Master Control Program:
Games as tactical interventions to restore the corporeal form
Dr. Walter Gibbs: [laughs] You've got to expect some static. After all, computers are just machines; they can't think.
Alan Bradley: Some programs will be thinking soon.
Dr. Walter Gibbs: Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop.
Tron (1982)
In the 1982 Disney film Tron, slacker programmer and arcade owner Kevin Flynn is physically disassembled by an experimental laser and recreated digitally within the totalitarian Game Grid, by the corporate-military-industrial Master Control Program. This operation –liquidating the physical and regenerating it digitally – is leveraged here as a symbolic rendering of the operation of digital game practices. The real world is dismantled, simplified, and reassembled; the user is confined to a world of rigid logics and culturally constructed values beyond negotiation.
Operating in the tradition of Tron, this collection fights for the users, highlighting the action of renegade humans and the subversive systems they’ve designed to call into questions logics of dominance and control at the heart of the machine. As much as the ludic resistance of Flynn & Tron, this collection is informed by Rita Raley‘s observation of tactical media (in the text of the same name). what unites these “forms of critical intervention, dissent and resistance” is the critical function of disturbance. Each of the games has been selected as an example of tactical interventions disturbing the socially constructed values that lie behind many mass-market experiences of game and play through the detournement of play objects and common logics of those objects. Most specifically, each of these games, altering the mechanisms of play to highlight the embodied experience, disrupts the expected semiotic regime that severs the player from the world outside the structure of the game.
Takako Saito’s Chess series has been selected as an example of a game art project that reminds us of our bodies in the world we live in as we play through a series of variations on a theme. With roots in Fluxus and reference to John Cage, it gestures towards tactical media’s deeper roots in earlier interventionist practices that entrust interpretation and meaning-making to the audience, constituting them as co-creators.
Chess is one of the best-known games, a symbol of strategy, abstract thought, and virtuosity. Chess is used to described governance, life, the mind, the world. When IBM sought to illustrate the power of their “giant brain” Deep Blue, the AI was deployed in a publicized chess match against one of the greatest chess players in the world. Centuries prior, chess was the method used to illustrate the virtuosity of the purported automata ‘The Turk’. Early pioneers of computation or cybernetics such as Konrad Zuse, Norbert Weiner, Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, and John McCarthy all turn their work to chess early in their speculations on control systems. The presence of Chess series, referencing one of the world’s best known non-digital games, calls on us to question assumptions baked into a tradition of physical play in the shadow of the digital operation that threatens it.
Saito’s variations create logics of play that highlight chess’ dominance of visual logics & separation from the body with forms of representation that address other senses: two played by smell (smell chess, spice chess), two by touch (weight chess and Nut & Bolt chess), one by sound (sound chess). Some of these evidently can be played like a straight-forward game of chess. Others, such as weight chess, call into question the rules of the game – nearly weightless white pieces (which always have the advantage of going first), weighty black pieces (which are always at a disadvantage). Others, such as spice chess, demand a new mode of engagement. Calling the sensory nature of chess to the fore, Chess series challenges the tyranny of the visual, encourages us to imagine other ways a game can be played, and calls into question the taken for granted assumptions built into the games’ rules.
As opposed to Saito’s reworking of game pieces to call to attention the values the game embodies, Mary Flanagan’s [giantJoystick] is a model that enlarges an Atari joystick while remaining faithful to the operation of the original artifact in every other respect. By exaggerating scale, new effects are produced. The joystick, a symbol of individual control and mastery, is beyond the control of any one player. No longer can the span of thumb and forefinger conquer the alien invaders or avoid pitfalls; no one human being can master this system. The alternative style of play presented is collective play – multi-player one-player games. One or more player works the joystick; another works the trigger button.
Studying the images of players engaging with the [giantJoystick], there is a clear physical and emotional investment in the play experience. Eye contact, wide smiles, physical expression – a kind of inversion of the typical joystick experience, which is solitary and inward-turning. Through new scales, new meanings become apparent. [giantJoystick] encourages us to reimagine what the video game experience could be, to challenge the isolation and individualism it encourages, and generate a world where play is physical and social – one we are isolated from by the digital game.
Completing this triptych of disturbance, the PainStation’s contradictory nature seems perverse: a game that punishes you for playing poorly, a device for amusement that creates agony in its users. It is an artifact from a dark dimension parallel to ours where a place where pain is fun. However, the most deeply unsettling characteristics have less to do with difference and more to do with resemblance. It is not a negative image where black and white are polar opposites; it is instead a reversed image, a mirror for modern digital gaming to examine itself and its practice.
The PainStation stands in a parodic relation to gaming; a name echoing the PlayStation, a legally actionable similarity of font choice, a machine styled as a vintage arcade cocktail table design (with a sleek modern twist). (The game played is ‘Pong’; an early digital game experience -- that, coincidentally, inspired the film Tron.)
Closely watching people play PainStation highlights the importance of disciplining the body. It is difficult not to pull one’s hand away from a hot surface; it is challenging not to avoid something that shocks you physically. The player, to win, must overcome physical discomfort and mental distraction – flashing lights, hot metal, lacerations, electrical shocks, aggressive sound effects. The experience of digital gameplay through symbolic manipulation of a gamepad or keyboard/mouse also demand disciplining one’s body to immobility and the confinement of attention to fine motor skills. One must learn to neglect the needs of the body– receiving as a reward a constant drip of dopamine and the flash and hum of the brain’s pleasure centers.
Lev Manovich suggested that the experience of digital play is that learning to play the game is learning to play the algorithm; a mental and physical conditioning, not dissimilar to what one must manifest to ‘win’. PainStation creates an allegorical picture of the dominance exerted by the control society; no longer is one compelled to obey under pain of torture, one volunteers for torture as a test, a proof of winning spirit that is conceived as a triumph over the self as much as it is over the conditions of life. It calls into question why we play, what we must sacrifice to play, and demands why we make such investments of time and physicality to an activity that takes such a toll on the body and the mind.