How To Do Things With Videogames, Chapter 6: Transit
“there was a time when one had no choice but to think of the journey as part of the trip, simply because it took so long to get anywhere” (45)
“In the mid-eighteenth century, for example, it would have taken ten days to travel from London to Edinburgh by horse and carriage under the best conditions. By the 1830s the trip took less than two days by railroad” (45)
“by removing the majority of time from a journey, the railroad also removed much of the experience of the space traversed” (45)
“Wolfgang Schivelbusch describes it as follows: ‘On the one hand, the railroad opened up new spaces that were not as easily accessible before; on the other, it did so by destroying space, namely the space between points. That in-between, or travel space, which it was possible to “savor” while using the slow, work-intensive eotechnical form of transport, disappeared on the railroads’” (45-46)
“While waypoints along a route had once been connected to one another continuously through the slow traversal of foot, horse, or carriage, the railroad disrupted this uninterrupted flow. As Schivelbusch explains, ‘What was experienced as being annihilated was the traditional space-time continuum which characterized the old transportation technology. Organically embedded in nature as it was, that technology, in its mimetic relationship to the space traversed, permitted the traveler to perceive that space as a living entity’” (46)
“If the carriage functioned more like a landscape painting, the railway functioned like a cinema camera” (46)
“travel is not a universal experience but one mediated by the particular forms that give rise to it” (47)
“A continuous, sensory voyage through slowly transforming countryside characterized travel by carriage. In the age of rail, the train produced a staccato vista through its single view. And of course today, in the era of the airplane, the vistas of travel have been removed entirely, replaced by the white blanket of clouds or the vague pattern of farmland five miles below” (47)
“If the panorama anticipated a kind of travel yet to come, the videogame looks back on one that’s already passed. Games restore the experience of resistance and adventure that the rail (and the airplane after it) had removed from travel, even if only through simulation” (48)
“a videogame constantly asks its players to act” (48)
“videogames tend to offer continuous rather than discontinuous space that must be traversed deliberately and actively, the opposite of the panorama show and the railway” (48)
“Places once felt isolated from one another, and the process of traveling itself served to unite them. Before the railroad, the traveler also doubled as adventurer, taming the spaces in between destinations by passing through them, both literally via foot or horse or carriage and figuratively by vision and judgment. The former gets you from place to place, but the latter solidifies the continuous space of transit and the real effort required to get there” (50)
“even as these simulated places may not embrace real remoteness by remaining so easy to access, once there players experience a new, simulated remoteness” (50)
“For these locations to simulate remoteness effectively, they must start out entirely unfamiliar, inviting the player to come to understand them through slow transit rather than the speed of transportation technologies” (50)
“in-videogame transit re-creates a past in which reality had not yet been dissolved into bits, but had to be traversed deliberately” (50-51)
How To Do Things With Videogames, Chapter 7: Branding
“Monopoly Here & Now bears a lesson about advertising’s role in commercial videogames. Most developers are concerned with the appropriateness of brands in games, and even large publishers have shown their unwillingness to hawk in-game space even at high premiums” (54)
“Yet some developers and players also believe that branding is appropriate when it enhances realism in a game. This principle is usually cited in reference to urban and sports environments, which are littered with advertising in the real world” (54)
“In cases like these, realism usually implies visual authenticity—correct appearances” (54)
“our understanding of particular rules of interaction in the world has become bonded to products and services. In a game, the behavior of a character, situation, or idea changes when aspects of that behavior can be offloaded from the simulation into a branded product or service” (55)
“In Obama’s case, the campaign focused on sports and racing titles, including Burnout: Paradise, an auto racing game, and Madden ’09, the popular football game. The result was red, white, and blue, Obama-emblazoned ads skirting racetracks and stadiums, bearing appeals to vote” (56)
“The feat made Obama the first presidential candidate to advertise inside a videogame” (56)
“Such an ad says nothing about the candidate’s qualifications or platform, of course, but it’s not meant to do so. Instead, the Obama spots borrow the contemporary, technical, and computational aura of the videogame and apply them to the candidate” (57)
