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Фридрих ТИТЬЕН / Friedrich TIETJEN |
| "Это реальность! Она виртуальная!" Фотография, пространство и реальность в компьютерных играх / "It's virtual! Really!" Photography, Space and Reality in Video Games |
Фридрих ТИТЬЕН / Friedrich TIETJEN
Независимый исследователь и куратор Центра культуры и искусств Reinbeckhallen, Берлин, Германия
PhD по истории искусств
Independent Researcher and Curator at the Reinbeckhallen, Berlin, Germany PhD in Art History friedrich.tietjen@univie.ac.at
"ЭТО РЕАЛЬНОСТЬ! ОНА ВИРТУАЛЬНАЯ!" ФОТОГРАФИЯ, ПРОСТРАНСТВО И РЕАЛЬНОСТЬ В КОМПЬЮТЕРНЫХ ИГРАХ
По мере того, как компьютеры пользователей обретают необходимую мощность и экраны с высоким разрешением, фотореалистичность компьютерных игр кажется всё более доступной целью. Тем не менее, чем ближе подбираются к этой цели дизайнеры компьютерных игр, тем больше она, кажется, ускользает. Даже в наиболее совершенных играх визуальные поверхности с первого взгляда выдают себя как изображения не фотографической природы, а сгенерированные компьютером. Зачем же тратить столько денег, времени и знаний на цель, которая кажется столь же иллюзорной, сколь и сами компьютерные игры? В поисках ответов данная статья обращается гораздо в меньшей степени к обсуждению визуальных поверхностей фотографии, чем к вопросу о том, как фотография и кино структурируют восприятие пространства и времени.
Ключевые слова: компьютерные игры, виртуальная реальность, фотореализм, постфотография, теория фотографии, теория игр.
"IT'S VIRTUAL! REALLY!" PHOTOGRAPHY, SPACE AND REALITY IN VIDEO GAMES
As the necessary computing power and HD screens got available to consumers, photo realism in video games seems to be within reach. However the closer game designers come this goal, the farther it seems to elude. The visual surfaces even of advanced games still give away on first glance what they are: computer generated, not filmed or photographed. So
why is there so much money, time and intelligence -
wasted on a goal that seems to be as much an illusion as the games themselves? The answer tried here has less to do with the visual surfaces of photography, and much more with the way photography and film structure the perception of temporality and space.
Key words: Video games, virtual reality, photo-realism, post-photography, theory of photography, game theory.
Speaking at a game developers' conference in July 2013, Tim Sweeney predicted what was going to happen in the business within the next ten years: "We'll be able to render environments that are absolutely photorealistic (...), like indistinguishable from reality..."1 Now
1 URL: https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/tim-
sweeney-photorealistic-games-possible-within-ten-years,3.html last visited 25.12.2019.
this Tim Sweeney is not a somebody - he is one of the founders of the Epic software company and a leading programmer of its most successful product: A game engine with the ambiguous name "Unreal" that is designed to control the interplay of movement, colors, shades, shapes and space of video games. First introduced in 1998, the Unreal game engine works in the background of hundreds of different games, such as online first person
| 4 (37) 2019 |
Фридрих ТИТЬЕН / Friedrich TIETJEN |
| "Это реальность! Она виртуальная!" Фотография, пространство и реальность в компьютерных играх / "It's virtual! Really!" Photography, Space and Reality in Video Games |
shooters (aka ego-shooters), level based adventure games, role playing games and simulators.2 Sweeney's prediction, thus, may not be just business pep talk, but also a fairly educated guess. Yet it also raises at least two questions: What kind of photorealism is meant? And what happens if games do indeed become photorealistic?
