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INTRODUCTION
It occurred to me in a nostalgic
moment of playing Super Mario World for the Super Nintendo
Entertainment System (SNES) that the moving images in front of
me shared space with some cinematic classics. Hours before turning
on my SNES, I had been sitting in the same position as I found
myself now on my second-hand plaid green couch watching a VHS
copy of Godard's À Bout de Souffle. Both the action
of playing a video game and watching a film (new wave classic
or American blockbuster) register for me initially as a means
of consuming entertainment. I've always been aware though that
past the act of being entertained while watching a movie, something
else was going on. I enact a critical deconstruction of the moving
image to allow myself insight into and gain even greater pleasure
from the film before me. It is practically impossible for me to
take in cinema on a passive level. It hadn't occurred to me up
until this very moment, while my little Mario avatar was stomping
on a flying turtle (in order to get a magic feather, granting
me a cape with which to fly), that my position as a gamer, as
a player, could benefit greatly were I to incorporate my penchant
for discursive viewing into my playing mode.
I've chosen to refer to the
act of playing a video game as a "mode," as it also
occurred to me at that same moment that despite the fact that
I allow my television screen to be used for the screening of great
films and playing captivating video games, both my mind and my
body are doing very different things during those very different
activities. While watching a movie I enjoy, my body is in a sort
of stasis. Whether I'm sitting or lying down (as I find myself
more and more prone to do every year), my body is relaxed and
comfortable. An awareness of the room around me dissipates or
at least gets relegated to my subconscious, and I become engaged
with the action playing out. Often an emotional attachment forms
and I find myself getting sad or angry at or along with a film's
characters. Conversely, if I am watching a movie I am not enjoying
the minutiae of my viewing space and the seat below me become
active players in my experience. I fidget, constantly trying to
gain comfort as though greater alignment with my seat will make
me enjoy Keanu Reeves that much more. In these instances I am
denied the ability to engage emotionally with the medium. Anger
occasionally boils up, but that is directed at my own stupidity
for devoting time to this viewing experience. Interestingly, I
will hardly ever turn something off which I've decided is terrible
once I've started watching it, which suggests that despite an
inability to gain pleasure from a film, I still have something
invested in it. There is a sense that it is my responsibility
to watch the thing through until its end as that is what I have
set out to do, and as that is what it was made for.
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