Gameplay Journal Entry #6 — Giovanni Minus
In today’s journal entry I would like to discuss the effects of a glitch on the user as they experience them. For the most part when a glitch for me occurs I usually end up being taken out of whatever kind of digital experience I am partaking in due to the glitch’s disruptive properties. The disruptive properties of these glitches can vary drastically. At times they can quickly go away and I am able to get back into the experience quickly, other times they can continuously permeate throughout the experience with me being unable to simply ignore them. A recent experience in particular where glitches would continuously persist throughout it would be in the game Cyberpunk 2077. The game ended up launching in a very messy state with people finding various bugs and glitches throughout as they tried to play it. One in particular that I would end up seeing a lot would be the ones where you fall through the ground and are presented with the city in a very unclear messy manner. Another would be one where characters would be unable to load properly resulting in being unable to see their models properly and are instead presented with very distorted faces and body parts. For myself and many others playing this game, these glitches proved to be too disruptive of the game experience. Those that played Cyberpunk 2077 were presented with too much sensory disruption at random intervals that caused them to be taken out of the game emotionally. Glitch’s such as these demonstrate to those that experience them that it only takes a little bit for our minds to register that something is wrong. However, the longer the experience the more disruptions that are required for us to register something is wrong, due to our own minds wanting to deny it. Covered in our readings from Glitches Be Crazy, “when a thing is running right- be it a digestive tract, a motor, or a data process-we don’t think about it” (Burns & Meaney 75). So when something does cause enough noise in that system (experience in this case) is only then when we are forced to acknowledge it.
Work Cited
Burns, Hannah Piper, and Evan Meaney. GLI. TC/H 20111: READERROR, by Nick Briz et al., Unsorted Books, 2011, pp. 73–75.
