erratic play

Mainstream videogames often shy away from interpretative ambiguity, finding commercial safety—and ludic economy—in well-worn generic personas and dramatic milieus. Terrorists, monsters, aliens, Nazis—these are the culturally uncomplicated enemies who, in stereotypical scenarios and archetypal narrative arcs, must be slain by the solitary hero (i.e., the player) on a quest to save the princess/community/world.

But what happens when a videogame uses people, places and contexts that aren’t so culturally clear-cut or historically remote? This is often the space in which indie and art-project videogames operate, offering through simulation various interpretations of real-life people, issues and events. When big-budget games do attempt to play with ongoing social conflicts, or with aspects of race, gender, class and other complex cultural representations, they do so at great financial risk and critical punishment. Certain titles justifiably earn our scorn for their cultural callowness: consider the first-person shooter Call of Juarez: The Cartel (Ubisoft, 2011), a game that twists the real horrors of cartel violence and human trafficking on the Mexican border into a racist, clichéd, fear-mongering narrative about white slavery. For a stirring takedown of the game—and remarkable analysis of the drug war in Ciudad Juárez—see the compelling Extra Credits review.

Bad-faith media objects abound, but perhaps the more challenging case for analysis would be a mainstream videogame that attempts to honestly—but humorously—replicate cultural tropes for playful purposes. For example, I’ve been playing Guacamelee! (2012), a Mexican-themed, platform-style game now available for download on the PlayStation Network. As the assistant editor of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies published at UCLA, I’m keenly attuned to issues of Chicano representation, and I was eager to play a mainstream game in which a Mexican milieu, regardless of abstraction and superficiality, permeates a game’s aesthetics.

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Like a crazy in-law haunting the attic, I occasionally post comments to UCLA’s Mediascape, an online journal where I served as a section editor and have published a variety of articles, video essays and interviews. Now I just bang on the journal’s ceiling from time to time and shout down unsolicited opinions from upstairs. My latest example (reproduced below) ponders how films these days are drawing upon video game visuals, and vice-versa—a trend I find both intriguing and disheartening. My comments come in response to an interesting conversation between two colleagues at UCLA on the subject of digital aesthetics and game spaces as depicted in Resident Evil: Retribution, The Expendables 2, and other recent action films. The conversation is published in the Mediascape blog, titled “What My Knees Knew: Cinematic Action, or Milla Jovovich in the Flesh,” and my comments are appened to the piece and reproduced below….

Thank you both for a wonderful discussion! I especially appreciated the restraint around attributing certain cinematic elements to video game aesthetics which, as a formal property, transcend audio-visual depiction and are inexorably tied up with their interactive mechanisms (core mechanics provided by design, input mechanics provided by interface controllers). Certainly some films engage/indulge in metaphors of video game visuality (graphically integrative tie-in opportunities abound for RE and other franchises)–just as Timecode and other films employ metaphors of database. But if these objects were actual databases and actual games (a la new media) we could manipulate them as such, and then judge their aesthetic qualities accordingly. Even if we leave aesthetics behind and talk about video game visuality or spatiality in cinema, we should probably strive for specificity; text-only Zork, abstract Tetris, and (near) photo-real Skyrim are all video games but, like painting, reflect radically different visual techniques, compositional concerns and, oftentimes, materials. Just trying to study videogame aesthetics in isolation is crazy-making enough to reach for a gun (talk about videogame violence….).

