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• 1 media/Video-Game-Controllers-Collection-Free-Stock-Vectors-Small.jpg 2018-07-21T12:56:28-07:00 Chapter Three 15 Evidence of a New Aesthetic plain 2018-08-13T14:33:18-07:00

  Crossover between games, film, television and literature is nothing new, and the translation can flow either way.  Games such as Streets of Rage, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Pokemon, and even Final Fantasy are just a few of the games translated into a filmic style, while still others: Castlevania, Mortal Kombat, Pac-Man, and Sonic to name but a few have also translated to television series. This tendency has been described by narratologists such as Marie-Laure Ryan (Ryan & Thon, 2014, p16) as 'media convergence', a term used in this context to denote “the tendency of popular narratives, such as The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Batman, or Tomb Raider, to migrate from medium to medium in any imaginable order”.  While media convergence is undoubtedly a concept, with a very few exceptions however, it is here suggested that these have not in fact translated well, and have experienced comparatively average interest amongst audiences away from their initial medium; Lara Croft for example was an incomparable favourite in terms of RPG avatar characters from the time Square Enix and Sony released the first Tomb Raider game; despite this, the Tomb Raider film franchise never seems to quite realise its full potential, and there is always something indefinably lacking.  The entertainment industry has tried different methods of ensuring media convergence success; another example is the Chronicles of Riddick.  The first film of a science-fiction franchise, Pitch Black (2000) initially met popularity from its audience but mediocre scores with film critics and the second film The Chronicles of Riddick (2004) faired worse; however the proposal for the first game, Escape from Butcher Bay (2004) met with so much popularity that Vin Diesel reprised the Riddick role for the game graphics, with the second film subsequently being released with a Director's Cut DVD and ultimately becoming a cult classic.  The following three additional franchise films also received mediocre to poor acclaim. The games in comparison were loved throughout and Escape from Butcher Bay is still widely considered one of the best ever Xbox games.  Film and television developers continue to use and test their approaches however, and there is an expanding desire for a gamic feel to film and television that can be seen in entertainment development methods.
  The 2016 Netflix science fiction-horror series Stranger Things is filmed against a 1980s retro backdrop, with the series events playing out for a a group of young Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) gamers along with the other inhabitants of a small town.  This series is not ostensibly about gaming, and yet not only does gaming have a strong positive spin throughout the series, the ‘geeky/nerdy’ image of D&D gaming in particular is shown to be underpinned by real intelligence in terms of alternate world development.  The child protagonists undertake significant research into their D&D developments and use this information within the Stranger Things universe to affect changes against the supernatural developments occurring within the series.  The feel of the series is reminiscent of contemporary films such as E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial that were actually filmed in the 1980s, and which showed child protagonists making decisions on an adult level, and successfully changing the outcome of horrific events.  The series leaves a sense of gamers being more intellectually and spiritually able to understand the changes inherent in an alternative, and horrific, world scenario than their peers and carers.  The second series of Stranger Things shows the contemporarily accurate addition of a new electronic games arcade around 1984-1986, which is then subtly indicated throughout the second series developments as an update in the same group’s original D&D gaming skills; changes in the monsters reflect changes in the speed and styles of play, with smaller, faster monsters offsetting larger, slower, but harder hitting boss-style monsters.

  In terms of the entertainment industry reflecting increasing gamic influence, one clear example is the novel by Ernest Cline, and later film, Ready Player One.  Both the book and film draw heavily on gaming and virtual reality; showing the world in the state of a continually immersed virtual reality gameplay world.  As with many other productions examining the possible impact of full virtual reality immersion, it deals with potentially serious questions on the potential implications of such immersion.  Unlike many other productions, it also portrays many of gaming history’s best loved moments, characters, and scenes in nostalgic detail, successfully capturing the magic felt by many long-term players.  While the Ready Player One world does verge on dystopia, it also has a degree of realism in ending with choices and management options for continued, more balanced play.  A possible result of forthcoming expectations for virtual reality, television series such as Black Mirror and Kiss Me First regularly focus on virtual realities that humans can meet, socialise, and sometimes even die in.  Kiss Me First considers the implications of a virtual world spilling into reality, already recognised as a significant risk in digital cultures through documentaries such as talhotblond (2009), where online individuals have been influenced into real-life action.  While many of these representations, including those showing the potential consequences of uploaded consciousness, display the potential negatives of their situations, some, such as the Black Mirror episode ‘San Junipero’, are far more subtle.  The San Junipero of the episode title is effectively a digital afterlife that people can choose to be uploaded into.  The storyline then examines the draws of such an afterlife; the chance that eternity can be spent with a loved one, or what happens to our love for those who are not uploaded.  Again, the theme is specifically neither positive or negative; the episode simply considers the choices for the individuals within it.

