❡ 1 – Introduction
Douglas Hofstadter once wrote, “I am a strange loop.” The exact meaning of this statement, though discussed at length and plainly articulated with bald candor, is immaterial and unknown. To fall back into a discussion of authorial intent, correct citation or truth would be sentimental at best and fatal to our enterprise at worst. No, we will not languish over what Hofstadter meant. We turn our gaze, instead, to what strange loops mean to us.
Nowhere is this thesis more explicitly formulated than in Nintendo’s Super Smash Brother’s Franchise. Super Smash Brothers – or SSB – is a party-style fighting game. This game is not like a traditional party game – pin the turtle on the stack of turtles, the drunkard’s walk, nose in the manger, etc. – as it is played on a video game console. There have been three versions but, for the sake of fidelity to the ur-narrative of the game, we will treat the series as if all interesting characteristics in any of the games were, at once, present.
How could a child’s plaything shed any light on the matter at hand? As Bertrand Isler famously wrote, “The toy is not so much play object as that-upon-which our individual histories, collectively situated, are played upon. I do not spin the yo-yo; the yo-yo spins, Arachne-like, the thread of historicity through the maze of pleasure.”[1]
Isler’s point here, though crudely put – and eventually undone by a misguided attempt to reconcile taffy as bad infinity with the emblem of real infinity, the slinky – is an important one. Such will be the methodology of this investigation: treat the interesting parts of the game as directly mapping on to the interesting parts of philosophy, mathematics, and popular music. To the critics of Islerianism who claim that this technique is without merit and capricious, an “attempt to blindly hook up long words with girls in flapper skirts,”[2] I respond with a simple thought-experiment.
Imagine a rubber globe of the world rolling across a room full of ladies with rouged-cheeks and bob hair-cuts. That is to say, imagine a Pepper Shorton film. At any point there will be a point on the globe that is both directly above the point in the world that the globe-point represents and directly below a chubby, young girl, her hands stained with preserves. Now, if you draw a line from the tip of her turned-up nose through the globe – her nose now touching the topmost pole of the globe as inquisitive, chubby little noses tend to do – to every point of the floor of the room and mark it on the globe, you have an entire mapping of the room. You could do this for a room of any size, even a room of infinite size. Now imagine, instead of a playroom, this was taking place in the space of cultural artifaction. If we repeat the same process, we can connect every bit of culture – every radio jingle, every nip-slip, every three-partner dance – through the globe to the nose of the porcine little cherub. Such is the functional correspondence of culture and plaything and player, video game and video gamer.
[1]p. 431. Isler, Bertrand. Play on the Edge of Radical Enfranchisment. Cherry Blossom Press. 1999.
[2]p. 38. Hornwald, Martin. The Critique of Apperceptive Encroachment. Oxford Institute of Technology Press. 2010.