“In a campaign that ran on the very concept of ‘change,’ Obama had much to gain by importing the abstract values of videogames into his image. Rather than apply Obama branding in the game, this was a case of the game branding Obama” (57)
How To Do Things With Videogames, Chapter 8: Electioneering
“The 2004 election marked a turning point, however, with the birth and quick rise of the offi cial political videogame. It was the year candidates and campaign organizations got into games, using the medium for publicity, fund-raising, platform communication, and more”
“Drunk on such videogame election elation, I remember making a prediction in a press interview that year: in 2008, I foolishly divined, every major candidate would have their own PlayStation 3 game” (58)
“We couldn’t have been more wrong. Videogames played a minor role in the U.S. 2008 election (and no role whatsoever in the mid-term elections of 2010)” (58)
“Three decades after its coin-op release, it’s disillusioning to realize that Space Invaders has become the gold standard for political game design” (60)
“There are reasons games have grown slowly compared with other technologies for political outreach. The most important one is also the most obvious: by 2008 online video and social networks had become the big thing, as blogs had been in 2004. Instead of urging voters to “play my game,” as Loftus and I surmised, candidates urged their constituents to ‘watch my video’” (60)
“Precedent aside, reskinning classic arcade games and placing billboards in virtual racetracks doesn’t take advantage of the potential games have to offer to political speech” (60)
“When we make videogames, we construct simulated worlds in which different rules apply. To play games involves taking on roles in those worlds, making decisions within the constraints they impose, and then forming judgments about living in them. Videogames can synthesize the raw materials of civic life and help us pose the fundamental political question, What should be the rules by which we live?” (61)
“the best solution may be to abandon the ‘election game’ entirely, in favor of the public policy game” (63)
How To Do Things With Videogames, Chapter 9: Promotion
“There are several ways advertising and games intersect. One is the advergame, a custom-developed title, usually played on a web page, built from the ground up to promote a product or service. Another is product placement, the insertion of branding or products into commercial games, a technique discussed in chapter 7 in the context of Monopoly. And a third is in-game advertising, the static (fi xed at development time) or dynamic (delivered over the Internet) insertion of billboards, objects, or videos into commercial titles” (64)
“As commodity goods continue to proliferate, brand companies have sought new ways to differentiate themselves from their competitors” (65)
“the Burger King games are the first titles developed from the ground up for that platform [Xbox 360] as advertisement—and with the exception of a game development contest sponsored by Doritos in 2009–10, they remain the only such specimens” (66)
“In the case of the Burger King Xbox games, the downright cheap cost per game further accentuates the promotion’s power: would-be burger lovers who already own an Xbox 360 proved more than willing to fork over $4 for a videogame when the going rate for commercial titles easily reaches fifteen times that price” (67)
“We use the term advergames to describe videogames whose primary purpose is to promote a company’s brand, products, or services through gameplay” (67)
“I suggest the name promogames to videogames whose primary purpose is to promote the purchase of a product or service secondary or incidental to the game itself” (67-68)
How To Do Things With Videogames, Chapter 10: Snapshots
“The Brownie, and later the 35 mm camera that replaced it, didn’t just simplify the process of making pictures; they also ushered in a new kind of picture: the snapshot. Snapshots value ease of capture and personal value of photographs over artistic or social value” (70)
“today’s computer culture values a similar strain of creative populism” (71)
“Websites and software provide tools that promise to ‘democratize’ the creative process. Cheaper, more powerful hardware and inexpensive, easy-to-use software have made professional video editing and DVD production available to everyone” (71)
“Following this trend, several companies have attempted to do for videogames what the Brownie did for photography. Big players like Microsoft (Popfly Game Creator) and Electronic Arts (Sims Carnival) have gotten into the game-maker game, as have start-ups like Metaplace, Gamebrix, WildPockets, PlayCrafter, and Mockingbird. While many of these products have since been shuttered or changed direction, each offers a slightly different perspective on simplifying game creation.1 Sims Carnival offers three methods: a wizard, an image customizer, and a downloadable visual-scripting tool. PlayCrafter relies on physics, Gamebrix on behaviors, Mockingbird on goals. Popfly uses templates” (71)
Commentator’s Note: This very much dates the book. Today, the obvious example would be Roblox.
