The Interface Envelope

Gaming, Technology, Power

James Ash

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781623565572
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In The Interface Envelope, James Ash develops a series of concepts to understand how digital interfaces work to shape the spatial and temporal perception of players. Drawing upon examples from videogame design and work from post-phenomenology, speculative realism, new materialism and media theory, Ash argues that interfaces create envelopes, or localised foldings of space time, around which bodily and perceptual capacities are organised for the explicit production of economic profit. Modifying and developing Bernard Stiegler's account of psychopower and Warren Neidich's account of neuropower, Ash argues the aim of interface designers and publishers is the production of envelope power. Envelope power refers to the ways that interfaces in games are designed to increase users perceptual and habitual capacities to sense difference. Examining a range of examples from specific videogames, Ash identities a series of logics that are key to producing envelope power and shows how these logics have intensified over the last thirty years. In turn, Ash suggests that the logics of interface envelopes in videogames are spreading to other types of interface. In doing so life becomes enveloped as the environments people inhabit becoming increasingly loaded with digital interfaces. Rather than simply negative, Ash develops a series of responses to the potential problematics of interface envelopes and envelope power and emphasizes their pharmacological nature.

1

Introduction

As the window of a Web browser replaced cinema and television screen, the art gallery wall, library and book, all at once, the new situation manifested itself: All culture, past and present, came to be filtered through a computer, with its particular human-computer interface.

MANOVICH (2001: 64)

[the interface is] … the place where flesh meets metal or, in the case of systems theory, the interface is the place where information moves from one entity to another, from one node to another within the system.

GALLOWAY (2009: 936)

As Lev Manovich argues, human life in the western world is increasingly mediated by digital, computational interfaces. Computers, laptops, tablet PCs, mobile phones, videogames and many other devices operate as the medium through which a variety of activities are undertaken. In a general sense, as Alexander Galloway suggests, the term ‘interface’ refers to a surface or point of contact between two entities. These can be between a human being and a technical object (in the case of a tool) or between two technical objects (in the case of software). As such, an interface can be a door handle, a steering wheel or a baseball bat as much as graphical user interface on a personal computer or a key on a keyboard. Further reflecting on the concept of interface in relation to software, Galloway (2009: 936) goes on to argue:

the interface becomes the point of transition between different mediatic layers within any nested system. The interface is an ‘agitation’ or generative friction between different formats. In computer science, this happens very literally; an ‘interface’ is the name given to the way in which one glob of code can interact with another. Since any given format finds its identity merely in the fact that it is a container for another format, the concept of interface and medium quickly collapse into one and the same thing.

Any serious consideration of what an interface is opens up a broader question about the relationship between concepts of the medium, object and technology. Upon closer examination an interface appears to be a medium itself, a piece of technological equipment as well as an object. Understandings of the interface (digital or otherwise) as a surface or space of contact are also loaded with specific assumptions about how objects, whether natural or technical, encounter and relate to one another in general. Indeed, questions about what an object is, what a technical object is and how these objects relate to one another are a central concern of philosophy itself. Famously, Martin Heidegger (1982: 4–5) argued that technology has been understood from an ‘instrumental perspective’:

we ask the question concerning technology when we ask what it is. Everyone knows the two statements that answer our question. One says: Technology is a means to an end. The other says: Technology is a human activity. The two definitions of technology belong together. For to posit ends and procure and utilize the means to them is a human activity. The manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools and machines, the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and ends they serve, all belong to what technology is. The whole complex of these contrivances is technology … . Who would ever deny that it is correct.

Drawing upon Heidegger’s definition, interfaces can be understood as mediums, objects and technologies. They exist in order to fulfil operations and, thus, are a means to an end; they are created through the human shaping of matter and also operate as a tool for human action. Despite his own criticism of the definition, Heidegger’s (1982: 20) instrumental account remains prevalent. Implicit in this narrative is an assumption that objects are ultimately substances with specific properties and that what differentiates technology from naturally occurring objects is the extent to which these properties have been manipulated by humans. For example, a stone is a natural object that has been produced by non-human processes such as erosion or weathering, while a flint is a technical one, because the flint has been broken by humans against other stones to create a sharpened point.

