1. A calculated guess.
”Jules: This was Divine Intervention! You know what “divine intervention” is?
Vincent: Yeah, I think so. That means God came down from Heaven and stopped the bullets.”-Quentin Tarantino, “Pulp Fiction”, 1994.
“This is how, at first, even at this age, I had some idea of the concept of contingency… In the theatre, you see the screen, everything on the screen is somehow meaningful. Then the film stops, you go outside, cars, people of the big city… nothing is meaningful.”
-Fredic Jamerson paraphrasing Jean-Paul Sartre from Sartre’s own memoir – interview with Fredic Jamerson, YouTube.
It’s a simple movie scene, not made simple by what occurs within its boundaries, but made simple by its notoriety, its canonisation into one of the most well-known scenes in film history. The knowledge of this scene, the way it replays endlessly, the knowledge of its presence, its stature, exists outside the film’s boundaries. Giving voice to its notoriety, feeding it, examining it from without, enclosing it, entrapping it in its sterile set state.
Two hitmen have already entered a room. One of the three victims has been shot dead, and now the main hitman begins his final task. He quotes a verse from the bible, full of fire and brimstone. Becoming more wrathful as he progresses, while standing above his intended target, looking down at him, disempowering him, as the victim can only shrink back into his chair with fear. At the verse’s climactic end, both hitmen draw their guns and shoot the man dead.
Much later the film returns to the previously played scene, and we now see what was not shown before: a young man is hiding in a room adjacent. Justifiably terrified, he holds a gun, held upwards, close to his face – in a defensive position – but also in a pre-emptive position, readying himself to go through the door and surprise the two gunmen. He can hear the hitman Jules Winnfield (played by Samuel L. Jackson) recite the bible verse to a second victim, roaring through the speech to its end – before he and his partner, Vincent Vega (played by John Travolta) fire their guns into the seated victim’s body. The terrified man now decides this is the time to act. He rushes into the room screaming and empties all his bullets towards them. But the expected, logical result does not occur. His gun is spent, all bullets fired. The two hitmen, Vincent, and Jules, look at their own bodies: all the bullets that had been aimed at them have miraculously missed. The trajectories of the bullets have somehow surpassed them. The two hitmen look back at the man and shoot him dead.
It is a strange scene, a stranger situation. What happened to the missing bullets shot by the third against the two hitmen? Why did they all miss, with the two standing just a few metres away? How did they go missing?
Explanations could be thought through. The third could have been too terrified to aim properly. You could ask the (now dead) third shooter, were you too shaken to aim decently? In a sense, the scene shows him just as surprised as the two hitmen, with all the bullets clearly having missed. In a sense, if asked, the dead victim could answer, I don’t know why I missed. I should have hit them, at least one of them should have been shot, not even fatally, at least one bullet should have hit.
If this situation is thought as real, there’s no method to review the situation, in time and place, to rewind the situation and try and see – although, in this sense, ironically, you could. Even with the sense of seeing the film scene as it is, not a carbon copy of what actually occurred, not as reality, but a copy of it, of something, further worse, altogether fictional, and not directly linked to something that did occur. Even if you take it as film, with its own rules and habits, watching the film scene over and over again still gives you nothing. The camera points at the third when he shoots front forward, thus escaping the possible revelation: if the camera had been filming from behind the shooter or even more precisely, behind the gun held by the hand of the shooter, at an extreme point of view shot, perhaps you could clearly see what happened to the gun’s pointed direction. Only when the act has finished, all the bullets spent, his face showing the incredulity, does the camera cut away, to show us the two hitmen’s equal incredulity, face forward, as they check their bodies for any bullet wounds. The camera keeps away from any verifiable vision of where the bullets went, of why they all missed. And that is all the film will give you.
But if you insist to still take the film’s narrative as pure fact, invented, yes, but reliant in transcribing factual events that could be arbitrarily possible, that could occur and could have occurred, then you could chase the bullets further by retreating metaphysically, by postulating God and deeming he or she could, by virtue of their perfect, ever omni-present, infallible eyes, this particular set of eyes that theologically see everything and everywhere, these eyes could know exactly what occurred in those few seconds.
Without bringing God into the picture, you could say that reality knows what happened, that it happened because, and that explanation because exists, has to exist, even if unreachable or unknowable by us. The bullets missed because of reasons that reality made occur, and if you were to ask reality, it will easily answer, “Well, you see, what happened…”
So, then we arrive at a kind of Platonic truth. A deferred truth. A metaphysical truth, floating somewhere up there. Here in our mortal, somewhat intelligent, sensory-limited, time-locked existence, we must rely on “the truth existing beyond, but still existing”. We can see that it happened within the framework of reality, and so it must exist, and the explanation exists as well. The reasons thus given are then there, but they are so barely present, so weak, so withholding, so alarmingly hidden, that it amounts to very little.
But why are we adamant to reach such dry explanations, such pointless, near-empty, boring, blank answers? Well, in a way, one tries to justify the scene’s plausibility, that the depicted “real” in the scene equates to a plausible, reconstructable, real state in the world. Whether it could occur that way – even if there is no real event that the film depicts, but a mimicry of plausible, possible events – even if this concatenation of events can be proximally manufactured to be close to reality, but not the actual thing. Close enough, believable enough to be mistaken for reality.
