Both in SUPERHOT and Ruiner, the game places a distance between the mechanical interactions of the game and the text occuring within the game world. In SUPERHOT, the gameplay revolves around performing actions which are not resulting as they are made, where actions are performed in the stilted, careful time of play, but then received back in a seamless, realtime fashion, the replay player is shown after death or completion, the “real” of what actions they were performing. In Ruiner and SUPERHOT, the player is divorced in the story from the character, with the player operating the character not in the name of the character, but in the name of some outside other, with both games taking time to remind the player their lack of control in their own actions.
In these instances, the nature of the game is broken down into its components. In Ruiner and SUPERHOT, the structure is such that the game is drawn into three separate layers of text, the Reader, the Mechanics, and the World. The Reader interacts with the Mechanical, performing the actions of the game, actions which are then interpreted from the player’s actions and then applied upon the world. In Ruiner, the player character has no free will, controlled by a hacker who mediates between the player’s input and the player character. In SUPERHOT, in addition to the ending of the story being the player killing the player character, the player performs actions which then produce a secondary product of the final replay. Of these, the Mechanics make the text function by governing the player’s interaction with the World and thereby making the World into a coherent text, putting it in some logical order. The Reader meanwhile is a position which must be fulfilled in order to make the text function, in order to experience the game, there must be some entity which the Mechanics plug into in order to deliver input upon the World. In Anodyne and SUPERHOT, the game requires actions which break the story and narrative, Anodyne in particular holding the entire second half of the game behind the player’s willingness to openly utilize glitches to boundary break to access additional content and secrets required for 100% completion. This boundary breaking has been a part of games, intentional or not, since the beginning of gaming, with the Mechanics asserting their dominance over the World, as the determiners of the World. The World is created anew in being broken, just as the Mechanics attempt to create the World in one form or another in their intended routes.
As I discussed in my commentary on Alice, game structure is not unique to works constructed purely as “games”. I only refer to it as such due to its most potent expressions being in games, just as I refer to its other-half as “novel” structure, that distinct by being a text which is driven by a central character, the text being structured around a reality being written in relation to this character. The game is distinct here, with the structure being of a world structured through the mechanics. The sitcom shows this duality interesting, with the cases of Bojack Horseman and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia as contrasts of being more easily read in the two categories. In Bojack Horseman, the sitcom as a character driven text works through the characters as the central components, the content of the show being towards writing a relationship of events and characters, with both affecting the other, and this spiraling relationship writing the text. It’s Always Sunny works in the opposite structure, where the characters are plateaus just as the levels in a game, and the content of the show is organized by the mechanical concerns, such as the episode’s topic and length, which dictates the characters interacting with each other.
The identity of “male” as constructed in the Enlightenment imagination carries with it a double facedness, wherein it retains contradictory aspects as both a non-existent rational objectivity possessed of an access to reality to which everything outside is excluded from, the sick, the female, the racially other, etc, and as a masculine self, wherein it is the outside, the everything, the female here imagined as a specific object which is constructed, such as in the case of a gender neutral silhouette being gendered as “male” and requiring some additions to be made female, such as a bow or skirt shape. The result of this allows an identity to be constructed which solves the man’s internal problem of dualism: he can be both possessing of the “mind” in the former and the “body” in the latter, hence allowing him to sustain his position in society through the “mind” without fear from the overcoding world of the “body”, saving him from the insecurity of lesser developed men towards the enemy-animal, the body embodied as a threat. By doing so, the man is able to enter and push forward the enlightenment-capitalist project, wherein he submits himself to inhuman machines of capital and language while believing himself to hold phallic authority over those actions he performs in his submission, the capitalist or scientist, working in total devotion to the market or to the method, yet by signing his name or emblem on every package or paper. It is through this double-action that the logic of imperialism functions, wherein it is both the objective, impersonal, civilizing mission, and the European conquest and domination of the world.
This equation is taken for granted in the struggle of feminism, in an ideological fashion, wherein it is assumed this is not only unchangeable but the desired “liberation” state that women should aspire to. In de Beauvoir’s writing, woman’s lack of access to this default is written as being a deprivation, a lack which woman must overcome, a schematic that takes for granted the basic terms of there being a default at all. Doing so empowers women, but only to an extent, with its end result if successful being that the original sins of the Enlightenment Man will be repeated by women. In doing so however, women are robbed of the very thing which would allow for them an escape from this terminal rationality, their femininity. This femininity - here imagined as nothing more than a prison which must be overcome (hence the feminist tradition of celebrating their own version of the male celebration of their body as grotesque), thereby making themselves as accessing of the default-masculine as men themselves are. The feminine in feminism has to it, no positive attributes at all, but is only a series of arbitrary attributes forced onto them by an abstract enemy, a spectral devil of whig religion which is slowly being cast off as women transcend to masculinity. This casting off of femininity requires women to repeat the same violence which occured to grant men their masculinity originally, a repetition of the same construction and then oppression of the feminine, committed a second time, against a new other.