This book demonstrates that, as technical objects, interfaces can be understood in ways that are not reducible to this instrumentality. By rethinking categories surrounding ‘matter’, ‘objects’ and ‘technology’, the chapters that follow develop a series of concepts in order to understand human practices with interfaces as potentially productive of what I term ‘spatio-temporal envelopes’. For now, envelopes can be defined as localized foldings of space-time that work to shape human capacities to sense space and time for the explicit purpose of creating economic value for the designers and creators of these interfaces. Through examining a number of contemporary videogames, I argue that creating economic value in this way can be understood as a new form of power, which I term envelope power.

Videogames are a useful site to theorize these interface envelopes for a number of reasons. First, videogame interface design is subject to rapid and continual change and so offers a window into the technical historicity of the interface. The past twenty years have seen huge innovations in how information is conveyed to players in videogames. Games consoles have moved from simple, single-button joysticks to a situation in which a large number of players now interact with games using remotes and cameras that can register complex forms of analogue bodily movement. Videogames, therefore, offer a wealth of examples of different Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) all of which have different logics and mechanics (Jørgensenn 2013). This allows us to study different videogames and analyse the different envelopes they attempt to generate.

Second, videogame interfaces are at the forefront of interface technology, both in terms of the devices used to control videogames and in terms of the software engines that run the games themselves. The Nintendo Wii gestural remote, the Playstation Move gestural remote and camera and the Xbox Kinect camera all radically reframe how players interface with games consoles. Technologies of gestural interface existed before these systems, but videogames have led the way in integrating these systems into mass-produced consumer devices (Jones and Thiruvathukal 2012).

Third, the logic of videogame interfaces is spreading to other areas and forms of life outside of games. Videogames can be considered as a barometer for broader developments in interface design. For example, in a promotional ‘vision video’ (Kinsley 2010) for their Kinect camera sensor, Microsoft (2011) points to a range of non-gaming applications for the device. The video depicts a range of scenarios including a surgeon using the Kinect to manipulate visual patient files without having to re-sterilize themselves and a child using game-like programmes as part of physiotherapy. While these are ‘visionary’ rather than actual applications of the technology, videogames offer a window through which to understand the multiple forms, logics and possible futures of the digital interface more generally.

We can use the concept of the envelope to identify shifts that are occurring in videogame design and understand the effects of these envelopes on players’ spatio-temporal perception. There is a trend in current big-budget videogame design and publishing (often referred to as AAA or triple A games) towards attempting to encourage players to concentrate on a modulating present moment, in an increasingly narrow spatio-temporal envelope of perception. The ways in which videogame interfaces are designed are central to the production of these narrow envelopes. A theory of interface envelopes can help us to critically reflect upon the forms of ‘presentness’ that videogames enable, how this presentness shapes the reflective and critical thinking of players and the extent to which this presentness may be spreading to other types of non-videogame interface.

Attention, economy, power

The concepts of envelopes and envelope power can be understood in the context of emerging claims around how interfaces operate as the site of new economies and forms of power. Writers such as Bernard Stiegler (2010a), Katherine Hayles (2007) and Douglas Rushkoff (2013) argue that the content presented through digital interfaces, such as television, videogames and social media, is creating a form of distracted present in which human capacities for imagination, long-term thinking and careful reflection are being broken down. Rather than developing ‘deep’ modes of attention, based around temporally elongated activities such as reading, these industries create a ‘hyper’ attention, where increasing levels of stimulation are required to keep viewers interested in a single subject or topic (Hayles 2007). In Rushkoff’s (2013: 3–4) estimation, the digital world is creating a ‘multitasking brain, actually incapable of storage or sustained argument’, leading to what both he and Stiegler (2009a) term a ‘temporal disorientation’. Instead of gaining pleasure from focusing on one activity, ‘we hop from choice to choice with no present at all. Our availability to experience flow or to seize the propitious moment is minimised as our choices per second are multiplied by a dance partner who doesn’t see or feel us’ (Rushkoff 2013: 115). In turn ‘we lose the ability to imagine opportunities emerging and excitement arising from pursuing whatever we are currently doing, as we compulsively anticipate the next decision point’ (Rushkoff 2013: 116). This breakdown of narrative, which Turner (1998) argues is central to how we interpret, understand and make sense of our lives and the world, has a profound effect; it creates what Rushkoff terms a ‘perpetual present tense’ or ‘perpetual now’.

