I’ve been constructing a syllabus for my media consumption over the next half-year and, of course, I have a lot of video games on it. I usually play video games with a narratively-oriented goal (“to get to the end of the story in order to complete the consumption of the game as a Text”); there is, however, also the ludological approach (“get a sense of the mechanics and get out”) and a hybrid (“get a sense of how the mechanics, and the repeated use of the mechanics, formally construct the narration of the work”).
I was curious about whether there was pre-existing literature on the understanding of video games as Texts, and whether my own biases had a history or if I was better off going for a more … casual approach, than enforcing “completion” on myself each and every time. So I of course asked my research assistant, a language model, and she gave me books that corresponded to books that exist in the real world, and here, I read one of them.
Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext focuses predominantly on hypertext literature and text-based adventure games (think Adventure, not even Zork). The author in reproducing the state of the art references semiotics extensively, but finds semiotics as such — and narrative understandings as such — to be lacking; that is to say, there is no 1:1 sign-to-referent produced on the screen, rather there is a cybernetic system producing signs in a loop between the operator and the machine itself. Likewise, narrative isn’t enough of a term — “nonlinear” isn’t quite right neither is “antinarrative”. “It is something other than narrative.”
The author introduces “ergodic art” as a term,1 though admits it’s not necessarily meant as a codification but as a makeshift terminology, alongside utilising “intrigue”,2 “anamorphosis,”3 “aporia”, and “epiphany” as core components of the cybertext. These texts are not even relegated to machines so much as they are pre-existing systems-as-texts that produce signs, and I would also say in the adoption of a new perspective (becoming a “successful user”) produces a sort of … “pseudo-narrative” understanding of the work.
Not to simply recapitulate the text. I found a lot of the perspectives refreshing to consider, though it didn’t really challenge my own experience of playing games so much as it provided an additional theoretical background, analysing the process of playing them as a broader tradition (that I guess often resembles a state machine with the constituent components and phases as narrative elements…?).
Okay, cool, so I read this book and it turns out playing a game comes down to preference because the game is playing you and you wanted that. So insofar as you understand its perspective and feel fulfilled, you have engaged with the text.
The autism tangent
The author also casually references the entire world of a video game as being autistic:
Personal relations and habits in an adventure game […] might best be described as autistic […] “it may be characterized by meaningless, noncontextual echolalia” […] Inappropriate attachment to objects may occur. There may be underemphasized reaction to sound, no reaction to pain […] the characters you meet in [an adventure game] appear to be living in their own private worlds. When questioned, they often repeat themselves without making sense, and you may stand next to them for hours without any sign that they know you are there.
No judgment on the tangent, but it led me to wonder: what does it mean to live in your own private world? That is, what is the opposite phenomenology? I often feel not reactive enough, though very emotional; I often just repeat other people or make random noises and I know very well the ways in which my responses are creating emotional responses in others without really doing anything about reaching out of myself to correct them. I know when people are emoting and I often … don’t do anything about it, even though I know what they seem to want from me.
But you know what I do find when I play a game? I have an almost superhuman ability to know what the right thing to say is and to say it. That is to say, “this person feels bad, and they definitely want to hear words of comfort, so I will select that choice.” But in real life … it’s not so easy. I find that my own coping mechanisms get in the way, that I inadvertently blurt some caustic remark or give some unhelpful gallows humour.
When I am my character, the decision that is obvious and true is apparent, and I can help others. The character is empty, so I step in. Likewise, if I can understand God as something that is “closer to me than I am to my Self,” then I have to get out of my own way to let that force, the will of Love itself, direct me to that same action. I’m not sure if I am making the analogue evident.
I suppose insofar as I am in the world, I am another being that is coping with the world, and I do things to console myself. And that reaction can seemingly be directed inward back at me, but at the same time I am fully aware it is not helping someone else; they feel unheard; they need the affirmation that only a language model can give them anymore.
Insofar as that response is hard to get from a human, maybe we all became autistic. Insofar as I can get myself to be emptied out for God, I can replicate it. Insofar as I can “role play as God,” having no attachment to the game world and so able to know the right action, do the right thing, directly touch another’s heart, I can learn that same emptiness in life.
Footnotes
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↩So what exactly is the difference between the ergodic and the nonergodic work of art? If we are to define this difference as a dichotomy (and such a definition may well end up serving the ideology it is trying to unmask), it would have to be located within the work rather than within the user. The ergodic work of art is one that in a material sense includes the rules for its own use, a work that has certain requirements built in that automatically distinguishes between successful and unsuccessful users.
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↩I argue that [the adventure game] effectively disintegrates any notion of story by forcing the player’s attention on the elusive “plot.” Instead of a narrated plot, cybertext produces a sequence of oscillating activities effectuated (but certainly not controlled) by the user. But there is nevertheless a structuring element in these texts, which in some way does the controlling or at least motivates it. As a new term for this element I propose intrigue, to suggest a secret plot in which the user is the innocent, but voluntary, target […] with an outcome that is not yet decided …
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↩The principle of anamorphosis, then, is to hide a vital aspect of the artwork from the viewer, an aspect that may be discovered only by the difficult adoption of a non-standard perspective.