Gameplay Journal #5 — The Nature of Glitches
A glitch in game design is, technical speaking, a departure from the intended gameplay experience due to a failure of one of the game’s systems. As a phenomenon however, it can be harder to pin down as strictly good or bad, as — especially with Glitch art — an entire new, if entirely unintended, experience can result. Menkman describes a first encounter with a glitch similarly to that of a natural phenomenon, “But as the understanding of a glitch changes when it is being named, so does the equilibrium of the (former) glitch itself: the original experience of a rupture moved beyond its momentum and vanished into a realm of new conditions. The glitch has become a new mode, and its previous encounter has become an ephemeral, personal experience.” (Menkman, p.341). In a sense, first discovering a glitch can be a special, personal experience, as — imagining a video game as a mechanical, rather than digital system — if gives the user a rare look behind the curtain, and under the hood — to see what parts of the system are interlinked and how, and how they might interact in unintended ways. Systems that logically would be entirely separate can start to affect each other and cause new circumstances that can be bother beautiful and terrible to observe. If one is invested in the intended experience, it can be a more negative experience, but for someone less invested in such — such as a person replaying a game they already know — it can both deepen their appreciation of the original experience and provide themselves an entirely new one.
A prime example of the phenomenon I have just mentioned can be found in the Twitch streams of ProtonJon, who is infamous among his community for his ability to glitch games in new and interesting ways. In particular, Jon’s glitch of Super Mario Bros 3, uploaded as a 45 minute long commentated stream highlight to YouTube, the streamer does their best to play through the glitched out game as it continues to destabilize around him, and co-commentators even comment on the cause and nature of the glitch, making it an ideal piece of study for this journal. The glitch, as described, it the result of pointer errors within the game cartridge due to a misread of the cartridge by the RetroN console Jon is using. As such, the game is ‘off by one’ for a large portion of data, causing virtually every sprite in the game to be misplaced, creating a heavily glitched, though still barely legible playfield. As noted by the commentator, as more and more data are loaded, the error will affect more and more data, eventually effecting the game’s music, and even level collision maps, rendering the game eventually unplayable. Despite this, the streamer continues, hindered but not stopped by the glitched game for over half an hour, driven by the desire to see each of the game’s novel enemies and assets in their new, glitched out state. In this way, the glitch both provides insight into the game’s inner workings and their elegance (when functioning properly) and provides as much ‘novel’ content as the original game.
Anyone interested in seeing the glitch for themselves can watch this video by from Proton Jon’s YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CIBrncUxwg
All rights to the video and its content belong to ProtonJon, and I am not related to or endorsed by them, nor are they endorsed by me.
Works Cited:
Menkman, Rosa. “Glitch Studies Manifesto.” Video Vortex Reader II: Moving Images beyond YouTube, by Geert Lovink and Rachel Somers Miles, Institute of Network Cultures, 2011.
