ABSTRACT
Historically, the 'corporeal intentionality' and sensitive
zonings of the body subject are pre-requisites for the production of (a
sense of) place. Digital Role-Playing Games however, in a simulation of
this inter-animation, have been highly successful in acheiving this effect
through a body avatar with representative sensitivities. First, this paper
illustrates how the production of place is integral to navigation and progression
through a Digital Role-Playing Game. Secondly, it reads the work of phenomenologists, Bergson,
Casey, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Serres into a discussion of how a dematerialised
sense of place is produced and operated. Third, and overall, this paper
considers the Digital Role-Playing Game as foundation for a critique of
failings in digital simulation practice, positing it as working example
of the ‘worldly transformation’ of mathematical ‘space’.
Keywords
Game, Gamescape, Phenomenology, Place, Spatium, Inter-animation, Quasi-Object,
RPG, MMORPG, Local, Morphology, Avatar, Geometric, Simulation, Cosmology
1.
INTRODUCTION
Unlike the simulation, which attempts an acutely representative
relationship with the real world, the RPG [1],
while borrowing from those technologies of representation, is not as preoccupied
with facsimile.
Though advances in simulation technologies allow for
a rich emulation of the real; gravity, inertia, flesh etc, the RPG chooses
to bend the rules in the ends of gameplay, somehow managing to include all
the ingredients necessary to create environments capable of richly immersive
experiences.
RPG's have a massive popularity as complete worlds, and
as such are actively inhabited. But how can such a deep sense of place (a
function of such presumably material conditions) possibly be produced within
patterns of interactive pixels that loosely emulate realworld conditions,
and why is the production of this effect so important to gameplay? Short
of attempting tedius speculation as to why so many millions of people would
rather be somewhere else, we can look to the RPG for clues as to what is
the rubric or code of this thing we know as a place, being that it is so
effectively reconstructed in these games.
As much as cultural investigation
might provide sufficient reason for recent popularity in this genre, technical
developments in both hardware and game design are as much responsible; todays
gameworlds are not only richer in visual detail, but offer the sense of
a full and expansive universe. On first appearances new gamescapes like
those of N64's Zelda, and PS2's Final Fantasies appear more preoccupied
with producing this world effect than providing an arena purely for combat,
dextrous operation and problem solving. Players have responded to this design
perspective; RPGs are widely talked about as complete worlds, as actual
places. This is an impression many traditions within the representative
arts have sought after for centuries.
2.
POLYGON DESTINIES
Reduced
to it's graphic constituents, the RPG, like all 3D games are comprised of
millions of polygons, little coloured shapes each with three or more sides
all collaborating to provide a rich illusion of space. The polygon comes
from a long legacy of geometric science whose first appearance was in a
model of the universe found in Plato's Timaeus, First comes the point, then
the line, third the triangle, four the simplest non spherical solid - a
triangular pyramid.
In
the geometric universe, forms are described as a composition of points falling
within the three primary vectors of x,y,z. The subject is itself a point
[2], whose visual subjectivity
is represented as an equation of scientific perspective or 'vanishing point'.
This field of algebraic-analytical relations allows for the purely mathematical
construction of any plane within three dimensions, and has come to be synonymous
with the largely universal idea of 'space' as it is scientifically understood.
The digital visualization of this spatial model coupled with the visual
configuration of the interacting subject can supposedly provide emulation
of any object or environment - even environments we know very much as places.
Simulations can be found for the Vatican, the Empire State Building, Niagara
falls, the White Cliffs of Dover, our entire continents are in the process
of being digitally reconstituted as we stand on them.
Heidegger
however, in his Building Dwelling Thinking says that the understanding of
space as comprised of points (spatium) produces not objects or places but
multiple positions. When the dimensions of height, breadth and depth are
abstracted from space as intervals, space itself and everything in it becomes
a complex of these analytic-algebraic relations within the manifold of the
three dimensions. He says,
"The space provided for
in this mathematical manner may be called "space," the "one"
space as such. But in this sense "the" space contains no spaces
and no places….only allowing for the computing of these magnitudes."
