Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2010, volume 28, pages 653 ^ 671

doi:10.1068/d9309

Architectures of affect: anticipating and manipulating

the event in processes of videogame design and testing

James Ash
Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, University Road, Bristol BS8 1SS,
England; e-mail: james.ash@bris.ac.uk
Received 24 July 2009; in revised form 1 December 2009

Abstract. This paper examines the process of designing and testing multiplayer levels for a large,
commercially released videogame. In doing so, it argues that videogame designers work to create the
potential for positively affective encounters to occuröa complex and elusive outcome that is key
to creating critically and commercially successful multiplayer videogames. By unpacking various
examples from this process, the paper attends to debates regarding the distribution and transmission
of media affects. Instead of acting to deterministically shape action, I suggest that processes of
videogame design are predicated on producing contingency, albeit a contingency that designers
attempt to manage and control. In this case, positively affective outcomes can only be understood
as a relation between the code space of the game and the embodied techniques users generate in
response to these environments.

1 Introduction (1)
``[I]n selecting what merits the name of `event' ... industries co-produce at the very
least, access to what happens through giving it the status of event ... . Thousands of
potential events, at a minimum, happen without happening, take place without
taking place, or take place without happening.''
Stielger (2008a, page 115)
``[W]hat is an event in fact? At first, we can only define it as what was not expected,
what arrives unexpectedly and comes to us by surprise, what descends upon us, the
accident ... . The event in the strong sense of the word is therefore always a surprise,
something which takes possession of us in an unforseen manner, without warning,
and which brings us towards an unanticipated future.''
Dastur (2000, page 182)
Referring to the television news industry, the philosopher of technology Bernard
Stiegler argues that a key aspect of media today is the active process of selection
through which events are rendered visible in the world. In every selection a decision
is made to broadcast one story over another, to open up one potentiality whilst closing
down another (also see Stiegler 2007; 2008b). In this sense, every selection involves a
lossöa covering over of that which has not been shown at the expense of that which
(1) The empirical material developed in this paper is drawn from interviews and participant

observations conducted between August 2007 and February 2008 as part of my ESRC-funded
PhD research at a large videogame design company. In this research I worked as an external tester
for the company as a member of the testing team. The research diary extracts are taken from my
reflections on these sessions after they took place, and comments presented here from other testers
were made informally during the sessions. All quotations from the game designers are taken from
formal interviews conducted at an earlier date in a separate setting. The commercial sensitivity of
the processes involved means that the names of the company, game, and employees have been
replaced with pseudonyms or removed altogether. Specific details that would identify the game
have also been changed to maintain confidentiality. Whilst the examples given in this paper are one
example from a single company, it was made clear to me by employees (many of whom had worked
at other videogame companies) that the processes detailed were practised in other companies.
654 J Ash

has been shown (also see Derrida, 1998). In this paper I argue that, through emerging
technologies and techniques utilised in videogame testing, game designers go further
than selecting what pregiven or already occurrent event is shown; through various
calculative logics of anticipation and preemption, they actively attempt to shape the
very contingency of the event itself prior to a specific content or situation. As Dastur
(2000) argues in the second quotation, an event can be understood as an unanticipated
happening. Game designers utilise the process of testing to shape the potential for such
unanticipated happenings to occur. To make these claims, I unpack examples from my
ethnographic fieldwork of a games design company, which was conducted during the
testing process for the multiplayer component of a first person shooting (FPS) game,
Crucial Pivot, which was released in 2008 for the PC as well as the Xbox 360 and
Playstation 3 videogame consoles. Drawing upon material from interviews with
designers and research diaries that were written whilst I was working as a tester during
this process, I argue that videogame designers actively manipulate spatiotemporal
aspects of the game environment in an attempt to produce positively affective encoun-
ters for users (by which I mean encounters which increase the body's capacity to act
and produce associated positive senses of intensity).
More broadly, this paper aims to connect debates regarding the affective nature of
social life with the emerging spatialities of new media in order to think through the
ways in which affect is designed into environments, and the consequences of this
(attempted) affective manipulation for users' bodies. This is an approach that has
received little attention in current writing on videogames. Whereas work in game
studies has attempted to understand how the rules of games influence user experience
(Juul, 2005; Lastowka, 2009; Salen and Zimmerman, 2004) or how the representational
aspects of games construct particular understandings of people and places (Shaw and
Warf, 2009), there has been less interest in the balance constructed by games designers
between structural determination and emergent practice and the role that contingency
plays in this balance, which I would argue is the salient element in much game design.
Ignoring this form of interaction risks ignoring the actual practices of gamers and
designers and thus a large part of what makes videogames a highly affective (and thus
successful) commodity.
Recent writing in human geography has considered the ways in which affect is
constitutive of and woven into everyday life (Anderson and Wiley, 2009; Dewsbury,
2003; Harrison, 2000; McCormack, 2007), including bodily experiences of boredom
(Anderson, 2004; 2005) and (dis)comfort (Bissell, 2008; 2009) and skilled practices
such as busking (Simpson, 2008; 2009). Within geography at least, much less work
has been conducted on the ways in which affect can be actively manipulated for
commercial and economic ends in the design and production of consumer services
and goods [although this has been an important concern in the marketing and retail
literatures (see Bakamitsos and Siomkos, 2004; Foxall, 2008; Milotic, 2003; Schoefer
2008)]. In order to understand the ways in which technologies are affectively engineered,
writers such as Thrift urge us to think in terms of a new kind of `microbiopolitics of
the subliminal':
``much of which operates in the half-second delay between action and cognition, a
microbiopolitics which understands the kind of biological-cum-cultural gymnastics
that takes place in this realm which is increasingly susceptible to new and some-
times threatening knowledges and technologies that operate upon it in ways that
produce effective outcomes, even when the exact reasons may be opaque'' (2004,
page 71).
Architectures of affect 655

