Cinema and the art of magnification

“Cinema is less an art of origination than it is of magnification… It’s the only art I know of where more comes out than goes in” Andrew Sarris

The power of a good quote is to be found in the notion that despite brevity and succinctness in expression there is density and breadth in ramification. The above quote, taken from Andrew Sarris in his book The Primal Screen, serves as a dense and broad observation of the cinema effect and, in particular presents conjoined implications for both production and reception of cinematic content. The idea is of course akin to the old adage of the ‘whole being greater than the sum of its parts’ but Sarris’ observation holds greater and more poignant specificity than that.

On one level it is an observation concerning the engagement of the viewer; that what they experience is not just performance, design, sound and composition but a gestalt of affect brought on by all that combined.

Looked at from the other side is the idea that the choices in staging, shooting, performance, sound and edit do not wholly account for what the viewer experiences - the emotional resonances of the viewer cannot be directly measured by each of these. Nor can a director really account for or reconcile the effect of their creation by the choices they make - what they have wrought will be magnified beyond their intent by the apparatus itself. Evidence of this is apparent every time you see a close-up on screen. A subtle raised eyebrow in such a shot has the gravity of earthquake on screen. The eyebrow was just a tiny expression, the camera was just a framing position - but the result is one of magnification where the holistic apparatus of cinema magnifies the effect beyond the production choices made. Likewise, the process of editing is the purest example of cinematic magnification where the placement of two shots together in sequence manifests a 3rd meaning that is both more than and beyond anything presented by the 2 shots independently. For the editor certainly more comes out than goes in.

Recently I have sat in audiences with my students viewing open discussions and Q+A sessions with prominent and both artistically and financially successful filmmakers. One of the fundamental aims of the courses I teach is to counter the culture of anti-intellectualism that pervades much filmmaking practice (particularly in Australia) and invest young creators with a deeper body of knowledge, and knowledge tools, by which they may articulate their cinematic visions.

Thus it was that I found myself often disheartened when questions were posed to these prominent filmmakers about their work and their responses were all to often glib, dismissive and self-effacing; concerned it seemed with presenting themselves as fuelled by filmmaking instinct rather than underpinned by rich knowledge and articulate understandings.

As I sat amid my students I felt all my good work to elevate their conceptual thinking being unravelled by throw-away one-liners. But in pondering further and discussing with colleagues I have come to some reconciled perspectives.

My first conjecture is that filmmakers who are dismissive of knowledge, declare openly how much they “don’t over analyse things” and expound their instinct over their expertise are displaying a kind of artistic bluster, playing to a persona of the artist they are expected to present. Eminent French filmmaker Jean Pierre Junet (City of lost children, Amelie) was a recent case in point. His light-hearted and dismissive scoffing when questioned about the themes and intents expressed in his highly stylised films was belied by the evidently vast body of knowledge that was apparent the more he spoke. So whilst he seemed to want to present the exterior of the instinctual, non-intellectual, autodidactic artist; the manner, detail and richness of his knowledge base was clearly apparent the longer he spoke (and of course in his films themselves). A colleague suggested to me that what so many good artists attempt to pass of as Instinct is really Intuition. The difference being that Intuition is the ability to react instinctively because the artist is fundamentally steeped in a rich body of knowledge, articulations and experience. Filmmakers with instinct make one or two good works; filmmakers with intuition make great works for a lifetime. Intuition is what happens when the knowledge, experience and conceptual understandings are so intuitive to, and inside of, the artist that they become instinctual and intutive.

In this vein, we come full-circle to the idea of cinema as “less and art of origination than it is of magnification”. The notion that partly because of this it is quite possible a director cannot articulate their intent or seem not understand the effect of their work in an articulate way because the cinema apparatus of experience magnifies their choices beyond their intent. Cinema is the art where more comes out than goes in.

INFOGRAPHIC: timelines in film and tv

The shape of story - data and drama

A relatively recent viewing the new John Hilcoat film The Road got me thinking about the visual shape of story. Upon seeing the film - and feeling utterly depressed as we walked out of the cinema effected as we were by its intense bleakness - a friend expressed visually his experience of the film by drawing in the air with his finger. What he drew looked something like this…

This image is about as an accurate a representation of the narrative experience as any written critical review could undertake. I found myself reflecting on other ‘graphs’ and visual representations of drama and narrative.

