Miruna Runcan

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

mirunaruncan@gmail.com

 

 

“Who Am I Today?” – Asks the Hero

The Actor and Spectator of a Daily Hypertext

 

 

Abstract: This paper seeks to raise a series of questions regarding the changes that have occurred in the paradigm of self-identity discourses and representations of young people, commonly known today as The Digital Generation, focusing on the differences between the “spectator’s condition” and that of the PC gamer. Its main interest is the circular road of self-presence representations, from linear narrative to level-stratified practice of the computer game, and vice versa. Following a short summary of the current tendencies in interpreting the shifts from spectatorship to game-controlling representations, the paper will try to formulate several hypotheses/theories concerning the displacement of the moral and aesthetic values, as the classical foundation of audience motivations in cultural consumption, towards the “experience” value, regarded as a chance to identify, build and consume different and alternative constructs of the Subject/Self.

Keywords: Spectatorship; Audience; Computer Games; Player; Self-Representation.

 

 

Spectatorship revisited

 

The social and psychological foundation of any theatrical communication, in any type of culture that uses such social/collective rituals, preserves the dialectical – imaginary and/or physical – separation between actors and audience. Despite our being, as Goffman suggested (inspired by Shakespeare), the actors of our everyday theatrical framing processes, we have to consciously decide, each moment, on which side of the invisible window our participation will actually manifest – seeing or being seen, watching or being watched. It’s hard to say whether our “acting” presence is, in a lifetime, longer or shorter than our “spectator” one, even if the classical hypothesis about the so-called “passivity” of the spectator is no longer considered to be[1] valid.

However, in terms of the socio-cultural ceremonies and rituals usually covering the performing arts practices, our audience/spectator condition has prevailed, for more than three millenniums now, over our acting condition. Only a few of our contemporary fellows are trained to practice acting as a profession; and even they have been spectators before and continue to be in their non-professional everyday life. In other words, it seems easy to imagine that the Jacques’ famous line from the Shakespearian play entitled As You Like It: “All the world is a stage / And all the men and women merely players” makes perfectly sense if transformed into “All the world is an auditorium / And all the men and women merely spectators”.

Even if there are subtle and discrete psychological, cultural and behavioral differences in our usual practices as theatre or cinemagoers, our focus here will not be this kind of differential analysis[2]. In this paper, we have chosen to consider spectatorship (the aesthetic, performing and visual arts-oriented type, not the accidental one) as a whole, as a unitary sequence of the emotional and cognitive processes, driven to the ultimate goal, that of obtaining pleasure and understanding.

Or, in this respect, we have to revisit, briefly of course, the (now classical) distribution of human roles offered by the theatre practice, as Passow put it:

 

Of constitutive importance for theatre is the theatrical interaction which divides into: (A) scenic interaction within the ‘make-believe world’ (fictitious scenic interaction) and (B) the interaction of the audience with this ‘make-believe’ world (audience-stage interaction in the field of fiction). However there exists further (C) the interaction of members of the theatre company amongst each other (real interaction on stage), (D) the interaction of the audience with the actors (real audience-stage interaction) and (E) the interaction within the audience. (Passow, 71)

 

Well, what we may infer from here is that only points A and B are relevant and indispensable to performance/theatrical/filmic communication, both of them being complex semiotic processes in the production of discourses and meaning. Point C could be, in fact, a vehicle subordinated to point A, whose role is to accomplish the conventional representation of the “make-believe world”.

Point D is, traditionally, the subject of ceremonial and psychological restrictions: usually, the spectators are not allowed, in effect, to respond, to speak, to interfere with the fictional word, to touch the actors etc.; they are only permitted to express their gratitude, joy, sorrow, discontent conventionally; and this is realized only jointly, as an audience not as individuals, at specific moments of the performance: end of arias or solos in opera, end of monologues, end of scenes/acts and, of course, end of the performance.

Even if theatre artists, performers or schools/companies throughout the entire span of the 20^th century struggled to break the invisible window that separates the actor from the spectators, even if countless theories and experiments have been – and continue to be – sampled even today, in order to “activate”, “implicate”, “awaken”, even “change places with” the spectator, little progress has been made as the hope (a delusive one, probably) for an equivalent/reciprocal interaction failed to materialize.

