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Fassone, Riccardo. "Game and Watch: Machinimas, Let's Plays

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Fassone, Riccardo. Fassone, Riccardo. "Game and Watch: Machinimas, Let’s Plays, Streams, and the Linearization of Digital Play." Intermedia Games—Games Inter Media: Video Games and Intermediality. Ed. Michael Fuchs and Jeff Thoss. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 135–152. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 27 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501330520.ch-006>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 27 September 2021, 07:10 UTC. Copyright © Michael Fuchs, Jeff Thoss and Contributors 2019. You may share this work for non- commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 6 Game and Watch: Machinimas, Let’s Plays, Streams, and the Linearization of Digital Play Riccardo Fassone “ e all play occasionally, and we all know what playing feels like.” Thus W Brian Sutton-Smith opens his book The Ambiguity of Play (1991). 1 This opening sentence suggests that play is an inherently embodied activity, something that should be done in order to be understood. Playing is doing or, following Sutton-Smith’s intuition, playing is the only way of understanding what play is. While the author of The Ambiguity of Play was certainly preoccupied with the implications and characteristics of analog play, scholarship on digital games has rarely challenged this stance. Video games are said to be “ergodic,” a term that defi nes them as textual machines in need of activation or, if we settle for a much maligned term, “interactive” objects that require a user for their actualization. 2 This is certainly a convincing rhetoric, if not a product of a player’s common sense. There is no play without activity. Nevertheless, occasionally, we all watch someone else play. Whether it is a sports game on television or in an arena, the unruly play of children in a park, or a speedrunner streaming a record attempt at Super Meat Boy (Team Meat, 2010), play has a magnetic quality: it constitutes a specifi c type of performance in which spectacle and athleticism seem to converge, and, at the same time, it invites a specifi c type of spectatorship. 3 According to Johan Huizinga, game studies’ undisputed forefather, play and spectacle are 135 136 INTERMEDIA GAMES—GAMES INTER MEDIA inextricably connected, and their relation changes according to specifi c historical, social, and technological conditions. The public games of the Romans, for example, invited a vicarious form of play, in which “the competitive impulse shifted, at an early period, from the protagonist to the spectator, who merely watches the struggles of others appointed for that purpose.” 4 This chapter seeks to understand what I will defi ne as the linearization of digital play; that is, its reduction to a linear audiovisual object, stripped of its ergodicity and thus ready for spectatorial consumption. My chapter will unfold following three paths: a historical reconstruction of the phenomenon, a description of three forms of linearization (machinima, let’s play, and live streams), and three theses concerning their larger meaning. Along the way, I argue for the relevance of analyzing the conditions and meanings of spectatorship in the context of video game studies, as in many cases this practice constitutes an integral part of the playing experience and of game culture in general. A short history of video game spectatorship In his article “Slots of Fun, Slots of Trouble: An Archaeology of Arcade Gaming” (2005), Erkki Huhtamo traces a connection between arcade video games and other forms of popular entertainment, dating back to the end of the nineteenth century. Huhtamo’s thesis is that instead of being born out of technological innovation in the early 1970s, arcade video games actually fi t within a tradition of other practices such as electro-mechanical play (e.g., pinball machines) and, more interestingly, non- interactive forms of spectacular entertainment, such as the use of automata to attract customers in department stores. 5 If we are to adopt Huhtamo’s media-archaeological perspective, we may think of video games as spectacular—and thus potentially spectated —devices since their inception as commercial products. The wealth of photos from the so- called golden age of arcade gaming readily available on the web testify to this legacy. These images almost invariably depict a player with a variable number of onlookers looking over his shoulder, trying to catch a glimpse of the game being played while waiting in line or, in other cases, simply acting as spectators. 6 The complex interweaving of play and spectatorship and the resulting social interactions and tensions found in arcade rooms have been described in a number of ethnographic studies, 7 but are condensed with remarkable precision by Carly Kocurek, who writes: The most popular games are surrounded by clusters of onlookers, some of whom may have added a quarter to the top of the cabinet to hold their GAME AND WATCH 137 place in line . The fl uorescent lighting is low in much of the space to maximize the visibility of the machines’ cathode displays . The unoccupied games play in the attract mode, displaying top scores and titles and short bursts of simulated play. The screens tease. 8 Both in their design and suggested social interactions, arcade rooms encourage the act of looking, spectating other players’ activities. Arcade games, with their neon colors and elaborated cabinet decorations are more than playthings, they are spectacular devices. The domestication of video games in the wake of the appearance of early game consoles such as the Magnavox Odyssey and the Atari 2600 seemed to put a halt to these communal play practices, making video game play a much more secluded affair. According to Mirjam Vosmeer, Gabriele Ferri, Ben Schouten, and Stefan Rank, “with consoles, however, videogame culture moved from arcades to attics and bedrooms, to re-appear later in the living room. For a long time, audiences remained fairly private.” 9 While the private nature of console gaming prevented the formation of “clusters of onlookers,” it might be safe to say that the coupling of the console with the TV set, which by the late 1970s was a fairly common appliance in most living rooms in the West, helped frame video game play as a shared experience. As noted by Sheila Murphy, advertisements for these early systems often depicted entire families gathered around the TV set, either with children playing and parents spectating or vice versa. 10 In this sense, early console gaming, by relying on earlier audiovisual technology, inherited television’s familial, communal vocation. Even with the advent of PC gaming, a notably more intimate experience, as it “normally takes place close to the screen and in a private space, such as ones [ sic ] room (or offi ce),” video games did not stop being spectacles. 11 During the early 1990s, following the release of Doom (id Software, 1993), a competitive scene grew around the fi rst- person shooter genre. Players gathered at LAN parties, more or less formal gatherings where several PCs were connected via LAN cables in order to allow for multiplayer sessions and, most notably, social interaction, fi le sharing, and spectatorship. 12 Moreover, some PC games allowed players to export and share their games via BBSs and other methods. The possibility to distribute audiovisual content gave rise to new forms of remote spectatorship; players no longer needed to gather in one place to watch others compete, but could download relatively small fi les that could be reproduced via the game’s engine. At the same time, with the rise of eSports, in particular in South Korea, video games started being broadcast on more traditional platforms, such as dedicated TV networks and, more recently in the West, sports television channels. The diffusion and success of eSports amplifi ed the aspirational 138 INTERMEDIA GAMES—GAMES INTER MEDIA quality of video game spectatorship; that is, a vicarious enjoyment of a performance that could, in theory, be replicated by the viewer. With the success of video sharing platforms such as YouTube and streaming services such as Twitch, forms of remote spectatorship became prevalent, and the number and diversity of producers of video game- related content grew dramatically. It was no longer only the e- athletes that had some degree of visibility, thanks to their skills, but a plethora of other performers with different communicative styles, narrative techniques, and performing personas. Watching someone play a video game is, now more than ever, an accepted way of participating in game culture, an integral part of the experience of playing digital games, and a consistent revenue stream for a number of actors. The next sections will detail some of the types of audiovisual content that derive from video game play and their intended modes of viewing, while the last section of this chapter will propose a reading of video game spectatorship along three axes: aspiration, nostalgia, and meta- play. Cinema through video games: the machinima After the success of Doom , id Software published Quake (1996), a largely similar game which requires players to navigate narrow corridors looking for enemies to annihilate. Despite the apparent similarities with its predecessor, Quake was provided with at least two profoundly innovative features: The fi rst was the possibility for players to compete in local multiplayer games via LAN or through an internet connection. The second, which will prove more relevant to this analysis, was a
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