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PLAYING WITH THE FUTURE:
DEVELOPMENT AND DIRECTIONS
IN COMPUTER GAMING

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ABSTRACT

Games and Culture

Graeme Kirkpatrick

This chapter draws on Peter Sloterdijk's notion of a 'critique of temperaments' to explore the cultural significance of the diffusion of computer games . The subjective experience of computer games playing is analysed as a form of 'cynicism'. The hand-held, 'game boy' device is used as a case study and particular reference is made to the 'Marioland' software series.

On the level of the symbolically ordered interface, these games offer the player a narrative sequence of stages, each of which must be completed by the player before she can proceed to the next. However, having been initially seduced by the game's interface, the successful player, must 'see through it' to defeat the machine. When this stage has been reached, the symbolic or narrative structure becomes a distraction and attention is given over to mastery of a meaningless choreography of fingers and thumbs. Playing the game then becomes 'enlightened self-deception'; the player no longer attaches any significance to the feedback that is channelled through the interface, except as a sign that she has made the right move. Those who continue to 'play' nonetheless, do so in spite of the fact that the 'pleasurable', entertainment value of the game has evaporated. They play in spite of, and in full cognisance of, the absence of any sense of play. This affords them a sense of mastery, but dispels the illusion that made them want to play in the first place. They end up mastering something that no longer matters.

The result is a cynical orientation on the part of players, which in turn discloses the social context within which games playing has become a 'normal' activity for adults as well as children. The social diffusion of games is underdetermined by the development of behaviourally complex, accessible technology and imaginative software. The paper explores the social context within which games have taken hold, using the idea that the games playing attitude is consonant with the cynicism explored by Sloterdijk. Elements of the latter's social, cultural and philosophical critique of cynicism are explored in the context of the analysis of games playing. In this way, a novel analysis of the cultural implications of the diffusion of such games is elaborated. In this analysis, the games player is opposed to the figure of the hacker. While the games player is seduced by an illusory mastery of the game, the hacker succumbs to a different kind of compulsion in connection with the machine. This is ostensibly purely technical, devoid of the kind of sumptuous narrative appeal of the games interface. Consequently, the hacker seems to be pathological in his devotion to the machine. However, hacking opens out onto a kind of cheeky, subversive play with the machine and with other users. This temperament is the very opposite of that of the games player (although both may reside in the same person at different times) and the paper attempts to situate it, dialectically, in the same socio-cultural context.

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