Dolls and Dead Bodies: metaphors for games

There is a trend in games studies to liken the avatar to the puppet, the player 'pulling strings' and making it dance. Under and by this influence the player/avatar relationship is constructed as uncanny and gameplay can be perceived in terms of performance. The entire discourse of the former is invested in a 'lifeness' of the puppet or avatars body in performance, but the animation of these bodies cannot be separated from deadness that precedes it and haunts through it. I want to unpick the living dead object of gameplay. 

Welcome to the Dollhouse

While dolls remain distinct from puppets, Steve Tillis claims that a puppet can be a doll but a doll cannot assume the role of puppet (Tillis: 57), the difference seems to be one of performance and play, both elements that both hold fast in the study of games. The puppet may be a vessel for theatrical or virtual performance and the doll a figure for play, but both are pliable bodies. The doll rather than the puppet is subject to more macabre readings that lend to the darker more cynical construction of an alternate ‘virtual puppet’ theory. 

In her book Critical Games, Mary Flanagan uses the dollhouse in reading The Sims. The games replication of a domestic environment in a virtual space is prefaced with a macabre overview of the changing nature of doll play as a socially constructed form. Using both Freud and Foucault, Flanagan suggests that playing with dolls takes a shift from the expression of domestic ideals to more sinister forms under repressive social times.  Referring to Victorian doll play depicted familial discord and doll abuse, the use of dolls to emulate crime scenes and train criminal investigation as well as grotesque doll creations of the surrealist movement, Flanagan introduces the idea of ‘unplaying’. This refers to subversive play actions such as doll mutilation and the acting out of taboos, actions that are aligned as opposition to socially enforced repressions, from sexuality to oppressive regimes.

Unplaying, manifests in children abusing their dolls, “killing” them, or some other revision of the “care giving” framework of expected play… While at first the gruesome act of killing dolls was seen as subversive, parents eventually encouraged doll death ceremonies in order to instruct girls on family funeral etiquette.

(Flanagan: 33)

The doll may have as weighty a connection to the avatar as the puppet, though Flanagan does not pursue the negative connotations of unplaying in games, the play element available in avatarial control can carry over the doll rhetoric into gameplay. Unplaying is reified in the montage film of Brody Condon, Suicide Solutions (2004). This is a collection of gameplay footage from 50 first and third person shooter games depicting avatarial suicide, player’s killing their avatars. Perhaps considered aberrant in terms of the game texts set imperatives the possibility for intentional avatar death certainly sits within the frame of unplaying, and broader play than it does performance.  There are numerous ways to intentionally kill the avatar in Halo 3, allowing the avatar to be shot by various weapons, falling of high platforms, jumping into water, inverting and reverting gravity.  The player can chose to play with the avatars death, this may take the form of walking into enemies in Sonic the Hedgehog, provoking a witch in Left 4 Dead, getting infected in Zombie Zone. As it has been stated throughout this thesis, games often offer ways to ‘die’ and playing with the avatars death seems to invoke the morbidity of Flanagan’s doll play. The unplaying with avatarial death in videogames does not perhaps carry the political and psychoanalytical context of Flanagan’s dolls, but the specificity of this avatarial play is indeed deathly doll like.

While the puppet performance seems to be championed in terms of life giving performance the doll is more open in play and imbibed with darker process of meaning production, one that Flanagan’s discourse finds inseparable from cultural contexts of repression and obsessed with death. Deaths connection to the doll is not at all unwarranted and the play of ‘killing’ dolls might have a more direct relationship to the doll itself.

Freud’s notion of the uncanny is formulated in regard to his other theories including the ‘return of the repressed’. For Freud the uncanny emerges from a literary text that forces the reader to address what was once repressed. Working from Jentsch’s formulation of the uncanny which conceives of literature that confuses the animate and the inanimate, Freud explicitly apposes the doll’s inclusion in he nuanced formulation on the grounds that it does not invoke the Oedipal complex. He writes ‘the theme of the doll, Olympia, who is to all appearance of a living being, is by any means the only element to be held responsible for the quite unparalleled atmosphere or uncanniness which the story evokes; or indeed, that it is the most important among them’.

Eva-Maria Simms contests that the doll be included in relation to both formulations of the uncanny by virtue of its deadness. Reading the uncanny representation of dolls in Rainer Maria Rilke’s writing, Simms observes a persistent theme of confusion between the toy and the corpse.

There is a… connection between the doll and death, one which we have hinted at and which is so obvious that it is easily overlooked. The doll is a dead body, an inanimate child, an unresponsive rigid corpse.

