Sun, November 8 2015 » future cinema 2015 » No Comments » Author: Caitlin
Thu, November 5 2015 » future cinema 2015 » No Comments » Author: Caitlin
More thoughts on Games 2 class
Our discussion today reminded me of this blog about The Sims. It’s a silly illustration of how game systems or logic might (not) translate into real life: http://justsimthings.tumblr.com/
And I wanted to share this post that illustrates the let’s say “uneven” experience of surveillance, whatever the technology: http://mic.com/articles/120461/best-mc-kinney-police-sean-toon-911-tweets?utm_source=policymicTBLR&utm_medium=main&utm_campaign=social
-Andi
Wed, November 4 2015 » future cinema 2015 » No Comments » Author: Andi Schwartz
Mark Mungo’s Paper/Project Proposal
In my paper, I will propose a hypothetical answer to the “Myth of Total Cinema”, Andre Bazin’s belief that cinema represents a desire to represent reality. While I would not be the first to present virtual reality simulations as the potential end goal, I will outline a more realistic path on how humanity may realize this. I will outline how this total cinema might look, how it would work, and the ways in which it may be developed.
I will seek to prove that the concept of Cinema is a continuation and conjoining evolution that has been going on since the dawn of story. I will outline how story developed as a useful mechanism for survival, to expand our ability for observational learning. Using my essay from undergrad, where I explored these topics, I will dive back into those primary sources. I will theorize that all forms of art have been an evolutionary divergence of reality sharing, through the capturing of an event or idea in a work or performance. The well accepted narrative and non narrative, theatrical, photographic, and aural traditions of Cinema are but a taste of reality we have found ways to share realities. We have yet to share other senses such as touch, taste, and emotion. These are much more complicated to share. Additionally, I will look at the evolution of media viewing as becoming increasingly small and personal. From tribal performances and stories, to the ultimately smaller mediums of today such as the smart phone (the most diverse media tool in history), and proposed near-future developments such as AR and VR, technology has progressively brought the “reality projection” closer to the viewer, the hand-held screen, the ear buds… the proposed glasses and contact lenses… We are forgetting that experience occurs in the brain, which is where total cinema must be played from.
Secondly, I will propose that recent research into mapping the human brain follows the predictions of Raymond Kurzweil, a leading futurologist and scientist, who says that the brain will be mapped by 2030, and we will have superintelligence, in ourselves or in an AI by 2045. Even if his timeline is overly optimistic, it is clear that within the next 100 or so years, our understanding of the brain (which is mostly speculative), will expand rapidly, and technology will seek to keep pace. I predict that once the brain is fully understood, we will be able to augment our brains with supercomputers, capable of stimulating our brains into dream states on command. In this true dream sharing, we will be able to experience another person’s reality or surreality with every sense and emotion desired.
Alternatively/additionally, I will outline how these simulations will require immense processing power, and explore the possibility of Artificial Intelligence assisted artistic creation (rather than creating through code, the AI would intuitively assist design a world to your desires). I will outline the political, sociological, and technological hurdles associated with the development of a singular, god-like AI, and the realities of this world. I will outline the nature under which this AI must be developed, where I posit it is essential that an international coalition of the top scientists work under a UN sanctioned protocol to develop an AI for the specific purpose of governing over us. I will refer to aforementioned brain mapping, and how it is assumed true AI will be based off of the model of a human brain. I posit that the conscience and parts of the brain related to morality of this AI be altered to contain the opinions of all humans who choose to upload a copy of their brains within this AI. The AI would be be driven by the aggregate desires of all humans, and serve utilitarian interests.
This AI would functionally represent, politically, a mix of democracy and dictatorship, and, technologically, a replacement for the internet, and the hardware and software of every piece of technology.
Through this neural network, we would be capable of not just sharing passive total cinema, but also total video game, being able to interact with an infinite number of malleable worlds. These games could be experienced alone, or with others, depending on design/choice. I will outline how this might work, and give examples from my fictional screenplay, StIMULATION, where many of these concepts appear.
Works Cited
Bazin, André, and Timothy Barnard. What is cinema. Montreal: Caboose, 2009.
Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Viking, 2005.
Liebert, Robert, and Lynn Liebert. Personality: Strategies and Issues. Pacific Grove, California: Books/Cole Publishing Company, 1998.
Mungo, Mark. Final Essay: Markist Film Theory: A New Comprehensive Film Analysis. Unpublished Essay. York University, 2012.
Mungo, Mark. StIMULATION. Masters Thesis Screenplay (In Progress). York University, 2015.
