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 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 'interface elements' in the further reading of this text. As Eva Nieuwdorp puts it: "Applied to digital games, the interface is invariably made equivalent to either the hardware (controllers and the like) or the software (visual elements of the game world) that generate human-computer interaction (HCI)." (nieuwdorp third page) This text will focus mainly on the "visual elements" by means of seeing them from a prespective of the interface.

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 lets the user know that he is being hurt by an enemy. In the case of this event, 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. These kinds of effects are usually employed to heighten the immersive character of the game by introducing a - for the gameplay necessary - interface element into the game in a way that is believable in the realm of the game. Believable in this sense does not mean 'realistic' but more something like 'consistent', as every game creates its own semantic realm the player has to submit to, and in which certain rulesets define the elements belonging in it and the elements that are to be revoked. (vgl/see Nieuwdorp text page 5 and 8) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_person_perspective

Therefore seeing the currently selected weapon on screen held by the avatar's hands is less of a barrier to the immersive potential of a game than having a two dimensional icon of the selected weapon somewhere at the border of the screen (which is also common practice in these games). Therefore having a representation of the avatar's arms wielding weapons can clearly be seen as an interface element, provided the representation of the weapon switches to another type when the player switches weapons in the game.

This particular visual interface element is in fact so popular that there is even artistic works made on its basis. Aram Bartholl's work 'First Person Shooter' for example is a pair of cheap cardboard spectacles with an image of arms holding an AK 47 Kalaschnikow rifle taken from the famous multiplayer egoshooter 'Counterstrike' applied to the plastic lenses. By wearing these the user is able to see real life through the eyes of a 'Counterstrike' avatar, bringing the virtual into the 'real' by means of cardboard and (probably) an inkjet printed foil. http://datenform.de/fps.html

The mix up of semantic layers, in this case the virtual layer of the game 'Counterstrike' and the real world is actually something very common to gaming itself, Bartholl's work only manifests this seemingly paradoxical state of being in two layers of reality at the same time in a way that makes it more transparent to the recipient. This layer on top of reality that is introduced by the game is often referred to as 'the magic circle'. "(...) The term magic circle is appropriate here because there is in fact something genuinely magical that happens when a game begins (...) Within the magic circle special meanings accrue and cluster around objects and behaviors. in effect, a new reality is created, defined by the rules of the game and inhabited by its players" (Salen and Zimmermann 2004, 95-96). While the described effects of this semantic realm of the game may be correct, Eva Nieuwdorp and especially Marinka Copier challenge the term of the magic cirlce because it suggests a concrete boundary that is to be crossed and also because it supports the binary notion that a person can only be inside the circle or outside of the circle. They deem this explanation insufficient because for example in Nieuwdorps text the question of pervasive games, played in real life but with another semantic layer on top, consisting of the game's rules, is being adressed. The parallel handling of these layers or 'circles' is the essence of a pervasive game, enabling the players to inject the imagined world of the game into reality. Switching roles, or layers is therefore nothing magical. We do it all the time, (vgl. Copier Seite8) even when not in a game context. A police officer for example has to be constantly aware of officially being a representative of the state and it's power to enforce law and at the same time deal with being a private person having individual needs and wishes. "people are crossing it all the time in both directions, carrying their behavioral assumptions and attitudes with them. As a result, the valuation of things in cyberspace becomes enmeshed in the valuation of things outside cyberspace" (Castranova 2005, 150)

So the boundaries are as permeable as they can be diffuse and we cross them casually all the time while actually being able to stay in multiple parallel realms at the same time. But how do we keep track of all those layers and involved semantic rulesets enabling us to modify our behavior accordingly?

