Reconstruction 6.1 (Winter 2006)
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Digital Extensions and Performed Players: A Theoretical Model for the Video/Computer Game / Ben Fisler
Abstract: Despite over twenty years of studies, scholars have yet to identify a productive theoretical model for the video game that does not depend on a fragmentary understanding of its form. Following Pierre Bourdieu's contention that the purpose of criticism is to understand cultural products as distinct scientific objects, and Marshall McLuhan's theory that the message and formative power of media are the media themselves, this study attempts to generate a foundational critical understanding of the video game. Building on the most lucrative intrinsic (such as David Myer's 1991 Computer Game Semiotics) and extrinsic (such as Jeffrey Goldstein's 1998 Immortal Kombat) studies of the medium, this study proposes that the video game be understood not as direct involvement (as many others have attempted to do) nor as a passive digital performance (as equally many have done), but as a mediated interaction between digital representations and organic activity. In this process of interaction, the video game generates a specialized kind of electronic narcissism, what Melaine Klein called "positions," the projections of polar or conflated understandings of self into idealized objects. A mediated, or "performed player" emerges from the medium, generated by the interaction between the digital representation on the screen and the organic human being controlling the actions of the digital representation. The author of this chapter suggests that this performed player is a useful starting point for both intrinsic analyses of games and extrinsic studies of the educational, cognitive, and psychological efficacy of games in empirical reality. As such this study challenges psychoanalytic theories and their applicability to understanding imagined selves as well as providing a wide-ranging analysis of the limitations of previous video game scholarship.
Introduction: The State of Video Game Studies and a Proposal for Future Research
<1> Over the last decade, scholars have developed an obligatory preamble to essays on video games [1]. This preface combines a lamentation over the lack of sophisticated scholarly work on video games, with an affirmation of their cultural significance and a call for further research [2]. This strategy seems a necessary one, intended to convince potentially hostile readers of the value of such research, but, it is somewhat misleading [3]. Video game studies have existed for nearly as long as the games themselves [4]. Scholars in sociology, American Studies, popular culture studies, media studies, as well as philosophers, casual and regular players, and politicians have contributed essays to journalistic and academic criticism.
<2> Of course, there is a difference between "study" and "sophisticated study." An article by former California Representative, Lionel Van Deerlin, titled "The Electronic Slaughter of the Innocents" (1992), refers to "most academic opinion regarding the rise in violence among school kids" without reference to any supporting psychological or statistical studies [5]. Much psychological work neglects appropriate qualification of evidence. Efforts to determine the cognitive impact of video games with violent or sexual content, for example, fail to distinguish between performed violence/sexuality and empirical acts of violence or actual sexual desire [6].
<3> This is not to say that responsible research has not been done. Several exhaustive histories, close structural analyses, genre, psychological, ethnographic, and media studies have been produced by prominent scholars such fields as social science and popular culture. However, absent from a considerable and multidisciplinary body of literature is a truly interdisciplinary study of the medium of the computer game. Popular culture studies, communications articles, and essays by game players, such as those of Jessie Cameron Herz, David Myers, and Steven Poole, provide useful models of the intrinsic qualities of video game structure and gameplay. Extrinsically minded investigations of the "cultural phenomenon" of video games, or the cognitive impact of video games on players, similarly, have produced some productive studies of the media as cultural texts or as games. Unfortunately, extrinsic and intrinsic studies have developed along largely disciplinary lines. Little effort has been made to combine a rich understanding of the particular structural patterns of video gameplay with studies of their sociological and cultural significance.
<4> Following sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's contention that the purpose of criticism is to understand cultural products as distinct scientific objects, and media theorist Marshall McLuhan's assertion that the message and formative power of media are the media themselves, this essay delineates a foundational critical understanding of the video game [7]. The most lucrative intrinsic and extrinsic studies of the medium demonstrate that the video game is neither a direct involvement game nor as a passive digital performance, but a mediated interaction between digital representations and organic control. In this process of interaction, the video game generates a specialized kind of electronic narcissism, ego transference that Melaine Klein explains as the projections of polar or conflated understandings of self into idealized objects. A mediated, or "performed player" emerges from the medium, generated by the interaction between the digital representation (usually referenced to the viewer rhetorically as "you") on the screen and the organic human being controlling (to lesser and greater degrees, depending on the particular game) the actions of the digital representation. This performed player is a productive starting point for both intrinsic analyses of games and extrinsic studies of the educational, cognitive, or psychological efficacy of games in empirical reality (in so far as any cultural object or event can be said to influence reality beyond the boundaries of gameplay).
"Playing" the Digital Self
<5> A form of media, from live theatre to sculpture, is either an attempted communication that is mediated by the structure of the form, or a form that produces meaning according to the specialized logic of its structure [8]. In both tenable cases, the form creates a functional system of interaction wherein perceptions, narratives, and ideological imperatives operate together and against one another. The pleasures of one form have similarities to others, but the existence of multiple varieties of media alone argues for the significance of those differences. As Pierre Bourdieu has variously suggested, the task of scholarly inquiry is to: "[L]ay the foundations for [...] social science of [cultural forms] as a distinct scientific object[s ...] by establishing [...] from what set of social conditions, it is really possible to speak of [the object]" [9]. The overall field of cultural production is composed of independent fields of activity that influence, but are not dependent upon or subordinate to, other fields [10]. Marshall McLuhan similarly maintains that criticism should begin from the form of media, censuring tendencies within game and information theory to speak of the form as merely a facilitator of content, which leads academic study to neglect the "structural core of the experience" [11].