But is film just an excuse to create a facsimile of real, possibly existing events? A copy of reality? What fails to be recognised, in taking the scene as a crude facsimile of realism, and nothing else, is the scene’s reason for being in the film (This is ignoring its moral lesson to Jules Winnfield as a miracle, and thus a sign from God to cease his ways).
In filmic practice, the event of the missing bullets is but a means to a filmic end. “If in Act One you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act”. The laws governing film don’t always come from facts that reside within, but lead from film’s mythology itself.
Reality is an afterthought, a necessary displacement from the true laws of film. Disregard the depiction of laws of reality, instead look at the event of the missing bullets as a gesture towards the totality of film’s many facets – its eventual displayed logic. This is not just meaning, but how films perform as touched by other forces: influenced by inwardly affecting laws within the film’s logic and outwardly practices of filmic laws reaching into the film.
After all, films teach you that it is possible for bullets to go missing and have done so for a long time.
There is the commonly repeated scene of someone learning to fire a gun. Bottles and cans are lined up at an arbitrary distance, on a bench, or tree branch or fence, in a country field, a cattle yard, an alleyway, near a house’s garden. The first shot is always a miss. The second maybe misses too, the third probably does the opposite and hits. Or the first shot does hit, displaying irony, anti-pedagogy. laughter. Such are the laws of film.
If you re-imagine the third shooter going through the procedure of missing all the bullets from his gun, but then suddenly picking up a second gun and missing all the shot from it as well, maybe as third gun , or a fourth, now a machine gun, then a bazooka, all missing just as badly, well then, it quickly escalated to the implausible, to the impossible, to the laughable. An intended and deliberate farce, a joke. It falls off into parody, an overstated mimicry of itself, a fourth wall snicker. This second imagined scene would break everything that the film had told you before it, its inherent seriousness of meaning and tone, despite the irony, or in tandem with it. In filmic law, it makes no sense.
Maybe such a scene would exist, but it would have to come after the missing bullets scene in the film was fully canonised, made famous. To break that canon, then, or to play with it mischievously alongside it. It would have to exist in a second parasitical film, that pulls the rug not only from Pulp Fiction’s seminal scene, but many other canonised moments of bullets failing to hit: when two groups shoot at each other behind cars, trees, buildings, walls, always constantly missing, until one or one or two or more are shot. The trope of Star Wars, the long fights across a spaceship’s internal corridors, the lasers missing constantly, then one miraculously hits. Shooting from a horse in various Westerns, or the classic duel in an old western country town’s main road. Everybody watches, there is a draw, one misses, the other hits. Or both take each other down. Again, irony, or fatal pessimism. Nobody wins in the end. Bringing down the window of a speeding car, to pull your arm through, to shoot behind or forward, constantly missing, then maybe one hits, changing the static situation, moving it forward.
There is a certain logic within these scenes: when will the bullet be allowed to act? Even missing is an act, really. All these filmic rituals, these histories of scenes, unintentionally reinforcing in you, creating an unconscious drag of forensic evidence – causing, telling you, bullets go missing all the time.
When really, the film’s laws know exactly when the bullets will hit. The laws are elsewhere, involving a hierarchy of character, scene, beat and plot occurrence, while the detritus, the discarded supplement of all these film shoot-outs, these often banal and forgettable fire fights, they tell you mistakenly, they teach you regardless, regardless of reality, but in parasitical tandem to it, that bullets are known to miss.
There is another scene that goes further to that black humour of the missing bullets scene, a second scene involving guns and bullets, a further exaggerated, negating play on common filmic law.
The two hitmen travel back by car with the one survivor of the three victims from that previous carnage. The scene seems like a customary return to normality, the filmic law of a lull, a relaxation in tone, as normality seeps back in after all that absurd, jarring violence. As they drive along, the film delivers some interaction between the two hitmen, an argument, an interval in effect. But when Vincent Vega turns to the backseat where the sole survivor sits, Vincent’s gun goes off, unexpectedly, the bullet striking and instantly killing the youth. Blood goes everywhere.
This random, unexplainable boldness almost never happens in films. In this second absurd scene a gun malfunctions or misfires, and something equally unexplainable jams back into action. A bullet sets off unexpectedly, the new arbitrary gun, just as arbitrary as the previous scene, giving no preliminary reason, no law of justification. Why did it go off?
If guns go off in films unexpectedly, well, the person who is struck, if self-administered or otherwise, it’s made to be known prior, to be indicated during the film, that he or she deserved it. Karma sucks. The guy had it coming, in other words.
Or if the gun jams, it is always at the crucial moment where it is most needed, when the weapon can finally solve the problem. Then, that fortune of action is removed, when the gun jams for the hero or heroine. The easy solution replaced by the now newly birthed tension, a further trial for the hero, a complication, a further tragic slap, a worsening of fate. If the heroic person is at the receiving end of a jammed gun, then a few more precious seconds are lent out, instead now you have a possibility of escape, life regained from death. The moment of death is reserved, some other possibility is offered, the possibility of something else is now promised.