   

  Television series that have no obvious link with gaming are using similar techniques to develop character immersion.  In the recent production of Patrick Melrose, each episode is a single day in the life of the main character, and is also one book in the original five-book series.  These individual suspenseful moments recreate the whole story; an overall five episodes reflecting the five books in the series; when taken together, these five days represent the core story of that character’s life and choices.  This use of time is in line with gaming principles. When a player’s avatar runs through an RPG world, the missions can each happen by interacting with the quest start point and the player chooses or denies the quest start; effectively, all missions are as important as each other, and all inhabit the same short timeline.  This technique thereby removes time as a factor and allows the player themselves to choose the next component of their timeline; their avatar’s ‘life’; however all those quests together form the game narrative. Patrick Melrose attempts the same effect, but unlike a game, orders the modules of time on the viewers’ behalf; these day-long quests in the form of episodic component sound bites, taken in any order, would still arguably construct the Patrick Melrose narrative.

   

  Entertainment is increasingly trying to reflect new experiences, and games are the cutting edge of this entertainment form.  With the release of games, and particularly first-person shooters (FPS), through web-based means, the changing cultural face of the internet and what this means globally began opening to discussion with the publication of articles such as Nazis in Cyberspace by Charles Kramer in August 1992 (Kramer, 1992, pp. 30-34).  The crux of the issue was the release of Wolfenstein 3D, which was released in the UK, but through Cyberspace, meaning it could be downloaded in any country, including Germany.  With Germany having banned all Nazi images, Wolfenstein 3D was pulled from CompuServe; with its developers John Romero and John Carmick resorting to sending packages containing the game in unmarked boxes to avoid the return of the unopened games from those responding to the resulting CompuServe ban (Kushner, 2004, p134).  Now 25 years later, games in cyberspace are actively trying to develop internal player narratives that transcend cultural boundaries to enable them to faithfully recreate a specific experience through a games medium. One such recent example is that of That Dragon, Cancer; a game created to pass on the parental experience of having a child diagnosed with, and ultimately dying from, cancer.  This hard hitting game has been developed and released by parents recovering from being in the position set for the player; the emergence of the Ludic Aesthetic is beginning to provide a range of experiences through play that are far removed from an original game premise of puzzles, or attack and defend.  Falling increasingly into the theoretical remit of art pieces that must be interacted with to create defined experiences, such as described through theorists such as Aarseth, Murray and Baudrillard in chapter two, these games break the mold in that their artistic aura is defined through player integration. While this concept opposes Walter Benjamin's theories (chapter two), it nevertheless acknowledges his desire for a new form of reception for more interactive art forms, similar to early examples such as Eugene Atget’s photographs.  These games fall within the art-house genre, and do not strictly reflect usual RPG elements.

