An argument Research paper

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Conclusion

Affective Archives

“Ga mes don ’t matter ,” writes Miguel Sicart. “Like in the old fable, we are the fools looking at the finger when someone points at the moon. Games are the finger; play is the moon.”1 Sicart contends that, con- trary to the classic theory of play inherited from Johan Huizinga that sepa- rates acts of play from the rest of life, play is what puts us into the world and what permeates all aspects of it. “Play is being in the world, through objects, toward others.”2 This book is one contribution toward furthering our understanding of how playing video games puts us into particular and unique affective relations to history, technology, and each other. Through affect theory, game studies gains an ethics and a politics rooted in an analy- sis of the collectivizing force of video games and the entrainment of our bodies through them. From game studies, affect theory gains a rigorous formal articulation of the ways certain shared and ordinary feelings take shape and reverberate through our everyday interaction with media and devices. Out of this convergence emerges a theoretical framework that addresses how our sense of being in the world, our feeling of the every- day, and our contemporary sensorium are shaped through our encounters with digital media. However, unlike Sicart, I argue that games do matter. Games are matter

The particular worlds, characters, and stories of video games cannot be meaningfully separated from what games ask us to do as players or from the less visible actions of their programming. Reconnecting play to everyday life does not require detaching it from the specific forms it takes through highly mediated objects. Thinking about video games as affective systems is not intended to replace play theory or proceduralism in game studies but rather to supplement them by addressing their omissions. Bringing af- fect theory into conversation with game studies accounts for the complex

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 16:44:16.

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affective relationships that develop between players and video games, across bodies, code, molded plastic, and screens. Video games— as media objects, as cultural practices, and as structures of feeling— can tell us quite a bit about the collective desires, fears, and rhythms of everyday life in our precarious, networked, and procedurally generated world.

The collapsing of the computational metaphor— its ceasing to be a metaphor— is one of the backbones of structuralism, poststructuralism, and theories of affect. The wish to move away from the symbolic, away from representation, then occludes this structuring paradox: the very limi- tations of computational systems and their symbolic representations. It is easier in many ways to start fresh by proposing that computational media are not representations. This approach, however, leaves us wholly unable to address how representation still matters, and specifically how computa- tional forms of representation increasingly matter. In holding affect theory and video games together, my approach assumes that video games— their images, sounds, stories, mechanics, and interfaces— can be read and inter- preted as giving shape and form to particular feelings. Video games are not technologies capable of autonomously and unconsciously rewiring our bodies; rather, they are a particularly popular form of representation through which we can trace and analyze how affect moves across bodies and objects in the present. Furthermore, bodies and subjectivity have long been, or perhaps have always been, coassembled with technologies of me- diation. Video games— like biometrics, affective computing, and motion capture— are an important contemporary site through which to address the longer history of how bodies are mediated, how their mediation in- forms shifting notions of what “the body” is, and which bodies come to matter. Thus, examining the links between affect and representation in video games is perhaps more crucial now than ever.

The cleaving apart of computation from representation that I trace in this book shapes not only how we analyze video games but also how these games enter into archival and curatorial spaces and discourses. In 2012, New York’s Museum of Modern Art announced that it had begun acquiring video games for its permanent collection. Among the first games acquired were early arcade classics like Asteroids, Space Invad- ers, and Pac- Man, but also included were contemporary web- based vir- tual worlds such as EVE Online and Minecraft. MoMA’s announcement aligned the institution with the wider movement to collect and preserve video games— from the Library of Congress and several prominent uni-

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versity archives in the United States to several more archives in the United Kingdom, Europe, and Japan. Paola Antonelli, MoMA’s senior curator of architecture and design, explained the rationale for acquiring video games in terms of their significance to “interaction design.” Echoing formalist ap- proaches in game studies that cite action and proceduralism as essential to the medium, Antonelli stated, “Video games are the purest aspect of inter- action design.”3 This, in turn, has shaped the ways MoMA has exhibited the acquired games. In a 2013– 14 exhibition titled Applied Design, video games were displayed on screens recessed into the museum’s walls, with their controllers perched in front of them on minimalist pedestals.4 Gam- ing systems and arcade cabinets, it seems, were deemed too unsightly for display. Perhaps more to the point, these aspects of the material culture of games did not fit with the museum’s definition of interaction design. The element of design that MoMA seeks to highlight through its collection and preservation is code, specifically source code. “What we want, what we aspire to, is the code,” Antonelli explained, remarking on the museum’s difficulty in acquiring code from game developers. “That is what would enable us to preserve the video games for a really long time.”5

This faith in source code and the related downplaying of other mate- rial and immaterial aspects of video games is meant to address the prob- lem of technological obsolescence. Institutions are faced with preserving software programs that were designed for platforms that become obsolete in a matter of a few years. Despite this hope that source code will equal preservation, scholars studying this problem often find just the opposite. Perfect source code, especially in the case of multiplayer online games, cannot preserve very much about what makes the game meaningful.6 Similarly, in Game After, Raiford Guins argues for a richer appreciation for decay and fragments, and for the broken machines we can no longer turn on, in our understanding of what might constitute a video game’s after- life. He writes: “The museified state of video games suggests the need to reassess our definitions. . . . Treated as a ‘cultural object,’ video games will not ‘come into being’ if ‘being’ is premised exclusively on a machine’s abil- ity to be ‘powered up’ and have its software executed.”7 Following Guins, I would argue that a broken Pac- Man arcade cabinet, that which Antonelli dismisses as nostalgic arcade kitsch, can tell us more about the affective appeal of the game than the source code can.

All archives, of course, have a close relationship with decay and ruin. And archives are always imperfect and incomplete repositories of objects

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and ideas. It is impossible to create a perfect archival record of anything, let alone what a video game feels like, long after its technological mo- ment has passed. But as interactive digital environments like video games become the ascendant medium of the twenty- first century, and as their formal and cultural properties continue to influence everything from art and cinema to how wars are fought and economic markets are run, it is becoming increasingly important to figure out how we will have access to and create meaning from the longer history of video games into the future. An affective archival practice for video games disrupts the fetishization of source code in game studies and game preservation. I am using the phrase affective archive to mean several things. As in Michel Foucault’s sense of the archive, how might institutions that collect and preserve video games be more attendant to the myriad ways in which games, those who study them, and those who preserve them participate in a “system of discursiv- ity” that is always necessarily incomplete yet establishes the possibility of what can be said about the games now and in the future?8 In An Archive of Feelings, Ann Cvetkovich writes, “Cultural artifacts become the archive of something more ephemeral: culture as a ‘way of life,’ to borrow from Raymond Williams.”9 Video games, as I have argued in this book, are al- ready affective archives. How might archival practices, then, address the ways video games are invested with feelings that “are encoded not only in the content of the texts themselves but in the practices that surround their production and reception”?10

The answers to these questions are outside the scope of this book, but I raise them in the spirit of thinking beyond the present state of game stud- ies and toward what the field, specifically video game history, might look like in a few years. Bringing video games into conversation with affect the- ory depends, as this book illustrates, on a historicization of both terms, a process that is necessarily partial. The ways we tell video game history, and feel that history, in the future will be shaped by the partial affective ar- chives that we form in the present. Indeed, the way the future will feel will also emerge from these ludic structures of feeling.

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