The desire for a knowable state, and the failure of the player’s expectations to ever account for the material operations of technical media, is precisely how play manifests in, on, around, and through videogames. As Hayles (2002, 33) summarizes in her earlier work, Writing Machines, “materiality emerges from the dynamic interplay between the richness of a physically robust world and human intelligence as it crafts this physicality to create meaning.” In this sense, Metagaming is an attempt to account for the play of materiality.Ģ. The term materiality, then, labels those emergent processes by which the physical, mechanical, and electrical attributes of videogames are made digital by various players (be they human or nonhuman). A wide variety of nonhuman mechanisms can observe, identify, and isolate patterns (e.g., regulatory systems, electrical sensors, recursive algorithms, etc.). when attention fuses with physicality to identify and isolate some particular attribute (or attributes) of interest.” Importantly, “attention” and “interest” are not necessarily human attributes. Noting this distinction between the symbolic operations of formal materiality and the physicality of forensic materiality, in How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis Hayles (2012, 91) suggests that both formal and forensic “materiality into existence . . . In other words, formal materiality expresses difference through symbolic abstraction, while forensic materiality functions in terms of the irreducibility and individuation of matter.
For Kirschenbaum, whereas formal materiality leverages formal or symbolic logic for “the simulation or modeling of materiality via programmed software processes,” forensic materiality “rests upon the potential for individualization inherent to matter” (Kirschenbaum 2008, 9, 11). Katherine Hayles and Johanna Drucker, Matthew Kirschenbaum (2008, 10) distinguishes between digital and analog materiality in Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Although the algorithmic operations of computational media appear digitally discrete, zeros and ones emerge from analog mechanisms like switches, transistors, and capacitors.