Losing in competition:
A survey of critical competitive games

In response to competitive games, in Tactical Media, Rita Raley wrote that "not playing in the best way to play." [1] Two games useful in fleshing out this statement are dead-in-iraq by Joseph DeLappe and Lose/Lose by Zach Gage. Both pieces draft very different and yet compelling responses to the hostility and antagonism present in competition.

dead-in-iraq by DeLappe appropriates and reimagines the war simulator America's Army. The original game introduces participants in a first-person shooter videogame. Its goal is to complete war missions. At first glance, America's Army is not very different than early combat simulators like Doom, Halo, and more recently, Medal of Honor, and Call of Duty. However, unlike other first-person shooters, America's Army was funded by the US Department of Defense to persuade Americans to join the army during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. This approach to wargames is not new. In fact, the US Army has been using manual and computer wargames to train soldiers since the 50s. [2] Yet what is different about America's Army is that instead of being used to study war tactics, it is blatantly promoting the war in Iraq. In other words, this combat simulator was conceived as a tool to foster interest in going to a real war to murder real people. In principle, competition in war games cannot be considered the cause of real violence. On the contrary, videogames are often times cathartic, liberating or, at the very least, they can help us have a better understanding of history. Nevertheless, in this case, the interest that underpinned warfare is directly responsible for popularizing and financing war simulators in which thousands of players share the experience of killing. DeLappe's response interrogates America's Army without really introducing new elements to the original game. DeLappe simply intervenes the online discussion forum in which players write comments while playing. In face of a moral dilemma and instead of stopping the game as suggested by Raley, DeLappe decides to denounce the US Department of Defense. His goal is not to criticize those who enjoy playing wargames. Instead, he enters the game to publish "the name, age, service branch and date of death of each U.S. serviceman and woman killed" during the US invasion of Iraq. In doing so, he blames the game as a cause of the death of thousands of soldiers (and civilians) in one of the most absurd wars in the history of the United States. "As of October 2007, he had input 3,582 names out of 3,829 reported dead." [3]

Likewise, Lose/Lose by Zach Gage questions the nature of competition. In his own words, this is a game "with real life consequences." [4] Playing this game make us lose time and again. For Lose/Lose Gage reuses the popular videogame Space Invaders. The goal of the original game consists in destroying the invaders of space. Gage’s iteration introduces a new set of rules and reorients the original goal of the game. In his website, he wrote that playing Lose/Lose in personal computers "will delete files on your hard drive permanently." It is certainly ironic that Space Invaders – a game that widely popularized the home console - is about destroying a virtual other identified as the alien. In that sense, Zach Gage's goal is to highlight the problematic notion of aliens necessary for players to appear in a game like Space Invaders. The original game imagines an alterity who is already an invader that must be eliminated. Nevertheless, this alien subject that must be destroyed is also necessary for us to be in the game. Put differently, without the alien, we can no longer participate in the match. Zach’s title Lose/Lose, is evocative of this reciprocal condition in competitive games. When we destroy the other, we are in turn inflecting violence on ourselves. We are destroying our own selfhood - and with that any chance to be recognized. Coincidentally, the one game that originally introduced videogames into the private spere is transformed now into one that destroys our personal information.

Gage and DeLappe´s work suggest an ethical turn in which players become aware of the consequences of competition by losing or not being able to play at all. To complement this idea, I would like to briefly call attention to an exercise performed by Kenneth Goldsmith and his students at the University of Pennsylvania. [5] In it, they emulated cowboy duels in which, back to back, two gunmen walk, turn around at the same time, drew their guns and fire. However, in Goldsmith's exercise, instead of firing pistols, participants hold the other player's personal computer to randomly deleted one file at the same time. Just like Lose/Lose, Goldsmith's “data duel” also entails a form of criticism because playing will make both players lose. This exercise presents the odd scenario in which both participants drop death after firing their guns. Goldsmith's work is useful in clarifying how all players lose something in competitive games. There are no winners in competition.

[1] Tactical Media by Rita Raley was published in 2009
[2] The Complete Wargames handbook by Jim Dunnigan was published in 1980
[3] Joseph DeLappe released dead-in-iraq in 2006
[4] Zach Gage released Lose/Lose in 2009
[5] Wasting Time on the Internet by Kenneth Goldsmith was published in 2016

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Facing first-person death:
A comparison between Chess and Call of Duty

Often times we feel that games do not have real life consequences because they provide a physical distance. In words of philosopher Eric Hoffer, “Dying and killing seem easy when they are part of a . . . game.” [1] However, the ways in which we perceive the consequences of games are at the same time affected by the ways in which we relate to other players and by the ways in which those relationships are presented in the game. The relationship among players is dependent on their physical presence or absence. For example, the effect of their actions is less tangible in online video games because nobody is really there (physically speaking) to face the consequences of a particular move in the game. In contrast to games played remotely, players of manual games like board games are physically there and accountable for their actions. Because they are facing real people who is presently playing, their actions feel more real.

