Representation and the Aesthetic Aura in Games: On the Solid Narratives of 1979 Revolution: Black Friday and Mixtape

Aligned Choice and Result, and Enforced Passivity

Representation close to the real has, ever since media were born, been an ideal and a desire long held by the creators who make media and the users who consume them. Games, too, have never been free of the ideal of "representation close to the real." Through the chain of modalities that has the user manipulate and decide actions and then confirms the result back to them, games have realized a sense of immediacy that other media seldom reach; and the immediacy a player feels through a game has been the game's own particular way of drawing near to the real.

In the process of approaching the real, a game inevitably produces two linked events: choice and result. Of the two, choice—in that the user can manipulate or decide it by their own will—is also the process of aligning the user's will and senses to the result. A considerable part of the core pleasure a game gives comes precisely from this alignment. The circuit by which the input I press returns as an event on the screen, and that result becomes in turn the ground for the next input, is taken by some to be the very substance of the agency a game grants the user.[1]

The word "choice," though, must be handled with care here, because operating—pressing a button—is not in itself a meaningful choice. Operations occur without number, but only when an operation leads to a branch point in the result, and the user's will leaves a trace on the world, does choice acquire meaning. To play a game is not merely to watch a story but to perform the logic of a system with one's own body, and in that sense the working of a game is always an act.[2]

Yet the fact that the user can operate choice harbors, at the same time, the possibility that the user might deliberately detach their will and senses from the result. The room for divergence—deliberately straying from the set route, twisting the intended ending, intentionally taking aim at the gaps in the system—is the very freedom the medium of the game permits the user, and the ground on which the play the game implements becomes the player's own. Some games, by contrast, are designed so that the user cannot decide whether choice and result align. Whatever you press, the story flows in its predetermined direction, and the room for divergence is sealed off in advance.

To enforce the alignment of choice and result is to drag the stories of the world the game offers in a particular direction. Whether intended or not, a game that enforces alignment takes on the character of propaganda. A game conveys its message not only at the level of narrative or image; the working of its rules and systems itself can become an argument.[3] The arrangement of rules that determines what is possible and what impossible, what is rewarded and what punished, is in itself an element of persuasion. When the alignment of choice and result occurs, the player is placed in the domain of passivity. A story the game enforces upon the user comes into being.

The problem is that enforcing a story does not stop at simply emphasizing a message. It disables the very function of the feedback the user could gain through results, and so damages the circuit that is the game's distinctive medial trait.[4] The enforcement of alignment can therefore lead, at worst, to a failure to make full use of the game's medial strengths. And yet no small number of developers and creators choose the path of enforcing the alignment of choice and result in order to deliver the message or representation they want. This is not merely a limit or problem of technology or capital. It is not that they lack the capacity to implement a branch point, but that not branching is more faithful to the something they wish to convey. It can, rather, be a choice toward the ideal of representing the real that the medium has long held dear.

What Games Gained by Giving Up Feedback

To gauge why games cling to representing the real even at the cost of giving up feedback, that characteristic of the medium, we first need to look a little more deeply at what representation is. Stuart Hall pointed out that representation is a phenomenon situated beneath society, holding that according to social convention and relations of power even the same object can be represented in entirely different ways. In particular, borrowing the concept of "discourse" that Foucault drew out to explain the union of knowledge and power, Hall argued that in the process by which meaning is reconstructed by media, there is no meaning fixed in the thing itself: meaning is not inherent in the object but is produced only within a particular discursive practice.

On this basis Hall holds that a particular group forms rules and discourses that represent objects in ways aligned with its own interests. As evidence, citing cases where Western media, in representing the East, depict it by way of Orientalism, he stresses the process by which the production and consumption of images collude with each other to create meaning. The East does not exist in itself but is drawn again and again as the Other that the West needs in order to define itself.

Hall saw this process of media images colluding as something to be overcome through oppositional reading. By grasping the intent hidden behind the collusion of production and consumption, the public can resist media. But there is one irony here. At the center of the oppositional reading and the alternative discourse Hall described, there always lay the shadow of an axiomatic standard: the universal and the mainstream. An oppositional reading is, in the end, a reading that stands against some dominant code, and that dominant code presupposes a common sensibility the public shares.

The trouble is that this premise does not sit well with today's fragmented media environment. In today's distribution environment, where hyper-personalized experiences like the omnichannel have become the norm, what forms a mainstream force is no longer a group with a general-purpose identity, like the median of a normal distribution. In an environment where algorithms propagate a different world to each person, the very notion of a single dominant code that everyone must oppose grows blurred. Rather, several small, hard groups—each pursuing strong exclusivity and a closed identity through extreme claims—gather to form the mainstream. The boundary between opposition and domination collapses, and one person's oppositional discourse becomes another's dominant discourse. This is not far from the scenery of the neo-tribal society Michel Maffesoli depicted.

