Expanding Interactivity
Critical Swtich is a Games Criticism Audio Show where Austin Howe and Zolani Stewart discuss digital games and art. If you want to support this show, you can subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/criticalswitch.
On this week’s Critical Switch, we’re going to talk about “interactivity,” and why it’s actually kind of useless as a way of articulating our relationship with videogames.
But then we’re going to do something better, we’re actually going to talk about what it means to form a meaningful relationship with an artistic work, any artistic work. We’re going to debunk some pretty obnoxious assumptions about videogames using this concept of ‘interactivity’, and then we’re going to explore some useful, and fruitful, and frankly much more interesting ways of thinking about how we create relationships with art objects, beyond something just being interactive or not.
For as far back as I’ve understood, the study of computer games has always had to justify itself by rhetorizing videogames as innovative technological objects.
So what this means, is that for videogames to be thought of as legitimate subjects of study, certain characteristics of the form had to be emphasized, as if you’re trying to sell this new thing to people who aren’t convincved, whether it is an academic establishment, or a publication, or some form of media organization.
And of course, one of those characteristics was centered on this perceived inherent dynamicism of videogames. That as computer software, what makes them important is that they are systematic things that are able to produce different kinds of outcomes, unlike static “old media.”
What I want to assert here, is that whether it is in professional scholarship, or popular media circles, videogames, emerging as a consumer object first, has always had to sell its concept. And in order to be sold, whether it is literal or metaphorical selling, you must rhetoricize yourself as exceptionally unique, mystical even! And this still annotates and shadows a lot our of understanding of what videogames can do and what they exist for.
So when I ask the question, what is it that motivates our need to assert interactivity as the central and defining characteristic of videogames, we can see how one of the answers, is that we are trying to fulfill this prophecy that we are told coming into videogame consumer culture, that videogames are exceptional and that they are magical.
So hopefully that gives us a useful perspective to work off of, because I want to spend some time un-knotting a lot of this, and bringing in some perspectives you may have not considered.
Now, to start from the top: Interactivity is crap! It’s a lot crap, a lot of bullshit. I’m not sure how not to be blunt about that. Like the more history, and criticism, and general scholarship about any real form of art and expression that I’ve read over the years, the harder it’s been for me to understand what is it about videogames that makes them so different from everything else. And it always comes back to this idea of interactivity.
Because we use it for these casual separations, for digital things that make responses on screen when you make an input, which is why we say things like ‘interactive art’ or ‘interactive media’, so they’re convenient ways to categorize media, and they make sense on immediate surface observation, but you push it any further and it falls apart, it stops making sense.
So one of these assertions
- A media piece is either interactive or not interactive. So that Interactivity is a binary trait. This is not true.
- Another, somewhat more reasonable but still very flawed, is the understanding of interactivity as a one-dimensional spectrum. So a piece of media is either very interactive, or not interactive at all. And it is very telling of course, that videogames get to be on the point end of the spectrum, that videogames are the most interactive possible. And I guess the other end would be like, a picture.
The problem here is pretty straightforward. It treats interactivity like a quantitative resource. Where videogames become the most interactive because you get a 14 button controller where every button makes some kind of response. It doesn’t matter how trite, or inconsequential, or meaningless those responses are, because there seems to be more of them, it must be more interactive than something with fewer responses.
It’s kind of a shallow perspective? For one, it clearly privileges a very specific kind of game, the kind that is literally designed to give you the sense that you are always being responded to in particular. But also, it doesn’t really articulate anything about how we’re engaged by digital media. The level of engagement we are having with a digital work, as well as the way we are being engaged, can’t be quantified or measured by the amount or magnitude of responses we think are happening. Engagement with digital art, and any art in general is a lot more nuanced and abstract than that.
Which leads me to the last point, the sort of logical conclusion of the previous two statements, which is that videogames, are inherently more engaged with people because they are interactive. That what makes games unique is that they are involving us, unlike other media forms you just stare at something that doesn’t care whether you are there or not. This the unique trait that supposedly makes videogames more involved and more dynamic experiences than everything else.
What I think needs to be asserted is that, every single form of art and expression I can think of is designed to involve you in some way, art is always trying to engage you, that is the point of art, or at least art that isn’t mediocre.
The experience of engaging with an art object is always reciprocal. It is always reciprocal! Whether it is a videogame, or a poem, engaging with art is usually a back and forth thing, where I’m not just sitting there doing nothing while a movie transfers senses into my brain, or where I can just completely full-heartedly impose all of my will onto a videogame without it ever acknowledging the nature of my actions, although there are games and movies that do both these things. But the art works that I find most fun to talk about where I feel like I’m engaging in a kind of conversation, a sort of discourse, where I’m sort of engaging this thing, but the object is also engaging me, by not just making something happen when I press a button in itself, but critically and intellectually challenging me through the nature of responses that are happening, and the various ways the game is engaging me like any work of art does.
