How to Tell Apart Games and New Media Art Chris Chesher

Neither gaze nor glance, but coat: relating to panel game screens

Chris Chesher

A heavy gear up man stands on a blazing Callaghan Bridge, surrounded by the sounds of early morning time Liberty City. He's just escaped from an exploding prison van, and fellow escapee ?8-ball? is asking him to drive to a hide-out in the ruby lite district. So the frantic activity stops, and information technology is now your turn. A huge pulsing bluish arrow in the sky asks y'all to become the shady character on the bridge. First you accept to larn how to control this brooding thug: you press the triangle push and he gets into the car. You press the ?X? push and the car accelerates down the bridge. You struggle with the direction controls to keep the car on track every bit you speed into the city.

This introductory sequence in Rock Star Games? Grand Theft Machine Three (GTA3), released for Playstation II in Australia in October 2001, is a typical opening for a console game. A somewhat cinematic back-story sets the scene, and defines the context and motivation for the action in which you are asked to participate. Although the opening mission ? to drive the car to the hideout ? is simple, it'due south quite demanding at kickoff effort. At that place are pedagogical elements scattered through the early on sections: explanatory text that appears in the early scenes: park on the glowing bluish spot to finish this mission; get through this door to salvage the game; park your car in the garage to go on a car between saves. The subsequent missions gradually introduce the conventions of gameplay and the world of the game. You larn how to control your seedy character?s movement on human foot and in cars. You work out how to start missions by following a ?radar? display in the corner of the screen to the locations where you receive instructions. Yous experiment with your avatar?south powers by chirapsia people up with a baseball game bat, and effigy out from bitter experience that it?south all-time to run away from police. You lot start to get familiar with your new body, and with the geographical and ethical layout of the false urban center.

After an hour of playing the game yous are transfixed, held to the screen. Your hands are aching from pummelling the controller. You are no longer thinking most which buttons to printing. Your own actions seem inseparable from those of the character on screen. Your eyes are sore from staring at the screen. You're barely enlightened of other things in the room.

This is not television. And information technology?s not movie house. The console game is a distinctive cultural form in need of its own modes of criticism and analysis. It?s undeniable that such games are important in sheer economical terms: they have now overtaken the cinema box office. Just more than than this, games have get a day-to-day screen experience for millions of people, and it?s time to try to make some sense of them. At the moment, in that location is a rapidly growing literature on computer games. Many researchers find it useful to start by comparison games with more familiar media forms. Espen Aarseth, who now heads a new Centre of Figurer Games Research in Denmark, compares games with an esoteric tradition of literary forms in which the reader is expected to brand a not-trivial effort to traverse the text (1997). Brenda Laurel compares computers with theatre to argue that interface designers should stage on-screen events in a fashion that borrows from the principles of stagecraft (1991). Lev Manovich?s Language of new media reads computers alongside the history of avante-garde cinema (2001). At their all-time, such approaches practise not merely borrow and utilize theories that work for other media, but show where the old concepts starting time falling apart in the face of a new miracle.

In this spirit, in this paper I will ask what differentiates panel games from televisual and cinematic forms? What is distinctive most the experience of playing games? How are the relationships people have with these screens different? What new concepts do we need to understand games? While they are clearly different as sound-visual texts and experiences from cinema and telly, they are besides related to them in complex ways. In fact, analysing computer games may demand a re-evaluation of traditional conceptions of other media.

Visible fictions

One common theme in Media Studies is that any medium tends to structure the means that people look at information technology. Looking is a learnt skill, and the conventions of looking are item to whatsoever visual medium. Viewers are expected to look at paintings in a gallery in i way, and watch live theatre in a different way. Means of looking change historically. Any new visual engineering emerges with its own conventions ? its own structures of feeling. It has mechanisms that attract optics, and techniques to counter distractions that might draw those eyes away. In this way, even traditional media are already interactive, in that they construction the activity of those who encounter them. A work succeeds only when its content and expression anticipate audiences? responses.

John Ellis?s influential 1982 book Visible Fictions is a practiced instance of the media studies tradition that looks at the activity of media consumers. Ellis compares the characteristic positions that spectators take towards Hollywood cinema with the positions that viewers take towards broadcast tv set. Because he did not anticipate computer games at all, his work becomes a useful starting bespeak for evaluating the new regimes of vision that emerge in the way that console game players chronicle to their screens. He establishes a generic framework for analysing agent / screen relationships, but leaves the example of games entirely unexamined. My task in this paper is to put the panel game alongside more than familiar media forms and then to look for the differences and the connections between all iii. As Ellis admits, trying to characterise a relationship to whatever medium every bit something stable and consistent is necessarily an oversimplification. Different individuals and groups relate to films and goggle box programs in different ways. The same problem of generalisation will be true with different games and different players, whose experiences vary dramatically.

