An argument Research paper

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· CHAPTER 4 ·

Games to Fail With

Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.

— charles F. Kettering, Reader’s Digest, May 1989

You fail it! Your skill is not enough. See you next time. Bye- bye! — Blazing Star (SNK, 1998)

Video games are often quite funny. Instead of gracefully leap-ing over a chasm in Super Mario Bros., we fall off the cliff. Instead of moving effortlessly through a virtual space, our stuttering avatar mirrors the inarticulate movements of our hands as we struggle with the control- ler. Humor in video games also arises from disorientation. It is easy to get lost in games that are set in vast worlds. When a novice player first attempts navigation in a game such as a first- person shooter from the Halo series, where he controls both his avatar and the camera movement, uninten tional slapstick emerges through the inevitable disorientation. The avatar runs forward while looking backward or gets repeatedly stuck in place because the player cannot yet coordinate the movements of two analog sticks to create a coherent perspective. Even the simplest and most classic arcade games, such as Pac- Man, Tetris, and Space Invaders, tend to evoke shrieks of laughter. While it is possible to attribute some humor to the images and sounds of these games, these qualities are not exactly what make us laugh when we play them. We laugh when playing a video game, even when the content is not explicitly funny, because we are presented with repeated scenes of our failures in interactions with computational processes.

In other digital encounters this would simply be frustrating, and some- times it is frustrating in games, but part of the appeal of video games is that they transport our everyday digital failures into the realm of play. Johan

Anable, Aubrey. Playing with Feelings : Video Games and Affect, University of Minnesota Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/piercecollege/detail.action?docID=5288351. Created from piercecollege on 2021-05-08 16:42:22.

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Huizinga argued that “play” is part of a “loosely connected group of ideas” that includes laughter, folly, wit, jest, joke, and the comic, and he suggested that the relationship of these concepts to each other “must lie in a very deep layer of our mental being.”1 Playing video games means willfully set- ting oneself up for failure. So much of playing these games is an experience of repeated frustration: not slaying the monster, not saving the princess, falling into molten lava, dying. Why do we bother? One obvious answer is that we hope to improve with each go, and then eventually not fail at all: slay the monster, save the princess, not fall into the lava, live. Part of the pleasure that video games usually afford is the experience of redeem- ing initial failure with success. The games promise that through repetition we might arrive at graceful mastery. This is also the conventional wisdom about failure that is found in self- help books and in inspirational quota- tions like the one from American industrialist (and inventor of Freon) Charles F. Kettering that begins this chapter. In the American capitalist imaginary, failure— as an externally measured condition and as a subjec- tive condition associated with fear, shame, and anger— is so unacceptable that it must be enveloped within a larger narrative of progress. “One fails forward toward success.” Yet capitalism is dependent on failure and its control. It requires that many of us fail, and it also relies on our putting an optimistic spin on failure or wallowing in self- loathing and shame so as not to experience failure as a compelling reason to revolt. More precisely, capitalism can accommodate a tremendous amount of failure as long as its subjects understand their failures as temporary and as the result of per- sonal shortcomings or bad luck, rather than as a larger systemic necessity shoring up an ideology.

But what of failures that cannot be redeemed by fantasies of success? What if, through video games, the feelings associated with failure were put to different ends? Might that experience have some affective and socio- technological significance that extends beyond the context of our play? This chapter addresses these questions through the work of contempo- rary artists using video games as a medium through which to experience various kinds of nonprogressive failure. Pippin Barr, Messhof, and Cory Arcangel explore in different ways the capacity of video games to draw us into fail states and what happens when our expectations of video game success are upended. These artists’ games use the aesthetics of failure— pixelated and low- resolution graphics, game mechanics that have difficult

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or awkward controls, the removal of the fantasies of control and mastery altogether— to disrupt the algorithmic and affective trajectories of win- ning and losing. These games work at the intersection of failure as a feel- ing, failure as an aesthetic, and failure as programming. From failed images to failed controls to failing to be playable at all, the games make cases for the uses and politics of failure.

“The present is perceived, first, affectively,” writes Lauren Berlant.2 Berlant’s work is useful here because, like Raymond Williams’s concept of “structure of feeling,” it is concerned with how contemporary media can be read for how they make the present sensible— how they index, col- lect, activate, and give shape to emerging and amorphous feelings about broader social conditions. Following Berlant, I consider the works of Arcangel, Barr, and Messhof through the aesthetics of failure and the af- fects associated with failure to further understand how video games reg- ister and express an emerging sensorium of the present. The link between affect and aesthetics as relational and subjective forces is important. It is through the aesthetics of failure in this chapter’s archive that we can pick up on the vibrations and gestures of a more widely distributed sensibil- ity to understand how the capitalist relationship to success and failure in North America is fraying and the “conventions of reciprocity that ground how to live and imagine life are becoming undone in ways that force the gestures of ordinary improvisation within daily life into a greater explicit- ness affectively and aesthetically.”3

The Shame of Failure

The centerpiece of Cory Arcangel’s 2011 show at the Whitney Museum of American Art was a large installation titled Various Self Playing Bowl- ing Games. The work consisted of six bowling video games, ranging from an early eight- bit title to more recent games, their corresponding systems displayed on a table, and large floor- to- ceiling projections of the games in action. Standing in the darkened gallery space, visitors watched as the ava- tar in each game launched ball after ball directly into the gutter. Arcangel rigged the gaming systems to play without a user and to deliberately and repeatedly throw only gutter balls— six screens, six games, and six avatars in a continuous trajectory of programmed failure, doomed to a process of repetition without difference. The sounds of the games bled together, and

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the disappointed groans from their virtual audiences filled the large room with a cacophonous sound track to accompany the failures depicted on the screens. The avatars looked dejected, shook their heads and covered their faces with their hands, and then did it all over again.

