Page 208 - Cyberculture and New Media

Tony Richards 199
______________________________________________________________
[F]irst, the use of subjective POV to create a newly
participatory role for the spectator; and second, the concept
of interpellation and its function, within discourse, in
constructing apparently unified subject positions [...] the
subject position created through shot-reverse-shot is
replaced in the FPS [first-person shooter] by a camera
simulated through software rendering of these three-
dimensional spaces [...] literalises the conceit of an
embedded diegetic participant [my emphasis] that cinema,
14
because of its material technologies, can only imply.

While in many ways an impressively argued paper, the above
excerpt betokens an overly optimistic reorienting of apparatus theory
imported inappropriately into the game’s quite undecidable ‘spacetime’. For
here to speak of a “diegetic participant” is to take the concept of ‘diegesis’
(storyworld) and to concomitantly equate the player as an insider-character
(or here paradoxically flipped outsider-captured) embedded within a ‘space’
which is in fact neither quite text nor non-text (non-text would be something
anarchically without overarching arché-textual structure like the internet):
15
being neither decidedly diegetic nor extra-diegetic . This undecidable
difficulty will later form an important component within our own
investigation of the gamic spacetime.
Further, according to Rehak the suturing function of the cinematic
shot-reverse-shot (presumed to subject the spectator within the difference of
16
framing positions ) finds a direct equivalence in the game’s free-roaming
simulated camera that would here make the player forget their difference and
distance from the presumed diegesis. A sort of umbilical-alliance here
comports the game-control as of a prosthetic extension (for that control
would extend the screen outward) and in so prosthetising-the-player would
swallow the player into the ‘diegetic’ matrix and make of them a mere third-
17
person-subject of the space .
As third-person subject of the space the gamer would seem to
misrecognise their pre-textual identity for that of a character already
embedded within the game’s “diegesis”. To unpack this problematic idea of a
diegetic already-embeddedness it will be worth looking in a little more detail
at this borrowed model of the cinematic subjection and misrecognition before
18
returning to Rehak’s own gamic application. According to Doane
identification within the cinematic apparatus works on three distinct levels.
19
After Metz she points out that these three modes of identification are with
the character, of objects (and issues) and finally with the projection/screen as
an act of ‘the gaze’ or looking in itself. This latter identification acts as a
mode of primary identification which subsumes and forms the condition of