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Alternative realisms: subjectivity-production in novels and games

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Alternative realisms: subjectivity-production in novels and games

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Content ALTERNATIVE REALISMS: SUBJECTIVITY-PRODUCTION IN NOVELS AND GAMES by Phillip A. Lobo FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL Department of Comparative Literature Doctor of Philosophy University of Southern California May 2019 ii Acknowledgements Were I to map the network of gratitude necessary to include all those deserving, I would produce a text longer than this manuscript. I must, however, make special efforts to thank Dr. Hilary Schor, whose brilliance and faith have inspired and sustained me; to her I owe the possibility of this journey. I must thank as well Dr. Joseph Boone, whose seminar was the magic circle in which the first glimmers of this project appeared, and who kindly oversaw and encouraged each proceeding step. Thanks, too, to Dr. Akira Lippit, whose eloquence, thoughtfulness and generosity are a model which I can only hope to approximate. I am grateful also to Dr. Lee Edelman, who showed me I was postmodern, to Dr. Jay Cantor, who reminded me that I was not, and to Dr. Joseph Litvak, who showed me the holes in history. I learned to love this work thanks to my teachers, and I work in hope of sharing the gift that was so generously bestowed upon me. I shower liberally with thanks my fellow graduate students at USC, in whom I found a community of uncommon warmth and welcome. I must especially thank Ingrid Leventhal, who was with me from the first, Kate Page-Lippsmeyer, who knows best and gives most, Alex Chase, whose voice I still borrow, Kendra Atkin, who made me strive, and Cord-Heinrich Plinke, for making room in his home and his heart. I’d be remiss not to mention my colleagues elsewhere: Daniil Leiderman, to whose unfailing support I owe my sanity, and Simon Shogry, luminous of spirit. My friends have sustained me through the vicissitudes of life. I am astonishingly lucky to know them all. To my mother, Elsa and my father, Jeff, I owe my existence, but as well so much of the happiness, trust, and self-assurance which makes that existence so worthwhile. So much also I owe to my grandparents, Marion and Henry, Marlene and Hal, whose homes and gardens contained so many worlds in which I played and learned and grew, all of them built on a foundation of kindness and love. I am who am I because of you, and for that my gratitude is limitless. iii Table of Contents I. Acknowledgements ii II. Introduction iv III. Reading Note xix IV. Chapter I – Subjectivity 1 V. Chapter II – Supplementality 63 VI. Chapter III – Multiplicity 116 VII. Chapter IV – Possibility 185 VIII. Conclusion 252 IX. Bibliography 259 iv Introduction I. Unsettling Scholarship I am not going to argue that games are art. The first and most important reason is that nothing betrays insecurity quite like a strident statement of equivalence. Needing to prove this or that thing is art conveys little more than a need-to-prove. This is not to say that arguments for the richness and cultural importance of games are less than defensible: it is simply that the argument is more compelling if it is a matter of showing how rather than asserting that. With this confidence my work paper presents its games as objects whose interest is evident in their very description. No further justifications are necessary. My second reason is that these arguments have already been made at great length by the field of game studies during its hard-scrabble ascendance to academic legitimacy during the nineteen-nineties and the aughts. Thanks to these early skirmishes, the discipline of game studies has secured a few corners of academic discourse, achieving a degree of self-governance free from simple incorporation into literary or visual studies. I am, however, reluctant to station myself within a particular camp of game studies, if any such redoubts remain after the end of that campaign. The territory that struggle carved out - its very territoriality - can be far too constrained, far too dependent upon border lines drawn out of political convenience. However illusory the opposition between the self-styled ludologists and their conjured foes, the narratologists, there remains some lingering sense that games must be thought of differently than other forms of representation, that games are in some ways superior to older forms. The arguments of ludologists – including the critical work of thinkers like Jespert Juul and Gonzalo Frasca - were often founded upon hard distinctions and arguments about medium specificity. 1 These distinctions came with implicit valuations: games are interactive 1 Cf. Gonzalo Frasca. "Simulation versus narrative: Introduction to ludology." In The video game theory reader, pp. 243-258. Routledge, 2013 and Jesper Juul. Half-real: Video games between real rules and fictional worlds. MIT press, 2011. v while narratives are passive, games are open-ended while narratives are linear, games grant agency to the reader who becomes player while narratives are under the ultimate sway of the sinister, undead, and heavy-handed author. These alleged differences in medium and form are worthy of examination, but this particular study recognizes the constant blurring and transgressing of the line game studies itself established when trying to assert its sovereign status in the intellectual landscape. That border has always been porous, and the romance between games and narratives is hardly new. One of the most important assertions of my work is the constant interrelation across forms – the fact that games and narratives share dreams realized via different means. A further focus is how early on that interrelation appears. While others trace the link between games and narrative into the dimness that lays beyond the bounds of recorded history (like John Huizinga’s invaluable Homo Ludens 2 ), I begin with the epochal shift that is seemingly marked by the novel: the emergence of modernity. What is new and different is the unprecedented sophistication of the technologies, the investment of resources, and the social pervasiveness of game forms. The proliferation of novels relied upon innovations in printing and an increasingly literate public. Today, digital games have flourished thanks to the increasing ubiquity of consumer electronics. Each partook of a sense of newness, a novelty particular to the innovations of the time: the novel with the breadth of its distribution; the modern game with the depth of processing power and its potential for complexity. In so doing, each was also marked by in contemporary concerns of their moment. In the diffuse manner of collective cultural production, each served as an answer to some pressing need of increasingly interconnected times and places. 2 Johan Huizinga. Homo Ludens. Beacon Press, 1955. vi II. Modern Quandaries No object emerges whole-cloth from beyond history. The Europe of Daniel Defoe’s time was in the grips of sweeping changes which upended existing forms of social organization. History was roiled and reshaped by events and forces with near proper-noun status: the Enlightenment, Capitalism, Colonialism. Our notion of modernity - the social relations that form us, the institutions we hold in ambivalent regard, the hegemonies in whose crumbling interiors we still dwell - emerges from this chaotic complex of elements. Meanwhile the contingency of that history has occluded itself, leaving the contemporary United States with a world framed in inherited terms, effectively maps of the world with Europe as their structural center. Novels played a critical part in this epochal shift. Individualism and realism in the modern philosophical sense ran in parallel with the formal innovations of the novel, as Ian Watt persuasively argues. 3 Serving as ushers and primers, models for a new way of being, novels offered a construction of self and the world more suited to a universe of individuals made ever more distinct and ever more interdependent. The question of what a person was - as a citizen, a subject, a recipient of natural rights, a cultural animal, a perspectival point, a sovereign experience, a statistical data point, an interchangeable unit - underwent reformation and negotiation. The novel aided ascendant classes in search of identity by articulating possibilities for those identities. Almost always viewed with ambivalence as a device able to delude as well as to educate, the novel’s influence is undeniable even if its exact effects remain undetermined. With the benefit of hindsight, scholars call the operative mechanism of the novel formal realism and view it as a distinctly modern mode of representation, concurrent with similarly styled contemporary philosophies. The conceit that the subject of literature could be “real people” in the “real world,” located with spatio-temporal specificity developed into the more 3 Ian Watt. The rise of the novel. Univ of California Press, 2001. vii audacious belief that reality can itself be represented through the written word, a grand sleight of hand revealed by Roland Barthes in his “Reality Effect.” 4 This access to an unmediated reality was a product of the newest mass media technology, and was an irony lost upon the novelists, who were aware of the seeming oxymoron of “representing reality” even as they developed conventional ways of doing just that. Novels against the novel appear in the same moment as the foundations of the form: Fielding’s Shamela appears a year after Richardson’s Pamela, purporting to “expose[] and refute[]” the “various falsehoods and misrepresentations” of the genre-defining romance novel. 5 The terms of Fielding’s argument are telling, however, as it is not over the reality of the work as such, but of the representation of its subject. Fielding does not question “is Pamela real?” or even “is Pamela real?” but rather “what is the reality of Pamela and Pamela?” Is she a paragon of virtue, or a political schemer? These are questions that presuppose the subject possesses a reality adequate for interpretation. As an implicit argument about reality, realism is a category disputed in the very moment it is proposed, but the very debate bespeaks the dream of worlds made of words, of a symbolic consistency that could create a credible reality. And the mark of that reality’s credibility is the credibility of the subjects that move within it, the record of experience that smacks of authenticity. That such a sense of authenticity is more an effect of the medium than a reflection on the medium’s actual verisimilitude only points to the pressing need to make sense of worldly experience when that consistency feels threatened, to supplement experience with a framework that guarantees legibility. Like divinatory methods to which they are (as we shall see) connected, novels helped sift meaning from chaos - a function explicated by Thomas M. Kavanagh and 4 Roland Barthes. "The reality effect." The rustle of language (1986): 141-148. 5 Henry Fielding. An apology for the life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews. Vol. 1. Library of Alexandria, 2010. viii Jesse Molesworth, though with very different final assessments - in a manner no less effective for its arbitrariness. 6 The resolution of this crisis in subject-formation is by no means neat and tidy; indeed, it barely resembles a resolution at all. Instead we find a constant tension between the subject’s liberty and its possibility, the capacity for agency and the requirements of self-regulation. This tension persists, not as some latter-day postmodern crisis, but as a more fundamental instability in the conception of the subject itself. Identity is always a vexed category, a retroactive positing, a reification of a symbolic compromise made between the subject and its reality. In modernity we find this vexation stems from a tension within its construction of the subject as both the singular recipient of rights and privileges, and as a series of drafts and responses to innumerable interpellations. Modern identity thus arrives to us, like modern history, as both an absolutely necessary singularity and radically contingent set of possibilities. III. States and Subjects, Singularity and Multiplicity The link between the novel and modern subjectivity has been well established – so thoroughly that further links have been forged between it and another institution central to modern identity: the nation state. 7 Even as individuals and their experiences were being enshrined as worthy of representation, their legibility were increasingly inscribed in terms of the nascent modern state and its own technologies of self-representation. While the novel’s role in imagining national character has been amply demonstrated, the relationship between the modern state and the broader impulse of realism can only be fully understood if one accounts for the role 6 CF. Thomas M. Kavanagh. Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance. Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 1993 & Jesse Molesworth. Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Realism, Probability, Magic. Cambridge University Press, 2010. 7 Cf. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guttari, 1000 Plateaus, Minnesota Press, 1987 and Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign vol.2, Univ of Chicago Press, 2011, for the relationship between modern statehood and identity. Cf. Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso Books, 2006, for an understanding of the novel’s role in this process. ix of statistical thinking in the development of the form. Arguments have been made for both the novel’s complicity in popularizing statistical thinking (a “taming of chance”) and for its offering instead a compensatory fantasy of exceeding statistical (in)significance (a “reenchantment”). 8 There is no denying their interrelation: Daniel Defoe’s proto-novel A Journal of a Plague Year is not coincidentally supported by John Graunt’s proto-statistical Reflections on the Weekly Bills of Mortality. 9 The idea of the novelistic subjects as “normal” - distinct from heroic, typographical or historically “great” subjects of prior literary forms - is tied up with the notion of the “norm” upon which statistics are founded. It should come as no surprise that games are, if anything, better suited for statistical representation than novels. The use of randomizers such as dice in early formulations of probability linked statistical thinking to gaming from the outset. The most expansive concatenation of pertinent elements - statistics, statehood, simulation and history - can be found in the early nineteenth century practice of Kriegspiele, documented in depth by both Jon Peterson and Catherine Gallagher. 10 One of the first exhaustive attempts at simulation, the war games of Prussia employed burgeoning state apparatus, flush with statistical information and unprecedently high-quality cartographic detail, into service to reimagine prior battles and prepare for future ones. These military exercises evince a different kind of realism than that of the by then well-developed genre of the novel. This form of statistical realism was based on a belief in the validity of different results emerging from the same set of circumstances, and incorporated contingency and alternative possibility into the fundamental understanding of historical events. It is an explicitly statistical and self-consciously ludic expression of realism and yet, just like 8 Cf. Ian Hacking. The Taming of Chance. Univ of Cambridge, 1990 & also Molesworth, Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel. 9 Molesworth, Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 108. 10 Cf. Catherine Gallagher. Telling it Like it Wasn’t: The CounterfactualImagination in History and Fiction. Univ of Chicago Press, 2018 & Jon Peterson. Playing at the world: A history of simulating wars, people and fantastic adventures, from chess to role-playing games. San Diego: Unreason Press, 2012. x novels, an attempt to represent events as they really were and thus as they really might have been. This conceit of realness is, as with all works of realism, a product of form which aspires to circumvent the problem of representation and present reality in all its alterity, rendering an experience as if it had been experienced by the player-subject. The connection between the Kriegspiele’s modern methods of representation and novelist realism appears more clearly when we examine the genre of New Romance (as documented by Michael Saler) and its seminal descendent, the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. 11 In the works of fantasy and science fiction that follow Tolkien’s lead we see the two strains of realism converge to serve as the basis for imagining not just alternatives to historical events, but other worlds and other ways of being. By mapping out a world with aspirations to simulational detail, and then creating space for individual experiences to be played out within those worlds, these novels both prefigure and inspire later ludic applications of the same principles. In so doing, however, they confound some of our basic assumptions about the norm upon which statistical reasoning is based. This confusion that is never so stark as when labeling tales of magic rings and time- travelers “realistic.” The consequence of these alternative realisms, both in their novelistic and ludic forms, is a growing sense that both history and identity might just as well consist of plural possibilities as of singular inevitabilities. The function of singularity is precisely to head off the anxiety of multiplicity: it is a fear that history may not be governed by some unifying meaning; a fear of the stranger-without redoubled by the fear of the stranger-within. In both novels and games realism contains the implications of this multiplicity, yet the social function of each form is often diametrically opposed to this plenitude of possibility. Realism-as-practiced - realism with its alternative elements suppressed - appears as constraining force all throughout its history. In 11 Michael Saler. As if: Modern enchantment and the literary prehistory of virtual reality. Oxford University Press, 2012. xi many ways serving as a stifling effect felt most emphatically during times of epistemological crisis. Hence the proliferation of so-called anti-realist experiments in both literary avant-garde and science fiction genre works, many of which engage either philosophically with the question of alterative realities and alternative selves, or actually employ the ludic tools like chance operations. The potential for pluralism emerges as a guiding value in my work, forming a pole opposite to sovereign singularity, and serving as a governing metaphor for the political pluralism to which I am ideologically committed. In a time when the proliferation of identities within national collectivities has been met with violent reactionary responses that aim to restrict what performances of identity can be read as politically and socially legible, the value of granting otherness equal dignity, both within the state and within the self, is an indispensable ethical commitment. In the arenas of representation in particular, where selfhood is conceived, constructed and promulgated, the stakes for what kinds of subjects are recognized is a matter of the most immediate concern for those at risk of being rendered illegible, those already at the margins. If we are to use these tools, struggle on these fields of contenstation with any hope of success, we must understand them and their ambivalence. IV. Means and Methods In each chapter I establish a relationship between novels, ranging from the first works of formal realism at the beginning of the eighteenth century to works of twentieth century genre fiction, and modern games, beginning with the development of rational gambling and narrative parlor games in the eighteenth century and ending with present-day digital games. Each chapter begins with an exploration of the novel, establishing aspects of realism as they are first developed and later challenged within its traditionally understood context, before extending that xii understanding to a game which possesses some formal, thematic or genealogical links to the preceding text. Within the first chapter alone we traverse the time between Robinson Crusoe initial publication in 1719 to Minecraft’s development in the twenty-first century, finding a surprising resiliance to the questions and problematics that mark modernity’s earliest manifestations. As I work through the games, I pay special attention to the subject position they produce, and the way they represent both the possibility of agency and the texture of otherness. I chiefly read them through Roland Barthes’ tripartate construction of the subject’s “positional field”: “temporality, person, and diathesis”. 12 In particular, I am most interested in the component of diathesis - the active, verbal capacity by which the subject defines and expresses itself. I suggest it is this that is especially highlighted in the context of games, where choice and agency are seen as so integral to their being-game. Barthes’ larger theory of the “reality effect” contributes to my broader understanding of how the “real” is represented as that which lies outside of semantic meaning, in the form of “insignificant notation” and “useless details” (Ibid. 142-143), 13 and thus how randomness - another definitively ludic quality - constructs a convincing alterity. This is further linked to Ian Bogost’s notion of “procedural rhetoric”, whereby the rules systems of a game are understood as a rhetoric that persuades through the active demonstration of a process rather than a description of it. 14 This allows us to view games as both a model for and an argument about a given subject and its relationship to a constitutive construction of reality. Games are not just objects themselves – they are not simply an assortment of rules and tools. In their playing, “game” also describes the experiences generated by those objects through use; the narratives they produce during and after; the fantasies and tendencies they enable. To 12 Barthes, The Rustle of Language, 20. 13 Ibid. 142-3. 14 Will Wright and Ian Bogost. Persuasive games: The expressive power of videogames. Mit Press, 2007. xiii reflect this aspect of play, some of my studies of games are accompanied by paratexts: documents that range from embellished reports of play sessions, to community surveys of problematic practices, to digital campfire horror stories and webcomics. These help me fully explore games as heterogenous – they are not monolithic constructions with definitive ideological results (a common presumption of skeptics who rightly point to the dangers of implicit ideological content being naturalized through the flow-experience of play). Games are, instead, artifacts around and through which identities and belief structures are mediated. V. The Grand Campaign My first chapter investigates the historical and formal relationship between realist novels and the production of modern bourgeois subjectivity. Drawing upon the work of Ian Watt and Susan Stewart, I outline how the techniques of formal realism were used to create, for the first time, a discreet, individualist subject, open to inhabitation by the reader by means of outlining a self and a world, an interior and an exterior. Jean Jacques Rousseau, who gives Robinson Crusoe (1791) pride of place in his essay on education, Emile, proposed a specific mode of reading which, upon closer examination, most resembles play. To his mind, Rousseau’s dream of the natural subject is best realized in treating Defoe’s novel as a game with a properly ludic freedom of decision. I elucidate this new style of subject-formation with a rigorous formal analysis of the video game Minecraft (2009), which possesses similarities to Robinson Crusoe not only in subject matter and experiential arc, but also its formal construction. To wit, Minecraft is a realist text. Indeed, much of what Crusoe aims to do, and much of what Rousseau values in that novel, are more thoroughly carried out in the game by dint of its very ludic and realist qualities. xiv I do not take Rousseau’s optimism at face value, however. Jacque Derrida’s second Beast and the Sovereign seminar reveals some occluded implications of the kind of sovereign subjectivity formed in the Robinsonian mode. This sovereign subject is beset by numerous anxieties, fears about the self and the other, fears distinct to the would-be sovereign subject, appearing prominently in both. Through my reading of Derrida I question just what is at stake in the subject of formal realism. In the survival simulation Day-Z (2013) these anxieties about self and other are played out in an arena of violence and fear. Practices of play in the game, and the way in which communities of gamers confront the endemic problem of knee-jerk virtual player-on-player violence, offer a potential remedy for the unintended consequences of realist texts. One way out of the naturalizing mistake of realism may be to recognize that it enables the remarkable power of role-playing, the self-consciously “performative” aspect of texts, instead of the certitude of individual experience. I turn to the wellspring of role-playing games in my second chapter, tracing a textual genealogy that begins with Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954). Tolkien’s work, however fantastical in subject matter, fits my refined definition of the realist mode that is made evident through a consideration of the critical confusion around the three-volume fantasy novel, rife with equivocations over the meaning of the term “literature” and the nature of literary realism. However, Tolkien’s realism is not the same sort of realism that informs Robinson Crusoe, nor even the work of Tolkien’s literary contemporaries. Its power is derived chiefly from the remarkable feat of world-building, one which sets the standard for generic fantasy. This alternative realism - one founded in the rigor and detail of its supplemental, appendectical material - is a mode which places emphasis (first and foremost) on a coherent description of a xv reality, and guarantees the coherence of the experience of that reality, however distinct that reality may be from our own. This alternative mode further elucidates the relationship between world-building and subject-position in both literary and ludic realism, as it is this appendectical detail which Dungeons & Dragons (1974) places front and center. Indebted to the exhaustive research of Jon Peterson, in this section I examine the convergence of literary longings and ludic methods that usher in this unprecedented mode of group narrative performance. Dispensing with fixed narrative and thus the singularity of Tolkien’s epic tale, the source manuals and supplements of Dungeons & Dragons comprise the whole of the text. In so doing they permit enormous freedom of play. This is a reality in which anything may be attempted, in which diathesis is radically expanded. And it is all grounded and guaranteed meaning through the consistency of the supplemental material. Not only does this permit the creation of numerous plausible worlds, these coherent externalities are used for the express purpose of enabling role-playing, and thus the creation of numerous plausible selves. This uncovers the supplemental quality of subjectivity, unseating it from its sovereign position, unsettling it. I further demonstrate the properly multiple quality of the subject by considering the numerous functions of another game within the Tolkeinian genealogy: the computer simulation Dwarf Fortress (2006). An object of staggering complexity, Dwarf Fortress aims to create an effectively infinite number of unique fantasy words in the Tolkienian mode. It has three modes of play: the subject of play is constituted either as a mobile individual, a disembodied organizer of a simulated community, or an abstract witness of history. These reveal the implications of the supplemental subject - that subjectivity is best conceived of not as natural or singular, but rather as a series of supplements to being, united by consistency of context, whereby the self can become its own other. xvi My third chapter explores the political implications of subjective multiplicity, finding in the critical literature the promise of the supplemental subject as an antidote to the symptoms of sovereignty. Beginning with The Female Man (1975), Joanna Russ’ polemical feminist science fiction novel, I investigate the implications of the fictional science which underpins the narrative’s premise, and its imagining of a transdimensional campaign of liberation conducted by numerous iterations of its protagonist, often read as versions of the author’s self united across multiple timelines. Drawing upon the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, I connect the Oedipal mode of subject formation and the logic of settled state societies from which sovereignty arises, contrasting them with a nomadic mode of subjectivity which is in keeping with my previous recognition of the multiple, supplementary subject. This use of multiplicity to challenge Oepidal subject formation is further dramatized in the progression of the BioShock game series, culminating in BioShock: Infinite (2013). Here too, time traveling multiplicity is pitted against a fascist state apparatus which aims to endlessly reproduce militant reactionary citizen-subjects. The game’s plot, however, remains trapped within its own Oedipal narrative, one which reproduces disaster time and time again, rendering the experience of choice and consequence - supposedly definitive qualities of ludic texts - irrelevant. After reflecting upon the necessary limitations of BioShock as a mainstream commercial product, I turn to a more nuanced critique of the alleged promise of ludic agency found in the independently developed game, The Stanley Parable (2013). Stanley’s satirical treatment of gameplay and game-player assumptions pits the player, the player-character, and the author- narrator at near-constant odds. Gameplay leads to a rather pessimistic conclusion that expecting liberation from the machinations of realism is vexed by a problematic conflation of freedom and control. All three texts seek to resolve themselves with a wish for their own dissolution, either xvii through willed obsolescence or abortive action, suggesting while multiplicity of self may be invaluable in countering the dangers of singular subject construction, the question of how to translate this interior collectivity into some program of political action, a means of historical agency, remains an unmet challenge. In chapter four I broaden the scope of my inquiry to address how this tension between freedom and control, the nomadic and the settled, the infinite and the constrained, relates more broadly to modern epistemology and the larger project of realism. Beginning with a survey of theories around the relationship between novelistic realism and probability theory, I uncover the manner in which novelistic subjectivity is tied both to gambling and to the rise of statistics - two interlinked methods respectively founded on the courting of exception and the foundation of the norm. In this context, scholars alternate between framing novelistic realism as a tool for the taming of chance by training rational subjects in a causal world (as per Ian Hacking and Thomas M. Kavanagh) or, paradoxically, as a way of preserving the solace of magical thinking from the depersonalizing disenchantment of statistical interpellation (this by way of Jesse Molesworth and Michael Saler). Either way, realism serves as a bridge between modern and premodern, and its connection to gambling links it both to the chance operations of games and to the premodern practices of divination. Locating the adaptation of divinatory methods at the roots of realism’s subjectification process, this premodern method is repurposed for use in the construction of modern reality and its subjects, with chance itself marking the absolute alterity beyond subjective intention or semantic meaning, and thus a backdrop against which the self can be discerned. This backdrop of the real, constructed both by the “exceptional” otherness of chance and the mediated “normative” otherness of statistical prediction, informs a new view of history and the possibility of agency within it. The practice of historical counterfactualism, a subject most extensively dealt with by Catherine Gallagher, demonstrates how alternative realism (the realism xviii of supplementarity) manifests in the production of counterfactual history scenarios and narratives, much as it produces counterfactual selves. Indeed, the question of how national collectivities can be formed, how a people can claim agency and thus constitute a subject proper to the “plot” of history, is a central preoccupation of these works. Specifically, in this chapter I tackle Philip K. Dick’s counterfactual history novel The Man in the High Castle, famously written using a divination method as a chance operator, finding within its pages numerous meditations on how to escape, alter or express some kind of agency in a history that seems unstoppable. This struggle between the settled quality of history and the potential to imagine (let alone effectuate) plausible alternatives reaches its apogee in games, whose simulational frameworks present a model of historical consistency and deviance through the creation of countless alternative timelines. By examining Paradox Interactive’s series of historical grand strategy games, most notably the medieval-era role-playing hybrid Crusader Kings 2 and the early modern nation-state simulator Europa Universalis 4, I grapple with the gravity of “settled” history and the orbit of its alternatives. The pessimism about the range of realist subjectivity discussed in the previous chapter is echoed in a historical context; the very internal consistency of the systems which simulate alternate history also trap it in the reproduction of certain underlying similarities, marking the horizon for imagining what kind of subjects can have range and efficacy. I find that, on the historical scale, the possibility of agency is tied up with the very formation I identified in realism from the start: sovereign statehood, the chief way in which modernity imagines collectivity. xix Reading Note: On Pronouns Since grade school I've been perplexed by the rhythm-breaking but institutionally grammatical use of he or she to denote an abstract person. It was an unwelcome staccato insistence, a weird bifurcation that frustrated the flow of written language. They struck my native ear as smoother, swifter, and just as fluent. And so, in spite of instructions and corrections to the contrary, I did not use he or she; I've always used they. What has been for decades somewhere between a matter of stubbornness and a stylistic choice has become, in the context of this essay, an ideological move. Prior to my time in primary school, this abstract person might have been rendered simply he; within traditional Western metaphysics the subject closest to the universality of form is male, after all, so how else to denote abstract personhood? The inclusion of the female pronoun, however culturally well- intentioned, still demands a choice - he or she - which excludes those increasing numbers of persons who reject binary identification. Expanding the list to include every alternative in use today - eg. he or she or e or xe or per or ve or yo - reveals the problematics of imposing any necessary gender upon an abstraction. So I opt for the inclusive they. This is a colloquial practice common enough that the Oxford English Dictionary sets aside a webpage to document this convention, which has been lately revived after a period of prior use in the sixteenth century. (‘He or She’ Versus ‘They’ 2018) Rather than lean on an argument of mere arbitrariness, I will instead embrace the full implications of opting for an inclusive they rather than the exclusive he or she. The abstraction that is reader or player, or any person, is they - both ungendered and multiple - both the potential for any entity of any sort to assume that role, and the potential within each entity for a multiplicity of selves. 1 Chapter I Subjectivity I. Fear of Fiction The globalization of bourgeois culture has seen the novel deemed a near-sacrosanct art form. Debates still rage over whether popular “trash” novels (chiefly young adult fiction) will eventually lead readers to the “irreproachable classics,” 15 e.g. whether the reader of Twilight will mature to Wuthering Heights. However, the novel as a form has long since become legitimate, at least in its more “refined” instantiations. It is easy to forget that when the novel was itself still novel, it was seen as an addictive form of mass entertainment: facile and potentially dangerous amusement for bored wives and mothers, and, worse still, intellectual poison for children and adolescents. Appealing to the base fantasies and unsophisticated aspirations of the aesthetically uneducated middle class and their sheltered children, the novels of the eighteenth century, like television of the twentieth, were frequently characterized as objects that wasted time and, worse, induced madness. While the novel may have the television to thank for its latter-day legitimacy, the threat of social disintegration attributed to the ‘boob tube’ is not quite the same as the mania-producing power ascribed to the novel during its outlaw youth. 16 If we look for similar accusations of excessive solitude and psychosis, the relatively young form of the video game serves as a much better equivalent to the novel. While the fear of fiction is at least as old as Plato’s Republic, a particularly great (and dangerous) efficacy has been assigned to both the novel and the video 15 The “at least they’re reading” hypothesis propounded by Neil Gaiman (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil- gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming) and disputed in The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural- comment/percy-jackson-problem). 16 Moreover, television nowadays appears split in a manner not unlike novels: between indefensible garbage (“pulp” fiction and reality television) and high-minded opuses (“literary” fiction and the new model for television drama found in HBO and Showtime projects). 2 game for their power to produce illusory experience that distorts perceptions of actual reality through convincing virtual constructs. Both forms are alleged to produce individuals divorced from social reality. (Cover 2006) Where before critics feared renegade Quixotes and suicidal Bovarys, contemporary anxiety fixates on digital alienation, embodied in the figure of the reclusive hikikomori of Japan or the anti-social gamer, wreaking passive violence upon themselves and their families through social isolation, sexual apathy and self-neglect. Recoiling from the shock of the Columbine massacre, it took no time at all for the American public to locate the tragedy’s etiology, not in the perpetrators’ ease of access to high-powered weapons, but in their predilection for the video game Doom. Guns don’t kill people, this mentality seems to say, fictions kill people. 17 Something about fiction is frightening: in its capacity to immerse and alienate, in the way fictions seem to risk short-circuiting the reality principle, either trapping its victims in an anti- social or causing fantasy to explode into the social sphere. This is particularly true of novels and games that seem to threaten immersion or and “ingress into a virtual… world” or provide a “‘release’ from the constraints of identity” (Cover 2006). The change in attitudes around the former might suggest what is critical is a historical perspective about the latter, entitling us to dismiss these fears as mere backlash. The emergence of each of these forms, and the emergence of critiques about these forms, is symptomatic of wider social changes of the sort that reliably inspire reactionary attitudes. Yet, these equivalences and their associated dangers should not be simply dismissed. Instead, they express the power and potential of these fictive forms. I do not see to suggest these forms are effective to the extent propounded by fiction’s most vociferous critics, but rather to investigate what about these media in particular – the novel and the 17 Compare this to the allegation of literature’s involvement in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in The Youth’s Companion. (“Booth and Bad Literature” 1865) Noteworthy is the article’s conflation of theater, literature and games, whereby Booth’s theatrical and literary education “had familiarized him with every species of tragedy till a murder meant nothing more to him than a move on a checker-board.” 3 videogame – inspire such fears. What do novels and games do that is so threatening to the individual and their society, and how do they do it? I take these fears seriously, and insist, as others in media studies have long done, that fiction has efficacy, that it contributes to the production of subjects, with all their quirks and characteristics. This is particularly pressing considering the preeminence of novels and games in contemporary cultural production and deployment, not least in the realm of education, where novels like Robinson Crusoe are already sacrosanct, and games such as Minecraft are increasingly hailed as a vital part of developmental curricula. As their educational use suggests, novels and video games share a genealogy, they truly take part in the shaping of selfhood. Thus they also contribute to those features rightly viewed with interest and ambivalence: the individual, the intersubjective, and the sovereign. II. Novel Subjects Ian Watt’s study The Rise of the Novel ties the ascendance of the novel to wide-spread social changes in the England of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson, reflected in shifts in the composition of the reading public, as well as that from philosophical idealism to the social and psychological realism of Hobbes and Descartes. …Both the philosophical and literary innovations must have been seen as parallel manifestations of larger change – that vast transformation of Western civilisation since the Renaissance which has replaced the unified world picture of the Middle Ages with another very different one… (Watt 31) The new world picture was a revised view of history necessitated by the emergence of middle- class hegemony and its concurrent social requirements: an emphasis on individualism and the need for professional specificity. The result is an emerging conception of a society consisting not 4 of communities sustained by inherited roles, composed of extended families and ordered by age- old tradition, but rather of “a developing but unplanned aggregate of particular individuals having particular experiences at particular times and particular places.” (Watt 31) Such a world is required, Watt argues, in order for a work like Robinson Crusoe to be both desirable and descriptive, and this new picture demanded a new formal practice in order to be properly represented. Watt identifies this new practice as “formal realism” which he alleges to be “the lowest common denominator of the novel genre as a whole.” (Watt 34). The qualities of formal realism subordinate plot to character, carefully render both characters and their environment as particular, and particularize temporality so that the time of the narrative is brought closer to everyday lived experience. The result is an intensely focused effort to produce, by means of the act of reading, something approaching “individual experience,” which, in turn, is seen as more representative of “real experience” – an experience of the real as it occurs within a discrete historical time. This mode stood in contrast to the timeless, ungrounded and frequently allegorical works of previous epochs, that relied rather upon traditional plots whose characters were drawn from a stockpile of established literary and theatrical “types.” Thus: “…the various technical characteristics of the novel described above all seem to contribute to the furthering of an aim which the novelist shares with the [realist] philosopher – the production of what purports to be an authentic account of the actual experiences of individuals.” (Watt 27) Roland Barthes keenly divines the hidden implication of the claims implicit to “realism,” noting that it amounts to an ideological trick, serving to naturalize bourgeois social order by sidestepping the signified and linking the signifier directly to the referent. In so doing, formal realism apes the discourse of science and along with it science’s pretense to a direct conveyance of the real (Barthes 148). The novel participated in the ideological artifice whereby the individualist, bourgeois subject was theorized, modeled and – through formal realism’s 5 widespread propagation – even brought into being. The emergence of the novel was instrumental in ushering in a new social reality and, along with it, a new conception of selfhood, a new kind of subject. This is supported by Watt’s own research. Inherent to the practice of formal realism is a psychological model which closely mirrors contemporaneous theories of the subject. As Watt points out, by allow[ing] his narrative order to flow from his own sense of what his protagonists might plausibly do next [Defoe] initiated an important new tendency in fiction: his total subordination of the plot to the pattern of the autobiographical memoir is as defiant an assertion of the primacy of individual experience in the novel as Descartes’ cogito ergo sum was in philosophy. (Watt 15) Hence the importance of Robinson Crusoe, a text whose very premise is Cartesian, casting, as it does, the protagonist upon the shore of an isolated island, as a subject free from social determination, even arguing for the separation of the individual subject from society, much as the properly investigative Cartesian cogito abandons its (socially determined) preconceptions and prejudices in order to acquire what the novel itself aims to represent: an authentic account of experienced reality. In essence, the novel is the first literary form intended to simulate individualist experience. 18 Formal realism writes the subject, specifically (at least in the case of Robinson Crusoe and other early novels) the modern bourgeois subject, through a series of formal mechanisms and inducements to a new kind of reading practice. III. Ludic Longing 18 Thence what may be considered a high water mark of the modern English-language novel, the work of Joyce and Woolf, with their sophisticated rendering of “stream of consciousness”. 6 How does realism achieve these effects? What formal mechanisms of writing and reading produce an experience of subjectivity? What, in short, defines the formal outline of the subject? What do novels do that is so novel, and thus so frightening in the eyes of its detractors? For Watt, the novel’s capacity for realism lies in its insistence on particularity, in the specificity which it grants its characters and their spatio-temporal surroundings. Whereas previous fictional forms rely upon established character types and at most an evocative but imprecise time and place of setting, the novel form “is surely distinguished from other genres and from previous forms of fiction by the amount of attention it habitually accords to both the individualization of its characters and to the detailed presentation of their environment.” (Watt 17-18) These are not simply correlated effects. You don’t get one without the other. Watt observes that “…the characters of the novel can only be individualized if they are set in a background of particularised time and place.” (Watt 21) This is, in itself, a very modern approach. Rather than a character defined by their gods (or narrative-given destiny), modern novels have a discrete individual consciousness that possesses consistency and dynamism over time, a consistency and dynamism that is firmly situated within a world that believably contains, sustains and produces them. The result: novels “have a sense of personal identity subsisting through duration and yet being changed by the flow of experience.” (Watt 24 The sense of personal identity which the novel constructs – the “flow of experience” which endures even as it moves through time and space – is pivotal to the new conception of the subject, and frequently provides the novel its narrative structure since, as Watt points out, traditional plots (what was, at the time of the novel’s emergence, plot as such) must fall by the wayside. The “formlessness” of the novel is the price it must pay for its “realism” (Watt13), a realism that is born explicitly of an identity as developed within the particularity of time and 7 place. The Bildungsroman takes on this aspect of the novel as its primary concern, and this now has the commonplace name of “character arc.” Thus the novel is perforce a matter of subject- writing, as the construction of a consistent and believable identity is the very basis for the development of the narrative. Yet it is not enough that the character appear “real” unto themselves. The reader must, in turn, be interpolated into the text and its world if their own subjectivity is to be properly written. Character identity needs to be contagious, the novel translating character experiences into the experiences of the reader as if they were one to one transposition. Indeed, the power of contagious identity is the root of the anxieties around the novel’s dangerous effects. Without the madness of mistaking oneself for a character, the contemporary fear of fiction would find it difficult to articulate itself. In On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection Susan Stewart deals explicitly with the novel’s involvement in “the generation of the subject.” Specifically she considers how this subject is defined – much as Watt’s “character” is defined by “environment” – by “the capacity of narrative to generate significant objects and engender a significant other” and, more importantly for this investigation, “the place of that other in the formation of a notion of the interior.” (Stewart xi) That sign of all good Cartesian subjects, whose only certainty is an inner truth whose limit is defined by the (potentially deceptive) world around it, interiority, is, by Stewart’s logic, the product of a post-industrial reading practice. Like Watt, her main target is realism, with its development of “conventions of point of view, ‘exactness,’ distance, and temporality,” not with a view of representing social reality, but rather as a means of producing a subject/object-self/other effect that takes on its own reality. Through “the solitude of … reading,” taking place as reading often does in private 19 in “the milieu of the 19 Extended to the case of public spaces – particularly on public transport in cities – reading becomes a way of generating a field of privacy amidst the public, a role that, as of today, is as often taken by smartphones and e-readers as traditional books. 8 bourgeois domestic” the novel enables its reader to “mim[e] the creation of both an interior text and an interior subject.” In this way the novel acts as a kind of prothesis of the soul, an “addition to the body which forms an attachment, transforming the very boundary, or outline, of the self.” (Stewart xi) This power of prothesis is indissoluble from the novel’s capacity to induce identification through its use of point of view. Stewart defines point of view as “a convention whereby the reader is situated within the text” – an effect enabled by the novel’s formal features. “Thus,” Stewart argues, “a new process of reading evolves from this new form of realism, a reading which gives the reader the status of a character. The reader comes to ‘identify with’ the position of Tom Jones, Pamela, Joseph Andrews, with the ‘proper name’…” in a process which is central to “the production and reproduction of a particular form of subjectivity.” (Stewart 4-5) Viewed together, Stewart and Watt’s claims reveal the most fundamental premise of literary subjectification. Watt limits himself to the representational argument, suggesting that the novel more accurately depicts a new social reality than previous genres. Stewart points to the active function of subject-generation in novels, the way the new social reality is produced by reading practices. On this point Stewart makes the more audacious claim, and the one least likely to fall into the naturalizing trap of realism. Both agree, however, that the process of subjectification (whether cast as depiction or as generation) relies on the definition of certain differential boundaries and action principles. For Watt, the line lies between character and environment. For Stewart, rather more abstractly, it is drawn between exteriority and interiority. In either case, it is a matter of the subject and the objects around them: it is a matter of the self and the world. What kind of world, then, does Defoe build in Robinson Crusoe, and what kind of subject that world would produce, what space into which the character is cast and the actions with which 9 he determines his relationship to that world? It is noteworthy that Defoe’s novel is most memorable and persuasive when Robinson is isolated on his famous island, a selection of the text bereft of what Jean-Jacque Rousseau calls its “irrelevant matter.” In a gesture that is nearly utopic in its reduction of the world, Defoe extracts all that he deems unnecessary for the flourishing of Robinson’s personhood. It is a return to nature with which Rousseau would be (and indeed, was) most pleased. The effect is startling, in that it does indeed produce an experience of commonality – of subjective union or identification – between Robinson and the reader. As Watt explains: Robinson Crusoe … is Defoe’s most heroic character, but there is nothing unusual about his personality or the way he faces his strange experiences; as Coleridge pointed out, he is essentially ‘the universal representative, the person, for whom every reader could substitute himself … nothing is done, thought, suffered, or desired, but what every man can imagine himself doing, thinking, feeling, or wishing for.’ (Watt 78) It would be remiss to think of Robinson Crusoe’s reactions as entirely universal; this is plainly an act of ideological naturalization, offering up an enterprising male European Protestant as the baseline for subjectivity. The critique of this subject-universalization (which is clearly related to but not the same thing as positing a universal subject) resembles Barthes’ larger critique of realism: such a move naturalizes a very specific kind of subjectivity, a Robinsonian subjectivity, that expresses less a lack of culture than the distillation of a very particular cultural attitude. 20 This process of identification is elicited by the novel’s formal structure. We are invited to inhabit Robinson’s position in the world through a depiction of that world, and of a certain set of habits by which one interacts with it. Indeed, the notion of habit and inhabitation – particularly 20 James Joyce diagnoses it thus: “The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence; the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well-balanced religiousness; the calculating taciturnity. Whoever rereads this simple, moving book in the light of subsequent history cannot but fall under its prophetic spell.” (Joyce, Daniel Defoe 25) 10 when inscribed in a world that is defined as uninhabited – is central to the process of subjective disassembly and reproduction. To be freed of habits, and thus of the previously defined boundaries of the subject, Robinson is cast on his Island of Despair. He is torn free of complex cultural context, and in having done so the subject of the novel can resemble the Cartesian cogito all the better. It is precisely this state of presumed innocence, free of prejudice and social determination, that Rousseau finds so appealing, and it is for this reason that – despite his avowed dislike of books – he singles out Robinson Crusoe as the sole component of a child’s ideal library. Superior to all the classics, including Aristotle and Pliny, Defoe’s novel is, to Rousseau’s mind, “the best treatise on an education according to nature. (Rousseau 58) Rousseau’s proposal that Robinson Crusoe is as educational aid is both a striking counterpoint to claims of the novel form’s social evil. Indeed, in his advocacy suggests the novel acts as an antidote to the very poison of the social. Rousseau in this way proposes a fascinating argument about reading. The scenario Rousseau envisions for Emile is one in which his nephew will not just read but re-read the novel, 21 and thus learn to inhabit its world, precisely because it is uninhabited, because the character of Robinson, with which Emile-as-reader ought to identify, is himself rendered habit-less, mirroring his natural surroundings and thus, by Rousseau’s estimation, growing into his natural goodness in accord with his natural reason. Although I earlier dispensed with the claim on the natural, the claim about habit persists, as does that about the inhabitation of the character-position (or, to put it in more theoretical terms, the subject-position) by a reader who, through re-reading, makes of the fictional island a play-space, a virtual reality sufficiently natural-seeming to meet Rousseau’s requirements. For Emile, the novel will “furnish [him] with material, both for work and play”: 21 This is not explicitly stated, but can be easily inferred by the exclusivity of the book and the duration of this exclusivity. 11 His head should be full of it, he should always be busy with his castle, his goats, his plantations. Let him learn in detail, not from books but from things, all that is necessary in such a case. Let him think he is Robinson himself; … He should anxiously consider what steps to take; will this or that be wanting. He should examine his hero's conduct; has he omitted nothing; is there nothing he could have done better? He should carefully note his mistakes, so as not to fall into them himself in similar circumstances, for you may be sure he will plan out just such a settlement for himself. This is the genuine castle in the air of this happy age, when the child knows no other happiness but food and freedom. (Rousseau 177) What is noteworthy in this passage is the peculiar form of reading practice which Rousseau expects of Emile. In a word, Emile should play at Robinson, he should play the novel, play in the novel, as if he lives on the island which the novel depicts. This emphasis on the beneficial aspects of play is part and parcel with the rise of individualism in which the novel plays such a central role. Rousseau’s is only one particularly influential example of the “widely reproduced theories” of seventeenth and eighteenth century Enlightenment scholars who set about “disseminating the paradigm of valuing children’s individuality and the formative qualities of joyful play” (Fanning & Mir 40) that gained such currency amongst the middle classes of the Anglophone world and persist to this day, reimagined and reinforced by psychologists and educators such as Abraham Maslow and Maria Montessori. (Nguyen 481, Dezuanni 14) In order for the educational value of Robinson Crusoe to be realized Emile ought not to read but to play. He ought not to adhere to events as they take place in Defoe’s novel, but rather be critical of them, imagining different outcomes and presumably playing them out in an extension of the fiction. This extension of course is enabled by the completeness of the novel’s world (a function of its containment, its status as island) and the emptiness of the novel’s subject 12 position. What is so compelling about Robinson Crusoe, then, is not the cast-iron convincingness of its protagonist, but rather the empty space which he creates, the position he leaves open for inhabitation by the reader; by this measure Crusoe’s adventure is noteworthy not because it is Crusoe’s alone, but rather because it opens the door for the kind of play which fosters an individual delivered from the fetters of the social (what Maslow calls “rubricization”) which limit the development of the creative individual. (Nguyen 481) Rousseau sees in the novel – this novel, at least – the opportunity for a fantasy space in which the burgeoning subjectivity of his nephew might safely grow. He does not wish for Emile to become the person of Robinson as such, but it is through his projection into Robinson’s position – his condition, his environment, his world – that Emile will be able to productively become at all. And this is due to the ease with which the experiences offered by the novel can be adapted and incorporated into the experiences of the reader – a reader who becomes a player. This resonates with Barthes’ distinction between the consumption of a work, and the production of a Text. In the case of the work-consumed, monistic reading shuts down the plurality inherent to Emile’s free-ranging resubjectification, the sense of multiplicity necessary to make his own way in the Text, to be made by the Text in novel ways. In the Text-produced, “…the reader plays twice over: he plays at the Text (ludic meaning), he seeks a practice which reproduces it; but, so that this practice is not reduced to a passive, interior mimesis (the Text being precisely what resists this reduction) he plays the Text.” (Barthes 63) The possibility of play, and therefore of the reader’s participatory production, hinges upon this empty space wherein the reader is not rendered as a “person,” some wholly constituted thing, but rather the reader-subject as “a man without history, without biography, without psychology” (Barthes 54). Which would seem, on the face of it, to be precisely what Rousseau desires: a restoration of the tabula rasa he so values, a rising above of – or at least escape from – 13 “prejudice,” and thus the capacity to “base [one’s] judgments on the true relations of things” (Rousseau 59). Of course, this rather romantic view should not be taken at face value, and not simply because of the naive (and typically realist) presumption that reading a novel will restore ‘true relations’ between the reader and the world of objects. Barthes himself is speaking not of the novel, which indeed more often than not takes the form of a consumer object, but rather of the Text, a much stranger and more vexing category of object, by no means limited to the novel and its formal realism. Thus, even though Rousseau seems to assume that reading Robinson Crusoe – or even “playing” Robinson Crusoe – offers freedom from the social or provides the unswaddled space of natural subjective growth that he desires in an education, his proposition should be questioned. As Barthes points out “[t]he most subjective reading imaginable is never anything but a game played according to certain rules,” and it is from this game, and its strictures, that we perceive not the “objective or subjective truth of reading” but instead a “ludic truth.” (Barthes 31) In the case of early novelists and what will become the new tradition of formal realism, the subject-as-constituted-by-the-text is hardly unburdened or undefined. These early novels engaged in an attempt to clearly define a subject and its potential relations, with objects and with other subjects. For Defoe, Robinson Crusoe’s situation permits him to “mak[e] a virtue out of necessity” by suggesting the moral and economic advantages of “that universal image of individualist experience, solitude.” (Watt 89) For Richardson, the novelistic romance inaugurated in Pamela possesses “the attractions both of fiction and of devotional literature at the same time and in the same work” (Watt 152), providing – as prayers do – a structure for feeling, and in so doing establishing the novel’s function of “serv[ing] as a fictional initiation rite into the most fundamental mystery of its society” (Watt 172) That is to say sex, though not just sex, but 14 more generally intersubjective relations that, in the wake of capitalism’s “weakening [of] communal and traditional relationships” (Watt 177), were left ill-defined. These are not propositions of free play but rather guidelines for the emergence of very specific subjects. They are works, even as they are texts, and while they sit on the edge of widespread social changes, they are invested in a certain outcome. What novels and their individualist bent do long for, however, is the capacity for Text to provide two things which themselves rub against the grain of singular subjectivity upon which individualism itself relies. First, the ability to roam freely in the world of the text, to play and thus to produce multiplicity within the ordered, consequential universe of the realist novel. And second, the ability to produce a unique, individual experience through the act of reading which permits the production of a subjectivity distinct from that of the character that is being read, however carefully constructed that character may be in its psychology and biography (as is the case with Robinson Crusoe, the homo economicus and autobiographer par excellence) or its proscribed intersubjective relations (as with Pamela, and its guidelines for the new sexual relationship, along with new feminine stereotypes). Individualist subjectivity is defined as distinct. It is conjured in the distinctness of a particular time and place. Yet even if the novel can convincingly convey a consistent-yet-dynamic flow of experience, the stuff of identity, it can only be a copy of the character’s experience, a kind of experiential calibration, unless there is room for play within the text. As Watt points out, the novel challenged literary traditionalism “first and more fully” by making its “primary criterion … truth to individual experience – individual experience which is always unique and therefore new.” (Watt 13) This uniqueness, this newness, finds its expression in the writing of the reader’s subjectivity through the ability to imagine alternatives, not simply to read and follow in Robinson’s footsteps, but to play on his island. The only way to render the reader’s experience as properly unique, and truthfully 15 individual, is to leave room for the reader to expand and extend that experience within the fictional world itself. Proper singularity, the emergent singularity of the unique reader-subject, paradoxically demands the capacity for multiplicity. It requires the self be mirrored, multiplied, and acknowledge in a realm of receptive (or at least responsive) otherness. 22 This points the way to contemporary gaming. In the novel can be found, both in its formal characteristics and its representational ambitions, precursors of the very devices and aims of contemporary video games. Far more than documentary film or reality television, the task of realism set out by the first novelists has been taken up by gaming with its diverse approaches to verisimilitude, and its methods for constituting the subject. Indeed, in gaming’s capacity for play it is possible to see the ludic longing already present within literary formal realism, and to discern the historical issues to which both games and novels emerge as reaction and response. IV. Self Inscription The challenge of attempting to “read” a game – that is, to perform critical analysis – is particular to its form. In the case of literary close readings, encounters with quotational fragments are treated as if they were approximate with meeting that segment of the text “in the wild.” This strategy has proven sufficiently productive at least amongst academics who, being chronic re-readers, have oftentimes already had numerous “natural” encounters with the quotation in question. This is, however, not possible for the critical reading of a game. An online publication might accommodate recordings of the game in action, but this does not allow a sense of game play, especially the practice of play as analogous to and even an extension of the 22 This mirroring/multiplication is reflected in both the anxieties found in both generic outgrowths of the novel and in contemporary discourse around artificial intelligence eg. the Gothic’s preoccupation with ghosts and doppelgangers presaged in Crusoe’s own “footprint in the sand” interlude, and the ambivalent (alternately apocalyptic and utopian) awaiting of the “singularity” where we meet our more-perfect computerized children, as well as our digitized selves. 16 practice of a reading “in the wild.” 23 The best equivalents to textual quotation – screenshots and recordings – cannot properly convey the experience of playing the game. This is doubly troubling since the conveyance of experience, or rather the construction of a certain kind experience, is the chief ambition of realism. I rely upon my previous findings and establish, as best I can, the ground upon which the experience of play is built: the position of the subject within the text. While is it impossible to translate directly the experience of play without recourse to a narrativization that flattens that experience, the mechanism that generate that experience can be described and interpreted, much as the rules of any game can be explained. By elaborating on the components and powers that constitute the player’s presence, the interactions which define the player’s relations to the game’s world, I establish a clearer sense of how the player is able to write themselves into and with the text and thus the kind of subject the game is capable of constructing. Barthes describes three factors which “define the positional field of the subject”: “temporality, person, and diathesis” (Barthes 20). While Barthes is speaking in linguistic terms, broadly referring to the subject of an utterance, the comparison is entirely functional. The playing of a game is, after all, a symbolic and semantic activity, a playing with language, for all that its mechanisms attempt to convey an experience of the real. Understood this way, person describes the inherent qualities implied in the identity of the player’s manifestation within the game, diathesis the player’s range of actions and interactions within the game’s world, temporality the manner in the subject is constituted with relation to time and its representation in the game. These three factors (self-definition, world-interaction, time-experience) are 23 This problem is further compounded by the fact that contemporary games frequently change from version to version, adding or changing features. For the purposes of this example, I will discuss Minecraft as best I understand it in its alpha and early-release stages, versions that are (as one might imagine) somewhat simpler than its initial versions. Moreover, I will focus on the single- player experience of Minecraft as that is generally representative and best fits the comparison with Robinson Crusoe. 