In her review of the Whitney show, Andrea Scott writes, “In their epi- grammatic structure, Arcangel’s looped one- liners recall Samuel Beckett— ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better’— with a little Borscht Belt thrown in.”4 Yes and no. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better” does indeed describe the procedural rhetoric of video games. But in the case of Various Self Play- ing Bowling Games, there is no possibility to “fail better.” Each attempt has been programmed to fail the same way each time, negating the optimism of repetition with a difference. The optimism of failing better is part of what Berlant calls “cruel optimism”— that is, an affective attachment to an idea, especially that of “the good life,” despite the ways that attachment “impedes the aims that brought us to it [and is constituted by] the sustain- ing inclination to return to the scene of the fantasy that enables you to ex-

cory Arcangel’s Various Self Playing Bowling Games consists of six bowling video games, their corresponding systems displayed on a table, and large floor- to- ceiling projections of the games in action. copyright cory Arcangel. Image courtesy of cory Arcangel and Lisson Gallery.

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pect that this time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world become different in just the right way.”5 The gutter ball sequences in Various Self Playing Bowling Games are not looped through montage; rather, they are the result of the gaming systems’ enactment of each game’s gutter ball al- gorithm. This is returning to the scene of the fantasy of success and discov- ering the cruel fact of code. Arcangel asks us to get used to failure because, as demanded by the games’ programming, not a single one of these virtual bowlers is ever going to succeed. Not this time. Never.

Is there anything more central to the American imaginary than expect- ed, even demanded, success? Success, it seems, is always on the verge of arrival and always possible despite many barriers and signs to the contrary. In this formulation, failure is nothing but a necessary step toward success. We fail forward, we might tell ourselves, but let’s be clear: failure usually feels like just the opposite. Failure is about fucking up, and it has long been closely associated with entrepreneurial and governmental breakdowns. In English, the word failure has existed since the mid- sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, it was being used to describe both a state of defi- ciency and lack in an object, process, or institution and also this state in an individual.6 By the twentieth century, Scott Sandage argues in Born Losers, his counterhistory of the American Dream, “failure had become what it remains in the new millennium: the most damning incarnation of the con- nection between achievement and personal identity. ‘I feel like a failure.’ The expression comes so naturally that we forget it is a figure of speech: the language of business applied to the soul.”7

We have lost the distance of metaphor. The language of business has become a personal fact. The statement “I feel like a failure” speaks to the personalization of failure and to the affect most associated with it: shame. In his detailed exploration of the negative affects, Silvan Tomkins argues that shame strikes the deepest because it is experienced as a wound inflict- ed on “the self by the self.”8 On feeling shame after failure, Tomkins writes:

Suppose one has struggled long and hard to achieve something and one suffers failure upon failure until finally the moment is reached when the head gives way and falls forward, and, phenome- nologically, the self is confronted with humiliating defeat. We would argue that cumulative failure might activate anger or distress or even fear, but that in order to activate shame there must be a continuing

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but reduced investment of excitement or enjoyment in the possibil- ity of success. Defeat is most ignominious when one still wishes to win. The sting of shame can be removed from any defeat by attenuating the positive wish.9

I quote Tomkins at length here because in this passage and through his wider conceptualization of shame, he makes a humane case for recogniz- ing the external factors that elicit this internal critique and the ways shame is a socially conditioned affect that functions to uphold social norms. He argues that the shame– humiliation affect kicks in at moments when our in- terest in something (a desire formulated as a thought) is piqued but previ- ous shame- based social conditioning inhibits our interest and engagement with the desire. Tomkins sums up the shame response as “I want, but . . . ,” explaining that “the most general sources of shame are the varieties of bar- riers to the varieties of objects of excitement or enjoyment, which reduce positive affect sufficiently to activate shame, but not so completely that the original object is renounced.”10 I want to play Dark Souls with my friends, but I’m afraid they will think I suck at video games. I want to speak out against a sexist assumption made by a colleague, but I’m afraid I may be seen as strident. I want to say “I love you,” but I’m afraid that you don’t love me. The desire is expressed in the first part of the sentence, and the shame- induced barrier to that desire is expressed in the latter half. From the trivial to the quite serious in these examples using Tomkins’s formulation, we can see how desire is forestalled and dampened, but not extinguished, by inter- nalized shame. We still want what we want, but the but of shame interferes.

Tomkins provides us with an understanding of the internal and exter- nal dynamic of shame that sheds light on how our optimistic attachments to withering fantasies are registered affectively. His formulation also em- phasizes how the deep cut of shame comes from our psychic transforma- tion of external disciplinary barriers (parental and social) into perceived internal and quite personal failings. As such, his general formulation of shame can be read alongside the specific types of affective impasses that Berlant’s cruel optimism describes. Berlant is concerned with how our desires for and attachments to certain objects and ideas persist despite the fact that our continued investment in them has deleterious effects on our well- being. For example, she is interested in why young Americans raised in the context of rapidly declining prosperity for most still cling to normative ideas of “the good life” based on outmoded notions of up-

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ward mobility and economic safety. Tomkins’s formulation of the shame affect provides an understanding, in one sense, of what is so cruel about cruel optimism. Our inability to give up the desire (to win, to succeed, to achieve the good life) is proportionally related to how acutely we experi- ence shame for not achieving the realization of that desire. Shame does not extinguish desire— the desire still smolders low and hot— rather, shame fuels the desire by internalizing and making personal the reasons we cannot fulfill it.

This is certainly a time of epic failures— failed states as well as failures in markets, the environment, health care, regulation, and more. And the details of these failures are often intricately bound up with complex digi- tal processes that tend to obscure responsibility while doing nothing to mitigate the effects of the failures on individuals. Compounding this are the ways technological failures have become a daily fact of life— 404 error messages, dropped calls, glitches in streaming media, drowned phones, shattered screens, crashed hard drives, not to mention the frenzied pace of planned obsolescence and the related march of our devices into land- fills. In 2008, as the global financial crisis snowballed, the phrase “too big to fail” made a sharp and morally bankrupt distinction between individu- als experiencing failure (the souls who could no longer pay their mort- gages) and corporations that simply could not be allowed to fail. Even as the world becomes more intricately connected and wealth more concen- trated among fewer and fewer people, we hold on to the idea that failing to succeed under these conditions is attributable to what individuals do or do not do. This is cruel optimism and the ideological work of shame. Yet in the past few years, Internet meme culture has seemed to reflect and refract this “language of business applied to the soul” by circulating and cele brating individual failure as a way of pointing to the ubiquity of fail- ures, large and small, in daily life. “Epic fail,” or simply “fail,” memes prolif- erated in 2008 and continue in the present. The memes were spawned by lingo coined on sites like 4chan that riff on the fractured English of the late 1990s Japanese video game Blazing Star, which taunts players with “You fail it! Your skill is not enough. See you next time. Bye- bye!”

