CRUDELY, A MACHINE. THE DREAM MACHINE THROUGH THE LENS OF RUSSIAN FORMALISM

This article explains how specific aesthetic decisions work in the game The Dream Machine. I analyze it through the lens of Russian For-malism: particular techniques of making a video game are judged through Shklovsky’s Art as a Technique, and the problem of the game genre is presented through Tynianov’s The Literary Fact. Theoretically, I aspire to re-claim the original context for these ideas, which is surprisingly relevant to contemporary horror media. Digital games as an artistic form re-intro-duce the effect of estrangement into the ongoing experiments with their medium; in The Dream Machine, this effect is created by replacing a digital simulacrum of computer generated imagery with high resolution scans of real life objects, made of modeling clay, cardboard and found objects. I la-bel this technique “scary matter”, and it can be found both in games, animation films and pop music videos, such as Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer. The medium of a digital game suggests it is timeless and infinitely replay-able, which intensifies the effect of estrangement in the case of always-al-ready dead ‘scary matter’.