Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture

5 The Game of Life: Experiences of the First-Person Shooter

This chapter examines the experience of information in first-person shooter computer games. At first glance, this might seem to refer to the rich layerings of textual and graphically presented information that accompany the perspectival animation of virtual space in these games. Elements of the screen interface, such as a compass heading graphic, a mini map, or a radar screen giving extra information about the player’s surrounds, avatar health level, and weapons selection indicators, are common informational supplements to the visual field of perception provided to the player. These elements are included as characteristic of the experience of first-person shooter play, but as the acronyms IT (information technology) and ICT (information and communications technology) indicate, information is more fundamental to this experience than the provision of these supplements. Information processing is what the computer does to make the experience of the game, of its world of interactive possibility, via a dynamically updated, perspectivally illusionistic interface, available to the player. Both the player’s experience of information at work in the game screens and the experience that information makes possible are objects of my inquiry . To envisage these is to seek to articulate perspectives concerning what are best understood not as two separate phenomena, but as two 5 The Game of Life Experiences of the First-Person Shooter A certain kind of targeting defines “opportunity” strictly in terms of the present in order to bring the future, and with it tuchë [happenstance], under control. —samuel weber, Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinking 87 88 the game of life adumbrations of the first-person shooter game-player object, or, in a term more appropriate to this dynamic entity, the game-player system. The components of this system exist in relationship to each other. Indeed, this system instantiates one of the most pervasive interconnections between war and technoculture that is of central relevance to this study. This is the logistical expansion of the military technoscience of cybernetics into and across technoculture . The notion of a game-player system evokes this cybernetic frame of reference for contemporary mediatized engagements. To play a first-person shooter is to adopt a view of information that emerges from this quite particular and historically conditioned cybernetic frame of reference. In the dynamic, interactive view of the game’s challenges the player envisages or, as Samuel Weber would say, “targets” the other as a particular and particularly generalizable kind of enemy.1 This is what Peter Galison calls the “cultural meaning” of the cybernetic legacy, an “ontology of the enemy” that emerged out of Norbert Wiener’s 1940s wartime research on improving antiaircraft weapons technology. This legacy, argues Galison convincingly, dies hard, and serious attempts to understand the contemporary technocultural moment downplay it at their peril.2 My approach to firstperson shooters in this chapter proceeds from this cautionary perspective. As I discussed in the previous chapter, Espen Aarseth proposes that works like the first-person shooter Doom (id Software, 1993) make their interlocutors work by functioning as “some kind of cybernetic system, i.e., a machine (or a human) that operates as an information feedback loop, which will generate a different semiotic sequence each time it is engaged.”3 Computer games such as Doom embody a fundamental modality of human experience, namely, one in which life seems to play itself out as a dialectic of “aporia and epiphany,” that is, obstacle to and discovery of the forward progress of experience conceived as a journey along a pathway of learning , development, and growth.4 This pair of “master tropes” constitutes, Aarseth says elsewhere, “the dynamic of hypertext discourse: the dialectic between searching and finding typical of games in general.”5 Having discovered the workings of this dialectic in the classic first-person shooter, Aarseth claims that the constant struggle against aporia to achieve epiphany so evident in Doom gameplay models one of the “prenarrative master-figures of experience.”6 the game of life 89 Aarseth’s notion of the aporia–epiphany master tropes couches experience in terms of an anticipatory, problem-solving process that corresponds perfectly with the expansion of military technoscientific modes of technological research and development across the military-industrial and militaryentertainment complexes. His explicit identification of the ergodic work as a cybernetic system only confirms the historical technical origins of ergodic phenomena as a major element of the logistical tendency. In responding to the transcendental scope of Aarseth’s formulation...