Videogames, Identity and Digital Subjectivity

Rob Gallagher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315390925
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book argues that games offer a means of coming to terms with a world that is being transformed by digital technologies. As blends of software and fiction, videogames are uniquely capable of representing and exploring the effects of digitization on day-to-day life. By modeling and incorporating new technologies (from artificial intelligence routines and data mining techniques to augmented reality interfaces), and by dramatizing the implications of these technologies for understandings of identity, nationality, sexuality, health and work, games encourage us to playfully engage with these issues in ways that traditional media cannot.

1 Digital Subjects

Videogames, Technology and Identity

This book makes two claims. The first is that digital technologies are fostering new conceptions of subjectivity and identity. It holds that social networks and smartphones, augmented reality interfaces and biometric sensors, artificial intelligence systems and, indeed, videogames are all changing how we see ourselves, both as individuals and as human subjects. The second claim is that digital games have emerged as a fictional form uniquely equipped to address these changes. If videogames are often framed as symptoms or drivers of a shift towards digital subjectivity, then critics tend to be less willing to acknowledge that they might also be expressive works with things to say about this shift. Across close contextual readings of a wide range of titles, this book makes that case, showing how games get to grips with the implications of digitization in a range of complex and imaginative ways. Like other fictional forms, videogames use words and images, sounds, symbols and spatial metaphors to communicate. But they also ask players to cultivate an understanding of the rules and probabilities, interfaces and economies that structure their virtual worlds. They are simultaneously ludic systems, digital architectures and expressive fictions. If, as fictions, they adapt techniques, scenarios and figures familiar from literature, cinema, the visual arts, pop culture and myth, as software systems they incorporate or model a range of other digital forms (by, say, simulating social networks, mimicking smartphone interfaces or integrating image editing tools and digital shopfronts). By, for and about denizens of those parts of the overdeveloped world that have most enthusiastically adopted digital technologies, the particular games that this book addresses dramatize the effects of new technologies in ways that traditional media cannot, letting us playfully engage questions of identity and nationality, privacy and embodiment, work and space. What does this mean in practice? It means roleplaying games about becoming a reality TV star, gothic mysteries about haunted smartphones, social networking simulations set aboard space stations, augmented reality apps which project adorable monsters into everyday spaces, text adventures about training biomechanical horses and critiques of government surveillance in which we lock ourselves in a bathroom to take explicit selfies – to describe just a few of the games the book covers.

Defining Digital Subjectivity

In arguing that fictional forms, media technologies and models of the subject develop in symbiosis, this book is hardly without precedent. Ian Watt (1959) long ago argued that the emergence of the novel, for example, is intimately bound up with the rise of the modern subject and bourgeois individualism, both recording and helping to effect ‘the transition from the objective, social and public orientation of the classical world to the subjective, individualist and private orientation of the life and literature of the last two hundred years’ (176). Nor do critics like Crary (2001) consider it a coincidence that cinema should have been roughly coeval with the psychoanalytic subject. Jonathan Beller (2006) goes so far as to argue that ‘the unconscious is cinema’s product’, proposing that film provided a ‘precursor of and model for the unconscious as it has been theorized during the twentieth century’ (17, 18). The storytelling strategies and the forms of subjectivation that the novel and the feature film favour were already being challenged before videogames entered the frame. With the advent of television, moving images began to inveigle themselves into audiences’ domestic spaces and quotidian routines. Soaps and serials drew viewers into prolonged, open-ended engagements with fictional people and places as discrete beginning–middle–end narratives were subsumed within the general televisual ‘flow’ (Warhol 2003; Williams 2004 [1974]). Advertisements and, later, music videos pioneered forms of address calculated to elicit affective attunement rather than rational comprehension. With cable and satellite came the rise of channel hopping – embraced by theorists of postmodernity as the perfect metonym for a culture felt to be schizophrenic or attention deficient – and a more ‘interactive’ relationship with media (Featherstone 2007, 5). Home shopping channels, Ceefax and Teletext, video diaries and reality TV began a blurring of fiction and reality, production and consumption that would be accelerated and exacerbated by the Internet. With changes to intellectual property law and the emergence of media conglomerates, meanwhile, came a new emphasis on extending ‘transmedia storyworlds’ across comic books, movies, novels, TV shows, toys and merchandise, web portals, stage shows, live events and tourist attractions (Ryan and Thon 2014).

In the process, videogames have emerged as a fictional form particularly well equipped to help us understand how digital technologies are redrawing the contours of subjectivity and identity. If games retain and remediate techniques familiar from prior media forms, this only makes them better qualified for this task, reflecting the fact that cultural shifts are neither smooth nor sudden, that digital subjects continue to orient themselves using what might seem like obsolete or anachronistic concepts even as they embrace new ones. What, though, is a digital subject? While the nature of digital subjectivity should be clearer by the end of the book, there are six propositions I want to advance at this stage – propositions that will give a sense of why videogames have a special claim when it comes to capturing important dimensions of contemporary experience.