Ellis drew on then recent work in picture show studies on the spectator's position in relation to cinema (well-nigh notably in the periodical Screen), informed particularly by psychoanalysis. In the cinema, spectators are positioned equally voyeurs, sitting together in a darkened public place, their gaze intently focussed on the screen. This organization encourages a psychological land that resembles dream or fantasy, assuasive spectators to build a close libidinal identification with characters in the narrative. The spectator experiences a complex sense that they recognise themselves in the images of others on the screen ? ofttimes ambiguously in more i of the characters. At the same time, they take on positions as voyeurs ? with a sense that the image is presented for their pleasure. While they tin?t intervene in the film earth, they can surreptitiously experience the internal lives of others. As feminist critics have argued, the cinematic gaze is often gendered. Information technology tends to privilege the active agency of the male gaze, while presenting the female person every bit passive object of that gaze. Information technology anticipates the male ?scopophilic? pleasure in looking at women as objects (although more recent feminist work on the gendered gaze has criticised this reading every bit overly reductive and totalising). The relationship of spectators to the screen is structured around manipulations of gazes ? of characters, camera and spectators.

Tv viewers relate to a much smaller screen that is e'er present in their domestic space, then images are experienced as relatively mundane. Television offers viewers a surrogate day-to-day image of the world that casually makes them complicit in this structured mode of looking. This view separates the 'normal' reality of Denizen and family at abode from a variety of abnormal worlds on boob tube screens. The image quality of TV images is relatively poor, and at dwelling house viewers? attention can ofttimes drift, and has to be drawn back regularly, usually through audio -- canned laughter, jingles and stings. Content is segmented so that viewers can easily rejoin the narrative at whatever point. Television?s characteristic regime of vision is the glance, rather than the gaze.

Writing in the early 1980s, Ellis did not foresee that some other culturally significant regime of vision in screen media would sally over the adjacent 2 decades. This new media germination, manifest in the panel game, operates with a dissimilar authorities of vision: not gaze, nor glance, but what I will phone call the glaze. The glaze is a liquid adhesion holding players' eyes to the screen. Players are held to the game in 2 ways ? with their easily on the controller, and their eyes on the screen. Identification between role player and the cardinal on-screen character is directly and visceral. The player takes on the office of a graphic symbol directly, rather than the cinematic spectator who vicariously identifies with others. Players are glazed into a game globe subjectivity, rather than detachedly gazing as cinematic voyeurs, or indifferently glancing at the world through television set.

Classical cinema, broadcast goggle box, and panel games are distinctively different in the ways in which they structure audience / viewer / player subjectivity. The table below outlines themes that I explore through the rest of this article.

Hollywood Movie house	Circulate idiot box	Console games
Spectators	Viewers	Players
Darkened public space	Domestic space & family	Atomic individuals in domestic (or other) space
Big, projected, high resolution photographic image	Pocket-sized, lower resolution, luminous image; sound draws attention	False images invoked from databases and algorithms
Phantasy, voyeurism	Distracted complicity	Sadomasochistic fetishism
Libidinal identification with others on screen	Watch bizarre globe from the security of domestic normality	Function play in navigable spaces
Nostalgia: what?s underneath?	Liveness: what?s happening?	Possible worlds: what can I practice?
Gaze	Glance	Glaze
Hollywood Cinema	Broadcast television	Console games

The distinctiveness of the glaze is increasingly apparent in the recent generations of games consoles, although it has been on the rise since the mid-1960s. 3rd person 'over-the-shoulder' games on recent games consoles (GTA3 and GTA Vice City) are exemplary of this regime of activeness/vision. No longer arcade games, they belong in the home. And dissimilar many before computer games, which remain obsessed by the technology itself, many panel games describe on wider cultural references. Early on computer games focussed on the computer in the aforementioned way that the proto-cinematic experiments of the 19th century foregrounded the appliance itself before the conventions and technology of movie theater stabilised. When Infinite invaders presented an irresistible hoard of aliens descending on the player?due south avatar, information technology metaphorically performed its own entrance into the world. Flight simulators, of which there accept been many iterations, mimic i form of loftier applied science with another. Japanese games developers were amid the get-go to move exterior the techno-fetishist milieu, incorporating the aesthetics of manga and anime, with great success in the earlier generation of console games from Sega and Nintendo (Wark, 1994:21-thirty).