All these events in film – guns misfiring, a Western shootout in a dust-laden main street, bottles being lined up on a wall, a scared youth emptying his gun into two killers and missing every single shot, someone shot in the back of the car inadvertently – these are all means to an end, whatever the film’s self-logic, its own led directive, but in a very crucial sense they have to work as singular instances of plausible happenings of what could be reality.
The laws that govern film might be found elsewhere in the progression of the film, but the regulating mind of the viewer still must be led by these moments into first believing, just for a brief period, that this unique, peculiar, singular, extraordinary thing could occur.
Film, via other films, and via a plausible “common sense” connection to reality, teaches the viewer what can be acceptable, what it considerably cannot. A systemic grey area of plausibility is holistically accepted, to varying degrees of acceptance for everyone, but still shared as an unconscious set of beliefs on how reality might be seen to transpose to film, and thus to function in film successfully.
Reality as an event is nebulous, aggressively undefined, able to be written upon by fictional authorship because of its cosmic gaseous unknowability. This indefinable ability allows it to be shadowed effectively by the nearly real, the pseudo-real of the film.
What assists film in getting away with improbabilities is the consensus by the viewer that the laws of the film, where the film is progressing, will lead to a point of understanding. In effect the viewer accepts the probability because it “will mean something” eventually. Acceptance of the improbability is put on credit, on standby, on hold, almost never rejected, because of what the viewer expects to be later offered by the film – almost as a substitute, a recompense. And because suspension of disbelief is entertaining. The tone, the history of the film, of the filmmakers, and the genre of the films that are already in its history, the whole gamut of films that are already working inside the present film, informs and sets out the parameters to which the film can work against, towards, within. It gives the viewer an expectation, it seduces him or her to an acceptance of what the film can get away with.
However, this acceptance of the viewer forwards towards the film, this giving grace to or an unconsciously sympathetic trust towards, lies a deeper, core acceptance of how reality works.
To the viewer, the real world is regulated and led by laws, but it can also be fantastically complex, seemingly unregulated, bizarre even in plausible impossibilities – anything could happen in real life, and so in film.
Science, as a grand narrative, as a social epistemological force, mediates this for the viewer, but always in arcane, highly specialised, and obtuse ways. In much the same way as God’s eye, science is a force outside of normal personal comprehension for most.
The viewer accepts science’s logic as explanation, but doesn’t, or doesn’t want to, or cannot, understand the laws, logic and reasons that science gives. He or she can only going forward, in most cases, as accepting that it does its job somehow, as a veritable, self-justifying truth that is known to exist. As a ever-present, assumed, concurrent explanation, worked by the controller behind the curtain that you don’t need to draw open, because you can safely assume they are behind it, doing their job, “the science operational” that operates and that’s enough to know, to know that it does what’s needed.
In most individuals one does not know why the light switch works. As that person will unconsciously accepts its scientific laws as unfathomably true and switches it on. It works because of “science”, because of the scientific history of theory and its further implementation surrounding its creation that the user assumes rightly to exist, and that it works, and that’s all that is needed to know, to comfortably use its utility.
So for the person who is familiar and comfortable with the world, always sees the reality in which the world operates as being explained by science – or God’s eye, or Reality that knows itself. Behind all of this, beyond this barrier of knowledge and understanding, because of the inscrutability of explanations, the world remains opaque, equally inscrutable, and dangerous in future possibilities: wild turns, unforeseen outcomes, which again can be equally explained by the same scientific world view, God’s eye, or “reality-is”.
The world is too complex, too infinitely holistic in pattern and execution, too large to be monitored and reported upon successfully, to be seen in a completely satisfying way, to be accounted for fully, or even partially.
God’s eye doesn’t speak back, science is piecemeal and temporary, ever shifting and too complex for a proper understanding for most people, “reality-is” but never honestly speaks, in its accounting of an eternally complete, law driven world.
I trip momentarily walking on the pavement. I turn around and look down, but can’t spot anything that could have caused it. I look more carefully, having felt a small force on my toes within the shoe that caused me to trip. Nothing. I try to feel the edges of the pavement with my foot, perhaps something got dislodged and flew off as it snapped. No, I can see nothing in the radius of my mortal eyes. Ultimately, I must go on, having exhausted the possibilities. The event has occurred, something happened that could be accounted for, certainly, but remains to you a mystery. It cannot be recaptured, it has now gone. It has thus happened beyond, or, rather, behind. An external point of no return. You can’t travel back to the point of the incident. Time goes on. Walk on and ignore it.
So do films mimic, are held down, and profit from this indecipherable state of opaquely accounted reality.
In effect, it is much easier to suspend disbelief, because what can happen in the real world is also incommensurably wide and varied and unaccounted for.
What occurs in the film can happen, and we are not talking just about in relation to historic existing reality of the past, and the possible, directed future reality, but anything marginally or fantastically but still essentially tied to what could be reality.
