Playing with Media’s Past
Representing the Intangible Histories of Media Technology in Independent Videogames
MA Thesis
Department of Media Studies
Graduate School of Humanities
24th June, 2016
Supervisor: Dr. Floris Paalman
Second Reader: Dr. Blandine Joret
1 Table of Contents Figures ...... 4 Abstract ...... 5 Introduction ...... 6 Chapter One: Independent Games, Nostalgia and the Retro Phenomenon ...... 8 Nostalgia ...... 8 Retro Style in “Indie” Games ...... 9 A Slow Year ...... 9 Chapter Two: Remembering the “Early” Internet as a Virtual World ...... 11 The “Early” Internet ...... 12 Videogames as Re-enactments ...... 12 Emily is Away ...... 12 Digital: A Love Story ...... 13 Cibele ...... 14 Chapter Three: Confronting New Media Culture in Kentucky Route Zero ...... 14 Imaginary Media ...... 15 Kentucky Route Zero’s “Dark Media Archaeology” ...... 16 Conclusion ...... 18 Works Cited ...... 19
2 Figures
Figure 1.1 “Eyes follow the aimless twig”. A Slow Year. 23
Figure 1.2 “Afternoon craves nap”. Pressing the button shuts 23 the player character’s eyes. A Slow Year.
Figure 1.3 “Waken when they meet”. Releasing the button 24 opens the player character’s eyes. A Slow Year.
Figure 2.1 Emily is Away’s simulacrum of AOL Instant 32 Messenger.
Figure 2.2 Dialing a BBS in Digital: A Love Story. 34
Figure 2.3 Exploring Nina’s desktop in Cibele. 37
Figure 2.4 Inside “Valtameri”, Cibele’s fictional online 39 multiplayer game.
Figure 3.1 Spinning Coin, Suspended, Correcting for Angular 46 Motion (1976) in Limits and Demonstrations.
Figure 3.2 Visage (1984) in Limits and Demonstrations. 46
Figure 3.3 The player must make Conway drink to progress. 52 Kentucky Route Zero: Act 3.
Figure 3.4 The regular road map in Kentucky Route Zero: Act 1. 55
Figure 3.5 The Zero in Kentucky Route Zero: Act 2. 55
3 Abstract
From the return of vinyl records and Polaroid cameras, to the popularity of Instagram and retro- styled videogames, the pasts, present and futures of media technology are converging. Media shape and facilitate memory, and now more than ever they are influencing the memory of media technologies themselves. Media experiences are embodied, but much of this sensory data is not accounted for by existing methods of historicising media objects. As amalgams of visuals, sound and interactive systems, videogames can simulate the user experience of past media objects, offering valuable new methods of historicism of interest to historians and media archaeologists alike. Nostalgia and retro style have long been a key presence in independent videogames but a recent trend has seen the emergence of number of independent works which deal specifically with past media objects and the history of new media culture in general. This thesis examines a number of these works - A Slow Year (Bogost, 2010), Emily is Away (Seeley, 2015), Digital: A Love Story (Love, 2010), Cibele (StarMaid, 2015) and Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer 2013-) - and demonstrates how they critically engage with the past in a media archaeological fashion, uncovering the forgotten experiences and possibilities of old media and establishing their new meanings in the present. While partly complicit in popular culture’s ongoing retro phenomenon, they are shown to eschew the accusations of cultural stagnation often levelled at nostalgia and to provide alternative accounts of new media culture than those perpetrated by retro’s corporate historicism.
4 Introduction
With the renewed excitement around virtual reality technology, the possibilities and limitations of digital simulation are once again the subject of much popular imagination. While perhaps VR’s most radical proposition is to deliver us into environments totally unlike our own, its capacity to present us with increasingly convincing approximations of the ordinary, physical world is of great interest to archivist and historians, and has been for some time. At the turn of the century, towards the end of the previous VR craze, scholars Bernard Frischer, Diane Favro, Dean Abernathy and Monica De Simone of the UCLA’s Digital Roman Forum project speculated as to how virtual reality apparatus might enhance “3D computer models of cultural heritage sites” (1). Their model, an approximate (albeit meticulous and highly scientific) virtual recreation of Rome’s iconic ancient civic centre as it is believed to have appeared in 400 A.D., was designed to be exhibited via “interactive 3D reality theater”, in which it appeared at a lifelike scale (the theater’s spherical screen measured “7.5 meters in diameter by 2.5 meters high”) and could be navigated by observers (2). Such a project, they imagined, might “be used as a point of departure for a wide range of urban-historical and architectural-historical studies that rely on solid data. That could include, for example, experiential studies involving the alignments of monuments and their impact on the observer” (2).
In their report on the Digital Forum, Frischer et al. do note the obvious empirical advantages of a fully rendered 3D model compared to non-digital methods of representing the structure (plaster-of-Paris models “leave out the interior spaces”, while engravings lack “color and photorealism”) (1). However, they are also keen, as in the quote above, to stress the experiential qualities of their project. Unlike a drawing or photograph, they explain, their digital model “can be explored at will in the three dimensions”, and can “offer high interactivity and, potentially, high immersivity when presented in a reality theater” (3).
Implicit in their use of terms like “interactivity” and “immersivity” is a desire for a more involved engagement with historical structures than is ostensibly permitted by static, two dimensional renderings. Similarly, their emphasis on the “impact” of their model’s physical characteristics such as its spatial arrangement and sense of scale suggests an interest in a kind of perception-based historical knowledge which virtual reality simulations are propitiously positioned to convey. As well as what it allows us to see, it would seem, just as important to the historical value of the Digital Roman Forum is what it makes us feel.
This idea of a preconscious knowledge about an object or space acquired through sensory perception is of course the central tenet of phenomenology. The work of archaeologist Christopher
5 Tilley outlines a precedent for a phenomenological approach to historiography, emphasising the kind of sensory knowledge accessible to an archaeologist who actually visits a site that cannot be derived from “the peculiar perspective of a ground plan, or a map” (153). Such an archaeologist, he posits, understands “...what it feels like to move around inside the passages and chambers: the experiences of light and darkness, constricted spaces and open spaces, the sounds, textures, colours, touch and texture, and other material qualities of the stones” (ibd).
Clearly one who engages with the Digital Roman Forum or similar virtual reality projects does not perceive the same breadth of sensory stimuli as they would visiting their respective real world locations. Just as certainly though, following Tilley and Frischer et al., they will nevertheless garner a great deal of additional sensory information than compared with schematic drawings or textual descriptions; one imagines it would be a great deal easier, for instance, to conduct a psychogeographical analysis of the Arch of Septimius Severus from a VR demo than a plaster-of-Paris miniature.
This points to a crucial preservational role fulfilled by 3D models of historically important sites. While UCLA’s Forum, a speculative reconstruction built manually with 3D graphics software in the late 1990s, might appear crude and inadequate compared with the “accurate and objective” models of the likes of the Scottish Ten project (which has successfully “documented” several UNESCO world heritage sites using modern day “point cloud” scanning technology), it still conveys valid sensory data about the Forum that is irreplaceable in video or on paper. Were disaster to strike and an earthquake level the real Roman Forum tomorrow, at least something of this information, something of “what it feels like to move around inside [its] passages and chambers”, would be preserved .
Citing Husserl, Tilley underlines the impossibility of attempting to understand or appreciate an artefact, landscape or structure while sidelining its sensory qualities:
Husserl argued that there is a fundamental distinction between the manner in which the world is represented in scientific descriptions and the manner in which humans actually experience it. In short, a scientific account is both inhuman and very impoverished[...] In a scientific description primacy is given to variables that can be quantified and measured: size, weight, distance, etc. But what of aspects of things that cannot be abstractly measured such as colour, taste, smell, touch and feeling? All these may be very important aspects of the
6 meaning of an artefact but they inevitably become regarded as of secondary importance from the prejudice of a scientific approach. (151)
These features (“colour, taste, smell, touch and feeling”) can be said to belong to a wider category of attributes that can be called the experiential qualities of an object. If an object’s empirical qualities include objective properties like its measurements, chemical composition and provenance, then its experiential qualities encompass all those which are subjective: its sensory features, the contexts of its usage and the meanings that those properties produce. Traditionally, these experiential qualities have been conveyed through secondary sources, translated via testimony in writing or speech. The Digital Roman Forum and virtual reality technology, however, point to how computer simulation can preserve at least some of these experiential qualities - in Forum’s case, a direct, embodied sense of its spatial arrangement and scale - even after the object itself has disappeared. But what of the other experiential qualities of historical objects? Their meanings, their social uses, their capacity to inspire? And what other methods of representation might convey these properties?
This question of how objects might be better historicised is the key project of media archaeology, “an approach - or a bundle of closely related approaches” to new media which attempts to make sense of “the media culture of late modernity” through the reevaluation of its past (Huhtamo & Parikka, 1). In the same way that Tilley positions his phenomenological approach to archaeology as a counterweight to field’s empirical bias, so too do Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka present media archaeology as corrective, a means to redeem new media’s hitherto “neglected” history:
Media archaeologists have concluded that widely endorsed accounts of contemporary media culture and media histories alike often tell only selected parts of the story, and not necessarily correct and relevant parts. Much has been left by the roadside out of negligence or ideological bias. (3)
Also like Tilley, Huhtamo and Parikka favour a history of objects which takes into account perspectives and responses of their users:
7 The past has been visited for facts that can be exciting in themselves, or revealing for media culture at large, but the nature of these "facts" has often been taken as a given, and their relationship to the observer and the temporal and ideological platform he or she occupies left unproblematized. (3)
While the authors stress that “media archaeology should not be confused with archaeology as a discipline”, they do so less to refute the similarity of their projects than to avoid the pigeonholing of media archaeology into a single discipline with “‘correct’ principles or methodological guidelines” (1). Rather, they claim, media archaeology is characterised by a breadth of its possible approaches, “allowing it to roam across the landscape of the humanities and social sciences and occasionally to leap into the arts” (3).
To the extent that media archaeology may be understood as an attempt to understand the meanings that media objects produce for their users, both historically and in the present, this research proposes that certain practices in modern videogame design may be construed as media archaeological in nature. These include the development of new works for commercial defunct platforms, the communication of new media’s cultural underlying conditions through videogame form and the representation of the experiential qualities of past media objects.
Claus Pias’ essay “The Game Player’s Duty” has detailed already some insights which videogames may bring to light viewed through a media archaeological lens, from the way technology “organizes relationships” to the contingency of “play” upon concrete material things instead of a broad “attitude” innate to “humankind”. (165) This thesis, however, contends that the actual making of a videogame can constitute a media archaeological act, one which reveals historical “ruptures” and reads media history “against the grain” (Huhtamo & Parikka 2).
Given their technological basis, videogames are an obvious fit to probe the history of technical media, though the same could be said of film, recorded music, photography and likely many other media. Like these other examples, there is a lot at stake for videogames in the past and possible futures of technology. The very possibilities of expression in videogames are vastly altered in proportion with technological advancements, with paradigm shifts like the emergence of polygonal three-dimensional graphics, the introduction of online play and developments in artificial intelligence having instigated significant transformations in the medium. While these shifts might be comparable
8 to, say, the transition from silent films to “talkies” in cinema, the sheer number of these evolutions and the ferocious rate at which they have occurred have spawned a wealth casualties in the form of unexplored ideas and unfilled potentials left, all ripe for media archaeological investigation. In addition, the understanding and preservation of old technologies are vital if videogames are to retain access to their past given that the integrity of videogame’s experience may be fundamentally compromised when removed its initial conditions of presentation. As Brendan Keogh indicates, the categories of text, subject and apparatus are so permeable and phenomenologically intertwined in the context of videogame play that even so much as using a different controller can significantly alter the experience: “The way a videogame feels to play will depend on the very specific makeup of a particular controller—the strength of the springs beneath the buttons, the texture of the plastic buttons, the shape and size of the gamepad itself” (133).
During play, Keogh explains, the player, the moving image and all the wires and plastic in between become a “cybernetic amalgam of material and virtual artefacts across which the player’s perception and consciousness are transmitted and transformed” (70). It is this near symbiotic relationship which videogames engender between their players and technology which, more so than the above arguments, renders the form such an auspicious case study for investigating the experiential qualities of media objects. It could be one explanation, for instance, the acute sensitivity towards “retro” technologies expressed in a growing number of independent videogames, a trend that this thesis takes both as a matter of curiosity in itself and as resource of textual data to better understand how videogames convey what could be called (to borrow a conspicuously technological term from realms of cognitive science and product design) the “user experience” of media objects.
This fascination with old media in independent games takes numerous shapes and forms, ranging from playful references to the aesthetic peculiarities of obsolete media, like the simulated screen curvature effect in Her Story (Barlow, 2015), to those that go as far as actually incorporating antiquated devices into the experience, such as What Hath God Wrought? (Lazer-Walker, 2015), a game played using a custom made telegraph key and preserved 19th century sounder. That this re- engagement with retro aesthetics and practices has emerged from and remained largely exclusive to the “indie” games movement is not insignificant. Nostalgia, the emotional currency of retro, had been typically understood as a reactionary response to current circumstances.
