Game Wonder

““The jewel in the crown of what videogames offer,” Poole writes in Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution (2000), “is the aesthetic emotion of wonder,” and he suggests that this emotion stems largely from the gaming medium’s ability to represent space, and more specifically, architecture”

““[A game] is a way to experience architecture […] If architecture is frozen music, then a videogame is liquid architecture.””

“If wonder, following Poole, secures the artistic value of games as a medium, it is nevertheless a paradoxical kind of aesthetic experience”

“Although Poole frames wonder as a signature effect of video games in general, his remarks really seem to concern only a small if prominent subset of them, namely 3D games that represent traversable space in a graphically impressive way”

“The reliance of such games on cutting-edge rendering technology means that what is liable to seem impressive will often be historically bound to an extreme degree”

“Video game wonder is historical, and even to conceive of it — which is of course different from the irrecoverable experience of actually feeling it — often requires a rigorous act of scholarly imagination, akin to envisioning the awe evoked by Renaissance artists’ first achievements in perspective painting”

“Game wonder thus depends in every case on an awareness of technical constraint”

“In this respect, it resembles the formalist awe of the specialist even when it’s experienced by an amateur. This is also why it’s hard to share with someone who doesn’t play games”

“The nonplayer judges games solely on their visual resemblance to the authorized forms of film and painting. Thus, photorealism may elicit a reaction, as will the studied imitation of recognizable painterly or filmic styles, but even these resemblances merely reveal the games’ ultimate inferiority to their visual models”

“the wonder felt by the specialist-amateur always derives from the understanding that any visual experience of virtual space is embedded within an interactive system that necessarily restricts the appearance and meaning of that space”

“Game wonder arises from a dialectical fusion of systems and spatiality”

“Game wonder is thus at once technological and mimetic. Strictly speaking, it is an awe at the power of a technologically produced representation of spatial experience”

“As Eugenie Shinkle has noted, such digital complexity can induce an experience of imaginative failure that links video games to the aesthetic category of the sublime. For Kant, the sublime denoted an emotional state evoked by phenomena whose extraordinary power or size defeats our capacity for mental representation”

“Although games are often no more than mere toys, their absurdly complex digital makeup may produce a similar breakdown of mental representation that hangs over the experience of game wonder like a shadow”

“One might therefore speak of game wonder as a variety of what Fredric Jameson calls the technological sublime — a uniquely modern experience of unthinkable complexity that, within Jameson’s Marxist framework, always refers back to the inconceivably complex global market that produced the technological artifact”

“Shinkle elaborates further on this connection, arguing that video games produce an effect akin to what Sianne Ngai calls stuplimity, a combination of sublime emotions and irritation, boredom, or banality that is characteristic of aesthetic experience in late capitalism”

“From a Marxist angle, then, the true object of game wonder becomes the technology industry (if not the entirety of postmodern global capitalism) itself, and thereby implicates the player in the vast systems of domination and exploitation that fuel it”

“the sheer amount of human labor now required to produce the average AAA game — often involving teams numbering in the hundreds forced to work extended hours for months or even years at a time — means that game wonder, like the awe evoked by the pyramids, often bears an especially close relation to collective human suffering”

“if game wonder is ultimately a pleasure in illusionism, then why does Poole give prominence to architecture over any other aspect of video game mimesis? I think it’s because he means architecture as a shorthand for something broader: the digital formation of awe-inspiring spaces in general”

“It’s in this sense, finally, that Bloodborne is exemplary: not in the systemic complexity of its spaces, which is minimal, nor in its pure graphical accomplishment, which is impressive for its time but not extraordinary, but rather in its simple representation of classically sublime architecture”

“If game spaces, as Poole writes, are “cathedrals of fire,” Bloodborne doubles down on this by presenting literal cathedrals whose Gothic style expresses an explicit will to awe”

“As Ario Barzan observes, Yharnam’s sublime architecture is “so eager to become something absolute and grand that it threatens to collapse into nonsense,” leaving the player at once “enraptured by its obliterating massiveness and overfed on its excesses.””

“like the other games in FromSoftware’s Souls series (which includes Dark Souls, Elden Ring, and Demon’s Souls), Bloodborne repeatedly makes a spectacle of its own spatial unity, dazzling the player with “distant views” (to cite one analysis of Souls world design) of enormous landmarks that are fully integrated into the game’s spatial system”

“Poised between genuine sublimity and debased commercialism, between the singular aesthetic experience and a shallow simulacrum of one, between wonder at a marvelous thing and wonder at a copy of that thing, Lovecraft’s description of Blake’s distant view anticipates the aesthetic ambiguities evoked by games, like Bloodborne, that replicate precisely this kind of sublime spectacle”

“Poole calls video game spaces “cathedrals of fire” because they are awesome feats of architecture made out of “immaterial light.” Yet the same reverent phrase could also describe a Las Vegas casino”

“If Bloodborne literalizes Poole’s extravagant figure, “The Haunter of the Dark” anticipates how game wonder combines both kinds of light — flaming sky and commercial beacon — into an uncertain blend”