Atkins
Atkins, Barry
b.atkins@mmu.ac.uk
Department of English
Manchester Metropolitan University
The Aesthetics of Iteration: The Plurality of Spectacle in Narrative Computer Games
Dr Barry Atkins
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Lara's Back on Top!
PSM August 2002
Return of the Queen
PC Gamer March 2002
The Babe is Back in Town
Newsweek
Press cuttings that endlessly cycle past in a screensaver distributed as part of the promotion of the forthcoming sixth outing of the Tomb Raider Series.
Plenty of early videogame and computer game critics (including myself) have identified the relationship between current narrative videogames and the Hollywood cinema of spectacle. In this paper I offer a corrective theorised account that points up the need for a specificity of analysis when we are confronted with the video or computer game. Videogame spectacle, I argue, is something other than the recording of the impossible or unique event (bigger, louder, never before seen) and offers a different form of textual pleasure to its reader. The spectacle of the videogame is both impossible and endlessly reproducible, fantastic in its offer of the unique event and mundane in its iteration. Rather than simply rehearse the common observation that, like the action movie or science fiction film, computer games rely upon the movement from spectacle to spectacle over any sophisticated narrative development, I explore the ways in which seeing again, rather than for the first time, is a central pleasure of a form of entertainment where repeated viewing of a single textual fragment is central to the experience of reading. In particular, an examination is undertaken of the extent to which iteration (essentially repetition with difference) is a core element of the encounter with the video game. The video game invites, and even demands, such a repeated (re)reading of textual fragments that then allows access to the plural spectacular event. This emphasis on the plurality of the spectacular moment brings us face to face with a new aesthetic experience, where the aesthetic is located not in the experience of art as singular event, but of the experience of the work of art as multiple event constantly re-viewed and re-encountered.
Dr Barry Atkins is Lecturer in English and Senior Learning and Teaching Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he teaches popular genre fiction and narrative theory, including courses in children's literature and science fiction. His game-related publications include More than a game: the computer game as fictional form (Manchester and NY: Manchester University Press, 2003) and 'To infinity and beyond?: Dialogue and critique in popular film's portrayal of videogames' [forthcoming] Text Technology, 2003.
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