Practices of anticipatory manipulation, such as those implemented in the design and

testing of videogames, can shape the subliminal realm of `doing without thinking' that
Thrift describes.
Yet, Barnett argues that such an account of affectöone which operates in the
subliminal realm of doing without thinkingöcan inadvertently reestablish discourses
that position consumers of media as passive dupes who are shaped unwillingly by the
technologies with which they engage (also see Hansen, 2006, page 249). As Barnett
writes in relation to the work of William Connelly (2002):
``Classical media-effects research is often criticised for assuming a hypodermic
model of media power, ascribing to `the media' the ability to inject their preferred
messages into the minds of their audiences. Connolly goes one better than this:
his account of media-affects is meant almost literally as a hypodermic model of
influence, with media technologies ascribed remarkable determinative power in
infusing affective dispositions under the skin of their audiences'' (2008, page 193).
My aim in this paper is to complicate both accounts by detailing a particular case
in which affect is actively produced and manipulated for explicitly economic ends.
I show that affective manipulation is necessarily a fragile achievement that is prone
to failure and always reliant upon being continually reworked in the creative respon-
ses users develop in relation to the designed environments with which they interact.
In this way, I decentre the position of the designers in the design process; designers
are not all powerful architects (which may be inferred from the accounts of both Thrift
and Connolly) who can simply and successfully design affects into an environment and
manipulate responses to that environment.
Instead, I argue that the production of successful videogame environments (by
which I mean designed environments which cultivate the desired kinds of affect) is a
complex, problematic, and ongoing struggle between the openness and performative
play of contingency and chance (which emerge through the techniques and intelligences
that users develop as they become skilled at these games) and the mechanical systems
and calculative rationalities through which these environments are designed. In the
case of multiplayer videogames, this tension plays out through the design of environ-
ments which stimulate contingency. Videogames rely on the affective properties of this
contingency in order to be commercially and critically successful, but the contingent
events and encounters on which this success rests can only be realised through the
technical and human limitations of quantitative forms of data manipulation. Skilled
game designers aim to mechanically produce and design contingent outcomes reliably;
they want to produce an alluring and captivating spatiotemporal image by staging,
managing, and controlling events within the limited computational architecture of the
consoles on which these games play and the technologies, programs, and software
through which these games are designed and programmed. I want to work with this
apparent paradox within games design over the course of this paper by unpicking the
processes through which the designers of Crucial Pivot attempted to engineer particular
outcomes and states of being and to highlight the ongoing struggle between the
assemblages of human and nonhuman actors, that are involved in attempting to create
these desired outcomes from software code to rule databases to games designers (see
Cohendet and Simon, 2007; Latour, 2005, pages 159 ^ 165).
While the practices discussed in this paper may seem very specific to the process of
designing and testing videogames, the issues raised in and by these processes speak to
and link between various debates in geography. The relationships between software,
`code space', and affect have been the subject of a recent special issue of Environment
and Planning A (see particularly, Dodge and Kitchin, 2009; Dodge et al, 2009; Sheller,
2009). In this issue, Dodge et al ask: ``Where is the division between the agency of
656 J Ash

software programmers, the agency of the software, and the agency of the user?'' (2009,
page 1291). This paper offers one answer to this question by showing how agency is
distributed between and emerges from the complex assemblages of various human and
technical actors that make up Crucial Pivot. In turn, the paper understands contin-
gency as the key concept through which to think the emergent effects of these `code
spaces'. Furthermore, this paper directly contributes to current debates in anticipatory
and preemptive practices in relation to security and governmentality (for example,
Anderson, 2007; Budd and Adey, 2009; Dillon, 2008; Dillon and Lobo-Geurrero,
2008). For Budd and Adey ``software simulations make the future present and actable
on by alerting the users to future possibilities'' (2009, page 1380). I show here how,
in the videogame industry, anticipatory knowledge is utilised to expand rather than
simply limit the potential for future events to happen (albeit within a prescribed range
of possibilities). Finally, the paper speaks to recent work on architecture and the ways
in which architecture plays an active role in shaping bodily dispositions, gestures,
moods, and capacities to act (such as Kraftl, 2006; Kraftl and Adey, 2008; Latham
and McCormack, 2004; Lees, 2001; Seamon, 1993). The paper shows how designers
can actively work within the limits of digital code to actively shape corporeal disposi-
tions and attempt to directly manage a range of affective states such as anger, frustration,
and joy.
The remainder of the paper forms four parts. In section 2 I introduce Crucial Pivot
and provide a short background on the financial (and other) rewards that can be
generated through creating positively affective videogame environments. In section 3
I move on to the specific processes of designing and testing the multiplayer maps for
Crucial Pivot. I argue that the processes and practices of videogame testing are a way
of rendering contingency itself visible, or at least an attempt to do so. Designers can
use the information and feedback gathered in the testing process in an attempt to
design out the types of contingency that create negatively affective encounters and
to cultivate those that produce positively affective encounters. In section 4 I demon-
strate how designers did this through the manipulation of the spatiotemporal conditions
of the designed multiplayer maps and environment in Crucial Pivot. I conclude the
paper by arguing that, while designers productively attempt to subsume the contingency
of events within a logic of calculation, they must also work to maintain and guard the
contingent as a positive force, as the contingent aspects of multiplayer videogames are
central to their commercial and critical success.

2 Crucial Pivot and the business of creating positively affective encounters

Crucial Pivot is part of the massively popular FPS game genre, in which users look
through the `eyes' of the character onto a visual field and can see their avatar's hands
holding a gun in front of them. In these games users shoot and `kill' other users/avatars
or computer-controlled opponents. The multiplayer mode of Crucial Pivot is similar to
many other games within this genre, in that (on average) between four and eighteen
users battle across the Internet on prespecified maps using a range of different game
modes such as `capture the flag', `team death match', and `free-for-all'. In `team death
match' mode, for example, users are split into equal teams, and they set out to
accumulate as many points as possible by `killing' as many members of the opposite
team as they can (users are awarded a set number of points for each `kill', and these
points are added to their team total). The team with the most points at the end of a
preset time limit (often around ten minutes) is declared the winner. The exact aims and
organisation differ somewhat in each of the modes, but the battles always take place on
self-enclosed multiplayer maps, which usually represent 1 or 2 km2 of space and are
populated by a number of geometric objects and landscape features.
Architectures of affect 657

