| [CHWP Titles] |
|
[CHC 2004] |
carolyn.guertin@utoronto.ca |||| http://www.mcluhan.utoronto.ca/academy/carolynguertin/ |||| About the Author
CHWP A.49, publ. April 2009. © Editors of CHWP 2009.
KEYWORDS / MOTS-CLÉS: Glide, digital games, feminism, glyphs / Glide, jeux numériques, féminisme, glyphes.
| section | Introduction |
| 1.0 Technology and Subjectivity | |
| 2.0 Diana Reed Slattery’s Glide | |
| Conclusion | |
| References |
The fracturing of the monolithic subject has been the foremost
project of feminism, which has sought to complicate and problematize
the unitary (constructed as white and male) point of view. Feminism has
therefore introduced the notion of subjectivities with fractal
dimensions, subjectivities that are composed of many component and
shifting parts like gender, age, class, race, abilities, and sexual
preference. Subjectivity under feminism thereby becomes a process and a
performance that is constantly in a state of redefining its own
complexity according to a network of power formations. In the abstract,
it is an “elaboration of specific practices and discourses”
and the “creation of social spaces” (O’Loughlin), but
in the interactive environments of virtual worlds and game spaces,
subjectivity is the mode of engagement; it is practice,
discourse and social space without mediation. Similarly, interactivity
is about how the subject performs in and engages with her environment.
The body in motion is the meaning of an electronic text and the act of
choosing movement is where we find agency.
The concept of agency is key to our interaction in game spaces. The
very fact of our movement in these environments—our
navigation—is what gives us pleasure in playing games. Our
interactive motions or performative gestures become plot events and
constitute what we normally think of as ‘story.’ Janet
Murray argues for movement as a language (149) in its own right in
games and for gesture as an “emotional repertoire for
interactivity” (191). In an interactive environment, subjectivity
becomes motion, becomes the way we move and the choices we make through
our embodied location in space. Many computer games, like Myst
and its spin offs or The Crystal Key, are billed as interactive
experiences in immersive environments, but they too assume an old
style, monolithic subject as a player. Feminist computer games, on the
other hand, set out to question notions of subjectivity by way of
interactive engagement. Two such games—Natalie Bookchin’s The
Intruder based on a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, and Diana
Reed Slattery’s Glide, the online component and
realization of a game explored in a trilogy of print
novels—interrogate the spaces between subjectivity and
interactivity. As a result, the purpose in these two games is not
winning or losing, but instead demonstrating narratological concerns,
and raising issues around who plays and who controls the eyes we see
with in these spaces.
These games use embodiment, which is necessary for spatial navigation,
to explore the potentiality of the multiplicity of subjectivities
involved not just in interactive environments but in our navigation of
the world as well. That is to say, these games assume a unique user and
privilege a single user’s individual experience. The experiential
realm is the domain of the body and game play is, therefore, central to
the politics of the body and to the multifaceted concept of embodied
subjectivity that allows our immersion “as gendered
subjects” in narrative space where we play at life as we inhabit
the world (O’Loughlin). The body is not a flat construct, but an
interface with its own environment and a dimension of our subjectivity
to boot. And, in fact, it is our spatial level of interaction that the
computer game attempts to engage to construct an embodied
interactivity.
Natalie Bookchin’s The Intruder is a retelling of
Borges’s story of the same name in ten different games. Ascending
through the history of electronic gaming from Pong through Space
Invaders, Bookchin explores the story of a woman used, shared, and
abused by two brothers. Locking us into the sordid triangle with a
predetermined course of action in the murder of Juliana, we become
complicit in the violence of the story, just as we are when we use
violence as a modus operandi in twitch or shoot-‘em-up games.
Where in Myst or Riven, point of view is prescribed but
fairly innocuous, allowing us to look all around us in a simulation of
Euclidean space, in The Intruder, we must assume an alien
subjectivity: we are forced to become one of the brothers in order to
participate at all. The game becomes increasingly violent too as we
progress through the 10 stages, so it becomes harder and harder for us
to ignore our own complicity and capitulation to their behaviour.
For instance, in two different renditions of Pong we move from batting
text to literally using the female figure—with a variety of
female body parts including a hand splayed in a ‘stop’
gesture in the background—as the ball in our game. Despite the
so-called ‘love’ triangle where the only love in evidence
is between the two brothers, they occupy the same position, so that
really our interactivity consists of a binary position or a split
choice. We can be either Christian or Eduardo, but we cannot be
Juliana. However, the very absence of the woman’s
voice—either in the original story or in the games—screams
for an articulation of her feelings and perspective on the situation.
In fact, her silence is underlined by the fact that Bookchin has used a
detached female voice to narrate the story. Juliana’s silence
becomes a tangible presence next to the brothers’ monolithic
position and the primacy of the triangle is maintained.
