Enjoy Being Punished by Games

Shannon Li

Samuel Sorensen

GAMES 101

Oct. 27, 2024

Enjoy Being Punished by Games

Game is an extremely violent mediation: it punishes you, it disciplines you. People can sit in front of a pile of matter, or a glowing panel, or immerse themselves in their own enjoyment without even having anything to do with it. It’s poetic in a way, but it’s also extremely creepy. For the player, in that emptiness, what remains is not cogito in the sense of René Descartes, because that assumes that ego congito is the only remaining behavior. But this is clearly not the case: in that immensely dark, yet endless void, the subject is self-absorbed: an ego without a body dances in a void without matter! In that suffocating void, subject can enjoy nothing, yet enjoying everything. Gaming is dynamic that allows the subject to enjoy the action of punishment. Gaming is dynamic that allows the subject to enjoy the action of punishment.

Enjoyment is the act of drawing physiological pleasure directly from matter. This enjoyment is necessarily associated with the direct fulfillment of physical needs. Enjoyment is achieved by the satisfaction of the most basic human needs: water for the thirsty, food for the hungry. This kind of satisfaction is the most primitive and basic operation of enjoyment. It can be said that water is drunk only to satisfy thirst, and rice is eaten only to satiate the stomach. Then when soup comes along, something different happens here. If the water is to be drunk to quench the thirst, then the water need not have the flavor of rice in it; and if it is to be eaten to satiate the stomach, then the rice need not have the taste of water in it. Soup, here, appears as a kind of non-necessity, a kind of surplus enjoyment. for the enjoyment of soup, it is demand (satisfaction) minus need (physiological supply). Because of this, the enjoyment provided by the soup is different. At this point there is something operationally more insidious, namely Jouissance.

French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan defines it in two different ways as articulated in his seminar: a “superabundant vitality” (Seminar VII) and a “backhanded enjoyment” (Seminar VII). Soups satisfy the physiological need of water and food as well as the satisfaction that people want to obtain through these behaviors, but an on-the-go soup that has been around since the industrial age makes the situation even more peculiar. Beverages, those on-the-go soups that mimic taste through industrially produced sweeteners, have transformed the act of drinking soup into a surplus, because people no longer have to drink to satisfy need, but only to satisfy demand, which is what Lacan calls “superabundant vitality,” which is what Lacan calls the “superabundant vitality” of a person’s life. Therefore, this is what Lacan calls “superabundant vitality”, which is demand minus need, a completely unnecessary enjoyment that does not produce any physiological pleasure for the human body.

The point of contention here is that the pleasure produced by the drink is physiological, directly related to the body. This is precisely the insidious aspect of the operation of this pleasure: it is disguised as being related to the body, whereas one does not always want it to be related to the body. It is even said to be painful to the body. Diet Coke, for example, is the perfect drink as a soda: it carries the role of satisfying need not as water, but also aspartame instead of satisfying sweetness, and subtracting sugar from sweetened drinks, Diet Coke made with aspartame is a kind of surplus-enjoyment. Something that has nothing to do with the body: the sugar that sweetens the body has all been replaced by aspartame. The water that quenches the thirst has been replaced by an ingredient that places a far greater burden on the kidneys than on water, so that it does not quench the thirst, and Diet Coke is, in fact, a thing that causes harm and pain to the body. A surplus-enjoyment.

