It's Only a Game
On freedom in games and other artforms. What remains of autonomous art?
1. Passing time
Music is spatial as much as it is temporal. Each musical piece persists beyond the specific time intervals of its performance, distilled as a score, a recording, or perhaps a collective memory. In these forms all moments in time exist simultaneously, though suspended tentatively and one-sidedly, waiting to be brought back to life.
Even in a single living moment of performance there is spatial differentiation. Notes in a chord contribute to a single layered moment, and two melodies developing in parallel may collude in counterpoint. The spatial form of the piece suggests what parts of it unravel at what time, which in polyphonic music entails unraveling multiple parts at once.
Painting is temporal as much as it is spatial. Viewers do not absorb a whole painting all at once, but trace their eyes across its forms, at times following its guidance, at times charting a course for themselves. Faced with a frozen snapshot, which may itself actually be stitched together from several moments in time, the viewer extrapolates forwards and backwards. Even a still painting can contain motion.
The conversion between time and space coincides with the conversion between the specific and the general, concrete and abstract, subject and object. Music and paintings are both distilled in space in general form, then brought back into sensuous specificity when experienced in time. Neither direction is possible without the other. Even an improvised piece of music draws from existing forms stored in memory. This mediation between forms and senses, or the bringing to life of what was recorded, is known in music as Play.
The connection of spatialization to the act of abstraction was established by the abolition of aura. An artwork was once a unique thing in both time and space. Once played, a piece of music would only have persisted as a specific memory, serving as a cultic concentration of a specific instance of a specific community. To appreciate it, one "had to be there." On the other hand, to be able to generalize performances and assign the abstraction a title was a breakthrough, as was the ability to compose a work of music without first having it performed at all, the ability to record a performance and replay it repeatedly, and finally in recent decades to represent a piece in a wholly digital, informational form. But even in the final case one presses "Play" to start the music.
Play in the narrow sense indicates temporalization, in the opposite direction to the spatialization of recording and composition. In the broader, Schillerian sense it refers to both directions: there is a playfulness, if not in recording then certainly in composition. Temporalization by itself rarely yields a single thread of events experienced wholly temporally, and even then successive events are rarely wholly identical. The chromatic scale in music, in analogy with visual art, poses a spatial relation. Two successive notes can be different in pitch in the same way that two neighboring brush strokes are different in color, and the temporal relationship between two successive notes depends on the spatial relationship between their pitches. In this sense space offers a set of comprehensible forms, which play navigates and arranges in time.
Relationships between space and time can be found in videogames by analogy. Just as spatially differentiated sounds are composed in music, so are mechanics, ideas, and paths composed in games. When confronting a game challenge, the player is forced to deliberate upon a choice, which may be as small as deciding on the timing of a jump. The function of a game challenge is to create a space of possible choices, from which the player must select one path, and close the others. The sum total of all of the rules and challenges of a game therefore gives rise to a superpositioned space of all possible paths through the game, awaiting collapse into a specific path upon the game's unfolding.
Possibility space, which is sometimes identified as a unique feature of games, can be identified in all artforms. If a game successively obscures and reveals parts of its possibility space depending on the paths taken, a musical piece too successively reveals a possibility space in time, by the player as well as the listener. When listening to an orchestral piece, a listener can rarely pay equal attention to all parts, let alone the many threads present within even a single part. The path one takes through an orchestral piece must be unique: sometimes paying more attention to the violins, sometimes the cellos, sometimes multiple parts at once. Such choices can have a major impact on one's overall comprehension of the work even in nominally non-interactive artforms. This is perhaps more manifestly visible in film: seemingly unexpected plot twists may have been foreshadowed by unnoticed details in earlier scenes.
Relative to other artforms, games have always been highly reproducible. All that is needed to replicate a game is to remember its rules, which in early games can be perfectly transmitted even in oral tradition. Chess has existed in a recognizable form for centuries, and formalized sport has existed since at least the bronze age. Nonetheless, older games bore a distinctly cultic function. The ancient Olympiad and the Mesoamerican ballgame both served as stand-ins for warfare, whereby the shared ritualistic value of a win would be enough to exert influence over a foe. Here, the possibility space of the game is inseparable from the religious and political fabric of the competing Maya or Greek city-states.
What mechanical reproduction brought to games was not reproducibility per se, and reproducibility per se was not sufficient to abolish the cultic nature of games. Instead, mechanical reproduction served to increase the transmissibility of increasingly complex game rules, such that a whole new compositional layer of game objects could emerge as distinct from the basic rules of the game. Unlike traditional games, rules do not uniquely structure a videogame. A videogame with the same rules as Super Mario Bros. – e.g. the same jumping arcs, powerups and enemy behaviors – but without its levels is not the same game as Super Mario Bros.
