Super Mario 64 (Yes, I am in fact using this media study essay as a loosely based reason to talk about video games) was my first video game. I was dearly in love with it and as I would grow older, I’d experience many new kinds of video games, albeit most where Pokémon related, but my love would gradually shift to films. There are a great many parrilels between the two mediums and I hope to explore some of the changes in art, society, and technology. This search will be centered around the term play and the works of Walter Benjamin, Miriam Hansen and to a lesser extent Steven Shaviro, to at least begin to investigate how the term has transformed over time and how this affects art and society and how the video games are leading this change.

As every great wedding toast starts, let us too start with a generic dictionary definition of the term play. Merriam-Webster, besides defining play as a term for sexual intercourse, the main definition is as a recreational activity or to partake in a game. Everyone is very familiar with the term play, play with toys, play hide and seek, or even play the clarinet. Which all share a level of engagement and interaction with objects, others, or imagination or some combination there of. But there are other examples that involve less interaction such as playing a movie or playing a record. Which while the viewer/listener is unable to act on those mediums and effect them there is none the less an effect felt by the viewer/listener when seeing The Room (2003) for example there is an unmistakable effect, possibly of nauseum, that is experienced. It can also be argued that video games bridge these two definitions but before exploring that line of thought let us look at how this term is defined in media theory.

As with all media study, film study, and basically every form of art we start with Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, referred to as the Art Work Essay. The essay outlines how with the advent of reproducible art, mainly photography and film, it has broken down what Benjamin calls the aura of art and fundamentally changed art. Aura being a rather ethereal term loosely meaning the here and now of a work, or the intangible grounded feeling of a work of art. Technology and the modern age has broken this down and it no longer makes sense to ask what is the original photograph since each one is a mere copy and none are more original than the next. He than goes on to show how he views film as important for helping the modern masses to cope with there ever-changing lives and that mastery over this machine, the camera, can lead to revolution and views it as a tool to fight fascism.

While there are some strange mystic tones to the essay and it is clearly heavily influenced by Marx, there are some unique and important insights into art and film. The first, instance of the term play in the essay delves into that topic. It comes in section VI and deals with the development of his idea of first and second technologies. First technologies being mystical or ritualistic technologies based more in swaying the gods favors, or immortalizing ritual procedures for future generations. Second technologies are based in “interplay between human and nature” where we first separated our self from nature. He defines the second technology as being fundamentally based in play, with film being an example of a second technology (although all art has elements of both). Next, he explains how this use of second technology can help humans train to deal with their evolving technological world. Also, he views second technologies as liberators, in that film can give us the cognitive ability to restructure our society but also that it can literally liberate us from manual labor in the case of the way automated farming systems or Uber eats both liberate us from the making of food.

Therefore, Benjamin views play as the fundamental step in separating us from nature. Unfortunately for the readers he fails to explore this topic at greater length. Leaving us with two sentences to suppose what he meant by play separating us from nature. That is, more or less, what Miriam Hansen spends 44 pages writing about in her work Room for Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema.

Well that may have been an a small over statement, it does extend the argument out in order to show that Spiel the German term meaning play, gambling, games and more, could be used to create a new mode of perception that would better allow us to live in the modern world. She talks of how various contemporary authors used the term and how Benjamin has himself wrote on the concept of playing. Miriam points out how Benjamin is very interested in children being allowed to imagine and encouraged to mimic adults or objects to best prepare themselves for integration into adult society. She points out how in earlier works and in earlier editions of the Art Work Essay Benjamin used this idea of mimicry and imagination to gain information or understanding about things very foreign to a child. Compared with Benjamin’s idea that film also lets the viewer rehearse different modes of perception and can help us gain information and understanding about technology, capitalism, and modernization and we see the apparent link between film and play. Later, Miriam talks about the term Spiel in reference to gambling and goes over some of Benjamin’s more strange ideas involving fate and chance and the spiritual, I will avoid talking about that here but see her essay for a more in depth investigation into Benjamin’s thoughts on gambling, they are rather strange.