As the games market has expanded, and technologies and cultures of production have matured, games have moved outside the technologically marked audio-visual frameworks, and too beyond the clan with children. The three dimensional immersive games released in the early 2000s accept drawn upon a wider range of cultural references. The increased capacities of storage and 3D processing power on the Sony Playstation 2 and Microsoft 10-Box have made it possible to work with more picture palace-realistic images and much more all-encompassing sound. In this context the wider cultural significance of the glaze is becoming more apparent.

While no single game tin stand for the characteristics of all others, the GTA series manifests many of the primal characteristics of the emerging conventions of the glaze. The earlier games in the series, GTA, GTA London 1969 and GTA2, feature relatively simple graphics and a height-down view. The first game was controversial at the fourth dimension because information technology seemed to encourage criminal behaviour, attracting the ire of Senator Joseph Lieberman in the US. The producers? media savvy was demonstrated by the way they embraced the publicity this controversy generated. Even so, the subsequently games begin to have more televisual or cinematic audiovisual qualities. GTA3 is the first fully three-dimensional game in the series. It contains more voice interim, a substantial soundtrack featuring radio stations from the fictional city, and a far more detailed world. GTA Vice City, released in 2002, gives the main character a name (Tommy Vercetti), a voice (played by Ray Liotta), and a historical location (the 1980s). It has fifty-fifty more developed visual and sonic complication and depth to the point where the gaze, the glance and the glaze can be juxtaposed without whatsoever amends.

Three dimensions of the glaze

The audiovisual authorities of the coat is characterised by at to the lowest degree three distinctive characteristics: spectacular immersion, interactive agency and mimetic simulation. These are not sequential categories, but simultaneous layers, each corresponding with a different significant of the term 'the coat'. The first significant of glaze refers to how a histrion's eyes become plain 'glazed over' when they are absorbed in the sensations and actions of a game play space. The 2nd meaning relates to stickiness, such as the glaze on a block. Games are viscous considering they incorporate strategies to hold players to them. Past giving direct feedback; a sense of power; game teleology (missions), and narrative elements, the game generates impact and captures the player's want to continue to play. The tertiary meaning relates to the way that a glazed object (such equally a glossy vase) presents a reflection of the world around information technology. Players recognise themselves, and a familiar world, in the game. But the images reflected in a curved vase are distorted according to the shape of the glazed object.

i. Optics glaze over

Game players get into glaze space ? immersive spectacle ? when they progressively remove their attention from immediate textile and cultural surroundings, and plunge into a world with different physical and ethical parameters. In this state, players seem to be in a vegetative status ? their eyes glazed over. Simply this advent is deceptive. They are actually intensively agile, both consumed by, and actively consuming, the game. In glaze-space (which varies in intensity), players suspend their awareness of their day-to-twenty-four hour period globe to become cybernetically suspended inside a virtualised sensorimotor space of the game world.

The ontological center of any coat-space is the game's virtual indicate of view (or multiple points of view). All games present a world from some perspective. Fifty-fifty the early text-based adventure games had points-of-view that became credible in the descriptions they gave in text of what a thespian can 'encounter' and act upon. Early 2000s 3D console games like the subsequently games in the GTA series offer spectacular views onto three-dimensional false worlds. The default glaze viewpoint hovers as an angelic virtual camera floating but to a higher place the shoulder of the protagonist character. When a role player turns the avatar'due south trunk around and moves forward, the globe literally revolves effectually him, and the camera follows obediently behind. This egocentric worldview immediately defines the stakes of the game: the interests of this graphic symbol are central. Unlike movie house, which is edited, and therefore switches angles throughout, the glaze remains steady, unless players trigger a camera change themselves. Otherwise, the camera stares tirelessly in the same relation to the protagonist and his world. But similar the dominant models of cinematic gaze, the glaze is undeniably a mode of vision that is gendered equally masculine.

