Short-Walks

This is my PhD blog. Here I’ll be listing and interpreting my notes on readings, any idle yet relevant thoughts I may be having, and progress posts on project work I’ll be producing.

[short-walks]

Defining My Practice

A recurring theme this past week, both in supervisor meetings, and in discussion with colleagues, is the question of my practice. I’ve decided to perform an audit of my practice as it stands right now, as I slowly but surely approach my confirmation. I hope that through this exercise I will be able to concisely and confidently answer these two questions:

What do you make?

How do you make it?

Before I begin I think it’s important to acknowledge that I am at best an emerging practitioner. I have roughly five and a half years experience in making video games, four and a half of those spent at university. Unlike many who attempt a PhD, I do not have an established practice and decades of experience (though this seems to be the majority in games academia, at least at my university). I suspect this will work in my favour in some areas (less underlying assumptions or bad habits to break out of), and work against me in others (little-to-no industry/development/life experience in the field).

So I set up a corkboard and a bunch of post-its, and placed all of the projects I have completed straight onto the board. I left out projects in which I didn’t have a significant say in the design or aesthetics of the work, so that meant no group assignments from university (burn, but also true).

Six works so far. So much for my ‘game-a-month’ idea last year. To fill out the board, I also added projects I am either currently working on, or have started and intend to finish at some point in the near future.

I also added a handful of projects from my undergraduate degree.

My next step was to organise these projects into distinct groups, so I could begin to note down any thematic, conceptual, or structural patterns. There’s a few ways I could do this.

2D versus 3D:

Exploration-Based versus Non-Exploration-Based:

Adaptation versus Original:

While these strict binaries might not seem productive, they enable me to notice some broad trends and patterns across my work.

Overwhelmingly, I prefer 3D to 2D. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the group projects I decided not to include on the board were 2D games.

There’s a roughly even split between works which unfold through non-linear exploration, and works which lead the player down a single path or unfold in a more structured manner.

Although most of my work is from personal experience, I do have an interested in critically engaging with the work of others through adaptation. Unsurprising that my interest in criticism and academia extends to making!

With these broad strokes, I re-grouped the projects based on their structure:

Top left: First-person, linear.

Bottom left: First-person, non-linear, focusing on multiple points of interest.

Top right: Genre games (shoot ‘em ups, RPGs).

Bottom right: First-person, non-linear, focusing on a single point of interest.

Centre: My Honours project, comprised of several small digital experiments.

I like the constant classification and re-classification of this process. It reminds me of Burroughs’ cut-up technique in the way it severs the automatic associations I see between the different projects. By arranging them into a few different groupings, I can start to see connections and motifs which I might not have before. I stuck pins in the post-its and began to materialise those connections. I used string because it was quick and easy, and made me feel like I was solving a murder or piecing together a conspiracy.

First I connected the projects that investigated virtual space in some way, whether it’s explicitly through a research project, or implicitly through aesthetics.

Then I linked works which dealt explicitly with memory. This is a motif I’m pretty aware of in my work so far.

Then I was in unfamiliar territory. I began to look around the board as a whole, and tried to find some more connections that could be made. I tried to think in terms of process, and link the projects which utilised design documents, as opposed to making design decisions as they came up during the production process. Interestingly, it was exclusively university assignments which were designed using documents. Is this something I have been neglecting? Or a natural evolution of my practice?

At this point I found it useful to attempt to connect projects which seemed to have no commonalities whatsoever; I felt this would be an effective way to uncover characteristics of my practice I might not be able to explicate otherwise. How can I connect ‘By Moonlight’ and ‘We Live Inside a Dream’? And which other projects share that connection? My goal now is to have every project on the board connected to at least one another.

So next I connected the projects that attempt to produce a specific affect. In most of these works my approach was to arrange a collection of formal elements (sound, colour, lighting, movement, A.I.) to form an impression. I’m starting to realise at this point that the connections I’m drawing between these different projects are how I am going to come to define my practice. As such, I’ve gone back through this post and rendered these connections in bold.

Finally, I connected the works which centred some kind of critical reflection as a central design goal. I’m going to leave it there for now, but I’ll keep the corkboard as it currently is in my workspace. I’m going to let it stew over the next few days, and see if any additional connections or insights come to me.

This rough GIF shows the spread of this ecology. I don’t see this as the final word on my practice. I haven’t had the time to fully consider the implications, and of course my practice will change over time. Before I wrap up, some initial reflections:

Much of my post-university work features exploration as a major mechanic. I am fine with this, given how much I like exploration in virtual environments and the physical world. I also like the idea of letting the user loose in an open space, and letting them build up an impression over time.

These same projects also utilise a first-person perspective. I am less comfortable with this. I don’t like the idea of restricting myself to a single perspective, particularly one so prevalent in mainstream game design and production. I would like to experiment with different perspectives (third-person, non-bodily (i.e floating/flying rather than walking), multiple simultaneous perspective, fixed, etc).

I seem to focus on grounded, sometimes personal experiences and memories, though I have dipped my toe into more critical works which investigate some aspect of the medium or the nature of virtual environments. I think moving forward I would like to combine the two, or at least hold each in equal esteem.

I would like to balance out my use of formal elements in my work. Until now I have favoured 3D models, colour, and the layout of space over sound and music in the composition of my projects. I would like to bring these elements into equal consideration.

Many of my environments explicitly encourage or make room for reflection, stillness, and non-action. This is a trend I am very interested in and would like to continue.

A conceptual interest lurking at the edges of my conscious practice seems to be myths or urban legends, as in Heikegani, The Visitors, and We Live Inside a Dream.

Since university, my use of design documents and planning has dramatically decreased. I tend to design “on-the-fly”, or entirely in my mind without moving those thoughts to paper. I would like to return to proper, organised, level design documentation and planning, even if my design goals may differ to those common in the industry (multiplayer shooter map design, side-scrolling platformer level design).

Finally, I’ll attempt to answer the two questions from the beginning of this post, including some mention of how I would like to consider my practice moving forward. 

What do you make?

I make short form, 3D, first-person, exploration-based, digital virtual environments. They deal with memory, myth, and the nature of virtual spaces. They utilise reflection, non-linear layouts, and limited agency to create a single, affective impression on the user.

How do you make it?

I utilise the Unity engine to combine 3D models, textures, materials, sound, and scripting to form each environment. Through an iterative cycle of design, production, and virtual exploration, I slowly develop my work across design documentation, blocking out, digital prototyping, and playtesting.

[short-walks]

Modulation, Memory, and Short-Form Virtual Environments

Following on from my recent thoughts on digital data and modulation, I wanted to continue to think through the idea I proposed of modulation and memory. As you may recall, I compared memory to the ideas of digital data (which is formless until rendered into a display state, such as sound or colour), modulation (the process by which data goes to and from a display state), and protocols (similar to instructions which tell a computer program how to modulate the data). Important to the argument was that the protocols leave a trace on the data; similar to the act of translating from one language to another. Some quirks are lost in translation, others are gained, or replaced. My idea was that memory could be considered both data and protocol in this context. Memory as data is relatively straightforward; an event or space is modulated into your mind as data, and is modulated to display when you recall it. The protocols which determine how you remember the event in this case include your emotional connection to the memory, your state of mind at the time, and so on. Memory is also demodulated and remodulated each time you recall it, adding or removing details. The idea of memory as protocol is similar. While the events we witness every day couldn’t really be considered formless, they are nonetheless modulated through our memories to determine how we react to them. Different people are going to have different reactions to a piece of music for example, depending on their previous associations with it.

With these ideas in mind, I wanted to continue to develop this line of thinking, as well as the project I started, to understand how these concepts might relate specifically to short-form virtual environments. Because I was already playing with the idea of memory, I wanted to further shape the landscape generated from my grandfather’s photograph to resemble those spaces it reminded me of. So I went on a bit of a walk around that area, taking a few reference photos.

As well as the general colours and forms of this area, I realised that my memories were tied to specific objects. This included the bench which we had the council place after my grandfather died, the stone pathway along the beach, and the wooden stairs covered in sand. I jumped back into Unity and started blocking in some of these objects, starting with the stairs.

It didn’t conform totally to the texture or shape of the original stairs, but I think that’s okay; there was enough there to make it feel similar to those actual stairs. I think this is key here. As you modulate the virtual images through the protocols of your memory, they pick up those traces and fill in the blanks, so to speak. The colour of the virtual stairs, their scale in relation to the camera and landscape, and the way they bend at 90 degree angles at certain points, were enough for my memory to “fill in” the rest, and associate it with that memory I had. Of course, that 3D model was specifically designed and placed to resemble those stairs, so I’d be curious if someone else would have a similar reaction to them.

 I wanted to play with the concept on a larger scale, so I drew up this quick top-down map of the environment. My idea was to place some specific objects around the space which would elude to the theme of remembering my grandfather. The player would stumble across them, and each discovery would add to the context of the piece. I chose the bench, clocktower, a car, and my grandfather’s old chair, all of which of course induce very specific memories for me. Rather than having a specific plot, my goal here was to create a certain impression in the player. They wouldn’t have too much of an idea of what was going on at first, but as they discovered more and more of the landmarks, they would serve as protocols which would trigger the player’s own memories, which in turn would be modulated back into the virtual space through how they interpret the environment as a whole.

In this way, not only was the user slowly building their understanding of the environment piece by piece, but also the composition of the scene itself. It’s a strategy that speaks more to this modulation process than a linear plot-based virtual environment, I think. With seperate landmarks around the environment, which the user can discover in any order, and each contributing something to the overall context and impression of the scene, these elements are modulated to memory data in the player’s mind. Given that the experience of a virtual environment exists in the player’s mind, it makes sense to incorporate as much of those memories and experiences as possible to guide affect. 

On a mechanical level, I think it’s also a useful strategy. As the player discovers these landmarks, I’m sure they would recall the previous landmark, and understand that uncovering each of them is probably the objective of the game, even if doing so doesn’t lead to a specific end state. This ‘connect-the-dots’ approach is a common one in short-form virtual environments (particularily Her Story and Gone Home), and I think that’s because it’s simply a more interesting and active form of storytelling. When considering the notions of modulation, it’s a more fitting approach to the exploration of a virtual space which is formed, conceptually, and to some extent mechanically, by the player just as much as the designer.

To finish off, I included a few elements to help guide the player, and reinforce those affects. I placed the objects around the scene, and moved them to just below the ground, so that when the player approached them, they would slowly rise. I did this to elude to the idea of the player uncovering these objects, in the same way that the real-world counterparts uncover memories for me when I’m near them. Then of course I needed some way for the player to know where the landmarks were hidden, so I added a simple square expanding out, as seen above. At this stage the player simply has to approach the general area for the landmarks to appear, but in the future I’d like to change that to a much more active process; perhaps the player would have to click on the object, or drag up with the mouse to slowly pull it up.

