Video Games and the Technological Sublime

[droqen]

Regarding EUGÉNIE SHINKLE's
"Video Games and the Technological Sublime"

[droqen]

In its classical form, sublime experience is found only in nature and not in human conceits.
[..] both natural and man-made objects became part of the discourse of Manifest Destiny.
[..] Where the European Enlightenment regarded nature as something to be admired from a distance, early American settlers saw it as an obstacle to be overcome, and public works like dams, canals, and railway bridges, which demonstrated humanity's control over natural forces, were powerful sources of sublime sensation. By the mid nineteenth century, natural splendour and technological accomplishment were firmly linked to each other, and to the ideology of republicanism, as individual experience of immensity and awe was transformed into a belief in national greatness.

[droqen]

If the interface works properly[..] the game form itself [and "The extensive gameworlds, dazzling graphics, and sophisticated gameplay"] is rarely available to the player in its entirety. Instead, it is encountered as a series of finite elements, experienced as 'extended cycles of exhaustion and recovery', as tasks are repeated over and over again in order to progress. Rather than a confrontation with the infinite, experience of the game form involves an extended and, at times, deeply tedious engagement with 'the mechanical operations of a finite system'.

[..]stuplimity [the experience of aesthetic awe intertwined with boredom] 'reveals the limits of our ability to comprehend a vastly extended form as a totality, as does Kant's mathematical sublime, yet not through an encounter with the infinite but with finite bits and scraps of material in repetition.'

Compare to my tweet quoted below:

i want to experience a game like i experience a painting, all at once. gameplay doesn't have to exist in four dimensions. trapped behind walls, behind time, behind gates, behind locked doors. gameplay could be free

[droqen]

This entire section, "Gameplay: stuplimity or flow?", is really hitting me hard! It's saying a lot of the things I have been thinking and talking about.

[droqen]

Stuplime affect makes no claims for spiritual transcendence or ironic distance, relying instead on a paralytic tedium: 'Instead of emerging from existential or phenomenological questions ... this boredom resides in relentless attention to the infinite and small'.

I can't tell how I feel about this section, in particular 'relentless attention to the infinite and small' seems intriguing to me, not necessarily something to be regretted or criticized on its face. But in context the essay appears to be making this claim critical of the stuplime affect.

[..rather than in classical formations of the sublime,] in stuplime experience, the initial dysphoric affect is not overcome by a competing one affirming the self's superiority, or concluded in a euphoric dissolution of self. Instead, stuplimity draws together boredom and astonishment, it fuses awe to its opposite and holds these opposing affects in tension – an indefinite state without resolution.

I feel some of this. If you play certain of my playables or oubliettes, in particular those without endings, they exist within this "indefinite state without resolution".

But I can't tease out the meaning of the first part. It seems "the initial dysphoric affect" is referring to something that the sublime and stuplime have in common, and then the claim presumes that the sublime overcomes this by either "affirming the self's superiority" or "in a euphoric dissolution of self."

Oh, writing it out piece by piece helped me think about it. The sublime puts the self in some form of existential crisis (the dysphoric affect), and that crisis must be resolved by either "affirming" the self's existence or allowing its existence to be destroyed (in "dissolution"). By contrast, the stuplime puts the self in some form of existential crisis, and that crisis is fused with boredom, an action which (for some reason) causes the crisis to be held "in tension", "without resolution."

What is it that the sublime does differently from the stuplime that causes the crisis to be resolved, or rather, "overcome"?

[droqen]

If gameplay is indeed an instantiation of stuplime sensation, this suggests that we situate video games in the context of the general waning of affect that is said to characterise postmodern experience: a cultural moment where depth is replaced by surface and real affects by simulated ones. [24]

Fredric Jameson argues that the ethos of work, suffering, and transformation that typified nineteenth-century sensibilities has been replaced, in the postmodern imagination, by play, idleness, and indifference. Terry Eagleton frames the difference between modernist and postmodernist aesthetics in a similar way: 'In the post-war years a different form of aestheticization was also to saturate the entire culture of late capital, with its fetishism of style and surface, its cult of hedonism and technique, its reifying of the signifier and displacement of discursive meaning with random intensities.' (Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, London 1990, p.373).

Do I believe that gameplay is an instantiation of stuplime sensation?

Do I agree with Fredric Jameson's argument about postmodern "play, idleness, and indifference"?

