Circuits: a video essay
screened at Level Up Conference, University of Utrecht, 4 - 7 November 2003
a Quicktime version is included on the Proceedings CDROM

This video essay examines continuities in, and transformations of, children’s culture and play through computer games.

Documenting two young boys’ engagement with the simulated environments and gameplay of Lego Racers 2 both on and off screen, this video essay identifies and explores how the everyday playing of this computer game on the one hand capitalises on well-established strategies of accumulation through cross-media licensing and the positioning of children as consuming subjects, whilst on the other hand these strategies are exceeded through semiotic and performative play.

A number of circuits of signification and playful activity are identified: between game rules and frameworks and emergent, exploratory play in the computer game; and between play with simulated action / space and play between children in actual space; between play with virtual toys and play with actual toys; between software and bodies.

The video essay questions conceptual oppositions between game and player, rule-based and emergent play, cyberspace and everyday space, old media and new media, subjects and objects.

Parallel Circuit: a text to accompany the video essay Circuits

Of all the circuits brought into play by these children the videogame’s racetrack is the least significant. The racetrack as both ludic and geographical structure is largely ignored in favour of other game apparatuses. The non-player cars are left to pursue each other in blissful automatic loops.

The first game (playing Lego Racers 2 on the computer) is one of exploration: not only of the gameworld, its beaches, mountains and tunnels; but also the interplay between this virtual environment and the action, events, and possibilities structured into the game. A new game algorithm is quickly established: how quickly can the avatar (Lego car/Lego driver) get from the starting line / game start into the sea and momentary death. And what are the pleasures of instantiating this little suicide again and again in spinning stars and swirling bricks? A game, then, of exploration and destruction, and the exploration of destruction. The avatar is destructable, not only via the terminal plunge into polygonal water, but also more incrementally in bumps and crashes. This shedding of bricks first to an unadorned chassis and then to the bisection of driver from car is as terrible and exhilarating (and hence as funny) as dismembering any body. The third game: “I broke myself into a man!”

The virtual and the actual are not opposites, both are real. The circuit from virtual, coded gameworld to actual, improvised gameworld is not unique to (the playing of) this game, but its loops are traced out and smoothed by the cross-media marketing strategies (and wit) of Lego. The fourth game is to build the virtual world with actual Lego. Texture-mapped homogeneity is translated in brickolage and a crayon-scribbled beach – ready for the drownings to come. This building work/play constructs a terrain as kinaesthetic as that on-screen. Bricks become mountains as toys clutched in small hands trace software-learnt curves of competing momentum and gravity, re-simulating a delerious physics.

Thus, after the videogame, familiar games are played differently. The game restarts, or rather the game starts anew. Familiar practices of building actual Lego vehicles are augmented by the videogame’s conventions. A setup prologue is established - ‘which one do you want?’ - from a range of designs laid out on the cushion/menu. The parent must play the player, tapping fingers on a book in an empty performance of keyboard control as the two non-avatars (hybrids of boys and toys) slide between the cardinal points on/in their map/world. Who is the player here? It looks like the parent who looks like he is playing a video game, but of course it is the hybrids, the monsters, part child, part car, part product, all elbows and plastic. The parental non-Player falls to the edge of the game action and space, performing but not an actor. Intermittently acknowledged or admonished, at best an audience for these little monsters, or a model of interpassivity.

Animated stars orbit the repeatedly revived avatar, children’s bodies/toys spin across the floor, a galaxy of bricks coalesces into a corporate logo. The player/consumer is hailed and a giant, insistent, green arrow floats overhead, pointing the way. But even interpellation is a kind of game.

references
Louis Althusser (1985) Essays on Ideology, Verso: London
Suzy Gordon (2003) ‘Reading play in the work of Melanie Klein: dogs, dolls and daughters’ paper at the Power-Up: computer games, ideology and play symposium, UWE / Watershed, Bristol
Donna Haraway (1992) ‘The Promises of Monsters: a regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others’, in Lawrence Grossberg et al (eds) Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge, pp. 295-337
John Law (ed.) (1991) A Sociology of Monsters: essays on power and domination and technology, London: Routledge
Martin Lister, Jon Dovey, Seth Giddings, Iain Grant & Kieran Kelly (2003) New Media: a critical introduction, London: Routledge
Sonia Livingstone (1998) ‘Mediated childhoods: a comparative approach to young people’s media environments in Europe’, European Journal of Communication 13.4: 435-456
Slavoj Zizek (1998) ‘Is it possible to traverse the fantasy in cyberspace?’ in E.Wright & E.Wright (eds) The Zizek Reader, London: Blackwell