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Carman Ng AFFECTING REALITY Carman Ng AFFECTING REALITY: INTERSECTING GAMES, TRAUMA, AND IMAGINARIES Abstract This essay examines how digital games shape human affective reper- toires and envisioned dynamics with nonhuman agents such as robots. Entanglements among humans, machines, and technologies impact essential issues in the historical present: from surveillance, climate change, cultural heritage, art, to the elicitation, habituation, and capturing of feelings. Approaching digital games as frontiers of such entanglements, this essay expounds dynamics among gameplay, affects, and gamic materiality through a case analysis of Nevermind (Flying Mollusk), a trauma-themed independent psychological thriller game with affect-sensing technologies. Discussion explores how the game can generatively engage with lived experiences and discourses of grief and trauma; and the relationality among individuals, structures of feelings, and stigmatization. Anchoring the essay is an argument that digital games represent and operate with fundamental tenets of posthu- manism, communicating meaning across affective and semiotic dimensions, bodies, machines, and sociocultural contexts. This essay emerged from an ongoing project on affective semiotics and social impact game design, in connection with a transnational research project on human-robot interaction supported by the European Research Council. APRJA Volume 8, Issue 1, 2019 ISSN 2245-7755 CC license: ‘Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike’. Carman Ng: AFFECTING REALITY Introduction dynamics contributes to work on several fronts. Affect research in the past decade focused on distinguishing the phenomenon Pivotal to comprehending “structures of from emotions, problematizing the longstand- feeling” in Raymond Williams’ theorization ing emphasis on individual intentionality, is an intellectual openness toward exploring cognition, and categorical emotions. Recent dynamic experiences, expressions, and so- accounts emphasize the social relationality cial forms consistently in fux, in the present, of affects (von Scheve), cementing the focus and immune to claims of alleged fnality. on affectivity as processual, transpersonal, Structures of feeling concern interanimating socioculturally constituted, and emergent dynamics between lived experiences and across bodies, including technological cultural expressions: how the latter shape systems. and express emergent ways of being in Yet, it remains unclear how the affect- the world; and develop understanding of inspired focus on social interactions may the emergent nature of lived experiences. constructively engage with trauma, which Digital games encapsulate such dynam- straddles individual and social realms. ics on both micro and macro scales: in the Recovering from trauma entails awareness moment-to-moment process of gameplay; of one’s emotions, triggering events, coping and the medium’s interactions within par- mechanisms, and available sources of sup- ticular technocultural contexts and media port, healthcare, and intervention. Diffculties ecologies, all pertinent to the materialization war veterans face in overcoming post- of artistic and design practices, transmedial traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) illustrate relations, and surrounding, media-shaping, tensions within such a matrix; challenges social discourses. Thus, it is productive to confronting marginalized social groups are explore machine feeling through affective likewise indivisible from such factors as race, digital games, which detect and dynamically gender, social classes and the cross-gener- respond to players’ affective states. ation ramifcations.[1] Trauma-themed digital Intersecting affects and emerging tech- games thus provide a gateway to critically nologies, this essay emphasizes the shaping engage with the often unspoken aspects of of affective repertoire. The concept, as I traumatic experiences, as well as systemic propose, explores spectra of human capaci- factors that enforce contemporary regimes of ties to feel, express, and regulate feelings, silence and stigmatization, by interweaving informed and potentially expanded, refned, design, gameplay, narrative, technology, and or enframed by technological facets of lived complex affects. experiences. Affective repertoire stems from On affects, the concept of repertoire perceiving this malleable range of affects is under-theorized. This may be due to the and associated reactions, which may then seeming incongruence in pairing affects and support individuals to consider and deha- repertoire. The former has been characterized bituate certain responses for future affective as precognitive and nonrepresentational; the encounters. Oriented toward posthumanism, latter, culminated from learning and curation, this conceptual tool aims to untangle how concerns competence, contexts of use, and technological designs prevalent in specifc components of identity, as in the example mediated encounters, environments, and of linguistic repertoire.