| Author |
Message |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, March 27, 2007 - 1:38 pm: | |
I have long thought this.
That computer games will.
Part of what's holding things back is the size of the task of digitalising reality. It takes 3 - 7 years for a team occupying the entire floor of an office block, working full time, to produce a simulation game like Silent Hunter 4. They have got an entire ocean and sky to manufacture. But all the same they are able to do it. Virtual water is fascinating; it looks like water but at the same time you know it isn't. But that crystaline formlessness has an affinity with computing itself. A thinking thoughtless mineral, "cool seething incompletion that I love" (Tom Gunn). Pure reverie and contemplation.
Stalker is a game I wouldn't mind investigating too. The Ukraine landscape after the apocalypse. Very eerie. Apparently it took the company 7 years to do. An office block of dedicated people, comfortably seated in this symbol of order and of the success of the machine and of the city, relentlessly working out the logic of their demise in the computed wonder of three dimensions.
Talking about the task of digitising reality of course is paradoxical in so far as the digital is itself a part of reality - so that presumably within Stalker it is precisely what one wont find, the office block of dedicated individuals relently working out this digitisation. |
arturo
Username: arturo
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, March 27, 2007 - 2:58 pm: | |
There is a game based on the Tarkovsky film? |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, March 27, 2007 - 3:08 pm: | |
I think the association is slight at best arturo. I think they do borrow from the concept of the zone however, so that the world shifts about as in Tarkovsky's Stalker. I am put off by the violence and gore however. Personally I would be happy just to walk about; go orienteering - a freewalk. The idea of violence bores me. |
arturo
Username: arturo
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, March 27, 2007 - 3:50 pm: | |
I got it. You mean the game inspired by Chernobyl.
Yes, I have the same feeling withsome games.I did play the original Tomb raider and I was far more interested in going around and looking at corners that at finishing the game.
I think that that is the concept of the Myst series but I am utterly unable to play those. I cna find the clues and get stuck all the time. |
arturo
Username: arturo
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, March 27, 2007 - 4:42 pm: | |
I am not quite sure about this but if there is now a technology and a market for what is essentially an ambient game,never mind that the ambient is horror. There could be a market for differente kind of games: a meditation game, a vision game and whatnot.
Maybe we are in for a new artform. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, March 28, 2007 - 11:24 am: | |
Watching the green lobby gaining momentum, it is obvious that a great deal of ostensibly rationally governed behaviour - or perhaps in the end all of it - is socially governed. It is becoming fashionable to be green, to have green cars, green houses and so on. It is becoming a reflex; like saying please or thankyou.
We are going to see this with computer art. The please and thankyou of games. Digital has already eaten tv, now that I think about it, because most of the adult working population spend more time looking at computer screens than they do tvs. Tv is the little streamed picture up in the left hand corner, piping away noislessly. All cars will have satnav soon, just like they all have radios. So the streets have been digitalised anyway. Blips on maps. Looking down at the satellite image of one's house (it even records one's car parked outside) changes the experience of walking around it. I have started thinking of my walk 'from the air'. There is a whole new orientation: horizon. One thing that interests me is the increasing minerality of computers and their accessories and additions. We are getting into a world with 'no moving parts'; that works as crystal does; by refracting light.
An entire planet of sim pilots, commandos, hoods, alt wannabe geek wizzes of various sorts, are busy coding their private worlds into a reality of no moving parts.
It can be exhilerating. There is nothing like being in the clouds and watching a sidewinder crossing space, tracing an arc into the tail of a mig and exploding; terrific sense of space. Of the horizon. A real feeling of motion.
That has a cosmic association. Below is planet earth. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, March 28, 2007 - 1:13 pm: | |
"Tony, where are you? Dinner's ready."
"I don't know."
"What do you mean you don't know?"
"I am guiding myself back by sat nav. If I walk over that hillock it should show me. I can't be more than ten minutes away."
"That's where the first radar station was established. Spotting the first German incursions."
"I know. Don't start without me." |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, March 29, 2007 - 6:38 am: | |
Infinite space within an object of no dimensions.
A ghost curve that follows a real curve that in any case is not a curve but that we see it.
Society is all there is.
In a strange way that is true.
Margaret Thatcher was addressing society in general when she affirmed that it doesn't exist.
It exists. But it is but a ghost existence.
