Eco-Performance in the Digital RPG Gamescape
Performance Studies encompasses a wide range of embodied behaviors, and its concerns about agency and event lead naturally to a consideration of the spaces of performance, since practices always take place somewhere. Cultural critics are charged with examining not just what is spoken, but also who is speaking (and more importantly, who is not) in the environment of a text or artifact. Landscape, like language, is not simply a passive medium facilitating the interactions between active and animate agents; landscape often determines actions and is determined by them in a recursive process that is evidenced in material and consequential ways. The spatial turn in both performance and cultural studies has prompted a resurgence of interest in the various ways that landscape performs, raising questions that probe both inclusive and exclusive ways of being and seeing in any cultural medium. Ecocriticism must also make this critical analytical commitment, asking how politics and economics shape the environments they inhabit, and considering how the materials and matériel of those environments are sedimented in the political and economic choices they produce1. More specifically, a radical ecocriticism should interrogate the performances in, and of, the RPG gamescape.
Arjun Appadurai proposed extending the traditional place-based concept of the landscape, whether natural or built, to encompass contemporary spatial categories such as financescape, mediascape, and ethnoscape (1996, 33). I would suggest an equivalent need for a critical examination of the gamescape, defined here as the multidimensional space within and against which the process of video-gameplay evolves. That gamescape contributes to what has been described as the ‘creation of presence’, the immersive experience in which videogame player/participants go beyond entertainment to experience a vividly affective engagement with the world of the game (Schieffelin 1998, 194). Conjoining place and performance in the notion of the gamescape stresses the natural and social relationships that inevitably develop between actors and contexts – relationships that are improvisational and contingent rather than predictable and fixed. The gamescape is simultaneously performance space and performative place, and it interrogates the identities that traverse its contexts even as it interpellates them. Successful gameplay demands that players read the gamescape as an active and critical component of RPG gameplay – and that same gamescape deserves to be read critically for its social constructions and cultural assumptions, especially those related to environmental issues. Revisiting the operations of the gamescape as performance encourages the growth of new dialogues between multiple disciplines, and unlocks new critical environments for exploration. Gamescapes are particularly ripe for a closer ecocritical consideration.
The term gamescape is not new to videogame criticism. Shoshana Magnet usefully proposed the term to serve as ‘a way of thinking about the implications of the way in which landscape in videogames is actively constructed’ and to foreground ‘how the gamespace works to shape a player’s particular understanding of a larger set of spatial ideologies’ (2006, 143). Magnet duly notes that landscape theory has expanded its traditionally more narrow aesthetic definition to include conceptual vistas such as the playing fields of the videogame, and she rightfully considers the critical consequences of failing to examine the ideological implications of the gamescape (centering her argument on the popular computer game, Tropico). Similarly, both Baerg and Voorhees in this volume actively examine the political valences in game design and gameplay. I would add, however, that videogame critics must also interrogate the gamescape as something more than simply ‘a thing to think with’; beyond providing the mise en scène of a staged political agenda, it must also be understood as a collection of performances that take place (and make space) with real consequences2. As I will demonstrate, the videogame Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits (Sony 2003) provides a multifaceted example of the variable performances present in, and presented by, the RPG videogame genre.
Calling for a new definition of landscape that acknowledges its multiform identity and variable performance, John Brinckerhoff Jackson suggests that, understood as ‘an environment modified by the permanent presence of a group’, landscape is produced when two different aspects of human existence interact (1984, 12). Jackson describes those desiring aspects metaphorically, figuratively embodied as a ‘political animal’ and an ‘inhabitant’. Landscape – and for my purposes, the gamescape – is produced in the dialectic exchange between these competing desires, making meaning out of the space between them while also delimiting the shape of each (see also Moran’s chapter in this volume, specifically with regard to his comments regarding ‘configurable being’ as they might be extended to the gamescape).