Wed, November 4 2015 » future cinema 2015 » No Comments » Author: Mark Mungo
Tue, November 3 2015 » future cinema 2015 » Enter your password to view comments » Author: Oksana Unguryan
Mobile Nation
~ Jonathan Clancy
Here is the written summary for my presentation on Gaming Platforms based on the case studies put forward in Mobile Nation.
I’ve provided links to some of the mobile games I will be referencing.
(Some are just extended play throughs).
Proposed questions are at the end.
The Mobile Nation
Video games are good for your soul.
- James Gee, Literacy Scholar
The studies and discussions put forward by Mobile Nation focus both on the unique design and functionality of mobile games, as well as putting forward a broader discussion regarding gaming literacy and how playing, understanding and designing games can create a crucial way for us to analyze and function in the real world.
The Mobile Nation Conference held in OCAD was put together to gather in one place both people working in the mobile phone industry and academics researching this ‘booming economy’ so they could discuss the direction in which mobile technology was headed. The various insights and predictions at this conference were used to help create the book, gathering information from mobile and gaming industry professionals from Hong Kong, Finland, Canada, and India to name just a few. It also gathered perspectives from insiders across a wide spectrum, such as Scratch Anarchists, Urban Activists, Politicians etc.
Two professionals in the mobile phone and gaming industry, Martha Ladley and Philip Beesley, edited this book in order to put forward an analysis on the proliferating importance of the mobile phone as both an extension of us and our way of life. A part of the book’s discussions involve the evolvement of games on phones and androids, their functionality and how game literacy on a mobile platform can shape us. The editors created the book as a ‘Snapshot of what’s coming’.
Today Android and IOS games are consistently growing in popularity and evolving in their design and gameplay, making mobile or on-the-go games a unique platform all of it’s own. One of the most successful companies Creative Mobile has over 250 million mobile gamers for theirs gaming apps alone. While these are largely car racing simulators that borrow from the standard console platform, there are many others that fully inhabit and explore the unique scope of play that comes with a mobile device.
Gaming Literacy
A Model for Literacy in the 21st Century?
Gaming Literacy, a concept proposed by Ladley, analyzes the significant impact games could have on the education and development of our society. This concept is broken up into three factors; System, Play and Design.
In this analysis Ladley references a term by Dutch Historian and philosopher Johann Huizinga, known as The Magic Circle.
The magic circle represents the idea that games take place within limits of time and space, and are therefor self-contained systems of meaning. A chess king for example is just a figurine on a coffee table, but when a game of chess starts, it suddenly acquires all kinds of very specific strategic, psychological and even narrative meanings.
Likewise a fist in rock-paper-scissors has a fixed meaning. Golden hoops in Sonic the Hedgehog have a fixed meaning of being rewards. Turtles in Super Mario have a fixed meaning of being inherently bad.
In Nightmare Malaria, a game in which you play as a little girl trapped inside her own infected bloodstream, Mosquitos have a fixed meaning of fear and danger, while nets are an essential tool for protection. The game places us within its magic circle to give us a fantastical but nonetheless immersive understanding of this disease.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uugoIC5sfQs
Nightmare Malaria
The Magic Circle therefor emphasizes meanings that are intrinsic and interior to games.
However Gaming Literacy, as argued by Ladley, turns this inward-looking focus inside out and argues that the meanings in a game’s magic circle are present outside the circle as well.
To clarify Gaming Literacy is not necessarily about the context of serious games designed to teach you subject matter, or persuasive games that are designed with a message or social agenda such as Nightmare Malaria. Nor is it about training game designers. Rather it is about the influence the very mechanics of playing or designing video games has on us, and our approach towards the outside world.
Ladley argues that System, Play and Design all represent kinds of literacies that are not being addressed today with traditional education. Together they stand for a new set of cognitive, creative and social skills.
‘Gaming a system’ means finding hidden short cuts and cheats and bending and modifying rules in order to move through the system more efficiently. This means we can misbehave when gaming but we can also, in the process, change that system for the better.
Day Of The Figurines – Pioneer in Mobile Gaming Possibilities
Mobile Phones are increasingly viewed as a carrier for entertainment, rather than a functional tool. But when it comes to games or any other app, it shouldn’t be just a matter of taking something from one media and shrinking it down. Beesley argues that designers must think strategically about what it means to be mobile with a device and what level of information can be digested by people on-the-go. Games therefor cannot be just a conversion of one media to another, they must be specifically designed for the mobile medium.
http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/day-of-the-figurines/
Day of The Figurines
An early example, given by the book, of modifying a game for the mobile phone platform (pre-android) is Day of The Figurines, launched by Game Lab in 2006. This was a text-based game in which the game unfolded over 24 days, with each day representing an hour in the game’s timeline. Players got to choose a figurine that would become a part of a model town and would begin play by receiving a text informing them of events that affected their figurine and the other figurines in the town. You would then text back a decision, which would include where you moved in the town and how you would react with the other players. How the players responded to these events and each other would have an incalculable effect on the town and the games results.
