‘What Was Your First Experience of a Videogame?’: The Fantasmatic Structure of Videogame Memory

The First Videogame Experience as the Objet a of Videogame Memory

The question ‘what was your first experience of a videogame?’ prompts a variety of responses from subjects interviewed on the Checkpoints podcast. Some attempt to recall the first videogame they personally played, though very few can confidently do so and instead resort to vague approximations (‘probably’ an Atari 2600 videogame, ‘probably’ Space Invaders, ‘probably’ one of several computer games that were in circulation at the time, and so on). Others try to pinpoint the moment they first became aware of the existence of videogames and, as will be discussed, associate the emergence of videogames in their lives with a moment of profound discovery. While responses to the ‘first experience’ question are varied, however, they all point to a common investment in the fantasy of the first videogame experience. Much like a dream, the first videogame experience is typically remembered in fragments – fragments that, in the act of recollection, are reassembled and filled out to form a consistent narrative structure. In its absence from videogame memory, the first videogame experience is retroactively transformed into a site of lost enjoyment, which clues us into its fantasmatic status.

Although subjects cannot typically remember their first videogame experience, ⁴ they nonetheless associate it with a ‘mind blowing’, ‘magical’, or ‘immediately intoxicating’ moment. Some describe having ‘never seen anything like’ videogames or of ‘falling in love instantly’. One subject, for example, recalls being at a social club and seeing a Space Invaders arcade machine for the first time. ‘There was a big, tall cabinet thing’, he recalls,

everyone was gathered around it, there were like loads of people like making a fuss about it […] and I went over to see what it was because obviously it was making incredible noises. And I still remember the sides, the cabinet art on the side is like one of the most evocative bits of gaming artwork for me […] the fuzzy alien with the white, kind of, outline, and the moon craters, and all that stuff. (Checkpoints Episode 48, 2016, t. 17:25) ⁵

The Space Invaders arcade machine, which he (and several others) compares to ‘the monolith in 2001, just being like, bwarrmm’ (E48, 2016, t. 18:44), is then revealed as a videogame – both in the memory itself and in the act of remembering – through the help of his father: ‘I remember he lifted me up so I could see the screen’ (E48, 2016, t. 17:59). Another subject describes memories of seeing her father frequently disappear behind the family television set in order to make repairs. One day, unbeknownst to her, her father connects an Atari 2600 to the television, which, at a young age, she conflates with his usual repair work: ‘my dad went back there, and he did some stuff with tools, and then all of a sudden I could control things on the TV. I mean, this was literally magic to me’ (E66, 2017, t. 13:38). ⁶ Several subjects recall being ushered into household spaces where videogames were revealed to them, almost theatrically, by parents, siblings, and friends. One subject remembers being invited to a friend’s house to play an Atari 2600 for the first time. He recalls the moment when his friend ‘closed all the windows [and] drew all the curtains in the room’ in order to create what he describes as a ‘ceremonial’ experience (E41, 2016, t. 09:55). Interestingly, while the host of Checkpoints often hypothesizes that ‘born digital’ subjects could not have experienced videogames in the same magical way as those born in the 1970s or earlier, subjects born in the 1980s and 1990s describe similar memories of videogames appearing in their lives as if out of nowhere (see, for example, E61, 2016, t. 27:32).

