The Nip and the Bite

Darshana Jayemanne's paper applies the non-mechanistic cybernetics of Gregory Bateson and Anthony Wilden to videogames, treating them as complex open systems in dynamic relation to their players. Opening with Alan Turing's speculations about machine intelligence, the paper argues that the videogame apparatus, which can say "I play," illustrates the human-machine relations at stake in computer-mediated culture. Jayemanne contends that the methodological challenge is to account for the non-linear, multifinal nature of games while also attending to their cultural and material contexts, and that cybernetic theory offers a synthetic frame for doing both.

Central to the argument is Bateson's observation that animal play-fighting depends on the "nip," a gesture that resembles the bite while metacommunicating the message "this is play." Wilden extends this through the distinction between analogue and digital communication, identifying primary digitalisation (the nip) and secondary digitalisation (negation and the emergence of a subject). The paper proposes that the player, avatar and apparatus together form a "virtual shifter" distributed across several levels of analogue and digital communication, with feedback creating a message-in-circuit. Illustrated through the trash-can desktop icon and the control scheme of the Resident Evil series, the framework is offered as a tool for analysing game feel, temporality, goals and genre. The paper is explicitly a theoretical proposal, acknowledging that videogame studies still lack a mature critical vocabulary and identifying future directions in phenomenology, sociology and Marxist analysis.