Over a thousand players took part, receiving a minimum of one text a day as the town hit various changing scenarios including a Scandinavian metal band causing a riot and an Arabic speaking army invading. The game nicely molded with the mobile phone platform as it could be accessed at any time and could be played in quick bursts.
Days of The Figurines also betrayed the basic premise of any game in that it had no real objective, rather it was an experiment to see how these decisions would shape the town. It also, consequently, invited the participants to openly think about and discuss with the others why they were playing the game?
Beesley references this as part of a new way of thinking in designing these mobile platform games, known as empathy-based design.
Day of The Figurines gave a whole other scope to mobile gaming possibilities, not just from its pragmatic use of the device’s texting mechanism, but by actively inviting an awareness for the players as to what purpose they had in participating in this game and what they wanted to achieve through it, rather than the usual goal-following set out for them by a typical console game.
This brings us to the first part of Ladley’s Gaming literacy…
Systems
Contemporary thinkers, Stephen Graham and Malcolm Gladwell are increasingly proposing systems-based thinking as the best way to understand a range of complex subjects from media to society to history and culture.
Being able to successfully understand and navigate, modify
and design systems will be more and more linked to how we
learn, work, play, and live as engaged world citizens. It stresses
the importance of dynamic relationships, not fixed facts.
- Ladley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCxS4MGMEgQ
Silent Age – Is a game in which you must navigate through a 2 dimensional world, interact with various characters and make choice in order to solve a groovy time-travel mystery.
Games are intrinsically systematic, they all have mathematical substratum and a set of rules that lye under its surface. Unlike film or other media, there is a clarity of formal structure to games; Their rules. Games are therefor uniquely suited to teach systems literacy.
Any game is a kind of miniature artificial system, bounded and defined by the game rules that create the game’s magic circle. In Silent Age you are bounded by the 2 dimensional world and the point and click format to explore and navigate through the game. When someone plays through this video game they uncover for themselves strategies that are more effective.
Likewise, for people creating game systems, playtesting, modifying the rules, and playtesting again, are all examples of how games naturally and powerfully lend themselves to systems literacy. Ladley argues that in theory this set of practices, unique to video game design, could help us modify and reconfigure other systems such as politics, economics or education.
http://thesilentage.com/blog/2014/01/making-backgrounds/
Silent Age – Breakdown
Second Principle of Game literacy. Play.
Play is our physical interpretation and adaptation of rules set into motion and, in doing so play, transcends the systems from which it arises.
When people learn to play video games,
they are learning a new literacy.”
– James Paul Gee, Literary Scholar
In the magic circle, rules are rigid and closed. When we enter the magic circle and agree to follow the rules, play happens. Rules are closed and fixed, play is improvisational and uncertain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT3HxcZDLYo
Prune, a bizarre game of the gardening variety- sort of.
In it the system structure is designed so the plant will grow out, sometimes into dangerous areas. You as a player must cut, trim or adjust its growth direction to keep the plant from being destroyed. The game is very flexible in how the plant grows and where you can cut it, opening up your ability to improvise and strategize around the game’s rigid platform.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gete61IxkPo
Bounden trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAbj6uL_PA4
Actual bounden game play
In Bounden to replicate the dance-moves in the game you and your partner, whilst both holding onto the same phone, must learn to adjust and co-ordinate with each other, create your own rhythm and physically move together to play within the game’s structure. This physical aspect and co-ordination allows for a much more personal approach to the game, as you and your partner must learn between yourselves how to work together using your bodies as well as the minimal controls in the game. It is also a perfect example of creating a game exclusively for the mobile platform.
Ladley also sees an importance in these games allowing us to not just play within it’s structure but to also play with the structure itself.
Games are not just about following the rules, but also
about breaking them. When rules are bent, broken and
transformed what new structures will arise?
- Ladley
The coded systems in a video game only become meaningful when they are inhabited, explored and manipulated by people, which brings us back to the argument about whether this can transcend into reconfiguring systems outside of games too.
