Various Notes 2023

Republish of various notes from last year.

2023-12-05
- #Hypothesis: moving away from the logic of the machine (from asm to higher levels) we also lost a specific way of designing
2023-10-30
- Look into Dragon’s Lair, Prince of Persia and other such games, where technology influenced aesthetics a lot. I already did that with Doom and Myst.
2023-09-25
- how much variance do designers/developers of digital games intend/allow regarding the graphics
- the space of aesthetic experience often exceeds the developers intention and can be modified in many ways
2023-08-20
- How do different programming languages (and hardwares) enable different kind of creativities and modes of expression, besides formal aspects of color schemes or poligon counts.
2023-08-24
- Some questions that arose in yesterdays discussion on my dissertation in a DHSpiele meeting.
- Do I get some source code at all?
- Which technical aspects of the image do I study?
- Can I at least include short animated sequences in my corpus?
- Which version of the executed image do I study, on which software, hardware, monitor?
- What were hardware specifics, that designers used and misused, like the VIC-ii badline, but for other systems?
2023-08-18
- How does design rhetorics deal with the death of the author and intentional fallacy?
2023-07-20
- A project on the maps drawn by people for various video games would be fantastic.
- Studying a games visuality through its limits and glitches is an interesting approach, and there is probably already material on that.
2023-07-19
- Do I need to have a look at how images are constituted besides digital games? Could a Correspondence Analysis on visuality be fruitful?
- “new media do not appear in opposition to the old but as emulators of features and functions that are already invented” (Aarseth, 1997, p. 81)
- Could there be a Cybertext’s equivalent foundational text on the visuality in video games? Are the variables and analysis Aarseth makes mappable onto image studies? Aarseth very much looks at the structure of digital games, but coming from literary studies.
2023-07-10
- Is source code a cybertext-producing cybertext? A meta-cybertext?
2023-07-07
- I took this from the abstract and leave it here for now:
- “If we take a closer look at the image of video games and accept it as an artifact that is calculated and constructed by code and computer hardware, we can conclude that the underlying technology is formative for its discourse and meaning. Respectively, that the technicians, such as programmers and graphic designers familiar with code, are significantly involved in the circulation and formation of meanings and power relations through the image in video games.”
2023-07-05
- I still struggle with making a meaningful connection between the source code and the playable experience. Cem Kilicarslan made an important remark. The player does not interact with the code. I have the feeling that this might be relevant at a point. What I’m interested in is this link between writing code and the emerging space of possibilities. Or say, the capability of code to create a multiverse. Code is emergent world-building by its ability to foster complexity.
- The investigation of source code is becoming more and more complex. Whereas earlier a lot of program code had to be written by people, it is getting more and more mediated by machines. Tools and frameworks take over the writing of code, producing the necessary code base through graphical interfaces. Generative AI will further this process, when people only need to write prompts. Is it possible that this bi-modal designerly activity will vanish soon or is mitigated to the fringes?
2023-06-21
- All research methods are based on philosophical assumptions about the nature of the social world and assumptions about how research should proceed. These assumptions guide methodological decision making (although often under the surface). These philosophical assumptions can be thought of as the “philosophical substructure” of research (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2011).
- What are the philosophical assumptions behind the methods that I’m applying?
2023-06-16
- Why is it, that we have so little C64 games in Switzerland?
2023-05-28
- What is the social relevance of my dissertation approach? I could think of the power in the hands of people who can code in order to produce images. How does this class of creatives structure the image in video games? Maybe there is something to be found in the research on the networked image.
2023-05-22
- It is hardly possible to see beyond the horizon of transformation from code to image. Looking at the visuality one can only make assumption about the code and vice versa. This has a profound impact on designing visuality through code.
2023-05-17
- Coding for visuality involves multimodal design. The code written and the output generated by that code does not correlate aesthetically. The brief moment of translation, from one system of signifiers into another happens already in the coders mind (or knowledge) before the computational act itself. There is a double rhetoric at play, one for the code, one for the visuality.
2023-05-12
- “strukturelle homoerotik” - Eugen Pfister, zu den Männern mit nacktem Oberkörper in den 80ern
2023-05-10
- In my dissertation, I am essentially interested in the transformation or translation of meaning from one system of signifiers into another. It is a multi modal approach. The materiality of visuality in video games is only on the surface comparable to paint in the painting. It is much closer to artworks where the artist wrote instructions. The basis of the image in video games is of textual nature, and as such opens it self to being analysed like a literal text.
2023-05-06
- Dissertation, thought, slow down the process of input to output, make the processing human experience album by thick description of what’s happening inside of the computer system
- Really go in-depth into this moment of transformation from input to computing system and code and back to output
2023-03-30
- How is visual meaning derrived from code? How does code turn into meaningful visuality?
2023-03-24
- What’s the impact of loading times on the game experience?
2023-03-17
- If the research of Fabian Sanglard shows one thing, then that the visuality of video games is inherently linked to materiality. There is not one without the other.
2023-03-07
- My gut feeling tells me, there is some interesting link between authenticity, Emulation and semiotics, in regards to the image.
- How to machine assisted semiology in traversing large archives of pop-cultural images?
- Are video games multimodal?
2023-02-27
- Where is the invisible labour in all of these games? Can we avoid recreating a narrative of white and priviledged men? Why are the gameworls we look at mostly about shooting, and scifi, economics and such things, traditionally ascribed to masculinity?
- What is absent (intersectionaly seen) in our corpus?
2023-02-24
- How about having a good look at all the platforms that, mostly illegaly, collect old games for preservation purposes?
2023-02-22
- How do emulators and their contextual technologies, such as displays, change our experience of game play?
2023-02-10
- The endless circulation of the retro game image in todays media landscape. (poping up as a reaction to the Images in Social Media workshop)
2023-02-09
- Something about reconstructing the images of the past. How the inages vanish with the technology and how emulation is not a replacement. Also something something semiology about how the image was related to the screen and to the room around it. How that is lost as well. So preservation of these images could also be a subject, because screenshots and video recordings don’t preserve the ergodic animage.
2023-01-11
- Materiality of digital born graphics
- Close reading AI generated images
- How technology (code, software) forms and frames the images we can produce
- What’s visible, what’s not visible
2023-01-12
- How do video game graphics life on, or beyond their respective games? On game platforms, screenshots, fan culture, etc.
2023-01-13
- How does participation (as in gameplay) change the reception of an image?
- How does the player become a co-creator of visual material, through gameplay?
2023-01-23
- Participation and code radically changes the production and reception of images in video games. The glitch in Ball Raiser is part of it’s reception.