Abstract
It behoves a media philosophical appraisal of the computer game—invested as media philosophy is in how media engender modalities of thought — to grapple with the computer game’s heritage. Specifically, the essay addresses an issue raised by attention to the computer game’s historical intertwinement with the military and industry: the extent to which these cybernetic machines, overdetermined by their techno-epistemic conditions, continue to perpetuate the ways of thinking from which they derived. The first section of the essay reconstructs parts of this history, drawing primarily on Claus Pias’s computer game genealogy: Computer Game Worlds (2017). It pays particular attention to how the prehistory of time-critical action games reveals their close relationship with and tacit optimization of player pre-reflective perceptual and sensorimotor capacities. The second section considers the lasting implications of the computer game’s historical a priori vis-à-vis their propensity to train their users. It engages with Patrick Crogan’s argument in Gameplay Mode (2011) that computer games are the “reproduction rather than simply the ‘product’ of […] Cold War mentality” and foregrounds his claims as important considerations for any attempt to think media philosophically with and through the medium (2011, p.105). That said, the essay concludes recouping the computer game by way of the very training function it appears condemnable for. Drawing on Mark Hansen (2000), my contention is that Pias and Crogan place in relief what I figure as a creative consequence of computer game play with implications for media philosophy: brokering our corporeal, pre-reflective adaptation to and, thus, agency within our contemporary lifeworld. It is by virtue of, not in spite of, computer games cybernetically working on us that they potentiate ways of thinking about and living in digital culture.
Highlights
What would a media philosophical computer game philosophy look like? Certainly, rather than bringing philosophy to bear on computer games, addressing the philosophical import of computer game representations, or conducting inquiry into the “ontology” of the game, a media philosophical computer game philosophy would consider how computer games engender and enable modalities of thinking with and through media that pertain to philosophical concerns
Split into three parts focused on each of these in turn, the “Action” section of Computer Game Worlds traces a genealogy that concludes with the emergence of the media objects many consider to be among the first action computer games—Tennis for Two (Higinbotham 1958), Spacewar (Russell 1962), Pong (Atari 1972)—and passes through bodies of knowledge explicitly developed for and implicitly entangled with warfare and management sciences (2017, pp. 15-123)
Played with friends for fun or run as a framerate diagnostic, Spacewar! indiscriminately tested and precipitated the update of both human sensorimotor and computer hardware capabilities. It would be several more years before computer games would begin their rise to major commercial success. Pias concludes his genealogy of the action game with Atari’s Pong in 1972, a genealogy that attests to how the popular title was only possible in its time-critical form by the conspiration of historical developments in psychology, industrial management, cybernetics, military logistics and Cold War infrastructure
Summary
Scholars pose various stories of the computer game’s genealogy: outgrowths from games as a cultural form, a facet of the history of leisure, another method of storytelling, another computational medium, an artifact in an affective archive, an instantiation of neoliberal capitalism, and so on. Computer Game Worlds traces the heterogeneous epistemologies, institutional practices, and technological developments that served as historical a priori for what we understand as different genres of computer game: time-critical (action), decision-critical (adventure), and configuration-critical (strategy). Split into three parts focused on each of these in turn, the “Action” section of Computer Game Worlds traces a genealogy that concludes with the emergence of the media objects many consider to be among the first action computer games—Tennis for Two (Higinbotham 1958), Spacewar (Russell 1962), Pong (Atari 1972)—and passes through bodies of knowledge explicitly developed for and implicitly entangled with warfare and management sciences User measurement: “[The computer game] produces and stores knowledge about its player in the form of data.”
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