User:Grrrreat/research/essay trim2

Lensflare Paradox

You find yourself on the roof of a train, shackles on your hands in front of you. No hint of where they came from as you reach the end of the cart and jump feet first through a window. A guy with a gun falls, you grab the weapon, a crosshair appears in the middle of the screen in the exact same moment as another opponent with a gun tries to find some cover. You shoot him before he can hide. The second one tries to run, but you shoot him in the back before he can get to the end of the train cart. Now there's a short pause. You notice a beer ad in the train, and maybe you can also see the strange speckles that seem to be in front of your eyes, blurry but fixed, not moving, reacting to the light. And as you walk through the corridor and come closer to the ceiling lights a lens flare appears. You reach the next part of the train and there is new bad guys to shoot.

This how the first minute of 'Battlefield 3' plays, a first person shooter set in a fictional war you participate in as an US elite soldier killing thousands of enemies during the course of the game. It is a title out of the very popular genre of 'ego-shooters', a category of games heavily relying on the first person perspective, or also called 'ego-perspective', which makes the player see the game world through the eyes of an avatar. These titles, hence the name, also usually involve a fair amount of gunfire directed at virtual bad guys with rounds of ammunition discharged putting whole army regiments to shame.

The popular discourse and media attention around ego-shooter games is due to the fact that the majority of them seem to consist only of sequences of mentioned gunfire including humongous amounts of bloodshed which usually come with the territory. Therefore, unsurprisingly, there is big debate about the social impact of these games and wether or wether not these virtual reenactments of violence should be banned. But that is a discourse in which this text will not be engaged. It should rather focus on the genre-specific characteristics of creating a consistent and believable gaming experience and take this as a starting point in trying answer to the thesis that there is such a thing as a culturally constructed visual vocabulary which serves as an interface for understanding visual media besides their content (indexicality).

To approach this question it might be helpful to first stay in the realm of ego-shooters and divide their world into two parts, appearance & mechanics and content. While the narrative content is, broadly speaking, very much exchangeable with only a few titles exceeding the scheme of 'you are some kind of hero/soldier caught in a war between good and evil and it is your duty to help the good triumph with the help of your righteousnes creed and the dexterity of your mouse-hand', and also often neglected due to the fact that most titles are ultimately developed to be multiplayer experiences in the long run, the appearance and mechanics of these games may be similar but definitely not the same. Actually things like graphics and effects are some of the most discussed topics among players before the release of a new title. Fans even write reviews or make videos comparing the indivual (graphics) engines to each other, finding out which one is better. (http://www.g4tv.com/)The criteria for selecting which is superior are diverse, and differ from user to user, but a majority of war-game players seem to discern between more 'real' games and games sacrificing 'reality' for improved playability.

As dominicanboy100 puts it: "i stiil saying for ever ever bad com 2 (bad company 2) is the best war ga,e.. but battlefield is the best real war game ever made... so if u love to be a sniper recon class on bad com 2 if u scoping long distance u goin to see the picture will be still solid no breath i mean u dont goin to move when u scopin ur enemies... but try to scope on battlefield 3 u goin to see that really suck cuase the picture going to be flashing a lot.. that really crap that game is good but sucks lol the guys in multiplayer are really ugly man the way the move are really ugly... nothing compare like bad com 2 that a game lol" http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/710886/battlefield-3-vs-battlefield-bad-company-2-comparison-video-frostbite-engine-meets-frostbite-2/

A famous example for a game trying to be as close to reality as possible was Operation Flashpoint, putting off most experienced egoshooter players but pleasing a small fanbase which is still active 11 years after its release in 2001. The game did not utilize HUD elements, crosshairs or other obvious interface elements except in situations where it was hard to avoid, such as subtitles in cutscenes etc. , which made it also very hard to comlete the misiion objectives. http://www.dedoimedo.com/games/operation_flashpoint.html

http://ezinearticles.com/?Battlefield-3-Destroys-the-Competition&id=6635044

Break down into content (narration, index) and appearance, binary view.

content- exchangeable framework: pretty much the same throughout all of the games.

break: immersiveness, gaming as handling multiple layers of reality (semantic realms) at the same time. not just in pervasive games, gaming is always juggling between realities.

switch to reality shows. content exchangeable framework important

same thing. we know that reality shows are not real, yet we still watch them and feel the thrill. paradoxical again.

mediation!

why th lensflare now? because we know it from war movies and it tells us we are in the right world for this kind of action.

the mediation is the interface for decoding the content. visual vocabulary as interface.

mc luhan: "the medium is the message" > "the mediation is the message"

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From here on only rough draft anymore:

- How to achieve the effect

- Not real but Unreal!

The interface of pervasive games is strictly virtual by creating a second layer on top of reality. In this semantic realm the players can move and interact besides the first layer, reality. But they have to be conscious about both layers at the same time. Generally in computer games this is different. While they create a second virtual realm, it is not so much of a layer on top of reality but more an artifical world in which a player has to worry about the real world only very little because the machine and their input and output mechanisms are stationary. But still the semantic realms have to created and appropriated in order to make the players understand the game. This goes as far as games using interface elements and effects found in previous or similar, well-selling games just because the players are used to them already, not questioning their actual function or impact on the game mechanics.

- Where else can these phenomena be found? Draw a wider circle, from micro to macro.