Dragons can exist, because culture and the media in many forms has taught you to recognise it as a plausible invented but existing reality within the strictures and laws of reality, at a fundamental level. They are depicted as able to fly, like bird’s flight, they are violent like large reptiles, such as crocodiles, they breathe out fire like a flamethrower from its manned spout. That breathed out fire also acts like ordinary fire – so equally it can’t do what fire cannot do. The event of breathed out fire has the same volume, ability, and strength as real fire in real life, to an ambiguous but still very much set extent. It can’t, for example, extinguish light, or freeze water or engulf a body with painless regeneration, unless set by a further explanation. Dragons are temporarily, conditionally accepted in films as real because of fanciful laws linked to cultural tradition, copy on copy, retracing acts from other implausibly and yet plausibly (i.e., fancifully linked to laws in the real world) imposed rules from the whole past of the dragons’ cultural depiction, as artifacts of what they could be. Transgressing ever forward with this possibility of dragons in this manufactured reality, making it real each time it crops up as invention, and laying the setting of what a dragon is within the parameters of reality – mimicking laws of spontaneous fire via the dragon’s breath, which have to be based on basic, communally upheld laws of how fire behaves, and flight, which has to be limited to reasonable laws of flight too, and speech, and types of reasoning, and action, and personality as set by other historically expressed examples.
The smallest things have to be regulated by an approximation to reality for the dragon to be real. In film, the way it turns its head, with a normative spine’s twist, the way it flies in the air, conditioned by the laws of flight to an acceptable degree, the way its eyes look and respond, mimicking a lizard’s eyes, how its jaw opens and how the tail moves, lizard-like. All conditioned by the experiential knowledge of what the viewer sees and expects from such an imaginary creature’s actions, an animal based on our experience of the physical animalistic conditions and possible functions retrieved elsewhere. It’s not so much what such an animal would be in real life, but what we would expect it to do if it did exist.
The Chimera, one of many Greek mythical beasts, functions on unspoken expectations of the laws of similar animals’ bodies and motions – in this anatomical recipe, you add a lion’s head, a goat’s head beside it, and then a dragon’s head at at the tail’s end. Feeding on earthly laws of fact, however fanciful, however miscreated, however obviously parasitic, and unreal.
If the dragon manages to turn its head around three times, or flies upwards into the sky with its wings fully retracted, or if its tail begins to speak autonomously, or the jaws extend too widely, to say, a 180 degree angle, then something speaks to the viewer’s eye as being factually wrong, as the film breaks the laws of necessary physical accountability to the real world. However, whatever the type of abnormality could be further accounted for by some other means, held up by additional laws, set by a further set of explanations: by, say, magic, a potion, a dream, a hallucination, the dragon not being a proper real dragon, but revealed as something else, a mimic hiding under the illusion of being a dragon, and so on.
So now here is a third law of plausibility that film can profit from. Beyond science and the eye of God, beyond the real-that-is, there is the shared consensus of how events can occur, if you are given enough plausible input on how the event exists by a film’s scene.
But despite all this back-and-forth, the scene remains the same. It doesn’t budge, it cements itself into itself. There is a kind of inevitability in film that ossifies its intent and makes its effects, the effects on the viewer less and less present, more and more distant despite and because of the number of times one re-watches the scene. The scene returns unmoved, static, compressed into cement. Like Frank Sheenan’s line from Scorsese’s “The Irishman”, where Frank Sheeran says to Jimmy Hoffa, “It’s what it is”. Like a warning, a finalisation: accept it and don’t digress – the scene never changes, its’ fixed, it’s canonised.
2. The real valued thing.
“Let nothing of the truths that have been defined be lessened, nothing altered, nothing added, but let them be preserved intact in word and in meaning.”
-Pope Gregory XVI.
“And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many.”
-King James Bible, Mark 5:9.
All films are canonised, resembling material objects as they exist in the real world. By “canonised” I mean material releases of a film, officiated into presence by various parties who carry enough accepted standing to do so, and a film that is conferred importance by existing. Even if they are withdrawn from the public, like Kubrick taking “A Clockwork Orange” off the U.K. film market after controversies arising from its screenings, they remain, they don’t fail to exist.
Even if they are lost, like so many silent films of the era, and thus lose their materiality, they remain canonised, and if any are miraculously recovered, their canonisation is respected. Any alterations or restorations made to the newly discovered film are meant to follow from the lost film’s previous known history, from its previous provenance, its documented presence. With these lost films, you could say their materiality was never destroyed. It once existed, as such – and could still spectrally exist. In a suitcase, in someone’s attic, or at the very worst, in the cultural memory, their historical presence, and all its ephemera that sustains its spectral materiality.
The question of canonization of a film being re-released, say, in a director’s cut, a restored version of a lesser quality print, an extended version from previously unreleased footage, a silent film with a new soundtrack, and so on, what splits off is another modified film from the original film. It is not that the new version replaces the old one and becomes the new canonised version, but instead there is a mitosis occurring, a split of one into two canonisations: the old and the new versions.
One of the most notorious examples in the history of the film is “Blade Runner”, starting from 1982 with the original theatrical release, and then splitting off with seven different versions being periodically released afterwards. All must be seen as canonised versions – all are cemented into a new being, even when re-released or improved or tampered. There is a duplication, and following that, a re-cementation. There’s no flexibility or change or destruction because the previous version, even if spectrally, still exists. The new doesn’t wipe or delegitimize the old.