The rules of a videogame are encountered secondarily to game objects. Outside of explicit tutorials, it is left to the player to figure out the rules by continuously confronting game objects, and even after repeated confrontation the player might not have grasped the rules in a clearly codified way. Super Mario Bros. players are often surprised to learn that Mario’s jump is not actually a parabola, whereas a novice chess player will know exactly how a knight moves. But clearly understood, well-established rules can be also readily bent, through a powerup or a level-specific twist, in service of a good challenge.
Videogame rules are less like the rules of chess or sports, and more like the time and key signatures of music. Rules guide composition, but composition is not determined by the rules. Just as two videogames with the same rules are different games if they do not share the same levels, two musical pieces with the same signatures are not the same if they do not share the same notes. Thus, the age of mechanical reproducibility has brought games closer to other artforms. Perhaps it has also brought other artforms closer to videogames – what appears today as a self-contained possibility space may have once been something more open-ended.
The increasing complexity of games reached its apotheosis in the single player videogame, which brought such a depth and variety to game objects that the videogame took on the appearance of possessing an internal life. To solve chess is a challenge, but to solve Super Mario Bros. is as nonsensical as solving a human – speedruns or high scores can be optimized, but there is more to Super Mario Bros. than a vehicle for competition. Against the game’s internal life, the high score stands out awkwardly, as a vestigial organ. What is unique about videogames against traditional games is that videogames can eschew all external ends, in favor of only its own concept: the temporal experience of its own internal space, that is play, for play’s sake.
The concept of art evades positive definition. The moment one set of criteria is accepted, some enterprising artist will seek to violate it. This is a form of play. The concept of art is, therefore, as much this violation as any definition. The same is true for the boundaries between artforms. That there is today such an artform as a videogame is already a foregone conclusion that does not need to be rationalized. We can differentiate videogames against antecedent games by observing what was gained or lost in time, but its relationship to its sibling artforms, with which it actually shares no common ancestors, is a separate question.
2. Just for fun
In game studies the concept of play is sometimes described as freedom within limitations, or “free movement within a rigid structure” (Salen & Zimmerman), or “constrained freedom” (Juul), or some similar formulation substituting “freedom” for “agency” or “voluntary action.” The idea is along the lines of what we described in the previous section, of play as the mediation of the temporal and spatial moments of an artwork.
Such phrasing tends to detract from the dialectic. It implies such a thing as freedom without limitations: experience without forms, time without space, a path without a defined possibility space — in other words, pure contingency. But random motion cannot be said to be self-determined, and totally random variable ends up reproducing a normal distribution. The danger of the “freedom within limitations” formulation is that it is either entirely redundant, or it flattens freedom into only one side of its relation, as merely what is not-limited. But freedom is limitation as much as it is not, and preferring one side over the other betrays both.
The radical thinkers of the Enlightenment had posed freedom in art as an analogy to freedom in society as a whole. In Schiller's terms, the feeling was that humanity had competing impulses towards animalistic contingency on the one hand and rigidly formal law on the other, and that either pole constituted a form of unfreedom. The hope, on the other hand, was that freedom would consist in the mastery over the relationship between contingency and law, pointing towards the ability to create and abolish one's own laws. Play in art was to be a microcosm of this relationship, and the mastery over this relationship was to be a tentative version of free self-legislation.
Game studies has already given names to the flattening of freedom towards either impulse. On the side of contingency is paidia, or the open-ended and imaginative play of childhood. On the side of limitation is ludus, or play with well-defined rules and goals. Most will pay lip service to the idea that both are equally valid and equally necessary. Most also suspect the necessary deformity of either pole, and favor one or the other implicitly.
If freedom is banished to one side of its dialectic, then art in pursuit of this one-sided freedom can only end in unfreedom. Much has been written about the culture industry's instrumentalization of play for unfree ends. Usually, the gist is that game rules are absorbed into and end up structuring institutions of social rationalization. One is then compelled to favor paidia against ludus, on the expectation that the latter inevitably takes on the function of the dominant social order.
But a game devoted to paidia is not quite devoted to the microcosm of freedom. It is devoted to the merely contingent pole of freedom. And, by virtue of devoting itself to an unfree end, such a game is no more innocent of instrumental reason as something manifestly administrated. It would be a mistake to pretend that contingency has no part to play in a social order that defends itself by abolishing the directionality of history. The appearance of contingency as open-endedness serves not to master but to obscure rationalization, to cover up the stink of the undesirable side of the dialectic. Paidia is a dishonest unfreedom.