War Movies: short shutter speed to get gritty, hyper-real images without blur. Insinuates the alertness and adrenaline rush of the combatants. smoke signifies uncertainty.

Cinema: dominant cultural form (de mul). Narrative. War movies again. Therefore symbolic forms used to mediate parts of the narrative become visual vocabulary, which again is found in games. The form of its mediation is being shaped.

Possible Conclusions:

1.It's the mediation that makes it 'authentic', not the content. What does this mean for these kinds of games? The format does not rely on the actual story? Like reality TV? Reality TV can be bent in every direction (Brooker, Screenwipe) as long as it 'looks' authentic it will work. So the mediation has to set it apart from the codes/interface? Of regular movies, series etc.

2.It is a semantic construction. The symbolic forms and the effects are the interface besides the obvious 'game interface'. They result from an evolutionary process producing a refined vocabulary of our understanding of a certain 'theme', only partly consisting of realistic representations of the theme, like war for instance, but mostly consisting of the mediated and charged up forms of it communicated mostly via films and games or also books, music or whatever media are close to the theme.. Therefore in order for a game to be real it has to attain the reality of this mediated form and not the actual reality.

Mediation makes us understand the 'real'/the it/the thing

One of the very few games that tried to be a really realistic war game, annoying most gamers and pleasing a very small fanbase (consisting of actual soldiers or former recruits?). http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Flashpoint_(Computerspiel)

Source:

 "The Pervasive Interface", by Eva Nieuwdorp  Jos de Mul, "The work of art in the age of digital recombination" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlefield_3#Plot http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Btwnh-hbrSs

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You find yourself on the roof of a train, shackles on your hands in front of you. No hint of where they came from as you reach the end of the cart and jump feet first through a window. A guy with a gun falls, you grab the weapon, a crosshair appears in the middle of the screen in the exact same moment as another opponent with a gun tries to find some cover. You shoot him before he can hide. The second one tries to run, but you shoot him in the back before he can get to the end of the train cart. Now there is a short pause. You notice a beer ad in the train, and maybe you can also see the strange speckles that seem to be in front of your eyes, blurry but fixed, not moving, reacting to the light. And as you walk through the corridor and come closer to the ceiling lights a lens flare appears. You reach the next part of the train and there is new bad guys to shoot.

This how the first minute of 'Battlefield 3' plays, a first person shooter set in a fictional war you participate in as an US elite soldier killing thousands of enemies during the course of the game. It is a title out of the very popular genre of 'ego-shooters', a category of games heavily relying on the first person perspective, or also called 'ego-perspective', which makes the player see the game world through the eyes of an avatar. These titles, hence the name, also usually involve a fair amount of gunfire directed at virtual bad guys with rounds of ammunition discharged putting whole army regiments to shame.

The popular discourse and media attention around ego-shooter games is due to the fact that the majority of them seem to consist only of sequences of aforementioned gunfire including humongous amounts of bloodshed which usually come with the territory. Yet another remarkable feature to most of the titles of that genre lies not in the fact that they simulate violence from a first person perspective, but instead in how they try to reinforce the notion that the player sees the virtual world through the eyes of the avatar. The most basic tool for achieving this is obviously the mentioned first person perspective. It restricts the player's field of view to that of the avatar's and lets him discover the virtual world through its eyes. To make the experience even more 'believable' or consistent, a wide range of rules are implemented, which will be referred to as 'effects in the further reading of this text.

While the origins of first person games lie somewhere in the 70's with titles like Maze War and Spasim, the games that really made the genre popular were Wolfenstein 3D (1992) and Doom (1993) both developed by ID Software. These games set a lot of standards for ego shooters, especially in the way they tried to simulate the ego-prespective by means of several different effects. One of these effects is an interface element that let's the user know that he has been hurt by an enemy. When this event happens, the screen turns red for short span of time, simulating that the avatar is distracted by the pain inflicted to him. This particular effect is still around in a refined form and can be seen for example in the game 'Call of Duty - Modern Warfare 2'. In Modern Warfare 2 small hits are displayed as blurry red crescent shapes indicating the direction of the perpetrator but more intense hits result in having the screen splashed with virtual blood and grit reinforced by a thumping pulse sound suggesting that the avatar has been wounded severely.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_person_perspective

lensflare - explain - perspective

not 'real' but consistent

immersive games

juggling layers of reality - real real, game real , sub layers (theme of the game?) example from wow article. the magic circle is a soft boundary. statement.

all these layers have their own rules, they are semantic realms. the rules decide wether something makes sense or not in that realm and they influence each other.

not only games same in reality tv - it is important to keep the camera shaky and the acting bad. even though we know it is not real we take it for real.

paradoxical state resolved by the layers. in one layer it might be real, in another it might be not. the conscious knowledge of that layer induced by its mediation is the key for understanding it. the paradoxical state is not in the medium but in us, who are living in many realities at the same time. (shifting between) the individual mediation tells us with which layer of reality we have to deal with.

similar:foucaults concept of heterotopia has not shifted to the virtual only with the beginning of the digital revolution and the construction of virtual places/locations, but was always about semantic realms

while i do not know war first hand, i do know war from movies which are shot with cameras, hence i do know lensflares in the context of war therefore i accept them also in mediations of war scenarions in different media, even when they simulate the perspective of a human individual. The same goes for fast shutter speeds. First used in Private Ryan.