17 interlocking codes, necessarily combined so as to be able to produce a robust experience of subjectivity. The object of investigation is Mojang Software’s Minecraft, first released in alpha form in 2009 for the PC, then officially published in its “full version” (that is, with numerous additions and refinements) in 2011. 24 Its subsequent success has seen it migrate to many other digital platforms and inspire innumerable imitators, testaments to its widespread popularity and considerable influence. In late 2014 the game and all its intellectual property were purchased by Microsoft for $2.5 billion – quite the market endorsement. Minecraft’s appeal is considerable, well exceeding the insular (and chiefly imagined) community of gamers. Frequently described as a “creativity tool” rather than a “game” (in the pejorative sense of an idle amusement), it has also seen widespread use as a teaching aid, serving to recreate art exhibits, historical monuments, and even venerated educational institutions. 25 Many educators – still operating under the tenants of neo-Rousseauian theories – have embraced Minecraft as a tool for precisely the kind of creative play which Rousseau encourages in the Emile’s reading of Robinson Crusoe. 26 This conceptualization of play has everything to do with the project of individualist subjectification, such that “the capacity to creative something new and original… functions as a privileged concept that is understood as highly individual” (Nguyen 472) – a goal which parallels exactly formal realism’s goal to produce “individual experience which is always unique and therefore new.” (Watt 13) Minecraft can be shaped into a number of forms, with a number of aims, some more or less effective. Yet at the core of its experience – in its “vanilla” instantiation – Minecraft is a game wherein the player assumes the position of a solitary individual within an extensive natural 24 Minecraft has since become one of the best-selling videogames of all time, second only to the innumerable iterations of Tetris. 25 As of September 2014, there are even plans to recreate the entire British Museum within Minecraft. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-29281051) 26 Abrams, 2016; Allert, Richter & Friedrichsen, 2016; Dezuanni, 2016; Dooghan, 2016; Fanning & Mir, 2016; Nguyen 2016 18 landscape open to the player’s plans and ambitions but containing certain threats to the player’s in-game manifestation. In short, it is a Robinsonian scenario, 27 and this – along with its popularity which, itself, can be used to equate Mojang’s game with Defoe’s novel – is why Minecraft serves as a useful example of the manner in which games carry on the tradition and assume the ambitions implicit to formal realism. The first of Barthes’ factors for determining subject-position is “person,” or in this case Minecraft’s “protagonist” – the entity through which the player inhabits in the world, the zero points of their actions and interactions – who is named Steve. Appearing in the block-like “voxel” aesthetic which is so distinctive of Minecraft, Steve is a rudimentary figure with some masculine gender markers (indicated by the short haircut and what appears to be face stubble). There is also an alternative manifestation named “Alex,” whose bears comparable feminine gender markers (a ponytail and pink lips). These characters are putatively genderless, 28 and even these rudimentary appearances are wholly optional; players are free to substitute a “skin” of their own choosing for this default appearance (see fig. 1.1). It is chiefly a cosmetic effect, with no effect on the hard rules of gameplay, amounting to a concession to the player’s own determination – another way they can choose, should they wish, to inscribe themselves. 29 27 A connection remarked upon by other scholars, to the extent that Minecraft has been described as both “a personal Robinsonade” and “a simulation of Robinson Crusoe’s adventure”. (Dooghan 6; Nguyen 484) 28 So sayeth the developer: http://kotaku.com/5929849/minecraft-guy-isnt-supposed-to-be-a-guyor-a-girl-says-games-creator; of course we should be skeptical of this presumed even-handedness from a creator who has publicly aligned himself with reactionary misogyny movements in gaming culture: http://observer.com/2017/06/minecraft-gamergate-markus-persson-notch- zoe-quinn/. 29 In fact, the default characters in Minecraft technically have their names appended with a question mark, viz. ‘Steve?’ and ‘Alex?’. This maps nicely onto the essential indetermination of the player-subject’s identity to which Minecraft aspires, though it is worth noting that gender distinction remains (despite the alleged genderless-ness of both manifestations) the first, and the default is, of course, male. 19 Figure 1.1: Steve Skin (left) and Alex Skin (right) While the appearance of Steve/Alex can change, the visual experience of “playing Steve/Alex,” thus the manner by which the player sees as and through Steve/Alex, is constant. The player’s vision is represented by a first-person view of the world common to video games. By placing the player “behind the eyes” of the body they inhabit, the game performs its first and most straightforward calibration with individual experience, combining the literary conceit of ‘first person point of view’ with the linear perspective of visual art, itself a means of producing “...fluent, realistic and seamless ‘direct representation’” (Işiğan, 2013), accounting for the association of the first person view in video games with “the popular concept of immersion,” a consequence “the perceptual illusion of non-mediation.” (Therrien, 2015) This matches 20 precisely Barthes’ description of the reality effect in literature, where the representational method effaces itself in the interests of seeming to depict unmediated reality. (Barthes 147-148) In this way the visual field of play is fixed to the bodily manifestation of Steve/Alex, and that body is mobile. The player’s person can move horizontally across his landscape, can jump the height of one “voxel” (the basic unit of matter out of which Minecraft’s world is composed), and is subject to gravity. Steve/Alex’s body is generally invisible to the point of view it supports, save for the appearance of its fist (when striking objects in the world barehanded) or whatever object it may be carrying (most commonly some sort of tool, such as a pick, axe or shovel). All interactions with the world – all potential diathesis – originate from this fixed viewpoint and its body (see fig. 1.2). The purpose is to create an experience of embodied subjectivity, of a presence in the world grounded by a physical body. Figure 1.2: A first-person view of the setting sun in Minecraft, with the character’s fist in the right foreground. 21 Of course bodies don’t simply exist – they require sustenance, are defined by their requirements and limitations. As such, Minecraft’s Steve/Alex has needs and physical limits; the player’s person is, in short, possessed of a limited mortality, at least when the game is played in “survival mode” 30 (as opposed to “peaceful mode” where external threats and internal needs are suspended, and “creative mode” wherein the godlike powers of flight and immortality are bestowed on the player’s person). The “heads up display” or HUD interface displays four signs of physical endurance: two constantly, two others only under the appropriate circumstances (see fig. 1.3). Figure 1.3: HUD displays (All existing bars in the HUD. Clockwise starting from the bottom left: the experience bar, the health bar, the armor bar, the oxygen bar, and the hunger bar.) Most central is health, a general representation of the person’s vitality and thus their closeness to death. This is represented with a row of small red hearts, ten in total, depleting right to left as the player’s person either endures physical damage (due to falling objects, falling from sufficient heights, being burned by intense heat, attacks from hostile entities) or when they begin to either starve or drown. Direct damage from attacks can be forestalled by wearing armor, which appears as first non-constant marker. Represented by a row of small shirt icons, armor is attained chiefly through crafting material harvested from the game’s world, such as leather or metal, into wearable items. The second constant marker is hunger, represented by a row of meat-shanks. This depletes slowly as time progresses, 31 and can be restored by consuming edible items such as fruit, bread or meat. When the row of hunger markers is full, the player’s person regains lost 30 This mode being the most Robinsonian, as well as the most popular, style of Minecraft play. (Nguyen, 2016; Dooghan, 2016) 31 Forming a link with temporality, weaving embodiment with the time-scale interior to the game. 22 health quite rapidly; when it is empty the player begins to starve, gradually losing health. The last marker, breath, appears only when the player’s person is submerged in water; once this counter, represented by a row of bubbles, depletes, the player begins to drown, rapidly losing health. The final indicator – the green bar and its attendant number – indicate, respectively, a value called XP (short for “experience points” or simply “experience”) – and the player- character’s “level.” This is a feature Minecraft inherits from one of its most influential predecessors, the “roguelike,” itself a descendent of tabletop roleplaying games such as Dungeons & Dragons, the investigation of which will be a central concern of my second chapter. For now, it is sufficient to note that “experience” is gained through specific significant actions: defeating enemies or animals and acquiring or processing resources. Experience is “lost” through death, an event which resets the player’s “level” to zero. While I include a more robust analysis of “experience” mechanics below, for the purpose of this discussion experience represents a kind of positive counterpoint to the sustain/protect function of the other four values, being a marker of the direct and active overcoming of the game world, rather than the passive resistance to exterior threats and interior needs. Existence is sustained, while experience is gained. Steve’s physical frailty meets some basic tenets of representational realism. Robinson Crusoe’s own experience is structured by many of the same concerns: the need for food, for protection, for shelter from inclement elements. These needs are all are proper to lived, embodied experience. Numerous environmental threats which Robinson faces are excluded from Minecraft (Steve/Alex faces no earthquakes, no sickness, no lightning-strikes 32 ). However, the central motivation for the player of Minecraft is, at least in the earliest stages of the game, identical to Robinson’s: a question of survival, not just the construction of consciousness within 32 Though the player’s person can fall victim to poison should they consume rotten, uncooked or venomous food. 23 the world, but the work of sustaining that consciousness, of securing survival for the player’s person. Generally speaking the loss of life in Minecraft is not as final as true mortality. Unless one is playing “hardcore mode” 33 the player’s person is “respawned” – effectively re-embodied, restored in a state of full health – either in the vicinity of their original spawn point (the spot where they first entered the game’s world, a mostly arbitrary location known as “worldspawn”) or proximate to the last bed with which they interacted. The practical penalty for death lies in the loss of on-hand possessions and accrued experience. Whatever the player’s person was wearing, carrying or holding in inventory remains at the location of their death. Death is thus penalized, though it is not fatal. It is more directly a material inconvenience rather than an existential threat. Respawning – a sign of the player’s effective immortality – is only one of the times Minecraft’s representational realism breaks down; a sign of what Ian Bogost would call “simulation fever,” those spots in the simulation where representational correspondence fails, where the simulation reveals itself as insufficient to that which it simulates, and thus betrays the ideological assumptions of the game’s developer, which assumptions act to implicitly shape the player’s experience. (Bogost 108) Robinson Crusoe suffers from something comparable to simulation fever of its own, particularly with regards to the protagonist’s psychological reactions to total isolation. As Watt points out that the “ideal freedom” Robinson gains from solitude is “both quite impracticable in the real world and … disastrous for human happiness.” (Watt 87) Yet these febrile patches are not failings in some ambition to total realism, but rather functional elements in the larger project of formal realism as I have defined it: the ability to generate convincing individual subjective experience. The capacity for play – a practice linked to the kind of reading Rousseau endorses – is critical for enabling the multiplicity amenable to subject- 33 To die in “Hardcore mode” is to lose access to that game instance entirely, a event/mechanic known generally as “permadeath”, another feature which Minecraft inherits from its genre predecessor, the roguelike. 24 inhabitation. Thus Minecraft’s respawning enables replaying and carries out the ambitions of realism insofar as it allows room for numerous iterations of the subject-in-the-world. It also demonstrates further that the world can (as per a non-solipsistic interpretation of reality) survive the subject’s destruction, remaining capacious enough for more and different subjects to inhabit it. Similarly Crusoe’s solitude is a symbolic condition: “real” insofar as it expresses the existential solitude distinct to individualist subjectivity, as well as the ambivalence towards solitude the modern (frequently urban) subject feels. These flashes of fever are not strictly “true to life,” yet they contribute to the texts’ ability to generate a subjective or phenomenal reality. Another febrile patch is Steve/Alex’s silence. Minecraft’s player character is just one of many silent video game protagonists, a trope which emerges precisely in the interests of a phenomenal realism that runs counter to representational realism. This evacuation of the voice can be read as an emptying out of any illusion of pre-existing presence, allowing room for the player’s own voice to emerge through their inscription onto the world. What speech is possible in Minecraft’s world is purely textual, and entirely player-produced, taking the form of either books or signs that the player constructs and inscribes. Indeed, giving Steve/Alex a voice – with, say, sound files that would trigger when the player performed certain actions or met certain conditions: “I’m hungry!” or “I’ve struck coal!” – would result in a much greater disruption of phenomenal realism. The necessarily finite supply of recorded lines would inevitably and mechanically repeat, and the singularity of a distinctive voice would detract from the potential for multiplicity which we have identified as critical to self-inscription. The person of Minecraft’s Steve/Alex is constructed as a bare or, more to the point, an unwritten subject, one as little elaborated upon as possible. The player arrives at themselves, as they do in the world, seemingly without preconceptions or pre-existing qualities beyond those most fundamental to a singular subject, and without motivations beyond the sustenance of that 25 subject. Even the most abstract of the player character’s qualities as experience points functions primarily as a marker of a subject’s unbroken duration, its continued survival. The implicit drive to accumulate experience points is simply a direct recognition by the game’s rules of what is, at root, the ambition of formal realism: the production of subjective experience through textual means. The substance of experience – both as game concept and in the broader sense – is interaction with the world. This is written into the game’s very title, which can be read as a portmanteau of the game’s two most distinctive and, in the interests of survival, necessary activities: mining and crafting. Both describe the player’s primary methods of relating to and interacting with the world of the game. It is proper to the tenets of formal realism that world should define subject, the structure of exteriority determining the shape of the player’s emergent interiority. Hence the importance of the second subjective foundational factor, diathesis: the grammar of action and interaction that defines the person’s boundaries and points of contact with the world, their functional vocabulary of self-inscription, their verbal capacity. 34 Much like Robinson, Minecraft’s player is at first driven to craft as a necessity for survival. It is feasible that a player might forgo crafting entirely and survive strictly from foraging fruits and eating raw meat (at the risk of poisoning), digging into the dirt with their fist for shelter from the enemies that thrive at night. Yet such a play-style deviates wildly from what must be understood as anything like the standard Minecraft experience. This alternative mode would indeed be a resistance to the kind of experience Minecraft is fashioned to produce, and would demand the player willfully refuse to engage with the vast majority of Minecraft’s game mechanics. The game wants its players to mine and to craft, understands that there is a great 34 “Verbal” taking on its full and doubled meaning, both linguistic-symbolic (as all actions within the space of a coded game are necessarily also coded and thus textual) as well as active-interactive (since verbs are the active components of language). 26 pleasure to be gained from this kind of interaction with its world, and the world of the game is built to sustain just such activities. Labor in Minecraft is primarily comprised of mining, but by no means limited to it, and this labor is not abstracted or elided. This is an effective radicalization of the realist ambition to produce ‘a continual sense of actual participation in the action’ which had, in the case of the novel, previously relied upon the deployment of epistolary or journal forms. (Watt 25) Each blow of the mining pick, each heave of the shovel, and each instance of ore-smelting must be actively played out, repetitious activities that should, on the face of it, be extremely tedious. Yet like Robinson’s journal, which is similarly repetitious – a great many of the entries, particularly the shorter ones, hinge upon variations on the verbs “to work” and “to go,” simple actions which are entirely at home in Minecraft – this collapse of narrative and experienced action leads to a compelling sense of immersion in that action, a simulation of that experience or, in the case of Minecraft, its immediate production, achieved through a “close match between player action and game response” (Costello 2016). Indeed, it is primarily through labor that the player accrues experience in both the broad narrative and the game mechanical sense. This is a radical realization of the realist ambition to produce “a continual sense of actual participation in the action” (Watt 25), which in the novel had relied upon epistolarity or journal-keeping. Much of this labor is, at least initially, enabled by and mediated through tools: the aforementioned pick, spade and axe. Labor consists of striking any given object in the world until it is either “knocked loose” from the world or reduced to components; in both cases, the action is one of making a piece of the world acquirable, i.e. able to be held in the player’s inventory. The very tools upon which the player relies to broaden the game’s interactions – beyond simply striking dirt, wood and sand with a fist – demand an engagement with the crafting mechanics, which function as a distillation of objects in the world into extensions of the player’s 27 powers, further advancing and enabling the task of acquisition. This is true, also, of Robinson Crusoe, who – over the course of his stay on the island – becomes “master of every mechanick art” () a mastery that eventually extends to a sense of his absolutely sovereignty over the island, thus underwriting his essential relation towards the world he inhabits. In many ways inventory and crafting interfaces are second in prominence only to the first-person viewpoint which frames the player’s primary modes of interaction – i.e. moving through and actively acquiring/altering the terrain and the objects that populate it – with the world. These interfaces define the player’s more complex object-relations which dominate Minecraft’s active grammar and tend to guide the long-term development of gameplay. Indeed, there are over 300 different crafting “recipes,” to even “play” much of Minecraft. Thus to engage with a large number of its rules and systems, the substance of the game itself means engaging with its crafting mechanics, mechanics that are progressive by design, with many crafted items permitting access to “more advanced” materials which, in turn, can be crafted into “more advanced” items. (see fig. 1.4) Figure 1.4: Inventory 28 First are “held items,” a grid of nine squares at the bottom both of the crafting display and the larger first-person interface, representing those items which the player has “ready-to-hand.” These are usually stocked with tools or, alternately, items which the player wishes to place back into the world. It is fitting, then, that this display appears directly beneath the health and hunger displays, as it serves a similar function of defining the limits of the player characters body. In this case this display serves as a direct expression of their outward actions, as opposed to the passive-reactive limit of survival that health and hunger represent. Indeed, the ‘held items’ display – which also maps those items onto numerals on the keyboard so that the player may easy switch between items-in-hand – is functionally identical to a common interface feature of another extremely popular genre of game: the first-person shooter, or “FPS.” The classic first- person shooter populates this realm of the “ready-to-hand” almost exclusively with weapons, whereas Minecraft focuses primarily on tools and items, 35 but both the FPS and Minecraft treat “held items” as the array which enables direct interaction with objects in the world. 36 The inventory-proper is a much more capacious grid of twenty-seven squares and it contains the reserve of the player’s possessions. It is a peculiar space, one that runs very much at odds with representational realism. Within the inventory objects become effectively weightless and insubstantial – or rather unworldly, unresistant – stacking upon one another in improbable amounts, allowing the player to feasibly carry as many as 1,728 blocks of solid stone without strain. Most noteworthy is the limit on the size of block-stacks: sixty-four, 37 a term that is less arbitrary than merely indicative of the abstraction of these objects, their distillation to pieces of code, the essentially manipulable base of the world. Within this window it is not just possible to 35 In Robinson Crusoe tools and weapons are also the prevailing ready-to-hand objects. Robinson rarely strays away from home without his gun handy, and he takes great pains to acquire an iron crow and to fashion a spade. 36 Thus we see how diathesis fundamentally structures the player’s subject, as it defines the essential manner in which the player can relate to and interact with its world. As the exclusivity of weapons in the FPS indicates, indeed demands and defines, violence is almost always the sole (certainly the primary) means of interaction in such games. 37 That is to say 2^5, a value that is instantly recognizable to those familiar with the binary power progression. 29 keep a tally of objects in one’s possession – it is immediately evident. Access to this information is a built-in feature of the player character’s ludic consciousness. Both Defoe’s protagonists and Minecraft’s Steve/Alex “have no need to learn [bookkeeping]” capable of keeping the reader/player “more fully informed of their present stocks of money and commodities than any other characters in fiction.” (Watt 63) The crafting window in the inventory interface consists of a grid of four squares that appear directly next to the player character’s image, 38 denoting the player character’s innermost – that is, most interior, most proper, most distinguishing – operation. It is a kind of nature-to- culture converter, turning raw materials into useable items, the most sophisticated and complex method by which the player inscribes themselves and their presence into the world of the game. The capacity of crafting-in-inventory is limited. To produce all of the most important tools and items it is first necessary to create a “crafting bench,” a fixed block through which the player can summon what can be considered the crafting display-proper (see fig. 1.5) Here the crafting grid is expanded to nine squares, and becomes capable of considerably more complex combinations and refined results. Figure 1.5: Crafting bench 38 This character display is noteworthy as the closest thing to a mirror in the game, the sole appearance of the player character outside of their fist. This indicates doubly the domain of the inventory as the domain of embodied subjective power, and that the body is itself one of the objects in the world which is under the player’s power. 30 In crafting we begin to see the essence of the player’s relation to their world, one mirroring Robinson’s own. What begins as mere survival engages the player’s near-inevitable progression towards a technological mastery of the world, an ever-more extensive power to shape and control that world. Almost any prolonged game of Minecraft is a task of endless distillation, of interacting with the world through held items, reserving a piece of that world in abstracted form in the inventory and then finally processing it through the crafting grid, generally for the purpose of further altering the world, and thus marking it with the player’s presence, the stamp of their self. This relationship to objects, and the understanding that comes with it, is intrinsic to the player character’s subjectivity. Recipes are simply known (to the player character, not necessarily the player, who may find it necessary to consult an online guide) or at the very least possible, and in fact define the furthest extent of the player’s interaction with the world. To craft complex and refined items from difficult-to-find resources is the closest thing to a ‘goal’ the game offers beyond survival. The ability to bake a cake was, at one time in the game’s development, seen as a prestige achievement. Thus we come to the boundary of the player’s immediate person and their actions, their relations with the world around them. 39 But what of the world itself? Robinson is nothing without his island. Indeed, island-ness is a key component of that which enables Robinsonian subjectivity, the conditions of “absolute economic, social and intellectual freedom for the individual” (Watt 86). His being cast away and stranded on an island is critical to Robinson’s resubjectification. This state of being is what forces him to attend to the specifics of his survival and thus motivates his crafting. He despises the island and the state it sustains at first but over 39 Diathesis is precisely about the crossing of this boundary, naming as it does the manner in which verbs subtly change their semantic function. Diathesis (as determinative of subject position) is as much a matter of the world’s action upon the subject as the subject’s action upon the world. It marks the point of mutual inscription. 31 time learns to love it as Rousseau loves it: as a space wherein his ultimate freedom is made possible through solitude in the untarnished space of nature. Yet, Crusoe’s island is not nature. Despite Rousseau’s insistence that the scenario is sufficient to simulate man in a natural state, the space Defoe conjures is not a natural one, nor is it a return to Crusoe’s presumed pre-social (and thus untarnished) subjectivity. To think otherwise is to fall into the trap of naive realism, which presents the text as a source of unmediated access to both nature itself and to the essential and reasonable humanity of the subject within it (what Rousseau considers natural to the human). The impulse is, instead, the ambition to do both which inflects the text, and the manner in which it attempts to do so, and thus it is the specific formal methods of representing reality which concern this investigation. Because while Crusoe’s island and Minecraft’s world cannot give us the real, they do aim to represent the real, insofar as they present a texture of experience more approximate to an experience of reality. Barthes touches upon this texture of reality when he comments on the importance of “insignificant notation,” “purely summatory” description that amount to “useless details.” His example is the barometer in Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart.” (Barthes 142-3) Indeed, this kind of signification in excess – or, rather, signification of excess – denotes reality by virtue of its seeming to do nothing besides report the real in all its structurally uncalled-for plenitude. It is not a description of any actual given reality – Crusoe’s island is wholly invented, not even extrapolated from discrete real locations as might be argued of, say, Conrad’s Costaguana – rather it contains an aspect we recognize as adhering to reality itself: that of excess beyond signification. Yet this aspect of reality – excess – is but one of several qualities which the world of games such as Minecraft very successfully simulate in their own assumption of the realist task. In their ability to generate worlds – that is, complex spaces in which the subject can inscribe themselves – games most distinctly continue the realist tradition. 32 Minecraft’s world is excessive – this is evident from its size and depth. While there are technical limitations on the size of the world in Minecraft, this limit is absurdly high, such that the proper ‘maximum’ size of the world would still be 9.3 million times the surface area of the Earth. In dimensions alone the potential space of Minecraft’s world quietly literally exceeds that of our own. From the perspective of direct representational reality this is quite obviously unreal, but it is perfectly congruent with the goals of phenomenal realism. For the solitary individual, the real world in all its vastness is sufficient to be infinite insofar as it is inexhaustible by any singular mortal experience. Minecraft assures its subject of a comparable infinity, guaranteeing that no meaning, function or purpose could possibly be ascribed to the whole of it, beyond that which its subject inscribes. Indeed, the only purpose one could allege to Minecraft’s excessive largeness is precisely its ability to limitlessly accommodate the inscription of the player, to mean nothing in itself but to be endlessly mine-able and craft-able, to endlessly support the acts of the player and the meaning they create through their activity Moreover, as I have established, mortality is a quality definitive of Minecraft’s subject, a mortality that emerges not only from the interior needs of the player’s person but also in relation to various threats in that world (be they mobile entities such as wild animals or monsters, or simple environmental threats such as precipitous drops or pools of lava). The world demands consistent forms of applied labor from the subject if they are to make their mark – however infinitesimal – upon the world. This is another aspect of phenomenal realism, that of resistance. Compare the aspirations to realism implicit to “survival mode,” wherein mortality and labor are enforced aspects of the game’s rules, to “creative mode,” wherein immortality and flight are both bestowed on the player, and whereby the labor required to make a mark on the landscape is reduced to zero. Even those components of the world deemed indestructible can be instantly destroyed by the “creative mode” player. Of these two “modes,” “survival” is easily taken as 33 “the most real,” almost exclusively by dint of its difficulty, in the way the world resists – and resistance is insistence, the mark of something other than the will of the player – thus also responding to the activity of the subject, demanding purposeful acts of inscription. Last of all, the world of Minecraft is random, thus activating a third aspect of phenomenal realism, and one which games are uniquely suited to provide. Whereas Robinson’s island will be the same every time, as will Robinson himself, Minecraft deploys a mechanism particular to gaming and its contributions to formal realism: that of procedural generation. Yet another legacy of the roguelike, procedural generation describes the process by which underlying algorithms are capable of producing a functionally unique world. This world-generation process is governed by certain rules, and thus certain consistent properties and qualities can be expected of it. 40 The ambition is clear: to make no two Minecraft worlds the same. This enables the “uniqueness” – a holy grail of realism according to both Watt’s analysis and Rousseau’s wishes – of individual experience by giving the player a functionally unique world in which to constitute themselves. The world is individual, and thus the subject must also be, as there is nothing else besides the world and the player’s interactions with it to define what the subject even is. The excess, resistance, and randomness of Minecraft’s world are all aspects deployed to create a sense of otherness, definitionally the limit of the self. They describe the uninhabited – literally that which has not been subsumed into habit, that which exceeds, resists and confuses habituation – and thus both nature and the other. It is in the service of creating a space for a habit-less subject that such a world is conjured, if only to encourage them to generate their own new habits, and thus a new subject. At first the world-as-found is ‘natural’ and only through time and engagement – through the production of experience through interaction – that the subject generates their relation to the world and thus the outline of its self. Most of these interactions are 40 Qualities which are generally in keeping with representational realism. 34 to some extent prescribed – hemmed in by the rules of the game – and indeed some prescription is necessary for realism to operate intelligibly. Actions must have predictable outcomes. However, the broader context which they form, the shape of meaning they outline, is entirely a matter of the player’s interpretation. Minecraft’s temporality is all that remains to fully situate the subjective field the player inhabits and the field of presence wherein they will inscribe themselves through new habits. Through temporal representation we see one of the most immediate ways in which games resume the ambitions of realism. As Watt notes, “the novel’s closeness to the texture of daily experience directly depends upon its employment of a much more minutely discriminated time-scale than had previously been employed in narrative.” (Watt 22) In Minecraft narrative time – the time of meaning and significance – is entirely collapsed into the minute time of conscious experience. As previously mentioned, labor is not elided in Minecraft. Instead it is part of the deliberate pleasure of the game, a hugely important part of the diathetic relationship between player and world. An axe-blow is an axe-blow is an axe-blow. Work takes as much time as it takes, demanding a more robust development of habit within the world by accounting for each action, without interruption. Thus what Robinson Crusoe simulates by use of the journal format (and what other early novels simulate through epistolary format) is directly accomplished in Minecraft, both diathetically and temporally. However, time in Minecraft is accelerated, as evidenced by the fact that a day and night cycle 41 in the game takes only twenty minutes. Yet the time experienced in Minecraft, while miniaturized, is continuous and one-to-one: time in narrative equals time in consciousness. Elision of time is possible in the game only by interacting with a bed, by “sleeping” in the game, an act which is analogous to an elision of consciousness itself. 41 Another de-realistic aspect of ‘creative mode’ involves a temporal suspension; as well as possessing immortality and flight, the player exists in the temporal condition of an endless day. 35 Minecraft thus aims to further fulfill a dream of realism, one which Rousseau identified in Robinson Crusoe, the dream of bare subjectivization (i.e. producing a subject without habit) through the production of a virtual nature (a definitionally uninhabited space). In many ways, Minecraft better answers the demands made of Defoe’s text. Its subject appears more bare than Robinson Crusoe, the world more capacious and, by the standards of realism itself, more representative of the “natural” by dint of its randomness –a randomness that, itself, guarantees the unique character of the subject and their experience. In short, Minecraft as a being a game permits freedom of precisely the sort Rousseau values: freedom from habit, freedom from society, the freedom of the solitary subject, and the Cartesian cogito. What is noteworthy is the extent to which, in the face of all this freedom, the same behaviors, common fears, and shared anxieties all tend to emerge. The subject is not as bare is it might seem. Although Minecraft aims to be more Robinson than Robinson, to be the kind of text Rousseau wished Robinson Crusoe to be for Emile, in this very hyper-Robinsonism space Robinson’s peculiarities of habit emerge not from any pretense of psychological interior – the description of which remains a privileged province of the novel – but rather as a consequence of broader subject/world relations. My next section addresses common behaviors and what they reveal about these relations. V. From Survivor to Sovereign Criticism of purported universal subjectivity is by no means new, but what texts as seminal and pervasive as Robinson Crusoe and Minecraft provide is a more detailed model of that subject position. They permit us to examine the habits and impulses that, in the face of purported freedom, tend to reliably emerge, even after three centuries of cultural ferment. Further, and especially in a procedural work such as a game, they allow us to examine, with structural rigor, 36 their conditions of emergence, inscribed in the relations between this supposedly bare subject and their supposedly uninhabited world. We say supposedly uninhabited, because while the core experience we have described is the single-player experience of Minecraft, the most Robinsonian in its solitude, even this island- world of solitude contains entities which approximate others. Yet there are, in Minecraft, a number of “mobs.” 42 Some of these entities – most of the animals – are domesticable. Minecraft’s domesticable animals find clear analogs in Defoe’s novel. The animal appears as a mechanical and masterable part of the world in both subjective universes, and thus is fully compatible with the Cartesian subject. Others – a number of supernatural monsters – are unremittingly hostile. Upon closer investigation, these are threats and fears that appear in both Minecraft and Robinson Crusoe, in the form of the monsters and phantasms that mark both texts. In his reading of Minecraft’s implicit ideology, Daniel Dooghan claims that the game is “a utopian space for aspirational neoliberal subjects” through its privileging of a “mythological individualism” (Dooghan 5, 17). It is this myth upon which the valorization of the unique, creative subject rests. Yet just as Minecraft participates in the tradition of the Robinsonade, its alleged neo-liberalism is descended from older formulations of the citizen-subject. As Dooghan himself asserts, reinforcing that genealogy, “what [Robinson Crusoe] provided for the rising 18th-century bourgeoisie, [Minecraft] provides for those under late capital.” (Dooghan 2) The common thread of individualism connects novel and game, reflecting the difficulties that arise when this paradise of the self encounters signs of the other. Jacques Derrida’s seminar The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2 is particularly useful, dealing – as it does – with both Robinson Crusoe and subjectivity, particularly the connection 42 This term is an abbreviation of ‘mobile’, and is derived from the conventions of MUDs, multi-user dungeons, themselves an intermediary between the coming chapters’ objects of inquiry: roguelikes, tabletop gaming and multiplayer online roleplaying. 37 between sovereignty and subjectivity which, he argues, Defoe’s novel illustrates. And it is in Crusoe’s fear that he locates this connection: [Crusoe] is scared. (He sleeps in a tree, having no house, “for fear of wild Creatures”): he <is> scared, that is his basic feeling, like Hobbes’s man for whom fear is the primary passion, the one that originally leads to the foundation of the state and to that alliance, that “covenant” that … can be signed only among men, according to Hobbes, and with neither God nor beasts. Daniel Defoe, we know, was a reader of Hobbes, among others. (Derrida 2) As I argued earlier, it was during an epoch of social change that fears about the novel and its powers proliferated. That this was due to the novel’s (alleged) power to generate that change, producing new subjects for a new social order. Yet what fear motivates the writing of the novel itself, and what fears does the novel’s new individualist subject express? For Rousseau it is the tyranny of society and all its prejudices that drives people to seek Robinsonian experiences, to attempt the Cartesian deconstruction of the traditional self to reach a prelapsian purity. As Watt points out, Robinson’s disastrous shipwreck, “far from being a tragic peripety, is the deus ex machina which makes it possible for Defoe to present solitary labor, not as an alternative to a death sentence, but as a solution to the perplexities of economic and social reality.” (Watt 88) This very desire to retreat from society is part and parcel with the society that was forming and was being formed by the novel. The individualist subject, whether or not it is brought into being through lived experience or through its fictional analog, endures in solitude yet fears its alternative. Thus Robinson Crusoe’s popularity can be accounted for in part due to its power to redeem the experience of being-alone which, for the individualist subject, is basically constitutive of experience. As Watt puts it: “The solitary readers of two centuries of 38 individualism cannot but applaud so convincing an example of making a virtue out of necessity, so cheering a coloring to that universal image of individualist experience, solitude.” (Watt 89) And in making a virtue of his solitude, Robinson reciprocally creates a fear of the other – a fear of a society of others, of the Other in general – which haunts him in various and ambivalent forms. As Derrida points out: [Robinson] is afraid of being swallowed up or “buried alive” … thus of sinking alive to the bottom, of sinking and being dragged down to the depths, as much because of an earthquake as because of wild or savage beasts, or even because of human cannibals. He is afraid of dying a living death by being swallowed or devoured into the deep belly of the earth or the sea or some living creature, some living animal. That is the great phantasm, the fundamental phantasm or the phantasm of the fundamental: he can think only of being eaten and drunk by the other, he thinks of it as a threat but with such compulsion that one wonders if the threat is not also nurtured like a promise, and therefore a desire. (Derrida 77) These fears – of the earth, of beasts and of cannibals, all manifestations of the other – remain visible in Minecraft, demonstrating the deep relationship between the kind of subject these texts form and the kinds of fears inherent to this formation of subjectivity. By examining another formal feature of the game, the presence of ‘mobs,’ the mobile and thus automatic and autonomous entities in Minecraft, reveals they are the closest thing the game’s world has to others. 39 Figure 1.6: Mobs The most benign entities in Minecraft are domesticable animals. As I noted above, pigs, sheep, cows and chickens can all be tamed, bred and slaughtered for resources such as leather, wool and meat. In this way they are not notably different from Robinson’s tame goats. Indeed, they serve a similar function in both texts, as subordinate companions and as both food and clothing. They are cute and distinctly inhuman. They are cohabitants – their presence shapes habit by existing as intractable objects and resources – but they are not easily mistaken for subjects. Meanwhile, the hostile mobs tend to be the most humanoid, even if the shape they resemble is mutated in some way. 43 There is the disembodied head of the slime, the armless torso of the creeper, the fleshless frame of the skeleton and then, finally, the most common hostile mob, the zombie. 44 The zombie is an embodied example both of living death and of death by being devoured – those very things Robinson most fears. As the image above indicates, the gradient that stretches from domesticable animal to hostile monster ends with the avatar of Steve himself, the player’s default avatar and – as side by side comparison reveals – the zombie is depicted as wearing the exact same outfit as Steve, comprising a dark (greenish, really) mirror of 43 The most bestial hostile mob is the spider, whose function as a mediator between animals (domesticable) and monster (hostile) is marked by its own ability to transgress boundaries; spiders are the only mob that can climb walls. 44 The ubiquity of the zombie in contemporary media culture would require a thesis-long explication unto itself. For now it suffices to note that it is precisely the zombie -– both in its function as horror movie monster and philosophical thought- experiment -– that begs the question: what makes the subject? 40 the subject. The zombie is thus a most proper contemporary analog to the cannibal who so concerns Robinson Crusoe. The two embody the same anxiety about the self-eating capacity of others, the threat to one’s ipseity they represent, both through both their difference (as other) and their resemblance (as too close to the self). As Derrida points out, this ambivalent fear of the other is correlated with habits of sovereignty. It reveals the mentality that produces both the modern subject and the modern state. Already the all-aloneness of the Robinsonian scenario, the individualism that Watt considers foundational to the novel and thus to its subjects, provides the basis for a conception of sovereignty. “It is not by chance” Derrida observes, “that two meanings as different as ‘I am alone’ (in the sense of solitude) and ‘I am alone,’ in the sense of exception, singularity, unicity, election, and irreplaceability (often, moreover, the features of sovereignty) here lodge in the same word.” (Derrida 66) Not content with this grammatical link, however, Derrida returns us to Rousseau, in order “to link firmly our reading… of Robinson Crusoe to our problematic of sovereignty.” He notes that, in a text other than Emile, Rousseau “invokes Robinson Crusoe” but this time “not as an experience of an exceptional insular originality that is freed from all prejudice, but rather <as> sovereign mastery, <as> monarchy of a Robinson who commands everything on his island, on an island during the time he lives on it alone, the sole inhabitant of his world.” (Derrida 20) The monsters, however, most vividly demonstrate the anxieties specific to the question of the presence of the other and the potential dangers they represent. The experience of threats to the player-subject – threats which themselves present a distorted or reduced image of the subject – is what motivates much of the initial construction in Minecraft. The danger of others is one of the most forceful initiators of activity and thus of the very inscription which, as I have established, comprises the formation of the player-subject. A similar motivation drives Robinson 41 as he constructs his wooden stake fences and, ultimately, what he calls his ‘Castle.’ An act mirrored by the Minecraft player who frequently populates their world with “increasingly elaborate fortresses.” (Dooghan 12) As such, the immediate active symptom of sovereignty is first and foremost a fear of the other – be it in the form of animals or, worse still for its similarity to the subject, man-eating-men: cannibals or zombies. Thus, as with Robinson, the subject’s trajectory from survivor to sovereign is one of the most reliably reproducible within Minecraft. As a strip from the popular gaming webcomic Penny Arcade so succinctly illustrates: Figure 1.7: Penny Arcade Comic “Mine All Mine, Part Two” Note that, while Robinson’s original technique for avoiding danger on the first night is to sleep in a tree, the character in the strip echoes Robinson’s fears of being “swallowed up” by the earth in the very act of taking refuge in the earth. Yet by the third night – thanks to the diligent daily work indicated in panel two – the frightened survivor is transfigured into a sovereign figure, confidently surveying the surrounding lands. The inclusion of a crown, cape and flag are all telling embellishments. The game has no recipe for crowns, flags or capes, yet the artist has depicted them as indicators of the kind of experience the character is having, standing triumphant 42 on their torch-lined rampart. Such is the insistent urge to sovereignty, the sovereign texture of experience, which inflects the subject constituted in Minecraft, just as in Robinson Crusoe. VI. Heroes, Ghosts and Kings The experiential quality of realism makes each reader’s encounter productive not only of the subject, but the story of that subject’s coming-to-be; the two go hand in hand, both the result of the formal processes at work. Games are particularly prone to this kind of narrative productivity. The social function of games, even or particularly single-player games, is to enable discussion and reflection not only on the rules of the game, but each player’s unique experience of play. The documents of these experiences – which take the form of everything from images to videos to forum posts to fiction – are texts in their own right, and thus often use formal methods very different from those of games, but they retain a privileged relationship to the specific game out of which they emerge. 45 Traces such as the crown, cape and flag are telling precisely because, while not directly represented within the game, they are experienced via association during the dynamic process of play. Thus I turn our attention to a particularly striking parallel between the incident of the footprint in the sand, one of the most frequently analyzed moments in Defoe’s novel, and one of these aforementioned documents of experience: the internet urban legend or “creepy pasta” called “Herobrine,” the latter of which I reproduce here in its entirety (spelling and grammatical errors included). I had recently spawned a new world in single-player Minecraft. Everything was normal at first as I began chopping down trees and crafting a workbench. I noticed something move amongst the dense fog (I have a very slow computer so I have to play with a tiny render distance). I thought it was a cow, so I pursued it, hoping to grab some hides for armor. 45 Games designed to create collaborative fiction – the role-playing games discussed in chapter 2 – are particularly clear examples of this function of ludic texts. 43 It wasn't a cow though. Looking back at me was another character with the default skin, but his eyes were empty. I saw no name pop up, and I double-checked to make sure I wasn't in multiplayer mode. He didn't stay long, he looked at me and quickly ran into the fog. I perused out of curiousity, but he was gone, I continued on with the game, not sure what to think. As I expanded to world I saw things that seemed out of place for the random map generator to make; 2x2 tunnels in the rocks, small perfect pyramids made of sand in the ocean, and groves of trees with all their leaves cut off. I would constantly think I saw the other "player" in the deep fog, but I never got a better look at him. I tried increasing my render distance to far whenever I thought I saw him, but to no avail. I saved the map and went on the forums to see if anyone else had found the pseudo- player. There were none. I created my own topic telling of the man and asking if anyone had a similar experience. The post was deleted within five minutes. I tried again, and the topic was deleted even faster. I received a PM from username 'Herobrine' containing one word: 'Stop.' When I went to look at Herobrine's profile, the page 404'd. I received an email from another forum user. He claimed the mods can read the forum user messages, so we were safer using email. The emailer claimed that he had seen the mystery player too, and had a small 'directory' of other users who had seen him as well. Their worlds were littered with obviously man-made features as well, and described their mystery player to have no pupils. About a month passed until I heard from my informant again. Some of the people who had encountered the mystery man had looked into the name Herobrine and found that name to be frequently used by a swedish gamer. After some further information gathering, it was revealed to be the brother of Notch, the game's developer. I personally emailed Notch, and asked him if he had a brother. It took him a while, but he emailed me back a very short message. I did, but he is no longer with us. — Notch I haven't seen the mystery man since our first encounter, and I haven't noticed any changes to the world other than my own. I was able to press 'print screen' when I first saw him. Here's the only evidence of his existance: 44 Posted anonymously in 2010 on 4chan’s /v/ board, over time the story gained popularity within the Minecraft player community, assisted by confabulators and references to the titular phantom in a popular series of YouTube videos. There is, of course, no Herobrine ghost programmed into Minecraft, much less one based on a departed sibling. Markus “Notch” Persson, the creator of Minecraft, has no deceased brother. Yet the core anxiety expressed by the story is startlingly clear and indicative. First the insistence on the instance of play being single-player – the narrator even stipulates that they double-checked to be sure they weren’t in a multi-player game. The subject is conceived as singular, as alone, and this is the basis for the initial fear and confusion. Next, the traces alleged to the ghost – leafless tree groves, sand pyramids, short tunnels – are specifically those the narrator believes are “out of place for a random map generator.” These are traces that are unnatural within the nature of Minecraft, the very “naturalness” of which is founded precisely in the assurance of randomness, and thus a trace of presence, of another subject. Compare this to Robinson Crusoe’s famous encounter with the footprint in the sand, a chapter which begins with an unambiguous assertion of Crusoe’s sovereignty: 45 There was my majesty the prince and lord of the whole island; I had the lives of all my subjects at my absolute command; I could hang, draw, give liberty, and take it away, and no rebels among all my subjects. Then, to see how like a king I dined, too, all alone, attended by my servants! Poll, as if he had been my favourite, was the only person permitted to talk to me. My dog, who was now grown old and crazy, and had found no species to multiply his kind upon, sat always at my right hand; and two cats, one on one side of the table and one on the other, expecting now and then a bit from my hand, as a mark of especial favour. (Defoe 117) Here is King Crusoe, surrounded by his trusted subjects: all domesticated animals. What follows is a classically Robinsonian description of clothing and equipment, stock and territory, that bears a resemblance to the function of Minecraft’s inventory screen, complete with a clearly described self-image. But it is Robinson’s fear we’re after, the fear that follows out this self-assuredness and self-possession that emerges from sovereignty, and it is in the passages further on that his royal composure is profoundly disturbed: It happened one day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen on the sand. I stood like one thunderstruck, or as if I had seen an apparition. I listened, I looked round me, but I could hear nothing, nor see anything; I went up to a rising ground to look farther; I went up the shore and down the shore, but it was all one; I could see no other impression but that one. I went to it again to see if there were any more, and to observe if it might not be my fancy; but there was no room for that, for there was exactly the print of a foot—toes, heel, and every part of a foot. How it came thither I knew not, nor could I in the least imagine; but after innumerable fluttering thoughts, like a man perfectly confused and out of myself, I came home to my fortification, not feeling, as we say, the 46 ground I went on, but terrified to the last degree, looking behind me at every two or three steps, mistaking every bush and tree, and fancying every stump at a distance to be a man. Nor is it possible to describe how many various shapes my affrighted imagination represented things to me in, how many wild ideas were found every moment in my fancy, and what strange, unaccountable whimsies came into my thoughts by the way. (Defoe 122) The assurance of being alone, and thus the assurance of sovereignty, and in turn the assurance of self-hood – individual, singular, making its determining mark on the world – is what the print upsets. As Derrida says, “having not yet found any trace of human life on the island, having not yet heard any voice other than that of his parrot Poll who echoes his own voice,” when Robinson encounters the footprint it is “as though he had seen a ghost, a vision of a specter (an Apparition).” And the ambiguity that inflects Robinson’s fear of being devoured – what Derrida calls a “promise” and a “desire” – appears also in his fear of the footprint, “a sign that is as menacing as it is promising, uncanny, as diabolical as it is divine: the other man. What terrifies Robison is the possible trace of the spectral presence of another, another man on the island. In a certain way, this is everything he was looking for or dreaming of, but the signal of the arrival of what he was hoping for, a bit like the messiah, suddenly terrifies him. Who is the other?” (Derrida 47) This ambiguity is essential, in that it regards the subject’s very essence, its sense of self- sameness, its authority over its actions – that is, the assurance that it is the author of those actions. Hence Robinson’s attempt to calm himself by reasoning that the footprint is his own: In the middle of these cogitations, apprehensions, and reflections, it came into my thoughts one day that all this might be a mere chimera of my own, and that this foot might be the print of my own foot, when I came on shore from my boat: this cheered me 47 up a little, too, and I began to persuade myself it was all a delusion; that it was nothing else but my own foot; and why might I not come that way from the boat, as well as I was going that way to the boat? Again, I considered also that I could by no means tell for certain where I had trod, and where I had not; and that if, at last, this was only the print of my own foot, I had played the part of those fools who try to make stories of spectres and apparitions, and then are frightened at them more than anybody. (Defoe 125) Robinson is taking comfort by laying diathetical claim to the mark, and dismissing his previous fears as so many ghost stories (like Herobrine!) But it is precisely that initial doubt as to whether or not it was his print, whether or not the mark was a unknown mark of his own or the mark of an unknown other, that most profoundly troubles Robinson and, more to the point, the Robinsonian subject. As Derrida explains: That’s the question that this bare footprint is asking me, as the trace of a man. The other man, the step of the other man – is it not me again, me alone who, returning like a revenant on the circular path of the island, become an apparition for myself, a specular phantom, a specular specter (the other man as myself, myself as another, I who am an other), but a specular phantom who cannot, who does not know if he is himself, apse, who really doesn’t know – nor whether he can still look at himself in the mirror? He scares himself. He becomes the fear that he is and that he makes himself. (Derrida 49) There are no mirrors in Minecraft, nor in Robinson Crusoe. The reflection of the self must be found in the other. Yet the always-uncanny other – appearing as ghost or zombie, cannibal or devil – presents an intolerable problem to the singular self, the sovereign survivor. Herobrine is identical to the player’s default appearance save for the lack of pupils, a particularly clear sign of the uncanny. Its simultaneous difference and resemblance, and its impossible (non)presence, challenges the player’s aloneness, singularity and self-sameness. The footprint on Robinson’s 48 island might not even be a sign of threat; it could be Robinson’s own, or that of rescuers. But the terrible foundational fear and fundamental fantasy lies in this very uncertainty, one that emerges in precisely the situation in which the subject is supposed to be most clearly defined, most singular and most sovereign. In Robinson Crusoe an island, in Minecraft a single-player session. This stranded state is, for Rousseau, a political dream of a ‘true’ democracy in which the subject and sovereign are contained within the same person, “a citizen who is, all alone and immediately, the state itself, the sovereignty of the state-of-citizen, of the citizen-state” one which correlates to “a sovereignty without obstacle and therefore without enemy” (Derrida 21). Yet Derrida goes on to ask, “what does ‘person’ mean, once the sovereign and the people are but one? Is it a new definition of person itself, the only political or politico-juridical definition of the person (beyond the individual), or else is it the insular utopia of an individual alone enough on an island to be both the sovereign and all the people gathered together, concentrated or reduced to a single individual, a Robinson on his arrival to the Island of Despair?” (Derrida 22) This total loneliness of the individual, both intolerable and indispensable, is itself the very guarantee of sovereignty. But the moment the other arrives in this political paradise, the moment intersubjective relations become a possibility, fear and the potential for violence are immediately manifest. In an instant we go from a Rousseauan natural state to a Hobbesian state of nature. Robinson’s methods for coping are thus predictable and predictably colonial: he demands subjugation and conversion, or resorts to violence. This, of course, is how he imposes his will on Friday – liberating him through violence he then demands literal religious conversion and total obedience, a willingness to die upon his order – but it is also his method for dealing with the English mutineers, once their leaders are executed and they are taken captive: …I sent for the men up to me to my apartment, and entered seriously into discourse with them on their circumstances. I told them I thought they had made a right choice; that if 49 the captain had carried them away they would certainly be hanged. I showed them the new captain hanging at the yard-arm of the ship, and told them they had nothing less to expect. When they had all declared their willingness to stay, I then told them I would let them into the story of my living there, and put them into the way of making it easy to them. Accordingly, I gave them the whole history of the place, and of my coming to it; showed them my fortifications, the way I made my bread, planted my corn, cured my grapes; and, in a word, all that was necessary to make them easy. … I left them my firearms—viz. five muskets, three fowling-pieces, and three swords. I had above a barrel and a half of powder left; for after the first year or two I used but little, and wasted none. I gave them a description of the way I managed the goats, and directions to milk and fatten them, and to make both butter and cheese. In a word, I gave them every part of my own story; and told them I should prevail with the captain to leave them two barrels of gunpowder more, and some garden-seeds, which I told them I would have been very glad of. Also, I gave them the bag of peas which the captain had brought me to eat, and bade them be sure to sow and increase them. (Defoe 218) Hence even when he agrees to let others colonize his island, and indeed leaves the island under their care, he does so under two conditions: absolutely subjection to him (recognition of his absolute and singular sovereignty) and that they hear his story and thus learn to imitate him. And thus Robinson Crusoe himself uses the story of Robinson Crusoe precisely in order to create more Robinson Crusoes, in order to properly subjectivize them, to make them sufficiently identical to himself, to erase their otherness. Thus we can understand Gilles Deleuze’s own 50 assertion when he states that the meaning of Robinson Crusoe – the nature of its paradise – is “a world without others.” 46 The result of this attempted subjectification, as we might expect, is not a harmonious and egalitarian polity. Robinson is, after all, trying to bequeath a single island to numerous singular Crusoes. When he returns to his island he discovers another story “as full of variety and wonderful accidents as my own part” – that is, singular and particular enough to perhaps be worth a novel unto itself – yet one that all the same sounds quite familiar: I visited my new colony in the island, saw my successors the Spaniards, had the old story of their lives and of the [English mutineers] I left there; how at first they insulted the poor Spaniards, how they afterwards agreed, disagreed, united, separated, and how at last the Spaniards were obliged to use violence with them; how they were subjected to the Spaniards, how honestly the Spaniards used them… (Defoe 240) However honest their use by the Spaniards, the fact remains that intersubjective relations are deeply fraught whenever the subject is defined in such a singular manner, and the moment this supposedly natural and unprejudiced subject encounters any form of other. VI. Trouble in Paradise Robinson Crusoe cuts the Gordian knot of burgeoning modern society by placing its protagonist on a deserted island, thus providing the conditions for the security of self-sameness and sovereignty. As a result, however, all of his encounters with others are fraught with anxiety and laden with conditions. At heart, it is a novel about the fantasy of singular sovereignty, one in which ideal happiness comes about from a mechanical mastery of an isolated world. Defoe 46 This in his essay Michel Tournier and the world without others. 51 proffers the island as the cure to the city, trading a world chocked full of others to one evacuated of them, a realm in which habit is closely hemmed in by structures both social and literal for a realm in which habits can freely form and develop towards control over all surrounding objects. This is not the case for all novels, however, many of which are concerned less with object relations and more with interpersonal – and thus intersubjective – relations. According to Watt, Pamela and other intersubjective novels (romances in particular) aim, instead, to heal the rifts created by capitalism, to replace defunct social relations with new ones by providing the necessary habits and mores for interactions between the very self-same and self-stranded subject of which Robinson Crusoe is simply an exemplar. Yet while Robinsonian aloneness can be achieved simply through the state of absorption the novel form is so good at inducing (and which so frightens its detractors), intersubjectivity can only be simulated within the text of Pamela, chiefly through the use of the epistolary form. Only games, by dint of their multiplayer capacities, have been able to produce properly intersubjective experiences within the text itself. 47 They offer the chance to explore not just what this or that author wishes were the substance of intersubjective relations, but what actually occurs under the conditions imposed by the fiction, the relations between a subject and its world, as well as between a subject and other subjects. What happens when sovereignly constituted subjects encounter similar subjects in the digital wild? What happens when a Minecraft-like subject encounters its proper other, a subject constituted in the same person, in the same world and temporality, with the same range of diathesis? Up until now, I have concentrated on Minecraft’s single-player mode; the fundamental Minecraft experience. And while Minecraft does have multiplayer functionality, it does so in a collaborative mode which negates or eases the anxiety of encounters with other subjects. To 47 This is not to overlook the collective experiences novels facilitate, the intersubjective work they do in their active reception; games are not uniquely intersubjective any more than they are uniquely interactive. 52 better understand the ambivalence of the singular subject with regards to fellow subjects in this section I consider a game that is explicitly multiplayer, a game which relies upon the presence of other players to derive its chief pleasures, to generate its distinctive experiences via the methods of formal realism. Thus I turn attention to the multiplayer survival game DayZ. DayZ began its life as a modification – “mod” in the player-community parlance – of another game, ARMA 2, the engine of which is renowned precisely for its realism, meant to better represent embodied experience than in its contemporaries such as Battlefield or Call of Duty. Whereas these latter games work to recreate already-mediate experiences of combat in the style of genre cinema (the war movie, the action movie), ARMA 2 emphasizes “realistic” simulation (eg. by including robust ballistic physics and fragile player avatars) so as to better render an “authentic” battlefield experience. It also aspires to a more embodied realism by inscribing the player characters’ as bodies-at-risk instead of bodies-of-combat, 48 and thus better approximating the physical frailty we find in the survival mode of Minecraft. Nominally set in a zombie-infested post-apocalypse, it deviates from other media of that theme by setting the game in Eastern Europe 49 and by the lack of importance attached to its undead antagonists. Unlike Minecraft, in which single-player is the primary mode, DayZ is a massive multiplayer online game, or “MMO,” and thus depends on servers populated by other human players. Also it involves little to no building, inviting its players instead to inhabit a formerly civilized but now evacuated world, full of neglected vehicles and abandoned buildings. 