Annotations ¶
Samuel R. Delany’s understanding of science fiction as he writes about it in his famous essay “About 5,750 Words.”
a different essay, Delany puts it more succinctly: “In science fiction, the world of the story is not a given, but rather a construct that changes story to story.”10
Colin Milburn across his books Mondo Nano and Respawn.
Neal Tringham’s Science Fiction Video Games
Patrick Crogan argues in his Gameplay Mode
Alien Zone, editor Annette Kuhn
C.L.R. James’ monumental Beyond a Boundary,
As Arjun Appadurai phrases it, speculation is a “friend with a difference, for it lends to the world of the concrete, the material, the sensory and the ordinary, the element of its capacity to be other than what it is in the present.”1
Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative materialist philosophy
Steven Shaviro when he writes that the key difference between extrapolation and speculation is that the latter exists in excess of the former. As he explains, “if extrapolation follows a social or technological trend ‘to the limits of its potential,’ then speculation seeks to imagine what happens when a trend exceeds its potential, and pushes against or beyond its own limits.”4
Meillassoux distinguishes two ways of thinking the possible in his After Finitude
“Speculation,” Meillassoux writes, “proceeds by accentuating thought’s relinquishment of the principle of reason to the point where this relinquishment is converted into a principle, which alone allows us to grasp the fact that there is absolutely no ultimate Reason, whether thinkable or unthinkable.”33 This radical speculation demands that we face up to material reality and realize that we cannot, with absolute certainty, make claims that the rules of existence in one moment will be followed up in the next one. Our ability to reason and make rational decisions or claims depends on us ignoring what haunted Hume: there is nothing that undergirds or supports our reality other than the faith that tomorrow will proceed like today and yesterday did. “There is nothing,” Meillassoux writes, “beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given—nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence.”34
Uncertainty in Games, Greg Costikyan
Daniel Vella and Stefano Gualeni provide a glossary entry for subjectivity in their Virtual Existentialism,
Mary Flanagan has already established the usefulness of this Guattarian mode of subjectivity formation in her Critical Play
Intersectional Tech
Guattari writes in a tossed-off fashion, “subjectivity needs movement, directional vectors, ritournelles, rhythms and refrains that beat time to carry it along.”70 To reframe this in relation to the process of subjectivation when a human encounters a video game, our subjectivity is processed through beats produced by designers and rhythmic patterns established by social structures.71 In order to play a game, you have to become a certain kind of person. In order to be a certain kind of person, you have to have a model or at least a bundle of qualities to inhabit, and those are produced in time and in alliance with structures beyond your control. That is subjectivity.
Darko Suvin, The Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).
Patrick Crogan’s analysis in his Gameplay Mode
Timothy J. Welsh in his Mixed Realism.
Ian Williams, “Rise of the Simulations: Why We Play Hard at Work,” Paste, September 15, 2014, accessed via Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20141119013716/http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2014/09/rise-of-the-simulations-why-we-play-at-hard-work.html
the “work” of games like Euro Truck Simulator 2 is a kind of affective reclaiming of the conditions of work. Doing a long-haul, real-time drive between European capitals carries a sense of material accomplishment with it afforded by the recognition that these tasks are arduous and that we are sitting through pseudo-accurate representations of them. As Williams puts it, “maybe the work simulations and their simple, blue collar vision of work which is increasingly vanishing in large sections of the country speak to a deep dissatisfaction in how and why we work. It’s a way of connecting with a way of life well on its way to going away.” This framework gives us another way of understanding games involved in labor, which is that they provide some kind of affective supplement in the stage of advanced capitalism that exists in the video-game playing parts of the world.
When Williams wrote his piece in 2014, the games that simulated or gamified work were fairly delimited and had similar aesthetic and mechanical registers. Euro Truck Simulator 2, and other simulators like it, put players into professional careers and gave them access to a limited set of mechanics to make that simulation work: they could attach and detach trailers, drive their truck, turn the headlights on and off, listen to the radio, use the GPS, and so on. Where this genre and VA-11 HALL-A meet is in the proliferation of games about specific real-world jobs: The Red Strings Club (Deconstructeam 2018), Coffee Talk (Toge Productions 2020), Neo Cab (Chance Agency 2019), and Cloudpunk (Ion Lands 2020) are core to the new form of work game. These games are all heavily invested in narrative over simulation, but their core gameplay is about doing service labor in the moment-to-moment in order to access the long arc of the story. If Williams is correct about simulation games and their relationship to nostalgia, then I argue that what this new genre formation of service-based labor is performing is a nostalgia for purpose beneath this labor. In the sim games, the fantasy of getting your hands dirty is enough. In the immaterial labor game, the fantasy is that all these skills I have developed will lead me down a meaningful narrative life and bring me into contact with interesting people. My service work will take me along for a ride. The terminus is not the terminal, but a world beyond.
Many Fingers (colestia 2020)
As Zakiyyah Iman Jackson writes in Becoming Human
Red, White, and Black
Diana Adesola Mafe, Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before (Austin: Texas University Press, 2018), 7.
C.L.R. James’ in his Beyond A Boundary
Ursula K. Le Guin: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art.”45 For Le Guin, the imaginative capacity of art brings about potential ideological change, and critics who focus on systemic games and their capacity for change act as accelerated Le Guins: games provide the art, but they also provide the reflection inside of the experience, suggesting that this medium is more powerful than other ones.46
Aubrey Anable’s monograph on the subject, Playing With Feelings: Video Games and Affect
E. Ann Kaplan, Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 59 – 78.
None of the art/writing on this site was generated by LLMs.
If you'd like to get in touch with me, check out my about page.
Follow me with an RSS reader to be notified when I write something.