“Long before Sims Carnival and its brethren, desktop game-creation software used genre conventions as the formal model for add-assets-and-script type tools: GameMaker fashions tile-based action/arcade games; Adventure Game Studio makes graphical adventures; RPGMaker outputs role-playing games” (71)
“Photography doesn’t make such a distinction; a camera can just as easily take a landscape as a portrait” (72)
“There is simply no magic box we can put in front of the world that, when a button is pressed, turns what it sees into a videogame” (72)
“The snapshot didn’t just popularize photography as disposable, it also helped greater numbers of ordinary people appreciate photography as craft. A successful game creation platform is one that fulfills such a role” (76)
A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 387-403
Number
“PROPOSITION VI. Nomad existence necessarily implies the numerical elements of a war machine” (387)
“Tens, hundreds, thousands, myriads: all armies retain these decimal groupings … Is this not the way an army deterritorializes its soldiers” (387)
“The Numbers may vary in function, in combination; they may enter into entirely different strategies; but there is always a connection between the Number and the war machine” (387)
“It is a question not of quantity but of organization or composition” (387)
“When the State creates armies, it always applies this principle of numerical organization; but all it does is adopt the principle, at the same time as it appropriates the war machine. For so peculiar an idea—the numerical organization of people—came from the nomads. It was the Hyksos, conquering nomads, who brought it to Egypt; and when Moses applied it to his people in exodus, it was on the advice of his nomad father-in-law, Jethro the Kenite, and was done in such a way as to constitute a war machine, the elements of which are described in the biblical book of Numbers” (387-388)
“The nomos is fundamentally numerical, arithmetic. When Greek geometrism is contrasted with Indo-Arab arithmetism, it becomes clear that the latter implies a nomos opposable to the logos: not that the nomads ‘do’ arithmetic or algebra, but because arithmetic and algebra arise in a strongly nomad influenced world” (388)
“three major types of human organization” (388):
- “lineal” (family)
- “territorial” (state)
- “numerical” (nomadic)
“Clan lineages are essentially segments in action; they meld and divide … The earth is before all else the matter upon which the dynamic of lineages is inscribed, and the number, a means of inscription: the lineages write upon the earth and with the number, constituting a kind of ‘geodesy’” (388)
In the State: “Property is precisely the deterritorialized relation between the human being and the earth” (388)
“The archaic State envelops a spatium with a summit, a differentiated space with depth and levels, whereas modern States (beginning with the Greek city-state) develop a homogeneous extensio with an immanent center, divisible homologous parts, and symmetrical and reversible relations” (388)
“The Numbering Number, in other words, autonomous arithmetic organization” is the numerical/nomadic way (389)
“the war machine operates with small quantities that it treats using numbering numbers. These numbers appear as soon as one distributes something in space, instead of dividing up space or distributing space itself” (389)
“The number becomes a subject … The number is no longer a means of counting or measuring but of moving: it is the number itself that moves through smooth space” (389)
Commentator’s Note: Compare the ‘unit-point’ in Pythagoras. Prior to the above ‘Greek geometrism,’ the mathematics of Pythagoras depends on the essential unity of the unit and the point. See my essay, “[[Pure Indetermination, 1]],” and the quotation therein from Guthrie: “Things are numbers, or, if you like, the basis of nature is numerical, because solid bodies are built up of surfaces, surfaces of planes, planes of lines and lines of points, and in their geometric view of number the Pythagoreans saw no difference between points and units.” This approach to Pythagoras might revise Deleuze and Guattari’s opposition of Greek mathematics to the Indo-Arab. Perhaps an even earlier Indo-European mathematics from which both geometrism and arithmetism arise? A metallurgic math (for instance, of the battle-ax and beaker cultures? See [[GAME 340, Week 10]] for more on this subject.)
“There is undoubtedly a geometry of smooth space: but as we have seen, it is a minor, operative geometry, a geometry of the trait” (389)
“The number is the mobile occupant, the movable (meuble) in smooth space, as opposed to the geometry of the immovable (immeuble) in striated space” (389)
“The numbering number … has only a dynamic relation with geographical directions: it is a directional number, not a dimensional or metric one” (390)
“Nomad organization is indissolubly arithmetic and directional; quantity is everywhere … direction is everywhere” (390)
“The numbering number is rhythmic, not harmonic” (390)
Deleuze and Guattari quote Children of Dune: “He moved with the random walk which made only those sounds natural to the desert. Nothing in his passage would [indicate] that human flesh moved there. It was a way of walking so deeply conditioned in him that he didn’t need to think about it. The feet moved of themselves, no measurable rhythm to their pacing” (390)
Commentator’s Note: I recently read an essay by Terence Blake on Deleuze and Dune, “In Praise of Divergence,” Agent Swarm, July 8, 2023, https://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2023/07/08/deleuze-and-dune-in-praise-of-divergence/, so coming across this direct linkage was a delightful surprise.
“the number is no longer numbered, but becomes a Cipher (Chiffre), and it it is in this capacity that it constitutes the ‘esprit de corps’ and invents the secret and its outgrowths (strategy, espionage, war ruses, ambush, diplomacy, etc.)” (390)
“A ciphered, rhythmic, directional, autonomous, movable, numbering number: the war machine is like the necessary consequence of nomadic organization” (390)
“Treating people like numbers is not necessarily worse than treating them like trees to prune, or geometrical figures to shape and model” (390)
“The question is not one of good or bad but of specificity” (390)
“A first characteristic of the numbering, nomadic or war, number is that it is always complex, that is, articulated … a unit of assemblage” (391)
“However small the unit, it is articulated. The numbering number always has several bases at the same time,” and “arithmetic relations that are external yet still contained in the number” (391)
Commentator’s Note: Compare the discussion of Go from the first reading, [[GAME 340, Week 2]]. Indeed, Go exemplifies the unit-point of Pythagoras.