The ways in which games have repercussions is dependent on the physical presence of other players. For instance, note how the act of killing a person is abstracted in tabletop games like Chess. In order to win this game, players simply kill the opponent by taking pieces and placing them out of the board. Faceless pawns are sacrificed in every match, but we don’t see them as soldiers being slaughtered. Thus, the violence is evoked simply by moving unrecognizable and faceless parts of an army. Conversely, in first-person shooters like Call of Duty, killing takes a highly realistic look. Players defeat their opponents by firing a gun or stabbing them with a bayonet. Instead of taking the role of a warfare strategist, this simulation places them in the first-person role of soldiers who can inflict suffering. Players kill through a technology that provides a realistic aesthetic experience.

Unlike computer games played remotely, antagonism is abstracted in manual games like Chess because we are facing our rival sitting right across the table. The actual presence of our opponent makes us uncapable of simulating – or even, conceiving – the act of killing in the same way that is presented in online video games. Whereas killing in Call of Duty is only possible because we have no physical contact with the contenders. The physical absence of players allows this game to simulate war in very concrete ways. Moreover, brutally murdering human-like avatars in Call of Duty doesn't really matter when they don’t have a real face.

[1] The True Believe by Eric Hoffer was published in 1951

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The limits of a library:
A reading of Erik Alonso

In Los Procesos, Mexican essayist Erik Alonso shares his experiences visiting Mexico City's public library – Biblioteca Vasconcelos. In his writing, the author poses a powerful question about the function of libraries. He asks, why do we go to libraries looking for a book? We do it because in libraries we find rare books that we could never find anywhere else and because it is comforting to be in a quiet space, isolated, in the middle of a noisy and crowded city. But "above all," he says, "libraries show us that the right book is that one which is shared with people that we will never meet." [1]

In that sense, books are transitory objects. Besides capturing the passage of time, library books are traces and records. For example, libraries keep track of when and for how long was a book checked out. This information is often times stamped on the back cover. Libraries also keep records of which books are missing. However, sometimes these marks tell us much more. For instance, a forgotten subway ticket that someone used as a bookmark, or an old receipt from a coffee shop placed inside of the book. Sometimes these notes travel in time. We might borrow a book from a library, leaf through it and find a yellowish note that someone left there decades ago. Conversely, someone could have ripped a page, subtracting information to save it – an interesting image cropped or something annoying or disturbing that the reader wanted to eliminate and delete forever. A reader could have barely underlined parts of the text with charcoal, or violently bookmarked it using ink or a "darn highlighter." Someone else could have squiggled unreadable notes on the margin or foot of the page – almost unrecognizable letters. Sometimes I draw cartoons on the edge of the page while listening to the professor lecturing or write something – the name of a person, perhaps. An absent person could have forgotten a book in some public restroom or on a bench at the park, awaiting a new destination far from the library.

All these marks provide new meanings to the book. These traces transform the book into a form of exegesis. These marks are placed beyond the text. We could also find these traces in the experience of going to the library, strolling through its hallways, finding the right book, taking it home and returning it days later. Sometimes a borrowed book will stay on our desk, unread, collecting dust. Alonso encourage his readers to think about those traces more broadly. He says,"I want my user's account to have more information. Perhaps the books borrowed and returned that I never opened." As for me, I am trying to imagine what would happen if a library was completely reshaped into a library in which books are more than repositories of fixed information. One in which we can engage with books not only as passive readers.

[1] Los Procesos by Eric Alonso was published in 2014 by Fondo Editorial Tierra Adentro. All quotes are translated from Spanish

 

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un - limit - ing

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The immediacy of language in diary work

In the preface of Soliloquy, Kenneth Goldsmith says that "if every word spoken in New York City daily were somehow to materialize as a snowflake, each day there would be a blizzard." [1] For this piece, Goldsmith recorded and transcribed all his words pronounced during a week. The resulting transcription of 281 pages was originally published by the Electronic Literature Collection. Besides materializing language and determining its size, Goldsmith was also aiming to identify those instances of language through which we actualize our everyday experiences. For instance, when we walk, we leave traces that are irretrievably lost. Our footsteps on the sand disappear shortly after being printed. These traces remain in the past. Likewise, when we speak, our words are lost because what we say disappears immediately after being said. Once something is pronounced, the words dissolve in the air. Spoken words are always destined to disappear like the footsteps imprinted on the sand.

