A conversation with not-novelist Masha Tupitsyn about her new book Love Dog

In November 2011, the writer and critic Masha Tupitsyn started a blog called Love Dog. Like she said at the time, her stance was Hamlet’s: “You don’t let go of your object

Love Dog — now also a book coming out soon from Penny-Ante, and the second volume in Tupitsyn’s trilogy of immaterial writing — is a project about love in the digital age, feminist love, and mourning. It is also a good read, lit through with ’80s songs, red and green, tarot’s fool, screenshots, time jumps, and a tough, elegant shyness. (Like Bowie, Tupitsyn knows “when to go out and when to stay in.”) It is a multimedia notebook, pieced out in day-sized chunks like it was originally, on Tumblr. First, though, Love Dog is a call to love, all the stronger and wiser because Tupitsyn’s heart has been broken too.

Her object is X.: “The person for whom I read everything now and will write this year, making the ‘you’ into a world.” Tupitsyn’s X. is not foggy, or a narcissistic cipher, but an actual person who is never named. And as Love Dog picks up speed, Tupitsyn writes too to her mother, to her dear friend Elaine Castillo, to books, cities, and others.

Though I see why Tupitsyn does not call herself a novelist, I’m going to keep Love Dog on my shelf next to Chris Kraus and Herta Müller anyway. Like their books, Love Dog is one you can enter at any point, yet is still cohesive and wholly of itself.

Masha and I chatted by email in late May and early June 2013.

Read the “The Dogs of Love” here.

image by masha tupitsyn

Dys4ia didn’t win at the IGF, which traditionally celebrates young white guys experimenting with the language of design through well-liked but increasingly familiar twee, retro aesthetics. (Disclosure: the festival is run by the same organization that owns one of my longtime employers, industry news and features site Gamasutra.) But this year the festival’s grand prize winner was another harbinger of a new, deeper way of viewing what game experiences can mean. Richard Hofmeier, another independent game designer, madeCart Life, a grueling simulation of the daily life of someone relying on a sidewalk cart’s income to survive. Its bleak grayscale art and the ruthlesness of even its smallest rituals, like showering, buying food, and remembering to pick your child up from school, represented a shift in the “life sim” genre, highlighting the humble heroism in simply facing the world every day without privilege rather than the power fantasies with which games are usually associated.

Hofmeier took a further step once he received the award: He turned over his booth on the well-trafficked show pavilion to his friend, critic, writer, and text-game creator Porpentine so she could showcase her game Howling Dogs, a fascinating, brilliant text experience in confinement, depression and escapism.

Since then, the individual games movement has exploded, attracting curious creators and new experimenters in droves. It’s also attracted its share of detractors, veteran game designers who look at the narrative-driven personal-storytelling games as “cool, but ‘not games.’ ” They may see a betrayal of their sanctified best practices of systems design, player agency, and reaction driven by conditions. Their resistance has begun to seem as political as it is professional, a desire to close a door to under­represented voices just as they’ve begun to step through it.

-“Playing Outside” by Leigh Alexander

The Honeymoon Killers, 1969

Plates 294 to 299 of Eadweard Muybridge’s groundbreaking collection from 1887 titled Animal Locomotion: an Electro-Photographic Investigation of Connective Phases of Animal Movements, a massive portfolio with 781 plates comprising of 20,000 photographs. In the preceding four years Muybridge made more than 100,000 images, working obsessively in Philadelphia under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania. The vast majority of Muybridge’s work at this time was done in a special sunlit outdoor studio, due to the bulky cameras and slow photographic emulsion speeds then available. One of his favored subjects to show the human form in locomotion was the tennis player.

-“Tennis with Muybridge” by The Public Domain Review

The Public Domain Review is an online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to showcasing the most interesting and unusual out-of-copyright works available on the web. You can explore our curated collections of curiosities and our fortnightly articles from leading scholars, writers, and artists at publicdomainreview.org

So a non-commercial common attracts commercial capital, but is this a problem? After all, open commons are not scarce resources, prone to depletion like clean water or ocean fish stocks. Your enjoyment of a city park or a downloaded song does not hinder me from enjoying the same. What turns the contradiction into a tragedy is that private capital tends to destroy the qualities that attracted it in the first place. While commons and commerce can never be completely disentangled, it is large-scale capital that is most damaging, and it is the commitment to openness that blocks off ways to prevent the damage.

Private capital damages open commons through three mechanisms. It erodes the common, it alienates the community that tends the common, and distorts the essential nature of the common.

Neighborhood diversity is an open commons prone to erosion. Harvey writes: “A community group that struggles to maintain ethnic diversity in its neighborhood and protect against gentrification may suddenly find its property prices (and taxes) rising as real estate agents market the ‘character’ of their neighborhood to the wealthy as multicultural, street-lively, and diverse. By the time the market has done its destructive work, not only have the original residents been dispossessed of that common which they had created (often being forced out by rising rents and property taxes), but the common itself becomes so debased as to be unrecognizable.”

