Gameplay Journal 4: Countergaming

I just wanna give a quick shoutout to the very first link I saw, Simulations and (Hyper)reality from gamescenes.org, as Hyperreality was one of my main areas of philosophical focus for a hot second after discovering Badiou, Baudrillard, and others. One project from this site that particularly caught my eye, for similar reasons¹ was Benjamin Poynter’s “Story Generating Apparatus”. Put simply, this project isn’t exactly a mod (nor does it really seem to be a ‘game’), but rather a re-envisioning of the purpose of the Oculus Hardware. I recently got to play on the newest version of the Oculus through a friend, and I am both terrified and terrified. Excited too, as the possibilities for envisioning a world in which identity is not tied to the physical body but to your representation of it is completely possible in VR, along with exciting avenues for play, personal discovery, interaction with disparate people’s from disparate places, and so on. It’s not too crazy to imagine a world in which everyone’s needs are taken care of and most people spend their time in virtual reality that is more “real” than this waking world. However, I am concerned with the disappearance of the real altogether, and I believe that the untethering of one’s experience of life from the real can create false selves and open one up to even more malevolent possibilities of internalized reality. Actually I’m sure Facebook, Big Tech, “the Man”, has no reason to subtly or not so subtly alter what I perceive as reality. But it’s hard to explain these ideas in real concrete terms, especially if “products” begin losing their status as goal maker and some virtual status is its replacement, perhaps those who conform largely to the types of VR lives that best serve the status quo, and so on, will be rewarded, and so on.

What does any of this have to do with anything? Well, Story Generating Apparatus seems to be taking a laser focus, on a few levels, to this process of Narrative. Or, in other words, by having the player have a “nostalgia trip” in the VR world, the player is experiencing a world that is meant to be a more or less accurate representation of what having a personal nostalgia arcade would be like. Other than having rather low fidelity (our VR is still not better than reality yet), this seems on its surface uninteresting, reading old comics, playing old games and so on in VR, why not just do the real thing? Well, that real thing? It doesn’t exist, either, not in the way we normally think. You, a human, apply perceptive filters to what you experience, cognize about your present moment and your memories. The VR headset is giving the player a temporary, visually representational aspect of the idea of these cognitive filters. As such, in the real world, the artist is presenting the Oculus as having the potential for creating reality in much the way our minds present reality to us. Our minds are a kind of Oculus, constructing reality from a set of inputs. We, through our lives, actions, memories, are the Story Generating Apparatus, and we, through our technology, reproduction, and media, largely serve to continue its existence. With all of this being said, I believe that Story Generating Apparatus functions through the formal definition of Countergaming provided by Galloway(Galloway, 124–125), specifically in reference to its focus on making the Apparatus visible, although still being representational, you navigate virtual comic books and virtual arcade cabinets. There is a recursive meta-narrative creating a complex multiple diagesis that extends beyond standard gaming conventions. You play as a gamer who is playing games (and other nostalgic activities), and as such, each layer comments and critiques the experience and role of gamer, consumer, and narrative creator, that forces the player to think introspectively on their own process of gaming and narrative creation. Most importantly, there is a focus on aesthetic over gameplay. The game is not about the gameplay but about the experience of the game. While there seems to be intentional graphical artifacting and playing a game as you’re playing a game through a VR headset does sound intrusive, I will not argue that these are attempts at achieving a status of countergaming in the same vein that Jodi does through Untitled Game.

Link to Story Telling Apparatus Trailer from Benjamin Poynter: https://vimeo.com/97390471

Link to Benjamin Poynter’s website: http://benjaminpoynter.com/WELCOME.php

1:I’m working on a theory that sits somewhere in an intersection of Semiotics, Narrative, and Existentialism that I’m calling “Narrative Reductionism” although I’m sure I will come up with nothing new.

Works Cited: Galloway, A. R. (2010). Countergaming. In Gaming: Essays on algorithmic culture (pp. 107–126). Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.