Playing Through: the Future of Alternative and Critical Game Projects

This paper explores a number of experimental game-based projects (including Tekken Torture Tournament, Painstation, September 12th: A Toy World, Under Ash, Desert Rain) in order to interrogate the critical potential of computer games. Gonzalo Frasca’s proposition this this potential arises from the nature of computer games as simulations will be evaluated with reference to Bernard Stiegler’s conceptualization of the mnemotechnical forms humans have developed for the recording and interpretation of cultural experience. In this light, simulation will be compared to narrative and theatrical forms, the forms to which Frasca opposes it in his account of simulation as the “form of the future.” We will see that the past of computer simulation, a past dominated by military techno-scientific developments, comes with it and must be considered in any theorisation of its critical potential as a cultural form.