First of all, the artists’ attempt to create an “activated” spectator comes up against the spectator itself. Since it is the voyeuristic need that motivates profoundly the spectator to engage himself in the actor-spectator dialog, in order to obtain the “jouissance” or the cathartic experience, he/she does not want to act on his/her own, nor does he/she want to be watched. Usually, when approached by the actor, he/she will react timidly, ashamed or even annoyed by the disruption of his/her personal adventure. And it is a natural frustration, in fact, because shattering the dream means destroying the unwritten but consensual pact of trust: the spectator is not there to act, but to become, in his/her imagination, the character, to identify himself/herself with the story or the concept, to improve with the mediated experience of being the OTHER, new and fresh. The spectator denies his/her everyday identity during the performance he/she is attending, disposes of his/her self-perceptions and judgments – in a process that Anne Ubersfeld (1971. 98) called “denegation” – in order to proceed to the semiotic deconstruction/reconstruction, in a “safe mode” that is,, counting on the fact he/she will derive pleasure from the performance without being harmed[3]. Specifically, the procedures of “activating the spectator” run the risk of killing the patient: the spectator invested in being Hamlet, and he/she is offered instead to be, even for a minute, the actor who mediates Hamlet for this transfer. With few exceptions, he/she will feel betrayed or even hurt.

At last, Passow’s point E refers, in its turn, to a neutral interaction towards the performance communication. This interaction is part of the performance rituals, it has its own conventions and codes, but it is supposed to end before the performance begins, and can be resumed after the end of it. Consequently, except for the empathic contaminations, the interaction at the level of spectators is not a part of the actual theatrical/performing communication and, if it accidentally occurs, it is perceived as noise (from a semiotic perspective), both by the groups of performers and the audience.

In a brief and, of course, abridged conclusion, we can say that the complex semiotic and communicational processes in performing arts (in praesentia or support-mediated) are conditioned by: a) the conscious and doubly codified separation/distance between the performer and the spectator, b) the mutual trust placed by the performer and the spectator in the “security” of visiting the fictional world; c) the fundamental rule of this communication experience, that is: both the actor and the performer renounce, for a determined time-interval, their everyday identity and try to assume a fictional one; d) the variable set of codes, conventions and aesthetic procedures that both performers and spectators share in the specific historical context[4].

 

PC Gamer, User and the identification vehicle

 

We can easily imagine a culture where discourses would circulate without any need for an author. Discourses, whatever their status, form, or value, and regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold in a pervasive anonymity.

Michel Foucault[5]

 

Be careful what you wish for, dear Monsieur Foucault, one would now dare to answer, because it might come true…

The psycho-cognitive changes (some philosophers even call them paradigmatic changes) of the perception/representation/insertion triad undergone by the so called Digital Generation are so complex, that the neurologists, the psychologists, the behavioral theorists, the sociologists and the mathematicians seem to be overwhelmed by a paradoxical, “never-ending” process of analyses and theories. First of all, it seems obvious that the impact of the new technologies on the human brain, from early ages (3 to 5 years old) of object oriented and interpersonal conscious activities, managed to produce profound mutations. In other words, the “computational alphabetization” which occurs before the actual acquisition of writing and counting skills, changes dramatically our traditional perception of cultural insertion, cultural consumption and, even more important, self-representation and identity construction.

In this respect, one has to admit that even the visual revolution, marking the death of Guttenberg era, as described and commented by McLuhan (1967), seems now less revolutionary: the invention of television did not affect our nervous/brain configuration, our everyday behavior and our traditional (19^th century) cultural references and practices to such an extent as computational practices did.

In fact, what are the main symptoms of these mutations? Everyone aged over thirty can provide an account of them from everyday observation:

 

– A gradual but nearly definite de-legitimation of traditional work/learning practices strongly displaced from their former place, the life core at the children aged over 6, no more than two decades ago. Instead, gaming practices advanced from their marginal childish places; they cover now not only most part of the daily (so-called) “leisure time”, but they have practically invaded the physical and imaginary time/space formerly reserved for the educational practices[6].

– The dramatic /decline of spectatorship interest and practices (shortening the time of concentration on any particular performing arts discourse, lack of patience and cognitive interest in traditional narratives); the aftereffects of this mutation are compensated by the increased capacity of reading/mapping and interpreting simultaneous visual discourses, unrolled at an unprecedented speed, on the one hand , and by the ability to interact rapidly and skillfully in virtual online communication and in a diverse spectrum of gaming/creative computational activities on the other hand (Palfrey, John, Gasser, Urs, 212)

– The hemorrhagic decrease of reading practices, compensated by the ability of finding and combining information from virtual sources.

– The alarming compression of the vocabulary of any natural language (it seems predictable that, in a decade or two, nearly any natural language, spoken and written at the end of 20^th century, will be perceived by its natives as a foreign or at least archaic language), to which is added the decreasing capacity of the person to produce complex and expressive linguistic discourses, especially in writing. Furthermore, there is a preference for , , the use of a slang on one hand – both orally and in writing – a nearly universal slang, English founded, containing the specific computational nouns and verbs, but also a syntax/semantics specific to virtual communication; on the other hand, there is a strong tendency to create (inside) group-specific argotic blocs of interpersonal communication (lexical-syntax-semantic), using popular culture references and icons as support, as well as particular group experiences.

