Through the Ludic Glass: Making Sense of Video Games as Algorithmic Spectacles
Bibliography
Fizek, S. (2022). Through the Ludic Glass: Making Sense of Video Games as Algorithmic Spectacles. Game Studies, 22(2). http://gamestudies.org/2202/articles/gap_fizek
Abstract
Video game analyses have historically focused on the human act of play or on the events resulting from the player’s act. Until recently, spectating has remained an analytical domain of film theory and visual arts. In game studies, this perspective has changed, with the arrival of the phenomenon of gameplay spectating and game streaming on a mass scale, and its leakage into academic as well as popular consciousness. How does the spectacle change the analytical perspective towards video games as objects of scholarly analysis and video gaming as reflective practice? In this paper, I will approach the video game as an algorithmic spectacle and propose an analytical perspective to study this phenomenon, reaching out to theories of moving (digital) image proposed by the philosopher Vilém Flusser and the filmmaker Harun Farocki.
Notes
Table of Content
- Introduction: Through the Ludic Glass
- Why Algorithmic Images Now?
- Computed Representations / Represented Computations
- Technical Images
- Operational Images
- Watching through the Ludic-Glass
- Layers of Spectated Meaning
- Towards Aesthetics of Spectated Play
Notes
Introduction: Through the Ludic Glass
Until recently the focus was on the player, whereas mass-watching let’s-plays and live-streams brought specating into focus.
In my exploration of the spectacle then, I am not that much concerned with observing other human players at play, but with the question of the configurability and operationality of the displayed video game image.
- The image in video games is not made of light, but of mathematics
- This needs a different kind of visuality-literacy from the specators
- the author builds on the concept of the technical image by Flusser and the operational image by Farocki
- both concepts don’t represent or signify things found in reality, but construct their own
Why Algorithmic Images Now?
- on why it is important to study the image these days
- she mentions a cartesian trap/dualism of differentiating between the visuality and it’s technicalities, a point that I started to make when researching the literature on the subject
- i didn’t get the part on simulation at the end of this chapter
Computed Representations / Represented Computations
- video games as aesthetic forms that rely on the tension between representation and computation, see (Fizek, 2022, p. 4)
- theoretical approaches to digital games often focus on the rule-based gameplay and submiss graphics and story
- Aarseth sees a double-layered object of mechanis and semiotics (aesthetics?)
- maybe it is exactly this binary that I want to tackle in my approach
Go to annotation “As Aubrey Anable notices, “computation/representation has become the structuring binary for game studies”” (Fizek, 2022, p. 5)
- digital born images are no longer simply representations, they display operations of software, but are also operational (Fizek, 2022, p. 5)
- making a link to Manovich’s work on the digital image
- eine Lanze brechened, for the disolvement of the border between computation and representation
Technical Images
- going into the concept of technical images by Vilém Flusser, which are not inscribed into a material surface (like traditional images) but constructed from particles (chemical) and pixels (digital)
- digital images are not a depiction, they are visualisations of computational processes
- Flusser aplauds the observers capability to see the image in the digital image, by keeping their distance and not see the subface
- this distance is different as standing apart from the image, it’s a distance of knowing/experience, it’s an epist-ontological distance
- on the need of knowing the technical in technical images
Go to annotation “Since technical images are no longer representations of the outside world but approximations and models of reality, their “critical reception … demands a level of consciousness that corresponds to the one in which they are produced” (Flusser 1985/2011, p, 22)” (Fizek, 2022, p. 7)
- Flusser making a case for studying how the images were produced
- Marino echoeing Flusser with his approach to critical code studies
Operational Images
- outlining Farocki’s work and concept of operational image
- operative images are also not representing, they have operational agency beyond deception/illusion
- operation/operative as terms are quite open to interpretation in media studies, and Frieder Nake reads them synonymous with computability/algorithmicity
- Manovich on the other hand reads operation as Go to annotation “technologically-based cultural practices,”
Watching through the Ludic-Glass
- skimmed
Layers of Spectated Meaning
- going into how a Flusserian reading of video game images could look like
- Mckeown defining “the image” as an ongoing conceptualized process
- another approach would be Kittler’s decending observation