I also added some text to each of the landmarks, conveying some memory I have associated with that object. This may seem to go against my remarks above about not telling a specific story and allowing the player to modulate their own memories to the work, but I think each of these snippets are vague enough to still allow that, while still presenting the idea of the environment in a more concrete manner. This of course means that I’m including more of my own protocols on the player’s modulation process, but I think it’s a worthwhile trade off to prevent them from having no idea what the landmarks are supposed to represent. You’ll notice I also placed some flowers at the bottom of the landmarks. We called my grandfather Poppies, the same flowers which I placed through the scene. It’s a very specific reference of course, but I think it makes each landmark move visually interesting, and could perhaps hint towards the idea of death. Australian players might interpret them as a symbol of the ANZACs, but those kind of images are typically associated with the elderly and grandparents anyway.

[short-walks]

Reading: Affect and the Medium of Digital Data

I’ve been asked to go back and lot over my supervisor’s paper Affect and the Medium of Digital Data. I remember it being an interesting read back in Honours, and I looked forward to going over it again now. Specifically, I was asked to reflect on “my relationship to my work, and the player’s relationship to my work”, in the context of the article. I also wanted to use this as an opportunity to really integrate theory and practice, so this post will be part reflection, part dev blog. I hope to really use a small project to help me understand the claims of the article. First though, some quick theory.

Nash’s paper concerns itself mostly with digital data, and the concept of modulation. Digital data is of course collection of information, interpreted in some way by a computer system. Modulation, and by extension demodulation and remodulation, “used here to mean the process of changing some phenomenon from one register into another, for the purpose of storage, transmission and display.” (p10) Nash cites examples such as changing key while playing an instrument or tone of voice while speaking as intentional processes of modulation. A core contention of the article is that digital data is essentially “formless and plastic” (p12) until it is modulated into a display state. That is, data is simply data, rather than being image data or sound data. A photograph can just as easily be made into a sound clip as a Photoshop file.

I opened a new Unity file, asked a friend for a selfie, and tried to populate the scene with as many modulations of that image as I could.

This included: applying a black and white version of the image as a heightmap for the terrain, a large-scale version of the image as a texture for the same terrain (above), opening the image in Audacity, which produced a horrific moaning sound, opening the image in a program called RGB MusicLab, and opening it in TextEdit. Jumping in and wandering the scene with a FirstPersonController, the terrain data was the most striking, as the low resolution caused a certain bumpiness in the landscape, as Unity had mapped the various shades of grey in the image to various height values on different parts of the mesh.

So we can see Nash’s claims have merit. I was quite easily able to generate a range of assets from a specific set of data. Of course, this data had already been modulated, demodulated, and remodulated several times before being placed in my Unity scene. The original image of my friend (itself a result of the specific moment in time and space in which she took the photo, the amount of light in the room, the quality of her camera and it’s modulation protocols) was demodulated into digital data from her phone’s camera, sent to my own phone with it’s own set of display protocols, and remodulated on my phone’s screen. It was then demodulated and sent to my computer, and again remodulated as display data when I opened it with Photoshop. Finally, Unity has its own set of protocols for how each modulation of that data should be displayed.

It’s easy to think of this process, though complicated, as a relatively clean one. But as Nash states: 

“The often unexamined assumption [is] that digital data is somehow ontologically endowed with the special power to make exact copies of anything, that to digitise something is to somehow capture it free of interference from the capturing medium.” (p11)

The set of data was demodulated and remodulated according to a set of specific protocols, which each leave a trace on that data as it passes through. These protocols are “intentional and transformative” (p12), which is evidenced by the amount of editing I had to do in Photoshop to get the terrain data  to present itself in a manner which would allow it to be walked upon. If the image was too grainy, or the contrast was set too high, the terrain would be an spiky unexplorable mess. Of course, what am I doing when I adjust the resolution, brightness, contrast, and curves of the image in Photoshop, is shaping the protocols which determine how the data is modulated to form its display state. To go even deeper, how those same Photoshop tools function, their protocols, have in turn been determined by some software engineer at Adobe who I’ve never met and will likely never meet. 

This begins to illuminate the role of the artist within virtual environments, and thus my relationship to my work. Modulation is a process that is constantly occurring, and digital data is the material with which the virtual artist works. So the designing and shaping of the protocols which guide (not determine) the data through to a display state, is essentially the role of the artist. 

“When it comes to display, modulation is a constantly occurring, crucial interaction that, at least to some degree, defines the nature of perceptions and therefore the work done in and through the medium with regard to display.” (p12)

A quick note on this idea. Nash states that “once protocols are required, questions of intentionality, ideology and cultural convention arise.” (p17) I think the remodulation of the image data into the display state of the terrain in Unity is a perfect illustration of this. Unity, as well as most level design or game making programs, determine heightmaps by reading a greyscale map of the terrain, as I mentioned above. The blackest parts of an image are the lowest in the terrain map, and the whitest are the highest. You can image how this might work in the below image.

Somewhere along the line, someone decided that darkness is going to be low, and lightness is going to be high. They may not have had a specific political ideological intention in designing those protocols, but it’s nonetheless emblematic of the way Western societies have positioned lightness and darkness for centuries. It reminds me of Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows, where he posits that the West’s obsession with light and clarity has lead to a devaluing of shadows and darkness. It becomes especially pertinent when you factor in skin tone; if I were to use a dark-skinned person as my subject in this scene, the areas of their skin would be depressions in the terrain, rather than the raised islands of my friend’s white skin. Even if that original designer wasn’t intentionally valuing light over dark, they are still reinforcing that ideology.

So I’ve established that data is plastic, and “until we modulate it into some kind of display register – any set of digital data is indistinguishable from any other set of digital data”. (p17) Digital data is modulated into colours, sounds, forms, and spaces, and all of that data is formless until remodulated during runtime. This is where the user’s relationship with the work comes in. During runtime, virtual environments generate data at the same time as modulating it into display; the player’s position in the world, their specific keyboards inputs, the current material objects, the amount of times an object has been activated, and so forth. This player-generated data can be fed back into the work as digital data, which in turn can be modulated into display. This data is intrinsically virtual, and according to Nash, raises a lot of interesting questions. In this sense a virtual environment becomes a “study of compositional relations, not forms, and the traces that emerge” (p20), where the “the user and the work enter a new relationship that is closer in spirit to the relationship between two performers than that of the relationship between artwork and user.” (p22) The role of the designer is to set out the protocols and parameters for the modulation of data; the user’s role is to facilitate that modulation into display.

To explore this further, I got a little weird. As I explored the environment generated from my friend’s selfie, I noticed the darker areas of her hair bore a distinct resemblance to the rockpools which I grew up around, especially when a simple water plane was added.

It immediately made me think of my grandfather, who lived close to those beaches throughout my childhood. I ran with the idea, and implemented a bunch of assets from a photograph of him, much in the same way I did with my friend.

This photograph contained a greater variety of shades and colour, and thus made for a much more diverse terrain file in Unity. Although it’s likely perceptual bias and pattern recognition, I began to see more features of the landscape I associate with my grandfather in the crude landscape of this virtual scene. The darkness of his suit became the rockpools I played in as kid; the jagged, reddened edges of his tie became the towering red bluff cliffs of those same beaches. There was also a bizarre intimacy to the experience, as I wandered across the features of a man I now only know from photographs and stories.

I think this is super fascinating in and of itself, and to broaden the scope of Nash’s article, it positions memory as both data and protocol, I think. It’s easy to see memory as data, especially in the context of art. An event, time, or place is modulated into your mind as data, ready to be displayed when you remember it. It’s without a doubt shaped partially by the capturing medium; your emotional connection to that event, and your connection to it. I remember 9/11 through early morning news reports before school, for example. Then, whenever you engage with a memory in anyway (through recollection, talking about it, making art about it) that data is remodulated according to those protocols. Consider the idea that you only remember your previous memory of an event, rather than the original event itself, could be seen as evidence of the demodulation and remodulation process, as the memory data is skewed, or picks up addition traces.

But, importantly, memory can also constitute protocol. When I saw the red cliffs and dark rockpools of my childhood in the plastic, formless terrain data, I was running that data through the protocols of my memory to make those connections. Similar to my Honours research, those same virtual forms may not have the some affective qualities for a user without those memories. I activated the work, running the data of the virtual environment through the parameters of my memory, which modulated it to display as a certain emotional response in my mind.

Finally, I wanted to quickly put into practice a concept Nash discusses in his article, and one that I alluded to earlier; the idea of inputting data generated from the virtual environment, into the environment itself. A key memory I have of my grandfather is him walking into the house unannounced, throwing chocolate frogs at the kids. I quickly replicated this by setting up a spawner which is constantly throwing out the same chocolates, directly above the player. In this was, the players position would determine where these giant confectionaries would land, directly contributing to the composition of the scene, even at a basic level.

And here lay a final lesson in the indeterminacy of the modulation process. The combination of the falling objects, the maroon sky, the looping sound of the image (an unnerving helicopter-like stuttering) and the music which played when each chocolate frog hit the ground combined to create a highly stressful environment, where the player is constantly pursued by giant blocks raining down upon them. While it didn’t create the warm, nostalgic affect I was intending, I don’t think anyone can doubt that the work creates a powerful affect through it’s modulation and protocols.

[short-walks]

Reading: Under the Gaze of Theory

While I’m quite familiar with the iterative process as it applies to game design and production, I admit I’ve had a little bit of trouble understanding how theory may figure into the cycle. During Honours, theory was treated more as a situating tool, to help explain the concepts I was dealing with, and what philosophical traditions my work was contributing to. Partly due to the structure of an Honours thesis (Introduction, Context, Development, Results, Conclusion), theory and my project work were almost two seperate elements; okay, I’ve done the theory, now I can start the project. Now that I’m doing a PhD, the theory and project work needs to be much more integrated, constantly informing and building off each other. I demonstrated my current understanding of how this might work in my recent research presentation, but wanted to dive into a deeper reading.

Boris Groys’ Under the Gaze of Theory is part historic analysis of where the idea of theory has come from and why it is needed, and part suggestion for how it figures into contemporary art practice. Groys begins with Arnold Gehlen’s suggestion that theory was initially conceived to explain the “difficult” art of the modern era. 

“According to this view, theory plays the role of propaganda- or, rather, advertising: theory comes after the artwork is produced, and explains the art works to a surprised and skeptical audience.”

Groys questions this assertion however, as he feels that artists see theory as “too narrow, too dogmatic, even intimidating.” Artists fear that the theorist presents their work in a singular light, thus shrinking their audience rather than making their work accessible and legitimate. Theoretical discourse is a conversation between a small section of the audience, often comprises of academics and more well-read critics. So if theory is such a “counterproductive form of advertising”, Groys asks: why is theory so central to art today?