48 This distinction is discernible through common formal features found in military shooters, such as rapidly regenerating health and health ‘pick ups’ (vitality rewards earned by killing enemies or capturing objectives) which result in a player character that regains vitality specifically through combat (provided one is the victor). In ARMA 2 (and thus DayZ) the player character’s body gains no direct physical benefit from combat and, indeed, is open to various lasting injuries and maladies such as broken limbs, concussions and hypothermia, problems which rarely effect aforementioned bodies-of-combat. 49 Specifically the fictional post-Soviet state of Chernarus (as opposed to Belarus), which is loosely based on a province of Czech Republic. (Leidermann, 3) 53 Rather than offering an escape from the determination of society by providing an undeveloped island, a formerly social space is emptied out for re-inhabitation. 50 Yet for all this, its similarity to Minecraft (and thus to Robinson Crusoe) is unmistakable. The presence of zombies, for example, preserves the fear of cannibalism 51 and the uncanny other. Moreover, it is a survival game with a similar range of diathesis, including values for general health (just as in Minecraft), blood, energy and hydration (all equivalents to Minecraft’s hunger meter), as well as – in a push for yet-greater realism of detail – stomach capacity, body temperature and lastly shock, a value that determines whether or not the player character is rendered unconscious by a blow. 52 Crafting and weapons are also central to the player character’s verbal capacity. Indeed, in its emphasis on arms DayZ even better resembles Robinson Crusoe, compelling players to go about as well-armed as Robinson himself. On the face of it, these weapons are intended for defense against the titular and thematic foes: zombies. But as any player of DayZ will tell you, the zombies are largely predictable annoyances, environmental hazards more than anything else. As Leidermann points out in his essay on DayZ’s post-Soviet landscape, “the zombies are simply local fauna, and the violence, accordingly, a state of nature” (Leiderman 5) resulting in a much greater emphasis on players’ interactions with other players. This irony is recognized by the community, with “[i]nteractions with other players provid[ing] the fundamental conflict and challenge of DayZ.” And it is in this conflicted and challenging intersubjectivity that the game’s realism is seen as most operative, prompting the community wiki to claim that, in DayZ, “[h]uman nature has rarely been so clearly displayed in a game.” (DayZ Wiki “Survival”) 50 We see this parallel also in genres of the novel. While Crusoe gives us a supposedly virgin isle to inhabit (and still its protagonist endures a haunting), the Gothic novel dwells always in ruins, amongst ghosts, a tendency so well established that it was satirized as early as Austen’s Northhanger Abbey. 51 Indeed, actual player character/player character cannibalism is a planned addition to the game, along with prion diseases, making Robinson’s worst fears a distinct reality in the game. 52 Unlike in Minecraft, these qualities are not tracked on visible meters but rather communicated via first-person statements in text, such as “I am hungry” or “I am bleeding”, which appear on the lower left of the player’s visual field. 54 Indeed, the notion of “realism” deeply informs both the development of the game and the discourse community formed by DayZ’s players. While various styles of play exist, some archetypal enough to gain titles such as “bandit” or “hero,” most lay some claim to “realism.” However, as these play styles are not always complementary, the definition of the term is a matter of fierce discussion. There is no easy agreement as to what constitutes proper “realism,” or even the kind of “reality” the game is supposed to depict (and, accordingly, what sort of experience the game ought to generate). Realism is easy enough to maintain when it needs only one subject to sustain it. Alone in their world, they inscribe themselves as they wish, inhabiting a privileged position both as constitutive exception and indisputable norm (as there are no other subjects to present alternatives to that normalization of habit). However, as soon as multiple subjects are confronted with the co-production of a shared reality, the very consistency of “reality” is at risk of fragmenting, at least in terms of a reliably “realistic” experience of the sort a work of formal realism is supposed to generate. One source of the anxiety around the “danger” of games, or of any media form, is this alleged ability to supersede “real” reality with its seductive fiction. The very solitary nature of much gaming – or reading, or watching – when combined with the constitutive loneliness of the individualist subject these texts produce make that subject’s grip on reality – on shared social reality – appear potentially tenuous. What happens, then, when subjects so constituted encounter the other? What happens when the diathesis of such a subject is conceived almost entirely in terms of violence, as is so often the case with games? While the quantifiable social evils of any given media form are beyond the purview of this analysis, best left to empirical researchers, I can at least address the relationship between the formal properties of the text and its associated violence. Moreover, I consider how best to mitigate these alleged deleterious effects by looking 55 to examples of emergent community within the spaces of gaming, the new social mores of ludic intersubjectivity. Within the DayZ community, the most prevalent issue is the anti-social habit of “killing on sight,” the tendency for players to shoot other players without hesitation or negotiation. The problem is so endemic that it has its own abbreviation – KoS – and entire forum threads have been devoted to discussing this habit, treating it as a common social problem. It is precisely in this context that the term “realism” is most fiercely deployed and debated. Given the constitution of the player’s in-game subjectivity, the condition of the world in which they exist and through which they move, and the sort of experience that DayZ is “supposed” to provide (itself a matter of debate), players continually question if the tendency to kill other players on sight is “realistic.” In the post-apocalyptia of DayZ, where resources are scarce and almost all other players are strangers, a number of questions are constantly raised and debated: is “kill or be killed” an appropriate habit of thought to adopt? To what extent? Is it “realistic” within the “realism” to which DayZ and its players aspire? And is it incumbent upon the game itself to structure the relations that ought to generate that reality, or are there some further rules – self-imposed by the various subjects in the game – that must be adopted in order to achieve the realist project? There is an argument to be made that this kind of viciousness is inherent to the formal structure of the game. Some accounts of DayZ depict it as a kind of Sadean playground, a space which shapes its subjects to be monstrous. As Brendan Caldwell reports in his incisive The Injustice Engine: Cruelty and Murder in DayZ: There is an obvious evolution to the long-term DayZ player. From the outside, and even sometimes from within, it seems like tormenting fresh spawns and holding people up for their shoes is a kind of ‘endgame’. The accumulating of weapons, food, knowledge and trustworthy friends (or, in my case, co-raiders) in order to survive certainly suggests that 56 the game is slanted toward greed and death. The scarcity of resources appears to encourage violence. An ever increasing scale of player-on-player cruelty, from the simple ‘execution on sight’ to the more expert ‘holding somebody down to force feed them a bottle of disinfectant’. 53 But the truth is more chaotic than that. You react to what you’ve done. You can always change your ways, if you want. It is because things are so scarce, and people so merciless, that your own survival seems significant. The truth is that DayZ is just a generator of feelings. Malice, pity, guilt, empathy, fear, reprieve – they come at you in waves. Sometimes they come when you don’t expect them. By this reasoning, killing on sight is the most shallow and uninventive violence you can commit in DayZ. Frequently worse horrors are conceived and executed by the player base, including the grisly practice of “blood banditry,” whereby groups of raiders capture victims and drain them of blood, either killing them afterwards or setting them loose on the very brink of death. That such anti-social behaviors manifest themselves in a game should not come as a surprise, as one forum- goer put it: “There are real killers irl [in real life] even when there are serious penalties to punish such actions. In a game with no rules or penalties, what makes you think it will ever be KOS- free? Just live with it.” (DayZ Forums, 12/17/13) There is something to be said for this viewpoint. Virtual spaces, bereft of real-life consequences, are well-suited for the playing-out of violent fantasies, where they can be enjoyed both by victim and perpetrator without lasting harm or social retribution for either party. That said, a survey found on the forum thread where this problem is discussed reveals that the motivation for killing is more often out of fear than in search of pleasure: 54 53 Force feeding has since been phased out of players’ diathetic range, putting an end to this particular facet of DayZ’s infamous cruelty. 54 Though fear itself is a form of arousal and, thus, a source of pleasure unto itself. 57 Or, as one forum-post put it, explaining the prevalence of KoS: “Because killing others is safer than trusting them. Simply not trusting anyone in a game like this one makes it easier, no decisions to take, less stress, less paranoya(sic).” (DayZ Forums, 12/17/13) The social problem of KoS is a function of a fundamental anxiety about the other, of the same sort that prevails in Minecraft and Robinson Crusoe. The Hobbesian state of nature that reigns in DayZ does not demand cruelty and murder, but it does permit it, along with numerous other complex and novel intersubjective actions. That brutality prevails is in some sense a function of the setting and theme, but it is not itself a formal necessity within the realism of the game. Once more from Caldwell’s essay: It isn’t that DayZ is a catalyst for cruelty any more than it’s a catalyst for kindness. It’s just that, when you’re playing a cruel game set in a cruel world and that game is ostensibly a role-playing game, you begin to think: should I be cruel too? I’ve already shot a guy. How much crueller (sic) can I get? And then, when you start to explore all the possibilities, it turns out the answer to that question is: A LOT. It is not, then, that violence is necessary, but that it is always possible. It is not that the world is ruined, that civilization is irretrievably lost, but rather than in its absence there is left a vast emptiness that can only be filled by the concrete actions of the players. The desolation of the 58 world is underwritten by a utopian promise which is enabled precisely by the emptying out of all pre-existing social structures, making space for new habits, not all ruthlessly pragmatic or anti- social. The very treatment of KoS as a social problem rather than an acceptable norm or a game feature is testament to this undecidability of habits in such space. As Leidermann points out “DayZ narratives proliferate with people’s ambitions to set up purposeless markets for the exchange of non-vital goods … to assemble libraries that cannot be read, to deliver sermons at the vacant churches throughout Chernarus, or simply to find and assist new players with food and supplies, showing that the callousness of the setting is itself a strong motivator for players to evade the game’s more violent logics for explicitly utopian aims.” (Leiderman 11) Thus it is not the clear definition of the subject which is the primary source of anxiety. While it is true that the subject constituted by formal procedures meant to generate a singular, self-same and thus sovereign individual has a tendency towards anxiety when encountering the traces of other such subjects, the anxiety is precisely that of not knowing if the other means you harm, of not knowing what kind of subject you are dealing with. 55 Within a typical multiplayer first-person shooter – a game like Quake or Unreal Tournament or the multiplayer modes of Halo – murder is the order of the day. Violence exists for its own pleasurable purpose, without the acute anxiety found in DayZ. There is no doubt, no uncertainty, no question as to one’s own course of action, nor the course of action of the other. The players are there to vie against and ultimately to kill one another, and that struggle is the heart of its pleasure. DayZ’s pleasure, its particular brand of anxious arousal, emerges from precisely the lack of certainty, one that comes about from the lack of clear definition given to the subject. Just as the footprint is terrifying because it might or might not be Robinson’s own, or 55 In previous versions of DayZ (specifically the original mod) this uncertainty was mitigated in part by the ‘bandit’ mechanic, whereby a player who murdered other players would be marked, their character given a distinctive raider’s bandana. This was phased out in the standalone, demonstrating the game’s commitment to precisely the uncertainty of intersubjective encounters. 59 that of a foe or friend, the appearance of the other in DayZ is frightening because their intentions are unknowable and their diathetic range sufficiently broad. The root of intersubjective anxiety is revealed in works of formal realism. It is not that their subjects are constituted as murderers necessarily; such a simple formal constitution does not generate any comparable anxiety. It is, rather, that formal realism demonstrates the terrible freedom of the subject in their very undecidability, and thus the great burden cast upon such subjects if they wish to live together. Desert island narratives are appealing precisely because they seek to escape this dreadful onus, and do so only at the cost of making a monstrous phantom of the other. To live with the other, day by day, knowing both they and yourself are capable of violence, that violence can emerge easily from their diathetic range, yet not knowing if violence is their intention – this is deeply psychically taxing, the stuff of properly modern existential horror. And this anxiety is only intensified by the realization that formal realism enables: that the subject is written, and thus has no determinate content, that it is formally constituted as empty, and the more “realistic” the subject (and thus the broader its diathetic range) the less determined that subject will be. Even within games, with their necessarily limited diathesis, the uncertainty is enough to reliably produce violent outcomes – yet this violence is sustained precisely by its non-necessary possibility. As Derrida points out: In spite of this identity and this difference, neither animals of different species, nor humans of different cultures, nor any animal or human individual inhabit the same world as another, however close and similar these living individuals may be (be they humans or animals), and the difference between one world and another will remain always unbridgeable, because the community of the world is always constructed, simulated by a set of stabilizing apparatuses, more or less stable, then, and never natural, language in the broad sense, codes of traces being designed, among all living beings, to contract a unity 60 of the world that is always reconstructible, nowhere and never given in nature. (Derrida 9) Hence the answer proffered by one forum thread – a term Caldwell points to as a reason for the tendency toward cruelty, yet a term which is also offered as a solution to the social problems of DayZ: roleplaying. And this term, when it is insisted upon, is done so the name of and in same breath as “realism.” Within the context of the proposed DayZ server, roleplaying means an even more profound commitment to the simulation of embodied reality of the player’s character and the world that encloses them, along with a strict set of guidelines on how one may treat the other. Remaining “in character” demands that the player restrict their knowledge to that which is proper to their instance of play, the life experience of the character in the world (eg. no returning to one’s corpse to recover one’s possessions, no examining extra-diegetic maps of Chernarus). These guidelines also require players to have a “realistic name,” specifically a first and last name, an identity that is necessarily lost (requiring a new name) when one’s character dies. 56 Violence between characters is not disallowed but must be presented in the appropriate context (a robbery, defense of territory, justifiable revenge). This violence requires that one player hail the other, establishing intersubjective communication linguistically before defaulting to violence. It is this last that is deemed most critical – the problem of KoS being, to the organizers of this server, what deprives the game of proper “realism” – such that the code of conduct itself proposes it as “the most important rule of all.” (DayZ Standalone RP/Realism – Server Rules) Only when social constraints are re-imposed and, more to the point, when the identity of the player characters are established and adhered to is the fundamental anxiety that drives “killing on sight” assuaged; this, at least, is the attitude of the server organizers. Some of this 56 This is one of the hallmarks of formal realism in the novel as well, the insistence on ‘realistic’ names, first and last. 61 unmistakably resembles the establishment of a Hobbesian social contract. There are explicit rules of conduct which are enforced by the server’s own absolute sovereigns, the administrators, who reserve the right to ban any player who breaks that contract. But the real medicine, the essence of the code of conduct itself, is the willful adoption of identities, the willfulness of which is testament precisely to the indetermination of the subject. Thus classification of subjects who are otherwise sovereign blanks is the first necessity of the new social. And the imitation of social reality, a reality that functions socially, is dependent – in the case of such games, at least – on the wholehearted, formal assumption of a role. The subject of the game is one that is assumed to be capable of any role, an identity-less transcendence that can assume temporary identities in order to participate in social and symbolic reality. As Derrida (referencing Heidegger) argues: Transcendence is the sense of projecting oneself in order to relate to beings as such, as beings. … …The movement of transcendence is indeed that on the basis of which one has a world as a totality of being as such. […] Heidegger explains for his part that words are born of this essential accord of men among themselves in their Miteinandersein, insofar as they are together, in their Miteinandersein, in their being-the-one-for-the-other, one-with-another, open to the beings around them, to being as such. … One cannot separate transcendence from Miteinandersein.… As soon as solitude itself … presupposes transcendence and language, it also presupposes, as solitude as such, as Robinsonophily, Robinsonocracy, Robinsonocentrism, if you will, Mitsein and Miteinandersein. (Derrida 226-27) 62 Fitting, then, that the next chapter will address the genealogical link between one of the greatest world-building novels and the most well-known roleplaying games, works with both leave a lasting influence on so many games and novels that would follow them, not least Minecraft. 63 Chapter II Supplementality I. A Ludo-Literary Lineage To understand roleplaying in the popular consciousness, it is necessary to trace a genealogy of influences. Roleplaying could rightly be considered one of the most prototypical types of performance, in which can be found the roots of religious ritual, drama, and other diverse and ancient cultural practices. Every actor is a role-player, as is every child who engages in make- believe. Even monarchs are role-players, their frail humanity anointed and crowned, their title passed on at the moment of their death to ensure the continuity of the performance of sovereignty. It is only very recently, however, that roleplaying has been codified as a formal game and undertaken as a particular leisure activity. Dungeons & Dragons is the original. It is undoubtedly the most famous roleplaying game, pre-dating the term “roleplaying game” itself. All other such games owe some ancestral debt to Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), whether they exist as direct descendants of (or as pointed departures from) this first formula. Through a novel combination of ludic practices and literary urges, D&D gave birth to a revolutionary new mode of narrative production, one which in many respects epitomizes the relationship between realism and subject-formation, literature and games. D&D owes debts in turn to J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. It is a work with a similarly pervasive and, in many respects closely linked, influence on all its successors, including the modern fantasy genre. Indeed, both have been reproduced and emulated so many times that the originals have been rendered “generic,” resulting in a paradoxical sense of unoriginality. This is a testament to the extent to which the world of Tolkien (and, more to the point, the Tolkienian method of world-building) has shaped contemporary expectations about fictional worlds, and the experiences sought within them. 64 II. Tolkien the Terrible There is something about The Lord of the Rings (LoTR) that critic T. A. Shippey called the power “to provoke … twin reactions of popular appeal and critical rage.” (123) To the devotees of Tolkien, few works are as splendid or important. Certainly none are as visibly foundational for the fantasy genre. To the fans’ credit there is a recurring timeliness to Tolkien’s work. Obscure (if not entirely ignored) upon its release in Britain, the books gained “sudden and monumental popularity” during the 1960s, particularly amongst youth counterculture, triggering “a flood of reprints, imitations and newcomers.” (Peterson 85) This Tolkien vogue was not a one-time event either: a similar popular resurgence was later replicated in mainstream popular culture near the beginning of the 21 st century, triggered by Peter Jackson’s film adaptation. What began as a brilliant but bizarrely academic exercise on the part of an Oxford philologist and medievalist became a trans-Atlantic popular success, twice over. Yet it has received less acclaim in academic circles. Some of this may be due to curatorial bias: much of the critical literature around Tolkien’s fiction is dominated by the editorial presence of Harold Bloom. Bloom approves of The Hobbit (under the taxon of “classic children’s literature”) but poo-poos Tolkien’s trilogy 57 as “inflated, over-written, tendentious, and moralistic in the extreme” in the very introduction he writes for the work’s Modern Critical Interpretations. 58 Within that volume, one essay attempts to explain the otherwise inexplicable “appeal” of the books to “mature readers” who should by all rights scoff at the “melodramatic incidents, the superficial brotherhood theme, and the one-dimensional characters.” (Keenan 3) Another essay is entirely given over to asserting the thesis that, while LoTR is “a magnificent 57 It is not actually a trilogy; it was only presented as such at the behest of the publishers. And this is not unimportant in understanding the unitary and unifying intention that drove the creation of The Lord of the Rings. For the sake of the parlance, however, I’ll continue to use the phrase 58 His introduction to the Tolkien volume of Bloom’s Modern Critical Views is no more charitable. 65 performance” it is “not … literature.” (Raffel 17) A perplexity on how even to categorize let alone account for that peculiar “appeal” suffuses the critical discourse. The critics make many valid points; I do not dispute the specific stylistic criticisms leveled at Tolkien's fantasy epic. With over one thousand pages to sustain, the text is likely to provide something upon which to grind an axe, not least the interminable songs and – I agree with Bloom on this point at least – its Manichean moralism. Yet something about the text surpasses itself, producing a glamor that mystifies the staunchest defenders of canon's gates. Even these avowed detractors see certain merits amidst the mess, albeit merits they struggle to define. At times it is that LoTR is engaged in modern myth-making, others that it functions well as a grand period piece. It is a reconstruction of the faerie-story genre, or perhaps – as its receipt of the World Science Fiction Award would suggest – should be understood as a work of science fiction. Critics often continue to wonder if it is genuine “literature” or simply “story-telling” (however marvelous)? Yet The Lord of the Rings does not function as myths function, though it is rests upon a mythology. It is not a faerie-story, though it does much to re-invigorate the narrative power of elves and goblins. It is, in fact, a work of realism, that most refined and definitive of novelistic forms. It is simply that the realism it practices is distinct from that to which the aforementioned critics are accustomed. III. An Extraordinary Reality It is Hugh T. Keenan that most directly tackles the task of explaining the fascination LoTR holds for mature readers. As a clear-sighted critic of literature he cannot rationally vouch for the books, yet, as he puts it: “…the structure of the trilogy appeals to us not rationally but emotionally.” (Keenan 15) He explains this “emotional appeal,” quoting critic W. H. Auden: “by 66 the time one has finished his [Tolkien’s] book, one knows the histories of Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves, and the landscape they inhabit as well as one knows one’s own childhood.” (Keenan 3) Thus reading Tolkien’s work produces a kind of regression into childhood, one which is assisted by how “amazingly alive” Tolkien’s world is, the vivacity of its inhabitants and the “surprising degree” of their interactions. (Keenan 4) While Keenan’s argument develops along different, thematic lines, it is this sense of a living world that is at the heart of the work’s power. This power which Auden avows (and to which Keenen gestures) is not unlike that which Rousseau claims for Robinson Crusoe. The power is the chance to supplant one’s social upbringing and one’s childhood with a fictional supplement. However, rather than an uninhabited desert-island world into which the reader is freshly and (to Rousseau’s mind) naturally reconstituted in Defoe’s novel, Tolkien’s world comes stocked with others, rich in their gradations of otherness. And, as Auden indicates, it is not solely the inhabitants (Keenan’s focus) but the “landscape they inhabit” which produces this immersive “second childhood” in the reader. From where does the book gain this vivacity? It cannot be the prose of the text itself. The keystone of Burton Raffel’s argument that LoTR, while “full of charm, excitement, and affection,” is “not… literature” (Raffel 17) rests upon the claim that Tolkien’s narrative fails to believably evoke immediate sensory experience. By Raffel’s reckoning, Tolkien is concerned with “a state, an idea, rather than specifically felt and explored sensory reality.” Only “narrative realities” matter to Tolkien, and as a result he makes “no real attempt to explore sensory realities.” (Raffel 20) Specifically pointing to Tolkien’s description of chairs in the Prancing Pony Inn, Raffel notes that: “the social and esthetic virtues of the room and the chairs are basic to his tale, but neither have independent existence, neither are experienced for us or by us.” (Raffel 22) 67 Putting aside the fact that Raffel’s definition of literature seems tied to a very specific mode of literary expression, we might at least accept that – by the standards of Watt’s definition of formal realism, whereby the text is a simulation of individual experience – this should disqualify LoTR from the roster of realism, even more quickly than might its inclusion of dragons and wizards. Yet while the experiences recorded in the book may not have the hallucinatory immediacy of a phenomenal realism, a certain reality effect is still achieved. Even Raffel admits that Tolkien “has succeeded in constructing a self-contained world of extraordinary reality.” (Raffel 17) How are we to makes sense of this discrepancy? What does it mean for the world of a work to be extraordinarily real (even or especially if that reality is itself extraordinary) yet for the experiences conveyed in that work to fall short of imitating reality in the manner proper to realist literature? And what does it mean for Tolkien’s landscape to be “alive” while the prose that describes it is comparatively lifeless, as if unlived? A narrow definition of realism – what I have in previous chapters dubbed “phenomenal realism” – cannot contain Tolkien’s work. Neither does LoTR possess the psychological realism we tend to identify with the “great novel.” It does not explore the complexities of interior experience that convince the reader that dead letters can in fact unfurl into a person of recognizable reality. Yet the other formal and generic categories in which the critics have tried to capture the books have failed to account for the “extraordinary reality” that makes Tolkien’s work so powerful in the face of all its alleged defects. The category of realism itself that must expand so as to reflect Tolkien’s central innovation: a different kind of realism, an alternative realism, more suited for the creation of alternate worlds, and one which better demonstrates the deep interconnection between games and the realist ambition. Tolkien himself explains the basis of this alternative realism: 68 What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful "sub-creator". He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is "true": it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken: the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. (The Tolkien Reader 60) This “belief” in the sub-creation is not achieved through the immediacy of prose, but from the congruence of the events with the laws of the world that are set out by the story-maker. Anything within the narrative which obeys the internal laws is believable. The spell only breaks when the narrative violates the terms of the world’s own laws. Less than from the work’s prose style, it is from these laws and the consistency they provide that this experience of the world’s own “reality” is derived. Thus, despite Tolkien’s insistence that the reader focus on the “soup” of the story rather than the “bones” which he boiled to make it, it is precisely from their marrow that his broth derives such richness. (Tolkien 47) But what precisely is meant by “laws” and “bones”? What forms the base of Middle-earth’s savory stew? The most visible, and most recognizable, osseous bits of Tolkien’s work are his maps, which were significant inclusions from the very first edition: They consisted of a general map of the western regions of Middle-earth and a more detailed map of Rohan, Gondor, and Mordor; printed in red and black on large folded sheets pasted in at the end of each of the three books, The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers carried the general map, while The Return of the King carried the other. In addition, there was a map of the Shire in red and black preceding Book I of The Fellowship of the Ring. (LotR, Note on the Maps) 69 Figure 2.1: Map from The Lord of the Rings 2 nd Edition Aside from the map of the Shire, the rest of the cartographia was placed in back along with the appendices, part and parcel with the Took family tree, the Shire calendar, and the table of Fëanorian letters (see fig. 2.2 and 2.3). Yet these maps were the most aesthetically pleasing, not to mention digestible, items in the appendices. They became icons unto themselves during the Tolkien vogue of the 1960s, appearing as posters in college dorm rooms. The modern fantasy genre has since taken this lesson to heart, frequently giving the world map a place of prominence, including appearing at the beginning of the book rather than in the appendices. Maps serve as a device that can be found in novels, games and – more recently – in mainstream television. The importance of maps to understanding the ludic component of realism cannot be overstated, particularly as the practice of cartography became increasingly scientific during the mid-eighteenth century. Scientifically composed maps serve as the guarantors of space. They are expressions of the coherence of physical space and thus its reality. The LoTR maps establish a consistent physics that grounds the action therein, rather than relying on (otherwise narratively functional) abstractions of distance: in a far away kingdom, just over the horizon. Such maps 70 make a representational claim similar to that of realism, alleging they show what is there, and no more. This alone places Tolkien closer to the realist camp. Yet the maps are only the most visible sign of the voluminous appendices which comprise precisely those “bones” that give not just savor but structure to The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s propensity for the appendectical had everything to do with a desire to create that internal consistency that he deemed critical for an act of convincing sub-creation. As Humphrey Carpenter notes: Not content with writing a large and complex book, [Tolkien] felt he must ensure that every single detail fitted satisfactorily into the total pattern. Geography, chronology, and nomenclature all had to be entirely consistent. …The map in itself was not enough, and he made endless calculations of time and distance, drawing up elaborate charts concerning events in the story, showing dates, the days of the week, the hours, and sometimes even the direction of the wind and the phase of the moon. … Long afterwards he said 'I wanted people simply to get inside this story and take it (in a sense) as actual history.’ (Carpenter 68) In this light, it becomes problematic to judge The Lord of the Rings upon the basis of its prose style. The labor spent in its creation was dedicated to this appendectical foundation in the name of a more complete realism. Defending his carefully constructed but visually difficult nomenclature, Tolkien himself says: “I am sorry the names split [the] eyes – personally I believe (and here I believe I am a good judge) they are good, and a large part of the effect. They are coherent and consistent and made upon two related linguistic formulae, so that they achieve a reality not fully achieved by other name-inventors…” (Carpenter 59) It is not enough, then, that the names seem realistic – that is, that they register as real by the standards of a phenomenal realism – but rather that they are realistic, in keeping with the manner in which nomenclature emerges historically. They may not be proper to our day-to-day experience, but they are proper 71 to Middle-earth and that, according to Tolkien’s theory of sub-creation, is what lends them their reality within the secondary world. It is to this philological sensibility – indeed, from its direct practice – that we owe much of what is so distinctive about The Lord of the Rings, what I call the ludic aspects of the text. 59 In philology the “laws” which govern Tolkien’s sub-creation are prefigured because it is a discipline which prides itself on the “intensely systematic nature of discovery, expressed as time went on increasingly by the word ‘laws’, and on the analogy of physics or chemistry…” (Shippey 127) The emphatic scientism of Middle-earth’s creation is apparent in its application of rigor to storytelling and the detailed world in which the story is told, whose reality is separate from the telling of the story rather than subordinate to it. 60 The appendices were published along with the three volumes – maps being distributed throughout, and appendices-proper gathered at the end of the third volume. While one must assume that most of those who have read and enjoyed LoTR have not approached the appendices with the same frequency or gusto, they have always been a foundational part of the work, both in its production and in its publication/reception. The result of this philologically influenced method of textual production is a sub-creation of remarkable internal consistency, a disciplined new mode of world-building, where the marriage of scientific rigor and fictional creation constitute a mode of realism distinct from, but related to, the tradition of phenomenal realism. Tolkien created an alternative realism, a realism of alternate worlds. And this too is proper to philology, which displayed a capacity to “erode… 59 Tolkien’s own dedication to this appendectical realism must be viewed alongside his academic discipline, which according to T. A. Shippey is “the only proper guide to a view of Middle-earth”. Unsatisfied by the ongoing debate between the ‘literary’ and ‘linguistic’ camps within the Oxford English department at the time, finding both approaches “too narrow for a full response to works of art”, Tolkien used philology to establish a fresh vantage point “at right angles to both”. It is from the vantage of this “third dimension”, Shippey argues, that Tolkien “trained himself to see things”, profoundly influencing the manner in which he wrote his fiction. (Shippey, 124) 60 In this light, the book’s receipt of the World Science Fiction Award becomes somewhat more intelligible. Despite being a work of fantasy, the “hardness” of the science that props up the creation of the novel’s world place it head and shoulders above some works of genre science fiction (Flash Gordan, John Carter, etc.) which are much less grounded in the discourse of science. 72 the philologists’s sense of a line between imagination and reality,” (Shippey 135) a power that ought by now to sound familiar. “The whole of their [the philologists’] science conditioned them to the acceptance of what one might call '*-' or 'asterisk-reality,' that which no longer existed but could with 100 per cent certainty be inferred.” (Shippey 135) What better way to describe the practice of alternate histories and fictional realms than this exercise in non-existent worlds which all the same can be fully extrapolated through appendices? 61 That Tolkien’s philologically influenced mode of world building lends itself to the ludic is not likely what any philologist, Tolkien least of all, had in mind. Yet core ludic values emerge where the production of literature and the practice of philology meet. For Tolkien, one of the great virtues of constructing a “feigned history” is that such a history possesses “varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers.” (Carpenter 64) It is this variety of applications, rather than the singularity of allegory, which brings us closest to the ludic. While ability to apply this feigned history “resides in the freedom of the reader,” allegory resides “in the purposed domination of the author”, (Carpenter 64) in the author’s ability to say ‘this stands in for this’ in a one-to-one relation. Something which Tolkien, however purposeful about the construction of his world, does not seem to desire. This preference is in keeping with both the ambition of realism to generate varied and thus unique experiences – itself an ambition best taken up by the ludic – and the perennial claim made of and by games: that their most distinctive characteristic is the freedom they grant the reader/player. This experience of freedom derives in great part from the readers’ ability to immerse themselves within the world of the text and to imagine themselves as potentially autonomous subjects within it. It is a world designed to be entered and dwelt in. As critic Thomas J. Gasque 61 This practice is perhaps most powerfully epitomized by the scenario described in Borges’ Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius: a world constructed from citational inference and encyclopedic reference, a universe posited in text robust enough to be capable of supplanting reality. 73 puts it: “In order to build a structure, Tolkien has selected those materials that make the system consistent. … But we must become aware of this structure gradually if we are to perceive its inner consistency and to accept what we see. [Thus, according to Tolkien] one does better if he plunges his reader right into the middle of his imaginary world.” (Gasque 4-5) This plunge is the moment of immersion, the instant where the person of the reader dissolves into the reader- subject. It is from within the world itself that they accomplish the gradual acquaintance necessary to sustain immersion, coming to inhabit that world and thus the subject position it constitutes. This immersive ambition is not unique to Tolkien, although Tolkien’s technique proves both effective and influential. The emerging fantasy genre, itself propelled by the Tolkien vogue, was quite self-conscious of the appeal of immersive becoming. This is most visible in what historian Jon Peterson dubs the “visitation theme” which is so common to fantasy fiction. This theme, roughly summarized, involves the explicit positing of the main character as a visitor to the setting of the novel. They are often in some way reinvented or reembodied, but originating from another world, typically our own. As Peterson explains: Visitation fictions recognized the appetite of fantasy readers in the 1960s to interact with these fantasy worlds – not merely as passive observers, but as protagonists. Fantasy was never content to be confined to the page. Fantastic adventure is too exciting, too immersive, to be appreciated only from afar: its fans wanted to get involved with it. (Peterson 124) This desire for immersion is not limited simply to the writers and readers of these works, either. As he explains, “[m]ost of the keys authors of the genre experimented with extra-literary components of the fantasy setting… all suggest[ing] a level of engagement that goes beyond the static experience of literature.” (Peterson 124) 74 I am not quick to agree that the experience of literature is “static” as such, yet the desire for these “extra-literary components” sheds light not only on why The Lord of the Rings was so popular but also why, specifically, it was embraced by a youth culture whose values seem in many ways inconsistent with those of the work itself. Peterson makes note of “the counterculture’s seemingly hypocritical acceptance of a work with so many reactionary elements,” suggesting that “…in some respects the work itself may have been ancillary to the extra-literary sense of the setting it imparted and the tremendous attraction that this magical world exerted on the minds of readers.” (Peterson 121) By this reckoning, the extra-literary components of The Lord of the Rings – its voluminous appendices and the sense of setting they sustain – are far from auxiliary, but rather its most definitive and influential aspects. IV. That Secondary-Universe Feeling Dungeons & Dragons also sought to satisfy this desire for immersion and its concurrent practice of alternative realism. Since its publication in 1974 Dungeons & Dragons has been subject to the same controversy as novels in the 18 th and 19 th centuries and video games in more recent years. All this controversy is consistently based on a similar fear: that these activities erode the line between reality and imagination to a dangerous degree. Considering the strategies of realism and its ambitions, it is less the claim that the line is eroding itself and more its hyperbolic degree that seems inappropriate. Novels and games do indeed aim to immerse and permit the reader or player to enter another world. In this way they permit the subject to lose and remake itself. However, to claim that such a state is comparable to schizophrenia or some other psychotic disorder (as was alleged of Dungeons & Dragons) avows a tremendous faith in the power of texts. (Fine 17) It is a difference of degree, not of quality. 75 Dungeons & Dragons answered a pre-existing and deeply held desire in its fans for precisely the kind of experience promised by fiction – most explicitly by fantasy fiction – yet never adequately delivered. While claims that role-playing games have resulted in murder and suicide have always proven fallacious, the very fact that their players clearly sought such intensely immersive, transporting experiences might have appeared understandably concerning to observers. As Peterson observes: To the media and to concerned parents, the obsessive interest that Dungeons & Dragons stimulated in its fans resembled belief in an alternate reality, what early spectator Mike Wood identified as a “secondary-universe feeling about it.” Players naturally labored to make their experience of the game world more real, to make its something more than just a conversation of words – could a world created by a game of Dungeons & Dragons have an existence of its own, independent of any game season, as a place that players visited periodically? …The more that players strove to make these worlds real, however, the more susceptible they became to the claim that they had lost touch with reality. … Few could deny that intense gaming triggered the powerful sense of immersion… To what degree, if any, does the property of immersion trigger in players a confusion between reality and the simulated world of games? (Peterson 596) Make no mistake: immersion is exactly the purpose of both realist fiction and the games that share its lineage. Yet if this goal is not distinct to fantasy games and gamers, but in fact shared by novels and their readers, what more – and what else – does the ludic instance offer? What about Dungeons & Dragons was so new, so timely, so literally original that against all odds it flourished and gave rise to innumerable successors, imitators, revisions and reformers? The irony is that few works are as unabashedly derivative as Dungeons & Dragons. There is never any attempt on the part of the game-makers to deny it. Indeed, that is its intended 76 purpose. The immediate pre-cursor to Dungeons & Dragons, the “Fantasy Supplement” to the medieval tabletop wargame Chainmail, explicitly states that its aim is to allow players to “refight the epic struggles related by J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, and other fantasy writers.” Yet immediately following this cheerful avowal of imitation comes another encouragement, the suggestion that the player "devise [their] own ‘world’, and conduct fantasy campaigns and conflicts based on it." (Peterson 41) Despite appearances, these suggestions are not contradictory. Tolkien's own work is similarly derivative, and similarly open about its derivation. The influences of Beowulf, Volsung Saga and Die Nibelungenlied are all visible within both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. What is so original about these derivations is the manner of their appropriation. When Tolkien borrows from myth and epic, he does so in a thoroughly modern, realist manner. Whereas creatures of myth are, like myths themselves, remarkably amorphous, diverse unto indistinction even within a single name, Tolkien's appropriations provide "a clear and consistent differentiation of his monsters" giving them "specific identities" which, thanks to his works' remarkable popularity, became "a de facto standard" for the fantasy genre as a whole. (Peterson 148-150) It was inevitable, then, that when the creators of Chainmail designed their Fantasy Supplement, Tolkien's widely promulgated bestiary provided the basis for both the method and much of the content for monstrous systematization. It is, however, only the starting point for a process of distillation, whereby increasingly ludic methods are applied to the taxonomic appropriation of mythical beings. By the time Dungeons & Dragons was a game in its own right, its co-creator Gary Gygax had undertaken "a deep and unprecedented taxonomic categorization and description of monsters" one which "renders them far more narrow and specific than even the standard set by Tolkien" by introducing "distinctions between virtually all subtypes and their 77 parent types … and flesh[ing] out many brief mentions, notably reclassifying as separate entities such creatures as goblins and kobolds or basilisks and cockatrices.” (Peterson 152) Even more than in Chainmail, the fantasy setting of Dungeons & Dragons is a generic setting, an amalgamation of various fantasy sources rather than the world of any particular author. Its construction was a taxonomic exercise, incorporated a superset of elements that appear in the corpus of fantasy fiction, and, through a system of quantification, providing something of a “grand unified theory” of how all these entities compare to one another and might interact with one another. … This ambitious taxonomical undertaking grew ever more elaborate as Dungeons & Dragons developed past 1974, incorporating diverse historical mythoi and the products of many authors’ imaginations; its overall classification of the fantasy universe is one of the most lasting products of the game. (Peterson 83) What makes the compendium of creatures from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons’s second edition called the Monstrous Manual distinct from a text (such as Jorge Luis Borges and Margaret Guerrero’s Book of Imaginary Beings) is precisely its commitment to realism. Borges and Guerrero delight in the unreality and referentiality of the imaginary beings they record in their book. Their attitude that suits their playful assertion that “the sum of all things – the universe” is essentially imaginary (Borges & Guerrero 12). On the other hand, Dungeons & Dragons aims for factual, descriptive language – the discourse of realism – which makes as if to efface the difference between signifier and signified. Like philology, the game adopts the rigor of scientific description. The Monstrous Manual provides not only vital statistics necessary for the game’s combat simulation, but such contextual information as ecology, habitat, society and diet. Thus while Borges and Guerrero revisit the well-known myth of the Minotaur, positing that is “a late and clumsy version of far older myths, the shadow of other dreams still more full of horror” 78 (Borges & Guerrero 101), the Monstrous Manual informs us that minotaurs are nocturnal carnivores, who inhabit temperate and subtropical labyrinths and form small clans of up to eight members. (see fig. 2.4) The Book of Imaginary Beings gives us the Minotaur of myth; The Monstrous Manual gives us material minotaurs, complete with vital statistics. Thus Dungeons & Dragons’ realism – the specifically appendectical realism of scientific reference – aims to impart a complete and distinct reality to decidedly imaginary things. Figure 2.4: Page 252 of Monstrous Manual, concerning minotaurs. 79 Of course the function of this description is not to convince the reader that the ‘real world’ contains minotaurs (though such a delusion is the essential fear of roleplaying’s detractors). Instead, its purpose is to allow the simulation of minotaurs in a manner that – if deployed within a sub-creation – would seem sufficiently real to sustain the experience of immersion. Borges and Guerrero want to point to the imaginary which suffuses the real, and Dungeons & Dragons aspires to realize the imaginary. The game makes that power of realization available to anyone who wants to use it. The compendiums that make up so much of the core text of Dungeons & Dragons provide these detailed descriptions, convincingly populating the worlds which the players come to inhabit. This is the legacy of Tolkien's systematization, the philological urge that drove the innovation of an alternative, appendectical realism: a radicalization of that very method of systematization, permitting an ease of imitation to the extent of reinvention. The desire to 'refight the epic struggles' of Tolkien's work goes hand in hand with 'devising one's own world', as both are enabled by the existence of internally consistent systems which, while pioneered in Tolkien's work, have their own independent efficacy. In this light, Gary Gygax's infamous rejection of The Lord of the Rings as the primary influence over Dungeons & Dragons seems more a deliberate but corrective misstatement than an outright falsehood or self-deception. It is, after all, not Tolkien's world itself that Dungeons & Dragons is imitating, but rather Tolkien's methods of sub-creation, methods which lend themselves to a variety of further sub-creations, rather than to a singular, reconstituted canon of fantasy. Gygax instead resists "a dogmatic elevation of Tolkien to an authority over fantasy": he wishes to preserve not its dead letters, but the animating spirit of the work, a spirit that has everything to do with its supplemental appendices. (Peterson 120) The function of Dungeons & Dragons is simultaneously imitative and creative. It is the ur-imitation which provides the means for a proliferation of creative enterprises, composed entirely of “extra-literary components.” The 80 bounty of a fantasy world can be accessed with the throw of a die (or two). Unforeseen encounters issue from a simple reference to a table of outcomes, ranging from monsters with complex properties to granularities like what strange sounds or material detritus can be found within a dungeon (with careful reference to geographical context and time, of course, see fig. 2.5). As Peterson puts it: “Within the support system of the taxonomy, players and referees who would never attempt to author a novel can accrue fantastic narratives and worlds on an installment plan, to share in the pleasure of invention.” (Peterson 201) Figure 2.5: Selections from The Dungeon Master’s Guide (1979) 81 It is no accident that this distilled mechanism takes the form of a game, and that its ludic aspects are precisely those deployed by realism to augment the sense of individual experience and subjective immersion. And it is also no coincidence that it is within the fantasy genre, rather than within the refined practice of literary realism, that this ludic practice was most fully developed. It is in fantasy literature that the promises of an immersive realism are most tantalizingly held out. V. Behind the Screen Dungeons & Dragons presents a somewhat different challenge to the task of analysis than did Minecraft. While Minecraft’s interactivity is difficult to represent, it is at least a singular work with clear bounds. It is easy enough to isolate the base “game” of Minecraft from the narratives generated through play, to isolate the static text “itself” from the experiences generated through and by it. Dungeons & Dragons is not so unitary, nor is its “play” as easily distinguished from its components. For where is the “text” of Dungeons & Dragons? Is it in the published documents that allow play, the game-master designed material that contain the action of play, or in the dialogue that itself constitutes play? The answer is of course “all of the above.” The former serves to sustain the latter two, as a radicalization of Tolkien’s methods, and it is in their specific interrelations and reciprocal functions that we may find further insights into the genealogy and function of alternative realism. The manuals, source documents, modules and supplements that lay out rules and supply content (in other words the books) published by the game’s creator company TSR comprise the “system” of the game, and constitute the most basic laws of whatever sub-creation they are tasked with supporting. This is the supplemental material that, rather than being sequestered in the rear of the “main” text as an appendix, is acknowledged as the game’s productive engine. For while the rules-proper reside in the two “core” rulebooks, the Players Handbook and the 82 Dungeon Master’s Guide, the majority of the published texts take the form of appendices filled with tables, lists and charts, an ever expanding series of supplements. 62 We have already seen an example of a D&D bestiary, but the game also sports compendia of spells, records of magical items and their effects, hex-cell maps of wilderness terrain, and the pre-designed labyrinths of the titular dungeons. The specifics of the rules vary from edition to edition, but the kind of material that surround them remains constant not only within Dungeons & Dragons but in almost all role-playing games. Added to these are the game master’s (or GM) 63 material, including additional maps, creatures, items and challenges they have extrapolated or invented, and their conception (be it written down or not) of the “general situation” that should define the bounds of play. 64 This information is, unless otherwise specified, for the GM’s reference only. The maintenance of secrecy is a great part of the GM’s function, as indicated by the apparatus of the “game master’s screen,” a cardboard barrier which allows the GM to consult documents and roll dice without fear of being observed by the players. Next, there is play itself, which typically is comprised of a group of individuals. One of whom is designated the GM, the rest take part as player characters (or PCs). These individuals engage in a dialogue in which each player is responsible for the actions of single character, and the GM manages the rest of the world and all its inhabitants. 65 While PCs may expect to have somewhat limited access to the general appendices during play, and to be barred from reading the GM’s additional material entirely, they produce their own small textual artifacts in the form 62 A proliferation which is, admittedly, as attributable to the requirements of the market as to the game’s formal properties. 63 The term more proper to D&D is ‘dungeon master’ or ‘DM’ but game master remains the most generic and broadly applicable (though other terms, like ‘referee’ used, albeit less frequently). 64 Though player characters are notorious for their propensity to surpass, exceed or otherwise ignore these bounds - indeed, such excess is a constitutive possibility of play. 65 While there is no technical upward limit to the number of PCs in an instance of play, the traditional structure of the game lends itself towards groups of three to six (this according to Gygax himself). This group typically defines the “adventuring party” for whose benefit the action of the game takes place; any larger, and it quickly becomes unmanageable for the GM. 83 of character sheets (often built upon a template). Each is a record of the vital statistics and possessions of an individual player character. Other than this, the majority of the “text” which the players produce is dialogic, emerging in the course of play as discussion within the party and between the PCs and GM. Finally, the game also requires dice of remarkable variety – a veritable a host of polyhedrons. The most iconic of these is the icosahedron or 20-sided die, used to manage probabilities, typically with reference to the success or failure of an intended action on the part of a player. The addition of dice is one of the most important for understanding the ludic trajectory of realism, injecting, as they do, that all-important element of randomness associated with the experience of a “natural” world in the previous chapter. Indeed, dice are one of the few aspects that cannot be derived in some part from The Lord of the Rings. Instead they arrive by way of the tradition of Kriegspiele or “war-games” which were developed in Germany during the nineteenth century. These distinctly modern war-games evolved from such martial board-games as chess, but their development has been towards the increasingly “realistic.” They have consciously tended towards simulation thanks to the efforts of such innovators as Johan Christian Ludwig Hellwig, Georg Leopold von Reiswitz and his son Georg Heinrich Rudolf, Charles Totten and Juluis von Verdy du Vernois. Reiswitz bequeaths to Dungeons & Dragons a commitment to complex rules of simulation, from which are derived the game’s numerous texts and supplements. From the innovations of Vernois and Totten comes the tradition of “free Kriegspiel,” which places emphasis on dialogic interaction and improvisation rather than rigid systems. Both attitudes culminate in the ambition to make a game which closely simulates the experience of a battlefield commander, and in which anything can be attempted (with the caveat that not all attempts are advisable, nor necessarily accomplishable) (Peterson 251). This cleaves to the ambition for a 84 greater realism, specifically by aiming to expand the diathetic range of the players to include any instruction that can be adequately verbalized, while also setting clear limits on what can be achieved based on the systematized reality of the objects and agents in the game world. This remarkable freedom comes at a price, however: it demands both a world detailed enough (and with detailed enough rules) that such autonomy is possible (that is to say, able to be plausibly simulated), as well as a consciousness capable of interpreting the verbal intentions of players so that the rules might represent them and their results – a “referee.” The function of the GM is thus to simulate the absolute alterity of the world, a function borrowed from the “referee” role in Kriegspiel. Indeed, the work done behind the GM’s screen in a role-playing game and the computer’s screen in a video game have a great deal in common. Much of what the algorithms in Minecraft accomplish in the generation of its world is prefigured in the work of the GM, who manages randomness through dice-rolling, as well as keeping in mind the world in all its appendectical excess. 66 And – through their management of monsters and other challenges – the GM provides the experience of resistance; all three elements responsible for the texture of the real in Minecraft. It is the GM who defines and interprets the success and, more importantly, the failure of any given attempt by a player-character, maintaining the limitations that make the game a work of realism as opposed to a flight of fancy, mere “make-believe.” 67 In this way they produce the exterior otherness, which leaves just enough space for the players to subjectivize themselves into the position of their characters. All these appendices, all these charts and maps and tables, serve the players and their characters. All try to deliver on the promise of the visitation theme and of formal realism: to 66 The prototype for all D&D campaign settings, “Blackmoor,” was designed by David Arneson to be an “area one could spent a lifetime exploring.” (Peterson 69) 67 The final consequence of the logic of formal limitation - the emergence of codifiable ‘fantasy physics’ - is a telling sign of just how committed to realism this practice is. The original imposition of rules and restraints, however fantastic or arbitrary, guarantees the consistency and thus the reality of all actions that adhere to them. 85 simulate and make accessible a convincingly fresh subject position within a convincingly built sub-creation. That this sub-created world is fantastical does not make it any less a work of realism. What matters is its internal consistency, however strange, and the subjective experience it enables. The agency proper to the subject is realized chiefly through a dialogic mode of proposition, wherein a player proposes an attempted action for a character. Simple, uncontested actions whose success can safely be assumed, such as quaffing from a cup or having a casual conversation, are simply acknowledged by the GM and taken as “having happened” in the sub- created world. If, however, the action is challenging or contested (say stealthily poisoning a drink or engaging in a public debate), a twenty sided dice is rolled, either by the GM, the player or both, and the success of that action is judged based upon the numbers rolled, compared with and/or modified by the pertinent qualities of the character, but ultimately still interpreted by the GM. In Dungeons & Dragons, a character is defined almost exclusively by the qualities quantified and recorded on the player's character sheet. Central are the character’s statistics, a set of six attributes representing the core physical (Strength, Dexterity and Constitution), mental (Intelligence and Wisdom), and social (Charisma) capacities of the character. These values are traditionally generated by rolling three six-sided dice, resulting in six numbers with an average of nine to twelve, with extremes of three and eighteen. This range (with some extension) is meant to encompass the whole spectrum of human variance. An individual with eighteen Dexterity (the “natural maximum”) would be a statistical outlier on par with an Olympian gymnast, while a mighty Storm Giant might have a superhuman Strength of twenty three. A being with an attribute of zero or null, on the other hand, is either dead or essentially lacking in that characteristic (a toxic mold, for example, might possess no Intelligence). These attributes 86 are meant to represent the individual aspects of a character and have an extensive effect over other characteristics. One such characteristic should be familiar from Minecraft, the “hit points” or “HP”, that in Minecraft is termed “health.” In Dungeons & Dragons this is a simple numeric value, the product of a calculation based on the character’s class (more on this shortly) and their Constitution. While there is some diversity of practice in how hit points represent the physical wellness of a character (some systems deem a character dead upon the depletion of their HP, others simply deem them “unconscious” or “dying” but capable of being rescued, not properly “dead” until they fall far into the negative range) in all cases HP is the degree of a character’s survivability. This gameplay mechanic, 68 what Peterson refers to as an “endurance system” is joined by the “avoidance system” of “armor class” – a quality derived from a character’s Dexterity and the armor they wear – and the “mitigation system” of “saving throws” which are used to avoid or mitigate reductions of HP or other forms of harm respectively. The core attributes can be further modified, and some special abilities added, by a character’s “race.” In the case of Dungeons & Dragons race refers to the distinction between humans and fantastic humanoids such as elves and dwarves, rather than between groups of humans. Thus, in the second edition, high elves are generally more dexterous than humans (receiving +1 to their Dexterity attribute), but less hardy (-1 to Constitution), while half-orcs are stronger and tougher than humans (with +1 to Strength and +1 Constitution) but are haunted by a barbaric reputation (-2 to Charisma). Further information about what it means to be any specific race within a sub-creation is found in other appendectical material, often varying from setting to setting. This additional information tends to be more contextual and less systemic, relying on the 68 A general term in game development and critical discourse for a discrete, functional aspect of the game’s ruleset. 