{"id":2085,"date":"2015-04-15T21:13:26","date_gmt":"2015-04-15T19:13:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/?p=2085"},"modified":"2015-04-29T22:30:39","modified_gmt":"2015-04-29T20:30:39","slug":"the-aura-of-the-video-game-image","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/2015\/04\/15\/the-aura-of-the-video-game-image\/","title":{"rendered":"The Aura of the Video Game Image"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is my thirteenth\u00a0monthly\u00a0Patch Wednesday<\/a>\u00a0post where I discuss a question about video games that I think is unanswered, unexplored, or not\u00a0posed yet. I will propose my own tentative ideas and invite comments.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The series is\u00a0called\u00a0Patch Wednesday to mark the sometimes ragtag and improvised character of video game studies.<\/em><\/p>\n

I recently spoke at the\u00a0What is an Image<\/a> conference, April 9-10 2015 at the University of Copenhagen. I had the opportunity to think about what\u00a0characterizes the on-screen images that we see in video games.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Space<\/p>\n

The first point is that video games do not ship as sets of images, they are rather image generators<\/em>.<\/p>\n

For example, how many possible images can Space Invaders<\/em> generate? Here is a\u00a0low ballpark number: each alien can be either alive or dead. With 55 aliens, this is 2^55 possibilities. The ship can be in 200 positions. There can be 2\u00a0shots on the screen at a time (at 200 * 200 positions), hence 2^55 * 200 * (200*200) * (200*200) \u00a0=11,529,215,046,068,469,760,000,000,000 = 1.15e+28\u00a0possible positions (this is not counting UFOs, scores or shelters, and conversely not discounting shot order).<\/p>\n

By comparison, there are only 10^22 stars in the universe, and Space Invaders<\/em> can therefore generate at least a million\u00a0different images for every star in the universe.<\/p>\n

This has a number of implications. Consider how this has played out, especially in the last 10 years.<\/p>\n

\"cod_aw\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We have many games like\u00a0Call of duty: Advanced Warfare<\/em>, a military shooter promoted on the fact that it is a next-generation game, running on next generation consoles, offering new graphics and game options, only made possible by the new generation of consoles (“HARNESSES THE FIRST THREE-YEAR, ALL NEXT-GEN DEVELOPMENT CYCLE IN FRANCHISE HISTORY<\/a>.”)<\/p>\n

A game like this demonstrates a particular traditional way of evaluating video games, one that comes from the fact that video games are image generators.<\/p>\n

In traditional mainstream and AAA advertising and reviews, the image on screen is seen as embodying the presence of the underlying technology. The played game is evaluated for\u00a0its ability to utilize (say) the PlayStation 4\u00a0graphical abilities. With every new console generation, we have\u00a0then launch games that are criticized because they do not\u00a0fully utilize<\/em> the new console’s abilities.<\/p>\n

We can\u00a0compare this to Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura\u00a0<\/em>in\u00a0The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,\u00a0<\/em>where he talks about mechanical reproduction as threatening the\u00a0sense of authenticity and\u00a0of the original<\/em>.\u00a0For video games it mostly makes no sense to talk of an original game<\/em>, but\u00a0with AAA games we may experience a\u00a0sense of\u00a0presence\u00a0<\/em>of the\u00a0hardware while playing.<\/p>\n

We\u00a0can see the on-screen image as carrying an aura<\/em> of\u00a0underlying computation, of ongoing calculations, shaders, of the hardware. (And it\u00a0literally comes from that, of course.) This is probably not what Benjamin would think of as an aura, <\/em>but I think it is being treated as such in the press and in game culture.\u00a0We can also read promo material and articles emphasizing that a particular screenshot, image, was made in-engine<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In short, modern big-budget video game\u00a0images are evaluated not\u00a0just in terms of which pixels are physically on the screen, but according to whether they were\u00a0generated in real-time, using the game machine hardware.<\/p>\n

A game, in this view, is seen as good<\/em> if it makes the invisible architecture of the game machine visible. This was the dominant way of promoting video games for a while.<\/p>\n

Independent Games<\/h3>\n

But let’s think about the counter-movement that is\u00a0independent games. (I have written about indie games visuals in more detail here<\/a>.) Here is the 2010\u00a0VVVVVV<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"VVVVVV\"<\/p>\n

VVVVVV\u00a0<\/em>embodies a\u00a0common\u00a0“indie”\u00a0nostalgia, what I call a representation of a representation<\/a>,\u00a0where modern technology is used to emulate older low-tech visual styles. Independent games are sometimes promoted with\u00a0an idea of going back to the beginnings of video game history, when games were made by one or two people, rather than by the giant 100-million dollar teams\u00a0of top games these days. (And with\u00a0VVVVVV<\/em>\u00a0there is a specific nostalgia for Spectrum\/C64 games such as Manic Miner<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Compare then the 2010\u00a0VVVVVV<\/em> to the actual 1983\u00a0Manic Miner<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"Manic<\/p>\n

Though VVVVVV<\/em> and\u00a0Manic Miner<\/em>\u00a0are in many ways\u00a0similar, the low-resolution graphics of\u00a0Manic Miner<\/em>\u00a0were\u00a0at the time understood to be a technological marvel; a\u00a0demonstration of hardware abilities, and claiming\u00a0the type of technological presence I talked about before with AAA games.<\/p>\n

This shows how\u00a0the very same video game images would be evaluated in entirely different ways in 1984 and in 2010.\u00a0Whereas the 1984 version of a game would be a technological marvel, a\u00a0contemporary game with identical on-screen pixels would be a revolt against the\u00a0technology-centric way of evaluating video games.<\/p>\n

This is the shift that independent games<\/em> claim: to move away from the focus on the\u00a0technology as\u00a0provider of the images that we are playing with, to a focus on deliberate sampling of historical styles, and by doing so, toward\u00a0evaluating\u00a0a\u00a0game and its images as having a personality that comes from its creator(s), to which we then have a personal connection.<\/p>\n

We could then criticize this idea of the independent developer as being quite romantic, but that is another discussion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is my thirteenth\u00a0monthly\u00a0Patch Wednesday\u00a0post where I discuss a question about video games that I think is unanswered, unexplored, or not\u00a0posed yet. I will propose my own tentative ideas and invite comments.\u00a0 The series is\u00a0called\u00a0Patch Wednesday to mark the sometimes ragtag and improvised character of video game studies. I recently spoke at the\u00a0What is an … Continue reading “The Aura of the Video Game Image”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","category-patch-wednesday"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2085\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}