For my trouble I have yet to find a mobile game that lets you break it’s rules, if anyone does please let me know. Although ‘’ does make an argument for players predicting and finding patterns in the algorithm of the game itself, referencing a game like “Quake” where ‘the player may eventually notice that under such and such condition the enemies will appear from the left, i.e. [The Player] will literally reconstruct a part of the algorithm responsible for the game play’. But otherwise in a literal sense of rule breaking there isn’t a game just yet that allows you as a player to adjust its gameplay to the point that you reconfigure it entirely. Unless we want to include programmed cheats but these are made available by the game and still abide by its rules and systems.
Play doesn’t take structures for granted rather it plays
with them, modifying, transgressing and reinventing
and will be imperative for innovation in the coming
century. Play will increasingly inform how we learn
work and create culture.
-Ladley
In Mobile Nation Ladley and her crew focused on the use of mobile games or applications exclusively in regard to public parks. This focused on the average park goers needs such as skate boarding, dog walking, tai chi practitioner, business people lunching, lovers consorting. Ladley was also surprisingly concerned that the designs of these apps needed to be engaging but not so complex or immersive that lead to inattention of your surroundings.
While there are plenty of skateboarding, dog walking and tai chi games there are few games that utilize the specific surroundings of being in a park. Perhaps this could be a later phase in open-ended mobile game platforms, designed for specific types of surroundings but it illustrates the ‘dream big’ ideology of Beesley in that the games are being designed in sync with our every day activities.
Open Ended Mobile Platforms
Due to their very nature mobile games have an increased opportunity to involve interaction and movement in their play, as well as open ended platforms and objectives, allowing them to further open up the magic circle around us.
https://www.ingress.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92rYjlxqypM
Ingress – Augmented reality mobile game
Ingress, connected coincidentally with the concerns of Ladley in regards distracting us from our surroundings, openly invites players to become more aware of them and to actively pursue sites and destinations within their area. The game declares in it’s opening that it is ‘More than a game. It lives and breathes all around you. All you have to do is look, let us open your eyes’.
It even takes the time to remind you that ‘You can switch it off and go back to your lives’, as though aware of the unlimited immersion this game could potentially cause.
In this game, real life and the game are morphed, as you actively take yourself to places of cultural significance such as museums or statues so you can capture portals created by an alien race and link them over other geographical locations. The real world is your platform. The application utilizes the Google Maps and GPS on your phone to determine your position and notify you of portals in your area. It is open-ended and involves teamwork and communication with others to capture and navigate the linking of these portals.
In Ingress the magic circle is literally opened up. The player’s literal surroundings change their meaning through this game; A statue or historic building is now a site for a portal and thus symbolizes adventure and great mystery. Likewise it makes movement and interaction with other players crucial, as the game creates a world in which you and the other participants are now an army whose co-ordination is essential to help your surrounding world from destruction.
Which brings us to the final element of Gaming Literacy.
Design.
The rules of play, design is the process by which a
designer creates a context, to be encountered by a
participant, from which meaning emerges. Designers
create context that in turn creates signification.
- Katie Salen
In video game design you are creating a set of possibilities, which can be explored in the game through play, metaplay and transformative play.
Video game design, unlike many other forms of design requires a wide variety of knowledge put into practice involving math and logic, aesthetics and story telling, writing and communication, visual audio design, human psychology and behavior, understanding culture through art, entertainment and popular media.
Thus the very process of designing a game creates a multi-modal form of learning that educators and literary theorists have been talking about for years. Design of a mobile phone game can also further appreciate and utilize various aspects of how we play a game and how we use our mobile phone features such as GPS, Google Maps, Bluetooth, camera and alerts.
Building off the back of Ingress’ multiplayer, augmented reality, platform the most anticipated mobile game coming this year is arguably Pokemon Go.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sj2iQyBTQs
Pokemon Go
Pokemon Go is multiplayer IOS and Android game, uses location on your phone to map out geo-catch points, which contain pokemon. Your phone notifies you where the pokemon is hiding and you can then see them in the area around you through your phone’s screen. Your phone also now essentially becomes a pokeball and is used to store and catch these creatures.
The game promises the ability to interact with others so you can battle or trade with friends. It also comes with additional accessories such as a pokewatch, a wrist-tracking device that vibrates to notify you if a pokemon is nearby.
It also has communal based Boss battles, in which apparently masses of people in an area can join forces to catch (or kill?) a super powerful pokemon. Unclear if these events will be activated, exclusively, by the company or if you can create and organize your own? Either way it certainly entertains Ladley’s concept of the magic circle extending or even being turned inside out for the participants.
Just like Ingress’ tagline ‘It’s time to move’, Pokemon Go by its very title embellishes the movement, and on -the-go accessability and immersion that could become quintessential to the mobile gaming experience.
But Ladley further stresses the importance of people being thought design of video games rather than just experiencing it.
