Artifact Functionality and the Logic of Trash in Videogames

June 26, 2023 Posted by Webmaster under Volume 32, Number 2, January 2022

Erick Verran (bio)

Abstract

This article works out a logic for trash in videogames through its consideration of the ludic artifact. Defining videogame trash as that which graphically outlives the execution of its ludic function, the essay distinguishes trash from objects that signify as real-world refuse, like Mario Kart’s banana peels, and the merely decorative. It also addresses the correlation between technical capability and a graphic verisimilitude that generates trashscapes. Examining videogames from Super Mario Bros. to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, this article’s philosophical, technical, and art-historical approach departs from narratology and garbage studies to offer a prolegomenon for further inquiry.

Introduction

Historically, the lack of trash in videogames has been a symptom of limited graphical horsepower, since it becomes computationally costly to render dropped weaponry, discarded refuse, or the corpses of defeated enemies indefinitely. Andrew Reinhard says as much in a discussion of World of Warcraft (Blizzard North, 2004), noting that the servers which host its many game-world instances “would be overwhelmed with data, remembering where to place every discarded item from every player within the world” (156). But design considerations dictate that an environment, however lugubrious or hostile in its outward affect, ought to be mechanically devoted to the player; that is, relatively tolerant of exploration and the confrontation of threats. If not merely constitutive of local color and atmosphere, the artifactual—that which is ontologically as well as strategically apart in a videogame and can be recognized as such—tends to take the form of obtainables or obstacles, monsters of course being a kind of hurdle varying in their degree of mobility.

Because my interest is videogames, I gladly leave to new-media scholars the discussion of excess within hypertext, file-management systems, and the emergent cross-pollination of digital culture with archeology and discard studies. Reinhard considers Garbology, inaugurated by William Rathje and Cullen Murphy’s Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage, for its applicability to game studies in his seminal Archaeogaming: An Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games, while Daniel Vella’s Kant-centered approach in “No Mastery Without Mystery: Dark Souls and the Ludic Sublime” takes umbrage with any methodology that devotes itself exclusively to the presentational, or seemingly noumenal, aspect of videogames. Against the possibility of encountering digital things-in-themselves, Vella asks us to set aside critical space for an aesthetics-forward inquiry keyed to feelings, writing that other methodologies “obscure the phenomenological and hermeneutical processes by which the game becomes available to the player as an object of thought.” Despite having no knowledge of in-game trash from the Kantian point of view—some inaccessible Dinglichkeit of trash—I am fascinated by just what two- and three-dimensional videogame objects afford, as well as by the ontic facts of their immediate use and longer-term disuse, depending on the underlying mechanics.

Going ahead, I’d like to lash Reinhard and Vella’s insights, respectively the basic objectness of videogames and contextualization of those objects, or artifacts, within a virtual environment, to this discourse as scholarly ballast. In order to better understand objects that exist as discrete facts of a game’s programming—as opposed to those induced through extra-ludic shenanigans, for which category Pokémon’s (Game Freak, 1996) legendary MissingNo. might qualify—I also tease out the apparent relationship between the phenomenal and what might be thought of as merely constitutive of trash per se. Reinhard uses the portmanteau “gamifact” (150) to describe an instantly occurring glitch (or bug, its subset), frequently born of a non-player character’s faulty coding in conflict with the programmed demands of its environment, while the practice of abusing a videogame’s implicit and explicit rules in order to generate interesting errors “gamejacking” (154) in Reinhard’s somewhat eccentric jargon.1 Controllers have their own uselessness, insofar as shoddy coupling between input and output can result in undesirable feedback. For most gamers this is temporary, a matter of the proverbial learning curve (Schmalzer). Gamepads invariably assume that the player is able-bodied in the normative sense; Madison Schmalzer, however, identifies a gray area between the human operator’s button mashes and their avatar’s response, referred to as “jank.” Schmalzer’s “Janky Controls and Embodied Play: Disrupting the Cybernetic Gameplay Circuit” dismantles the ideological belief that this interfacial equation stands for a perfectly noiseless affair. What follows, at least in terms of the hand-on-joystick aspect of manipulating images fixed in liquid crystal, is the unsettling fact that some irreducible haptic extra, “a glitch in the flow of information” (ibid.) has plagued videogames since their experimental birth. Is the lesson then to embrace what is insoluble about trash, to drag it into the open?

Toward an Ontology of Artifactual Trash

In “What Digital Trash Dumped in Games Tells Us about the Players,” Douglas Heaven quotes Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger, New York-based artists who bought a vacant lot in Second Life (Linden Lab, 2003) and asked their fellow lifers to jettison whatever they felt comfortable parting with:

Suddenly the dump took on a new light. “It was hard to see things disappear; it was like living with daily loss,” says Lamprecht. Some objects were intricate, things people had put care into making. Many were no more than a few months old. “When is a digital object ready to die?” she asks.