The viewpoints bachelor within whatsoever game implicitly structure the challenges and pleasures experienced by its players. Other genres of games offer different points of view, some more detached and strategy-oriented, and others more subjective. The standard over-the-shoulder view of GTA3 contrasts with isometric points of view typical of existent time strategy games such every bit Age of Empires and the Warcraft series, and god-games such as the Culture series, Sim City or the Sims. These viewpoints lack depth perspective: all distances are in the same calibration, like a map that has been tilted. This literalised Cartesian view is better for arranging multiple avatars beyond a territory. The top-downwardly view is also easier to compute, which was why it was characteristic of many early on games like Pac-man or Space invaders. While GTA3 has a more subjective viewpoint than these map games, its over the shoulder view is more detached than the kickoff person view in Quake, Doom, One-half-life or Halo, which directly threatens the player's self. First person games generate a vertiginous sense of move, and use sound and rapid motility within an enhanced depth-perspective space to give players a sense of visceral immersion. These are comparable with horror films or war movies that requite audience members a straight sense of personal insecurity.

Figure 1 Isometric point of view in Historic period of Empires http://www.gamesdomain.com/gdreview/zones/reviews/pc/nov97/aoe46.html

Many games offer several choices of viewpoint, effectively supporting unlike experiences of playing the game. For case, in GTA3 it is possible to play around with signal of view by switching between different camera modes. Three of the views offer alternative framings on the central character. In cinematic terms, one is a close-upwardly, another a mid-shot (the default) and the other a long shot. Unlike cinema, the player controls the cuts between cameras, not the editor. When the character steals a car, the game switches viewpoints to something typical of a driving game, which besides offers different levels of zoom and a first-person view. Some other viewpoint (which is dropped in Vice City) recalls earlier incarnations of the game, and shows the character and surround from above. This view breaks the premise that the histrion experiences just what the graphic symbol does, but it is useful for seeing what is on the other side of walls!

Points of view in games are almost always designed to provide possibilities for players to human activity within the game world. If a thespian wants to aim a gun, the interface will either offer direct line of sight downwards a butt, or use an automated targeting system. The potential victim must be on screen, and in articulate spatial relation to the role player avatar. This is quite different from the dominant shot-counter-shot editing construction in a movie shoot-out. In cinema, some sense of audition disorientation can be a directorial device. Some game viewpoints are the exceptions that prove the rule, by emphasising spectacular imagery over playability. When driving in the GTA games, it is possible to switch to a novelty viewpoint ? the ?cinematic camera?, which mimics a moving picture motorcar chase, with a series of shots from a range of perspectives. A sequence might start with a camera well-nigh the car wheels, then switch to a camera in a building to a higher place the car, and to another on the side of the road that pans equally the automobile zooms by. This invasion of the gaze relationship into glaze space makes the game almost unplayable. At the same time it makes available to the player a new subjectivity ? of filmmaker rather than games junky.

The most pregnant shifts in bespeak of view in GTA3 and Vice City, though, happen in cutting scenes: cinematic sequences that typically appear at the beginning and end of missions. Like many other games, this convention advances the narrative and establishes the central graphic symbol?s motivation for the next mission. During a cut scene, the screen switches to a broad-screen letterbox way, and the user has no command over the histrion for the duration. The protagonist character on screen is shown listening to the dialogue (more than oft monologues) of other characters, and there are cinematically significant camera movements. These scenes are of import in establishing the scenario for the next sequence of activeness, and besides help to develop a more than textured mise-en-scene. They set the mood, and serve as a reward for successfully completing a mission.

Promotions of the subsequently GTA games on television, print and the spider web tend to privilege the cinema-realistic imagery, and de-emphasise the default over-the-shoulder point-of-view. The tv set advertising screened in Australia resembles a movie trailer. Many fan sites feature screen-shots: a notwithstanding image capturing the contents of the screen during game play. These images tend to be taken at moments in which the game grapheme, and the virtual photographic camera, is in an farthermost and unusual state of affairs. During normal game play, the graphic symbol is virtually frequently facing away from the virtual camera, so that the thespian can see what he is facing. In virtually screen shots, though, the player has chosen to turn the character towards the camera, borrowing from visual conventions of a personal snapshot, or a flick poster. None of these images give much of a sense of what actually draws players to the game, nor what holds them to it.

ii. Sticky glaze and computing property power

Games have a remarkable capacity to hold players? attending for long periods of time. Sherry Turkle talked in the 1980s well-nigh the computer game?s ?property power? (1984:29). The glaze can besides exist imagined as a liquid adhesion that holds players' optics to the screen. The handset and panel are fixers in a two-function mucilage that connects players to the games panel, physically and psychologically. The game interface offers affordances that permit users in on the game past mapping buttons and joysticks to events within glazespaceⁱ. In this fashion users have agency ? to walk, run, leap, punch, shoot, duck and steal cars. Early in the game, players? powers are limited, and the challenges are relatively easy. The rudimentary narrative construction established in the cut scenes introduces missions that are pretexts for gradually introducing new capacities (weapons, cars, boats, routes to new areas etc.). To consummate each mission players need to employ a combination of trouble solving and learned skills.