– The gradual (but astonishingly profound) dissolution of the traditional values concerning the author’s and/or producer’s legal rights, and even a gradual de-legitimation of all intellectual rights, seen – as they have been for centuries – as a constitutive part of the property of legal philosophy. The virtual communication, the evolution of the new media and its specific technologies, and the virtual cultural consumption practices suffered, as compensatory effects, not only a fundamental change of attitude towards the author/producer/owner’s moral and legal authority, but also a “collaborative” and “active-creative” relationship with the cultural products[7].

– As a direct consequence, the textuality or the finitude (and the patrimonial value) of the cultural product called “piece of work” or even “piece of creation”) dissolve into an infinite number of possibilities to be reedited, remixed, rewritten by its receiver, whereas the frontier/distance between the author and the beneficiary of the cultural product simply vanishes[8].

 

In this context, what can we tell about the comparative distance between the traditional spectatorship and the capacity of young, digitalized audiences for interpreting performing art products? Moreover, can we really read and interpret, coherently, the individual and social, now in progress, implications of this change?

Let us start from the first and most common topic of the sketch-list above, concerning the shift from the work-learning model to the gaming-learning one. Both spectatorship and PC gaming practices share, apparently, the same need for conventional rules and, of course, both seem to have a similar effect, that is, the absorption into the fictional world. More than that, a large part of Role Play Games (and many other kinds of computer games) borrow the dramatic and narrative vehicles, static and dynamic frames, and – of course – the casting and the characters from film and theatre performances. Thus, considering this borrowing-challenging competition, we have to concentrate on the distance between the position of the spectator and that of the gamer/user.

 

The process of secondary identification taking place in cinema theatres depends paradoxically on distance while in the case of games we encounter something more than just intimacy. Identification is replaced by introjection – the subject is projected inward into an “other”. We do not need to complete imitation to confuse the “other” with the “self”. The subject (player) and the “other” (the onscreen avatar) do not stand at the opposite sides of the mirror anymore – they become one. (…) During the game, the player’s identity ends in disintegration, and the merger of user’s and character’s consciousness ensues (Filiciak, 2003, 91).

 

As we pointed above, the spectator forsakes consciously and willingly – for a definite period of time and in secure conditions – his/her own identity, in order to merge, identify with and interpret the fictional world of the performance. In other words, he/she empties the pot of his/her inner self with the intention of filling it up – by interpreting and re-constructing – with a different identity, capable of being invested with a global significance. In opposition to this process, in computer games – and particularly in RPGs – we engage in a re-mediated activity, which compels the practitioner to interpret information step by step, in order to configure his/her own identity and actions. Ubersfeld’s “denegation” is, in this case, only a starting point for a set of more complex processes, similar, in a way, to stage or film acting. The classical actor’s paradox of Diderot, – “the conscious and systematical lie” – becomes here, simultaneously, the attribute of the one who plays and the one who observes the game, insofar as we are speaking about the same person. In other words, the paradox covers both conditions and melts them, to the degree that the gamer/player builds his own conventional presence as avatar, observes and controls it, in order to gain new abilities and skills and, eventually, to win the game.

 

To generalize: in art we might have to configure in order to be able to interpret whereas in games we have to interpret in order to be able to configure, and proceed from the beginning to the winning or some other situation. (Eskelinen 2001, 2)

 

In the parallel universes of the game, the functionality of the goal-oriented narrative-image compound becomes the major dimension we have to consider when thinking about the motivational differences between the spectator and the gamer. The gamer/hero has to decipher the rules and methods as he/she goes along, in order to cross/pass from one level to another. Therefore, he/she assumes a permanent state of configurative interpretation. In this respect, the spaces, the objects and tools, the time-situation contexts, as well as the other characters (helpers, enemies or neutrals), all count only as functional subordinates.

 

Consequently, in computer games the distinction between static settings and dynamic characters transforms into a more complex continuum of combinations, alterations, and middle terms, because the distribution of static and dynamic game elements doesn’t have to mimic any practices in other modes of expression and communication. (Eskelinen 2001, 4)

 

The entire set of cognitive and psychological processes is motivated by the pleasure taken from being in and of merging with a different world for which narrative chains and symbolic images are the major vehicles. The spectator cannot – and will not – break this set of analogical processes, excepting the cases when fear, disgust or misunderstanding should block his/her identification or should make the shields of protection insecure. By comparison with such a motivational ground, in the role-playing game the functions of the narrative vehicle are profoundly weakened. In a role-playing game, one wants to impress and defeat the other players and/or to simply win the trophy. More than in the spectator’s case, Victor Turner’s idea of liminal condition (Turner, 1982, 31), matches the gamer/player’s condition, as it conserves and supports the (fully conscious) possibility of an “in between worlds” position. It is not until the gamer has positioned himself perfectly “between” the two worlds, that he/she can find the perfect solutions for winning.