The political aspect refers to the human need for community; like all creatures, we can neither thrive nor perpetuate our species alone. There is more to this social dimension than a simple desire for ‘the mere presence of other bodies’; we have ‘the need for sustained discourse, for the exchange of ideas … and for disagreement, since both kinds of communication lead to a sharpened sense of our identity’ (Jackson 1984, 11). Landscape evidences this social sensibility in multiple ways, marked by territorial borderlines, roads, cities, and towns – public spaces and domestic places that reflect the ingress and egress of multiple actors, incised by their constitutive and transgressive interplay. These emergent spaces have a clearly performative dimension as well as a material one, often ignoring natural boundaries in the construction and identification of political and social domains. Spatial outlines serve as performance scripts, directing certain kinds of social behaviors (and certain types of social actors) while rendering other performances impractical or impossible. RPG gamescapes are therefore informed and conformed by a variety of political/community elements. There are spaces to explore and places to visit, towns or cities teeming with creatures of every age and description, and pathways and roadways that must be traversed in order to connect with those other bodies. Players typically maneuver their avatars through a network of domestic and public spaces, homes and businesses and town squares and church ruins, around and across the gamescape, soliciting conversations with other avatars, building alliances, forging connections and negotiating and renegotiating both contracts and contexts in order to forward gameplay. In the process, the instinct for community constructs a social space, and players participate in the political construction of their avatar (including its environmental consciousness) within the confines and contours of the gamescape.
Alternatively, however, player and avatar also experience the environment of the game in a second way: as inhabitants. If the need for community modifies the kinds of interaction from which social identity emerges, then the natural landscape also influences and shapes both the actors and their interactions with other characters/avatars/elements in their performances. In turn, those performed behaviors can, and do, impact the surrounding environment, creating a kind of inhabited cyber-ecology in which every element ultimately interacts and interfaces with every other element. Inhabiting the role of an avatar in the gamescape demands that, as actors, we ‘are also inhabitants of the [world of the game], involved in the natural order and in a sense even part of it’ (Jackson 1984, 11). Everyday activities, such as seeking food and shelter and locating safe spots to restore vitality or to memorialize performance, are characteristic behaviors prescribed and proscribed by environmental conditions – whether in the natural landscape of the real world or in the virtual gamescape of the RPG. Responding to the pressure to survive and thrive within the natural order of the gamescape, avatars must successfully adapt to conditions and evolve a variety of defensive behaviors that shape their performance identities (or as Moran describes in this same volume, their ‘capacities’) just as actively as the political pressures forge a social aspect; in the RPG, the progressive leveling up of individual avatars literally signifies the ongoing construction of identity in response to the pressures of inhabiting the gamescape.
In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested that ‘nature is thoroughly mediate’, available for the production of an image of the world that is no more than ‘a realized will – the double of man’ (1991, 35). In the context of the RPG, the gamescape is equally and eerily so. Successfully performed gameplay is doubly ‘ergodic’, requiring a ‘nontrivial effort’ on the part of both player and avatar to negotiate the gamescape successfully (Aarseth 1997, 1)3. This video-gamescape is both naturally virtual and virtually political; it is at once an immaterial cyberspace without physical location or extension, and, at the same time, an imaginative place of performance and presence where behaviors generate immediate and material consequences. Here, in the gamescape, player/agents willingly and willfully merge their analog selves with the digital identities of their avatars, doubling themselves in conjoined performance (rather than simply exchanging identities, one for one). This gamescape is neither as broadly undefined as the game-space, nor as specifically local as any one game-place; instead, the gamescape resonates between them, ‘a mediating term’ that is ‘more grounded and available to visual experience than space’ and yet ‘more environmental and constitutive of the imaginative order than place’ (Chaudhuri and Fuchs 2002, 3)4. Gamescape is at once manifestly ‘there’, some place where performances can be seen, and then again diaphanously ‘here’, an imaginative space suffused with the potential of the virtual, where some other/Other scene might appear. While it is tempting to reductively read the natural order of the game environment as little more than the projection of design code, such a reading fails to grasp the multiple ways in which gameplay and gamescape are implicated in each other.
Conceived and constructed by game designers, the gamescape depends on its underlying game engine to provide what might be thought of as the natural laws that govern the potential manifestations of the world of the game itself (Bogost 2006, ch. 5). Not every option is available, not every outcome is possible in the gamescape; just as the laws of gravity and thermodynamics delimit how natural phenomena can behave in the material world, the game engine dictates the limit behaviors of objects and avatars within the game. Yet within the constraints of any game’s coded parameters, multiple performances take place, performances that vary individually even as they ultimately coalesce around a desired end. In most RPG gameplay, there is a final outcome that is the goal of every player. Certain permutations of behaviors must be accomplished in order for gameplay to come to a successful conclusion; yet within the game, the specific order of that performance is not dictated either by the terms of the narrative or by the constraints of the game mechanics. Performance is both repetitive and yet non-iterative; players learn to negotiate the gamescape through a combination of repeated, patterned behaviors while also expecting to be rewarded with new opportunities for enhanced play. ‘This balance of predictability with randomness of theme and variation’, as Mark Wolf notes, ‘is necessary to most video games’ (2001, 82), and it is this same sense of video-gameplay as a rehearsed, repetitive performance, both inside the world of the avatar and outside in the world of the player, that suggests the doubling that is at the heart of performance studies. The gamescape, mediating between political spaces and inhabited places, also serves as a performance medium: a field of play for performance studies.
Richard Schechner describes performances as restored behaviors or twice-behaved behaviors – activities that are rehearsed and repeated over the course of many occasions and multiple lifetimes (2006, 28). Whether formalized onstage or acted out daily, these are practiced performances, behaviors that repeat and recall past performances and that are ‘marked, framed, or heightened’ by our consciousness that we are, in fact, performing: ‘restored behavior can be worked on, stored and recalled, played with, made into something else, transmitted and transformed’ (2006, 35). Video-gameplay, with its emphasis on pattern and repetition, is clearly restored behavior, doubled again by the simultaneous activities of player and avatar as each executes a series of learned, repetitive moves. Successful inhabitation requires that behaviors be rehearsed and repeated in order to render them readily available in the appropriate setting as conditions demand. Successful negotiation of a political space demands that traditional behaviors must be storable, recallable, and easily transmitted from one set of actors to another according to custom and tradition. Schechner reminds us that anthropologist Erving Goffman defined a performance as ‘all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants’ (1959, 15–16). Those repeated performances he described as a ‘part’ or ‘routine’; in the context of the gamescape, such restored behaviors correspond to the roles we play in the RPG videogame genre. These roles represent the accumulation of various bits of behavior, of skills and accessories, of items of equipment and magical abilities, all chosen by the player from a menu or earned through successful play; this improvisatory production of an identity, even limited by a finite set of options, further contributes to a sense of player agency and to a sense of avatar singularity. Battle performances, a significant set of rehearsed and repeated behaviors, are choreographed to respond to external threats and to maximize the performances of multiple avatars, often in synchronized performances together. Players must shift avatars to tactically defeat enemies that emerge in the gamescape, influenced by each character’s specific skills and talents; at some moments, the battle performance of one avatar may be enhanced by the performance of another.
Significantly, Goffman elaborated on his definition of performance by adding: ‘When an individual or performer plays the same part to the same audience on different occasions, a social relationship is likely to arise’ (1959, 15–16). In the RPG gamescape, narrative development and environmental elements conspire to produce behaviors that are repeated, again and again, for audiences re-encountered throughout gameplay. Avatars hold conversations over and over again with a variety of non-playable characters (NPCs) in order to produce new information, and they frequently revisit locations in order to discover new objects or to uncover information not available during a previous episode. Sometimes, even previous battles must be re-fought when avatars retrace their footsteps through unstable segments of the gamescape. Inevitably, relationships between avatars and between players and places within the game emerge; moments of confusion often dictate a return to a likely safe place, typically a town or domestic space, where information is readily available and where NPCs have demonstrated a pattern of providing usable, reliable information. Knowing those audiences also enables better role-playing choices: skilled players use those encounters to better select weapons, skills, and restoratives based on previous experiences in the same place, with the same space. The pressures of inhabitation and the expectations of community (that together shape the inner world of the game) dictate these specific nuances of behavior, culminating in a performance that enacts a further doubling. Jackson notes that the inhabited and political aspects of landscape are always found together in the real world of the player ‘out there’. ‘In here’, in the gamescape of the avatar, these same aspects continue to contribute in turn to the development of the identities that emerge in the mediated interface between them (Jackson 1984, 42).
Schechner points to the ubiquity of restored behaviors across time and space, but he also identifies a paradox at the heart of performance – a paradox he describes in language that returns us to the digital context of the gamescape. ‘Performances are made from bits of restored behavior,’ he writes, ‘but every performance is different from every other’, and the idea that ‘bits of behavior’ can be recombined in exponential ways adds yet another layer of variability to this non-iterative repetition (2006, 30). Jackson points out that while the political landscape is the product of some ‘coherent design inspired by philosophy or religion’, structured with ‘a distinct purpose in view’, the inhabited landscape is ‘an existential landscape: it achieves its identity only in the course of existence’ as it responds to changes in needs and wants in an adaptive evolutionary dialogue with its mediate and immediate surroundings (1984, 43). The virtual gamescape, mediating between bytes of information and bits of behavior, is simultaneously produced by the same Darwinian tension and is made productive by the same paradox. It emerges between the structured order of computational system operations and the improvisatory randomness of unit operations, between the linear, goal-directed narrative of the game and the episodic performances that traverse it.