My particular fascination for Infographics revealed some surprisingly irreverent but not the less poignant examples.


And even at a micro-level the ability for visual data to manifest distinct drama can be astute. The images below visualise individual character moments and quotes.

Amusing through they may be they point toward the power for visual representations to be powerful writing tools.

Stewart McKie In an article entitled Screenplay Visualisation: Concepts and Practice undertakes a kind of environmental scan of some of the methods employed by various creative writing software tools to visualise rather than just write. Though its few years old now and at least one of the applications referred to has gone the way of the dodo, the essay none the less provides a good broad look at some methods for script and drama visualisation.

Among those mentioned is of course my favourite creative production and screenwriting weapon Celtx. It has numerous visual tools including Storyboarding and clip-art based Sketch system perfect for mapping blocking staging and dramatic spaces.

There is however one further tool in Celtx that is enormously useful for seeing the shape of a drama over time and expressed through colour. The index-card view in Celtx allows for each card to be assigned a colour group. As a creator you might colour code by character, or act or location or any other grouping paradigm. In any such case the real power of colour grouping is the ability to zoom out to see all the cards of your project in one go and from this macro-perspective the colour-shape of your story becomes clearly apparent.  You will see immediately where their are clumps and where there is sparseness of certain colours and by this identify the peaks and valleys in the drama you are crafting.

The other tool that I find particularly useful in this mode is the superb and free mind-mapping app X-Mind. Xmind creates bubbles and links those bubbles together in trees, flow charts and relationship links. Xmind can also convert from and between tables of data to flow-charts and mind maps. It’s here that an interesting workflow opens up. Information on characters and scenes can be entered into a standard grid table in X-mind - perhaps a column for character and then scene descriptions in another. And then, with single click, the table of linear data can be displayed as a non-linear mind-map or flow-chart where new relationships between scenes, characters, ideas and events can be seen at a macro-level that may not be apparent in a linear script of text.

There is of course nothing new about this idea. Yet I think there remains huge opporunity to move away from assuming  writers all have brains wired the same and all work in the same way with words on blank paper. Creative thinking is a many-headed beast, words on paper may be the end goal but the road to that goal should be dictated only by what best suits the creator and the project.

Whilst we all use software to enact and enable creative process that shouldn’t mean software tool should dictate the creative process. Good creative software doesnt overtly govern the method or impose the order by which an end creative result is obtained. This has long been my criticism of most post-production and editing systems where by they, all too often, enforce a predefined process to exclusion of other possibilities. The extremely popular Final Cut Studio for example uses discreet applications for each process (edit, sound, colour grade, etc) this is not uncommon but the integration between these Apple apps is almost totally one-way. Soundtrack Pro and Apple Color are designed and intended to work with a locked off edit completed in FCP. The fundamental idea that the software thus entrenches and imposes upon the project and creators is that Sound and Colour are interpretative rather than generative, that sound and colour do not inform the edit only add to it, that sound and colour must follow the edit; a hierarchy of process dictated by the software. FCStudio is a software suite that distinctly tells you How to work and dictates its own internal notion of a ‘correct’ process to the large exclusion of other possibilities. Software paradigms such as that inherent (but not exclusive) to FCStudio fail to be open-workbenches and instead serve as pre-defined pipelines. (I have written about this in more detail in an essay entitled The Philosophy of the Tools.)

This is an conceptual trap that tools such as Celtx (which I have had some involvement and input to over the years) strive very hard to avoid by providing as much as possible a workbench rather than a pipeline; a collection of tools that the creator exploits in any manner and order they wish to best suit their needs. This idea brings us full circle to perhaps appreciate and explore the exploitation of non-literary mechanics to produce literary works - visual methods to better articulate written expression.

INFOGRAPHIC: noir ominus lighting

How, Not if... drama, video games and TV

Among my favorite regular website reads is The Story Department. Started as the blog Australian script editor Karel Segers, TSD has evolved into a rich repository of essays, articles, reviews and discussions about story, cinema and screenwriting with contributors and readers from all over the world. This month I have the honour of having a small article fetaured on TSD entitled How, Not If: drama, video games and TV that sprang from a lengthy binge of near round-the-clock, weeks-long, game playing and TV drama series watching….

The intro is below and the link will take you straight to The Story Department to read the whole thing.

