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The Value of Haptic “Synesthesia” and Rhythm in Video Games

This isn’t meant to be a treatise, merely an exploration.

Last week (along with more than 435,000 others), I bought the Humble Indie Bundle #4. Included in this bundle (hardly humble) was the game Bit.Trip Runner. It seems a simple enough platformer at first glance, the kind of thing you could build in Unity in an afternoon. You’re avoiding obstacles while moving ever forward. Jump, slide, kick. Easy. But there’s an element in Bit.Trip Runner (something which the entire Bit.Trip series is built around) that makes it special: a pronounced sense of rhythm. The soundtrack to each level is a basic beat. As the obstacles fly by, you find yourself jumping in time with the beat. You are, essentially, moving through a song in each level. It builds as you collect gold and bonuses. Certain “phrases” repeat in the form of obstacles placed in the same sequence. You experience the sound as space, moving from beginning to end in a composition.

While playing Bit.Trip Runner, I found myself internalizing certain key combinations. They became part of my vocabulary as a result of their frequent repetition, linked in my mind to the sounds they produced. To me, this seems akin to the basic process by which one learns to play an instrument: muscle memory of a series of motions becomes attached to the sound (chord, note, progression) they produce.

While this sort of thing can’t be called true synesthesia, it’s a close cousin. And although the Bit.Trip games make a point of focusing on the player’s rhythm as a part of gameplay, there are plenty of games that require rhythm. Platformers, certainly: almost all platformers require a sense of rhythm, if not a consistent one then at least in different parts of levels. Shooters like Killing Floor or Counterstrike (though they often feel like chaotic frays) require the player to pay attention to health levels and cover, which becomes a kind of 6th sense made up of sound and sight.

The rhythm of a game is situational awareness in an entirely simulated situation. It’s a key element of immersion. Games that don’t rely on depth and breadth of world or story to create a virtual reality (like the Elder Scrolls games, MMORPGs, or The Sims) rely instead on intense situations that command the player’s full attention. I found myself so drawn into the rhythm of Bit.Trip Runner that I was not focusing on the screen. All I saw was what was coming at me, devoid of detail and needing no explanation. It required of me a narrow and specific kind of focus, one that I don’t often have to employ in my everyday life.

This could be my own weak attempt at justifying the hours I’ve spent trying and retrying Bit.Trip Runner’s levels, but I think there’s a great deal of value in giving oneself over to that kind of intense fixation. I find that I  come out of the spell of the game feeling awake (and a bit dazed, at first, as if waking from a dream), my mind ready to take on more complex tasks. I become very aware of my body, and my reflexes feel sharpened. It feels similar to drinking a cup of coffee.

That seems to me like a good role for video games to play, especially in a student life that requires long stretches of studying and “brain-work”. I guess it’s similar to playing sports (for people who have enough skill/interest to give over to them) or dancing. It’s good for you, in reasonable doses (for me, that’s the handful of failed attempts it takes before I get frustrated and go back to working).

Or maybe it’s just fun.

Troy Davis’ Execution: Oh, the Hyperreality

We’ll probably be talking about the racial and judicial questions raised by Troy Davis’ execution for a while, and hopefully that will mean something in the end. It’s not easy to have a positive conversation about a national issue; most of the comments you read online are the end product of a voice reverberating in the space between a reflective computer screen and the mind that looks into it. Nowhere is this more apparent than on Twitter, the Internet’s beloved one-to-many microblogging platform. Examination of any of the gallows-day tags (#RIPTroyDavis, #Dear Georgia, #Supreme Court, and their ilk) will reveal such gems as this:

And this:

And, because this pops up at the top of your screen every 5 minutes, there’s not much chance of a conversation happening across follower groups:

The multitude of Twitter updates about Troy Davis serve another end, one that this tweet from Paddy Johnson of artfagcity expresses pretty well. The Twitter buzz paints a picture of the execution proceedings, their protests, and the people involved from millions of perspectives. And it’s important to note that “paint” is the metaphorical medium of this picture; it has become an uncanny, hyperreal representation of a real event. American’s Twitter Shitters have come to the virtual town square to watch a hanging through mediated eyes.

