Gameplay Journal 6
I recall early in the years of the eight generation of home consoles people were anticipating the ‘next-gen’ installment in the Assassin’s Creed franchise. What everyone expected was cutting edge graphics, a strong narrative, and memorable gameplay. Instead the game was met with a lukewarm reception muddied by the multiple numbers of bugs and glitches found in the game. One of the most prominent was a glitch that found characters in the game “lose” their face, essentially with just their eyes floating in space. Soon this creepy occurrence became heavily associated with the state of the game itself. Many attributed this glitch to the developers rushing the game and releasing it in an unfinished state.
This glitch reconfigures my experience of videogame technology by creating a disconnect between my perception of the scene playing out and the image being produced. As the glitch occurs the game continues like normal, from gameplay to cutscenes. In this sense the glitch takes me out of the flow of the game, as it is difficult to concentrate and be unbothered by it. This idea that a glitch causes a game “defying their normal functions and use and exposing their infrastructure and materiality” (pg. 115) is shown here. The very essence of this glitch affect the senses of the player and abruptly alters the aesthetic of the game into something new, albeit odd. Where the head of the model should be is now empty space, this demonstrates a sort of “behind the scenes view” of what constitutes a videogame. In this instance the normal function of the game breaks way to show that inside every rendered character is a hollow shell, and once more a glitch creates a whole new experience.
Ferreira, Pedro. Ribas, Luisa. “Post-Digital Aesthetics in Contemporary Audiovisual Art”. 2020. Print
