Gameplay Journal #5: Glitches

Video game glitches have always been a thorn on gaming’s side for decades. They can ruin our experiences but sometimes they can enhance it. A “glitch” refers to an unexpected defect, fault, flaw, or imperfection and it’s more commonly associated with video games. Trying to explain what a glitch is to someone who doesn’t play video games is kind of difficult, but I always try to make it easy. A glitch, much like it’s literal definition, is an unexpected defect that’s not supposed to happen. It’s like buying a soda from one of those see-through soda machines where you can see your drink be selected thanks to a robot, but it stops in the middle of dispensing, shakes your soda all of the sudden, and proceeds to give you your drink.

Menkman’s definition of a glitch is interesting, “a wonderful interruption that shifts an object away from its ordinary form and disclosure, towards the ruins of destroyed meaning” (Menkman, page 3). Glitches can indeed be a wonderful interruption especially when it is experienced in a online multiplayer game like Battlefield 3, but at the same time I don’t find them to be wonderful in a single player game like Cyberpunk 2077, which was the reason why I stopped playing after 15 hours of playtime. I was severely disappointed about that game being full of glitches and bugs, especially the ones that make the game crash.

For this week’s video, I chose a glitch from Cyberpunk 2077 that pretty much tells me this game was far from finished. As requested for compilation videos, the glitch I chose is in the 03:54 mark.

Works Cited

Menkman, Rosa. “Glitch Studies Manifesto” n.d. PDF file.