The fantasy of the first videogame experience is sustained through its status as a magical event that is impossible to replicate, recapture, or even remember. Its fantasmatic status sets in motion what one subject describes as ‘a constant quest of trying to get my hands on a videogame system or trying to spend more time with videogames whenever I could’ (E18, 2015, t. 37:15). There is, in other words, a common desire to recuperate the lost enjoyment attributed to the first videogame experience. This desire is not just limited to videogame memory – it is also expressed in other areas of videogame culture. For example, Swalwell (2017) observes that the desire for the ‘original [videogame] experience’ holds a similar, fetishized status in retrogaming communities. Keogh (2014, n.p., italics in original) likewise notes that the desire for what he calls a ‘pure videogame form’ is firmly ensconced in the cultural imaginaries of videogame production and consumption alike. For Lacan, lost enjoyment – or jouissance – is an excessive, disruptive, or traumatic form of enjoyment that the subject is nonetheless compelled by. In the context of videogame memory, this lost enjoyment is ultimately unobtainable because the first experience is, as established, a fantasy, an absent centre. Yet, by investing in the repetition associated with the recuperation of this fantasy, the first experience becomes increasingly reified in videogame memory. The perceived scarcity of videogames is a common theme here. Subjects recall frustrated memories of being unable to acquire videogames due to a lack of disposable income (see, for example, E25, 2016, t. 09:48; E42, 2016, t. 15:14; E63, 2016, t. 09:56) or because of prohibitions set in place by authority figures (see, for example, E25, 2016, t. 11:59; E45, 2016, t. 07:03; E87, 2017, t. 14:49). Videogames are (and were) expensive; perhaps the most cost-prohibitive commodities that subjects recall desiring at a young age. However, memories of the supposed scarcity of videogames or of the ‘constant quest’ of trying to recapture the magic of the first videogame experience are indexical of a more fundamental fantasy: the loss of what Lacan calls the objet a and the desire for its retrieval.

For Lacan, the subject’s alienation in and by language gives birth to a retroactive fantasy that they have lost something that once made them whole – something that, once recovered, will absolve them of their lack. This lost something is the objet a. Although the objet a is not an empirical object that is literally lost, its constitutive absence nonetheless renders the subject lacking. The fantasy of retrieving the objet a and ameliorating one’s lack is what sets the metonymic structure of desire in motion. For Lacan (1998 [1973], p. 178), desire has no object, because the true object of desire is the constitutively absent objet a. Actually existing objects of desire can only ever act as surrogates for the objet a (see McGowan, 2013, pp. 37–39). Because no object of desire can compare to the objet a, desire can never be satisfied. Desire can only curve around but never quite hit upon its objet a (Lacan, 1998 [1973], p. 178). This is why desire is, in Freudian terms, polymorphously perverse: it moves metonymically from one object to the next in search of the sublime satisfaction of the objet a. This is also why Lacan refers to the objet a as the object-cause of desire. The objet a causes the subject’s desire—it reels the subject into the social order in search of what it feels it has lost—and it is this very desirousness that differentiates the human being (as a desiring or lacking subject) from other types of being (see Allen and Ruti, 2019, p. 169; McGowan, 2016, p. 93; Zupančič, 2017, p. 35). The first videogame experience is the objet a of videogame memory because it gives fantasmatic expression to an unsymbolizeable, constitutive loss. It gives narrative consistency to the subject’s foundational lack-in-being by constructing a fantasmatic scenario wherein the subject once had access to the ultimate enjoyment (in the form of the first videogame experience) but subsequently lost it. It is, in other words, an object-cause of desire that kick-starts the ‘constant quest’ to recapture the lost enjoyment attributed to the first videogame experience.

Subjects interviewed on Checkpoints recall developing elaborate strategies to overcome the seemingly empirical obstacles separating them from their lost enjoyment. One subject remembers fasting so that he could spend his lunch allowance on arcade videogames (E128, 2018, t. 31:11). Another recalls sublimating his ‘desperate’ desire for a Nintendo Entertainment System by consuming box after box of Nintendo-themed breakfast cereal. ‘Once the cereal was done’, he says, ‘I took [the first cereal box I owned] to my room, made a little cardboard Nintendo controller out of cardboard and crayons, and connected it to the box with a string, and just pretended to play on this little drawn-out TV screen that was on the front of the box’ (E95, 2017, t. 18:46). It is also common for subjects to discuss class, wealth, and access to videogames through the lens of the inexpensive, undesirable, or unsupported consoles and computer models they ‘made do with’ as children. Several subjects who grew up in the United Kingdom, for example, recall wishing for Commodore 64s, but ultimately settling for their (allegedly inferior) Dragon 32s, BBC Micros, or ZX Spectrums (see, for example, E54, 2016, t. 10:30; E57, 2016, t. 08:58; E60, 2016, t. 17:52). Memories of repeatedly failing to obtain videogames because of scarcity or other empirical obstacles are significant because they feed into the fantasy of lost enjoyment. We might even say that the first videogame experience – as an objet a – retroactively determines the content of videogame memory, in that it compels the subject to prioritize certain memories (such as the scarcity of videogames) over others.