It is safe to assume that Sweeney's idea of photorealism has little to do with the works of Chuck Close, John Bader, Tom Blackwell and the other painters who were and are tagged by art critics and historians as photo realists. Sweeney refers rather to a more commonplace understanding of photorealism as it is applied, for instance, to the images generated with the help of computer aided graphic design that are commonly used by the advertisement industry and for movies. Both approaches to photorealism, however, have one thing in common. The term photorealism was, and still is, applied only to images of non-photographic origin. That photographic images are photorealistic, apparently, appears to be self-evident. Yet it remains unclear to what understanding of photography and of reality the composite term photorealism exactly refers. Given, however, the use of the word, a photorealistic image could be two things: it could appear either as a photograph, or as reality itself.
There is some evidence that Sweeney had in mind the latter definition, but this understanding of photorealism still needs some fine-tuning. It refers to photographic images that are kind of "normal," or normal in the sense that they are neither blurred nor too dark nor too poor in contrast &c. In short, they are normal in the way that they make us recognize what is depicted instead of the
picture itself; what we tend to see is an object image and not an image object. Both are separated, if at all, not by a clear divide, but rather, a foggy field of contesting and complimentary notions about the relation of photography and visual reali-ty.3 Photographic theory has been aware of this since the early days of the medium, and has produced a number of definitions to describe these different notions. Photographic images have been described as being a trace of what they depict, an imprint, a reduplication, an index. Each of these approaches has its merits and logic; none of them, however, suffices alone in describing all possible relations as they change with the different uses of photographic images. A photo booth portrait, for instance, can be looked at indexically by a customs officer matching an ID to its holder, or it can become a physical trace to a lover carrying it
around in his or her wallet and missing the loved -
one. In other words, the relation of a photographic image to reality is not so much the result of its means of production, but to a greater extent, of the uses to which it is put. The realism of photographic images derives more from desires and demands resulting in the uses to which they are put, with these practices changing and shifting.
All of these frames of reference are based on the assumption that what photographic images show is somewhat real, i.e., connected to how visual reality appears to the naked, unadulterated eye.4 When in the 19th century, most photographs
2 For a list that may not be complete see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_g ames
3 I hope to be excused that for the sake of the argument I use a rather empirical and vaguely defined understanding of visual reality here.
4 The nature and degree of reality of a photographic image however depends on the author's argumentation. For Susan Sontag for instance, photography creates "a duplicate world, of a reality in the second de-
gree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision," i.e., a world that at the same
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Фридрих ТИТЬЕН / Friedrich TIETJEN |
| "Это реальность! Она виртуальная!" Фотография, пространство и реальность в компьютерных играх / "It's virtual! Really!" Photography, Space and Reality in Video Games |
were portraits taken at studios by professional photographers, photo reality beyond the likeness of the face was merely phantasmagorical. Customers came and had their portraits taken surrounded by theatrical props such as plaster columns and painted backgrounds. Wearing their Sunday's best and posing, more or less dramatically,5 photographic realism for them was not a record of their social existence, but a means for a pictorial social upgrade. Another practice appeared with the introduction of light weight and easy-to-use cameras around 1900. A picture could now be snapped wherever the camera was taken. While
time is less (the second degree) and more (more dramatic) than the visual world; see Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1977), p. 52. Whereas Guy Debord argues that the "images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living." In modern society, images, including photographs, generate a detached pseudo-world that is somewhat less than what world has been and is transmuted into something neither alive nor dead. See Guy Debord, "Society of the Spectacle" in: Sunil Manghani et al. (eds.), Images: A Reader (London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi:SAGE, 2006), p. 69 5 As of the 1880s, for instance, women were often photographed as if they were reading. For a more extensive discussion of that specific pose see my essay "Immer gleiche Bilder. Zur Notwendigkeit der ReInszenierung fotografischer Gruppen- und Einzelporträts", in Klaus Krüger, Leena Crasemann, Matthias Weiß (eds.), Re-Inszenierte Fotografie. (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2011), p. 287. Online at: https://www.academia.edu/35885041/Immer_gleiche_ Bilder._Zur_Notwendigkeit_der_Re-Inszenierung_fotografischer_Gruppen-_und_Einzelportr%C3%A4ts (last visited 25.12.2019)
studio portraits tended to suspend time into some disengaged timelessness, even if staged, many vernacular photographs depict specific moments in the life of the photographed or the photographer. Additionally, a second process of image verification became accessible. These photographs could be compared to what the photographer and maybe the photographed remembered to have seen and where they had been. These photographic images become real by means of a reality check that can be, and is, repeated ever again by those who use them as a part of biographical self-assurance. Furthermore, this reality check also influenced the perception of other photographic images; if one photographic image is proven to be true, the same can be applied for all photographs.
