|
The Art of Gaming: J.J. King
The 1978 arcade sensation Space Invaders is a distillation of America's mid Cold-War psyche: us versus them, home team against bug-eyed alien, in a conflict that demands total vigilance and competence, infinite aggression in the face of eternal attack. Trigger Happy, a Shockwave piece by Alison Craighead and Jon Thomson, substitutes paragraphs from Foucault's 'What is the Author?' for the invaders, exploiting the game's familiar ideological structure to cast the Foucauldian text as Other: the words edge down the screen spitting laser fire, the player's oppositional role parodies the dialectical critical response, and the agonistics of language take form as a brute struggle for survival. A good gag, and one which the insistently banal ice-cream van jingles accompanying the action serve as an effective punchline. This critique of the critic, central to the installation version of Trigger Happy, also extends into an observation about reader behaviour in a hyperlinked (clickable) environment. The process of the game reduces the player's focus on the text to an abortive, belligerent gaze on single words: hitting one, you target the next, and so on - until the sentences become punctuated beyond intelligibility. The sense of a whole is elided, reduced to an impossibility by the irresistable urge to click. The online version of the piece [http://www.triggerhappy.org] pursues this strand further, resurrecting keywords from the text as hyperlinks, beckoning the user away from the Invaders environment and out onto the web. Craighead & Thomson's crosshair thus passes onto a central problematic of the network, the Attention Deficit Disorder (as psychologists are now calling it) which is endemic to the radically interconnected environment. An overabundance of hyperlinks, they seem to say, encourages the substitution of click-through for thorough reading, again reducing the critical attitude to a binary: accept / reject, take on / cast off; get bored, click here. In the web environment, as in that of Trigger Happy, the reader's focus on text seems constantly and thoroughly aborted, perpetually distracted by the prospect of more specialised, more scintillating, more apropos information. Thus, in the midst of this play on hits and clicks, Trigger Happy is gesturing towards the basis of a future information economy, where attention, precisely because of its scarcity, may become a central commodity. The most successful constructions, we're left thinking, may be those which in generating attention and catching the gaze, can take the reader's finger off the trigger. J.J. King |