Digital Project Plans

Taxonomy of Virtual Spaces

Over this summer, I am starting a new digital project to explore the planar geometric projection options I defined in my Taxonomy of Digital Spaces. I plan to create a digital game where the spatial qualities of the game can be changed on the fly, in order to partially show specific spatial paradigms that, I argue, are unique aesthetic qualities of digital games.

The final project should be much like a virtual museum, where different spatial concepts may be explored and examined in an interactive manner. This will be similar to another project I created a few years ago, Traversing Virtual Dimensions (after which this blog is named). In Virtual Dimensions, the player is able to experience some of the earliest developments of a player avatar able to navigate through virtual space in digital game history. Unlike that project, Taxonomy will allow a player to set different methods of projection for the virtual environment and navigate that environment in a game-like manner.

This project also has some similarities to other games that I've written about where the game environment is modifiable during play.

The following are some screen shots of my initial tech prototype:

Game environment test with oblique projection.

Game environment test with orthographic projection.

Game environment test with perspectival projection.

I am using the Unity game editor as my development environment because I know that game engine very well and can work in it relatively quickly. My tech prototype uses the Kenney Game Assets All-in-1 asset pack for game characters. The ability to change the type of projection with Unity's camera is thanks to Art Leaping's Camera Perspective Editor scripts and the background cityscape seen in the prototype. All assets are used under license.

Creating all of the custom art needed, by hand, to project the same environment in many different methods of projection would be an insurmountable amount of work for one person. While I would relish the chance to create several different tile sheets of environmental sprite art and matching 3-D geometry as an exercise in different digital game art styles, I simply don't have the time to tackle that and everything else the game needs. However, if I am able to replicate 2-D game art methods by using a modified game camera, I can project the same set of 3-D scene objects to the screen in many different ways with different camera settings. Adapting to this technology should save a lot of effort.

The first goal for the project is to make project where the navigable environment may be changed to use the different methods of projection outlined in my research. The next step is to be able to change the other two conceptual image planes on the screen: the agents (characters and interactive elements) and the background/foreground objects. Once that is complete, I plan to have different player avatar characters that can move around the virtual environments in as-yet undefined methods of player affordances. These two elements together (the graphical spatial qualities and the player navigation affordances) can be used to define a game's spatial paradigm.

The final goal of my research is to define game aesthetics by their spatial qualities dealing with the embodied phenomenon of navigating virtual spaces, a cyberkinaesthetic experience. I posit that specific aesthetic trends and styles can be traced through our young art form's history and create a new diachronic "art history" of digital games in the process.

Game Genres, pt. 3: The Gamester's Types of Video Games (1983)

Continued from part two.

After reviewing two different game manufacturers' systems of "game genres" used for marketing and selling their titles, here is a player's-eye analysis of different arcade game types. The author takes an almost phenomenological approach: he classifies each game type by the interface through which he experiences the game. Delineating titles by these distinct interface designs, shared among games of a common genre, happens to tend to classify games by their affordances given the player to navigate virtual spaces. Each interface is built around those affordances of navigation and action. This probably wasn't Kordestani's intent with the system, but I see it as a side effect that correlates with my own studies of cyberkinaesthetics.

The Gamester's "Types of Video Games"

The Gamester's Guide to Arcade Video Games (Paul Kordestani, TAB Books Inc., 1983)

Paul Kordestani's The Gamester's Guide to Arcade Video Games (1983) is a hard-to-find, early guide to winning arcade game strategies. Many early texts about digital games are focused on tips and tricks to impress the other players at the arcade or maybe get ahead at tournaments. Kordestani is billed as a business consultant and arcade game enthusiast and founder of GAMESTER, Inc., "an arcade game player's support group."

The book's publisher, TAB Books, is better known for publishing guidebooks on all manner of technical subjects: electronics, lasers, robotics, and computers (I've owned TAB books on all these topics). TAB's other book on video games (that I know of), How to Repair Video Games (1978), is much like the other tinkering and repair guides they publish. Kordestani's Gamester's Guide is unusual as it is a different type of technical guide that describes gameplay and techniques more than electronics design or computer architecture.

Part I of this book consists of general information about games gleaned from Kordestani's "17 months of research and writing" (pg. vii). As the title implies, this book focuses on video arcade games, and there is information on game cabinet styles, general functionality, popularity, terminology, history, and even controversies. Chapter 3 is where Kordestani describes his "Types of Video Games," a sort of game taxonomy based on control methods and movement affordances. This is an unusual take on the concept of game genre, but is one that ignores in-game representation and focuses mostly on the human-computer interface through which the game is controlled. Each game type is classified by letter.