A universe of coordinates he says is a universe of positions. What lies
between these positions, the interiorities (places) and their simultaneous
subjectivities, is of no significance in this model. This of course sounds
disastrous for the legacy of a virtual reality, how can that sense of really
being there possibly be produced when the very medium of this high representation
is innately dissolving of the experience of place itself.
Henri
Bergson however astutely points out that geometric space is not so much
an arbitrary construction laid over
the world as a filter or gauze so much as being inextricably written into
both speculative and deductive reasoning through the very composition of
the body. He says logical thought itself has a basis within the geometrics
of the body in action; as the most efficient course of action for the body.
Therefore it is geometric thinking which persists, in that speculative thought
is the process of defining outcomes for any course of action. Funnily enough
the RPG is full of both speculative and deductive reasoning, the solving
of riddles, life threatening choices made through the strategic navigation
of options. So what are we left with now; when the very substrate of the
gamescape knitted with a place-less and denuded geometric logic, whose very
vehicle of progression is the work of dry and logical thought? The RPG sounds
hardly the site for a rich sense of place, capable of wonder and investment!
Yet
the RPG is already the most popular game in Japan, so popular that when
Final Fantasy VIII was released so many children took the day off school
and so many adults the day off work that the Government released a public
statement that videogames would not be released on weekdays. The RPG is
one of the best selling genres of game in the world. More computer games
were sold in America last year than books, and already one in five households
in Britain owns a PlayStation - a huge proportion of these statistics include
RPGs. And if as these statistics suggest, that more and more people will
continue to invest in these ephemera as places, then we have a new kind
of landscape to contend with, one that asks us in turn to innovate both
popular and historical conceptions of landscape, place and social space.
But
the RPG is a paradoxical landscape, in that being dematerialized it appears
incapable of occupation. This attitude persists up until an RPG is first
played. For it is through the very action of gameplay that gamers build
into what is otherwise a mere plane of interactive pixels.
We
can see a capacity for spatial imagination at work in all games, which are
themselves always a spatialisation of some sort, if only of action itself.
While chess is an obvious example of this it is useful in understanding
how the basic interplay of boundary and territory may become an engaging
platform for action. The seminal abstract game Tetris, while being without
the third dimension provided a gruelling arena for time to compete with
the management of area in an unnegotiable rain of bricks. Gameplay holds
this territorial logic together in the tensions of it's internal competitions.
Competition within this innate territorial logic relies on a perfection
of ability within the computer game, which always gets more difficult as
the game goes on. But too much of either challenge and reward always results
in a bad game. This elusive margin for the constant and persistently engaging
improvement of performance is the quest of all game designers, and what
is strange is that when this margin is found it is so often found for millions
of people. - though some were better than others, everyone found Donkey
Kong perfectly difficult.
The
polygon has allowed for this spatialisation and perfection of action to
be oriented in a very particular way, namely by the representation of spatial
illusion which simultaneously produces the effect of an environment. With
the 3D game the manifolds of territory are immediately complexified. The
addition of this extra dimension, brings a capacity for movement that inevitably
activates a curiosity for exploration.
