Navigating and Pruning the Gardens of Forking Paths: Cyberpunk, Videogames, and Globalization

Computer and video games have existed, in their present form, since the Pong craze of the early seventies. During that time they have developed rapidly into an important part both of the global economy and of mass culture around the world (one of the first new shops to open in US-occupied Baghdad, we"re told, was a store selling pirated CDs and Playstation games). But academics have only recently found them worthy of serious scrutiny. Game studies now are probably still in the same phase that film studies were in the '20s—we"re still trying to make sense of the medium (we're still debating, in fact, whether the computer game can properly be termed a "medium" at all); still trying to develop a basic critical vocabulary for the interpretation of computer games; still trying to figure out what their relationship is to older media.

Meanwhile, the medium itself is constantly changing, fueled by Moore's Law—which also fuels (and is fueled by) the mechanisms of global capital. Not that the fact of change is surprising in and of itself. But the rate of change, and the degree to which the evolution of the medium depends on the laws of the market, is perhaps unprecedented. Computer games stage, in very explicit ways, the feedback loops between global culture and global capital.

Yet few, if any, studies have been published that attempt to theorize video and computer games in the context of globalization theory. That is the object of this paper. The assumption is that globalization (however one chooses to define it) generates the necessity for new modes of subjectivity; new configurations of communities; new ways of thinking about labor and production and so on--and that cultural criticism can help us recognize and understand these new configurations. Video games in particular, I would like to suggest, generate and/or reflect new ways of thinking about embodiment, control, and community formation in a globalized world.

I open with a consideration of William Gibson's "cyberpunk" science fiction as my main reference point here, for two main reasons. First of all because, in the two decades or so since its inception, cyberpunk fiction (most especially Gibson"s Cyberspace Trilogy—Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive), has been immensely influential in shaping the ways that we think about the information technology revolution in general, and in shaping the ways that we think of computer games in particular. My second reason for wanting to deal with cyberpunk fiction here is—I'll return to this later in the paper—because Frederic Jameson seems to consider cyberpunk literature as, perhaps, the literary genre most explicitly concerned with cognitive mapping.

To cut to the chase: the discourse in cyberpunk literature over the effects of the new communications technologies is dominated by the trope of disembodiment. In cyberpunk fiction's inaugural work, Neuromancer, William Gibson describes cyberspace as a "consensual hallucination" onto which one's "disembodied consciousness" is "projected" (Neuromancer 5)--"a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system" (Neuromancer 52). Cyberspace, in Gibson"s world, is a Heaven of "bodiless exultation" (Neuromancer 6), a luminous "nonspace of the mind [filled with] clusters and constellations of data" (Neuromancer 51).

The "meatspace" of the body, then, is by definition Hell. Expelled from cyberspace for rebelling against his employers, Case "falls into the prison of his own flesh" (Neuromancer 6). Another Lucifer figure, Tiny (from "Dogfight," a story Gibson co-wrote with Michael Swanwick) is a former fighter pilot who is now wheelchair bound, his nervous systems having failed under the stress of serving as the human CPU in a cybernetic cockpit, his eyes speaking of 'an eternity of fear and confinement [...] two edges sawing away at each other endlessly' (Burning Chrome 165). The body serves, in fact, both as penitentiary and commodity—a kind of disposable and recyclable carceral fashion accessory for the mind. Malleable faces and anatomies abound in Gibson's oeuvre. The narrator of "Johnny Mnemonic," at the beginning of the story, examines his store-bought face: "your basic sharp-faced Caucasoid with a ruff of stiff, dark hair. The girls at Under the Knife were big on Sony Mao, and it was getting harder to keep them from adding the chic suggestion of epicanthic folds" (Burning Chrome 1).

The mind, on the other hand, endures even after the death of the body—several major characters in Gibson's trilogy exist only as "personality constructs"; their bodies long dead, their minds uploaded to memory units as data structures. The split between mind and body that this suggests is highlighted by the cybernetic "Aleph" of Mona Lisa Overdrive—a giant bio-chip that possesses enough computational power to simulate an entire alternate universe. The Aleph (plainly inspired by the story by Borges) is inhabited by the consciousness of a hacker named Bobby Newmark, while his body wastes away, permanently sedated, strapped to a bed, fed intravenously. Ultimately his body dies, but Bobby lives on, in the Aleph. Bobby Newmark transcends meatspace by deciding to have a new body that is made out of information instead of flesh---by deciding, in effect, that his body (all bodies) might as well have been made of data all along.

All of this takes place against the backdrop of a world of which we catch only momentary glimpses, its landscapes characterized rather by the evocative fragment than by the in-depth portrayal of the whole. This is a fragmented-ness determined (or so Gibson would seem to suggest), largely by the limitations of the body, which is unequal to the task of processing its perceptions. Ultimately, then, the entire Cyberspace trilogy becomes a pedagogical text, instructing us on how one can come to see the world entire, unbroken. The shape of the world--our world--is only visible, the novels suggest, when we realize that the world is a structure of data, not flesh. This is a working-out into narrative form of the image of transcendence presented early in Neuromancer, of what we see when we

program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Mahattan, outlines of hundred-year old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta (43).

The entire sequence of novels, in fact, is ultimately about the birth of Minds—AIs—that never had bodies to begin with, and who come to serve as figures for the unknowable totality of the data-world. But there's no room for human beings in this world, except when they are coded into data-organisms. At the end of Neuromancer, Case is doubled; split into personality-construct-Case and flesh-Case. Personality-construct-Case is assumed, like Enoch, into a data heaven, walking side by side, along an endless beach, with the AI god Neuromancer and the personality-construct ghost of his former lover, Linda Lee. Flesh-Case simply disappears, walking out of the life of his current lover, the stubbornly embodied "street samurai" Molly (who is probably an intertextual echo of the equally stubbornly embodied Molly Bloom).

Gibson's cyberspace, in Neuromancer, is characterized as being the offspring of "primitive arcade games" (51), by which Gibson meant Pong, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong (he was writing in 1983-4). This would seem to suggest that Gibson sees the beginning of a mind-body split in the experience of playing a video game. A brief overview of the critical literature on video games suggests that this trope of disembodiment has also been naturalized as part of the way in which video games are viewed or analyzed or evaluated. In popular theorizing of video games, for instance, typical video game reviews score games under the subheadings of "graphics," "sound," and "gameplay." Graphics and sound are what appeal to the sensorium; gameplay (or so it"s implied) goes on at some different level, of cognition or aesthetics.

The same trend, perhaps, is to be found even in more sophisticated treatments of video games. Two major strands of video game theory, for instance, are concerned with video games and violence; video games and gender. These strands of game criticism typically focus on the game's influence on the game player's identity/subjectivity, focusing on, for example, social/cultural codes in games, which the game player is perceived as [being in danger of] internalizing. Another, more recent strand of critical thinking on video games focuses on the video game as encoded data and algorithms that run that data. In this case, the player is seen as reproducing the algorithms embedded within the game program. Thus, Lev Manovitch argues, in his Language of New Media, that

the similarity of between the actions expected of the player and computer algorithms is too uncanny to be dismissed. While computer games do not follow a database logic, they appear to be ruled by another logic—that of the algorithm. They demand that a player execute an algorithm in order to win. [...] the user is trying to build a mental model of the computer model (222-3)

Similarly, Lee Shuen-Shing, in his analysis of the temporalities of gaming, argues that the experience of playing a game is characterized by a process of "negotiation," in which the player encounters a series of problems that need to be solved in order for the game to progress:

Aporia, a dilemma or a difficult moment in making decisions in games, exists in the time span of negotiation. When negotiation grows into recognition, this aporia is dissolved and the emotive state of the player advances into epiphany, "a sudden, often unexpected solution to the impasse in the event space,"

The experience of gameplay is thus seen as essentially disembodied. The mind is what exists in a circuit with the program, playing the game. How did we come to this point? Why is the body so mysteriously erased, first from cyberpunk literature, and from our conception of the new technologies (specifically, in this case, video games)? Manovitch theorizes that "data structures and algorithms are two halves of the ontology of the world according to a computer" (222-3). Here, we should perhaps reverse this statement and think about why we tend to think of our relationship to the computer only in terms of data structure and algorithm.