<6> A theory of the video game as distinct scientific object can be derived from the near twenty-year published discourse on the subject. Its distinctness lies in the relationship between the human player's organic ego (or what developmental psychoanalysts prefer to call the "sense of self") and the digital representation shown on the computer or game console screen [12]. This electronic agent (from the idealized female body of Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider (1996-2002) series to the dinosaur-like body of the Aliens V. Predator series (1999/2001) has been variously dubbed the player's "avatar" or "skin" [13]. While avatar is an attractive label for the player's electronic champion, suggesting a deep psychic link with the human player, it is an imperfect one. The human player does not incarnate herself/himself into the computer world (as the classic definition of avatar requires). "Avatar" also fails to account for narrative rhetoric within many games that situate the human player as the subject of the action. In the game Baldur's Gate (1999), the player's quasi-Medieval hero/heroine makes camp in the wilderness and the player is informed: "As you sleep, visions plague your dreams" [14]. Skin suggests the immediacy of the human player's involvement in the electronic narrative. Certainly the digital agent is conceived as similar to an external guise donned by the player to act in the digital world. While this identification does account for the rhetorical placement of the player in much gameplay (as immersed in a narrative referring to things "you," the human player, do in the electronic world), it suggests that the human player believes herself/himself present within the digital world. Unless the human player suffers from a medically verifiable delusion, the player understands that she/he is in front of a computer keyboard or game console, making no physical contact with the electronic representations presented on the screen. From Melanie Klein's work on narcissism comes a more precise understanding of the electronic agent, as idealized object [15]. The ego projects into the object certain qualities of the self and then identifies the object with those qualities. When qualities of the self perceived as positive by the ego are projected into an object, that object becomes idealized [16]. McLuhan extends this notion into the specific forms of media, conceiving: "Any invention or technology is an extension [...] of our physical bodies" [17]. The digital agent, then, need not be seen as a guise worn by the human player or a living being under her/his psychic or spiritual control, but a digital extension of the player's ego, a specialized type of object that serves as a target for ego projection. This allows game theory to explain how human consciousness enters into gameplay, and how digital representations become intellectual extensions of, but remain separate objects from, the living human.
<7> The intrinsic structural properties of video games have a unique impact on the narcissism of active transference, what Sigmund Freud identifies as the more empathic, and arguably positive, manifestation of narcissism, one that generates pleasurable empathy with the object [18]. Stephen Poole delineates the particular properties of the digital extension in Trigger Happy: Video Games and the Entertainment Revolution (2000). He explains three main types of digital extension based in the perspective of gameplay (global view, first-person, third-person). Poole generally divides video games into the genres of God game, real-time strategy, sports, role-playing, puzzle, and first-person shooter. Poole does not specifically provide a list of genres, but suggests these categories throughout his study based on screen perspective (what the human being playing the game sees on the game console screen or computer monitor), time frame (whether the passage of virtual time is constant or divided into turns), and qualities of narrative (the game's engagement with themes from fantasy, science fiction, world politics, and so forth) [19]. The direct experience of gameplay, however, depends mainly on the first consideration, that of screen perspective.
<8> The process of transference provides a window into the subjective experience of playing with the digital extension. As McLuhan reminds his reader, narcissism is not the love of one's self. The legend of Narcissus details an individual not obsessed with himself but with a reflection of himself that he believes sincerely to be an "other." To McLuhan, the point of this myth for media theory is: "[M]en at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves [...] and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs or extensions of the body" [20]. The fact that video games exist somewhere between passive visual constructs, such as film, and such participatory pastimes as sports or card games, requires a theoretical frame for the precise equilibrium created by its particular process of transference.
<9> Video game transference lies between a wholly separate visual world, since the player is participating in the events occurring in the game, and a wholly present active self, since the player always acts through an electronic representation, i.e., the digital extension that responds to her/his commands. While characters in a motion picture may impact the observer's understanding of her/his subjectivity, the representation is, at least on some implicit level, acknowledged with a sense of separateness. The spectator does not believe he/she is watching her/his real world self in action, however much he/she may identify with the characters onscreen. On the other side of the continuum, an individual playing tennis or poker is fully present as the acting player, and is full immersed in the activity of gameplay. A person playing tennis is a person playing tennis. However, the presence of a player in video gameplay involves a constant process of negotiation.