3. FATEWORK
Fuller
and Jenkins, in their Nintendo and the New Travel Writing configure these
representative universes of the RPG as an interactive story, or, in line
with it's explorative nature, as a spatial story of the like found in renaissance
travel logs or epic novels. However on closer inspection, in other words
playing these games, it becomes apparent that the story comprises mostly
a context for events and the culture of gameplay. Though the story may be
actively played into existence in a classic RPG like Final Fantasies, it
better understood as an annex and addition of a more basic procedural logic
within game design itself. My interviews of gamers (and personal experience)
reveal that for the most part gamers play RPG's to firstly explore and secondly
try and make it through to the end. The emphasis on story in modern RPG
design with games like Final Fantasies or Baldur's Gate grounds the gameworld
in a cosmology that gives the occurrence of events real meaning. More so
the RPG need not include any sole agenda of epic travel. While still being
explorative Sega's immensely popular Shenmue is an urban RPG set in the
1980's
This
story, if you could really call it that is told to you in the inevitability
of game play, the story itself isn't interactive, the game is. An interactive
story implies that there are many different stories or outcomes to be had,
this is not the case in RPG's today. In this way the RPG shares very little
with the hypertext novel it is often likened to. A major limitation in developments
in this area is that even if there were to be an unlimited amount of labour
and funding to make an RPG with an extensive branching plot, the whole thing
needs to be squeezed onto a CD or cartridge. In this way it is ironically
the economy of information storage that ensures we cannot build infinite
universes - which is exactly why it is so important they feel infinite.
This economy of disposable disk space alongside the expenses of time and
labour inevitably influence a particular approach to game design, where
progression in the game operates as amostly linear stream of events. This
event stream however (while prevalent in game design generally) surfaces
in the RPG in a way that works the gamer into the worldspace, into it's
places.
Because
there is really only room for a continuum that diverts occasionally, each
scene is constructed as the means to progress to the next, and as such become
constructed within a model where progression into another scene can not
occur until certain tasks have been fulfilled - the golden key effect. Sometimes
this is enforced with an object as iconically literal as the stone door
of TombRaider, other times, as in PlaneScape or Baldurs Gate, passage is
barred because the character has not fulfilled certain designated events
at an earlier stage and so must go back. This device is important in tying
down the character to any narrative obligations or design agendas at work
within the game.
Precisely
because we must find our way out of one situation and into the next, RPG
game events have the feeling, and operate, as a pre-eminent structure or
fateline, one that pervades a special importance to being somewhere[3].
There's always another door to find, a message with information we'll need,
an inconspicuous amulet that proves to be absolutely necessary later…
It
is at this point that the RPG develops an intensity not capable in the story.
Now
within the dancing patterns of pixels we have a message, it is as though
these places and events were left there for us especially. Potentialised
with a greater significance than others, they feel like evidence of a universal
logic or order within the gameworld.
The
universal logic I'm speaking of here is not necessarily strategically set-up
to produce the player within a solipsistic universe, so much as being foundational
to game design itself; there wouldn't be a game without the task of earning
the right of way. That there needs to be a series of tasks to perform before
being able to access another level means that objects and events have the
feeling, when playing, of being grouped around you. As a result these objects
and situations seem to be reflections or apparitions of some kind of intentionality
or will of the gameworld.
Because
of this dynamic association with the gameworld through the centralised operations
of the user, we can think of objects and events within the gameworld as
relational objects, or to use Serres's term, 'quasi objects'. These potentialised
objects and situations organise not only other objects and situations within
the gameworld, but inversely organise the movements of the player as well.
More than just a symbol, the quasi-object, because it is a relational object,
is written into a morphology that binds the universe of the gameworld together,
both in time and through the user.
Edward
Casey notes that places attract and gather, objects, languages, people,
places and things and that these are held in a particular configuration
and as such make a relational sense between them. These relations support
this universal logic that manifests in play as a total atmosphere, an indescribable
mood that is particular to and pervades all things in the game
RPG's
are full of objects, situations and chains of events that work beyond the
mere associative attraction/likeness of metaphor, but work in themselves
and together to produce learnable operating systems that often transcend
specific games themselves. Many quasi-objects are recognisable even across
game genres, like the convention of the health pack. In operation these
objects etc need not have any representative association with objects etc
in the real-world. They only need to work as a landscape, as a weapon, or
a health pack to soon become those things; what begins as a metaphor soon
becomes the thing it stands in for (where the metaphor is a rhetorical association
that hasn't yet been operated). When you're down to 1, the health pack is
very real.