She is involved with a company called Gamelab which has created number of gaming literacy projects and uses a program called Gamestar mechanic, which will help youths learn about game design by letting them create and modify simple games. In 2007 they opened up the Gamelab Institute of Play.
According to Ladley’s Game Literacy Theory with regards Design, the understanding of systems and design of video games can transcend into our understanding of systems and meanings within them. While the playing of these games can teach us how to adapt and improvise strategically in a way that can show us the functionality of these systems and how they can be changed.
Conclusion and Questions
Our behaviours are increasingly being taken into account
in the design of mobile services and the services offered,
but also mobile devices are having an effect on our
behaviour as well, so there’s a real conversation going
back and forth between opportunities and sociability.
- Philip Beesley
http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/iperg/
Blast Theory, creators of Days of Figurines, are becoming the pioneers of what are coined pervasive games; Games which extend in time, space or special effects. They are determined to utilize the developments of mobile devices and their functions to create games that will occupy a different place in the lives of players than traditional games, with games that can be played across whole countries or cities and where even non-players can inadvertently be part of the game. Examples such as Uncle Roy All Around You and Rider Spoke, encourage players to use objects, locations and people around them to play and navigate through these pervasive games, illustrating the greatest argument for the potential of Johann Huizinga’s magic circle being turned inside out.
The physical nature of these [Mobile phones] is increasingly
close to our bodies and that means they are really potent
because they are increasingly becoming a part of us.
– Philip Beesley
Beesley theorizes that mobile devices are becoming extensions of ourselves, and therefor should these mobile games continue to adapt into our movements and surroundings they may be able to create a greater scope for the magic circle and, in doing so, let us turn it inside out and utilize this ‘playing’ mentality into the various structures and systems all around us.
In the coming century the way we live and learn, work
and relax and communicate and create is going to more
and more resemble how we play games. Gaming literacy
offers valuable model for what it will mean to become
literate, educated and successful in this playful world.
-Martha Ladley
What does the current scope of mobile platform games have with regard creating interaction or community between users in everyday life, circa Pokemon Go and Ingress? Is it just within the game play or does it translate outside of the magic circle?
Are mobile games currently utilizing the standards of system, play and design that could reshape our way of understanding, teaching and redefining the structures all around us? What ability would game design programs, such as at Gamelab, have on younger minds to re-evaluate social, political or mechanical structures and possibly change them?
How much ability do games have to make users break and re-mold the rules or even the games structure, as proposed by Ladley? And if it were possible would this translate into our everyday lives and would that consciously or unconsciously get put into practice by us?
For people creating game systems, playtesting, modifying the rules, and playtesting again, are all examples of how games naturally and powerfully lend themselves to systems literacy. Can this translate into refiguring, modifying or playing through other systems in our world such as political systems, educational systems or economic systems? Is there really a correlation or should the education system adapt game literacy to purposefully teach children how to configure and redefine systems?
Bibliography
Beesley, Philip and Ladley, Martha. Mobile Nation Riverside Architectural Press, Canada, 2008.
Paul Gee, James. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, , 2003.
Online Articles
http://www.itworldcanada.com/article/mobile-nation-people-and-their-devices/4552
http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/iperg/
http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/ivy4evr/
http://vv.arts.ucla.edu/AI_Society/manovich.html
http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/day-of-the-figurines/
Video Game Footage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxfRIg9SMV0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uugoIC5sfQs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCxS4MGMEgQ
http://thesilentage.com/blog/2014/01/making-backgrounds/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT3HxcZDLYo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gete61IxkPo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAbj6uL_PA4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92rYjlxqypM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sj2iQyBTQs
Tue, November 3 2015 » future cinema 2015 » No Comments » Author: Caitlin
Emily Dickinson video game
here is the slightly demoralizing piece I mentioned in class: “Video game designers at a recent conference were given the challenge of developing a game about the poet Emily Dickinson. We hear about some of the games they came up with.
Guest:
Jason Della Rocca, executive director, International Game Developer’s Association”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4529990
Sun, November 1 2015 » future cinema 2015 » No Comments » Author: Caitlin
The Ecstasy of Communication – Summary
Baudrillard in “The Ecstasy of Communication” fears that our grip on the tangible is waning. “There is no longer a system of objects,” our language of signs is changing and “simultaneously it is disappearing” (11).
Our Lacanian identification or the relationship that an individual has to the objects around them in shaping their identity – with its concrete set of signs and meanings – is giving way “to a screen and a network” (12). His anxiety with new modes of communication lies with it belonging to a new set of language and an intangible space where the object only functions on a surface level: “the smooth and functional surface of communication” (12). Baudrillard uses the example of television, which dates the piece, but nevertheless, the ideas that he presents lend themselves directly to issues surrounding new media and communication tools.
