The Pretentious Gamer

“Instead of relying on adults to spend money they don’t have on things they don’t need, now we’ll have kids spending money they don’t have on things that don’t exist.”

Old and a dated look at Kwedit but still an amusing take on virtual goods and microtransactions in general.

These are images from a new photobook, Gameface, by Studio Kinglux.

It’s always a little disturbing being confronted with what exactly we look like when we (gamers) play most single player, non-motion controlled games.

There’s always something of a disconnect between the heightened mental stimulation and engagement we feel, and…

…the look of blank boredom that we actually physically express, despite obvious concentration.

The zombie look that dominates the gamer’s countenance never does justice to the mental engagement that is happening beneath the surface.

It makes what has been accomplished with Wii, the potential of Sony’s “Arc”, Rock Band et al, and of course Natal seem even more appealing in comparison … despite the fact that the potential of more physical inputs has been shown so far to have many, many more limitations when it comes to pure gameplay – i.e. potential of mental engagement.

Can we have games that engage us equally mentally and physically? Or is the zombie look an expression of the necessity of heightened mental engagement of these kinds of games? Is same-screen social gaming – good ol’ trash talking in one-on-one beat ‘em ups, for example – the middle ground? Is it Alternate Reality Gaming? Is it somehow finding a way to bring increased gameplay sophistication to physical input games?

I found this video (posted after the jump) amusing – using a gaming icon to illustrate trends covering a few different topics. Also Ratatat as soundtrack!

Commenter response to the video on Kotaku seems to communicate disdain, ambivalence, or utter bafflement. The struggle seems to be with either the lack of a powerful message or the strangeness of familiar game elements used out of context. It is what it is … only using a somewhat unorthodox medium for the subject matter.

Certainly by this point, Mario and other gaming icons have adequately penetrated the cultural/societal lexicon to be used effectively to communicate an out of context message. Will framing real life issues within the vocabulary of interactive entertainment become more widespread with technological accessibility and increased (possibly) cultural relevance? This also has plenty of implications for the serious games movement.

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I’ve been meaning to link this for a while, this has to be one of the most interesting things I saw in 2009 (despite it being from 2008).

The “Avatar Machine” was created by Marc Owens, a recent participant at the designers in residence program at the Design Museum in London.

Incorporating a physical, wearable costume inspired by (and apparently directly derived from) low-poly in-game character graphics, a suspended, back-mounted camera system, and a head-mounted visual interface, the Avatar Machine essentially allows a participant to move about and interact with an environment while viewing him/herself in the third person – an entity in a 3D world, viewing oneself outside oneself.

His statement for the piece:

“The virtual communities created by online games have provided us with a new medium for social interaction and communication. Avatar Machine is a system which replicates the aesthetics and visuals of third person gaming, allowing the user to view themselves as a virtual character in real space via a head mounted interface.

The system potentially allows for a diminished sense of social responsibility, and could lead the user to demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment.”

Game nerds everywhere rejoice (…?). Gamers are intimately familiar with the experience of visualizing a self-representational entity from a 3rd person/over-the-shoulder/behind-the-back viewpoint, as it remains a standard convention of perspective in 3D games. With that shared experience as the context for the piece, it would be wild to be able to have it translated to your actual, physical self and environment, though I expect gamers and non-gamers would approach that experience very differently.

“The system potentially allows for a diminished sense of social responsibility, and could lead the user to demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment.”

For the most part, the language of third-person perspective 3D games is the language of violence. To a lesser extent, it also includes spatial navigation, exaggerated physical movement/capability, AI interaction, and so on – but pick up any 3rd person perspective game, and chances are good that the predominant way of affecting the virtual environment is through a physically destructive capability.

Is this what the statement suggests is the end effect of the Avatar Machine on the user?

Bearing that in mind, this hypothetical seems a bit bold to me. Can it potentially lead users to this conclusion? Or does it encourage it? Is that almost the intention of the piece?

Additionally, how much of this is enabled by the simple fact that a weapon representation is incorporated into the costume itself? Is anti-social behavior encouraged more by the simple fact that the Avatar Machine includes a modeled sword?

If anti-social behavior is simply suggested by a sense of viewing yourself from a traditional violent game perspective, would the implications be the same were the user unfamiliar with these paradigms of gaming? If you’ve never experienced a third-person perspective violent game, or controlled a polygonal fighter in a virtual environment, why would you have any inclination of these things in the Avatar Machine?

For non-gamers, people unfamiliar with this viewpoint and its conventions in games, I think what would be most notable is a sense of detachment; a sense of being outside yourself.

Therefore, does Owens suggest that this sense of detachment would lead a user to said gaming-environment-type actions without having game experience? That the natural conclusion of a sense/perspective of physical personal detachment is this diminished sense of social responsibility, contextual game experience notwithstanding?

Another thought: what would be the difference in self-perception if there was no “costume,” no polygonal wearable parts? Having the outfit – clunky, low-res models reminiscent of late 90s era 3D game tech – adds an immediacy, a visual impact to the piece, but doesn’t necessarily say anything about self-perception; the user’s place in the environment as an individual. Rather, wearing it, you become a generic bunch of abstracted polygons.

What if it incorporated appropriately digitized textures of your face, clothing, hair, etc. to a generic model, a la some existing attempts at in-game player texture mapping for custom characters? What if you were no longer “blond spiky-haired hero” and instead a differentiated, distorted representation of yourself as an individual? How then would you approach your place in the environment?

Via DesignBoom.

After writing on twisted, distorted body imagery in Japan’s Real Kanojo, I see this stunning image, also titled, without any context, “Real Konojo”…

Found here.

From Blade Diary.