With that, let’s talk about some examples! Finally, some examples, right? So I’m not just talking out of my ass all day.
So the first book we’ll be looking at is Theatre & The Visual, by Dominic Johnson. The Theatre & books are very good, and very short, and cheap, so I do recommend picking any book in the series.
In Theatre & The Visual, Johnson introduces us to a contemporary performance artist named Franko B. And what Franko B did, in the early 2000s, is he did a performance called I miss you, where he walks about the room, and through the audience, gouged in blood, so with tubes in his sleeve he’s bleeding from his arms and his body and presumably his legs too, and he leaves a trail.
And when he walks through the audience, on this lighted catwalk, the audience will stare at him, and the blood on him, but he stares back. So he’s exchanging glances with the audience. And as described, it is a reciprocal engagement happening, very intimidating and sort of intense.
What’s interesting about it is that in theatre, it’s argued that the actor and audience are sort of set in their place. The actor is understood as ‘blind’, not only in that an actor is literally blinded by the lights, preventing them from looking at the audience, but in that the actor is understood as pretending the audience doesn't exist, because they’re supposed to be part of the fiction. Or as Rebecca Schneider describes,
But what is done by Franco B, and by extension lot of performance art, is that these understood roles are sort of shaken up. Our passivity and complicity in filling the audience role is called into question. To sort of emulate Johnson’s rhetoric a bit, we often stare and watch feeling comfortable in our place as observers, but we don’t expect those things, and those people to stare back.
Franco B stares back, which is why I love this example, because in staring back at us, he unravels a politics in visual engagement. That when watching his performance, we don’t just get to be this invisible audience judging whatever and whoever we want, we are also responsible, and complicit in politics as audience, because we are part of the world, and we can’t escape that.
So this is really cool because this is basically about interactivity, what it means to interact with the people and objects that are placed in front of us for ‘entertainment’. Because we’re viewing what is essentially a performance of shock, we are watching someone bleed profusely, but we are reminded that we are also complicit in the way we participate in spectacle.
But even then, Contrary to what Johnson argues as the sort of default dynamics, I would say that theatre and performance arts have always, to some degree been about interactivity, about the politics inherent in reciprocal engagement, as well as technology and its place in that, long before videogames.
So that was one example. Hopefully that will help us complicate interactivity in a way that’s necessary. I’m going to give one last example, a short one, because I’m already going way too long:
The Ambassadors was painted in 1533, in the middle of renaissance era, but it looks it was done in Photoshop. And the reason is because there is a long, stretched out image positioned under these two wealthy looking men.
The only way to get an actual look of the skull, you have to look at it in a very particular way? You have to sort of edge it from the side. And the thing about that, is that this is a painting that is made in anticipation of a certain kind of visual input. So like a digital object that anticipates your input, and will do something specific on that input, the Ambassadors is a painting that is designed to respond in a specific way to a specific engagement that you have to make. And because of that, it would be really weird, if I said that this thing wasn’t somewhat interactive.
Whether it is interactive or not isn’t really the point. The point is that there is a nuance here, in these flow of engagements, whether coming from me or this thing, that these base assumptions about interactivity just do not help us articulate. And this is sort my main, closing point, that engagement with any object, is a much larger, much more nuanced, and a lot more interesting, than the kinds of binds we put ourselves in when we think about what it means for something to be interactive.
That pretty much concludes a lot of what I had to say. That a really large of ideas, pushed into a pipe. I hope that was all somewhat coherent. I hope you learned something.
Last Addendum Point, before I leave you alone: Videogames are often very static objects. They are collections of script files, and model objects, and image files, and sound files. They’re not actually responding to you because they are pre-built to make consistent responses. Every CD of a videogame you buy, at a store, is the same CD. The dynamicism that we see in videogames is an interpretation. It’s a perspective that we project onto them because we learn to process phenomena in a certain way, the end result of what’s happening in front of us. So it’d be difficult for me to say that games are inherently dynamic in comparison to ‘static’ forms.
Second Ammendum Point: When we say we want something to be interactive, we usually mean that we want to be controlling something. But control in a videogame is an illusion. We’re not controlling anything in a videogame. We’re actually doing exactly what the software expects of us. If we did something, if we entirely imposed our will onto the software without its own approval, the software would crash. We interpreting certain responses as us being in control. And the difference here is that, if it’s all interpretation, and us projecting our perspective, we can’t have an objective ontological expectations about how this object and this experience is supposed to be. And if it’s all interpretation, that means that videogames are much, much more fluid than we give them credit for. That means we can approach and think about our experience in all kinds of ways. And we can draw from all kinds of sources, if it’s painting or performance art or music or poetry or whatever you’re into. We don’t have to operate under these very useless binds around interactivity when we’re thinking about what makes videogames interesting and how videogames shape our experience.