It is fitting that our contemporary take on failure— the language we use to describe it, the “fail”— originates with a video game. As Jesper Juul argues in The Art of Failure, every video game is about failure on some level, and as such failure is an essential quality of the medium. Juul links the experience of failure in video games to other types of painful

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entertainment— the tragic novel, the horror film— and to accounts of these genres that see them as safe containers for painful feelings. One of the reasons we accept repeated failure in video games, he asserts, is that it allows us to experience the feelings of shame and anger associated with losing but ultimately dismiss these feelings as “just a game.”11 Another way of understanding the cultural ascent of video games over the past forty years is to see them as controlled, small- scale versions of the state of end- less competition under which capitalist societies live. In his seminal book Man, Play, and Games, Roger Caillois argues that the types of games that are popular in a given culture at a given time tell us something about a perceived lack in that culture. Along these lines, Caillois proposes that in contemporary capitalist societies intensely rule- based competitive games (organized sports, for example) might enjoy popularity because they serve as supplements, offsetting a perceived lack of fairness and regulation in the market. Through sports, we might gain a feeling that the winners deserve to win because the game is fair and highly regulated (and the los- ers have only themselves to blame).12 Games have now come to structure

“Fail” memes proliferated after the 2008 financial crisis.

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everyday life, large and small institutions, and life and death, marking a movement away from games as supplements to games as a central and de- fining mode under capitalism.

Pippin Barr

Pippin Barr excels at making video games that fall somewhere between pranks and structural experiments. They are easy to play yet impossible to win. They are often quite funny, but they can also be militantly bor- ing and sometimes even enraging. Barr’s games are freely available on his website, where he also writes about his design process. Many of his games are quite consciously about frustrating their players, and they are framed as such in Barr’s exclamation point– laden and sardonic descriptions. For example, the blurb for You Say Jump I Say How High (2012) begins with, “Jump! How High! You be the judge! Enter into the magical world of ad- justing physics parameters! Just like a programmer! Grow dark with rage! Feel light with elation! Ride the jagged waves of numbers! And collect some coins and stars while you’re at it!”13 Many of Barr’s games play with our expectations of how time should work in a video game, using impos- sibly short or discouragingly long time frames. For example, in Durations (2014) the player chooses among mini- games like “One Second Typing Tutor,” “One Month Maze,” and “One Decade at the Slot Machine,” each of which is designed to play at the pace stated in the title, or, more realisti- cally, until the player quits in boredom or frustration. Additionally, Barr’s games tend to speak to feelings around larger social conditions of impos- sible expectations and failure. As the copy for Barr’s Don’t Drown (2014) puts it, “Are you drowning right now?! Don’t do that! Or maybe you could just let yourself go! Slip beneath the waves!”14

Barr’s games often put us in a state of feeling that we are succumbing to the inevitable, giving up and slipping beneath the waves. They are exer- cises in failure and meditations on futility. A closer look at his games Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment (2011) and Snek (2013) illuminates how failure can function critically at the intersection of programming, play, and aesthetics. At the beginning of Let’s Play we are invited to choose among five Greek myths. The instructions are basic, and the tasks are familiar: to play as Sisyphus, “rapidly alternate ‘G’ and ‘H’ keys to push the boulder up the hill”; to play as Tantalus, “rapidly press ‘G’ to take the fruit, rapidly press ‘H’ to drink the water.” We quickly realize that there is no way to

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complete the tasks successfully; we can only futilely repeat them. The pix- elated fruit always moves just out of reach; the water always drains before we can drink it. Just as the boulder reaches the top of the hill it rolls back down despite our frantic button mashing. The game does not track our progress with a conventional display of our score. Rather, it measures our failures. In Sisyphus, for example, our failed attempts to push the boulder up the hill are counted next to the word “Failures” in large blocky letters. More perversely, our repetition of failure and the game’s enumeration of it do not bring about an end to the game. There are no “game over” screens in Let’s Play. Damning us to the endless repetition of failure, Barr denies us even the small satisfaction of completion or virtual death. The only thing we can do is give up and close the browser window, and this is hardly a satisfying option. The game’s blurb taunts, “You can do it Sisyphus! Be the boulder! Keep on rollin’! Don’t stop! Never give up! No retreat! No sur- render! No end in sight! Just delicious Greek torment as far as the eye can see and as fast as the fingers can type!”15

In 2013, Barr translated his approach to failure to a new platform with Snek. Designed for iOS, Apple’s mobile operating system, Snek is based on the classic 1970s arcade game Snake. Snake was the first game that, be- ginning in 1998, came preloaded on Nokia mobile phones. Snek is Barr’s homage to this iconic game, but adapted to the world of Apple’s mobile interface: the capacitive touchscreen and its multitouch gestures— the swipe, tap, pinch, and reverse pinch and also the accelerometer and gyro-

The player’s failures are quantified in Pippin Barr’s Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment.

