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.

Seeing a game through the eyes of a person, simulating the 'real' or natural perspective of a human is certainly a try to make the experience more realistic.

Yet to navigate and interact with the created worlds, classical interface elements are usually still necessary. But most developers of newer titles usually try to avoid having too many obvious on-screen interface elements, since they are suspected to work against the immersive nature of the game due to their 'artifical' nature. The word artifical in this context may sound strange since the whole virtual world in which an ego-shooter takes place are artifical, but in order for the virtual world to work it has to be 'real' in a sense that it has to be a consistent construction that consists only of parts which fit in to the semantic realm of the set theme of said virtual world.

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