  The concept of experience through play is examined in the new film Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017), which begins with an old console game (a metamorphosis of the original Jumanji board game of the original film) that has been plugged in and subsequently draws four players into Jumanji’s world.  The players must from then on follow the the kinds of rules and limitations that would be present in genuine video gaming. The film fosters the concept of ludonarrative dissonance, in that each player receives three game lives, but can die in unusual gamic ways (such as being eaten by a hippopotamus), and instead of the usual game over, use of the final game life will equate to death in reality; this gamic technique develops the sensation of stress and impetus within the film.  It is a form of experiential ludonarrative dissonance that imbues some of the examples of the Ludic Aesthetic focused on here with their gamic feel, one example being the performance art of the Shia LaBeouf’s performance arts collective, Labeouf, Ronkko & Turner.  This collective has consistently used gaming techniques and even specific games to develop their performance art pieces, which often also resemble elements of social media such as YouTube challenges.  Also reminiscent of gaming, particularly Japanese television game shows, the viewer effectively watches the YouTuber act similarly to a human avatar; here is the challenge, and how will the YouTuber respond to the two plates in front of her?  Will she eat the raw chicken piece, or eat the sweet that is shaped like a raw chicken piece? In the case of Labeouf, Ronkko & Turner, examples of works such as #INTERVIEW, in which LaBeouf and journalist Aimee Cliff engaged in an unspoken interview filmed by each other through GoPro cameras strapped to their heads, were based on metamodernism and LaBeouf’s desire to “find[ing] myself through the networks, and explor[ing] the multiplicity of personas” (LaBeouf, Ronnko & Turner, 2018); linking closely to the multiplicity of the internet and the philosophical work of Deleuze and Guattari outlined in chapter two above.  All of LaBeouf’s performance art works have had clear gamic influences, all are remediated through social media and the “small screen” (Taylor, 2017c), and LaBeouf himself describes his recognition of social media as a form of gaming network “I look at social media as Tetris, it’s a game” (LaBeouf, Ronnko & Turner, 2018). Active from 2014 and citing their references as Brecht and Artaud amongst others, the collective have a self-professed aim of utilising “empathy, emotion and social interaction to foster new forms of community across digital and physical networks” (LaBeouf, Ronnko & Turner, 2018). LaBeouf summarises the gaming influence more succinctly, stating “we win together, we lose together.  Fuck Tetris. We make new games together” (LaBeouf, Ronnko & Turner, 2018).

   

  The aim of this dissertation is to outline the shape of the emerging Ludic Aesthetic in wider culture, and so it is important to examine cultural mores that are, on the surface, unconnected to a gaming experience; let us therefore take the example of online dating, with desire an area of the original Homo Ludens.  Prior to the development and uptake of digital cultures, people searching for their life partner would in all likelihood have been drawn towards other individuals within their own, or at least geographically accessible, communities.  With a huge world population aligned with data globalisation, the awareness of a proliferation of people moves to the fore, and the available dating pot becomes significantly larger, with access to online dating sites. Established online dating sites draw personality clues from answers given during the sign up process, to then match that individual’s preferences to other people within a chosen vicinity; the distance you are willing to travel is also part of your settings.  You message the people you are interested in and/or matched to online, and then the time may come when both parties wish to meet. This general approach is similar to one you would perhaps take having already met, and developed a bond with, someone face to face, but with the added benefit that online discussions can occur on a global stage, with people moving continents in some cases to take up a new life with their chosen partner. The dating app Tinder however, gamified the dating process when first released in 2012.  On the basis of one initial picture, Tinder users could swipe left for bin (in which case the image does not come up again, at least for some time), or swipe right for interested, in which case the owner of the picture received a notification of your interest in them, and could similarly swipe left or right. Rather than establishing a bond, there was a speeded up process that increased the likelihood of ephemeral encounters, and decreased chances of longer-term association. In this way, actual human contact can resemble brief encounters undertaken during gaming sessions distance interaction options; they may add interest to a short period of play, but are soon and easily forgotten.  Whilst this matches a modern desire for short ephemeral bursts of satisfaction based on quick turnaround consumerism mirroring the objectives of capitalism, it simultaneously has the potential for hugely negative effects, with news stories raising sexual attacks and even murders enacted through this relatively anonymous medium. This communication form echoed a game scenario with ourselves as the online avatar; it had all the hallmarks of a game, but with the potential for very real repercussions. Tinder has now been updated with very basic person matching software, particularly since a surge in 2018 of consumers once more increasing geographical viability as a meet requirement, but with the next set of online dating expected to include virtual reality nightclubs and meeting places (Belton, 2018), the risks of gamifying core social contact is a darker aspect of the emerging Ludic Aesthetic.

