| This dissertation addresses the premises, mechanics and implications of a wildly popular form of entertainment: computer and console video games. While much has been written on “virtuality” as a general condition or symptom of modernity, very little work, at the time of this writing, has been done with specific games as they intersect with, enrich and pose questions for the existing academic discourse on “the virtual.” In Surface Tension I attempt what amounts to a close reading of three carefully chosen games, paying close attention to the materiality of their representations of virtual space as an inviting dream world the player may enter.; My introduction establishes the central concern that motivates my research: if the player is introduced to a world in which the percept is silently substituted for the object, what model of subjectivity is promulgated, and what will happen to me? I draw my basic questions from the world of psychoanalytic theory; I adapt my methods of “reading” computer and video games from the methods developed to analyze literature, visual art and film. Central to my approach is the figure of the screen, a trope which invokes the psychoanalytic concept of the screen as site of the eruption of an uncanny “other” perspective on the apparent solidity of the perceived world, but which also alludes to the material support of the game, the surface on which the illusory world is inscribed.; I then turn, in subsequent chapters, to extended analyses of three games: Cyan's Riven, Sega's Shenmue, and Activision's Tony Hawk Pro Skater Part 2. Examining the ways in which games represent space, time and the subject, I show how each game, in its own fashion, offers an uncannily lucid commentary on the dream of total immersion in a virtual space. My final chapter takes up the question of interactivity, not in computer games, but in the contemporary novel House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. I argue, in this concluding investigation, that the richest interactions are to be had not with the fantasy world “behind the screen,” but with the work itself, in its manifestation as screen. |
