerges as a multimedia link within a wider multimedia system. It is worth making transparent the interdependencies between the single ‘submedia’ which are thus tied into one other in the video game, in order to be able to touch upon the ways of the specific constitution of perception. And so the last part of this chapter will dedicate itself to this purpose, by means of a description of the immersive form specific to the video game and its related ‘derealization’.

Behind the Looking Glass: The Medium of the Video Game Searching for Traces: Reflections on the Definition of Media An analysis of video games necessitates a definition of media. Without this definition, a description of the phenomenon cannot be achieved, because the fundamental conditions that make video games possible are ensured only through their status as media. The definition of media to be used here cannot, however, simply remain implicit but must, in view of the ‘new media’, be transparent to some extent, in order to make clear, at every point, on what level descriptions and arguments are taking place. The greatest difficulty is that a canonical definition of media does not exist. The literature on this topic—which Sybille Krämer has, not without justification, described as ‘labyrinthine’16 —is decidedly diverse. The disparate approaches, which range from the mathematical model of Claude E. Shannon,17 to the anthropological media conceptions of Marshall McLuhan,18 to Niklas Luhmann’s medium/form distinction,19 show that ‘medium’ as such is difficult to grasp. We may take it as given that treating the medium by means of a simple model of it as a pure transmitter channel, in the sense of a ‘sender—channel—receiver’ model, is no longer viable or rewarding. Scholarship, which has expanded since 16 Sybille Krämer: Was haben die Medien, der Computer und die Realität miteinander zu tun?, in: Krämer (ed.): Medien—Computer…, p. 9. 17 Claude E. Shannon, Warren Waever: Die Mathematischen Grundlage der Informationstheorie, Munich 1976. 18 Marshall McLuhan: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McGraw Hill, New York 1964. 19 Niklas Luhmann: Die Kunst der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt/M 1995, pp. 165–215.

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the early 1990s to become an unsurveyable mass, claims for the category ‘medium’ an ever more central role in human perception and recognition, up to the point at which it almost appears as though that category might have taken the place in the humanities formally occupied by the ‘Subject’, dethroned even before Foucault and Lacan.20 And yet some fundamental traits of a media theory must be held in place; a media theory which aligns itself towards the ontological status of the medium and which tries to push the definition of media further and to make it productive in view of the terminological challenges presented by the ‘new media’: 1. First, the medium may be distinguished by its location. This results from the term medium itself (Latin: middle) and implies that it is a mediator. This mediator may not be understood as a self-sufficient entity, but rather must be understood relationally: ‘As “mediator”, it is a relational expression, that is, not the middle itself, not the midpoint, not the center, but rather the mediator precisely in relation to something which is not the middle, and which exists on both sides of it.’21 This description is precise, because it explains an important circumstance, which appears repeatedly in the analysis of media on an argumentative level, and which can also lead to problems. It is important to recall the fact that the medium as such always remains invisible, representing the ‘blind spot in media use.’22 Descriptions of TV programmes, single formats, film genres etc. are not descriptions of the medium ‘TV’ or ‘film’: ‘We do not hear vibrations in the air, but the sound of bells; we do not read letters, but a story; we do not converse in syllables, but in opinions and convictions, and film usually lets us forget about this projection surface.’23 The analysis of a medium as a genuinely invisible mediator, whose location is a relational position without ‘substance’, prevents the pitfalls of hermeneutic analysis of content, which would lose sight of its own object. Of course, we can never work without concrete examples, but it is important to keep in sight the distinction between a medium and its ‘content’ or ‘message’. Media are no ‘substance’, no ‘thing’—they are a function. 20 Sybille Krämer, in conversation. 21 Konrad Ehlich: Medium Sprache, in: Forum Angewandte Linguistik. Vol. 34, Frank-

furt 1998, p. 10. 22 Sybille Krämer: Das Medium als Spur und als Apparat, in Krämer (ed.): Medien— Computer…, p. 74. 23 Ibid., p. 74.

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2. Without what is said above, McLuhan’s famous formula ‘the medium is the message’ would not be comprehensible: ‘This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the “content” of a medium is always another medium.’24 This sentence may only be understood on the level of the ‘pure’ medium; only then does it lose its seeming paradox. The sound film functions as a multimedia system of gramophone and photography; television as a system of film and radio25 ; the video game as a system of film, writing and sound; and general storage and visual media on the basis of a further multimedia system, the computer. On this level, the medium gains a more distinct outline, because it can be described in its interdependency with other media, opening up the possibility of defining more closely the specificities of whichever medium is being treated. One medium cannot be led back to another, in order to make judgements on the basis of differences. Because there is no ‘original medium’ to which all others lead back, the difficulty lies in the logical problems of autopoietic systems. Not for nothing does Niklas Luhmann’s definition of media, whose basis is the distinction of medium and form, represent the starting point for a classification of singular media which come into effect within the video game. There will be more to say on the relevance of the medium/form difference. 3. Points one and two now serve to take up a further important characteristic of the medium, on the basis of which an aisthetic approach is legitimized. If, on the basis of the genuine invisibility and the complex interdependencies of media, the actual ‘message’ in question must be abstracted, then following this, it can also be seen that the medium in its function as mediator constitutes the respective ‘transported’ object in specific ways. Media are not neutral mediators of their object, transferring only their own respective ‘message’ as such. In a large part of the scholarship, the assumption arises that media articulate or even constitute their respective ‘contents’ in a specific way: ‘In the diversity of the research relating to media, one common denominator takes shape: the conviction that media do not only serve the transfer of messages, but must instead, further, in some way participate in the content of the message.’26 This assumption is decisive for an aisthetic approach, because here it becomes a little more

24 McLuhan: Understanding Media… 25 See Friedrich Kittler: Grammaphon—Film—Typewriter, Berlin 1986. 26 Krämer: Das Medium…, p. 73.

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transparent how we can imagine a media-historically conditioned transformation of forms of perception. If it is true that media can change or even constitute forms of perception, then the question is how this can happen without regard for their content, particularly as the medium constantly withdraws from direct view as the ‘blind spot in media use’. This constant withdrawal of the medium as such can have nothing to do with its intended ‘message’. The medium evades not only the recipient but also the producer of media contents; that is to say, the medium is just as much a participant in the ‘content of the messages’ because it is invisible, unintended.27 Only in this way can such deeply ripening changes as are initiated through, for example, the introduction of phonetic script28 or the printing press,29 happen at almost a subconscious level. The moment at which the medium withdraws from observation is significant and must therefore be considered more closely. In her essay ‘Das Medium als Spur und als Apparat’ (‘The Medium as Trace and as Apparatus’), Sybille Krämer develops, in an investigation of McLuhan’s and Luhmann’s media theories, an attempt at precision, starting from this neuralgic point. Krämer describes a definition of media which, in setting itself against the concept of signs which she also sees to be at work in Luhmann’s medium/form distinction, describes the ‘impact force’ (Prägekraft ) of a medium as ‘trace’: With the medial dimensions of sign processes—and there is no sign without a medium—something comes into view which does not straightforwardly fulfil this schema of agreed-upon sign-meanings: the impact force of a medium—and this is the decisive assumption here—unfolds in the dimension of a significance beyond the structures of conventionalized semantics. And it is the materiality of the medium which provides the foundation for this ‘surplus’ of sense, for this ‘added value’ in meaning, which is in no way intended by the users of signs and which is not subject to their control. By

27 When talking here and in what follows about ‘unintentionality’, this must be understood in the context of processes of signs that are characterized by arbitrariness, and thus with conventionality and intentionality. To speak in a Husserlian sense of ‘unintentionality’ would be meaningless, because intentionality represents here a non-investigable fundamental condition of every kind of directedness towards the world. 28 See Jack Goody, Ian Watt, Kathleen Gough: Entstehung und Folgen der Schriftkultur, Frankfurt/M 1996. 29 See Marshall McLuhan: The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Toronto 1962.

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virtue of the strength of their medial materiality, the signs say more than their respective users mean.30

This ‘dimension of a significance beyond the structures of conventionalized semantics’ is now the medium as trace, whose ‘medial materiality’ is now the significant factor. The medium as trace differentiates itself from the sign through its unintentionality, which withdraws from intended and conventionalized sign use and thus also media use: Even traces are interpreted, but they are seen as a pre-discursive, as a pre-semantic phenomenon: traces do not tell us something, but show us something. Above all, however: that which they show must have emerged incidentally, and thus unintentionally—otherwise we would not be dealing with a trace, but rather with a sign, consciously staged as a trace.31

Here, the concept of the unconscious is applied to the definition of media, a perspective which only becomes problematic when the unconscious is too strongly anthropomorphized.32 Though sketched alongside the Freudian conception of the unconscious,33 what is intended here is an analogy to the structure of the unconscious. Significant are attributes such as ‘unintended’, ‘incidental’ and ‘prediscursive’, which indicate a level of meaning that for its part largely withdraws from the grasp of discursive understanding. Should it be a question of a level of meaning, this ‘added value’ which is expressed in the impact force of the medium, must, however, remain discursively recoverable. And it is precisely here that the analogy to Freud’s unconscious works, which remains—though in a distorted

30 Krämer: Das Medium…, pp. 78–79. 31 Ibid., p. 79. 32 It is not only possible with Jacques Lacan to conceive of the unconscious as being independent of the subject. See Jacques Lacan: Seminar on the Purloined Letter, in Lacan: Écrits, trans. by Bruce Fink, in collaboration with Heloise Fink and Russel Grigg (New York, London: W. W. Norton, 2002–2006); otherwise, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guatarri: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, I, London 1977; summarizing—Henning Schmidgen: Das Unbewußte der Maschinen. Konzeptionen des Psychischen bei Guattari, Deleuze und Lacan, Munich 1997; and Friedrich Kittler: The World of the Symbolic—A World of the Machine, in: Literature, Media, Information Systems, ed. by John Johnston, Amsterdam 1997. 33 Krämer: Das Medium…, pp. 80ff.

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way—legible: ‘This aspect of the trace, to have a meaning which is interpretable, yet without having been intended by its author, played a role when Sigmund Freud discovered at the turn of the century that in speaking, more happens than is intended in any intended statement.’34 The crucial point within this conception of the medium as a trace is that in the definition of the trace, the ambivalence of the medium’s simultaneous insistence and withdrawal is held steady. For one thing, the trace is in reality only interpretable when it loses its ephemeral status of the ‘prediscursive’. Were this not the case, the trace could not be interpreted, could not be read. To be interpretable, it must take on the character of a sign for the interpreter, even if only as the symptom of the absent being to have left the trace behind. At the same time, however, the insubstantial nature, the unintended moment of the medial status is held in place, as the trace as such does not say but rather shows. This ‘showing-itself’ oscillates between a withdrawal in the mode of the prediscursive, and discursive readability in the mode of interpretability, without, however, ever letting itself fully be grasped. Through its insistence, a consideration of the medium cannot, however, be subdued in the assumption of the medium’s general unrecognizability. At this point, an aisthetic method of consideration sets in, one which attempts, within a shift of stress in favour of the ‘medial materiality’ of a phenomenon, not to privilege the discursive elements of the medium at the cost of its prediscursive dimension. Of course, both levels may not, because of their tight intertwining, be considered in isolation from one another. The separation between prediscursive and discursive levels or, as in point 4 below, of apparatus and instrument, remains analytical. The relationship of this thought figure with Heidegger’s definition of truth in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ can only be hinted at here, and not described closely and fully. A brief indication may, however, help to contour more distinctly the ambivalent structure of the medium as trace. Heidegger speaks in his ‘Work of Art’ essay of the essence of truth that is attained in the artwork, as a ‘concealing unconcealment’: The essence of truth, i.e., unconcealment, is ruled throughout by a denial. This denial is, however, neither a defect nor a fault—as if truth were a pure unconcealment that has rid itself of everything concealed. If truth could accomplish this it would no longer be itself. Denial, by way of the 34 Ibid., p. 79.

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twofold concealing, belongs to the essence of truth as unconcealment. Truth, in its essence, is un-truth. We put it this way emphatically to indicate, with a perhaps off-putting directness, that refusal in the mode of concealing is intrinsic to unconcealment as clearing.35

At this point, only the concept of the ‘concealing unconcealment’ is important, a thought figure which describes the ambivalence and changing nature of what it brings into view, without halting the constant ‘tipping’ of one area into the other in the favour of the one area or the other, and thus robbing it of its dynamic. It is worth emphasizing, too, that both here and in the figure of the medium as trace, both sides of the prediscursive and the conceptually ascertainable fundamentally belong together and, as paired phenomena, forcefully exclude intentionality. As little as truth (and with it the ‘being’ and the occurrence of truth in the artwork) can simply rid itself of concealment for Heidegger, in order to become pure alétheia, ‘unconcealment’ in Heidegger’s translation, just as little can the medium as trace rid itself of its unintentionality and its prediscursive nature, without disappearing as such. For truth without concealment is no longer truth, and the medium as trace without unintentionality is no longer a trace, but a conventional sign. 4. What has been said up to this point must now be put into a perspective in which it is possible to differentiate media from pure instruments and tools. To describe a medium such as the telephone as a ‘method of communication’ means to understand it as a tool, as the means to an end. On this level it is difficult to see what insight can be wrought from asking to what extent the relevance of an aisthetics of the ‘new media’ can be justified, if the subject acts towards the medium as if towards a tool—particularly because, regarding the medium of the video game, this ‘tool-like’ aspect is no longer visible. How should such a tool influence forms of perception when it is only made for a particular purpose and can only be understood in the context of its functionality? Again, Sybille Krämer helps with the differentiation of ‘instrument’ and ‘apparatus’. In contrast to the pure instrument as tool—where under ‘tool’ we understand not just technical artefacts but also symbolic

35 Martin Heidegger: The Origin of the Work of Art, in Heidegger: Off the Beaten Track, Cambridge 2002, p. 31.

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‘thought-things’,36 as represented by calculations or formal languages— Krämer defines technical media, as are found in the case of the video game, simultaneously as ‘apparata’. What fundamentally differentiates the apparatus from the instrument is the phenomenon of immersion (immersio, Latin, diving in, diving under), which takes place in the medium as apparatus. The content, the ‘message’ of a medium is ‘immersed’ in this medium37 and is linked inseparably with it, which at the same time means that this content can probably be translated into other media, but cannot appear entirely without a medium. Thus, if this content were not available by means of media, then it would not be available at all: ‘The productive significance of media technologies is not an increase in performance, but the creation of worlds.’38 It is important that technical media are also always ‘instruments’, or at least can be—hence a medium differentiates itself from a pure instrument through the addition of the ‘apparatus aspect’ and vice versa. The weighting between the apparatus aspect and the instrument aspect is different in every case. There is no ontologically clean separation to be made here, only certain mixed relationships which can be useful to the profiling of a medium in each context. Thus the apparatus character of a hammer retreats noticeably behind its tool character, yet without being entirely obscured, even if a greater theoretical effort would be needed in order to determine more closely its apparatus character. The situation is reversed in the case of the medium of the video game, whose ‘world-creating’ character is programmatic, while a definition of its tool character would be somewhat more difficult. Here it becomes clear why a media-theoretical consideration finds a fruitful field of investigation in the medium of the video game. In the video game, the tool character of its diverse submedia (storage and transmission media) retreat into the background in the mode of the game, in a way that allows the apparatus character to be an end in itself. The elements of a media theory described imply a far-reaching definition of media. And, in fact, it appears as though an entry to reality without medial mediation would no longer be thinkable, and the argument would result in ‘media constructivism’. If not only storage and communicative

36 Krämer: Das Medium…, p. 84. 37 Ibid., p. 83. 38 Ibid., p. 85.

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media can be understood as media, but also light and sound, then a field of perception without media can no longer be imagined. The risk here is in universalizing the definition of media, making it no longer functional, because too many phenomena would be subsumed beneath it. But it is easy to avoid this misunderstanding. That there can be no access to reality without the intervention of media does not necessarily mean that there is no reality independent of media. The reality outside of medial approaches (the Lacanian ‘Real’), that reality which cannot be grasped by media, is only beyond our capacity for experience, being thus outside our capacity for observation: From the internal link of mediality and reality, it does not follow that all reality is in essence a medial construction. It follows simply that something like reality is accessible to us or to anybody through medial constructions. Reality is not given as a medial construction, but simply by virtue of medial construction.39

This crucially important differentiation leads to the concept of ‘realistic constructivism’ suggested by Martin Seel,40 which incorporates Luhmann’s medium/form distinction, but anchors a reference point in the assumption of an ‘outside’, even one that is only intuitively plausible, and however it might be expressed, an assumption that avoids falling into a postmodern rhetoric of disappearance and de-realization41 while simultaneously saving the achievements and the level of abstraction of the constructivist fundamental assumptions of Luhmann. Luhmann’s description of media by means of the medium/form distinction has enormous heuristic advantages, because this model is abstract enough to serve as a theoretical tool for the differentiation of media and the description of their interdependencies without falling back on form/content dialectics. The medium/form distinction differentiates itself from this kind of ontological42 difference by displacing the standpoint of the observer and

39 Martin Seel: Medien der Realität und Realität der Medien, in: Krämer (ed.): Medien—Computer…, p. 255. 40 Ibid., p. 255. 41 See, for example: Jean Baudrillard: Videowelt und fraktales Subjekt, in: Ars Electronica

(ed.): Philosophien…, Berlin 1989; Baudrillard: The Agony of Power, 2010; Paul Virilio: Ästhetik des Verschwindens, Berlin 1986. 42 Luhmann: Die Kunst …, p. 166.

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thus opening up a more abstract level. Media are understood by Luhmann as a mass of ‘loosely coupled elements’, inside which forms combine themselves in ‘tight pairings’.43 Luhmann himself uses as an analogy ‘the metaphor of wax … on which inscriptions are possible and which cannot be erased’,44 which, however, distorts too greatly the important moment of unintentionality. The relationship of medium and form becomes more precisely tangible as loose and solid pairings of elements in the image of the trace: The medium is characterized by a loose coupling between elements (which can be considered practically independent from one another) and affords no internal resistance against the implementation of forms from outside. The forms ‘thicken’ on their side the connections between elements of the medium in rigid pairings, which are perceived … The trace of a foot in the sand implements, for example, a more rigid pairing between grains of sand, to which they offer no resistance (because they show no strong connection to one another).45

The medium itself is ‘formless’, a circumstance that has appeared elsewhere already, in the discussion concerning the genuine invisibility of the medium (Point 1). Certainly, the elements that constitute a medium consist themselves of forms that have ‘formed’ within other media. This is the point of the statement that the content of a medium is always another medium (Point 2). Within this strict pairing of medium and form, which behave towards one another as two sides of a coin, it becomes clear what an important role the medium has as constituent for the perception of form. While only the ‘rigid pairings’ of forms can be perceived, they are unthinkable without the elements of the medium of which they consist, and by which they are causally conditioned. These elements, however, fall out of perception and thus form the ‘blind spot in media use’ (Point 3). Significant, then, is only the standpoint of the observer and the observer’s ‘differentiation, which makes a difference’, which is to say, what is form and what is medium in a phenomenon cannot be held ontologically apart 43 Ibid., pp. 167ff. 44 Ibid., p. 166. 45 Claudio Baraldi, Giancarlo Corsi, Elena Esposito: GLU. Glossar zu Niklas Luhmanns Theorie sozialer Systeme, Frankfurt/M 1998, p. 59.

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from one another, like ‘form’ and ‘content’ in the classical sense, but rather is coupled to the interests of the observer and is thus relative: There are no last elements out of which the elements of all other media and forms and their possible forms would be formed. Every difference, even every supposed ‘last’ difference, takes place in a space of differences which cannot at the same time be object of this difference. On the other hand, the reciprocal dependence of medium and form is re-instated here. Media are media for forms, forms are forms in media.46

With this conceptual set of instruments in place, it is now possible to differentiate the medium of the video game in its medial status and to bring its apparatus character into view (Point 4). It is now much easier to hold the levels separate from one another in order to be able to observe the medium itself in passage through its forms (single games). For this, the video game must first be examined as form, constituted within other media (computer, digital image, game) in order for it to be examined, on the basis of these predispositions, as a medium itself. The Media of the Video Game 1: The Magic of the Symbolic. The Computer as a Universal Discrete Machine Code is everything I thought poetry was, back when we were in school. Clean, expressive, urgent, all-encompassing. Fourteen lines can open up to fill the available universe. Different kind of sonnet, though, right? Different rhyme scheme? I don’t know. Sometimes you gotta wonder.47

Binary Code: A New Media Standard Alan Turing’s data processing machine on the basis of an endless paper strip and a write/read head arrived on Nietzschean ‘pigeon feet’ in the sense that, at the time of the publication of Turing’s dissertation in the

46 Seel: Medien der Realität …, p. 247. 47 Richard Powers: Plowing the Dark, 2011, p. 7.

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year 1937,48 it was scarcely conceivable what a lasting influence this discovery would have on media history. Despite the inconspicuousness of his theoretical construct, Turing’s ‘Universal Discrete Machine’ nevertheless forms nothing less than an end-point of a media history which found its beginnings with the discovery of the first written languages and, with Turing’s ‘small’ discovery, reached an end. This ‘end’ does not, of course, signify the disappearance of these media themselves, but rather their transformation into the mode of digital technology: Digital technology functions like an alphabet but on a numerical basis. It replaces the continuous functions into which the analogue media transform input data, which are generally also continuous, with discrete scannings at points in time as equidistant as possible, in the same way that the 24 film exposures per second, or at a much higher frequency since the Nipkow screen television did before. This measurement, followed by evaluation in the binary number system, is the precondition for a general media standard.49

What makes the computer, as the realization of the Turing machine, into an agent of a media-historical epochal threshold,50 is this last point, the evaluation of input data in the binary numerical system. Binary code is the symbolic system which, in its simplicity of the in/out, 0 and 1, reaches the highest degree of abstraction of symbolic codification. It is therefore capable of dissolving the leading medium of the alphabetic code based on letters by redeeming something on an unexpectedly profane level; something which, in the dreams of Cabbalistic magic and language mysticism, was formally given to the alphabetically coded Symbolic: the capacity to create a world, and in a thoroughly literal way. The achievement of binary code as a condition for the possibility of computers and software consists not only in its speed and immense storage capacity but above all in its capacity to create data, and in a way that is fundamentally different from analogue media. While data in technological conversion and storage media such as film, audiotape or television

48 Alan M. Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, 1936. 49 Friedrich Kittler: History of Communication Media. CTheory, 30 July 1996. Online at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=45. 50 Ibid.

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always remain reliant on a process of inscription within the medium, in the form of physical traces—think of the chemical impressions of light relations in photography—in the passage of binary code, these traces are entirely eliminated. A digitized image on a computer screen has nothing in common with its predecessor on a technological level, while at the same time, the optically perceivable differences between a photograph and its digital pendant tend towards null. What was formally a physical or chemical impression is now, in the medium of binary code, transformed into an endless number of tiny points, which, in contrast to a traditional photograph, allow themselves to be manipulated and changed on every arbitrary micro-level. Immersed in the invisible medium of binary code, the ontological status of digitally stored data is transformed fundamentally in contrast to analogue media, and with far-reaching consequences: The general digitization of channels and information erases the differences among individual media. Sound and image, voice and text are reduced to surface effects, known to consumers as interface. Sense and the senses turn into eyewash. Their media-produced glamor will survive for an interim as a by-product of strategic programs. Inside the computers themselves everything becomes a number: quantity without image, sound, or voice. And once optical fiber networks turn formerly distinct data flows into a standardized series of digitized numbers, any medium can be translated into any other. With numbers, anything goes. Modulation, transformation, synchronization; delay, storage, transposition; scrambling, scanning, mapping—a total media link on a digital base will erase the very concept of medium.51

In his characteristically trenchant style, Friedrich Kittler describes here a fundamental phenomenon of digitization whose importance can hardly be over-emphasized. The ‘total media link on a digital base’ does not erase the concept of medium itself, but rather transforms the media immersed within this media link in a way which is of central importance for the field of ‘virtual reality’ and thus also for the video game. A Mechanical Unconscious The ontological status of the submedia at work in the medium of the computer changes to that of a surface effect. Through digitization, the

51 Kittler: Grammophone—Film…, trans. by Dorothea von Mücke, p. 102.

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last remains of physical referentiality, the final trace of the Real, is driven out of technological communication media. This digital ‘exorcism’ leads these media into the field of the Symbolic, leaving no remains. Regardless of the observational point we take, referentiality can be formulated only within a semiotic terminology in the medium of binary code. For while, for example, photography and analogue sound recordings still carry a trace of the real in the form of opto-chemical or magnetic ‘imprints’ of the recorded object, and are only semiotic phenomena on a secondary level, digital photographs or ‘sampled’ sound recordings represent purely semiotic phenomena. The ‘material’, the elements from which these are made inside the computer, belongs to the field of the Symbolic—in the form of the binary code—just as much as their ‘content’, which remains legible in a conventional, interpretable way. Only thus is it possible for one medium ‘to pass into another’ without interruption. What is meant here is the technological foundation on the basis of which an overused term such as ‘multimedia’ can begin to make any kind of sense. Conventional media boundaries are suspended as formerly incompatible analogue media now constitute themselves as forms in the medium’s binary code, and show themselves thus to be rigid pairings within the same elements. Precisely this is indicated when speaking of the ‘universality’ of the medium of the computer. Significant here is that, in contrast to the analogue translation of one medium into another, the normal perceptual integrity of the singular media remains apparently intact for the receiver. That is to say, through the ‘universality’ of the medium of the computer on the basis of binary code, the ‘impact strength’ of any digitized media is retained. And yet it is in precisely this illusion that the specifically subtle impact of the computer comes to expression. What is ‘discrete’ in this medium consists in the imperceptible transfer from the analogue medium to its simulation, in the medium of computer. An important point concerning the medium of the computer consists in the fact that, while the ontological status of the forms constituted in the medium of binary code has changed significantly, these changes remain entirely hidden from our perception. On the level of perception, our acoustic experience of an old gramophone recording differentiates itself in no way from a digitized ‘sampled’ recording of the same thing. A digitized film sequence simulates film without its audience being aware of the difference because, at the level of perception, no difference can be perceived—so long as, of course, the technological conditions of the hardware permit adequate playback. Only through image errors specific

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to the computer, such as so-called compression artefacts, does the actual medium reveal itself in the form of an error, as it disturbs the illusion of simulation, draws attention to the digital status of the respective medium in the computer itself, and thus brings something like a leftover referentiality into view. Closely considered, every level on which the ‘user’ interacts with the computer today consists of such ‘superficial effects’, as the level of the binary or mechanical language is itself submerged in the medium’s ‘unconscious’, and accessible only to a special caste: that of the information technician. The term ‘unconscious’ should not be understood here in its strict sense, but rather must crucially symbolize the circumstance that the program-level is separated from the diverse interfaces with which the ‘user’ interacts by a hierarchical sequence of interim bodies. The Symbolic of the pure binary code itself withdraws from any direct access. The interaction takes place over a sequence of interfaces located at different proximities to the mechanical level. From the very proximate ‘machine language’, the mastery of which is entrusted to only a very few specialists across the whole world, to the various programmer languages such as C+ or BASIC, and to the ‘tools’ of named user programs such as Photoshop, it becomes steadily less and less important for the ‘user’ even to know the actual program level at all in order to use the computer. The introduction of graphic user interfaces through the ‘Lisa’ computer from the Apple company in the mid-1980s, and its commercially more successful successors, particularly Microsoft’s Windows interface, signifies the last step away from the actual machine level so far, thus from the direct influence on the hardware by means of binary code: ‘The higher and more effortless the programming languages, the more insurmountable the gap between those languages and a hardware that still continues to do all of the work.’52 In order to make use of a computer, today’s ‘user’ does not need to understand, even on a rudimentary level, what is going on in the interior of this now most discrete machine. On the one hand, this makes user-friendliness the foundation for the mass use of the computer, while, on the other, it makes a user-directed control of the computer impossible. On the level of hardware, the introduction of the ‘protected mode’ by the current leading producer of microprocessors, Intel, flanking the beginning of the 90s, signified a partitioning-off 52 Friedrich Kittler: Protected Mode, in Kittler: Literature, Media, Information Systems, ed. by John Johnston, Routledge 2013, p. 158.

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of the machine level from the ‘user’, who is now no longer given even the possibility of direct access at the level of hardware.53 Given the depth of the gap between ‘user’ and machine, it appears to be necessary for hardware manufacturers to protect the machines from their users. A machine of such high complexity that a direct interference on the part of the ‘user’ is not only no longer desired but is even seen as potentially dangerous, cannot, of course, entrust its own reproduction and further development to its ‘wetware’54 : ‘For the hardware complexity of such microprocessors simply discards manual design techniques; in order to lay out the next computer generation, the engineers, instead of filling out uncountable meters of blueprint paper, have recourse to Computer Aided Design, that is, to the geometrical or autorouting powers of the actual generation.’55 The more the machine level is uncoupled from the ‘user’, then, the more the computer reaches the status of a mass medium, precisely because the ‘user’ must deal less and less with the highly complex machine level and can give him/herself over to the comfort of user-friendly interface effects, ‘in the indifference of his ignorance—hanging in dreams, as it were, upon the back of a tiger’.56 This work deals with a form of this artificial dreaming, for all forms of computer-induced ‘virtual reality’, including video games, derive their fascination not least from the circumstances that are, in a strict sense, the ‘magical’ emanations of the ‘universal’ and discrete medium of binary code. Cabbalistic Emanations: Digital Technology and Magical Practice It is therefore not surprising that the topoi of a noticeably large number of video games take up a theme like ‘magic’, or even the concrete creation of artificial homunculi and golems. Since the appearance of Mail Order Monsters (Electronic Arts/C-64), in the mid-1980s,57 about the 53 Ibid., p. 217. 54 ‘Wetware’ is an ironic term indicating the human user, in relation to ‘hardware’ and

‘software’. 55 Friedrich Kittler: There Is No Software. CTheory. Online at http://www.ctheory.net/ articles.aspx?id=74. 56 Friedrich Nietzsche: On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense, in Nietzsche: Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, Boston 2017, p. 62. 57 In what follows, after every title of a video game cited, the publisher of the respective game, and the platforms on which it was first published, will be named in parentheses.

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creation and ‘training’ of monsters, which are ‘bred’ by many players and can be sent into battle against one another in the mode of an early form of ‘multiplayer game’, the creation and breeding of magical creatures, as well as their conjuration, has been common stock of diverse game genres. In Alice (Electronic Arts/PC), the female protagonist has a special weapon at her disposal, named ‘Devil Dice’, which, when used in battle, releases a virtual demon to assist the heroine, but, if no villains are available to attack, can also turn against the player-controlled character. In the Final Fantasy series (Square/diverse systems), which has published a million copies every year internationally, the playable characters, the ‘Summoners’, have played an increasingly important role since the third part of the series.58 The trivial mythologies surrounding the summoning beings, with names such as ‘Shiva’, ‘Gilgamesh’ and ‘Odin’, often play a significant role on the narrative level of these video games, which belong to the genre of ‘roleplay’. In the Japanese roleplaying game Persona (Atlus/Playstation) and its successor Persona 2: Eternal Punishment (Atlus/Playstation), these virtual creatures are even described as emanations of the self, which, embodying psychic aspects of the play characters, can take richly varying forms. In Diablo II (Blizzard/PC), the character class of the ‘Summoner’ is even accompanied by living golems and undead beings.59 The phenomenon of the Pokemon games (Nintendo/Gameboy, N64), however, is one of the most astounding mass phenomena here, for the whole game content consists of the hunting, collection and training of diverse classes of monster.60 58 Excerpt from the handbook of Final Fantasy X (Square/PS2): ‘Aeons [the name of the summoned creatures in this game, M.R.] are divine creatures that only answer the call of a true Summoner. Each Aeon protects its master with unique powers and characteristics. Aeons grow stronger as their summoners do.’ 59 Excerpt from the handbook to Diablo II ; description of the summoning spell ‘Clay

Golem’: ‘While it is fairly simple for a Necromancer to animate dead tissue, it is another matter entirely to instill the spark of life into inanimate objects. The Clay Golem is the simplest form of this complex art, creating a servant directly from the earth to serve the Necromancer. The intense drain this places on the psyche of the caster only allows him to maintain a single Golem of any type at a time. Effect: Raises a Golem from the earth to fight for you.’ 60 A particularly elaborate form of these virtual creatures is represented by those creatures that play a key role in Black & White (Electronic Arts/PC). In this game, the player may choose from a selection of creatures resembling enormous tigers, tortoises or apes, and which can be raised by the player like virtual pets. Worth mentioning here is the extremely sophisticated ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) of these creatures, which are no longer

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The vast majority of the contents of contemporary video games indeed derive from the pool of fantasy.61 Whether as ‘science-fiction’, ‘fantasy’ or classic ‘horror’; the ‘Irrational’ articulated in fantasy experiences, in the form of the virtual bestiary, experiences an unexpected renaissance in that medium which counts as the technical summit of modern rationality since Leibniz: the computer. With a good dose of cultural pessimism, we might take this as a poignant example that ‘The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression’.62 To consider it more soberly, however, what is reflected in this amassing of homunculi, monsters and golems is only the fascination with the way in which binary code is in the position to let (symbolic) worlds arise from it. Not only are analogue media seamlessly translatable into this code, but this ‘numerical alphabet’ forms originary media contents that were formerly simply not possible. Within the ‘black box’ of the computer, columns of numbers come to life, for every form of virtual reality in the medium of the computer is the emanation of the combinations and permutations of this ‘numerical alphabet’. And yet the conception of a symbolic code with the power to create worlds from itself is nothing new. The tradition of Cabbalistic magical practice, closely related to the legend of the golem, is linked to the book Sefer Jezira (Book of Creation) and its concept of the magical power of the Hebrew alphabet. In this tradition, the power to breathe life into things is attributed to these letters, by means of their combination and variation according to particular rules: ‘These letters are the actual structural elements, the stones out of which the structure of creation is founded.’63 And: ‘The letters of the alphabet, and moreover those of the name of God, or of the whole Tora, which was the instrument of God

directed by the player but, rather, react independently of the behaviour of the player, in accordance with complex algorithms. It is noticeable how life-like these creatures can appear. They are not simply virtual recipients of orders, but behave (seemingly) according to their own whims and can also act against the player’s attempts to train them (which is, in practice, more the rule than the exception). 61 An exception here is formed only by certain areas of the simulation genre, like sports

games or vehicle simulations. The subjects of the diverse forms of adventure, role play, action games or jump and runs can be relegated almost entirely to the field of fantasy, even if it is frequently in a very simplified form. 62 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. by Edmund Jephcott, Stanford 2002, p. 28. 63 Gershom Scholen: The Idea of the Golem.

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during Creation, have secret, magical powers. The initiated knows how to use them.’64 Similar to the purely electric circulation in the circuits of computer hardware, the golem itself is first of all only the ‘unshaped, formless’, that is, ‘material, formless hyle’.65 Only through a magical ritual—or the work of programmers—does this ‘formless hyle’ waken to life, as the ‘initiated’ ‘animates’ the golem by means of the correct combinations of letters, and the programmer—the ‘initiated’ of our time— ‘forms’ program routines from the ‘numeric alphabet’ of his symbolic medium, which then create virtual objects which can, in turn, act autonomously. Just as the animated golem represents a fragile shape which, when not observing the strict combination rules of the Hebrew alphabet, can escape the influence of its creator and run amok, the smallest mistake in programming the ‘villain intelligence’ in a game such as Half-Life (Sierra/PC, PS2) can make these virtual characters go haywire and destroy the coherence of the game. The homunculi, consisting of polygons or two-dimensional ‘bitmaps’, and populating video games in their thousands, are just as much emanations of a Symbolic as the golem is of the Cabbalistic tradition. The question concerning whether the objects created in this manner are ‘real’ or fictitious is ignored. What is significant is the idea of a medium which possesses not just mediating characteristics, but also the characteristics of constituting, on a fundamental level.66 What shows itself to be ‘worldcreating’, in the medium of binary code as much as in the Cabbalistic conception of the Hebrew alphabet, is finally no more and no less than ‘the semiotic dream of proper names being immediately linked to their referent’67 ; that is, the dream of the identity of signifier with signified. Nothing other than this is meant by ‘magic’: ‘Originally referring to the archaic field of exclusive occult practices, the term “magic” signifies the form of the realization of a power which can take unmediated effect in

64 Ibid., p. 219. 65 Scholem: The Idea of the Golem, p. 212. 66 An idea whose perhaps most subtle form Walter Benjamin worked out in his concep-

tion of ‘Sprachmagie’. See: Walter Benjamin: On Language Itself and on the Language of Man, in Bullock, Jennings (eds.): Selected Writings, Vol. 1, Cambridge, MA and London 1996; and Winfried Menninghaus: Walter Benjamins Theorie der Sprachmagie, Frankfurt/M 1995. 67 Umberto Eco: Mirrors, in: Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Indiana UP 1984, p. 212.

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reality, that is, which is to be understood without the relation between ends and means of technological reason.’68 In the Symbolic of binary code, the instrumentality of a medial relationship between ends and means in conventional language is dissolved. The columns of numbers of a program routine that is responsible, for example, for the ‘rendering’ of a polygonal 3D environment on the computer screen, do not signify these graphics, they are the graphics, in the moment of their realization on the screen. Semantics come together with the realization, because the ‘numeric alphabet’ of binary code is not a language, but a Symbolic, which derives its ‘effective power’ from the fact that it is directly executable: The reason is that only .COM and .EXE files entertain a strange relation to their proper name. At the one hand, they bear grandiloquent names such as WordPerfect, on the other hand, they bear a more or less cryptic (because non-vocalized) acronym such as WP. The full name, alas, serves only the advertising strategies of software manufacturers, since DOS as a microprocessor operating system could never read file names longer than eight letters. That is why the unpronounceable acronym WP, this posthistoric revocation of a fundamental Greek innovation, is not only necessary, but amply sufficient for postmodern wordprocessing. In fact, it seems to bring back truly magical power; WP does what it says. Executable computer files encompass, by contrast not only to ‘WordPerfect’ but also to the big, empty old European words such as ‘mind’ or ‘Word’, all the old routines and data necessary to their self-constitution. Surely, tapping the letter sequence of ‘W’, ‘P’ and ‘enter’ on an AT keyboard does not make the Word perfect, but this simple writing act starts the actual execution of WordPerfect. Such are the triumphs of software.69

68 Mennighaus: Walter Benjamins …, p. 17. 69 Kittler: There Is No… Independently of Kittler, Jay David Bolter arrived at the same

result, this time on the example of graphic user interfaces: ‘Electronic icons realize what magic signs in the past could only suggest, for electronic icons are functioning representations in computer writing.’ In Jay David Bolter: Writing Space. The Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing, Hillsdale, NJ/London 1991, p. 26.