This form of presentness should not be confused with a positive state of what Csikszentmihalyi (2009) has called flow, or as some form of digital mindfulness. In Rushkoff’s (2013: 4) words:

we are not approaching some Zen state of an infinite moment, completely at one with our surroundings, connected to others, and aware of ourselves on any fundamental level. Rather we tend to exist in a distracted present, where forces on the periphery are magnified and those immediately before us are ignored. Our ability to create a plan – much less follow through on it – is undermined by our need to improvise our way through any number of external impacts that stand to derail us at any moment. Instead of finding a stable foothold in the here and now, we end up reacting to the ever present assault of simultaneous impulses and commands.

Beyond individual negative effects, Stiegler suggests that, in attempting to control attention, these so-called ‘cultural industries’ also create problems for the construction of social relations. The issue with attention controlling apparatuses such as social media is ‘that … [they] … destroy … attention itself, along with the ability to concentrate on the object of attention, which is a social faculty; the construction of such objects is in fact the construction of society itself, as civil space founded on cultural knowledge, including social graces, expertise and critical thinking (i.e. contemplation)’ (Stiegler 2010a: 13). To illustrate this, Stiegler (2013a: 82–83) gives the example of families who all sit separately in front of their own screens and so do not spend time learning to identify or relate to one another. Stiegler argues this is problematic because parents do not pass on somatic skills such as empathy or care to their children, which he considers to be the skills that are key to forming strong communities and societies.

In ‘Taking Care of Youth and the Generations’, Stiegler (2010a) terms this process of capturing and holding attention by market forces an ‘attention economy’. Beller (2006: 4) suggests that attention is ‘the newest source of value production under capitalism today’. For Beller (2006: 4), reality itself becomes organized around the production of a ‘cinematic’ form of attention: ‘The cinematic organization of attention yields a situation in which attention, in all forms imaginable and yet to be imagined … is that necessary cybernetic relation to the socius – the totality of the social’. Attention becomes both a finite, exchangeable commodity and a necessary relation that offers access to others in the world. As Goldhaber (1997: n.p.) puts it ‘having attention is very, very desirable, in some ways infinitely so, since the larger the audience, the better. And, yet, attention is also difficult to achieve owing to its intrinsic scarcity. That combination makes it the potential driving force of a very intense economy’. Put simply, the question of attention is important because, as Stiegler argues, the capture of attention through a variety of ‘psychotechniques’ is central to the monetization of audiences through advertising, the development of brand loyalty and the blurring of boundaries between work and play in a variety of media (Stiegler et al. 2007, Stiegler 2009a: 38, Yee 2009, Paul 2010, Crogan and Kinsley 2012).

From this perspective, videogame interfaces can be understood as part of a ‘global cultural industry’ (Lash and Lury 2007, Kirkpatrick 2013) and an example of the latest state of what has also been termed ‘cognitive capitalism’ (Brophy 2011, Peters et al. 2011, Boutang 2012), the explicit aim of which is the manipulation of perception in order to create economic value. In the case of videogame interfaces, positive affect and attention have economic value that designers attempt to generate to keep players engaged with the game and willing to consume further iterations of that game in the future. However, it is not straightforwardly the case that these industries work to create a ‘perpetual now’ (Rushkoff 2013: 261) in order to create profit; the techniques utilized in videogame and interface design attempt to modulate players’ capacities for recollection and anticipation within envelopes of differing length. In this way, interfaces can be understood as generating a continuously modulating now, in which the ability to reflect on the past and anticipate the future are opened and closed in ways that are specific to this or that envelope. I term this form of productive and active modulation envelope power. As I outline in Chapters 3, 4 and 5, envelope power is influenced by, but distinct from, what Stiegler (2010b) terms psychopower (the specific capacity of media technologies to capture and hold attention) and Neidich (2013) refers to as neuropower (the construction of synaptic and habitual relations in the body and brain in order to influence consumer decision-making). In contrast, envelope power is the capacity of interfaces to organize the relationship between memory and anticipation through the production of localized foldings of space-time in order to generate economic value.

