Glitches
Glitches are a part of video games, they always have been. from their very early days on cartridges, you can easily find a glitching sprites just by having the cart not securely placed in the console. Dating even before that, is a rather well known glitch in Pacman. That is to say, the original arcade version of Pacman and, presumably, the non-re-branded Puckman. while not found until competitive play of the game had seen traction, after a certain level in Pacman was reached, the game began to visually glitch. beyond this, if the play was to successfully continue playing the game further, the game itself would boot the player back to the start screen, effectively causing a reset to occur.
One definition of a glitch, as stated by Rosa Menkman, is that a glitch is a “…interruption that shifts an object away from its ordinary form and discourse, towards the ruins of destroyed meaning”. (Lovink, G., & Miles, R. S. 340)I find myself only partially agreeing with this statement. saying that a glitch is an interruption is perhaps only applicable only under the assumption normal play and that the glitch is noticeably detracting for the player. Additionally, the notion of discourse towards ruin is a bit more grand than it can be in most situations. To take a well weather example, Skyrim, into account, many people will tell you about encounters with bugs, yet it is a well loved and highly played game that has been released multiple times and seemly any platform it is able to release on. i would struggle to find someone who calls that ruin. now a person could make the very valid argument that a bug is not a glitch, to which i would reply that we’ve reached a semantic debate. regardless, i believe that it can be universally agreed upon that a game’s physics being over exerted via atypical play to cause an unaccounted for effect, would indeed be considered a glitch, not a bug. i can say this because, as an operative definition, we can say that glitches happen in systems that work as intended under normal play whereas bugs are a result of a flaw in the system due to developer error. Skyrim has giants launch the player into the sky upon death, that’s a bug because of a value error, what is a glitch is being able to walk through barred areas by running into a plate held in from of the players face to spaz the physic to let them through
Lovink, G., & Miles, R. S. (2011). Video Vortex Reader II: Moving images beyond YouTube. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.
