Exploring Videogames with Deleuze and Guattari

Towards an affective theory of form

Ciara Cremin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781138925526
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317406990
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Sociology

Videogames are a unique artistic form, and to analyse and understand them an equally unique language is required. Cremin turns to Deleuze and Guattari's non-representational philosophy to develop a conceptual toolkit for thinking anew about videogames and our relationship to them. Rather than approach videogames through a language suited to other media forms, Cremin invites us to think in terms of a videogame plane and the compositions of developers and players who bring them to life. According to Cremin, we are not simply playing videogames, we are creating them. We exceed our own bodily limitations by assembling forces with the elements they are made up of. The book develops a critical methodology that can explain what every videogame, irrespective of genre or technology, has in common and proceeds on this basis to analyse their differences. Drawing from a wide range of examples spanning the history of the medium, Cremin discerns the qualities inherent to those regarded as classics and what those qualities enable the player to do.

Exploring Videogames with Deleuze and Guattari analyses different aspects of the medium, including the social and cultural context in which videogames are played, to develop a nuanced perspective on gendered narratives, caricatures and glorifications of war. It considers the processes and relationships that have given rise to industrial giants, the spiralling costs of making videogames and the pressure this places developers under to produce standard variations of winning formulas. The book invites the reader to embark on a molecular journey through worlds neither 'virtual' nor 'real' exceeding image, analogy and metaphor. With clear explanations and detailed analysis, Cremin demonstrates the value of a Deleuzian approach to the study of videogames, making it an accessible and valuable resource for students, scholars, developers and enthusiasts.

1
Videogame Plane

Graeme Kirkpatrick (2007: 90) nicely enumerates what for him constitutes the form of a videogame:

Like baroque dramas, their ostensible, symbolic content diminishes in proportion as we understand them to be saying something impossible. It is very hard to say what you have been doing with a game because the form seems to fit life, but doesn’t, and this is what makes it form. Again, there is a reversal: unlike the artwork the impact of the game is not discharged in the moment of its appearance. It evaporates and fades the harder and more resolute we are in attacking it. If we soften, it confronts us with more solidity and permanence than we can stand.

Videogames, he suggests, are a puzzle that stymies and thwarts our freedom, but ‘through violent, strategic, intense play, we undo [their] spell but are restored to the world with a new sense of the possible and of its limits’ (2007: 89). Kirkpatrick’s claims are not unsympathetic to propositions I develop in this book. What it lacks in my view is a theoretical grounding that enables him to flesh out a more comprehensive analysis of the form and also the many factors that influence it and our relationship to it. This is where Deleuze and Guattari put us at an advantage. Ian Bogost is too hasty in dismissing them in favour of Alain Badiou (2009) whose concepts strike me as useful only by analogy. Bogost (2010) deploys Badiou’s concepts of ‘event’ and ‘count as one’, which in Badiou’s philosophy has far-reaching implications. For example, Badiou refers to elements that are present in the world but not counted. When they subtract themselves a world-transformative ‘event’ occurs in one of the four domains of art, love, science and politics. Slum dwellers are not ‘counted’ in the democratic form of governance but were they to announce themselves upon the world, perhaps by descending en masse to the city, they potentially rupture the world as represented within the established order they were hitherto invisible in. Badiou’s one is different to Deleuze’s notion of event. In the latter it is more of an everyday occurrence and lends itself better to the more mundane enterprise of analysing videogames. Although Deleuzian philosophy is adapted, the concepts themselves serve a literal purpose. There is no deviation in describing videogames in terms of assemblages or play in terms of affect or the industry as a ‘plane of organisation’. Moreover, the concepts themselves are part of an assemblage that cannot neatly be divorced in the way that scholars utilising Deleuze and Guattari typically have. Their concepts when utilised together enrich their value. The chapter outlines some of the key concepts of the book concluding with some tentative propositions.

Into the light

Concepts bathe dark zones in light and aid us in becoming receptive to non-linguistic sensations, to invent planes, test forces and solve puzzles. For the game developer, concepts can help with inventing new styles of play, the concept of gravity in Super Mario Galaxy or ‘worm holes’ in Portal, for example. The player needs concepts in order to advance, such as the concept of a ‘hookshot’ in The Legend of Zelda that when possessed can be utilised to get to a higher ledge. The philosopher invents concepts on the plane of immanence that by opening thought to sensations help to tackle questions related to problems they have posed. The plane of immanence is present in every artistic expression on the creative plane of composition. ‘The function of the artist’, writes Ronald Bogue (1997: 259), ‘is to render visible what has ceased to be seen, to paint the forces of the Strausian world of sensation. But the artist must also deconstruct representation and invent “a space of the invisible, of the possible”’. This is the role of the developer and the relationship the player has to form. The plane of immanence is defined by the concepts operating on it. The schoolteacher ‘poses’ problems that, as Deleuze (1991: 15) says in reference to Henri Bergson, keep us ‘in a kind of slavery’; the freedom of thought is the ‘power to decide, to constitute the problems themselves’. The thinker poses the problem from which questions are derived and concepts created. What is the videogame plane?

