17. Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise

Surveillance technicity: affect, retention and videogame analytics

“…It uses the heroes that your teammates and enemies have selected, along with the items that you've purchased and abilities you've skilled up, to adaptively suggest popular options among winning teams. (Dota Team, 2018) In this way, as I have argued elsewhere (Egliston, 2019b), DotaPlus can be described as what Stiegler terms a 'mnemotechnic' -a specific kind of tertiary retention that works expressly to shape memory, and moreover, individuation (often in service of capitalism, see Stiegler, 2011). The technological capture and relay of user data, much like Stiegler's reading of audio-visual media (television and cinema), are key in the mnemotechical production of perceptual experience and individuation: 'they bear witness for me .…”

“…To think human perception in terms of time is of course not without precedent and can be traced to 19th-century phenomenologists like Husserl, for whom human experience can be understood as segmented into distinguishable moments. Indeed, perception in relation to technology more generally has been long understood in terms of time (see, for example, Ash, 2017;Bucher, 2012;Dieter and Gauthier, 2019;Kinsley, 2015;Langlois, 2014;Mackenzie, 2002;Stiegler, 2009Stiegler, , 2011. Likewise, the experience of videogame play has been widely conceived in terms of time (Ash, 2015;Jayemanne, 2017;Keogh, 2018), characterised by its temporal 'rhythms' (Apperley, 2009) which emerge between player and game.…”

“…In understanding how DotaPlus' surveillant technics profitably reshape player experience qua temporality, I draw on Stiegler's theory of retention. Retention features prominently inStiegler's (1998Stiegler's ( , 2009Stiegler's ( , 2011 work and is a crucial part of his broader theory of 'epiphylogenesis', developed over the Technics and Time series of books -doing so via the renovation of numerous continental thinkers (chiefly, Heidegger, Simondon, Husserl, Derrida and Leroi-Gourhan. Explaining exactly how he engages with each of these thinkers, however, is beyond the scope of this article).…”

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

“…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. 17 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. 18 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.…”

“…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 (1998Stiegler ( , 2008Stiegler ( , 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). 5 Channeling this shift towards the emphatically parergodic situation of interactive gameplay, computer games become the paradigmatic media objects-or agencies-of a philosophical reorientation, changing the terms of humantechnological 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.…”