Glitches, love them or hate them, if you’ve played a game or even watched someone play a game then you’ve seen or experienced one. A glitch can range anywhere between your game crashing after the player does specific actions, i.e. the game crashes if the player jumps into a specific corner, to your character falling through the ground endlessly. No matter how dramatic, for the most part glitches are annoying and frustrating. There are some cases where a games glitch can lead to a good laugh, but normally it hinders the player from progressing in the game. In it’s simplest definition, a glitch is an error in something technological, that hinders the user from continuing on with their desired actions.
In our reading this week’s reading, Rosa Menken describes a glitch as “a break from (one of) the many flows (of expectations) within a technological system” (Menken, 341).With this being said, it makes it easy to see why glitches can be so frustrating. In general, most of us are used to our technological devices working the first time, when we want them, how we want them. So when we face an issue like a glitch, it frustrates us because things aren’t going the way we want them. However, there is an exception to this. As shown in the video above, glitches can be exploited and used for our advantage. In the remastered Bioshock game, you can exploit a glitch in order to get the hardest achievement in the game while technically on the easiest difficulty. While it is a cheap way to get it, this is a great example of how to use technological errors for our own advantage.
Lovink, G., & Miles, R. S. (2011). Video Vortex Reader II: Moving images beyond YouTube. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.