—-

I play games like I once used to read novels. There exists a pile and as I finish each game (taking a number of weeks and occasionally months each) I move immediately onto the next, working my way through the continually replenishing stack.

It seems significant that I would use the word Finish in regard to games. As it’s the self-same word I would use for a book, it implies certain things. Chief among these implications are notions of linear Progression, Finality and Inevitability. For many game theorists these three concept terms are somewhat of an anathema.

Games are supposed to be non-linear, open-systems rather than closed ones, they are player-controlled and thus are distinct and apart from cinema and literature. Similarly, by nature of being player-controlled they are, in theory, without inevitability.

click here to visit TSD and read the rest of this article and many others dealing with narrative drama and screenwriting.

Five Dramatic Truisms

The idea of Story is both a highly complex and extraordinarily simple thing. And whilst there are a 1001 bullshit books dictating precise steps to Hollywood success (all of which bastardise and mis-quote or mis-attribute Aristotle in some way) I’m going to attempt to offer up something more succinct to help with effective storytelling :

Here’s my take on 5 simple ideas about engagement with audiences through story. No formula, no set structure, no character defaults or prescriptive sign-posts; just 5 things for story-tellers to keep in mind. The most complex chemical structure is built from the simplest elements.

1) Knowing
A crucial question to ask at a scene by scene level is “what does the viewer know?” And in particular what does the viewer know compared to the character(s)? Does the audience know Only what the characters know? Or does the audience know More than the characters know? The difference is huge and will determine the nature of the drama being constructed. Be it tension exerted by the unknown or anticipation in waiting for the known to happen.

We may see this dichotomy at work most evidently in horror films. If the viewer knows the slasher is lurking behind the door but the character doesn’t then the drama is in the anticipation of the character encountering what the viewer already knows to be there. If the viewer only knows what the character knows then the drama is in the surprise; we jump when the character jumps.

The role of the director and editor is to clearly articulate what the viewer knows in any given scene. If the filmmakers are clear about which of these 2 options is intended then the scene can play out with dramatic clarity.


2. Worry
There’s really only one reason we watch/read stories - we Watch because we like to Worry.

Regardless of the type, tone, style or structure of the story, irrespective of its traits and topics, one thing is consistent - if we are going to be engaged we must be made to give a shit. If you as a storyteller fail to make us care then all the great dialogue, descriptions and details in the world won’t save ya.

Of course this simple notion begs the question ‘how do you make a reader/viewer give a shit?’ The only way we can care is to empathise. So invariably we must like the character; no matter how flawed they are. So, make a character I like and then attack them. Hit them with everything. Batter them till I want to scream at the storyteller “leave him alone”.

3. Trapped
Here I am going to borrow directly from Howard Suber and his outstanding book ‘The power of film’. In it Suber declares that all good films can be aptly titled ‘Trapped!’ and the statement’s simplicity belies a profound observation.

If we watch because we like to worry - and the more worried we are the more engaged we are - then the idea of Trapped tells us so much about drama.

A character in a room is not ‘trapped’ until 2 conditions are met a) He wants to get out and b) he is prevented from getting out. Whilst the idea of action and obstacle is well known in drama the prism of Trapped is far more acute. It implies not just a desire and an obstacle for a character but something more - no way around, no foreseeable exit, compelled, cornered, inevitable. Trapped is not just something an obstacle in the way but a state of being beset on all sides and robbed of choices.

In all good stories the characters are beset on all sides - circumstance, bad luck, bad choices, fate, action, inaction, internal pressures and external forces. The more Trapped a character is the more engaged we’ll be to see how or if they escape, triumph, succeed or fail.


4. Argument
Drama must be Argued and, as in its traditional context, a Good argument is not one-sided but rather teeters back and forth like a tug-o-war rope.

Invariably a story will choose a winner, the philosophical premise of the filmmaker will come to rest at the films conclusion one side of the tug of war pit or the other. But the crowd will only be satisfied if the victory was hard fought, if the conclusion was earned. Just as when we go to a football match; seeing your team win 100-0 is not nearly as satisfying a narrow hard fought victory in the final seconds. The argument is more important than the result. In the end the audience may or may not care what the filmmakers point was - depending on the film - but they will care about the fight, the struggle, the argument. Often films that are predictable are so simply because the filmmakers have failed to present a counter argument to their central idea. The drama is unbalanced and the viewer can see the end position a mile off.


