Annotations ¶
Cultural studies matters because it is about the future, and about some of the work it will take, in the present, to shape the future. It is about understanding the present in the service of the future. By looking at how the contemporary world has been made to be what it is, it attempts to make visible ways in which it can become something else.2
Lawrence Grossberg, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense
Media texts provide us with source material for what might be possible, how identities might be constructed, and what worlds we might live in. These are the reasons media representation matters…’9
‘For him [Hall], culture is not something to simply appreciate, or study; it is also a critical site of social action and interpretation, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled.’11 As ‘everyday’ culture, both games as cultural objects, and gamer culture (subcultures, fandom, etc.) are sites where dominant and subordinate entities struggle for recognition.
Larger shifts toward neoliberal values in the US economy and in education, introduced in Britain by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s and by President Ronald Reagan in the US in the mid-1980s, announced an inescapable reality of economic globalization and its free-market demands.28 Neoliberalism called for economic deregulation and enhanced freedom of the market in order to allow it to self-regulate, with the promise of ‘trickle-down’ economic results. This also included the reduction of government spending on health, education and other social services and increased policy-making that would shift the onus toward individual responsibility, and increased privatization of services formerly considered part of the public sector.29
Take, for example, the social media-driven outcry against the tone-deaf Twitter ads for EA Games’ Battlefield 1 (2016), a first-person shooter set in World War I. The insensitive hashtag ‘#justWWIthings’ was used, prompting public criticism, and forcing EA to apologize and pull the campaign.40
Games access the public imagination, and in their carefully crafted expressions, they fulfill a persuasive function (as other image-making practices), and they mirror aspects of society within a particular historical moment. Analysing them closely can help us reflect upon and understand the ways culture works on us – something that is otherwise difficult to grasp from within that culture. Such insights may accord us more agency as stakeholders within a given context, in a given time.
Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel’s The Popular Arts: A Critical Guide to the Mass Media (1964)
Cultural studies is an interlocking set of leftist intellectual and political practices. Its central purpose is twofold: (1) to produce detailed, contextualized analyses of the ways that power and social relations are created, structured, and maintained through culture; and (2) to circulate those analyses in public forums suitable to the tasks of pedagogy, provocation, and political intervention.54
By challenging methodological dogma, and elitist prejudice and value judgment, it [cultural studies] has been uniquely instrumental in at least making the academic community aware of the conservative nature of its endeavors, if not everywhere forcing it to change. It has, if nothing else, forced the academy to realize its collusion with an elitist white-male politics of exclusion and its subsequent intellectual closure. Everything about cultural studies that makes me not want to say that cultural studies is what I do must be considered as a footnote to this major acknowledgement.62
Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured. It is not a sphere where socialism, a socialist culture – already fully formed – might be simply ‘expressed’. But it is one of the places where socialism might be constituted. That is why ‘popular culture’ matters. Otherwise to tell you the truth, I don’t give a damn about it.64
games are simultaneously systems of information, cultural products, and manifestations of cultural practice. On some level, systems such as games must, due to the conditions of their creation, represent cultural norms and biases in their realization. These results can go, and have gone, completely unacknowledged.77
She bluntly characterizes game culture as ‘particularly masculine, heterosexual and white’ and digital games themselves as ‘the least progressive form of media representation, despite being one of the newest mediated forms’.73 This is a characterization that rings true, in the sense that, with little exception, mainstream games present a vision of the world that is devoid of postmodern, post-structural, post-colonial, feminist or any other critical cultural intervention.
Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire
Every time I watch a popular television narrative like, well say, ‘Hill Street Blues’ or ‘Miami Vice,’ with its twinning and coupling of racial masculinities at the center of its story, I have to pinch myself and remind myself that these narratives are not a somewhat distorted reflection of the real state of race relations in American cities.
They are functioning much more as Levi-Strauss tells us myths do. They are myths, which represent in narrative form the resolution of things, which can’t be resolved in real life. What they tell us about is about the ‘dream life’ of a culture. But to gain a privileged access to the dream life of a culture, you had better know how to unlock the complex ways in which narrative plays across real life. Once you look at any of these popular narratives, which constantly in the imagination of a society construct the place, the identities, the experience, the histories of the different peoples who live within it, one is instantly aware of the complexity of the nature of racism itself.92
Procedural media like videogames get to the heart of things by mounting arguments about the processes inherent in them. When we create videogames, we are making claims about these processes, which ones we celebrate, which ones we ignore, which ones we want to question. When we play these games, we interrogate those claims, we consider them, incorporate them into our lives, and carry them forward into our future experiences […] these media influence and change us.97
In his ‘Across Worlds and Bodies: Criticism in the Age of Video Games’, Keogh writes about the fraught history of games criticism.
Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, Bogost
Keogh’s searching, personal and incredibly rich Killing is Harmless extends this line of inquiry into practice by generating a phenomenological response to a single game: Spec Ops: The Line (2012).
Clara Fernández-Vara makes this connection clear in her Introduction to Game Analysis, a lucid introductory guide to possible methodologies of critical writing on games.105
Understanding how cultural meanings are communicated and how identities are created takes training. That can be academic training or self-education, but it is not something one can wake up in the morning and know how to do.’107 As a by-product of the economic, socio-political and academic turn toward the neoliberal, and the subsequent emphasis on enhancing the technical and immersive dimensions of video games, there has been comparatively miniscule engagement with their cultural meanings, relative to previous media.
GamerGate can be thought of as a paradigmatic irruption of something that would normally remain pervasive but invisible into public view. The controversy made visible the normally hidden identity politics at play in dominant games. Representation is in fact a frontline of power relations and domination, within particular spheres of influence, and this is no less true of games than other forms of mass culture and their attendant industries.
It should be understood that the perceived neutrality of games, even those that do not purport to deal with issues of identity, traffic in the assumption of a perceived ‘universalism’ or ‘neutrality’ that is fictive. It has never been the case that there was a politically neutral or a raceless form of games representation. Rather, there was such a stranglehold on the image-making machine by a small and privileged constituency of producers who possessed the temporary power to displace their own subjectivity as ‘universal’, when in fact it is shot through with the politics of identity.
