Let's play, speedrun, playthrough and walkthrough, live streaming, machinima: these are some of the keywords of a relatively new phenomenon and, for many, completely unexpected — related, at least superficially and ironically, to the contemplation of a past of fresh paint that dries on the wall: sitting and watching others play. Attending live or deferred games of any video game (sports, adventure, role-playing: it doesn't matter): a practice in which one's level of interaction is often limited to choosing whether to continue watching, change channel (in this case, Twitch or YouTube) or turn off everything.
It's Game Video: no more and no less than the overturning of the most classic video game, that is, that now planetary and essential play practice born about sixty years ago, and that in the last twenty years has recorded an uncontrollable rise - so much so that the market for video games has even managed to overcome, in terms of revenue, that of cinema or TV on demand and streaming platforms.
It's okay to play video games: but why watch others play - and often even strangers? To answer the question, Matteo Bittanti and Enrico Gandolfi have put together a playlist of more or less academic essays, all of which have been published since the '00s for trade magazines and specialized studies. Video Games: Performance, Entertainment, Streaming (published by Mimesis, 200 pp) deals with the phenomenon, for some still very strange, of the charm that can reside in a gaming session of a first-person shooter like Fortnite - to name one of the most popular and fashionable - watched rather than played.
The Video Game was not created by chance. Obviously, part of the merit goes to the increase in entertainment and communication technologies, information dissemination, but, as often happens in technological areas related to social, the use that then underlies the needs and inventiveness of man is far from the mere sum of the two objects - in this case, video games + the Internet. The addition is not the exact operation to describe the phenomenon: from the union between network and video games has taken place since the beginning a heterogeneous proliferation of practices and cultural artifacts of primary importance for those who, for some time now, is dedicated to games or visual studies - but not only.
Let's play, speedrun, playthrough and walkthrough, live streaming, machinima - the words at the beginning - are the new objects of study at the center of which is no longer the user-player of the videogame; next to them there is the new figure of the user-spectator.
Bittanti and Gandolfi, in the selection of essays translated by them, as well as written, adopt three essential concepts to explain texts and contexts of these new practices: performance, show and streaming.
Performance is the basis of the videogame - without performance, the videogame does not exist; a bit like the book, which comes to life materially only in the act of reading. But the video game performance, unlike the one required by other media, is of an ergodic type: that is, it involves a pragmatic and active work, the coordinated use of hand-and-eye, which translates into dexterity when the player is called to maneuver his avatar through joypad (or other designated peripherals). The player is thus a performer.
In this direction - a viaticum that lays the foundations for the concept of Video Game -, the essays by Jason Wilson (Participative Television. The videogames of the origins, the video art, the abstraction and the problem of the attention) and Rainforest Scully-Blaker (A practiced practice: Running in the videogames together with De Certeau and Virilio) put in foreground just the figure of the performer and the notion of literature ergodica like synonym of videogame.
Wilson's text initially examines an abstract painting by the artist Barnett Newman, Onement IV, to suggest, in addition to superficial and aesthetic affinities with a screenshot of an old clone of the legendary Pong (both figures in the book are basically two black "canvases" divided in half by a white bisector), how the user of a work, as early as 1949, was called by Newman himself to participate, conceptually, in the process of building the picture: the work, in fact - and so others in the series - is accompanied by precise instructions on how to position oneself in space, in order to achieve a precise, immersive and "sublime" fruition.