This blog post started with a hangover from last week’s discussion(s) about interactivity – I’d summarize a lot of that discussion as asking the question, is interactivity the privileged/defining characteristic of videogames? In discussion someone (I think Riss) suggested that interactivity is a defining quality of “game,” but our reading definitely complicated that – i.e. Patrick’s discussion in the excerpt we read from Videogame Criticism and Games in the 21st Century about Analogue and Depression Quest, interactive digital experiences that were only precariously considered games. Interactivity seems to be both a privileged category for digital media and something that defines, but is in excess of, the “game” in videogame. When we talked about Problem Attic and the videogame’s (potential) privileged status as an art form that could especially inculcate empathy in its players – presumably because the “activity” of interactivity reinscribed the identification between player and fictional other of the avatar in a physical/experiential way beyond the reach of other (allegedly) non-interactive media – Zoe also helpfully brought up the flip side of that argument, the fear that videogames also have a privileged status as media that can influence players about and/or persuade players of and/or habituate players to and/or make players identify with violence.
That alternating list of verbs I think anticipates the question that came up for me this week: if digital media and/or videogames has a special power to…do something…to audiences specifically because of its interactivity, is that special something centered on persuasion, a cognitive movement, empathy, an emotional movement, or affect (something else, but not entirely – something which maybe contains a movement like ‘habituate’)? How does interactivity, specifically, manipulate affect, specifically? Do digital media have a privileged status with respect to affect?
The writers we read this week who speak most to this issue are Anable and Grusin, and they make similar claims about the relationship between affect and digital media: if they don’t quite say that digital media have a privileged relationship to the production of affect, they do say that affect has (or should have) a privileged relationship to the analysis of digital media. Affect, they write, as an interpretive method, helps us to account for the effects of digital media that go beyond representation.
Grusin, in the introduction to Premediation, writes, “Affectivity helps shift the focus from representation to mediation, deploying an ontological model that refuses the dualism built into the concept of representation”; later, discussing Rosalind Picard’s empirical findings on affective states during game play, he writes, “The fact that the biggest affective responses were measured when the game failed to work properly does not minimize or contradict the claim that playing video games establishes an affective feedback loop between the player and the game, but suggests instead that maintaining the relationship with media artifacts, forms, and practices themselves is more affectively significant than the particular cognitive or representational or semiotic content depicted in games or other media” (7, 112, my emphasis).
For Grusin, what needs to be accounted for in media beyond representation has to do with media’s engagement of multiple senses, in other words, with its interactivity. Grusin writes: “Stern’s account [takes] cross-modal affective patterning or mapping to be basic to our interactions with the world from infancy….videogames (and interactive media generally) would seem to work as modes of trans-modal or cross-modal affective and cognitive modulation by adding touch to sight and sound…In this way our media interactivity provides a kind of intensification or reduplication of affective interpersonal relations” (95 – 96). For Anable, what needs to be accounted for in media beyond representation is not just mechanics – it’s not even mechanics + representation (mechanics as a part of representation, representation as inseparable for mechanics). It’s something like {viewer >> mechanics + representation} – the whole matrix, as a dynamic process, needs to be accounted for by affect. Regardless, the reason we need affect for digital media is that because they are an interactive medium (they involve mechanics) they demand an account beyond representation (i.e., beyond Bogost’s incorrect reading of casual games as purely kitsch/sentimental based on their graphics alone). She writes: “The rhythm and aesthetic of time management games—their zaniness—is a quality that is represented by and that also exceeds their narrative and mechanical processes. It is felt, not as an emotion tied to subjects or digital objects; but rather as something more fugitive, as affect passing between them.” Also: “by shifting attention slightly away from emotions and onto affect, I want to pry open a space for the ways these games, as affective systems, cannot be completely pinned to any subject or representational practice; but rather function as mediations between subjects of labor, the devices of labor, and representations of labor.”
It’s not totally clear that Anable and Grusin’s arguments for affect as a framework for digital media analysis flow from a corresponding belief that digital media produces more affect than other media, or has a special relationship to affect (I would argue Grusin is really making this claim, even though he spends a lot of time reminding us that older media produce affective feedback loops via multiple senses). And I’m not sure where this shared insight about “getting beyond” representation lands us. Are novels pure representation, because they don’t involve haptics or sound? Does that mean we shouldn’t use affect as a framework for their analysis? Where does the belief (if this is indeed what they are saying) that digital media (or let me say, interactive media) have a special ability to manipulate affect stand with respect to the belief that interactive media has a special ability to produce empathy? Which is possibly another way of saying, how does affect relate to emotion? This is where I snag on the mystification of the term affect we were discussing Thursday – all five of our authors seemed to use affect slightly differently (and Richmond and Grusin frankly use it in ways that seem synonymous with ‘emotion’). In class, Patrick offered one way of working around that confusion, by shifting our attention from “what is affect” to the question “why do we need affect?” So perhaps the consistent/shared answer from Anable and Grusin – that we need an account of affect to get beyond accounts of media that only consider representation – can be a way in. Though -- to end on a note of cynical indecision – it remains a question for me why a concept like “emotion” can’t get beyond representation, and give us reader-response type account of what media do rather than what media mean.