Wk11 Tute Reading- As We Become Machines

For my particular reading, I covered Martti Lahti's article in The Video Game Theory Reader, entitled As We Become Machines: Corporealized Pleasures In Video Games. As the name indicates, it deals with the role video games play in the barrier between technology and humanity, and the effect such video games have on the senses and the actual body itself- hence the ‘corporealized' part of the title.

Lahti argues throughout the article that videogames serve as a way of bypassing the ordinary limitations of the body and experiencing things normally considered impossible or improbable without actually literally undertaking them in the body, and that there has been a distinct evolution throughout the history of video games that has made this integration of the human body and the actual experience of the player's avatar in the game more and more complete. This is something I personally can agree with, having myself played several videogames and found myself getting so ‘into it', so to speak, that I was thinking in terms of the game, as opposed to my actual surroundings. For example, when playing the computer game Descent 3 four years ago, I didn't see the computer screen around me or the room I was in, I didn't hear the background noise in my house, and I wasn't thinking about school or any other ordinary teenage worries- instead I saw the cockpit of a ship flying over the surface of some asteroid somewhere- plus the installations and enemy craft below-, I heard the sounds of enemy gunfire and my own ship's afterburners and guns, and I was thinking about how best to avoid being blown out of the sky. The experience of the game was almost real in some ways, overriding most of my own sensory intake of the real world around me and the truth is that the game is considerably old by the standards of today's games. But I digress. This is exactly the sort of idea that Lahti is trying to get across when talking about the merging of the human being, the player, and the character, the player's avatar in the game.

The descriptions of the various games and their influence on the bodies of players reminded me of my own experiences, and thus enabled me to engage more with the actual text by relating this knowledge to my own experiences. The same can be said for the actual games listed in the texts, such as Doom, Perfect Dark, Half-Life and the like, games which I played when I was younger. The mention of these particular examples allowed me, at least, to draw on my own experiences to gain a particular insight into Lahti's arguments that would not have been as clear were they only supported by abstract concepts.

One of the ideas Lahti presented that interested me the most was the idea of the male gamer playing a female avatar in a game. While a user is compelled to integrate with the female avatar in the course of the game, at the same time the male player is also asked to ‘dissassociate himself from her and instead to take visual pleasure in looking at her'. I found this very interesting, considering the long-standing arguments about Tomb Raider's Lara Croft being either a positive female item or busty titilation for male players, and the idea of a male both integrating himself to play the role of the woman while at the same time disengaging himself to admire the female character is a compelling and complex idea that I feel could warrant a lot more study on. However, I found the idea of video games being ‘a safe way to try on being a different race or sex without the risk of relinquishing any social or cultural power' to be an idea that was perhaps overconsidered. I don't believe most male video game players play games featuring female characters for some kind of fantastic way to masquerade as a woman. I certainly don't. The idea never really crosses my mind, and I'm normally more concerned with the matter of the game itself than whether I'm male, female, black or white. Although with the upcoming Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Playstation 2 game, which allows players to take on the role of an African-American gangster, it might be interesting to see whether or not players see it as a safe way to become another particular race and social class, that being an African-American criminal.

Lahti's final, concluding summary of her arguments states that ‘various games emphasize an immaterial and disembodied vision that explores a virtual landscape with relative freedom and liberates perception (and the body) in some fashion from its normal limitations of placement and movement in daily life', and also that this is done by actually connecting the ‘cyborg bodies' of the game with our real bodies by the use of various input and output technologies such as more evolved points of view, pedals, force feedback, light guns and various other technologies designed to immerse players in corporeal sensations. By this, Lahti indicates that players do not actually lose all concept of their bodies and become technology, but instead that their bodies are influenced by technology, rather than being taken over by it.. I find the actual arguments in themselves very compelling and persuasive due to their correlation with my own experiences, in addition to the description of what seem at least to me to be artificial stimulation of the body to create the effect of escape from realism that the video game designers wish to convey.

Key quotes:

"According to Ted Friedman, computer games teach us to ‘[think] like the computer', a process which creates a sense of ‘self-dissolution', being ‘sucked in'. He goes on to describe playing a game such as Civilization II as being in an ‘almost meditative state, in which you aren't just interacting with the computer, but melding with it'"
(Course Reader, p. 293)

"Character and player are unified into a first-person movement through the virtual space. One effect of this unification is the creation of a stronger experiential homology between the fictional world of the game and the real world, where virtual space begins to seem continuous with the player's space rather than sharply delimited by the frame of the monitor as I have been arguing."
(Course Reader, p. 294)

"In this sense, our pleasure is based on blurring the distinction between the player and the character we jump, fly, shoot, kick, and race when we are actually clicking the mouse or tapping the controller."
(Course Reader, p. 295)

"The monitor guides us into (a perceptual and corporeal) interaction with the computer and, as a technologized form of vision, it becomes a component and extension of the body; it replaces our body, or rather extends its capacities, and becomes both a representation and source of bodily experience, thus creating a hybrid condition resonant with the cyborg."
(Course Reader, p. 296)