A historicist objection to my approach here might be that, in identifying a fantasmatic structure of videogame memory in the Checkpoints memory texts, I am mistaking an archival construction for a psychical structure. Treated as a historical archive, the Checkpoints podcast is indeed quite limited. For example, the host often asks questions that steer subjects’ memories into a set of pre-determined themes – the most obvious being the primacy of the first videogame experience. Moreover, the vast majority of people interviewed on the podcast are male, grew up in the United Kingdom or North America, and work in or around videogames. For the historicist, this might suggest that the Checkpoints archive itself – rather than an underlying psychical structure – is what mediates and gives shape to the fantasmatic structure of videogame memory. However, to reiterate, I am treating the podcast not as a historical archive but as a series of memory texts that, taken as a whole, hint at a subjective structure that exceeds the shaping force of the archive. The psychoanalytic approach I am developing resists the idea that videogame memories are wholly determined by historical, cultural, economic, or even archival forces – it thinks of subjectivity (and, by extension, memory) as something that fundamentally exceeds these categories. We can further navigate these tensions by turning to an analysis of the figure of the Other in videogame memory.

The Desire of the Other

Early videogame memories are often anchored not to particular videogames but rather to what Lacan calls the desire of the Other. For Lacan, the big Other is a non-existent social authority whose imagined presence binds the social order and covers over its internal inconsistencies. The little or intersubjective other, meanwhile, refers simply to another subject. Intersubjective others such as parents, friends, and siblings usually figure more prominently in subjects’ early videogame memories than actual videogames. Subjects describe memories of parents bringing videogames home from work, of watching siblings play videogames before they themselves played them, and of hearing or reading about videogames rather than experiencing them first-hand. One subject, for example, describes an early videogame memory by way of a friend’s testimonial:

In terms of the moment when I kind of first… almost like saw myself in videogames? Would’ve been… my friend, my best friend David […] we used to walk to the swimming baths. So, holding hands as tiny primary school kids, we went to the swimming baths. And he told me every week about what he was doing with The Hobbit […] the text adventure version of The Hobbit. And he described, ‘oh yeah, I’m up to the spot, and the spiders are coming down and eating me, I’m trying to hide, oh yeah, and I’m up to some trolls, and I have to wait ‘til the sunlight appears, and then…’ et cetera. And this literally sounds like the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life. (E19, 2015, t. 08:41)

Intersubjective others often appear in videogame memory as if they possess a privileged relation to the lost enjoyment attributed to the first videogame experience, and in this way, they take on the qualities of big Others. This aligns with the Lacanian (1998 [1973], p. 235) aphorism that our desire is always the desire of the Other. We tend to fantasize that the Other has privileged access to the objet a – that it holds the key to the secret of what we should desire – and it is for this reason that we tend to pattern our own desire on what we think the Other desires. By inhabiting the desire of the Other, we fantasize that we can put an end to the question of our own desire once and for all.

Paternal and maternal figures often take centre-stage in subjects’ recollections and are typically portrayed as figures who enable and/or prohibit access to videogames. However, there are important differences in how paternal and maternal figures are portrayed in these roles and, by extension, how they act as avatars for the desire of the Other. Paternal figures are often remembered for being early adopters, for bringing videogames home from work, and for being obsessed with technology and tinkering. ‘My childhood game collection was basically games that my dad wanted’, says one subject. ‘He had money, and I didn’t, so I played whatever he bought’ (E16, 2015, t. 08:56). Paternal figures are usually remembered for inaugurating the subject’s desire for videogames by, for example, bringing videogames home from work, but just as often, they are remembered for failing to maintain or display sufficient interest in videogames. In Fink’s (1996, p. 61, italics in original) words, ‘the Other’s desire escapes the subject’—in this case, the paternal Other fails to maintain or display sufficient interest in videogames—‘yet the subject is able to recover a rem(a)inder thereof by which to sustain him or herself in being, as a being of desire, a desiring being’. In other words, while the desire of the Other ultimately escapes the subject’s grasp, it nonetheless provides the subject with a set of coordinates to orient their own desire. This feeds into a broader mythology of father figures providing access to tools and technologies (usually to their sons) through a patriarchal lineage. Some male subjects, now parents themselves, speak of a wish to impart this lineage to their sons, but often lament the fact that, in one subject’s words, their sons ‘will probably end up playing, like, flicking football on [a] mobile phone’, as opposed to first experiencing videogames the way they once did (E56, 2016, t. 16:02). Given that the majority of subjects interviewed on Checkpoints are male, it is unsurprising that narratives of, for example, paternal bonding feature prominently in the memory texts.