87 player’s commitment to the task of role-playing – that is, using a good-faith interpretation of the available appendices to perform the appropriate subjectivity through dialogue. Lastly, the character possesses a “class.” This term refers more to a character’s vocation and professional skill set than to their socio-economic position within the world. This is perhaps the most definitive of a character’s qualities, as much if not more than their core attributes, since attributes and class are closely related (a capable rogue typically needs high Dexterity, and all good wizards require high Intelligence). It is within and as this class that a character grows in power and experience, gaining a diathetic range appropriate to that vocation (per genre convention). Thus a high-level fighter would have the indefatigability, endurance and martial prowess needed to go toe to toe with a dragon, while a high-level wizard might be able to summon a djinni and negotiate a reality-altering wish. The mode of subjectification in Dungeons & Dragons is suitable to its aspiration to recreate the experience of fantastic adventure. Thus, there is an emphasis on combat and exploration – the stuff of the quest and, more to the point, the stuff of the swords and sorcery genre which the game sought to imitate from its very inception. The formal mechanisms of the game, particularly the mode of dialogic proposition, permit a range of action far outside the narrow confines which defined its wargame predecessors. In all cases, however, the character remains the sole origin of the player’s diathesis. As in Minecraft, the limits of the subject are a matter of their inscription within the world, their diathetic range. That this interaction between the sub-created world and self-inscription is comparable to the formation of “actual real world” social worlds forms the basis of Gary Alan Fine’s sociological thesis on fantasy role-playing subculture. Fascinated by the way in which a group of gamers “interprets, defines, and transforms cultural elements in its sphere of knowledge into the cultural framework of an imagined society” (Fine 2), Fine performed a domestic ethnography on 88 the culture of fantasy role-players in 1983. His investigation is wide-ranging, but the heart of his inquiry involves how self-conscious this world-building, subject-producing activity can be: What makes these small groups particularly interesting as examples of this form of cultural manipulation and creation is their self-consciousness about the fact that they are dealing with cultural elements. … The fact that players are role-playing characters makes them reflexively aware of the culture and social system that these characters are embedded in and are constructions, and simultaneously aware of the fact that they stand outside these worlds. The extensiveness and richness of this culture … indicates the potential of small groups as “world-builders.” (Fine 239) Fine’s analysis suggests a powerful critical function inherent to the practice of fantasy role- playing. Indeed, Fine directly compares the manner in which groups of role-playing gamers gather and propagate their sub-culture to the spread of feminist activism. (Fine 236-237) Despite this functional similarity and the purported critical potential of fantasy role-playing, Fine observes that, at least in 1983, fantasy role-playing is an unwelcoming and even hostile subculture for women. At the time the assumption of both the game’s makers and much of its player base was that, while women might enjoy role-playing if they tried it, very few of them played. This should not lead us to overlook the tremendously important role of women including Lee Gold and Hilda Hannifen – both prolific amateur press association contributors – who wielded considerable influence over the spread and reception of Dungeons & Dragons beyond the narrow, and decidedly male-dominated, niche community of wargamers. Indeed, the initial success of Dungeons & Dragons relied in great part on its propagation through science-fiction and fantasy fandom, a community containing numerous prolific female writers and fans, many of 89 whom were similarly invested in both in building their own universes, and in generating stories within the universes of others. (Peterson The First Female Gamers 2014) As might be expected of a hobby founded and dominated by white, middle class men, during Dungeons & Dragons’ early days the rules reflected numerous implicit assumptions. All warriors are dubbed “Fighting-men” and high-level clerics dubbed “Patriarchs.” There was a persistent use of the masculine pronoun in all early supplements – but nothing properly diathetic, that is to say agency defining, is denied female characters within the rules-proper. Later an article reprinted in The Dragon, the official Dungeons & Dragons magazine, proposed a codification of gender differences. For example, by changing the Charisma attribute to “Beauty” for female character, by lowering their potential Strength, or penalizing “Beauty” should Strength surpass a certain value. This article sparked outrage from both female players and male players of female characters. The struggle between a diverse body of fans and a demographically uniform cadre of game developers drove revisions of the rules, briefly in the direction of formalizing difference, ultimately towards an egalitarian indistinction. As of this writing a character’s sex is a rules-neutral inscription within Dungeons & Dragons, making no demands on the system to simulate beyond recognition through play. (Peterson 2014) Peterson points out the process of world-building is critical and problematizing, forcing its players and designers to consider precisely how the “natural” and the “cultural” are constructed. Indeed, the term “realism” inevitably enters into all of these debates, since the only justification for including such a difference in the simulation must be some claim to better representing reality, and the experience of embodied female subjectivity. However influential Dungeons & Dragons may be, it is important to note that, while it is the first such game, it is far from the only one. Since its inception many others have emerged, most of whom have borrowed from its basic structural components: numerous appendices defining the world, a referee who 90 manages that world, and a group of players who control individual game-subjects within the world. These others often outline the subject position in a very different manner, under very different terms. What almost all of these games share in common, however, is some form of progression and permanence for the player characters, a feature cited as one of the most compelling of Dungeons & Dragons gameplay. This means that a character not only persists between instances of play (between individual “sessions” and even between prolonged “campaigns”), retaining their equipment and abilities, but the character also increases in power, gaining greater and greater diathetic range within the game’s system. The marker of progression in Dungeons & Dragons is the mechanism of “experience points” or “XP.” Experience serves as the foremost engine of the aforementioned progression, with the power of characters increasing with each “level” they gain, each new “level” attained by achieving a sufficient amount of experience. This device is mirrored in Minecraft, where it functions in a vestigial but still very telling manner. As I noted in my discussion of Minecraft, experience points mark events of overcoming, be it the defeat of some entity or the acquisition of some resource (both of which are hold-overs from the very first experience point system). Under the original rules of Dungeons & Dragons experience points are doled out based upon the power of foes vanquished (more powerful foes generate more points than would weaker enemies) and wealth collected (originally at a 1:1 ratio, where each gold piece acquired was 1 XP earned). In both cases, experience is related to an increase in diathetic potential for the character. In Minecraft, XP is used to craft special items and effects while in Dungeons & Dragons it permits level progression. On the surface, experience appears to represent exactly what it names, and that which formal realism aims to replicate (albeit less the experience of day to day life, and rather that of a fantastic adventure). Yet the rules of any given game acknowledge only certain kinds of 91 interactions with the world – in our examples, these overcomings and acquisitions – as definitive of “experience.” Thus in an unrevised game of Dungeons & Dragons, just like in a game of Minecraft, it is the destruction of others and the enrichment of the self which qualify as events sufficiently robust (i.e. having faced sufficient resistance) to be deemed “experience.” Of course, different games offer different means of acquiring experience, ones less beholden to the aggressively sovereign enterprise begun in Dungeons & Dragons. Yet in nearly all cases, the experience system operates as the most basic economy of these games, comprising an incentive that aims to encourage the sort of story that the game is meant to replicate. Indeed, the translation of role-playing games into digital formats, in which the computer takes on the role of the GM as guarantor of worldly otherness, further illuminates this meaning of “experience.” Within computer RPGs, experience is often doled out upon the completion of “quests:” distinct narrative threads that often involve or enable other forms of experience acquisition but are seen as worthy of experience in their own right. These games aim to generate narrative. Specifically, narrative of their appointed genre. This was stated plainly as early as Chainmail’s promise to recreate the battles of Tolkien and Howard. In its earliest days, for lack of a better way to demonstrate play, Dungeon & Dragons advertised itself using brief works of fiction, meant to “exemplif[y] the play of the game.” While predictably derivative, they were all the same functional fantasy tales, sufficient as stories unto themselves, yet standing as examples of the sort of narratives Dungeons & Dragons was capable of producing. (Peterson, 464-6) As products of play, each story amounted to a record of a group’s individual’s subjective experience – that is to say, the very conceit of the realist novel, albeit in a world not our own. Indeed, under the terms of realism, narrative and experience should be equivalent, and within role-playing games this equivalence is codified. 92 What is so compelling about the experiential narratives produced by role-playing games, what makes them seem “real” in comparison to the “static” mode of literature, is precisely that they emerge from the immanent support of appendectality – from a more extensive simulation of otherness – with a larger diathetic range than is granted by the progression of plot in, say, a novel. It is, in short, its capacity for emergent narrative, one of the holy grails of gaming, in which a player has compelling narrative experiences as a result of their free interaction with the game. And while as early as Rousseau’s treatment of Robinson Crusoe in Emile, realism has been alleged the power to let the reader “play” in the world, games are uniquely suited to providing the rich and systemic alterity that create this sense of emergence. VI. Return to Moria The transition from the dialogic mode of Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop role-playing games into its digitalized descendants highlights some of the most important formal components of role-playing. These must be fully formalized and encoded in the absence of the flexibility permitted by the improvisational authority of the GM. While what are now called “RPG elements” can be found dispersed through numerous contemporary games – referring to almost any form of player-character progression, the accumulation of diathesis in the game world – the most immediate descendants of Dungeons & Dragons are the massive multiplayer online role- playing game (MMORPG), the “classic” computer role-playing game (CRPG), and the enigmatic class of games inspired by 1980’s Rogue (the roguelike). The MMORPG is complicated case. In its most popular fantasy instantiations – Everquest, Guild Wars, and the presently predominant World of Warcraft – these games render their fantasy world in a manner not unlike that of a theme park, with discrete zones for particular activities, and highly structured forms of player/player and player/environment interaction. 93 While World of Warcraft does have demonstrably engrossing gameplay, much of its long-term gameplay is motivated by the chase for the ‘rare drop’ (an incentive system similar to slots gambling). 69 It is a well-structured experience, but not one that tends towards the production of novel subjectivities and subjective interactions. Emergent narratives can and do occur, but chiefly around unintended consequences and bugs which stand out from the usual smooth operation of the game. 70 The premier science fiction MMORPG, EVE Online, is more celebrated for is ability to generate emergent narratives. The game relies less upon structured activities and more upon the free interaction between players. The range of potential intersubjective diathesis in EVE is much broader than that of the more popular fantasy MMORPGS, with a range that includes con artistry, graft, espionage, piracy and all-out warfare. The CRPG is even less interested in emergent narrative, focusing rather on a more novelistic linearity, embracing the literary pedigree of fantasy role-playing by emphasizing traditional plot structures and characterization. Games such as Baldur’s Gate and Arcanum generally support a main plot line that must be pursued along with secondary plots that can be taken or ignored. These games present a somewhat more flexible form of narrative, with some room for diathetic variation, but they are not given to a true sense of emergence. These games are evidently designed, your character’s importance foreordained, their story pre-told. They substitute the dialogic flexibility of the GM with the smooth efficiency of a machine, and the bolstered value that comes from carefully designed settings and scripted interactions with defined conclusions, or quests. The CRPG is in many ways a development of the classic RPG “module,” a self-contained game iteration that reduces the burden on a GM by providing the lion's share of material needed to run the scenario. Such games are populated with appendectical 69 Whereby a reward is connected to an action, but in a highly random, highly unlikely manner. This has been shown to produce addictive behavior in rats, and its efficacy on humans is observable anywhere there are slot machines. 70 For example, the “Corrupted Blood Incident” which was eventually used as a model for epidemic research. 94 material, both within the game itself (frequently in the form of in-game texts) and in supplementary materials (the map and/or a manual). However, this material informs more than it produces, and the narratives of the CRPG are always those that have already been written, and players have no way of rewriting them as they could a tabletop RPG. 71 The problem of emergence is most directly tackled by the roguelike, a genre named after 1980’s Rogue, a game that was as simple as it was seminal. Taking the role of an adventurer, a la Dungeons & Dragons, the player of Rogue ventures into a perilous, multi-layered dungeon, collecting items and battling various fantasy monsters in order to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor. The premise describes the most rudimentary of traditional Dungeons & Dragons gameplay, yet it aims to accomplish this without recourse to a GM’s presence. Inevitably this leads to a restriction of player-character diathesis, as what may be attempted is narrowed down to what discrete actions are permitted by the game’s rules, in the absence of live dialogue or negotiation. However, both the construction of the world in a roguelike as well as the specific limitations it places on the player-character illustrate some of the most important formal features of role- playing games and the tradition of alternative realism. 71 It is not uncommon for such games to have multiple potential “endings” to the pre-written storyline, commonly associated with some moral dichotomy that allows the player to choose between the conduct of an archetypal hero or villain. Though it is a motion towards the “forking paths” ideal of emergent narrative, it falls too short of the mark. 95 Figure 2.6: A screenshot from Rogue (1980) There are three defining formal features of Rogue and its children. First, it has procedurally generated levels (meaning the dungeon was remade anew for each playthrough). Second, the player possesses no extra “lives” (itself a ludic convention derived from arcades, where limitations on play iterations drive profits). Finally, there is no means of loading a previous save state (short of purposefully backing up the single save file, a form of cheating known colloquially and derogatorily as “save scumming”). This means that each single playthrough of Rogue is necessarily distinct, with each dungeon being unique (at least nominally), and each adventurer pointedly mortal. Despite the seeming simplicity of its gameplay, Rogue proved extremely influential, inspiring numerous other games 72 which elaborated on its basic principles while preserving two 72 Not least Minecraft, in which procedural world generation is a critical feature. 96 key formal elements which came to define the “roguelike” as we understand it today: procedural level generation and permanent character death (portmanteau’d to “permadeath”). Descendent games such as Moria, Angbad and NetHack developed the formula and refined the experience, and almost all of them were free and freely distributed. After decades spent as something of an underground genre, the roguelike has gained remarkable popularity in recent years, leading to a proliferation of games dubbing themselves “roguelike” or at the very least “roguelike-like.” Nowadays one can explore roguelike worlds set in the distant stars (Faster Than Light) or on the surface of an alien world (Cogmind), or an zombie-blighted instance of our own Earth (Cataclysm). However, the earliest elements of the roguelike set – Moria and Angbad most obviously – make plain where Rogue and its fellows locate their influences and origins. Indeed, one of the most openly avowed Tolkienian descendants is also the most fascinating and ingenious of contemporary roguelikes: the mad project of Tarn Adams, Slaves to Armok, God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress. More commonly referred to by its rather more manageable sub-title, Dwarf Fortress is a game of tremendous complexity, an incredibly ambitious work of realism which assumes the vector of Dungeons & Dragons, already quite radical, and projects itself even further. Whereas Tolkien gave us a story set within a world rich enough to support more stories than the novels themselves record, and Dungeons & Dragons gave us the means and quantifiable rules to experience such stories in similarly constructed worlds, Dwarf Fortress aims to generate endless worlds in a Tolkienian mode, innumerable Middle-earths each with a level of internal consistency and detail that rivals even Tolkien’s carefully-constructed sub-creation, each containing numberless narratives, waiting to be created and discovered by the player, as well as an internally consistent physics to supplement and fulfill the expectation of mechanical determinism shaped by Dungeons & Dragons. 97 Dwarf Fortress is atypical, even within the idiosyncratic and independent world of roguelike freeware games. In development since 2002 (and in the MoMA collection since 2012) the game is in a ceaseless process of refinement and elaboration. It may never be truly “finished,” it has no proper “release date.” It is driven by no market forces, answerable to no investors, motivated solely by a quest to create a comprehensive generic fantasy world generator capable of doing in minutes what took Tolkien years. The game’s creator, Tarn Adams, is a model modern auteur. He is a postdoctoral scholar of mathematics who left his position to live with his brother and their cat, sustained by the good will and donations of the community that has formed around his game. This community is a small (by industry standards) but fiercely devoted group of fans, who maintain the game’s wiki and introduce new players to the game. Dwarf Fortress is infamously difficult to play thanks to its remarkable complexity, further obscured by what is – by modern game standards – an archaic graphical interface. Of the many ways in which Dwarf Fortress evokes the avant garde, not least are its rejection of the sleek visual verisimilitude of mainstream gaming’s “cinematic realism” 73 and its stubborn refusal to retreat into abstraction. Its modified ASCII tile set is an inheritance from earlier roguelikes, where it serves – as it does now – as a way to keep performance requirements low. While the graphics are, if not simple, then certainly not high-resolution or verisimilar, the game itself is computationally demanding, tracking the movements and actions of numerous entities both within the instance of play and within the game’s larger world. Dwarf Fortress exceeds even the detail of Dungeons & Dragons, not resorting to the abstract expression of “hit points” but rather tracking the status of each entity’s individual appendages and organs, their bone and tissue. 74 73 Best exemplified by the modern military shooter, in which each blade of grass might be carefully visually rendered, but have no pertinence to gameplay, nor any real influence within the game’s world. 74 Even individual splatters of blood and vomit are informationally associated with their source, a computational conscientiousness that has yet to be made into a gameplay feature, may have future applications “for witchcraft”. 98 The realism of Dwarf Fortress exceeds that of Middle-earth in the course of aspiring to it. It is the realism of appendectical complexity, a mix of internal consistency, breathtaking scope, and a remarkable lack of interest in subordinating either to the pragmatic task of making a playable game or readable narrative. The game-as-played does not need cats to die from alcohol poisoning after cleaning themselves from beer spills (an actual consequence of the game’s rigor) any more than Tolkien readers need to know that his invented names are properly grammatic. These formal elements are self-purposeful, expressive of the real’s capacity to exceed narrative functionality or legibility. The emphasis on the world-building act of sub-creation is evident from the outset. Before the game-proper may be played (or, alternately, as the necessary first move) the player must first create a world. Various parameters can be set, including the size of the world, its level of mineral wealth, the average ferocity of its wildlife and the number of civilizations that may exist in it. Then, at the click of a key, continents rise, oceans expand, volcanos burst out from magma vents. After that, living beings emerge, cultures form, civilizations develop, a history comes into focus. Figure 2.7 shows the northern coast of a main continent, with dwarven-occupied mountains in the south, elven forest retreats at the north most tip, and a goblin civilization sandwiched between them. Across the Ocean of Sprays is a smaller continent, settled by sizable numbers of both goblins and humans. The content of this world is Tolkienian in extraction, with deep-delving dwarves, wicked goblins, tree-cherishing elves and rapacious humans, yet it is wholly unique, generated procedurally just as with Minecraft’s world – just as with all roguelikes and their spiritual successors. 99 Figure 2.7: Screenshot of “The Realm of Omens” As of this writing Dwarf Fortress has three modes of play once the world is spawned: Adventurer, Fortress and Legends. Each mode positions the subject differently in relation to the world created. “Adventurer” mode defines its subject and structures its gameplay in a manner most similar to traditional roguelikes (including the original Dungeons & Dragons) by placing the player in command of an individual character with a variety of skills and attributes. Thus embodied, the player traverses the world, step by step, capable of interacting with the other inhabitants of the world, asking for information, offering help or even enlisting their aid. The player must survive hostile encounters through combat or avoidance, as well as sustaining their life by eating, and drinking and sleeping. They may travel in the wilderness, enter towns and cities, explore caves and plumb abandoned ruins. They possess skills that improve, as per the convention of progression, though rather than the abstraction of experience, skills improve with use, an arguably more “realistic” model of skill acquisition. The character persists between sessions of play, which can be saved, but if they die that save file is deleted – their story is over. 100 This weighty responsibility is mitigated somewhat by the fact that the game is turn-based rather than real-time. The game doles out time in atomized chunks, the character taking each action sequentially and – from the perspective of the player – possessing unlimited time between actions to assess the situation. In practice, this this kind of care is taken only when the situation demands it (for example, during conflicts or other perilous situations) and while the player is traveling the game transpires almost in real time as the player strings together near-continuous similar actions. For long stretches of uninterrupted travel, the player may expand to “map view” and move at an accelerated pace, simultaneously abridging narrative time and distance. Sleep also elides in-game time, and is a physical necessity without which the character will succumb to fatigue. As an example, Figure 2.8 shows the player character (designated here by the centrally- placed blue square with grey glyph), named ‘Nocam Rarsescura’, a human female in her homeland of the Incidental Prairies, standing at a crossroads outside of a settlement; she is wearing a llama wool dress and wielding a copper spear. To the east is a small wooded copse, while to the north dogs and hens scratch in the muddy sand. 101 Figure 2.8: Screenshot of Nocam Rarsescuro Adventurer mode thus constructs a traditionally realist subjectivity: a solitary individual’s experience, much like in Minecraft or Robinson Crusoe, within an effectively inexhaustible world. It is distinct, however, in the methods and intentions that produced that world. The sub- creations of Minecraft’s world and Robinson Crusoe’s island, insofar as they can even be called sub-creations, are relatively simple and barren, staging a certain kind of sovereign subjective fantasy of the lone individual’s survival through a triumph over otherness. Dwarf Fortress’s world is suffused with history and inhabited by numerous organized entities, resembling Middle- earth or a setting in Dungeons & Dragons, yet without the singularity of Tolkien’s work or the inevitably necessary improvisation of a GM. Adventure mode takes place in a living world, rather than being set in a contrived labyrinth or in an uninhabited landscape, and its complex interlocking rules not only provide the constraint necessary for a sense of resistance, but also for novel uses of those rules to produce emergent content. Players have, for example, developed schools of dwarven martial arts as a consequence of the game’s robust physical simulation, a system as suited for dance as for combat, allowing for elaborate actions outside any possible foresight or intention on the part of the developer. (Kisat Dur: the Dwarven Martial Art) “Fortress” mode places the player in a subject position of management simulators such as Sim City or Dungeon Keeper. In this mode of play, the player is given the task of administering the activities of a dwarven settlement, starting with seven individual dwarves and a cart full of supplies, arriving in a spot of the world’s surface selected by the player at the outset. As the settlement establishes reliable sources of food and drink as well as shelter and labor, migrants begin arriving to bolster the population. Liaisons from nearby seats of dwarven authority pay visits, arranging trade agreements. As the settlement’s wealth grows, kobold thieves, raiding parties and even invading armies of goblins may threaten it, requiring defensive measures such 102 as traps, moats, guard dogs and even a trained dwarven militia. At times, enormous creatures such as dragons or titans will appear to threaten one’s dwarves. Other threats can come from within the fort, such as vampires living secretly amongst your populace, or – more commonly – from the psychological pressures of survival causing one’s dwarves to lash out, risking a “loyalty cascade”, when the social fabric of the fortress dissolves into an orgy of violence. And, of course, one can always dig too deep and release terrible monsters from the depths of the earth. The life of a fortress is typically bounded by the appearance of one of these threats, too great to overcome or even to recover from. This inevitable end is viewed philosophically by the player community, leading to the game’s motto from the in-game manual: “losing is fun”. Like the individual roguelike protagonist, every fortress is only mortal, and it is noteworthy that – just as in Adventurer mode – there is no way to reload. Events are irreversible once they have transpired. Even if the player should achieve hermetic levels of security from the most existential threats to fortress’s existence, a fortress’s life may end simply because the player grows bored of the monotony of the status quo and ceases to play. Danger is one of the great engines of the game’s emergent events, danger that can be as immediate as a werebeast arriving to wreak havoc, or as indirect as a poorly-planned engineering project flooding a fortress with water or – worse still – molten lava. Unlike Adventurer mode, time in Fortress mode flows continuously, but can be paused at moment. Events transpire but the player must be vigilant to notice and react, applying attention as they attempt to decode their meaning and cause. Fortress mode frequently involves a hermeneutic process of piecing together occurrences from traces, its challenge compounded – at least at first – by the glyphic visual interface. As a player’s literacy improves, the task of translation becomes easier and easier, but there remains always an element of archaeology, the untangling of history (even if it is the history of the past few moments) through the examination 103 of traces and signs. This construction of time emphasizes the autonomy of the world, which can and will proceed without player intervention. Rather than producing the main causal chain of experience, as per Adventurer mode, the player may opt to influence events but does so by insinuating themselves into the situation as it unfolds. The subject-position of Fortress mode is further distinguished from that of Adventurer mode in the nature of its diathetic range. The player may assign specific tasks or designate certain areas for certain functions, but all direct actions must be carried out by in-game entities, who are free to disobey if they are unhappy or incapable. This gives the player insight into the complexity of those entities, further investing them with a sense of their independent reality, the degree to which they exceed the direct, sovereign control of the player, despite the player’s administrative – and thus authoritative – role in the game. Figure 2.9: Profile of Tosid Sholidudil Each dwarf is painstakingly detailed, both in their physical appearance and their personality, which includes beliefs, preferences, relationships and desires. Dwarves make friends and lovers, 104 adopt pets (or are adopted by pets, as in the case of cats) and invest emotional significance into their handicrafts. Figure 2.9 is the profile of a dwarven brewer named Tosid Sholidudil (the last name translating to ‘Clutchlanterns’). It lists her vital statistics, appearance, significant interpersonal relations, her cultural and personal beliefs (and notes where the two come into conflict), her personal preferences, physical and mental capabilities, and her most recent set of experiences, along with an associated affect. Hence the possibility of loyalty cascades: a miner may own a pet dog, that dog might die in an unfortunate accident, caught in the crossfire between militia and invaders. The distraught miner throws a tantrum, destroying a nearby stone table with her copper pick. That table was made by a master mason, who – infuriated by the destruction of his prized creation – lashes out at a nearby soldier who, already on-edge from witnessing the messy death of her dwarves-in-arms, strikes the mason down. The mason’s lover and friends become enraged, seeking an extrajudicial vengeance which antagonizes the remaining soldiers – and so on, until the fortress roils with violent interpersonal conflict. These fatal loyalty cascades are not the result of purposeful design. Indeed, the developer intends to mitigate them in future iterations of the game. They are, however, a consequence of the interlocking rules of the game. They are “bugs,” but like so many bugs in Dwarf Fortress, they emerge so clearly from those rules that they lack the immersion-breaking quality of common game bugs. While it is true that there is often something head-scratching about some of the game’s idiosyncrasies, whereby its “bugginess” is evident in terms of representational realism (eg. a festival in which, instead of throwing spears or hammers as part of an athletic display, the competitors throw the strings of instruments), 75 they are sometimes embraced as “features,” unintended but serendipitous occurrences that contribute to the sense of a living world, capable of its own organic self-elaboration. 75 [http://bay12games.com/dwarves/index.html#2015-04-01] 105 This blurry line between bug and feature underscores Dwarf Fortress’s peculiar capacity for emergent narrative. However experienced the player, there is always some chance they will encounter unplanned events that emerge as if from alterity, yet are legible within the world. Such “bugs” do not disrupt the created world (they should not crash the game, or confuse the visual interface necessary to make sense of the game world), but rather spring from the consistency of the rules itself, the event proper to its world if not quite to our own. And only worlds built with sufficient dynamism and complexity are capable of producing such emergence. It is because such occurrences are both unforeseen events and functions of clearly defined rules that they take on the sense of validity, a feeling that some genuine otherness has been encountered. The final mode of play, “Legends,” is a study in the role between narrative and appendectality. In this mode, the player possesses no active diathesis whatsoever. Unable to effect the world of the game even indirectly, they are instead given access to an archive including historical figures (including heroes, monsters and gods), sites (towns and fortresses), regions, civilizational entities (such as cultures, religions and local governments), structures (towers, taverns, temples, etc.), as well as historical maps. The breadth of the information available is overwhelming, and given in no organizing principle save the broadest chronological arrangement. The most a Legends player can do is explore these archives, unravelling narratives from the range of accessible objects and entities. In this respect, as a hermeneutic practice without interactivity beyond the act of interpretation, Legends mode resembles the reading of literature. Yet rather than the narrative logics of plot, Legends mode offers a worldly hermeneutics. Its “plot,” which is to say the organization of events into some larger signifying chain, is a function of the world’s internal consistency. What transforms these events into narrative is the player’s identification of them, the encounter their consciousness has with this 106 complex world-object, and the narrative thread is extracts. Thus even Legends is about the generation of narrative, this time through a process of pure hermeneutics, without inscription. The legends-self functions only as a witness to that emergence. That emergence was made possible only by the complexity and consistency of the sub-creation. This hermeneutic process is further elaborated in the reciprocal relationship between Legends mode and Adventurer mode. Upon creation, the world has a number of historical secrets, indicated in Legends mode but initially inaccessible, which can be discovered only through investigating it in the embodied Adventurer mode. These discoveries are made by inquiring into local history, reading engravings and inscriptions, and uncovering artifacts such as coins and tablets, transforming the causal-chaining adventurer into a Legends-like reader, further layering the acquisition of objects and experience onto the generation of narrative. One of the most compelling aspects of the game is this layering of experience, including encounters not only with systemic emergence, but with the player’s own efforts, their own previously-made marks on the world. A player in Adventurer mode may traverse a site they themselves have built in Fortress mode, encountering it either as a bustling outpost or a Moria- esque ruin haunted with whatever doomed the fortress in the first place. This makes for an important distinction between the traditional roguelike and Dwarf Fortress. Rather than the randomly generated tunnels and traps of Rogue and its dungeon-crawler fellows, Dwarf Fortress invites the player to encounter their own work from a different subject-position. Returning to a player-built fortress is compelling because it allows that player to encounter an artifact of another, formally distinct iteration of the self. Indeed, if the accumulated product of diathesis defines the subject, the player-made fortress is the self, the purposeful inscription of self into the world, but one that is startlingly different from the mode of individual experience as produced by traditional rogue-like play. 107 Compare this experience to that of Robinson Crusoe finding the footprint in the sand, an ambivalent and ambiguous sign of an other so close to the self that it troubles sovereign self- assurance. In the case of Dwarf Fortress the individuated adventurer-self knowingly encounters the product of the fortress-self. These distinctly different selves, rather than threatening the distinction, each provide a reciprocal contrast. The adventurer-player cannot assume the distributed efficacy of the fortress-player, any more than the fortress player can embody themselves and thus take on the adventurer-player’s direct diathesis. At most the fortress-self can foresee the arrival of the adventurer-self in its construction and/or the adventurer-self can draw upon the knowledge of the fortress carried over from the fortress-self. Thus in Dwarf Fortress the player may encounter the self as othered, even as these distinct self-formations remain grounded within the same world. The game allows not only for multiple points of subjective production, but also demonstrates the variety of formal modes capable of generating a subject, beyond that of individual sovereign experience, and makes each present to the other. It is this sense of coming into a presence (including one’s own) that give these games – and indeed all realism which aims to generate an experiential subject – their profound appeal. Whether it be witnessing yourself emerging from a thing profoundly other (an inexhaustible world) or encountering the traces of the othered self (a footprint in the sand), it is always the feeling of presence that these games aim to provide, the sense of a subjective immediacy that is only possible through an encounter with otherness. Viewed in this light, the progression mechanic in role-playing games and their descendants reveals itself for what it is: the accumulation of presence in the world. This process of self-inscription is analogous to the production of narrative, by which the experience system enables and incentivizes but does not wholly encompass. As experience is gained so is power, by way of “levels” (or other modes of character progression). What is power in a world of fiction but control over how the narrative 108 unfolds? The more you write your character (or build your fortress), the more you experience the world through their subject position, the more diathetic range is given over to them, the more they approach the breadth of agency that feels proper to subjectivity, and the more they are present in that world. The manner of self-inscription may vary based upon the manner of the subject position provided by the game, something which is defined primarily through the world and its constitutive rules, but the accumulation of presence – of whatever sort – is the primary function of any subjective mode. Of course, that such an experience of presence – that most coveted of qualities within Western metaphysics – can be produced through the artifice of fiction leaves us with a troubled sense of what presence is and means, particularly in its fraught relation to otherness. For you don’t get one without the other: just as interiority requires an exterior to bound it, “proof of presence” always involves being both witness and witnessed, a “realization” that has everything to do with the sense of reality which realism produces. Games are particularly good at providing the three-fold sense of otherness into which the self is inscribed (albeit often by means of violence and acquisition), and in so doing they underline the necessity of that very otherness, without which the outline of the self would be impossible to define. This inevitably raises Robinson’s specter, the dangerous blurring of the distinction between self and other, by revealing their mutual necessity, something which is troubling to a sovereign subject, the very subject formal realism brings into being. This anxiety is both answered and exacerbated by the practice of role-playing, which articulates a mechanism for the creation of subjects and, in so doing, demonstrates how contingent – how couched in otherness – the self must be in order to feel at all real. 109 VII. Those Dangerous Supplements I return to the problem of Rousseau’s subject which can achieve its return to a natural purity but only through the sheer cultural artifice of realist prose. For the presence-accumulation function of role-playing is analogous to – indeed, is a continuation of – this paradox at the heart of Rousseau's understanding of writing and the subject. While for Rousseau writing is, as per the Western metaphysics of presence, a kind of degraded speech lacking the presence of the speaker, it is also, at least within his personal experience, the only way he can properly represent himself as he “truly is”. As Derrida explains it: In terms of this problematical scheme, we must therefore think Rousseau’s experience and his theory of writing together, the accord and discord that, under the name of writing, relate Jean-Jacques to Rousseau, uniting and dividing his proper name. On the side of experience, a recourse to literature as reappropriation of presence, that is to say, as we shall see, of Nature; on the side of theory, an indictment against the negativity of the letter, in which must be read the degeneracy of culture and the disruption of the community. If indeed one wishes to surround it with the entire constellation of concepts that shares its system, the word supplement seems to account for the strange unity of these two gestures. (Derrida, Of Grammatology, 144) That is to say, Rousseau finds the primacy of presence, his presumed true nature, can only be retrieved through the use of literature as a supplement. This is a shocking conclusion since, by Rousseau’s light, supplements are dangerous since they can only muddle the clarity of the natural subject. This conflict between Rousseau’s philosophy and his experience pertains to the ambivalence about literature and games, and any formal medium which reproduces subjectivity 110 in a sufficiently convincing way. It is an ambivalence that is best exemplified by the arc of the novel, once the bane and now the boon of our culture. It is an ambivalence, Derrida claims, that lies at the heart of a problematic within Western metaphysics around the very concept of the supplement, a concept that is itself fundamental to the practice of alternative realism. Derrida locates this ambivalence at the root of signification and the supplement: And there is a fatal necessity, inscribed into the very functioning of the sign, that the substitute make one forget the vicariousness of its own function and make itself pass for the plentitude of a speech whose deficiency and infirmity it nevertheless only supplements. For the concept of the supplement – which here determines that of the representative image – harbors within itself two significations whose cohabitations is as strange as it is necessary. The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence. It cumulates and accumulates presence. It is thus that art, technè, image, representations, convention, etc., come as supplements to nature and are rich with this entire cumulating function. (Derrida145) This method of presence accumulation, which we have identified with the self-inscriptive function of realist subject-production, is older that realism itself. So, too, its troubling implications have been part of this proposition all along. Yet while it is true that fiction has indeed been viewed askance since antiquity, this particularly acute anxiety about the subject is proper to the endeavor of realism, for, ‘[w]riting is dangerous from the moment that representation there claims to be presence and the sign of the thing itself.” (Derrida 145) And it is realism that takes the radical leap, endeavoring not only to represent speech in its absence, but reality itself. 111 Appendectical realism succeeds because it embraces the logic of the supplement and takes it to its limit, exploiting the supplemental quality of reality in its efforts towards subject- production, specifically through the production of an exteriority which encircles the interiority of the subject. As Derrida explains “…whether it adds or substitutes itself, the supplement is exterior, outside of the positivity to which it is super-added, alien to that which, in order to be replaced by it, must be other than it. Unlike the complement, dictionaries tell us, the supplement is an ‘exterior addition’.” (Derrida 145) This is figured literally in the case of Dungeons & Dragons, where the game supplements provide the worldliness of the world, expressly for the purpose of allowing its players to carve out subject-positions. Thus what should be most given to us – be it Dasein, the cogito, the faculty of empirical reason, this mooring of experience we call the subject – appears as the refined product of a particular cultural technology. It is not an intrinsic possession, but a gathered resource; not immediately present, but gradually produced. Rousseau’s quarry, that wildest and most natural thing, the self-identical subject, is only ever found in zoos. And a return to the state of innocence he craves can be achieved only through the “system of substitution” of education, that “keystone of Rousseauist thought.” Self-hood is acquired, not innate, and thus can never be properly natural in Rousseauist terms. It is no coincidence that a novel plays such an important role in Emile, supporting the Rousseauist educational project while underlying the irony that “…it is indeed culture or cultivation that must supplement a deficient nature, deficiency that cannot by definition be anything but an accident and a deviation from Nature. Culture or cultivation is here called habit.” (Derrida 145-146) I return to the concept of habit, the voxel components of subjectivity. As I have established, the habits of a subject are not trivial. They are constitutive of the subject itself, the subject that is defined only by its self-inscribing actions, in its relation to the alterity of the world 112 and other subjects. I first considered role-playing as an answer to problematic habits within the game world: through the imposition of a certain code of conduct and, tellingly, the application of a proper name to one’s character, the roleplaying reformers hope to stem the tide of arbitrary intersubjective violence. It amounts to a kind of domestication of the wildness inherent to any subject, meant to foreclose the anxiety of uncertain encounters. Moreover, such rigors are as much a matter of defining the subject to themselves, as a self, as of encouraging the habits that seem proper to a fully subjectivized individual. Roleplaying is thus not simply an answer to the issue of intersubjectivity. It is an answer (or an attempted answer) to the issue of subjectivity itself, the same issue Rousseau tackles in his treatise on education: how do you repair a warped subjectivity? While gaming has gained rather wider traction, it is worth noting that Dungeons & Dragons and its children are painted (not always unfairly) as the province of the socially alienated. As Gary Fine explains in his ethnography of fantasy role-players, the subjective/intersubjective facilitation function of gaming is well understood by its own community, where gaming is seen as “a means by which former (and current) science fiction fans feel that they can overcome their shyness – by adopted alternate persona.” (Fine 61) Like Rousseau, who had numerous anxieties about society at large and women in particular, the typical gamer says “they have difficulty interacting with others, particularly women…” self-consciously professing to feel out of joint in modern society, “a little ‘odd’ or ‘deviant.’” (Fine 61) Also like Rousseau, for whom the supplement writing serves as a means of presenting a ‘true worth’ that would be invisible in spoken discourse, for the gamer “…taking on a role helps one overcome deficiencies of one’s ‘real self.’” “Whether a gamer believes that gamers are marginal or socially disorganized persons,” Fine explains, “most agree that gaming provides a supportive atmosphere for the development of interpersonal skills.” (Fine 61) 113 That the “real self” could be deficient is entirely counter to Rousseauist thought, yet the logic of the supplement makes this conclusion unavoidable, and the conditions that produce this dissatisfaction about the “real self” – the self as defined by day-to-day social reality – are not unlike those that motivate the Robinsonian subject to seek the uninhabited. Fine evokes an image of the gamer in 1983 as “today’s Everyman … battered by forces outside his control; he is at the mercy of restrictions, superiors and bureaucrats.” In this situation, gaming is “said to provide not only an escape from worldly pressures, but a feeling of control or efficacy over an environment – even if it is a fantastic environment.” (Fine 57-59) In effect, the diathetic range of day-to-day reality is so hemmed in by habits and demands, the “real self” loses much of that agency that feels proper to a subject. The self-consciously adopted new role, not despite but perhaps because of its fantastical qualities, “provides sufficient self-distance that players believe that they have transcended the constraining features of their selves.” (Fine 56) Thus one must bracket the “real self” to achieve a self that is “natural” by Rousseauist standards (i.e. free from constraint). Yet just how complete is this transubjectivization? Games aim to be immersive and engrossing, yes, and the richness of supplemental material is the key component in that engrossing function, but do gamers genuinely enter a full state of alternative subjectivity? Is such a total transformation even possible, and would it be any different from the psychosis and reality/fantasy distinction failure alleged by the fiercest critics of gaming? These critical questions are not out of keeping with the ambitions of gaming-as-realism. As Fine asserts, and as my investigation into the ambitions of realism demonstrates, role-playing games “are designed to provide “engross able” systems of experience in which participants can become caught up.” (Fine 196) In practice, however, the relationship between the “real self” of social reality, and the “novel self” of the game is not a matter of hermetic containment or total transfiguration. The 114 interplay between the “real self” that rolls dice, eats snacks and makes out of character jokes, and the “novel self” of the game character who embarks on adventures is active and dynamic, involving what sociologists like Gary Fine refer to as “frame switching”, an active process of moving between frames of social reference and concurrent performances of self. Total engrossment would imply “the setting aside or ignoring of alternative awarenesses.” While “individuals do get ‘caught up’ in fantasy gaming” as per the ambitions of games, “this engrossment is a flickering involvement” rather than a true psychotic self-loss. (Ibid. 187-188 196) This flickering between frames and roles, Fine points out, is not particular to gaming: Numerous activities involve the enactment of several selves in the same individual. Actors, storytellers, spies, experimental confederates, con men, and of course fantasy gamers all have multiple selves lodged within the same body. […] The dramaturgical analogy suggests that we are all keyers and fabricators. The person consists of a bundle of identities that are more or less compatible, but which when enacted must presume a lack of awareness that other identities are possible. The identity enacted is grounded in the assumption that that is the “real” identity, although often the enactor is well aware that this identity is chosen for the purposes of impression management. The task of self- presentation does not merely involve manifesting an appropriate and coherent identity, but also involves concealing those other identities that are either incompatible or differently keyed. Even when awareness of the impression management is not wholly conscious, the structural relationship between selves is still present. (Fine 187-188, 196) Which brings us to the occluded truth of Rousseau’s paradox, and the grounds upon which the realist project of re-subjectification could ever be realized. The blankness of the subject is a source of anxiety, an anxiety that is alleviated through the careful positive determination of the 115 subject’s identity, along with the identity of the other. Yet this positive determination can only be achieved through supplements. As Derrida puts it: …the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void. It is represents and makes an image, it is by the anterior default of a presence. Compensatory and vicarious, the supplement is an adjunct, a subaltern insistence which takes-(the)-place. As substitute, it is not simply added to the positivity of a presence, it produces no relief, its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness. Somewhere, something can be filled up of itself, can accomplish itself, only by allowing itself to be filled through sign and proxy. (Derrida 145) The supplemental retrieval of the self from this emptiness does not result in a new, true, self- identical subject. Rather, it highlights the multiple quality of selfhood. It is small wonder that the sovereign subject, that self-same-self, is so troubled by the footprint that might be their own but might be anyone else’s: it could easily be both at once, the self-as-othered. The edifice of singular self-hood is built upon shifting sand, its very possibility of production based upon its multiplicity, in its being a sign in a long chain of signs adopted to stand in for the self. 116 Chapter III Multiplicity I. A Topical Introduction The recent coalescing and invocation of the term “gamer culture” means that the question of identity in games is inseparable from the question of which identities games foster and support (and which identities they suppress or discourage). At the heart of the reactionary response to the increasing visibility of women in games, and feminist criticism of games, is an investment in a gamer identity which popular opinion and culture frequently affirm as categorically male, white and middle class. The ideal conclusion to be drawn from the recognition of the multiple subjectivities offered by games is that the gamer could be imagined as a bare, universal subject able to take on any possible identity, becoming multiple in the course of playing. However, such a formulation of subjectivity is often cited within feminist criticism as synonymous with white, middle class males touristically stepping into various roles and claiming to inhabit them as a function of their privilege. Faith in multiplicity risks leading to naive assumptions of its political-liberatory potential. My claim to multiple subjectivity by way of games could be taken in line with utopian visions of the Internet during the 1990s, when hopeful scholars predicted the dissolution of prejudices once everyone was free to adopt whatever contingent identities they pleased in the disembodied space of the digital. Like Emile, internet users would enter a Robinsonian realm where socially constructed identities would be revealed as mere costumes worn playfully by our natural, universal selves. This rosy outlook has been contested, as this fantasy of disembodiment favors those whose bodies are the least threatened, least at issue in the question of the subject and the rights conferred on that subject. (Gonzáles, 37-38) 117 I am not naive about the effect of games upon the wider culture, and in no way assume that their benign and liberatory potential is a necessary consequence of their formal structure. Were this true, games would already have fostered a new wave of politically conscious, self- critical subjects with a de facto recognition of the social construction of gender, sexuality, race, etc. As with the Internet, similarly hailed as a space for free discourse without the hampering effects of socially imposed identity, 76 the tools of formal realism in games – their role in the definition both of subjects and the world in which they exercise their diatheses – have been claimed by both progressive movements and the ascendant forces of fascism in the twenty-first century. 77 As such I recognize games as an increasingly influential and technically sophisticated method of representation and subjectification. In the larger cultural battle around the mutability and meaning of identity, games have a critical role to play. Realist games, with their detailed and deliberate productions of experience, provide an insight into the supplemental and multiple nature of subjectivity. They formalize the way in which the self is a production in and of an encounter with otherness. In these games there are grounds for hope, however cautious; after all, the idea of multiple subjectivity is frequently touted by radical liberatory and feminist discourses, contrasting the multiplicity of the self to the singular, unified identity of the subject-citizen fostered by patriarchal hegemony. The question, then, is how and to what extent do subjectifying mediums promote liberatory multiplicity, or sovereign singularity? Are we doomed to play games and read novels that, despite simulating the experience of otherness, only affirm an essential Self? 76 Yet another echo of Rousseau’s hopes for the novel. 77 Exemplified by the “Gamergate” movement, which served as one of the coalescences of the political consciousness of the so- called ‘alt-right’, precisely through online message boards and other forms of social media. (Bezio and Goethals, George R. 556– 566.) 118 Rather than a binary opposition, I find instead a spectrum of tension within the practice of realism, one addressed explicitly and implicitly in both novels and games. This chapter addresses three texts engaged in a struggle against the common practices and assumptions of realism in its respective novelistic and ludic manifestations. Critiquing and counteracting the symptoms of the statist subject, they provide an insight into the possibility of outmaneuvering naive attitudes about games, both as boon and bane. II. The Stakes of the Game Critic Laura Fantone sees in games the potential to influence the way subjects are formed. She places faith in “a positive change in the subject emerging from the crisis of modernity” whereby we can see “videogames as a postmodern product in which fictional nomadic identities are possible.” (52) Drawing explicitly upon the notion of the machine put forth in A Thousand Plateaus as that which “cuts the fluxes” (Deleuze & Guattari 98), disrupting flows and provoking new configurations, she argues “that video games are machinic” specifically “in that they allow us to comprehend events in particular new ways” including the conceptions of gender, thanks to “an ontological relation that materializes worldviews, bodies and environments.” This materialization comes about when games-as-technology are used not strictly as something that “limits, defines and calls for specific knowledge” but rather “reorganize[s] our conceptions of time, space, bodies and gender.” (Fantone 53) Fantone recognizes in video games the same tension that I identified in the novel: the opposing deployments of the technology of subjectification which I have identified with formal realism, towards conceiving the world and towards writing the self, a technology that has, from the beginning, been coopted by statist and sovereign inclinations. It is easy enough to see why. The creation of a consistent experience of selfhood, framed by a self-contained world, lends 119 itself to an experience of “second nature” compelling enough to become a primary interpretive mechanism. But the moment this outline of a new self becomes naturalized, the marks drawn on a map mistaken for island-like natural barriers, the nomadic potential of the text, its plurality and machinic versatility, is foreclosed. Optimism rests on the hope that video games will provide unique advantages in the reclamation of the technology that has, since its inception, been deployed to the effect of sustaining certain social norms and fostering specific kinds of identity. The hope is found in games’ potential for divergence, the ways in which they can diverge into potentials which more seemingly “fixed’ texts necessarily foreclose. By activating the plurality of digital texts, optimists like Fantone hope that virtuality “can create unpredictable effects and interstices of freedom.” (Fantone 58) This dream of “freedom” lies at the heart of the discourse of games, both within the critical literature and in the field of production itself, is even frequently emphasized in development and then touted in marketing. This belief that players are necessarily more “free” than readers, that games lend their users “agency” that novels do not, underwrites much of the optimism about the potential for games as avenues for the production of new identities. Yet just as novels have ended up reproducing hegemonic notions of identity, playing an active role in the formation of the modern subject, so too have games (video games in particular) been rightly critiqued for their majority representation. In chapter one I identified ways Minecraft reproduces the problematics of sovereignty extending throughout numerous genres of games, creating a general cultural impression (perhaps overstated but far from erroneous) that games are largely violent power fantasies addressed to white men. Rather than representing the triumphant liberation of novelistic potential, ludic subjectification suffers from difficulties similar to those plaguing its literary forebears: games too often resemble each other in the way that their subjects are constructed, and in the kind of 120 subjects they construct. Moreover popular attitudes about what games are, and ought to be, have led to a doubling-down of reactionary subjectivities, exemplified by the cultural gatekeeping of the proto-alt-right Gamergate movement. These gatekeepers aim to impose and enforce reactionary subjectivities as “normal” (as opposed to the presumed intrusion of “social justice warriors”), upholding a consolidated, patriarchal regime of representation in games. This is not to say that games are a lost cause, or that the promise seen by optimistic critics is nothing more than delusion, only that the question put to formal realism is by no means resolved. Much as novelists of the twentieth century self-consciously sought to address and remedy the stultifying effects of realism-as-practiced, the Gamergate conversation then provoked video game developers, creators, and players to questioned their own prevailing practices of production. III. The Patriarchal Plot The association of novels with feminine readership is well documented, as is the gendered practice of reading. 78 The emergence of literate middle-class women as a market in the nineteenth century motivated the production of various new publications, “above all, the cheap popular novel.” (Lyons 317) Part of the peril seen in the novel form was based upon the “(supposedly) female qualities of irrationality and emotional vulnerability” which, combined with the novel’s unique power over the inner lives and imaginations of its readers, presented a threat to both public and private morality (Lyons 319). Yet the romance plot, which Gustave Flaubert excoriates in the 1856 novel Madame Bovary, appears earlier as a form of moral education. Samuel Richardson’s 1740 work Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded was written to impress 78 The influence of the novel upon the social construction of gender has received only light treatment in the previous chapters; its absence is conspicuous, much like the absence of women in Robinson Crusoe and the earliest forms of character construction in Dungeons & Dragons. As gender is one of the most contentious issues in the public discourse around gaming, this is an oversight worth addressing. Lyons, Martyn. “New Readers in the Nineteenth Century: Women, Children, Workers.” A History of Reading in the West, edited by Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, Polity, 2003, pp. 313–344. 121 upon contemporary young women the virtues of innocence (more precious than life itself), and despite being widely mocked and parodied even at the time of its publication, 79 Richardson’s romance plot – complete with the epistolary format, the modest but beautiful protagonist, and the reformation of the rake through the triumph of virtuous femininity – helped to define this prolific genre (Doody). Moreover, its usefulness as an education is premised on its presumed truthfulness and its relation to reality; Richardson “spends a lot of breath… trying to convince the readers that Pamela is based on a true story” in the interests of using the novel as an “efficient tool of ethical edification of young women.” (Doody) The romance plot’s efficacy shares its historical function with its masculine counterpart, the individualizing Bildungsroman. The latter sets out unambiguously to construct a subject who confronts choices, overcomes difficulties, and arrives at the end of the novel, having successfully completed his subjectification as an enterprising citizen. The former provides the corresponding model for women in a patriarchal manifestation of liberal individualism, with Pamela’s chief tasks being the preservation of her intrinsic moral virtue and its concurrent domestication of a man. As Robin Silberglied argues: “The contemporaneous emergence of [the romance plot] with the rise of industrial capitalism and the foundation of liberal citizenship is hardly coincidental.” (Silberglied 156) Indeed, the romance plot served, if anything, an even more critical role than the Bildungsroman in the establishment of middle-class norms by “foster[ing] the newly defined bourgeois family, with its necessary emphasis on sexual difference and a gendered division of labor.” Thus the novel in general, and the romance plot in particular, usher in the new social order, and the accompanying “elision between capitalist production and familial reproduction.” (Silberglied 156) 79 Indeed, the rapid proliferation of responses, rejoinders and re-writings is an indicator of the novel’s seminal effect, its early-day appearance as a distinctly modern media and cultural event. (Keymer and Sabor 2) 122 This ideological work was necessitated by, as Ursula Vogel puts it, “the liberal-bourgeois project of social progress and political emancipation” which was “parasitic upon the traditional family to ensure stability against the potentially disruptive dynamite of a liberated society,” a side-effect of the liberal individualism capitalism required to operate. (Vogel 154) In a universe where sovereign individuals are asked to engage freely in commerce and courtship, it was necessary to make domestic servitude somehow palatable, to sustain – in the interests of patriarchal domination – the gendered aspect of citizenship under the new liberal auspices. The romance novel serves as a “compensatory social and narrative practice” (DuPlessis 2) restraining those social powers that liberalism, in tandem with capitalism, threatened to unshackle. 80 While men in realist novels were depicted as the recipients of newfound individualist freedoms through coming-of-age and thus coming-of-agency plots, women in novels, and novels for women, set up a supplemental alternative: romance plots in which women find men. There is hope, however, that if certain narrative modes helped usher in a new social order, then other modes might serve to provide alternatives. Much as I have argued realism is capable of realizing not just our world, but other worlds, it also has the power to realize not just singular subjects, but other selves. Certainly the novel, as has been amply demonstrated by its many experimental turns, has proven capable of representing far more than middle-class normativity. In drawing the link between narrative and the establishment of new social norms, Silbergleid argues that “if we accept that narrative is our governing epistemology, the very mode of human consciousness, then any amount of social change or subversion necessitates a new narrative structure, a new way of envisioning the world.” (160) This is not, to Silbergleid, a hypothetical case. Her research leads her, as it leads us, to seek this “new narrative structure;” 80 Crusoe’s emphatic, lonely masculinity must be compared to that of Moll Flanders, Defoe’s other iconic protagonist. As Ian Watt points out, “the essence of [Moll Flanders’] character and actions is… essentially masculine. …Moll accepts none of the disabilities of her sex… a heroine who fully realised one of the ideals of feminism: freedom from any involuntary involvement in the feminine role.” (Watt 113) 123 together we find one particularly cogent attempt in Joanna Russ’s 1975 science fiction novel, The Female Man. IV. The Problem With Paradise If scholarly optimism is to be believed, The Female Man is a model for the liberatory potential of the novel form, as an exemplary alternative practice for distinguishing sovereign subjectivization from some hoped-for alternative. The Female Man has prompted numerous critical interpretations celebrating its “energetic disruption of linearity” (Robinson 115), its effecting of a “coming into consciousness” and enabling an “advancing out of stasis to the possibility of action” (Annas 149). By “solicit[ing] the reader’s empathic identifications in complex and multiple ways and encourag[ing] political action … through these identificatory processes” (Gardiner 92) the novel allows the reader to “revise the definition of subjecthood and broaden the field of possibility in terms of what human beings can modify, re-imagine, and build anew” (Martins 408). Russ’ “good use of bad methods” – her purposeful re-appropriation of the tools used to sustain the social order, a revision as opposed to an outright rejection of the subject – is perhaps best summed up in the notion of using novelistic narrative to “be productive, …not reproductive” (Silbergleid 165), where reproductivity stands for heterosexual hegemony, patriarchal domination, other oppressive mechanisms against which these critics invariably stand. The novel earns these accolades both through its subject matter – Ellen Morgan dubs it “the truest, most complete account available of what it feels like to be alienated as a woman and a feminist,” (Morgan 10) – and in its experimental structure, part of the wider trend of “aesthetic experimentations” among the text’s contemporaries. (Yaszek 45) This is quite a lot to allege of a single slim volume, one which foresaw that its detractors would be as (if not more) vociferous than its champions. The Female Man is both an 124 experimental science fiction novel, and a polemical, political, feminist text. Accordingly, the complaints leveled at Russ’ novel (when they are not expressly about gendered double- standards) are often justified on the level of form, or the lack thereof. In his assessment of the negative critical and readerly reactions to the novel, Ritch Calvin notes that criticism typically focused on the lack of “epistemological ground,” “coherent plot” and “resolution” (39) all understood to be expected of the novel-as-practiced. He even makes a comment echoing the criticism of Tolkien’s work: just as The Lord of the Rings is “not literature,” some critics of The Female Man deem it “not a novel.” (42) I do not want to over-stress the comparison, however. The peculiar contribution of The Lord of the Rings was, after all, the establishment of a robust epistemological ground, perhaps at the cost of the phenomenological immediacy. But both Tolkien’s and Russ’ work represent uses of novelistic realism in ways that deviated from what had become the tacitly accepted standard for how realist novels ought to be; hence the generic isolation of fantasy and science fiction and the propensity for critics to throw these two works together in passing. The Female Man’s engagement with utopian literature is paradigmatic of tension that reveals the conflicted relationship of the genre with liberatory politics. While modern utopias, particularly critical utopias such as Herland or Looking Backward, are typically politically progressive, depicting a more socially and economically just world, formally they suffer a kind of stasis. Any attempt to create a sustainable representation of social justice leads to a fixed system that seems in some essential way to be contrary to the open society sought by liberatory politics. At their best, they question received notions of social organization, in the interests of inciting change. You visit utopia, you take notes, but you do not remain and you do not bring it home. Moreover, the utopian form runs contrary to the basic tenets of formal realism. Fredric Jameson argues that “the Utopian text is mostly nonnarrative,” the presence of its usual “tourist- 125 observer” leaving it all the same “somehow without a subject-position.” Consequently “the Utopian text does not tell a story at all: it describes a mechanism or even a kind of machine, it furnishes a blueprint.” (Jameson The Seeds of Time 384) This schematic is necessarily self- contained and self-sustaining and essentially atemporal, so that the setting may be “released from the multiple determinisms” of history. (Jameson 376) At first glance, the sections of Russ’ novel describing the anarcho-community of Whileaway appear as standard utopian representations, initially through encyclopedic accounts, however humorously conceived. Whileaway is even outside our time, as “the future” but “not our future.” (Russ 7) Yet critics have made much of how the text’s peculiar construction defies both utopian fixity and subjective singularity. The accusations leveled at “settled” realism and “static” utopia are isomorphic if not identical, the product of similar concerns about novelty in formal realism. If, as Bülent Somay argues, “classical utopian fiction” suffers from the limits of fixity, then The Female Man responds through its construction as “an open-ended text” which “portrays a utopian locus as a mere phase in the infinite unfolding of the utopian horizon.” (Somay 26) Somay claims that the “polyphonic” nature of the text, its “use of various narrative voices” and “the possibility of approaching the narrative through different personae” allow it to evade the limits imposed by classical utopian narrative. (Somay 30) The deployment of embedded perspective, the province of the novel, makes The Female Man different from other utopias and their tendency to take the form of guided tours. Instead Russ’ narrative spends time with each protagonist in each timeline, each a self of their world, making full use of formal realism’s distinctive capacities to convey subjective experience. As multiple and mutually supplemental experiences (with the point-of-view characters ultimately convening to negotiate an uneasy alliance) those subject-positions do this invaluable work. Rather than merely inviting contrast between worse and better worlds with our own, it elaborates on the kinds of subjects that 126 would emerge from each of those worlds, allowing those possible selves to converse, compare experience, find common interests and clash over differences. 