(Simms: 81)

Proclaiming the doll a dead body, or dead object allows it to infiltrate the Jentsch’s form of the uncanny as it animates with play, but the deathly doll as represented in Rilke allows it to permeate Freud’s model in context. The dead doll, through its association with female innocence and play in childhood evokes a repressed developmental stage. For Simms the dead-like doll relates with the infantile mind that at one stage could not distinguish between life and death and thus provokes a return, an uncanny impression. The deathly connotations carried by the dolls figure may explain the fictional tradition for expressing the scenario - when dolls come to life.

 

Killer dolls

Victoria Nelson’s The Secret Lives of Puppets is a cultural historical analysis of the representations of puppets through literature and entertainment with recourse to their uncanny, supernatural and more sinister manifestations. Nelson’s approach does not differentiate between puppets and dolls in terms of performance and play, rather the approach is progressive looking at the perceived ‘life’ present within constructed bodies from puppets and toys to cyborgs and avatars. 

From the twentieth century, according to Nelson, two schools of thought regarding the puppet asserted themselves, the first perceiving an uncanny soulless body and the second regarding the puppet (and its like) as a ‘Neoplatonic ensouled idol’. The uncanny school perceives the puppet as a lifeless object, born of the hand of man and equally controlled by him. Whereas the Neoplatonic school is evident in twentieth century science fiction, emerging as tales in which the makers and supposed controllers of the puppet are rivalled by them. Terming these puppets ‘divine machines’, Nelson is referring to mechanised human simulacra’s. The anxieties of the divine machine, that somewhat resemble those of cyborg rhetoric, are exhibited in films like Terminator, Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell. What follows the thematic tension of machines returning on humans is a specific representation termed ‘killer puppets’. Taking the deathliness of dolls and dummies, Nelson observes a trend for horrific filmic  depictions of the puppet turning on its master and this scenario set forth might best describe the playeravatarial camera relationship at work in first-person shooters.

Nelson’s supernatural approach to the puppet mythos leads her to speculating on ideas of possession. Referring to a possession of the puppet object, not ownership, but demonic devilish possession. This theme is discussed in particular relation to a set of films that depict the doll or dummy endowed with volition without the use of strings or direct handing from another body, that is achieved through dark or evil forces. Films like Dead of Night (1945), Puppet Master (1989), Dead Silence (2007), ‘The Puppet Show’ episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Childs Play series (1988-2004) all feature possessed dolls.

In both Dead of Night and Puppet Master the puppets are victims of manipulation by an evil master but eventually gain control destroying their operators. In the latter Toulon craves immortality and brings his puppets to life in order to kill people as part of his quest. Eventually the puppets gain autonomy and take vengeance on their master. 

In no time the Divine Machines were casting off their now-superfluous human agents, acquiring supernatural powers along with their freedom. Over and over the old roles were reversed as the newly independent and increasingly omnipotent simulacra first surpassed, then dominated, their human masters.

(Nelson: 258)

For Nelson this type of killing doll is motivated by vengeance, giving deserved death to a cruel master that made them perform murder. There is a second type of killer puppet however, completely autonomous homicidal maniacal dolls.  Chucky, the ‘good guy doll’ from the Childs Play series for instance bares the soul of the ‘Lakeside strangler’, transferred at the moment of his death. The doll kills at random in the quest to reacquire a human form. For Nelson this depiction is a contemporary reflection on the nature of the soul and supernatural alignments with evil. Our inability to determine the existence of the soul whilst desiring it produces paradoxical representations in the form of the killer doll. The supernatural taboos mingle with desires for the spirit and, after life, return as Chucky. 

It is according to Nelson’s account of the representation of the killer doll that the design of the first-person shooter is perceptibly analogous to the killing doll in three specific ways, the positioning of the players representative body on screen, the games required performance and the games rejection of the player.

The first-person shooter does not feature an avatar, but the player is positioned in ‘first-person’ assuming the position of the eyes of a playable character often with an arm wielding a gun being the only physical representation on the screen. In this sense the player occupies the body of the invisible avatar, like chucky, they are possessing it from within. The visual field, in place of a visible body as a players presence in the diegesis is a more suitable analogy than the puppet. The marionette for instance would be more suited to ‘top down’ gameplay in which the avatar is seen from above. There are no visible strings, the players hand is not directly implicated in the motion of the doll but remotely, and the player cannot perceive the physical motion of the body that they command, the position is transferred to an embodied vision of the possessed doll or puppet. In Gaming Mind, Gaming Body Bryan Mitchell-Young uses a particular form of phenomenology to formulate the player’s embodiment in the first-person shooter game. He claims that the players own body disappears in game play, merging with the ‘absent body’ on-screen, leaving only the mind, effectively producing a Cartesian spilt between mind and body. While Angela Ndalianis suggests that the ‘gameplay logic is that the player’s own body, which exists beyond the computer screen, “fills in” the remainder of the protagonists [avatars] body.’ (Ndalianis: 100). Perhaps this is why Nelson refers to avatars as ‘ethereal Neoplatonic daemons’, the player orienting their consciousness and physicality into the absent avatarial body in the game.  