Literary scholar Svetlana Boym, for instance, frames nostalgia “as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals” (10). For her, nostalgia constitutes “a yearning for a different time—the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and
9 progress” (8). Media studies scholar Pat Gill describes nostalgia in similarly oppositional terms: “Nostalgia arises as a response to the historical combination of an uncertainty about the continued usefulness of historical and traditional forms and formulae, the nature of unpredictably changing political situations, and the scope of indeterminate technological innovations” (164). While the “indie” games community might not share the underlying conservative impulse implied by these descriptions, there is a clear similarity between the dissatisfaction with the status-quo which characterises the nostalgic attitude and the discontent towards the mainstream videogames industry often ascribed to and voiced by “indie” developers. As with all cultural movements, what actually constitutes “indie” game development is diffuse and contested, leading Felan Parker to quite rightly discourage scholars from “mythologizing oppositional relationships between various forms of indie game development and the hegemonic, mainstream industry” (2). Even so, some degree of resistance to mainstream trends must be acknowledged here to understand the different nature of independent games’ relationship with technology in comparison with the mainstream industry (with the term “independent” in this instance referring specifically to commercial works developed and distributed without the aid of a publishing company). Although the advent of digital distribution, the availability of cheaper, more accessible development tools and likely many other factors were critical to the independent games “boom” in the late 2000s, particularly crucial was the adoption of what were perceived as retro aesthetics and practices - i.e. a return to “classic” genres like the 2D platformer or “forgotten” visual styles like “pixel art” - a move that both constituted and was constitutive of a greater defiance of the mainstream industry’s persistent drive towards increased technological sophistication. As such, the potential of old technology as a catalyst of change and creativity is inscribed in the very foundations of the indie movement and is invariably reflected in the majority of contemporary independent games that engage with old and obsolete media artefacts.
The mainstream games industry is not without works which prominently feature old technology. Two notable examples are the Bioshock (2007-) and Fallout (1997-) series’, both counterfactual fictions of a steampunk inclination which would no doubt be of considerable interest to media archaeologists. As paradigmatic examples of contemporary major studio design practices however (these are violent, action-oriented games with fantasy settings), such works are not aligned with the interests of this research. Rather, this thesis is concerned with understanding the connection between historically sidelined technologies and the subversive, comparatively marginal work of indie game designers. It turns to a number of independent games which deal with the limitations, creative avenues and political opportunities afforded by technical media, which delve into their social meanings and material consequences, in order to discern what videogames, in their
10 capacity to convey the user experience of media objects, can contribute to media archaeology’s ongoing excavation of the pasts and futures of new media culture.
The first chapter begins with a more thorough investigation of the indie movement’s relation to contemporary retro phenomenon. In doing so, it considers media studies scholar and videogame designer Ian Bogost’s A Slow Year (2010), a games which displays a fondness for the consumer commodities of the recent past that could be perceived as indulging in nostalgia in typically hegemonic way. A closer inspection, however, reveals that nostalgia is not an end in and of itself; rather, A Slow Year recontextualises the Atari VCS, a media device from 1977, as valid platform for contemporary artistic expression. Contrary to the popular conception of retro as creatively moribund, the game is shown to point to the new possibilities enabled by the experiential engagement with historical objects through videogames.
Emily is Away (Seeley, 2015), Digital: A Love Story (Love, 2010) and Cibele (StarMaid, 2015), three games which invite the player to participate in an interactive re-enactment of the internet’s past, are the focus of the second chapter. These games show that, as well the experiential qualities of objects themselves, videogames can convey something of the social experience created by media technologies. This chapter proposes that understanding the early internet as a “virtual world” opens up possibilities for the creation of experiential histories of the internet which may aid in understanding the transformation in social dynamics enacted by transition from a pre-social media internet of anonymity to the contemporary internet of hyper-identity and surveillance.
The final chapter engages with Hertz and Parikka’s concept of “circuit-bending” as media archaeological act of intervention in new media culture as well as Thomas Elsaesser’s reservations about media archaeology’s radical credentials through the lens of Kentucky Route Zero (2013-), a game series which confronts the material cost of new media through a magical realist narrative which also serves as a meta-commentary of computer and digital media history. By conveying common media practices like “planned obsolescence” and “black box” design through the videogame form, the chapter argues that Kentucky Route Zero demonstrates a kind of “dark media archaeology” which observes the futility of technological advancement to bring about social change.
In sum, this thesis provides and overview the ways in which modern independent games engage with past media technologies and, by extension, the retro phenomenon. While acknowledging that this recent confluence of interest in past technologies among independent game designers is likely symptomatic of the same conditions which have catalysed the retro phenomenon (and perhaps media archaeology too), textual analysis of the aforementioned works reveals that they
11 are hardly complicit in the status quo of new media culture. Rather, by exploring novel means of conveying the experiential qualities of media objects, they illustrate new kinds of critique and resistance.
12 Chapter One: Independent Games, Nostalgia and the Retro Phenomenon
The retro phenomenon - broadly defined by Kristian Handberg as a culture-wide fixation on the mass-produced products from “the recent past, decades rather than centuries ago” - is becoming increasingly tricky to pin down. Scholars generally agree that retro as we know it today began in the 1970s with the trend towards resurrecting the subcultural styles of the “Fifties era” (which spans from the early post-war years to the onset of hippiedom and psychedelia at the beginning of the 1960s), as exemplified by films like American Graffiti (Lucas, 1973), the television series Happy Days, and revival rockabilly bands sporting “Brylcreemed hair, drape jackets and brother creepers” (Reynolds 243). Identifying what constitutes retro in contemporary times is much less straightforward however. This is partly due to the ever increasing supply of recent past from which pop-culture can pillage, with essentially the entire second half of the 20th century now qualifying as retro. More confusing however, is the fact that after more than four decades of persistent retro fever, the ideas, commodities and aesthetics of yesteryear now so thoroughly permeate the present that the difference between modern culture, retro revivalism, and genuine historical artifacts is becoming harder to distinguish.
This is especially true of the videogames industry, in which retro aesthetics and practices are both a highly lucrative source of revenue and a fundamental creative force. Much like in modern cinema, reboots and revivals make up a large number of all major studio videogame releases and are frequently among the highest grossing titles in a given year. A prototypical example is Doom (id Software, 2016), a recent blockbuster production released to commercial success and unanimous critical acclaim that is at once a reimagining of and successor to the 1993 videogame of the same name (“Doom..”). Much of the praise for Doom has an implicitly nostalgic tenor, attributing its appeal to how faithfully it recaptures the original game’s pleasures. Simon Parkin in The Guardian calls it “a reboot that captures all the crazed, adrenaline-pumped purity of the original”, for example, while Patrick Lindsey, writing for Paste, states, “DOOM (2016) [sic] isn’t a departure or a reimagining. It’s something much better, much more pure. DOOM (2016) is a homecoming.” Almost no iconic videogame is without a similar “back to basics” remake, with some notable examples including New Super Mario Bros (Nintendo, 2006), Sonic the Hedgehog (Sonic Team, 2006), Tomb Raider (Crystal Dynamics, 2013) and PacMan: Championship Edition (Namco Bandai, 2007).
Besides these innumerable resurrection projects, the videogames industry also maintains a fierce regime of reissues and re-releases, partly fueled by the swift turnover of console “generations”
13 (when a new set of platforms are released, historically occurring in approximately six-year cycles) which encourages publishers to periodically make their back catalogue available for modern technologies. Again, this is a routine practice in all entertainment media - every new video format is seemingly guaranteed a release of Star Wars (Lucas, 1978) for instance - but not at the same rate. For comparison, The Beatles’ Please Please Me has been reissued about six times since 1963 whereas there are so many versions of the puzzle game Tetris (Pajitnov, 1984) (well over a hundred) that even discerning what counts as a reissue versus a remake is a herculean task.
It would appear, therefore, that videogames typify Svetlanna Boym’s claim that “while many nineteenth-century thinkers believed progress and enlightenment would cure nostalgia, they have exacerbated it instead” (9). Indeed, the correlation between the industry’s rapid technological turnover and its accelerated propagation and commodification of nostalgia seems irrefutable proof that, as she observes, “technology and nostalgia have become co-dependent” (10). But while nostalgia is certainly pervasive in modern videogames, it is by no means homogenous in its deployment or its effects. Rather, with reference to the videogame A Slow Year, this chapter contends that videogames both reflect and defy common assertions about the role of nostalgia in contemporary culture. As such, it is first necessary to outline how nostalgia has commonly been and is currently theorised.
Nostalgia
As film scholar and media theorist Paul Grainge notes in his essay “Nostalgia and Style in Retro America”, much of the early writing on nostalgia tends to describe the phenomenon as a pathological response to a crisis of the present, “the consequence of socio-political disorientation and creative enervation” (27). Grainge cites Fred Davis, who, taking stock of retro’s first decade in 1979, perceived the then “current nostalgia boom” as reaction to the “social upheaval” of the sixties, as well as Allison Graham, who connects the nostalgia of the 1980s to what she observes as a disintegration of a “spiritually fulfilling integration of past and present” (363). Related to these ideas is the notion that nostalgia supposes the preferability of the past over the present. Philosopher Scott Alexander Howard terms this belief the “poverty of the present” and demonstrates how it involves not only the favourable judgement of the past but also its retroactive reconstitution whereby virtues thought to be lacking in the present are inscribed onto the past in hindsight. In this context, nostalgia takes on the connotations of escapism: “first, one makes a negative assessment of the present, and then, aided by a selective memory, one flees to an idealized and imaginary past” (644).
14 These initial accounts characterise nostalgia as something like a coping mechanism, a source of comfort in the face of confusing present and a way of amending a sense of discontinuity with the past. Fredric Jameson, in his Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, also links nostalgia to present historical circumstances, in his case “a crisis in the postmodern historical imagination” (28). But rather than a palliative, Jameson accuses nostalgia of contributing to the breakdown of historical memory at the end of the 20th century. For him, nostalgia functions something more like an addictive narcotic, the highly stylised pastiches of the past in modern media providing a temporary fix for a feeling of alienation from history, but in turn exacerbating the overarching systemic problem of communing with an “authentic” past (29). By undermining historicity in this way, this “mesmerizing new aesthetic” imperils “our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way”, producing a different kind of poverty of the present - a poverty of reflection - in which “we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations of our own current experience” (21).
The endurance of Jameson’s critique is evident in the prevalent conception of modern popular culture as terminally cannibalistic (as in the popular maxim “pop will eat itself”) having purportedly reached a creative standstill and now resigned to regurgitate existing ideas and aesthetics ad infinitum. Examples range from music journalist Simon Reynolds’ Retromania, a book- length examination of pop music’s apparent stagnation in which he claims “instead of being about itself, the 2000s has been about every other previous decade happening again all at once” (x), to German director Wim Wender’s pithy diagnosis that "most American films are now comments on the history of cinema, not comments on life" (qtd. in Graham, 349).
As Graham observes however, this proposed dichotomy between some “true” life and that which is mediated is a false one. “Comments on the history of cinema,” she writes, “are, however inadvertently, comments on life” - media fundamentally structures modern life, thus media objects are an increasingly substantive feature of the past (349). This realisation informs an alternative branch of theory which understands nostalgia not as a “mark cultural amnesia or creative bankruptcy, but a way of acknowledging that the past exists through textual traces in cultural and ideological mediation with the present” (Grainge 29). For film scholar Kaija Silverman, for instance, nostalgia “makes clear that the past is available to us only in a textual form, and through the mediation of the present” (qtd. in Grainge 29). In such accounts, nostalgia does not obfuscate the past but instead offers more nuanced and self-conscious access to it through mediation, capable of constructing (in Grainge's words) “meaningful narratives of cultural memory” (29).
15 Recognising the media’s role in engendering nostalgia, Grainge himself further abstracts this line of thinking to illustrate the way in which changes to media distribution and programming are also responsible for the growing prevalence of the past in the present. Focusing on broadcast media, Grainge shows that a series of developments in the media landscape, from “the expansion of the cable industry and the growth of commercial radio in the 1980s” through to “the digital and video revolutions”, has brought droves of old archive content back into circulation, “transform[ing] our ability to access, circulate, and consume the cultural past” (33). It no accident, he posits, that it is in this context that “the aestheticization of nostalgia has emerged”, cementing for him the notion that nostalgia “cannot be explained through any single master narrative of decline, crisis, longing, or loss” (32).