If anything, cultural studies works for games because it demands criticality – including internal, methodological self-reflexive criticality. It refuses fixed subject positions and disciplinary knowledge as sufficient to grasp and understand the world. Things like ‘economic development’ and ‘technological innovation’ largely drive games writing, as opposed to the nebulous ideal of the ‘public good’. I understand this ‘public good’ as the cultivation, among other things, of activated, critical players with discernment who knowingly engage with their own self-fashioning. A burgeoning movement in alternative games exists on the side of this ‘public good’, which is made possible by the increased accessibility of game design tools and the vacuum created by the mainstream industry’s failure to model a meaningful sense of inclusion, or take creative risks with the medium.132
Lawrence Grossberg claims that ‘[c]ultural studies matters because it is about the future, and about some of the work it will take, in the present, to shape the future. It is about understanding the present in the service of the future.’137
In his How To Talk About Video Games, Bogost writes:
Criticism is not conducted to improve the work or the medium, or to win over those who otherwise would turn up their noses at it. Nor is it conducted as flash-in-the-pan buying advice, doled out on release day to reverie or disdain, only to be immediately forgotten. Rather, it is conducted to get to the bottom of something, to grasp its form, content, function, meaning, and capacities. To venture so far from the ordinariness of a subject that the terrain underfoot gives way from manicured path to wilderness, so far that the words that we would spin tousle the hair of madness. And then, to preserve that wilderness and its madness, such that both the works and our reflections on them become imbricated with one another and carried forward into the future where others might find them anew.138
As Mary Flanagan aptly notes, ‘gaming occupies a critical cultural niche. We must learn how to talk about it.’139
A mess is not a pile, which is neatly organized even if situated in an inconvenient place underfoot. A mess is not an elegant thing of a higher order. It is not an intellectual project to be evaluated and risk-managed by waistcoat-clad underwriters. A mess is a strew of inconvenient and sometimes repellent things. It is less an imbroglio of the sort one finds in a painting of Pollock or Picasso, and more the mess one finds in a sculpture of Kienholz. A mess is an accident. A mess is a thing that you find where you don’t want it. A mess is the cascade of broken glass on the floor when you miss the alarm clock and catch the water glass. A mess is the heap of hot, unseen dog shit on the stoop, and then on the stoop and the bootsole. A mess is inelegant, a clutter, a shamble, a terror. We recoil at it, yet there it is, and we must deal with it.
Videogames are a mess. A mess we don’t need to keep trying to clean up, if it were even possible to do so.1
Ian Bogost, ‘Video Games are a Mess’
In my use of the phrase ‘politics of identity’ I refer specifically to a call that cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall makes for a new ‘politics of identity’, to be differentiated from conventional ‘identity politics’, which is associated with essentializing notions of the subject.4 Gesturing toward political identities that are not ‘founded on the notion of some absolute, integral self’, he embraces instead a tripartite strategy of a politics of difference, of self-reflexivity and of contingency.5 Scholar James Procter has interpreted each of these elements as: (1) a rejection of binaries and an understanding of difference as existing within both the group and within individual identity; (2) an understanding that all subjects speak from a specific position; and (3) an understanding that those positions we do take are contextual and may shift in different circumstances.6
When referring to ‘ideology’, I refer to Hall’s usage during a discussion of racist ideologies in media as meaning ‘those images, concepts and premises which provide the frameworks through which we represent, interpret, understand and “make sense” of some aspect of social existence’.9 Per Hall’s thinking, ideologies are not isolated concepts; rather they are connected by chains of meaning. Likewise, ideologies are not driven by individual intention, but shift as part of a collective process. They may seem natural, but are in fact highly constructed. And, according to Hall’s definition, ideologies construct a place for subjects from which to perceive themselves as speaking truths, in a way that feels so authentic to themselves and their experience that they take it for their own – although it actually arises from larger discourses and forces at play.10
As one scholar said of Hall, ‘For him, culture is not something to simply appreciate, or study; it is also a critical site of social action and interpretation, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled.’11
Hall wrote of media as ‘not only a powerful source of ideas about race. They are also one place where these ideas are articulated, worked on, transformed and elaborated.’13
Adrienne Shaw’s significant intervention into game culture, Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture,
Matthew Thomas Payne’s work on post-9/11 military games has similarly described games in this way, saying, ‘video games are modern day palimpsests; they are interactive records that possess layers upon layers of creative practices and that contain – like the faint and hidden writing on ancient parchment – earlier iterations of code, mechanics, and cultural beliefs about citizenship, patriotism, sacrifice and government power.’29
As Said himself wrote, ‘To believe that the Orient was created – or, as I call it, “Orientalized” – and to believe that such things happen simply as a necessity of the imagination, is to be disingenuous. The relationship between the Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony…’37
One ought never to assume that the structure of Orientalism is nothing more than a structure of lies or of myths which, were the truth about them to be told, would simply blow away. I myself believe that Orientalism is more particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is a veridic discourse about the Orient […] Nevertheless, what we must respect and try to grasp is the sheer knitted-together strength of Orientalist discourse, its very close ties to the enabling socio-economic and political institutions, and its redoubtable durability. After all, any system of ideas that can remain unchanged as teachable wisdom (in academies, books, congresses, universities, foreign-service institutes) from the period of Ernest Renan in the late 1840s until the present in the United States must be something more formidable than a mere collection of lies. Orientalism, therefore, is not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material investment.38
Following Said’s characterization, games set in the fantastical Middle East often imagine the Orient as timeless, exotic, naive and fundamentally contradictory to modernity. ‘Since video games are usually produced with their consumer base in mind,’ Šisler contends, ‘they tend to incorporate and reflect the general imaginations of the Middle East prevalent among the Western public, as well as the audience’s expectations of particular genres.’ He continues, ‘Moreover, the highly competitive nature of the game market, together with high production costs, reinforces the iteration of proved and successful patterns in game genres and content.’40 In his theorization, Šisler traces a clear line, through Said, that follows the connectedness between the popularization of the cultural representation of Islamic and Arab societies in games and the Western imperial policies that inform and sustain them.
Together, these elements signify what lies beneath the story of Aveline, namely the vestigial presence of the decidedly gendered swashbuckler and Orientalist fantasy, which are predicated upon a notion of adventure that Hall described as ‘synonymous with the demonstration of the moral, social and physical mastery of the colonizers over the colonized’.45 In other words, while the game’s narrative of liberation and its exceptional heroine of colour break with the dominant reading of the swashbuckler figure and Orientalist fantasy, its poetics retain the eroded, fragmented, accumulated gestures that recall a cultural history of European empire (see Figure 1.5).
