Gaming and the Virtual Sublime: Rhetoric, awe, fear, and death in contemporary video games

by Matthew Spokes

Can you have a transformative experience as a result of falling through a programming error in the latest triple-A title? Does looking out across a vast virtual vista of undulating mountains and tumultuous seas edge you closer to the sublime? In an effort to answer these sorts of questions, Gaming and the Virtual Sublime considers the 'virtual sublime' as a conceptual toolbox for understanding our affective engagement with contemporary interactive entertainment. Through a detailed examination of the history of the sublime, from pseudo-Longinus' jigsaw puzzle of the sublime in rhetoric, through the eighteenth-century obsession with beauty and terror, past the Kantian mathematical and dynamical sublime, all the way to Lyotard's 'unpresentable event' and Deleuze's work on chaos and rhythm, this book road-tests these differing components in a far-reaching exploration of how video games - as virtual spaces of affect - might reshape our opportunities for sublime experience. Using playthroughs, developer diaries, forums discussions and contemporaneous reviews, and games ranging from the heartbreak of That Cancer through to the abject body-horror of Outlast (with a dash of Tetris in-between) are discussed in terms the experience(s) of play, their design and their co-creation with gamers with a specific focus on rhetoric and narrative; awe; fear and terror; death and boredom. Written in an engaging and accessible style, this book is a must-read for philosophers, scholars, and those interested in games and popular culture more broadly.

170 pages, Hardcover

Published August 28, 2020

Reviews

[xenia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Decent summary of the sublime and the affective. Spokes is well versed in poststructuralist thought and explicates it effortlessly (the chapter on affect and virtuality is standout). Strained application of such concepts to video games. A lot of what Spokes says about video games could be said about any media form (that they elicit affective responses from the player; that they conjure a sublime experience in the player through their depiction of terror from a site of safety (e.g. home)). Conversely, a lot of what Spokes says in his attempt to valorise video games rehashes reductive arguments about older media (tv, films, books) as passive experiences. This is simply not true; the whole world is a hermeneutic engagement. We interpret the world, with our conscious and nonconscious capacities, categorising different sensations for the purpose of responding with the appropriate bodily schema. Yes, video games are interactive experiences; no, this does not make them more immediate; yes, it makes them different, and more differentiating, than older forms of media not based on play.

tl;dr: Spokes doesn't clearly shows how video games transform our understandings of the sublime or the affective, nor what makes video games unique as objects (or, perhaps, encounters) of analysis. There are hints of this (video games recruit the player into feedback loops in ever narrowing affective bands), but they are easily lost and misplaced.

Will update once I've read the second half.

[Marina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Spokes sets forth a compelling vision for video games, but proceeds to dump an incredible amount of context on you in the first few chapters, barely bothering to relate this to a video game at all. This is a frustrating book in this regard, requiring you to stick with several incredibly dense and abstract chapters that come one after the other, with no real application of the theories around the sublime onto the video games that are supposed to be the subject of this book.

However, in the final few chapters, Spokes focuses his analysis onto the actual title of the book, in a series of chapters Rhetoric, Awe, Fear, and Death, actually creating some structured and interesting analysis. It's just a shame it takes so long to get there.