Important to both these works is the concept that rather than trying to shoe horn film and photography into art it is more pertinent to ask how art is transformed by reproducibility. The concept of play being central to how art is transformed since as, Miriam notes, art in the west tends to be very focused on an accurate representation of reality and lacked the element of play and mimicry of the second technologies. With the advent of film there was a large shift towards second technologies and with film play becomes central in its ability to transform art but also structures of society. Furthermore, performance is brought up in both essays as a form of playing or exhibiting, such as when the actor performs to the camera while in a rather straight forward way Benjamin attributes the performance to taking control of the machine and as a test of the actors merit, Miriam views this acting in a similar light to a child pretending to be a fireman, at it’s heart acting still retains an element of play.

The last thing I’d like to touch on from these two essays, is the idea that film can fundamentally change our understanding of the world and cause us to question dominant ideologies. Film like play is essentially pointless. Neither meet basic requirements of life or put clothes on our backs, both film and play exist because we enjoy them, and they help to deal with boredom. This idea is important though as people are more and more alienated from their work and more separated from nature, we use playing games or watching films as a substitute, but they can and do more than that. Films can both offer an escape and an alternative and Benjamin just begins to dig into that in his essay. Films of the early twenties tended to involve run away trains, factories, automobile chases and the like and we see that late on especially in the fifties and onward in a post-world war two and in the grips of the cold war world, that films focus more on an alternate science fiction future, possibly run by apes and starring Charlton Heston. While these may be reflections of the masses common fears and desires it should not be disregarded that the films may influence this trend rather than are just a symptom of it.

At this point though you may be wondering, when will he get to video games? Well you are in luck.

There is a common goal amongst video game enthusiast to have video games be held as art. In many of the same ways as film video games feel as though they get a bad rap because some games appeal to a mass market or glorify violence very akin to what was felt about early film. I would like to argue that rather than try and copy what other forms of media did to become art I would like to take the same position as Benjamin and see how video games change our modes of perception and have reshaped art as we know it.

First, we should gap some of the perceived differences in film analysis and video game analysis and Steven Shaviro in his work the Post Cinematic Affect begins to look at the comparison between films and video games. He begins this by looking at the film Gamer (2009) a very Running Man-esque film in which convicts are controlled through a neural link by gamers who then play a real-life game of death match with the usual, you will be set free after wining ten matches, but no one does or subsequently they disappear, set up. Also, I would add many of these ideas bellow applies to another film Surrogates (2009) where people control alternate robot lives, to the point no one goes outside, which to be honest until researching this essay I had no idea they where separate film, I thought they where the same film. Before continuing, with Shaviro’s essay I would offer a guess that the fact that games like World of Warcraft hit their peak around 2008-10 may be correlated with this rise in video game science fiction. Back to Shaviro’s essay he postulates that this film among others in the essay exhibit a post cinematic affect which he defines as cinemas attempt to deal with the 21^st century and the technology it entails. Those who are paying attention may notice some similarity with Benjamin’s theories. Shaviro sees Gamer as a way of dealing with concept of online multiplayer games using film. One of the other concepts explored in the film is of a Second Life style game where people willingly sell their bodies and let other people control them to live out their fantasies. As Shaviro points out this brings a new extension to alienating the worker from their production and the concept of the body so that now even their body becomes the product.

The use of the term play in Shaviro’s essay is markedly different from the other essays discussed so far. While his use of play still fits the term second technology in that as people play, they are further and further separated from nature, the difference is that in Shaviro’s description of play there is an element of control. Rather than mimicry as Benjamin puts it, Shaviro sees these players as controlling other bodies. Rather than pretending to be a soldier in the game, the characters control the bodies and in the case of the film Surrogates begin to lose their real selves. The proletariat is no longer just alienated from their product, they are alienated from their body and even themselves. Shaviro views this as a logical progression in our post-Fordism world where all value is extracted from us in order to gain capital that the only value left to take is from the body itself. Which is reminiscent of accelerationism and the idea that capitalism will likely end in a form of neo-slavery. While Shaviro doesn’t straight it in as plain of words, but this all is created by play, by the separation of nature. Before things can get too dark though, both Gamer and Surrogates end with the characters tacking back control of their own bodies and shutting down the methods of control so that all people must return to their own lives. This offers the audience the cathartic return to normalcy but as Benjamin would point out it can also be viewed as preparing the audience for their own struggles with increasing modernization and the gamification of life. The films to a certain extent don’t fault people for playing these games or being absorbed by them, the main villains are the ones who create or control the systems. Taking this fear of technology and making a human character out of it for the audience and main character to exact revenge on. Both films have their utopias twisted by capitalism and so that it must be torn down and shown to be a falsehood.

