Gaming and the Virtual Sublime: Rhetoric, Awe, Fear, and Death in Contemporary Video Games 1838674322, 9781838674328, 9781838674311

Citation preview

Gaming and the Virtual Sublime

This page intentionally left blank

Gaming and the Virtual Sublime: Rhetoric, Awe, Fear, and Death in Contemporary Video Games

MATTHEW SPOKES York St. John University, UK

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Emerald Publishing Limited Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK First edition 2020 © 2020 Matthew Spokes. Published under an exclusive license by Emerald Publishing Limited. Reprints and permissions service Contact: [email protected] No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-83867-432-8 (Print) ISBN: 978-1-83867-431-1 (Online) ISBN: 978-1-83867-433-5 (Epub)

Contents

Abbreviations

ix

Author Biography

xi

Acknowledgments

xiii

Chapter 1  Introduction: What are Games for? 1.1 Peacock Hey!, Byron and the Significance of Skeletons 1.2 What are Video Games? 1.3 Video Games and Play 1.4 Games as Art 1.5 The Structure of this Book

1 1 3 5 9 11

Chapter 2  The Classical Sublime 2.1 Introduction 2.2 The Origins of the Sublime in Longinus 2.3 The Sublime of Dennis, Baillie and Gerard 2.4 The Mathematical, Dynamical and Aesthetically Sublime

15 15 16 19 24

Chapter 3  The Contemporary Sublime 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Lyotard’s Lessons on the Sublime 3.3 The Sublime Rhythms of Bacon in Deleuze 3.4 The Techno-Sublime 3.5 The Gamified Sublime

31 31 31 34 37 39

Chapter 4  The Affective and the Virtual 4.1 Introduction 4.2 What is ‘Affect’? 4.3 Video Games and Affect 4.4 A Critical Pause 4.5 What is the ‘Virtual’? 4.6 Methodological Approaches

43 43 43 48 52 52 58

vi   Contents

Chapter 5  Rhetoric 5.1 Introduction 5.2 What does Longinus Mean by ‘Rhetoric’? (Slight Return) 5.3 Text, Narrative Architecture and the Persuasive Power of Rhetoric 5.4 Challenging Forms of Narrative and Storytelling through Video Games 5.5 Rhetoric, Temporality and Identity 5.6 Rhetoric and the Sublime

63 63

Chapter 6  Awe 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Realism and Representation in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey 6.3 Beauty and the Sublime in The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt 6.4 Representational/Simulational Landscapes in Red Dead Redemption 2 6.5 The Importance of Incorporation and Sensation in Super Mario Galaxy 6.6 Chaos and the Outer Limits in Elite: Dangerous and Red Dead Online 6.7 Awe and the Sublime

83 83

97 101

Chapter 7  Fear 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Terror, Magnitude and the Kantian Sublime 7.3 Fear, Games Design and Agency 7.4 Immediate/Visceral Fear (via the Abject) 7.5 Uncanny Fear 7.6 Structural/External Fear 7.7 Fear and the Sublime

103 103 105 108 111 115 119 122

Chapter 8  Failure, Repetition and Death 8.1 Introduction 8.2 Failure and Agency 8.3 Repetition and Ritual 8.4 Death, Dying and Living Again 8.5 Failure, Repetition, Death and the Sublime

125 125 127 132 136 140

64 66 71 76 80

85 89 92 95

Contents    vii

Chapter 9  Towards the Virtual Sublime 9.1 Introduction 9.2 The Virtual Sublime, and How to Understand it 9.3 We Need to Conceptualise ‘The Real’ in a Consistent Way 9.4 We Need to be Expansive in Our Use of the Sublime 9.5 We Need to Experiment with Conceptual and Practical Applications of Sublime Ideas 9.6 We Need to be Responsive to Developments in Interactive Simulational Media

145 145 146

References

155

Index

169

148 149 150 151

This page intentionally left blank

Abbreviations

AC:Or Assassin’s Creed: Origins E:D Elite Dangerous FANF Five Nights at Freddy’s GOW God of War GTA V Grand Theft Auto V Odyssey Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey PoP:SoT Prince of Persia: Sands of Time RDO Red Dead Online RDR2 Red Dead Redemption 2 Sekiro Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice SH2 Silent Hill 2 SMG Super Mario Galaxy TDC That Dragon, Cancer Isaac The Binding of Isaac TWD The Walking Dead W3:WH The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt NPC Non-player character (an in-game character who is other to your avatar and controlled by the game)

This page intentionally left blank

Author Biography

Dr. Matthew Spokes is an Associate Dean for Sociology and Criminology at York St. John University. He has published a number of pieces on video games, including work on structural violence, pro-social behaviour, procedural rhetoric, methodological approaches, and narrative architecture and mortality. His previous book was Death, Memorialization and Deviant Spaces (Spokes, Denham and Lehmann), published as part of Emerald ‘Death and Culture’ series.

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

My thanks go to a number of colleagues who have supported me with ideas and advice during the writing of this book, including Dr Jack Denham, Dr David Hill, Dr Adam Formby, Professor David Beer and Dr Steven Hirschler (who all chipped in on matters sublime and ludological) and Dr Rosie Smith (who listened to me grumble). Even more substantive thanks go to my wife and my amazing daughter, both of whom put up with far too many disrupted evenings and weekends.

Chapter 1

Introduction: What are Games for? 1.1 Peacock Hey!, Byron and the Significance of Skeletons My daughter has had an imaginary friend called Peacock Hey! since she was two years old (she has just had her 4th birthday at the time of writing). Peacock Hey! is a 100-feet tall mermaid whose age varies wildly depending on the context of the story she is the protagonist of. These stories all have a similar thread: something my daughter has been asked to do has previously been experienced by Peacock Hey! and, because Peacock Hey! has done something before, it’s okay for my daughter to do it too. Peacock Hey!, despite not being real, makes the world a more familiar place, a less frightening place. Although not as well-known as Don Juan, Byron’s (2004) poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage still manages to capture the awe of those men – and it was ostensibly men – fanning out across Europe on the original ‘Grand Tour’. In the section titled ‘There is a Pleasure in the Pathless Woods’, Byron writes There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore There is a society where none intrudes By the deep Sea, and music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but Nature more […] Byron’s poem was written following his travels through the Mediterranean (Heffernan, 2006) and this passage sees him considering the vitality and inspiration of nature; the enjoyment of losing oneself in the forest, the power and ferocity of the sea. What Byron is describing is the ability of nature to instil in a person a sense of awe, or even what some would term the sublime (see Needler, 2010). Now the obvious question is what connects my daughter’s imaginary friend to Byron’s Grand Tour? The answer is that both exemplify, in different ways, attempts to codify and comprehend experiences that initially transcend our ability to understand them. For my daughter, this is framed largely through her life course. She is four, going on five, so many of the things that adults take for granted are new and daunting – the unknown that only becomes known through Gaming and the Virtual Sublime: Rhetoric, Awe, Fear, and Death in Contemporary Video Games, 1–13 Copyright © 2020 by Matthew Spokes Published under an exclusive license by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved doi:10.1108/978-1-83867-431-120201004

2    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime experience. Byron, as he identifies in the poem, uses the verse to try and explain that which is perhaps beyond explanation. Both of these examples get to the root of the sort of issues this book will explore in how we try to make sense of experiences that challenge our perception of ourselves and the world around us. Further in to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron contrasts his admiration for the wonders of the natural world by offering a description of late eighteenth century Greece that Shaw (2013) describes as ‘withering’ (p. 148). In Byron’s work, Shaw sees elements of the sublime, in identifying a connection between the isolated exemplar and the universal, the individual experience connected to the whole which may or may not have something to do with that ‘fatal divide between the human and the divine’ (p. 153) often identified in what came to be called the Romantic sublime. For my purposes, it demonstrates at the very least a classic example of the relationship between subject and object, and the range of impacts each can have on the other. Before proceeding, it is perhaps worth giving some context to the book. My first piece of published writing as an academic explored the ways in which communities of video game players and fans (I will endeavour to use ‘gamers’ throughout) used a single-player role-playing game – Fallout 4 (Bethesda, 2015) – to discuss their own fears of dying (Spokes, 2018). Specifically, the game is set in a post-apocalyptic future where the East Coast of the United States has been largely destroyed as part of a nuclear war. Gamers navigate a hellish landscape of collapsed buildings and mutated animals, trying to make sense not only of what happened, but where humanity is headed. The totality of the destruction is immense, but what chimed most with gamers were the day-to-day tragedies of individual deaths, typified by skeletons placed in the game environment. Some of the skeletons were arm-inarm, suggesting a final embrace at the point of impact, others were going about their everyday lives, shopping at the supermarket with their children in the trolley when the bomb fell. Gamers used these skeletons to situate and try to imagine their own deaths, or avoidance of death, in a similar scenario: the game was an opportunity for discussion, and also a way or attempting to deal with the magnitude of the death of humanity (albeit in a representational sense). Video games, and virtual worlds more broadly, engage us on both micro- and macro-levels. As Muriel and Crawford (2020, p. 140) observe, ‘video games and their culture can help us understand wider social topics such as agency, power, everyday life and identity in contemporary society’ and in working through this book I am keen to consider in detail the relationship between video games as the individualistic pursuit they are frequently typified as, and video games as virtual and simulational spaces for testing us, for allowing us to explore their wider ramifications as reflective of the social conditions, practices and processes we engage in and with: in the context of the latter, much like Peacock Hey!, video games may act as a proxy for making the macro more manageable. But equally I want to explore the ways in which they push us towards connecting with ideas and environments that challenge and antagonise our understanding of how things are. Using case studies from contemporary video gaming, this book can be thought of as an experiment in applying various philosophies of the sublime in an effort to see how well they work in the context of interactive media. My focus is on

Introduction: What are Games for?    3 unpacking a variety of philosophical ideas in relation to four key areas: rhetoric, awe, fear and death. I am interested in whether or not it possible to experience the awe of a Byronic landscape through the television screen, if fear can be propagated in a pizzeria staffed by animatronic animals? Can repeating the same action over and over and over again be the path to a transcendent experience? More than that though, the central question this book is asking is how useful the concept of the sublime is in understanding our recent entanglements with representative virtual and simulational spaces: is the sublime fit for purpose, or does it need recasting for the virtual age? Where best to begin… At this early stage, it is already worth reflecting on the why this chapter and indeed the book is about ‘gaming’. By ‘gaming’ I mean specifically the processes, practices and experiences of playing video games (which is what gamers do!). Throughout I will be exploring ideas that may be applicable to games more broadly, including things like ‘play’ and ‘affect’, but my primary interest is in the application of the sublime to the video game. To caveat this, I am not suggesting that the sublime is something applicable to all games, but rather that our understsanding of video games might be enriched – or at least more thoroughly scrutinised – through a conceptual framework based on sublime ideas. Throughout the book I will use ‘game(s)’ and ‘video game(s)’ interchangeably, much like ‘player’ and ‘gamer’: if I refer to ‘games’ in a broader sense outside of the video game, this will be clearly demarcated. The bulk of this chapter then will set some groundwork for exploring video games as well as developing some of the associated terminology that will be used in this book. Firstly, it is important to understand what a contested term ‘video game’ is, so some definitional work is definitely in order to establish a working description to problematise later on. Secondly, I’ll double-down on differentiating the focus of this book from ‘games’ more generally as this will enable us to better understand competing arguments about what games do and why we play them. Here I will reflect on both Huizinga and Caillois’ discussions on things like ‘play’. Stemming from this, contemporaneous research that outlines an ontological distinction between games as objects and games as processes will allow the interrogation of dominant schools of thought in the associated field of Game Studies. Thirdly, research on the impact of games, in terms of their power to offer new ‘possibility spaces’ (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004), socio-political engagement and critical tools for understanding a changing world will begin to show the affective resonance of this form of popular culture, and how far removed it has become from simplistic notions of passively consumed entertainment.

1.2 What are Video Games? An obvious question, right – but what a video game is is heavily contested. Initially, a ‘video game’ can be challenged terminologically: Perron and Wolf (2009, p. 6) acknowledge this by explaining that although the field of academic research into video games has developed exponentially in the last 20 years or so, ‘a set of agreed-upon terms has been slow to develop, even for the name of

4    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime the subject itself (“video games”, “videogames”, “computer games”, “digital games”, etc.)’. This issue is compounded, they continue, by games journalists using a variety of different terms, and professional organisations similarly muddying the waters.1 The video games industry also uses all sorts of terms, for example, ‘electronic entertainment’.2 It is important then to identify that there is by no means agreement around terminology, but also that it is useful to have a term in use for the sake of clarity. Following Crawford’s (2012) detailed discussion, this book will adopt ‘video games’ as the standard term throughout, for the simple reason of frequency: it is after all the most used term. What a video game is could be understood definitionally. I could say that a video game is ‘a computer game that you play by using controls or buttons to move images on a screen’ (Collins Dictionary, Video Game, 2019) but as with the use of the term ‘video game’, this definition is also problematic. For a start, the definition suggests a video game is a ‘computer game’ – a terminological concern – before stating that you ‘play’ it using controls. What you do with a video game depends very much on your understanding of ‘play’, as well as arguments about the nature of active versus passive engagement though the manipulation of ‘images on a screen’. So not that helpful. Perhaps a video game can be understood simply as a form of interactive media? There are a few ways of situating games here – again, Crawford (2012) is invaluable in detailing the arguments for and against the view that games are media – including how video games are entertainment products first and foremost. This certainly chimes with their rise to prominence as a cultural product (Donovan, 2010); for example, in 2018 Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar North, 2013) became the most profitable entertainment product of all time (Donnelly, 2018) when compared to film and literature. In addition to this, lots and lots of people play video games. Video games can be thought of as products of culture industries spread across the globe, where large development teams spend many years and many millions of dollars designing products to sell to gamers. Video games have considerable reach in terms of how many people come into contact with them, directly or indirectly. Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2) (Rockstar Studios, 2018), according to some estimates (Takahashi, 2018), had 2,800 employees working on its development for seven years at a cost of around $170million, but given that Take Two, the owner of the developer, made $725million in the three days after the release date (Sarkar, 2018) selling 17 million copies of the title, this seems like both an indication of the size and scope of the industry, but also what a sound financial investment video game development appears to be at present. If video games are media, it is worth thinking about them in relation to both their production and their consumption. As Warde (2005) argues, consumption is not simply the end result of production, and is not entirely about

1

For example, the principle academic organization for scholars of video games is DiGRA, the Digital Games Research Association. 2 This accounts for two of the three e’s in the games industry’s annual E3 shindig.

Introduction: What are Games for?    5 passive engagement with particular objects and practices, but is instead an active series of processes and relationships that reinforce as well as challenge a variety of socio-cultural structures (consumption as a type of subcultural capital for instance). As a form of material culture, video games offer a way of exploring these relationships as a type of social reality, where different consumers use video games in a variety of ways that complicates any simplistic binary between production and consumption: simply put, video games are a lens through which we can explore contemporary culture (Denham & Spokes, 2018; Muriel & Crawford, 2018). The scale and scope of video games makes them a viable locus of academic study and research, and research into video games as I’ll detail throughout, is necessarily diverse and is able to draw on a variety of perspectives. As Grey (2009, p. 1) contends, games can ‘be read critically, not simply as expressions of culture or as products of consumption, but as objects through which we can think’; this thinking might involve the formal qualities of the game itself in relation to interactions between programmers and players (Cremin, 2012), methodological issues around capturing and detailing what constitutes ‘play’ (Giddings, 2009) or the role of memory in creating players identities and associated narratives (Mukherjee, 2011). Bogost (2010, p. ix) argues that video games have important persuasive powers in terms of how we see the world around us: Video games can … disrupt and change fundamental attitudes and beliefs about the world, leading to potentially significant longterm social change. I believe that this power is not equivalent to the content of video games, as the serious games community claims. Rather, this power lies in the very way video games mount claims through procedural rhetorics. Thus, all kinds of video games … possess the power to mount equally meaningful expression. As Nieborg & Hermes (2008) tell us, a multitude of disciplinary approaches and analytical tools can be used to explore video games, and reciprocally video games may help to illuminate current debates in other disciplines. We can also see these sorts of activities in the related field of Games Studies, and it is worth spending some time working through the development of key arguments in this area of research to shed more light on what a video game is and what a video games does.

1.3 Video Games and Play Play is something intrinsic to all games, video or otherwise, and the notion of play is central to numerous positions in the field of Game Studies. Debates around what play is and what happens to us when we play – echoing the opening question about what a video game is – typically emerge in response to the work of two scholars: Dutch cultural theorist Johan Huizinga (particularly his 1938 book Homo Ludens) and French sociologist Roger Caillois (in Man, Play and Games,

6    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime originally published in 1961).3 Huizinga (1955) defines play in relation to its form, as something that stands outside of quotidian experience but that completely encapsulates a person in the sense of its absence of utility and its emphasis on the imaginary: he also describes it as a ‘free activity’ (pp. 34–35). Play, he goes on, takes place in a demarcated spatio-temporal location and is governed by specific rules that result in group coherence which again underscores the separation from everyday life. In the context of video games, on a rudimentary level we can already see the ways in which play is operationalised: imaginary worlds, a leisure pursuit separate from work, rules as defined by developers. But what Huizinga speaks to is essentially a series of binary distinctions, a dialectic of sorts. The absence of utility suggests that Huizinga sees play as the opposite to seriousness (Ehrmann, Lewis & Lewis, 1968), that play cannot form part of our everyday experience that the imaginary runs counter to reality. This binary is important when thinking about video games, because not only is play frequently considered a quotidian experience, the philosophical notion of the virtual challenges these distinctions, particularly the representational and the real (see Chapter 4). Huizinga’s work has had considerable impact on the field of Game Studies including academic research in relation to video games: for example, Salen and Zimmerman’s (2004) landmark study on play-through-game-design is titled Rules of Play, and expressly unpacks Huizinga’s work in defining ‘meaningful’ play (pp. 31–36). Likewise Juul’s (2005) work on the constituent elements of the video game again draws on both the power of the imaginary and the need to see play through codified systems of rules (p. 1). Caillois’ (2001) work, situating games and play as conditional in many social structures and behaviours, reproduces some of Huizinga’s original contentions (free, separate, rule-based, make-believe) through ‘six characteristics’ including the notion of games being unproductive. Whilst many binary distinctions remain, the interplay between ‘play’ and ‘games’ is more pronounced, with Caillois developing a spectrum that runs from ludus (codified rules for structure action) through to paidia (or playfulness, the more unstructured spontaneous nature of play). His argument, crudely distilled, is that the push and pull between ludus and paidia is what leads to potential instability in cultures as rules are routinely established and reformed. Ehrmann, Lewis, and Lewis (1968) acknowledge the important ways in which Caillois attends to this neglected area of Huizinga’s work, but decry his obsession with categorisation (p. 32). Thankfully his expanded categorisation does push past Huizinga’s focus on competition in the aforementioned two types of play (ludus and paidia) and four differing forms: these forms – agon (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (role play) and ilinx (perception altering) – have in turn informed scholars of Games Studies, including Walther’s (2003) application of these categories to video games, notably Hitman: Codename 47 (IO Interactive, 2000). For Walther, the suitability of these categories rests firstly on accepting the ways in which the categories may interrelate. Hitman is initially about mimicry in that the player must located their ‘play-mood’ in response to the role (which

3

Sutton-Smith (1977) is an important touchstone also, but I’ll come to this elsewhere.

Introduction: What are Games for?    7 is make-believe), but this itself involves a complicated relationship between the gamer, their avatar and the game space. Following this, mimicry becomes agon, whereby the game design directs gamers towards rule-specific competitions (missions that need completing). Gaming here is clearly multiple, challenging the simplistic delineations previously discussed. Sutton-Smith, in his two-volume study of games cunningly titled The Study of Games (Avedon & Sutton-Smith, 1971) considers multiplicity in terms of how, various groups – from academics and educators to the military – have their own definitions so that the meaning of games and play are not inherent, but vary depending on the people thinking about them and engaging with them. This resonates in van Vught and Glas’ (2018) analysis of games as objects and games as processes. They consider these positions as ‘opposing ontological strategies’ with the former occupying a space where ‘the game object provides some core structure that encourages or even enforces certain play actions to be performed’ (p. 4) and the later more about the action or processes involved in play, rather than the object itself (‘this mission that happens to feature in Hitman: Codename 47 is exciting!’). Play is bifurcated depending on the view of the gamer. In the first instance, play is more of a methodological concern and in the second, play is the ‘object of analytical interest’ and whilst this again implies a dialectic, it is one underscored by multiple meanings of gaming and play that are gamer-dependent. Despite not engaging with video games explicitly,4 Sutton-Smith’s appraisal is still regarded as helpful interjection, recognising as it does the multiple ways in which play can be conceptualised in relation to video games (Juul, 2001). Similarly, Tavinor (2009, p. 32) argues that scholars of video games need to ‘construct a definition that offers the possibility that there may be more than one way to be a videogame [sic.]’. Indeed, in Game Studies there have historically been two frequently oppositional approaches to understanding the video game – ludological and narratological – and both these positions are worth exploring to strengthen the foundations of this study. I have already detailed a handful of binaries in studies of games, both in a historical and contemporaneous sense (play as structured vs. unstructured, games as objects vs. games as process) and, in terms of video games, there is a similar distinction that has previously seen video games scholars framing games as either ludological or narratological. It is worth saying that much of the initial antagonism between key players in this debate has abated, but it nonetheless demonstrates entrenched views on what video games are, what they do, and how they can be understood. In addition, these debates can also be understood through the sublime, where ludology maps on to the embodied, affective experience of a sublime happening and narratology could be seen as the more traditional, pseudoLonginian emphasis on rhetoric (see Chapter 2). For clarity I am going to present these debates in chronological order, rather than by perpetuating the binary.

4

It was 1971 after all, so he would be limited to Galaxy Game or dying from a snake bite in the original text-version of The Oregon Trail.

8    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime In Hamlet on the holodeck: The future of narrative in cyberspace, Janet Murray (2017, p. 10) situates video games in terms of their ‘promise to reshape the spectrum of narrative expression, not by replacing the novel or the movie but by continuing their timeless bardic work within another framework’. By contextualising video games this way, Murray imposes narrative sensibilities on the medium, or rather she shows how video games are narratological in that as a ‘new compositional tool [they should be placed] as firmly as possible in the hands of the storytellers’ (p. 284). At the time, Game Studies scholars were less than conducive to what they saw as a type of reductionism. Aarseth (1997) sees video games not as passively read texts, but as ergodic experiences, whereby the gamer is required to actively participate instead. More dramatically, Juul (1998) states that ‘computer games are not narratives […] rather the narrative tends to be isolated from or even work against the computergame-ness of the game’, which sets the scene for a divorcing of story from play. Further to this, Eskelinen (2001) argues how outside academic theory people are usually excellent at making distinctions between narrative, drama and games. If I throw a ball at you I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories. From here we might characterise a series of skirmishes between the two camps. For the ludologists, a sustained critique of games-as-narratives can be found in the work of Frasca (2007) and Mäyrä (2008) to name a few. Another notable battle played out between Jenkins (2004) and Eskelinen (2004), with Jenkins attempting to offer spatialised dynamics as an inbetween space – because ‘it makes sense to think of game designers less as storytellers than as narrative architects’ (p. 121) – which Eskelinen characterises as a position ignorant of key critiques which breaks no new ground in theorising video games. These arguments are increasingly met with calls for a middle ground from both narratologists and games designers/developers (see Mukherjee, 2015). Murray having perhaps unwittingly instigated the initial conflict, appeals for calm, stating that ‘Game studies, like any organised pursuit of knowledge, is not a zero-sum team contest, but a multidimensional, open-ended puzzle that we all are engaged in cooperatively solving’. She calls it ‘the last word’ (Murray, 2005), and I am inclined to agree. What we glean from these disagreements are the impassioned positions that some scholars take over what a game is and what it does. Is it a narrative or is it about play? Once again, the discussion is sometimes reduced to an unproductive binary distinction, whereas, as demonstrated earlier, there are multiple readings of what games are. Perhaps the most useful thing to take from these arguments, as Crawford (2012) does, is the sorts of features we tend to find in games: things like agency (what the gamer does or is able to do) and interactivity, both of which will thread throughout the empirical chapters of this book (Chapters 5–8). Games involve an interrelationship between play and narrative, the locus of which is where successful titles afford gamers affective experiences that both have a lasting impact and push towards what might be considered a sublime encounter.

Introduction: What are Games for?    9

1.4 Games as Art To continue in the same vein of opening old wounds concerning what games are, a final distinction might be gleaned from arguments around whether or not games qualify as a form of art. I am not introducing this flippantly, but rather as a way in to considering the development of the sublime in later chapters: the philosophical underpinning of the sublime, particularly in the eighteenth century, routinely turns to art as a way of replicating the sublime – the earlier example of Byron’s poetry does just that – so if video games are considered an art form, this too might be a vehicle through which the sublime can be articulated. What evidence is there that video games are an art form? There is support for this statement from both academics and games developers, the most notable of the latter being Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, a games designer characterised in a New York Times profile as the company’s first artist (Paumgarten, 2010). Miyamoto has been involved in many of Nintendo’s key titles since the late seventies, including Donkey Kong, Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. He understands the role of the game developer as an in-between space straddling art and construction: he explains that another important element [in game design] is a belief that creators are artists. At the same time, however, it’s necessary for us creators to be engineers, because of the skill required for the creations. (Saltzman, 2000, p. 10) Here, Miyamoto is echoing the dualism previously identified in the split between ludologists and narratologists. To make a game you are required to balance the role of an engineer and an artist, implying that the final output – the video game – is a composite of both. In terms of the academic approach to video games-as-art, on a philosophical level, Tavinor’s (2009, pp. 195–196) work considers the ways in which theories from the philosophy of art can be co-opted and applied to video games seeing as ‘videogames – at least, some of them – show considerable overlap with the conditions that are taken by cluster theories of the arts to identify or define artworks’. Earlier, Smuts (2005, p. 12) outlined the identifiable thematic overlaps between the development of video games-as-art and literature more broadly: the incorporation of video games in to established arts organisations and structures including museum exhibits and art programmes shows the growing trend towards inclusion. Furthermore, he states that there is a quickly growing body of recognized major works in video games [and] game designers have used the medium to tackle previously unsolvable artistic problems facing film and literature. (p. 12) Art critics, on the other hand, are less than enamoured with the video game-asart. Noted film critic Roger Ebert (2010) has been vocal on this topic for a number of years, feeling similarly to ludologists that the aspect of ‘play’ precludes video

10    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime games from becoming art. In a 2010 piece, he argued that ‘one obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome’. Not wanting to stray too deeply into film criticism, I’d argue that the points Ebert raises can also be levelled at film – a format routinely consider art. As Martin (2007, p. 209) compels us, ‘the public should not let a new medium frighten them [when] photography, video art, and cinema have shown the art world that great mediums with limitless potential are worth struggling for’. Art critics are not quite ready for this shift: Jonathan Jones (2012) has passionately argued that ‘no one owns the game, so there is no artist, and therefore no work of art’. These antagonistic approaches to change haven’t stopped art galleries and museums putting on shows framed by video games, such as the V+A Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt exhibition in 2018–2019, or the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquiring 14 games as a ‘seedbed for an initial wish list of about 40’ (Antonelli, 2012) including everything from classics like Pac-Man (Namco, 1980) and Tetris (Pajitnov, 1984) through simulation games like SimCity 2000 (Maxis, 1994) right up to a MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games) like EVE Online (CCP Games, 2003). It is also telling that the French government awarded Miyamoto the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for his services to video games development (Crampton, 2006). The vital aspect of these arguments in the context of this book is that video games are noticeably productive, in a variety of ways both within and beyond the game itself. Video games engender debate, sometimes hostility, as well as fostering deep and wide-ranging explorations of their value in telling about society (Becker, 2007). Today, this developing and adapting field of cultural production can be contextualised in multiple ways inclusive of anything ranging from interactive performance art (Gee, 2006) through to educational tools: using video games as practical tools for art educators leads Sweeney (2010, p. 271) to conclude that video games can be considered the most influential contemporary form of digital culture. Jenkins (2005) too talks about how games have influenced art forms, including cinema (Run Lola Run’s use of multidirectional plotting and the line between real and imaginary space in The Matrix) and avant-garde art (Matthew Barney turning the Guggenheim into a Cremaster video game) and how when Gilbert Seldes suggested cinema was an art form in 1924 he was met with the same consternation that presently greets video gamesas-art criticism. Ultimately, Jenkins (2005) suggests, ‘games represent a new lively art, one as appropriate for the digital age as those earlier media were for the machine age’ (p. 5). Much of the above discussion, however, is pretty old of course. Smuts (2005) for instance uses Max Payne and Halo as examples in his discussions, games that are now in their third (or more) iteration: comparatively speaking, the games considered ‘art’ in this earlier context now look more than a little tired, so it is important that when we consider the role of video games in our lives, we consider the changes to the medium in the last few years, alongside speculations of the route video games may take in the future (where virtual reality (or ‘VR’) in particular

Introduction: What are Games for?    11 looks likely to expand).5 What each of these debates has highlighted is how games can be seen as ‘…functions of the larger grid of possibilities built by groups of developers, players, reviewers, critics, and fans in particular times and places and through specific acts of gameplay or discourses about games’ (Jones, 2008, p. 3) and these perspectives, these heteroglossic voices, inform this book. Ultimately, understanding video games and their significance involves a move towards what Calleja (2012, p. 182) describes, through the ways in which the interpretation of experiences afforded by digital games and their social and cultural significance [involves] reframing the relationship between the media object, the player, and the social and cultural contexts that envelop both and are differently inscribed in each. What I hope to achieve in thinking through the sublime in the context of virtual and simulational spaces is a better comprehension of our entanglements with video games and how respecting and drawing on a variety of approaches and ideas points us in the right direction.

1.5 The Structure of This Book Following this chapter, the book is divided in to eight further chapters, with the first three comprising a philosophical, ontological and methodological overview, respectively. Chapter 2 sets the scene for an interrogation and recasting of the sublime by offering a historical overview of key thinkers and their development of the concept. This will include the foundations of the sublime in the study of rhetoric undertaken by pseudo-Longinus, the early- to mid-eighteenth century theories of Dennis, Baillie, Gerard and crucially, Burke on nature and beauty, as well as Immanuel Kant’s writing on awe and the difference between the mathematical and dynamical sublime. Chapter 3 will augment this historiography of sublimity by working on more contemporaneous examples, spending time considering postmodern developments including Lyotard’s work on unpresentability (with reference to avant-garde art) alongside Deleuze’s writing on rhythm and sensation (typified by the painting of Francis Bacon) before detailing theories around the techno and the gamified sublime: the intention is to identify present-day thinking about the sublime before testing the value of these approaches through a variety of empirical case studies and associated discussions. Chapter 4 will unpack some key contested terms which I am using to justify and demonstrate the potential for sublime experience through video games, specifically the ontological underpinnings of the ‘virtual’ and the notion of ‘affect’. These interrelated discussions will inform the methodological approaches used in the empirical chapters. Following my initial readings of the sublime in relation to video games, the book will work through four empirical chapters broadly aligned to the history

5

Having said that, I’m still going to talk about Prince of Persia. And Sim City 2000.

12    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime of the sublime I have laid out, namely ‘rhetoric’, ‘awe’, ‘fear’ and ‘failure/death’. Using examples from God of War, The Walking Dead, That Dragon, Cancer, and Silent Hill 2, Chapter 5 examines the value of a rhetorical notion of the sublime through Longinus, alongside ideas around narrative architecture (Jenkins, 2004) and procedural rhetoric (Bogost, 2008, 2010). With an extended discussion of the relationship between narratives, rhetoric and gamer agency – filtered through Murray (2017) and Mukherjee (2015) – a consideration of the role of temporality and identity as disruptive elements is forwarded. Chapter 6 explores the sublime in relation to notions of awe and beauty in a number of eighteenth century philosophies of the sublime, using case studies from Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey and The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt to examine the relationship between representation and realism. Furthering that theme, alongside the ‘are games art?’ argument, I explore RDR2 as a space for exploration and the development of ideological apparatus. The agentic role of the gamer will also be introduced (I return to it repeatedly throughout) in the context of sensation and Super Mario Galaxy (through the work of Cremin, 2012 and Deleuze, 1981). The chapter closes by demonstrating how the sublime can be glimpsed at the edges of virtual worlds – through Elite: Dangerous and Red Dead Online (RDRO), where the actions of the gamer destabilise the procedural order of the game and the operational rules of engagement collapse into chaos. Chapter 7 uses Five Nights at Freddy’s (FNAF) as an extended metaphor for reincorporating aspects of narrative into our understanding of the sublime. Using a number of examples of ‘survival horror’ games, which are designed to instil terror and fear, I offering a working example of a spectrum of fearful experience ranging from the immediate/visceral ‘sublime’ encounters with a ‘computational others’ and the ‘abject’, through a variety of environmental and story-telling facets which exhibit the uncanny, towards a systemic/structural notion of fear, where the development of games feeds into extant social, cultural and political problems impacting our lives today. Fear is explored through a detailed application of both Burkean and Kantian approaches to the sublime, in relation to games like Outlast, Alien Isolation, P.T. and Bioshock to name a few. Chapter 8 inverts the format of the book as a closing thought experiment, starting instead with an examination of key game features such as failure, boredom and death before unpacking each of these in the context of an approach to the sublime. This includes a return to debates about agency (Tanenbaum & Tanenbaum, 2010), alongside a discussion of repetition and ritual logic (through Deleuze, 2014). A number of gameplay tenets related to death will be outlined using examples such as Assassin’s Creed: Origins, The Binding of Isaac, To The Moon and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Chapter 9 attempts to draw together the disparate threads of sublime thought in the context of the virtual, returning to rhetoric, awe, fear and death. Attending to the opening debates about the development of games and their importance in our everyday lives, a working conceptual toolbox for the virtual sublime will be forwarded, together with a discussion of recent scholarship in the area. Further to this, the book will consider contemporaneous developments in video gaming that offer future lines of flight into the virtual, including the possibility

Introduction: What are Games for?    13 of collective/shared affective experience and the role of VR in challenging our agency and identity (for instance, what impact will fully haptic feedback have on our ability to distinguish virtual and non-virtual experiences?) In opening the book, I have sought to situate video games as a meaningful site of enquiry. Video games are multifaceted. They can be understood as a proxy for ‘real’ experiences – I’ll come back to this in Chapter 4 with regard to affect and the virtual – or as the object of consumption. They facilitate ‘play’, they function in ways both similar and dissimilar to traditional ‘games’, and they are also ‘art’. Some argue they tell stories, and others argue they don’t. Essentially though video games, much like my daughter’s imaginary friend and Byron’s semi-autobiographical musings on walking along the coast of the Aegean, are a prism through which we might attempt to contemplate, manage and understand experiences that are, on the face of it, challenging to our cognising mind. I have observed this already in my own work, on death and dying in Fallout 4 (Spokes, 2018), through the use of simulated warfare against the unknown ‘Other’ of North Korea in video games that were released during the height of the War on Terror (Spokes, 2019) all the way up to how the morality of gamers impacts their choices in gameplay styles (Denham, Hirschler & Spokes, 2019): this book is my attempt at expanding these initial and sometimes fleeting ideas by using video games to test types of extreme experience, where the medium pushes the gamer beyond. By exploring these sublime encounters, the real impact of video games as the essential cultural artefact of the twenty-first century will be underscored, and the value of debate around their vitality and meaning will be furthered. Reasonably straightforward then…

Chapter 2

The Classical Sublime 2.1 Introduction In Costelloe’s (2012) opening reflections on the development of the sublime, he suggests both that the sublime has a very long history and that – as with other philosophical concepts – the death of the sublime as a way of thinking through experiences related to everything from beauty and terror to death is premature. He goes on to say that this decline is not meant to signal an end to the human experience of sublimity, but rather some sort of problem with the philosophical category itself (p. 1). In developing the virtual sublime, my aim is to consider the problems with a theoretical field that spans thousands of years, as it is first important to get a feeling for the history of the concept and how it has been developed, before trying to situate the sublime in relation to video games as a case study. Shaw (2007) explains that the sublime has been variously thought of as: grand speech and rhetoric; something towards the divine; a space between human understanding and the overwhelming scale of nature, demonstrative of the power of reason in the face of imagination; and an exemplar of that which is beyond the grasp of our perception. Given the variety, and indeed longevity of the concept, this chapter can offer at best a potted and necessarily selective history of key thinkers on the sublime, accepting of the fact that no history can be complete, to paraphrase Costelloe. Recent academic work by the likes of Brady (2013), Shaw (2007), Day (2013) and Doran (2015) comes close, and I will both synthesise and draw on their insights throughout. This chapter will focus on those thinkers that appear with the greatest frequency in academic work on the sublime, in an effort to highlight key tenets of the concept, underline thematic similarities, and identify perspectives to take forward into the later empirical chapters. I am clustering these thinkers as ‘classical’, in that their work spans from Ancient Greece through to the eighteenth century: contemporary approaches, from the post-war period to today will detailed in Chapter 3.

Gaming and the Virtual Sublime: Rhetoric, Awe, Fear, and Death in Contemporary Video Games, 15–29 Copyright © 2020 by Matthew Spokes Published under an exclusive license by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved doi:10.1108/978-1-83867-431-120201005

16    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime My opening discussion considers the origins of the sublime in relation to rhetoric, art and nature, with pseudo-Longinus (henceforth, Longinus1) the primary focus. Many of the main exponents of the sublime in the eighteenth century offer a sort of distended response to the art and nature distinction initially laid out by Longinus (Doran, 2015), including John Dennis (1996) on the sublime and terror/fear, John Ballie (1996) and Alexander Gerard (1996). Edmund Burke (1996) and Immanuel Kant (1781, 2003, 2008) both offer substantial accounts of the sublime (indifferent to beauty and indistinguishable from representation in the former, and as dynamical or mathematical in the analytical sublime of the latter) and will be explored in some detail. Rather than waiting solely until the empirical chapters, throughout this chapter I will proffer a number of ways in which these classical approaches might be beneficial in thinking through the potential for sublime experiences with video games.

2.2 The Origins of the Sublime in Longinus The origins of the concept of the sublime stretch back a long distance, and as Day (2013, p. 36) highlights, even if ‘the ancients had no word that conveyed exactly what we mean by “sublime”, this does not mean that they lacked a comparable concept’. The initial articulation of the sublime in a codified sense can be found in the Peri Hypsos – On the Sublime, or On Sublimity – a text typically attributed to the first century ad Greek critic Longinus. Longinus is the first to offer both an account of the sublime [hypsos in Greek] rooted in the power of rhetoric to engender sublime experience, and a nascent typology and hierarchy for scholars to work with. On Sublimity is an extended commentary on the nature of aesthetics as well as a work of literary criticism, what Doran (2015) terms a ‘subjective and intersubjective account of literary practice’ (p. 28). Longinus draws on examples from nearly 50 authors spanning a millennium, including Sappho (whom I will return to shortly), the epics of Homer and the Book of Genesis. The way in which this relates to the sublime is through Longinus’ assessment of the relative worth of different pieces of writing. He extols the virtues of good writing over bad, detailing the stylistic forms that indicate good from bad. For Longinus (2011), bad writing demonstrates the decline of oration and rhetoric, which he argues runs in parallel with moral decay in society more broadly. Good writing on the other hand displays grandiosity, which in turn – through his aforementioned typology – can have transcendent effects on listeners/readers: it is this notion of the transcendent that has been the mainstay of sublime theory since Antiquity. Crucially, sublimity does not necessarily come from classical rules of rhetoric, the methodical process of composition and delivery which Day (2013) calls ‘consummate excellence and

1

I will avoid, for reasons of brevity, diving into arguments about the contested identity of Longinus – is he Cassius Longinus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus or even Plutarch – which has led to the author being referred to as ‘pseudo-Longinus’. Similarly, there is considerable debate about the title of the work.

The Classical Sublime    17 distinction in language’ (p. 30), but can come in an instant, a moment [kairos] or ‘thunderbolt’. Longinus’ focus on grandeur is not entirely unique, with the Athenian orator commonly referred to as Demetrius of Phalerum also exploring literary descriptions of the heavens, epic conflicts with a Homeric flavour and the power of metaphors and allegory in impacting experience, but in Longinus’ work, as Day (p. 38) contends: the sublime as a phenomenon […] rises above the sum of the treatise’s specific linguistic prescriptions to denote a particular experience of language, one in which the intensity of communication between author and reader leads practically to the fusion of the two. Grandness of thought, or grandeur (there are multiple translations of Longinus that interchange this term) in the typology, is something Longinus had previously developed in his work on Xenophon – at least that is the case in Havell’s 1890 translation of Longinus – and it is from this that all else stems. The process is as follows: grandeur produces ecstasy [ekstasis] instead of persuasion in the listener, where a combination of astonishment [ekplêxis] and wonder [thaumasion] can be considered ‘superior to the merely pleasant’. Persuasion is something that people can control, whereas astonishment and wonder cannot be controlled for, and exert ‘invincible power’ [dynamis] that can overcome the listener. It is not coincidental, as Doran (2015, pp. 40–41) states that the terminology Longinus uses evokes this idea of the transcendent, with ekstasis meaning to stand outside of oneself (something I’ll cover again with regard to Burke). Owing to the sheer weight of responses to Longinian sublimity over the years, there has been a wide spectrum of attempts at claiming and reclaiming what the original text might mean. We have seen already how Longinus writes about the sublime in the context of rhetoric, and it is the response to this rhetoric that has helped frame debates on issues including the distinction between art and nature, something I will return to in the work of Burke and Kant later in this chapter. To give one example of this selective reading – which of course I myself am equally guilty of – Thomas Reid’s 1785 interpretation about nature and art shows how straightforward it is to read Longinus to whatever end you need to serve. In Essays on the intellectual powers of man he argues that the sublime in Longinus – whom he describes as ‘a heathen critic’ – ‘cannot be produced solely by art in the composition; it must take its rise from grandeur in the subject’ (Ashfield & de Bolla, 1996, p. 178), a sort of unstoppable force of nature which he likens to the spiritual: for Reid, what he sees in Longinus is an advocation for nature as a proxy for the Almighty, that the Universe itself can only ‘appear truly grand, and merit the highest admiration, when we consider them as a work of God’ (p. 179). Others have argued (see Macksey, 1997) that throughout On Sublimity allusions to the divine and the power of light demonstrate the spiritual nature of the work, alongside Longinus’ claim that the Book of Genesis shows how humans

18    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime can aim higher than themselves through literature, that rhetoric is transformative. Indeed, the use of ekstasis as an important factor in hypsos is argued to symbolise the ‘momentary transcendence’ that can be understood as divine. Here, terror is considered the strongest emotional response in transposing our experience from the quotidian to the infinite (Doran, 2015, p. 43), which is of particular interest given how important fear is in both Dennis’ and Burke’s later writings on the sublime. But Longinus has also been read as an advocation for the abilities and authority of humanity. Whilst Longinus (1996, p. 28), in section 35 does discuss ‘godlike writers’, and how ‘the whole universe is not sufficient’ to match them, the sublime is still located in ‘the extensive reach and piercing speculation of the human understanding [which] passes the bounds of the material world’: as Shaw (2007, p. 14) argues whilst ‘feelings […] may arise in nature […] art is required to give them shape and coherence’. To create a sublime effect, Longinus argues, is to uses rhetorical devices such as metaphor and hyperbole to instil in the listener some kind of affective response that is hard to define. I believe this is analogous to exactly what contemporary games developers seek to achieve with video games. Longinus (2011) argues that Sappho’s love poem encapsulates this relationship between rhetoric and receiver perfectly, as seen in the interplay between the speaker and their lover. The combination of the senses of taste and sight, the lingering flutter of the heart and the fire that courses through the limbs leads to a sublime feeling of bodily dissolution. Except, as Shaw continues, it is also entirely possible not feel anything in response to rhetoric. An erudite combination of rhetorical devices does not explain the ‘the fundamental sense in which the sublime escapes the grasp of its teacher’ (Shaw, 2007, p. 14). A typology of rhetoric is not a blueprint for producing the sublime, and as Day (2013, p. 34) argues, efforts to situate the sublime in relation to ‘ancient stylistic classifications can only lead to frustration’. Furthermore, simply stating that the sublime is the ‘nonpresentable’ (Day, 2013, p. 36) is something godly and therefore impossible to codify, is a bit of a cop out.2 I would argue that, to an extent, the process of aligning the textual with the spiritual clearly demonstrates a thinking through of the sublime, an attempt by humans to distil those experiences that are initially beyond them, even if these attempts are imperfect. Vitally in these readings, the sublime is not solely a natural phenomenon but one that is inspired by and reflected in texts of different varieties. As has been argued by the likes of Auerbach and Ziolkowski (1993), this finds its purest form in the marriage of the divine and the literary, seen in the works of Auerlius Augustine and Dante Alighieri for instance. The sublime may be spiritual, but the spiritual experience is rooted in, and responds to, powerful texts. Again, whilst acknowledging the problems discussed in Chapter 1 around video games operating as texts, this early explanation of the sublime shows a connection between the listener as a subject and rhetoric as an object in a way that

2

Lyotard, as I will unpack in the next chapter, is much more solid in detailing what the unpresentable is, and how it relates to the sublime.

The Classical Sublime    19 arguably parallels contemporaneous entanglements between gamers and video games as media artefacts (though the agency of the gamer is more substantive of course). What we see in Longinus, and in the interpretive works spurred by On Sublimity, is the challenging relationship between nature and art, and between art and the divine, not to mention the difficulty in articulating what sublime experience is: is it bodily, as in Sappho, or spiritual as we later see in Augustine and Dante? Can it be both? In the context of video games, seen in the previous chapter as both a form of art and a kind of text, the potentiality for sublime experience is at the very least theoretically assured through Longinus, though the method for understanding the sublime is still elusive. Longinus’ five types of sublime experience (hypsos) also offer an initial way of conceptualising responses that could be mapped on to contemporary interactive media: completing a game to 100% could inspire ekstasis for instance. To offer a practical example, during my first playthrough of Tomb Raider II (Core Design, 1997) on the PlayStation 1 I distinctly remember the astonishment (ekplêxis) I experienced when a succession of claustrophobic tunnels gave way to the Tibetan foothills: revisiting the game today, the crude rendering of faraway mountains and unending blue skies that seemed so vibrant to my 15 year old self are pretty laughable but at the time the space felt wide-open, dangerous, full of possibilities.3 More recently, I experienced a feeling of wonder (thaumasion) sailing out across the ocean in Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt (CD Projekt Red, 2015), steering my tiny boat between the rocky pinnacles of Undvik in search of an ice giant who had forced the local population to abandon the island: in terms of graphical fidelity, these games are leagues – and years – apart, but their initial impact is the same, bound up in the moment, an encounter that whilst codifiable loses its essential essence in translation but is still present (kairos) nonetheless.

2.3 The Sublime of Dennis, Baillie and Gerard The work of John Dennis in the early eighteenth century can be understood as a bridge between much earlier work on the sublime and the move towards understanding the sublime in aesthetic terms through ‘beauty, novelty, ugliness and the picturesque’ (Brady, 2013, p. 11). The increasing interest in the sublime at this time stems in no small part from Nicolas Boileau’s translation of On Sublimity in 1694, and Dennis (1996) frames his discussion of the sublime in relation to poetry, echoing Longinus, though he argues that ‘neither ancient nor modern critics have defined poetry’ (p. 32). He sets out his stall early in claiming poetry is a pale imitation of nature, and this shift to considering the power of nature is typical of the period more broadly speaking. Despite this comparatively lowly status, as an art form poetry can inspire ‘passions’ and ‘enthusiasms’ in the reader, which we might understand as a proxy description of the sublime. The use of the

3

Possibilities including being attacked by oddly cuboid eagles and crashing a speedboat through a pixelated version of the Rialto Bridge in Venice to name a few.

20    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime word ‘passion’ also implies the divine, as in Longinus’ exaltation of the Book of Genesis, and Dennis details how if the ‘chief excellence in the body of poetry’ is the invocation of passion, then ‘sacred objects, are more susceptible of passion, than profane ones’ (p. 33). The common passion, as Dennis (1996) calls it, is terror or fear. He frames this as ‘things then that are powerful, and likely to hurt’ (p. 36). In suggesting terror, Dennis is connecting the sublime again with the immensity of the divine, but also setting the groundwork for other scholars during the period who similarly highlight fear as a primary element of the sublime. In relation to video games, fear and terror are routine components developers use to engender affective responses from players – Thomas Grip, one of the developers of the survival horror game SOMA, explains how you want ‘to set a mood where the player fills […] gaps with various horrifying things. You […] want the player to feel vulnerable’ (Marks, 2017). This aspect of the sublime will be explored in considerable detail in Chapter 7. Dennis’ (1996) list of those things that inspire common passion – that is those things that come closer to ‘everything that is terrible in religion [as] the most terrible thing in the world’ (p. 38) – is both extensive and interesting, and worth quoting at length as it offers an insight into the concerns present at the time. It also underscores many of the thematic and character-driven facets of contemporary video game design.4 His list of things ‘producing this enthusiastic terror’ include: Gods, daemons, hell, spirits and souls of men, miracles, prodigies, enchantments, witchcrafts, thunder, tempests, raging seas, inundations, torrents, earthquakes, volcanoes, monsters, serpents, lions, tigers, fire, war, pestilence, famine &c. (p. 38) In this list we see a juxtaposition between humans and deities, and a parallel between the natural world and supernatural: the passions these evoke, as Brady (2013) argues, is a mixture of both joy and terror, again echoing the nonpresentable seen in Longinus, that the sublime is neither positive or negative in isolation (though this is challenged later by Burke). A crucial shift between Dennis’s position in the early eighteenth century and Burke in the mid-to-late takes place in the work of Baillie and Gerard. Yes, there remains the impact of nature as a crucial determinant of the sublime, but Baillie (1996, pp. 88–89) also includes uniformity ‘as that which thus raises the mind to fits of greatness’ and unfamiliarity. Whilst these two aspects seem oppositional at first, and not necessarily related to the natural world, they also emphasise the complexity of sublime experience. Baillie explains how if you take the example of the sky as a ‘vast and uniform heaven’ where there is nothing to ‘limit the imagination’ (p. 90) it is possible to view the sublime both as a repetitive uniformity (we see the sky routinely) and unpredictability (no sunrise or sunset

4

I am not for a moment suggesting video game design is inspired by Dennis, merely the similarities suggest that concerns around the terror inspired by sublime objects and experiences are persistent over time, albeit through different media.

