The University of Chicago Playfulness 1947-2017
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PLAYFULNESS 1947-2017: HERMENEUTICS, AESTHETICS, GAMES A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE BY PETER DOUGLAS MCDONALD CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JUNE 2018 Copyright © 2018 by Peter McDonald All Rights Reserved For those who pretended a world into being, and those who made belief. TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vi ABSTRACT ix Introduction Interpreting Play 1 Chapter One Replayability: Play without Truth 32 Chapter Two Secrecy: Play without Reason 87 Chapter Three Trickiness: Play without Rules 142 Chapter Four Fairness: Play without End 200 BIBLIOGRAPHY 262 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1. A still from Video Chess depicting Duchamp in sepia. .............................................. 40 Figure 1.2. A still from Video Chess depicting overlaid photos. .................................................. 42 Figure 1.3. A still from Video Chess depicting outlined bodies. .................................................. 42 Figure 1.4. A still from Video Chess depicting abstract outlines.................................................. 43 Figure 1.5. A still from Video Chess depicting blurred areas of color. ........................................ 44 Figure 1.6. Two stills depicting Duchamp and Kubota playing against nude opponents. ............ 47 Figure 1.7. Specrtum Holobyte’s 1987 release of Tetris for the Amiga computer. ...................... 79 Figure 1.8. SexTetris (1993), a variant on the theme of Tetris. .................................................... 80 Figure 2.1. Takako Saito, Spice Chess (1977). ............................................................................. 92 Figure 2.2. A line of empty green blocks leads to a secret exit in Super Mario World. ............. 132 Figure 2.3. Secret exit in “Cheese Bridge,” from Super Mario World. ...................................... 136 Figure 2.4. A comparison between Mario enemies. ................................................................... 139 Figure 3.1. Two cards from Deck: A Fluxgame .......................................................................... 145 Figure 3.2. Brecht’s Universal Machine II. ................................................................................ 158 Figure 3.3. Inventory screen of King’s Quest VI. ....................................................................... 189 Figure 3.4. Alexander, the avatar of King’s Quest VI, reaches a boiling pool. .......................... 196 Figure 4.1. Benjamin Patterson, A Game: Three Capacities and One Inhibition (c. 1963) ....... 224 Figure 4.2. A generic SimCity 2000 town. .................................................................................. 242 Figure 4.3. A choice of city ordinances in SimCity 2000 ........................................................... 251 Figure 4.4. An example newspaper reporting on the state of the world from SimCity 2000 ...... 253 Figure 4.5. An alien descends to destroy the city in SimCity 2000 ............................................ 255 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My heartfelt thanks goes out to my advisors Bill Brown and Patrick Jagoda. Without Bill’s combination of focused reading and capacious understanding of games and entertainment, I would never have been able to traverse the fuzzy registers of playfulness. Bill’s work has been my model for connecting the details of baseball or amusement parks to the metaphors and concepts that make play a cultural force. Patrick has been a mentor and collaborator in more ways than I can count. Patrick’s generous curiosity, his capacity to hold onto ambivalence and conflict, and his patient experimentalism are qualities that I aspire to in my writing and thinking. Patrick has constantly included me in the communities he builds, whether in the interdisciplinary lab at Game Changer Chicago or the strange collaborations that pop up around his Alternate Reality Games. He has gone out of his way to collaborate—on essays, classes, colloquia, and research—and always in a spirit of equality and play. I would be a different and less capacious scholar without the ongoing support of these two. Over and over, my academic career has been shaped by these kinds of mentorship, large and small, without which I would not be here. My thanks goes to Christina Lupton, who decided to take an odd-ball undergraduate under her wing and write about the connections between 18th century novels and video games. That experience gave me my first real sense of what a career as an academic might mean. Without Adam Frank’s encouragement of what, at a relatively conservative English department in the early 