The process of creolization refers to the brutal interaction of culturally different populations as they have occurred in different parts of the world in which the system of plantation-organized society. Créolité, on the other hand, is the ‘fact of belonging to an original human entity which comes out of these processes in due time’.53
That is the tyranny of realism that games focused too much on questions of accuracy, rather than emancipatory possibility, must struggle to overcome. It is also indicative of the way imagined audiences over-determine the stories companies are willing to tell. If we can only imagine new ways of viewing what has been, we never get a chance to imagine what might be.73
Shaw’s point is well-taken, and it is clear in Liberation as well that all fictive elements of the game operate within the scope of actual historical outcomes. That is to say, whatever speculative elements there are, the game does not ultimately offer a different unfolding of history. Rather, all outcomes reaffirm history as having an inevitable progression that persists with its results, even within the fantasy realm and time of the game. One can say, at most, that it recuperates obliterated subjectivities and offers ‘hyperfictional’ asides that provide the catharsis of an alternative outcome or emission of some quashed truth. At the same time, the game renders history as malleable, subjectivized and elusive. Within the larger meta-narrative of the past being controlled by an entity (Templar Order) with interests in how its narratives are related, the rhetorical device of a machine constructed for virtually re-living that past in playable form reveals a very real struggle for history.
How a group is represented, presented over again in cultural forms, how an image of a member of a group is taken as representative of that group, how that group is represented in the sense of spoken for and on behalf of (whether they represent, speak for themselves or not), these all have to do with how members of groups see themselves and others like themselves, how they see their place in society, their right to the rights a society claims to ensure its citizens. Equally representation, representativeness, representing have to do also with how others see members of a group and their place and rights, others who have the power to affect that place and those rights. How we are seen determines in part how we are treated; how we treat others is based on how we see them; such seeing comes from representation.1
Richard Dyer, The Matter of Images
Games engage in a politics of identity through their inclusions and omissions, their complex constructions and their highly manufactured totalities. It is important to consider that, when examining any game, its images are all entirely intentional – and ‘images’, once again, encompass visual, aural and textual elements in the broadest sense.
Whiteness studies, or ‘critical whiteness studies’, arose from post-colonial and post-modern theory made popular in the 1970s and 1980s, with a strong surge in the US in the 1990s. As Tyler Stallings summarized this moment, ‘vocabularies and strategies had developed based on the notion that forcing the dominant culture to recognize itself – to name itself, when for so long it had claimed to have no name – was the first step toward dismantling it.’27
Ruth Frankenberg, in her White Women, Race Matters, outlines three key facets of whiteness: ‘First, whiteness is a location of structural advantage, of race privilege. Second, it is a “standpoint,” a place from which white people look at ourselves, at others, and at a society. Third, “whiteness” refers to a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed.’28
The White man at the dawn of the twenty-first century faces all the commonly shared perils of his fellow citizens, the lingering horror of 9/11, the uncertain contours of the War on Terror, but also and uniquely, he faces the knowledge that an America that he has always thought of as essentially his seems to be slipping away in an increasingly multi-racial America.37
Dyer writes on the representation of whiteness and heteronormativity:
Women, ethnic minorities, gay people and so on are not the only ones to be social groupings; everyone belongs to social groupings; indeed, we all belong in many groupings, often antagonistic to one another of at the least implying very different accesses to power. The groupings that have tended not to get addresses in ‘images of’ work, however, are those with the most access to power: men, whites, heterosexuals, the able-bodied […] This must not imply, however, an equivalence between such images and those of women and other oppressed groupings. The project of making normality strange and thus ultimately decentering it must not seem to say that this has already taken place, that now masculinity, whiteness, heterosexuality and able-bodiedness are just images of identity alongside all others […] As in all issues of representation, we must not leave the matter of power out of account any more than the matter of representation itself.
most of the time white people speak about nothing but white people, it’s just that we couch it in terms of ‘people’ in general. Research – into books, museums, the press, advertising, films, television, software – repeatedly shows that in Western representation whites are overwhelmingly and disproportionately predominant, have the central and elaborated roles, and above all are placed as the norm, the ordinary, the standard.48
Scavenging in the game is key to a critique of failed capitalism, which is also an extension of the critique of a white hetero-patriarchal order that is now in ruins. One of the key characteristics of hypercapitalism is the splitting of objects from their literal use-value. Advanced capitalism invests objects with meaning that may be thoroughly detached from their actual usefulness.
Pokemon cards
Resident Evil, media and culture studies scholar Derek Burrill writes:
In Resident Evil, the true antagonist is the virus. The virus is an oft-used nemesis in videogames from similar genres (such as Parasite Eve or Syphon Filter), as the virus serves as an internal threat, playing on general cultural fears of HIV, Ebola, and other physical dangers, while it also manifests itself as an external threat in the form of some infected physical presence. This enables the player to overcome representations of internalized struggle and weakness through virtualized, external physical destruction and violence.
This image of whiteness, deathliness and trauma is also key in the game’s blurring of the boundary between super-soldier and homicidal maniac. The Line indicts the supposed civilizing mission or ‘white man’s burden’ of protecting the world from degenerating into disorder, darkness and barbarism. In this, ‘the line’ that is crossed may also refer to the dissolution of stable white masculinity as it is put into crisis through a racialized encounter with the other in the Arab world. In a strong departure from the typical military shooter, in which the playable character has righteousness on his side, this game generates friction.84 The ‘full spectrum dominance’ demonstrated in the excessive use of force, poorly rationalized missions and mounting insanity interrupts the core values of such games. And, as I have argued, as cultural forms of signification, the visual politics of these images betray an affective quality of deep ambivalence, fear and a perception of larger ambient anxieties surrounding eroded white dominance in US culture.