I would like to call attention, especially, to live-tweets of the execution. A number of “new media savvy” journalists planted themselves in the crowd and posted as they heard/saw things happen. I’ll take, as an example, Ed Pilkington of the UK’s Guardian. Here are some selections from his Twitter feed (@Edpilkington)over the course of the execution:

One of the defining characteristics of a hyperreality is the inability (or even the difficulty) of the mind to distinguish the real from the virtual. What better example of this poor distinction than Ed Pilkington’s tweets? For many of the people posting those 672 updates per 5 minute period, this was the reality of the event. The landscape that tweets, en masse, construct is one that we should always be questioning. It seems that people, glued to their Twitter feeds, consuming with voracity these scraps of opinformation*, are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of it all. They forget, with quantity, what can be considered a fact (and, indeed, a meal of facts about the Troy Davis case would be a meager one). Hyperreality is here, and it’s a shadowy problem, inherently invisible to those who it worst affects**.

The usual suspects are to blame here. The need to be constantly updating engenders expression without consideration. Low-power, high-frequency posts are crumbs blowing in the networked storm. This smallness also means that anything a user can employ to pull on his/her readers’ heartstrings, any of the myriad forms of spectacle that he/she can apply, are a key strategy to obtaining readership. Shout loudly and you join the din, shout loudly in an accent and you’ll throw off the drone enough to be noticed, if only momentarily. The immediacy of information allows people to absorb it without the need for research. That process of seeking information at least implies a filtering of and deliberation between sources, something which a stream of tweets simulates but does not provide.

It remains to be seen if the confusion will be attenuated in the execution’s aftermath. Troy Davis is gone, he has had his moment of martyrdom, his words have been retweeted and hashtagged into oblivion. Maybe now we can start a real conversation about the obstacles we’ve created for ourselves in our urgent, mediated curiosity. A conversation that takes time, requires reading, and doesn’t start with “#Dear Georgia.”

*Opinion-information: The strange fusion that the Internet has done so much to advance. I think I just invented it. A WORD IS BORN!

**I suppose I should include a disclaimer here: A belief’s popularity in the hyperreality does not preclude its truth. Hyperreality is “reality by proxy”, and thereby capable of  representing things which are actually real.

A Love Letter to the Rectangle

This dissertation on rectangles is only partly tongue-in-cheek. I really like rectangles, as a designer and as a design-minded human being. I think that they are beautiful. Here’s why.

A rectangle demands precision. If you, as a line, fall short of straight, you can not even be part of the rectangle. The pairing must be perfect. A lines finds its exact equal when it is in a rectangle.

Rectangles are largely separate from Nature’s milieu of shapes. They don’t occur naturally as commonly as the circle, the triangle, or the spiral. When they do occur naturally, it is often as imperfect specters of angular symmetry. The true rectangle is something that has to be crafted with elegant precision by human hands using ratios and numerical guides. It is something perfect than humanity can make; a triumph over disorder long before the age of the machine. The true rectangle is the pinnacle of construction. It requires thoughtful arrangement when joined with other rectangles. There is no room in an impeccable Modernist form for any other shape but a rectangle (even the noble triangle, though it is able to wield a right angle, is out of place in a grid of squares). Rectangles are impenetrable when unified.

The rectangle’s importance to the written word cements its importance to our mental ecology. When writing transformed our minds, it transformed our perception as well. The circle may be relevant to verbal or (come kinds of) visual cultures, but the rectangle is the only shape for a culture that reads and writes its words the way most modern societies on earth do today. 

The rectangle is the foundation of many frameworks of human design. We rely on to provide clear visual cues and contact, in everything from storefronts to literature. Few human-machine/human-computer interfaces, digital or physical, would be able to operate without it. The button, the key, the progress bar, the text box: without rectangles, we would be adrift in a network of nodes joined by lines of varying lengths, clustered in circles, arranged in a pattern of triangular incessancy without any clear “stop” or end to the set.

We always notice the rectangles around us. A misstep in alignment can cause anxiety, a dense collection of rectangles can cause tension, a wide-spaced and symmetrical grid can relax us, whether we are consciously aware of it or not. The importance of clean and organized rectangles in the visual environment is enormous. It can be the straw the breaks the camel’s back or the pool of water that relieves its parched throat.

Though many optimists and believers from the network or circle set will argue that the era of rectangular thinking is fading, I think it has centuries of relevance left. We may be putting our friends in circles, but we are sharing our updates with them in rectangles. The frames through which we view the world are all still rectangular (the viewfinder, the screen, the image plane). The most-used and most-visited websites on the Internet adhere to a gridded layout. We conceptualize our networks with nodes and intersections, but we interact with them rectangularly. The impeccable collection of rectangles persists as a powerful visual architecture, and the most appropriate form of expression for the products of modern society and industry. We created the rectangle, and before we can be done with it we must change ourselves dramatically.

