Alternate Reality Games and Tactical Media

After the Rita Raley reading, my current understanding is that Tactical Media are temporary, performative interventions in the media ecology. Just as Peters’ “Infrastructuralism” in The Marvelous Clouds is an invitation to perform a close reading on the pervasive, monotonous, and overlooked media that perform the job of logical organization, Tactical Media locate the sites of power that operate below the surface of society. Tactical Media, in many ways, seem like an answer to Infrastructuralism’s call to action, taking the next step in actually disrupting these organizational flows of power and drawing attention to these ubiquitous, invisible systems. Only, according to Raley, while Tactical Media “want to have a material effect on the world,” they are “temporary and provisional.” By “tinkering, playing, and visualizing,” they can critique the systems they are deployed in without structurally changing those systems during the time in which they are happening. For my own research purposes, I found this extremely relevant to the study of Alternate Reality Games (especially, but not limited to those that have been employed in institutional contexts or have subversive goals).

While they might be most commonly recognized as viral marketing campaigns today, Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) describe cultural and aesthetic forms that take advantage of the contemporary media landscape. They combine “real-world” encounters (e.g., events taking place in meatspace) with the frequent shifts between screens that have become a part of everyday life. This transmediality, in addition to an inventive use of at-hand media forms, functions to sever players’ critical distance from the historical present. Critically, they do not announce themselves as games, which is what designers refer to as the “This is not a game” (or TINAG) aesthetic. What specifically brings to mind ARGs when talking about Tactical Media is how they effect ruptures and reversals in the codes organizing our techno-social milieus through the way they induce metalepsis, (Genette 1980:234-237), a narratological term connoting the transgression between different levels of story or between story and narration. While this term has traditionally been used with reference to written texts analyzed in narratological discourse (and occasionally invoked in discussions of agency in electronic literature), it can be applied in an ontological sense to these contemporary media forms. ARGs introduce violations into the mechanism that demarcates the world of the narrating and withholds it from that of the narrated; what results is the blurring of once-distinct ontological worlds.

ARGs are ultimately ephemeral experiences, so all their re-organizing is, as Raley says of Tactical Media, “temporary and provisional.” Yet, when an ARG finally ends, a lack is introduced, which threatens to send players back into realm of psychological alienation. But, there has been a change introduced. Players feel the need to plug themselves into a ‘cause’ or community, and to do something. These players know how the world could be, how a different kind of knowledge could be done, and they know, from how the ARG increased their affective potentials, that it is within their power to create new undergrounds in the space left for them, using their emergent network of resources and collaborators. As Tactical Media or ludic undergrounds, ARGs offer us the tools for the undoing itself without necessarily positing something better. Moreover, because they constitute experiments in worldbuilding, at the very least, a study of ARGs opens up new terrains in the examination of how knowledge production and affect work in underground spaces, and what happens when a Tactical Media project collapses.

I'm curious as to what resonates most to others about the Raley reading, but what I find interesting about the concept of Tactical Media (with reference to other political undergrounds) is that while other undergrounds seem to either collapse in on themselves or become co-opted by the structures they perhaps were opposed to, ARGs end naturally by design. In the way they occupy the same epistemological grounds as a supposed “post-truth” society, perhaps these ludic undergrounds as a form of Tactical Media can be constitutive of a new political practice that can progress us further in the direction of heterotopias and more livable futures.

What do you think about the concept of a subversive artistic practice? Are there any artworks or aesthetics that have inspired you to action?

India Weston

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On a side-note: One part of the reading I am having trouble parsing (and perhaps someone can clarify) has to do with the idea that "Tactical media comes so close to its core informational and technological apparatuses that protest in a sense becomes the mirror image of its object, its aesthetic replicatory and reiterative rather than strictly oppositional," (Raley, 12).

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Works Cited

Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.

Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cornell UP.

McGonigal, Jane. 2003. “This is not a game”: Immersive aesthetics & collective play. Digital arts & culture 2003 conference proceedings. DAC 2003. Melbourne, Australia. pdf.

Peters, John Durham. 2015. The Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press.

Raley, Rita. 2009. Tactical Media. Introduction. London, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.