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Kittler only misses the fact that this ‘magical power’ introduced to the alphabet is not in fact as new as he claims. As shown above, the conception of a symbolic that ‘does what it says’ is present in the Cabbalistic tradition, whereby the relationship here becomes even more noticeable when we consider that the Hebrew alphabet also contains no vowels, and the influential name of God, the so-called Tetragrammaton JHWH —structurally at least—represents a similarly ‘magical’ acronym such as WP. ‘Postmodern writing’ thus becomes a premodern, magical practice. A Symbolic which is identical with itself on this described level, like binary code, thus thwarts the effect of ‘loss of reality’70 attributed to it in the age of digitization, because it introduces, in an unpredicted way, elements of Western metaphysics believed to have been destroyed and, for example, quickly negates, for example, the thesis of the arbitrariness of the sign. The Lieblingskind of post-modern media reflection proves itself, then, as archaic: the dialectics of Enlightenment. No surprise, then, that video games unleash those monsters, homunculi and golems, as hallucinated epiphenomena of a machine language sunken within a mechanical ‘unconscious’; creatures which reflect, across the tour of the fantastic, the profane—magical status of the medium for which they must thank their existence. The fascination of computerinduced ‘superficial effects’ results, then, from the circumstance that, in contrast to the confusing imponderables of real worlds, the elements of a virtual reality ‘do what they say’. Within virtual worlds, everything is symbolic, everything has ‘sense’, as chaotic and as threatening as the actual contents of a video game might be. In this way, the medium of the computer signifies, for the form of the video game constituted within it, not just the hardware prerequisite, but rather also a reservoir of certain topoi which decisively inflect video games. What this chapter should prove is that what is in question here is, above all, the reflections of the genuinely ‘magical’ status of the medium, which are repeated in the form of explicitly ‘magical’ game contents on the level of ‘surface effects’ of concrete video games.

70 See Sect. 1.2.

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The Media of the Video Game 2: Mirror Games. The Digital Image Between the Symbolic and the Imaginary I am led, therefore, to regard the function of the mirror-stage as a particular case of the function of the imago, which is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality—or, as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt. Jacques Lacan71 Oh, Kitty! how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it! Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it somehow, Kitty. Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Lewis Carroll72

The discrete medium of the computer today allows, as we have seen, an interaction only via surface effects. The primary surface by which the user—or in this case the player of video games—comes into contact with the medium is the screen; that is, the level of the digital image. Only on this level does the interaction between human and machine occur, because despite all of our fantasies about data suits, VR glasses and cybersex, the screen remains the medium that forms the most important threshold between ‘wetware’ and hardware. Within the relationship of hardware and wetware, the traditional relationship between the Imaginary and the Symbolic is at first reversed, because of the specific characteristics of the medium of the computer. When memories return in the form of pictures our task is in general easier than when they return as thoughts. Hysterical patients, who are as a rule of a ‘visual’ type, do not make such difficulties for the analyst as those with obsessions. Once a picture has emerged from the patient’s memory, we may hear him say that it becomes fragmentary and obscure in proportion as he proceeds with his description of it. The patient is, as it were, getting rid of

71 Jacques Lacan: ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, trans. by Alan Sheridan. 72 Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking Glass: And What Alice Found There.

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it by turning it into words … When this work has been accomplished, the image disappears, like a spirit being lain to rest.73

While Freud’s talking cure, then, discusses the Imaginary as a fulfilment of hallucination in the Symbolic, until the obviously disturbing images ‘crumble away’ and are ‘lain to rest’, what happens in the production of images in computer graphics is exactly the opposite: the images of virtual reality learn to ‘run’ through the underlying program routines as the digital image of a computer graphic appears in the moment of the instant realization of a program sequence, only to disappear again instantly and be replaced by the next. In contrast to Freud’s hysterics, the program code tears down the Symbolic by turning it into images. These images, however, are fundamentally different from all previous image media, because in the medium of the computer, and strengthened further in the video game, the virtual space of images does not exist independently of the observer. The screen is the imaginary surface through which the player steps into a virtual image space, like Alice into the looking-glass.74 In the game, the opaque surface of the screen becomes porous, a phenomenon which represents an important, if not the specific characteristic of the video game, because, contrary to the purely receptive processes before former analogue image media such as photography, film or television, the digital image within the video game is reliant on the interference of the player. Without the player, the game cannot take place, time stands still—Game Over: Virtual realities’ depend upon the technique of “immersion”, through which we no longer merely look at images, but step into the room of images and can have an effect on the image surroundings without (perceptible) time delay. Through the rapid development of computer graphics, these days complex 3D graphics based on polygons are possible in real time, and they have largely dissolved written text as the key medium for conveying game contents. This development is linked to the general visualization of the computer/user interface. If the computer was, up until the mid-1980s,

73 Sigmund Freud: Studies on Hysteria (together with Josef Breuer), trans. by Strachey and others, 1895, p. 110. 74 And indeed, Lewis Carroll’s Alice completes the entry through the looking-glass of digital images within the game Alice introduced earlier. The game is an adaptation of Carroll’s material, as the player accompanies Alice through a nightmare version of Wonderland.

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still a medium defined as a ‘counting machine’, which could be operated only by the manual input of complex system direction instructions (and programmer languages), the appearance of the aforementioned Lisa computer from the Apple company represents an important intervention. The graphic user interface of the Lisa computer and the new hardware interface of the controlling ‘mouse’ signified together the introduction of a new opportunity for interaction in the world of ‘serious’ computer use, which had until then been the sole preserve of video games. What is significant here is that the graphic user surface creates the opportunity for a symbolic interaction no longer accessible at the program level. Within this interaction, a software interface (symbolic user surface) can be operated by means of a hardware interface beyond the keyboard (the mouse). From this point on, it is not only that words, mediated by program code, ‘Do what they say’. Since graphic user interfaces of the Windows type have become the industry standard, images also do what they show. On the level of the digital image, the Symbolic and the Imaginary are limited, as writing and text begin to cross over into one another both ontogenetically and on the level of perception. Through its universality, the medium of the computer allows us to experience images in the mode of text, and text in the mode of images. On the level of use, our dealings with text under hypertextual conditions take on characteristics and aspects that we have traditionally assigned to images. Our floating reading of letters is modified by a pictorial dramatization of the arrangements of signs, characteristic for the hypertextual World Wide Web In this open, non-linear type of floating sign reception, forms of perception enter which we know from the reception of images. In the perception of an image, we are not led from the outset—as when reading a book—to follow a linear sequence-pattern of thought structure. The pictorial elements of which an image consists open up different patterns of non-linear reception and with them various forms of reading and the construction of an image as a meaningful unity.75

On the other hand, digital images are constituted on their program level within the medium—as has been shown—by symbolic structures, the program code: 75 Mike Sandbothe: Transversale Medienwelten. Philosophische Überlegungen zum Internet, in: Gianni Vattimo, Wolfgang Welsch (eds.): Medien—Welten—Wirklichkeiten, Munich 1998, p. 74.

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If we consider, furthermore, the internal data structure of digital images, then it becomes clear that images made of pixels set together have the character of text from their technological structure. With the corresponding editor programs, the elements of which digital images consist can be exchanged, switched and changed, like the letters of a text. Images become scriptures, which can be flexibly edited. In the digital mode, the image loses its outstanding status as an imitation of reality.76

This admixture of the Symbolic and the Imaginary in the mode of the digital image is no marginal note in cultural history. It underlines the status of the computer as an agent of a medial epoch threshold. The digital image represents the point of culmination of a culture which, though anchored in ‘oculocentrism’,77 has simultaneously, as in a type of defensive movement, privileged the discursive over the imagistic. The discovery of central perspective through the Florentine architects Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti at the beginning of the fifteenth century and its philosophical implementation by René Descartes’ ‘analytic geometry’ represents a crucial historical development and a turning point within European ‘oculocentrism’, even if the roots of our privileged treatment of sight are to be found in antiquity.78 Since the days of Greek philosophy, the eye has been celebrated as the most superb part of the senses. The most noble ability of the spirit, theoria, is described in metaphors which are predominantly taken from the visual sphere … Not only has the sense of sight provided analogies for the intellectual superstructure; it has also, furthermore, served as a general model of perception and has thus served as a measure for the other senses.79 76 Sandbothe: Transversale…, pp. 75–76. 77 I borrow the term ‘oculocentrism’, which describes the supremacy of sight over all

other senses within Western culture, within a Derridean jargon: Ales Erjavec: Das fällt ins Auge…, in: Vaittimo, Welsch (eds.): Medien Welten…, pp. 39–59. 78 It is worth emphasizing here that the privilege of seeing as a fundamental metaphor of all true recognition for Plato accompanies an aggressive resistance towards all that is imagistic-sensual. Seeing is uncoupled from the seen, the image, and is thus deprived of sense. Jacques Derrida goes so far as to claim that Western philosophy has only constituted itself as such in order to resist the powers of the image and not to give in to the image’s unsettling effect. See: Jacques Derrida: The Work of Mourning, Chicago 2003, p. 35. 79 Hans Jonas: Das Prinzip Leben. Ansätze zu einer philosophischen Biologie, Frankfurt/M. 1994, p. 235. Considered exactly, tendencies of the Platonic philosophy are

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Between the valorization of sight in antiquity and the discovery of central perspective comes the religiously motivated hostility towards images in Christianity, which influences significantly our relationship with images,80 and further intensifies the Platonic mistrust towards the simulation character of the image. This mistrust towards the image leads to its secularization, while, in theory, the image is led into discursivity. Central perspective as a ‘symbolic form’ in the sense of Ernst Cassier is therefore—as Erwin Panofsky has shown81 —anything but an adequate form of the representation of the visual. It is, rather, even a ‘symbolic form’, representing an approach to the visual that is not necessary historically conditioned. It is a highly artificial gloss of the multidimensional status of visual perception. Therefore, the implementation of central perspective in the seventeenth century, together with the technique of calculation, signifies a domestication of multidimensional seeing by means of a transformation of the Imaginary into the Symbolic: With central perspective and with calculus, seeing is sublimated into an act of observation and reading. Descartes analytic geometry leads us to a reduction of multidimensional sight to a one-dimensional reading. Here, the visually perceptible figure is replaced by formula that may only be read. And this happens in such a way that the ability to algebraically transcribe, that is to represent the figure with discrete symbols, becomes a criterion of existence for geometric objects and a condition for the possibility of scientific description of phenomena.82

What happens here is nothing less than the attempt to save visual within the traditional metaphor of occulocentrism, and yet, simultaneously, by means of the transfer of ‘multidimensional sight to a one-dimensional reading’, to rid the image of its semblance character, which represents the basis of the Christian—Platonic resentment towards the image. In the same way by which images are transferred into symbolic representation, thus described. Within the pre-Socratic philosophy, the prevalence of seeing is not yet recorded. See, on this, Martin Heidegger: ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in Heidegger: Off the Beaten Track, Frankfurt/M. 1994, pp. 90ff. 80 Erjavec: Das fällt ins …, p. 40. 81 See Erwin Panofsky, ‘die Perspektive als “symbolische Form”, in Panofsky: Aufsätze zu

Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, ed by H. Oberer and E. Verheyen, Berlin 1992. 82 Sybille Krämer: Zentralperspektive, Kalkül, Virtuelle Realität, in: Vattimo, Welsch (eds.): Medien—Welten…, p. 31.

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however, the semblance character of the image is again shadowed within the ‘world implications’ (Krämer) expressed both in calculus and in central perspective: This rationalization of perception is completed by a fictionalization of the picture of reality. A new valuation of the relationship between the illusory and the real announces itself here. Aisthetically, we associate the illusory with hallucinations, with an error in our sensory impressions; in epistemic terms, illusion functions as a false representation which cannot be brought into alignment with reality. But central perspective uses techniques of illusion as a model for the real. And calculus—at least in Leibniz’s recognitiontheoretical reflections—can no longer be related to reality, but only to the models of reality constructed by us … We see: that which is illusory and that which is real no longer remain dichotomous labels; rather, the illusory and the fictitious become the very ingredients of the real.83

The price paid here for the repression of ‘multidimensional sight’ consists in the internalization of that which should be excluded from the scientificrationalistic discourse of Descartes and Leibniz: of the ‘semblancecharacter’, the illusory part of the image. The conflict between image and word, between Imaginary and Symbolic, is manifested in the formation of a theory which, while chained to the metaphor of occulocentrism since antiquity, is repressed by the Imaginary and put under the rule of the Symbolic. This hostility towards images continues into the theory formations of Structuralism and so-called Post-Structuralism.84 Whether in Baudrillard’s criticism of a culture of simulation85 or Lacan’s Freudian concept of a subject which first constitutes itself fully in the field of the Symbolic86 and must cross through a ‘dangerous’ ‘misreading function’87 on the way there, in the Imaginary of the ‘mirror stage’; within all of these

83 Krämer: Zentralperspektive…, p. 31. 84 See: Erjavec: Das fällt ins …, pp. 45ff. In his representation, Erjavec refers to Martin

Jay’s observations in Martin Jay: Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought, Berkeley 1994. 85 Jean Baudrillard: The Agony of Power, 2010. 86 Jacques Lacan: Seminar I: Freud’s Technical Papers, Cambridge 1988. 87 Lacan: The Mirror Stage, p. 204.

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approaches, in all of their other differences, a deeply inscribed hostility towards images is inherent.88 The Imaginary withdraws, then, since Plato, from the field of Western metaphysics, confronting the Symbolic as its Other. It must ‘crumble’, as is paradigmatically pre-figured in Freud, to yield to the Symbolic. This ‘talking cure’ subjects Western metaphysics, from Descartes and Leibniz onwards, under the dictates of rationalism, to the Imaginary, because of the suspicion, existing at least since the Platonically inspired Christian iconoclasm, ‘that images release affects and suspend reason’.89 Because even up to the present time, the image, despite all ‘attempts at domestication’ cannot completely collect itself and settle peacefully, it appears today, in a time of accelerated image production, strengthened further in the form of the digital image, as uncanny, foreign and unapproachable. This is not too far from a rhetoric of estrangement and derealization, as found in exemplary form in the works of Jean Baudrillard. As Baudrillard, for example, in his essay ‘The Vanishing Point of Communication’ describes the virtual ‘TV-image’ of the screen as being obscenely close to the human, he wants to prove this proximity, simultaneously, to be an illusory effect of simulacra: Proximity of images, tactility of images, tactile pornography of images— though physically so close to us, the TV-image is paradoxically light-years away. It stays at a very special distance that can only be defined as insuperable by the body. The distance of the theatrical scene, of the mirror, is superable by the body, it can eventually surmount it, this is why this distance remains human. The distance of the screen is virtual, hyperreal, and therefore insuperable.90

It is not only that Baudrillard fails to find an explanation for how we might imagine a corporeal superability of the distance to language or

88 At this point it can only be indicated that an aporia emerges within the cited theory formations, in that these approaches of image hostility perpetuate a concept which, as has been shown, is a constituent of Western metaphysics from Plato to Descartes, thus exactly the tradition of thought that many ‘post-structuralists’ (with the exception of Lacan) hoped to overcome in relation to Nietzsche and Heidegger. 89 Erjavec: Das fällt ins …, p. 44. 90 Jean Baudrillard: ‘The Vanishing Point of Communication’, in David Clarke and

others (eds.): Baudrillard: Fatal Theories, Routledge 2008.

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to the mirror; he straightforwardly transfers his description of the ‘TVimage’, which follows the model of analogue image media, into the field of the digital image.91 And precisely here lies a significant error in reasoning, which disregards the special status of the digital image between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, because the digital image—as proven also by Vilém Flusser92 —may no longer be categorized exclusively under the field of the Imaginary, as has traditionally been the case: The difference between traditional and technical images, then, would be this: the first are observations of objects, the second are computations of concepts. The first arise through depiction, the second through a peculiar hallucinatory power that has lost its faith in rules.93

The punch line of the digital image appears to be that the specifically new quality of this medium derives from the complex reciprocal relationship between the Symbolic and the Imaginary—whereby, within this relationship, the process of dichotomizing both levels, a process that has been installed in the course of a long tradition, begins to dissolve. Images can be experienced in the modes of textuality and vice versa; the digital image simulates traditional images, but loses the opacity of analogue images on the basis of the possibility of interaction. That is, on the basis of the quality of the digital image as an emanation of program code, it can be influenced in real time, unlike the images of analogue image media, which can only be received passively. The elements of a digital image can be, like ‘the letters of text’, ‘exchanged, switched, and changed’ (Sandbothe), while the Symbolic of the program code simultaneously enters the field of the Imaginary in the moment of its instant execution as a digital image. To the ‘user’ of virtual realities, the opaque surface of the screen becomes, at least on an aisthetic level, ‘soft like gauze’, forming the condition of the possibility of the experience of immersion, within which the ‘user’, via the hardware interface, can also completely physically enter the virtual space. This

91 Baudrillard: ‘The Vanishing Point…’, p. 12. 92 Vilém Flusser: Into the Universe of Technical Images, Minnesota 2011. 93 Ibid., p. 10. This statement, which sounds peculiar when cited in isolation, that the

‘hallucinatory power’, which has ‘technical images’ to thank for its existence, according to Flusser, and which is the result of a historical process causing a loss of ‘faith in rules’, represents the Flusserian formulation of the phenomenon of the ‘dissolution of reality’, which was mentioned earlier in this work.

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reciprocal relationship culminates in the paradoxical status of the digital image,94 which brings about far-reaching consequences for virtual worlds as they are encountered in video games. The surface of the screen to be traversed, ‘soft like gauze’, is best represented, in its paradoxical-seeming structure, across the inherited dichotomy of the Symbolic and the Imaginary, by the metaphor of the mirror: ‘Virtual realities are a technique to enable interactive reflections of symbolic worlds. The new perspective which accompanies this type of mirror lies in the interactive, possibly also synesthetic dealings with data structures. With virtual realities, possible worlds can be sensuously explored.’95 The metaphor of the mirror functions, in this context, as one possible representation of the paradoxical status of the digital image, because a mirror of this sort is new and would be a contradiction in itself under traditional conditions. Not for nothing is the reflection, for Lacan, situated as a residuum of the Imaginary in opposition to the Symbolic. The mirror, as a surface of the pure Imaginary, withdraws from every access to the Symbolic; for reflections, as Umberto Eco has made clear, possess no status as signs.96 Reflections are the only forms of images that reflect to the observer whatever is in front of the mirror in absolute symmetry; images, then, which have no autonomous existence independent of their ‘referents’. Because there are no reflections beyond mirrors, those reflections are dependent on the current presence of the thing being reflected; the medium of the mirror is not a storage medium. Here is the fundamental difference from all other image forms such as photography, television images, and forms of manual pictographic representation. Reflections have no semantics, but only pragmatics97 ; they exist only in the mode of our dealings with them, only within a ‘catoptric interaction’ (Eco), which urgently presupposes a perceiving subject. Here, the proximity to the digital image within the screen becomes clear. On the basis of the mixed relationship of the Symbolic and the Imaginary I have described, which is only possible in the medium of the computer, in the digital image we are dealing with a medium that belongs, on the 94 See also Paul Virilio’s analyses of the ‘paradoxical logic of the image’ in the age of digitization: Paul Virilio: The Vision Machine, Indiana 1994, p. 156. 95 Krämer: Zentralperspektive…, p. 33. 96 Umberto Eco: Mirrors, in: Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Indiana UP

1984. 97 Ibid., p. 77.

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one hand, on the level of perception, to the field of the Symbolic, in the mode of ‘symbolic interaction’. On the other hand, however, precisely because of this possibility of interaction, it possesses exactly the signum of that image form that is regarded traditionally as an incarnation of the pure Imaginary: that of the reflection. The entry through the mirror is thus played out in video games again and again, because a peculiar desire lies in precisely this transgression of boundaries. Magritte’s ‘La reproduction interdite’ can serve as an illustration to a first step of the act of perception regarding virtual realities in the video game. It is immediately apparent that the mantelpiece and the book situated in the lower right corner of the image98 are reflected in a physically correct way by the mirror, while something in the reflection of the man is clearly not right. What is significant in Magritte’s image is the millisecond-long hesitation in a first fleeting consideration of the image, which consists in our uncertainty about what precisely is not right in this depicted reflection. Magritte’s image makes use of a phenomenon which is a general misperception in the face of a real, everyday mirror, but which comes to be reality in the mode of the digital image: the conception, that is, that ‘the reflected objects might be found behind the surface of the mirror’.99 Not for nothing is the term ‘virtual’ a term in optics meaning ‘light-wave deceiving images’,100 and has thus developed along the course of the phenomenon of the mirror.101 No space, of course, can be found behind the surface of the mirror. In our perception, however, we ‘see’ this mirrored space in the mode of ‘as if’, because the perception does not perceive the physical process of symmetrical reflection, but semioticizes it automatically. Magritte’s image appears, then, as a consistent depiction of an entry into a virtual space. But there is something else to note. Not only does the reflection signal the supposed object of reflection in a view of his back, but a transgression of a boundary into a virtual space has taken place; the space to which the figure in the reflection is turned, is unmarked, 98 The book depicted is Edgar Allan Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym. Of course, the mantelpiece and the book serve to make the mirror within the image recognizable as such, and not, for example, as a window. 99 Krämer: Zentralperspektive…, p. 32. 100 Ibid., p. 32. 101 The phenomenon of the so-called ‘Fata Morgana’ belongs equally to this phenomenon complex.

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in an unsettling way. A diffuse, ochre-coloured surface spreads before the figure in the reflection, instead of, as would normally be the case, correctly reflecting the space before the mirror, like the book or the mantelpiece. This is explained by the paradox that arises as soon as the mirror loses its ‘capacity as mirror’, which happens when virtual space is no longer a misperception, but rather, in the process of entry into this space, becomes a semiotic space. Because this contradicts the status of the reflection as a genuinely non-symbolic image, the virtual space in ‘La reproduction interdite’ becomes a blind spot, a spatially unmarked, latent unsettlement, an empty space of a paradox no longer able to be represented in any conventional way. The image worlds of video games mark exactly this virtual space, by filling out the blind spot by means of software, and thus driving the situation of the perceiving subject who interacts with virtual spaces a step further. If the man standing in Magritte’s image before the mirror is comparable with the real player before the screen, then the play-figure controlled by him—for example, the protagonist of the game Silent Hill 2, corresponds to Magritte’s ‘mirror figure’. Within the video game, however, virtual space does not remain unmarked: the things and objects in video games—literally—look at and address me,102 being constitutively reliant on the player in order to become dynamic. Because what is specifically new in digital images consists in the intermingling of the Imaginary and the Symbolic within them, there emerges a desire for video games that, on the basis of the status of the digital image I have outlined here, in the mode of the ‘entry through the mirror’, the boundary between ‘interior world and surroundings ’ (Lacan) or, systems-theoretically formulated system and surroundings, seems to become porous. Within the mirror-world of virtual spaces, sight and objects belong to the same sphere. They are apparently no longer divided by the otherwise unsurmountable boundary of system and surroundings. In this way, sight begins to become autonomous within video games, particularly since the introduction of 3D technology based on polygons. The orientation of sight is transferred to the respective hardware interface (mouse, game-controller), with the help of which sight, otherwise bound to a subject, can exist within the virtual world of images, independent of a virtual character. 102 See Jacques Lacan: What Is a Picture?, in Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.): The Visual Culture Reader, London 2001.

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Here, three perspectives are dominant in contemporary video games, which to an increasing degree become ‘independent of their subject’. One particularly popular game perspective in current action games is the socalled ‘ego-perspective’, in which the image space is organized to create the illusion that the player is looking directly at the environment through the eyes of a virtual character. Strictly following the rules of central-perspectival representation, the advantage of this perspective consists in the high degree of immersion offered to the game by the direct possibility of identification. The weapon in the lower left part of the picture symbolizes the ‘entry through the mirror’ in a striking way as this—as a prosthetic extension of the real body, belonging directly to the virtual body of the game figure—extends into the virtual space. Because this perspective delivers only a very vague simulation of the human field of vision and the body belonging to it in reality cannot be simulated along with it, this perspective takes some getting used to. Not for nothing do the possibilities of interaction with the game environment in video games which use an ego-perspective limit themselves mostly to the aiming at and shooting down of diverse virtual enemies. A higher degree of ‘abstraction of vision’ forms the so-called ‘third-person’ perspective, which zooms out from the virtual body of the play character to the point of view of the player, situating the player mostly somewhere over the game figure. The view is now not bound to a particular avatar, though the point of view mainly follows the protagonist like a camera. The advantage consists in the now much widened field of vision which has less and less in common with the simulation of a real observational standpoint, bound to a body, because processes and objects can be observed that are found to take place outside the field of vision of the virtual figure, who still acts as the representative of the player. The possibilities of interaction within video games that use this kind of perspective are far more diverse. The polygonal architecture of such games is no longer merely a decoration but is itself part of a semiotic image space, as, for example, the player of Tomb Raider must watch out for possibilities to manoeuvre the protagonist over architectonic obstacles. The virtual landscapes are, on their side, directed towards the possibilities of movement of the digital heroine, so that the digital image here constitutes a semiotic context which certainly

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is so hidden under the central-perspectival simulation that a puzzle structure emerges. This, in turn, is the content of the game Tomb Raider.103 In games such as Black & White or the adventure Gabriel Knight 3 (Sierra/PC), the wandering viewpoint is fully autonomous. There may still be a game character who acts within an unrolling frame narrative, but the point of view can be manoeuvred completely independently of the virtual protagonist, like an immaterial camera. Here, the simulated view is consequently ‘disembodied’, as it no longer needs a virtual representative to function as the fictional point of origin of vision. The Media of the Video Game 3: In the Wonderland of Paradoxes. The Video Game as a Form of the Medium of the Game So, you like Suikoden? Ah, you have saved often. You are a prudent person. You still don’t believe me? Set your controller on the floor … Now, I will move your controller using my mental powers….104

Alice and Psycho Mantis: Ontological Uncertainty It is well known that Alice, following her entry through the mirror, steps into a land of paradox and constant metamorphosis. What appears perfectly normal and familiar at first glance often transforms, on closer inspection, into something different, something entirely unexpected. An even somewhat complete cartography of the most important paradoxes that appear in Lewis Carroll’s tale to confuse the reader as well as poor Alice is no small undertaking. It has been achieved convincingly only in the form of a comprehensive theory of the constitution of meaning by Gilles Deleuze.105 One particular paradox runs through the text as a leitmotif: the equation of reality and unreality, of actual events and possible events, of (presumed) reality and the virtual. An exemplary moment is Alice’s

103 The game content of Tomb Raider consists in the situation that the player must orientate him/herself in a complexly constructed virtual landscape and locate the respective level’s exit each time. For this, mostly acrobatic climbs are necessary. 104 Game dialogue in the game Metal Gear Solid (Konami/Playstation). 105 See Gilles Deleuze: The Logic of Sense, Columbia UP 1990.

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encounter with the ‘mirror-twins’,106 Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who disclose to her the matter of the sleeping king, snoring to himself pleasantly under a tree: ‘He’s dreaming now,’ said Tweedledee; ‘and what do you think he’s dreaming about?’ Alice said ‘Nobody can guess that.’ ‘Why, about you!’ Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. ‘And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?’ ‘Where I am now, of course,’ said Alice. ‘Not you!’ Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. ‘You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!’ ‘If that there King was to wake,’ added Tweedledum, ‘you’d go out— bang!—just like a candle!’ ‘I shouldn’t!’ Alice exclaimed indignantly. ‘Besides, if I’m only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know?’ ‘Ditto,’ said Tweedledum. ‘Ditto, ditto,’ cried Tweedledee. He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn’t help saying, ‘Hush! You’ll be waking him, I’m afraid, if you make so much noise.’107

Alice’s uncertainty is the result of an ontological vagueness. While she refuses to recognize the possibility that her very character might in fact be the unreal figure of a dream, which, on the awakening of the dreamer— ‘bang’—would go out like a candle, she also doesn’t want to run that risk, and tries to stop the king from waking up. We can never know. In the game Metal Gear Solid, the plot brings us to a particular moment of encounter between the hero, Solid Snake, controlled by the player, with a virtual enemy called Psycho Mantis,108 who, according to the game’s mythology, possesses telepathic capacities. This encounter

106 Dietrich Schwanitz: Systemtheorie und Literatur. Ein neues Paradigm, Opladen 1990,

p. 13. 107 Carroll: Alice…, p. 34. 108 The narrative content of the game revolves around a conspiracy the hero of the

game must defeat by means of infiltrating the headquarters of a terrorist group. The actors all have code names which, with their common history as ‘top agents’ are involved with a secret government Task Force.

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emerges in a fight within which Psycho Mantis demonstrates these capacities in an impressive way. If the real player happens to have another game produced by the developer Konami saved on his or her console, the program discretely reads this information. The result is a ‘proof’, at first a rather baffling one, of the telepathic capacities of the virtual character Psycho Mantis, who addresses the game habits of the player and his or her possible preferences (‘So, you like Suikoden? Ah, you have saved often. You are a prudent person’).109 To underpin his telepathic powers, Psycho Mantis demands the real player of the game Metal Gear Solid—not, that is, the player’s virtual alter ego—to take the ‘controller’110 out of his or her hand and place it on the floor. The proof of his ‘mental powers’ now appears in the moment when the controller, lying on the floor, really does appear to move, in fact because of strong vibrations within the device. Meanwhile, on the screen, Psycho Mantis, laughing diabolically, seems to rejoice in his demonstration of his power. The link between Alice and the user playing Metal Gear Solid consists in the equivalence of contradictory levels, both ontological and logical. Alice’s uncertainty concerning her own ontological status is similar to the uncertainty evoked by the staged virtual encounter with Psycho Mantis. For a brief moment, it is no longer unambiguously clear what is reality and what is dream—or what is reality and what fiction. Above all, uncertainty reigns over which level can be made to dominate over the others. For Alice, this second of uncertainty leads to her short-term, irrational worry that the king might wake up and thus extinguish her own existence. For the game player, it leads to the astonishment that a virtual character suddenly has power over a real ‘thing’, and thus appears to be in a position to be able to ‘break out’ of the tight framework of his virtual condition. Threshold Phenomena: Game as Medium While the staged ‘ontological uncertainty’ in playing Metal Gear Solid may be only momentary, what is crucial is the dynamic it thereby sets in 109 Suikoden is the name of a role-play game by the developer Konami. 110 Implied here is the real hardware interface of the game console Playstation, the

“Dual Shock Pad”, which by means of in-built motors can make the ‘controller’ vibrate with various degrees of intensity. This is a notable immersion technique, known among other things as ‘force feedback’, which enables a haptic connection to the action on the screen via a real hardware interface.

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motion. In contrast to Alice, Psycho Mantis knows that he is part of a fictitious, virtual reality. Once again, an otherwise fixed borderline—the borderline between fiction and reality—becomes permeable and can, at least momentarily, be crossed. As Psycho Mantis steps, in an orchestrated feint, briefly out of the framework of the onscreen game, levels that are in fact logically and epistemically incompatible coexist for one another within the medium of the game. Precisely this, for Gregory Bateson, is the most important constituent of play.111 The fascination aroused by the phenomenon of the game is the result not least of the momentary transgression of borders—whether in terms of logic or of psychoanalysis—inherent in the structure of the game. Bateson analyses this aspect of the game by means of the concepts of primary and secondary processes. In his analysis, the game acquires a mediating, medial function by means of its particular logical structure. If the mechanisms of the unconscious primary processes and those of the secondary processes, rooted in the field of the discursive, are normally black boxes for one another, the game, or rather its paradox-precipitating structure, is able to transcend these otherwise insurmountable borders: ‘It therefore follows that the play frame as here used as an explanatory principle implies a special combination of primary and secondary processes.’112 Crucial here, though he does not examine this aspect more closely, is Bateson’s description of the game as a medium established between various logical and epistemic levels, that does not take on a synthesizing function. The dynamic of the medium of play is constituted in a logical-epistemic grey zone, similar to that of a so-called ‘lucid’ dream, in which the dreamer suddenly becomes aware that he or she is dreaming. This particular form of dream always takes place at the threshold between sleep and the beginnings of wakefulness. As long as the dreamer participates unconsciously in the dream, its operational framework remains closed. It is not simply that the border to the operation of the secondary processes cannot be crossed, but that this border cannot even be perceived. The moment of lucid dreaming, on the other hand, is characterized by the sudden possibility of formulating metastatements, in Bateson’s sense, which for their part pose the problem of framing (‘Is this a dream?’).

111 Gregory Bateson: A Theory of Play and Fantasy, in: Bateson: Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Chicago 1972. 112 Bateson: A Theory, p. 185.

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The dreamer still finds him/herself in a state of dreaming, but now on the threshold of waking consciousness: ‘He cannot, unless close to waking, dream a statement referring to (i.e., framing) his dream’.113 The structure and dynamic of the game as a threshold phenomenon of this nature can only be understood as a process in which the moment of the intermittent, the sudden,114 represents the mode in which the medium of the game can be recognized, momentarily, for what it is. This explains the fact that the simultaneous convergence of incompatible levels is only ever momentarily tangible. Alice’s uncertainty is just as brief and momentary as is that of the player of Metal Gear Solid, before the conventional epistemic borders of reality and fiction race in once more, and the escapades of Psycho Mantis are revealed to be a stage trick. So too is the occurrence of the lucid dream possible for mere seconds, and only during that threshold between sleep and wakefulness. Bateson himself suggests the dream analogy because, in analysing the phenomenon of the game he simultaneously describes it as a threshold phenomenon, one that ‘mediates’115 between primary and secondary processes and unfolds its specific potential precisely in this transgression of boundaries. At this point, a relationship emerges between various categories, whereby one can never be seamlessly translated into the other: ‘The message “This is play” thus sets a frame of the sort which is likely to precipitate paradox: it is an attempt to discriminate between, or to draw a line between, categories of different logical types.’116 A differentiation becomes significant here, namely that between ‘play’ and ‘game’. For Bateson, the form of the ‘game’ is differentiated from that of ‘play’ by its higher degree of complexity, which results from the

113 Ibid., p. 185 [my italics, M.R.]. 114 Karl Heinz Bohrer has proposed, at length, the important role played by the

moment of suddenness as an expression and sign of the discontinuity and non-identity of modern aesthetics. See Bohrer: Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance, trans. by Ruth Crowley, New York 1994. It would be interesting to correlate the ‘ludic society’, much invoked in the context of the digital age, with the context he describes of the ‘concept of suddenness’ in aesthetic modernity. 115 ‘Mediating’ is understood here, of course, not in the sense of a synthesizing process. The medium as ‘mediator’ describes—as mentioned earlier—is first nothing more than a place that can only be defined in relation to that of which it is a mediator. 116 Bateson: A Theory…, p. 190.

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fact that in the game, the problem of framing shows itself in strengthened form and completely reveals its paradoxical character. In an intensification of the paradoxical structure of ‘play’, which is constituted alongside the frame message ‘This is play’, the logical-epistemic vagueness is itself thematized in the form of the ‘game’ through the question ‘Is this play?’ Bateson’s game theory, as well as Niklas Luhmann’s concept of medium and form, orientates itself around the phenomenon that even ‘meaning’117 emerges from the processing of paradoxes. Exemplary for this is the figure of Epimenides’ paradox:

All statements within this frame are untrue I love you I hate you

This figure creates the effect of the ‘double-bind’, a logical, epistemic and psychological structure which Bateson has examined in the context of research on schizophrenia. In the game, he sees a process at work which is able not to solve the aporia of this ‘double-bind’, but rather to overcome it. The appeal, the effect and the function of play and game lie for Bateson primarily in this overcoming. The achievement of play has such a wide scope, for Bateson, that he sees himself impelled to describe it as an evolutionary jump in the development of communication. The processing of paradoxes is fundamental for a communication that transcends the pure recognition of signals and symptoms, and is capable of metacommunication. Play shifts between the fields of unconscious primary and discursive secondary processes; levels that would not be compatible outside of play. Bateson illustrates what this means via the map—territory relation, which describes the capacity to differentiate between logical levels. Since a differentiation between levels is not possible in the framework of the primary process, it proves itself to be a function of the secondary process. The problem of the paradox arises now from the confrontation of 117 ‘Sense’ should be understood here in Luhmann’s terms, where, ‘sense’ is itself a

medium whose characteristic it is to enable self-referentiality and complexity along the differentiation of real/possible or current/potential social and psychical systems. ‘Sense’ is a base fundamental prerequisite for complex systems. See Claudio Baraldi, Giancarlo Corsi, Elena Esposito (eds.): GLU. Glossar zu Niklas Luhmanns Theorie sozialer Systeme, Frankfurt/M 1998, pp. 170ff.

