Published May 24th 2008
Abstract: Douglas Brown’s Rez: An Evolving Analysis dives into Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s ‘trance shooter’ to reveal how the game’s recursive dynamics – between sight and sound, rhythm and novelty, abstraction and representation – work to construct the player’s spatial and temporal experience.
Filed in Games, Older Media, Sound, Volume 13 | No responses yet
Published May 23rd 2008
Abstract: As a way of envisioning futuristically appropriate player experiences, this paper speculates on the emergence of participatory virtual environments as a metamaterial phenomena resulting from the confluence of aleatory, tribal playspaces and human-computer interaction (HCI). Using a set of revolutionary influences from 1960s, namely Thomas Kuhn, Marshall McLuhan, Victor Turner, and John Cage, the stage is set for virtual playspaces and postulations are made about the ability of these influences to affect theatre’s core axioms. Reflections are made on the resistance that might occur, notably in the form of audience reticence, and requisite conditions are laid out for the emergence of a new paradigm in the landscape of theatre.
Filed in Games, Older Media, Other, Volume 13 | No responses yet
Published May 23rd 2008
Abstract: In this exploratory essay the author describes the shared context of Sculptor turned Games Designer Keita Takahashi, best known for his PS2 title Katamari Damacy, and superstar contemporary artist Takashi Murakami. The author argues that Takahashi’s videogame is an expression of the technical, aesthetic and cultural values Murakami describes as SuperFlat, and as such expresses continuity between the popular culture and contemporary art of two of Japan’s best-known international creative practitioners.
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Published May 23rd 2008
Abstract: Exploring the notion of the literary imagination, Holly Wills examines how several major works of videogame art invite the viewer/participant to imagine the world differently through their deployment of gamic tropes. Relations open up and expand under some aesthetic conditions; contract and distort under others. Wills offers a compelling trajectory of aesthetic concern over digitality itself, the site of a persistent anxiety of being which underscores the artists surveyed.
Filed in Film, Games, Older Media, Volume 13 | No responses yet
Published May 22nd 2008
Abstract: Eugénie Shinkle’s piece Digital Games and the Anamorphic Subject reassesses the visual lineages that prefigure contemporary gaming forms. Games, in the process of locating gamers in space, draw on the tradition of anamorphic art exemplified by Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Recasting the regimes of vision and attention in these terms facilitates new insights into gaming subjectivity.
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