UC Santa Cruz

Glitch in video games has been studied as an intentional aesthetic element and as an unintentional breakage that produced new narrative possibilities. Glitch art theory has examined interaction with glitch as phenomenological, but the examination of glitch as a systemic aesthetic in video games has gone under-explored. This thesis proposes that the defining power of glitch, in both cases, arises from the ways it makes the otherwise invisible protocols of computing visible in both domains and finds that both glitch art production and transformative modes of videogame play—such as speedrunning and narrative reparative play—have the capacity to make this glitch materiality productive.