Marcus Schulzke argues that the core mechanics of the game effectively prevent the player from preserving themselves from the ethical difficulties of the situations The Line presents:
The game shows the potential problems of soldiers entering a war they barely understand and hoping that good intentions alone will allow them to produce a good outcome. This dystopia is therefore one that calls attention to the many evils of unrestrained violence and military intervention, especially in regions that are poorly understood. The game mechanics present these messages forcefully by constraining players in such a way that they must use violence to complete the game only to find that victory can be hollow and far too costly.87
As Holger Pötzsch similarly asserts, ‘Spec Ops: The Line ultimately subverts the myth of the male, white soldier as glorious hero and saviour so central to the American and increasingly also European military imaginary.’88
The fact that the game [The Last of Us] uses a worn generic trope – a catastrophic event that over-night destroys all established institutions and unravels received power relations – and thus establishes a postapocalyptic context ‘ex machina’ significantly reduces the critical import of The Last of Us. By taking recourse to a sudden breakdown of order that is unequivocally connected to a clear external cause, the game loses its ability to meaningfully comment upon key tendencies in contemporary society and politics such as rapid ecological detriment, economic downturns, growing inequalities, or resurgent practices of warfare at a global scale.90
Anne-Marie Schleiner contests the feminist critique of Croft, declaring her ‘a product of the mechanization of bodies; her fetishized synthetic beauty resides in her slick and glistening 3D polygons, evolved from clunky robotic forms into attire more appropriate for the information society.’93 Presenting a broad array of possible readings, Schleiner advocates for the subversion of gender categories by appropriating and hacking the iconic Lara.
In describing female hypersexualization in relation to Tomb Raider and other games, Jon Dovey and Helen Kennedy assess that, ‘the visual imagery in many mainstream games seems to be entirely ignorant of the critiques that have been made of these stereotypes in other visual media and appear to import some of the worst examples in an entirely unreflexive and uncritical way.’94 Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins outline the problematics of Croft as a character purported to be liberated and capable, while pandering to chauvinistic teen male interests (‘tits and ass’, as they put it).95 They ponder the potentialities of transgender identification made possible through the male player’s engagement with a female avatar.
W.J.T. Mitchell’s query in relation to ideological constructions of land, from his now-canonical Landscape and Power, which ‘ask[s] not just what landscape “is” or “means” but what it does, how it works as a cultural practice’.8 He explains:
Landscape as a cultural medium thus has a double role with respect to something like ideology: it naturalizes a cultural and social construction, representing an artificial world as if it were simply given and inevitable, and it also makes that representation operational by interpellating its beholder in some more or less determinate relation to its givenness as sight and site. Thus, landscape (whether urban or rural, artificial or natural) always greets us as space, as environment, as that within which ‘we’ (figured as ‘the figures’ in the landscape) find – or lose –ourselves.9
Henry Jenkins and Kurt Squire have, already in the early beginnings of game studies, made a similar assertion regarding in-game environments:
Game worlds are totally constructed environments. Everything there was put on the screen for some purpose – shaping the game play or contributing to the mood and atmosphere or encouraging performance, playfulness, competition, or collaboration. If games tell stories, they do so by organizing spatial features. If games stage combat, then players learn to scan their environments for competitive advantages. Game designers create immersive worlds with embedded rules and relationships among objects that enable dynamic experiences.10
“is this a boss arena?” yes. It is.
their highly influential Game Cultures, Jon Dovey and Helen Kennedy remark on the centrality of cultural context for an understanding of how space functions in games: ‘Although games and play take place in their own time and space, this “location” is intimately related to the wider cultural landscape […] it can be argued that we can only understand the game space through its relation to the non-game space.’11
The action is seen from a floating camera-eye perspective, mostly above and behind the player-character’s figure. Particles of dust, droplets of water and Snake’s blood when he is injured all gather on that window, providing the sense of being in an action film (a mediated experience) as opposed to being immersed in the action-adventure itself.16 The aural components of the game confirm this, as one can hear a rustling noise that imitates wind resistance against a microphone, when running or on horseback, suggesting mediated sound. Each ‘Episode’ or mission has its own title sequence, another reference to cinema. The figure-ground relations are such that the playable character is usually fairly small and dead-centre in the image, which in filmic terms might convey a sense of entrapment or diminutive relation to the land. However, the practical function of this is that the player may see the character being controlled, as well as roughly 180 degrees of the surrounding space.
Using the advantages of the ruins dotting the area, the high ground for remote visual identification of foes, as well as the cover of night, this game configures the land strongly in terms of its use-value for the completion of objectives (see Figure 3.3). The space is, however, startlingly devoid of local people, eliminating the possibility of friendly fire or collateral damage. The land yields resources like medicinal plants and raw diamonds, but is just as easily a site of unexpected danger, such as animal attacks or passing Soviet trucks filled with enemy soldiers. Interior spaces similarly contain details that lend a certain texture and authenticity to a notion of militarized Afghanistan as represented in lived-world news media.