5. Emotional Expectations
An audience may enter a film not knowing what will happen but they do go in with specific emotional expectations. They expect to feel a certain way and their enjoyment of the film will be shaped by how well those expectations of feeling are fulfilled, exploited or subverted.

This idea is self evident every time you stand with your friend or partner in the cinema foyer or dvd store deciding what to watch. “Hey what about (insert movie here)…?” “Na I don’t feel like a (comedy, thriller, scifi, horror) tonight”. We make decisions about what to watch based on how we wish to feel. So for the storyteller, what is fundamental, is to know how you want your audience to feel?

Summary:
So Storyteller…. Here’s what you gotta do:
~ Make a character I give a shit about and make me worry about their fate
~ Trap them in a ‘place’ they can’t get out of but Must escape.
~ Surprise me when you surprise them
or
~ Give me foresight and show me what they don’t know
~ By all means have a point but argue it rather than deliver it.

INFOGRAPHIC: future entertainment

Puppeteering the pointless third-person

Mass Effect and the Thrill of Seeing
Genre’s of computer gaming have long found their conventions identified by modes and mechanics of viewership and control than more traditional narrative and thematic traits. Thus games are foremost referred to by terms such as First Person Shooter (FPS) Role Playing Game (RPG) and Real Time Strategy (RTS) rather than SciFi, Horror or Noir (though they very often possess these traits as well)

What this implies is a primary concern of games being focused on How a ‘story’ is engaged over the What of the ‘story’s’ depiction. The mechanics of engagement on the part of the viewer are governed by the vantage point of control they are presented. This range spans from the intimacy and immediacy of First Person (Bioshock, Half Life, et al) through to the omnipotent remove of a ‘God-View’ 3rd Person (Command and Conquer, Company of Heroes etc).

Between these two extremes - and their various implementations and variations - sits the venerable 3rd Person Shooter. The addendum of the term ‘shooter’ constructs an intimacy to the scene whilst retaining a remove from the immediacy of 1st Person. Into this vein of games that exploit this viewership of Intimate Remove we add recent titles such as Arkham Asylum, Dead Space and Mass Effect.

Here we find a question begging - Why 3rd Person? What does removing the player from the personal avatar embodiment of 1st Person add to the experience?

The simple answer would be the “thrill of seeing” that for the viewer/player the thrill of the game is in seeing the “performance of execution” on the part of the avatar and controlled by the player. This is, in effect, a form of digital puppetry where the thrill for the puppeteer is in seeing the puppet come to life and perform physical feats of movement.

In 1st Person by contrast the thrill of seeing is fundamentally different - focused as it is not on the avatar/puppet itself but rather on the immediate first-person world depicted. Aside from hands and the pointy end of a firearm the puppet is unseen.

So we might conclude that the justification and appeal of a using 3rd Person view-mode is to centre game experiences around the ‘performance’ of the puppet. One need only look at the plethora of martial-arts fighting games (such as Tekken) To see this in action. Such games are akin to circus performances – the thrill in seeing feats of skills, acrobatics, dexterity and spatial defiance. Nor should we neglect more base descriptions of “stuff that looks cool”, a coarse term that belies that important notion of appeal centred on the puppet rather than the world the puppet is in.

In Arkham Asylum for example the thrill of seeing is in the viewing of the Batman puppet in the performance of extraordinary feats. Similarly the player challenge lies in the puzzle of navigating a space in 3 dimensions from a position of the puppeteer who can see beyond the first person perspective of the puppet itself. The experience is therefore not in the immediacy of the experience of the avatar but in the orchestration of the experience for the avatar as an agent.

We might also look at an RPG game such as Dragon Age which justifies its choice of the 3rd Person by understanding the nature and appeal of sword-play and melee combat. The thrill of seeing would be largely lost if the players acrobatic and dexterous sword swings and parries could not be seen from a cinematic remove.

However this understanding of the appeal 3rd Person - and acknowledging particular games where its use seems wholly in tune with the games’ mode and intentions - brings up the issue of games where 3rd Person seems out of place and without justification….

