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Vol. 11, No. 1 (2020)

http://www.eludamos.org

Gaming and the ‘Parergodic’ Work of Seriality in Interactive Digital

Environments

Shane Denson

Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture. 2020; 11 (1), pp. 9–37

Eludamos Vol. 11, No. 1 (2020)

pp. 9–37

Gaming and the ‘Parergodic’ Work of Seriality in

Interactive Digital Environments

SHANE DENSON

Videogames, game franchises, gaming cultures, and the activity of gameplay itself—

all of these are marked by seriality as a crucial industrial and commercial but also

cultural and formal logic (Denson and Jahn-Sudmann 2013; Boluk and Lemieux

2017, pp. 173-206). In this respect, contemporary digital games and gaming are still

governed by the serialized forms of popular culture that emerged in the nineteenth

century, articulating a productive and easily exploitable formula of modularized (or

episodic) repetition and variation that forms the core of what Horkheimer and Adorno

would later diagnose as the politically regressive ‘culture industry’ that streamlined

the production of popular music, genre literature, comics, film serials and blockbuster

franchises, television programs, and other media of the twentieth century (2002, pp.

94-136).

Regardless, though, of whether the culture industry was ever as

monolithic—or the ideological force of its serialized logic ever as focused or as

powerful—as the first-generation Frankfurt School thinkers would have us believe,

seriality functions in qualitatively different ways in videogames and the interactive

digital media environments of which they are a part. The difference, which I will

explore in this essay with reference to the figure of Batman and his move from

analog to digital and ludic media, can be summarized in terms of a shift from a

‘parergonal’ to what I call a ‘parergodic’ logic.

In broad outline, this shift can be understood as follows. Like many of the heroes and

antiheroes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Batman is a Janus-faced figure

who alternates between a secret identity (the caped crusader) and a public persona

(the billionaire Bruce Wayne, whose riches fund the technological equipment upon

which his alter ego depends). This duality is of central significance to the construction

of the character and to the articulation of narrative conflicts and their resolution or

deferral (for example, the constant threat and narrow avoidance of his unmasking

motivates many of Batman’s actions and relations, both public and private). But the

significance of such duality is not restricted solely to the diegetic level; it is, in fact,

centrally implicated in the formal and material logics of serialization, which involve the

reader/viewer in an oscillation between an ongoing story or narrative world and its

articulation in more or less closed, episodic forms—alternating between continuity

and discontinuity, between inside and out, thus establishing a disjointed relation

between one comic book, film, or television episode and the next.

Some of the

twentieth century’s most popular serial figures, like Batman, Dracula, Tarzan,

Frankenstein’s monster, or Sherlock Holmes, pushed this logic even farther, crossing

over from one medium to another and enacting a properly ‘parergonal’ logic; as

emphatically plurimedial figures, that is, they continually crossed the boundaries

between print, film, radio, and televisual media, slipped in and out of their frames,

and showed these frames to be reversible—very much in accordance with the

multistable logic described by Jacques Derrida (1987) under the heading of the

parergon.

The latter concept, which combines para (next to, besides) and ergon

10 Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture • Vol. 11, No. 1 (2020)

(work), refers to material or conceptual framing devices that can either focus attention

on the work (a painting, a story, an argument) or, as might be the case with an

ornately carved and gilded picture frame, can become the object of attention itself.

Serial figures, who already embody this logic in their alternations between public and

private personas or between civilian clothes and flashy, ornamental costumes, turn

this reversibility back on the media of their articulation when they cross from one

medium to another; transcending the particularity of any single iteration, such figures

constitute themselves as higher-order media in which the transformations of first-

order apparatic media (radio, film, television, etc.) can be traced in the manner of an

ongoing—though not altogether linear—series.

In the twenty-first century, however, the medial logics of serial figures have been

transformed in conjunction with the rise of interactive, networked, and convergent

digital media environments. In making the shift to digital and especially ludic media,

the figure of Batman exemplifies this transition from a broadly parergonal to a

specifically ‘parergodic’ logic. The latter term builds upon Espen Aarseth’s (1997, p.

1) notion of the ‘ergodic’ situation of gameplay—where ergodics combines the Greek

ergon (work in the double sense of labor or an artistic or other work produced by this

labor) and hodos (path), thus positing nontrivial labor as the aesthetic mode of

players’ engagement with games. Ergodic media give rise to new forms of seriality

that accompany, probe, and trace the developmental trajectories of the new media

environment. These new serial forms and functions, as embodied by a figure like

Batman, are fundamentally interactive, and they raise questions about the blurring of

relations between work and play, between paid labor and the incidental work or

‘immaterial labor’ (Lazzarato 1996; Terranova 2000; Dowling, Nunes, and Trott 2007)

culled from our leisure activities and entertainment practices, in the age of what

Gilles Deleuze (1992) calls the ‘control society’ or of what Steven Shaviro (2010)

calls ‘post-cinematic affect.’ Tracing Batman’s transitions from comics to graphic

novels, to the films of Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan, and on to the popular and

critically acclaimed Arkham series of videogames (Rocksteady Studios 2009-2015),

the episodic point-and-click Batman: The Telltale Series (Telltale Games 2016-2017),

and the virtual reality game Batman: Arkham VR (Rocksteady Studios 2016), I will

demonstrate that the dynamics of border-crossing which characterized earlier serial

figures has now been re-functionalized in accordance with the ergodic work of

navigating computational networks—in accordance, that is, with work and network

forms that frame all aspects of contemporary life. With computational media devices

serving as the platforms through which we engage the figure of Batman, whose own

preoccupations with digitally enhanced perception and action form the very core of

his superhero identity, our serial interactions with the figure qua avatar become a

highly self-reflexive probing of our own multistable relations to the digital media

environment.

Ultimately, this essay aims to contribute to the philosophical study of computer

games by developing a media-philosophical perspective on the self-reflexive work of

serialization in tracking the shift from what Bernard Stiegler (1998, 2008, 2011)

describes as a ‘mnemotechnical’ media regime (dominated by recording technologies

such as the phonograph and cinema) to the anticipatory regime of real-time

audiovisual generation (whereby the retentional or past-orientation of traditional

media is replaced by digital computation’s protentional and future-oriented

temporality).

Channeling this shift towards the emphatically parergodic situation of

Denson • Gaming and the ‘Parergodic’ Work of Seriality in Interactive Digital Environments 11

interactive gameplay, computer games become the paradigmatic media objects—or

agencies—of a philosophical reorientation, changing the terms of human-

technological interfacing at both the individual and the collective level, including the

political-existential level that Jean-Paul Sartre (2004) referred to in his later work as

the ‘seriality’: the mutually alienated social existence that he saw as the default form

of collectivity in the modern world. As we shall see, the new temporality of a

computational media regime changes the parameters of social and political

formations as much as it does those of cultural and textual forms. Coming to terms

with these changes is the task of accounting for what might be called the new

seriality.

The Mediating Function of Serial Figures

In order to understand this media-philosophical reorientation, we need to understand

first of all the media-historical role and function of serial figures as they operated in

analog media. In a nutshell, this function can be summarized as follows: serially and

plurimedially instantiated figures (like Frankenstein’s monster, Tarzan, Dracula,

Batman, Sherlock Holmes, or Fu-Manchu) self-reflexively traced out the unfolding

trajectories of media change and transformation, exposing the dynamics of ongoing

media-epistemic shifts to critical reflection and/or aesthetic-experiential awareness.