4. PERFORMING ‘REAL’
"Symbols,
or general signs, have become associated with their meanings by usage. Such
are most words and phrases and speeches and books and libraries."
Charles Sanders Pierce
This
works even where there is only a bare likeness, as in PacMan. However the
signs of this game only suggest a situation that comprises of a maze, ghosts
and two sizes of yellow dots. It does not promise to be any more than the
sum of these components - that is its charm. The system of signs in a RPG
however emphatically promise a worldspace through the depiction of geographical,
anthropomorphic and social correlatives that when operated, in other words
become related, produce a worldspace. In this way RPG's do not need to strictly
mimic or simulate real world systems to effect the sense of working as a
complete world. In fact it is often the inherent other worldliness of RPG's
that allow for them to operate in their own magical way, with no need for
explanation. This is true of most science fiction - at a certain point we
must give in to the fact that the alternate world works on a set of rules
incompatible with our own. This same resolve allows for game symbols to
become working objects, taking the rest of the worldspace along with them.
Because objects and events in the RPG are operable, they do not need to
be activated and supported by the imagination, and so they are quickly forgotten
as the stuff of fiction.
Fuller
and Jenkins, in their, 'Nintendo and The New World Travel Writing,' however
insist that these universal logics found in RPG's are one and the same with
the story. Furthermore they qualify the RPG, as providing means for the
player to restage the founding myths of rennaisance period of America, ultimately
as a means of attaining symbolic control, They say,
"The R.P.G not
only allows players to identify with the founding myths of the American
Nation but to restage them, to bring them into the sphere of direct social
experience... an R.P.G takes children and their own needs to master their
social space and turns them into virtual colonists driven by a desire to
master and control digital space."
Aside
from this problematic association with the American Founding myths - a great
majority of games are made and played by the Japanese, and secondly that
prerequisite of the player of the RPG is a child (Sony estimates that upto
20 percent of it's players are over 35 years) - we can question the assumption
that any RPG is played purely to attain mastery of a landscape, in the sense
of becoming a god figure. Mastery may be temporarily achieved, but the RPG
gamescapes are never held and managed purely in the sense of the domination
of territory as in a game like Civilisation II or the turn based battle
games. The RPG gamescape ultimately refreshes itself ready to treat any
player the same way all over again. We always begin at some point of entrance
(or level), and in order of progression, from the known into the foreign.
We know that these places are inhabited, and that the game will consistently
and willingly respond, as though itself a single sensate entity; we enter
these worlds superstitious, as animists, building as we go a system of object,
site and event and learning it's rhythms. Because these landscapes will
ultimately return to their original condition, occupation is privileged
with having no responsibility to long term consequence, to history, as a
record of these successes. More importantly, experience of this forgetful
or refreshing landscape is cumulatively advantaged through repeat performance
- we get to practice getting good at being somewhere, something not allowed
for within the condensed thresholds of the urban landscape. In this
way the RPG can be understood as a kind of psychological holiday within
the thick of everyday life.
It
is an incredible feeling to know a place in a game so well that every exacted
movement or operation is requitted with precisely the response you anticipated.
No longer is the game a complex of trigger operation and interpretation,
the interval between perception and action, game and player, is closed along
with any consciousness that this is all happening within illusory space.
Another
way of putting, 'getting good at being somewhere' is becoming local.
Edward
S. Casey in, "How To Get From Space To Place" qualifies place
as both occupation and the production of knowledge from occupation; in other
words it needs only to become local to become an authentic place.
“...precisely as surrounded
by depths and horizons, the perceiver finds herself in the midst of an entire
teeming place-world rather than in a confusing kaleidoscope of free floating
sensory data. The coherence of perception at the primary level is supplied
by the depths and horizons of the very place we occupy as sentient subjects.
We come to the world - we come into it and keep returning to it - as places
already there.....There is no knowing or sensing a place except by being
in that place, and to be in a place is to be in a position to perceive it...Such
knowledge, genuinely local knowledge, is itself experiential in the manner
of lived experience..."
