Immunitary Gaming Mapping the First-Person Shooter
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Immunitary Gaming Mapping the First-Person Shooter Robert Andrew Cenci Doctoral Thesis Department of Media and Communications Goldsmiths, University of London 1 Declaration of Authorship I hereby declare that all the material contained in this thesis is my own work. …………………………………………………………………… Robert Andrew Cenci 2 Abstract Videogames have been theorised as an action-based medium. The original contribution to knowledge this thesis makes is to reconfigure this claim by considering popular multiplayer FPS games as reaction-based – particularly, immune reactions. I take up Roberto Esposito’s claim that the individual in contemporary biopolitics is defined negatively against the other, controlled and ultimately negated via their reactions to power’s capacity to incessantly generate threats. By inciting insecurity and self-protective gestures, FPS games like Activision’s Call of Duty franchise and EA’s Battlefield series vividly dramatise Esposito’s thought, producing an immunitary gaming. Immunitary Gaming locates the FPS within key moments of change as well as evolution in Western image systems including the emergence of linear perspective, cartography and the early years of the cinema. The FPS appropriates these image systems, but also alters their politics. Giorgio Agamben has argued that the apparatuses of late modernity no longer subjectify like their forebears, but desubjectify the individual, producing an impotent neoliberal body politic. I trace a similar development here. My work also seeks to capture the player’s movements via autoethnographic writing that communicates the viscerally and intensity of the experience. The FPS is framed as capable of giving insight into both the present and the future of our technological and political milieu and ‘sensorium,’ in Walter Benjamin’s terms. In its valorisation of the individual and production of insecurity to incite action, this project argues that the FPS is a symbolic form of immunitary neoliberal governmentality. 3 Contents 1: Stillness and Action: a roadmap of the FPS and 5 immunitary gaming 2: A Conceptual and Discursive Heads-up Display 21 for the FPS 3: Mapping the Apparatus: event, image and subject 73 4: The Immune Image 104 5: Cartographic Gaming 150 6: Respawn: life, death and immunitary mastery 197 7: Immunitary gaming: mapping and profaning a neoliberal apparatus 240 Bibliography 255 4 1 Stillness and Action; A Roadmap of the FPS and Immunitary Gaming 1.0 Lights, camera, action! Alexander Galloway has defined the videogame as an action-based medium (2006: 2). However, I would like to propose a revision, or, at least a refinement to Galloway’s definition in relation to two commercially dominant competitive first-person shooter (FPS) franchises – Activision’s Call of Duty (2003-2016) and its competitor, EA’s Battlefield (2002-2016) – in approaching the gestures they produce as reactions. This thesis argues that these videogames should be read as apparatuses which catalyse an immunitary (Esposito 2008, 2011) response in the player, establishing a dialectic of inside and outside, self and other which continually transgressed. I hope to demonstrate that if the FPS hails the subject, it does so not as a call of duty, but as the call of insecurity – a primary condition of the neoliberal subject (see Lazzarato 2009: 119-120 and Chandler and Read 2016). To characterise the FPS in these terms, I map the FPS via autoethnographic reports of the intimate and intense experience of playing online. To complement this approach, I also chart how the genre represents relations of continuity and rupture with the aesthetic traditions and subject-object relations of the image systems of the last five hundred years: maps, perspectival construction and, particularly, the cinema. The reaction incited by the videogame is an input, a bodily gesture that makes tactile contact with a control device connected to computer hardware that runs as per the routines of software. However complex these bodily and technological processes are, the visible result of the player’s initial gesture is a corresponding animation on screen. These movements are mapped live in the rectangular frame that is dominant in the Western tradition of picture making since the systematic construction of linear perspective by Leon Battista Alberti (2004) in the renaissance. Anne Friedberg has argued that vision remains mediated ‘within the delimited bounds of a frame and seen on a screen’ (2009: 7) regardless of historically specific spectator- image relations and associated ways of seeing and sensing. It is this interchange of corporeal 5 and technological activity, situated quite literally in the frame of Western aesthetic traditions where I locate the FPS’s ephemeral image and where this thesis finds its meaning. Martti Lahti (2003: 163) has evoked the ‘delirium’ of the affective feedback loop between player and videogame, noting how the body writhes as