Heaven likewise notes that ARK: Survival Evolved (Studio Wildcard, 2017), “an online game in which players form tribes, build forts and ride dinosaurs” has struggled with garbage: “the clutter had become unbearable. The game’s world was filling up with structures that players had made and then abandoned. It took up territory that the remaining players wanted to use, and was also an eyesore.” Gone Home (The Fullbright Company, 2013), an early success for the story-based exploration subgenre of adventure games whose star rose sharply over the 2010s, is also discussed alongside Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (The Chinese Room, 2015), which focuses Christian eschatology on the last human being in Oregon. In the latter, one is tasked with investigating the lives of community members by way of the personal effects they left behind en route to the hereafter. “But,” Heaven qualifies, “Lamprecht and Moderegger were interested in what players leave behind – not objects that have been planted by game developers.” I, too, am interested in what is lost to player activity, just not to the exclusion of design quirks and other aberrant miscellany. Reinhard latches onto the glitch as a videogame’s chief artifact, an often temporary anomaly that should be documented with care when found:

Everything else within the game is a deliberate creation of one or more game developers, which taken as a whole could be considered landscape archaeology as described above. But glitches are true intrusions into game-space, and as such they can be classed as “significant finds.”(152)

Reinhard’s identification of important artifacts with that which slips through developers’ fingers necessarily forecloses on player subjectivity, finely discriminant and primed as it is on a reflexive level to engage what seems useful and dismiss everything else; the idea of programmers as demiurgic teams patching holes in complicated ships is another matter. But this is merely a disciplinary shift, from a scientist’s archaeo-historic praxis to the domain of ontological aesthetics. In my attempt to work out a theory specific to videogame-situated trash, I would cast a wider net for those graphical dregs non-player characters couldn’t take with them, or what remains when the fun has gone out of a thing.

Jared Hansen’s “An Abundance of Fruit Trees: A Garbology of the Artifacts in Animal Crossing: New Leaf” (included in the Animal Crossing-themed special issue brought out by Loading in 2020) presents the first study analyzing a videogame through the garbological lens while carrying over archeology’s survey method for contextualizing a site. Hansen visited ten randomly selected towns in the (then) latest Animal Crossing (Nintendo, 2012) using the game’s transporting Dream Suite feature.2 Sizing up players’ discardments, Hansen ultimately lumps these in-game objects into five categories: Fruit, Gyroid (vaguely humanoid figurines based on historic Japanese grave markers), Furniture, Clothing & Accessories, and Other, which includes six beehives and a ruby (28). Moreover, the author notes at the outset that said artifacts were “coded based upon their iconography (what their visual signifiers were) as well as their semiotic connotations (what they symbolized or represented)” (27), while for instance a fruit basket’s eligibility as trash is judged only according to location. While guessing at its history and microeconomic implications follows, shouldn’t every place be equally storage-appropriate if a player thought of themself as the omnipotent manager of their town? Leaving a veritable orchard of pears outside the train station (29) might represent some organizing function for the player, to the effect that they keep better track of items outdoors than shut in a house. Reinhard is doing the diligent anthropologist thing for ageless relics left in timeless spaces, as a paleoanthropologist might get forensic on bones unearthed in a mountain grotto, while by the conclusion of his oneiric tour Hansen has a number of inferences to share regarding three of the towns’ goings-on but less in the way of a philosophy.

My ambition, by contrast, is to sketch a prolegomenon of sorts by sampling a myriad of games anecdotally rather than cataloging a lot of garbage qua text. Intuitively, trash would seem exclusive to three-dimensional role-playing games; for example, in the Elder Scrolls franchise and massively multiplayer online games, where flora and free-roaming fauna have run riot in the last decade. At least initially, we’d be hard pressed to identify any play-based residua in a nineties platformer title like Sonic the Hedgehog (Sega, 1991), for that scattering of golden rings, released upon Sonic colliding against the steel spikes, ultimately proves ephemeral. But then ignoring the various upgrade monitors—sped past for a faster completion time, as a self-imposed handicap, or out of sheer neglect—might just count. A perhaps classic, early form of artifactual trash is found, if imperfectly so, in Super Mario World (Nintendo, 1990). Jumped-on Koopa Troopas leave behind their shells, which indeed perseverate in the world but then offer a certain amount of interactivity. The invalidating drawback here is that the Koopa shell is fully intended within the loop of Super Mario World’s gameplay to remain player-adjacent, being now available as a graspable projectile, however much an empty turtle’s shell signifies as sloughed off, like the chuckable banana peels of Mario Kart or Counter-Strike’s sprays, the (often irreverent) symbols and custom images with which players tag a map’s walls. Going forward, my attempt will be to reinforce this distinction between the readily useful and the uselessly present,3 to the extent that what a game’s developer intends to be investigated and put to some environment-directed use by player (recycled, almost) can foreground undesigned offshoots that result from this loop.

A Phenomenal State of Visual Excess

Here it is convenient, if no longer all that fashionable, to apply the concept of “hauntology”— developed by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx (1993) and later popularized by Mark Fisher—to any burgeoning theory that would have for its cynosure the ontology of trash in videogames. To adapt Colin Davis’s gloss, that which simultaneously adheres to the confines of a (digital) space and balks at its material laws “[replaces] the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive” (373). Once a treasure chest’s single ludic gimmick is triggered, a permanent rigor mortis sets in. From precisely that moment, the start of a familiar animation that tells us a plundered chest shall no longer engage with us, is it become trash, just as a raiding party holds out for the merest indication of a dungeon boss’s defeat before congratulating themselves rather than waiting around to see if the boss really has died. Like the difference in first-person shooters between a terrorist’s three-dimensional body and the invisible hit boxes, the “ludic capacity” of any monster or clickable object never matches its accompanying presentation exactly. A non-player character’s melodramatic collapse thus stands for the technical fact of its cessation in advance of the story.

