Josephine Anstey Four Seminar AH 563
Both the games I played this week were three dimensional - Carmeggedon and Super Mario 64. Which means that a three dimensional set is created, and the user is given a viewport into that set/world. We are very much following a film model and think in terms of a camera which we have control over. Our viewport can show the world from our point of view or it can back off and show us in the world. It tends to be easier to play both Mario and Carmegeddon if you are not smooshed up against your eyes, but back a little seeing yourself in the world.
Let's contemplate how much the film model dominates the way we approach games, virtual reality and cyberspace. We're very used to projecting ourselves onto someone who we see entirely separate from ourselves - shots from our own point of view are typically about being a victim, a target, unable to take in the whole scene and assess it for danger. So we have become accustomed to a second self - a projected self.
What is your point here? That the way we project ourselves into films is in some way a (necessary?) precursor for our acts of projection into VR, cyberspace, games; for the mulitple self Aluucquere Rosanne Stone circles?
... the social mode of the computer nets, evokes an unruly multiplicity as an integral part of social identity. (The War of Desire and Technology at the close of the Mechanical Age. P 42)

Is this act any different than projecting ourselves into a character in a novel?
Extreme danger or a life threatening circumstance in real life can cause some people to leave their bodies and hover nearby watching them. How strangely similar!
Hallo_o! You think its OK just to leave this thought out here hanging? Although it does speak to my point about the novel. I mean obviously multiple and projected selves have been around in the arenas of entertainment/art and spirituality/witchcraft/ shamanism for ever.
Reality is styled in films, made richer, and bigger, the boring bits removed. Film are high resolution, and have a bandwidth which in terms of sound and visuals, and within the frame, rivals that of reality. Games cannot reach this kind of resolution. Some - like Carmeggedon - try for a grainy, low res reality, others - like Mario - opt for a cartoon look. (Of course films have created the conventions of cartoons as well.)
Yes ... but the thought is not really finished it it? In fact its more like 2 thoughts pushed together and going in different directions. One - that film gives us a more intense version of life. Two - that when they have the bandwidth/resolution etc, cyberspace, VR, games, will also try to be "real". And just two weeks ago you were lamenting the drive to recreate reality in VR. "What for?" you cried.

But if we can recreate a reality with the boring bits cut our then we have... well I guess there are plenty of sci-fi books to choose from. Either the wealthy elite spends all its time in cyberspace and the plebs scrabble for access. Or the plebs are tricked into fake cyberspace lives while the rich enjoy real life.
At the moment there is a trade-off, resolution for real time interaction. But as computer power and memory increase we will, I assume, start to approach the resolution of film in the interactive media. For now one question I have is whether we are engaged in a fundamentally different way when we play games than when we watch a movie?
Not a bad question.
Perhaps the death of the dream of the movie/game indicates this is so. In about 92, 93, 94, I went to a day of lectures at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens about games. Rocket Science was just starting up, and one of its directors was waxing lyrical about what they were going to do as they merged narrative movie and game content. A couple of years later they had abandoned the idea completely.

There were several voices at the conference who were dubious about the possibility of such a merger even then. They suggested the activities of game playing and movie watching were different, but I don't recall any particular analysis of the differences. At the simplest level one is active (inter-active), the other passive.

But so much theoretical thinking has gone into how we actively create meaning as the audience of film or as readers for us to characterize watching or reading as simplistically passive. At this point I don't really have any answers to this question of the difference between game and movie experience, or even any more useful questions to get into it more deeply. I just think it is important for anybody interested in expanding the lexicon of games and interactivity to start thinking about.
Oh - disappointing, but honest I suppose.

I'm trying to get hold of the end of an idea that might help. Or maybe not.

Something about, "What are you required to do?"

In the case of a novel, movie, narrative (of the traditional sort) you are required to fill in the world around the signifying string of words or shots you are offered. You make a series of preliminary assumption-created worlds, each model more refined until the end when the right arch finally falls into place and the structure coheres and is revealed whole.

Is this what is required of you in interactive games? I suppose in the games I dream of the answer is yes, but somehow you can also create and experience yourself in the world you create. But in the games as they now exist are you required more narrowly to fill in the rules for the game, and only as a by-product do you create the world?

*****

Excited by the video games I played I would typically not notice that they made me nauseous until I stopped playing. Then I would feel lousy. I have read that children who go through the stage of crawling, do not learn to track things with there eyes in a way that becomes of paramount importance when they are learning to read. We didn't get a TV until I was 11. I'm now thinking that I must have missed out on a stage that was a physiological sine qua nons to really being physically comfortable in computer-land.
Thankyou for sharing this detail of your childhood.