The compulsion towards offering paidia as a corrective to social rationalization is a version of the compulsion towards socially impactful art in general. Ludus is no better in this respect, though it is perhaps more honest about its instrumental character. Socially good ludus, also known as procedural rhetoric or persuasive or serious games, seeks to produce an effect in society using the administered nature of game rules. Usually, they attempt this by simulating some injustice in society, or training the player to adopt good social habits, or affecting the player’s empathy towards in-game characters. There is no pretense to freedom nor pretense to an internal end. Its explicit objective is to serve as propaganda around some social issue, a compulsion wholly external to the artwork itself.
The point is not to prove that paidia and ludus are bad to simply sweep them aside, nor to draw out some hamfisted dialectical "synthesis" as a corrective. The deformities of present society are necessary symptoms of present society that will inevitably reemerge so long as society remains more or less the same. The worst abuse of theory would be to condemn what one already dislikes and alibi what one already likes. The comb must be applied evenly. Paidia is the one-sided embrace of time, and ludus is the one-sided embrace of space. Their relationship, the relationship of time to space, subject to object, experience to form, occurs not wholly within the artwork, nor wholly between the artwork and its creator, but between the artwork and its player. In other words, it is a problem that the artist can pose but cannot hope to solve by themselves.
Play is manifestly a social act. The characteristics and meanings of play change with history. There was the autonomous, auratic play of Schiller’s time, and the massed, political play of Walter Benjamin’s time. For Schiller, the still-intact aura of an artwork meant that it could be imbued with an autonomy, or an internality, that was to mirror the autonomy of a free society. The task of the artist was to assemble aesthetic forms in a beautiful way, that both stood in their own right and also combined into something new and greater. In doing so, play would reflect freedom without needing to be about freedom, so long as play pursued its own concept in the form of beauty.
For Benjamin, the liberation of artworks from cultic specificity meant that art had become a manifestly social organ, taking on the work of mass documentation in photography and mass propaganda in film. Hence, art acquired as all other social organs do the who-whom of politics: who is making art, for whom, to what end? Such a politicization of art depended first on the politicization of society, and second on art’s adequacy not to the concept of art, but to the concept of a social organ. Here beauty, as the metric of play's attainment to its own concept, is grouped with the outdated cultic value of art, to be swept away in proportion to the abolition of art's self-contained existence – the abolition of possibility space altogether.
Adorno objected to this thesis on the grounds that it fell towards a one-sided embrace of socially useful practice — by analogy, towards ludus. Both the cult-value and the exhibition-value of art in Benjamin’s account, respectively before and after the dominance of mechanical reproduction, resolve towards use-value, whereas for Adorno the internality of an autonomous artwork refuses neat resolution to any external factor at all. Any such resistance to utility was lacking in Benjamin’s account. Perhaps at this time Benjamin was still channeling the energy of Tatlin in some belated form. If it seemed that the realization of freedom in society really was on the horizon, then the freedom in microcosm should naturally have been in the process of dissolution, and all efforts should have been aimed towards the highest goal.
But Benjamin's work was nearly two decades removed from Tatlin's, and today we are another ninety years further removed. The bifurcated compulsion towards socially impactful art, towards seemingly liberating paidia and seemingly useful ludus, is symptomatic. Such heavy-handedness appears necessary only because art per se fails to attain the concept of society, which in the final estimation is the failure of society to attain its own concept. To side with one or the other would be to alibi for this failure.
In the aftermath of regression, perhaps something of art's autonomy calls out once again. Maybe it is not simply a misrecognition that something resembling autonomous art, which to Benjamin was supposed to have been abolished, only appeared in games after the domination of industrial reproduction. There is something in the internal dialectic of autonomous art that petulantly refuses to answer to practice, politics, and usefulness, even as it remains thoroughly obedient. Perhaps what is left of autonomous art is play, which is the last part of art still tolerated by the public as a leisurely act, and still devoted only to its own concept, now named "fun" instead of "beauty" — above all, a game must be "fun."
"Fun” leans towards sensuousness, and the movement from a dialectical “beauty” to a less dialectical “fun” is admittedly a symptom of a regressed, absolutized play. Play today severs time and space, it shunts freedom to one or the other side of the dialectic, it sneaks rationalization under the guise of freedom. If all this must be recognized, play's necessary appearance of uselessness must be maintained in equal measure. Even an illusory uselessness restrains the all-dominating temptation towards a hasty unity with usefulness. It affords play some breathing room to confess its own falsehood. Maybe, play is allowed to pose a problem with no solution.