“I would suggest that today artists need a theory to explain what they are doing- not to others, but to themselves. In this respect they are not alone. Every contemporary subject constantly asks these two questions: what has to be done? And even more importantly: How can I explain to myself what I am already doing?”

In other words, what is art for? And, therefore, what is the role of the artist? It’s a question that has been asked for as long as there has been art, affecting centuries of artistic thought and practice, all the way to contemporary government policy. Various points in history have offered various answers, and any cursory look at a general reference art history book will reveal a broad trajectory; art was there to idealise and glorify God, then it was the artist’s job to replicate the techniques of the old masters, then it was to explicitly reject those techniques and aesthetics, then it was more about ideas then technique, and so on. Groys states that art history is a series of traditions, and then protests against those traditions. However, in both the pre-modern and moderns eras, “it was more or less clear what that tradition looked like - and accordingly, what form a protest against this tradition could take”. Today however, there are thousands of images, traditions, and protests around the world. So if someone wants to make art, “it is not immediately clear to him or her what art actually is, and what the artist is supposed to do.” The question of “what is art for?” becomes relevant once again. 

The Descent from the Cross (1435)- Rogier var der Weyden.

To Groys, this question inverts the role of theory. Rather than explaining a piece of art to an audience after it has been made, theory explains art to the artist. Theory expands art, and makes it universal; it “liberates artists from their cultural identities”. However, if this is the case, that art is explained before it exists, does this not go against the position of art as unpredictable and unexplainable? Groys describes the history of this split; logic, reason, and philosophy on one side, with art, emotion, and religion on the other. But then something happened.

“However, modern and contemporary critical theory is nothing other than a critique of reason, rationality, and traditional logic.”

Critical theory, through early figures such as Marx and Nietzsche, positioned itself as opposed to reason, and the philosophies associates with it. Marx saw reason as the domain of the wealthy, upper classes of society- those whose “basic needs were already satisfied, whereas underprivileged manual laborers were consumed by a struggle for survival that left no chance to practice disinterested philosophical contemplation.” Nietzsche came from the opposite direction, but maintained a criticism of autonomous reason.

“Nietzsche viewed the will to truth as an effect of the philosopher overcompensating for a lack of vitality and real power by fantasizing about the universal power of reason.”

From here, theory begins to treat reason with suspicion, as an internal process that cannot be totally accounted for. The theorist recognises that one cannot step outside of themselves. As Groys puts it: “we cannot have an inner experience of the limitations of our temporal and spatial existence.” This is why those Enlightenment-era philosophers saw reason as immortal and autonomous. Like the idea of a soul or spirit before it, we need something else to reflection on ourselves, something beyond ourselves. “To discover the limitations of my existence in space and time I need the gaze of the Other.”

As I understand it, Groys is saying here that we need Others (theory) to know ourselves (our behaviours, practices, our art), because we cannot truly know ourselves. And we only know ourselves as alive because of death, but we can’t experience ourselves as dead. We only experience death through others; we don’t die.

“But an external and critically-theoretically minded spectator would say about Descartes: he thinks because he lives. Here my self-knowledge is radically undermined. Maybe I do know what I think. But I do not know how I live- I don’t even know I’m alive. Because I never experienced myself as dead, I cannot experience myself as being alive.”

Tombstone of Marcel Duchamp. Translation: “Besides, it is always the others who die.”

According to Groys, while we were once under the gaze of God, of reason, we are now under the gaze of theory. Through art, we “become an image that can be seen and analyzed by the Other.” There are a couple of implications here. First, I won’t be able to understand the findings of my research in a broader context just through producing work and evaluating it. Because I cannot get away from my own inherent conditions and biases, I need theory to generalise my work and practices; a generalisation required by the PhD qualification. This goes some way to justifying it’s position in research. Furthermore, Groys suggests that theory is active, and privileges practice. Because theory critiques philosophical contemplation, including aesthetic contemplation (echoing works like Sontag’s Against Interpretation), it “defines the field of action we are called to undertake”, rather than explaining actions, such as art, after they have occurred. 

Groys positions this amongst a wider shift to a more active society; where once we partook in “passive contemplation” at the cinema or by reading books, we now spend our free time travelling, playing sports, and posting on Facebook. I’m not sure I agree with his claims here (cinemas and museums have hardly been abandoned, and playing sport isn’t really a recent phenomenon), but I understand his point. It’s similar to a general shift to the short-form I’ve noticed, but that’s another post. Groys states that while this wider call to action is emblematic of theory’s “call to action”, this media environment cannot totally represent or satisfy it.

“But of course, theory does not merely call us to take action towards any specific goal. Rather, theory calls for action that would perform- and extend -the condition of theory itself.”

And this, for me, is really the crux of this reading. From what I’ve seen and heard in academia so far, a common mistake while undergoing creative practice to research is to have the project “perform” theory. That is, the creative artefact demonstrates how a certain theory might work, or how it’s principles could be illustrated in another form. But for Groys, part of theory’s “call to action” is “one of conversation that exceeds the terms of communication.” By applying theory to practice, we transform and extend theory. By applying practice to theory, we transform and extend practice. They feed off of each other, receiving and generating knowledge. This links in really nicely with the idea of a PhD when Groys stats that through this cycle, theory “asks questions concerning the meaning of knowledge.”

“How has this new knowledge transformed me, how it has influenced my general attitude towards the world? How has this knowledge changed my personality, modified my way of life? To answer these questions one must perform theory- to show how certain knowledge transforms one’s behaviour.”

As a creative practice researcher, it’s easy to apply this to the explicit goals of my degree; to generate new knowledge, and demonstrate how this knowledge has changed me. How has this knowledge affected my work and my practice, and practice in general? Or, on a smaller scale during the iterative design cycle, how has this piece of theory affected what I make? And how has what I’ve made affected my understanding of the theory? Groys takes a wider view to these questions, and suggests that theory not only tells us we are “finite, living bodies”, but that it compels us to “demonstrate that one lives.” In our culture, it is art that “performs this knowledge of being alive”, he argues.

“Indeed, the main goal of art is to show, expose, and exhibit modes of life. Accordingly, art has often played the role of performing knowledge, of showing what it means to live with and through a certain knowledge.”

The Soothsayer’s Recompense (1913)- Giorgio de Chirico.

Groys points to the Russian avant-garde, Surrealism, and Conceptual Art as movements which reflected on and contributed to various critical theories, such as economic determinism and the unconscious. He also mentions that theory isn’t autonomous like reason or immortal like the soul. 

“The theorist is also a human being, and I have no reason to completely trust his or her intention. The Enlightenment taught us, as I have already mentioned, to not trust the gaze of the Other.”

“Theory taught us not to trust ourselves, and the evidence of our own reason. In this sense, every performance of a theory is at the same time a performance of the distrust of this theory.”

This is an important consideration in the relationship between theory and practice, I think. Theory isn’t absolute. It’s there to be picked at, questioned, tested. And in an interesting inversion on my initial question (how does theory figure into practice?), this is where practice can figure into theory. It can support a theory, or problematise it. It can shed light on things about itself which it can’t see in a theoretical context. It’s common to hear of a failed venture, “it was good in theory”- implying that it wasn’t until the idea went into practice that it was revealed to be inadequate. In order to trust a theory, you must first distrust it.

Groys closes out his reading with a description of the two key responses to the gaze of theory: art as the performance of theory, and theory as propaganda. The latter describes artists not as performers of theoretical meaning, but as practitioners who seek to compel others into action. Here practice and theory are so closely bound that the art “shares the successes and failures of the theory that it propagates.” Because we are material, finite beings, theory calls us into action, but this same sense of urgency undercuts any action we may take, as “any human action can be at any moment interrupted by death.” Groys suggests that “this lack of time prevents us from making long-terms projects; from basing our actions on long-term planning; from having personal and historical expectations concerning the results of our actions.” 

This could be another hint as to the turn toward the short-form, but again, another post. Groys spends the rest of the article essentially reiterating the points he’s already made. Art speaks to the universal, rather than the individual interpretations of certain commentators, and it does so because of theory. So has my understanding of the relationship between art and theory changed as a result of this reading? Not really, but it has certainly deepened, which is all I can ask for. However, I have looked through this article several times, and still feel that a true understanding eludes me. Perhaps this will come in time, perhaps with another reading. I know what will help though, and that is to answer the call of theory, and put it into practice. I think I will attempt to build a theory-informed, short-form virtual environment next, just to try to get some sense of how it all might fit together in a practical way. I have no idea how long it will take or what it will look like, but I guess I’ll find out soon! Groys, Boris. “Under the Gaze of Theory.” e-flux. 35.5 (2012). n. pag. Web. 23 May 2016.

[short-walks]

Research So Far

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been focusing on a presentation I had to give to my research strategies class. It was essentially a summary of my research at this point in time; where it’s coming from, what it’s trying to do, who are my influences, and what is my method. I decided to present my work in the form of a virtual environment (makes sense!) and I played through it in front of the class along with some commentary. I thought to recreate it here I would post a series of screenshots from walking through the work, and include some relevant text on each image.

I began with the title of my project on a wall which the player is looking at. I hope it’s pretty self-explanatory, but if it isn’t, this presentation essentially breaks down this title. It’s also the source of this blog’s name!

The first section is a small introduction to the concept of the short-form virtual environment as I understand them. I defined them as small video games which can be experienced in a single sitting, which tend to focus on a single explorable virtual environment. These games emphasize exploration rather than solving puzzles or engaging in some some of conflict, and tend to evoke a single mood, narrative, or theme. Their status as an art-form (and as games!) is highly contested, which is where I come in.

I then gave a bit of my personal background, and how I came to research. I explained that I’m an emerging practitioner, and that I came to my undergraduate games degree with a bit of a fine art background, which I hoped to incorporate into a game design practice. However, shortly into my first year the local industry was completely gutted in the wake of the GFC, and there were no jobs to go to. So I refocused a bit and decided to investigate the theory and practice of game design, especially my own, which lead me into an Honours year.

During this time I produced a series of projects with an exegesis, which investigated the fundamental forces which interact when we experience an interactive virtual environment.

I knew at this point that research was something that I was interested in, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to specifically study. So I took a year out and worked on some of my own projects, and tried to get some writing published. Through this process I noticed a lot of intersection between what I was making, writing about, and playing, and saw this as part of a wider paradigm shift in game design.

The earliest video games were created in spaces like universities and the garages of computer enthusiasts. Soon enough an industry formed around these works, and the games were expected to be bigger and better every year. Recently, game-making tools like Unity and self-publication platforms such as itch.io have allowed for a greater range of creators making a greater range of games for a greater range of reasons.