Turning the perspective to games. The act of playing is, in its broadest definition, superabundant vitality. It is unnecessary because it does not satisfy the physiological need of any living thing. play, in its operation, also operates through pain. The game always requires the participant to give of his own accord, whereas pure enjoyment is precisely the refusal to give. The enjoyment of the game can only be obtained by giving, and giving is necessarily painful in the physical sense. It is impossible to have a kind of giving that is not burdensome to the body, either mentally or physically. A Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, in chapter 24 of his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, talks about ” A game is a machine that can get into action only if the players consent to become puppets for a time” (McLuhan 263). The game uses certain rules, and the players agree to act under the rules of the game. And the rules, or regulations, necessarily prohibit the players from doing something. Even the simplest game behaviors: a puppy spinning in circles and biting its own tail, a monkey throwing something from its left hand to its right. They resist situations such as the puppy not biting its tail, or the monkey dropping something. Gaming behavior is a behavior that drives the game machine to function after agreeing to the rules of the game. And it is precisely a kind of punishment. after agreeing to regulation’s injunction to penalize rule-breaking, and still proceeding on its own initiative: just as in the case of whipping oneself with a whip. In order not to break the rule the subject satisfies the desire of the Other, which is to follow that particular rule, by means of self-discipline. The punitive measures of suppression of the self become here enjoyment. Enjoyment of those measures which are meant to thwart and impede enjoyment. As a Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek opens a debate with Jordan Peterson in 2019 “A renunciation of pleasure can easily turn in pleasure of renunciation itself” (Zizek 46:06). Surplus-enjoyment is the turning of the repulsive into a pleasure, precisely as the game operates.

Games are a drive toward death. The enjoyment of throwing something from the left hand to the right hand and back again necessarily requires some kind of labor, and in the process of repetition. The subject gains the pleasure of the taboo in the challenge of regulation. There are two mechanisms at work here, repetition and taboo; repetition is not about repeating, but about the difference that will come but does not come after repeating; if the regulation of the game is interpreted as a taboo in relation to the rules of the game, then the taboo as the subject of punishing is the subject of punishment through constant repetition, by being repeatedly challenged. If, in Sigmund Freud’s context, gaming as death drive is a self-destructive behavior, and it has been shown above that gaming is self-punishing, then the way in which it brings about pleasure is through its regulations, that is, game rules as the challenge to taboo is precisely the process of making punishment enjoyment.

If in Freud’s theory, the pleasure principle is the non-conscious attempts to constantly enjoy. Then game, on the contrary, as Jouissance, it operates against the pleasure principle. “The function of the pleasure principle is, in effect, to lead the subject from signifier to signifier, by generating as many signifiers as are required to maintain at as low a level as possible the tension that regulates the whole functioning of the psychic apparatus” (Lacan 1954-5). If the pleasure principle is to allow tension to be relieved, then taboo is to create more tension by challenging itself. Take the purest act of play: try not to think about the pink elephant. The rules of the game as a taboo go against the pleasure principle. It evokes the subject’s desire to challenge the taboo by creating pressure on the non-conscious, and of course, even here the desire necessarily belongs to the taboo in Lacan’s context, not to the subject. In repeated challenges, the subject enjoys the feeling of self-punishment without offending taboo. And without taboo, this punishment would be joyless.

If, in a dark void, a person who does not need to eat, drink, or sleep, a person who does not have any need to survive just exists. Then that person would inevitably try to kill himself. But if all concepts have been obliterated, even the body has been obliterated, and even death cannot be approached. Then the person will inevitably try to go into all means of self-punishment. Forcing himself to perform some kind of ritual in his consciousness. Keep himself from thinking about the pink elephant. If everything symbolic, everything about language is erased. Trying not to think like Descartes is the only thing he can try to think about in the void. At least in the process of challenging taboo, cogito retains something purer than enjoyment through self-punishment. That exceeded feeling of superabundant vitality.

Work Cited

Ippolit Belinski. “Slavoj ŽIžEk Vs Jordan Peterson Debate - Happiness: Capitalism Vs. Marxism (Apr 2019).” YouTube, 20 Apr. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYGnd99McHM.

Lacan, Jacques. Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse. (The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis.) 1954-5. Unpublished.

Lacan, Jacques, 1901-1981. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. New York: Norton, 19882015.

Mary, Jacobus. The Poetics of Psychoanalysis, (Oxford 2005).

McLuhan, Marshell. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 4th Printing, Signet Books, 1964.