2000s, could only seem like a bizarre combination of literary close-reading and video games, I would never have felt my work had a disciplinary home. Lorraine Weir at UBC; Susan Brooks, Clint Burnham, and Carolyn Lesjak, at Simon Fraser; Lauren Berlant, Edgar Garcia, Deborah Nelson, and Julie Orlemanski at the University of Chicago, each of these folks taught me how to be rigorous and methodical while holding onto the charm and vi provocation of a thought. Elaine Hadley, John Muse, and Kristen Schilt showed me how to teach, and how to make teaching an intellectual project in its own right. To many others I owe conversations whose repercussions I am still working out and through, particularly Sianne Ngai and Helen Schwartzman. Finally, the process of being a student and picking up the University’s codes has had its own challenges for me, and several people have provided invaluable mentorship through the program and into the job market, and in particular I would like to thank Rachel Galvin, Heather Keenleyside, Dan Morgan, Bill Rando, and Ken Warren for making it as painless as possible. I have been fortunate to find communities in my academic career that blend rigorous theoretical questioning, political activism, a commitment to teaching, and the need to put ideas into creative practice. My master’s program at Simon Fraser University provided a blueprint for the organic intersection of these commitments, and the world is a more livable place because of Myka Tucker-Abramson, Jen Currin, Mercedes Eng, Emily Fedoruk, and Matt Fehr. In Chicago, I have found many transformative communities. Some of these have come from lasting friendships and intellectual bonds, and I cannot imagine the world without the support of Rowan Bayne, Nadia Chana, Alexis Chema, Jesse Friedman, Sage Gerson, Jake Kennedy, Chaz Lee, Bea Malsky, Steven Maye, Kevin McPherson-Eckhoff, Andres Millan, Nicole Morse, Nell Pach, Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz, Alicia Sparrow, Erin Trapp, Jean-Thomas Tremblay, John Walsh and others too numerous to name. A special place in my heart is set aside for those who I had the privilege of collaborating with to build Alternate Reality Games. The intimacy forged through our panicked inventions has no equal and it is to these folks that I dedicate the work of this dissertation: Addie Barron, Mollie Braley, Dan Cohen, Philip Ehrenberg, Christine Fleener, Leslie Gailloud, Arianna Gass, Melissa Gilliam, Hugh Graham, Julianne Grasso, Omie Hsu, Daniel Lipson, Megan Macklin, vii Jesse Martinez, Ben Nicholson, Rahul Roy, Chris Russell, Kalil Smith-Nuevelle, Zoë Smith, Ashlyn Sparrow, India Weston, Keith Wilson, everyone I worked with in more fleeting ways, and of course Patrick. Without my amazing partner, Amanda Shubert, this project would have spiraled off into something much less coherent. She read every bit of it and helped me keep the ideas simultaneously focused and approachable. I also owe much to my parents, who never treated play as something merely frivolous. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the University of Chicago English Department and the Division of the Humanities, the Nicholson Center for British Studies, and the Mellon Foundation. Such support was essential, and I am grateful for it. viii ABSTRACT The history of video games has been dominated by technological determinism, with scholars tracing a neat line from William Higginbotham’s first game on an oscilloscope screen through more and more complex hardware to 2017’s Nintendo Switch. In this dissertation, I tell the story of video games differently, from the premise that play itself had to be invented as a medium before designers, artists, writers, and engineers could explore its possibilities. While game pieces, accompanying text, and illustrated boards had previously been objects of artistic and commercial manipulation, it was only after the Second World War that the experience of play itself was intentionally shaped through the design of rules, goals, and game mechanics. Games became “graphs of a self-graphing world,” as Mark Seltzer describes them, places where complex systems model and simulate their own workings. This dissertation uses playfulness to track the lineage that extends from the development of avant-garde games in the 1950s and 60s to the establishment of video games as the hegemonic form of play in the 1990s. Playfulness, I argue, involves an interpretive relation to play that can reveal the social commitments, aesthetics concerns, and historical contexts that gave rise to a new culture of games. In particular, I focus on four different kinds of playfulness: replayability, secrecy, trickiness, and fairness. Each of these categories is an interpretive response to an important series of questions that links the pleasures