With video games, there is a lesser ability to apply a clear canonization bias, as there is less of the material concrete solidity that you find in film. Of course, in the early days, a game was released via a physical format, and that was that. How it was born was how it remained – no more additions, no more repairs. If the work was later re-released, via a suitably faithful remake or remaster, the canonization split common to film would then occur.
However, with technological change, crucially with the turn to digital media and the rise of the implementation of the internet worldwide, developers began to push video game production into the necessity and the advantage of releasing customary patches to the base game after release. After first date release, bugs needed to be fixed; constituting existing errors, crashes, unintended effects, non-functioning, or over-functioning trajectories of the code. Through this, the experienced structure of the game could now be processed via a patch and effectively changed by it.
That standardised the practice of guiding a game towards a relatively better state. Its envisioned stable, perfect state could now be pushed further into the unseen future.
Unlike film, after the new modified version emerged, the old version of the game did not split away into another canonised version. It did not even keep a spectral presence. Its rank was stripped, it was demoted. It was simply effaced, consumed by the latter’s new existence. What use could an old version have, performing less effectively, less precisely? Like an amorphous malleable blob that grew or shrank by physical increments, each time a new patch was added to it, the video game travelled towards a teleologically better functioning, more complementary version of itself, but always the singular one.
Due to the new ability to change the game’s code at whim, a second strange effect arose into being, as if set into motion, as if self-propelled, as if self-determined by this new separate mechanic. As the longevity of the game’s existence continued due its popularity with gamers over long periods of time, the ability to retain and evolve players’ interest was discovered. The game could be projected to be substantially played for longer, to remain alive in the marketplace of gamers who continued to find interest in it, and create the possibility of fresh gamers discovering it. The game could be extended and changed appropriately to keep players’ interest ongoing, and to sustain interest in it within the gaming world.
Furthermore, the technological leap of having the ability, via transmission by the internet, to add small inputs of code, small relative to the size of the original game code size, this leap was utilised into an ongoing, cyclical cause and effect. This was due to a new addition to game culture that had existed before but grew alongside it afterwards: the community of active, participating, discursive, opinionated gamers – active in reddit forums, official game forums, Steam forums, user reviews for the game on Steam, twitter, and so on. They aren’t an audience, however. They are participants in the extreme, in a way that films can’t have. They are voices participating, by critical ways, by expressed influence, on the game’s ongoing evolution.
These gamer “voices” are multitudes and spectral at the same time. They are undifferentiated in their clouded mass, hidden behind their mass anonymity. Even with separate, singular, individual acts of note, they could be anybody: who is behind that post, that review, that comment, that uptick, that username? And yet they carry an effective force in their collective expressive emanations. These could be picked up by video gaming’s fourth estate, the other separate body (tangible, official, accountable), when these voices carry enough presence, enough visibility, enough revolt to tip the scales of attention. The well-known youtubers, the video games journalists working in the press, the video gaming websites, part of the fourth estate, will report and react – causing a feedback loop to occur back to the multitudes of gamers, who could grow in sentiment and react again.
What is feeding these voices, prior to game release, and post-release, besides their own actual experience of the game, besides their own turbulent, en masse, circulated opinions of this gaming experience?
In the status of games, besides the experience of the game itself, there’s only the company behind the making of the game – with its secret hierarchies, its mandarin strategies, its leviathan undercurrents, its infernal machinations.
Unlike most films, in video games there is no shadow of the auteur logic which the public can read and judge – the shadow of the director, to which all filmic control lies, moderated by other forces but still present; the screenwriter to which all textual presence lies; the cinematographer to which all visual; the actors to which all performative, and so on. In various degrees of noticeability according to a convoluted context, filmmakers rise to be accounted for.
For most video game production, the production process, and its history, the making of is left opaque – the evidence of intentionality and strategy occluded, masqueraded – as a corporation always benefits by not speaking honestly, by controlling the message given out, by the grand everlasting need to spin. There are production companies in both ends that can contribute to the esteem of its eventual product (in film, for example A24, or, unfortunately, the old Miramax – in games, FromSoftware or Nintendo) but there is no film director equivalent in games (there are rare exceptions) to receive the responsibility of presence in the product, to boost it up, to be responsible for its canonical status. For a videogames, what gets noticed at best is the reputation of the company that had the most effect in a game’s creation: the history of its past produced games and their success or failure, its conservative strategy of creating monotonous cookie-cutter style games versus taking risk-taking chances by the creation of unique games, the size of developers in the company compared to a small sized company (the “too many cooks” syndrome), the history and length of production of the game, “in development hell” against “slowly taking their time”, “released too soon” versus “a miracle in production”, and so on.
Going back to the canonisation question, this careful silence by the production company’s part leads to a further delegitimization of games’ status as “canon”. Usually, the game and only the game carries the weight of where presence lies. Prior to and when the game is released, the game is made to seem by the corporation to be its own messenger of justification: chaste, pure, neutral, self-evidential, innocently self-aggrandising. Everything released by the company is peripheral and advantageous towards it. Everything pre-released by the company to the public references the game only, as it is: the gameplay, the way it looks, how it performs, the imagined gamers who will enjoy playing it, the experience, the journey. Its possibilities, its enchantment, its pleasures, and promises.