This wall features the following works:

Dear Esther

Grave Apologies

Hide

Rain, House, Eternity

Firewatch

orchids to dusk

Library of Blabber

Timruk

Gone Home

ten moons

Mystery Tapes

SURREALISTa

Wood For The Trees

Thirty Flights of Loving

The Tower Inverted

The Static Speaks My Name

This leads into some initial trouble I had placing myself within a solid discipline. Because these works are so diverse, I wasn’t sure if they fit so snuggly into the mold of video games, so I also considered them as pieces of virtual art or digital media (which they totally are too). I decided to focus on them as games, and found it useful to quite strictly define how I was and wasn’t approaching the research.

Of course, you can study games in a few ways. You could look at them through a social science, player behaviour, gamification sort of way, or a technology, A.I. sort of way. I’m approaching from a humanities, games-as-culture lens, but there will be cross-over with the other two fields as well.

Then you can approach games-as-culture in some different ways: a narratological, games-as-texts way, or a ludological, games-as-systems way. I’m approaching them from aesthetics, which to me most usefully describes how games are designed and experienced.

Once I had defined my approach, I could define which theorists and practitioners would fill my community of thinkers. I created this space to house them, and divided it into four sections.

The game studies area contains many of the academics who influenced the early debates around games in the academy; the ludologists and narratologists, the game design textbook writers, and the more theory-minded academics.

The theory section houses general cultural theorists, whom I used in Honours to back up claims I made surrounding the virtual, affect, audience reception, and so on.

The designers are represented mostly by the people who made the works I linked above, but also virtual artists and mainstream designers who influenced the short-form virtual environment.

Then there is the short-form section, which contains theorists and practitioners of the short-form, mostly the short story at this stage.

This space is useful because I can move these figures around and see where they lie in relation to each other and those four broad categories. I can also spot any gaps in knowledge that my research could attempt to fill; you can see in the above image that there’s quite a gap between design and theory, and game studies and the short-form. This is good! It shows that I’m heading in the right direction. 

Once those initial opportunities for knowledge were identified, I spent some time discussing the debates and discussions occurring in these communities.

I gave some brief context on the narratology/ludology debate of early game studies, in which the former saw games as texts to be ‘read’, and the latter saw them as a collection of rules and systems the player interacted with to find meaning.

I compared this to the recent formalist debates, in which the formalist would argue that what’s important in the study of games is it’s interactive, rule-based elements; everything else, such as story, sound, visuals, is unimportant and interchangeable. I positioned these two arguments as one argument essentially repeating itself over and over, especially when view from the perspective of design, which has treated all elements of a game, ludic, non-ludic, visual, non-visual, as equal from the start.

In response to these debates I brought up the field of scholarly-focused criticism that has arisen around online spaces like Twitter and blogs, where critics and academics are moving on to more interesting discussions that they feel they can’t have within the academy.

In a similar way, there’s a distinct history of game design movements, works, and manifestos which have explicitly operated outside the commercial sphere, and sometimes in direct opposition to it. This includes shareware games like DOOM, the Scratchware Manifesto, mods like Escape from Woomera, indie games like Braid, the Notgames Manifesto, Queer Games like dys4ia, and altgames like Encore. They all deny the dominant narratives and motifs of mainsteam games production in some form, and interrogate the role of elements traditionally positioned as essential to the video game form, such as rules, combat, the male gaze, or agency. 

I then positioned short-form virtual environments as part of this lineage, and specifically located my research as contributing to these wider discussions and design movements around video game form. I hope that by studying the specific form of the short-form virtual environment, and how they are designed and experienced, I can contribute something to the broader idea of the video game form.

I then went into my methodology for a little bit, basically describing that my research would follow an action research model, and that this is essentially how video games are made anyway, so I’m pretty familiar with it :)

To illustrate how this method would work in my research, I used the presentation itself as an example. My method was to write up a quick script summing up my research, before crafting a basic environment around that script.

However as I got further into the process, I noticed that I was starting to think about my research in different ways. For example, as I was moving around the figures in the community of thinkers area, I found it easiest to do so from above. This is where I first saw those gaps between the figures, which helped me to think through where I might situate my contribution to knowledge. This influenced the script, which in turn influenced the construction of the environment, so you can see how both elements started to really feed back into each other. I imagine the relationship between theory and my practice functioning in a similar way.

To wrap up I lay out my basic plan between now and Confirmation, which is a more substantial presentation I have to give toward the end of the year. My basic plan is to continue to nail down the short-form theory, and figure out it might work in relation to my work and research. I also hope to produce some more meaningful projects which I could present at Confirmation.

The presentation itself went pretty well. Unfortunatley I think my audience (mostly comprised of writers and filmmakers) was distracted by the form of my presentation, because the feedback I received was mostly to do with what I should and shouldn’t have done in the work, rather than the quality of the proposed research itself.  Fortunately I showed the presentation to my supervisor, who had some more productive comments. A key one was for me to really nut out the relationship between theory and practice, so that will be the topic of my next post!

[short-walks]

Experiment in Sound

I’ve been reading Graeme Kirkpatrick’s Aesthetic Theory and The Video Game recently, and while I’ll post a larger response when I’ve finished it, I wanted to focus in on an idea he explores in the books third chapter: Controller, hand, screen. Here’s a couple of quotes from this section:

“Video game form, like form in the art image, is not exclusively or even primarily a visual concept.”- Page 93

“The essential pleasures of gaming, including humorous breakdowns caused by excessive attachment to learned procedures confronted by deliberate dissemblance and disruption of those expectations, are accessible in a non-visual form.”- Page 94

The main argument of the book is that theorists and critics should approach video game from an aesthetic viewpoint. As part of this argument he looks at Soundvoyager, a Game Boy Advance game in which “success relies upon close attention to the sounds produced in response to player actions, rather than visual information.” 

His argument at this stage I believe is that sound is just as or even more important to building a sense of space within a virtual environment.

“Rather than opening up a three-dimensional illusory space in front of the eyes, Sound Voyager creates a sensation of movement and of shifting spatial relations in the back of the player’s head.”- Page 94

Although Kirkpatrick is really using this to make a wider point, I’d like to stay with this claim and use it as a springboard to explore the role of sound in virtual environments, which is not something I’ve done in too much detail before. I originally wanted to see how I could shape an environment to guide and help the player navigate without visuals, but this soon led to more questions and ideas. So I ended up with two seperate environments, documented below.

Sound Experiment #1

I thought I would start with a relatively simple navigation puzzle in which the player, starting at the house on the left, would have to make their way up the path, open the garden gate, walk down the street, and detect that they would have to press the button on the traffic light and wait for it to be safe to cross, or be hit by a car. I wanted to utilise a situation from the physical world so that the player could use their existing knowledge of navigating a space they’re familiar with to navigate mine. 

I quickly blocked out the various sections of the environment with some basic boundaries so the player wouldn’t accidentally walk off the edge and fall forever. Because I would be turning off the mesh renderers off in the final environment, essentially making all the objects invisible and the player ‘blind’, this was really all I need to do for the visuals. The next step was to implement the interactive elements such as the garden gate, the traffic light button, and the spawning cars.

This involved a few simple scripts. The first deleted the gate when it was clicked by the player. I considered animating it to open, but the effect would be basically the same for the player. Next, I set up a couple of spawners on each end of the road, and set them to instantiate a ‘car’ object every one to three seconds, seen above. Finally, I created a small cube and placed it on the cylinder which stands in for a traffic light. When clicked, it destroys the two car spawners, stopping the ‘cars’ and acting as a stop light. At this point, the only thing left to do was add the sounds themselves.

I went out into the real world (gross!) and recorded the sounds I would need from sources around my neighbourhood. I then implemented these key sounds into the scene.

The traffic light objects had three sounds: a general one for when the button wasn’t pressed, one single clip when pressing the button, and a third loop to indicate it was safe to cross. These sounds were recorded from a real traffic light, and therefore the design here was basically done for me. This meant less work of course, but it also meant that the player’s understanding of the space would be dependent on their familiarity with how traffic lights function in the physical world- in particular Australian traffic lights. I also recorded sounds for bumping into and opening the gate, and a general loop to represent the cars driving by on the road. Once all of this was in place, it was simply a matter of turning off all the mesh renderers and seeing if I could navigate the scene. Surprisingly, it was extremely difficult to navigate the environment; I couldn't even get out of the front garden, let alone cross the street! Even with headphones, I found myself stumbling around the area, trying to trigger the sound of myself hitting the gate so I could position myself. I was able to use the sound of the traffic to navigate a little, as I knew that if it was on my left it meant that all I had to do was walk forward to reach the gate, but this was only because I was familiar with the layout of the scene beforehand- god help you if you’ve never seen the environment before!  I suspect the issue here is one of feedback. When you can see, you can instantly position yourself within a space at all times, just by looking around. In a non-visual space, it’s quite hard to do this, especially without a constant sound, like the traffic moving. These kind of locating sounds are a good way to help the blind player navigate (differentiating between walking on pavement and grass would have also been a good strategy, if I had the time to program that out), but it’s not feasible for specific objects. For instance, the player’s goal was the gate, but unlike the traffic light, there’s no real locating sound for a stationary gate. This meant that the only way to locate it was to stumble onto it’s position, rather than move toward it like you could with visuals or a looping sound. It makes me suspect that sound in virtual environments, while important, cannot totally function without visuals. However, I also suspected that this issue was a symptom of representation space. What would happen if I had the player explore a non-representational space?

Sound Experiment #2

As with the first experiment, I began with a quick sketch.

My idea here was to explore how a player might be guided in a non-visual, non-representational virtual space. As you can see, the environment would consist of five cubes, which would hum gently, and play a sound when touched. They would be spaced out appropriately, and be both above, below, and around the player. This was modelled off a recurring puzzle in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, in which the player collects a group of floating silver gems in order to open a door. 

The gems make a sound when collected, which increases in pitch the more gems you collect. I wanted to replicate this to indicate to the player they were making progress, but in the interests of time I realised I could just simply make the cubes disappear when touched, and so just used a simple guitar strum I knocked up in Garageband.

In Unity, I positioned the cubes roughly according to my sketch, and added some simple looping synth tracks to each. By adjusting the Spread and Spatial Blend settings in Unity, I was able to construct a fairly dynamic soundscape, where the player could wander between the different sound sources and form some sense of space. I began with a Logarithmic Rolloff, but switched to Linear and adjusted the sound distances to overlap slightly so the player would have a clearer sense of where the other objects were. With a Logarithmic Rolloff, all of the sounds tended to blend together a little too much, making it hard to seperate one source from another.