The Classical Sublime    21 is every the same). This underlines the challenges in typifying the sublime as one thing, but also introduces new ways of thinking. Baillie develops the representational away from poetry towards painting as well – having dismissed architecture en route – explaining how landscape painting might ‘likewise partake of the sublime; such as representing mountains’ (p. 99). Nature inspires sublime experience, and the representational ‘shall fill the mind with nearly as great an idea as the mountain itself ’ (p. 99). This demonstrates a key move away from the stylistic rules of Longinus towards a broader range of aesthetic dimensions. Gerard (1996, p. 168) echoes Baillie’s expanded representational repertoire, using the idea of ‘association’ to explain how paintings and architecture can evoke the sublime by replicating or representing aspects of the natural world – the Pyramids, for example, have a comparable magnitude to a mountain. Magnitude, for Gerard, is a vital component of the sublime, but the idea of scale is also allied to that of beauty, a defining feature that can contrast the sublime. Nicolson (1997) argues that prior to Gerard, Dennis had already made the connection between magnitude and beauty in his journal entries on the Alps, where he contrasts hills and valleys (the beautiful), with the horrors of the mountains (the sublime), but Gerard (1996) extends this directly: ‘it is not on a little hill […] that we bestow the epithet sublime [original italics] but on the Alps, the Nile, the ocean, the wide expanse of heaven’ (p. 168). Dennis, Baillie and Gerard, in their development of the sublime, open several avenues for enquiry in relation to video games: how might representations of vast or magnificent spaces affect gamers? How might the uniformity of play provoke transcendent experiences? How can beauty and the sublime be conceptualised and understood in an interactive environment? By broadening the conceptual framing of the sublime to include representations, understanding video games in this context is further strengthened, though the increasing complexity of the sublime (a fivefold typology in Longinus; the divine, natural and supernatural in Dennis; representation is Baillie and magnitude in Gerard) of course makes contemporary analysis similarly convoluted. Doran positions Burke as both one of the preeminent thinkers on the sublime as well as a founding father of modern aesthetics. It is Burke (in Doran, 2015, p. 141) who bridged the gap between ‘the empiricism of early eighteenth-century criticism […] and the development of philosophical aesthetics in Germany’ (p. 141), in relation to Kant amongst others. The second edition of Burke’s landmark work A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful was published shortly after Gerard’s Essay on taste (both 1759) and was the first extended study to compare and contrast the sublime and the beautiful. In a simplistic sense, this distinction is immediately useful for the study of video games in allowing us to distinguish between games that look attractive in terms of graphical fidelity (see Chapter 6) and games that have a tangible – but hardto-define – impact on players. Where Dennis, Baillie and Gerard had one foot in the Longinian tradition of representation through text like poetry, and one in other forms of representational media like painting, it is Burke who achieves a final step away from the

22    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime sublime as wedded to rhetorical arts towards the sublime as a broader aesthetic category.5 Still, his initial delineation between the beautiful and sublime has clear parallels with both Baillie and Gerard with regard to issues of magnitude contrasting with delicacy: Sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small; beauty should be smooth, and polished; the great, rugged and negligent; beauty should shun the right line, yet deviate from it insensibly; the great in many cases loves the right line, and when it deviates, it often makes a strong deviation; beauty should not be obscure; the great ought to be dark and gloomy. (Gerard, 1996, p. 140) In drawing these distinctions, Burke is demarcating the sublime and beautiful as their own categorical entities: he situates the former as originating in experiences of pain (the dark, the rugged) and the latter in pleasure (small and smooth). The inability to fully codify these experiences chimes with Bentham’s (1780) later work on the hedonistic calculus and the difficulties of fully articulating that which causes pleasure or pain. Further to this, Burke’s discussion of the passions caused by the sublime are rooted, like Dennis, in the power of fear. He details how the terrible – including various objects and that which ‘operates in a manner analogous to terror’ – is where the sublime is located (Burke, 1996, p. 131) and that the sublime operates to modify power in some sense: a sublime experience is greater than a beautiful one by virtue of the impact that terror has on a person. A pleasurable experience requires little effort on behalf of the ‘neutral character’, whereas pain ‘is always inflicted by a power in some way superior, because we never submit to pain willingly’ (p. 137). This is a marked shift away from earlier approaches, relegating the more bucolic sublime in favour of danger and fear (Brady, 2013). The sublime then is an experience imposed by some powerful state or action beyond the individual’s control. This relates to the introduction of ‘obscurity’ by Burke: as Brady (2013) argues, the move away from clarity foregrounds ‘darkness, uncertainty [and] confusion, as […] sublime because they challenge our ability to form clear ideas’ (p. 25) and, as a result, prevent us from controlling and managing them. What on the face of it seems like a binary distinction between great and small is questioned both by the notion of obscurity, but also the modification of power itself. If we are unable to control something, it has power over us, with Burke suggesting scales of power (and, therefore, gradients of sublime affect we

5

Although he does still use the term ‘astonishment’ (ekplêxis) to describe the effect of the ‘great and sublime in nature’ (Burke, 1996, p.132) as well as talking about the sublime experience of words in poetry.

The Classical Sublime    23 can experience). For example, he describes the ox as having vast strength, but also innocence, which prevents a person having a visceral, terrified response. A bull on the other hand combines that strength with a destructive temperament, making it more likely to evoke fear. Better yet are those animals which roam ‘the gloomy forest […] the howling wilderness’ (Burke, 1996, p. 138), like lions and rhinos – their freedom and ferocity are, in essence, uncontrollable and from this our sublime fear stems. In Chapter 7, taking this notion of scale, I will demonstrate how video games use fear and fear-inducing experience on a similar gradient or spectrum, from the immediacy of an encounter with something terrifying all the way through to representations of systemic horrors like war and genocide. We can also experience obscurity and horror when confronted by the infinite – or proxies of the infinite – in the shape of anything our mind is incapable of identifying the boundaries of: scale is again important here as our incapability can range from the vastness of outer space through to microscopic world of bacteria. Not only does this further demonstrate the importance of scale, or intensity, but it also shows the potential connection with the mathematical/ dynamical sublime of Kant which I will come to in the next section. Towards an understanding of video games, these approaches point to the idea that sublime experiences can be located across different scales, from the known galaxy in Elite Dangerous (Frontier Developments, 2014) and the procedural universe of No Man’s Sky (Hello Games, 2016), through the claustrophobic underwater city of Rapture in Bioshock (2k Boston, 2007), to hunkering down in a temporary log shelter in The Forest (Endnight Games, 2008) praying that you survive the night.6 Lastly, as Shaw highlights, Burke’s reading of the sublime is not entirely coherent, poised as it is between the power of physical things – environments, animals – and the impact of language (a holdover from the Longinian tradition): although Shaw (2007) does not explicitly state that sublimity is an effect of language ‘his argument seems constantly to be on the verge of declaring this possibility’ (p. 49). This makes sense given the positioning of the work between empiricism and aesthetics. Burke’s theory repositions the sublime effect of an object and the description of the object in such a way as the two become indistinguishable. In Part Five, Section Seven, Burke (1996) explains how we might assume that words – as representational signifiers for a sign – have relatively little impact on us in terms of sublime experience but contrary to this ‘we find by experience that eloquence and poetry are as capable, nay indeed much more capable of making deep and lively impressions […] than nature itself in very many cases’ (p. 141). This is the result of the power of combinations, that words can be arranged in such a multitude of ways that they can ‘give new life and force to the simple object’ (p. 141).

6

If the cannibals don’t get you, the crippling hunger will finish you off: the game features, in the bottom hand corner of the screen, a gradually depleting stomach that flashes red as your hunger/thirst increases.

24    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime In the context of video games, this insight is particularly important because firstly it solidifies the relationship between sublime experience and texts, and secondly it shows how the representational – be it poetry or a game world – can command as much affect and impact as the thing itself: as Shaw (2007) states, ‘it is language, in other words, that brings about the transformation of the world, enabling us to hymn the vastness of the cathedral or the depths of the ravine’ (p. 6). In summary Burke’s theory of the sublime offers a clear distinction between the sublime and beautiful rooted in the pain/pleasure dichotomy, it introduces the significance of scale in engendering sublime affects (both large and small), and details how power, obscurity and a loss of control inspires terror and fear (considered the greatest sublime experience). His theory also shows significant engagement, beyond Baillie’s initial work on representation, with how representation can transcend the beautiful towards the sublime object. It is this connection between objects and experience that remains the central conundrum that Kant attempts to unpick in his analytic of the sublime.

2.4 The Mathematical, Dynamical and Aesthetically Sublime Before considering Kant’s work on sublimity, there are a few issues to raise. Firstly, Kant’s contribution to the sublime is enormous, and casts a long shadow over almost all subsequent theories of the sublime including everything from the importance of ethics and moral psychology in his work (Merritt, 2018) to his role in the development of aesthetics (Crowther, 1989) alongside the work of JeanFrancois Lyotard who will be discussed in the next chapter. Secondly, despite the expansiveness of his writing, a significant proportion of analysis on Kant’s sublime is framed by his 1790 work Critique of the Power of Judgement whereas, as Doran (2015, p. 173) identifies Kant’s thinking on the sublime is varied and ranges across his whole career from Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime in 1764 (potentially in response to Burke, though this is subject to debate) up to Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View in 1798. My discussion of Kant is similarly selective owing to issues of space, but I think it is important to acknowledge that although I am focussing on specific aspects of Kant’s work, a nuanced understanding of his wider writings is more than beneficial (see Brady, 2013; Crowther, 1989; Doran, 2015 to name a few). As Shaw tells us, although many scholars have rubbished the connections between German idealist philosophy and British traditions of the sublime in poetry and painting, the overlaps are in some cases quite striking: Kant’s work can therefore be understood as a route away from the issues presented in Baillie and Burke (identity, mental states and sublime objects) (Shaw, 2007) towards an analytic of the sublime that understands magnitude and power in relation to what Kant terms mathematical and dynamical sublimity. Odd to put this at the beginning, but I intend to end this section by considering Crowther’s (1989) approach to recast Kant’s work as an aesthetic sublime. This is of particular significance to video games as it roots the magnitude and power of sublime experience in artefacts, thereby reinforcing to some extent

The Classical Sublime    25 the confusion found in Burke; given Kant’s debates on the value of the natural, artefacts might seem like a minor aspect of his theory, but I’m introducing this now as it could also be argued that these ideas unify his early aesthetic thought on the sublime and beautiful with the moral philosophy and transcendental approaches in his later work. It is worth knowing that I am working towards this as for this book the connection between an artefact and a mental or affective state, on a conceptual level, is vital to understanding if and how sublime experiences relate to contemporary interactive media. Kant’s sublime seeks to move beyond the immensity of nature found in earlier eighteenth century philosophy by forwarding the mind as the locus of the sublime: that is not to say that nature has no role, but rather the effect of sublime experience is to foreground the mind as superior through a seemingly paradoxical process that can be typified as mathematical or dynamical. The mathematical sublime can be thought of as an experience of an object in relation to its magnitude, differentiated between the ‘simply great’ and the ‘absolutely great’. The simply great implies a judgement in comparison with other objects – this mountain is great because it is bigger than that mountain – whereas the absolutely great challenges our ability to reason through ‘…a presentation that makes us aware of its own inadequacy and hence also of its subjective unpurposiveness for the power of judgment in its estimation of magnitude’ (Kant, 2008, p. 109). One thing worthy of note in the expanded discussion of the mathematical sublime: Kant initially suggests that the sublime is not possible in art because art is produced by people and therefore delimited as ‘both the form and the magnitude are determined by a human purpose’ (p. 109).7 In essence, mathematical sublimity appears at the sweet spot between ‘the logical estimation of magnitude [which] knows no limits’ (Merritt, 2018, p. 26) and an aesthetic judgement which does. Doran (2015) condenses this in explaining that ‘the judgment of absolute greatness, of the sublime, is simply the chasm between reason’s impossible demand and the inadequacy of the sensible presentation (the imagination) that occasions it’ (p. 229). The paradox here is that if a mathematically sublime experience of the absolutely great transcends the imagination, how is the mind forwarded as the crucial determinate in the process? A concurrent process is that because of an inadequate imaginative response, we are alerted to the ‘supersensible’ nature of our reason – we are forced from the tangible encounter with the sublime object towards the space of ideas – whereby our ability to conceive of this inadequacy in comprehension highlights our own ability to be superior to the object itself. The mind is therefore of paramount importance, though Kant notes as well that there is still a level of subjectivity to contend with.

7

I will return to this in relation to an aesthetic sublimity later – it is one of many paradoxes presented by Kant which have resulted in contention around his original meaning. Here what is meant seems relatively stark, but this is later contradicted in relation to the Temple of Isis which Kant describes as the most sublime thought ever expressed.

26    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime The dynamical sublime differs from the mathematical with a focus not on magnitude but on power. Kant reflects on another paradox, of being fearful of a thing whilst simultaneously being in a position of safety – the ferocity of an unknown and potentially infinite universe, considered from the relative safety of the Earth, for example. Kant (2008) likens this experience thus: We can […] consider an object fearful without being afraid of it, namely, if we judge it in such a way that we merely think of the case where we might possibly want to put up resistance against it, and that any resistance would in that case be utterly futile. (pp. 119–120) Kant underscores this in the context of some natural phenomena – threatening rocks, lightening, volcanoes – explaining how in the face of such a threat, our ability to resist is tested. But, he argues, the sight of them becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, provided we are in a safe place. And we like to call these objects sublime because they raise the soul’s fortitude above its usual middle range and allow us to discover in ourselves an ability to resist which is of a quite different kind, […] that we could be a match for nature’s seeming omnipotence. (p. 120) This fear-within-safety parallels Burke, with both the focus on the sublime as terrifying/terrible as well as the relationship between pleasure and pain. Shaw (2007) considers this as follows: ‘a sublime object might be terrifying, but the fact that I derive pleasure in the contemplation of this object and not pain suggests that my feeling is radically subjective’ (pp. 79–80). Here again is the foregrounding of the primacy of the mind in sublime experience. The dynamical sublime can be exciting or scary precisely because it is experienced at a distance: we are simultaneously afraid, but are able to contextualise our weakness not as something intrinsic in the object but rather something that resides within the mind. These perspectives, on the face of it, present questions for the study of video games: video games are aesthetic objects designed by people, so their ability to afford sublime experience is potentially restricted by human purpose. Absolute magnitude seems unlikely in an environment that has been produced by teams of designers before being play-tested and released for the gaming public to buy. But then Kant also details how subjective experience has a crucial role to play in whether or not an experience of magnitude or power is sublime: one approach, as Crowther (1989) suggests, is to explore the significance of subjectivity in sublime experience through our relationship with artefacts. A focus on artefacts, given Kant’s earlier assertion, might seem forlorn but as Doran contends, just because in his critical philosophies Kant is ‘unable to focus on the question of the sublimity in artifacts [sic.], this does not thereby mean that he thought the topic unworthy of study’ particularly given that ‘art

The Classical Sublime    27 provides the model for the noncognitive experience of nature’ (Doran, 2015, p. 260). How might artefacts be reconciled within Kant’s analytical sublime? Both Doran and Crowther suggest that the development of an aesthetic sublime is the answer, with the former characterising this as ‘illustrative images of sublimity or pseudo-sublimity, drawn from life or artistic examples’ (p. 266). Even in this scant description the potential parallels with video games is clear: video games are an illustrative example of an interactive medium that may facilitate sublime experience as well as represent responses to sublime experiences. It is also possible to identify similar angles in Kant’s work, where he presents some examples of sublime experiences in relation to artefacts. Crowther (1989) collects these into discussions of architecture, painting, plays and other forms of text (inscription for instance) (pp. 158–162). Kant considers visiting St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, where looking upon the building evokes perplexity and bewilderment in the spectator (Kant, 2008, p. 108). Crowther (1989, p. 153) describes this as ‘a work of artifice […] so perceptually overwhelming as to transcend our sense of its human origin, and serve simply to make vivid the scope of our capacity for rational cognition’. Alongside the sublime in architecture, painting achieves similar aims, with Crowther using the famous example of Van Gogh’s Still Life of Old Peasant’s Shoes: they may look tatty, but as Heidegger (2008) attests, they actually represent the immensity of individual human suffering embodied in a representative artefact, a horror made palatable when observed at a distance, a fear-within-safety. The aesthetic sublime also involves the power of the artefact in relation to universal truth and subjective emotional experience. Certain artistic works can have immense emotional impact for some on a personal level, and not so much for others, such that the experience transcends rationalisation. Crowther uses the example of the Shakespearian tragedy King Lear where a ‘universal truth’ (that fallibility accompanies old age) is exemplified and embodied through a powerful representation of this truth such that the ‘play has more of an affective impact on the individual than the truth itself’ (Crowther 1989, p. 159). Finally, with regard to rhetoric (that Longinian classic) we can return to Kant’s description of the Temple of Isis: he states that there has never been a more sublime utterance, or a thought more sublimely expressed, than the inscription at the temple which reads ‘I am all that is, and that was, and that ever shall be’ (Kant, 2008, p. 185). This text, on a Roman building dedicated to an Egyptian god in Pompeii, suggests something so totalising that it is impossible for reason to comprehend its magnitude. More importantly for my purpose is how this aesthetic sublime will work in relation to video games? As Crowther has done, a few examples might serve to illustrate the ways in which the mathematical and dynamical sublime might be encountered, given that artefacts can engender sublime affects according to Kant’s aesthetic sublime. In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda, 2011), the titular region of Tamriel has at its centre a mountain, the Throat of the World. According to the developer’s Games Creation Kit, the mountain is 7,000 steps high and home to the Order of the Voice, helmed by a contemplative dragon called Paarthurnax. From the pinnacle of the mountain, the whole of the province stretches out before the

28    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime gamer, the Nord city of Whiterun reduced to a vague rendering of pin-prick buildings in the draw-distance. It is not the game world itself that is sublime, but rather the inability of the player, from their avatar’s perspective, to fully reconcile and incorporate the space that surrounds them. In a philosophical sense, the mind’s attempt to rationalise this immensity is met with failure. This sort of experience will be explored in more detail in Chapter 6. In the first Silent Hill game (Team Silent, 1999) – a high point for the survival horror genre which I will return to in Chapter 7 – a terrifying game world is achieved through the combination of complimentary design approaches, including character types, environmental effects such as the perpetual fog that shrouds the former mining town (we’ll ignore that this was done largely because of problems with hardware capabilities on the PS1), sound effects and, most crucial of all, a fixed third-person camera that restricts what the player can see. This limited viewpoint increases the fear you feel interacting with the game space, never truly knowing what unseen horror was shambling towards you through the mist or lurking unseen around the corner. If the game invoked this kind of fear, why play it? The dynamical sublime and the idea of fear-withinsafety might explain this, as the experience is mediated through the proxy of your avatar, Harry Mason, a man searching the mysterious town for his missing adopted daughter Cheryl. As a development of Baillie, Gerard and later Burke’s approaches to the sublime that were routinely rooted in the terror of uncontrollable nature, Kant’s mathematical, dynamical and aesthetic sublime forward a more individualistic, subjective understanding where the mind itself is the locus through which the sublime can located. Despite this apparent shift, what I think is noticeable in these approaches are the broad trends that underpin the development of the sublime up until the end of the eighteenth century. For Longinus in Antiquity looking at the power of oration and text, rhetoric is where the sublime is located. Different forms of representation, particularly painting and architecture, provide the more up-to-date forms of rhetoric in Baillie and Gerard’s work. In Dennis, and in Burke, we see how beauty and the sublime are differentiated through a sense of awe, the feeling that there is an uncontrollable something-else beyond us in scope and scale that threatens who we are and in doing so points to sublime encounters. In tandem with this, the impact of the natural world – both directly experienced and as represented in text and art – has inspired fear, not just in Dennis’ discussion of the supernatural, or Burke’s insistence that the sublime is painful, but also in Kant’s work on the mathematical and dynamical sublime. These three pillars – rhetoric, awe and fear – are the mainstays that underpin my empirical analysis in Chapters 5–7. Although I have not outlined it here, my intention is to pull these three interrelated notions together in a final chapter exploring what might be considered the ultimate sublime experience – death. I will use death as a prism to think through crucial aspects of video game interaction (with an emphasis on repetition and failure), drawing on key tenets of the philosophy of the sublime, to offer a substantive articulation of the value of a distinctly virtual sublime in understanding our present engagements with interactive entertainment.

The Classical Sublime    29 Elsewhere in this chapter, through some speculative readings of video games, I have started to sketch out some possibilities for how these ideas might be mapped on to artefacts, but before being able to synthesise these ideas (both conceptually and methodologically) into a virtual sublime, engaging with contemporary approaches to the sublime will need to be unpacked. In the next chapter that will involve a detailed look at the development of the sublime in the work of Lyotard and Deleuze in particular, as well as recent work on the techno and gamified sublime.

Chapter 3

The Contemporary Sublime 3.1 Introduction In this chapter, the focus will move to more contemporaneous work on sublimity: this often emerges in response to Kant in particular, with Jean-Francois Lyotard the primary focus of scholarship in the last 40 years or so. Lyotard frames much of his discussion through aesthetics, and the importance of painting in avantgarde art, as a way of understanding the sublime in a contemporary context. In tandem with this, the work of Gilles Deleuze on Francis Bacon offers a number of useful insights that can be carried forward. This shift to an increasingly postmodernist sublime is not without precedent as a number of academics frame recent engagement with the sublime in connection to the postmodern turn (see Gan, 2015; Johnson, 2012; Malpas, 2002; Zepke, 2017). Exploring these theorists will allow me to see how the sublime has been recast and, crucially for the opening claim in the previous chapter, whether or not the sublime can be salvaged as a way of thinking through encounters with video games: theories around the technosublime (Fedorova, 2017) and the gamified sublime (Encheva, 2017) will also be considered as stepping-off points for this in closing the chapter.

3.2 Lyotard’s Lessons on the Sublime Jean-Francois Lyotard (1994) offers a sustained investigation into the sublime which combines a close reading of Kant’s work – to be found in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime – with how we might conceptualise the sublime in relation to contemporary art, particularly avant-garde art such as that of Barnett Newman (who features in detail in The Inhuman) (Lyotard, 1991). Understanding Lyotard’s reading of the sublime is useful for several reasons: firstly because it situates the experience of the sublime as a form of immediacy, an affective event that cannot be retrospectively rationalised whereby the mind attempts to present the unpresentable; secondly it demonstrates, along with the writing of Deleuze, how aesthetics and approaches to representation can be sublime, further supporting my central contention that video games are a medium through which affective experiences are possible. Gaming and the Virtual Sublime: Rhetoric, Awe, Fear, and Death in Contemporary Video Games, 31–42 Copyright © 2020 by Matthew Spokes Published under an exclusive license by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved doi:10.1108/978-1-83867-431-120201006

32    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime Lyotard’s contribution can be simplistically reduced to a historically contingent debate framed by the schism between old and new – modern and postmodern – read through the work of a number of avant-garde artists, but that would be a considerable disservice to a sustained argument that not only engages deeply with Kant but also pushes the sublime in new and practical directions. Lyotard’s discussion of Newman is an important starting point, demonstrating as it does the connection between aesthetic/artistic representation – or indeed the destabilising of representation – and the affective experience of the sublime. Newman (1948) himself wrote extensively on the sublime, alongside producing art that typically consisting of blocks of colour separated by vertical lines, and his essay for Tiger’s Eye titled The Sublime is Now, is the clearest evocation of his argument. In the article he advocates for a break from the restrictive conditions of formalised European art conventions towards a more emotive – and ‘real’ – art. He explains that ‘instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or “life,” we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings’ (Newman, 1948). Lyotard (1991) sees this enunciation as an important challenge to tradition, but one that also avoids throwing the baby out with the bath water. Although Newman ‘seeks sublimity in the here-and-now’ (p. 93), breaking with an idealised past and those techniques associated with romantic art, he does not reject its fundamental task, that of bearing pictorial or otherwise expressive witness to the inexpressible. The inexpressible does not reside in an over there, in another world, or another time, but in this: in that (something) happens. On a practical level how does this break from tradition operate? One indicative instance of Lyotard’s argument shows the differences in approach between Duchamp (hardly a traditionalist) and Newman: The two works are two ways of representing the anachronism of the gaze with regard to the event of stripping bare […] Duchamp organised the space of the Bride according to the principle of ‘not yet’ and that of the Etant Donnés according to that of ‘no longer’ […] Duchamp’s great pieces are a plastic gamble, an attempt to outwit the gaze (and the mind) because he is trying to give an analogical representation of how time outwits consciousness. (Lyotard, 1991, p. 79) This reflection on Duchamp forms a broader consideration of the power of contemporary avant-garde art to disrupt standardised representations of time and space: for Lyotard, even the disruption offered by Duchamp is still delimited by what it is trying to represent – the analogical representation – whereas the work of Newman, with its ‘dimensions, colours, lines’ (p. 80) instead offers no such allusions. The power of Newman’s art is that it cannot be reduced to linguistic description: it has to be experienced. He says that ‘it is not difficult to describe, but the description is as flat as a paraphrase’ (p. 80). Instead, attempts to reach

The Contemporary Sublime    33 description alert us to the inability to represent ‘so many expressions of a feeling’, a state that can only be conceptualised through the sublime. In Johnson’s (2012, p. 120) description of this process the vital mechanism of the sublime experience is the ‘presentation of the unpresentable’. In the presentation of the unpresentable, Lyotard (1993) is returning to a Kantian discussion of the genesis of sublime experience, and elsewhere he frames this in relation to the challenge of representing ‘the infinitely great, the infinitely powerful’ (p. 43) through objects which are unable to do so. In doing so, we see some clear callbacks to Kant in relation to magnitude in the mathematical sublime and power in the dynamical sublime, highlighted by the issue of the imagination’s inability to rationalise the limit/limitlessness of itself. As Johnson (2012) expounds, the sublime […] is the aesthetic manifestation of thought’s inexorable attraction to transcendental illusions: in sublime experience, thought tantalizes itself, as it were, with the possibility of discovering the absolute. (p. 120) Lyotard’s vital interjection within this semi-classical framework is to reassert the potency of art, not as somehow beneath the immensity of nature (and therefore subjugated in Kant’s work), but as a disruptive and revolutionary force. In challenging forms of representation, again returning to Newman, postmodern artists present possibilities ‘that differs from what appears permissible for thought and action in the present’ (Malpas, 2002, p. 200). The inability to codify the affective experience of being with the painting is indicative of art’s ability to engender the sublime. This immediacy and presence also speaks towards the sublime as an affective encounter, something I will explore in more depth in Chapter 4. Lyotard’s contribution to the sublime is useful in relation to video games in a number of ways. Firstly, video games can be considered a challenge to traditional forms of representation in that rather than offering a simple binary between creator and user (artist and public), these associations are problematised by the interactive element of engagement: users can themselves become creators in a ludic sense (see Cremin, 2012), though it is important to acknowledge the difficulty in framing this with regard to agency (Muriel and Crawford, 2020). Secondly video games, like art, offer spaces in which affective possibilities exist. This can include games that question particular genre conventions. Spec Ops: The Line (Yager Development, 2012) is a good example of this, where the conventions of a third-person shooter (good guys beating bad guys after lots of shooting) are actively disrupted by the developers (who reference films like Platoon and Full Metal Jacket) in presenting a narrative full of ambiguity and morally questionable actions which led reviewers at the time to describe the game as unpleasant (Gies, 2012). Likewise, games which challenge the gamer, through the prism of the avatar, in their understanding of their environment, actions and narratives taking place: the obvious example that springs to mind is the confusing and often upsetting journey the player takes in That Dragon, Cancer (Numinous Games, 2016), a game which explores one family’s experience of losing their son to cancer. Similarly, this can be seen in the unusual structures,

34    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime disappearing quests and town districts named after body parts in Pathologic (Ice-Pick Lodge, 2004) which lead the player on a peculiar and discombobulating ride through the sand-plague-riven ‘Town’ in an intentionally half-drawn Eastern Europe. By antagonising conventions of genre, design and gameplay, I would argue that video games represent a juncture for a new critical reading of the sublime, one predicated on the sorts of immediacy Lyotard outlines.

3.3 The Sublime Rhythms of Bacon in Deleuze Deleuze’s work on the sublime is complicated and stretches across much of his individual and collaborative writing with Felix Guattari. For the purposes of the present study, I am limiting my enquiry to an intentionally restricted outline of Deleuze’s initial reading of Kant – with a focus on a seminar given at St. Denis in early 1978 alongside his work on critical philosophy (Deleuze, 1978, 2008) – and the application of ideas of rhythm and chaos that stem from this, which find their most substantive discussion in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (Deleuze, 1981). This work is largely situated in respect to Deleuze’s ‘philosophy of difference’, and is important for this study of the sublime because of the way in which it challenges Kant’s overarching project of universal conditionality for the possibility of experience towards a subjective real experience of an individual in the here and now, thereby echoing Lyotard’s ‘now the sublime is like this’. A substantive application of these ideas will be undertaken in Chapter 8 in relation to repetition and death. Deleuze, like Lyotard, spends considerable time offering a close reading of Kant (2008). This can initially be seen in his presentation of comparative measurement, the way in which the mind begins to quantify magnitude before it is overwhelmed. Deleuze (1978) explains how this operates through the ‘apprehension of successive parts’: When I see a tree […] I begin with the top, then I go towards the bottom, or the other way round, and I say that this tree must be as big as ten men …. I choose a kind of sensible … and then, behind the tree, there is a mountain, and I say how big this mountain is, it must be ten trees tall. And then I look at the sun and I wonder how many mountains it is; I never stop changing the unit of measure according to my perceptions. My unit of measure must be in harmony with the thing to be measured. The sublime functions when this harmony is disrupted. Deleuze (2008, pp. 42–43) sees this as related to aesthetic judgements, explaining how this harks back to the beautiful/sublime distinction considered in the previous chapter where the sublime is engendered through the experience of the ‘formless or the deformed’ (akin to Kant’s distinction between magnitude and power). The formless, or the deformed, he describes as the imagination ‘confronted with its own limits, forced to strain to its utmost experience a violence which stretches it to the extremity of its power’ (p. 43) and, vitally, experiencing the sublime involves

The Contemporary Sublime    35 the limits/limitlessness of the imagination. The imagination is limitless providing it operates in relation to apprehension, the aforementioned ‘succession of parts’ that radiate out in a fractal sense through the process of comparison and, to an extent, expectation. If apprehension is not possible, if the imagination is unable to ‘reproduce the previous parts as it arrives at the succeeding ones [then] the imagination is confronted with its limit by something which goes beyond in all respects’ (p. 43). The imagination in this context is pushed to a violent extreme, and Deleuze recounts Kant in identifying the result of the imagination recoiling on itself. Conversely, there is a negative pleasure in this, where the imagination finds the inaccessible limit of itself, it makes the ‘very inaccessibility [of the supersensible] something which is present in sensible nature’ (p. 62): we become aware, through the process of pushing the imagination to the limit, the tangible nature of the infinite imagination. In the context of the affected individual Deleuze questions how understanding is possible. We do not exist in a perpetual state of sublime confusion (aping earlier theories of the sublime, he jokingly describes such a situation as ‘terrible’), so there has to be some sort of reclamation that grounds the individual. Through pushing the imagination to its limit, Deleuze (1978) says I can no longer reproduce parts, I can no longer recognize something […] it is the infinite as encompassing all of space, or the infinite as overturning all of space; if my synthesis of perception is suppressed, this is because my aesthetic comprehension is itself compromised, which is to say: instead of a rhythm, I find myself in chaos. Rhythm and chaos emerge as the key relationship-tension in experiential terms. Deleuze (2014) explores this initially in Difference and Repetition, which I will return to in Chapter 8, but given this chapter’s focus on artistic representation, the development of these ideas can also be found in Deleuze’s study of the work of Francis Bacon. Deleuze describes rhythm in the context of ‘the figure’, a painted form that appears in much of Bacon’s work. The figure contains certain features, but they are rendered in such a way that they become more of a surface for sensation and response rather than explicitly figurative in a traditional sense (Deleuze, 1981, pp. 31–33). The process of producing the figure, Deleuze argues, requires Bacon to transform material conditions (paint) into this surface for sensation, which is achieved through rhythm. Painting the figure ‘is possible only if the sensation of a particular domain (here, the visual sensation) is in direct contact with a virtual power that exceeds every domain and traverses them all. This power is Rhythm, which is more profound than vision, hearing…’ (p. 37), but nonetheless involves recognisable production. Rhythm can also be understood in relation to chaos, in the sense that it both sits above a chaotic maelstrom as a domain of sensation, but also enters into a system of cyclical (re)production, whereby rhythm comes from chaos and returns to it; this is the essence of the experience of the sublime (using Deleuze’s earlier description of the process).

36    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime Famously, this sensational experiencing, a chaotic sensing, is funnelled through the concept of the ‘body without organs’, where the organisational structures that make up an organism are absent. In Bacon’s work, perpetual churn is achieved through the ‘catastrophe’ (p. 83) of diagrammatic painting, where the artist intentionally derails organisational structures (art-historical framing perhaps, or the unconscious repetitions of form causes by the familiarity of the hand holding brush). Doing so facilitates the formless, or deformed. The cycle sees rhythm attempt to rearticulate form, making things again recognisable. Chaos then seeks to unfurl this formalising and the cycle begins again. The process implies that rhythm will ultimately succeed – else we would exist in the perpetual state of the sublime Deleuze fears – but it does so in a changed form, where a transformation of some sort has taken place: not simply a return but a return with change. Similar to Lyotard, the sublime has revolutionary potential, a positive outcome from the initial negative disassociation. In Deleuze’s (1978) seminar on Kant there are further artistic examples which underscore these ideas further in parallel with Bacon. Bacon is a painter who has the ability transform materials which challenge representation through the rendering of sensation. In the Kant seminar, Deleuze closes by thinking through chaos in the work of two Pauls: Klee and Cézanne. For Klee, Deleuze uses the ‘grey point’ discussed in Klee’s notebooks, stating that it has ‘the double function of being both chaos and at the same time a rhythm in so far as it dynamically jumps over itself’. With Cézanne, landscapes fold in and collapse on themselves, painted forms shimmer with ‘iridescent chaos’. The aesthetic in the shape(s) of painting, and the artists ability to transcend materiality by questioning familiar forms, by antagonising the imagination and facilitating sublime experience. It does so rather than impeding it. Art is productive through the ways in which the immediacy of our response to it challenges our ability to rationalise and understand the succession of parts. Okay, fine, you might say: but how does this relate to gaming? Firstly, on a procedural level, this conceptual approach argues that representations exist in multiple states at once. This can be seen in a seemingly ordered, programmed state (the game as designed) that can easily break down as a result of the tumult beneath (glitches in gameplay from something as mundane as a framerate drop all the way down to literally falling out of the game world itself as I will discuss in Chapter 6). Rhythm and chaos are routinely evoked through cyclical processes of dissension, and rearticulation. How this process manifests itself in terms of the relationship between games and gamers is both crucial to understanding the sublime with regardless to interactive entertainment, but also to identifying the limits or limitlessness of the media. Secondly, building on the first point, we can see how the subjective sublime experience of gamers – through their interactions with games – operates in a similar way to the figure-without-figuration in Bacon. In terms of limits/limitlessness, this might include video games that purposefully disrupt (or deform) expectations of genre, play styles, spatial representations, types of interaction. The opportunities afforded by the medium, and the ways in which developers both establish and disarticulate the form of the game, shows parallels with the sorts of artist Deleuze extols.

The Contemporary Sublime    37 Thirdly, in framing his reading of Kant in relation to aesthetics and particularly the work of nineteenth and twentieth centuries painters, we again see – as we have in Lyotard – a return to valuing artistic representations as sublime (which in a way brings the concept full circle to Longinus in the way that representational forms in texts can be transcendent). Video games, as a unique interactive representation/simulation that require direct haptic input and feedback from gamers, is therefore not only allied to art – as argued in Chapter 1 – but may also offer a sublime experience that needs thinking through in relation to the sensational world in the BwO: this is something that simultaneously justifies the development of a virtual sublime, but also sets out a challenge to codification: what is the revolutionary potential of this new form of sublimity if any? What might new forms of technology such as the development of VR afford us in challenging our imagination? Following this overview of Lyotard and Deleuze – whom I will return to in the analysis chapters later in the book – I want to close the chapter by looking at two very contemporary applications of the sublime, ones that focus on the concept in relation to technology and gamification.

3.4 The Techno-Sublime In this section, I want to focus on two congruent areas of the sublime, both of which feed on from Lyotard’s – and to an extent Deleuze’s – ideas around the sublime as a form of rupture, which he famously calls the ‘differend’. In the first instance, the technological sublime (Fedorova, 2017) offers a way of considering technology as pushing at the material/immaterial distinction I’ve previously discussed in Lyotard, and Deleuze in the context of Bacon’s painting. For example, the juncture between a material object and our ability to cognise the immateriality of it, such as related gestures or shifting sound palettes, is exemplified in technological developments that challenge the position of the self in respect of objects. Virtual reality, in a representational sense, actively disrupts the distinction between the self and the avatar in a virtual space by dematerialising the individual – yet the individual is still responsive in the space through the haptic feedback of a controller, gloves or other device that assist in navigating the world. Secondly, the gamified sublime takes the idea of gamification – which has come to mean the application of the logic of games to non-game contexts (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, & Nacke, 2011) – as a way of understanding the Kantian approach to the sublime as the overwhelming of rationality and fearat-a-distance. Subsequently it has been suggested that the sublime can be read in tandem with the concept of ‘flow’, which is defined as ‘when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 2008, p. 3). The parallels with the sublime seem obvious on the surface, but in addition to that the significance of voluntarism not only implies agentic choice (a fundamental tenet of interaction with video games), but also the possibility of repetition, that the sublime can be transcendent and also actively reproducible in attempts to push towards the limits of difficulty: the work of Encheva (2017) will be outlined in this regard.

38    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime The technological sublime can be understood as a stopping point in a continuity of approaches to the concept which started in Antiquity (through rhetoric), moved on to the more naturalistic sublime of the eighteenth century, before arriving in the nineteenth century as a sort of ‘industrial sublime’. Indeed, the first use of the ‘technological sublime’ can be found in Perry Miller’s (1961) work on the United States in the nineteenth century, specifically how the veneration of machines pointed towards the American psyche being more geared up to practice rather than theory. Machines, as tangible, physical objects, were able to instil awe and might be understood as sublime because of the ways in which the mind encounters the enormity of the achievement of human endeavour: Marx (2000) subsequently extends this notion in the context of the building of the railroad, where technology transcends nature by making even the remotest spaces – the literal frontier – accessible. Technology and human progress are indistinguishable in this reading of history, testing the material/immaterial duality previously seen in Lyotard and Deleuze. Later developments, notably Nye’s (2006) discussion of the technological sublime, focus more on the immaterial, casting industrialisation and technological advancements as reflective of the projection of an American mindset, a way of distinguishing and conceptualising the maelstrom of American life by standing back and observing the interplay of these features at a distance (perhaps without the fear we see in Kant). Recently, Fedorova (2017) has developed a number of useful standpoints on the ‘techno-sublime’, the name-tweak suggestive of a slight move away from the historical ‘technological’. To start with, Fedorova is keen to highlight that the techno-sublime is not limited by an application to modern technology – whilst contemporary technologies might offer important insights, the concept is better understood as ‘an independent phenomena that has to do with the inherent potential of a thing and the possibility of its actualization’ (p. 144). The origins of this can be found way back in Antiquity, specifically Longinus’ understanding of techne, the combination of a person or soul’s ability to think beyond itself and certain rhetorical techniques or tropes that can engender this. Techne, Fedorova explains, is part of poiesis, and fulfils the function of moving representations (mimesis) towards logos, or universal order. A companion to this can be seen in Aristotelian thought which also frames techne as the process of moving something from non-existence to existence. For Fedorova this is not about naturally occurring phenomena, but rather the ways in which humans ‘manipulate the laws of nature and create objects with a generative potential capable of bringing something from non-being into being’ (p. 144). She stresses that this should not be confused with art because techno-sublime objects are not fixed: based on the range of earlier arguments I have covered, it is unsurprising to say that this interpretation of art is not something that I agree with, particularly as much of the rest of Fedorova’s argument about an object’s ability to reproduce itself (autopoiesis) is an extended riff on Lyotard’s ‘novatio’ in avant-garde art. Given that video games operate in an interstitial zone between artistic representation, agentic ‘possibility space’ (Salen and Zimmerman, 2004), and generative virtual worlds, elements of art and technology are intrinsically problematised by this form of interactive media, again pointing towards the value of a virtual sublime.

The Contemporary Sublime    39 Despite this disagreement on Fedorova’s positioning of art, her later discussion on the role of digital technologies is eminently applicable to video games in productive ways that continue to prod at the sublime as a vital locus of enquiry. She talks about how information technologies (particularly those that offer augmentation of the senses in some way, like biofeedback) ‘radically alter the way we perceive ourselves and the world’ (p. 146). Video games, in a multitude of ways – narratively, spatially, graphically – have the power to shift and antagonise our sense of self and, as such, appear to conform to Fedorova’s reading of digital media (pp. 147–148). Using this reading, I am therefore situating the video game in the ‘[…] form of an interface, making presentable – visible/readable/ interpretable – the highly complex inner workings of machines’, where the visible/readable/interpretable becomes interactive, and responsive as we enter in to a relationship with the object. This interactivity is doubly significant given ‘an interface also serves as a meeting point between two types of symbolic order – the one that makes sense for humans, and the one that works for machines’ (Fedorova, 2017, p. 148): in this context, the video game and the gamer are caught in a series of engagements and entanglements that push at the presentable, where the agency of the gamer is captured, rearticulated, recast through types of play, simulational possibilities, complex representations and the machinic interface. The practice of play and responsive affective experience (whether rationalised or sublime) gets to the heart of the concept of the technosublime and ‘its creative potential, [as] something that gets activated in the moment of sensible recognition of oneself through one’s own other’ (p. 146). A prime example of this, as I will return to throughout the book, is the challenging relationship between the gamer, the avatar as a proxy for the gamer, and the game world itself. The spaces and actions where our ability to reconcile these complex interconnections is tested is also where the virtual sublime is located.

3.5 The Gamified Sublime The gamified sublime, in Encheva’s (2017) work, looks to reconcile in part differing theories of the sublime that include Kant, Burke and Freud; this is achieved through the prism of Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of flow. The use of flow in the context of the sublime is not new however. Shinkle’s (2012) work on the digital sublime looks at the ways in which flow, alongside Ngai’s (2005) concept of stuplimity1 which I will return to in Chapter 8, can be used to understand our engagement with contemporary video games. Focussing on Chen’s 2008 game flower, Shinkle (2012, p. 7) describes flow as ‘a state of total physical and psychic immersion in a task’, operating in a sweet spot between identifiable goals,

1

Stuplimity can be thought of as the paralyzing effect of experiencing both shock and boredom simultaneously. Shinkle sees this as ‘an apt description of the player’s encounter with the game form’ (2012, p. 6), with Ngai (2005, p. 262) explaining that the experience ‘confront[s] us with the limitations of our capacity for responding in general’, so a sort of frozen to the spot moment.

40    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime challenge and the reduction of frustration (so anything that might remove the individual from the totalising experience). The key is to make tasks autotelic by balancing diminishing risk with the removal of self-consciousness, so the task becomes the primary focus. To return to Csikszentmihalyi, (2008) flow becomes a unifying experience that can be attained to such an extent that we potentially step ‘out of the boundaries of the ego and […] become part, at least temporarily, of a larger entity’ (p. 112). For Shinkle (2012), this hints at the sublime, except, she argues, for the challenges associated with ‘uninterrupted ludic activity in which the technology itself – software and interface – disappears into functionality, and in which the merger between player, interface, and game content appears seamless’ (p. 8). Seamlessness is a problem because for the sublime encounter to take place, a moment of rupture – Lyotard’s ‘immediacy’ – directly challenging the cognising self is required, and this is not possible where the self has essentially dissipated into the task itself. Encheva (2017) echoes this in her concise description of the sublime as ‘the experience of the subject at the limit’ (p. 139). The sublime does not simply refer to a sublime object, but rather is constituted by the relationship between perceiving subject and object (p. 131) and flow can be understood through the process of a perceiving subject moving from the overpowering experience of the sublime back to the empowering experience of being in control (p. 132). Whilst the sublime still occupies the sort of space discussed in classic approaches in Chapter 2, it is part of a process, one where the perceiving subject is eventually able – through the mastery of tasks, for example – to reconcile powerlessness and transform it into something they have control over. To an extent, this could be read in response to the Kantian fear-at-a-distance, as the eventual mastery over the magnitude of the unknown, the threat, is rearticulated: yes, there is something to be feared at a distance, but as a perceiving subject I am able to reflect on it from a far and, as such, achieve mastery over it. This also forwards the primacy of the mind over the object, to return to Kant’s mathematical sublime. In relation to games, Encheva outlines how games occupy a duality between the agency of the individual and the structural framing of the developer (here reading McGonigal). Video games offer ideal opportunities for gamers to develop mastery, responding agentically to the design choices of the developer. As the gamer moves closer to mastery, Csikszentmihalyi (2008) argues that a ‘loss of self-consciousness can lead to self-transcendence, to a feeling that the boundaries of hour being have been pushed forwards’ (p. 64). The simplified question here is again about the relationship between the perceiving subject (the gamer) and the object (the game) in terms of arguing that the former, through the transformative potential of experience, is of primary importance over the latter, despite the latter facilitating the transcendent experience. For both McGonigal and Csikszentmihalyi, the ultimate goal of flow is the promotion of happiness in the perceiving subject: tasks are enjoyable for their own sake in that moment, and whilst they challenge the self they ultimately end in recapitulation and empowerment having moved things forward. Happiness is quite different from the sort of rupture we see in Burke and Kant, so immediately appears at odds with traditional understandings of the sublime.

The Contemporary Sublime    41 However, if we think about flow as a process rather than the outcome, it can also be read as a point of rupture: where the achievement of optimal flow (the merging highlighted by Shinkle earlier) is an outcome of a process of attempted mastery. Reaching that point may involve complicated, difficult to reconcile experiences that could be considered sublime and achieving a state of happiness through flow does not preclude a process of unhappiness, fear or boredom as well. This understanding of flow, that there is the potential for sublime experience within the confines of processes that challenge the self, can be seen in video games in a number of ways. Allying this idea with the earlier discussion of Fedorova’s techno-sublime, the perceiving subject’s relationship with the interactive and machinic elements of gaming (the games themselves, the interface, the tangibility of the hardware, the control systems and the like) points towards opportunities for sublime experiences. This might include the dissolution of the self in relation to a seemingly unachievable task of great magnitude – for example, Isshin the Sword Saint in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (Sekiro) (FromSoftware, 2019) is so ‘obscenely hard’ (Coles, 2019) it can reduce players to tears (Alyska, 2019) – that is eventually mastered (so moving from pain to pleasure perhaps), or games that require such monumental investments of time to complete that working towards mastery becomes transcendent. A solid example of this is the action-RPG rogue-like The Binding of Isaac (McMillen, 2011) where players fight through a monster-filled – and procedurally generated – basement with the ultimate aim of defeating Issac’s mother. One reddit thread (Reddit, 2018a) discussing the game asks users what their total game time is, with the original poster – disposable_ sentience1 – claiming 2,653 hours (110 days in total) over Hex_Birds comparatively inconsequential 1,342 hours (56 days): they ask ‘is that weird? Do I have trouble letting go?’. To field test this idea of flow in processual terms, I will explore this in more detail in relation to specific examples (like those briefly highlighted above) in Chapter 8, considering both flow and stuplimity through ideas of failure, repetition and death. In this chapter I have highlighted, albeit highly selectively, some theoretical developments of the sublime in contemporary thought, alongside some applications of ideas around the sublime with regard to both technology and video gaming. It is worth mentioning that theories of the sublime are obviously considerably more voluminous than I have made out, but developing a tangible and workable understanding of the virtual sublime necessitates close, selective reading alongside empirical investigation (Chapters 5–8). Through this reading, I have identified a number of approaches and challenges to the classical understanding of the sublime I outlined in Chapter 2, notably the tension between the importance of the object – be that a painting or a video game – which challenges notions of creator/consumer, and the subject: this connection between the mind of the perceiving subject and role of the object will be crucial throughout as all of these perspectives consider the sublime as part of a relational process in response to an object, which not only reinforces the significance of the video game as a machinic but interactive entity (and indeed that gamer/player as a perceiving subject) but also gestures towards what the object does and what potentials it holds in response. The issue of representation is also vital – theories of the sublime from Antiquity

42    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime to today have used representation as a proxy for the sublime, and video games as an interactive representational/simulational medium might be understood as the next step in this development. In the next chapter, I will look at two interconnected concepts from which an operationalisation of the perceiving subject/object will be forwarded (with the necessary caveat that binary distinctions are not necessarily helpful)! In the first instance, the object (the video game and its associated feature and entanglements) will be explored through an interrogation of the ‘virtual’ – what does it mean when we say a video game is a virtual space of possibility, for example. An understanding and working definition of the virtual is of course vital to this project. Given the discussions in this chapter on sensation, immediacy and the embodied interconnection between people and machinic/computational elements (e.g. interfaces), a detailed discussion of ‘affect’ should facilitate a questioning of how subjects and objects relate, as well as how to actively operationalise the sublime in a measurable way (by which I mean the development of a conceptual toolbox for the virtual sublime, rather than actual, concrete measurement).

Chapter 4

The Affective and the Virtual 4.1 Introduction In this chapter, my intention is to combine a detailed ontological base focussing on affect and the virtual with an outline of how these ideas will be operationalised through an indicative methodological framework. As previously shown, the variety of relationships we have with video games, including their ability to engender responses in and from gamers, need to be understood in terms of interactivity and impact this has in terms of sublime experience. The much-debated concept of ‘affect’ appears to offer a level of mutuality – or at the very least, a way in – that chimes with the sort of perceiving, cognising subject/object connectivity I unpacked in Fedorova’s work (2017), or indeed the multiplicity of ways in which games act and interact with the people playing them. If it is theoretically possibly to trace the impact particular forms of experiential reality have on an individual, then this sets the groundwork for considering how sublimity can be reconceptualised in relation to the virtual. A thorough working definition of the virtual is also a necessity, both in deciding practical frames of reference, but also in thinking through how games operate as types of space: is the virtual any different from the physical, tangible realm of objects that inspired fear in John Dennis or wonderment in Longinus? Finally, and perhaps of most use in terms of sketching out associated processes that lead to experiences that can be considered sublime, I will end by detailing the specific methodological design I will use in the empirical chapters, cognisant of the importance of methods that sufficiently reflect the philosophical issues of affective experience in relation to the virtual whilst also allowing for interpretive analysis in response to case studies and examples from video games.

