Gaming DH : Glitches and Black Boxes

In this blog post I would like to expand upon my practicum exercise from week 9. In playing with all three of the course tools for digital deformance I was struck by the layers that they added to artifacts in the process of deforming them. The GIFmelter and Image Glitcher felt as if they were applying filters (Lisa suggested as much in her practicum). While these are certainly new ways of looking at these texts, they don't seem quite aligned with Bogost's model of carpentry discussed in notes towards a deformed humanities.

What I didn’t note in My practicum but which bothered me about these tools was the degree to which I was unsure if what I was seeing was an accident, an aberration in the coded structure of the texts being glitched or if they were simply processes crafted to give the appearance of a technical mishap. This recalls the 5^th point raised by Rosa Menkman in “The Glitch Manifesto,” “Realize that the gospel of glitch art also tells about new standards implemented by corruption. Not all glitch art is progressive or something new. The popularization and cultivation of the avant-garde of mishaps has become predestined and unavoidable. Be aware of easily reproducible glitch effects automated by softwares and plug-ins. What is now a glitch will become a fashion.” (11) These tools were aesthetically and maybe formally glitchy but they didn't seem to be a function of noise introduced in their transmission but rather were applied after the fact. I suppose this is a matter of identifying where in the Sender->Reciever chain noise is introduced. But these technologies seemed more in line with the Databendign Menkman experiments with around file formats than a glitch produced in a signal during transmission.

These might all be the same kind of glitches in the sense of the “Glitch Manifesto’s” 7^th point that we ought to “rejoice in the critical trans-media aesthetics of glitch artifacts. Utilize glitches to bring any medium into a critical state of hypertrophy, to (subsequently) criticize its inherent politics.” (11) This seems to welcome an expanded sense of the glitch. Certainly the data-bending that Menkman does depends on the introduction of noise, but I wonder what the ontological difference between this glitch and a photo filter is then? Is it the unexpected or random nature of it? Is it still random if you've written a program with the intention of making it random? The databent images in Menkman’s work look very much like the images produced by the Image Glitcher software, but Menkman’s operate by sending the user into the code where the Image Glitcher simply puts a new black-box in the mix. Menkman explains at length the processes by which she achieved particular glitches, by copying code, by introducing random code, etc. Each of these produces a different effect, and these differences reveal different operations at work in making image data readable to a user. This brings us back to the questions of Bogost’s carpentry in Mark Sample’s “Notes Towards a Deformed Humanities.” The quote that Sample has cited (and which I’ll borrow) defines carpentry as “making things that explain how things make their world.” (Bogost, 93)

Certainly the products of Glitchers, Databending, Melters, and Meaning-Eaters are new texts, but they don’t all necessarily point us what is going on in the machine, at least not in the same ways. The glitched image may recall it; I had a text message image download improperly on my phone once and the image glitcher resembles that, just like it resembles the databent images from Menkman’s work. However, I don’t understand the glitched image produced by the Image Glitcher and there doesn’t seem to be much cause for me to direct my attention towards the internal processes that have produced it. It’s the intended result of the tool - where my phone corrupting image data is cause of confusion or Menkman’s databending is cause for experimentation, the tool produces a planned outcome. The tool is disruptive to the images formal coherence - I can think think about the image and what (in a humanistic sense) is the code of an image, of its ineligibility, of its form. But with these black boxes I’m not necessarily thinking of the machine and of noise in the same ways. So, in a wider view of defeomance all these technologies might cause us to think about the cognitive mechanisms we've developed for receiving images, gifs or online articles. However, the process seems to matter for the critical capabilities of these tools. The objective of Bogost’s carpentry is to turn our attention to technical process, to world-making. Likewise the Glitch Manifesto’s first point poses glitch as a critique of a fetishization of coherence, or noiseless transmission. It seems to me that these projects take a critical edge when we are encouraged by this deformance/transformation to think about the process, in addition to the aesthetic effects.

