The Tyranny of Interactivity
Play is about movement as is cinematography and film production is about all kinds of movements, the latter of which Lyotard explores in his essay, Acinema. Play is a movement of characters and images created with movement, informed by movement and models of movements. Capital generation is one model of movement that generates models of movements, such as consumption. Play is consumption of movement by movement, created by models of movements. After the videogame crash of 1983, Nintendo swooped in to standardize some of these movements. These standards extended from distribution to production that yielded play movements that resemble one another. Marketing leaped forward to say how these movements should be perceived by alluding to things that appear similar to emphasize difference. From these promotional practices, resembling movements become reduced to properties comparable on a glance to increase movements of transaction. This reduction views movements in terms of speed that sees the rate coins are swallowed by arcade machines resembling one-armed bandits and production as part of the movement of play as consumption.
To produce is to create something by a variety of movements. Through engagement with code, shapes come into life for movements. Like the scalpel leaves its mark on stone and the paintbrush on canvas, code reflects those who type them and the tools that molded ones and zeroes. Art simultaneously conceals and reveals the artist and their craft. Marketing operates with a similar dualistic mode, but aims to transcend the material reality of craftsmanship to create its own unreality, akin to statues erected for tyrants. It exists to propagate values that can be mapped onto capital movements by concealing and revealing parts that creates a simulacrum without origin to appear real and unreal at once.
The first-person perspective in videogames is such simulacrum. Engagement reveals a resemblance of a familiar perspective and becomes concealed by its resemblance. It simulates our shared perspective and the point of view through which the artist creates that reveals the creation through resemblance and conceals it at once by being a resemblance. Carrying a gun in a videogame is a result and resemblance of artistic engagement pointing at the artwork and resemblance itself that the symbolic and literal pull of the trigger shatters. In this sense, the pervasive videogame gun represents an inward projection of marketing’s hostility towards production as an elevation and destruction of artist and art itself. It is an act of displacement of the self against the non-self through the resemblance of the self because of resemblance to non-self.
This displaced destructive force turned inward recreates the tyranny of marketing as resemblance, always on the move, calculating, only to pivot to the next thing. Videogames funnel players from one section to another, making sure sweaty hands grip and stroke the joystick at all times. Once it unclasps, the artist can lay down its overworked brush and scalpel to rest, only for players to scream out in internalized inward frustration to perpetuate a resemblance of tyranny.
Loading screens aim to hide the fabric of art and the artist’s work. There’s pressure to make these interactive to further concealment. This concealment is often framed in abstract terms, such as immersion and flow, that demands the material labor of the artist only to conceal this very labor to promote interactivity. The process begins and ends with interactivity through the means of interaction to promote it as abstraction and conceal it as material reality. To hide any resemblance of artistic touch, these loading screens are crafted in ways to fit in with the game’s theme. Yet, these concealed loading screens create resemblances of interactivity that reveal them to be a resemblance to unveil and obfuscate frustrations concealed under resemblances. Think of Dead Space 2’s crawl spaces that enclose and sprawl. They suffocate, provide safety and demand labor at once.
In these moments of frustrations with loading screens, players and creators feelings bubble to the surface against the absence and presence of interactivity, but remain displaced under the tyranny of resemblances. Players lament the simultaneous absence and presence of interactivity as resemblance while artists are frustrated with this resemblance as absence and presence of their labor. The simulacrum of interactivity is at once game as labor and labor as game for players as is resemblance as labor and labor as resemblance is for developers. This resemblance for developers is of games as games are of resemblance for players, a similar and different resemblance imposed by the tyranny of interactivity as resemblance of a game.
A game is then of interactivity. So-called walking simulators get away with guns as interactivity whilst keeping first-person perspective as interactivity. It is to reject and embrace interactivity while rejecting and concealing its tyranny as inward projection of hostility. Artists free themselves from hostility but conceal this freeing effect to which players reflect the inward projection of tyranny as outward effect of hostility.
To reject hostility is to reject tyranny of consumption as interactivity. Consumption is a force turned inward going through a transformation to a state of mind that leaves as an outward projection of self-expression. It’s a force of movement about movement that produces movement. To reject this is to walk free of movement, but to walk is to be in movement. It demands ignoring this force that subordinates walking to feel free, a privileged pose attainable only through simulation that produces resemblances that cannot decouple movement from its thrust, walking from its hostility and interactivity from its tyranny, but create resemblances that bare more or less resemblance to what it simulates.
