Swipe, match, relax: casual game daydreaming as affective calibration

Is Pokemon Go a casual game? If not, it still affected me last year in the same all-consuming yet uninvested way that Candy Crush has this week. In trying to figure out this pull, I appreciated Anable bringing Berlant's work on the affective elements of women's mass media in conversation with casual games. Anable notes that though "casual games are not inherently radical or even progressive media forms...they animate a different structure of feeling than other types of video games, other media forms, and other digital processes with which we engage [link]." Though I recognize that Pokemon Go is often a totally social game with a robust community of people who tie their identity to it, for me when I was playing it in my peak (though it feels foreign to apply the word "play" to it, as it felt more like I was directing blankness into otherwise packed days) I would use it as a way to eat up my commute time walking to and from work and social functions. I initially downloaded the game in tandem with deleting all forms of social media -- I wanted to see if I would feel better or different tapping a screen repeatedly for an arbitrary goal as opposed to tapping on a screen to get bizarrely curated information about acquaintances. The underlying reason I was still relying on a screen, obviously, speaks to a technological crutch that I was assuming would stay constant in my commute time. Or perhaps I was trying to transition from desk work to less tech-oriented living -- a powering down. Regardless, it was the affective register between me and my environment that I was seeking to change. 

I see a lot of similarities between the two games, which speaks to how inconsequential casual game narratives are to their players (or at least to me). Though there are certainly people who solely get their fictional narrative and branding needs met through the Angry Birds and Pokemon, I like that in Pokemon Go the player doesn't have to even begin to deeply understand the objectives to fully engage with the tapping and feedback loop of success and failure -- and realistically, even when you do know the deep ins and outs of the games, there are enough elements of total luck and hidden algorithm at play that it doesn't really make you any better at it. This is totally true with Candy Crush; it took me many trials to understand how the special candy appears, how to drop candy into the sort of portal passages in later levels, how to direct and use the bomb candy, etc. That's the addicting element of the gaming for me, though -- the ability to enter a universe with unique logics, rules and timing and still be able to 'fake it.' I compare the feeling of entering the feedback loop of a numbing casual game with another practice I took on while at a dead-end desk job -- looking at Craigslist ads for gigs I have no qualifications for. Both activities involve very noncommittally descending into a fantasy instead of being present in my daily routine, imagining interaction with a community I have not earned membership into (I always looked at jobs outside of my field, I am not a gamer). Both activities too emotionally shift me into a place of possibility while existing in a stilted or fraught IRL space. This sort of adjustment-oriented distraction seems distinctly affectively different than more involved gaming or media spaces where one might seek to disengage with regular life.

The ability to do something while mostly thinking about something else is a process of opening, which made me think about how Anable's reading works with Massumi's more cybernetic or scientific stance on affect theory within digital media. The expansiveness that comes from instigating daydreaming (which is essentially what casual games do for me) can be radical given the context. It is also radically altering my own sensory development, Massumi might suggest, by throwing myself into several collective hour's worth of Candy Crush over the course of a few days in-between classes. Candy Crush reminds me that "the event decides, as it happens" in both the world of fast-pace iPhone gaming, and in the more rational sphere of making a choice about what term paper to write -- but in the case of playing Candy Crush, I receive immediate feedback on how my intuition is doing, and can adjust in real-time with zero negative consequences in my actual life (Massumi 20). The adjustment, too, is still not controlled outside of intuition, but the repetitive choosing soothes a sense of self that is used to a sense of actual stakes in decision-making.

Pokemon Go and Candy Crush both create entirely separate "free range worlds of cues," and reading the cues through tapping in time-controlled interactions perhaps satisfies me because it isolates what I am always rationalizing alongside of in my professional life (intuition etc.) (31). That, along with the experience of only doing one thing with my eyes/ears/hands and not talking to others creates space in my day I would otherwise not have much of (showering comes to mind as one of the only other total-sensory but total zone-out moments I definitely get daily) to recalibrate my body to its affective environment. If I never get past level 14 in Candy Crush or beat a boss in Pokemon Go, I will not play any less, because the tapping is responsive and useless enough to be the most effective escape from decision fatigue, a feeling of constant surveillance, media exhaustion and the many elements of tension that arise in trying to be a responsible person in this moment of ubiquitous computing.

*

Anable, Aubrey. “Casual Gaming, Time Management, and the Work of Affect.” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology, June 2013.

The Power at the End of the Economy, by Brian Massumi, Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 19–56.