The World Is Born From Zero: Understanding Speculation and Video Games PDF
Preview The World Is Born From Zero: Understanding Speculation and Video Games
Cameron Kunzelman The World Is Born From Zero Video Games and the Humanities Edited by Nathalie Aghoro, Iro Filippaki, Chris Kempshall, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Jeremiah McCall and Sascha Pöhlmann Advisory Board Alenda Y. Chang, UC Santa Barbara Katherine J Lewis, University of Huddersfield Dietmar Meinel, University of Duisburg-Essen Ana Milošević, KU Leuven Soraya Murray, UC Santa Cruz Holly Nielsen, University of London Michael Nitsche, Georgia Tech Martin Picard, Leipzig University Melanie Swalwell, Swinburne University Emma Vossen, University of Waterloo Mark J.P. Wolf, Concordia University Esther Wright, Cardiff University Volume 8 Cameron Kunzelman The World Is Born From Zero Understanding Speculation and Video Games ISBN 978-3-11-071832-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-071945-1 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-071947-5 ISSN 2700-0400 Library of Congress Control Number: 2022932716 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Lichenia, © Molleindustria, 2019. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com Acknowledgements ThisbookbeganwhenIwasworkingontheprospectusformydissertationwhile completing my PhD at Georgia State University. Looking at the works I had se- lectedtowriteabout,IrealizedthatIhadaccidentallybecomeasciencefiction scholar,anddecidedtocommittothatratherthantodisavowit.AlisonSperling suggestedthatIattendtheScienceFictionResearchAssociationconference,and thereIencounteredavibrantscholarlycommunity.Thatencounterwithscience fiction studies, and the friction I felt when trying to line up how my home dis- ciplinesofgamestudiesandfilmstudiesunderstoodtheirobjectsofstudy,pro- duced this book. I could not have completed any of those initial investigations in graduate schoolwithoutthecriticalsupportofmycolleaguesatGeorgiaState.Alessandra Raengo, my advisor for many years of graduate school,taught me how toread. Iwouldnot have accomplished muchwithout thattool,and I am alwaysgrate- ful. Discussions with Jennifer Barker, Angelo Restivo,Ted Friedman, and Ethan Tussey were critical to developing how I understood media objects and what theycan do. Aclass on feminist theory with Amira Jarmakani literallychanged my life. I am deeply thankful to my fellow graduate students who helped me learn in immeasurable ways: Laurel Ahnert, Adam Cottrel, Jason Derby, Daren Fowler, Jenny Gunn, Justin Horton, Jazmine Hudson, Kristin Juarez, Dewey Mu- sante,andJennOlive.AspecialthankyouisreservedformyfriendJohnRoberts, who is alwayswilling togo on an absurd intellectual journey in order to figure out a hard philosophical problem.This book would also have been impossible without the support and critique of Lauren Cramer, who is a brilliant scholar and has always pushed me to think more deeply and complexly about the world that we all live in. Since coming to Mercer University, I have had the benefit of enjoying the company of, and critical discussions with, a number of excellent colleagues. Thank you to Natalie Bourdon,Tom Bullington, Kevin Cummings, David Davis, Frank Macke, Mary Alice Morgan, Michele Prettyman, Deneen Senasi, Laura Simon, James Stanescu, and Vasile Stănescu. Ben Dunn and his work at the McEachern Art Center has been crucial to my psychic life here. My students and teaching have also been critical to the development of the ideas in this book, and I want to thank Cam Wade, Luke MacIver, and Mallory Morgan for theirintellectualcontributionsalongtheway.EmilyBartlettperformedsomere- searchwork for this book that I am extremelygrateful for. Finally,the personal andfinancialsupportprovidedbyDeanAnitaGustafsonandtheCollegeofLib- https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110719451-001 VI Acknowledgements eralArtsandSciencescannotbeunderstated,andtoherIextendaveryspecial thanks. Inmyprofessionalacademiccommunities,thereareliterallytoomanypeo- pletonamewhohavehadadirectimpactontheideasinthisbook.GerryCan- avan hasbeen a constantchampion. Alison Sperling is probably the entire