In the 1970s, with the advent of the first electronic arcade games, and later in the 1980s,
with the first video games available for home -
computers, another practice in photo-realism appeared which is closely related to the introduction of a cinematic space that not only can be seen as in a movie theater, but also is accessible to and within limits controlled by the observer. It "is a defining characteristic of video game spaces that they allow this step into the represented space."6 It was common of all of the early video games that they were flat, i.e., 2D. Although for board and card games the third dimension is not of essential importance anyway, other games made use of unique graphical features that could be developed with the help of computers, including the depiction and construction of navigable spaces.7 For
6 Michael Nitsche, Video Game Spaces. Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Game Worlds (Cambridge, Mass./London: The MIT Press, 2009), p. 85. See Nitsche for a more detailed discussion of the cinematic space in video games.
7 The construction of a navigable space for computer games can be seen in connection to much earlier elec-
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Фридрих ТИТЬЕН / Friedrich TIETJEN |
| "Это реальность! Она виртуальная!" Фотография, пространство и реальность в компьютерных играх / "It's virtual! Really!" Photography, Space and Reality in Video Games |
games such as Rescue on Fractalus (1984), fractal graphics were employed to create a space in which the player could move his vehicle up and down and left and right.8 A different approach can be seen with games such as the First Person Shooter (FPS) Castle Wolfenstein 3D (1992).9 Adapting and refining wireframe graphics as had already been used much earlier for the game 3-Demon (1983)10 into ray casting graphics in which the player moves through a maze of walls and doors. Wolfenstein 3D soon was succeeded by many other games that employed similar applications of cinematic space; today there is hardly a genre of games it is not applied to, even if it is of only little or no use to the gameplay itself, as, for instance, for card, board and many strategy games.
Castle Wolfenstein 3D also introduced another element that connected the player's real body to the played virtual body. At the lower edge of the screen, the muzzle of the gun controlled by the player aims into the game space. With Doom (1993), this feature is refined; now it is not only
tro mechanical arcade games such as Sega's Periscope from 1966. For details see Steven L. Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and beyond (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001). For the electronic arcade motorcycle racing game Fonz, from 1976, the vehicle still is a two dimensional object which is looked on by the player from above; the route however already stretches in perspectively into a distance.
8 For a video of the gameplay, see for instance https: //www.youtube. com/watch?v=KtyhC0M5RY4 (last visited 25.12.2019). Later games such as Koronis Rift and The Eidolon (both 1985) also apply fractal graphics.
9 The game refers to the earlier 2D games Castle Wolfenstein (1981) and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein (1984).
10 3-Demon is a spatial adaption of Pac-Man; for a
video of the gameplay, see URL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0JGd_itBVk (last
visited 25.12.2019)
the gun pointing into the game space, but the hands holding it are visible, too, as if they were extensions of the gamer's body, making them part of the played body. With this, the screen is no longer just a graphic surface - it becomes a membrane connecting the reality of the game to the reality of the player.11
Certainly not all games applying cinematic space strive for photorealism, as wildly successful games such as Minecraft (2011) demonstrate.12 On the other hand, photorealism is applied to video games that have very little use for an accessible cinematic space, as in particular certain card, board and strategy games. Both an accessible cinematic space and a strive for photorealism, however, are quite common among certain kinds of sports games and FPS. These games do not only aim at connecting the body of the player into the
cinematic space by way of employing mimetic -
controls such as steering wheels and graphical features such as weapons protruding into the games space from the lower rim of the screen, but they also apply camera angles common to contemporary cinema, often allowing the player to switch between them. Setting aside sports and racing games, an exemplary game of this kind is DayZ, a so-called online Open World Multiplayer game. It is a game where the player encounters a rather small number of players and a rather large number of zombies in a vast post-apocalyptic landscape, which, incidentally, was sculpted after an area in the Czech Republic in the vicinity of Usti nad La-
11 Earlier arcade games such as Fonz employed a similar feature - here the controls resemble the handlebar of a motorbike and even vibrate when the player's vehicle collides with another on the screen.
12 Interestingly enough, however, the use of the tools by the player is shown similarly to how the muzzle of the gun appeares at the lower end of the screen in FPS.
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Фридрих ТИТЬЕН / Friedrich TIETJEN |
| "Это реальность! Она виртуальная!" Фотография, пространство и реальность в компьютерных играх / "It's virtual! Really!" Photography, Space and Reality in Video Games |
bem.13 Here, there are no missions to accomplish, no high scores to achieve, no levels to reach; the sole objectives are to survive by getting equipped as fast as possible, and to explore the world. This world is created with loving care to details of the visible surfaces and on at least some natural laws, as well. If you bleed, you start to shiver, and finally faint; if you jump off a building, mostly you die. In other words, the game has many options and contingencies and, therefore, a certain similarity with the complex realities of life.
What photorealism does in games such as DayZ might be just this: it makes them resemble films, not only those films that can be seen on TV or in movie theaters, but also those films, millions of which over the past decade have replaced the photograph and the album as social currency. In these games-as-films, the viewer/player is not a subject simply watching what is screened for him or her; he or she becomes an acting subject, an actor creating and existing in the image that he or she watches. The connection between producing images, looking at images and being part of the images, on the one hand, and the body of the player, on the other hand, is strengthened by the recent development of new interfaces between game and gamer. In one instance, the body and its movements is employed to control the game. Devices such as Nintendo's wireless Wii translate bodily movements in space into movements in the game. Display units such as Oculus Rift combine stereo glasses with sensors for position, and allow the space of the game to be perceived as the space in which the body moves, while at the same time the
13 There are a number of websites and videos comparing both landscapes; see for instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr71jrkzWq8 (last visited 25.12.2019)
non-game reality surrounding the player is blocked from view.
For the time being, the structure of the games, their narrations and subjects have not changed a great deal. In particular, the opportunities of enhanced technicality of bodily perception only begin to be explored. One can gain a glimpse of future developments in the business by viewing games such as Ambient Flight,14 which currently is available only as a demo version. In it, the gamer is an eagle flying through mountainous landscapes where he or she obtains another, nonhuman body moving in space. However, it is of more importance, in my opinion, how these games, technologies and methods of world making shift the role of the image, or more precisely, the role of the photorealistic image and with it, photography. 134
If the images generated with the help of -
hardware and software become "indistinguishable from reality," as Sweeney predicted, the relationship between photography and reality starts sliding. At the beginning, I briefly described the relationship between ontology and the pragmatics of the photographic image. While more recent onto-logical arguments emphasize the difference between pictures and depicted realities, pragmatic approaches of everyday life depend upon photographic images as duplications of reality. The pragmatic perspective of Sweeney's photorealistic games, in addition to sensory controlling and feedback devices such as Oculus Rift or Wii controller change what happens to the player. His or her experience is not one of images anymore, but one of bodily realities; that is, the games do not only utilize the visual perception of the player, but other senses too. With this, the possible reality
14 https: //www. youtube. com/watch?v= ly_5ceZtl-4 (last visited 25.12.2019)
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Фридрих ТИТЬЕН / Friedrich TIETJEN |
| "Это реальность! Она виртуальная!" Фотография, пространство и реальность в компьютерных играх / "It's virtual! Really!" Photography, Space and Reality in Video Games |
check that pragmatic understanding of photographs relies upon erodes as well; what is real and what has happened can be mixed up in many different ways. It is something that already occurs in games such as DayZ, where some players have taken up a routine for themselves in redefining their role within the game. They do not attach to one of several groups and clans that fight and build together, but understand their role as that of an embedded journalist writing pieces on the fights that go on in one world or the other. It is noteworthy that the region around Usti nad Labem has recently seen a bit of game-related tourism, with players in camouflage apparently trying to reenact what they have played online before.