According to Maffesoli, the greatest feature of neo-tribalism is that the emotional resonance offered by the here and the now—this place where I stand—is what binds people together. Not a rational contract or a grand ideology, but the emotion of being-together itself becomes the ground of cohesion. Attending to a social vitality—puissance—welling up from the bottom of the everyday, distinct from institutionalized power (pouvoir), Maffesoli held that this vitality is expressed through an "aesthetic aura." The aesthetic aura is the everyday ritual and aesthetic, such as a tribe's own distinctive style or slang. Here we must pause on one thing: the origin of the aesthetic aura is not the person who creates or enjoys that distinctive style, but the form of the aesthetic aura itself.

The aesthetic aura Maffesoli pointed to does not, as Walter Benjamin noted, dwell in a unique and singular original, but in the endlessly copied and shared form itself. If Benjamin's aura is the aura of authenticity, Maffesoli's aura is the aura of form. The scene of games clinging to the representation of the real lies precisely on the tension between these two auras. A game seems to chase the Benjaminian authenticity of the real's presence, but what it actually puts in the player's hands is the aesthetic aura Maffesoli pointed to—the aura of form. In other words, the reason a game clings to representing the real even at the cost of giving up feedback may lie, rather than in the message it wishes to convey, in a particular form itself.

From Narrative to System: How Has the Game's Aesthetic Aura Changed?

When many people think of Maffesoli's "aesthetic aura," they tend, because of its enjoyability and presentness, to imagine expressions or styles that are apolitical and stand well clear of propaganda. But the aesthetic aura itself can be put to political use however one likes, and can—even unwilled—work like propaganda. Consider, for instance, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (hereafter Modern Warfare), which newly established the history of the FPS. Modern Warfare's greatest features can be summed up roughly as: minimal yet highly polished combat contained within a relatively small volume; a short, narrative-driven structure; and cinematic staging that makes use of a linear story.

What we need to examine again here is the sense of speed Modern Warfare realizes through these features. This sense of speed works by stimulating the user's desire to move quickly to the next campaign, and shuns feedback beyond the walkthrough. The pleasure the player gets from Modern Warfare is the fun of a shooter breaking through enemies who are clear objects of hostility. It is worth noting, though, that this fun rests on a thoroughly Western-centric viewpoint—saving the world by engaging in firefights on the soil of other countries sick with civil war, like the Middle East or Russia. This sensibility, which makes war consumable as entertainment in a clear good-versus-evil structure, is already political enough.[5]

The "aesthetic aura" Maffesoli pointed to is precisely something like the narrative clarity of the distinct good-versus-evil structure that Modern Warfare lays as the base of its sense of speed. The narrative clarity meant here does not refer only to the distinctness of conflict—that is, to the relations between the work's world and its characters. It means the clarity of choice and result, which is to say the clarity of cause and effect. In Modern Warfare, for instance, the rules of cover and fire that form the sense of rushing forward grant the player clarity in the state of failure. This clarity of cause and effect creates an aesthetic aura, even within a narrative worldview that handles complex character relations, through the form of result-following-from-action.

The camera system of 1979 Revolution: Black Friday*. When the character arrives at a spot that can be interacted with via the camera, a camera icon appears at the bottom. Among these, when there is an interaction that can call up material juxtaposed with historical sources, the camera focus turns green. (source: gameplay capture)*

1979 Revolution: Black Friday (hereafter 1979 Revolution) deserves to be singled out as a case that creates an aesthetic aura through the clarity of choice and result even within a complex worldview. The system of interacting through the camera the protagonist Reza carries around is worth noting as a modality that creates an "aesthetic aura."

1979 Revolution is an interactive movie, and even seeing every ending it has a short play time of a little over three hours. And whatever choice the player makes, 1979 Revolution judges the Iranian Revolution to be a tragedy. Since the past is recalled within a frame structure in which the protagonist is held and interrogated by the new regime, the emotion of the ending is already determined from the start. On top of that, by presenting, at particular points, material showing the actual Iran, the game takes on the form of the protagonist going around searching out what tragedy occurred in Iran.

The key here is the camera mechanism. A scene the player photographs within the game is set side by side with a historical photograph actually taken during the revolution. At the moment the fictional image overlaps the documentary image, the game declares that what it represented was not fiction but the real. This is a case of implementing the representation of the real as mechanism, and at the same time it brings about a powerful, repeated learning effect on the player: remember the Iranian Revolution as a tragedy.

