ESSAY: Douglas Edric Stanley's "Exhausting Gameplay" (2012)
"The need for death in gaming is multifaceted. The cynical argument, largely based on the arcade experience, might describe death in gaming as an economical equation: in order to make more money, games needed to provoke death as quickly as possible in order to get to the next “insert coin”. But death in gaming has been with us practically since the beginning, or at least since 1962′s Space War, long before the video game arcade phenomenon became an economic reality.LINK:
A less cynical, more narratological reading of eschatology and gaming might look at death as a question of motivation: by introducing death into the game, a certain internal dynamic is created, which in turn heightens the gameplay and structures the temporal form of the game itself. Given that the player will eventually die (from inaction, from inattention, from error, etc), the goal of the game becomes that of survival. The “game over” screen provides some sort of closure to the game and proposes — albeit post facto — a redefinition of the initiating act of the game: “I want to play” has now been translated within the gameworld into “I want to live”.
A third approach would be to look at the material substrate of gaming itself: video games are played on machines and machines, eventually, break down. To quote Felix Guattari: “Machines are instilled with a desire for abolition. The emergence of the machine is accompanied by failures, catastrophes, and death which haunts it. La machine est travaillé par un désir d’abolition. Son émergence est doublée par la panne, la catastrophe, la mort qui la menace.” Chaosmose, Éditions Galilée, 1992, p.58. From this perspective, we could see the figure of death in gaming as an extension of this fatal impulse of the machine. The figure of death would be an attempt at sublimating the machine’s death drive into a poetic form — a form upon which a game world might be built."
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti