Zombies in the Zone: splatter physics and physical bits in Horrific Play
The fragmented body is notionally at odds with phenomenology, as it is the intention of the physical separation to segregate and deprive the senses but there is residue, the fragment actively seeks to disrupt or disable the body through protest or excavation. The fragmented physical form is what Elaine Scarry deems an unmaking that shatters any verbal communication, this body and its comprehension must therefore exist is some visceral place as the pre communicative phenomena that Merleau-Ponty discusses. This paper will explore how the fragmented body may be unified with the sensation it defers…
For some contextual history, in art criticism the fragmented body has two major affiliations, the first arising from Modernity. Here the Fragment, as representation, is both literal and metaphoric in manifestation. Figuring the broken, disordered body that testifies to a time of civil unrest, its art often manipulating bodies of authority whilst other forms epitomize the Cartesian dualism and fragmented themes of identity that plagued the modern subject. Linda Nichlin’s Marxist analysis of the ‘body-in-pieces’ tracks the cultural correlation of this movement with its fragmented themes running through the social, psychological and metaphysics of the Modern experience.
The fragment also refers to the objectification of the body through diagramming discussed in Barbara Stafford’s ‘Body Criticism’, much owed to the express of medicine in the enlightenment period, and also appearing as a motif of Baroque and Renaissance art. This fascination stems from the morbidity of anatomical inquiry and the unprecedented capacity to reveal what lies within. This movements creating, for the first time, access to the unknowable interior but simultaneously resolutely mapping it and resigning it to objectification.
Both forms drive away sensation; they are melancholic, the first in its determined remembrance of a depression and the second as a limiting and detached process of definition. There is no sensation to the charts of the body these merely produce disembodied words and metaphors for it. Yet by looking specifically at the splattering physical effects against the reciprocity of play sensation may be applied to the fragments and redeem the fragmented form from its melancholic state.
Ones situation as player is only contextualized by their subsequent position as viewer. In this respect it is a ‘cause and effect’ logic that determines the sensation. The combination keys that determine play are often arbitrarily attributed, in Zombie Zone for instance, the x is equivalent to ‘stab’ and the square equal to ‘kick’. There is nothing intuitive in this control mechanism, it must be learnt and equally ‘felt’. Laura Marks speaking on cinema suggests that experience is embedded in the skin. That touch, as the sense close to the body is the repository of sensual memory, a tactile remembrance awaiting provocation that may be targeted by other sensory experience, like the visual. The play situation is exemplary of this sensory oscillation as roles shift between tactile agency of the player and viewership with each position reinforcing and informing the other.
The average game of Donkey Kong lasts 30 seconds, and its difficultly is routed in dynamics, specifically the rhythmic negotiation between object trajectories. Thus, the motoring of the sprite has more to do with memory than anticipation. To know not only every nook, but strategically how to get there, to understand the rules that govern the opponent and capitalize on their weakness with direct relation to your own programmed capacity. The knowing of these strategies and abilities are fixed within a tutoring system of ‘haptic cues’ that firstly indicate and then imbed strategy.
In the confrontational instance that hails a violent reaction a propreoceptive action occurs, with an inability to equally distribute ones gaze and concentration between locations (screen and remote), one evokes a body memory that feels for the remote pad reactively from prior played experience in order to null the situation. The operational modes for survival in play are not intuitive, they must be acquired and in this practice of acquaintance the ‘gib’ is signifier of distinction. This is the pixel junk that erupts from the slain, its quantities and patterns marking ones precision. The resulting image acts as haptic cue, symbolizing either success or failure and the ability to repeat or amend it. This productive moment of command is also the causal moment. A doing that becomes irrevocably joined to the subsequent action or effect.
The zombie genre physical to its core, the lore of the zombie is embedded in the flesh, from its eating habits to its reproduction and giblets are thusly inherent to its form. The undead infection is not only rooted in the body and its sensuous touch to another but a violent and overt penetration of that skin, while it is an act of equally penetrative violence that serves as the only mode of nullifying the infected. Both bloody instances are the cutaneous signification that determines playability and steers progression.