Of course, the Iranian Revolution is not a history that can be judged only positively, as 1979 Revolution exhibits it, and its victims, too, deserve rightly to be mourned. But what matters critically is something else: that the manner of presenting material showing the actual Iran produces the effect of emphasizing the representation of the real. This effect does not stop at imprinting the Iranian Revolution on the player as a tragedy. It can expand into an aesthetic aura that makes one judge negatively the very macro-category of power that provided the cause of the revolution.

The formation of an aesthetic aura is ambivalent. It can, as Hall hoped, promote critical thought about a work and make oppositional reading possible. But at the same time, it can hold the power to make the player follow the aesthetic aura that rejects power as such, to the point of refusing even axiomatic common sense like order itself. When the aura takes form itself as its ground, the rejection of power that had been the object of critique can, before one knows it, slide into a blind loyalty to form. When the sentiment of negating power in general hardens into an aesthetic, it becomes another kind of enforcement.

Mixtape poster (source: Steam)

Mixtape, which has lately been stirring controversy across various game communities, makes us reflect on how precariously this aesthetic aura can be put to use. Mixtape, too, like 1979 Revolution, is an interactive movie composed in the manner of recalling the past, a work aiming nostalgia toward the 1990s as its point of appeal in play. As three friends move toward the last night of their high school days and trace back their memories, particular songs call up playable scenes of recollection.

What is peculiar is that Mixtape has almost no campaign that would be implemented as a fail state. In Mixtape the player fails at nothing and branches to no result. This can become the seed of a criticism that the game did not implement even the minimum requirement of choice it ought to provide the player—for the possibility of failure is the very device that grants meaning to the player's action. If you cannot fail, there is no success either; and if the result does not diverge, there is no choice.[6] Mixtape's interaction is functional interaction as texture, existing for emotion rather than for result.

But we ought to retrace how the choice by which Mixtape went to such lengths to remove the domain of choice could lead to a global commercial hit. What Mixtape gained by not implementing the player's choice is two things. One is a solid system in which the player cannot set the direction of consumption; the other is an aesthetic volatility in which no meaning beyond a single playthrough can be found. That is: even though it can reap no meaning beyond a kind of instant simulation, discarded once played, the chance of being chosen by consumers rises, rather, if it presents a clear direction of appeal. What Mixtape gained in exchange for erasing the options is a package of smooth emotion that arrives identically for everyone.

Here we need to look back, with suspicion, at what the language of achievement—like "sales figures"—is producing. Perhaps the "aesthetic aura" and the propaganda that Mixtape aims for are themselves precisely a use-and-throw-away consumerism. If Modern Warfare secured a minimum of the real through narrative clarity, and 1979 Revolution through its judgment of power, then Mixtape's aura is directed at no message at all, but at the form of consumption itself.

In this way the aesthetic aura gradually empties out content and leaves only form. The process that runs from the clarity of hostility that war brings, through the pastiche that incites the condemnation of power, and finally to the texture of a nostalgia that asserts nothing, is also the process by which the aura is released from message and becomes form itself.

Solid Virtuality and Liquid Reality

The shared feature of these three works worth attending to here is that the relations of their narratives are fixed. Choice and result were forced to align, the room for divergence was closed, and the story is hard and set.

Zygmunt Bauman once pointed to liquidity as the feature of the modern age. What Bauman regarded as the object of liquidity was nothing other than identity and meaning. Identity is no longer something given but a task each person must endlessly bear and renew, and that task is never completed. When in consumer society even identity becomes a commodity to be bought and discarded, people, unable to stay long anywhere, endlessly flow away.

Why, then, in an age of liquidity, do we go out of our way to consume fixed narratives? Perhaps, within the virtuality of the aesthetic aura, we are migrating to a solidified virtuality, fleeing the liquid reality where identity, endlessly flowing away, can find no place to set its foot. The place where choice has vanished, the world where the result is predetermined and has hardened stiff, may look rather like a refuge to those worn out by a reality with nothing firm to grip. Herein lies the reason the 1990s that Mixtape revives appeals so powerfully. It is a nostalgia for what was never experienced, presenting a past one cannot return to as if it were a hometown that could be fully restored—a gesture that thrusts out a hardened past against a present that flows away.[7]

But a last question remains. Can solidified virtuality truly save an identity that endlessly flows away? Or is it no more than a momentary refuge, one more use-and-throw-away instant? If, just as Benjamin's aura withered amid reproduction, this solid virtuality leaning on the aura of form also evaporates with a single act of consumption, then where we have arrived may not be a refuge but another name for an ever-smoother liquidity.

References

Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (New York: Free Press, 1997).

Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).

Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

Roger Stahl, Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2010).

Jesper Juul, The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).

Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).