Maternal figures are quite often absent from subjects’ recollections, but when they do appear, they are usually portrayed as figures who actually play or display an interest in videogames as opposed to simply making them available. ‘While he [father] may have provided the technology,’ as one subject puts it, ‘I’m sure it’s her [mother] who got me hooked on these things’ (E2, 2015, t. 03:20). One subject even claims that his mother was playing The Legend of Zelda while she was pregnant with him (E67, 2017, t. 16: 54). Like paternal figures, maternal figures also provide access to videogames by, for example, bringing them home from work, but the maternal act of making technology available tends not to be framed through the lens of paternal bonding or patriarchal lineage but rather through metaphors of nurturance, sacrifice, and excessive acts of generosity. ⁷ One subject, whose parents divorced when he was young, says he ‘can’t imagine the hardships she [mother] suffered and all the sacrifices she made to pander to my [videogame] enthusiasm […] I don’t know where she found the money from, but I’m very grateful that she did’ (E54, 2016, t. 08:36). Another subject recalls his mother’s sacrifice in the following way: ‘[we were] the only immigrant family on the [British] council estate, you know. Poor as you can imagine. And she’s forking out all of this money [for an Atari 400], splashing it on her credit card. And that’s where everything kicked off’ (E31, 2016, t. 16:55). While these memories are clearly grounded in particular experiences of class and cultural heritage, they highlight the different (gendered) ways that fathers and mothers inaugurate (and, at times, limit or prohibit) the subject’s desire for videogames.

Fathers and mothers are not the only figures to perform this role in videogame memory. One subject, for example, recalls being granted an opportunity by her older brother to play his copy of Final Fantasy X at a young age. ‘I had, like, this paranoia of, like, playing videogames without him built into me,’ she says, ‘because I was always afraid he was going to find out and like, get really mad at me and like, you know, go ahead and throw out my Barbies or whatever’ (E29, 2016, t. 09:19). For this subject, the desire of the Other is associated not with paternal bonding or patriarchal inheritance but rather with gendered experiences of prohibition and self-censorship. ‘I play, like, maybe two, three hours of Final Fantasy X before just feeling like I was doing something really wrong’, she says, ‘even though, you know, it wasn’t like I didn’t know how to play a JRPG’ (E29, 2016, t. 09:31). Beyond fathers, mothers, and siblings, there are numerous other authority figures who appear in subjects’ recollections: arcade operators, shop owners, magazine writers, shady characters who run neighbourhood piracy rings, family friends who provide informal channels through which to acquire imported videogames, and so on. These figures often take on a revered status in subjects’ recollections. One subject recalls witnessing, at a young age, an arcade operator replacing a cabinet in the local arcade:

I said, ‘what are you doing!?’ He said, ‘well, I’m just changing the boards, taking the money’. It was his operation. He would drive around the valleys with his van. He would carry arcade machines, on his back, because he was an actual Welsh monolith with hands like shovels […] So what happened is that we built up this kind of friendship where we’d go around to his house on the weekends. In his garage, we’d play the latest stuff that came in from Japan, his wife would cook us chips, and we’d tell him what we thought about it. (E28, 2016, t. 31:49)

Perhaps figures such as these take on a revered status because, from the child’s point of view, they appear unrestricted by the usual barriers that prohibit access to videogames – parents, money, mobility, and so on. They seem to possess privileged access to the lost enjoyment attributed to the first videogame experience.

