Kokoromi now collectively conscious in Edge
Ooh, that’s pretty! My Kokoromi co-conspirators and I are now in the excellent game magazine Edge, talking about the amazing success of last year’s gamma 256. Well, actually, it’s Heather and Phil talking– Damien being in Texas, and sadly I was near death at the time (damn bronchitis, how dare you keep me out of Edge). See the whole two page extravaganza here and here.
January 23, 2008
More on game photography
Videoludica (Matteo Bittanti) has posted on the work of Robert William Overweg, who is photographing “beautiful moments” in idealized but violent virtual worlds. From Overweg’s artist statement: “What I also find interesting in viewing the final results is that the experience you have while viewing a picture from my hand created in a game. Is in the beginning often not different from the experience you would have watching a picture created from the real world. The border between reality and virtual reality fades for a subtle moment.” As I have argued, aesthetic now tends to surpass the bias towards photographic “truth,” in which case the technical dynamics of the photographic process (light hit that thing) aren’t as important as the ability for the image to create a photographic experience. Combined with the simple fact that these images do, in fact, document (real albeit designed) experience (physical world fairly irrelevant on that point), and you have the game photograph: the difference really being the nature of the world, not the photo.
MORE DISCUSSION OF THIS POST ON gameCODE
January 22, 2008
Website upgrade
Thanks for your patience while I update the website– it’s more complex than I had remembered!
January 21, 2008
What’s unreal?
Definitions and etymology of unreal (intro. circa 1600)
1. lacking in reality or substance or genuineness; not corresponding to acknowledged facts or criteria; untrue
2. not actually such; being or seeming fanciful or imaginary; fantastical
3. contrived by art rather than nature; artificial
4. lacking material form or substance; insubstantial
5. wonderfully beyond real; larger than life (slang: intro circa 1960)
To what extent are games unreal? Are they untrue: presenting a misleading perspective on systems; a false mastery of illusionary conditions? Are they fantastical: seeming fanciful and irrelevant; a diversion into the hypothetical? Are they artificial: not real but constructed, or at a minimum indicative of the designed real? Are they insubstantial: sectioned off from real life; banal; lacking in weight? Are they beyond real: gloriously hyperreal; celebrations of the ideal and the possible?
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