They did this by shifting from a medial and diegetic ‘inside’ to a plurimedial ‘outside’

or ‘in-between,’ thus transcending individual media and establishing intermedial and

media-historical relations. In doing so, these serial figures ‘mediated’ media changes;

that is, they negotiated transitions and sometimes helped media users to navigate

new media spaces, for example by framing newness, novelty, or innovation against

the background of the familiar—as when a familiar story was reframed or remade in a

new medium—alternately highlighting either continuity or discontinuity and helping to

‘make sense’ of the change. This mediatory function, as I see it, is dependent on the

medial constitution of serial figures—on their relations to first-order media (individual

media in the normal sense of the word). In particular, it is essential that these figures

are plurimedial—that they are not confined to a single medium but instead move

between books, film, radio, TV, and other media. Serial figures therefore transcend

any single medium in which they might be expressed, and because this is the case,

they are themselves able, in effect, to serve as higher-order media within which the

evolution of (normal, lower-level) media (like film, TV, comics, or novels) can be

made visible. More generally speaking, these figures serve as platforms on which

large-scale, ‘environmental’ shifts in the media landscape can be made available to

critical or affective/aesthetic experience.

It is in this sense that serial figures can be

said to figure the serial trajectories of media—that is, to provide an image or figural

form of media’s ongoing developments, changes, and evolution—rather than simply

delineating characters within a given series.

12 Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture • Vol. 11, No. 1 (2020)

Frankenstein’s monster (Boris Karloff) and Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller) as self-

reflexive serial figures following the transition from silent to sound film.

A couple of examples will clarify these claims. In the early 1930s, in the wake of the

transition from silent to sound cinema that dramatically altered the production and

reception of film from about 1926 to 1931 (Crafton 1997), Frankenstein and Tarzan

films used the established, familiar figures of the monster and the ape-man to

foreground and probe the meaning, the effects, and the phenomenology of filmic

sound. They did this by transforming two very articulate literary characters into

inarticulate, moaning and yelling beings whose visual iconicity rests atop a somewhat

confused, almost schizophrenic relation to sound. They drew attention to the still

unsettled nature of filmic sound, which served as a medium for dialogue and other

diegetic information, of course, but which also embodied a very recent media-

technological innovation that had not yet been fully naturalized or stripped of its

novelty. These uncanny creatures, only half-alive or half-human, further

denaturalized sound to spectacular effect. In James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931),

Boris Karloff’s mute monster contrasts sharply with the depiction in Mary Shelley’s

novel, originally published in 1818 and since proliferating in countless theatrical and

literary adaptations, of a loquaciously poetic creature; but even more than

problematizing the relation of film to novel as a ‘faithful’ or ‘unfaithful’ adaptation, the

monster’s muteness raises questions about the medium of film itself (Spadoni 2007;

Denson 2014, 2016).

Deprived of speech, the monster on screen is reminiscent of a

silent-film actor, who for technical reasons must communicate through gesture and

pantomime rather than words. The transition from silent to sound film is thus

problematized in the very figure of the monster. The same goes for Johnny

Weissmuller’s portrayal of Tarzan, who in Tarzan the Ape Man (Van Dyke 1932) is

deprived on film of his noble and eloquent alter-ego Lord Greystoke and is instead

reduced to an athletic body and the iconic yell by which he communicates with the

animals of the jungle (Denson 2008).

Thus, both of these figures use sound in ways

that call into question its naturalization, in the talkies, as a transparent or unobtrusive

carrier of verbal information. Both the monster’s moans and the ape-man’s yell

foreground a still untamed materiality of the sonic dimension, in effect reinforcing a

by-then fading sense of the media-technological novelty of sound film while

paradoxically embodying all that might be seen as primitive or obsolete in the silent

cinema.

Denson • Gaming and the ‘Parergodic’ Work of Seriality in Interactive Digital Environments 13

In this way, these figures maintained a complex relation to media change: they did

not simply herald in the new; rather, they problematized change itself, opening a

space not only for various judgments or opinions about the talkies but for various and

conflicting perceptions and affective relations with respect to media change. Any fear,

suspense, or pity that viewers might have experienced with regard to the monster,

the ape-man, or to the fictional worlds they inhabit would be implicated in a complex

set of feelings about the cinema itself and its recent transformations. It is in this

sense that Karloff’s monster and Weissmuller’s ape-man can be seen as paradigm

examples of the ambiguous mediatory function of serial figures: they ‘mediate’ media

change through a negotiation that is anything but straightforward, and that implicates

viewers in an effort to probe and navigate the phenomenological contours of the

transitional space between the old and the new.

This has important consequences for thinking about the form and function of the type

of seriality that’s at stake here. Both Karloff’s monster and Weissmuller’s ape-man

were immediately serialized: Frankenstein was followed by Bride of Frankenstein

(Whale 1935), Son of Frankenstein (Lee 1939), The Ghost of Frankenstein (Kenton

1942), and so on until the series finally concluded with Abbott and Costello Meet

Frankenstein (Barton 1948); Tarzan the Ape Man was followed by the sequels

Tarzan and His Mate (Gibbons 1934), Tarzan Escapes (Thorpe, Farrow, McKay,

Seitz, and Wellman 1936), Tarzan Finds a Son! (Thorpe 1939), Tarzan’s Secret

Treasure (Thorpe 1941), Tarzan’s New York Adventure (Thorpe 1942), and a bunch

of others. In both of these cases, though, the basic weirdness of the figures—their

initial ambivalence with respect to diegetic and nondiegetic levels and to silent and

sound-film medialities—was quickly reduced as the once-volatile icons were

streamlined into increasingly predictable figures living in much less wonky universes

than the ones they had been born into. But this is only a very narrow view of the

figures’ seriality. For beyond these explicit series of sequels, there is a broader realm

of serial instantiation and proliferation in which both figures participated. Karloff’s and

Weissmuller’s iconic embodiments joined much longer series of instantiations in a

variety of media, including novels, theater, political cartoons, pulp fiction, silent film,

comics, radio, and later television series. They contributed therefore to a higher-order

series, one with even less concern for narrative continuity than the series of Tarzan

and Frankenstein films of the 1930s. Constituted by the figures’ often quite

mechanically repetitive stagings, punctuated by minor and major variations in theme

and above all medium, these higher-order series do not seem to lead anywhere, at

least from a narrative point of view. On the other hand, though, they provide a record

or index of media-historical transformations (Denson and Mayer 2018). From this

perspective, the iconic versions of the monster and the ape-man are emblems of

transition on a grander scale, snapshots of popular-cultural and media-technological

processes that stretch from the early or mid-nineteenth century up until at least until

the end of the twentieth.

Towards a Post-Figural Seriality

But if this general picture, according to which serialization processes are deeply

intertwined with processes of medial self-historicization, still applies today in certain

respects, something subtle and yet fundamental has nevertheless changed.

14 Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture • Vol. 11, No. 1 (2020)

Describing this change is the primary task of this essay, which takes us from the

twentieth into the twenty-first century and radically revises the model that I have

described so far. The serial trajectory that I will be tracing here via the figure of

Batman is again a trajectory of media change—most centrally, the transition from

analog to digital or from cinematic to ‘post-cinematic’ media (Shaviro 2010; Denson

and Leyda 2016). But it is also a trajectory of transformation with regard to the very

parameters, forms, and functions of seriality and serialization processes within this

new media environment. In a sense, it is a transition away from the serial figure as a

mode of popular-cultural expression and medial self-reflexivity, and a shift towards

something new: a ‘post-serial figure,’ perhaps. What I mean is not that seriality is

over or that these new figures have somehow stopped being serial. Rather, the post-

should be seen as a problematization, foremost, of the figurality of serial figures. The

recent history of the Batman figure traces this shift towards, or intimates the coming

of, a post-figural serial form.

This is a complicated shift, however, as classical serial figures like Frankenstein’s

monster and Tarzan were themselves characterized by an unstable, flickering sort of

figurality, which Derrida’s (1987) reflections on the notion of the ‘parergon’ help us to

conceptualize. But the serial figure’s digital-era counterpart, as we shall see with

recent iterations of Batman, refocuses the broadly parergonal logic of the twentieth

century into what I call a parergodic logic that corresponds to the post-figural,

processual nature of digital mediation, computation, and interactivity.

First, let us look at the logic of the parergon, by which classical serial figures, as I

have been describing them, are governed. Etymologically, as I mentioned earlier, the

term parergon is composed of the prefix para- (next to, besides) and ergon, which

derives from Greek for work. The parergon is thus literally ‘next to the work,’ marginal

or supplementary to it, as a frame is with respect to a picture (or an hors d’oeuvre

with respect to the main course of a meal). But the picture frame in particular

demonstrates an essential reversibility: on the one hand, the frame serves as a

background for the work, that is, as a ground for the image it frames and selects or

presents as the figure at the center of our attention. On the other hand, the frame can

also be absorbed into that figure when seen against the larger background of the

wall, as might be the case when we take a broad view of a row of paintings on a

museum wall before selecting one to observe more closely (Derrida 1987, pp. 60-61).

The frame is therefore subject to repeated figure/ground reversals, and it is the same

with serial figures: a figure like Frankenstein’s monster is of course part of the

diegetic universe outlined by a given film, for example, but it also exceeds that frame

and partakes in a plurimedial series of instantiations. We never just see

Frankenstein’s monster; we see an iteration of the monster that stands in

extradiegetic relation to Karloff’s iconic portrayal and a host of others as well.

Figure/ground reversibility is an essential precondition for plurimedial seriality as

such, specifically enabling the foregrounding of mediality that allows the serial figure

to serve as a figuration of media change.

Recently, however, things have changed. For one thing, media have changed. With

the rise of digital media, the formerly discrete media across which serial figures were

deployed as plurimedial beings—across film, TV, print, comics, etc.—come to mingle

in much closer proximity to one another. What Henry Jenkins (2006) calls our

‘convergence culture’ responds by recalibrating narrative and cultural expression, by

Denson • Gaming and the ‘Parergodic’ Work of Seriality in Interactive Digital Environments 15

coming up with new ways to tell stories (and to sell commodities) that take advantage

of the coming-together of media in the space of the digital. This includes, among

other things, new forms of serialization. In Jenkins’s version, transmedia storytelling

is inherently serial, but much less linear than a conventional television series might

be, as it allows the reader/viewer/player/user to explore various facets of a story-

world through movies, games, textual, and other forms, and it allows in many cases a

variable order of consumption that corresponds, we might say, to the database

structures in which digital information is stored and (interactively) accessed.

explore a transmedial series is not the same as reading a serialized novel from

beginning to end, because the point of this type of storytelling is to construct a

coherent world or universe in which the media consumer can traverse various paths

that will each complement one another and enrich their knowledge of the whole, thus

providing a greater number of opportunities for affective (and, of course, monetary)

investment in that world.

And while this might appear similar in some ways to the

various entry points provided by classical serial figures’ various retellings, the smooth

consistency of transmedial serialities and the universes they construct actually

appears hostile to the plurimediality at the heart of the classical figures’ mediatory

functions. As I have been suggesting, those functions depended on disjuncture and

inconsistency between media as the pivot for the parergonal figure/ground reversals

by which they could track and foreground media changes. Predictably, then, many

once robust serial figures, like Fu-Manchu, have more or less withered and died in

this new environment; others, like Tarzan, live on, but they seem to have lost their

former edge. After Disney’s Tarzan (Buck and Lima 1999) and Phil Collins’s

Broadway musical Tarzan (2006), Tarzan hardly has any of the threatening and

unpredictable potential left that he had in Weissmuller’s first film. This, it seems to

me, is indicative of a new drive for standardization rather than, as was the case with

classical serial figures, the activation and juxtaposition of often incompatible

associations drawn from a figure’s prolific serial career.

A figure like Batman, on the other hand, thrives in this environment. Remarkably, it

does so in such a way as to be both immersed in the medial and cultural environment

of digital convergence and interactivity and yet somehow resistant to the streamlining

forces of transmedialization. Batman has been transformed irrevocably in his

transition to the world of digital and post-cinematic media, and yet he maintains some

of the rough edges between various medial instantiations, remains unsettled in his

oscillations between films, videogames, and comics, which collectively fail to tell a

coherent story. Formally, then, Batman resembles classical serial figures in this

respect: like Tarzan or Frankenstein in the wake of the sound transition, Batman

combines the new and the old; he is quick to don bright and shiny innovation, but he

juxtaposes it with recalcitrant vestiges of the medial past. The parergonal potential

that results from this mixture is different from that of earlier figures, though, as it is

transformed in relation to the computational basis of digital mediation, by which

plurimedial distinctions (or the borders between discrete media) are effaced. Without

accounting for this computational basis, an approach like that of Jenkins only

scratches the surface of the cultural and experiential changes associated with digital

convergence. Looking at the recent history of Batman helps us to go deeper, for it

traces the transition to computation as a total or all-encompassing environment for

cultural and material life. What the figure reveals, though, is the progressive eclipse

of figurality, upon which the parergonal reversals of classical plurimedial seriality

depended; figurality, as in the figure/ground Gestalt-shifts I have described, is a

16 Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture • Vol. 11, No. 1 (2020)

matter of perception and its objects, but these are circumvented through the

processual workings and non-perceptual mediation of algorithmic computation.

Maintaining, through serial plurality, a space of marginal difference from which to

track the emergence of these processes, Batman traces the transition from figural to

post-figural forms and thus embodies the shift from a parergonal to a parergodic

logic.

With the term parergodics or parergodicity, I am linking Derrida’s notion of the

parergon with Espen Aarseth’s (1997) use of the term ergodics to describe

processes and structures of digital interactivity. Ergodics, which Aarseth borrows

from math and physics, is composed of ergon (work) and hodos (path, way). For

Aarseth, the arduous or laborious path of ergodic interactivity marks a fundamental

difference between digital media such as videogames or electronic literature on the

one hand and traditional literature and narrative media on the other. For whereas the

path of a narrative is fixed for the reader of a novel or the spectator of a film, for

example, it must be generated in digital media through a cooperative effort between

the user and the computational system. The signs composing the text of a

videogame—including textual strings, visual perspectives, narrative and audiovisual

events—are not (completely) predetermined but generated on the fly, in real time, as

the player makes their way through the game. Ergodics, the path of the work or the

work of the path, therefore describes the nontrivial labor that, according to Aarseth, is

the basic aesthetic mode of players’ engagement with digital games.