[droqen]

i don't understand these quotes, time to break them down:

reifying of the signifier

reifying: the act of treating something abstract, such as an idea, relation, system, quality, etc., as if it were a concrete object
signifier: a symbol, sound, or image (such as a word) that represents an underlying concept or meaning

i think i understand "reifying of the signifier" and how it relates to video games. a later sentence in the essay is "In the video game, technology is used superficially – not to control nature, but to simulate it." and i relate to this as well, the reification of the signifier is where we simulate not nature, but the signifiers of nature... an artifact which seems to want to recreate the beauty of nature, rather than increase the viewer's admiration of it.

displacement of discursive meaning with random intensities

discursive: "digressing from subject to subject," "relating to discourse or modes of discourse."

yeah i don't really get this one. 'discursive meaning.'

okay, the word 'discursive' on the online merriam-webster contains two literally opposing meanings, which sucks:

Definition of discursive
1a: moving from topic to topic without order : RAMBLING
//gave a discursive lecture
//discursive prose
b: proceeding coherently from topic to topic

ah but here is a better one

discursive (philosophy): marked by a method of resolving complex expressions into simpler or more basic ones : marked by analytical reasoning

[droqen]

the discursive meaning is ... okay, i just need to check out the source material to understand what's going on here, and oh my god it's 426 pages long and only available for reference. well, here it is . . . The Ideology of the Aesthetic

[droqen]

We move into flow from stuplimity, in contrast.

Flow describes a state of total physical and psychic immersion in a task.

A flow state [..] is one of control.

[droqen]

Can stuplimity or states of flow be properly described as sublime affects? Flow states challenge subjective boundaries by encouraging a dissolution of self.

This paragraph begins by asking a question and basically answering "no", then asks a different question - where else can the sublime be felt in technology?

If we are to understand sublime affect in the ecological terms outlined earlier, then we need to look for it somewhere else – at those points in gameplay where the player becomes aware of the technology that lies beneath the game form, and where the consequences of this encounter present a challenge to the self.

I particularly like the phrase "a challenge to the self"

[droqen]

Playing a video game involves a kind of Faustian bargain with the technology, a handing-over of real-world agency in exchange for agency within the gameworld.

My question here is, "Is it worth it?" I find that my answer is increasingly "No," but I do want to ponder (in a grammatically simplified bullet point form) the possible gains offered by the bargain, the reasons that Shinkle identifies a player might agree to such a bargain.

What the game offers:
- a different reality (one of spectacular scenography)
- enhanced abilities
- more or less eternal life

What the game is doing in order to keep its end of the bargain:
- supporting a perceptually coherent gameworld
- 'humanises' the technology
- acting as an extension of the body
- enabling the technology to function as an affirmation of reason
- sustains a subjectivity that is 'posthuman' (in Hayles's sense of the term: [the] subject[..] is seamlessly articulated with an intelligent machine)

[droqen]

I will not quote anything from the section that immediately follows -- it's hard for me to comprehend -- but the argument that I believe is being made is that the interruption of the 'perpetually coherent gameworld' can produce a feeling of the sublime, of the infinite, of the incomprehensible. Then it continues thus, contradicting such an argument:

Once the functional bond – the interface – between the subject and the game is broken, the subject experiences a momentary glimpse of technology as an inhuman other.
[..] the initial glimpse of technology-as-other is followed by nothing more elevating than frustration.
[..] The dissolution of the technologically enabled self is both catastrophic and utterly banal: marked by a profound sense of rupture and loss, situated in the mundane reality of the post-human everyday.

[droqen]

The concluding sentence:

In and of themselves, contemporary electronic artefacts are both impenetrable and ephemeral – the fruits of human labour and ingenuity deployed in the form of aesthetic objects designed to entertain, and then to be discarded.

I will likely make the attempt to return to this text. It's speaking to me, saying things I have been saying to myself but in different ways, with references to outside texts and perspectives that I have not encountered myself. I think I'd like to start by reading some of these. I should make myself a reading list!

[droqen]

By the way: I agree with this concluding sentence, and I'm not happy about any of it.

[droqen]

pingback Ugly Feelings

the sublime is found in a transcendent escape -- requiring a place safe -- from stuplimity, from flow, and from gameplay.

The abovementioned "discarding" is present in the sublime as well: a safety from danger. What if we rewrote the concluding sentence with the understanding that this "discarding" is a foundational element of some sense of the sublime?

In and of themselves, contemporary electronic artefacts are both impenetrable and ephemeral – the fruits of human labour and ingenuity deployed in the form of aesthetic objects designed to entertain, and then [..] to ascend beyond, to be perceived as ultimately inferior by the observer.