The fact that early videogame memory is enmeshed with the desire of the Other is also evident in the way subjects discursively construct their memories in the act of recollection. For example, one subject draws on a foundational myth in videogame history – the failure of the Atari 2600 videogame, E.T. the Extra Terrestrial – when describing his formative memories:

Interviewee: I remember the Pac Man port being pretty good. And Defender was pretty good as well. E.T., of course, we’ll not talk about that.

Interviewer: Did you play it?

Interviewee: I briefly played it at a friend’s house, but it’s just, it’s just terrible. Why, do you have a soft spot for it? (E6, 2015, t. 04:54)

The subject shuttles from past (‘I briefly played it at a friend’s house’) to present (‘it’s just, it’s just terrible’) to personal (‘I remember the Pac Man port being pretty good’) to collective (‘E.T., of course, we’ll not talk about that’). The memory text is mediated through the presence of intersubjective others (‘I briefly played it at a friend’s house’) and the desire of the Other (‘do you have a soft spot for it?‘). To interpret this passage through the lens of another Lacanian (1997 [1986], p. 139) concept, we might say that videogame memory is always ‘extimate’ in that it is at once both deeply intimate (subjects feel as if they know their memories intimately even if they cannot recall the specific details) and exterior (augmented by or attributed to the desire of the Other) to the subject. This does not imply that videogame memory is straightforwardly ‘intersubjective’ or ‘collective’ but rather that it arises in the very gap, inconsistency, or contradiction between that which is most intimate to the subject (their personal memories) and that which is exterior to them (that which they have patterned on the desire of the Other).

The Intervention of the Reality Principle

Subjects often give detailed accounts of the places and spaces ⁸ where they first encountered videogames. They construct mental topographies of domestic spaces (see, for example, E121, 2018, t. 19:50) and arcade environments (see, for example, E116, 2018, t. 23:25); they restage pedestrian journeys to video rental stores, arcades, and shopping malls (see examples below); and they describe experiences of being psychically transported into virtual realms of videogame play (as in the above anecdote about the The Hobbit). ⁹ In Freudian terms, we might say that memories of place and space – particularly when they involve experiences of separation – are indexical of a moment when the reality principle intervenes in the subject’s psychic constitution. The reality principle channels the desire latent in the fundamental fantasy (which is correlated to the loss of the objet a and the desire of the Other) towards socially designated processes of separation and individuation.

Many subjects associate their early videogame memories with pedestrian journeys to physical sites beyond the family home – arcades, shopping malls, holiday destinations, chip shops, friends’ houses, and so on. One subject describes a formative experience of walking ‘half a block’ (under the watchful gaze of his mother) to play a Nintendo Entertainment System at his friend’s house for the first time (E64, 2016, t. 13:06). Another recalls being left to her own devices at a shopping mall, where she played edutainment software at a Scholastic store while waiting for her mother to complete the shopping (E68, 2017, t. 06:53). One subject, whose parents divorced when he was young, recalls the emotional burden of carrying his PlayStation to and from his parents’ houses. ‘I borrowed a duffel bag from my dad and it became my PlayStation bag and I just always brought it back and forth every weekend, so that I didn’t have to be separated from it’, he says. ‘I just remember having to have that responsibility of like, “I know I really want to take this with me, but also it will hurt him [father] if I forget it, or if I don’t bring it back”’ (E99, 2017, t. 20:06).

In her textual analysis of 1930s cinema-going memories, Kuhn (2013) characterizes her informants’ recollections of journeying to and from the cinema as ‘transitional’ phenomena. The journey to the picture house—which, in the 1930s, children often undertook by themselves or with friends—represents for Kuhn (2013, p. 58) a temporary ‘separation from the mother-associated place-object, the home’, and is thus associated with processes of separation and individuation; of testing out journeys from the inner world (that of the family home, which represents a zone of primal undifferentiation) to the outer world (that of adolescence, which represents a shift toward individuated existence) and back again. The ‘PlayStation bag’ anecdote is a useful illustration of a transitional phenomenon in videogame memory: the PlayStation bag occupies an intermediate zone between the homes of the child’s divorced parents; it allows the child to negotiate experiences of separation associated not only with his parents’ divorce but also with his frequent journeys to and from their respective houses; and it is in itself a symbol of the physical and psychical journey undertaken.