• Type A: One-Lever Maze Games ("lever" is Kordestani's term for joystick. These games focus on movement in a 2-D plane, especially maze games like Pac-Man and similar games like Q*bert.)
• Type B: Lever Plus Action Button Games (these games focus on movement through an environment in a 2-D plane with the addition of one button for taking an action like jumping (Donkey Kong) and punching (Popeye). It is unknown how Kordestani would classify more maze-like games that have an action button (like Wizard of Wor and Mr. Do!)
• Type C: Upward-Shooting Games (Space Invaders started this genre that encompasses (in 1983) what Kordestani estimates to be "approximately one-third of all video games" (pg. 15). The player controls a vertically-shooting base that is restricted to movement along the horizontal axis near the bottom of the screen. Some examples have an additional button for some limited power effect (presumably, like Phoenix and its Force Field button).)
• Variations of Type C (upward-shooting games where the player's base may move vertically in a restricted area at the bottom of the screen, like Centipede)
• Type D: Automatically Sideways-Moving Games (side-scrolling games with an auto-scrolling framing device (also called "Authoritarian" by Dominic Arsenault and his team in "The Game FAVR: A Framework for the Analysis of Visual Representation in Video Games" (2015)). Examples include Moon Patrol and Scramble.)
• Type E: Total Maneuvering Games (rightly called "the most challenging control boards" and Kordestani incorrectly asserts that "Asteroids was the original of this type" (pg. 19). Maybe he never played Computer Space or Space Wars before. This type of game is a momentum-based multidirectional shooter. The controls allow the player to rotate their avatar right and left, thrust forward, shoot, and often include an additional action like shield or hyperspace.)
• Variations of Type E (side-scrolling but freely moving games like Defender and its sequel, Stargate.)
• Type F: Three-Dimensional Games (first-person games showing a perspectival view of a 3-D environment, like Red Baron and Battlezone. This category is not classified by its interface, though Kordestani notes that the controllers in the example games (one 4-way joystick in Red Baron, two 2-way joysticks in Battlezone) are "substantial" and "much larger than the usual control levers" (pg. 20). These "substantial" joysticks contribute to the experience that the player is controlling a military aircraft or armored fighting vehicle.)
• Miscellaneous Games (games that don't quite fit into the other categories, like Missile Command and Tempest)

It does not appear that Kordestani's "types" influenced any other genre system. Kordestani doesn't even use the system in the book's Part II, playing techniques for 41 different games that were prevalent in 1983-era arcades. However, it does stand out for classifying games by interface rather than representation (eschewing milieu categories like "science fiction" or "horror").

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)

Terminology Analysis of Digital Games, part 9

Continued from part 8.

As previously examined, the algorithmic coupling of player and technology integrates the avatar into the player's body schema after adaptation to the mappings between physical and logical interfaces. As such, "the avatar... is a tool that extends the self toward the game world via active remappings of the body's boundaries" (Bissonnette 2019 pg. 213). 

Terminology Analysis BEYOND Coming of Age in Second Life, part 6

Continued from part 5.

As this series of blog posts continues, it becomes less and less about the terminology in Boellstorff's Coming of Age in Second Life.

CYBERKINAESTHESIA (cont.): 

Continuing to look at Silvie Bissonnette's Affect and Embodied Meaning in Animation (2019), she states that players enter an "algorithmic coupling" of the player's body with their avatar (2019 pg. 203). They achieve perceptual symbiosis with their avatar, but must establish a form of algorithmic synchronism with the interface and physical mastery of different mappings in order to achieve success in a game with more complex moves (pg. 203).

Terminology Analysis of Coming of Age in Second Life, part 5

Continued from part 4.

CYBER: Previously, I mentioned that Boellstorff sees "cyber" as a term that is roughly equivalent to "virtual" and "online" in many cases. He states that "cybersociality," "online culture," and "virtual world" are all interchangable (2010, pg. 17). "Cyber-" becomes just another prefix that means "related to a computer," as is common in today's vernacular, but I want to look at the roots of this term.