Contingencyöas the unexpected, the random, the singular, the unrepeatable, or

the surprising (Dastur, 2000; Dillon, 2007) öforms the key part of what gives multi-
player online videogames the alluring and addictive quality that is absent in most
single-player games (Salen and Zimmerman, 2004, pages 572 ^ 586). As one user who
participated in the testing sessions for Crucial Pivot put it, playing against real humans
rather than the computer ``makes every match different'', such that one ``can never get
bored''. In a single-player game, the user moves through a predefined level with a set
destination in mind, and the only enemies they will encounter are controlled by the
game's artificial intelligence. Within multiplayer modes the user has to pit his or her
wits against other human opponents in self-enclosed `arena'-style areas. In these games
`living', `dying', winning, and losing are often decided by reactions to encounters that
last for less than two or three seconds. This demands a high level of concentration
and attunement to what is happening on screen from users because human opponents
are much tougher (insofar as they are more creative) than the computer-controlled
artificial intelligence enemies. Whilst they are often very limited in size, the multiplayer
maps are massively open to the potentials for movement within them. There can be
literally thousands of different routes around the average map, and the route taken
is dependent on where a user is heading or the direction from which a user is being
attacked, and there are perhaps hundreds of thousands of positions and angles from
which to fire upon the other users (Mackenzie, 2002, chapter 5; Reeves et al, 2009).
Being successful at these games requires the development of what Sutton (2007)
terms `open skill' or what Reeves et al term ``contingent tactically oriented under-
standing'' (2009, page 205). This is a form of contextually-appropriate responsiveness
that is required in order to negotiate a situation: ``within the game's structured patterns,
the actions required for success in responding to the changing environment must be
flexibly and minutely adapted'' (Sutton, 2007, page 764). That is to say, users have to
be able to react in context-dependent ways to situations as they emerge within the
game. These emergent situations are themselves produced by the movement and
action of other users across a network, which makes them inherently unpredictable
and unknowable (Aarseth, 1997; Bogust, 2006). Sutton terms this form of flexible and
minute adaptionöwhich takes place ``under ... (what can be) severe time constraints''
(2007, page 764)ö`regulated improvisation'.
Stimulating positive affects in the bodies of videogame users requires game design-
ers to attempt to regulate the spatiotemporal aspects of the game environment in order
to preempt the kinds of open skill and regulated improvisation that users develop as
they become familiar with a game. The designers do this through manipulation of the
type and quality of events that occur within the game's levels and maps. Designers
are able to shape the potential of these affective encounters by altering users'
game environment and by changing the rules that govern the users' engagement with
that environment.
In this paper I refer to affect in the Deleuzian sense: as the outcome of an
encounter between two or more bodies (which can be human or inhuman, organic or
inorganic), which either increases or decreases a body's capacity for action (Deleuze,
1988; also see Delanda, 2002, page 62). In Crucial Pivot the meeting of users' avatars
within the maps, and the subsequent actions taken by those users, is an affective event,
which either increases or decreases the capacities of those users to act within the game.
Within FPS games, positive affects produce complex mixtures of bodily states, which
can culminate in experiences of giddiness (``I hit two people with one shot!!''), surprise
(``where the hell did he come from?''), and triumph (``I won, nineteen kills, no deaths!''),
for example. On the other hand, negative affects may evoke senses of frustration
(``How could he hit me from there!''), fatigue (``I'm sick of this''), inevitability (``I am
658 J Ash

just going to re-spawn and he is going to kill me again''), and a bodily sense of tenseness
in the muscles and joints and so on (all of these responses are taken from participants in
testing sessions for Crucial Pivot). Playing against other humans online, rather than
against computer-controlled opponents in a single-player game, increases the intensity
of such affects. As such, online gaming can arguably be considered the most affectively
charged form of gaming available to users.
The ultimate aim of producing positively affective encounters, for the designers at
least, was to produce a state of captivation in the user. When they are captivated by a
game, users enter a state of heightened concentration such that the surrounding envi-
ronment in which they find themselves recedes from consciousness and (subjectively)
time appears to move very quickly. As the lead tester for the game puts it:
``Good gameplay is where you are literally going through [the game] and it's not
repetitive, if you are doing the same thing it gets repetitive ... gameplay should be ...
you pick it up ... and it should draw you through ... . So if anything you forget, if it
doesn't feel like you are playing a game is ideal gameplay.''
This is similar to an account of a `flow' experience made famous by psychologist
Csikszentmihaly (1991). As Jackson et al describe it, flow is ``a state of concentration so
focused that it amounts to absolute absorption in an activity'' (2001, page 130). Whilst
similar, I use the term `captivation' rather than `flow' to get at the specificity of
the ecological relationship between user and (image) environment that occurs when
playing videogames. As I argue elsewhere, videogames are predicated on producing
ethologically limited worlds, with a limited capacity for users to affect them [compared
with much human experience in the extended environment (see Ash, 2009; Ash et al,
2009)]. Videogames captivate users by offering a limited capacity to affect the world of
the game, and in doing so, they encourage users to concentrate on those limited affects
to a greater extent. In other words, the user becomes attentively focused on a small
number of affective relations that are programmed into the environment. For example,
a typical moment taken from a Crucial Pivot multiplayer match on the `engine room'
map might involve a user spotting another user's avatar on a steel gantry above them
but with a series of pipes obscuring and blocking their line of sight. At the same time,
they must be aware of their own visibility to other users within the map. Each user has
to assess their avatar's location, predict how their enemy may move in relation to their
own avatar's movement, and make snap decisions about a range of factors, including
aiming their weapon, firing their weapon, reloading their weapon, throwing a grenade,
ducking, strafing, drawing their secondary weapon, and so forth. In the `engine room'
map, decisions relating to an avatar's location might involve attempting to climb the
ladder to sneak up behind the enemy, taking a long shot at them from a distance,
hiding behind one of the pipes waiting for them to come down, and so on. Multiplayer
matches can be said to encourage a state of consciousness that is similar to that
cultivated by a fast-paced sport, inasmuch as they require finely tuned, highly skilled
responses to emergent situations (see Jackson, 1996).
The online component of videogames, where users play against one another, either
competitively or cooperatively over the Internet, has a relatively short history in home
videogame consoles. It was only with the arrival of current-generation consoles, such
as the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, that the technology and infrastructure matured to
such an extent that home console users would be willing and able to play online in
large numbers. Microsoft suggests that the Xbox 360's `Live' service currently has
more than 17 million members, while rival Sony's own `PSN' (Playstation Network)
boasts 14 million registered users worldwide. These users spend a huge amount of time
using these services. As a Microsoft press release for the hit FPS game Halo 3 (Bungie,
2007) states:
Architectures of affect 659

