Terminology Analysis of Digital Games, part 12

Continued from part 11.

Virtual Subjectiveness: is a model of the "whole user experience" of being in virtual space.

The Visual Subjectiveness (VS) is the mediation element composed of the physical interfaces, the mappings, the logical interface, and the behaviors [of the above, with respect to the Virtual Environment (VE)]. The VS not only mediates the user's experience at a cognitive level, defining for her a specific understanding of the VE, but also... what potentiality she has and how she can apply it in her activity and reactions within the experience. Hence, the user does not directly interact with a VE to obtain an experience; rather, the experience of the user is actually mediated by an intermediary entity that we call the VS (Parés and Parés "Towards a Model for a Virtual Reality Experience: The Virtual Subjectiveness" Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 2006 vol. 15 no. 5 pp. 532-33).

VS is the relationship between the user and the VE based on the transmission of semantic information to the user through the VS. A VR experience is under control of the user, but VR application creator maintains control over that experience by changing the properties of how the user will "unfold" their participation (how their affordances will be moderated or change throughout the virtual experience (2006 pg. 532)), thus designing the user's VS.

As a digital game level designer, I am intimately familiar with the need to shape and control the user's experience. We create an illusion of a full, rich, vibrant world, but limit the experience to the amount of the world that can be loaded into computer memory at one time. The virtual world only exists around the player's extent of perception, with sections of the world being loaded as they come into view and deleted from memory as they recede into the distance. We use tricks adapted from stagecraft, like facades and forced perspective, to create Potemkin villages of detail that are just beyond the player's reach. We limit the player's freedom of perception to prevent them from seeing "the man behind the curtain," breaking the illusion of their virtual world by seeing that behind apparent solid, brick walls of virtual reality, there exists only void. Players are subjected to the designer's will in order to maintain the illusion of a cohesive world.

N. Katherine Hayles notes that our embodied, cybernetic connection to computers changes our perception and makes us virtual subjects.

We do not need to have software sockets inserted into our heads (as William Gibson envisions in Neuromancer) to become cyborgs. We already are cyborgs in the sense that we experience, through the integration of our bodily perceptions and motions with computer architectures and topologies, a changed sense of subjectivity (Hayles "The Condition of Virtuality" The Digital Dialectic 1999 pg. 91).

Hayles' early look at of virtual subjectivity sees its construction in the adaption of the physical and virtual interfaces into the body schema.

Although the shape of virtual subjectivity is only beginning to emerge and is therefore difficult to envision clearly, certain features are coming into focus. Proprioceptive coherence in interplay with electronic prostheses* plays an important role in reconfiguring body boundaries, especially when it gives the user the impression that her subjectivity is flowing into the space of the screen. When the interface is configured as keyboard and screen, the user will perceive that space belongs to the computer, and flow to the user... whatever the symbiosis is taken to mean, it seems clear that the virtual subject will in some sense be a cyborg (Ibid. pg. 92).

* I prefer to refer to these embodied technological extensions as augmentations rather than prostheses. A prosthesis implies a replacement for a lost body part while the computerized apparatuses I write about are created to extend a human's abilities beyond normal capacity. The metaphor of the cyborg prosthesis is common with digital media academics yet, as Elizabeth Petrick points out, their writings rarely take people with disabilities into account (Petrick "The Computer as Prosthesis?" Abstractions and Embodiments: New Histories of Computing and Society 2022 pg. 401).

Daniel Vella and Stefano Gualeni declare that virtual subjectivity arises, not from affordances and limits, but from the explicit or implicit goals the player pursues in the game world. To many, goals are a defining characteristic of games and few examples of games do not feature set objectives (they cite Proteus (Key and Kanaga 2013) and Second Life (Linden Labs 2003) as exceptions). However, achieving the goal doesn't matter. "On the contrary, its status as an existential project lies in the fact that... the goal is only a pretext that serves to shape the player's comportment in the virtual world into a particular form and, as such, to constitute a particular project of being in the virtual world"  (Vella and Gualeni "Virtual Subjectivity: Existence and Projectuality in Virtual Worlds" Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 2019 vol. 23 no. 2 pg. 122). The virtual world exists in order to enact such goals.

Note that digital games have a distinct difference from other forms of computer applications with regard to goals. With productivity software, for example, the user brings their goals to the application (I use accounting software in order to keep track of my business expenses for tax purposes). With games, the application assigns goals to the user (many games give a checklist of mission objectives the user must accomplish in order to advance) (Marc LeBlanc "Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics: A Formal Approach to Game Design" Lecture at Northwestern University 2004).

Of course, a player often has the freedom not to pursue the explicit proscribed goals that the game assigns. They have agency to pursue their own goals and wander the virtual world aimlessly, attack their own allies, or simply hop up and down in one place. In fact, pursuing a game's proscribed goals when they do not align with the player's personal goals might be seen as acting in bad faith, as Sartre would put it: being what one is not. Marta Kania sees this concept of "bad faith" as characterizing the self-avatar's (Kania's term that aligns with virtual subject) condition -- a player must assume the role of the avatar, to be what one is not, in order to realize the self-avatar's condition. "This way, the point of view of the self-avatar participating in the gameplay situation; i.e. her situatedness within the gameworld; constitutes a basis for meaning-making in a game" (Kania Perspectives of the Avatar 2017 pg. 100).

But, argues Kania, the self-avatar/virtual subject is only acting in bad faith when observed from a perspective external to the gameworld. Within the gameworld, the player's situation has the characteristics of an actor. What is otherwise seen as bad faith provides a perceptual frame for the player acting as a self-avatar, and allows the player to perceive meaning and fulfillment in the gameworld (Ibid. pg. 107).

Terminology Analysis of Digital Games, part 11

Continued from part 10.

We always have an incomplete view on the virtual environments of digital games as they are projected onto the flat, two-dimensional surfaces are our display screens. In the case of two-dimensional games, we might only see these virtual agents and objects from the front view or from one side. These objects may not even have a "back" side, yet we do not tend to see them as incomplete objects. We still have an impression that they are whole and have extents into the virtual space.

Philosopher Alva Noë explored aspects of human perception of actual objects and concluded that we perceive three-dimensional objects in this same way.

"For example, you look at a tomato. You have a sense of its presence as a whole, even though the back of the tomato (for example) is hidden from view. You do not merely think that the tomato has a back, or judge or infer that it is there. You have a sense, a visual sense, of its presence... How can the tomato's back show up in experience when we manifestly do not see it?" (Noë "Curious Reference" The Philosophical Quarterly vol. 59 no. 236 2009 pp. 470-71 emphasis original).

We do not see the back of the tomato, yet we perceive the fruit as a whole object, voluminous and extended in three dimensions.

"You can only see part of the tomato's surface... [but] when you look at a tomato, what you see is not part of it (the facing surface), but it" (Noë Action in Perception 2004 pg. 76 emphasis original).

We have a "sensorimotor knowledge" about experiencing objects like tomatoes, which enables us to perceive an object that we only see a portion of it.

"These features of the world... fall within the scope of your perceptual awareness despite the fact that they are, in a straightforward way, out of view... They are present in experience -- they are there -- despite the fact that they are absent in the sense of being out of view. They are present precisely as absent" (Noë "Curious Reference" The Philosophical Quarterly vol. 59 no. 236 2009 pg. 472 emphasis original).

Our perception fills in the unseen aspects to experience a whole; we don't need to see the back because our sensorimotor systems understand that changing our subjective view of the object will bring the hidden portions of the tomato into view.

"My sense of the visual presence of the tomato's back -- in contrast, say, with the tomato's insides -- consists in practical understanding that simple movements of my head and body in relation to the tomato would bring the reverse side into view. It is visually present to me now" (Noë "Curious Reference" The Philosophical Quarterly vol. 59 no. 236 2009 pg. 474).

Vacant House in Onett
Ape and HAL Laboratory Earthbound 1995

Brendan Keogh reminds us of a moment where a digital game directly confronts our perception by sensorimotor knowledge (Keogh 2018 pp. 35-39). In the Super Nintendo role-playing game Earthbound (1995, released as Mother 2 in Japan), the buildings in the player's hometown of Onett are all displayed on the town map in an oblique projection (the roof and the front and right side walls are all visible from outside, but the player can never see the other exterior sides). There is a "vacant house" for sale on the outskirts of town for an expensive price, well beyond the player's budget at the start of the game. There is no way to go inside the house without buying it, and if the player waits too long into the game's story, the real estate agent will disappear and the house will no longer be for sale.

It is possible for the player to stay near the start of the game, saving up enough money to buy the house. Once paid, the real estate agent runs away and the player may walk their character into the house through the front door.

Vacant House Interior

Once inside, the player sees that the house is a dilapidated, run down mess. There are holes in the flooring and, most importantly, there is no wall on the rear of the house. It is easy to say that the game creators were breaking the fourth wall because there is no fourth wall. Logically, the characters in the game would have surely noticed that the house is incomplete before buying it. The joke is on the human player and their incomplete view into the game's world.

Note: Earthbound/Mother 2 is constantly changing the player's perception of the game world by using different projections for different aspects of the game. Onett and most other exterior locations are displayed in a typical "cavalier" elevation oblique projection. The unusual village of Saturn Valley uses a vertical oblique projection. Fourside uses a "military" oblique projection that accentuates the sense of height in its tall skyscrapers. Building interiors often use opposing oblique projections of the right and left walls to convey a naïve image of converging lines of perspective, as if the walls are converging in the distance. Finally, battle scenes are set in a hazy, fog-like environment: an ambiguous space.

Noë agrees with philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty that we have more than a "pictorial" perception: seeing a retinal image of the object and recognizing it as a tomato (Noë "Pictures in Mind" Action in Perception 2004 pp. 35-74). Merleau-Ponty's examples use a cube, not a tomato, 

"I express the carnal presence of the cube that is there before my eyes... in its perpetual evidentness. The sides of the cube are not projections of it, they are nothing other than "sides." When I see them... according to perspectival appearance, I do not construct the idea of a geometrical plan [alternately translated as "flat projection"] that would account for these perspectives; rather, the cube is already there in front of me and unveils itself through them" (Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception 1945 trans. 2012 pg. 211).

Merleau-Ponty similarly writes about actively perceiving a drawing of a cube on a piece of paper as if it is an object with dimensional extents.

"Depth is born before my gaze because my gaze attempts to see something"  (1945 pg. 274 emphasis original).

The drawing, a projection of a cube on a flat surface, gives the impression of a whole object, even when the method of projection (oblique, orthographic, or isometric, for example) does not match the subjective perspectival experience we have when observing an actual, material cube.

"The six faces and twelve edges can only simultaneously coexist and remain equal for me if they are arranged in depth. The act that corrects appearances, giving acute or obtuse angles the value of right angles, or to deformed sides the value of a square, is no the thought of geometrical relations of equality and of the geometrical being to which they belong -- it is the investment of the object by my gaze that penetrates it, animates it, and immediately makes the lateral faces count as "squares seen from an angle," to the extent that we do not see them according to the extent that we do not even see them according to their diamond-shaped perspectival appearance" (1945 pg. 276).

Similarly, we accept digital game objects projected on our display screens, be they an animated sprite character or vacated house with a missing wall, as complete objects with some sense of depth and dimensionality in their virtual environments. Their spatiality should make sense within the logic of their particular virtual spaces.

Note that digital game graphics tend to be varied and hybridized, even within a single game. A single frame of a game is often constructed of numerous images, arranged in order to construct a cohesive scene. Especially in the era when games were shifting from 2-D to 3-D, various objects may use different methods of projection, yet still read as part of a single organized space.

For example, in Doom (Id Software 1993), the player explores the game world from a first-person perspective viewpoint. The environment is drawn the the screen via a raycast 3-D method, essentially creating a two-point perspective view by rendering the view in vertical strips. This works well maneuvering laterally and looking left or right, but the player cannot tilt their view up or down. Objects in the game (keys, pieces of armor, exploding barrels, etc.) overlap each other and recede into the distance, but they are simple orthographic sprites that are always seen as if from the same direction. Creatures are similar to objects, but use different sets of sprite animations that mimic displaying them from eight possible directions. The sky and mountains in the distance are simply a flat background image displayed behind all other objects and environmental elements.

Researcher Dominic Arsenault and his team at the Université de Montréal created a framework for analyzing this many and varied projection methods that create hybrid visual modes in game graphics ("The Game FAVR: A Framework for the Analysis of Visual Representation in Video Games" Loading... The Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association 2015 vol. 9 no. 14 pp. 88-123). It is an effective toolkit for defining the varied graphical presentations of elements in a digital game image, but it is not intended for analyzing a game's spatiality. For that, I've incorporated some of the Game FAVR concepts into my own system of defining virtual spaces (Rowe "A Taxonomy of Virtual Spaces" unpublished).

 

CYBORG:

Additional quotes about the concept of digital games as cyborgian play.

"Computer games, like most computer applications, work through feedback between user and software. It has been argued that these games, or, more precisely, the circuit of game and player in the act of playing, are literally (for the duration of the game at least) cybernetic. Computer games... produce the game player as cyborg" (Kennedy "Illegitimate, Monstrous and Out There" Feminism in Popular Culture 2006 pp. 188-89).

"There is no player separate to the interface and game world, there is a fusion of the two into a cyborgian subjectivity -- composed of wires, machines, code and flesh" (Kennedy "Female Quake Players and the Politics of Identity" Videogame, Player, Text 2007 pg. 126).

"From my experience with... virtual reality simulations... I can attest to the disorienting, exhilirating effect of the feeling that subjectivity is dispersed throughout the cybernetic circuit. In these systems, the user learns, kinesthetically and proprioceptively, that the relevant boundaries for interaction are defined less by the skin than by the feedback loops connecting body and simulation in a technobio-integrated circuit" (Hayles "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers" How We Became Posthuman 1999 pg. 27).

Terminology Analysis of Digital Games, part 10

Continued from part 9.

Brendan Keogh uses N. Katherine Hayles' media criticism techniques to understand digital games as an embodied textuality. I believe it is this sense of embodiment that digital games convey that is key to understanding the unique aesthetic qualities of digital games. While all forms of texts may be said to be embodied (films, plays, novels, music, etc.), digital game players enter a cyborgian circuit with the game machine, through its physical interface, integrate into an algorithmic coupling with the simulated world, and experience a sense of navigation through virtual space that I call cyberkinaesthesia.

The author interfacing with a game controller (2018)