Once collected and exhibited by the Smithsonian, a videogame per se—the physical cartridge containing its source code, gameplay rendered through sound and graphics, or combinations thereof—goes on to be understood in Raiford Guins’s terms as an object’s “afterlife” and is in turn recontextualized (A. R. Bailey, 11). Whether anticipated by the game’s programmers or not, artifactual trash is by contrast that which eventually becomes estranged to itself within the diegesis of the gameworld, either through its spatio-temporal perdurance or queasy abundance, the slain mob duplicated beyond some subjective threshold for graphical saturation. Indeed, much that may be thought of as categorically diffuse in a videogame is often only ever apparently so, the result of whipping in-game artifacts into a visual frenzy. A videogame may be unstable by design, with the line between gameplay and chaos paradoxically blurred. A bit of postgame content in Diablo II (Blizzard North, 2000), known colloquially as the “Secret Cow Level,” wherein hordes of upright cows descend upon the player with murderous fury, is a relatively famous example of a storyworld overawing itself; as the duplicate cows mass together, the discrete logic of that artifact is all but lost in a super-animation of mooing skirmish, despite retaining its interactivity. Conversely, “trashy” styles of play could describe a mode of enjoying a videogame against the grain of its coding, perhaps by attempting to hijack a scripted procedure (e.g., infinite duplication of a unique, single-use item), as in the viral case of dynamite exploding in Minecraft (Mojang, 2011) where the blast’s simulation crashes players’ computers.4

A game’s operator plays a crucial role in the propagation of trash-esque contingencies. In Rollercoaster Tycoon (Chris Sawyer Productions, 1999), for instance, incoming fairgoers might be funneled toward an unexitable square pit on purpose. Unable to die, this growing multitude of theme park visitors gradually solidifies into a buzzing black hole of redundant, overlapping activity. The purest trash, to risk an oxymoron, is that which resists absorption back into RAM’s ether. Released from whatever ludic function it had, trash lives on in a manner akin to undeath after having been iterated into meaningful, operant being. These neutralized artifacts, if we pause to notice them, hang around in the form of virtual blight jettisoned from a mimetic ecosystem. Abundant loose newspaper and inner-city tumbleweeds certainly give Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar North, 2013) its true-to-California granularity. But I focus on polygonal garbage bearing the paradoxical quality of a specter, “an aberration in which at least two states of being can be observed simultaneously: what is, and what is supposed to be” (Reinhard, 153). With respect to an environment already unreal, these “ghosts” are inside-out, for the quaintly skeptical reason that it is other than natural in a videogame—supernatural, as it were—for the decommissioned to remain among the actively living, as though the Magic Kingdom’s engineers might leave a slumped-down animatronic alongside functioning ones. The useless is typically swept from view, nearly as often in life as in digital spaces.

Doubling back to Super Mario World, think how a player, while sending Koopa shells speeding away, sometimes traps one between a couple of green pipes or opposed blocks where the shell is then fated to ricochet endlessly. This is one possibility for trash: the in-game artifact—“that is, the game object as it is given in the player’s experience” (Vella, 2015)— propelled toward a phenomenal state of visual excess if not outright meaninglessness. What had been offered to the player as a tool, whether as a means of gaining experience points or beating the game, now appears unstuck from play, its ludic capacity exhausted. A booby trap in Thief that has discharged its sole spring-loaded shot and desublimated categorically back into its surroundings remains to be looked at, but it ceases to be associable with that higher class of the affective, having become a bit of operational decor going through its programmed motions.

New Durability and the Circulation of Loot

Consider the simplified thermodynamics behind the crafting of items that Bethesda introduced with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011) and of cooking outdoors in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo, 2017), processes through which the necessary components are permanently consumed without ever leaving a fractional remainder. Thus a crafter’s recipe in World of Warcraft is absorbed via instantaneous learning as the catalyzing ingredient, much as The Matrix’s Neo downloads kung fu. Especially in online RPGs, quantification by an auction house, say the one located in Orgrimmar, the capital city of Warcraft’s orcs, often bears no more relation to its user-deposited holdings than informational strings coded by color. Bags of holding, too, despite their magically nonsensical internal volume, are usually each restricted to a slotted grid. At the other end of the spectrum, a druid’s sought-after leather goods might be lodged with their guild’s bank, just as a letter, flagged by an exclamation point as unread, might be ignored in one’s mailbox. The systole and diastole of fragile treasure coursing through a kingdom—it all belongs somewhere, from the far-flung corners of a recovery quest to Blathers’s filled museum. A modality of videogame trash yet to be considered is the readable in-game book, a feature associated with the Elder Scrolls universe, findable in dusty crypts or a wizard’s private library. Away from the dichotomy of unaffectable stationary artifacts and repetitious spectral phenomena, the artifact qua literature, however responsive to clicking and even directly impactful on one’s experience in Tamriel, is nonetheless ludically inexhaustible.

In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo, 1998), where a tumultuous fight could make the hardware sweat, Link’s slingshot as much as the fabled Master Sword are incapable of deterioration. Although Deku sticks and shields are highly flammable, and the Giant’s Knife breaks after eight uses or if the player strikes a wall, thereafter becoming the Broken Giant’s Knife, the former may be said to do so as a mechanical novelty (Deku sticks are used to burn away obstructive cobwebs inside the first dungeon), the latter as a comment on the inferior quality of Goron smithing. It might then strike us as either counterintuitive or entirely foreseeable that with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) Nintendo chose to introduce durability alongside its new ubiquity of farmable kit. Maybe the Switch console’s increased technological brawn is felt to justify both material abundance and a significant degree of on-the-ground persistence, unless perishability is seen as a necessary check on this Cambrian explosion of stuff. Couldn’t a single Thunderspear if not Boko Club stay for the length of Link’s quest as a de facto reward keyed to the plot? Prior to this latest adventure, The Legend of Zelda tied locales to the player obtaining the Megaton Hammer or Fairy Bow, and this saw Link’s collection organized across a handful of dedicated menu pages. Although gear hardiness overall scales with one’s progression in Breath of the Wild, cheap disposability obviates the once-a-chapter upgrade of past Zelda titles and, with the further addition of a nonlinear plot, brings the franchise dangerously close to Elder Scrolls territory. Let us agree, provisionally, that the beginning of virtual garbage more or less correlates with the drive, spurred by consumers, for ever greater verisimilitude in games, even if the rates of everything are exaggerated, as if to match the shorter day/night cycle. From dimensional objects fully there in the game world to their smaller, inventoriable copies, like an icon tucked away inside Link’s knapsack becomes an apple cooked on a campfire.