Boellstorff credits the coining of "cyber" to William Gibson's concept of cyberspace (first used in Gibson's "Burning Chrome" (1982) and expanded in his novel, Neuromancer (1984)) (2010, pg. 19). The "cyber" prefix has its roots in the term "cybernetics," first coined by mathematician Norbert Wiener in 1947, to give name to the science of "control and communication in the animal and the machine" (Wiener, Cybernetics (1948)) (2010, pg. 20).

From the start, cyber was concerned with control. This makes sense when looking at the root of cybernetics, the Ancient Greek kubernētikós (κυβερνητικός), essentially meaning "good at steering" (kubernáō "to steer," -tikós "skilled at").

In fact we "steer," or navigate, our way through virtual spaces constantly when dealing with digital media. Like modern-day flâneurs, we may "surf" the web through a network of hyperlinks, "scrub" the timeline to a specific point in a Youtube video, or mindlessly "scroll" through a news feed of social media updates. Similarly, one may embody an avatar in a digital game and navigate their way through a virtual world.

Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (2002)

I am interested in understanding how to discuss the aesthetics of navigation through virtual space. Lev Manovich posed this same question in The Language of New Media (2002), dating from way back when digital media was still "new" media. He also terms this concept "poetics of navigation through space" and how "art history, geography, anthropology, sociology, and other disciplines" give us tools to analyze static space, we don't really have a way to discuss dynamic space or its navigability (2002, pg. 259).

[Update 4 Dec 2022]

Note that this sensation of navigating virtual space is not exclusive to digital games. It is an aesthetic of all digital media, but I argue that it tends to be especially pronounced in games, where exploring new spaces may be the player's main goal. As an example, N. Katherine Hayles compares the kinesthetic experiences of reading books to those of reading hypertext, finding that greater engagement disconnects the reader from the printed page but further connects the hypertext reader to the computer interface.

This effect marks an important difference between screen and print. Although a reader can imaginatively project herself into a world represented within a print text, she is not likely to feel that she is becoming physically attached to the page itself. On the contrary, because the tactile and kinesthetic feedback loops are less frequent, less sensually complicated, and much less interactive, she normally feels that she is moving through the page into some other kind of space. The impression has a physiological basis. The physical stimuli the reader receives with print are simply not adequate to account for the cognitive richness of the represented world; the more the imagination soars, the more the page is left behind. This difference in the way proprioceptive coherence works with the computer screen, compared with the printed page, is an important reason why spatiality becomes such a highly charged dimensionality in electronic hypertexts (Hayles "The Condition of Virtuality" The Digital Dialectic 1999 pg. 88 emphasis original).

[End update 4 Dec 2022]

From this, I've been developing a new term:

CYBERKINAESTHESIA: The embodied sense of movement through a virtual space. Cyber- refers both to the original concept of "steering" and control along with "related to a computer." Kinaesthesia refers to one's sense of body position, orientation, and movement in space - and is synonymous with proprioception.

[It is commonly accepted that the two words are equal in meaning, and I will sometimes use them interchangably, but strictly speaking, proprioception is a sense of one's body's position in space and kinaesthesia is the sense of one's body's movement in space. Proprioception has a Latin base roughly meaning "self-receiving [sense]" (prōprius "one's own," re- "back," capiō "take") while kinaesthesia is from Greek and roughly means "movement sense" (kinein "to move," -aisthesis "perception," -ia "state of being").]

As I briefly mentioned in the last post, digital games can affect a player's preconscious sense of proprioception, causing players' bodies to duck when there is an on-screen threat, lean as they take a curve in a driving game, or move their head try to peer around a corner projected on the screen. The player's conscious mind has not been fooled into thinking that they have really entered the screen space (through the looking glass, if you will), yet their body may react as if they are "in" the game. Why?

Sylvie Bissonnette, Affect and Embodied Meaning in Animation (2019)

Sylvie Bissonnette's Affect and Embodied Meaning in Animation (2019) examines this same "cyberkinaesthesia," as I call it, in digital games as well as similar embodied sensations from watching animated films. As she puts it, the viewer enters a "complex perceptual entanglement with the animation apparatus"  [apparatus being the screen and the technologies that produce the moving images] (2019, pg. 3).

The technical interface becomes an extension of the viewer, something that we humans have a natural knack for, according to Andy Clark. In Clark's Natural-Born Cyborgs (2003), he writes that our neural physiology is pre-adapted to be transformed by our technological augmentations. We are "cyborgs not merely in the... superficial sense of combining flesh and wires but in the... sense of being human-technology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and nonbiological circuitry" (Clark, 2003, pg. 3).

To be continued...