But, to commemorate last weekend’s epic downloading of the Rock Band Talking Heads pack, the following:

Special thanks, as always, to my buddy Dave at Geek Lee Tist:
dork aggregation machine par excellence.

Arkham Asylum

In a sense, it’s how the game institutes a kind of “fungibility” (to borrow a term from Ian Bogost’s Unit Operations) for its own processes, how they function as a sort of common currency that can be exchanged into different kinds of pleasures, nearly at will.

The co-equal trick of the game is to read the gameplay alongside the game’s well-known “narrative” content, not to insist on their Platonic or formal distinctness, but to get at how they inform one another.  I myself have an odd relationship with this approach to criticism: having to play the tactical move of always keeping narrative and ludology separate, if only to allow them to collide later.  That tension is part of my long-standing interest in Bogost’s work – he gets at the inherent messiness of the medium in a way that I think is irresitible.

But back to Batman.  There’s another economy in play here: an economy of images.  These images are irredicibly “felt” on some level.  It explains the underlying thirst for this game, one that borders (but does not become, I think) a version of Marx’s commodity fetish.  The game plays towards this thirst for iconic form: constructing a Batman who is a transcendent composite of the characters various versions from the past: armored like the post-Burton films, dark and physically imposing like Miller’s, gadget-happy like Adam West, stealthy like Bale, yet with a classical design and moral compass.  It plays out in the familiar voice casting.  It plays out, perhaps most noticeably, in the restrained-yet-expressive cavalcade of familiar Rogues Gallery faces.  That many of these “images” are garnered only through the side-quest of Riddler trophies, a mechanic with its own clear iconic weight within the franchise, further affirms my sticky, emergent sense of an “imalgorithmic” structure.

In other words, to escape the gravity of my sloppy portmanteau of image and algorithm, I found my experience of the game to be faceless, frontless.  There’s a vertigo to this kind of play, in Caillois’s sense of the word, where rules meet the “free-play” of imagistic meaning, where images meet the corporate complex behind Batman.  I’m trying to work out the critical use-value of this vertigo.  Is this what it means to play a good game?   Or, is this a selective state available to members of the audience (like myself), who have already participated in a rich iconic economy prior to the game?  Once we’re here, what do we do?

The Unvarnished Truth

This represents, to my mind, perhaps the single greatest piece of writing on video gaming ever.

Dragon*Con Swag: Art by (clockwise from top) Dan Brererton, Amanda Conner, Tyson McAdoo, Dirk Strangely

What I’ve taken away is a scene of unabashed joy: images of quite-nearly unfiltered celebrations of the weird, the fringe, the intellectual and the pseudo-intellectual.  “Nerd culture,” both a real abstraction and an apparition of my own design, celebrates and reifies itself.  The culture of Dragon*Con is almost entirely based on commodity fetishism.  The abstract ideas and figures of pop culture are, for that moment, disarmingly real — purchased for a low, low price.

Dragon*Con is ringed on all sides with that crystallization of enthusiasm into real “stuff”: into posters, costumes, t-shirts; into celebrity panels, autographs, and photo-ops.  My semi-trained critical eye detects that business far too easily.

Coming out of the ‘con, though, with that gut feeling like Christmas morning was already over, I pinpointed my dissatisfaction, and it forms the beginning point for what I hope will be a longer-term project of thinking through the lens of Nerd Culture.  I wanted more depth.  The moment-to-moment flanerie of Dragon*Con, and a reading of the event based on the sheer surface weight of the experience, does not get at the more fundamental kinds of interactions boiling beneath the surface.  Engagement with either of the Battlestar Galactica panels I attended is based on a far more profound interaction with the multiple rhetorical layers that constitute that show: as a commodity, as genre fiction, and as a discourse on humanity/technology/etc.

This isn’t simply about reproducing the (consumed) image through costume, dress, and autograph collecting in an effort to find a more “real” experience.  This is about living through the image in an attempt to re-encounter the image.  This is a community speaking back to “electrate” culture in its own terms.