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the secondary and primary process, whereby it is assumed ‘that the primary process is continually operating, and that the psychological validity of the paradoxical play frame depends upon this part of the mind’.118 The game, in the form of the question ‘Is this play/a game?’, now exceeds this frame: ‘In primary process, map and territory are equated; in secondary process, they can be discriminated. In play, they are both equated and discriminated.’119 The structure of the momentary—punctual appearance of an ontological—epistemic vagueness, as described above, consists in this equation of ‘either/or’. Within the game, various levels are not merely mediated with one other. The game is momentarily in the position, in the mode of temporal succession, even if it is a fluctuating one, to produce a connection which allows it to process this equation.120 The medium of the game is now this fluctuating form because temporal succession is never linear but rather recursive. The operations tip over, again and again, into a different area each time, such that a stable point of the ‘before’ or ‘after’ cannot be determined: the paradox is left standing and yet is processed; a synthesis, however, never comes to being. The game as a medium remains discrete, but at the same time constitutes ‘meaning’, which results from the constantly moving processuality of the shifting of both levels. Pathological forms, like that of schizophrenia, arise, then, precisely when a psychic system is no longer in the position to carry out this balancing act, when it can no longer process paradoxes in the described way. Proximity and Distance. Self-Referentiality in Video Games This is a well. You may think that there is something to it, but it is in fact just an ordinary well.121 118 Bateson: A Theory…, pp. 184–185. 119 Ibid., p. 185. 120 This type of procession of paradoxes is in Luhmann’s theory formation further carried out and more closely described with the help of George Spence-Browns thought figure of ‘re-entry’. Even for Luhmann, the paradox is not a form to be avoided if possible, but rather represents, in contrast, an integral constituent of psychic and social systems. ‘Re-entry’ designates that entry through which a system can reintegrate into itself the basal differentiation on which it is itself based in the train of self-observation. In the medium of the game, which is based on the differentiation between the real and the dictional (“Is this play?”), precisely this difference is thematised and in recourse to time. 121 Game dialogue after ‘clicking’ on a virtual well in Final Fantasy I (Square/SNES).

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Prior to any categorization of video games into various genres such as ‘action’ or ‘adventure’, the constitutive foundation of the video game consists in a staging of self-referentiality which takes place in the medium of the game and is urgently thematized in every video game, though it is seldom as clear as it is in the example Metal Gear Solid. The particular function of the video game as a form of the medium of play results from constant confrontations between techniques of immersion which, by means of sometimes considerable efforts, aim to create the illusion of a ‘realistic’ game world and of the unavoidable recursion of the medium to its own status as unreality, as a virtual space (of play). This confrontation of contesting aspects creates the video game’s field of tension. On the one hand, the effort to create more and more realistic game environments and possibilities for interaction continues uninterrupted as the driving force of technical development in this segment of the market. On the other hand, a video game must not be too realistic and will on this level always continue to betray its own status as a ‘game’. There emerges an equation of proximity and distance, as a video game can only begin to function through the distance of the playing user, while at the same time a high degree of immersion must be reached to achieve the necessary credibility of the game environment: Counter-intuitively, it seems for the moment that the perfect videogame ‘feel’ requires the ever-increasing imaginative and physical involvement of the player to stop somewhere short of full bodily immersion. After all, a sense of pleasurable control implies some modicum of separation: you are apart from what you are controlling.122

It is important to bear in mind that it is in this equation of the external viewpoint and the intrinsic participant perspective that the specific quality of the video game can take effect; a quality which is lost from view as soon as one level is privileged at the cost of another. For this reason, Sybille Krämer—dissociating herself from theories which see the classical concepts of reality and epistemology disappear in the space of the virtual—emphasizes precisely this equation of levels of perception as an originary form of perception that can be experienced only through the possibility of virtual realities.

122 Steven Poole: Trigger Happy. The Inner Life of Videogames, London 2000, p. 77.

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In the face of this domination of one absolute perspective, remember that the technique of simulation of virtual realities requires the divergence of the de facto place of the body and the virtual place of interaction. ‘Cyberspace’ requires, then, the differentiation of virtual reality and the bodilysituated external world.123

Consequently, video games emphasize precisely this differentiation, because the game as a medium installs the dynamics of this differentiation in the form of the video game directly into the relationship between the playing user and the machine. Contemporary video games, for this reason, in no way lack examples of the self-referentiality inherent to the game. Scarcely a video game, for example, comes without a ‘save’ function, which allows the player to interrupt the action of the game in order to continue from that point at a later time in the game. This save function is necessary because the player, of course, cannot be expected to busy him/herself with a game continually for over 80 hours. Often, this save function is not triggered by a discrete keyboard input, but is represented as an object in the virtual space itself. The form of these save points varies considerably. Often, game developers attempt to build them more-or-less adroitly into the logic of the game, to avoid the break in coherence that is the inevitable consequence of stepping out of the virtual environment. These save points, which come in the form of abstract moving objects (Final Fantasy VII , Square/Playstation, PC) or books (Dragon Warrior 7 , Enix/Playstation), stand out from the game as foreign objects and refer to the artificiality of the virtual environment into which they, as strange foreign bodies, ‘do not fit’. Another kind of play with self-referentiality can be observed in the form of the ‘red herring’, a virtual object that exists only to produce a gap within the symbolic universe of the game, in which everything is significant and effectively refers to something else. In the Japanese role play game Final Fantasy 7 (Square/Playstation, PC), the player can find objects which, on closer observation, reveal themselves to be miniaturized toy simulations of virtual characters the player encounters in the course of the game. These characters are virtual objects without any ‘meaning’, because the player cannot do anything with them, in contrast to all the other objects within the world of the game. They are, within the context 123 Krämer: Zentralperspective…, p. 36.

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of the game, ‘meaningless’; they are not there to help solve a riddle, or to be used for another purpose. They are pure signs which refer beyond themselves to the outside of the game, because the player can only recognize these objects as ‘meaningless’, or run for ever behind the presumed function, the referent of this sign, in a parody of the Derridean ‘neverending chain of signification’. In Anachronox (Eidos/PC), in a dilapidated futuristic town, the player’s alter ego encounters a man whose sole function is to stand in a corner and, in the style of a mad dystopian visionary, accuse the ‘NPCs’124 of their own artificiality (‘You are all not real! We’re in a game! Just look: …’ etc.). In Metal Gear Solid and its successor Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (Konami/PS2) as well as, above all, in Deus Ex (Eidos/PC, PS2) this ontological—epistemic vagueness itself finally becomes the theme of the game’s plot. It should be remembered that play as a medium, in its mode of enabling an equation of levels which otherwise cancel each other out, provides a dynamic that climaxes in the video game through its various medial prerequisites (computer, digital image, game). The video game as a form of the medium of play, however, transforms this dynamic into the form of a simultaneous coexistence of proximity and distance of the intrinsic actor and the external observer. The tension resulting from this is then the medium, within which single concrete games constitute themselves as forms. In these forms of the medium of the video game, the paradoxical status of the medium appears by means of continual new stagings of self-referentiality. The paradoxical status of the medium, however, reflects only human perception in toto, which, always at the same time external observer and ‘embedded’ participant, is simultaneously subject and object of observation. This conflict can be experienced in dealings with virtual realities and precisely in the form of the video game: Here, however, what can be experienced in a model is what Kant formulated as a conceptual insight: the fragmentation of our reference to the

124 NPC = non-player character. Characters which populate the streets of cyber cities as virtual extras and simulate ‘life’ by means of generally very limited, automatically running animation loops.

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world, as far as we are—irreducibly—external observers and intrinsic participants. But whilst Kant deprives the participating perspective of ‘knowledge’, virtual realities could become emblematic for how genuine recognitions can be gained, not only in the perspectives of the observer, but also in those of participants: in any case, this new form of synaesthetic treatment is inherent to models which are opened up through virtual reality.125

Video games as the most widespread ‘models of virtual reality’ enable, as interactive media, precisely this integration of the participant perspective with the observer perspective and in this way enable an ‘either/or’ of the interacting subject, who is now no longer only a non-participating observer, but simultaneously a suffering participant. This ‘suffering’ is aesthetically sublimated in the mode of the ‘as if’ character of the game, because a danger, of no matter what kind, held by a participant perspective, is framed within the game and as a game and thus weakened and domesticated. A Distance, as Near as It Might Be: Immersion in Video Games He spent his teens alone, sealed in his bedroom, voyaging. All the while, he held on to that first hint, hoping to locate the fecundity that he’d wrongly thought already inhabited that first adventure. Each new release, each innovation in design, produced in him the sliver of recovery. But Closer only stoked the fire of Not Quite.126

In a study of the media which make up the video game, we are impelled to scrutinize more closely terms such as ‘immersion’ and ‘virtual reality’ once the medium of video games comes into question. While video games have much in common with various forms of ‘virtual reality’ (which I call ‘VR’ in the following), like artificial realities which can be explored by means of data gloves or similar interfaces, the singularity of this medium is first glimpsed when the original quality of the medium can be worked out in contrast to other forms. To this end, we must describe the kind of VR with which we are dealing in video games. In his work CyberSociety. Mythos und Realität der 125 Krämer: Zentralperspektive…, p. 36. 126 Powers: Plowing the Dark, p. 110.

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Informationsgesellshaft (CyberSociety. Myth and Reality of the Information Society), the sociologist Achim Bühl has summarized what we understand by the term VR, identifying nine characteristics that cumulatively represent the ideal model of a virtual reality—which, as Bühl shows, does not exist in this pure form. By means of the characteristic of immersion, we may observe in detail the form of virtual reality mediated through the medium of the video game. By contrasting it with other forms, we can elucidate specifics of the video game experience. Virtual Reality and Immersion Tightly bound up with concepts of virtual reality and the term ‘cyberspace’, the phenomenon of immersion represents the technique which enables the user’s perceptual apparatus to enter the spaces of virtual imagery: ‘The user is immersed in a computer-generated development environment, he or she enters into a “space behind the screen”.’127 Here, the effect of immersion results not from monocausal events; that is, from a particular item of hardware or software acting alone. Like virtual realities themselves, their agent, the effect of immersion, is ‘a type of convergence-technology which supports itself on the basis of available basic technologies like data helmets, software developments, artificial intelligence, parallel calculator architecture and networks’.128 Bühl assumes here that the main aim of every technique of immersion consists in letting the user feel the difference between reality and VR as little as possible. Thus the more complete the immersion, the less likely the user is able to differentiate between VR and reality. At its technological center, virtual reality aims for the deception of human senses. The observer entering a virtual computer-generated world should have the impression of a subjectively experienced reality. The sensory impressions created by the computer should deceive human senses perfectly. After the sense of hearing, the sense of vision is the easiest to simulate in humans. It seems to be only a matter of time before the resolution quality of displays and the processing power of modern computers will be

127 Achim Bühl: CyberSociety. Mythos und Realität der Informationsgesellschaft, Cologne 1996, p. 54. 128 Ibid., p. 62.

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in the position to create virtual sensory impressions which are absolutely realistic.129

The models for this idea of a total immersion are—as Bühl shows—concepts which appear predominantly in science fiction and are linked with names such as William Gibson and Stanislaw Lem. Lem’s concept of ‘phantomatic’ forms the kernel of the idea of total immersion. For Lem, phantomatic realities are those ‘realities that are absolutely indistinguishable from the standard reality but that are subject to different laws’.130 A perfect illusory technique of this kind—one that can no longer be differentiated from reality—should, however, start on a neuronal level. Thus neuronal interfaces between human and computer are the consequence of this claim for total immersion, but they still belong to the realm of science fiction, on the basis of technical difficulties that appear close to insurmountable. In relation to forms of VR that exist today, however, of interest are not so much the imaginative extrapolations of science fiction, but rather those techniques that aim towards the (apparent) ideal of total immersion. It remains to be said that we can only even begin to talk about VR when the intention for immersion is available; when the ‘entry’ into a computer-generated artificial world is the aim of those convergence technologies whose effect is the experience of immersion: ‘In the following, we understand by Virtual Reality those techniques which allow a person to integrate immediately into computer-generated development environments, in distinction to, e.g., pure computer simulations, in which an immersion does not take place.’131 Ever since the beginnings of computer technology, the integration of the human into a virtual environment—as near to complete an integration as possible—is the long-term goal of diverse equipment aiming to close off the human perceptual apparatus from ‘normal’ reality. From Morton Heilig’s Sensorama, which even adds an olfactory component by means of scent jets,132 but which is not interactive, to Ivan Sutherland’s Sword

129 Ibid., p. 70. 130 Stanislaw Lem: Summa technologiae, p. 191 [https://issuu.com/cristinobogado/

docs/lem-stanislaw-summa-technologiae]. 131 Bühl: CyberSociety…, p. 53. 132 Ibid., p. 58.

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of Damocles,133 and finally to Jaron Lanier’s ‘data glove’,134 there has been no lack of elaborate technological attempts to clear an entry for the human body into virtual spaces. It is noticeable how little these technologies have impacted the field of the video game, though there has been no lack of new attempts to make interfaces such as data gloves or even ‘shutter glasses’ attractive to gamers. We might argue that the costs of a technologically satisfactory VR interface currently lie beyond what is affordable for consumers, and that the meagre success of such interfaces is thus (still) due to technology being insufficiently developed. In contrast to this is the assumption, leading from the medial status of the video game as it has been presented above, that there is no such total immersion in the medium of the video game, and that this would even contradict the specific character of the video game. To formulate this as a thesis: the fact that nowadays video games do not aim for total immersion, and that the emerging interfaces maintain a distance between user and screen, does not speak of a deficit of the VR mediated through video games, but rather represents its conditions of possibility. Because within a total immersion the aisthetic balance of external observer perspective and intrinsic participant perspective is tilted as far as possible in favour of the participant perspective. The medium of the video game would thus lose much of its status as a threshold phenomenon. And the character of the threshold phenomenon is—precisely because of the medium of play—the foundation of all video games.135 Moving through the most important media which have been described as elements of the form of the video game (computer or binary code, digital image, play), we have seen that on precisely those levels on which the medium of the video game is still not constituted as a form, an equation of levels which seem otherwise to be incompatible has proved itself to be structurally dominant. Regardless of whether it is a question of the ‘magical practice’ of program code, which in the mode of instantaneous realization of a Symbolic blurs the boundary between the current and the potential, switches the digital image between the Symbolic and the Imaginary; or whether the medium of the game fundamentally represents a medium of the non-synthetic mediation of incompatible logical

133 Ibid., p. 58. 134 Ibid., p. 61. 135 Cf. Sect. 1.4 in this work.

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and epistemic levels: the video game as ‘convergence medium’ thematizes this ‘threshold character’ and has this as its content, for example, in the form of self-referentiality, staging it in a new way time and again. A total immersion can, therefore, never be fully achieved in video games and it is also not their intention—as we saw earlier. This structure, inherent to the video game as a threshold phenomenon, is expressed in the particular experience of immersion which can be achieved through this medium. How, though, might we conceive of an experience of immersion which is broken, again and again, by the fluctuation between the external observer perspective and intrinsic participant perspective, and which nevertheless draws its not inconsiderable attraction from immersion? High-Speed Meditation: Picnoleptic Immersion Crucial for an immersive experience within a virtual reality is the possibility of some form of interaction. Virtual realities are defined not only by a particular form of perception, but also by the possibility of interacting with objects in the virtual environment, in real time. In contrast to the VR systems described by Bühl,136 the impact from the side of the user does not typically work via HMDs137 or data gloves, but rather via a two-level interface system which consists on the first level, in terms of hardware, of a ‘controller’; and second, in the form of a software interface, part of the program itself, situated in the virtual world. Up to this point, the forms of interaction in video games are in no way different from conventional interactions with a PC. The combination of both of these control elements varies according to the game. The most significant thing is that the game control, resulting from the combination of a hardand software interface, allows as intuitive as possible a navigation within the game environment. To keep the control of a video game as simple as possible, developers today fall back mainly on so-called ‘joypads’—apart from the PC, where the mouse/keyboard combination is the dominant hardware interface. The design of these control devices is no simple undertaking, as they aim to combine as great a navigational freedom as possible with ergonomic comfort and intuitive usability. The single key-commands of a controller

136 Bühl: CyberSociety…, pp. 57–61. 137 HMD = head mounted display.

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are arranged differently according to the game and must enable the control of, for example, a simulated vehicle or the direction of a whole virtual football team. Immersion in video games occurs at the moment when the control of a video game is taken up by the user in ‘flesh and blood’ to such an extent that the singular actions needed to play—the conscious observation of motor actions as well as the information of the software interface—are forgotten and the player can thus interact intuitively with the virtual environment. In this moment, we think as little about the control and navigation of virtual objects as the human body must ‘reflect’ on its everyday motion sequences. As the game navigation is registered in our motor memory, the controller and the software interface become prosthesis-like extensions of the body into the virtual environment and are no longer perceived as external, artificial pieces of apparatus. This moment describes our entry into the virtual environment: the experience of immersion which differentiates the video game from the normal use of a PC. While the user of a PC treats the medium as a tool, as an instrument, in the sense of a meansto-an-end relationship, this aspect sinks to the background in the mode of the video game, in order to foreground the ‘world-creating’ apparatus character of the underlying media. The user now enters this ‘world’. There must be a reason why so many of the people I know who enjoy videogames describe racing a good lap in Colin McRae Rally or clearing waves of defenders as a ‘Zen’ experience. This is understood to be a shorthand for a kind of high-speed meditation, an intense absorption in which the dynamic form of successful play becomes beautiful and satisfying.138

Steven Poole, following the work of the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, describes this condition of ‘high-speed meditation’—the moment of blending out the real environment and the simultaneous immersion in the virtual environment—as ‘flow’. Csikszentmihaly was interested in the fact that musicians, rock climbers, chess players and other people engaged in very complex tasks reported an experience of ecstasy or bliss, losing track of time and losing the sense of self. He decided that, although on the face of it each activity was markedly different, all his subjects must be having the same sort of experience, which

138 Poole: Trigger Happy…, pp. 179–180.

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he termed ‘flow’. In this state, ‘action flows upon action according to an internal logic that seems to need no conscious intervention by the “actor”’. And ‘there is little distinction between self and environment, between stimulus and response, or between past, present and future’.139

Several important characteristics of the experience of immersion in video games are named here. For one, the cessation of conscious interventions into the virtual environment on the side of the player is important. A sign of flow is that the actions accomplished by the user no longer require conscious direction, but rather proceed ‘as if from themselves’. Of course, I do not refer here to any somnambulant capacity induced by video games. Rather, an entry into a virtual space of images in the mode of this particular experience of immersion is characterized by the fact that actions and reactions within the virtual game world seem to step into relationship with each other according to an ‘internal logic’, without the conscious participation of secondary processes. This phenomenon has a similarity with what Poole names ‘muscle memory’, referring to the methods of musicians: When a pianist attempts a new piece, most of her attention is focused consciously on playing the right notes according to what is printed on the manuscript page, and working out precise fingerings for particularly difficult passages. But there is a point at which these visual instructions are no longer needed, when the player has so thoroughly learned the music that she does not consciously think about where to put her hands next. People also call this ‘getting the music under your fingers’. It is only now, when the mechanics of playing have been assimilated, that the player can concentrate on performing the music.140

What is significant here is the emphasis on the specific performance character inherent in the video game, which is typically neglected in views of video games. The player is not just the ‘subservient’ subject, helplessly exposed to multiple stimuli. On the contrary, the attractiveness of the video game consists in precisely those moments in which the ‘muscle memory’ of the player gains the upper hand against cognitive observation, and a feeling of control arises.

139 Ibid., p. 180. 140 Ibid., pp. 181–182.

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In contrast, however, to the comparative examples mentioned by Poole, such as the playing of an instrument or climbing a mountain, flow is never constant within a video game. It is always only ever fleeting, momentary. While for a musician the learning of a score—and for a mountain-climber, physical training—is only a preliminary step to be overcome, and only a means to an end, flow in the act of playing video games remains at the stage of ‘muscle memory’ and becomes an end in itself, since no ‘afterwards’ exists. In the case of the musician, the actual action, the autonomous acquisition and the individual interpretation of the piece of music, takes place on the basis of the previously practised ‘muscle memory’. Only after the physical—technical difficulties of a musical piece are mastered does the actual execution begin. The flow of a musician in the act of playing a piece of music must be constant. If uncertainty were to set in, for example, over the requisite finger positioning, even for just a moment, then a performance, as a personal, creative treatment of a piece, would be interrupted and made unviable. For a mountain climber, this kind of uncertainty concerning the motor processes of the body, no matter how short, could even be life-threatening. The situation is quite different in the case of playing a video game. Here, flow may well be identified in that moment when ‘muscle memory’ no longer demands a conscious intervention, but at the same time this specific state of consciousness meanders again and again into emptiness, being constantly interrupted by the demands of the game itself. This constant interruption of the flow is the result of the specific, dynamic structure of the video game, whose immersion-effect of flow depends on a fragile equilibrium between the individual motor and cognitive capacities of the player and the demands of the respective game situation. Flow only occurs in the moment when the capacities of the player— for example, to keep a virtual racing car on the track, aiming to reach the highest possible speed and simultaneously to dodge competing vehicles—are not overloaded by the requirements of the game. At the same time, however, a game must not make it too easy for the player and risk boredom. An immersion experience of flow is achieved at the point ‘when there is a perceived match between the demands of the activity and the subject’s skills’.141 The maintenance of this equilibrium succeeds, however, inconstantly. The capacities and momentary predispositions of each

141 Ibid., p. 180.

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player are always too varied, meaning that the experience of this ‘perceived match’ can be achieved only momentarily. With some practice, these moments can be intensified, extended and attached to one another like a chain, but a constant immersion experience of flow is not structurally possible over a longer time period, as with, for example, the playing of a piece of music. The consequence is a constant tipping back and forth between the external observer and intrinsic participant perspectives: a permanent, reciprocal movement between jubilatory feelings of happiness in the mode of the immersion experience (‘experience of ecstasy or bliss’, ‘successful play becomes beautiful and satisfying’) and frustration during the unavoidable interruption of that bliss. This situation holds the potential for addiction unleashed by video games. Much less effort must be expended to achieve the immersion experience of flow than is necessary for the learning of a score, for example. Simultaneously, for this simplification of the fundamental techniques, the player must pay the price of constant frustration and permanent deferral of the sought-after flow experience, which is ultimately never reached. A compounding factor is that, in the mode of the video game, the relationship of the player and the game is precisely the reverse to that, for example, in the practice of music. It is not the player who dispenses with the game, but exactly the reverse: the game uses the predispositions of the player to unfold the medium. This asymmetrical relationship is a new quality that first takes effect in our encounter with digital media and which is very clearly formulated in the medium of the video game. At this point, the limits of Poole’s analogies come to light. We should agree with Poole when he states that ‘aspects of play and performance’142 coexist in the video game. However, this coexistence must not simply be equated with the processes observed in the playing of a piece of music. The greatest proximity to predecessors of the type described can be recognized at the earliest in that kind of musical practice which, not relying on the exact memorization of a score, comes to fruition in the act of improvisation. One might think that improvisation corresponds exactly to this structure of the ‘perceived match between the demands of the activity and the subject’s skills’, as the capacities of the musician, in the form of his or her command of the instrument and satisfactory knowledge of harmony

142 Ibid., p. 183.

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in some way ‘fit together’, in the ideal case, with the demands of the situation (for example, a correctly played chord sequence in a jazz piece), such that an auditory wholeness arises. The improvising musician would be in the condition of flow in that moment if his or her motor capacities as well as his knowledge of harmony and of the respective piece of music were so well developed that he or she would no longer consciously have to reflect on the structure of the chord sequences or on the required finger positions in each case, and could busy him/herself creatively, simply and alone with the musical material. Flow in the mode of the video game would be comparable with the attempts at improvisation by an amateur musician whose capacities have not yet reached the necessary measure of prowess and who, on the basis of this, experiences his or her flow to be interrupted again and again, because uncertainties, for example, concerning the demanded finger position or the corresponding harmony successions, force him or her to consciously intervene and, if necessary, to correct him/herself. Comparable to this situation is the immersion experience in video games, but with the significant difference that the user of a video game can never attain a form of prowess similar to that of a professional musician. On the level of ‘muscle memory’, persistent practice of the play mechanic of a single game can be internalized in such a way that the required ‘finger positions’ on the ‘instrument’ of the joypad can be achieved as if on their own. These capacities, for whose attainment participants in E-Sport take great effort, as professionalized players of a particular game, such as Quake or Starcraft , have scarcely any use in the context of other games. In each case, gameplay must be learned from scratch. As soon as prowess in playing a particular video game is attained, then the game quickly loses its appeal. The motivation of professional video game players consists, in this case, in the competition with others—a level of play which no longer belongs to the game itself, but rather uses the game as a vehicle. The video game as such needs the fragile balance between the ‘skills’ of the user and the ‘demands of the activity’ in order to function. If the structure of the immersion experience in video games, then, corresponds only contingently to that of flow, then it remains to be seen how we might describe an immersion experience which shares many aspects with the phenomenon of flow, but which ultimately is not rooted in the ‘ecstatic’ aspects of flow, but rather seems to privilege only the aisthetic modi of this condition. Along with the fact that the immersion experience

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takes place on the level of unconscious primary processes, Csikszentmihaly’s indication, cited by Poole, is important: that the boundary between system and environment is blurred as much as for the immersed subject as is temporal succession (‘there is little distinction between self and environment, between stimulus and response, or between past, present and future’). This specific ‘implosion’ of space and time is the theme, in various ways, of postmodern medial reflection and is theoretically examined above all in the work of Paul Virilio, alongside the works of Baudrillard, which devote themselves to the apparent process of dissolution of referential sign systems. Virilio starts from his theory of speed, which he named ‘dromology’ (from the Greek dromos: run, step), and from which it follows that history finds itself in a constantly growing ‘ecstasy of speed’, leading ultimately, in the mode of real time in the digital age, to the implosion of space and time. New media technologies allow for the instant simultaneity and ‘synchronized spatiality’ of enormous distances and time zones, while in parallel to this, the physical human becomes ever more immobile and the body, which can no longer keep up with enormous accelerations, being no more than the ‘host’ of instant communicative practices, finally becomes ballast—which, in the final consequence of a subject surfing in the data world, must only be stripped away. Whether or not we follow Virilio’s apocalyptic extrapolations, it is certain that we can take a great deal from his analyses of the various physical conditions of speed, which link urban studies, aesthetics, strategies of war, and media history. In this connection, Virilio finds in his ‘aesthetics of disappearance’, in the phenomenon of picnolepsy, an analogy to the condition of aisthetic experience, as it is induced by the high acceleration of today’s media technologies. The lapse occurs frequently at breakfast and the cup dropped and overturned on the table is its well-known consequence. The absence lasts a few seconds; its beginning and its end are sudden. The senses function, but are nevertheless closed to external impressions. The return being just as sudden as the departure, the arrest word and action are picked up again where they have been interrupted. Conscious time comes together again automatically, forming a continuous time without apparent breaks. For these absences, which can be quite numerous—hundreds every day most often pass completely unnoticed by others around—we’ll be using the word ‘picnolepsy’ (from the Greek, picnos: frequent). However, for the picnoleptic,

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nothing really has happened, the missing time never existed. At each crisis, without realizing it, a little of his or her life simply escaped.143

The heuristic advantage of describing the immersion experience specific to video games as a picnoleptic experience consists in differentiating it from Poole’s analogies to the creative practice of music or even to Zen experiences, while retaining the aisthetic components of these experiences. As such, we avoid describing the immersion experience in video games as a meditative experience, thus elevating it beyond its status. Just like the picnoleptic, in the mode of immersion the user of a video game experiences an absence which lifts him from out of his real physical situation and blurs the boundaries between system and surroundings on an aisthetic level. Because the immersion experience takes place on the level of the primary processes, it obeys another logic, temporally and spatially, which momentarily suspends the dichotomies we conventionally draw between, for example, the Symbolic and the Imaginary, or the real and the fictitious. Virilio describes the dream-like suspension of our conventional sense of time by means of the picnoleptic’s loss of duration. Here, ‘duration’ refers to the Bergsonian durée, which, in brief summary, signifies an ‘inner time’ in contrast to linear, ‘objective’ time. The player immersed in the picnoleptic immersion of a video game forgets all too quickly the linear time of clocks, only to notice, after a subjectively experienced short time of playing, that several hours of ‘objective’ time might easily have passed. As with Virilio’s picnoleptic child, those time periods in which we step out of conventional reality into a world of shifting boundaries and porous mirrors are momentary and sudden. In contrast to a total immersion, picnoleptic immersion is characterized by a coming and going of levels, a movement that characterizes the specific dynamic of the video game. Not for nothing are, for Virilio, many games also pure scenarios of this dynamic; a situation which completes the argumentative circle here, because: ‘The basis of the game is the separation of the two extreme poles of the seen and the unseen, which is why its construction, the unanimity that pushes children to spontaneous acceptance of its rules, brings us back to the picnoleptic experience.’144 143 Virilio: Aesthetics, p. 9 [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7LGkCFPsv6SYTk4Z mIyYmQtN2RkZS00OWI5LWI1NWUtY2QwMDMwMTNkNmE4/view]. 144 Virilio: Aesthetics …, p. 14.

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Conclusion The status of the video game, and of the media on which it is based, culminates in the picnoleptic immersion specific to video games, and can be experienced sensually in the performative act of playing. Yet the question remains: how might we bring the relationship between the user and the medium into the perspective whose characteristics were the focus of the single chapters of this work? A first clue is given by the ‘potential for addiction’ specific to video games, which, as we saw, results from the double structure of picnoleptic immersion. It is worth noting that, when describing the video game experience in the context of the phenomenon of flow, critics often fall back on an affectively and emotionally overloaded terminology. Hence Poole’s description of a good gaming experience with words like ‘bliss’ or ‘ecstasy’, or as being ‘beautiful and satisfying’. The immersion experience is represented as a kind of intoxication, within which the boundaries of time and space, of subject and object, of internal and external worlds, blur—and which unfolds its potential for desire in the mode of an almost Dionysian ‘ego dissociation’. It would be all too easy to connote this ‘intoxication’ negatively and to describe it in the context of drug abuse, where the lexical proximity of the computer user and the drug addict, both being ‘users’ of a sort, is no coincidence. Here, we all too often overlook the fact that—soberly considered—the video game is not simply a product of a ‘crazy’ digital culture industry designed to influence the ‘masses’, but rather is a medium which, being part of a far-reaching medial transformation, belongs to this transformation and should, as such, be judged as neutrally as possible. While it is scarcely surprising from a cultural—critical perspective that such an aisthetic ‘ego dissolution’ in the spaces of virtual realities is negatively connoted by Baudrillard or Virilio, and is described by means of a rhetoric of decline, this judgement is not necessarily compelling. Such an argument draws its justification primarily from unspoken basic assumptions that allow writers to establish an opposition between reality and virtuality, or between reality and fiction; this contrast is then staged as a conflict between actuality and ‘un-actuality’. And thus with every complaint about the ‘agony of the Real’, we lose sight of the fact that the very conception of reality at its foundation is itself historically conditioned and must in no way be misunderstood to be an objective criterion. To be

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more precise, we are not complaining, here, about an agony of the ‘Real’, for this would be unthinkable. It would be more exact to speak of an ‘agony of reality’, where ‘reality’ is defined as a historically contingent and changeable construction of the world around us. The Western rationalistic concept of reality itself emerged alongside a long tradition of taking into account its own ‘techniques of illusion’. This is also the case for the presumed contrast of ‘real reality’ and fiction. Elena Esposito suggests, for example, referring to Michel Foucault, that the dichotomous differentiation between a sphere of the fictional and an ‘objective’ reality independent of it is an invention of modernity. Historically, there have been many periods in which a differentiation between reality and fiction was not only non-existent, but would have been epistemological nonsense.145 The question ‘Do we still need fiction, in a reality like our own?’146 is thus not only an effective provocation, but rather implies the observation that the boundaries between these oppositions, organized dichotomously in our everyday understanding, have long lost their fixity. Hence, the question about reality and virtuality must be considered to be just as dependent on the observer as that of reality and fiction, representing, strictly speaking, not an ‘objective’ but rather a normative criterion. In the context of the ‘dissolution of reality’ and ‘aestheticization’ in the age of digitization, we are not concerned with leading terminological trench warfare, but with describing the status quo of the situation as it is, and from this foundation, glimpsing the aisthetic quality experienced through new media like the video game. The emphatic way in which the experience of immersion is connoted positively on the one hand and negatively on the other, in the mode either of a rhetoric of disappearance or of judging video games by their pathological aspects (addiction), shows us at least one thing: in these playful virtual worlds, made to be explored, we are clearly dealing with a phenomenon about which it is curiously hard to speak neutrally. Both the drug analogy and the description of the immersion experience in the mode of flow reveal a potential of this specific perceptual experience which withdraws from conventional rationality and can be strictly categorized under the irrational, by virtue of 145 See Elena Esposito: Fiktion und Realität, in: Krämer (ed.): Medien—Computer…, pp. 269–297. 146 Derrick de Kerckhove: Brauchen wir, in einer Realität wie der unseren, noch Fiktionen?, in: Vattimo, Welsch (eds.): Medien—Welten…, pp. 187–201.

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its dream-like, intoxicating status. It is, however, necessary to disentangle something of the concept of the irrational from the semantic context of its use in the work of Georg Lukács,147 in order to clear the term of bias and thus render it functional again. Umberto Eco offers an approach: One of the antonyms of ‘unreasonableness’ (according to Roget’s Thesaurus ) is ‘moderateness’. Being moderate means being within the modus —that is, within limits and within measure. The word reminds us of two rules we have inherited from the ancient Greek and Latin civilizations: the logical principle of modus ponens and the ethical principle formulated by Horace: est modus in rebus, sunt certi denique fines quos ultra citrque nequit consistere rectum. At this point I understand that the Latin notion of modus was rather important, if not for determining the difference between rationalism and irrationalism, at least for isolating two basic interpretative attitudes, that is, two ways of deciphering either a text as a world or the world as a text …Latin rationalism adopts the principles of Greek rationalism but transforms and enriches them in a legal and contractual sense. The legal standard is modus, but the modus is also the limit, the boundaries.148

147 See Georg Lukács: The Destruction of Reason, Vols. I to III, trans. by Peter R. Palmer, 1980. Lukács uses the concept of the irrational within a strictly Marxist perspective to describe intellectual tendencies which, according to his argument, can be made responsible, in a direct causal relationship, for the crimes of Fascism and National Socialism. The result is, despite many important insights into the historical relations, an ultimately hugely oversimplified depiction which does not shy away from indiscriminately excommunicating the most disparate approaches, from Romanticism to Nietzsche, Dilthey and Bergson, to NS apologists such as Baeumler or Rosenberg, to irrationalism—which he compares to the ultima ratio of historical materialism. This attempt at a philosophical—historical ‘tabula rasa’ has encountered firm resistance in Adorno, as is well known (see Theodor W. Adorno: Erpreßte Versöhnung, in Adorno: Noten zur Literatur, Frankfurt/M 1998), and today, within scholarship on Fascism, it has become obsolete, at least in this apodictic variant. What remains, however, is the use of the adjective ‘irrational’ as a pejorative word which is used by all ideological camps in the same diffuse manner and always with the intention of defamation. 148 Umberto Eco: Interpretation and History, in: Interpretation and Overinterpre-

tation, pp. 26–27 [https://books.google.de/books?id=wbhROmD3guQC&pg=PA26& lpg=PA26&dq=umberto+eco+unreasonableness+moderateness&source=bl&ots= LQQXWjFEP5&sig=FdDt-0e5YatPT_iwDa9lgYgrO-0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKE wjz9tHC2q7VAhVHBBoKHdBrA6sQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=umberto%20eco%20 unreasonableness%20moderateness&f=false].

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Structurally, then, the constitutive characteristic of the ‘irrational’ consists first in a transgression of boundaries, in a deviation from the boundaries of the ‘modus’. When a phenomenon is categorized under the field of the irrational, this categorization signifies nothing other than an act or dynamic of transgression. This transgression of boundaries then describes a process which transgresses the ‘modus’ from within, and on both sides. Here we are seeking justification for why the field of the irrational is constantly accompanied by paradoxical phenomena, for what is logically excluded from a ‘modus’ is precisely the condition of the possibility of transgression, and so can no longer be seen without contradictions within the rules of the transgressed ‘modus’. The fact that this transgression of boundaries is often not judged neutrally and is, for example, with Lukács, connoted in a decisively negative manner, results from the circumstance that the transgression seems to negate the respective transgressed ‘modus’ each time, while actually only making its system boundaries visible as such. If both sides of the boundary are considered according to an opposition such as true/false or ethical/unethical, the ‘scandal’ is perfect and the ‘guilty’ party quickly found. A description of the picnoleptic immersion experience of video games as belonging to the field of the irrational is not intended to be a judgement, but rather only a description, revealing a certain figure of thought to be a ‘criminal offence’. The irrational element as a transgression of boundaries in the sense sketched above helps to keep in view the boundary-transcending nature of this perceptual condition as a ‘threshold phenomenon’, without having to judge this process in one or another direction. Throughout the course of this work, the concept of the threshold phenomenon has shown itself to be the common denominator of the most important media participating in the medium of the video game. The medium of the computer, or the media standard fundamental to it, can be described as a medium which is in the position to transcend, in some way, that boundary which is marked on the one hand by signs, and on the other by the referent; that is, in the medium of binary code, the sign no longer stands in a relationship of reference with the signified, but rather literally in a causal constitutive relationship with it. The program code does not mean: it is, in the act of realization—it ‘does what it says’. This profane—magical practice of the program code is the form of the threshold phenomenon specific to this medium.

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The digital image, in turn, reveals itself on the basis of the medium of the computer as a further threshold phenomenon, switching between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, and, precisely through this transgression of boundaries, laying the foundation of virtual realities: the possibility of interaction with virtual spaces. Play is finally the medium which, in the form of the drawing-together of incompatible logical levels, itself supplies the condition of possibility for the form of the video game. The video game refers to the paradoxical structure of the named boundary transgression in the mode of its self-referentiality, staged anew, again and again. Finally, in the perceptual mode of picnoleptic immersion, these boundary transgressions are reflected in our interaction with the medium of the video game itself and allow this structure of dynamic fluctuation to be experienced. Here we can see that the specific vagueness that is the sign of the paradoxical process of transgression is not ‘pacified’, in order to finally ‘peacefully enter’ one or another field. The dynamic of the constant change between euphoria and frustration which arises from the incessant ‘tipping’ between external observer and internal participant perspectives in the picnoleptic immersion experience can be summarized in the formulation that the relationship of user and medium is characterized by a permanent ‘distance, as near as it may seem’, to quote Walter Benjamin. This dynamic, as irrational as it is in the sense sketched above, has far fewer pathological traits than it does have ‘erotic’ ones. Of course, such a relationship, like every ‘irrational’ relationship, can develop the character of dependency, but this aspect describes only a pathological portion of the phenomenon. With just as much justification, we might speak less of addiction than of seduction. The computer’s holding power is a phenomenon frequently referred to in terms associated with drug addiction. It is striking that the word ‘user’ is associated mainly with computers and drugs. The trouble with that analogy, however, is that it puts the focus on what is external (the drug). I prefer the metaphor of seduction because it emphasizes the relationship between person and machine.149

This structure of seduction latent in the person—computer relationship openly appears in the medium based on it, the video game, in the mode 149 Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen, 2011, p. 30.