Gameplay in the first-person shooter genre is consistently about killing enemies and the body possessed in the game is controlled with the specific role of killing. The first-person shooter is survival based, set in labyrinth environments that must be negotiated through whilst under enemy attacks. House of the Dead 2 and Left 4 Dead enemies are a variety of zombie characters, BioShock features mutant enemies, Rise of the Triad consists of Nazi enemies and monsters, and in every case the game imperative requires the elimination of the enemy for the played character to survive and progress forward in the game. The impetus on killing in the genre situates the avatarial camera as the possessed killer doll, motivated by the possessor (the player) to kill on command.

However there comes a point in the game where the possessed body seems to turn on the player. The first-person shooters in-game death will occur from a failure to kill enemies, in Left 4 Dead this moment shifts the first-person perspective. If the playable body is ensnared by the tongue of a smoker enemy the avatar body is exposed, dragged forward appearing in the diegesis. The separation from the position of the avatarial camera is a loss of possession and the player is no longer effectively controlling the killer doll or making it kill, it is getting killed. Similarly in House of the Dead 2 the in-game death occurs when the player fails to kill an enemy, the poor possession of the killer doll becomes an equally poor performance of the killer doll manifest on the screen in the conceding of attacks by a non-player character enemy. When the attacks results in in-game death the player loses control completely and is faced with a death animation in which the avatar swoons to the ground like a puppet or doll without a master steering it. At this point the relationship that the player/possessor has to the avatar/killer doll is broken.  The killing performed through the avatar as motivated by the player results in the death animation that signifies the avatars revolt on player as the avatar body is revealed in the death moment and the connection between them is severed. Like the puppet master, the possessor has had a hand in their own death, brought about with their connection to the control of the doll. Taking up the position of possessor in the game is as fated as the supernatural connection forged by Toulon in Puppet Master.

Playable character death in the first-person shooter BioShock takes another form of representation, though its results are ultimately the same as the other two examples. When the character dies the avatarial camera flips simulating a falling body whilst audio and visual feed for a few moments before fading to a menu screen. In these moments the player looks helplessly out of the invisible avatars unblinking eyes without control of it.  Like the Divine Machines, the programming and animations of the games design see that the killer puppet can always turn on its master.

xoxo Final Girl 

FIRST BLOOD: teenage girls that bleed and feed.

In preparation for a lecture on film psych 101 and the up-and-coming release of trash horror Jennifer's Body (2009) I reprised a forgotten love of Ginger Snaps (2000) and visitations to the beautiful and monstrous allegories of the female transition and the importance of first blood. 

The physicality of the horror in such movies is metaphor. A monstrous interpretation of the physical changes incurred during puberty manifested as psychoanalytical archetypes, a context that such films find hard to escape in criticism. What I am interested in is the oh-so-female specificity that sees teenagers bleed and feed beyond the hormonal. This entry will look at the reason these girls transition to monsters and not women. 

Barbara Creed writes of the 'monstrous feminine', a psychoanalytical reading of monstrous female depictions routed deeply in the abject.  The emphasis is heavily on gender and Creed unpacks the ways in which the patriarchal gaze of the cinematic apparatus doubles with Freudian fears to produce beastly women. 

Teen Wolf (1985) follows the adolescent emergence of the wolf in the male. This is non-violent. The change is hereditary, a familial right and rite of passage that the male passes through relatively unscathed. There is no blood and no body count. Yet from beginning to end the context and classification of the female beast in her becoming is quite different, it is born in the non-consensual spilling of blood and it ends that way too. 

The premise of Jennifer's Body sees a teenage girl come cannibal after a sacrifice gone awry. The satanic ritual calling for virgin blood fails because of Jennifer's experience and a daemon takes possession of her dead but rockin' bod. Similarly in Teeth (2007), the character Dawn suffers assault on her way to alterity. Proudly abstinent, Dawn's body reacts to the men in her life that try to coerce her into sex - her vagina bearing teeth. The bloodshed in death upon the alter and the loss sustained in hymen rupture serve the same function - they instigate radical physical change. 

