Dear Player: Can a Fish Play a Game? Converting the Animal

Cat’s are players, get over it. Heck, Crows can even play games with structural linguistics. But what about something as uncompetitive as their prey? Last year a project from the student hackathon HackNY (2014) used motion sensing technology to enable a fish to ‘play’ Pokémon Red. Clearly indebted to Twitch Plays Pokémon, what might be nothing more than a satirical prank nevertheless opens up questions about the nature of ‘play’, as well as the potential for game interfaces to open artistic commentary on our attitudes to the Animal.

The set up of ‘fishplayspokemon’ maps the ‘natural’ movements of a fish around its bowl to the buttons of a gameboy by sensing colour shifts in quadrants of a grid overlay. It’s logged 160hrs of game time, and defeated a Squirtle with a Charmander. The irony isn’t lost on anyone. An immediate point posed though is one of reciprocity - if the fish is unaware of the causal impact of its actions, in what sense can it be said to ‘play’? We can safely assume that the fish doesn’t share our goals, nor, with a 5 second memory, any methodical knowledge of what it’s doing - the setup is crazy if taken ‘literally’. However, whether awareness is a necessary prerequisite for 'play' is debateable - these guys seem to be having fun. What it does do, however, is translate an animal’s movements into a virtual world which we humans have heavily coded with meaning. We see a representation of ‘fishness’ different, and no less abstract, to any before - an animal as an oddball protagonist, rather than subject, of an experiment. An anti-hero, if you will.  I can’t dislodge the tongue from my cheek, but let’s look at why (and how) someone gave a fish the controller.

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While dolphins, primates and others seem to exhibit a fondness for play, its fair to say that humans have an ambivalent and selective view of animals when it comes to the idea of ‘play’. Huizinga’s concept of Homo Ludens argues that in significant ways culture is ‘play’, and humans have trouble letting go of their monopoly on culture. While that monopoly has been questioned, the majority still see the discussion as redundant - mainly because discussion with animals seems impossible. To bastardise Wittgenstein: “If a lion could talk, we could not understand them. But what if we were both speaking the same virtual language?

Game-like interfaces have long been used to test animal responses - usually to try and identify and diagnose human-like properties in/through animals - from the mathematical proficiency of a pig to Dawkins strained analogy for superstition in the behaviours of a slot-machine-playing pigeon. Games have been seen, because of their abstraction of input, as a means for animals to reach for, or sink to, the ‘human’ - like these self-doubting monkeys. So far, so anthropocentric. But in these ends-oriented experiments, little attention seems to have been placed on the idea of an animal as a player. Input achieves the scientist’s goals, never the animals, except things have changed with examples like ‘fishplayspokémon’. Here a game merely translates a fish’s un-incentivised habits, while also affording a relatively open context for expression in which the fishes actions are narrativised without it being assumed that the fish is revealing some profound truth about human 'nature'.

This intersects with recent trends in Indie games which question the nature of agency, motive and narrative in games. I hope to return to this throughout the series, but for now we can think of this space as a means for the Animal Turn to work its way into video-game discourse.

Let’s look at another context - another medium. A leitmotif in a range of recent digital music practices has been the translation of the natural processes of plants (such as transpiration) into electronic music. Interactive installations have been devised which allow human participants to interact with the plant and listen to the shifts in the music. Putting to one side already confused debates about whether plants express emotion, human’s can in a sense be put in a dialogue with plants. Making the inaudible audible in a mode of synthetic sound we treat as musical, such practices discuss the inadequacy/limits of translation between our own human discourses, as well as engaging the problem of understanding the alien agencies of other species and our impact on them. Digital music has a history of converting found data into sound, anything which can express a wave (light, currents, electromagnety-whatevers) can be ‘converted’, quantized and transmuted into notes by a number of means. Indeed, we might talk of a thematics of death hear, similar to that surrounding the photograph, that once fixed, this kind of ‘assisted-readymade’ sound reifies its subject. Stuck in a duration, a loop, the subject must be rendered inert - as if ‘killed’. Pieces like this one even convert the life of a dead tree into melancholy music, by treating its tree rings like a dead medium, an LP.