Constructive games sustain a cybernetic residual that dynamically maintains a agree over players. As a thermostat regulates temperature, ludostatic mechanisms regulate optimal playing weather condition. If the glaze holds players too tightly, information technology volition amerce them, and they will give upward. But its grip cannot exist too loose, either, or players drift off and lose interest. While some proponents of virtual reality dreamed of unlimited power and movement in virtual worlds, glazeplay works considering information technology maintains limits to a role player's capacities. The speeds and forces of actions are advisedly modulated, and boundaries defined and policed. By playing more, players gather more ability ? non simply through faster cars and bigger guns within the game, simply too because they themselves develop better skills and knowledge of the game. At the same time, the difficulty escalates as the missions become more complex and enemies become more than aggressive. James Paul Gee argues that this balance institute in figurer games is an effective style of learning:

Each level dances around the outer limits of the player'south abilities, seeking at every point to be hard enough to be just achievable. In cognitive science, this is referred to every bit the regime of competence principle, which results in a feeling of simultaneous pleasance and frustration… (2003)

Different the voyeurism of the cinematic gaze, the psychic relationship of the coat is sadomasochistic. At its most bones level, the pleasance of play comes from inflicting and receiving hurting inside the ludostatic frame (Tulloch, 2002). Games engines tease players by tactically extending and constraining their powers co-ordinate to the current state of play. The glaze relation is generally closer to what Laura Mulvey (1989) refers to as sadistic festishism rather scopophilia (the love of looking). Nevertheless, at that place is also a stiff masochistic dimension to the pleasures of glaze-play. It usually takes many failed attempts at completing difficult missions before the thespian succeeds. Failures are often more spectacular than successes. If y'all get ?wasted? (die), you lose control over your character?s movements, and the viewpoint drifts off into the sky. When you re-awake outside the hospital, yous?ve lost all your weapons, and any mission you were on is failed. Only you can restore your pre-decease condition by returning to the most contempo save. On the other hand, if you discover health bonuses or armour (or controversially, visit a prostitute in the uncensored version), you lot increment your survival powers. Much of the pleasure of play is in facing and cheating death.

Games must always have something at stake ? an ethical universe with values worth fighting for. Like many games, GTA asks players to perform a constant dance with ethical bug. Players tin can replay sequences indefinitely, and experiment with different outcomes of the same circumstances. They tin adopt a range of styles ? from existence polite and conscientious to interim out murderous rampages. This chapters to explore a variety of possible worlds contrasts with the tendency for boob tube to impose a supposedly collectively agreed upon moral meaning for the events it represents. Television news advocates a moral order that centres on the family and domesticity, implying consensus and social cohesion.

However, games are not without their normative tendencies. In order to progress in a game, the player must play in a certain way. In the case of GTA this means acting according to what would usually be considered quite amoral standards. In Liberty Metropolis, extreme acts of violence are problematic not for their impact upon victims, but because they attract too much police attending. The game is self-consciously ironical, parodying the ethical relativism depicted in gangster films. The game logic itself is a course of social criticism or parody. Police accept bribes, and are so dumb that they can?t recognise yous if y'all have sprayed your car a unlike colour. Bystanders show cocky-interested indifference to violence nearby. You lot buy an ice cream factory that operates as a front for selling drugs, and a used automobile lot that gets its stolen cars delivered in the heart of the night.

Critics of the game (including the Australian Function of Film and Literature Classifications Board that initially banned GTA3) tend to overlook the complex ethical dynamics of games. Certainly gender and ethnicity are represented in this game in highly problematic means, to a point of self-parody. The imagery of violence is gruesome and distasteful. But unlike many games in which the expressionless simply evaporate, in this game ambulances come to accept away the bodies. Most games avoid dealing with ethnicity by marking others as space aliens and mutants. GTA?s cities are populated by a range of ethnically-marked criminal gangs: Italian Mafia, Japanese Yakuza, Columbians, Yardies, white collar corporate criminals, crooked cops and dwelling house-boys in colours. These coat earth stereotypes reverberate recognisable images from a repertoire of Western urban cultural myths.