The various simulated landscapes of The Phantom Pain give the appearance of a more immersive or ‘real’ experience.17 In relation to his discussion of another military-themed game, Spec Ops: The Line, Matthew Thomas Payne has indicated that this idea of the ‘real’ in games is a slippery proposition at best, because naturalistic imaging is falsely confused with authenticity and realism:
Realism – understood as a set of claims about the world – is not necessarily synonymous with verisimilitude, or a media technology’s ability to re-present worldly sights and sounds. And yet, the entertainment industry purposefully conflates the war game’s ability to render photorealistic graphics and surround sound with broader notions of experiential realism.18
While the game itself approaches photorealistic detail, it is important to differentiate its lack of fidelity to actual spaces as well as its hyperreality. Used by Jean Baudrillard, this term describes a sense in which the real itself is inaccessible, and can only be understood within a system of signs that reduplicate the real again and again until the object of the representation becomes lost and unattainable. What remains is simulation that staves off its own ‘crisis of representation’ by hysterically repeating itself.19
games scholar Espen Aarseth declared: ‘The defining element in computer games is spatiality. Computer games are essentially concerned with spatial representation and negotiation, and therefore a classification of computer games can be based on how they represent – or, perhaps, implement – space.’23 Focusing
Michael Nitsche, in his book-length analysis, identifies five distinct ‘planes’ for approaching the subject of game space. These include the ‘rule-based space’ that sets the mathematically delimited parameters for what is possible in the space; the aural and visual presentation or ‘mediated space’ that is seen onscreen; the ‘fictional space’ or imagined comprehension of what is experienced; the ‘play space’ or interplay between the human and hardware; and finally the ‘social space’ which includes other players and observers in their direct or indirect engagement with the game.28 As Nitsche argues, these in-game and extra-game elements work in concert to provide a whole experience, and a sense of presence in the immersive space.29 While surveying a history of approaches to various dimensions of game spaces such as player reception, the notion of a ‘magic circle’ (which separates play from other everyday activity), and design of level architecture, Nitsche suggests that the confluence of these elements engenders an experience of game space:
Nitsche writes:
In order to shape this camera work, virtual cameras can mimic all of the mentioned real-camera behaviors in their presentation of a video game space without any physical restraints. Paradoxically, this freedom of digital cameras can initially result in a shrinking of applied artistic practice. A virtual camera lacks the functional parts of a real camera apparatus that codefine [sic] cinematic language. There are no lenses, filters, shutters, no iris, or film stock in a virtual camera; the camera does not weigh anything and does not make any noise – yet all these elements are responsible for a range of cinematic effects and the development of cinema’s form. Without these defining features, virtual cameras lack an important incentive for artistic development: the creative encounter with the limitations of the technology.32
Mark J.P. Wolf, who has written extensively on game worlds and how effective world-building occurs across many forms, contends that playable spaces themselves demand critical attention. Wolf’s Building Imaginary Worlds connects the spaces of games to the development of other kinds of world-building, such as those that can be found in literature, table-top games, dollhouse play, building sets, role-playing games and the like, as well as text-based adventures and graphical adventure games.37 He groups these disparate but, according to him, connected phenomena under what he calls the ‘imaginary world tradition’, suggesting that what players of games experience in the simulated spaces of playable media finds its precedence in thousands of years of human storytelling and play:
The notion that ‘things could have been otherwise than what they are’ is the idea behind the philosophy of possible worlds, a branch of philosophy designed for problem-solving in formal semantics and, that considers possibilities, imaginary objects, their ontological status, and the relationship between fictional worlds and the actual world. Possible worlds theory places the ‘actual world’ at the center of the hierarchy of worlds, and ‘possible worlds’ around it, that are said to be ‘accessible’ to the actual world. These worlds are then used to formulate statements regarding possibility and necessity.38
Games scholar James Newman argues that for Fuller and Jenkins ‘at least part of the pleasure of videogame play is derived from the transformation of the place to space, the eradication of the unknown and the bringing of uncertain geographies under the control and influence of the player.’47 As Newman describes the connection between game space and travel narratives, the ‘heart of these narratives [is] the transformation and mastery of geography – the colonization of space.’48 Newman himself characterizes the progress through a particular game as quite often contiguous with progress through its world, and suggests that ‘gameplay may not be seen as bounded in space, but also as a journey through it.’49
William Huber similarly connects the speed with which one moves through game space to a sense of domain over it:
Velocity compresses the experience of place and creates the passing landscape, or spaces of transition. There can be affective shifts associated with moving through a space quickly through which one once moved slowly – even without conflict, a kind of mastery is produced, and the satisfaction of this telescoping mobility is a significant element in the aesthetics of the play of these games.50
Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: Videogame Forms and Contexts. In it, co-authors Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska describe the functional use of varying degrees of utility, accessibility and comparative freedom of game worlds, depending upon technological limitations – but also what various types of gameplay necessitate. The scholars maintain that, ‘the world of the game is often as much a protagonist, or even antagonist, as its inhabitants.’53
Among other things, King and Krzywinska argue that ‘[i]f the appeal of spatial exploration in games is closely connected with a continual search for avenues of fresh stimulation, this might also be strongly resonant with broader processes within capitalist/consumerist culture, which relies on the constant creation of new “desires” to be satisfied.’54
scholar Eugénie Shinkle identifies how world-building in games is shaped to communicate and guide:
Familiar and easily navigable, with a wide field of vision and a distinct foreground, middleground, and background, Cartesian space enhances the player’s sense of presence by enabling them to situate themselves in space and understand the orientation of visual objects. Positive and negative space is used to create areas of depth and areas of blockage; players will tend to move straight ahead into areas of depth without too much prompting, with massed objects and paths directing their progress when necessary.56
Like the perspectival foundation on which it is constructed, landscape representation is a paradigmatic form; a means of inscribing deeply-held cultural attitudes into an apparently neutral space of representation. Viewing a landscape is, of course, not a natural way of seeing, but a visual habit that transforms experience. And landscapes, in turn, are not simply representations of particular states of nature, but created contexts within which politics and ideology take shape. The discourse of landscape – its definition, its conventions, its history – authorizes a specific cultural vision of nature, and its political potency is, in part, a function of its ability to naturalize this vision, to conceal deeply rooted cultural sensibilities behind a screen of benign realism.57
The work of King and Krzywinska, as well as Consalvo, constitutes a distinct intervention in games scholarship that gestures toward a critical cultural approach to games. Although their work unlocks potentials for games scholarship, this avenue of inquiry nonetheless deserves greater expansion to meet the increasing complexity of game representations and technological capacities.
Likewise, Miguel Sicart points out that computer games ‘create game worlds with values at play’.64 Players, he says, engage with these spaces, understanding that while they may cheat or test the system, they are mostly subject to its rules. These rules, he argues, generate a world suited to the goals of play.65 There are ethics involved in rule-making, and of course the spaces that are generated would be, as Sicart characterizes them, ‘ethically relevant’ to analyze.66
In his essay on imperial landscape, W.J.T. Mitchell describes how representations of the land in Western imaging practices, as they emerged in the seventeenth century, were specifically connected to social engineering67 around imperialist expansion into the West.68 Calling upon a history of scholarship on the development of landscape painting and its penchant for particular kinds of representations, he asserts these images are always already ‘secondary representations’.69 That is, nature itself is mediated by cultural constructions around its meaning, before then undergoing a secondary transformation under the process of representation.