If nostalgia for these latter theorists constitutes a kind of memory of media - that is, the memory of the past as it is represented through media - then media studies scholar Tim van der Heijden’s concept of “technostalgia” addresses the means by which the apparatus which facilitate the creation of these memories is itself remembered. Van der Heijden finds an obvious popular example of technostalgia in the smartphone application Instagram, which emulates the “‘vintage’ look of analogue film and photography technologies” by artificially reproducing the aesthetic qualities of pre-digital photography like “film grain” and “degraded colors” (104). Instagram and other new contemporary memory practices like it indicate for Van der Heijden “an attentive shift in contemporary media culture from technologies of memory to a memory of technologies” and are typically nostalgic in that they appear to compensate for a sense of loss, in this case the materiality and collective ritual consumption of analogue media. By returning to new media the aesthetic markings and degradation associated with analogue media which the slick clarity of digital technology effaces, these practices purport to undo the transformation of meaning inflicted upon mediated memories by the digital’s disruptive effect on traditional consumption conditions and contexts. Giuseppina Sapio, quoted in Van der Heijden, offers family photographs as an example. If the digitisation of photography has now rendered the habitual group viewing of family photo albums an endangered activity, then manipulating digital images to make them look old, she explains, “gives the idea of symbolic continuity to the reservoir of family images” (107).
Retro Style in “Indie” Games
Whether or not the popularity of retro in today’s popular culture indicates a memory crisis ala Jameson or may be attributed to an increasingly media rich environment (or a combination of
16 both), all of these accounts testify to the interdependence of media and nostalgia. And just as pop music, cinema, smartphone applications and broadcast media have all for the above authors served as axes to comprehend and question the roots and meanings of nostalgia, so too may videogames provide insights into contemporary culture’s relationship with the past. As discussed in the introduction, the particularities of videogames’ relationship with technology - the heightened involvement of the apparatus in the phenomenological experience of games; the anxiety over the potential loss of the medium's past through the “forgetting” of technologies; the rate of technological turnover the medium has witnessed in its short history - makes them an apposite case study with which to probe Van der Heijden’s “attentive shift” towards the remembrance of technologies. Moreover, videogames’ capacity to mediate the user experiences of retro technologies gives rise to new modes of technostalgia which (this thesis claims) move beyond the evocation of past media aesthetics to convey the embodied experiences and social contexts of media objects. All of this is to say that the retro operates in peculiar ways in videogames (especially so in independent games) and that the nature of this relationship deserves further elaboration.
In many ways, videogames seem an ideal posterchild for the retro phenomenon. Besides their previously enumerated proclivity for remakes and rereleases, early videogames themselves have become perennial icons of retro, alongside lava lamps, platform shoes and pastel coloured cadillacs; the eponymous space invader from the 1978 arcade game is a mainstay of retro iconography, as are the ghosts from PacMan (1982). If there exists any proof that retro is really just “a symptom or expression of capitalist culture’s final victory” then videogames are a prime candidate (Handberg, 174). This is, after all, an industry remarkably well-practiced in what Reynolds prescribes as the telltale signs of nostalgia’s commodification, “the logic of renovating the tried-and-true, of milking the cult status of the original”, what with its extensive portfolio of long-running, evergreen franchises which are iterated at an intense clip - as Fifa (EA Sports) games for every year since 1993, fifteen Final Fantasy’s (Square/Square-Enix, 1987-), and innumerable other examples can attest (xvii).
But there are two sides to videogames’ retro drive. There is the one which emphatically reflects Reynolds’ assertion that “nostalgia is now thoroughly entwined with the consumer- entertainment complex”, that preys upon consumers’ “pangs for the products of yesteryear, the novelties and distractions that filled up [their] youth” via the perpetual trotting out of childhood icons like Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog (xxix). And there is the one, rife in independent game development, that has emerged not out of savvy boardroom decision making but practical necessity.
17 In her essay “Nostalgia in Retro Game Design”, videogames researcher Maria B. Garda compares the use of older and simplified videogame development tools (relative to mainstream industry standards) like Game Maker by independent game designers to the adoption of “less sophisticated devices” like “amateur lightweight camera[s]” by independent filmmakers, both of which have lowered “the entry level competencies” in their respective media, enabling artists of more modest technical and economic means to pursue “ambitious and innovative projects” (4). A side effect of this strategy, however, is that works created in these conditions are inevitably less technologically impressive than those produced using the latest, most expensive equipment, and are thus often perceived as “inferior” or dated (5). Both commercial norms and technological determinism work to create this impression. Regarding the former, the mainstream industry typically deploys teleological ideas about videogame design to market its products. Each successive “generation” of hardware boasts more computational horsepower than the previous, while the promotional material for the games themselves often aims to convince players of their technological novelty and purported empirical superiority over older works. In a press release for the recent major studio title Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst (DICE, 2016) for instance, the project’s senior producer Sara Jansson claims the game is “pushing the boundaries of first person movement” and “brings a lot of great new, interesting gameplay and features to the experience for our players” (“Welcome…”).
Even setting aside this marketing rhetoric, the very real presence of technological determinism in videogame design cannot be ignored. Advancements in the likes of computer graphics, physics simulation and artificial intelligence have expanded the expressive possibilities of videogames and, in doing so, produced an effective chronology of genres and styles. Hence, older genres and presentational styles (e.g. the 2D platformer and “pixel art”) are commonly perceived as being “retro” compared to more recently established modes of expression (e.g. the first-person shooter and polygonal 3D graphics). During the “indie boom” of the late 2000s, when independent games experienced a groundswell of mass market attention and became categorised by consumers and press under the unifying label “indie”, many independent designers gravitated towards these older styles on account of their amenability to small development teams of limited resources. Subsequently, nostalgia became a common trope associated with the indie “movement”, evidenced through what videogames scholar Jesper Juul has called “independent style” (which “emulate[d] visual styles from earlier times”) and the 2D platformer’s prevalence as the indie genre du jour (see Braid (Number None, 2008), LIMBO (Playdead, 2010), Super Meat Boy (Team Meat, 2010), Fez (Polytron, 2012), among others). As communications scholar Nadav Lipkin explains, the term “indie” at this point in time was less a sign of a developer’s political or economic stance vis-a-vis the mainstream industry than an indicator of their adopted style, which was more often than not, a
18 nostalgic one. “Insiders and developers distinguished themselves as indie by presenting games that featured chiptunes, more simple graphics, retro game designs and heaps of nostalgia for earlier titles” (18). “The puzzle-platformer with retro pixel art has become a careworn cliché of the indie game scene,” wrote videogame critic Oli Welsh in his review of the canonical indie title Fez, a typical indication of the sentiment of time.
While the discourse around independent games has since shifted (largely due to their newfound ubiquity and diversity following the “boom”) and the kind of works Welsh describes are now considered much less indicative of the “scene” as a whole, independent game development remains overwhelmingly an act of swimming against the mainstream industry's tide of better, newer and more. With respect to mainstream industry standards, most independent games could be perceived as backward looking and technologically regressive. Garda suggests, for instance, that the independent game Hotline Miami (Dennaton Games, 2012) is “inferior in the sense of game design to its almost two decades older inspiration – Grand Theft Auto (DMA 1997)” on account of being a “2D experience with a very linear story” compared to the latter, which features “3D physics” and is “perceived as the protoplast of modern sandbox [i.e. non-linear] games” (4). As Garda observes, such developments complicate the teleological “narrative of technological advancement” which dominates popular accounts of videogame history (5). They also illustrate, as Jesper Juul shows, the peculiar nature of independent games’ relationship with the medium’s past, which he calls a “counterfactual nostalgia”. Because the retro style espoused by many independent games is realised and displayed using more modern technology than that of their inspirations, they are inevitably “rendered at a quality not found in earlier video games” and thus, Juul claims, “involve a nostalgia for a time that never actually happened” (“The Counterfactual…”). As Ian Bogost’s A Slow Year demonstrates however, even retro-leaning games developed using more appropriately dated technology can be just as tricky with the past.
A Slow Year
A Slow Year (2010) is a collection of four “game poems” created by videogame academic and designer Ian Bogost for the Atari Video Computer System (later renamed the Atari 2600), a home videogame console released in 1977 and discontinued on January 1st, 1992. Though digital versions are now available for PC and Mac, A Slow Year was initially distributed on original Atari VCS cartridges and thus playable only on original Atari VCS hardware. Bogost’s game is not alone in its commitment to a commercially defunct platform - Wikipedia lists a few dozen original VCS games
19 released since the year 2000, and other platforms like the NES have also attracted hobbyist development communities (Furino). With regards to independent videogame development as a whole however, A Slow Year’s engagement with retro aesthetics and practices is highly atypical.
Case in point: while A Slow Year is certainly a work of counterfactual nostalgia, it does not fit the criteria with which Juul defines the term. For Juul, the counterfactual nature of retro-leaning independent games arises from their paradoxical pairing of new technologies with old aesthetics, resulting in visual styles like Minecraft’s (Mojang, 2008) “blocky 3D” which “refer to styles that were not actually part of video game history”. By virtue of its being a legitimate VCS game rather than a new work imitating the style of the old hardware, this is obviously not true of A Slow Year - it does not so much refer to a style but rather is that style. On the contrary, part of what makes Bogost’s game counterfactual is actually its fidelity to the original production and presentation contexts of VCS development, effectively enabling it to pass as an “authentic” product of the console’s era on an technical and aesthetic level, while simultaneously being motivated by ideas and design choices which were not present in genuine games from that time.
Svetlana Boym’s categories of “restorative” and “reflective” nostalgia are useful concepts to help unpack the idiosyncrasies of A Slow Year’s brand of retro. Restorative nostalgia “attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home” (13). It tries to safeguard “truth and tradition” and “return to origins”, and hence can be analogised as a futile act of retroactive preservation. The “total reconstructions of monuments from the past” are examples of restorative nostalgia in action; they are concerted efforts to have old objects “remain eternally young”, as if they were not “past” at all (The Future…, 41). If restorative nostalgia is obsessed with the uncompromised survival of the past, then reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, is precisely interested in how the present impeaches upon and creates an imagined “past”. Reflective nostalgia denotes how the past in remembered (e.g. reflected upon). It involves both “longing” and “critical thinking” and can be “ironic and humorous” in doing so (“Nostalgia…” 15).
Garda invokes Boym’s categories in her discussion of “retro game design”, though largely focuses on reflective nostalgia. For Garda, only re-releases of existing games can qualify as restorative, while any new work which exhibits a “retro longing for a bygone time in the history” is considered reflective on account of its interpretative approach to the past (4). A Slow Year - at once a reflection upon and restoration of Atari VCS aesthetics, presentation styles and development procedures - prompts a reconsideration of these categories as they apply to videogames.
20 Firstly, it is important to note that restorative nostalgia need not be fixated upon a specific object (e.g. a “monument”) but can be directed towards a tradition - and furthermore, that this tradition is often imagined. A fixation upon traditions is very much at the heart of A Slow Year. In the written material which accompanies the game, Bogost describes the differences between programming for the Atari VSC and more modern devices, suggesting that relative constraints (“which are many and severe”) imposed by the older system lend themselves to a minimalistic, abstract method of expression similar to certain kinds of poetry (9). “The game embraces maximum expressive constraint and representational condensation,” he writes, “and for that reason it has much in common with the poetic tradition.” (xix) By “interpret[ing] the Atari’s constraints through the lens of poetry, and particularly Imagism”, A Slow Year, in a decidedly media archaeological fashion, is able to excavate hitherto unrecognised artistic histories of Atari games, such as their “unacknowledged tradition of naturalism” (12). Being a game which consists entirely of observing and interacting with images of nature - a cold winter’s sky, rain and thunderclouds, a twig floating on water, a tree shedding its leaves - A Slow Year brings to the fore the elements which were typically confined to the backgrounds and incidental scenery of games about jumping over chasms (Pitfall! (Crane,1982)) and flying aeroplanes (Barnstorming (Cartwright, 1982)), but nevertheless there. It reconsiders these games, with their “rain forest[s]”, “aurora borealis” and “mountain sunset[s]”, as “place[s] to visit” as much as amusing pastimes, and, by relocating their expressive constraints within the poetic traditions of naturalism and Imagism, invites their representations of nature to be viewed not as crude, primitive artefacts of an underdeveloped technology belonging to a bygone era but as potentially beautiful works of a purposeful and perennial artistic style (13).
At a conceptual level then, A Slow Year’s project is a restorative one. By reconceptualising the Atari’s conditions of production as formal principles rather than technological limitations, it positions Atari game development as a legitimate contemporary artistic method - a marginal one perhaps, but not anachronistic. While mainstream videogame development tends to equate innovation with greater technological sophistication and higher graphical fidelity, Bogost argues that older media is still brimming with unexplored frontiers:
...to me, programming the Atari offers more rather than fewer connections to the history of art. Working on the Atari is no different than writing sonnets, or fashioning vessels by glass blowing, or capturing photographs with view cameras. Those forms are old, but they are far from dead. The Atari too is a living platform. It still has secrets to give up to us. (18)
21 An additional tradition the game revives is the physical media and packaging of original Atari games. Initial copies of A Slow Year were released on salvaged Atari cartridges, complete with newly printed labels that meticulously emulate the visual styles of the “real” thing. This is another gesture with media archaeological insights: at a time when digital sales of videogames now eclipse physical purchases and when several of the biggest publishers now longer include instruction manuals with their products, A Slow Year’s packaging brings to light meanings and pleasures afforded by the material artefacts that once accompanied videogames which only become apparent in hindsight (“Breakdown…”; Fahey). This seemingly secondary packaging and printed matter, Bogost implies, actually has a considerable effect upon how the play experience is distributed (spatially and psychologically) and, potentially, how games are designed.