To finish off, I wanted to see how the objects being above and below, and not just around the player, would have an impact on their sense of navigation. I implemented an old script I used during my Honours work to enable the player to move up and down and found that, interestingly, it was actually hard to determine your vertical position in the environment without visual feedback. Jumping back to the default first-person controller and walking around the scene, it was clear that the direction the player was facing (via manipulation of the mouse) as well as their distance from sound sources was key in establishing this sense of space. 

Just briefly, I also began work on a third environment. My original intention was to create another representational space, but this time have the player’s vision suddenly restored halfway through. I was interested here in the intersection between the player’s imagined view of the environment, and the one that I had created through modelling and texturing and so forth. After realising that representational space was hard enough to navigate, and in the interests of time, I decided to scrap the idea. But I did go some ways to developing it, seen below.

Upon reflection, I feel that sound is somewhat unexplored territory in virtual environments. It’s mostly used for reinforcement, like a audio reward for pickups, or for set dressing, like crafting a scene to sound like the environment it’s supposed to represent. It’s hard to say that sound is used for much more than this in a vast majority of games. I think part of the reason for this is simply that there isn’t really an established language for working with sound in virtual environments, like there is with visuals. Artists and designers are intimately familiar with line, shape, colour, tone, balance, and other visual elements and principles, but rarely work with the same level of detail in audio. Not only this, but the nature of representational spaces means that sound is relegated to a role it may not be interested in playing; I feel that sound in virtual environments, and virtual environments themselves, are more suited to non-representational spaces.

[short-walks]

A Question of Methodology

As part of my research strategies course I was asked to reflect on the idea of methodology in regards to my research, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to really explore this idea, given I’m a little foggy on what methodologies could be useful in examining virtual environments.

I chose for my investigation two completed PhDs: Troy Innocent’s The Poetics of Digital Media: A Model for Interaction, Representation, Structure and Algorithm Articulated via a System for Human-Computer Expression, and Adam Nash’s The Multi-User Virtual Environment as a Post-Convergent Medium. McMasters provided a very brief overview of his chosen methodology, whereas Nash went into greater detail on his process, utilising a series of dynamic methodologies which evolved across major works.

While neither methodology was directly applicable to my research, I found useful ideas in each. Innocent’s method was not practice-based, but did involve gathering the key concepts to his research into virtual worlds, arranging them into a table, and using these concepts in relation to one another (interaction and time, for example) as a lens with which to examine some case studies from digital games, both mainstream and experimental. Nash’s approach was to reflect on works he had previously completed, his design processes, and how both informed his central argument.

My research, still in its early stages, is similar to Innocent’s in that it attempts to define and explore the key qualities of a relatively new medium. His methodology could prove useful in organising my theoretical findings into an approachable and usable method for guiding my project work. By doing so, I could ensure that my practice would serve a practical purpose within the context of the research, rather than some aimless ‘making’ which may not lead to new knowledge or a further iteration.

Innocent also examines varies methods from architecture, aesthetics, human-computer interaction, and more. He acknowledges that, while these may be useful, and there are elements of each identifiable in game studies, none of them can completely account for the unique qualities of virtual environments. He states: “While virtual world design may draw upon many sources in establishing and developing its conventions for communication and expression, it has evolved to the point at which it has become something else”. This is essentially Nash’s central argument, so now might be a good time to examine his methodology.

Nash’s method could also be useful, as it does take a more creative, practice-based approach to his research experiments. Although his reflections are retrospective in nature (that is, he completed the described works before commencing a research degree), there is a clear investigative thread between the works. Nash articulates clearly the success and failures of each work in regards to his research goals, and how reactions to his virtual art experiments from his audience influenced the design of the next experiment. While my research is a little more introspective at this stage, I still feel the method of creating a work in response to theory, rigorously evaluating its strengths and weaknesses in regard to the research, and using that knowledge to inform the next work, is a highly useful one.

Nash also mentions “action research”, which is essentially working on a project, assessing it upon completion, and using that knowledge to inform the next project. This is very close to the iterative design cycle I’m used to as a designer, and proves especially useful in a research context. You can analyse in one of two ways: either by reflecting on your own production and critique of the works, or by gathering audience responses. I chose the latter during Honours, which definitely had it’s pros and cons. I’m hoping for this PhD, at least at this point, that I could focus on my own work and responses, as this will bear deeper research, I think.

In these early stages of my research, and without a pre-described final form for the research in sight, I think it’s useful to think about methodology, and how a method can shape and reinforce one’s research. At this point I think I will continue to produce small virtual environment experiments in response to readings, and hopefully by continuing to iterate on works, some kind of useful methodology with emerge for me to continue to evolve and refine.

[short-walks]

The Tower Experiment

Following on from my reading on monumental architecture yesterday, I thought I’d spend a little bit of time on a quick experiment to try to evoke some sense of awe or a similar affect in response to a virtual tower.

I began by sketching out a couple of pages of basic tower silhouettes, to try to get a basic form I could build off. This was an attempt to come up with some kind of unique form for the tower, with which I could build the rest of the scene from.

I put a little asterisk next to tower ideas that appealed to me; I seem to have had some kind of preoccupation with inorganic/broken apart structures, as well as multiple towers crossing over. Using these forms as a base, I jumped into Maya and mocked up some of the forms in 3D.

I then imported these towers into Unity, and set up a basic terrain with a white skybox. I initially implemented some fog, but decided to remove it at this stage so the shape of the towers could be seen. i then placed each of the towers into the scene, and briefly walked around each tower with a first-person controller to get some kind of idea of how each form feels when looking up at it and walking around. I gave each the same dark grey material, as I was essentially still judging their form, just from a different perspective.

Each of these are viewed from the bottom, so they don’t function quite as well as silhouettes, but I still think they were useful. At the moment I’m a fan of numbers 1 and 4, so I’ll use these to continue, but I’ll still have the models for the others later on if I need them. So now my task was to decide between the two options I had chosen. To do this, I wanted to see how each tower might look at a distance, and how it looked as the player approached it from that distance. So I jumped into Unity, and using the terrain tool, carved out a basic landscape for the tower to sit within.

Almost immediately, I faced a problem. Blocking off the edges of the terrain with some simple mountains meant that the scale of the tower relative to it’s surroundings was suddenly sharply in focus. I needed to decide how big I would make the surrounds in relation to both the tower and the player, as this would define how the player saw the tower and thus their reaction to it.

I chose to shrink the tower a little, but make the surrounding mountains fairly large, so the player would subconsciously understand that given the mountains are big, then the tower must be monumental. This also feeds into Joye and Verpooten’s theory that part of the awe-inspiring quality of monument architecture is the fact that it indicates its constructors can or have overcome nature. From this point, I focused on building in some more elements to emphasize the size and form of the tower.

I blocked out some basic squares of land around the tower that I imagined the player could wander through as they approached the structure. I figured adding some smaller blocks to stand in for other buildings in the land immediately surrounding the tower may break up the players view of the tower, and provide a strong contrast between tall and short.

Once i began to place in these blocks, I came across another challenge: the uneven terrain. I essentially had two options; I could either adjust the height of each block so that they were all relatively even, or I could being each block down to the ground but maintain their height, so that the tops of the ‘buildings’ would not be even. I decided to go with the latter option, as it mimicked the uneven, more organic landscape, which I thought would contrast nicely with the very rigid, straight, inorganic form of the tower.

This was a good start but the layout of the blocks was a little...blocky. I spent a bit of time rearranging these squares, so that the pathways wouldn’t be so straight and narrow. This meant a couple of things: the actual layout of the space would be more organic, and thus contrast with the tower, and when the player was amongst the blocks, their view of the tower, and the way forward, would be obstructed, revealing and hiding different views of the structure and landscape at different times.

It was at this point that I called it a night. I think I learned a few useful things by developing this brief virtual environment, and came away with even more to think about. For instance, unlike in the physical world, the designer of a virtual world has control over many more elements which could reinforce a sense of awe in visitors. I had to sculpt the landscape within which the tower lies, and I could have made it flat, jagged, smooth, rocky, harsh, and so forth. Similarly, I had direct control over the weather in the environment; I think using some kind of mist or fog would have been effective as the tower slowly revealed itself, and it’s height. Finally, I think it’s important to pay attention to how the user approaches the monument; coming up a hill toward it could emphasize its height even further, or coming down toward it could give the player a glimpse of the contrary landscape surrounding it. Overall a useful exercise.

[short-walks]

Reading: An Exploration of the Functions of Religious Monumental Architecture From a Darwinian Perspective

This is a reading I picked up from an article on Kill Screen, originally written by Yannick Joye and Jan Verpooten. It’s a scientific investigation into how religious architecture influences subjects psychologically, which I normally wouldn’t go for, but I found it to be pretty applicable to what I’m thinking about, so decided to dive in. I won’t spend too much time of the specifics of the article, as it becomes less and less relevant to my research as it goes on, but it does link in nicely with a key reading from my Honours work, so I’ll instead spend some time discussing those two articles in relation to one another.

Joye and Verpooten spend the first part of their article discussing current understandings of how monumental architecture might influence those who see and experience said architecture. According to their research, monumental architecture, such as towers and pyramids, evoke awe in those who experience them because subconsciously we understand them as “a non ambiguous and reliable signal of power.” Essentially:

“Building monumental architecture required massive amounts of energy, and only those who actually had power and controlled it could have been capable of recruiting and managing the energy and labor necessary for building such edifices.” 

An easy example would be the Citadel from Half-Life 2, which towers over you from the very first moment you step outside in the game, and can be seen from almost any level.

These kind of monuments emphasize the seperation between the people who have the resources to build something that gigantic, and the submissive working classes who don’t. This works within the fiction of the game; the Citadel is an obvious power symbol for the citizens of City 17, just as much as it is a goal for the player. We could also consider this concept within the politics and culture of game production. As I mentioned in my last post, there’s a real strictness on where financial resources are devoted. So when Hideo Kojima includes some detailed ‘stumbling’ animations in the introduction sequence to The Phantom Pain, but never again, that could be read as a signal of his influence and prestige as a designer, which allows him to bypass the general rules on budgeting and reusable assets.

This could also be tied into further claim from Joye and Verpooten. Just as Kojima’s “wasteful” use of production resources can be seen as a signal of his power over publisher Konami, the building of monuments in a society could be seen as being wasteful, as these buildings are often off-limits to the public, and often only serve a restricted use, such as a tomb. The pyramids of Egypt signal not only that that society had the resources and labour to build such a gigantic structure, but also that they had enough resources and labour to “waste” on a single-use pyramid, rather than houses or other, more useful buildings. 