Gender has been dubbed as essentially performative by both Judith
Butler and Eve Sedgwick, and in Bookchin’s game gender is
performed through Juliana’s silence, with the female acting as a
social construct that underlines what is neither being examined on a
personal level nor played in contextualized ways (Cassell 300). Since
embodied subjectivity is constantly redefining itself within and as a
networked interface of power relations, so it follows that an embodied
materialism is a manifestation of what Teresa de Laurentis, after
Michel Foucault, calls the ‘technology of the self.’ The
technology of the self is a “process of representation and
self-representation” (O’Loughlin) and the material
dimension of the subject that measures how gender structures
subjectivity as a variable of its own complexity. The technology of
subjectivity might be seen (like gender and sexuality) as
“‘the set of effects produced in bodies, behaviors, and
social relations’ by the deployment of ‘complex political
technology’” (de Lauretis 3). In short, the technology of
the subject is a redefinition of the gendered self in a matrix of a
collectivity of posthuman differences.
When place and perspective emerge as a vantage point for fractured and
fractal subjectivities, we acquire added dimensions in our engagement
with the world. We move from a two-dimensional topography into a
multidimensional topology. Donna Haraway in her “Cyborg
Manifesto” called this notion of fractal subjectivities the
‘split self’. “The split and contradictory
self,” she says, “is the one who can interrogate
positionings and be accountable, the one who can construct and join
rational conversations and fantastic imaginings that change
history” (193). Haraway sees splitting as a privileged position
that endows the subject with agency within feminist theories and
epistemologies. Fracturing encourages, she maintains, “heterogeneous
multiplicities” (193) that are cumulative and irreducible.
Subjectivity is by definition a multidimensional topology and so is
vision (193). The self-aware subject is a kaleidoscope perspective that
is always in the process of becoming, always incomplete and able
therefore to mingle and merge with another (Haraway 193). While
Haraway’s split refers specifically to her cyborg consciousness,
doubled visions have long occupied feminist spaces. What is unusual in
Bookchin’s split vision though is the denial of the female as a
means of foregrounding her silence. As object, Juliana can always only
ever occupy space rather than move through it as a self-determined
agent. There can be no agency for the game object whose sole purpose is
to be a target. This is made explicit in the final game where, from the
vantage point of a chopper in the air, we must capture her within
crosshairs and fire repeatedly in order to advance the story to
encounter Christian’s statement, “This afternoon I killed
her.”
Haraway’s split subject is a merging of the human and machine
dating from 1984, but with the advent of networked communications this
metaphor has proved to be insufficiently complex for an increasingly
mediated age. N. Katherine Hayles takes Haraway’s cyborg
consciousness to a new level. Hayles posits human subjectivities as
multiple agents operating from a network of competing desires, motives
and forces with the body acting as the steersman between shifting
states of being. She calls this the posthuman. Uniting consciousness
and the body, like Merleau-Ponty’s ‘body subject’,
“the posthuman subject is an amalgam, a collection of
heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose
boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction”
(3). This subjectivity is fractal, modeled on the complexity of the
network, and maps the malleable relations between self, consciousness
and environment. But while Hayles’s network subjectivity is
emergent and distributed (291), it is still locked within a framework
of the human-computer interface. Interactivity and fractal
subjectivities draw in the motion of the body in space and Diana Reed
Slattery’s Glide is just such an exploration of the body
as an interface between subjectivity and an immersive environment.
Glide’s site of true interactivity and language
acquisition is contained in its website, especially in the animated
visual lexicon, a sort of elaborate glyph ferris wheel, with its
accompanying Collabyrinth. In many ways, this text fits no
known model for either game or for fiction. It is neither hypertext nor
freestanding independent game. The first novel in the trilogy, The
Maze Game, is separate on paper but incomprehensible in essential
ways without the lexicon and Collabyrinth. The website is
divided in nine independent parts, which provide information about the
novels and the Glide language. One of these parts is a listserve where
fans of the text and those interested in visual language can come
together to discuss theoretical issues or share their Glide readings
and poetry. To play with these glyphs, and to navigate the mazes of its
syntax is the real raison d’être for the novel
itself. In fact, without dancing in these spaces and allowing the
oracle to cast our glyphs to make connections with our personal
past-present-future, we cannot understand the different sensory and
mental states or thought processes of the characters. As we learn the
language though, the very walls take on meaning and significance. A
text in Glide is a maze, a collection of glyphs. Just as a maze has
many different routes that can be taken through it, so meaning in the
Glide language is always dynamic and architectural, is always in
movement between renegotiation and interpretation.
