Video Games
sales in the U.S in 2008 totaled over $21 billion
Early computer and video
games were developed five
decades ago running on
platforms such as
oscilloscopes, university
mainframes and EDSAC
computers. Tennis for two
(1958), Spacewar (1962),
Pong (1972)
Oscilloscope Games
Not photorrealistic
Hypermediated
Called attention to the interface
Frenetic pace
Film
Crossover from video games to other cultural
industries like Hollywood (i.e. Final Fantasy, Doom,
Lara Croft, etc.)
Film Directors are going to gaming: John Singleton
(Boyz N the Hood), Bryan Singer (X-Men), John
McTiernan (Die Hard), et al.
Video Games like Grand
Theft Auto have been the
focus of news media (i.e. 60
Minutes, Guardian, NY
Times, etc.).
It is not for kids anymore. The average age of the
video game player is 30
female game characters:
wise old women (fantasy),
objects waiting for male
rescue or fetichized
subjects of male gaze
Narratology
Literary theory and narratology have been helpful to
understand cybertexts and videogames
Narratology
Narratological approaches
used
Aristotelian Poetics
Russian formalism
poststructuralism
Videogames
Stories?
Games?
Narratology
Ludology
Roger Caillois
founded the College of Sociology as a reaction to the
Surrealist movement that was dominant in the 1920s
sought to move away from surrealism's focus on the
fantasy life of the unconscious and focus instead more on
the power of ritual and other aspects of communal life.
Caillois left France in 1939 for Argentina. During the war
he was active in fighting the spread of Nazism in Latin
America. He was responsible for introducing authors such
as J.L. Borges or Alejo Carpentier to the European public.
Play
occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy,
ingenuity, skill, and money.
a free and voluntary activity that occurs in a pure
space, isolated and protected from the rest of life.
Play
1. free
2. separate
3. uncertain
4. unproductive
5. regulated
6. fictive
Types of Game
ludus are games containing a rule that specifies a
winning condition while
paidia are play-activities with rules but no winning
condition
Matrix of Games
agon games are games based on direct competition
between players. agon is the ancient greek word meaning
contest or challenge.
alea are games that based on chance, games that we
consider forms of gambling. Latin name for the game of
dice
mimicry refers to role-playing games, such as "playing
house".
Mimêsis in Aristotle’s Poetics is translated as
make-believe”. Mimicry is incessant invention.
ilinx (vertigo) games centered on the pleasures of
movement. Greek for whirlpool.
Videogame as Narrative
1) all literature is to some extent indeterminate,
nonlinear, and different for every reading
2) the reader has to make choices in order to make
sense of the text
3) a text cannot really be nonlinear because the
reader can read it only one sequence at a time,
anyway.
Ergodic Literature
nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to
traverse the text
from the Greek ergon & hodos, "work" and "path."
a text can never be reduced to a stand-alone
sequence of words. There will always be context,
convention, contamination -Espen Aarseth
Pacman--------------Fully two-dimensional
Completely Opaque
Nothing behind or beyond the interface
Immediacy of the experience can come only through
acknowledging the medium
Videogames
Repourposed TV set
Fantasy RG
Books
Videogames
Photorrealistic attention to
detail
Myst remediates several
media on several levels
Antiquated prose and
poetry
Cinematic POV
Sex & Violence
Computer games attacked
because they remediate
immediate media (TV &
film)
Books are not attacked
Hierarchy of Immediacy
Text (book)
Graphic (comic book)
Photography
TV
Film
Cybersex or teledildonics
hypermediacy
Red Light Center
Second Life
Reciprocal Remediation
Computer graphics
refashion photography
Photography refashions
computer graphics
Pedro Meyer
Desire for immediacy
Every photo is a failed
attempt
Digital photography
complicates and mocks the
desire for immediacy
If photographs are images, and films are moving
images, then video games are actions
computerized visuality is no longer about light but is
instead about space.
in film, the subjective perspective is marginalized and
used primarily to effect a sense of alienation,
detachment, fear, or violence.
first-person perspective holds forth the possibility of
action that makes it such an uncomfortable technique
in cinema, but such a natural arrangement in gaming
since gaming is an action and not an image, realism
should be imagined on different terms.
a better kind of realism for gaming would follow the
model of neorealism in film in which a film's
neorealisticness depends on its narrative and not its
form (e.g., its degraded style)
an index for the very dominance of informatic
organization and how it has entirely overhauled,
revolutionized, and recolonized the function of
identity
the opposite of history, not because the game
fetishizes the imperial perspective, but because the
diachronic details of lived life are replaced by the
synchronic homogeneity of code pure and simple
“Godard’s cinema, broadly speaking, is within the
modern tradition established by Brecht and Artaud,
in their different ways, suspicious of the power of
the arts- and the cinema, above all- to ‘capture’ its
audience without apparently making it think, or
changing it.”
- Peter Wollen
Counter cinema
1.
Narrative straightforwardness (transitivity) vs narrative
intransitivity (gaps, elipses, digressions, episodic constructions,
disjuncture, excess).
2.
Identification vs Estrangement
3.
Transparency vs Foregrounding
4.
Single vs Multiple Diegesis
5.
Closure vs Aperture
6.
Pleasure vs unpleasure
7.
Fiction vs Reality