Per the familiar storybook trope, with the royal family’s deposal, one vile of heart brings about literal Weltschmerz, which is meant to explain the stultifying darkness and proliferation of monsters unleashed upon the land of Hyrule. Outfitted in his signature tunic with sword and shield, Link encounters them deficient, present-at-hand: jowled hobgoblins and death’s-head arachnids, hooded wraiths toting lanterns, and skeletons decked in grass skirts. With the irritant’s removal, green life once again rushes over a benighted land, the suggestion being that tranquility is nature’s lowest energy state. If one could change how The Legend of Zelda handles its dead, such that these ghouls of Nintendo’s go from obtusely threatening to something less than zero, defeated but then not vanquished aesthetically, the moral character of Link should alter, too, from effectively a cutter of Gordian knots, as enemies come apart suddenly and are no more, to something decidedly macabre: a plundering marauder who leaves a trail of carnage. This does, however, resemble the hindsighted impression one can have of a temple’s many completed puzzles, when the whole is appreciated as something very much done, every gate lifted and the shoved-into-place cubes remaining on their pressure plates. Avatars gunned down in a battle royale (if their camouflaged bodies last the length of the match) and a lot of mottled boars5 in scattered heaps amount to visual records of the player-conqueror’s bloody score.6

Meanwhile, it is common for games to visualize an enemy’s demise in such a way as to appear diegetically legitimate, as when the titular Prince of Persia slashes through djinns and they collapse into sand. In “Screw the Grue: Mediality, Metalepsis, Recapture,” Terry Harpold delineates just this phenomenon, how developers struggle artistically as well as logically to fictively embrace—or “recapture”—the harsh outer limits of what they’ve wrought. Earlier top-down iterations of The Legend of Zelda segregated Hyrule into equally-sized parcels of land. A house surrounded by shrubs fits within a tile of navigable space, while a spooky forest might load across multiple discrete tiles, such that brushing against one drags the player there with a wipe. For Harpold, these laminations of narrative architecture with technical necessity represent “the moment where entanglement threatens to bring forward the game’s determinism by its definite technical situation[;] that determinism,” he writes, “is turned back into the gameworld, so as to seem to be another of its (arbitrary but consistent) rules” (93). Thus in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (Nintendo, 1993) the geography’s evenly subdivided layout displays an almost folk understanding of place, with the loading threshold disguised inside a hollow log or draped over a garden wall, an agreeably convenient method for allocating the Super Nintendo Entertainment System’s 128 kilobytes of memory.7 But in nailing down an equivalence for trash in videogames, we must also acknowledge what has been one of the medium’s greatest charms: its juggling of abundance and the strictly ludic. If not exactly trash for yet having a purpose, the former can still offer a clue as to the relationship game-players develop with a presentational form of entertainment based on taking advantage of that which is given.

Between artifacts constantly disappearing and others cropping up out of nowhere, we might imagine virtual entropy as well as something like its opposite, except that neither of these metaphorical ebbs and flows actually replenishes or draws from some finite numerical integrity making up the game world. The goblin’s worthless body doesn’t break down into virtual fertilizer but, like a hologram, is “unplugged” by the GPU. Diablo II’s mechanics dictate that loot dropped by killed mobs, including equipment and gold, despawns after a set number of minutes which varies according to the item’s rarity, while in Dragon Age: Inquisition (BioWare, 2014) obsolete iron greaves or an unwanted broadsword is consigned to binary oblivion if dropped from the player’s inventory (Reinhard 156); instantiated out of its data file, an apparently (to the player) unique graphical object is then flushed from the memory.8 The extent to which built-in deletion is to be thought computationally healthy, or the management of a roster of competing presences a sort of ecology, deserves elaboration. Videogames thoroughly dramatize the Enlightenment principle of instrumental reason with its twin emphases on counting and representation, such that a monster’s dwindling hit points are readable in the health bar above its head.

The Real World Must Be Edited

If our definition of artifactual trash is that which graphically outlives the execution of its ludic function, edificial trash might consequently be limited to a handful of unique scenarios, including hanging around after Bowser’s defeat to explore his lair, denuded now as a flown bird’s nest,9 and the habitation of out-of-bounds zones, a recreational (or extra-ludic) activity common in massively multiplayer online games that could remind one of alpine climbing. Wm. Ruffin Bailey offers us the important terminology of “fossilized content” for a nearly identical issue: unused code embedded within a game’s programming, say in the form of a map the developer ultimately decided against publishing or a character model that never made it into the story (82). These are not Easter eggs, which are intended to be found by clever scavengers if not stumbled upon. Content traditionally inaccessible to the player quite nicely forms the inverse to Guins’s object afterlife (A. R. Bailey), what we might deem the “beforelife” of a designed space. Like the obviated artifact that refuses to disappear, a space’s beforelife would refer to a limbo state of narrative sterility, both traversably present-at-hand and barred from that meaningful condition of interactive relevance. What’s provided is a clearing for goal-based gameplay, as opposed to exploration for exploration’s sake.10