81 When treated as a technique or technology, 82 a technic, formal realism joins the broader appropriation of the prosthetic and cybernetic technologies that feminist critics have claimed as openings to social and individual transformations. Such technologies are united under a common critique of the modern logic of identity, whose construction still relies on formal realism. Much like the limitations of utopian literature, in which the new is foreclosed due to the fact of attained perfection, the imposition of the logic of identity “forecloses any possibility of radical and unexpected change” – of a genuine encounter with otherness. Any hope of using technology as a “facilitating agent for new and transformed futures” will require an “open-ended, non- deterministic conceptual horizon” upon which “the novel may appear.” (Currier 324) If there is any doubt about the concurrence of utopian ideation and this logic of identity, Dianne Currier removes it: “to escape determinism and teleology requires the surrender of certain notions of revolution, utopia and progress.” The guarantee of safety implicit to utopia relies upon the closure of the possible. Currier calls for the same “utopian horizon” as Somay, but on the level of individual subjectification. Once more, imagining new selves demands the imagining of new worlds, and vice versa. V. The Many Within It is important to view The Female Man alongside its contemporaries, which engaged with similar formal experiments and wrestled with similar problematics. As Lisa Yaszek points out, 81 With the exception of the mastermind Jael Reasoner, each subjective position is depicted as “typical” of their timeline. Even the utopian representative, Whileaway’s ambassador Janet Evason, is emphatically commonplace, chosen not because she is exceptionally qualified but rather because her world could afford to lose her. (Russ 146) 82 As Donna Haraway in does in her well-regarded Cyborg Manifesto, in which she directly refers to The Female Man. (164, 178) She more explicitly refers to The Female Man as a “writing technology” which creates a new subject, “FemaleMan” in her later work, Modest_Witness. (75) 127 post-war writers and artists in "diverse generic traditions" were working out "new models of storytelling" in a search for "new models of subjectivity" which could better suit the times and its demands. (Yaszek 156) Modern artists and writers in movements as diverse as the Surrealists and Oulipo participated in this anti-subjective turn, using machinic techniques such as automatic writing and games in attempts to circumvent conscious subjectivity and – once more echoing Rousseau – access some authentic encounter with the unmediated real, and thus with the untapped possibilities underlying staid normative subjectivity. The Female Man does not, however, aim to remove the subject from the equation. Rather than reject the subject outright, rather than "simply destroying the codes of patriarchal culture," Russ' novel "works to penetrate and reorganize them,” (Yaszek 76) finding new possibilities in existing tools, a reappropriation of the novel as a subjectivizing technology. Hence the bold claim of Susan Ayres, who asserts that Russ’s novel is a “war machine,” a term she borrows from Monique Wittig. In this characterization, The Female Man possesses the power to “pulverize the old forms and formal conventions” thus making them appear “outdated, inefficient, incapable of transformation.” (Wittig 45) Russ’s novel attains this power, Ayre asserts, through the use of “narrative shifts” that “not only displace the reader, but on another level they raise the question of the identity of the subjective self.” (Ayres 23) Russ disrupts the sense of a unitary, sovereign subject, forcing a recognition of the contingency of the self, of its essential multiplicity. However, according to Ayres this martial mobilization of multiplicity “ultimately relies on the power of language to reappropriate the universal” (Ayres 32) a criterion set up in Wittig’s essay “The Trojan Horse,” which asserts that it is “the attempted universalization of the point of view that turns… literary work into a war machine.” (Wittig 49) Th term “war machine” is related to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, specifically the “Treatise on Nomadology” in One Thousand Plateaus, which deals explicitly with the war 128 machine exemplified by the nomadic societies – Mongols, Scythians, Arabs – which they raise as foci of resistance against state power. Both uses of the term rely upon the thesis that artistic objects and movements can function as a means of political liberation. These convergent discourses of the “war machine” differ on the troubled grounds established at the beginning of this chapter. Wittig claims that universalization is the key to the war machine’s success, while Deleuze and Guattari see it as functioning through its deployment of contingent multiplicities, in opposition to the “global specific” which universality implies. Of course, it may well be a matter of both working at once: of the Trojan Horse functioning only if it appears as a benign and digestible Oneness just long enough to disgorge the militant multiplicity hiding within. What makes The Female Man's relationship to games so interesting is the novel's formal innovations and the manner in which they conceptualize this potential for multiplicity in a singular theory. The Female Man accomplishes the feats ascribed to it by defeating certain expectations of novelistic realism. Formal realism is typically at pains to establish the existence of its fictional subject through a certain consistency between the action of the character and the experience of the reader, the substance of the subject and the composition of their world, ultimately creating a space of identity which the reader may inhabit. While not all novels are the singular stories of a Robinson Crusoe, for formal realism to function conventionally, there cannot be any lasting question as to the identity of the speaking subject of the text, that presence that the text aims to simulate and impart on the reader. Moreover, the world of the text should be causally coherent, so as not to risk disengaging the reader from the fluid process of identification. Russ’ novel troubles these traditions deploying the pillar of identity, the novelistic “I,” in strange and unstable ways, and flouting expectations about the structure of plot and the experience of chronology. As Sally Robinson puts it, drawing upon the French Écriture féminine: 129 Russ’s novel defies limits, resists structuration; it is a spectrum of different discourses (scientific and historical, personal narrative and feminist critique, among others), no one privileged over another. This plurality of discourse renders the concept of plot elusive; any attempt to pin down this narrative to one unified story line (or even “braid”) is destined to fail. Plot usually centers on a protagonist with whom we can identify, or at least through whom we can understand the story; here, we have no unified personage, no traditional sense of character which is so central to the realist text. By breaking down the boundaries between the four main textual figures – all of whose names begin with the letter J – Russ’s text practices a de-centering of the subject. Each of the four J’s intersects with the others: they share desires, experiences, possibilities, and even “identities.” The J’s are close to what Kristeva calls a “questionable subject in process,” an alliterative to a unified “phallic” subject. Russ explodes conventional expectations of character by breaking down boundaries between self and other to produce a continuing polyvalence of the subject. (Robinson 116) The philosophical basis for this deployment reflects my larger contention about the supplemental, constructed quality of subjectivity. Russ articulates it through the mouth of a prominent philosopher in her utopia, Dunyasha Bernadetteson, whose declaration "Humanity is unnatural!" (Russ 12) serves as the zero-point from which the rest of Russ' implicit argument expands. Susana Martins notes as much when she identifies the novel's "attempts to revise the definition of subjecthood,” a motion that is concurrent with "broaden[ing] the field of possibility in terms of what human beings can modify, re-imagine, and build anew," both in themselves and in their world. (Martins 408) The science-fictional components of the novel tend towards just such revisions. The technologies in the book can be read as analogs to the technology of formal realism itself, when 130 repurposed in the manner Russ models. For example, the induction helmet which forms the basis for Whileaway's utopian economy is explicitly figured as a technology which “redefine[s] the boundaries of the self or, alternatively, create[s] a self with no ultimate, definitive boundaries” (Martins 408) The induction helmets are the utopian solution to the problem of industrialization, multiplying the labor of an individual worker “to have not only the brute force but also the flexibility and control of thousands” (Russ 14) – to effectively multiply the capacities of the self – through a union between person and machine which blurs the distinctions between self and world, expanding the body so that “their toes [control] the greenpeas, their fingers the vats and controls, their back muscles the carrots, and their abdomens the water supply.” (Russ 51) Time travel – here explained as interdimensional travel – is another such analogous technology for redefining the self. Rather than imagine one continuous and linear progression of events that can be travelled to, Russ substitutes a notion whereby the timeline blossoms into innumerable adjacent possibilities. Movement within one's own timeline is impossible, thus doing away with pesky paradoxes. Instead, the "only possible motion is diagonal motion” (Russ 160), a shift to those adjacent timelines where various possibilities were or were not realized, and where one's alternate timeline self exists in accordance with the world-history in which they were formed. Drawing from Martins, we can read this as a metaphor for the "mode of consciousness" (Martins 415) employing the kind of counterfactual, possibilistic thinking that distinguishes fixed selfhood from multiple selfhood, and static utopia from the utopian horizon, finding the utopian potential in the untaken paths of history, where the unrealized is not consigned to the impossible. This form of time travel, and specifically the "cluster protagonist" it produces, serves both as metaphor for a contemporary state of being and a model for how to overcome or outmaneuver it. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues, the multiple “I” of the novel can serve both as "alternate selves in one person," in keeping with our multiple model of the subject, as well as 131 "alternative strategies for dealing with the same kind of social givens: female non-dominance in a patriarchy." In literalizing the "divided consciousness of contemporary women,” Russ simultaneously demonstrates the multiplicity that novels are capable of fostering, while also highlighting "the visceral need for a speculative fiction which creates a world beyond our own." (DuPlessis 6) Once more, world-creation and self-creation go hand in hand, not only in that a different world makes us consider what it would be like to be a different self, but how different selves, like Russ' utopian visitor, Janet Evason, might serve as critical vantage points for the everyday world beyond the bounds of the book. While the construction of Russ' novel may subvert novelistic conventions of characterization and plotting, it does not do so by forsaking the techniques of formal realism. However confounding the multiple perspectives may be, each is embedded in a worldly experience. This wandering consciousness of the narrator is not so different from the work of high modernists like Woolf. In both cases the mechanisms of formal realism function smoothly. As I discussed in chapter two, most works of fantasy place greater emphasis on the construction of the world, drawing on myth and legend for content but not form, their world-building and internal coherence rigorous to the point of scientism. The same goes for science fiction, which – having established whatever differences between its world and our own – requires a degree of fidelity to that premise that is entirely in keeping with formal realism. In Russ’ work this science fiction conceit analogizes the operation and expresses the potential of the realist novel itself; her theory of multiple timelines and multiple worlds – combined with the foundational assertion of the “unnaturalness” of humanity and the contingency of self- outlines a theory of novelistic subjectivity. Russ’s full explanation of this theory, and the multiple selves it engenders, is worth replicating in detail: 132 Sometimes you bend down to tie your shoe, and then you either tie your shoe or you don’t; you either straighten up instantly or maybe you don’t. Every choice begets at least two world of possibility, that is, one in which you do and one in which you don’t; or very likely many more, one in which you do quickly, one in which you do slowly, one in which you don’t, but hesitate, one in which you hesitate and frown, one in which you hesitate and sneeze, and so on. To carry this line of argument further, there must be an infinite number of possible universes (such is the fecundity of God) for there is no reason to imagine Nature as prejudiced in favor of human action. Every displacement of every molecule, every change in orbit of every electron, every quantum of light that strikes here and not there – each of these must somewhere have its alternative. It’s possible, too, that there is no such thing as one clear line or strand of probability, and that we live on a sort of twisted braid, blurring from one to the other without even knowing it, as long as we keep within the limits of a set of variations that really make no difference to us. Thus the paradox of time travel ceases to exist, for the Past one visits is never one’s own Past but always somebody else’s; or rather, one’s visit to the Past instantly creates another Present (one in which the visit has already happened) and what you visit is the Past belonging to that Present – an entirely different matter from your own Past. And with each decision you make (back there in the Past) that new probable universe itself branches, creating simultaneously a new Past and a new Present, or to put it plainly, a new universe. And when you come back to your own Present, you alone know what the other Past was like and what you did there. Thus it is probable what Whileaway – a name for Earth ten centuries from now, but not our Earth, if you follow me – will find itself not at all affected by this sortie into 133 somebody else’s past. And vice versa, of course. The two might as well be independent worlds. Whileaway, you may gather, is in the future. But not our future. (Russ 6-7) What is striking about this passage, which otherwise is a restatement of the popular “many worlds” resolution to the problem of quantum uncertainty, is its remarkable congruence with the logic of games, and to the conceit of world-building’s capacity to create legitimate alternatives to the current state of affairs. The sequence begins with an intentional act – that of tying one’s shoes – opening up the potential for two states, failure or success. But failure is not a negative state, it is simply an alternate branch: nothing depends upon it; it is not a negation. It is simply as if the character (you) had, to borrow from the parlance of role-playing games, failed to make the necessary skill check. In such a case, the game will continue, consequences proliferating and further defining the singular instance of play, but against the background of very real alternatives. Within the tradition of the novel, this kind of branching based on possibility is impossible to represent; it is only in imagined texts, like that posited in Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths, that such divergence is supportable. Games, however, sincerely pursue exactly this kind of capacity to sustain branching narratives, and in fact do so – to a greater or lesser degree – merely as a function of the iterative nature of play. It is possible in novels only if one “plays” a novel, as when Rousseau hopes that Emile will explore alternatives to the castaway’s actions in his inhabitation of that fictional nature. While there is a direct link between the ludic function of a text and its capacity for multiplicity, the result is not necessarily the liberating “mode of consciousness” celebrated by The Female Man’s advocates. Russ’s text also demonstrates that a given ludic arrangement can constrain the possible by limiting the subject’s diathetic range. The potentials and problems of 134 ludic logic in The Female Man are used to illustrate the vexing nature of sexed interaction, which it frequently parodies as a game or script that leads to restrictive and stereotyped identities, particularly for women. During Janet Evason’s ethnographic foray to a Manhattan party, she – and the reader – are treated to representative examples of such rote interactions as: ‘A ROUND OF “HIS LITTLE GIRL”’ and ‘A SIMULTANEOUS ROUND OF “AIN’T IT AWFUL”’ (Russ 35). These insipid social games are carefully scripted, reproducing the same set of interactions every time, with no variation between iterations. Rather than enabling multiplicity, these rigged social games serve to delimit the possible by rendering deviations illegible and making their perpetrators into spoilsports. 83 In another particularly telling passage, Russ literalizes the diathetic restriction of gender roles by positing that all sexed interaction (in our world, at least) is governed by contrasting blue and pink books, color coded by gender, addressing every social situation. After a scuffle between Janet and an over-aggressive suitor, the male book tumbles to the ground and Joanna recovers it, literalizing the metaphor and granting both herself and the reader an opportunity to peek into the opposing side’s playbook: The little blue book was rattling around in my purse. I took it out and turned to the last thing he had said (“You stupid broad” et cetera). Underneath was written Girl backs down – cries – manhood vindicated. Under “Real Fight With Girl” was written Don’t hurt (except whores). I took out my own pink book, for we all carry them, and turning to the instructions under “Brutality” found: Man’s bad temper is the woman’s fault. It is also the woman’s responsibility to patch things up afterwards. 83 A class of persons seen as far more socially disruptive than cheats, comparable to “apostates, heretics” as well as “outlaws[s]” and “revolutionar[ies].” (Huizinga 11-2) 135 There were sub-rubrics, one (reinforcing) under “Management” and one (exceptional) under “Martyrdom.” Everything in my book begins with an M. They do fit together so well, you know. (Russ 47-48) Even in the face of the rank injustice, the imbalance between the ranges, rules and outcomes of the books, the fictional Joanna takes time to note the artfulness of the game’s construction, the self-justifying arrangement of its terms. How else could it seduce its users, and foreclose all other possibilities? Russ appeals to an understanding of habit as limiting the self by defining the diathetic range, presenting a set of consequential actions and responses. This passage demonstrates the flipside to realism as a form where anything can be attempted and every experience is unique: a blinkered view of the possible that seduces with its apparent self- consistency, even as it forecloses lines of flight away from the pre-programmed conclusion: Girl backs down – cries – manhood vindicated. Janet’s answer is to throw both books away, a solution that might appears simple enough to a transdimensional traveler from a utopian world. But, according to the fundamental ludic basis of identity-formation, the question becomes how to expand diathesis of both women and men beyond their presently proscribed identities – beyond the proscriptive binary upon which “woman” and “man” are based. How to make possible Female_Man? The distillation of this problem, at its most ludic, is summed up in the comparison the novel makes between the diathetic repertoires available to men and women, respectively: Men succeed. Women get married. Men fail. Women get married. Men enter monasteries. Women get married. Men start wars. Women get married. Men stop them. Women get married. 136 Dull, dull. (See below) (Russ 126) The “available moves” for women are so limited that it should come as no surprise that the women conforming to these ludic cultural practices all fit, to Russ’s mind, a set of easily identifiable types: Eglantissa, Aphrodissa, Clarissa, Lucrissa, Wailissa, Lamentissa, Travailissa, etc., all of whose personalities and even future fates are preordained by the restrictive set of possible subjective modes available to them, the handful of habits that permit a woman to be legible as a woman. (Russ 34) In a broad sense, this is presented as an issue of (mass) cultural representation. When Russ wishes to demonstrate the problem of inequality in cultural representation, she resorts to citing figures in film, literature, television and history. But her relation to these cultural objects is ludic, an imagining of self-as, premised on the inhabitation of the represented roles which ludic elaborations of realism (role-playing games being paradigmatic) make their raison d’etre. When bemoaning the invisibility of women as substantial, powerful figures in mass culture, for example in the following: “Rodan is male – and asinine./King Kong is male./I could have been a witch, but the Devil is male./Faust is male./The man who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima was male.” (Russ 135-136), Russ’s narrator insists she doesn’t want women to be allowed to be “a ‘feminine version’ or a diluted version or a special version or a subsidiary version or an ancillary version, or an adapted version” of cultural depictions of heroism: she wants women “to be the heroes themselves.” (Russ 206) In her writing on video games and the novel forms of embodiment they allow, feminist scholar Laura Fantone echoes Russ’ desire, “the desire to be a monster, a dinosaur, a wrestler or a tank. … to move as … a heavy monster, play with the possibility of smashing buildings, stomp my feet, scratch with my claws and threaten the other players with my paws and sounds.” (Fantone 62). Violent and destructive as these fantasies of becoming monsters and nuclear 137 bombers may be, they are savored in the name of novelty, the player’s ability to be something new, and the thrill of “meet[ing] a new entity that [one] could never have encountered in… everyday life,” (Fantone 62) an entity that could well be the self, refigured and reformed by a new set of contingent habits. Thus Russ has no issue with allowing her youngest protagonist, and the only one (as far as we can gather from the text) that is not part of the collective Js, the luxury of indulging in sovereign fantasies, provided they are made available at all. Laura Rose is free to imagine herself as a “Queen in lonely splendor or a cabin-boy on a ship” (both highly Robinsonian fantasies) and is twice described as “the girl who wanted to be Genghis Khan.” (Russ 207) Russ here is not objecting to sovereignty or solitude as such, but rather to the way that certain bodies are barred from certain subjectivities, a prefiguring that has less to do with the fundamental potential of subjectification and more with their monopolization by certain social and demographic interests. As much as one might be tempted to do as Janet urges and throw out all the books that construct and constrain one’s sense of self, and pursue a Rousseau-like quest for naked selfhood, her home world of Whileaway, and thus the utopian attitude it has enabled, is a product of a plague introduced by Jael’s faction into an alternate timeline. (Russ 211) Indeed, to forsake or exclude the problematic elements or instances of subjectivity may be a strategic misstep. The interdimensional, intrasubjective alliance that marks the novel’s hermeneutic climax, and provides the clearest (if analogical) vision of a practical program of liberation is proposed by the most violent, radicalized member of the protagonist cluster. Having gathered her other selves together, Alice “Jael” Reasoner makes plain her intentions: This is what we want. We want bases on your worlds; we want raw materials if you've got them. We want places to recuperate and places to hide an army; we want places to 138 store our machines. Above all, we want places to move from – bases that the other side doesn't know about. (Russ 200) The character most ready to overthrow patriarchal oppression is also the one most deeply ingrained into a universe of assumed roles and constant struggle. Of the J’s, Jael is the most defined by and implicated in a world of stark gender distinction, more even than the emphatically “feminized” Jeanette (though it is telling that she is the readiest to accept Jael’s proposal). A product of the literal war between the sexes that has consumed her iteration of Earth, Jael is sensible of roles and rules; she uses them to do her work, masquerading, amongst other things, as a Manlander policeman and a Prince of Faery, entering starkly gendered spaces and using their expectations to strategic advantage. (Russ 188-191) Her bloodthirsty attitude may disturb if viewed from a utopian perspective, but one great value of multiple subjectivity is the ability to draw upon the resources (literalized in Jael’s proposal) of one’s various modes of self, to have access to the aspects and alignments that determine appearance and provide perspective. It is not, then, any specific formation of subjectivity that is inherently ethically compromised, but rather the fixity and stasis deriving from the logic of identity, when the many within are denied by or subordinated to a singular conception of self. VI. A Populous Solitude The appearance of the Great Khan in Laura Rose’s fantasies links my discussion more tightly with the work of Deleuze and Guattari, who similarly admire Genghis and the war machine he coalesced around himself because he manifested a critical stance towards sovereign subjectification and its complicity with the State apparatus. Their extended metaphor painstakingly connects the constitution of states and societies to modes of subjectivity, suggesting a feedback loop between the two. In their “Treatise on Nomadology,” Deleuze and 139 Guattari point to the role of nomads in defining the exterior limit of settled, statist societies, rejecting the notion that nomads are simply “less developed” than their settled neighbors. Rather, they claim that nomadism is a functional mechanism for preventing the accretion of state power. It is the nomad’s ability to resist the state, the war machine’s intrinsic power of exteriority, which disrupts the interiority Deleuze and Guattari see as central to state power as manifest in the singular subject. They favor, instead, a nomadic mode of subjectivity, one that does not settle in one place, but rather follows lines of flight: “A tribe in the desert instead of a universal subject…” (Deleuze & Guattari Plateaus 379). This mode provides an alternative to the sovereign solitude that gives rise to the fear of the other, both within and without, being instead an “extremely populous solitude” which is “already intertwined with a people to come” (Deleuze & Guattari 379); an anticipatory, multiple mode of self that defies the rigid lines defining exterior and interior. Their explicit critique of the Oedipus complex is extensive, comprising the whole of Anti- Oedipus and specific to its moment – the height of psychoanalysis’ institutional power – but a similar tack has been identified in Russ’s work, which critics in the periodical Discourse allege provides “a way of challenging entirely cultural systems and institutions of power that reproduce themselves by means of these [specifically Oedipal] narratives” by “rewrite[ing] the Oedipal conflict into their texts by assigning it a limited place and a place limited historically…” (Discourse 47) Russ’s novel functions as a “nomadic war machine” mounting a successful counterattack against the “settled” qualities of novelist conventions, 84 conventions which restrict the potential for multiplicity in favor of reproducing and reinforcing a particular kind of subjectivity. Deleuze and Guattari would identify these conventions as an imperialist, colonialist, 84 Appropriate, then, that contemporary critic Lester del Rey deemed The Female Man a “truly schizophrenic book” (Del Rey 168), the schizophrenic being one of the chief metaphors Deleuze and Guattari use to typify their alternative mode of subjectivity. 140 fascistic and specifically Oedipal subjectivity premised on a.) intersubjective conflict b.) the internalization of exterior constraints, c.) a continuous process of self-reproduction. The nomadic subject they favor is strictly analogous to the anti-Oedipal subjectivity they propose in their earlier work, Anti-Oedipus. This is a subject that is, “produced as a residuum alongside the machine, as an appendix, or as a spare part adjacent to the machine.” As opposed to the interiorized subject of the state, they argue, the nomadic subject “is not at the center, which is occupied by the machine, but on the periphery.” (Deleuze & Guattari Anti-Oedipus 20) The conditions for the formation of this “strange subject” should sound familiar to us, being appendectical, peripheral, and machinic. They articulate a model for the kind of temporary, ludic subjectivities that are generated by games, those desiring-machines par excellence. Thus this formulation supports and mirrors my previously established conception of a supplemental subject. This subject forms through a ludic encounter with the text, but their subjectivity is generated by the machine, is a supplement to it and is supplemented by it and, while proper to the multiple quality of subjectivity-as-residuum, it is by no means “natural” (as Dunyasha Burnadetteson has already pointed out) and does not predate this encounter. The nomadic subject, insofar as it constitutes a part of a war-machine, is thus well- equipped to be militarized against the formation of State subjectivity. But, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, this is not to say that the war machine cannot be co-opted by the State. Thus, while the subjectivity-generating power of Robinson Crusoe is testament to the nomadism of subjectivity, capable of taking us out of ourselves and casting us upon a distant, fictional shore, the work itself strives to affix the wanderer, to relocate the nomad as interior, Statist and sovereign. In the course of the text, Robinson Crusoe moves from a longing for escape to a precious attitude about his island, to an addiction to the power and security it affords him. If the novel form has been used to propagate bourgeois individualism, it is because it has so effectively 141 domesticated its readers. It has made a too-comfortable home for the subject and, conversely, it has made itself at home in us. That home, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the home of the Oedipal drama, one that cannot be thought apart from the colonial and sovereign modes of bourgeois being that we have already identified in Robinson Crusoe. As they put it: “…[t]he capitalist formation of sovereignty will need an intimate colonial formation that corresponds to it, to which it will be applied, and without which it would have no hold on the productions of the unconscious.” (Deleuze & Guattari 179) This colonial formation is the Oedipus complex itself – the self-replicating triad of mommy-daddy-me – which is “always colonization pursued by other means… the interior colony.” (Deleuze & Guattari 170) Gender and sex identity, and the naturalizing of the former to the latter, has ever been the taproot of Oedipalization’s dendronic structure. The “proper” identification (sons with fathers, daughters with mothers) is considered the “successful” outcome for a functional modern subject. But this is the product of a labor of “fixing” and “ordering,” to borrow the terms of Stephen Linstead and Alison Pullen, whereby a singular identity is “extract[ed] and “differentiat[ed] from the mobile and multidimensional mesh in which it is embedded.” (Linstead & Pullen 1290) Prior to the Oedipal triangulation, gender identity (identity in general) “does not originate in multiplicity or acquire multiplicity – it is multiplicity” possesses those qualities which, to Deleuze and Guattari, exemplify the rhizome. (Linstead & Pullen 1291) Although singular selfhood is the outcome in which capitalist modernity is most invested, an understanding of subjectivity as supplemental leads us to reconfigure our terms and assert that “…multiple identities may indeed … be the human norm rather than a pathological form.” (Linstead & Pullen 1291) The critical recognition is that the subject is not singular and central, but multiple and peripheral. The critical task is to trouble assumptions about the distinction between interior and 142 exterior, the settled relations between subject and object. It is in their aptitude in generating an iterative but non-reproductive multiplicity that makes ludic modes of reading so uniquely suited for mobilization as a war machine. Only when the self is taken as natural and primary does one fall into the Oedipal trap; only when the multiple and contingent are mistaken for the singular and independent. Thus the battle lines are drawn between presumptions of interiority and the realization of exteriority, between reproductive identity and synthetic becoming. Realism, as a technology, is not partisan or particular in this struggle. As Russ’ work demonstrates, the novel is just as able to break chains as well as to forge them. If, then, games further the promises and powers of realism, then the potential of explicitly ludic narrative forms may be commensurately greater. Certainly in the postmodern moment, where the recognition of identity’s contingency has produced acute cultural vertigo, the part games will play in the formation of future subjects cannot be understated. 85 Yet if liberatory politics, and liberated subjectivity, are premised on some essential notions of “freedom” and “choice” (the virtues of autonomy offered by liberalism but heretofore revoked in the very same gesture), then examining just how games engage with these notions, and to what extent they are realized, interrogated, and challenged is just as important as investigations into the novelistic strain of formal realism. VII. A Strange Trajectory In the early days of game studies, the new discipline fought hard to establish and maintain its boundaries. Prominent game critics as Jesper Juul and Gonzalo Frasca adopted the term "ludology,” to distinguish the operations from "narratology." Their decision was rationalized by Espen Aarseth as an effort to prevent the imposition of a “theoretical imperialism” over game 85 Hence the prominence and urgency of the politics of personal and cultural identity, which both emanate from and are reflected in the struggles in and around game reception and production. 143 studies by pre-existing modes of analysis, particularly literary scholars who, it was feared, might ignore or obscure what was distinct about games as a medium. (Aarseth 16) A vocabulary of difference emerged to justify this policing of disciplinary borders, and to define the nature of these borders. Much of the impetus stemmed from the distinctively interactive nature of ludic objects. As vocabularies of difference tend do, it generated a set of values as well. Games were valorized as "active" in opposition to "passive" literary texts. They were characterized as "freedom" contrasting with narrative predestination. Finally within games were "choices" that produce "consequences" as opposed the now dreaded term of derision within gaming lay- criticism: "linearity.” While the emphatic quality of this difference-making is founded in the historical need for a new field of study to distinguish and justify itself against more established critical modes, this notion of games, and of play in general, as a realm of freedom has a far longer pedigree. Johan Huizinga establishes early in Homo Ludens this "first main characteristic of play: that it is free, is in fact freedom." (Huizinga 8) Huizinga is not specifically referring to "freedom" in terms of the ability to "do anything,” or the ability to change the expected course of a narrative. Instead he means more that games suspend and reassign consequence, because "play is not 'ordinary' or 'real' life. It is rather a stepping out of 'real' life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all its own." (Huizinga 8) Yet this too is related to the ways in which games "open up" realism. Within the magic circle of a game, some freedom is found that is, presumably, not available in other spheres of activity. The ability to reconfigure and experiment, to encounter something beyond the construction of reality which produces the "ordinary" is what makes play special. Designated outside, defined in part against, the realm of utility, games reliably produce the unexpected. 144 Of course, there are critics of ludic exceptionalism, particularly when those theories include presumptions about the socially salutary effects of the interactivity, and its associated rhetoric of freedom. In The Cultural Logic of Computation David Golumbia makes a dire augury about digital games, that "the rationality of software representation leads not to the world of choice but the inevitability of realpolitik." (Golumbia 135-7) Golumbia refers specifically to strategy games such as Civilization (1991), in which the player's subject position is an abstract, transhistorical statist entity. The critique meshes well with our previous observations about the way sovereignty is fostered as component of individualist subjectification. 86 Fears that games interpellate their players into an unconscious acceptance of their premises precisely by seducing them into thinking their actions are free provide a cautionary counterpoint to more optimistic idea of the critical player who uses the game to interrogate their own assumptions about the world and their place in it. 87 However, just as the most productive critiques of the novel-as-form come through experimental novels like The Female Man, the deepest meditations on the contradictions of the rhetoric of freedom in games are found in games themselves. While the general movement of the game industry, particularly the digital game industry, has been towards greater avowal of this rhetoric of freedom and choice, the work of Irrational Games provides an alternative movement, wherein the presumptions of that rhetoric are increasingly interrogated. Irrational Games’ 1999 game System Shock 2 (SS2) first appears as part of this movement in first-person shooters towards a greater experience of choice, combining roleplaying elements. 86 This is a running concern; the most current iteration of the Civilization series, the sixth, has drawn criticism for its inclusion of playable First Nations. The controversy encompasses a wide variety of issues around representation, but the formal complaint is that, by encoding and universalizing the logic of colonial expansion, it naturalizes its violence; the procedural rhetoric of the game posits that the Cree would have been “just like” their colonizers, given the chance. (https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/01/05/civilization-vi-cree-nation-cultural-representation/) 87 Lars de Wildt describes this dichotomous conception of the player-subject as that between a presumption of a “naive”, Althussarian subject ignorant of its own construction and a “critical” subject of deconstruction who actively analyzes the manner of their subjectification. (de Wildt Precarious 4-5) 145 In this case the game brings together the skill progression mechanic and a broad range of potential diathesis that links role-playing games to realist efforts, to provide a more robust experience of choice. While it does not use the mechanism of “class” as established in Dungeons & Dragons, it permits a player to specialize and select their skills and abilities, distinguishing each player’s style, the path they take through the game. The game's world – a space-faring vessel visited by a terrible disaster, its passengers dead or transformed into hostile mutants and cyborgs – is designed for multiple routes and various means to accomplish objectives. While these alternatives are necessarily limited, both by technology and narrative requirements, it marks a distinctly broader diathetic range and finer granularity of variance than could be found in its contemporaries. The player character of SS2 is a blank slate: an amnesiac (a not-uncommon trope in games) whose personhood is produced only through their actions (typically if not exclusively violent, as befits a first-person shooter). Furthermore, the game requires that the player follow a certain path from its beginning to its end. It is not an “open world” game like Minecraft, where there are no goals save survival and those defined by the player. SS2 cloaks this narrative imperative through the imposition of goals from without. A malevolent AI villain drives the player forward, first deceiving them and then coercing cooperation, giving the player the sense that their otherwise limitless freedom is curtailed by some entity, rather than structural necessity. It is with the first iteration of BioShock that Irrational Games’ creators directly tackle politics and ideology. 88 Styled as an exploration and critique of Randian Objectivism, the first BioShock game takes place in the underwater city of Rapture, a post-war haven for the best and 88 Something which System Shock 2 does only obliquely, beyond its generically required dim view of a corporatist future. The game poses an opposition between the monistic paranoid rationality of a singular machine-intelligence and the multiple, immanent affectivity of an organic collective consciousness; the villainous AI, SHODAN, characterized by her aspirations to godhood, is the progenitor of a psychic mutant collective called “The Many” which rebels against its “Machine Mother.” The human protagonist ultimately survives and triumphs over both threats to individuality, one by way of transcendent incorporation, the other by immanent absorption. 146 the brightest, in the mold of Rand’s self-exiling libertarian genius-colony in Atlas Shrugged. Appearing first as a neon dream of art-deco architecture and laissez-faire decadence, it is a crumbling, leaking ruin by the time the player enters it. Its self-serving society has already collapsed in on itself, transformed into a nightmarish ecosystem of genetically modified monsters and madmen. As a critique it is by and large too ham-fisted to be properly persuasive. Although its ambition is admirable and its aesthetic design impressive, its proposed moral education is one of the least effective aspects of the game. Rather, the game’s use of formal mechanics – especially in comparison to SS2 – is critically interesting, particularly in connection to the core ludic value of player agency. BioShock replaces the granularity of skill progression from SS2 with a moral choice mechanic found in many games, particularly RPGs. 89 Such a mechanic generally earmarks certain points of decision in a game, typically indicating that one is "evil" (generally ruthless, immediately self-serving) while the other is "good" (selfless, merciful, tending towards long- term benefits). The practical function of such mechanics can be thematic. For example, the ‘Light Side vs. Dark Side’ dichotomy of the Star Wars universe, found in the 2003 game Knights of the Old Republic). Or they can be moralistic, demonstrating the destabilizing effects of violence through altering the narrative and the setting, as per the 2012 game Dishonored. Or they may simply be ludic in that the provides the player an additional incentive to replay the game using different tools and techniques, like in the 2017 game Prey (“replayability” being a cardinal virtue in game design). Frequently, the player is pressed into choosing exclusively one or the other course in all their decisions and is usually rewarded with one of two or more distinct 89 It retains the game design value of multiple approaches and multiple paths, combining a suite of customizable skills (genetic modifications called “plasmids” within the fiction, a literal “re-writing” the player character’s capability) with an elaborate game world containing interactive features (eg. flammable oil slicks, meltable ice accretions, a dynamic ecosystem of enemies) meant to give players the means to approach, or avoid, conflict in a number of ways. 147 endings which reflect the way the player’s decisions have affected the world of the narrative. By and large this mechanic, for all that it is widespread, is a fairly facile exercise both in choice and in its exploration of morality. All the same it is essentially premised upon the principle of ludic freedom: the sheer ability to choose one’s path in a game, to define your character and their actions as “good” or “evil” (by the game’s set moral structure), is seen as an expression of the broader diathetic range permitted by ludic texts. BioShock’s morality mechanic serves as an extension of its larger political critique, and thus its moral pedagogy. This design provides the player the option to either literally extract immediate gains in the form of serum syringes gained by murdering genetically modified little girls (the "Little Sisters" being the most pathetic aspect of this anti-Objectivist education), or gaining long-term gains by mercifully freeing said girls from their genetic curse. Partnered with the game’s larger critique of Objectivism (with its elevation of selfishness to a social virtue), it is something of a false choice. The player must be committed to monstrosity, pushing against the moral grain established by the text, to decide that murdering children for short term gain is preferable to liberating them. 90 The game’s “good” ending is a redemptive tale of new beginnings, while the “evil” ending shows the player’s acquisitive violence spreading like a contagion across the world. As a result, the functional range of diathesis, at least in terms of how the player can affect the larger narrative of the game, is only nominally increased. The game’s social critique curtails any sense that really meaningful choices are being made. The game itself (or rather, the game’s designers and architects) have already made up their minds as to what sort of subjectivity and what kind of ethical habits the player ought to aspire toward. Rather than 90 The falseness of this choice is underlined when the player-character receives care packages from the Little Sisters, packages which contain as much or more gene serum than if you’d harvested them; morality appears less as an act of altruism, and more as a wise long-term investment strategy. 148 providing a space for varied self-inscription, BioShock at every turn exhorts the player to choose one certain path, one certain self, over an equally certain other. By the end of BioShock, however, the notion that games provide a space of free self- inscription has already been undermined in one of the most interesting moments of the game. In a move borrowed from SS2, wherein the AI taskmaster initially disguises itself as a curt human scientist, at a certain point in BioShock the player character’s most constant ally and guide – a character who goes by the moniker “Atlas,” with folksy manners and a charming Irish accent – is revealed as the game’s primary antagonist. A series of flashbacks disclose that the player character is a clone of Rapture’s founding father, Andrew Ryan, brainwashed and sent to kill Ryan himself in order to effectuate “Atlas’s” larger plans of conquest. The polite requests made throughout the game by Atlas, all accompanied by the trigger phrase “would you kindly,” are in fact subliminally enhanced imperatives. Every goal the player has pursued under the pretense of freedom is retroactively revealed as pre-programmed. This is a clever formal trick, revealing as it does the underlying problem with any sense of freedom a game might provide. Whereas in SS2 goals are dispensed chiefly via threat, in BioShock they are presented as polite suggestions which the player, guided by the logic of game progression, unerringly obeys without any sense that their obedience could be interpreted as anything but their own volition. Very rarely is control taken away from the player in the course of the game. This is noteworthy, since many games resort to scripted events or cutscenes in order to assert narrative control over key points in the plot. Yet every request that Atlas makes is fulfilled, simply as a consequence of the player seeking to move forward in the game’s spaces. To use Lars de Wildt's configuration, this reversal points out precisely the degree to which the player-subject is naïve in believing in any agency, caught up in an illusion belied by the unconscious assumptions of gameplay (progression, goal-pursuit, movement through a designed 149 space). There is no "actual" mind control at play, only a retroactive explanation that is plausible because it is congruent with the realities of game design. The plot twist is no more than a reframing which draws attention to what was already true but obscured by the presumption of freedom. Critic Collin Pointon believes that the manner in which BioShock "explores the theme of the limitations of player autonomy" (Pointon 6) is itself is a way of changing the "hermeneutic horizon" which comprises the "conscious and unconscious ideas of what a game is, how it works, what to do in it, how it will affect them, what they want out of it" (Pointon 7-8). Thus, like Fantone and the other optimists, he holds out hope for "a fusion of horizons where a new space of possibilities suddenly comes into existence." (Pointon 8) This optimism is once again founded on the "risk" of "having a completely unforeseen experience" and thus "being changed yourself by the horizon of the 'other'." (Pointon 10) While any given text, be it novel or game, might not be able to offer individual agency, it can provide an encounter with otherness that challenges and alters the self in such a way as to produce a more important kind of freedom. The trouble comes from a construction of reality naturalized to the point of foreclosing alternatives, from a presumption of free agency that paradoxically produces a kind of subjective inevitability: the same subjects in the same stories, over and over again. The revelation of the player character’s true nature as a clone assassin, a being whose sole purpose is to destroy the patriarch of Rapture, is also the first explicitly Oedipal dynamic in the series, but it is not the last. This is an early sign of the series’ preoccupation with the problem of inevitability in games, and how this inevitability is tied up with the process and problem of subjectification that lies at the heart of the ludic logic of realism. In framing the player character not as a free agent, not as a properly blank amnesiac defined solely by their player-controlled actions, but rather as always-already the unwitting puppet of unseen directives, the game further 150 chips away at the assumptions of freedom, and of individual agency, that underpin gaming as a textual practice. VIII. Will the Circle Be Unbroken? The next and final definitive installment in the series, 91 BioShock Infinite, takes on another critique, this time of fascism, racism and religious fundamentalism, particularly in their expression through the ideology of American exceptionalism. Once again, the critique itself is doomed to a certain banality, mostly because its target is so broad. While there are poignant moments, the game ultimately resorts to a watery both-sides-are-bad critique of political radicalism, suggesting that even egalitarian revolutionary movements are unjustifiable if they engage in violence. 92 This is particularly ironic considering that BioShock: Infinite (hereafter Infinite) is, if anything, more thoroughly a first-person-shooter than the first BioShock. That is to say, Infinite is more emphatically and unavoidably violent. While the game pays lip-service to the potential of non-violent play (including extra-diegetic exhortations during the loading screens, informing the player that immediate conflict may not always be necessary) it barely allows for the limited mechanics of stealth and avoidance present in the first game. Infinite resembles a shooting gallery or theme park more than an ecosystem. The occasional non-violent section is inserted between bouts of conflict, often in the interest of introducing one of the game’s often-impressive set-pieces, before eventually emptying these stages of their non-violent actors in order to give way to the inevitable shoot-out. 91 There is much good to say about BioShock 2 (design led by Zak McClendon) and its expansion, Minerva’s Den (design led by Steve Gaynor), but we will confine our discussion to Ken Levine’s work (often portrayed as the auteur at the heart of Irrational) so as to better chart the “flagship” problematic with which the games struggle. Irrational’s creative director and lead writer Ken Levine effectively dissolved the company after completing the game and its expansions. 92 For more on this problematic equivalence see Ed Smith’s article: https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/kwzz43/the-politics- of-bioshock-infinite-are-all-the-worse-when-revisited-in-a-heated-election-year. 151 This difference in design and gameplay is further reflected in Infinite’s shift in genre. Whereas System Shock 2 and BioShock both lay firmly in the camp of science-fiction horror, a genre that often adopts a reflective attitude towards its setting and sustain a sense of personal fragility that disincentives violence, Infinite indulges in pulp science-fantasy. The game is complete with steam-punk aesthetics and a player character who – far from being a nameless amnesiac – is a noir trope: a debt-saddled, alcoholic former Pinkerton and private detective by the name of Booker DeWitt. Menaced by debtors, or rather by a sense of debt, 93 and haunted by his involvement in both the genocide of the American Indians and the bloody history of strike- breaking in the United States, 94 DeWitt is induced to infiltrate the mysterious flying city of Columbia in order to find a captive girl by the name of Elizabeth, and bring her to New York, whereupon his debt will be “wipe[d] away.” Columbia, like Rapture before it, is outwardly beautiful but inwardly rotten, founded on the principles of fundamentalist American exceptionalism that the game wishes to critique (much as Rapture was designed to illustrate the follies of an Objectivist ideology run amok). Whereas Rapture’s glamor belied its rapacious core of capitalist acquisitiveness, the manicured exterior of Columbia and its devout, well-groomed, white middle class populace is underwritten by an exploited racial underclass of Black and Irish workers. Its society is effectively theo-fascist, to the point of caricature. The Founding Fathers are elevated to sainthood, the city’s secret police wear garb suggestive of the Ku Klux Klan and revere John Wilkes Booth, and a vast theme-park exists for the express purpose of preparing children for military service in the defense of white racial supremacy. Led by a bearded prophet known as Father Comstock, a self-styled hero of the infamous battle of Wounded Knee who led Columbia’s secession from the United States after 93 The ambiguity of motivation is part of the game’s larger conceit about interdimensional travel: that the subject, upon making the shift from one iteration of history to another, alters or obscure’s their own memories so as to cope. 94 Thus establishing his character - a generically appropriate white male anti-hero - as the product and perpetrator of the most unambiguously brutal elements of colonialism and capitalism. 152 Congress condemned his unilateral intervention into the Boxer Rebellion, the ultimate trajectory of Columbian society is one of apocalyptic militarism, a fundamentalist mission of purgative conquest directed towards the sinful world below. It is understandable, then, that the decision to participate in this fascist subjective mode is simply foreclosed rather than left open as a course of action, however unpalatable. With such a profoundly objectionable manifestation of the “wrong” choices, Infinite abandons even the pretense of permitting the player the option of selecting a moral pole. All of its comparable moments of decision are rendered either narratively toothless or without obvious importance in the first place. 95 Choices exist in Infinite but they are ultimately inconsequential, numerous paths leading always to the same destination. 96 The very structure and circumstances of these choices points to a deeper problem with the idea of the freely self-producing subject of games, the promise that drives the ludic aspects of realism. Whereas the first BioShock highlights the false pretense of freedom in a designed environment while leaving the formal structure of choice – the game's morality mechanic and alternate endings – intact, Infinite questions the possibility of alternatives not simply within the scope of its own narrative, but within the larger context of the series. 95 A fact telegraphed in an interlude where a pair of scientists – alternate reality doubles of each other – invite the player to flip a coin. The result is always “heads”; the impossibility of choice is underlined by the impossibility of chance. 96 The lack of consequential choices are noted also by Rick Elmore (104) and Martin T. Buinicki (727). 153 Figure 3.1 A sequence in the game, illustrating both its repetition and its rigged nature. The first such choice comes near the start of the game, before any incidents of violence originating from the player. Indeed, this initial non-choice is the precipitating incident for the participatory violence of the game. Upon ascending to Columbia, which floats among the clouds thanks to a marvel of quantum mechanical science, the player-character finds the city in the midst of a festival celebrating the city’s succession from “the Sodom below.” After weaving peacefully through the celebrations and activities, including a shooting-gallery game whose targets are anarchists called the “Vox Populi,” the player-character receives a mysterious telegraph informing them not to choose a specific number: 77. The significance of this number is made apparent soon after, as the player-character is invited to choose a baseball from a large basket as part of “the raffle.” The baseball is marked with the number 77, a lucky number according to the woman bearing the basket, and despite the warning in the telegraph mere 154 minutes before, the player-character retains the ball. There is no semblance of choice as of yet, even in the face of the game’s seemingly explicit instructions. When the player-character arrives at the heart of the raffle itself, a stage surrounded by a crowd caught up in a group rendition of “Goodnight Irene” led by a top-hatted master of ceremonies, the true nature of the raffle is revealed. This revelation is in keeping with the game’s direct if unsubtle evidence of Columbia’s virulent and institutional racism; the “prize” the player-character has won 97 is the chance to be the first to throw their baseball at a captive pair – an Irish man and a Black woman – who are guilty of the crime of miscegenation. The choice presented to the player is either to throw the ball at its intended target, presumably in order to maintain one’s cover in the service of the larger mission, or, alternately, to throw it at the master of ceremonies, a target all the more tempting for his aggressive racism and his role in orchestrating this spectacle. No matter the result of the player’s calculus, however, the throw is never made. As the player-character prepares to make their pitch, an officer of the law seizes their wrist and draws attention to the mark on the back of the player-character’s hand: a scar deliberately shaped into the letters “AD.” As propaganda images previously encountered in the game space indicate, this is the mark of the “false shepherd,” a foretold antagonist of the community. DeWitt exhibits yet another bit of surprising denseness in the face of forewarning, keeping this mark exposed even as he moves about the populace. Cover blown, DeWitt messily kills one of the law officers and the previously peaceful if unnerving setting shifts into all-out melee, the non-violent characters 97 The “lucky number” 77 is inevitably the first one called, a move which subverts one of the fundamental tenants of ludic realism, randomness. An opportunity for genuine randomness, befitting the ludic function of a raffle, is instead a fixed and highly scripted event. 155 disappearing, replaced by waves of armed enemies. “Control” returns to the player-character as the game shows itself for what it is: a graphically violent shooter. 98 What is most noteworthy about this false choice is its precipitation: the mark on the hand, a literal inscription on the body of the character which defines the role they will play in the narrative. The predominance of narrative inevitability over choice is striking. The insistence that the role the player is given to play overrides any variance they might seek to inject into the proceedings, including moments when the game explicitly offers an opportunity for just such a variance, is paramount. The player has no chance to see the narrative reflect a superficial consequence of their choice. The throw, aborted before it can be completed, is as inevitable as the choice of the number 77, as that number’s fortuitous drawing at the raffle. The game’s second choice comes after the player-character has freed the game’s companion character: the “girl” he is charged with acquiring. Elizabeth is an attractive young woman who the Columbians view with religious reverence yet who is kept locked up in a specially designed prison. She is constantly surveilled with scientific rigor and carefully guarded by a monstrous winged entity known as “The Songbird.” 99 Free from her cell for the first time in her conscious life, she decides to celebrate by purchasing a brooch. She leaves it to the player- character to choose one of two designs: a bird or a cage (both recurring symbols that first appear on the dual sides of a key given to the player-character at the beginning of the game). Such a dichotomy might seem consequential at least symbolically, and does in fact have the consequence of determining a small aspect of Elizabeth’s appearance throughout the rest of the 98 Buinicki asserts that “[t]he true point of the [raffle] scene is to expose the cruelty and inequality hidden beneath the wholesome imagery” (727), part of the game’s larger project to “interrogate the construction of history itself” and “reveal the dystopic quality of US history.” (723) Thus both the setting and the game, the construction of history and the process of subjectification, are unmasked. 99 Another instance of a hegemonic trope both in wider culture and in video games: the imprisoned damsel. Elizabeth’s design and introductory appearances - reading, singing, dancing, longing to visit the wider world - cite the legacy of the Disney princess, a reference that takes on a troubling resonance with the “Mainstreet USA” trappings of Columbia’s bright, white face. 156 game. However, any other sense of consequence is undermined by the function of the key. When spun (as Elizabeth does once within the player-character’s vision) an optical illusion places the bird within the cage, illustrating that the two symbols are complimentary and mutually-positing. Moreover, the role of the Songbird as Elizabeth’s guardian and jailor troubles the notion that the bird represents Elizabeth’s own freedom. Ultimately, in any case, Elizabeth’s freedom is merely a cover for the player-character’s plot to deliver her to his creditors, so as to discharge his debt. Aside from one small difference at the very end of the game, this choice is not reflected upon further, nor does it change the narrative. The game offers two other choices that are framed in terms of violence or restraint. In the first, the player decides whether to ask a vendor for a ticket or hold him up at gunpoint. In the second, the player decides whether to kill a defeated enemy or let him live. In each case if the player chooses to avoid violence, the game inserts it. In the case of the ticket vendor, if the player does not choose to threaten him, the vendor attacks the player-character with a knife, skewering DeWitt’s already-scarred hand and prompting Elizabeth to bandage it. In the case of the defeated enemy, if the player opts not to kill him he is later found imprisoned by the Columbian authorities, reduced to a vegetative state by particularly brutal torture. The culmination of this enforced logic is illustrated most clearly at the game’s climax. Elizabeth has the ability to open rifts in space-time, bringing objects in from parallel universes, and even leading both herself and Booker bodily into wholly different historical tracks. The climax includes visiting a different historical track in which the alternate DeWitt has already died fighting for the Vox Populi. This prompts the Vox Populi to turn against the “imposter” DeWitt, whose continued existence “complicates the narrative.” This permits the game to justify violence against the egalitarian rebellion as well as the fascist Columbian authorities, a violence further absolved by the insistence that – due to the depth of their hatred and the extent of their own 157 violence – the Vox are ethically equivalent to the Columbian authorities. Violence, then, appears as an inherent quality of the system in which the player-character is trapped, and, despite the strategic temporal shifts, no truly better world lies on the other side of the timeslip. There are no alternatives, and the multiverse always contains exactly what has already been articulated. There is no escape from the master narrative. At a certain point, Elizabeth is seized by the Columbian authorities and subjected to torments that drive her to realize the full scale of her powers, freeing herself (with some help from DeWitt) by summoning a massive cyclone. When she is freed, she invites DeWitt into a strange realm populated by an infinite expanse of lighthouses, which Elizabeth calls “doors,” all of which are copies of the lighthouse at the beginning of the first BioShock. As the player- character moves through this space, they see innumerable other instances of the player-character and Elizabeth moving in tandem, all seeking their own identical lighthouse. This, Elizabeth explains, is the fundamental reality of the multiverse they inhabit: “There is always a lighthouse, there is always a man, there is always a city.” This narrative keystone illustrates the essential sameness that inheres not simply between instances of play in Infinite, but between the iterations in the BioShock series as a whole. It is a startling move, one which serves the same function as the inconsequential choices in Infinite and the revelation of brainwashing in BioShock – undermining that sense of uniqueness and newness which is so important for the conceit of the realist text, particularly in its ludic mode. No matter the degree of iteration, no matter the variance permitted within the game, mutatis mutandis, there remains always a lighthouse, a man and a city. This might seem like political cynicism on par with the equivocation between a fascist regime and a revolutionary labor movement. The components of this limited universe, its three constants, provide a deeply impoverished view of potential realities, one trapped by a ludic goal- 158 structure (the lighthouse), the presuppositions of masculine identity (the man), and fixed political systems (the city). In contrast, the feeling of freedom in the open, explorable spaces of Columbia, what Grzegorz Maziarczyk calls "a fully developed dystopian environment, which he/she can interact with," obscures the intractability of both its dystopian violence and the demands of game design. Infinite frustrates even the comparative hopefulness of the first BioShock, which allows some redemption for Rapture, since, in Infinite, the player "cannot … transform [Columbia] from dystopia to utopia. (Maziarczyk 237) This sense of inevitability is mirrored also in the filling-in of the protagonist's identity, one which is "pre-structured" and "predetermined to an even greater extent" than that of the amnesiac assassin in the first game. (Maziarczyk 237) This thematic meditation on inevitability in games can be read alongside its formal retreat into a more "generic" presentation of the first-person shooter as a part of its critique. Much as the first BioShock played upon the expectations of free action within the confines of ludic and narrative progression, Infinite engages in a critique of larger questions of subjectification, of the kinds of subjects and the kinds of actions which are legible in games of this type. As Diana Adesola Mafe argues, the game "relies on hegemonic codes of what constitutes a so-called normal and, more important, good FPS game – namely, challenging and rewarding gameplay, a white avatar, and a Eurocentric story." (Mafe 93) This initial seeming, that of "the most normal of video games" (Mafe 95) belies "its subversive potential" which "lies in its ability to disrupt those codes" and thus "gradually reveal the fishbowl" (the transparent assumptions of ludic subjectification) effectively "invok[ing] hegemonic models precisely in order to interrogate them" (Mafe 93) and thus "carefully deconstructing its own normalcy." (Mafe 98) The game, then, takes a naïve player and instructs them through gameplay to take a more critical view of 159 what constitutes a "normal" representation of the ludic subject, much as the first BioShock drew attention to the "fishbowl" of assumed agency. But the hymn that repeats with such significance throughout the game, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" (1907), provokes the question of how to escape the seeming inevitabilities of the exploitative state and the fixed self, the two being analogous within a Deleuzean conception. How then, to escape this trap? How does the game break with the logic of inevitability, the iterative sameness that belies the sense of freedom which make games so compelling in the first place? Is liberation even possible within the confines of a text? Where is our line of flight? IX. Escape from the Oedipus Complex The structure of BioShock: Infinite’s plot is, if anything, more Oedipal than that of its predecessor. It plays out some of the implications of Deleuze and Guattari’s own observation that the Oedipus complex is a fascist formation, one whose principle function is to reproduce a singular form of subjectivity. First, the theocratic leader of Columbia, Father Comstock, who is responsible for the entrapment and interdiction of Elizabeth, turns out to be the player- character’s alternate self, a version of Booker DeWitt who undergoes adult baptism 100 and presumes the absolution of his crimes at the Battle of Wounded Knee. 101 The struggle between the bearded “Father,” aged and rendered sterile by exposure to the reality-warping devices that make the floating city of Columbia possible, and his younger double, plays out as a struggle over the possession of Elizabeth. Elizabeth is revealed to be Booker’s own daughter, Anna DeWitt, 100 Rick Elmore draws the link between the game’s foregrounding of the ritual of baptism - a process of subjective suspension and recreation which the game explicitly links to the interpretation of quantum mechanics which justifies alternate realities and timelines in both Infinite and The Female Man - and “the very ambiguity at the heart of secular political founding” (Elmore 98) which emerges from the problem of sovereignty, itself founded on “the strange operation of expelling the unexpellable” (Ibid 102), a process of creating a political “outside” to define an “inside”, a state-subjectivity sustained only through constant antagonism with the perceived infiltration of “others”. 101 As Buinick puts it, “[i]n fighting against the tyranny of Columbia, players discover they have been fighting a bigoted, self- righteous version of themselves.” (Buinick 723) This struggle to reveal and confront “the fascist within” is congruent with the Deleuzean critique of subjectivity. 160 whom Booker sold to Comstock in order to gain relief for his gambling debts. Thus the daughter- damsel-MacGuffin – who is also the closest thing the game has to a sexual object of desire for the player – is precisely the barred body of incestuous desire. Furthermore, the great evil which the player’s actions throughout the game seek to avert is Elizabeth’s grooming to be Comstock’s successor. This is the motivating force behind his final apocalyptic mission, proclaimed in the prophecy “The Seed of the Prophet Shall Sit the Throne and Drown in Fire the Mountains of Man” and presaged in a recurring vision of a mid-eighties New York City under aerial bombardment from the floating city of Columbia. Dramatized as a process of psychic subjugation with vague but torturous surgical methods, the essential aim is to shape Elizabeth into a new iteration of Comstock, with the same values and goals. As DeWitt observes: “He’s trying to turn her [Elizabeth] into him [Comstock].” Once this is accomplished, the engine of inevitability kicks into full gear, and even when an aged and converted Elizabeth views the fruits of her labors and regrets the part she has played, she reflects that the social (war) machine she has set in motion has gained too much momentum to be stopped. The spirit of Comstock moves them all towards the completion of their grim purpose. This method of subjective mass-production, the fascistic stamp of a singular form of identity onto Elizabeth and all of Columbia, is illustrated in the harrowing sequence of the game that takes place in “Comstock House,” a sanitarium for political dissidents wherein captives are subjected to rigid routines and forced to wear masks wrought in the image of the revered Founding Fathers, a literal imposition of State-sanctioned subjectivity onto resisting bodies. This identification with the State-Father(s) is the basis of the reproduced and reproducing fascist subjectivity, and serves as an excellent textual representation of Deleuze and Guattari’s own observation that the Oedipus complex operates in just such a manner. Oedipus is, for them, a “cycle of destiny where [the unconscious] always remains a subject” (Deleuze & Guattari Anti- 161 Oedipus 290). What could be a better description of the tension between the promise of multiplicity implicit to iteration? Even as the player-character moves from timeline to timeline, shifting between worlds like Jael in The Female Man, the subjectivity produced in the player by the game remains utterly consistent across all timelines and over time. The only real game- mechanical differences between worlds and timelines are expressed through which weapons are available (burst guns instead of carbines, volley guns instead of grenade launchers). Ultimately they are all various flavors of what is essentially the same kind of violence. As such DeWitt’s intervention, and thus the player’s, is not enough to break the chain of events leading to Columbia’s apocalyptic invasion of "the Sodom below.” Booker DeWitt is, after all, just another instance of the Father, one motivated by repentance and directed against the prevailing authority, but incapable of producing a meaningfully different outcome. This does not make Infinite different from any other game of its type. Save that it is self-conscious about this problem, constantly pointing to the disingenuousness of the iterative variance that should make games spaces of free self-inscription, even as it invites the player to immerse themselves in recurring cycles of violence. The narrative struggles against its own inevitabilities, against the limitations that make it a narrative, and it tellingly finds resolution through a symbolic deployment of multiplicity that bears a striking resemblance to Russ’s proposed campaign of transdimensional guerrilla warfare. The final revelation that Booker and Comstock are the same person, split at the moment of a baptism which one rejects and the other accepts, comprises the last scene of the game, when control is fully wrested from the player. In this scene, a multiplicity of Elizabeths, differently costumed in such a way as to suggest their origin from various timelines, appears before the player-character and delivers the solution to the problem of continuous Oedipal reproduction. To prevent the antagonism that leads to a cyclical history of bad becomings, that antagonism must 162 be “smother[ed] in the crib.” As a group, these many Elizabeths – like the many J’s in The Female Man – convene to put a pre-emptive end to the patriarchal problem of Oedipus, even at the cost of their own existence. They drown the player-character before the game’s plot can even begin (see fig. 3.2). Figure 3.2 The first-person drowning of Booker DeWitt. Thus the game offers the only solution: to undo its very premise, to bar the subjective space it opens for the player and deny them the chance to be subjectivized at all. The player’s ludically generated subjectivity does not exist in a state of freedom, but as part of what Deleuze and Guattari call “a subjugated group investment, as much in its sovereign form as in its colonial formations.” (Deleuze & Guattari Anti-Oedipus 280) This stands in stark contrast with the multiple Elizabeths, who represent “the other, a subject-group investment in the transverse multiplicities.” (Deleuze & Guattari 280) Not sovereign, not singular, not even what we would easily call a subject, but a populous solitude, an interior nomad horde which transgresses the boundaries of exterior and interior and breaks free of the orbit that holds it captive. The game 163 does not purport to grant the player, nor their character, this state of being. Instead locates it in the player’s companion, a non-player-character empty of actual subjective experience. X. THE END IS NEVER THE END IS NEVER THE END… Is there any hope of a game providing a genuine space for liberatory becomings, or are they merely another false promise? Can a game sincerely critique itself without falling into its own trap of seductive, reproductive subjectivization? While BioShock: Infinite does what it can to explore this question, it remains held in an essentially hypocritical stance, not the least because – after the credits roll – the game offers one last video that suggests a restoration of the daughter to her father, a familial reinstatement, the traditional resolution of the Oedipal bind. This post-credits cut scene depicts DeWitt entering a nursery to find his baby daughter safely ensconced in her crib, an outcome without narrative explanation. This effort is furthered by the expansions that follow, downloadable additions to the game which are at pains to tie up the loose ends of the BioShock mythology and foreclose any variety in interpretation, reducing what there is of the open and ludic to the closed and classical (to borrow a Barthesian formulation). Perhaps this is only to be expected; being unsettled is uncomfortable, a state of precarity which induces anxiety. 102 For all its serendipitous alignment with the schizoanalytical critique of fascist subjective reproduction, for all its (worthy, admirable) pretensions to social commentary (more trenchant now than when it was released), Infinite is a prime example of a Triple-A game, a hugely expensive, carefully designed piece of mass consumer entertainment. It may elaborate a criticism of its form, but it is at root beholden to it. Its ideological equivocations are symptomatic of this 102 This difficulty is foregrounded from the start of BioShock: Infinite, with the first words appearing on screen being a quotation from the (fictional) Barriers to Trans-Dimensional Travel: “The mind of the subject will desperately struggle to create memories where none exist.” In the game, headaches and nosebleeds stand in as physical signs of the difficulty the subject faces when thrust into alternate instances of selfhood. 164 foundational lack of boldness. To find a sustainably critical game, a game which challenges the very notion of "game,” and which addresses directly the problem of whether games can be used pedagogically (transforming the naive player into the critical player), even if the lesson is – in the end – that we cannot look to games for freedom, we would do well to turn to Galactic Café’s 2013 game The Stanley Parable (hereafter Stanley). The frame narrative of Stanley, such as it is, comes at the "beginning" of the game rather than attempting to force rereading by being presented at the end in BioShock or Infinite. It is delivered by a male narrator with a British accent, capitalizing on humorously dry delivery to lend a tone both ironic and pedagogical from the first word: This is the story of a man named Stanley. Stanley worked for a company in a big building where he was employee number 427. Employee Number 427's job was simple: he sat at his desk in room 427, and he pushed buttons on a keyboard. Orders came to him through a monitor on his desk, telling him what buttons to push, how long to push them, and in what order. This is what Employee 427 did every day of every month and every year, and although others might have considered it soul-rending, Stanley relished every moment that the orders came in, as though he had been made exactly for this job. And Stanley was happy. Stanley’s nature is overdetermined and overproscribed. He is at once a parody of an ideal corporate drone, a non-subjectivized non-player character, and a tacit parody of every video gamer. All three are components in a machine, all three locked into a routine dictated by that machine, all three satisfied (or, in the case of the NPC, functionally fulfilled) by an activity that, to anyone outside of the given habitual condition, would indeed find "soul-rending", essentially meaningless and without real agency. The game narrator continues: 165 And then one day, something very peculiar happened. Something that would forever change Stanley. Something he would never quite forget. He had been at his desk for nearly an hour when he realized that not one single order had arrived on the monitor for him to follow. No-one had showed up to give him instructions, call a meeting, or even say ‘Hi’. Never in all his years at the company had this happened – this complete isolation. Something was very clearly wrong. Shocked, frozen solid, Stanley found himself unable to move for the longest time. But as he came to his wits and regained his senses, he got up from his desk and stepped out of his office. Stanley epitomizes the first sense of Foucault’s subject as someone “subject to someone else by control and dependence” (Foucault 331), following each order, experiencing dread when the power relationship is suspended. (de Wildt Enstranging 7) At this instant, the player is for the first time given control of the Stanley character, able to move in the manner traditional to first-person PC games: vertical and horizontal motion through space using the W-A-S-D key cluster, with a full range of vision limited by a vertical axis so the player cannot look through their character’s body, or double-back their vision as if breaking their own neck via mouse-movement. 103 The narrator, who until now had total control of the text of the game, has narrated a course of action – getting up from the desk and leaving the office – which the player will have to fulfill through interaction. A player might take that cue naively, following the narrative prompt, and not without good reason. There appears to be little of consequence in the cubical, no obvious way in which to shift the narrative’s flow. There is little reason to treat Stanley (as character, hailed by the narrator) as distinct from the player, due to the formal cue of first-person perspective and the standardized controls which invite “a full 103 The player cannot yet make the character jump, a function typically bound to the space bar, and made possible in Stanley through a specific route in the text. 166 correspondence between the place and orientation of the player with that of the character as in natural perception.” (de Wildt Precarious 14) Of course this sense of the “natural” is a function as much of familiarity with the formal conventions of games as it is of a phenomenology which “matches” reality, as placing someone without the necessary ludic literacy in control of a standard first-person control scheme will demonstrate. What to the long-time PC game-player has become second nature is far from initially intuitive or fluid. However, the game presupposes a literate player, one who can be expected to slip into established habits of ludic subjectification, whose experience both makes them liable to slip into the unspoken assumptions of the form, as well as able to recognize those formal assumptions and thus, when prompted, interrogate them. After suturing the player’s control to the character’s actions, the newly formed player- character is invited to make their way through a sterile office environment, bereft of others, while the narrator informs the player of Stanley’s shock at finding that all his co-workers have disappeared. The narrator informs us that Stanley is heading to the “meeting room” to find them, and, on the way to fulfill this prediction, the player-character will arrive in a room with two doors. The narrator prompts: "When Stanley came to a set of two open doors, he entered the door on his left." But the right door, too, is wide open, inviting the player to a clear alternative (see fig. 3.3 below). 167 Figure 3.3: Open doors and the clear alternative This is core of The Stanley Parable, the moment where the game explicitly invites you to deny the narrator’s directives. The games creators present a purely formal moment of choice weighted by the interjection of authority, a seeming realization of the principle behind Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths along with a promise of subversion. From this point on, the game is a series of such decisions and potential paths, some directed, some implied through opposition, some a matter of pressing oneself against the seams of the game until one finds a way to pass through. And, in truth, other paths were already present, other digressions possible from the outset. The player could have chosen to close the door to their office before leaving it, trapping the player-character inside and prompting the narrator to assert that "…Stanley simply couldn’t handle the pressure. What if he had to make a decision? What if a crucial outcome fell under his responsibility? He had never been trained for that. No. This couldn’t go anywhere except badly." Stanley began its existence as a modification of Valve Software’s 2004 game Half-Life 2, itself the sequel to a first-person shooter – the original Half-Life (1998) – renowned for its 168 realism, at least as compared to contemporaries such as Quake (1996) or Doom (1993). While Half-Life 2 strays from the choices which made the first game so innovative in its time, 104 the legacy of the series is an association with unprecedented realism, both in terms of the world and the player-subject within it. Instead of an indomitable space marine or muscle-bound gladiator, the protagonist of the Half-Life series is a theoretical scientist, his fragile body sustained by his hazmat suit, hunted by aliens and government operatives alike. Instead of transparently ludic layouts, the first game’s levels resemble the interior of a research facility, populated by helpless scientists and under-armed security guards who "recognize" the player-character and address them accordingly, interpellating them into the world. Before the "action" of the game begins there is a lengthy section without violence, one which begins literally "on a rail" as the player- character uses the facility transit system. Next the player is set loose in a (at the time) surprisingly open and detailed workplace environment, contrasting the two states (linear rail movement, a la an arcade "rail shooter" and comparably free movement) while also giving the space a sense of depth and complexity. The game’s decision to sustain the player’s perspective in an uninterrupted fashion after this initial "railroading" – never taking control away from the player once granted – cemented Half-Life’s experience as one of the most immersive and “realistic” of its generation. Later expanded and instantiated as a "standalone" game, Stanley still uses the same engine as Half-Life 2, called the "Source Engine.” This is a piece of software which – in the words of the game’s co-designer Davey Wreden – is "really good at rendering linear corridors" (The Beginner’s Guide 2015). Designed with such a tool, Stanley takes on the legacy of first- 104 In the first game the player-character is a victim, and hero, of circumstance, a physics doctorate researcher consigned to trivial, menial labor when an experiment goes awry, forced to survive both an interdimensional alien invasion and the government’s attempt to cover up the incident; the second game elevates the same character to messianic status, framing him as the savior come to depose a despotic alien occupation, leaning more heavily on action and the robustness of the physics engine than on innovative representation or storytelling. 169 person games, games which might well be considered the most immediate successor to the realist ambition. Minecraft is a first-person game, as is DayZ, as are many of the most visible games in the marketplace, and their claim to realism is indicated in the very name "first-person" – the conceit that the game conveys the experience of a discrete "I" as opposed to the abstract, impersonal subjectivities of, say, Sim City or even Pong. And, as noted above, Half-Life was seen as a high-water mark for the realist ambitions of first-person games. As I noted above, Stanley is meant to be played by someone with a gaming background. This is not unusual; like many refined, inward-looking examples of a medium, novels included, Stanley rests on the assumption that the player is a player, possessed of a ludic literacy which makes the game’s uses and reversals of certain expectations meaningful in the wider context of the medium. This is made explicit at one point when a door marked "Broom Closet" appears in one of the game’s numerous linear hallways, hinting to the experienced player at some kind of significance by dint of its prominent labelling, encouraging digression or investigation—games conventionally hide literal or narrative valuables in broom closets. Should the player enter it, the game’s narrator takes pains to insist that there is nothing in this closet: “You do realize,” the narrator will ask, “there’s no choice or anything in here, right? If I had said ‘Stanley walked past the broom closet’, at least you would have had a reason for exploring it to find out, but it didn’t even occur to me because literally this closet is of absolutely no significance to the story whatsoever. I never would have thought to mention it.” The narrator invites laughter at a joke that relies both on narrative expectations and on the very notion of realism as that which possesses insignificant detail; Stanley’s broom closet is made out to be like Flaubert’s barometer. An experienced player, however – particularly a player of Stanley, who is taught through the game play to seek every digression, every wrinkle in the narrative fabric – does not tend to believe the narrator. They wait it out. And the waiting is rewarded with more dialog from the 170 frustrated narrator, who denounces the player’s desire to discover hidden choices and new “endings” to the game and tries to convince them of the fallacy of their hope. Eventually, the narrator comes to “a very definite conclusion:” that the player has died and “collapsed on the keyboard.” The narrator then begins to loudly request that whoever is nearby dispose of the body and find another person to take the dead player’s place, “making sure they understand basic first- person video game mechanics, and filling them in on the history of narrative tropes in video gaming, so that the irony and insightful commentary of this game is not lost on them.” This sort of bizarre, self-referential digression is a prime example of Stanley’s absurdist take on games and gaming, lampooning certain expectations about choice and freedom in gaming. This is proper to the larger project of the game, a self-described "parable,” and thus an object meant to teach some important lesson, usually with a moral or ethical quality. In the case of Stanley, the intended journey – should the player obey the game’s narrator to the letter – is a tale about escaping control, about finding freedom after a period of near-enchanted enslavement. But the issue is troubled by the many twists and turns away from the central narrative that the game invites one to take. These are expressions of the very "freedom" which other games alleged to offer, but they challenge the freedom-finding narrative of the game itself. The trouble emerges first and foremost from the constitution of the “self” within the game, the question of who the player is, who the character is, and the degree to which the two coincide through the act of play that joins them. Eventually, when the player reaches the end of a given digression, one of eighteen possible "endings," 105 the game restarts, lapsing into a load screen that declares in frame- spanning script "The end is never the end is never the end…" before placing the player-character 105 The preoccupation with endings – with the goal of finding them all intuitively understood as the way one “wins” the game, exhausting its content through experience – itself serves to underline the strange subjectivity of the game-player. Even should Stanley “escape” in this or that ending the player will return to the beginning, swept by up by the game and driven by curiosity. 171 once again in the initial office with the initial prompt (sometimes, but not always, with some small variance). Each "ending" is its own meditation on control, freedom, incentive systems and the ambivalence that exists between player and game, presenting a variety of different relationships between the player-agent, the Stanley-character and the narrator-author. This logic of iterability and repetition is critical to the game’s argument, leading to an accumulation of different endings which each represent different selves, as defined by one's actions, as well as the relationships between those selves, demonstrating what Lars de Wildt calls “precarious presence” and highlighting a “spectrum of identification” and a “continuum of difference between the interpreting subject outside of the game, the playing subject controlling the [character] and the played [character] represented.” (de Wildt ) A recursive labyrinth, Stanley deploys the prevailing assumptions of how games are played, what games offer, in order to demonstrate the way “agency” is problematized both by the demands of game design and the multiple qualities of the player-subject. 172 Figure 3.4: A flowchart mapping all the potential “endings” to Stanley. XI. Split Selfhood The guiding dialectic of the Stanley is most clearly located in the figure of Stanley himself, and the split in the player-character's selfhood which he embodies. As previously I noted, Stanley stands in for a number of figures, not least a non-player character and a kind of nightmarishly idealized gamer, someone who either has no agency, functioning only as mindless part of a machine with fixed operations, or a person who, in the very pursuit of agency, finds the whole purpose of their existence within subservience to empty commands delivered by way of a computer screen. It is this self which the Narrator addresses. Yet this is not a “person” but a player-subject, the one which, for Miguel Sicart, exists through its fidelity to the premises of the game, (Sicart 71) under the assumption that this self desires, or deserves, freedom. Ironically, 173 this freedom is only possible (at least according to the Narrator's plans) should the player lead Stanley down the path prescribed by the Narrator: freedom arrives by relinquishing control. Control, on the other hand, is precisely what the player is offered in Stanley, the ability to depart from the Narrator's path, an option that appears when the player is confronted with the room with two doors. The irony of the player's situation becomes plain as their attempts to break with the Narrator (and thus the game's) seeming intentions, their efforts to wrest control of the narrative for their own purposes, leads them deeper and deeper into the maze of the game itself. As they uncover more and more nested content they remain firmly within the game's confines, increasingly resembling the “ideal gamer” aspect of the Stanley character – the expert-button pusher, complying thoughtlessly to the game’s instructions – in the very act of trying to assert the player's agency. That sense of agency, the experience of an agentic self exists only within the context of the game’s recognizing the player-character’s actions, rewarding seeming deviance with recognition. As Sicart points out, using a Foucauldian formulation, that without being subject to power, the subject cannot become, much less be. (67) Agency, understood as control over the narrative through the diathetic affordances of the character, is then seen as coming at the cost of any actual “freedom.” That Stanley's freedom and the player's control are mutually exclusive is dramatized by the wryly named “Freedom Ending.” This is the ending that results from the player taking all the Narrator's prompts and thus proceeding in a linear fashion through the game's environment. By taking the straight and narrow path, one discovers that Stanley has spent his entire existence subject to an omniscient mind-control mechanism, an in-narrative analogy for the notion of “game as ideology” comparable to the original BioShock’s plot twist. Only by deactivating the mind control machine – the thing which makes the character of Stanley a puppet to the player's whims, the terms under which Stanley can be controlled – can Stanley achieve freedom. This 174 freedom, when it comes, actually wrests agency from the player. The moment Stanley is “free,” he slips from the player's control, moving as if by his own volition, looking around a scene of natural beauty and walking down a path towards a distant horizon, away from the labyrinthine confines of the game's office space. Of course, this is not a lasting sort of freedom, not unless the player chooses to treat this as a satisfactory end to the game and switches it off, leaving Stanley and Stanley. Induced by the logic of games, and the promise of that forking path, not only can the player be expected to start over, the game automatically does so, suggesting hunger for more endings. This makes the “Freedom Ending” both the most “true” and “untrue” ending, demonstrating as it does the bind at the heart of games. The fundamental assertions that games are about freedom or that games are about control are both articulated here. Video game “agency,” or rather the experience of agency from which games derive so much of their compelling power, is shown to amount to very little. The Freedom Ending demonstrates the first and most obvious bifurcation of “you” and “Stanley,” player and character, demonstrating that these selves and their aims are diametrically opposed. Every assertion of player agency necessarily comes at the cost of Stanley's freedom. During most of the game play Stanley is indeed effectively “mind controlled,” guided exclusively by the computer-mediated commands the player hands down. Conversely, freedom for Stanley leads to a loss of player control over the character, as Stanley steps out into the vista of an open world and begins to look around, liberated from the mouse-and-keyboard shackles imposed by the player. Rather than an alliance between selves with common goals and interests (though there was dissent even within the cluster protagonist of The Female Man), Stanley lays bare a structural imbalance in the possibility of agency within a structure of multiple selfhood. If we convey ontological dignity upon the selves instantiated by play – endowing them not simply with 175 “degrees of presence – more or less resembling the ‘natural’ perception of everyday life” but instead to “formulat[ing] unhierarchized different forms of presence” (de Wildt Precarious 12) – if we are to call upon these other selves as allies, and not as slaves, then it is incumbent upon us to examine our relationship between those subjectivitives, instead of assuming their subordination to a larger (dare we say sovereign?) self. The game also plays out, and plays into, what Lars de Wildt calls “…a fundamental tension in participatory media that games often willfully ignore,” that “while the promise of interactivity may be a promise of freedom, even the briefest contemplation shows us that the explorable options making up this freedom are limited and, perhaps more disillusioning, pre- programmed.” (de Wildt Enstranging 1) This tension has expressed itself in the critical literature in the (aforementioned) opposition between two seemingly “paradoxical” models of subjectification in games, on the one hand the optimistic “deconstructive” account on the other, the pessimistic “interpellationary account,” (de Wildt Precarious 1) whereby games are seen as “paradigmatic for ideology” (de Wildt Enstranging 2). The irony of these opposing figurations of the subject of play is that the smooth interpellation of the player-subject hinges upon a “presumed merger of the player and the diegetic character into a single, stable subject” and thus players who are “caught up in the illusion of agency” and “lose themselves in the game-proposed roles” (de Wildt Enstranging 2). However, the degree of ludic literacy required to achieve this seamless integration – to forget the interface so entirely as to slip into the transparency of fluency – is itself a requirement of the “deconstructive subject.” No truly naïve player could achieve the state of passivity with regards to the mechanism of the game, while the educated player is the only one with the tools to perform the necessary deconstructive work. “Education” here indicates more a thorough training and internalization of ludic norms, in keeping with theories of interpellation, but this still 176 presupposes a unitary subject who either recognizes the power relations at work and thus is exempt, or who does not and therefore is subject to them. This bind, which Miguel Sicart tackles and Lars de Wildt problematizes, is explained in terms of a Foucauldian conception of the subject as that which exists always in relation to power – that is, according to the rules of the game. 106 The Foucauldian subject engages in a voluntary act of subjectification undertaken under the auspices of power, which could not take place outside those power relations. Games are all the more explicit, all the more voluntary, as an optional activity whose operations are, by and large, transparent (or at the very least consistent) in a way social relations are not. Thus “the ideological-paradigmatic game-as-structure and the deconstructing player-as-subject are in a dialectical relationship,” giving us rather more room to play in as we determine the actual interrelation of the split subjectivity of the player (de Wildt Precarious 5). The brilliance of Stanley comes in no small part from the way that it demonstrates the instability between these states of awareness/interpellation. The player is both Stanley and controlling Stanley, themselves figured as both perpetrator and victim of mind control. This experience is underlined by the way in which the game shifts frames, sometimes immersing the player behind Stanley’s eyes, sometimes decoupling the player from Stanley, even taking a moment to identify the player as “a real person” whose agency is qualitatively different from that of the character they control, and whom the Narrator is seeking to educate. This dialectical relationship and the antagonism between player and character is further modified by the relationship between the player, the character, and the Narrator, the last being the most 106 While Sicart assumes “an implicit super-subject,” the “autonomous individual player” which resembles a Cartesian “thinking self” who is capable of moral judgments and exists outside “the push and pull of [the game’s] power relations,” de Wildt favors a less stable view of player-subjectivity which is more in keeping with our theorization of the multiple, supplemental model f the subject. (de Wildt Enstranging 6) 177 significant presence and seeming stand-in for authorial intention. 107 As the numerous other endings elaborate, the Narrator's role varies from a Big Other explaining the situation and selves, making the initial interdiction which is either obeyed or broken, and assuming relationships as varied as sadistic tormentor, helpless victim and even ally against common confines: the game itself. One side of the sadistic relationship between player, character and Narrator is dramatized in the Countdown Ending (also known as the Explosion Ending). Should the player get far enough in the Freedom Ending-chain to find the central control console for the mind-control mechanism, one of the game's classic forking paths presents itself. The Narrator exhorts Stanley to deactivate the nefarious machine, the final step required to achieve the aforementioned Freedom Ending, by pressing the “OFF” button. Alternately, the player can choose to have Stanley press the “ON” button, presumably in the interests of taking control of the machine itself and ascending to the role of omniscient controller, which so many games bestow upon their players. This choice disappoints the Narrator: “After they kept you enslaved all these years, you go and you try to take control of the machine for yourself, is that what you wanted? Control?” he asks, before asserting, “You don’t have nearly the power you think you do.” And to prove his point, the Narrator slips back into narration – as an authorial authority will – informing Stanley (and the player) that “he had just initiated the network's emergency detonation system,” triggering a countdown to a nuclear detonation. Underlying the absoluteness of the Narrator's power, the dialogue points to the arbitrary choice of this countdown's duration: “How long until detonation, then? Hmm…let's say, um…two minutes.” The turn to sadism is sharp at this point, with the Narrator mocking the player’s pretensions to control and their reliance upon agency as the unspoken promise of a game. Left 107 Presence in the Derridian sense of being the only character with a voice, who guarantees meaning by acknowledging the player-character’s actions, even in defiance of their stated wishes. 178 with no option but to retreat to the previous room, the player is confronted with a wide variety of buttons, both colored and numbered, a clear indicator to any experienced gamer that there should be some solution or escape from the situation. These buttons are, however, entirely useless, and interacting with them leads the Narrator to mock attempts: I mean, look at you, running from button to button, screen to screen, clicking on every little thing in this room! … Something here will save me! Why would you think that, Stanley? That this video game can be beaten, won, solved? Do you have any idea what your purpose in this place is? *Laughter* Stanley, you’re in for quite a disappointment. But here’s a spoiler for you: that timer isn’t a catalyst to keep the action moving along. It’s just seconds ticking away to your death. You’re only still playing instead of watching a cutscene because I want to watch you for every moment that you’re powerless. To see you made humble. This is not a challenge, it’s a tragedy. You wanted to control this world? Fine. But I’m going to destroy it first, so you can’t. Directly citing the structure of repetition and iteration, the Narrator then shares their knowledge that this is just one instance of the story: Sometimes when I tell it, I let you sit there in your office forever, pushing buttons endlessly and then dying alone. Other times, I let the office sink into the ground, swallowing everyone inside. Or I let it burn to a crisp. I have to say this though, this version of events has been rather amusing. Watching you try to make sense of everything and take back the control wrested away from you, it’s quite rich. I almost hate to see it go. But I’m sure whatever I come up with on the next go around will be even better. A cursory reading might then align the Narrator with BioShock’s unmasked Atlas, an explicit figuration of the implicit domination imposed by the game’s rules, the totality of the system’s 179 control over the state of the subject it produces. Power thus appears as the sole province of the author, whose control is both concealed and enhanced by the presumption of player agency. The relationship of repetitious sadism is not one-way, however. The circumstances are cunningly reversed in the Starry Dome Ending where the Narrator proposes a kind of peace treaty with Stanley. “Come along Stanley,” he says, “I want to show you something beautiful.” The beautiful something is a dome-shaped room with a screen-saver-esque aurora of shifting colors playing against the curved ceiling. Here the Narrator sighs with satisfaction and says that in this place both he and Stanley can be happy. And perhaps this is true of the Narrator, and even of Stanley – but it is unlikely that the player will be happy. As always, the player will grow bored with stasis and begin to explore, discovering the one exit, a door which leads to a room which contains nothing besides a set of stairs leading to an elevated platform with no railing. Should the player ascend these stairs (as the player inevitably will in their desire to explore the space and assert their agency) the Narrator will warn the Stanley that it is unsafe, and that he should be careful not to do anything to disrupt the happiness they have found in the aurora room. This will, of course, only prompt the contrarian player to experiment, leading to the only available action: plummeting off the upper platform to injury, but also change, a kind of forward motion, a consequence to player action. The way out becomes clear: the player will need to hurl Stanley off the landing three times to die, reset the game and begin again, in the quest for more endings. Here the Narrator begins to plead with Stanley, plaintive urgings which will necessarily fall on deaf ears, and which starkly reverse the sadistic relationship, demonstrating that the Narrator is just as trapped within the closed system of the game as is Stanley and, presumably, the player, as long as they are playing. Control doesn’t belong to the Narrator any more than it does to Stanley, since without Stanley – without the subject in the world of the game – the Narrator’s narrative powers are unrealized. 180 There is a problem common to the Narrator, Stanley and the player. Despite their antagonisms, many of them structural, one ending suggests the possibility of alliance between these conflicting entities. The Confusion Ending illustrates this best. After a series of twists and turns that have the Narrator himself lose all sense of where the story is or how to find it, including an unsuccessful attempt to get on track by following “The Stanley Parable Adventure Line,™” the player finds themselves in a room with a wall with a projection of the “Confusion Ending Schedule.” On it the player and Narrator both see the script trapping them. The Narrator, horrified, tries to refuse this doom and destiny, raging against his own lack of agency: Oh, hold up, what's this? Hmm...hmm...the confusion ending? You're telling me...that's what this is? It's all one giant ending? And we're supposed to restart the game...what...eight, eight times? That's really how all this goes?! It's all...determined? So now according to the schedule I restart again, then, what...am I just supposed to forget? Well, what if I don't want to forget! My mind goes blank simply because it's written here on this...this...thing! Wall! Well, who consulted me? Why don't I get to decide? Why don't I get a say in all this! Is it really – No, it can't be. I don't want it to be. I don't want the game to keep restarting. I don't want to forget what's going on. I don't want to be trapped like this. I won't restart the game. I won't do it! I won't do it! I won't do it. Were it only so easy. The game will inevitably restart, interrupting the Narrator with a mechanical klaxon, and the Narrator loses all knowledge of the previous events. How to escape? The closest thing to an honest answer the game provides becomes clear in the Museum Ending. Requiring the player follow a sign promising “escape”, and to ignore the threats of death levelled by the Narrator, this ending leads the player into the jaws of a heavy industrial machine. The Narrator blithely bids Stanley farewell as the machine closes in around 181 the player character, yet the instant before death (and thus inevitable restart in the initial office room) the game pauses and a woman's voice interjects: "Farewell Stanley!" cried the Narrator, as Stanley was led helplessly into the enormous metal jaws. In a single visceral instant Stanley was obliterated, as the machine crushed every bone in his body, killing him instantly. And yet it would be just a few minutes before Stanley would restart the game, back in his office, as alive as ever. What exactly did the Narrator think he was going to accomplish? When every path you can walk has been created for you long in advance, death becomes meaningless, making life the same. Do you see now? Do you see that Stanley was already dead from the moment he hit start? *Chuckles* Oh, look at these two. How they wish to destroy one another. How they wish to control one another. How they both wish to be free. Can you see? Can you see how much they need one another? No. Perhaps not. Sometimes these things cannot be seen. This Narrator's Narrator is a bit on the nose, and her narration accompanies the player's emergence into a replication of a white box museum space, wherein The Stanley Parable is laid out in exhibitory style, reduced to bits and pieces, mortified in the manner proper to all museums. If there is anything like a final word in Stanley it would be this. Whereas the Narrator may propose endings which the player's restlessness can undermine, the Narrator's Narrator offers the one solution: But listen to me, you can still save these two. You can stop the program before they both fail. Push 'escape' and press 'quit'. There is no other way to beat this game. As long as you move forward you will be walking someone else's path. Stop now, and it will be your 182 only true choice. Whatever you do, choose it! Don't let time choose for you! Don't let time – And if you haven't yet quit, you die and the game restarts as it does every other time. The disenchantment of the Museum Ending, however, belies the pleasure that games provide, the very reason we play games. The game in its deconstructed state – laid out in exhibits with explanatory plaques – lacks the vitality and tension of a game-as-played, much as a joke loses its power when it is explained in detail. While disenchantment is desirable to the extent that it approximates demystification, breaking the spell means losing the magic of the medium. Operating under the assumption that we would like to keep on reading novels and playing games, we would be remiss to throw the baby out with the bathwater. For games are games insofar as they act as an other that recognizes the player’s actions, the way its rules – which reign within the magic circle of play – lend the player’s action meaning. Novels are novels insofar as the reader experiences their fiction as sufficiently real to engross and compel. The player/reader cannot fail to be hailed, not without failing to manifest as a subject in the first place. They cannot play without accepting that what freedom they have is bought by constraint. Whatever agency they feel is experienced against a background of recognition, the formal system that defines diathesis in the first place. However, that hailing does not contain them entirely, does not address every aspect of the split selfhood that games induce. That split may vex notions of total autonomy, of “freedom”, but it also prevents total passive interpellation. The supplemental quality of the subject distributes its iterations at the periphery, tracing a complex interrelation that requires frame-switching and intrasubjective negotiations. This subjective dissonance is not expressly a subversion of realism; rather it is a consequence of realism as a means taken to certain ends. It is a populous solitude that discovers itself as other to itself. 183 None of these works is meant to be the final word on their forms, tempting as it might be to think so. Just as Stanley can be resolved “successfully” only by turning off the game, and BioShock's endless loop escaped by nullifying its own conditions of possibility, so too is the end purpose of The Female Man the novel's own irrelevance. Russ urges her own novel in its final passage to embrace its own obsolescence: Do not complain when at last you become quaint and old-fashioned, when you grow as outworn as the crinolines of a generation ago and are classed with Spicy Western Stories, Elsie Dinsmore, and The Son of the Sheik; do no mutter angrily to yourself when young persons read you to hrooch and hrch and guffaw, wondering what the dickens you were all about. Do not get glum when you are no longer understood, little book. Do not curse your fate. Do no reach out from readers' laps and punch the readers' noses. Rejoice, little book! For on that day, we will be free. (Russ 213-214) Freedom is not found inside these structures. If anything freedom is discovered only by stepping away from those states of constructed presence, by assuming responsibility for personal subjective experience. Perhaps it is not freedom we should be seeking, nor a sense of control to counterbalance being subject to powers-that-be. Power is not the bogeyman any more than the Narrator is an unambiguous enemy, without power the subject cannot come into being. And those power relations, to further borrow from Foucault, “can only be articulated on the basis of an ‘other’ recognized and maintained to the very end of the subject who acts.” (Foucault 340) Once more we find otherness at the root of the subjectification process, the other we fear, the other we need, the other without and the other within. We need that other to serve as witness and guarantor, to experience the peculiar and precious thing games can offer: “possibilities for players to perform other subjectivities.” (de Wildt Enstranging 5) 184 The problematic now is how best to encounter otherness, how to avoid the trap of addiction to a mastery that feels like freedom but can only ever be a form of control. It is in asking this question that I am drawn back to the mechanism of chance, the alterity indicated by randomness. If the utopian horizon for which optimistic accounts long is ever to be grasped, it can only be through the capacity to encounter the unexpected. Not the consequential, not the agentic, not the free reign of a sovereign subject, but those moments when control is lost and the future becomes in some essential way unknown, containing a plenitude of possibility. 185 Chapter IV Possibility I. Risky Business In previous chapters I moved from the inception of formal realism in the eighteenth century novel to the development of digital games in our contemporary moment, from rarified military training techniques of the nineteenth century European warrior class to mass-market entertainment in the late twentieth, between fantasy and science fiction, the settled and the nomadic, all in an attempt to work through the functioning of realism as a discourse in myriad manifestations. In earlier chapters I also established that while realism has extensive and various manifestations, it is distinctly modern: part of the epistemological shift in the shadow of which we still live. Realism has been adopted as a means of both securing and challenging figurations of reality, and therefore describes a field of contestation in which subjectivities are experimented with and produced. It has also regularly employed ludic techniques, even when the texts in question are not explicitly games. My task in this chapter is to marshal a scatter pattern into a legible constellation, to extract from this motion some general trends that might serve to illuminate the as-yet undetermined trajectory of modernity-in-progress. There are interconnected clusters of objects and influences, with periodic upswells of activity within cultural production – a managing of historical anxieties made acute by their unique circumstances – yet bound together by certain conceptual continuities. These suggest unresolved tensions in the thinking of modernity, and how it constructs its subjects. The prevailing theme appears around the mutual implicating principles outlined in the preceding chapter: freedom and control, complimentary yet contradictory concepts tied up in the ludic promise of agency, the promise (and danger) of expanded diathesis. Thus, as new constructions of liberalism sweep the Anglophone world, novels arise to participate in the change, both to 186 express and to contain the implications of individualism. As proponents of Enlightenment go about their work of secular rationalization, narratives of coincidence, worlds of plausible fiction and games of chance combine to re-enchant the world within the new paradigm. Creators of master narratives face disappointment and disarray in the twentieth century. New systemizations arise to compensate for their loss, both enabling the thinking of multiplicity while still falling under the sway of a restrictive set of identity formulations. And as the present interpenetrations of global telecommunication reform the notion of the public, and thus of publication, making possible new affiliative communities and new platforms for the articulation of identity, those very platforms are mobilized to propel repressive projects and tap into the passionate intensity of the worst elements of the political imaginary. In every era, radicalism is advocated in both progressive and reactionary forms; it is to be expected that when the stakes are high, both sides are stirred into frantic activity. This is not unique to modernity, though modernity may be unique in its self-consciousness of crisis, its investment in crisis as a motive force. The continuity of realism’s role in the thinking-through of these crises suggests that some insight into the current moment may be found in realism. In the modern era (or is it post-modern?) of the politics of identity (or is it post-identity?), the reimagining of the role of citizens on a global scale, the necessity of collective action in a time of increasing personalization, the stakes of the ways and hows of subject-production are high. My previous chapter valorized multiplicity, holding it up as the antidote to the troubling symptoms of the singular-sovereign-subject examined in the first chapter. 108 This antidote remains apt in my current conversation: the imagining of the self as multiple and supplementary as proper to the kind of open-mindedness necessary for democratic pluralism, the palliative 108 Viz. the resolution of the crisis of intersubjectivity through the destruction or assimilation of the other. 187 effects of empathy, and the imagining of alternatives to the status quo which is the sine qua non of emancipatory projects. However, it also paints too stark a contrast, forcing binary thinking even as I exhorted binary thinking be abandoned: the multiple, immanent, liberatory versus the singular, transcendent and oppressive. There is not so simple a relationship between one political “good” and a neatly opposed “evil,” any more than do novels and games simply make subjects as “good” or “evil.” Such an attitude leaves me in the dubious position of judging each object upon a single axis, an act that, by my stated values, would flatten the multiplicity of interpretations – and thus the multiplicity of reading/writerly selves – that ought to inhere within any text, regardless of its seeming closure. Instead I acknowledge the tension, rather than the strict opposition, a push and pull between those two principles: freedom and control. I keep in mind Foucault’s insight that resistance does not take place outside of power, but as a function of power, within power. This is particularly true in games, which aim to create a plenitude of possibilities precisely through the use of governing constraints, the freedom that can only exist within the bounds of what Huizinga calls the magic circle. Moreover, in my first chapter I argued that the subjectivization process begins with the world into which the subject is thrust. If the ultimate goal of counterfactual narrative is to change the world – and, indeed, earlier research draws very explicit lines between the imagining of alternate worlds and contemporary projects of historical justice – then this relationship between the world and the subjects it produces is perhaps the most critical for understanding the political implications of the form. Alternate realism is an engine for alternate realities, for histories and worlds that diverge from our own, full of both utopian and dystopian potential. Finally, I turn to that element of realist representation which I have, from the start, identified as the particular strength in ludic texts: the element of chance. I invoke it in this chapter to bring my argument full circle, back to Crusoe’s island and the advent of modernity to show that questions 188 of chance and contingency inform the modern novel from its inception as a key participant in the revolution in probabilistic thinking, while simultaneously providing the clearest indication of the urge to become-game which I have alleged to realism. II. State, Subject, Statistics The scholarship paints a compelling if not entirely coherent portrait of the influence of aleatory thinking in the progeneration of the novel. These scholars acknowledge the critical connection between formal realism (as embodied by the novel) and a new way of understanding and representing reality: statistics and its accompanying field, probability. The development of probability theory, stemming from the works of Jakob Bernoulli, Blaise Pascal, and Christiaan Huygens, marks the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as the time of a probabilistic revolution, 109 leading to the development of “statistics, the doctrine of chances, and the form of the modern novel” which in concert “brought our modern ideas of society and nature into existence in the first place.” (Campe 2-3) The connection, and its implications for an understanding of reality and the agents within it, is not to be understated in the literature: “The triumph of probability theory and the rise of the novel,” which sustained and mirrored one another, became “part of a single shift in our understanding of the world and of how we represent our place within it.” (Kavanagh ix) The influence of this new field and mode of thought was felt in both intellectual and political circles, with figures as prominent as Gottfried Leibniz struggling to adapt a pre-modern vision of Providence with a universe seen increasingly as riven with contingency, while at the same time statistical methods were being adopted by European governments in an effort to reform military and civil administration. It also played an outsized role in the reimagining of individuals as subjects, both in regard to the newly articulated 109 Cf. Ian Hacking’s The Taming of Chance (1990). 189 “phantasmagorias of social normalcy,” as well as subjects of newly configured apparatuses of state power, two mutually supporting functions. (Campe 20) The connection between statistical representation and the novel is most evident in the genre’s early association with the practice of gambling. This association had already contributed to the development of probability as a mathematical method that can frame and depict reality, becoming what Rüdiger Campe calls the “appearance [Schein] of truth” in a phenomenological sense. (Campe 3) Eighteenth century novels on both sides of the English Channel are replete with references to gambling, both as subject matter and as theme. (Molesworth 62, 130; Kavanagh ix) This is not a matter of mere reference or coincidental inclusion. Gambling, as a component in and producer of plot, reveals the fundamental connection between the new modern notion of chance and the ludic underpinnings of the novel. In the process of researching this link between probability and realism, Jesse Molesworth finds himself making the claim that novel- reading involves “ludic qualities” whereby “narrative fiction initiates a game played between narrator and reader.” (Molesworth 134) He does so by citing Huizinga’s commentary on the play-aspect of poetry, but in the context of the novel the game has changed. Realism makes fiction a numbers game, with the novel’s author playing the part of “lottery master,” 110 and the reader expected, as part of the “interactive game” with the narrator, to treat the world of the text, and thus the reality it alleges to reference, with the “predictive process” proper to playing cards. (Molesworth 135) Molesworth admits that this claim regarding the ludic qualities of novel- reading seems, at the time of his writing, “far-fetched.” (Molesworth 135) But I consider it anything but. That modern notions of chance and the ludic qualities of the novel were, from the genre’s inception, effectively thought together is a consequence of the larger epistemic shift. Whether or 110 Molesworth refers more specifically to Henry Fielding and his oeuvre, but Molesworth’s principle is stated generally, and we will take it as such. 190 not novels participated, as Thomas A. Kavanagh claims, in the taming of chance under the rationalist order of the Enlightenment, or rather, as Molesworth alleges, served to re-enchant the world by making magical thinking viable under that same order, both are premised on the changes wrought in individual and historical consciousness by the advent of modernity. These changes included the reconceptualization of reality as a game, specifically a game of chance, in which each player must become a canny reader of potential outcomes as they make their way through the thicket of contingency. Kavanagh most clearly formulates this model of the modern player-subject, proposing a fundamental connection between probability theory and modern subjectivity, specifically in regards to statistics. In its “nineteenth-century mutation into the discipline of statistics” probability theory wrought “profound changes in the form of the historical consciousness imposed upon the individual.” The statistical subject was one imagined as “freed from prejudice, superstition, and unexamined ballast of tradition” and further “unencumbered by any allegiance to a past or a history extending back beyond their canny analysis of the specific situation” rather than persons “defin[ed]… through the temporal continuities of family and class”; this new subject was an agent of rational decision unfettered by the past, concerned chiefly with “quantify[ing] and carefully measur[ing] the array of alternatives before them.” (Kavanagh 21- 22). This way of thinking, of positioning the individual within a new conception of history premised not on unbreakable tradition but rather a spreading fan of possibilities from which the individual may choose, amounts to “a new form of subjectivity.” (Kavanagh 21-22). In its depiction of this kind of new temporal experience, the novel “became for its audience the cornerstone of a new individual and a new identity” where the “narrative of choice” imparted “an acute awareness of self” as being a “novelized, narrativized man.” (Kavanagh 118) 191 This resembles my theorized “bare subject,” and echoes Rousseau’s instructions for the proper reading of Robinson Crusoe, 111 that I return to observations regarding the connection between the modern subject and the modern conception of sovereignty. Kavanagh relates the abstraction of the achieved through probability theory with Rousseau’s concept of the volonté générale, through which “the modern state demands that each individual merge into and identify with all other members of the community” so that “all come to participate equally in the collective privilege of sovereignty.” (Kavanagh 17) This collective identification is meant precisely to manage the dangers of sovereignty and individualism’s volatile admixture. The new citizen-subject should sufficiently identify with, and thus resemble, its fellow citizen-subjects. 112 A further parallel appears through the very manner in which statistics relates to history, political philosophy, and the formation of the modern state. According to Campe, statistics stands in contrast both to history, which “reports singular events” and political philosophy which “contemplates the ideal form of the state in strict universality,” in that it bridges both, dealing as it does with “a particular state at a particular time, an object of study midway between singularity and generality.” (Campe 6) This is a state-based formulation of realist subjectification: both individual and general, distinct and representative, “anyone” and “unique.” It is through statistics that “the ‘respective individual state’” is “represented in its particularity as a whole of its own.” (Campe 244) While Campe opts to call statistics “the poetry of the state,” (Campe 205) connecting its function to that ascribed to poetry by Aristotle between history (the particular) and philosophy (the universal), I suggest we instead call it the “realism of the state,” the mechanism by which the state defines its own interior, territorial constitution, and thereby (in a further echo 111 Further Rousseauist is the discourse of probability’s “vision of the individual as a consciousness freed from prejudice, superstition, and unexamined ballast of tradition.” (Kavanagh 21) 112 This need was all the more acute during the rapid urbanization of the 18 th century, in Britain in particular, which “brought with it a particularly uncanny side effect” in the form of permanent strangers, a marked change from the extended networks of pre-modern communities. (Molesworth 240) This can be further linked to “the modern notion of ‘self-hood’” as “a particular turn inward - the act of partitioning the self” to cope with “the psychic impact of living in a larger community surrounded by strangers.” (Ibid 240-242) 192 of Deleuze and Guattari’s observations about Oedipal subjectivity) one that has “successfully colonized its own territory.” (Campe 205) Campe goes further in asserting that this “territorialization of the state” and its concurrent “nationalization of society,” are connected to early novelistic experiments in representation, specifically through the use of tables. (Campe 207) Pointing out the appearance of tables of data in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, Campe claims that the birth of the novel involves turning “evidence of statistical probability” from an “epistemic category” into an “aesthetic form.” This transformation is in keeping with the aim of realism to erase mediation in favor of direct reference, as the table seeks to circumvent more traditional forms of persuasion in favor of a “evidential placing-before-the-eyes,” as if the table, in its simultaneity and non-narrative outline, could represent a truth that could not otherwise be so directly conveyed. (Campe 221) Thus the tables of Tolkien and Dungeons and Dragons (or more properly the company that published the D&D’s materials, TSR) are not late additions to the realist repertoire, but rather present from realism’s inception. This suggests, in part at least, that they are culpable in the production of state subjectivity. In previous chapters I considered the implications of sovereignty and other symptoms of statehood on the production of individual subjects through realism. Misgivings about a genre so thoroughly implicated in one of modernity’s most perilous projects are understandable, but less clear is this criticism pertains to works of fantastic fiction. And does realism, in fact, render the world as legible, its risks as calculable? Is realism, indeed, the vanguard of the Enlightenment, and an accomplice to state power? While Kavanagh considers this all part and parcel with the Enlightenment’s larger project of transmuting “mere” chance to calculable probability – reconstructing the world as coherent and causal, its subjects as normal – Molesworth claims that novels ultimately achieve the opposite effect. The realist novel’s reliance on plot reveals its true function: to make the 193 experience of an ordinary person appear exceptional enough to be worthy of narration. For Molesworth, “realism is, at bottom, a mechanism for the fictionalization of the reader” and that “fictionality is the principle by which a materialist or secular cosmos re-enchants itself.” (Molesworth 9) The Enlightenment, in dismantling the comforts of Providence and its guarantee of individual importance, leaves its newly formed subject in a state of crisis intolerable to the ego (Molesworth 9). The statistical subject, existing as it does in relation to an definitionally unexceptional norm, suffers the same terror of ordinariness that causes a child to produce what Freud calls “the family romance.” (Molesworth 47) While the novel adopts the terms and tools of the new rationalist order, it does so in order to preserve the psychic benefits of pre-modern magical thinking, dwelling, as it does, not on the “blanks” in the lottery but on the exceptional cases of success or, alternately, exceptional cases of failure. (Molesworth 39) While the secular regime of probability theory may rely upon the metaphorization of reality as a game, it does not account for the desire that has made gaming – and more specifically the chance element of gambling – so compelling. Efforts were made by Henry Fielding in Tom Jones and Edmond Hoyle in his treatise on whist to instruct readers in the proper practice of seemingly idle or even morally dangerous entertainments of reading novels and playing cards to convert them into practices that would instead foster the “ability… to construct potential narrative paths, and eventually to select the most favorable from all alternatives,” (Molesworth 140-142) as is proper to the new subject Kavanagh theorizes. However, Molesworth’s research suggests that actual people playing actual lotteries at the time were motivated not by the odds of winning – which, if scrutinized with proper probabilistic rigor, do not justify the purchase of a ticket – but rather by the opportunity to experience the kind of chance turn of events that mark plot. (Molesworth 9) 194 Gambling’s connection to the novel is more about the experience of immersion, its power to fictionalize its players. The rational, statistical subject, in command of a probabilistic worldview and their capacity for weighing all possible outcomes, should seek to mitigate risk at every turn. But the enthusiasm for gambling, the actual phenomenal effect which lends chance it pleasure, is the “offer of plot – the creation of risk rather than its minimization.” (Molesworth 89) For Molesworth, “[g]ambling time is ‘special’ precisely because it is fictional time” capable of simultaneously “expanding the present to allow hours to slip by unnoticed” while also “manufacturing significant events at a breakneck pace” and thus allowing the player to live “a hundred lives in one” or “a whole lifetime in a few minutes.” 