And often, on pre-release and after, there is a violent reaction by the gamers to the game’s always assumed falsity, of pretending to be unalloyed, untarnished, and pure. Behind that often lies a history of mistakes, exaggerations, lies and cover-ups: underhanded money grabbing techniques via microtransactions, or overpriced pre-release versions, faulty remakes, poor remastered versions, ports of the original game to other platforms performing poorly, games released with no warning of its very substandard, unfinished state – filled with bugs and poor-quality experience, with the strategy being to finish the game (or not) with later patches.
The long history of deception causes a culture of suspicion to be sustained within gaming communities, causing further natural delegitimizing of anything companies may in the future put forward at any point, and, in a way, delegitimizing all video games.
All of this contrasts with film, made petrified, made inevitable in its ossified state. The malleable state of games, its crucial taxonomy, with its promise and doom of changeability, brings a turbulent state within the battlefield of opinion: furtive machinations versus desire, expectation versus reality – infinitely played on and never reassured, never rested and completed.
3. The bullet that doesn’t count.
“It’s as if the glitch, for all its surreal and defamiliarizing power, were unusually resistant to being made meaningful in a traditional sense, unusually resistant to being conceived of as anything other than a simple fault of code.”
-Nathan Wainstein, “Bugs and Features: On Video Game Glitches and Interpretation“, Los Angeles Review of books, March 27, 2021.
“Baudrillard believes that we are living in a world where the simulations hide reality. I think this is a nonsensical proposition. … Images are just as concrete as is the table on which your machine is standing now. We do not have any ontological tool any longer to distinguish between a simulation and a non-simulation. The critical tool which we have to use is concreticity as opposed to abstractness.”
-Peternák interview with Vilém Flusser.
If a bullet misses in video games when clearly they should have hit, these are structural mistakes: the missing bullets are built into the structure of the games’ code, and thus something in the code is faulty, or something wrongly extraneous has been added. They don’t carry meaning or refer to the past mythological history of video games, except as a wholly separate case, perhaps to other notoriously broken games – a mythology of empty ineffectuality, and even that is a circumstantial step.
Simply put, they are just wrong, a bug in the code that needs fixing. They are unconditional in their blind damage, they lack purpose, morality and meaning in their unintentional intentionality. They break the sense of immersion in the game while not being what they are meant to be: to perform, to hide well while they perform well. Upon breaking, they reveal themselves as they are, they come to show themselves: stubbornly meaningless – not a carefully curated image of reality, just code performing. In their impotence to anything real, their failure to work properly acts as a virtual crime of manslaughter – unintended, disastrous, final.
If a gun misfires in a video game, it’s not operating as it should. In that act or misstep, the game world reveals itself as free, malleable, and dependent on the care of the developers – but also too dependent. Too artificial, approximate, illusory, imperfect.
If another player in the game uses hacking software to cheat while participating in a multiplayer game, and the bullet towards them misbehaves (for example, it lessens the damage on the cheating player, or it has no effect), the expressed purity of the game code is invalidated in its route, and the purity of the game as a playable entity is rendered corrupt. The whole field of structured fairness, the tacit agreement mutually held by all players during the game’s playability and enforced by the game’s coded rules, is ignored. The bad player by cheating can almost convince himself/herself that they are a good player, as evident by they being able to suddenly excel at the game. It’s a deluded experience that almost makes the whole video game experience null, worthless, but they are not really looking honestly, they are wilfully, stupidly blind.
The experience of a bullet in video games is extremely subjective in the experience of that action. Unlike the camera that films as an aside to the event, the shooter in video games experiences the event of shooting usually with his eye directly behind the weapon, in a manufactured retelling of what an actual gun user experiences in real life. Unlike an actual gun user, the vast variety of game-guns and game environments make each gun (even gun additives: the scope, the pommel, the barrel, the stock, and so on) something to be quickly and repeatedly tested through game experience, creating communally a classificatory ladder of good vs bad performance, of best vs worst guns. A new gun released into the game by the developers gradually reveals itself, by player use, with its own powers and conditions. It starts to occupy its own space within an arsenal of other weapons of use in the game, each classified via communal experience as to what works well, and what doesn’t, what is useless and what is exemplary. The new norm gets changed or re-balanced with each official patch, which causes the guns to shift, with “nerfs” or “buffs” contributing towards a new “meta” or state of the game according to the new best and new worst – cascading to affect other aspects of the games according to the overall complexity of identifiable and lived-through game combat structure. The video game itself shifts in being, as the developers’ changes populate the whole game, with players’ voices reacting and judging to the permeating changes, influencing the game’s future patches by opinion and consensus, and so on.
There is another deep subjectivity. As a good film plays/preys on the viewer, who passively watches the unfolding film with acquiescence, the game does the same to the gamer, it controls the gamer – with one difference: the gamer controls back, a symbiosis of push and pull, of give and take.
