A 'Pataphysics Engine

Seth Giddings, University of the West of England, UK. Published in Games & Culture (October 2007).

The 'Pataphysical Strategy#

The only strategy against the hyperrealist system is some form of pataphysics, 'a science of imaginary solutions'; that is, a science-fiction of the system's reversal against itself at the extreme limit of simulation, a reversible simulation in a hyperlogic of death and destruction.

Ludic Gadgets#

For Baudrillard, everyday technologies have an ironically playful hyperreality. In The System of Objects, he outlined key distinctions between conventional notions of machines as developed and used for functional ends and a proliferating range of noninstrumental consumer technologies.

Gadgets are characterized by "irrational complexity, obsessive detail, eccentric technicity or gratuitous formalism." They are only subjectively functional, the product of obsession. Gadgets are always ludic, everyday technologies are hyperreal in Baudrillard's terms, but also, as toys, their use or consumption are playful games. Toys and games have always had their own noninstrumental functions and their own particular simulacral realities.

Play, Culture, Simulacra#

Baudrillard establishes the Renaissance as the moment of a key historical and cultural transformation in which the culture of simulation, his precession of simulacra, begins. Significantly, it is specifically in the ludic realm of the theatre that the counterfeit ancestors of contemporary simulacra are fabricated.

The counterfeit and the simulacral are born in seriously playful materials, behaviors, and technologies. In the churches and palaces, stucco is wed to all forms, imitating everything, a mirror of all the others. As stucco and the playful technologies of baroque theatrical machinery spread to other ritual architectures, "[t]heater is the form which takes over social life."

Surrealism and the Ludic#

Surrealism was founded on the play of chance. From the early 1920s, the aleatory aesthetic of Lautréamont's "chance encounter of the umbrella and sewing machine on the autopsy table" was pursued through automatic writing, photography, collage, and many games of exquisite corpse. Such games were deployed to catch out the conscious mind, to shake mundane reality, hint at, or proliferate, other realities in the gaps.

Susan Laxton calls this "the Surrealist ludic," the "deployment of chance meant to militate against means/ends rationality." This linkage between the ludic and the proliferation of realities in Surrealism is precisely the cheat code in play in this essay.

Ubu and 'Pataphysics#

Perhaps the most vivid irruption of the surrealist trope in Baudrillard's writing is his invocation of Alfred Jarry's grotesque creation Père Ubu and his proto-absurdist science of 'pataphysics:

There is no more marvellous embodiment of Integral Reality than Ubu. Ubu is the very symbol of this plethoric reality and, at the same time, the only response to this Integral Reality, the only solution that is truly imaginary in its fierce irony, its grotesque fullness. The great spiral belly of Pa Ubu is the profile of our world and its umbilical entombment. We are not yet done with 'pataphysics.

Videogames as 'Pataphysical Machines#

Videogame play is a paradigmatic form of contemporary hyperreality. It generates virtual realities at the heart of everyday life and advanced media culture; it is marked by intense intimacies between subject and object, the human and the technological. The code of videogames renders virtual theme parks on the imploded and ubiquitous television screen.

It might be read as absolute confirmation of the domination of the human by things, or then again as a multiplication of reality, perhaps even a ludic 'pataphysics of cyberculture. Game studies has begun, perhaps unwittingly, a surrealist ethnography (or hyperrealist ethology) of simulacral culture.

The Productive Ambivalence of Play#

The ambivalence of play and games has always entailed their machinations in the persistence and reproduction of social orders and hierarchies (from rituals to playgrounds) as well as in their subversion or transformation. Against left pessimist subsumption of play and games to the instrumentalities of consumer passivity and capitalist accumulation, we might maintain the productive ambivalence of play and simulacra, their generation of new realities and their maintenance, inversion, or destruction of existing ones.

Play is artificial, as in mimetic illusions, yet characterized as a primal impulse. It is useless and produces nothing, yet is understood psychologically as a form of practice, trial action for life. It is constructive, as when the smooth play of machine parts keeps up production, and it is destructive, as when too much play in a part can bring the whole to a catastrophic halt.

Key terms in Giddings's framework include: