an exploration of the video game as architecture using phenomenological methodology

Phenomenology is an attempt to make rigorous accounts of subjective experience. One way of briefly illustrating the problem is by considering the following quote attributed to musician Fats Waller regarding what Jazz is;

"…if you hafta ask, you ain't never gonna know!"

Phenomenology attempts to offer a rigorous approach to getting answers to such questions without resorting to mysticism or metaphysics on one hand or reducing experience to the denigrated status of qualia. Qualia is term used to refer to experience as a minor phenomena produced by the physical universe.

When we play a video game, if it is successfully executed, we become immersed in a two dimensional representation of a two or three dimensional space. We may become a medieval Persian prince as in the game Prince of Persia, even though we are female. We may become immersed as an acrobatic Asian female leaping across the roof tops of a futuristic Tokyo, as in the game Mirror's Edge although we are clumsy, Caucasian males.

Our identity then becomes briefly mirrored on either side of the screen. Within that screen we have both landscapes and and architecture, whether it is the expansive worlds of games such as Myst or the multiplayer online worlds of games such as Second Life or World of Warcraft.

And at what point does the game itself become an architecture? We experience moving through an environment that we interpret as "Bricks and Mortar" even as we sit on a couch or perhaps perform the "Wii dance" as they simulate riding a snowboard, fighting monsters or bowling. Is this an essentially architectural experience albeit a virtual one?

The Polish Philosopher, Roman Ingarden offers a perspective in his book "The Ontology of the Work of Art". As a phenomenologist, he is interested in how we consciously experience phenomena, in this case specifically architecture. As an psychologically interior experience how does "brick & mortar" differ from pixels on a screen? Both are intended structures; That is to say a creative vision went into their creation. The individual encountering them treats them as objects with mass, oapacity and presence.

Are video games art?

The placement of video games in relation to other disciplines raises several problems. In a post on this topic, Brett McCallon, writes about the The High Art of Bioshock.

"Any person can read a novel, listen to a hip-hop album or watch a movie, if he has even a shred of interest. But comparatively few have the equipment and know-how needed to complete a top-tier video game."

This reveals a failure to understand that reading is interactive. This does not undermine his arguement that video games can be evaluated as high art. However, it does raise the question of specific modes of critique for discrete genres and of more broadly applicable critical approaches.
Gonzalo Frasca argues for specific modes of criticism in his essay "Simulation versus Narrative". Ludology, or the study of games and video games in particular persues an alternative semiotical structure of simulation in contrast to narrative. While he allows that both simulation and narrative share common elements, Frasca argues that video games 'are a just a particular way of structuring simulation, just like narrative is a form of structuring representation'.
The popular critic, Roger Ebert, dimisses the possibility of a fine art interpretation of video games.

"Ebert, himself not a gamer, bases his argument on the fact that games are interactive. To paraphrase his point: because games require input from a player in order to move forward through their narratives, player actions necessarily subvert authorial intent."

Ebert fails to realise that the subjective intentionality of the audience always subverts authorial intent to some extent. "The Death of the Author" an essay by Roland Barthes forcefully argues that no interpretation or appeal to authorial intention is possible.
In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, speaking of a castrato disguised as a woman, writes this sentence:

' "It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling" Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story's hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, endowed by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it the author Balzac, professing certain "literary" ideas of femininity? Is it universal wisdom? or romantic psychology? It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.'

We always interpret, even if the text is simple.

Bibliography
Barthes, Roland, "The Death of the Author", in Aspen #5-6, Fall-Winter 1967,Roaring Fork Press, NYC. downloaded 15/09/2008
Frasca, Gonzalo, "Simulation versus Narrative" in The Video Game Theory Reader, Wolf, Mark J.P. & Bernard Perron, eds. Routledge, New York, 2003

Virtual Architecture; Sarah Jane Gorlitz + Wojciech Olejnik, mm, 2007. Video

The video installation mm by the artist duo known as Soft Turns creates a video trompe l’oeil using two video projections on opposing walls of the main gallery at Optica. Sound effects suggest dripping water, and reverberations suggest the empty corridors and subway platforms that appear on the walls. The perspective is that of a camera traveling through a mysterious subterranean structure.