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of the picnoleptic immersion experience. The intrusive way in which sexualized metaphors abound in the field of the video game—one need only think of the not coincidental double meaning of the term ‘joystick’—is only the superficial effect of a much more subtle strategy of seduction put into play by the medium. Only thus can we understand how a virtual figure like Lara Croft, modelled together rather badly from polygons, can radiate an ‘erotic’ aura encouraging international publications from Der Spiegel to Newsweek to deem it appropriate to let the scantily clad protagonist of the game Tomb Raider pose on their covers. What Lara Croft turns into the icon of a new relationship with media is not so much her polygonal primary characteristics, but rather her role as a metaphor for the relationship of seduction that is characteristic of the confrontation between human and machine in the video game. What makes Lara Croft so attractive is not the woman herself as a ‘pin-up’ of the digital age. The erotics of geometric graphic data alone are rather limited. Rather the virtual ‘media star’ Lara Croft is the translation of the much less obvious structure of seduction in the picnoleptic immersion experience into the culturally more comprehensive form of the ‘conventional’ sultry eroticism of the ‘pin-up girl’. This model again sets up the familiar form of the desiring subject in opposition to the desired object in a relationship that does not work here, because the specific ‘erotics’ of the video game is not an interpersonal one, but rather a narcissistic one. Musicians often hear the music in their minds before they play it, experiencing the music from within before they experience it from without. The computer can be similarly experienced as an object on the border between self and not-self. Or, in a new variant on the story of Narcissus, people are able to fall in love with the artificial worlds that they have created or that have been built for them by others. People are able to see themselves in the computer. The machine can seem a second self…150

It is to the merit of Marshall McLuhan that he points out that the common translation of ‘Narcissism’ as ‘self-love’, inherited from Freud, betrays the real meaning of the myth. The key point of the Narcissus myth lies in the fact that Narcissus precisely does not recognize the reflection in the water as his own, and thus falls in love with an image of himself, but rather with a face whose origins he misunderstands. He does not

150 Turkle, Life on the Screen…, p. 30.

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even understand this image as an image but takes it for another person, standing in front of him and yet unreachable. The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experience, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word narcosis, or numbness. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image.151

The form of the experience as it is undergone in video games is a precise copy of this narcissistic structure, whose ‘servomechanism’ is the picnoleptic experience of immersion. For one, the structure of ‘distance, as near as it may seem’ is shown to be the erotic form to which Narcissus fell victim. Just as the reflection of Narcissus—medially conditioned—can never be reached, so too is the user trapped in the mode of a fluctuation between perspectives of external observer and intrinsic participant, specific to the video game, without ever being able to reach the ‘satisfaction’ of the continuous ‘flow’ of the total immersion experience. On the other hand, however, the moment of immersion, within which the picnoleptic condition of forgetting time and space—the moment of the prosthetic immersion in the virtual space—is accompanied by numbness to the extent that, in these moments, the body and the environment can be ‘left behind’ on an aisthetic level and the user can become insensitive to stimuli beyond the virtual space because, within this state, external and inner time, for example, are unhinged from one another. We see, finally, that video games may very well have a ‘numbing” or narcotic effect on their users, but this is a numbness that should not be misunderstood as an escapism willed by the user. On the contrary, it is a medial effect that is ineluctable but can be consciously explored through the possibilities offered by new media. The intermingling of sign and referent, of Symbolic and Imaginary, of primary and secondary processes, and the structure of the picnoleptic immersion experience which is made possible through them, may well be irrational—but this irrationalism is the form taken by the medial reality specific to the video game in an age of the dissolution of reality. 151 McLuhan, Understanding Media…, p. 51 [http://robynbacken.com/text/nw_ research.pdf].

CHAPTER 2

Noise, Disturbance, Perturbation: The Interplay Between Transparency and Opacity as a Gameplay Device in Silent Hill 2

James Sunderland—the main character and the player’s avatar in Silent Hill 2—is in an unpleasant situation. Not only is he compelled to pursue the spirit of his presumably dead wife into a ghost town shrouded in mist, on the basis of an impossible letter sent to him from the beyond, but there is also no way back. Orpheus has crossed the threshold of Hades and the player quickly surmises that James will not save his Eurydice, but lose himself with her in this foggy underworld. From the very first takes of the opening video sequence, it is clear where James—and with him the player—has ended up: in a twilight zone, on the border between the Imaginary and the Real.1 At the beginning of the game, James finds himself at the border of the town Silent Hill, that ‘special place’ at the heart of the ghostly letter from his dead wife. This ominous dispatch from the kingdom of the dead that lures James to Silent Hill reads: ‘In my restless dreams, I see that town, Silent Hill. You promised you’d take me there again someday. But you never did. Well, I’m all alone there now … in our ‘special place’ … waiting for you…’ This ‘special place’, which is only ever spoken of vaguely and in intimations during the course of the game, and the precise nature of 1 My attempt here, however, is not to replicate the Lacanian model of the mirror stage across the avatar—player relationship again, though the temptation to do so, particularly in the case of Silent Hill 2, is not insignificant. On the theme of ‘the mirror stage and video games’, see Rehak (2003), as well as Rautzenberg (2002, pp. 37 ff.).

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Rautzenberg, Framing Uncertainty, Performance Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59521-8_2

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which is never made clear (does she refer to the Lakeview Hotel? The bar? Silent Hill itself?), is clearly identifiable as a variant of the Lacanian objet petit. Slavoj Žižek neatly formulates this as an ‘empty space on which the subject projects the fantasies that support his desire, a surplus of the real that propels us to narrate again and again our first traumatic encounters with jouissance’ (Žižek 1991, p. 133). As the player finds out at the end of the game, at the centre of this secret jouissance is Sunderland’s murder of his wife, who is said to have died of cancer. Silent Hill is thus filled with fantasies from James’s own private hell. The ‘surplus of the real’ breaks fresh ground. It is no wonder that only he can see the amorphous creatures and shapes which seem to emerge both from the omnipresent mist and from the static noise of his defunct radio. Because while some NPCs (non-player characters) James meets over the course of the game also seem to see something, they never see the thing that presents itself to the view of James (and of the player). Laura seems not to see anything threatening at all, and Maria— well, Maria herself is probably one of James’s fantasies.

Ecstasy of Absence As if to set the mood, the first thing that James, and with him the player, see of this ‘special place’ is a dirty privy filled with the ‘abject’—that is, those disgust- and fear-provoking parts of the Real that oscillate ontologically between object and subject2 —and, in this space, James’s reflection, which allows the player to see him/herself seeing. This first scene—in which James watches himself in the mirror while the player watches him from the third-person perspective, a bodiless, ‘absolute’ view—encompasses the entire poetics of Silent Hill 2. The medial surface that is otherwise invisible becomes tangible. At this point, Silent Hill 2 steps beyond a representation of the Real in the disfigured mode of the Imaginary (cancer, the fleshy amorphous creatures, ‘abject’ things like the smeared toilets).3 2 On the term ‘abject’, see Kristeva (1982). 3 On the Real as a fleshy, amorphous dream image: ‘There’s a horrendous discovery here

[in Freud’s dream of ‘Irma’s Injection’], that of the flesh one never sees, the foundation of things, the other side of the head, of the face, the secretory glands par excellence, the flesh from which everything exudes, at the very heart of the mystery, the flesh in as much as it is suffering, is formless in as much as its form in itself is something which provokes

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The various mirror encounters, which often occur on the occasion of central knot points of the plot,4 stage absence in relation to the viewer. The instances where the Protagonist encounters mirrors show the absence of the viewer whose very point of view, to follow optical logic, should be visible in the reflection. That this is not the case is a triviality of virtual spaces known to every player of video games, but in Silent Hill 2, this absence constantly evokes the uncanny as an ecstasy of absence. Ecstasy should be understood here in the sense of Gernot Böhme’s ‘that through which things make themselves noticeably present’ (Böhme 2001, p. 131): ‘it concerns the way in which a thing steps outside of the space of its presence, of its sphaera activitatis , and thus becomes tangibly present there’ (ibid.). What is interesting in Böhme’s conception of the sphaera activitatis here is that he names the spatially tangible ecstasy, that is, the ‘stepping outside of itself’ of a presence into the surrounding space, which no longer describes the presence itself, but rather the atmospheric ‘tainting’ of space that it causes. For example, the formal characteristics of a statue, a house or a colour are not in question so much as the way in which these ‘extend’ or ‘radiate’ into the surrounding space, and take effect there, in correspondence with all other factors in this space. A contradiction seems to consist in the fact that ecstasies in Böhme’s sense always postulate something present, for reason of which the talk of an ecstasy of absence seems to be counter-intuitive. However, here precisely lies the point: because the Real in Lacan’s sense5 slips from the levels of the Imaginary and Symbolic, and thus from every representation, a anxiety’ (Lacan 1988, p. 154). It would be difficult to formulate a better description of the design of creatures and textures in Silent Hill 2. Lacan continues: ‘there’s an anxietyprovoking apparition of an image which summarises what we can call the revelation of that which is least penetrable in the real, of the real lacking any possible mediation, of the ultimate real, of the essential object which isn’t an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence’ (ibid., p. 164, [itals M.R.]). 4 In the opening shot, for example, or during an encounter with the suicidal Angela. 5 There will be more to say on the dark category of the Real in Lacan, that well-known

‘darkness’ of which is owed to its metaphoricity. Lacan himself delivers very few explicit explanations for this category, in contrast to those of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. See, above all, the chapter ‘Tyche and automaton’ in Lacan 1988. In heuristic terms, it is crucial to maintain a stark division between the Real and the Symbolic and Imaginary. The Imaginary, according to Lacan, not only constitutes the corporeal image of the subject in the mirror stage, but, as the original function of recognition, spans everything that is ‘image’, including the way in which our perception constitutes ‘reality’. The Symbolic

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staging of the Real can only succeed not when the unrepresentable itself is represented (for how would that work?) but rather when its sphaera activitatis becomes tangible as such. This is exactly what we mean when we speak of an ecstasy of absence. The uncanny consists in the tangible, but not nameable, insistence of an unrepresentable thing, which reveals itself only indirectly: here, in a staging of the ecstastic presence of something absent (that is, the bodiless viewpoint).6 The crux of the matter is that, in Silent Hill 2, the uncanny is evoked not only in parasitical reliance on the all-too-well-known topoi of (trivial) literary and film history,7 but rather, above all, through its inclusion and thematization of the unsettling quality of its medial conditions of possibility. These have become an agent of the uncanny, and precisely this is the neuralgic point around which everything in Silent Hill 2 revolves. Games such as Project Zero and Eternal Darkness continue this approach, with varying degrees of success. While in Project Zero media technology (photography) takes a central place in the plot structure, Eternal Darkness plays with the recipient’s perceptual conventions: visual disturbances are staged in parallel with the mental condition of the virtual protagonist, disturbances that are engineered in such a way as not to be immediately recognizable as staged events . This goes as far as the apparent non-compliance of media technologies: if the panic meter—which symbolizes the mental state of the main character, who has all kinds of

spans the level of the ‘order of the Other’; that is, everything that ‘pervades’ the subject, but always precedes it. This means, first and foremost, language as a structure. The Real, on the other hand, escapes comprehension by means of these categories and encounters the sheer ‘that’ as a pure resistance. In other words, the perception of a table is optically and spatially above the Imaginary and ‘as table’—that is, in its everyday meaning and as the signifier ‘table’—is determined above the Symbolic. This is the level of ‘reality’. The pure fact that I can stumble across this table is a quality of the Real. The Real is, according to Malcolm Bowie, ‘a tile falling onto the head of a passer-by, a person from Porlock bringing a creative trance prematurely to its end, or, to take one of Lacan’s own examples, a knock on the door that interrupts a dream. The network of signifiers in which we have our being is not all that there is, and the rest of what is may chance to break in upon us at any moment’ (Bowie 1993, p. 103). 6 The theme of an ecstasy of absence cannot be pursued sufficiently here. I would simply like to point to the long history of such phenomena, which includes Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini wedding (1434) as well as Michel Foucault’s famous analysis of the Las Meninas in ‘The Order of Things’, or the reflection of Neo in Morpheus’s glasses in The Matrix (Andy Wachowski/Larry Wachowski, USA, 1999). 7 See, for example, Capcom’s Resident Evil series.

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uncanny things to contend with—reaches its furthest position, the TV can suddenly ‘switch off’. The image goes dark and the unprepared player ‘momentarily falls out of the game’.8 At other times, the volume changes suddenly ‘of its own accord’, with a visual feedback symbolized by a volume bar moving up and down: a recognizable part of the visual interfaces of most TV devices. This enhanced form of self-reflexivity is relatively new in the field of computer and video games, and implements a break in the relationship between representation and medium in the dramatic composition of the game. Thus Silent Hill 2 is part of the tradition of more recent Japanese horror films, whose specific quality consists in the representation of apparently opaque medial surfaces as the residuum of pure horror. Films such as Ringu (Ring —The Original, Hideo Nakata, Japan, 1998) or even Kairo (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan, 2001) stage ghosts, both on the level of plot and of image, in the age of their technological reproducibility. In Ringu, a curse is transferred simply through the copying of a video tape on which some surreal sequences are recorded. According to legend, anyone who watches this video recording will die shortly afterwards. The climax of the film is the entry of the Imaginary into the Real: in a kind of birth scene, the ghost claws itself out of the television screen, to stand physically before the unbelieving and fear-stricken—or narcotized, as McLuhan would say—protagonist. The curse cannot be undone, but only transferred to somebody else through a copy of the tape. The circulation of the signifier thus protects us from the invasion of the Real. In Kurosawa’s Kairo, a slightly altered version of the same story is given, this time through the example of an internet page.9 8 To avoid arousing frustration in the player, the interaction sequence is paused in such cases. After the ‘malfunction’ has ended, gameplay can be resumed from the point at which things seemed to have stopped. At this point, at the latest, it is clear that what has happened is not a real malfunction, but a staged trick. 9 There are numerous other examples, and not just from Japanese cinema. The references, however, are not always as clear as here, or in Phone (Byeong-Ki Ahn, Korea, 2002) and Existenz (David Cronenberg, USA, 1999). Other films certainly belong to this thematic complex of the ‘Uncanny of the Medial’, on varying levels: including Vanilla Sky (Cameron Crowe, USA, 2001), the Matrix trilogy (Andy Wachowki/Larry Wachowski, USA, 1999/2003/3003), The Blair Witch Project or even Into the Mirror (Seong-hoKim, Korea, 2003), as well as The Eye (Oxide Pang/Danny Pang, Hong Kong, 2002). Samuel Weber held a seminar, together with Bernd Scheffer, on the theme of ‘The Uncanniness of Media’ in the winter semester 2003/2004 at the Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversität in Munich, in which, according to the course description, they discussed the

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What is most interesting in these films is the representation of the border between the Real and Imaginary, embodied here in both cases by technical media (the TV screen, the monitor). The transferral or transgression from one level to another is always revealed via a disturbance of vision, a kind of ‘noise’ that allows the medium to be recognized as such. As iconographic predecessors in the field of cinema, we can cite Tope Hooper’s Poltergeist (USA, 1982) and, above all, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (USA, 1983), which play repeatedly through this reciprocal interpenetration of the Imaginary and the Real.10 Here too, the medial surface is established as a membrane between the Imaginary and the Real, whereby the traumatic entrance of the Real always happens in transit through noise (here in form of the ‘noise’ of the TV). The signal-to-noise ratio is thus not just a problem of physics and telecommunications, but a problem of the emergence of the ‘supernatural’, the uncanny, from the realm of pure contingency, of ‘white noise’— which is itself no more and no less than the ecstasy of the Real.

The Uncanny, Noise, the Real It is a constitutive characteristic of all media that they are invisible as such, forming the ‘blind spot in media use’ (Krämer 1998, p. 74): We do not hear airwaves, but the peal of bells; we do not read letters, but a story; in conversation we do not exchange sounds, but opinions and convictions, and the film we watch in a cinema usually allows us to forget the projection screen. (ibid.)

Media themselves are first perceptible in the course of malfunction, whether in the form of static noise, of the distortion of images, or of so-called compression artefacts:

uncanny between the theories of Heidegger, Benjamin, Freud and Derrida. For reasons of space, and in the lack of a corresponding publication, I can unfortunately not touch upon this wide-ranging discussion. The theses presented by me in this chapter have been developed independently of this seminar, in which I did not take part. As far as can be gleaned from the course description, however in Munich one aspect of this thematic complex was focused on (repetition) which here—as will be seen—is omitted. 10 An important predecessor of this topos in the field of film is, of course, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (England, 1966).

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They (media) usually take effect beneath the threshold of our perception; in being used, media ‘retreat’ through a kind of ‘aisthetic neutrality’: only in the noise of malfunctioning do media come to recognition, arriving at the centre of our perception. Media are encountered by a figure of reflection, which is ‘mediation’, and which unfolds such that the impression of ‘immediacy’ occurs. (Krämer 2003, p. 81)

Noise, however, is not simply an accident or ‘exception’ to this immediacy. On the contrary, it is most likely the case that the ‘accident’, the ‘noise’, is actually the rule and condition of possibility of media, and thus cannot simply be brushed to the margins of media history.11 Peter Geimer shows how the genesis of photography is precisely indebted to those various accidents and coincidences related to photochemical processes in the development of negatives. After having analysed a particularly ‘neat’ exemplar of one such photochemical accident,12 he resumes: This last example clarifies what happens when the materiality of photography haunts the representation of the world. The image is divided into two parts—on the right side, Bernini’s colonnades of St Peter in Rome; on the left side, the meaningless work of photochemistry. In the heat of the dry press, the referent melts. Looking at photographs like these, photographers would experience what Martin Heidegger calls ‘the modes of conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy’. These modes appear when a thing loses its readiness-to-hand, when it is missing, becomes inoperable, or disrupts the smooth flow of our actions. When we discover its unusability, the tool becomes conspicuous.

Not by accident does Geimer choose a formulation like the ‘haunting’ of representation by the materiality of the medium. On the border of chaos, malfunction and accident, the materiality of the medium reveals itself as something that deeply unsettles the sphere of representation. Heidegger’s 11 This thesis draws considerable support from the works of Jacques Derrida, who in ‘Signature Event Context’ (Derrida 1988), through a deconstructive reading of Austin, brings the failure of speech acts from the periphery to the centre: ‘Or, on the contrary, is this risk rather its internal and positive condition of possibility? Is that outside its inside, the very force and law of its emergence?’ (Derrida 1988, p. 17). 12 See Geimer (2002, p. 324). It concerns a ‘failed’ photograph (taken from a ‘Handbook of Photography’ from 1930), the left-hand part of which, through the melting of the emulsion, caused by the great heat from drying the negatives, exhibits streaky traces which seem to threaten to invade the still recognizably intact right-hand part of the image.

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dictum that the ‘tool’ first shows itself as such in the mode of ‘obtrusiveness’ and ‘obstinacy’ describes precisely this resistance of the medial against meaning, and against that representation which first enables it. The violence of this process resonates clearly in Heidegger’s writing; the ‘melting away of the referent’ is the trauma of meaning, that is to say of the whole semiotic—hermeneutic realm. However, ‘The obtrusiveness of malfunction is thus nothing negative, no deficit, no exception to the rule of photography, but rather, one of its possible manifestations’ (ibid., p. 326). Geimer goes on to describe how the sciences around the start of the twentieth century put this resistance of the medium of photography to use for the purpose of recording the invisible. X-rays, radioactivity, electricity, infra-red radiation and heat leave traces on the photographic plate and thus enter the field of human perception. This insight, however, comes at the price of the undecidability between chaos and reference: ‘it is not always obvious whether the effects of an experimental order are a discovery or background noise; material for a Nobel Prize or cause for complaint’ (ibid., p. 332). Because of this undecidability, the photographic plate can also become a medium in the occult and spiritual sense. Around 1900, the ‘photography of the invisible’, that is, the attempt to copy and thus to chronicle physical phenomena such as Xrays or the infra-red, stands upon the same shaking ground as the popular contemporary phenomenon of ‘ghost photography’ (ibid., pp. 329 ff.). The ‘haunting’ of representation by the materiality of the medium means, then, a ‘malfunction’ of the Symbolic as well as of the Imaginary. It is also a transgression, a border-crossing. The medium of photography, apparently so reliable, so homely/canny because it is boldly mimetic and indexical, becomes uncanny once contingency haunts mimesis and the signal is finally revealed to be a state of exception within chaotic noise, and not the reverse. In his text The Uncanny, Sigmund Freud, following a lengthy etymological recapitulation, defines the tendency of this term to tip over into its opposite—the ambivalence of heimlich, canny—as the residuum of the Unheimlich itself: ‘Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops towards an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a subspecies of heimlich’ (Freud 1917–1919, p. 225). In this context, Freud finds great importance in a citation of Schelling, which he takes from Daniel Sander’s dictionary of 1860: ‘“Unheimlich” is the name for everything that ought to have remained… secret and hidden but has come to light’ (ibid., p. 223). This latter is, as we have seen in the above, precisely

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the moment of transgression, the diffuse borderline between chaos and representation. Everything that ought to have remained hidden in the ‘canniness’ of photographic mimesis is its birth from pure contingency, and precisely this emerges in the mode of the photochemical ‘accident’, the Heideggerian ‘obstinacy’ of the tool. We are dealing here with an ambivalence in the Freudian sense of the uncanny, which—to formulate it in Lacanian terms—rips a hole in the Symbolic, out of which the Real spills forth. This Real is the place, that is the un-place, the dystopia of noise, the ‘object of anxiety par excellence’ (Lacan 1988, p. 164). At this point, however, it is crucial not to ontologise Lacan’s category of the Real, if talk of the Real is to be more than academic jargon. The diverse and ever newly undertaken descriptions of this category in Lacan’s works aim not to conceptualize the Real as such, and yet to make it tangible. Only thus can its determining difference from reality be maintained, which is a function of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, and which must not be interchanged with the sphere of the Real13 : For the real does not wait, especially not for the subject, since it expects nothing from speech. But it is there, identical to his existence, a noise in which one can hear anything and everything, ready to submerge with its roar what the ‘reality principle’ constructs there that goes by the name of the ‘outside world’. (Lacan 2006, p. 324)

Here, at least two points are central, which have already been noted many times: the connection of the Real with coincidence, with chaos, with pure contingency, as well as the moment of violence instigated by the intervention of the Real: the Heidegerrian ‘obstinacy’ of the ‘tool’ in the ‘obtrusiveness of malfunction’. If there is consistency in Lacan’s writings on the Real, it lies in the accident, the tyché in an inverted Aristotelian sense. This chaos of radical contingency is certainly not something insubstantial, which would be easy to ignore. On the contrary14 : the chaos persists in a way of pushing through the thin membranes of the Symbolic and the 13 Only when this differentiation is strictly upheld can the problem of virtual reality be profitably posed again, beyond a postmodern reformulation of Plato’s allegory of the cave. 14 ‘The meaning which man has always given to the real is the following — it is something one always finds in the same place, whether or not one has been there’ (Lacan 1988, p. 297).

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Imaginary, collapsing their orders and revealing them as ephemeral. The ‘melting of the referent’ cited in the case of photochemical accidents is an example of precisely this. Because what is this ‘noise, in which one can hear everything’ other than chaos, the undecidability between noise and signal—noise itself? In physics, ‘noise’ is defined as a broadband signal with an accidental amplitude curve. The problem of the signal-to-noise ratio lies in filtering out, or camouflaging, an information-carrying signal from this meaningless coincidence. The main attribute of ‘white noise’ derives from its condition of being a form of noise that has the same amplitude in every frequency and can thus be described as an analogue to the colour white, which, in displaying an equally high intensity of all colour spectra, allows no differentiation of colour to the eye. What remains is an aesthetically empty space which, seen in physical terms, is exactly the opposite: an overfilled space of iridescent intensity, which overstrains the human perception apparatus. The same goes for the so-called Johnson—Nyquist noise, the white noise we generally define as ‘background noise’—thermal noise that arises from the movement of molecules. Here, we might, at least theoretically, hear ‘the noise of the material, and presumably nothing else’15 (Kittler 1993, p. 170). The Real is, of course, not identical with noise, with chaos, or with pure contingency. Noise is not the Real so much as a form of the Real’s insistence. The mode of this insistence is that ecstasy of absence, mentioned above, which may explain why noise is the place of the uncanny; why the Real is described as the ‘object of anxiety par excellence’. Noise is, as we have seen, the inescapable emptiness of sense and yet it is not nothing. As with white noise, which is only empty on an aisthetic level because, like the colour white, it exceeds the capacity of the perceptive apparatus on the basis of a pressing fullness, the Real reveals itself as an unrepresentable blind spot which makes its presence tangible at the borders of representation. The ecstasy of absence is the mode in which the 15 ‘And because thermal noise, which all materials radiate at working temperatures, even resistors or transistors, according to Boltzmann’s formula, is also such a kind of white noise, information without material and material without information are coupled like two readings of a picture puzzle’ (Kittler 1993, p. 165). It is not difficult to see how greatly this essay is indebted to the works of Friedrich Kittler, whose application of Lacan’s Symbolic-Imaginary-Real triad is not, however, strictly pursued here. For Kittler, only the medium of the gramophone stands in close connection with the Real (see Kittler 1986, pp. 35 ff.), whilst for me this is true for media in general.

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Real can be detected in its sphaera activitatis at the border of what is representable. The shocking thing, the ‘object of anxiety par excellence’ is the disturbing notion that everything ‘which constructs the “reality principle” under the name of the exterior world’ (reality, symbolic order, the coherency of representation) stands on very unsteady legs and runs the risk of disappearing into the air with a ‘bang’ under the pressure of the Real at any moment. Scarcely anybody has given this notion such obsessive and exhaustive expression as has the narrator of the ‘unnameable’, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, whose influence within the Silent Hill series is ubiquitous. In the ‘Rue d’Auseil’, the narrator of The Music of Erich Zann makes a typically Lovecraftian discovery, corresponding to the name of the street: It was very dark, but the city’s lights always burned, and I expected to see them there amidst the rain and wind. Yet when I looked from that highest of all gable windows, looked while the candles sputtered and the insane viol howled with the night-wind, I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleaming from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance to anything on earth. And as I stood there looking in terror, the wind blew out both the candles in that ancient peaked garret, leaving me in savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium before me, and the daemon madness of that night-baying viol behind me. (Lovecraft 2014)

Mist The ‘noise of the Real’ is an integral part of both the aesthetics and the game mechanics of the Silent Hill series. The sheer number of ‘states of disorientation’ implemented within the game exhausts all possibilities. The ever-present mist haunting the streets of Silent Hill boasts a sophisticated and complicated design.16 This mist—an iconographic prop, an heirloom from the tradition of gothic horror—works to disorient the player and alert him or her to the presence of those demonic fantasies that populate the streets of Silent Hill. The mist is in perpetual movement and

16 In contrast to Silent Hill , the mist in Silent Hill 2 must no longer hide the shortcomings of the console. The schematic movements of the streaks of mist show clearly that the mist, just as much as the darkness, has a central compositional role to play.

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seems to lead a life of its own. Again and again, shadows appear to emerge from it, only to disappear once more. One of the most instructive examples for the intrusion of the Real is taken by Slavoj Žižek (1989) from a novel by Robert Heinlein, The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag. In this text, the world is an artwork created by otherworldly beings, and, like many other planets, it is visited now and then by extra-terrestrial ‘art critics’. The eponymous Jonathan Hoag is one of these critics and he has discovered some small flaws in what is called, on Earth, reality, which he intends to quickly iron out. This work, he says, is hardly worth mentioning, and the protagonists of the novel (Randall and Cynthia) ‘will notice nothing; but on the drive home to New York, they must under no circumstances open the window of their car’ (Žižek 1989, p. 12). Of course, it turns out to be difficult to heed this advice, and on the event of a car accident on the way home, as we might expect, they disobey the Old Testament prohibition on images: Randall asks his wife to lower her window a little [here Žižek cites from the story]: ‘She complied, then gave a sharp intake of breath and swallowed a scream. He did not scream, but he wanted to. Outside the open windows was no sunlight, no cops, no kids—nothing. Nothing but a grey and formless mist, pulsing slowly as if with inchoate life. They could see nothing of the city through it, not because it was too dense but because it was—empty. No sound came out of it; no movement showed in it. It merged with the frame of the window and began to drift inside’. (ibid., p. 12)

After the window has been frantically cranked back up, and the world outside seems normal, Randall wants to convince himself once more of this Lovecraftian collapse of reality: ‘Wait a minute,’ he said tensely, and turned to the window beside him. Very cautiously he rolled it down—just a crack, less than an inch. It was enough. The formless grey flux was out there, too; through the glass city traffic and sunny street were plain, through the opening—nothing. (ibid., p. 12)

Žižek then resumes: ‘What is this ‘grey and formless mist’ if not the Lacanian Real—the pulsing of the pre-symbolic substance in all its abhorrent vitality?’ (ibid., p. 12). The point here is, of course, that the intrusion

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of this ‘pre-symbolic substance’ happens precisely at the border between the Imaginary and Real (‘It merged with the frame of the window and began to drift inside’), and that this border takes the form of the flat window pane as a screen. James Sunderland, too, would certainly have something to say of the ‘abhorrent vitality’ which does not only hide shrouded within mist, but which is the mist. That Sunderland is not surprised at any moment about the constant oscillation between mist and darkness seems only because he has, from the very beginning, given himself over to the wayward dream logic of this ghostly place. On the level of the user, this tendency of the mist to devour reality (the reality principle) undergoes a doubling, because the graphic engine of Silent Hill 2 equates the draw distance—that is, the border of visibility of the polygon objects—with the border of the mist, obviously for the purpose of economizing game memory. In the predecessor developed for Sony’s Playstation, and as a result of the technical limitations of that earlier console, it is easy to see what hides behind the mist. The graphic errors known as pop-ups show the polygon streets and buildings which seem stable in the foreground in a state of constant dissolution. The illusion that reality finds its continuation behind, or rather inside, the mist is thus done away with. Such graphic errors do not appear in Silent Hill 2 in such clarity, but some few polygonal fade-ins are reminiscent of the most fearful characteristic of the ‘horrible vitality’ of the mist: the destruction of reality.

Radio The sound design of the Silent Hill series is a chapter in itself and cannot be done justice in the framework of this essay. One element, certainly, earns a mention here, being not just aesthetically relevant but also relevant for gameplay. Early in the course of the game, James finds an obviously defunct portable transistor radio, which is in no condition to pick up radio signals, but which indicates the nearing presence of enemy creatures through an increasing static noise. The aisthetic orientation of the player in Silent Hill 2 is thus directed by the correlation of two sources of noise: mist and static noise. The dramaturgical trick in this is that the impression of threat and danger arises thanks to the subtle addition of various ecstasies of absence: without suddenly being able to perceive what is approaching, the convergence of these two sources of noise allows only the pure certainty that something is there. By contrast to a film, however, in which the production and staging of ‘states of disorientation’ demand

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a sophisticated orchestration in order to have a significant impact on the viewer,17 in the case of Silent Hill 2 the medium of the video game allows for an immersion in a diegetic world of ‘empty signs’ which operate, so to speak, purely connotatively. It appears, namely, as though signs have lost their denotations. The convergence of the radio noise and the mist allows for no more than an impression of something. The uncanny emerges precisely from the condition that the radio noise does not connote a particular referent, just as little as the diffuse shadows within the mist. None the less, the urgent presence of something is constantly tangible. This is no mean feat when we consider that video games are usually tightly-bound worlds of signs, in which everything must make ‘sense’ for the game to be coherent. Because the emissions of static noise cannot be ignored, unlike visual data, the radio is an important strategic method of building tension within the dynamics of the game. Together with the sophisticated sound design, an auditory level is implemented which cannot be escaped. The crescendo and diminution of the noise emitted by the defunct radio implements the uncanny of the medial into the world of the game itself, in the form of a gadget relevant to the gameplay. The ‘obstinacy’ (Aufsässigkeit ) of the medium thus, on more than one occasion, saves James’s life.

Noise Effect Alongside the mist and the radio, there is a third ‘source of noise’ which is not recognizable at first glance, but which precisely for this reason generates what is probably the most effective ‘state of disorientation’ in Silent Hill 2. I refer here to the noise effect, which can be turned on and off via the option menu: a graphic effect which, once active, overlays a scarcely perceptible, colourless noise filter across the whole game graphic. The reception history of this effect is interesting because, in the first version of Silent Hill 2, which appeared first only on Sony’s PS2, this effect could not be controlled by the user. Subsequent adaptations for Microsoft’s Xbox and the PC, however, now allow for the effect to be turned off by means of a more-or-less hidden sub-menu. 17 A master in the orchestration of these audiovisual strategies is, of course, David Lynch, in whose films Real and Imaginary are placed again and again in relationship to one another through various ‘states of disorientation’ (see, above all, Lost Highway, USA, 1997).

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The background to this could be that the image—latently disquieting and softly grainy—was criticized by its intended audience, used to the sterile hyperrealism of contemporary polygon graphics. Their irritation is a reaction to this inverted ‘look’ of Silent Hill 2, which runs contrary to the otherwise conventionally very clean optics of commercial video games. Certainly, diverse graphic filters, like those used in Viewtiful Joe, for one, have been standard for a long time now, but these filters fulfil quite another semiotic task. One such filter in Viewtiful Joe, which is used in many ‘shots’, simulates dirt on the film and the ‘jumping picture’ of analogue image media. It is thus clearly identifiable as a signifier, denoting the signified ‘film’ as intermedial allusion. Not so in Silent Hill 2. Here the fillrate-intensive effect apparently serves only to worsen the quality of the image: a risky decision and one that is uneconomical, though aesthetically more stimulating. Meanwhile, this example has set a precedent and is put to use in increasing numbers of software games marketed to adults, such as Manhunt . It should by now be transparent that this noise-effect is rather more than a process of adding a bit more ‘dirt’ to a sterile texture.

The Aesthetics of Silent Hill 2 and Its Sequels The ‘birth of the uncanny from the spirit of the medium’ in Silent Hill 2 means, first, an increase in the aesthetic quality of contemporary video games. Through the self-referentiality of representation in Silent Hill 2, the aesthetics of video games seems finally to respond to the level of reflection of classical modernity. If the graphic representation of video games was, in its historical beginning, still forced to fall back on abstractions through its own technical limitations, this tendency has, since the early 2000s, developed in the direction of ever more ‘realistic’ representations of virtual spaces (see Wolf 2003). Not least through games such as Silent Hill 2 does it become ever more evident that this mimetic trend within video game aesthetics lingers behind the true possibilities of the medium. At this point, the aesthetic categories of interactive media art enter slowly into the commercial field of interactive entertainment software. In the implementation of malfunction and ‘states of disorientation’, however, no video game—with the exception perhaps of Eternal Darkness —has gone as far as Silent Hill 2. Until the present day, the use of such graphic filters is limited primarily to intermedial references to analogue media. The

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arrangement of polygonal spaces according to the standard of central perspective also continues uninterrupted. Silent Hill 2 offers a forecast of how abstraction and self-referentiality can extend the expressive possibilities of the video game, without simultaneously having to throw all commercial concerns overboard. The thematization of the uncanny as a reference to the medial conditions of possibility of the video game has scarcely been attempted. Silent Hill 2 is thus a foretaste of what the avant-garde in the world of video games might look like.

References Böhme, Gernot (2001) Aisthetik: Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre. Munich: Fink. Bowie, Malcolm (1993) Lacan. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1988) Signature Event Context. Trans. by Alan Bass. In: Derrida, Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Freud, Sigmund (1917–1919) The Uncanny. In: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII: An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. Trans. by James Strachey. London: Norton, pp. 217–256. Geimer, Peter (2002) Was ist kein Bild? Zur ›Störung der Verweisung‹. In: Ordnungen der Sichtbarkeit. Fotografie in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technologie. Ed. by Peter Geimer. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Kittler, Friedrich (1986) Grammophon—Film—Typewriter. Berlin: Brinckmann & Bose. Kittler, Friedrich (1993) Signal—Rausch—Abstand. In: Kittler, Draculas Vermächtnis. Technische Schriften. Leipzig: Reclam. Krämer, Sybille (1998) Das Medium als Spur und als Apparat. In: Medien—Computer—Realität. Wirklichkeitsvorstellungen und Neue Medien. Ed. by Sybille Krämer. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 73–95. Krämer, Sybille (2003) Erfüllen Medien eine Konstitutionsleistung? Thesen über die Rolle medientheoretischer Erwägungen beim Philosophieren. In: Medienphilosophie. Beiträge zur Klärung eines Begriffs. Ed. by Stefan Münker, Alexander Roesler, and Mike Sandbothe. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, pp. 78–91. Kristeva, Julia (1982) Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, Jacques (1978) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. New York: W. W. Norton. Lacan, Jacques (1988) The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. Trans. by S. Tomaselli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Lacan, Jacques (2006) Response to Jean Hyppolite’s Commentary on Freud’s ‘Verneinung’. In: Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. by Bruce Fink. New York and London: Norton. Lovecraft, H. P. (2014) The Complete Fiction. Ed. by Peter Straub. New York: Library of America. Rautzenberg, Markus (2002) Spiegelwelt. Elemente einer Aisthetik des Bildschirmspiels. Berlin: Logos. Rehak, Bob (2003) Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar. In: The Video Game Theory Reader. Ed. by Wolf and Perron. London: Routledge, pp. 103–129. Wolf, Mark J. P. (2003) Abstraction in the Video Game. In: The Video Game Theory Reader. Ed. Wolf and Perron 2003. London: Routledge, pp. 47–67. Wolf, Mark J. P., and Perron, Bernard (eds.) (2003) The Video Game Theory Reader. New York: Routledge. Žižek, Slavoj (1989) The Undergrowth of Enjoyment: How Popular Culture Can Serve as an Introduction to Lacan. New Formations 9, pp. 7–29. Žižek, Slavoj (1991) Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

CHAPTER 3

Not-Ready-to-Hand, or How Media Become Obtrusive

In Zelda II : The Adventures of Link, a Japanese action adventure game from 1987, in a small hut whose interior is far more spacious than its exterior would suggest, the player makes a memorable encounter. Here the player controls a character named Link, who must look around for clues in a virtual village, to seek out the kidnapped princess who gives the game its name. To do so, the player must ‘talk’, with a press of the button, to certain NPCs (non-player characters), who provide clues that propel the gameplay forward by means of short, pre-written dialogues. This search for clues is a typical element of this genre of game and largely determines its structure. In one particular hut, however, the player of Zelda II comes across a NPC who neither has anything useful to say to aid the progression of the plot, nor provides any interesting background information. This NPC simply stands in his house and when the player ‘talks’ to him, states his name: ‘I am Error.’ To understand the full relevance of this relatively nondescript scene, we must remember that computer games are conventionally tightly-bound worlds of signs in which everything refers to something else, and everything must, in the context of the game, make sense. An absolute pansemiosis rules in service of the fabric of the game and the narration. Because computer games are the products of aesthetic work,1 questions of 1 ‘Aesthetic work should pertain to that activity which forms things, spaces, arrangements in regards to the affective consternation that an observer, receiver, consumer etc.

