What is the Video Game Image?
I finished readingy The philosophy of software last week and went half through Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality this week. The two books, on with a philosophical approach and one with a focus on everyday programming practices, are a great match and sparked some fruitful insights.
When thinking through programming practices through the Computational Image, with programmers in mind, they become people who internalized this mediating concept, and can translate their own human intentions into a machinic not-quite-ready-at-handedness. Willumsen calls this first and second order designing [@willumsenSourceCodeFormal2016]. They are, through their practice, creating digital artifacts that keep the user using, and the computer computing, by enabling a software-based feedback loop. In this Assemblage, the image on screen plays an important role, as it is one of the main phenomenological channels (next to physical interaction and sound). The video game programmer then has to create a Visuality that tells the game (narration), as well as enable this feedback loop through user-interface-like aspects (interfacing the mechanics).
This makes the Video Game Image a very specific and unique type of image, that differs substantial from the image of a film or animation (which I already had a hunch about, but little vocabulary to express it). Haven’t read much Kittler, Flusser, Parrika or Gaboury [@kittlerOptischeMedienBerliner2011; @flusserInsUniversumTechnischen2018; @gabouryImageObjectsArchaeology2021] yet, and I wonder if this aspect will pop up there. This structural aspect is very well taken up by the Framework for the Analysis of Visual Representation in Video Games, as it concentrates on this intersection between narration and user-interface.
I was also thinking about what bothers me with critical code studies. To fully understand code, we cannot just apply close reading and take a look at variable name and single out some functions or subroutines. To understand a program in its entirety, we need to understand the structural aspects of code as well. And that is something very few humanities researchers in the critical code studies do.
Since we the researchers are not the original authors of the code we study, we are going to have a hard time doing gaining a sufficient understanding. Hence, the need for distant reading tools and methods that mediate between our research questions and the code base, and provide us with access to these structural aspects of the code for a given program or video game.
Log 2024 Week 22
- Worked on Matching sparql query and image files in CSV, which needed a bit of tinkering. Since I had various sources, the files were labeled differently. I needed a script that creates a new datasheet with the filenames and merged with the Metadata from a SPARQL query.
- Worked on the transcription of the interview with Laro Schatzer. I experimented with
whisperto create an interview transcript. Kind of magic, and the conversion from Swiss-German to German worked near-perfectly. - Collected my thoughts and wrote a summary entry for The philosophy of software: code and mediation in the digital age.