<10> Lev Manovich, in The Language of New Media (2001), explains this process of mediated interaction as "teleaction," his preferred term for the player's ability "to manipulate reality through representations [using ...] image instruments [... to] not only represent reality but also control it" [21]. While players experience different levels of mediation in different games, each of the three types of perspective involve some interaction between what the digital extension does in the programmed electronic universe and what the organic human being "makes it do" by pressing mouse, joystick, and other interface buttons, punching keys, and turning nobs. In a third-person perspective game like Tomb Raider, the digital image of Lara Croft responds to the commands of the organic body controlling her. A first person perspective game, such as Doom (1993), which Poole identifies as a "first-person shooter," where the screen shows what the player would actually see were she/he present in the game world (excluding peripheral vision), is a different experience from a third person perspective, where a visual representation of the game's main character is present in the screen view [22]. However, even in the first person perspective there is some digital representation of the player. In Doom, the face of a white man with brown hair shows the health status of the player and a gloved right arm shows the weapon the player is currently using. In what Poole calls a "God game," such as Activision's Civilization: Call to Power (1999), the organic human being spends the majority of gameplay watching a map of the world covered in cities, and is able to command several military, diplomatic, and exploratory units, without a digital extension shown in the screen's view [23]. Such global view programs, however, feature "cut-scenes" at key points in the game (preset computer graphic sequences that show "the player" in important moments, such as winning or losing the game). Moreover, as Poole articulates, full immersion in the events on screen is mediated by their artificiality:
Transformation of time and the ability to "play with" the economic systems, and by virtue of gameplay, to "reload" the game and try different methods, plus the digital representation of short programmed films plays a role in transference, mediating total immersion in the video game world.God-game variables are "kludged" - simplified and imprecise - and their reality is
laughably clean compared to the infinitely chaotic and messy real world [...] but what they do offer by virtue of their machine habitat, and what makes them slightly different from what they would be otherwise - complex board games - is the modeling of dynamic processes. Time can be sped up or slowed down [...] fiddling with the fiscal and monetary operators of SimCity [sic] for a couple of minutes and observing the results for the next accounting period provides a remarkably intuitive way to understand the fundamentals of balancing a budget in a capitalist state. [24]
<11> David Myers, in "Computer Game Semiotics," explored his frustration as he attempted to explicate the games from a structuralist perspective. Despite some definitive structural patterns in the visual narrative, a complex system of internal elements of conflict complicates a clear structural reading [25]. In a game like Railroad Tycoon (1990), where the player's goal is to run three computer-generated "opponents" out of business by building the largest and most successful railroad empire, this design results in a game system where a single event during play can have a wide variety of consequences [26]. A simulated earthquake, for example, could destroy some of the player's property and be considered negative in that regard, while simultaneously damaging an opponent's property and serving to improve the player's standing. As Myers puts it, a video game is "a semantic microuniverse," where context is constantly shifting in a process that perpetually "deconstructs and reconstructs itself" [27]. The video game is a spiraling structure that is perpetually growing in complexity, as a host of conflicts mutually impact each other.
<12> Myers's previous research found marked similarities between the digital patterns of Boolean operators and the structures of the human mind [28]. Articulating the interactive qualities of gameplay as an electronic reproduction of the organic brain's interpretive processes, Myers writes:
The computer game is composed of Boolean operators combined into logical and finite, yet extremely complex sequences. High-level sequences of this sort tend to evoke dramatic relationships during play and, therefore, to appear patterned after interpretive processes within the human mind.
While he restricts his investigation of video games to the symbolic structures of gameplay in "Computer Game Semiotics," he provides a useful explanation of the technological circumstances that manifest the digital extension.
<13> Combining these disparate strains of investigation in a more compete form, one finds in the digital environment of the video game a form of artificial sub-intelligence (a mathematical system that is similar in form but significantly more simplistic than organic intelligence) that allows electronic constructs to interact with each other. One non-player programmed digital roller coaster entrepreneur competes with another and with the player's digital extension. The actions of both kinds of constructs impact the entire world of play. From the human player's perspective, her/his digital extension competes with wholly constructed opponents according to the instructions provided to it by the human player, even though, as cultural theorist Friedrich Kittler notes, the player's digital extension and its various competitors are actually nothing more than "one-way functions in recent mathematical cryptography," languages that have been concealed by software protocols and (more recently) the mouse interface [29].
<14> The process of transference helps explain the intersection of these organic and digital worlds. The organic self is never wholly immersed in gameplay, since some electronic image, and the qualities of unreal time and spatial relationships created by Boolean operators within software language, always mediates the player's involvement. Neither is the organic self ever wholly separate from the digital extension, as the events of gameplay will not proceed unless the organic self provides instruction to the digital extension. The digital extension becomes Klein's idealized object when the human player has control over its actions. She/he can instruct the object to act according to her/his "good" qualities. When playing the digital extension of the "Predator" (inspired by the 1987 film of the same name) in Aliens vs. Predator 2, the human player has the opportunity to make his digital extension eliminate entire human armies and liberate fellow members of his species from the clutches of a corrupt galactic corporation. Simultaneously, the digital representations of humans are projected with hostile qualities according to Klein's theory (greed, for example) [30]. When the digital representation acts according to the predetermination of the software programmer, its actions disrupt the process of transference, since its actions may not always adhere to the notion of self being projected into the digital extension. In Sierra Online's Betrayal at Antara (1996), the digital extensions of three quasi-Medieval heroes (one woman and two men) unravel a complex mystery involving corruption within two powerful households, but in the final "cut scene" elect not to reveal the secret to the public in order to protect their families [31]. Players are unable to control their digital extensions entirely and theory needs to account for the disruptive impact of their "independent agency" (a narrative illusion programmed by the software developer) on the process of transference.