Ian Bogost’s creative engagement with a similar paradox in information systems can be useful here as well. Bogost critically compares system operations, which operate in a top-down fashion to ensure an orderly flow of information supporting the primary goal of a teleological system, to unit operations, creative ‘modes of meaning-making that privilege discrete, disconnected actions’5. Bogost makes a fundamental distinction between the effects of these two types of operations: system operations actually ‘regulate meaning for their components’, while the existential nature of unit operations, like that of inhabited landscape, suggests that any meaning that can be attached to these episodic and distinctive activities will be ‘derive[d] … from the interrelations of their components’ (2006, 4, my italics). The political landscape of the videogame expresses an organizing system that is conveyed by narrative, particularly in the often extensive narrative typical of the RPG. This aspect of the gamescape is therefore filled with what Jackson identifies as visible political elements: roads and highways, monuments, ruins, and public spaces, which also ‘have a definite role to play … [t]hey exist to insure order and security and continuity’, reminding players and avatars of the official history of the diegetic community and of the rights and responsibilities that its members are heirs to – a function that is clearly regulatory and prescriptive6. On the other hand, the episodic performances of the player/avatar are often driven by the immediate demands made by the inhabited landscape. Avatars are first concerned with their own survival, functioning primarily to secure health, rest, safety, and financial means, and to defeat external threats to their ability to continue to perform in the game. In these unit operations, avatar identity is always contingent upon the other components of the singular situation: on the skill of the player, on an accumulated inventory of weapons and spells, and on the rays of relation (a phrase I deliberately borrow from Emerson’s Nature) between the primary avatar and the secondary playable characters who accompany him or her. Indeed, those relationships are generally invisible during narrative interludes, when their separate representations are often collapsed into the solitary figure of the playable avatar7. The individual identities of the assemblage that supports the primary avatar (masked during system operations by merging them into the single figure of the primary in order to simplify narrative in the service of the game’s end) become visible components at the moment that narrative pauses and battle operations begin.
This paradoxical ambiguity at the heart of both performance and operations produces yet another doubling in our examination of the gamescape, and radically underscores the need for an eco-performative videogame criticism that interrogates the production of both space and performance. The multiple tensions between the political landscape and the inhabited landscape, between system operations and unit operations, between the mission and the moment, serve to highlight why a more expansive (and more ecological) videogame criticism must consider all these performances, rather than focus exclusively on the ideological script that is but one active aspect of the gamescape as a whole. Few games illustrate the potency of this creative and contradictory tension better than the PlayStation 2 RPG game, Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits (Sony 2003)8.
From its opening sequence, Sony Computer Entertainment America’s 2003 videogame Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits visually and verbally presents a world characterized by dual performance, by a conflicted doubling that will recur across multiple aspects of character and story. We are presented with a gamescape in which nature and culture are simultaneously at odds and at one, where nature figures simultaneously as a spiritual resource and as a depleted energy source in a world populated by two vociferously opposed categories of inhabitants, Humans and Deimos. The story narrative replicates the shape of the world it describes, dividing play action between two concurrent yet non-iterative storylines, those of Kharg and Darc, twin offspring of a Deimos father and a human mother, separated at birth, each unaware of the existence of the other. The system operation is overcoded with the story of separate quests with the same goal – the successful recovery of a collection of original and elemental Great Spirit Stones whose possession endows the holder with great power that may be used for good or evil. In narrative sections that follow Kharg and Darc by turns, we are invited to experience a gamespace delimited by both its political and inhabited aspects, ostensibly moving to the same conclusion, but experienced very differently by its protagonists.