Mass Effect I’m looking at you…

Mass Effect (1 and 2) is an epic narrative shooter with an RPG structure of progression and level-ups. Mass Effect is also a Third-Person shooter where the player’s perspective is not experienced from the immediacy of the first-person but rather from an immediate and behind POV as you marionette the character of Shepard around the galaxy.

The camera of viewership is fixed; the distance of its placement from behind the avatar is locked and cannot be zoomed in or out. Nor can this fixed third-person camera be swung or controlled from its static vantage independent of the puppet. The issue with this viewpoint is that the choice for Third-person in Mass Effect seems to serve no viable or tangible purpose and have no direct connection to the experience the game provides. Since mass Effect is a shooter and the focus is primarily (if not solely) on the targets of that shooting there is virtually nothing of performative interest in watching the back of the characters head and shoulders. There is no ‘thrill of seeing’ that might otherwise be gained from a sword-wielding character. There is no thrill of seeing because frankly we’re not seeing much and the perpetual view of the back of my puppet’s head is nothing more that a visual impediment to the screen.

In a game such as oblivion (which shares so much as an RPG to Mass Effect) the camera viewpoint of the player can be freely moved from First-Person, Third-Person and withdrawn further to an omnipotent, almost god-view over a scene. In this regard to ability to move out of first and into third person becomes a strategic tool, the means to see around corners, pause and take a strategic view of an environment and obstacles. But Mass Effect has no such function, the camera is simply locked in stasis serving almost no game play purpose, unable to be zoomed back to garner any strategic advantage.

Some may argue that the third-person view for a shooter facilitates the “duck + cover” game mode where the player can position their character behind cover whilst still being able to see enemies from their 3rd person view. The idea is that duck+cover gameplay has a greater level of strategy about it than run+gun, point+shoot first-person. It’s an idea directly connected with that expressed earlier in regard to Arkham Asylum where the player is puppeteer with a privileged all-seeing perspective over the scene rather than the intimate immediacy of first-person embodiment.

But if this is the case then why not make 3rd person a ‘mode option’, selected with a button when the player moves their avatar into cover? Why is it necessary to spend the entire game with 20% of the screen real-estate taken up by the decidedly dull back, shoulders and scruffy head of an avatar just to facilitate a game mode that makes up less than 2% of game time..?

Its seems to me that the Third-Person perspective in Mass Effect is pointless, serves no purpose and adds nothing to the game. Third-Person makes sense for sword and melee games and spatial strategy gameplay but it makes no sense for shooters. Such a flaw is all the more apparent on a otherwise superb and groundbreaking game as Mass Effect.

Most computer games aren't games at all...

and they’re all the better for it.

Gaming is hip. It’s hip in popular terms with some figures reporting some 60% of US households in 2009 owning a console and with the massive penetration of home PC’s we can safely assume many of those also have games installed and being used right along with pron surfing. The computer gaming industry’s turnover annually is now measured in billions and rivals Hollywood. Gaming is also hip in the media either as bone of complaint and controversy or as a medium to leverage for marketing benefit and demographic relevance. Gaming demonstrates even more hipness in academic spheres as a field of study where it’s become the new black for garnering research grants and premising conference papers.

But I think the word ‘Game’ is a problem…

There are a number of ways we might see this problem. Observe that the following are all considered Computer/Video games:
- Tetris
- Bioshock
- Nintendogs
- World of Warcraft




In both popular and academic regard there would be little objection to a group moniker of ‘game’ being applied to all these. And yet these 4 popular examples are as radically different as hiku is from an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. Whilst we would call both ‘writing’ such a term is useless as a grouping or a definition.

So this prompts us to consider a definition of the word ‘game’ itself. Here’s a few :

“a contest with rules to determine a winner”

“a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome”

“competition conducted according to rules with the participants in direct opposition to each other”

There are two concise implications of such definitions; the first is that a Game must have a clear objective and competitive challenge/obstacle that must be overcome. And further that a game must embody a clear Win/Loose paradigm.

So with this idea - ages-old through the human history of playing games - we can measure the four ‘game’ examples above to see if they fit the parameters of a game?

Does Tetris have a clear challenge/obstacle and embody a Win/Lose structure? Yes, no doubt.