<15> Video games are thus a specialized type of narcissism and a specialized form of ego transference. The human player's ego interacts with the digital extension, imbuing this electronic object with certain qualities perceived in her/his self. Generally, these qualities will be seen as "good" (strength, ingenuity, agency, supremacy, mercy), though there is certainly room for more conflated notions of self. The structure of Boolean operators prevents total immersion in the spiraling structure of computer game play since the position of the player's digital extension is constantly renegotiated in opposition to its electronic opponents. Moreover, the nonrealistic qualities of design prevent total believability and all video games include programmed events that show the digital extension acting independently of the organic ego. As game theorist Ted Friedman simultaneously articulates and laments:
Computer Games [...] connect the oppositions of "reader" and "text," of "reading" and "writing," together in feedback loops that make it impossible to distinguish precisely where one begins and the other ends. Recognizing a reader's changing expectations and reactions as a linear text unfolds is one thing; but how do we talk about textual interactions in which every response provokes instantaneous changes in the text itself, leading to a new response, and so on? The answer is, not very clearly, yet. [32]
Despite Friedman's confident assertion, one can speak with some clarity of the player's engagement with the digital universe if one sets aside language that places the player as a reader of just another, albeit electronic, text, and conceives in the process of specialized ego transference the mutual creation of a mediated, or "performed" player.
<16> The language of performance provides for the articulation of mediated identity construction in the specialized process of ego transference that is video game subjectivity. When the video game narrative manipulates rhetorical address to identify the organic player as "you," the player agrees to suspend disbelief, to accept temporarily that the digital extension is a signifier of herself/himself. The process is like unto the playing of a role in so far as the double consciousness of performance, actor/role, are acknowledged to be separate but mutually dependent entities. It is different from acting since no outside spectator exists to observe the performance. Yet "performed player" does provide for a mediated entity that exists in the intersubjective energy between the digital extension and the organic ego. Since ego transference is ubiquitous but never total in the playing of video games, the performed player provides an explanation of how the rhetorical placement of the player as the "you" of gameplay and the player's incomplete control over the digital extension generate a kind of metaphysical "feedback loop" that becomes an imagined subjectivity of its own. In Diablo (1996), the player controls her/his digital extension to defeat the "Lord of Terror," then watches that extension enter a cut-scene where it injects itself with the spirit of the demon and sets out to the "ancient lands of the East" to find a more permanent solution. The narrative informs that the player: "You pray that you have grown strong enough to contain the demon and keep him at bay" [33]. The double consciousness of performance then creates a performed player that is the "you" of gameplay. It would be absurd to claim that a psychologically stable organic player believes that he/she has actually injected herself/himself with the soul of an ancient evil at the close of gameplay, but the process of informational feedback loops through disrupted ego transference can be said to create an imagined performed player that exists in the interaction of organic ego and digital extension. The "you" of gameplay is an intersubjective metaphor created by the interaction.
<17> The advantage of the performed player metaphor is that it provides a paradigm for the study of interactions between video gameplay and lived reality, and potentially offers a new bridge between the considerable body of extrinsic and intrinsic studies of video games. Allowing for a model of subjective experience constructed on the specialized logic of the medium, it provides a landscape of possibilities for exploring identity construction and cognitive impact within its process. For example, future studies of violence in video games, which have heretofore dominated the extrinsic literature, could apply the metaphor of the performed player into a more demanding methodology of impact, acknowledging simultaneously the connection and division between the digital extension and the organic player created by the complex process of ego transference, and locating aggressive play not merely in the human player's experience or on the game screen, but in the imagined activities of the performed player [34]. An especially lucrative area of research concerns the significance of the performed player to positive identity construction, especially within such a monolithic identifying category as gender.
The Identity of the Performed Player
<18> As video games have become increasingly popular as a recreational activity in the United States, Great Britain, and other industrialized nations, there has been a recent marked increase in the representation of female gamers [35]. Recent statistics place women within a reasonable margin of their male counterparts. In the United States, where eighty-two percent of children ages 8-18 (male and female) play video games regularly, a gender division of those statistics reports ninety-five percent of males and seventy-five percent of females as regular players [36]. Most recent studies uphold these statistics, placing women between thirty-five to forty-five percent of the gameplaying audience [37].
<19> Some video game companies have begun to cater to the new demographics. Kathyrn Wright's article "The Gaming Industry and the Female Market" cites sixty-five video games designed by women for young female players, from 1994 to 1998 [38]. Nonetheless, the majority of video games are still aesthetically constructed as though their players were exclusively male. As gamer Kathryn Anderson-D'avila points out, the female game player would have few options were she to restrict her leisure time to video games gendered for her [39]. Even the successful Tomb Raider series, with its intelligent, witty, athletic female adventurer, Lara Croft, seems designed for its male players, as the digital icon of Croft commonly appears on the computer screen in unnecessarily revealing outfits [40].
<20> Ignorance of gender representation may spring from a long embedded ideology that neglects the female demographic on the basis of traditional statistics, statistics that recent investigations vigorously disprove, and is perpetuated by a disproportionately male body of game designers and producers [41]. Despite the incongruity, women continue to play, and an investigation of how they negotiate their representation in the context of the video game illuminates the performed player as an interactive construct composed of contradictory images of gender. On the basis of online game reviews and ethnographic research, the performed player mediates the digital gendering present in a masculinist industry.