The threat of media is that we no longer just live in the objective world but now have virtual selves to manage on the global network. The object is no longer fetishized; it is replaced by the thrill of a “potential tactic” or “the game of possibilities” (13). As mentioned last week in our discussions of the vector, and weeks past with VR and gaming, there is a thrill in the possibilities of these vast new spaces – or in the fact that we buy into the idea that they are vast.
Using Barthes and his discussion of the car as a springboard to show the shift from the fetishized object to one of mastery, he segues to “the stage at which it becomes an informing network” whereby the subject and its interface are “wired” to one another. It’s no longer about the object, or its function, but rather the pure interaction with it – the play between the subject and its object in “an uninterrupted interface.” (14).
This new level of communication, like all systems or what he calls “ecological niches,” come with their own set of new language and rules – ones that if not followed could end in catastrophe. Yet, this new language, or in terms of commoditization, this “market” comes with a set discourse that only a certain percentage of people working closely with it understand. The fear of the unknown echoes to the naïve realist camp, and allows those within in the know to help in the construction of the myth or marketing surrounding new technology. Much of the construct of this myth comes from our collective social memory, the make up of the science fiction genre or our future gazing. Now that myths are becoming realities, and metaphors are obsolete, we’ve entered “the beginning of the era of hyperreality” (16).
By allowing science fiction to manifest itself in our everyday lives, Baudrillard feels that it has changed the dynamic of public and private space in the ways in which this technology and its mobility allows for the two to blur. We are now “terminals or multiple networks” (16). Now “one’s private living space is conceived of as a receiving and operating area, as a monitoring screen endowed with telematic power, that is to say, with the capacity to regulate everything by remote control” (16-7). Moreover, our spaces are combining and miniaturizing themselves into microcosmic metropolitans. “One could conceive of simulating leisure or vacation situations in the same way that flight is simulated for pilots” (17).
According to Baudrillard, the combination and miniaturization of technology and spaces of life has rendered the human body useless, now that our behaviour is primarily a series of small movements of the hands – clicking over buttons and keys. If anything is left of the human body it is the brain and its “operational definition of being” – our own miniaturized self – the warehouse of the infinite and first hard drive. The focus on miniature power centres correlates with our city centres, battling urban sprawl by building up rather than out. However, he claims that public spaces are now becoming merely an “ephemeral connecting space” centred on consumer consumption: “huge screens upon which moving atoms, particles and molecules are refracted” (20).
As public space now only represents a place of transit and exchange, and private space is being interpolated by the public through this miniaturized and yet vast new network of possibilities, what happens to time? Although Baudrillard calls it “vast leisure time” I would argue that we’ve merely found more tasks to fill it with. While the efficiency of machines has shorted our work week, and in some ways have made our lives more manageable, our hyperreality comes at the cost of desiring speed to all aspects of our lives, and our need to be constantly filled with a task at hand.
Shifting back to his discussion of television, Baudrillard comments that private space is disappearing along with public space. By blurring the two spaces with technology has aided in the dematerialization of spectacle or secret (20). Television brings “[t]he entire universe… on your home screen. This is a microscopic pornography, pornographic because it is forced, exaggerated, just like the close-up of sexual acts in a porno film” (21). As extreme as that claim may be, he states that the lack of distance between public and private, this “imaginary protector” is a threat or an obscenity. “Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more illusion, when every-thing become immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication” (21-2). Without the separation of the private, “[w]e no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene” (22). The obscenity manifests itself in the “all-too-visible” where it “no longer contains a secret and is entirely soluble in information and communication” (22).
Coming back to the idea of miniature, the obscenity of commodity is in its abstract packaging. The small, lightweight, and formal aesthetic offers up its essence immediately. It fetishizes the mode of communication rather than its message (23). The “promiscuity” of communication is “one of a super saturation, an endless harassment, an extermination of interstitial space” (24). Suddenly space is no longer free, but on sale for advertisement and bombardment; he states, “I am no longer capable of knowing what I want.” The commodification creates a schizophrenic identity “with the emergence of an immanent promiscuity and the perpetual interconnection of all information and communication networks” (27). Yet instead of being in a state of confusion or a loss of touch with reality, it is the “total proximity to and total instantaneousness with things” that creates this schizophrenic or fragmented state (27).
Moreover, he quickly wraps up in his first chapter by saying that through the ecstasy of communication, the distinction of public and private space has been altered by our new networks which result in an individual not being able to “produce himself as a mirror” or an identity, but rather a hub of several different networks (27).