Envelope power relies upon the active contingency and the productive skills consumers generate through practices of consumption. While videogame mechanics can be developed to encourage users to hold negative affects in their bodies for long periods with negative implications (see Chapter 6), at the same time, the envelope power videogames generate also sensitizes players’ bodies to cultivate new capacities to sense difference between increasingly small units of space and time. The ‘microeconomy of attention’ (Stiegler 2010a: 94) that envelope power tries to tap into is not about mobilizing a pre-given attentional structure, or creating docile bodies (Foucault 1977), but about actively opening up and creating new capacities for attention and affect that can be mined in order to realize new forms of embodied and habitual value.

Investigating and questioning Stiegler and Rushkoff’s critique of digital presentness is important, not just because of the popularity of videogames, but because the logics that underlie these forms of game design are bleeding out into broader processes and technologies in everyday life. Interface envelopes are not just limited to videogames but can be used to understand other interfaces and how they might shape human capacities to sense space and time. Analysing concrete examples of these technologies in action (as I do in Chapter 7) allows us to explore the extent to which they encourage the emergence of new critical faculties of response to attentional economies, or whether these capacities simply draw players further into circuits of consumption linked to these interfaces, as writers such as Steigler and Rushkoff assume.

Post-phenomenology and new materialism

To discuss envelopes and envelope power, the book develops a series of concepts that are informed and influenced by work in phenomenology (Heidegger 1962), speculative realism (Bryant et al. 2011, Harman 2013, Gratton 2014), object-orientated ontology (Bogost 2012) and new materialist theory (Bennett 2009, Roberts 2012, Lapworth 2013) to form what could be termed a ‘post-phenomenology’ (Ihde 2008, 2010, Ash and Simpson 2014). Although a very broad term, phenomenology is a school of thought that attempts to describe the world through the ways in which it appears to the human being without recourse to prior theories (scientific or otherwise) that would purport to explain such experience (Merleau-Ponty 2002: vii–x). Drawing upon and critiquing phenomenology, writers in speculative realism, object-orientated ontology and new materialism share an enthusiasm for rethinking basic questions around what matter and objects are. For example, Graham Harman (2002: 19) argues that ‘inanimate objects are not just manipulable clods of matter, nor philosophical dead weight best left to positive science. Instead, they are more like undiscovered planets, stony or gaseous worlds which ontology is now obliged to colonise with a full array of probes or seismic instruments – most of them not yet invented’.

This desire for a renewed engagement and exploration of objects emerges from recent critiques of philosophy, which argue that traditional phenomenology (amongst many other philosophical schools) is trapped within what Quentin Meillassoux terms a ‘correlationist’ perspective. Meillassoux (2010: 5) defines correlationism as a perspective that argues ‘we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from one another’. In other words, any knowledge or experience of the world is partial, situated and human. Harman argues that the result of this is that accounts of matter, or objects in the external world, have generally been reduced to how they appear to consciousness. As Harman (2005: 16) puts it, ‘the object is stripped of all independent power and considered only insofar as it flares into human view’. Stripped of this power, objects become understood as forms of inert, passive matter that only become powerful when manipulated or used by humans.

Work in object-orientated ontology, speculative realism and new materialism offers a challenge to phenomenology to think about how sensory experience is shaped by the world in ways that aren’t reducible to or necessarily experienced by consciousness. For ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Interface
• 3. Resolution
• 4. Technicity
• 5. Envelopes
• 6. Ecotechnics
• 7. Envelope Life
• 8. Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint