Gaming and the Virtual Sublime

Rhetoric, awe, fear, and death in contemporary video games

Matthew Spokes

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781838674335
• Topic: Informatica
• Subtopic: Realtà virtuale

Can you have a transformative experience as a result of falling through a programming error in the latest triple-A title? Does looking out across a vast virtual vista of undulating mountains and tumultuous seas edge you closer to the sublime? In an effort to answer these sorts of questions, Gaming and the Virtual Sublime considers the 'virtual sublime' as a conceptual toolbox for understanding our affective engagement with contemporary interactive entertainment. Through a detailed examination of the history of the sublime, from pseudo-Longinus' jigsaw puzzle of the sublime in rhetoric, through the eighteenth-century obsession with beauty and terror, past the Kantian mathematical and dynamical sublime, all the way to Lyotard's 'unpresentable event' and Deleuze's work on chaos and rhythm, this book road-tests these differing components in a far-reaching exploration of how video games - as virtual spaces of affect - might reshape our opportunities for sublime experience. Using playthroughs, developer diaries, forums discussions and contemporaneous reviews, and games ranging from the heartbreak of That Dragon: Cancer through to the abject body-horror of Outlast (with a dash of Tetris in-between) are discussed in terms the experience(s) of play, their design and their co-creation with gamers with a specific focus on rhetoric and narrative; awe; fear and terror; death and boredom. Written in an engaging and accessible style, this book is a must-read for philosophers, scholars, and those interested in games and popular culture more broadly.

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 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-in-arm, 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 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 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 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 long-term 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, 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 demarcat...