Things thus only become real when they are accorded manners. So that certain cultural phenomena such as one finds in science fiction, or in simulations and games, will only ever very gradually become 'real' - acceptable. In so far as by definition that they are unreal and therefore a kind of offence against social good form.
Everything can be seen to be defined in these terms. People who regard themselves as unusual for example - who need to be 'unusual' to themselves - need to be because they have made it a social demand. It relates to nothing but an image. What am I? An ordinary man? Defined by absolutely common tendencies and interests? Yes. Perhaps their combination isn't common but in themselves there is nothing unusual about my interests, except that I would have them be unusual - a dangerous, a social, illusion that needs constant reaffirmation.
I once used to know a little boy who every time he turned a street corner, and especially one street that was lined by factories with high walls which created an echo, would scream: "Richard the Lionheart!"
I sometimes think that simulations are all that are going to remain of many things. Geographically, in flora and fauna. One day and for many generations there will be no Polar Landscape. Ghost worlds.
Nothing but places to go on holiday that aren't there. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, March 29, 2007 - 12:32 pm: | |
Here is a gamer talking about one of his first experiences with S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:
"I just got to my first factory level (Garbage area) and have been pinned down by bandits for the past 2 hours. The guards have tried helping me but they also got killed. I'm low on bullets, it's dusk, and I've noticed different animals appearing in the distance. I'll have to stay on the factory roof tonight and hope I make it to daylight. This is going to be my first night in the Zone and I have no idea what to expect. Do I hide in a corner, get as high as possible and hope the bloodsuckers don't climb stairs and through windows? I have absolutely no idea."
Pretty happy sort of game. Reminds me of The Road. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, May 08, 2007 - 8:08 am: | |
The visual imagination.
When flight simulations started out, visually they were simply flat blocks of colour rendered in perspective terms. A runway was a triangle. The sea a flat blue or green. And so on. If you look on u tube at FSX videos or at the Lock On or Wings over Vietnam videos for example you will see visually stunning 'reality'. Especially in Microsoft's FSX. An example is the landing of a Lufthansa 747. The line between simulation and reality has become incredibly thin. Look on the motorways it is passing over and you see domestic traffic moving as normal! The sense of space it creates! I find this compelling. I can look at it for hours on end. The progress made in producing this visual and physical simulated reality in just a few years has been amazing. From triangles to more or less complete 'authenticity' in the blink of an eye. And yet those old flat colour sims were compelling too. You could get similar sensations of being shot down, for example, the excitment, the surprise, the feelings of helplessness, flying in what amounted to just a few very basic visual cues. A cloud like a sheet of paper cut into cloud shape was - became - a cloud if you were 'flying' over it in the sense of fully engaged in the reality of the sim.
It points somewhat to the way that a merely visual complexity isn't enough; or can sustain one's interest only in very limited fashion. Part of the interest of that Lufthansa video is the fact that the 'pilot' is fully, completely, flying the plane. That this complicated engagement runs alongside the visual authenticity. To be 'really flying the plane' in this sense - for me - creates a feeling of power; a certain sense of awe *even though it is imaginary* - or because it is. Otherwise one's attention wanders; one gets bored, one pitches the plane into the ground to see what kind of an explosion it will make - and so forgets about the whole thing. What keeps one's interest is the sense of reality. Which perhaps requires a certain discipline. For example, I have found that to be able to consistently land a F18 on the deck of the Ronald Reagan the best thing for me is to imagine the air passing over the wings, to get a feel for that. It helps ...
Thus is the visual imagination created. It is not just visual but it is visually grounded.
For instance just as when sound forms the grounding. With my eyes shut sitting on a train on my left I hear a platform announcement, on my right I can hear the music track of someone's mp3 player - quite clearly I can hear the lyrics, someone is whistling the tune - and I can hear another train passing, all of which creates the auditory sensation of travel. But not just sound 'exists' to create it. And yet just sound or mainly sound is the sensation by which these things are apparent to me.
I want to say that I don't just hear the sounds: I imagine them. The appeal of listening is the way that it lends itself to my imagination. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, May 08, 2007 - 12:04 pm: | |
The above touches on the way that things 'come alive'. Even actuality needs animating. Things need imagining if they are to live. (Only thus do actual things exist!)
One person looks. The image of the plane, that is visible, yes, but nothing more; nothing is alive; albeit that this image has been rendered using a very sophisticated graphics technology. Dull! Another sees the air, the space, thus conquered: the engagement; and that through it he has gained a world. (An infinity.) |
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