“Criminal Code: Procedural Logic and Rhetorical Excess in Videogames” by Mark L. Sample

Digital Studies scholar Mark Sample looks at how gameworlds presented in video games can appear to simulate criminality in a manner that is faithful to reality or history while concealing polemical or even subversive elements in its computer code. To an extent the article is concerned with describing a method of reading computer code as a scholar, to this end Sample finds two possible meanings in code: The first responds to its “procedural power” (4), the code’s ability to performatively enact the program it describes. The second, it’s “evocative power”, the way that code contains “suggestive traces of its historical context” (4). Critique, the article suggests, can be formed by focussing on moments of slippage, where the code might be “readable by the machine one way and readable by scholars and critics in another” (4).

This article adds to the field of Critical Code Studies (CCS), which is the close reading of computer code as a form of literature, and broadly contextualizes itself as a response to Digital Studies scholar Matthew Kirschenbaum’s identification of “screen essentialism”; whereby diegetic gameplay is taken as the sole object of a critic’s study at the expense of “the underlying software, hardware, storage devices, and even non-digital inputs and outputs that make the digital screen event possible in the first place” (2). Seeking what literary critic Katherine Hayles has called “media-specific analysis of creative works” (2), the CCS of this article grew out of the Platform Studies of digital media scholars Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost which consider the affordances and limitations of each individual component of the hardware and software of a given system.

Sample offers two examples: Micropolis, a Unix port of the popular urban planning game SimCity, tasks players to make urban planning decisions that will reduce overall instances of crime. In the code instances of crime occur randomly according to a likelihood that is calculated separately by the game for each tile of the map; this is called the crime rate. Of interest for Sample is that the key variable in the code for reducing the crime rate is not social initiatives, education levels or community building, but simply, and polemically, on the distance of a location to a police station; the best route to reducing crime being to add more and more police. The second study is JFK: Reloaded, a self-styled documentary video game that gives players the chance to relive the investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy. At the level of gameplay conspiracy minded players notice how difficult it is to arrive at the same historical conclusions as the Warren Commission. At the level of code Sample discovers non-running ‘notes’ written by the game designers to each other during the design process, the content of which explicates the subversive motives behind the game.

For scholars of perpetrator studies this paper shows how CCS offers a method to examine simulations, specifically of criminal acts, as a form of representation that can subvert, critique or perpetuate ideology. Deeper still are the numerous sub discussions this implies about stakeholders in game production and game consumption: Of particular interest is the deep discussion the paper offers of Ian Bogost’s “simulation fever, [the] compulsion to render any and all real world processes as a simulation” (5). The game designer, framed as an author function, is central to this proposed line of analysis; as both an interpreter of acts of perpetration and, perhaps, a perpetrator in their own right.

Author of this entry: Alie Tacq

Sample, Mark L. “Criminal Code: Procedural Logic and Rhetorical Excess in Videogames.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 007, no. 1 (July 1, 2013).