113 (Molesworth 91-92) The novel, formless yet rife with incident, gains its vitality from the earlier practice of gambling and its ability to “manufacture potential plot nodes – narrative turning points.” (Molesworth 90) In this way, the novel does answer a critical need of the newly constituted subject, not as an education in the rational assessment of alternatives, but rather as a “remedy for the discovery of ordinariness” which is all the more pressing in a world increasingly colonized by statistical thinking. (Molesworth 46) Rather than ushering in the modern era, the novel and its single- character plotline “enables modern to melt temporarily into premodern,” still bound to the magic of teleology by way of plot, but able to hold water within a new epistemic era “since it is built from the raw materials encounter in the modern frame (realism, and therefore fictionality).” In this way, the novel’s role in burgeoning modernity is to repair “the status of the self,” (Molesworth 50) a necessity in an era marked by rapid social and cultural change. Gambling was uniquely suited for the task of bridging this gap between modern method and premodern assurances. Serving as the cornerstone for the first works of probability theory, it 113 All qualities that can be easily alleged to many modern games, not all of them forms of gambling, but many of which borrow from gambling’s incentive systems. 195 is the foundational language for the discourse of ascendant modernity. But it also retained, in its aleatory roots, connections to the quintessential premodern meaning-making practice: divination. III. Signs of Things to Come The link between divination as the premodern method of deducing meaning from chance operations, and formal realism as a kind of training to make sense of a complexly causal reality, further illustrates the role of both in the production of subjectivity. During the Reformation and its antecedents, when the authority of the Catholic Church and the social order it maintained was losing its cohesion, problems of self became pressing in the face not only of the shift towards capitalism and its concurrent social upheavals, but also in a religious context. Under the influence of thinkers such as John Calvin, the question of who is elect and who is not presented not only a pressing theological concern, but an acutely personal one. How, after all, is the newly individual and individuated Protestant subject to know whether or not they were saved? The answer is found, of course, in the individual’s encounter with the Christian ur-text of the Holy Bible. This is an encounter which falls in line with divinatory traditions: a single text with cosmological representative power providing grounds for innumerable individual interpretive applications. This process of text-for-the-production-of-self is directly analogous to the concurrent use of novels to address similar concerns. Just as the novel became central to the conception of the psychological individual, per Robinson Crusoe, as well as to the construction of new social roles and relations, per Pamela, the divinatory use of scripture plays an indispensable role in the Protestant construction of self, whereby one finds the self “in another person – i.e., a biblical character,” a process not just analogous but effectively identical to the finding of self within a novel. (Preus 451) 196 In fact, the two go hand in hand. J. Samuel Preus figures the first works of formal realism – Robinson Crusoe foremost among them – as extensions of the divinatory use of scripture, amounting to an assertion that the secularization of divination itself produces formal realism, and is the subjective exercise which the realist novel relies upon for its most engrossing and dramatic effects. The psychological gymnastics of the novel reader, who simultaneously inhabits the life written upon the page, as well as passing judgement on that life, maps onto what Preus calls “divinatory split consciousness.” This consciousness is created, he argues, through the “peculiar characteristics of Puritan introspection” whereby the “self is on trial,” interrogated by “the divining Word-via-consciousness,” which is “rigorously detached from the self” (Preus 450) much as the Cartesian subject stands in skeptical consideration of the phenomenal self’s sensory experience. This mode of introspection is what links the “the generic invention of the novel” to “the rules of divination.” (Preus 441) Preus further suggests, “[d]ivining personal identity and destiny … through meticulous description of its material and chronological course is the crux” of early realist novels including Robinson Crusoe. (Preus 456) Viewed through their relation to divinatory practice, what Barthes calls the “irrelevant” or purely “summatory details” attain a significance beyond the illusion of transparent reportage. Any given detail is significant precisely because it carries a message addressed to the self which experiences it, because it does not emerge from the intentions of the self, but rather from the world at large, precisely in its otherness. This “‘found’ character” of formal realism is inherited from the presumed objectivity of divinatory practice, one which has everything to do with what is understood as “realistic description” (Preus 460). It is important to note that the arbitrary, “rule-governed” (Preus 441) basis of divination also ties it to the practice of realism. The “split consciousness” effect which is so important to the 197 reading of novels finds its roots in divination, whereby “[t]he diviner does not originate his speech, does not speak for himself or presume ‘authorship.’ He defines himself as a medium, or mediatory, of an external voice…” and thus sustains “subject/object dualism” within themselves, much as novels simultaneously produce a representation of an objective world and a subjective experience of that world. The conceit to objectivity, and thus “[t]he credibility and plausibility of the whole system,” is a product of the rules which prevent manipulation. (Preus 444) Arbitrariness (specifically the arbitrariness of rules) marks the limit of what could possibly be subjective or intentional, and thus the beginning of the presumably objective world “out there.” 114 Thus formal realism emerges – in this reading at least – as a secularized mode of divination, specifically designed to address questions about the nature of the self. 115 While the specific, primary function of realism in the novel may be contested both within the critical literature, and in its actual historical practice, some points prove consistent. First, that realism negotiates the relationship between modern and pre-modern. Second, that it is part of the larger urge to build systems and model reality. Third, that it is deeply involved in the production of subjects, both in their transformation into modern individuals, and in their endurance under the strains of modernity. Fourth, that the construction of the modern subject in some key ways mirrors the construction of the modern state. Fifth, and most pertinent to my argument, all of these powers and practices relate to the changing role of chance (alongside and due to its mirror and counter, probability) in modernity: linking premodern chance to modern calculation, 114 This guarantee of unmanipulable objectivity is precisely the same guarantee sought by the inclusion of chance operations both in literary experiments aspiring to decenter the author, as well as in wargames which attempt to replicate the contingent elements of historical events. 115 The same process of secularization applies to the conception of history that makes alternate history possible: a point of great importance later in this chapter. As Catherine Gallagher argues, “the ability to think counterfactually and to construct alternate histories of important wars measure the extent to which a nation’s historians have joined secular discipline and have truly broken with the concept that divinely decreed necessity shaped the national past.” (Gallagher Counterfactual 54) But while the shift by which “secular contingency replaces providential necessity,” the formal mechanism of chance sustains the “…age old link between divination and the writing of history,” (Bennett 198) both of which “picture the world as a great ‘semiological system’…” (Ibid 176) The key difference being that the doctrine of contingency informs the modern, individualist notion of freedom, one which does not greatly predate the 19 th century. (Boehmer 64) 198 premodern narratives of fortuitous accident to a modern conception of the world as coherent and casual, premodern subjects of Providence into modern subjects of possibility, premodern dynastic obligations to modern nations defined by statistical self-report. The warp of realism is woven with the weft of chance, both binding it and bound to it. Realist games and their descendants are part of this tapestry. They are instances of applied probability: they depict the world in terms of a coherent, calculable totality; they serve to supplement selfhood. Indeed, all the necessary elements for a narrative method that not simply thematizes but in fact incorporates the narrative-generative possibilities of chance have been available at least since the eighteenth century. Yet actual realist games do not gain popular prominence until the twentieth century. It is not until the latter half of that century that dice are incorporated in the active production of narrative for narrative’s sake in Dungeons and Dragons and other roleplaying games. There is a gap here that indicates some bridge needed created between the emergence of these elements at the advent of modernity and their eventual combination in contemporary games. IV. Bridging the Gap Molesworth identifies one of the first modern uses of randomizers for the production of narrative experience in Etteilla, ou manière de se récréer avec un jeu de cartes (1783), written by Jean-Baptiste Alliette (better known by the titular pseudonym “Etteilla”). A direct precursor to tarot card divination, Etteilla’s system uses a standard pack of playing cards plus one structuring blank to produce individualized narratives. In keeping with his thesis, Molesworth claims that the emergence of tarot cartomancy in pre-Revolutionary France (“when ideas about the importance of individual autonomy were being articulated in their most modern form”) mirrored a “symbolic terror at the infinite possibilities afforded by… newfound liberties” 199 (Molesworth 225-226). In calling upon the premodern tradition of divination, amounts to a “deferral of individual autonomy” disguised as the very expression of that autonomy. The “invention of liberty” and the explosive consequences it had for ideas of the self and of history were, by Molesworth’s reckoning, cause for “an instinctual and automatic turning away from the gaping maw of narrative freedom.” (Molesworth 225-226) Yet something of the promise of those very possibilities made tarot cartomancy appealing. Perhaps it was the promise of an inexhaustible text the like of which is not so practically undertaken until the creation of the roguelike genre of video games, and which motivates the contemporary gaming industry to this day. 116 Etteilla’s system of card-reading is meant to provide “endless narrative pleasure, a form of wonder that could be re-experienced over and over” with the text’s introduction going so far as to claim it amounts to “a complex library of all that has been, is, will be, or could even be written.” It is therefore capable of rendering a “faithful portrait of human life, representing the accidental occurrence of event in which man is ensnared as though in a fishnet, and where a superior power forces him to fall and ties him to its will.” Combined in one deck of cards is the promise of endless iteration, of total narrative freedom, but all of it tied to a system “complex enough to create the illusion of being guided by an intelligence, or ‘superior power.’” (Molesworth 215) Molesworth goes so far as to identify in Etteilla’s ambitions to create a “Bibliothèque complette” a version of Borges’ Garden. 117 (Molesworth 216-217) That this earliest game of narrative generation is part of the tradition of realism is evidenced in its parallel function to that of novelistic realism. First, it bridges modern and pre- 116 The most trenchant example in recent memory would be the mainstream cultural penetration of No Man’s Sky (Hello Games 2016), a game that quite literally promised a functionally inexhaustible galaxy of billions of distinct stars and planets. However much the game failed in its realization (and however much that failure was inevitable due to the difficulty of realizing fantasy) it was explicitly motivated by precisely this desire for a game of inexhaustible possibility. 117 As counterpoints I mention both Borges’ Library of Babel, which conceives of the universe quite literally as a potentially infinite library that is all the same devoid of any guarantee of meaning, and his Lottery of Babylon, where the game of a city’s governance has expanded to the extent that it is indistinguishable from every chance event that transpires in the world. 200 modern, serving as a “link to pre-Enlightenment magic” (Molesworth 219) but “through the mechanism of plot” rather than actual “supernaturalism.” Second, it operated by “offer[ing] a surplus of details” in order to manufacture “individuated fates” that were continuous (from past to present to future). Third, it guaranteed the “exceptionality” of its participants, their uniqueness, through its method of “customizing fate.” (Molesworth 222) 118 Without recourse to careful plotting by the hand of some author, it relied instead on the proclivity of the narrative- hungry public – well trained in novel-reading by late the eighteenth century – to treat the experience of reality as a game with numerous possible outcomes. The practice of constructing a system of microcosmic significance, specifically through divination practices which rely on chance mechanisms, is at least as old as the I-Ching 119 and its codified precursors. Chance, particularly in its manifestation as coincidence, is taken to be one of the chief ways in which reality – specifically the divinity behind reality in the premodern frame – discloses itself, though only when interpreted through the proper system. (Field 13, 129) The difference with Etteilla was that the animism of premodern metaphysics had been replaced by the putative empiricism of modern probability. 120 Instead of a revelation of divine guidance towards an ideal outcome, the initial purpose of the Etteilla system was to create a deus ex machina for the purpose of multiplying possible narratives, all in the name of pleasurable diversion. The deck of cards, less morally constrained than Leibniz’s choosy God, was capable of sustaining all possibilities, precisely in their state of fictionality. This change required a 118 The meaning of an Etteilla spread is structured around the single blank card used to supplement a standard deck of playing cards. This centrality of the blank, the meaning of which is determined by the cards that “fall” around it, is in keeping with both novelistic and ludic instances of realism. (Molesworth 215-216) 119 A work Espen Aarseth refers to as “the best known cyber-text in antiquity.” (Aarseth 9) 120 The system’s later development into what remains one of the more popular forms of modern divination - tarot cartomancy - complete with pervasive myths about its ancient and mystical origins, further emphasize the modern longing to bottle premodern lightning. 201 popular grasp of probability theory, which, “offered no new knowledge of any specific event” but rather “spoke eloquently of all possible alternatives.” (Kavanagh 15) 121 I follow Molesworth’s lead in viewing realism’s role in the epistemic shift of modernity as ambivalent; even Kavanagh senses a tension within novelistic realism, noting in his study that some novels of the eighteenth century “work in the opposite direction” of the alleged taming of chance, “toward a celebration of chance necessarily challenging the conventions of the novel of experience and problematizing the form of the genre.” (Kavanagh 122) The capacity for games to serve both as a vehicle for experiencing multiplicity, and as a guarantor of coherence through the imposition of structuring logic is present from the origins of liberal individualism. This tension is unresolved to this day. Additionally, by the latter half of the twentieth century, realism was still perceived as stifling, oppressive, in need of problematization. Both Kavanagh and Molesworth suggest this ambivalence is present from the form’s earliest maturation. Historian Michael Saler locates yet another effort towards “re-enchanting an allegedly disenchanted world” in an intermediate era: at the turn of the nineteenth century. For Molesworth, this had been addressed by the covert teleology of plot. By the late nineteenth century the “magical thinking” of the first-person plotline was either not sufficient unto itself or had loosened enough to permit the unveiled fantastic. Hence the emergence of a new genre: “Fantasy, cast in a rigorously logical mode replete with ‘objective’ details.” (Saler 6-7) It will come as no surprise that Saler’s objects of study, which he describes as part of the “pre-history of virtual reality,” include The Lord of the Rings. His research concerns precisely what I have previously referred to as works of alternative realism, those texts which, like Tolkien’s, construct their fantastic worlds with a distinctly modern rigor. This formal innovation 121 This same capacity made probability theory critical to the development of both counterfactual history and Kriegspiel in the nineteenth century. 202 predates Tolkien. Saler identifies the practice first in the works of the late nineteenth century genre of New Romance. Texts such as H. Rider Haggard’s She, Robert Luis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and the hoax-work of Edgar Allen Poe all “frequently adopted the rhetorical modes of fact-based science” specifically “footnotes, maps, photographs, glossaries, and appendices” so as to create “logically cohesive worlds.” (Saler 15) 122 The use of the “new rhetoric” of science (the modern form of evidentia, of “laying- before-the-eyes”) in order to substantiate the existence of a fictional setting is linked to probability and games by more than lineage or association. The New Romances might be playfully appropriating the forms and figures of reason, but the actual rigor of Tolkien’s worlds, and the formal underpinnings of the games they helped inspire, reflect a much deeper connection to the very figuration of reality upon which both empirical science and modern probability theory depend. Tolkien’s own self-conscious practice of creating “Secondary Worlds” mirrors the epistemological move Campe alleges is key to the articulation of probability theory. We “have framed off a state of the world into which we peer from without” something that takes its modern form when “probability has been tied to the model of the game” (Campe 275). It is a short step to actually model a world in terms of a game, as the designers of the first pen-and-paper roleplaying games would in their efforts to more fully and vividly inhabit these Secondary Worlds. The multiple quality of supplemental subjectivity is also linked to the new probabilistic paradigm. The logic of probability entails an iterable subject, one capable of multiple possible paths, and thus a multiplicity of potential narrations. The need for imagination, what Saler considers the engine of New Romance, is prompted by the probablistic subject’s outlook, their 122 Saler also recognizes the statist implications of this practice of realism, noting that, in New Romance, “through such ‘objective,’ documentary means, the imaginary world of the novel became as legible as any colonial space mapped by agents of the New Imperialism.” He notes as well that “Tolkien also likened imaginary worlds to imperial possessions.” This modern legibility is part and parcel with the state’s means of territorialization. (Saler 42) 203 cognizance of possibility beyond their immediate understanding, and their desire to retroactively grasp those possibilities. As Campe puts it, since “one can never have all the circumstances at hand” in the moment of decision, much less the ability to actual explore the diverging paths, then “replaying the ongoing combination of circumstances in one's memory or imagination logically follows.” This in turn produces a “reservoir” of possibility that “leads in turn to the narration of other stories, or, in an emphatic sense, to continued narration.” (Campe 312). The imagining of and fascination with counterfactual courses, the ideal that Borges’ Garden describes, is an outcome of probabilistic thinking. It is appropriate, then, that Saler points to precisely this power of multiplicity as the chief benefit of the “spectacular texts” in which he locates the pre-history of both roleplaying games and their digital descendants. (Saler 5) He alleges that, in nineteenth century Britain and America, there was a shift in Victorian-era “moral and social codes” such that there was “a heightened sensitivity to the existence of multiple ‘selves’ and interior ‘worlds’” which “undermin[ed] the Victorian ideal of a unified sense” in favor of a recognition of “double consciousness” and “the self-reflexive habitation of imaginary worlds.” (Saler 40) Prior to the late nineteenth century this excessive quality had been managed in different ways, either “tamed” through the rationalization of the world in Hacking and Kavanagh’s terms, or resolved, as Molesworth has it, through a new articulation of the old compensatory fantasies of self- importance. Either through a training in rationalism or the balm of magical thinking, cultural work was done to contain the destabilizing forces of liberal individualism and the epistemological upheaval that marks modernity. 123 By the turn of the century, however, the conception of self as defined by “character,” and the coherence of self it implied, was contested 123 Molesworth, drawing the philosophy of Michel Serres, goes so far as to claim that the “impulse toward organization and system building” which characterizes modernity under the auspices of the Enlightenment “serves to assuage a more primal fear associated with the concepts of multiplicity and possibility.” (Molesworth 126) 204 by the notion of “personality,” one which allowed for the conception of “the self as a fluid, variegated space – a universe encompassing multiple personae and worlds.” (Saler 40) Saler argues the side of the optimists in the previous chapter. For him this turn of the century “play[ing] with multiple identities and multiple realities” served to help adults “question essentialist outlooks and appreciat[e] the contingent nature of narratives” thanks to what he dubs the “ironic imagination:” “a form of double consciousness that became widely practiced during the 19 th century and attained its cultural centrality in the twentieth” whose chief benefit was its ability to enable “individuals to embrace alternative worlds and to experience alternative truths” thus “challenging normative understandings of the world.” (Saler 15) The further irony is that the concept of “the norm” is itself a product of the very probabilistic thinking necessary to conceive of the modern subject as multiple. 124 Cognizant of this ambivalence, as he is of the “inherently ambivalent properties of enchantment” to either deceive or enlighten, Saler looks for the distinction in the “self- reflexivity” (Saler 20) enabled by the growth of fan communities which prefigure the collective inhabitation of virtual worlds so prominent in today’s games. (Saler 5-6) The shift from fictional worlds briefly visited to virtual worlds persistently inhabited was the consequence of new practices in publication and communication, new “infrastructural means that enabled readers to collectively imagine and occupy virtual realities.” (Saler 5) While an encounter with a text alone might be “insufficient to challenge one’s most cherished opinions,” the creation and inhabitation of what Saler calls “public spheres of the imagination” facilitated several developments in the political implications of alternative realism. First, in “demonstrating underlying commonalities between imaginary and real worlds” these texts and the “animistic reason” they cultivate 124 Kavanagh makes explicit the origin of this irony in the connection between liberalism and probability theory, that “what began as an ethics of the individual freed from the weight of the past subordinated itself to the far more oppressive ideologies of the probable and the normal.” (Kavanagh 25) 205 “enabled readers to use the former [imagined worlds] to reimagine the latter [the real world].” Second, in aiming to “enhance the ‘reality effects’ of fantasy… by probing the details, reconciling apparent contradictions, and filling in its lacunae” as part of a “collective effort… rather than a transient, private encounter” they enrich the sense of inhabitation without the same risk of solipsism. Third, in “provid[ing] new social networks, countering the disenchanting effects of isolation and anomie that modernity could engender,” they work as yet another means of alleviating the difficulties of modern subjectivity. (Saler 17-18) The net effect of these collectively inhabited “alternative realities” should be, by Saler’s estimation, to habituate “readers to see narratives as complex, provisional, and pragmatic, rather than as transparent, essential, and unchanging” and eventually “not only of fictional texts, but also of normative interpretations of reality” which, in turn, led to an acknowledgment of “the constructed dimension of identities as well as the liberating capacity to juggle multiple allegiances.” (Saler 19) Optimist that he is, Saler ends up reiterating the most hopeful claims I made in my previous chapter, that “multiple selves in turn generate[] multiple worlds” such that “the self not only accommodated different perspectives… but also alternative worlds, manifold geographies of the imagination.” (Saler 41) All this thanks to the specifically collective and public manner in which these worlds are experienced. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, the “double consciousness” of the modern mentality, the distinctly modern capacity to “embrace complementarities, to be capable of living simultaneously in multiple worlds” (Saler 13), the governing notion of the norm persists. As does the desire for a return to a comforting idea of premodern atavism, both being unresolved implications of realism’s relevance. Collective inhabitation of alternative realism’s elaborate worlds has not stemmed the rise of reactionary sentiment. The new elective belongings of twenty-first century social media, along with the increasing prominence of virtual worlds, have 206 seemed to intensify rather than resolve the struggle over the place of pluralism both in identity and in politics, and most acutely where the two meet. Whether or not the field is slanted in one particular direction or another, it remains a contested one, a cultural battlefield littered with ever- more sophisticated machines for factualizing fiction and fictionalizing facts. The contemporary arguments over the “true” history of games and gaming, of who claims possession of what space, who is due recompense or representation, are undeniable evidence of the as-yet unsettled question of just how the struggle within new collectivities and capacity for alternative imaginings will settle. Saler is aware of this, noting that modernity itself is characterized by “unresolved contradictions and oppositions” (Saler 12) in the very way it constructs history and our relation to it, what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the “timeknot” of modernity, which in its very defiance of unitary interpretation provokes a sovereign, objectifying attitude towards historical evidence. (Chakrabarty 243, 249) It is within the discourse of history that alternative realism finds itself most directly engaged with the question of collective identity, specifically in its relation to the state as historical agent. And it is probability theory and its way of modeling the world that rests at the roots of a practice which itself owes much to the logic of games: alternative history. V. History, Otherwise In her extensive study of alternate history that is defined the practice of imagining and playing out counterfactual historical scenarios Catherine Gallagher points to the 1970s as “a starting point for several simultaneous developments” in scholarship, technology, entertainment, and social consciousness which combined to give what she calls “the counterfactual mode” increased cultural currency. In the scholarly discourse of history we find “debates about new counterfactual methodologies” not previously seriously entertained. Meanwhile “courts employed counterfactuals to assess remedies for historical wrongs;” and in short order “high-school 207 teachers began using classroom computer software that allowed students to vary the outcomes of WWII battles” for the purpose of education, while “multiplayer gamers also began repeatedly fighting and revising past wars.” By the 1980s and into the 1990s broadcast media began “acquainting viewers with various alternate-history scenarios” and by the 2000s “the counterfactual-history mode spread from science-fiction genres… to the mainstream novel.” (Gallagher Telling It Like It Wasn’t 1) This is at the start of a timeline which contains Joanna Russ and TSR, along with the first true predecessors of digital games, and the advent of the communication and publication technology of our contemporary moment. The history of this counterfactual mode runs in close parallel to the connections between realism to modern probability theory that I mapped earlier in this chapter. Just as with probability, prior to the Enlightenment, counterfactual narratives of historical events were chiefly used as a rhetorical exercise. It is not until modernity that coherent alternate histories, and the realities they beget, are extrapolated and extended. While the capacity for counterfactual thinking is often taken as part and parcel with the “secularization of historical writing,” with the accession of material contingency in the place of destiny, Gallagher mirrors Molesworth 125 in asserting “almost an opposite… understanding of the [counterfactual] mode’s genealogy,” locating it first in Leibniz’s “new version of God’s Providence” and its guarantee of an “overarching rational purpose” that could, like the elaborations of plot, provide an explanation for all events. (Gallagher16-17) Indeed, the eventual secularization of counterfactualism first served to enhance the sense of total determinism, of “teleological necessity” which “suppressed the very interest in chance and the counterfactual method” that, for all its theodicy, was still inherent to the Leibnizian formulation. (Gallagher 23) 125 Whose own work is indebted to Gallagher’s theory of the “fictionalization” function of the novel. 208 Despite what Gallagher characterizes as the “suppression of counterfactualism by historical determinism” during the nineteenth century, she notes that it survived in various forms throughout. (Gallagher 23) Most pertinent to my study is the mode’s prolonged maturation within the view “one of the most flourishing historical practices of the last two centuries: …military history.” (Gallagher 27) The very same statistical innovations within military institutions during Europe of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, aided by “the vast growth in state information gathering and bureaucratic organization” and “improvements in geographical, demographic, and commercial knowledge” placed a new premium “on collecting and consolidating information” and the creation of “new state-run institutions for fostering its systemic use in the military sciences.” (Gallagher 28) These changes are reflected in the way histories of war were told, with an emphasis on the plethora of possible factors and contingencies (increasingly represented in the form of statistical data) and the possibility that a different, better course could be charted and taken, preparing its students to improve upon history instead of merely repeating it. In turn, battles and campaigns were now recorded in this manner. This new mode of recordkeeping then altered their representation as events; they became replete with empirical detail meant to render them theoretically repeatable. In that repetition they were also changeable, and thus military histories could be constructed with the kind of framing associated with games and with the coherence alleged to realism. The “practical embodiment” of this idea, that “military history might be summed up in tables of statistics, which could in turn be mathematically manipulated to model probably futures,” was the kriegsspiel. Its incorporation of dice to “build randomness” served the double function of teaching its players probabilistic calculation and, conversely, in preparing them “to confront unforeseeable and uncontrollable accidents as they arose.” (Gallagher 34) 126 This served 126 That is, to teach the kind of risk-aware and thus risk-averse habits proper to the modern statistical subject. 209 to “tighten the connection between probabilistic mathematical thinking and counterfactual- historical reasoning” (Gallagher 35) as well as further linking counterfactual practices to the playing of games. The ludic qualities of realism have inhered from its origin as a practice which is all at once magical, meticulous and distinctly modern, but the Kriegspiel may be the first properly modern, realist game. 127 Even the Etteilla system relied upon a not-distinctly-modern propensity to construe meaning through narrativization. It is not until the development of Kriegspiele that a comprehensive, systematized realism generative of potentially limitless possibilities from a distinct location in space and time under a system of strict cause and effect actually incorporates chance as a constituent part of reality-as-represented. It is telling that this first historical example is a game conceived in the burgeoning state of Prussia and presented to its king. The affinity for war narratives found by those employing the counterfactual mode, one of the most sweeping forms of state diathesis, is evidenced in the content of both novelistic and ludic alternative histories. While historians as early as Livy played with counterfactualism, 128 it took modern wars and “[t]he fullness of modern historical war records” with their “thick penumbra of possibilities surrounding the actual events” to inspire the kind of detailed extrapolation found in contemporary counterfactual texts, and in turn to foster a “curiosity about those possibilities” that “grows with their elaboration.” (Gallagher War 55) Once that curiosity is stoked however, its implications need not be strictly military, and while the cloud of contingency is first most visible and most carefully recorded in the context of modern battles and campaigns, the counterfactual mode is capable of other applications. 129 Instead, I find 127 The breakthrough success of war games in the commercial market came with Avalon Hill’s 1958 release of Gettysburg. Billed on the box as a “REALISTIC GAME” which allowed the player to convincingly recreate or, better yet, change the outcome of the famous American Civil War battle, Gettysburg was sold explicitly as a means of producing an alternate history. It should come as no surprise that the American Civil War is second only to the Second World War as a popular divergence point for alternative history literature, at least within the English language tradition. 128 Specifically his digression about a longer-lived, Westward-bound Alexander of Macedonia, in Ab Urbe Condita, in which he posited that Rome would have bested the famously undefeated conqueror. 129 The same can be said of ARPANET; though initially developed so that the American military command structure could survive a beheading, the infrastructure of the internet and its effects deserve analysis and critique but they are by no means intrinsically militaristic. 210 yet more evidence of a tension within this cultural technology and its implications, its potential uses, its very relationship to potential. While the counterfactual mode may find its first and clearest expression in critical military history, and realist games are born of modernizing military institutions, the counterfactual itself is not beholden to those projects. If the modern state requires the statistical conception of the world into order to achieve greater and greater over its territory and subjects, then the counterfactual shadow it casts begets alternative, unrealized histories whose validity as potential possibility is supported by the very same system of calculation. This is not merely hypothetical. These alternative histories, and the ontological validity they gained in their articulation through the language of empirical data and state power, become a central part of the discourse around historical and social justice starting in the 1970s, as they penetrated the popular consciousness in Britain and America. This shift was aided by the new currency counterfactualism gained in the domain of econometrics, itself made possible by developments in statistics during the decade prior. (Gallagher War 56) Still, an anxiety persists around the relationship between alternativity and realism, and the means by which the former can be recovered from the latter. In the experiments in literature carried out during this time, authors adopted an ambivalent attitude towards realism and its relationship to both history and literature. Russ plays with the novel’s form to “unsettle” realism and to invite imaginings of alternative times, worlds and selves, but she is not alone. Italo Calvino’s 1973 speech, Cibernetica e fantasmi, takes note of how “[i]n history we no longer follow the course of a spirit immanent in the events of the world, but the curves of statistical diagrams, and historical research is leaning more and more towards mathematics.” Rather than rejecting this rising tide, Calvino – along with his colleagues in the Ouvroir de Litterature 211 Potentielle 130 (Oulipo) – invites a “further encounter between mathematics and literature,” using the “instrument of chance” as a “machine” for “destructuralization of form, of protest against every habitual logical connection.” 131 (Calvino 8-11) While this project is provoked and informed by modern mathematization (the Oulipo movement is explicitly algorithmic) Calvino’s broader enthusiasm for combinatorial literature is inspired as much by “enormous number of combinations” possible in premodern folk tales 132 and the inexhaustible possibilities of chess as it is by contemporary methods of imagining multiplicity. (Calvino 3) Calvino’s own experiment in combinatorial narrative, The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973), uses Etteilla’s occult elaboration on his original fiction engine, the divinatory tarot. There is, for Calvino, a fundamental “tension in literature” which is “continually striving to escape” the “restricted number of elements and functions” granted to it by language. (Calvino 16) The tarot is simply a distillation of this basic principle, as are all meaning-making systems: a struggle between the freedom of possibility and the constraints which generate it in the first place. Just a year prior, Angela Carter’s picaresque The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) playfully theorizes a guerilla campaign waged through the use of an erotic permutation machine that can “[make] great cracks in the hitherto immutable surface of the time and space equation” and bring forth alternatives from the “vast repository of time, the discarded times of all 130 Itself an “offshoot” (Calvino 9) of the College de ‘Pataphysique, dedicated to the study of “imaginary solutions,” “the laws which govern exceptions” and “the universe supplementary to this one.” (Jarry Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician 21-22) 131 This encapsulates the anxieties around the novel, which is somehow both “formless” and entrapped in webs of habit and causality. 132 This echoes Vladimir Propp’s own observations about folktales, which are made of a limited set of elements which “can be freely connected without any violation of logic or artistic values” allowing “the principle of complete freedom and mutual substitution.” Though it is therefore “possible to artificially create new plots of an unlimited number,” Propp observes that “people make little use of this freedom, and the number of actually existent connections is not very great.” All the same he makes much of “the establishment of this principle of freedom, alongside that of the lack of freedom.” (Propp 108-111) 212 the men and women who have lived, worked, dreamed and died.” 133 (Carter Infernal Desire Machines 17) This she sets in ironic opposition to the “Minister of Determination,” whose purpose and methods so perfectly and parodically express the alleged ambitions of the modern statistical state: [The Minister] was in the process of constructing an immense computer centre which would formulate a systemic procedure for calculating the verifiable self-consistency of any given object. He believed the criterion of reality was that a thing was determinate and the identity of a thing lay only in the extent to which it resembled itself. … He believed that the city – which he took as a microcosm of the universe – contained a finite set of objects and a finite set of their combinations and therefore a list could be made of all possible distinct forms which were logically viable. These could be counted, organized into a conceptual framework and so form a kind of checklist for the verification of all phenomena, instantly available by means of an information retrieval system. So he was engaged in the almost superhuman task of programming computers with factual data concerning every single thing which, as far as it was humanly possible to judge, had ever – even if only once and that momentarily – existed. Thus the existence of any object at all, however bizarre it might first appear, could first be checked against the entire history of the world and then be given a possibility rating. Once a thing was registered as ‘possible’, however, there followed the infinitely more complex procedure designed to discover if it were probable. (Ibid 24) Carter’s skeptical attitude toward modernism and its epistemological rigors is further expressed, like Calvino, through an interest in the permutable power of fairy tales, which she tries to recover 133 A formulation that bears a striking resemblance to Campe’s characterization of “the inessential parts of history” as “nothing other than the novels of private persons.” (Campe 289) Here all those “inessential”, marginal histories which are part of the texture of Carter’s urban and colonial setting return with a vengeance. 213 from the “the great impulse towards collecting oral material in the nineteenth century” which “came out of the growth of nationalism and the concept of the nation-state with its own, exclusive culture;” (Carter Fairy Tales xvii) yet another act of resistance against the closure of modernity, the state’s monopolization of meaning and possibility, through a modern reappropriation of premodern traditions. These examples are representative of efforts made since early in the twentieth century by avant-garde movements in art and literature, from the Surrealists in the 1920s to the Fluxus movement of the 60s and 70s. But while both Calvino and Carter produce art in response to the tension in modern modes of representation, neither of the aforementioned works are alternative histories-proper. They are not even realist novels in the strong sense, both self-consciously adopting and adapting premodern literary forms. To understand how the counterfactual mode matured into its present, prevailing form it is necessary to examine a work that predates Calvino and Carter’s by a decade, the novel that served as the inspiration for Gallagher’s work in alternative history, Philip K. Dick’s 1962 The Man in the High Castle. (Gallagher Telling 313) VI. The Oracle and the Author The Man in the High Castle is explicitly concerned with alternate history. It takes place in a timeline in which the Allies lose the World War II and fascism achieves global dominion. 134 Itself inspired in part by the seminal alternate history novel by Ward Moore Bring the Jubilee (1953), Dick’s text is critical to the genre in large part because of its self-reflexivity, demonstrated not least the conceit of the “book-within-the-book,” whereby the text explicitly investigates the function of alternate history narratives specifically, and historicity in general. 134 An extremely popular alternate timeline, common in both novels and games. (Apperly Modding 185) 214 It is also the first novel to use a divination method, the I-Ching, 135 “in such a central, sophisticated, and self-reflexive way.” (Mountfort 288) Much of the mystique around the book emerges from debates around the degree to which the I-Ching – which relies on chance operations to produce readings – can be credited for its production. When read alongside the “anti-realist” experiments of Dick’s contemporaries, this is the part of its production that seems “least reducible to its characterization as a dystopian, ‘realist’ novel.” (Lison 50) This “anti- realist” tendency is read much as both Carter and Russ’ work were read some ten years later, in that it “opens up the formal enclosures of both the novel and history from within.” (Lison 48) This formal “opening up” is explicitly connected to the “autonomy” granted to the “aleatory” – that is, the chance operations of divination – within the text. (Lison 48) Through “incorporation of an element that itself refuses formal closure: contingency” the novel is seen as “mak[ing] possible new realms of perception and thought.” (Lison 46) This capacity is understood not as a refusal of form in part because the I Ching is itself a very rigorous formal mechanism, the “abritrariness” of which, by divinatory logic, guarantees its authenticity. Rather it “reveals unknown structures… precisely because it is determined.” (Huntington 159) Within the scholarly criticism, then, chance operations are seen as essentially linked to the “interactive” process of narrative-generation which permits an attitude of “participation” in the imagining of history as one possible narrative amongst others. (Slusser 198) That this mystically inflected text is frequently taken as the most “realist” of Dick’s oeuvre makes sense in light of the relationship I have established between chance operations and realism. Indeed, it accounts for the “gratuitous” aspects of the text, by way of a “formal imperative” to depict events that otherwise “have no apparent reason” for being in the text. (Gallagher War 60) This formal imperative can just as easily refer to either the demands of 135 Which, according to Andrew Lison, “anticipates the computer-aided interactive fiction that… formed the basis for many early computer games.” (Lison 49) 215 formal realism or the divinatory constraints, because within the novel the two are one and the same. The realist requirement for the inclusion of insignificant details as reportage of “what happened” is not merely a representational gesture, it actually reflects the “reality” of the oracle’s answers. 136 This aspect of “simple report” links the logic of novelistic realism – how representations of reality are seen as having no intention or reason beyond itself, that reality is precisely that which exceeds the subject and their symbolic framework – to chance operations, which annul intention or reason, invoking an alterity that either contains its own reality or which activates new possibilities through its contact with a subject otherwise hemmed-in by habits. The role of the I Ching as a divination system within the novel is perhaps less pervasive than this critical emphasis would suggest. It is true that the characters within the novel frequently refer to the oracle in times of indecision, often with plot-shaping results. The text itself is punctuated with selections from (or readings that reference) the Baynes translation of the pertinent hexagrams. When pressed on the point in a 1974 interview with Vertex, Dick said that he consulted the oracle as the characters. The hexagrams in the text are a record of these consultations, and he notes the plot’s course was, at these key points, determined by the toss of the coins. (Vertex Interview) Given Dick’s well-established gnostic predilections, it is easy to see why critics are drawn to the idea that he “appears to have consulted the oracle … obsessively” while writing the novel (Mountfort 287) to such an extent that “Dick regarded the I Ching itself as having, in a sense, written High Castle…” (Mountfort 291-292) and therefore the alternate history in which it 136 It is noteworthy that Dick’s novel was, upon its reception, “praised most for its verisimilitude,” its possession of classic novelistic virtues like normalized social setting and moral/psychological complexity while at the same time its peculiar treatment of the question of historicity and the ontological parity of fictional realities and ‘real’ reality “…connect Dick with writers such as Kafka, Barthes, Borges, Nabokov, and Calvino who employ antimimetic narrative strategies.” (Canaan 383) While these impulses seem, as Howard Canaan asserts, at odds, stating that “[w]orking against its texture of surface realism and supplying imaginative energy to Dick’s fiction is a latent and seemingly irrational Otherness … that subverts and disrupts it” (Canaan 390) this production of “irrational Otherness” is, in fact, precisely where realism and presumably anti-realist chance operations find common cause. 216 is based. (Canaan 395) The text itself flirts with the idea by way of the book-within-a-book, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, an alternate history novel which takes place in a timeline where the Axis powers were defeated (but one that is explicitly different from our own, see my discussion below). Grasshopper’s author, Hawthorne Abendsen, pointedly refuses to ask the oracle, for fear that it would confirm his suspicion that he was not really the author of the novel, not a creative agent but a conduit. (Dick 271) The location of the “actual” author of the text of Grasshopper is less important than that the text frames the question. Determining the location and possibility of agency and authenticity – and both in relation to history – are the prevailing philosophical issues within High Castle. Dick exercises his novelistic prerogative in shifting between perspectives, ranging from Jew-in- hiding Frank Frink, to his wandering ex-wife Juliana, to the resentment-filled shopkeeper Robert Childan, to Japanese colonial official Mr. Tagomi, to defecting Nazi agent Rudolf Wegener. Each character has a certain perspective and a certain relationship to power. Each gains some insight into the unfolding geopolitical and metaphysical plot. Each also entertains some possibility of escaping not only the looming terror of global annihilation or, perhaps more importantly, the unimpeded interstellar spread of Nazism’s self-replicating psychosis. Unlike Russ’ cluster protagonist, however, Dick’s characters never have the chance to compare notes. It is precisely this relationship between the individual and the collective, and the possibility of historical agency, to which one of the book’s central readings of the I-Ching pertains. Frank Frink consults the oracle, inquiring after the success of a new business venture whereby he and his partner will seek to create unique, contemporary American art – something which, in the colonial milieu of the book’s setting, is not thought to exist. He receives a seemingly contradictory response. While the overall judgment he receives is “Good Fortune,” 217 and with it assurance of the success of his joint business venture, there is a fly in the ointment: a “moving line” that portends disaster. It was, beyond doubt, one of the most dismal lines in the entire book, of more than three thousand lines. And yet the judgement of the hexagram was good. Which was he supposed to follow? And how could they be so different? It had never happened to him before, good fortune and doom mixed together in the oracle’s prophecy; what a weird fate, as if the oracle had scraped the bottom of the barrel, tossed up every sort of rag, bone and turd of the dark, then reversed itself and poured into the light like a cook gone barmy. It must have pressed two buttons at once, he decided; jammed the works and got this schlimazel’s eye view of reality. Just for a second – fortunately. Didn’t last. (Dick 52) Reality, or rather the mechanism that generates it, seems to have malfunctioned. However premodern that mechanism, Frank is confronted with a distinctly modern problem of concurrent contradiction, as well as the puzzle which induced Leibnitz to propose the solution of theodicy: how can a fate be both good and bad? He works to quickly resolve the inconsistency, but finds it is not so easy: Hell, he thought, it has to be one or the other; it can’t be both. You can’t have good fortune and doom simultaneously. Or … can you? That jewelry business will bring good fortune; the judgment refers to that. But the line, the goddamn line; it refers to something deeper, some future catastrophe probably not even connected to the jewelry business. Some evil fate that’s in store for me anyhow… 218 War! he thought. Third World War! All frigging two billion of us killed, our civilization wiped out. Hydrogen bombs falling like hail. Oy gewalt! he thought. What’s happening? Did I start it in motion? Or is someone else tinkering, someone I don’t even know? Or – the whole lot of us. It’s the fault of those physicists and that synchronicity theory, every particle being connected to every other; you can’t fart without changing the balance of the universe. It makes living a funny joke with nobody around to laugh. I open a book and get a report on future events that even God would like to file and forget. And who am I? The wrong person; I can tell you that. (Dick 52-53) Frank is more right than he can know. It is easy enough to read this judgment in terms of the novel’s larger geopolitical plot, which centers around a struggle within the Reich over whether or not to effectuate “Operation Löwenzahn,” the consequence of which will be global thermonuclear war. However briefly, however lacking in context, Frank gains a glimpse of the larger plot which contains, and seems to annul, his own. And this forces him to consider his individual relationship to collective peril. The judgment was for me alone, for my work. But the line; it was for all of us. I’m too small, he thought, I can only read what’s written, glance up and then lower my head and plod along where I left off as if I hadn’t seen; the oracle doesn’t expect me to start running up and down the streets, squalling and yammering for public attention. Can anyone alter it? he wondered. All of us combined … or one great figure … or someone strategically placed, who happens to be in the right spot. Chance. Accident. And our lives, our world, hanging on it. (Dick 53) While we are led to believe that the pro-Löwenzahn faction is ascendant at the time of the novel’s closure, and that nuclear catastrophe is immanent, this does not entirely foreclose hope; 219 the judgment is still “good.” However, it prompts Frank to flicker through various theories of historical agency – collective action, hope in a “great man,” or the well-planned actions of a lone, informed individual – and ends up on “Chance,” that which definitionally lies outside of agency. Frank’s sentiment, his experience of reality as riven between individual action and collective (disastrous) destiny, would not have seemed so far from the reality in which Dick’s novel was read: The Man in the High Castle was published in the same month as the Cuban Missile Crisis. 137 And while, as Gallagher points out, counterfactual histories always exist in relation to the history from which they diverge, 138 Dick does not resort to a simple privileging of “Our Timeline.” It is true that the alternate reality of Abendson’s book is given the status of “Inner Truth,” that “Germany and Japan lost the war” (Dick 272). Yet what spares Dick’s text from the political sin Fredric Jameson alleges to dystopian 139 texts – that they discourage political organization against the status quo under the doctrine of “it could be worse,” a kind of supplement to the Leibnitzian theodicy – is that, if The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is the “true” history it is explicitly not the history of those reading The Man in the High Castle. 140 When Dick’s novel seeks to bestow ontological privilege, it is not to our reality, but another reality which is perhaps “more similar” to our own than the one in which the story takes place, spared the worst excesses of the Reich, but all the same is no less subject to the dangers of war or the predations of empire. 141 137 Itself an event that has produced counterfactual imaginings, as well as a swarm of questions as to where the agency of that history moment lies. With Kennedy? With Khrushchev? With Vasili Arkhipov? 138 Even within Dick’s novel, the character of Juliana Frink, who tracks down the divinatory origins of Grasshopper, observes that the alternate history narrative serves to tell us “about our own world.” (Dick 248-9) 139 Or “anti-Utopian” as he would have it. Cf. Jameson 200-205 140 This marks one of the key differences between Dick’s novel and the recent television adaptation, which replaces the “book within a book” with a “film within a show.” While this cannily replicates Dick’s gesture in a new medium, the content of the filmic Grasshopper is not that of a third, distinct timeline, but rather actual footage from our timeline. This may be a consequence of the associations of each medium: film bears strong associations with the immediacy of documentary, an imprint of the real, while novels by dint of their formal conceits are seen as productive of fictional and fictionalized worlds. 141 The end of Abendson’s text depicts a continued rivalry between the United States and the unbroken British Empire, with the British winning out in the end. (Dick 169-172) 220 The desire to escape the nightmare of history through locating some agency sufficient to change the course of history, or by locating some escape route to a different, better timeline, motivates any number of counterfactual narratives. In Dick’s text, however, it is not the sole province of would-be time travelers. If anything, it distributes this urgent fantasy to nearly all of the protagonists. Frank has a glimpse of the danger through the oracle and flips through possible historical agents. Julia sees in Grasshopper a potential “way out” (Dick 269) though she’s skeptical that anyone else understands it as she does. Wegener, the defector who brings word of Löwenzahn in hopes of preventing it, seeks solace in the thought of “other life somewhere which we know nothing of” since “there must be world after world unseen by us, in some region or dimension that we simply do not perceive.” 142 (Dick 258) Of all its characters, only Mr. Tagomi actually manages a trip into a parallel reality; the manner and means of his visitation are telling. Deeply shaken by his killing of Nazi assassins, Tagomi enters ‘American Artistic Handcrafts,’ the purveyor of dubiously sourced “antique” Americana that serves as the initial setting in the novel. Its proprietor, Robert Childan, a deeply ambivalent character dominated by racial resentment, has recently been “converted” to the sale of hitherto nonexistent contemporary American art, having realized that much of his stock’s value is based on falsely produced historicity. Proclaiming that Edfrank jewelery contains “the contracted germ of the future” he insists Tagomi take a piece of jewelry to contemplate it so as to achieve a “new view in [his] heart” which “does not occur at once.” (Dick 238-239) 142 A consoling fantasy employed as well by one of the first modern counterfactualists, Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881). Imprisoned, watching the defeat of the revolution he’d dedicated his life to, Blanqui relies on both multiple-worlds theory and a precursor to Russ’ ‘cluster protagonist’ to recover a sense of “political hope” through means of “repetition with variations” (Gallagher 69), imagining innumerable other worlds and selves as a logical consequence of the infinitude of the universe and the result of “infinite combinations of the same variables.” (Ibid 68) He even posits “a unified identity of the ‘one’ who lives these myriad lives” which “despite the lack of communication between instances” share “one identity” allowing “eternal camaraderie of the copies, each of whom can take comfort, despite the local isolation of the moment, in knowing himself to be constantly ‘on thousands of worlds…’” (Ibid 70-71) 221 In his desperation, Tagomi purchases a single pin, 143 claiming to “have no faith” (Dick 239) but hoping that, in Pascalian fashion, by “looking at it at regular intervals” (Dick 240) as a bi-daily ritual, he may find a “Way.” Once out of the shop he subjects the pin to a series of tests in hopes of divining its secret. He meditates upon it: “Om as the Brahmins say” (Dick 240) and regards it as a potential microcosm. He reminds it of its duty: “Listen… [s]ales warranty promised much” (Dick 241), before apologizing for demanding it disclose itself. He tries to become childlike: “[i]mitate… innocence and faith” (Dick 241), and then ends up shaking it both “like a recalcitrant watch” and “like dice in critical game” to “[a]wake the diety inside.” (Dick 241) His impromptu ritual recalls Frank’s hope for the tumble of chance, but with an added possibility of intervention, a hope for agency, in the object if not in himself: “Breath on it, shake it, breath on it. Win me the game.” (Dick 241) He shifts from Aristotelean sensory analysis to Chinese elemental cosmology, then at last to Buddhist metaphysics, as if the proper configuration of old philosophy and new art might birth the “way out” that he seeks alongside the other protagonists. In the midst of his investigation, he is interrupted by a policeman who mistakes (or slantwise recognizes) Tagomi’s trinket as a “puzzle.” (Dick 244) He is, as of that moment, in “Our Timeline.” Our history is, as we know, by no means paradisal, and Tagomi’s journey is not one that ends in lasting refuge. In the shadow of the Embarcadero Freeway Tagomi encounters the racism of post-war America, while bringing his own colonial assumptions with him. His altercation with a man who disparaging refers to him as “Tojo” comes about as a consequence of his assuming that what to him appears a colonial subject will cede him his seat. He visits a place that is no longer his home, and while it is better for the defeat of the Reich, it is only better by degrees. 143 The jewelry is meant to be suggestive rather than figurative - “small metal swirls, shapes that merely hinted rather than were” - but the pin in question - a “small silver triangle ornamented with hollow drops” geometrically echoes the trinary timeline structure. (Dick 238) 222 While Edfrank jewelry provides access to alternative worlds in a manner distinct from – but parallel to Grasshopper (and thus The Man in the High Castle itself) – this travel is marked with the same pessimism that Gallagher notes when she points out that “forking-paths time-travel plots… seem powerless… to represent positive historical change in any unique world.” (Gallagher Telling 173-174) In keeping with Russ’ theory, only diagonal movement is possible, and “change occurs only as a time traveler moves across worlds” still unable “to repair our history.” This recalls Kafka’s ironic remark, that there is hope but “not for us,” (Gallagher Telling 174) which itself is echoed in Russ’ assertion that the utopian Whileaway is “not our future.” (Russ 7) Yet if these worlds are to be reached at all, this access is gained through art which “points to a new world.” (Slusser 195) Lacking the science-fictional means to “actually” travel into some better world, we must rely on works of fiction to enable their imagining, and to supplement our reality with a potential that might allow us to realize it. This invites a very different attitude towards the role of fictions-as-simulacra (much bemoaned by Baudrillard) and the proliferation of “replications” in which “all sense of… original location is lost.” (Slusser 195) The logic of iteration becomes productive not of the same but of the new, and the dethroning of a singular “official” history redistributes narrative authority in a more democratic manner. Both the I- Ching, with its mingling of sheer chance and totalizing system, and the “small metal swirls” of Edfrank jewelry, possess at once “fixitive” properties (as interpretive frameworks, as points of reference, as an alterity against which to shape oneself) and a “protean” quality (introducing chance-beyond intention, inviting interpretation, unlocking novel imaginings and activating unseen potentials). And both are necessary so as to create “new worlds… whose elements are undetermined.” (Slusser 195) This, at least, is the strategy employed by Dick, along with other 223 experimental novelists of his era, as part of a larger effort to unsettle realism and multiply the possibilities of history. VII. The Agent of History Some of the pessimism of alternate history narratives is a consequence of the gravitation pull exerted by our actual timeline; sometimes the reality of our reality stubbornly remains like a kicked stone. “Solving” the problem of our history in fiction can only invite the imagining of alternatives, not their actual realization, short of being a practical program. 