 

In literature, theatre and film everything matters or is conventionally supposed to matter equally – if you’ve seen 90% of the presentation that’s not enough, you have to see or read it all (or everything you can). This is characteristic of dominantly interpretative practices in general. In contrast, in computer games you either can’t or don’t have to encounter every possible combinatory event and existent the game contains, as these differ in their ergodic importance. Some actions and reactions in relation to certain events will bring the player quicker to a solution or help him reach the winning situation sooner or more effectively than others. (Eskelinen 2001, 4)

 

What motivates the gamer/player – especially when he/she is totally absorbed in the game – is the extraordinary illusion – well managed by the game’s system of programming – that he/she has a deterministic control both over the evolution of his avatar and over the game’s development.

In the long run, the video-game – including and particularly the RPG – is never really lost, it can only be abandoned. It ends only by winning, even if winning comes after several strategic failures. However, a strategic failure brings with it better managed techniques and skills for the gamer’s avatar. “The relation between the player’s psychophysical presence and his or her virtual presence in a game is usually designed to be both control- and consciousness-oriented”, wisely points out Eskelinen (2001, 7). By abolishing any determination which is external to the game’s universe, – in other words, fate, destiny, responsibility and authority – the video/computer game player’s fundamental condition is to be there[9]. The traditional “identification” link between the spectator, the mediator and the character, mediated by the actor, is broken. Consequently, the gaming experiences and the avatar investment of the self exclude completely the tragic condition of the hero, and all their philosophical and aesthetical aura of mythology. Aristotle can – at long last – retire.

Can we imagine a worldwide popular culture (or, at least, a large part of it) without authors and authorship, as Foucault predicted? It’s already here, I dare say.

 

 

References

Ben Chaim, Daphna, Distance in the Theatre: The Aesthetics of Audience Response, 1984, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press

Benett, Susan, Theatre Audiences. A Theory of production and reception, (Second edition) London& NY, Routledge, 2003

Branigan, Edward, ‘The Spectator and Film Space: Two Theories’, in Screen, 22.1/1981

Cover, Rob, “Audience Inter/Active. Interactive media, narrative control and reconceiving audience history”, New Media & Society, Vol8(1): London, Thousand Oaks, 2006

Ellis, John, Visible Fictions, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982

Eskelinen, Markku ,‘The Gaming Situation’, The International Journal of Computer Game Research, Volume 1, Issue 1, July 2001

Filiciak, Miroslaw, ‘Hyperidentities”, in Wolf , J.P, Perron, Bernard, eds., The Video Game Theory Reader, Routledge, N.Y./London: 2003

Foucault, Michel, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ithaca, NY Cornell University Press1977

Goffman, Erving Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Boston: Northwestern University Press, 1986

Kundanis, Rose M., Children, Teens, Families and Mass Media, Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Elbaum Associates Publishers, 2003

Livingstone, Sonia, Bovill, Moira, Young People, New Media. Research report, http://www.mediaculture-online.de

McLuhan, Marshall The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man; 1st Ed.: University of Toronto Press 1967; reissued by Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978

Passow, Wilfried, ‘The Analysis of Theatre Performance: The State of the Art’, in Poetics Today, 2.3/1981, p. 240

Runcan, Miruna Pentru o semiotica a spectacolului teatral (For a Semiotic of : Theatrical Performance) Cluj: Eikon Publishing House, 2006

Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications. 1982

Ubersfeld, Anne, ‘The Pleasure of the Spectator’, in Modern Drama, 25.1/1982

Ubersfeld, Anne Lire Le Théâtre, Paris: Sciences Sociales, 1971

 

 

This essay is a fragment of The Everyday Drama Research and Creation Program, a complex interdisciplinary research-creation project, carried out during the last seven years at the Theatre and Television Faculty of the Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj, Romania. The current theme/field of this program – “The X-Men & Women Generation” – focuses on the young people’s representations of the self, based on their cultural consumption. The Everyday Drama Research and Creation Program was awarded a two year grant by the Romanian Ministry of Culture (2007-2008) and undertakes empirical and theoretical studies, video-productions, written journalism, plays and theatre productions.

 

 

Notes