Play Difference
“Do you have to play games to experience them legitimately?” This question by Trevor Hultner of the videogame blog No Escape invites responses to reject and reframe its premise. Autumn Wright posits that we should look at the order these things happen before we can talk about experience and legitimacy. Through Sara Ahmed’s lens of queer phenomenology, they look at the act of play and propose that we should consider the preceding step of play, that is, the who.
It’s thoughtful look at how material conditions define who even gets to play. Yet, an invisible force seems to hold a firm grip at this subject, drawing the author closer only to push it away to which they need to reassert themself over and over again: we matter, everyone matters. It’s as if a value judgment on experiencing play reverberates and forces reorientation. Is the notion of legitimacy so pervasive that it seeps into every inch of the who-play-experience order, even though it can initially be derived from an experience?
This notion of legitimacy establishes judgments about experiences and moves beyond it to become prescriptive about play and the who, as Oma Keeling observes in their response as well. Notions of gatekeeping, truth and ingenuity crop up in these pieces, alluding to an autocratic exclusionary power that remains elusive. I aim to extend on this by relating it to the idea of originality in art. This authenticity refers to a state interlocked in time and space. It’s been an inconceivable concept at the time it has emerged, since works of arts exist in a physical realm exposed to the passage of time. Mass production squeezed this aristocratic notion to shrinking corners for rich people to play games of speculation on select pieces of art. While digitization transformed the materiality of art pieces to the materiality of what they are displayed and presented at.
Consider that you play a game on the personal computer in low graphical settings, then return to it years later to play them in high settings. Which is the original experience? These low-medium-high settings typically refer to presets of every graphical setting. Their individual customizability renders it impossible to have a singular setting for the original. Once you change a setting, the presets change labels to “custom,” rendering any notion of originality to what they are: difference. These labels implying a hierarchy in graphical fidelity act more as remainders of a bygone era where the ruling class used authenticity to differentiate themselves from other classes. Copies, replicas and works from unknown artists have been similarly called inauthentic. The difference between the original and replica, the known and unknown are different. But the goal to elevate artworks deemed worthy of appreciation isn’t concerned with differentiating between differences, but molds them together to a different difference. It’s concerned to say better or worse according to a totalizing but elusive value system. Aristocrats were engrossed with the display and expression of power in every corner of their life. Art was used as an attempt to stop the effects of time, to not see and think about the difference it brings to their power. They tried to achieve this by exclusion to effects of insularity. Promotional materials by contrast invoke differences open to association, then obfuscate them to establish fewer differences in relation to a product. Customizability is one such example that points towards seemingly vast differences, but are bound to differences established throughout history, that is, of exclusion.
Remasters, remakes and remixes are such occupations with the idea of the original. These allude to an initial experience and its associations, but promise a better version of it. It invokes the idea of authenticity over and over again, simultaneously alluding and eluding nostalgia and its bittersweet taste to keep it and not keep it alive. To defy the passage of time, nostalgia puts us in a comatose state to the exclusion of difference. It’s an attempt to deny difference itself, to flee from time’s universalizing difference and the inevitability it brings. In this attempt, the self chooses indifference and exclusion to experiencing people and itself.
