![]() ![]() This essay will focus on the recent release Pokémon GO. The franchise includes a plethora of entertainment media. In it, cute-looking creatures with superpowers fight each other for the fame and glory of their masters (the players). The Pokémon franchise has been successful with males and females (Tobin, 2004). Following Barad, I conclude that this quality is not unique to software, but software – and videogames above all – are a useful tool for understanding a vision of reality that favours activity over materiality as the basis of our existence. Accepting these propositions together, software can be understood as continuously reemerging through shared activities. I explore SethBling’s codeinjection suggesting that actions clearly reveal software’s double existence as both tangible ‘thing’, locatable on magnetic memory, and as a vaporous non-entity. It then becomes possible to embrace software(s) as performative examples of the entangled ‘phenomena’, suggested by Barad (2007), that produce everyday reality through quantum activity. Academics and users alike should attempt to see software as living a double-life: as simultaneously solid as it is (metaphorically) gaseous. Though it is possible to contrast Wendy Chun’s (2008a) suggestion that one can view software as ‘vaporous’ against Friedrich Kittler’s (1995) assertion that ‘there is no software’, I propose a more holistic approach. Drawing from this I propose a performative understanding of videogames (and software in general) to reinvigorate discussions of software’s materiality. This article takes inspiration from Youtuber and software developer ‘SethBling’ and his 2016 ‘code-injection’ (Bling, 2016), in which, using only a standard Super Nintendo Entertainment System controller and in-depth knowledge of the console, he ‘injected’ and executed the code of popular mobile game Flappy Bird (Nguyen, 2013) into a running instance of Super Mario World (Miyamoto, 1990), effectively transforming one game into another through play. ![]()
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