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scope that recognize user input such as tilting, rotating, and shaking. Both Snake and Snek are simple but challenging games that require the player to maneuver a “snake” around the screen in pursuit of a piece of food without allowing it to run into its own body. With each piece of food it eats, the snake grows longer, making the game more challenging as the snake takes up more screen space. Barr’s Snek has three basic play mechanics: tilt, turn, and thrust. In turn mode, using a common gesture of the iOS interface, the player maneuvers the snake by turning the device from portrait to landscape and back again. In tilt mode, the player controls the snake by tilting the screen in the direction she wants it to go. Thrust mode— the most physically performative of the three— requires the player to grip the phone and make thrusting motions in the air, like an exaggerated version of the iOS “shake to undo” feature. The difficulty of Snek resides in how Barr has programmed the controls to be unresponsive to gentle manipula- tion, so that the player must absurdly exaggerate the gestures in a mostly futile attempt to make the snake move in the desired direction.

Both Snek and Let’s Play are about eruptions of jerkiness in places where we generally expect smoothness. In Let’s Play this is most evident at the level of the image. Barr reverse engineered Flash— a software pro- gram that uses vector graphics to animate curves and was developed as an upgrade to the pixelated bitmap graphics of earlier digital design— to create a game with bitmap graphics that look like they were rendered on a Commodore 64 computer. Essentially, Barr inserted jaggedness into a program meant to eliminate it. The pixelated imagery is mirrored by the jerkiness of the gameplay gestures. Each mini- game has two- button con- trols that require no skill or strategy to engage. Rather, the player is com- pelled to mash the keyboard in spasmodic bursts, alternating between the “G” and “H” keys to roll the boulder up the hill. This disruption of the smooth is even more pronounced in Snek, which uses the basic choreog- raphy of iPhone gestures but intentionally programs them to work poorly and ludicrously. Documenting Snek’s development process on his blog, Barr explains that he set out to make a game that is “super awkward to play and thus the opposite of a ‘proper’ iPhone game.”16 He succeeded in his goal of making an iOS game app that fails to provide the smoothness and ease that we owners of these devices have come to assume as our right, yet he often found himself pulled toward making a very different type of game. Barr writes:

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I’d started with the idea of an awkward iPhone game, and suddenly I was making a procedural music- generation game based on swipe input, with nice calming chiming sounds and smooth gameplay . . . as if the device itself demanded [it]. . . . I pulled out of it again and managed to return to making an awkward game, but it’s pretty clear that the iPhone (or perhaps iPhone culture) “wants” a particular kind of approach to game making.17

The game instructs us to tilt or thrust “smoothly,” but smoothness fails us at every turn. Snek is not about a slight tilting of the screen, but rather about turning the screen completely away, so that we can no longer see what is going on in the game. It is not about the smooth swipe but rather about the jerky thrust. In fact, thrusting can be so extreme that there is a very real risk of losing hold of the device and launching it into the air.

In Cruel Optimism Berlant argues for reading disturbances in bodily ges- tures, what she calls “glitches,” for how they register affective adaptations through historical moments of loss. Berlant is most concerned with losses around what she calls the fantasy of “the good life,” by which she means the fraying of “upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy.”18 She explains, “I want to show how trans actions of the body of the aestheticized or mediated subject absorb, register, re- enact, refigure, and make possible a political understanding of shifts and hiccups in the relations among structural forces that alter a class’s sense of things, its sensing of things.”19 Through Let’s Play and Snek, Barr asks us to perform these glitches. The games use the aesthetics of failure, from the low- resolution graphics to the unwieldy and slightly embarrassing controls, to playfully disrupt the sensual experience of gameplay and to renegotiate our affective relationship to these devices that we are accustomed to using absent- mindedly. The games disturb our assumptions about how games are supposed to work and how our bodies have been trained to interact with them. As such, these games do not lend themselves to helping us pass the time while, say, commuting on public transit. To really play Snek, for exam- ple, to inhabit and perform its aesthetics of failure, we must take up space and move our bodies in ways that tend to be viewed as odd, even antisocial. Foregrounding this potentially hilarious effect, the opening screen of Snek warns, “Best learned in private. Best played in public.”

In that video games emerged alongside and are very much a product of the transformations of labor, politics, and our lingering attachments to

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the withering fantasies that Berlant describes, they are excellent sites for detecting and tracing the affective transformations that have accompanied these shifts. Similarly, as Sianne Ngai argues about the relationship be- tween affect and aesthetics, we can understand the aesthetics of failure as emblematic of late capitalism and bound up with everyday mixed feelings about a number of contemporary conditions. She writes:

These include the implications of the increasingly intimate relation between the autonomous artwork and the form of the commod- ity; the complex mixture of negative as well as positive affects resulting in the ambivalent nature of many of our aesthetic ex- periences; . . . the future of the longstanding idea of art as play as opposed to labor in a world where immaterial labor is increasingly aestheticized.20

Pippin Barr’s Snek.

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In that Barr’s games blur the relation between artwork and commodity and between pleasure and displeasure, they also aesthetically and affec- tively disrupt the conventional trajectory of failing forward. They ask us to feel failure differently— not quite to sit and accept failure, but more to flail with failure: to move our bodies nonproductively in relation to machines designed for the more orderly and smooth operations of immaterial labor, in that doing so might reverse the individualization of failure and deflect it back onto the failings of larger systems.

Messhof

Messhof (aka Mark Essen and Kristy Norindr) is a Los Angeles– based independent game design team known for making games with low- resolution graphics that belie their surprisingly difficult controls. Like Barr’s, Messhof ’s games frequently cross the porous boundary between art institutions and the indie game world, and their colorful pixelated graph- ics hark back to 1980s computer and arcade games. Pipedreamz (2010) is all about the fantasy of transforming labor time into leisure time and is also about getting high, surfing, and working at a fast- food restaurant. While most of Messhof ’s games are distributed for free or for small fees as downloads from their website, Pipedreamz is a free browser game. The game was licensed by Adult Swim for its website, which, like the rest of the cable television program’s content, is aimed at a young, mostly male audi- ence interested in humor, animation, and popular culture. In Pipedreamz we play as an undifferentiated white pixelated humanish figure working at the fast- food restaurant Burgertronix. The game begins with a pink pig wearing sunglasses, who introduces himself: “Name’s Steve. I’m your boss, but I’m also yer bro! Meat can change your life. Trust me bro. Lemme see you eat that meat.” The Burgertronix tasks alternate between eating meat without being seen and flipping burgers on a grill. Both tasks have fail states. If the other characters see us eating the meat, our avatar vomits a horrifying excretion of pixels and the process begins again. If we flip the burgers too soon or too late, we are taunted by insults from offscreen like “Don’t burn them, dum dum.”

