Glitches in video games are funny. As a form of non-sequitor they allow our minds to draw connections between sometimes distant concepts and also implicitly deconstruct our active perceptions about the game worlds they occur in. A glitch is interrupts until it is reintegrated into understanding or purged understood as something that should not be.
I am grinding for Blood Vials and Blood Echos for my third attempt at Brother Gascoigne on Bloodborne PSX: healing items and experience. The Great Bridge is close to a pair of werewolves, enemies both so I warp there forgetting about a particularly tricky encounter with a troll and some nasty zombie crows which blocks my path. Three times I try to get past before the glitch occurs.
The original Bloodborne does not have many discrete loading zones, but this wonderful demake does. Three times this troll performs a leapong attack knocking me through the loading zone. In the third one I use one of my vials to heal as I look like I have no health. The item does nothing. “What?” my friend asks over voice chat, “Were you in the negative?” The second vial returns the life bar to the screen.
We repeat the glitch and conclude that the loading scene transition interrupts the death trigger and spares the hunter her grim fate. “Is this exploitable?” I think disturbingly quickly; I would have loved a convenient way past Gascoigne whose attack patterns I had yet to memorize sufficiently to pass. What had been humorous had become exciting with the possibility that it might have opened up.
Having negative health in Bloodborne PSX doesn’t turn you into an immortal zombie, however. Death is checked every time you take damage, which in retrospect seems like the obvious way of managing the process: a clean process, low chance for unintended side effects. The glitch can remain something benign, some magical and fun. Not exploitable.
Despite classicaly being monsters who led men to their doom upon sharp rocky coastlines; it is apparently harder to stomach their harvest than it is the werewolves I sought to kill, again and again for their blood.
Dwarf Fortess is a game about building a settlement of dwarves, creating a functional creative economy which maintains that settlement, creating glorious art, and then conquering over all the monsters, great beasts and that come after you for all the beautiful things you’ve made, including the young in the case of the baby-snatching goblins. Players control their outpost from a high level view and establish tasks and job assignments never doing direct labor as embodied in the game 1. The game has a system of physics and physical mechanism robust enough to construct complex machinery in.
Dwarf Fortress is a game funded by its dedicated which also produces visual and narrative work inspired by experiences of playing the game, historically shared via forum. One day a player presents a record of a beach-side fortress open to the water and rigged with mechanical bars and grates and water gates. It could trap mermaids which wander in one by one and then catching their bones on a grate as the killing pool is drained. You see, mermaids are supernatural creatures so their bones were extra valuable as material in the glorious art I mentioned.
The mermaid bone harvesting machine is a natural outcome of incentives within the context of Dwarf Fortress, but it was unexpected. A glitch not in the programming, but one frame higher in the gamespace. Only apparent as a glitch in its construction and sharing in story form across forums and in response from Bay12. A glitch fixed by making mermaid materials marked no longer as supernatural. Mermaid bone becomes economically equivalent to cow bone withing the game logic2.
I don’t know if it was the because it was mermaids being harvested or the machinic intensity of the factory process, which otherwise is celebrated as ingenuity in games like DF that led to the response. Im all likelihood, it was probably a bit of both. I am not here to say that it shouldn’t have been addressed. I cannot however not tie connections to the tendency of games to re-instantiate greater cultural logics. What interrupts shall be excised.
I am afraid I read McKenzie Warks Gamer Theory when I was too young and that it proconfigured some parts of my academic thinking inconveniently. Odds are though, it would have eventually become inconvenient regardless and Gamer Theory’s logics just resonated with my yet repressed queerness. I have yet been able to escape one chapter which haunts me I my ongoing studies in computational media. This is the chapter on SimEarth and coltan mining.
Perhaps I may be romanticizing it a bit, it was about a decade ago at this point, but that chapter effortlessly drew lines between the exploitative practices in the Congo to the nihilistic certainty of human extinction in longterm play of SimEarth. Materiality of the electronic circuits qnd the costs of powering the at the time relatively slow processors become the keys to this connection. Exploitation and use.
Can we call this a glitch? I don’t think so, but often such suffering is dismissed as such. “This is something distant that can’t be addressed”, “it’s put of our hands”, or perhaps, unspoken, “but what addressing it would hurt us economically”. But here I am typing this out on a phone while wrapped in a blanket, cozy, uploading this text to some distributed cloud hosting compqmy currently chugging power generated through consumables in a world where there isn’t always another werewolf to farm or mermaid to harvest.
The hope SimEarth offers is that under the right conditions something new might arise after the inevitable end of humanity. In jest the game points to the combination of high technology and radioactive diffusion as triggers for a new civilization of robotic beings. Glitch has been occupying me, because it can serve as hope, direction, and a mark if resistance (I want to believe.). Glitches interrupt.Glitches are visible. But I fear they are just as appropriate of any other mechanism. Glitches are after all, errors made of the systems own operations.
I pray those we recognize are its death drive.
An role-playing focused Adventure mode exists, right now we are focusing on the central Fortress mode. ↩
It’s ironic that magic has to die for it not to be exploited. Wonder, or a mechanized representation of it, must be removed because incentive structures are bad and exploitable. Or maybe what is wrong is that magic and wonder would be inherently ties to value. ↩