[2] Conceptualizing sociohistorical contexts, incubate feelings affective repertoire is an attempt to ques- and bodily intensities. Knowledge of such tion the assumed incompatibility, inviting 97 APRJA Volume 8, Issue 1, 2019 inquiries into agency. Proceeding from inten- argument that, with cogitative design and tion to actions capable in effecting change, narrative, the medium can harness affective agency is essentially constrained by social computing technologies for enhanced game- factors beyond individual control. That said, play and potential intervention. Finally, the trauma does not necessarily eclipse agency, essay affrms a future-oriented perspective, when one mindfully engages with feelings, positing a tripartite research methodology to thoughts, and aspects of any experiences engage digital games as incubators of aes- that might be uncertain, destabilizing, or thetic potential, complex affects, and visions otherwise habituated. As Shaun Gallagher of human-technology interaction. observes, the body crucially constitutes the mind, meaning, and communication. A critical orientation toward agency, embodied cogni- Posthumanism | digital tion, and trauma thus builds in parallel with affective repertoire and resilience. As efforts games | affect in articulating ontologies of affects and emo- tions expand, exploring bodily sensations Images of human-nonhuman relationships as indexical of affects, emotions, and mobi- percolate the mediasphere. Their eclecticism lization of behaviors in digital games brings manifests across cinema (e.g. Blade Runner complementarity. Identifying patterns among 2049, Ex Machina, The Matrix), videogames game design features and activated affects (e.g. Metal Gear Solid, Deus Ex), television enable a rethink about the experimental role (e.g. Westworld, Humans), and experimental of digital games and their aesthetic, techno- art that interfaces the body with prosthet- logical, and sociopolitical importance across ics, networked systems, and biotechnology alleged confnes of the intellect and feelings. (e.g. Stelarc). Understanding the diversity This essay presents excerpted analyses of such visions, technological innovations, from an ongoing research project on digital and cultural production carries importance, games and human-robot interaction (HRI), especially upon our understanding of the as illustrative of changing social realities and “nonhuman turn.” Conceptualized in the contemporary concerns. These range from 2015 eponymous book (Grusin, vii), the porousness between real and virtual worlds nonhuman turn involves intersections among to ethical quandaries regarding artifcial intel- human and nonhuman entities (e.g. bodies, ligence. The driving premise is that digital technologies) in tackling issues of the 21st games are shifting our affective capacities, century, including terrorism and climate sci- eliciting various affectivities while informing ence. As intellectual inquiry, it decenters the our understanding of the posthuman condi- unifed human subject through the notion of tion. Readers frst fnd a contextualizing the nonhuman, fnding resonance in affect overview of posthumanism, digital games, theory, animal studies, cognitive sciences, and current developments in affect-centered and new media theory, to name a few rel- game analyses. The section outlines the evant felds of study. need to articulate the meaning-making logic Similarly re-assessing the symbiotic of digital games as prominent cultural forms relationships among humans, technologies, and posthumanizing artifacts of procedural and nature, posthumanism challenges social and multimodal complexities. Then, readers categories and dichotomies with technosci- fnd analysis of an independent psychologi- ence, inviting philosophical discussion on how cal thriller game Nevermind, in support of the 98 Carman Ng: AFFECTING REALITY technology fundamentally constitutes the hu- and such technologies as virtual reality man condition (Haraway; Nayar; Hauskeller, (VR) interfaces, increasingly applied in non- Philbeck, and Carbonell 3). The archetype of entertainment contexts, including education cyborg, at once organic and mechanic, has (Gee, de Freitas & Maharg) and military inspired various schools of thought with the training.[3] It matters to critically engage with potential to steer human development on the the medium in design, gameplay, analyses, scale of civilization. A telling example is the and pedagogy. Digital game criticism broadly techno-utopian discourse of transhumanism, involves three trajectories: formalist, which which embraces
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