Returning to film, however, I’d throw 2009′s Gamer into the discussion, as it offers (and foregrounds by title) metaphors/signifiers of gamic activity (e.g., heads-up displays), while also thwarting through plot concerns and photo-real style an easy separation between ludic space/time/event and “real” space/time/event. Indeed, one might argue, pushing it a bit, that the film’s meta-commentary suggests that we may still phenomenally know the difference between game and reality, but we’re running out of (visual) evidence to distinguish them (perhaps this is a state en route to eXistenZ, in which even phenomenal difference evaporates). This “ludic effect” writ large–life is but a game–seems an emerging theme, if that’s the word for it, in Neveldine and Taylor’s work (see for example the conclusion of Crank for a delightfully perverse equivalence between character death and 8-bit extra lives). Perhaps the mutual love affair at the moment between games-wanting-to-be-films and films-wanting-to-be-games is reflective of the techno-industrial overlap between their productions, combined with market insecurities plaguing both media. But for those of us who love film, television, and video games equally but differently, here’s hoping media’s progenitors–despite their mutual infatuations, their incestuous appropriations—stop trying to make all their children the same.

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“Haunted” interfaces, sensor tricking, and cell trances are just a few of the gadget-enabled gestures cataloged in the fascinating online publication Curious Rituals: Gestural Interaction in the Digital Everyday. Produced by researchers working last summer at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA—Nicolas Nova, Katherine Miyake, Nancy Kwon, and Walton Chiu, along with Dan Hill and Julian Bleecker—this recent work investigates the pervasive—but often overlooked—gestures and behaviors that emerge from our co-habitation with electronic devices, such as waggling a dying remote in front of a TV, or rapidly inserting and ejecting wonky DVDs as an “obsessive fix.”

The impetus for the project in part is the cultural misperception that digital devices and their interfaces somehow render users passive, even paralyzed. As one of the researchers frames in the introduction to Curious Rituals, casual use of the term “digital” often neglects its original definition—manual manipulation:

The hidden assumption behind the use of such an adjective is that these digital artifacts are not very engaging from a physical standpoint. That is, people sit at their desks with their laptops; couch potatoes play games on their sofas; commuters stare at their smartphones in their smart-phone with blue-glow faces. But is this clichéd version of the everyday life true? Are we really so immobile when using the vast panoply of digital apparatuses? (7)

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A recent article in The Atlantic documents what may be the earliest-known example of computer-generated art. Likely inspired by the image of a calendar pin-up “girl,” a technician working with the military in the 1950s used punch cards to program a vector-traced outline of a semi-naked woman, striking a pose reminiscent of airplane nose art from World War II.

The image, known by some computer operators at the time as “girley1” (“girley2,” a hula dancer, would come along a few years later and serve as an example of early computer animation), often appeared on the radar-like consoles used by the Air Force in the 1950s and 60s as part of the air defense computer system. The computers combined static maps of the U.S. coastline with real-time radar monitoring of the air space and an interactive, graphical interface. With a light gun, operators could point at the blips on their screens and call up flight information—or spot unknown objects.

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Writing about glitches and less-consequential aberrations in video games is my way of rehabilitating bad play experiences through (hopefully) good analysis. Landing at present “squarely” in my sights (a pun in the making here; stay tuned) is the mapping of game actions in Borderlands 2 to the buttons of a PS3 gamepad.

I find gamepad mappings fascinating, and I often examine them in detail to discover how a game’s “verbs”—the possible, meaningful actions in a game—have been arrayed for interactive use. While detailed, printed instructions for playing video games have become relics, infographics of available gameplay action are still published within a video game’s liner notes and tucked into “option” screens on the game’s main menu. As a practical matter, these gamepad “maps” communicate to the user an equivalent of “You are here” for the thumbs and fingers.

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The digiscape was predictably flooded this week with “binders full of women” memes after presidential hopeful Mitt Romney inserted both feet into mouth during a town hall debate. In the aftermath, a lot of people are raiding the usual sites that serve as clip art generators for Facebook and other social media (repurposing is the lifeblood of new media) to distribute those little billboards of intertextual richness and variation: the immutable image, the malleable captions (“Trap Her, Keep Her!” the epitome of the moment). Sometimes my Facebook stream reads like an endless demonstration of the Kuleshov effect, expressed in the grammar of LOLcats.