Riddle: What Speaks Loudly But Is Heard By No One?

But much Twitter art criticism is the result of light engagement with the work. Indeed, I suspect that you have to immerse yourself to truly understand social media art.

(here)

Writers at art news blogs Art Fag City and Hyperallergic have been hucking articles at each other of late over the validity of what they’re calling “social media art”. Ultimately, it seems to have come to this old chestnut: “You just don’t get it!” But why is the retort of angsty teens and furries being used to justify an art form? To make a broad generalization, that’s probably because the art form itself has all the depth of a teenager.

So much “social media art” is irrelevant for the same reasons that social media themselves are irrelevant. No matter how directly social media try to assist us in understanding ourselves, our lives, our world, they all seem to land shy of the mark. That’s because there are some aspects of living and being (human-ing) that an asynchronous one-to-many or many-to-many paradigm of communication can’t capture.

Yet we expect it to, or at least we expect that it expects to. For better or for worse, society seems to have put all of its chips on the world-shrinking, fast-moving, masturbatory powers of social media (at least for now). I think that’s the big mistake/misunderstanding/hullabaloo in this argument. I think that’s where Paddy Johnson takes issue, and I also think it explains why An Xiao and Hrag Vartanian have such a hard time playing defense. The art is “substandard” because the medium is substandard. These networks, even though they are a lot of fun and all your friends use them, are not the place to have a productive discourse on humanity. However, Hrag Vartanian is right when he says that ”it seems to be the power of Twitter to augment conversations and direct interest rather than shine as a standalone medium.” Twitter cannot be our forum; neither can Facebook. Not even Google Plus is up to the challenge. And can I get a “lol” from the crowd about how I am writing this on tumblr?

Perhaps the fact that social media art, by and large, falls flat is enough to make it a valid medium for a statement on the inadequacy of our current modes of perceiving each other/how we’re related. Our social networks aren’t good enough to envelop life. They might never be good enough. Social media art’s pithiness is as strong an argument as any for the continuing relevance of the real world, and, at least right now, it might also be the loudest.

The Matter Fetish in 2011

The Venice Bienalle has been infiltrated by the vapors of digital art! A collective of artists calling themselves ManifestAR installed an uninvited augmented reality exhibition throughout Venice on June 1st. Today I was linked to this interview by my professor, who is one of the artists involved in the project. As the artists have all stated, the work that they produce is inherently location-specific; in fact, it is worthwhile as art almost entirely because of its use of location. Site specific art is not a new concept (although arguably a modern one), and there has been a tradition of artists exploring place in digital formats since the late 1980’s.

The question put to the ManifestAR artists in this interview was why they made the “choice not to extend the availability of the works more broadly online as net.art pieces.” Obviously, the answer was because they would lose the poignancy if they were abstracted from their original locations, but the question itself was what interested me. Asking why the pieces were not made available some easily share-able/archivable format would not have been in the cards were this an interview with a sculptor or installation artist. There is something about the “digital art” label that implies infinite reproducibility, persistent relevance, and relative ease of access. These concepts are directly opposed to the ideal of the art object as a commodity. And the commodification of art (i.e. how do you make a living making art?) is something which artists and art theorists (digital and otherwise) have been dealing with nigh on forever.

So it makes sense that the interviewer asked this question. And I’m not trying to problematize it. But it’s sort of surprising to me that there would still be such a strong attachment to the physical art object today. Plenty of things exist solely in the digital ether, and we spend more and more of our time in virtual or digitally mediated environments with each passing day. We pour ourselves and our expression into various online platforms. The point where we take what happens digitally as seriously as we take “IRL” events is still in the near future, but we have at least our fingers and toes across the line (if not more). However, we still see reality as more real. (And, I mean, I’m not saying that it isn’t.) A physical sculpture is still more of a sculpture than a 3D model of the same object. There is no scarcity if your object is infinitely replicable (so how much money is it worth?) and there is no ownership (in the traditional sense: a patron does not buy and own the art object, there is nothing to put on a pedestal in a museum). We still have a matter fetish in the cultural realm.

