Glitches and Representation
Videogame glitches tend to be characterized as disruptive and alienating. Disruptive in a sense that they break linear narrative, and alienating in revealing the cogs of a narrative machine. These descriptors carry negative connotations that stand in opposition to beauty. To affirm beauty is to allude to a context where this affirmation gains meaning. This context is assumed by affirming beauty through negation. It is to describe something akin to something else. The person who describes this something doesn’t have to know its context but outline an assumption upon which the description hinges on. The same can be said about something else to which something is related. Familiarity is assumed from the recipient of the description that affirms that this something is alike another thing without specifying where this comparison is located and what directions it points towards.
Consider a narrative that presents a story with familiar notions. To say that a glitch evokes a sense of alienation here is to assume its opposite in what is presented, how its presented and in presentation itself. Representation of family through characters in a narrative structure appear alienating because of a glitch. This affirmation hinges on familiarity with notions of family, characters, narrative and the representation of them in such and such ways. Representation is alienating in itself because it presents notions in unusual ways that cease to be unusual through repeated exposure to them. Becoming familiar with representation strips it from its alienating qualities. A glitch ceases to be any different once it claims familiarity through repetition, in fact, it ceases to be a glitch to become an assumption upon which people describe things.
Glitch in this sense is an inadequate descriptor that exists in a sphere of assumptions about representation in relation to notions of the familiar and unfamiliar. To say that a representation is alienating is to affirm its presentation as unfamiliar and itself as familiar without being familiar with representation itself. Consider how a character represents a human being. Saying that its representation in such and such way invokes a sense of alienation is to affirm that it strays from what one considers an ideal human being. This affirmation hinges on an understanding of the Platonic ideal that purports to have the ability to discern the beautiful from the ugly while not knowing how to carry out this separation because it relies on assumptions about representation and what is being represented.
One possibility for this separation is reduction. But to separate, one cannot help but think about how to carry this out that invokes more and more notions that complicate this separation. Consider how the notion of intent appears in relation to videogame glitches. To describe a glitch as alienating is to call it ugly in exposing a machine’s cogs and wires. It can allude to the narrative framework resembling a machine and the exposition itself. The narrative’s resemblance to a machine appears here as either beautiful and ugly in concert with exposition itself that’s either ugly or beautiful. Intent can show up at the end of wires, or as narrative machine, or as a product of this machine. If we take away the machine-like framework of this representation, we’ve described three disparate notions (narrative, exposition, intent) to which value judgments attach themselves. Frameworks, such as analogy, change the composition of these disparate notions to expand with additional ones and alter judgment attachments.
These notions simulate what we consider to be real, such as a human being like ourselves, to which our judgments come into play, fragmented, to assemble into paradoxical judgments. These fragments upon which judgments base themselves on and fragment them further are intertwined with what we consider real and simulated. Untangling them, or rather, attempting to, points towards assumptions which reveal the context where this attempt takes place, to collect fragments, cast them aside, reduce them to build hyperstructures, and so on. These ends as such can be ascribed to notions of search for meaning where synthesis and analysis appear alluring. But what we’re interested in is the preceding context where simulation creates simulacrum of the real. Descriptions create and recreate simulacrum from fragment to fragment that makes its context shift and move without end. Value judgments are but one way to call upon to make sense amongst these fragments, for which videogames and their assorted parts lend a hand. Because what is there in a videogame but code that creates representation of the real and simulation?
Glitches emerge as alienating and disruptive in relation to preconceived notions about what code creates as representation that code is indifferent to, because it creates as long as it has the conditions to create. Code has no end nor what we consider meaning since it exists to create representations. It appears unlike a human being that evokes a sense we ascribe to alienation, ever-shifting, forever-fragmented. Glitch is an affirmation of an assembly of these fragments, forced into an unwieldy shape to accept simulation as non-simulation to make claims about the real through the non-real.
Boundaries between real and non-real, simulation and non-simulation are but echoes of ideals between which fragments come and go that shape and reshape categories upon which affirmations hinge. This shaping and reshaping is ceaseless while categories remain the same in name which is why an assertion that describes a thing as alienating is confused. It says that this thing is alien-like but doesn’t know in what sense it is as such because its relation to aliens, alien-likeness, alienation and likeness are forever-shifting. Its fragments assemble and become further fragmented through reflection that leaves behind fragments only to be picked up again for assembly and fragmentation. This movement is perpetual in its movement towards the unknown to which a machine resembles. The machines’ movement represents this movement in its resemblance but differs in its direction, because it moves towards what is known (discerned from its function or stated by its design) while what it resembles moves towards the unknown. Once a machine’s cylinder starts to rattle and its gears refuse to switch towards what is known, the machine’s movements start to resemble the fragmentary movements in their direction towards the unknown. A glitch introduces the unknown into the operation, opening further associations to this resemblance, such as between the erosion of cylinders and cogs and the degradation of a body in which this fragmentary movement of thought happens.
Glitch simulations in this sense make the unknown known, alluding to a notion that resemblance can be known too that the allusion cannot touch but merely gesture towards. Instead of questioning itself, simulation points out the absurdity of decay and erosion in its resemblance to death without questioning itself as simulation that gives room to fragmentation. This keeps the point of reference alive between simulation and simulation, fragment and fragment in their resemblance, reducing representation and what is represented to to their points of reference. Upon reflecting on these reference points, only their absurdities remain intact towards the direction they point at which is the unknown.
