What is a video game, anyway?

I don't know much about video game studies, so if you do, forgive me. What I do know is mostly what Cameron Kunzelman, and to a lesser degree for me, Ian Bogost has told me. So, this is a post about video games, by thinking through that question through the work of Cameron Kunzelman (from now on, either Cameron or CK). (Also, before you read further, a couple of notes. All of Cameron's games are free browser games, most of them require your volume to be on, and most of them are really short. I suggest you play the games as you read, occasionally, I suggest it in stronger terms as you go through the post).

Cameron's video games raise certain questions about what makes a video game a video game. He clearly has little patience for the normal popular questions around video games, like, are they art? Or what will make them art? Or if they are a craft of auteurs? (He, of course, made a super short video game making fun of these very questions, entitled, wonderfully, "The Citizen Kane of Games"). Instead, Cameron's games pose for us questions around what makes a video game a game, and what, while we are at, does it mean to play a game? (I am sure he is far from the first game developer to raise these questions, all I am saying is, he does so interestingly, and I already said I know shit about video game theory, so why are you giving me a hard time?). Now, he has made some games that are clearly in the traditional indie developer version of a normal video game. Take his first video game, Smash the Patriarchy!, a game that I am terrible at. The game is lower key version of the original Mario Brothers, you jump around, try to avoid enemies and falling. You can win it (or so I have been assured). But take his video game Oh No! In this game, you press keys in order to avoid the giant head of Michel Foucault, who is trying to eat you. You can never win this game, Michel Foucault will always eat you (just like grad school all over again). But, it is still pretty obviously a game. Fun to play after a few drinks in a group. But let's take what is without a doubt CK's most popular game to date, Alpaca Run. (Okay, I really suggest going and playing this game before going further with this post. It won't take more than, say, five minutes, put you need to be on a computer and need to have volume. There are just minor spoilers ahead, you have been warned).

There are actual youtube videos of people playing Alpaca Run for the first time. Several of them. One of the things that are fun about these videos is the first time their alpaca character should die, and doesn't. The other time is at the end, when the alpaca finally transcends. People just get happy. But here is what is odd. Though in many ways an inverse to Oh No! (in Oh No there is no win state, in Alpaca Run there is no fail state), Alpaca Run feels like less of a game. I often have referred to it as an interactive music video, a way of pulling you further into the charming song by Samantha Allen.  I often end up referring to the video games by CK as interactive this or interactive that, instead of as a video game. Take his most recent story based game, Catachresis . (There are, of course, other story games, like the always popular twine game about Slovaj Zizek making a twine game). (Also, btw, I was done like a character from the game, here). Catchresis is game that is a weird cross of HP Lovecraft, Ghostbusters, occultic technobabble, and walking (so much walking). It is both funny, and, spooky (not scary, but spooky). There is a brilliant blog post about this game here, and I am going to quote it a bit before coming back to my point. It starts with a definition:

Catachresis, a fygure, wherby the propretie of a worde is abused: as, Facies simillima lauro [A face most like a laurel tree], where facies oonely belongeth to a man, and not to a tree, although it doth signifye there a similitude or fygure.
-The dictionary of Sir Thomas Elyot, 1538

The author of the blog post goes on:

Apocalypse from the Greek means uncovering.  In English it was rendered as Revelation, from the Latin revelare, to “lay bare.”  To tear away the veil — to show that which has been hidden.
We live in a time when these words mean the End of the World.  We are now inundated with narratives of Apocalypses — biological, ecological, technological, religious, vampiric, zombie, whatever.  The issue with this use (abuse?) of the term however — this catachresis — is that it is a slide from the original meaning of the Biblical “Revelation.”  John of Patmos had the future laid bare or uncovered or revealed to him — the Apocalypse was not the end of the world itself, but the position of seeing it before its time.
By conflating the revelation with the thing revealed, I think we foreclose on its possibilities — its immensities, for one.  At the end of Catachresis nothing is revealed in any sense beyond the basic — you find out the world is ending and then it ends, welp!  But furthermore, there is not a call to speculate as in some games, no sense that you need to piece together the mythology that has led up to this point, because the event (it is clear) is so much larger than us.  There is no uncovering, but a descent into sublime unknowing.

So yeah, that happened. In way, very little happens in the game Catachresis. You walk around a lot, you engage with things, technobabble happens. Once or twice you solve a really puzzle. But at the end of the game, more or less the same thing happens to everyone that plays the game. First you are the cause of the end of the world, and then you are powerless to stop it. One can ask why CK didn't just write a little spooky story about the end of the world. Well, because at the end of it, playing the game (if you can call it playing or a game) is that you become complicit in everything. Sure, there are characters, but you are the character. You make the world end, and then you fail to stop it. One can understand this as the video game version of what Scott McCloud explains in Understanding Comics as the gutter. For those that want the parts of McCloud I mean with examples and references, check out this SEK post. The gutter, of course, is the way that comics make you complicit in their storytelling (indeed, one assumes most mediums most have a way of making you complicit in their triumphs and atrocities).

