Page 223 - Cyberculture and New Media

214 The Différance Engine
______________________________________________________________

haunted by ‘constative’ (by iteration for example) is Derrida’s knowing
misuse.
42
Hence the notion of a ‘copyright’ that marks off an internal limit from its
citational outside (wherein the latter possibility is repressed).
43
Games as such then are not to be seen as strategic campaigns inviting
resistant and escalating tactical counter campaigns on the part of the player (a
la the counter-tactics cherished by de Certeau and his followers such as Fiske
and his playful polysemically-equipped ‘semi-active’ consumers). Such
notions of a firewallable identity are not a part of the game no matter how
many boundaries are tried and tested. Here again is a contradiction which
both defines the game and reveals why its future, to come, does not lie in any
form of recalculated or reconditioned filmic presence. The game involves and
always-already accounts for the free-play of the player. The computer can do
nothing else than accept such user input. It is not then a war and thus not a
real hacking.
44
Could one talk about a Deleuzean becoming-first or becoming-third or of a
fold between? Such a rhizomatic becoming from-the-divide however does not
recognise the radicallity of the flickering undecideability between these
‘positions’ as we hope to elaborate.
45
Montgomery, R., Lady in the Lake, MGM, 1947.
46
Mulvey, L., ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in Popular Film and
Television Tony Bennett (ed), BFI Press, London, pp.206-215.
47
Scott, H.G. & F. Truffault, Hitchcock. Simon & Schuster, New York, 1985
48
This small list of three could be expanded and an interesting study
undertaken to further problematise the difference between so-called first-
person videogames and traditional narrative or diegetic genres that employ
the first-person but within the larger narratological web that is the text. This
difference needs to be unlocked much more than it is within the literature and
the gamic (which should not be reduced either to the ludological, after
Caillois and Frasca) quality of the videogame exorcised from these
differences.
49
For an examination of the haunted or hauntological nature of the spacetime
in videogames see Lockwood, D. & Richards, T., ‘Presence-Play: The
Hauntology of the Computer Game in ‘Games Without Frontiers, War
Without Tears: Computer Games as a Sociocultural Phenomenon’. Jahn-
Sudmann A., and Stockmann, R., (eds),Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp175-
185.
50
This perhaps is where the conceptual mistake can occur that games are
necessarily like film, because so many games still want to be film (to
remediate film). They have perhaps not attuned yet to their gamic
potentiality. We would strongly argue then that the game is always already