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Targeting games would seem the least likely to need the support of a framing storyline, and yet they almost always have one. A gamer might watch the introductory cut scenes, or idly scan the back story printed on the insert inside the box, but no more than once. Yet these storylines have a purpose that they fulfill simply by existing, even when they are ignored. Storylines release the gamer from entrapment in the net. They draw a line between a character and its enemy. They polarize a net into antagonistic fronts — even if these fronts are not spatially separate. Indeed, there may be dark labyrinthine twists that fold one front around and against the other, as in games such as Deus Ex. Storylines have a particular role in framing the action of targeting, it relieves one of responsibility toward that from which one cuts away a self. Storylines frame the possibility of separating self from other, so that the other may legitimately become a target. The defeat of the other reopens the instability between self-other that is characteristic of a network, hence the need for the story to regenerate the separation all over again.

142.

The storyline is the gamer’s alibi. While the gamer is immersed in a world of pure digital relations, flipping the switch between self and other, playing out the possibilities of a consistent and stable time that can be defeated, the storyline insists that there is some other point to it all. One is fighting the bad guys. Many games tend toward fanciful sci fi storylines, like Rez or Deus Ex, or perverse ones, where one plays the bad guy rather than the good one, such as State of Emergency or Grand Theft Auto, precisely because storyline is merely an alibi. You are elsewhere. You are not in the topographic space where storyline cuts a moral line between self and other, us and them, good and evil. You are in an amoral space where lines merge and converge everywhere, ceaselessly transforming from one shape to another, without a break. storyline is the bad faith of the game. Read it as if it were like a novel or a movie and it seems ridiculous. Storylines cannot be read as morals. Games are not morality tales. But their backstories can be read as allegories. The storyline provides a key to the relation between the effective enclosure of signs within the game as a system of values and the ineffective enclosure of signs within gamespace, caught between values and meanings.

143.

The backstory to gamespace in general is not of paradise lost, but of a paradise that refuses to arrive. It is an Apple with fatal bugs in its operating system that never delivers the seamless interface of human and machine. The smooth and inevitable rise of the ‘network society’ stalls on persistent glitches. More and more advanced forms of network intelligence arise to solve these problems, which reappear regardless. In Rez this intelligence is called Eden. However — the story goes — “Eden became confused when the flow of information being sent to it began to greatly increase in speed and volume. Eden started to question the meaning of existence and the consequences of its actions. Finding itself surrounded by paradoxes, and realizing the power of autonomy which it possessed, Eden began to shut itself down.” Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to travel into Eden’s network and reawaken the system, overcoming its fire walls and destroying viruses that populate it.

144.

The backstory for Rez in particular concerns the relation between topology and gamespace. The dense network of lines that make up topology put every thing in transit and make all signs of things transitive. Everything is in motion toward something else; every sign is passing over to another. Topology gives rise to the always failing, always incomplete attempt to make a game of it, in which transit along any line has a goal and a limit. The storyline of Rez is an allegory of this forlorn hope that the shot in transit might have reason to hit its target. The game of Rez is an allegorithm in which the play of opening and closing the aperture of the self finds its logic.

145.

In Rez the enemy is the network itself. Or rather, the enemy is the monstrous possibility of the network separating itself from the gamer. Separation is the gamer’s prerogative. In Rez the gamer’s mission is to the save the network from itself, from its difference from the gamer, from its self-inflicted death. The gamer risks autonomy in targeting in order to restore it at the moment of victory, empowered and enhanced. But the goal, strangely enough, is to bring the network back from the brink of autonomy, to restore its seamless, selfless continuity — a continuity which presumably includes the gamer. The paradox of targeting is that by closure the gamer opens towards the net. In Rez, the storyline sustains the alibi that it is the net itself which closes to the gamer, and hence makes itself a target, eliciting its own opening.

(1) Comments for 141.

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John Tyson

posted: 4/2/2007

Let me preface by saying a few things:

-I find your concept for this book fascinating, especially because I feel that in order for gaming to gain popular respect as a social art form, rather than an entertainment commodity, we need to explore ways to criticize it. Part of the reason games are marginalized as an art form is that nobody knows quite what to make of them yet – all the aesthetic tools previously used for analysing things don’t quite fit. In a similar fashion to what had to happen when film began to emerge as a new form, new strategies and tools must be devised to make sense of this new medium. I therefore wholeheartedly support what you’re working toward with this book.

