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Experimental Futures
Respawn: Gamers, Hackers, and Technogenic Life
In Respawn Colin Milburn examines the connections between video games, hacking, and science fiction that galvanize technological activism and technological communities. Discussing a wide range of games, from Portal and Final Fantasy VII to Super Mario Sunshine and Shadow of the Colossus, Milburn illustrates how they impact the lives of gamers and non-gamers alike. They also serve as resources for critique, resistance, and insurgency, offering a space for players and hacktivist groups such as Anonymous to challenge obstinate systems and experiment with alternative futures. Providing an essential walkthrough guide to our digital culture and its high-tech controversies, Milburn shows how games and playable media spawn new modes of engagement in a computerized world.
- GenresNonfiction
312 pages, Hardcover
Published December 14, 2018
7 people are currently reading
57 people want to read
About the author
Colin Milburn
10 books6 followersColin Milburn is Gary Snyder Chair in Science and the Humanities and Professor of English, Science and Technology Studies, and Cinema and Technocultural Studies at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Nanovision: Engineering the Future, also published by Duke University Press.
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August 14, 2020
Video Game Theory
Video games are now part of popular culture. Like books or movies, they can be studied as cultural productions, and university departments offer courses that critically engage with them. Scholars who specialize in this field of study take various perspectives: they can chart the history of video game production and consumption ; they can focus on their design or their aesthetic value; or they can analyze their narrative content and story plot. There is no limit to how video games can be engaged: some thinkers even take them as fertile ground for philosophy and theory building. Within the past few years, a handful of books have been published on video game theory. Colin Milburn’s Respawn can be added to that budding strand of literature. It is a work of applied theory: the author doesn’t engage with longstanding philosophical problems or abstract reasoning, but draws from the examples of a wide range of games, from Portal and Final Fantasy VII to Super Mario Sunshine and Shadow of the Colossus, to illustrate how they impact the lives of gamers and non-gamers alike. In particular, he considers the value of video games for shaping protest and political action. Video games, with the devotion that serious gamers bring to the task, introduce the possibility of living otherwise, of hacking the system, of gaming the game. Gamers and hackers develop alternative forms of participatory culture along with new tactics of critique and intervention. Hacktivist groups such as Anonymous use video game language and aesthetics to disrupt the operations of the security state and launch attacks on the neoliberal order. Pirate parties have won seats in European legislatures and advocate a brand of techno-progressivism, digital liberties, and participatory democracy largely inspired by video games. Exploring the culture of video games can therefore offer a glimpse into the functioning of our modern democracies in a computerized world.
Geek vocabulary
A culture is formed of various groups that may develop their own specific identity within the context of the larger social system to which they belong. Gaming culture can he treated as a subculture: a series of social codes, technological lore, and insignificant facts of history, popular culture, art and science. Subcultures create social groups by delineating their identities, beliefs, and habits as much as they exclude those who do not belong to the group. Geek culture is a subculture of computer enthusiasts that is traditionally associated with obscure media: Japanese animation, science fiction novels, comic books, and video games. Respawn is replete with trivia, code words, and key expressions that open for the noninitiate a window into the world of gaming. “All your base are belong to us” is the poorly translated sentence from the Japanese arcade game Zero Wing that is now used as a catchphrase for violent appropriation and technical domination. Used by the leader of the cyborg invasion force known as CATS, it signifies that a posthuman future is already inevitable, and presents an allegory of the information age in which mistranslations and malfunctions abound. Made popular by the website Something Awful, it is the feline equivalent of the Doge Internet meme that consists of a picture of a Shiba Inu dog accompanied by multicolored text deliberately written in a form of broken English. Variations on the CATS meme include the message posted by YouTube in 2006 that “All your videos are belong to us” or, following the Snowden affair and the exposure of NSA’s vast data-surveillance operation, various Internet images that proclaim: “All your data are belong to U.S.”
