Fingerkrieg - The ideology game

For screenshots and an explanation of the game, see Fingerkrieg.

Description

Ideology renders things invisible.

"What is software , " Chun writes, "if not the very effort of making something explicit, or making something intangible visible , while at the same time rendering the visible (such as the machine) invisible ?"

One can see the computer interface as a window. Not to another world as ie. with paintings. But to the machine. Windows that seem to get more and more intuitive, natural and realistic. They try to obfuscate the inner workings of the machine, in order to make them easier, faster and more practical in use. There seems to be a trade-off, of knowledge versus speed: interfaces require less knowledge of the system in favour of speed.

"There was a lot of thought about natural metaphors. It started with your hand. If your finger is swiping back and forth, and you're moving the view accordingly, that in some ways is mimicking [real-life interactions with] physical objects." Ganatra

As interfaces are there to render themselves invisible, they make you forget the window is there at all. It is like the realist painters: paintings should be as close to (the visible) reality as possible. In painting a counter movement arose: modernistic painters tried to shift the focus to the frame itself. One might compare this to glitch art: by disrupting computer images, one becomes aware of the 'material' in use.

In Fingerkrieg, we oppose the traditional click interface with the new swiping interface. As swiping seems to be more natural, more gradual, we believe it hides even more of the system than the binary click interfaces do.

An ideology is often not as much about its contents as it is about its presentation. Many aspects of it, are like 'empty containers'; open to all possible meaning. Famous examples include the Swastika and Beethoven's Ode To Joy - Soviet Union, Nazi's and Chinese, extreme right in South Africa, and extreme left Gonzalo all used Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

Fingerkrieg incorporates similar hollow phrases to arouse commitment for the player's cause: defending their hidden ideology.