Machinic Stories: The Literature Machine, Technicity and the Computer Game

In a letter to a friend, typewritten on his famous Malling Hansen writing ball, Nietzsche observed that ‘our writing instruments contribute to our thoughts’ (Kittler, 1997, p. 13). Nietzsche’s comment links technology to what he calls ‘our thoughts’: by implication, this can also mean what is understood by ‘text’, especially in the broader Barthesian sense, of something that is not restricted to materiality. Nietzsche’s comment, made over a century ago, therefore implies that the claim made by so-called ‘new media’ from the last two decades to having newly established the link between the text and the machine is problematic. Of course, it is true that technological developments in the last few decades have strengthened the notion of the machinelike nature of texts. For example, hypertext and electronic text are composed of machine code that is present as a layer of machine-readable text beneath whatever text they convey to us. Similarly, machines are also increasingly being seen as texts, and complex machinic systems like video games and simulations are beginning to be perceived both as programs and as texts that can be read. However, as Nietzsche’s observation indicates, the text-machine relation is not a new development; instead, it is originary. An analysis of video games, arguably one of the latest manifestations of machinic textuality, as well as ‘new media’, helps to examine this idea more deeply.