``Within the first day of its launch, Halo 3 players worldwide racked up more than
3.6 million hours of online game play, which increased more than elevenfold to
40 million hours by the end of the first week, representing more than 4,500 years
of continuous game play'' (Microsoft, 2007).
Indeed, over a year after launch, Halo 3 is still in the top five most played games on
Xbox's Live service, and as of early 2009, users had racked up more than 64 109 years
of playtime (Bungie, 2009). Developing a successful online component for a game,
then, is highly desirable for game designers as it gives the game a longer shelf life
and builds IP (intellectual property) awareness and loyalty, both of which are crucial
in developing and marketing sequels. Moreover, longer-term engagement with a single
game increases users' interest in playing any sequel because they have already devel-
oped a set of familiarities and skills with the user interface, weapons systems,
and specific play mechanics of that title [all of which vary dramatically between IPs
(see Curran, 2004; Juul, 2005, page 139)].
Furthermore, producing an affective engagement with particular products is impor-
tant in a business environment that is increasingly reliant upon a `microtransactional'
model of profit generation. Most developers now regularly release extra content ösuch
as levels, weapons, and upgradesöat timed intervals after a game's initial release,
which can be downloaded for a fee. The creation and maintenance of an online com-
munity of users are key to realising the profit from these releases. This is particularly
important because additional content of this type can result in a large amount of extra
income for a developer in exchange for relatively little work, as the game engine, art
assets, and physics modelling already exist. For example, the FPS game Call of Duty 4
(Infinity Ward, 2007) has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide, while 1.5 million
copies of the downloadable map pack, which was released four months after the initial
game, had been sold as of mid-2008 (CNET.com, 2008). Creating and maintaining an
online community for a videogame relies on designers' abilities to produce environments
and contexts which stimulate and cultivate the continuing production of positively
affective encounters. Indeed, the success of a videogame (in terms of sales and income
generation) depends upon the successful creation of such affects.

3 Rendering contingency visible

Crucial Pivot, like many other games in its genre, was designed and produced by
around eighty members of staff, who were split into specialist teams of programmers,
artists, level designers, and so on. The whole process, from initial design to released
product, took around two years to complete. Testing was a crucial stage in the game's
development because it was only through exposing the game to outside individuals
(who had not been involved with its production) that designers could judge the `success'
of the environments they had created in shaping users' movements and actions. In this
section, I want to point to how the process of testing operated around attempts
to resolve this tension between contingent and analogue bodily action and attempts to
control this action using digital quantitative states governed by computational rules
within the game's database. However, the resolution found was not predicated on the
reduction of bodily movement to digital states; it required the designers to work with
these (analogue) bodily states. In this way, I complicate an account of the digital and
analogue as separate or distinct processes and argue instead that the digital can affect
the analogue and vice versa. The process of games testing acted as what Mackenzie
terms a ``centre of envelopment'' (2009, page 1305), instead of a centre of calculation
for the abstraction of analogue bodily movement into discreet mathematical states.
That is, rather than stabilising and reducing movement to quantitative states, the
processes of testing acted to potentialise human movement and action in different
660 J Ash

ways that will become clear in section 4 [on the complexities of calculation see
Crampton and Elden (2006) and Elden (2006; 2007)].
At Angle Games (the developer of Crucial Pivot), the aim of the testing process was
to see in practice how effective the multiplayer environments were at producing posi-
tively affective encounters. If, and when, the designers registered that these affects were
not occurring, they could attempt to manipulate properties of the spatiotemporal
environment in order to encourage the cultivation of the right kinds of affects through
quantitative variables in the game's database. One can see parallels between Latour's
account of scientific laboratories and the offices of Angle Games. For Latour, labo-
ratories act as ``theatres of proof '' (1993, page 18), where complex assemblages of tools
and equipment come together in a specific locality in order to render particular entities
visible in the world. Through a process of decontextualisation (the scientific experiment
which isolates the factors it wants to study), an entity becomes nameable, calculable,
and, thus, predictable and knowable (see Latour, 1988; Latour and Woolgar, 1986).
However, in Latour's account, a laboratory acts to render visible a particular object
or process, whereas at Angle the entity that was to be rendered visible through the
games testing process was contingency itself. That is to say, through bringing together
a complex assemblage of tools and equipment (the computers, software, screens, net-
working equipment, the unknowing bodies of the external testers, etc), the designers at
Angle attempted to produce contingent events, rather than any particular object or end
state. They attempted to bring the contingency of contingency into the open, to make
contingency visible and nameable (also see Dillon, 2007). However, as I go on to argue,
the designers did not attempt to simply close down the potential of this contingency
but instead tried to actively manage it, to make it work for them, even though it was
ultimately beyond their control.
The sense of contingency that I want to draw upon here is a relative concept of
contingency as the unpredictable and, thus, unknowable, taking place of an event.
In this sense, contingency is not absolute, but relative to humans' understanding of
a given entity or process; contingency is that which cannot be pinned down by any
process that attempts to pin it down (Dastur, 2000; Dewsbury, 2000; also see Delanda,
2002, chapter 1). Contingency is the unexpected happening of an event, whether that
contingency is understood as absolute in the universe or simply relative to humans
incapacity to adequately understand it. In relation to Crucial Pivot, an event is an
unpredictable taking place; it is the creation of a situation that requires a creative
response by users, rather than the mere fulfillment of a preunderstood goal or applica-
tion of a preformed behaviour (see Bateson, 1972, part 5). Events in Crucial Pivot
operate within an already existing horizon of expectation and are thus relative to the
coded structure (the programs and rules that make up the game) which allows these
events to unfold.
From this `evental' perspective, contingency in the context of game testing can be
understood as operating in two ways. Firstly, contingency can be understood as the
unpredictability of the intelligences displayed and employed by the users themselves
(the creative responses produced within a match that users develop through their
experiences with the game). Secondly, contingency can be understood as the unpredict-
able emergence of the relations between these intelligences through the spatial and
temporal rules and structures of any given level or map. That is, the events produced
by these intelligences within a given level or map, which themselves engender creative
responses and so forth. The process of testing Crucial Pivot involved gathering together
sixteen videogame users in one space (the offices of Angle Games) in an attempt to
force these two forms of contingencyöthe contingency of users' intelligence and the
contingent events created through user responses öinto the open in an attempt to
Architectures of affect 661

