Marc Arthur

“Does not Aristotle’s idea of drama as a mimetic reenactment and relief from our besetting pressures apply perfectly to all kinds of games and dance and fun?” (McLuhan, Marshal. Undestanding Media P.238.)

McLuhan is suggestive in his appraisal of games as “mimetic reenactment”. I am interested in developing a literacy for the different levels of mimetic reenactment a game can evoke. I don't think that all mimetic reenactment equally applies to games, theater or dance. A video game certainly does not evoke the same kind of simulation as an emotional night at the theater may. Different modes of simulation function on different levels for different people.

The issue seems to be one of form and content. Does the form of a game better evoke the content of a real life situation than the form of theater? My first thought would be that a game solicits immediate participation. After a night at the theater a person may be introspective or thoughtful about the subject of the play but will most likely forget about it in a few months. A game, which demands participation, mimics life but also demands participation from it's viewers. For this reason a game has the potential to create change in ways theater cannot.

The work of Augosto Boal is an interesting hybrid example of this. His theatrical style is a sort of game that demands the audience to reenact the reenactment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Boal

Today I began playing the online game "Torn City". My friend Dominic plays the game daily. When I lived with him it really got on my nerves that he was so involved in a game that took up a good portion of his day. He was always so committed to a virtual crime or stealing money to put towards buying a virtual mansion.

This begins a social experiment. What is so compelling about these kinds of online games? Does it take a certain kind of person to exist daily on a forum where text and images are exchanged? Am I one of those people?

Becasue I had no "money" when I first joined the game I only had one option: to join the army. It was thrilling. I just clicked a button and it was done.

www.torncity.com

While I was playing “Battlezone” on the computer last week I couldn’t help being extremely frustrated by the controls of the game. The Mac keyboard I was using was so efficient that it did not leave any room for nuances. As I recall when playing arcade games, it is the nuances of a controller that can often help one win a game.

This made me aware of how essential the design of the console is in the illustration of a game's content. As I sat in front of the computer playing I reminisced of the pleasure of sitting down at a “Pac-Man” table looking down at the screen with my competitor across from me. For me, what made many of the games like “Battlezone” or the ones that Wolf describes in his essay “Abstraction in the video game” so abstract are the consoles themselves. Through an art world lens, the sculptural and interactive qualities of the console for “Star Wars” would still be considered cutting edge even today’s art world.

Wolf attributes the movement from experimental and abstract video games towards realist video games to the market audience’s desires. Still, I wonder why there has not been more multi-media creativity in game design. Wouldn’t it be cool to interact with a variety of real objects as well as virtual ones to win a game? It would be like the way one must interact with a Rauschenberg painting to begin to understand its meaning.

Wolf, Mark J.P.. "Abstraction in the Video Game" Chapter 2.

For my midterm I will continue play the online game "Torn City". I am interested in how violence can manifest in such a static online forum.

The game spore is really interesting to me for all the reasons that it is interesting to everyone else. It is a hybrid of all gaming forms and as well its narrative covers time from it's beginning and into the future. The game also illustrates peoples inherent desire to act as god. Spore seems like the ultimate video game version of an omniscient Greek play to me. Regardless the quality of the game once it is released there is a good chance that it will do well. I am interested in the way that these games are marketed similar to movies. A blockbuster film, regardless how good the actually movie a actually is, is marketed in such a way that the film draws in a certain audience on its opening night. Like a Mathew Barney film, spore just continues to teas its audience about the game so as to a crew a larger audience when they actually release it. From what the blog world says, the game has already been pre-ordered by over a million people on amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FKBCX4/

It was exciting to play half life because it mimicked reality so well. It felt a times that I could just continue to wonder around the world on some kind of post apocalyptic derreve. That was not the case, and if it was I may have become bored. The truth of the game is, after you beat the game a few times it would probably be pretty boring to play again. What makes the game for me, more than the graphics or violence, is the narrative. Like a good story the game seems to uphold the traditional arc.
In theater there is a Brecht's device called the ""Chinese scroll" in which the title of the scenes were displayed to the audience as a mechanism to alienate them from the play. Brecht was trying to alienate the audience so that they could be aware of their role as an audience an not get lulled into believing the characters of the play were real. In Half life the titles seem to function in the same way. The presence of the title not only alienates the game player but it makes them feel like they have some kind of history or meaning or lineage to live up to.

What happens when games are removed from virtual reality and placed in the real world? Although this Pac-man game takes place in the real world it still relies on cell phones, wi-fi and custom designed software to play. If this kind of game play is anticipating more game play in the real world I would be very excited. As amusing as "Pacmanhatan" is, I'm sure it gets boring at some point in the same way the real Pac-man does with it's monotony. It would be really fun to play a game like World of War Craft or Halo 3 in the real world.

The obvious answer to why people play in virtual worlds and not in the real would be that the graphics and interface makes it much easier to truly slip away into another dimension. One does not have to be pro-active. Our initial instinct to play a game is one where we create these realities ourselves in a hope to be pro-active and change the reality we exist in. The complex and sophisticated games of "House' I would play as a child come to mind. The advantage of a game like Pac-man in the real world is that the player can use their whole body and really deal with the violence of being chased by ghosts and they have more creative input. A player of Pac-man in the real world is forced to conceptualize and deal with the real environment rather than leaving it totally up to the designer.