Abstract
This chapter explores how performativity and character design are linked in videogames through ‘serial aesthetics’ (the emphasis on and repetition of salient features). In making use of serial aesthetics, game character designs help players to maintain performative control in the dynamic and shifting scenarios of virtual worlds: each character is a ‘metamorphic body’. Serial aesthetics links game characters with caricature, but also leads to politically regressive designs which tie a body’s external signification (marked by qualities such as gender and race) to its performative capabilities. Gaming’s metamorphic bodies are explored through readings of QWOP, God Hand and the Metal Gear series.
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Notes
- 1.
The difficulty of definitively judging the effects of caricature have affinities with Baudelaire’s life and work, which both seem prone to associations of contradictoriness, ambiguity and a kind of ‘seeing double’ (Meltzer 2011). This has been explored by Susan Blood (1997) in relation to Sartre’s ambiguous characterization of the poet’s ‘failure’ and ‘bad faith’ (1950) and Bataille’s response to Sartre (2012).
- 2.
The situation of Grand Theft Auto with regard to race is however more complex than can be dealt with here – for a range of critical responses, see Garrelts (ed). (2006).
- 3.
As The Colonel, a simulation of military command structures in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty says apropos Snake: ‘Forget about him! He was never part of the simulation!’
- 4.
In later versions of Metal Gear Solid, released when force-feedback controllers were available, this connection with tactility is made explicit. Psycho Mantis tells players to place their motion-feedback-enabled controllers on the floor so that he can move it about with his ‘telekinetic powers’.
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Jayemanne, D. (2017). Serial Aesthetics – Gaming’s Metamorphic Bodies and Baudelaire’s ‘Argot Plastique’. In: Performativity in Art, Literature, and Videogames. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54451-9_7
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