evidence of its imbrication into a cybernetic system which he aligns with the shocked cinematic spectator mapped by Benjamin in ‘Motifs’ (1999). But what do I mean by affect? I take Brian Massumi’s definition initially developed in his translator’s introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987), understanding it as a preconscious intensity of sensation that cannot be captured by language, exceeding representation while also framing the body’s ability to act. Massumi notes that affect: is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body's capacity to act. (1987: xvi) The idea of a preconscious intensity raises the question of whether affectivity is analysable. In response to this intellectual aporia, Massumi notes in Parables for the Virtual that affect is ‘unformed and unstructured…it is not entirely containable in knowledge but is analysable in effect, as effect’ (2002: 260). With affect we are left with traces, with consequences. It is these effects (gestures) that the videogame captures like the ripples in sand left by the surges of the body’s affective tide. Despite the hallucinogenic intensity and almost limitless variance of the interchange between body and technology, the content of the videogame’s moving image is limited by what Massumi (2002: 137) has characterised as the ‘possibilistic’ nature of the digital. The pre-coded nature of the videogame frames future activity in the screen space, representing the visible output of what Patrick Crogan (2011: 5) has argued is the cybernetic logic that structures videogame experience. The possibilistic future-oriented nature of the visibility of the videogame signals the overarching authority of its game’s code. Actions occur in what Erwin Panofsky (1997: 30) might have described as the game’s ‘mathematical space’ – which, just like the calculated perspectival construction of the renaissance, produces a sense of the infinite via an intensification of control over the finitude of the image (1997: 65). If we return to Galloway’s claim that action is the central characteristic of the videogame as a medium, the gestural movements articulated on-screen are evidence of the game’s existence – its image and life. However, these actions are also an expression and modulation of the player’s life provoked by 6 the screen, translated into a signal that is regulated by algorithms of the software and fed back into the display device: a reaction, rather than action. Despite my focus on the way the videogame incites affective intensities in the body and captures echoes of these intangible processes in the movements of the image, this thesis also engages at various points with psychoanalytic theory. There are two reasons for this. One lies in the way that videogame theorists have established a dialectic between the medium as characterised by bodily activity and a psychoanalytic model of the cinema predicated on the transcendent, disembodied gaze (see Ash 2010: 6). There is also a trend in the other direction in which language is borrowed from the lexicon of Lacan (2006) and apparatus theory (see Baudry 1974 and Metz 1982). This is taken to its extreme in explicit mappings of psychoanalytic ideas against the FPS in works important for this thesis (Taylor 2003, Morris 2002). On the other hand, I also engage with the work of Freud borrowing his terminology around fear and emotion. In a more long-form way, the repetitive nature of the death drive (2010) is mapped against the FPS’s respawn mechanism in this thesis’ final analytical chapter. Rather than attesting to the validity of Freud’s understanding of mental trauma, this appropriation of his work is more of a thought experiment in which a concept is mapped against an unlikely target to draw out the particularity of both. In the case of ‘Respawn’ this results in a profitable dialogue being established between Freudian and Deleuzian (2004) repetition that emphasises the way affect is central to both ideas, but in different ways. 1.1 Image, action and embodied perception This capture of the player’s gestures by a calculated form of representation means that the existence of the videogame medium and the player are entangled. Affective intensities cross into the body while the body’s gestures appear on-screen. Hans Belting (2011: 29), has argued that images need to be understood as anthropological because they are always essentially animated by the human body. Belting stresses that the role of the medium in producing the image is to provide a visibility that the body must endow with life. Images are never simply ‘out there’, but are products of an interaction or exchange in which human perception and imagination are key elements, also meaning that the image occupies a social and political space 7 (2009: 32). There appears to be a parallel here with Galloway’s conception of the videogame, which, like the image, must be enacted by the player to exist. Videogame actions are anthropological in the sense that they express a moment of negotiation with the human element.