Mitchell asserts that landscapes are central to the construction of particular ideologies about the land, nation and social identities that shore up how cultural power functions.71 Key to Mitchell’s analysis is his understanding of ‘place’, ‘space’ and ‘landscape’, which he defines as a ‘specific location’, a ‘practiced place’, and a ‘site encountered as an image or “sight”’, respectively.72 He attributes these definitions largely to the influence of Henri Lefebvre’s concept of triangulation as a strategy against binary thinking about space and place, and sense of how landscape is constituted through mediation. And, he additionally appropriates concepts from Michel de Certeau, particularly his theorization of space as activated through various registers of engagement.73 Like Mitchell, this chapter presumes the notion that these three concepts operate in tandem; as Mitchell puts it, they ‘dictate a process of thinking space/place/landscape as a unified problem and a dialectical process’.74
I similarly assert that in relation to games, ‘landscape is better understood as a medium of cultural expression,’ and that representations of that landscape (in this case, within games) reveal ‘ways of seeing the landscape, but as a representation of something that is already a representation in its own right (emphasis added)’.76 This is significant because, like Stuart Hall identified in his canonical essay, ‘Encoding, Decoding’, the messages within media have a ‘complex structure in dominance’ that reflect power relations at each stage in the production and consumption of the text.77 Importantly, these messages may have an apparent sense of realism, but as Hall argues, this ‘[n]aturalism and “realism” – the apparent fidelity of the representation to the thing or concept represented – is the result, the effect, of a certain specific articulation of language on the “real.” It is the result of a discursive practice.’78 These codes, in other words, may be so universally accepted as to appear natural, but it is extremely important to understand that this is the by-product of the code having reproduced a largely unquestioned perception in the viewer (or in this case, player). In an absence of understanding how these many layers of meaning-making take place, through representation and secondary orders of representation (which drifts in orders of degree away from the thing in itself), the highly ideological images of games may become taken for granted as realism. Actually, they have already been mediated through multiple layers of cultural intervention at several points in their process of production. The visual power of so-called photographic realism in games may obscure this, and their technical frameworks may naturally invite formal approaches. However, it is vital to consider games as at least second order representational formulations.79 This is one of the ways in which games are quite literally culture – that is to say, as I have argued elsewhere in this book, they are necessarily formulated cultural constructions. This is evidenced in their landscapes, and so it is possible to look to in-game landscapes themselves, for insight into the cultures in which they originate.
Within The Phantom Pain itself, there are specific and elaborate ways of looking at the landscape; this activity is in fact exceedingly bureaucratic in its character. One can observe the enemy from a distance via in-game binoculars. Seeing them through this technologized vision (which is a doubling again of a view on a simulated space through the ‘enhancement’ of simulated binocular vision) permits the identification of enemy soldiers and then the marking of combatants with a red triangle. Once classified as enemies, soldiers with markers can always be seen and their distance from the player is noted numerically in metres. In short, they no longer possess the element of surprise, a key advantage for the player during engagement. Significant objects of interest are noted as well, and observation of the space often reveals additional intel through remote communications that will prompt a player about their mission and best strategy.
Within this scenario, observation carries with it a kind of dominion; it is opportunistic. Seeing, while no guarantor of success, maps territory, hostiles and key targets. Scavenging for intel may become as (or even more) important than the hunt for objects, and it begins to take on bureaucratic dimensions when elaborate schemas of collection of information and resources (like raw diamonds, processed materials, fuel, medicinal plants, specialists in bionics and translation) directly allows for Mother Base to be expanded and the main character’s abilities to be enhanced. Gameplay even allows for micromanagement of Mother Base’s resources and redistribution of individual recruits, per their special abilities. Under categorical types of engagement with Mother Base – such as development, resources, staff management, base facilities and database – a player enhances their functionality in the field through the strategic use of resources. Eventually, one’s income to the base is enhanced through various indirect means, such as the establishment of a ‘Merc Deployment Unit Function’, which allows the player to dispatch mercenaries to other conflict zones for profit. Managing and allocating all these hoarded resources can begin to feel like work. This complex demand to multitask and simultaneously understand the game through various visual references (on the ground during active play; through the ‘iDroid’ screen that presents a map and multiple tabs and pull-down menus for the activation and administration of various resources; and the binocular view) presents a quintessential twenty-first-century multiplex management strategy. In their overview of how values are communicated through games, Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum effectively argue that even these seemingly neutral diagrams contain beliefs, moral positions and politics.83 In relation to the simulated Afghan landscape, a map becomes a complex representation of potential objectives and notions of progress.
Mitchell conceives of the viewer of the land as a kind of predator. Setting aside the form of strategic looking that scans the landscape with binoculars in order to ‘mark’ enemies, there is a larger sense in which games encourage the address of the game space and all that is within it from the viewpoint of its prospective use-value for the player. It is an opportunistic and exploitative form of observation. This predatory viewing is not limited to military tactical shooters, since many forms of games demand strategies around the effective use of space. Mitchell, in relation to the history of Western landscape painting, connects this active predatory looking to imperial expansion. He describes a set of binary hierarchal relations between Western and non-Western aesthetics of landscapes. Among these is the notion that the non-Western native of the land does not see the land for its abundance and promising economic value. They are constructed as failing to ‘exploit, develop, and “improve” the landscape’ in such a manner that normalizes its rapacious appropriation by the West.88 The genius of this position is that the construction of the land as underused (by the predatory, desiring eye) provides its own verification by virtue of what it sees. ‘Landscape,’ Mitchell concludes, ‘thus serves as an aesthetic alibi for conquest, a way of naturalizing imperial expansion and even making it look disinterested in a Kantian sense.’89 This sets up an interesting paradox, in fact, that runs the gamut between desiring or opportunistic looking and the naturalization of expansion as originating from a disinterested place.
The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, originally published in 1964, Marx exploits the ideology of the wilderness, specifically the desert, as an access point to foundational American constructions of landscape. He describes the curious dual image, which oscillates between an Edenic vision and hostile wilderness:
To depict America as a garden is to express aspirations still considered utopian–aspirations toward abundance, leisure, freedom, and a greater harmony of existence.