translate them from something that was inherently unpredictable and unknowable into
something that could be anticipated and repeated. The aim was to make the forms of
contingency that occurred within any one match into a visible, and manipulable,
object. Only by rendering contingency visible could the designers attempt to bring it
under their `control' and to shape it to the game's advantage.
The emergence of these intelligences, and the events they created, was so difficult
to anticipate because they are what Massumi terms an `analogue' process. Massumi
describes the analogue as something that cannot be purely reduced to measurement
through quantitative states or mathematical modelling. The analogue is:
``a continuously variable impulse or momentum that can cross from one qualita-
tively different medium into another. Like electricity into sound waves. Or heat
into pain. Or vision into imagination. Or noise in the ear into music in the
heart ... Variable continuity across the qualitatively different: continuity of trans-
formation ... In sensation the thinking-feeling body is operating as a transducer''
(2002, page 135).
The analogue is so powerful because of its capacity to translate or transduce energy
between different material and phenomenal states of being. This transduction occurs
proprioceptively (between sensory organs and perceptual systems within the body) and
affectively (between bodies and other objects). The major problem for the designers at
Angle Games was that they could only attempt to control and manipulate an analogue
body ^ subject through the digital quantitative states of the game's programming
software. As one of the lead designers for Crucial Pivot explained:
``Once you've put the mechanic in there, normally ... [the] programmers will put it in
and initially it will be a little bit rough. The basics will be in there ... at that stage
you will start playing the game and playing that new mechanic and seeing if things
need tweaking and, normally as you design, you identify certain areas that are
going to need a bit of tweaking ... . So how long you've got to heal a character or
how long a particular animation takes, how much wobble there is on the sniper
scope, all these kind of values normally the programmers will set for us, or we've
got a set of tools where we can go in and tweak things. Things like enemy AI
[artificial intelligence] or the health of a particular player or the amount of damage
a weapon does; we've got a very large statistics database that we can edit directly,
make a change and then try that out directly. So, normally, it's a process of
iteration: put the basics in there, you go in and play it, make a few tweaks, play
that again, see what you feel.''
Massumi argues that ``[t]he digital is ... exhaustively possibilistic. It can, as it turns
out, potentialize, but only indirectly, through the experiential relays the reception of its
outcomes sets in motion'' (2002, page 141). The `possibilistic' nature of the digital states
of the database was problematic for the designers because the digital code öand,
therefore, the control they could exercise over the game's environmentsöcould only
be represented and manipulated through discreet quantitative states: as either `on' or
`off ', or as `one' and `zero' (the language that make up the basis of binary code).
In order to deal with the tension between the potential inherent in human action
(the emerging intelligences of users and the events these intelligences created) and the
game's digitally coded structure (which could only be manipulated through quantitative
variables in the game's database that controlled the physical rules and systems of the
game world), the designers had to develop and draw upon what Anderson (2007), via
Foucault, terms ``anticipatory practices''. By anticipatory practices, Anderson means
practices that attempt to plan, preempt, and rationalise the potentiality of future events
in order to bring this potentiality within a logic of calculation. These logics and
rationalities are powerful because they are not simply `neutral'; they ``produce different
662 J Ash

epistemic objects through which future possibilities and potentialities are disclosed,
objectified, communicated and rendered mobile'' (2007, page 158; also see Anderson
and Fenton, 2008; Anderson and Holden, 2008). In other words, these logics are not
merely thought experiments whose effects are localised in the present; they also
produce ways of thinking that affect the possibilities inherent within a particular
future. At Angle Games, the designers' explicit aim was to shape the potential actions
of potential users, which would only take place once the game was released to the
public. Rendering contingency visible was crucial to this process because it allowed
the designers to anticipate and model potential forms of action and movement within the
game and, thus, preemptively to foreclose actions and movements they deemed to produce
negative bodily affects (such as frustration). As the lead designer for Crucial Pivot put it:
``There has been a tendency, especially in the previous generation [of FPS games],
for games to ... frustrate players who don't play games all that much. There is a lot
of tendency for players to play 30 to 40 percent of the game and then put it down
and not come back to it because they got to the point where it just got a bit too
difficult for them.''
For the designers, the aim of the testing process was to reduce the number of such
experiences.
``You are trying to find the sweet spot for the majority of players. You're never going
to get it perfect for everybody, [you have to] test it with enough people so that
you can canvas opinion from a large number of testers'' (lead designer on Crucial
Pivot).
To find this `sweet spot', the designers attempted to diagram users' intelligences
(understood as a series of somatic bodily techniques and analytical ways of conceptu-
alising and responding to situations within the game) and reduce them to abstract and
codified tendencies which could then be manipulated in a number of ways. Of course,
not all users at all points in time within a match could experience positively affective
encounters, and nor was that the designers' aim. One team would have to lose, for
example, and one user's avatar would die and respawn more than others and so on.
The designers wanted to ensure that the only negatively affective encounters experi-
enced by users were down to an error or lack of skill on the user's part, rather than the
fault of the underlying map design or rules of the game. More importantly, they
wanted the users to recognise the outcome of this encounter as their own fault. This
opens up a different range of possible courses of action for users who were experienc-
ing negative affects in the game. Users who continued to lose could stop playing the
game. This would not simply be a matter of accepting defeat; users should be able to
recognise that the more negatively affected they were, the less likely they could play
well. Once they have crossed a threshold of negative experience, simply stopping and
not engaging is the most tactical and productive thing users can do until the visceral
sense of bodily frustration or anger subsides (on disengagement see Harrison, 2009).
In rendering contingency visible through the practices of testing Crucial Pivot, the
designers sought to build affect into their anticipatory practices. As Anderson notes,
``affect is, consequently, not a mere `extra' ... that can be attributed directly to indi-
vidual personal feelings or vaguely to a collective mood but a necessary component
of how anticipatory practices function'' (2007, pages 158 ^ 159).
The most obvious way in which contingency was rendered visible in the testing
process was through repetition. Repetition was a necessary part of testing for two
reasons. Firstly, repetition was key to producing the contingency that designers wanted
to study. Groups of users would play the same level a number of times over a three-
hour period. This repetition was required so that the designers could observe the
development, or nondevelopment, of various tendencies of behaviour and movement,
Architectures of affect 663