“Logistics is the art of these external relations, which are no less a part of the war machine than the internal relations of strategy” (391)
Logistics and strategy “together constitute the science of the articulation of numbers of war. Every assemblage has this strategic aspect and this logistical aspect” (391)
“numerical composition, or the numbering number, implies several operations: the arithmetization of the starting aggregates or sets (the lineages); the union of the extracted subsets (the constitution of groups of ten, one hundred, etc.); and the formation by substitution of another set in correspondence with the united set (the special body)” (392)
“It is true that nomads have no history; they only have a geography. And the defeat of the nomads was such, so complete, that history is one with the triumph of States” (394)
Weapons and Tools
“PROPOSITION VII. *Nomad existence has for ‘affects’ the weapons of a war machine.”
“[[André Leroi-Gourhan]] … ‘For ages on end agricultural implements and weapons of war must have remained identical’” (395)
“the same machinic phylum traverses both” (395)
“The weapon is ballistic … The more mechanisms of projection a tool has, the more it behaves like a weapon, potentially or simply metaphorically” (395)
“The tool, on the other hand, is much more introceptive, introjective: it prepares a matter from a distance, in order to bring it to a state of equilibrium or to appropriate it for a form of interiority” (395)
Commentator’s Note: Compare Heidegger on the workshop and Levinas on the dwelling.
“the war machine, with breeding and training, institutes an entire economy of violence, in other words, a way of making violence durable, even unlimited” (396)
“‘In horseback riding, one conserves the kinetic energy, the speed of the horse, and no longer its proteins (the motor, and no longer the flesh). . . . Whereas in the hunt the hunter’s aim was to arrest the movement of wild animality through systematic slaughter, the animal breeder [sets about] conserving it, and, by means of training, the rider joins with this movement, orienting it and provoking its acceleration’” (Virilio, cited 396)
“Work is a motor cause that meets resistances, operates upon the exterior, is consumed and spent in its effect, and must be renewed from one moment to the next” (397)
“Free action is also a motor cause, but one that has no resistance to overcome, operates only upon the mobile body itself, is not consumed in its effect, and continues from one moment to the next” (397)
“Weapons and weapon handling seem to be linked to a free-action model, and tools to a work model” (397)
“Linear displacement, from one point to another, constitutes the relative movement of the tool, but it is the vortical occupation of a space that constitutes the absolute movement of the weapon. It is as though the weapon were moving, self-propelling, while the tool is moved” (397)
“The tool does not define work; just the opposite. The tool presupposes work” (397)
“It is the machine that is primary in relation to the technical element: not the technical machine, itself a collection of elements, but the social or collective machine, the machinic assemblage that determines what is a technical element as a given moment, what is its usage, extension, comprehension, etc.” (398)
“It is through the intermediary of assemblages that the phylum selects, qualifies, and even invents the technical elements” (398)
“What effectuates a free-action model is not the weapons in themselves and in their physical aspect but the ‘war machine’ assemblage as formal cause of the weapons. And what effectuates the work model is not the tools but the ‘work machine’ assemblage as formal cause of the tools” (398)
“The tool is essentially tied to a genesis, a displacement, and an expenditure of force whose laws reside in work, while the weapon concerns only the exercise or manifestation of force in space and time, in conformity with free action” (398)
“from the point of view of force, the tool is tied to a gravity-displacement, weight-height system, and the weapon to a speed-perpetuum mobile system” (398)
“Weapons and tools are consequences, nothing but consequences” (398)
“It is always the assemblage that constitutes the weapon system” (399)
“The stirrup … occasioned a new figure of the man-horse assemblage, entailing a new type of lance and new weapons; and this man-horse stirrup constellation is itself variable, and has different effects depending on whether it is bound up with the general conditions of nomadism, or later readapted to the sedentary conditions of feudalism” (399)
“The situation is exactly the same for the tool: once again, everything depends on an organization of work, and variable assemblages of human, animal, and thing” (399)
“Assemblages are passional, they are compositions of desire. Desire has nothing to do with a natural or spontaneous determination; there is no desire but assembling, assembled, desire” (399)
“Affects are projectiles just like weapons; feelings are introceptive like tools” (400)
“Weapons are affects and affects weapons” (400)
“The martial arts have always subordinated weapons to speed, and above all to mental (absolute) speed; for this reason, they are also the arts of suspense and immobility … one learns to ‘unuse’ weapons as much as one learns to use them … Learning to undo things, and to undo oneself, is proper to the war machine: the ‘not-doing’ of the warrior, the undoing of the subject” (400)
“It is true that the martial arts continually invoke the center of gravity and the rules for its displacement. That is because these ways are not the ultimate ones. However far they go, they are still in the domain of Being, and only translate absolute movements of another nature into the common space—those effectuated in the Void, not in nothingness, but in the smooth of the void where there is no longer any goal: attacks, counterattacks, and headlong plunges” (400)
Endnote 80: “Treatises on martial arts remind us that the Ways, which are still subject to the laws of gravity, must be transcended in the void. Kleist’s About Marionettes, trans. Michael Lebeck (Mindelheim: Three Kings Press, 1970), without question one of the most spontaneously oriental texts in Western literature, presents a similar movement: the linear displacement of the center of gravity is still ‘mechanical’ and relates to something more ‘mysterious’ that concerns the soul and knows nothing of weight” (561)
“there is an essential relation between tools and signs” (401)
“For there to be work, there must be a capture of activity by the state apparatus, and a semiotization of activity by writing. Hence the affinity between the assemblages signs-tools, and signs of writing-organization of work” (401)
Commentator’s Note: Compare [[Uses and Tactics]] on the “scriptural economy.”