A second remark is concerned with another sphere where virtual and real realities converge. That they do so has been known only since Jean Baudrillard, in 1991, claimed that the Gulf War never took place, as it dissipated in the images the media distributed. If, in his example, media coverage overwrites and overcomes the actual reality that no picture, no photograph could ever capture, the opposite is happening, too: with smart phone cameras and apps that not only recognize faces but only snap when the face is recognized as smil-ing;15 with smart phones and programs that identify a commodity in a shop, find out whether it can be had cheaper elsewhere or even order it online instantly;16 with digital mirrors for virtual dressing that glue a garment onto the customer's body and make him or her see how it would look17. These examples name but a few where images do not
15 See, for instance, apps like Smile Capture and Smile Shutter.
16 See, for instance. apps such as Pounce and Price Check.
17See for instance https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Mr71j rkzWq8
reproduce realities, but rather create, form and become them.
Probably one of the more impressive recent examples for the convergence of these realities is Google Glass, in which visible reality not only withers into a photographable surface, but this photographable surface becomes a reality augmented and superimposed with all kinds of data, connections and imagery. These technologies transform real space into an image and, vice versa, the image into real space, transferring greater control over what is happening and what can happen to the viewer and to the company controlling the device. How widespread and random these amalgamations are can also be seen with the recurrence of 3D-visuality in movie theaters and private photography, with advertising props protruding from billboards and shop windows, and
even from seemingly insignificant phenomena, -
such as the embossing of book covers and packages. The latter has become again very fashionable in the past decade, after it was seemingly dead for about a century, as can be seen from applications that are rarely functional in the modernist sense, though neither are they only decorative. They make use of reality as space that is real and virtual at the same time.
A last note concerning the fate of the Barthesian punctum: if photorealism is at the core of the punctum, and if the punctum is what can connect a photographic image, more or less violently to a beholder, exciting a subjective amazement that this world really is this way, generating such pictures, then photorealistic games and augmented realities possibly reshape this amazement and with it, the punctum. The punctum depends on subjectivity, difference and detail. This is exactly what digital photorealism can deliver - visuals that are detailed and unique and different to
| 4 (37) 2019 |
Фридрих ТИТЬЕН / Friedrich TIETJEN |
| "Это реальность! Она виртуальная!" Фотография, пространство и реальность в компьютерных играх / "It's virtual! Really!" Photography, Space and Reality in Video Games |
anybody and everybody. This means that the punctum is no longer confined to images taken from the reality we consider to be real. In other words, photorealistic games of the future cease to be realistic but become real. Hence, if the virtual reality of games becomes photorealistic, so does the real reality. Or, again in other words, if Sweeney's prophecy becomes true - how can reality then be distinguished from games?
References
1. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, in Sunil Manghani et al. (eds.), Images: A Reader (London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: SAGE, 2006).
2. Steven L. Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon and beyond (New York:Three Rivers Press, 2001).
3. Michael Nitsche, Video Game Spaces. Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Game Worlds (Cambridge, Mass./London:The MIT Press, 2009).
4. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1977).
5. Friedrich Tietjen, "Immer gleiche Bilder. Zur Notwendigkeit der Re-Inszenierung fotografischer Gruppen- und Einzelporträts", in Klaus Krüger, Leena Crasemann, Matthias Weiß (eds.), ReInszenierte Fotografie (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2011).
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