   

  In 2016, an episode of BBC Radio 4’s Digital Human (Krotoski, 2018) discussed military developments in the form of the trial of long-distance warfare through the use of military pilots flying drones from a secure central base using virtual reality.  The concept of war as a style of game is far from new, with Johan Huizinga styling the original Homo Ludens on the concepts of war in 1938, as discussed in chapter two, and the philosopher Paul Virilio connecting war with filmic and game styles in his book War and Cinema. Similarly, the general theme of gamified drones is a common theme within science fiction, with films such as Pixels (2015) depicting gamers fighting wars in gaming styles, and Ender’s Game (2013), which was based on the novel Ender’s Game (1985 by Orson Scott Card) attempting the initial battle by convincing the protagonist that it is a fantasy simulation instead of a real event.  In reality, the pilot experiment was initially something of a failure. The military found that post-traumatic stress increases exponentially when the engaged solder is in no danger of reciprocal attack.  For the personnel involved, it was too much of an indistinction to be expected to attend the office and drop bombs via virtual reality drones that kill real people, and then return home to their families expected to operate within their family environment; this is an aspect of distance warfare that the military are now working on.  Interestingly, when I shared this information with a group of Battlefield gamers, their general consensus opinion was that they (gamers) would have had none of the same problems exhibited by the military personnel; this response matches the plot of the Ernest Cline novel Armada.  The reason given was that gamers are used to gaming, and identify with the process and immersion as a game: to them it is not real.  To a soldier who has previously been exposed to warfare, the gamers suggested that these individuals very much understood the consequences of their actions and can visualise them in real life, whereas they would simply see the virtual reality flights as just another game.  Obviously this potential supposition could not ethically be tested, and it is well documented that games do not, contrary to very early ludological opinion, make people violent, or make people act as they would in the world of a game; this is presupposed to be connected to the concept that a gamer can trial experiments and their results without in fact engaging in them in reality; which actually suggests that gamers would be affected once able to visualise the results of their actions; another of the subjects touched on by the novel Armada.

   

  Teaching can also be considered as an area of gamification.  The collaboration element of teaching is the crucial aspect here, specifically where the software and apps that ‘make teaching fun’ converge within digital humanities.  The drive towards less complacent pedagogy, with social media teaching stars such as Jesse Stommel arguing for greater interaction and innovation within the teaching agenda are leading to an increasing use of smartphone applications such as Kahoot, Lensoo Create, and even Microsoft Sway to recreate teaching as a game, with virtual reality avatars, online reward systems, and innovations such as online image and video annotation collaboration.  It is easy to visualise the advantages of an amalgamation of teaching styles, particularly for kinaesthetic learners and for drier subjects that students would have real difficulty in learning by rote, and indeed, nor should they; teachers utilising technological means can almost certainly provide better learning options. There is however a reverse argument that needs to be made so that learners can ultimately gain the best results to study. Innovative teaching methods enhance learning immeasurably, but students entering study above a certain educative level would still need to gain a basis of solid research ability.  If all teaching were to be engendered in a gamic format, how would a learner attain the skills needed for a solid basis of lone self-disciplined research in order to achieve higher-level academic achievement such as PhD? Moving into post-academic achievement, any employee or researcher, once qualified, must also be able to successfully conduct self-motivated paid research in the workplace; teaching styles should be engaging and innovative, but must also not lose sight of the goal, which is to provide an entry route to higher education or employment. Returning to the example of a kinaesthetic learner, and training for physical tasks that require muscle memory, a interesting case is the use of games to assist trainee surgeons.  Games and gaming hardware, such as Underground (2013) by Grendel Games, have been developed to mimic the surgery instruments that a newly qualified surgeon will use to conduct laparoscopies. Rather than being simulations that place the trainee under realistic pressure, these games have instead been developed for use during relaxation time; rather than mimicking surgery, they instead develop the same movements, hand eye coordination, and control that a surgeon will need in order to carry out their work.  The crucial factor during game development was for these games not to be directly work-related, as training absorption is improved when the actions undertaken are pleasurable; the aim is to steady the surgeon’s hands and develop the connection between their visual information and hand actions. The game developer Grendel Games develops games solely for the medical profession, with adaptive controllers and hardware that mimic surgical tools to improve skills and muscle memory.

