Memory of a Broken Dimension: A Study in a Politics of Skill for Experimental Art Games

William Lockett's paper argues that a political theory of digital games should draw on art history rather than relying solely on Ian Bogost's account of procedural rhetoric. Using the experimental game Memory of a Broken Dimension as its case study, the paper contends that skill acquisition, shaped by both technology design and post-industrial labor, is a politically significant process that procedural accounts fail to capture. Its theoretical grounding draws on Jonathan Crary, Darin Barney, and Maurizio Lazzarato, and it positions video games as shapers of collective, generationally shared skills of perception and interaction.

The central thesis is that the political significance of game design lies in the embodied, historically situated experience of play rather than in representational content alone. Against Bogost's "simulation gap," which prompts post-hoc critical reflection, Lockett turns to Michael Fried and Robert Morris's debate on minimalist sculpture, particularly Morris's concept of "gestalt sensations" and heightened bodily self-awareness. Experimental games like Memory are framed as designed situations that disrupt habitual move-and-look interfaces, producing new embodied awareness. The game's move-look interface and DOS-style command-line mechanics are read as thematizing the historical transformation of human-computer information access, in which movement itself becomes a form of data entry.

The analysis is interpretive rather than quantitative, and it focuses on a single game and its close reading. Its key claim is that level design and disorienting graphics turn players' navigation skills into a self-aware experiment, where politics resides in the "stutter" of skill deployment rather than in contemplative critique. Orientation is presented as entangled with a historical lineage of made things and collective computer use, and designing for the reorientation of how players move and look is characterized as a politically meaningful act of speculation and intervention. The paper's scope is therefore theoretical and aesthetic, addressing experimental art games and the broader politics of skill rather than any measured industry segment, geographic market, or time period.