1 Digital subjects belong to a culture of data collection and demography, which treats individuals as ever-expanding masses of information waiting to be aggregated and analysed. In the 1990s, the emergence of the Internet fuelled liberal fantasies of ‘colour-blind’ tolerance and post-structuralist dreams of polymorphous identity play. Today, however, digital subjects are perpetually being sorted and ‘cyber-typed’ along lines of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, age, taste, socio-economic status and medical history (Nakamura 2002; Galloway 2011, 135–137). In the process, the biography, which narrates the individual life as a developmental arc following a logic of cause and effect, is being superseded by the profile, a collection of taxonomic and behavioural data, which becomes a basis for constructing new categories and speculating about future actions. Some profiles deal in fixed, objective and/or empirically verifiable characteristics (height, blood type, eye colour and so on), others in characteristics that are subjective, qualitative or subject to change (tastes, political affiliations, age); in some cases (as with a Facebook page or a LinkedIn profile) individuals will fill in and maintain their own profiles, while in others (as with the profiles Google assembles on the basis of users’ browsing habits or the kill lists given to US drone pilots) this profiling will be automatic and covert.

2 Digital subjects express themselves via ‘autobiographical performances’ and playful acts of self-presentation, from selfies, blogposts and tweets to videogame ‘Let’s Play’ videos (Papacharissi 2015, 98). These activities manifest an understanding of the self as a reflexive project pursued before an audience of potential followers, subscribers, lovers, employers and contacts. As Alexander Galloway (2011) argues, digital culture is founded on a perhaps unlikely combination of ‘romanticism and cybernetic systems theory’ (26, 28); where the influence of romanticism can be seen in online culture’s celebration of ‘creative’ spontaneity and its emphasis on personal perspectives, its debt to systems theory is manifest in the multiplication of feedback mechanisms (likes, follows, subscriptions, replies, retweets) which sort social winners from losers. But where Romantic poets disavowed charges of egoism by pleading fealty to higher callings – divinity, nature, art, liberty and so on – digital culture inherits postmodernity’s suspicion of grand narratives, transcendent signifieds and hoary traditions, prizing innovation, improvisatory élan and the capacity to adapt oneself to new roles, styles and contexts. Flexibility becomes a key attribute: as consumers, digital subjects are expected to seek out new products and experiences; as professionals, they are required to adapt to the changing needs of a volatile labour market; as performers they are expected to keep their personal brands fresh and relevant.

3 The digital subject is very much embodied. That body, however, is increasingly understood in cybernetic terms, by way of ‘human-computer metaphors’ that frame it as a form of ‘wetware’ or a quasi-Cartesian vehicle requiring technocratic management and maintenance (Franklin 2015, xv). As these ideas have gained traction, familiar notions of interiority and psychological depth have come under strain. Where Enlightenment philosophers argued that ‘man’ was essentially rational, and where Freud posited an unconscious realm to which unacceptable memories, wishes and ideas were banished, in the era of the ‘new unconscious’ attempts to explain (and indeed to influence) our behaviour are more likely to draw on cybernetics, behaviourism, big data, game theory, genetics, neuroscience and evolutionary biology (Galloway 2011, 28). Subjects become ‘black boxes’, signal-processing mechanisms whose workings are knowable only to the extent that given stimuli reliably elicit given responses (Galloway 2012, 242; Franklin 2015, 92–93).

These developments have important repercussions for our understanding of agency. For transhumanists, new technologies promise to grant digital subjects greater choice and control, enabling us to transcend the limits and circumvent the ‘bugs’ evolution has bequeathed us. Behind these fantasies, though, lie fears of being out of control or subject to another’s control, of technologies being used to circumvent our rational decision-making faculties and trick us into behaving against our best interests. If we can be patched and upgraded like digital systems, can’t we also be hacked and (re)programmed? Such fears are intensifying as more authority is granted to human-engineered but increasingly autonomous algorithms and artificial intelligences. Where it was once possible to see technology as a means of prosthetically extending human capacities, Mark B.N. Hansen (2015) argues that today this is no longer the case (221); rather, digital subjects must share their sovereignty with nonhuman agents whose modes of apprehending and acting upon reality are often very different to ours.

4 The digital subject is networked, a node linked to other nodes by strong or weak ties to form the ‘social graphs’ that are superseding more established models for understanding relationships and communities. While this emphasis on collectivity and connection might seem to be at odds with my claim that digital culture is individualistic, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2016) explains that the brilliance of what she calls ‘N(YOU) media’ lies in their capacity to address a ‘you’ that hovers between the singular and the plural (3–4). In digital culture, personal success entails expanding and effectively mobilizing one’s contacts, and the winners are those who learn to navigate networks confidently. Digital subjects often express themselves through avatars, mouthpieces and aliases, using templates and stock formats (catchphrases, hashtags, fonts, memes) to mediate between the personal and the collective in ways calculated to foster connections and collective identities. As we will see in Chapter 3, they also seek to avoid ‘context collapse’ by tailoring their behaviour to the norms of the spaces in which they find themselves – be those spaces online, offline (or, as is increasingly the case) layered, hybrid environments (Marwick and boyd 2011).

