In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

7Alchemy Ora, lege, lege, lege, relege, labora, et invenies. Altus [Isaac Baulot] in — Mutus Liber, a 1677 guide to creating a philosopher’s stone Of the many types of magic at work in the computer game medium—and we have discussed several in the course of this book—arguably none is more potent and pervasive than alchemy. Commonly (though not necessarily accurately ) understood as a pseudo-science focused on discovering a way to convert lead into gold, alchemy can be traced back to ancient Egyptian and Greek words that refer either to the cadaverous black silts that form the bed of the life-giving Nile River or to the hazardously transformative arts of early metallurgy. Tellingly, neither the geological nor metallurgical etymology is definitive; the word “alchemy” is itself marked by combination, distillation, and ambiguity. It is thus ideal for describing the prima materia of the computer game medium. Alchemy connotes an alloy (or is it a brew?) so dense as to be impenetrable, so fluid it cannot be held. Just as the philosopher ’s stone changes the inanimate into the vivid, the inflexible into the pliant , and the mean into the magnificent, so too does the computer game medium (and indeed every medium) transform the things it touches. The preceding chapters of this book have quietly illustrated this alchemy. In chapter 1, for example, we talked of computer game idiosyncrasy and how it demands a whimsical rather than strictly scientific, critical approach, arguing that attempts to corral games too closely risk being foiled by caveats , violations, and unavoidable dispensations. We also argued that idiosyncrasy is key to the medium’s transformative power, enabling computer games to “change the relationship between human beings and the technologies they use to work, play, and communicate with one another.” Beyond this rather exoteric change—as medieval alchemists would term such out- 98 Chapter 7 ward alterations—we hinted at the medium’s ability to incite more esoteric transmogrifications: “[C]omputer games have a way of smoothing humancomputer interaction, of effacing biological and discursive difference by mystifying it, or at least making the disjunction between human beings and the machines they interact with less disjunctive. For game studies to clearly and deeply illuminate what amounts to a kind of love—the increasingly intimate relationship between human beings and their computers—the field must be unafraid of contingency.” In other words, the medium’s peculiar concatenations and imbrications are well suited for connecting human beings and the ways they change and evolve with the technologies that change and evolve with them. Colliquating human and machine, melting them together in the crucible of play, is what gives the computer game medium its shimmer of intensity , unpredictability, and delight. In chapter 2 we took up the question of irreconcilability, arguing that computer game discord and disparity wind up collapsing attempts to reconcile the medium with others and even itself. Computer games are filmic . . . except in ways so important that the comparison quickly becomes silly (e.g., interaction, play, authorship, kinesthetics, and so on). The medium is internally consistent . . . except when one compares how computer games are made, who plays them and how, and the cultural impacts of their varied sono-visual aesthetics. Admittedly, there is a kind of unity that can be associated with the medium, one capable of binding a workshop’s worth of strange and unstable elements into a single artifact that even non-gamers can identify as a computer game. It is an odd unity, though, recalling the looping logic of alchemical texts: components of ambiguous necessity are brought together until the only true and universal statement that can be offered regarding the synthesis is that the components have indeed been combined,the impossible made possible and disharmonies tranquilized. Close on the heels of this conundrum: the dawning realization that in no way could one discern which element in this complex process of transformation had been the pharmacon, the primary active ingredient, the catalyst. We highlighted this impenetrable, irreconcilable, but strangely workable quality of the computer game medium, writing: “This medium-based and discursive discord [ . . . ] amounts to a kind of magic in that the phenomenon of disjunction is difficult to apprehend as a logical, synthetic, and mundane process. Rather, it appears in iteration after iteration as illogical, antithetical, and unusual.” It is hard not to appreciate the way that sixteenth-century alchemist Philippus Theophrastus Paracelsus responded to the challenge that such a conundrum—unity out of irreconcilable complexity and difference—is absurd . He...

Share