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TWITCH PLAYS POKEMON/MARI/O/DREEPS
TWITCH PLAYS POKEMON. By Anonymous. Based on the Videogame Pokemon Red by Satoshi Tajiri. Python scripts bridging web input to VisualBoyAdvance, emulating Game Boy. February 2014.
MARI/O. By Seth Bling. Based on the Videogame Super Mario World by Takashi Tezuka and Shigeru Miyamoto. Lua script for BizHawk, emulating Super Nintendo Entertainment System. June 2015.
DREEPS. By Hisanori Hiraoka. iOS. January 2015.
If performance works with agency, then games are the genre of performance that best highlight the ostentatious display of such agency. In particular, video games and professional spectator sports seemingly transport players and viewers into bodies perfectly oriented toward achieving pointless, artificial goals that replace unattainable, authentic ones. This certainly describes one register of gameplay, and one that is worth a lot of money-as I am writing this, The Witcher 3, starring a be-stubbled, poisoned-sword-wielding loner, just moved 4 million copies in under a month-but it is far from the only mode in which games can function and even prosper. Along with the rest of the past halfcentury's explosion of diversity in game forms and styles, there have also been an enormous variety of experiments in modes of agency. This review highlights a few popular examples from the past couple of years that present extreme points on one spectrum of methods for mapping players to digital agents.
The traditional model of idealized protagonist identification in old media finds its video game correlate in a single player mapped to a single agent. If this stands at the midpoint on the continuum of agent/player relationships, then two extreme points would be: as many players as possible mapped to a single agent, and no players mapped to a single agent. Both of these extreme positions have popular exemplars from the last two years, and the most famous of these exemplars are "hacks"-modifications of existing games intended specifically to press them into other modes of agency.
Both of these positions act as synecdoches for categories of postindustrial labor. The second position names authentic automatism: labor replaced by mechanical effort; the first names counterfeit automatism: intensified labor that serves to hide itself and feign automatism. This is the labor involved in "sharing economy" services like Uber, which collapse human effort down to unified interfaces. Its historical...