You could say the filmgoer forms the experience of the film while viewing it, reconstituting its meaning into an explanation that makes sense to the viewer. For video games this relation between the game and its consumer is a perennially closed loop. Through played game time, the game reconstitutes itself and acts after the gamer reconstitutes the newly morphed game experience and acts upon it, which the game reconstitutes in response, turning back to the gamer, and so on. All of this is on the base level of direct experience, wherever the gamer might find themselves in the real world: sitting or lying on the carpet, on a couch, on a gaming chair, or standing up, in a train with a portable gaming device, whatever the case. The self plays the game while ignoring the outside perceptual shifts. The game consumes the gamer’s attention.
What saves the game’s rapacious need to be consumed by the gamer – and thus consume the gamer as well – all those aspects of immobility and entrapment – is the sense of communion a player feels towards a game, as he experiences the game over time. The game’s richness and responsiveness opens, it reveals itself, reveals its revelation. The game’s ever structuring structure discloses over played time, and the player learns how to operate within it successfully – within its structure, its conditions. And to excel at it, to profit from its set primal laws. Through that, a new world, previously never experienced, opens up.
The after-effects of communion, what happens after the experience is cut off, when it ends (after a great film, exhibition, musical event, video game) reveals that artwork’s artificiality – it no longer invades us with its presence and force – any prolonged, impossible, freakishly, unceasing ecstasy towards an artwork beyond time and memory’s veil would instead veer into obsession, madness, blindness, loss of self. The return to the real is necessary to be able to return to an artwork.
All popular artworks are orphans waiting for someone to attach themselves to, to leech onto, to parasitically invade their consciousness. They enter as they entertain. Any ethics of the unreal supplanting and dislodging the now ignored real is made apparent by the artwork’s ontological status. They profess to be real while obviously not being real, they manufacture their own importance as they are in the process of manufacturing their expression, which rarely ends after the artwork’s release.
It’s easier to see a particular film as having high ontological status due to the ability to see, judge and critique it as a work of art. This ability to see it as being substantially important is not due to the effect it has in terms of viewer number, to the amount of money spent on its production, or the money it could recoup (video games do all these) but by the elite status it could receive and the status of the critics around it – all of it over more than a century adding to the slow accretion of historical depth through the life of film as a medium.
Most video games are already fading into obscurity as soon as they are released. There is no prolongment of its ontological status – they have no historical presence after its players move on to another game, except as salient but minimal cultural points of interest in the overall history of video games. The same moments of “being” as mentioned previously with film does appear, but with subdued or invisible tones: there could exist the same large mass of players for a game, the same money spent and recouped, the same varied, official, and developed critical appraisals. But all of it is kept underground, in a second lower layer – while mostly for films it is overground: relevant, respected, and reappropriated and re-applied by various, more important media interest groups.
Gaming, unfortunately, is for gamers’ interest only, and remains underground because of this, including lacking the same weight, the same gravitas as found in film. Games are disposable, insignificant. Games are gratuitous, they go against the grain of proper materialist common sense, where every action in the real world must have purpose, to have verifiable and rationally examined and examinable goals, to have results, to give advancement in some realistic quantifiable end result. Instead, the aesthetic experience is all the game can give you. The ecstasy of heightened senses in another state, in another separate, distinct zone from reality is its only goal.
In this lesser epistemological state, does the video game actually exist? You could argue other artistic forms exist, by virtue of their making: music has physical, necessary performers, a painting is the residue of a set of physical actions by a painter using media, a film is created by a set of differentiated physical participants cooperating in a very complex manner. But how does the musical track exist, physically? How does a painting exist after being reprinted elsewhere in various states of media? The screened film shot into light in a movie theatre, for the select viewers sitting inside, the streaming film available online as digital data, ready to be watched and rewatched.
Is gaming real? Sport, with its set rules and conditions, could be seen just as arbitrarily. It has its formal rules, which generates its participants’ relation to the sport, with its own histories and communal approaches, creating a hierarchy of participators (and the chorus of media and followers surrounding them) according to how well they adapt and succeed to the sport’s formal rules. The only difference is gaming’s virtuality, which influences the status of its “being” disparagingly. Sport, however arbitrary or artificial its rules, must occur in the real world.
You could describe games and sports as both operating in a magic circle, a term popularised in the 2000’s in academia regarding video games:
“All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the ‘consecrated spot’ cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground. The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc, are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.”1
You could also describe it as a closed box system. Playing cards have 52 varieties of different cards within their decks, and a wide variety of rules of games springing from that extent and limitations. These card rules are the closed boxes that players can participate in.
The sport of golf is a closed box, with appropriate rules of golf setting the limitations within that closed box, but they do involve physicality and materiality. There is a specific golf field that must operate as a playing ground with specific physical characteristics that has to be maintained by workers and management. There are real golf clubs that the player must swing effectively with, a real golf ball flying in a real determined trajectory, a hole dug into the ground and cemented a certain distance away, and so on.
Instead video games are easier to denigrate due of their lack of physicality, or the mundane quality of its physicality: a television or monitor to look at, headphones or speakers to emit sound, a keyboard and mouse or console controller to input your movements and decisions – beyond that thin physical veneer surrounding the game is the real world that the player has to bracket out provisionally while playing.
