The Art of Glitch

For as long as games have been created glitches have rooted inside these games one way or another. They were never intended to be in video games and yet through human error, hindsight or lack of intellect they exist. They are in a sense a mutation of a beautiful specimen and at some level define it. And although game developers do their best to get rid of them or to have a game as glitch free as possible, it is almost an impossible endeavor that we have to embrace both as players and as the creators. I have stated characteristics and effects of glitches but at the core glitches are difficult to define, it is more than just a thing that’s not supposed to be there, or an error. Geert Lovink and Rachel Somers Miles the editors of Video Vortex Reader II, view glitches in a more organic way “Some people see glitches as technological, while others perceive them as a social construc-tion. I think it is useless to place one perspective above the other.” (Lovink and Miles, 2011, p. 345).

The editors of this book see glitches as more than just mistakes, they express that one must look beyond the simple descriptions and expand onto the social territory of what glitches mean to humans. Although unintentionally we create glitches, and we take responsibility for their effects on our games whether good or bad. Every time we make a game we play with creation and human experience; glitches alter this experience. If we are to be honest with ourselves, some of the most interesting episodes that we may have experienced while gaming usually involves a glitch of sorts. Is as if the unintended creates a more human response than what the developers could ever deliver. Take the Skyrim giant glitch in which the player is propelled a great distance towards the sky after being hit by a giant. This is one of the funniest things you can actually do in Skyrim, it creates laughter, fear and amusement for the player and it was never meant to be in the game.

Works Cited

Lovink, Geert, and Rachel Somers Miles. Video Vortex Reader II: Moving Images beyond YouTube. Institute of Network Cultures, 2011.