While the journey to and from these non-home locales is associated with ever-increasing independence from the family home, what happens inside the arcade, the shopping mall, the chip shop, or the friend’s house is an altogether different story. In the arcade, for example, subjects recall encountering unfamiliar, exotic, and sometimes even threatening surroundings and inhabitants. While some subjects reminisce positively about the ‘primordial sense of community’ (E69, 2017, t. 12:22) gained through repeat visits to the arcade, many have stronger memories of the intimidating prospect of stepping up to play arcade videogames amidst crowds of older (often male) children. One subject recalls one day possessing the pocket change necessary to play an arcade videogame, only to be bullied off the machine by an older child once he began playing (E37, 2016, t. 07:00). Memories of the lack of agency and/or sense of intimidation associated with playing videogames beyond the familiarity of the family home are even more pronounced for female subjects. One subject recalls frequent visits to her neighbour’s house to watch her male friends play videogames, noting that ‘they just never handed the controllers to me’ (E16, 2015, t. 12:35). Another describes ‘going to the chip shop and seeing Space Invaders machines and absolutely dying to play them […] but I would never have done that’ (E85, 2017, t. 37:41). The reason for this, she explains, is that ‘[the arcade machines] were just always surrounded by boys’. These memories are indexical of a moment when the subject is forced to adapt to the reigning reality principle (which, in the context of videogame culture, is and was predominantly heteropatriarchal), and this is where historicism would typically begin its analysis.

Interfacing with the Real

As already discussed, the fantasy of the first videogame experience, like any fantasy, gives narrative expression to a constitutive loss. Its function is to paper over the trauma that might otherwise be experienced by interfacing with what Lacan calls ‘the real’ of this loss. The real (which is one part of Lacan’s triad of symbolic, imaginary and real psychic registers) refers not to an objective reality lurking beneath the façade of the social order, but rather to the excessive, disruptive, or traumatic kernel of subjectivity that resists symbolization absolutely. Most subjects interviewed on Checkpoints – like most subjects in general – insulate themselves from the trauma of the real by immersing themselves in fantasy, or what Lacan calls ‘the imaginary’. For psychoanalysis, fantasy is a form of what Berlant (2011) might call ‘cruel optimism’: fantasy enables the subject to construct a scenario wherein its objet a is literally lost and can therefore be reobtained. Such fantasies are appealing because they imply that the subject can overcome their lack by recuperating the lost enjoyment attributed to the objet a.

Conceivably, fantasmatic projection is what motivates subjects to prioritize memories of mastering videogames rather than memories of, for example, being challenged or even traumatized by videogames. Many subjects remember developing a sense of proficiency in videogames that far surpassed that of their parents and siblings. ‘[videogames were] something that […] I was better at than my parents’, says one subject (E12, 2015, t. 31:00). ‘I remember […] deciding I was really good at videogames’, says another, ‘so I think that, like, had an impact on me in terms of, like, “videogames are a thing I’m good at, so I will keep playing videogames”’ (E94, 2017, t. 11:30). Likewise, subjects who grew up in environments dominated by microcomputers often recall vivid memories of discovering, at an early age, that the code of computer programs could be tinkered with and eventually mastered. Along with the fantasy of the first videogame experience, the ‘I broke the computer code’ trope is a common formative memory, especially among developers (see, for example, E53, 2016, t. 26:42).

