An interplay of methods

Mapping the Apparatus: Event, Image and Subject

3.0 An interplay of methods

This thesis produces a cartography of how movement of the FPS’ interface is incited, enacted and sensed. The aim of this act of aesthetic and corporeal mapping is to coordinate the player’s activity with the operation of macroscopic political techniques. For Foucault (2008),

neoliberalism is a form of governmentality wherein there is an extension of free market

behaviour, the production of affectively intense ‘dangerous’ competitive environments and the subjectification of self-interested insecure actors into every sphere of existence: biology, family, criminality (Foucault 2008: 223). Suturing this contagious and mutating economic doctrine with the FPS entails a move away from the desire to approach the videogame apparatus in terms of its explicit programming of gestures, such as those patterned in the iconic spaces of Foucault’s disciplinary society (1991). I am concerned with reading the player’s actions and their causes as a form of indirect governance, an ‘acting upon action’ (Rose 1999) that constitutes and manages the individual in Western culture defined by the tension in liberalism between fostering

freedom and the need to manage its expression within certain parameters (see also, Esposito 2008:74).

This thesis has a double-edged methodological approach. As noted in my introduction, recent work by Alva Nöe (2006) has highlighted the co-constitution of perception and action, and the FPS is an apparatus that reproduces this dynamic synthesis of the senses. The interception of this linkage between seeing and doing means that the ludic, story and spatial elements encountered by the player are only concretised by their unpredictable gestures and may be elided altogether as the perspective is pushed and dragged, raking and twitching into and across the multiplayer maps of Call of Duty: Black Ops III (2016), for example. This raises the

methodological question how to capture what Martti Lahti has called the ‘delirium’ (2003) and

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Pasi Väliaho the ‘rich rhythmic sensory stream’ (2014: 35) of these unique visual, psychological and somatic events? In Postmodernism, Jameson (1991) quotes a lengthy passage from Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1978), report from the Vietnam War as a crystalisation of the former’s idea regarding the changing spatiality of postmodernity which also seemed to resonate with the hallucinatory and affectively dense screened and embodied event of playing the FPS:

He was a moving-target-survivor subscriber, a true child of the war, because except for rare times when you were pinned or stranded the system was geared up to keep you mobile, if that was what you thought you wanted…the more you moved the more you saw the more besides death and mutilation you risked, and the more you risked of that the more you would have to let go of one day as a ‘survivor.’(cited in Jameson 1991: 45)

It is the evocative visceral power of Herr’s account – which is not an authoritative cartography of the conflict taking in its broader context with a panoptic and god-like gaze but like a first-person rush down tunnels of risk with which an account of the FPS’s power as it is experienced and sensed should begin. Similarly, I write front-line autoethnographic accounts of the intimate experiential texture of playing rather than beginning with the analysis of isolated, fixed and recurring interactions determined by the FPS’s ludic rules, narrative structures or spaces.

Adams, Jones and Ellis note that ‘The term autoethnography invokes the self (auto), culture (ethno), and writing (graphy). When we do autoethnography, we study and write culture form the perspective of the self’ (2015: 46). However, in this thesis, the ‘self’ that is being both produced and revealed is the product of the FPS as a particular technocultural apparatus of power. The perspective of this ‘self’ is less a self-reflexive writer-ethnographer than it is a report of a stream of sensations, emotions and perceptions that are unfolded in the collision of body and apparatus.

It is noteworthy, given the obvious expressive power of the written word, that Brian Rotman (2008) has argued that the alphabet cancels the body’s spectrum of gestural expression. There is an irony, then, in the fact that I attempt to articulate manual and on-screen gestures and

sensations through autoethnographic writing – a ‘disembodying’ medium, in Rotman’s terms (2008: 3). This apparent detachment from the body is exacerbated by the fact that the

appearance of the player’s gestures on the screen is such that they have already been translated into code and this code itself has mutated into a screen-based aesthetic by technical processes of calculation and graphical rendering. The written word is not a portal into the body or

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experience of the player, but a doubly mediated and regulated ghost sensed by the body, gestured through the apparatus and passed through the code of the written word.

As a methodological counterbalance to this autoethnographic alphabetical inscription of the event of playing, I also analyse repeating or visually ineluctable elements of the FPS interface, such as the graphic elements of the HUD. Encompassing Panofsky’s three-stage search of the intrinsic meaning of the image in Studies in Iconology (1972), I complicate the hermeneutic distance implied by Panofsky’s method with more contemporary conceptualisations of the image that emphasise how it is animated by the body (Belting 2011) while also having its own desires and fetishistic lacks (Mitchell 2005). However, in a situation like the FPS, this animation is not simply a colonisation of the body by a desirous and ghost-like entity, but a lack that demands action, hailing the body and bringing the image closer to a corporeal and technological event. Gerere, the Latin root of the English word gesture means literally ‘to carry, manage, conduct’. When we consider the image of the FPS, we have a gesturing that is not just

expressive of the player, but one that carries the image’s desires into the world via the interface.

The boundaries between the animation of the image and the self-directed activity of the player are enmeshed in a situation in which the image is not only anthropological, but the human being – the anthropos – is invaded and shaped as an image.

The reader might ask how you can be at once the subject of the game’s affective regime and adopt the posture, reserve and objectivity of the analyst. However, this tension between apprehending the FPS as an experience and as an image is both replicated and explored in this thesis in the sense that the apparatuses of modernity and late modernity colonise and subjectify the individual often through the power of the image, fogging subject—object relations via the production of cinematic bodies, for example (see Shaviro 1993, Barker 2009). In videogames, the player has the means to respond to this colonisation of the imagination and the body by the apparatus in that they can feed their gestures (whether as actions or reactions, deliberate or impulsive) back into the screen. The form of this gesture is doubled as a manual input and a screen-based movement. However, a player does not look at their hands when they play, but at the screen which is the site of the game’s veridicality. But what of previous approaches to analysing the FPS? What can the methodological strategies that shape the discourse and conception of the FPS reveal. And what omissions and inclusions do their maps articulate?