These cocky-conscious elements reflect a pervading nighttime sense of humour and social criticism that underlies these games. They are anti-authoritarian, with a cynicism towards legal boundaries too as perceived boundaries of political definiteness. The parody is most explicit in the radio soundtracks that feature self-obsessed announcers, vacuous talk-back callers and stupid advertisements. But more interesting is the warped ways in which the glaze world responds to the user?s actions. Many critics of game violence seem to evaluate games past applying a moral accounting that attempts to weigh up the social benefits and liabilities of a detail work to define whether of non it has redeeming value. The dynamic ideals of the game are non reducible to such a simplistic calculus. Much of what appeals virtually the game is in its exaggerated simply evocative representations of a possible world that parallels our ain without ever being it.

iii. Reflections of the self in coat

The immersive and sticky glaze world operates on a tertiary dimension by offer players a distorted prototype of themselves. A glazed ceramic surface such as a vase reflects the epitome of observers back to them, merely distorts and colours these images out of their usual proportion. In a related mode, game players see themselves present in the role that the game grants them.

While games are consumed domestically, they are not for the whole family. They are for diminutive individuals. Where television addresses a collective viewing audition, games address each player every bit an individual. Of course at that place is withal space in playing games for not-players to participate as spectators, tutors or collaborators. Only information technology is the person with the agile controller who is directly addressed by menus to set up the game and start play. They might even be asked to identify themselves by proper noun, initials, or even an image (as in the 2003 PS2 game Eyetoy). This record documents their performance from that point forward. The status of each thespian (and their own world) is saved at the terminate of each session of play (and more than frequently). At that place is a grade of object permanency by which players? actions have ongoing effects. In multi-role player games, the marking of private identity supports competition and cooperation between distinct individuals.

Unlike television content, which is homogenised to suit family viewing, games are oft addressed to include and exclude groups according to gustation. Function of the pleasure of playing games that horrify your parents is that it asserts your own identity. The popular demonisation of games, characteristically on goggle box, plays into this pleasure in non-conformity. Similar much reckoner-based media, many games let customisation and individualised role-play.

Ellis observed that cinema spectators tend to identify vicariously with several characters on the screen. Even if there is ane hero, they can identify with almost any character at different times. By dissimilarity, with game players there is a clear distinction between self and other. Players meet their own decisions reflected in their avatars? movements. If they cull to move left or shoot, the avatar completes that movement for them. Dissimilar the full characters in a cinematic narrative, who seem to have contained existences, and psychological depths, the central graphic symbol in GTA3, in particular, is empty. The central office-character is a heavily congenital white male with picayune else to distinguish him. As a designer from Rockstar Games said, in that location is a pigsty at the centre of the activeness, critical for identifying with the avatar:

The pb player is the simply person who never speaks. He has no personality. Or rather he has your personality, the actor has to have freedom to act equally they desire, not equally they think the model they are controlling should want. Everyone else has a character, for the same reason — you are in their world, and they demand to exist. (Douglass, 2001)

This lack of characterisation is no flaw. It is a necessary status. Players make full that absence with their own motivations, strategies and reactions. The sequel, Vice Urban center, gives the graphic symbol some more depth past giving him a name and allowing him to speak, but retains an openness that allows users to partly recognise themselves within the character. Of form this openness is just limited, every bit the graphic symbol is conspicuously marked every bit white, male person and bad.

In the place of depth of characters in the GTA games is hyperbolic gender and indigenous stereotypes. The games enquire players to participate in ridiculous patriarchal and phallocentric phantasies. In cut-scenes in GTA3, the character of Azuka plays dominatrix, tying upwards and whipping her victims, in a very literal portrayal of castration feet. What was plain a romantic narrative is subverted in the soundtrack over the final credits, when the central character shoots the woman he has finally rescued because she starts complaining virtually her fingernails. Missions in Vice City include not merely acts of direct violence, simply too performances of masculinity including intimidating jury members, and smashing store windows to extract protection money.