From here each girl possesses a unique but monstrous power over the men in their worlds. Jennifer seduces and slaughters her way through the school, hungry for the flesh of boys who betrayed her. Dawn also grows an appetite, albeit from the nether regions. Having been used and manipulated for sex she harnesses her inner monster seeking out predatory men to dismember. Both characters vengeance is based on consumption. They consume, take into themselves the blood of the gender that drew it first. Sex is the semenal act in both cases, literally enacting the castration that their fair sex symbolizes as a sanguine solution to their original lack. 

The allegory at work in Ginger Snaps operates differently to that in either Jennifer's Body or Teeth , rather than biblical it's biological. In this tale of two sisters Ginger reaches sexual maturity signaled by the commencement of menarche. Out playing a prank Ginger gets the 'curse', blood drips down her leg. Following the discovery of first blood she is bitten by a werewolf and the transformation begins, substituting womanhood for monstrosity. Ginger pays the price for the bloody breach, the exposure of red taboo and the penalty is monstrous. Ginger undergoes full metamorphosis over the months lunar/menstrual cycle. She becomes the embodiment of feminine taboo. She becomes sexually active passing the Lychan infection to her male partner, inflicting him the undesirable essence of the monstrous feminine. She begins to physically regenerate, and with her wounds healing she becomes the impenetrable woman. Furthermore she grows a tail and claws that make her explicitly penetrator. 

Briget the younger of the sisters is trying to rescue her Ginger from taboo. Culminating in the chase scene that has Briget bowing before the transformed Ginger lapping from a puddle of the leading mans blood. She is coerced to consumption by her sisters guilt and the man who came between them is a binding banquet shared.  

Vengeance is in the blood and these girls take back the blood that is spilled, into themselves. In blood these tales begin and so they must end. The woman that bleeds transfuses herself out of the accepted gender role into something other. Thats why these girls bleed and feed. 

xoxo Final Girl 

 

NOTE: The above is what comes from an academic with a hangover up all night with the complete works of De Sade, a copy of Bataille's Solar Anus and some Sutter Cane on her bedside table. COMBO. 

  

Sonic 2 Indulgent Retrospective

Following a post by dearest friend Dave on Sonic 2 and cheating I went on a nostalgic bender thinking about my personal experiences on the game that first made me aware of gaming. I had always played, flapping around in gamespaces never really considering the ludic construct or consequence and rhythm. Sonic 2 was released in 1992, perfect timing for my spungey mind eager to absorb the lessons that would take me through the next two generations of videogames. 

What lingers with me most is the competitive edge that the two player game instilled in me as well as introducing me to the fun of aberrant play. The 'verses' set up of Sonic 2 was tiny and perfect, only making 4 levels accessible as well as bonus rounds. I recall now critical awareness sparking at the time as the bonus rounds I professed to be 'biased' (I would later find this to be 'unbalanced') towards Sonic and formulating a form of play that balanced the grounds. Myself and  my foe (regularly an anonymous cheating friend) would turn our backs to the screen and blindly control our characters through the assault course. The pleasure was phenomenal, we could hear both the sounds that indicated coin collection (the game imperative) and the crashing sounds of boulders indicating the loss of coins though you could never be sure whose character events belonged to. Turning around would be anticipated and full of pleasant surprise wether your character won or lost. Gradually my friend came to win these blind games more and more. This was not due to some tactic knowledge of the course as there were variations and we turned our heads before identifying which course we were playing. One day amidst our giggles I looked to my left catching my friends face in the reflection of the fire place. She had been cheating! Every match she had been playing the mirror reflection of the game. This was when I realised this was serious. Games were serious and it was ON NOW!

Allowing the cheater back into the game, the idea of playing a game began to change for me. It began to evolve. I was actually looking at the space, dissecting it. Working it out. It wasn't so much about winning but screwing up the other player. In the 'Mystic Cave' levels I could do this expertly. Crumbling floors would ensure that another player could not follow my passage through the shortest route, while in the 'Casino Nights' levels taking elevators or occupying pinball flacks prevented the other player from using them gaining me a few seconds advantage. Collecting boxes was also key and memorizing where the 'death boxes' were they could avoided and collected by the other player to their disadvantage, 'teleport' boxes, though not always fixed in their positions, could sneakily be relied upon to swap my place with the other player should they have the advantage. This was the first and deepest pleasure I had experienced in play, formed of knowledge that came to match execution. 

xoxo Final Girl 

The Twilight Sigh-ga

About three things I was absolutely positive.

First, Twilight was a saga of nonsense metaphysical titles. 

Second, there were parts of it – those bits between the covers – that were the most pointless constructions ever to offend the page. 

And third, I couldn’t put the fucking things down.

A mis/un-understanding of the Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer.

