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This is a transcript of a paper ‘Random & Boring’ that I gave at the CODE conference at Swinburne University, 21 November 2012. Is there a bad way to become interested in a topic? I wonder this because, at first, my “interest” in boredom was quite disingenuous. Working in the area of pedagogy support and development in higher education quickly made me alarmingly familiar with the notion that teaching should be done in a way that is both “engaging” and “interesting”.

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This deeply bothered me, why was there such concern with affective forms of teaching? I remembered being extremely bored for most of my undergraduate degrees (sorry Otago) and judging from students’ faces when I’m “teaching”, sometimes (not all the time) they are experiencing something fairly similar (although they have the benefit of some high tech distractions which I definitely could have made excellent use of). Pedagogy and boredom seem deeply entwined, doesn’t boredom just ignite a will to do something else—usually some kind of escape: daydreaming, doodling, fidgeting, graffiti—but it might also drive students to take more interest in the subject, to become responsible for their

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own learning, rather than relying on the lecturer’s, tutor’s, or instructional designer’s spoon-fed titbits for sustenance. I began to try to provoke my colleagues by suggesting that boredom might have something going for it. As I discovered, boredom has quite a lot to it, and for me this was particularly in relation to the random. Randomness, and the possibility of something being different, or even new, is what boredom pushes people towards. “Random” and “boring” as concepts, provide me with a way of thinking of and talking about a small project that I am working on: that examines the Swedish

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digital game Minecraft. As intellectual concepts “random” and “boring” are relatively new to me, but provide scope to talk about something quite particular within a wider framework—because as it turns out, boredom, apparently, is a condition of Modernity. Growing up in Palmerston North, New Zealand, had given me a great deal of experience with boredom—especially on Sunday afternoons (according to Benjamin, Sunday afternoons in Berlin at the start of the 20th century sucked as well—so at least P.N. can’t be held entirely to blame); but, I had very little grounding either in the experience of modernity (so often associated with

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the city) or the key intellectual work that examines boredom (and there turns out to be quite a lot of it—as I found out last night). In this paper I want to delve into why scholars of modernity, in particular Walter Benjamin and Henri Lefebvre, valued the random and boring (especially the boring). I will first elaborate the boring, and then the random, and their fruitful intersection. Finally, I will briefly discuss the digital game Minecraft in order to consider the experience of the boring and random in algorithmic conditions. To start I will turn to the boring. For those of you who are easily bored, be forewarned, I am about to take a page

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from the book of one Raymond Williams, and trace the emergence of the term boring in the English language. Probably only coincidentally, like the sport cricket, the word “boredom”—the immediate antecedent of “boring”—dates back to the 1760s. Other eras promulgated similar concepts, but these were linked to imbalances of humours, cosmological disorders, or possession by demons, and were available as experiences only to select classes or castes. “Boring” itself has been traced back to 1864—the same year that the submarine was first used in warfare. The development of these terms “boredom” and “boring” constituted somewhat of a break, primarily due to boredom being a mass

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phenomenon. Originally understood as being caused by a lack of responsibility, or moral failing; during the 19th century, sources of boredom were increasingly situated outside of the self. Boredom scholars—yes it is indeed, according to Gardiner, a sub-discipline—carefully note that the timing of this development, notably coincides with “the birth of modernity.” Boredom, at first, may seem to be the result of the institutional implementation of linear time and rhythms, what Lefebvre describes as the expansion of compulsive time by the “bureaucratic society of controlled consumption” a term he developed to describe the new

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technologically-enabled government of post-War France. Boredom, however, is not confined to experiences of institutions, for both Lefebvre and Benjamin boredom also shapes everyday life, including the realms outside of work: particularly for Benjamin the city street and for Lefebvre the domestic sphere. Even so, the realm of work was often under fire from critics of boredom. The office cubical, that peculiar symbol of white collar technical work so effectively encapsulated by Mike Judge’s 1999 film Office Space, is described by Moran, as: “the intentional erasure of human possibility, the preclusion of self-made variations

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of pace, meaning and intentionality; relentless in their governance of detail, they leave room for little but boredom in their effect.” That other Situationist, Vaneigem, turns his critique to the commute, the commuting office worker is “turning in upon themselves, shrivelling up, living trivial lives and dying for the details” (it does kind of sound like he has ridden the number 75 tram). Everyday life thus abounds with opportunities to cultivate strategies, for coping with boredom. But what strategies are cultivated? I’ve suggested already that boredom might be constructive. So is this cultivation

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even necessary? A crucial point, is that boredom is experienced by everyone, it thus cuts across the various spheres of everyday life to point to a general dissatisfaction with modernity. The Situationists and Lefebvre (at times) suggest that boredom is a counter-revolutionary weight—they literally argued that boredom must be destroyed. But Lefebvre is also able to conceptualise boredom in a more fruitful way. In the classic essay “Notes on the new town” from Introduction to Modernity he writes:

Here, in the new town, boredom is pregnant with desires, frustrated frenzies, unrealized possibilities. A

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magnificent life is waiting just around the corner, and far, far away. Its waiting like the cake is waiting when there’s butter, milk, flour and sugar (124).

The ingredients are all right there in the heart of the domestic sphere, and if people get bored enough, the cake might get made (I hope the people in the new town prefer egg-free cake). An alternative way to think about boredom is suggested by Joseph Heller. Among the many minor characters in Catch 22, is one Dunbar, an airman that attempts to prolong his life by cultivating boredom, subscribing to

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the belief that being bored made time pass more slowly. Dunbar’s strategy gave him the appearance of control over his own existence in a time of great chaos and uncertainty. This points to an issue regarding the individual’s subjective experience of boredom, the experience of boredom itself marks a degree of autonomy from the conditions through which boredom is produced. Boredom exposes the failed project of modernity in an affective and experiential manner. Boredom can force us to ask the question: how should “we” actually spend our time? It gives us a window into

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the endless repetition and sameness that is otherwise masked by capitalism’s endless search for novelty and innovation (iPhone 4?). To quickly move to random, which I don’t really have time to give the Raymond Williams treatment too, one key factor that ushers in boredom, as a mass experience of modernity, is the systemic shutdown of uncertainty and possibility in everyday life—that there is less openness to randomness and possibility. An example of this line of thought is illustrated in Benjamin’s essay “Convolutes” where he laments the fact that the design of

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the modern city alleviates many of the negative effects of the weather (I can’t help wondering if he would have come up with this theory if he lived in Melbourne instead of Berlin and Paris). This reduces the difference between days caused by patterns the weather and seasons. For Benjamin, rain was a factor that contributed to producing variable patterns of activity and movement. It both drove people indoors into potentially new spaces, activities, and configurations, and by imposing inactivity on the city-dweller and distancing them from its distractions, produced a space for reflection. The derive of The Situationists was another way of reinscribing the over-

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programmed modern city with a sense of randomness and wonder. Boredom finds its power in the accidental communities produced by the city. In collections of strangers produced by the rhythms of the city, boredom is overwhelming. No wonder personal media has been embraced so thoroughly. But it should never be understood as the cause of disconnection or isolation, it is a response to it, an attempt to modulate boredom using available technologies. Benjamin in a similar way singles out the figure of the gambler among the throngs of the arcade, as someone who at first glance is effectively alleviating

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their boredom—through games of chance. However, on a closer look, Benjamin decides the gambler is ultimately trapped in a similar series of repetitions to the worker. This anticipates a strong line of research around digital games and labour—as in playbour—that argues gaming also increasingly resembles (and in some cases becomes) work. I’m not going to pretend that this is a good segue into my discussion of Minecraft—but, today, it must suffice. Now, I’m about to say that Minecraft is a very boring game, but please don’t be fooled, I very much enjoy and admire this game. There is a certain point in every game

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scholar’s life (I imagine) when one has played a game so much that a certain level of commitment to write and/or talk about it becomes ingrained in play, so as to justify the time invested. Minecraft, for me, is such a game. First, as I promised, I find Minecraft to be a boring game. In so much as, once you have figured out how to survive the night, then it becomes are question of what actually to do, or can be done with the game. Once the issue of survival is no longer in question, everything else is what Mckenzie Wark would describe as “trifling”. He states:

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You trifle with it—playing with style to understand the game as a form. You trifle with the game to understand the nature of gamespace as a world—as the world.

Trifling with Minecraft is thoroughly entwined with other media. As the game is perfectly designed for trifling, players demonstrate their style by sharing it on other media platforms. Second, difference in Minecraft is produced algorithmically, one of the key moments of the game is the generation of the world, and how this moment

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impacts on the frequency and location of particularly important blocks. This leads to a great deal of detailed online discussion about how to understand the way that this algorithm produces ‘randomness’, in order to harvest blocks in the most efficient manner. Third, the random glitches that are produced in the generation of Minecraft worlds are embraced. For example, Mojang (the game developers, who created Minecraft) encourages people to use ‘land-in-the-air” glitches as landmarks for navigation. They also celebrate that the villainous creeper emerged from a coding glitch. Furthermore, unusual and amusing glitches are also

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subject to the content sharing practices of the community. Not as an example of style, but as a celebration of the ‘random’, the style of the game itself (or game designer). The cultivation of glitches by Mojang and the community of players, illustrates how in Minecraft, the random and boring both are intertwined and important for the success of the game. ----------------------------------------------------------- To conclude with suitable pith at this point, is impossible. I can see some directions that may be worthy of exploring. Particularly, the notion that domestic and personal computing technologies are—to some—extent

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tools for modulating boredom, needs to be followed up with a more detailed understanding of the collective affective stakes of boredom in contemporary everyday life. The random, has for me, been more difficult to pin down, and I would also like to consider it, in much greater detail in the future. If this presentation wasn’t quite random enough, I feel confident at least that it was boring. For that reason I very much appreciate the time that you have given me. Thank you.

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Tom Apperley