Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture

4. Gaming the Glitch: Room for Error

75 4 GAMING THE GLITCH: ROOM FOR ERROR Ever tried, ever failed. No matter. Try again, fail again, fail better. —Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho Historic contingency and the concept are the more mercilessly antagonistic the more solidly they are entwined. Chance is the historic fate of the individual—a meaningless fate because the historic process itself usurped all meaning. —Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics don’t we need to write a ludology for losers? Computing culture is predicated on communication and control to an extent that can obscure the domain of the error. Between a hermetically rule-bound realm of programmed necessity and efficient management of the totality of the possible, this book situates a realm of contingency: distortions in the strictest signal-to-noise ratio, glitches and accidents, or moments where the social hierarchy of computer knowledge condescendingly ascribes to “user error” what does not compute. Whether one sees the graphic user interface (GUI) as a Taylorist discipline teaching ergonomic interaction or as yielding to reductions of interaction to resemble what users had already learned, the GUI is pivotal for our culture.1 And the discursive formation of computer games runs parallel to that of the GUI: interaction revolves around perception, hand–eye coordination, and discerning errors. But although a typical GUI—from the desktop metaphors of 76 GAMING THE GLITCH Vannevar Bush’s Memex to the Xerox Star or Apple Lisa, and beyond— aims for visibility and patient acceptance (or even anticipation) of user error, games probe the twitchy limits of reaction times and punish user error with loss of symbolic energy. Audiovisual cues pull users into feedback loops that a game might exhibit proudly, whereas other, perhaps less playful user interfaces tend to hide them in redundant metaphor. As our digital culture oscillates between the sovereign omnipotence of computing systems and the despairing agency panic of the user, glitches become aestheticized, recuperating mistakes and accidents under the conditions of signal processing: “Glitches can be claimed to be a manifestation of genuine software aesthetics.”2 If one postulates that computer games are an adaptive response to the omnipresence of computing devices—and we do notice that gadgets often come with a game preinstalled so as to teach us how to handle them—then the fact that games afford users significant room for error is an important deviation from the common assumptions about the strictures of human–computer interfaces (HCIs). Some observers have even joked that if HCI practitioners were to try game design, the resulting game would have a big red button with the label “Press here to win!” But rather than discuss the tendency among game critics and designers to resist or embrace HCI, this chapter will opt for a more theoretical meditation on games as an enculturating force. Games provide room for error; that room is typically understood to be the construction of the user. To the extent that this room for error, this playful sense for potential deviations and alterations, is an essential part of games, it pivots on the opposite or absence of complete necessity. As Cogburn and Silcox argue, “Our play-through of the game instantiates a property that could not be instantiated in a computer program, and hence that is not ‘already there’ in the lines of code that make up a finished game from the point of view of its designers.”3 Whether conceived as choices, as rare constellations, or as mere accidents, in opening that space where something is possible otherwise, those crevices in the continuity of experiential space are “revealing the folded-in dimensions of contingency, which included those of experience and of its description, very much in the non-causal and non-linear way in which the autopoiesis of systems takes place in the descriptions currently given of them.”4 In treating the GAMING THE GLITCH 77 (near) future in terms of possibilities, we distinguish between the formal possibility of the imaginable and the objective possibility of what we can already anticipate. Gaming unfolds only as we play, and although gaming videos and machinima are becoming more popular now, archival records of actual gaming experiences are still uncommon. But by the same token, under highly technologized conditions, presence exists only insofar as past and future exist: the present is the form of the unnecessary past and the unrealized future.5 Without such an opening to contingency and error, programs might seem to close off that room...