Does Bioshock have a challenge/obstacle (or series of challenges)? Yes. But, does Bioshock have a Win/Lose paradigm? No… Certainly my avatar may ‘die’ but since I am immediately re-incarnated in the nearest Vitachamber or can restart at will from my near infinite save-games; the idea of ‘losing’ in Bioshock is completely absent. Bioshock, like so many of its narrative-based computer game brethren, assumes from the outset that the player will complete the ‘story’. The challenge, drama and tension is not at all in a Win/Lose scenario but rather in the experience of working through game. The old “life is a journey not a destination” adage is wholly applicable. Completing the game is as inevitable as death, life holds no victory and neither does Bioshock; just the experience of the progressive journey from beginning to end. Now, certainly in games such as these the player may choose Not to finish/complete the game but this is not Failure or Losing anymore than walking out of a boring movie hardly constitutes a failing to watch.

So we come to Nintendogs. Is it a game? Does Nintendogs have a clear challenge/obstacle? Only in the most obtuse of terms that, aside from feeding your virtual dog, are entirely self selectable and optional. Does it have a Win/Lose scenario? Clearly not. There is no victory nor ending resulting in losing. This is not to suggest that Nintendogs is without drama and challenge engagement but as Nintendogs lacks any kind of definable and summative conclusion there is a clear lack of the parameters that would otherwise and traditionally define a game.

Lastly we come to World of Warcraft. Is the venerable MMORPG a ‘game’? Does it encompass a clear challenge/objective? Yes and No. It resembles Nintendogs in the sense that any challenges and obstacles are entirely non-compulsory and self-selectable. A premise that unto itself is largely the antithesis of a ‘game’. Does WoW have a Win/Lose premise? Definitively not. WoW has no end-point or conclusion at all. There is no state of ‘victory’ and even character death is simply a temporary set back until the ghost of the character is re-spawned at a graveyard.

From these four it is only Tetris that apparently conforms to established definitions of a ‘game’. As such, in an effort to understand what these entities formely-known-as-games really are, allow me to suggest naming groupings that don’t use the highly problematic word ‘game’ at all:

- Tetris  = puzzle
- Nintendogs = simulation
- Bioshock = interactive story
- WoW = virtual world

What I have dared to do is suggest that 3/4 of what we might call games are not games at all. It seems to me that there are two elements that have contributed to the problematic nature of the word ‘game’ and its use to describe entities that fundamentally lack game-like components. The first is that the earliest and seminal computer games were indeed ‘games’ by definition. Space Invaders, Pong, TVSports, PacMan, all had clear singular objectives with tangible Win/Lose in competition with either a fellow player or against the computer. Hence the game concept of ‘lives’ and the deflating stamp of ‘game over’.

But a great bulk of what we now think of as ‘games’ - Bioshock, the Sims, Oblivion, GTA, Nintendogs, etc - have long dispensed with these mechanics. However as the lineage can be traced directly from Pong to Bioshock the former’s status as a ‘game’ is carried forward to the later. (This seems much like the use of the term ‘Film’ to describe a feature movie even if that movie was shot digitally and not ‘on celluloid film’ at all.)

The other potential reason for the problematic nature and mis-assignment of the word ‘game’ is derived from a shared technological base. Whilst we may view Tetris, Bioshock, Nintendogs and WoW as four very separate and removed entities, the fact remains that they are all electronic entertainment, screen-based media, existing as software and all generated from the same creative tools of manufacturing computer images. The aesthetics of electronic entertainment for the viewer are invariably tied to the means of their production.

But just because WoW is made from the same tools as computer games and looks ostensibly like a computer game, does not mean that it is a ‘game’ or provides the same experience as a ‘game’ by definition. What is interesting is that few would call Second Life a ‘game’ and yet it is a twin sibling of World of Warcraft. Both are made from the same basis of a 3D graphics engine, both are open worlds where users freely choose any objectives they want to pursue. Both aesthetically look like games as the general populous would understand them. Yet both lack the Win/Lose scenario or a defined and specific objective. World of Warcraft is simply a less boring version of Second Life. It may have more things to do that involve weapons and blood and strange creatures but otherwise functions invariably as a virtual world in a dressing of game clothes..

The difference between WoW and Second Life, that warrants a popular use of the word ‘Game’ for one and not for the other, might be observed in the demographic each is trying to attract and engage. WoW calls itself a Game because it is designed to attract ‘Gamers’ - people who define themselves as Gamers. Second Life is not seeking to attract Gamers, it endeavours to attract those outside of an established gaming social grouping.