Sun, November 1 2015 » Future Cinema » 2 Comments » Author: City Ninja
How to Do Things With Video Games by Bogus
Mark Mungo
In his introduction to How to Do Things with Videogames, Ian Bogost outlines a number of positions taken on media and video games, and his take on them in general.
Bogost outlines the views of Nicholas Carr, specifically his book, The Shallows who viewed emerging technologies such as the internet as harmful to our ways of life, and detrimental to the supposedly reasonable and imaginative minds that arose after the Renaissance and into the Industrial Revolution. Immediately I identify this as an incredibly limited, romanticized view of Western Culture, during an age of endless wars over religion and nationalism, and general disregard towards global civilizations.
Bogost contrasts Carr’s position with Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus, in which Shirky argues that the internet allows for social movement, citing a Korean pop band’s influence in organizing a rally against US Beef.
Bogost asks the question of who is right, and like all academics, striving to move the study forward, posits that neither are entirely right or wrong.
In his support, Bogost cites the work of Mathew Battles, who identifies the “skimming and dipping” as having ancient origins, and calling out Carr for believing not only that the internet introduced this to society, but that literary writing was the only true form of written language.
Bogost goes on to critique Shirky’s admiration for a k-pop led rally against beef… for hopefully obvious reasons. Shirky himself didn’t care about the message, just that it was being communicated through the internet.
Bogost poses his own theory, that “technology neither saves nor condemns us. It influences us, of course, changing how we perceive, conceive of, and interact with our world.”
Bogost argues against media duality (it is positive or negative), and instead posits that a medium should be studied for its spectrum of uses. In it’s most general sense, video games allows users to take on the simulated role of another, from being an urban planner in The Sims, to a stealth ninja in Ninja Gaiden.
Bogost elaborates at length on media ecology, a mode of criticism that views media not in isolation, but in relation to others and society as a whole. He uses Neil Postman’s example of how a caterpillar removed from a forest changes the forest itself.
Okay, A more relevant example is that of Television’s effect on America in the mid 20th century. It was not the old america, plus television, but a new society, where television was not just present, but had an impact on every home, school, church, business, and political campaign.
Bogost goes on to address McLuhan’s “medium is the message”, and though he agrees with it, explains that the message is also the message. What this boils down to is that video games are worth studying as a medium, in general, but also on it’s specific uses, to better understand. Identifying this as media microecology, Bogost suggests that understanding how the specific uses of a medium might give us a better understanding of its spectrum, and therefore indicate its usefulness and impact on society.
Imagine the ways in which society is structured around television at present, and how the internet has created shifts with politicians tweeting, online classes, etc. Bogost later on will go through how video games, in it’s broader definition is changing, and already changed, the way we live drastically.
Bogost posits that the range of capabilities of interactive simulations are wide, and widely used, and moving away from the narrow minded approach to video games, like Carr’s to writing, will do better justice to what Video games deserve. In his book, he demonstrates that video games are a form of simulated realities, with purposes of a huge range, that have already drastically changed modern society, the sign of any great medium. He believes that further study, and a removal from the concept of video games solely for entertainment, or as a medium used by a distinct culture for specific purposes, will push the abilities of the medium further.
Tue, October 27 2015 » future cinema 2015 » No Comments » Author: Mark Mungo
Notes on Game Design as Narrative Architecture from First Person
Sarah Voisin
- the biggest problem that crops up in game theory is a lack of codified terminology, and a gulf between academic terminology and the terminology used by game users
-this book is organized around the debate of narratology versus ludology; that is, are games texts that can be read as such, or are they something closer to pure play. If you read the Ergodic Texts reading you have a good idea of where the ludologists are coming from.
-Jenkins is responding to attempts to map traditional narrative structures onto video games. Hypertext narratives are too avante garde for a commercial audience, and more classical forms like film criticism miss the mark. We shouldn’t be applying these ways of reading to video games, but there are things to be learned from them.
-onto this argument Jenkins places a few caveats; yes, not all games have narratives and they are fun but we are lacking in the type of vocabulary needed to explore their nuances. Many games do have “narrative aspirations” that rely on the tropes and idioms of “genre” and action entertainment to guide the player, so we need to understand video gaming’s relation to narrative in order to move forward. The future of games falls in neither direction and nor should we encourage it to do so, dammit Jim this is art and we need to encourage experimentation for it to live and breath. A good game is based on more than just its story, and again, work into critical language is needed in order to talk more productively about video games. And finally the longest; games aren’t going to tell stories in the same way that other media tell stories, which is why you can’t map old narrative models onto them. The ludology argument is to concerned with pushing games as far away from their “cinema envy” as possible. In doing so they operate with restrictive models and understandings of narrative, typically limited to classical linear Western storytelling. They also tend to focus on whether the game as a whole is telling a story.
