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ABSTRACT
Targeting is the most basic skill a gamer needs to master to survive from enemies, solve puzzles, and unfold a story in videogames. Before this simple gamer action happens, most game objects distributed in a game world are isolated in metastable states performing each predefined routine without causing any actual interaction with others. Therefore, in order to pull away these objects from their initial non-communication and to mobilize their interactions for the gamer’s goal, the disturbance from the gamer’s targeting is indispensable. In today’s open-world videogames, the readiness of these objects for being aimed is aestheticized in the forms of aura they radiate when the player characters use certain magical/technological skills. In this genre, a gamer’s narrative and ludic experiences, all triggered by his/her shooting the glittering objects, are thus translatable into the networking patterns of these objects under topological transformations. As an object-oriented approach in videogame studies, this essay examines how the recent videogame design for the open-world of objects redefines the cultural meaning of videogame.
Notes
1 Bethesda Game Studios, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Rockville, MD: Bethesda Softworks, 2011).
2 Rockstar North, Grand Theft Auto V (Edinburgh: Rockstar Games, 2013).
3 Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 1–2.
4 Jesper Juul, “The Open and the Closed: Game of Emergence and Games of Progression,” in Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference Proceedings, ed. Frans Mäyrä (Tampere, Finland: Tampere University, 2002), 323–29.
5 For this debate and its focus on theorizing the purity of videogames as cultural forms, see Brendan Keogh, “Across Worlds and Bodies: Criticism in the Age of Videogames,” Journal of Game Criticism 1, no. 1 (2014).
6 Autotargeting is a feature of recent videogames, which guides an action triggered by a gamer to automatically reach the object near the crosshair. See “Auto-Aim,” GiantBomb, http://www.giantbomb.com/auto-aim/3015-145 (accessed December 15, 2017).
7 See Yasmin Kafai, “World of Whyville: An Introduction to Tween Virtual Life,” Games and Culture 5, no. 1 (2010): 3–22; Yeng-Ting Lee et al., “World of Warcraft Avatar History Dataset,” in MMSys’11: Proceedings of the Second Annual ACM Conference on Multimedia Systems, eds. Ali Begen and Ketan Mayer-Patel (New York: ACM, 2011), 123–8; Chia-Jung Chan, Ruck Thawonmas and Kuan-Ta Chen, “Automatic Storytelling in Comics: A Case Study on World of Warcraft,” in CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, eds. Dan Olsen D, Ken Hinckley, Meredith Ringel Morri, Scott Hudson, and Saul Greenberg (New York: ACM, 2009), 3589–94.
8 Aarseth, Cybertext, 91.
9 Ibid., 78–9.
10 “Open world,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_world (accessed December 15, 2017).
11 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press), 23.
12 Ibid., 57, 7, 53.
13 Ibid., 66.
14 Bruno Latour, “On Recalling ANT,” in Actor Network Theory and After, ed. John Law (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1999), 17–18.
15 McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), par. 148.
16 Ibid.
17 Alan Kay, “The Early History of Smalltalk,” ACM SIGPLAN Notices 28, no. 3 (1993): 30.
18 Justin Joque, “The Invention of the Object: Object Orientation and the Philosophical Development of Programming Languages,” Philosophy & Technology 29 (2016): 351–52.
19 Ibid., 341.
20 Kay, “The Early History,” 3.
21 Ibid., 5–6.
22 Ibid., 3.
23 Kay, “The Early History,” 3.
24 Ibid., 23.
25 Ibid., 7.
26 On Immutable Mobile, see Bruno Latour, “Drawing Things Together,” in Representation in Scientific Practice, eds. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 44–45. For a topological space of actor networks, see John Law, “Objects and Spaces,” Theory, Culture & Society 19, no. 5/6 (2002).
27 Michel Callon, “Some Elements of Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Baym,” in The Science Studies Reader, ed. Mario Biagioli (New York: Routledge, 1999), 71–72.
28 Kay, “The Early History,” 7.
29 Stephen Johnson, Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create & Communicate (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 173–205.
30 DeLanda defines machinic assemblages by their components aggregated through “relations of exteriority,” which can be flexibly “detached from it and plugged into a different assemblage.” The Incredible Machine literalizes this theoretical entity with the autonomous objects coupled to each other for a common goal. See Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London, UK: Bloomsbury Academics, 2006), 10.
31 Kevin Ryan, The Incredible Machine (Eugene: Dynamix, 1993).
32 Gilbert Simondon, “The Genesis of the Individual,” in Incorporations, eds. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zoon Books, 1992), 304.
33 Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Ninian Mellamphy (London, UK: University of Western Ontario, 1980), 13–14.
34 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 244.
35 Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s Like to be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 21.
36 Latour, “On Recalling ANT,” 17–18.
37 Ian Bogost, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 4.
38 Valve Corporation, Portal (Bellevue, WA: Valve Corporation, 2007).
39 Valve Corporation, Portal II (Bellevue, WA: Valve Corporation, 2011).
40 Aarseth, Cybertext, 92.
41 DoctorMelon, “Science in Portal 2: The Infinite Loop Squash,” YouTube, http://www.youtu.be/aRkphNk2yFM (accessed December 15, 2017).
42 Arctic Avenger, “Portal Infinite Loop,” YouTube, http://www.youtu.be/uKp8E3od_S0 (accessed December 15, 2017).
43 Valve, Portal, in-game developer commentary #12, 48.
44 Nicholas Jennings, “On agent-based software engineering,” Artificial Intelligence 117 (2000): 283.
45 Nintendo, The Legend of Zelda (Kyoto, Japan: Nintendo, 1986).
46 Alexander Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 5.
47 CD Projekt RED, Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (Warsaw: CD Projekt, 2015).
48 Rocksteady Studios, Batman: Arkham Knight (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, 2015).
49 Kristine Jørgensen, “Between the Game System and the Fictional World: A Study of Computer Game Interfaces,” Games and Culture 7, no. 2 (2012).
50 Galloway, Gaming, 10.
51 Galloway, Gaming, 11.
52 Ibid., 10.
53 Nintendo EPD, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Kyoto, Japan: Nintendo, 2017).
54 “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild,” Speedrun.com, http://www.speedrun.com/botw#Any (accessed December 15, 2017).
55 Mary Ann Doane, “The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (2003): 90.
56 Doane, “The Close-Up,” 104–5.
57 Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 19.
58 Ibid., 65.
59 Ibid., 59.
60 Mark Andrejevic, “Nothing Comes Between Me and My CPU: Smart Clothes and ‘Ubiquitous’ Computing,” Theory, Culture & Society 22, no. 3 (2005): 116–18.
61 Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 203, 185.