Expanding this idea beyond Aarseth’s original frame of reference, the concept of

ergodics can also be seen to ground a wider variety of interactive and participatory

potentials in contemporary culture, where computational networks are implicated

virtually ubiquitously in entertainment, social life, and work. Significantly, the borders

between these realms are remarkably unclear (think of all the things people do on

social networks and the virtual impossibility of distinguishing clearly between work

activities and play), and it would seem that this has something to do with the

indifference of computational media to the type of contents processed. This

computational indifference to the phenomenological modalities of human

experience—or to the differences between the analog media that at least partly

corresponded to those modalities—leads, as Mark Hansen (2010) argues, to a

divergence between mediation in its classical, perceptually oriented form and a new

form of mediation that channels human affect into the process-oriented project of

establishing ever greater networks of pure connectivity. This is the larger

significance, I propose, of what Steven Shaviro (2010) calls ‘post-cinematic affect’: in

contrast to the cinema, which was constituted by the storage and reproduction of

perceptual objects, ergodic mediation involves acts of affective interfacing with the

fundamentally post-perceptual realm of computation, which is algorithmic, distributed,

and nonlocal, in contrast to the phenomenological basis of human embodiment.

Clicking on a YouTube video not only delivers perceptual content to your embodied

eyes and ears, it also delivers computational content—information about affective,

epistemic, and monetary valuations—to the routines of network-constitutive

algorithms. In this environment, play activities not only involve the execution of

nontrivial work, as Aarseth argues, but corporations and financial interests, among

others, continually find clever ways to disguise work as play, to ‘gamify’ our labor,

both paid and unpaid, while mining the data generated in the process in order to

profit from both dedicated and incidental work. In this environment, as Matteo

Denson • Gaming and the ‘Parergodic’ Work of Seriality in Interactive Digital Environments 17

Pasquinelli (2009), Shoshona Zuboff (2019), and many others have argued, virtually

any investment of attention or affect will also generate a surplus value for Google,

Facebook, & Co.—a value produced and accumulated parasitically, without regard

for any significance we may attach to the contents of our digital interactions, by

means of computational algorithms functioning on an altogether different level than

the human concerns that feed them.

So, given this picture of computational or ergodic culture, I am skeptical of any

utopian visions of the supposedly emancipatory effects of a popular ‘participatory

culture,’ which might better be termed a ‘parergodic culture,’ since the cultural

‘contents’ of media become incidental, marginal, or reversibly supplemental to the

nontrivial labor of interactive work.

On the other hand, though, the transition to a

media environment of generalized ergodics has not been without para-ergodic

margins from which to witness the shift, to take stock of it in the process of its

occurrence. This is where the parergon meets ergodics, and it is in this reversible

margin of parergodicity, neither completely inside nor outside the realm of

computational ergodics, that I would like to situate the serial work of Batman from

about the mid-1980s to the present. Emerging from the revisionary takes on the

figure as he migrated from comic books to the more ‘serious’ or ‘adult’ form of the

graphic novel, Batman films and games have traced the transition to generalized

ergodics, and thus embodied the shift from parergonal to parergodic logics of

seriality, in a number of ways: through the intrusion of video-based interactivity in

cinematic forms; through diegetic technologies such as remote sonar sensing

implemented through mobile computational devices, biometric data-mining and facial

recognition software, or cinematic representations of nonhuman vision; and above all

through the work of digital play itself.

Batman: From Cinematic to Post-Cinematic Serialities

The starting point for all of this is the appearance, in the 1980s, of graphic novels

such as The Dark Knight Returns (Frank Miller 1986) and Arkham Asylum: A Serious

House on Serious Earth (Grant Morrison 1989), along with The Killing Joke (Alan

Moore 1988) and others. Batman was re-envisioned here as a much darker figure,

setting the tone for a variety of iterations leading all the way up to the films by

Christopher Nolan (2005-2012) and the more recent DC Extended Universe

(beginning in 2016). The graphic narratives of the 1980s were part of a self-

conscious transformation of the comics medium, part of an attempt not only to

dissociate Batman from the campy TV show of the 1960s and a kids’ stuff image, but

to make comics generally a more palatable (if not quite respectable) medium for

adults. So not just the tone and the darker image of Batman, but also this medial self-

awareness fed into the explosion across newer media that begins with Tim Burton’s

1989 film and runs through Nolan’s films and the Batman: Arkham series of

videogames (2009-2015).

In his analysis of Arkham Asylum (the graphic novel), James Wurtz (2011) highlights

some of the strategies that can be seen as foundational for this line of development.

Against the escapism and childish sort of fantasy associated with superhero comics,

graphic novels like Arkham Asylum sought to create a greater sense of connection or

contiguity with contemporary reality (including the media sphere of the 1980s) as part

18 Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture • Vol. 11, No. 1 (2020)

of the grittier image they painted of the world, and they coupled this with a self-

reflexive exploration of the contiguity of images in the medium of graphic narrative.

This self-reflexivity is enabled, as Wurtz puts it, by a relatively “thin plot” (2011, p.

556) that is not so much about character development but about the “spatialization

and visualization of sanity and insanity” (2011, p. 556); these are depicted as

basically reversible—or, as I have put it, parergonal. This reversibility is enacted most

vividly at the end of the book, when Joker lets Batman leave the insane asylum after

a series of non-climactic encounters with some of the villainous residents, saying

“there’s always a place for you here” and bidding him: “Enjoy yourself out there. In

the Asylum.” Inside and outside are marked as reversible, hence enacting a

parergonal logic—one not solely directed towards a destabilization of constructions of

sanity or normality but also aimed toward an “investigat[ion of] how we understand

the role of space and the spatial in the comic” (2011, p. 557). Wurtz continues:

Coming as it does at the end of the book, the Joker’s comment both amplifies

and undermines Batman’s (and, more pertinently, the reader’s) understanding of

the preceding events and their meaning as well as highlighting the complex

examination of the nature of space in the comic that underpins the narrative in

manifold ways. (2011, p. 557)

I would argue further that, in this way, the comic reinforces the figure’s new contiguity

with the contemporary world by cementing a material-experiential bond—a self-

reflexive bond that centers around the reader’s navigation of the reversible

boundaries between the contiguous images of panels on the page, between the

spaces that these panels frame, and between the fictional and real-world spaces

brought together at the point of the medium’s reception. Moreover, the thematic

destabilization of sanity and insanity is linked in the comic with the occurrence of

media-technological transformations; one of the doctors in the asylum tells Batman:

We’re not even sure if [the Joker] can be properly defined as insane. […] It’s quite

possible we may actually be looking at some kind of super-sanity here. A brilliant

new modification of human perception. More suited to urban life at the end of the

twentieth century. […] Unlike you and I, the Joker seems to have no control over

the sensory information he’s receiving from the outside world. He can only cope

with that chaotic barrage of input by going with the flow.

The insane asylum, one of the central sites of Foucault’s panoptical disciplinary

society, is marked as a relic of the past, giving way to a new form of sensibility

attuned more closely to what Deleuze (1992) calls the ‘control society,’ the post-

Fordist world of cognitive capitalism with its demands for flexibility or ‘going with the

flow.’ Finally, I suggest, it is an attunement with the incessant flux of computation at

the base of an emerging culture of ergodic interactivity.

