You walk away from the game but the cross-hairs don’t recede. The adrenalised thrill of gameplay filters through into reality. cyber café killers places game junkies in Lan-within-Lan heaven. A special experiment constructing strong links between real and virtual violence, designed to study the culture in which street/gang violence spills over into internet cafés, and game violence filters back into the street.

cyber café killers is one of a number of works which maps its site-specific location. Significant in this work is the site it reproduces; a networked gaming environment which, by its nature, is already infused with a psychological association to the thrill of game play. In cyber café killers, players kill their opponents who sit with them in the café, as they would in any normal networked gaming environment. However this virtual reproduction is a catalyst to a psychological experiment. cyber café killers engages standard emotional responses gamers have to the proximity and reality of their opponents, and then amplifies these responses. Firstly by making us consciously aware that these responses exist, and secondly by providing us the oppportunity to test the extent to which they can be manipulated.

Cho sees the work as responding to social theorists who have sought to understand the feedback loop between real and virtual violence without ever actually playing networked games, instead seeking too-deep answers in their ‘psychoanalytic bullshit’. For Cho, the answer is neatly summed up in the concept of ‘euphoric rage’; a complex emotional blend of aggression and excitement, compounded by the thrill of adrenaline-charged game play. The cyber café provides a natural breeding ground for euphoric rage, and Cho views this as the romantic appeal of the context. “You can see the agony of defeat mapped in real time onto the face of the players sitting across the room from you. Seeing actual physical representations of your online killings creates an incredible sense of pleasure.”

By qualifying our investment in game play, cyber café killers provides an example of the potential of virtual environments to expand emotional responses to physical and/or virtual behaviour. It also contributes to the endless dialogue on the relationship between mediated/real violence; in this case pointing out the obvious correlation between the two, whilst also inviting users to engage with violence as a motivational factor.

Half -life. DLs include video documentation.
06/03

Unbeknownst to online players, their gameplay may be hijacked for the purposes of audiovisual art. In QQQ real time quake games - played by an anonymous international collection of gamers - are displayed to a gallery audience via a local, hacked engine. The modified graphics subvert the function of the gameplay, turning player’s actions into afterimage trails and motion smears - a virtual performance amidst chaotic, abstracted architectural forms. The work highlights an element of existential flexibility that is granted to us by the extension of our corporal form into that of an avatar. Performance artists are borne from game players who remain oblivious to their existence in this capacity.

Using the random actions of the game play as generative input to the hacked engine, QQQ detours data, illustrating the vulnerability of our virtual existence to purposes of subversive modification. In doing so a boundary between the interaction of our corporal and virtual forms is defined. We lack control of those offshoots of our virtual selves that exist in contexts without our knowledge. By employing modified versions of players' avatars, nullpointer illustrates one of the many potentials for alternative realities online - stretching the fabric of the gamers universe to incorporate multiple destinies for our virtual clones.

specs:
nullpointer hacked almost all the aspects of the engine… gfx (both ingame and interfaces, textures, shaders etc), sound (all sounds altered), and some key scripts and bindings. He also had to set up and specify the server to run the maps, game types and impure modes he needed.

In the installation the user is the audience, who participates in the matches as a spectator. There is a pedestal mounted console for the users to interact with the piece. This pedestal has a keyboard sunk into it with all keys except 'W' 'Space' and 'Return' removed - The keys control 3 aspects of the interaction (Switch player being followed, Zoom camera in/out and Step from 1st to 3rd person view), essentially camera controls so the users can 'direct' the action.
02/03

Julian Oliver gave a 5 day QuakeIII level editing workshop to 10 participants of foam's tx0om workshop series. the workshop was set in a tiny castle town in croatia-istria of around 80 inhabitants. participants were taught how to model using the Quake III level editor and then from visual, contextual and mythological material gathered they contructed a playable abstraction of the site that was projected back onto the town walls to a rain-soaked audience of locals and guests. the gamelab workshop was focused on making sure that particpants could freely continue exploring the tools after the workshop.. read on..
11/02

Velvet-Strike: War Times and Reality Games
http://www.opensorcery.net/velvet-strike/about.html

Velvet-Strike is a collection of spray paints to use as graffiti on the walls, ceiling, and floor of the popular network shooter terrorism game "Counter-Strike". Velvet-Strike was conceptualized during the beginning of Bush’s War on Terrorism. Others are invited to submit their own spray-paints relating to this theme. Anne Marie Schleiner is the brain child behind Velvet Strike. These are some of her thoughts on the project:

"When I first heard about the attacks on September 11, just a fraction before I felt a wave of sadness, a nauseating thought passed through my mind. What terrible timing-with this president in office, perhaps even more so than previous ones, he could use this event as justification for dangerous actions on a global scale and at home. A few weeks later, I left for Spain to give a workshop on modifying computer games. When I arrived the next morning at the workshop I learned that the U.S. had declared war on Afghanistan. The workshop organizers had installed a new demo of "Return to Castle Wolfenstein", a remake of an old Nazi castle shooter game, on all the PC's. The sounds of the weapon-fire echoed off the concrete walls of the workshop warehouse space--what I once approached with playful macho geek irony was transformed into uncanny echoes of real life violence. At that moment, that room was the last place I wanted to be. Joan Leandre, (one of the other artists presenting at the workshop), and I discussed creating some kind of anti-war game modification."