viz. - Games

Journey and Non-Referential Iconography

Scott Garbacz — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 14:00:00 +0000

Probably all illustrations, and certainly the animated images I’ve discussed in Frozen and Lilo and Stitch, come freighted with a vast history of associations. Striking images can literally provide worldviews—complex perspectives from which to view matters ranging from gender roles to cultural identities to ideal body types. Frozen’s visual aesthetic offers a triumphantalist account of traditional images put to new uses, while Lilo and Stitch offers a harder-edged criticism of our lazy, self-indulgent ways of looking at the world, for instance. Yet both deliberately and meaningfully comment upon the mediating power of their own iconography. Both films are, in short, particularly focused on understanding how images have worked in the past, and how they can be made to work differently in the future.

Journey is a video game whose cartoon-like visual aesthetic draws strongly from the same animated tradition as the first two films, yet its aims are quite different. In both its gameplay and its visual design, I will argue, Journey is not focused on what it means, but rather on the raw experiences it can provide. The game reminds us, in short, that while images have deep and rich rhetorical histories, they are also something more than mere arguments.

At first glance, Journey seems yet another participant in the iconographic tradition of Disney-style heroic adventure. The game's unnamed protagonist wears yet another variant of the cape worn by Sleeping Beauty's Prince Phillip or Frozen's Anna: a red, flowing cloak whose bold coloration differentiates him or her from the various backgrounds he will visit. Fittingly, this character will go on his own quest, making his or her way through dozens of different landscapes and ruins in order to reach a distant mountain peak. Not surprisingly, the primary figure this character finds among the ruins is dressed in a pure white gown that carries at least two markedly female associations: that of a helpful nun, and that of a bride on her wedding day. Her beak-like face, on the other hand, nearly literalizes the cultural ideal of a woman as a "mother hen."

Flowing, red clothing for adventurers: the one unchanging truth of the fashion world. Image source: Youtube.

Yet while one could perform a gender analysis (or, for that matter, a cultural analysis) of Journey's treatment of archetypes of a lone adventurer in an exotic foreign place, to do so would be to miss one of the most notable and immediately striking features of the game: its insistant attempt to minimize or obscure any ability of its images to refer to anything outside of themselves. This design aesthetic stretches from the game's costume design (just ornate enough to defamiliarize the reader and yet not ornate enough to betray any one particular origin) to its art style (frequently, the game presents such clean lines and well-defined spaces as to make the background seem neutral), to its narrative (a serious of wordless, simply-illustrated cut scenes hint at a deep religious subtext to the journey, but provide no clarity as to what the significance might be), to its very protagonist (all gender, race, and class markers are obscured beneath his or her robe, and any distinctive voice is replaced by a small variety of musical notes.) For the most part, the game goes out of its way to limit the degree to which it reflects the world outside itself.

The landscape, like the character is often a nearly blank canvas. Image source: Thatgamecompany.

Two things, however, receive much more focus than in a traditional video game. The first is light. Not only are all the game's various locations carefully differentiated by their color palate (as is common in video games), but the use of light and tonality is often taken to dramatic extremes. One segment of the game takes place in a harsh, snow-and-wind haunted mountain pass, where the screen is at times almost entirely white. On the other hand, an early visit to a sun-drenched temple demonstrates the game's lighting effects at their most impressive; the sun reflects vibrantly off the golden sand, an effect dazzling in itself yet made more impactful when suddenly encountered within a game otherwise willing to stick with relatively bland backgrounds.

Image source: Forbes

At such moments, the game becomes a meditation on the power and significance of light and vision; while architectural details may be visible, much more powerful is the play of light and shadow, gold and brown. The relatively desaturated and low-contrast images before this climactic relevation of light, for instance, only serve to de-sensitize the mind of gamers, so that what could be a merely standout moment in another game is transformed into a revelation.

Yet the game's most powerful use of constraints involves not images themselves, but rather PS3's multiplayer functionality. Amid the loneliness of the game's single-player campaign, the game randomly brings two human-controlled players together in a single universe. As with the game's visual presentation, this interaction takes place within strictly-enforced limits. Communication comes from watching what the other person does, or pressing a single button that (depending on how hard or quickly you press it) triggers one of a small number of musical notes. Cooperation is limited to the ability to assist each other in making higher than normal jumps.

Image source: Thatgamecompany.

As with the visuals, the game's careful limitations provide an intense focus. These interactions obviously lack many of the hallmarks of day-to-day encounters: human voice, facial expressions, language, posture, distinctive clothing, and so forth. Yet the knowledge of that the character accompanying you is played by a fellow human being makes all the difference in the world. Indeed, the very difficulty of communication only increases the wonder when communication does emerge, as when two players spontaneously develop a quick two-note call-and-response to check in, or when a new player is greeted with a sudden shower of notes that serve as an unmisible signifier of welcome. In these multiplayer sections, the game became less about the designed narrative than about the experiences it enabled: experiences of recognizing, working with, and above all communicating with a fellow human.