At any rate, all of this reminded me of my object from my practicum in week 8, the shoe-box of NES games on my coffee table. Below are two videos of one of these games glitching. Where the deformance tools seem to layer code onto their objects producing a new text in the process, this seems to function through the loss of some information. What is going on on my TV screen is a hardware glitch, somewhere in the machine (in this case the pins that connect the game cartridge to the game console) information is lost or corrupted. My Nintendo is trying to make sense of the games program despite some information not getting passed to the machine. The result is a visually baffling but still playable version Ducktales 2.

After digging this out of my bedroom a few weeks ago and moving it to my apartment I've encountered a number of these glitches. Sometimes the game won’t start, or often static runs through the screen. In a particularly interesting case, I encountered a level in Super Mario 3 that was missing part of a hillside that caused Mario to hover as if he were permanently mid-jump. In considering the implications of the hardware glitch, it’s not simply the textual object and our relationship to it that is changed, but in the process the underlying technological processes that produce the text which are made apparent. In order to rectify the glitches that appear on my NES I’m forced to break with the game’s play interfaces, the TV screen and the controller. I turn my attention to the hardware interface. I try the reset button and the power button, but these don't solve the problem. The signal is disrupted somewhere deeper in my machine. I could jiggle the cartridge inside the machine to try to establish a better connection. Or, I could take the game cartridge out and blow on the connector pins on the game-board protruding from the bottom of the cartridge, to remove any dust. In either case this interface isn’t made for me, the pins form an analogue connection that allow the NES to read the information on the game cartridge. By blowing on the pins I recognize this point of technical interfacing as the site at which the noise is introduced, I’m forced to think through the operations inside my NES and intervene in the process of transmission. I become aware of the world making of my NES rather than simply taking pleasure in the aesthetic of garbled information on my TV.

The NES Cleaning Kit,
Licensed Nintendo product for cleaning game connectors.

What is especially interesting about this version of deformance is that the reading technologies necessary to produce the view of Ducktales2 that has appeared on my screen are only really available on the original hardware. The glitch is integral to the process of reading done by the NES’s original hardware, it’s a pattern that relies on an analogue disruption of the NES’s internal system. This means that there isn't a way to accurately emulate this kind of deformance/glitch with layers of new code. It’s here that I feel like we are seeing an ontological difference between active tools deformance and the intervention of noise more organically.

Thinking about this distinction between the two is best illustrated by NO-CARRIER's NESglitch tool. This program tries to reproduce familiar NES glitches by writing an executable NES ROM File that approximates the aesthetic of fuzzy connection inside a Nintendo. The NES glitch is so integral to the console and the experience of playing that it takes on a kind of nostalgic cache and an aesthetic of its own. The Angry Nerd videogame, a tribute to a popular YouTube channel that reviews classic games, features a level that centers on the glitch such that the word Glitch appears onscreen. The letters are jumbled to look as if they were produced accidentally on an old NES. NO-CARRIER’s tool aims at a similar effect. Without the analogue disconnect between metal connecting pins inside the NES, NO-CARRIER’s game scripts patterns that look like these glitches. Using the button inputs on a controller the user can cycle through a combination of patterns that approximate the look of a hardware glitch. However, a comparison between NO-CARRIER’s tool and a glitched NES game reveals important dissimilarities.

The first image below is Produced by NO-CARRIER's ROM file, loaded into an emulator (at least that's how I used it, you could also load it onto an emulator cartridge and play it on an NES) while the second is a hardware glitch produced in Snakes Revenge. They have similar elements, but some of the game world in Snakes Revenge remains visible below the garbled pixels. The Image produced by NO-CARRIER’s tool contains some of the same formal properties, but without the background as a point of reference. We see pixelated and scrambled cells but there isn’t a guiding pattern behind them. They are spread across the screen in a too-random checkerboard pattern. This dissimilarity results because they are produced in very different ways. This, I would like to argue is an ontological difference and produces a difference in what they allow us to read. The glitched NES image reminds us that there is a coherent text somewhere behind the illegible flurry of stay letters and pixels. We know that something responsible for bringing this coherent text to us has failed and the result is a game that causes its reader to reflect on the technical process that makes an NES cartridge playable. NO-CARRIER’s tool can’t point us to that internal operation. Playing with patterns produced intentionally is an interesting experimental practice in glitch aesthetics, but the process that it recalls does less to foreground technology, putting stock in the nostalgic aesthetic instead.