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Patrick Jagoda
Patrick Jagoda is William Rainey Harper Professor of Cinema & Media Studies, English, and Obstetrics & Gynecology at the University of Chicago. Patrick’s books include Network Aesthetics (2016), The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (2016, with Michael Maizels), Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (2020), and Transmedia Stories: Narrative Methods for Public Health and Social Justice (2022, with Ireashia Bennett and Ashlyn Sparrow).
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Ashlyn Sparrow
Ashlyn Sparrow is Senior Research Associate at the University of Chicago. She has worked on scholarly board, card, and digital games, public health apps, serious games development, interactive learning experiences, and digital media art with youth and for youth. She is a co-designer of the book Transmedia Stories: Narrative Methods for Public Health and Social Justice and has co-authored essays in journals such as Journal of Adolescent Health, Games for Health Journal, and hyperrhiz.
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Abstract
Video games are an art form that saw early experiments in the mainframe computing era, emerged fully in the personal computing era, and has proliferated amid the ubiquitous computing era. This new media form introduced an expanded sensorium through aesthetics that include mechanics, kinesthetics, proprioception, networked interrelations among players, and haptics. An exemplary element of video game aesthetics is proceduralism, a concept first theorized by media scholars such as Janet Murray, Ian Bogost, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. In this essay, we approach the expanded field of media aesthetics via video game proceduralism and its computational foundations, but with particular attention to traces and absences that gesture toward the unconscious. Instead of the individual unconscious, we are most interested in something more akin to Fredric Jameson’s “political unconscious,” which is historical and collective, though still nonrepresentational. Our inquiry focuses on how game aesthetics feel out connections among terms that might otherwise seem distinct, including computational abstractions, speculative finance, and racial capitalism. To explore this point, we turn to American designer Lucas Pope’s 2018 Return of the Obra Dinn, an independent puzzle game that asks the player to explore a merchant ship that disappears and returns several years later in 1807. This game is unusual, even singular, but it also stages more generalizable ways that proceduralism accesses history. In place of the game's own logic-driven murder mystery, we substitute a media aesthetic mystery: why would a late 2010s video game use a contemporary perspective and a 1980s graphical style to explore a narrative about early 1800s marine insurance? By making sense of Obra Dinn’s medium-specific operations within the context of political hermeneutics, we seek to theorize what we call the procedural unconscious. Though human beings lack direct access to the opacity of contemporary computation, algorithms, and networks, video games use procedural and affective interactions to extend our sensation and perception into the contemporary media ecology and allow us to play and experiment with it. The procedural unconscious complicates a rationalist approach to video games through careful attention to their sensory dimensions and opens up a more layered approach to historical thought, especially the trajectory that leads from the transatlantic slave trade to racial capitalism.