Another obscure lore sentence is the question: “Where were you on April 20, 2011?” that refers to the date the PlayStation Network was shut down as a retroactive security response to an external intrusion. Colin Milburn reconstructs the story of this particular episode, which exposes the troubled relations between Sony Corporation and various groups of hackers, of which the attack on Sony Pictures by operatives allegedly sponsored by the government of North Korea is only the last installment. It all began with Sony’s decision to make its PlayStation 3 open to homebrew programmers and technological innovators in order to encourage participatory science, peer-to-peer design, and do-it-yourself innovation. With its PlayStation Network or PSN, it even claimed to have created “the most powerful distributed computing network ever” and made it accessible to Stanford University’s researchers to simulate the mechanics of protein folding by installing the Folding@home software on all its stations. However, in January 2010, the young hacker George Hotz—more commonly known by his alias, GeoHot—announced that he had found a way to hack the PS3, gaining access to its system memory and processor and allowing users to make pirate copies of their games. Sony backpedalled on its open system policy and filed a lawsuit against GeoHot, which then found supporters among the hacker collective Anonymous who launched a massive DDOS attack against Sony servers. It is in this context that the PlayStation Network outage occurred, disabling gamers access to their favorite occupation and exposing them to the risk of leaked personal data, including passwords and credit card numbers that the hackers were able to extract from servers. Anonymous was quick to deny responsibility for the criminal intrusion, but it wasn’t the end for Sony’s troubles and the company was exposed to more attacks by malicious black-hat hackers. Meanwhile, the unsolved mystery of who hacked the PSN invited conspiracy narratives and dark humor mashups. “PlayStation Network was down so I killed Osama Ben Laden” was how a meme described president Obama’s reaction, while others noted the time coincidence between the PSN shutdown and the day the Skynet network took over the world in the Terminator movie.
Doing it for the lulz
The gamer culture intersects with hacking in the lulz, a form of corrupted laughter that derives pleasure from online actions taken at another’s expense. The “field of Theoretical Lulz” as depicted on Encyclopedia DramaticaRespawn, a command-line first occurring in the game Doom, means to reenter an existing game environment at a fixed point after having been defeated or otherwise removed from play. It is the opposite of permadeath games that make players start over from the very beginning if their character dies. Yet another option is to play in “Iron Man mode” and try to reach the end of any game with only a single avatar life, eschewing the “save” or “respawn” functions. The hacker concept of “magic” refers to “anything as yet unexplained, or too complicated to explain,” but also to the command words in adventure games that included functions such as “XYZZY” or “PLUGH”. The word “pwn” is not a programming function or an instruction code, but a term of appreciation (as in “This game pwns”) that originated in the gaming community itself, probably born from a typographic error. According to the most enthusiastic critics, games raise philosophical issues. The role-playing game Portal includes the sentence “There will be cake” in its opening, but the player soon realizes that “The cake is a lie.” Of course, these two sentences have achieved cult status, and are repeated in countless Internet memes or signs carried at street demonstrations.
For Colin Milburn, games are closely correlated to the meaning of life. Many concepts from computer science draw parallels to the realm of organic life—worms, viruses, bugs, swarms, hives, and so forth. Sony has built upon this connexion by attaching its brand to an image of biological organism and vitality, from its 2007 “This Is Living” advertising campaign to its 2011 “Long Live Play” motto. Sony executives routinely speak about the PlayStation’s DNA, refer to its microprocessor as The Cell, and insist on the nucleic compatibility between successive generations of hardware products. For Colin Milburn, “‘respawn’ stands for a surplus of vitality, a reserve of as-yet unexpended life, a technologically mediated capacity to keep on going even while facing dire adversity.” He uses the term “technogenic life” to refer to the entanglement between organic life and digital media and the emergence of new life-forms, neither fully human nor artificial. This is of course a familiar trope in science fiction, and the author lists classic novels such as John Brunner’s Shockwave Rider, Vernon Vinge’s True Names, or William Gibson’s Neuromancer as part of any gamers’ portable library. Video games are experiments in applied science fiction: they allow players to test the limits of life, to engage with anticipation and foresight, and to make other futures imaginable. Gamers always have the possibility to reset, save, shut off, or reload. Games tend to encourage a playful and experimental attitude to life: working through error, overcoming failure, persevering toward the goal while staying open to the unexpected. Playing games can teach us how to live: indeed, they are part of our lives as Homo Ludens. Gamers respond to the injunction to “get a life” by arguing that they already have one, indeed many: “I am a gamer, not because I don’t have a life, but because I choose to have many.”