What follows is, of course, hopelessly simplistic and reductive, but it must nevertheless serve to establish the parameters of my argument. I begin perforce with Descartes, who, at the beginning of the modern age, conceptualizes the self as consciousness: I think therefore I am. The body thus becomes an epiphenomenon of identity, which, in the formulation of the world implicit in the cogito, resides in the rational mind. And this paves the way for Adam Smith, who, scant decades thereafter, first conceptualizes the market as a self-regulating set of Cartesian reasoning subjects, who act in accord with the demands of enlightened self-interest. Smith"s ideal consumers are rational minds that process the information given to them according to a set of logical rules. By quantifying value--by splitting it into use value and exchange value—-they are able to visualize the market as a field of data, mapped on the non-spatial coordinates of the supply / demand graph. And this is, as countless (most notably, of course, Adorno and Horkheimer in The Dialectic of Enlightenment) have argued, the beginning of the dominant formulation of modern human identity: that of the liberal human subject.

Fast forward to the twentieth century, to the work of Alan Turing. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that you are in an isolation chamber (or so Turing's famous thought-experiment goes), fitted with a input-output terminal that communicates either with a program (a data structure) running on a machine, or with another human being sitting in another isolation chamber with another input-output terminal. Into this terminal one types questions, statements—whatever comes to mind. The terminal then displays responses. Now, Turing asks, as long as the responses that are displayed on the terminal seem to make sense, seem, in other words, to be actual responses to your input, does it make much difference whether the response is coming from another human being or from a machine? And if it turns out that your interlocutor is a machine, then wouldn't we have to say that the machine is, in a sense, thinking?

Rationality—and hence subjectivity---is thus equated with a particular structure of disembodied information ("disembodied," that is, because the question of whether the body exists or not is treated as being immaterial—-pun intended—-to the question of cognition / consciousness). The Turing machine need only produce verbal responses that seem rational. This, we might say, is the logical end point to the conception of the liberal human subject—-the self / mind / consumer as automaton / program / data structure. We could easily argue that this erasure of the body is the final horizon of disciplinary power, a "policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behaviour" that is meant to produce "practiced bodies, 'docile' bodies" (Foucault 138). What is more docile, after all, than something that is entirely superfluous?

Meanwhile, between the beginning of the Enlightenment and the present, the world (or the world economy—which amounts, within this framework, to the same thing), as a data structure, grows monstrously complex, in ways that have been theorized by, among others, Lyotard, Jameson, and Baudrillard. Baudrillard sees this complexity as the inevitable end-result of the uncontrolled proliferation (or "orgy," as he calls it in The Transparency of Evil) of what we might in this context (the assumption that the world is itself one vast data structure) see as data structures that explain the world-as-data-structure (we can map these meta-data-strutures onto Lyotard"s meta-narratives). For if the world is a data structure or database, we need, as Manovitch theorizes, some sort of interface to navigate it, and these interfaces are, in this case, ideologies, maps, simulacra. But, according to Baudrillard,

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory [...] it is with [...] imperialism that present-day simulators attempt to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation (1-2).

If the world is seen as a data structure, then all one needs in order to master or change the world is more data, or a different way of manipulating data—everything remains at the level of data, which was formerly the level of the representation of reality, but has now in effect replaced reality. Thus instead of the interface and the database remaining separate, it is always the case that the interface actively changes or determines the database. So, the orgy: the interfaces multiply, and each interface rearranges the data-world, until, finally, change becomes trivial, insofar as it is impossible to track. We arrive at a kind of critical mass of complexity; the world manifests itself as an overwhelming flow of data that we cannot process, in which we have no agency (Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle is another source that we might cite here), representation for which we no longer know the referent. As in cyberpunk fiction, disembodiment is both the driving force behind a vast, unknowable world system, and the reason for its opacity. Thus we have Jameson"s description of the postmodern:

The postmodern body [...] is no exposed to a perceptual barrage of immediacy from which all sheltering layers and intervening mediations have been removed (280) [...] alienation is directly proportional to the mental unmapability of local [space] [...]the gap between the local positioning of the individual subject and the totality of class structures in which he or she is situated, a gap between phenomenological perception and a reality that transcends all individual thinking or experience [...] (283).

The postmodern can thus be seen as a crisis precisely in the conception of the Enlightenment subject as competent data-processing machine, a crisis (an aporia, in fact) in the ability of the subject to reason its ways through the complexities of a data-world shaped by global capital.