Writing a diary entails a similar experience in which we are always behind the experience, collecting pieces of it and writing them down. Although in this case there might be a tangible result. The diary, besides being a repository of our thoughts and feelings, is also a travel log because there we describe everything that happened to us at any given point in time. We keep track of time because we don't want to forget the past. In order to reflect on past experiences, we have to travel back in time. Moreover, the diary begins to take the form of an epitaph because what is described in it is already gone. We will never be able to retrieve those experiences again. By tracing his words in Soliloquy, Goldsmith is aiming to recover the immediacy of his words and trace their trajectory in time. He starts on Monday morning and finishes on Sunday night. His words are no interpreted, instead, they are simply recorded. Goldsmith approach intends to bridge the gap between the experience of language and the representation of it. In transcribing spoken words to paper he is trying to capture the immediacy of language.

The paradox of immediacy between speaking and writing is also present in the work by Jack Kerouac. To avoid any distractions when changing the page in the typewriter, Kerouac wrote On the Road on a continuous stream of paper. [2] I wonder if he actually intended to recreate the experience of language in his writing, as if his typewriter resembled a long road across the US. This novel seems to take the form of a diary in which writing, and living are parallel experiences. Likewise, experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas also imagined the immediacy of language when he filmed fragments of New York City and presented them in his famous series of film diaries. In making those pieces he recognized that there are similarities between the process of writing and filming in capturing experiences. To borrow Mekas’ words, he says that unlike a literary diary, "in the filming (…) the main challenge become how to react with the camera right now, as it's happening, how to react to it in such a way that the footage would reflect what I feel at that very moment." [3] For Mekas filming a diary is not about looking back in time. Filming is about responding to reality right here and right now. In fact, Mekas developed a web diary project for many years in which he presents unrelated fragments of daily mundane activities.

In Uncreative Writing, Goldsmith pictures Jack Kerouac "taking a road trip across the country in a '48 Buick with the convertible roof down, gulping Benzedrine by the fistful, washing them down with bourbon, all the while typing furiously away on a manual typewriter, going eighty-five miles an hour on a ribbon of desert highway." [4] In such way, he imagines the process of writing On the Road as allegorical to the experience of traveling in which writing and living are unfolding at the same thing. Maybe this is why Goldsmith decided to write Soliloquy to emulate a similar process because he literary provides an accurate transcription of all his words. For him writing a diary is not about looking back to interpret his experiences, feelings and thoughts. He is looking for the immediacy of those experiences. By placing a hidden microphone, he recorded approximately 120 hours of audio and transcribed it. All his experiences are there, laid out as they happened.

[1] Soliloquy by Kenneth Goldsmith was published by the Electronic Literature Collection
[2] On the Road by Jack Kerouac was published in 1957
[3] The film diary: a lecture on reminiscences of a journey to Lithuania by Jonas Mekas was presented in 1972 at the International Film Seminar
[4] Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age by Kenneth Goldsmith was published in 2011

 

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A reading of Wikipedia

In an excerpt from Fictions entitled Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Jorge Luis Borges talks about a missing article of the “Anglo-American Cyclopaedia” that describes Uqbar, "a region of Iraq or Asia minor." However, for a long time Borges was unable to find the quoted article and when he finally did, there were discrepancies that made him doubt about its authenticity. [1] Taking a similar approach, in The garden of the forking paths, Borges talks about Dr. Yu Tsun, a former teacher of English at the Tsingtao Hochschule who casts unsuspected light upon the “History of the World War by Capitan Liddell Hart.” In the story, Dr. Yu Tsun conducts a thoroughly revision of Hart’s writing. [2] What Borges suggests in both of these pieces is not only that history is fabricated but that history is changeable, alterable and falsifiable.

As such, Borges writing opens a fundamental question to modern historians: How do we tell history and what are the resources available to do it? In that sense, historical narration is always open for interpretations because it is never finished. History’s narration is both a forking path and a falsified document. It is worth stressing out that the things described in both stories are fictional. There is no history of Hart or any further critique made by Dr. Yu Tsun. Everything about them is fabricated. Despite the fact that Uqbar does not exist, the way in which Borges talks about it make us feel that there is in fact a real place somewhere and that its records are missing, altered or falsified. This realization introduces a new idea that could clarify and expand our understanding of what Borges was trying to articulate in 1944. By falsifying and questioning the accuracy of history Borges denounces the supposed link between history and reality.