<21> A number of electronically savvy individuals have created websites to support female game players. Gamegirlz.com, Womengamers.com, and Gamegal.com, among others, have appeared online since the late 1990s. These sites feature articles investigating issues important to women interested in video games, such as the minimal presence of female engineers in new technology trade schools or the treatment of female players by male players in online game sessions [42]. Each posts a variety of reviews of popular video games. These reviews critique games on the basis of complexity, difficulty, the beauty and elaborateness of its digital representations, generally called "graphics," and such technical concerns as file loading speed and smoothness of gameplay. These principles seem to be standard among male and female reviewers alike, but the female-oriented criticisms also include a brief discussion of gender representation [43]. These reviews are instrumental to a discussion of how women negotiate video games designed for men.
<22> It is through the process of disrupted ego transference that we find female players experiencing their subjectivity in such games as Tomb Raider, where, despite the seemingly positive female character, can still alienate female gamers through design choices that seem positioned toward men. However, the mutual creation of the performed player allows the female gamer to undercut sexualization of the digital extension's body (assumed for heterosexual male desire) and refocus attention to more empowering qualities of the icon of Lara Croft.
<23> The digital extension of Lara Croft demonstrates how even a strong female character can be marketed to a male demographic. The establishment of Croft as a strong, independent, female adventure-seeker, has, since the first programs, operated parallel to the visual representation of the character as an object of the male gaze. The Tomb Raider game series began in 1996, thrusting the then-infant Eidos Interactive to the frontline of computer game manufacturers. With four standard issues, Tomb Raider I, II, III, and IV: The Last Revelation, as well as several expansion packs and a special edition titled Tomb Raider: Chronicles, it would be impossible to discuss each program in detail within this article [44]. Alternatively, the body of games can be interrogated as a unit, encapsulated as the idea of the Tomb Raider series signified by the experience of playing Lara Croft.
<24> All Tomb Raider games follow the same basic narrative. Lara Croft is a rich Englishwoman, whose penchant for physical, outdoor activity has long alienated her from British elite society. Unconcerned with the snobbery, she lives out her life pursuing ancient treasures and doing battle with assorted evil characters, a sort of feminist's Indiana Jones. The object of gameplay is to use various weapons at Lara's disposal, as well as her near superhuman physical strength and athleticism, to overcome obstacles and eliminate hosts of enemies that cross her path [45].
<25> The Womengamers.com review of The Last Revelation provides a useful survey of the pleasing qualities of the game, as well as the gender concerns of Croft's electronic representation. The critic appreciates the "sassy, intelligent lead character," the graphics, which she calls "crisp" and "smooth," and the intellectually and coordinatively challenging puzzles (for the human player manipulating the mouse). In her "marketability to women" section, however, she problematizes the sexualization of the digital Croft icon and relates it directly to the application of technology, noting that, as computer game technology has grown, so has the ability to make the feminized appearance of Croft more "natural." The reviewer writes: "Let me put it this way, newer video cards allow higher polygon counts on the screen. Higher polygon counts on your screen makes for smoother curves. Get it?" [46] She is "more than a little baffled at the physical attraction anyone could feel for a completely digital image" [47]. In the popular media, the objectification of Lara Croft as, albeit fictional, female subject has coincided with the rise of Croft as icon. Television advertisements for Tomb Raider III began with a profile of enhanced gameplay possibilities and ended with a promise of "new outfits," which preceded a catwalk presentation of several human models in material equivalents of the revealing digital clothing Croft was to appear in during gameplay [48]. Sexual desire has followed the Tomb Raider series, perpetuated by both the industry, in its choice to portray Croft in revealing virtual clothing, and the players, who sexualize the image as subject of the male gaze.
<26> Despite the problematic sexuality of Tomb Raider, many women enjoy the programs. Oldham reports that, according to Eidos President Keith Boesky, thirty percent of Tomb Raider sales have gone independently to women, an exceptional figure, especially considering that it does not include sales to families where young women play the games, which arguably composes the greatest portion of the market [49]. The Womengamers.com reviewer adds to her complaint a recuperation of a positive vision for the mediated player: "However, I can understand how a sassy, intelligent lead character can draw interest to a game. Combined with great gameplay and some puzzles mixed in along the way, its easy to see why we are compelled to play TR again, and again" [50]. While sexualization of the digital image (seen as hostile to the female player's ego) disrupts positive female subjectivity, the intelligence and strength exhibited by Croft throughout gameplay (seen as "good" qualities of the ego) can be recuperated as a positive reinforcement of feminine identity. As the real world female player participates in the specialized process of video game narcissism, she subsumes the sexualization of the digital extension and convalesces its positive aspects of gender representation, producing a performed player that is less objectified and more empowered.
<27> Surveys of a number of male and female game players through an online discussion group asked subjects to answer several questions about their experience with the character of Lara Croft. Self-identified female players, similarly to the reviewer for Womengamers.com, expressed annoyance at her digital representation, but felt that, while instructing Croft to battle enemies, solving puzzles, and make her way through the various digital environments, they forget about her proportions and become "more interested in her abilities." Male players reported enjoying Croft's "proportions," but also felt that during gameplay, one quickly forgets "how hot she looks." The act of ego transference seems to reduce the objectification produced by/for the male gaze through the programming of the digital extension. The performed player may allow the human being to traverse the passive act of spectatorship that contributes most actively to gender objectification [51].
