This response/comment on Mike’s second entry ended up running a little long, so I feel it deserves it own status as a post. Medium wont allow me to attach a title to this, so I apologise for how it appears on our front page…
This, rather strange, notion is echoed in Shaviro’s essay on Gamer and the analogous FPS game experience in the film. Although he rationalizes this comparison between the FPS and POV shots in film using Galloway, he goes further to point out the main difference between the diegetic world of films and that of the non-montaged game scape. This difference, for both Galloway and Shaviro, is film’s inability to supply a fully formed, completely roamable landscape, which is in contrast a necessary function of games. The gamescape is fully loaded and rendered on-demand and without lag, while “cinematic space is necessarily fragmented, because it is, at best, a selection… from the continuum of the real”. He reinforces this point further in his footnote, where the identification and attachment one feels to the FPS character is turned into alienation and unease, since it removes one’s anchor in the diegetic world.
A second (or third?) connection here is with Scott’s brief segue into film theory in Networked Boredom, where he in turn evokes Stanley Cavell’s writing on film. The problem Cavell posits is that cinema, through its techniques and form, presents to us a world from which we are both absent and are subsequently unable to act as conscious, ethical human beings. Additionally, and weirdly so, once we are removed from the screen as an acting and present subject, we experience subjectivity but of a different, uncomfortably bodily kind; the self-encounter (see Scott’s Vulgar Boredom). This, by the way, is the kind of uber-intuitive philosophical analysis that we take for granted when talking about mediated experiences, and makes Cavell a joy to read.
I apologize for this drawn out subpost but we had previously talked about Galloway, Shaviro and the connection between POV shots in film and FPSs (hurray for meatspace interaction!), and thought that I report on the further findings. As a corollary, check out Shaviro’s excellent talk on the trends in speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy which deal with subjectivity in similar ways.
But what about death in gaming? I agree that death in videogames can structure gameplay by teaching us consequences of incorrect gameplay. I think the instructive role of death in videogames is further complicated by the fact that the game’s basic algorithmic protocol does much the same in the way of instruction. Additionally, highly immersive game experiences made possible by powerful new game engines can lead one to assume the role of tourists in spectacularly hyper-real computational spaces, where roaming about and enjoying the scenery is as much a goal as the normal ‘I play well or I die’ schema of traditional gaming. I am thinking here of the highly publicized virtual expanses of Skyrim and id Software’s Rage.
Furthermore, as we learn from the stalwart indie-gaming community, death in gaming is most often recapitulated, deliberately mismanaged, or altogether subtracted when radical new ways of playing videogames are developed. I am not proposing, however, that death may become obsolete from games in the foreseeable future. The distraction from traditional modes of play inside mainstream games is usually momentary, and a player may stop to glean at the realistic clouds overhead for a minute or two before getting back to the business of shooting their way out of a level. Perhaps this momentary respite is also a matter of consumer conditioning on a meta level, or a break in the continuum to appreciate the shiny new tech at hand.