4.2 What is ‘Affect’? What impact do games have on gamers (and vice versa) and what conceptual tools do we have to think through a suitable answer to this question? If gamers are simply passive receptacles of interactive entertainment, then any argument suggesting games impact gamers is dead in the water. This argument is a bit Gaming and the Virtual Sublime: Rhetoric, Awe, Fear, and Death in Contemporary Video Games, 43–61 Copyright © 2020 by Matthew Spokes Published under an exclusive license by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved doi:10.1108/978-1-83867-431-120201007

44    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime of a straw man of course, but it gets us going: there is an unending stream of high quality, rigorous research that explores how games impact gamers, including contemporary political upheaval – Demirbag-Kaplan & Kaplan-Oz (2018) on the relationship between GTA V (Rockstar North, 2013) and the Gezi protests in Turkey – or the use of dystopian spaces as a lens on the critical failures of late-stage capitalism (Schulzke, 2014). Indeed my own work has considered how mortality in games provokes debate about the nature of existence (Spokes, 2018), how simulated violence can push gamers towards a countering pro-social stance in play (Denham and Spokes, 2018), and the ways in which stereotypical representation can have a demonstrable impact on perceptions of the Other in the context of international responses to terrorism (Spokes, 2019). In this section, to think through the impact games have on gamers, I want to talk a little bit about the concept of affect as a way of understanding both how and why games impact, influence and interact with gamers. The notion of interaction is especially interesting because I think a robust investigation into the sublime has to consider not just the gamer as a recipient, but the game as well: both are agentic in different ways, and both impact each other so cannot be taken as separate. As per approaches to the sublime that muddy the distinction between supposedly stable binaries like ‘subject’ and ‘object’, gamers and games need to be understood in tandem, and affect – as I will show – gets at how this interconnectivity functions. Using affect as a concept – once it has been sufficiently pulled around and reshaped – will also enable me to field-test the possibility of sublime encounters by considering the relative intensity of interconnections in relation to the four key areas of the sublime identified in Chapters 2 and 3: rhetoric, awe, fear and death. I want to start with some scene setting through an overview of extant psychological research as this is the arena in which affect is routinely spoken about and measured, but rarely do these psychological analyses begin with sufficient critical scrutiny of the initial concept. In analysing notable approaches to affect, it is possible to develop a nuanced application of how affect relates to video games, and how this concept might enable a way of understanding the sublime, given how Chapters 2 and 3 both highlighted the problems of attempting to codify this sort of transcendent, or transformative, experience. Initially then, the impact of video games on gamers – and indeed in the public imagination more broadly – is routinely framed by psychological research that claims to measure affect with regard to violence. This is an important place to start because it implies games have the ability to impact what gamers do away from the screen, that there is a causal relationship between virtual space and physical space. Video games are frequently linked with various real-world instances of violence (see e.g. Denham & Spokes, 2018) and regardless of the reliability of these connections – more on this in a moment – the fact that this narrative exists and is routinely cited by politicians as the root of anti-social and asocial forms of conduct (see Ducharme, 2018; Parkin, 2018 for commentaries on the Trump administration’s foray into this debate) suggests there is some

The Affective and the Virtual    45 connection between things people do in games and how this might relate to the world around them. The psychological research conducted in the area of affective behaviour and video games has often focussed on games contributing to violent behaviours. Famously, Anderson & Ford (1986) used an experimental model to assess how violent and moderately violent games impacted affective levels of aggression in participants, measured against a control group who played no games. This study kickstarted a wave of research on the impact of violence, echoing much of the concomitant work psychologists were conducting on film media and behaviour which proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s. Fast-forward to 2001, and Anderson and Bushman (2001) make the connection between the two types of media: they find that, in a meta-analysis of available research on video games and violence, there is a clear increase in aggressive behaviour in children and young adults. Subsequently, other studies find an affective relationship in terms of violent video games and ‘trait hostility’ towards others (Kirsh, Olczak & Mounts, 2005) and that both violent and non-violent video games have different impacts on levels of physical aggression in participants with high and low dispositional anger (Engelhardt, Bartholow & Saults, 2011). It is not for me to argue that there are a great many problems with lab-testing gaming habits but what is noticeable in each of these studies is the initial working presumption that video games do something to the gamer, something that can be speculated about and subsequently measured. The underpinning issue with the psychological studies outlined above is their passing familiarity with the concept of affect. In The Autonomy of Affect, Massumi (1995) identifies the following problem that neatly encapsulates the need for a better understanding of affect: Our entire vocabulary has derived from theories of signification that are still wedded to structure even across irreconcilable differences (the divorce proceedings of poststructuralism: terminable or interminable?). In the absence of an asignifying philosophy of affect, it is all too easy for received psychological categories to slip back in, undoing the considerable deconstructive work that has been effectively carried out by poststructuralism. (p. 88) The concern with not properly articulating a theory of affect is that we tend to rely on problematic categorisation and causality. For Massumi, affect can be understood as a response within media and literary theory to the failure of master narratives, particularly given the ways in which the information age in late capitalism errs towards the image as a primary datum. What does this mean exactly? Firstly, affect should not be confused with emotion – it ‘is most often used loosely as a synonym’ (p. 88) – which he describes as ‘qualified intensity’. Affect is something where qualification is not possible, but it still does something: Spinoza, Massumi tells us, offered a starting point for a definition in suggesting affect is

46    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime an ‘affection of (in other words an impingement upon) the body’ (p. 92). Affect relates to both intensity and experience and how these factors emerge. Massumi (p. 94) folds this into a Kantian imperative in understanding ‘the unclassifiable, the unassimilable, the never-yet felt, the felt for less than half a second, again for the first time’. Crucial in this definition is the nature of immediacy: Massumi is suggesting that affect differs from emotion in that emotion requires a certain amount of codification – a qualifying of intensity – whereas affect can only really happen in the moments before signification processes take place. Shouse (2005) similarly argues that affect can be considered ‘a non-conscious experience of intensity; it is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential’. He too locates this intensity in the Spinozan sense of bodily impact, suggesting the potential for transference between bodies, as this is where the power of affect lies: It is affect’s ‘abstractivity’ that makes it transmittable in ways that feelings and emotions are not, and it is because affect is transmittable that it is potentially such a powerful social force. This is why it is important not to confuse affect with feelings and emotions. (n.p.) In the previous chapter I noted the problematic binaries that exist between play and narrative: the same appears to be true in discussions of affect. As is implicit in Massumi and Shouse’s work, if the body is the locus of affective experience, then the mind is its opposite, the site where affect is delineated and destroyed. Leys (2011) suggests that in defining affect in this way, theorists like Shouse and Massumi are guilty of prioritising the body over the mind, returning to that everlasting binary of philosophy – Cartesian dualism. Ley states (p. 437) that one of the problems with bodily interpretations of affect is that these are only contingently related to objects in the world; our basic emotions operate blindly because they have no inherent knowledge of, or relation to, the objects or situations that trigger them. This problematises affect considerably, because without the situational knowledge of what an object is, how can it impact us in terms of that split-second unstructured and fleeting potentiality? For Leys (p. 443), the real issue is ‘the belief that affect is independent of signification and meaning’, which in some ways returns us to both the Hegelian dialectic of cognising subject (the affected individual) and object from the previous chapter. There are a number of ways that this apparent impasse might be challenged, including Anderson’s (2009, p. 80) concept of ‘affective atmospheres’. Rather than assuming an either/or, he uses the example of air to show how, by invoking a Marxist material imagination, it is possible to see the lightness and movement of air both as experiential – through the impact it has in terms of say turbulence – and as indeterminate. Atmospheres can be affective in codified ways as much as they can be hard to pin down: how does one fully account for entering a room where a person ‘can feel oneself enveloped by a friendly atmosphere or caught up in a tense atmosphere’ (p. 79)? In this context, atmospheres are affective both

The Affective and the Virtual    47 in bodily terms – the physiognomical response of the body to the space – and separate from the body, so they are both subject and object: ‘to attend to affective atmospheres is to learn to be affected by the ambiguities of affect/emotion, by that which is determinate and indeterminate, present and absent, singular and vague’ (p. 79). Seyfert (2012) thinks this is all a bit woolly, which is fair considering that understanding the specifics of affect is not necessarily practically fixed by simply using terms like ‘atmosphere’. He argues instead for an increasing engagement with the social aspect of affect. By repurposing Spinoza’s notion of the body not as a reductionist entity (a human body is, in a Spinozan sense, as important or unimportant as any other body – a body is constituted through its encounters with other bodies), he posits affect in a way that disentangles affect in three ways: which consists of, first, continuous intensive changes in the capabilities of a body – capabilities for affecting (actively) and being affected (receptively); second, the resulting bodily states and modes (affections); and, third, the affectif, the entirety of all elements involved in a particular situation, out of which affects emerge. (p. 34) This is both clearer and indicative of processes that can be practically understood. He calls this approach a theory of social affect where affect can be understood as the result of (social!) encounters (of various bodies) [which] emerge in transmissions, interactions, encounters. Then, affects are situational phenomena, irreducible to the individuals whom they circulate or to ‘atmospheres’ through which bodies move. (p. 42) We move then to a position where the affectif can be considered as ‘all relevant social bodies and their differentiated interactions’ (p. 42). The outcome of this approach is that anthropocentric notions of affect are flipped so as to include the role of environmental factors in fostering affective relationships: a rejoining of subject and object without diminishing the immediacy of intensity. In the context of video games, this also means that the role of the object as a body is considered a vital determinant in the process of affective experience. Further to this, Seyfert uses the work of Jean-Marie Guyau (1962) to think through how affect might be socially active. If bodies are the outcome of encounters and exchanges with other bodies there has to be a process through which affect becomes communicable, and this is typified through transmission and affective interactions. For starters, Guyau is not interested in the standard individual and collective notion of causality but rather in the interaction itself (which handily facilitates dismissing much of the psychological research on video games!). Seyfert (2012, p. 37) explains that it is the ‘inter-passage, the in-between, the transmission that emerges in moments of interaction’ that is the primary focus of Guyau’s theory of affect. Transmission, he continues, is not something possessed by one body over another, or some unique atmosphere but rather a multidirectional

48    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime phenomena ‘of in-between-ness, an effect that emerges in the encounter of social bodies and, by that, it is the product of an affect’ (p. 37, original emphasis). Simply put, transmission is an indicator that a relationship of affect exists: it is the measurable outcome of affective experience(s). To untangle this multitude of affective interactions, Guyau develops a fivefold typology, which I intend to return at various points throughout the empirical chapters. These five types are not mutually exclusive categories, but rather typified examples of where transmissions might be identified and can be split into one indirect and four direct types. The indirect type, which relates to semiotics is ‘expressions’, with the four direct types comprised by ‘haptic’, ‘olfactory’, ‘aesthetic’ (visual and acoustic) and ‘the unconscious transmission at a distance through nervous currents’ (Guyau, 1962, p. 1 cited in Seyfert, 2012, p. 38). In this context, the indirect type of affective interaction operates quite distinctly from Massumi’s conceptualisation where symbolic association was considered problematic. In the context of the case study of this book, the four direct types could clearly be overlaid on interactions between gamers and video games. Vitally, Guyau is positing a way of gauging affective experience through the measuring of transmissions, which Seyfert (2012) explains are further defined by their ‘density, so that we see a decrease in the density of the transmitting medium when we go from haptic and olfactory transmissions to visual and acoustic ones’ (p. 38). Transmissions, therefore, differ in terms of their relative density. In relation to the impact of rhetoric, awe, fear, and death, understanding the relative nature of affective experience in this way will demonstrate the similarly relative nature of what facilitates sublime encounters: I do not intend to suggest that one is more powerful than another, but I expect to see that certain types of game interactions provoke and respond in different ways and with different densities.

4.3 Video Games and Affect How has affect previously contributed to research on video games? And how might these ideas of transmission, interaction and encounter manifest themselves in the present work? As with the assertion in Chapter 1, contemporary video game research on the role of affect has worked to push past the simplistic binary distinctions of body/mind, subject/object towards a nuanced understanding of the role and importance of affect in our engagement with and response to virtual worlds. In each example, affect is shown to be a response initially on a precognitive level to the stimulus of the object, the video game. Video games do something to us and we do something to them. Shaw and Warf (2009) consider affect in an environmental context, asking how virtual spaces, like physical spaces, are powerful sites of affective experience; in Guyau’s typology this could be understood as the aesthetic and expressive transmission of affect. Their working definition has parallels with a lot of non-representational theory like Thrift (2004), where affects can be thought of as precognitive and embodied (re)actions, and their analysis points to the dynamics of capitalism at an emotional as well as an intellectual

The Affective and the Virtual    49 level, that is, as it operates within the depths of the unconscious as well as consciousness. (Shaw and Warf, 2009, p. 1333) Although this implies the Cartesian dualism noted earlier, ‘affects encountered by the player in virtual worlds are never “possessed” by the body: rather, they are impressions fleetingly experienced’ (p. 1340). This leads them to conclude that ‘the video game player [is] an affective event, a constellation of affects and percepts that is constantly changing and coming undone’ (p. 1340). Shinkle’s (2012) work appears to situate her within the bodily school of thought typified in the work of Massumi (1995, 2002) and Thrift (2004) as well. She describes affect in gaming as a form of synaesthesia, which is ‘temporally and corporeally delocalized, incorporating emotions but not reducible to them’ (p. 3) and which is ultimately unquantifiable. This differs, she says, from other experiences with regard to popular culture: feeling fear whilst watching a film, for instance, is never as visceral or immediate because the viewer is always passive and divorced from real-world outcomes; this is not the same for video games. However, it would be an oversimplification to suggest that Shinkle subscribes to the dualism highlighted earlier. She actively questions the mind/body split, likening it to the ongoing debate about the artificial distinction between real world and virtual world entanglements (pp. 5–6). Affect, she asserts, is a way of understanding the significance of gamer presence where rather than focussing on matter versus mind, ‘immersion is perhaps better understood in terms of openness than of full perceptual isolation’ (p. 6). What is interesting in Shinkle’s (2005) work is the move away from the binary distinctions previously discussed. When affect is understood through the prism of gameplay we see phenomenological aspects of interactivity that are difficult to describe or to model theoretically, but which nonetheless make a game come alive […] Player activity, in other words, comprises both psychological and physiological responses, and involves two feedback loops which interact on complex levels. (p. 2) Feedback includes a variety of functions – cognition, volition – that facilitate an affective response which loops around into the conscious experience of the gamer. Crucially though, the bodily response to this environmental stimulus happens before the conscious mind actively engages to begin the process of feedback in the form of ‘biological reflexes like skin conductance response, heartbeat, and respiration rate’. This sounds similar to Guyau’s fourth direct form of affective (1962) interaction, the nervous response, though he states this happens at a distance. Nonetheless, it is a potentially mappable transmission that shows the tangible impact video games have on gamers. This feedback loop, if I use the example of a particular video game such as Resident Evil (Capcom, 1996), changes over time as the result of familiarity: the physiological response when you, as Jill Valentine or Chris Redfield, open the mansion door to be confronted by a cut scene of a zombie dog is only going to

50    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime have affective power once, so the developers of video games increasingly consider the role of affective experiences in design. Resident Evil again shows this, where later editions of the title confounded the expectation of gamers with the zombie dog bursting into the mansion itself. James Ash’s (2013) work on these types of expectations and ‘retentional economies’ focuses on the role of developers. His conceptual apparatus includes, for instance, ‘captivation’, where developers build particular environments to attune affect in such away – perhaps through the sequencing of particular scripted events – as to produce ‘captivated subjects’, gamers who play for long periods of time. To achieve this requires careful consideration of the affective relationship between specific embodied responses to stimuli within game design, so these can be factored in. Indeed, Ash’s (2012) most powerful articulation of the role of games developers in this process is the interplay between ‘amplification’, ‘modulation’ and ‘bandwidth’, which I feel echoes Guyau’s typology outlined earlier. Ash (2012) begins with ‘affective design’, essentially the processes associated with attempting to generate affective response through the use of specific design choices: for video games this can be seen as aesthetic decisions, or procedural decisions that are programmed into the code of the game to hold gamers attention (pp. 3–4). Video games are considered to be an exemplar of affective design because they are poised between very codified elements – the programming of the game – and the uncodifiable, the experience and response of the gamer. This serves to make video games ‘part of a particularly complex form of affective design because videogames [sic.] operate as externalizations of designers’ (apparent) intentions rationalized into code’ that are subsequently interpreted or immediately responded by gamers (p. 10). The example Ash uses is from the game Halo 2 (Bungie, 2004), where the developer bemoans the problems of constructing sufficiently meaty sounds for firearms: something as straightforward as the sound a gun makes can impact whether or not the gamer is convinced enough to use it. Whilst this may seem minor, it contributes to an overall picture of whether the game is satisfying and ultimately whether or not the gamer will continue to purchase games in the series – this ‘retention of attention’ is important in a commercially driven industry like the video game sector, as generating affective opportunities and attention is what keeps gamers coming back. Affective design is used to keep gamers’ attention. It is essentially the tripartite process of consciousness that is made possible by a relationship between present perception (primary retention) and past experience (secondary retention), both of which are enabled by the technical objects and knowledges that make up the environmental content of that past and present experience (tertiary retention). (Ash, 2012, p. 8) Attention oscillates across a continuum, which Ash terms ‘modulation’, or the way in which experience can be affected along the continuum. Video games, opento-interpretation as they are by gamers, cannot simply create or define affect,

The Affective and the Virtual    51 but they can ‘modulate affect within a specific bandwidth’ (p. 13): this aspect of modulation resonates with Guyau’s concept of transmission. Modulation is further complicated, as Seyfert similarly attests, because affect is necessarily difficult to engender as it is connected to the personal circumstances, socialisation, biography and context of the individual. An uphill struggle for those engaged in affective games design then. In relational terms, ‘to be attentive in any sense is, therefore, to be affected by something’ (p. 9). The scale of the affect is the ‘amplification’, though Ash is quick to dispel the idea that amplification is simply increasing affect: it is the opportunity to ‘generate and modulate between affective states’ (p. 12). Amplification is analogous then to Guyau’s notion of density: for Guyau, density is a proxy through which affect can be understood and measured, and for Ash amplification is the ability to develop and maintain an affective state. In both cases, affect is reified in some way, albeit for differing purposes. A problem of bandwidth remains. Bandwidth is the margin in which affective states can be modulated and amplified, but this margin narrows as a result of the somatic experience of gamers. ‘In videogames [sic.], the generation of somatic memory operates in a feedback loop between body and game environment, producing particular affective attunements’ (p. 11). Ash tells us. Playing a game enables gamers to develop particular competencies over time, and in the process this diminishes the ability of the game to have as broad a bandwidth for affective experience. Bryant (2011, p. 277) explains that experiences become ‘inscribed in the fiber [sic.] of … [the] nerves and muscles of … [the] body’ following multiple engagements – akin to Guyau’s fourth type of direct experience – and this means that for designers to retain attention, and to develop games that keep gamers coming back (and paying for the experience) ensuring the modulation of affect is vital, and this involves careful tuning (amplified) across increasingly narrow bandwidths. For this book, the idea of bandwidth is important because this may have knock on effects in terms of sublime experience – if you are learning, consciously or otherwise, what to expect from a gaming experience, how can it engender a sublime experience? I will return to this in detail in Chapter 8, with a particular focus on failure and repetition. These three examples – Shaw and Warf (2009), Shinkle (2005, 2012) and Ash (2012, 2013) – are united in their assessment of why a focus on affect is necessary, and that is the relationship between video games as an affective experience and, as discussed in Chapter 1, video games as a saleable commodity. Developers want gamers to keep coming back for more. Ash argues that if you want to retain a gamer, keeping them engaged and engaging, then holding their attention is key. Shaw and Warf (2009) similarly see the project of mapping affect in video gaming not as an enterprise in perpetuating Cartesian dualism, but rather to investigate the concomitant work that affect is always busy doing ‘behind the scenes’ [...] because of the ways in which each player’s sensory register is increasingly commodified and exploited under postmodern capitalism

52    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime When considering the sublime in gaming, this push and pull between the unclassifiable experience and the commodified one is something that requires careful thought.

4.4 A Critical Pause Ash (2012, 2013) also alerts us to the importance of terminology (‘amplification’; ‘modulation’; ‘bandwidth’). In this subsection alone, I’ve mentioned affect, transmissions, interactions, resonances (sort of), density, atmospheres, intensities and so forth. Before moving on to consider the important connection between the affective and the virtual, I’d like to take a minute to pause and offer a sort of working definition of affect that I will return to when considering the application of affect and sublimity. Affect, after Seyfert (2012), is an experience that results from a body encountering another body. These bodies can be organic (a human, a society) and inorganic (a video game, a control pad), but each body requires another for an affective experience to take place. It involves various capabilities on the part of a body – to be affecting and affected. But affect is not a linear process – indeed, we have already seen how it challenges standard notions of linear temporality, for example – between these two poles. To understand and detail affect, after Guyau (1962), we need to consider the transmission of affect (or ‘modulation’ to use Ash’s term), that is ‘the particular channels, frequencies, timbres and tonalities in the process of mutual affecting by those bodies’ (Seyfert, 2012, p. 35). There are five types of transmission Guyau suggests which seem like a good starting point to empirically test this approach. Affect can involve four direct experiences – haptic, olfactory, aesthetic and nervous – as well as one indirect experience, the expressive. This latter type is rooted in forms of signification, which is important because it is also possible – on a conceptual and potentially practical footing – to understand affect in terms of codification: affect is also responsive, and operates in feedback with a stimulus (an object to a perceiving subject), so signification is necessary on some level for affect to happen. Guyau’s categories are not exclusive, but operate across a spectrum (or ‘continuum’). The ways in which affective experience operates can be understood in terms of the density of experience (or ‘amplification’) and how transmission moves within certain parameters (‘bandwidths’). Measuring, in some sense, affective experience either after the ‘half-a-second’ (Massumi, 2002) in which the experience takes place (before full codification) or through the development of affective design, will enable us to locate the sublime as an overarching indicator of affective experience(s), accepting that fully articulating the experience ourselves is theoretically impossible.

4.5 What is the ‘Virtual’? As with affect, the concept of the ‘virtual’ is bound up in a series of problematic associations. In this section, I am going to outline a reasonably short origin story of the concept through Shields (1999, 2003), Bergson (2004) and

The Affective and the Virtual    53 Deleuze (2014) – and their cheerleaders/detractors – before thinking through, again in relation to Shields (2003), how conceptual clarity about the virtual will enable the connections between the virtual and the affective to inform a practical exploration of the sublime in video games. The virtual is a locus of affective experience rather than a philosophical abstract, and virtual spaces can be understood in terms of their particular topologies: these are locatable, definable after-effects from a variety of processes of change. A crude example of this would be that when a game is put on general release for gamers to purchase, it has – within certain affordances – a fixed topology that is the culmination of multiple processes such as games design, market research feedback, specific coding decisions, narrative choices, random bits accidentally left in, gaps, etc. Within the fixed topology, the potential for a sublime experience is manifest through identifiable transmissions of affect in in-between spaces that we might think of as metaxical. The first stumbling block to overleap is the issue of what the virtual means (closely followed by what the virtual does). In common parlance, when people are asked to think about the virtual, they routinely combine it with the word ‘reality’: the issue here is that in doing so it suggests a binary distinction – yes, another one – and definitional distancing between a thing that doesn’t exist (the virtual) and a thing that does (reality). Unpacking this misleading dichotomy is one of the central tasks that awaits as it presupposes the meaning of the virtual sans proper conceptual enquiry. As Massumi (1998) highlights ‘Virtual reality’ has a short conceptual half-life, tending rapidly to degrade into a synonym for ‘artificial’ or ‘simulation’, used with tiresome predictability as antonyms for ‘reality’. The phrase has shown a pronounced tendency to decompose into an oxymoron. It was in that decomposed state that it became a creature of the press, a death warrant on its usefulness as a conceptual tool. (p. 16) Given that the last 20 years has given us a seemingly unending stream of academic papers on the nature of the virtual and the potential uses of the term in fields as diverse as community building (Maclaran & Catterall, 2002), music (Bennett & Peterson, 2004) and even dental medicine (Joda & Gallucci, 2015), Massumi’s proclamation seems a little presumptive.1 As Dyens (2002, p. 33) argues, in increasingly digitised spaces, the virtual challenges simplistic ontologies of organic versus inorganic. Where our ontological position is defined by a biological understanding we are effectively blind to the potentialities of the inorganic in forming, perpetuating and assembling relations in-between. This might sound a little actor-networky (see Callon, 1999), but it underscores the significance of the non-human in facilitating affective experiences: as I will go on to detail, the virtual is where affective transmissions are 1

Not to mention the fact that Massumi himself has published numerous tomes on exactly this subject in the intervening years (see e.g. Massumi, 2002, 2014, 2017).

54    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime locatable, and these necessarily have a deep-rooted relationship with the materialities of the immediately tactile physical world. This is also demonstrably connected to Fedorova’s machinic agency in the techno-sublime, where the relationship between organic and inorganic is problematised. As Shields (2003, p. 4) identifies, the virtual has been a viable cultural category – in the shape of ritualism, and ‘architectural fantasies’ – for a significant period of time (a suitable justification for my present enquiry if ever there was one!). The present state of affairs, the abstraction of the virtual from the real, is incongruous with many cultures both contemporary and historic, where ‘collective “conjuring” of altered modes of perception and understanding are more common’ (p. 11). The virtual can therefore initially be defined as a mode of thought, a conceptual tool for understanding how we perceive the world around us. What are the origins of the term? On a theological level, the binary distinction between the virtual and the real relates to the Christian Eucharist and differing interpretations of what this ritual represents. Transubstantiation – the conversion, as part of the sacrament commemorating the Last Supper, of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ – is understood in multiple ways. For Catholics and Lutherans transubstantiation is a concrete conversion of actual body and blood, as Dulles (2009, p. 456) argues; ‘the presence is real. That is to say, it is ontological and objective’. Reformation theologians like Calvin and Zwingli, however, argued that the conversion was symbolic, or virtually real, though no less powerful for it – ‘for why should the Lord put in your hand the symbol of his body, unless it was to assure you that you really participate in it?’ (Calvin, 2008, p. 901). Aside from the way in which this debate fractured the Church for hundreds of years, it also demonstrates how the virtual came to be understood as related to, but potentially different from, the real. Another good example of this distinction, as Shields (2003, p. 10) outlines, is the gigantic Mesdag panorama in The Hague. The panorama, a 360-degree vista 120 metres in circumference, depicts the fishing village of Scheveningen in 1881, with the viewer standing in the centre surveying the scene. In one sense, this painting is not real because it is not a space in which physical interaction between the viewer and the scene can take place – it is a representation of the fishing village – but then, Shield’s argues, that is hardly the point: It is not simply representation but a simulation in which real sand conceals the bottom edge of the painted beach scene. The panoramas were extravagant attempts to not only mimic reality but to outdo actual experience […] by relocating the viewer in to a panoptic and omniscient position. (p. 10) Arguably, this forced and designed-in perspective, with the potentiality for affective experience through simulation seems to be a fitting parallel to the contemporary video game. What it also shows is that the virtual has a complex relationship with the real in that the gestation of the term is connected to particular tangible stimuli – the ordered ritualism of the Eucharist, the circularity of the Mesdag panorama, the relative immensity of both.

The Affective and the Virtual    55 The genesis of theorising the virtual starts with Bergson, most prominently Matter and Memory (1911), the subtitle of which (‘Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit’) implies a bipartite body/mind split that has been previously outlined in relation to affect. Bergson’s riposte to Ribot (1882) – who argued that the memory can be scientifically isolated in a particular part of the brain – is that the spirit cannot be routinely reduced to a material entity, thereby underscoring the indivisible relationship between the two. Deleuze, in Bergsonism (1966, p. 96) discusses the way in which time comes to the forefront of issues around the classic distinction between subject and object. Bergson (1911) states that ‘questions relating to subject and object, to their distinction and their union, should be put in terms of time rather than space’ (p. 77) and for Deleuze this presents an opportunity to articulate time not as an organic entity but a crystal one, where time fractures into a series of presents that pass us by and a series of pasts exist in aspic. Deleuze develops this in relation to Proust’s (2013) In Search of Lost Time where memory can be involuntary – eating a cake brings back unbidden memories – or voluntary, where you consciously recall something by choice. Famously Deleuze (2014, p. 272) offered the following assessment of the value of the virtual, which is worth quoting at length: We have ceaselessly invoked the virtual. In doing so, have we not fallen into the vagueness of a notion closer to the undetermined than to the determinations of difference? It is precisely this, however, that we wished to avoid in speaking of the virtual. We opposed the virtual and the real: although it could not have been more precise before now, this terminology must be corrected. The virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual. Exactly what Proust said of states of resonance must be said of the virtual: ‘Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’; and symbolic without being fictional. Indeed, the virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the real object – as though the object had one part of itself in the virtual into which it plunged as though into an objective dimension. This passage is vital because much of the philosophical debate about the virtual stems from it (see e.g. Ansell-Pearson, 2005; Mullarkey, 2004). For the purposes of this book, Shields (2003) offers a detailed practical guide to understanding the virtual in relation to ideas like the actual, the real and so forth. Ultimately, Shields offers a theoretically rigorous framework that will facilitate discussion in Chapters 5–8. Shields starts by considering the virtual in relation to the binary distinctions that have peppered my discussion so far. The virtual, he argues, is routinely equated with non-existence by virtue of quotidian understanding which allies the real with notions of ‘material embodiment, tangible presence and reliability’ (Shields, 2003, p. 19). However, new digital technologies problematise this dichotomy directly. Shields asks

56    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime when one transfers a computer image or file, can it be said to move in the same physical way [as a tangible object does]? No. The virtual is neither absence nor an unrepresentable excess of lack. The file moves and is conventionally verifiable for most computer users, and is ‘real’, so we need to break down the commonsensical notion ‘reality’ into more fine-grained concepts. (p. 20) The real issue with ‘the real’ as a supposed oppositional entity is that it is insufficiently delineated to deal with the complexity introduced by the virtual. The virtual troubles the real through the utilisation of multiple forms of tangibility, meaning that the category of the real is not solely related to material embodiment. To state this plainly: the problem is not with the definition of the virtual but with the definition of the real. This points to the development of a more nuanced theory ‘of the real and the ways in which the virtual and the concrete are different really existing forms’ (p. 21). Another example of this quotidian uncertainty can be seen through the use of the word ‘virtually’, routinely understood as ‘close to being real’: ‘I’ve virtually finished explaining Shield’s interpretation of the virtual’. Shields argues that from this standpoint, it is relatively easy to see how the virtual – the not-quitebut-almost – can be reified because ‘general qualities are virtualities that “really exist”. They can co-exist and co-define an actual object or process in the material word, the manifestation of which depends on the context or situation’ (p. 24). To offer clarity to these conceptual distinctions, Shields develops a tetralogy of the virtual which draws on the sort of dichotomies identified in Bergson’s work. The crucial distinction is that the category of what is ‘real’ is made up for ‘the virtual’ (the ideally real) and the ‘concrete present’ (the actually real). Both are real, but in different and interrelated ways. To summarise, in this schema, the virtual can be thought of as a real idealisation, something like a memory, dream or an intention. The concrete present, relatedly but necessarily differentiated, is an actual real such as a taken-for-granted thing, an actualised idea and anything that embodies memories. Once the virtual is situated within the real, arguments about its validity as a viable site of experiential enquiry are somewhat moot. As Shields goes on to argue, the virtual as an exemplar of an ideal real, inherently related to the actual real of the concrete present, becomes ‘a template for understanding and reacting to events in everyday life whenever societies face a situation in which distant events […] have local impacts’ (p. 32): a video game, programmed by huge teams of developers, artists, writers, coders can have local affective impact on individual gamers in their active response to the experience of play. As Shields articulates, in the context of the digital and associated technology, ‘… the virtual is not merely an incomplete imitation of the real but another register or manifestation of the real. In some cases it is better than the real’ (p. 46). Shields also considers the virtual in relation to practices of reification, where the virtual ideal becomes an actual concrete present. To achieve this, the concepts of liminality and metaxis are developed as conceptual tools towards a conceivable process of transmission, to use Guyau’s aforementioned terminology.

The Affective and the Virtual    57 Shields begins by situating these processes as ‘techniques’ of the virtual, with memory an exemplar. In a digital world, memory ceases to be an abstract, but shifts into the material realm as a form of accessible information – digital photographs might be considered an example of this. These techniques ‘create the illusion of presence through props, simulations, partial presences and rituals which involve the past and make absent others present. They aid metaxis from the virtual to the actual by giving concrete presence to intangible ideas’ (p. 41): there are three points to unpack here. To attend to the first point about props and simulations making absent others present, a parallel example of this which might help articulate the transmission more clearly is Hirsch’s (2001) concept of postmemory. Hirsch’s initial development of postmemory in the early 1990s considered how the children of Holocaust survivors made sense of the incredible collective trauma their relatives experienced in the Second World War. Through the prism of the Art Spiegelman (1987) comic book Maus: My Father Bleeds History, Hirsch (2001) details how postmemory demonstrates a tangible means of contact that one generation can have towards another despite not being actively physically present for it: she describes this as ‘experiences that they “remember” only as the narratives and images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right’ (p. 9). This, she suggests, is demonstrable – in a qualitative and temporal sense – from the memory of survivors but it has power in its own right ‘precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through representation, projection, and creation’ (p. 9). In this context, the comic book acted as a prop in the process of making the virtual (the then-historic experience of surviving the Holocaust) a concrete present for the children of Holocaust survivors. Similarly, I would argue that video games operate in such a way as to move the virtual toward the concrete present: in Chapter 1, I discussed how my earlier research found gamers using Fallout 4 as means to explore their fear of death, the virtual world of nuked Boston becoming a concrete present in the imagined death of the individual. An affective experience was transmitted from the virtual to the concrete present. To attend to the second of Shields’ points around partial presences and rituals, this speaks to the in-betweenness of the process of transmission itself. In relation to affect, I earlier highlighted the tension in experiential terms that exists between the affective experience, and the cognitive and cultural work that follows this in defining what has transpired. Partial presences attend to this also, as the potential for half-formed or divergent interpretive experiences are likely when memories become material. At a level of abstraction, we can see this with video games, as an assemblage of simulations (the game space), partial presences (things like progression and scripted events that ‘click’ with some gamers, and work less well with others) and rituals (the technical requirements and skills associated with play) are clearly a technique of the virtual, ‘giving concrete presence to intangible ideas’ (Shields 2003, p. 41). This is discussed in relation to repetition and failure in Chapter 8. The third point, the process itself, is where Shields mentions ‘metaxis’. The origin of this term is Greek (literally ‘in-betweenness’) and is used in Plato’s

58    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime Symposium to highlight the challenges of codifying the difference and sameness of people and Gods – that we are both human and divine. For Shields, metaxis is a useful way of thinking about the virtual and the concrete present as being real, and how one can impact the other, or indeed develop into the other. It is also innately human. If virtual spaces are, as Shield’s attests, indexical, interstitial moments (p. 49) then we enter a situation where relations between places inside (the virtual) and places outside (the concrete) are increasingly indistinguishable. To pin this down, metaxis operates as a form of translation, transposing ‘digital action and virtual encounters to the world of living animals and objects’ (p. 49). Metaxis is analogous to transmission. Ultimately, what can be gleaned from this engagement with Shields’ work is that a sublime experience is inherently possible in virtual space: as virtual spaces, video games facilitate the possibility of sublime experience in a variety of ways that I will detail through approaches to rhetoric, awe, fear and death. Our engagements with video games can be sublime because affective experience, through transmission and metaxis, facilitates an exchange between the concrete present and the virtual (and, as Shinkle suggests, back again, in a feedback loop). To explore video games as digital virtual spaces where the possibility of sublime experience is realised, we need to detail the processes that link the ideal (virtually real) and the actual (concrete present): methodological-speaking, this is what I will now unpack.

4.6 Methodological Approaches There are a variety of different approaches to studying and analysing video games. Many of these tend to focus on empirical evidence to understand interrelated functions between the game and the gamer, whilst others consider the narrative possibilities of the medium (both perspectives were discussed in Chapter 1): there are problems with purely ludological and narratological approaches however, and in this book if the intention is to tease out the potential for sublime experience, then an approach that explores the interdependence of games and gamers is vital, rather than succumbing to anything too reductive. In the context of the game, both Montfort (2006) and Konzack (2002) suggest various layers that make up what a game is and what it does as per the enquiry in Chapter 1. Montfort presents these levels as a series of questions for the video game scholar: What other games, game forms and game elements do they draw on? What player skills from other games will transfer to this game? How exactly is the game played, with how many people, doing what sorts of things? Also, what programming language was the game written in, using what sort of development process? How many people were involved in designing and producing it, and what earlier code was directly incorporated or otherwise re-used? How does the game play with or against the platform on which it was implemented and the history of programming on that platform? (Montfort, 2006, n.p.)

The Affective and the Virtual    59 In offering these hypotheticals, we have a multifaceted series of dialogues that games engage in and with, through the number of people involved in their production, the programming language, the history of genre, the skills of the player and the ways in which the game is played: much of this relates back to Ash’s discussion on affective design. Such a variety of pertinent questions points at the potential for games to not only be situated in the context of their sociocultural production (see Denham, Hirschler & Spokes, 2019, for an example of this in relation to systemic violence) but also as an ongoing heteroglossic dialogue between gamers and interfaces, where affective experiences can be understood through various transmissions across virtual spaces. This is perhaps less structured than Konzack’s approach, which takes a sevenfold typology which moves from descriptions of games, through their functionality and meaning, all the way up to broader issues of ‘socio-culture’ (p. 98). Nitsche (2008) instead discusses five planes or layers of experience, noting that ‘no model can provide all possible approaches upfront’. Of these five planes, two relate directly to the game, namely rule-based space and mediated space: the former is ‘defined by the code, the data, and hardware restrictions’ and the latter builds on this as ‘the output the system can provide in order to present the rule-based game universe to the player’ (p. 16). The other three planes are where gamers engage with, and imagine, a world provided for them (fictional space) and decide on actions in relation to this (play space), which in turn can impact other players (social space). Despite offering numerous interpretive frames, all of these perspectives appear to share the sort of subject/object binary outlined in Chapters 2 and 3. Yes, there are specific procedural rules to designing a game (see Salen and Zimmerman, 2004), and these are impacted by the hardware the developer has access to (see King and Krzywinska, 2006), but ultimately this means little unless the output – the game – is actively experienced by a gamer, and in doing so the gamer brings all sorts of aspects of themselves into play: this includes their ethical and moral persuasion (Sicart, 2009) and the potential for pro-social as well as anti-social behaviour (Denham & Spokes, 2018). It is worth reflecting on a deeper ontological question here about the nature of knowing in the context of gamers and games. It is not my intention to present a one-size-fits-all account of the affective experience of all gamers. This is something outside the scope of a philosophical encounter with developing ideas and would be antithetical to the complicated interplay between gamers and games. Instead, my approach is closer to that of Haraway (1988) and Law (2004). For Haraway, ontology and epistemology have to be expansive and based on what she terms ‘situated knowledges’, a series of approaches that respond to the everchanging connections between actions, actors and culture. She states that: the moral is simple: only partial perspective promises objective vision. This is an objective vision that initiates, rather than closes off, the problem of responsibility for the generativity of all visual practices. Partial perspective can be held accountable for both its promising and its destructive monsters. (Haraway, 1988, p. 583)

60    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime In arguing the value of the partial, Haraway underscores the futility of reducing culture to the definitive (layers and levels for typifying ‘the video game’), instead forwarding the importance of partial linkages between diverse elements: this, I would argue, has a parallel in the in-between possibility space where the virtual and the concrete present come together through metaxis, and affective experiences are transmitted. Firstly, to comprehend the virtual sublime involves accepting intrinsic complexity, and the need to acknowledge that any work can decontextualise, recontextualise and repurpose data in myriad ways, ‘engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable’ (Derrida, 1988, p. 12). Of course, accepting the inherent complications of these factors should not lead to conceptual confusion as there have to be practical approaches to reflect the partiality of data, actors and indeed the researcher. As Law (2004) argues […] there is a need for tools that allow us to enact and depict the shape shifting implied in the interactions and interferences between different realities. There is need for assemblages that mediate and produce entities that cannot be refracted into words. (p. 122) What does this mean in terms of the epistemological approach I am taking here? Firstly, that the only genuine approach to exploring the virtual sublime is to account for the absence of totality and to recognise, as Strathern (2005) suggests, that ‘each part also defines a partisan position’ (p. 39). What I am working towards is an assemblage in the Deleuzian sense, laying down disparate components, challenging collective utterances and pulling things together into a ‘hodgepodge’ (Deleuze, 2007, pp. 176–179): I am offering a malleable blueprint of sorts, and one that has precedent in both Cremin’s (2012) work on Super Mario Galaxy and Mukherjee’s (2015) development of narrative and storytelling in video games. Secondly to understand the potential affective aspects of video game interaction there needs to be an underpinning practicality to assist in detailing differing experiences. This has to be representative – as a reader, you can only interpret my argument based on what I present linguistically, unless you augment this by playing the games featured here, producing your own text in the process – but I will draw on a number of empirical sources, so as to offer a sort of content analysis that mirrors Šisler’s (2008) work and my own earlier work (see Spokes, 2019). This will include my own playthroughs (so as to effectively describe and reflect on the experience: reductive, but useful nonetheless), alongside playthroughs hosted on YouTube and Twitch by other gamers to facilitate comparison and contrast. Alongside this, analysis of reviews and comments threads will also be used in an effort to demonstrate relationships between the virtual and the concrete present: I will be working with titles released recently and not-so-recently, so looking at contemporaneous source material is needed. Aarseth (2003, p. 3) talks about this type of approach as ‘playing research’, a threefold understanding of (1) the design of games – the affective design in Ash’s parlance; (2) observations of the way people play and react to play; and (3) the experience of playing the games ourselves. Karppi and Sotamaa (2012, p. 443) develop this further, arguing that

The Affective and the Virtual    61 playing research needs to go beyond the limits of game world and normative gameplay, and move toward a concept or assemblage of play that takes into account games as singular and multifaceted technocultural entities. Karppi and Sotamaa are advocating for a tangible exploration of the sort of conceptual in-betweeness – the multitude of entanglements between games and gamers, virtual and concrete – discussed with regard to metaxis and transmission. My approach, therefore, is to consider both the game in terms of affective design, and ludological and narratological elements, in conjunction with the response of gamers (including myself), thereby drawing on a wide base of evidence from the aforementioned sources of reviews, videos, playthroughs, comments and the like. I will work through key examples in selective game genres to explore the tenets of the sublime as identified in Chapters 2 and 3, with a particular focus on rhetoric, awe and fear, as well as death as a concluding exemplar. To understand the relationship between the virtual and the concrete present, I will focus primarily on types of transmission outlined earlier in this chapter. I will clearly and distinctly explain this process as it takes place throughout Chapters 5–8, as well as applying theories of the sublime to the case study examples of games that have been selected. This combination of theory and analysis aims towards what Strathern means when she says she is ‘looking for a good description’: a good description […] can only proceed through analysis, and analysis can only be informed through theoretical insight, but theory in itself is not an end, the good description is, and therefore the issue is all the time what concepts one is using. (Borić, 2010, p. 281) Ultimately, I am aiming to reflect the inherent complexity of games and gamers and think through how our engagement(s) with different worlds of affective experience can be understood through the sublime. From this point, I will return to key approaches to the sublime based on the discussions in Chapters 2 and 3. The focus will be on applying earlier ideas of the sublime that relate to rhetoric, awe, fear and death, to video games as a representational/simulational medium, to understand how these ideas might explain (or not) our contemporary entanglements and affective experiences of the virtual and the relationship between perceiving subject and object.

Chapter 5

Rhetoric Isn’t it beautiful? It’s almost tragic. When life ends, it gives off a final lingering aroma. Light is but a farewell gift from the darkness to those on their way to die. I’ve been waiting, Snake, for a long time. Waiting for your birth, your growth, and the finality of today. (The Boss in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater) [To Ron] ‘Now go! I need to meditate. Or masturbate. Or both’ (Trevor Philips, GTA V)

5.1 Introduction The two quotes that open this chapter – the first delivered by the Boss to Naked Snake in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater [MSG3]1 (Konami, 2004), the second by the sociopath Trevor Phillips to his ‘friend’ Ron in Grand Theft Auto V [GTA V] (Rockstar North, 2013) – neatly underscore the connection between telling particular stories and offering insights about the characteristics and peculiarities of people. The Boss’ speech is bombastic, vaguely Shakespearean in its reflection on the tribulations and stages of Naked Snake’s life (As You Like It perhaps). It showcases an overly dramatic narrative form that routinely accompanies tripleA titles.2 That is not to suggest that GTA V doesn’t have a grand story to tell. The narrative of GTA V is clearly rooted in Hollywood gangster tropes, more ‘washed-up mobsters’ than ‘Elizabethan tragicomedy’, and this story, like that of MSG3, is bound by the relationship between protagonists – namely Michael, 1

To aid in clarity, I’ll abbreviate games that are mentioned multiple times by popping the acronym in parentheses next to the title, so Grand Theft Auto V will be GTA V, for example. 2 Even titles that aren’t really associated with strong storylines – first person shooters like the Call of Duty series, or ‘Tom Clancy’ games, still rely on grandiosity in narrative framing: the recently released Modern Warfare (Infinity Ward, 2019), for example, features an epic narrative arc that connects principle characters from the 2007 original to the 2019 reboot. Gaming and the Virtual Sublime: Rhetoric, Awe, Fear, and Death in Contemporary Video Games, 63–81 Copyright © 2020 by Matthew Spokes Published under an exclusive license by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved doi:10.1108/978-1-83867-431-120201008

64    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime Franklin and the aforementioned Trever (who is clearly an unpleasant guy) – and antagonists. What these two titles demonstrate are the differing ways in which narrative – story-driven or character-driven – can impel us to think deeply about our associations with different types of people and their motivations. In Chapter 4, through Shield’s (2003) work on the virtual, I unpacked the ways in which the concrete present – the physical, tangible realm of the real – and the virtual – the ‘ideal real’ – are both sides of the same coin, so when we consider narratives in games, we are thinking through the ways that the representational/ simulational spaces of the virtual reflect, refract and challenge facets of our everyday experiences, though in exaggerated ways perhaps (unless you happen to be friends with a sociopath meth dealer of course). In this chapter, I’m going to kick off the empirical investigation into the sublime by thinking through how these relationships, facilitated by types of rhetoric in video games, might problematise our sense of self, thereby destabilising the perceiving cognizing subject. As outlined earlier, my approach is to use extant theories of the sublime to road test and apply related ideas to contemporary video games. For clarity, I’m going to do this largely chronologically, working from Antiquity towards the modern day (with brief dalliances elsewhere) through rhetoric, awe, fear and then death. The aim is that, at the end of the present work, I will be able to draw conclusions on which aspects of the sublime are applicable to virtual, interactive entertainment and which are less useful: the outcome of this will be a virtual sublime, a hybridised theory that roots sublime experiences in the transmission of affective encounters between gamers and video games. To start then, given the importance of narrative in both the development of video games and scholarship on video games (see Chapter 1), I will return to the rhetorical sublime of Longinus. Initially I’m going to do a quick refresher on why Longinus might be useful, before looking at the work of Frasca (2013) and Bogost’s (2008, 2010) discussion of ‘procedural rhetoric’: here, I will show how the rhetoric in games operates similarly to rhetoric for Longinus, where the ‘power to persuade’ is complicated by the agency of the ‘listener’ or gamer.3 Lastly, I’m going to apply these ideas to a variety of contemporary video games – God of War (GoW) (SIE Santa Monica, 2018); The Walking Dead (TWD) (Telltale Games, 2013); That Dragon, Cancer (TDC) (Numinous Games, 2016), Silent Hill 2 (SH2) (Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo, 2001) – in an effort to see how issues like identity and temporality are challenged through types of rhetoric and whether or not these are transmitted in sufficient density (Guyau, 1962) to afford an affective experience (or at least the potential for one).

5.2 What does Longinus mean by ‘Rhetoric’? (Slight Return) Before detailing how rhetoric is understood in video game scholarship, I want to return to a workable definition of rhetoric in relation to the sublime. In terms

3

For a detailed discussion of rhetoric in the context of games more broadly, see Sutton-Smith (2001) on ‘seven rhetorics of play’.

Rhetoric    65 of specificity, as detailed in Chapter 2, Longinus built a theory of the sublime in relation to rhetoric, so the definition I intend to work with is developed from that. Longinus suggests that rhetoric is a particular skill, and a gifted orator can use rhetoric to elevate the literary to great heights (hypsos). Rhetoric can be thought of as a spectrum which directly relates to broader social issues: good rhetoric demonstrates the best in society, whereas bad rhetoric reflects moral decline. The implication of this is that rhetoric might also have transformative potential, turning bad to good and vice versa, but how might this be actioned practically? O’Gorman (2004) argues that rhetoric in a Longinian sense is somewhat paradoxical, a combination of the practical (I’d argue the concrete present), where specific skills in oration and the formation of an argument are utilised alongside the poetic (the virtual): both need to exist together for rhetoric to become transformational, akin to Shields’ (2003) application of metaxis. Longinus states that rhetoric succeeds when listeners are ‘dragged away from demonstrative arguments and are astounded by the image, by the dazzle of which the practical argument is hidden’ (Longinus, cited in O’Gorman, 2004, p. 73), so it is both the ‘consummate excellence and distinction in language’ that Day (2013) outlined in Chapter 2 (p. 30) and a shift of perspective that hides technical precision behind magnitude (O’Gorman, 2004, p. 77). The relationship between the sublime and rhetoric involves the integration of technical skill and aptitude, and poetic language. Combining practical argument with methodical arrangement and composition is the bedrock, but it is the poetic that facilitates sublime experience. Longinus suggests that this experience arrives as a flash or thunderbolt [kairos]: in the context of Lyotard’s ‘immediacy’ in Chapter 3, and the discussions of affect in Chapter 4, this might be thought of as a non-conscious experience of intensity. In Guyau’s (1962) typology of transmission, rhetoric itself would appear to occupy the space between indirect ‘expressions’ – experiences framed by semiotic and linguistic structures – and the direct realm of ‘aesthetics’ in the shape and form of poetry. It is the density of this affective experience of expressions and aesthetics that needs to be understood in terms of whether the sublime is possible with regard to rhetoric in video games. Returning to the importance of magnitude, I also detailed in Chapter 2 how Longinus describes this transformative grandeur as producing particular types of affect. Sublime rhetoric produces ecstasy [ekstasis] instead of persuasion in the listener, through a combination of astonishment [ekplêxis] and wonder [thaumasion], which differs from what he describes as ‘the merely pleasant’. Persuasion (which we might think of as allied to the technical competency of shaping rhetoric) is something that people can control, whereas ekplêxis and thaumasion cannot be predicted, exerting ‘invincible power’ [dynamis] that can overwhelm the listener. In the context of game narratives my intention is to explore the potentiality for astonishment and wonder through the functioning of rhetorical forms in video games: what is it about games, if anything, that offers an intense, unexpected affective experience?

