Through the Ludic Glass: Making Sense of Video Games as Algorithmic Spectacles

Bibliography

Fizek, S. (2022). Through the Ludic Glass: Making Sense of Video Games as Algorithmic Spectacles. Game Studies, 22(2). http://gamestudies.org/2202/articles/gap_fizek

Abstract

Video game analyses have historically focused on the human act of play or on the events resulting from the player’s act. Until recently, spectating has remained an analytical domain of film theory and visual arts. In game studies, this perspective has changed, with the arrival of the phenomenon of gameplay spectating and game streaming on a mass scale, and its leakage into academic as well as popular consciousness. How does the spectacle change the analytical perspective towards video games as objects of scholarly analysis and video gaming as reflective practice? In this paper, I will approach the video game as an algorithmic spectacle and propose an analytical perspective to study this phenomenon, reaching out to theories of moving (digital) image proposed by the philosopher Vilém Flusser and the filmmaker Harun Farocki.

Notes

Table of Content

Notes

Introduction: Through the Ludic Glass

Until recently the focus was on the player, whereas mass-watching let’s-plays and live-streams brought specating into focus.

In my exploration of the spectacle then, I am not that much concerned with observing other human players at play, but with the question of the configurability and operationality of the displayed video game image.

Why Algorithmic Images Now?

Computed Representations / Represented Computations

Go to annotation “As Aubrey Anable notices, “computation/representation has become the structuring binary for game studies”” (Fizek, 2022, p. 5)

Technical Images

Go to annotation “Since technical images are no longer representations of the outside world but approximations and models of reality, their “critical reception … demands a level of consciousness that corresponds to the one in which they are produced” (Flusser 1985/2011, p, 22)” (Fizek, 2022, p. 7)

Operational Images

Go to annotation “My own interpretation of operationality does not expand on Bogost’s “unit operations.” It is closely tied to the technical medium and builds upon Harun Farocki’s perspective, connecting operations with computational and algorithmic processes.” (Fizek, 2022, p. 9)

Watching through the Ludic-Glass

Layers of Spectated Meaning

Annotations

In my exploration of the spectacle then, I am not that much concerned with observing other human players at play, but with the question of the configurability and operationality of the displayed video game image. (p. 2)

I want to portray video games as algorithmic spectacles characterized by images that are “…functions in the mathematical realm” (Parikka, 2012). In an algorithmic spectacle, light, the basic “substance” of optics is replaced by the calculus (Parikka, 2012). This foundational transformation of the image provokes questions much deeper than those of purely technical nature. (p. 2)

Games are programmed systems. Their images displayed on-screen are effects of algorithmic operations and at the same time, an important part of the game’s operationality. (p. 2)

Often, in order to understand the ludic spectacle, the audience needs to know how to interpret the ever-changing visual “muddle” (think of fast-paced multiplayer online battle arenas, also known as MOBAs). An algorithmic spectacle requires from its audience the ability not only to observe images as representations of something but above all to decode imaginary systems in action. (p. 2)

In order to prepare some ground for the question of technicity and operationality of the video game image, I will start by providing some rationale behind the choice of the image as an analytical category. I will then move on to addressing the problem of the representation and computation binary, without which the problematic place of the image in the study of video games cannot be entirely grasped. (p. 2)

Without rethinking the image, game studies will keep falling into the Cartesian trap of differentiation between the visual layer – that which is represented – and the rules or mechanics – that which is computed (p. 3)

it is an aesthetic form emerging out of the tension between representation and computation; between that which is displayed on the screen and that which is computed behind it (p. 4)

Theoretical perspectives looking at video games as digital rule-based processes have often pointed towards narrative and visuality as merely supporting roles. (p. 5)

After more than twenty years of research dedicated specifically to video games, we no longer need to fear “colonization” on the part of other disciplines (Eskelinen 2001). By now, game studies stand firmly on the interdisciplinary ground and can (or even should) reinspect the old elephants still marking their presence in the room. I see the question of representation/computation as one of the most settled proverbial elephants of our field. (p. 5)

the image abandoned the realm of representation many decades ago, together with the synthetization and discretization of information. Digital images are no longer representing or signifying and hence cannot be placed vis-à-vis game mechanics or rulesets. Video games are played and displayed. Their operations are often displayed visually and their images are operational in nature. The misconception that they still belong to representational media rests on the erroneous conflation of the image with its sensorial reception on the part of the human player/viewer. (p. 5)