For one thing, this material seems to constitute part of a games’ apparatus, “extend[ing] the experience of a game” by “making it possible to peruse and contemplate the title away from the computer”. (20) In A Slow Year’s case, the computer generated haikus included in the instruction manual facilitate this activity, recounting scenes which recall the images seen in the game. For another, it “allowed developers to clarify the systems or fiction of a game” outside of the diegesis of the experience, a task which is often achieved in modern videogames via in-game tutorials, explanatory text and cinematic sequences respectively. Again, A Slow Year’s instruction manual contributes to the experience in a formative way in this respect. By off-loading all explanatory and expository duties to the manual, Bogost was able allocate as much of the Atari cartridge’s four kilobytes of storage space a possible for achieving the game’s images and effects. This might seem a trivial to designers working under less restrictive technological constraints, but it also affords the experience a certain kind of “purity” which transcends logistics - there are no menus or text in A Slow Year, for instance. It also introduces a degree of desirable misdirection to the play experience. The instructions for how to play A Slow Year are written as haikus and are as such brief and fairly ambiguous, leaving the player to consider for themselves how the lines might be translated into rules. Take the haiku for the “Summer” section of the game, for example:
Afternoon craves nap
Eyes follow the aimless twig
Waken when they meet (20)
22 Figure 1.1 “Eyes follow the aimless twig”. A Slow Year.
Figure 1.2 “Afternoon craves nap”. Pressing the button shuts the player character’s eyes. A Slow Year.
23 Figure 1.3 “Waken when they meet”. Releasing the button opens the player character’s eyes. A Slow Year.
Upon loading the “Summer” section, the player sees the image pictured above. First, they notice that a bundle of brown lines emerges in the bottom-left corner of the screen and drifts automatically from the left side to the right, that moving the Atari joystick horizontally will make the green rectangle at the bottom of the screen to move in a corresponding direction, and that holding down the button will cause each of the black borders to grow until they meet in the middle and the whole image has turned black. Releasing the button, they discover, will return the image to normal. In combining this procedural information gleaned from experimenting with the controls and observing the game with the text of the haiku, the player can interpret the objects on-screen and parse the rules of the game. The brown lines, they discover, are the “aimless twig”; the green rectangle is the focal point of the player’s “eyes”; the encroaching black borders are their eyelids. From this information they can discern how to play the game, which unfolds like this: first the player notes the distance between the green rectangle and the incoming twig (“Eyes follow the aimless twig”, fig. 1.1). Then, they press the button close their eyes (“Afternoon craves nap, fig. 1.2). Finally, once they estimate that the log has arrived at the same vertical position as the rectangle, they open their eyes (“Waken when they meet”, fig. 1.3).
24 In much the same way as a reader is expected to infer the meaning of poem through interpretation, A Slow Year asks the player to draw upon similar mental faculties to uncover the logic of its four short games. This unconventional and, by mainstream standards, fairly obtuse mode of play is achieved through past media technologies and formats no longer favoured by contemporary creators. As Bogost notes, the “low fidelity graphics intrinsic to the hardware” of the VCS demand abstraction and thus lend themselves well to the kind of ludic ambiguity he pursues in A Slow Year (17). While the technologically meagre visuals of early videogames are typically thought of as one of their deficiencies compared to mainstream modern works, Bogost turns this “shortcoming” into a feature, affording a kind of play experience arguably more novel than many of the formulaic genre games, created with the latest and greatest in technological innovations, which crowd the mainstream industry’s release calendar. Furthermore, it rediscovers pleasures of the videogame experience which have been forgotten in the move to digital distribution. “Back in the day, written instructions and other materials that came with a game served a much greater role in the overall experience of the artifact,” Bogost writes. “Today those sorts of paratextual materials have all but gone extinct...” (15).
This last point reveals the reflective side of A Slow Year’s brand of nostalgia. Boym notes how “new technology and advanced marketing” have been mobilised by corporations to stimulate what she cynically calls “ersatz nostalgia”, a nostalgia “for the things you never thought you had lost” (10). In discovering the unrecognised experiential values intrinsic to the material components which used to accompany videogames, as well affording the retroactive recognition that “part of a game’s enjoyment came from figuring out how to play it”, A Slow Year offers a sort of Joni Mitchell-ian twist on Boym’s ersatz nostalgia, which instead pines for the things you never realised you had lost (i.e. “you don’t know what you got ‘till it’s gone”). Similarly, in a truly reflective fashion, Bogost’s game conjures nostalgia for experiences that never actually existed; it projects ideas onto the past that are as foreign to yesteryear’s world as they are to today's. His insistence that “the Atari is a slow machine”, for instance, is informed modern technological standards. A market leader in its prime, the pace of programming for the VCS would have been the norm for the majority of videogame developers. Furthermore, the crawling pace of the games included in A Slow Year convey a typically nostalgic longing for “the slower rhythms of the past” that are, again, an invention of imagination. Indeed, despite its contingency on decades old technology and its efforts to disguise itself as an authentic VCS release, A Slow Year is a thoroughly contemporary work and Bogost is aware of this fact. One of the key advantages of developing games for defunct platforms, he explains, is that one is freed from the constraints and expectations of modern development: “For once, it’s possible to plumb the depths of a game console without worrying about competition, accessories, upgrades,
25 expectations, shelf space” (11). Much like Thomas Elsaesser’s claim that cinema’s retirement from its role as modernity’s primary storyteller into the curatorial purview of artistic institutions has freed the medium to pursue other purposes and functions, the VCS has, for Bogost, through its commercial death and subsequent resurrection become a platform for experimenting with different kinds of videogame styles than those encouraged by modern technology and market expectations (362).
As a digital videogame that is at the same time a larger holistic entity consisting of software and material elements, A Slow Year both restores and reflects the user experience of videogames from the Atari VCS era, conveying something of how the experience actually was while at the same time emphasising and exaggerating certain elements so as to establish the meaning of that experience in modern contexts. It also demonstrates that celebrating the methods and practices of the past need not be a regressive gesture leading to cultural stagnation, as critics of nostalgia warn. Lastly, A Slow Year illustrates how, by simulating phenomenological qualities of the past, real or otherwise (in this case an imagined “slowness”), videogames may discover in past media new avenues of expression - avenues which only become visible in retrospect.
26 Chapter Two: Remembering the “Early” Internet as a Virtual World
The “Preserving Virtual Worlds” project, undertaken by a number of US institutions in conjunction with the Library of Congress, is the most substantial academic initiative to date to reckon with the alarming perishability of videogames. Recognising the enormous cultural influence videogames now exert, the project sought to establish urgent strategies for the preservation of a wide range of works, from early experiments in interactive fiction to the blockbuster production Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (Blizzard, 2002) (12). As broad a spectrum of videogames as their corpus of virtual worlds represents, however, it is just that - a collection of videogames. It seems that as far as the project is concerned, the term “virtual world” is synonymous with “videogame”. Contrastingly, the actual definition of virtual worlds which the report provides, which is taken from the defunct online journal the Virtual Worlds Review, is much more open, and could apply to far more experiences than just videogames. A virtual world, it states, is simply “an interactive simulated environment accessed by multiple users through an online interface” (9).
Could it be possible, therefore, to consider what might be called the “early” internet as a virtual world? The internet is, after all, is an “interactive… environment accessed by multiple users”. What exactly it “simulate[s]”, if anything, is less clear, but with regards to how the early internet might be preserved, such quibbles are outweighed by the conceptual advantages of approaching it in much the same way as the fantasy universes of online multiplayer videogames. For one, the reasons the Preserving Virtual Worlds project posits for preserving online games are just as applicable to the early internet. The human interactions that take place in virtual worlds, the report argues, are no less important than those that occur away from the screen, involving similarly significant “social, political and economic activities” and thus should be documented (89). This is surely true of all interactions which take place on the internet, whether inside a multiplayer videogame, on social media or in a chatroom. Furthermore, the knowledge already accrued about from the preservation of online multiplayer games - the challenges as well as the strategies devised to tackle them - can provide an initial roadmap for how to archive the early internet.
The “Early” Internet
But what exactly is the “early” internet? Clearly any attempt to separate the history of the internet into discrete periods or eras would be an oversimplification, though at least one well known
27 example exists in the form of “Web 2.0”, a designation for the internet of the mid-2000s onwards popularised by the entrepreneur Tim O'Reilly. According to O'Reilly, what set Web 2.0 apart from previous incarnations of the internet were new services built around “harnessing collective intelligence” - websites like eBay and Amazon, as well new methods of content creation like blogging and wikis (37). All of these, he argued, produced a web in which the line between users and creators became less discernible. Many have dismissed O’Reilly’s reasoning however, including internet inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who denies the existence of such a clear cut new paradigm. “If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people,” suggests Berners-Lee. “But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along” (“developerWorks...”).
Still, regardless of the validity of Web 2.0 as a genuine juncture point, one cannot deny the stark differences between the experience of being an internet user today to that of ten, never mind twenty, years ago. Online interactions from before the mid-2000s were characterised by different dynamics such as asynchronous communication and relative anonymity, resulting in a distinctly different kind of environment with different behaviour norms. In a piece reflecting on two independent videogames about older forms of internet communication, Cibele and Emily is Away, journalist Leigh Alexander draws out some of these differences:
I often think about the fact we don't really have 'online lives' any more. When I was small, to have a 'handle', to get on the Information Superhighway, was like attending a masquerade ball on a brand-new planet. All of you were suddenly someplace else, strange and new.
...nowadays, in the age of remote working and Real Name Policies, some corners of real life feel more forbidden, more secret, than the internet does or perhaps ever will again. (“Cibele...”)
Alexander’s comments address how the decline of privacy and anonymity on the internet have impacted upon her personal experience as an internet user, changes which are likely hard to comprehend for someone who has no memory of an internet prior to social media. They highlight an intangible, subjective history of the internet - a history of emotions, feelings and experiences - that is swept aside by the more empirical accounts that portray web history as a procession of new products and services - from “domain name speculation” to “search engine optimization”; from “Britannica Online” to “Wikipedia”; from Web 1.0 to 2.0 (O'Reilly 18). But how does one convey an experiential history of the internet?
28 Cleary preserving the actual content of the early internet, as organisations like The Internet Archive (an automated web archival project) as well as vigilante initiatives like Archiveteam (which backed-up the entire catalogue of sites hosted on Yahoo’s Geocities) are currently doing, is of great importance. These primary sources provide empirical evidence about how the early internet was used, as well as how it looked and functioned. Such material in isolation, however, divulges very little about how it felt to use. It says little about why it might have felt like “someplace else, strange and new”, “forbidden” or “secret” to Alexander and her contemporaries.
The authors of the Preserving Virtual Worlds project encountered a similar predicament in their attempts to preserve the online multiplayer game Second Life (Linden Lab, 2003-). No matter how extensively archivists preserve the software and hardware components which make executing an online game possible, they concluded, all they will have procured is an empty framework which conveys very little about how players experienced the game.
If we were to manage to archive all of the objects from a given region, including all scripts, animations and other inventory content that are typically protected, we would, in effect, have managed to archive a ghost town, an empty set of architecture and geography with no information about how the space was used or what its inhabitants were like. A static snapshot of a world such as Second Life may in some sense serve as a surrogate for the original, but it is a poor substitute. Part of the fundamental nature of Second Life is that it is a living, evolving, dynamic space. An archived copy of a region provides some documentation of what the world was like, but it is hardly a complete set of documentation, and in a very real sense it is not and cannot be a complete version of the original. (91)
There is a parallel to be drawn here to the Digital Roman Forum project discussed in the introduction, and its ability to capture or at least approximate some of the phenomenological qualities of the real life Forum that cannot be communicated through statistical documentation alone. The digital Forum and other 3D models address to some degree the problem of preserving the experiential qualities of an archeological site - they can approximate, for instance, the psychogeographical information that emerges from a site’s scale, layout and architecture. As of yet, no clear, comprehensive solution has presented itself with regards to the preservation of virtual worlds’ similarly elusive properties: their emergent social dynamics and behaviours; the sense of being part of a virtual community. As the Preserving Virtual Worlds report points out, secondary sources like “video, images, audio, and first-hand testimonials from players and player
29 communities[…] information from trade magazines, conventions, reviewers, commercial outlets” go some of the way (85). Indeed, writing like Henry Jenkins’ essays “Love Online” and “Do You Enjoy Making the Rest of Us Feel Stupid?”, two nascent works of internet ethnography, provide a valuable window into the customs of early internet culture, including information about users’ discussion habits and how relationships were maintained before social media.
