archive : s0metim3s

The best – or possibly, the easiest – way to describe all this is that it’s structured like a computer game. There are levels, each one more difficult than the previous: successively bigger and nastier monsters to kill or evade but, also, if one is quick enough to find them, things placed around the various levels to help you get through them (medipacks, BFGs, friendly scientists, and so on).

I am practiced, in a way, or a few ways. But I would surely prefer cheat codes, at least some sequence breaks, some rest. Or, to put this another way, I would prefer a whole lot more with the ludic (precisely because of what is at stake), and far less interaction with the rather conventional (teleological, heteronormative, survivalist, Christian or, what is the same thing, fuck boring) narratives that institutionally adhere to breast cancer.

In the idiom of gaming theory, ‘emergent gameplay’ seems like a better inclination, one that thinks of narrative (and its unfolding) as just that - it can unfold, to be sure, but to play the game in earnest means to come across “glitches” that generate unanticipated foldings and unfoldings, hacking. Another way of talking about what the wikipedia entry describes as a situation in which the game works “normally” but produces “unexpected results” - or more simply put: serendipity, which is nothing if not a faculty for messing with narrative-led, programmatic necessity.

In any case, the ‘this’ and not-so-virtual medical sequence being: a series of tests (some more or less painful and/or 1950s scifi than others), surgery, chemo, then radio – with a long flight timed somewhere between surgery and chemo, ie., in three weeks – then ‘the [chemically-induced] change’.

(Mild diversion - There are jokes in here about the verdict, or what feels like a legal ruling of some kind: Sentenced to six months [chemo], transportation to the penal colony of New South Wales. But as fascinated as I am by the western, scifi/horror seems more adequate to the moment. Still, the looming, post/colonial variant of Mantacor aside, I imagine there will be some fraction of a respite, something of the Isle of Calypso about it before the chemical storms hit ‘rapid cell division’ and immunity along with it.

Maybe this is an abrasive way to focus, assuming my attention ever really strayed this decade or more, on the rather Roman questions of immunitas, communitas, precari-us, fugai … – or perhaps just come up with a better class of esoteric jokes. Maybe it’s also a way to pay homage to that somewhat beautiful cover of Wells’ book, The Island of Dr Moreau - what seems like a perfect rendering of both Isle and Mantacor, both with their chimeras.)

But back to computer games - my favourites were Quake and HalfLife. I’ve not played either for a long time. Both first-person shooters, both in the horror/scifi genre, both considered to be innovations in computer game design. Unlike others I’d played before, these were engrossingly scary – and therefore fun, for me.

For the canon-building traditions of gaming theory (ie, Callois), there are four categories of games: agon (contest), alea (chance), ilinx (vertigo), mimicry (make-believe). Quake and Halflife had elements of all these, but it was the vertigo they incited which made them scary, and compelling – the jump across dark, abyssal space; audibly constrained breathing and adrenalised heartbeat; a long, whistling fall in darkness if you missed; then bone-to-concrete shattering thud. To play is to repeat this only-ever-heard virtual death, over and again. In gaming, it can be - was - exhilarating to play with this risk (and repetition) of the jump. (There are other, more chilled versions of jumping.)

This audio triggering of the vertiginous has its technical history in film – and computer games, particularly first-person shooters, have always borrowed heavily from film, both syntax and genre. Quake and HalfLife were, in the development of computer game design, notable for the their use of a realtime sound engine. It was never the graphics that made those games precipitate sweating, but the soundscape – that which is not seen, but heard. In the history of film, corporealism – particularly when pressed toward the corporsurrealism of horror – is accomplished not by images but by sound. The play of light and tempo is significant. But it’s the sounds that viscerally get around any lapse or gap in credulity at what is seen.

Of course, Cat People is the film credited with the ‘discovery’ of this ‘what goes bump in the dark makes one jump’ convention in filmaking - though everyone knows it was a ‘discovery’ made under the pressure of monetary constraint, and so falls into the category of serendipitous rather than planned, as this short doco notes:

A Kantian would persist in approaching all this through the models of the university and courtroom, as figured by an encounter between Reason and Nature:

Accidental observations, made in obedience to no previously thought-out plan, can never be made to yield a necessary law, which reason alone is concerned to discover […] Reason must not approach nature in the character of a pupil who listens to everything the teacher has to say, but as an appointed judge who compels the witness to answer questions that he himself has formulated.

And they would, then, suck at gaming.

[tbc]