Of what use is the past to a gamer? Peter Lunenfeld: “For the most part, its blood, mischief and role playing that gamers revel in. They live in an alternative universe, a solipsistic one scripted by designers whose frame of reference extends no further back than Pong, Pac-Man and Dungeons and Dragons. The visual and storyline tropes that most of us bring with us as cultural baggage are… all but forgotten ancestral memories, thrown off, on purpose, too cumbersome to be of any use.” In this new world that appears indifferent to history, with only halls of fame for its champions, chronicles of its big battles and charts of its greatest hits, accounting for how this digital gamespace came into being presents something of a problem. Perhaps it is best to approach it in its own style, as a series of levels, each of which appears to the gamer on battling through to the end of the last. If one is defeated, one starts over. But remember: these are the grind levels. The going is hard here, even a little boring. You may need to attempt it more than once. In gamespace, time is measured in discrete and constant units, and while one cannot always win a level, one can always start over and do it again.
052.
Click to start. Here is a new world. The first level opens onto a topic (from the Greek ‘topos’, or place). Here a topic is a place both on the ground and within language. Jacques Derrida: “The themes, the topics, the (common-)places, in a rhetorical sense, are strictly inscribed, comprehended each time within a significant site.” One can place one’s foot on a topic because one can place one’s tongue on it, and vice versa. Or one can point toward it and say: “there it is…”. All around the topic it is dark, unknown, unmapped, without stories. Move around a bit and you bump into others, from other tribes, other settlements. Via others one learns of still others. The topics start to connect. A map forms. Once there is a map, there is the topographic, which traces lines that connect the topics, and which doubles the topical with the space of maps and texts. These outline the contours in space and time of what was the topical, redrawing and rewriting it a continuous and homogenous plane. The lines of the topic are traced into the page; the lines on the page are traced back onto the earth as the topographic. History is a story and geography an image of this topography, in which the boundaries are forever being expanded and redrawn. This play between the topical and topographic is the first level.
053.
In the first level, every topical feature that resists inscription as a continuous space is erased and replaced. Impassable mountains yield their passages, joining once separate topics. Every recalcitrant people with its own indigenous topos is exterminated and forgotten. James Fenimore Cooper: “In a short time there will be no remains of these extraordinary people, in those regions in which they dwelt for centuries, but their names.” The names persist, on maps, or in books with titles like The Last of the Mohicans. The first level is this dissolution of the topical into the topographic, where an oral lore is erased and replaced by inscription: Lines on maps, lines on pages; lines that evolve from trail to rail. The first level is where the topographic unfolds as the line between what is charted and what is uncharted. (See Fig. 3) The storyline dwells between the autonomy of the topical and the authority of the topographical, always lagging behind.
054.
In the cinema, mapping and writing meet. The emergence of the topographic and its struggle to subsume the topical becomes the great theme of western cinema, above all of John Ford. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, cinema functions as the form that can reveal retrospectively the workings of topography, its creation of a storyline that justifies the imposition of the line. The completion of the topographic is the subject of film noir. Here the topographic has connected all of space in a loose network, and one cannot run beyond the frontier to escape it. One escapes within, looking for ill-lit, interstitial topics, like the rail yards and wholesale markets of Jules Dassin’s Thieves Highway, for example. In The Naked City, this power of telesthesia — perception at a distance — is everywhere. The police, forensics, the coroner are all brought together via the switch board operator, enabling and overcoming a division of labor with the telephone, and compacting space into a temporal event.
055.
This is the point where the line splits, into one that moves objects and subjects, and another, faster one that moves information, the line of telesthesia, of the telegraph then telephone. Through the telegraph, the sheriff has advance warning of the approach of his nemesis. Through the telephone the police chief coordinates action in space. Telesthesia allows the speeding up and coordination of the other line, setting the railway timetables by which vast armies of goods or soldiers may be mobilized. Telesthesia makes possible topographic space, where vast territories are coordinated within the bounds of the line. As telesthesia develops, from telegraph to telephone to television to telecommunications, topographic space deepens and hardens, but always with gaps and exclusions.
You have an interesting method of citation – on some level it seems more authentic to just place the name with a colon and then the quote – it seems less open to bastardization of the original, but it is also pretty unconventional. In the second chapter I believe, you use a standard form – is there a reason for holding or breaking this convention?
The citations are more like samples. Sometimes i want to name-check an author but i can’t find the quote that fits, and the citation gets more conventional.
first line: its -> it’s (as in “it is blood mischief and … that gamers revel in”)
“No further back than Dungeons and Dragons” suggests that D+D was not in itself a grand orgy of anarchically collected pasts; its popularity hinged on the very idea of reclamation and re-evaluation of these zones and events that were inhabited by real and fictional pasts smashing together like planes to form a cosmology.
I know this is Lunenfeld, but as a introductory statement, this is my first reaction.
