Games and Culture

http://gac.sagepub.com What if Baudrillard was a Gamer?: Introduction to a Special Section on Baudrillard and Game Studies
Bart Simon Games and Culture 2007; 2; 355 DOI: 10.1177/1555412007309535 The online version of this article can be found at: http://gac.sagepub.com

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What if Baudrillard was a Gamer?

Games and Culture Volume 2 Number 4 October 2007 355-357 2007 Sage Publications 10.1177/1555412007309535 http://gac.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com

The occasion that sparked this particular collection of short essays is a sad one. The death of Jean Baudrillard and the end of the possibility of more of his particular brand of theoretical provocation has prompted a good deal of reflection and commentary across the social sciences and humanities.1 In game studies though, we might safely say that we had barely begun to know him. Ours will be a posthumous engagement, and the pity is that we will never be able to challenge the thinker who surely could have held his own in any death match we might define. Baudrillard might have enjoyed (and certainly worried about) the ragtag composition of our nascent field with so many next generation scholars as eager for the next instance run as any promising critical intellectual intervention. What would he have thought of this generation of not just player-scholars but designer, indeed programmer, scholars? What kinds of games would he play with us? We will never know of course, but then we scholars of digital games are beginning to excel in the study of what if. For this exercise, I invited a number of scholars with more than a passing familiarity with Baudrillards oeuvre to imagine Baudrillards engagement with games, play, digital culture, and the field of game studies itself. The contributions included here demonstrate that such an exercise is more than timely; it is in fact a critical intervention in a field of study that struggles to get a hold of itself in the face of powerful externalities, the latest game craze, the mythologies of the moral majority, the heterogeneous corporate agendas of the game industry, or the traditions of disciplinary academia lagging 20 years behind its objects of study. This special section on Baudrillard and game studies is not meant to be the last word. If anything, what we propose to offer here is a kind of collective first word. These contributions are the opening moves in the ultimate sandbox game that constitutes Baudrillards work, and readers are invited to play with us, follow, and challenge the lines of thought initiated by this diverse group of scholars. The essays here certainly do not present any kind of unified interpretation, and each is well worthy of independent consideration. Nevertheless, as a collection, I believe the essays are provocative and instructive for future game studies scholarship. And in these few short comments, I will endeavor to describe where these provocations may lie. Gerry Coulters Baudrillard is certainly not a game studies scholar let alone a gamer. The best Coulter will give us on Baudrillards behalf is a definitive ambiguity with respect to digital games, but perhaps this is also a productive state for our field to occupy. Coulter sees Baudrillards focus as less on digital games than on the critical potential of gamers as possible double agents of the virtual. What is important is that this has less to do with game studies own obsessions with questions of player agency
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356 Games and Culture