To describe America as a hideous wilderness, however, is to envisage it as another field for the exercise of power. This violent image expresses a need to mobilize energy, postpone immediate pleasures, and rehearse the perils and purposes of the community. Life in a garden is relaxed, quiet and sweet […] but survival in a howling desert demands action, the unceasing manipulation and mastery of the forces of nature, including, of course, human nature. Colonies established in the desert require aggressive, intellectual, controlled and well-disciplined people.93
In this, The Phantom Pain provides a paradigmatic example of a natural environment-turned landscape. Figure/ground relations in this imagined space – in the first part of the game, specifically Northern Kabul, Afghanistan – surely differ from the conventional images of earlier expressive forms like poetry, fiction and painting of an imagined pastoral American land. In this procedural game world, the view and engagement is shifting, commanding a particular set of relations to the space. It is discursive, rather than fixed, but fundamentally structural in the sense that the ‘image’ still operates within the bounds of a constructed rule-based system (a game made of software) that is delimited, culturally contextual and necessarily ideological. Its playability as a media form renders it distinct from earlier forms of landscape. However, the landscape of The Phantom Pain similarly configures the space as overarchingly devoid of ‘natives’, and instead illegitimately occupied by an invading Soviet force. And, it presents the Afghan landscape as a new wilderness space to be dominated and domesticated through aggressive, intellectual, controlled and well-disciplined manipulation (see Figure 3.8).
Neda Atanasoski has discussed the strange transfiguration of Afghanistan in the American popular imagination in her research on humanitarian militarism, and its connection to postsocialist imperialism.101 Particularly, the construction of 1980s Afghanistan as a site in need of humanitarian intervention has morphed from a sense that communism and inhumanity must be fought, into a post-9/11 ideology of rescuing innocents (especially women) from repressive fundamentalist Islam. In her essay on US media representations of the Soviet–Afghan War, Atanasoski writes:
The contradiction between the messianic overtones of President Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy promising a postsocialist future and the place of Islam and Muslims in that future came to a violent head after 9/11. Currently, the memory of U.S. military and humanitarian aid to the mujahideen has become an alibi for the perpetual military occupation of Afghanistan. The implication that humanitarian investments unaccompanied by U.S. military oversight fail to properly ‘discipline’ Islam frames the necessity for U. S. imperialism in the Middle East […] Throughout the Reagan presidency, the Afghan freedom fighters were enfolded into a U.S. narrative of secular progress, which would bring about a free world, as well as into a messianic narrative of deliverance from Communist oppression […] Yet because of the objectification of the mujahideen for the purposes of a U.S. global vision, after the fall of the Berlin Wall they themselves came to embody the totalitarian and oppressive evil once associated with Communist ideology.102
And the blackout suggested a new ‘heart of darkness’ for a colonial imperialist power (the Soviets), a moral darkness that the United States might battle, in order to cover up its own stench of past imperial violence in Vietnam. Through humanitarian intervention against the Soviet Union’s presence in Afghanistan, the US could publicly redeem itself by fighting against totalitarianism – even though, as Atanasoski well argues, the connectedness between US actions in Vietnam and the USSR’s actions in Afghanistan were similarly imperialist. However, with the defeat of the Soviet Union in the region, the US ceased its militarized humanitarian aid, leaving a crippled war-torn country in turmoil. The rise of the Taliban occurred in the vacuum of this ‘hollow ideal’ of American humanitarianism.103 In an impressive form of ideological acrobatics, the US transforms the guerrilla freedom fighters they once covertly backed into the enemies of freedom and democracy in the world.104 Atanasoski ultimately contends that, paradoxically, the ‘buried memory of the Soviet-Afghan War reaffirms US morality in the Middle East in the present.’
Film theorist Dudley Andrew once said that,
Worlds are comprehensive systems which comprise all elements that fit together within the same horizon, including elements that are before our eyes in the foreground of experience, and those which sit vaguely on the horizon forming a background. These elements consist of objects, feelings, associations, and ideas in a grand mix so rich that only the term ‘world’ seems large enough to encompass it.111
As in film, the world-building of video games consists of a framing that constitutes itself as representing that which can be seen within it, in relation to what is presumed to persistently exist beyond it. There is a sense that what cannot be seen nevertheless exists, and lives in a totality beyond the frame of the playable image.
In the case of The Phantom Pain as one of many potential examples, the complex engagement with a troubling, fraught history of the US with Afghanistan forms the affective and literal ‘ground’ upon which the game is built and enacted. The space is configured as bureaucratic, and seen through the violent predatory gaze, which reconfigures the land as something to be exploited and disciplined by Snake and his well-oiled Diamond Dogs (see Figure 3.9). Notions of progress toward goals in the game are linked to seeing, mapping, claiming and managing. It is impossible to fully understand the game decontextualized from its moment of coming into being. Given that landscape has been shown to legitimize conquest, the predatory gaze directed toward a game world for the purposes of better exploiting its puzzle-solving potentials comes as no surprise.
I have increasingly come to believe that our understanding of the city cannot be viewed independently of the cinematic experience. [Jean] Baudrillard’s much-quoted notion of starting from the screen and moving to the city accepts a duality between the real city and the reel city that no longer exists. I propose instead that to understand this relationship better, we should start not from one and move to the other, but engage with both simultaneously. In what Baudrillard calls the ‘collapse of metaphor…the obscenity of obviousness…our chasms of affectation,’ culture keeps imitating and duplicating itself in a delirious self-referentiality. In a pervasive game of mirrors reflecting each other, art imitates life, life imitates art, art imitates art, life imitates life.1
Nezar AlSayyad, Cinematic Urbanism
In her essay on the relationship between geopolitics and games, Rachel Hughes considers the interrelations between the two, and importantly, the ‘historical intimacy between commercial and state interests in the computation and simulation of conflict’, as well as the mobilization of particular geopolitical viewpoints within particular genres.4 ‘Consciously or otherwise,’ Hughes writes, ‘genre is as integral to the meaning-making of political strategists and military generals as it is to game designers and players of digital games.’5 Hughes describes the ‘looking-moving-feeling’ of the military genre of action games as engendering ‘“anticipatory looking” (and rapid response) [which] arguably matters more than the player’s game strategy, experience-level and dexterity in manoeuvring their avatar through the gameworld.’6 This ‘generic resonance between geopolitics and gaming’ or ‘game world geopolitics’, as she terms it, is significant because her research pointedly draws into consideration the importance of genre in relation to geopolitical representational practices within simulations, and how they may impact lived world attitudes.7
Given Rockstar’s reputation for iconoclastic, satirical and critique-oriented scenarios in other titles such as the Grand Theft Auto series and Red Dead Redemption, one can only assume that the decision to uproot Max from New York is a calculated risk, given the success of the original Max Payne and its sequel.
