Gaming and the ‘Parergodic’ Work of Seriality in Interactive Digital Environments

Shane Denson

doi:10.7557/23.6352

Abstract

Twentieth-century serial figures enacted a “parergonal” logic by crossing boundaries between various media, slipping in and out of their frames, and showing them—in accordance with a Derridean logic of the parergon—to be reversible. With the rise of interactive, networked, and convergent digital media environments, these medial logics are transformed. A figure like Batman exemplifies the transition from a “parergonal” to a new “parergodic” logic; the latter term builds upon Espen Aarseth’s notion of the “ergodic” situation of gameplay—where ergodics combines the Greek ergon (work) and hodos (path), thus positing nontrivial labor as the aesthetic mode of players’ engagement with games. Ergodic media give rise to new forms of seriality that accompany, probe, and trace the developmental trajectories of the new media environment and the blurring of relations between work and play, between paid labor and the incidental work culled from our leisure and entertainment practices.

Highlights

Serial figures, who already embody this logic in their alternations between public and private personas or between civilian clothes and flashy, ornamental costumes, turn this reversibility back on the media of their articulation when they cross from one medium to another; transcending the particularity of any single iteration, such figures constitute themselves as higher-order media in which the transformations of firstorder apparatic media can be traced in the manner of an ongoing—though not altogether linear—series
In the twenty-first century, the medial logics of serial figures have been transformed in conjunction with the rise of interactive, networked, and convergent digital media environments
Tracing Batman’s transitions from comics to graphic novels, to the films of Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan, and on to the popular and critically acclaimed Arkham series of videogames (Rocksteady Studios 2009-2015), the episodic point-and-click Batman: The Telltale Series (Telltale Games 2016-2017), and the virtual reality game Batman: Arkham VR (Rocksteady Studios 2016), I will demonstrate that the dynamics of border-crossing which characterized earlier serial figures has been re-functionalized in accordance with the ergodic work of navigating computational networks—in accordance, that is, with work and network forms that frame all aspects of contemporary life

Summary

Introduction

(work), refers to material or conceptual framing devices that can either focus attention on the work (a painting, a story, an argument) or, as might be the case with an ornately carved and gilded picture frame, can become the object of attention itself.

Results

Conclusion