Denson • Gaming and the ‘Parergodic’ Work of Seriality in Interactive Digital Environments 19

The Joker’s televised address and Batman’s multimedia console in Tim Burton’s

Batman (1989).

Tim Burton’s film Batman of the same year (1989) follows up on this germinal

intimation of the shift from parergonal to parergodic logics. As in Arkham Asylum, a

negotiation of spaces configured as contiguous and reversible is activated in Burton’s

film, where a similar reversal of insides and outsides—this time marked explicitly as

medial spaces—occurs during Joker’s televised address to Batman and the people of

Gotham. Here the medium takes on an unexpected materiality as the Joker shoves

the mayor’s image off the screen, and a crucial reversal is visualized as a shot of

several contiguous studio monitors gives way to the various screens united in

Batman’s multimedia console. It is here, with a sudden freeze frame interaction, that

Batman enacts a further parergonal reversal: while the film’s editing leads us to

believe that Bruce Wayne, like all the citizens of Gotham, is viewing the Joker’s

address live, he pauses the recording, in effect pausing the continuity of the film

itself. And with this seemingly insignificant difference it introduces between live and

recorded images that can be rewound, fast-forwarded, and searched, Batman’s

pausing of the image announces, in effect, an entry into the interactive space of post-

cinematic media. This is the first step towards the reconceptualization of images and

visual media as purely processual, computational, and no longer tied to perception as

its objects. Later, in the twenty-first century, when computational technologies are

implemented more broadly in the actual production of visual media, Nolan’s films and

the Batman videogames, with their more thorough and explicitly interactive

exploration of digital spaces, will definitively transform parergonal logics into

parergodic ones.

20 Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture • Vol. 11, No. 1 (2020)

An updated computational console with biometric, forensic, and other capabilities on

display in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008).

For example, Nolan’s second film, The Dark Knight (2008), can be seen as a serial

continuation not only of Batman Begins (2005), the first film in Nolan’s trilogy, but

also an updating of Burton’s early exploration of Batman’s ergodic mediality. Most

centrally, Nolan’s film updates Batman’s computer console and places it in the middle

of the caped crusader’s pursuits to restore order to Gotham. The film also spends a

considerable amount of time foregrounding this computational wonder machine,

which as a visual attraction alternates reversibly with the film itself and serves to

foreground its CGI-based spectacles. Within the frame of the narrative, a new range

of computational powers is demonstrated, including biometric facial recognition (e.g.

the console shows the Joker’s face overlaid with vectors and anchor points) and

computational forensics (e.g. fragments of a shattered bullet are digitally

reconstructed, pieced together with such detailed precision as to reveal even the

perpetrator’s fingerprint on it, which is of course identified automatically in a relevant

databank). Early in the film, Bruce Wayne’s tech guy Lucius Fox demonstrates to him

a new technology, utilizing a cell phone to emit an inaudibly high frequency capable

of mapping a remote location by means of digitally enhanced sonar. This sets the

stage for the film’s climax, when the sonar program is spread, virus-like, to the cell

phones of all of Gotham’s inhabitants. Through this network, which feeds into Bruce

Denson • Gaming and the ‘Parergodic’ Work of Seriality in Interactive Digital Environments 21

Wayne’s central console, now equipped with a giant wall of display devices, Batman

is able to ‘see’ the whole city. This is a disembodied or nonlocalized 3D computer-

graphics vision generated through a distributed, nonhuman sensory form that is

ergodic in the sense of being a computational process rather than a matter of

perceptual objects. Seeing through the eyes of a machinic network, Batman is able to

find the bad guys just in time for the final showdown. At a decisive moment, though,

Batman’s ‘vision’ machine crashes—and the event is presented to us in first-person

perspective, crucially drawing attention to the mediation of our own vision through

computational processes. Here the parergonal reversibility between diegetic and

medial levels is rendered thoroughly parergodic, as we are made witness to an event

that challenges the perceptual frames delineating the narrative and our very ability to

engage or disengage visually with the medium.

Batman sees through walls with computationally powered echolocation, and a

system crash (marked by digital compression artifacts) challenges visuality in

Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008).

But the scene anticipates an even more intense experience of parergodic

involvement in the videogame Batman: Arkham Asylum (Rocksteady Studios 2009).

Here, the specifically parergonal exploration of spatialized boundaries between sanity

and insanity that goes back to the graphic novel of the same title is translated into a

narrative that weaves back and forth between the diegetic ‘reality’ and hallucinations

induced by the villain Scarecrow. The player, who has to act in order to stay alive,

can never be sure when one of these hallucinatory states has begun, and he or she

therefore gets drawn into such illusions until an abrupt awakening takes place

following a victory (in one of the boss battles) or its deferral. Even more poignantly,

though, there is a total break with all narrative, perceptual, and actional involvement

at one point late in the game, when the images on the screen freeze and display

digital artifacts and the soundtrack begins to skip like a scratched CD. Suddenly, the

screen goes black and the game literally reboots—or at least I could have sworn that

my PlayStation restarted at this moment, while a feeling of panic gripped me. When

the game restarts, we see images reminiscent of the game’s opening scenes—thus

compounding a sense of fear that either my disk or my machine is broken, and that

all my progress in the game, by this time perhaps some 10 or 20 hours depending on

play style, is lost and will have to be repeated. But this time things are backwards:

now the Joker is in the driver’s seat, escorting Batman into Arkham Asylum. This

cutscene gives way to an interactive sequence where the player controls the Joker,

thus instituting a weird sort of actional identification with the villain, who then turns

and points a gun directly at the player, whose vision is suddenly and somewhat

22 Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture • Vol. 11, No. 1 (2020)

confusingly realigned with Batman’s point of view. There is no way to avoid death,

and we see a “Mission failed” screen with the following tip: “Use the middle stick to

avoid Joker’s gun fire.” Only, there is no middle stick on a standard PlayStation or the

Xbox controller. This whole sequence therefore emphasizes the point of interface as

a reversible margin where computational or ergodic media converge as both the

thematic/actional ‘content’ as well as the material platform for play. And the quasi-

glitch and simulated crash of the game focus and channel this attention to reveal the

significant work involved in ergodic play; the very real panic and extradiegetic fears

activated here highlight the cognitive and physical labor invested by the player, as

well as the precariousness of the digital platform for the storage or accumulation of

such work, over which we have little individual control, though our activities are sure

to generate profit for the corporations holding ownership of intellectual properties (like

DC Comics and its parent companies Warner Bros. and AT&T for Batman), of

proprietary software and hardware (like Sony and Microsoft for the PlayStation and

Xbox consoles we are operating), or the algorithms that will mine our activities for

surplus value (like Alphabet/Google when we post a gameplay video on YouTube or

comment to express our opinions, affects, or values).

A simulated glitch and system crash in Batman: Arkham Asylum (Rocksteady Studios

2009).

Denson • Gaming and the ‘Parergodic’ Work of Seriality in Interactive Digital Environments 23

“Mission Failed” screen and the tip to “Use the middle stick” in Batman: Arkham

Asylum (Rocksteady Studios 2009).