-I have not yet had a chance to read the entire book, nor this whole article – I am reading this first because I am especially interested in Rez for several reasons I’ll mention in a moment.

-That said, I feel you may have missed the especially interesting part of Rez. What you are discussing here (the act of targeting, the self/other relationship, etc) is valid and interesting, but it applies to virtually all battle games – the difference in Rez is simply the exact method of targeting (holding a button and then releasing; in most games this act would be a purely mental one.) The truly interesting part of Rez is the fact that playing the game is an act of musical creation. Everything your character does has a sonic equivalent, and it’s all sequenced in time with the pulsing soundtrack. Different enemies emit different sounds when locked onto or killed, and different tones are emitted depending on how many enemies you lock onto at once. You can also control when the background groove advances to the next bar of music by deciding when to finish off that little floating thing at the end of each section.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to explore Rez as a new mode of musical creation? We are traditionally used to the idea of a musician sitting down with an instrument specifically to engage in the act of music. In Rez, on the other hand, the creator is sitting down to play the game – the music is created incidentally.

Another thing you might not have known about Rez is that it has enjoyed success in certain subcultures as a sex toy. The PS2 version was released in Japan with an extra device called the “Rez Trance Vibrator.” It plugged into the USB port on the PS2, and vibrated in time with the music in the game, including the actions of the player. It’s anyone’s guess exactly what the device was actually intended for, but it’s fairly obvious what it was used for. Because of the degree of interactivity in the use of the device, it became not just a masturbatory aid, but also part of foreplay/lovemaking for couples.

Here’s a bit more info about this stuff, it’s an article I wrote for The1880, an independant Emerson blog. Take a look if you like! http://www.the1880.com/2007/03/27/rez-the-synthesis-of-interactive-media-electronic-music-and-auto-erotic-stimulation/

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Razi

posted: 10/25/2006

This is so cool! Our minds becoming such that we long to not break connection with this abstract world.

To quote 150: “The whole pulses and jives to this tempo of making, breaking and remaking alterity, the bounds of one and zero, presence and absence.”

It seems that Rez embraces the digital gaming medium as self aware and in doing so increases the sense of suspended disbelief. And in this the gamer constantly fights time to keep the moment intact to remain connected. So many games attempt to recreate our reality instead of encancing digital reality in it’s own right. With our capacity to reason in the abstact it is a shame there are not more games that totaly self aware as digital embraces itself and alows the mind to morph into it’s rules.

McKenzie Wark responds to Razi

Razi writes: “It seems that Rez embraces the digital gaming medium as self aware and in doing so increases the sense of suspended disbelief. And in this the gamer constantly fights time to keep the moment intact to remain connected.”

That’s a terrific summary of the idea here.

Christian McCrea

posted: 11/27/2006

This discussion was fantastic; I want to add only an anecdote to elaborate on the points made here. I met Tetsuya Mizuguchi here in Melbourne a couple of years ago and quizzed him about Rez’s status of a game about game history.

He was adamant in saying that this was not the purpose, but was keenly aware of the implications of making a game in which “you shoot down languages, each enemy is a letter in a dead language” (which he means very literally) and intimated Rez is actually “about learning how to use computers, and then going beyond use, and then going beyond that again, always beyond.. but not exploration, more like a long fall”

His presentation of the history of Rez began with his inspiration: washer-women songs of contemporary South Africa with their call-and-response, sending vibration and sound to respond to a single singer’s improvised action.

He went on to show footage of Rez before he had to comprimise with Sega – available on You-Tube and a mighty companion to the finished game.

So card/page 145 is very true in its reading of closure, I think, especially given this anecdotal experience, and the alibi notion rings true.

I am looking at fig. 6 and thinking where ‘target’ is situated. Part of me thinks this model is readable for all but the most important part of the game; not Eden, but the Running Man boss battle. Victory there is survival over dread and Callois’s vertigo model resurfaces briefly before shattering into a hundred yellow squares and reaffirming the system.