Page 217 - Cyberculture and New Media

208 The Différance Engine
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a linear text, experienced also as first in this game-text) and third-person-ed
(beast) with attributes of a first which then provides the game’s irresolvable
identity-play (and thus showing the game to be beyond constative and
performative as distinctives). Three narratological dynamical parties then are
at play in their presence in this game. The complex, even psychotic, status of
first and third person is rarely addressed or problematised within the critical
literature and tends to be reduced to easy positional differentiations (as we
have seen) of first or third and a clear diegetic arena within which their
activities are thus then circumscribed.
Let us concentrate briefly a little more here then, for economic
simplicity, on one of the boundary-between parties only: the beast. This
beast, this other-self, has fluidly open-closed (invaginated) boundaries which
prevent us from landing it as some diegetically encircled third person
constative position. Also however as acted-upon it cannot be wrapped in any
performative first-person immediacy.
The opening few transactions of the game are centred on
demonstrating to us its openness, its choices. Two character-guides or
preliminary-chaperones, one angelic and one demonic (momentary helpers or
traditional omniscient narrators as far as the game allows for such stabilised
guiding hands) unravel the function of many of the game’s core components.
They foreground for example the concept of the building up of the
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behaviours of the beast that we have taken on. In this rather camp parody of
the cartoon’s (Good vs. Evil) disembodied ‘inner voices’ we are told how we
can affect various outcomes. Here then after this restrictive nursery-slope
(once we are on our own) the game becomes far from black and white. This
is why a textual analysis cannot really take us any further down these
multiply-forking paths. How can one textually analyse such a shaded
uncertain and undecidable object? How then can one talk of a diegetically
locked temporo-spatiality, where by definition either a first or third person
position could be defined?
The beast, as neither constative third-person character nor
performative first-person occupied tool, never sleepwalks along a path of
calendar pre-destination. By coaxing the character, and by having it
continually on the edge of a slipping-away-from-grasp, we find a haunting
sense of its future attributes in its de-centred present movements within the
story-world ‘we-it’ occupies; making of ‘it-we’ a flickering undecidable
performative-constative (or as we saw earlier a Derridean re-coined
performative). The beast is then is a de-central character of a morphous
identity within this différance engine that is the slippery diegesis of the
game’s fluid futurity. The important fluidity of this future and the haunting of
the other-path cannot help but make us aware of the question of other
always-already hanging over present-absences.