HOMO LUDENS, MEMENTO MORI?

Last February the 17th the I-Dissabtes (Saturdays) in Mediateca Caixaforum hosted a workshop of videogame projects “acceleration” by Joan Leandre and Vanni Brusadin which ended up to be a talk about artistic intervention in games for obvious practical reasons: how to give a workshop in only three hours?

I decided not to attend the talk for various reasons and because I’m afraid that if things go on like this the only mantra I’ll be reciting in my PhD dissertation will be Huizinga-Callois-Aarseth (there is also an agenda setting in the digital art), but when I got to the place at the last minute to look for some friends I found a couple of worth mentioning issues in the narrative sense. Fashion splash, anyway (by now).

The first one are the creations by Palle Torsson based on movie scenes, the Evil Scenes. Torsson takes scenes from famous movies and modifies them with a videogame software to create three-dimensional settings without characters. The result is both disturbing and interesting because of:

The use of cinematic material. In my paper essay Tempus fugit (previous to this blog) I wrote about the need to promote the creation of digital settings because good (digital) stories cannot be told without them. The fact that these settings work as skins for future videogames doesn’t assume originality (the material isn’t created by the user from scratch), but it means a certain set design reference.

The degree of realism deliberately achieved. It’s a question I only consider in strictly aesthetic terms and it’s the reason why I tend to withdraw from games, as I previously commented in ART, GAME AND NARRATIVE: AT THE END, A QUESTION OF TASTE.

How this creation is related to the copyright of the original material and remix culture. How to legitimate the use of an obviously imported creativity? (Every creativity is imported, Lawrence Lessig would say, but what happens when the importation is so obvious?)

The remarkable fact that all selected movies are violent (Psycho, The shining, Clockwork orange, and so on).

The second issue that raised during the talk is nothing new under the sun, but war simulation games relating to real facts such as Kuma War reminded me that we live in a time of multiple docummentaries, that is, of multiple fictions. The difference between CNN News and Kuma War might end up being the intention, or not?

I wouldn’t be able to take in this last issue in a future academic research, but narratives (and here I use narratives in a let’s call it pejorative sense) generated by news broadcastinge feed the collective imaginary in terms of imagination, not information. Therefore it isn’t so strange that when I’ve looked up the term storytelling in the Internet one of the senses I’ve come up most often with isn’t that of literary fiction, but the strategies (“stories”) made up by corporations to talk their employees into something (for instance, the goodness of dismissing a lot of people).

Now someone might argue that Baudrillard would be happy if he read me, but it’s not true. In both Evil Scenes and Kuma War, violence is all around. Violence seems to be central to our current identity, or at least, in the way in which creations such as Torsson’s seem to rethink the history of modern cinema; Cronenberg scholars would also be happy by reading this, but I wouldn’t join them either. Despite I don’t ignore the headlines bombarding me each and every day in the papers and the critical purpose of political games, I insist on what I said regarding last year’s Game as critic as art conference: please, could we reflect on our contemporary condition in relation to other issues?