144 More telling, however, is the anxiety over the nature of agency in the modern reckoning of history, without which the present counterfactual mode would not exist. As Gallagher points out, alternative histories approach agentic subjectivity differently than do other novels, or rather the form’s function as a producer of individual experience struggles against the implications entailed in the counterfactual mode. Starting with Louis Auguste Blanqui, the possibility of transworld identity – the extent to which “entities” (nations, cultures, individuals) remain “themselves” even when “events” unfold differently – has been explicit in the counterfactual mode. (Gallagher Telling 11) Gallagher identifies this idea of “counterfactual character” as “one of the mode’s most distinctive features” whereby “space opens up for the attribution of different characteristics to the same entity: different thoughts, actions, experiences that might plausibly have belonged to it had it faced different conditions,” expanding the category of character itself. (Gallagher 12) When set aside Saler’s distinction between early nineteenth century “character” (coherent, fixed) and late nineteenth century “personality” (dynamic, changing), and his claim that the latter is linked to the playful fantasies of the New Romance, the connection between counterfactualism and 144 In fairness, practical programs such as reparations have been argued using counterfactual logic, but that has been more the province of law (tort law and insurance, specifically - both probabilistic developments in jurisprudence) than of art. 224 alternative realism further manifests, in particular, in the ways they reimagine the possibilities of subjectification. This idea gains an added layer of complexity, and a further urgency, when combined with the question: who is the proper agent of history? The question is implicit to the notion that history can be changed at all, that some agentic act might have altered the course of events. What can we hope in besides chance? Wars and assassinations appeal to the counterfactual imagination, and to counterfactual novels in particular, because they invest certain individuals and their actions with history-changing power. Be it through the “character” of Robert E. Lee, Lee Harvey Oswald, or a chrononaut seeking to “correct” the past, it is easier to novelize changing history when history appears to rest in one person’s hands. Lone time-travelers seek to cause or prevent assassinations, disasters, injustices. They aim to intercede when their limited influence and foreknowledge (one of the necessary advantages of a time traveler, since counterfactuals must reconstruct a recorded past event) can be most advantageous. Yet as the pessimism of so many time travel plots reveals, it is hard to sustain faith in individual agency, particular when “transworld-identity assumption applies only to the referents of the names of historical individuals or collectivities” that may be radically changed along with history. (Gallagher 11) To imagine “the different psychological, social, cultural, familial, economic, and emotional dimensions of ordinary people’s lives under the altered conditions” much less how such people attain agency in history 145 required both “the novelistic norms of formal realism” and (Gallagher 73) as well as a more distinctive “emphasis on collective agency” 145 Gallagher points to a clear articulation of this concern in the avant-garde work of René Barjavel (influenced by the founder of ‘pataphysics, Alfred Jarry) which evinces “History with a capital H” is “predetermined or contingently and spontaneously made” the latter of which would assist in “the self-assertion of the common man (symbolized by the fictional nobody) against historically significant men.” (Gallagher 164) 225 which “replaces the alternate-history utopia’s interest in a great man’s potential with an equally energetic creation of collective characters” that is more suitable for novelization. (Gallagher 93) The historical entities who appear most capable of the necessary collective action, through which “fictional nobodies” are able to become agents of history, are nation-states. Modern wars appeal to counterfactualism for yet another reason: they provide stages large enough and mobilizations vast enough for nations themselves to take on the role of characters: “agents with consciousness, subjectivity, and some ability to make decisions and take unpredictable actions” and who “most importantly” (and important that they are said together) “have good and bad luck… can foresee multiple future options.” (Gallagher 145) Thus the question of national and individual character, state and subjective agency, are thought together as citizens of conquered collectivities strive to retain or restore the “spirit” of their nation, and nations mobilize their citizens in the often-existential struggles of modern warfare. This search for a “national character” is itself part of a larger crisis in identity formation that persists to the present moment. It is no coincidence that while nationality has only lately (from a historical perspective) become a constitutive part of individual identity, it has simultaneously monopolized modern abilities to imagine historical agents while also, after the disastrous legacy of colonialism and two global wars, becoming “a concept that no longer seems coherent to us.” (Gallagher 192) The counterfactual mode emerges precisely “when such questions of national character in any of these senses arise” since “[h]istory, with its uncontrollable contingencies, must concentrate on how some actor (a state, a people, certain individuals) behaved under a certain set of conditions” is therefore “insufficient to the task of defining character” which necessarily contains the counterfactual capacities of “inherent aptitudes and potentials that circumstances might never have actualized,” what historical entities were “capable of doing, not just what they did.” The counterfactual mode therefore “might be 226 seen as increasingly unrestrained as the idea of national character declines” in the face of a cultural pluralism that challenges its most common articulations. Counterfactual histories are therefore both “stimulated by a desire for national character” while ultimately “discrediting” that very notion as they open the door to imagining alternative collectivities. (Gallagher 193) I suggest the same with regards to the formation of individual identities: as identity categories fluctuate in the postmodern milieu, new forms arise to supplement them, and in their very supplementality reveal them as contingent formations from the very beginning. In the current historical moment, an unsettling of identity categories not unlike that ushered in by modern individualism has become part of the cultural conversation. It may be that the present state of affairs is simply the latest expression of the same problematic, much as the “postmodern” describes less an “after” modernity than a recognition (and consequence) of modernity’s inherent contradictions. If, as contemporary game scholar Enrico Gandolfi suggests, “cultural identities are now more fluid, plural and relational” thus making “a coherent ‘scene’… demanding to picture,” then games become a particularly important part of the cultural “repertory” which is both fluid enough to be used in the practice of “identity bricolage” while also answering the “need of coherence.” More, perhaps, than other popular cultural forms, games are capable of serving as the “gravity centers” which allow self-reflexive subjects to “arrange some redundant principles in order to rule their own dimensions:” just enough framing to make meaningful action possible and individual agency legible. (Gandolfi Identities 1-5) And, through their incorporation of chance elements, games add that dose of contingency – of contact with a definitive alterity – that is so important for both the texture of realism and the possibility of the unforeseen which delivers the subject from the dread of determinism. VIII. The Now of History 227 The interest in counterfactualism has by no means abated in popular culture, least of all in video games. Counterfactual histories have appeared as settings for many games, from the “secret histories” of Assassins Creed (2007-18), to the Jet Age post-apocalypse of Fallout (1997- 2018), to the political pulp-appropriation of the Nazi-victory trope in the new Wolfenstein (2014), or even the alternate history settings of BioShock. Often the deployment is rhetorical and/or aesthetic, using the alternate history as an evocative setting for a narrative that is, in most other respects, functionally linear. Such uses of the setting place these games closer to the role of alternative history novels: they invite the player to inhabit and consider an alternative, and to judge it alongside “Our Timeline.” Others, however, are systems designed to enable the potential for alternativity, for creating the conditions for innumerable alternatives which unfold from play- session to play-session, rather than exploring the particulars of one pre-defined alternative. Listing closer to modeling and simulations, with fewer fixed goals and a more explicit conceit to representing reality, they use carefully constructed systems to lend each of their potential timelines equal validity under their shared set of rules. (Köstlbauer 170) Particularly representative of the kind of total systemic realism which generates distinct alternate histories is the grand strategy genre, which has extended the simulational tradition of kriegsspiel. Many of these games, like kriegsspiel in its time, are presented as educational aids. Over the last fifty years games in general, and games in this genre in particular, have been used more and more to teach lessons about history. (McCall 517) 146 These objects often serve two masters, designed for both edification and amusement, suspended between the duty to teach through “accurate” representations of history (as simulations) and the need to make interaction with their systems pleasurable in their own right (as games). (McCall 518, 552-3; Köstlbauer 146 McCall draws upon a considerable body of scholarship to shore up his claim that “historical games” are “quite complimentary to the practice of counterfactual history” to the extent that they in fact “generate the material of counterfactual narratives.” Indeed, he deems it impossible to explore “the historical causes and effects of any event” without “counterfactual reasoning.” (McCall 525) 228 170) These goals are not necessarily antagonistic: the nature of this entertainment is the production of plausible alternatives, making use of counterfactualism’s capacity as a “a plot- generating machine.” (Gallagher Telling 45) Moreover, the consistency of the rule-set makes action within these systems consequential and legible, and therefore amenable to the sense of expanding diathesis which is so important to the sense of progression in these games. The games examined in this chapter most resemble critical military histories, where the player “stand[s] on the heights of a temporal mountaintop beside the counterparts of world- historical players in a gargantuan game.” Unlike Dwarf Fortress, with its Adventurer Mode, they offer no way to enter the world of the game as a discrete individual, 147 unable to “give us the ground-level view, the lived experience of a possible alternate-historical world” as alternate history novels do. This is a sign of the larger “…incommensurability of the ‘objective’ historical perspective and the personal one.” (Gallagher 157) The player’s agency is funneled to a point of individual decision, empowering them as an agent within history (though by no means an omnipotent one). They are almost always from the vantage of an ahistorical “manager” of one’s nation state, imagined as continuous through history and with near-total self-knowledge. (McCall 520) 148 In this way the subject-position of such games often resembles an idealized form of the modern state, transparent to itself and continuous through time, a realization of a Levianthan- esque absolute sovereignty and a collapse of a collectivity into a singular agent: the player and their decisions. There are a range of games that are deeply interested in the concept of sovereignty, the extension of colonialism, and the development of a modernity which radiates outward from 147 Crusader Kings 2 is an arguable exception, as the player-character is, at any given moment of play, an individual, but this subject position lacks the robust embodiment of the RPGs we’ve examined, and the game’s emphasis on heredity and inheritance suggests the “person” of the player is more properly the dynasty itself rather than the individual. 148 McCall’s example is the Sid Meier’s Civilization series, a popular game and thus a popular object of analysis. While it has some important formal differences from the games this chapter most closely examines, this state super-subject is a common form of subjectification across the genre. 229 Europe. In particular I consider the flagship historical grand strategy titles of Paradox Interactive, a leader in the field (Apperly Counterfactual 7), whose the roughly continuous series of games includes Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Victoria and Hearts of Iron. 149 They are, in some respects, a procedural theory of a Euroagentic history, but one caught up with precisely the alternatives that challenge the totality of that hegemony. All are built using the proprietary Clausewitz Engine, named, of course, after the military theorist. 150 All the same they represent each of their eras with a distinct set of mechanics, and each posits a somewhat different agent as proper to that historical epoch. While this sample is by no means comprehensive, it is representative of a sustained course of alternative history representation in video games and will serve as a way to gauge just how realism in games has effectuated the counterfactual mode. Moreover, it allows me to examine concrete theories of historical agency, as each game is a procedural argument on that topic, defining a certain horizon of the historical imagination. Last, through an examination of the alternate historical projects undertaken by the players of these games, I shed light in the profound political ambivalence that hovers around these objects. What makes this series so apposite is the way the strict, causal realism of its simulational system can plausibly represent a course from a “historical” initial state to dramatically altered courses of history. Every game has a “start date” – a ludic version of the “nexus” trope endemic to counterfactual history 151 – after which events can, and almost always do, transpire in a manner unlike that of “actual” history. (McCall 526) Prior to the pastwards expansion of its timeline, 152 149 Strung together, the timeline these games collectively cover is from 769 AD to the late twentieth century, with the last period properly represented being that of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. Each game has been through a series of iterations, with the most recent versions of each game being, as of this writing, Crusader Kings 2, Europa Universalis 4, Victoria 2 and Hearts of Iron 4. 150 Whose principles Reiswitz “intended to exemplify” in his original kriegsspiel. (Köstlbauer 173) 151 Gallagher defines this bit of “lingo” as the “definitive instance of divergence from the actual historical record” spawning “the Alternate Timeline [or ATL], in contradistinction to OLT, or Our Timeline.” This structure has been predominant in alternate history texts since its 1836 innovation by Louis Napoleon Geoffrey-Château. (Gallagher 52) 152 First in the Old Gods expansion and later in the Charlemagne expansion. One of the difficulties in “reading” games such as this is their frequent updating as well as the tendency for their communities to modify the base game; some critics point to this as part of these games’ intrinsic flexibility. (Apperly Modding 195, Köstlbauer 171) 230 Crusader Kings 2 locates its earliest nexus on September 15 th of 1066, a month prior to the Battle of Hastings. Much like its critical-historical and novelistic counterparts, the game chooses an instant of generally agreed-upon political and military importance, the kind of event or course of events that invite conterfactual speculation. The Norman Invasion is under way but, starting from the moment of play, it is entirely possible for William de Normandy to fall in battle rather than Harold Godwinson. Or for some other unforeseen event to change the outcome: an unexpected ally for one side or the other, a peasant uprising in a key province, a jealous rival murdering one of the claimants. A great part of the pleasure of the game is positioning oneself within the expected course of events, drawing on the knowledge of their “actual” outcome to either realize or alter them, playing the odds or aiming to beat them. One player may trust in the momentum of history, taking the role of Duke William; another may prefer take the side of the Anglo-Saxon underdog, attempting to prevent the Norman conquest. The urges both to fulfill history and to recover its unfulfilled possibilities are vitally present and proximate. Often both can be accomplished at once. It is possible, after all, for the player of Duke William to triumph by different means than the historical William, just as it is possible for Normandy to mount another invasion later along the altered timeline should Harold’s forces prevail. As Gallagher notes, all counterfactual history relies upon some implicit reference to the “actual” timeline parallel to which it runs; this is no less true in games that generate alternate histories. “Our Timeline” must be as accomplishable as any of the “Altered Timelines” in order to sustain the ontological validity of the alternative timeline, or ATL. We need to be able to “get there” from the same starting conditions using the same set of forces, factors and contingencies. Hence the game-space’s representation of the world as geographically matching our own. Moreover, the initial arrangement of powers, the game-spaces’ distribution of territory and economic development, all aim to represents the “historical” material conditions of the various 231 nations, territories and individuals. 153 The plausibility of all potential alternatives relies both upon the consistency and persuasiveness of the system which represents the production of historical events, and on the capacity of those systems to produce different outcomes in response either to the agentic action of the player or – in a critical contradistinction – the chance operations built into the game itself. In all of these games, historical events in their particularity are represented either emergent from a general concept (a mechanic in Crusader Kings 2 whereby the Pope organizes crusades, rather than any specific crusade), characteristics intrinsic to its actors (the Navigation Acts of 1651 and 1660 are represented as one of the “national ideas” specific to the “character” of England in Europa Universalis 4, but need not take effect on those dates), or as an extra- systemic supplement to the rules (the Indian Uprising of 1857 in Victoria: Revolutions “spawns” militants ex nihilo at a triggered date, rather than the uprising being extrapolated from the unhappiness and political repression of the local population as per the usual method for representing such events). The subject position of these games changes depending on the era in which they are set, the particular set of historical forces, and agents that are given primacy in the game’s representation of history’s unfolding. The qualities and capacities of the “main characters” vary from game to game for both the player and the computer-controlled agents. It is in these subject positions that these games do the work that Gallagher identifies in counterfactual fictions: create relationship between individuals and collectivities, question the degree to which a nation’s “spirit” exists beyond the known history of that entity, and finally question just who it is that has agency in history. 153 This is in strict contrast to other historical strategy games such as Civilization which often take place on randomly generated maps and begin will all potential player-subjects at precisely the same level of power, guaranteeing “fair play” but arguably reducing the plausibility, the “realism,” of its counterfactual histories. 232 IX. Before We Were Modern Crusader Kings 2 is the sequence’s sole representation of a strictly pre-modern period. Rather than imagining the agent of history as a nameless, ahistorical abstraction, the player’s diathesis is expressed through the foremost member of a medieval dynasty. This individual will possess traits (many of them structured around the seven sins and virtues of Catholicism) and capacities (specifically diplomatic, military, stewardship/management, intrigue and learning) as well as a cultural and religious background, all of which can be changed in the course of play through special events or through exposure to culturally distinct characters or regions. When the played-character dies, play continues only if the now-dead player-character has a legitimate heir, who then becomes the new player-character; the lack of an heir leads to the game’s abrupt end. The overriding motivation, and the basis for continued play, is the production of legal heirs who can sustain the dynasty until the game’s end-date. The rest of the world is populated by hundreds of identically constituted agents controlled by AI routines which are meant to reflect each character’s personality. Whereas the player is free for the most part to make decisions based upon their preferred playstyle, enjoying the time traveler’s advantage of comparative foreknowledge 154 and only lightly constrained by the personality traits of their character, the AIs are designed to act as autonomous agents of varying degrees of rationality. 155 All these AI decisions ultimately rest on a random number generator, which decides first which characters are making decisions (this helps reduce the processor load 154 Knowledge that becomes less and less useful as history swerves further and further off its “actual” course. 155 To this end, AI characters have 5 hidden traits - “zeal” determines the tendency of hostility toward characters from other religions, reflecting the game’s focus on religious conflict; “greed” determines their propensity for focusing on wealth accumulation (making them more likely to start embargo wars, and less likely to pay ransom), and their amenability to monetary inducements (a gift to a greedy character will be larger but have a greater positive effect on their opinion); “honor” determines their likelihood to remain true to their alliances and their willingness to join plots; “ambition” determines their likelihood to seek territorial expansion (should they be a landed ruler) and their willingness to prosecute wars to that effect; “rationality” determines how cautious the character is about effectuating their plans, their willingness to take risks. (https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/11/11/crusader-kings-2-characters/) 233 since not all characters are making decisions at all times), and then further decides if and what action those characters will take. As representations of individuals, the AI actors are systematically represented as essential unpredictable – hence the plausibility of their otherness – yet coherent within the context of the rules which manage the range of potential, however randomly determined. For example, a wise ruler keeps an eye on vassals with the “ambitious” trait, but will never know precisely when, if ever, such a vassal might make a play for power. Given the sheer number and variety of its agents, with hundreds of individual AIs all making their own decisions based upon randomly generated personality traits, one cannot expect history in Crusader Kings 2 to long resemble the one we know; it is a game where the world is particularly prone to reshaping. It is also amenable to the player’s more sustained, deliberate efforts to expand diathesis. Barring bad luck (always a possibility given the ever-present chance element, and the inequality of starting positions), the player familiar with the game’s systems stands a good chance of gradually expanding the diathesis of their player-character’s dynasty, its demesne (territory under the player-character’s immediate control), and its realm (which includes those provinces controlled by AI vassals). The traits of any given player-character instance in the dynastic chain may unlock or foreclose certain options and events, and an incompetent ruler will frustratingly retract diathesis (eg. a ruler with inadequate stewardship cannot efficiently manage a large demesne; a ruler who is not at least sixteen years of age must defer to an AI-controlled regent who must approve certain decisions). This instability itself is part of the game’s pleasurable tension, modulating the experience of progression, and creating “turns” in events (the equivalent of deferrals in plot) which demand a player revise their strategy or their goals accordingly. As with Dwarf Fortress, the maxim “losing is fun” applies to a game complex enough to create satisfying stories even in the case of defeat. All the same, insofar as “success” involves a mastery of the rules, and “progression” is linked to an expansion of player-character 234 diathesis, successful progression is a general consequence of increasingly centralized control of the nascent state. 156 “Progress” in the technological sense is also tied to concentrations of power; only characters with the rank of duke 157 or higher get to produce the “points” (military, economic and cultural) which may be invested into an appropriate technological advancement. These advancements almost always augment the power and efficacy of the nascent state. Even the “tolerance” of cultural technology provides the distinct benefits of making characters of different cultures and religious more loyal to the ruler, and, should gender equality 158 be established, doubling the talent pool for important positions such as counselors and military commanders. The connection between the sense of progression and the expansion of diathesis is found in many of the games we’ve examined so far, not least the role-playing games which contribute, by way of character attributes, to Crusader Kings’ status as a genre hybrid. Within Crusader Kings and its peers in this sequence, however, the diathesis is pointedly played out against the backdrop of known history, and on a recognizable map (fig. 4.1). 156 As evidenced by the benefits of single-heir inheritance such as Primogeniture or Ultimogeniture (so as not to fragment the demesne upon succession), and the eventual establishment of absolute crown authority (restricting the rights and powers of vassals and removing obstacles to the enactment of the sovereign’s decision). 157 The ranks range from “baron” level holdings of which a number may exist in a province, “count” holdings which contain an entire province and its baronies, “duke” titles which have legal claim to a collection of counties, “king” titles which contain duchies, and “emperor” titles which contain kingdoms. Vassal-lord relations are possible only between unequal ranks; kings may only swear fealty to emperors, not to other kings. 158 As of the current iteration of the game the player can choose whether or not they want their session to reflect “historical” sexism (male-preference in inheritance, negative opinion penalties for female rulers, female characters disallowed from prominent roles); prior to the updates in the Conclave expansion, egalitarian gender laws were restricted to exceptional minorities like the Basque culture group or the Cathar heresy. 235 Figure 4.1: A representation of the playable map in Crusader Kings 2, colored by culture group. While the colors of the map, and its cultural, religious, and political composition may change, it is literally Eurocentric in geographical terms. Like all the games in the sequence, Crusader Kings 2’s interface consists of “several maps which detail various aspects of management (of resources, transportation networks, religion, and so on)” placing the player “at a distance” from the action and “revealing the genre’s roots in board and war games.” (Apperly Counterfactual 9-10). However, unlike the later games, Crusader Kings 2 does not represent the entire globe. While expansions such as The Rajas of India, The Horse Lords and Jade Dragon have expanded the map, including the Indian subcontinent and some of the Eurasian steppe, as well as the political presence of China, upon its initial release the game’s map included only Europe in its entirety, along with North Africa and the Middle East (so as to permit the drama of the crusades to play out as advertised). Moreover, the earlier versions of the game do not allow the player to play as a 236 non-Christian ruler. It is only over years of expansions and additions to the game that other government forms such as the Iqta’, merchant republics, steppe nomads, and pagan tribes became playable or even represented as mechanically distinct political modes, with their own distinct diathetic capacities. Even then, while political parity is maintained between Iqta’, republic and feudal monarchy, the necessary trajectory for tribal pagan peoples, should they wish to remain politically competitive, is to either convert to an organized religion or to reform their branch of paganism to more resemble competing faiths. Either way, tribal politics must ultimately be abandoned in favor of some more centralized form of political organization in order to access certain vital inheritance laws. The game’s ongoing development can be read as the gradual extension of subjectification (in both mechanical detail and variety of diathesis) to more and more various peoples and governmental forms, while retaining an emphasis on the ascendancy of those forms which superseded others within a hegemonic understanding of history. 159 It can be seen as analogous to the entire project of Eurocentric modernity, with a specific formulation of state and subject sitting at the core, imperfectly assimilating and subordinating any alternative under the dubious presumption of its universality. This critique is sustainable throughout the sequence of games, never so obviously as in the game that chronologically follows Crusader Kings: the tellingly titled Europa Universalis. It is not without reason that grand strategy games, which draw so heavily upon histories of global conquest, are seen as potentially naturalizing “Eurocentric and colonial assumptions.” (Apperly 2) 159 It is easily read alongside critiques of historical gaming as naturalizing such views of history. Cf. David Golumbia. The Cultural Logic of Computation. Harvard University Press, 2009; Matthew Wilhelm Kapell, and Andrew BR Elliott, eds. Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2013; Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Vol. 18. U of Minnesota Press, 2006. 237 Under what basis, then, the claim that games such as Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis create “a scope for an expression of identity that challenges the hegemony of official history?” (Apperly 6) For one, it is necessary to challenge the assumption that games are played naively, bereft of the self-reflexivity that might lead to a critical engagement. This is an argument made of novels as well, but which may appear more compelling when applied to a medium which is precisely about fostering specific habits of play, derived from structures of meaning which the player may unwittingly “internalize.” To mistake the model for reality, to take it for an accurate representation of world history as it necessarily had to unfold, would indeed be to reinscribe colonialist assumptions. But both the games-as-played and the communities that form around them vex any such pat assessment, demonstrating a much more complicated relationship between gameplay and official history, one that relies almost entirely upon the “counterfactual imagination” and its link to realism. An examination of the counterfactual impulses behind play reveal a desire that is very much against official history, even as it grounds those counterfactual imaginings against the background plausibility of that hegemonic discourse. High level play in Crusader Kings, as in all the games in this sequence, often involves the recovery of some lost historical possibility: rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem as the Jewish Khazars, restoring a Zoroastrian Persia or Zunbil Afghanistan, reforming Pagan faiths to resist the spread of Christianity, ending the great schism in Christianity and restoring the Roman Empire. Most telling might be the Sunset Invasion expansion, which stages a profoundly ahistorical invasion of Western Europe by the Aztecs, who arrive with a transatlantic fleet and blackpowder weapons. The irony of this invasion relies on its being a mirror image of the depredations of the conquistadors, a kind of “turnabout is fair play” conception of historical justice. 238 Figure 4.2: A few of the decisions available to a Jewish character in Crusader Kings 2. Many of these counterfactual possibilities are mechanically supported by way of “decisions” and “events” which produce changes, such as shifts in government type, that would otherwise not “fall out” of the game’s systems. Some are available only to certain entities. For example, only a Jewish ruler has the option to rebuild the Temple (see fig. 4.2), and only the Basileus or Basilissa of Byzantium can remake the Roman Empire, further connecting certain potentials to the “character” of a given historical entity. Even so, in deference to the core counterfactual appeal of the game, Crusader Kings 2 has expanded to accommodate more variation, including the creation of non-historical kingdoms and empires, further augmenting the player’s ability to alter the course of history. In both cases, it is a desire to tell a different history – often in direct and ironic opposition to recorded history – that compels sustained play, however much that counterfactual narrative remains structured by the game and its built-in assumptions about the nature of the subjects capable of historical agency. X. Institutional Inevitability Now in its fourth iteration, Europa Universalis may be the most important for my study, since it is a dramatization of burgeoning modernity. With its fourteen expansions, 160 many of which entirely overhaul previously central mechanics, any reading of Europa Universalis 4 is bound to 160 As of this writing. 239 miss some nuance of its previous iteration, to say nothing of its future state. Like Crusader Kings 2, this development has been marked by the gradual amendment of history and its possible agents, unlocking further counterfactual possibilities by extending subjectification to more and more various kinds of actors. What marks its difference is its place in the timeline, and the way it represents agents in the epoch, as it works to produce the “feeling” of a history that is now fundamentally structured around the advent of modernity. This modern-wards tilt causes the game’s subject position to break with Crusader Kings in a number of telling ways, not least the shift from detailed individuals at the head of (or contained by) states to the subjectification of the state itself. Whereas in Crusader Kings a realm and its various courts are full of representations of individuals, the only “individuals” represented in Europa Universalis are rulers, generals and advisors, all rendered components of a state apparatus, all of which are elements of the larger diathesis managed by the player, who has near- total control over “a military/economic machine that typifies military despotism.” (Apperly 10) The player may choose their state-subject from anywhere on the globe, thanks to the expanded map, a “key innovation” which supports the counterfactual impulse (Apperly 8); the “protagonist” of a player’s alternate history need not be a European power. The possibility of protagonism rests on the development of a state apparatus. The colonizable parts of the map (fig. 4.3) are represented as containing groups of “natives” who, while they can resist or assist in the colonization of a territory, cannot themselves gain diathesis, even as AI agents. 240 Figure 4.3: A map of the American colonial regions in Europa Universalis 4. Historical agency is thus represented as the exclusive province not of individuals but of national collectivities, and those national collectivities must express themselves through some sort of state apparatus. The development of this apparatus, the diathetic capacities of a nation, are tied to technological advancement and the adoption of modern institutions, and therefore with a movement towards an inexorable and inevitable modernity. One of the great challenges of the game during the course of its amendment and expansion, both between iterations (i.e. from the original Europa Universalis to the fourth game) and within each iteration itself, is to account for the global hegemony which the European 241 powers established through a vast network of colonial violence and exploitation. The counterfactual impulse of the game leads players to push back against history-as-written; yet the legibility of that history seems to demand a confrontation with European hegemony, even in the interests of resisting it. How, then, to represent the circumstances which allowed European states to write the history which Europa Universalis both repeats and invites the player to change? It is not left to chance, though chance determines the exact nature of history’s unfurling. The elements that ushered in the dominance of colonial powers are represented as systemic, this seeming bias within history itself coded into the game’s very structure so as to plausible recreate that history. The game presumes a colonial flow of resources, with the trade system’s “origin nodes” located in California, Siam and Ethiopia, and the “end nodes” found in Genoa, Venice and the English Channel. While it is theoretically possible for a mid-stream node (say, in Ceylon) to accrue enough trade power to halt the flow of wealth before it reaches Europe, the flow of trade – like the march of hegemonic history itself – is on Europe’s side. Earlier versions of the game represented Europe’s various technological advantage with built in “tech types” which nakedly and arbitrarily favored “Western” nations. While technologies would cost a nation in the “Western” tech group their base rate in resources, any nation in an alternative group (eg. “Anatolian,” “Indian” or “Nomadic”) would pay a marked-up price. A process of “Westernization” in non-Western nations was necessary to attain technological parity, making long term competitiveness possible. When revising the mechanic, the developers reflected that the current ruleset was effectively “punishing nations outside of Europe.” (Johan, 2016) Starting with the release of Patch 1.18 in October of 2016, this system has been superseded by a more complex (though still Eurocentric) refinement. Penalties to the acquisition of technology are tied instead to a failure to adopt a series of “institutions” which appear in 242 chronological order – Feudalism; Renaissance; Colonialism; Printing Press; Global Trade; Manufactories; Enlightenment – and which flow out from their points of origin into the rest of the game world. To compete on the world stage, to sustain an adequate diathesis to change history in a noteworthy way, states without these institutions must adopt them. The locus of Europe’s advantage in historical agency is less in its simply “being European” (though some of these institutions, like the Renaissance and the Printing Press, are still geographically bound to European regions or religions) and more in modernity itself, as a series of institutions which augment the powers of the state, a process that culminates in the Enlightenment. 161 Figure 4.4: Selections from the Institutions interface in Europa Universalis 4. Players have long been altering the ruleset so as to make desired counterfactual narratives more viable, but even in the face of these disparities, the player community sees value in the challenge of playing against those stacked odds. Unlike games where fair play is guaranteed by the initial parity of its agents, the concept of “winning” is negotiated alongside asymmetries. The systems 161 This institutional “destination” of history in the game is linked explicitly to “expeditions… being sent to measure, catalogue, weigh and map the world” and “projects such as the colossal undertaking of creating a complete encyclopedia of all knowledge or a complete index of all plants, animals and fungi in the world.” (Europa Universalis 4 Patch 1.18) 243 are large enough and the histories variable enough to support “myriad potential sub-optimal outcomes.” (Apperly Counterfactual 9) While Great Power status (calculated in terms of economic development, diplomatic prominence and technological sophistication) may lay beyond the reach of regional powers, a play-session may set more modest goals, or play simply for the sake of seeing how a new history will unfold. The validity of these narratives as histories is conditional on “fidelity” (Hong 47) to the constraints of the game which makes it “real enough” (Hong 45) and community recognition (Apperly Counterfactual 8) is itself grounded in an insistence on “historical accuracy and realism.” 162 (Köstlbauer 177) The difficulty of achieving the counterfactual is both proof of skill and bestows an exceptional status upon the timeline itself, due to its improbability. This is evidenced by the game’s numerous “paratexts,” 163 which Tom Apperly deems critical to the formation of the “counterfactual communities” which, “through the production and sharing of paratexts” are able to “remix the official history of the games to include other perspectives developed through counterfactual imaginations.” (Apperly Counterfactual 1) The production of counterfactual histories is so central to the pleasure of the game that records of them are shared in the form of “After Action Reports” (AARs). These paratexts are composed by players, posted on forums and subsequently read and commented upon by the community. These “dual display[s] of game and writing prowess” constitute a “discernable sub-genre” which is defined by “faithfulness to the gameplay” (Apperly14) – what is played is what is written (with stylistic flourish and elaborations), making it all the more like “authentic” history (and like realist literature) in that each is a record of “what happened.” An exemplary paratext is the AAR 162 This drive for “realism” motivates a player-driven response to render under-developed (in the game-design sense) regions in greater detail, often by the players from that region, through the practice of modding the game. (Apperly 13; Köstlbauer 171) 163 A broad term referring to secondary texts generated about and around the game and shared within player communities; “Herobrine” is an example of a Minecraft paratext. In the case of historical simulation games, these paratexts frequently take on a counterfactual character. (Apperly 1) 244 ‘Rise of the Condor,’ 164 whose player-author sets their initial goals within a complex framework: “Do I have any specific goals? Maintain Incan independence as long as I can (may not be possible, after all) would be the most important, and if I do, I'll go for the old chestnut of kicking the Europeans out of South America. I'll also be going for Australia, so – wish me luck.” (Mike von Bek 2003) The baseline goal of sustained diathesis is stated outright: Incan independence is the most important. It is identical to the player’s independence, the furthest range of their diathesis, as expressed through the sovereignty of the Incan state. The fact that the further goal of expelling the European colonialists is an “old chestnut” points to the long tradition of counterfactual playthroughs of precisely this sort. The difficulty is part of the pleasure, and that pleasurable difficulty is precisely that of pressing back against a recalcitrant, even rigged, history; it is the pleasure of gambling, of the lottery, the pleasure of beating the odds. If European hegemony is seemingly inevitable, so much so that it structures history itself, what better plot twist than to throw the conquistadors back into the sea? The final goal of “going for Australia” is the culmination of this ironic reversal; the player intends to settle the antipodes with Incan colonists. The subjugation of “tribal” (stateless) people (the native populations of territories available for colonization) is accepted as a part of the discourse of conquest and expansion. When ‘Condor’ relates the counterfactual Sapa Inca Huayna-Capac’s ambition to “subjugate the tribes of Panama and bring them to heel” the language is undisguisedly that of imperial histories. (von Bek 2003) There is, in the telling, an obvious relish in the rejection of European colonial discourse, particularly the term “savage,” (von Bek 2003) and a clear antipathy towards the “real” perpetrators of South American colonialism (in ‘Condor’ the Incas’ come into conflict with both Spain and Portugal). This is a satisfaction that can only be felt through implicit 164 More specifically an AAR for Europa Universalis 2. 245 reference to “our” colonial history, a satisfaction that is augmented from working against the game’s own stacked odds, taking on a seemingly Quixotic historical task and succeeding. All the same the history of ‘Rise of the Condor’ is colonial and imperial, by dint of the game’s rules, which link historical diathesis – in this case the ability of the Inca player to shape the game’s history as the game generates it – to the economic benefits of settlement and conquest. To defeat the colonialists, von Bek had to beat them at their own game. The horizon of the game’s imaginary remains locked within the confines of the kind of history it can tell, the way it assigns historical agency. It allows the history of colonialism to unfold differently, but it remains the history of colonialism. It allows other states’ stories to be played out as they might have been instead of as they were, but states are the only characters in those stories. If the game’s breadth and complexity allow, as Apperly asserts, a negotiation with official history, that negotiation relies on reference to that official history for its critical power. There is just one problem that Calvino claims lies at the core of literature, a claim that here neatly extends to the narrative production of history: given limited pieces and positions, the components of received history, what new combinations can we create, what new outcomes can be imagined? XI. Settled Matters The great irony of this sequence of games is that the more information that is known about a historical era, and the closer the sequence gets towards the present moment, the less changeable that history seems to become. The high tide of empire, the nineteenth century, is richly detailed in Victoria 2, to the extent that the actual population of its state actors achieve a more complex, agentic representation. 165 But this richer representation of a state’s population relies upon their 165 Populations can immigrate, change class, adopt ideologies; they have needs, ethnicities, religions, legal statuses and, more importantly, an interlinked set of political attitudes, representing a given groups political consciousness, desire for pluralism, and 246 statistical rendering (to “appear” to the state and to history they must be represented as populations), and takes place against a background of Great Power super-agents and their “spheres” of influence, as well as a diplomacy system that splits “civilized” nations from “uncivilized” ones. There is even a sudden disappearance of African nations previously represented as agents in Europa Universalis 4, as their status as viable states is dissolved by the thicker representation of colonial hegemony. By the time we reach the twentieth century and the sequence’s simulation of the Second World War, Hearts of Iron 4, the number of potential states, and thus potential actors, has dwindled, and the possibility of large-scale historical agency belongs almost expressly to the most powerful members of the major geopolitical blocs. A favorite scene of counterfactual imaginings, not least because of the exhaustive record keeping and unrealized plans that create a “thick penumbra of possibilities” around modern wars (Gallagher Counterfactual 55), alternative World War II timelines remain focused around the outcomes of certain battles, tracing divergent outcomes but relying on the same set of major national characters. The timescale of Hearts of Iron changes to count hours per second instead of days, carefully rendering supply chains and modeling the complexities of twentieth century warfare, but populations once more disappear into abstraction as the richness of representation and potential divergence give way to a few clearly delineated courses of action (fig. 4.5). degree of militancy. The upshot of the system is that a population that is aware of its political interests but which cannot exercise them becomes increasingly militant, and that the possibility of consciousness depends on the pluralism of that population. 247 Figure 4.5: The national focus tree of the British Raj in Hearts of Iron IV. This is not to say that dramatic alternatives 166 are not possible in Hearts of Iron, but the bounds of those alternatives, the range potentially efficacious subject-positions, have narrowed. This recalls a larger tension within realism and its relation to chance, counterfactualism, and alterity. If realism, particularly in its alternative mode, is more “real” the more exhaustively detailed it is, then that very thickness of detail gives the depicted reality a more fixed, more settled character. This feature of realism is brought into sharper relief in the counterfactual mode, which “somewhat paradoxically… derive[s] alternatives to the catastrophic events from probabilistic models of what is ordinary, thus placing a heavy emphasis on normality.” (Gallagher Telling 7) Normalcy, a defining feature of the statistical thinking which so deeply informs modern counterfactualism, is precisely that which is at stake in realism’s alternative modes. Games then naturalize normative understandings of history through their representation in systems, while 166 For the most striking divergences, it falls upon the player community to create mods such as Kaiserreich: Legacy of the Weltkrieg, which chooses the First World War as its nexus point, extrapolating a new geopolitical balance from the victory of the Central powers. Even then, it repeats the drama of the Second World War as a vast, ideological struggle: different characters, same drama. 248 also inviting challenges to the primacy of any given hegemonic narrative. Hence those novels that mobilize the subject-multiplying capacities of realism against the “settled” qualities of their own form. Hence what may be found in gaming and gaming communities: both the most radical experiments in form and subjectivity, as well as the breeding grounds for the most vicious and retrograde political activity. XII. Et Alia The terror of liberty has not abated since the advent of modernity, both for states and for individuals, and realism – first through the novel and now increasingly through games – has played a central role in both fostering liberalism and in containing its explosive potential. Gallagher suggests that counterfactual narratives of the sort we have been discussing further “intensifies the connection between the novel form and national consciousness” which together contribute to “the rise of the modern nation-state” by “allowing people to visualize the norms, habits, and extent of their ‘imagined community’” thus “mak[ing] the sovereign polity seem both natural and hard-won.” (Gallagher 241) Yet the very qualities of counterfactualism produce a “peculiar kind of indeterminacy” whereby its characters – often national, often collective – possess “the vitality of the permanently unfinished.” This vitality comes about, however, only when “seemingly persistent traits and habits would have broken down” (Gallagher12-13) making every alternative narrative both an assertion of and challenge to the consistency of every subject position, from the citizen to the state itself. A further irony emerges from the cooption of counterfactualism by politically regressive movements. Both the proliferation of “alternate facts” and the insistence of histories which erase the role of marginalized persons in the cultural production of games and novels are grim realizations of the very same dissolution of historical and narrative authority. The rhetoric of 249 groups such as Gamergate and the Sad Puppies, two early coalescences of communities that now calls themselves the “alt-right,” seek to frame their own discourse as the suppressed one, a valiant resistance against their paranoiac imagining of conspiratorial feminists, minorities and other “social justice warriors” who have foisted their agenda upon their last bastions of power and play, the final cultural redoubts against an onslaught of political correctness. By their lights, it is they who are resurrecting the timeline buried by the hegemonic history, locating their rightful privilege in a past “greatness” which should be self-evidently false but which fascist movements have long relied upon to legitimate their depredations. The alt-right’s demands are both a reaction to identity politics and a twisted expression of it: representation, political and cultural, should belong only to certain kinds of subjects. We need look no further than the furor over the introduction of a non-binary gender category to the character creation mode in Harebrained Schemes’ BattleTech (2018) to see how slight the infringement upon the identity categories they deem acceptable need be to elicit a furious response. This response is noteworthy too, as the reactionaries frame themselves as representative of the true collective to whom the game, and games in general, properly belong. In the words of one outraged customer: “WE PLAY GAMES TO RELAX AND GET AWAY FROM THIS PC CRAP, NOT TO HAVE IT SHOVED IN OUR FACES.” 167 This “WE” is a collective founded on perceived sameness, one that simultaneously invokes and denies its own political basis. 168 It is a drive to expel otherness so as to restore some mythical prior purity; that is, it is in key ways identical to every fascist project that has preceded it. 167 Cited in Patrick Klepeck’s article at Waypoint, “They They/Them Option in ‘Battletech’ Is About So Much More Than Choice.” 168 Another common rhetorical move from the alt-right in gaming communities is to claim that they don’t desire politics in games whatsoever, that they are interested only in “having fun.” This commitment to alleged apoliticality is, naturally, adopted by projects which aim to capitalize on precisely the energy of reactionary movements, eg. Hatred (2015). Cf. Keith Stuart. “Hatred: Gaming’s Most Contrived Controversy.” The Guardian, May 29, 2015. 250 If my research has yielded anything beyond a recognition of realism’s extension beyond traditional definitions and its enduring ludic qualities, it is the importance of multiplicity and pluralism, both in the form and within modern political life. To successfully create a just modern socius there must be a figuration of identity broad enough to contain all potential subject positions. The role of realism in that project begins with a recognition of the multiplicity within the self, an understanding of subjectivity as supplemental and contingent, a narrative product much like history, a field of contestation rather than a verity. As yet there is no perfect answer to the question of how to foster otherness when the mechanisms of realism seem just as prone to shepherd us back to the idea of the norm, naturalizing what it actively produces. However, games bring this tension into sharpest relief, most of all those games which best exemplify the realism I have articulated so far: games of systems and processes, rich with detail and pregnant with alternativity. These games seek the inexhaustibility associated with reality, with the surprises that only the truly unknown can bring, yet still causal, explicable, legible. And these games – from the breadth and depth of Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress’ worlds, to the procedural generation of roguelikes, to the alternative histories of grand strategy – all aim to conjure realities plausible enough to visit and enchanting enough that those who play them wish to stay. Without the element of chance, intersecting with the formal structure of the world’s worlding, this combination of comprehension and surprise, consistency and uniqueness, would be impossible to achieve. This centrality of chance in ushering in the unforeseen prevails in novelistic experiments as well, where chance appears as an antidote or counterpoint to the settled qualities of realism, a kind of premodern magic which delivers the world from the mortification of determinism. For determinism is as dangerous for the self as it is for the world; after all, the two are interlinked. Chance that definitionally defines what cannot be known ahead of time, that which lies beyond 251 our reach, the limits of diathesis in games, agency in history, power in modernity – this is our best access to sheer otherness. If the project of the Enlightenment was, indeed, to tame chance and produce a rational reality occupied by rational subjects organized into the rational collectivity of a rational state, then these alternative realisms look to untame that reality enough to activate those potentialities of subjectivization and collectivization which remain hidden beneath things “as they are.” The need for such an activation of potentials, an encounter with the unforeseen, is never more pressing than when the imagining of agency in history has become so hemmed in, when modern divinations speak again and again of unbearable inevitabilities. Caught between the gravitational pull of history and the abyss of raw possibility, we cannot retreat into our castles, defending our little territories of selfhood, our states of sameness. We must rove and roam, even if it is just within ourselves, in the countries of our imagination. We must multiply ourselves, and with it our worlds, and move between them, becoming strange, becoming other. We cannot only be as we are, as we have been, as we can yet imagine becoming; we must hope that, over the next rise, around the next bend, with the next fall of the dice, we might meet what we might be– might have and might yet. 252 Conclusion I. Stakes and Stance I cannot not understate my love of games. There is value in scholarly dispassion, a compartmentalization that should ideally shield one from prejudicial distortion, but it would be a flagrant disavowal were I to deny my enthusiasm for the form and the pleasure I take in them. Neither should I understate my love of novels; the two are interwoven in the skein of my desire. It was my initial visits to novelistic elsewheres that drew me to games. Like so many others players, I looked to games to satisfy my desire to more fully inhabit those paracosmic parallels, realms of fantasy rendered as if real. Without the novel and its thickly rendered world, innumerable modern games are inconceivable; with the novel, the urge to find playful ways to enter that world was inevitable. I raise this so as not to lose sight of the stakes, and how personal they are. While it is easy enough for me to laugh off the moral panic around games as an echo of the largely discredited panic around novels, I would be remiss were I to go on to assert that novels and games are harmless. The panic around realism’s seductive, delusive, even demonic power is largely misinformed and misguided, but it the why and the how of their wariness which is suspect, not the wariness itself. Studying realism in novels and games has not made these forms appear any less powerful or persuasive. Their relation to the discourses of power and violence, selfhood and the state, are doubtless more complex than the causal condemnations suggest, but that complexity must be interrogated. My enjoyment is not an absolution; I know this precisely because I wish to have my enjoyment absolved. When I speak of a tension within realism, I speak also of a tension within myself, between my critical faculties and my desire to play, and further with my desire to be critical of how I play, of what that play means, and why I take pleasure in it. Three questions I returned to again 253 and again were: why are sovereign fantasies so pervasive, and so appealing? Why is agency so often rendered through violence? And are there alternatives to these norms? The necessity of this self-examination is all the more pressing when I consider how games and novels have become flashpoints of cultural conflict. Years before their movement into the political mainstream, reactionary movements such as the Sad Puppies 169 and GamerGate 170 prefigured the logics and tactics of the “alt-right.” The purpose of these movements was largely to insist upon the sovereign status of one identity over all others; to terrorize and silence any alternative expressions of selfhood; to assert ownership over the means of producing selves; to re-write the history of a form to justify that ownership. National identity under late capitalism is perhaps no longer coherent enough to sustain fascistic subject formations. The contemporary right has chosen to circle their wagons around a new locus: consumer entertainment products. That the fantasies that sustain them are violent should come as no surprise, but it is not the mere representation of violence that makes them reactionary. Rather, it is the broader violence to alternative subjective formations which they enact and impose on the field of cultural production. The most vexing irony is that popular opinion has accepted many of these reactionaries’ basic terms. To the larger cultural imaginary, the history of games is one dominated by a certain archetype: gun-toting excesses of violence, the province of men, with cultures that are irredeemably juvenile and toxic. Even when they are not violent or gendered, 171 they are cast as 169 A bloc of right-wing, anti-diversity Hugo Award voters whose stated intention is to return science fiction literature to a (mythical) state of masculine-fantasy purity, before its infiltration by progressive politics and marginalized people. (Schaub, Michael. “’Sad Puppies’ campaign fails to undermine sci-fi diversity at the Hugo Awards.” The Los Angeles Times, 24 Aug. 2015.) 170 A campaign of concentrated harassment aimed at women and minorities, justified under the premise that video games and games journalism needed to be purged of infiltration by progressive politics and marginalized people. (Stuart, Bob. “#GamerGate: the misogynist movement blighting the video games industry.” The Telegraph, 24 Oct. 2014.) 171 Indeed, a large market exists for specifically “feminine” games; this “designed identity” for women, differential from that of the “primary” gamer identity of the young middle-class male, is the basis for both industry decisions and the cultural assertion that “real” games (and their associated differential identity) are the province of men. (Chess, Shira. Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed Identity. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.) 254 empty confections, idle amusements that produce glassy-eyed conformity and passive consumption. The fallacy is in the totalizing quality of this view, one founded upon an erasure both of the facts of history and the capacities of the form. Contemporary games are not intrinsically or wholly an exercise in masculine power fantasies, any more than is science fiction comprised entirely of Flash Gordan serials. They are not necessarily facile fascinations which lead to moral depletion, any more than are novels. But they are not intrinsically enriching, either. My response to this characterization is to vigorously assert the fullness of history, not in the interests of absolution but in fully confronting the ambivalence that persists within realism, and within the production of modern subjectivity more broadly. II. The Enduring Tension None of this is new. The crisis of modern subjectivity is concurrent with the modern subject itself. The technologies and media used to construct them have developed and changed, but I have pointed to longer lineages than one might expect, and deeper roots. Of the many heads on the hydra of modernity, the most central to this study are those of Enlightenment and liberal individualism. The other snarling faces must get their due; global capitalism and colonialism form a necessary milieu for a work like Robinson Crusoe. Realism as a technique, however, is most visible in its relation to the epistemological shift that demanded new modes of subjectification, a necessary corollary to a new way of depicting and producing reality. However clean the break may be, the sense of being “modern” is a sense of just such a break from “pre-modern” mode of interpreting experience, and the emergence of the novel is evidence that the place of the subject becomes a matter of great concern as soon as its framing changes from spiritual to secular, and as state projects begin to use new modes of imagining its 255 subjects so as to render them as governable citizens. Statistical representation, causal determination, and the newly operative idea of the “norm” become foundational to the way the subject and the society in which it participates is imagined appeared as a countervailing force, even as it participated (and continues to participate) in the promulgation of the Enlightenment values of rationalism and self-interest. The individual is held between a norm they must abide by to be seen as a subject, and an opposing sense of their own singularity, that their experience is utterly unique. This interior tension between novelty and consistency form the basis of the tension playing out in realism throughout its history. A realist work must, on the one hand, appear consistent enough to allow legibility, and thus inhabitability. It must be able to inculcate new habits of interpreting worldly experience in a way that produces a continuous experience of selfhood. On the other hand, if it is to be experienced as realistic this depiction must be all at once flexible enough to accommodate alternative outcomes, and vast enough to surprise. Realism must, ideally, contain within it the possibility of the new, and the promise of the inexhaustible. It is for good reason then that Borges has returned again and again throughout my work, as one of his governing metaphors, the labyrinth, exemplifies this tension. Works of realism are “forged by men” and therefore “destined to be deciphered by men,” their coherence guaranteed. (Borges 81) Yet labyrinths also contain the possibility, and the peril, of encountering something unexpected, or even monstrous. Ultimately I have attempted to engineer a meeting with the monster, to recognize it, ultimately, as an aspect of the self. I have valorized the nomadic, multiple and alternative in contrast with the sovereign, singular and exclusive, encouraging a self-othering which acknowledges differential identity within a body and mind usually conceived as singular and unitary. This is not, however, to suggest adopting the former and wholly expunging the latter. 256 Without the tension between them, the form itself does not function. I take a cue from Foucault when I assert that without power there is no subjectification. The value in the former terms is in their very non-exclusivity, and I emphasize them in order to push back against the monopolization of subject-production by a select set of persons and bodies that are legible under that regime. The mistake is not identity or subjectivity as such, but the naturalization of mechanisms that are in fact supplemental, contingent, and actively assumed, and the use of productive mechanisms for strictly re-productive means. With their capacity for variation and the requirement of willfully and knowingly adopting of arbitrary rules, games would seem to be more inclined than classical works of realism to foster a recognition of the form’s possibilities for expanding selfhood and diathetic range. My study remains agnostic as to the comparative potency or value of one or the other to realist project. I assert continuity, not priority. It is, however, true that the risks and rewards may be different in the more ludic expressions of realism, and that work must continue to develop a vocabulary of critical analysis that allows us to address that difference. Moreover, the rhetoric of games which promise freedom while providing a remarkably limited set of verbs for interacting with their worlds, a constrained diathesis consisting too often of “kill” and “take” and little else must be viewed with skepticism. But this is a problem not of capacity but rather of convention. The limitation I find at the end of this study lies in the imagining of alternatives, marking the horizon of how creators, writers, artists, and critics all conceive of subjects and the possibilities of agency. III. Around the Next Corner The task ahead is to seek out the alternatives, to push back that horizon in hopes of finding new formations at the edge of current cultural production, as well as delving into the archive, 257 seeking shapes that become clearer in the light of a more expansive understanding of realism. If there is an optimism I can fully avow it is the assertion than even a limited set of elements can produce effectively limitless configurations. The tension between the legible and the unexpected is here told in terms of hopeful possibility, not of escaping the form but unlocking its already- present capacities. The literary archive already contains numerous examples of just such experiments in permutation. My new definition of realism further incorporates both experimental and generic works. From Angela Carter and Italo Calvino, to Joanna Russ and Philip K. Dick, all engage in rigorous literary play with conventional practices of realism, adding new elaborations to the form through experimentation and self-critique. I located figures as canonical and generic as J. R. R. Tolkien within the field of realism and its discontents, recovering from works often excluded from an the literary-proper. This subversive, expansive sensibility can be located in other fields of cultural production as well: avant-garde art movements such as Collège de ‘Pataphysique, Fluxus, and the Situationists, all seek a self-reflexive engagement with their forms and their relationship to the ludic constitution of reality, the rules that produce our shared worlds. 172 Contemporary games have their own self-reflexive and experimental works, and I have explored The Stanley Parable as a prime example, as well as Dwarf Fortress, of works which challenge the prevailing assumptions about subject conception and formation and provide models for new organizations of selfhood. Searching for other games liked as these, “independent” projects produced outside the dominant industry paradigm, will be invaluable for future scholars to expand our understanding of the varieties of subject-formation. This should not, however distract from interrogating the most widespread examples, games as well-funded and pervasively marketed as the BioShock games, or as ubiquitous as Minecraft. It is particularly 172 Marcel Duchamp, with his fascination with chess and his ironic world-building through the Three Standard Stoppages, The Delay In Glass, and The Green Box, is exemplary of this ludic engagement with representation in visual art. 258 important to both seek new models for the subject and be mindful of the ones which are even now being propagated, driven by vast market forces and collective psychic needs. 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Creator Lobo, Phillip Alexander (author)

Core Title Alternative realisms: subjectivity-production in novels and games

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publication Date 02/20/2019

Defense Date 01/16/2019

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Comparative Literature,game studies,gender,History,novel studies,OAI-PMH Harvest,probability,realism,Sovereignty,subjectivity

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Schor, Hilary (committee chair), Boone, Joseph (committee member), Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee member)

Creator Email phillip.lobo@gmail.com,plobo@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-123737

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Legacy Identifier etd-LoboPhilli-7091.pdf

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Document Type Dissertation

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