66    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime

5.3 Text, Narrative Architecture and the Persuasive Power of Rhetoric At the top of the chapter I used a comparison to illustrate the parallels between different types of media. The Boss in MGS 3 and the plot of GTA V were likened to Elizabethan tragedy and a Hollywood mobster film, respectively. To understand how rhetoric can be conceptualised in interactive media, there are crucial differences that need to be highlighted to account for why games have sublime potential, and Elizabethan tragedies and Hollywood mob epics do not. Simply put, the latter are solely representational, whereas the former allies the representational with the simulational: I’ve been combining these two terms throughout the book without clarification until this point, so now seems like a good juncture to tease apart the distinction. As a reader, listener or viewer, you are able respond to whatever text you are engaging with, but your response arguably does nothing material to the text itself. Shouting at the TV screen does not alert the victim to the presence of the serial killer hiding behind the curtain. As Frasca (2013) argues, traditional media as a representational format are ubiquitous in society (so much so that they are effectively invisible) and whilst ‘they excel at producing descriptions of traits and sequences of events (narratives)’ (p. 223) they are essentially static. Video games challenge this. In simulational media, the gamer becomes a type of active agent (within the limits of the programming) rather than a passive one, able to influence, sculpt and impact the virtual world which they inhabit. As such, the rhetorical devices used by developers draw from different wells (though these are not intrinsically beyond using more traditional narrative devices as I shall highlight later in this chapter) and offer different paths for affective experiences as a result. In a definitional sense, this already intimates that sublime rhetorical experience in interactive media may differ from Longinus’ original typology. I explained in Chapter 1 the ways in which approaches to video games in Game Studies have previously been delineated into camps arguing the virtues of play versus story, ludology versus narratology. The position I take here is that video games represent a combination of these aspects framed by the spatialised context of the virtual world in which the game takes place what Jenkins (2004) describes as the ‘narrative architecture’ of game design. The totality of these elements results in a unique virtuality that may reference other media forms, but transcends them through the power of agentic interactivity. Jenkin’s (2004) ‘narrative architecture’ appears to share familiar ground with Frasca’s ‘simulational’ reading of games, stating as he does that ‘if some games tell stories, they are unlikely to be in the same way that other media tell stories’ (p. 120). Ultimately this spatiality facilitates a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which play and stories come together, the space where the sublime might be experienced. Jenkins (2004) details how spatialised narratives can hark back to pre-existing associations – thereby combining the virtual of the game with the concrete present of our quotidian lives – as well as offering a locale where narratives might emerge or where events can be sequenced (pp. 124–6), what Salen and Zimmerman (2004) term a ‘possibility space’. Importantly this also suggests that narratives in

Rhetoric    67 video games aren’t the same as narratives in other media because they can become unfixed from the original intentions of the developer. For instance, in drawing on pre-existing associations, game developers have to ‘paint their worlds in fairly broad outlines and count on the visitor/player to do the rest’ (Jenkins, 2004, p. 123). Failing to design games without the agency of the gamer at the forefront of the process is both uncommon and problematic if you want to sell video games. What unites the key elements of narrative architecture for Jenkins is how the stories that are told are anchored by ‘broadly defined goals and conflicts and pushed forward by the character’s movement across the map’ (p. 124). Both play and narrative are intimately connected. Building on this, Bogost (2008, 2010) considers the implications of imposing ideological apparatus on games, through what he terms ‘procedural rhetoric’. For Bogost (2008), games can be understood as ‘deliberate expressions of particular perspectives’ (p. 119) that are realised through the aforementioned ‘possibility space’ created by different constraints such as the narrative of the game, environmental design and the like. Video games are spaces where procedural models of both imagined and real systems are enacted to frame engagement partially through the imposition of defined rules and processes. Through these procedural models, games present and reflect aspects of our experience of the real world in material, social and cultural terms (pp. 122–124). Video games are not empty vessels of meaningless content (p. 125) but are spaces where claims about the world are made including ‘the hidden ways of thinking that often drive social, political or cultural behavior [sic.]’. I have previously explored the practical issues of procedural rhetoric in the context of The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and how procedural rhetoric in games that feature the DPRK as an antagonist reflect the Axis of Evil agenda adopted by the Bush Administration during the ‘War on Terror’ (Spokes, 2019): this points to the fact that games are not entertaining fripperies, but instead reflect contemporaneous socio-political positions of those in power. Procedural rhetoric, in Bogost’s terms, differs in part from the Longinian mode of rhetoric, seeing as it operates on a practical level as processes that persuade. Whilst procedural rhetoric combines a classical model of rhetoric (words or texts that seek to affect changes of opinion or action) and a contemporary model in terms of video games being an interactive medium that offer an effective conveyance of ideas (p. 125, see also Mathieson, 2015), Longinus was keen to stress that sublime rhetoric moves past this towards moments of wonder and astonishment. If procedural rhetoric is more of an underlying feature of gaming engagement, it seems unlikely that this type of rhetoric will sufficiently transmit affective experience in an immediate sense. Is it possible to rethink procedural rhetoric to an extent so as to consider how it might contribute towards the sublime? In part, the answer is that procedural rhetoric is not really isolated from textual/visual rhetoric – they operate in tandem. The result of this is that procedural rhetoric may have the capacity to push the individual towards the sublime. Here I am echoing Harper’s (2011) call to consider the ‘intersections of narrative or thematic and ludic/procedural content’ (p. 400). Seiffert and Nothhaft (2015) have responded to this by separating out two rhetorical approaches, namely ‘content level’ and ‘procedural level’ (p. 262): when considered in conjunction,

68    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime the interaction between these types of rhetoric – the visual/textual content and the procedures and processes gamers work through – offers a more fully realised model of what games do to gamers: they are designed in particular ways that reflect underlying stories about our sociocultural environment, and they contain representational elements (their narratives, their environment) that gamers interact within a simulational context. This slight reframing points towards how procedural rhetoric may push gamers towards the sort of transcendent experience outlined by Longinus: the combination of narrative architectural elements and the underlying procedures that compel the gamer onwards, offer a route to astonishment and wonder if the developers design the game to have that impact. I’m going to demonstrate how this might work with an example. GoW (SIE Santa Monica, 2018) sees the exiled Greek god Kratos, and his son Atreus, set out on a journey through the Nine Realms of Norse mythology to deliver his wife’s ashes to the highest peak in the land (though this eventually spirals out in to a much more complicated story of Norse Gods, prophecies, giants and the horrifying inevitability of Ragnarök). The game clearly draws on characters and story elements from Norse mythology but tells its own story. The primary ludic element of the game comprises a combat-oriented, third-person perspective with a solid focus on axe throwing (more on this later) as a way of overcoming monsters of increasing size and artificial intelligence complexity. My first experience playing GoW combined the concrete present and the virtual in a way I had not expected. The tutorial system for the game is embedded inside the opening of the story, rather than operating as a standalone section, as has been the case historically – Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Nintendo EAD, 2005) features a great example of how mindless busywork tutorials are less thrilling than seamlessly integrated narrative ones. During the tutorial, the player (as Kratos) learns to propel a canoe and instruct his son Artreus in the ways of combat. This latter dynamic is especially interesting as you are learning the controls for combat whilst Kratos is instructing Atreus as if he already knows them – a sort of gamer/avatar disconnect. What this also offers is early character building, where the connection between father and son, which develops more throughout the game, is established though the implication from the story is that a frosty relationship existed before you started playing. The primary reason I found the experience of the opening of the game disconcerting, is that the impetus for Kratos and Atreus’ journey out into Midgard is the death of Kratos’ second wife Laufey – before the combat-training element of the tutorial kicks in, you build a wooden pyre for your dead wife and cremate her. In the concrete present of my everyday life, I operate in a similar three-person set up so it was hard not to consider the verisimilitude between the death of a loved one and the responsibility of protecting and raising a child alone.4 The procedural

4

I am by no stretch of the imagination suggesting that I am like a Greek God. More to the point, this unbidden comparison popping into my head whilst I was playing demonstrates the potentiality for the concrete present and the virtual to knock up against one another.

Rhetoric    69 and content rhetoric of the game therefore propelled me towards an affective experience. Not, I should add, a sublime one of either wonder or astonishment, seeing as my initial realisation of the comparison was entirely through reflection.5 On a personal level, there was insufficient density – to use Guyau’s terminology – for this to be properly affective, so let’s dig deeper. Firstly, we can understand the rhetoric of GoW in a straightforward literary sense (sans ‘simulation’) through its story and its characters. The game series more broadly speaking is clearly inspired heavily by classical mythology, with God of War III (SIE Santa Monica, 2010) featuring Kratos’ battle with the Gods of Olympus. Although the most recent iteration of the franchise is set against a backdrop of Norse mythology, Kratos is still the exiled Greek god of War. On a basic level, the sort of grand narratives that the Gods inspire relates quite closely with many of the epic texts Longinus focuses on (Sappho, Homer), typified neatly in his evocation of the rhetorical power of Homer’s description of the War God in battle. Here Longinus describes Homer as swept away by the maelstrom of the fight, an example of ecstasy and astonishment that Guerlac (1985, p. 275) calls the ‘traumatic inscription [of] receiving the “thunderbolt”’. Bakhtin (2010) dedicates much of his literary archaeology to showing how particular types of narrative persevere, and the trajectory from Homeric epic to GoW is not really much of a leap given that they both correspond to what Bakhtin calls ‘Greek adventure-time’. He explains how, in thinking through the ‘time-space’ of narrative forms – their ‘chronotope’ – it is possible to understand the motifs that reoccur in genres. For example, in the form ‘Greek Romance’ he states that ‘no matter where one goes in the Greek Romance with all its countries and cities, its buildings and works of art, there are absolutely no indications of historical time, no identifying traces of the ‘era’ (p. 91). GoW through the use of myth-based narrative forms becomes atemporal, existing outside of ‘everyday cyclicity – such as might have introduced into it a temporal order and indices on a human scale’ (p. 91). This suggests that GoW – on a rhetorical level – is transformational in that it reaches beyond specificity towards an archetypal story, the grand narrative, one that temporally displaces the gamer through its appeal to magnitude. Secondly, if we consider the narrative architecture of GoW, that is, the spatialised way that the game is organised which facilitates the story, we can see how the grand narrative is undermined by the ludic, procedural aspects of play. The game map, for instance, revolves around a hub – the Lake of the Nine – from which access to the many realms of Norse mythology is available. Progressing through the game involves returning to this central space, which changes to reveal new pathways depending on your level of progress. This relatively mundane feature undermines the grandiosity of the narrative in favour of the rules of play: to progress, you still need to complete tasks. How is it then, that even when the narrative is undermined by the spatial arrangements, I still find myself enthralled by it?

5

I could make a case for this being demonstrative of the Kantian supersensibility of my cognizing self, but I think that might be stretching things a little.

70    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime Alongside sparse but well-scripted father and son interactions, GoW features a hugely impressive array of technical skill by the development team, including the well-publicised absence of loading screens that make the world appear as one naturally occurring possibility space (see Ramsey, 2018). This does much to convince the gamer of their stake within the world, affording the suspension of disbelief and the opportunity therefore to experience the space as someone who appears to make a difference. A minor, but I think excellent example of this attention to player engagement is Kratos’ axe. Anderson (2018) spends considerable time with sound engineers exploring the challenges of making the axe the player uses to fight various other-worldly adversaries sound authentic, which result in an eventual ‘thunk’ that does indeed sound how you would imagine a magic axe to sound. The tactility of the experience, the intensity of using the tools at your disposal, enables the player to feel physically connected to the avatar and the space. This is the successful marriage of procedural and content rhetoric that echoes Ash’s (2012) work in Chapter 4 on the importance of the sounds that guns make in first-person shooters. It also connects the virtual experience of throwing an axe to the concrete present: it sounds and feels right, despite there being no way of knowing that. The axe has made an impression. Thirdly, to return briefly to Bakhtin, in framing the epic adventure-time narrative, he explains that this timelessness – a feature which enabled the adventuretrope to survive as a narrative form for the best part of two millennia – prevents these types of narratives from connecting with the ‘repetitive aspects of natural and human life’ (2010, p. 91). This, I would argue, is where rhetoric-as-sublime – in the case of GoW – falls apart somewhat: the tension between the power of the rhetorical narrative and the repetition of play. Although we have the epic narrative, and aspects of narrative architecture that all appear to be designed towards engendering an affective experience, the nature of the repetitive action of gameplay might be seen to undermine the transformative power of astonishment and wonder in the gamer, particularly if the developer has worked towards that through the other features mentioned earlier. Regardless of how heartily thunky it sounds, much of what you do still involves repeatedly throwing an axe at things (albeit beautifully rendered things) and then calling the axe back to you: this game is not as grand as the gods and monsters that haunted John Dennis in Chapter 2, but instead involves a process-driven simulation that butts up against the rhetorical dimension of the narrative. Whilst in some ways the game enables you to be sucked into a transformational space, the repetition potentially prevents an intense affective experience from dislocating the gamer fully, as in the Longinian sense of the rhetorical sublime. However, as I will return to Chapter 8, repetition in a non-rhetorical sense has the power to afford the transmission of affect. Maybe rhetoric in this context – through the prism of interactive entertainment – is unable to enable sublime experiences. This opening example represents again the tension between ‘play’ and ‘story’, but I think we need to work it through some other games before we write-off the rhetorical sublime completely.

Rhetoric    71

5.4 C  hallenging Forms of Narrative and Storytelling through Video Games In this section, I want to think about how rhetoric is challenged through differing ideas about storytelling that might be applied to video games. Here I am returning to some of the debates outlined in Chapter 1, because I feel the application of arguments about the transformative potential of rhetoric in the form of persuasive narrative might enable a greater understanding of the potential connection between texts, affect, transmission and the sublime. Having identified the problems of procedural rhetoric in the previous section, turning to other notions of rhetoric is therefore, at the very least, a sign of due diligence. Much of the debate about narrative and rhetoric in video games has been framed in response to Janet Murray’s (2017, but originally published in 1997) seminal text Hamlet on the Holodeck. In the book, Murray details how cybertexts – which I’ll treat as analogous to video games for the purposes of this discussion – have the ability to transform our understanding of who we are and how we interact with the spaces around us (be they virtual or concrete present). Murray (2017, pp. 15–19) draws on a wide variety of media sources to think through the positive and less-than-positive aspects of new interactive and simulation media, starting with an extended analogy about the significance of the holodeck in different iterations of the Star Trek franchise. These spaces, where crew members from Star Fleet vessels can interact with simulations that vary from Sherlock Holmes to James Bond, allow for the temporary suspension of engagement with the ‘real world’, except – as often happens in science fiction – the difference between the concrete present and the virtual overlap and breakdown (the Ship in a Bottle episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes becomes aware he is a simulation and attempts to escape the confines of the holodeck is especially memorable). This dissociation neatly encapsulates both the promise of new forms of engagement with interactive narratives – namely the possibility space for enacting and exploring ‘strange new worlds’ or different versions of ourselves – and the nascent threat posed by systems that participants do not fully understand. Turning to literature, Murray highlights Aldous Huxley and Ray Bradbury’s claim that the ‘more persuasive the medium, the more dangerous it is’. She goes on ‘as soon as we open ourselves to these illusory environments that are “as real as the world” […] we surrender our reason’ (Murray, 2017, p. 23). Before considering the immersive aspects of video games, it is worth looking at a brief example of what we might think of as an interactive in-between, a video game that is its own medium but draws on other literary forms (television, books) and presents its own procedural and content rhetoric in a way more akin to a novel. A good illustration of this type of video game (I am reluctant to refer to it as a genre, because the scale of variation between games of this type is often substantial) is The Walking Dead (TWD) series (Telltale Games, 2013) which started in 2013 and was released episodically until 2019 (concluding as the developer went bust amid scandals about staff maltreatment): I’m not going to suggest that episodic releases mirror the serialisation of Dicken’s novels as narratives or anything

72    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime trite like that, though I suspect there is a bit of parity in terms of episodes acting like old serials did: as money-spinners and tie ins. This is one of several aspects that makes TWD an interesting series. Firstly, the series sits within a range of tangentially related media products. The title is also shared with two TV series and a long running comic written by Robert Kirkman. As a result, the game exists within and across multiple meanings and remakings, something identified by fans of the franchise who often look for the connections between them (Carter, 2017). As a result, TWD is part of a metanarrative – or what Jenkins and Deuze (2008) call ‘transmedia storytelling’ (p. 8) – where the story exists across multiple platforms. This complicates a straightforward A to Z understanding of what the narrative is. Any story that is told, any rhetoric that is forwarded, exists in relation to rules and environments that are designed in other media, which has the knock-on effect of streamlining the story whilst also making it expansive in a shared Universe. Secondly, the primary story that is told – beyond the micronarratives fans have identified – begins as reasonably standard in the Bakhtinian ‘adventure trope’ sense, with a heroic character (an eight-year-old girl called Clementine) attempting to surmount seemingly impossible odds (hordes of zombies). However, as the series progresses this narrative becomes more nuanced, with gamers presented with a series of difficult moral choices. This is where interactive fiction differs from literature in that although the choices are pre-written by an author (the game developers in this case), the decision of which route to follow, which path to diverge along, is left with the gamer. As with GoW, procedural rhetoric has a role to play in this. Butt and Dunne (2019, p. 431), in their research on gender stereotyping in this series (and, by the same developer, Life is Strange), situate these titles in the ‘adventure game’ genre and describe the procedural rhetoric as having parallels with ‘a number of titles […] dedicated to producing significant and moving narratives by relying on a mechanism of player choice between multiple outcomes’. They continue that these choices are often mutually exclusive situations, delimited by apparent moral complexity, but that this is normally a reductive ‘doing the right thing’ scenario (p. 431). This procedural rhetoric is reasonably simplistic, harking back – as Butt and Dunne argue – to the ‘Trolley Problem’ where choices are presented as either/or (have a trolley hit five people, or pull a switch and only hit one) and the outcomes of each choice have a greater or lesser impact on others. Whilst there is arguably more nuance to these games than this flippancy suggests, it is not a million miles away from the same sorts of choice-based scenarios that can now be found in film and TV: the Black Mirror standalone film Bandersnatch (Netflix, 2018) presents options such as ‘Frosties or Sugar Puffs’ and ‘Chop Up His Body or Bury Him’, for example. This mirrors the ending of Season 2 of TWD where the player is presented with the conundrum of killing Kenny or letting him kill Jane. Whilst this implies a bit of a dead-end in terms of the nature of affective experience (how inspiring can either/or be?), contemporaneous reviews discuss the ways in which the overarching story – how a childlike Clementine is able to build a future for herself beyond just surviving (Hetfeld, 2019) – still has real power in terms of forcing

Rhetoric    73 gamers towards morally challenging decisions; as Longinus argues, a story well told has transmissive potential. Except TWD being closer to interactive fiction than a video game prevents it escaping the confines of its limited form. Whilst the series might be considered an ‘adventure game’, the actual mechanics of the gameplay have been described as clunky and repetitive (Hetfeld, 2019), with Butt and Dunne (2019) suggesting (p. 446) these sorts of games are plagued by binary choices and ‘forced endgame scenarios’ which prevent them truly transcending the constraints of their design. Despite the narrative possessing some power, the technicalities of play limit the impact. The procedural and content rhetoric is therefore limited, and the ability to engender transformative rhetoric experiences of astonishment or wonder are curtailed. Again, the ludic nature asserts itself over the narrative. Narratives do not exist in a vacuum (they are, as Bakhtin argues, dialogic and heteroglossic – part of a continuum that is produced and reproduced constantly) and because the nature of the video game is one premised on interactivity rather than just representation, there is also the question of agency to be considered. Earlier, I detailed how Huxley and Bradbury – in Murray’s reading – highlighted the negative impact of surrendering our reason to new forms of pervasive simulation where real/virtual are hard to distinguish.6 This implies a level of passivity on the part of the gamer, as if they are resigned to simply being a recipient of the narrative architecture, whereas gamers are of course agentic, tangled in a web of interactions between designed spaces, machines and embodied experiences (see Chapter 8 for a further exploration of this). Murray (2017, p. 53) also identifies this mistaken passivity, muddied by the problem of ‘the interactors experience [which is] not as authorship but as agency’. Mukherjee (2015) takes issue with this approach because it creates a binary distinction between author and agent that not only perpetuates the ‘interactor’/gamer as a recipient, but also situates agency as frequently human-centred (something taken further by Muriel and Crawford, 2018, 2020). In doing so, Murray misses the role of the machine and the developer in the choices that are made. Agency instead is at the very least the confluence of developers, gamers and machines, alongside myriad contributory factors (environment, upbringing, predispositions, identity, politics, procedural and content rhetoric) taking us closer to Fedorova’s (2017) techno-sublime. By limiting the agency of the gamer, the opportunity for affective experience is similarly limited. Further to this, Murray also describes agency as ‘taking action’ and seeing the outcome of decisions, but that implies a straightforward relationship between gamer and game where actions are meaningful and easily understood. Mukherjee (2015, p. 150) argues that this is not the case because there are too many other

6

I am here ignoring the obvious fallacy in distinguishing between two elements that, in Chapter 4, I explained were essential the same (the concrete present and the virtual represent the actual and ideal real, respectively).

74    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime competing, feedback-looping factors that impact what is going on outside of simple cause and effect (or affect even!)7. The reason why this distinction is important with regard to the sublime is that in a binary distinction between the objects and subjects, if agency is limited to a straightforward causal relationship, the potentiality for sublime experience is limited, as the perceiving subject can identify and rationalise the stimulus that is provoking the experience (much as I did with GoW): as discussed in both Chapters 2 and 3, the sublime is only possible in states where this relationship becomes harder to distinguish, and the perceiving subject is unable to square the experience with extant indicators of familiarity. For sublime experiences to be possible with regard to rhetoric and narrative, the first challenge to overcome is one which situates the gamer as either (a) passive or (b) agentic in a linear sense. Games like TWD, which sit more closely with interactive literature than with other genres of video games, therefore offer limited scope in terms of the possibility of sublime experience: their procedural and content rhetoric are too linear and perfunctory to facilitate a disruption to the perceiving subject. Associated narratives may have the power to move – as Hetfeld outlined – but when this is combined with paintby-numbers gameplay, the opportunity is lost. That is not to say, however, that we should throw the narrative baby out with the bathwater, but rather a refining of the role of rhetoric and narratives in gaming is needed to pinpoint those forms that disrupt. Mukherjee attempts to address these concerns by applying Derrida’s notion of (w)reading to the problem of agency and linearity, which he calls ‘playing stories’. (w)reading acknowledges that ‘reading is writing, and in another, it is not [and that] the processes of reading and writing are inseparable and intrinsic: they repeat and alter each other, both constantly and simultaneously’ (Mukherjee, 2015, pp. 59–60), echoing Bakhtin’s heteroglossia in the process. This conceptualisation, which Derrida himself considers akin to play, when used in the context of video games, would locate gamers and games as both passive and active. Going back over the previous examples in this chapter, playing as Kratos in GoW sees you as both agentic avatar, but also prisoner to the wild imaginings of a simulated Midgard. Variations of the holodeck can also be simultaneously read (the penchant for literary characterisation and extant narratives from Earth’s past) and written (the android Data plays a version of Holmes throughout Star Trek: The Next Generation) and indeed rewritten (Moriarty in the 24th Century!). Lastly, TWD is both dialogic and (w) read in a variety of pantextual ways owing to the interconnected texts of multiple media sources: in essence, there is no master text or referent, only subdivided

7

It is worth noting that although Murray forwards this definition – which Mukherjee takes issue with – she also closes the book by talking about the challenges of procedural authority (akin to Bogost’s notion of rhetoric) and describes how the fastchanging nature of the medium means those who study games and gamers will need time ‘to grow accustomed to combining participation with immersion, agency with story, and to perceiving patterns in a kaleidoscopic fictional world’ (1997, p. 347): her definition is therefore somewhat more nuanced than Mukherjee initially suggests.

Rhetoric    75 versions that share some traits but undermine others. Ultimately, (w)reading offers a contesting of common-sense ideas of narrative as a linear progression from point A to point B, and this is particularly useful in the context of interactive simulation media like video games. Both Atkins (2007) and Mukherjee (2015) use the same example of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (PoP:SoT) (Ubisoft Montreal, 2003) to practically demonstrate the nature of (w)reading through the fractured temporality of the game, and I want to use this to introduce the importance of temporality in interactional narratives because I believe this both challenges cause and effect and points in the direction of affective experience as engendered by rhetoric. PoP:SoT – a combination of action/adventure and platformer – is unsurprisingly set in Persia with the titular Prince narrating the story of the Dagger and Sands of Time. The release of the Sands, the result of a trick played on the Prince, transforms the population of an unnamed city (potentially Azad seeing as that is the name of the Sultan) into monsters. The plot of the game involves you navigating and fighting through the palace of Azad to return the Sands to their original resting place. Atkins and Mukherjee identify how the game disrupts temporality by allowing the player, if they fail at a particular point, to ‘rewind’ the game; the titular Prince exclaims at the point of failure ‘No, this is not how it happened’. Having replayed the game for this book, I found that saving the game also prompts the Prince to say ‘I’ll start from here next time’, suggesting a whole series of alternative starting points that existed until this temporal juncture. What is fascinating about this title is how the act of rewinding effectively means the game is always beginning and ending, remade by the player in a way that Mukherjee (2015, p. 131) sees as analogous to Scheherazade delaying her execution with endless stories in One Thousand and One Nights. When I returned to PoP:SoT (I last played it on the Gamecube) I had also largely forgotten about the role of light portals in unsettling the temporal order of the game: when the Prince walks in to these, often in advance of entering an important new area, the game switches to a black and white cut-scene of the Prince traversing different obstacles. At the Sultan’s menagerie, after I defeated some hammer-weilding quasi-monkeys, the light portal offered a ‘flashback’ for the characters (the Maharaja’s daughter Farah exclaims ‘Be careful, remember what happened last time’) but prolepsis for me as a gamer: a series of interlinked glimpses of the poles I’d need to swing around to get to the top of the giant aviary.8 Temporality is troubled in multiple ways in a narrative and procedural sense then, through flashbacks, prolepsis, the ability to start and end stories at will and

8

There’s a great bit of narration as you reach the ground floor of the aviary. After you’ve fought off some demonic cranes, the Prince explains how he’d dreamt of the aviary as a child and that it was considered one of the Wonders of the World but now it ‘has been transformed into a place of terror by the Sands of Time’: the menagerie is almost entirely empty except the poles and platforms you need to swing on. You’d have to work pretty hard to find it terrifying. More on that in Chapter 7.

76    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime the overarching narrative of the Prince telling his story to Farah. In addition to this, like TWD, the game exists in multiple tellings across a Prince of Persia metaverse, an example of Jenkins and Deuze’s (2008) ‘transmedia storytelling’. PoP:SoT is part of a long running series, it spawned a number of sequels, as well as a film starring Jake Gyllenhaal, an actor best known for his role as Billy Crystal’s son in the film City Slickers. These disjunctures disrupt the players ability to feel fixed in the narrative architecture of the game, and hint at the potential for a certain amount of transmission in terms of indirect ‘expression’ in Guyau’s typology.

5.5 Rhetoric, Temporality and Identity I think this also moves us towards understanding procedural and content rhetoric as directly challenging our identity through a combination of storytelling, agency and temporal disruption, and in rounding of this chapter on rhetoric I am going to focus on two titles which I feel exemplify how identity and temporality can be challenged through game design and engagement, and how these types of rhetoric might move us towards a virtual sublime experience. My first example of this is the exploration game That Dragon, Cancer (Numinous Games, 2016). TDC was developed by Ryan and Amy Green, alongside Josh Larson, in an effort to share their experiences of the death of the son Joel from a form of aggressive brain cancer. The game functions as both a first and third-person-perspective ‘point-and-click’, presented in 14 vignettes that enable the player to actively engage with some of the conundrums and challenges the couple faced from the point of diagnosis through to the eventual of death of their son. The initial development of the game began whilst Joel was still alive, with the game being released subsequent to his death. Not only does this mean the development traverses much of what is subsequently depicted in an interesting temporal parallel where simulation mirrors the concrete present, it also means that coverage of the games development runs in tandem with the progression of Joel’s cancer, leading to multiple overlapping narratives that extend beyond the game itself. Some of this coverage focussed on the importance of faith to the Green family: Ryan described to the BBC (Lussenhop, 2016) that the genesis of the project came from a particularly traumatic night in hospital where his son was seriously dehydrated, but unable to keep liquids down because of his chemotherapy. Ryan recounts how the point at which Joel stopped crying was the point at which he dropped to his knees and started to pray, stating that with the game he ‘wanted to share that moment of, sometimes we feel hopeless but then there’s grace’. A surface reading of this might suggest a sublime experience with religious connotations: the virtual rhetoric reflecting the concrete present much like Longinus’ exhalations of the Book of Genesis. I think instead that the real power of this game comes from the interwoven rhetorical approach of the vignettes. The vignettes, short gameplay fragments, are temporally distinct from each other, and although the gamer is aware of the overarching narrative, this results more in gamers finding ‘themselves accidentally stumbling into the story, rather than being told about it or shown it. They piece this difficult reality together

Rhetoric    77 around themselves and become implicated in it’ (Robertson, 2013). This is again similar to the earlier discussion of (w)reading, where the text of the game is produced by both reading (the design) and writing (playing). The Green’s experience of losing Joel will undoubtedly have been felt on a register different from that of the gamer, but the disjointed narrative goes some way towards replicating the confusion of their situation in other people. The presentation of the vignettes – the content rhetoric – helps with this too. Some sections feature symbolic engagement which intentionally restricts agency, such as the consultant’s room filling with water whilst Ryan and Amy sit and listen, or the use of careful audio design; a forest scene where a faceless child laughs on a swing and a carousel before disappearing. Personally, I have watched numerous playthroughs of the game but have found myself unable to play it owing to the combination of both the types of vignettes and the overarching story. In doing so, I appear to fall into the bracket of early play-testers of the title, who reportedly broke down crying and had to leave the game booth (a box of tissues was subsequently left under each monitor during testing/demoing at games conferences) (Tanz, 2016). This is a game that clearly evokes an emotional response, but is it moving towards a sublime one? Koster (in Tanz, 2016) argues that what TDC represents is the most appropriate medium through which to wrestle with different stories of life and death situations, but whilst there is a demonstrable transmission of affect, I am not sure that the story of Joel itself can provoke that sort of dissociative experience discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. However, the procedural and content rhetoric, particularly the disjointed nature and form of the vignettes, does push towards destabilising the identity of the player and challenging their ability to act in the game space. This is not passivity as Murray (2017) attests, but careful, purposeful affective design. I think this chimes with Anderson’s (2009, p. 80) contestation of the sometimes binary distinction between affect and emotion: ‘affect with the impersonal and objective. Emotion with the personal and subjective’. TDC, in the context of its rhetoric, works towards breaking down this ill-considered separation, where the emotional nature of the individual story of Joel and his family registers in the atmosphere the game creates through its affective vignettes. The second title I want to discuss, which is still lauded in terms of its contribution to challenging narrative forms, is Silent Hill 2 (SH2) (Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo, 2001, 2001). Whilst the game is part of a franchise, and might be seen to operate in a similar sense to TWD and PoP:SoT (alongside the games, Silent Hill was also a not-especially-good film from the mid-2000’s), SH2 is designed ostensibly as a standalone title, with the only commonality the titular ex-mining town.9 From a content rhetoric point-of-view, the game differs from its predecessor by placing less emphasis on combat – which is probably a good thing given a variety of challenging fixed camera angles – and more on solving a series of puzzles and riddles that are left largely unexplained. The primary objective in the game is to

9

Though for some reason the map of the town differs from the original … it’s all part of a clever reveal that comes near the end….

78    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime navigate your avatar (James Sunderland) around different internal and external environments in an effort towards locating your deceased wife (who may or may not actually be deceased). This ambiguity in the central plot becomes especially significant later in terms of impacting the players sense of self in relation to James as an avatar. The narrative architecture marries with the rhetoric in several clever ways to destabilise the standard tropes of this type of game, and thereby effectively challenges the gamer in terms of decision-making. A good example of this is the use of fog. Now it is certainly the case that fog has been used in games to disguise hardware limitations such as draw-distance (see e.g. MacKay 2017), but in SH2 it is used as a positive feature towards the overall atmosphere of the game: the fact you can’t see very far, but can hear the sounds of approaching enemies, or the echo of your own footsteps reflected off nearby unseen structures, is deliberately and effectively unnerving. In this sense, the game embodies aspects of Anderson’s (2009) concept of ‘affective atmospheres’. Anderson (p. 79) explains that the atmosphere of an aesthetic object discloses the space–time of an ‘expressed world’ – it does not re-present objective space–time or lived space–time. It creates a space of intensity that overflows a represented world organised into subjects and objects or subjects and other subjects. Instead, it is through an atmosphere that a represented object will be apprehended and will take on a certain meaning. The affective atmosphere of SH2 is such that the gamer is acutely aware of the unrealness of the scenario – both in rhetorical and tangible gameplay terms – but it is not immediately clear how or why things are happening in the way they are. Anderson goes on (p. 80) to explain that the significance of atmospheres is that they present ‘a series of opposites – presence and absence […], definite and indefinite – in a relation of tension’, and within the game this manifests as a perpetual sense of being on edge, that something is not right with the world. Cleverly, this extends beyond the immediate confines of the narrative architecture, as facilitated by content rhetoric. For example, in challenging tropes of similar titles, simple things like seeing how much health James has involves opening the pause menu rather than reading it from a heads-up display (HUD). Reading the fragmented maps to navigate the town involves either being in a sufficiently lit location or turning on the flashlight, which limits what else you could be holding. In doing so, the unsettling nature of game world is effectively combined with dread in the gamer. (w)reading in this context demonstrates both the agency and lack of agency afforded to you through play and through your engagement with the often vague and disturbing story. On one level, I would argue that whilst this appears affective initially, SH2 doesn’t necessarily do things with enough intensity, that there is not a sufficient density of transmission to facilitate an affective experience of the sublime in Guyau’s terms (1962). Aspects of the game are intense for short periods, largely

Rhetoric    79 helped along by an exquisite soundtrack – it blends ambient sound with harsh metallic scrapes, clanks and screeches – alongside the fact that James’ radio emits increasing levels of static based on your proximity to enemies. However, these brief periods of combat and tension are often combined with a general sense of confusion about where to go and what to do – whilst the conceit of the maps only being accessible in lit areas or under torchlight adds a level of tension, it can also be just plain annoying (which demonstrates how the concrete present of play can interject successfully in the virtual world!) – which detracts from the experience and can lead to the player stepping back from the game. But the time-out-of-joint nature of the narrative really comes together at the end of the game, and this in some part makes up for the less-than-ideal design choices. Over the course of the game, James collects a number of bits of evidence that you are required to piece together in the pause screen in an effort to solving the overarching mystery at the centre of the game. In doing so, you also begin to realise that the troubling backstory of the town of Silent Hill is considerably closer to home than you first imagined. Silent Hill is an amorphous place that destabilises both temporality and the identity of the gamer by forming and reforming itself based on the decisions you make. James, as an avatar, experiences Silent Hill as an isolated individual, pursued by mutated and deformed women through the fog-bound streets. On a procedural level, this is meant to represent the core tension at the heart of James’ narrative – the search for his wife, following the letter he receives from her summoning him to Silent Hill. Except of course that his wife is dead. What Silent Hill does is create a version of his wife Mary, named Maria, who manifests as a fit-and-well person – in contrast to Mary as terminally ill. She is also hypersexualised. This implies two things: firstly, that Maria, as a manifestation of James’ psyche, represents all the things his dead wife was not (but he wanted her to be), and also that the entire game is in essence a journey through James’ trauma towards a state of understanding and acceptance. What you accept, through James as your avatar, is that you euthanised your terminally ill wife. Right at the end of the game you then have the interesting conundrum as to why, allowing the gamer to consider whether Mary is killed to end her suffering, or to end James’? So far, this presents itself as a clever slight-of-hand from a narrative perspective, and one that shares something with TDC in its exploration of trauma and death. However, on a procedural and content level, this is achieved through the agglomeration of ludic, material decisions made by the player. The endings available, which vary from James committing suicide offscreen by driving his car into water to an extended scene of him visiting/revisiting Mary on her deathbed, are entirely dependent on choices made throughout gameplay. None of these are directly flagged at any stage and vary considerably in their importance, from the routes you take across the map to mundane choices made in the pause menu like how often individual documents are opened. There are hints of this at different points, such as the gradual fading of Mary’s letter, but the ambiguity of the decision pathways that lead to these endings mean that as well as the avatar’s uncertainty, the player is similarly left in a state of disquiet. This is a prime example of (w)reading, where the simultaneity of reading the game through the design choices of procedural and content rhetoric

80    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime are also written by the gamer as the emergent horror of what you have done is borne out in the endings. How you play directly challenges both James’ eventual outcome and actively questions you as a gamer in the choices you make, except you don’t know this until long after you’ve made the decisions. What we have then is a complicated challenge to identity and temporality that is framed through types of rhetoric and narrative architecture. In some senses, including the ending(s), the ability to unseat and confuse pushes us towards the sort of sublime experience explored both in Chapter 3, where the sensing body is disconcerted in response to the rhythms of the game world, as well as through Longinus’ original typology of astonishment and wonder: reaching the end point of the game, being confronted with the fact that you were the enemy all along can only really provoke one response! This is contrasted with some of the clunkiness I highlighted earlier. The other temporal aspect of SH2, which works towards limiting its affective impact today is simply the passage of concrete present time. Looking back from this vantage point almost 20 years since its release, SH2 has not held up well (with the exception of the soundtrack). The dialogue, the inventory system, and navigating the haunting fog-bound town no longer inspire uncertainty in the same way they once did for the simple reason that it all seems really clunky by modern standards (if you don’t believe me, head over to YouTube and watch the multiple ending options to see just how bad the voice acting is in particular). This is the rub – the original sophistication of the rhetoric is potentially diminished if gamers are unable to suspend disbelief when exploring the narrative architecture of games, and exposure to contemporaneous titles similarly diminishes the ability of these games to engender affect. As such, temporality is both a powerful aspect of narrative architecture when it is made to challenge the identity of the gamer – pulling the rug out from under you offers an immediate astonishment at what you have done – but it is also one which itself declines over time.

5.6 Rhetoric and the Sublime What both TDC and SH2 gesture towards is the complexity of ways in which games and gamers come together to question identity through a combination of rhetoric (both procedural and content-based), temporality and the narrative architecture of different game worlds. As I have detailed throughout this chapter, if we conceive of rhetoric as procedural and content-based what we are presented with is a potential space for sublime experience that develops the original Longinian approach to types of text. How these texts are (w)read is of course the key determinant in moving towards the sublime, and this is tied up with the problematic notion of agency. Whilst I have demonstrated these trends through a relatively compact number of examples, they are demonstrative of the ways in which destabilising traditional narrative forms and assumptions impacts gamers. I opened by suggesting why it was worth reframing games through Longinus, to see if new forms of rhetoric that respond to interactive, simulational media might be understood through some of the ideas that have developed since Antiquity. I would argue that this is a limited success. In some ways, rhetoric

Rhetoric    81 continues to indicate the opportunity for the sublime, and forms of narrative – when married with procedure and process – result in affective responses and emotive reactions on the part of gamers: this can vary from the moral quandaries of TWD to the revelation that you are the bad guy in SH2. However, there are limitations to rhetoric: firstly, the debate between play and story interjects to destabilise things; secondly, tied to this, the gameplay experience itself undermines the ability to engender wonder and astonishment. Whilst I have identified numerous instances of potentials for sublimity, to return to Guyau’s typology, the transmission of affective experience just doesn’t appear to operate at a sufficient level of intensity for this to take place. Those games that do appear to push towards the sublime are routinely hampered by the technical aspects and design of gameplay itself, thereby damaging the affective impact of the narrative. Given that much of this chapter has been related to Jenkin’s notion of narrative architecture, it seems apt to conclude with his observation that ‘the experience of playing games can never be simply reduced to the experience of a story’ (Jenkins 2004, p. 120). However, as I highlighted above, I do not intend to dispatch rhetoric entirely, as I feel the most effective (and borderline affective) example here – despite the flaws of age and design – is SH2, and this is achieved through the atmosphere (Anderson, 2009) achieved in the game. SH2 is a game that makes you fearful, and given that terror and fear are key tenets of sublime thought, I will return to narrative and rhetoric in the context of fear in Chapter 7, to understand the ways in which narrative might be modified by the immediacy of a terrifying experience. Building on this as an important aside, given the sorts of processes this book is working through (rhetoric, awe and fear), the games featured in this chapter also share similarities with regard to death and dying, alongside sharing commonalities of identity, temporality and the like. Kratos’ odyssey in GoW, sharing similar Bakhtinian tropes with Greek adventure-time, is spurred by the death of his wife and his need to take her ashes to the top of the world. In TWD we see a broader sense of death at a societal level, in terms of the wide-spread zombification of humanity and the ramifications this has in our present position of advanced, latecapitalism. PoP:SoT similarly deals with societal decline and death, with time itself responsible for the destruction of ninth century Persia. Finally, TDC and SH2 explored the differing ways we engage with death on an interpersonal level, through the vignettes of Joel’s life or the dawning realisation of the role that James Sunderland played in the death of his terminally ill wife. In each case, on an agentic level, the gamer is the hand which steers the avatar, and whilst I have intimated that rhetorically there are problems with sublime experiences in a virtual world, I think there is genuine mileage in returning to this again in a later chapter (Chapter 8) with a prolonged study of agency and death. In the next chapter, I will explore narrative architecture along a tangential line from what I have looked at here, moving from the rhetorical in terms of narrative, towards the relationship between types of space, design and agency, drawing heavily on the distinction between beauty and the sublime as found in a variety of eighteenth century philosophers from Burke to Kant. Virtual spaces afford gamers a variety of possibilities, and these possibilities may afford affective experience towards the virtual sublime.

Chapter 6

Awe […] I saw from out the wave her structures rise As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand; A thousand years their cloudy wings expand Around me, and a dying glory smiles O’er the far times when man a subject land […] (Byron, 2004)

6.1 Introduction In the quoted section of a canto from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the reader is presented with a rhetorically rich depiction of Venice, neatly capturing a city that marries – for Byron at least (Marks, 2018) – collapse, decay and grandiosity, a place he went on to describe as ‘the greenest island of my imagination’. Tales of Byron’s exploits in Venice are legendary, and, as demonstrated in the passage above, these visceral imaginings – a virtual Venice – exist in the same world as the tangible, concrete present of Byron’s every day. This can be understood on both a rhetorical level through Byron’s description, but also an embodied experience of space: staring out from the Bridge of Sighs (the English name coined by Byron) you see the majesty of nature and human endeavour, the combination of the real (concrete present and virtual), the spectacle of the space and the sensation of the experience. King and Krzywinska (2006), in their landmark work Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders, spend some time reflecting on this relationship between realism, spectacle and sensation. This is encapsulated in an extended discussion of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, a game I introduced in the previous chapter. During a section of the game titled ‘Had I really seen her’: […] a dark, enclosed passage is entered, to the accompaniment of non-diegetic, low-key tinkling-bell sounds of the kind often used to figure the presence of magic in fantasy games. The screen goes entirely black, disorienting the player. Out of the darkness,

Gaming and the Virtual Sublime: Rhetoric, Awe, Fear, and Death in Contemporary Video Games, 83–102 Copyright © 2020 by Matthew Spokes Published under an exclusive license by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved doi:10.1108/978-1-83867-431-120201009

84    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime a spectacular vista appears, frame by an elaborate golden arch in which the player-character stands […] Stretching out below is a bottomless smoky-blue void, criss-crossed by rope-and-woodenslatted bridges strewn with torches emanating an unearthly blue glow. ‘What the –?’, asks the character, as he takes in the spectacle, cueing the player to join him in regarding the space with contemplative awe. (King & Krzywinska, 2006, pp. 154–155) There are a number of things going on in this passage which are useful to unpack. Firstly, the authors offer a poetic description of the experience of entering this game space, highlighting the otherworldly nature of the bridge-in-thedarkness. Secondly, they detail some of the content elements of the game design that facilitate the initial understanding of the space (as disorientating) and their surprise at what is presented, albeit through the character’s responses. Thirdly, and in tandem with the second point, they suggest a simultaneity of response, in underscoring the interrelationship between the gamer and the avatar (‘playercharacter’). What these three interconnected points indicate is how the gamer – as a hybridised player-character – can experience something that pushes at the limits of who they are through their engagement with an affective, transformative game space. So far, so sublime: a simultaneity of response surely points towards the sorts of immediacy and sensation that Lyotard and Deleuze discuss (see Chapter 3). The fourth and final thing that King and Krzywinska outline is how this space is regarded with ‘contemplative awe’. In Chapter 3, I explored what constitutes a sublime experience – the philosophical underpinning of which reaches all the way back to Longinus – in relation to the dissociative nature of affect, that when something transformative happens with sufficient transmissive density (Guyau, 1962) the perceiving subject is destabilised (in the face of the unpresentable object which cannot be rationalised). But if you’re able to contemplate awe, is the sublime possible? These two very different examples of bridges, one that exists in the concrete present (but is rendered virtual through Byron’s poetry), the other in a virtual space, still do something to us. They have some sort of affective power and possess – in an interconnected sense – the ability to challenge, provoke and destabilise us in a variety of ways (our reflective capacity, our sense of scale, for instance). In this chapter, I’m going to consider the spaces of video games in the context of some eighteenth century approaches to the sublime I introduced in Chapter 2. The perspectives of Dennis, Baillie, Gerard and Burke were typified by a reinvigorated interest in nature and landscape, which in turn provoked heated debate about the similarities and differences between the beautiful and the sublime. Through a number of key exemplars including Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2) (Rockstar Studios, 2014), Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (Odyssey) (UbiSoft Quebec, 2018), The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (W3:WH) (CD Projekt Red, 2015), and Elite: Dangerous (E:D) (Frontier Developments, 2018), I will apply theories of the sublime related to awe in an effort to see – as was the case with rhetoric – how useful these ideas are in understanding our entanglements with video games and, crucially, whether

Awe    85 or not gamers’ engagement with game spaces can engender an affective experience of sufficient density to constitute sublimity. I will start by considering the importance of realism and representation, given how this framed much of the end of the previous chapter, before moving on to think through the role of video games as a simulational medium, and how the combination of representation and active engagement through agency, games design and play facilitates a questioning of the sublime in the context of awe.

6.2 R  ealism and Representation in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey When we talk about video games in the context of the virtual environment in which the game takes place, there are a multitude of factors to consider, not least of which is the relationship between realism, representation and play. For Murray (2017, p. 126) ‘the more realised the immersive environment, the more active we want to be within it’. This implies a clear connection between how realistic a game is and the want of gamers to engage with it. In considering the sublime in relation to video gaming, this also suggests that affective experiences are afforded in environments so immersive that gamers lose themselves within, which evokes the earlier debate on the value of ‘flow’ for instance (see Chapter 4, and again in Chapter 8). Of course, the corollary of this is that games developers have to push themselves to improve the fidelity of the environments they create in an effort towards invoking affective experience and I explained the importance of this in relation to Ash’s (2012 and 2013) work on retentional economies and captivated subjects. Earlier, King and Krzywinska (2006, p. 125) argue that this has been the case throughout the development of video games, dominated as they are ‘on one level, by investments in increasing realism, at the level of graphical representation and allied effects.’ This is partially what fed the console wars between Sega and Nintendo in the 1980s, right up to the three-way split between Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo today: it is not solely about the quality of the technology (plenty of consoles have failed – the Atari Jaguar, Sega’s Dreamcast) but being able to sell your product effectively off the back of connected interactive media products that keep gamers coming back for more. This perspective chimes with that of games developers as well, where the challenge to design and present increasingly realistic representations of the concrete present is always limited by hardware capabilities; for instance, Jonas Mattson – the senior environment artist on W3:WH – explains how the design team always wanted to make an open world game, but we’ve been limited by tech […] so now we had these new consoles, it worked well so we could do the Witcher game we’d always wanted to make. (Webster, 2015) In the context of the techno-sublime (Fedorova, 2017), this demonstrates the continued interdependence between gamers, developers and machinic elements in fostered our affective experiences.

86    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime A good illustration of the importance of balancing realism within the framework of technical capabilities can be seen in the game The Getaway (Team Soho, 2002). This title was heavily delayed for the PlayStation 2 owing to the technical capacity of the console to effectively render in high resolution much of the London setting where the open world, action-adventure takes place. Realism can be achieved partially by appealing to aspects of the concrete present in terms of their representation in the virtual. For example, The Getaway uses official licenses to connect simulational objects in virtual London to the concrete present world: this includes actual vehicles from Saab, Fiat, Lexus and MG Rover and firearms from Heckler & Koch and Remington. Whilst this may seem minor, it implies a blurring of the artificial separation between virtual/concrete present which further reinforces how both operate as facets of the real, and how the space in-between – where metaxis is possible – has potentially dissociative properties. King and Krzywinska (2006, p. 131) also discuss this title focussing specifically on the aforementioned setting (something that was so difficult to pull off the developers blew the original game budget considerably). They argue that the ability to map building surfaces from London on to wireframe 3D models adds a level of fidelity and realism to the game (with some artistic license) which sets it apart from the generic spaces of ‘New York’ and ‘Miami’ in Grand Theft Auto III (DMA Design, 2001) and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (Vice City) (Rockstar North, 2002) as concomitant releases; having said this, the power of the franchise as a retentional economy (Ash, 2013) comes in to play seeing as Vice City was released at around the same time, the sales of which massively outstripped The Getaway. Realism, in this type of open world sandbox game, has developed in line with technological improvements in the games industry.1 Where King and Krzywinska identify identikit spaces in the original Grand Theft Auto (DMA Design, 1997), a cursory glance at Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar North, 2008) shows how realism has developed in terms of rendering, providing an eerily accurate recreation of New York that considerably supersedes previous iterations of the franchise. More recent still, Watch Dogs: Legion (Legion) (UbiSoft Toronto, 2020) carries The Getaway’s torch for realism in terms of mapping – as its predecessor Watch Dogs (UbiSoft Montreal, 2014) did with Chicago, a sizeable cross-section of London that reaches from Westminster to Tower Hamlets has been recreated. According to Clint Hocking, the creative director of the title, the design phase of the game started in 2015: with Legion pegged for a mid-2020 release, the time and effort that has been put into simulating London is immense (Hern, 2019). On a straightforward level then, improvements in graphical representation necessarily transform the experience of play, because the ability to recognise and connect the simulation/representation with your own experience is substantially increased. The in-between space between the concrete present and the virtual – where metaxis is possible – is noticeably porous on an experiential level, as gamers

1

The irony here is knowing how dated my discussions of ‘contemporary’ games will be in five years time

Awe    87 are able not only to engage in the narratives and gameplay of these sorts of open world games but are also able to sight-see, and visit locations that are directly mapped from the concrete present. Sticking with open world games, these types of virtual space are useful in antagonising associations with other forms of representation that were considered realistic at the time. If eighteenth century evocations of the sublime – with regard to beauty and terror – were mediated through the concrete present of the natural world, and the virtual in the supernatural (as in Dennis) then video games are homologous in our current period. In the previous chapter, GoW was used to show the ways in which narratives in video games could be thought of as part of a lineage that reaches back to Antiquity, particularly in the context of Bakhtin’s (2010) work on chronotopes and how this plays out in a modern setting through repeated forms and markers of genre. Open world games are not a genre as such – Tomai, Salazar and Flores (2013) describe them broadly as typified through diverse playing styles in ‘free’ environments where the path between the player and their goal is self-guided – but they are virtual spaces that encourage exploration and engagement that, whilst very clearly designed, afford opportunities to play off-the-rails as an agentic gamer. I will focus on several examples throughout the rest of this chapter. One title that combines both the lineage of adventure narratives and an open world setting is Odyssey. The development of this game again underlines the efforts developers go to create or recreate realistic spaces of engagement as a way of ensuring gamer retention. The team at Ubisoft started their research for the title – set during the Peloponnesian Wars – by working through filmic depictions as well as other games before deciding that the scope of these media was insufficient. Nonetheless, this synergy between media is again suggestive of Jenkins and Deuze’s (2008) outline of transmedia storytelling that was highlighted in the previous chapter. During a scouting trip to Greece (one of three the team undertook) they met Dr Stephanie-Anne Ruatta, an expert in classical languages and literature, whom they subsequently employed on the project as an in-house historian: in the words of Ubisoft’s development blog, along with visiting as many locations in Greece as possible, this approach was considered vital to ‘ensure their version of [Greece] felt authentic’ (Maguid, 2019). As such, the representational space – the content rhetoric of the game – is purposefully designed to mirror a ‘factual’ recreation of the environment, so closer to simulation. Given the efforts the team went for designing this space, the implication is that maintaining high levels of realism is one feature that enables gamers to suspend disbelief in the setting. In the context of sublime experience, transmission that could lead towards the sublime is only going to be possible when gamers feel like the space is something they genuinely occupy, and that their engagement with an avatar is as close as possible to being fully present in the virtual. This game seeks to achieve that by being ‘devastatingly intent on overawing players with its painstakingly detailed recreations of the ancient [world]’ (Starkey, 2018). This representational fidelity is of course nothing if it is not coupled with compelling gameplay and well-considered rhetoric. Contemporaneous reviews

88    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime of the game demonstrate how this combination of setting and play are carefully allied with one another in an effort towards achieving an effective combination of representation and simulation. For example, in relation to how the accuracy of the game space results in 60% of the game map being covered in water (corresponding with the abundance of islands that comprise Greece) Starkey (2018) again details how, around the time of the Peloponnesian Wars, shallow-seas naval battles were a sizeable part of Grecian maritime combat, and that their inclusion in the game achieves several things: firstly, it connects this title with others in the series in terms of the depiction of ‘historically accurate worlds’ (the preceding title in the franchise, Origins, was set in Ancient Egypt: see Chapter 8) thereby facilitating a level of expectation amongst gamers; secondly, in choosing the setting and title of the game, the team offer ‘a firm nod to the epic poem’ of the same name which in turn situates it within the lineage Bakhtin (2010) delineates with the adventure chronotope; thirdly, at the level of gameplay, the ability to engage in sea warfare ‘fills out an already expansive adventure […] with plenty of additional texture’(Starkey, 2018). The combination of these three factors solidifies the relationship between procedural and content rhetoric alongside problematising the virtual/concrete present binary with regard to historical representations based on up-to-date scholarship. How might this be understood in the context of the sublime? The most obvious way is in relation to scale and the impact this has on the perceiving subject. Dennis, as I explained in Chapter 2, identified a number of examples of facets of the sublime that are transcendent natural (and supernatural) forms which inspire ‘common passion [and] enthusiastic terror’, namely: Gods, daemons, hell, spirits and souls of men, miracles, prodigies, enchantments, witchcrafts, thunder, tempests, raging seas, inundations, torrents, earthquakes, volcanoes, monsters, serpents, lions, tigers, fire, war, pestilence, famine, etc. (Dennis, 1996, p. 38). In a representational and simulational sense, Odyssey enables the player to engage with many of these archetypes, through battles with the Gorgon Medusa, through to the all-out-war that frames the game more broadly. Gareth Glover (2018), the game director at UbiSoft Bucharest,2 describes the games as full of mysteries, myths, and legends, true to how people of the time envisioned them. For them, the gods and the supernatural were everyday explanations for things that couldn’t be otherwise explained, and so we created a lot of quests and content based around this understanding. This symbiosis suggests the potential for sublime experience in the context of Dennis’s understanding, with Odyssey offering an affordance to experience not

2

As is typical with many triple-A titles such as Assassin’s Creed, multiple teams from the wider global operations base of developers/publishers work on each title, rather than individual developer studios. Similarly, RDR2 involved eight different developer teams under the umbrella of ‘Rockstar Studios’.