Indeed, Arc the Lad’s perspective is only one of the unique aspects of its system operations, an aspect that emphasizes a unique spatial orientation as a way to interrogate its own political gamescape. Using the third-person perspective that characterizes RPG play, Arc provides its own mechanism for challenging this univocal and homogeneous narrative viewpoint. Because gameplay is antiphonal (we play alternately as the Kharg avatar and then as Darc), our player’s-eye view is not restricted to a single standpoint. This has the effect of doubling the ideological valence of the gamescape; as I noted earlier, we cannot remain unaware that the political elements of the gamescape are variably constructed depending on whose perspective controls the view. Jackson emphasized that the continuous tension between the political and the inhabited aspects of landscape means that ‘no landscape can be exclusively devoted to the fostering of only one identity’ (1984, 12); in Arc the Lad, this twofold identity is made visible in the twin avatars, Kharg and Darc. As Kharg, we perform in a human-centric gamescape, where extractive activities are justified (‘The most important thing is to develop the country’) and where the stated victory conditions for each early battle is ‘defeat all enemies’. Thus the gamescape’s performative effect is to delimit a human-only community for which every non-human entity is excluded as enemy and to demand a centripetal performance that can only produce a utilitarian environmental practice. As Darc, we are Deimos, despising the greed of humans who ‘steal’ the spirit stones necessary for Deimos magic and demanding nothing less than genocide; victory conditions here are to ‘defeat every last human’! According to the master narrative, Darc’s purpose, like Kharg’s, is to locate and retrieve the lost Great Spirit Stones, but each avatar assumes that the power of the stones will be his to use exclusively for the benefit of his race and for the eradication of the other. An invasion force of human mercenaries dismissively responds to charges of trespass with the quip, ‘This is Deimos territory … therefore, it doesn’t belong to anyone’. Neither race is willing to acknowledge the rights of the other to life, liberty, or property.
In primitive cultures, territorial boundaries worked like a protective container, preserving the purity of the cultural territory within from contamination by all that was outside that ‘envelope’ or ‘packaging’ (Jackson 1984, 14). In modern nations, however, those borderlines perform more ‘like a skin: a thin surface which is in fact part of the body, part of space which it protects’ (Jackson 1984, 12). Arc the Lad’s twin avatars perform like embodied social spaces, and these social behaviors are doubly framed, marked, and emphasized, since they are literally twice-performed, once in one skin and again in the other. In this fashion, the gamescape mediates the player’s experience and that of each avatar. As Kharg, we experience life as the only son of a prominent political figure in a modestly successful urban setting. Kharg’s narrative reflects the performances expected from a young person of means, with an emphasis on his responsibility to his social community and not to the environment that supports it (‘Your time has come to give something back’). The presence and pressure of an audience – a key component of any performance – is also registered repeatedly across the gamescape. NPCs emphasize the safety and security of town life compared with the dangers reputed to be lurking outside the city walls. ‘Once you leave town,’ a non-playable character comments, ‘you may come across monsters.’ Townspeople offer Kharg advice on appropriate conduct, and all agree that the monstrous Deimos, ‘just creatures that can talk and use tools’, can never be reconciled to the human need for progress.
Once the narrative shifts to Darc’s story, however, we are subjected to an entirely different interpretation of the events just experienced as Kharg. The performances in, and of, Darc’s gamescape are manifestly different in tone and detail. While Kharg appears fully human, with only a secret mark to show his Deimos half, Darc has survived as an orphan slave, visibly marked as half human. He lives among the Orcon, one of many Deimos populations; we quickly realize that while all Deimos may look alike to humans, there are actually many species of Deimos, living in communities with their own social networks and conflicts. Just as Kharg understands his identity in terms of the performances expected of him in the social space he inhabits, Darc performs an identity conditioned on slavery and discrimination. In Orcoth, he is dismissed repeatedly as ‘a Deimos wannabe’, disqualified from full membership even in the restricted social sphere he initially inhabits. His constant query, ‘Which path should I walk?’, interrogates the instability of his identity, and his social status measurably limits his potential audience and retards his character’s opportunities for growth.
Even when they walk separate paths, however, Kharg and Darc’s separate identities follow similar developmental trajectories, noticeably in relation to their battle companions. Each assembles a supporting cast of confederates who make up the components of their singular battle units. Kharg and Darc are both literally and metaphorically non-identical twins, near doubles of each other, and those characters that encounter both of them remark on their similarity of gesture. The same near mirroring of non-iterative likeness can be observed between their battle companions – yet another example of parallel performance that resonates across this doubled and redoubled gamescape (Whitlock 2004, 181–3). Recalling Bogost’s description of unit operations, we can see that these battle groups perform in a singular yet similar way. Neither Kharg nor Darc remains solitary for long; each needs other avatars in order to maximize survival in the inhabited gamescape, particularly when faced with battle conditions. Each is also constantly practicing his behaviors with and for this increasingly important cohort of companions. Out of these repeated performances, relationships emerge – relationships that become critical to survival. NPCs provide social density in every urban setting in the gamescape, but inhabitation demands more than the presence of other bodies and more than the critical exchange present in community. Inhabitation demands uniquely cooperative interrelationships, such as those made visible in the battle units. Those relationships are not born of the static conditions preset by narrative or historically determined by community standards; instead, they develop out of adaptive and improvisatory performances – both Kharg and Darc are at one time or another betrayed by one or more of their companions (which subsequently calls for a renegotiated relationship between them), and their battle units periodically reconfigure and recombine to produce variations on their original themes.