  Continuing the medical theme inevitably draws to the expectations now surrounding virtual reality.  SnowWorld is a virtual reality game first trialed around 2008 for military burns victims, following virtual reality (VR) testing stemming from controlling the fear of spiders in severe arachnophobes.  Victims of severe burns were given VR goggles that set them in a cartoon version of the Arctic, and set to play as either a penguin or polar bear avatar engaged in a first person shooter attacking objectives with snowballs.  A soldier named Sam Brown was part of the initial testing, which found “the game play was like a white noise that canceled out the pain—as great a relief as [Brown had] gotten so far during therapy, better even than morphine” (Kirk, 2012).  The immersion in VR, even more than that required for standard gaming, relocated the patient into a cold environment, and offered a powerful distraction during wound care.  “Pain needs constant attention...Rather than having pain as the focus of their attention, for many patients in VR, the wound care becomes more of an annoyance, distracting them from their primary goal of exploring the virtual world” (University of Washington, 2018).  As the use of VR for pain and medical management gains traction in small peer reviews and academic papers, a recent television advertisement (Samsung, 2018) shows virtual reality used for rehabilitating patients with lost limbs by imagining themselves walking along the beach to acclimatise to a new prosthetic leg. Returning to the desire of people to immerse again in gaming after a period of non-play, studies have shown swift moving games such as Sonic The Hedgehog can act positively on mental acuity in ageing people, providing a barrier against diseases such as Alzheimer’s and dementia (Taylor, 2017a), and in some instances games consoles have begun to be introduced into care homes for the benefit of the elderly inhabitants (Borland, 2007); for past gamers, this could be a familiar and welcome form of rehabilitation and therapy.  The medical applications of games focusing on both physical and mental health do not end with the above examples, but now have threads into controlling anxiety, making children less afraid of visiting the dentist, and covering a multitude of other aims and objectives; from small beginnings, an investigation into this area of work is now a sizeable research project on its own.

   

  Returning to daily life, smartphone users now have the scope to complete every daily requirement by application, from work planning and banking to reading a book or playing a game during a lunch break, all using the cyborgian small screen computers in our pockets.  Using applications such as Habitica, we can even gamify our everyday habits and tasks, with a virtual reward system that allows us to create and obtain virtual items for our mini avatars as a reward for each task completion in an amalgamation of bullet journalling and gaming: we went swimming today as per our schedule, for that we receive a new purple jacket for our mini self.  This effectively makes a game of basic task completion that would previously just have been an inherent part of daily life. Consider our kinaesthetic learner for a final time this chapter, and for the sake of this scenario, allow for the concept that an individual who learns by completing tasks may therefore struggle to, for example, read and absorb a full narrative text. Then imagine that every game is just a book; a Deleuzian multiplicity with ongoing gamer and developer authorship, true to its origins of D&D and interactive narratives such as game books.  For bibliophiles, a book is fully immersive, with a reader able to lose themselves within its pages for the duration of their reading term; a dedicated reader would generally describe the visualisation of the environments and events unfolding within the literature. The ongoing body of research by this author noted in the Theoretical Approach/Methodology section of this piece has predominantly focused on the developments in the art house games genre, and a style of game soaked with narrative hallmarks is an achievement of this genre now coming to fruition, and linking to the work of theorists Murray, Aarseth, Coyne and others outlined in chapter two.  A kinaesthetic learner leans towards understand by doing, and a game can constitute a simulation of anything a player wishes to experience. While still a testing ground, narrative games produce a story that is then played/read and experienced by the gamer. This can, but does not necessarily, mean a traditional style text on a linear path; instead what a narrative game attempts to do is create an open world environment that the reader/gamer engages with at their own pace. At the end of the game, as with literature, the story has been read and experienced, and the lessons and understanding that the reader/gamer will have taken from that game will vary for every person, as narrative game developers allow for elements of the story to be left open to interpretation.  If the content of any book can be played, then any experience that can be delivered in a book can also be played; this theoretically leads to the concept that anything can be a game, and opens the way for the Ludic Aesthetic.
  
  Next: Chapter Four: Examination of a New Aesthetic
  
  Or return to: Index
  
  Previous: Chapter Two: Background Theories