GTA related reading + notes

HIGH ART/LOW LIFE: The Art of Playing Grand Theft Auto by Soraya Murray

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Summary (main things i took away):

1. the game as a commentary on real-world corruption and violence with recognisable (mostly American) cultural products ~ presenting some ugly parts of capitalism
2. the game as a virtual stage to perform + experiment in ways that are seen as “strange” or unnatural in real-life social constructions
3. the game as a virtual space to get lost in spatially and temporally

Quotes (favs highlighted):

In-game reality:

• (GTA) is all kitschy, gratuitous violence for entertainment purposes, it is also a masterpiece of interactive design.
• it represents a compelling human-computer encounter between informational space and lived space
• success in the game is largely contingent upon effectively negotiating and memorizing the virtual terrain.
• one second of actual time equals one minute; one minute equals one hour and twenty-four minutes becomes a day.
• when one considers what it means to become lost in a city that exists only in the time and space of the simulated.
• a convincing sense of one’s character-body is developed through aesthetic feedback.
• sound remains a highly understudied element of electronic games.
• The gangsta rap from the early nineties that blares from the cars CJ drives includes NWA, Dr. Dre, Eazy E, and Tupac, all of whom voice the problems of police brutality, the inability to find legitimate work, and the harshness of ghetto life.
• Electronic games re-present “living” spaces in which a digital proxy interacts with other agents, providing staging grounds upon which to play.
• the authorities rarely venture onto this block, whereas the police presence in affluent areas is more visible and aggressive.
• Grand Theft Auto represent rule-based, problem-solving environments that require creative solutions within a defined set of parameters.
• these are all boundary zones in which it becomes possible to experiment safely with extremely disorienting aspects of modern life.
• Rather than placing a game in opposition to player, I argue instead that as an interactive form, the two necessarily mutually affect each other.
• The performative dimensions of these complex worlds provide sites for open-ended explorations of the societies they mirror.

Contextualised IRL:

• The game seems equal parts social commentary and logical cultural outcome of combining America’s ruthless capitalistic impulse with a valorized national legacy of barbarism and hegemony.
• By tapping into recognizable cultural signifiers such as film, fashion, music, and slang, the designers of GTA are able to establish a virtual sense of “place” that enriches one’s overall experience.
• Rather than advocating gangsterism, rap lyrics and the hip-hop mentality advocates the proper hardening of will and development of the aggressiveness necessary to shed internalized feelings of victimhood to embrace market competition.
• What emerges is the game’s subtext: an experience of the dystopic metropolis, punctuated by a keen satirical comment on the omnipresent corruption and hypocrisy that would mitigate such a reality.
• the virtual body of the protagonist seems to demand more and more of what our real bodies need, while satirically emulating the social pressures associated with superficial appearances and materialism
• But now, that signifier of the black body, that shell upon which so many negative associations has been projected, becomes a mirror for a thorny cluster of societal relations in America.
• a liminal space that fluctuates in the imaginary and in ideology.

Beyond Play and Narration: Video Games as Simulations of Self Action by Jochen Venus

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Quotes (favs highlighted):

game studies/narrativity commentary:

• This new technology has challenged the established forms of experimental, playful, and narrative rehearsal by their hybridization or, as Lev Manovich has it, by their “deep remixability.”
• Video games are technical artifacts that attain their aims in the experience of their use.
• The general gaming experience is a regulatory idea that shapes the design of video games as well as the expectations of gamers.
• the general gaming experience could be described as a noumenal gameplay that cannot be actualized entirely in a singular gaming session.
• Like the Kantian Ding an sich (‘the thing in itself’), the general gaming experience conceptualizes a negativity that we encounter by the impossibility to realize the general gaming experience as a whole.
• An inquiry into the aesthetics of video games would then be an experiment with different perspectives rather than a methodologically secured routine.
• it is by the approach through a variety of perspectives that we establish a character’s reality.
• By deliberate coaching and criticism of the perspective process, characters can be considered tentatively, in terms of other characters, for experimental or heuristic purposes.
• Two of the most prominent incongruent perspectives in the Game Studies discourse would certainly be the perspectives of gameness and narrativity
• to enrich the notion of the general gaming experience by the application of a series of incongruent perspectives.
• (GTA San Andreas) has attracted much critical and scholarly attention, mainly for reasons that have nothing to do with the simulation of self-action but with the cinematic depiction of its virtual world
• The most prominent artificial self-action in GTA San Andreas is driving to a particular place, because all missions are introduced and connected by this activity.