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Games present another easy form of ‘translation’ - a simple set of keys, buttons which can be mapped to any input that can be turned into current. At its core we can see anthropocentric projection as a problem, but also often a point of departure for understanding the non-human. Perhaps this is why our twich viewers are constantly myth-making around fishy intentions and supplementing texts to their plucky protagonist. They muse on whether the fish is eating, or the irony of its choice of a fire elemental. The channel’s creators repeatedly frame its actions as those of an agent: “[he] has been playing since the start” “he selected his own name” etc. However, the most common fear and source of amusement for its audience is the recurrent thought that the fish, whenever motionless, is dead. Hundreds of viewers now see a fish in the limelight and equate AFK with a more morbid kind of inertness. Perhaps like the photograph and the tree ring record, reflections of the reifying aspects of representation are never far away.

However, the Game provides an unusual medium, distinct - this is a stream, not a recording, the fish is not fixed, it must be in motion in order to be a player. When it stops we turn from the game screen to the fish bowl - its lack of participation draws our attention back to it. Where it escapes the motion sensor, it takes on an aspect of the abject - lifeless matter falling outside the grid. Where Kristeva would argue through Lacan that death is an an absence, and so falls outside representation of what is present, the dead body is a present absence. Something we can see but can’t understand, something that seems like a partial agency, beyond codification. Perhaps we can see a means of reflecting on the Animal as something similar. An inert fish sheds its pixel-y anthropoid skin. So to speak.

Not much of a communion, you might say, talking to an idling fish as if it were a cadaver. But here death also stands for an unrepresentable term in the medium. The alien plays of Pokémon on-screen both substitute for the fish, but defamiliarises it enough for the gap to remain visible - the untranslatable idiom. The fish is given access to a metaphorical rhetoric, and through this almost poetic performance of the game without its goals, it is treated as greater than an object or a chance procedure. The fish has a virtual life as virtual as any human player, but its performance also  hints at the absent real.

In play there is a unique space of exchange. The fish is given human clothing, but by operating in a human space he is allowed to signify. Indeed, all button mashing is equal - to an intermediary like a game, all input is valid, whether it be human or fish. The Game is the intermedium par excellence  - an animal can ‘perform’ in a game much like a human can, its actions can be narrativised. Maybe that’s all ‘play’ is, activity which can be represented in a game - action narrativised into a performance which society labels a ‘game’.

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Before concluding let's consider a game which articulates this conversion of the animal and foregrounds the untranslatable idiom of the 'Game'. Octodad is all about different bodies, marked Others and problems of translation. Playing as an Octopus who performs as a human man, players have littel control over their avatar as they attempt to save their marriage, disguise their identity, and adapt to everyday environments hostile to octopodes. Moving limbs individually breaks almost all sense of flow  - only in losing oneself to momentum and chaos can the player experience a giddy loss of ego. By figuring a series of hilarious masquerades (at one point we are an octopus pretending to be a man pretending to be a shark), the identity and agency of the player is made as elastic as Octodad himself. Creative misfortune, chance victory and excessive and inadequate translation are the name of the game. Here we have the game space as hybrid - animal-human-neither.

Indeed, it might be interesting to hold on to what we can’t translate. We've seen everything from blindfolded players in animal masks to pets playing games about pets and for pets, and in the end these demonstrate that games are often about unintended consequences. Games are all about conversion - our actions are transmuted the moment we press a button. And while all input is equally implemented in a game, players themselves remain unequal. Play is a space of compromise, of workable misrecognition. Like the present/absent, or this untranslatable element we’ve been talking about, the game lives in this middling space, neither entirely human nor entirely fishy.

Give it another 1000hrs and see how well ‘Grayson’, the fish, does. If he Lives that long.

Merlin Seller