The aesthetic rehabilitation of that which is consigned to societal degradation naturally includes ruined architecture, though its inclusion in a videogame can readily be thought of as more than a source of moody ambience. Popularly backdated to European romanticism and its feverish love of vine-covered abbeys with collapsed roofs, ruins were seized upon not only by the Lake Poets in the early nineteenth century but also by Dutch artists like Jacob van Ruisdael, who captured the rural industry and dilapidation of the Netherlands using earthy hues. In an essay discussing the tropes of game-world design, Mark J. P. Wolf notes that “ruins give a location a ‘before and after’ dual timeframe [cf. Reinhard’s ‘two states of being’]; a sad melancholy present, and a supposedly better past when everything was new and functional” (“Experience” 226). While a bucolic hut may be understood as an (immovable) object laid down by the developer and a mountain in the far distance just an unvisitable bit of scenery, game companies have not shied away from residuality as the setting itself, from Ico (Japan Studio and Team Ico, 2001), set in an abandoned castle, to Fallout, Bethesda’s post-apocalyptic moneymaker.

Aside from a sunny patch of grass here and there, Ico’s backdrop is altogether Spartan for want of affectable stuff, though ludic artifacts, such as the ladders and lengths of chain one can climb, are grafted onto it. Walt Disney’s pioneering animators made the same compromise. Compare the meticulous, static backgrounds of Eyvind Earle, drawn only once, with the less-detailed cels that dance across their surfaces. With the Pixar era’s dimensional jump to CGI the charming flatness of Sleeping Beauty was both hollowed out and inflated, like in a fun-house mirror, with the newly gained space populated by talking toys and zoo animals. On the gaming front, modular artifacts continue to press beyond the Heideggerian edges of Lichtungen, those bright clearings in which players fight and die. One provisional solution has been to constrain the area through which we (slowly) move, a hallmark of the Resident Evil and Dark Souls franchises, such that these stygian ordeals appear to be chock-full of undead enemies as well as semi-detached passive elements. Think how Metal Gear Solid began with the navigation of tight corridors before Hideo Kojima set the series in a relatively capacious forest and, finally, a sprawling desert canyon.

To give a very different example, reissues of Frogger (Konami, 1981) increasingly distend each of the game’s obstacles and platforms—the tractor trailers, floating logs, and red-shelled turtles—before finally pitching the axis of play backward. So Cimabue put a little meat on the Virgin Mary’s bones and later schools revamped her holy apartments, expanding the floor and maybe putting in a real window. The biologies of oil painting and videogames are curiously resemblant; time and again they’ve converged on homologous answers to the problems encountered in depicting a lushly figured-out world. The technique known as cangiante, for instance, which helped Michelangelo separate the interlaid fabrics of his great ceiling, stratifies Frogger into a busy freeway jutting between the safe harbors of land below and above.11 Tripartite cutscenes in Tecmo’s original Ninja Gaiden, debuted on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1988, use three shades of blue to indicate the atmosphere hanging between Ryu and the demon’s temple (fig. 1). Giotto’s fog becomes the turquoise gradations of Bruegel, and the eerie chartreuse mist of Titus Interactive’s critically loathed Superman: The New Superman Adventures, (Titus Interactive, 1999) at least set players outside in advance of Skyrim’s convincingly perspectival highlands.

Fig. 1. Ninja Gaiden. Nintendo Entertainment System version, Tecmo, 1988.

The Elder Scrolls Online. Windows PC version, ZeniMax Online Studios, 2014.

In an essay on Louise Glück, William Logan observes that art of modest scope finds reality too large a pill: “For a poetic world to be this narrow, the poet’s desires must be powerfully austere. The real world, in other words, is so overwhelming it must be edited” (205). While in Glück’s case holding back was a deliberate choice, offering less than everything is inherent to art. Harvest Moon, of the farm-simulation subgenre, and Euro Truck Simulator, a driving simulator, appeal to consumers by presenting ludic versions of fatiguing human chores such as spraying herbicide, adjusting bulky furniture, or hauling logs, which are likely to be avoided in life.12 Beyond what might be called the partial automation of play via technology, the videogame apparatus as a whole can therefore be understood as the virtual distillation of play out of the living context in which we find it. Almost directly an effect of technological shortcomings, shearing a natural object to its iconographical core for the end of gameplay, a utopic process of semiotic clarification, results in lettuce heads at a sprinkle, a sofa light enough to lift, and automotive engines without all the grease. Martin Heidegger made a similar argument for the medium of painting:

As long as we only imagine a pair of shoes in general, or simply look at the empty, unused shoes as they merely stand there in the picture, we shall never discover what the equipmental being of the equipment in truth is. From Van Gogh’s painting we cannot even tell where these shoes stand. There is nothing surrounding this pair of peasant shoes in or to which they might belong—only an undefined space. There are not even clods of soil from the field or the field-path sticking to them, which would at least hint at their use. (159)

This process of hermeneutic as well as aesthetic depuration has been observed by sociologists like Erving Goffman as the fundamental urban desire for a clean manageability in daily life. He writes: “We tend to conceal from our audience all evidence of ‘dirty work,’ whether we do this work in private or allocate to a servant, to the impersonal market, to a legitimate specialist, or to an illegitimate one” (44). That clarification, with its distinction between figurative art and the human act of seeing and which we find so agreeable, remains evident in the most realistic of today’s games. In both cases it is inevitable as a material fact. Susan Stewart, in her wide-ranging cultural analysis On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, argues that atmospheric distortion and the artificial are often received pleasurably as enhancements, much as the moon’s rocky malformation translates across space into a flawless sphere: “Here again we see . . . that distance creates physical perfection and idealization. The fairies have the attraction of the animated doll, the cultural ideal unencumbered by the natural” (111–112). Videogames, which have no choice but to dilute the actual objects, psychology, and employments they draw upon, thus ingeniously trade on our generalized disgust for what is perceived to be visually or practically unnecessary as the excuse for limited representational and experiential capabilities. Much of the ire directed at gaming as mere escapism is flatly contradicted by big-budget endeavors to recreate the quotidian alongside epic realism and the fantastic in games like Red Dead Redemption and The Witcher. However grand the creative director’s ambitions might have been, translation of anything for the sake of a videogame inevitably leaves behind a tidy polygonal copy free of static.