After we have flipped enough burgers or eaten enough meat, our labor at Burgertronix is rewarded with a mini- game in which our avatar attempts to surf on a huge, seemingly endless blue wave. Strangely, it seems like the meat at Burgertronix has the potential to transport us to an alternate

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surf- based dimension, where Steve, our pig boss, can also be our “bro.” Pipedreamz alternates between these scenes of abject work and seemingly idyllic leisure, punishment and reward. Yet Pipedreamz sets us up for fail- ure. The work we do at Burgertronix is quite easy to master. The controls are simple and, as in Barr’s games, button mashing is about all that is re- quired. Conversely, the leisure section of the game is quite difficult. The surfboard moves too fast across the water and is difficult to control in any skilled fashion. We fall into the water and have to swim to the surface again and again. The alternation between success and failure at first seems to replicate the same basic give- and- take that structures most video games, but in Pipedreamz this alternation never resolves itself into anything re- sembling a winning state. No matter how many points we earn or how well we flip burgers, we always end up getting fired.

The difficulty of Messhof ’s games is often their most noted feature. Ed Halter compares the use of strange controls and difficult navigation in Messhof ’s games to “the way a musician might use carefully orchestrated noise.”21 In its refusal of the basic expectations of rhythm and melody in music, noise, like the controls and graphics of Messhof ’s games, disrupts the clear signal of “winning” and our assumptions about what constitutes the form and our enjoyment of it. This is also true of Messhof ’s most widely known and critically lauded game, Nidhogg. Designed and released by Essen in 2010, Nidhogg is an extremely difficult sword- fighting game for PCs, rendered in colorful glitchy graphics. Players compete with each

Pipedreamz sets us up for failure in work and play.

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other, in multiplayer mode, or with the game’s AI in single- player mode in a tug- of- war battle that allows the player to progress across the map to the finish line only after repeatedly killing multiple adversaries. The game is difficult to play well because it is hard to control the small, blocky figures. Their undifferentiated forms contradict the speed and precision of their movements.

We feel failure in Pipedreamz and Nidhogg in their juxtaposition of simple graphics and difficult mechanics. Yet it is not a simple bait and switch. In Messhof ’s games, the instability of the image— the possibility that it may disintegrate, obscure its dangers, or erupt into a colorful and often comically gruesome display— is an ever- present threat that neces- sarily informs how we play. In Nidhogg , for example, we learn early on that our sword- wielding avatar and opponents, once pierced, will bleed con- tinually accumulating arrangements of pixels that will end up obscuring the pitfalls of the playing field, leading to more death. Similarly, like our bodies come undone, the pixels of the map itself may dissolve underneath us, leading us to fall to our death. In Pipedreamz, the pixels are more stable, but their crudeness and uniformity challenge us to decipher the contours of danger. While surfing on the enormous blue wave, we are encouraged to try various tricks for extra points, but the visualization of both the exe- cution and the effects of those tricks is beyond the capacity of the game’s

In Nidhogg, the simple graphics belie the game’s difficulty.

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low- resolution graphics. We fail at consistently pulling off tricks and we fail at improving because the game’s images fail to capture the detail of the game’s mechanics. Unlike in Barr’s games, in Pipedreamz and Nidhogg our actions have causes and effects that lead to some sort of end. What comes radically undone in the relationship between the visuals and the mechanics are the expectations of fairness and consistency that undergird most digital gameplay.

Aesthetics of Failure

Video games are not distractions from the frustration and failure of our everyday lives; rather, they are intimately linked to how we feel failure— not just how we feel about failure, but how we actually experience the feel- ings associated with failing. If the impasse, in Berlant’s terms, is that we are caught up in the desire to succeed according to the unrealistic terms of late capitalism but our attachment to that desire is also what keeps us from finding a way out of that impasse, then video games as the ur- medium of failure might provide another scenario and another way of sensing the present. Can video games be a medium for feeling differently about failure in a society that demands success but provides fewer and fewer paths to it?

Tomkins offers a partial, if unsatisfactory, answer when he writes, “The sting [of shame] can be removed from any defeat by attenuating the posi- tive wish.”22 Similarly, in The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam makes a case for embracing failure as a tactic for short- circuiting and undoing the heteronormative benchmarks of success in American culture:

Failure preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers. And while failure certainly comes accompanied by a host of negative affects, such as disappointment, disillusionment, and despair, it also provides the opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life.23

Is the answer to Berlant’s formulation of the impasse around cruel optimism to give up our desire for success? The short answer is no. The expansion of our capacity to feel failure differently, to flail with failure, is a project quali- tatively and sensually different from embracing failure as radical politics. It

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is unclear in Halberstam’s formulation how failing and its negative affects can meaningfully intervene in neoliberal structures that seem to thrive on failure. As Jamie Peck argues, rather than being derailed by the failures of its internal logic, neoliberalism mutates and fails forward.24 Furthermore, neoliberal policies combined with technocratic governmentality exacer- bate inequalities and position some to fail better and with less risk than others. For most, the endgame of failure, even radical failure, is still inter- nal, personal, and shameful failure. The games I am discussing modify the affective charge around failure and disturb shame’s internalized trajectory. They resist immersion and smoothness and instead point to the program- ming of failure. To flail with failure, as we do in these games, is to spas- modically disrupt the quiescence of the impasse and to become attentive to the relationships among our failings, our feelings, and the systems with which we interact.

