I keep forgetting Agrias is a dude.

I know it’s been a while since I posted — and even longer since I posted anything worth a damn.  Sorry about that.  I finished the draft of my project for History of the English Language, and and about to get going on my paper for Gothic novel.  Why should this excite you?  My paper is on the use of the Gothic in survival horror games.  I found a few articles about Silent Hill, and I’m playing SH2 specifically for the paper.  But I’m not going to talk about that specifically right now.  Instead, I mean to work out a little of the theory on video games I’ll be using — I’m applying phenomenology to video games.

Poulet was one of the leading figures in the field.  I’m actually working solely off the introduction to his work I just read, but I wanted to get this down.  Poulet describes the act of reading as entering into the author’s consciousness (he keeps to a Barthian idea of the author — he doesn’t mean the person who wrote the text, but the figure which acts as the collation between the texts) and actively studied the oevre of writers, rather than single texts.  He believed readers were receptacles for this authorial consciousness, and embodied “an interior universe of mental entities” (1319).  Basically, the reader absorbs the objects of the written consciousness, replacing the book with the world within, and the consciousness of the reader is dispossessed and is filled in, for a little while, with this author-consciousness.

First we must assume Poulet’s “book” can be any text.  That’s easy enough to do today, in a world where everything is considered a text.  Done.  So let’s apply this idea to video games.  The first problem we seem to run into is one of passivity — Poulet described the reader as passive when he or she is the receptacle, but gamers are not passive.  That is, if the gamer is passive for too long, we (usually, MGS notwithstanding) consider the game as poorly-made.  A game with no story does not function without activity on the part of the “reader.”  The gamer must act, or nothing happens — and this is true every moment.  Think of Pac-Man or Space Invaders.  Pac-Man especially — there are no real pauses, and none in the gameplay.  There are no cut-scenes, no text blocks delivering dialogue or exposition.  There is simply action.  So, for now, let’s rub out “passive” and write in “active,” then see if the rest of this stuff holds together.

Now, the game disc — or cartridge, if we’re being old-school — is replaced by the game itself.  We don’t think much about the medium of the game while we’re playing, so that feels on track with Poulet’s idea that the book is replaced.  Our knee-jerk reaction may be to say it can’t be the author’s consciousness, because there’s almost never a single author for a game.  But we’re not dealing with biographical authors here, but Barthian authors.  Sonic Team is the “author” for Sonic games, for example — it doesn’t matter if certain developers were fired or hired between games, the team is a cohesive force binding the games together.  If someone else were to release a Sonic game it wouldn’t be all that appropriate to consider it lumped together with the others, would it?  We would view it as a reaction, like Wide Sargasso Sea is to Jane Eyre.  The same characters appear in the same setting, but they’re never considered as two parts of the same authorial consciousness.

If authorial consciousness is theoretically available in a game, does the gamer become dispossessed and filled in with the authorial consciousness?  Yes, I would say so.  The gamer takes up the skills offered by the game, learns them well enough to do without reminders, and then moves through the world of the game.  It is less like being absorbed into a book and more like being caught up in a dance or a kata.  The gamer  is doing precisely what the author intends — and yes, that’s what happens, even with the idea of the gamer as an “agent of chaos.”  The game world is constructed for the gamer to move through in the same way Poulet posits the world of the book is made to move into the reader.  We’re simply dealing with activity rather than passivity.

I’ve managed to map a theory about books onto games.  They are still different forms of media.  My speculative idea here is that the activity of the game is what induces this state in the gamer, not the story (if a story is present).  Now, I love good stories, and I love them in video games.  On my own I prefer to play games with strong stories, like Half-Life or Shadow of the Colossus.  I use those two examples not only because they are two of my favorite games, but also because they exemplify where I’m trying (in part) to go here.  Little of the story is ever delivered, in either game, to a passive reader — how many cut-scenes are there in either game?  True, they’re not absent, but more often than not the gamer is gaming, and not watching.  Games dispossess the gamer through motion — the gamer’s own motion.  Gamers are not immersed — logically, if we really did map ourselves onto the protagonists, then alarmists might actually have ground to stand on when they claim games make us more violent.  But that’s not what we’re doing.  We’re coming in contact with the authorial consciousness, “enacting a wondrous merging with the presence of someone wholly other and unique” (1319).  A video game is the least immersive form of entertainment, because it requires complete, willed action on the part of the gamer (I hold, along with most book-nerds, that reading is an active process, much more so than watching movies or TV, but I’m not talking about the same kind of activity here.  In books it’s active reading, a usage of the reader’s consciousness to, in Poulet’s terms, absorb the secondary consciousness.  The reader seeks the state of that passivity that lets the author come visit.  Readers act on themselves; gamers, on the other hand, act upon something external to themselves. So, really, revising my earlier statement — gamers dispossess themselves).

All sorts of related conundrums come up at this point.  What is the role of the protagonist in this relationship?  Does this affect the story, as I was talking about earlier?  The protagonist thing — I’m still doing reading on that.  I have an article to read all about the construction of protagonists in games, actually.  The story, if one is present in a game, is affected by the gamer.  Even if the game is perfectly linear, it isn’t.  The gamer controls the pace at which the story comes to them.  A gamer can still be actively engaging in that trade-off of consciousness — that is, still playing — even if they aren’t advancing the story at all.  Think of modern sandbox games, such as Grand Theft Auto 3, where the gamer is still playing if they steal an ice cream truck and ride around a farm but refusing to do any storyline quests.  The gamer could even stop and watch the sun set over Vvardenfell — that’s still playing.  Doing these things, or their analogues, in the act of reading a book or watching a movie, effectively stops the act of reading or watching.  Going back and checking out a cool scene in Star Wars isn’t absorbing the author’s consciousness — that consciousness is delivered to the watcher through forward motion through the story.  Pausing in reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell to reflect on the beauty of Clarke’s prose isn’t absorbing the consciousness either, it’s aesthetic appreciation of craft.  So even in the most linear of games, the fact of how gamers dispossess themselves to take in, rather than receive, the authorial consciousness turns the story into something that results from the gamer’s actions.

“Your princess is in another castle” isn’t memorable because of the struggle Mario went through to finish this castle; it’s memorable because of the authorial consciousness successfully negating the last moments of gamer-action, spurring the gamer forward to new heights of action.

citations from The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.  Vincent  B. Leitch, ed.  New York:  W. W. Norton & Co.  2001.