Videogames as Re-enactments
Just as diagrams or photographs of the Roman Forum communicate scarcely little of its experiential qualities however, such data provides only a very limited insight into first-hand experience of occupying an interactive virtual world populated by thousands of users, be that virtual world an online multiplayer game or some pocket of the early internet. One preservation strategy which poses a potential solution to this quandary, however, is “re-enactment”. Re-enactment, the Preserving Virtual Worlds report explains, “covers a range of possible techniques, including the reconstruction of an experience from historical record and game-related artifacts, the reconstruction of the environment through technology, and the documentation of game-related experience through secondary sources” (83). It seems clear that a full-blown “reconstruction of an experience” stands as the most promising, while also the most challenging, method of emulating the experiential qualities of the past. And a precedent does exist for re-enacting past media experiences; there are a myriad of methodologies being implemented to understand the historical consumption and usage of cinema and live music, for instance. Early film spectatorship is re-enacted through the reconstruction of 19th-century nickelodeons, such as those housed at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and the Riverside Museum in Glasgow, as well as through revival screenings of silent films with live Wurlitzer organ accompaniment. Rock concerts, too, receive similarly imaginative archival treatment; there are theatrical length documentaries like The Last Waltz (Scorsese, 1978) and Shut Up and Play the Hits (Southern & Lovelace, 2012) (the latter of which aims to situate the viewer in the crowd through camera positioning), and also literal moment for moment re-enactments, such as Concerto for Voice and Machinery II (Mitchell, 2007), a “restaging” of an infamously riotous performance by German group Einstürzende Neubauten “complete with the disorder” of the original event executed 23 years later (Reynolds 49).
At the report warns, “re-enactments pose significant risks of altering the appearance and performance of games”, and the same goes for the imitation of any past object or event (6). While it is plain that the content of re-enactments should not be mistaken for objective historical fact and are
30 only as accurate as the living memory and documentation upon which they are based, this need not diminish their value as tools for understanding the past. As a supplement to and supplemented by other kinds of historical material, they can shed a light on the experiential qualities of the past which are not communicated by conventional dictated histories delivered via images or text. Undoubtedly re-enactments qualify as a nostalgic activity and it is in this understanding that their virtue becomes apparent. Both an attempt to recover the past while at the same implicitly “acknowledging that the past exists through textual traces in cultural and ideological mediation with the present”, re- enactments are simultaneously restorative and reflective, producing a kind of simulation which might allow access to the meanings of the past while at the same time permitting the retroactive reflection which establishes its meanings for the present (Grainge 29).
Emily is Away
Where revival screenings offer an insight into the experiential qualities of early cinema spectatorship, videogames may do the same for the early internet. It makes sense, after all, that one interactive medium should be an appropriate way to historicise another. Emily is Away, one of the works cited in Alexander’s article, is a prime example. In Emily is Away, the player operates a simulated version of AOL Instant Messenger, a chat client that saw widespread use during the 2000s. Over five chapters, each around five minutes long and set a year apart, the player makes conversation with Emily, one of the player character’s classmates from high school. The game’s structure and content are fairly unremarkable; Emily is Away progresses like any other work interactive fiction, the player choosing between prepared dialogue options to advance the story down one of a few possible branches. Its presentation, on the other hand, is of great interest as an example of re-enactment and early internet historicism. On both an audiovisual and procedural level, the game aims to immerse the player in the user experience of the AOL chat client. In order to make their chosen messages appear, the player must strike a corresponding number of keys as if they were typing out the letters themselves, their key presses accompanied by the recorded rattle of a chunky mechanical keyboard. The conspicuous whir of a desktop computer plays throughout, occasionally punctuated by the pings of message alerts or, between chapters, the sound of logging into Windows XP.
31 Figure 2.1. Emily is Away’s simulacrum of AOL Instant Messenger
These sensual hallmarks of 2000s computer use express an intense technostalgia (see Chapter 1), but one with a shorter memory span than previously encountered by van der Heijden. Whereas van der Heijden observes technostalgia in the “re-appropriation of original analogue media technologies” and the “various digital media applications… which play with the look and feel of their analogue equivalents”, Emily is Away is one of many recent independent videogames which evokes the stylistic trappings of past digital technologies, in some cases barely a decade old (104). Furthermore, these works aim to convey not just the “look and feel” of these technologies but also their functionality and usage contexts - in sum, their user experience.
Alexander’s illustrates how by mimicking the experience of using AOL Instant Messenger, from aping its layout and visual style right down to approximating the delay between communications, Emily is Away is able to recall some of the emotional and psychological responses that using the real program solicited. “The game's best beats come in the emotional pauses in the simulated chat client,” she explains, “and the understanding that even in brief, unsentimental sentences, the choice of one word over another might have unexpected intonation” (“Cibele...”). Her latter point sheds light on how internet chat clients, like any communication technology, both shape the way in which communicants express themselves (“in brief, unsentimental sentences”) and, moreover, how users interpret messages. While a printout of an AOL Instant Messenger conversation
32 might indicate the technology’s influence upon the likes of sentence structure or vocabulary, it would not capture the erratic rhythm of the back and forth between the participants, or the suspense of waiting while a conversation partner “is typing…”. And this experiential data, as Alexander indicates, is rich in meaning, prompting her to speculate as to whether certain experiences which have also been left behind along with abandoned methods of early internet communication:
[...] is that weird pull, those magical silences, the special weight of a certain person's sign-in alert even part of the human experience any more? Virtual communication is no longer magic. It's no longer rare and risky, and as time passes, more and more of us will be much the same person "here" as we are "there." (“Cibele...”)
Such revelations challenge the idea that early forms of internet communication are any less expressive or semantically complex than “real life” exchanges or those conducted using later, more technologically sophisticated methods. Jenkins, in an account of his son’s first online relationship, notes that “the medium’s inadequacies are, no doubt, resulting in significant shifts in the vocabulary of love. In cyberspace, there is no room for the ambiguous gestures that characterized another generation’s fumbling courtships” (175). On the contrary, Emily is Away illustrates that even before the advent of voice over IP, “cyberspace” communication was rife with ambiguities. On several occasions during the game, both characters begin composing messages only to delete them halfway through and start again, leaving the player to wonder what they had intended to say - an anxious experience presumably familiar to anyone who has used a chat client.
Digital: A Love Story
Christine Love’s Digital: A Love Story is another independent videogame about early internet communication, or more accurately, proto-internet communication. Set “five minutes into the future of 1988”, the game takes place within the simulated interface of an “Amie” computer, a fictional spoof of Commodore International’s real life Amiga. The player’s Amie has recently been installed with a modem, granting access to the nascent world of networked message board communities. These communities, or Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs), are computers servers to which users can connect in order to upload and download files or exchange public and private messages in a format not dissimilar to contemporary internet forums. Though some forms of BBS communication exist to this day - BBSs are still widely used in China, for example, where their “bottom-up many-to-many communication” format complements the nation’s “collectivism-oriented culture” (Jin 27) - BBSs
33 were largely abandoned in the western world when dial-up internet connections became widely available in the mid-90s, allowing users to connect to servers from all over the world through a single connection supplied by their internet service provider - a considerably more streamlined process than manually dialing each individual BBS.
Figure 2.2. Dialing a BBS in Digital: A Love Story.
Digital: A Love Story re-enacts this arduous process of discovering and connecting to BBSs. The game is a “computer mystery/romance” told through fictional BBS messages in which the player must read and reply to messages in order to advance story, picking up clues as to what to do next. The player begins the game with a contact number for the “Lake City Local” system, which they access by opening up a “Dialer” application on the simulated desktop, typing the corresponding digits into a text field and hitting enter. Next, a “Now dialing…” alert window pops up while distorted modem noises whine in the background, lasting for good five to ten seconds before the system’s welcome page appears. While this artificial connection time is likely much shorter than is historically accurate, it is repeated every time the player connects to a system, regardless whether or not they have visited it before. Similarly, the player must manually redial the correct number for every system they connect to, often preceded by a long-distance calling code for systems further afield. These simulated elements, despite being obviously streamlined, are important in establishing the comparatively glacial and tedious process of BBS communication compared with the instantaneous
34 correspondence of today’s social media. For one reviewer writing in The Economist, these touches were profoundly nostalgic, prompting them to “wax rhapsodic about a game that revels in the annoyances of logging on in a pre-web world”: “This game happens to be terribly engaging to anyone who grew up using primitive versions of online computing,” they confess. “The appeal is in reliving the intricate series of inputs that were required simply to get online, much less to communicate” (“The Low-tech...”).
The sense of longing described by this reviewer highlights the extent to which technostalgia somewhat diverges from regular nostalgia. Nostalgia typically projects two qualities onto the past: slowness and simplicity. Nostalgia is a “longing for the slower rhythms of the past”, states Boym (13); “a collective longing for a happier, simpler, more innocent age”, according to Reynolds (xxv). In the nostalgist’s mind, Gill explains, “the recent past, one that seems much simpler and slower and still (almost) graspable, becomes a reassuring construct that allows for a stabilizing self-definition in the present” (164). While Digital: A Love Story’s depiction of BBS communication certainly fulfills the conventionally nostalgic image of an idealised slower age, what makes its representation of the past appealing for the reviewer above is how much more complicated it is compared to the present, not simpler. Perversely, the reviewer identifies the “annoyances” of the “pre-web world” as something to be celebrated. It is a sentiment which reveals something paradoxical about technology’s relationship with simplicity that perhaps aligns technostalgia with the more politically questionable side of nostalgia discourse: the desire to return to an “ideal home”, pursued by “reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and homeland” (Boym, 15).
To make a bald generalisation: as consumer technology has increased in technical complexity - as it has attained greater processing power, quicker networking speeds, more functionality and so on - it has tended to become simpler to use and more widely accessible. For this reason, it is difficult not to see a longing for a time of more complicated, opaque technology as having elitist undertones. In his essay on media fandom during the BBS era, Jenkins notes that in its earliest days, computer networked communication was available only to a very specific demographic of people. At this “early moment when researchers, companies, and military bases still dominated the Internet and when there was still great concern about whether women would feel comfortable about participating in such online discussions”, he explains (116). BBS users “tend[ed] to be college-educated, professionally oriented, technologically inclined men, most of whom are involved either with the academy or the computer industry” (118). In this context, the desire to return to an era of more complicated technology seems an exclusionary gesture, one that might return technology to its “ideal home” in the upper echelons of the academy and white-collar labour.
35 Evidently, nostalgic notions of simplicity and complexity become confused in discussions about technology. Consider, for instance, the popular opinion that consumer technologies purportedly designed to make life easier have in fact led to a modern lifestyle in which people now feel exhausted and overwhelmed, constantly assailed by an incoming barrage of notifications, emails and updates. In his Atlantic article “Hyperemployment, or the Exhausting Work of the Technology User”, Ian Bogost proposes that, in concordance with the permeation of internet connected technologies, email has developed from a something “fun”, “silly” and “a trifle” into a time consuming chore and the root of a “foul new anguish”. “Now, email is a pot constantly boiling over,” he writes. “Like King Sisyphus pushing his boulder, we read, respond, delete, delete, delete, only to find that even more messages have arrived whilst we were pruning.” Such a view is a typical example of the nostalgic “poverty of the present” trope - it “makes a negative assessment of the present” that implies “an idealized and imaginary past” (644). But videogames like Digital: A Love Story, which attempt to model the user experience of early internet communication, can provide experiential evidence that might well serve to substantiate claims like Bogost’s. One should of course be wary of the artistic license taken in any representation of the past. Yet, while Digital: A Love Story does inevitably exaggerate some elements of the early internet experience - Love has admitted to “play[ing] up the isolation”, perhaps in reference to the small number of other users in the game world - for the most part the game actually accelerates and streamlines the process of early internet use in a way that is likely more palatable to contemporary players: “downloads” happen instantly; characters reply to your messages in seconds (“Digital…”). The administrator of a long distance BBSs encountered halfway through the game warns that “it may take upwards of several days for a message to reach someone on a different node”. In reality, these messages take around ten minutes to come through.
Digital: A Love Story, then, illustrates the usefulness of videogame re-enactments as a supplement to anecdotal accounts and archived data about the early internet. As a fictional simulation which emulates much of the functionality as well as the aesthetic properties of BBS communication, it enables players to compare different eras of internet communication at the level of the user experience (though they should also remember that all representations of the past are partial). Another notable feature of Digital: A Love Story is its use of archive material. Though all of the text included in the finished work was written by the author, Love based messages of the game’s fictional users on genuine BBS posts collected at textfiles.com, a hobbyist-run repository message board posts from the 1980s. Love’s game thus illustrates how the videogame can leverage static
36 archival data to inject life into the “ghost town[s]” that virtual worlds become once their servers go offline (McDonough et al. 91). It suggests the usefulness of fictional simulations of the past as a method of historicising and “preserving” the phenomenological aspects virtual worlds which raw text files and other empirical residue do not capture on their own.