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usability and user guidance are central to their design. Games must avoid confusing their user, and risk him or her giving up in frustration. On the other hand, potential solutions within the game must not be too obvious, for this would destroy that particular quota of uncertainty which is an integral part of every game. A not inconsiderable attraction of computer games thus consists in the unravelling of semiotic networks within the diegesis internal to the gameplay. In this scheme, a NPC such as Error, mentioned above, is usually either a quest giver (a character who gives tasks to the player), an enemy, a seller of items, and so on: that is, a service provider within the sign economy of the game. Error, however, merely stands there and is what he is, an ‘error’ who fails to fulfil a function, namely by failing to provide the usefulness expected of him. He sells nothing, he offers no advice relevant to the gameplay, he does not draw out his weapon as a challenge; he is simply there, or, as another better-known inhabitant of a hut would say: he is not zuhanden, ‘ready-to-hand’, but vorhanden, ‘present-at-hand’.2 Various theories have arisen to explain the appearance of this character.3 One theory explains him as the product of an error in translation, morphing his original name ‘Errol’ into the personification of a dysfunction. More charming, however, and also more likely, is the theory that explains this character’s appearance as a conscious joke engineered by the game developers. For a little later in the course of the game, the player encounters a NPC who is not at all meaningless, but fulfils an important function within the game world: acting as one of those characters who drive on the

should experience through it. One could also define aesthetic work, in an extended sense, as rhetoric, inasmuch as it has been the task of rhetoric, from the times of antiquity, to arrange the words of a text or of speech in such a way that the reader or listener is captured, that is, persuaded by it. The intention of rhetoric in this classical sense, that is, the aesthetic work as I define it, points towards the affective experience which an observer should undergo in viewing the arrangement that is to be formed’ (Böhme, Aisthetik, p. 53). 2 Throughout this translation I have used the terms ‘ready-to-hand’, ‘present-at-hand’, and ‘unready-to-hand’ or ‘unavailable’ to designate zuhanden, vorhanden and unzuhanden and their cognates. In this I follow Michael Wheeler [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ heidegger/]. In the citations of Heidegger, which I take from Stambaugh’s translation, I have modified these terms accordingly, for reasons of clarity. 3 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=I%20AM%20ERROR (accessed 26 July 2012).

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game story by setting new tasks. He is thus one of those service providers mentioned above, a quest giver. Not only does this character look so similar to Error as to be identical to him, he also bears the name ‘Bagu’—the Japanese Romanization of the English word ‘bug’: i.e. error, malfunction.4 The appearance of a bug, in its current sense of a software error, is conventionally something to be avoided, because the ideology embraced by the computer game is that of total immersion. A good game is distinguished by the fact that the constructed nature5 of its medial composition is not thematized: in the ideal scenario, the player does not play with pixels or with digital characters, but with a character called Link who meets a character called Error in a village. In the ideal scenario—which represents as much the constant goal of media—pedagogical considerations as it does the telos of the computer game design—the user is perfectly embedded in the illusion. He or she is ‘illudated’, ‘in lusio’—that is, taken into the game and immersed within the game world. Error is, in fact, in the strictly teleological world of the computer game, an un-thing, a ‘never tallied up remainder’, an irritation which drives the player into a semiotic cul-de-sac. As the player asks him/herself: ‘What is this for? Why do I need this NPC? Why is he there?’, irritation sets in, disturbing the player’s immersion within the world of the game. This irritation is the threshold moment at the centre of the phenomenon of malfunction, at least as long as we abstain from reducing malfunction to pure dysfunctionality in the sense of information theory. Martin Heidegger’s theory of Zeug, or ‘tool’, which will be taken as a basis in the following, is a theory about how to understand a relation to the world that is not already communication, not already sign, not already sense, but that cannot be reduced to simple presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit ), that is to silent, enigmatic ‘thing-ness’.6 The attractiveness of the malfunction paradigm consists in the model of alternation between readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit ) and presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit ) 4 For the history and etymology of the bug metaphor as a description for a technical

malfunction, see Ofak: ‘Störung. Eine Wiederentdeckungsreise’. 5 See Nohr: Die Natürlichkeit des Spielens. 6 Here I draw on a theory of malfunction on the basis of Heidegger’s Zeug analyses,

which I have laid out extensively in Rautzenberg: Die Gegenwendigkeit der Störung. My reference to Heidegger for a media theory of malfunction is indebted to Peter Geimer. See Geimer: ‘Was ist kein Bild?’.

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in the mode of unreadiness-to-hand or unavailability (Unzuhandenheit ), which Heidegger develops in the tool analyses of Being and Time. Today, this is increasingly understood as a trans-human theory explaining, on a fundamental level, how things behave with other things. In order to prevent misunderstandings from the outset, it needs be noted that, in this perspective, consciousness, systems, media and ideas are also ‘only’ things among things, which stand in for one another in relations of readiness-to-hand, unreadiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand. This justifies the theoretical attractiveness of Heidegger’s tool analysis to areas of scholarship ranging from media theory to the most recent speculative turn in philosophy.7 What makes the tool analyses especially attractive for media theory is their potential to explain the characteristic of mediality that we might call ‘aisthetic neutrality’, to follow Sybille Krämer: They (media) usually take effect beneath the threshold of our perception; in being used, media ‘withdraw’ through a kind of ‘aisthetic neutrality’: only in the noise of malfunctioning do media come to recognition, arriving at the centre of our perception. Media are encountered by a figure of reflection, which is ‘mediation’, and which unfolds such that the impression of ‘immediacy’ occurs.8

This is the phenomenon whereby media themselves disappear in the act of showing something. In Heidegger’s formulation: ‘What is peculiar to what is initially ready-to-hand (zuhanden) is that it withdraws, so to speak, in its character of readiness-to-hand in order to be really ready-to-hand’.9 What is peculiar to the ready-to-hand—that is, to those things, media, 7 For the role of Heidegger’s tool analyses in this context, see Harman: Tool-Being. The fervent interest accorded to cultures of things and objects in recent years, stretching from Bruno Latour’s Parliament of Things to Hartmut Böhme’s ‘other theory of modernity’ under fetishism, is, of course, grounded in the post-metaphysical turn which, from Heidegger to poststructuralism, no longer accords the subject a privileged position in the structure of the world. In such a world, subjects are things among things, which are black boxes for one another: a metaphor that constructivism has borrowed, not accidentally, from the empire of things. 8 Krämer: ‘Erfüllen Medien eine Konstitutionsleistung?’ 9 Heidegger: Being and Time, p. 69. I have modified Stambaugh’s translations as noted

in footnote 2. The following reconstruction of the Heideggerian arguments must lose some of its conceptual sharpness and detail at this point, because of constraints of length. For an extensive reconstruction and interpretation in regard to a media theory of malfunction, see Rautzenberg: Die Gegenwendigkeit der Störung, pp. 121–177.

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artefacts, tools, ideas or figures which, in being used, become imperceptible—is the quality of being there while not being there. A presence which can only be present as it becomes in some way imperceptible can only be expressed by the paradox of a ‘present absence’ but it is nonetheless an everyday occurrence. This imperceptibility is precisely the way in which readiness-to-hand takes form in the world. We see here already that with the modes of readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand, we are dealing with analytical abstractions that never appear in their ‘pure’ state. Readinessto-hand is always closely linked with presence-at-hand; the one is always registered in the other. By ‘readiness-to-hand’, Heidegger refers to the imperceptibility of something in the course of its serviceable use. This ‘something’ emerges in the course of readiness-to-hand, in practical behaviour, and it is neutralized not only in perception, but also in thinking, in understanding, and in the use of signs. This is the mode of transparency in which things are ‘aisthetically neutralized’. A hammer does not expressly come to our consciousness when we want to hit a nail into the wall; a series of letters is ‘forgotten’ as such as soon as a word is assembled from them; we ‘overlook’ a television display, despite its being constantly ‘before our eyes’. Presence-at-hand, on the other hand, means for Heidegger the oppressive dullness of sheer thing-ness. This is the mode of opacity in which we register that something is there, but cannot do anything with it. This thing which is ‘only’ present-at-hand does not serve us in any way, and no use can be drawn from it. For somebody who has never seen a hammer and to whom its possibilities of use are unknown, it is only one phenomenon among many others; a sequence of letters in a foreign language is, as a sheer form, meaningless without the context of its use; a broken television simply stands around in space until we notice how much space it takes up, or indeed how bulky it is. In this last example, we find ourselves in an area of transition, in the no-man’s-land between readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand. While the television has become unusable, we notice something about it that once might have remained imperceptible: its ‘bulkiness’. This bulkiness, however, spreads into the surrounding space and taints it negatively. We might, perhaps, be tempted to replace the ‘old thing’ with a new flatscreen or similar.

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Heidegger names this mode of being between readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand (though, of course, without the reference to bulky televisions) unready-to-hand (unzuhanden): ‘Things which are unready-tohand are disturbing and make evident the obstinacy of what is initially to be taken care of before anything else.’10 It is at this point that things become truly interesting because, unlike readiness-to-hand and presenceat-hand, unreadiness-to-hand is not a more-or-less stable condition, but rather a process whose primary symptoms are irritation and instability. It is here that we find ourselves at the nexus of the concept of malfunction as a theoretical category. In the mode of becoming-unready, something is no longer serviceable but it has not yet become simply and bluntly present-at-hand. The noise that disturbs my view of the football broadcast does not only interrupt the broadcast but rather makes it perceptible as such for the first time; it makes me conscious again of my own physical position, which is to be found precisely in its distance from the stadium, the images and noises of which are only being broadcast to me. More important, however, is that it represents a climax in our field of perception which brings the experience of being-in-the-world suddenly to the centre of our attention. Aside from defunct household appliances (on which this analysis is none the less formally applicable, without compromise), it is clear that the phenomenon of malfunction is of central importance for media aesthetics, and that is independently of any singular medium. In the case of malfunction, media are perceptible as such. Their ‘serviceability’ is done away with, and in this way the process of mediation that is clothed in immediacy becomes self-reflexive. It is thus no accident that Heidegger too, after Being and Time, placed tool analyses at the centre of his artwork essay—a topic which cannot be further developed at this point. The unready-to-hand itself is divided, for Heidegger, into three submodi, which are useful for a closer analytical breakdown of the phenomenon of malfunction: The modes of conspicuousness [Auffälligkeit ], obtrusiveness [Aufdringlichkeit ], and obstinacy [Aufsässigkeit ] have the function of bringing to the fore the character of presence-at-hand. That which is ready-to-hand is not thereby observed and stared at simply as something present-at-hand. The character of presence-at-hand making itself known is still bound to 10 Heidegger: Being and Time, p. 73.

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the readiness-to-hand of the tool [Zeug ]. This does not disguise itself as a mere thing. Tools become ‘things’ in the sense of what one would like to discard. But in this tendency to discard, what is ready-to-hand is still shown as being ready-to-hand in its unyielding, objective presence-at-hand.11

With the ‘tendency to discard’, here, Heidegger addresses the phenomenological core of the unzuhanden, the malfunction. He is referring to the field of the ‘parasitical’,12 the disgust, the bug metaphor or the ‘enemy interception’, which has long determined the basic semantic stock of the concept of malfunction, from Shannon to Serres. The experience of malfunction is described as repulsive—the exact opposite of readiness-tohand, Zuhandenheit, with its serviceable inconspicuousness. It is important to note that it is not something like presence-at-hand itself which has a repulsive effect, but rather the dynamic of the unready-to-hand, the malfunctioning of reference which is, as a process, responsible for such ‘strong sensations’.13 It is easy to move from this general theory of malfunction to the computer game, because all forms of ‘becoming unready’ described here can be observed in the computer game in exemplary fashion. It is, of course, necessary to emphasize that the examples outlined here cannot claim to be exhaustive. Obtrusiveness, Aufdringlichkeit, is perhaps the most obvious form of the unready-to-hand, because it appears as pure dysfunctionality. Whether a character sinks into a level geometry to which it does not belong, or polygons and textures move themselves with complete ‘independence’, the forms of Aufdringlichkeit in games are legion, as every programmer can easily confirm. Such ‘real’ malfunctions, which earn that adjective through being completely unintentional, can have the most varied effects on the player. They can be funny, or uncanny; they can be frustrating, when the texture of the game collapses; but they can also be used to the player’s advantage in the form of glitches , by overriding the rules

11 Heidegger: Being and Time, p. 73. 12 Serres: The Parasite. 13 With the term ‘strong sensation’ (starke Empfindung ), I refer to the phenomenon of disgust, of which Winfried Menninghaus has shown that its repulsive insistence, or, expressed differently, its Abstoßtendenz, must be thought of as the background of classical aesthetics since Kant, at the latest, as the grounds of resonances of the beautiful. See Menninghaus: Ekel.

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immanent to the game. This is, of course, what we call ‘cheating’: the exploitation of software errors or ‘back doors’ in the program code to the advantage of the player. In any case, this ‘obtrusiveness’ brings the fragility of the media-technological framework to light. Through taking forms that are generally jarring to our perception, it is likely to trigger the Abstoßtendenz (tendency to discard) mentioned by Heidegger. Insubordination, Aufsässigkeit, is, by contrast, of a more subtle nature, and has been put to work successfully in certain games. Silent Hill 2 (Japan 2001, Konami) might usefully serve as an example here, as a game in which the ‘malfunction of reference’ becomes a ‘reference through malfunction’.14 In this game, the player is oriented and disoriented primarily by means of two explicit states of intoxication. A general mist impedes the player’s vision, while a radio (one that is actually defunct and unserviceable) acts as an orientational device precisely through its unreadiness-tohand—for the relative proximity of an enemy is indicated by an increase in the static noise it emits. The conflict between the malfunction of reference (by the mist) and reference through malfunction (by the static noise) is the nucleus of the game design. Conspicuousness, Auffälligkeit, finally, is that level within which the close coupling of readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand becomes clearest, because in order for something to be ready-to-hand, it must possess a quantity of presence-at-hand in order to be serviceable at all in the sense of aisthetic neutrality. If this sounds paradoxical, it simply describes the everyday fact of perception that something can only be perceived once it emerges in some way from the chaos of possible sensory data. It is true that, for example, a projection light and screen retreat behind the film image to allow this image to become visible in the first place. But this process does not extinguish the materiality of the media technologies that constitute the image. They are, in fact, constitutive of the possibility of the film image, and as such they are always visible—invisible. In the example of the computer game, this can best be observed in the intertwining of the ready-to-hand and present-at-hand in the graphical user interface, a phenomenon which extends to every single human— computer interaction today. This interface designates all those graphic elements of control within the game, which, as permanent measurable data, give information about system conditions relevant to the gameplay.

14 See Chapter 2.

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This includes, for example, the life bar, which indicates the virtual health of the avatar. How this element is integrated—an element that can clearly be recognized as an agent of the thing-medial presence or Vorhandenheit of the designers, whether they know Heidegger or not15 —is the most sacred subject of diverse design philosophies. According to the ideology of total immersion, the fundamental rule is: as little visible interface as possible, only as much as strictly necessary. This can, however, take very diverse forms. The spectrum stretches from one ideal, in which the graphical user interface is completely absent, to a design in which the game images themselves are totally occluded by interface elements. In games such as ICO (Japan 2001, Sony) or Shadow of the Colossus (Japan 2005, Sony), only the absolutely necessary overview elements are indicated, and then only if the game situation absolutely demands it. When the protagonist of Shadow of the Colossus is riding through the landscape, for example, no interface elements other than the landscape and the avatars can be seen. Only when fighting with Titanic creatures do sparsely formed interface elements appear, like a health bar or a picture of a weapon. These vanish as soon as the danger is over. Even the act of saving the status of the game is embedded within the diegesis of the gameplay. In ICO, for example, the ‘save’ menu is called up when both protagonists sit down on virtual sofas standing around in the archaic landscape, while in Shadow of the Colossus , this function is fulfilled by briefly praying at one of the shrines dotted across the screen. Blizzard’s World of Warcraft (USA 2004), on the other hand, is an online role-playing game in which up to 25 real players can play together over a client—server connection. Here, the so-called ‘end game’ is a highly competitive affair. The highest level in-game content, so-called ‘raids’, demand good group co-ordination and optimal information control from the player/s. To achieve this, various statistics and measurements can be called up, giving precise information about the current game activity. The more complex and difficult the game content—i.e. the fights within the diegetic game world—the further the actual events of the game

15 Heidegger’s relevance for design theory cannot be ignored today, most of all thanks to highly influential foundational texts from the 1980s, which arose under the influence of the Heidegger specialist Hubert Dreyfus. To be named here are, above all, Guy Bonsiepe (Interface: An Approach to Design) as well as Understanding Computers and Cognition by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores.

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retreat into the background. What remains is a confusion of signs, indecipherable to the layperson: flashing signs and columns of numbers. The interface, here, takes over the space of the image, inhibiting recognition of the events of the game. In these examples, to which countless others may be added, transparency and opacity, readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand, are found not in opposition to one another, but in all possible mixed relationships. Here it becomes evident that the unready-to-hand can be understood not only as a malfunction in the conventional sense; that is, as an interruption of otherwise seamless program functions, or as a dysfunctionality. On the contrary, the relationship of these levels can be negotiated differently in every case, and must finally be understood as a constituent of mediality. Malfunction as interruption and dysfunctionality is only one of the possible analytical levels which can be explored closely through Heidegger’s tool analyses, because it does not share the binary on/off logic of earlier communication theory. Communication is not simply either merely functional, on the one hand, or disturbed, on the other. Malfunctions are not exceptions to an otherwise ‘functional’ mediality. The paradigm of malfunction is interesting, therefore, because—as is suggested not least by Heidegger’s analyses—malfunctions must be understood instead, in the complex sense outlined here, as agents of functionality.

References Böhme, Gernot, Aisthetik. Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre (Munich, 2001). Geimer, Peter, ‘Was ist kein Bild? Zur “Störung der Verweisung”’, in Geimer (ed.), Ordnungen der Sichtbarkeit. Fotografie in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technologie (Frankfurt am Main, 2002), pp. 313–342. Harman, Graham, Tool-Being. Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Peru, IL, 2002). Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time. Trans. by Joan Stambaugh (Albany, 2010). Krämer, Sybille, ‘Erfüllen Medien eine Konstitutionsleistung? Thesen über die Rolle medientheoretischer Erwägungen beim Philosophieren’, in Münker, Stefan and others (eds.), Medienphilosophie. Beiträge zur Klärung eines Begriffs (Frankfurt am Main, 2003), pp. 78–91. Menninghaus, Winfried, Ekel. Theorie und Geschichte einer starken Empfindung (Frankfurt am Main, 2002). Nohr, Rolf, Die Natürlichkeit des Spielens. Vom Verschwinden des Gemachten Computerspiel (Münster, 2008).

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Ofak, Ana, ‘Störung. Eine Wiederentdeckungsreise’, in Rautzenberg, Markus and Wolfsteiner, Andreas (eds.), Hide&Seek. Das Spiel von Transparenz und Opazität (Munich, 2012), pp. 65–81. Rautzenberg, Markus, ‘Vom Rausch(en) des Realen. Zur Geburt des Unheimlichen aus dem Geist des Mediums in Silent Hill 2’, in Neitzel, Britta and others (eds.), See? I’m Real… Multidisziplinäre Zugänge zum Computerspiel am Beispiel von ‘Silent Hill’ (Münster, 2005), pp. 126–145. Rautzenberg, Markus, Die Gegenwendigkeit der Störung. Aspekte einer postmetaphysischen Präsenztheorie (Zürich and Berlin, 2009). Serres, Michael, The Parasite (Minneapolis, MN, 2007).

CHAPTER 4

Ludic Mediality: Aesthetic Experience in Computer Games

Until recently, computer games have generally been considered the sad and solipsistic hobby of primarily male adolescents. Few would have taken seriously any attempt to connect gaming with aesthetic experience. On the contrary: computer games were (and sometimes still are) viewed as vulgar and stupid glorifications of violence. The image of the lonely nerd solemnly sitting in the pale light of his screens hacking away on his keyboards and controllers without much social interaction outside of social media is perhaps still a widespread preconception. It illustrates a medial short circuit, a kind of media-induced autism that has little in common with what happens in the reception of art. Borderline sociopathic behaviour on the one side; and on the other, aesthetic contemplation. In this chapter I will neither try to support this preconception, nor to falsely eulogize the medium by somehow proving that computer games are art. Both approaches would be fruitless: on the one hand, it is easy to debunk simplistic preconceptions simply by examining them more closely; while on the other, it is useless to try to elevate a ‘bad’ reputation by applying notions of art that are historically contingent and would first demand a definition of art—an endeavour which is futile after the historical avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, because art seems to be more a historical category, and not so much an ontological one. It is a different story, however, with the notion of aesthetic experience, which, following certain theoretical developments during the twentieth century, can no longer be as closely connected to art as was the case in the nineteenth century. When notions of aesthetics or aesthetic experience © The Author(s) 2020 M. Rautzenberg, Framing Uncertainty, Performance Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59521-8_4

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come into play in the following, I will thereby follow theoretical developments in philosophy, art history and media studies that have turned away from the Hegelian paradigm of aesthetics as a theory of art. For Hegel, ‘the sensible shining forth of the idea’ (German, das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee) defines the artwork, meaning that it somehow conceals that artwork’s notional meaning, which in turn has to be excavated by philosophy to come ‘into its own’, making art superfluous in the process. Many contemporary approaches to aesthetics take exactly the opposite approach. While I cannot summarize this development sufficiently here (a few pointers have already been given in earlier chapters), it may suffice to say that the efforts of many parts of contemporary philosophy, art theory, cultural studies and media theory (to name a few) are concerned with reconnecting aesthetics with the subject matter with which it came into being in the thought of Aristotle, and with which it again stood in close connection in the eighteenth century with Baumgarten, and this connection was further developed by, for example, Walter Benjamin or Maurice Merleau-Ponty. That is, aesthetics not primarily as a theory of art but, corresponding to the Greek term aisthesis and its use in the work of Aristotle, as a general theory of perception.1 Of course, art is an important part of such an endeavour because there are no artistic expressions or artefacts that are not dependent on perception. With this shift from artworks to perception as a whole, a much broader perspective is possible. At the core of this paradigm shift lies a theoretically as well as methodically momentous readjustment from an ontological ‘what?’ to a pragmatic—performative ‘how?’ kind of questioning. The questions are not so much about excavating the meaning ‘behind’ phenomena but about those phenomena themselves as affective experiences of something that happens in perception (Widerfahrnischarakter). This phenomenological approach is accompanied by an anti-ontological tendency informed by post-structuralism, one that aims not to approach phenomena as something ‘outside’ (as opposed to ‘inside’ the subject or 1 This shift from aesthetics as theory of art to a broader theory of perception was a defining characteristic of German theory from the early 1990s onward: Karl-Heinz Barck u.a. (ed.): Aisthesis. Wahrnehmung heute oder Perspektiven einer anderen Ästhetik, Leipzig 1990; Gernot Böhme: Aisthetik. Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre, Munich 2001; Erika Fischer-Lichte: Ästhetik des Performativen, Frankfurt/M. 2004; Dieter Mersch: Ereignis und Aura. Untersuchungen zu einer Ästhetik des Performativen, Frankfurt/M. 2002. For a historical overview of this development in English, see HansUlrich Gumbrecht: Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey, Stanford 2004.

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the brain) but as part of a dynamism that connects ‘subject’ and ‘object’ in the eventfulness (Ereignishaftigkeit ) of sensual perception. As a consequence, notions of ‘medium’ are replaced by concepts of ‘mediality’, a perspective that does not ask about particular cultural techniques or technological artefacts such as computers or letters, but that tries to understand what characterizes a medium. ‘Mediality’ is therefore different from ‘mediation’, because the latter term already implies a theory about what media do, whereas the term ‘mediality’ tries to take a step back by asking what makes media media in the first place. It is no coincidence that a particular sentence from Paul Valéry is often quoted in this context, because it gives perhaps the most concise way of addressing one of the most crucial theoretical issues within post-ontological aesthetics as outlined above. For Valéry, the aesthetic object-ness2 (Gegenständlichkeit ) of a poem lies in its ‘prolonged hesitation between sound and meaning’.3 This oscillation between aisthesis and semiosis , perception and signification, materiality and meaning, can be understood as the presence with which recent esthetic theory is in large part concerned.4 These presence-effects in aesthetic experience, however, are not confined to our experience of artworks. They occur (or not) during the course of aesthetic practices in everyday life5 : in a conversation, in responding to the gaze of others, on entering a room, during work, in the affects and emotions of fatigue or boredom, in sports, in contemplation and exaltation. Our daily interactions with media, and therefore, of course, with computer games too, are part of this everyday character 2 On aesthetic object-ness: ‘The aesthetic experience leads to the constitution of its own—the aesthetic—object, which is not the same as the real object that may have given the impulse in perception that led to the unfolding of the aesthetic experience in the first place, and which, if created as an artwork to this end, played a regulative role during the course of aesthetic experience’ Roman Ingarden: Erlebnis, Kunstwerk und Wert. Vorträge zur Ästhetik 1937 –1967, Tübingen 1969, pp. 3–4. My translation. (‘Das ästhetische Erlebnis führt zur Konstitution eines eigenen—des ästhetischen—Gegenstandes, der nicht zu identifizieren ist mit demjenigen Realen, dessen Wahrnehmung gegebenenfalls den ersten Impuls zur Entfaltung des ästhetischen Erlebnisses gibt und das manchmal, wenn es ein zu diesem Zweck gebildetes Kunstwerk ist, eine regulative Rolle beim Verlauf des ästhetischen Erlebnisses spielt.’) 3 Paul Valéry: Windstriche, Frankfurt/M. 1995, p. 40. My translation. 4 See for example George Steiner: Real Presences, Chicago 1991; Dieter Mersch: Was

sich zeigt. Materialität, Präsenz, Ereignis, München 2002; Elaine Scarry: Dreaming by the Book, Princeton 2001; Jean-Luc Nacy: The Birth to Presence, Stanford 1993. 5 The following is, of course, heavily influenced by John Dewey’s ‘Art as Experience’.

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of aesthetic experience. One of the advantages of the paradigm shift in aesthetics described above is that these kinds of experience can now once again be analysed regardless of their ‘value’, which is always historically determined. A term like Gernot Böhme’s ‘aesthetic work’ must be understood in this sense: Those activities shall be called aesthetic work that design [German, gestalten] objects, spaces, and arrangements in regards to the affective response that a beholder, recipient, consumer etc. will experience through them. One could also define aesthetic work in an extended sense as rhetoric, inasmuch as it has been the task of rhetoric, since antiquity, to place the words of a text or of speech in such a way that the reader or listener is captured, that is, persuaded by it. The intention of rhetoric in this classical sense, that is, of aesthetic work as I have defined it, is aimed at the affective experience that a beholder should undergo when confronted with the designed arrangement.6

In this sense, computer games too are ‘designed arrangements’ exhibiting specific characteristics of the aesthetic object. We can disregard the question of whether these characteristics are comparable with those in the experience of art, because it is not the task of post-Hegelian aesthetics as described above to form a normative canon within the realms of art. But the term ‘aesthetic experience’ still demands a final short explanation. The phenomenological implications of the term might give the impression that it is entirely concerned with the aesthetics of reception. It must be noted that this is not the case, even if this aspect receives the most attention in what follows. Those precarious effects of presence as specific modes of aesthetic experience are not compatible with a scheme like ‘producer—object—recipient’, which stems from information theory

6 Böhme: Aisthetik, p. 53. My translation: ‘Als ästhetische Arbeit soll diejenige Tätigkeit bezeichnet werden, die Dinge, Räume, Arrangements gestaltet im Hinblick auf die affektive Betroffenheit, die ein Betrachter, Empfänger, Konsument usw. dadurch erfahren soll. Man könnte ästhetische Arbeit in einem weiten Sinne auch als Rhetorik bezeichnen. Insofern es die Aufgabe der Rhetorik seit der Antike ist, Worte eines Textes oder einer Rede so zu setzen, daß dadurch der Leser oder Hörer von der Sache, um die es geht, gefangen wird bzw. für sie eingenommen wird. Die Intention der Rhetorik in diesem klassischen Sinne bzw. der ästhetischen Arbeit, so wie ich sie definierte, richtet sich also auf die affektive Erfahrung, die ein Betrachter im Anblick des zu gestaltenden Arrangements erfahren soll.’

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and describes how an intended meaning or effect is transmitted in linear fashion from a source through a channel to a receiver, where the ‘message’ is then decoded. The aesthetic object or aesthetic object-ness (ästhetische Gegenständlichkeit ) evoked in each case contains a modicum of radical alterity that can never be fully surmounted, whether by the ‘producer’ or by the ‘recipient’. The artist, director, developer or author does not ‘produce’ presence—Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht’s book Production of Presence notwithstanding—just as the recipient cannot willingly create it. Aesthetic object-ness (Gegenständlichkeit ) has an inherent obstinacy or stubbornness (Eigensinn) that is already included in the German word Gegen-stand, which can never be fully semantically domesticated. Herein lies its fascination. It must finally be noted that, while computer games have just been described as a medium, their medial status is anything but self-evident. Of course, computer games are dependent on digital media as their enabling condition and it is a useful hypothesis that the specific qualities of computer games are intrinsically connected to digital media. But it is also true that the analysis of computer games cannot be confined to the analysis of their technical conditions and discursive origins. Nor will it be sufficient to borrow notions from the arts. Even a preliminary definition of the computer game as an intermedial network system, for example, must first carve out the specificity of the aesthetic experience in computer games.

Intensity of Representation According to a famous definition by the German literary scholar HansRobert Jauß, aesthetic experience differs from all other kinds of human experience: ‘It lets one “see anew”, thereby providing the delight of fulfilled presence; it leads to different imagined worlds and revokes the constraints of time within time; it anticipates future experiences and opens up the scope of possible actions; its lets us recognize the past or suppressed memories and thereby preserves lost time.’7 Besides the discovery of ‘different imagined worlds’, two main notions here are key: ‘fulfilled presence’, meaning the presence of aesthetic object-ness as described above,

7 Hans-Robert Jauß: Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik, Frankfurt/M. 1991, p. 40. My translation.

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and a notion of play.8 Based on aesthetic presence effects that Karl-Heinz Bohrer uncovers in Homer’s Iliad and in the film 300 (Zack Snyder, USA 2006) I will focus on God of War 3 (Sony Computer Entertainment, USA 2010), to sketch out modes of aesthetic experience in computer games, though, of course, without claiming to give a comprehensive account. Zack Snyders’ 300, which relates a highly idiosyncratic interpretation of the story of the Battle of Thermopylae, can be categorized as a fantasy film, with all the positive and negative connotations attached to this genre. God of War 3 reaches beyond the sensational gesture of 300, enacting a fantasy adaptation of the Greek Olympus with its gods and goddesses. It may have little in common with the world of Homer’s epic poems, but it is none the less considered to be one of the best computer games of recent years. Apart from their subject matter, these three examples have something else in common: an almost obsessive representation of physical violence. This is the aspect paid the most attention by the literary scholar Karl-Heinz Bohrer, a writer who made an important contribution to what we might call a post-metaphysical theory of presence, as early as the 1980s.9 In his essay ‘Appearance and Meaning. Homer’s Iliad and Claude Simon’s La Route des Flandres ’10 Bohrer describes the aesthetic object-ness of the Iliad as an ‘evocation of aesthetic intensity’,11 which for him is a definitive criterion, indeed is the ‘meaning’ of art as a whole. Bohrer’s descriptions of intensities are reminiscent of Valéry: aesthetic presence is defined as a presence in which ‘the pending abidance between factors of appearance and factors of meaning remains undecided’.12 This, for Bohrer, is the poetic effect of presence: ‘This presence corresponds both to the dimensions of time and of space, to the “now” in space and time, and this “now” will not be defined by its meaning but by its sheer

8 ‘Spielraum’ (in English, ‘playing field’, scope). 9 Karl-Heinz Bohrer: Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance, New York

1994. 10 Karl Heinz Bohrer: ‘Erscheinung und Bedeutung. Homer’s Ilias und Claude Simon’s La Route des Flandres ’, in: Gertrud Koch, Christiane Voss (eds.): Zwischen Ding und Zeichen. Zur ästhetischen Erfahrung in der Kunst, Munich 2005, pp. 20–34. 11 Ibid., p. 25. My translation. 12 Ibid., pp. 21–22. My translation: ‘bei der das schwebende Verweilen zwischen

Erscheinungsfaktoren und Bedeutungsfaktoren unentschieden bleibt’.

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being-there. Or: its meaning, its sense, can only be had through the intensity of its representation.’13 When we discuss the aesthetic object-ness of the Iliad, we can disregard semantics, motivation, narration and other hermeneutical dimensions. This argument is supported by Erich Auerbach’s characterization of Homer’s style as ‘even (or uniform) illumination’.14 According to Auerbach’s famous analysis, the Iliad features no narrative tightening or distension, no focalization; no central plot around which everything else is arranged ornamentally. It is precisely in its overflowing descriptions of seemingly negligible circumstances and objects—descriptions which can be, at times, a little tiring, at least for today’s readers—that we find the specific intensity Bohrer describes. The enormously detailed descriptions, like the famous ekphrasis of Achilles’ shield, ‘painting’ and thereby evoking a whole world with language, always become more intense when they are connected to corporeality, sensuality and aisthesis; when—to borrow words from George Steiner—‘Words are forced into the careful service of touch’,15 as in the following passage from Book XVIII: 78–147 in the Iliad: ‘that insidious anger that rises in the breast like smoke, sweeter to it than trickling honey’. The almost synesthetic quality of this description works independently of the semantic level of the sentence, its ‘content’. For the presence-effect, the aesthetic object-ness of this passage, it is not important who says these words, or to whom, or to what end. This ‘purely objective realization of a psychological process as a kind of ever-present appearance—the honey, the breast, the smoke—enraptures the reader or listener.’16 According to Bohrer, this intensity of presentation is accelerated in those passages where acts of killing and violence are depicted: he calls it the ‘act of killing 13 Ibid., p. 21. My translation: ‘Diese Gegenwärtigkeit wird sich sowohl auf die Zeit als auch auf die Raumdimension, auf das “Jetzt” in Raum und Zeit beziehen müssen, und dieses “Jetzt” wird dabei von seiner schieren Anwesenheit, nicht von seiner Bedeutung zu bestimmen sein. Oder: Seine Bedeutung, sein Sinn werden ausschließlich über die Intensität der Darstellung zu haben sein.’ 14 Erich Auerbach: Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Kultur,

Tübingen/Basel 2001, p. 26. My translation. 15 Steiner: Von realer Gegenwart, S. 246. 16 Bohrer: Erscheinung und Bedeutung, p. 26. My translation. ‘Diese rein gegen-

ständliche Vergegenwärtigung eines psychischen Vorgangs als eine stets präsente körperliche Erscheinung—der Honig, die Brust der Männer, der Rauch—bewirkt eben das Gefesseltsein des Lesers bzw. Zuhörers.’

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as a peak of intensity’17 His example is the fight between Hector and Achilles at the gates of Troy: But the rich mail Patroclus lately wore, Securely cased the warrior’s body o’er. One place at length he spies, to let in Fate, Where ’twixt the neck and throat the jointed plate Gave entrance: thro’ that penetrable part Furious he drove the well-directed dart: Nor pierc’d the windpipe yet, nor took the power Of speech, unhappy! from thy dying hour. Prone on the field the bleeding warrior lies, While thus, triumphing, stern Achilles cries: ‘At last is Hector stretch’d upon the plain, Who fear’d no vengeance for Patroclus slain: Then, Prince! you should have fear’d, what now you feel; Achilles absent was Achilles still.

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The form of representation in the Iliad transforms the Trojan War, just as it transforms the individual act of killing, into a ‘phantasm’, which means, for Bohrer, the ‘transformation of the event into a picture of intense fantasy contents’.18 These phantasms are made possible by the physical intensity of representation. Contrary to his professed intention, Bohrer comes close to over-emphasizing the evocation of the present by the representation of violence, a point suggested by Gert Mattenklott in his response to Bohrer’s text.19 For the mimetic adaptation of language to physical conditions and ‘peaks of intensity’ is, significantly, still a function of language. Ekphrasis is the representation of an image in the medium of language; it is not the image or the object itself. The theoretical analysis of aesthetic object-ness must continually maintain the oscillation, the ‘hesitation between sound and meaning’, because it is precisely in the undecidability, in the fleeting mode of hesitation or oscillation, that the

17 Ibid., p. 27. My translation. 18 Auerbach, Mimesis, pp. 8–9. My translation. 19 Gert Mattenklott: ‘Antwort auf Karl-Heinz Bohrer’s Beitrag über Erscheinung und

Bedeutung’, in: Gertrud Koch, Christiane Voss (eds.): Zwischen Ding und Zeichen. Zur ästhetischen Erfahrung in der Kunst, Munich 2005, pp. 34–38.

