Bleeding Out/Mixed Blood
Georges Bataille seems to serve networked play in games very well because of the way that eroticism is discussed in his book Death and Sensuality. Just like in Samuel Delaney’s Times Square Blue, and thus thatgamecompany’s Journey, a fleeting interaction with a live other produces an experience that is outside the realm of normativity. In Delaney’s example, the experience between two (or more) people is mediated by the screen within the porn theater. We can see how Delaney, Journey, Bataille intersect when Bataille is speaking on Sade:
Eroticism always entails the breaking down of established patterns, the patterns, I repeat, of the regulated social order basic to our discontinuous mode of existence as defined and separate individuals. (18)
Social order can be influenced outside of human interaction without a doubt, but it is quite a different beast when that transgression is physically manifested, which is something we learn from Delaney. When Delaney is going to the porn theaters, he is transcending the avoidance that is created by the public against the “type” of people that go there. Not only that, he and they, the inhabitants of the porn theater, are behaving outside of the normal progression of defined relationships both romantic and friendly. Even though they are independent, they are not completely discontinuous — they are linked through orgasm, something as continuous as the experience titled “death” that the being falls into, but the body is forbidden to enter. Journey picks up on this, strips the overt sexuality and death away from the players, and instead rests on interaction and cooperative playing that doesn’t have us (or even allow us to) to get to know the other player. While it allows for a range of emotions (as can be read at journeystories.tumblr.com), the stakes don’t seem as high as in our other examples, not nearly as filled with anguish, confusion, death, and power, things that remain consistently visited upon by massive amounts of gamers year after year. It is difficult to speak on Journey in the sense of eroticism that Bataille suggests without heading right to Delaney at this point, but it is quite easy to head to Call of Duty.
Playing online matches of Call of Duty, much like all other interactions with videogames, produces a unique experience for the player. One that indeed does border on eroticism, in a similar way to Journey. Call of Duty is about as anonymous as the porn theaters that Delaney frequented in that similar characters appear within the space, their identities not hidden, but mediated by the space. The space of the matchmaking room in Call of Duty offers an odd look into humanity simply through the usernames of the people who the player will eventually work alongside/work against kill/be killed by.
In Death and Sensuality, when speaking on reproduction, Bataille comments upon the strange singularity that is reached by birth through sexual reproduction, with two beings being morphed into the body of one. This is flipped over in Network play in the Call of Duty franchise and almost any other networked FPS, with death effectively birthing a new being (respawn) in which the killer and the killed both play equal parts in the creation. The respawned player is not unlike the collision of sperm and ovum, with the killed (having watched how he was killed in a kill-cam) now fused with the killer who may still be killing, and thus, creating. The same way that the participants in Delaney’s porn theaters were linked by orgasm, the players of networked Call of Duty are linked through death. The digital battlefield is much more than space.
Complicated ideas towards mediated affect seems to be at forefront of our experience with technology, and this does not and should never exclude the example of games. This is eluded to by Rosalind Pickard (as quoted in Richard Grusin’s Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 ), when she says,
It is usually assumed that technology-mediated communication always has less affective bandwith than person-to-person communication. Sometimes the limits on bandwith are desirable. You might wish to choose a medium where your emotions are not as easily seen. (as it appears in Grusin 114)
Broadly speaking, I think that this speaks quite earnestly to both networked and non-networked games. Within the feedback loop created by player and computer, there is communication, even if it is just the flicking of joysticks and the pressing of buttons. However, the enemies within the game, and the enemies that resemble other networked players do not know how hard that player is pressing those buttons or flicking those joysticks. They may be in tears, they may be filled with rage, they may be laughing, they may be a child, they may be struggling to hold the controller the right way. Regardless, the player is communicating something to the game realm that is masked by their avatar. Within the technology of the game, the code doesn’t care who that person is. Death in a game, as much as it seems like an end, a restart, a break in experience — is actually a significant meeting place for a new beginning that doesn’t forget the old. Once one dies in a game, their experience within that game, even if in the same arena with the same people/enemies, is different each time they die. A player exchanges with consoles, computers, and other players, through death, differing ideas about how they will progress within that space.
The following has much less to do with videogames and much more to do with the idea of structuring a final class project within a series of blogposts.
I’ve ended up focusing a lot on single player interactions throughout the course of these blogs, something that I didn’t necessarily intend to do. I followed my interests in a way that I normally wouldn’t do within the confines of a paper, and I feel very proud of my dedicated research over the past weeks, the people turned friends I have been working on this publication with, and the class I have been working on this for. I can’t help but also feel at a loss towards how well I did on this project. I’m not sure how one judges this sort of thing and I feel rather anxious towards the idea of it. However, I feel like the experience here has mimicked the trial-and-error dichotomy that I have discussed within games. Each blog post posits a birth and a death, only to be revived in the next, and played through a different way.
I might edit and add to the existing posts over the next few days, but for right now I am going to let this thing rest.
Bataille, Georges. Death and Sensuality. New York: Walker and Company. 1962. Web. http://www.totuusradio.fi/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Bataille-Death-and-Sensuality.pdf
Grusin, Richard. Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11. New York: Palgrave Macmillian. 2010. PDF.