Cibele
Figure 2.3. Exploring Nina’s desktop in Cibele.
Cibele, the other work cited in Alexander’s article, is also built upon the archived content of past internet communications, but rather than using this material as inspiration, Cibele includes much of it intact, as is. Through its use of archive content, Cibele re-enacts not just a generalised user experience of earlier internet communication but a user experience - that of the author, Nina Freeman, or at least at least a partly fictionalised representation of her (henceforth referred to as “Nina”). Nina is a freshman college student who has recently moved away from home and struck up a relationship with a similarly college-aged boy named Blake via a fictional online multiplayer game called “Valtameri”. Everything the player can know about Nina they learn from perusing her computer files; the majority of the game takes place within Nina’s desktop, where the player can
37 open documents, click through folders and read messages the same as they would on a regular computer. Playing Cibele can thus often feel uncomfortably voyeuristic, especially given that many of these files are genuine artefacts from Freeman’s past, including poems, photos, blog entries and diaries (Figure 2.3). This awkward sense of eavesdropping on private thoughts and conversations continues into the sections of the game staged inside Valtameri, where the player controls Nina’s online character “Cibele” while listening to her and Blake chat clumsily about their feelings for one another.
Set in 2009, the events portrayed Cibele are evidently not indicative of early internet communication - though social media is notably absent from story, perhaps because major services like Facebook and Twitter were still in their infancy in terms of widespread popular adoption at that time. Even so, critical responses to the game take a nostalgic tone in discussing the methods of online communication it represents. Adi Robertson at The Verge writes, “the game feels grounded in the end of the earnest, open LiveJournal-and-blogging internet, when online communication could feel both like intimate journaling and performing for an imaginary crowd.” Tyler Colp, writing for ZAM, says “I used to read old blog entries, look at old photos, save writing assignments, and send emails like Nina. I used to live online, on my computer, in a virtual world.” Part of this can be attributed to the fact, while Cibele does memorialise certain media objects and technologies and some of the social habits associated with them, it is first and foremost a personal story - a videogame “confessional” that “speaks to a generation that hasn’t yet had its particular version of adolescent romance spoken to in an interactive form.” (Walker) Unlike Emily is Away and Digital: A Love Story, which in their faithful recreations of past media objects present themselves primarily as tributes to their respective technologies and eras of internet communication, Cibele is a pseudo- autobiographical story of a relationship which happens to have been conducted through an online game. It marks the inflection point at which memory and the usage of media technology have become inseparable, and recognises that the user experiences of technologies are potentially also profound life experiences.
38 Figure 2.4. Inside “Valtameri”, Cibele’s fictional online multiplayer game.
Despite the fact that Valtameri purposefully deemphasises accuracy and detail in its simulacrum of multiplayer online games, it manages to capture much of the usage behaviours, social significance and meaning that experiences like Final Fantasy XI (Square-Enix, 2002-) (the inspiration for Valtameri) invoke for their players. While the Preserving Virtual Worlds report goes to great lengths to ascertain methods of preserving the “technological environment” of such games, including highly specific technical components like “the game world visualization component, input manager, and user interface system[…] the realm that maintains the object catalog, object instances, and player instances”, the critical responses to Cibele suggests that these elements are not necessary to convey, and indeed by themselves are incapable of conveying, much of the meaning and experiential qualities of these games (84). The very fact Valtameri is a highly rudimentary sketch of its source material in Robertson's view serves to accentuate the instrumental and almost incidental social function such games provided within their player’s lives, rather than being isolated activities pursued for their own sake. “Valtameri is obviously not a "real" role-playing game; you can’t fail, die, or level up,” she writes. “But it stylizes and emphasizes the parts of games that are less about challenge or goals and more about providing a pretext for interacting with other people.” Similarly, Cibele illustrates that online multiplayer games are typically used concurrently with other programs and services and that their user experiences can be diffused across any number of different
39 channels. As sociologist Katherine Cross writes, the Valtameri sections of Cibele are “frenetic”. “Valtameri itself isn’t terribly challenging or exciting,” she states, “but the real challenge is in both paying attention to the spoken dialogue, answering several in-game private messages from friends while carrying on and absorbing the disparate conversations with them, and alt-tabbing out of Valtameri to look at emails and photos. All while grinding on those mobs in Valtameri” (“Love Letter”). As Cross shows, these other activities are portrayed as integral to the experience of playing an online multiplayer game, and thus should be historicised as such.
In deciding how virtual worlds should be archived the Preserving Virtual Worlds report draws to attention the problem of “boundaries”; what are the fundamental components that actually constitute the experience of a virtual world? The report cites some straightforward items like the hardware required to run the game and the media upon which it is stored as well but also suggests the need to archive “information, beyond the game itself” (13). Belonging to this category is “context”, which “although not an immediate threat to the preservation of games,” the report claims, “is important to creating understanding for future users” (14). It offers some suggestions: “information from trade magazines, conventions, reviewers, commercial outlets[…] TV commercials, music, spin-off media (Saturday morning cartoons), merchandise[...]”. In light of Cibele’s depiction of online multiplayer game experiences, clearly these boundaries should be extended to include phenomena which, on their face and unlike the tangentially related items listed above, might have no direct association to the game at all. In brings to attention that the history of any virtual world cannot be extricated from it uses within people's lives and as well as the other activities it supplements and facilitates.
Indeed, this is what all three of the games examined in this chapter demonstrate. While archivist like textfiles.com and the Internet Archive focus almost exclusively on the content of early internet exchanges, often presenting this information in the form of raw text dumps, these games suggest that media in which these communications occur is just as important to preserve and furthermore, offer ways of doing so. They illustrate the current approaches to early internet preservation are omitting the experiential qualities of early internet use and that archivists and historians may benefit from adopting the methods of fictional re-enactment deployed in these works.
40 Chapter Three: Confronting New Media Culture in Kentucky Route Zero
In today’s consumer capitalist climate, rarely is the worth of a media device measured according to whether it is still operational; according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, half of all discarded electronics still work (Gade qtd. In “How to Reduce...”). Rather, technical media are diagnosed “dead” long before their material parts expire, ideologically usurped sometimes mere months after their introduction to the market by way of a commercial process called “planned obsolescence”. Planned obsolescence, Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka explain, is a strategy for “artificially decreasing the life-span of consumer commodities… increasing the speed of obsolescence, and stimulating the need to purchase” (142). It can take multiple forms - the constant influx of newer, more desirable technology is one such implementation, relying on the technolust of gadget enthusiasts to incentivise upgrades. Another, more insidious practice is the deliberate sabotaging of older models. The release of Apple’s fifth iPhone iteration, for instance, coincided with a general software update for all iPhone users - mandatory for those who wished to continue using certain purchased applications - which, as one journalist observed, seriously impaired the battery life and responsiveness of older phones (Rampell).
While the standardisation of such slash-and-burn tactics might be good business practice in the short term - after all, it allows a company like Apple to sell new smartphones season after season to the same customers, like a fashion brand refreshing their clothing line - their long term consequences are almost certainly catastrophic. It’s all well and good to declare unfashionable gadgets “dead”, but as Hertz and Parikka remind us, technical media never really die. Composed of sturdy metals, hazardous chemicals and plenty of un-biodegradable plastic, all of our discarded CD players, Game Boys, CRT monitors and cassette tapes live on in landfills, polluting the landscape geologically and aesthetically. Worse still, the production of new media devices is largely predicated on processes which are highly damaging to the environment, be it the green houses gases emitted during their manufacture or the energy intensive acquisition of the rare earth materials essential to almost all modern technology.
Besides their contribution to climate change - which is only exacerbated, of course, by the culture of annual upgrades - the conditions of labour upon which the production of most modern technology depends is also highly problematic. Referencing Apple products in particular, Parikka writes, “the iDevice is enabled by dubious labor practices, including child labor in the mines of Congo; the appalling working conditions, which lead to a number of suicides, in the Foxconn factories in China”, though dozens of other major tech companies including Microsoft, Dell and Samsung have
41 also been criticised by consumer watchdogs and NGOs for their compliance in the unethical treatment of workers due to inadequate oversight in their supply chains (Parikka 89; Turner and Webb).
Clearly a reconsideration of the way we discuss, consume and inevitably dispose of new media devices is both necessary and urgent. For Hertz and Parikka, along with media theorists like Erkki Huhtamo and Erik Kluitenberg, media archaeology constitutes such an intervention. Not technically a discipline due to its lack of agreed principles and terminology, media archaeology, as defined by Erkki Huhtamo and Parikka, is “an approach - or a bundle of closely related approaches”. These approaches may take many shapes and forms, drawing from various theoretical backgrounds, including film studies, literary studies and Foucault's writing on the “archaeology of knowledge”, but are ultimately united in their common “discontent with ‘canonized’ narratives of media culture and history” (3). Importantly, media archaeology confronts “the rejection of history by modern media culture and theory alike by pointing out hitherto unnoticed continuities and ruptures”, and in doing so constructs “alternative histories of suppressed, neglected, and forgotten media that do not point teleologically to the present media-cultural condition as their ‘perfection’ ”(3). Media archaeology’s general disdain for teleology is particularly relevant in the context of an upgrade obsessed gadget culture. In its belief that all media, even “dead ends, losers, and inventions that never made it into a material product have important stories to tell”, media archaeology stands in opposition to the teleological narratives commonly espoused by tech companies to market their products, whereby new devices are presented as unambiguous improvements upon and thus replacements for previous models. Numbered naming schemes typify this practice - e.g. Windows 10; iPhone 5; PlayStation 4 - creating a perceived redundancy of everything but the newest, most “perfect” device.
As well as a conceptual tool, media archaeology is something that can be practiced. The DIY movement called “circuit bending” provides for Hertz and Parikka on such example. Performing a combination of engineering, hacking, and objet trouvé art, circuit benders dig into the guts of old technologies and playfully experiment with their innards, crossing wires, inserting switches and otherwise adulterating the original components so as to bestow the forgotten objects with new functionalities. While on the surface circuit bending appears a fairly innocuous hobby, Hertz and Parikka claim it has significant political implications. Firstly, the reanimation of these objects, now instilled with new functions, produces a violent reinsertion of forgotten technical media into the contemporary media landscape, both aestheticizing the act of recycling and confronting the orthodox image of media as something trendy, sleek and perpetually modern: “the customized, trashy, and folksy methodologies of circuit bending recall historical practices of reuse and serve as a
42 useful counterpoint to envisioning digital culture only in terms of a glossy, high-tech ‘Californian Ideology’”(145). Secondly, circuit bending destabilises the metaphorical trope of “death” in media discourse. It reminds us that outdated media devices - though figuratively “dead” from commercial standpoint - nonetheless remain materially present, and that the actually “death” of “dead media” is located elsewhere - “in the concrete sense of the real death of nature through [media’s] toxic chemicals and heavy metals” (146).
While Reed Ghazala performed what is thought of as the first canonical act of circuit bending in 1978 by turning educational children’s toys into crude synthesisers, Hertz and Parikka trace the spirit of the exercise back to pioneering media artist Nam June Paik and his video synthesiser, created nine years earlier along with Shuya Abe by tampering with television sets. Paik, who seems an apposite poster child for an alternative, more materially conscious media discourse. A work like TV Garden (1978), for instance, in which television sets lie scattered among rows of potted plants, underlines the delusional commonplace division between technical media and “nature” that works to obfuscates media’s contingency upon “natural processes from photosynthesis to mineralization”, while also offering a cautionary vision of a future where discarded technology crowds the natural landscape, inundating the undergrowth (139).
Imaginary Media
That being said, Hertz and Parikka could just as well have found a progenitor for the circuit bending movement in Lula Chamberlain, a relatively unknown new media artist whose work provides an equally insightful and subversive perspective on media culture. A contemporary of Paik - and indeed, active in much the same circles before relocating to Mexico sometime around the 1970s - Chamberlain’s output exhibits a similar interest in the connection between media and the natural world. Moreover, she exercises a magpie-like fervour for repurposing old technology that perhaps eclipses even that of Paik, counting books, televisions, teletype terminals, punch card computers and microfilm readers among her expressive materials. One of her most renowned pieces actually goes as far as to recycle one of Paik’s own works - Overdubbed Nam June Paik Installation in the style of Edward Packer is a reworking of Paik’s Random Access (1963) in which Chamberlain recorded an audio journal directly onto the same strips of tape displayed in the original work.
Certainly Chamberlain is an alluring figure. Be it her innovative forays into interactive fiction or her early interest in applying computer technology to the task geographical surveillance (which involved the construction of a makeshift computer lab deep inside a network of cave tunnels) her
43 work speaks to the versatility of media as well as the longstanding “interactions between media, art, and science”, and is as such worthy of considerable academic attention. Perhaps the most curious thing about Chamberlain, however, is that she doesn’t exist (Parikka, Geology 8).
