To paraphrase one of the questions posed by Patrick Jagoda in our last class, what type of subjects do games create? Games to Fail With provides two answers, the first what type of subject conventional games do create, the second what type of subject games both could and should create. Audrey Anable suggests “that the room for error in games functions like a release valve in the hyperbolic computing discourses of order and infallibility, but it also trains users to assume that any errors are their own in the human-computer interaction formulation of the “user error” (Anable 128-129). However, the parsing of error in games as “user error” as opposed to “system error” ignores what Alexander Galloway in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture regards as the crucial fact that “both the machine and the operator work together in a cybernetic relationship to effect the various actions of the video game in its entirety” (Galloway 5). In essence, every error that occurs in a video game is always already both “user error” and “system error”, just as, on a higher level of generality, every failure is always a combination of an individual and their environment. By promoting the idea of “user error” (a characterization that is perhaps disputable given the habit of many players of blaming unluckiness, defective controllers, weak characters, and poor game design instead of themselves), conventional video games reinforce and recreate the illusory neoliberal subject position of complete autonomy and complete responsibility for failure.
Alternatively, with games such as Pippin Barr’s, Anable suggests that “Their games are asking us not to celebrate failure but to flail with it for a while and learn its contours. Maybe flailing with failure through games that jerk our bodies out of the smooth rhythms of frictionless labor, or deny our participation at all, will shift our attention away from perceived personal failings and back to the failures of a larger ideological formation—say, a user interface, a digital platform, or even an economic system.” (Anable 129). Anable suggests that through games that force us to contend with the futility of playing them and the thoroughly unsatisfying possibility spaces they offer, we can analogize such experiences of despair, boredom, and desire for cessation/extrication with other systems such as capitalism and reject those systems accordingly. Such a view suggests the certain game can create subjects primed for revolt, able to attribute their dissatisfactions to the systems governing the status quo, who demand systemic change where they might once have satisfied themselves with a renewed commitment to proper conduct and remarshaling of effort. With this second characterization, we have both a conventional subject and a revolutionary subject, a binary of with and against, of reproduction and destruction.
However, I think such a binary approach mistakes the true nature of certain “larger ideological formation[s]” and overdetermines the subjects that games create. One well-documented form of subjectivity that games create is the addict. Instead of the binary between a rewarding games and rewardless games, worthwhile and futile games, the model of addiction is one in which users have compelling reasons to be addicted, as the activity in question can be extremely rewarding, but eventually the addiction is all-consuming and as difficult as it is to quit, the rewards exceed the benefits. My subjectivity was affected in such a way by the game League of Legends, which is oscillatorily immensely satisfying and frustrating, and I determined my frustrations exceeded my satisfactions. This model of addiction provides a way to recognize that even systems with significant rewards can ultimately be detrimental, or, put differently, a subject position which can reject a system that produces more harms than benefits even if the situation is not completely futile.
Finally, I think it is worth rescuing Halberstam from Anable’s quick dismissal. Anable suggests that “it is unclear in Halberstam’s formulation how failing and its negative affects can meaningfully intervene in neoliberal structures that seem to thrive on failure” (Anable 119-120). It seems to me Anable did not read the Queer Art of Failure, which is unfortunate. As Jack Halberstam acknowledges in his prefatory remarks, “Failure, of course, goes hand in hand with capitalism” but by looking to Renton, Sandage, Munoz, and others, it is possible to create a different archive where “failure is productively linked to racial awareness, anticolonial struggle, gender variance, and different formulations of the temporality of success” (Halberstam 88-92). Hacking, modding, exploiting, and breaking games, enacting metagames against and outside of normative play, and constructing entirely new games within engines and environments, produces a subject position that regards the world as comprised of mutable systems that are all potential sites for the production of life-affirming, counterhegemonic ways of being. Players who recognize the contingency and mutability of games may go beyond Anable’s model of simple refusal, that of seeing futility, and instead see a place of productivity where new forms of life can be created.
In short, we have four potential subjectivities produced by games, the individualist, the systematist, the addict, and the creative. This list is incomplete but hopefully conveys that Anable’s formalism is helpful in sketching out some but not all of the subjectivities produced from, with, through, and around games.
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