As the comments on a YouTube clip of this sequence revealed to me, I was not

alone in having experienced anxiety, fear, and frustration over this apparent crash. A

video titled ‘Batman: Arkham Asylum – Glitches!’ (딸바람 2010) posted on December

5, 2010 garnered comments such as the following:

“When this mission happened (screen freezing) I thought my Xbox was broken”

“when i first got to this part, i thought that my xbox had overheated or something”

“When this happened I almost broke my controller”

“I thought the same thing, and I was like dear god no, especially at 00:15”

“I thought my game broke when that happened.”

“I thought my game broke at 00:15”

“Thought It Was A GLITCH THAT I ALMOST PASSED OUT”

“i thought i broke my tv at 00:15”

“when this happened i thought the game broke, or I broke the xbox”

“I thought the servers were fried and I was like W.T.F”

Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture

User comments on

A comment on another clip of the same sequence put it succinctly: “How to REALLY

scare a gamer? Make him

these exchanges, the individual experience of ergodic

malfunction opens onto a social dimension of parergodic reflection. Significantly, it is

here that the intermedial seriality of the sort I have been tracing (the narrative and

iconographic relations between comics, films, and game

another conception of seriality: namely, the social

collectivity that Sartre (2004), in his later Marxist

mode of sociality in the modern world, where virtually

mediated by commodities and infrastructures of the built environment. Sartre

describes a mundane scene of people waiting at a bus stop:

These people—

who may differ greatly in age, sex, class, and social milieu

realise,

within the ordinariness of everyday life, the relation of isolation, of

reciprocity and of unification (and massification) from outside which is

characteristic of, for example, the residents of a big city in so far as they are

united though not integrated

activity in an organised group common to them all. (Sartre 2004, p. 256)

That is, these people just happen to be at the same place at the same time; they

have no common goal that would define them as a

place in line—

their position in the

with that of everyone else. The loose grouping of the Sartrean seriality is ordered

simply by the constraints of material objects and infr

seats on the bus, the ticket machine that assigns a place in line, the limited space

underneath the bus stop where one might take shelter from rain, etc. The seriality

arrays itself around what Sartre calls the

structures and technologies store human praxis, or past living labor, while

condensing it into inert objective form. In the practico

Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture

• Vol. 11, No. 1 (

2020

User comments on

a YouTube clip of the simulated glitch.

A comment on another clip of the same sequence put it succinctly: “How to REALLY

scare a gamer? Make him

[sic] believe his computer is broken”

these exchanges, the individual experience of ergodic

labor and infrastructural

malfunction opens onto a social dimension of parergodic reflection. Significantly, it is

here that the intermedial seriality of the sort I have been tracing (the narrative and

iconographic relations between comics, films, and game

s) comes into contact with

another conception of seriality: namely, the social

political dimension of alienated

collectivity that Sartre (2004), in his later Marxist

inflected work, sees as the default

mode of sociality in the modern world, where virtually

all interpersonal relations are

mediated by commodities and infrastructures of the built environment. Sartre

describes a mundane scene of people waiting at a bus stop:

who may differ greatly in age, sex, class, and social milieu

within the ordinariness of everyday life, the relation of isolation, of

reciprocity and of unification (and massification) from outside which is

characteristic of, for example, the residents of a big city in so far as they are

united though not integrated

through work, through struggle or through any other

activity in an organised group common to them all. (Sartre 2004, p. 256)

That is, these people just happen to be at the same place at the same time; they

have no common goal that would define them as a

‘group,’

and thus their particular

their position in the

‘series’ defined by the queue—

is interchangeable

with that of everyone else. The loose grouping of the Sartrean seriality is ordered

simply by the constraints of material objects and infr

astructures—

the finite number of

seats on the bus, the ticket machine that assigns a place in line, the limited space

underneath the bus stop where one might take shelter from rain, etc. The seriality

arrays itself around what Sartre calls the

‘practico-inert’

in recognition of the way

structures and technologies store human praxis, or past living labor, while

condensing it into inert objective form. In the practico

inert, the active component of

2020

)

a YouTube clip of the simulated glitch.

A comment on another clip of the same sequence put it succinctly: “How to REALLY

(Gyoru 2009). In

labor and infrastructural

malfunction opens onto a social dimension of parergodic reflection. Significantly, it is

here that the intermedial seriality of the sort I have been tracing (the narrative and

s) comes into contact with

political dimension of alienated

inflected work, sees as the default

all interpersonal relations are

mediated by commodities and infrastructures of the built environment. Sartre

who may differ greatly in age, sex, class, and social milieu

—

within the ordinariness of everyday life, the relation of isolation, of

reciprocity and of unification (and massification) from outside which is

characteristic of, for example, the residents of a big city in so far as they are

through work, through struggle or through any other

activity in an organised group common to them all. (Sartre 2004, p. 256)

That is, these people just happen to be at the same place at the same time; they

and thus their particular

is interchangeable

with that of everyone else. The loose grouping of the Sartrean seriality is ordered

the finite number of

seats on the bus, the ticket machine that assigns a place in line, the limited space

underneath the bus stop where one might take shelter from rain, etc. The seriality

in recognition of the way

structures and technologies store human praxis, or past living labor, while

inert, the active component of

Denson • Gaming and the ‘Parergodic’ Work of Seriality in Interactive Digital Environments 25

praxis carries over into the present and towards the future, as the built environment

and its technologies present themselves as instruments to be utilized towards the

realization of our goals; but the inertia of the material object and its rootedness in the

past (the time of its manufacture) stands as an obstacle, resisting the facility of use

with a ‘coefficient of adversity.’

Alienation and political impotence are therefore not

just psychosocial shortcomings of the seriality, but rather materially enforced by way

of the built environment, with its underlying exigencies and scarcities. However, if the

infrastructure breaks down, or if the bus never arrives, there is a chance that this

alienation might be overcome; outraged at the inconvenience, the people at the bus

stop might organize, start protesting and demanding change. The loose collective of

the seriality might be polarized into the robust collective of the group.

And while it seems unlikely that the simulated glitch in Batman: Arkham Asylum could

prompt such genuine political activity, we should note the way the sequence focused

players’ attention on the material infrastructures of their experience (their affective

relations to the console, the controller, the optical disk and digital data of the game,

the television set, and the network servers) and how this common experience

prompted them to communicate and commiserate with one another on the online

platform of YouTube, thus taking a small step beyond the anonymity and isolation of

single-player serialized gameplay. So, while this may be a merely germinal form of

collectivity characterized by the very weakest of ties (such as might be afforded by

the ordering constraints of the notoriously toxic environment of YouTube’s comments

section), it is nevertheless highly significant for thinking about the conditions and

obstacles of sociality in a computationally networked world.

Time-Shifted Seriality

Finally, we must acknowledge that the foregoing example of the simulated glitch,

despite its aesthetic foregrounding of interface and infrastructure and its provocation

of an emergent social relation, also brings to light a further obstacle to political

agency: contemporary parergodic culture is designed to skim value off the top of any

and all activity, including our attempts at political action, expression, or organization.

The problem is not just that YouTube’s comments section is toxic, or that its interface

and formal layout are not conducive to effective communication, but that there is

evidently no way to step outside of the essentially serializing (in Sartre’s sense)

structures of the digital environment. This is because of a fundamental material and

temporal shift in the medial infrastructure of experience, which is no longer that of

Sartre’s practico-inert.