Lula Chamberlain is a virtual artist, a fictional character in the ongoing Kentucky Route Zero series of videogames created by Jake Elliott, Tamas Kemenczy, and Ben Babbitt. Since 2013, Elliot et al. have published three of a proposed five episodes (or “Acts”) of the Kentucky Route Zero story along with a number of smaller, interstitial games intended to complement the narrative conveyed in the primary instalments. These side-works, labelled “Intermissions”, fill in additional plot details and flesh out the histories of supporting characters, though their connection to main story temporally or geographically is not immediately clear. The first of these intermissions is Limits and Demonstrations (2013), a short retrospective of Chamberlain’s work which features five of her pieces, including the aforementioned tribute to Nam June Paik. Players control three visitors to the exhibition - Emily, Ben and Bob - directing them to observe and discuss the various exhibits. As in the mainline entries in the series, players of Limits and Demonstrations guide characters around the game’s environment with the mouse, clicking on objects and reading lines of dialogue so as to move the experience forward.
Like most real life exhibitions, Limits and Demonstrations opens with a short piece of introductory text. From the outset, this brief overview hints at a media archaeological bent present in both Chamberlain’s work and Kentucky Route Zero as a whole:
Marking the first major public showcase of her work in over twenty years, this retrospective exhibition of work by pioneering installation artist Lula Chamberlain comprises a diagonal slice through time, place, and form.
The words “a diagonal slice through time” certainly resonate with the project of media archaeology and its obfuscation linear, straightforward accounts of media history in favour of more oblique understandings.
But what about Lula Chamberlain’s work is particularly media archaeological? Or more to the point, how does Kentucky Route Zero - in which the imaginary construct that is Chamberlain’s oeuvre represents just one facet of the series’ engagement with media, its history and its representation - expand the notion of circuit bending beyond its concern with materially present media objects to those which are virtual, both drawn from reality and concoctions of pure fantasy? And how does this intersect with ideas about retro? Can a videogame - inextricably dependent on the latest, most
44 energy, resource and labour intensive computer technology and yet, in its digital composition, distinctly removed from media’s gritty material realities - really pose a substantial critique of new media culture? Considering the multiple layers of fantasy and immateriality at play here, the media- archaeological discourse of “imaginary media” is perhaps a good place to begin such an analysis.
In the Book of Imaginary Media, Siegfried Zielinski outlines three variants of imaginary media: “untimely”, “conceptual” and “impossible”. The latter, he writes, are “imaginary media in the true sense, by which I mean hermetic and hermeneutic machines, that is machines that signify something, but where the initial design or sketch makes clear they cannot actually be built, and whose implied meanings nonetheless have an impact on the factual world of media” (qtd. in Kluitenberg 56). The media art installations of Lula Chamberlain are explicitly examples of “impossible” media, according to a passage of in-game text apparently so logistically complex that no piece has ever been realised as the artist truly intended:
[...]these works share a confounding legacy: in each of their debut exhibitions, they were nearly impossible to install. Galleries and museums balked at the scale, power requirements and highly-skilled labour involved in maintaining these works for display. Some of their debuts collapsed under the weight of logistics, only to be successfully executed much later.
[...]the works on display here also trace the extremes of our capabilities and the frontiers of our patience as both viewers and exhibitors. Are we capable of viewing these works as they were meant to be viewed? Do we even want to be?
45 Figure 3.1. Spinning Coin, Suspended, Correcting for Angular Motion (1976) in Limits and Demonstrations
Figure 3.2. Visage (1984) in Limits and Demonstrations
46 Spinning Coin, Suspended, Correcting for Angular Motion (1976, Figure 3.1) appears to defy gravity, consisting of what looks like an enormous microfilm scanner teetering on just one corner of its base, while Visage (1984, Figure 3.2) (apparently composed of “unknown media”, though including what looks like a PDP-11 computer cabinet encircled by teletype terminals) seems to be a sort of hologram, with floating grey streamers spiraling round and round like a tornado, tracing the shape of a man’s face. “Imaginary media mediate impossible desires”, states Eric Kluitenberg. He offers Star Trek’s (Roddenberry, 1966-69) universal translator as an example, it being just one manifestation of a general desire for a “technological means to bridge the gap with the other”, in doing so attaining the utopian ideal of unmitigated understanding between the species. The imaginary media encountered in Limits and Demonstrations however do not represent any such obvious desire, at least not one with such a direct functional benefit.
As noted above, Chamberlain’s works are fantastical technological objects made possible only through fiction, not unlike the space-age gadgets of a sci-fi film. What is different about these examples of imaginary media, however, is that they are also understood as impossible within their fictional context as well. The text from the curator’s introduction hints at this fact when it questions the possibility of viewing the works “as they were meant to be viewed”, as does the description of Visage as being composed of “unknown media”. The characters too are at a loss: upon viewing Visage, the player is given the option to ask “What is that made of?”, to which Ben responds, simply “It’s a mystery.” He is similarly puzzled when faced with Spinning Coin…, remarking, “This coin actually doesn’t look real”. While the conventional use of imaginary media in fiction is to imagine a world in which that technology is a mundane part of everyday, thus depicting an alternative way of life such a technology might enable, in this case the imaginary media is just as strange to the characters in the text as it is to the player. In this sense, through their rediscovery as imaginary, impossible media, these otherwise banal pieces of technological detritus (old computers, magnetic tape, etc.) become in Chamberlain’s artistic configurations objects of awe and mystery - both within the diegesis and for the player. Her art can thus be seen as rekindling the sense of wonderment that technologies such as the television in Vertex Texture Fetch and the antiquated computers in Visage once elicited when they were state of the art pieces of equipment - when they promised, as Benjamin Nicoll argues new media always do, to “provide solutions to ‘age-old’ deficiencies in human communication” and to “giv[e] rise to utopian dreams of a perfectly mediated society” (6).
The notion that obsolete media devices might be espoused to preach the utopian potential of media is of course deeply ironic, and is the contradiction which is at the heart of Kentucky Route Zero as well as Thomas Elsaesser’s criticism of media archaeology. In presenting his position on
47 media archaeology, Elsaesser invokes a similar language to that used in discussions of nostalgia and the retro phenomenon, describing it as a “symptom” and a response to wider cultural crises (334, 335). Media archaeology, he writes “does not escape our culture’s most prominent pathology: the need to preserve the past, to fetishize ‘memory’ and ‘materiality’ in the form of trauma and loss” (362). Though he does not make the connection explicitly, what he calls “our culture’s most prominent pathology” must be synonymous with the retro phenomenon, or at least a close acquaintance. Anxiety about the “dematerialisation” of culture and a “yearning for [...] collective memory” are, after all, oft-noted driving forces behind contemporary culture’s retro drive (van der Heijden 107; Boym 10). Furthermore, Elsaesser traces the genesis of media archeology to the loss of belief in ‘progress’ articulated by postmodernist thinkers like Adorno and Lyotard, an idea which finds its phenomenological expression in the “hyper-stasis” of retro culture, the purported “changed temporal feel” resultant from the past’s prevalence in the present (Handberg 174).
If, like retro culture, media archaeology is indicative of a crisis, then - be it crisis of historicity ala Jameson, or “capitalist culture’s final victory” (Handberg 174) - for Elsaesser, media archaeology is potentially as much a consequence of and participant in this crisis as it is a countermeasure. For Huhtamo and Parikka, the value of media archaeology lies in its capacity, through the construction of “alternative histories of suppressed, neglected, and forgotten media”, to dispute the perceived “perfection” of the “present media-cultural condition” (334). By recasting abandoned technologies not as media history’s failures but as its unfulfilled potentials, media archaeology, they argue, exposes the contemporary media landscape as just one of an infinite number of possible presents and, therefore, one that might be productively redirected in light of the insights media archaeology digs up. Elsaesser, on the other hand, worries that media archaeology’s enthusiasm for the detritus of the past risks legitimising it and the unsustainable ideologies which produce it, transforming what would be sobering reminders of consumer capitalism’s unchecked hubris into assets of the ruling agenda (363). In this view, media archaeology consents to and fuels the “general appropriation of the past for the benefit of our corporate future”, appearing less like “the emergency brake on the express train that is travelling on a bridge to nowhere” and more like “the whistle that blows off steam” (363, 364).
Kentucky Route Zero’s “Dark Media Archaeology”
So where does Kentucky Route Zero’s media archaeology fit in this schema? Does it offer a way out of the crisis behind the retro disease or simply perpetuate it? To the contrary of the popular
48 aphorism that claims “that which is not part of the solution is part of the problem”, the remainder of this chapter argues that is does neither. While it might not lend itself to any immediate practical application, Kentucky Route Zero leverages the videogame form to put forward a dire media archaeological critique of new media culture, incorporating detrimental corporate practices like planned obsolescence and “black-box” engineering into the experience of play through the game’s procedural and narrative structures. Finding a halfway point between Elsaesser and Hertz and Parikka, it suggests that the drive to ascribe new utilities to old objects serves to better the ruling economic model, leading to community disintegration and cultural atrophy, but at the same time advocates media archaeology’s rediscovery of forgotten pasts as a means of keeping the consumerist desires of retro in check.
To understand Kentucky Route Zero’s contribution to media discourse, it should first be noted that Huhtamo and Parikka are cautious about declaring media archaeology as a foolproof solution to problems of contemporary media culture like planned obsolescence and “tyranny of the new” (Elsaesser 362). While Elsaesser suggests that a “different kind of future [...] seems to lie at heart of media archaeology’s utopian aspirations”, the aforementioned authors never goes as far as to confirm its efficacy as an agent of change (19). Rather, they paint media archaeology as more of a diagnostic tool, one which brings together the past and present so they may “inform and explain each other, raising questions and pointing to futures that may or may not be” (15; emphasis added). Similarly, Hertz and Parikka suggest media archaeology’s potential to change the conversation in their appraisal of circuit bending, which they argue recalls “historical practices of reuse” and serves as a “useful counterpoint” to current media practices, but stop short of calling it revolutionary outright.
While I take Elsaesser’s point that media archaeology seems more of a product of present cultural conditions than a coherent counteragent, it would be unfair to portray is as complicit in them. Instead, I offer that media archaeology operates as something like the critical side of the retro coin. If the retro phenomenon is a celebration of the well-known consumer commodities of the recent past, drawing upon and instantiating a nostalgic, corporate-friendly “collective memory”, then media archaeology is a thoroughly un-nostalgic look at the past by virtue of concerning itself with the objects no one remembers. The retro produces a condensed memory of the past that includes only that which was commercially successful - a history written by free market economics. Media archaeology, on the other hand, is an account of the market’s casualties, a consciously selective writing of history which repopulates the past with failures and vies to remember media on account of their ideological value to the present rather than their commodity value or cultural cachet.
49 It would be wrong to deny that media archaeology is often optimistic and, indeed, utopian in its outlook given its belief that “the hidden treasures of the past might provide keys for a cultural renewal” or at very least provide “inspirational value to artists” (Huhtamo & Parikka 10; Hertz & Parikka 146). But in its focus on the losers and also-rans media history, it cannot help but paint a bleak picture of media culture, one haunted by what Hertz and Parikka quite darkly call “zombie media”, “the living dead of discarded waste” (146). Commercially dead but materially very much still with us, these abandoned media objects portend the “real death of nature through its toxic chemicals and heavy metals” (146). Following philosopher Timothy Morton’s concept of “dark ecology”, which advocates for an ecological mindset that focuses morbidly on society’s refuge, this more doleful side of media archaeology might similarly be called “dark media archaeology” (Ecology Without Nature). Such a designation captures most starkly media archaeology’s opposition to the retro: while the retro celebrates the select ephemera of the past which retain cultural relevance in present, the former mourns the majority that do not and yet persists anyway - and moreover, recognises that their persistence likely spells disaster.
Kentucky Route Zero epitomises this darker side of media archaeology. The game’s world is inundated with references to past media technologies, abandoned artistic styles and other sorts of failed experiments forgotten to history. Blending signifiers of Americana like bluegrass music, gas stations, desolate highways and bourbon with allusions to media art and computer science, Kentucky Route Zero reimagines the history of digital culture as modern folklore, its key figures recast as wandering souls encountered along the road. In his series of articles “Kentucky Fried Zero”, Magnus Hildebrandt identifies many of these references. The protagonist, Conway, for instance, takes his name from mathematician John Horton Conway, best known for his seminal computer simulation the Game of Life (1970), widely “regarded as the first art game” (“...Act 3”). Shannon, the lead supporting character, is named after Claude Elwood Shannon, whose information theory formed the basis of electronic communication (“...Act 1”). Other characters are based on Joseph Weizenbaum, the creator of the early text-parsing and artificial intelligence software ELIZA (1966), Ted Nelson, whose pioneering work in hypertext document navigation informed the structure of the World Wide Web, as well as various authors of interactive fiction and adventure games, like William Crowther and Roberta Williams (“...Act 1”; “...Act 3”).
