From NES-4021 to moSMB3.wmv: Speedrunning the Serial Interface
By Patrick LeMieux
Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture
Although play is irreducible, games repeat. Beyond the serial repetition that characterizes industrial forms of mechanical reproduction like newspapers, comics, novels, and films, in the case of videogames the microtemporal speed of serial interfaces and massive scale of serial distribution operate both below and above the horizon of conscious experience. As such, the serial operations of videogames structure, enclose, and ultimately alienate the technical processes of play from the conscious knowledge of the player. In their essay, “Digital Seriality: On the Serial Aesthetics and Practice of Digital Games,” Shane Denson and Andreas Jahn-Sudmann characterize the diachronic sequencing of serial interfaces and synchronic consumption of videogames as “digital seriality.” This essay explores digital seriality through the history and practice of tool-assisted speedrunning, a form of metagaming that stages an intervention at the level of serial interfacing and subsequently disrupts the collective serialization of videogames as a mass medium. From the operations of the NES-4021, a parallel-to-serial shift register that governs controller input in Nintendo Entertainment System, to the history of moSMB.wmv, an early speedrunning video by Morimoto that went viral in 2003, tool-assisted speedruns transform twitch-based platform games into turn-based puzzles and single player experiences into massively multiplayer online games by playing the serial interface.
Histories of the Future
by Patrick LeMieux
Published in Electronic Book Review
A small Java applet, running at a hundred frames per second, has been continually rendering all possible combinations of black and white cells within a 32 by 32 pixel grid since January 27, 1997. Inspired by the dimension and format of Susan Kare’s now-ubiquitous Macintosh icons, John Simon Jr.’s Every Icon (1997) attempts to exhaust the potential of this tiny, two-tone canvas one square at a time. After flickering faster than the eye could see for what seemed an eternity, the first cell of the second row turned black on June 8, 1998, well over a year after being launched. Simon’s software will take more than 5.85 billion years to reach the third line—sometime in a future beyond the death of the sun. Instead of enumerating every element of a 32 by 32 grid, Every Icon Editor (2014) is an interactive Java applet that projects the date of any icon drawn by Simon's applet. Although we can speculate on the nature of digital inscription, the microtemporal speed and recombinatorial potential of electronic literature escape the register of human experience and trouble the very concept of time. A modest piece of software with profound philosophical ramifications, Every Icon Editor proves that we can never know the durational quality of digital media, even as these media increasingly constitute our experience.
Speculation: Financial Games and Derivative Worlding in a Transmedia Era
By N. Katherine Hayles, Patrick Jagoda, and Patrick LeMieux
Published in Critical Inquiry
Alongside computer games and video games, a more experimental ludic form emerged in the early years of the twenty-first century: alternate reality games (ARGs). This essay explores ARGs in relation to digital media and finance capital through the case study of Speculation, a game that we directed and cocreated with students at the University of Chicago and Duke University throughout 2012. From cryptographic puzzles and online simulations to live performances and geocached dead drops, Speculation incorporates a wide range of media to imagine a transmedia world based on the culture of Wall Street investment banks and the context of the 2008 global economic collapse. Because gamification (a design strategy that uses motivation-oriented game components to promote consumption, labor, and education) and convergence culture (the flow of content across multiple media platforms) are already core components of contemporary capitalism, Speculation’s ARG format offers a platform for thinking within and through our contemporary information economy. The game appropriated the strategies and logics of capital in a medium already caught up in the contradictions of neoliberalism and explored the relationship between contemporary finance and convergence culture through a process that we call “derivative worlding.” This term entangles the futures projected by financial derivatives with the derivative nature of collaborative storytelling inherent to the ARG form. Building on practice-based research methodologies, Speculation blurs conventional divisions between creators and consumers, producers and players, artists and researchers. In the process of discovering, decoding, remixing, and remaking Speculation, thousands of players transformed the game into a collaborative platform for speculating on the future of finance capital.
Dwarven Epitaphs: Procedural Histories in Dwarf Fortress
by Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux
Published as a chapter in Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era edited by N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman
Dwarf Fortress, a freeware computer game in constant development since 2006 by Tarn and Zach Adams of Bay 12 Games, has become the progenitor of a new genre of videogames which employ the enhanced processing power of home computers to push not pixels, but processes. Given that failure is the rule, not the exception and that such a minimal graphical output belies complex algorithmic operations, the players have turned towards narration as a means of sharing their experience with other players. The textual artifacts produced in response to the game could be called dwarven epitaphs, ludic obituaries created to memorialize the death of play. Dwarf Fortress transforms from a world generator into a story generator. In this book chapter, we explore the relationship between the graphically-minimal textual architecture and the computational processes that define the game. The ASCII interface mediates the feedback between human player and computational processes. In Dwarf Fortress, as well as other examples of procedurally-generated worlds such as Eskil Steenberg’s Love (2009) and Markus Persson’s Minecraft (2010), play manifests as storytelling. By creating unwinnable conditions and a merciless virtual environment of geological transformation, Dwarf Fortress builds a game around failure. Nothing is permanent as the inhospitable wilderness of the digital landscape will always destroy the player’s fleeting successes. The players, however, have the satisfaction of taking away the battle stories surrounding their experiences.
Stretched Skulls: Anamorphic Games and the Memento Mortem Mortis
By Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux
Published in Digital Humanities Quarterly
From Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors to Robert Lazzarini’s skulls, anamorphic artworks explore the tension between mathematical models of vision and an embodied experience of space. After reviewing the ways in which anamorphosis has been deployed as a philosophical tool for investigating digital media in terms of human phenomenology, specifically through the criticism of Espen Aarseth and Mark Hansen, this paper analyzes how contemporary videogames like Sony’s Echochrome series, levelHead by Julian Oliver, and Mark ten Bosch’s forthcoming Miegakure technically, aesthetically, and conceptually explore anamorphic techniques. While The Ambassadors is famous for its anamorphically skewed skull, a classic memento mori, we propose that the anamorphic effects of videogames can be more accurately described as a memento mortem mortis: not reminders of human mortality, but of a nonhuman the death of death. By foregrounding the impossibility of ever fully resolving the human experience of computational space, the memento mortem mortis in these "anamorphic games" gestures toward experiential domains altogether indifferent to human phenomenology to create allegories of the beyond.
Hundred Thousand Billion Fingers: Seriality and Critical Game Practices
By Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux
Published in Leonardo Electronic Almanac
The title of this essay borrows from Raymond Queneau’s iconic Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, a sonnet generator capable of producing 10^14 unique texts – a quantity that no one reader (or even a million readers) could parse in a lifetime. While Hundred Thousand Billion Poems gestures towards the impossibility of ever accessing the totality of its many reading paths, computer games such as Super Mario Bros. limit the player to one isolated, incomplete perspective among an enormous (but finite) set of possible playthroughs. Despite this single-player experience, collective patterns of play emerge from the repetitive, procedural, and discrete elements that drive computational media. Following Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of seriality framed in terms of contemporary theories of network culture, this essay examines two categories of metagames that play the serial logics intrinsic to computational media. Metagames are games about games and the examples in this essay are built inside, outside, or alongside Super Mario Bros., inscribing twenty-five years of procedural play. From remakes of ROM hacks to speedruns of sequencers, this eclectic collection of player-created modifications documents an alternative history of computer games defined not by the production of software but by play. Whether reading Queneau’s book or playing computer games, the constraints of the poem or program produce a range of repetitions. Rather than subjecting the player to the mechanisms of control as defined by the rules of the game, the techniques documented in this essay successfully metagame their own serial conditions to model the movements of a hundred thousand billion fingers.
Annotating Adventure: Critical Code Studies Conference - Week Three Introduction
By Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux
published in Electronic Book Review
In the third week of the Critical Code Studies Working Group in 2010, Dennis Jerz led led the group on an expedition to map the original source code of Will Crowther's inaugural interactive fiction, Colossal Cave Adventure. The group attempted to collaboratively annotate Crowther’s original source code in conjunction with a discussion that, following the ethos of Critical Code Studies, highlighted extrafunctional content and offered historical, political, aesthetic, technical, and anecdotal observations.
Open House: Interaction as Critical Reflection
By Jack Stenner and Patrick LeMieux
Published in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition, 2011
This paper describes Open House, a networked art installation by Jack Stenner and Patrick LeMieux that allows visitors to telematically squat in a Florida home undergoing foreclosure after the U.S. housing collapse. Virtual markets transformed this otherwise livable property into a ghost house. Prior to the collapse, the movements of global capital seemed like a distant reality to most homeowners, but in the end it was imaginary systems of value, not bricks and mortar, that fell apart. Through computer interaction that integrates computational processes, mechanical relays, and human interactions, Open House implicates the tendency to separate virtual and physical activity, an enabling mechanism and proximate cause for the current U.S. economic crisis.
Eccentric Spaces and Filmic Traces: Portals in Aperture Science and NYC
By Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux
Published in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference, 2009
This paper examines the way in which time and space are figured within a new genre of what we are calling "eccentric games" and a site-specific video sharing application called Trover by Dan Provost. Taking Valve's Portal as our case study, a chiasmatic relationship emerges between these different modes of eccentric media. In order to access eccentric space the video games we examine appropriate the logic of film whereas Provost's video application Trover is informed by an eccentric logic of games.
Game-Space: Unfolding Experiments in Subjectivity
By Jack Stenner and Patrick LeMieux
Published in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference, 2009
Using computer vision techniques and game engine technology, the interactive installation, Game-Space, explores subjectivity in mediated environments. The appear discusses the development of this work and its current conception as a machine for the experimental production of a new subjectivity in the form of a mechanic hybrid.
Pipe Bomb: Exploding Code in the Work of Jodi and René Magritte
runner-up for the Bruns Graduate Essay Prize presented by N. Katherine Hayles and judged by Eugene Thacker
This paper begins by examining some examples of visual works by both artists and theorists working through René Magritte. Ending the survey with Michel Foucault's brief work of art criticism, This is Not a Pipe (1971), this essay will attempt to carve out an interpretive zone in which to better understand the semiotic play at work between different orders of textuality in digital media production, specifically wwwwwwwww.jodi.org.
wwwwwwwww.jodi.org is a frequently discussed digital media artwork by Joan Heemskirk and Dirk Paysmens (collectively known as Jodi) in which meaning is produced specifically through the dynamic interplay between code and output. A large body of new media scholars have adopted a similar critical framework for reading Jodi's website. This essay picks up where Alan Sondheim, Peter Lunenfeld, John Cayley, McKenzie Wark, Alan Liu, and Chris Funkhouser each end his criticism of Jodi. Instead of reading narrative or ironic causality between code and output, I perform a kind of Foucauldian reading which emphasizes the disconnect between these two orders. Rather than reading various windows of a web browser sequentially in order to construct narrative frames, the linguistic signs and plastic elements collapse into simultaneous and, more importantly, discontinuous arrays.
Critical Expression
Set in contrast to traditional argumentation, Critical Expression suggests a third option within typical debate structure. Kant's Third Critique positions aesthetics between institutions of knowledge (science) and institutions of belief (faith.) Here I am searching for this aesthetic mode of knowing. The addition of a third voice hopes to lubricate abstract argument through practice and resist typical impasse between incompatible apparatuses.
However, the goal of the experiment is not to win or solve debate, but rather, to find energy &mdash an active force which motivates, propels one toward action. The experience of conatus is a pathway into the future. It is an active joy, an opening up or widening, which motivates action.
Using ethics, screenwriting, and visual linguistics to analyze a US public policy, a Hollywood film, and the English Discipline, the first part of Critical Expression, entitled My Guide, works to locate personal conatus through the parallelism invoked by Gregory Ulmer's CATTt Generator. The second part, entitled My Poem, further extrudes conatus from that specified location.
The Logic of Sensuality
This work of electronic writing attempts a close reading technique which promotes ethical viewership in response to Anna Kell's paintings. Working through both Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze's ethics, I map a pattern from Marcel Duchamp to Kell and produce an artwork (this essay) emblematic of my subject position.