We Are Heroes
Gamers are also influenced by the subculture of comic books and superhero movies. Since 1978, when the first Superman cartridge appeared for the Atari 2600, the video-game industry has produced a steady stream of superhero adventures. One such game was City of Heroes, a massive multiplayer online role-playing game or MMORPG that attracted a large community of followers. In the game, players created super-powered characters that could team up with others to complete missions and fight criminals belonging to various gangs and organizations in the fictional Paragon City. When the South Korean company NCsoft decided to terminate its Paragon Studios development team and to shut down the game in 2012, massive protests arose. Online testimonies reflected feelings of camaraderie and shared culture, domestic and social belonging, comfort in times of sorrow, and personal accomplishment—indeed, all the qualities of “having a life”. Rallying under the motto “We are heroes. This is what we do,” participants envisaged various measures to keep the game operating past the announced date of closure. Their logic was straightforward: the company had made a game where players had spent the past eight years defending their city; it was only natural that they rose in protest against this attack on Paragon. Some decided to go rogue and keep the game running on servers based on the leaked source code. Like in the world of superheroes, the online community has always had its rogue elements, its vigilantes and its villains. The author is not sure where to categorize hackers such as the group Anonymous: “despite their roguelike appearances, hacktivists might even seem to be on the right side of history.” But the hate speech, misogynistic attacks, and racist slurs that circulate on forums such as Reddit or 4chan clearly fall into the villainy category. They represent “the dark side of the lulz,” the politics of terror and mayhem that is already familiar to the fans of Batman’s Gotham City and other superhero worlds.
Gaming also shapes a political imaginary. Numerous players have attested to the impact of gaming on their own political or ecological sensitivities. The dispositions and practices cultivated by gaming can inform political choices, responsible policy decisions, and collective action. Under the right circumstances, video games offer ways to experiment with the technopolitics of the present, to think otherwise even from the inside of a computer system. Edward Snowden has confessed that his motive for challenging the security state has developed partly through his lifelong interest in video games. According to Colin Milburn, video games frequently present interactive narratives about civil disobedience, social resistance, and transformation, becoming models for engagement. The quotidian act of saving or resetting gameplay data itself models an orientation to social change, affirming that duration and persistence are not givens but are always active processes of construction. Final Fantasy VII has encouraged a generation of players to consider “how deeply the fights for economic democracy and environmental sustainability are intertwined.” Gaming and hacking cultures are intrinsically correlated. The “primal scene of hacking” occurred in the early 1960s when MIT research scientists experimented with the university’s mainframe computer to create the first video game, Spacewar! The first online role-playing game, Adventure, which circulated on the ARPANET in the seventies, included a secret hideout place where the author left his unauthorized signature. Many games include hacking as a function, and offer the possibility to tweak the code or experiment with alternative commands even from the inside. But in the end, even those who resist the prevailing systems of control are likewise products of those same systems. Like in Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One, the only possible option may be to play through to the end or to quit entirely. Completing a game inevitably triggers the formula: “Game Over”.
Video games are now part of popular culture. Like books or movies, they can be studied as cultural productions, and university departments offer courses that critically engage with them. Scholars who specialize in this field of study take various perspectives: they can chart the history of video game production and consumption ; they can focus on their design or their aesthetic value; or they can analyze their narrative content and story plot. There is no limit to how video games can be engaged: some thinkers even take them as fertile ground for philosophy and theory building. Within the past few years, a handful of books have been published on video game theory. Colin Milburn’s Respawn can be added to that budding strand of literature. It is a work of applied theory: the author doesn’t engage with longstanding philosophical problems or abstract reasoning, but draws from the examples of a wide range of games, from Portal and Final Fantasy VII to Super Mario Sunshine and Shadow of the Colossus, to illustrate how they impact the lives of gamers and non-gamers alike. In particular, he considers the value of video games for shaping protest and political action. Video games, with the devotion that serious gamers bring to the task, introduce the possibility of living otherwise, of hacking the system, of gaming the game. Gamers and hackers develop alternative forms of participatory culture along with new tactics of critique and intervention. Hacktivist groups such as Anonymous use video game language and aesthetics to disrupt the operations of the security state and launch attacks on the neoliberal order. Pirate parties have won seats in European legislatures and advocate a brand of techno-progressivism, digital liberties, and participatory democracy largely inspired by video games. Exploring the culture of video games can therefore offer a glimpse into the functioning of our modern democracies in a computerized world.
