Deep Play

Excerpt from "Deep Play," in Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito, At the Edge of Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006)
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Cultural experience 'begins with creative living first manifested as play'.¹ While D. W. Winicott's words describe children's play, they also capture the creative energy of jaromil's elegant forkbombs and I/O/D's Web Stalker. Clearly, the kind of polymorphous perversity described in the first chapter requires sustained and engaged play with the tools, memes, and structures of digital technology. If this perversity is equivalent to the immune system's production of antibodies, then gameplay at its most profound mirrors the immunological moment when one of those antibodies latches onto a virus. In the physical body, this 'match' revs up the immune system and unleashes its power. In the social body, this match between artistic play and unarticulated cultural memes revs up the creative process and produces the kind of art we'll explore in this chapter. But when does gameplay approach artistic expression? Some of the computer games we'll look at are clearly marketed as entertainment, yet the astute player can often discern a match between gameplay and deeper cultural dissonances. Avid players of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, for example, might begin to sense that the over-the-top street crime in Liberty City, 'the worst place in America', is just a popular and playable version of the kind of corporate crime at the core of their own society.

Perhaps the measure of a game's relevance isn't any particular plot twist, theme, or game dynamic, however, but the extent to which it provides or reveals unarticulated technological memes for the player. Clifford Geertz's anthropological analysis of Balinese cockfighting sees in this violent sport an allegory of the entire social system of Bali, a kind of behavioral mirror of social power and stratification. Taking his cue from Jeremy Bentham's notion of 'deep play' as 'play in which the stakes are so high that it is ... irrational for men to engage in it at all', Geertz describes the significance of the bloody fights and the irrational betting practices they engender:

...[the cockfight] provides a metasocial commentary upon the whole matter of assorting human beings into fixed hierarchical ranks and then organizing the major part of collective existence around that assortment. Its function, if you want to call it that, is interpretive: it is a Balinese reading of Balinese experience; a story they tell themselves about themselves... Every people, the proverb has it, loves its own form of violence. The cockfight is the Balinese reflection on theirs: on its look, its uses, its force, its fascination.²

A similar statement might be made about the vast majority of violent computer games. Whether the enemies are aliens, monsters, dragons, or evil wizards, players clearly derive great pleasure from taking responsibility for defending themselves, a behavior not only taboo in Western culture but also very difficult to actualize given the elusiveness of threats to our survival. Whom do we blame for global warming? Toxic dumping? Decimation of species? Deforestation? Migration of jobs? Political marginalization? How can we articulate the ways in which we feel disempowered when the latest advertisements celebrate our infinite choices of car models, shampoos, or miracle drugs?

In games, we can enact our id rages on polygon prostitutes and mutant monsters. Or we can hone our skills in car-racing or skateboarding and become champions in a realm with easily defined rules and clear rewards and punishments. Either way, we regain some momentary, and virtual, control over our destinies. But can we exercise our newly acquired skills outside the box? Can we get the gamers out of the game long enough to discern the behaviors they are assuming rather than just being immersed in them? Such a moment of realization might be the difference between trivial and deep play, between killing time and working out social and cultural issues.

The moment of contact between art and technological or social memes is likely to occur in this kind of deep play, whether players become street versions of corporate butchers and robber barons (GTA: Vice City) or bickering schoolgirls trying to tear each other's hair out (Sissyfight). If something startles the player out of immersion and into reality, out of illusion and into insight, then we have a moment of arrest remarkably similar to the instant when an antibody latches onto a virus. Suddenly, a shift in the system (immunological or ideological) occurs, and nothing remains the same. Focusing on moments of arrest may seem counterintuitive to those who believe, like Henry Jenkins, that gameplay is about movement:

those memorable moments don't simply depend on spectacle. After all, spectacle refers to something that stops you dead in your tracks, forces you to stand and look. Gameplay becomes memorable when it creates the opposite effect -- when it makes you want to move, when it convinces you that you really are in charge of what's happening in the game, when the computer seems to be totally responsive.³

While this visceral immersion may be intoxicating, it's in fact the moments of arrest that can constitute game art as opposed to mere entertainment.

Although he didn't use the term, the German playwright Bertold Brecht championed the political value of arrest. Brecht felt that catharsis -- the driving force behind most forms of entertainment from Aristotle to Paul Auster -- would defeat any lasting social effect that art might have. In place of enthralling emotions like fear and terror, Brecht advocated a self-aware art form that would enlighten rather than engross. Arrest is the Brechtian moment when we become aware of the magic of the genre and cast a critical eye over what is happening.

If code is the magic of our time, then games are the magic shows that enthrall the masses, recently topping Hollywood in gross revenue. But in gameplay, the magical sense of control and movement Jenkins describes is illusory. While your avatar may be flying through cloud banks or smashing through police barricades, your bottom is still on your chair, your bladder is filling, your stomach is grumbling, and only your thumbs are twitching. Furthermore, while the game may give you the illusion that you are in charge, in fact that role is largely reserved for the game designer. In moments of arrest, the illusion is shattered and the Wizard found to be an ordinary man behind a technological curtain.

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