Another important aspect to playing in both films that Shaviro does not mention is that through the control of another body, another life, that character comes to a realization of the flaws in the dominant ideology, in this case that being controlled or controlling others/pretending to be an other leads to a corruption of values or a corruption of the idea of self. The idea of playing a game, or of playing in virtual reality can awaken the player to new ideas and break others is an important distinction.

I will argue that video games are an important new medium in which we can contest the common ideologies and give the player new modes of perception in which to live in a post-Tetris world, all of which revolves around the concept of play. Now that we have discussed films, and films about video games, lets extend Benjamin’s framework to video games. Let us start simple with an example, Undertale (2015) is an American indie game that came out to critical success. If you have not played the game and are reading this essay, or marking it, please leave now and play it, it is absolutely mind blowing. The game is a traditional rpg style similar to the game Earthbound (1994) where you control a child brought into a strange surreal underground realm where monsters live. As you play through it goes from dark, to sweet, to funny and back to dark multiple times. As you progress through the game and lay a beat down to various monsters, you notice characters mention someone missing. After beating two giant wolf knight creatures a townsperson mentions the wolf couple is missing and hadn’t returned home. This and other moments create a real visceral sense of guilt in the player, and you stop looking at the enemies as enemies but as characters that you killed. The game allows you to talk to the monsters mid battle and through this you learn all fights can be avoided you just have to convince them to let you leave or in some cases flatter them enough to distract them.

Now why did I start with this game? This game doesn’t beat you over the head with the idea of “do not kill monsters!” rather it allows the player to choose how to play and to feel guilty about their actions or just forget about it and keep killing. In fact the game rewards you with money and “LOVE” a form of experience points for killing enemies, as well as it generally being much faster to kill the monsters then to take the time to get to know them and how to escape fighting. This is all turned on it’s head later in the game as it becomes much more clearly stated, but the player is still allowed to experiment and to play how they like. While the story is set up like it is in a film where to a certain extent you don’t have complete free will, you are still able to figure out this concept on your own through play. This is integral to my view that video games create a new mode of perception, they allow the concept of play to offer the player a way to stumble onto ideologies of their own volition. In films this is often forced on the viewer and although the viewer is thought to be almost mimicking the onscreen characters, they in no way can interact with these new ideas and literally play with these concepts. Video games however offer such a space to do so, you can organically interact with new and abstract ideas.

While some games do tend to be very linear stories very reminiscent of films or even visual novels, and fan of Japanese games understands the feeling of basically going from one cutscene to the next with almost no input. Other games give the exact opposite, Minecraft (2009) (also the same year as Gamer came out) which allows players to basically build and develop as they please. While it has now been wholly absorbed into capitalism with every store having merchandise, the game itself is surprising lacking any in game economy. Players build and craft everything they need in what is called sandbox gaming where there is no inherent purpose to the game other than to have fun. This game that has for all intents and purposes no dialog, no instructions, and until later updates was completely single player, allows players the feeling of hands on making and the games surge in popularity could be the masses feeling alienated from their product, and using Minecraft to reconnect. This offers players an alternative to commonly held ideas of capitalism that can make them question and probe their own life. While I’m not trying to say we should structure our society around crafting everything ourselves it does plant the idea that capitalism is not the only way of surviving.

Coming back, to the concept of play, since play is so important to Benjamin’s and Hansen’s understanding of second technologies and film, I think it is integral that we consider video games as the logical extension of second technologies and look at how they can be used to help people integrate into our post-Tetris world and if Benjamin is to be believed to lead to a revolution. I think it is naive to underestimate the power of video games, considering it is one of the largest markets in the entertainment industry. I’ve touched on a little in both video games how playing with ideas can lead to changes in perception, but I’d like to go in a little deeper. Ideologies only become ideologies when they have been sufficiently internalized, many are unaware of the various ideologies at play within themselves. Play then offers a way to combat unwanted ideologies or incorporate better ones, since people better understand ideas, they themselves have come to rather than having that idea forced on them. Video games that tend to be highly narrative driven fall into the force ideas category, that’s why games with more choices and more free form gameplay are extremely important. If a player comes onto an idea themselves, they are much more likely to internalize it, and because they can test it and play with the concept in a virtual reality, they can see for themselves whether it works or not.