Ultimately we might say the shock of the postmodern, at least in this context, amounts to a kind of massive system overload—-something like a global "blue screen of death" (the blue screen that Windows computers displayed—at least up until the time of Windows 98—when the computer ran into a "fatal error"). Meanwhile, the material, embodied realities that are quantified as data, and which are ultimately obscured by that quantification (alienation as Cartesian split; as divorce between signifier and signified) subject countless people to misery.

Jameson insists that the only way to resist the pressures of late capitalism and of the postmodern—to combat this alienating data overload---is to try to recover a sense of place in the world, to recover the material, spatial coordinates that the forces of global capital have masked or de-privileged as being extraneous to the representational data flows of the market. Culture and cultural criticism alike have to perform this work of cognitive mapping, which, in the end, is precisely the attempt to think of postmodern data overload as something other than data, something other than overload.

But what happens when cognitive mapping merely serves to reinscribe the fallacies of what it is intended to resist? Cognitive mapping, in the Jamesonian sense, is an attempt to "think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system. It is in terms of that enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable, other reality of economic and social institutions that, in my opinion, the postmodern sublime can alone be adequately theorized" (38, my emphases). Note that the intrepid cognitive mapper is still only trying to think, to theorize, to reason his or her way through the complexities of the "postmodern sublime"—that the cognitive mapper / critic / artist / postmodern subject is, then, implicitly still disembodied, still alienated. Is the cognitive mapper then just another free-floating intelligence; another Gernbackian figure of Enlightenment Reason? Where"s the "postmodern body" to be found in all of this?

The notion of cognitive mapping thus becomes problematic. The cognitive map is not enough (we could invoke Last Year at Marienbad here, that wonderful example of the uncontrolled proliferation and resultant collapse of the map-making function of data / narrative structures in the post-modern era). We need different kinds of maps. We need haptic and somatic maps; maps that function not only as toolkits—-as implements or extensions of implemental reason--but more intimately, as part of our bodies, as part of our baseline somatic perception of the world, as an integral part of the ongoing processes of life.

This may ultimately mean that "map" isn"t even quite the right word for what we want—at least, not "maps" in the traditional cartographic sense. For what is a map in the traditional sense but an attempt to represent reality? Representation--which implies a separation between informational representation and material reality, which is to say, yet another re-inscription of disembodiment; another kind of data structure. And a map is also, traditionally, static and unchanging (at least until revised—Kuhn's theory of paradigm shifts is a theory of updated maps)—which is why they tend, at least according to Baudrillard, bend "reality" (which is made, apparently, of much more malleable stuff) to conform to their outlines.

Here we can learn from Deleuze and Guattari's Thousand Plateaus. According to Deleuze and Guattari such a "map" should properly be called a tracing rather than a map. A tracing is, in their words, an "image of the world" that "reproduces an unconscious closed in upon itself" (12). What we need, in contrast, is not an arbitrary freeze frame of the world, reduced to one static state—-something that aspires to a deterministic, Laplacean knowledge of initial conditions—-but rather a fluid, flexible model of future possibilities; an emergent model through which we can organize our experience of the indeterminate. This is a true "map," to again use the words of Deleuze and Guattari, one that is "entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real [...] it constructs the unconscious [...] it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification [...]" (Deleuze and Guattari 12).

We can also refer to Douglass Rushkoff, who argues that, in order to make sense of a chaotic landscape, one needs to employ a combination of pattern recognition skills and flexibility—

A non-linear appreciation of historical time, where useful moments and strategies—even the strategy of linearity itself—can be absorbed on an as-needed basis, divorced of their original contexts (Rushkoff 34). The ability to recognize the quality of something from its shape and to trust one's impulses based on this recognition, may be the key skill in understanding any chaotic landscape (Rushkoff 53).

Rushkoff suggests that in order to become more efficient at recognizing useful patterns, one needs to be able to perform the operation of condensing information into "icons"—-once thus compressed, information "can be scanned and understood quickly [...] icons amount to the recognizable patterns underlying more complex situations" (55).

Also of some appeal is the idea of emergent strategy as articulated by Will Wright, creator of the popular Sim- series of games (Sim City, Sim Ant, Sim Farm, Sim Tower, The Sims, etc. etc.).