Rather than inert objects, digital devices and networks are dynamic and responsive.

Our media no longer simply record or preserve past experience and labor, as might

be claimed for the ‘mnemotechnical’ functions of phonographic or cinematic media;

today, our screens generate audiovisual contents in ‘real time,’ exhibiting a

dynamism based in feedback loops that incorporate present use (including the casual

or incidental labor of clicking, scrolling, and playing games) into the ongoing

production of value. Moreover, screen-phenomena are generated out of predictive,

future-oriented processes (ranging from high-level autocorrect algorithms, to mid-

level motion-estimation protocols in video compression-decompression, to low-level

processes like speculative execution) that actively anticipate and thereby shape the

26 Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture • Vol. 11, No. 1 (2020)

perception and subjectivity of the user. This anticipatory logic is at the heart of

computational gameplay, which depends on microtemporal operations that predict

changes at the level of the pixel in order to optimize display framerates and data

transfers over networks with limited bandwidth.

Instantiating a new temporality that

transcends the physical inertia described by Sartre, videogames therefore also

exceed the past-based or retentional forms of analog media, as described by Stiegler

(2011); videogames’ much-discussed ‘interactivity’ in fact involves protentional,

predictive processes that endow them with greater agency as their anticipatory

dimensions intertwine with our own being-towards-the-future to jointly produce the

events on the screen.

This implies a radical revision of individual human-technology

relations, but also a changed basis for social relation, owing to a fundamental

transformation of the material lifeworld: the practico-inert, while still very much a

condition of our social existence, has given way to a new condition that might be

termed the practico-alert. Alertness, always being ready, is both a technical fact of

predictive computation and a constant demand on our attention; present experience

no longer takes place against a neutral background of the past distilled in the form of

inert objects and built environments, but in concert with ‘smart’ devices, even ‘smart

cities’ that anticipate our every move. Our predictive technologies, always alert to the

contingencies of the ever-shifting future, demand that we too are always alert—an

experience that, upon reflection, should be familiar to players of videogames.

Cryptographic Sequencer in Batman: Arkham Asylum (Rocksteady Studios 2009).

But finding the space for reflection amidst ergodic totalization is precisely the

problem, and it is the reason why it is of paramount importance to maintain a para-

ergodic margin of reflexivity. The self-reflexivity that I have been charting in Batman’s

trajectory towards a kind of parergodic, post-figural seriality opens that margin by

providing what McKenzie Wark (2007), following Alexander Galloway (2006, p. 91),

calls ‘allegorithms’—a portmanteau of allegory plus algorithm—that enable us to

grasp the workings of a technocapitalist lifeworld, a generalized ‘gamespace,’ from

Denson • Gaming and the ‘Parergodic’ Work of Seriality in Interactive Digital Environments 27

within. Most directly, games like Batman: Arkham Asylum and its sequels Arkham

City (Rocksteady Studios 2011) and Arkham Knight (Rocksteady Studios 2015) do

this by having players enact technical operations that overlay and/or collapse the

difference between diegetic representation and computational gameplay. For

example, in these games Batman is equipped with a ‘cryptographic sequencer’

gadget that visually resembles the layout and form factor of the player’s game

controller and maps the player’s manipulation of left and right joysticks onto the

avatar’s motion in order to crack codes and hack digital devices; here, audiovisual

and haptic feedback, combined with the mirroring of Batman’s technological

capacities and our own engagement with the digital gadgetry of the controller, lead to

a kind of mise-en-abyme that seems calculated to heighten immersion in the diegetic

world but can as easily expose to us the physicality of our ergodic labor.

If this can be seen as an ‘allegorithm’ of our ubiquitous imbrication with digital

technologies, the serialized nature of Batman ensures that these videogames also

provide ‘allegorithms’ of the new seriality itself—in both its (inter)medial and social

dimensions. For example, the episodic point-and-click Batman: The Telltale Series

seems, on the one hand, to revert to a much more traditional understanding of

seriality; with its narrative focus and explicitly serial segmentation into ‘episodes’ and

‘seasons,’ the game remediates the cultural forms and serialized release schedules

of serial literature, pulps, comics, and television programs. But against this

background, the game exposes the contemporary future-orientation of seriality more

generally. Compare the dynamics of feedback that, in the form of letters to the editor

and related mechanisms, have been a standard part of serialized storytelling since

the nineteenth century; as Frank Kelleter (2017b, p. 25) argues, these interactions

between authors and readers turned serial fictions into something like ‘self-observing

systems’, with agents exerting influence on one another and on the ongoing course

of the serial events. In the Telltale series, however, this previously social function of

serialization is now folded into the cybernetic architecture of computation: the player

is allowed to exert influence on the ongoing narration by making choices along the

way (choosing from among a small set of periodically presented options regarding

dialogue or other actions), and these choices will change characters’ personalities,

alter their behaviors, and trigger larger narrative events (just the kind of things that a

reader might, in days past, have written to an author about). But here the influence is

registered automatically, by means of algorithms rather than human interlocutors, as

the totality of the branching narrative has been mapped out in advance, all of the

players’ inputs anticipated ahead of time. Thus, while player choice plays a major

role in this interactive serial fiction, the feedback loop has been tightened and taken

out of the human time of perception and the social space of communication. This

might be seen as a dehumanization of the process, part of the general shift from

memorial to protentional media that characterizes ergodic culture and complicates

individual and social agency. As if in recognition of this fact, Telltale’s Batman

compensates with “Crowd Play”, a feature which reintroduces social interaction by

delegating decisions to a group of local or remote viewers who use networked

computers or mobile devices to vote on in-game choices, which the player can opt to

review or accept by default. But even so, the game bears witness to radically altered

social parameters of seriality, operating now on the basis of algorithmic processes

and statistical aggregations.

28 Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture • Vol. 11, No. 1 (2020)

Self-reflexive packaging and a mirror reflection in Batman: Arkham VR (Rocksteady

Studios 2016).

Whereas Batman: The Telltale Series marks the difference between old and new

serialities by means of a mutation of narrative, Batman: Arkham VR does so by

means of an operational exploration of the practico-alert and its transformation of

contemporary praxis. Indeed, perhaps the sole appeal of the game lies in its

cultivation of what Neil Harris (1973) has called an ‘operational aesthetic,’ an interest

in how things work, by focusing our in-game activity around the use of Batman’s

gadgets (his Batarang, grappling hook, and forensic scanner) to solve a set of

puzzles.

Played in first-person perspective, and situated narratively in between the

Arkham City and Arkham Knight installments of the main Arkham series, the game’s

operational aesthetic is in fact directed towards the operation of our own

equipment—the novel VR headset and controllers that we use to act within the virtual

world. Like many VR games, Arkham VR is ultimately little more than a demo for this

hardware. In this respect, it follows in a long line of media that exploit established

serial figures and produce serialized contents in order to promote adoption of new

platforms and apparatuses.

But the novelty that is foregrounded here, our thorough

embodiment of the hero and the total mapping of avatar/image onto our own body

schema, is possible only on the basis of the shift from retentional to protentional

media and the tightening of the feedback loop that constitutes the practico-alert.

Early on, the game demonstrates this embodiment potential but also provokes an

alienating shock when we catch a glimpse of ourselves in a mirror; our every motion

is perfectly matched, but the body is not ‘mine’.

