HUMlab will be streaming two presentations on gameworld spaces from
the Connecting the Dots: Movement, Space, and the Digital Image
conference held at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences
and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge. The session will
be streamed live in
HUMlab X (The Arts Campus) as part of the Lunchbox Learnings series.
This is a chance to hear two very interesting papers on game space in
the popular games Minecraft and The Sims (see abstracts below) by two
well-known scholars: Dr Seth Giddings, new media and game studies
lecturer and Programme Leader for Media and Cultural Studies in the
Department of Creative Industries from the University of the West of
England (co-editor of New Media: a critical introduction (2009), editor
of The New Media and Technocultures Reader (2011), and author of
Gameworlds: virtual media, everyday life (forthcoming)); and Dr Alan
Blackwell, Senior Lecturer in neuroscience and Human Computer
Interaction with The Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge.
We will be starting a little earlier at 11:15 am on 12th April,
Friday, and we will end at about 12:30 pm. Even though this is a
streamed session, there will be plenty of chances to ask questions and
take part in the discussion.
All welcome!
Useful Links:
Facebook Event:
https://www.facebook.com/events/585271961485244/
Website for Connecting the Dots:
http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2069/
Digital Cultures Research Center:
http://dcrc.org.uk/
Seth Giddings:
http://www.sethgiddings.net/
Alan F. Blackwell:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~afb21/
ABSTRACTS:
“The Metaphysics of Minecraft”
Alan F. Blackwell
University of Cambridge
Minecraft is a popular computer game of the “sandbox” genre, where
players explore and build in a virtual world. The user typically
experiences this world as a “first person” view, from the point of view
of a virtual avatar. The screen shows an imaginary landscape of hills,
grass and trees, or when mining, dirt, gravel, coal and various ores.
The player can grasp a variety of tools in his or her virtual hand, and
controls these pickaxes or other implements with the computer mouse. The
contents of the world may be shared with other players, via one of many
Minecraft servers, each of which contains its own virtual world, with
the avatars of other players on that server exploring, mining or
creating around you.
This kind of virtual world sandbox game is not unusual. Much
attention was paid by media and media scholars to the game “Second
Life”, originally launched in 2003, 6 years earlier than Minecraft.
Second Life also allowed the player to interact with the avatars of
other players, explore and create houses or products. But the
distinctive nature of Minecraft is the lack of realism in this virtual
world. Unlike the animated fantasy world of online games such as Second
Life, the graphics of Minecraft have extremely low resolution, looking
intentionally crude. The virtual world is constructed of cubic blocks,
nominally a metre on each side, meaning that the player can make rapid
progress felling blocky trees for timber, digging blocky mines for coal,
and assembling blocks into houses, farms or larger structures. Unlike
the fine textures of realistic virtual worlds in multiplayer online
role-playing games, the large blocks of Minecraft seem like giant
digital Lego. Players can rapidly collect building materials and tools
for ambitious construction projects, or even deploy an inexhaustible
supply of digital blocks in a non-competitive creative mode. Lack of
realism results in a system that is democratic and generative to a
degree not seen in comparably popular games.
The freedom offered to players extends well beyond facility of
movement in the virtual world. The Swedish creator of Minecraft, known
as Notch (and his company Mojang), have intentionally allowed fans to
decrypt and modify the Java language source code of Minecraft itself. A
determined player can substitute new pieces of code for any part of the
Minecraft system – a practice described as “modding”. Mods are shared
among players, allowing individuals to choose more and more mutated
versions of the game world – with different tools, materials, plants,
animals or monsters, as well as magic powers for the player. For those
without sufficient skill to write Java code, it is still possible to
change the world by replacing the block surfaces or the appearance of
their own avatars with alternative textures. And where players are
inclined to tinkering, it is possible to create automated machinery and
gadgets in the Minecraft world itself – using redstone (a fictional kind
of semiconductor) with switches, pistons – and even virtual computers
inside the computer, that can be programmed in their own simple language
to make robots do the mining and building on your behalf.
These facilities reconfigure space in the virtual world of Minecraft
in surprisingly profound and reflexive ways. Rather than a literalistic
re-construction and re-presentation of “virtual reality”, Minecraft
offers a democratised spatial poetics – an Open Work, in the sense
defined by Umberto Eco. The boundaries between coal and code are
permeable to an extent only previously imagined in the dream allegories
of Neuromancer and the Matrix. Minecraft players not only inhabit the
worlds of each other’s imaginations, and collaborate to redefine the
game they are playing, but blur the bounds between the product itself
and their own media culture. They share advice on recipes and mods via
active support communities and wikis. But even more prolifically, they
use screen recorders to make videos of their avatar playing the game,
with voice-over narration explaining their constructions and adventures,
or giving advice to new players. Minecraft players may spend as much
time watching videos of other people playing as they do playing
themselves. And the machinima affordances of the Minecraft world lead to
players creating their own homages to popular films such as the Hunger
Games, with the original narrative re-located into the block world of
Minecraft. As with building and modding, the blocky low resolution is
liberating to young creators who could never emulate professional
animation standards, but probably didn’t want to. Older players gain
YouTube followers by using custom mods or additional animation software
to create meta-narratives – postmodern commentaries on the genre and its
communities – such as the Egg’s Guide to Minecraft series.
At the time of writing, the emergent media ecology of the Minecraft
community is racing ahead of critical commentary. This abstract has
attempted to set out the scope of reconfiguration between space and
action. But the children currently playing Minecraft seem likely to
become a new generation holding radically altered expectations of
digital space.
————————————-
“Sim You Later: at play across virtual and actual space”
Seth Giddings
University of Western England
Current developments in mobile and locative media, and in augmented /
mixed reality media (for instance at the Pervasive Media Studio in
Bristol) take the permeability of virtual and actual space as a given.
Digital space is thought of not as the worlds within worlds of virtual
reality or cyberspace as imagined in 1990s, but rather as ‘content’ or
experience delivered to – for instance – a smartphone user as they
navigate their everyday environments. If the separation or transcendence
of the actual lived world was the technological imaginary of virtual
reality, then the dissolution of media technology into an augmented
everyday is the promise, or dream, of pervasive media.
However the interpenetration or layering of digital and actual space
does not dissolve the specific media/technological forms of digital
space. Rather we see a mixing or layering of heterogeneous domains, some
the quotidian environments of streets, homes and playgrounds, some the
intangible domains generated from databases, algorithms and user
interfaces, some rendered in the Euclidean geometry of game engines,
others in the text-constituted spaces of chat and Twitter. To understand
these composite realities, I would argue, we need to pay attention both
to the technological nature of digital spaces as software and hardware,
and to particular events in which virtual and actual spaces are
generated.
The presentation will draw on microethological studies of the
play-testing of pervasive media games, and of children’s videogame play
across digital and physical gameworlds. Microethology is a theoretical
and empirical method of participant observation in intimate events in
technoculture. The presentation will suggest key concepts for studying
emergent behaviours of, and in, the mixed realities of emergent digital
media cultures. It will argue that digital space should be understood in
relation to three significant factors:
behaviour – both human and nonhuman;
time – particularly the speculative and iterative time of simulation;
play – both serious and phantasmagorical.
