Page 214 - Cyberculture and New Media

Tony Richards 205
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presenting first-person singular-pronominal active present-participle of the
“I-do” (furnishing the, for example, the famous speech act of the I-do of the
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wedding rites ). This singular presence however is predicated and reliant
upon (iterative) the ‘past-perfect’ of the “you-did” that would seem in
comparison to this first-person singularity to be an externally cold and stale
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recording, citation or writing technology . Thus the citational writing-
within-speech (we could recoin it arché-citation) that is Derrida’s own
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reworked ‘performative’ points to a différantial-undecideability (between –
but not beyond- ‘performative’ and ‘constative’ as opposites) that can also be
seen to be at the heart of the videogame which neither a constative 1.0 theory
nor the performative 2.0 theory could circumscribe. For in the game, as we
will see, there is an excess or dissemination that overruns or invaginates the
boundary of any third or first-person position.
Beyond these (1.0 vs. 2.0) views then, it is preferable that the game
should not be conceived of as a program(me) at all. For within this
compounded neologism both a closed ‘program’ (1.0) and a closed ‘(me)’
(2.0) presumes a violatory concept of an outer hacking or breaching of
erected ‘meta’ fences that would attempt to fend off such incursions or
breechings by some notionally errant alterity. For in the old ‘sovereign-
spaces’ of the linear media text or program(me) there are the countless
protections against fore-seen audience dissention, dialogically contained
within, as constitutive of their very boundary or notionally ‘cleaved’ singular-
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existence ). As a concomitant of this non-limit in the game, and at this point
still in a measure of agreement with 2.0, we must also be wary of utilising
unproblematised concepts from film or literary-linear studies such as
‘diegetic space’. For here a distinct or internal ‘diegetic space’ (to be divided
off from the notionally ‘extra-diegetic space’ of the ‘audient’ encountering
that “theatrical” en-closure) would create a too neat divide, frame or
parergon which does no justice to the openly invaginated nature of the space
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that is the game-staging : the outlying districts of the game are not so
circumavigable. This lack of a diegetic framing or of a carved-off narrative
space becomes all the more conspicuous when we see that there is no ‘One’
in the sense of a clear narrative agency. Here we come upon the importance
of the first/third person problem for the videoogame.
In the game there is a clear (and essential) undecidability between
the first and the third person subject positions (performative and constative
respectively) whose vibrating-interlace will deny the ability of the space-of-
play to wrap up its incorporated ‘protagonist’. Before coming to land
squarely on this however we must briefly look at a very important transition
between the game and its linear subject-position forebears, one also that
makes it very different to the externality of subject positions within the
internet experience (could one here even think in the region of first or third
person?). Within literature, and in its transportation to film, the difference of