Looking at the moment of infection as haptic example, Zombie Zone features an affective and infective play mechanic that highlights the kinesthetic cause and effect of play and presents with 2 simultaneous sensations. In play the imperative is, as the survival horror genre would suggest – survival. The bikini babe avatars hack and slash their way through the zombie masses turning the landscape into a vista of bodily waste, and at this stage it invokes undead mythology. Though it be the operational impetus to progress through slaughter, the absurdity of the giblets hold their own narrative drive and danger. Should the avatar become drenched in the infectious matter she begins to turn, and is penalized for poor tactics with a rapidly depleting lifeline. This is the embodied instance of fearful touch, a fleshy ‘vehicle for articulating how tactility itself can become monstrous’ and how this may be both repugnant and pleasurable. To arrive at this state as a play against the grain of the game is to indulge in the ‘erotics’ of such touching, to have reveled in the carnage pleasures of chaotic slaughter in a subversive desire to see the bodies splatter again and again. Inversely there is a repellence in the mechanic, as the players sword becomes soaked in blood it suffers possession. This moment is intimate; the screen begins to pulsate, obscuring and overwhelming the vision with blood. This is an affective infection that impedes playability through loss of control. This is the moment of repulsion as the player is forced to recon with the body, indeed our body, in that infected repulsive state.
This engagement is meaningful firstly because the frag instills the moment within memory and secondly because it has the ability to affect the player externally, making it aware by interruption of its tactile memory motoring the action. This constructs not only ones ability in the game but ones ability to relate through the pain image to the fragmented pieces. A relationship of consequence that Eddo Stern’s game modification ‘Tekken torture Tournament’ makes beautifully material. In this the players of beat ‘m up game Tekken are subject to electrical shock when their player character is wounded or fragged. This is the kinesthetic process through which balances of positive and negative reinforcement embed the learning, all based on that haptic cue that is physical detriment be it in the game or out.
However embedded the fragmented body be in the kinesthetic motors of play this is a specific sensual memory and does not address the ability to relate and sense body to body across mediation and diegesis. Beyond the reciprocity of active play there is the algorithms of the game body that have no material prospect for relation. These forms are but a series of surfaces rendered into representation and the gore of their fracturing presenting only a representational relationship to the internal matter that it denotes. In the most basic terms of reception the viability and extensionally the acceptability of the game body exists on its own terms, as occupant of an independent plane. The correspondence that occurs is contingent on continuities and what Stephen Prince terms ‘perceptual cues’ that indicate elements of the real and construct a viable fictional space that need not aspire to ‘hyperrealism’ but sensibly justify its own diegesis. Prince discusses the perceptual regimes of cinema in a post-photographic climate in his Screen published essay True Lies and Perceptual Realism, positing that within a medium that increasingly utilizes the illusions of Computer Generated Imagery it is the textures and physics of the image that determine its realism. And further, that this perception as reliant on indicators facilitates the production of plausible fictions objects and beings without real referent. He states:
“Spectatorship builds correspondences between selected features of the cinematic display and viewers real world visual and social experience. These include iconic and noniconic visual and social cues which are structured into cinematic images in ways that facilitate comprehension and invite interpretation and evaluation by the viewers based on the salience of represented cues or patterned deviation from them”. (Prince:32)
It is in this same way that sensational reception may occur in the violent fragments of the gibs. The medical practices of mapping the body segregated it from its materiality and deprived it of its flesh, yet familiarize us, through the visual, with an objective knowing of our own inaccessible interior. This disembodied acquaintance fragments the subject of its inquiry but supplies resonant palpability to the intangibility of the interior. These medical proofs then serve as the pro-textual referent for the sensational experience that the broken body yields.
As indicative this modus be of an ability to connote material resonance to unknown there are more basic physics at work in play that assert this perceptual mode in a phantom of lived experience.
Historically the animation of death has been determined by economics and technologies. Sprites falling prey to their technologies with sequences of 4 frames to obliteration or simply blinking out of existence. While later generations that incorporate such fangled technologies as ragdoll physics are resigned to their engines economies, bestowed with a few if not one death animation that offers nothing but a parallaxical perspective of alteration.