Perhaps, in Cameron's work, this is clearest in his short (and very appropriate for this blog) game Laika. The historical Laika was a dog, and she was the first animal to orbit earth, and among the first to be in space. She died, through heat, in the craft. And though she died in flight, she was going to be killed no matter what. Science, and all that. In the game, Laika, you do very little. You press one button, over and over again, which slowly leads to the take off of the craft. You even have to press the button for each number of the countdown. At the end, you are treated to what, for my money, is the most haunting ending of any game Cameron has given us so far.

In William Burroughs' album Dead City Radio (and in his book Interzone), there is a short track entitled no more Stalins, no more Hitlers. See here. Or watch here, start it 3:32 if it doesn't start automatically there for you.

For those that can't watch, it goes like this:

We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule, or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision.
They are representatives of abstract forces who have reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of past.
There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers.
The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident. Inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push.

In a very real sense, Cameron's games (maybe video games in general) are ways of forcing us to confront complicity in all these buttons that we are pushing.



(PS, if you would prefer to hear CK talk about games, in a smart way, rather than my late night unable to sleep thoughts, go to this video. He start speaking around 25:10. It's smart, talks about Ranciere and the rise of French Pantomime, because...).

Jonathan Safran Foer vs. Bourdain part II: The magical natural community of animal flesh eaters

This post follows up, in a very different way, from the earlier post on the debate between Jonathan Safran Foer and Anthony Bourdain. Both posts are ways of thinking community in the midst of a debate about eating animals.
One of Bourdain's major arguments against JSF is that eating animals is a special and unique bond, a special and unique production of community. JSF wonders if we can produce community only through eating other animals, and Bourdain basicallys says no. The example he gives is the tea party, that they probably wouldn't agree on much expect how awesome barbecuing is. Which is odd, because if he decided to say that Obama was a secret Muslim socialist fascist, he'd be able to bond over that. That is to say, community can be produced through other ways, it just depends on what ways we want to produce community, what ways we feel are ethically justifiable. Though of course, maybe Bourdain is right about the uniqueness of flesh eating in producing community.
One doesn't have to be a sacred sociologist in the tradition of Durkheim, Mauss, and Bataille (though it helps) to realize how important sacrifice is to producing community. Remember, sacred life is an ambiguous life: it is both protected and at the same time absolutely killable. It is through the sacred life that we sacrifice that we are able to produce inside and outside, us and them, lives to be protected and lives to be killed or let die. In other words, community (there is of course an entire intellectual tradition that tries to think community outside of foundational violence and separation. See Bataille, Blanchot, Nancy, Agamben, Derrida, and Esposito for some of the more important examples). How else can we possibly understand Bourdain's many incoherent arguments? Rather than trying to respond with rational arguments to JSF, Bourdain treats us to transcedentalism as why we must kill and eat animals. In one of the weirdest moments of the debate Bourdain is going on and on about magic, and about how roasting the flesh of other animals is completely magical and produces community and communion. At this point the moderator steps in and asks Bourdain if he means that it is natural, to which Bourdain readily agrees. Magic=nature=roasting and eating animals. Of course, the structure of sacrifice also equates magic with nature, both a practice of giving to the gods while at the same time producing natural divisions. This is also the way to understand Bourdain's bizarre insistence that the Christmas turkey is an everyday example of dead animals producing culture. As JSF responds, that isn't an everyday example, but rather a one day a year example. [sidenote: This always JSF's maneuver in these discussions: simply refuse to argue about the marginal cases, and insist that we give up eating animal flesh in all the instances everyone agrees that meat eating is indefensible.] This is again the logic of sacrifice, that the exceptional moment of the sacred structures the everyday as well.
Okay, on some level I am being silly here. On some level Bourdain is just speaking gibberish. But I am interested why this gibberish is instead sense to Bourdain and for many other people. I am interested in why the moderator hears one of his guests talking about magic and immediately thinks the natural. By abstaining from our cultural sacrificial rituals, I have also (to some degree) abstained from our sacrificial ritual. And I want to underline this last point, the abstaining from the ritual preceded the abstaining from the logic. This makes such a debate between JSF and Bourdain so interesting and so impossible. The ability to communicate is based in many ways upon a shared sacrificial language and logic, upon a shared community and culture. Bourdain can talk about magic and have the moderator hear the word natural, even though those words are antonyms, because they share a similar logic and language. And in that logic and language sacrificing animals is both at once supernatural and natural. What is gibberish for me living in my different culture is obvious to those within this other, border community.
What I am saying is that in a very real way, Bourdain is right, the sacrifice of animals produces an unique culture. What we have to figure out is if that is a culture we wish to be members of. Think about it this way, for any of you who have lived in the South or had discussions with certain Southerners, many people contend that the Civil War was not about slavery, but instead about conflicting culture, about trying preserve a way of life. And without a doubt, that is true. But it was a way of life, a culture, that necessitated the sacrifice of the black body through rape, murder, and enslavement. The connection between sacrifice and culture explains why Derrida included "Heidegger's Ear" -- an essay on sacrifice, friendship, and animals-- as an appendix in the French publication of The Politics of Friendship, his work on rethinking community (even sacrificing community).
This is one of the main reasons that so many people in the vegan movement have had such reaction against 'localvorism' [.pdf], or at least the pro-meat eating version of localvorism. While in many ways opposing factory farming should make us allies, and in some cases it does, when you read Michal Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver, you realize that both of them are desperately worried that factory farming is destroying the sacred rituals of slaughtering other animals. In other words, the vegan movement wishes to exist from this particular logic of sacrifice, of which the factory farm system is the fullest expression of, meanwhile these particular localvores which to oppose factory farming because they feel it is destroying the sacredness of killing animals. Those of us who oppose the killing of other animals have the particular problem of working from outside the material-semiotic realities of the community that engages in sacrificing animals. These debates almost always replicate the cultural chasm between those eat animal flesh and those that don't.