It is here that the erroneous assumption that TERFs are merely “appropriating” feminism in the “FART” acronym is false - TERFs are not appropriating anything, they’re taking a more popular approach to the same ideological path that all feminism assumes as an axiom. The difference of TERFs and trans-friendly feminists is an ontological disagreement on what creates one as a woman, with the TERFs being one with a more natural conclusion. Unlike the trans-friendly feminist, who relies on womanhood being constructed by some mentally based subtle, spiritual essence of womanhood, the TERF relies on that same subtle, spiritual essence constructed through the very same medical and sociological languages which construct the entire rationalist project of feminism. The feminist is unable to respond within feminism with any strength therefore, because the project of feminism requires woman to be constructed in a way referring to some real core and not to any femininity or attributes, a construction of womanhood that has stark few variations that include transwomen.
The end goal for transwomen therefore should not be to take up feminism in a new direction - to do so is a false errand, but to abandon feminism as yet another project of the Enlightenment and instead promote femininity as the quality which is to be uphold, against a masculine rationality. It is this femininity which transwomen are in fact more capable of access to, the feminine being the “mind” itself, not as an alien, but as the matter which creates the total self. While man is firmly tied to the physical, purely a creature of the body who must construct of his renunciation and then reintroduction of that body, woman is capable of acting purely outside the body, with woman needing to be constructed in the first place, evident in the example of the women’s bathroom sign or Ms. Pacman. Transwomen, having their entire womanhood constructed, are therefore naturally more akin to this quality of being cyborg between the human and the ahuman artistic, cultural, linguistic, technological, etc, through which womanhood is constructed, thus granting them a more intimate experience of the feminine.
After the discovery of the third dimension in painting came a second, silent discovery, of the fourth dimension, time. The ancient genre of portrait painting quickly gave way to genres developed through the brand new techniques developed in Italy and the Netherlands through the 16th and 17th centuries, where a single instant was frozen in time in the same form as photography, preceding photography. In previous art, the goal of the painting (or woodcut or drawing or etc) was always to represent more than simply an instant, to show a holistic image that cuts across time by showing multiple events on one continuous plane, the whole of the narrative being rolled out to be shown at the same time, as in the Bayeux Tapestry. With the discovery of the third dimension and all its attendant realisms (lighting, perspective, size, texture, etc) came the silent and slow discovery of the third dimension’s ability to operate in the fourth as well, capturing a scene in its motion, thus capturing a scene situated in time. Just as realism itself was perfected with the invention of the camera, so was this, with the camera being perfectly able to capture a scene in the single moment, a frozen being, which is always, forever, perfectly being as it can suffer no change or alteration forward or backwards.
This work of being which emerges from the hand of the creator is now forever severed from the creator. It has been born and frozen while its creator and subjects move on. To be able to return to the image or to go inside the image is to enter a location where at minimum, time has been shifted back, if not stopped all together. The Painted Worlds of the Souls series and the levels of Mario 64 both show this, with their worlds being contained and still, frozen as a moment that is forever cycling through prescribed motions, with time only marked by the subject entering it and modifying events. When Max Caulfield enters her polaroids in Life is Strange, she returns to that moment, the exact stage of motion all things were in when they were frozen into an eternal moment of being in the photograph. The photograph freezes a moment but is fleeting forever from both sides of the camera which created it. The both sides is vital, as the photograph sits between, the photographer and the subject, or the creator and the world which is captured, both of which are moving in time and captured to a single instant of being in the photograph.
This entity, between subject and object, when divorced from both, is hereby capable of communicating with both. The choosing of what is shot declares the movements of the creator, the position of all subjects declares the world around the shot and both directions of investigation can be taken by a reader from the frozen entity. Through this, the entire network of interconnected systems which make both creator and world appear are unveiled in examination. In this way, photography, in freezing time, in fact creates more time than the traditional style of timeless composition did, where the frozen moment implies time far beyond would could ever be grasped by a creator attempting to put it all onto paper. The weather extrapolates to a year of patterns of rain and sun and wind, the grass and ground to eons of geologic time, the composition to the entire story of the creator’s day and week and month, and etc. The aforementioned frozen worlds, entered through paintings all show this, Life is Strange and its timeline-switching, Souls and Mario 64 with their contained worlds.