A Quasi-Panoptical Universe

As laid out by the genre-defining Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985) on the Nintendo Entertainment System, videogames pare down ludic fulfillment to its barest semiotic necessities. Whether interactive, stationary, or decorative, the elements populating a Mario stage derive equally from natural formations and such visual-cultural receptacles as the question mark and blocks.13 Wolf explains that “another reason for making game elements representational are the default assumptions and diegetic structures that accompany them and make both the interface and gameplay more transparent and intuitive” (“Abstraction” 52). Game design can be understood to wed together the basest signifiers into robust anthropocentric objects so familiar they drop nearly beneath our apprehension, their substance forged in the very shape of players’ engagement (Harpold 91); for example, Magikoopas, basically turtles in a wizard’s robes, wield enchanted wands, or crystals fixed to the ends of gold cylinders If they’ve eschewed invisible forcefields, a level designer attempting to impede entrance into a functionally peripheral zone excluded from the story—what we might call “plot deserts”—will deposit a stationary obstacle like a boulder or rotted tree trunk. Meant only to steer the hero, these may be objects seen elsewhere and even of a height less than those granting the player passage. In this case, however, a binary switch has been flipped and the traveler’s movement is redirected. Where the player has greatest interactivity a landscape tends to be sensitive to the point of bursting, as with Super Mario’s dispersed acne of coin blocks. A crafted world is thoroughly ergonomic, anticipating the objective behind one’s every movement.

Charting a videogame’s landscape, such as the primordial, old-growth Colorado of Horizon: Zero Dawn (Guerrilla Games, 2017), we know its navigation is secretly efficient, that forests and elongate bluffs instantly vanish when players turn away from them. Strategic obfuscation gives equal advantage to a three-dimensional battleground as to the pages of an illuminated manuscript. Medieval scribes used gold leaf and colored solitaires as a kind of decorative opacity to brick up unintended vistas running off into the distance between the columns of a portico or through a sanctuary’s fenestella, which no one then understood how to depict accurately. About a millennium later, Iguana Entertainment, in search of a convenient way to hide South Park’s (1998) lackluster draw distance on the Nintendo 64, steeped the surrounding hills in impenetrable whiteness (fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Giotto di Bondone. St. Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata. C. 1300, Upper Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi.

South Park. Nintendo 64 version, Iguana Entertainment, 1998.

Another classic example of literally obscuring the Nintendo 64’s limited capacity for rendering distances are the misty junglescapes of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter (Nintendo, 1997), released the previous year. No doubt these studios grasped methodologically the illusioning of (virtual) space within a two-dimensional plane, how Masaccio went about it during the Italian quattrocento using taut string. The world was simply too much, thus one of the more practical reasons for the extremely tall horizon in Animal Crossing games has always been to show less.14

Isn’t this the excuse afforded medieval and post-pandemic videogames, like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (Ubisoft, 2020) and the episodic Last of Us, where respectively the country’s population either has yet to explode in numbers or was decimated by a fungal pandemic?15 Otherwise, these environments would be awkwardly barren and at pains to account for the almost complete lack of on-screen bustle, a fact attributable to insufficiently powerful hardware that also accounts for visually uncluttered gameplay, zombie shoot-’em-ups notwithstanding. In the middle of San Andreas’s loud poverty is this energetic nucleus of a man, identifiable as the avatar as much for his geometric centrality as his physical isolation. Gaming’s current phenomenological dynamic realizes for the first time George Berkeley’s philosophy of subjective idealism, of which Bertrand Russell provides the following summary in his brilliantly diplomatic English:

To the objection that, in that case, a tree, for instance, would cease to exist if no one was looking at it, he replied that God always perceives everything; if there were no God, what we take to be material objects would have a jerky life, suddenly leaping into being when we look at them. (589)

From the essay in which Rem Koolhaas coins the term “junkspace” comes the description of the shopping mall as “a quasi-panoptical universe in which all contents rearrange themselves in split seconds around the dizzy eye of the beholder” (177). Impossibly, every shopper is catered to as though they were the center of everything. Our customer-obsessed age has been remaking itself for nearly two centuries in accordance with Emerson’s poetic declaration that mother nature orbits the human (40). But whether videogames, with their Ptolemaic focus on the player’s every move, are themselves an overwhelming influence on the market-driven gamification of life or corollary to it is an ongoing debate.

Postscript

Although independent titles continue to crop up on the Steam platform like mushrooms, for now it appears we’re stuck with the model of rereleasing content already vetted by a first wave of buyers, including high-caliber reboots like the Spyro (Toys for Bob, 2018) and Crash Bandicoot (Vicarious Visions, 2017) trilogies. Nostalgia sells, yet opting for vintage color palettes and banking on technologically outmoded forms of gameplay denotes an intellectual milestone for the medium, self-imposing austerity in a time of scientific plenty, the very feat of counterbalancing responsible for Van Gogh’s stylistic pivot between his early period (e.g., the chromatically muted Potato Eaters) and his tragic fourteen months in Arles.16 The shift is a typical one, in which an art form’s smarter practitioners eventually see the necessity of billeting philosophy, of undermining the old question of beauty’s use.