The videogame plane is the plane of all possible videogames, the plane on which developers and players, artists and apprentices, compose, a plane of composition. It is the surface on which all events occur, all possibilities arise. All variations emanate univocally from this single plane of pure multiplicity, differing by their intensities and how those intensities are assembled and diagrammed. ‘A multiplicity’, Deleuze and Guattari (2003b: 8) write, ‘has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows)’. Consider, for example, a single-celled amoeba from which complex life forms arise with multiplicities far greater than in the original form (we could also use the example of the multiplicities of simple agrarian societies compared to highly industrialised ones today). Animal species operate on their own distinctive planes that determine what each can do: nest, burrow, glide; humans by contrast can invent and scramble planes. A bird with a beak designed for grubbing cannot, for example, learn to fish. Humans can learn from different creatures and embark on new becomings in alliance with them, exceeding a plane of nature to become something other to what could otherwise be presupposed by their organs. By learning how to hunt and fish the human exceeds their organs and escapes nature’s contingencies. Variations produce differences in kind. For videogames, variations produce new and wonderful multiplicities of men and women, ‘shoot ‘em ups’, ‘role players’, Star Foxes and Final Fantasies. Every videogame operates on its own plan(e), or diagram. With Space Invaders Taito invented or at least popularised the shoot-’em-up plane. Square did not invent the role-playing plane with Final Fantasy; they simply made it their own. It is because all videogames emanate from a single plane or origin that, for all their diversity, they can be compared. It is therefore legitimate for a videogame theorist to develop or work with a common language, one that applies to all videogames without exception. The language is not imposed but rather induced from concepts invented for the purpose of responding to questions, questions to be sure that can never fully be answered. Every answer is necessarily open-ended. ‘There is a strict correspondence between the created concepts and the instituted plane’, Deleuze and Guattari (1991: 59) say, that ‘comes about through indirect relationships that are still to be determined’. Accordingly, the supreme act of philosophy is:

not so much to think THE plane of immanence as to show that it is there, unthought in every plane, and to think it in this way as the outside and inside of thought, as the not-external outside and the not-internal inside-that which cannot be thought and yet must be thought, which was thought once, as Christ was incarnated once, in order to show, that one time, the possibility of the impossible.

(Deleuze and Guattari, 1991: 59)

It is there in every invented genre; in every videogame we play.

What is a videogame?What do videogames enable us to do? Deleuze and Guattari do not oppose systems of analysis. Rhizomes are systems, albeit open ones. They oppose rigidity. This must be borne in mind when seeking answers to such questions. Videogames are assemblages of forces, of affects and pre-personal becomings; they are multiplicities, not closed systems at all, rather open to infinite variation and invention.

Interpreting Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy can be like clasping hands to hold water. There is always leakage. The impossibility in arriving at a watertight description is a factor in their warning against interpretation and what makes their philosophy open-ended. But, as Ian Buchanan (2006: 148) points out, if concepts cannot be interpreted they have no use. A passenger asked to pilot a commercial plane would see plenty of instruments, dials and switches but would find all of them unfathomable. Practical philosophy would by definition be rendered impracticable. It is a fool who claims to have the word on Deleuze and Guattari. It takes a courageous fool to take them at their word and commit acts of philosophical buggery with their conceptual toolkit.

Given the subtitle of this book, a question that needs to be asked is what do they mean by ‘affect’? How does it correspond to a host of terms such as ‘force’, ‘intensity’ and ‘sensation’? Why affect and videogames? Ash (2012) explains affect as the force of an encounter, the capacity to affect and be affected. It denotes a force rather than emotion, a force that varies in intensities as it combines with other forces in different assemblages to engender multiplicities. Bodies affect and are affected. Spinoza is a touchstone for Deleuze’s thinking on affect. ‘When a body “encounters” another body, or an idea another idea’, Deleuze explains, ‘it happens that the two relations sometimes combine to form a more powerful whole, and sometimes one decomposes the other, destroying the cohesion of its parts’ (Deleuze, 1988 [1970] 19). Form, Deleuze tells us, is constitutive of the interlocking relations of each body and each body to one another, how they affect one another, to increase or diminish one another’s capacity to act, positively and negatively, for good and bad. So, for example, positively the act of raising the arm and clenching one’s fist expresses the power of a body but decomposes another body when striking it (Deleuze, 1988 [1970]: 32). The good affect augments a body’s capacity to act. The bad affect diminishes or decomposes a body’s capacity to act. Of videogames, we might say that the body of Mario-the-avatar is strengthened by the power of the player’s gestures that are mapped to it and enable that body as affect to successfully negotiate a hurdle. The same gesture, lacking the precision and intensity of the first, throws Mario into a pit of piranha plants. What is good in one relationship is not necessary good in another. The association of a player’s bullet with the image of an oil drum in Far Cry 4 is only good if the resulting explosion kills the enemy; not when it kills the player because they are too close to it.

Affect is between points, preceding and authoring images; it is the virtual force behind all actualisations or creations; it is the act of creating, of art, philosophy, science, our psychology and politics. Affect is not desire. It is intensities. Intensities are the indivisible durations of warmth and coolness, high and low pressure, speed and slowness, the haecceities that combine and give rise to multiplicities. Haecceities are individualities. Deleuze and Guattari (2003b: 261) again: ‘A degree of heat, an intensity of white, are perfect individualities; and a degree of heat can combine in latitude with another degree to form a new individual, as in a body that is cold here and hot there depending on its longitude’. Extensions, by contrast, are divisible. A volume of water for example can be divided to make two volumes of water but the heat of that water is unaffected. (These points will be elaborated on in later chapters and also repeated for the convenience of the reader.)

Affect is motion, not emotion. Emotion is intelligible, felt but also interpreted:

I am happy today; I am sad. Interpretation comes after the fact, the moment in psychoanalytic theory when a sudden traumatic event is momentarily defined ‘trauma’. As Massumi (2002: 35) explains, affect is the ‘simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and the actual in the virtual, as one arises and returns from the other … For affect is synesthetic, implying a participation of the senses in each other’. The composition of affects and their decomposition through different bodily relations are perceived over duration as a vital or virtual force and actualised in every event that flashes in repeated iterations on the screen. The event of play is simultaneously virtual and actual.

Another touchstone of Deleuze’s thought already intimated is Henri Bergson. Let us consider how our senses operate. I went for dinner a while ago with a person who lost the capacity for taste. She told me that it is the texture of food that now gives her pleasure and that influences her decision about what to order from a menu. When those with the capacity for taste are choosing a meal, texture is unlikely to be a conscious factor in the decision, unless the diner is a connoisseur or there are particularly distinctive textures on offer. The lesson here is that although the conscious mind may not register a sensation the body nonetheless perceives it. At a certain magnitude percept – akin to sensation rather than perception as such – passes over into affect, perhaps when the texture of our food is unusual. If you are eating something while reading this, you are probably now thinking about the texture of it. Now there are images in your mind and those images correspond to your memories of different textures that you compare to the one you are currently masticating. You have subtracted images that are not in this moment useful to you and now the image you have is of the texture rather than the taste. Philosophy, Deleuze tells us, is a thought without image. It does not settle problems but, as suggested, opens itself up to them. We can think about each videogame sensation in isolation, music, sound effects, colours, bright lights and shapes, and even the rumble effect of the gamepad. An affective philosophy encourages us to be receptive to sensations in much the way a tongue is receptive to texture, to accumulate images through experimentation and experience, to withdraw perception-images as circumstance requires, retaining those useful at that particular moment.

So, when perception (percept) reaches a certain magnitude it crosses over a threshold into affection (affect), like the difference between a hand that caresses and the hand that stings and leaves an imprint on the skin. The brain is like a photographic plate on which sensations are imprinted, an image that is in perception, condensed and accumulated in memory. The outer world of perception meets the inner world of affects. The mind functions as an interface between what affects us and our responses to them. This is the interval in which images that are not useful are withdrawn. Returning to the question of art, Deleuze and Guattari (1991: 94) state:

It should be said of all art that, in relation to the percepts or visions they give us, artists are presenters of affects, the inventors and creators of affects. They not only create them in their work, they give them to us and make us become with them, they draw us into the compound.

It is this capacity both to perceive and be affected by art that enables, in the context of videogames, the player to do things with affects. We are literally drawn into the compound of the creation and, because we are ourselves active in a process of creation, also inventors and creators of affects.

For Spinoza, then, affect concerns bodily relations, the ‘good’ being what augments or empowers a body and the ‘bad’ what decomposes or deprives a body. For Bergson, affect corresponds to the totality of what the sensory-motor-schema perceives and from which images (accumulated and condensed in memory and operative in the present) that are not useful subtracted. Affect filters into every aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, including a term they adapt from Antonin Artaud, the body without organs (BwOs). As they explain:

Whenever someone makes love, really makes love, that person constitutes a body without organs, alone and with the other person or people. A body without organs is not an empty body stripped of organs, but a body upon which that which serves as organs (wolves, wolf eyes, wolf jaws?) is distributed according to crowd phenomena, in Brownian motion, in the form of molecular multiplicities.

(Deleuze and Guattari, 2003b: 30)

How do we make a body without organs? By multiplying. By exceeding what the body in its organic organisation was until then capable of. By making ourselves a body without organs we loosen the grip of organisation and compose with affects. Because affects exceed representation, they also exceed identity and the limits imposed by language on the body. We return to this later, but briefly, the bod...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Videogame plane
• 2 The smooth and striated
• 3 Rhizome-play
• 4 Ludo-diagram
• 5 Artist and apprentice
• 6 Molecular Mario
• 7 Major/minor
• Bibliography
• Index