The human observer is able to visually judge only the continuous aspect, so the discrete essence of the image needs to be displayed as if it were no different to the traditional analog image. We can find a similar perspective in the work of Lev Manovich who analyzes a digital image on the one hand as a representation that belongs to human culture and on the other as a computer file that belongs to “computer’s own cosmogony” (Manovich, 2001, pp. 45-46). (p. 6)

The representation/computation fold consolidates the old Cartesian body/mind split disguised under the digital veneer. (p. 6)

What may seem like a paradoxical proposition or a rhetorical exercise is rather a materiallygrounded philosophy of media. It shows how material processes determine the medial situation or how firmly software is grounded in “hard” matter. And this is what I would like to point towards in this piece, laying bare the video game’s visual and operational layers and bringing them back together, for they cannot and should not be seen as separate units. (p. 6)

The computational “cut” performed by many of us, game scholars, places a default borderline where it does not really exist. (p. 6)

I would much rather think in terms of interferences (Dippel and Fizek, 2018), tensions and multiplicities (Jayemanne 2017) to acknowledge the multi-layered dimension of the video game. (p. 6)

The computational nature of technical images questions their very ontological position as images in the first place. Inaccessible to human senses, they can no longer depict. What we are able to see are the visualizations of computational processes. As human observers, we must decode technical images as continuous representations; otherwise, they would remain entirely inaccessible to our aesthetic judgement. In other words, “as object of computability, the image must be digital; as object of perceptibility, the image must be analogue” (p. 7)

Since technical images are no longer representations of the outside world but approximations and models of reality, their “critical reception … demands a level of consciousness that corresponds to the one in which they are produced” (Flusser 1985/2011, p, 22) (p. 7)

The meaning of a technical image then is literally encoded. In order to decode a technical image, as Flusser argues, we do not need to read what it shows but rather read how it has been programmed (p. 7)

We must criticize technical images on the basis of their program. We must start not from the tip of the vector of meaning but from the bow from which the arrow was shot. Criticism of technical images requires an analysis of their trajectory and an analysis of the intention behind it. And this intention lies in the link, the suture of the apparatus that produced them with the envisioners wh (p. 7)

produced them. (Flusser 1985/2011, p. 48) (p. 8)

Operative images “do not represent an object, but rather are part of an operation” (Farocki, 2004, p. 17). In other words, digital images are no longer approached as representations or signs but rather as instruments capable of acting. (p. 8)

we cannot see the digital. nor can we hear or smell or taste or touch it. the digital does not exist for human senses. we just cannot perceive it. the computable is the operative and dynamic aspect. computability thus is the primary aspect; digitality is only secondary. the computable is also called the algorithmic. (Nake, 2016, pp. 67-70) (p. 9)

My own interpretation of operationality does not expand on Bogost’s “unit operations.” It is closely tied to the technical medium and builds upon Harun Farocki’s perspective, connecting operations with computational and algorithmic processes. (p. 9)

To perform a Flusserian interpretation would require a systematic analysis of the way, in which the image has been constructed. One of the possibilities, as advocated by the emerging discipline of critical code studies, would be to interpret its underlying code. (p. 12)

Out of Mckeown’s code-analysis we find out that it is not the “blacksquare.png” that is the image. Instead, he defines an image as an ongoing contextualized process. The operations behind the display of as simple an image as a black square demonstrate the complexity of the video game spectacle and the technical conditions of its meaning production. (p. 12)

n an attempt to capture the algorithmic spectacle, we could also follow Friedrich Kittler’s media archeological method of descending from higher to lower levels of observation (Kittler 1997, p. 150); from that, which is visible on the screen, through programs and their infrastructural logic down to the operating system, and low-level programming languages including the very machine code responsible for the operationality of the hardware itself. (p. 13)

Each program comes with certain design possibilities but also constraints. In that sense, it becomes an active agent in the process of image “envisioning” as theorized by Flusser. (p. 13)

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