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presence effect of aesthetic object-ness unfolds itself. 300 clearly illustrates, by contrast, what happens when descriptions of physical intensity are not maintained when they are transferred across media. In the light of this, we might begin to gain the impression that 300 has a great deal more in common with the representation of the Iliad as described above than certain judgements on mainstream American cinema give it credit for. What is striking in the film—just as it is in the Iliad—is the obsessive attention to detail in the representation of physical violence, as precisely this is the central motif of the film. The closeness of the two works goes as far as the lance that cuts through the victim’s throat, stretched out by a slow-motion take in 300, just as is the depiction of the battle between Hector and Achilles through the rhythm of Homer’s verse. Everything is presented in a spectacular intensity that is fundamentally strengthened through the possibilities of digital cinematography, which makes such effects possible. 300 is one of those films that have been completely digitally generated, right down to the actors and the ground on which they move. And today’s digital cinema shares at least one thing with the Homerian style in Auerbach’s sense: its ‘uniform illumination’. What Auerbach means by this in his book Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature is that Homer describes and represents his narrative in a balanced and undiscriminating fashion. There is no differentiation between foreground and background; nothing remains cast in shadow. The narrative flow of the Iliad is laid out such that ‘an uninterrupted, rhythmic procession of phenomena moves by, and there is nowhere a form left fragmentary or only half illuminated, nowhere a gap, a gaping, a view into unplumbed depths’.20 This description bears remarkable similarities with the filmic elements of 300 mentioned above. And indeed it is a media-technological fact that the digital image knows nothing of the principle of foreground and background. While it is possible for the digital camera to register images of the most extreme depth of field, digitally generated images must first be ‘taught’ depth of field as well as light and shadow, a process that is hardware-intensive and arduous at the level of software too. Through a principally unlimited capacity for adjustment, today a level of detail can be reached that photography cannot touch. We could, with Baudrillard, speak of the ‘promiscuity of the

20 Auerbach: Mimesis, pp. 8–9.

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detail’21 proper to the digital image. Everything is offered to the eye, in an intensity that is almost painful.22 But is this really a question of the intensity of representation as described by Bohrer, which is a symptom of aesthetic experience? It seems doubtful. 300 shows, in contrast to the Iliad, something like an inverted ekphrasis, turning the aesthetic object-ness in the sense outlined above into pure kitsch. Here we see what happens when the oscillation of ‘sound and meaning’, aisthesis and semiosis , is arrested, curdled into an excess of detail and brought to a standstill. Here there is no text describing an image, but only an image evoking a text that describes an image. The ‘hesitation between sound and meaning’ evaporates, being overrun by an excess of detail. To avoid misunderstandings: my setting the mode of aesthetic experience in 300 in a relationship to kitsch does not automatically imply a value judgement. Kitsch is related to that disgust of excess which has historically played a role, and which continues to play a role, in art theory and aesthetics, as so comprehensively shown by Winfried Menninghaus.23 Disgust is an independent mode of aesthetic experience which founds the repulsion background of all that is ‘beautiful’.

Aesthetic Experience in Computer Games? God of War 3, finally, plays with violence more drastically even than 300. Pure action and naked spectacle come to the fore, becoming ends in themselves and surpassing 300. Studying a computer game such as God of War 3 purely through screenshots makes it difficult to understand what exactly should differentiate this game from the example of 300. Here too we have the spectacular ‘uninterrupted, rhythmic procession of phenomena’, tipped into perversity; the ‘promiscuity of the detail’ which nearly overwhelms the senses; the constant, almost hypnotizing fire and fury of events. God of War 3 21 Jean Baudrillard: ‘Videowelt und fraktales Subjekt’, in: Ars Electronica (ed.): Philoso-

phien der neuen Technologien, Berlin 1989, pp. 113–133, here p. 116. 22 See, on this thematic complex, Markus Rautzenberg: ‘Exzessive Bildlichkeit. Das digitale Bild als Vomitiv’, in: Ingeborg Reichle, Steffen Siegel, Achim Spelten (eds.): Maßlose Bilder. Visuelle Ästhetik der Transgression, Munich 2009, pp. 263–279. 23 Winfried Menninghaus: Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, trans. Howard Eiland and Joel Goelb. New York 2003.

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is, furthermore, extremely brutal on a visual level: fountains of blood and guts, as far as the eye can see. From the standpoint of a non-participating observer, we are dealing with a classic example of what is sometimes disparagingly termed a ‘killer game’, since it seems to prize above all else representations of the act of killing, rendered in as much detail as possible. Of its Greek template, little more seems to remain than a polygonal cardboard set offering a background for continuous scenes of carnage. However if we stop simply looking at God of War 3 and start playing it, our perspective changes radically. The filmic level of the images retreats; actions in a virtual space gain priority in our perception. To orientate oneself in this space, navigation is needed in a carefully constructed deictic space that is organized purely according to its legibility. The ‘reading’ demanded of the player is not a decoding in a semiotic— information—theoretical sense, but above all an understanding accompanied by perception. Computer games are, on the one hand, dense worlds of signs in which everything must make sense so that the player can even begin to progress in the game. However, the accumulated meaning is no semantic depth dimension, but one that discharges itself continually in impressions of movement. Thus, for example, to balance the model of movement of the enemy in order to react to him, the space constantly changes dynamically and must be navigated, and so on. Formulated semiotically, these models of movement and their corresponding screen displays are indexical signs which, when scanned rhythmically, lead the reactions of the player. The reaction time is so short that these signs are, in effect, reduced to their pure reference character, and in the moment of being understood they transform immediately into a movement response on the part of the player. Thus there arises a flow of movement the motor of which is rhythm. Camera and visible objects must be arranged such that the player is in a position to understand what s/he has to do or where s/he has to move, without being given the feeling that s/he is only following given orders (which is, however, both technically and discoursehistorically, entirely true24 ). Computer games give the player the freedom to make decisions which (as in all games) function only within fixed, regulated parameters. The point is: computer games are, above all else—and this statement is fairly unspectacular on first glance—games. There is a great deal to say 24 See the discourse analysis of computer games by Claus Pias: Computer Spiel Welten, Munich 2002.

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about the role taken on by the concept and phenomenon of the game in art and in theory, which cannot be undertaken at this point,25 but it is none the less important to emphasize that the aesthetic object-ness of the computer game, as I have tried to outline it, is not to be found at the level of images, not in narration, not in the degree of the violence depicted, but rather at the level of the game; i.e. the game events. Computer games, like all games, are not read or received like a film, but are actively explored; they are handled plastically, and indeed they do not exist without this practical handling on the part of the player. It is, however, important to emphasize that this observation does not simply equate to our saying that computer games are interactive and are experienced immersively. In the theory of interfaces, this concept means the immersion (Latin, immersio) of perception in a virtual space, whereby an experience of immersion is considered successful when the illusory perception is ‘perfect’, and the observer can no longer distinguish between reality and virtual space.26 This, however, is precisely not the case, regardless of how much the computer game industry busies itself with generating photo-realistic graphics. For computer games—and this is true in general for virtual spaces27 —the maintenance of the difference between the somatic body and the virtual space is significant, not the narcotizing ‘total immersion’. Aesthetic experience in computer games thus grows from the unrelenting to and fro between these levels, and the medium in which this dynamic takes place is the game.

25 See Ruth Sonderegger: Für eine Ästhetik des Spiels: Hermeneutik, Dekonstruction und der Eigensinn der Kunst, Frankfurt/M. 2000. 26 See Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin: Remediation. Understanding New Media, Cambridge/London 2000; Achim Bühl: Cybersociety. Mythos und Realität der Informationsgesellschaft, Cologne 1996; N. Katherine Hayles: How We Became Posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, Chicago 1999. Before all else comes Gui Bonsiepe’s influential interface theory, which argues for pure transparency as the ideal state of a user interface: Gui Bonsiepe: Interface. Design neu begreifen, Mannheim 1996. This ideal dates back to the first Human Interface Guidelines of the company Apple, whose WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get ) approach characterizes the design of popular GUIs (graphical user interfaces) even today. 27 ‘But let us remind ourselves with respect to this absolute supremacy of a single

perspective, that the simulation strategy of virtual realities presupposes that the actual place of the body and the virtual place of interaction diverge. “Cyberspace” thus presupposes the difference between virtual reality and the physicially situated external world.’ Sybille Krämer: ‘Zentralperspektive, Kalkül, Virtuelle Realität’, in: Gianni Vattimo, Wolfgang Welsch (eds.): Medien—Welten—WIrklichkeiten, Munich 1998, pp. 27–39, p. 36.

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Game and Mediality The fascination aroused by the phenomenon of the game is rooted in its structure, which—whether in the terms of logic or of psychoanalysis— is based on a moment of transgression. Bateson analyses this aspect of the game by means of the concepts of primary and secondary processes. The game acquires a mediating, medial function through its particular logical structure. If the mechanisms of the primary processes, which are unconscious, and those of the secondary processes, which are rooted in the field of the discursive, are normally black boxes for one another, the game, or rather its paradox-precipitating structure, is able to transcend these otherwise solid borders: ‘It therefore follows that the play frame here used as an explanatory principle implies a special combination of primary and secondary processes.’28 What is significant here, though he does not examine this aspect more closely, is Bateson’s description of play as mediality which is established between various logical and epistemic levels, but which does not take on a synthesizing function. For Bateson, the dynamic of the medium of play is constituted in a logical—epistemic grey zone, similar to that of a so-called ‘lucid’ dream, in which the dreamer suddenly becomes aware that he or she is dreaming. This particular form of dream takes place at the border between sleep and the onset of wakefulness. As long as the dreamer participates unconsciously in the dream, its operational framework remains closed. It is not simply that the border to the operations of the secondary processes cannot be crossed; this border cannot yet even be perceived. The moment of lucid dreaming, on the other hand, is characterized by the sudden possibility of formulating meta-statements, in Bateson’s sense, which problematize the frame (‘Is this a dream?’). The dreamer still finds him/herself in the state of dreaming, but on the threshold of waking consciousness: ‘He cannot, unless close to waking, dream a statement referring to (i.e., framing) his dream.’29 The structure and dynamic of the game as a threshold phenomenon of this nature can only be grasped as a process in which the moment of the intermittent, the sudden,30 is the mode in which the 28 Gregory Bateson: A Theory of Play and Fantasy, in: Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Chicago 1972. 29 Ibid., p. 185. 30 Karl Heinz Bohrer has written at length of the important role played by the moment

of the sudden as an expression and sign of the discontinuous and non-identical in modern

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medium of the game can be recognized, momentarily, for what it is. Thus it becomes clear that the event of the simultaneity of incompatible levels can only ever be understood momentarily. The event of lucid dreaming, too, is possible only for moments, and only on the very boundary between sleep and wakefulness. And yet it is precisely this moment that is so important, for it is—I argue—the residuum of aesthetic object-ness in the game. Bateson himself suggests the dream analogy because, in analysing the phenomenon of the game, he simultaneously describes it as a threshold phenomenon; one that ‘mediates’31 between primary and secondary processes and unfolds its specific potential precisely in this transgression of boundaries. At this point, a relationship emerges between various categories, in which the one can never be translated seamlessly into the other: ‘The message “This is play” thus sets out a frame of the sort which is likely to precipitate paradox: it is an attempt to discriminate between, or to draw a line between, categories of different logical types.’32 A differentiation becomes significant here: that between play and game. For Bateson, the form of the ‘game’ is differentiated from that of ‘play’ by its higher degree of complexity, which results from the fact that in the game, the problem of framing shows itself in heightened form and reveals its paradoxical character. In an intensification of the paradoxical structure of play, which is constituted alongside the frame-statement ‘This is play’, in the form of the game that logical-epistemic indistinction is thematized through the question ‘Is this play?’ Bateson’s game theory, as well as Niklas Luhmann’s concept of medium and form, centre around

aesthetics. See Karl Heinz Bohrer: Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance, trans. Ruth Crowley, NY, 1994. 31 ‘Mediating’ is understood, here, of course, not in the sense of a synthesizing process. The medium as terminus medius describes first nothing more than a place which can only be defined in relation to that thing of which it is a defined as a mediator, but disappears itself in the process of mediation. See Konrad Ehlich: ‘Medium Sprache’ in: Forum Angewandte Linguistik Band 34, Frankfurt/M. 1998, pp. 9–21. 32 Bateson: A Theory …, p. 190.

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the phenomenon that even ‘meaning’33 emerges from the processing of paradoxes. Exemplary for this is the figure of Epimenides’ paradox: All statements within this frame are untrue.

This figure creates the effect of the ‘double-bind’, the structure of which Bateson has examined in the context of research on schizophrenia. In the game, he sees a process at work which is not able to dissolve the aporia of this ‘double-bind’, but which is able to exceed it. The appeal, the effect and the function of the game lie, for Bateson, primarily in this excess. This achievement of play has such a wide scope, for Bateson, that he sees himself impelled to describe it as an evolutionary leap in the development of communication. The processing of paradoxes is fundamental for a communication that transcends the pure recognition of signals and symptoms and is capable of meta-communication. Play shifts between the fields of unconscious primary and discursive secondary processes: levels that would not be compatible outside of play. Bateson illustrates this by means of the map—territory relationship, which describes the capacity to differentiate between different logical levels. Since a differentiation between levels is not possible in the framework of the primary processes, it proves itself to be a function of the secondary processes. The paradox arises from the confrontation between the secondary and primary processes. We assume ‘that the primary process is continually operating, and that the psychological validity of the paradoxical play frame depends upon this part of the mind’.34 The game, in the form of the question ‘Is this play?’, exceeds this frame: ‘In primary process, map and territory are equated; in secondary process, they can be discriminated. In play, they are both equated and discriminated.’35 This

33 ‘Sense’ should be understood here in Luhmann’s sense. Here, ‘sense’ is itself a medium whose characteristic it is to enable self-referentiality and complexity along the differentiation of real/possible or current/potential social and psychical systems. ‘Sense’ is a base fundamental prerequisite for complex systems. See Claudio Baraldi, Giancarlo Corsi, Elena Esposito (eds.): GLU: Glossar zu Niklas Luhmanns Theorie sozialer Systeme, Frankfurt/M 1998, pp. 170 ff. 34 Bateson: A Theory …, pp. 184–185. 35 Ibid., p. 185.

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equation of the ‘either/or’ unfolds the structure of an ontological—epistemic vagueness that appears only momentarily, as described above. In the game, the different levels are not merely mediated with one other in synthesis. In the mode of a temporal succession, even if it is a fluctuating one, the game is able to produce a connection that allows it to process this equation.36 The medium of the game is this fluctuating form because temporal succession is never linear but rather recursive. The operations tip over, again and again, into a different area each time, such that a stable point of ‘before’ or ‘after’ cannot be determined: the paradox is left standing and yet is processed; a synthesis, however, never comes to being. The game as a medium remains discrete, but at the same time constitutes ‘meaning’, which results from the constantly moving processuality of the shifting of both levels. Pathological forms like that of schizophrenia arise precisely when a psychic system is no longer in the position to carry out this balancing act; when it can no longer process paradoxes in this way. In computer games such as God of War 3 (which is in principle a completely arbitrary example), this tightrope act is the agent of aesthetic experience, which does not, as in the case of Valéry’s or Bohrer’s examples, result from a ‘hesitation between sound and meaning’, but consists in momentary boundary transgressions between the somatic body and the virtual space, and thus generates peaks of intensity which define the actual (aesthetic) attraction of the medium of the computer game. The relatedness of these (qualitatively very different) forms of aesthetic experience consists in the fact that this ‘hesitation’, this ‘oscillation’ is not articulated through a phantasmatic melting or identification (for this would be the pathological form). Instead, it is experienced and appears momentarily as an interdependence against the background of an ineluctable difference. The residuum of this appearance is—at least in the case of the computer game—game as mediality, and it is in this modus of ludic mediality that we uncover the aesthetic object-ness of the computer game.

36 This type of procession of paradoxes is in Luhmann’s theory formation further carried out and more closely described with the help George Spencer-Browns thought figure of ‘re-entry’. Even for Luhmann, the paradox is not a form to be avoided if possible, but rather represents, in contrast, an integral constituent of psychic and social systems. ‘Reentry’ designates that entry through which a system can reintegrate into itself the basal differentiation on which it is itself based in the train of self-observation. In the medium of the game, which is based on the differentiation between the real and the fictional (‘Is this play?’), precisely this difference is thematised and with recourse to time.

CHAPTER 5

Caves, Caverns and Dungeons: Speleological Aesthetics in Computer Games

One of the most important games in gaming history was released in the year 1996, and was about a young woman who liked to raid tombs. It is of media-historical significance, that Tomb Raider (Eidos Interactive 1996, O: Core Design) together with Nintendo’s Super Mario 64 (Nintendo 1996, O: Nintendo) was one of the games that established the shift from 2D to 3D polygonal graphics, which afterwards became the new paradigm for computer games. This paradigm shift was so successful that today, 2D games, while still being made, have a distinctively nostalgic atmosphere about them. ‘Real’ big budget games today have to use polygonal 3D engines—this is what the audience expects and is what keeps players buying new consoles and GPUs (graphics processing units). But it is debatable whether it is this shift from 2D to 3D that will be remembered about Tomb Raider, because it is its heroine Lara Croft who has dug herself deep into the cultural imaginary of the digital age. Since the tremendous—and until then unheard of—commercial success of Tomb Raider, which lasted well into the twenty-first century, there suddenly was a flood of publications that dealt with Lara Croft as a cultural phenomenon and tackled the issue from many angles—from ambitious editorials1 to scientific articles.2 1 Miranda Sawyer: ‘Lara Croft: The Ultimate Byte Girl’, in: The Face No. 5, June 1997. 2 Examples from Germany included: Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky: Lara Croft —Modell,

Medium, Cyberheldin. Das virtuelle Geschlecht und seine metaphysischen Tücken, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 2001. Internationally: Helen W. Kennedy: ‘Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo?’ 2002, http://www.gamestudies.org/0202/kennedy/; Mike Ward:

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Rautzenberg, Framing Uncertainty, Performance Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59521-8_5

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It is quite possible that one day the rise of game studies as an academic field will be connected to the emergence of the acrobatic virtual icon Lara Croft. But it is not the aim of this chapter to analyse the ‘phenomenon’ of Lara Croft in its entirety, and it can be said that the actual game of Tomb Raider is far less well known than its pistol-wielding protagonist. The success of the game series, first published by Eidos and developed by Core Design, was solely attributed to the virtual persona of Lara Croft and it was at her that all public attention was aimed. A new star was born, and the fact that she was made out of animated polygons was equally hailed and demonized as a new archetype for the digital age. In addition, computer games were suddenly perceived to be a worthwhile subject for academic scrutiny and Lara Croft was analysed in gender studies, psychoanalytical approaches and, of course, media theory. It would be superfluous to revisit those topics again, and therefore this chapter will try to make a case for the hypothesis that the real success and achievement of Tomb Raider was not its protagonist but in fact lies in the ways the game depicts and implements the exploration of caves, caverns and dungeons as a metaphor and gameplay mechanic. Tomb Raider is a descendent of a long line of ancestors that go back to the beginnings of the digital age, having implications that are not only relevant to computer games but also for an anthropology of media. Like her cinematic counterpart Indiana Jones, Lara Croft is an archaeologist by profession, and archeology is one of the disciplines that speleology is pertinent to: the study of caves. Like media studies, speleology is at its core an interdisciplinary field of research which cannot be reduced to single disciplines without diminishing its complexity. But at the core of speleology there is the exploration of caves as an activity that has two main components: actual exploration; and cartography. Without these practical aspects there would be no speleology at all. All the other related disciplines—archeology, paleontology, hydrology, climatology and biology, to name the most important ones—serve as auxiliary sciences for the practical part of speleology. Practical speleology that consists of exploration and cartography is the main ingredient of the study of caves as an academic discipline. And there are legitimate reasons to analyse computer games from the perspective of speleology, because caves and their exploration as

‘Being Lara Croft, or, We Are All Sci-Fi’ 2000, http://www.popmatters.com/feature/ 000114-ward/.

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a game mechanic, subject and metaphor are as important for the medium as real caves are for speleology. Therefore, a speleological approach to an epistemology of computer games could start with a list of those games that are explicitly about caves, caverns and dungeons and such a list would already be quite extensive. The Dungeon Crawler, for example—a sub-genre of role-playing games, the most well-known example of which probably being the Diablo series (Blizzard Entertainment/Activision 1996–2014, O: Blizzard Entertainment)—is not only about killing monsters and collecting treasure but has implemented the two core ingredients of speleology—exploration and cartography—as the foundation of its game design. Tomb Raider was one of the pioneers of action adventures, a genre that is still successful, with game series such as Batman or Uncharted. In these games, exploration is the most important aspect of gameplay. Even though Uncharted is more of an action game, exploration is still a leitmotif, of which the title is an indication. Here, semiotics of space is of the utmost importance, meaning that it is the task of the player to read the virtual rooms and landscapes in order to mentally map them, to find ways to climb or otherwise escape these environments; a crucial skillset for explorers of caves (spelunkers) as well as gamers. That being said, it is no wonder that one of the first computer games was created in the spirit of speleology in the year 1975.3 That year, the programmer, speleologist and Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast William Crowther created the first text adventure. His primary concern was to entertain his two daughters, who had been estranged from him since his divorce. But this game, that would make history under the name Colossal Cave Adventure, did not just excite his daughters but also a little community of scientists and computer programmers, who at the time were connected to the ARPANET, eventually to become the Internet. Crowther and his (former) wife played an important part in the development of the ARPANET, and both happened to be enthusiastically involved in amateur speleology. They were among the first to feed their computers with cave descriptions and coordinates, and printing complex maps of local cave systems. The necessary software for this was at the same time the foundation for Colossal Cave Adventure, combining classic speleological practices with fantasy settings: the adventure as a genre for computer games, and an 3 Roger Bruckner, Richard Watson: The Longest Cave, Chicago, IL 2006; Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon: Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet, New York 1998.

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ancestor of both World of Warcraft and Tomb Raider was born. In those virtual cave-systems, monsters were lurking and treasure chests contained vast riches and the player could combine items and tools to progress in the game. This basic structure of the adventure has not changed much since those days, even though big 3D environments and fitting genre descriptions such as ‘open world game’ suggest that players would now play in the open. But in contrast to Flammarion’s ‘wanderer on the edge of the world’ even today there is no real way for players of computer games to escape the cave, because every computer game that simulates 3D landscapes is encapsulated by so called sky-boxes, that as an impenetrable celestial sphere put an end to every attempt of further exploration. Skyboxes are domes or ceilings on to which textures are applied that depict cloud and sky-like patterns to give the illusion of sky and open horizons. So in fact every computer game that uses polygonal landscapes is actually set in cave-like environments, regardless of whether it is Tomb Raider, Need for Speed or Call of Duty. This principle is also the basis for another well-known virtual environment, that—alluding to Plato’s allegory of the cave—is called cave automatic virtual environment , abbreviated as ‘Cave’. From the self-made maps that had to be scribbled by the player to give the orientation in early text adventures to the complex, multimedia map systems that are an integral part of games like World of Warcraft, cartography has remained an important part of game design and game interfaces. The simple maps of the past that often misused school exercise books by using them as atlases to virtual worlds rather than for homework, have turned into impressive maps packed with information, whose functions are not only aesthetic and cartographic but also of an encyclopedic nature, thereby integrating augmented-reality features. This is not only of anecdotal value, even if these mapping practices of the early days of computer games might give reason for nostalgia. But the speleological interrelations between exploration and cartography can be thought of as an instructive metaphor for the medial conditions of computer games and their epistemology. These metaphors lead even deeper down the labyrinths of caves, caverns and dungeons, and it is increasingly apparent that it is not possible to talk about speleological epistemologies without referring to Plato’s allegory of the cave. Jean Baudrillard could be cited as exemplary for a kind of critical media theory, where the platonic heritage can be observed right down to the notions that are being used, with ‘map and territory’

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being one of them. For Baudrillard, the demise of Western culture can be directly observed in the way in which the difference between ‘map and territory’ has lost its meaning, in which we all just live a secondary life amid simulacra. The very definition Baudrillard applies to this condition in this apocalyptic cultural analysis is all about his observation of an epistemological shortcut between map and territory resulting in a ‘substitution of the real by signs of the real’.4 The hypothesis is that in our age of omnipresent mass media, representations (maps) have taken over or have occupied the place where reality (territory) once was. The realm of signs, that can only exist because of the primordial difference between signs and what they signify, map and territory is exchanged for the superficial glamour of media-induced simulations. The difference itself, on which Western culture was built, thereby is all but annihilated, according to Baudrillard. For Baudrillard, the increasing indistinguishability between map and territory, the signifier and the signified, representation and that which is represented, is a symptom of a long history of the vanishing of the ‘real’, that can’t be undone. For him, we as humans of the digital age are still sitting in Plato’s cave, staring at the shadow images we mistake for reality. For the French philosopher and media theorist, the cave exit itself, that was still very much a way out for Plato’s cave dwellers, is blocked and the only light that is still visible is that emitted from the cathode ray tubes and light-emitting diodes (LEDs) of our TVs and monitors. But what role do computer games play in this dark and apocalyptic landscape of new media? While Baudrillard himself never really commented on them, it is probably safe to assume that he did not really feel the need to do so, because computer games are products of digital media and therefore pure simulacra, automatically included in his critique on the ‘agony of the real’. But it is worthwhile to take a closer look here. From their technological constituents at the level of software development all the way up the level of user interfaces, computer games are made up of complex semiotic interrelations that are technically and logically based on binary ‘if/then’ principles that are realized in electronic states within processors. However, at the level of perception (aisthesis ) this interweaving of signs and electronic actualizations shows itself as a ludic space of potentiality suspended between map and territory, a suspension that cannot be halted but has to be explored interactively in the 4 Jean Baudrillard: ‘Die Präzession der Simulakra’, in trans.: Agonie des Realen, Berlin 1978, S. 9 (my translation).

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process of playing the game. The often understated emblematic meaning of computer games therefore lies in their potential to be actively explorable metaphors of the medial dynamism that is at the core of all media based on the combination of von Neumann architectures and Turing machines—aka computers. Since the beginning, but especially since polygonal 3D graphics were introduced to computer games during the mid-1990s, navigating virtual image spaces has been one of the core elements of computer games. Therefore, it is not surprising that the relation between map and territory is crucial here, and this time in a very literal sense. Early RPGs (roleplaying games) such as The Bard’s Tale (Electronic Arts 1985, O: Interplay) required the player to draw maps by hand to navigate the diegetic worlds of these games that were made of text-boxes and rudimentary still images containing necessary information regarding the relative position of the player in the world of the game. Today, games such as World of Warcraft automatically ‘draw’ complex maps containing a plethora of information that is conveyed to the player by means of hypertextual procedure making game-related data instantly available in real time, relative to the actual player position. These maps are an important part of the interface and are often integral elements of the game design; ‘fast travelling’, as in Skyrim (Bethesda, USA 2011) being one of the prime examples: once discovered, the player can travel to any place on the map by clicking on the related point on the map. Even games like Pac-Man (Namco, Japan 1980) work basically along the lines of the explorative interweaving of map and territory, or, to quote Michel de Certeau’s terminology, of ‘spaces and places’: At the outset, I shall make a distinction between space (espace) and place (lieu) that delimits a field. A place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location (place). The law of the ‘proper’ rules in the place: the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own ‘proper’ and distinct location, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability. A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of

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conflictual programs or contractual proximities. On this view, in relation to place, space is like the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed into a term dependent upon many different conventions, situated as the act of a present (or of a time), and modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts. In contradistinction to the place, it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a ‘proper’. In short, space is a practiced place.5

Even in Pac-Man there is a cartographic system in place that can be actively explored by moving through the ‘map’ itself. In this system—that is nothing but another framing in both the pictorial and game related sense—time is introduced via the explorative movement of the player within the game ‘space’, which, of course, is at the core of what we call ‘interactivity’. What makes computer games so attractive is not the simple stimulus/response mechanisms but the possibility of actively exploring framings whose coordinates, albeit established by soft- and hardware, are transformed from ‘spaces’ to ‘places and vice versa through the act of playing the game. Here is an example. In RTS (real time strategy) games such as Heroes of Might and Magic (Ubisoft 2006, Nival Interactive) the player is moving through an area that is always surrounded by an opaque zone, mostly represented by the colour black and is called the ‘fog of war’ not only in games but since Carl von Clausewitz,6 in theories of war-time strategy. The player is moving his avatar through an image space that is map and territory at the same time. The black ‘fog of war’ that occupies not only the upper part of the screen but also the left half of the map at the bottom of the left-hand side of the screen, clears gradually as the avatar moves into it. The player cannot know what is in in store for him or her there—it could be bandits, monsters or even treasure chests. What matters most is the element of uncertainty, that has to be avoided or at least minimized during wartime to ensure survival, but that can never be fully eliminated, according to von Clausewitz. However, in computer games, not only can uncertainty never be eliminated, it cannot be allowed to be eliminated because uncertainty is constitutive for game and play as a medium. The player is navigating through an area that is turned into ‘place’ (map) by means of the performativity of exploration, while at the same time this very ‘place’ is turned 5 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley 1984, p. 124. 6 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Oxford 2008.

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into ‘space’ (territory) because of the constant ludic transformation of the virtual image. Computer games literally and figuratively mediate between map and territory by continuously transforming them into one other, and this is the iconic mode, the ludic condition of interactive digital images. During exploration, map becomes territory, ‘place’ becomes ‘space’ and vice versa. But it is one of the defining aspects of ludic mediality that these differences do not become blurred during the performativity of gaming, but on the contrary become perceivable as gameplay devices. This is exactly what Gregory Bateson means by the ‘logical anomaly’ of game and play that is so crucial to his theory: during the performativity of gaming, map and territory are treated as being equal and different at the same time.7 This observation is not exclusive to computer games but an integral part of digital imagery. Regardless of whether we engage virtually with desktop icons, playfully explore new apps on our smartphones, interpret the brain via PET images, or give the latest movie star cosmetic surgery in Photoshop: the described dynamism of map and territory is ubiquitous in the digital age. In conclusion, it can be assumed that, in contrast to Baudrillard’s theses, map and territory in digital images—of which computer games are the explorable metaphor—can be conceived not as dichotomous but as modes that are interwoven in a way that is of great importance to media theory. The philosophical backdrop for all of this is, of course, still the allegory of the cave but this time not, as for Baudrillard, in its Platonic but in its speleological version. ∗ ∗ ∗ Like many media theorists and critics of the twentieth century, Baudrillard draws heavily on Plato’s allegory of the cave. In that regard, one is immediately reminded, for example, of Susan Sontag’s influential essays On Photography or media critics emerging from the Frankfurt School of thought, namely Alexander Kluge. And it is easy to see why, because Plato’s thought experiment in the seventh book of politeia is a very important source of over 2000 years of Western metaphysical thought. It would

7 Gregory Bateson: Ökologie des Geistes. Anthropologische, psychologische, biologische und epistemologische Perspektiven, Frankfurt/M. 1985, S. 251.

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be completely futile even to attempt to acknowledge the weight of centuries of study regarding this subject matter here, but it is helpful to remember that the very logic of the dichotomy of illusion and reality that is in question here is so deeply embedded in our ways of thinking that we almost cannot help but take this fundamental difference—and its many masks like map and territory, signifier and signified, the imaginary and the real—for granted. We tend to forget that these categories are not ‘naturally’ self-evident but historically conceived and carefully constructed over the course of centuries. Here we are facing a difference that is at the basis of what we know as truth, reality and authenticity, and it took philosophy enormous acts of argumentative strength to even come up with the possibility of alternative notions of being and truth during the course of its history. Reading the allegory of the cave we are indeed astonished by the apparent modernity of its depiction of a media-historical primal scene. The copper engraving Antrum Platonicum from the year 1604 exemplifies this scene authentically: on the right-hand side are the cave dwellers who can only perceive the shadow images displayed on the cave wall to the far right. Because the depiction works in ellipsis and is not linear like Plato’s narrative, it deviates a little from the text by not showing the shackles that bind the cave dwellers and force them to look in only one direction, towards the wall. The shadows themselves stem from statues that are placed on top of a stone wall behind the cave dwellers, backlit by fire. At this point a recurring and common misunderstanding can already be avoided, because the engraving is very true to the allegory: the shadowcasting statues are not lit by the daylight coming from the entrance to the cave but by an artificial source, the small lantern hanging from the ceiling of the cave. This is crucial because it illustrates that the platonic difference between illusion and reality, appearance and truth is not binary but organized in a hierarchy that has more than two layers. To put it differently: Baudrillard’s distinction between map and territory in his ontology of media is modelled after the difference between shadow images and statues in the platonic allegory, not between shadows and the sunlit world outside the cave. But, according to Plato, only the latter is the realm of truth, the only reality there is, the realm of ideas. In the copper engraving one can see the cave-dwellers arguing and talking to each other in an agitated manner while those outside, who walk in the sunlight, can only be seen as

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blurred figures from within the cave. It is remarkable how close this depiction is to the perceptual logic of photographic imagery: while the people inside the cave are drawn with sharp detail, the figures outside the cave not only appear blurred but also ‘soft’ in a photographic sense. The part of the picture that is supposed to depict the outside world appears generally ‘overexposed’, thereby simulating the limited dynamic range typical of film and photographic sensors. The glaring sunlight overpowers all visual detail. This is very true to Plato’s description in politeia, which is constantly working with optical metaphors of blindness and visibility, transparency and opacity, while at the same time degrading the senses as not being suitable for true ‘insight’. The epistemological hierarchy in Plato’s allegory of the cave is therefore not binary but threefold: first, the shadow images; second, the statues illuminated from behind by fire, thus animating the shadow play in front of the wall; and third, the realm of ideas outside the cave. Plato only differentiates between the epistemological framings in which the objects are perceived: inside and outside. Like the shadow images, the statues too are ‘just’ images (compared to the real world of ideas), but the shadow images are epistemologically weaker than the statues on top of the wall, which is a way of thinking typical of Plato. While the flickering shadows can only show ephemeral and fleeting shapes (Greek, phantasmata; Latin simulacrum), the statues are at least of concrete matter, stable objects of perception. But both are images, and because of this are categorically different from the world of ideas. Statues and shadows are related by mimetic interconnection of representation, a mode of existence completely different from ideas. As far as images go, statues are ‘better’ than unstable shadow images but, like them, are still ‘just’ images. Only because of this is it possible for map and territory to change places, as the cultural critique of the victory of simulation is suggesting, because only elements that belong to the same logical or categorical plane can substitute for one another. For Plato, ‘reality’ or that which lies beyond the cave exit, is categorically different from all that exists within the cave. In contrast, the difference between shadows and statues is not categorical but gradual, and this is why they can interrelate as substitutes for one another as in Baudrillard’s philosophy. For an ideological critique, the notion of an authentic reality that has to be saved from the shadow images of simulation thus becomes problematic. Following Plato’s idea as explained above, the thesis of an ‘agony of the real’ falls short because reality is not really affected by the difference between map

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and territory. This means that Baudrillard’s critical stance cannot assume a privileged position from which the distinction between simulacra and authentic reality can be made. In other words, even with Baudrillard we are still inhabitants of Plato’s cave. At this point one could ask if Plato’s way out of the cave is the only viable one. What if, what is really interesting is not outside the cave where the sun blinds the eye so that nothing is really visible in any case? These are crucial questions that philosophy of the twentieth century was engaged with in many ways, and one of the most original contributors to this field of inquiry was Hans Blumenberg in his late opus magnum, ‘Höhlenausgänge’ (cave exits). The title already gives away that it is a modern approach to the platonic allegory but the book begins with the conjecture that for humankind the way into the cave is not a regression away from ideas, but on the contrary a basic condition for civilization as a whole. Blumenberg proposes an inverted platonism, because for him going into the cave is at the very core of civilization, the birthplace of culture. According to his evolutionary—anthropological speculations, the cave allows for culture and civilization to prosper because—contrary to jungle and savanna—it allows for concentrated attention towards a specific point in space, the cave exit, while jungle and savanna need a kind of constant but dispersed alertness towards all directions, because in those environments danger could come from anywhere and all sides. Therefore the situation of the cave as an environment for living had the extremely important side-effect of making the kind of deep sleep possible that is characteristically human. Only in this safe environment, where this kind of sleep is possible, can dreams occur. In the wilderness, on the other hand, there is no peace, only a kind of ‘dulled alertness, even while sleeping’.8 For Blumenberg, conquering the cave is the beginning of a certain mastery of space that was not possible in the openness of the savanna and the perceptual complexity of the jungle. At the same time, the human need for shelter inside an enclosed medium is met. Of course, the German philosopher had to make some far-reaching psychoanalytical as well as anthropological assumptions here. One of them was the thesis that the evolutionary origin from the ocean and the liquid medium of the womb

8 Hans Blumenberg, Höhlenausgänge, Frankfurt/M. 1996, p. 27 (this and all of the following translations from this book are by me).

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has instilled an indelible longing for the ‘intramarine conditions of the easy and secure life in a homogeneous medium’9 in the human psyche. Here, in cavernous safety, the ‘birth of imagination’ takes place, mankind evolves to become ‘dreaming animals’.10 This has political consequences too: while one can live comfortably within the safe enclosure of the cave, one cannot make a living there. But for the first time in history it is possible for the physically weaker members of a primordial tribe to survive without having to participate directly in the hunt for food and therefore without being able to provide for themselves. So, provocatively, Blumenberg ties the birth of imagination directly to the physically weak, who have to compensate in some way for their inability to earn their right to exist. Their ‘weapon’ to do this with is imagination: ‘The pleasure of being able to let something happen, without having to suffer through it, was the secret of the non-hero.’11 The meandering imagination in the safety of the cave becomes a powerful tool of the intellectual non-hero against the huntsmen and warriors, the artists against the ablebodied ‘men of action’. Culture is and always will be a conspiracy against the exclusive standardization of humanity through the example of the strongest, the most useful and efficient members of society—albeit knowing that without them, nothing would work—even if this conflict is changing its name … Those who are excluded from the hunt become dreamers, storytellers, tricksters, imagemakers, fools, who provide enrichment and entertainment during times between hunting sessions … Fiction and compensation originate from the same source.12

9 Ibid., p. 22. 10 Ibid., p. 29. 11 Ibid., p. 30. 12 Ibid., p. 33. [Kultur ist und wird bleiben eine Verschwörung gegen die exklusive

Standardisierung des Menschlichen durch die Tüchtigsten, Nützlichsten, Stärksten—ohne die alles andere nicht ginge—mag dieser Konflikt auch seinen Namen ändern … Der vom Jagdtrieb ausgeschlossene wird zum Träumer, Erzähler, Narren, Bildermacher, Possenreißer, zur Bereicherung der für den Lebenshunger zunächst toten Zeit … Fiktion und Kompensation kommen aus der selben Quelle.]