Geek vocabulary
A culture is formed of various groups that may develop their own specific identity within the context of the larger social system to which they belong. Gaming culture can he treated as a subculture: a series of social codes, technological lore, and insignificant facts of history, popular culture, art and science. Subcultures create social groups by delineating their identities, beliefs, and habits as much as they exclude those who do not belong to the group. Geek culture is a subculture of computer enthusiasts that is traditionally associated with obscure media: Japanese animation, science fiction novels, comic books, and video games. Respawn is replete with trivia, code words, and key expressions that open for the noninitiate a window into the world of gaming. “All your base are belong to us” is the poorly translated sentence from the Japanese arcade game Zero Wing that is now used as a catchphrase for violent appropriation and technical domination. Used by the leader of the cyborg invasion force known as CATS, it signifies that a posthuman future is already inevitable, and presents an allegory of the information age in which mistranslations and malfunctions abound. Made popular by the website Something Awful, it is the feline equivalent of the Doge Internet meme that consists of a picture of a Shiba Inu dog accompanied by multicolored text deliberately written in a form of broken English. Variations on the CATS meme include the message posted by YouTube in 2006 that “All your videos are belong to us” or, following the Snowden affair and the exposure of NSA’s vast data-surveillance operation, various Internet images that proclaim: “All your data are belong to U.S.”
Another obscure lore sentence is the question: “Where were you on April 20, 2011?” that refers to the date the PlayStation Network was shut down as a retroactive security response to an external intrusion. Colin Milburn reconstructs the story of this particular episode, which exposes the troubled relations between Sony Corporation and various groups of hackers, of which the attack on Sony Pictures by operatives allegedly sponsored by the government of North Korea is only the last installment. It all began with Sony’s decision to make its PlayStation 3 open to homebrew programmers and technological innovators in order to encourage participatory science, peer-to-peer design, and do-it-yourself innovation. With its PlayStation Network or PSN, it even claimed to have created “the most powerful distributed computing network ever” and made it accessible to Stanford University’s researchers to simulate the mechanics of protein folding by installing the Folding@home software on all its stations. However, in January 2010, the young hacker George Hotz—more commonly known by his alias, GeoHot—announced that he had found a way to hack the PS3, gaining access to its system memory and processor and allowing users to make pirate copies of their games. Sony backpedalled on its open system policy and filed a lawsuit against GeoHot, which then found supporters among the hacker collective Anonymous who launched a massive DDOS attack against Sony servers. It is in this context that the PlayStation Network outage occurred, disabling gamers access to their favorite occupation and exposing them to the risk of leaked personal data, including passwords and credit card numbers that the hackers were able to extract from servers. Anonymous was quick to deny responsibility for the criminal intrusion, but it wasn’t the end for Sony’s troubles and the company was exposed to more attacks by malicious black-hat hackers. Meanwhile, the unsolved mystery of who hacked the PSN invited conspiracy narratives and dark humor mashups. “PlayStation Network was down so I killed Osama Ben Laden” was how a meme described president Obama’s reaction, while others noted the time coincidence between the PSN shutdown and the day the Skynet network took over the world in the Terminator movie.
Doing it for the lulz
The gamer culture intersects with hacking in the lulz, a form of corrupted laughter that derives pleasure from online actions taken at another’s expense. The “field of Theoretical Lulz” as depicted on Encyclopedia DramaticaRespawn, a command-line first occurring in the game Doom, means to reenter an existing game environment at a fixed point after having been defeated or otherwise removed from play. It is the opposite of permadeath games that make players start over from the very beginning if their character dies. Yet another option is to play in “Iron Man mode” and try to reach the end of any game with only a single avatar life, eschewing the “save” or “respawn” functions. The hacker concept of “magic” refers to “anything as yet unexplained, or too complicated to explain,” but also to the command words in adventure games that included functions such as “XYZZY” or “PLUGH”. The word “pwn” is not a programming function or an instruction code, but a term of appreciation (as in “This game pwns”) that originated in the gaming community itself, probably born from a typographic error. According to the most enthusiastic critics, games raise philosophical issues. The role-playing game Portal includes the sentence “There will be cake” in its opening, but the player soon realizes that “The cake is a lie.” Of course, these two sentences have achieved cult status, and are repeated in countless Internet memes or signs carried at street demonstrations.