<28> Complimentary concerns of identity constructions (the monoliths of race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, and so forth) are less available to study, since the electronic age has not produced as visible a body of video game advocates as those manifested by the various "female gamer" websites. These are no less important, however, and it should be clear that the performed player provides an equally useful lens into the experience of, for example, a male Latino gamer playing Lara Croft.
<29> Some identity categories are less troublesome than others. Representations in class, for example, in so far as one considers only the direct experience of video gameplay (ignoring that the classic "digital divide" between human players of varied economic agency prevents some people from playing certain games) are not as inequitable as gender. From such early video games as Space Quest (1986) to such recent games as Resident Evil (1997), video games have not only been non-hierarchical, they have often been anti-hierarchical with regards to economic class. Space Quest centers on a digital extension of janitor Roger Wilco, who eventually becomes the savior of the galaxy; Resident Evil indicts industrial capitalism through a corporation whose irresponsible practices cause the player's digital extension, along with the narrated population of the United States, to be overrun by the living dead [52].
<30> Race is more difficult, since industry ambivalence toward positive multiracial representation seems even more significant than in gender. David Cole, president of DFC Intelligence, a market research company that contracts in the video games industry, argues that the video games industry tries to stay as neutral as possible in its representation of the race and ethnicity of game characters, in order to avoid offending potential customers [53]. While he acknowledges that video game sales closely represent the national population (African Americans, for example, constitute a $2.2 billion share of the market), he maintains the approved strategy is to avoid dealing with race. Nonetheless, many video games include digital extensions of different colors. Roleplaying games like Baldur's Gate allow the human player to customizer her/his digital extension by choosing the skin, hair, eye, and clothing colors of its representation. The African American female gamer can create a digital extension that physically resembles a black female, allowing her to create a performed play that is at least racially like herself. However, the digital extension, with its use of early modern English and slight hint of a European dialect, suggest pre-colonial Europe rather than twenty-first century America. The African American female gamer could participate in the creation of a performed player that exists in a fantasy multiracial Europe, or one that is merely a colorblind casting of an essentially white, western character. A third-person perspective games like Marian Gothic: Unification (2000) requires that the player accept the digital extension's race as programmed into gameplay [54]. Ego transference for an African American man playing Martian Gothic can be reinforced into an idealized vision of racial harmony, since the player's digital extensions are three different people (a white English female security officer, an African American commander, and an Asian American science officer) who must work together to achieve their mission. Likewise, racially positioned character traits (the African American hunches more when he runs) could disrupt ego transference.
<31> While the ability of the player to engage in the creation of a performed player that reinforces qualities of the ego perceived as good, and reduces qualities perceived as hostile, should not be understated, hegemonic understandings of identity programmed into gameplay merit equal consideration. Only with a rich understanding of the possibilities inherent in the digital extensions available to the player, both within specific games and across the field of video game production, will academic study be able to investigate the production of the performed player through this incomplete process of ego transference, and to begin exploring the impact of performed video game players on the subjective experience of living human beings.
Notes
[1] Video game is an adequate term to encompass both home "game consoles," devices created expressly for gameplay and games played on microcomputers of the Macintosh or IBM "Clone" (PC) types. The experience of both systems is essentially the same and programmers create versions of most games for both. [^]
[2] The most recent example of this obligatory preamble, as I call it, is the jacket of a recent collection, The Medium of the Video Game, ed. Mark J. Wolf (Austin: University of Texas, 2001). Wolf's contribution to the field is a pointed example of the disciplinary boundaries discussed throughout this article. While Wolf and four other scholars provide an erudite series of essays detailing the history and intrinsic aspects of the video game, as well as three studies looking at the medium through psychological and ethnographic lenses, there is surprisingly little effort therein to combine the two, though certainly the reader would be able to infer how the different methodologies might speak to one another. [^]
[3] David Myers states that the study of computer games may seem "frivolous" to some. See his: "Computer Game Semiotics," Play & Culture 4 (1991): 334-45. [^]
[4] The now famous "first video game," (although it is more accurately called the first "popular consumer video game" as computer designers created "tennis" games in programming studios several years before they became a consumer product) Pong, appeared in the mid-1970s. The first studies appeared by the early 1980s. The first essays include: "Personality Differences between High and Low Video Game Users" (1983), "Video Games as Psychological Tests" (1984), "Videogames, Sex, and Sex Differences" (1984), and "Video Games: Competing with Machines" (1987). Currently, nearly fourteen hundred books, articles, manuals, and guides on the subject exist at libraries across the United States. [^]
[5] Lionel Van Deerlin, "The Electronic Slaughter of the Innocents," San Diego Union, December 21, 1992. [^]