Both the game's presentation of light and its treatment of human interactions signal that the game is not being "about" something so much as it is interested in creating something. The glorious sunset walk is not "about" the power of beauty in the way that Lilo and Stitch is about the danger of mis-read stories; nor is it (like Frozen) "about" the revision of the Disney adventurer narrative in order to include women (and sisters) as protagonists. Instead, the most significant thing that Journey does is to provide us with carefully cultivated experiences, where a simple iconography allows players to focus on certain aspects of life while ignoring others. The final effect is very different from that of other forms of visual narrative, and arguably significantly less rhetorical. Yet it is no less real for all of that, and no less worthy of consideration and analysis.

Finger Discipline

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 15:32:48 +0000

(Image Credit: Techanbob)

Typing, for me, has long been tied up with game playing. Before keyboards were tools for productive labor they were complex controllers for beating monkeys in vine races to bananas and outrunning pirates to the buried treasure. When I first encountered computers in the early 90s my parents, and later the public school I attended, took care to teach me how to type. I was told stories about aging businessmen that floundered when forced to type their own memos and warned about the impending importance of touch typing. So, in what seems to be a fairly common experience, I spent afternoons at home and computer sessions in school playing lots of Mavis Beacon. This ongoing utilitarian interaction with games, though, wasn't an early form of gamification.

Typing wasn't gamified for me. It was a specific physical interaction that I hoped to wrap my head and hands around so that I could drive my word-car faster than the computer; it was a game. Generally, when we look at gamification we’re considering an overlay that resituates our desires toward particular interactions and activities. Gamification overlays divert our attention so that rather than focusing on the relationships and interactions germane to particular activities we are shaped by our position on a leaderboard or the siren's song of a new badge. The gamified experience is always first with an abstract goal system and second with the activity at hand. So that while gamified systems situate users away from matters at hand and toward abstractions, games situate users toward a particular direct engagement with the matters at hand.

(Image Credit atypingtest.com)

I learned to type so that I could beat that damn monkey, but I didn't want to beat the monkey to achieve a badge. Even with all the talk about needing to know how to type to make it in the world today it was always about winning the game at hand. What I didn't realize, though, were the particular ways that these games were disciplining my relationship with the keyboard as a tool, an object, a body that I've developed a deep relationship with. Perhaps most noticeable is simply how I rest my hands on the keyboard. asdf jkl; each finger not only has a particular place but more unsettlingly feels out of place when resting elsewhere. The realization that your fingers are on the wrong row--a realization made apparent by the mangled words the configuration produces--is uncanny. I can't help but look down to see if my fingers are still my fingers and if the keys are still on straight.

(Image Credit: Shane McGlaun Slash Gear)

That's not to say that I don't or that you can't relate to the keyboard in different ways. These early typing games worked hard to cultivate a specifically productive relationship between the keyboard and my fingers. They focused on speed and precision and largely situated the keyboard as a tool to be mastered. The dissonance between the keys and fingers, the utter unnaturalness of it all, was something to be smoothed over--from my mind to the computer's screen with nothing in-between. This same effaced immediacy is disciplined through other games, as well. After years of playing first person shooters resting my right hand fingers on wasd, left hand on the mouse, almost feels as natural as the home row. More than any particular intent that I carry with me it is where my hands rest on the keyboard that dictates what I will be doing with my computer. Different games, of course, situate keyboard interactions differently. Hotkey heavy games like Starcraft (and I am awful at Starcraft and even worse at keyboard use in Starcraft, so take this as an unfamiliar and awkward perspective) configure the keyboard less a controller and more a console or instrument panel. The perspective shifts from key presses contributing to the creation of a word or action and similar presses performing concrete actions. In some games every key carries the weight of punctuation.

(Image credit: Steven LeMieux, QWOP screenshot)

And while some games, amongst other practices, work to naturalize our relationships with the keyboard through disciplinary practices there are other games that highlight just how strange these relationships are. There's nothing natural about the home row. QWOP, created by Bennet Foddy and launched in 2008, drastically breaks with common productive interactions with the keyboard. The game, named after the four keys it demands you use, asks the user to run a simple 100 meter dash. But rather than typing out words to move forward like early typing games or simply pressing W to move like in first person shooters the player is offered more direct control. Q and W control your runner’s thighs, and O and P his calves. Rather than controlling a runner you end up attempting to control a runner's legs.

