Game Culture as Performance
For the Flexibilization and Penetration of aesthetic with technical functional, economic, and social Structures during the Design Process of PC and Video Games
The project comprehends PC, Video and Internet games as part of a collective cultural practice whose creative potential becomes analyzable under the perspectives of distributed aesthetics and immaterial labour.
First: The creation of games is to be seen as a widely emergent process: determined by the intermedial, transindividually perspectivated, and thus open. It is a process that is marked by non-traditional spaciotemporal forms of “immaterial labour” and ‘work-as-play’-modalities, by alterable collective networks of design superimposing each other and differing within themselves, as well as by the specific infrastructures through their interplay.
The focus of interest is neither on the product design managed in advance, nor on its target-oriented involvement in economic cycles, nor is it on its precise impact on social processes, nor on consumer disciplining. Rather, it is on the fact that game development is marked by dynamic configurations and feedback loops between production and consumption, which leads to stable changes, mutual adaptations, and transformations not only on an economic and technical, but also on an aesthetic and social level.
It holds true for product development in the game design sector that it is not to be understood than a one sided, auctorial, and disciplinarian gesture that conducts a strict ‘socialization of attention’ according to economic, technical, social and also symbolic target objectives. Instead it has to be seen as a trans-subjective modularizing process that adapts to the dispersion and mobility of all involved individuals, in permanently varying constellations: First, the relevant design process (in which a large number of individuals with differing tasks are already involved) is a transmedial one: it reshapes an already existing input of the consumer culture, where, for instance, narrative and motivic patterns from existing fields (already existing game versions, movies, comics, etc.) are adopted and expanded and/or modified in order to be integrated again into larger media applications (game forums, game websites, film adaptation, etc.). So we have a specific branching inside an already scattered intermedial environment, which connects producers and consumers with totally different fields of interest within reversible dynamic networks. Their modifications, which are describable yet not fully predictable, feed back into the economics of design, for example by promoting there the tendency for the serial variant of previously created game architectures. The design actions, which are contingent on each other, will be perceived by others in their succession, and result in creative follow-up gestures. It is a situation that forces the actors to be consistently geared in their behavior to their own perception and that of others within the network, and thus turns them into spectators of their own creation.
This significantly affects the perspective on creativity: it may only be grasped in accordance with a “distributed aesthetic“ that allows for the fact that creative action branches itself into asynchronous production in terms of multiplied power to dispose over the artifact (that is in each case only preliminary.)
The dynamic distribution of designing power to complex networks of disparate individuals, apparatuses, and media authorities is able to dissolve the rigid borders between production and consumption, as well as those between technical effectiveness, economic efficiency, and affective-performative dispositions. This becomes evident also by the interweaving of functional action – which is constitutive for the design process – performative testing and playful maneuvering as an aspect of a comprehensive immersive game design aesthetic.
The de-centralizing and the blurring of boundaries between game designer and player/gamer leads simultaneously to the expansion of informal and undisciplined development processes and of ludic communication modes; moreover, it also requires the development of “implicit“ knowledge as well as of sensual-affective creativity (above all, the exploration of physical design knowledge) as conditional criteria of technical-economic action. All these are aspects of a highly affect-based concept of “labour“; they are most often marginalized within merely product and process-oriented models of comprehension.
The term “immaterial labour“– which was shaped by Lazzarato and reshaped by Hardt/Negri for the discourse on the post-capital forms of work organization – is to serve as a theoretical guiding perspective. It refers to the development and representability of primarily informal and affect-oriented, as well as physical manners of communication.
Though the high evaluation of “immaterial labour“ within present economic discourses are transparent as a biopolitical strategy of post-capitalist society, the question regarding the extent to which it will become negotiable as a potential of sustained convertibility of overall social and global structures still arises: the fact, that economic and cultural phenomena get more and more indistinguishable would thus by no means be merely considered a scenario of industrialization and mechanization of culture and thus of alienation; rather, it emerges as an option for a dynamic culturalization of the economy.
Game culture allows for the possibility of a playfully practical and quite individually different acquisition of “post-human“ lifestyles, in which the demarcations between technology, economy, and game undergo profound shifts. The drafted dynamic negotiation processes of game culture might generally point to the contingency of institutionalized power and to the reversibility of the allocations connected to this power’s tendency to stratify and territorialize (active – passive, producer – consumer, etc.) Due in no small part to the diffusion of the areas of playing, economic value, and technical benefit, which have captured the entire culture, questions arise regarding game culture in terms of a practice of rehearsal (including production and consumption alike) toward a quasi liquefied, transmedially culturized and decentered subjectivity.
Dr. Jörg von Brincken