In Go, both players have a model of what's happening on the board, and over time those models get closer and closer and closer together until the final score. At that point you have a total shared model of, you know, "you beat me." (Laughter.) Up until that point, though, there's quite a large divergence in the mental models that players have [...] In each player"s mind, there's this idea that "Oh, I control this and they control that, and we're fighting over this." They each have a map in their head of what"s going on, and those maps are in disagreement. And it's those areas of maximum disagreement where the battles are all fought. You play a piece there, and I think "Oh, that's in my territory, I"m going to attack it cause you're in my territory." Whereas you"re thinking, "Oh, that's my territory, you're invading me." And finally, the battle resolves that in our heads, and then it's pretty clear that, "Okay, that's your territory and that's mine." So the game is in fact this process of us bringing our different mental models into agreement. Through battle.

This is a model of not of representational cognitive mapping, but of a struggle between two intersecting potential realities; two simulations that are mediated through the agon of the game. What interests me here, again, is the characterization of reality as a fluctuating process rather than rational structure.

These theorists, among others, then, seem to offer us some ways out of the deterministic stasis implied in the Jamesonian concept of cognitive mapping. What they all offer is a conception of cognitive mapping as fluid modeling process, as heuristic practice rather than representation or description. Wright and Rushkoff (Deleuze and Guattari to a lesser extent), however, still fail to address the problem of embodiment. Their solutions are still contained within the horizon of conscious cognition. The maps (or models or algorithms, whichever we choose to call them) that are needed in order to carry out a truly successful cognitive mapping, on the other hand, must be used, as I"ve suggested above, not just at the cognitive level, but at the level of the body.

This is, I would like to argue, precisely what we can learn from computer and video games. Let's think about the steps that are involved in learning to play a game. I'll use Soul Calibur II, a popular cross-platform 3D fighting game, as an example. In this game one plays as one of 23 (on console) or 16 (on arcade) characters (each of whom has a distinct martial-arts weapon and motion captured pseudo-authentic style---samurai with katana using Kenjutsu moves, Chinese monk using Monkey Pole style, Chinese girl using Wu-shu sword style, German knight with giant claymore, etc.), and fights (in one of several approximately tennis court sized arenas) against another character, controlled either by the computer or by another player. Each character can move in eight directions—to their front, back, left, right, and so on—at differing speeds, depending on the joystick input, and on the character"s base speed. Moves (slashes, kicks, throws) are executed by combining strictly timed joystick motions and button presses. When moves connect with your opponent (i.e., when the game detects a collision between the polygons representing your weapon and the polygons representing your opponent), the opponent either takes damage (represented by the shrinking of a green "life bar" at the top of the screen), or blocks (if the other player is holding the block button). The fight is over when one character's life bar is depleted completely, or when time runs out, in which case the player whose character has the most life left wins.

The first step in learning the game is this: you learn what you can do, and how to do it. You learn (to both execute and recognize) your character's moves, where and how they hit, how far they reach, how fast they are, how much damage they do. Each character has somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and fifty different moves.

Second step: you learn what everybody else can do--you learn everybody else's moves, where and how they hit, their reach, their speed, their damage, how to block or avoid them, etc.

Third step: you start going into more technical details--you familiarize yourself thoroughly with the deep structures and rules of the game, insofar as you can determine them, through a process of trial and error. All animations in SC take place at 60 frames per second. Each move takes a certain amount of time to hit, and a certain amount of time to recover from before your character can do another move, or before your character can block; these increments of time can be counted in terms of frames--thus one might say that a move takes 10 frames to hit, or 15. Recovery time changes according to whether your move actually hit the other character, or whether it was blocked. By figuring out the technical properties of the animations, then, one can begin to calculate some aspects of game strategy using simple arithmetic. For example, the character Xianghua's basic horizontal slash takes 10 frames to impact, gives 6 frames of advantage on hit and -1 advantage on block, meaning that if the other character is hit by this move, 6 frames (or 1/10 of a second) must pass before the other character can move, attack, or block, and that if the other character blocks Xianghua's move, 1 frame (or 1/60 of a second ) must pass before Xianghua can move, attack, or block. In practical terms this means that if Xianghua's slash hits, and she immediately decides to do another, identical move, the other character's move would have to have an impact timeframe of under 4 frames in order for it to be able to interrupt Xianghua's second hit. But no character has a move that takes less than 10 frames to hit, which means that Xianghua's second hit is guaranteed. Alternately, if Xianghua's slash is blocked, and she tries to do the same move immediately afterwards, her 1 frame disadvantage ensures that only a move that hits in under 11 frames (and only if the player playing the opponent executes that move instantaneously) would have a chance of interrupting it--and such moves are rare; half of the characters in the game don't even have moves that are faster than 12 frames. Intermediate-to-high level players either know or have good estimates of the frame data for all of the moves in the game, and know how use this knowledge to their advantage—frame data determines, to a large degree, when one can press the attack, and when one must stay on defense.

