🪴 Jachére

Five month later, more or less

Jun 07, 20246 min read

Five month later, more or less

I’m trying to collect some thoughts on the state of my project, in preparation for a Ludens PhD colloquium. Although I started with my Dissertation in February 2023, I only felt like actually working on it the last five month…

I start with the (current) research questions, taken from the Blinded by the Light - Synopse:

To what extent were the technological foundations and the materiality of video games intertwined and implicit in influencing and shaping programming practices of early video game visuality? How did video game developers leverage programming to shape the images of early video games, and what implications did their approaches held for the intersection of technology and Visuality in video game development?

I wrote about my hypothesizing, my base for these questions, in Thinking about Images and Software and What is the Video Game Image?.

Visuality refers to the socio-cultural construction of how and what we see. I am interested in the image as a medium of communication, a semiotic device that attempts to transport information and meaning. Building on that, my base argument is that video game images are a specific type of image, that have specific demands from players, developers and researchers alike. One of those needs is, that we have to engage with the computational phenomenology in one way or another.

  • As a players we need to understand the affordances that the video game as software offers in order to be able to participate.
  • As developers or researcher we need to understand how the image ties into the technical.

The way I go about researching this phenomena, is through critical code studies. I study and contextualize source code and programming practices. Focusing on the the 1980ies allows me to look at a moment in homebrew video game development history were developer were closer to computing. There were less layers in between the logic of the microprocessor and the game developer, in the form of development tools, and developers were still figuring out how this stuff is working. In the process, they also had to figure out, how to create the Video Game Image that mediates between player and machine.

To fully understand code, we cannot just apply close reading to source code, 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. The need for distant reading tools and methods arises, that mediate between our research questions and the code base, and provide us with access to structural aspects of the code for a given video game.

Since this is a cumulative dissertation, I’ll have to translate the above outlined questions into journal papers. These, again taken from the synopse, are currently planed as follows:

  1. Metadata, Imagedata and Videogame Graphics; The technical in the visual and vice versa, which tries to establish a distant viewing of the Assembling a Video Game Screenshots Corpus and the images relation to their means of production.
  2. Media theory/archaeology; Video game images in between player interfaces and telling the game, inquires how the visual image relates to Berry’s Computational Image through the application of FAVR.
  3. Conceptualizing graphics programming in the early 80ies; Analysing means of production (hardware and programming languages) and distant reading source code through computational methods and visualizations.
  4. Case Studies; Early homebrew video game development and the production of video game Visuality, where I have a close look at a handful early video games, bringing design research and critical code studies together.
  5. (Bonus) Working with historic source code, from Preserving Video Games as Cultural Heritage to analysis.

State of the Assembling a Video Game Screenshots Corpus

After some work on building and analyzing the Assembling a Video Game Screenshots Corpus I need to revise my approach to building and finetune the hypothesis and the question behind Observing the Coming of Age of Video Game Graphics.

I’m looking at video game images and their metadata. For some time, I didn’t have a profound hypothesis concerning where to look at exactly. But after this month where I did some first analysis, the exchanges at Leisure Electronics and some readings (What is the Video Game Image?) something is about to formulate. I’ll started to collect these thoughts under Dissertation, but here is the gist of it.

That video game graphics and their materiality, the technology they are rooted in, are intertwined is a given. So much we know (see Bogost for example). When considering the specific type the Video Game Image is, we should be able to observe a a formation of the Algorithmic Image or Ergodic Animage that is linked to time and technology. In order to get there, observeable or not, I need to adjust the corpus generation as well as what kind of metadata I collect.

  • The corpus needs to concentrate on games from the 1980ies, along the lines of early homebrew culture [@swalwellHomebrewGamingBeginnings2021].
  • In order to have a benchmark, I could include image material from games that inspired our games corpus, and/or are from the same period.
  • The parameters of what metadata I extract from the images need to adapt as well:
    • colors and resolution
    • visual diversity within game (i.e. from mode to mode, level to level)
    • visual complexity of an image (e.g. from order to noise, along the entropic gradient)
    • FAVR, which I have no clue how to automate yet

Log 2024 Week 23

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