I have consulted on this, with many. I know a lot of people that are irrevocably in love with Twilight (hark at my quoth). I, shamefully, must join hoard. But thinking critically it is hard to base my interest. Every moment I consume or regretfully/excitedly turn the page it's full of conflict between my better taste and judgement and some very base simple pleasure that I want desperately to disallow and have banished to the attic with the mad women at comic con. But between the blatantly insipid prose, inability to develop tension or suspense and loathsome character construction, there is something there, something stalking. I use this term rather than haunting because it is that invasive and nonconsensual. I have been molested by Twilight. I feel dirty and used. 

So I become curious what is its appeal? It is trash, it is awful, it is just plain bad but I do persist. After one negative experience I willfully buy the remaining three books. This is not a diagnostic enquiry, and I do not profess to probe the psyches of millions of terrifying Americans, but I want to attempt an answer to a reading experience that counters everything I know and trust. 

My joy in this is hard to place. There is no seduction, literally or literary-ally. Sex is in prohobition here. The saga follows Bella's desire to become a vampire and Edward's uncompromising and simplified restraint. There is no tease, there is a gap instead of a gape where the sexual tension should be. Perhaps here we find a reverse appeal, seeing that where the reader is given nothing the imagination fills in. This would explain the steam that much Twilight fan fiction tries to blow, eagerly expressing the repressions of its protagonists. (see Furnace, Sex and Vampires, Cullenary Education: Forks Sex Ed,).   

My fundamental problem with this saga is that it sets the gothic back by about 100 years with unconvincing, and unviable, Jonas brothers rings of promise and self-inflicted sexual-repression. Where went the ‘sex, death and ecstasy’ of the art of transgression? Have we truly run out of taboos and minorities to pin our otherness upon? The vampire used to be the body though which we liberated and performed deviancy, a skin for reveling in. Desire has been a contemporary imperative in vampire fictions from Dracula's aroused Lucy, floating curtains and same sex experiences in The Hunger and Nadja, to the adolescent crushes of The Lost Boys and Near Dark. The process of becoming  a vampire is routed in seduction, a lustful carnal process that presents as orgasmic. The 'petite mort'. The 'little death' that raises one to immortality. Yet, Meyer’s constructions are insipid inversions rather then subversions. There is nothing progressive here, in terms of cultural commentary or genre. Instead of exposing repression through transgression this book wilfully endorses it, forcing the reader to endure lengthy diatribes about will power and virtue. 

This is the concerning evidence of the prevailing 'CandyGothic'. A state of horror affected by its own designs of difference. 

The CandyGothic signifies an attempt to reassess the function of horror in a (western) culture in which transgressions, repressions, taboos, prohibitions no longer mark an absolute limit in unbearable excess and thus no longer contain the intensity of a desire for something that satisfyingly disturbs and defines social and moral boundaries. 

(Fred Botting)

The Twilight saga is symptomatic of genre proliferation in which the mass production of shock and controversy has eaten itself, forcing the themes and effects back within the limits. More shocking is it suddenly to have moral contexts and safe subtexts. And this is a troublesome feeling to be addressed with such materials and actually feel challenged by a startling lack of textual challenge.  

This said perhaps the appeal is a masochistic one. Page flipping as self-harm, as though I invited the displeasure as pleasure. Everything wrong in it made right but a willful desire to dislike that became the liking of the text. 

xoxo Final Girl 

proposed amendments to the seven degrees of zombification

In his essay Ontological Anxiety Made Flesh: The Zombie in Literature, Film and Culture, Kevin Alexander Boon purports that the zombie's monstrous construction is effective as an embodiment of mans greatest fear - that of death. The zombie's construction blurs the boundaries between the self and the other. It is life in death brought forth from beyond or below (ground) and bringing with it the reminders of our own mortality. Zombies are commonly defined as a physical body with no will of its own, but instincts to follow. It suffers a complete loss of humanity and those individuating processes that we hold so dearly in life. This is the fearful splitting of the human into otherness. The zombie carries with it the threat of becoming, it does not want to undo you but wants to make you. 

Boon's thesis is supported by a categorization of zombie archetypes popularized through cultural media and through which their particularities play and taunt at our ontological anxieties while they tug at our intestines and gnaw at our throats. His first type is the 'zombie ghost', the body that has returned from death with its volition in tact or at least so automation, as found in Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) in the form of Captain Barbossa and his skeleton crew. This type is perhaps is a more generic form of the 'undead'. There is the rather unpopular 'zombie ruse' in which the power of suggestion performs a diversion suggesting the presence of a revenant that proves to be false. The 'zombie drone' bears the strongest resemblance to the original Haitian myths of the dead being risen to the possession of a person to perform their biding. Perhaps the most familiar form of zombie is the 'zombie ghoul' as popularized by the films of George A Romero.  This zombie is dangerous and has developed a taste for the flesh of the living, and produced allegories for infection in a fearful climate with films like 28 Days Later (2002). The infrequently used 'zombie channel' is related to the ghoul variety in that they are still cannibals but through the process of consuming they reacquire some of their humanity, absorbing knowledge and personality through the blood. The 'tech zombie' shares many traits with the drone, its distinction being its control via technological device or medium, the most famous example of this being The Stepford Wives (1975). Boon's final type is the 'cultural zombie' who is determined by a lack of freewill and personal identity but are not in fact dead. Such characters would be Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho, who is loosing himself in yuppie culture and slaved to his American Express card. 

I would like to propose an addition to this analysis, that combines many of the properties set out by Boon but problematizes the spectators presumed attitude towards the zombie character. Instead of emotions of fear, this type invoke sympathy - the 'sympathetic zombie'. The gap in this study was highlighted during a renewed enthusiasm for gothic literature and of my students projects. i became aware  that the existence of this type of monster inverts all our ideas about the monster that dares occupy the divide between humanity and monstrosity. The 'sympathetic zombie' reminds us not of our finitude but of the atrocities of humanity of the violence that freewill can yield. 

Marcel Sarmiento's critical success Deadgirl (2008), depicts a 'zombie drone' of sorts. A girl is discovered by 2 youths in an abandoned mental institution strapped to a table. She is enslaved by one of the boys and passed around his friends for sex. While the themes of possession and the objectification of the body in zombie narratives is not new, the slant takes the zombie film out of the survival horror genre. Instead concentrating on the debasement of the monster forcing an uncomfortable sympathy toward it. Sympathetic monsters briefly came to popularity in the Victorian gothic revival, with the poster-boy of Frankensteins monster. Like the zombie Frankensteins monster is a fusion of man and beast, the recognizably human characteristics endear him, his cognition and his modest quest for a wife as well as his acknowledgement of his own difference, while the other-side revolts. Yet in Deadgirl the humanness of the brutality done and the sufferance endured by the zombie seems to have an overriding effect on the otherness aspect and sympathy is evoked. The character of Bub in Day of the Dead also warants this sympathy. After being bitten we watch his struggle through the becoming. His desire to remain human engenders sympathy in a way that is alien to the genre as a whole. It seems to be about retaining an evident sense of humanity that by Boon's definition is lost in the zombie. This presence of volition radically shakes up a tired genre.  We need the monster, we etch our culturally dominant fears into them but we sometimes need reflect, through a saturated genre, the monster of man. 

xoxo Final Girl 

AWESOME PHYSICS

This saying began life as a joke. An exclamation among friends defining stupid and ridiculous special effects. Now its the real deal. A paper delivered at Brunel Postgraduate Digital Games Conference. 

Awesome Physics: technologies to tear the body apart

This generation of games are privileged with a resource of technology that endows the body with powerfully visceral performance capacities. Physic engines bestow the game body with a motivation that is emulative of corporal functions in real-world spaces. Whilst the motivations of physics applications are conceptually intent toward realism their impact on the body is often rendered hyperbolic in a sign system that demands accentuation for its communication. This paper will look at the manifestation of moments of awesome physics, defiant moments of physics and the engine itself that produce exceptional scenarios that operate against the realistic potentials of the technologies as well as conventional forces of physics.

In previous work I have discussed how the sensation emitted by the fragged body as assisted by the physics engine, bestowed with movement emulations and simulations that resonate with the plausibility of physical pliability. This inquiry continues with a physics fascination but instead is focused toward mechanics and a production of style that is contrary not necessarily to sensation but to physical rule. This study intends to theorize moments of express physical alterity, moments of such divergence as to provoke awe in their reception. This is a study of physics expression that make me say what? And then wow!

With respect to my research this investigation of awesome physics concentrates on its manifestation in the violent throws of the frag and its spontaneous reanimations of dead game bodies. The physics agent both kills the body and resurrects it. In the simplest terms the physics involved with awesome physics refers doubly to the operation of physical sciences and their impact on the physical body. Awesome physics are involved in a cause and effect scale that is inconsistent, disproportionate or entirely elusive, producing moments of physical impossibility. Looking at respective moments that embody this action I will determine how the bizarre renderings of physicality and physics become fantastic and how their experience might be pleasurable.   

The tenants of awesome physics are not all together unfamiliar to our visual media and consumption.  This fantastic phenomena predates the videogame form, its most explicit antecedent residing in the eccentric traditions of classical animation. In terms of physicality and the subversion of universal certainties its most notable formulation is the persistence of illogical return. That is the evasion of death performed as imperviousness or resurrection. This evasion in itself is not explicitly awesome physics though the linear actions of it total performance exhibit a fluctuation in plausible effect, rather it is the specifics of each evasion that purport awesome properties.

