Darshana Jayemanne

Infants, Interfaces, and Intermediation: Digital Parenting and the Production of “iPad Baby” Videos on YouTube

We investigate the ways young children’s use of mobile touchscreen interfaces is both understood and shaped by parents through the production of YouTube videos and discussions in associated comment threads. This analysis expands on, and departs from, theories of parental mediation, which have traditionally been framed through a media effects approach in analyzing how parents regulate their children’s use of broadcast media, such as television, within family life. We move beyond the limitations of an effects framing through more culturally and materially oriented theoretical lenses of mediation, considering the role mobile interfaces now play in the lives of infants through analysis of the ways parents intermediate between domestic spaces and networked publics. We propose the concept of intermediation, which builds on insights from critical interface studies as well as cultural industries literature to help account for these expanded aspects of digital parenting. Here, parents are not simply moderating children’s media use within the home, but instead operating as an intermediary in contributing to online representations and discourses of children’s digital culture. This intermediary role of parents engages with ideological tensions in locating notions of “naturalness:” the iPad’s gestural interface or the child’s digital dexterity.

The Nip and the Byte: Analog and Digital Performances in Videogames

This chapter ties together key threads developed in previous sections through applying the non-mechanistic cybernetics of Gregory Bateson and Anthony Wilden to Austin’s notion of performativity. Wilden distinguishes three levels within Bateson’s account of animal play: the analog continuum, the primary digitalization and the secondary digitalization. Mapping this onto Austin’s speech acts yields rigorous definitions of ‘ludic’ acts – illudic and perludic – which are capable of accounting for the wide variety of videogame performances.

Introduction: Videogames as Performances

This chapter presents a structural overview of the book, introducing key terms and concepts. The chapter opens with the figure of a door as a way of intertwining two central themes: framing and performativity. The approach to performativity taken by the book is distinguished from other significant traditions and texts in the academic study of games. The central contribution (a comparative methodology for analyzing videogame performances) is outlined along with the interdisciplinary engagements of the text.

Physical Wit: Games and the ‘Tactile Unconscious’

This chapter extends Benjamin’s concept of mimesis in order to understand the tactile aspects of videogame performance. Benjamin argues that there are two aspects to mimesis: semblance and play. Modern technologies of reproducibility such as photography and film have caused a shift towards the playful pole. This playful form of mimesis allows audiences to habituate themselves to the emergent forms of embodiment implicit in their relations to technology, developing what Benjamin calls an ‘optical unconscious’. The chapter argues that this notion needs to be amended for gaming through a reading of Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake, with the processes of mimesis having intensified to form a ‘tactile unconscious’. This mass distraction is capable of accounting for tactile experience in gaming at both individual and collective levels of analysis.

Serial Aesthetics – Gaming’s Metamorphic Bodies and Baudelaire’s ‘Argot Plastique’

This chapter explores how performativity and character design are linked in videogames through ‘serial aesthetics’ (the emphasis on and repetition of salient features). In making use of serial aesthetics, game character designs help players to maintain performative control in the dynamic and shifting scenarios of virtual worlds: each character is a ‘metamorphic body’. Serial aesthetics links game characters with caricature, but also leads to politically regressive designs which tie a body’s external signification (marked by qualities such as gender and race) to its performative capabilities. Gaming’s metamorphic bodies are explored through readings of QWOP, God Hand and the Metal Gear series.

How to Do Things with Images

This chapter explores J.L. Austin’s notion of performative utterances and how they may be repurposed for studying videogame performances. Austin himself attempts to exclude performances inside a ‘framed’ space (such as a game) as ‘parasitic’ on normal performative acts. However, the concept of the frame is important for articulating how performances are structured and understood. As Ndalianis has argued, baroque art utilized multiple framing devices in order to orient and guide audiences’ performance within a represented space. The importance of framing to videogames is demonstrated as a type of ‘neo-baroque’ media, through several case studies including Defender, the Elder Scrolls games and Batman: Arkham Asylum.

What Is Rhyparography? The Ambiguity of the Framing Device

This chapter examines framing devices in the history of Western art and literature. It shows how the ancient genre of rhyparography (the realist still-life or genre scene) reemerged in the margins or frames of devotional paintings as trompe l’oeil. Two scholarly readings of a key ‘gallery scene’ painting (The Cabinet of Corenlis van der Geest by van Haecht) are compared: firstly, Stoichita’s ‘tautegorical’ reading which emphasizes felicity and secondly Agamben’s ‘allegorical’ reading which emphasizes infelicity. These paradoxical readings of the framing device are shown to have intensified by the nineteenth century in a close reading of Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece.

Anterior Motives – From Subjective Shot to Portal’s Figure of Reversal

This chapter critiques Galloway’s notion of videogames as ‘collapsed allegory’, contrasting it with the idea of the framing device. Where the former can only account for the avatar’s movement, the latter is able to accommodate the many types of movement seen in FPS games. The problem then becomes one of identifying the ways that the multiple framing devices ‘collapse’ toward the game’s conclusion, thereby structuring its temporality. Two classes of framing device are identified: integral (those incorporated into the graphical, sound or tactile design of the game) and hypermediate (those which are more overt frames or screen demarcations).

‘Fanciful Microscopy’ – Framing Devices and Uncertainty in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49

This chapter conducts a close analysis of The Crying of Lot 49 in order to explore how the novel’s recursive structure exhibits the framing device in both its felicitous and infelicitous readings. These two aspects are generated by the novel’s use of uncertainty to challenge the conventions of the realist novel, its pastiche of detective fiction, its self-aware media specificity and the protagonist’s tendencies to both paranoia and melancholia. The book’s climactic gallery-scene converges these diverse qualities into a remarkable balance between uncertainty and immediacy. This makes The Crying of Lot 49 an interesting precursor to many of the aesthetic properties and techniques that will come to characterize videogames, in which the two aspects of the framing device become mapped onto the ludic concept of success/failure.

Time Invaders – Conceptualizing Performative Game Time

This chapter characterizes framing devices and other game elements as unstable signifiers, evaluating performances according to how they generate diachronic or synchronic effects by acting on those signifiers. Videogames make use of computers’ capabilities to present a very large set of these signifiers and thus generate highly complex forms of temporal experience. Because neither diachrony (exemplified by player performance) nor synchrony (computer-coded rule structures) can complete their respective operations and always leave a differential margin, videogames can be understood as diachrono-synchronic systems.