Affect and aesthetics are intimately related. The term aesthetics is de- rived from the Greek word aesthesis, meaning “sensation” or “feeling.” Both affect and aesthetics seek to describe the visceral and immaterial ways we form relationships with and make meaning from our surroundings. Yet you would not know this from game studies’ accounts of aesthetics. Although the significance of the ludology versus narratology debates in game studies has been overstated, these debates had lasting effects on how aesthetics are defined and treated in game studies. The term game aesthet- ics is generally used to refer to how games look— the style of animation, the heads- up display, the graphics, and so on. Aesthetics get collapsed into images. Related to the broader division between image and action in game studies discussed in chapter 2, there is a tendency in game studies to cordon off aesthetics from the computational and interactive aspects of games.25 This rather arbitrary separation aids approaches that wish to emphasize the ludic aspects as the essential feature of video games and connect them to the history of all types of games in order to disentangle video games from other visual media and theories of representation.

The reduction of aesthetics to images and the relegation of images to secondary importance, after action, in game studies makes for a rather anemic application of aesthetic theory to the medium. Graeme Kirkpat- rick makes a case for an “aesthetic approach” to game studies that accounts for how our pleasure in games is bound up with the whole experience of what it feels like to play a game, arguing that aesthetic concerns “cannot

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be bracketed off as incidental to gameplay but must be understood as central to and organizing the whole activity.”26 Yet even this more holistic approach goes off the rails when Kirkpatrick tries to contend with the as- sumed primacy of action over representation in game studies. He does this through a radical separation of form and content. He writes, “If we want to understand how the video game has come to occupy the position it has in contemporary experience we need to analyze it in terms of its form; the way it shapes space to create the possibility of meaning only to stop short of actually providing it.”27 Formalism allows Kirkpatrick to make a case for the importance of video game aesthetics without having to account for their representations. He sticks to the beauty of high- resolution graphics, the dance- like movements of players’ bodies, and the rhythms of algorithms to propose the video game as a container for aesthetic experiences that emerged in the 1960s to fill the void left by conceptualism’s abandonment of form for content. Kirkpatrick’s account of video game history (and con- ceptualism) implicitly condemns art for politicizing aesthetics and sug- gests that video games, by contrast, must occupy an apolitical aesthetic position in culture.28 Cementing this view, Kirkpatrick writes, “If the video game is such a container [for aesthetic experiences] then the questions raised by its success for cultural politics are not the ones we thought we had to ask when we were preoccupied with whether games are violent, or sexist, or whatever.”29

What is at stake in this vigorous denial of visual and political mean- ing in video games? In light of the attacks on feminist critics of the video game industry and culture, and contrary to Kirkpatrick’s opinion, it seems increasingly important to understand how video games are more than just containers for nonideological aesthetic experiences. Game studies needs to broaden its understanding of and engagement with aesthetics to take into consideration the ways aesthetics are always a negotiation between that which is seen and that which is felt, and this necessarily has effects on the mediation of identities and subjectivities. Our ability to laugh freely at our video game failures is in some ways constrained by how we already feel positioned by gaming culture’s subjects and objects. Video game mastery, what constitutes a game, and who are and are not video games’ proper sub- jects are often gendered and raced boundary markers. The degree to which one plays the “right” games with the “right” skills leads one— as though following a flowchart with binary yes/no answers— to arrive, or not, at

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the identity “gamer.” To be too disoriented in play is to fail the wrong way, to be unfunny, to just be a bad player. As such, feminist approaches to video games are wedged uncomfortably between game studies’ problem- atic turn away from the screen and its images (limiting the rele vance of feminist engagements with representation in games) and online gaming culture’s decidedly unfunny attacks against women (where being a femi- nist is to be the worst kind of failure). Hence, the meanings we make of games and their capacity to affect us are part of a complex interaction of factors that exceed both representation and mechanics. Aesthetics are not a particular aspect of video games but rather a way of identifying an af- fective relationship that is created between and across the games’ images, sounds, mechanics, hardware, algorithms, and players. To understand the expressive potential of video games’ aesthetics of failure, we cannot sepa- rate representation from computation, or the screen from the code.

The interplay between images and mechanics is a core feature of how the games I discuss in this chapter express failure. The images are not sec- ondary in their affective meditations on failure; rather, they are the first point of contact and condition our ambivalent responses. At the level of the image, Barr, Messhof, and Arcangel reject the smoothness and clean- ness of contemporary digital design. They very consciously traffic in out- moded and cheap digital aesthetics. Messhof and Barr both use inexpen- sive, nonprofessional Flash- based game design software that lends their games an amateurish and nostalgic appearance. Arcangel appropriates and modifies video games from his youth and, under the banner of “dirt design,” eschews the professionalization of contemporary web design and instead celebrates the vernacular aesthetics of early web culture. Although they do not use the term, all three employ an “appropriate technology” approach that is rare in an era when that kind of thinking has more or less vanished. In a sense, they fail to progress to high- resolution and hyper- realism and remain stubbornly in the computer’s past.

The pixelated and glitchy graphics in the games are related to broader gaming trends. Browser games, mobile game apps, free or cheap game- making software, and new funding and distribution opportunities for in- dependent game designers are all part of larger recent shifts in the global video game industry: the shift from games as physical objects to down- loadable files, the shift from consoles to mobile platforms, the shift from hard- core to casual gaming. These shifts have attendant aesthetic effects.

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Reining in the race to hyperrealism and complexity in the video game in- dustry, smaller platforms and digital distribution tend to require simpler graphics, mechanics, and interfaces.