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The imaginative power of the cave is the result of the combination of fantasy and power, a power that is not based on weapons but on imagination and fancy. The stories of the cavemen become legend, from legend springs myth, and from myth cults and rituals are born: The alliance between imagination and magic could not have been far fetched: those who could bind the imagination of others would soon have gods and ghosts at their side. Where images are made, cults can emerge. In the end the strong ones went out with the power of fulfilled rituals strengthening their backs. The weak would become keepers of the temple.13

Obviously, Blumenberg is not talking about computer games or even media here, but it is interesting how deep the described cave situation of concentrated attention towards a specific point is inscribed into the collective imaginary. The famous ‘man cave’, for example, already alluding to the caveman, is a popular resort or safe haven for businessmen (and to a far less a degree, women, which is interesting) who want to escape everyday stress. These rooms—most of the time luxuriously decorated with pinball machines, video game consoles, sports memorabilia and, of course, an enormous dominating TV set as the only look-out from within the cave—allow their inhabitants to be carefree, to relax in an environment that seems to be worlds apart from the tensions of the ‘rat race’ out there. Examples like this can be multiplied all the way to the cliché of the ‘stay-at-home’ nerdy kid who has to be dragged away from the screen into the garden by his or her parent to ‘get some fresh air’. It should be obvious, though, that one cannot use Blumenberg as a philosophical excuse for media consumption without restraint. Nothing could be further from the intentions of the philosopher, who never owned a TV set in his life, and of whom only two photographs exist. But it is evident that even in the most trivial incarnations of cave dwelling, it is still Plato’s version of the cave that is at play here. The powerful influence of the platonic allegory permeates all social strata of education as well as the collective imaginary. It is not a specific problem of philosophy or the study of Plato alone, far from it. One does not have to follow through with all the conclusions Blumenberg is drawing from his interpretation of the platonic narrative to 13 Ibid., p. 30.

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find his inversion of the allegory interesting, because in it lies a radical reevaluation of the epistemological role of the image, because Blumenberg suggests a reversed Platonism: the cave facilitates culture and civilization because it is the birthplace of images (the images within the caves of Lascaux immediately come to mind). Leaving the cave does not mean ascending towards a higher place as in Plato’s philosophy, but on the contrary, a descent into the difficulties and dangers of the struggle for survival. In situations of struggle and hunting for food, human consciousness is constantly bound by possible danger, always on the look-out. In this state of mind, fleeting fancies of imagination cannot arise. On a side note: it is exactly the same with games and play. Where the primary needs of an organism are not satisfied, playfulness cannot occur— it needs free space to unfold.14 Animal offspring can play only when older members of the pack are watching over them, so they do not have to be aware of their (possibly dangerous) surroundings; humans can only dream, think and create when they do not have be alert all the time. ‘Images, symbols, names and finally notions are media in which the harsh urgency of reality could be represented; a reality that one could withdraw from because of those very media … The breadth of reality could be imagined as potentiality.’15 Image, symbol, name, notion: according to Blumenberg, this is the evolution of medial world apprehension. At the beginning there is the image (not the word!) as a first distancing between mind and world, the basic condition for differentiations between illusion and truth, map and territory. But this sequence is not to be understood as hierarchal. Images are not ‘weaker’ than symbols, names or notions (that would be blatant Platonism), they are just the first way of distancing from reality. Images come first because, for Blumenberg, humans are defined as ‘emphatically visible beings’16 and it is because of this that the visual sense plays such a primary role in human evolution. Their upright walk makes easy prey out of humans in jungles

14 Gustav Bally, Vom Ursprung und den Grenzen der Freiheit: Eine Deutung des Spiels

bei Tier und Mensch, Basel 1945. 15 Hans Blumenberg, Höhlenausgänge, Frankfurt/M. 1996, p. 35. [‘Im Bild, im Symbol, im Namen und schließlich im Begriff werden die Dringlichkeiten einer Realität vorführbar, aus der man sich in dem Maße zurückziehen konnte, wie man über jene Repräsentanten verfügte … Die ›Weite‹ der Wirklichkeit wird als Möglichkeit vorstellbar.’] 16 Ibid., p. 55.

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and savannas, the gaze of the other constitutes human subjectivity: Rimbaud writes ‘J’ai une autre’ namely the one who is seen by the other. So, for Blumenberg, the cave is first and foremost an ‘escape from visibility’ and this is the image’s hour of birth. Looking at the cave entrance in a concentrated way from the safety of the back of the enclosed cave, the world becomes an image. Therefore it only seems natural that even modern media such as computer games have a very specific relationship to topics concerning caves. But the number of references to cave dwelling and cave exploring in computer games is quite striking because not only do these references occur thematically but also historically and formally. Computer games as explorable image spaces are a kind of lucid-dream version of Blumenberg’s cave exploration in the sense that it is not the cave itself that is explored but, from the relative safety of the cavernous enclosure, the world as an image. The resulting possibilities often go far beyond what game designers originally envisioned. Not only are ways of meta-gaming already invading reality, but digital myths and legends begin to lead a life of their own. Geocaching, for example, is a form of speleology that found its way from the inherent logic of computer games such as Colossal Cave Adventure back to reality, transforming it through new gaming and epistemic potentials. It is a long-standing tradition to hide so-called ‘secrets’ within a given game world. In Tomb Raider, for example, the secrets consist of small items that are placed in hard-to-reach places inside the game architecture and whose purpose is just to be found. The items themselves are of no importance, but the finding of them is the aim. This is easier said than done, because the secrets are very artfully hidden. In geocaching this idea is re-implemented into reality with the aid of global positioning system (GPS) equipment, and specific rules and regulations. As in Tomb Raider, the thrill does not lie in the items themselves but in the act of finding them—the ‘hunt’ itself. With this geocaching is ludifying cities and landscapes by way of integrating computer game logic, including interfaces and regulations, into reality.17 Another interesting example in this context is in-game photography. Aesthetically elaborate games such as Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar

17 Layne Scott Cameron, The Geocaching Handbook: The Guide for Family Friendly, High-Tech Treasure Hunting. Guilford, CT 2011; Erik Shermann, Geocaching: Hike and Seek with Your GPS, Berkeley, CA 2004.

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Games, USA 2013) or Skyrim have always been used by gamers to produce breathtaking screenshots. David Hall, for example, is famous for depicting the game worlds by finding arresting motives and placing them within delicate compositions inspired by the history of the visual arts. Now professional photographers have discovered the aesthetics of computer games and treat Grand Theft Auto V as a virtual environment for street photography in the styles of Bruce Gilden, Garry Winogrand or Joel Meyerowitz. To that end, the in-game interfaces the game provides are used to walk the virtual streets of a fictitious Los Angeles in order to see what happens. Because the artificial intelligence of an open world game such as Grand Theft Auto V offers such elaborate routines and behaviours, they are complex enough to interact with one another in unexpected and unforeseen ways without ‘breaking’ the game. In-game street photography treats these interactions within the virtual world as ‘street life’, applying the aesthetics of street photography, which means waiting for the decisive moment to occur. The resulting ‘photographs’ are interesting because they question the very foundation of documentary photography. Because street photography itself is defined by ethical and aesthetic guidelines that have been developed through the history of the medium from Walker Evans to Bruce Gilden, and that depend on authenticity and certain notions of what the term ‘documentary’ means, applying rules to a virtual word of computer games means questioning those very notions of documentary authenticity, revealing them to be aesthetic programs through and through. There are, of course, reasons why Grand Theft Auto V is such a successful backdrop for this kind of photographic aesthetic, because, in contrast to the real world, it provides a visual backdrop that is made exclusively of images derived from classic Hollywood cinema and TV series such as Breaking Bad or The Sopranos , as well as the films of Quentin Tarantino or Michael Mann. The result is a world that is designed to appeal to the camera, as real landscapes only occasionally do. In this city it is always ‘golden hour’, for example, because, as every cameraman knows, sunset and dawn provide the most dramatic light for photography. There is even a kind of war photography in Grand Theft Auto V. In its competitive multiplayer modes players can shoot each other in many inventive ways. The in-game cell phone that works as an interface and menu system in the main game works here too, resulting in a different photographic aesthetic that looks like common war journalism as seen on CNN every day. The ‘photographers’ in these modes even create their

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own costumes in the character creation menu of the game, where one can customize one’s appearance in the game. Here, people design clothes with ‘Media’ or ‘Press’ imprints on their backs, which, as in real war situations, does not guarantee that the players remain unharmed. But even this can be turned around again: the American artist Doug Rickard, for example, takes the automatically generated pictures of Google Street View and arranges them in a way that again reminds of classic street photography. But this time these photographs originate in a photographic practice that is in no way connected to aesthetic criteria. So in the case of in-game photography the virtual image is explored as a world while in the case of the random Streetview shots the world is explored as an image. All of this is following the logic of speleology as described above, an interweaving of map and territory where it is not always sure where to find the exit from the cave.

References Bally, Gustav: Vom Ursprung und den Grenzen der Freiheit: Eine Deutung des Spiels bei Tier und Mensch, Basel 1945. Bateson, Gregory: Ökologie des Geistes. Anthropologische, psychologische, biologische und epistemologische Perspektiven, Frankfurt/M. 1985. Baudrillard, Jean: ‘Die Präzession der Simulakra’, in: trans.: Agonie des Realen, Berlin 1978. Blumenberg, Hans: Höhlenausgänge, Frankfurt/M. 1996. Bruckner, Roger, Watson, Richard: The Longest Cave, Chicago, IL 2006. Cameron, Layne Scott: The Geocaching Handbook: The Guide for Family Friendly, High-Tech Treasure Hunting, Guilford, CT 2011. De Certeau, Michel: Kunst des Handelns, Berlin 1988. Deuber-Mankowsky, Astrid: Lara Croft—Modell, Medium, Cyberheldin. Das virtuelle Geschlecht und seine metaphysischen Tücken, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 2001. Hafner, Katie, Lyon, Matthew: Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet, New York 1998. Kennedy, Helen W.: ‘Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo?’ 2002, http:// www.gamestudies.org/0202/kennedy/. Sawyer, Miranda: ‘Lara Croft: The Ultimate Byte Girl’, in: The Face No. 5, June 1997. Sherman, Erik: Geocaching: Hike and Seek with Your GPS, Berkeley, CA 2004. von Clausewitz, Carl: Vom Kriege. Hinterlassenes Werk des Generals Carl von Clausewitz. Vollständige Ausgabe im Urtext, drei Teile in einem Band mit

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erneut erweiterter historisch-kritischer Würdigung von Werner Hahlweg, Bonn 1980. Ward, Mike: ‘Being Lara Croft, or, We Are All Sci-Fi’, 2000, http://www. popmatters.com/feature/000114-ward/.

Computer Games Tomb Raider (Eidos Interactive 1996, O: Core Design). Super Mario 64 (Nintendo 1996, O: Nintendo). Diablo (div., Blizzard Entertainment/Activision 1996–2014, O: Blizzard Entertainment). Batman (div., Eidos Entertainment 2010–2013, O: Rocksteady Studios). Uncharted (div., Sony Computer Entertainment 2007–2011, O: Naughty Dog). World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment 2004, O: Blizzard Entertainment). Half Life (Sierra Entertainment 1998, O: Valve). Need for Speed (div., Electronic Arts 1994–2013, O: Electronic Arts). Call of Duty (div., Activision 2003–2013, O: Infinity Ward). The Bard’s Tale (Electronic Arts 1985, O: Interplay). Skyrim (Bethesda 2011, O: Bethesda). Pac-Man (Namco 1980, O: Namco). Heroes of Might and Magic (Ubisoft 2006, O: Nival Interactive). Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar Games 2013, O: Rockstar North).

CHAPTER 6

Just Making Images: Evocation in Computer Games

If the goal is to investigate the relation between knowledge and mediality in computer games, one would be hard pressed to find better examples than Portal and Portal II , because those games—produced by Valve, a developer who made history with its Half-Life series and Steam online distribution service—may very well be regarded as metagames par excellence. Like Blow-Up in the world of film, these games practically bring with them their own theory. Paradoxes as a core ingredient for iconicity, and the many metaphors and topics found within game design and a self-referential narrative together constitute the literal and epistemic playground that is Portal, reminding us that we are confronted with computer games about reflecting on the medium of the computer game, a reflection in the form of an aesthetic experimental ensemble.

Experimental Ensembles According to Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, an experimental ensemble in science consists of the totality of an epistemic thing (epistemisches Ding ) and its technological condition (technische Be-Dingung ), two intertwined epistemic layers. This is the whole point of Rheinberger’s epistemology: epistemic things, understood as ‘things, the efforts of research and knowledge are aimed at—not necessarily objects in a strict sense, it could be

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structures as well as relations or functions’,1 are not just products of their technological environments. Experimental arrangements and technological conditions are not categorically different from epistemic things. While the latter are defined by irreducible uncertainty and vagueness, the former are, on the contrary, of the highest possible precision and definition, made possible by scientific standards of a given period in history. Within a scientific experiment, these two components are connected in a ‘nontrivial interplay’ in which they are ‘pushed into- and away from each other, they can even change roles’.2 This is possible because, within an experimental ensemble, the relation between an epistemic thing and its technological condition is functional and not ontic. This is the post-ontological punchline of historical epistemology; according to Rheinberger, its poststructuralistic heritage: ‘Scientists are more like tinkerers and bricoleurs than engineers. By being non-technological in nature the experimental ensembles transcend the identity conditions of the technological objects that hold them together.’3 But what does this epistemological theory have to do with computer games? I would like to argue that this correlation does not only make sense because experimental ensembles are the main topic of Portal. The relation is important, because both in Portal and in Rheinberger’s epistemology game and play are treated as media of knowledge. Notions of game and play always arise at crucial points in Rheinberger’s argumentation, when he tries to show the potential of his theory that tries to do nothing less than ‘to understand the emergence of the new, of unpredictable events and with this the essence of scientific research’.4 Describing the researcher as a bricoleur as well as the notion of an experimental ensemble, that does not hide its theatrical connotations in the sense of interplay,

1 ‘Dinge, denen die Anstrengung des Wissens gilt—nicht unbedingt Objekte im engeren Sinn, es können auch Strukturen, Reaktionen, Funktionen sein’, Hans-Joerg Rheinberger: Experimentalsysteme und epistemische Dinge. Eine Geschichte der Proteinsynthese im Reagenzglas, Frankfurt/M. 2006, p. 27. This and the following translations from this book have been done by me. 2 Ibid., p. 29. 3 Ibid., p. 34: ‘Wissenschaftler sind vor allem Bastler, Bricoleure, weniger Ingenieure.

In seinem nicht-technischen Charakter transzendiert das Experimentalensemble die Identitätsbedingungen der technischen Objekte, die es zusammenhalten.’ 4 Ibid., p. 31: ‘als das Spiel der Hervorbringung von Neuem zu verstehen, das Auftauchen unvorwegnehmbarer Ereignisse, und damit das Wesen der Forschung.’

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go a long way towards explaining the close connection between game and play and scientific knowledge-creation. Of course, one could argue that there are substantial differences between the genesis of scientific knowledge and aesthetic constructs, and both should be described accordingly. This is, of course, a field of inquiry that cannot be discussed here at appropriate length, but it should be noted that a close correlation of scientific and artistic practices is one of the most important reasons for the rise of historical epistemology, from Gaston Bachelard and Ludwig Fleck to Bruno Latour, Ian Hacking and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, as well as Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison. It should also be noted that there is a strong tendency within historical epistemology, even as early as Bachelard and Fleck, to view epistemology through the lens of aesthetics, a tendency that has been answered generally in recent years by the humanities, by conceptualizing art as a way of producing knowledge, which in turn led to many curricula and research projects analysing artistic practice as an epistemological practice and vice versa. The following will take these developments in the humanities as well as in the history and theory of science as a backdrop on to which the thesis will be projected, that Portal can be understood as an epistemological experimental ensemble, in which the imagination of the player can be perceived as an ‘epistemic thing’ or to put it another way: Portal can be read as a reflection and staging of the thesis that the important medium for imagery in computer games is not a screen but the ‘head’ of the player—his/her imagination in the form of evoked imagery. In the following, the term ‘evocation’ will play the role that ‘epistemic thing’ plays in Rheinberger’s epistemology.

Digression: The Term “Evocation” It was Sherry Turkle who first drew the notion of evocation from its semantic slumber.5 As much as the term is omnipresent in day-to-day use in the humanities and the arts, it is seldom understood or even questioned. Turkle’s use of the term unfortunately is no exception. Her wonderfully edited book on evocative objects, for example, collects many intriguing texts about objects that somehow come to life for different

5 Sherry Turkle: Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, Boston MA 2007.

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people because of very different reasons but not once is there an explanation, let alone a definition of what is actually meant, when someone, for example, says, that something is ‘evocative of something else’. On close inspection, the word is a strange beast: on the one hand, everybody seems to be perfectly aware of what it means to ‘evoke’ something, but if one were to be asked to give even a broad description of what activity is thereby being referred to, one would be hard pressed to produce a decisive answer. And for good reason, because evocation is at its root a word stemming from occult practices, a ‘conjuring’ of sorts. But what is conjured in our everyday use of the word? Images, thoughts, atmospheres, scents, memories. In a separate research project I have tried to come to terms with the concept, and while my book on ‘evocation as non-visual iconicity’ is not yet finished, there are a few pointers that may be helpful for further investigation and serve as a preliminary backdrop for what follows in this chapter.6 In de anima, Aristotle renews the prevalent notions of vision of his time by establishing the term ‘in-between’ (Greek: tó metaxy), a medium (as later translations would have it) that is invisible in itself but is able to bring about visibility. Since Aristotle, the question of the terms and conditions of visibility has been closely tied to the notion of invisibility as a specific source of the ‘power of images’. It is therefore not surprising that contemporary ‘picture theory’ is also very interested in those aspects of vision and iconicity that are not exclusively rooted in optics. Terms such as ‘Bildakt [picture act] (Bredekamp),7 ‘volume’ (DidiHuberman),8 ‘iconic energy’ (Boehm),9 or notions of pictures having

6 For more information and an extended bibliography, please refer to my articles (in German): ‘Evokation. Zur non-visuellen Macht der Bilder—Eine Forschungsskizze’, in: Julian Hanich, Hans Jürgen Wulff (eds.): Auslassen, Andeuten, Auffüllen. Der Film und die Imagination des Zuschauers, Munich 2012; ‘Transformatio Energetica’, in: Fabian Goppelsröder, Martin Beck (eds.): Sichtbarkeiten 2: Präsentifizieren: Zeigen zwischen Körper, Bild und Sprache, Berlin, Zürich 2014. 7 Horst Bredekamp: Theorie des Bildakts. Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen 2007, Berlin 2010. 8 Georges Didi-Huberman: ‘Was wir sehen blickt uns an. Zur Metapsychologie des Bildes’, Munich 1999, trans., Vor einem Bild, Munich 2000. 9 Gottfried Boehm (ed.): Was ist ein Bild?, Munich 1994.

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some kind of ‘intrinsic vitality’ (Mitchell10 ) point towards a need for theoretical approaches that are able to describe and analyse those elements of iconicity (Bildlichkeit) that may be invisible to the eye but are vital to the affective and aesthetic qualities of iconicity. At stake here are questions about the ‘power of images’, how the specific qualities of iconicity can be tackled while not relying on ‘pure visibility’ or classical hermeneutics, semiotics, iconology or iconography alone. The research project aims to look at these questions by focusing on non-visual aspects and modes of iconicity that are ‘in-between’, neither ‘inside’ nor outside, image nor picture, mental image nor physical artefact. The term ‘evocation’ (from the Latin evocare, calling forth) can shed new light on how those non-visual aspects of iconicity are historically conceived and constructed, because even in today’s metaphorical usage, ‘evocation’ always refers to practices of ‘producing’ iconic presence while at the same time being specifically ‘non-visual’ (in an optical sense) in nature. However, non-visual aspects of iconicity are not a discovery of today’s picture theory. On the contrary: the term and phenomenon of evocation is an essential, albeit sparsely documented, element of a ‘cryptic history of vision’ (Boehm) that is just beginning to come into view. Of the rich history and vast amount of material relevant to this research project, three fields appear to be essential: (1) Techniques of evocation: The roots of the concept of evocation can be found in rituals and theurgic practices. The oracle at Delphi, magical rituals as well as rhetoric practices of producing images in the minds of the audience (Ars memorativa) have all to be accounted for as means of producing a specific kind of ‘vision’; (2) Poetics of evocation: Visio corporalis and visio spiritualis are two distinct but intertwined modes of vision that were viewed as ‘two sides of the same coin’ until the nineteenth century. This was to end with Helmholtz’s Optics. From then on, ‘vision’ became governed by science and optics, and the notion of ‘inner vision’ or visio spiritualis was transformed into a mode of aesthetic experience that culminated in Stephane Mallarmé’s poetics of evocation; (3) Picture theory: The twentieth century described the act of seeing as being dependent on invisibility. In particular, the phenomenological tradition from Husserl to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty continues to this day to insist on the notion that seeing is more than mere optics. 10 W. J. T. Mitchell: Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, Chicago 1994.

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Being in the Picture: Environmental Storytelling To make all of this applicable to computer games, I will concentrate on one aspect that is crucial to Portal and Portal II , and of utmost importance for computer games today: environmental storytelling as metanarrative agency in Portal II. Half Life and Portal are the two game series that established the renown of Valve as a game developer since the mid-2000s. It is commonly acknowledged that there is a certain level of elegance and subtlety at work in these games that appears to be hard for other developers to match. There are, of course, many technological and aesthetic reasons for this, but one element that is cited time and time again in conjunction with the specific quality of Valve’s games is the complexity of environmental storytelling that can be experienced here. This notion, while not exactly well defined, is at least clear: what is usually meant here is the capacity of the designers to tell a story through atmosphere, allusions and connotations, whose signifiers are placed within the game world more or less as backdrops and scenery. In his article ‘Game Design as Narrative Architecture’, Henry Jenkins borrows the term ‘environmental storytelling’ from Don Carson, a designer with years of experience in designing theme parks for the Walt Disney company, who incorporated his specific expertise into game design theory. In his article ‘Environmental Storytelling: Creating Immersive 3D-Worlds Using Lessons Learned from the Theme Park Industry’, he states: One of the trade secrets behind the design of entertaining themed environments is that the story element is infused into the physical space a guest walks or rides through. In many respects, it is the physical space that does much of the work of conveying the story the designers are trying to tell. Color, lighting and even the texture of a place can fill an audience with excitement or dread.11

This description is as important as it is concise: environmental storytelling means infusing physical space with narrative elements. This means that the story is unhinged from linear narration and is instead transformed into a mode, that designs work as an image. In this, narration is closely intertwined with spatiality and it is with this concept that Jenkins (with the 11 Henry Jenkins: ‘Game Design as Narrative Architecture’, in: Noah Wardrip-Fruin/Pat Harrigan (eds.): First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, Cambridge MA 2004, pp. 118–129, here p. 121.

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help of Michel de Certeau) is developing his notion of a ‘spatial story’. For Jenkins, game designers are architects of storytelling spaces in the sense of the ‘infused physical space’ in Carson’s article. Interestingly Jennings mentions the term ‘evocation’ here, unfortunately (and symptomatically) without explaining it any further but instead using it as a reformulation of Carson’s arguments. According to this, ‘evocative spaces’ are spaces that are able to conjure up associations to certain texts, narratives and images stemming from a collective cultural unconsciousness. Evocative spaces in this regard are parasitic with regard to the pretexts they depend on. Theoretically, this is, of course, not enough but it preserves the somewhat haunting quality of evocation, its undeniable insistence, while at the same time being undetermined, vague and uncertain. What is most compelling about Portal is a kind of subtlety in its narrative means that are, contrary to most computer games, not borrowed from film or literature but instead are specific to the medium: explorative iconicity of the virtual image space is the mode at play here; the fact that exploration through the player is the most basic and constitutive element of computer games. Environmental storytelling itself is, of course, not specific to computer games. Aspects of environmental storytelling can be identified as those that work in iconic modes and therefore do not operate in the medium of language, but like symptoms and traces, semiotically speaking, as an index. It is about details that evoke the impression of a world that is much bigger and richer than what is actually shown. When in a dystopic futuristic version of Los Angeles in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the language ‘city speak’ is a mixture of Chinese, German and English, and the rainy streets are furnished with Shinto shrines, these details evoke a fictitious world that is at the same time related and unrelated to reality, or, to be precise, it is related by potentiality, by a sense of what could be. Another example is the red herring, a plot device made famous by Alfred Hitchcock, which can appear as a person, a fact or a thing that leads the reader/spectator astray by evoking a world of possibilities that are kept virtually present throughout the narrative without ever reaching a conclusive payoff. The task of red herrings is to distract, thereby keeping the imagination busy to allow the important elements of the story to remain secret for a time. In the films of Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry, Iran/France 1997) sounds and dialogues happening outside the frame are of greater importance than what is actually shown in the frame, while the famous shots of empty rooms in the films of Yasujiro Ozu (T¯ oky¯ o Monogatari, Japan 1953) where the camera lingers just long enough to

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make the presence or the absence of people perceptible are used to the same effect: Pronouncing the latent presence of an absent world. There are many examples like this in the arts and use of any media. In Portal and Portal II the story is told almost exclusively by its environment. Its spaces are filled with traces of a world that seems to have been annihilated by some kind of apocalypse, but the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the end of the world remain vague. While in both games the player is accompanied by sidekicks—two AI-driven robots in the shape of mechanical eyes (Wheatley and GLaDOS) who seem never to be quiet—they each have an agenda of their own and are unreliable narrators. Their stories of what is really going on are sparse and players have to read between the lines. In a sequence towards the middle/end of Portal II, the player discovers old bureaux and laboratories deep beneath the labs where the player enters the game that seem to once belong to the Aperture Science company, that seems to be responsible not only for the experiments to which the player is constantly subjected, but also for the Portal technology itself. Within these abandoned and derelict spaces a grand story is told of the rise and fall of an industrial empire that seems to have started by producing shower curtains and ultimately became the industry leader of applied quantum physics, a field of research that seems to be in some way connected to the apocalypse of which the player only sees the ancient remains, deeply buried underground.12 But this story is not told through cut scenes. It is told by audio logs that tell of the trials and tribulations within the company during its apparently long history, but most importantly through the environment: the portraits of the inventor and CEO of Aperture Science decorating the walls of the vertical level structure, the enigmatic and charismatic Cave Johnson, who seems to have grown more and more troubled during the company’s history; and the furniture and the vertical topography of the spaces that decorate the rooms and laboratories of the company like fossils sedimented in the earth, layer by layer representing different parts of history. The game gently leads the player through the game architecture in a way that lets him/her unfold the lore and narrative without artificially imposing filmic cut scenes or text blocks to make its point. The way that this gradual revealing of the game narrative is achieved is typical of environmental storytelling: the dynamism here is one of free (speleological)

12 [http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Aperture_Science]; last verification 11.06.2014.

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exploration, or at least the impression of it. The narrative itself remains vague and uncertain, consisting of allusions, connotations, possibilities, atmospheres. The iconic medium or the imaginary machine here is not so much the virtual image space of the game itself but rather the imagination of the player. To illustrate what kind of image is at stake here, one could hardly find a better example than the following from the unfinished novel The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald, in which the charismatic movie producer Monroe Stahr explains the art of scriptwriting to the author Boxley, who does not seem to grasp the difference between writing dialogue for theatre and writing for the movies: ‘Suppose you’re in your office. You’ve been fighting duels or writing all day and you’re too tired to fight or write any more. You’re sitting there staring—dull, like we all get sometimes. A pretty stenographer that you’ve seen before comes into the room and you watch her—idly. She doesn’t see you, though you’re very close to her. She takes off her gloves, opens her purse and dumps it out on a table’—Stahr stood up, tossing his key-ring on his desk. ‘She has two dimes and a nickel—and a cardboard matchbox. She leaves the nickel on the desk, puts the two dimes back into her purse and takes her black gloves to the stove, opens it and puts them inside. There is one match in the matchbox and she starts to light it kneeling by the stove. You notice that there’s a stiff wind blowing in the window—but just then your telephone rings. The girl picks it up, says hello—listens—and says deliberately into the phone “I’ve never owned a pair of black gloves in my life.” She hangs up, kneels by the stove again, and just as she lights the match you glance around very suddenly and see that there’s another man in the office, watching every move the girl makes—’ Stahr paused. He picked up his keys and put them in his pocket. ‘Go on,’ said Boxley smiling. ‘What happens?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Stahr. ‘I was just making pictures.’13

The English differentiation between image and picture comes in handy here. Most of the time, image means, more or less, an immaterial mode of iconicity, while picture mainly denotes pictorial artefacts: pictures are physically present. In this short excerpt, Fitzgerald plays with the ambiguity of the term ‘pictures’ in the context of his novel that plays out in the studio system of classic Hollywood. Here, ‘pictures’ can always be used as 13 F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Tycoon, London: Penguin Classics 2001, p. 38.

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a synonym for ‘movies’. At the same time, he turns the ontological definition of the ‘pictures’ evoked by Monroe Stahr (what a name!) against the usual use of the notion, which would suggest the use of the term ‘image’ here instead, because what the inventive film producer ‘produces’ here are not physical artefacts but conjured images in the minds of his listeners (and readers). By that, Monroe Stahr thinks of his ‘pictures’ as belonging to an ontological twilight: not quite a picture and no longer entirely an image. This kind of vague and uncertain iconicity ‘in the head’ of the spectator/reader/player is what evocation is all about. Therefore techniques of environmental storytelling can be called evocative in so far as the images are conjured by a narration whose signifiers are atmospheres and ‘after-images’, traces of something present-through-absence that is conjured in the imagination of the spectator/reader/player but is always vague and indeterminate. This may be what all those erased doors stand for as a metaphor in Portal II. Every now and then the player stumbles on varnished doors that still show traces of the wall bricks beneath the paint, visually reminding of faded or bleached out characters in a book. The specific iconic vacuum created by evocation is not just pure absence but, as with the varnished doors in Portal II, still traces of something. What really happened in this world is unclear but it is evident that something happened and this ‘something’ is the modus operandi of evocation. The player become a diagnostic of a symptomatology of the iconic space inside the game, he/she has to ‘get a picture’ of it by him/herself. Those images are then of the same kind that Monroe Stahr addresses as ‘pictures’ in the context of Fitzgerald’s novel or that show in the varnished doors in Portal II that perhaps not by coincidence remind us of the canvasses that films are projected on to, or painters use for their work. The subject matter of Portal II is fortunately chosen for the topic of evocative iconicity because the same element is of utmost importance both to the latter and for experimental research (which is parodied here in a very precise way): uncertainty. What is at stake here for theory is not a notion of ‘blank space’ or absence within a given structure, made fashionable by postmodernism and poststructuralism, but on the contrary an overabundance of something that has to be latent and virtual precisely because of its abundance. This kind uncertainty that seems to be about to burst with potentiality is very closely related to what Edmund Husserl calls appresentation (German, Appräsentation). In phenomenology, this term denotes the co-presence of those aspects of a perceptual

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object that are not accessible in a given perception, the adumbrated (German, Abschattung ) sides of things. Appresentation is in itself a necessarily invisible constitutive of visibility in that it is not only framing the visible— and by that setting it apart from the chaos of raw sensual data (Greek, hyle)—but because it lets the adumbrated aspects of perception be copresent in a way that is important for perception as a whole. This is why Jean-Paul Sartre in this context speaks of the ‘intrinsic poverty of imagination’,14 because actual perception can only ever show a very small part of what is actually present. This poverty is in contrast to the overabundance of what is not actually present but that is always at hand through appresentation, even if it is puzzling as to how exactly this can be the case. When Husserl, in an important passage of his Logical Investigations, speaks of the appresented as to be ‘pictured at the core of perception’ (‘im Kerngehalt der Wahrnehmung verbildlicht ’15 ) the question arises as to what notion of ‘picture’ is being used here, because at this point the comfortable distinction between image and picture no longer applies here. Eugen Fink,16 a student of Husserl, has successfully shown that appresentation does not mean that something is ‘just’ virtual and therefore ‘in-actual’ but is co-present, it appears together (German, Miterscheinen) with what is truly present in an actual perception. We do not need to measure or photograph an object from all sides to be sure that there are other sides, other aspects to everything, otherwise we could not navigate the world, let alone understand it at all. When I look out of the window all I see might be the roof of the house next door, but I know that this roof belongs to a house with different rooms, that this house is in a street, that it is part of a city or village and so on ad infinitum. Nothing but the roof is really concrete in the actual perception but the world surrounding it does not stop being present because of it. But it is a different kind of presence, one that is more vague and uncertain than the roof, but none the less inevitably there. Gottfried Boehm emphasizes the importance of this for a Bildtheorie when he states that ‘in the case of the visual display the indetermined, that Husserl identifies in the adumbration of the 14 Jean-Paul Sartre: Das Imaginäre. Phänomenologische Psychologie der Einbildungskraft, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1971, p. 51. My translation. 15 Hua XIX/2, 589. My translation. 16 Eugen Fink: ‘Vergegenwärtigung und Bild. Beiträge zu einer Phänomenologie der

Unwirklichkeit’, in: Studien zur Phänomenologie (1930–1939) (Phaenomenologica 21), Den Haag 1966, pp. 1–78.

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object, moves from the back of the image into its back-ground, its foundation (Grund)’.17 Therefore the appresented is always somehow present at the core of perception, namely in the mode of being ‘pictured’. But this ‘being pictured’ is always fleeting, blurred, co-present on the horizon of perception, invisible in an optical sense but of a specific insistence that makes it impossible to speak of it as a mere absence. What is normally called environmental storytelling is much more than just a narrative technique. It is more like an aesthetically implemented reflex of the specific uncertainty that in Portal is represented through the subject of experimental ensembles, where the player becomes the ‘epistemic thing’ of its evocative surroundings in game. Uncertainty is the essence of play and game, and a core ingredient of experimental research, and this cannot be without consequences for the notion of image/picture that is at play here. In the interplay between a multimedia system called ‘computer game’ as the technological condition and the imagination of the player as the ‘evocative/epistemic thing’, explorative iconicity emerges as a mode of evocation specific to computer games in the sense of environmental storytelling.

Phantasmal Media In his book Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation and Expression, the American computer scientist, cognition researcher, artist and game designer Douglas Fox Harrell tries ambitiously to conceptualize this vague and uncertain kind of evoked image with the notion of phantasm, trying to find ways to produce them in digital media. In this context, ‘phantasm’ is defined with regard to the theoretical provenance of the term in cognitive science, which thereby describes a certain kind of mental image. Understood like that, phantasms are first and foremost ‘the result of human imaginative cognition’ and ‘a combination of imagery (mental or sensory) and ideas’.18 Harrell uses much of his book to classify the kinds of ideas and images that are of importance to his subject matter, because one thing is immediately obvious: the difficulties and

17 Gottfried Boehm: ‘Unbestimmtheit. Zur Logik des Bildes’, in: Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen. Die Macht des Zeigens, Berlin 2007‚ pp. 199–212, here p. 210. My translation. 18 Douglas Fox Harrell: Phantasmal Media. An Approach to Imagination, Computation and Expression, Cambridge MA 2013, pp. 3–4.

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obstacles the book has to tackle and the reason for its considerable theoretical depth and width are not only because Harrell commendably tries to combine humanities, computer sciences and cognitive science, but also because of the precarious ontological status of the phenomena he aims to understand. It is important to not take the easy road here because the phantasms Harrell is analysing are—as it is shown during the course of his book—neither sensory nor mental. According to Harrell, phantasms are iconic hybrids19 made up of personal experiences, real pictures, the ‘imaginary’ in the psychoanalytical sense, discourse formations built from education, cultural background, gender, ethnicity, world views, preconceptions of every kind, aesthetic education, conditioning through media, and a plethora of other factors. It is Harrell’s belief that these phantasms are powerful images that cannot only be analysed and theorized about, but also be intentionally produced, especially through computer software that is programmed accordingly. The goal here is twofold: ‘understanding how computer systems prompt phantasms and developing computing systems that can both reveal insidiously oppressive phantasms and prompt positively empowering phantasms alike’.20 Therefore the horizon of Harrell’s questions is both political and emancipatory; from this perspective, phantasms are guidable iconic hybrids that can be intentionally produced and made visible by digital art, computer games and interface design. Phantasmal Media could turn out to be a milestone not exclusively but especially for the study of computer games, because with this analytical framework theory could catch up with the state of aesthetic strategies games such as Portal are already applying. The author always manages to keep his analyses applicable to actual game design while at the same time combining mathematics, art history, cognitive science philosophical and political theory for a unique view on the subject matter that does not flinch in the face of difficult questions and notions. That means that the research field Harrell is covering is so vast that it becomes evident that this breadth of theories and approaches is necessary to tackle the complex

19 Harrell does not use the term ‘hybrid’, presumably so as not to burden his theoretical framework any further by bringing in the discourse of post-colonial theory. This is rather unfortunate, because the difficult notion of hybridity is, of course, the most complex, and applying that to the notion of phantasms as hybrid images could be fruitful. See for further reading on theories of hybridity: R. J. C. Young: Colonial Desire. Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, London/New York 2002. 20 Harrell, Phantasmal Media, p. 28.