Perhaps the use or absence of the word ‘Game’ is little more than an exercise in market positioning.

Now, let me be clear - the fact that I am arguing that Bioshock, Nintendogs, WoW (and their siblings) are Not games, should not be read as a negative criticism of them as works of art and entertainment. Bioshock, WoW, Nintendogs are not deemed or positioned as lesser for being ruled outside of the name ‘Game’; indeed quite the opposite. By recognising that these forms of screen-based media entertainment and art are Not games is to acknowledge that they function above and beyond the somewhat petty Win/Lose mechanics of games. By being more complex, more nuanced, more sophisticated they are elevated and exalted. More importantly by observing that they don’t share the common traits of games we better position ourselves to more accurately understand what they really are; the means by which they engage, the other forms of art and media they fluidly derive from, remediate and connect to.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the eminent philosophers of the 20th century, uses the idea of defining Games as the premise for his seminal work ‘Philosophical Investigations’ (the Wikipedia entry on him and his book is really very good for an overview). Wittgenstein’s thrust of argument is simply that a word’s meaning is derived solely from how it is used in popular and common conversation and communication. Thus in regard to my argument here that most computer games do not fit the definition of a ‘game’, Wittgenstein would counter simply by saying that since people call them games, they are so…

It’s the kind of logic that’s hard to argue with without sounding like a wanky academic looking for a reason to justify their next research grant and conference travel funding. But I do believe that such broad and egalitarian perspective fails to make definitions useful and productive tools.

And why would we want to do that? To make BETTER games of course…! To take the art of ‘games’ further.

I would suggest that so long as we continue to define electronic interactive media as ‘games’ we will continue to curtail and truncate their development as moving-image arts by chaining them to antiquated concepts of ‘Win/Lose’ and ‘Game Over’.

Why are we here? Looking back and looking forward

Seminal musician and video artist Tom Ellard of Severed Heads recently marked a 30th anniversary of the groups music with a special performance at the 2010 Sydney Festival. Accompanying the performance was a presentation given by Tom entitled Why Are We Here? Both a self effacing question from the ever humble Tom about why people would come to see Severed Heads after so many years and, at the same time, a deeply thoughtful question on the nature of exploration in music and art, the impact of nostalgia and the notion of ‘looking forward’.



The complete slides and notes are availible online with the slide images being hillarious compositions in their own right and the ‘notes’ amounting to a sincerly thoughtful essay on the nature of progressive art.

“Despite the revolutions to and fro we continue to look backwards for authority and approval. Nothing has changed except we have a whole new layer of language that marginalises creativity. Rather than record an album we ‘examine the idea of recording an album’. We review, revise, we analyse, we do everything through safety glass and avoid responsibility for the creative act as if it were pornographic. Art has fallen into a passive language that once typified the physical sciences.

I am disturbed by the fear implied by this kind of language. I hear people denying that they do anything. They are not making music, it’s non notational, it’s random, it’s all about process. This fear also means keeping to a comfort zone where need approval from the past while hiding behind fake irony.”

In particular i was struck by the powerful simplicty of Tom’s manifesto regarding music but which can easlly be expanded for all arts. (in particular the 2nd point which seems wholly applicable to digital filmmakers who measure their creations by the tools they used and are more articulate in discussing their editing software than they are their ideas…)

• We’ve had 40 years of post everything. Stop with the passive language. Stop analysing. Publish and be damned. Progress is pornographic,  but that’s not a bad thing.
• Music is not research, it’s not measured in milligrams. I don’t want to told how many speakers you used, whether it was MaxMSP, whether you used a Wiimote. It’s not to be metricised. To hell with funding as the score and festivals as the new concept album. We need people to make music that’s intangible, loud, tiny, ridiculous and in every way metaphysical. Music that’s brave and foolish.
• Stop seeking approval from the past, seek community, seek experience, seek humour. But the whole ‘golden age / end times’ argument has got to go. It belongs in the 1800’s.
• I am not afraid of pop music, of pubs, of top 40. I make things. I make chairs, I make myself useful. Milton Babbit asked Who Cares If You Listen? I do.
• Reclaim randomness. Randomness is an energy source, infinite opportunity. It is not shuffle, it’s not a nihilistic everything is the same as everything else. Difference is an energy that can lead us onward.