Page 218 - Cyberculture and New Media

Tony Richards 209
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That the ‘present-diegesis’ (the spacetime that the beast is
“presently” inhabiting) is haunted by an-other diegesis makes any narrational
absolute positioning of third-person constative eminently undecidable. That
we are not free to operatively or performatively roam makes any
metaphorical first-person ‘experiential’ equally undecidable. Such
undecidabilities that we are opening up here cannot be closed down by the
wishful thinking of the protective absolute oppositions of third or first
person. Thus we must put in place a more knowing, open and avowedly
undecidable recoined performative which contains and admits of its
constative-iterative.
This more knowing and thus less certain re-coined iterative-
performative must recognise that neither a 1.0 locked constative (third-
person) beloved of apparatus theory, nor an open and free-roaming
performative (first-person) beloved of reflexive models is correct for these
new media spaces such as the game. Identity here is never knitted nor
unknitted but also never simply a happy combination or resolution of the two
(hence no 3.0 synthetically appreciating or sublating these differences). This
irresolvable un-becoming flickering of the first and the third persons provides
a telling problem in this différance-engine that is the videogame. That we
cannot resolve this différance in the spacetime of the game may be something
to celebrate...
...For the game itself does not end in either definition by the game or
by walking away free within it. The game goes far beyond the game and we
will not be walking away from it. For we are not really playing it.
We are facing our incompletion...

Notes

1
This of course purposefully and rather self-confidently utilises a computer
program nomenclature to display a theoretical goodness of fit to the
momentum of this modern world.
2
Again we must underline the somewhat ironic sense of this progressive 1.0
versus 2.0 mounting of hostilities. A younger generation of media theorists
(typified in the parties of Merin, Gauntlet et al) parcel-up as “1.0” a seeming
homogenous unity which does not recognise ludic play. More particularly
they seem to say that media studies 1.0 does not seem to recognise that the
world has moved on into the more client-sided pursuits of games, the internet
and social networking sites. Thus the technologies-of-the-teaching need an
overhaul as they are in grave danger of being left behind and outstripped by