The fourth step is when you start recognizing where the rules of the game break down. At even higher levels of play, players have come to know the game so well that they can identify points where the game does not follow its own rules--glitches--and exploit these oversights as if they were always meant to be part of the game.

Fifth step: you are able to apply all of the above to gameplay, and you are able to read your opponent's strategy in terms of all of this data as well—to anticipate your opponent (gamers call this yomi, a term borrowed from judo). This is not the ability, of course, to forecast one's opponent's moves (like some super-Kasparov who already knows what his opponent is going to do twenty moves in advance), to have mapped out in advance every event on a grid of space and time. That, given the number of different things your opponent could do, is impossible. Rather it is the ability to predict, based on a mix of pattern-recognition ("the last couple of times when my opponent was in this particular situation, he reacted in such-and-such a way, so this time he's probably going to do the same thing"), and empathic projection ("if I were him in this situation, what would I do?"), four or five likely scenarios. Since you can only do one move at a time, your goal, in this situation, is to pick the move that counters the greatest number of those possible scenarios.

Gameplay at this level is already, then, a process of heuristic modeling, an attempt to make sense out of an immensely complex and continually fluctuating system. One is learning the rules--the code of the game. One learns it so well that one is virtually able to run through a game in one's head (hardcore gamers often report dreaming "in video-game"--much like an earlier generation would have dreamed in Technicolor), reproducing all the animations, all the timing. Even of such an apparently simple game as Pac-man, novelist D. B. Weiss is able to write that:

the dots all rack up points equally, of course; in retrospect, however, some are revealed as wrong choices; links in a chain of wrong choices that trace out a wrong path leading to a withering demise beneath the adorable and utterly unforgiving eyes of Blinky, Inky, Pinky or Clyde. As anyone who ever played the game seriously must know, the order in which the dots are experienced is of great importance. For each labyrinth, there are rigid and precise patterns through the maze—i.e., specific sequences of dot acquisition—that, if followed with a samurai's unwavering, arrow-into-hell certainty, allow the knowing Pac-Man to ascend from level to level with Zen ease and deliberateness' (Weiss, 7)

All of this, as shown previously, has already been pointed out by Lee and Manovitch. But there's an additional component here, one that becomes most visible when we consider the incredibly precise navigation and timing that is necessary for so many games. Many of the glitches in Soul Calibur, for example, require timing a button press to just the right frame out of 60--not just any 60th part of a second, but the right 60th part of a second. This seems impossible, when one considers that fact that our eyes aren"t capable of picking out such a small segment of time (they run, of course, at around 24 fps), and that average human reaction times probably peak around a 10th of a second. Yet most high level players are able to hit these "just frames" with a high degree of accuracy. They are able to do this, not because they consciously know when to hit the button, but because they have trained their muscles to remember the timing, the rhythm.

I'd argue, then, that one's condition when playing a video game, in fact, is far from being the experience of disembodiedness. Precisely the opposite is true—-gameplay is an experience of hyper-embodiedness; heightened, supplemented, and augmented embodiedness. Even a brief consideration of the degree of emotional investment in the outcome of the game might provide a clue. I have more than one friend whose first reaction, after they lose a tournament match, is to hurl their controller to the ground, or to punch the machine. And their indignation at their controllers seems peculiarly private or intimate—there's a quality to it that I find hard to attribute to wounded pride alone. It's as if a part of their bodies had just betrayed them; as if a hand had suddenly stopped moving. After particularly hard matches they smoke cigarettes. If I shake their hands, their hands are usually sweaty or shaky. And it's worthwhile to note the other involuntary physiological responses—bodies swaying as a on-screen race car turns a corner; ducking or flinching in response to a near miss in Quake or Halo; sweaty palms; elevated heartrate; altered breathing patterns; pupil dilation. These reactions are probably present in response to older media such as TV, film, or even print, of course (who hasn't felt vertigo in an IMAX theater? who hasn't gotten goose-bumps at least once from a piece of music or a book?)--but in association with video games they are arguably, both stronger, and more frequent; perhaps in large part because one's physical reactions have more explicit influence on one's use of video games.