I have used this term post-Tetris world, several times now and its time I explain it. Tetris is not secretly trying to impart any ideologies or break down capitalism. Tetris is just a game about matching shapes and clearing blocks however Tetris is one of the first games to exhibit what players call a “zen state” which is when the whole world melts away and you body just feels like it is reacting to the gameplay there is no thought, no stress just playing. Again, this draws interesting parallels to film where the viewer drops away and are no longer aware of the auditorium or their own bodies but just become enwrapped by the film. Many film critics have pointed to this aspect of film as being fundamental to its appeal and to allowing the viewer to fully identify with what is happing on the screen. Tetris while not revolutionary shows us one of the first instances in video games of this next level of engagement with a medium and goes further than film because the player is involved in the process rather than just observing. The game has inherent rules and logic that must be understood in order to play the game, and even though the game itself has no ideologies it is trying to push, the rules and logic of a game can be used to great effect to change people modes of perception. Minecraft while not getting to that level of “zen state” as Tetris its music and mildly receptive mechanics bring you into a relaxed comfortable state. Even Undertale while being more narrative driven has what is called quick time events where you must react to attacks, where in game you have a heart sprite that you have to weave and doge through the enemy’s assault, reminiscent of old arcade classic games like Galaga.

But all of this, involves playing, of integration between body and technology. None of these concepts or these ideologies would function if it where not for playing. Through playing I believe video games offer a new medium in which a new set of aesthetics can be created in order to as Miriam Hansen put’s it make up for the “political consequences of the failed – that is, capitalist and imperialist, destructive and self-destructive – reception of technology”. While this concept was formed for the use of film discourse, I think it fits extremely well to the medium of video games and offers new and possibly greater possibilities. I am hesitant to copy paste the whole of Benjamin’s thesis as it does have some flaws and instead encourage a formation of a new theory one tailor made for video games to help us better understand how video games can change our society.

To conclude, the term play is a broad and important term, first, in Walter Benjamin’s work The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility he felt play is the essential element of what he defined as creating the second technology. Which is technology that separates us from nature and is created through experimentation and exploring. He believed that film was a form of second technology, with elements of the first technology, and furthermore, he believed that film was able to change our modes of perception to help us better integrate into the industrial capitalist construct. Next, Miriam Hansen took a deeper look into the term play as used by Walter Benjamin. She wanted to show why the term was so important to Benjamin’s construction of the second technology and why he felt film served such a vital role to this concept. Miriam did this by exploring Benjamin’s other work on play specifically how children play, in order to come to a better understanding of what he meant. She also looked at how the German term Spiel is used as compared to our term play, and how contemporary German authors used the term. Transitioning to video games I pointed out that like film there is a common hope to be considered an art and agreed with Benjamin that it is more prudent to consider how the art is changed. To begin, that look on art I started looking at Steven Shaviro’s Post Cinematic Affect where he breaks down how in a 21^st century society how we deal with rapid technologization and growing economic concerns through film. More specifically I focused on his take on the film Gamer as well as my added look at Surrogates through which we see a fear of technology and being alienated from one’s own body which Shaviro sees as a reinterpretation of capitalism pushed to its extremes. In this we also see large uses of virtual reality, video games and technology on film which I used to bridge the gap between the use of play to describe film in Benjamin’s work to extend it to include a new second technology video games. Finally, through this I showed how two video games Undertale and Minecraft operate in different ways to impart different ideologies and to help change the players modes of perception. Then I defined a term post-Tetris world which is when we first see the idea of a “zen state” develop in video games and how that could be the next big step in a medium’s ability to change someone’s mode of perception.

I think that the fight against dehumanization and alienation of the workforce needs every help it can get. Any chance to make the world a little less shit is worth taking. My hope with this essay is to convince some more people that video games at the very least can make that fight, a little easier if used correctly, or can lead to real innovations in how we structure our society and how we interact with that world. As someone who has grown up with video games in my house just as much as films, music, or art (maybe not art my family are not art people) it seams strange to consider one as a lesser muse.

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility. Random House, 1998.

Hansen, Miriam. Room for play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema. MIT press, 2004.

Shaviro, Steven. Post Cinematic Affect. John Hunt Publishing Ltd., 2010.