There are nonetheless moments in the memory texts where, in the act of recollection, subjects interface with the traumatic real of their memories. As an example, consider the following memory, wherein a subject recalls an uncanny encounter with a Commodore 64 computer. According to his own recollection, he is three or four years old in this memory:

And then it was time for dinner. And I left the computer on, you know, in dad’s office. And I came back from dinner and the sun had gone down, it was kind of dusky in the room, I think. And the monitor was still on. And the computer was doing something. In retrospect, what it was clearly doing was like some sort of attract mode […] And the demo mode was, it was particularly inscrutable as I remember it because it was just like drawing random, it was sort of like freestyling in the thing’s paint mode. But I had so little literacy for how computers worked, what they did, what they were capable of, and what, how humans instructed computers to do things that, um… it just seemed like magic. You know, it seemed like there was this ghost haunting this machine […]

It wasn’t scary. It was more just enthralling because I don't think I attributed it to like a supernatural thing specifically, but it was just sort of like, something magical is happening that I don't understand. And it's coming from the machine […] So I think really, from that point, from that very first day it feels like, I felt like computers could have mysteries inside of them. (E55, 2016, t. 13:16)

This memory can be productively interpreted through the lens of Lacan’s (1998 [1973]) analysis of Hans Holbein’s 1533 painting The Ambassadors. As Lacan (and countless others) observes, The Ambassadors undermines its own visual schema (as well as that of the viewing subject) by superimposing an oblique skull-shaped blob atop its otherwise traditional figurative setting. The purpose of this skull-shaped blob is to remind viewers of the inevitably of death – to remind them of the trauma of the real – by disrupting the symbolic coordinates that the painting and the viewer otherwise inhabit. The skull-shaped blob radically undermines the viewer’s attempt to master the perceptual field, just as the above subject describes his unsettling realization that the computer contains ‘mysteries’ that exceed his comprehension. The skull-shaped blob, like the freestyling computer in the above anecdote, is an object that disrupts the subject’s fantasmatic support system by laying bare the trauma of the real. Both objects ‘[reflect] our own nothingness’ (Lacan, 1998 [1973], p. 92). While most subjects interviewed on Checkpoints associate their early videogame memories with the acquisition of skill and competency, there are some who, as in the above anecdote, recall a fundamental inability to master videogames and their mysteries. In these moments, the excessive, disruptive, or traumatic kernel of videogame memory – that which is usually occluded by fantasmatic projection – pops into view, much like the skull-shaped blob in The Ambassadors.

In a similar vein, videogames are often positioned in subjects’ memories as objects that both amplify but also provide a means by which to seek refuge from and/or accept fears, phobias, and traumas associated with childhood. One subject recalls being ‘terrified’ of videogame violence at an early age, to the extent that he ‘[couldn’t] deal with games that had enemies in them’ (E61, 2016, t. 23:01). This aversion reached its apex when he first encountered the videogame Kirby’s Dreamland. While Kirby’s Dreamland was the first videogame he became ‘enamoured with’, he nonetheless had a ‘fundamental dread that if Kirby came to harm, that harm would also […] transfer to [him]’ (E61, 2016, t. 24:32). Yet, once he discovered other videogames in the Kirby series, such as Kirby’s Block Ball, he was able to confront his phobia. ‘Kirby was just a ball [in Kirby’s Block Ball]’, he says (E61, 2016, t. 27:04). ‘All he could be hurt by was the spikes, and for some reason, as an existential threat, spikes were not as scary to me as enemies. So […] that was basically, that was like my, kind of the first game that I really kind of immersed myself in as a child’ (E61, 2016, t. 27:04). Another subject attributes her interactions with non-player characters in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask as a reason she was able to overcome her ‘death anxiety’ as a child. ‘As a kid’, she says, ‘that just like blew my mind where I was like, “hm, okay, people [in the videogame’s central Clock Town area] are aware of their mortality, and they’re comfortable living with it” […] by directly interacting with the subject matter, it helped me get over my death anxiety in a very, very big way’ (E125, 2018, t. 29:27). One subject, whose immigrant family grew up in a British council estate, recalls being ‘hated’ and ‘routinely bullied and abused’ by his neighbours (E31, 2016, t. 20:46). ‘[videogames] were a great way to get away from, from that hell we lived in’, he says (E31, 2016, t. 20:46).