We can link the work of Barr, Messhof, and Arcangel to a wider move- ment in contemporary art, christened the New Aesthetic, that embraces errors, glitches, outmoded hardware, old video games, vernacular digital culture, amateur graphic design, and other aspects of digital media that are generally dismissed as obsolete or simply “bad.”30 As demonstrated by works ranging from Takeshi Murata’s glitchy videos and Kelly Goeller’s pixelated street art to the degraded YouTube and cell phone imagery of Johan Grimonprez’s videos and Jon Rafman’s Google Street View pho- tography, the New Aesthetic is a response to the overly commercial and derivative design aesthetic of mainstream digital culture. While not all of the work is about failure per se, grouped together the various stylistic approaches of New Aesthetic artists offer ways of seeing and feeling the world that embrace the mistake or the badly rendered in order to reject the hegemony of the smooth digital aesthetic and its links to what Jodi Dean calls “communicative capitalism.”31

Barr’s, Messhof ’s, and Arcangel’s games can be read as rejections of the smooth digital aesthetic. The simple graphics and low- resolution imagery set us up for an easy win, which we are then denied by the difficult me- chanics. At the level of gameplay, they use difficult controls or, in the case of Arcangel, remove the player’s control altogether. This jaggedness in the image and jerkiness in the controls constitute what I call the aesthetics of failure. The aesthetics of failure speak to the technological constraints of nonprofessional game design software and smaller platforms but also to the ways failure in games can be a preferred aesthetic and an ideological tactic.

Mirroring their jagged and twitchy aesthetics, these games ask us to perform various arrhythmic, jerking, and flailing gestures as we attempt to bend the games’ algorithmic logics to something resembling a win. Yet we cannot win. The interplay between representation and computation is essential to how the aesthetics of failure work in these games. They disrupt the commonplace harnessing of our bodies to machines that are meant to smooth and expedite labor. They throw a wrench into the way shifts in capitalist production— from Taylorism to the self- management in imma- terial modes of labor under neoliberalism— have depended on a smooth physical and affective relationship between workers and machines.

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Programmed to Fail

Recently, video games that experiment with intentional failure have achieved cult success. Games like Octodad and Super Gang Beasts use the aesthetics of failure for comedic effect. Part of an emerging genre some- times referred to as “fumblecore,” these games are designed to be inten- tionally and comically difficult.32 In Octodad and its sequel, Octodad: The Dadliest Catch, we play as the title character, a cephalopod masquerading (poorly) as a human suburban dad. Our goal is to move Octodad so that he appears as a “normal” man and does not reveal his true nature. But the control scheme is so intentionally complex and sensitive that, despite our best efforts to contort our hands correctly, Octodad tends to flail through his suburban world, smashing his tentacles against everything in his path. The games are funny because they brilliantly foreground the limitations and disorientations of our bodies entangled with the code and hardware of the games.

We tend to laugh at certain types of failure— in games or otherwise— because we get caught up in what Sianne Ngai describes as their “zany” aesthetic. Ngai revisits and revises Henri Bergson’s notion of the comic arising from “mechanical inelasticity.” According to Bergson, we laugh at the folly of a person who, through a kind of machinelike repetition of be- havior, cannot adjust his body to a changed circumstance.33 Bergson gives the example of a man who stumbles on a rock while walking down the street and falls down. If the man had decided to just sit down in the street, adjusting his body in relation to the street as if he had fallen, we would not laugh. But the appearance of a vital and living being moving in a routinized fashion, walking, and not being able to change this routine to account for an obstacle produces our laughter. We laugh at the zany, Ngai argues, be- cause of too much elasticity. Ngai proposes a historical shift from Bergson’s time to the present, when an aesthetic of zaniness emerged to comically address the state of trying to wholly adapt our bodies to the machines and technics of capitalism. She asks, “If the rigidity of others is what makes us laugh, can an absolutely elastic subject— one who is nothing but a series of adjustments and adaptations to one situation after another— be genu- inely funny?”34 The zany performer evokes the laughter, but also the dis- comfort, of watching someone too willing to bend and respond to the in- creasing demands the world makes on her body.

The zany in video games, then, is often about the mechanical limita-

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tions of both bodies and machines that surface through their necessary entanglement at the interface a game provides. Hence our laughter at Octo dad’s rubbery body and our inability to control it, or our laughter as we frantically smash our hands against buttons or screens to respond to the increasing speed and demands of pretty much any game. Video games, which emerged in the mid- twentieth century as affective interfaces for the cybernetic interactivity of computers that was transforming the land- scapes of work and leisure, are then where we find the zany in its most advanced state. Humor in video games is not really an effect of our wit- nessing the “mechanic encrusted upon the living,” as Bergson puts it.35 Rather, more aptly, humor in video games emerges at the moments when the limitations of our living bodies meet the limitations of the software and hardware of a game— the implicit humor in the reductive statement “Press A to jump.” This is more akin to humor arising from our witnessing the living attempting to thrust itself upon the mechanic. Plugged into a cybernetic loop with the game, we imagine that we can transfer the full potential of our embodied vitality to the mechanics of the game, but, flail- ing, we repeatedly fail.

Since he started making art in Buffalo, New York, in the early 1990s, Arcangel has displayed interests that have vacillated between breathtak- ing virtuosity and abject failure. For him, failure seems to exist in the gap between our ability to use digital tools as amateurs and how quickly digital technologies and aesthetics seem to become outmoded and “bad.” Planned obsolescence. Programmed to fail. Devices fail, corporations go out of business and stop manufacturing software, and the trends of Inter- net use shift, as do their aesthetics, leaving closets and landfills full of “useless” devices and hard drives and energy- hungry servers full of out- dated files, software, and websites that have not been updated since the 1990s. Arcangel’s work expresses an overt desire for the vernacular digital aesthetics of early web culture, before web design templates, blogs, and social media obviated the need for everyday experimentation. Arcangel’s official website communicates a lot about his relationship to web culture. Cory Arcangel’s Official Portfolio Website and Portal is intentionally naive and harks back to the days of “home pages” and “web portals.”36 It is clut- tered with advertising and looks hopelessly outdated. The frames, fonts, and animated GIFs locate it, designwise, in the mid- 1990s. Arcangel uses outmoded web design aesthetics to expose the contours of a form that tries very hard to be transparent.