Glaze space is a familiar, just distorted epitome of the players? own world. While the cities depicted in the GTA games are recognisable as twentieth century urban landscapes, they are simulated composites of fragments of imagined American urban life. As the designers live in Scotland, these images are largely drawn not from personal experience, only from Hollywood movie house. The mansion in Vice City is borrowed from Scarface. Vans driven past gang members are but like those in Boyz in the Hood. The producers acknowledge that the world of GTA3 owes a lot to gangster films:

During the pattern phase of the game, the squad would get together 1 night a week and sentinel films (however, this was actually an excuse to drink beer). We watched a lot of films including Bullitt, Casino, Scarface, Goodfellas, The Warriors, Debbie does Dallas... Basically annihilation with car chases, gangs and a lot of activeness. (Douglass, 2001)

Glaze infinite presents a possible globe, not an actual earth. In cinema, actors are recognisable as actual humans, and spectators are aware that an bodily actor once performed this scene. Console games reference no world in particular (in the aforementioned way that a cartoon, painting or animation tin can always be read every bit possibly pure invention). At that place are uncanny traces of human performances and concrete places within the glazeplay, merely these are non cinematic. The glaze world is a multimedia mosaic constantly being reconfigured. Fragments of actors' movements, vocalisation performances, the shapes of buildings and images of surfaces are stored in a database as movement captured gestures, audio samples, 3D models and texture maps and triggered at appropriate moments. The world is composed on the fly co-ordinate to the histrion?southward whims. Glazeplay is invoked, non narratedⁱⁱ. Over hours of game play, the coat spaces go a second home, almost every bit familiar as the streets in your own physical suburb.

Extending the glaze

Cinema, telly and the panel game each take a dominant regime of vision / agency: the gaze, the glance and the glaze respectively. However, these modes are by no means exclusive to each medium. Cut scenes in games are cinematic. Home theatre systems establish gaze relationships with spectators in domestic spaces. DVD menus bring a coat interface to the gaze of cinematic texts. Experiments in interactive cinema attempt to take the glaze to the movies. Television creates glaze relationships in sport telecasts: viewers become closely identified with the sensorimotor world of the game, even without whatsoever direct control over the action. Channel surfing is a prototypical glaze activity. Other cultural forms that don't involve a cathode-ray tube or a projected prototype might likewise develop glaze relationships: gambling machines, pinball and (arguably) even driving a car. In each of these there are articulate and narrow modes of action available, and express parameters of affordance: a poker machine'due south lever, the flipper buttons on a pinball car, the steering wheel of a motorcar, and and then on. Each of these does have a screen of a sort: a front cover, or windscreen.

The glazed over, glutinous and identity-reflective conventions of games are ascendant equally cultural forms, increasingly seen beyond traditional gaming subcultures. But the distinctiveness of the glaze relation is ofttimes not recognised. Games are sometimes read naturalistically ? every bit though they were like real life, and not medium-specific conventions. Screen theory and practise often overlook the specificity of coat subjectivity, and read games according to the logics of gaze or glance. In producing glaze texts, some designers overemphasise immediate visual impact, while neglecting ludostatic engineering. Some theoretical work applies textual or visual analysis without attention to user subjectivity or to how game screens are experienced in very different means. In artful judgements of games, the lack of character development or narrative complexity in games is sometimes seen as an inadequacy. Even so, these mistakes are likely to get less common when, alongside the longing gaze and the distracted glance, the sticky glaze becomes an increasingly familiar human-screen relationship.

Note: an earlier version of this article was published as an essay in dLux Media Arts (2003) Plaything Exhibition Catalogue, Sydney: dLux Media Arts.

i For more on affordances and user subjectivity see Chesher, Chris (2003) ?Layers of code, layers of subjectivity? in CultureMachine 5 (2003), http://culturemachine.tees.air conditioning.u.k./Manufactures/CChesher.htm

2 For more on invocational media see Chesher, Chris (2002) 'Why the digital computer is dead' in Ctheory electronic journal: http://ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=334

References

Aarseth, E. (1997) Cybertext. Perspectives on ergodic literature, Baltimore and London: John Hopkins
Ellis, J. (1982) Visible fictions, London, Boston, Melbourne & Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul

Gee, J. P. (2003) ?Loftier Score Education. Games, not schoolhouse, are teaching kids to call back? in Wired 11.05, online at http://world wide web.wired.com/wired/archive/11.05/view.html?pg=i accessed August 2003. See besides Gee, James Paul (2003) What video games have to teach us almost learning and literacy, London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan

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