The closed box is visible in the video game’s enclosed virtual environment, that the player is made to experience in avoidance of all. In the closed box of the screen to which the game is projected into via cables, which one must concentrate wholly towards. The enclosed-ness, the hard demarcation is repeated in the closed box hardware (console, PC, cloud in some server) within which the software is equally enclosed – kept necessarily apart from all outside it. In sports like golf the closed box is invisible. You have a golf field, where a man is teeing off in the languid afternoon of a spring day. Where is the closed box?
In the future, you could recreate everything a golfer does (physically, environmentally) within a virtual space governed by the mechanics of a very sophisticated video game via software and hardware of extreme complexity. Then the reality of a golfer in a golf field playing would be completely matched by the game’s projected reality. All that would be left to mark out the difference between the two states would be the player’s knowledge of what is real and what is fabricated. By entering into the virtual apparatus, and by ejecting from the apparatus would the only way to distinguish it from reality.
All video games that strive for a level of realism, such as the shooter genre, are approximations – compromised attempts for that mimetic wish of creating the perfect copy of an outside covered field of reality. Apart from the material state (sitting in a chair, wearing headphones, using a mouse and keyboard, staring at a screen), what reveals their virtuality immediately is their imperfect state to that imagined perfect game. All games have holes in the patchwork of their being, towards a normalised ideal of how things should feel by the game’s desired mirroring of that field of reality, restricted by the limitations of current technology and production methods.
The closed box physicality of the game is reflected by the closed box virtuality of the game and the code which supports it, all three suggesting unconsciously the enclosed otherness and separation of a whole game, not in here with us the real world, but trapped in there, in the box, where we venture into, remain for a period, and then exit to the outside world. It is an illusion, an influence of condition that the whole game system unwittingly fosters in our consciousness and subconsciousness – that is hard to see beyond. Thus, the presence of video game experience can be safely disputed, as having no materiality, as being other than reality. The move of a mouse based on very specific skill, all the reflexes needed, the sophisticated game sense required is harder to judge than a golfer’s expert swing of a golf ball. This physical hard line, this demarcation, makes it easier to believe that the game has nothing to do with the real world, that they are diametrically uninvolved.
While the real world exists as an occult/esoteric indeterminate boundary, computer reality does not. It’s structured within a closed system, of boundaries of a certain code size and complexity, where everything within it is regulated, processed, determined by that code.
Beyond it, there is the input from the player flowing into it and affecting it, but apart from that, there is only the emptiness of the base meaningless outside, the nothingness of unclear directedness, the indecipherable disability of the real world. To the code, this world does not exist.
The real world often has difficulties that cannot be surpassed, they are hard stops in the future not allowing passage, no matter how one feels about the freedom and possibilities in life. In video games, evident difficulties are placed there as soft stops that are meant to be surpassed with enough skill. They are challenges that are meant to be challenged – they attract and invite, via various pointers and pathways in the game, attempts by the player to challenge them. The computer world is more substantive than the real world, when seen from the perspective of code. In the computer world all the facts are seen, present and accountable for – reality is instead opaque, evasive, and paradoxical, to which most of us make attempts to simplify by locking it into a narrative of our own making.
You are in the inside of this text as you read it, ignoring or cancelling out the outside as you solely concentrate on this inside. Suddenly, a noise startles you. You take your eyes off the pages. surveying the area. Now you are on the inside of reality, and the text is the new outside, the new other. The outside is always the eternal other, evading notice when not surveyed, and slipping through and reforming, repopulating somewhere else when you examine the new inside. When watching a film in a movie theatre, your mobile phone rings, it’s an important call, forcing you to take the call outside, to momentarily plug yourself out of the film. The artificiality of the film reveals itself as you walk out, and upon returning, you are forced to plug yourself back in, to squeeze through its artificiality, to get back into the film, to let go of reality and accept the film’s reality instead, to re-involve yourself into it, to retake and relocate its precarious flow and to keep up.
When we are in the inside of the game, we are logically aware of the outside, the real world, and when within the real world, we are aware of the game awaiting within its special escapist “inside”. But when we are truly in the game, experiencing it fully and unconditionally, there is no outside – the outside forgotten, put aside mentally. Some games demand attention, total involvement, even obsession, to be experienced fully, to understand it. They demand letting go of the restrictions of the outside.
There are multiple insides everywhere: the inside of a book, a YouTube video, the car when driving, a train ride, a job’s shift and the many insides that you have to grapple within it.
There is no objective outside that one can safely traverse into, what you could call the real real. What we have is only a succession of infinitely detailed insides that open up and reveal themselves as we enter, shifting into other reals as we shift. Throughout the currents of continually emerging consciousnesses, of states of being, the other is always the other, separate and inviolate, all of it compounding into a wish, something which we like to think as the supreme real, the real that matters, the real that offers the most and lifts us up to blissful understanding, that makes our life complete. That perfect real, in all its vastness and sublime decipherability, touching the periphery of our shallowly indefinite, imprecise, narrowly perspectival real. It’s there, a promise of how we hope we can be, of totality, if only we opened our eyes and moved a certain way. Something out there must be the real “real”, the one that cements our life, that justifies it, that makes it supremely meaningful. Something bigger, something better than ourselves. Or it could be just another closed box, waiting to be entered.
- Huizinga (1955), p. 10. from Wikipedia article “Magic circle (games)” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_circle_(games ↩︎