Consider, too, that the game player is in constant motion-—gameplay cannot take place without physical reaction. Hand and eye have to be coordinated and re-coordinated constantly; the player is constantly aware that a "scrubbed" or incorrect input could lose the game for them. The player is constantly, therefore, rearranging the controller, feeling out buttons, listening to the sound of one's own button presses to make sure one has the correct timing, listening for his opponent's button presses as well. The technologies employed in modern video games--naturalistic graphics, surround sound, force feedback vibration motors in controllers--are intended to increase the player's "immersion" in the game, meaning, in general usage, to enhance the feeling of being "in" the game (and thus "out" of one's body). But in practice, they reinforce the awareness of the body, tightening the circuit between eye, ear, and hand—it is simply the case that, in this case, one is working with a kind of expanded image of the body that includes the machine and screen and the peripherals and one's opponent (Donna Haraway"s cyborg circuit; a kind of distributed cognition). Gameplay, then, takes place not just at the level of conscious cognition or heuristic modeling, but also at the level of the reflex, of muscle memory.

We can, of course, choose to think of this as being a simple matter of one not being able to execute a plan without ultimately commanding and mastering the stubborn flesh, and thus this may seem, at first glance, to be nothing more than a case study tailor-made for Foucauldian analysis; another instance of the workings of disciplinary power, training us, even in the midst of our "leisure" time, to tame our bodies, to make them "docile and practiced." And when we consider, in fact, that games are a product of the globalized economy, does this not seem to suggest that globalization is controlling our bodies, using games as a vector? Button presses/commands are the same for a particular game anywhere you play it, and certain commands are even the same across many different games ("dragon-punch" and "fireball" motions—-forward-down-downforward-punch and down-downforward-forward-punch-—from Street Fighter are found in virtually every fighting game; mouse-and-keyboard controls and inverted Y-axis are found in virtually all first person shooters). Thus we might begin to think of everyone playing a given game as being involved in executing a series of standardized processes or programs (data structures, which we"ve already equated with capital) that work to modify their own bodies. And, of course, it"s to be expected that people who play video and computer games usually tend to spend money on them. So the circuit of data and capital comes full circle. The ultimate figure for this, in the gaming world, can be found in the game Dance Dance Revolution, in which the player pays to be controlled by the game, executing dance steps that have to be in perfect sync with the directional cues that appear on the screen. Cognitive mapping then seems to disappear beyond the horizon of possibility, replaced instead by the maps of power and capital that precede us and bend us to their will.

But this is, I think, only half the truth. For the relationship between heuristic and practice, between plan and execution is, in this case, not a straightforward one of privilege, discipline, or domination. Instead, these poles exist in a mutually modifying recursion, in which the heuristic determines the movement of the body, but the body"s movements also continue to affect and modify the heuristic. In this context, then, the practice of game-playing can be seen as a kind of model for a new practice of cognitive mapping, one in which representation and reality, flesh and data, mind and body are seen not as polar opposites, but as nodes in gleaming cyborg circuits, part of an emergent whole that can be grasped precisely by living in it. The popularity of videogames, then, can be said to represent the precise cultural moment in which the Enlightenment trope of the mind-body split no longer makes sense--the moment, perhaps, in which we're finally starting to come to terms with the postmodern.

Works Cited

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Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995.

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Lee, Shuen-shing: ""I Lose, Therefore I Think": A Search for Contemplation amid Wars of Push-Button Glare." in Game Studies , Volume 3, issue 2. URI: http://www.gamestudies.org/0302/lee/

Manovich, Lev. The Language Of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

Pearce, Celia and Will Wright: "Sims, BattleBots, Cellular Automata, God and Go: A conversation with Will Wright." in Game Studies , Volume 2, issue 1. URI: http://www.gamestudies.org/0102/pearce/

Weiss, D. B. Lucky Wander Boy. New York: Plume, 2003.

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