In light of these ideas, Hypertext comes as a device helpful in liberating history from its lineal constraints. Because instead of following a thread and moving along a chronological narration of events, hyper-textuality in the context of history and social sciences poses a rhizomatic reading and writing process in which the past is accessed differently. [3] Furthermore, hypertext not only interrogates the link between reality and history but also questions the fabricated dichotomy between reader and writer. This consideration proves to be helpful in understanding how new modes of reading encourages passive readers to become active. Yet, when I say active reader, I don’t mean just to be fully engaged with the reading but instead to take on the role of a writer. The most far-reaching example of traditional reading of history is the encyclopedia for which readers collect various volumes that are divided in discrete categories. An early example of how hyper-textual modes of reading and writing impacted the traditional structure of the encyclopedia is the visionary project developed by Intemedia Systems at Brown University that later on gave birth to Wikipedia: The free encyclopedia. This one-of-a-kind platform is a scheme in which thousands of users write history on an open-access online archive that has no boundaries or edges. Wikipedia’s nature is to be unfinished. With the release of Wikipedia, two things changed. On the one hand, the reading of history became a non-linear experience and, on the other, its authoritative nature was seemingly broken because anyone could write and rewrite history time and again. Moreover, the categorical difference between reading and writing became irretrievably unstable because readers also take on the role of writers.

In a class exercise at the University of Colorado, Boulder, I asked my students to write new entries on Wikipedia. One of the restrictions listed by Wikipedia's editing guideline is that any contribution has to be "constructive." But what is the meaning of constructive for a platform that is literally “constructed” by thousands of users? It was thanks to this exercise that I became aware of the contradictions of the free encyclopedia. Several considerations have to be made here to understand the role of hypertext in liberating history from the constraints of authoritative writing. For example, in Wikipedia any user is allowed to write new entries or edit exiting ones. However, not all entries are authorized by the wikipedians (volunteer users who regulate entries) or bots programed to automatically spot vandalism and fake news. Rather than discriminating entries based on their “constructiveness,” they dismiss writing that is considered fake. To approve any new changes, robots seek all over the internet for sources that sustain the new information. Nevertheless, if the information is not supported by external evidence, the entry is rejected. It is precisely that notion of fake versus real that is replicating the old encyclopedia’s mode of history.

Therefore, is hypertext a useful resource to revise and criticize history? I would say that despite its effort to liberate information, Wikipedia still guarantees truthfulness as opposed to falseness and safeguards an outdated understanding of history. But the question is still open: What criteria is used by wikipedia to discern between something authentic and unauthentic when entries are written by thousands of people?

[1] Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges
[2] The garden of the forking paths by Jorge Luis Borges
[3] Ideas borrowed from Hypertext by George Landow

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Compressing reality:
A reading of the Internet through Benjamin and Bush

Rene Magritte's iconic painting Ceci n'est pas une pipe remind us that what we are seeing is not really what we believe to be seeing. What we experience in Magritte's panting is not a pipe, but a pipe painted on a canvas. This also applies to the way in which we perceive things on the internet. Once liberated from their material constraints, the objects tend to lose their specificity as stable and recognizable things when we perceive them on the screen. Thus, in face of a scenario like this, unrooted objects can represent both everything and nothings at once. In that sense objects are turned into empty receptacles of meaning. [1]

Our capacity to stretch and shrink reality is a consequence of an ontological shift eloquently described by Walter Benjamin in The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In 1938 Benjamin noted how the uniqueness of an image (its aura) is irretrievably lost once it is mass reproduced by the camera. [2] In light of this, scientist Vannevar Bush explored the relationship between technology, perception and knowledge-building in modern societies. In a similar fashion but faster than before, this phenomenon first presented by Benjamin and further explored by Bush in 1945 is today fully experienced through the internet.

Similar to Benjamin’s skepticism about technology, in his seminal paper As we might think, Bush laments how reality loses its specificity when it is reproducible, compressible, transferable, erasable, etc. In that writing he provides a few hints to understand today’s full engagement with electronic media and the impact of the internet. According to Bush, the main purpose of technology is to provide certainty about what we are perceiving and apprehending. Bush even goes so far to suggest that through technology we must ground, standardize and homogenize our perceptions of reality. He says that this is only possible if we manage to develop a form of technology that is autonomous and automatic. A mere science fiction dream, Bush’s writing is still an acute prediction of how the internet today is driven by algorithms programed to write thousands of entries on Wikipedia, trace our location and destination on a Google Map, suggest music on Spotify, commodities to buy on Amazon, and people to follow on Twitter. From Facebook to Uber, the internet is managed by automatic and autonomous bots that control access to the information we read and the ways we relate to the world. [3]

Nonetheless, as we equip ourselves with more technology, algorithms, and robots, the knowledge that we thought to be grounded on reality becomes unstable, ceases to be concrete and takes the form of a non-linear network. Our knowledge, rather than being ruled by indexical categories and evidence, is guided by sets of changing associations. Moreover, these changing associations are not in our hands anymore. Is technology today grounding us in reality or is it alienating us from it?

[1] Ideas borrowed from John Berger's Ways of Seein
[2] The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin was published in 1938
[3] As we might think by Vannevar Bush was published in 1945