Maybe it makes sense to quickly rewind to this text's beginning. In the introductory part there was a short passage about the lights in the scene and the effect they caused, the lensflare. Maybe you noticed it right away, maybe you did not, but: assuming that in an ego-shooter we take the perspective of the Avatar there should be no lensflare, since it is a physical phenomenon that can only occur in lens-based image production and not in human eyes. So either our character has mechanical, glass-based lenses as eyes or this effect is just incorrectly placed into the game. Obviously it does not matter that much because it is a videogame and has no claim to be a truthful, physically correct simulation (or maybe you are a lens-eyed android) but there is something to this paradoxical effect that makes it worth mentioning. The lensflare does not appear by random chance in lots of more action centered videogames, especially war games. It is a visual interface element we mostly know from war and action movies with Transformers as best example of over-indulgence in the use of this visual effect. Therefore if it is repeated in a videogame it serves as a visual identifier of the theme, the world of the game. It helps us build up expectations, and accept the semantic realm the game creates as consistent, as 'real' in its own terms.

This phenomenon is very similar to the way reality tv works. In the book 'Reality TV' Mark Andrejevic writes about the TV-Show 'Survivor' and its paradoxical state of being on the hand a reality show about survival in nature without technological means and on the other hand a multi-million dollar enterprise produced with a staff of hundreds and the best recording equipment available. "The seemingly self-contradictory tension in the notion of the "illusion of relity" recurs at several levels in the 'Survivor' series. (...) Making reality seem real, it turns out, requires the very latest in high tech audio and video equipment.(...) This -budget production process perfectly summarizesthe paradox of "manipulated authenticity": we can imagine a cast member , clad in a loincloth and clutching a hand-carve spear heading into the water to forage for dinner, followed by a gaggle of photgraphers and production assistants, shooting with hand-held cameras, dollies and special underwater cmeras to catch the action. The production crew never appeared in the versions of the show edited for broadcast but remained behind the scenes-allowing viewers to adopt the position of the voyeur catching the action in all its "immediate" authenticity." (197 Adrejevic) It seems as if it is not about 'reality' at all but about 'authenticity'. But what makes 'authentic' so different from 'real'? Wikipedia says that authenticity "refers to the truthfulness of origins, attributions, commitments, sincerity, devotion, and intentions" and in a philosophical context it even says "Authenticity is a technical term in existentialist philosophy, and is also used in the philosophy of art and psychology. In philosophy, the conscious self is seen as coming to terms with being in a material world and with encountering external forces, pressures and influences which are very different from, and other than, itself. Authenticity is the degree to which one is true to one's own personality, spirit, or character, despite these pressures." By applying this to computer games or reality television one could say that the authenticity of their constructed realms lies exactly in the non-truthfulness to nature (or reality in a whole), in the ways they differ from it. "(...)the promise of reality TV is not that of access to unmediated reality (the positivist promise) so much as it is the promise of access to the reality of mediation." (andrejevic p.215). So therefore the lensflare, while it may be physically incorrect in the real world only underpins the consistency of the game's mediation. Andrejevic also talks about a "fetishization of mediation itself" (same). While states it in a reality TV context, this is also true for many computer games which are advertised by their newer and better graphic engines, their improved gameplay and "amazingly realistic effects" (City of Villains, a game centered around superheroes and villains). The same goes for the two biggest milestones in console gaming since 2006, the Wii and the Kinect. The great novelty was not a particular game or genre of games itself but the the new interface mechanisms invented by the console companies. When the Kinect came out everybody was interested in the new interface and not the content of the games that utilized it. It was all about new ways of interaction with the machine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authenticity_(philosophy) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authenticity

Explain Immersion

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x lensflare - explain - perspective

x 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.

a - 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.

Starting from pervasive games: Two layers: game and real. They have to be negotiated at all times. Then Marinka Copier text. Not only pervasive games but all games have the merging of the layers. No game is so immersive that it eradicates the real. Back to Nieuwdorp text: Layers are semiotic domains, rulesets of sorts. Drawing the circle further with the reality tv text: watching tv is also a layer, as is watching a genre like reality tv. stacking of layers. juggling the rulesets at all times. therefore it is all about handling the semiotic domains, which can be found everywhere where there is communication but nowadays primarily in media. therefore media layers and layers are not about contetn but about the rules of the domains. content is interpreted differently according to the domain, so the focus has to be on the rulesets. the mediation is the message.

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Older Parts

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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'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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