The meaning between glyphs morphs where their edges touch, producing
ever-shifting margins and centres of meaning. The relationships in the
blendings between them are complex: “the user arrangement
generates a situation (glyph-pair), a transformation (morphing glyph)
and a context (a maze of glyphs seeded by the 3-glyph oracle). The user
is offered interpretations (words, images and/or music) and invited to
add interpretations to a growing database” (“launch the
oracle,” Glide Website). The clearest example of how the meaning
can alter on the basis of personal interpretation is illustrated by the
three glyphs cast in The Maze Game after the villain’s
attack on the Dancemaster. Concerned for the safety of their teacher,
the four dancers, MyrrhMyrrh, Daede, Angle and T’Ling seek
guidance from an oracle as to how to best proceed. What they receive
is: 
, strike, caress, receive. MyrrhMyrrh
arranges them in a nesting tower, with “strike above
caress… The symmetry of opposites. Touch and strike,
caress and wound—the pairing was cupped in receive.
Doubled by the interior receive” (241). She makes the
first translation, reading the entangled glyphs as “Kiss or
insult, I accept it all” (242). Daede’s interpretation
of the same signs is the poem, “Even a lashing rain is taken
by the sea as gentle stroking” (242). Angle, the cyborg, has
a precise mind that sees the meaning more pragmatically: “He
couldn’t disassociate the double wave in strike from its
meaning on a… maze. Those two empty spaces between were the
formation called the loophole… Love is the only loophole,
he thought. But that sounds pretty matter of fact. Ah! ‘Between
the wound and the caress, flows the loophole of love’”
(242). T’Ling, injured in the attack, rather than making an
original interpretation chooses a quote from an ancient text,
“St. Leonard of the Tower said, ‘There is a crack in
everything. That’s how the light gets in’” (242).
This drive to write metaphor as a means of understanding the language
is the goal of the Glide website and the legend to understanding The
Maze Game.
In the novel, the language of the lily is for the Glides multifaceted,
acting as “a navigational system, signaling to each other over
the watery habitat of the giant blue water lilies whose pollen they
harvested; as a poetic gestural language; as a secret code”
(“Architecture”):
The game which defines their culture—the Dance of Death—is played on mazes of glyphs. Game moves and strategy are described in Glide terminology. Composition and translation in Glide is considered to exercise the cognitive function of making metaphor, which Glides believe increases the connectivity between minds, internally and socially, and which they link to creative thinking in general (“Architecture”).
In order to acquire such a connectivity, a player at the website
must assume the role of a Dancer to receive such a three-glyph oracle
and play the game. The browser’s dance makes her a participant in
her own right distinct from the Dancers whose stories are told in the
print novels. The glyphs that make up the oracle, which the Lily casts
for us, are the gap or the hole—the three missing characters on
the 27-glyph game griddle. As the gap in the maze, these three glyphs
contain the meaning (including the outcome) of the dance, which must be
interpreted by the player after the fact. While we acquire a truer
interactivity with the Glide oracle than with the other games, we still
only play at the game through the oracle, rather than dancing and dying
as the dancers do. The Collabyrinth, however, draws us in in
far more interactive and performative ways. We can create poems solor
or with other players across the network, and we can alter the size,
speed of transformation, colour and other variables as we play with the
glyphs and write poems as a group effort.
Janet Murray and Brenda Laurel argue that electronic texts offer more
than simple interactivity; they believe that agency is born
through the act of spatial navigation within the virtual environment
(Murray 128-129; Laurel 21). In interactive spaces, we construct the
text as we play within its walls, with our choices forming the topology
of the space of our voyaging. According to Justine Cassell, the most
effective “feminist vision of game software design as a space in
which authority can be distributed to users” is “to have
the game be about [its own] design and construction”
(302). Slattery gives us that option with the Collabyrinth.
Feminist theory specifically includes collaboration as an approach
integral to the mingling of political movements and alliances across
disparate fields and perspectives (Cassell 303), and in such a way the Collabyrinth
invites us in either as a single player or as one member of a network.
By using the Glide language we become storytellers, finding ways to
express our own vision of the Dancers’ perspectives on the world.
Justine Cassell argues that “storytelling is an important
activity for the construction of self, for the construction of the
world, and for the construction of the norms by which we lead our
lives, and thus an activity that encourages storytelling is a potential
space for the maintenance of an identity that is not voiceless”
(307). In other words, it is in storytelling or, more specifically, in
the performance of our story that we find our voice and inhabit the
experiential realm. Navigating through and with the Glide language
foregrounds our body as our interface with both visual language and
story space.
The body itself is a spatial interface whose inscriptions are depths in
the surface, according to Elizabeth Grosz. She envisions this spatial
interface as a Moëbius strip. For Grosz, subjectivity is that
which gets written on the inner surface of the strip and the
“twisting of the Moëbius is the torsion or pivot around
which the subject is generated” (36). It is “an interface
of the inside and outside” where passive becomes active and
active passive (36). The “inversion of the Moëbius strip, at
that point of twisting is a self-transformation” (160), outside
in, inside out, like the transformation that the glyphs undergo in the Collabyrinth.