The procedural animation software ‘Euphoria’ utilized in up-and-coming zombie game Possession purports an animated strategy that offers nuance at every angle, and a precision of physics that ensure an individual response to impact with regard to location, acceleration and trajectory. Thusly rendering a scenario specific animation to every strike imbuing the body with physics and physical splatter that responds and adheres to that physics resulting in a closer body logic. This is Prince’s perceptual realism and in the newfound alterability of the ‘Euphoric’ body the sensations provoked by worldy correspondences may flourish in their exactitudes. Returning again to causality with specifics to violence, pain and its produce, there is a highly visceral process underpinning the experience and sensation at play. Here the relationship between the ability to act on other bodies in play and the result of that action are refined through variables. For instance the varying effects produced in Possessions pummeling scenario performs that worldly expectation of effect carried from common experience of falling, and its potential for variation in execution deploys a sensible sense of physics in line with not only real physics but is constructive of a viable fictional space situated in trauma. For the first time in gameplay the causal moment connects to the violent one with an assertive shared world logic that the particulars of initiation will determine the conclusion. This evolved alignment with body logic creates a representationally real physics and physical sensation, grounded in the memories of the body, sitimulating those tactile repositories evoking a felt sense of both effect, and as player, affect.
In closer relation to the sensual relation to the distressed body, Aaron Smut discusses the visceral techniques of horror employed by Dario Argento to encourage assimilation in physical devastation. Claiming that depictions of bodily violence adhere to a translatable sensibility appealing to common sensual denominators that will require limited imaginative interpretation. That is to say that when the sword attack is executed in Zombie Zone and the body falls apart or bursts into giblets the experiential sensation of the moment is anchored in a memory, however exaggerated, of laceration. Pondering this pain relation he posits:
‘if we think of a wound, we can scarcely forbear reflecting on the pain which follows it… most people have at one point or another cut themselves on a small piece of glass, perhaps stepping on a shard from a broken bottle. Argento asks us to imagine how much more we could get hurt by one of the giant pieces of glass that line our homes and offices, especially if out tender throats (and not our tough feet) were the sliced flesh.’ (Smuts)
The assimilation of the body is in this respect indicative of a dialogue in which the body may respond physically to the imagined flesh of an image through both taughtological experience of the frag and more primitive visceral impulse. So the fragmented body and its bits are intelligible as effect through cause and a felt form of association. The perceptual schema of play relies on sensory and body memory, a phenomenal history that as Vivian Sobchack reminds us accompanies us to the screen experience making it meaningful directly because of the body. Sobchack’s ‘Carnal Thoughts’ delve into ‘cinesthesia’, and it is her analysis of The Piano in terms of sensory exchange focused on sensory disability that is the foundations for the incorporation of the fragmented body into sensation. Discussing the suturing processes that enables the visual to assume the position of touch she purports a portrayal of blindness that need not deprive with sensory incapacity but motivate that visual in another direction playing on sensory interconnection. Such fracturing of the phenomenological paves the way for a sensual comprehension of a fragmented body that lay in bits. In terms of play it is the sensual casality that firstly lays claim to the sense of affect on a fragged and fragmented body then the compounded sensually informed memory of the observational body that assimilates and even sympathize its form through collective sensory trauma and the more abject ponderings of the impossible interior displayed. Thusly the process of sensually experiencing the fragmented body is not Gestalted, it is not filling in the gaps, it is feeling them.
Like the phantom limb that is felt long after its detachment, the broken physical image resonates with the flesh and imagined relations to its possibilities resulting in an experience of ‘phantom tactility’. In the moment of the frag the game body performs a spectral performance of arbitrary, yet concrete relation to the remote command of the playing body. The violent result of which lies in the hand of the player body irrespective of diegesis – This is what my fingers did! This umbilical to effect that is the player agency conduces the fragmented body not just as consequence but a tangible entity waiting to be acted upon. This is how one is able to attach material qualities in reminiscent terms to the game bodies that are essentially nothing more than husk, data made fleshy. For Philip Brophy phenomenology extends beyond the fleshy material. His discourse motions to a body that can respond to ‘non-physical’ experiences. Conceiving of “how we might use our bodies to understand, how we might identify body shapes, surfaces, forms presences as indicators of physicality’… and this in terms of mediation is our ‘‘phantom-tactile’ relation to the world” (Brophy). And it is in cooperative oscillation between bodily memory of world and play agency that the phantom fragmented bodies of game are able to provoke such tactility, elevating them from haptic cue to palpable image.
xoxo Final Girl