For Colin Milburn, games are closely correlated to the meaning of life. Many concepts from computer science draw parallels to the realm of organic life—worms, viruses, bugs, swarms, hives, and so forth. Sony has built upon this connexion by attaching its brand to an image of biological organism and vitality, from its 2007 “This Is Living” advertising campaign to its 2011 “Long Live Play” motto. Sony executives routinely speak about the PlayStation’s DNA, refer to its microprocessor as The Cell, and insist on the nucleic compatibility between successive generations of hardware products. For Colin Milburn, “‘respawn’ stands for a surplus of vitality, a reserve of as-yet unexpended life, a technologically mediated capacity to keep on going even while facing dire adversity.” He uses the term “technogenic life” to refer to the entanglement between organic life and digital media and the emergence of new life-forms, neither fully human nor artificial. This is of course a familiar trope in science fiction, and the author lists classic novels such as John Brunner’s Shockwave Rider, Vernon Vinge’s True Names, or William Gibson’s Neuromancer as part of any gamers’ portable library. Video games are experiments in applied science fiction: they allow players to test the limits of life, to engage with anticipation and foresight, and to make other futures imaginable. Gamers always have the possibility to reset, save, shut off, or reload. Games tend to encourage a playful and experimental attitude to life: working through error, overcoming failure, persevering toward the goal while staying open to the unexpected. Playing games can teach us how to live: indeed, they are part of our lives as Homo Ludens. Gamers respond to the injunction to “get a life” by arguing that they already have one, indeed many: “I am a gamer, not because I don’t have a life, but because I choose to have many.”
We Are Heroes
Gamers are also influenced by the subculture of comic books and superhero movies. Since 1978, when the first Superman cartridge appeared for the Atari 2600, the video-game industry has produced a steady stream of superhero adventures. One such game was City of Heroes, a massive multiplayer online role-playing game or MMORPG that attracted a large community of followers. In the game, players created super-powered characters that could team up with others to complete missions and fight criminals belonging to various gangs and organizations in the fictional Paragon City. When the South Korean company NCsoft decided to terminate its Paragon Studios development team and to shut down the game in 2012, massive protests arose. Online testimonies reflected feelings of camaraderie and shared culture, domestic and social belonging, comfort in times of sorrow, and personal accomplishment—indeed, all the qualities of “having a life”. Rallying under the motto “We are heroes. This is what we do,” participants envisaged various measures to keep the game operating past the announced date of closure. Their logic was straightforward: the company had made a game where players had spent the past eight years defending their city; it was only natural that they rose in protest against this attack on Paragon. Some decided to go rogue and keep the game running on servers based on the leaked source code. Like in the world of superheroes, the online community has always had its rogue elements, its vigilantes and its villains. The author is not sure where to categorize hackers such as the group Anonymous: “despite their roguelike appearances, hacktivists might even seem to be on the right side of history.” But the hate speech, misogynistic attacks, and racist slurs that circulate on forums such as Reddit or 4chan clearly fall into the villainy category. They represent “the dark side of the lulz,” the politics of terror and mayhem that is already familiar to the fans of Batman’s Gotham City and other superhero worlds.
Gaming also shapes a political imaginary. Numerous players have attested to the impact of gaming on their own political or ecological sensitivities. The dispositions and practices cultivated by gaming can inform political choices, responsible policy decisions, and collective action. Under the right circumstances, video games offer ways to experiment with the technopolitics of the present, to think otherwise even from the inside of a computer system. Edward Snowden has confessed that his motive for challenging the security state has developed partly through his lifelong interest in video games. According to Colin Milburn, video games frequently present interactive narratives about civil disobedience, social resistance, and transformation, becoming models for engagement. The quotidian act of saving or resetting gameplay data itself models an orientation to social change, affirming that duration and persistence are not givens but are always active processes of construction. Final Fantasy VII has encouraged a generation of players to consider “how deeply the fights for economic democracy and environmental sustainability are intertwined.” Gaming and hacking cultures are intrinsically correlated. The “primal scene of hacking” occurred in the early 1960s when MIT research scientists experimented with the university’s mainframe computer to create the first video game, Spacewar! The first online role-playing game, Adventure, which circulated on the ARPANET in the seventies, included a secret hideout place where the author left his unauthorized signature. Many games include hacking as a function, and offer the possibility to tweak the code or experiment with alternative commands even from the inside. But in the end, even those who resist the prevailing systems of control are likewise products of those same systems. Like in Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One, the only possible option may be to play through to the end or to quit entirely. Completing a game inevitably triggers the formula: “Game Over”.
June 30, 2020
This is definitely one of the best readings that merge gaming, science fiction and activism. Especially the first chapters...
April 9, 2025
This book does a great job of extracting the deeper social framework of some of the most popular video games. The author posits a new form of life—technogenic life—that represents the biological evolution of humanity merged inextricably with the technological web of life which is manifested most powerfully by video games. Video games present the most tangible representation of technogenic life because they demand that we physically participate with the game. Not only do we become emotionally attached to the game and its characters but the subtext of the game changes us emotionally and gives us a new point of reference for how we live our own life.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 30, 2020
A mashup of the institution of philosophy with gamers qua armchair philosophers.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews