The Aura of the Video Game

Game Design as the Last Refuge of Art, Part II

“It still remains true to say that the consumption of reading- and seeing-matter has far outstripped the natural production of gifted writers and draughtsman… It follows from all this that in all the arts the output of trash is both absolutely and relatively greater than it was in the past; and that it must remain greater for just so long as the world continues to consume the present inordinate quantities of reading-matter, seeing-matter, and hearing-matter.” -- Aldous Huxley, 1934¹

GAME DESIGN IN THE AGE OF TECHNOLOGICAL REPRODUCTION

I found the above-quoted passage among a dense jungle of footnotes while revisiting The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by German-Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin.² First published in 1936, it predicts and characterizes a future of dramatically altered mass perception brought about by novel techniques of mechanical reproduction. It made a big splash at the time because continental thinkers were generally confused and terrified by the so-called masses’ rapid acclimation to the spectacular media of photography and film.

It’s made another big splash over these past few years as those thinkers’ burned-out descendants are again confused and terrified by the so-called masses’ rapid acclimation to slop culture and generative AI. I believe I first encountered this essay while doing research for my high school policy debate team around 2013 — God only knows how it related to economic engagement with Latin America. Later, it was assigned reading for a class I took in college. I now find myself in the amusing position of wanting to talk about it in the context of modern video gaming discourse. Let me set the stage a little bit.

Like many German-speaking political thinkers of the 1930s, Walter Benjamin was of a rather neurotic disposition. However, he set himself apart from the mainstream intelligentsia by virtue of his being a Marxist Jew who studied Kabbalah and the Occult, which made him a respectable handful of enemies. And despite his Marxist proclivities, he didn’t much care for the actually existing communism espoused by that peculiar Lenin fellow out East. You’d think this would all render him an otherized minority among otherized minorities, but bro was of a convivial nature and shook a lot of hands in a lot of smoke-filled Parisian cafés. His work on the nature of popular aesthetics remains influential across various ideological spectra and offers some fascinating space for reflection even if you’re not down with his views on political economy. Cut the guy some slack — for whatever reason, being a German Jew in the 1930s could really make a guy veer left.

The history buffs among you will recall that the 1930s played witness to some fairly dramatic and consequential history — so much of it, in fact, that we occasionally forget about the events that weren’t directly related to nationalist praxis, economic depression, or reactionary populists with funny accents. The thirties also saw the beginning of Hollywood’s Golden Age and, more generally, an overwhelmingly swift proliferation of mass media and global commercialism. The world wasn’t just becoming more interconnected, but also more perceptible: more than ever before, the common man became able to experience distant objects and events without being physically present to witness them up close. No less importantly, said common man noticed that reading picture magazines and going to the movies were much more stimulating uses of his free time than playing pick-up sticks or re-reading the Bible. Humanity’s relationship with art and culture were changing fast, and those given to philosophizing about it were freaked right the hell out.

You seeing any parallels with recent trends? Last week, I promised to explain why video game design in its capacity as a modern artform represents an extension of human cultural perception and why it will act as a bulwark against the worst excesses of AI technologies. Reinterpreting this old essay through a modern lens is how I intend to do so. Part I isn’t necessarily a prerequisite to enjoying this follow-up, but you oughta check it out if you haven’t:

Now, before we begin in earnest, a word on Teutophonics. The essay’s original title — Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit — has that most German quality of being more poetic than apprehensible. German intellectuals love nothing more than to synthesize abstract concepts by smashing their linguistic roots into ad-hoc noun phrases — I think it’s how they get their rocks off. Luckily, I studied German in school for eight years, which was just about long enough to comprehend the basics. So, largely because it’s convenient for my arguments below, I’ll prefer a more literal translation of “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.”

I take pains to make a distinction between “mechanical reproduction” and “technological reproducibility” because the latter strikes me as more intuitively applicable to the world of today. Benjamin had in mind the reproduction of objects and phenomena by mechanical means (lithography, photography, film, etc.), whereas I have in mind the reproduction of human expression by technological means. In both cases, the reproduction is necessarily a partial corruption of the original, which will serve as the hitch I use to connect a ninety-year-old essay to video gaming discourse and the contemporary AI industry.

So why was Benjamin so upset by this partial corruption, and why do I consider it worth telling you about in granular detail? That seems like as good a place as any to begin. Buckle up!

THE AURA OF THE ART OBJECT

If you’ve been reading for awhile, you’ve probably seen me describe certain artwork — video games not least of all — as being possessed of an aura that imbues the work with value beyond the immediate experience of consuming it. “Aura” in this context is a difficult concept to summarize, because it doesn’t really describe an objective or observable phenomenon. It represents the unique, authentic quality of an object borne of its specific location in spacetime and/or tradition. Here, I’ve got a familiar case study for you:

Consider the red-faced tourist who visits the Louvre and takes a picture of the Mona Lisa with his smartphone. He’s probably not trying to literally document the portrait on the wall in front of him — he knows very well that he could just google the damn thing when he gets home. He’s most likely attempting to document the feeling given off by the portrait, which after all was potent enough to draw him to the damn thing that he could easily have googled. That incorporeal sensation is the aura of the Mona Lisa. It’s why they put it in the Louvre in the first place.

Back in the thirties, mechanical techniques — especially photography and its derivatives — were becoming increasingly reliable at reproducing scenes that once could be experienced only by the naked eye. The entire world was gripped by a dawning fascination with these previously inaccessible experiences. Even the poorest subsistence farmer could now witness the splendor of the African Savannah or the Rajas of the subcontinent, after a fashion. Some doubtlessly wondered what point remained in painting or traveling just as some now wonder what point remains in writing or coding.

This was deeply concerning to Benjamin, who makes a persuasive case that the aura of a physical object simply cannot be so reproduced. At issue is the aura’s being derived from the object’s embedding in space, time, and tradition. He uses a notional Greco-Roman statue as an example: it “stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idle. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura.”³

Why? Because the statue’s viewers looked upon its carefully orchestrated topology, perhaps even running their fingers along the polished surface that other fingers once sculpted, and imagined either a pious devotee or an obsessed cultist laboring over the marble before them. Whether they were awestruck or disgusted doesn’t matter so much as the fact that the shapely rock before them inspired such emotion in the first place. There exists a hard-to-define but nevertheless undeniable human connection between artist and audience that persists even over millennia, and it’s no less important to the appreciation of a given work than its mastery of form or its subjective aesthetics.

To photographically reproduce a statue is to decay its aura, because those subjective phenomena have to be reinterpreted through a downscaled, two-dimensional projection of the statue. Or, in a factory reproduction of the statue made as a tchotchke for your desk, the aura decays entirely — its viewer only sees plaster hastily molded by an immiserated sweatshop worker, or else looks past the thing altogether because it exists only to break up the visual monotony of a cubicle. It is no longer embedded in the spaces or traditions of its original artistic imperative, and its aura is diminished regardless of what decorative value might remain.

But wait a minute — if the aura of a given work of art is so tightly bound to its spatiotemporal and/or traditional circumstances, then how can we characterize the aura of contemporary digital artwork? The short answer is that we reinterpret the nature of the connection between artist and audience with respect to its evolving traditions.

THE AURA AND TRADITIONS OF THE VIDEO GAME

One of the funny things about primarily digital forms of art is that, more or less uniquely, they are young enough to have existed under capital-driven market systems throughout their entire histories. And, without wishing to sound like a harrumphing Bolshevik, this state of being erects significant barriers to the practice of embedding a primarily digital work of art in tradition. I’m not just talking about how market incentives discourage authentic expression, though. The artforms that have endured through the centuries, for which we construct galleries and exhibitions in most human settlements, all began as expressions of cultic veneration — paintings and statues filled ziggurats and cathedrals long before they filled public museums.

Now, where novel and highly interdisciplinary artistic media are concerned, one can’t really isolate a chain of tradition of this sort. But that doesn’t mean that video game design lacks traditions! As with film, i.e., the other globally popular medium that’s necessarily multidisciplinary in nature, game design traditions are derived from the lived experiences of the involved creators, and from the standards and practices that come about when their varied experiences collide toward the realization of mutual goals. In film, for example, it became traditional to open a new scene with an establishing shot because it was mutually realized that so doing paid dividends in audience comprehension. In game design, it became traditional to open with a tutorial sequence because it was mutually realized that diegetic tutorialization was usually more effective than spelling everything out in a manual.

We can also characterize the nature of these traditions by pointing to instances in which they’re actively resisted. It seems fitting to again bring up Marathon (2025), this year’s forthcoming reboot of the venerable first-person shooter franchise. Regular readers may recall that I’m not particularly impressed by the reboot’s near-total abandonment of its source material, and I think it serves to illustrate what I mean when I describe video games as having a tradition-derived aura of their own. Marathon (1994) was a madcap escapade through space with a totally unique plot whose levels of detailed presentation and conceptual nuance were practically unheard of beyond computer roleplaying. Its thematic inventory had room for everything from artificial intelligence and cybernetic transhumanism to first-contact philosophy and man’s place in the universe. The level design may have been nightmarishly confusing, but hey — every genre formula’s got to start somewhere.

Marathon (2025) is instead to be a multiplayer extraction shooter with a lime-and-magenta color palette, because developer Bungie is now an instrument of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s commercial homunculus rather than a leading innovator in game design. Why not call it Destiny 3 or Halo: REVELATIONS? Big-money game development has lately taken cues from Hollywood and developed a knack for monetizing nostalgia, but still has no discernible appreciation for the aura of its own historical work. Or, to put it in Benjaminian terms: the online commentariat that lashes out against Marathon (2025) or Snow White (2025) aren’t pissed because these products are offensive in their own right, per se, but because they’re offensive to the auras of Marathon (1994) or Snow White (1937).

Benjamin thought that mechanical reproduction’s rapid proliferation was a function of “the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.”⁴ I think this explains why Marathon (2025) isn’t a story-based game for one player like its namesake: the suits perceive the “contemporary masses” — here, the gamers who are nostalgic for Marathon (1994) and might pay $70–$100 for a reboot — as both disinterested in original IP and insistent upon experiences that are immediately familiar. This creates a bizarre paradox in which nostalgia for Marathon (1994)⁵, an original IP with a unique play experience, is exploited by a modern reproduction whose play experience is deliberately copied from contemporarily popular templates instead of the source material.

Given all this, the increasingly promised operationalizing of generative AI technologies in high-level game development sounds less like an optimistic prediction and more like a threat. AI still can’t imagine or create as humans can — it can only technologically reproduce as machines do. The AAA industry is beginning to run up against the practical realities of these limitations.

THE IRREPRODUCIBILITY OF VIDEO GAMES

If you consume a lot of gaming-related media like I do, you may have heard about Microsoft’s perplexing, AI-hallucinated tech demo from earlier this year that allegedly sought to recreate the experience of Quake 2 in an entirely generative format. Now, as an acolyte of the information sciences with a vested interest in exploring the limits and potential of artificial intelligence, I found this demo quite compelling from a strictly technical perspective! That AI research has produced realtime frame generation that responds to human input is an undeniable achievement, assuming it’s easily replicable. Additionally, Microsoft’s talk of using this tech to more easily bring old games to modern hardware sounds like a genuinely useful real-world application of generative AI that I could easily get behind under the right circumstances.

But in my capacities as a lifelong gamer and as a student of gaming history, I just feel kind of depressed. This Quake 2 demo is presented at near-VHS-quality resolution and yet runs barely any faster than a slideshow, and I frankly cannot imagine that this product will ever generate a game more compelling than the dime-a-dozen color-matching distract-em-ups you find on smartphones. I can hardly even imagine that generating and subsequently fixing an AI-produced game would be more efficient than doing it entirely from scratch. My cynical half assures me that Microsoft knows and embraces all of this, and that they plan a future wherein ninety-nine percent of new video games are cheap, artless garbage made as second-screen distractions for people like me who can’t afford to spend $100 on GTA VI. My philosophical half counters with the suggestion that they’re most likely just promising the world to anyone who will listen so that the money doesn’t dry up. I guess we’ll know for certain before too long.

What I most want to get across is this: fun video games are extraordinary gestalts of carefully assembled human creativity, and machines simply will not ever replicate them without first simulating the intricacies of that human creativity. I brought up 2019’s Disco Elysium last week as an index example of this idea in action, which I stand firmly behind. Look, I think it’s pretty neat that Microsoft’s new model can generatively reproduce an experience a bit like an arena shooter from 1997! But if any of Microsoft’s publicists sincerely expect me to believe that generatively prototyping complex, emotional, and/or psychologically fraught narrative experiences with deep player involvement is just a matter of consuming more training data, they’re gonna need to show their goddamn work.

TO FEEL AND TO NUMB

I want to wrap up by discussing what is for me the most stable and pertinent dichotomy in the philosophy of art. To Walter Benjamin, the popular mass media of the early twentieth century were living examples of how increased mass participation could change the character of art’s consumption. His own formulation was that “[a] man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it… [whereas] the distracted mass absorbs the work of art.”⁶ MCU films have been made in one form or another since antiquity, you know.

But for video games, which blur the line between distraction and concentration more than perhaps any other field of human endeavor, some iteration on the idea is called for. Since the pacing of an interactive experience is almost always player-controlled, the designer has precious little influence over when and where a player will be inclined to concentrate or drift off. And, since many games require dozens of hours over several sessions to complete, it’s seldom reasonable to expect a player to come away from a given session with a remotely holistic view of the whole experience. The best a game designer can generally hope for is to cultivate a particular set of emotions to be experienced over the course of play. Which set of emotions ends up being chosen for this purpose forms the basis of my own taxonomy.

Some games are made with the foremost intention of providing a worthwhile psychosensory experience to players who are willing to meet the designers on their level, or at least halfway — games like Undertale, Morrowind, or Spec Ops: The Line, to name the first three that come to mind. Other games are made with the foremost intention of lulling players into a state of soothing apathy, usually toward the end of lengthening their play sessions and/or monetizing their boredom — I’m sure I need not list examples. As with all forms of popular media under post-war liberalism, the former strategy tends to generate critical praise from in-groups while the latter tends to be commercially dominant. This goes quite some way toward explaining why video gaming still lacks the dignity of cinema among the non-gaming masses.

It also happens to inform the heuristic I apply when deciding whether or not a given game will be worth my time and money. Yahtzee Croshaw, who may as well be the Roger Ebert of video game criticism, had my favorite formulation of this:

“Throughout history, gamers and gaming correspondents have always divided games into the worthies and the unworthies, and this dichotomy has taken many forms: PCs versus consoles; hardcore versus casual; mobile versus everything else. But for me, the split has always been thus: games that make you feel versus games that make you numb. Some games challenge and energize your emotions and give you ideas and inspiration, whereas other games seek only to massage your rodent brain with repetitive pats to the head so you don’t think dangerous thoughts...”⁷

And speaking of dangerous thoughts, the world feels much different today than it did even six months ago, and I think it should be uncontroversial to say that we are now living through another tectonic shift in how the average person interprets the reality around them.

While Walter Benjamin penned his seminal essay from a safehouse in France, the Italian and German fascists were answering Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer’s call of ars gratia artis with their own ideological call-to-arms: “Fiat ars—pereat mundus,” to use Benjamin’s rendering. Hitler tapped Albert Speer to terraform Berlin into a gauche monstrosity of columns and triumphal arches, while Mussolini unironically tried to restore the Roman Empire. It should go without saying that both men and their lickspittles were naïve, boyish LARPers wearing the crudely hewn skins of continental sophisticates, but they all came from a long tradition of insecure philistines who hadn’t previously made a go at conquering civilization. I think we as Internet-brained Westerners may have something to learn from the quiet war of aesthetics between the fascists and the communists.

In the end, Bolshevik and Blackshirt alike have always shared one belief in particular: that the human imagination can be both an arena for and a means of material struggle against stagnation and injustice. The Weimar Republic and the Mutilated Victory didn’t just lead to fascism on their own — they led to broad, cross-ideological rejections of the discredited social orders that produced them. We’re now living through a comparable resurgence of cross-ideological resistance to our own widely discredited institutions, and God knows we could use something behind which to shelter.

I so dearly love video games and the communities that form around them because, to me, they represent the most promising extant defense against the forces of apathy and stagnation that now threaten authentic human expression. The strength and resolve of these communities are an ongoing source of personal inspiration — Giant Bomb is newly independent, everyone’s talking about a bizarre JRPG from France, and promising new gaming publications are coming to Substack every week. We might just have a chance after all.

Alright, Walt, give us something good to close out on.

“There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.”⁸

Ahhhhh… that should do nicely.

Til next time <3

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Want to read Benjamin’s essay yourself? MIT hosts a freely accessible copy of Harry Zohn’s 1969 English translation.

1. Aldous Huxley, Beyond the Mexique Bay. A Traveller’s Journal, London, 1949, p. 274.

2. If you’d like a bit of Teutonic flair with this newsletter, try reading his name as “VAL-tuh BEN-yuh-MEEN” from this point forward.

3. From The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction — Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn, 1968, Schocken, p. 223.

4. Ibid.

5. That’s it. I’m not reaching for another goddamn parenthesis key for the rest of this newsletter.

6. Ibid., 239.

7. Transcription of source: https://zeropunctuation.fandom.com/wiki/Remnant:_From_The_Ashes

8. From Theses on the Philosophy of History — Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn, 1968, Schocken, p. 254.