5 For the digital subject, work and play may be hard to separate – a prospect by no means as utopian as it might sound. For Kirkpatrick (2013), videogames are a product of the shift towards a more ‘ludic’ model of capitalism, a shift which saw employers attempting to address growing dissatisfaction with the stultifying monotony and rigid hierarchies of the Fordist workplace by recasting work as more creative, fulfilling and flexible (27–30). This entailed capitalizing on the capabilities of information technologies to reorient overdeveloped economies away from industry and towards forms of immaterial, intellectual and affective labour in the creative and service sectors. The promise was of entrepreneurial individuals liberated to pursue forms of ‘passionate work’ suited to their abilities, interests and personal commitments (McRobbie 2016, 36). The reality, however, has been one of aggressive deskilling, greater precarity, fiercer competition and widening inequality, as training programmes, jobs for life, opportunities for advancement, pension funds and employment benefits are scrapped or curtailed along with the other perks and concessions put in place to reconcile workers to the Fordist order of things. As this suggests, while ‘ludic capitalism’ might sound more agreeable than its forebears, it is not just about ‘paidiac’ playfulness and creativity but also the drive to game the system, maximize advantages and exploit rivals’ weaknesses (Caillois 2001 [1958], 27). Whether they are scrabbling for the next pitch, gig or short-term contract, striving to survive the next downsizing or attempting to build a lucrative personal brand, digital subjects are always playing the game. Meanwhile data mining has turned what were once leisure activities into a form of unpaid work, allowing companies like Google, Microsoft and Netflix to extract value from activities like browsing the web, playing games or watching movies. If videogames promise an escape from the stresses of professional life they also recapitulate ludic capitalism’s logic of productivity and entrepreneurial endeavour – as we shall see in Chapter 7.

6 Finally, digital subjects play digital games. Where videogames were once a comparatively niche pursuit, today this is no longer the case. Retirees play Scrabble with family members via Facebook; commuters while away their train journeys with rounds of Candy Crush; Norwegian prime ministers are caught playing Pokémon GO in the middle of parliamentary debates (Cresci 2016). But while most people now have some experience of playing digital games, this does not necessarily mean they would describe themselves as ‘gamers’. It’s to this distinction and its implications that I want to turn now.

Ludo Ergo Sum

When I refer to ‘gamers’ and ‘gamer culture’, I am talking about subjects who have made digital gaming a core part of their lives and identities. The term gamer brings with it a range of associations, and like all collective identities, it fits some of those it is applied to more snugly than others. Gaming enthusiasm also comes in many flavours: devotees of certain genres and platforms might spurn others, and passionate subcultures and fan communities often form around franchises and practices in which the majority of gamers might have no interest. There are, however, some important traits and tendencies that have long been characteristic of ‘gamer culture’ as a whole – or, at least of Anglophone gamer culture, on which this book focuses. Here Graeme Kirkpatrick’s recent work on the genealogy of the ‘gamer’ archetype and of gaming as a cultural field becomes useful. He proposes that one of the key concepts around which gamer culture coalesces is that of ‘gameplay’, held to be the key quality that elevates some games above others and differentiates videogames as a form from other media (2013, 78–81). To appreciate ‘good gameplay’ is to appreciate digital games as finely tuned ludic structures, platforms for competition and opportunities to acquire and demonstrate a mastery of technology. As this suggests, while gamers certainly appreciate lore and trivia, pretty graphics, catchy soundtracks and memorable character designs, gamer culture is (as I discuss in Chapter 6) highly invested in the idea of seeing through the interface to discern the systems and mechanics that lie beneath. Gamer culture is also Janus-faced: rife with nostalgic affection for ‘retro’ games that become ciphers for lost childhoods, it also enthusiastically embraces new technologies, showing an unwavering faith in the ability of new hardware to open the way to play experiences more involving and rewarding than those that have come before. Beyond its privileging of gameplay, its fascination with new technologies and its nostalgic investment in the ‘retro’, however, gaming culture’s key defining trait is its intimate but awkward relationship with the figure of the ‘geeky’ white, middle-class male (Thornham 2011, 50, 71; Kirkpatrick 2012; Shaw 2014, viii). For a long time, digital games were dismissed as the preserve of children, or else of nerds and loners seeki...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Digital Subjects: Videogames, Technology and Identity
• 2 Datafied Subjects: Profiling and Personal Data
• 3 Private Subjects: Secrecy, Scandal and Surveillance
• 4 Beastly Subjects: Bodies and Interfaces
• 5 Synthetic Subjects: Horror and Artificial Intelligence
• 6 Mobile Subjects: Framing Selves and Spaces
• 7 Productive Subjects: Time, Value and Gendered Feelings
• Index