This essay examines how we collectively neglect the true subject of gaming, and what this neglect means for our conception of the medium’s artistic potential and psychological effects. It is informed by the following concepts, elaborated in other essays:

game-entrainment

postures of attention



There is an incredible poverty of language for analyzing video games. We can talk about some details: the specs, the mechanics, the assets, the sequence. However, we can barely begin to discuss theme or genre in any meaningful way. The genres that we do have named—FPS, moba, bullet hell, RPG—provide some utility through familiarity and association, but even by compounding them it is very difficult to convey the sense of what a game is like. This is, of course, because video games are primarily haptic and somatic experiences, a phenomenological field even more intimately subjective than the ethic/aesthetic responses that are typically the primary concern of conventional media.

It bears repeating: the actual subject of gaming is somatic experience. More than the graphics, animation, mechanics, gameplay, or gamefeel, it is rather the idiosyncratic distribution of attention among these elements that determine what a game is, what is the animal with whom you are negotiating. Or rather, it is the accumulation of those distributions that constitutes this animal, since the shape of one’s attention is continually morphing throughout the game, to suit different situations. But the variations of attention are typically threaded along by central themes or gameplay conceits, and even an abrupt shift in gameplay creates a posture of attention that is informed by the posture before.

Now, those conventional elements of gaming (graphics, mechanics, et al) naturally contribute to the somatic gestalt, but in most cases you could swap one or several of these elements, and it would feel like “the same” game. Asset swaps are the most superficial and obvious: playing Skyrim with outrageous character substitution mods changes the somatic animal only slightly. What about changing the inputs and therefore the haptic expectations? Playing Tekken with a fishing controller affects the somatic animal somewhat, but not radically. Despite the dramatic change in haptic response, there remains within the screen unchanged elements: aesthetic, timing, sense of weight, and so on. (Outside the screen, timing and sense of weight are likely altered through the haptic substitution, and this contributes to the somatic variance).

Description of these differences is difficult, but the somatic qualia of games are known to all. To some degree, it’s an inherent feature of digital media. We know that there is something-that-it-is-like to pick up a coin in Mario. We can recognize that it is of the same nature to pick up a ring in Sonic, or a doodad in Banjo-Kazooie. The form and function of these collectables can be totally distinct, from a gameplay perspective, but still identifiable as the same thing. In these examples, they are all attached to the same verb: “picking-up.” But the same somatic object can take on less familiar forms, and is still identifiable as the same. How about the credits sequence of Smash Ultimate? The player is flying through space firing bullets at swarms of targets. Though it superficially resembles the satisfactions of a shmup, the somatic object that results is similar to the picking-up examples. There is also Danger Danger, an arcade game exclusive to Two Bit Circus, an experimental LA venue, where the player rolls a ball through a minefield. Upon grazing the edge of the mine, it bursts with a little noise and gives you a yield of points. Nothing is being picked up in this case! But the somatic itch is the same.

When pressed, most players can account for their somatic experiences to some degree, but truly the language has not developed in any significant way. Part of the reason is the softness endemic to interactive media; for reasons besides the somatic, the affective responses are more beholden to subjective, inner experience. Maybe we need gamers (and game developers!) to get hip to poetry. Haha. Not really. But something in that zone. After all, poets are the mechanics of collective perception.

Brushing the Edge of Language and the Conversations We Could Be Having

The postures of attention elicited by gaming are part of the reason that it is important to perform psychological readings of games. Whether or not the somatic relationship to the game actions is realized, they are still encoded in the unconscious of the body. By playing a game, players are inherently performing psychological self-mediation. This point is much elaborated in my essay on that subject.

The Dark Souls games are unusually sophisticated in this regard, so I find myself exploring them quite often. The somatic animals of Souls games are particularly well defined because of the meaningful relationships between the aesthetic, the mechanical, and the philosophical attributes of objects and scenes. The dynamism between these elements is always what produces the somatic animal, but in the case of Dark Souls these correspondences appear to be deliberately cultivated. An environment is never an arbitrary coat of paint over the gameplay of that sequence, and the same goes for the philosophical purport of the section. Therefore, even if someone is not considering the philosophical content of an area, they are still playing through the same subject from which that content derives. Knowingly or not, they participate in the philosophy. This is the negotiation with the somatic animal.



That said, this is always happening in any game. But because of the lack of meaningful relationships between the components of the game—the organs of the somatic animal—our game experiences are too often disposable. However, if we cultivate our awareness of the somatic subject of games, if we begin to acknowledge this synaesthetic content, more appropriate language will emerge from it, and we can begin to build more refined and enduring games. (Of course, the language we currently have is already an obstruction to our imagination—right now, “refinement” sounds like we’re talking graphics and tight controls, and “enduring” is used to mean addictive! But we’re asking for much more.)