Working backwards is of course possible as well. Richard Brautigan in Trout Fishing in America performs this, reverse photography where all details of creator and world are laid out, leading into the central image “Trout Fishing in America”, the details all spiraling again and again to that one phrase. In working backwards, Brautigan is able to explicate what only occurs in the unconscious of a photograph. In doing so, Brautigan reveals the nature of the “natural” and “artificial” distinction and its inherent instability in comparison to the creator/world distinction. In Brautigan, the artificial and the natural meld seamlessly, with the two being treated as unified as one half of the details moving into “Trout Fishing in America”, with the other half being the “I” who speaks through the text. The human is as alienated from the natural as the industrial and vice versa, with both acting as the world and thus one in the same. Codependant on each other and out of control of any one individual person, the distinction is revealed to be meaningless as the world speaks for itself in separation from any creator which may seek to inflict meaning upon it.
With this model explicitly drawn so as not to divide the world, the model that’s been created is one of a presence and absence, in both directions, where the world makes the creator by the absence of the world and the creator makes the world by the absence of the creator. The only thing which separates the two is the ego being capable of distinguishing itself from the world around it, thereby creating this division at all. The ego must eventually come to recognize itself as having frail boundaries, which shift and grow based on conditions. The final understanding of this is to understand the ego itself as being placed only in the moment itself, with the ego of the past being made by its world and the ego of the future being made from the past, and finally the ego of the present being made only by the past, including the ego of the past. The ending is to realize the unity of the self with the world, with the ego only being preserved in the momentary experience. It is through this momentary experience that the ego is capable of being, just as a photograph is being, a single instant, forever.
In both Don Juan and the works of De Sade, the horror that sex elicits is not in the sex itself, but the way the sex is removed from sex. For Don Juan, sex becomes an accounting scheme, for De Sade, an exercise in bureaucracy. Sex is reduced to something which is alien to sexuality, with libidinal desires channeled into the inhumanity of something alien to the emotional irrationality which is sexuality. The body upon which this type of sexual legalism is done becomes thus completely desexualized in effect, but then creating a jarring dissonance between the sexuality supposedly pointed to beneath a surface of remarkable asexuality, knowing the existence of the desire which is wasted as its funneled into engines which annihilate desire in their operation.
Such a concept of desire is vital to understanding sexuality. Desire is never consensual because desire is a process of sublimation. A sexual fantasy or kink is never about anything as simple as the object in itself inspiring some lust, but about the unconscious sublimating some libidinal energy into a narrative. It is for this reason that the narratives driving and determining the sex act are so vital to making a sexual fantasy have weight. The sexual fantasy is the sublimation of desire, so the various narratives not only allow for the movement of that energy through the system created that is the desire, but also the energies being weighed in its relation to morality, where now the desire assimilates into the worldview of the individual as both the desire and its prohibition are codependant, the desire being sublimated into the sexual in its indulgence and the desire being sublimated into the political in the moral, both in being moral and immoral.
Unspoken here is the exact nature of the desire. Desire in its sublimation creates a posthuman mediation, some linguistic machine, which is created from the individual’s energies. Machines are thus required to speak to each other in order that any relationships can be had, with two persons equally participating in their own machines, which may or may not be capable of plugging into eachother’s. When compatibility occurs, the individuals are not having sex with each other - as communicating with the other is impossible - but having sex with a desire which is compatible with their own, both communicating, a pair of machines now melding into one.
It is for this reason that legalism of sexuality inspires horror. The machine of legalistic-sexuality is one which is alien to desire, yet perfectly compatible with the end plugs of the desire. The desire is perverted to mean not what is truly desired, but to mean the very thing which results from the fulfillment of this desire, the acts which result from the linguistic movement that truly takes place. Legalistic sexuality is horrifying not only in being alien to all, but also in being parasitic in its ability to latch onto the mind, as one unaware of their own desires will be only able to chase the results of their unconscious machines and may see the legal machine as being one in the same as the result.
Being an alien machine, legalism of sexuality is thus able to be commodified in an eternal number of ways. The only true successor to De Sade, the webcomic Oh Joy Sextoy has this in its very title, with sex having been reduced to only its results (anatomy and objects and motions), it can thus be made into commodities and then plugged into machines which operate on commodities moving as nothing except free-moving props guaranteed by some force, ie, the body without organs of capital and the bureaucracy of finance. With these objects able to be commodified, the mind is thrust with it, dragged along by endless machines far and beyond that which could ever be fueling the desire, tearing the psyche apart as desire is channeled into more and more futile paths through the various perversions of capital: silicon valley “polycule” culture, dating apps, or “kink”. Each of these imitates the end result of something which has at some point been genuinely expressed. Polycules legalize polyamorous relationships, dating apps legalize casual sex and matchmaking, and kink legalizes sadomasochism.