The first impression is of a vast network of empty spaces. As the videos play out the appearance of rising water suggests the images were electronically manipulated. The reflection of the water doesn’t look …normal. As the videos continue to play and loop a realisation develops that the scene portrayed is a maquette. The video’s stop motion creates a further illusion of movement in a series of subway corridors.

“They are made not as direct replicas of actual places…these spaces are presented in situations which often fall just outside of physical reality…Each becomes a non-place, an illusion, a gap between the real and what appears to be its modelled double.”
-Gorlitz. S and W. Olejnik. “mm”, Artist Statement, March 2008

Audio effects and opposing walls create an architecture within the gallery space, redefining the experience of it. As both projections change over time, the faint audio cues suggest additional changes that might or might not be visible. When video images happen to synchronises creating mirror images the experience becomes especially disturbing because it reinforces the sense of being in narrow hall way. Rising water appearing in the corridors adds to the often claustrophobic response- despite the the open volume of the gallery.

“mm” raises issues of virtuality in architecture as electronic simulcra become increasingly difficult to differentiate from “bricks and mortar” constructions. A sense of disorientation-la nausée?- accompanies this installation. The question of how these 21st century constructions will affect our culture through our Pleistocene senses and instincts is raised but only minutely answered by this affecting installation.

“mm” at Gallerie Optica 372 Ste-Catherine O suite 508, Montréal
until April 19, 2008

references
State of Play Virtual Architecture 1.0:

Terra Nova:Virtual Architecture

CARVING SPACE: RESPONSIVE VIRTUAL ARCHITECTURE TOOLS GO OPEN SOURCE

Two new essays about virtual architecture

Designing Virtual Architecture (2000)

Landscape and romantic topology: Emily Shanahan- Forest for the Trees

This exhibition uses the geometric form as a simile for synthetic forms as contrasting with natural organic forms. "Shaped tree","Prism" and "Horse Skull and Yellow Flowers" all share a tetrahedral shape as central to their composition.

"...removing the image from a credible context in Shaped Tree, the white, leafless tree floats in a space that remains undefined as either an interior or exterior environment."

-from Forest for the Trees artist statement

...an imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the artificial perimeter...How to feign a violation and put it to the test? Go and simulate a theft in a large department store: how do you convince the security guards that it is a simulated theft? There is no "objective" difference: the same gestures and the same signs exist as for a real theft; in fact the signs incline neither to one side nor the other. As far as the established order is concerned, they are always of the order of the real.

-taken from Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988), pp.166-184http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.html downlowded 10 April,2008

"These works address the relationship between natural and artificial constructions, specifically within the context of landscape and still life painting."

-from Forest for the Trees artist's statement

Shanahan's work attempts to address the portrayal of the natural world by at once using an almost surreal deconstruction of images of trees, birds, flowers and skulls. The recurrent theme of the tetrahedron suggests a metaphor for modern physical science as a trope for nature. Yet all these images occcur within the symbolic realm of the hyperreal. Forest for the Trees becomes another element in a symbolic reality. While it does not explicitly reference electronic media, it occurs within the context of a audience who is as aware of landscape as framed in the television and video game as is experienced by walking through a field. Indeed, the reorganisation of perceived natural images become par excellence the simulcra of Baudrillard's hypereallity. The relative banality of these subjects do become unsettling because of their displacement from a perceived natural order, yet they also serve to comfort the audience with a familiar in an increasingly disoriented perceptual envitronment.

A human figure appears in three works; "Nightingale", "girl with ribbons" and "Cold weather".The sentimental quality of these works seem disconnected from the received themes of the exhibition. As a romantic trope this creates an unfocussed statement. A cloud of notions infuse this exhibition about the portrayal of landscape in an increasingly hyperreal culture.

Forest for the Trees at Room and Board Gallery 372 Ste.Catherine west Suite 427, Montréal, QC until 12 April, 2008.

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