Let’s return to Dark Souls for a bit to experiment with something. If we were to discuss purely the somatic affect of some part of a Souls game, with no native language to employ, how would we do that? I suppose we should start with something conspicuous. So much of the Souls identity is its level design. From a bird’s eye view, a psychogeographical reading of Dark Souls would assume something like a constellation of an area’s archetype through its bonfires. It is the gestalt of these nodes and their tableaus that tells us what an area is “about” … but what are these nodes individually? Facets of the underlying principle? Is there any way to develop this model further?

Bonfires are essentially checkpoints. Even in very old games, a lot of the time you’ll find checkpoints after a set sequence or a “theme,” and in that case, it’s easy to correlate the checkpoint with its sequence. The identity of an area emerges clearly in such cases. For example, classic shmups often have keynotes to their challenges, like “this gauntlet is about curved arcs” or “this sequence is about vacillating from one edge to another.”

Part of the praise for Dark Souls’ level design comes from appreciation for tightly organized sequences and gauntlets. When these designs succeed, those sequences become just as memorable as bosses. In DS1 the Anor Londo archers segment, for example, stands out because it’s a unique challenge. While the same general challenge of dodging projectiles through narrow passage may recur, it never feels quite the same; this is the only time you have to distribute your attention into this specific shape. Aiding the strong sense of identity is the fact that this situation is really only solved and overcome once.



Aesthetic components that contribute to that identity include the setting: a city whose architecture suggests it is “too big” for the player; and which is immaculately clean, and rests high in the heavens. This conveys intimidation, physically, culturally. It is bathed in twilight, conveying the promise of something. This particular sequence is on a steep incline, which supports both the feelings of being outmatched, and that of promise. Weaker projectiles (lightning) are thrown around the player on the way to this point. If a player learns they can tolerate these weaker missiles, they are then extra deflated when blasted back by the giant arrows. When the archers are eventually approached, they are revealed to be not mere people, but taller, heavier, with inhuman poise. The flavor of this intimidation, the atmosphere of the challenge, are appropriate to the nature of what the challenge is on a purely mechanical level. If the player were facing an identical sequence, but traversing along a wooden walkway over a swamp, or with goblins firing these arrows, or whatever, it would not form the same somatic experience. This is a very basic example of how the somatic animal derives in part from aesthetic elements, and how its character becomes clearer when they are related purposefully; but of course there are many more contributing organs in the body than these. The philosophical correlates tend to be more personalized: the great city in the sky could symbolize an authentic heaven to one player, a false authority to another, an astral realm of temptation to a third, and so on. Whatever associations a player accrues un/consciously as they face this challenge also join the somatic gestalt.

Most game analysis people are aware of the whole “games that teach by design” thing, but the conversation all too often resolves with the sentiment that it’s good when games do this. Or for developers, the question is “how do you build a game to do this?” In either case, example after example is thrown around, but there is no digging into the somatic affect of any of them. We recognize the satisfactions of the player’s progress, but we typically aren’t analyzing what qualities are being solicited by these challenges. Take the case of something like Megaman or Shovel Knight level analysis. “Okay, we introduce the concept of the disappearing platform: the first time is low risk, then it’s higher risk, and requires a more precise jump. Then we introduce a new behavior in that same type of platform (and indicate visually) etc…” But there’s something more to it. When you introduce a gameplay theme, and elaborate on it, and twist it, what is the accumulation of it? All we can say is “oh, it’s the disappearing platform level” because we have absolutely no vocabulary to discuss this specific partition of attention that is being conditioned and developed, let alone the attitudes that correspond with it. There is something that it is like, somatically, to sink into a pattern, to sync with a game’s expectation. Something is happening to the mind of the player as these micro-skills are being developed. It is not just forming new capacities to act within the game; it is the establishing of new recognitions of processes and situations, many of which have applications in other internal (psychological) events, or even in the external irl world.

The lack of available language isn’t due to laziness or intellectual disinterest; it is rather from our desensitization to the somatic experience. Wine tasting provides a handy allegory: being a good wine taster isn’t about describing the sensory experience in precise or beautiful language. Obviously that’s an asset, but the essential skill is sensitivity to your own impressions, and being honest about them. This is difficult because there’s little common cultural infrastructure around the sensation of taste, so people start muting themselves to their own impressions. Speaking far more broadly, we’re given a wealth of data about the world around us that we are constantly ignoring, because we are conditioned to think it’s irrelevant. When it comes to the somatic content of games, as anything else, coding the experience into language is not a cause of sensitivity atrophy, but a symptom! With or without the support of language, if you take time to be present with your somatic experiences—wine or games or anything else—they begin to unfold new dimensions, styles, flavors, shapes. And this content, even when elusive and unnameable, can be helpful in understanding the superficial gestalt.