The twin narratives ultimately collapse into one as the game nears its conclusion, responding to a teleological system operation that condenses an otherwise unruly narrative into a single admirable story. United against a final enemy whose strength requires that they combine forces, Kharg and Darc perform a collapse of their doubling into a single identity. We also choose here, electing to play as either Kharg or Darc while the remaining half shadows the active avatar. As the game concludes, a final cinematic sequence allows us to step back, returning to our analog body while both avatars return. We see their handshake, a symbolic performance of a totalizing narrative that suggests a cooperative future for both human and Deimos, one that foregrounds a collaborative assimilation as pervasively seductive as the ideology of colonization that Magnet argues is so insidious in Tropico. The narrative subsumes the action of the game, and smoothly elides the doubled difference we have experienced in the course of gameplay. Magnet’s critique would surrender the gamescape to the narrative at this point; Bogost’s argument would assert that videogame criticism should emphasize the unit operations of gameplay, the discrete microperformances that inhabit the gamescape and that emphasize not narrative coherence but operative repetition. An ecocritical videogame criticism cannot settle for either alternative, but instead should consider the relation of each to all of the behaviors informing the expanse of the gamescape. Performances, as Schechner insists, ‘exist only as actions, interactions, and relationships’, and it is as multiple performances that Arc the Lad ought to be interrogated (2006, 30).
In his monumental ode to the production and representation of social space, Henri LeFebvre notes that social space emerges as a sort of by-product of the extension and acceleration of human traffic, in the growth and development of economic and information networks. Like the virtual gamescape of the videogame, social spaces are immaterial and yet real; we perceive them in the spatial practices that emerge out of the interaction between conceptual representations of space (like political maps or engineers’ diagrams, these are maps or outlines rather than territories) and those lived spaces of representation where we act out our individual lives (Lefebvre 1991, 38–40). Social spaces/spatial practices are no more materially extensive than cyberspaces, yet they are real in the sense that they have consequences – they effect changes in the political and inhabited aspects of the gamescape, which mediates between them. These practices conform, transform, and perform social spaces; social spaces manifest a particular shape as a result of our repeated and rehearsed behaviors, and performance practices and performed spaces co-evolve over time. While not separable like physical spaces, social spaces are readily recognizable and they ‘may be […] superimposed’ on one another so that they exist simultaneously rather than one simply absorbing or eradicating another (Lefebvre 1991, 86–8). The gamescape, as I have argued throughout this chapter, is a social space, marked by the spatial practices of both playable and non-playable characters whose comings and goings are lived and mapped within it. Arc the Lad’s gamescape contains a multitude of overlapping spatial practices: both human and Deimos avatars move from place to place, from simple dwelling to major plaza, from country to city, and from one nation to another. As the avatars traverse the worlds of Arc the Lad, the gamescape materializes around them, expanding the field of play as peripheral areas become more central, and as new centers of action redefine what is consequently peripheral. Movement and performance make room in the game; performances construct or produce the social spaces within which the avatars subsequently perform again.
Those performances that comprise the gamescape represent the collision of system narrative and unit operations in a repertoire of repeated behaviors. Bogost endorses unit analysis as a critical methodology for reading a variety of cultural artifacts, a ‘general practice of criticism’ that relies on ‘the discovery and exposition of unit operations at work in one or many source texts’, and he demonstrates his method by focusing on Steven Spielberg’s 2004 film The Terminal (2006, 15). Arguing that the film’s narrative is an unruly and undisciplined tangle of weak plotlines that thinly links discrete events together, Bogost instead examines its unit operations to discern their thematic motif. Like Magnet’s recovery of the ideological narrative that overdetermines the action in Tropico, Bogost’s approach is useful in its conclusions, but privileges only one aspect of the gamescape in its critique.