including: the route that the average user would generally follow to access a specific
location in the map, spots where users were likely to hide or `camp' within the map,
and specific areas which could act as `choke points' where a small group could gain a
disproportionate advantage over a rival team by using a geographical feature to hold
and defend a position, whilst the enemy could attack this position only in one way. By
requiring testers to play the maps over and over again, the designers were able to bring
to light and codify ``habits and embodied movement capacities [that] are to some extent
both consciously inaccessible and verbally inarticulable'' (Sutton, 2007, page 766)
through the expression of these habits and capacities as tendencies to move towards
certain points or to fire in a certain way. During the testing process, matches would
often be restarted unexpectedly in order to check that a previous action or course
of action was repeatable or likely to be repeated by users. It was only when specific
actions became demonstrable through repetition that they could be recognised as
tendencies, and it was only on this basis that designers could attribute positive or
negative value to the tendencies that emerged through repeated game use. As such,
there is no simple opposition between the analogue body ^ subject and the digital code
and rule database, rather the designers worked to translate and blur the boundaries
between the two states in order to encourage positively affective encounters.

4 Producing positively affective encounters

The spatiotemporal manipulation of bodies through the medium of architecture is
nothing new (see, for example, Borden, 2001; Lefebvre, 1991; 2004). As Adey shows
through the example of airports (2004; 2006; 2007; 2008), architecture plays a key role
in encouraging passengers to move in ways deemed `right' and `wrong' by the authorities
and institutions that attempt to control them.
``The most typical of these techniques involve the architect trying to give the pas-
senger `no option'. Giving them no options meant delimiting the circumstances
passengers find themselves in. The passenger is faced with a situation in which
forwards or backwards are the only directions they may go'' (Adey, 2008, page 444).
For the designers of the multiplayer component of Crucial Pivot, however, the aim
was not to limit possibility and push users towards an end destination or state; instead,
they wanted to actively expand users' possibilities for movement and to discourage the
creation of instrumental end destinations or states. Although designers have no direct
control over users' actions, in the multiplayer mode of FPS games, and in Crucial Pivot
in particular, the developers attempted to produce positively affective encounters
through the manipulation of quantitative variables in the game's database that affected
the rules of the game and the properties of the game world without any intention of
simply encouraging users to move from point A to point B.
In this section I want to signal two ways in which the production of these positive
affects were cultivated through altering specific spatiotemporal variables of the game
environment and the rules that governed the users' interactions with that environment.
In doing so, I will explore how these positive affects were mobilised in an attempt to
create a state of attentive captivation in users and the ways in which alterations made
to the spatiotemporal structure of the environment also shaped the potentialities for
specific bodily capacities to become opened up or closed down.
4.1 Introducing delay
The first example I want to draw upon is an incident that occurred in the second-to-
last testing session before the game was due to be released. Most of the in-game
variables were already tied down, and there was little room for large changes to be
made at this late stage in the game's development. Nonetheless, it was becoming clear,
664 J Ash

as users were complaining across the room, that there was a problem with the grenade
launcher. The grenade launcher had been a source of many issues throughout the
games testing process. It was a contentious weapon in Crucial Pivot because a user
could fire and miss yet still kill their enemy with the shrapnel from a single shot. As
such, it was considered a weapon for unskilled and unsporting users and one which
created high levels of frustration in opponents who were subjected to its power.
Furthermore, because of the specific mechanics of Crucial Pivot, only one of the
two characters available could be equipped with it. This tended to result in users all
using the same character (the one equipped with the grenade launcher). This meant
that the specific properties of the grenade launcher were understood to produce a
series of negative affects for the broader game as a whole. The first of these was
frustration in users who felt themselves to be unfairly killed by the grenade launcher.
This frustration was expressed on a number of bodily and verbal registers. Watching
one user during a testing session, these registers included: a continual straightening
and arching of the back as a user leaned closer towards the screen after each death at
the grenade launcher's hands, a twisting and turning of the neck in an effort to ease the
build up of tension in the back and neck muscles, and tapping the X button repeatedly
after dying in an attempt to respawn more quickly. These bodily comportments were
accompanied by a series of exaggerated sighs and grunts as the user became increasingly
frustrated and felt powerless in the face of the grenade launcher.
The second set of negative affects was that the grenade launcher indirectly affected
the user's choice of character. This had a number of further, unanticipated, effects
for the game. By mostly choosing character B, users would not choose character A,
and this meant that they would not have access to a sniper rifle. The sniper rifles gave
users a zoomed scope and, thus, the ability to aim and fire accurately over very long
distances, whereas the grenade launchers had a very short range. As a result, character
choices would alter the potential distances and types of battle that could take place
within a map. In order to avoid harbouring and cultivating such negative affects (and
effects), the designers altered the properties of the weapon in order to limit its power.
As I recall:
``One of the testers was moaning because he had died whilst reloading the grenade
launcher. The length of the animation was there to offset the power of the grenade and
thus make it harder for players to simply keep using the grenade launcher to create
quick and easy kills'' (research diary, 11 February 2008).
The game designers increased the length of the animation that was played every
time the user reloaded the grenade launcher. In the first testing sessions the reloading
process took less than two seconds; in the amended version the same reloading process
took close to four seconds. Although this difference may sound inconsequential to the
casual observer, the extended delay put the user at a severe disadvantage when taking
part in a multiplayer match. The two extra seconds left the user essentially defenceless;
they were unable to fire back if they encountered an enemy. As such, after each shot,
users would have to react defensively whilst the grenade launcher reloaded, and this
gave rival users a chance to enact their revenge. Through alterations made to the delay
between cause (hitting the Y button to reload on the Xbox 360 control pad) and effect
(having a reloaded grenade and the ability to fire again), the designers were able to
alter the potentiality of users' responses to various contextual events and encounters
within any one match. By extending this delay, the designers were able to reduce
negatively affective encounters ö they could minimise the experience of frustration
for the user ö and avoid a breakdown in the user's captivated state. Quite literally the
designers could design out the potential for creating particular visceral states in
users, such as the tense, shifting, agitated bodies described earlier. On the one hand,
Architectures of affect 665