rea- son I went down this road at all, and I value our friendship highly.Thank you specifically to Ben Abraham, Stina Attebery, Ian Bogost, Stephanie Boluk, Ka- therineBuse,ChrisCarpenter,YussefCole,PawełFrelik,KishonnaGray,Michael Hansen,DarshanaJayemanne,StephenKearse,ReidMcCarter,PatrickLeMieux, Maddy Myers, Marielle Niesler, Laine Nooney, Joshua Pearson, Danielle Rien- deau, Steven Shaviro, Rebekah Sheldon, Austin Walker, and Rob Zacny. Pieces of this book have appeared in other places in radically different forms. Some of the arguments in the first chapter about mechanics of specula- tionwere published in“The Click of a Button:Video Games and the Mechanics ofSpeculation,”ScienceFictionFilm&Television11,no.3(2018).Thegermofthe thirdchapterappearedinBulletPointsMonthlyunderthetitle“Destroyedinthe Cut.”Thefinalchapterongamesandclimatechangeappearedinaslightlydif- ferentformas“VideoGamesasInterventionsintheClimateDisaster,”Paradoxa no. 31 (2019–2020). My extended thanks goes out to my editor Rabea Rittgerodt and the entire production team at De Gruyter, all of whom have been excellent in shaping and preparing this book for publication. Esther MacCallum-Stewart and Sascha Pöhlmann provided truly helpful early feedback on the manuscript, and the anonymous peer reviewers were supportive when it was helpful and critical whenitwasnecessary.IamdelightedtoalsothankPaoloPederciniforallowing me to use images from Lichenia for the book’s cover. MichaelLutzhasreadmorethingswithmethanprobablyanyoneelseatthis point,andthereareveryfewideasinthisbookthathavenotbeenbouncedoff ofhim.Itishardtoimaginethisbookactuallybeingfinishedwithoutthosecon- versations. Finally, I want to thank Kelly. Contents Introduction 1 Solid Snake’s War Dystopia 1 Science Fiction and Video Games 4 Thinking with Video Games 14 Several Notes About This Book 17 The World Is Born From Zero 19 Chapter 1 A Method for Thinking Speculation, Science Fiction, and Video Games 21 What is Speculation? 21 Speculation in Science Fiction 22 Contingency and Facticity 36 Hume’s Problem 37 Mechanics of Speculation 41 The Plenitude of Speculation 52 Chapter 2 Potential Labor: On VA-11 HALL-A 54 Introduction 54 Immaterial Labor 57 Games, Subjectivity, and Speculation 63 VA-11 HALL-A and the Speculative Bartender 78 Potential Labor Beyond the Workplace 88 Subjectivity in Third Person 90 Thinking Like A Chicken Fryer 93 Coda: Radicalizing the Subject 97 Chapter 3 Anti-Blackness and the Aesthetic Grounding of Speculation: On the Last of Usand the Last of Us Part 2 101 Introduction 101 A Note On This Chapter 103 Game Studies and the Racial Imagination 104 The Last of Us: Henry, Sam, and the Void 114 Left Behind: Riley’s Bite 126 The Last of Us Part II: Nora, The Basement, and the Prompt 129 VIII Contents Chapter 4 The Politics of Design in Climate Change Games 141 Introduction 141 The Capabilities of Modeling 149 Affective Climate 158 Direct Intervention in the Climate Disaster 169 Beyond Intervention 175 Conclusion 178 Bibliography 180 Media 192 Index of Names 194 Index of Subjects 197 Introduction Solid Snake’s War Dystopia InMetalGearSolid4(Konami2008),warhaschanged.Privatemilitarycorpora- tions(PMCs)performthevastmajorityofwarfare,andtheydosoatthebehestof governments and private interests. Behind the scenes, their operations are sur- veilledandcontrolledbyanartificialintelligencesystemnamedSonsofthePa- triots(SOP).Operatingwithandthroughnanomachinesinjectedintoeverycom- batantworldwide,SOPisauniversalmarketplacethatallarmedwarfaremustgo through. All guns are registered to specific users, and those users are the only people who can fire those guns. The bedrock of the global economy is arms sales. It is a warfare utopia, and it is one of the most popular science fiction video game settings. Players experience this fiction through the character Solid Snake.The pro- tagonist of Metal Gear Solid (Konami 1998) and a critical ally in Metal Gear Solid2:Sons of Liberty (Konami 2001), Solid Snakeis an archetypalsciencefic- tionprotagonist.HeisthecloneofthegreatestColdWarrior,thepatriot-turned- mercenaryBigBoss.HecameofageintheUnitedStatesspecialforcesunitFox- hound during the waningdaysof the Cold War. After retiringduringthe 1990s, hewaspulledbackintotheworldofclandestineopsandsneakingmissionsfor the so-called Shadow Moses Incident.