-“Open Wide” by Tom Slee

Stephen Shore,  Church Street and Second Street (June 20, 1974)

Suicide is paradigmatic of subalternity. It constitutes the ultimate limit on speech: The protagonist can no longer tell her own story, explain the sequence of experiences that led to the decision, or describe the hesitation of feet at the edge or the joy and terror and speed of the fall. And yet, it is only after death that the act can be brought to life. Only when it has been silenced can that death made sense of, pieced together into a chain of events that says something about the world and how it works. While Spanish activists and politicians have sparred over how best to interpret the suicides, therefore, the tasks of narration and emplotment belong to the writer and historian. Perhaps this is why Talal Asadhas suggested in On Suicide Bombing that suicide is intimately tied up with fiction and the desire to craft “plausible histories.”

One way to tell this story would start from the recognition that the suicides bring into sharp relief a set of structural factors that can otherwise be difficult to see with the naked eye. With general unemployment currently at 26 percent — though the figure for youth is more than double that — it isn’t hard to imagine plausible scenarios in which spiraling interest payments converge with ever increasing desperation. Since the financial crisis hit in 2008, foreclosures have skyrocketed: Some 400,000 evictions have taken place, which amounts to hundreds a day. At the same time, the most recent census data shows that between five and six million housing units currently sit empty, approximately 20 percent of the country’s housing stock. In this way, crisis intensifies the structural contradictions of capitalism. The Spanish countryside is now littered with half-built subdivisions, carcasses of concrete, brick, and rebar, the scars of a construction boom fueled by northern European banks.

-“Pasado Compuesto” by Dan Nemser

Dadi Dreucol (con On_ly), No future, Valencia 2012. All images come from the blog Escrito en la pared.

“Leak, Memory” by Neelika Jayawardane

“Leak, Memory” by Neelika Jayawardane

watercolor by an unnamed Guantánamo detainee, via

My memories of play all seem like alien encounters. The earliest one I can summon involves holding a plastic bat and being in an open field, wearing sandals. My brother is somewhere nearby, and I have no idea what we are doing, but there is also a small plastic ball that produces a strange machining noise as it sails through the air. Then I am four or five; I have decided to pretend to be a dolphin and swim across the soft ripples of my parent’s bed. Then I am the victim, left alone with my older brother who, when the sun sets, decides to start speaking like a demon, locking himself in his room and refusing to come out, then rushing after me an hour later, pinning me to the floor, growling and snarling until I am crying — an outcome produced, a role played, a win had.

Then I’m playing football in high school. I get confused when the lineman across from me gets angry that I hadn’t tried to hit him during the preceding play, slipping past sideways so I could get closer to the ball carrier. “What? Are you afraid to hit people? Come on, hit me!” On the next down, I didn’t think about the ball or anyone else. I hurtled my body at his with as much force as I had at 14. After the play I walked back to the huddle dizzy, spots in my eyes with each blink. “That’s better,” he yelled.

Then I’m playing a game called Final Fantasy VIII, a spiral notebook filled with statistical variations based on character changes I can make, trying to decide the best approach for the game’s ending fight, when my dad tells me my grandfather’s finally died and asks me if I want to fly to Arizona the next morning to attend his funeral. I tell him no. I hardly knew him, and the service will be all strangers, and I have no money, and there are all these changing numbers here before me to attend to.

-“Reign in Drool” by Mike Thomsen

For a game that is already receiving praise from many critics as the best of the year, with IGN claiming it “nudges the entire genre forward,” it is worth pausing on Infinite’s jarring limitations. Of course every game must end, but Infinitechallenges what a good ending to a video game is by enforcing entirely deterministic play. The agency of the game is the slight variation in control from player to player, the online competitions for who has taken the best screenshot of Columbia, the interpretations of Infinite itself. Where other games have climactic finales, they also ensure that a world exists that begs exploring, and allow players to push the boundaries of linear storytelling.

As a result, the experience of Bioshock Infinite is far more cinematic than it is interactive. Already YouTube users have spliced the entirety of the game’s pre-written scenes into a film. It comes as no surprise that Levine tried to make it as a screenwriter before responding to an ad for Looking Glass Games in 1995. His imagination deserves some measure of the praise the game has received. The storytelling and attention to detail in Bioshock Infinite is masterful; it challenges the player to think long after the game has ended about how the world of the game, and our own world, works. But the pitfall of cinematic gaming is their allure hinges on the mystique of a punchline ending. It’s not that the ending is too profound to understand, the narrator has simply made it so convoluted and structurally complex that players can’t immediately suss out its precise contours. This is not necessarily a good thing.

-“After Infinitude” by Kathleen French

art by George Rozen (Shadow Magazine, July 1934)

This is the editorial note to The New Inquiry Magazine, Vol. 17: Games. View the full table of contents here.

Subscribe to TNI for $2 and get “Games” (as well as free access to our archive of back issues) today.

