MAGA (metamodernism as game aesthetic)

Abstract

This article considers Trump’s presidency as metamodern, embodying contradictions within the established order and resonating with contemporary cultural trends. Oscillating between modernism and postmodernism, metamodernism is defined by coexistence of seemingly contrasting affective states and dispositions: enthusiasm and irony, hope and melancholy, attachment and alienation, generating a multifaceted subjecthood. Trump’s nostalgic slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) emphasizes this vacillation, a new inflection of an old phrase, received as both facetious and sincere, promising return to a prelapsarian state, while also taking neo-liberal ideals to extreme conclusions. This juxtaposition, the nostalgic impulse for something new, is traced as an increasingly dominant aesthetic form within digital games. As we explore, certain genres and aesthetics epitomize this, providing anachronistic audio-visuals, rhizomatic exploration, punishing gameplay, revolving around intertextuality and demands for community participation. We finally locate both Trump’s presidency and this nostalgic turn in contemporary digital games as symptomatic of a metamodern impulse, a search for stability and order amongst an increasingly fragmented, imbalanced and chaotic system.