“Entirely different is the case of the weapon, which is in an essential relation with jewelry” (401)
The jewelry of nomadic peoples, especially, “constitute traits of expression of pure speed, carried on objects that are themselves mobile and moving. The relation between them is not that of form-matter but of motif-support, where the earth is no longer anything more than ground (sol), where there is no longer even any ground at all because the support is as mobile as the motif” (401)
“Metalworking, jewelry making, ornamentation, even decoration, do not form a writing, even though they have a power of abstraction that is in every way equal to that of writing” (401)
Commentator’s Note: See also [[The Ontology of the Work of Art]] on the “ornamental,” though a much different approach than Deleuze and Guattari.
“The case of runic writing is more troubling because its origins seem exclusively tied to jewelry, fibulas, elements of metalworking, small movable objects. The point is that in its early period runic writing had only a weak communication value and a very restricted public function. Its secret character has led many to interpret it as magical writing. Rather, it is an affective semiotic, comprising in particular: (1) signatures, as marks of possession or fabrication, and (2) short war or love messages. It constitutes a text that is ‘ornamental’ rather than scriptural, ‘an invention with little utility, half-aborted,’ a substitute writing. It only takes on the value of writing during a second period, when monumental inscriptions appear, with the Danish reform of the ninth century A.D., in connection with the State and work” (402)
Commentator’s Note: See [[A Web of Migration]] on Ogham, statues, inscriptions, etc., in Celtic cultures, Beaker culture (to link to the note above, and next time).
“A worker-soldier, weapon-tool, sentiment-affect affinity marks the right time, however fleeting, for revolutions and popular wars. There is a schizophrenic taste for the tool that moves it away from work and toward free action, a schizophrenic taste for the weapon that turns it into a means for peace, for obtaining peace. A counterattack and a resistance simultaneously. Everything is ambiguous” (403)
Referencing Ernst Junger, they write: “Draw the line, or what amounts to the same thing, cross the line, pass over the line, for the line is only drawn by surpassing the line of separation” (403)
Endnote 85: “It is in the Traite du rebelle (Paris: Bourgois, 1981) that Junger takes his clearest stand against national socialism and develops certain points contained in Der Arbeiter: a conception of the ‘line’ as an active escape passing between the two figures of the old Soldier and the modern Worker, carrying both toward another destiny in another assembly (nothing of this remains in Heidegger’s notion of the Line, although it is dedicated to Junger” (561)
Commentator’s Note: I’m not familiar with Heidegger’s notion of the line, but it seems likely that this is because Heidegger is formulating fascist ideality in support of national socialism (i.e., Nazism).
“the nomad warrior and the ambulant worker. A somber caricature already precedes them, the mercenary or mobile military adviser, and the technocrat or transhumant analyst, CIA and IBM” (403)
“Martial arts and state-of-the-art technologies have value only because they create the possibility of bringing together worker and warrior masses of a new type. The shared line of flight of the weapon and the tool: a pure possibility, a mutation. There arise subterranean, aerial, submarine technicians who belong more or less to the world order, but who involuntarily invent and amass virtual charges of knowledge and action that are usable by others, minute but easily acquired for new assemblages” (403)
“The borrowings between warfare and the military apparatus, work and free action, always run in both directions, for a struggle that is all the more varied” (403)