-Jenkins posits rethinking these issues in the context of spatiality, to move away form linear storytelling and toward “narrative architecture”
Spatial Stories ad Environmental Storytelling
-“Game designers don’t simply tell stories, they design worlds and sculpt spaces.” The argument here is that games, even in a classical non electronic sense start with a sense of space, a geography, whether it be a game board or a dungeon. To talk about game narrative we need to talk about game space. And I don’t know which reviewers Jenkins has been watching but there are at the very least a large chunk of them that focus on the story, its why we’re having this argument in the first place.
-positions games in the tradition of “spacial stories” ie travel narratives like the Illiad and The lord of the Rings.
-games already tap literary genres that are most invested in spatial storytelling and the characters are sometimes stripped to faceless guides.
-cites Don Carson who worked on Disney attractions saying that the space of an experience must reinforce any narrative you might want to tell. Carson specifically uses the example of drawing on the audience’s understanding of pirates and reinforcing that with every sense you can.
-environmental storytelling creates immersive narrative in at least one of four ways; evoking preexisting notions from the player, as a stage where the narrative events take place, by providing narrative information in the mise-en-scene, or “providing resources for emergent narratives”
Evocative Spaces
-games can evoke narrative using elements that a player is already familiar with. For example, you won’t get the plot of Star Wars by playing a Star Wars game, you’re playing a Star Wars game because you’re already familiar with Star Wars, and where the game sits is within a larger narrative ecosystem. Sometimes I wonder if Timothy Zhan is angry over the new movie.
Enacting Stories
-spacial stories are often dismissed as episodic, uncontrolled, loose, lacking in authorial craft. They do not conform to the traditional Hero’s Journey
-Jenkins argues that narrative can enter a game in the form of micronarratives, the best definition he offers being “short narrative units that intensify our emotional engagement”, using the infamous Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin as an example.
-however in this context the importance of t an overall structures / narrative for these scenes to support is downplayed. Rather, a game is an overall construct that bends to the actions of the player, based on a vocabulary of possible actions (even though in about 99% of cases, the player starts and ends in the same place no matter what. No matter how much time you spend fishing in Orcarina of Time, the game still opens and closes with the same two scenes).
-gaming is a performance centred genre, and exposition interrupts that performance. Jenkins thinks of game design as a balancing act between these elements
Embedded Narratives
-Jenkins points out that nonlinear storytelling has become pretty popular, asking the reader to keep in mind the Russian formalist distinctions between fabula, the “raw material of a story” according to Wikipedia, and plot, the way the story is organized / told / structured / made interesting.
-it isn’t necessary for the maker of a game to be so controlling over the information the player receives, because unlike a filmmaker they are not constrained by the temporal structure of the film, they have this big ol’ game space to play with
-they are in a sense designing an unstructured narrative space (the world) filled with narratively relevant pieces for the player to explore, and the prestructured narrative they will be unlocking.
-he uses the flashback as an example of how mise-en-scene can convey plot information; the game doesn’t usually pull the player back in time, but they can return to a changed space and witness the consequences of off screen events, or be queued into recalling past events (think of the use of the Citadel location in Mass Effect).
-Melodrama is a familiar genre to look to that uses the mise-en-scene to give the reader clues as to characters internal states, and is a good place to look to in visualizing what he’s talking about
Emergent Narratives
-sandbox games in the style of the Sims as opposed to Minecraft; narrative possibilities rather than building blocks
-using the Sims as an example; you can create characters certain traits and put them into conflict with one another
-In conclusion the design of game spaces has narratological consequences
Questions and Things to Think About
-what elements are most important to you as a player?
-how does spaciality disrupt the linear nature of time
-what kind of alternative modes of storytelling do video games support
-how a player interacts, or is allowed to interact, with the narrative architecture is an important part of the design that Jenkins glosses over in what is more a discussion of commedia dell’arte. Is the question balance or is it how we mesh performance and exposition. There are a lot of games where the how is a lot more interesting than the what.
-how in your experience has the player’s use of a game differentiated from the intention, or the reading of the intention that Jenkins presents. Do you play the Sims for a sense of narrative or do you play it to see what happens when you lock someone in a doorless room and then set it on fire.
And also a ten minute video that gives a quick explanation of the narratology / ludology debate that Jenkins is referring to. With sources!
Sun, October 25 2015 » future cinema 2015 » No Comments » Author: Sarah Voisin