users waiting for the grenade launcher to reload experienced anxiety and a feeling that
time was passing very slowly as their avatar was exposed during the reload animation.
On the other hand, the other user who had been shot at with the grenade launcher
was given an increased window in which to react, which was experienced as a very
small amount of time to shoot at the other user. By extending the time taken to reload
the grenade launcher, the game designers could avoid the experience of time inter-
vening in and replacing the captivation of users (other than those using the grenade
launcher).
Altering the variables of the grenade launcher to make it a less deadly weapon
encouraged the development of an increased aiming sensitivity between thumb, thumb-
stick, and the aiming reticules on screen and thus sensitised users' ability to move
through the environment as a whole, as the space of the image had to be traversed in
a more precise manner in order to aim and hit a rival user with one shot. Before its
variables were altered, the grenade launcher offered a larger range for damage and was
reloaded in a second or two. This meant that users could be imprecise with their aim
and less attentive to the specific location the rival user's avatar was occupying or where
they were about to head because they could rely on the large blast field of the grenade
to kill them even if it hit indirectly. After it had been altered to be less powerful and to
take longer to reload, users had to focus more closely and try to anticipate the
direction in which they thought the user might head because an indirect hit would
not kill the user. As a process of passing, time became more apparent to the user in the
seconds during which they remained vulnerable as the grenade launcher was reloading.
They were also forced to sense time more minutely because, with a reduction in the
power of the grenade launcher, the user had to track the enemy more closely in order
to successfully hit and kill an opponent.
4.2 Spacing flags
The second example I want to draw upon is the placement of flags in Crucial Pivot's
`capture the flag' mode. In this mode, teams of users battled to control a number of
flags spread throughout each of the multiplayer maps. The more flags a team con-
trolled, the more points that team would score, and the team with the most points
would be declared the victor after a set period of time. Reflecting on a `capture the flag'
testing session involving the `pump room' level, I commented that:
``The other area which had received a large change was the pump room. In previous
weeks the level was very unbalanced; if a team captured a specific flag in the
middle of the map, they could dominate the surrounding area and basically hold
the other team off and win. Tonight was the first night that this level had been
played since `Barry' [one of the lead multiplayer designers on Crucial Pivot] made a
number of changes to it. The flags had been moved in line with some timing tests
they had been doing. The new spacing would mean that both teams were likely to
reach the flag at the same time, which should result in a battle to win the flag. This
battle was fair as it didn't privilege one team's geographical starting point over that
of the other team. `Barry' said they actually timed different routes to the flags from
different spawn points to make all the times equal. This made a huge difference
in the play in the level and resulted in a hectic but much more intense battle''
(research diary, 24 September 2007).
By repositioning the flags within the spatial structure of the level, the designers
were able to directly affect the intensity of the gameplay. The new positions increased
this intensity because it increased the number of synchronous encounters between
users, as users on opposite teams would approach and contest the ownership of the
flags at roughly the same time. The previous flag locations made it easy for one team to
666 J Ash

gain control of the central flag, simply because their `spawn point' (where the users'
avatars would reappear after being `killed') was closer to that flag. This quickly
produced negative affects in the opposing team because the game was suddenly
perceived to be `lost' and the flag `not worth fighting for'. In one session the disparity
of the distribution of affective intensity between the bodies of the winning and losing
team became particularly evident. The winning team became increasingly amused by
the situation, realising their inherent advantage. This was expressed through a number
of bodily registers, including an upright but relaxed bodily posture and laughing as
they continued to dominate the match. These affects served to reduce the losing team's
motivation and, thus, their subsequent performance in the match.
As objects and markers, the flags had the potential both to disrupt and dislocate
and to cultivate and individuate the performance of users and their sensibility to the
environment as a whole. The position of these flags was calibrated by taking into
account the speed at which a user could travel to that marker from a range of different
points, rather than in terms of the distance between these points and the marker itself.
The flags themselves acted as nodes for the emergence of intensive encounters as users
battled to control them. The sensitivity of this calibration was such that moving each
flag only a few `metres' within the game environment would upset the careful balance
the designers had created. Small changes to the placement of flags within a level could
remove the possibility for the very potentiality of such battles to occur at all, which
would produce negative affects in users and break down their captivated state of
attentiveness. The successful production of events (fairly contested battles for control
of flags) and the positive affects of intensity created by these events were predicated on
the ability of the game designers to indirectly manage the speed of the avatars' move-
ment as the users rushed towards the flags at the beginning of a match. As a result, the
spacing of the flags was directly implicated in the processes of encouraging a state of
captivation in users. Once users knew the position of the flags in a level, their efforts
were orientated towards reaching the flag closest to them, wherever their avatar had
spawned. On the journey to this flag, their thoughts would be centred on whether they
could beat the other team to the flag, as they knew that the other team could reach the
same point in a similar amount of time based upon their own starting position.
This attunement to the situation at hand, focused the users' attention on the
immediacy of the moment (the urgency of getting to the flag), but it also allowed
them to anticipate the coming moment in which an encounter with the other team
was assured as they reached each flag. They were able to anticipate this moment of
battle because each of the flags had been placed in a position so that it would take
an equal amount of time to reach from the various spawn points within the level. Of
course, not all the efforts of the designers were predicated upon producing synchro-
nous encounters. Creating experiences of waiting and the suspense associated with an
often anxious form of waiting was also paramount to creating an experience of
captivation in the user. Map environments that required constant movement and
intensive encounter were seen as problematic, as this was considered to have a dulling
effect on the bodies involved. As the lead tester for the game put it: ``If it's intense all
the time, then all the really intense bits... blur into one another.'' Lulls of waiting for
an enemy to appear or anticipating where the enemy might appear were central in
intensifying the moments when the enemy did appear. Intense, positively affective
encounters were then the relational outcome of periods of motion and rest, speed
and slowness, rather than an increase in encounters and events per se.
Architectures of affect 667