[6] For example, see: Bill Green, Jo-Anne Reid, and Chris Bigum, "Teaching the Nintendo Generation? Children, Computer Culture, and Popular Technologies," Wired Up: Young People and the Electronic Media, ed. Sue Howard (Bristol, PA: UCL Press, 1998), 19-41; Nola Alloway and Pam Gilbert, "Video Game Culture: Playing with Masculinity, Violence, and Pleasure," Wired Up: Young People and the Electronic Media, ed. Sue Howard (Bristol, PA: UCL Press, 1998), 95-114. [^]
[7] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 242. [^]
[8] McLuhan and other media theorists tend toward the position that form produces content; communications theorists often hold that media provide systems through which meanings are communicated. Which side one takes in this dispute depends very much on one's philosophical acceptance or rejection of individual agency. If software designers have an agenda independent of the rules of their field of production, then those designers can be said to use the medium to communicate. If the software designer's agenda is, in part or whole, product of the medium, as Bourdieu and other postmodern sociologists would argue, then it is more likely that form of video games precedes their messages. [^]
[9] Though variously suggested, the text is specifically quoted from one of Bourdieu's writings on sports. See: Pierre Bourdieu, "How can one be a Sports Fan?" The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During (New York: Routlege, 1993), 341. [^]
[10] See: Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, edited by Randall Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). [^]
[11] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 242. [^]
[12] For an introduction to postmodern developmental psychology's reversal of Freud see: Daniel N. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1985). [^]
[13] Core Design, Tomb Raider, vol. 1-9 (Eidos Interactive, 1996-2002), PC-CDROM source; Monolith Productions, Aliens V. Predator, vol. 1-2 (Fox Interactive, 1999/2001), PC-CDROM source. [^]
[14] Bioware, Baldur's Gate (Interplay, 1999), PC CD-ROM Source; emphasis by the author. [^]
[15] Drawn from: Melanie Klein, "Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms," The Writings of Melanie Klein (London: Hogarth Press, 1946); Klein does not actually refer to narcissism, but the psychoanalytic concept is held to be same by scholars in the field. See: Hanna Segal and David Bell, "Theory of Narcissism in Freud and Klein," Freud's "On Narcissism" An Introduction, edited by Joseph Sandler, et. al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). [^]
[16] Some readers may be familiar with objections to the Freudian model of ego, superego, and id, in postmodern developmental psychoanalysis. In this article, however, Klein's use of the Freudian ego is applied as a philosophical explanatory metaphor and is not maintained as a transcendental property of the human mind. In the 20th and 21st centuries, what Freud once led western civilization to believe were universal qualities of consciousness are still valuable to philosophy, even if their empirical psychological credentials are notably suspect. [^]
[17] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 45. [^]
[18] Explained in: Nikolaas Treurniet, "Introduction to 'On Narcissism'" Freud's "On Narcissism" An Introduction, edited by Joseph Sandler, et. al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 85. [^]
[19] Steven Poole, Trigger Happy: Video Games and the Entertainment Revolution (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000), 1-44. [^]
[20] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 41-45. [^]
[21] Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 165-67. [^]
[22] Id Software, Doom (Id Software, 1993), PC CD-ROM Source. [^]
[23] Activision, Civilization: Call to Power (Activision, 1999), PC CD-ROM Source. [^]
[24] Steven Poole, Trigger Happy: Video Games and the Entertainment Revolution (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000), 34-35. [^]
[25] David Myers, "Computer Game Semiotics," Play & Culture 4 (1991): 338; 340. [^]
[26] Sid Meier, Railroad Tycoon (Microprose, 1990), PC CD-ROM. [^]
[27] David Myers, "Computer Game Semiotics," Play & Culture 4 (1991): 341. Myers prefers "computer game." In deference to him, I will use that term when quoting his work. [^]
[28] David Myers, "Computer Game Semiotics," Play & Culture 4 (1991): 335. [^]
[29] Friedrich Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems, edited by John Johnston (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1997), 151. [^]
[30] These notions are contingent on the notion of "good" as identified with that which most people perceive as "good," such as strength, honesty, compassion, and the notion of "hostile" as identified with such as "cruelty" or "greed." Although the structure of a game may create complications, as when the digital extension of Grand Theft Auto receives points for "murdering" electronic representations of innocent pedestrians, the player is always projecting the digital extension with some positive quality of the self, although "power" may certainly be gained at the expense of her/his sense of "fairness" or "mercy." [^]
[31] Sierra Online, Betrayal at Antara (Sierra Online, 1996), PC CD-ROM Source. [^]
[32] Ted Friedman, "Making Sense of Software: Computer Games and Interactive Textuality," Cybersociety: Computer Mediated Communication and Community (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995), 73. [^]
[33] Blizzard, Diablo (Blizzard, 1996), PC CD-ROM source; emphasis by the author. [^]