Alienation from the Body

My wish for the gaming world to develop deeper somatic sensitivies—and broader linguistic fluencies in service of them—is not just so that we can become more refined dilettantes of gaming, or even that better games will result (which they will). The longing mostly derives from what I feel is a necessity to understand these virtual worlds, because it is becoming clearer all the time that our participation in these worlds has unknown psychological consequences. There are at least two effects of gaming that are, according to Franco “Bifo” Berardi, already contributing to conditions of crisis. One is the dissociation of language learning from the bodily affect (this includes the somatic animals we’ve been exploring); the second is the virtualization of the experience of the Other. As I see it, these two are inextricable to some degree, and while the second effect is perhaps the more visible and the more dire, it is the first effect which is most pertinent to this essay.

It should be no surprise that in projecting one’s consciousness into a game, that person may begin to ignore the information of their body. Consider Chen Rong-yu, one gamer among many who, mind immersed in a game, straight-up dies in a gaming café. To cite a less extreme example, many of us have probably had the experience of a foot falling asleep, or becoming super hungry during a gaming session, unrealized until we put the controller down. Beyond these obvious body responses, there is a wealth of other, subtler information that our bodies are constantly giving us. Given our current relationship to the act of gaming, it is inevitable that some of this information will be ignored as we abstract our awareness more and more in a gaming session, confining ourselves to the virtual, becoming disembodied. Yet in this disembodied state, within the game, we are making choices, communicating, relating, learning, conditioning ourselves. There is still a fat pipeline of information coming through, but it is overwhelmingly mental, and minimally somatic. This is how language comes to resemble code. The somatic and affective material is lost as the abstraction becomes more extreme. (A look into the style by which gamer lingo mutates is a good indication of that!)



To really understand the inhumanity of this situation, Berardi, referencing Luisa Muraro, follows the somatic component of language to its primal place:

Access to language is fundamentally linked to the affective relation between the body of the learner and the body of the mother. The deep, emotional grasp on the double articulation of language, on the relation between signifier and signified in the linguistic sign, is something is rooted in the trusted reliance on the affective body of the mother. When this process is reduced to an effect of the exchange between machine and human brain, the process of language leaning is detached from the emotional effect of the bodily contact, and the relation between signifier and signified becomes merely operational. Words are not affectively grasping meaning, meaning is not rooted in the depth of the body, and communication is not perceived as affective relation between bodies, but as a working exchange of operating instructions. We can expect that psychic suffering will soon follow.

The disembodied linguistic state is not fully endemic to the time spent playing the game. With enough time and attention spent in the virtual, becoming accustomed to the “merely operational” abstraction of language, it begins to bleed into the irl. The person becomes unaware of the affective information of the body even while walking around in it. Since the body is the home of myth, and therefore meaning, and its affects are the substance of those structures, it is easy to see how alienation from the body often results in extreme nihilism. This is far more likely the primary link between video games and mass shootings, rather than the violent content of certain games. The actual violence of gaming is the severing of the person from their own somatic awareness.

If games continue to be addictive, while also sensational and superficial, inconsiderate of the way that their elements combine together and are digested in the unconscious of the player, we’re going to continue to find scores of gamers alienated from their own bodies and reduced to a state of hopeless nihilism. This doesn’t always turn violent, but it can. In many case the violence is self-directed. In the virtual world, our problems grow more complex, but they do not always necessitate any kind of affective fluency. In the meat-world, our problems grow more complex, and we still have our bodies, so the problems will therefore always comprise affective elements. As it stands, most of our crises demand greater affective fluency than before, but our collective time spent in virtual worlds has left that capacity to decay.

Sensibility itself is at stake, here. Sensibility is the faculty that allows human beings to understand those signs that are not verbalized, and that cannot be reduced to words. Sensibility (and sensitivity, which is the physical, erotic face of the non-verbal ability to understand and to exchange meaning) is the interpersonal film that makes possible the empathic perception of the other. Empathy (the ability to feel the pleasure and the sorrow of the other as part of our pleasure and sorrow) is not a natural emotion, but rather a psychological condition that is cultivated and refined, and which, in the absence of cultivation, can wither and disappear.



In asking for better language for talking about games, it must be stated that such language only really matters if it is used toward reconciling us with the body. Having a bunch of extra descriptors for games is not the point, the point is building comprehension of the gameplay experience. We know how to build games; we know how to execute actions in games. We have absolutely no idea how to play games.



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Berardi, Franco. Heroes. p48-49