The
power very particular to the format of the game is that knowledge is aquired
through a performance of memory. Taking Casey's own cue, we get 'from space
to place' by learning how each representative situation or area works through
operations within them. In this way, the local knowledge that is produced
in a RPG is different from other
interactive systems (like other games) because earning it is simultaneously
the feeling of confident occupation.
For
Casey, 'space' is a hypothetical universal originating in Euclidean geometry,
it can only exist without beings because to put beings into a space is to
immediately produce knowledge, which in turn produces place. In this way
we can address the problem of Casey's prerequisite for the experience of
place - how does the user get inside the gameworld, in the sense of being
in that place? To resolve this we'll look at the avatar for it's representative
sensitivities and, as a kind of dynamic suture.
5. ID-WARE
ID
software's Castle Wolfenstein 3D is arguably the first fully 3D game. Gamers
were amazed to find themselves looking out through the eyes of the agent
within a fully rendered world seamlessly scripted to movements. This viewpoint
has since been synonomous with the first person shooter style of game, often
coupling the visual field with crosshairs in a cyborgian blend of vision
and weapon. The RPG has a different phenomenology of optics, one that at
first appears to be contradictory to the project of writing the user into
the game experience.
From
the action dominant diluted RPG forms like TombRaider whose intermittent
filmic cuts and interactive camera tracking set up the gamer as a movie
director, to the turn based, character heavy traditional RPG's like Squaresoft's
Final Fantasy series, the gamers viewpoint is a floating eye following the
character as they are negotiated through the gamescape. In several lighter
strains of RPG like Zelda and TombRaider, the user eye shares most of the
perceptual horizons of the character but is higher up, often looking over
the shoulder or sometimes out and around the avatar occupying an advantageous
perspective of the situation. The more classic RPG's like
Planescape, Baldur's Gate and Final Fantasy posit the user perspective
in a priviledged top down view of the situation, much more is revealed of
the surrounding environment. Both these view points seek to spare no details
of the characters interaction with space, it is about an absolute exposure
of the operations of the avatar in the environment, and as such all the
threats to the well being of that character are transposed into a body oriented
vulnerability. We watch these characters be maimed, tire and die and as
such they becomes the subject of a covetous or protective gaze, simply because
we can see them. The first person shooter viewpoint is perfect for shooters
like Sierra's Half-life or ID Software's Quake for this reason; because
we can't see our representative bodies our own our representative
death is less significant, so much so that when playing some first person
shooters ones numerous deaths become about as significant as a paper-cut.
This viewpoint allows the pure and undistracted engagement in combat. Deus
Ex though being a great game, claims to be an RPG while ambitiously operating
within the first person optic. But because we never get to see ourselves
in the game3, roleplay must be heavily supported by the imagination to compete
with this first person interface for action, and investment in ones chosen
role is more difficult.
The RPG asks that the player steps
from these more utilitarian relationships with the avatar and into a relationship
with a character - a kind of avatar that embodies not only a greater portion
of representative humanness, but in doing so widens capacity for empathic
investment.
In an RPG the character plays an
essential role in the milieu of the game and as such is less preoccupied
with combat than with an excellent adventure. Because of this, gameplay
is of a slower pace and the life expectancy of the character is generally
greater allowing more time and more vehicle for investing in their representative
lives This intensifies as we move into the more traditionally derived (pencil
and paper based) RPG strains like Baldur's Gate and Final Fantasy. Instead
of looking through the body into the gamescape, the avatar of an RPG is
configured as the subject of a reflexive and responsible gaze that is forever
assessing possible courses of action for the avatar as we coordinate it
in relationship to the events of any given situation. It is the gamers projected
empathy and felt responsibility for the representative sensitivities and
mortality of the character that produces an extended Cartesian reflex. This
active relation constitutes a kind of cybernetic selfhood that in turn binds
the gamer with the character through a foldback of both real and representative
sensitivities.
