Page 206 - Cyberculture and New Media

The Différance Engine:
Videogames as Deconstructive Spacetime

Tony Richards

Abstract
The purpose here is to intervene within some dominant strands of videogame
scholarship and propose a more problematic relation to our object. The two
dominant tendencies taken-up here represent what has come to be self-styled
as a media studies 2.0 model, over and against a supposedly previously
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dominant (and retroactivated as outmoded) 1.0. Proposed in opposition to
these somewhat sweeping positions will be a deconstructive model which,
while disagreeing with these theoretical ‘algorithms’, would not believe itself
to be leading a charge toward any notionally more thoroughgoingly
circumnavigating 3.0 account. Specifically, while the 2.0 account proposes a
“new” active first-person Performative framework versus an “old” third-
person indicative Constative, we would recommend a reworked iterative-
Performative as propounded in the works of Derrida and Butler.

Keywords: différance, undecidable, narrative, first-person, third-person,
performative, constative, interpellation, suture, reflexivity.

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1. Introduction
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To briefly recount the saga: the outmoded 1.0 account tended to
grant supremacy to the machine, supply, or server side of the communicative
equation leaving for the audience only an intractable, non interactable blank
space to be crowded-out by an insuperable-power: the subject(-objective) is
overwhelmed by the text’s all too powerful mode-of-address. Within this
previously dominant model of domination then each ‘text’ would form (from
its secured vantage point) a linear-perspectival control-engine that would
either hypodermically inject (older-outmoded theory) or interpellate (more
modern-outmoded theory) their object-individual as their subject. This denial
of any space either to play or to poke polysemical holes into the socialising
fabric of the oncoming text constituted the figure then of an indivisible
program(me) acting as some locally firewalled representative of a much
larger media-industrial eco-system. While some theorists felt that this did a
disservice to the multifarious positionality of the receiving audiences (that
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there was always a residual meaning allowance or a polysemic-playspace
within the static and weaved net of a particular text’s ‘material’ signifiers),
there was still nonetheless a strong server-sided control of what composed the