virtualization or a variation upon 'fucking machines'

As a colleague once told me, video games have no corollary in history.

I wonder if I could diverge from that characterization by calling video games a coalescence of dexterity and imagination, in a sense, they are interactive fantasy engines with labor inputs occurring specifically at the play interface, i.e., the 'joystick.' Let's be loose with 'joystick.' In the past I've asserted that the history leading to this moment, when it is writ large as matter of 'technology and human affairs,' i.e., big picture stuff, then it goes from the slave whip to the joystick. But when I say let's be loose I mean to suggest that it's not only the hands acting upon the world or upon others that is the sine qua non of interface design seen as a mode of oppression. No, the senses themselves can and will become labor inputs. In the perfect interface, the greater availability for inputs lends itself to greater intimacy with complex logical processes performed by machines. And it is particular upon the soft contours where flesh touching becomes a data point. A design aesthetic leading to more ways to interact through digital media may suggest very flatly 'fucking machines,' where every body part with an incentive to be touched becomes an input for a virtualization of experience.

And lest we forget, video games as media exposes a conceit of digital culture. Game logic is ultimately a neurological companion, offering basic interaction mechanics to keep a body's dendritic appendages amused. One way in which this occurs is in the content and mechanics of games. A popular type of mechanic reveals, very plainly, the labor components of gameplay. If you're required to 'level' a character, 'mine' and move geometric blocks constituting the game world, if you have to engage in any number of mediated work activities like 'learning a skill' represented by a point scale of knowledge you begin to see not only the basic logic of gaming but how it can confiscate, through narrative appropriation, habituated practices of life and run them as game mechanics built out of mathematical logic. But there's sugar in the mix. Something is unlike reality. Games, by virtue of their economics, are designed (correctly or not) to have extensive replay potential. Games that scale power in various ways, such as by breaking down gameplay into logarithmically defined scales of power, which are overcome by gaining a level or acquiring better equipment, essentially take experiences of transcendence and pre-solve them as a matter of time spent doing the correct chores for 'leveling' and acquiring a set of increases to game play mechanics. The point I am attempting to makes is that 'going up' mathematically can occur in any number of ways but the sensation that it motivates from players differs from that of a person engaged in a real-world activity. Real world activity isn't broken down into discrete mathematically expressed units of accomplishment, so it gets boring and is necessitated by survival. Games reframe events like these as moments for acquiring experience, essentially boiling down gameplay narrative into time spent engaged in activity successful to the goal you want to accomplish. Life has goals and they're often much more vague and less evident in the small chores one does, and when they are it's often a manner of how one has established a life around the necessity of some kind of labor.

I've stated briefly that game interfaces are suggestive of sexual devices, aiming for more contact as a context for perfectly interfacing. The games themselves can co-opt life activities, and retool them as mathematically pre-designed gain-games in a larger contest for statistical superiority over other targets, be they players or game encounters. They can also be translation points for force relations, specifically between self and world or self and other. Game interfaces disrupt dialogue as it is envisioned by Martin Buber, leaving one to not be touched back by the horse so much as to have a satisfying enough 'encounter' to continue returning.

"Gimme sugar baby." - Ash 'Army of Darkness'

The dialectical mechanics of off and on, zero and one--the basis for all variety, is both a stratum and a motif. The nuance of reality is an efflorescence of complex rates and conditions for neurological interaction with vast array of life, including its growth and decay, and environmental factors representing the exigent conditions where an individual coincides. At the extensions of our neurology is a marking of time, worked material that provides familiarity, momentary specters from a past informing our actions, encouraging or discouraging us. We are ourselves some grotesque saguaro of a cultural aspect, posing and gesticulating in repetitive ways as if growing into them. That posed cactus is our habitus.  It's a moment with a history. It is continuously taken out of time to be presented to us as an exemplar of our selves--a cloud of body movement reduced to the statistically most significant moments. And these moment are put up as examples of humanity. Here I am and maybe you too. We all find ourselves with our hands, our minds, our bodies placed before an altar that provides some form of companionship, some form of satisfactory experience, some semblance of a reality that we accept. And all the while we are in some senses immobile before our mobile phones. That returning gesture, going to our portable smart-device, again and again, is not so much compulsive as it is the only path we have to take about a cage woven out of information.