The question naturally arises: Why dislocate Max? What does it mean to contextualize this classic character type within a new site? Whatever the developer’s intentions around reimagining the franchise, this move effectively takes the noir detective figure, which is a construction fundamentally borne of anxiety around modernity and the city, and places him in a new condition that invokes postmodernity and the global through the megacity with its circulation of bodies in a transnational flow, stark ethnic and class-based fragmentation, militarized protection of privileged districts, large numbers of dispossessed, compression of time and vertical architectural hierarchy of classes (see Figure 4.2)
Lance Rubin points to their persisting relevance in the contemporary context of a ‘War on Terror’:
Dick’s protagonists stand as powerful allegories for the confusion, paranoia, and phenomenological uncertainty about memory and identity in post-9/11 America. Rather than externalizing threats in the Manichean mantra of ‘with us or against us,’ Minority Report, Imposter, Paycheck and A Scanner Darkly suggest that the menaces to freedom are much closer. They articulate an internalization of the ‘War on Terror,’ the willful forfeiture of our humanity to those who would manipulate our memories and identities for political ideals that disregard the lives of individuals in the name of a professed greater good.43
These manipulations of memories and identities for political ideals refer, in Rubin’s description, to the strategic erasure and re-mix of national memory as it regards the Bush, Jr. administration’s post-9/11 insistence on the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, then its subsequent imperative to bring democracy and ‘save’ Iraqis through invasion, even after such weapons were not found. In this, Rubin unveils an erasure of historical memory at work in the United States: justifying military intervention; rationalizing the outcomes of that intervention; forgetting about the circumstances which may have led to the ensuing conflict; and then wilfully ignoring national culpability for reprehensible global economic behaviour in order to remain comfortable.44 Remember Me does not fall far from these themes, as the cost of Nilin’s recuperation from amnesia is often her painful reliving of traumatic memories, and her tampering with the memories of others, all for the sake of the professed greater good.
In this ‘space of flows’, one holds relevance and centrality in terms of one’s connectedness to the network society, as opposed to geographical location.46 Max Payne is one such figure, displayed to a new global node in the space of flows, employed by managerial elite, and disoriented by his new identity in the network. Castells also identifies the coming of a ‘Fourth World’ – a new formation comprised of those left out of the utopian vision of globalization:
a new world, the Fourth World, has emerged, made up of multiple black holes of social exclusion throughout the planet. The Fourth World comprises large areas of the globe, such as much of Sub-Saharan Africa, and the impoverished rural areas of Latin America and Asia. But it is also present in literally every country, and every city, in this new geography of social exclusion. It is formed of American inner-city ghettos, Spanish enclaves of mass youth unemployment, French banlieues warehousing North Africans, Japanese Yoseba quarters, and Asian mega-cities’ shanty towns. And it is populated by millions of homeless, incarcerated, prostituted, criminalized, brutalized, stigmatized, sick, and illiterate persons. They are the majority in some areas, the minority in others, and a tiny minority in a few privileged contexts. But, everywhere, they are growing in number, and increasing in visibility, as the selective triage of informational capitalism, and the political breakdown of the welfare state, intensify social exclusion. In the current historical context, the rise of the Fourth World is inseparable from the rise of informational global capitalism.47
Writing on Blade Runner, Marcus A. Doel and David B. Clarke described its future city in terms of:
its fractal geography; the interruption of temporality; the triumph of flexible accumulation within the hollow husks of global corporations; the fusion of the mechanisms of capital accumulation and governance, the absorption of referentiality and representation through a proliferation of simulacra and simulations; the lack of authenticity and the indeterminacy of identity; the short-circuiting of memory, genealogy, and history; the omnipresence of the Fourth World; the slow motion catastrophe of space-time decomposition; and the banality and fatality of living on in the hereafter.60
In his The Condition of Postmodernity, Harvey theorizes the ‘time-space compression’ that emerges as a result of capitalism, which advances its aims across great distances and differing times, often with near instantaneity. Likewise, he discusses how spatial barriers are reduced through advancements in transportation and communication. The term ‘time-space compression’ refers to:
processes that so revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves. I use the word ‘compression’ because a strong case can be made that the history of capitalism has been characterized by speed-up in the pace of life, while so overcoming spatial barriers that the world sometimes seems to collapse inward upon us […] As space appears to shrink to a ‘global village’ of telecommunication and a ‘spaceship earth’ of economic and ecological interdependencies […] as time horizons shorten to the point where the present is all there is (the world of the schizophrenic), so we have to learn how to cope with an overwhelming sense of compression of our spatial and temporal worlds.67
If it is true that, as Harvey says, ‘conceptions of time and space are necessarily created through material practices which serve to reproduce social life,’ what kinds of material practices of time-space in the form of representations exist in these gamic examples?69 What do they tend to say about the social relations from whence they arise? In the case of Max Payne 3, I have already mentioned the core game mechanic of Bullet Time, which effectively allows the playable character to manipulate time and space by observing the movement of his bullets in slow-motion as they find their targets, and enemy bullets as they approach. In gameplay, this manifests itself as time slowing for all the action in the game, except for the playable character, who then possesses the advantage of aiming with real-time speed at slow-moving targets. So activating Bullet Time, which allows for a limited ‘adrenaline’ rush of focus, results in a heightened capacity for precision when aiming and firing at foes. In this iteration of the game, a simple vertical adrenaline meter marks how much of it remains before the Bullet Time runs out. Similarly, the Shoot Dodge function is a slow-motion dive that is used to evade a mortal attack, although it is possible to be injured. In both cases, time and space shift in the emulation of the heightened focus that is narratively described as Max’s preternatural skill for gunplay. The material practice evidenced in this game is one of a central relationship to time-space compression that expresses itself as bursts of control within a larger framework of postmodern chaos, with its fragmentation, transnational flow and constant threat of obsolescence due to the fluctuations of global capitalism.
AlSayyad keenly observed in the epigram that opens this chapter, representations of the city and life mutually constitute each other in continual interplay. This is no less true in gamic cities. They participate with the world. Like his metaphor of the ‘pervasive game of mirrors reflecting each other’, games also engage with the lived world, so that ‘art imitates life, life imitates art, art imitates art, life imitates life’.97
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