But my favorite digital response was not the stream of snark, but rather a series of “reviews” posted to an Avery binder page on Amazon.com. (Thank you, Michelle, for cluing me into the phenomenon.) I wanted to include a couple of screen grabs, just in case Avery or Amazon decide to pull the plug, but they look terrible here. As of this writing, some 900 posts and thousands of “helpful” clicks have been logged in response to Romney’s binder comment.

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The long-anticipated (at least by me) Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming has been published! I wrote a couple of entries (on biomechanics and gestural interfaces), and I am delighted to be included with friends and colleagues in what is sure to become an essential reference in the field. As the PR copy for the two-volume set attests, “Video games are far more significant to society than they may seem. They were the first form of interactive audiovisual multimedia, introduced consumers to computer technology, and were one of the main selling points for early home computers, launching the digital age for the general public.” Also: video games are fun. A special thanks to editor Mark J. P. Wolf for undertaking such a massive endeavor, and to John Underkoffler at Oblong for image permission.

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I’ve been playing the video game Saints Row: The Third (Volition/THQ, 2011), which hits the screen like a whippet-huffed version of Grand Theft Auto IV. To articulate this comparison in more technical terms: although the core mechanics and urban milieus of the games are similar, the aesthetics of SRTT and GTAIV engender different psychological affects in the player. GTAIV pairs the ludic struggle with a deadly serious protagonist (Niko Bellic), who metes out justice in the gritty alleys of Liberty City. SRTT, however, turns your gangsta loose in the neon, urban jungle of Steelport, stuffed in a bunny suit (if so inclined—this game has big closets) and wielding a giant, lethal phallus like a sword. It’s a Freudian field day.

SRTT gleefully wallows in brash, crass, and absurd storylines and gameplay. And this is all for the good. Perhaps more games could juxtapose—as SRTT does with wild abandon—the ridiculous and the sublime, offering players the very excesses of hilariously bad taste and neck-snapping contradictions we (sensibly) would otherwise reject, and (hopefully) would never encounter in daily life in the first place.

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The “spoiler” claim has emerged in recent years as a curious symptom of modern-day media ubiquity. We want our iPhones, our digital clouds, and our on-demand instant access to everything. We want to be “first!” (a phrase some web-site readers go so far as to vapidly append to stories and blog posts). Except, of course, when we don’t.

The Olympics flap over NBC’s premature promo-ing (and the ensuing network apology) underscores the tension between two cultural expectations media must satisfy: the fastness of information reporting (media as ends), the slowness of mediated experience (media as means). Which is why NBC affiliates are trying to split the difference, encouraging people to watch their televisions as if they were radios: Just look away while the latest results about Michael Phelps display onscreen. One wonders how many people actually follow through on the medium’s startlingly bizarre (and metaphorically suicidal) directive to “stop looking at me.”

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Extrapolating from the current intersection of Hollywood’s aversion to risk and its reliance on computer-generated effects, the future-fiction novel Remake (1995) dramatizes a film industry in which new live-action films are exclusively CGI-generated pastiches of old movies. Want to put yourself in a film and then change the ending? Just visit a video booth at Hollywood and Highland, and you can be the Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca who ditches Claude Raines and strolls into the mist with Ingrid Bergman instead. Such cinema revisionism—by fans and studios alike—is a juicy conceit, which Remake, at a brisk 176 pages, only begins to extract.

Tom, the novel’s protagonist, re-edits old films for a living, removing their references to “AS’s”—addictive substances, such as alcohol and cigarettes—a task reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s gun/walkie-talkie swap in the DVD release of E.T. Rather than recapitulate the plot of Remake, I want to examine a scene in which Tom goes to an industry party and runs into a computer graphics tech named Vincent, who is demonstrating his latest breakthrough: a “weeper simulator” that digitally applies tears to any actor.

As Vincent explains, “Tears are the most difficult form of water simulation to do…. It’s because tears aren’t really water. They’ve got mucoproteins and lysozymes and a high salt content. It affects the index of refraction and makes them hard to reproduce.”

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