and more to do with the logic of a cultural system that threatens to undo itself at every turn. Indeed, there may be a resource here for those of us who find most game play to be significantly less than agential (to press the button or not to press the button) yet who see cultural political significance in the collective action of gamers. Eva Kingsepp also cites a productive ambiguity in Baudrillard, this time around perennially nagging questions of representation, reference, and authenticity in historical war games. Kingsepp asks us to consider the difference between games like Medal of Honor, which play into the dominant cultural logic of simulation, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which appear to unsettle it. Kingsepps close attention to specific games opens up, in Baudrillard, avenues for considering different modalities of simulation, which in turn can take us further into a consideration of some kinds of games as art. While Kingsepp works with Baudrillard through examples of specific games, Alexander Galloway soberly reminds us that for Baudrillard, games; what we recognize as games (digital or otherwise) are merely old order distractions from the real game or perhaps the game of the real. The virtual is emphatically not the gamic for Baudrillard, Galloway writes, it is this world that is the game. It is in this sense that Galloway can confirm that Baudrillard was indeed a gamer, the best that ever lived. His game was metaphysical, but his play style was arguably ludological. Galloway makes a number of insightful distinctions for game studies on this score. First, the ontological equation of the real and the game messes with the simple binarism of the concept of the magic circle, which would pit the gamic against the real in an essential tension. Second, we can see the specific place of the machine in all this as the expedient, declarative modality of pure machinic transparency, pure abstraction and frictionless symbolic exchange along with an artifice of seduction, of psychic complicity and oblivion. This combination presents us with the perfect crime; the real as The World of Warcraft. Seth Giddings machines are different however, and a dynamic counterpoint to Galloways reading of Baudrillard on Kasperov versus Deep Blue. Returning to Baudrillards The System of Objects, Giddings finds not the abstraction of the computational machine but the material playfulness of the gadget or gizmo. This is Giddings starting point for considering Baudrillards situationist and surrealist connections, especially regarding the possibilities of a kind of playful technics as a form of resistance to capitalist production. Whereas Baudrillard was critical of such dialectical positions (consider Baudrillards implicit critique of Huizenga discussed by both Giddings and Galloway), Giddings sees a residual affinity with the ludic in Baudrillards reflections on Alfred Jarrys pataphysics. As with Coulter, Giddings sees positive ambiguity, the code of videogamesmight be read as absolute confirmation of the domination of the human by things, or then again as a multiplication of reality, perhaps even a ludic pataphysics of cyberculture. Of course, this alternation between digital games as the epitome of social control and the most subversive source of resistance is part of the problem for Baudrillard. To play this game is, in a sense, to play straight into the hands of the moral majority on the one hand and the game culture industry on the other. We should try perhaps to be a little more indifferent and a little more radical. This brings us to the question of how game studies might handle Baudrillard. As Patrick Crogan notes in the final essay
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Simon / Introduction 357

of the collection, the tendency thus far has been to cite Baudrillard on simulation only to define what game studies is not about. To a large extent, this is the idea that for most game studies, games are a matter of simulation in the practical computational sense (real simulation?), whereas Baudrillard is deploying a more politically charged abstract notion of cultural simulation (simulated simulation?). Although there is a need to be careful about how the term simulation is deployed, Crogan maintains that computational simulation remains the heart of the matter for digital game play, production, and scholarship within a generalized culture of simulation. In this way, Baudrillard can be used to make the connection between the idiosyncrasies of specific kinds of gamesplay, including their modalities of simulation, and the larger cultural processes in which that study is situated. The focus becomes less on the procedural versus representational aspects of digital games as discrete objects and more on gameplay as culture. My final note concerns the status of our own project from a Baudrillardian perspective. Surely, we now know that as game studies scholars we are part of the game and dangerously at risk of becoming players in denial. Consider that part of what games scholarship does is to make games serious (let alone to make serious games, which is a danger of a different sort).When games become serious, they lose much of their triviality and arguably they are made to fall more easily into the dominant mode of production. In this sense, they become banal. No longer acting as ludic gadgets, games are made to be about something; games are made to definitively refer. They are tamed and made positive. They become repositories of data to be scraped and mined for definitive information about the integral reality of the human condition. I do not mean to be antiintellectual. I am not suggesting that we leave the games and the players alone. That would be too dialectical. Instead, I might suggest that Baudrillard, as a master of the writing game, offers insights into how we might write our object in more radical ways. If, in gameplay, we may perceive sites of ludic unintelligibility, aporia, and contradiction, how might we convey this in a form that is not in fact amenable to the next best thing? How might our own writing become ludic in this sense? Baudrillard spent a life working to exceed the limits of his thought. He did not wish to play to the endgame. He knew his concepts would become banal, thus he tried to extinguish them (or at least to become indifferent to them). Baudrillard could have played in game studies, but he would have been a griefer. Amazing, then, he would get along just fine in this growing crowd of dissident and disaffected minds, and we are sure to see more of what kinds of moves may be made on his behalf in the near future. Bart Simon Concordia University

Note
1. Jean Baudrillard passed away on March 6, 2007. Bart Simon, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal. He is the director of the Montreal GameCODE Project and is pursuing research on the sociomaterialities of gaming and critical posthumanism.

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