[-empyre-] I Can't Play And Speak At The Same Time

[David Surman]

I Can't Play And Speak At The Same Time

Introduction From David Surman

Since this discussion is already in rude health, I shall slot my
quarters in quietly, over here at the end cabinet. I have been playing
seriously for 20 years now. As a kid, like the cuckoo's egg in the
wren's nest, I voraciously pursued children whose parents had
succumbed to pure pester power, following them into their homes and
settling resolutely at whichever console was currently in fashion.
Through the rise and fall of SEGA, I took up residence in a sequence
of host households, subduing the stirring concerns of curious parents
with brisk recital of high-school voodoo and world-weary dimples.
Games provided an anchor for the intensity of a disruptive home life,
and their generation growth seemed to match so perfectly the
revelations of later adolescence. I remember it, cast in harsh
Scottish light, the winding walk to Richard Clark's house, a boy I
barely knew, through suburban tributaries that lead triumphantly to a
home PC and a Sega Megadrive wrapped in a modest bungalow.

I'd like to think that as I have formalised my relationship to games,
our bond has changed, and that the strategies with which I put game
into life might have shifted. In my academic post, dedicated to games
design, I can't complete the fiction in which I make professional my
play. Gaming has become about a particular set of relations that are,
to me, metonymic of being present in a contemporary social space. To
play is to become Zeno's paradoxical arrow. To the non-player I am
losing valuable time, but in reality I am just achieving a stillness
that furrows the brow of the cynic.

In many respects, the classic Atari Joystick, that grumpy,
parsimonious plaything, which had to creak under teenage grip before
my _Crystal Castles_ (1984) mouse would move an inch, embodies
perfectly my disposition as a player. When you've read as many
Americanised samurai comics as I have, you know that the steel of a
katana is folded one hundred times to make it razor sharp and robust.
Like an old married couple haunting my attic, those Atari pads must be
similarly perfected, compressed by one hundred compulsive
interactions. To play is to be both exhilarated and motionless; stiff
shoulders and heavy eyelids, numbness in the back of the legs and a
sudden awareness that, since the last save point, I have been
clenching my jaw. Like Mokujin, the playable wooden puppet of _Tekken
3_ (Namco, 1993) onwards, the gaming subject can be both everyone and
no one, omniscient and anonymous. As I play I'm shape-shifting my way
through a series of afforded identities, and yet am conditioned by an
irreducible split, that of player and character.

The primacy of the player-character stands in for all splits we are
taught to feel, in recovery from which we seek new connections. In
this vein I connect my queerness and my gaming, thinking through the
negotiations with self and other that are second nature in the
masquerade of adolescent queerness. Contemporary gaming, having
recentred globalisation with the "soft power" of politicised Japanese
aesthetics, now puts the sophisticated rhetoric of androgyny, male
beauty and techno-sexuality into the nest of all the Richard Clark's
in Great Britain, quietly playing host to the nomadic passions of the
compulsive, aspirant gamer. Queering exceeds aesthetics though, and
immanent to the surface level expressions of the latest JRPG is the
question I ask myself; in the novelty of interaction, do the most
enduring games always "queer" us insofar as they require us to modify
our embodied relation to the experience against increments set by the
developer? A fatally framed question emerges; can gameplay transcend
the novelty of spectacular interaction long enough to sustain a
discourse? For my part in this playtime potlatch, I see much of the
project of Serious Games as a misapprehension failing to capitalise on
the discursive power of aesthetics in play.
-- 
David Surman
Senior Lecturer,
BA (hons) Computer Games Design
Newport School of Art, Media and Design

http://artschool.newport.ac.uk/sp_dsurman.html
http://www.gaygamer.net

 Animation: an Interdisciplinary Journal – http://anm.sagepub.com