[34] Until recently, researchers have studied the impact of violent video games exclusively as a form of digital text, images and storylines no different from a television program, or as a game, no different from playing with war toys or engaging in aggressive sports. Nola Alloway and Pam Gilbert provide a timely study of violent video games as popular culture texts that "produce and market a politics of gender under the guise of apolitical entertainment." Surveying a number of young boys who were in the habit of playing such violent games as Doom, Alloway and Gilbert found that the boys had internalized a politics of masculinity that equates violence with pleasure and desire. These adolescents believed that their sisters and mothers did not like playing such games, but believed they did because, as one child put it: "Little kids like guns, racing cars, and all that." Though Alloway and Gilbert could have qualified their subjects' viewpoint by noting the large number of young women who currently play video games, they provide an interesting argument for the need to look critically at the violence in popular culture narratives to reduce the gendering present in associating violence with being male. The metaphor of the performed player would enhance connections between the pre-adolescent perception of masculinity being engaged in violence, and the reported gender distinctions made by the boys in their surveys. The boys believed that their fathers were also in the habit of playing video games, both on their home consoles and in video arcades. The performed player in this case, is a mediation between the organic selves, the young boys playing with guns and the digital extension of an ultramodern military man. The structure of game play, however, does not encourage total self-immersion; the boys implicitly understand that they are not actually discharging firearms or driving cars, as evidenced by their statements that neither they nor their younger brothers have ever "driven a car or shot a gun." There is considerable if not total engagement in the texts presented through the video game that perhaps makes it more efficacious than simply watching violent images on a television screen. Nonetheless, there is sufficient mediation produced by the digital construct to prevent complete loss of the cognitive distinction between the organic self and the programmed self. See: Nola Alloway and Pam Gilbert, "Video Game Culture: Playing with Masculinity, Violence, and Pleasure." Wired Up: Young People and the Electronic Media, edited by Sue Howard (Bristol, PA: UCL Press, 1998). [^]
[35] For historical works on the development of computer games from Pong to the twenty-first century, see: The Medium of the Video Game, ed. Mark J. Wolf (Austin: University of Texas, 2001); Steven L. Kent, The First Quarter: A 25-Year History of Video Games (Bothell, WA: BWD Press, 2000); Jessie Cameron Herz, Joystick Nation: How Video Games Ate our Quarters, Won our Hearts, and Rewired our Minds (Toronto: Little, Brown & Company, 1997); Leonard Herman, Phoenix: The Rise and Fall of Video Games (New York: McGraw Hill, 1984). [^]
[36] "Statistics on Media Usage," Learning Resources Center Online (Learning Resources Centers, 2001), 30 April 2001: http://www.media-awareness.ca/eng/issues/stats/index.htm. [^]
[37] See: "Women and Computer Games," About.com (About.com, 2001), 20 May 2001: http://interactfiction.about.com/games/interactfiction/library/weekly/aa122099a.htm. [^]
[38] Kathyrn Wright, "The Gaming Industry & The Female Market," Womengamers.com (Womengamers.com, 2001), 20 May 2001: http://www.womengamers.com/articles/market.html. [^]
[39] Katharine Anderson-Dávila, "What's in a name, Who's in the game," Womengamers.com (Womengamers.com, 2000), 14 May 2001: http://www.womengamers.com. [^]
[40] Noted in a review of the most recent edition of the game, at Womengamers.com. The unnamed reviewer argued that there really is no practical reason for an explorer to wear a black bikini. I will explore this contradiction further throughout the article. [^]
[41] Early ethnographic and psychographic analyses include: "Personality Differences between High and Low Video Game Users" (1983), "Video Games as Psychological Tests" (1984), "Videogames, Sex, and Sex Differences" (1984), and "Video Games: Competing with Machines" (1987). David Myers provides a brief survey of these articles in "Chris Crawford and Computer Game Aesthetics," Journal of Popular Culture 24. 2 (1990): 17-32. See also: Gillian Skirrow, "Hellivision: An Analysis of Video Games," High Theory/ Low Culture: Analyzing Popular Television and Film, Ed. Colin McCabe (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1986) 115. For a recent survey of the gender state of the video games industry see: Jennifer Oldham, "The Cutting Edge; Few Makers of Video Games are Playing to Women," Los Angeles Times, 25 May 1998: D1. [^]
[42] For readers unaware of this facet of computer games, a popular alternative to solo gameplay involves logging on to a online version of a game like Doom or Diablo to compete with other gamers in a multiplayer game. [^]
[43] I base the first conclusion on my comparative reading of many reviews on women's gaming sites and gender neutral gaming sites. [^]
[44] An expansion pack is a game file that includes extra sequences of play, often referred to as "missions." [^]
[45] Lara Croft can leap hundred foot gaps and catch miniscule stone crevices with her fingertips, while sustaining only minor wounds. [^]
[46] "Review of Tomb Raider IV: The Last Revelation," Womengamers.com (Womengamers.com, 2001), 21 May 2001: http://www.womengamers.com/revprev/adv/TR4.html. [^]
[47] "Review of Tomb Raider IV: The Last Revelation," Womengamers.com (Womengamers.com, 2001), 21 May 2001: http://www.womengamers.com/revprev/adv/TR4.html. [^]
[48] To maintain focus on the video games industry, this article does not discuss the 2001 film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider produced by Paramount Pictures, nor various Lara Croft memorabilia, such as game and movie posters. [^]
[49] Jennifer Oldham, "The Cutting Edge; Few Makers of Video Games are Playing to Women," Los Angeles Times, 25 May 1998: D1. [^]
[50] "Review of Tomb Raider IV: The Last Revelation," Womengamers.com (Womengamers.com, 2001), 21 May 2001: http://www.womengamers.com/revprev/adv/TR4.html. [^]
[51] Anonymous, interviews by the author, College Park, Mary., 20 April 2002. [^]
[52] Roberta Williams, Space Quest (Sierra Online, 1986), PC CD-ROM Source; Capcom Entertainment, Resident Evil (Virgin Interactive, 1997), PC CD-ROM Source. [^]
[53] Marvin V. Greene, "Their Work is all Play: Turning Their Pastimes into Careers in the Video Games Industry," USBE Information Technology (Career Communications Group, 2002), 12 November, 2002: http://www.blackengineer.com/PDA/entertainment/video.htm. [^]
[54] Creative Reality, Martian Gothic: Unification (Take 2 Games, 2000), PC CD-ROM Source. [^]