I’ll argue that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Physical things have value that is irreplaceable digitally. Each has its merits, though, and we need them both plus the space in between to say anything effective about ourselves and our experience.

just put some hot sauce on it

I am a college student, and as such am familiar with the many ways of making rice from a 10 pound bag (six bucks at Shaw’s) taste like a different meal every night. One of those ways, an old standard, is throwing hot sauce on it. I’m a Frank’s girl, bu I’ve heard of people having good results with Cholula as well.

So, when I read articles like this one from The New York Review of Books, I feel a little bit closer to the journalists who write them. Not because I’m a journalism student; in fact,  many would (unfortunately) say I’m the exact opposite: I study interactive media. The connection comes from the fact that I like to throw hot sauce on things I find bland. The points made in this article are the journalistic equivalent of that.

It has apparently become too dull to deal realistically with issues of identity in the postmodern Age of the Internet. Instead, authors need to throw in references to  ”biochips”, “brain–computer interfaces”, and “hive minds”. It’s a shame, really, because before any of those technological epiphanies begin to affect us, we will have to come to an understanding of what an individual is in the modern world. The only way to get there is by thinking and talking about it, using not prediction or speculation but observation and consideration.

Hot sauce soaked pieces like Sue Halpern’s still contain cogent thoughts about who we are and what we’ll permit in 2011, but I’m willing to bet that the average reader won’t be talking about that over lunch with their coworkers. Instead, they’ll be recounting “this article they read” which said that “the Singularity*—the long-standing science fiction dream of melding man and machine to create a better species—might have arrived.” Maybe that’s just the nature of lunchtime small talk, but I like to think that it’s becoming more and more acceptable to talk publicly and casually about things that would have caused metaphysical crises 30 years ago. 

So I guess that what I’m trying to say is that, while soaking cheap rice in hot sauce is ok, it is unproductive to do the same to a journalistic article. Especially when that article is meant for educated, lexically-oriented people like the audience of the The New York Review of Books, and contains such important ideas. I still recommend reading the piece; it brings up some good questions and will point you to some interesting reading. Just don’t get too caught up in the sauce.

*As a side note: This is an incorrect definition but correct usage of the term “Singularity”. What Halpern is defining sounds more like intelligence amplification (specifically man-computer symbiosis, an idea explored quite famously by J.C.R. Licklider), an element of some Singularity theories but not by any means a sufficient definition of the theory itself.

like a game of taboo, but more artfag

it was fearful, and for a while more important than blood.
i thought that 3 or 4 years ago,
but, now, i don’t think it is very important at all.
other than as a moment of extreme
soft
vulnerability that everyone goes through.
i have to admit
still
my curious attraction and desire…
but now it comes from something like
fellow-feeling
as if it makes me feel human
to see you bare that way
the same way i feel human when i see
someone debased.
is it the perversion of my generation
to be the voyeur
of its own abstracted humanity?

in western fantasies i could bundle my belongings and head for the desert alone.

i could pilot a caravel away from shore and feel my hair blowing in the sea wind.

but i won’t do that because it is not poetry.

in poems i will lay in some domestic environment

filtering emotions through my pores.

it’s (a) love paragraph(s)

my fingers are fat and salty with sweat; they will sting your heart when i remove it for examination. don’t worry! i will be sure to leave some arteries intact. i have heard that, out in the open air like that, every heartbeat burns like lemon juice. i’m sorry. i am trying very hard to be delicate. if i could put you under glass i would, but we are miles from any sterile environment and must accept the inevitable contaminants. i will track sand into your ribcage and, assuredly, these swarming gnats will mire themselves in the sticky slick that coats your exposed organs. already i have been careless and gotten gory fingerprints on your face. i could not help this, either; you are so fine and i would die to once touch you and not leave a stain.

it’s lovely, all of it, and, while the integrity of the expedition has been compromised, this will be a stunning bit of education for me. i think, and it’s just a hypothesis, that if i fill you with colored water and glass shards, and pad the seams with cotton balls, and stitch and patch the leaks over with oilcloth, you will come through. we won’t be able to publish the results, but you will probably come through.

you should be okay, but i have never been professional in anything. it will get harder for you to do this in the future, you will take longer to recover than ever before. it seems you have experience with this; these things you know, i am sure. i am sorry for including so many personal pronouns, but, to be clear, this metaphor concerns you and i exclusively.