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If the most essential feature of video games is, as many claim, that they create spaces for the players’ actions above and beyond their programmed narratives and images, Arcangel’s Various Self Playing Bowling Games in- stallation casts doubt on this notion. These games do not address us as potentially masterful players; rather, they address us as observers of their systems and ask us to see them as authored and programmable systems. The circuit board is crucial here. The circuitry that allows the games to be “self- playing” is exposed and inscribed by Arcangel. Its crudeness con- trasts with the hidden mechanics of the molded plastic consoles and re- flects on the “madeness” of both. Arcangel’s manipulation of the games and removal of player control bring to the foreground the ways the games’ designers have programmed failure to look, feel, and sound. As such, the installation offers us the most radical version of flailing with failure by alienating us from the subject position of player and its attendant fantasies of mastery. As “self- playing,” the games fail to offer the subject position of “player” to the viewer. In the gallery we are watching the machine enact the failures of imaginary players. As viewers, we are completely outside the cybernetic loop, a position that violates the most basic (if exaggerated) principle of video games: that we can control them. Denied the possibil- ity of playing the games, we contemplate the games as systems. We notice how with each new generation the player has more vectors of control over the ball’s trajectory and measurement of success. The graphics and per- spectives of the later generations directly mimic televised bowling com- petitions, and heads- up displays show interfaces for adjusting the angle and spin of the ball, while graphics convey measurements for “power” and “accuracy.” This obsession with remediation and accuracy in the later games makes the repeated gutter balls all the more absurd. Through the repetition of the representation of the avatars’ failure to score even a single point, we are provoked to think about the games as states of failure on many levels. Even though the graphics become somewhat more realistic and three- dimensional over the chronological progression, we cannot help but notice how they fail to capture realistically the appearance and movements of human beings. The games also fail as simulations. No mat- ter how realistically they represent the space and sounds of the bowling alley, they are at best remediations of televised bowling rather than simula- tors of the actual physical experience of throwing a heavy resin ball down a narrow wooden lane toward ten pins.

Repetition is key to Arcangel’s work, but it is repetition without differ-

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ence. Countering the logic of repetition in video games where we repeat sequences and levels in order to make the outcome different, repetition (of button sequences, programming, and software inputs) in Arcangel’s work denies the logic of repetition for the sake of progress. What if we repeated failure, like Arcangel’s virtual bowlers, with no measurable move- ment toward anything resembling success? This is repetition to stay right where we are, refusing originality, refusing the new, and repeating until the accumulation of repetition exposes something about the process itself. By removing the possibility of progress, Arcangel’s self- playing games re- peat lines of code until, as when we repeat a common word over and over again, its strangeness is revealed.

Conclusion

Play, and its long association with creativity, is an important cultural hinge between aesthetics and affect as subjectivizing forces. Affect and aesthet- ics both provide ways of delineating the contours of a subject or object in relation to other subjects or objects as well as the many points of over- lap that join us emotionally to others. The aesthetics of failure speak to

Arcangel’s signed circuit board foregrounds the programming of failure. copyright cory Arcangel. Image courtesy of cory Arcangel and Lisson Gallery.

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what Ngai describes as the subjectivizing force of aesthetic categories in that they “play to and help complete the formation of a distinctive kind of aesthetic subject, gesturing also to the modes of intersubjectivity that this aesthetic subjectivity implies.”37

In the early part of the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin argued that the function of film is “to train human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily.”38 Benjamin’s concept of Spielraum, or room- for- play, in cinema refers to a number of qualities of the medium in which he saw the possibility for radical social effects. He imagined room-for-play in film to change the relationship of humans to machines through a kind of retraining. Miriam Hansen writes, “Spiel . . . provides Benjamin with a term . . . that allows him to imagine an alternative mode of aesthetics on par with the modern collective experience, an aesthetics that could counteract, at the level of sense perception, the political consequences of the failed— that is, capitalist and imperialist, destructive and self- destructive— reception of technology.”39 This reference to the “failed” reception of technology is a massive understatement considering the alienation, exploitation, and loss of life and limb associated with the new mechanized forms of labor and warfare in Benjamin’s time. Hansen links Benjamin’s interest in play to his wider project, carried through much of his writing, “to theorize an alter- native mode of apperception, assimilation, and agency which would not only be equal to the technologically changed and changing environment, but also open to chance and a different future.”40

Video games have inherited and substantially revised our perceptions of technology and the meaning of play over the past sixty years. As Peter Krapp notes, some sorts of games generally come preinstalled on our digi- tal devices to “teach us how to handle them.”41 But games, it is important to understand, are also part of a process of training us how to feel about these devices and the larger systems for which they are proxies. If cinema offers room for play, in Benjamin’s terms, video games offer that as well, but they also offer room for error and failure.42 This is not to say that video games function as didactic mechanical interpellators; rather, it is to point out that Benjamin’s famous essay can be read beyond the limits of a strict Frankfurt School interpretation for the way it speaks compellingly to the intersecting forces of aesthetics and affect in an emerging medium, and to how these are intimately related to how we feel about the medium and, in turn, how the medium provides a particular emotional texture for its time. Krapp notes

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that the room for error in games functions like a release valve in the hyper- bolic computing discourses of order and infallibility, but it also trains users to assume that any errors are their own in the human– computer interaction formulation of the “user error.” The games discussed in this chapter, how- ever, use the aesthetics of failure and their affective dimensions to question the logic of “user error.” The intersection of aesthetics and affect in these games gives us access to the ways the senses make meaning through cul- tural objects, like games, beyond the scope (and the scopic limits) of rep- resentation. This intersection also moves us beyond a tendency in game studies to artificially separate aesthetics from meaning making.

The aesthetics of failure in Barr’s, Messhof ’s, and Arcangel’s games speak to the sociohistorical context of failure and also to our yearning for different relationships with our machines and their sensual capaci- ties. Their games are asking us not to celebrate failure but to flail with it for a while and learn its contours. Maybe flailing with failure through games that jerk our bodies out of the smooth rhythms of frictionless labor, or deny our participation at all, will shift our attention away from perceived personal failings and back to the failures of a larger ideological formation— say, a user interface, a digital platform, or even an economic system. The aesthetics of failure in these games create different affective conditions and trajectories for failure in a culture that keeps raising the bar of success while simultaneously pulling the rug out from under all but the most privileged.

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