The resistance of the cartoon body is however subject to a certain logic. Referring to some of the most complex theories of the workings of the Universe, quantum mechanics - the Universe on the smallest scale – Stephen R Gould[i] investigates the applicability of bizarre universal behaviours to cartoon physics. Observing the contrariness of the laws of the Universe he notes how the counter intuitive activities of Bugs Bunny might be explained by quantum tunnelling. Bugs has a talent for escape, finding himself in inescapable situations he somehow defies the inevitability of detainment to pop-up in another location unexplained as though he were somehow able to pass through solid objects or manipulate them in some way. This inexplicable escape is the enactment of quantum tunnelling seeing that particles are able to pass through impenetrable materials. The behaviours associated with wave particle duality explain the resilience of animated bodies. Acting like ‘solitons’, particles that are able to ‘remember’ their shape after collision, the animated body exhibits physical retention after impacts. This is how Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s Judge Doom is able to peel his flat carcass from the floor and pop back into shape after an encounter with a steamroller. Wile E. Coyote’s relationship to gravity might best be explained with the observational conditions of science. Wile E walking on air will only fall once he becomes aware of his situation, as though gravity were conditioned by his consciousness. Not unlike Schrödinger's possibly unhappy cat the nature of something, in this case physics is only certain upon its observation.  And this analysis could continue…  

Alan Cholodenko elaborates on cartoon behaviours claiming that the spectacular expression of these bodies belongs to a third order of the uncanny, what he terms the ‘cosmological uncanny’.

So despite the explicability of the apparently fantastic cartoon body it remains awesome as a rendering of the invisible conditions of the physical universe. These strange bodies are the visible performance of the quantum defamiliarizing the subjects in context permitting the resonance of exceptionality, though these bodies do not inherently belong to Freudian psyhoanalytics as will be discussed later.     

Glitches 

The restraints of this paper do not permit a full and varied examination of the dissemination of awesome physics, instead I will conduct a comprehensive analysis of two categories, firstly addressing the glitch.

The very nature of the glitch is difference. It has never been rendered it has never gone through the processes of game design. It inhabits those rendered processes, lying dormant until it is provoked. The glitch is anomalous, and as visual a pure instance of spectacle. The accidental nature of the glitch is utterly chaotic; it is an error that manifests in an unpredictable form. The glitch disrupts the anticipation of effect in play by producing flawed and incompatible effect from cause. The particular way in which play organises cause-effect logic is completely disrupted by the glitch by making the scenario unplayable or interrupting successful play by spectacularly affective error in effect. Gameplay requires a certain degree of consistency to make it playable, especially in the programming of executable moves the glitch or error then prevents or disrupts that order. Yet the difference of the moment, of what the glitches does to the body, exalts its at the same time as total exceptionality.

The most common form of glitches that registers visually occurs in the collision programming that determines the solidity and playbility of a body or object. Its slippages appear as uncanny tunnellings in which the avatar body melds with or penetrates solid objects. Such errors may occur as benign but inexplicable instances where the avatar passes through supposedly solid objects unaffected as though they were apparitions. 

This phenomena may also be observed in more fantastic forms. Oblivion notoriously holds this type of error. This effect is the result of a break in the Havoc physics engine and is achieved by moving a dead body under the arch of an open doorway. After closing the door the body becomes trapped inside it convulsing wildly. Another infamous glitch in the Oblivion engine causes fragged bodies to melt down, their weapons and armour still intact the player may then stretch portions of the melted form at liberty and to great lengths. This glitch is determined by the mode of the frag. Attacking a non-player character and casting the body with a paralysis enchantment before executing the frag will provoke the peculiar occurrence. It is a bizarre reaction to mixed instruction, the engine confused between the paralysis commands and the death that inhibits further behaviours, melts down taking the body with it in a chaotic conversion of conflicting applied physics.

Glitches often occur at the death moment because it is a change in state, or technically a change in programme prompted by player commands. The frag moment, the moment that signals character death and orders the end of their animation is particularly susceptible to fault as the glitch will attack the body unless that body is completely deprived of programme. This is why death glitches are rife in games that apply ragdoll physics post-mortem.

Mortal Kombat: Deception (2004)[i] features the series’ first ‘hara-kiri’ and ‘fatality’ moves. Hara-kiri from the Japanese refers to a noble seppuko, an honourable suicide of a warrior and is an in-game suicide combo executable when the opponent reaches frag stage signalled by the screen anchorage ‘finish him’. Executable under the same rules the fatal move produces a violent kill as appose to a knockout and like any combo is inalterable in its performance, it is exact. In double player mode, if both actions are performed simultaneously a glitch occurs.