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subject, which none the less is part of every mediated reality. It is no coincidence that he started as a game designer and media artist—fields of work that at their very core are concerned with the emergence of form and expression. In view of the many merits of Harrell’s phantasm theory, it would be nitpicking to criticize the whole project over details, because an undertaking of this magnitude has to reduce the complexity of certain aspects in order to keep the whole in check.21 Because Harrell’s idea of phantasm only begins with cognitive science it would be helpful to add earlier notions of the term to get a view on phantasmal media outside of their technical implementation.

Theatricality and Monstrance of the Phantasm Notions of theatrically have broadened quite a bit since the 1990s, and one of the discoveries that has been made is that the iconic element, or more precisely, the ‘being-on-display’ or visibility of theatrical scenarios is an important component of this concept. It is, of course, trivial to argue that stagings and performances are dependent on perceptibility, but for theatricality the combination of being-on-display and bodily involvement has been of special importance since the beginnings of performance theory. As early as 1908, Nikolaj N. Evreinov defined theatricality as an ‘aesthetic monstrance of an openly tendentious character, that, even outside of the theatre, can easily and joyfully unshackle us from reality by creating whole stages and sceneries through a single enchanting gesture, a single beautifully uttered word’.22 Without stretching the analogy too far, it is

21 Harrell’s fixation on the generation of meaning, for example, would be questioned by today’s humanities as well as the strictly cybernetic semiotics he applies in his chapters on computer science. There is doubt that algebraic semiotics can fruitfully be applied to phenomena of evocative imagery, because the differences between specific media tend to become levelled out in this approach for argument’s sake. The result is that the argumentation loses sight of iconicity as a specific media phenomenon during the course of the book. This is especially unfortunate with regard to the notion of phantasma, because it is a platonic notion whose difficult oscillation between aisthesis and semiosis is already a much discussed topic in the humanities. 22 ‘eine ästhetische Monstranz von offen tendenziösem Charakter, die selbst weit von einem Theatergebäude entfernt durch eine einzige bezaubernde Geste, durch ein einziges schön ausgesprochenes Wort Bühnenbretter und Dekorationen erzeugt und uns leicht, freudig und unabänderlich von den Fesseln der Wirklichkeit befreit’. Nikolaj N. Evreinov, ‘Apologija teatral’nosti’ [Apology for Theatricality], in: Utro, 8 September 1908, zitiert

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obvious that the term ‘monstrance’ plays a significant role here. Anticipating Ervin Goffman’s frame analysis as well as important notions of theories of game and play that came after, the notion of framing as containment of powerful, somehow energetically charged entities comes into view. A monstrance is a richly ornamented and precious vessel containing the holy altar bread in order to show it to the congregation during liturgical ceremonies. Ostensories are similar in that they are meant to show something, this time a relic. The iconic logic of these vessels consists of them pointing towards their interior (i.e. the body of Christ or a relic) whose power is thought to be so immense that, despite their understated appearances, transcend and transform the framing (the vessel) itself. The rich ornaments on the vessel are signifiers of its inner abundance. The outer form of this framing, adorned with gold and jewels, is staged as a symptom of the sacred core residing within. Therefore the framing (the vessel) can be read as a direct result of the enclosed space, containing sacred energy, it is an expression of it, while at the same time the framing intensifies the impact of what is on display, by giving it an aura of preciousness. This framing dynamism is, in the metaphors of Evreinov, what the actor is capable of without a theatre in the sense of a house or physical stage. It is his ‘enchanting’ gesture that conjures worlds without the need for stage props of costumes. One does not have to give into the ecstatic sound of Evreinov to speak of the abundance of meaning that lies at the core of theatricality and that seems always to attract metaphors from the realm of imagery. Even the cool and sober sound of structuralistic analysis tells of these aspects of theatricality. In her Semiotics of Theatre, Erika Fischer-Lichte drafts a specific concept of the theatrical sign that is defined by the thesis, that those signs are always ‘signs about signs’. But because this definition is true for any aesthetic use of signs, she sees the specific character of theatrical signs in their materiality: While, for example, poetic and musical signs can only refer to other signs as linguistic and musical signs—differentiating themselves from all nonlinguistic and non-musical signs necessarily through their specific materiality—theatrical signs are capable of being of the same material as those

nach Harald Xander, ‘Theatralität im vorrevolutionären russischen Theater. Evreinovs Entgrenzung des Theaterbegriffs’, in: Erika Fischer-Lichte et al. (eds.): Arbeitsfelder derTheaterwissenschaft, T¨ubingen 1994, pp. 111–124, p. 113. My translation.

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signs that they are referring to … Every arbitrary object that can work as a sign in a given culture can work as a theatrical sign for the same object without any change in its materiality.23

There is a rupture within the framing of theatricality running through every object and person, separating them from their own materiality and at the same time duplicating them as signs. A chair, for example, loses its everyday ‘ready-to-handness’, its inconspicuous servitude, as soon as it is framed by theatricality, its ‘monstrance’. Again, we encounter an ‘enchanting gesture’: the frame, as ephemeral and immaterial as it might be, creates a second reality that literally grafts a ‘second chair’ on to the first.24 This ‘sign-chair’ is characterized through ‘high semiotic mobility’ as well as ‘polyfunctionality’25 without ever ceasing to be just an ordinary chair in its concrete materiality. It can be addressed as a person, ‘climbed’ as a mountain, ‘driven’ like a car—within the theatrical framing the chair can transform into many different entities without ever changing its materiality. Like the altar bread in its unremarkable materiality on the inside of the monstrance, objects and persons on stage transform their framings and vice versa. This is true for everything that finds itself within the theatrical frame. From the perspective of an image/picture theory, the theatrical situation seems to be a framing that paradoxically lets what is inside the frame transcend its boundaries through containment. The 23 ‘Denn während beispielsweise die poetischen oder musikalischen Zeichen nur in ihrer Qualität als linguistische oder musikalische auf andere Zeichen zu verweisen vermögen—sich also von allen nicht-linguistischen bzw. nicht-musikalischen Zeichen, die sie bedeuten sollen, mit Notwendigkeit in ihrer Materialität unterscheiden müssen—vermögen die theatralischen Zeichen grundsätzlich in materieller Hinsicht dieselben Zeichen zu sein wie diejenigen, die sie bedeuten sollen … Jedes beliebige in einer Kultur als Zeichen fungierende Objekt vermag ohne jegliche materielle Veränderung als theatralisches Zeichen für dasjenige Zeichen, das es selbst darstellt, zu fungieren.’ Erika Fischer-Lichte: Semiotik des Theaters, Band 1: Das System des theatralischen Zeichens, T¨ubingen 1998, p. 181. My translation. 24 For the notion of grafting, see Jacques Derrida: ‘The Double Session’, in: Jacques Derrida: Dissemination, Chicago 1981, pp. 173–289. The botanical term ‘grafting’ originally referred to an artificial refinement of a plant through the implementation of foreign matter. This term has proved to be especially useful in the humanities because it seems to allow for a consistent notion of hybridity at the fringes between nature and culture. And it is the same here: The materiality of the chair is indistinguishable from its ‘sign being’; the theatrical sign according to Fischer-Lichte is a polysemic configuration of signs that is inseparable from material foundations but not identical to them. 25 Fischer-Lichte, Semiotik…, pp. 182–183.

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evocative intensification of what is expressed on or within the framing itself is based on the abundance of polysemic potential that in turn is provided by the framing itself. This abundance of potential meaning that can never be represented at the same time can be felt within the framing as a push outwards from within, so to speak, always on the verge of bursting out of the frame, and this is the reason why those liturgical vessels are so richly decorated: their excessive ornament is not ‘ornamental’ in the sense that they are just non-essential accessory parts, but are expressions of an ‘internal pressure’ that is always on the verge of breaking out. This inner pressure charges the images/pictures with potentiality. In linguistics, this kind of ‘charging’ is called connotation; in images/pictures one could talk about evocation instead, which is capable of generating phantasms. Both notions (connotation and evocation) can, of course, not be completely separated because both depend on appresentation. Connotation and evocation are two modes, two ways of how something can be ‘pictured at the core of perception’ but it is doubtful that something like this can be controlled or intentionally guided.

Aperture Science All this may give the impression that the theoretical diversions above have led us pretty far away from the laboratories of Portal and Portal II . Phantasms and theatricality as ingredients of notions of non-visual iconicity are not just aimed against a picture/image-theory that tries to expel theatricality from the realm of images/pictures26 . Perhaps they could even give hints as to why the powerful company that pulls the strings in Portal and 26 This remark of course goes against Michael Frieds influential distinction between “Absorption and Theatricality” (Michael Fried, Chicago/London 1980) that the art historian in the meantime has applied to contemporary art as well. According to Fried there is a paradigm-shift in eighteenth century art (with Diderot as its seismograph) that, apparently, is still of importance today: “Briefly, starting in the mid 1750s in France a new conception of painting came to the fore that required that the personages depicted in a canvas appear genuinely absorbed in whatever they where doing, thinking and feeling, which also meant that they had to appear wholly unaware of everything other than the object of their absorption, including—that was the crucial point—the beholder standing before the painting. Any failure of absorption—any suggestion that a painted personage was acting for an audience—was considered theatrical in the pejorative sense of he term and was regarded as an egregious fault.” (Ibid., p. 26) I would like to argue that such a narrow notion of theatricality is not going to be sufficient to expel theatricality from the realm of visual arts as I have tried to show. This is especially true for digital media.

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Portal II is called ‘Aperture Science’. The history of this illustrious and shady company is filled with curious inventions and risky endeavours, and so their product-line consisted of shower curtains as well as ‘Portal-Guns’, a device that, through the ingenious use of quantum mechanics, can shoot holes into the space—time continuum. But what is the connection of all this, why is the company called ‘Aperture Science’? Aperture is, of course, the opening of the iris, which mimics the mechanical function of the human eye and the term is used mostly in optical instruments such as cameras. The iris is emblematic here not only because the company sign of ‘Aperture Science’ is just that, a stylized iris, but because it is emblematic for the game itself. At the beginning of this chapter it was mentioned that Portal and Portal II are lucky subjects for theory because they are self-referential metagames that bring their own theory. Now we can take a closer look at what self-referentiality really means here: Portal and its sequel are about the genesis of evocative imagery out of the interplay between player/observer and the virtual image space of the game. From the eye-like forms of GLaDOS and Wheatley to the permanent surveillance that is constantly referred to by the audio logs and the ever-present cameras point towards iconicity as a main topic of the game. First and foremost, it is the portal-gun that is an amalgamation, a hybrid between camera and gun, or, to be more precise, in Portal the weapon of the first person shooter becomes again what it always was: a portable camera. Because the barrel down there at the bottom right corner of the screen always was more like a distraction from what it really is happening in three-dimensional game worlds. In fact, the player does not steer or play a virtual representation of the body but rather a camera, a disembodied eye that makes its way through digital landscapes. The Portal Gun takes back the martial weapon metaphor of the third-person shooter and converts it back into something it has been since the days of DOOM: an image-machine, a camera. Therefore, what those Portal Guns produce or ‘shoot’ are not bullets or laser beams but portals or doors: framed thresholds or, to be even more precise, pictures. There would be much to say about the door as a symbol of iconicity (Bildlichkeit ) and even the attempt at a summary at this point would be futile. But it should at least be noted that the door as well as windows and cave exits could be conceived as an important archetype of iconicity itself. While thinking about windows immediately reminds us of a long historical line from Lean Battista Alberti up to Microsoft’s ‘Windows’,

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and the notion of the cave entrance with an even older philosophical lineage from Plato to Susan Sontag and Hans Blumenberg, the door as a model and metaphor is of great importance for an epistemology of the image/picture: The motive of the door is of course ancient: traditional, archaic, religious. Completely ambivalent (as a passage, as a place one can pass through) and in that sense used in all mythological constructions. Dante places a door at the entrance to the inferno—‘I am the entrance into the city of pain … Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’—but also at the entrance to purgatory; this a ‘fissure, agape in the wall’, where a silent guardian keeps watch; his rapier, an image for the dividing threshold blinds the gaze and the awestruck Dante will halt before the door, incapable to go through unless Virgil helps him.27

The door as threshold inevitably leads to a paradoxical situation of a locked-in lock-out; it is not a tool that is ready-to-hand but a metaphor for iconicity (German, Bildlichkeit ) per se: ‘And in front of a picture—if we define a picture as the object of the gaze—all stand as if we were in front of an open door, but we can never enter its frame.’28 The Portal games aim at exactly the same paradoxical structure of digital media that are also shaped by the principle of the door.29 Finally, the optical aperture itself has to be taken seriously as an epistemic model. The principle of aperture in camera technique has been, along with shutter speed and light sensitivity of the film/sensor, one of the three main factors in producing a photographic exposure since

27 Georges Didi-Huberman: Was wir sehen blickt uns an. Zur Metapsychologie des Bildes, Munich 1999, p. 226. My translation. 28 Ibid., p. 234. 29 In his article, ‘Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics or on the Nature of Language’ (Jacques

Lacan: ‘Psychoanalyse und Kybernetik oder von der Natur der Sprache’, in: Jacques Lacan: Das Ich in der Theorie Freuds und in der Technik der Psychoanalyse, Olten 1980, pp. 373– 391), that has been of special importance for German media theory since Friedrich Kittler, the French psychoanalyst, argued that the door as a principle is not only a link between the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’, but a critical metaphor of the binary ‘on/off’ of digital media. Lacan’s famous figure of thought too is about describing the paradoxical nature of the door applied to the intrinsic logic of digital circuits. When the door (i.e. the electric circuit) is open, the circuit is closed (= condition 0), when the door (the circuit) is closed, the circuit is open (= condition 1): ‘As soon as the door opens, it closes. When it closes, it opens’ (Ibid., p. 383. My translation).

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Daguerre, Talbot and Niepces invented the medium. The aperture is not only responsible for the amount of light reaching the photosensitive material, but especially for what and how much is in focus, which is one of the primary creative means in photography. The bigger the aperture, the shallower the depth of field, meaning that more areas in the foreground and/or background of the photograph are out of focus. From a narrative point of view, Portal works with such an ‘open aperture’, this is the poetology of these games. As the narrative is concentrating only on the most important pieces of information, always just keeping little snippets of the story ‘in focus’, everything else is blurred out in a haze of uncertainty and vagueness. As in photography, however, this ‘blurring’ is not just hidden or absent but is even more present precisely because of its vagueness. There is a reason why in particular the most expensive camera lenses in photography are judged by the way they render the out-offocus areas. The aesthetically extremely high qualities of the game world can be understood as a kind of monstrance for the story, and because of this are allowed to be ‘out of focus’ as much as they are. The wealth of inner diegetic commentaries—verbally through audio logs or the constant banter of GLaDOS and Wheatley or through the in-game architecture of the laboratories, where even the wall textures seem to bear witness to the history of the world they reside in—all of these generate an abundance of potential meaning, that is an expression of meticulously framed uncertainty: the actual story of the world, that never gets told. Instead, the story is infused and embedded in the game world as iconicity (Bildlichkeit ) that oozes out of every rendered frame and it is this evocative poetology that is so fascinating about games such as Portal and Portal II .

Index

A Achilles, 109–111 Action game/action adventure game, 8, 28, 43, 91, 121 Addiction, 62, 67, 70 Aesthetic experience, 5, 103, 106–108, 112, 114, 118, 141 expression, 8, 83, 104, 150 intensity, 82, 108, 109, 111, 118 monstrance, 150, 156 object-ness, 105, 107–112, 114, 116, 118 paradigm of aesthetics, 104 of video games, 5, 7, 87 work, 91, 106 See also Aestheticization Aestheticization, 3, 4, 9, 10, 67 of existence, 5, 6, 9 Affective experience, 104, 106 Agony of the real, 3, 66, 123, 128 Aisthesis and semiosis, 105, 112 Aisthetic, 13, 16, 17, 39, 57, 63–67, 72 neutrality, 79, 94, 98

Alberti, Leon Battista, 35, 154 Alice/Alice, 27, 33, 44–48 Alphabet Hebrew, 28, 29, 31 numerical, 28 See also Numerical system Anachronox (Eidos/PC), 53 Analytic geometry, 35, 36 Anxiety, 75, 81–83 Aperture Science, 144, 154 Apparatus, 16–18, 55, 56, 82 aspect, 18 character, 18, 21, 59 See also Medium, as trace/apparatus Apple, 25, 34, 114 Appresentation, 146, 147, 153 Aristotle, 104, 140 ARPANET, 121 Artificial, 6, 26, 36, 56, 59, 71, 127, 152 intelligence, 2, 27, 55, 134 realities, 54 Auerbach, Erich, 109–111 Augmented-reality, 122

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 M. Rautzenberg, Framing Uncertainty, Performance Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59521-8

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158

INDEX

B Bachelard, Gaston, 139 Barck, Karlheinz, 9 Bard’s Tale, The, 124 Barthes, Roland, 7 Bateson, Gregory, 47–50, 115–117, 126 Batman, 121 Baudrillard, Jean, 19, 37–39, 64, 66, 111, 112, 122, 123, 126–129 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 104 Being-on-display, 150 Benjamin, Walter, 9, 10, 78, 104 Bildakt , 140 Binary code, 21–26, 28–31, 57, 69 Birth of imagination/images, 130 Black Box, 28, 47, 94, 115 Blade Runner, 143 Blair Witch Project, The, 77 Blind spot, 10, 12, 14, 20, 42, 78, 82 Blow-Up, 78, 137 Blumenberg, Hans, 129–133 Boehm, Gottfried, 140, 141, 147 Böhme, Gernot, 75, 106 Böhme, Hartmut, 94 Bohrer, Karl-Heinz, 48, 108–110, 112, 115, 118 Boltzmann’s formula, 82 Bowie, Malcolm, 76 Breaking Bad, 134 Bredekamp, Horst, 140 Bühl, Achim, 55, 56, 58

C Cabbalistic, 22, 26, 28, 29, 31 Call of Duty, 122 Carroll, Lewis, 32, 33, 44, 45 Carson, Don, 142, 143 Cartography, 44, 120, 121, 122. See also Exploration Catoptric interaction, 40

Cave cave automatic virtual environment, 122 cave, caverns and dungeons, 120–122 exit from the cave, 135 (Plato’s) allegory of a cave, 81, 122, 126, 128 Central perspective, 35–37, 88 Certeau, Michel de, 124, 125, 143 Chaos and representation, 81 Christian iconoclasm, 38 Clausewitz, Carl von, 125 Colin McRae Rally, 59 Colossal Cave Adventures , 121, 133 Communication media, 24 methods, 2, 17 Vanishing Point of Communication, The, 38 Compression artefact, 25, 78 Computer aided design, 26 generated world, 55 Concealing unconcealment, 16, 17 Conflictuality, 7, 9 Considerations of representability, 93 Conspicuousness, obtrusiveness and obstinacy, 79, 96 Constructivism, 18, 19, 94 Core of perception. See Perception Croft, Lara, 71, 119, 120 Crowther, William, 121 Cryptic history of vision, 141 Csikszentmihaly, Mihaly, 59, 64 Culture industry, 8, 66 Cyber sex, 32 society, 54 space, 52, 55, 114

INDEX

D Daguerre, Louis, 156. See also Niepces, Joseph Nicéphore; Talbot, William Henry Fox Daston, Lorraine, 139 Data glove, 54, 57, 58 helmets, 55 structure, 35, 40 suits, 4, 32 Derealization, 3, 4, 11, 38 Derrida, Jacques, 35, 78, 79, 152 Designed arrangements, 106 Deus Ex, 53 Devil Dice, 27 Diablo series, 121 Diablo II , 27 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 140, 155 Diegesis, 92, 99 Digital age/age of digitization, 2, 4, 31, 40, 48, 64, 67, 71, 119, 120, 123, 126 image, 21, 32–35, 38–43, 53, 57, 70, 111, 112, 126 media, viii, x, 62, 107, 123, 148, 153, 155 myths, 133 revolution, 10 technology, 22, 26 Disappearance, rhetoric of, 19, 67 Disembodiment, 4 Displacement. See Considerations of representability Double-bind, 49, 117 Dragon Warrior 7 , 52 Draw distance, 85 Dream dreaming animals, 130 images, 74 thoughts, viii Dromology, 64

159

Dungeon Crawler, 121 Duration (durée), 65

E Eco, Umberto, 7, 29, 40, 68 Ecstasy, 59, 62, 66, 78 of absence, 74–76, 82 of speed, 64 Ecstatic presence, 63 Ego, 46, 53 dissolution, 66 perspective, 43 See also Third-person perspective Electronic Arts, 2, 3, 27, 124 Empty signs, 86 Entertainment experience, 1, 2 industry, 5 software, 4, 5, 8, 87 Environmental storytelling, 142–144, 146, 148 Epistemology, x, 51, 121, 122, 139 epistemic thing, 137 of the image, 155 Erotic aura, 71 Eternal Darkness , 76, 87 Evans, Walker, 134 Evocation evocative imagery, 150, 154 evocative object, 139 evocative poetology, 156 evocative space, 143 poetics of, 141 techniques of, 141 Evreinov, Nikolaj N., 150, 151 eXistenZ , 77 Experimental ensemble, xi, 137–139, 148 Exploration, 120–122, 125, 126, 133, 143, 145 External

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INDEX

observer, 53, 54, 57, 58, 62, 70, 72 perspective, 57, 58, 72 viewpoint, 51 Eyck, Jan van, 76 Eye, The, 77 F Faith in rules, 39 Fantasy film, 108 Final Fantasy/Final Fantasy VII , 8, 27, 52 Fink, Eugen, 147 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 151 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 145, 146 Flow, 23, 59–63, 66, 67, 72, 79, 111, 113 Fog of war, 125 Foucault, Michel, 12, 67, 76 Fox Harrell, D., 148 Frame, 85 analysis, 151 narrative, 44 work, 3, 5, 46, 47, 49, 85, 98, 115, 117, 149 Freud, Sigmund, viii, 15, 16, 33, 38, 71, 74, 78, 80 G Galison, Peter, 139 Game architecture, 43, 133, 144 as a medium, viii, 21, 46, 47, 50, 52, 107, 118, 125 character, 44, 54, 92, 135 console, 46, 131 content, 2, 8, 10, 27, 28, 31, 33, 44, 45, 99 design, 93, 98, 121, 122, 124, 137, 142, 149 environment, 43, 51, 58 figure, 43

navigation, 58, 59 over, 33 plot, 8, 45, 53 theory, x, 49, 114, 116 Gameboy, 4, 27 Geimer, Peter, 79, 80, 93 Geocaching, 133 Gibson, William, 4, 56 Gilden, Bruce, 134 GLaDOS, 144, 154, 156 Glitches, 97 God of War 3, 108, 112, 113, 118 Goffman, Ervin, 151 Golem, 26–29, 31 Google Street View, 135 Grand Theft Auto V , 133, 134 Graphical user face, 98, 99, 114 Graphics, 30, 87, 114 computer, 33 3D, 33, 119, 124 Gumbrecht, Hans-Ulrich, 104, 107 H Hacking, Ian, 139 Half-Life, 29 Hall, David, 134 Hallucinatory power, 39 Heidegger, Martin, 6, 16, 17, 36, 38, 78, 79, 92–100 Heroes of Might and Magic, 125 High-speed meditation, 58, 59 Hitchcock, Alfred, 143 Homer, 108, 109, 111 Homunculi, 26, 28, 29, 31 Horace, 68 Human, ix, x, 4, 10, 12, 26, 32, 38, 43, 53, 55, 56, 64, 71, 72, 80, 82, 98, 107, 123, 129, 130, 132, 148, 154 body, 57, 59 Husserl, Edmund, 141, 146, 147 Hyle, 147

INDEX

I ICO, 99 Iconic energy, 140 hybrids, 149 medium, 145 presence, 141 vacuum, 146 Iconicity, 137, 145, 146, 150, 154–156 explorative, 143, 148 non-visual, 140, 141, 153 Ideality of sense, 9 Illusion, 24, 37, 43, 51, 67, 93, 122, 132 and reality, 85, 127 of simulation, 25 Illusory, the, 37, 114 Imaginary, the the Real, 65, 73–75, 77, 78, 85 the Symbolic, 32–40, 42, 57, 65, 70, 75, 80–82 See Real, the Imago, 32 Immediacy, 79, 94, 96 Immersion effect of, 55 experience of, 39, 56, 58–60, 62, 63, 65–67, 69–72, 114 immersive strategies, 7 phenomenon of, 18, 55 simultaneous, 59 total, 56–58, 65, 72, 93, 99, 114 See also Flow; Picnoleptic experience Improvisation, 62, 63 Infused physical space, 143 In-game architecture, 156 Insubordination, 98 Interaction/interactivity, 10, 25, 32, 34, 41, 43, 51, 52, 58, 70, 77, 98, 103, 105, 114, 125, 134 Interfaces

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elements, 39, 58, 98, 99, 124 neuronal, 56 user, 25, 30, 33, 34, 39, 114, 123 See also Usability Interior world, 42 Internal logic, 60 Interplay, 124, 148, 154 Into the Mirror, 77. See also Mirror Intoxication, 66, 98 Intrinsic, x, 17, 51, 53, 54, 57, 58, 62, 72, 155 poverty of imagination, 147 vitality irrational, the, 141 Invisibility, 13, 20, 140, 141

J Jenkins, Henry, 142, 143 Johnson—Nyquist noise, 82. See also Noise Jump and run, 8

K Kairo, 77 Kiarostami, Abbas, 143 Kittler, Friedrich, 13, 15, 22, 23, 25, 26, 30, 31, 82, 155 Kluge, Alexander, 126 Konami, 44, 46, 53, 98 Krämer, Sybille, 4, 11–15, 17, 18, 36, 37, 40, 41, 51, 52, 54, 67, 78, 79, 94, 114

L Lacan, Jacques, 15, 32, 37, 42, 155 Language, 18, 22, 25, 30, 31, 34, 38, 76, 95, 109, 110, 143 mechanical, 25 program, 25 Last Tycoon, The, 145 Latour, Bruno, 94, 139

162

INDEX

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 28, 37, 38 Lem, Stanislaw, 56 Level of meaning, 15 Lisa, 25, 34 Logical, 2, 47–49, 57, 68, 70, 115–117 anomaly, 126 level, 117 Logical-epistemic vagueness. See Vagueness Ludic mediality, x, 118, 126 Luhmann, Niklas, 11, 13, 14, 19, 20, 49, 50, 116, 118 Lukács, Georg, 68, 69 Lynch, David, 86

M Magic, the/magical status. See Cabbalistic Mail Order Monsters , 26 Majestic, 2, 3 Malfunction, 77–81, 87, 93, 94, 96–98, 100 Mallarmé, Stephane, 141 Man cave, 131 Manhunt , 87 Mann, Michael, 134 Map and territory, 50, 117, 122–124, 126–129, 132, 135 Materiality of senses, 9 of the medium/medial, 14–16, 79, 80 sensuous, 9 Matrix, 76, 77 McLuhan, Marshall, 11, 13, 14, 71, 72, 77 Mass media, 5, 7, 123 Media analogue, 22–24, 28, 33, 39, 87

consumption, 131 new, 4, 11, 12, 17, 21, 64, 67, 72 revolution, 5, 6 Mediality, 19, 94, 100, 115, 137 and mediation, 105 concepts of, 105 Medial surface, 74, 77, 78 Mediation, ix, x, 18, 57, 75, 79, 94, 96, 105, 116 Mediator/mediating, 12, 13, 29, 47, 115 Medium as medium, 3, 21 as trace/apparatus, 14–18 is the message, 13, 14, 18 medium/form, 11, 13, 14, 19, 20, 116 of the computer, 23, 24, 31–34, 40, 69, 70, 118, 137 of the video game. See Game, as a medium; Play as a medium Melting away of the referent, 80 Men of action, 130 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 104, 141 Message, 12, 13, 18, 48, 49, 107, 116 Metal Gear Solid, 44–46, 48, 51 2: Sons of Liberty, 53 Meyerowitz, Joel, 134 Microsoft Windows, 25, 154 Mimetic trend, 87 Mirror entry, 42–44 image, 3 play, 6 stage, 32, 37, 73, 75 See also Surface Mist, The, 83, 85 Mitchell, William, 141 Models of virtual reality, 54 Modernity, 5–7, 48, 67, 87, 94, 127 Multidimensional sight, 36, 37

INDEX

Multimedia systems, 5, 10, 11, 13, 148 Multiplayer game, 27 Muscle memory, 60, 61, 63

N Narcissus, 71, 72 Need for Speed, 122 Niepces, Joseph Nicéphore (20), 156. See also Daguerre, Louis; Talbot, William Henry Fox Nietzsche, Friedrich, 21, 26, 38, 68 Noise background, 80, 82 dystopia of, 81 of the Real, 83. See also Real, the radio, 86 static, 74, 78, 85, 86, 98 See also Johnson—Nyquist noise Non-player character (NPC), 53, 74, 91, 92 Numerical system, 22

O Obstinacy, 80, 81, 86, 96, 107 Oculocentrism, 35 Ontological epistemic vagueness, 50, 53, 118 status, 12, 23, 24, 46, 149 uncertainty, 44, 46. See also Uncertainty Open world game, 122, 134 Ozu, Yasujiro, 143

P Pac-Man, 124, 125 Pan-semiosis, 91 Paradoxes, ix–xi, 13, 42, 44, 47–50, 95, 115–118, 137

163

Participant perspective, 51, 54, 57, 58, 62, 70. See also External, perspective Perception forms of, 10, 14, 17, 34, 51, 58 human sense/sensual, 9, 105 theory of, 9, 104 Performance/performative, 18, 60–62, 66, 104, 150 Persona 2: Eternal Punishment , 27 Phantasm/phantasmata, 110, 148–150, 153 theory, 150 Phantomatics, 56 Phenomenon of immersion, 18, 55 of malfunction. See Malfunction of picnolepsy, 64. See also Immersion of the video game, 7, 8 Phone, 77 Photography in-game street photography, 133–135 ghost photography, 80 of the invisible, 80 photographic imagery, 128 street, 134, 135 war, 134 Picnoleptic experience, 65, 72. See also Immersion Picture, xi, 32, 37, 43, 82, 87, 99, 110, 128, 135, 145–149, 155 analysis, 140 theory, 140, 141, 152 Plato, 35, 38, 81, 122, 123, 126–129, 131, 132, 155 Play as a medium/medium as play, viii, 47, 51, 53, 57, 115, 125. See also Game, as a medium Pokemon, 27 Poltergeist , 78 Poole, Steven, 8, 51, 59–62, 64–66

164

INDEX

Portal and Portal II , 137, 142, 144, 153, 154, 156 Post-structuralism, 37, 104 Power of images, 140, 141 Presence, 40, 75, 76, 82, 83, 85, 86, 95, 99, 144, 147 effect, 105, 106, 108, 109, 111 production of, 107 Present absence/present through absence, 95 Present-at-hand/presence-at-hand, 92, 93–98, 100. See also Readyto-hand/readiness-to-hand; Unready-to-hand/unreadiness-tohand Process primary, 47–50, 64, 65, 72, 115–117 secondary, 47–50, 60, 72, 115–117 Program code, 33, 34, 39, 57, 69, 98. See also Binary code Project Zero, 76 Projection surface, 12 Prowess in playing, 63 Psycho Mantis, 44–48 Q Quake, 8 Quest giver. See Service provider R Raids, 99 Rationalism, 38, 68 Ready-to-hand/readiness-tohand, 79, 92–94, 95–98, 100, 155. See also Presentat-hand/presence-at-hand; Unready-to-hand/unreadiness-tohand Real, the ecstasy of, 78

invasion of, 77 noise of, 83 surplus of, 74 Reality collapse of, 84 dissolution of, 4–7, 9, 10, 39, 67, 72 experienced, 55 loss of, 3, 31 objective, 67 virtual, 4, 7, 23, 26, 28, 31, 33, 39–41, 47, 51–56, 58, 66, 70, 81, 114 See also Virtual, space Reality and unreality. See Unreality Recognition, 12, 35, 49, 54, 75, 79, 94, 100, 117 Repulsive, 97 Resistance of the medium, 80 Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg, 137–139 Rickard, Doug, 135 Riefenstahlization, 6 Ringu, 77 Role play game/role playing games, 52 RTS (real-time strategy) games, 125 S Sander, Daniel, 80 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 141, 147 Satisfaction/satisfying, 59, 62, 66, 72 Save points, 52 Scheffer, Bernd, 77 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 80 Science fiction, 4, 56 Scott, Ridley, 143 Seduction, 70, 71 Sefer Jezira (Book of Creation), 28 Self -referentiality, 49–53, 58, 70, 87, 88, 117, 154

INDEX

-reflexivity, 77 Semblance character, 36, 37 Semiotic, 7, 24, 29, 40, 42, 43, 80, 87, 92, 93, 113, 121, 123, 141, 150 Senses, vii, 9, 10, 14, 23–26, 31, 35, 47, 49, 51, 55, 59, 64, 65, 68, 75, 80–82, 86, 91–93, 100, 106, 109, 111–113, 115, 117, 124, 125, 128, 132, 137, 138, 141, 143, 148, 149, 153, 155. See also Materiality, of senses; Perception Sensorama, 56 Serres, Michel, 97 Service provider, 92, 93 Servomechanism, 72 Shadow of the Colossus , 99 Shannon, Claude E., 11, 97 Shutter glasses, 57 Signs significance, 15 signification, 53 signify, 123 Silent Hill /Silent Hill 2, 42, 73–77, 83, 85–88, 98 Simulacra, 38, 123, 129 Simulations, ix, 8, 24, 28, 36, 37, 43, 44, 52, 56, 114, 123, 128 Skills, 8, 61–63 Skyrim, 124, 134 Snyder, Zack, 108 Software, 2, 22, 26, 30, 42, 87, 93, 98, 111, 121, 149 development, 55, 123 interface, 34, 58, 59 Solid Snake, 45 Sontag, Susan, 126, 155 Sopranos, The, 134 Space behind the screen, 55 Spaces and places, 124 Spatial story, 143 Speculative turn, 94

165

Speleology, x, 120, 121, 133, 135 Sphaera activitatis , 75, 76, 83 Staged events, 2, 76 Stahr, Monroe, 145, 146 Starcraft , 63 State of disorientation, 86 Static noise. See Noise Subjectivity, 6, 133 Substance, viii, 6, 12, 84, 85 Sudden, the, 47, 48, 115 Suikoden, 44, 46 Sunderland, James, 73, 74, 85 Superficial, x, 9, 123 effects, 23, 25, 31, 71 Super Mario, 8 Surface effects, 23, 31, 32 of the mirror, 41 See also Mirror, play Symbolic, the interaction, 41 order, 83 See also Real, the System and surroundings, 42, 65

T Talbot, William Henry Fox, 156. See also Daguerre, Louis; Niepces, Joseph Nicéphore Tarantino, Quentin, 134 Taste of Cherry, 143 Technical artefacts, 17 development, 4, 51 difficulties, 56, 61 images, 39 media, 18, 78 reproducibility, 10 Tendency to discard, 97, 98 Text adventures, 121, 122 Theatrical, 38, 138, 150–153

166

INDEX

signs, 151, 152 Theory of game and play, 126, 151 of speed. See Ecstasy, of speed Thing-medial presence. See Present-athand/presence-at-hand Third-person perspective, 43, 74 Thought and skill games, 8 Threshold phenomenon, 48, 57, 58, 69, 70, 115, 116 Time inner, 65, 72 objective/linear, 65 Tomb Raider, 43, 44, 71, 119–122, 133 Tool, viii, 17–19, 25, 59, 79–81, 93–97, 100, 122, 130, 155 Total immersion. See Immersion Traces, 11, 14–17, 20, 23, 24, 79, 80, 143, 144, 146 Transgression of boundaries, 41, 48, 69, 70, 116 Turing machine, 22, 124 Turkle, Sherry, 2, 70, 71, 139 Two-level interface system, 58. See also Hardware/Software

U Unavailable, 92 Uncanny, the, 75, 76, 78, 80–82, 86–88 of the media, 78 Uncertainty, x, xi, 41, 45, 46, 48, 61, 63, 92, 125, 138, 146, 148, 156. See also Ontological, uncertainty Uncharted, 121 Unconscious, the, 15, 25, 47 Unintentionality, 14, 15, 17, 20 Universality, 24, 34 Unready-to-hand/unreadinessto-hand, 92, 94, 96, 97,

98, 100. See also Presentat-hand/presence-at-hand; Ready-to-hand/readiness-to-hand Unreality, 7, 51 Usability, 58, 92 User interfaces, 25, 30, 33, 34, 39, 114, 123

V Vagueness, 45, 50, 53, 70, 118, 138, 156 Valéry, Paul, 105, 108, 118 Value added, 14, 15 of an item, 5 See also Level of meaning Valve, 137, 142 Vanishing of the real, 123 Videodrome, 78 Viewtiful Joe, 87 Virilio, Paul, 40, 64–66 Virtual body, 43 character, 29, 42, 43, 46, 52 enemies, 8, 42, 45 environments/landscapes, 43, 52, 56, 58–60, 122, 134 icon, 120 image space, 33, 124, 143, 145, 154 persona, 120 protagonist, 44, 76 space, 2, 33, 39, 41–43, 51, 52, 57, 60, 70, 72, 75, 87, 113, 114, 118 world, 4, 6, 8, 10, 31, 40, 42, 58, 67, 122, 134 Virtuality, 4, 66, 67. See also Reality Visibility, 85, 128, 133, 147, 150 pure, 141 Visio corporalis , 141

INDEX

Visio spiritualis , 141 Vitality abhorrent/horrible, 84, 85 Volume, 77, 140

W Weber, Samuel, 77 Western culture, 35, 123 metaphysics, 31, 38, 126 philosophy, 35 Wetware, 26, 32 Wheatley, 144, 154, 156

167

Windows, 25, 34, 41, 83–85, 145, 147, 154 Winogrand, Garry, 134 WordPerfect, 30 World as an image, 133 implications, 37 World of Warcraft , 99, 122, 124 World Wide Web, 2, 34 Z Zelda II , 91 Zen experience, 65 Žižek, Slavoj, 74, 84