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<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nIn History, Take Three: How Video Game Replay Alters Your Perception of Time<\/a>, we set out to explore the paradox of “historical replayability” in games. If games can be replayed at will, how does this affect, or alter, our perception of historical time? For example, if play time<\/em> is experienced in the forward-looking “present tense”, how does this play-time-bias intermingle with open-ended historical narratives in games? And if history marks the irreversible<\/em> course of human actions and outcomes in time and across time, what insight (or gratification) can be obtained through the replay of historical scenarios, given the limited set of outcomes offered by each game title, and game genre?<\/p>\n\n\n\n These question led us down the winding roads of historical representation in games, from the standpoint of players engaging with historical narratives. With the help of Adam Chapman and Jesper Juul, we discovered that time in video games – or temporality<\/em>, “the experience of time” – took on a layered aspect in general (player time and game narrative), with additional nuances in temporal structure conditioned by different games genres. Real-time action games, for example, always present narrative from the standpoint of time-of-action, the past experienced as a living present. At the other end of the spectrum, turn-based strategy games give players control over the game clock, as they adopt the posture of a historian looking at a historical panorama from a distance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If game genres open up different possibilities for narrative design, can video games also limit historical expression? To our original point: what becomes of time and temporality when we come under the thrall of simulation media?<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the first chapter of his book Philosophie des jeux video<\/a><\/em>, technoculture theorist and historian Mathieu Triclot tries to debug the pleasures that players derive from Doom<\/em>-like first-person shooters. From an outsider’s perspective, these games come across as a virtual theme-park of gratuitous violence. Attentive onlookers will notice, however, that the F5 \/ F9 keys, “quick save ” and “quick load “, are regularly activated by players engaged in prolonged gaming sessions; thanks to these controls, players who fail a sequence can attempt to replay from the chosen save point. As Triclot points out – and herein lies the peculiarity of the video games – this design feature allows players to replay a game sequence to their satisfaction. In this way, the skill of shooting married to the spectacle of violence are boosted by the even headier desire of game mastery. Thus, the fantasy of temporal control, which operates here powerfully, becomes itself a source of morbid pleasure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It seems significant that this encapsulation of replayability can be found in a book that delves into the cultural history of computer technology and the phenomenology of play<\/em>. Replayability, in fact, casts a long shadow across \u201cplayability\u201d itself; one presupposes the other – a game that cannot be replayed loses its identity as a game and begins to resemble the playful improvisation theorized by Roger Caillois in Les jeux et les hommes<\/em><\/a>. The replayability of games also raises an old philosophical conundrum – how can \u201csameness\u201d produce difference? And in the case of video games: does replayability not imprison \u201cdifference\u201d in the cage of the identical – abstract time<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the critical literature on replayability, I have found philosophical perspectives to be curiously absent. The question of replayability is generally approached from the standpoint of game design<\/strong> – tricks or techniques to improve the replayability of a game \u2013 or, marketing <\/strong>– how replayability adds value to a game product \u2013 or even, psychology <\/strong>\u2013 what compels players to replay a match or a game sequence, or return to a game after a hiatus?<\/p>\n\n\n\n One notable exception: a dissertation that examines replayability with reference to Nietzschean philosophy, by Benjamin Lavigne from the University of Lorraine<\/a>. As Lavigne points out, advancement in a video game is achieved, at gameplay-level, by incremental mastery of the main gameplay loop, that the player must overcome in order to meet all the core challenges that comprise a game. From a Nietzschean perspective, this contrived challenging of players by the designers, by correctly dosing frustration and pleasure levels, allows for the player\u2019s will to power <\/em>to be expressed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Admittedly, this is a fantasy \u201cwill to power\u201d, since it is staged within a cybernetic process of automation. To take up Mathieu Tricot\u2019s already-cited example: players obsessed by their performance, enjoying the effects of video game power fantasies, are in reality in the tow of algorithmic logics which they internalize in their will-to-mastery. Douglas Hoare also analyzed this form of pleasurable self-dispossession in his book Le jeu vid\u00e9o, ou l\u2019ali\u00e9nation heureuse<\/a><\/em>. To put it in Nietzschean terms: the gamer is the \u201clast man\u201d<\/a> \u2013 the ultimate end-product of modern comfort – playing out his\/her\/their \u00dcbermensch<\/a> fantasies on the screen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thus, replayability – conveniently assumed in video games – allows players to simulate the experience of Eternal recurrence<\/a>, though emptied of its original meaning. Under the spell of replayability, Nietzsche’s parable suffers an ironic twist: a philosophy that sought to lift the spirit by confronting one\u2019s self to<\/em> temporality (“lead your life so that you can wish it to repeat itself eternally” ) dissolves into the \u201cidentical difference\u201d of the abstract time loop, recurring eternally around virtual<\/em> self-mastery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The seductive power of history-themed video games, I insist, rests in large part on the premise of \u201c\u200b\u200breliving history\u201d in light of <\/em>this technological promise of time mastery, reduced to the manipulable parameters of the gameplay loop. To answer the question “why do players replay history”, the three epistemological stances common to history-themed games (as theorized by Adam Chapman in his book Digital Games as History<\/a><\/em>) can then help explain how game genres compel players to “rehash” history with different goals in mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The reconstructionist approach<\/strong> in historical video games provides players with an impression of “presence” in a simulated historical settings. Why replay? To take up again a game sequence after failure, improve one\u2019s performance, revisit a scenario, return to an atmosphere, etc. And what are the effects of repetition on the player? Arguably, the development of the analytical reflex to master a game; further, the critical assessment of the construction of the scenario\/game, by virtue of familiarization… <\/p>\n\n\n\n The \u201cconstructivist\u201d ethic<\/strong> proposes simulation as a gateway to counterfactual historical experiments. This epistemology rests on setting up game frameworks for understanding historical conflict, and transhistorical development. Why replay? To deepen one\u2019s knowledge of a game, or respond to the call of “making history” set by a game\u2019s marketing, as the privileged actor\/interpreter of the played-out scenario. Better, to modify the code of the game so that it better fits with actual historical details\/scenarios. What are the effects of repetition on the player? Mastery of the game by successive attempts at game scenarios; generating hypotheses on historical causality, etc. Or again, take the leap from being player-historian to developer-historian, aka. modding<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, the \u201cdeconstructionist\u201d approach<\/strong> beckons us to \u201cplay with the code(s) of history\u201d, by pointing to the constructed nature of historical discourse. This approach relies on the use of scriptwriting techniques, admixture of improbable genres, ironic anachronisms, etc. and other rhetorical devices that highlight the artifices of historical narration. Why replay? Quite simply, it is through the act of replay that the constructed aspect of a narration comes to our awareness, much like analyzing a book or film by reviewing them. Moreover, this approach encourages semiotic play with signifiers, as for example with the practice of quasi-historical modding. What are the effects of repetition on the player? Positively, the deconstructionist approach empowers the player by giving him\/her\/them an insider’s perspective on historiography. Negatively, it \u201cvirtualizes history\u201d by reducing past lived experience to semiotic codes or conventions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a way, we could say that replayability, in its essence, carries with it the posture of deconstruction, because it focuses the player’s attention on the rhetorical codes of video game culture, how stories and genres \u201cwork\u201d with audiences; as mentioned, the overall effect is a push toward virtual history, where referenced historical materiality is reduced to semiotic code – or computer code, in our case!<\/p>\n\n\n\n In closing, I would like to summarize three structural tendencies<\/strong> that bring concrete temporal relations to a vanishing point in video games, giving rise to abstract, automated time structures:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Entertain us they may, video games also operate a reduction of historical narrative to programmable outcomes. And video game replay will ultimately force machine time down your throat. We have argued above that the fundamental tension that shapes player expectations toward historical narratives in games is the player’s confrontation with the cybernetic process, the interplay between the concrete time of the body and the abstract time of the machine. Which strategies we should devise to ground our historical thinking and build bridges between our ancestors’ lived experience and our own, I leave you, dear readers, to explore – whether such strategies can be imagined inside or outside the \u201cmagic circle\u201d of games and the iron fist of algorithmic logic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Replayability: Will to Power or Last Man Sitting?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nNo Escape from Abstract Time<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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