Page 215 - Cyberculture and New Media

206 The Différance Engine
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the first and the third-person never hands over an active ‘signifier’ arranging
role to the person who is doing the reading or the spectating (hence now the
neat new celebratory baptismal-neologism of the morphed
reader+writer=wreader). The handing over of the optical first-person
position in a few select linear-films never hands over the reigns to the viewer
however. This is a very different to first and third undecidables within the
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game . One need only look at one of film’s famous (and few) incursions into
the “first-person” territory to see the difficulties of taking up the optic
alignment and concomitantly then assuming to make of the spectator the key
player.
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Montgomery’s Film-Noir ‘Lady in the Lake’ was an experiment in
film which took cinematic suture and the dominant point-of-view and
transformed these into a constant optical-point-of-view. Here then we rarely
saw the star of the show (Montgomery himself) for all the ‘other’ eyes in the
film looked directly into ‘our’ protagonistic ones. This experiment was
famously a failure for the voyeuristic distance so beloved of cinema
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(Mulvey et al) would paradoxically prevent the ‘immersion’ of stepping
into the shoes of the screen-party rather than witnessing the scene from an
associational distance. Another problem is the control of a space of
comparison where we would be needed to be ever-present and thus outside of
the constant locked character-optic. For if every component within the
narrative-space is restricted to our optical-presence then unrestricted aspects
unperceived by us ‘the character’ could not be compared or controlled by the
omniscient narration (the obvious point about suspense as Hitchcock pointed
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out to Truffaut is showing more than the character knows and thus
increasing our sense of empathy at their plight; for example a bomb ticking
away under their seat). Thirdly, and most obviously for our purposes, the
optical aspect does not hand over the reins, for nothing in the space is ever re-
arranged by any extra-diegetic empirical viewing. On these three grounds at
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least then the game is prevented from coinciding with such narrational first
or third personage; for the interactivity of the game makes a mockery of the
taking-up of these inside/outside positions: the game invaginates this divide.
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Games then in being a haunted différance-engine operate on the
very boundary distinction of first and third person, text/and non-text, of
performative and constative and of presence and absence. Designers are still
mistakenly fighting (pragmatologically) to create a first-person performative
with the additional security of the cinematic third-person constative: hence
the promised ‘Cinematic’ experience which game’s covers and cutscenes
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often wish to foreground ). This battle however is headed in entirely the
wrong direction and cannot complete its mission, as the game is situated from
bottom on openings. Let us look at a game which more openly welcomes or
embraces its gamic nature.