***

“Can a game be art?” The banality of the question isn’t only in the way it deploys art as the Platonic ideal of all cultural production, or the way it invites tautological answers. (Are games art? Is art a game? Yes. No. Maybe. Sometimes.) No, the real failure is that it elicits a precise, elitist definition of art — who’s in, who’s out — while assuming games are both straightforwardly simple and in search of dignity.

Games can seem less like artistic creations and more a simple consequence of the human condition. No one has to make a game; the collective struggle for survival invented all their tropes. Gamification is a commonsense management approach and a mating strategy, as Neil Strauss’s rape-culture classic The Game suggests.

So we take for granted certain definitions of playing and of games, of rules and boundaries and transgressions and rewards, and we internalize their contradictions as inherent to the social operating system: In the market-democratic utopia of games, everyone is equal within the system, equal before the rules, at least at the start, and through some combination of cunning, creativity and will, a player can demonstrate she is the best. Games allow freedom that depends entirely on the restrictions of arbitrary rules. The freeform fun of play is better when its instrumentalized. Competition brings out the best in us by destroying our spirit and inculcating failure. We work at leisure; we play goal-driven games to escape the grind of pursuing life goals. With the rise of video games, we’ve begun to play alone more and more often, while the games themselves are becoming more insistently “social.

Creativity, curiosity, and learning are always encouraged, as long as they’re not deployed against the logic of the game. This reaches an apotheosis in contemporary work culture: Be creative! We’ve got a pool table and a beer fridge and a big open office without cubicles and no benefits and an 80-hour work week! Play with us! Or play around at home on special projects!

The rise of gaming’s cultural prominence reflects broader changes in structures of control and value extraction. As Sarah Wanenchak shows in an essay for this issue, SimCity’s always-on DRM points to the transitions capitalists are making from producers to rentiers. Kathleen French reviews the subtle and insidious limitations of Bioshock Infinite’s open-ended world. Rob Horning looks at social media as gaming system (and data-generating profit center), whose roots can be traced to 1960s pop psychology and its behaviorist dogma. According to Mike Thomsen’s “Reign in Drool,” games placate us with opportunities to submit and plague us with farcical rehearsals of the way our mortal bodies always limit our possibilities.

But there is another conception of play that’s subversive, insurrectionary. The ultimate game is revolution: new rules, no rules. This sort of play comes into view when the contradictions inherent in gameplay begin to destroy its necessary logic, opening a new terrain of possibility. What might weaponized games look like? Finch Kaye interviews Porpentine, a writer and game designer producing games as bombs, opposing misogynist gaming culture while destabilizing video games’ basic elements. In “Playing Outside,” Leigh Alexander elucidates the history of bro-centric video-game culture and points past it to games with goals — social, ethical, and political — that move beyond the limiting trap of familiar pleasures and “fun.” Though as Tim Maly shows in “How to Destroy a Commnuity” massively multiplayer games can also be training grounds for destroying collectives, for innovating means to re-isolate the people that games bring together.

Hermione Hoby interviews Fatima Al Qadiri, an artist and musician who composed an alternate soundtrack for Desert Strike, a 1992 Desert Storm video game for a Sega console. Al Qadiri, a Kuwaiti survivor of the Gulf War, played Desert Strike as a child just after the war and hasn’t been able to play video games since.

Opting out of games and game playing and competition and authority is something that games themselves let us fantasize about. It’s not clear whether this helps. Enjoy the rules!

Kenyan women have been laying their bodies on the line for years. A group of women stripping naked in public is one of our most potent political practices. Women’s bodies work as a potential and latent public space in Kenyan modernity because they usually appear in public only under cover: a frightening secret weapon everyone knows about. In many African communities, there is no stronger curse or taboo upon men than seeing “the mothers naked.” There is no stronger way for women acting together to register political dissent. Deployed in this way, women’s bodies have the power to make (something) public, to create “a public” around this action, and thus to produce both public-ness and publicity from the ground of their own corporeal materiality.

As political action, this is not only a public mode of power and a specific form of public voice. It is also a critical public voice of dissent against the all-encompassing patriarchy.

These women’s bodies are subversive bodies. Women’s power deployed in this way can only be oppositional, always a challenge, always-already embodying and performing the power to refuse. Yet, women’s bodies do not have to be unclothed for significant utterance. A woman’s daily clothing is already a mode of speech about her life and about her relationship to the situation of her embodiment. In contemporary Kenya, even the banality of women’s everyday clothing appears to pose a threat to masculinist domination.

-“Silence is a Woman” by Wambui Mwangi

From TNI’s forthcoming Kenyan Election Supplement.

“Silence is a Woman” is dedicated to the reverberating voices of Gladwell Otieno and Zahid Rajan, and to all the women in all the bus and matatu stops in Kenya.

Image credit: Wangechi Mutu, “Primary Syphilitic Ulcers of the Cervix”

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