Now,
with this avatar/user bind in place, we can see how an RPG satisfies Casey's
prerequisite of being in that place.
The
avatar of an RPG is not a visitor of the gameworld, so much as a denizen
of it both in milieu, and innately in it's internal construction. Numerous
basic social exchanges produce and affirm the subjectivity of the avatar,
weaving it into the milieu of the gamescape as a life existing amongst other
lives. This subjectivity exponentially increased with the advent of network
gaming and multiplayer, where other real time players interact with the
user. But the avatar is written into the game on a more innate level.
6. INTER-ANIMATIONS
The
very logic of game design ensures that the representative body of the avatar
is already capable of completing any challenges that the game has
in store. The avatar is ultimately the most capable of competing with the
challenges ahead of them, a part of the world through what they can do in
it. It feels this way from the moment we begin playing because we know that
the gameworld was made entirely for us. As an agent a priori of the universal
design, they are even more than just a denizen. These factors ensure that
the players decisions are transported into the game, beyond the pure intentionality
of the first person shooter game. They operate the mechanics, myths and
logics of the gamescape through a fleshed out subject of that world, and
as such the world feeds back through that embodiment, in turn animating
the gamer. It is this feeding back of the world through the gamer that is
contiguous with Kant's seminal theory of inter-animation where place and
the subject are autopoetically engaged in a continuous and dynamic reciprocation
- a necessary factor for Kant in the production of place.
If
as Casey says, that place has openings, thresholds, sensitive zonings that
mimic the flesh of the body, then the same is true for the game. There is
a shared pneumatic fleshlike structure between avatar and gameworld; the
digital flesh of the body/avatar shares the same flesh of the gameworld.
But this is not enough to produce a sense of place. The body must move within
the place, as a dynamic component of it's flows. And Casey agrees, by noting
that Galilieo's configuration of the body, as a punctiform object committed
to the laws of gravitation and physics and without it's own
self motion, is not capable of producing place.
Casey
asserts that, "precisely by allowing us to make diverse entry into
a given place…the body insinuates itself subtly and multiply into encompassing
regions". In his essay, 'How to get from Space to Place', he looks
at Kant's bilateral body. With brachiations and multiply articulated structure,
it has multiple and extensive simultaneous engagements with space, producing
a bodily subjectivity as an extension of space > place. This also works
as a means of place interfacing back onto the body through multiple sensitive
points. Of course the representative sensitivities of the avatar cannot
compete with that of the gamers own, even though many gamers will tell you
they feel every pain of the avatar. But on a more intrinsic level however,
in the sense of the bodily structure, the avatars subjectivity very much
a part of it's place, written into the gamescape as an extension of it's
symmetries and distances.
But
what is special about the digital body of the RPG avatar, is that it's very
structure, by being designed as ultimately perfectly fit to operate in the
game world it already contains the necessary intervals of the gameworld,
a perfect subject of it's physical dimensions; of it's anatomical challenges.
For instance, of all the jumps we cannot make in a game, there is always
a jump we are meant to make. In other words where ever the avatar can
operate, their body is best suited to operate - and so often it is what
we cannot do that leads us to what we are supposed to do, a perfect and
reliable reciprocation of effort. Each ladder, river, dungeon, car park
is made for the operations of this body in particular, even if against it.
The avatars body is direct expression of their environment, written into
the gamescape as a capacity for it's distances.
It
seems we have come back to Bergson's body of intervals, from which we project
possible courses of action in the gamescape. Looking at Lara in action we
can see just how much an avatar can contain the geometry of the world in
it's very intervals. Each movement fulfills a dimension in the gamescape.