Awe    89 only the realism of a space inaccessible to our everyday engagements with the concrete present, but also designed to facilitate encounters with the terrifying such that we are shaken from our quotidian world. How far this goes in relation to terror and fear is something I will explore in more detail in Chapter 7, but at the very least the potential for sufficient density of transmission is offered through this representational and simulational open world game being ‘realistic’. As King and Krzywinska (2006, p. 151) argue, developers are essentially trying to balance ‘variable blends of elements that aspire or make claims to different kinds and degrees of realism’ with some aspects purposefully exaggerated in an effort towards provoking a response from gamers, similar to Ash’s (2013) ‘captivated subjects’ argument.

6.3 B  eauty and the Sublime in The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt Myth and legend, coupled with a realistic game space, can also be seen in W3:WH, and before moving on to explore beauty in more detail through Burke and RDR2, I’d like to sketch out the beautiful/sublime dichotomy with regard to the environments of Skellige in particular, an island kingdom to the west of the W3:WH game map: like Odyssey it is predominantly covered by vast expanses of open ocean, and the ways in which the landscape is designed and detailed does, I think, correspond neatly with Burke’s arguments around the sublime object in contrast to the beautiful. When Burke explores the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful he talks about a number of preoccupations with theories of the sublime at the time (such as whether or not representations of the sublime can themselves be sublime … which they can). For Burke (1996), beauty resides in smaller things, whereas ‘sublime objects are vast in their dimensions’ (p. 140), as well as being rugged, negligent, dark and gloomy in the face of beauty’s love of ‘the right line’ (p. 140). W3:WH excels in the environmental story-telling stakes, and can be described as most of the above. The opening portion of the game, as you ride across the dead on the battlefields of Velen not only drops you in at the deep end with the horror of war, but also lays the foundation for a broader malaise that penetrates everything from the destructive marriage of key NPCs like Phillip Strenger – the Bloody Baron – who offers Geralt (your Witcher avatar) the immortal advice ‘the world might seem black and white to you Witchers, but for us common folk it’s shades of grey’, all the way to the shadow cast over the village of Mulbrydale by the hanging tree outside the village, populated by the swinging corpses of deserters from the games’ civil war. These locales are vast, the sublime framed as the terrible outcome of war. The intensity of the game space is encapsulated in the Isles of Skellige, a Northern Kingdom of the game that you first visit during the Destination: Skellige mission. My first encounter with Skellige sees Geralt washed up on the shore following a sea battle with pirates. The ship you travel in is shipwrecked on the coast of the largest island. Here the skies are brooding, seemingly on the verge of perpetual thunder; the seas that surround the island are unending, haunted by ghostly apparitions of long-sunk vessels and giant whales. Of the six individual

90    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime islands, most are peopled by a menagerie of grotesque mythical beasts intent on pulling out your insides (like the Arch Griffin). What contributes to the sense of dread – beyond the inevitable interpersonal violence – is the scope of the space itself. Mountains tower over you, with castles like Kaer Trolde cut into the sheer rock of immense cliff faces. Travelling from island to island in a tiny boat underscores how wide the seas are. You are intentionally dwarfed and ultimately intimidated by the space, and this is achieved through considerable attention to detail. Dwiar (2017) discusses the lengths that the developers went for recreating specific environs that mirror the concrete present Northern hemisphere locales that inspired W3:WH. Drawing on considerable experience – Dwiar (2017) is a garden and landscape designer who has previously won a gold medal from the Royal Horticultural Society – he highlights how the mountains look genuinely geologically convincing, the woods naturally dense, and the fields rolling, but everything down to the smallest details of the design give them an extra quality – they become believable landscapes and places. (n.p.) This believability – generating what I previously discussed as the ability to suspend disbelief – is vital in convincing gamers that the space they inhabit exists in some sense, somewhere between the ideal virtual and actual concrete present. This blurring of boundaries shows the ways in which appeals to realism impact the individual gamer. Dwiar (2017, n.p.) explains that if designers are able to achieve a heightened level of realism, then gamers will more readily engage with spaces of play. He explains that: Our aesthetically-aimed eye will look at the game and instantly recognise that, of course, that mountain on the horizon looks mountainous in shape and that river bends absolutely naturally enough, but in each of the landscapes and environments created, there are elements of landscape design that would feature in the real world when re-creating a believable naturalistic look and feel. In creating a space where the difference between a representation/simulation of an environment and the concrete present environment in the non-virtual world is fractional, and given that spaces like the mountainous terrain of Skellige is not necessarily an environment gamers have access to outside of the game, the potential for an affective experience is magnified. In Chapter 2, I detailed how Baillie (1996) argued that representative paintings of landscapes in the eighteenth century could ‘likewise partake of the sublime; such as representing mountains’ (p. 99). Nature inspires sublime experience, and the representational ‘shall fill the mind with nearly as great an idea as the mountain itself’ (p. 99). In this sense, depending on the effectiveness of transmission, if a painting is able to engender an affective experience in the viewer, then the interactive medium of video gaming offers the chance of sublime experience: Bonner’s (2018, p. 14) work on ‘striated wilderness’ in Horizon Zero Dawn suggests a direct parallel, as this game

Awe    91 stand[s] in the tradition of landscape paintings, landscape gardens or nature parks. They can stage a playable witnessing of and reflection upon (a pristine) nature and man’s impact on it. My initial encounter with Skellige was one of trepidation, fear and awe, confronted as I was with landscapes that challenged my perceptions in the way Burke suggests, moving from the first experience of awe in the scale of the mountains, towards the fear engendered by my avatar’s position within that scale. However, this early engagement with awe-inspiring space wears off: you become increasingly desensitised to it, and I would argue this is somewhat ironically the result of game design, the same game design that is intent on hooking gamers in using realism. Were the landscapes to produce a sublime experience through the terror of being confronted with unknowable vastness, in such a way that the perceiving subject is unable to reconcile the experience, the game probably would not have sold as many copies as it did. The game would be too overwhelming to want to engage with. Affective experience in this context is fleeting. If we think about this through other game features, it is clear to see why this limitation is necessary. The content rhetoric of the game, and the narrative elements of the stories it tells – particularly the careful scripting of side missions3 – firmly locate the avatar in the environment, the by-product of which is to reduce the level of anxiety or affectivity in the gamer: to progress, you need to reconcile your fear through familiarity. Your avatar is from this world, the characters you interact with inhabit it, and the outcome of this is that the opportunity for sublime experience diminishes swiftly (in this particular context). Game developers aim to create ‘meaningful play’ through simulation and representation but this is only possible if the gamer is eventually familiar with the rules of engagement, rather than permanently fearful of them. In the context of Sutton-Smith’s (2001) ‘rhetorics of play’, W3:WH starts by situating play as imaginary (forwarding the importance of creativity and flexibility, but also uncertainty) until familiarity shifts this towards play as power, where the gamer achieve mastery over the game through control and practice. Returning to the specifics of environmental and landscape design, it is also important to identify that the seeming vastness of the world of W3:WH is tempered by programmed-in limitations. W3:WH is not an unending space, and delimiting the space is perhaps where we reach the limits of representation. In a simulational sense, for the regular gamer the space is indeed gigantic4 but for dedicated gamers the first thing that happens when you are confronted with the

3

The Witcher is now a sufficiently vast transmedia product, with the original books spawning both the games and a popular Netflix series starring Henry Cavill, famous for playing Chas Quilter in The Inspector Lynley Mysteries amongst other things. 4 Koch (2015) calculates the game map size as 52 square miles (136 square kilometres) based on a presentation given by the developers CD Projekt Red at GDC (available at http://twvideo01.ubm-us.net/o1/vault/GDC2014/Presentations/Bushnaief_Jasin_ Solving_Visibility_In.pdf)

92    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime apparent magnitude of an open world game is test the limits of that vastness. Salen and Zimmerman (2004), in discussing the relationship between rules, game design and play, identify that ‘player behavior [sic.] is not universally law-abiding [and] for game designers, this means you should never take players’ behaviour [sic.] for granted. […] assume your game will be played not just by earnest rulefollowers’ (p. 281). In W3:WH, if you attempt to leave the map – in Skellige this can be achieved by jumping in a skiff and heading north – a pop-up message informs you that ‘You’ve reached the world’s edge. None but devils play past here. Turn back’. There is only so much space hardware can render, so the game must have limits. Similarly, Plunkett (2018) underlines the size of the Odyssey world map by watching someone walk it from end to end. It takes 2 hours and 28 minutes to do so, but this undermines the idea of a truly open world because the distance becomes ultimately quantifiable: Ancient Greece ends in grey rolling waves off the coast of Lesbos. If the game is quantifiable in this sense, it is also reduced in magnitude: it moves away from the absolute of the mathematical sublime and becomes manageable. Going forward, in understanding the sublime in relation to game spaces, realism and play, perhaps then it is the individualised moments of engagement, rather than magnitude at a recordable level that is important?

6.4 Representational/Simulational Landscapes in Red Dead Redemption 2 RDR2 opens with some dramatic snow-bound cutscenes, as Dutch and his gang – including your avatar, Arthur Morgan – attempt to escape from the law across a mountain range in white-out conditions. Sometimes they’re pursued by wolves. The heavily scripted opening of the game is certainly cinematic in nature, drawing on a number of routine tropes from films (Spaghetti Western and otherwise) to lend the game space an air of authenticity: to my mind, the beginning is similar to the hemmed-in blizzard of Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. Tropes, as I discussed in relation to Bakhtin (2010), are useful shorthand to allow gamers to get to grips with particular spaces through evoking familiar corollaries: you understand aspects of the game and its content and procedural rhetoric and logic because you have prior experience through a different medium. As with the earlier example of Odyssey this alerts us to the importance of convergence (Jenkins & Deuze, 2008) in assisting gamers in situating themselves in the game world. The flipside of this, and something developers who are aiming to garner affective experiences are well aware of, is that it is reasonably straightforward to play to these tropes as well as to play with them. What I mean by this is that games developers can design-in points at which affective experiences can be sharpened, assuaged, downplayed or accentuated so as to purposefully manipulate the narrative architecture of the game (Jenkins, 2004) and the response of the gamer, either fulfilling expectations or challenging them: in this sense, play conforms to participation as controlled experience (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004, p. 314). An example to illustrate this: in the original Red Dead Redemption, your avatar John Marston reaches a key point in the game where the map south of the fictionalised Rio Grande becomes an available game space, it having been locked up until

Awe    93 this point. As you ride into Mexico, the environmental sound drops away completely except the muffled noise of your horses’ hooves on the trail. Over the top of this, Jose Gonzales’ It’s Far Away rises up. The first time I experienced this ride, it sent a genuine shiver through me, a combination of trepidation (moving into an unknown space) and awe, as you follow the riverside trail towards the nearest settlement. The environment echoes the sort of ‘big sky’ you might expect in the concrete present, ably recreated to such an extent that some have described this part of the game as the greatest moment in gaming history (Albrighton, 2014). Watching the scene back, I had a similar feeling to my first playthrough, though I suspect this was more in terms of my nostalgia for the original experience. However, RDR2 pulls a similar, more nuanced trick5 as you leave the snow fields of the Grizzlies for the spring-thaw of West Elizabeth. You cross a ford at the top of a waterfall, and as you leave the river, the cart hits a rock and the wheel comes loose. You clamber down, fix the wheel, and as you go to collect the items that have fallen off, the camera pans down and back across the river to where a party of displaced indigenous Americans on horseback look on. One of your gang comments ‘Poor bastards’ and laments how it is a shame how badly screwed over they’ve been. This is a seemingly throwaway moment, but at its heart is some skilful scene setting that mirrors the cliff-top ride in the original game, but here underpinned by the gamer’s potential knowledge of the deeply troubling story of land clearance. Over the course of the game, this small moment develops into landscapes of change – some big, some small – effectively changing the scale from the micro, individual experience (in the original Red Dead Redemption) to the macro. The reason I am drawn to this in particular is I think RDR2 does interesting things in terms of the sublime, especially in relation to the power of sensation games evoke. This can be seen most strongly in the ways in which the landscape itself reflects both the changes that have taken place in the United States since the period when the game is set (the late nineteenth century) and how artists in particular sought to grapple with the awe and immensity of the pristine environment they were riding into as European settlers headed west. This manifest destiny is of course troubled by the impact that settlers had – and continue to have – on indigenous populations. The fact that all of this is stirred-up by what is, in essence, a 20-second semi-interactive cut scene demonstrates how combining the individual gamer’s response to broader social, cultural and spatial landscapes can lead to something approaching the sublime. How this differs from W3:WH is that this combination of game space with very carefully constructed narratives engenders different responses, which I feel are related to the framing of this game through aforementioned tropes, but also through nods to actual history (rather than a dissimilar fantasy world). In highlighting the value of RDR2 in the context of landscapes, Gies (2018) offers a treatise detailing the overlap between the vistas of the game and the

5

I’m ignoring the bit where they actually pull an identical trick using D’Angelo’s Unshaken because that would be a major spoiler.

94    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime development of particular styles of art that became known as the Hudson River School. Interestingly, Gies opens by referring to Aaron Garbut – Rockstar North’s art director on RDR2 – and his assertion that the designers look to neither film nor art for inspiration. This is counteracted reasonably swiftly, with insights from Wendy Ikemoto, the associate curator of American Art at the New York Historical Society: the concession from the designers is that for some areas – such as atmospheric lighting – the art team drew their ideas from JMW Turner and, in the second iteration of the Hudson River School, Albert Bierstadt, Charles Russell and Frank Johnson. Gies uses this as the impetus to explore the similarities between key parts of the game environment and well-known paintings from the Hudson School, including Bierstadt’s Donner Lake from the Summit (1873) and Charles Russell’s When the Land Belonged to God (1913). The game space of RDR2 is impressive in the ways in which it distils a wide variety of America topography, flora and fauna into one arena, enabling gamers to traverse the entire continent through indicative habitats: similar to Dwiar’s examination of the fauna of W3:WH, RDR2 has also had actual ornithologists assess how representative birds are in the game (see Lund, 2019). When compared with the paintings of the Hudson River School, it is clear to see the parallels with similar representative environments, and Gies draws our attention to light, mid-range colour and saturation in particular, where the game appears to replicate much of what Baur would go on to call ‘luminism’ (see Wilmerding, 1989). The difference between the Hudson River School representations in art, and those in RDR2 of course is that the latter can be directly interacted with, meaning the gap between the virtual space of interaction and the actual concrete present is increasingly indistinguishable. From a narrative perspective too, where the Hudson River School operate as a sort of propaganda tool for westward expansion (see Miller, 1993), the landscape changes in RDR2 represent a social commentary you can play through (see Denham, Hirschler & Spokes, 2019). If we think this through in the context of Gerard (1996) and Dennis’ work, arguably the sublime is possible through these representations in the same way that eighteenth century painting and architecture were understood to have affective power. For Dennis, as I discussed in the context of Nicolson’s (1997) earlier argument, observing mountains offered important contrasts of scale – where hills and valleys could be considered beautiful, mountains offered a scalar horror. Similarly, in RDR2, the tonal and spatial shifts between the varying environments in the game space offer a similar notion of scale. As representations, we can see through Gerard (1996, p. 168) that the idea of association can be just as powerful as the thing itself, so the sublime can be reproduced in those things that replicate or represent aspects of the natural world (the example in Gerard being the Pyramids and their comparable magnitude to mountains). When earlier research (see Ribbens, Malliet, Van Eck, & Larkin, 2016) has shown that gamers find realism a crucial aspect of their ability to suspend disbelief, and with the increasing processing power of games consoles facilitating near photo-realistic virtual environments, the ability to be affected by a representative/simulational space that harks back not only to other representations (such as paintings of the mid-west) but actually mappable terrain, is increased.

Awe    95 Moving on from this, suspension of disbelief is not just about looking at a game space and feeling a sense of awe as an indicator of the sublime, but also involves agency and engagement as a crucial aspect of simulation and interactivity. Gamers need to be immersed and incorporated into the game space as this offers the closest overlapping of virtual and concrete present, which in turn increases the potentiality for affective experiences of the sublime.

6.5 T  he Importance of Incorporation and Sensation in Super Mario Galaxy Part of the problem with conceptualising the sublime in the context of virtual space involves the ways in which the game space has the potential to act on and be acted upon by the gamer. Calleja (2011) seeks to clarify how games impact gamers and vice versa through his development of the ‘player involvement model’ which he positions as a refining of the problematic notion of ‘immersion’. Here we might think of immersion as a gamers ability or otherwise to sense that they are occupying a simulated space. For my purposes, the closer a gamer is to feeling – on an affective level – like the game is having some sort of impact, the greater the opportunity for a sublime experience where the individual is unable to fully reconcile the subject/object distinction. Calleja finds immersion a problem because overuse has watered down its vitality as a concept. Through the player involvement model, he suggests that incorporation might better represent how gamers become fully engaged in virtual space. He describes incorporation as a subjective experience of inhabiting virtual space where gamers have the ability to meaningfully act in that space whilst also being present in relation to others. In essence, Calleja’s (2011) model consists of two interconnected temporal frames: On the first level, the virtual environment is incorporated into the player’s mind as part of her immediate surroundings, within which she can navigate and interact. Second, the player is incorporated (in the sense of embodiment) in a single, systematically upheld location in the virtual environment at any single point in time. (p. 169) These frames are simultaneous, on the one hand involving the internalisation of the environment by the gamer into their consciousness, whilst at the same time being incorporated through the avatar in the game space. There are six related processes that facilitate incorporation including movement (kinaesthetic) with the game space (spatial) that involves aesthetic effects (which he terms ‘affective involvement’), rule-based systems designed in (ludic) that may be personal (narrative) and shared with others (shared involvement) (p. 170). The synthesis of these elements enables players to be incorporated into the game. The relative success of these processes echoes, I think, the variable density of affective transmission we see in Guyau (1962) – the greater the strength of the connection between these elements, the stronger the bandwidth, the more the gamer feels a part of that virtual world.

96    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime The power of this notion of incorporation is that it effectively combines the embodied individual as the player, and the game itself, so it moves beyond representation towards a rounded understanding of engagement and the impact this can have. Similarly, and related to the significance of sensation and the sublime in Deleuze’s work, Cremin (2012) furthers this idea with regard to how this symbiosis facilitates the challenging of designed-in narratives and gives real agency to gamers. Cremin starts by returning to Sutton-Smith’s (2001) understanding of the ambiguities of play, focussing in detail on the disruptive element of ‘frames’ of engagement. Sutton-Smith (p. 229, cited in Cremin, 2012) states that disruption ‘is the key to play, and that structurally play is characterised by quirkiness, redundancy, and flexibility’. Cremin argues that play can only be truly disruptive when gamers are able to push beyond what seems immediately apparent. In Super Mario Galaxy (SMG) (Nintendo EAD Tokyo, 2007), for example, as gamers we are Mario: he is not simply an avatar we control. We engage in an ongoing process of casting and recasting the avatar through our ‘affective encounters with the video game world and its characters’ (Cremin, 2012, p. 75). Vitally, video games cannot be purely representational in Cremin’s understanding because the act of play and the ways in which the gamer interacts and manipulates the game world, and is affected by it, makes it non-representational (p. 77). Boiled down, what makes the game incorporative is the agentic nature of the gamer, and the opportunities the gamer produces through their play. Deleuze and Guattari (1994), in describing the roles of the writer in the production of text, see someone who ‘twists language, makes it vibrate, seizes hold of it, and rends it in order to wrest the percept from perceptions, the affect from affectations, the sensation from opinion’ (p. 176) and gamers for Cremin occupy the same space. In discussing SMG in depth, Cremin teases out the potential for tension between the designed game space and the affective opportunities afforded to the gamer. In encountering a planetoid in SMG, Cremin (2012, p. 81) details how gamers […] have to think about the surface, the size of the planetoid, and the effect of the small blue floating stars used as slings to propel Mario between them. When we play SMG for the first time, we have to think about, look for and see friction, we have to think about the ways its intensities will affect our movements. When playing a video game, the gamer is not simply a recipient of representational or even simulational information, but is instead an agentic, feeling, sensing body bound up in cycles of responses, affective reactions and traumas. How might this operate in the context of the sublime? If we think back to Deleuze’s (2008) thoughts on harmony as the ‘apprehension of successive parts’ (p. 43), then the gamer encountering the game world through the avatar proxy of Mario disrupts this harmony through a variety of available actions. This tension between what you–Mario can do and what you–Mario actually does operates similarly to Deleuze’s (1981) notion of ‘the figure’ where sublime experience is possible in the sensing relationship between domains: for Deleuze it is the material conditions of

Awe    97 painting and virtual power that extends beyond the representational through the cyclical processes of chaos; and for Mario it is how the initial rendering of a figurative avatar is increasingly evaporated through action, what Cremin (2012) calls a ‘becoming-Mario’ (p. 77). If we reconsider this potential for affective experience through the density of transmission, when gamers reach beyond the confines of the Sutton-Smith ‘frame’ and disrupt the space, we see the increasing blurring of object and subject. A sensing body experiences olfactory, haptic, expressive and nervous transmission as a totality. Here then the agentic gamer has a commensurately increased opportunity for a sublime experience, where the sensing body is affected through the chaos of agentic gamers. As I discussed in relation to Deleuze earlier, in his extended work on Bacon this chaos, or ‘catastrophe’ as he terms it, can be seen in the intentional derailing of differing organisational structures in an effort to offer a formless or reforming object. In the context of video games derailing can be understood in terms of agentic play. To explore this idea in detail, I will now move on to consider these ideas of incorporation and disruption through examples of specific types of play in E:D and RDRO (the online version of RDR2). The ability to disrupt and derail in the context of open world games relates to what Salen and Zimmerman (2004) consider ‘degenerate strategy ecosystems’ (p. 273), a style of play that treads an intentionally blurry line between imaginative approaches to play and ‘rule breaking’ more broadly (see also Sutton-Smith, 2001). Through this type of play we can potentially escape the confines of expectation towards the virtual sublime.

6.6 C  haos and the Outer Limits in Elite: Dangerous and Red Dead Online Emergence, Salen and Zimmerman (2004, p. 158) argue, is vital in terms of our understanding of how designed systems and operational rules become meaningful for gamers. In this chapter, I have already considered the role that realism in terms of game environments has played in this regard, suggesting parallels with those experiences of eighteenth century explorers, poets and artists as they set out across the globe to see and respond to the magnitude of the natural world. Following Campbell’s (1982) lead, but applying the ideas of complexity to video games, Salen and Zimmerman (2004) suggest ‘emergence’ is intimately connected with complexity, where ‘a simple set of rules applied to a limited set of objects in a system leads to unpredictable results’ (p. 158). Those unpredictable results we might think of in the context of Deleuze’s (1981) battle between rhythm and chaos: where the rhythm of the game might be thought of as the interplay between different system elements which make up the game world and the experience of play, chaos is how increasing complexity forces rhythms to break down in some sense. In their schematic of emergent systems of play, Salen and Zimmerman (2004) outline four systems for understanding games. Firstly, fixed systems are unchanged, where the relationship between elements remains the same at all times. Secondly, periodic systems are those which repeat unending patterns. Thirdly, there are chaotic systems, characterised by the perpetual motion of elements (they

98    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime liken it to static on a TV (p. 156)) and fourthly and finally there are complex systems. Complex systems sit in a spectrum between the periodic and the chaotic as they are more ‘unpredictable than a periodic system, but not so full of dynamic relationships that they end up as a chaotic haze of static’ (p. 156). I would argue that, given the increasing complexity of dynamic elements in contemporary video games in particular, it is more difficult than ever for a complex system to avoid descending into chaos. The effect of this chaos is the affordance of affective experience, the potentiality of the virtual sublime, and it is something facilitated via the agency of gamers as the essential arbiter of that disruption.6 Milne (2019) offers a comprehensive insight into the lengths some gamers go for testing the limits of both a game space and themselves. The Distant Worlds 2 expedition in E:D saw an initial 13,615 gamers embark on a 65,000 light year voyage to the edge of the galaxy, a journey which saw only 3,747 players arrive at the Beagle Point system five months later. Over the course of the expedition, according to data compiled by ‘Commander Qohen Leth’, the best part of 10,000 players perished in a combination of wilful self-destructing of vessels, running out of fuel, crashing through gravity wells and the like: this might seem like a minor thing given that you would respawn following your death, but as Milne (2019) explains, the eventual respawn would see you leave an expedition you had potentially sunk months of time to, along with the loss of ‘pricey exploration data’. Milne’s discussion of the voyage is interesting for several reasons. For starters, it is a transmedia object. It reads like a travelogue (as does the accompanying podcast) that would not seem hugely out of place in the Travel section of a bookshop, as he outlines the types of systems he passes through, the nature of nebula and what the surfaces of far-off planets are like as a resting spot: these insights are no less tangible than watching The Sky at Night hypothesising on what methane lakes on Jovian moons might be like, considering how challenging these things are to conceptualise and visualise. Secondly, setting out across the galaxy demonstrates considerable dedication on the part of gamers. Milne clocks up 710 hours of gameplay – the equivalent of a solid month of concrete present time – in the game, dealing with issues like his vessel’s ability to plot the route through areas called ‘The Abyss’, alongside the tedium of travelling through huge expanses of nothingness.7 Thirdly, and crucially, is Milne and many others actually bothering to see this through. What is it that makes gamers want to test the limits of the game, in this case the limits of rendered space? For Milne (n.p.) it is simple: Elite Dangerous, like most games is about systems and mechanics for players to learn and master. This can often be comforting after

6

Arguably speaking – for a longer discussion of the challenges of framing agency in this way, see Chapter 8. 7 This dedication of time, and the apparently boring nature of engagement might also suggest something about the high attrition rate.

Awe    99 your daily dose of cold reality, where best-laid plans can go up in smoke. Events like Distant Worlds 2 are something else though. It’s grand and personal all at once. If I can dedicate myself to something like this, who’s to say that energy and determination can’t be carried forward? Here we see that the Milne distinguishes between the everyday nature of play in the game world and how the expedition differs from this, in terms of magnitude and scope but also the impact it has on the individual. Bound up with this destabilising of the personal in the face of the immensity of the voyage, we also see how Milne maps this on to the concrete present, how the transcendence of the experience in the game has been affective in that it has altered his perception of the concrete present through his interaction with the virtual. Milne’s example challenges the limits of the system, with gamers using every element of the game world to push towards the edge of (virtual) forever. This involves considerable physical and mental effort – engaging in an active game world for months on end with only one purpose is a serious challenge given that games are routinely designed with specific goal orientation in mind – on the part of the gamer, not to mention the time and energy used within the game itself: failing to effectively plan an expedition of this magnitude can see your craft drifting eternally in the vast emptiness of space with little hope of recovery. The journey of discovery across the galaxy, in the tradition of those intimidatingly massive landscapes rendered by the Hudson River School, is one into an unknown, where the generative and randomised elements of the game world can only really err towards chaos given the immense complexity of both the available objects in the game, and the gamer as agentic subject making choices about how to test the limits. The fear this must inspire (along with the inevitable boredom of the journey) pushes the gamer closer to the sublime, towards that unpresentable something/nothing at the far reaches of the game. Whilst E:D is a good example of the transmission of affective experience through a combination of nervous, aesthetic and haptic transmission in particular, it still conforms to an extent to the system limits – the system may invite chaos, but it is still bound by the edges programmed by Frontier Developments, the game developer. The second example, a travelogue by Australian game developers (nicknamed The Grannies) who sought to discover the true limits of RDRO, demonstrates how beyond the limits of the game, affective encounters are considerably more likely. In RDRO, there is a trick where if gamers are able to find a particular spot on a cliff, draw their gun and push forwards, after some rough-and-tumble with the physics engine of the game, it is possible to move through the edge of the game world into the space beyond. The Grannies, whilst not the first to identify this, offer a similar travelogue to Milne in their exploration of this space beyond the edge. What do they find there? A huge wilderness that extends in many directions, containing abrupt texture changes in the landscape, weird geometric anomalies, high-resolution and low-resolution spaces operating alongside one another.

100    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime Eventually they reach another edge where they can see through to the underneath of the world and having camped out alongside the edge they jump into the abyss in turn. As Kalonica (cited in Plunkett, 2019) puts it, they are ‘constantly falling and being pushed back up […] the day and night cycle was still visible, it was a such [sic.] bizarre and beautiful space’. As Plunkett (2019, n.p.) explains in his summary of the endeavour What’s fascinating about this isn’t just that the world is so large outside the fence, but that bizarrely thanks to how open and empty it is this is in some ways more of a Wild West adventure than the actual game Beyond this falling and pushing, the gamers eventually emerge into an infinite body of water, with the inevitable consequence that, following the still extant operational mechanics of the game, their avatars eventually succumb to the fatigue of swimming and drown. The whole journey has played out like one elongated wander into the virtual afterlife. As Plunkett (2019) summarises ‘this intrepid journey (and accidental Westworld homage) past the edge of the world might be the most interesting thing about the game I’ve ever seen’. The power of this encounter is that excitement, surprise and anguish were only possible following the chaotic breakdown of expectation and the fabric of the game world itself: as Plunkett details, the real adventure only begins when leaving the limits of the system is possible. Escaping the confines of the map, the gamers were confronted with a truly emergent system, where behaviour was unpredictable and their previous understanding of the space and its rules became, eventually, useless. In this sense, the game environment descending into chaos neatly replicates the sort of sublime shift Deleuze discusses with regard to the absence of form in Bacon’s work. The ending – the drowning of all the avatars – is possible only because rhythm, the rules of game engagement now reconstructed out of chaos, begin the cycle again and the avatars respawn. What the Grannies expedition shows is that the virtual sublime is possible when expectations are disrupted. The team encountered a space of significant magnitude, populated by objects and textures that didn’t make sense, and eventually their avatars – their conduit to the world through which they are the perceiving subject – descend into chaos as well, with largely unpredictable results. In wanting to escape, agentic gamers challenge the limitations of the game space, which may offer a sublime experience when an unexpected new environment or experience is encountered. Contrary to this, it is through understanding the rules of the designed system, and the gamers role in engaging or otherwise with the rules, that sublime experience is stymied. Before moving on, I think it is also worth noting that these two closing experiences are both examples of what Jenkins (2006) calls ‘participatory culture’, that the insights into the sublime as an experiential state are gleaned from the production of gamers and fans. I intend to return to this in Chapter 9, as I believe there is something important to consider when the sublime rubs up against collective experiences.

Awe    101

6.7 Awe and the Sublime The obvious counterpoint to this argument is that even this seemingly limitless space in RDRO, limits still exist. Rockstar North still included the spaces that the Grannies were able to document within their design, albeit an area of the game they presumed would remain inaccessible. Whilst this is true, the developers did not build that space with the intention of having it peopled by gamers who have escaped the figurative form of the game and moved towards an affective experience of the virtual sublime in a substantive way. Similarly, although in codifying the experiences for audiences the sublime is lost (it is rearticulated and therefore no longer an immediate, unpresentable experience), that should not detract from the fact that something clearly happened. In this chapter, I have introduced a number of different ways in which we might understand the virtual sublime in the context of debates about awe and magnitude. Some of these perspectives were more successful than others in corresponding with the key tenets I unpacked in Chapters 2 and 3. This suggests that elements of earlier theories of the sublime are useful but may be limited in accounting for interactive media. Burke and Dennis offered useful insights into the separation between binaries like natural/unnatural and beautiful/sublime, but Deleuzian notions of chaos and the figure made it possible to move beyond subject/object distinctions towards a detailed understanding of becoming as embodied and contingent within different virtual spaces. My initial focus was on the role of realism and representation, given the prominent role that representational and figurative art played in the development of the sublime with regard to eighteenth century approaches (and the debates in Game Studies around the differing nature of simulational interactive media). I detailed the ways in which Dennis and Gerard saw representation in art (the virtual) as analogous to actually being at the foot of a towering mountain (the concrete present). In relation to video games, with regard to realism – and a focus on graphical fidelity and the believability of virtual space/place – I suggested a relationship where the move towards photo-realistic environments makes the delineation between virtual and concrete present increasingly blurred. Realism was also seen in the lengths developers go to replicating elements of the concrete present in virtual space, including the direct mapping of actual spaces from one to the other. There were a variety of parallels between representational forms in the concrete present, such as the Hudson River School and the figurative American West, alongside the use of experts in framing the historical context of a game world (Odyssey), and the flora and fauna of both Northern European environments (W3:WH) and turn-of-the-twentieth century North America (RDR2): if it’s good enough for landscape designers and ornithologists, it shows a commitment to fidelity whereby developers are moving closer to wholly accurate ‘possibility spaces’. Of course, representational engagement only gets you so far. To truly afford affective experience, gamers must be incorporated into the game world (following Calleja, 2011), and this involves a complex balancing act between simulation, representation and play. With regard to the latter, as I discussed in conjunction

102    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime with Cremin’s (2012) work on SMG, the agentic nature of the gamer is vital to realising the potential games and play have as a site for the virtual sublime. Agentic play is a disruptive force, as Sutton-Smith (2001) has said, and it is only when pushing at the limits of emergent systems that the power of the gamer to affect and be affected by the game world is possible. The agentic gamer brings chaos to the rhythms of complex systems, and moves past what Salen and Zimmerman (2004) call ‘meaningful play’ where the actions of a player and the responses of the system to those actions result in particular outcomes (p. 156): they challenge meaning, and in doing so move into spaces where sublime experiences can occur. It is only in the closing two examples from E:D and RDRO – the former related to magnitude, the latter to disruption – that we see the nature of the virtual sublime more exactly, as that metaxical state between the virtual and the concrete present where the delineation between object and perceiving, cognizing subject is sufficiently disarticulated that the transmission of affective experience is possible. The virtual sublime, in this context, is possible in a space which is rendered in such a way to: (a) be believable to the gamer; (b) to afford the gamer opportunities to act (which are not necessarily obvious); and (c) facilitate incorporation to such an extent that associations between subject and object – through affective, agentic play that challenges the systems of which the gamer is a part – are increasingly difficult to distinguish. In the next chapter, through an examination of Kant in particular, I will ally this spatialised sublime with the rhetorical sublime from Chapter 5, so as to understand affect in relation to fear.

Chapter 7

Fear By the time you’re exploring a ruined department store full of people wearing the faces of discarded mannequins it’s hard to tell where you crossed over from ‘cop solving crimes’ to ‘man potentially in hell’. (Hurley, 2019) Uh, they used to be allowed to walk around during the day too. But then there was The Bite of ‘87. Yeah. I-It’s amazing that the human body can live without the frontal lobe, you know? (Phone Guy, Five Nights at Freddy’s)

7.1 Introduction As an employee of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a security guard of sorts (the previous incumbents having mysteriously disappeared), the mundanity of sitting in my office, monitoring security cameras, turning lights on and off and occasionally closing doors in a seemingly empty restaurant, is periodically punctured by my inevitable murder at the hands of homicidal animatronic animals: by day, they entertain children at pizza-based parties but at night they stalk the checkerboard corridors of the pizzeria in search of human prey they can stuff inside one of their vacant suits. I first played FNAF (Cawthorn, 2014) with my friend Tom. He was visiting from South Korea, bringing with him his knackered laptop (which added nicely to the fuzziness of the security camera footage) and the promise of solid jump scares. Jump scares are those moments when an unexpected event physically shocks you into recoiling: they are often slightly foreshadowed by an expectation that something bad is going to happen.1 We played FNAF in my living room, with

1

My favourite one from cinema is the scene outside the diner in Mulholland Drive when the ‘dumpster man’ appears from behind the restaurant. Or that bit in Descent where the camera pans around the survivors in the cave to reveal a humanoid cannibal at the end of the line. Gaming and the Virtual Sublime: Rhetoric, Awe, Fear, and Death in Contemporary Video Games, 103–124 Copyright © 2020 by Matthew Spokes Published under an exclusive license by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved doi:10.1108/978-1-83867-431-120201010

104    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime the lights out, at 2 a.m. We were both partially inebriated. I screamed so loudly at one point, I thought the students living next door would bang on the wall. This is by no means a unique reaction – a quick search of YouTube for ‘Let’s Play’ videos of the game will attest to that – but it does beg the question as to why gamers choose to engage in games that are intentionally fear-inducing, or disgusting, or horrific. As Ruberg (2015, p. 122) expresses, it is important to consider ‘the seemingly unpleasant [as it] allows us to uncover underexplored modes of experience’. I would not describe FNAF as a fun experience, but it was definitely a memorable one. Ruberg also argues that not all games are fun, but the aspects of what makes them not-fun are equally revealing. Fun, she explains, fails in capturing the totality of experience: ‘the accidental fall from a treacherous platform […] a flash of bile when an opponent meets a player in combat and wins’ (p. 133). In this chapter, my intention is to consider fear – which Dennis, Burke and Kant all include in their formulation of the sublime – and how this relates to the virtual sublime through the challenging of the perceiving subject in response to a fearinducing object (and how the ‘abject’ plays in to this). FNAF occupies a variety of not-fun aspects in terms of its design and could therefore be considered an archetype for games that engender fearful responses. Through these aspects, it is possible to delineate important facets of the virtual sublime. Firstly, the game substantially limits the gamer’s agency. You are, at least in the early iterations of the game, physically fixed in place. You are able to operate the cameras, which overlay your field of vision (obscuring your view of approaching monstrosities), you can turn on lights and open and close doors, but all of this is achieved by simply moving your view left to right and clicking on particular buttons. Your agency is further limited by an ever-decreasing power bar – you can use all of the above until the power goes out, at which point you are prey to the robots stalking you in the dark. Limited agency, as a number of scholars have identified (see Newell, 2016; Perron, 2004), is a feature of this particular genre of gaming which is often called ‘survival horror’. For Kirkland (2009), survival horror can be understood as fostering a ‘sense of helplessness, entrapment, and pre-determination’ (p. 64), so given the fixed nature of the viewpoint and the action in FNAF, we can say this game conforms to the standard expectations of the genre. Secondly the game features characters that, to put it kindly, are thoroughly unsettling. Again, this chimes with tropes from other survival horror games which I will detail shortly. Broadly speaking, these sorts of antagonists – as Švelch (2019) develops (see 7.3) – can be thought of as ‘computational others’: like us in some ways, but also somehow distant and threatening in their inhumanity. This distinction between the gamer and the Other is crucial to understanding the density of transmission in terms of affective experience. With FNAF, the computational others develop from the uncertain (you are unaware what you are dealing with until an ex-employee calls the office to let you in on the horrible truth) to the downright horrifying as they attack and inevitably kill you. Thirdly, survival horror games, in relation to the purposeful limiting of gamer agency, are frequently accompanied by restrictive narratives that add to an ‘onthe-rails’ gameplay experience. This differs markedly from the apparent freedom

Fear    105 of the open world vistas of RDR2 or W3:WH, in that survival horror games are typically confined to organised spaces where player agency is regulated through types of interaction and highly restricted narratives. Games like Bioshock (2k Boston, 2007) achieve their narrative structurally (akin to Jenkins, 2004 ‘narrative architecture’), with the gameplay taking place in the underwater city of Rapture, where the mutated former residents – Little Sisters and Big Daddies – are the result of a failed social (and medical) experiment with Randian individualism and genetic splicing. Other games like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (The Chinese Room, 2015) tell literal stories through the narration of absent characters who are represented by gold shimmering haze (so vaguely ghostlike, but not quite), leaving the player with a sense of unease as they try to piece together where everyone went (spoiler: it isn’t the Rapture). The reason this narrative fixity is interesting is the way in which it clearly contrasts with the earlier discussion of the role of rhetoric. In Chapter 5, rhetoric was dismissed as failing to sufficiently engender affective experience owing to the lack of density of transmission, and the rhetoric to fully problematise the subject/object distinction. Here, if we move from the sublime as something uplifting in a transcendent sense, to something horrifying (in the Burkean tradition, and Kant’s mathematical/dynamical sublime) – what Kristeva (1982) calls ‘the abject’ – then rhetoric is perhaps afforded transformative potential as fixed narratives speak to underlying fears about identity and the world around us. We shall see. Ultimately, my aim is to try to understand that the way that fear operates, the way it is programmed into FNAF and other games as part of captivating subjects through a retentional economy (Ash, 2013) of affective design, is a spectrum. This spectrum maps across Guyau’s transmissive density, from what I am going to call ‘immediate/visceral fear’ (of an interpersonal attack on the gamer/avatar), through ‘the uncanny’ (the unfamiliar familiar2), to the structural, systemic fears of the concrete present. Our experience of fear – intrinsic to specific experiences in individual games – is not simply immediate or primal but is the product of extrinsic fear (located in the concrete present). It is through the metaxical processes that connect aspects of this spectrum together that we find the virtual sublime. Of course, the other clear connection is to particular understandings of the sublime in relation to the ‘terrible’, which can be read through Dennis’ fear of God as manifest in certain types of natural phenomena, Burke’s sublime in the pleasure/pain principle and how pain is inflicted but unbidden by the individual, as well as Kant’s bipartite sublime: the mathematical and the dynamical. I will unpack each of these and apply them accordingly.

7.2 Terror, Magnitude and the Kantian Sublime Before developing the sublime in relation to fear and video games, it is worth returning briefly to some of the philosophical underpinnings of associated ideas discussed in earlier chapters. Of those scholars whose work on the sublime I have

2

In FNAF this is achieved by taking the familiar – a child’s party venue, a relatively safe space – and making it unfamiliar.

106    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime introduced, who will be most useful in the context of fear? Burke (1996) directly contrasts the sublime with the beautiful, and as we saw in Chapter 5, he does this by considering the characteristics one would associate with each. The beautiful is smooth where the sublime is painful, the beautiful is soft, where the sublime is ragged: beauty is light, but the sublime is gloomy. Whitehead (2014) demonstrates this contrast expertly when reflecting on the survival horror game Alien Isolation (AI) (Creative Assembly, 2014), where you attempt to flee a crashing space-station stalked by Giger’s classic xenomorph through a maze of collapsing tunnels and falling-apart mess halls: this is a game during which you’ll spend a lot of time frozen in fear, hiding from certain death – but you’re just as likely to find yourself stopped in your tracks to admire the scenery. The sublime is terrifying and terrible for Burke, and the beautiful is pleasurable. Drawing on utilitarian ideas of pleasure and pain, the sublime is found in the latter, with the facility for pain to interject in such a way that the individual is unable to fully reconcile their responses. As outlined in Chapter 2, Burke frames the sublime as the outcome of an affective experience by a powerful state or action that reaches beyond the individual’s control. A pleasurable experience, Burke (1996) argues, requires little effort on behalf of the ‘neutral character’, whereas pain ‘is always inflicted by a power in some way superior, because we never submit to pain willingly’ (p. 137). Crucially, as previously argued, the terrible and fearful in a Burkean sense are also located in objects which operate ‘in a manner analogous to terror’ (p. 131). What constitutes the terrible in the context of objects obviously differs from person to person and has changed over time. For Dennis (1996, p. 38), it is partially religious (Gods, daemons, witchcrafts) but also natural (tempests, earthquakes, tigers) and manmade (war). As with artistic representations of the time – the paintings of Fuseli and Blake for instance – today we might see fear similarly through analogies in particular media (films and video games). What unites eighteenth century terror and our current fears is the problematic relationship between tangible objects and what they might mean or represent: for example, although Dennis’ fear of the terrible is located in specific things – all serpents and pestilence and raging seas – these fears speak to a broader existential threat of the many unknowns that confront us, notably the amorphous ‘Other’. Our ability to square away that which causes fear, to rationalise and recapitulate – to make something more or less terrifying – operates along a scale which is dependent on sufficient information. For example, as Lavers (2009) argues, descriptions of animals on the Indian subcontinent pre-Renaissance, channelled through the limited framework of travelling merchants and relayed to relatively immobile Europeans, managed to transform the rhinoceros into a unicorn (it has four legs, can run quite fast. It must be a horse … with a horn on its head). Fear develops and spreads in the sorts of environments where information is limited, or in the case of video games, where information is deliberately restricted, or agency is purposefully curtailed to achieve affective experience.

Fear    107 The amorphous nature of fear and the terrible in the sublime is, as I have previously discussed, arguably encapsulated in Kant’s analytic of the sublime, specifically bifurcated into the mathematical and dynamical. In the former, the terrifying is that which moves beyond the subjectively great to the absolutely great, ‘…a presentation that makes us aware of its own inadequacy and hence also of its subjective unpurposiveness for the power of judgment in its estimation of magnitude’ (Kant, 2008, p. 109). The absolutely great challenges our ability to rationalise and subsequently codify affective experience. I would argue that the amorphous nature of fear is therefore transformative, is sublime. It has the potential to operate at sufficient density to transmit differing forms of affective experience, particularly in the context of nervous expression (Guyau, 1962). With the dynamical sublime, Kant engages with fear directly, but offers a nuanced understanding of sublime experience in the context of connectivity and distance: this will be important in the context of the virtual sublime because any engagement with a fearful experience in a video game is automatically distanced by process from the gamer, through the hardware to the software and back in a feedback loop. The video game may reify your fears in some sense, but that is still mediated through a control device, an interface, an avatar. Kant (2008) likens this experience thus: We can […] consider an object fearful without being afraid of it, namely, if we judge it in such a way that we merely think of the case where we might possibly want to put up resistance against it, and that any resistance would in that case be utterly futile. (pp. 119–120) In this sense, Kant is arguing that the object of fear invokes a response, but at a stage removed. As perceiving subjects, we can imagine the fearful thing, can imagine our inability to push back against it and come up lacking. However, the thing itself is not required to be present, I would argue: it just needs to be represented in such a sense that we can make a judgement about it in the terms outlined above. The balance between pleasure and pain, as seen in Burke, is tested by Kant as well. He argues, in relation to threatening natural objects that ‘the sight of them becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, provided we are in a safe place’ (p. 120). Pleasure and pain can comingle, providing we are sufficiently distanced to be offered the chance to imagine resistance (even if futile) because this raises the mind from what he describes as ‘the middle ground’, towards the potential of the sublime. This might go some way to explaining, on a theoretical level, why gamers engage with experiences they know are going to scare them. What we have then is a history of fear and terror as key components of eighteenth century conceptualisations of the sublime. For Dennis, this related to contemporaneous fears about God as manifest in the (super)natural; for Burke, the sublime rests in the terrible/fearful world of unbidden pain and our inability to resist; for Kant, resistance is also a factor, but the relationship between pleasure and pain is contested through points of overlap and the ability for the sublime to challenge our ability to rationalise the subject/object distinction in the first

108    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime instance, and the potentiality for distance to allow us to conceive of the fearful as sublime. In relation to this latter point, and in conjunction with a variety of contemporary literature on fear and gaming, I think there is a clear argument to be made for how fear manifests as a spectrum of affective experience, related to Guyau’s theory of transmission: my intention then is to posit and test this idea to see if the virtual sublime, in relation to fear, operates in this way.

7.3 Fear, Games Design and Agency Järvinen (2009, pp. 90–94), in his work on the application of the Ortony, Clore and Collins model of emotional engagement, highlights a number of key factors in the relationship between a gamer’s experience and the design of a game, situating this in relation to ‘attraction emotions’, or whether or not objects – game settings, design, soundtracks, etc. – result in players liking or disliking a game. The relative level of like or dislike results in consequences across a spectrum, with travel in the direction of dislike eventually provoking disgust: game developers, Järvinen argues, know and play on these associations (see also Ash, 2013). Whilst in Chapter 4 I spent some time detailing the conceptual issues with equating emotion and affect, the spectrum Järvinen outlines has clear overlaps with Guyau’s notion of the importance of density in transmission: if affective experience is related to liking or disliking, it sufficient response is required for this to take place. It also begs the question that, if designers are purposefully making games that are disgusting, why do gamers engage in games they might actively dislike, that they know might provoke fear? Järvinen frames this in relation to a number of variables – both local and global – and the variance across these variables means that vastly different games – he uses Super Monkey Ball and Silent Hill – can both provoke fear, albeit in different ways: Super Monkey Ball achieves this through a fear of falling (from the race course), and emotional uncertainty results from this, whereas Silent Hill achieves alternative uncertainty through the environmental design of the town, the use of fog and the unpleasantness of the characterisations (p. 94). If fear – as a suitably extreme response to stimulus – operates in this way, is it possible to develop a model for understanding fear through types of affective experience? Before moving towards this, I want to visit scholarship on video games, fear and design to offer grounding in my later analysis. I opened by discussing the ways in which FNAF purposefully prevents gamers from active engagement. Rehak (2007, p. 143) considers this in the context of Doom 3, a first-person shooter in which id Software (2004) who designed the game purposefully limited player agency through game mechanics. Rehak explains that Navigating the zombie-filled environment, players may use a flashlight to illuminate their path, but cannot hold a weapon at the same time. The choice – see where you’re going versus defend yourself blindly – leads to much panicked toggling back and forth between gun and flashlight and is suspenseful or annoying depending on your disposition.

Fear    109 In Doom 3 we see how the ‘operational rules’ of the game (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004, pp. 132–135) bump up against the agency of the player, something previously identified in other forms in Chapters 5 and 6. The restricted use of the torch makes you choose between seeing or not seeing, which has clearly been designed to create tension and atmosphere, but as Rehak attests, it very much depends on your disposition. Some gamers may enjoy the challenge, and concomitant fear of not being able to see, but others designed a software patch to allow the game, on PC at least, to be played with both a flashlight and weapon drawn. There are those who want to play in one style, and those who are less inclined, as Järvinen explained: this is not just difference between games, but also difference within games, framed by the design choices that have been made. Disposition can also be linked to retention, where games that invoke an affective experience through fear are still those predicated on keeping gamers engaged. Salen and Zimmerman (2004, p. 333) discuss this in terms of games following a process that balance out a designer’s want to create content that entices gamers in (‘crossing the boundary of the magic circle’) but also keeps them in place. Survival horror titles in particular are faced with the difficult juggling act of retaining gamers through carefully balanced operational rules, game mechanics, content and procedural rhetoric, and narrative unpleasantness. FNAF, for example, is both scary and frustrating. Whilst I chose to engage, there are plenty of gamers for whom this type of title is of no interest. Choosing not to engage can demonstrate something beyond frustration with rules and game mechanics. King and Krzywinska (2006, p. 202) argue that game playing is bound up in the relationship between the specific qualities of playing (the operational rules for instance) in conjunction with the imagination of the gamer. They state that ‘the kind of behaviour familiar to individual players from particular types of games might be expected to contribute to the repertoire-stock of their imaginations’: I am not suggesting that this means if you play a violent game you become violent (a debunking of this can be found in Denham and Spokes, 2018 and Denham, Hirschler & Spokes, 2019) but rather that different types of games – following my earlier exploration of Bakhtin and tropes in rhetoric – correspond to different types of expectations, and these can work in favour or to the detriment of designers of survival horror titles. Some gamers want to play, othersdo not. Tied to this, Spittle (2011, pp. 314–316) highlights how, with regard to the conventions of horror cinema, video games operate a rhetorical and narrative shorthand reliant on the probability that players of FPS’ [first-person shooters] can be expected to have a familiarity with the rhetorical tropes and representational practices that they will encounter in horror games. Whilst this may seem an obvious observation, one that mirrors Jenkins and Deuze’s (2008) work on convergence and transmedia storytelling, in the context of fear and the sublime it is an important one. What these expectations afford the gamer is the opportunity to engage in genres they are familiar with and enjoy, or

110    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime that there is also the potential to have those expectations challenged: it is the latter where the affective experience of the virtual sublime is most likely to be found, when those individual qualities of the perceiving subject are undermined and disassembled by the object. The dynamic between agency and the loss of agency is vital, given that from what I have explored so far the virtual sublime is only possible where player agency, or the impression thereof, is afforded the widest possible remit (including, as in Chapter 6, the ability to move beyond the programmable confines of the game itself). How can a sublime encounter be possible in games that function to limit agency in some of the ways suggested above (withholding information about the avatar, heavily regulated environments, restrictive narratives and so forth)? Spittle (2011, pp. 324–325) thinks this through in the context of the gamer as a ‘defender of subjectivity’. Whilst gamers, as per Salen and Zimmerman’s assertion of applied imagination, might be said to possess a unique informed position that they map on to their avatar, there is a tension in the fact that ‘games implicate the gamer as controller of the action’ and in doing so the gamer is afforded ‘a proliferation of possible readings of abject and uncanny rhetoric depending upon the way the player/character traverses and interacts with the game world.’ So although games based in ‘horror’ as a genre, much like the Bakhtinian ‘adventure’ trope discussed in Chapter 5, allow gamers to engage in spaces that are in some way other to their quotidian experience, they are impacted by a multitude of routes towards affective experience based on the ‘proliferation of possible readings’, intrinsic and extrinsic to the game, both agentic and scripted by designers. Fear becomes a powerful tool to challenge identity through operational rules, game mechanics, narratives and the unexpected perspectives gamers bring to the table when they play. As in Dennis, and in Kant, I would argue there is a spectrum in which fear operates. This runs from the immediate, interpersonal horror of individual encounters with the object of fear (different types of Other), through unnerving and weird engagements with environments and entities who remind us of ourselves and our lives but not quite, all the way up to macro-level structural fears about our society, our institutions and the world we live in. Video games are a representational and simulational tool for designers and gamers to explore these fears in what might initially appear to be a safe environment, one step removed from ‘reality’ through the proxy of the game interface, controls and the like. From the perspective of the transmission of affective experience, I want to develop this spectrum through key exemplars, in relation to those scholars of the sublime who use fear and terror to understand experience. Despite the seeming gulf in representative form between painting, architecture and video games, the latter as interactive media facilitates different types of encounter that alert us to the power of the virtual sublime. At heart, fear – running from the ‘immediate/visceral’, through ‘the uncanny’, to the ‘structural/external’ – demonstrates the ways in which the metaxical process of play challenges the perceiving subject in pushing it towards the unreconcilable object. My intention is not to suggest that all games within a particular genre of ‘survival horror’ are the only places where this

Fear    111 affective experience is possible – I will also briefly look at games like The Witness (TW) (Thekla Inc., 2016) and Animal Crossing: New Leaf (AC:NL) (Nintendo EAD, 2013) – but rather that a multiplicity of fearful experiences are spread across a spectrum, which in turn suggests the relative magnitude of affective transmission. In this sense, video games that are in some way fear-inducing offer an ideal testing ground for understanding the virtual sublime.