5 Conclusion
In this paper I have argued that game designers attempt to utilise rather than simply
evacuate or subsume the contingent within a logic of preemption. In doing so, I have
disrupted simple distinctions between the digital as a form of calculative abstraction
and the analogue body subject as irreducible to purely digital or discrete mathematical
states (see Massumi, 2002). Rather than suggesting that processes of calculation are
necessarily abstract and reduce the body's potential for movement, I have argued that
processes of game design and the material spaces in which game testing is carried out
operate as what MacKenzie (2009) terms a `centre of envelopment' where complex
forms of difference (between the analogue and the digital) are transduced and rendered
visible in order to produce positively affective outcomes. In turn, this complicates
much writing that argues technology inherently or absolutely closes down the potential
of the future (as inherently contingent) by framing and calculating the future as a
temporal mode of the present (for example, Derrida, 1998; Derrida and Stiegler, 2002;
Heidegger, 1977, pages 119; 1997, pages 157 ^ 159; Stiegler, 2008b, chapter 2). Videogame
designers manipulate the environments they design to increase the potential for positively
affective events to occur in the future; however, they can never be sure of the content of
these events and of how they will actually occur and unfold as the game is played `in the
wild' (Hutchins, 1995) once released to the general public.
Furthermore, this paper has added to current debates regarding theorisations of
the event, emphasising what might be termed an ecological rather than absolute
conception of the event. In an absolutist notion of the event, ``the event cannot be
reduced to the fact that something happens. It may rain tonight, it may not rain. This
will not be an absolute event because I know what rain is ... . The arrivant must be
absolutely other'' (Derrida, 2002, page 13). Instead, I have outlined a conception of the
event as a process of ecological emergence. Here an event is the outcome of a material
assemblage of various entities, forces, and rules working together to encourage and
prohibit specific forms of movement and action. Whilst an absolute account of the
event is interesting, framing the event from an ecological perspective is useful because
it allows us to begin to pick apart how the potential for events to happen are being
designed into environments (both digital and physical) and thus begin to understand
how various bodily states (such as frustration and anger or pleasure and pain) can
potentially be produced and controlled through manipulating affective relations in
the environment. This then allows us to interrogate the possible responsibilities the
designers of such environments have in the kinds of affective relations (and thus
bodies) they (potentially) construct.
Utilizing a Deleuzian account of affect has also allowed me to complicate simple
distinctions that posit videogames as either `positive' or `negative' for the bodies
involved and thus a notion of a body as simply being positively or negatively affected
by an affect. On one hand, `successfully' designed FPS games do rely upon a logic that
Heidegger argues is central to our experience of modern technology, namely: ``the
mania for what is surprising, for what immediately sweeps us away and impresses us
[... for] fleetingness as the basic law of constancy'' (Heidegger, 1999, page 84). However,
on the other, these games also involve the development of techniques for interacting
with them that subsist over longer periods of time within the body. What I have shown
in this paper is that positive affects designed into an image by one group do not
necessarily produce an equally positive affect when a body encounters that affect.
For example, both designers and users agree that captivation is a positive affect ö
designers want to produce the conditions that encourage it, and users want to experi-
ence it because it gives them the ``buzz and rush'' they desire (participant in Crucial
Pivot testing session). However, many people continue to use videogames even when
668 J Ash

their capacity for attention and concentration has diminished, which leads to poor
performance in the game. The `positive' affects that lead to captivation override the
`negative' affects of tiredness that are experienced in the individual sense organs of
the body (such as the muscles in the eyes or the back aching). What this points to is
both the autonomy of affect (Massumi, 2002) and the manifestation of affect as a
multiplicity which encounters different bodies in complex ways that cannot be (pre-)
resolved as either simply `positive' or `negative' for the body that is shaped by an
encounter. Rather, what I have shown across this paper is that the `shaping' of bodies
and the `infusion of affective dispositions under the skin' are not the product of passive
exposure to, or reception of, affective images. Instead, I have argued that the body is
shaped through the creative responses generated by users in relation to the images they
experience, rather than the images themselves. Moreover, these responses are not
negative or manipulative; they positively bring into being different bodily capacities
and modes of attunement, which cannot be intentionally determined by those who
produce the images through the processes of design. In regard to the question of
intention, developing an account of how contingency is mobilised and travels across
different contexts, discourses, and technologies in Crucial Pivot has complicated simple
accounts of power and control and shown how the very thing that makes the com-
modity of the videogame successful (contingency) is beyond any simple authorial
intention of a team of designers or a company.
As such, it is important to remember that currently most game designers and
companies are unable to produce the correct mixture of contingency and structure
within a game, and thus they fail to captivate and capture an audience or community
of users at all. Those games, such as Halo 3 (Bungie, 2007) and Call of Duty 4 (Infinity
Ward, 2007), that have been received as both commercial and critical successes are the
exception rather than the rule. This paper has argued that these games are successful
because they create environments ö and the rules that structure the user's engage-
ment with that environmentö that equally distribute the potential for movement and
action throughout them. Whether the techniques that produce such positively affective
encounters can be further codified and what effect this may have on the contingent
events made possible by multiplayer videogames remains to be seen.
Acknowledgements. I would like to thank the staff at Angle Games for allowing me into their
workspace. Without their generosity and openness this research could not have been undertaken.
I would also like to thank my supervisor J D Dewsbury for reading several versions of this
paper whilst in draft form. The research reported in this paper was supported by the ESRC.
My sincere thanks go to Professor Gillian Rose at the Open University for granting me the status
of visiting research fellow in the geography department, where revisions to this paper were made. Three
anonymous referees provided very helpful comments and feedback. As always, thanks to Lesley-Anne
Gallacher for her constant support.
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