Moral schizophrenia and the power of affect in US v Stevens

I just got through reading the oral arguments (.pdf) in US v. Stevens. It was very interesting, to say the least. If you don't want to take the time to read around 70 pages of oral arguments, you can check out this summary from slate here (which is biased on the side opposite of mine, but entertaining to read). The oral arguments are certainly all over the place, but I wanted to highlight two interesting points from them.

(1) Gary Francione has often pointed out that most of us relate to animals in a mode of what he calls moral schizophrenia. We are willing to treat the family pet as a member of the family, while at the same time eating animal flesh on our dinner table. This moral schizophrenia is, in many ways, at the heart of the arguments made by the Justices against the law. Because we have a culture that has no real coherent way by which we determine something cruel or not (hunting, even the most vicious kind, in. Killing a cat though in the same way, probably illegal to sell images of that. Dog fighting and cockfighting, out! But bullfighting, specifically let in!). I have a lot of sympathy with the Justices on this one, it clearly is something very different from laws against depicting child pornography, which the present law is explicitly based off of. In child pornography we have an action whose exceptions are both narrow and fairly uncommon. Also, those exceptions have a certain degree of seeming coherency to them. In the case of the law about showing violence towards animals we have a law that is necessary has broad exceptions that are quite incoherent. I am not saying that the law should be overturned on this point (I really am not taking a stance on this issue), but I am pointing out that I think that advancing animal welfare legally will continue to face such issues.

(2) Another interesting part of the back and forth included two different times where there were discussions of banning speech that was not communicative. That rather than communicating to anything, appeal to something. Such as obscenity appealing to lust, or these images potentially appealing to sadism. While the term 'affect' was never used in these discussions, that is certainly what was under consideration. To what degree does the first amendment cover affect? What these backs and forths seemed to imply was that the State must not intervene on the question of content, but anything that simply advances affect can be regulated by the State.


The whole thing is pretty weird. For example, both lawyers seemed to agree that if there was a channel dedicated to broadcasting human sacrifices that were taking place outside of the US, Congress couldn't make such a channel illegal. The justices seemed all very bemused and confused by this stance, particularly this mutual stance.

affective contamination/communication

I think animals are completely capable of communication. I know that most studies show that animals learn (as opposed to some sort of mechanistic pure instinct, rather animals seem to have a power of life as well). Furthermore, many different types of animals have shown a great deal of skill at working together (most of those studies deal with types of primates, but still...). I think that animals communicate, not at the level of phone/logos (the separation of which concerned Aristotle so much, and in many ways whose separation continues to dominate western metaphysics and ontology), but at the level of the affect. Vitalistic power (so, life, but perhaps both more broadly and more narrowly understood) involves "affective contamination" (Guattari, Choasmosis). Affective contamination involves a lot of things. (1) It is a necessary pre-condition for all becomings (or as Haraway puts it, becoming-with). There is no becoming without being caught up in affects (indeed, D&G worry that animals-as-pets create modes of oedipalizations. I think you can see this when people go around and refer to themselves as mothers or fathers of animals. They never mean this as some sort of monstrosity "Who am I to have birthed this creature!?" but always a domestication. Mama-Papa-Me. In this sense D&G actually push against Haraway's criticisms that they are not concerned with animals themselves. They are very worried that the animal itself will become nothing more than a child. However, they also admit that pets can also create becomings. And that indeed pets can be sites of both oedipializations and becomings). (2) Affective contamination, rather than logos, is at the heart of social bonds (of community, operative and inoperative). Words so seldom convey content, but affects do. Think about funerals. Nothing profound is every said at a funeral (I'm sorry for your lose. He was a really great human. et cetera). Nothing profound is said, but community is created, a common is created. Or think about this one: I love you. The words themselves are totally vacuous, but yet they are so often seen as the most important words. Indeed, also all performative magics are not based upon words but upon affective contamination (it is not the content of "you are now husband and wife" it is rather the affect of it). Perhaps all communication is affective. That's a thesis I like, but I have no clue how to support that one. (3) All histories of productive power are really histories of how productive power takes affective contamination as their objects. They are histories of immunizations, and in this sense the work of Roberto Esposito is essential. Foucault very much seemed to make this point with his understanding of power relating to disease control (sovereign power is based upon leporsy, disciplinary upon plague [see both of these in Discipline and Punish and Abnormal], bio-power is based upon both polio and stopping racial contaminations [Security, Territory, Population and Society Must Be Defended, respectively]).