7.4 Immediate/Visceral Fear (via the Abject) Immediate/visceral fear relates to the gamer/avatar encountering an object that provokes fear or a fearful response. FNAF works because the gamer, after their first death,3 is aware of the operational rules of the game very quickly and whilst you know the jump scare is coming, it continues to terrify because of the variability of when it takes place. This difference relates in part to the agency of the player – have they run the camera out of power already, are the doors knackered – but also the specific design choices of the developer. There are a number of gameplay dynamics that are used to achieve this. So far, we’ve seen the jump scare as being effective in provoking the gamer in an immediate physical and psychological response, as well as the ways in which gamers are given the ability to fight or have the opportunity of flight restricted. Fear can also be engendered through other design approaches and developing an atmosphere within a game space is important: we’ve seen this in the context of lighting (Doom 3) but sound design can be equally powerful. I never gotten further than about an hour of game time into System Shock 2 (SS2) (Irrational Games, 1999), after the tedious character design training levels that is. The game environment of the Von Braun, controlled by the malicious AI SHODAN, was too much for me. The lost-in-space setting and, more importantly, the frightening sound design prevented me from going any further than the initial hub-levels, where walls painted with slogans in human blood were nothing compared to the audible shambling and groans of the stations mutated inhabitants. You never knew when an attack was coming, but you could hear it gradually approaching from multiple directions. My immediate response to the visceral horror of these distorted occupants and their plaintive cries was to stop engaging. More recent titles, such as SOMA (Frictional Games, 2015) and the aforementioned AI achieve similar things in terms of environmental design, though with the added advantage of better graphical fidelity (see Chapter 6), which in turn makes the experience seem more real. For Wakeling (2015), SOMA is terrifying because the horror manifests itself in the hideous creatures that stalk and pursue you […] in these moments of isolation where the sound design really comes to life: all menacing growls, piercing shrieks, and something scurrying in the vents above.

3

Or, in my case, third death.

112    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime AI encapsulates how environmental design, when combined with a monstrous antagonist, can be used to great effect in invoking fear in the player. McCaffrey (2014) explains how the clomping of the alien’s footsteps, the bassy whump of it ­skittering around in the air vents above you, its angry shrieks and hisses – they all make Isolation very good at ensuring that you’re never comfortable. This combination of the game space, and the fear-inducing enemy that occupies it, has at its heart a central tension that speaks to the virtual sublime, namely how the player is made to, in one way or another, confront a terrifying Other of which they have limited understanding: the nature of this Other, and the challenge in reconciling what it represents, affords us affective experience as gamers. SS2 features a variety of mutated humans intent on killing the player, something which Švelch (2019, p. 258) describes in detail in relation to Bioshock – a game routinely considered the successor to the System Shock franchise: The woman starts attacking your character, screaming incoherently. You have no choice but to bash her with a wrench. The illusion of humanness has been shattered. Like most survivors in Rapture, that woman is a ‘splicer’ – a decaying and deranged, monstrous ex-human. It is not only her tattered clothes and weird grin that gives it away, but also her relentlessly aggressive, repetitive behaviour [sic.], which clearly puts her into the category of video game enemy, or more generally, a computational other – a non-human algorithm-driven agent. There are two points of interest here in relation to fear and the virtual sublime as an affective encounter with the immediate/visceral. Firstly, the computational other is not simply an external process manifest through a mutated representation, but rather exists in a metaxical state: it isn’t inhuman, in that possesses qualities – elements of language, dress, interaction – that we would consider human, but then it is also deranged and intent on splattering your insides up the wall. It is this irreconcilability that points towards a Kantian idea of the sublime, except of course there is nothing dynamic about it – the fearful object is not at arm’s length where it can be rationally considered but is instead charging at you with a wrench. Secondly, as Švelch (2019) later highlights, ‘splicers, as portrayed in the finished game, are in transition from humans to monsters’ (p. 262). The fact they never fully transform, held in a perpetual failure to coalesce, is indicative of a virtual sublime with particular regard to the Deleuzian formless figure in Francis Bacon’s (Deleuze, 1981) work: splicers are fear-inducing precisely because they are neither one nor the other. These computational others are a good example of both the loss of agency of the gamer – your opposite cannot be reasoned with and will attack you – and how video games confront the gamer, through engagement with the immediate/visceral fear

Fear    113 of a thing coming for you, with inhumanity in reflection. Kant would argue that this opposite is precisely disgusting because of the way in which it simultaneously challenges the beautiful – splicers antagonise the player’s familiarity with the human form in their deformity – whilst insisting that we enjoy it. In Critique of Judgement, Kant (2008) explains that the object is represented as insisting, as it were, upon our enjoying it, while we still set our face against it, the artificial representation of the object is no longer distinguishable from the nature of the object itself in our sensation, and so it cannot possibly be regarded as beautiful. (p. 141) This idea of the disgusting is powerful because it implies irreconcilability, but it also exists on a spectrum. Korsmeyer (2012, p. 753) explains how disgust is but one of several powerful affects that art [and, for our purposes, video games] deliberately arouses to shape a narrative, to intensify the impact of an image, and to convey profound and difficult meanings. It takes its place alongside fear, pity, grief, sorrow, melancholy, dread – all the emotions that have given us versions of the ancient paradox of tragedy, namely the striking puzzle represented by the fact that art that is supremely uncomfortable to experience may be sought after and accorded the highest value – even enjoyed. This reading of the disgusting, in relation to fear, can be seen in the context of video games as aspects designers actively factor into their games through the application of atmospheric effects, jump scares and limited player agency. It also addresses the earlier enquiry about why gamers would play games they potentially actively dislike, or recoil from. In Burke’s conceptualisation of the sublime, we experience fear and pain as inflicted by unbidden encounters (which gamers might seek to avoid), but encounters with disgusting computational others can still be enjoyed on Korsmeyer’s terms, because the horror they confront us with speaks to the separate underpinning reality of existence where fear is but one competing experience. Kristeva’s (1982) work on the abject might call this disgusting thing ‘the abject’. The abject is witnessed as separate from subject and object and is useful in its ambiguity because it antagonises the binary by exposing ‘the border between self and other as constituted and fragile, and threatens to dissolve the subject by dissolving the border’ (Young, 1990, p. 144). There is still an element of the Burkean pleasure/pain dynamic in the concept of the abject, but this is considered in terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis: the abject opposes Lacan’s object of desire, which seeks to maintain symbolic order by allowing the subject to capitulate their pleasure in objects. Instead Kristeva (1982, p. 2) explains that the abject is ‘the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. It lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the latter’s rules of the game’. In the context of the video game, the symbolic order

114    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime of simulation that facilitates types of play and engagement with virtual worlds is challenged by the abject, and in turning to disgusting, horrifying but interactive simulations, the expectations of the gamer can be deconstructed leading to a sublime encounter. A particular scene in Outlast (Red Barrels, 2013/2014) exemplifies this neatly, where you/your avatar awakes strapped to a wheelchair. Dr Rick Trager – described as a ‘Variant’, so not a million miles away from a Bioshock splicer – uses a pair of bone shears to remove two fingers from your hand, an injury that persists throughout the remainder of the game. As Newell (2016, p. 37) details, the experience of this removal, which takes place during a cutscene but is done in such a way that it retains the first-person perspective from normal gameplay, has the effect of thrusting the gamer ‘into a keenly masochistic mode of spectatorial identification’. For Kristeva, the abject is how the real pushes forth into our lives (in contrast with objet petit a). The abject in video games, through the process of metaxis and transmission, is closely interrelated to the abject in our quotidian experience. In this sense, the immediate/visceral, whilst clearly connected to our initial psychological gut reaction to being confronted by a thing that makes us fearful (where the object crosses the line towards the perceiving subject) is also something more: it operates as a proxy for the unnameable, primal fear that challenges our identity and sense of self. Kristeva (1982, p. 10) says this abjection indicates the heterogeneousness of the self and its counterpart in the Other, facilitating a space of uncertainty: thus braided, woven, ambivalent, a heterogeneous flux marks out a territory that I can call my own because the Other, having dwelt in me as alter ego, points it out to me through loathing. In doing so, I would argue that the effect of the abject in video games with immediate/visceral encounters, through the transmission of nervous affect, is to provide us with sublime experience, until our cognising self attempts to recapitulate and rationalise away the fear (‘it’s only a game!’), ignoring the falsehood of this reassurance. If the Other uses the abject as a way of challenging the self, it speaks to a broader series of fears. Kristeva (1982) sees this in the separation of human from animal, where the abject operates at a primal level, an instinctive underlying aspect of the human condition. Historically, she argues, by way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as representatives of sex and murder. (pp. 12–13) An example of this on a practical level in video games is the attempt to separate out the avatar from the animalistic xenomorph in AI. H.R. Giger, in discussing the underlying fears that haunted his xenomorph designs, has previously identified

Fear    115 his physical aversion to snakes and maggots as well as his adolescent obsession with sex as distinguishing his body-horror illustrations4 (Huston, 2017) thereby locating the abject in a particular space and mode of production. In addition to these primal fears, I think fear in a contemporaneous sense also relates to concerns that we are less readily able to pinpoint. With the immediate/ visceral fear of encounters with computational others, we are confronted with our potential inhumanity, but we are also able to clearly identify the antagonist even if we are unable to fully reconcile the Other. How then do we attend to irreconcilable sensations and impressions where the antagonist is not easily locatable? The Freudian notion of the uncanny can help us understand this further.

7.5 Uncanny Fear Immediate/visceral fear, through the notion of the abject, explains to some extent how the sublime can be located in relation to simulated interpersonal encounters with computational others, through encounters of sufficient density to transmit affect (notably related to the nerves and aesthetics in Guyau’s 1962 typology). It is also important to understand how nuanced fear can be, as true in video games as it is in everyday life. The relationship between our everyday lives, and the familiar experiences which govern our activities, underpins much of Freud’s (1919) work in developing the ‘uncanny’ as a way of ‘investigating the subject of aesthetics’ (p. 219). Freud begins by situating the uncanny as related to that which is frightening, but takes issue with the imprecise way in which the term has been used in the past. For my purposes here, an element of precision is also required: I will be using Freud’s specific German definition because, as Freud explains at length, the etymological importance of the word governs its use and without precision we’ll have the word meaning different things in different cultures (initially ‘uncomfortable’ in English, but ‘gruesome’ in Arabic and Hebrew) (p. 222). For Freud, the uncanny ‘undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible – to all that arouses dread and creeping horror’ but it also has a crucial interplay with its opposite in German. Unheimlich [uncanny] is the opposite of ‘heimlich’ [homely] and whilst we might want to claim that the uncanny is therefore that which is unfamiliar rather than familiar, Freud urges caution – ‘the relation is not capable of inversion [and] something has to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar in order to make it uncanny’ (pp. 221–222). What is added, Freud derives from Jentsch (1906); a level of uncertainty that operates between familiar and unfamiliar, what we might call the ‘unfamiliar familiar’. Jentsch discusses how to successfully affect the uncanny,

4

As a brief aside, it is also interesting to note that in the same interview, when discussing the building of the xenomorph in the original Alien film, Giger explains how the animal and the sexual were intimately linked: ‘see the muscles and tendons of the jaw? We made them out of stretched and shredded latex contraceptives’. This is telling given that, according to Dan O’Bannon the scriptwriter, the original Alien film was also designed as a parable about interspecies rape (see the Alien Evolution documentary in the Quadrilogy box set for information).

116    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime the subject need only regard the object with a level of uncertainty. He uses the example of not knowing if a figure is either an automaton or a human, and this has specific application in the context of video games. A definition of the unfamiliar familiar, rooted in figurative aesthetic representation, is a useful way of exploring how the uncanny relates to fear and ultimately the virtual sublime. Indeed, the opening quote of this chapter, a review of the game Condemned: Criminal Origins (Monolith, 2005), neatly demonstrates how the familiar (a department store in a shopping centre) can be quickly destabilised by taking those known elements and altering them just enough to make them unfamiliar again. Similarly, to return to the opening example of FNAF, Scott Cawthon – the developer of the game – explained how the uncanniness of the animatronics was inspired by his first game a family friendly game about a beaver […], but when I tried to put it online it got torn apart by a few prominent reviewers. People said that the main character looked like a scary animatronic animal. (Couture, n.d.) Fear can be said to operate as both uncanny and immediate/visceral. With the latter, FNAF is frightening because of the propensity of jump scares that directly challenge you on an interpersonal level, but it is also the former in the way that the animatronics, as Cawthon identifies, are both familiar (animals) but not familiar enough. This jars with our quotidian experience because these representations are not all there. Being unable to pinpoint exactly what it is that is missing – the Freudian transformation of the unfamiliar into the uncanny – solidifies the experience of dread. It also hints at where the sublime might come in; being confronted by the immediate/visceral affords the perceiving subject the opportunity to realise its own mastery in overcoming the magnitude of the fearinducing Other it is presented with (as per the Kantian mathematical sublime), but the disparity between the object itself (the animatronic) in opposition to what it does (it kills you) is irreconcilable, making it uncanny and sublime. Through the proxy of the game and its inhabitants, fears of an unknowable Other – the unfamiliar familiar – can never be fully assuaged. As in the previous section, uncanniness can be achieved through particular operational rules, game mechanics and environmental choices. In understanding how the uncanny is engendered in video games, I would argue the confluence of Švelch’s (2019) ‘computational others’ and the game world setting collide to produce this effect. The uncanniness of computational others is clearly present in Švelch’s (2019) development of the term and the game Bioshock. Švelch roots his uncanny through the behaviours of splicers in the game and how these mirror – without quite replicating – our own lives in some ways. In the context of the operational rules of the game, splicers are antagonists, but they are also formerly human, corrupted by experimentation and the environment in which they have grown (the city of Rapture). They are proxies for us in terms of how they look – distended versions of human, but still recognisable – inviting us to consider how corrupted we would have to be in a material sense to take on their form. Švelch

Fear    117 writes that the dehumanising process involves further corruption through addiction (to a drug called ADAM): what is noticeable about this allying of dehumanisation to addiction beyond it echoing the transformation from ‘“good” capitalist consumers into deviant consumers’ (p. 269) is that the gamer is also required to make choices about how to collect and use ADAM. In this sense, there is little to distinguish antagonists from protagonists, further blurring the lines of identity between subject and object. Besides the literal horrors of deformed humanity, the terminology used to describe computational others in Bioshock is also telling. ‘Splicers’ etymologically imply some combination of the recognisable and the unfamiliar, but the homely and familiar can also be seen in other antagonists in the game, such as NPCs like ‘Little Sisters’ and ‘Big Daddies’. Uncanny fear is at its most affective when the seemingly unfamiliar of the game echoes the familiar of our concrete present existence. This is present in a number of other titles, a great example of this being the playable demo of P.T. (7780s Studio, 2014), an interactive teaser from Konami for the game Silent Hills.5 P.T. combines many of the operational rules and mechanics I’ve already introduced, such as jump scares and elements of supernatural horror, most notably the random attacks of a hostile apparition called ‘Lisa’, along with limited player agency (you get a torch; you can run but not far). The setting is an average suburban house (familiar) or at least it appears to be until you realise the corridors loop indefinitely and family pictures randomly drift away (unfamiliar). The content rhetoric your unnamed avatar engages with combines familiar objects from the home (a bathroom sink, a refrigerator) with classic body horror tropes (there’s a mutated foetus in the sink and the fridge is full of blood). A similar theme, the invasion of the familiar space of the home by the unfamiliar, can also be seen in Project Zero 3: The Tormented (Tecmo, 2005), a game which utilised evil spirits transposing themselves from photographs into the home lives of the protagonists as a survival horror trope. This challenging of the quotidian with an unknown threat conforms to the definition of the uncanny, with Riendeau (2014) explaining how even as a brief demo, the setting and the people who occupy it (as computational others) results in the unfamiliar familiar: there is ‘a sense of family trauma and domestic violence and the duality of the “real world” and the nightmare world’. P.T. is successful in being uncanny because it makes increasingly hard to reconcile which is familiar and which is not. The uncanny environment is seen in a number of titles which include immediate/visceral markers and those which do not. SOMA (Frictional Games, 2015) has plenty of jump scares, but also uses ‘environmental details [to] fill in the blanks’ (Wakeling, 2015) about what has happened in the underwater research

5

P.T. was pulled from the PlayStation Store when Silent Hills was cancelled, much to the consternation of gamers. Subsequently, it has achieved a sort of mythical status amongst those who have been able to access and amend the original demo to explore how the game was going to be designed.

118    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime facility where the game is set. You have recognisable locations (changing rooms, mess halls and the like) but they are populated by the unfamiliar – robots who might be being controlled by humans, or who might have downloaded human consciousness.6 The game uses these familiar tropes for the gamer to latch on to, but then destabilises these associations to provide an experience oscillating between uncanny and immediate/visceral. The presence/absence of humans is in fact where much of the power of the uncanny is located in video games. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (The Chinese Room, 2015) features a bucolic English countryside devoid of people but populated by their memories; TW (Thekla Inc., 2016), an island-based mega puzzle features Pompeii-esque casts of what could be a former populace; and Sea of Solitude (Jo-Mei Games, 2018) features shadowlike characters swimming beneath abandoned cities that were presumably once peopled. The uncanniness these titles produce is all framed through environmental design and the implication of a familiar that is now unfamiliar. Other titles like Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer, 2013) achieve the uncanny in ways that can be isolated through analysis – transmedia use of Lynchian tropes, a ghostly road trip through ambiguous settings – but never fully capitulated; I couldn’t fully tell you why this game is so unsettling. This is the power of the uncanny in producing fear. Uncanniness is potentially more powerful than the immediate/visceral in terms of the transmission of affective experience because it operates across a longer time scale, in broader environments and through actions and interactions that we know, but we also do not fully know. The uncanny works because ‘the fear of the unknown is often more terrifying than the blunt reality of coming face-to-face with your pursuer’ (Wakeling, 2015) as in the immediate/visceral part of the spectrum. But how is the uncanny something that transmits sufficient affective experience to engender the virtual sublime? Firstly, this could be considered in a transcendent, even religious sense to return us to the genesis of the sublime in the work of Longinus, Dennis and others. Otto (1958) discusses the nature of the uncanny in the context of his notion of ‘the numinous’, that is something that implies the presence of the divine in an awe-inspiring sense. The beginning of this process involves ‘the feeling of “something uncanny,” “weird”. It is this feeling which, emerging in the mind of primeval man, forms the starting-point for the entire religious development history’ (pp. 14–15). It is powerful in challenging our idea of self and identity precisely because it ‘penetrate[s] to the very marrow, making one’s hair bristle and limbs quake’ (pp. 14–15) whilst still being anamorphic, never fully coalescing into the recognisable and therefore reconcilable. The uncanny delimits our ability to reconcile subject and object by destabilising our understanding of the latter, and this lack of conciliation affords us a sublime experience, albeit one that we might not necessarily register in the same way we would an immediate/visceral fear of the Other. The ambiguity of the unfamiliar familiar is no less powerful, but it manifests itself in such a way that

6

I suspect Jentsch would love this.

Fear    119 its irreconcilability lingers rather than instantaneously shocks. In the context of video games, this nuance can be seen in Brown and Marklund’s (2015, p. 14) work on AC:NL (Nintendo EAD, 2013) – here, a game that is ostensibly about being mistaken for a town mayor is also deeply strange because of an ‘unnatural and hollow mimicry of societal structures’. Indeed it is this last element that pulls us towards the third pillar of fear as external/structural, which I feel sits at the opposite end of the spectrum to the immediate/visceral, but illuminates both this and the uncanny by situating player engagement and game design within a much broader series of threats where the virtual sublime is bolstered by rubbing up against the concrete present directly.

7.6 Structural/External Fear Whilst FNAF is, on an operational and procedural level, a reasonably rudimentary video game with limited agency and options for the gamer, it does include structural/external concerns to a degree, and in closing these three sections on the spectrum of fear, I will argue that the fear we experience as gamers, both immediate/visceral in our play and through our engagement with uncanny spaces, scenarios and computational others, is actually a proxy for external fears of one of any number of contemporary societal problems. In FANF, the external world asserts itself in several senses, which pronounces and intensifies fear. This can be seen, as the opening quote in this chapter demonstrates, in the initial call-in from a former employee – and their disturbing explanation of the things that have happened to previous employees: interestingly, the job you have taken on continues to be advertised despite your employer knowing people have been killed. Further to this, your lack of agency in the game itself is reflected in the player-character/avatar presumably taking on the job despite knowing the risks: gotta get paid, etc. These sorts of actions in the case of FANF, whilst not necessarily fear-inducing in the sense that being murdered by a metal fox with an eye patch is, still indicate underlying concerns about the precarity of employment, the lack of safeguards and the rampant uncaring nature of late capitalism where killing workers is more a formality than a tragedy. I do not want to oversell this specific example, but a variety of other horror-themed titles routinely refer outwards to broader issues including the nuclear fallout of NEO Scavenger (Blue Bottle Games, 2014), the environmental degradation of FAR: Lone Sails (Okomotive, 2018) and fears of communicative diseases in Pathologic (Ice-Pick Lodge, 2004) through to the deadly nature of survival in a war-torn future in This War of Mine (11 Bit Studios, 2016) and contemporaneous concerns around immigration in Papers Please (3909 LLC, 2013): even in a seemingly mundane management strategy title like Sim City 2000 (Maxis, 1994), social inequality manifests itself through problems associated with population density and access to services. The most straightforward way to demonstrate how structural/external concerns are amplified through video games and play is through an example. Here I extrapolate out from Newell’s (2016) work on the body horror of Outlast (Red Barrels, 2013/2014) and its downloadable content Whistleblower (Red Barrels, 2013/2014),

120    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime which is a sort of prequel to the main game. It is interesting to note that Newell is also interested in the sublime, though his reading of the sublime as contrasting with the abject is problematic: he argues, for instance, that Korsmeyer sees the abject (or ‘sublate affect’) as achieving the opposite of the sublime – something depressing rather than uplifting – whereas she actually argues, through Korsmeyer (2002), that the sublime is also productively unpleasant and terrifying in tightening a slack mind. Nonethessless, Newell’s unpacking of Whistleblower in particular can be read as a series of benchmarks for structural/external fear through a combination of representational aesthetics, content rhetoric and operational rules. In Whistleblower, your avatar – a software-engineer named Waylon Park – is subject to a series of unpleasant tortures at the hands of various characters, including, a cannibal Variant called Frank Manera (a classic computational other) who refers to Waylon as ‘meat’, neatly demonstrating an important level of depersonalisation between you and the Other. In Newell’s (2016) analysis, Manera can be differentiated from other antagonists both psychoanalytically and in a structural sense through his position within the ‘Project Walrider’ story arc, whereby the Murkoff Corporation attempts to create an ideal being through the manipulation of nanites7: Manera, with his ‘baby talk […] repeatedly asserts a sense of acquisitive desire for [Waylon’s] body’ (p. 41). Newell continues Unlike Chris Walker, another major antagonist whose murderous rampages are linked with military structures of containment, surveillance, and control, or Trager,8 whose sadistic experiments mirror the exploitative practices of neoliberalism and unethical science, Manera is driven only by imbecilic, hyperphagic appetite, by a pathological need to possess and consume. This typology can be expanded outwards in the context of our contemporaneous concerns in the twenty-first century. In Walker we see an aesthetic representation not just of the threat of the military – also identifiable in games as varied as Fallout 4 (Bethesda, 2015) in the guise of the Brotherhood of Steel and the lack of accountability in Special Ops: The Line (Yager Development, 2012) – but also the wider surveillance culture in which we live our lives. It is as much about the military as it is about governments, or shadowy conspiracies in the hinterland between: our collective inability to directly pinpoint what our fears are prevent us from attending to them. Video games reflect and amplify this, again confronting us with our own failures beyond the game space. This is fear as scalar – we cannot identify our position within the magnitude of terrible things that are happening – and fear at a distance (Walker is a proxy for the military), echoing the Kantian dynamical sublime.

7

The detail is not vital, but is probably useful for context: the underlying issues with human experimentation are a recurring theme in games reaching back to the original Wolfenstein 3D. 8 You’ll recall I introduced him earlier – he was removing fingers with a bolt cutter.

Fear    121 Similarly, Trager, in fulfilling what initially appears to be a fairly standard trope of ‘mad Nazi scientist’ not only represents the sort of visceral, abject horror discussed earlier but also occupies a space that combines both the ‘neoliberalism’ Newell ascribes and, crucially, an underpinning approach to rationality that has supposedly guided scientific progress since the Enlightenment. Trager, alongside the procedural and content rhetoric of Outlast in a more general sense, is the manipulation and destruction of the recognisable body, over which we have a semblance of control, through a transformative process that pulls the gamer from perceiving subject closer to the irrational mutated abject/object. The virtual sublime operates within this transition, initially muffled by the immediate/visceral of losing digits, through the uncanny (he at least appears to be a scientist) to the structural/external fear of the absence of rational action. This type of obscured structural fear can also be seen in SOMA where the somehow conscious robots hide the wider scientific failures of research on the base; in SS2 where the zombiesque mutants of Von Braun mask the potential horror of unchecked artificial intelligence; and even the robotic ‘dinosaurs’ of Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerilla Games, 2017) are impressive enough to make you forget that the tribalistic culture in which your avatar is an outcast is a vision of our future, where our present ‘technological advancement’ is depicted as nothing more than decadence and hubris. Structural/external fear is damaging but functions on a different level to the immediate/visceral or uncanny, where operational rules, aesthetically unpleasant environments and a panoply of jump scares often conceals underlying structural concerns (I explore this elsewhere in the context of systemic violence and capitalism in Denham, Hirschler & Spokes, 2019). The relationship between individual encounters with the immediate/visceral as indicative of the structural can equally be seen in the games outside of the survival horror genre, notably in the best-selling game of all time, GTA V. One particular scene in which Trevor – the sociopathic meth-dealer who is one of three playable avatars in the game – tortures a man to obtain details of an assassination was singled out by both academics (see Atkinson & Rodgers, 2016) and opponents as varied as MPs, the teachers’ union the ATU, and Amnesty International (Hern, 2013) as an egregious example of the horrors of video game entertainment. Interestingly, given that the game involves activities as varied as mowing down pedestrians and paying sex workers for a lap dance, it is the one-on-one nature of the interaction9 evoking the immediate/visceral that drew the most ire. In contrast with games like Outlast where the gamer is the recipient, it is understandable that an interactive torture scene of a NPC would prove controversial. However, this obscures the broader structural fear at work here: the gamer via the proxy avatar of Trevor is a de facto employee of a government agency – the ‘FIB’ in the game – and as such represents an absence of agency, in the sense that you are forced to participate. You are provided only the illusion of control through your interaction. It is precisely this imbalance that offers fertile ground for thinking

9

This interaction includes ‘teeth pulling’ and ‘electrocuting a man by connecting him up to a car battery’.

122    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime about the sublime as fear that is far away and of considerable magnitude: the fear that, through structural factors, means our independence to act is curtailed. These experiences are affective and sublime because they point at something irreconcilable over which we have no agency.

7.7 Fear and the Sublime In this chapter my aim was to explore differing facets of fear as both a key component of video games but also one which has preoccupied a variety of thinkers of the sublime from Dennis to Kant. In Chapter 5, I largely dismissed the role of narrative and rhetoric in engendering affective experience towards the virtual sublime, as even games with a particularly strong, even heart-rending narratives (GoW springs to mind) are stymied by the distance between player and avatar, between the concrete present of the world around us and the virtual environments that seek to replicate elements of that for entertainment. Fear, however, challenges my argument. With fear, we see the separation between concrete present and virtual increasingly blurred through the process of metaxis, whereby a gamer’s engagement with operational rules, game mechanics, procedural rhetoric and aesthetic representations push back from the hardware in numerous ways. Using games that can broadly be considered part of the horror or survival horror genre (with a super brief mention of Sim City 2000), I addressed this through a spectrum approach, situating experiences that could enable sublime encounters ranging from the immediate/visceral, through the uncanny, to the structural/external. Fear, with its precursor ‘the abject’,10 is present in a variety of theories of the sublime, particularly in attending to the subject/object binary. Fearful experiences are affective ones (as well as being emotive) and our inability to fully rationalise and explain away these experiences, be they jump scares, creepy looking robots or attacks on the notion of progress, is indicative of the virtual sublime: video games facilitate the sublime by making us fearful. This is witnessed in ways that directly connect the virtual sublime to antecedent ideas of the sublime in e­ighteenth ­century philosophy. Immediate/visceral fear conforms to both Dennis’ reading of the terrible in the context of those objects in the world that promote fear and our reactions to those fearful things: within video games, this can range from jump scares through environmental design. Furthermore, as a gamer, the responses you might have when encountering a homicidal animatronic chicken, or a relentless zombie, ­correspond with the Burkean tradition of the sublime as located closer to pain than to pleasure, something further developed in the context of Kristeva’s work on the abject.

10

For additional application of the abject, see also Carr (2014) who offers an interesting exploration of the abject in the context of ability/disability through a case study of the game Dead Space.

Fear    123 The uncanny, which I framed through Freud’s etymological work on the familiar/unfamiliar, achieves the sublime through the virtual by appealing to the irreconcilability of contextual associations that are both a thing that we know and a thing that we don’t know. The virtual sublime is located where we experience something that is known to us but which still provokes fear (to an extent): when our cognising self as a perceiving subject attempts to rationalise this, we are found wanting. The lack of pinpoint accuracy in describing our fears in the context of being a Mayor in AC:NL or looking at CCTV screens in a kid’s pizzeria highlights the problem with squaring away the thing we recognise and the nagging sense that something is amiss. This type of fear, and the sublime experience that results from it, is more insidious than the immediate/visceral, because the source of concern is not readily available. The uncanny is close in some respects to the Kantian dynamical sublime: where Kant argues that we can find a thing fearful without directly experiencing it, we can see this in the games that we play. We are not amnesiac research scientists waking up on a deserted underwater base (SOMA), or the last surviving crew member on a spaceship pursued by a ravenous xenomorph (AI), so we are able to keep that which is fearful at a distance, as ‘the sight of them becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, provided we are in a safe place’ (Kant, 2008, p. 120). Structural/external fears interrogate this place of safety however, suggesting that these fearful objects – the computational other, the hostile environment, the body horror embedded throughout the procedural rhetoric and operational rules of a game – are never far away, but are instead aspects of much broader societal concerns. The collapse of rationality, the surveillance state, the rampant destruction of finite resources in the pursuit of capital accumulation: these issues are all of a scale that the individual is not in a position to rectify or challenge. Representational proxies of mad scientists, military personnel and inhuman antagonists speak to our lack of capability in confronting problems of such magnitude there is no conceivable way of addressing them. In this sense, the structural/external offers parallels with Kant’s mathematical sublime, as the nature of our fear – exemplified through the video game – corresponds to the absolute. Kant argues that whilst the absolutely great transcends our imagination, the mind is still a crucial determinate for understanding this through the ‘supersensible’ nature of reason: our interaction with the sublime moves from a tangible encounter with an object towards the realisation that identifying our own inadequacy is itself demonstrative of the power of the mind. The structural/external fears enacted in the games discussed here are perhaps so great they are hard to conceive of, without stepping away and reflecting at a distance. In the context of fear, I would argue that this is what keeps gamers returning to games they know are going to provoke a fearful and virtually sublime experience: the affective transmission – as direct interaction with the nervous system, in Guyau’s (1962) terms – is of such intensity in an immediate/visceral, uncanny or structural/external sense that it challenges the identity of the gamer as a cognising, perceiving subject (until that is rearticulated through reflection and the moment passes).

124    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime Following the pattern established throughout the book, before formulating an overarching theory of the virtual sublime in Chapter 9, I want to focus on three intertwined components of video games from an operational level – namely failure, repetition and death – that reflect more contemporaneous work on the sublime, with a focus on Lyotard and Deleuze in particular. Augmenting and applying their theories of the sublime, in conjunction with related ideas of ‘stuplimity’ (Ngai, 2005) and ‘flow’ (see e.g. Csikszentmihalyi, Abuhamdeh & Nakamura, 2014) which Shinkle (2012) has previously identified I will return to issues of agency as well as considering how video games proffer an affective experience of the virtual sublime through failure and repetition, but also with regard to death as an ‘unpresentable event’.

Chapter 8

Failure, Repetition and Death Sleep? I never sleep. I just wait. In the shadows. And I will kill you all. Everyone who sniffed the air that day in Siwa! (Bayek of Siwa in Assassin’s Creed: Origins)

8.1 Introduction Bayek of Siwa, a principled medjay whose purpose is to find and kill those who conspired to murder his son (more on this later), has reached Krokodilopolis having previously offed all-but-one of the senior members of a secret Order who control Ptolemaic-period Egypt. Krokodilopolis – formerly Shedet, a centre of worship for Sobek the crocodile God – is ruled by Berenike, an elderly Greek stateswoman and nomarch appointed by Ptolemy XIII who1 is also the self-styled ‘Crocodile’, a member of the Order of the Ancients who Bayek has sought to kill. Berenike, in attempting to conceal her identity, kidnapped a little girl called Shadya, the daughter of Hotephres (a man who had found evidence of Berenike’s true identity) and murdered her by tying her feet to a rock and throwing her in the Faiyum Oasis: Bayek is seeking revenge.2 Part of my attempts to avenge Shadya’s death through Bayek as my proxy involves becoming a gladiator in the arena at Krokodilopolis, and working my way up the skills tree – through combat with Roman soldiers and lions – to challenge two ‘Gallic Brothers’ as ‘boss’ fights. The first time I reached this section of the game, in attempting to dodge the pointed staff of one of the brothers (by hitting ‘square’ on the PS4), I rolled first into a moving bollard covered in spikes, and then onto an ascending platform also covered in spikes. This mistake depleted my health massively, and one blow from the Brothers resulted in my death; well, the death of my avatar at least. I failed, both in a narrative sense – I had not avenged

1

Spoiler alert. And this is just one minor plotline of one part of Assassins Creed: Origins [AC:Or]. The overarching mythos of the game, and the role of Animus and Abstergo Industries is so expansive, it can be a real challenge to get a handle on. 2

Gaming and the Virtual Sublime: Rhetoric, Awe, Fear, and Death in Contemporary Video Games, 125–144 Copyright © 2020 by Matthew Spokes Published under an exclusive license by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved doi:10.1108/978-1-83867-431-120201011

126    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime the drowned child – and in an operational sense, whereby my inability to master the practical skills required to defeat the boss(es) had seen me impaled. But then of course I just sat through a brief loading screen, respawned at the last save point and started over. In this chapter I will close the empirical phase of the book by focussing on three interconnected components of video games and our interaction with them as gamers, namely failure (see e.g., Juul, 2003), repetition (Gazzard & Peacock, 2011; Salen & Zimmerman, 2004, pp. 340–342) and death (Kocurek, 2015; Spokes, 2018). The previous empirical chapters have been framed by an aspect of sublime theory – rhetoric, awe, fear – and whilst I focus on key features of interaction here, I will continue to relate this to contemporaneous theories of the sublime, with particular reference to Deleuze (and a little bit of Lyotard) as well as notions of flow, stuplimity and the techno and gamified sublime from Chapter 3. This chapter operates as a closing experiment in thinking through three game features as a connected process – failure leads to death, repetition assuages failure – using the lens of affective experience(s). These factors suggest several pertinent questions with regard to an overarching theme that has thread its way throughout this book: what constitutes gamer agency and in what ways might agency impact the transmission of affective experience? In Chapter 6, I suggested agency needs to be suitably expansive to allow players to escape programmed confines, but in Chapter 7 I also showed how restricting agency can have a powerful impact. Do I have the freedom to control my destiny and kill those who have wronged me (through the proxy of my avatar) or am I just conforming to the rules set out by designers? Given that this book is about the potentiality for sublime experience in the virtual it is important to consider how agency relates to failure, repetition and death in the same way I have analysed it through rhetoric, awe and fear. This chapter consists of three substantive readings. Firstly, through the work of Juul (2003), I’ll sketch out how failure operates as a central mechanic of video game play, and how failure and success are both a challenge to balance and a paradox. From here, Muriel and Crawford’s (2018, 2020) reconceptualisation of agency will be used to explore the limits of freedom and control, and how this tension between agentic play and restrictive play has a demonstrable impact on whether or not affective experience is possible. Secondly, through the work of Ngai (2005) on stuplimity and Csikszentmihalyi (2008) on flow (as well as some contemporaneous applications of this ideas in relation to video games), I will explore the role of repetition as an additional mechanic in game play. Augmenting these ideas with both Gazzard and Peacock’s (2011) framework of ‘ritual logic’, and Deleuze’s (2014) repetition and difference, I suggest a route towards the sublime as a transcendent experience where repetition becomes more than simple reiteration. In returning to the broader narrative and operational rules of Assassin’s Creed Origins (AC:Or) (UbiSoft Montreal, 2017), I’ll offer a practical example of ritual logic and how this might be considered sublime. Thirdly, AC:Or, and the role of death in both the story and gameplay, tees up an examination of how death and dying – intimately linked to failure but also

Failure, Repetition and Death    127 repetition because you want to avoid dying again – are configured in three key ways in video games: death as the story (related to rhetoric), death as a structural and an environmental by-product (related to fear) and death-by-design, so dying in a purposive operational sense. Examples of each of these aspects as they function in different contemporary video games will be used to concretise the framework, alongside earlier research I have worked on in terms of how gamers understand mortality through play (Spokes, 2018). In closing, agency will be revisited so as to articulate and challenge how failure, repetition and dying can be considered opportunities for affective experience. Throughout, the sublime will be considered in relation to previously introduced approaches including Lyotard, Deleuze, Kant and, to a lesser extent, Burke.

8.2 Failure and Agency How we fail has changed over time. Well, perhaps not the way we fail – which is typically the disparity between what we want to do in a game, our ability to achieve our aims and how this corresponds in relation to the mechanics of the game itself – but the impact failure has on us. Before the advent of home computing, and the influx of games consoles which moved the experience of gaming from the arcade to the bedroom (or other room of your choice), failure was a bit of a public spectacle (see Fiske, 2017). Sinistar (Williams Electronic, 1983), an Asteroids-like space shooter from the early 1980s that involved fighting super-fast enemies whilst a giant skull-shaped ship yelled ‘Run, Run, Run; Beware Coward!’, achieved a level of notoriety for just how quickly it would end you: reportedly, the development team had originally designed each game to last an average of three minutes depending on a gamer’s aptitude, but this was revised down to two minutes at the request of company owner Harry Williams (Sawyer, 2013). Standing with a group of friends, or indeed observed by members of the public, as your ship explodes and the arcade cabinet screams ‘Beware, I live!’ is an unceremonious-nee-embarrassing way to die. As a kid, being killed playing Toki: Going Apespit! (TAD Corporation, 1989) on the Sega Mega Drive was still shameful at a personal level, but at least people I didn’t know weren’t laughing at me.3 What home gaming achieved was to make our fear(s) of failure a private matter, or a ‘personal responsibility’ (Bulut et al. 2014, p. 347) with the potential for wideranging implications in the context of agency. For Juul (2003), winning is vital though misunderstood. Gamers play games to win at them, but if games are too easy they become uninteresting; instead, a middle ground is needed where games ‘should be “neither too easy nor too hard”’ (p. 237). Juul explains that the most basic understanding of failure – that

3

Rather than trying to find a dusty Mega Drive and subjecting myself to a purposeless death for research, I thought I’d search for the Toki death animations online: the fact that almost every video of gamers playing old home console titles revolves around faultless speed runs demonstrates something quite telling about the significance of failure and repetition in gaming culture I think.

128    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime it operates in contrast to winning, making the latter more exciting as a result – is misguided, because failure adds to the experience of play by introducing the gamer to the nuances of play: in failing, you better understand the mechanics of the game, and the ways in which your play relates to the operational rules of the game. Failure is also perceived to be negative, which begs the question (previously asked in relation to games that evoke fear): why do gamers engage? Based on empirical evidence, Juul suggests it is because ‘failing, and feeling responsible for failing, make [sic.] players enjoy a game more, not less’ (p. 238). Juul sees failure as connected to punishment, that failing is the absence of success in a particular task and punishment is the outcome of this. Here there is an inkling of the pain/pleasure dynamic previously explored in relation to the Burkean sublime, the idea that a sublime experience is essentially one that causes an element of pain. How punishment is meted out is scalar, ranging from that which is unpunished in the game (but perhaps internally embarrassing) such as walking into a wall, through losing energy or being pushed back to a checkpoint, right up to ‘life punishment’ (loss of life) and ultimately ‘game termination’ (p. 238). The severity of these punishments should theoretically be proportionate to the nature and size of the failing, but as I will explore later in Sekiro (FromSoftware, 2019), this assumption is routinely challenged by games designers. Drawing on Kelley’s use of attribution theory, Juul (2003) outlines three types of attribution for failure in a video game: person (your traits or disposition); entity (caused by the characteristics of a differing entity); and circumstances (such as luck, chance, effort and environment). What these multitudes of punishments and attributions suggest is a substantial level of complexity in terms of attending to the initial problem of balancing success and failure. Juul (p. 248) explains how this is exacerbated by the contradictory demands of the gamer. Gamers do not want to fail because it makes them feel inadequate, but failing makes it easier to identify how to succeed; similarly, winning without failing can be gratifying when it is interpreted as mastery, but winning without failing can also lead to a feeling of dissatisfaction (the game is too easy). The in-between space – which we might consider a useful example of metaxis operating between poles of experience – is akin to Csikszentmihalyi’s (2008) notion of ‘flow’, where achieving an optimal flow state of focus as you move towards achieving particular goals involves oscillating between your skill and a level of increasing difficulty over time: the game should be neither too hard nor too easy, and should allow the gamer to complete their goals having felt sufficiently challenged. Practically, this must be a nightmare to get right when designing a game. Failure, in being connected to both game design and the ability of the individual to master the necessary competencies to progress towards achieving a goal (winning), is intimately tied up with the problematic notion of agency. Agency, as Muriel and Crawford (2020, p. 142) define it, is the ability to produce some sort of change, which offers parallels with the definition offered by Murray (2017) in Chapter 5. Salen and Zimmerman (2004) earlier offered that ‘playing a game means making choices and taking actions. All of this activity occurs within a game-system designed to support meaningful kinds of choice-making’ (p. 33).

Failure, Repetition and Death    129 Agency can therefore be understood through ideas of freedom, control and responsibility, where video games present themselves as full of opportunities and choices to be made (even if these seem, in principle, to be very limited), and the responsibility to act is always bestowed on the player. (Muriel and Crawford, 2020, p. 140) This interpretation also relates back in part to Tanenbaum and Tanenbaum’s (2010) reading of agency as intrinsically related to gamers through play and narrative, with agency conceptualised as a gamer’s connection to meaning making within a particular context, instead of simply being about the freedom to act. Thus, agency is an important factor in connecting gamers to the games they play, in that the level of agency a gamer has – or at the very least the impression of agency – impacts how the game is played, whether or not the gamer sticks with the game (retention), and how ‘meaningful play’ is understood. It also implies that when we fail, it is because of some deficiency in us as gamers and our skill set, rather than solely the fault of the game itself. As detailed in the previous chapter, agency can be purposefully limited so as to ensure gamers pass through a specific series of markers or checkpoints, or to ensure that a particular story is told: in the context of a game like Outlast, inescapable moments that frame the central narrative – as in the case of the avatar losing fingers – are intentionally restricted. What this alerts us to, as Crawford (2012, cited in Muriel & Crawford, 2020, p. 139) has previously argued, is that although gamers have the impression of control, ‘players do not freely manipulate video games at their will’, because video games, as Fedorova (2017) also argues, are bundles of multiple actors including designers, hardware, software, environment, social factors and the like. Failure can also be considered as the metaxical process where ‘agentic’ gamers rub up against developers. For example, Burgess and Jones’ (2017) conducted a thematic analysis of forum post-responses to the Mass Effect trilogy of games, focussing on gamer dissatisfaction about the ending of the third game; the developers failed to deliver what was expected or required. Clarkson (2013) characterises the ending as follows (spoiler alert): Provided a player has gathered enough military force, all three possibilities for dealing with the series-long villains, the Reapers, are available. The player can opt to control them, destroy them, or join with them in an organic-AI synthesis of some kind. The main issue with this outcome, as they go on to explore, is that in a sequence of games that frame so many decisions as agentic choices made by the gamer, which in turn affect characters you have invested time in,4 an ending where all 4

The ending of the second game for instance can result in a number of your crew perma-dying depending on the choices you’ve made.

130    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime three outcomes are essentially identical is likely to rile gamers. Following analysis of over 25,000 posts on the developer BioWare’s forum, Burgess and Jones (2017) found that not only did gamers identify the absence of meaningful choice – a core determinant of agency, or feeling agentic – but by ‘failing’ to achieve a good outcome their frustration increased, exacerbated by ‘players’ emotional connections to the game world and characters, including their PCs’ (p. 156). Here we see the confluence of different actors (hardware, software, gamers, spaces and narratives) problematising agency through the perceived absence of freedom and control, that gamers identities are bound up in these associations, and that there is a disruptive affective experience that results from a misalignment of expectations and experiences. This isn’t sublime per se, but it does show that gamers wanted an ending that reflected their feeling of being ‘able to choose our own destiny/fate’ (p. 150). Failure can also be seen in a rhetorical sense in the much-publicised ending of Fallout 3 (Bethesda, 2008), prompting one Reddit user (Reddit, 2014) to ask, ‘why the hell does the ending of Fallout 3 shit on my life’. At the end of the game, completing the main narrative arc – which involves adding a modified virus to a water purifier – results in a flash of light and a narrated cut-scene summarising your actions in the story (based on how good or evil you were). Gamers were particularly aggrieved at this because, until the Broken Steel DLC content was added, it ended the game and the vast open world of the Capital wasteland was no longer explorable. Failure, in this context, was both on the part of the developer (in not realising gamers might like to continue mopping-up side-missions and gaining XP, hence the DLC) and, arguably, the gamer (for having not explored the game space as fully as was available at the time). As Tanenbaum and Tanenbaum (2010) suggest agency is therefore more complicated than simply the freedom to do what you like. Moreover, agency can just as much be about the perception of impact as the actual impact of change-makingthrough-play. Freedom, control and responsibility become problematic because agency is multiple. Juul’s binary of succeeding (winning) and failing (losing) is perhaps a simplification of a much more nuanced conceptualisation of what goes on during play and the its impact on gamers. Ermi and Mäyrä (2005), for example, distinguish between imaginative immersion – whereby a gamer is concerned with their relation to the characters, game environment, story and so forth – and challenge-based immersion, which is more akin to Juul’s (2003) development of ‘flow’, where gamers find a balance between skill and challenge. The potential for disparities between the perception of the gamer and the outcome of their actions is therefore more complicated than identifying an optimal approach for success. Indeed, success-as-winning or completing an objective would only work in the context of challenge-based immersion. How is winning and failing useful then, if these ideas are necessarily multiple? Ultimately, failure in its various forms demonstrates a central paradox that reaches beyond Juul’s initial concern about balancing challenge and reward, winning and losing. Failure alerts us to the fact that the positionality of the gamer as responsible for their actions – a seemingly agentic individual controlling characters, spaces and narrative – is illusory. I am not suggesting that the gamers have no agency but rather that the gamer, alongside the variety of objects, actions

Failure, Repetition and Death    131 and approaches that make up the game, is subjectively produced: Muriel and ­Crawford (2020) argue that agency is instead a relational arrangement, so whilst gamers may have the impression of being tangible, concrete actors that have ­primacy over others, they are in fact ‘assembled, institutionalized, and stabilized [as] an effect’ (p. 143). In this regard it is possible to understand failure and agency with regard to the virtual sublime, as an affective experience which destabilises the subject (the gamer) by problematising their relationship with the object (the game). In a Kantian sense, your ability to control the outcome of what you do, to direct change, is supplanted. As a gamer, your understanding of what the game is and does, and what you are required to do, is constructed from multiple angles including, but not limited to; previous engagement, either with the series or through a demo; familiarity with the genre and associated expectations; contextualised requirements gleaned via a tutorial (typically the opening of the game, or a separate selectable playthrough); and previously developed skills, aptitudes and learned behaviours. However, these varying factors, which all contribute to a gamer’s perception of who they are and what they enjoy, can be destabilised by the confluence of unexpected actions and actors both intrinsic and extrinsic to the game, which in turn can produce unexpected results. Your failing might have been purposefully designed-in by developers – Bertozzi (2014) for instance explores the Dark Souls franchise as an example of ‘predation play’ where if gamers, who have invested 30–50 hours of playtime, ‘die before the end, they lose everything and have to start over again from the beginning’ (p. 434) – or might be a mismatch between expectations and design. In both cases, the subject/object relationship slips. An example: in the 2011 game Rage (id Software, 2011), after shooting some NPCs for you by way of an introduction, a driver in a buggy pulls up and shouts ‘it ain’t safe, get in’. Stretching away behind you is a path to what looks like an abandoned cement works. So far, so tantalising. If you choose to walk past the buggy, in essence turning down the kind offer of sanctuary, the driver shoots you dead. Why, you might ask, present the illusion of freedom of choice when there is none? Aside from this being useful in setting you up for a series of scripted engagements with NPCs, failure to comply and the consequences arising from this situates you as an object as much as the game itself is, negating your subjectivity and freedom in favour of implicit, controlled behaviours. In doing so, your ability to reconcile your identity as an agentic individual comes to a crashing halt. The virtual sublime in this context is close to the Burkean tradition of a painful affective experience, as failing (either through your own inability to master the skills required to win, or through the unexpected outcome of various actions and actors) is not necessarily pleasurable in the same way that winning might be. At the very least, failing is productive in multiple senses. Firstly, it can be productive because ‘humans use play as a way of modelling [sic.], understanding, and practicing strategies for success in nonplay environments’ (Bertozzi, 2014, p. 431), thereby echoing Huizinga and Caillois to an extent. Secondly, failing produces affective experiences, the transmission of which is dependent on how much the gamer has invested in the game. The examples of Mass Effect and Fallout 3 for instance show highly emotive attempts to reconcile disappointment, whereas being

132    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime killed by the driver in RAGE is simply head-scratchingly odd. Thirdly, a crucial facet of failing is that it produces a counterpoint: the attempt to overcome the failure, to recapitulate, to reconcile the disarticulation of subject and object in the virtual sublime. Repeatedly failing could be thought of as transcendent in the sense that a video game is an unusual space that replicates aspects of the world and allows failure(s) with relatively minimal consequence. Repeated failure is productive in games in ways that do not necessarily map on to everyday life in the way Bertozzi elucidates, so it represents the chance to step outside of quotidian experience through failing again and again. This doesn’t mean that failing is not painful in some way, or something that gamers seek to minimise, but it does mean that the sublime experience of failure can be overcome through practice. Can you avoid the painful affective experience of failure? Should you? Given that failure is as multiple and contingent as agency itself, failure is unavoidable. Similarly, as Juul (2003) rightly argues, without the element of jeopardy that failure offers, it would be impossible to learn and progress. On an operational level, failure can be partially assuaged through practice. Given that repetition is considered a fundamental feature of video games, ranging from simply understanding the rules of engagement over time, through game mechanics such as ‘grind’, to eventual – but not inevitable – mastery then understanding the relationship between failure and repetition might further illuminate how the virtual sublime is possible despite the seemingly restrictive nature of engagement.