We are given ample time to play

with this uncanny spectacle, though, which foregrounds the tightest loop of futural

calculation, encompassing both movement and perception, and demonstrates the

apparatus’s fascinating but unsettling ability to capture and act upon our bodies

directly, prior to cognitive-perceptual registration on our part.

This entanglement of

agencies, the very crux of the practico-alert, implies that we have been anticipated in

advance as our consciousness lags behind the microtemporal operation of the

machine. The shock of mis/recognition in the mirror provides an affective clue to this

pre-subjective shift in the very basis of perception and praxis.

Denson • Gaming and the ‘Parergodic’ Work of Seriality in Interactive Digital Environments 29

Batman’s workstation in Batman: Arkham VR (Rocksteady Studios 2016).

The banal reality of digital labor: searching databases on the Batcomputer in Batman:

Arkham VR (Rocksteady Studios 2016).

Significantly, however, the type of praxis around which Arkham VR revolves is, for

the most part, incredibly boring. There are none of the fighting and fast-paced action

that characterize the games in the main Arkham series. Instead, what we spend most

of our time doing is indistinguishable from work. We scan crime scenes with digital

gadgets and search databases on the Batcomputer. The sheer banality of the latter

seems to foreshadow the more likely, and less spectacular, future of AR/VR as a

30 Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture • Vol. 11, No. 1 (2020)

‘productivity’ application, allowing us to access our virtual workspaces from home—

and thus chaining us to our desks no matter where we may go. In what must surely

count as an allegorithmic mapping of the operational aesthetic onto the embodied

and social production of value under contemporary capitalism, Arkham VR embodies

a parergodic seriality in several senses at once: it stands playfully next to (para-) the

ergodic lifeworld that threatens to swallow us whole, but by foregrounding the

operation of the digital in the form of work (ergon), the game opens a margin from

which we might reflect on an underlying serialization of gesture (a standardization of

movement, which is required for the hardware to recognize or classify our gesture,

thus continuing the alienation and mechanization of movement at the heart of factory

production—the original source of serialized production), which is transforming the

shape of hodological space (the non-Euclidean, praxis-oriented space of real

movement, defined in terms of the ‘coefficients of adversity’ and affordances of

technologies and the built environment) and social space alike.

Regarding the

social dimension, VR raises big questions about (Sartrean) seriality in the age of the

practico-alert: will these technologies lead to a more generalized form of alienation,

where everyone is standardized in accordance with the microtemporal generation of

the virtual environment and the limited bandwidth allowed for the exercise of agency

in pre-calculated roles, or do they herald new freedoms and social possibilities,

where we can overcome geographical and cultural barriers to meet in this new

space? While I am dubious of the utopian alternative—after all, we have seen where

the Internet has led us—the parergodic potential of serialization processes casts

doubt on the dystopian totalization of ergodics as well. In the case of Arkham VR, it is

the imperfection of the mapping—the uncanniness of seeing ‘our’ reflection in the

mirror, or the strangeness of not seeing our body when we look down at Batman’s

utility belt and find it floating oddly in space—that announces embodiment as one of

the most significant of parergodic margins, or that which has not yet been fully

incorporated into the ergodic system. Finally, this marginality of embodiment,

combined with the drudgery of computational labor in the game, point to the fragility

of the technomasculine subjectivity that Batman stands for and that computer games

have been training their players to embody for decades.

While it is surely

unintentional, Arkham VR thus stages the failure of a serialized identity based in

patriarchal ‘mastery’ of technology at the same time it exposes the limits of ergodic

totalization, or computational technology’s ‘mastery’ of human existence.

More generally, the parergodic work of seriality, as I have traced it here with respect

to Batman’s navigation of digital and interactive media environments, will remain the

necessary work of producing ever new margins for reflection, reflexivity, and agency.

Serialized media are important in terms of indexing changes in perception,

embodiment, and social relation. In their ludic forms, as I have argued here, they help

us to ask questions about our present and future relations to a world restructured by

predictive media, and they challenge us to think about how exactly we want to

embody this new seriality.

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Notes

On seriality as a formula of repetition and variation, see Eco (1979) and Eco

(1985). On seriality in popular culture more generally, including its nineteenth-

century origins and later transformations, see Kelleter (2017a), Kelleter (2012),

Allen and van den Berg (2014), and Loock (2014).

I have explored these dynamics in Denson (2013).

On serial figures, see Denson and Mayer (2018) and Mayer’s (2013) extended

study of the Fu Manchu figure.

For an analysis of these dynamics in relation to Dracula as a serial figure, see

Denson and Mayer (2017).

I argue this point at length in Denson (2020).

The phenomenological, aesthetic, and political implications of this transformation

of media technologies from a recording-based or retentional to a predictive or

protentional functionality is the topic of a current book project, tentatively titled

The New Seriality: Political Aesthetics in a Digital Lifeworld.

I intend the term ‘media-epistemic shift’ in a Foucauldian sense, implying the

replacement of one medial episteme—the medial regime of the seeable and

sayable—by another. See Foucault (2010).

On media as an environment, see Hansen (2006), which expands and

complicates a basically McLuhanesque idea; cf. McLuhan (2001).

Cf. Denson (2014); Robert Spadoni (2007). See also my video essay, “Sight and

Sound Conspire”.

For more on Tarzan as a multifaceted and plurimedial figure, see also the other

contributions to Krüger, Mayer, and Sommer (2008).

On the database as (the model for) cultural forms, see Manovich (1999) and

Vesna (2007).

See Ryan (2015) for a concise exploration of narratological difficulties associated

with transmedial fragmentation, as well as questions about the term’s use as a

description of marketing, rather than narrative, strategies.

This is one of the central arguments of Denson (2020).

On embodiment and its role in the viewing of cinematic images, as well as the

way that this gives way to a more ‘diffuse’ form of embodiment in electronic

media, see Sobchack (1992 and 2016).

See also Brinker (2016) for a less-than-optimistic view of the exploitative

potential of ‘participatory culture.’

Denson • Gaming and the ‘Parergodic’ Work of Seriality in Interactive Digital Environments 37

This is a term that Sartre, as early as 1943 in his magnum opus Being and

Nothingness, had borrowed from Gaston Bachelard in recognition of the friction

that materiality and embodiment introduced into phenomenology (Sartre 1992, p.

324)

See, for example, Cannon (2012) on the use of speculative execution in gaming

contexts.

I argue this point in chapter 3 of Denson (2020).

On statistical aggregation in Telltale games, see also Sulimma (2014).

On the operational aesthetic as a component of an earlier form of seriality, that of

film serials of the 1910s, see also Brasch (2014).

See, in particular Hagedorn (1988).

For a similar phenomenon in a non-VR game, The X-Files Game (1998), see

Laurie Taylor (2003).

As I argue in Denson (2020), such a pre-personal impact can be thought in terms

of Bergson’s (2007) affective body qua ‘center of indetermination’ or in terms of

Merleau-Ponty’s (2002 , p. 92) ‘inner diaphragm’ prior to the differentiation of

objective stimulus and subjective response. It can also be conceptualizted in

terms of what Hayles (2017) calls the ‘cognitive nonconscious’.

On hodological space, see Lewin (1934), subsequently taken up by Sartre

(1992).

On videogames as a training ground for ‘technomasculinity,’ see Kocurek (2015).