That all these figures from across digital media history exist simultaneously and together in the world of Kentucky Route Zero is provocative, and indicates the game’s intention to tell a story about modern media culture. The inherent anachronism of their co-presence is typical of the game’s elusive setting, in which time and place are muddled. While a sign spotted outside a TV repair shop
50 visited during Act 1 suggests that the game takes place sometime during or after the digital television switchover of the 2000s (it reads “We do not sell digital converter boxes”), scarcely little of the technology the player encounters seems to have progressed past the late 1970s. Of the two computers the player may interact with, one is a bulky grey machine with a command line interface that, incongruously, is equipped to receive emails from the power company, while the other is resembles a PDP-1, complete with a vectorscope and ticker-tape printer. The latter, despite being composed of technology dating back to the 1959, is used to run a tribute to Colossal Cave Adventure (Crowther, 1976), the first known text adventure game, which was built using the much later PDP-10 hardware.
The game’s flattened history of digital technology clearly channels media archaeology’s disavowal of linear histories, but does so without any of its speculative tendencies. Kentucky Route Zero’s excavation of media’s “dead ends, losers, and inventions that never made it into a material product” do net yield visions of “futures which may or may not be” (Huhtamo & Parikka 3, 14); instead, the game hints time and again at the impossibility of any tenable future. These clues take the form of numerous allusion to Becket’s Waiting for Godot (1953) as well a showpiece musical number in Act 3 whose refrain repeats the words “It’s too late..”, but they are perhaps most pronounced in the game’s use of foreshadowing, cementing from the start that the player character Conway’s fate has already been decided.
Conway is a delivery driver for an antiques store undertaking his “last job” on account of his employer’s impending insolvency. By the end of Act 3, however, he has been entrapped in seemingly interminable employment for a whisky distillery called Hard Times, for whom it is implied he will work in perpetuity to reconcile his “debt”. Each of the events leading to and involving his employment at Hard Times are anticipated earlier in the game. At beginning of Act 2, for instance, the receptionist at The Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces mistakes Conway for a Hard Times delivery driver before conceding that he “do[esn’t] really look like one of the boys from the distillery anyway”. This soon changes however, when Conway has his left leg exchanged for glowing orange mechanical replacement following an accident. His new limb, the player later realises, bears a striking resemblance to those of the distillery workers, the robotic skeleton people encountered at the end of Act 3. The amputation also marks Conway’s entrance into debt, which he later consummates by drinking a shot of expensive whisky in front of an adding machine at the distillery. This moment sheds light on a short passage the player may discover in Act 1 which describes “an elaborate ink drawing of a one-legged man working an antique adding machine, surrounded by whisky bottles”, no doubt signaling Conway’s eventual fate.
51 Figure 3.3. The player must make Conway drink to progress. Kentucky Route Zero: Act 3.
Such copious foreshadowing is rare in and perhaps antithetical to conventional interactive fiction as it serves to actively flaunt the player’s lack of agency in the story. Nowhere is this clearer than the moment in which Conway drinks the whisky. Here, a text box with the word “Drink” appears above the glass which the player must click in order to move on (Figure 3.3). The player may be understandably reluctant to click the box at first given their knowledge of Conway’s history of alcoholism, choosing instead to scour the rest of the screen for other options. After a short while however, the game will take control away from the player and forcibly move the cursor back to the text box in an unambiguous gesture of authority over the player and Conways’ fates. Given the game’s immersion in media culture, the constant reminders of Conway’s invariable demise draw obvious parallels to the common industry practice of planned obsolescence. Like the latest in high- tech gadgetry, Conway’s days are deliberately numbered from the beginning, though just like marketing hype and warranty plans are deployed to distract electronics customers from their devices’ inevitable short demise, so to do the dialogue choices and the freedom to explore the game’s map work to convince Kentucky Route Zero players that they have some amount of say in what is to come. By the end of Act 3 however, both Conway and the player have been made obsolete. Conway has been folded into “The Formula”, the mathematical equation behind the
52 running of the Hard Times distillery which, much like the constant tech cycle that keeps electronics manufacturers in business, ensures the cycle of debt continues. The player, on the other hand, is afforded no more dialogue options as the rest of the act plays out on its own. “I’m confused,” comments one character, to which Conway responds, “That’s just the way these things go kid.”
Another common media industry practice reflected in Kentucky Route Zero is “black box” design. Black boxes, Hertz and Parikka are technological devices which perform certain functions but effectively conceal the processes which enable their functioning from the average user. They are “a requirement of infrastructure and technological development,” the authors explain, because the “millions of transistors, circuits, mathematical calculations, and technical components” from which modern media devices are constituted are “almost incomprehensible” to anyone but experts (148). Black boxes therefore offer the benefit of complicated technologies to average users without their having to understand how the devices actually work. Take mobile phones for example; anyone can make a call on a mobile phone without having an in depth knowledge of telecommunications and electrical engineering.
A side effect of black boxes is that they mystify technology for the average person, rendering its workings unknowable and inaccessible. As technology becomes increasingly integrated into the fabric of everyday life, the average person is thus more and more disempowered, at the mercy technology over which they have no means to exert control. While Hertz and Parikka discuss black boxes purely in terms of material devices, Ian Bogost’s writing on “algorithms” (or rather, his repudiation press’ haphazard use of the term) suggests that the black box ideology extends to technical literacy in general. Google and Facebook, too, are black boxes in that they are powered by hidden software which has a fundamental impact on many people’s lives. Importantly though, Bogost argues that power held by black boxes can be countered somewhat by a discourse which consciously works to demystify their operation.
[...]talking about big, complex companies and their services as mere “algorithms” amounts to a theological position. [...] Facebook and Google and their ilk aren’t gods, nor are they even really just software. They are businesses, made out of lots of things—people and clients, office locations and Wall Street analyst expectations, and yes, software and hardware as well. But perhaps most of all, they are bureaucracies, complex organizations with many thousands of stakeholders, all pushing and pulling against one another. This isn’t heavenly effort, but just ordinary terrestrial work. (“Go tweak…”)
53 The analogy used by Bogost here which sees the perceived incomprehensibility of modern technology as provoking near religious levels of subordination in the average person is not dissimilar to that deployed by Kentucky Route Zero. Using the genre conventions of magical realism, the game establishes technology as a kind of supernatural and yet seemingly unremarkable presence in the characters’ lives, a constant source of strange, inexplicable happenings that nevertheless is treated with an unquestioning indifference. The most obvious example is the “Zero” itself. The player is has been told about the Zero a number of times before they encounter it for themselves in Act 2, but mostly just rumours and hearsay. When the titular highway is mentioned in conversation, the word “Zero” is printed in a peculiar, silver typeface that shifts and changes like liquid mercury, imbuing it with a sense of mystery that is compounded by the fact that no one seems to know where or what the Zero actually is. These question are never really answered either, at least not explicitly. In terms of the game’s structure, the Zero is one of two ways the player navigates between locations in the game. The former is via a regular road map of Kentucky, around which the player guides Conway’s truck by tracing the roads with their mouse (Figure 3.4). The name of each road is displayed as the player drives along it, which along with a compass in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, ensures the player always has a coherent sense of direction and where they are. The Zero, on the other hand, is a beguiling infinite loop with no sense of forward or backward, up nor down (Figure 3.5). The player can move along the Zero either clockwise or counter-clockwise by clicking on the left or right-hand sides of the screen respectively, travelling round and round the loop until they eventually come to their destination. At all times the player can only see a small portion of road to either side of their cursor, making it near impossible to construct a mental image of the Zero’s layout. Even more confusing is the fact that the landmarks situated along the Zero change with each new journey around the loop as the road branches and winds in ways invisible to the player. It is common, for instance, for the player to turn back on themselves and find that they are on completely different, unexpected section of road.
54 Figure 3.4. The regular road map in Kentucky Route Zero: Act 1.
Figure 3.5. The Zero in Kentucky Route Zero: Act 2.
55 The Zero is thus a prototypical black box. By carefully following provided directions (“drive clockwise to the scarecrow, then turn around and head counter-clockwise until you reach the pendulum…”) the player can successfully get from A to B, but they are left none the wiser as to how Zero actually works. Interestingly, the Zero is illustrated in a way that looks profoundly digital; the single, unbroken line of its road is enclosed by pulsating white wireframe tunnels, the whole thing looking something like a waveform or an early virtual reality demonstration. Given Cardboard Computer’s previously professed affinity for Nam June Paik, it does not seem a stretch to see the Zero as an allegory for the internet, i.e. “The Information Superhighway”. It is, after all, a seemingly intangible network that connects all reaches of Kentucky Route Zero’s world, and is vital to the running of its everyday affairs - it is Hard Times preferred trade route, for example.
That Kentucky Route Zero evokes media industry practices such as planned obsolescence and black box design in the context of a story about debt and economic downturn seems no accident. If the game’s non-linear approach to history brings the past and the present of digital media history together in a media archaeological way, it also serves to draw parallels between the Great Depression, with its references to miner’s strikes and owing one’s soul to the company, and post- Financial Crisis social conditions. The failed and forgotten experiments of the past in Kentucky Route Zero are not limited to just media objects; in the Museum of Dwellings, the player can spot the Dymaxion House, architect Richard Buckminster Fuller’s depression-era concept for a ready-made, affordable home that was never commercially realised (“...Act 2”). By juxtaposing the problematic aspects of modern media culture with the failures of previous eras to alleviate social inequities, Kentucky Route Zero expresses an emphatic skepticism about new technology’s capacity to bring about change. Its most polemical insight - especially with regards to media archaeology - is its profound ambivalence about emancipatory potential of ideologies of recycling and reuse. Dotted throughout the game are dozens of examples of discarded objects which have been reappropriated for new purposes: caskets used as whisky casks, scrap metal turned into windchimes, crabs using office supplies for shells, a cathedral transformed into an office space. The latter - The Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces - represents the apotheosis of this practice and underlines its fruitlessness. A sort of hybrid repossession and development organisation, the Bureau evicts and relocates tenants who have fallen behind on their payments, moving the evictees to one of its previously reclaimed buildings while assigning the incoming property to a new purpose - and endless cycle “renewal” that in reality achieves nothing. At the beginning of Act 2, the player is given the opportunity to review
56 some of the cases currently being processed by the Bureau, including a proposal for a new chapel: “Chapel once repurposed into a bottling factory could be repurposed into a chapel,” the proposal recommends.
Incidentally, the clerk reviewing the proposals at the Bureau is none other than Laura Chamberlain. The wry point being made here is clear; that in her role as media artist and her role as bureaucrat, Chamberlain is effectively performing the same activity, neither to seemingly much avail. Among Elsaesser’s discretions about media archaeology is his concern that art and culture are on the verge of usurping industry and technology, taming the latter’s failures through reuse and aestheticisation and maintaining the status quo (363). Chamberlain’s employment at the Bureau however suggests that both art and industry are governed by economic and political conditions in which the reuse of the past provides the only means of survival - that like media archaeology, they are both symptoms of a larger systemic problem. While the previous independent videogames examined in this thesis have used the videogame form to the convey the user experience of past media technologies, Kentucky Route Zero conveys the futility of digital media practices, past and present, through the experience of play. It turns abstract ideas like planned obsolescence and black boxes game elements with which the player participates, thus gaining an understanding of how these systems operate and their structuring role in contemporary media culture.
57 Conclusion
For Thomas Elsaesser, it is the obsolescence of cinema as a crucial venue of image circulation and primary storytelling medium in the 21st century that has finally prepared the form to pursue the different kind of futures that are the focus of media archaeology (19). Having been relieved of this burden by new forms of media it is now free to concern itself with functions outside those which its role as a commercial, entertainment medium dictated - in short, it need serve the status quo no longer. Furthermore, the digital turn which has brought about its new marginality has also opened up new ways to think about cinema’s; the ease of display afforded cinema in the digital world has returned it to a state of presentational diversity not unlike that which it occupied in the 19th century, severing from it the singular apparatus to which it has been shackled for most of its life.
Videogames are of course one of the many new media forms whose emergence has led to this reorientation of cinema’s ideological role. Yet they too, in their short history, have experienced a shift from an early period of many different kinds of apparatus - i.e. the arcade era - to one of the (mostly) standardised presentational mode of home consoles. And perhaps this consensus apparatus too, only a few decades old, is, like the Bazinian cinematic apparatus, on the verge of being usurped by VR.
But unlike cinema, videogames need not wait until then to discover their media archaeological potential in the way that Elsaesser believes cinema is now doing so. Indeed, the works examined in this thesis have shown that videogames are already engaging with the past in innovative ways that implications beyond just the medium itself. Independent games like A Slow Year, Emily is Away, Digital: A Love Story, Cibele and Kentucky Route Zero illustrate how by conveying the user experience of media objects, videogames can communicate experiential qualities and meanings of the past that are often overlooked by more conventional methods of preservation and historicism. Moreover, they demonstrate themselves as capable of delving into the history of new media culture ways that, while perhaps symptomatic of the same purported postmodern crises driving retro culture, result in new, creative ideas and provide ample critical reflection to keep the any of extant regressive tendencies of phenomenon in check.
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