A more holistic approach to the analysis of the gamescape would be to embrace the paradigm of the scenario as a more nuanced tool for videogame criticism. As Diana Taylor defines it, a scenario is a rough schematic of plot and place that recalls Schechner’s notion of a restored behavior; it is ‘never for the first time’, but is always already performed; it ‘makes visible, yet again, what is already there […] Simultaneously setup and action, scenarios frame and activate social dramas’ (2003, 28). Instead of limiting analysis to a single plane of interpretation, applying this critical lens to videogame criticism acknowledges the episodic, rehearsed, and repetitious operations of gameplay while retaining a sense of the narrative’s contribution to the tensions between the demands of community and individual survival that produce the gamescape. Taylor argues that scenarios are ‘repeatable and transferable’ and that they ‘may appear stereotypical’; they are also adaptable, potentially subversive, and they may also be multiple, just like the systems that manifest them (2003, 31). In this same volume, Roger Travis’s emphasis on the ‘modularity of content’ and the ‘re-compositional system’ evidenced in videogameplay suggests the usefulness of the scenario as an analytical tool. Several scenarios traverse the gamescape of Arc the Lad, including story/map lines of conquest and colonization, racial discrimination, and the traditional bildungsroman. Importantly, however, each minor scenario is informed and inflected by the gamescape’s always prior and present master scenario – the scenario of environmental damage.
Concerns about resource use, abuse, and acquisition ground both narrative and action in Arc the Lad. The presence of industrial waste and abandoned machinery littering the landscape of Kharg and Darc’s domains is often experienced before it is explained, and episode behaviors are often linked to environmental issues. The search for the Great Spirit Stones and the contestation over the acquisition and use of lesser spirit stones is grounded in environmental crisis. Humans have depleted all of the gameworld’s available natural resources, necessary to power their technology – including their weapons, which are vital to their ability to keep the stronger Deimos at bay. Early in the narrative, we are told that ‘when two groups want the same resource, fighting is inevitable’, and every narrative episode is framed by a battle that in some way performs the struggle for power which activates every environmental standoff. Humans recognize that the spirit stones they mine are not an infinite resource: ‘It may run out, and when it does, we don’t have any other resource to fall back on.’ Even the knowledge that their last and only resource is not renewable, however, does not alter performances or practices. Instead, the humans propose a version of environmental wise use (‘We just have to make sure we use the spirit stones we have wisely’) and continue to justify their extractive mining practices on human and Orcon lands (‘We’ll probably find another deposit of spirit stones in the meantime’ and ‘At the moment, everything’s looking all right’). Territorial invasion and colonization are resource-related, as is much of the genocidal race hatred that pervades the gamescape. Both humans and Deimos demand the total eradication of the other race in order to ensure access to, and control of, the only remaining source of literal and metaphorical power on the planet.
If humans repeatedly refuse to grasp the reality of their energy crisis, Deimos, whose cultural organization is demonstrably less technological and more primitive than that of the humans, are also contributors to the planet’s environmental decline. One Deimos literally consumes the only living resource available to him. In a display of unthinking gluttony and lack of self-control, the Orcon leader Densimo eats a Firble, a harmless and rare creature that, if protected, will mature into a flying monster. Since Deimos lack any form of technology, and since the wingless Orcon are unable to travel other than on foot, a winged monster might enable an expansion of their social and political space, but Densimo eats the Firble because he believes it will make him stronger. Orcon social space is ruled by one mantra: ‘Deimos only understands strength’ – a solipsistic world view that threatens to lead ultimately to a Deimos tragedy of the commons. Deimos battle in order to destroy humans, while humans battle in order to destroy monsters. Both races are threatened by a global energy crisis that potentially will return them ‘to the time of destruction … the endless night of despair’, but it is not until the final battle that human and Deimos, Kharg and Darc unite. The primary environmental message in Arc the Lad is performed as a repeated failure to act responsibly in the face of dwindling resources and as an endless expenditure of energy against the one ally each side needs to combat the real threat to survival. In these repeated performances of their differences, Kharg and Darc, human and Deimos, double their past failures and forecast an identical future. It is only when those performances shed difference and embrace the common good – the shared survival of both races – that a potentially successful future outcome (predicated on repeated performances of cooperation) is activated in the gamescape.