Yes, but isn’t that the things L is getting at: its an appropriated past, a past made useful…
Agreed, but some added thoughts:
Lunenfeld:
——————-
“by designers whose frame of reference extends no further back than Pong, Pac-Man and Dungeons and Dragons”
——————–
..and in the same sentence, suggesting that there’s a rejection of the tropes the ‘rest of us’ take for granted. His interest is more in the cutting-off of history – I think – the snapping to grid, precisely where he logistically launched the premise of his task-to-history. Your theme in ‘America’ seems to the process of abstraction, which for me comes to a head in your description of Benjamin. Lunenfeld’s approach seems contrary to what follows, perhaps? This chapter gave me a reminder of the forms of recollection and recourse that occur across the topoi.
Lunenfeld:
———————-
” all but forgotten ancestral memories, thrown off, on purpose, too cumbersome to be of any use.”
———————-
Abstraction liquifies the past for the purpose of eliciting power through nothing short of absolute pageantry. The shield becomes the shield bar above the health bar, represented by a red cross, and so on it goes.
I have admittedly appropriated PL for my own purposes, as with many of the other quotes. Which is why the notes are going to be listed in the back as ‘cuts’. They are more like samples than citations.
I am suprised the military and the government has not stepped up the gaming promotion yet. Eventually, there is going to be a great need to highly skilled gamers in high level military and government jobs. As robots become more prevalent, such as the new honda bot or microsoft bot, there is going to be a giant increase in demand for someone to control these from behind the scenes.
Brad Henry on 051.
posted on 10/12/06
Yeah, but the background to that level of control will remain essentially mathematical. The idea of a practical robot is already nearly 1000 years gone. Duns Scotus and metal skins…
The Laws of Pyshics are hardly going to be resolved here and Animation/Gaming is really, in terms of Government the same illustrative content as anywhere else.
M
… I mean it isn’t that simple. What use forthright robots when the logic of War is now tnat of how Nations go about losing ‘em.
M
jeez, typo… “Infantry” not Infantly… but hey what’s the difference?
M
… Highly skilled gamers for the Military? “Not that simple”. ie.
-Most of the infantiy weapons produced and deployed in WW1 were never fired.
-After the advent of airborne warfare @ WW2 there were whole fleets of ships designed for the sole purpose of shooting down airplanes which used to have an %11 efficiency.
An engineer would sit in a room with a slide rule and calculate the vectors along the plumb-line of the moving ship ( a little piece of Brass imbedded in the deck) for each incoming aircraft, then assign the calculations to the gunners verbally. Didn’t do much and some ships survived to become Museum pieeces.
-When you say “gamers”; the game is really over when you add munitions. It becomes unlikely, the same rules don’t apply: Robotics and CGI games aren’t even in the same “ball park” to use the American parlance and when the stakes are set so, there’s the %11. So, in game terms- you lose!!!
M
As far as the Lunenfeld quote on 51 goes, he may be in the most part correct but i dont see how that denies a gamer’s need for the past or history, well maybe for the history of the phsyical world. But the game worlds themselves have a history one that would mater to someone who exists primarily within the game world. The high scores and kill counts are just as valid in the game world as our war statistics are for people who exist elsewhere. People within the game will talk about someone who accomplished this many quests in some amount of time, killed this many enemies, played for this many hours or beat/destroyed/decrypted the game algorithm is any manner of way that makes that person spectacular, even heroic, as apposed to the regular old gaming joe. The blood, mischief and role playing are fun and as gamers throw off the ancestral memories they put on a new history, a digital history cataloging the past lives of the heroes and failures that exist within their world. And this is not with a frame a reference limited to pong and D&D because it some way it is structurally and mentally based on how we perceive history in reality and the historical construct within the game is born from the one recording human history for the last 50,000 years, from oral tradition to misguided texts. It seems to me that for someone who exists in this altnernate universe, the history of said universe would be as interesting, if not much more interesting and important to them than the equivalent history within reality and its meaning to the average joe flipping burgers at Dairy Queen. Whats more exciting, learning about Alexander’s conquest of the known world, or some guy in Utah’s conquest of the known universe and knowing you have the ability to do it yourself? It depends who you are and which world you choose to live it, whether that world is “reality” or a digital construct makes no difference. The past is important in both worlds because it can provide a framework for operation or at the very least fuel competition.
Gregory Stefano writes: “The high scores and kill counts are just as valid in the game world as our war statistics are for people who exist elsewhere.” A good point. But the question might be whether history is really adequately captured in an algorithm or a war in a body count. Games give one a certain understanding of how history works, and perhaps in many ways a quite interesting one. But it is not the only way to think historically.
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The succession — from the oral to the inscriptive — is too absolute, helping to produce the absolute ‘newness’ of independent, ahistorical game-space. The presence of the ‘new’ here depends, I think, on a false succession.
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let us not forget that telesthesia is not solely the domain of the police, but is also increasingly within the purview, (or perhaps is becoming the condition of?) citizenship.
see google-earth
Isn’t that the same thing? Isn’t citizenship merely self-policing?
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