8.3 Repetition and Ritual If, as Juul (2003) argues, all video games have an aspect of failure hardwired into their design – because an inability to fail would be unsatisfying for gamers – then failing leads to trying over in an effort not to fail. I will be working from the assumption that having financially invested in a game, gamers are willing to persevere to overcome their initial failure.5 This is, of course, a simplification given the sort of multiples discussed previously, and indeed my own propensity towards rage quitting (see White 2014) games I am terrible at (so, most games). MacDonald (2019), in her review of Sekiro, explains how ensuring gamers return can be tricky, which relates back both to Juul’s amended notion of flow previously discussed – an identifiable sweet spot between difficulty and time – and Ash’s (2013) ‘retentional economy’ of captivated subjects in video games. This is highlighted in MacDonald’s discussion of the difficulty of Sekiro – a game from the same developers who designed the famously difficult Bloodborne and Dark Souls games – which she says is not ‘a game you can chip away at, but one whose every challenge requires hours of sustained application’. Games that present this type

5

There appears to be little contemporaneous research regarding gamers who give up on different types of game, the point at which they give up, and their motivation for doing so – this is an area that requires interrogation in future work: there are, however, plenty of anecdotal accounts of the varying reasons for quitting generally (time, cost, family life, the toxic environment of online play – see Reddit, 2018b for more detail).

Failure, Repetition and Death    133 of perpetual challenge require dedication, as per Bulut et al.’s (2014) requirement of ‘personal responsibility,’ and practice to master: in this sense, repetition can be understood as a sustained repeated engagement towards achieving an objective. There are two exemplars I intend to explore with regard to repetition, the aforementioned Sekiro, a game set in a quasi-undead version of sixteenth century Japan and The Binding of Isaac [Isaac] (McMillen, 2011), a procedurally generated roguelike dungeon-based game which ‘ends’ with an eventual showdown with Isaac’s mother (represented in-game by a mutated leg and red-stiletto shoe) who has trapped you in the basement. Both of these games, whilst from very different genres, exhibit key similarities in what is expected of gamers by developers: an ascending level of difficulty over time; the need to dedicate parcels of time to play; and practice towards mastery. Sekiro is tough.6 As MacDonald (2019) details, ‘it offers no comforting sense of gradual progress, but a series of ever-ascending peaks’. Play is like actual, embodied, physical toil, connecting it back to Guyau’s (1962) notion of nervous, and potentially haptic, direct transmission. Similarly, Evans-Thirlwell (2019) asks ‘how many games are strangers to their own cruelty’. Repetition and failure are closely connected in Sekiro, with Tach and Parkin (2019) arguing how the ‘rhythm of struggling, dying, learning, and repeating is a huge part’ of the game, one that is essentially built into the games’ systems: you are able to resurrect and restart, but doing so takes a toll on the games’ characters who help you along the way, so an additional mechanic of punishment for failing. Practice and repetition edge you closer towards not failing, to overcoming the odds against the challenges presented to you, because the game is designed in such a way that dedication and learning is the only way to progress: for example, whilst you can ambush bosses, they cannot be assassinated by surprise so learning the ‘game’s ferocious sword-fighting’ is inescapable (Evans-Thirlwell, 2019). On the face of it this might seem dull – repeating the same actions towards eventual success – but recent reviews suggests that repetition actually ‘leads to a deeper engagement with the nuances of the encounter design: recovery times, boss phases and questions of terrain, the ranges at which you’ll trigger an especially violent riposte’ (Evans-Thirlwell, 2019) such as a boss battle. Sekiro combines moments of horror and surprise, in the context of the perpetually shifting nature of enemy combatants or the magnitude of a boss, with a pattern of learning the operational rules of the game through repetition. This juxtaposition between the unexpected and the routine can be understood in the context of boss battles, where the player has to spend considerable time and effort using the skills they have developed to attack and defeat a complex enemy who uses multiple techniques and approaches against you. Boss fights operate as a punctuation of repetition, often resulting in failure. Boss fights hark back to Fedorova’s (2017) development of the techno-sublime discussed in Chapter 3. In approaching the battle with Isshin the Sword Saint – you’ll recall from the same chapter that this is a fight so ‘obscenely hard’ (Coles, 2019), of

6

Though arguably not as tough as Dark Souls (see Hidalgo, 2019).

134    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime such magnitude, that it can reduce gamers to tears (Alyska, 2019) – the transmission of affective experience is of sufficient density to produce a sublime encounter. We have the perceiving subject (the gamer) using the interactive and machinic elements of the game (the controls, the interface) in an effort to overcome the particular challenge towards achieving a goal, but this is complicated through both the magnitude of the task and the minutiae of the practiced engagement with the aforementioned elements of play. Attempting to reconcile the absolute with the quotidian invokes a kind of dissolution of the self, in which, to paraphrase Encheva (2017, p. 139), the perceiving subject experiences its own limitations. MacDonald, in attempting to resolve this breaking-down, explains how ‘after one battle the adrenaline was so strong I could physically taste it7 – but the preceding hours of trying and failing often drove me to despair’. This aligns quite closely with Ngai’s concept of stuplimity. Stuplimity can be thought of as the affective experience of being confronted by both shock and boredom simultaneously. Ngai (2005, p. 262) explains that the experience ‘confront[s] us with the limitations of our capacity for responding in general’, so a sort of frozen to the spot moment, which in opposition to Kant, happens not in relation to ‘a vastly extended form as a totality […] but with finite bits and scraps of material in repetition’ (p. 271). This idea of boredom and shock is also noticeable in terms of commitment: in Chapter 3 I offered some anecdotal examples of the amount of time gamers have given over to Isaac, so it is worth exploring this in more depth. As a video game which procedurally generates levels, Isaac works towards challenging Salen and Zimmerman’s (2004) characterisation that ‘a game provides that same consistent structure each time but a different experience and outcome every time it is played’ (p. 340). The consistency in Isaac is instead related to gamer engagement through the interface and their eventual mastery of the controls and expectations of the operational rules which govern randomly generated spaces. The shock is gleaned from the unexpected encounter with each newly generated dungeon. A close friend of mine, let’s call him Rudiger,8 has clocked up 1,604 hours (around 70 whole days in total) of play at the time of writing. Roguelikes aren’t really my thing, so my personal understanding of their commitment to this particular game is limited: similarly, as we saw in Chapter 4, Ash’s (2012) concept of ‘bandwidth’ suggests diminishing returns for this type of game, given the accrued experience the gamer will develop over time. So why persevere? Aside from the fact Rudiger likes the game because it runs properly on their laptop, they also appreciate the absence of problem-solving elements as the ­simplified gameplay allows them to reach ‘a state of flow’ – as they put it – in a straightforward way. This doesn’t mean the game is not challenging, but rather the pitfalls are different from Sekiro. It also suggests the developers have effectively

7

Arguably an example of Guyau’s direct olfactory transmission. I let them pick their own pseudonym: I think this is from the Simpsons episode Bart’s Inner Child (1F05) where Bart’s self-determination to do his own thing is held up by a confidence trickster as a beacon of acceptable behaviour that helps him to sell a load of self-help books to the unthinking citizens of Springfield. 8

Failure, Repetition and Death    135 located the middle ground between difficulty and time so as to reward gamers for their commitment. Interestingly, whilst the game may seem boring for those looking in, owing to its repetitive nature, Rudiger says that a typical playthrough is only half an hour long (so the 1,604 hours is agglomerative over a considerable time period). Repetition here is clearly linked to temporality in the context of video gaming itself – dedicating thousands of hours to dungeon exploration, for example. It can also be considered through theoretical approaches like Deleuze’s (2014) notion of repetition as passive synthesis, active synthesis and empty time. In pursuing the ways in which repetition might be considered sublime, the concept of ‘repetition as synthesis’ is a useful way of understanding the subtle forces at work when we repeat, initially by questioning what repetition is in the first place. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze (2014) – through a number of different approaches ranging from Nietzsche to Bergson – interrogates the nature and value of repetition and difference in terms of their relative position as antecedents of identity. In a simplified sense, repetition can be broken down into three types; passive synthesis, active synthesis and empty time. Passive synthesis can be considered habitual, including repetitions like seasonal cycles, the routines processes of organic life and the like. If we think of repetition in video gaming as habitual, then key and button pressing in specific orders to achieve particular aims appears to map on this. However, given that games offer ‘a different experience and outcome every time’ (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004, p. 340), repetition does not appear to simply involve repeating the same identical thing over and over, but rather shifts as gamers become more familiar and experienced with the variable agents at play. Active synthesis is framed through memory – so perhaps the recollective power of accumulated experience – which destabilises a reductive reading of linear time and progression through a number of intercessions. Deleuze (2014, p. 109) explains that active synthesis, in the guise of ‘destiny’ disrupts step-by-step deterministic relations between presents which succeed one another according to the order of a represented time. Rather, it implies between successive presents non-localisable connections, actions at a distance, systems of replay, resonance and echoes, objective chances, signs, signals, and roles. Rudiger, in playing what seems like the same thing over and over, is instead engaged in a series of remakings through the assembled articles that the game is constructed from, the interface, expectations and their memory of how these interconnected elements are contextually framed. Their play echoes their previous play, but is not simply a replication of it: it is a new confluence made of connections, actions, systems, chances, signs and signals. Repetition is therefore an unpredictable force of multiplicity that challenges the Kantian notion of the possible in favour of the actual, the affective experience of existing in the present moment. Repetition for Deleuze (2014) is not the repeating of the same identical thing, but rather the repetition of difference which affords us a multitude of

136    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime potentialities in the moment, where ‘all levels and degrees coexist and present themselves for our choice on the basis of a past which was never present’ (p. 109). Contrary to what seems on the face of it to be a restrictive structuring of gamer engagement, curtailing freedom and agency, repetition facilitates the gamer as an agent of change. As repetition is not simply repeating, but repeating with change, each change elicits difference, facilitates adaptation and manipulates control. Muriel and Crawford, in their work on agency, rightly argue that agency is both multiple and contingent, but similarly repetition-as-multiple challenges reductive understandings of player freedom and control: as Deleuze (2014, p. 109) argues, ‘freedom lies in choosing the levels’ rather than as an externalised absolute. The outcome of these practices, whereby control and freedom is internalised and the gamer moves closer to mastery, is that the perceiving subject experiences a ‘loss of self-consciousness [which] can lead to self-transcendence, to a feeling that the boundaries of our being have been pushed forwards’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 2008, p. 64), as I outlined in Chapter 3. This is something echoed by Rudiger, who explains that a game like Isaac enables them to ‘zone out’. In this sense, repetition is sublime as it can be freeing and transcendent, returning the sublime to the idea of raising something up that was previously discussed in the context of rhetoric in Chapter 5. This reading of gamer engagement through repetition as transcendent echoes Gazzard and Peacock’s (2011) work on ‘ritual logic’. Rituals, they explain, are necessarily ludic in nature and require performance, the repetition of recitation through the use of gestures, objects and adherence to rules, and, when successfully performed, rituals lead to transformation, which is ‘the bringing about of change through a deliberate (or accidental) act’ (p. 501). Repetition, with regard to ritual logic, is something they consider to be a necessary feature of video games but it is the end product of repetition that is key rather than the repetition itself: this transformative potentiality is where the sublime is possible, the moving beyond the limits of the subject towards ‘a significant moment’ (p. 505). However, given Deleuze’s definition of repetition in relation to difference, on a conceptual level Gazzard and Peacock’s ‘ritual’ is repetition, the sublime and transformative power of play as a facilitator of change.

8.4 Death, Dying and Living Again In both Sekiro and Isaac, you die often. Dying, or in Juul’s (2003) terms ‘game termination’ through life punishment, is perhaps the ultimate expression of failure experienced by gamers. It is also closely linked with the previous chapter in relation to our engagement with terrifying computational others (who kills us), and is implicitly present in earlier theories of the sublime (what is death if not the outcome of Dennis’ exemplars of fear for instance?). Death, like agency, failure, and repetition, functions in a multitude of ways, and in this section I am going to analyse a handful of selective examples of death which speak to commonalities observed throughout this book. These include: death as narrative, death as environmental and death as operational. I will then apply this typology back to my opening discussion of AC:Or. My intention, in relation to previous discussions of

Failure, Repetition and Death    137 agency, freedom and control, is to use death as a thought-experiment for understanding how video games promote affective experiences of the sublime, using both Deleuze and Lyotard as routes towards this. In terms of death as narrative, this is illustrated by the game To The Moon [Moon] (Freebird Games, 2011). In discussing ‘narrative’, I am augmenting Jenkin’s (2004) notion of ‘narrative architecture’ from Chapters 1 and 5 with Carr’s (2006) delineation between ‘discourse’ and ‘story’. The former constitutes the meaning-making aspects of expression and how content is communicated (akin in part of Bogost’s procedural rhetoric as well), whereas the latter involves the relationship between characters, events and the like. Moon’s discourse, as Denby (2011) describes it, involves technological advancement enabling people to access the memories of others in an effort to change the course of their life as they perceive of it. In the game, two doctors attempt to fulfil the last wish of Johnny, a dying man who dreams of being an astronaut and flying to the moon. The story involves a number of characters and events that are explored through what contemporaneous reviews outline as conscious attempts by the developer to subvert recognised gaming tropes (see Chapter 5). Nonetheless, travelling backwards through Johnny’s memories requires tile-based puzzle solving and some pretty standard obstacle avoidance as you chase characters down corridors. In this sense, death is present in the discourse (Johnny is dying) but absent in the story: this is of course not always the case – I’ll demonstrate this later with AC:Or – but it shows how death is used in relation to narrative. There is also a useful connection to repetition in how discourse operates. The discourse of Moon is in essence an example of active synthesis, in that phases of Johnny’s life are repeated – he’s experienced them once himself, and then the doctors repeat them – but the temporal shift (whereby Johnny is moving chronologically forward whilst the doctors head backwards) means that this form of repetition reframes the original starting point. By altering his memories, the Johnny who begins the game is not the Johnny who ends the game. Death with regard to narrative, even in a relatively straightforward game, is highly complex and potentially affecting. Death as environmental ties to narrative as well. I have previously explored the ways in which death is embedded in virtual spaces and environments (see Spokes, 2018) and this is particularly important in relation to the role of realism – we saw in Chapter 6 how crucial this is to the suspension of disbelief in gamers – but also the tacit world-building that can be achieved by designing a video game where death involves both explicit encounters (the death of your avatar, the death of computational others) and implicit encounters (spaces that imply death through their design, connected to the ‘story’ in Carr’s terms). Recent examples of this in video games – and please avoid reading the fact that both these titles are supposedly historically accurate (see e.g. Jones, 2018) – include Kingdom Come: Deliverance (Warhorse Studios, 2018), where you are able to die at the hands of computational others (in this case, one-dimensional medieval bad guys the Cumans) as well as dying from hunger. Another indicative title is Plague Tale: Innocence (Plague) (Asobo Studio, 2019), which is set in fourteenth century France during the English invasion of the Hundred Years War. This version of

138    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime France is home to Amica, the principle avatar you control. There are numerous explicit encounters with death in the game, particularly with regard to the hordes of flesh-eating rats which can reduce a computational other of your choice to nothing in a matter of seconds (avoiding the rats is of course also an operational issue – don’t get eaten!), but the implicit is equally significant in grounding the gamer in the environment. Inderwildi (2019), in considering the historical efficacy of the game, explores the connection between the game and the Black Death which ravaged Europe at the time the game is set. The game world of Plague is eerily similar to eyewitness accounts at the time, which speak of desolate streets full of death, full cemeteries and hastily dug pits in which the dead were placed layer-upon-layer. Whilst Inderwildi identifies that Amica’s story results in her being not-as-affected by her experiences as eyewitness accounts suggest people were, this doesn’t diminish the potential impact of this on the gamer. From the perspective of the sublime, comprehension of the sheer magnitude of death during the Black Death, as represented in the implicit encounter, is possible (though unlikely given my assertions in Chapter 5). As Petite (2019) argues the entire game is experienced through this environmental death, so at one stage ‘you actually have to walk across an entire field of bodies’. Death is of considerable magnitude, akin to the absolute, and when you do come into contact with the living in the form of computational others, ‘most […] that you come across want to kill [you]’ (Petite, 2019). Finally, death is operational. Plague, it has been suggested (see Petite, 2019), undermines the world building of environmental death in an operational sense because the gameplay is relatively limited or repeats itself in a way that makes the game too straightforward to be a challenge: here we are reminded of Juul’s initial paradox of balancing challenge with failure. If there is no challenge, no prospect of failure, then the game itself fails to engage the player (Juul, 2003). Death is a relatively standard operational feature that signifies both the failure of the gamer, but also a requirement of engagement: kill or be killed (Atkinson and Rodgers, 2016; Spokes, 2018). In many games, death is crucial aspect of the operational rules of engagement through the avatar killing computational others, but it can also be achieved in alignment with narrative and environmental factors, with death unrelated to simulated interpersonal violence on the part of the character you control. The game Papers, Please (3909 LLC, 2013) shows the confluence of these three factors very clearly. In the game, set in a fictionalised, dysfunctional Eastern-bloc country, you work at the border crossing of Grestin, a city between Arstotzka and Kolechia. As an immigration officer, you process the documents of a variety of arrivals to determine whether or not they should have access to the country, or whether their papers show they are criminals, terrorists and the like. The game becomes increasingly complex operationally as you attempt to assess the documents whilst interviewing arrivals, taking fingerprints and conducting full body scans. There is an overarching discourse here around the challenges of immigration in a challenging political climate, and the story eventually combines with death as an environmental outcome as well – not only are the arrivals you process sometimes shot whilst crossing the border (if, for instance, you let someone through who is

Failure, Repetition and Death    139 actually a terrorist) but the introduction of the mysterious EZIC organisation puts you in the position of deciding if their members should be allowed through so as to destabilise the government of Arstotzka (or if they should be outed and assassinated). In many cases, operational death is the purposive outcome of game mechanics. I opened by considering my experience of playing AC:Or, and before moving on to think through how theories of the sublime might help us understand encounters with death, it is worth demonstrating the practical application of this typology of death and dying to show its efficacy as a toolbox for exploring types of engagement. Firstly, in using Carr’s definition of narrative as the confluence of discourse (expressions of meaning, similar to ideological apparatus) and story (the relations between characters, events and environment) the latter is typified in the overarching storyline of Bayek and his wife Aya’s search for the murderer of their son Khemu, which takes place in their home village of Siwa. The central mission throughout the game involves the pair venturing out across a divided Egypt, working to unearth members of the shadowy Order of Ancients who have orchestrated the deaths of countless Egyptians during a tumultuous historical period where multiple factions including Greece and the Roman Empire are vying for control of the country. Whilst the story involves the murder of their son, the discourse is very much one of retribution and revenge, suggesting that justice is best served at the tip of an arrow or flaming sword. Death is framed most clearly as a narrative process when Bayek kills one of the Ancients: each death is accompanied by a cutscene showing an exchange between the two characters in a blank, black space of judgement before Bayek waves the feather of Ma’at to send them to their second death.9 Secondly, carefully connected to death as narrative, death as an environmental by-product is a feature of many of the side missions of the game, as well as the central story of Bayek and Aya. Death is explicit in the form of prosaic kill-quests (kill the rich merchant poisoning slum dwellers so he can inherit their land; kill the commander of a rebel camp to free some rebels) or supernatural forces that increasingly occupy the latter sections of the game (a glowing orb making an entire community sick). Death is implicit in that a repeated theme across the game is how common people suffer at the hands of those who abuse power: this might be a dark priest sacrificing innocent civilians to the scorpion God Serqet, or villagers dying of exhaustion whilst building an aqueduct, or a farm owner made to slaughter local women and children by a Roman proconsul. The message the game conveys is clear: life is brutal, and often short, unless you’re skilled enough to fight back. Thirdly, death is an operational requirement of the game, in that the rules of engagement and the vast majority of gameplay involves either killing or being killed (failing). Through a level-up system based on experience points, you are

9

In Egyptian mythology, the second death – the totalized annihilation from existence – was at the hands of Ammit, a demon variously constituted of different bits of a crocodile, a hippo and a leopard (with a goat’s arms).

140    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime able to develop Bayek – but not Aya – as an effective killer, wielding swords, bows, maces and axes depending on your preference. Whilst the game occasionally prompts the option to fight bare-knuckle, this is only mentioned during a loading screen and is generally not practical given that killing ‘named Ancients’ is the primary objective. Each mission involves some aspect of killing, from the clearing out of entire forts to shooting a heron out of the sky to pluck a feather for a birthing ritual. Again, developing proficiency at killing enables you to progress, and the more refined your skills are, the more straightforward this becomes (though with variable difficulty settings, there are clear attempts to aim for the flow state outlined at the top of this chapter). As previously demonstrated, death exists in different senses and ways in different video games. It can be used as a simulational proxy as well as a series of tangible features both implicit and explicit. In AC:Or, death is narrative, environmental and operational. With regard to the earlier debates about repetition and ritual logic, the nature of repeated actions towards particular goals eventually takes on a ritualistic aspect as Bayek gradually pieces together the organisation responsible for the death of his son: he is transformed from an angry, but initially powerless, agent to a killing machine able to fell an armoured war elephant. Of course, the ritual aspect of this particular title is helped along by the Egyptian setting, bound up narratologically with priests, rites, Gods and monsters. We also see death as clearly connected to failure – perhaps the ultimate expression of an inability to effectively develop the necessary skills to engage with the game world and its denizens. To fail is to repeat, and to repeat is to learn, with the aim of eventually overcoming the failure. Interestingly, in a game so framed by death, the death of the avatar is perhaps the least convincing and substantive. Owing to the setting – you’re not in Egypt, but an ‘immersive simulation’ offered by the Animus programme which forms an overarching theme throughout the Assassin’s Creed franchise – you don’t really die but instead a shimmering grid of black and gold surrounds the player and the word ‘Desynchronization’ appears on the screen. When the game reloads from the last save point, when your avatar is rearticulated, the world comes back into existence as the same black and gold grid flickers away from you. Very meta.

8.5 Failure, Repetition, Death and the Sublime In closing I would like to consider the ways in which our differing engagements with death can be understood with regard to theories of the sublime, in the same way I have done for failure and repetition. Deleuze (2014, p. 143) is a useful bridge between death as we might experience it practically (our individual avatar dies) and death as an affective absolute. He says […] death has two aspects. One is personal, concerning the I or the ego, something which I can confront in a struggle or meet at a limit, or in any case encounter in a present which causes everything to pass. The other is strangely impersonal, with no relation to ‘me’, neither present nor past but always coming, the source of an incessant multiple adventure.

Failure, Repetition and Death    141 This quote highlights two connected aspects that I want to further in thinking about the sublime. Firstly, the idea of struggle and limitation echoes much of what I have already introduced with regard to failure, that death symbolises or actualises the individual’s confrontation with their limit. In one way, this is a reasonably traditional Kantian idea of the sublime, in relation to a subjective personal attempt at reconciling the absolute. Secondly, Deleuze suggests that death creates a paradox in that it is also always approaching, so never past or present. The fact that this is cast as an opportunity for ‘multiple adventures’ chimes with Lyotard’s (1993, 1994) reading of the sublime which I outlined in Chapter 3 in the primacy of the immediate, and the challenge, or impossibility even, of presenting the unpresentable. Video games, on a simplistic level, attempt to present the unpresentable, to codify death in such a way that gamers are able to, and indeed choose to, engage with it. However, a careful reading of Lyotard’s ideas on sublime art awaken us to the fact that the sublime is possible as death bursts free from the confines of representation. Lyotard’s theory of art – which is often misconstrued as being about abstract modernism, but is not limited to specific approaches or artistic media – is closely related to a Kantian sublime but, as Zepke argues, Lyotard is keen to pull away from the ‘ideal realm’ of Kant towards actual experience, framed by capitalism and the ‘mechanism of negative presentation’ (Zepke, 2017, p. 70). This perspective is also seen in Deleuze elsewhere in this chapter. In Chapter 3, we saw how Lyotard’s theory of art – via Newman – casts the sublime in the moment of happening: here there are parallels with the affective experience of the immediate/ visceral aspect of fear from the previous chapter as well as the moment of death. As Zepke details (p. 71), Lyotard’s interest in sublime art is to do with the way it ‘disrupts capitalism and its techno-scientific support’, and I would argue that, in the use of death as a key mechanic for both progression and understanding of life, video games – a product consumed by gamers, bound up in the sorts of technical-scientific processes that facilitate capitalistic enterprises like the games industry – are sublime art. Lyotard, through the prism of paintings by Jacques Monory, offers an example of this. In the piece ‘Ciel No23 Neptune et Triton’, Monory paints a sky of stars, with Neptune and Triton to the upper right of centre. In codifying this image, Monory is showing both those objects which are beyond our comprehension – planets impossibly far away, stars so distant our attempts to understand them are rendered in formulae – but also the ways in which technology facilitates the reproduction of these incomprehensibilities in a way which is apparently digestible. This harks back in part to Lyotard’s earlier work on the differend, where our ability to link phrases (i.e. Carr, 2006, might call ‘discourse’) is prevented despite our knowledge that there is a missing, unarticulated linkage there beyond language, an insistence of articulation that never coalesces. Here we find the apparent disparity between representation and comprehension. Lyotard (1998, p. 195) explains this as ‘the cosmological infinite [...] effaced behind the technological infinite’. The outcome of this is that our experience of aesthetic objects – paintings, video games – is potentially delimited by the technologies which produce the objects, diminishing their power to evoke affective experience.

142    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime These technologies leave ‘little freedom to the eye and the mind’ (p. 223) when it comes to the instance at which we perceive, the moment of happening. This means that rather than experiencing the sublime, we are instead engaging with a technological reproduction of the infinite. A curious juxtaposition to this can be found in the earlier discussion of Moon where not only is death framed through the technological reproduction of the developers, but is also embedded in the narrative and operational rules of engagement: Johnny’s attempts to go to the moon are predicated on the immediacy of his impending death, and are facilitated by technological advancements that enable this to take place. In the context of video games, this could be understood as the instrumental ways that death is framed for us: death is a narrative construct, death is the by-product of the virtual space in which we engage; death is the outcome of operational rules. In this way, gamers are presented with infinite variants of death, but ones regulated by the technologies which produce them, so a version of the absolute in the sense of the mathematical sublime, but one that is in reality an ‘infinity of competencies’ (Lyotard, 1998, p. 227) rather than something which genuinely disrupts and destabilises us. However, as I have demonstrated elsewhere (Spokes, 2018), because death is such a powerful force – emotionally, affectively, as a catalyst for the production of active synthesis in its destabilising of the present/past – it still facilitates the sublime by superseding these attempts of techno-science to replicate what it is and what it does to us as perceiving subjects. In my work on Fallout 4 (Bethesda, 2015) many of the features discussed in this chapter were present, with death functioning as a gameplay mechanic – kill or be killed – and as the by-product of the environment (in this case an irradiated, future Boston). Whilst the idea of death in this context was framed in particular ways by the techno-scientific apparatus of game design, when I explored how gamers interpreted and understood these markers (through forum discussions and magazine articles), their experiences were both divergent – the stories of death they told were their own reflexive narratives that reached away and beyond those which had been proffered by the developers – and used as a crutch for their own introspection, in the same way that my daughter uses her imaginary friend Peacock Hey! to mediate her experiences, and Byron used poetry to try and reconcile his experiences of the absolute magnitude of the natural world around him as he travelled across Europe on the Grand Tour. Death, through the proxy of the video game, challenges the perceiving subject to reconcile experience and, where this fails, the sublime is glimpsed, seen in the inability to fully link phrases, or to return to rhythm from chaos. Depending on how successful the applications of varying aspects of death are in the virtual space of the video game, the transmission of affective experience towards the sublime will also vary. In Fallout 4, the techno-scientific representational death varied from the personal and quotidian – skeletons of couples who appeared to have taken their own lives rather than fight to survive in an eviscerated post-nuked landscape – to the absolute, seen in the complete destruction of the environmental and social world (or a simulation thereof). The techno-scientific idea of death was subsequently challenged by gamers however, who questioned both the realism of this scenario (would people really be reduced to skeletons mid-argument?)

Failure, Repetition and Death    143 and the ways that environmental and social collapse would actually take place (Spokes, 2018). Whilst this seems on the face of it like a recapitulation against the sublime – the perceiving subject successfully reconciling the monumental experience of death by allying it to practical issues – it actually alerts us to its opposite, that the game has transmitted affect to the gamer by confronting them with the unpresentable, the ungraspable totality of death. The only way to attempt to reconcile is by appealing to the limitations of operational rules and game mechanics, and in so doing the gamer’s debate does not attend to death itself, but rather its simulation (in the same way that structural fear is near impossible to articulate). Death itself is the final expression of the sublime, an affective experience where the perceiving subject can never be reassembled. Failure, repetition and death are three interlinked gameplay elements that all speak to the transmission of affective experience. Failure, as I discussed, is productive as well as destructive. Whilst it can, on an operational level, result in the disassembling of the avatar (game over!) it is also required to progress: in relation to agency, failure alerts the gamer to the ‘disconnect between the player’s cognitive experience of ‘being in control’ and the actual degree of control allotted to the player’ (Tanenbaum & Tanenbaum, 2010, p. 16). This is suggestive of an intrinsic dislocation between subject and object, and hints at how the sublime might be experienced as a result of multiple affordances and challenges to both expectations and identity. Repetition was considered as a practical remedy to avoid failure, that practice enabled gamers to develop the requisite skill set to overcome initially insurmountable odds in some senses (as in Sekiro). On a theoretical level, repetition also proved important in the context of the sublime; it returns the gamer to an agentic actor of change. Following Deleuze (2014), repetition is not controlled duplication towards mastery, but is rather a successive series of ‘non-localisable connections […] systems of replay, resonance and echoes’ (p. 109). Instead of simply repeating the self-same thing, repetition – even in contexts where control and freedom appear curtailed – allows the player to enter a flow state that pushes them beyond self-consciousness towards a dissolution of boundaries (Csikszentmihalyi, 2008) or on to a transformational state enabled by ritual logic (Gazzard & Peacock, 2011). Death, which could be considered the ultimate example of failure, or the unpresentable in Lyotard’s (1994) terms, was articulated through forms of video game presentation – as narrative, as environment, as operational – but was also subsequently recast through Lyotard’s ideas on sublime art. Whilst the video game offers a techno-scientific infinity of representations which could preclude the sublime owing to the immediacy of the event being curtailed by the controlling nature of a restrictive representation, the absolute magnitude of death itself alerts the perceiving subject to the actual infinite beyond (which might be awe inspiring, or fearful depending on your disposition). The sublime is possible where the video game, as a proxy, pushes the gamer towards engaging with that which they cannot reconcile, and as I demonstrated through returning briefly to my earlier work on Fallout 4, the only recourse is to understand the video game as a techno-scientific object to be deconstructed. From this, the inadequacies of representation become

144    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime indicative of an opposite: simulations in and of themselves may be limited, but they enable an affective experience of death that cannot be fully realised in any other form. In underscoring multiplicities such as agency, failure, repetition and death, this chapter reflects the broader practicalities of my enquiry. In Chapter 4, the theoretical bedrock of the virtual and the concrete present were identified as needing to be cognisant of multiplicity, and the methodological approaches I outlined sought to draw on the contingent and subjective nature of ontology, epistemology, and indeed the purposeful selection of games for discussion. In turn, this highlights the problem of offering conclusions. Conclusions imply an aspect of finality, but the nature of the virtual sublime is best understood through the assembling of different remakings, how video games facilitate affective sublime experiences in a real diversity of ways through varying levels of transmission. What this means, in moving on to the final chapter, is that recognising multiplicity is a crucial outcome of ‘thinking with video games’. It is also important to honestly reflect how the virtual sublime, whilst useful for understanding our contemporary entanglements with interactive simulational media, is only ever going to be about potentiality.

Chapter 9

Towards the Virtual Sublime 9.1 Introduction I’ll try not to keep you too long. Concluding to me always seems a little odd, given that most research is part of a continuum, a dialogic process (see Bakhtin, 2010) that responds to earlier work whilst pointing at directions of travel for forthcoming work. In that sense, attempting to summarise this book as a combination of conceptual developments, thought experiments, discussions about gaming and personal asides about my relative ineptitude as a gamer is doomed to failure at worst, or prone to becoming damp squib at best. Instead, rather than recounting in a step-by-step manner, I’ll offer a workable definition of the virtual sublime based on where I have gotten to so far. I’ll frame this in relation to affect and the virtual, as well as explaining why this is important and what it says about our contemporary entanglements with video games. Following this, I am going to outline the three things that need to be kept in mind when moving towards the virtual sublime: (1) that our discussions are predicated on a useful definition of the virtual in the first instance; (2) that we need to be aware of the usable aspects of sublime thought and value historical contributions to our present research in the second; and (3) that we frame our experiments in understanding the virtual sublime with a view to future technological developments, bearing in mind how significant these have been so far (see Chapter 6). Whilst I have looked at ideas around rhetoric, awe, fear and death, I think it is important to ensure that these are not considered as the only approaches to either video games or thinking about the sublime more broadly: as per Strathern’s (2005) concept of partial connections, I have sought to offer a line of thought that underscores some connections between gamers and games, but these are by no means the limit. They are instead an introduction to what are useful ideas for thinking through specific affective experiences with regard to both the design of games and the experience of playing them.

Gaming and the Virtual Sublime: Rhetoric, Awe, Fear, and Death in Contemporary Video Games, 145–153 Copyright © 2020 by Matthew Spokes Published under an exclusive license by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved doi:10.1108/978-1-83867-431-120201012

146    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime

9.2 The Virtual Sublime, and How to Understand it The virtual sublime is an outcome of engaging with video games. The sublime, which exists in the immediate, in the moment that affective experience takes place, is facilitated by video games and our entanglements with them. We can trace affective experiences by considering the density of the transmission of affect (Guyau, 1962) – what Ash (2012) describes as ‘bandwidth’ – which is dependent on a number of factors that register with individual gamers in different ways: some encounters produce affect in some gamers, but not others. Affect in relation to video games is very context dependent. Guyau frames transmission through direct and indirect means – including expressions, aesthetics, the haptic and olfactory, the nervous – and throughout this book I have shown how these affective registers might be understood in response to particular games. I have not sought to demonstrate this in a systematic sense, as this would be antithetical to both my ontological standpoint and to the multiplicity of possible encounters. However, I have highlighted how this might be understood through key approaches to the sublime in relation to exemplars of video games. Firstly with respect to sublime ideas of rhetoric, where I focussed on Longinus in particular, some games produce affecting narratives (Jenkins, 2004) that can impact the gamer (SH2 and the concluding rug-pull moment for instance; or the familial grief threaded through both GoW and TDC) but, at the same time, rhetoric in the context of content and procedure – as well as storytelling – can be undermined if our engagement with the virtual world prevents the suspension of disbelief (SH2 again achieved this by ageing and looking terrible!). Reaching the virtual sublime is harder if you are not fully invested in the world you occupy even if associated stories are sufficiently powerful. Nonetheless, examples of the disruptive power of temporality in video games did move us in the direction of the sublime in some cases. Secondly, in the context of awe, I suggested that some of the failings associated with the rhetorical sublime might be assuaged by realism, that technological progress has led to the production of games that are increasingly indistinguishable in their photo-realistic looks and accurate presentation of areas such as landscape, flora and fauna (here I looked at Odyssey, W3:WH and RDR2). Whilst this went some way to helping gamers suspend disbelief, as well as bridging the gap between the virtual and the concrete present, it was the idea of gamer agency that appeared to solidify the opportunity for sublime encounters. Having the power to control and act within a game world facilitates affective experiences. Although the concept of agency is as multiple as the sublime – as discussed throughout – the appearance of freedom, the chance to cause chaos, and the ability to push at the limits of game mechanics and operational rules (as in the case of RDO or E:D), showed real potential in achieving the virtual sublime. Thirdly, fear combined the debate about rhetoric and agency, in terms of how restricting both and forcing the gamer to respond to differing types of fearful experience could also engender the sublime. Using FANF as a base on which to develop a wider spectrum of fear as affective experience, I outlined the relationship

Towards the Virtual Sublime    147 between immediate/visceral encounters with computational others who want to kill us, how the unfamiliar familiar can inspire a creeping dread that is hard to shake, and how our contemporaneous fears in the concrete present – ranging from the failure of Enlightenment ideas like scientific progress, to climate change and the collapse of society – are reflected and made playable through video games as diverse as Papers, Please and Outlast. Fourthly and finally, the confluence of debates about agency, chaos, rhetoric and fear played out through the interconnected features of failure, repetition and death. Failure was understood as a productive force in gamers improving their approach to play, enabling them to learn the rules of the game. In doing so, the virtual sublime may be achievable through entering into a flow state (as discussed in the context of Isaac) where repetition itself produces change, or through the juxtaposition of terrifying encounters with repetitive gameplay (a take on Ngai’s, 2005 ‘stuplimity’, which was considered in relation to Sekiro, a game so hard you can taste it). Death, the ultimate failure, can be understood across a spectrum of engagement, with the sublime revealed through the connection between represented, simulational death – as in AC:Or which combined death as narrative, environmental and ­operational – and the absolute magnitude of death in the concrete present. In each case, the virtual sublime was shown as a potential end-product of encounters with video games, with the caveat that the sublime, as in Deleuze (1981), is an ongoing process of rhythm descending to chaos, recapitulating, and descending again. This does not mean that the sublime can only be encountered through these means, but rather that there is still value in thinking about the sublime through the historical development of associated ideas, contrary to what Costelloe (2012) suggested at the start of Chapter 2. Looking for affective experience through transmission, as I argued in Chapter 4, is also similar to Shield’s (2003) application of ‘metaxis’, the inbetween productive state of the virtual and concrete present. Play, in the context of video games, is metaxical: it operates in-between the virtual and the concrete present as a way of turning the ideal real into the actual real. As agentic individuals, we engage in the process of metaxis, or reifying the virtual, by using our simulational experiences to transpose ‘digital action and virtual encounters to the world of living animals and objects’ (p. 49). The virtual sublime results in us reflecting on the concrete present in some sense. I have highlighted a variety of ways in which this has taken place throughout the book. For instance, the experience of being strapped to a chair and dismembered in Outlast forces us to confront our tangible, fleshy selves, particularly in relation to the diminished control we have over our bodies. We can try to move, but there is no escape. Through this we are confronted with the limits of our agency. In TDC, via a selection of troubling vignettes, we have to come to terms both with our own mortality and what we would do in a situation where our child was terminally ill. Those games with a well-calibrated affective register impact us in ways that move the virtual closer to the concrete present: both of the examples above enable us to experience simulations of the concrete present through representational means. These sublime encounters are only achievable through types of play.

148    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime There is not one route to achieving the virtual sublime. The path can sometimes be a linear one (because the designers paved the way on purpose, as in P.T.), or it can seem cyclical (as with Isaac), or it can come out of nowhere, like falling off the edge of the map in RDO. If we do achieve the virtual sublime as the outcome of affective experiences with video games, we see it challenge our identity through the relationship between subject and object. This indicates that associated processes that contribute towards affective experience are unlikely to be as straightforward as one thing acting on another, but is instead reflective of the variety of interrelationships between gamers, designers, developers, hardware and software, not to mention the implication of external factors on our play. If we are to understand the practices, processes, actors and machinic/non-machinic elements that may contribute towards sublime encounters we need to embrace complexity and partiality. Whilst these representational, simulational spaces might not seem part of the concrete present (we’re not nineteenth century cowboys, or space pilots, or actually fighting Medusa), by engaging with them virtually, we are alerted to the immensity of the world around us, the irreconcilable challenges of history, of the future. Operationalising this, making the virtual sublime a way of explaining aspects of our entanglements, is a practical problem. How do we solve it?

9.3 We Need to Conceptualise ‘The Real’ in a Consistent Way As I have demonstrated, based on Shield’s definitional work, video games tease out the overlap between the concrete present and the virtual in ways we can actively engage with. Games might reflect macro-issues such as the horrors of war (This War of Mine), the collapse of society (Fallout 4), the problems associated with the rise of populism (Papers, Please) or the historical contingency of illness (Plague); they might also allow us to engage with the micro, alerting us to our fears of interpersonal harm at the hands of the Other (AI; Outlast) or our limited capacity for bodily control in motion (SMG). What might be considered frivolous entertainment is the experience of the concrete present at a stage removed. It is as real as virtually real can be. But to get to this stage it is crucial that the virtual is properly understood as a facet of the real. At the beginning of this book, I asked whether or not fear can be propagated in a pizzeria staffed by animatronic animals. The answer is ‘yes it can’. The same too is true of the power of repetition in pushing us beyond the limits of ourselves (even playing as a small boy locked in a basement, fighting procedurally generated enemies), or experiencing a simulated natural vista that stretches farther than the eye can see. The reason for this is that video games are real, in the sense that they represent ‘the ideal’ to the actual real of the concrete present (Shields, 2003). Whilst examples of virtual, digital, interactive entertainment that simulate tangible, physical things (which are organised in a number of ways by games designers and developers: operational rules, game mechanics, procedural rhetoric) might seem different from reality, this is only on the surface. They are in fact productive forces shaping and remaking our engagement with the social, cultural and political milieu in which we live. If we accept that the virtual and the concrete present are both facets of the real, then the importance of video games is self-evident. They are the tool for

Towards the Virtual Sublime    149 thinking and experiencing. This happens through metaxis, the ‘operation of the imagination which connects the perceptual environment with the virtual and abstract world of meanings which over-code our perceptions’ (Shields, 2003, p. 39). For my daughter, Peacock Hey! is a metaxical process of actualising and challenging her fears of the unknown; for Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is metaxical in attempting to codify the absolute of nature-as-experience on the Grand Tour. Video games are no different. They operate as ‘the boundary of the concrete and a digitally created virtuality’ (p. 45), except that this delineation – as I have demonstrated throughout – is increasingly blurred. This idea of the virtual as increasingly indistinguishable from the concrete present is an appropriate summary of our contemporary condition with regard to interactive simulational media.

9.4 We Need to be Expansive in Our Use of the Sublime I also asked at the beginning of the book if the concept of the sublime is fit for purpose: the straightforward answer is that it is. All theories of the sublime require is a bit of interpretive work and creative license. The reason the sublime is fit for purpose is because the sublime is adaptable to a variety of scenarios and developments that stretch from Antiquity to the present day. In each empirical chapter, I have plotted a route through key approaches to the sublime – using rhetoric, awe, fear and death – and even when using relatively distinct examples of video games that have the potential to produce an affective experience in the gamer, there have been considerable points of overlap with ideas of the sublime. So in Chapter 5, I ran through the restrictions of rhetoric in engendering the sublime, before this was shown to be only a partial picture: if you think about rhetoric in the context of games that inspire fear (Chapter 7), then it becomes powerful once more. Similarly, ideas about death as sublime (Chapter 8) had clear connections to both notions of awe and moving beyond the limits of what we know (Chapter 6) and contemporary sublime thinking with regard to art in the writings of Lyotard (1994) and Deleuze (1981, 2014). What this shows is both the importance of the sublime as a mode of thinking, but also that the sublime is multiple. The virtual sublime is therefore a collection of perspectives and affordances that reflect the complexity of approaches to the sublime over the last several thousand years. What are the points of commonality? I would suggest that having worked through theorists and philosophers as diverse as Longinus, Dennis, Baillie, Gerard, Burke, Kant, Lyotard, Deleuze and Fedorova to name a handful, we can see similar concerns about the nature and value of engaging with representation and aesthetics, the immediacy of experience and encounter, and the ways in which the sublime extends beyond the subject, or rather troubles the nature of the subject (be that in terms of magnitude, terror or the abject). In each empirical chapter, I have considered video games in relation to these sublime ideas, and found indicative examples where individual titles or genres push towards affective experiences as well as others that are less-than-successful in doing so. The diversity of thought on the sublime affords us the chance to

150    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime combine and contrast these sometimes similar, sometimes argumentatively different approaches towards a productive notion of the virtual sublime. The ability to design this sort of ‘hodge-podge’ (Deleuze, 2007) is essential. The book would be less of a thought experiment/empirical examination mash-up if I were to simply replicate that which had come before, so developing areas of overlap between thinkers as diverse as Longinus, Kant, Lyotard and Deleuze shows the continuing value of the sublime as a theoretical and conceptual toolbox that can be employed in a number of ways to help us understand video games and ourselves in relation to them, bucking the trend Costelloe (2012) suggested in Chapter 2 where the philosophical vibrancy of sublime thought was considered exhausted. Whilst I have purposefully not explored the full extent of writing on the sublime, I have shown the ways in which the history of thought on the sublime dovetails with contemporary games scholarship, and detailed how and why this confluence might be of use in our present context. There are plenty of new works on the sublime that do innovative things in this regard, including ideas around space and objects in the concrete present (Pohl, 2019), the developing sublime of algorithms (Ames, 2018) and the impact of sensory power and tactility in understanding sublime experience (Lichtenstein, 2019). Except of course, the new is not new. The above discussions, much like mine, are all predicated on the continuum of sublime theory from as far back as Ancient Greece. It is more a question of making these ideas workable.

9.5 We Need to Experiment with Conceptual and Practical Applications of Sublime Ideas In this book I have outlined the virtual sublime in relation to affect, and how transmission is indicative of affective experience. Reflexively, it is necessary to ask if affect is the right route? My ontological position is that you cannot explore the possibilities of action between a diversity of actors if you start from a perspective that there is an overarching rule that controls or limits human activity. Across the empirical chapters I have shown how adopting heterogenous approaches to ideas, applications and data are epistemologically valid. In essence, if you fail to experiment with multiple approaches, there is always the possibility that you’ll miss something.1 Practically speaking, multiplicity makes the development of a conceptual toolkit a real challenge. What I cannot promise is that there is a blueprint of the virtual sublime that can be easily mapped on to every situation. However, I think what I can say is that there are particular conceptual approaches that might be useful in understanding certain circumstances. For example, let’s turn back to transmission and affect very briefly. 1

I recognize this leaves me open to claims of a piecemeal understanding of particular perspectives in particular fields, but accepting that knowledge is partial and situated (Haraway, 1988) is at the very least an honest position.

Towards the Virtual Sublime    151 Transmission is a way of seeing if an affective experience has taken place. Sometimes the interplay of different forces (gamers, developers, the game, the hardware, the software) are more likely to afford affective experience than others, so it is helpful to have some way of measuring this. For example, we saw how in SH2, although rhetoric might have steered us towards the sublime by disassembling the subject through the narrative of the avatar and their/your complicity in euthanising your wife, the fact that game looks crap prevents this from happening. This is why density of transmission is valuable in the approach I have used: it accounts for, in a scalar sense, the likelihood that something affective has taken place. If you can isolate the forces, or at least suggest the significance of some of them in particular instances, then you are able to unpick both the entanglements between forces (how each are related) and the impacts they are likely to engender in future engagements. This does not mean you have a reducible total – that you can say X game has Y affective impact – but rather than you can identify some commonalities and typical affordances with regard to the arrangement of forces in a given context. It is not about a reductive outcome where the gamer is the subject and the game is the object,2 but about the processes, challenges, changes and antagonisms that operate (in)between forces. In a practical way, this is suggestive of how the sublime happens, and is therefore traceable in some sense. It is not so much about the actual experience of the sublime encounter, but about using conceptual and practical means to detail the potentialities afforded us through video games as an interactive, simulational medium.

9.6 W  e Need to be Responsive to Developments in Interactive Simulational Media Video games, as Grey (2009) argues, are important both as artefacts and as a productive means of thinking and challenging the world around us: throughout this book, I have underlined the ways in which video games exist as both objects for play, but also proxies through which we challenge our limits as cognising, perceiving subjects. As with any research, I have accentuated specific areas (rhetoric, awe, fear and death) so as to make practical the study of video games as facilitators of affective experiences, but to deepen this analysis going forward it is also helpful to identify areas of growth, and offer suggestions and questions as to how we might develop the virtual sublime in future. As I have shown, our understanding of the impact of interactive simulational media has changed over time, so we must be cognisant of this when designing and implementing research. So then, a few ideas for consideration… Firstly, is the virtual sublime only achievable through video games? I would argue that it is only possible through an interactive medium that facilitates play and experimentation in relation to gamer agency. How this is operationalised 2

I do accept, however, that to test out these ideas it is helpful to have these constructs in place to challenge.

152    Gaming and the Virtual Sublime in future is liable to change. For instance, who is it that experiences the sublime encounter? This book has considered the perceiving subject as an almost exclusively individualised entity, but video games aren’t necessarily played in isolation.3 We need to think too about collaborative gaming and collective experience. Is experiencing the sublime only possible in an individualistic sense? The variety of gamer identities suggests this is the case. However, individual identities cannot operate in a vacuum; they feed in to, reflect, refract and reframe collective identities. I have already hinted at this with regard to Jenkins and Deuze’s (2008) transmedia storytelling and convergence culture in terms of video games which cross boundaries between media forms, thereby including different types of engagement, but how might our identities and experiences be challenged by increasingly convergent media? Recently concerns with how convergence might lead to socially undesirable outcomes have been raised (see Macey & Hamari, 2018, on the convergence between gaming, spectating at eSports and gambling). Conversely, using some of the approaches suggested in this book might also contribute to contemporary work looking at large-scale samples of gamer identities that impact socially productive and desirable outcomes, including ideas of wellbeing and challenging loneliness through collective play (see Kaye, 2019). The relationship between collaborative gaming, identity and the sublime is one opportunity moving forward. Secondly, building on this, context is also central in collective experiences of gaming. In Chapter 8 I briefly highlighted how the shift from gaming in arcades (see Fiske, 2017) to home consoles changed the nature of failure from public spectacle to private embarrassment (or indeed a catalyst to improve). However, in recent years this has almost come full circle with the massive expansion of live streaming and the increasing importance of eSports (not to mention the potential for spatialising the sublime with mobile gaming). Whilst the academic community have been relatively slow off the mark with this development (Vera, Terrón and García, 2018), it is clear to see that the shift back towards collective experiences, both of play and consumption, has lasting implications for affective experience, or at least recasts arguments about the sublime in relation to collaborative encounters rather than individual ones. Opportunities for understanding these changes have recently been developed in relation to some of the areas discussed earlier in this book, including challenges to identity (Liao, 2016), the power of external forces in shaping narratives (see Ismangil, 2018 in relation to Chinese nationalism in Dota 2, for example; similarly, Szablewicz, 2016), control and freedom knocking up against existing social structures (Karhulahti, 2017), and differing types of agentic participation: Soriano, Davies, and Hjorth (2019) consider this with regard to the interconnections between surveillance, kinds of play and the social dynamic of care when watching play in a public space. Each of these approaches offers a

3

For me, this is largely the case, but I think that relates to my formative experiences of failing publicly. In particular, repeatedly losing death matches in Unreal Tournament or being demonstrably the worst at four player Quake 2 on the N64.