(Image credit: Steven LeMieux, QWOP screenshot)

Attempting is the key word. It is a hard game, and the majority of my time playing has been spent sending my runner sprawling forward and backward. What the game highlights through these displays of muscle mangling is just how utterly unnatural this whole affair is. While I play I am constantly looking from the screen to my fingers to my legs attempting to wrap my head around how my fingers can relate to my legs. Standing at my desk I shift in place, fidget, work to control my legs with my fingers as I mime pressing the keys. How do my calves relate to my thighs? And how on earth do both sets work together to move me forward? Half the time I spend playing QWOP the runner stands there waiting for me to make my move. The keyboard becomes distinctly unproductive and explicitly foreign. I have never run more than five meters in QWOP, but some people have. They talk about achieving a rhythm, machine human synchronization (imperfect and ugly but a synchronization all the same), and in that moment of success I can't help but wonder if the game is closer to falling back into common disciple practices of naturalization than ever.

(Video credit: PEROLINN)

Videos of these successful runs, though, make me think that Foddy has not only snatched victory from the jaws of defeat but has compounded the deeply disturbing experience of playing QWOP. The runner shifts and jerks awkwardly along the track. His halting gait is punctuated by brief moments of almost graceful performance. When both feet leave the ground I can't help but see the possibility for fluid motion, but then he lands with a shudder. These glitchy shudders and squats betray any possible rhythm that the player may have reached with his or her keyboard, and they point not only at the ever present friction between user and keyboard but at a complete lack of naturalness in the human. Thighs and calves and feet and running are bizarre. QWOP hints that these inborn connections and technologies aren't any more natural than the home row.

3-D Games and Visualing Outer Space

noelradley — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 19:10:52 +0000

In 21st century rhetoric and writing departments, we don't teach geometry. But like the sciences, we are developing computer games. Here in the DWRL, graduate student developers have created Rhetorical Peaks, an interactive game, where students practice rhetorical terms and strategies. It's interesting, then, to compare how different fields use different kinds of computer-assisted gaming. On Thursday, I saw these geometry games, which are visualizations for outer space created by Jeffrey R. Weeks.

Image credit: Screenshot from Geometry Games H/T to Jeffrey Weeks

A freelance mathematician and author of The Shape of Space, Weeks presented at the University of Texas to a full auditorium. He let audience members interact with several geometry games, free and downloadable, which were lessons in spatial visuality connected to theories on the shape of the universe. For example, the below shot of his tic-tac-toe game, while appearing to be a two-dimensional, actually works in three dimensions (the torus-shape). The outer squares meet the opposite side like a cylinder. This means your x's and your o's make connections beyond the edges of what you see. The combinations of winning and losing plays are increased. Forgetting it is 3-D can make you an easy target to your opponent. Note: You can play another human, or the computer.

Image credit: Screenshot from Geometry Games H/T to Jeffrey Week

Weeks' visualizations became progressively more advanced as the talk went on with various models of how a finite universe might be shaped. Some of more viable theories are for a slightly curved universe (about 1% curved) and a dodecahedron universe (the initial screenshot, above). The interesting thing is that these kinds of visualizations come before the latest data. Based on math principles and current cosmography, these games approximate what patterns of micro-wave data and light data would look like if the universe was curved or boxy, or torus-shaped, etc. Then, the visuals get placed against the patterns of the most up-to-date data. Most of these data are coming from NASA's WMAP, a satellite orbiting the sun on the same path as the earth. The combination of computer programming and satellite data has produced stunning findings.

Caption: Horizon view of microwave data

Image credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team

I was struck with how useful the visualizations were for translating higher-order math and cosmography into layman's terms. I was also struck with the way these 3-D games have such a powerful application in the field of cosmography. It makes me curious as to comparing the implications of 3-D gaming in the humanities and 3-D gaming in the sciences? I don't have an answer here, but I think it would be fascinating to discuss. A hat tip and curtsy to Eileen's recent posts on science and visuals, by the way, which have helped me to think more in this direction.

Image credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team

P.S. Did you know scientists can see 99.997% to the beginning of time? For those of us who rarely ponder the realities of space-time, this info is pretty mind-altering

Googolopoly

John Jones — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:56:24 +0000

If you teach rhetoric and technology, you might be interested in “Googolopoly,” a version of the classic Parker Bros. game that charts the search giant’s quest for web-wide domination.

FYI: Rich Uncle Pennybags’ pitchfork is a clue that the creators are ambivalent about Google’s quest to “organize” your data and “make it universally accessible and useful.”

Those of you who have time to kill in during these last few weeks of class can download the entire game here.

via TechCrunch