AUT: re: video games

[andrew robinson <ldxar1@xxxxxxxxx>]

"How utterly worthless." (MJ)

Hear hear!  You're quite right about reappropriative
uses of computer games/consoles etc - that there is a
culture of use-values which escapes and exceeds the
exchange-values associated with gaming.  As well as
the collecting of "obsolete" items you mention,
there's the phenomenon of emulation - the programming
of PC's to duplicate the functioning of game systems -
and the resultant situation where emulators and games
of all the old systems can often be downloaded for
free online, as what is called "abandonware".  Check
out the World of Spectrum archive for instance, which
has literally thousands of old Spectrum games.

In addition, the prices of consoles and games
depreciate very rapidly.  It's certainly true that
newly released games cost ridiculous prices and are
unaffordable to many people.  But often within months,
and certainly within a few years, everything comes
down in price as the next generation of hardware and
software is released.  Hardly anything avoids the
"bargain bin" for long.

There is also the phenomenon of grassroots
game-writing.  Check out for instance the Darkolic RPG
website, where you can download free games written by
other individual gamers and put up on the web.  Also
initiatives like RetroSpec, which re-create old
console and arcade games for free.  From all of this,
there emerges a horizontal network of gamers who write
games for each other and play each other's games.

And of course there's the "virtual community" issue -
the potential of the kind of coming-together which
occurs when people from across the globe adopt
alternative personalities and come together in virtual
worlds.  An opening of identity to difference, I would
suggest.

On the other side, I think there are reactionary
undercurrents (political or libidinal) to some kinds
of video gaming - the valuation of quick reactions and
unthinking immersion typical of speed-based games is
reminiscent of the speed-up of production, and there
is a lot of militarism as well, as well as a general
tendency to sexist gender-roles in a lot of games.

But there are genres and types of gaming which I think
have rather different ideological coordinates.  RPG's
I think are a forgotten art-form - a well-written RPG
is similar to a good film for instance, yet whereas
film theory is recognised as a kind of art criticism
today, nobody has really examined computer games as a
kind of art.  That the "audience" become participants
to some degree is I think a step forward from
traditional media such as cinema, TV, novels, etc.,
even though the choices and options are constrained by
the game designer.  (In this respect RPGs are similar
to the older real-person RPGs such as Dungeons and
Dragons, and the adventure gamebook phenomenon, which
again are strangely overlooked in cultural criticism,
even while they seem to break down the boundaries
between author and reader).

Of course there is still the problem of cost, but this
is true for all produced goods today, including
necessities.  I don't see why this impinges greatly on
the cultural value or otherwise of particular
phenomena.  Video games are not inherently expensive,
as is show by how quickly they become "abandonware".
I think the target should not be video games here, so
much as the cult of having to have the latest, newest,
most hyped games and consoles.  In other words, the
pressure to own games and hardware for sign-value
instead of use-value (to use Baudrillard's analysis in
"consumer society").

There's something disturbingly ascetic about the
attempt to extend the critique of commodity fetishism
into a critique of the individual commodities
themselves - as if culture is a luxury to be smashed
in the process of revolution, rather than something to
be expanded; as if pleasure is an undesirable obstacle
to revolutionary purity, rather than being something
denied by capitalism and cruelly used as a carrot to
induce conformity.

Andy


		
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