Videogames are among the first objects subjects remember being ‘good at’, but they are also objects to retreat into during moments of psychic upheaval and trauma. In fact, at the beginning of each episode of Checkpoints, Dineen specifies that his aim is to bring to light ‘the games that have shaped [the subjects’] lives in one way or another, games that have inspired them, games that have forged connections and games that have soothed wounds’. In several episodes, Dineen offers personal context for this mission statement by referencing a difficult period of his own life, wherein playing videogames provided a pathway towards emotional healing:

I just, on my own, bought a second-hand Nintendo 64 and a copy of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and just played it, like, like you wouldn’t believe, for like a good three or four months, I’d say. And it was just, it was just this sort of soothing bath for my body and soul at that, at that point in my life, where everything I knew about the world just collapsed at a very awkward age for me. (E100, 2017, t. 01:11:31)

Here, I want to echo Ruti (2018, pp. 108–111) in acknowledging that although videogames can only ever provide a temporary solution to our constitutive lack (because, as noted earlier, lack is foundational to subjectivity), there are nonetheless some videogames—such as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater in Dineen’s anecdote—that possess genuine therapeutic qualities for subjects; that enable them to take an active, interventionist role in subjectifying the constitutive trauma of the real and the circumstantial traumas of everyday life. ¹⁰ These videogames will, by necessity, always fall short of the sublimity of the objet a, but they nonetheless contain a trace of the lost enjoyment that, in Dineen’s words, inspires us to forge connections and soothe wounds.

Conclusion

On the surface, the core thesis of the Checkpoints podcast seems to be that our life narratives can be traced back to our formative videogame experiences. This thesis aligns with popular misunderstandings of psychoanalysis: that psychoanalysis teaches us that our formative childhood experiences determine the content of our dreams, repetition compulsions, and unconscious desires as adults. The argument made in this article, and the psychoanalytic approach to memory analysis I have taken, is practically the opposite of this thesis. The point of this article, and the point of psychoanalysis, is not simply to discover what actually happened in the past in order to explain why everything then transpired in the way it did. Instead, it is to identify what is absent from memory – what is constitutively excluded from the subject’s symbolic universe – and perhaps most importantly, what is retroactively placed into the void created by this constitutive absence. From a psychoanalytic perspective, our earliest videogame memories do not contain the secret of why our lives transpired in this or that way. Nor are they simply products, constructions, or symptoms of historical and cultural forces. As ‘screen memories’ (Freud, 1982 [1899], p. 318), our earliest videogame memories are indeed based on true events, but they are retroactively ‘remodelled’ and ‘exaggerated’ to give fantasmatic expression to unconscious desires and/or originary traumas that would otherwise resist symbolization absolutely.

The first videogame experience, as the objet a of videogame memory, provides the narrative basis for this fantasmatic structure. Although subjects interviewed on Checkpoints feel as if they know this experience intimately, their memories are often conjured in relation to the desire of the Other. The fantasy of the first videogame experience also provides the basis for memories of separation and individuation. As objects that contain an echo of lost enjoyment, videogames are also remembered as objects that once enabled subjects to channel energies invested in childhood traumas, phobias, and personal psychic struggles towards more empowering, productive, and future-oriented goals and purposes. Overall, I have focused here on interpreting videogame memories as texts rather than contexts. In doing so, it has not been my intention to claim that the psychoanalytic approach to videogame memory is better than or should replace the historicist approach. Both approaches provide important insight into the question of why early videogame experiences inscribe themselves so forcefully into our memories. Moreover, the subject of psychoanalysis is always formed in historically specific ways. For psychoanalysis, the subject’s entry into the reigning social order determines, among other things, its relation to the desire of the Other (which, as we saw in relation to subjects’ memories of paternal and maternal figures, remains predominantly heteropatriarchal). Yet, as Copjec (2015 [1994], p. 56) writes, ‘the subject [of psychoanalysis] is the product of history without being the fulfilment of a historical demand’. Videogame memories may indeed be products of historical, cultural, and economic forces, but they always contain unconscious elements – elements that emerge at the interstices between their latent and/or manifest content – that speak beyond their historical conditions of possibility.