Ecocriticism has not traditionally focused on the videogame as a significant representation of popular engagement with environmental issues – an omission that should be addressed. Arc the Lad’s gamescape mediates between a system narrative gesturing towards a more sustainable future and microperformances more concerned with power struggles than with the ecological threat that will ultimately overrun both. The gamescape is shaped by the tensions of that eco-dialogue between doing and saying, between the inhabited landscape and its political doppelgänger. At the intersection of presence and performance, the gamescape echoes with the effects of past performances even as it models contemporary behaviors. Indeed, Twilight of the Spirits represents the first installment of this series available for the PlayStation 2, but it was preceded by older games, Arc the Lad I, II, and III, which also feature environmental scenarios that resurface in the present story. The landscapes of Arc the Lad are multiply haunted: by the debris of abandoned technology, by the corrosive effect of racial prejudice, and by the Spirits themselves, the elemental anima of this world now symbolized by the Great Spirit Stones. The restored nature of all scenarios result in this sense of what Taylor (citing Derrida before her) calls hauntology. For Taylor, the real power of performance ‘rests on the notion of ghosting, that visualization that continues to act politically even as it exceeds the live’ (2003, 143). Reminders that we have passed this way before, the sights and cites of these residual specters of our past behaviors can adjure us to change – and that is the plea of every contemporary environmental text. Performances summon those ghostly actors of the past, but the efficacy of those specters to move us is contingent on yet another doubling. ‘Performance’, Taylor notes, ‘becomes visible, meaningful, within the context of a phantasmagoric repertoire of repeats’, but ‘we see only what we have been conditioned to see’ (2003, 144). An ecocritical videogame criticism needs to point to both aspects of environmental visibility, so powerfully figured in this installment of the Arc the Lad series of RPGs. This is the Twilight of the Spirits, after all, where we are admonished by the fading manifestations of the Spirits to mend our ways in order to mend our world. If the narrative of Arc the Lad suggests that change is in the wind for this gamescape, our rehearsed and repetitive performances suggest otherwise. In a real world threatened daily with global climate changes, diminishing resources, and species extinction, the notion that we are always haunted by our past performances (whether or not we choose to see them) is the message for which the gamescape can be a powerful medium. LeFebvre asserts that ‘to change life […] we must first change space’ (1991, 190). In the gamescape, we find ourselves interacting with the ghosts of our performances past, even as we improvise a new scenario with those performances we intend for the future. Performing ecocriticism within the gamescape of the RPG demands that we engage with both aspects of the gamescape. We must continue to challenge the sites of systemic narrative and claims of political community, while insisting that our rehearsed and restored individual behaviors remain clearly and honestly in sight. Videogame criticism, in dialogue with ecocriticism, doubles our chances of successfully reading the environmental nuances of the gamescape – speaking in unison, they can be a real game-changer.
Notes
1 Lefebvre 1991, 105. Lefebvre distinguishes between durable components/materials (stone, brick, cement) and the more disposable tools and instructions for their use, matériel that is quickly replaced as those uses change over time. His distinction seems particularly appropriate in the context of the gamescape, where programming capabilities rapidly change to produce new representations with what are essentially the same bits of data, and in terms of environmental conflict over dwindling resources and extractive techniques.
2 Brown 2010, 187, 183–215. Brown’s provocative phrase refers to artist Brian Jungen’s unconventional ‘misuse’ of contemporary cultural artifacts, and his point underscores Magnet’s claims for considering the gamescape as a useful artifact for the deconstruction of ideologies underlying representations. My point, however, is that to use the gamescape in this way also objectifies it, potentially occluding its active and evolutionary performance.
3 Aarseth’s definition applies to any literature or text that demands substantial reader participation and response.
4 While Chaudhuri and Fuchs’s intent is to consider how rethinking the tensions between theatre and the landscapes it represents can invigorate theatre criticism, the benefits they identify are also available to performance studies and to traditional ecocriticism.
5 Bogost 2006, 3. Bogost’s thinking, which draws from cybernetics, informatics, and his ‘home discipline’, literary criticism, is an ambitious and notable effort to clearly connect the concept of unit operations with multiplicity as used by French philosopher Alain Badiou, about whom I have written elsewhere. While well beyond the scope of this article, the potential for generative thought made available in Bogost’s text is well worth pursuing. See also Moran and Travis in this volume for other applications of Bogost’s arguments to RPG analysis.
6 Jackson 1984, 12. I will return to the question of what constitutes an ‘official’ history, and whose version is therefore disqualified or suppressed altogether.
7 Emerson uses the phrase ‘a ray of relation’ to describe the interconnection between man and every other creature in Nature, 24. Note too that these connections between the various components of the gamescape, whether natural objects or other actors, are often not visible during those narrative stretches that interrupt, or come between, episodes of ludic performance.
8 From hereon I will refer to this game alternately as Arc the Lad or simply Arc, but the reader should be aware that there are multiple titles in the Arc the Lad series, of which this game, Twilight of the Spirits, is only one.
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