Some Integrity by Padraig Regan

Author:Padraig Regan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Glitch City is a generalized term used by players of the Pokémon games to refer to maps with invalid tile data. […] Although some aspects of the source map of Glitch City are preserved (such as some tiles), most other attributes are completely changed (such as what is and is not walkable terrain).

— Bulbapedia, the community-driven Pokémon encyclopaedia

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In the first generation of Pokémon games, it is not difficult to slip outside of the mathematics that dictates that for every entrance there must be an exit and that the two sides of every door must press against each other. By following a complex but easily replicated series of movements, it is possible to trick the game into warping you to a location that does not exist. Because the game must load something on the screen, it scrambles through its memory and comes up with a collage of tiles: grass, pavements, water, windows and bricks are blended together with numerals and scraps of indecipherable text. And all of these visual signifiers are divorced from what they represent. You can move through a Glitch City, but how and where exactly you can move cannot be discerned from the visual content on the screen: you might find yourself walking on water or, ghost-like, through a copse of trees.

It is tempting to think of the glitch as a random occurrence, to use the word to mean something like a destructive miracle. But a glitch is as much a consequence of the rules governing the system in which it happens as is the system’s normal functioning; a glitch not a moment when the system is suspended, but a moment when the system shows its freakish, unplanned depths. It shares this quality with, say, a torrential rain shower in the middle of an otherwise sunny June, or the murder of 49 queer people in a nightclub, which, despite its vital specificity, cannot be extricated from the global discursive regime in which our lives are understood to be material for theological and political debate.

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