These
environments, as a geometric precipitation of the intervals of the avatar's
own body works as the pure transmission of the geometric intellect, as a
total manifestation of the Euclidean ideal we are supposedly so innately
best suited to. Maybe this why operations in a gameworld can sometimes feel
so fundamentally reassuring…
But
though the avatar is so very much part of the gameworld in these ways, a
body and a place tend to present themselves as particular; eg my body in
this place. The body of the avatar is claimed by the gamer as an extension
of this assertion. and so by way of this relation the gamer is equally frustrated
by the avatar's containment. This dynamic exchange of real and representative
sensitivies in the frustrations and competitions of gameplay facilitates
an exchange that oscillates in and out of awareness of the iconographic
individuations of avatars like Link or Lara - we sway between roleplay and
becoming.
It
takes a lot of work to get through a game - finding a way to the next place
is always a significant event...And in an RPG often it's not what you do,
it's when or how you do it. There's a scene in TombRaider III where the
gamer has to find a switch that turns the whole room upside down, to allow
access to a tiny window that's impossible to reach the other way up. It
takes most gamers days to work that one out.
If
there's one performative relation denominative to most videogames, it is
the determination and overcoming of boundaries through gameplay. These boundaries
describe the limits of experience in a game while also doubling as a kind
of perceptual horizon. To open up another view or access another area is
to open up a new field for action. In other words it's through the transgression
of these boundaries that consecutive places reveal themselves to the gamer,
the world exists before we get there, but we've got to get to know it to
get through it.
As
we saw earlier, place in an RPG is performed, and through the boundary,
further places are performed into existence. It is this reflexive exchange,
operating through memory, of the difference between environments, that produces
the worldspace as potentially infinite. It does not need to be infinite,
so much as the effect of it contained within the logic of the very action
of progression. And, because we so often group, name and remember places
by what we do in them, to play RPG's is to accumulate numerous secret histories,
atlases and a sense of having lived in another world. These are histories
and experiences that other gamers understand, where they can say, "you
know that place where…"
7. FROM SPACE TO PLACE
The gamescapes of the RPG come as a result of early developments
in the stepsister industries of virtual reality and simulation, yet don't
seek to emulate the real. While the RPG might borrow from the technical
advances of these practices, the agendas of the polygon are decidedly redirected
into the production of other worlds. Polygons in an RPG collaborate as a
skin for the production of a gamescape dense with signs, superstitions cosmologies
and milieu. These are alternative ways of being in a world, alternative
to the very logic that is innate in the substrate of their very make-up,
that of polygons - the geometric unit of an ancient model that sought to
measure and emulate the universe as accurately as possible. Ironically it
is this conversion of the polygon that has redirected the founding agendas
of the 'digital space', reworking it in such a way as to be capable of personal
investment, to become habitable - in short, a place.
8. Footnotes
[1] for
purposes of this paper the terms RPG refers to a single player game employing
an avatar undergoing a character development throughout the course of the
game.
[2]
the 'point' of the subject is often referred to in game play, developer
tools and 3d modelling software as a 'camera'
[3] whereas
in many other genres of game this sense of pre-destination is often carefully
disguised in the interests of realism or other milieu / design agenda's
9. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to Chad Chatterton [for happy hours of
conversation and gameplay], and Rachael Tempest, for both research assistance
and commentary.
10.
REFERENCES
Henri
Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Zone Books, 1998)
Fuller
and Jenkins, Nintendo and The New Wold Travel Writing (nettime.org, 1996)
E.Casey,
'How to Get from Space to Place....' Senses of Place,
(School
of American Research Press: New Mexico, 1997)
M.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and The Invisible (Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1968)
Martin
Heidegger, 'Building Dwelling Thinking', Basic Writngs
The
Edge Magazine,
columns, Issues 82, 83, 89 (UK, Future Publishing)
Michel
Serres, 'Gnomon: The Beginnings of Geometry in Greece,' A History of Scientific Thought, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995)
Robert
Markely, Virtual Realities and their Discontents, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press 1996a)
Phillip Goodchild, 'Time and
Evaluation,'
Antithesis - Special Ed, 'Time and Memory' (Melbourne, Depts. English and
Cultural Studies, Melb University 1997)