Towards the Virtual Sublime    153 number of avenues for exploring affective experience through the challenging of subject(s) and object in a collective, collaborative sense. Thirdly, an additional crucial development in the coming years will be the uptake of ‘virtual’ reality. Ignoring the obvious issues from a definitional standpoint (loop back around to Chapter 4 if necessary), the shift from VR as a rarefied pastime, to one where a majority of gamers with next generation consoles (or indeed phones) have access to VR on a daily basis will transform the sublime encounter. Part of this book dealt with the potential difficulties for affective transmission between gamer and game when the control interface or the peculiarities of manipulating your avatar impacted your engagement. Moving towards VR as a more incorporative experience (Calleja, 2011), we may see a reduced separation between gamer, avatar, hardware and software, which will change our understanding of the sublime through new ideas of embodiment and affect in gaming (though Guyau’s transmission of direct haptic experience will presumably be useful!). Augmenting ideas around the sublime with emergent work on embodiment in gaming (see Bailey, Bailenson, & Casasanto, 2016; Maurer, 2016; Maurer, Lankes, & Tscheligi, 2018) will therefore be vital. What this points to is that the way we play is changing, where and how we play is changing, and our understanding of what play means in relation to interactive simulational media has to change too. The virtual sublime is one way of doing this, by conceptualising the end point of our complex and developing processes of engagement with these media. Returning to the history of sublime thought and outlining how this can inform our notions of affective experience and sublime encounters in the present (and the future) at the very least points to the ongoing significance of thinking with video games. They are not simply static representations of the real world: they are the real world – the ideal real to the actual real of the concrete present. As such they provide us with experiences, insights and challenges that enable us to question our social, political and cultural situation as well as our own identity.

References Aarseth, E. (1997). Cybertext: Perspectives on ergodic literature. Baltimore, MA: JHU Press. Aarseth, E. (2003). Playing research: Methodological approaches to game analysis. In Proceedings of the digital arts and culture conference, Melbourne, Australia. Retrieved from http://www.bendevane.com/VTA2012/herrstubbz/wp-content/ uploads/2012/01/02.GameApproaches2.pdf Albrighton, T. (2014, January 27). Gaming’s greatest moment. ABC Copywriting. Retrieved from https://www.abccopywriting.com/2014/01/27/gaming-greatest-moment Alyska (2019, July 16). The final boss made me cry [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=xj9mOzDNxFo Ames, M. (2018). Deconstructing the algorithmic sublime. Big Data and Society (January– June, pp. 1–4). Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1177%2F2053951718779194 Anderson, A. (2018, July 12). Behind the glorious sound of ‘God of War’. A sound effect. Retrieved from https://www.asoundeffect.com/god-of-war-sound/ Anderson, B. (2009). Affective atmospheres. Emotion, Space and Society, 2(2), 77–81. doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2009.08.005 Anderson, C. A., & Bushman, B. J. (2001). Effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, physiological arousal, and prosocial behavior: A meta-analytic review of the scientific literature. Psychological Science, 12(5), 353–359. Anderson, C. A., & Ford, C. M. (1986). Affect of the game player: Short-term effects of highly and mildly aggressive video games. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 12(4), 390–402. doi:10.1177/0146167286124002 Ansell-Pearson, K. (2005). The reality of the virtual: Bergson and Deleuze. MLN, 120(5), 1112–1127. Antonelli, P. (2012, November 29). Video games: 14 in the collection, for starters. Inside Out. Retrieved from https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2012/11/29/video-games14-in-the-collection-for-starters/ Ash, J. (2012). Attention, videogames and the retentional economies of affective amplification. Theory, Culture & Society, 29(6), 3–26. Ash, J. (2013). Technologies of captivation: Videogames and the attunement of affect. Body & Society, 19(1), 27–51. Ashfield, A., & De Bolla, P. (Eds.). (1996). The sublime: A reader in British eighteenth-century aesthetic theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Atkins, B. (2007). Killing time: Time past, time present and time future in Prince of Persia: The sands of time. In B. Atkins & T. Krzywinska (Eds.), Videogame, player, text (pp. 237–253). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Atkinson, R., & Rodgers, T. (2016). Pleasure zones and murder boxes: Online pornography and violent video games as cultural zones of exception. British Journal of Criminology, 56(6), 1291–1307. Auerbach, E., & Ziolkowski, J. M. (1993). Literary language & its public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Avedon, E. M., & Sutton-Smith, B. (1971). The study of games. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Bailey, J. O., Bailenson, J. N., & Casasanto, D. (2016). When does virtual embodiment change our minds? Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 25(3), 222–233.

156   References Bakhtin, M. M. (2010 [1984]). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Ballie, J. (1996 [1747]). An essay on the sublime. In A. Ashfield & P. De Bolla (Eds.), The sublime: A reader in British eighteenth-century aesthetic theory (pp. 87–100). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Becker, H. S. (2007). Telling about society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bennett, A., & Peterson, R. A. (Eds.). (2004). Music scenes: Local, translocal and virtual. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Bergson, H. (2004 [1911]). Matter and memory (N. Paul & W. Palmer, Trans.). London: George, Allen and Unwin. Bertozzi, E. (2014). The feeling of being hunted: Pleasures and potentialities of predation play. Games and Culture, 9(6), 429–441. Bogost, I. (2008). The rhetoric of video games. In K. Salen (Ed.), The ecology of games: Connecting youth, games, and learning (pp. 117–140), Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Bogost, I. (2010). Persuasive games: The expressive power of video games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bonner, M. (2018). On Striated Wilderness and Prospect Pacing: Rural Open World Games as Liminal Spaces of the Man-Nature Dichotomy. In DiGRA’18-Proceedings of the 2018 DiGRA International Conference: The Game Is the Message. Retrieved from http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/DIGRA_2018_paper_18. pdf Borić, D. (2010). Arriving at a good description: interview with Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern. Journal of Social Archaeology, 10(2), 280–296. Brady, E. (2013). The sublime in modern philosophy: Aesthetics, ethics, and nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, A. M., & Berg Marklund, B. (2015). Animal crossing: New leaf and the diversity of horror in video games. Conference proceedings of digital games research association. Retrieved from diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:860375/FULLTEXT01.pdf Bryant, L. (2011). The Ontic principle: Outline of an object-oriented ontology. In L. Bryant, N. Srnicek, & G. Harman (Eds.), The speculative turn: Continental materialism and realism (pp. 261–279). Prahran: re.press. Bulut, E., Mejia, R., & McCarthy, C. (2014). Governance through philitainment: Playing the benevolent subject. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 11(4), 342–361. Burgess, J., & Jones, C. M. (2017). “Is it too much to ask that we’re allowed to win the game?”: Character attachment and agency in the mass effect 3 ending controversy. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 37(3), 146–158. Burke, E. (1996 [1759]). A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful. In A. Ashfield & P. De Bolla (Eds.), The sublime: A reader in British eighteenthcentury aesthetic theory (pp. 131–143). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butt, M. A. R., & Dunne, D. (2019). Rebel girls and consequence in life is strange and the walking dead. Games and Culture, 14(4), 430–449. Byron, G. G. (2004). Childe Harold’s pilgrimage. Project Gutenberg. Retrieved from https:// www.gutenberg.org/files/5131/5131-h/5131-h.htm Caillois, R. (2001). Man, play, and games. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Calleja, G. (2011). In-game: From immersion to incorporation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Callon, M. (1999). Actor–network theory: The market test. The Sociological Review, 47(1), 181–195. Calvin, J. (2008). Institutes of the Christian religion. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers. Campbell, J. (1982). Grammatical man: Information, entropy, language, and life. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Carr, D. (2006). Games & narrative. In D. Carr, D. Buckingham, A. Burn, & G. Schott (Eds.), Computer games: Text, narrative & play (pp. 30–44). Cambridge: Polity. Carr, D. (2014). Ability, disability and dead space. Game Studies, 14(2). Retrievd from http://gamestudies.org/1402/articles/carr

References    157 Carter, A. (2017, January 30). Walking dead: 15 Ways video games connect to the comics (andShow). Screen Rant. Retrieved from https://screenrant.com/walking-dead-videogame-tv-show-comics-connections-easter-eggs/ Clarkson, S. (2013, December 4). Mass effect 3’s ending disrespects its most invested players. Kotaku. Retrieved from https://kotaku.com/mass-effect-3s-ending-disrespects-itsmost-invested-pla-5898743 Coles, J. (2019). Sekiro Isshin, the Sword Saint Boss guide. Games Radar. Retrieved from https://www.gamesradar.com/uk/sekiro-isshin-the-sword-saint-boss-guide/ Costelloe, T. M. (Ed.). (2012). The sublime: From Antiquity to the present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Couture, J. (n.d.). IGN Interviews: Scott Cawthon. IGN. Retrieved from https://www. indiegamemag.com/igm-interviews-scott-cawthon-five-nights-at-freddys/ Crampton, T. (2006, November 6). For France, video games are as artful as cinema. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/06/business/ worldbusiness/06game.html Crawford, G. (2012). Video gamers. London: Routledge. Cremin, C. (2012). The formal qualities of the video game: An exploration of super Mario galaxy with Gilles Deleuze. Games and Culture, 7(1), 72–86. Crowther, P. (1989). The Kantian sublime: From morality to art. Abingdon: Oxford University Press. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2008 [1990]). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York, NY: Harper. Csikszentmihalyi, M., Abuhamdeh, S., & Nakamura, J. (2014). Flow. In Flow and the foundations of positive psychology (pp. 227–238). Dordrecht: Springer. Day, H. J. (2013). Lucan and the sublime: Power, representation and aesthetic experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deleuze, G. (1966 [1988]). Bergsonism. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books. Deleuze, G. (1978, March 28). Seminar on Kant at University of Paris St. Denis. Retrieved from https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/68 Deleuze, G. (1981). Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (2007). Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Deleuze, G. (2008). Kant’s critical philosophy: The doctrine of the faculties. London: Bloomsbury. Deleuze, G. (2014 [1968]). Difference and repetition. Bloomsbury: London. Demirbag-Kaplan, M., & Kaplan-Oz, B. (2018). We beat the cops in GTA: Po (ludic) al activism in the age of video games. Convergence, 24(6), 623–647. Denham, J., Hirschler, S., & Spokes, M. (2019). The reification of structural violence in video games. Crime, Media, Culture. Retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/ doi/10.1177/1741659019881040. doi:10.1177/1741659019881040 Denham, J., & Spokes, M. (2018). Thinking outside the ‘murder box’: Virtual violence and pro-social action in video games. The British Journal of Criminology, 59(3), 737–755. Dennis, J. (1996 [1701, 1704]). The advancement and reformation of modern poetry and the grounds of criticism in poetry. In A. Ashfield & P. De Bolla (Eds.), The sublime: A reader in British eighteenth-century aesthetic theory (pp. 30–39). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Derrida, J. (1988). Limited Inc. Evanstone, IL: Northwestern University Press. Deterding, S., Dixon, D., Khaled, R., & Nacke, L. (2011). From game design elements to gamefulness: Defining gamification. In Proceedings of the 15th international academic MindTrek conference. Retrieved from https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2181037.2181040 Donnelly, J. (2018, April 9). GTA 5 Estimated to be the most profitable entertainment product of all time. PC Gamer. Retrieved from https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/gta-5estimated-to-be-the-most-profitable-entertainment-product-of-all-time/ Donovan, T. (2010). Replay: The history of video games. Hove: Yellow Ant.

158   References Doran, R. (2015). The theory of the sublime from Longinus to Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ducharme, J. (2018, March 12). Trump Blames video games for school shootings: Here’s what science says. Time Magazine. Retrieved from http://time.com/5191182/trumpvideo-gamesviolence/ Dulles, S. J. (2009). Church and society: The Laurence J. McGinley lectures, 1988–2007. New York, NY: Fordham Univ Press. Dwiar, R. (2017, June 7). A landscape designer take on Witcher 3. Eurogamer. Retrieved from https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-06-07-a-landscape-designers-take-on-thewitcher-3-mass-effect-and-dishonored Dyens, O. (2002). Metal and flesh: The evolution of man: Technology takes over (E. Bibbee & O. Dyens, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ebert, R. (2010, April 16). Video games can never be art. Chicago Sun Times. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20111010001841/ http:/blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/ 2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html Ehrmann, J., Lewis, C., & Lewis, P. (1968). Homo ludens revisited. Yale French Studies, 41, 31–57. Encheva, L. (2017). Flow, freedom, and the gamified sublime. In T. Trifonova (Ed.), Contemporary visual culture and the sublime (pp. 131–141). London: Routledge. Engelhardt, C. R., Bartholow, B. D., & Saults, J. S. (2011). Violent and nonviolent video games differentially affect physical aggression for individuals high vs. low in dispositional anger. Aggressive Behavior, 37(6), 539–546. Ermi, L., & Mäyrä, F. (2005). Fundamental components of the gameplay experience analyzing immersion. Proceedings of the DiGRA conference changing views: Worlds in play, Vancouver, BC. Retrieved from http://summit.sfu.ca/item/260 Eskelinen, M. (2001). The gaming situation. Game Studies, 1(1). Retrieved from http:// www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/ Evans-Thirlwell, E. (2019, March 27). Sekiro: Shadows die twice review – A stripped and scared masterpiece. Eurogamer. Retrieved from https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-0327-sekiro-shadows-die-twice-review-a-stripped-and-scarred-masterpiece Fedorova, K. (2017). The ambiguity effects of the techno-sublime. In T. Trifonova (Ed.), Contemporary visual culture and the sublime (pp. 142–150). London: Routledge. Fiske, J. (2017). Reading the popular. London: Routledge. Frasca, G. (2007). Play the message: Play, game and videogame rhetoric. Ph.D. thesis, IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen. Frasca, G. (2013). Simulation versus narrative: Introduction to ludology. In B. Perron & M. J. Wolf (Eds.), The video game theory reader (pp. 243–258). London: Routledge. Freud, S. (1919). The Uncanny (J. Strachey, Trans.). London: Hogarth. Gan, P. (2015). Constructing a deconstructive sublime. Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, 2(1), 73–91. Gazzard, A., & Peacock, A. (2011). Repetition and ritual logic in video games. Games and Culture, 6(6), 499–512. Gee, J. P. (2006). Why game studies now? Video games: A new art form. Games and Culture, 1(1), 58–61. Gerard, A. (1996 [1759]). An essay on taste. In A. Ashfield & P. De Bolla (Eds.), The sublime: A reader in British eighteenth-century aesthetic theory (pp. 168–172). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giddings, S. (2009). Events and collusions: A glossary for the microethnography of video game play. Games and Culture, 4, 144–157. doi:10.1177/1555412008325485 Gies, A. (2012, October 9). Spec Ops: The line. Devils duty review. Polygon. Retrieved from https://www.polygon.com/2012/10/9/3479482/spec-ops-the-line-review-devils-duty Gies, A. (2018, October 26). Red dead redemption art inspiration landscape paintings. Polygon. Retrieved from https://www.polygon.com/red-dead-redemption/2018/10/26/18024982/ red-dead-redemption-2-art-inspiration-landscape-paintings

References    159 Glover, G. (2018, December 19). The mythical creatures of Assassin’s creed odyssey [Blogpost]. Retrieved from https://assassinscreed.ubisoft.com/game/en-ca/news-updates/342079/ the-mythical-creatures-of-assassins-creed-odyssey%E2%80%93interview-with-thedevelopment-team Grey, S. (2009). Dissonance and dystopia: Fallout 3 and philosophy amidst the ashes. In Online proceedings for the philosophy of computer games conference, Oslo. Retrieved from http://gamephilosophy.org/wp-content/uploads/confmanuscripts/pcg2009/ Grey%20Sarah%202009%20-%20Dissonance%20and%20Dystopia%20Fallout%20 3%20and%20Philosophy%20Amidst%20the%20Ashes.pdf Guerlac, S. (1985). Longinus and the subject of the sublime. New Literary History, 16(2), 275–289. Guyau, J. M. (1962 [1887]). The Non-religion of the future: A sociological study. New York, NY: Schocken Books. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Harper, T. (2011). Rules, rhetoric, and genre: Procedural rhetoric in Persona 3. Games and Culture, 6(5), 395–413. Heffernan, J. (2006). Cultivating picturacy: Visual art and verbal interventions. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Heidegger, M. (2008). The origin of the work of art. In D. Krell (Trans.), Martin Heidegger: The basic writings. New York, NY: Harper Collins. Hern, A. (2013, September 18). Grand theft Auto 5 under fire for graphic torture scene. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/18/ grand-theft-auto-5-under-fire-for-graphic-torture-scene Hern, A. (2019, June 26). Watch dogs legion’s dystopian post Brexit London. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/games/2019/jun/26/watch-dogs-legionsdystopian-post-brexit-london Hetfeld, M. (2019, March 26). The walking dead: The final season game review. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/games/2019/mar/26/telltalethe-walking-dead-the-final-season-review-playstation-xbox-pc-nintendo. Accessed on October 9, 2019. Hidalgo, J. (2019, April 3). Sekiro shadows die twice review. RGJ. Retrieved from https:// eu.rgj.com/story/life/2019/04/03/sekiro-shadows-die-twice-review-tenchu-darksouls-technobubble/3342587002/ Hirsch, M. (2001). Surviving images: Holocaust photographs and the work of postmemory. The Yale Journal of Criticism, 14(1), 5–37. Huizinga, J. (1955). Homo ludens; A study of the play-element in culture. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Hurley, L. (2019, October 31). The 20 best horror games of all time. GamesRadar. Retrieved from https://www.gamesradar.com/uk/best-horror-games/ Huston, D. (2017, May 11). H.R. Giger: Behind the alien forms. Scraps from the loft. Retrieved from https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2017/05/11/h-r-giger-behind-the-alien-forms/ Inderwildi, A. (2019, June 6). How a plague tale: Innocence fails to capture the horrors of the black death. Eurogamer. Retrieved from https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/ 2019-06-06-how-a-plague-tale-innocence-fails-to-capture-the-horrors-of-the-blackdeath Ismangil, M. (2018). (Re) creating the nation online: Nationalism in Chinese Dota 2 Fandom. Asiascape: Digital Asia, 5(3), 198–224. Jenkins, H. (2005a). Game design as narrative. Computer, 44(53), 118–130. Jenkins, H. (2005b). Games, the new lively art. In J. Raessens & J. Goldstein (Eds.), Handbook of computer game studies (pp. 175–189). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jenkins, H. (2006). Fans, bloggers, and gamers: Exploring participatory culture. Ney York, NY: NYU Press. Jenkins, H., & Deuze, M. (2008). Convergence culture. Convergence, 14(1), 5–12.

160   References Jentsch, E. (1906). On the psychology of the Uncanny. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2(1), 7–16. Joda, T., & Gallucci, G. O. (2015). The virtual patient in dental medicine. Clinical Oral Implants Research, 26(6), 725–726. Johnson, D. B. (2012). The postmodern sublime. In T. M. Costelloe (Ed.), The sublime: From Antiquity to the present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, A. (2018, February 23). Kingdom Come deliverance inaccuracy. PC Games N. Retrieved from https://www.pcgamesn.com/kingdom-come-deliverance/kingdomcome-deliverance-inaccuracy Jones, J. (2012, November 30). Sorry MoMa, video games are not art. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2012/nov/30/ moma-video-games-art Jones, S. (2008). The meaning of video games: Gaming and textual strategies. London: Routledge. Juul, J. (1998). A clash between game and narrative. In Proceedings of the digital arts and culture conference, Bergen, Norway. Retrieved from https://www.jesperjuul.net/text/ clash_between_game_and_narrative.html Juul, J. (2001). The repeatedly lost art of studying games. Game Studies, 1(1). Retrieved from http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/juul-review/ Juul, J. (2003). The many meanings of difficulty in video games. In B. Perron & M. J. Wolf (Eds.), The video game theory reader 2 (pp. 237–252). London: Routledge. Kant, I. (1781). Critique of pure reason. Redditch: Read Books Ltd. Kant, I. (2003). Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kant, I. (2008 [1790, 1987]). Critique of judgement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Karhulahti, V. M. (2017). Reconsidering esport: Economics and executive ownership. Physical Culture and Sport, Studies and Research, 74(1), 43–53. Karppi, T., & Sotamaa, O. (2012). Rethinking playing research: DJ HERO and methodological observations in the mix. Simulation & Gaming, 43(3), 413–429. Kaye, L. K. (2019). The role of gamer identity on digital gaming outcomes. Proceedings of the international conference on human–computer interaction, Orlando, FL. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-23570-3_34 King, G., & Krzywinska, T. (2006). Tomb raiders and space invaders: Videogame forms and contexts. London: Bloomsbury. Kirkland, E. (2009). Storytelling in survival horror video games. In B. Perron (Ed.), Horror video games: Essays on the fusion of fear and play (pp. 62–78). Jefferson, NC: MacFarland. Kirsh, S. J., Olczak, P. V., & Mounts, J. R. (2005). Violent video games induce an affect processing bias. Media Psychology, 7(3), 239–250. Klepek, P. (2015, October 6). How the Witcher 3’s developed ensured their open world didn’t suck. Kotaku. Retrieved from https://kotaku.com/how-the-witcher-3sdevelopers-ensured-their-open-world-1735034176 Koch, C. (2015, May 2). How big is ‘The Witcher 3’?. Tech Times. Retrieved from https:// www.techtimes.com/articles/50240/20150502/the-witcher-3-is-how-big-we-breakdown-the-size-of-cd-projekt-reds-ambitious-rpg.htm Kocurek, C. A. (2015). Who hearkens to the monster’s scream? Death, violence and the veil of the monstrous in video games. Visual Studies, 30(1), 79–89. Konzack, L. (2002). Computer game criticism: A method for computer game analysis. Proceedings of the computer games and digital cultures conference, Tampere. Retrieved from http://www.academia.edu/download/31458323/konzack-tampere2002.pdf Korsmeyer, C. (2002). Delightful, delicious, disgusting. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 60(3), 217–225. Korsmeyer, C. (2012). Disgust and aesthetics. Philosophy Compass, 7(11), 753–761.

References    161 Kristeva, J. (1982). Pavers of horror: An essay on abjection (L. Roudiez, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Lavers, C. (2009). The natural history of Unicorns. London: Granta. Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. London: Routledge. Leys, R. (2011). The turn to affect: A critique. Critical Inquiry, 37(3), 434–472. Liao, S. (2016). Hong Kong net-bar youth gaming: A labeling perspective. In Transnational contexts of development history, sociality, and society of play (pp. 183–209). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lichtenstein, E. I. (2019). Sensory force, sublime impact, and beautiful form. The British Journal of Aesthetics, 59(4), 449–464. Longinus, W. (2011). On the sublime. In W. R. Roberts (Ed.), Longinus on the sublime: The Greek text edited after the Paris manuscript. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lund, N. (2019, January 11). Birdwatching like it’s 1889. The Guardian. Retrieved from https:// www.theguardian.com/games/2019/jan/11/red-dead-redemption-2-birdwatching-birds Lussenhop, J. (2016). That Dragon, Cancer: Coping with a son’s diagnosis through a video game. BBC News. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35286068 Lyotard, J. F. (1991). The inhuman: Reflections on time. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Lyotard, J. F. (1993 [1982]). Answering the question: What is postmodernism. In T. Docherty (Ed.), Postmodernism: A reader (pp. 38–47). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Lyotard, J. F. (1994). Lessons on the analytic of the sublime: Kant’s critique of judgment [sections] 23–29. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lyotard, J. F. (1998). The assassination of experience by painting Monory (R. Bowlby, Trans.). London: Black Dog Publishing. MacDonald, K. (2019, April 12). Sekiro: Shadows die twice review. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/games/2019/apr/12/sekiro-shadows-die-twicereview-playstation-xbox-software-activision Macey, J., & Hamari, J. (2018). Investigating relationships between video gaming, spectating esports, and gambling. Computers in Human Behavior, 80, 344–353. MacKay, J. (2017, February 7). In praise of video gaming’s Old Dalliance with distance fog. Vice Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9p3a/ in-praise-of-video-gamings-old-dalliance-with-distance-fog Macksey, R. (1997). Longinus. In M. Groden & M. Krieswirth (Eds.), The Johns Hopkins guide to literary theory and criticism (pp. 470–474). Baltimore MA: John Hopkins University Press. Maclaran, P., & Catterall, M. (2002). Researching the social web: Marketing information from virtual communities. Marketing Intelligence & Planning, 20(6), 319–326. Maguid, Y. (2019). Assassin’s Creed Odyssey: The game that greece built [Blogpost]. Retrieved from https://news.ubisoft.com/en-us/article/348038/Assassins-CreedOdyssey-The-Game-That-Greece-Built Malpas, S. (2002). Sublime ascesis: Lyotard, art and the event. Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 7(1), 199–212. Marks, R. B. (2017, July 1). Creating dread: The design decisions behind horror games. CGM Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.cgmagonline.com/2017/07/01/creatingdread-design-decisions-behind-horror-games/ Marks, T. (2018). Notes on Lord Byron in Venice. The Spectator. Retrieved from https:// www.spectator.co.uk/2018/03/notes-on-lord-byron-in-venice/ Marx, L. (2000 [1964]). The machine in the garden: Technology and the pastoral ideal in America (2nd ed.). Abingdon: Oxford University Press. Massumi, B. (1995). The autonomy of affect. Cultural Critique, 31(2), 83–109. Massumi, B. (1998). Sensing the virtual, building the insensible. Architectural Design, 68(5/6), 16–25. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

162   References Massumi, B. (2014). Envisioning the virtual. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Massumi, B. (2017). Virtual ecology and the question of value. In E. Horl (Ed.), General ecology: The new ecological paradigm (pp. 345–373). London: Bloomsbury. Mathieson, C. (2015). Procedural rhetoric beyond persuasion: First strike and the compulsion to repeat. Games and Culture, 10(5), 463–480. Maurer, B. (2016). Embodied interaction in play: Body-based and natural interaction in games. In Entertainment Computing and Serious Games (pp. 378–401). Cham: Springer. Maurer, B., Lankes, M., & Tscheligi, M. (2018). Where the eyes meet: Lessons learned from shared gaze-based interactions in cooperative and competitive online games. Entertainment Computing, 27, 47–59. Mäyrä, F. (2008). An introduction to game studies: Games in culture. London: SAGE. McCaffrey, R. (2014, October 3). Alien isolation review. IGN. Retrieved from https:// uk.ign.com/articles/2014/10/03/alien-isolation-review Meer, A. (2017, June 16). The Joy of Witcher 3’s great outdoors. RockPaperShotgun. Retrieved from https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/06/16/the-joy-of-the-witcher-3s-greatoutdoors/ Merritt, M. M. (2018). The sublime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, A. (1993). The empire of the eye: Landscape representation and American cultural politics, 1825–1875. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Miller, P. (1961). The responsibility of mind in a civilization of machines. The American Scholar, 31(1), 51–69. Milne, C. (2019, July 18). Elite Dangerous Expedition Diary Part 3. RockPaperShotgun. Retrieved from https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/07/18/elite-dangerousexpedition-diary-part-3/ Montfort, N. (2006). Combat in context. Game Studies, 6(1). Retrieved from http:// gamestudies.org/0601/articles/montfort Mukherjee, S. (2011). Re-membering and dismembering: Memory and the (re)creation of identities in videogames. Proceedings of the games and philosophy conference, Athens. Retrieved from http://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/ojs/index.php/famecos/ article/viewFile/29822/17372 Mukherjee, S. (2015). Video games and storytelling: Reading games and playing books. London: Springer. Mullarkey, J. (2004). Forget the virtual: Bergson, actualism, and the refraction of reality. Continental Philosophy Review, 37(4), 469–493. Muriel, D., & Crawford, G. (2018). Video games as culture: Considering the role and importance of video games in contemporary society. London: Routledge. Muriel, D., & Crawford, G. (2020). Video games and agency in contemporary society. Games and Culture, 15(2), 138–157. Murray, J. (2005). The last word on ludology v narratology in game studies. Proceedings of the international DiGRA conference. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/ profile/Janet_Murray6/publication/251172237_The_Last_Word_on_Ludology_v_ Narratology_in_Game_Studies/links/57640b7408ae421c44814664/The-Last-Wordon-Ludology-v-Narratology-in-Game-Studies.pdf Murray, J. (2017 [1997, 2001]). Hamlet on the holodeck: The future of narrative in cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Needler, H. (2010). ‘She walks in beauty’ and the theory of the sublime. The Byron Journal, 38(1), 19–27. Netflix. (2018). Bandersnatch [Film]. Directed by David Slade. Written by Charlie Brooker. Retrieved from https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80988062 Newell, J. (2016). The act of witness: Outlast and videoludic body gothic. Studies in Gothic Fiction, 5(1), 32–48. Newman, B. (1948). The sublime is now. Tiger’s Eye, 1(6), 51–53. Retrieved from http:// theoria.art-zoo.com/the-sublime-is-now-barnett-newman/ Ngai, S. (2005). Ugly feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

References    163 Nicolson, M. H. (1997 [1959]). Mountain gloom and mountain glory: The development of the aesthetics of the infinite. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Nieborg, D. B., & Hermes, J. (2008). What is game studies anyway? European Journal of Cultural Studies, 11(2), 131–147. Nitsche, M. (2008). Video game spaces: Image, play, and structure in 3D worlds. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Nye, D. (2006). The consumer’s sublime. In R. Hassan & J. Thomas (Eds.), The new media reader (pp. 27–39). London: Open University Press. O’Gorman, N. (2004). Longinus’s sublime rhetoric, or how rhetoric game into its own. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 34(2), 71–89. Otto, R. (1958). The idea of the Holy (J. Harvey, Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parkin, S. (2018, March 8). Donald Trump takes on the non-existent link between violent video games and mass shootings. The New Yorker. Retrieved from https://www. newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/donald-trump-takes-on-the-nonexistentlink-between-violent-video-games-and-mass-shootings Paumgarten, N. (2010, December 20). Master of play. The New Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/20/master-of-play Perron, B. (2004). Sign of a threat: The effects of warning systems in survival horror games. Proceedings of COSIGN 2004 (pp. 132–141). Retrieved from http://www. cosignconference.org/downloads/papers/perron_cosign_2004.pdf Perron, B., & Wolf, M. J. (Eds.). (2008). The video game theory reader 2. London: Routledge. Plunkett, L. (2018). Don’t bother walking across Assassins Creed Odyssey. Kotaku. Retrieved from https://kotaku.com/dont-bother-walking-across-assassins-creedodyssey-1829609764 Plunkett, L. (2019, June 25). Red dead online players escape game world. Kotaku. Retrieved from https://kotaku.com/red-dead-online-players-escape-game-worldfind-beautif-1835829191 Pohl, L. (2019). The sublime object of Detroit. Social & Cultural Geography [OnlineFirst]. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2019.1683760 Proust, M. (2013). Swann’s way: In search of lost time (Vol. 1). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ramsey, R. (2018, March 21). No load screens, no camera cuts in God of War seemed ‘impossible’ says Dev. Push Square. Retrieved from http://www.pushsquare.com/news/2018/03/ no_load_screens_no_camera_cuts_in_god_of_war_seemed_impossible_says_dev Reddit. (2014). Why the hell does the ending of fallout shit on me? [Social Media Post]. Retrieved from https://www.reddit.com/r/Fallout/comments/1btrd9/why_the_hell_ does_the_ending_of_fallout_3_shit_on/ Reddit. (2018a). How many hours do you have in BOI? [Social Media Post]. Retrieved from https://www.reddit.com/r/bindingofisaac/comments/84ajt9/how_many_hours_ do_you_have_in_boi/ Reddit. (2018b). Stop gaming [Social Media Post]. Retrieved from https://www.reddit. com/r/StopGaming/comments/930h2k/quitting_video_games_is_so_hard/ Rehak, B. (2007). Of eye candy and id: The terrors and pleasures of Doom 3. In B. Atkins & T. Krzywinska (Eds.), Videogame, player, text (pp. 139–158). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ribbens, W., Malliet, S., Van Eck, R., & Larkin, D. (2016). Perceived realism in shooting games: Towards scale validation. Computers in Human Behavior, 64, 308–318. Ribot, T. (1882). Diseases of memory: An essay in the positive psychology (Vol. 43). New York, NY: D. Appleton. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/diseasesofmemory00ribouoft/ page/n10/mode/2up Riendeau, D. (2014, August 18). Silent hills ‘pants soiling’ scares won’t measure up to P.T. Polygon. Retrieved from https://www.polygon.com/2014/8/18/6033001/silent-hillspt-horror-films

164   References Robertson, A. (2013, July 12). That Dragon, Cancer: The video games helping a father face his son’s disease. The Telegraph. Retrieved from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ technology/video-games/10170337/That-Dragon-Cancer-the-video-game-helpinga-father-face-his-sons-disease.html Ruberg, B. (2015). No fun: The queer potential of video games that annoy, anger, disappoint, sadden, and hurt. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 2(2), 108–124. Salen, K., & Zimmerman, E. (2004). Rules of play: Game design fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Saltzman, M. (Ed.). (2000). Game design secrets of the sages (2nd ed.). Indianapolis IN: MacMillan. Sarkar, S. (2018, November 7). Red dead redemption 2 tops 17 million copies shipped. Retrieved from https://www.polygon.com/2018/11/7/18073314/red-dead-redemption2-sales-17-million-units Sawyer, S. (2013). The most difficult arcade games ever! [Blogpost]. Retrieved from https:// www.libertygames.co.uk/blog/the-most-difficult-arcade-games-ever/ Schulzke, M. (2014). The critical power of virtual dystopias. Games and Culture, 9(5), 315–334. Seiffert, J., & Nothhaft, H. (2015). The missing media: The procedural rhetoric of computer games. Public Relations Review, 41(2), 254–263. Seyfert, R. (2012). Beyond personal feelings and collective emotions: Toward a theory of social affect. Theory, Culture & Society, 29(6), 27–46. Shaw, I. G. R., & Warf, B. (2009). Worlds of affect: Virtual geographies of video games. Environment and Planning A, 41(6), 1332–1343. Shaw, P. (2007). The sublime. London: Routledge. Shaw, P. (2013). ‘Twixt life and death’: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Don Juan and the sublime. In G. Hopps (Ed.), Byron’s Ghosts: The spectral, the spiritual and the supernatural (pp. 147–164), Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Shields, R. (1999). Virtual spaces? Space and Culture, 2(4–5), 1–12. Shields, R. (2003). The virtual. London: Routledge. Shinkle, E. (2012). Videogames and the digital sublime. In A. Karatzogianni & A. Kuntsman (Eds.), Digital cultures and the politics of emotion (pp. 94–108). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Retrieved from https://go.aws/326n7ie Shouse, E. (2005). Feeling, emotion, affect. M/c Journal, 8(6). Retrieved from http:// journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php?source=post_page Sicart, M. (2009). The ethics of computer games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Šisler V (2008). Digital Arabs: Representation in video games. European Journal of Cultural Studies 11(2), 203–220. Smuts, A. (2005). Are video games art? Contemporary Aesthetics, 3(1). Retrieved from https://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=299 Soriano, C. R. R., Davies, H., & Hjorth, L. (2019). Social surveillance and let’s play: A regional case study of gaming in Manila slum communities. New Media & Society, 21(10), 2119–2139. Spiegelman, A. (1987). Maus: My father bleeds history. New York, NY: Pantheon. Spittle, S. (2011). “Did this game scare you? Because it sure as hell scared me!” F.E.A.R, the Abject and the Uncanny. In Games and Cuture, 6(4), 312–326. Spokes, M. (2018). “War… war never changes”: Exploring explicit and implicit encounters with death in a post-apocalyptic gameworld. Mortality, 23(2), 135–150. Spokes, M. (2019). The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, procedural rhetoric and the military-entertainment complex: Two case studies from the war on terror. Media, War & Conflict [OnlineFirst]. Retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/ doi/10.1177/1750635219828761 Starkey, D. (2018, April 10). Assassin’s creed is big, beautiful and shallow. ArsTechnica. Retrieved from https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/10/assassins-creed-odysseyreview-epic-scale-forgettable-choices/

References    165 Stiegler, B. (2010). For a new critique of political economy. Cambridge: Polity. Strathern, M. (2005). Partial connections. Lanham MD: Rowman Altamira. Sutton-Smith, B. (1971). The study of games. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons. Sutton-Smith, B. (2001 [1997]). The ambiguity of play: Rhetorics of fate. In H. Bial & S. Brady (Eds.), The performance studies reader (pp. 132–138). London: Routledge. Švelch, J. (2019). Always already Monsters: BioShock’s ‘splicers’ as computational others. Nordlit, 42, 257–278. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.7557/13.5015 Sweeney, R. W. (2010). Pixellated play: Practical and theoretical issues regarding videogames in art education. Studies in Art Education, 51(3), 262–274. Szablewicz, M. (2016). A realm of mere representation? “Live” E-Sports spectacles and the crafting of China’s digital gaming image. Games and Culture, 11(3), 256–274. Tach, D., & Parkin, J. (2019, March 21). Sekiro: Shadows die twice review. Polygon. Retrieved from https://www.polygon.com/reviews/2019/3/21/18274733/sekiro-reviewps4-xbox-one-pc Takahashi, D. (2018, October 26). How much did Red Dead Redemption 2 cost to make? VentureBeat. Retrieved from https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/26/the-deanbeat-howmuch-did-red-dead-redemption-2-cost-to-make/ Tanenbaum, K., & Tanenbaum, J. (2010). Agency as commitment to meaning: Communicative competence in games. Digital Creativity, 21(1), 11–17 Tanz, J. (2016). Playing for time. Wired Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.wired. com/2016/01/that-dragon-cancer/ Tavinor, G. (2009). The art of videogames. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons. Thrift, N. (2004). Intensities of feeling: Towards a spatial politics of affect. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 86(1), 57–78. Tomai, E., Salazar, R., & Flores, R. (2013). Mimicking humanlike movement in open world games with path-relative recursive splines. Proceedings of the ninth artificial intelligence and interactive digital entertainment conference. Retrieved from https:// www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/AIIDE/AIIDE13/paper/view/7411/7594 van Vught, J., & Glas, R. (2018). Considering play: From method to analysis. Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association, 4(2). Retrieved from http://todigra.org/ index.php/todigra/article/view/94/145 Vera, J. A. C., Terrón, J. M. A., & García, S. G. (2018). Following the trail of eSports: The multidisciplinary boom of research on the competitive practice of video games. International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations, 10(4), 42–61. Video Game. (2019). In Collins Advanced English Dictionary Online. Retrieved from https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/video-game Wakeling, R. (2015, September). SOMA review. GameSpot. Retrieved from https://www. gamespot.com/reviews/soma-review/1900-6416245/ Walther, B. K. (2003). Playing and gaming: Reflections and classifications. Game Studies, 3(1), 1–20. Retrieved from http://gamestudies.org/0301/walther/ Warde, A. (2005). Consumption and theories of practice. Journal of Consumer Culture, 5(2), 131–153. Webster, A. (2015, April 28). Building The Witcher 3’s huge, wild fantasy world. The Verge. Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/28/8507405/witcher-3-wild-huntworld-building Weiskel, P. (2019). The romantic sublime: Studies in the structure and psychology of transcendence. Baltimore, MA: John Hopkins University Press. White, M. M. (2014). Learn to play. Natick, MA: AK Peters/CRC Press. Wilmerding, J. (1989). American light: The Luminist Movement 1850–1875 (reprinted ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Young, I, M. (1990). Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zepke, S. (2017). Sublime art: Towards an aesthetics of the future. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

166   References

Video Game References 11 Bit Studios. (2016). This war of mine [Video game]. Warsaw: 11 Bit Studios. 2k Boston. (2007). BioShock [Video game]. New York City, NY: 2K Games Inc. 3909 LLC. (2013). Papers, Please [Video game]. Saitama: Lucas Pope. 7780s Studio. (2014). P.T [Video game]. Tokyo: Konami. Asobo Studio. (2019). A Plague Tale: Innocence [Video game]. Paris: Focus Home Interactive. Bethesda. (2008). Fallout 3 [Video game]. Rockville, MA: Bethesda Softworks. Bethesda. (2011). The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim [Video game]. Rockville, MA: Bethesda Softworks. Bethesda. (2015). Fallout 4 [Video game]. Rockville, MA: Bethesda Softworks. Blue Bottle Games. (2014). NEO Scavenger [Video game]. N/A: Blue Bottle Games. Bungie. (2004). Halo 2 [Video game]. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Game Studios. Capcom. (1996). Resident Evil [Video game]. Osaka: Capcom. Cardboard Computer. (2013). Kentucky Route Zero (Act I-V)[Video game]. West Hollywood, CA: Annapurna Interactive. Cawthorn, S. (2014). Five Nights at Freddy’s. Available on Steam and other platforms. CCP Games. (2003). Eve Online [Video game].. United States: Atari. CD Projekt Red. (2015). The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt [Video game]. Warsaw: CD Projekt. Core Design. (1997). Tomb Raider II [Video game]. London: Eidos Interactive. Creative Assembly. (2014). Alien: Isolation [Video game]. Tokyo: Sega. DMA Design. (1997). Grand Theft Auto [Video game]. New York City, NY: Take Two Interactive. DMA Design. (2001). Grand Theft Auto III [Video game]. New York City, NY: Rockstar Games. Endnight Games. (2018). The Forest [Video game]. Vancouver: Endnight Games Entertainment. Freebird Games. (2011). To the Moon [Video game]. Canada: Freebird Games. Frictional Games. (2015). SOMA [Video game]. Helsingborg: Frictional Games. FromSoftware. (2019). Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice [Video game]. Santa Monica, CA: Activision. Frontier Developments. (2014). Elite Dangerous [Video game]. Cambridge: Frontier Developments. Guerilla Games. (2017). Horizon Zero Dawn [Video game]. Amsterdam: Guerilla B.V. Hello Games. (2016). No Man’s Sky [Video game]. Guildford: Hello Games. Ice-Pick Lodge. (2004). Pathologic [Video game]. Moscow: Buka Entertainment. id Software. (2004). Doom 3 [Video game]. Santa Monica, CA: Activision. id Software. (2011). RAGE [Video game]. Santa Monica, CA: Activision. Infinity Ward. (2019). Call of duty: Modern warfare. Activision. IO Interactive. (2000). Hitman: Codename 47 [Video game]. London: Eidos Interactive. Irrational Games. (1999). System Shock 2 [Video game]. San Mateo, CA: Electronic Arts. Konami. (2004). Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater [Video game]. Tokyo: Konami. Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo. (2001). Silent Hill 2 [Video game]. Tokyo: Konami. Maxis. (1994). SimCity 2000 [Video game]. Redwood Shores, CA: Maxis. McMillen, E. (2011). The Binding of Isaac [Video game]. Santa Cruz, CA: Edmund McMillen. Monolith. (2005). Condemned: Criminal Origins [Video game]. Tokyo: Sega. Namco. (1980). Pac-Man [Video game]. Japan: Namco. Nintendo EAD. (2005). Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess [Video game]. Kyoto: Nintendo. Nintendo EAD. (2013). Animal crossing: New lead [Video game]. Tokyo: Nintendo. Nintendo EAD Tokyo. (2007). Super Mario Galaxy [Video game]. Tokyo: Nintendo. Numinous Games. (2016). That Dragon, Cancer [Video game]. Des Moines, IA: Numinous Games. Okomotive. (2018). FAR: Lone Sails [Video game]. Munich, Germany: Mixtvision. Pajitnov, A. L. (1984). Tetris [Video game]. Boulder, CA: Spectrum Holobyte. Red Barrels. (2013/2014). Outlast [Video game]. Montreal: Red Barrels.

References    167 Rockstar North. (2002). Grand Theft Auto: Vice City [Video game]. New York City, NY: Rockstar Games. Rockstar North. (2008). Grand Theft Auto IV [Video game]. New York City, NY: Rockstar Games. Rockstar North. (2013). Grand Theft Auto V [Video game]. New York City, NY: Rockstar Games. Rockstar Studios. (2018). Red Dead Redemption 2 [Video game]. New York City, NY: Rockstar Games. SIE Santa Monica. (2010). God of War III [Video game]. Los Angeles, CA: Sony Interactive Entertainment. SIE Santa Monica. (2018). God of War [Video game]. San Mateo, CA: Sony Interactive Entertainment. TAD Corporation. (1989). Toki: Going Ape Spit [Video game]. Tokyo: TAD Corporation. Team Silent. (1999). Silent Hill [Video game]. Tokyo: Konami. Team Soho. (2002). The Getaway [Video game]. Tokyo: Sony Computer Entertainment. Tecmo. (2005). Project Zero Three: The Tormented [Video game]. Tokyo: Tecmo. Telltale Games. (2013). The Walking Dead [Video game]. San Rafael, CA: Telltale Games. The Chinese Room. (2015). Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture [Video game]. San Mateo, CA: Sony Interactive. Thekla, Inc. (2016). The Witness [Video game]. Berkeley, CA: Thekla Inc. Ubisoft Montreal. (2003). Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Montreal: Ubisoft. UbiSoft Montreal. (2014). Watch Dogs [Video game]. Montreuil: Ubisoft. UbiSoft Montreal. (2017). Assassins Creed Origins [Video game]. Montreuil: Ubisoft. UbiSoft Quebec. (2018). Assassins Creed Odyssey [Video game]. Montreuil: Ubisoft. UbiSoft Toronto. (2020). Watch Dogs: Legion [Video game]. Montreuil: Ubisoft. Warhorse Studios. (2018). Kingdom Come: Deliverance [Video game]. Hofen: Koch Media GmbH. Williams Electronic. (1983). Sinistar [Video game]. Enterprise NV: Williams Electronic. Yager Development. (2012). Spec Ops: The Line [Video game]. New York NY: 2K Games.

Index Affect, 3, 13, 42–53, 55, 57, 65, 67, 70–71, 77, 84, 96, 102, 146, 150, 153 Agency, 2, 8, 12–13, 33, 39–40, 64, 67, 73–74, 76–78, 80–81, 85, 95–96, 98, 104, 106, 108–111, 117, 119, 121, 124, 126–132, 136–137, 143–144, 146–147, 151 Ash, James, 50–52, 146 Awe, 1, 3, 11–12, 28, 38, 44, 48, 58, 61, 64, 81, 83–102, 118, 126, 143, 145–146, 149, 151 Baillie, John, 11, 19–22, 24, 28 Bandwidth, 50–52, 95, 134, 146 Bogost, Ian, 5, 12, 67 Burke, Edmund, 11, 16–17, 20–26, 28, 39, 40, 84, 89, 91, 101, 104, 106–107, 120, 127, 149 Computational others, 12, 104, 112–113, 115–117, 119, 136–138, 147 Death, 44n1, 125–144, 147 Deleuze, Gilles, 12, 29, 31, 34–38, 53, 55, 60, 84, 96–97, 100, 112, 124, 126–127, 135–137, 140–141, 143, 147, 149–150 Dennis, John, 10, 16, 18–22, 28, 43, 70, 84, 87–88, 94, 101, 104–107, 118, 122, 136, 149 Failure, 125–144, 147 Fear, 12, 103–124 immediate/visceral, 12, 105, 110–119, 121–123, 141, 147

structural/external, 110–111, 119–123 the uncanny, 12, 105, 110, 115–119, 121–123 Fedorova, Ksenia, 31, 37–39, 41, 43, 54, 73, 85, 129, 133, 149 Flow, 37, 39–41, 85, 124, 126, 128, 130, 132, 134, 140, 143, 147 Gerard, Alexander, 11, 16, 19–22, 28, 84, 94, 101, 149 Guyau, Jean-Marie, 47–52, 56, 64–65, 69, 76, 78, 81, 84, 95, 105, 107, 108, 115, 123, 133, 146, 153 Hudson River School, 94, 99, 101 Interactivity, 8, 39, 43, 49, 66, 73, 95 Jenkins, Henry, 8, 10, 12, 66–67, 72, 76, 87, 92, 100, 105, 146, 152 Juul, Jasper, 6–8, 126–128, 130, 132, 136, 138 Kant, Immanuel, 16–17, 21, 23–27, 31–39, 40, 81, 102, 104, 107, 110, 113, 122–123, 127, 134, 141, 149–150 Kristeva, 105, 113–114 Longinus, 12, 16–19, 21, 28, 37–38, 43, 64–69, 73, 76, 80, 84, 118, 146, 149–150 Ludology, 7, 66 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 24, 29, 31, 34–38, 84, 124, 126–127, 137, 141–142, 149–150

170   Index Massumi, Brian, 45–46, 49, 52–53 Metaxis, 56–58, 60–61, 65, 86, 114, 122, 128, 147, 149 Murray, Janet, 8, 12, 71, 73, 77, 85, 128 Narrative, 66–76 Play, 5–7, 10, 133, 147 Realism, 85–89, 101 Repetition, 125–144 Rhetoric, 63–81 Shields, Rob, 52–58, 65, 110, 148–149 Simulation, 10, 37, 53–54, 69, 71, 73, 75–76, 86–88, 90–91, 95, 101, 114, 140, 143 Spectrum, 6, 8, 12, 17, 23, 52, 65, 98, 105, 108, 110–111, 113, 118–119, 122, 146–147 Stuplimity, 41, 124, 126, 134, 147 Sublime as dynamical, 16, 25 as gamified, 11, 29, 31, 38–42 as mathematical, 25 as opposed to the beautiful, 55 as rhetorical, 12, 70, 102, 146 as technological, 37–38 Transmission, 47–49, 51–59, 61, 64–65, 70–71, 76–78, 81, 87, 89–90, 95, 97, 99, 102, 108, 110, 114, 123, 126, 131, 133, 142–144, 146, 151, 153 Video games, 2, 4–5, 10, 13, 37, 39–40, 44, 48, 50, 67, 110, 120, 141, 149, 151 as designed environments, 12, 36, 54, 68, 70, 96–97, 99–100, 108–109, 127–128 as narratives, 8

as possibility spaces, 3 as proxy, 140 as representational, 6, 21–24, 37, 61, 64, 66, 68, 87, 108, 120, 147–148 operational rules, 12, 97, 109–111, 116–117, 120–123, 126, 133–134, 138, 142–143, 146, 148 Virtual, 12–13, 42, 44, 53–58, 65, 86 Assassin’s Creed: Origins, 12, 125 Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, 12, 84–89 Bioshock, 12, 23, 105, 112, 114, 116–117 Elite: Dangerous, 12, 84, 97–100 Fallout 4, 2, 13, 57, 120, 142–143, 148 Five Nights at Freddy’s, 12, 103 God of War, 12, 64, 69 Outlast, 12, 114, 119, 121, 129, 147–148 P.T., 12, 117, 148 Power, 35 Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, 75, 83 Red Dead Online, 12, 97–100 Red Dead Redemption 2, 4, 92–95 Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, 12, 41 Silent Hill 2, 12, 64 SOMA, 20, 111, 117, 121, 123 Spaces, 2-3, 49, 59, 88, 96 Super Mario Galaxy, 12, 60, 95–97 That Dragon, Cancer, 12, 33, 64 The Binding of Isaac, 12, 41, 133 The Getaway, 86 The Walking Dead, 12, 64 The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, 12, 19, 89–92 To The Moon, 12, 137, 142