75 3.1 Capturing the ‘event’ of the videogame

Writing about id’s Doom (1993), Espen Aarseth sought to distinguish between ergodic forms such as the videogame and previous image and literary cultures. For Aarseth:

Ergodic phenomena are produced by some kind of cybernetic system, i.e., a machine (or a human) that operates as an information feedback loop, which will generate a different semiotic sequence each time it is engaged. Thus, a film such as The Sound of Music or a copy of a novel such as Finnegans Wake is not ergodic... The experiences of their audience, though individual in an interpretational sense, are singular as far as the material sign production is concerned. (1999: 33)

The visual variety of a videogame such as Doom means that the hermeneutic method of textual analysis and strategies as diverse as Sassurian semiotics and Panofsky’s iconology that take the concrete referent or signifier as a common source – if not definitive of meaning – can no longer lay claim to grasping the ergodic phenomena. However, where the cinema might generate its own body – to each film its corpus – the videogame is not only a unique semiotic event but a singular affective and psychological mirror image of the player’s modulation by the apparatus.

When we play an FPS, the semiotic sequence is unique, not because the technology is involved in generating a randomised image, but rather because the body that gestures this sequence into visibility is a multiplicity of sensations and perceptions that are both conscious and

non-conscious. Each sharp intake of breath, the kneading of slick palms, the ticks of the analogue stickscontaminate the screen in small and unmeasurable ways. Aarseth’s insightful

characterisation of the ergodic nature of videogames suggests that there is an intangibility to their enaction that is almost antithetical to close analysis but this isn’t simply a semiotic variance (a variance of signs) but a total contamination of the sign by the body and vice versa.

The problem of capturing ergodic videogames in their totality has led to a range of

methodological responses that have deep implications for the way in which they have been theorised. When ludologists analyse play (see Juul 2005, Lantz and Zimmerman 1999), they do so regarding the foundation provided by a game’s rules. Equally, approaching videogames in terms of narrative (see Jenkins 2006, Murray 1997) seeks to grasp them by their plot points,

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storytelling mechanisms and pleasures. Each approach takes the problem of the uniqueness of the videogame as a visual and bodily event and binds it to the concrete and accessible.

Whether games are viewed through the lens of their narrative, ludic, spatial or other qualities, textual analysis and its recourse to fixed elements remains an important facet of work on videogames in the humanities. Rather than produce an exhaustive survey of these

methodological strategies, I would like, instead, to take Mia Consalvo and Nathan Dutton’s 2006 article ‘Game Analysis: Developing a Methodological Toolkit for the Qualitative Study of Games’

as an explicit and emblematic example of the costs and benefits of such an approach. Consalvo and Dutton propose the production and categorisation of discrete data-sets, each containing a total mapping of the possibilities of objects, interfaces, interactions and explorations. Their approach to the first of these categories –an ‘object inventory’ – is useful in crystallising some of the overriding issues at stake. The creation of an object inventory entails cataloguing and archiving ‘all known objects that can be found, bought, stolen or created, and produce a

detailed list or spreadsheet that lists various properties of each item’ (Consalvo & Dutton 2006).

Such a thorough approach would generate of a wealth of fixed textual data. Each object could then be isolated and analysed in terms of its specific ludic or other qualities activated when the object was used in-game. This totalising strategy has some obvious advantages. For example, in competitive multiplayer FPS titles such as those in the Call of Duty and Battlefield franchises, a full survey of the different weapons available to the player could certainly act as a textual base from which to map their effects on the more open gestural and perceptual rhythms of gameplay – including on the connection between different kinds of weapon and the play-styles that they enable or foreclose. However, for this information to be useful, it would still require a riskier plunge into the game as an uncertain and unique event. Without recourse to the game in these terms, there seems little use in isolating objects for their own sake.

Additionally, this task would re-cast the researcher as a kind of fevered archivist. In his meditation on the archive, technology and Freud, Jaques Derrida noted that ‘archivization produces as much as it records the event’ (1996: 17). This means that the act of recording and storing is not simply an attempt to preserve past events and texts, but shapes the future of whatever practice the archive seeks to maintain. Derrida speculates how a technology such as email would have not only recorded and collated, but shaped the broad practices of

psychoanalysis, for example. And we can see, too, how a utility such as an Excel spreadsheet

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would not simply function to archive all elements of the videogame, but would inevitably predetermine a kind of destiny for the event of play, implicating it in practices like accounting.

The desire to fix and know every element of a game such as EA’s Battlefield 4 would reduce the theorist’s activity of playing to a fevered digital kleptomania, an archive fever. In his first thesis conceptualising this malady Derrida records its symptoms:

It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away…It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement. (1996:

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This compulsive desire to wrest an object from its context and place it in some repository, a place of both remembering and forgetting is legible in Consalvo and Dutton’s desire to treat the videogame event as an object, to save it from its own live temporal flow, but also to ‘forget’ its context. To analyse the videogame as a text is to archive, to preserve but also to destroy. A situation arises in which the videogame is enveloped by its methodology. The opportunity cost of such an approach in terms of capturing the gameplay of the FPS appears almost total, and the overall method is a gesture of control or fixing in a medium that, as Galloway (2006) has

emphasised, should be approached in terms of action and its processes. However, whether archiving fixed elements or focussing on the processual nature of gameplay, technical and material assemblages and infrastructures operate behind and beyond the visibility of the image but operate to produce this visibility and suggest a potential approach to contextualising the flow of the player’s experience.