When Slavoj Žižek tells the director’s camera that “maybe the first thing to do is accept the waste, to accept that there are things out there that serve nothing. To break out of this eternal cycle of functioning” (Fiennes, 01:00:37–01:00:52), he echoes the hackneyed motto of Oscar Wilde by way of Walter Pater, in whose opinion the finest art is solely out for itself. The introspective think tank that is modern art has a great deal to teach game designers about aging gracefully, or turning the medium’s prodigious gifts toward that final frontier of artistic maturity. Rational tenderness and a brainier kind of gameplay than the industry’s supply chain has furnished thus far are needed to check raw, unfettered competence. Recall the twice-a-decade console wars flexing technical specifications like they’re biceps. Just as corporate television blunts our understanding of what should be considered avant-garde today, a larger, though not necessarily insidious, greenhouse effect may be driving videogames toward info saturation, reformulating gameplay in awfully familiar bottles. As Fisher writes, “at a certain point—a point that is usually only discernible retrospectively—cultures shunt off into the sidings, cease to renew themselves, ossify into Trad. They don’t die, they become undead, surviving on old energy, kept moving, like Baudrillard’s deceased cyclist, only by the weight of inertia” (356). With data-transfer rates guaranteed to outpace loading times, the osmotic videogame stage, once hermetically sealed off, is bounding headlong into total contiguity.17 Entertainment heat is accumulating inside our products per se, for fewer and fewer see any point in concluding. Even when the inner fruit is disposed of, we’re increasingly keeping the husks.18

Matthew Collings observes about Ghanaian refuse artist El Anatsui that “wealth’s mystique is removed . . . but we’re still getting the pleasure” (00:13:14–00:13:21). Amassed in the thousands, this sculptor’s ore is the flicked-away crowns of top-shelf liquor and champagnes; these bottle caps occupy a muddled zone as luxurious trash. Irish poet Derek Mahon writes in “A Garage in Co. Cork” to this effect:

The intact antiquities of the recent past,
Dropped from the retail catalogues, return
To the materials that gave rise to them
And shine with a late sacramental gleam. (151)

Most compelling about El Anatsui’s work is his investiture of detritus with a contemplative second, almost evangelical valuation, insofar as these stitched tapestries radiate precisely that metaphysical surplus responsible for the “aura” of expensive liqueurs. Caps detach at a loss of carbonation and commercial virginity. Empties gather like a kettle of gasping fish, while the bottles’ most extraneous element, their labels, become zombified as fine-art objects: born privileged, lowered to landfill caste, then posthumously revived for judgment at a higher level. In short, this is Michael Thompson’s “rubbish theory,” which describes how frangible matter passes through a state of decrepitude in order to achieve the nirvana of durability (4), the irony being that with the apotheosis of a thing it generally quits decaying altogether. For the cynical, this amounts to nothing more than collecting and reorienting the discarded so that it might be upcycled to artistic bliss. In a blatant alchemical reversal of the hierarchy, a tapestry of garbage woven with copper thread goes on to be highly sought after and destined to last in a climate-controlled vault. One might even say it achieves a more trash-like character—uselessness in extreme proportion to endurance, at the pinnacle of which sits plastic—than the junk relegated to bins.

The ugly first-world convenience of junkspace would seem to place it opposite Schmalzer’s jank, born of consumer frustration.19 Or there is now a certain bipolarity to industrialized culture, depending on ableness as much as disposable income and which, inundated with capital and vast electronic capability, may choose between further bombardment of our senses and meaningful engagement. If the videogame business is fast approaching a computational tipping point, the need of previous generations to constantly discard artifactual trash—not to mention trim environmental fat down to the camera’s (mercifully limited) field of view20—shall in hindsight take the shape of a cleared technological hurdle. It is the question of whether the dungeon’s goblins are kept in sight together or brought out singly for destruction.

Erick Verran is an independent scholar and poet whose literary criticism and articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Virginia Woolf Miscellany, Contemporary Aesthetics, Georgia Review, and Journal of Sound and Music in Games. Obiter Dicta, a collection of short essays, was published by Punctum Books in 2021. His poetry last appeared in the Massachusetts Review. He lives in New York.

Notes

1. Rainforest Scully-Blaker helpfully identifies “two sets of rules that a player encounters in a game – implicit rules and explicit rules. Implicit rules are those which exist by virtue of Huizinga’s Magic Circle, by virtue of an assumption that the virtual world of a game is whole. Explicit rules are those which actually govern the game.”

2. “This game mechanic,” Hansen tells us, “allows for players—such as the author—to visit a wide variety of towns beyond their local limitations or their immediate friend group. A limitation of using the Dream Suite however comes with its design—since it is framed as a dream, and the player is not allowed to return with any items, they cannot enter shops. It proved to be a useful tool in analyzing random towns without intruding upon the privacy of players” (27).