The engine fails to negotiate a separation or hierarchy and the two moves are gruesomely, bizarrely combined. The character with the fatality play is pronounced winner and in the midst of their executing move is illogically struck by the hara-kiri specific to their opponent. This mingling of two sensible and recognisable actions, within the game context, is confused by the compounding. It is the irrational meld of two disparate moves producing impossible physical images of violence. The merging of two discrete acts confuses cause and effect often producing images with no rational affective agent, making the violent frag spectacular.

Splatter Physics 

Whilst glitches are the awesome product of lapse in cause and effect logic producing obscurity, splatter physics reigns in absurdity. The splatter that I am talking about is the awesome sum of disproportionate effect, its excess sublimated by indulgence of effect. Bodies may be totally consumed by the gibs that spew from them or left to welter in inexplicable quantities of blood, limbs may be propelled out at phenomenal rates over impossible radius and all this is actioned as a reward system in the game scenario. Not only does the release of giblet effect progression but its very nature may be configured by cheat to gratify in obscene measures, acknowledged in Rise of the Triad with the blurb ‘ludicrous gibs’ to signify merit. This suggests that the gib sits within a base gratification model, as the visceral visual reward for the frag its disproportionate figuring might exalt the measure of success and along with it the pleasures of its manifest.

Looking at the splatter effects of Doom in ‘extreme gore’ mode the impossibilities of the gib are elucidated. The single frame transition from body to giblets is an extreme one as the mass of the body is replaced by inconceivable amounts of blood that gradually coat the landscape. The motion, trajectory and quantities of this spray overwhelm the diegesis producing what Christian McCrea terms ‘dimensional excess’. That is the disruption in the sense of layered dimensional order prompted by the force of the gushing hemal matter that is so vast and strong that damages not only the body but the laws that would act upon it and the dimensions that would confine it.  These moments, rather then being divisive, are both explosive and consuming they implode sensible arrangements but expunge meaning that may be pleasurable.

Referring here to a meaning beyond the frag reward signification the meanings produced are the chaotic formations contrary to body logic. The kill that produces gibs or that breaks the body apart revealing ham bones works to disturb the body’s structure and to take it beyond conceivable limits. McCrea notes an appropriate correlation between physical violence and its effects claiming that violence is ‘semiophagous’ that ‘it devours and disrupts signs’. The excess of its force as exhibited in some games, or additioned with mods, produces the awesome effects of deviant signage or what Philip Brophy calls ‘possessed signifiers’ in which meaning is submissive to effect.

Like the exploding body for Brophy, the gib is an arbitrary configuration, ‘in that they are not manifestations of psychological impulses which await our individual identification through their implicity, but rather fictitious possibilities of an unqualified textuality awaiting our individual consumption of their absurdity’ (Brophy). While the immediacy of the absurd impact might twinge the ‘cosmological uncanny’ or creep with abject dissidence at the core the process and effects of explosion or eruption is all together more basic, more base and simply visceral. The effects of splatter physics, as effect and affect, are cathartic. 

Explosion is the directing of concerns, fears, frustrations at the image of the body, causing it to splatter under force, impact, intensity and pressure. More so, it is the point of eruption, the instant of dematerialization, that serves as the dead-end-centre for the painful yet pleasurable build-up of everything being directed at the body – both material and symbolic. In bluntest terms, the photographic effect of the exploding body-part is not unlike a cum shot. (Brophy)

The exploding body is a release, a release from the forces of the engine, a release from the pressures of the sign and a release from the anxieties of the enemy presence.  It is essentially the compounded pleasures of relief and in its excess awe.

Conclusions 

Despite the multifarious modes of their manifestation the violence of the physical renditions of awesome physics remain alike, all in their unlikeness; in their spectacular rendering of physicality that registers in exceptionality.  The reproducibility of fantastic actions in games and a players complicity in the performance of awesome physics alludes to a pleasure in chaos that is akin to the delights that the cinephile finds in paracinema. It is a joy found in the bad over the good, in the ridiculous over the sensible.

To briefly conclude I return to the contrary nature of the awesome incident facilitated by a technology formed of virtuous physical relation.  Converse is it that the ragdoll and collision physics that imbibed the game body with forceful sense of realism should be the very things that break that relation apart, an opposition that Barbara Wegenstein eloquently observes with respect to mediated butchery, she states:

It is almost as if the medium could hold together the body, so that it can fall to pieces and be dispersed into the environment. (Wegenstein, 2006: 39)

xoxo Final Girl