¹ During that mission, he met his clone twin Liquid Snake and he discovered a cybernetically enhanced ninja who, it turns out,was the resurrected corpse of his war buddy Grey Fox. He was aug- mented with nanomachines,which allowed his handlers to monitor his condi- tion from afar,but at the same time he became an unknowingvector for a tail- oredviruscalledFOXDIEthatkillednearlyeverymajorcharacterhemetwitha simulatedheartattack.AttheendoftheIncident,itwasrevealedthatavastcon- spiracy of techo-political origins existed in the heart of international politics. Metal Gear Solid 2 then explored this from a near-future angle,with the setup including a massive faked environmental disaster, world-spanning AI control programs, and the resurrection of the now-dead Liquid Snake from an arm that has been grafted onto a man named Revolver Ocelot. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (Konami 2004), rather than continuing from this point, headed back into the 1960s to depict the rise of Big Boss in the wake of his mentor, and mother,The Boss. In this game,we learned that the late twentieth century TheeventsofMetalGearSolidaretheShadowMosesIncident. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110719451-002 2 Introduction (in this fictional world) is really justa shellgame between a man named Major Zero and Big Boss over how to carryon the memory of The Boss. Thisisanextremelyelaboratesetofhistoricaleventsthatledtotheeventsof MetalGear Solid4, and I am recounting it all in brief heretonotethe spiraling waythatthesciencefictionelementsoftheseriesconstantlybuildononeanoth- er.Releasedoverthecourseofmorethanadecade,thesegamesareemblematic ofacomplexifyingstylethatcharacterizesmanysciencefictionvideogamesand their worlds.This isnotabookabouttheMetalGear Solidseries,but this elab- oration of the history of a science fiction world allows us to begin to think through a core concept of this book: speculation. In order to ground their pastsandfutures,thesegamesskipbackwardandforwardintime.Thisrelation between what we know and what we assume to know, or what we speculate about, in science fictionworlds is critical to the following book. When MetalGearSolid4begins,then, itisby-the-booksciencefiction.Itis our world, and its post-Cold War problems, recast through a different lens and projected forward from that skewed perspective. Following Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska, I hold that “science fiction deals with the problems and promises offered by science, technology and rationality in an imaginative con- text,” and in relation to video games, it is the games themselves that give theseproblemsandpromisesshape.²Whileourfirstthoughtsaboutsciencefic- tiontendtofocusinonpossiblefutures,asMaryAnnDoaneremindsus,science fiction’s futural projections are often “bound up with issues of reproduction— whether in its constant emphasis upon the robot, android, automaton, and an- thropomorphically-conceivedcomputeroritinsistentreturntotheelaborationof high-tech, sophisticated audio-visual systems.”³ The tracing of technological warfarehistorythroughthesciencefictionalmode,fromTheBoss’reproductive systemtocloningtogenetherapytoautotelicAIsystems,isonelongtrajectory ofspeculativethoughtthatengageswiththecoreofthegenre.WhenSolidSnake appearsonthebattlefieldofanunnamedMiddle Easterncountry(thegeopolit- icalracismofwhichisalsoapartofthespeculativeeconomy),heappearsasa figure of history who is able to show us, precisely, how war has changed. His family line, of birth and cloning and weaponized subjectivity, is the map of how warischanging.He’sacharacterbornoutofthemachineryofsciencefic- tion, and his world is permeated by familiargenre expectations. Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska, Science Fiction Cinema: From Outerspace to Cyberspace (London:Wallflower,2000),2. MaryAnnDoane,“Technophilia:Technology,Representation,andtheFeminine,”inLiquid Metal:The Science Fiction Film Reader, ed. Sean Redmond (New York: Columbia University Press,2007),188.
The list of books you might like