3. I adapt these terms from Heidegger’s “ready-to-hand” (zuhanden) and “present-at-hand” (vorhanden).

4. That sort of fun chaos, available to players who use Minecraft in the alternative “creative mode” and which strips away the survival aspect, is central to videogames as divergent as Half-Life 2 (Valve, 2014) and the Super Smash Bros. franchise. Thanks to a revolutionary physics engine, Half-Life 2’s corroded barrels, toilets, and other debris clang about realistically with the gracelessness appropriate to the unimportant, as do the ragdoll bodies of enemies, their looseness of limb informing the player that an enemy Combine unit is deceased. In Super Smash Bros. a litter of rained-down items is quickly picked up and thrown without much regard for unique properties; one just hopes the baseball bat or turnip makes contact. Although Half-Life 2 is a first-person shooter and Super Smash Bros. a multiplayer king-of-the-hill brawler, both make trashy gameplay the backbone of players’ experience. Moreover, the simultaneity of all that on-screen stuff can incur a loss of framerate, negatively impacting the very gameplay the developers sought to provide.

5. One of many non-player characters referred to in World of Warcraft as a “trash mob” because it is easily defeated and featured monotonously in starting-zone quests.

6. See Dynasty Warriors, the hack-and-slash series of videogames set in feudal Japan, wherein the player cuts their way through an impressively dense mass of adversaries. In this case the heads-up display keeps a running tally while the latest corpse on the ground dematerializes.

7. Correspondingly, with the 2019 remake of Link’s Awakening for the Switch, Nintendo chose to blend the original’s screen-by-screen progression into one seamless overworld, a change that is also reflected in the now gridless in-game map.

8. Still, there’s the steady accumulation of useless loot over the course of a dungeon run; for instance, the procedural realms of Diablo and Torchlight (one of its lookalike descendants) end with unloading everything onto a vendor back at camp, from superfluous equipment valued at a few silver pieces to common drops good for a handful of copper. By contrast, in a first-person shooter like Bioshock one is eventually forced to scroll through uselessly many unlocked guns and abilities in a way that feels materially gratuitous.

9. As Gaston Bachelard comments, “Indeed, the nest we pluck from the hedge like a dead flower, is nothing but a ‘thing.’ I have the right to take it in my hands and pull it apart” (94). Thus, what of Captain Olimar’s multicolored army of Pikmin fetching the disjecta membra of his ship or Katamari Damacy (Namco, 2004), which stars a little prince directing a magically adhesive sphere with the goal of snowballing together everything in sight, from skyscrapers and bulbous trees to tape dispensers and people (all of which, incidentally, are roughly the same size)? Is its opposite Donut County (Ben Esposito, 2018), in which a growing player-controlled hole swallows up trucks, picnic tables, and farmers’ barns?

10. As for artifacts, their beforelives might include looking at the embedded models of items with asset-rendering software or even junk code, but not the affixed candelabra and beer kegs in a tavern. A door that ignored one’s repeated clicking or a glitched weapon that could not be picked up, for instance, would be problematic. This ludic artifact should neither be able to execute its function (unless it lacked one entirely due to a coding hiccup) nor to disappear. Only in the sense of bifurcating potential states is a glitch trash-like; adjacently speaking, these rogue things fall squarely between trash and decoration for their abortive irrepressibility and spectral nullity, respectively.

11. Note that, at least in regard to the original arcade format, Frogger’s color-coded mosaic extends neither behind nor ahead of Konami’s amphibious hero but beneath and above, while the connotation is exactly the opposite. In subsequent versions of the game, this semiotic mismatch is corrected with the introduction of the z-axis.

12. Untitled Goose Game (House House, 2019) comes to mind, especially the viral chore that has players endeavoring to furtively carry off every item to the goose’s den. See Ian Bogost.

13. While the point of Cory Arcangel’s hacked-cartridge-cum-artwork Super Mario Clouds (2002)—in which everything has been erased except Shigefumi Hino’s famous scrolling clouds—lies in drawing an interpretive circle around the decorative, I’m inclined to say that this “defacilitation” elevates it to something like trash status for the first time. Arguably this is videogaming’s Duchamp moment, the inoffensively familiar placed on an aesthetic pedestal.

14. In their article “Explaining the Horizon (and Planet) of Animal Crossing New Horizons,” Ashley Villar and Alex McCarthy describe that adorable home world as a “cylinder-planet” with an estimated radius of just 36.6 feet.

15. Wolf provides us with the equivalent rationale for found objects in such games when he points out that “the ruined state of a place justifies why relatively few things are usable or worth adding to a player’s inventory; the few good items are hidden amongst piles of junk and wreckage, making the things you can find and use seem even more valuable by contrast” (“Experience” 226).

16. On the point of gameplay and technological capability, for instance, Baba Is You (the puzzle game that won accolades in 2019) weighs in at two-hundred megabytes, about one per level.

17. I elaborate on this question of contiguity and the obsolescence of loading screens in my book, Obiter Dicta:

Invariably with today’s open-world games, a technical sleight front-loads the player’s journey into found lands, it being desirable to render a landscape gradually, in tandem with its approach. Or one recalls the sporadic buffering that plagued software of the aughts and the recurrence of brief elevator rides, a divertissement for when the console is loading the subsequent area as well as an attempt by developers to analogize what is a necessary hardware operation into the gameplay. Conveying that a three-dimensional environment is actually undivided, persistent across space and time, therefore entails staggering the revelation of that environment. (100)

18. Three-dimensional videogame artifacts are of course utterly hollow, even when it comes to the polygonal “membrane.”

19. Often that frustration—“the disconnect between expectations and actuality” in Schmalzer’s usage, or for Vella the unbridgeable gap “between [the player’s] experience of the game, her understanding of the game as system, and her awareness of an underlying implied game object”—is actually what’s desired by players (Juul, 2013).

20. Known as frustum culling and occlusion culling (Hurley).

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