The Moëbius strip presents “two surfaces which cannot be
collapsed into one” (189) like binary code, which is
mathematically irreducible. This is a construct and conglomerate of the
body and its subjectivity as an interactivity (Grosz 189). The body and
subjectivity become a dynamic process and performance, and constructs
of gendered bodies become irreducible specificities, a feedback loop of
the Moëbius rotations on itself that serves to undermine, displace
and critique the former male-only model that ruled. Feminist
transgression can thereby become a framework for interaction (Grosz
189) and a literal embodied gesture. Grosz constructs the body as a
flow of intensities: “fluids,” she says, “unlike
objects, have no definite borders; they are unstable, which does not
mean that they are without pattern. Fluids surge and move, and a
metaphysic that thinks being as fluid would tend to privilege the
living, moving, pulsing over the inert dead matter of the Cartesian
world view…” (Grosz 205). Grosz’s Moëbius strip
is a model that is not well-suited to representing modes of being, but
instead privileges the dynamic of modes of transformation just as
Slattery’s morphing glyphs do. Similarly, the Moëbius strip
is best at representing the temporal moment of transformation and its
dynamic nature speaks to its innate ability to stand in for a complex
ontological process (210). The Moëbius strip represents not being,
but becoming.
In our mediated age where time has become foreshortened and compressed
into geographic space by technological advances like the telephone and
the airplane, communications theorist Paul Virilio calls for a new
state of being, a state that he calls trajectivity: “Between the
subjective and the objective,” he says, there should be
“the ‘trajective,’ that being of movement from here
to there, from one to the other, without which we will never achieve a
profound understanding of the various regimes of perception of the
world that have succeeded each other throughout the ages” (24).
Each point in place on our journey through the textual space of the
Glide Collabyrinth is a specific embodied position that is
always in the process of becoming something else. And it is our journey
through our own collaborative act of storytelling that engenders the
dynamic embodiment for us as players.
The connections between the functioning and form of digital games is
found in their use of ruptures in perspectival space. It is no accident
therefore that we are now seeing a revival of Baroque aesthetics in all
art forms. The Baroque invites the senses back into affective works and
engages us on levels beyond the emotional as sensory navigators.
Spanning the 17th and the first quarter of the 18th century, the
Baroque was a school that attempted to make sense of the competing
trajectories of transcendent experience in emotional and spiritual
space-time. The artists of the Baroque period used what we would now
think of as multimedia—combining painting, sculpture (in
numerous, juxtaposed and polychromatic materials), theatrical staging
and lighting, and architecture in new spatial configurations—to
create immersive environments for a single, idealized perspective in
real geometric space. In similar ways, computer games attempt to engage
all of our senses in virtual space, drawing us into the game world
through opulent graphics and interactive features. Bookchin and
Slattery engage us through their respective use of complicity and
interactivity to draw us into the plotline of their fictional game
spaces. We are co-opted and interpellated precisely because their
projects ultimately are narratological ones, using stories to invite us
in. According to Justine Cassell, ‘storytelling is a nexus of
change in the relationship between gender and technology’ that
works to create constructs of the self (311). Glide achieves the
interactivity that most games only twitch and shoot at by requiring us
to undertake the act of creation in visual language. We cannot help but
be transformed by the nature of this new visual alphabet as we alter
our perspective to find ways to write it.
Bookchin, Natalie. The Intruder. 1999. 20 May 2002 http://www.calarts.edu/~bookchin/intruder/
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Cassell, Justine. "Storytelling as a Nexus of Change in the
Relationship Between Gender and Technology: A Feminist Approach to
Software Design." From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer
Games. Eds. Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins. Cambridge: MIT,
1998. 298-326.
de Lauretis, Teresa. “The Technology of Gender.” Technologies
of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: U of
Indiana P, 1992. 1-30.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.
Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women. New York:
Routledge, 1991.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1999.
Laurel, Brenda. Computers as Theatre. Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1993.
Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT,
1997.
O’Loughlin, Marjorie. “Intelligent Bodies and Ecological
Subjectivities: Merleau-Ponty’s Corrective to
Postmodernism’s ‘Subjects’ of Education.” 1995.
11 April 2005. http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/EPS/PES-Yearbook/95_docs/o'loughlin.html
Sedgewick, Edie. Tendencies. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.
Slattery, Diana Reed (with Daniel O'Neil and Bill Brubaker). Glide
1999-2001. 20 May 2002. http://www.academy.rpi.edu/glide/
---. The Glide Collabyrinth. 2002. http://www.academy.rpi.edu/glide/apps/collabyrinth.html
Slattery, Diana Reed. The Maze Game. Kingston, NY: Deep
Listening Publications, 2003.
Virilio, Paul. Open Sky. Julie Rose, Trans. London: Verso,
1997.