Of course in virtual space, this becomes less of an issue. During the production of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker for example, it was probably a lot easier to model this tower:

Than it was to model the boat that Link sails around in during his adventure:

In the physical world, the opposite would be true; the tower would take years of planning, resource gathering, expertise, and physical labour and ingenuity to construct, whereas the boat would probably only take a small team a few months to design, build, and paint. And yet we still feel a sense of awe when approaching that tower, or any other, in a video game. It could be argued that it still takes a level of expertise to design, model, texture, and light that tower, but the same could be said of any object in the game world. In terms of labour, the amount of work it would take to create that tower could be equal or less than any other virtual object. So how can we account for this feeling of awe? Joye and Verpooten offer some more thoughts:

“The history of architecture shows us that during different epochs and among different cultures wasteful advertising through monumentality mainly occurred by erecting structures who most constant and distinctive feature is their very large size, most often expressed through height (cfr., towers, pyramids, ziggurats).”

The scale of a monument is something that usually carries over between physical and virtual worlds. Whether you’re in a third or first-person perspective, impressive monumental architecture tends to tower over you, often leading to a sense of inferiority and/or wonder. Joye and Verpooten attribute this feeling to encounters with parents and other authority figures during childhood, in which we learn to associate physical size with social power. This is a phenomenon which continues into adult life as well; winners in sporting events are placed on the top of a podium, musicians are placed above their audience on a well-lit stage, and the director of a company usually has their office in the upper floors of a building. My supervisor’s office is a few floors above mine. In this sense, social superiority is often conveyed through height. The article calls this a “sensitivity for bigness”.

So we’ve established that height is generally associated with importance, in both physical and virtual spaces. But a sense of inferiority is not all the we might feel when confronted with a monument of extreme height. These structures can also evoke affects and emotions like “admiration, beauty, delight, goose bumps, aesthetic chills, fear, dizziness, romance, or hope.” An astute virtual traveller might also note that it’s not just looking up at monumental architecture that could evoke these feelings; it could also be the sensation of looking down at a landscape, or across some particularily stunning landscape, or entering into an intricately detailed space. Joye and Verpooten therefore posit that it’s contrast, rather than scale, which can evoke these feelings in regard to monumental architecture. The Citadel from Half-Life 2 inspires awe not just because it is gigantic, but also because the structures which surround it are small and cluttered. It’s this premise that hellojed’s The Tower Inverted almost solely rests on. 

The work is a series of virtual environments where the ‘goal’ of each is to reach a specific area of the space, usually by moving toward some kind of tower, whether it’s a vertical stream of particles or a piece of architecture in the landscape. It becomes clear quite quickly that your first action each time you are dropped into a new environment should be to look for what part of the scene is contrasted most strongly, whether it’s by size, colour, or movement. Without much else to do except walk and jump, each tower also inspires awe just by the virtue of your inability to do anything except look up and move toward them.  

Joye and Verpooten state that “vastness might also refer to extraordinary craftsmanship”, thus including both size and effort in their definition of monumental architecture. From here, they apply these findings to their investigation of religious monumental architecture, but I’d like to diverge a little and instead extend their findings in relation to another article I’ve read. It’s called Designing Better Levels Through Human Survival Instincts, from Christopher Totten. As the name suggests, it’s an article on how various types of spaces may provoke our in-built survival instincts as human beings. As I was looking through the Joye and Verpooten reading, I was thinking that towers and other monuments might appeal to us not only because they represent awe and superiority, but also because they may represent safety. 

As humans, it’s reasonable to assume that we subconsciously seek out higher ground. Just as when we build our offices in order of social or corporate importance, we often try to get above our terrain in our day-to-day life. If a café or restaurant has a second floor, we often find it preferable to grab a table on that second level, and when we go on holiday we often seek “good views” over the landscapes we visit; tourist destinations and high altitude locations incorporate this into their design. To frame this within the context of our survival instincts, it’s reasonable to state that we look for high vantage points to get a read on our surroundings, trying to spot predators, prey, shelter, water sources, and escape routes. The crux of the Totten article is that players are constantly seeking to “overcome” danger in their level designs; we start Metroid Prime as a relatively defenceless Samus Aran who can eventually conquer her environment and enemies through the collection of weapons, armour, and tools. 

“In Hyrule, Zebes, and many other designed digital worlds, players find themselves in environments that act as both safe havens and dangerous wildernesses; using the dichotomy to their advantage and overcome their own disadvantages if possible.”

High vantage points are desirable in many virtual environments, and not only for mechanical purposes. As well as seeking out goals and potential enemies, players can also seek these vistas with the assumption that it will provide a aesthetically pleasing view of the game world, and allow them to feel some sense of power or superiority over the space, as the designers and inhabitants of skyscrapers and other tall monuments might in the real world. Totten cites Batman: Arkham Asylum as a game in which seeking out a high vantage point (usually the game’s gargoyles) as highly desirable. Indeed, trying to make your way to one of these structural elements is often the first thing you may do when entering a new room in the asylum.

“One of the elements of the game that assisted in the player's feeling of power was the level of control they had over the game's environments. Even in the largest rooms of the asylum, Batman can jump and swing from the highest structural elements and maintain his vantage point above his enemies. Fitting the character of Batman, players have incredible freedom over spaces that would be overwhelming and dangerous in other games.”

A key idea here is prospect versus refuge space, where the latter is relatively safe and controlled by the player, allowing them to relax and assess potential threats and opportunities in the prospect space around them. Towers and other monumental architecture can act as a refuge space, allowing you to view and assess the surrounding prospect space of a city or wilderness. While you may be more exposed on the top of a tower than you would be in a cave or tall building, it still allows you a sense of control and superiority over the virtual space, a sense of control which those on the ground wouldn’t have. Assassin’s Creed mechanised this idea by placing lookout points around their virtual cities, which allow players to get a sense of the surrounding areas and add key details to their mini-maps.

This is a strong instinct in virtual environments designed around competitive first-person shooting as well. It’s often advantageous to seek high ground in multiplayer matches, to keep enemy players in view, and to take advantage of the ability to snipe at them from great distances. Totten finishes his article by acknowledging that, while high vantage points in virtual environments may be mechanically and aesthetically advantageous, they can also open players up to danger, or a sense of danger. A good way to combat this, he says, is to shelter the player in a structure, or provide glass or guardrails (a common real-world design tactic) to visually seperate the player from the dangerous drop that accompanies great heights. You can also, if you choose, emphasize this danger:

“The player is open to danger, but in this case, the greatest source of danger is not enemy creatures or combatants but the environment itself. This feeling is known as vertigo. Height used in this way is a very dramatic spatial element. Vertical elements such as structures or shadows can deepen the sense of vertigo by drawing the player's eyes deeper into the chasm.”

So overall, two very useful articles, even if the former doesn’t specifically address virtual environments. To that end, I think I’d like to use this reading for a (hopefully) weekly experiment. I’m going to just briefly put together some kind of explorable virtual environment, and see how I can use knowledge gained in this reading to design some kind of awe-inspiring tower. Hopefully through this process, I’ll also be able to come up with some new ways of inspiring awe in the player.

Joye, Yannick., and Jan Verpooten. "An Exploration of Religious Monumental Architecture From a Darwinian Perspective." Review of General Psychology Vol. 17 No.1 (2013): 53-68. 

Totten, Christopher W. “Designing Better Levels Through Human Survival Instincts.” Gamasutra. N.p. 21 June 2011. Web.

[short-walks]

Reading: Game Design as Narrative Architecture

Emerging from the narratology vs. ludology discourses which were prominent during the early 2000s in game studies, this article from Henry Jenkins attempts to blend the merits of both views to form an understanding of spatial storytelling within video games. It’s funny, one of my supervisors actually recommended that I read this article a while ago and I completely forgot about it; it wasn’t until I read it of my own volition yesterday and searched up some citation information that I realised they were one and the same.

Jenkins begins by weighing a few of the diverging views on narrative in games present at the time of his writing, which tended to place interactivity and narrative at opposite ends of a spectrum.

“Interactivity is almost the opposite of narrative; narrative flows under the direction of the author, while interactivity depends on the player for motive power.”

Jenkins argued that these sort of views may be a result of the application of film theory to games, which “can seem heavy-handed and literal minded, often failing to recognize the profound differences between the two media.” To me, this is a distinct habit of academia; a reliance on spotting similarities rather than differences between mediums. This could be an anxiousness on the part of academics, who are faced with an entirely new medium and aren’t quite sure how to deal with it, and so fall back on established ideas and terms to talk about them. However Jenkins, and I, would agree with this, stating:

“The last thing we want to do is to reign in the creative experimentation that needs to occur in the earlier years of a medium’s development.”

While there is certainly plenty to gain from exploring film, theatre, and narrative studies in relation to games, we must be careful in not leaning too heavily on these ideas which might restrict how we talk about and make these works. This was something I discovered in Honours, and it seems like scholars were just coming around to the same idea during the period this article was written. Since then, games studies has incorporated aesthetics into their discussions just as much as narrative, and opened itself up to more forms of narrative theory beyond what may have been looked at before.

“First, the discussion operates with too narrow a model of narrative, one preoccupied with the rules and conventions of classical linear storytelling at the expense of consideration of other kinds of narratives, not only the modernist and postmodernist experimentation that inspired the hypertext theorists, but also popular traditions which emphasize spatial exploration over causal event chains or which seek to balance between the competing demands of narrative and spectacle.”

Jenkins advocates here for a turn towards the spatiality of games, rather than focusing on narrative or ludology. Even with early games, which one might not typically associate with a traditional conception of virtual environments, as relying on their spatiality:

“Even many of the early text-based games, such as Zork, which could have told a wide array of different kinds of stories, centered around enabling players to move through narratively-compelling spaces: “You are facing the north side of a white house.There is no door here, and all of the windows are boarded up. To the north a narrow path winds through the trees.””

This is quite an important point, I think, and could even be used to justify my focus on virtual environments in this research. You can have a virtual space without a game, but you can’t have a game without a virtual space. You can’t have anything without a space. This positions virtual environments, and the qualities of their spatiality, as quite a fundamental concept in game studies; you could even argue that in order to understand video games you would first have to understand virtual environments. Jenkins agrees, stating that “before we can talk about game narratives, then, we need to talk about game spaces.”

Jenkins spends the rest of the article laying out four main “narrative options” for game designers to utilise in their game worlds: 

Evoked Narratives This is where environmental details evoke well-established narratives from our collective memory, and goes some way to explaining why science-fiction and fantasy are so popular as game genres. Dressing Link up as Peter Pan is going to remind players of adventure and wonder, feelings the The Legend of Zelda games tend to deal with, for example.

Enacted Narratives Enacted narratives could be said to be the most dominant form of story telling in digital games at this moment. Story "moments” are peppered throughout the games world, and to advance the plot the player moves between them. The environments are structured around these moments, funnelling players towards specific cutscenes or in-game conversations or events through linear level designs. Uncharted, Half-Life, and Call of Duty would be good examples of this kind of narrative presentation.

Embedded Narratives These story cues are a little more subtle than the first two, and generally involved hinting at a narrative which has occurred before the player had reached the space. Most games use this at a very fundamental level, by including environments which have some sort of history, like ancient ruins or a developed city. Games also use this as a signposting technique (the hallway full of corpses in Metal Gear Solid is a good indication of the challenging boss fight in the next room), and as a way to add texture to their worlds without bogging the player down in cutscenes or audio logs. Increasingly, the narrative burden is being placed entirely on the composition of a virtual environment and objects within it, as in Gone Home.

Emergent Narratives Arguably the most exciting form of narrative delivery for academics is where tools are provided by the designer for a story to emerge naturally from the intersection of elements which make up a games world. The Sims allows players to create their own stories by putting them in control of the virtual lives of their avatars, just as running around one of Grand Theft Auto’s cities is likely to result in some kind of emergent interaction between the player and the game’s A.I. Multi-user games such as World of Warcraft could also be said to breed emergent narratives as players interact with the world, and each other.

So overall a useful article, if only as a foundation for further investigations into narrative in short-form virtual environments, if I choose to take that path. However, what can I draw from this piece if I’m dealing with virtual environments without a specific, pre-described narrative? There are a couple of points in Jenkins’ article which I believe are worth extrapolating in this regard.

“Just as some memorable moments in games depend on sensations (the sense of speed in a racing game) or perceptions (the sudden expanse of sky in a snowboarding game) as well as narrative hooks, Eisenstein used the word, attractions, broadly to describe any element within a work which produces a profound emotional impact and theorized that the themes of the work could be communicated across and through these discrete elements.”

To me, this quote is emblematic of the idea that, even if narrative theory may not be directly applicable in all cases, we can still use elements of it to design virtual spaces. For example, if we consider what Eisenstein calls “attractions”, such as unique structures, vistas, or visually complex landscapes, as plot beats, we can begin to see how designer could lay out these spatial moments throughout a player’s path through a virtual environment, to provide affective moments of awe, concern, and so forth. Dear Esther plays with this idea beautifully, carefully revealing certain views and compositions of its space at certain times to tell a spatial story of rebirth and redemption.

Of course, Dear Esther is a very strictly linear game. The player’s path, and therefore the way they enter certain environments and view them, has been rigorously designed to achieve those certain affects, even if they aren’t contained within a cutscene. This ties in with readings I’ve been doing surrounding performativity, and is referenced by this quote from Jenkins:

“The actors have mastered the possible moves or lassi associated with each character, much as a game player has mastered the combination of buttons that must be pushed to enable certain character actions. No author prescribes what the actors do once they get on the stage, but the shape of the story emerges from this basic vocabulary of possible actions and from the broad parameters set by this theatrical tradition.”

The key difference here is that a designer, unlike a theatre director, has prescribed (as much as one can, indeteminancy of computer hardware and input notwithstanding) the actions avaliable to the player in the game world. There’s nothing physically stopping an actor in a play from breaking character, walking off the stage into the audience and going to grab a burger. There are things in place to prevent such action in a virtual environment though; in Dear Esther there are colliders preventing you from walking away from the path the designers want you to follow, and if you walk into the ocean you drown and will be placed back on the path. There’s no jump button, or fly button, and no way to teleport. In fact, the only way to not follow the pre-described path is to either quit playing the game completely, or to walk back toward the start of the level. Even then there are quirks built into the environment, such as steep cliffs, which prevent you from going back after a certain point. The designer of virtual environments, as I discovered in my interaction experiment, is designing every little detail, including which actions are afforded and which are not. So to close, how might we design a virtual environment to contain some sort of plot, without harshly limiting the player’s control through cutscenes or strictly linear level design? The answer, for Jenkins, lies in the urban design philosophy of Kevin Lynch. 

“He proposes an aesthetic of urban design which endows each space with “poetic and symbolic” potential: “Such a sense of place in itself enhances every human activity that occurs there, and encourages the deposit of a memory trace.”

I think that idea of potential is an important one. Triple AAA game development is very concerned with efficiency, and with such high budgets and therefore high risks, it’s hard to blame them. Assets such as models, textures, and animations mean work, which means paying people to do that work, which means taking money from the budget. To fill a virtual space with “poetic and symbolic potential” would be a risky idea; to spend money on something that the player might not ever see or experience. But with short-form virtual environments, a key feature of which is their status as non-commercial works, this ceases to be as much of a problem. Designers still may have a budget in terms of time and effort, but they won’t have to justify each creative decision in terms of money spent or wasted. They can totally afford to put in a model or sound effect the player might not ever experience.

A good example to finish up is last year’s Her Story. While it’s hard to call this a virtual environment (at least in the sense I mean in this research), the game consists of a collection of video interviews of a single woman in relation to the death of her husband. By viewing these tapes, the player is able to piece together the plot of the game, and how the woman is involved. While there are some restrictions and prompts to guide the player’s investigation, for the most part they are in control of what they watch, and when. They can totally miss not only entire videos, but entire plot points if they don’t pay attention. Her Story is brave enough to build itself on potential rather than restriction, and allows each player to form their own narrative architecture. Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. 118-30.

[short-walks]

Experiment in Interaction

Continuing on from my response to the Kwastek reading, I first implemented a script that meant a random sound would play when you clicked any given cube, rather than a pre-determined sound. This was my first attempt at adding an element of unpredictability to the work. I then played around with light and colour, adjusting the intensity of each in Unity. This led me to introducing a closely linked idea: shadows.

By including some miscellaneous cubes around the scene, I was able to introduce not only an interplay of code, colour, and sound, but of light and shadow as well. This is where I realised that many of the ‘non-human’ interactions occurring in a digital work are things I don’t typically think about, things which interact in any other medium, such as sound and colour. I wanted to push this idea as far as I could, so I jumped in Maya and sketched out a basic mesh featuring a few more structures.

This way, I would hopefully emphasize the shadows, and create some interesting visual interactions. Because the structures were constructed of cubes, something even more interesting happened. Each time a light was activated, a different face of each cube sculpture was highlighted. 

This was, first and foremost, and interesting tactic in sharply demanding the user’s attention at any moment. I was also fascinated with the idea of depicting the same space in a variety of ways, so populated the scene with a few more of the sculptures, and finalised the audio. I wanted to get away from my default idea for the soundtrack, which was a calm, meditative ambient soundscape, and instead went with an underlying drumbeat and some brass instruments for the main interactive objects.

In terms of scripting, I designed some basic rules for the scene so that it would respond both to the player’s input, and to itself. The idea was that every three to eight seconds one or more objects in the scene would activate, which meant that the scene wouldn’t be dormant for too long. Additionally, if the user clicks any of the cubes, this would set off a brief chain in which that object would activate another random object four times. This is this code:

Almost definitely a better and more efficient way to do that, but you know. 

So that’s how the work was constructed. Reflecting back on it yielded a few interesting observations, especially in conjunction with my supervisor. My original intention was to explore how interaction might work in virtual environments without relying on a human user. Obviously this was a fairly shallow and quick investigation, but it nonetheless lay some groundwork for future investigations. For me, this meant experimenting with elements which were random, and outside the users control. However, an important point is that these elements weren’t out of my control, as a designer. Even if the sound played, or amount of time between activations was random, I ultimately chose which sounds were possible, and the range of time. 

This isn’t unique to virtual environments either. To go back to Three Quintains (Hello Girls), although Calder didn’t determine the speed at which the wind might blow, he did allow that interaction to occur through the design of his sculpture. Ultimately it’s a question of affordance; which interactions do you allow to occur through your design? In nature, without design, and without intention, interaction occurs all the time. In art, with design, and with intention, certain interactions can occur. 

[short-walks]

Reading: Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art, Katja Kwastek

This reading is going to be a little brief, as this book, although engaging, tends to lean on definitions and very basic analytical tactics to fill its pages, which is of little use to me at this point. Nevertheless, there were a couple of interesting (and contestable) points I’d like to explore here.

Kwastek begins with, as I mentioned, some basic definitions. Coming from an art history background, it’s understandable that she begins this way, but she unfortunatley fails to link it back to any art or media history. A lot of what she states initially is present in my own Honours thesis, including the idea of a user ‘completing’ a virtual environment.

In interactive art however, we are not faced with an artistic offering that requires straightforward observation; rather, the aesthetic object must first be made accessible through the action of the recipient before any act of contemplation (or reflection) is possible.

Her focus is again, on physical interactive environments rather than virtual interactive environments, but there is a lot of crossover. She mentions the idea of digital art being an ‘event’ in the case of both the artist and participant. This is an interesting point which I admit I’ve skimmed over a little; the idea that a designer can be surprised by his work just as much as a user. Kwastek brings in our old friend Myron Kreuger to solidify this point:

Myron Krueger shares this view, and sees the possibility of the artist being surprised by his own works as an important feature of interactive art. In his view, the contradiction between the desire for surprise and the desire for control is a characteristic of interactive art.

Closely tied to the idea of emergence, the potential for a work to operate beyond the original designed intention is something I haven’t really played with in my work. I’m going to experiment with this idea with a little project I hope to develop shortly. Building off of a small experiment I made during Honours, I’m going to experiment with a little bit of randomness and unpredictability, and see how the environment behaves with and without a user present.

Right now, when you click on one of the above squares, it briefly lights up and plays a sound. I’m going to expand upon this idea in a few ways; space out the objects a little more, randomise which colour and sound is generated when a square is activated, and implement a script that spawns an expanding collider upon each click, which can also activate other squares. In this way, the interactions between the squares is just as, or even more important, than the user’s actions. With key elements of these interactions randomised, I will hopefully be able to encourage and maintain the element of surprise for both myself and the user.

Theoretically this will also encourage users to push the environment and to see what it can do. Kwastek briefly explores this idea from the perspective of the designer:

The production process is guided by visions or mental representations of possible interactions, or by assumptions about how the recipient will realize the interaction proposition. Many artists, however, also emphasize the need for openness or willingness to relinquish total control.

Again, nothing really groundbreaking, but still important to keep the basics in mind. She does go a little deeper in discussing the objects which may make up a digital interactive space. Virtual objects, just like the environments they are situated in, can “authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid, and so on”. I think it’s important to keep this in mind as I start working on this experiment; are the objects encouraging action? Are they implying limitation, or freedom? What do I want them to imply, if anything?

