166.
Boredom can be displaced only so far. Even the most deluded of gamers can eventually realize that their strivings have no purpose, that all they have achieved is a hollow trophy, the delusion of value, a meaningless rank built on an arbitrary number. Boredom always returns. Giacomo Leopardi: “The uniformity of pleasure without purpose inevitably produces boredom.” The very action of overcoming boredom reproduces it, when gamer and game reach some impasse. There is always a limit. In games this limit it always given in advance. That’s the very merit of games. In State of Emergency, the game is an allegorithm of its own limited interest. It turns the moment of boredom, the hour propitious for making bombs, into a game as well. It’s a game about the destruction of gamespace — as itself a game. The destruction of gamespace is a game that provides a uniform pleasure with any other game. This is the military entertainment complex at its height, constantly displacing boredom into yet more games.
For the most part, in most game experiences, there is no uniformity of pleasure, unless that uniformity is the lack their of. Rather, the pursuit of a kind of ludic pleasure is one of the points of playing games and this, rather than repetition is the task of the player. Music and sex both are repetitive pointless acts but within them, and games, “the endless”-ness of the “bit-flip” between targets and targeter is one of the greatest pleasures in game play (and cybernetics in general). When we hit this pleasure it is precisely the “endless” and “between” relation which comes out of the “always limit” of games. The limit (time, action, space, coins, resolution etc.) engenders the not-uniform moment of pleasure rather than inhibits it, this may be because game play is, as Caillois, Suits, Salen and Zimmerman point out, emergent.
Sam, i may want to quote some of that… just warning ya now.
I was only trying to find one key to the affective life of gaming, not account for everything about it. And this ‘digital’ quality of targeting seemed a likely candidate.
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