The Prosthetics of Video Games
This chapter explores the machinic working of synopticon (as opposed to the panopticon) in the digital age that captures libidinal desire through two major forms—(violent) war videos and edutainment, which are developed in the next chapter. I draw on Laca
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The Prosthetics of Video Games
Those of us who are privileged to live in a technological world must take the term posthuman seriously. We are slowly leaving the world shaped by print technologies at the turn of the twentieth century, where graphic advertisements were nascent, to consumerism shaped by a social media and a screen culture in the twenty-first century. The transition is as dramatic as the one that took place between chirographic technologies of scriptural cultures to the typographic print technologies of the Enlightenment, a span that took some 500 years. If the widespread emergence of television in the 1950s marked the point when the moving-image became ubiquitous in American homes, video game computer graphics, beginning in 1978 with Warren Robinett’s computer game, Adventure for the Atari 2600, marks at least one of the more significant moments when the computerized moving screen began its invasion into homes. If the earlier screen technologies are generalizable as being ‘passive’ in their reception, the new screen technologies are said to be ‘interactive,’ a binary that has received a deconstructive turn as ‘interpassivity,’ a term coined by the Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller (2000), which I shall develop later. This chapter grapples with the change of perception that such ‘interactivity’ with the video game ‘revolution’ is bringing about since it has major consequences in the way posthuman perception is structuring our everyday life, especially the way we learn and hegemonically accept the state of the global symbolic order—always telematically presented to us © The Author(s) 2019 j. jagodzinski, Schizoanalytic Ventures at the End of the World, Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12367-3_8
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through carefully constructed network of ‘screened’ images. My intention is more to situate video games in the larger schema of this telematic condition than to dwell on actual game themselves in any depth. There is already enough literature that does this, especially on the Internet (www. gamezone.com), as well as in important journals such as Game Studies. I take video games to be the ubiquitous form of being posthuman with the understanding that technology itself has a double function: On the one hand, the human senses are extended by its prosthetics, heightening the acuity of perception and bodily mobility into an extended more powerful ego. On the other hand, such technological manipulation leaves the senses open to exposure, intensifying human vulnerability in direct portion to the power of the technology itself (Buck-Morss 1992, ft. 80, 22, 33). Technology ‘doubles back’ on the senses, producing a counter-need for a ‘protective shield against the “colder order” that it creates’ (p. 33) as an illusionary form of ego-protection. The machine as tool has a correlate in its development as armor, engendering certain invincibility, and with it certain anesthesia to endure the ‘shocks’ of the social order without pain. This is the thesis that I
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