 |
| Credit: Gregory Mark |
§1:
Kid's play videogames. They're intended to entertain, encourage fantasy, pass time, etc. Even the gritty, violent, scary ones aren't that serious. Unless we're Hillary Clinton, we all know its the stuff of fantasy.
But as is so often the case, that which is in theory made for children's fantasy and entertainment in practice actually intensifies its opposite; it brings to the forefront the adult's - those who created it - dreary reality; we see that which is made intentionally for the child's warm, tendency towards narrative cohesion unintentionally captures the adult's cold, unconscious, fragmentary, fantasies (remember all the dark, strange, sexual imagery and innuendos in Disney/Pixar?).
What is more, the attempt at simulating 'reality' in a digital space - with its combined hardware, software, and wetware limitations - ends up simulating the negative space of the limit more than it ends up simulating the positive experience of the playable game-world. In other words, the rudimentary script and code-architecture of videogames highlights the limits of the script and code, the limits of experience. Videogames become canvases for distorted, absurd physics, strange and horrific facial renderings, awkward AI social ainteractons - vehicles for glitches and exploits.
These glitches and exploits soon become more interesting than the intended features of the game, and the player invests more time in how to break the game than how to perform within its rules. As my friend has pointed out, the 'accidental' aspects of a videgoame discovered by dedicated and competitive players can be some of the most fun, and ultimately sought after aspects of a game.
It is as this point that Kant, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud converge. Kant because we're talking about limits - the videogame simulates the environment that reveals the noumenal excesses, the glitches that spill over and remain unsymbolized within the structure of the game. Nietzsche because he points out that man takes the means to the end as the end itself. This is meant as a critique, but its a positive with videogames - the means of enjoyment become the end. It's not about playing the game as intended, its about gaming the game. Marx because, as I mentioned elsewhere, both Marx and videogames, in attempting to do one thing on the level of agency, cohesion, and narrative, actually reveal the very limits of these experiences. Freud because these all express themselves as unconscious processes accidentally made real through conscious decision (the Freudian 'parapraxis' or 'slip of the tongue' known later as the 'Freudian slip' is perhaps itself a glitch of some kind...).
It all culminates in the darkside to the child's euphoria, the traumatic horror of videogames.
§2:
Gregory Mark's Twitter thread on 'No Clip' aesthetics captures this in maximum aesthetic density.
'No clip' is psychotic terror, schizophrenic fear. The walls disappear, empty spaces never intended for the player to experience are near.
In a paradoxical loop, the artificial limits peel back revealing the natural limits of human experience.
For the field of psychoanalysis, the infant requires an other - the parent(s) - to structure his or her ethereal, chaotic experiences, and to provide containment. If the infant does not have the other to structure the chaos through comfort and language acquisition, the infant does not develop out of its initial state of magical thinking, and takes on schizophrenic tendencies.
In other words, if the baby isn't helped to regulate, and learn that there are borders, boundaries, and limits, it feels boundaryless, floating , limitless, and experiences a deep terror that can only later be felt as a lack, and described in terms of fragmentation, the kind we see in deeply psychotic schizophrenics. This is precisely what is at play with 'no clip' in videogames. A simulation of repressed schizo fears, fears we all unconsciously experienced as children and either learned to structure, or became stuck in.
§3:
Grasping at concepts is as useless as it is uninteresting, so I'll instead tell a story.
I'm young. The age doesn't matter. I'm playing a skiing level in a Playstation 1 James Bond game and I unexpectedly clip through the map. Under my control, James skis into oblivion, but doesn't die. I lose myself in the empty screen; I ski forever. I become fixated on the negative, unrendered space, and remember wondering if I will ever be able to escape the negative space. Anxiety grips me. I become overwhelmed and turn off my playstation.
Another time - and time is relative here, this is likely a series of memory fragments from different times condensed int one - I'm young, but not as young as the James Bond terror. I think I'm playing Spyro the Dragon. I look up into the poorly rendered, digital sky and begin to feel scared beyond reason. It seems to go on forever, but at the same time, is completely flat, goes nowhere. It's all so hard to get into words.
I grasp at many fuzzy memories of scary times with games. Not scary times with scary games, but with completely mundane games. Something about their failure at sealing up the cracks in their reality simulations, something about the way three dimensional spaces are smashed into two dimensions, and copy+pasted to infinity. Something precisely 'unamable...'
Perhaps this is why the videogame served as the medium for many 'creepypastas' in the early 2000s....'
 |
| Credit Gregory Mark |