presence/performance commentary:

• In my view, the most interesting aesthetical phenomena of video games emerge in the interplay between the pictorial elements on the screen (situationally abstract) and the varying senso-motorical schemata the player has to enact beyond the screen (situationally concrete, without which the video game cannot be executed and perceived)
• The gaming experience is a gestalt in the medium of situational self-awareness, and that means that it is subject to an infinite variety of singular situational circumstances, which cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
• The absorption of our attention is so complete that we forget about the abstractness of the pictorial elements we are manipulating.
• And this is a fruitful perspective in so far as it highlights the difference of being immersed and standing, so to speak, outside the pool.
• If video games can provide the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, could they as well, on the other hand, provide the sensation of being deprived of any reality, the sensation of being purely artificial? The sensation of remoteness to ourselves?
• In contrast to conventional games, video games separate the player from the playing field, and they translate bodily felt concrete actions..into situational abstract cinematic depictions of totally different actions. This adds up to an alienated and situational abstract presentation of self-action experience.
• we encounter a performative paradox: we simultaneously feel ourselves remotely controlling and being remotely controlled.
• The academic field of Cognitive Geography has taught us that our living environment is structured by our spatial knowledge, and that we acquire this knowledge along the paths we follow in the conduct of our everyday life.
• there are five distinctive elements that are of interest in (the above) respect: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks…. With GTA San Andreas, this knowledge becomes an artificial presence of self-action experience.
• The general gaming experience thus amounts to an artificial portrayal of the phenomenology of practices, an artificial presence of self-action.

i need to try and reframe these lol:

If this is true, the aesthetics of the general gaming experience can only be a general assumption, maybe a tentative guess, but not a positive definite statement because we can only encounter aspects of this general experience but not the experience as a whole. An inquiry into the aesthetics of video games would then be an experiment with different perspectives rather than a methodologically secured routine. It would not result in the assertion of a structured whole and a logically closed functionality but in the disclosure of formerly undisclosed experiential perspectives.

= the gaming experience is infinite and cannot be stated through a single, methodological routine thus always producing undiscovered potentials 🤨

We would notice that the threshold of immersion corresponds with its intensity, and that video games have to deal with a much more complex rite de passage than most other media. We would have to acknowledge the importance of the seamless series of cinematic headings, tutorials, and actual gameplay to overcome the aversion of immersion. So the perspective of immersion is quite illuminating in terms of the structure and logic of the general gaming experience.

= there is great value placed in the tools required to effectively tell the story in such games as these tools directly affect the level of immersion a user experiences 🤨

Along with Lambert Wiesing (who has emphasized the experiential remoteness of media content), one could argue that, just like pictorial media establish a situational abstract view and allow the direct communication of pure visibility, computer games establish an “artificial sameness” of general self-action experiences and allow the direct communication of pure self-action.

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By comprehending the incongruity of immersion and remote control, we gain a richer perspective on the general gaming experience, in so far as we can describe both the fascination of diving into a different reality and the artificiality of the gamic depiction of self-action experiences.

By the coaching and criticism of an open series of perspectives, the aesthetics of the new media form that dwells on the threshold separating the space on the screen from the space beyond the screen becomes more and more distinct.

Deep Remixability by Lev Manovich

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• What is the logic of this new hybrid visual language? This logic is one of remixability: not only of the content of different media or simply their aesthetics, but their fundamental techniques, working methods, languages, and assumptions.
• The computer does not “remediate” particular media. Instead, it simulates all media. And what it simulates are not the surface appearances of different media but all the techniques used for their production and all the methods of viewing and interaction with the works in these media.