1. before trying to determine or invent a central developmental tendency in videogames it’s worth considering if the value of this format is specifically that of a space for local encounters: encounters between the material life of persons, the development and distribution of technology, and the social fantasy of what that technology means.
2. such a conception would also allow additional focus not just on the format’s capacity to synthesise (“see how the new format allows x to do y!”) but also on its role as a place where tensions and inconsistencies between various tendencies of each aspect can be evaded, dramatised, disguised or worked through (“see how the new format symbolically solves problems resulting from the inability of y to do x!”).
3. what comes out of the subsequent idea of “videogames” as a fundamentally nebulous site of the symbolic interactions between existing tendencies? an image something like that of a witch’s cauldron, forever churning, where the most unlikely fragments of life and history bubble towards the surface before disappearing once more back into the murk: courtly epic, urban planning, pet care, caspar david friedrich, horror movies, stock management, skateboarding, questionaires… similar to the notion that the content of a dream is selected to allow the dreamer to remain asleep, we could say the content of a videogame is selected to allow the player to keep playing a videogame - which in part involves mediating ,obscuring, or dissolving the different contradictions and tensions that exist within the context where the videogame is played (for example the contexts of leisure, of consumption and usage).
4. similarly possible that the “game” part of videogame is just such content - that rather than an integral structural component it exists as a broad imagined paradigm used both to explore computer technology on the basis of a series of correspondances and also to enable a kind of fantasy identification through which those explorations can be concieved of in a certain light, as a delimited form of social experience. from this we can say the question is not so much “what are the unique properties of videogames” as “what are the unique problems that the category of videogames was invented to erase?”. what is the role of this term plays in mediating through the different aspects of culture that it must engage, what is the fantasy that the notion of game offers of the way we percieve and engage with the contemporary, what is the relation of this term to the concept of the virtual?
5. if “game” is one particularly durable notion of the imagined contemporary then surely “virtual” is as well, and the two are paired frequently enough to make me wonder if each one functions as a kind of implicit psychic complement to the other. f. jameson among others has speculated on the links between 1980s cyberpunk and contemporaneous developments in finance capital, which both required new conceptual models as it grew more expanded and diffuse and which also increasingly seemed, through the magic of globalized outsourcing, less and less connected to any form of material reality; such a model suggests both why the virtual became arguably the primary non-apocalytpic vision of futurity but also arguably identified with futurity per se, the futurity of speculation and of seemingly unhaltable expansion. and i’d argue that, if videogames orient themselves along one pole by relation to the figure of the game, the other pole is determined no less decisively by reference to the virtual and thus to the future. the historical development of the format would be difficult to map out from the perspective of game design alone: far more tenable to my mind is the notion of that history as a continuous struggle to synthesise these two categories. videogames make less sense as entertainment than they do as future entertainment, where the quality of futurity is used to compensate for any defects in structure, and where the fixed social form of computer manipulation that is the game is used to provide a safe and grounded structure through which that future could be integrated within normal life. this dual structure also contradicts itself as much as it aligns, as the closed structure of the game must struggle to accomodate the affective open-endedness that is the allure of the future, which in turn perpetually grinds against efforts to ground it in repetitive practice and which must constantly engage with and absorb fragments of the contemporary in order to retain a viable effect.
6. the failed nature of this synthesis and the eternally provisional status of the drives that would make it up are what make me wonder if the true space of videogames is less this endless, mindless back and forth than the hole opened up by the perpetual failure of same, where the hybrid objects that result can fall back and crash into the present day, like the alien garbage from roadside picnic. this is what i mean by “a space for local encounters”: a format where the very incapability and instability of efforts to finally achieve unproblematised tech singularity result in the abrupt re-emergence of the very abysses it exists to cover, and in a temporary irradiation of the everyday by imaginary futures.
