“A Feel For The Game”

Mostly because I seem to have so much time on my hands recently, I’ve found myself playing video games again. However, I’ve only been playing those games that I’ve put many many hours into in the past, because I can’t really find the patience to ride out the learning curve and play something new. Halo, Starcraft, Civilization III (really a subspecies of my original love of starcraft), Super Mario, Waverace and Goldeneye—all of these games contain a set of movements that are second nature to me, a type of acquired knowledge. The phrase that McKenzie Wark uses in his recent book Gamer Theory—“organic intellectual”—hasn’t left my mind for some weeks now, and seems to aptly describe this process of interiorizing a set of operations within a field of data.

In reading Jonathan Sterne’s book The Audible Past, I came across this quotation from Marcel Mauss on the concept of technique which is worth quoting at length:

“The body is man’s first and most natural instrument. Or more accurately, not to speak of instruments, man’s first and most natural technical object, and at the same time technical means, is his body….Before instrumental techniques there is the ensemble of techniques of the body….The constant adaptation to a physical, mechanical, or chemical aim (e.g. when we drink) is pursued in a series of assembled actions, and assembled for the individual not by himself alone but by all his education, by the whole society to which he belongs, in the place he occupies in it” (qtd. in sterne p. 91, orig. from “Body Techniques” in Sociology and Psychology).

So, these media which encourage the development of technique—be they video games, television/channel surfing, computer interface, or the keyboard I’m typing this on—are always building off of previous methods of sense perception, both on the level of individuals and societies.

This stuff really becomes interesting at the point where the medium or technological apparatus that has initiated this development of technique begins to erase itself in that process. (When am I no longer interested in playing the game itself, but exercising this series of interiorized functions and movements?) For example, Sterne’s exploration of the early practices of the stethoscope cite the efforts of early practitioners to overcome and ignore a superficial humming sound produced by the apparatus itself in order to concentrate on the “intrathoracic sounds.” Sterne writes, “In classic technological deterministic fashion, the tool stands in for a whole process from which it erases itself.”

What I am interested in here is how the semantics of a certain technique, and the process of its establishment in individuals (the learning curve?) can create, participate in, or disseminate certain social codes. For example, in the case of the stethoscope, its inventor R.T.H. Laennec advocated its use by arguing that the device would eliminate the improper, direct contact with women and lower class people. The use of the stethoscope, or mediate auscultation, became a way to distance the self from unpleasant social difference, both spatially and by abstracting the body as an abstract code of sounds.

The repercussions of technique in contemporary media require much more thought. This acquired knowledge, this second nature, I think at this point is best described by Susan Sontag when she advocates “a style of knowing something.” Watch this video and see what I mean.