The design for this experiment is also inspired by Kwastek’s discussion of the concept of interaction. She begins, as she often does, with a definition:

Around 1900, the concept of interaction was used to denote various different types of feedback process. The 1901 Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology defined interaction as “the relation between two or more relatively independent things or systems of change which advance, hinder, limit, or otherwise affect one another,”, citing as examples both the mind-body relationship and the interaction of objects in and with the environment, which is also often called “reciprocity”.

She then presents her own definition:

The term ‘interactive art’ serves a category-specific designation for computer-supported works in which an interaction takes place between digital computer systems and users.

I think it’s obvious here that the idea of ‘interaction’ has drifted from being quite a general term to one that is specifically associated with computers and digital media, and requires a human agent. However, it’s entirely possible for interactive art to exclude human users. Interactive art doesn’t even need to involve digital computer systems, in my opinion.

This is a video I took of Alexander Calder’s Three Quintains (Hello Girls) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. As you can see, it consists of a group of sculptures in a shallow pool, with water squirting out from various sides of that pool. The large, coloured panels which dot each sculpture can be pushed by both the wind and the water fountaining out, causing the sculpture as a whole to slowly rotate. There are also small motors beneath each sculpture, alternating between pushing against and going with the influence of the wind water.

This is a great example of non-digital, non-human interactive art. When I saw it in person it was actually a little bit of a revelation for me. There is interaction occurring here, it just doesn’t involve a human, who is forced to the position of viewer rather than participant. Because we privilege our own involvement, and the digital in what we can ‘interactive art’, we hesitant to include a work such as Calder’s into that category. We exclude so many valuable and rich works from our perception by narrowing our definitions. With my experiment, I hope to explore the idea of interaction in virtual environments, and how virtual environments with an element of randomness, and which don’t require human input, can operate.

[short-walks]

Metamodernism and Virtual Environments

I’ve been fascinated by this concept of metamodernism recently, first introduced to me through Sturgill Simpson. A lot of its core principles have resonated with me, and I’ve also been thinking through how it may relate to interactive virtual environments. This isn’t necessarily a new direction for my research, just an opportunity to play with this idea and how it may be relevant to my thinking, and as such, this is really just me dipping my toes into the concept. I’ve been reading about metamodernism through two main readings: various blog posts from Seth Abramson, and the original journal article, Notes on metamodernism, from Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker. It’s with this second reading that I begin my discussion.

The article was written in 2010, so some of it’s positions are a little outdated, but it is useful as an initial basis. It essentially posits that postmodernism, the dominant cultural paradigm of the late 20th century, has become out of date and fails to account for many aspects of contemporary life. They instead propose that metamodernism is the most suitable candidate to follow postmodernism. Metamodernism, rather than replacing either modernism or postmodernism, is instead an oscillation between the two. It takes into its fabric both irony and sincerity, hope and melancholy, empathy and apathy, purity and ambiguity. In their own words:

It’s an attitude that says, I know that the art I’m creating may seem silly, even stupid, or that is might have been done before, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t serious.

They summarise by saying metamodernism “can be conceived of as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism.” The idea of a paradox is a key one in metamodernism, in that it takes seemingly conflicting concepts and places them side by side as equal, and Vermeulen and van der Akker frequently cite this idea as an “impossible possibility”. 

Existence has the structure of the In-Between, of the Platonic metaxy, and if anything is constant in the history of mankind it is the language of tension between life and death, immortality and mortality, perfection and imperfection, time and timelessness, between order and disorder, truth and untruth, sense and senselessness of existence.

They present several art works as metamodern, and use the contradictions within these works to support this status.

These include the films of Wes Anderson and David Lynch, which “attempt to restore, to the cynical reality of adults, a childlike naivety - as opposed to the postmodern “smart” cinema of the 1990s, which was typified by sarcasm and indifference.” They spend the rest of the article positioning various films, photographs, and pieces of architecture as metamodern in this way.

The works [at display] convey enthusiasm as well as irony. They play with hope and melancholy, oscillate between knowledge and naivety, empathy and apathy, wholeness and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity,...looking for a truth without expecting to find it.

Before I move onto the next set of readings from Seth Abramson I want to briefly reflect on this idea of “looking for a truth without expecting to find it”.  To me, that is a concept that links strongly to one I’m already engaging with, the concept of becoming. To not expect to find something is to either acknowledge that it doesn’t exist, or that is forever out of your reach. For something to be constantly out of your reach, it would have to be constantly moving and changing: becoming. Vermeulen and ver der Akker similarly end their article with:

The metamodern should be understood as a spacetime that is both - neither ordered and disordered. Metamodernism displaces the parameters of our place with those of a surreal place that is placeless. For indeed, that is the “destiny” of the metamodern wo/man: to pursue a horizon that is forever receding. 

Abramson’s blog posts on metamodernism were written after the above journal article, and therefore are a bit more up to date and build on the concept a little more. I picked three posts in particular to read through: Ten Basic Principles of Metamodernism, The Metamodernist Manifesto, and Metamodernism: The Basics. Although they all seem to serve as general introductions at first glance, they all offer something different and purposeful. As above, I’ll do a quick recap of what I learnt from these three readings, then get into their relation to virtual environments.

The first post focuses on some of the commonalities one might find between various works said to be metamodern. Abramson casts many of his observations against postmodernism, and tries to determine the differences between the two.

Where the “dielectical” thinking of the postmodernists assumed that every situation involves just two primary opposing forces - which do battle until one emerges victories and the other is destroyed - dialogic thinking rejects the idea that there is no middle ground or means of negotiation between different positions.

To me this is a very relevant point in regards to how groups function in society today. One only has to lazily scroll through their Facebook feed to see arguments erupting or continuing. On topics such as refugees, gay marriage, anti-vaccination, or feminism, people take a very solid stance (usually by re-posting an existing news article, but that’s beside the point). The attitude becomes: “you’re either completely with me, or against me”. The brand of metamodernism which Abramson promotes addresses this by stating that:

Metamodern dialogue does not pave over differences between parties and positions, it simply empahsizes areas of overlap between contesting opinions that could lead to effective collective action on a slate of issues.

For instance, examining the recent GamerGate conflict, one can see a clear manifestation of a postmodern attitude. Those against the movement distance themselves from their “enemies” with cynicism and ridicule, and those opposite relentlessly harass and argue their point. 

If someone we encounter online only mostly agrees with us on a topic, but also vocalizes some diagreement, we are more inclined, as now-instinctive postmodernists, to put that individual on the other side of dialectical spectrum from ourselves. Every interaction is all-or-nothing; no longer do we say “either you’re part of the problem or you’re part of the solution,” but rather “either you occupy exactly the point I do on a two-dimensional dialectical spectrum or you are, yourself, the entirety of the problem.”

Both sides refuse to even hear out the other, let alone work toward a reasonable solution. Everything is treated as a war. Metamodernism instead posits that, although two sides may not agree on everything (and they most certainly won’t), they should seek out overlap in each argument in an attempt to work together to solve an issue.

It does sounds a little hokey and sentimental, but this is only a reinforcement of the ideas of paradox and a return to hope which I mentioned above. Metamodernism holds that one can know they are doomed, but continue to live as if they are not. This extends to many other aspects of contemporary life.

Metamodernism, which came of age in the Digital Age, recognized that we feel at once distant from others - because on the Internet almost everyone is a stranger, so we are daily surrounded by more strangers than at any other point in human history - but also incredibly close to others, as the Internet allows us to create connections more quickly than ever before.

I think this is a good point at which to tie in virtual environments. As I detailed in my Honours research, a players relationship to an interactive virtual environment is constantly changing. At one moment they may feel dominance over the space, the next, completely enveloped by it. An basic example of this shift may be moving from the top of a mountain into a cave, as in Tomb Raider.

This is a useful entryway into virtual environments from metamodernism because the ‘folding’ of identity onto itself is an important concept in both instances. Metamodernism also treats realities in a similar way. Abramson states:

Metamodern spaces emphasize dialogue, collaboration, juxtaposition, and generative paradox by permitting the overlay of clearly distinct realities without any of these realities being in any way diminished.

The above could almost be a definition of an interactive virtual environment. They emphasize dialogue between the designer, environment, and user, and similarly require collaboration between those entities to form an experience.

The ideas of juxtaposition and generative paradox are also present and accounted for. When we engage with a virtual environment, our previous memories and experiences are folded into one point in time, and as we are subjected to the affects of the environment, we are reminded of previously felt emotions and experiences. Some virtual environments rely on this phenomenon to generate a feeling of nostalgia. They present familiar spaces, aesthetics, and mechanics to form or strengthen an emotional attraction to their own work.

This is true of the physical world as well; we constantly use memory and affective/emotional responses to navigate the world every day. But it is especially pertinent in virtual environments because they are an amalgamation of elements from the physical world. This is where the concept of the remix comes in.

The metamodern artist therefore remixes, mashes up, and otherwise juxtaposes or conceptualises both original and found material as a way of overlapping discrete realities.

If you’re trying to represent the physical world in a virtual environment, there will no doubt be an element of remix occurring. This could be using textures or sounds to represent something else (a wood texture re-coloured and distorted to appear like water, for example), or it could be the manipulation of scale and space to guide a certain affect. This is a key idea in the construction of virtual environments, even if you aren’t trying to represent the physical world. It’s the integration of different elements to create something bigger, something new.

The “remix” for instance, appears as a metamodern form because it allows a single author to interact honestly and responsibly with the language of another with the aim of creating a new, unique, cohesive, coherent and entirely “whole” self-expression.

This of course links with Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality:

By contrast, “intertextual” texts put different materials into dialogue or collaboration with an aim of creating something larger - something more august, more authoritative, more functional, and/or more inspiring - than any of the parts could be on their own.

I think I’ll leave it there for now, but this is definitely an idea I’d like to continue to explore and think about. At the very least, I see the elements key to metamodernism; dialogue, collaboration, juxtaposition, and remix, as similarly key to our understanding of virtual environments. 

I’ll finish up with a quote which I think captures the spirit of metamodernism, and why I found it so appealing.

Maybe you find yourself feeling nostalgia for a time in the past you never lived in; maybe you find that the falsehoods you hear on the internet are having as profound an emotional effect on you as the facts they obscure; maybe you’ve ceased to recognise the boundaries of genre, medium, or convention as having any lasting meaning whatsoever, while seeing in this collapse of distinction boundless potential for both self-expressive and appropriated creativity; perhaps you find yourself quoting lyrics or commercials or films without realising you’re doing it; perhaps you enjoy visual and material art whose constituent parts are readily discernible but whose totality feels somehow otherworldly; perhaps you feel the most and least yourself when you’re anonymous on the Internet; perhaps you recognise that emotional truth and objective veracity are separable but of equal force in the lives of individuals; perhaps you think it’s time to actually dialogue with, rather than merely shouting at, those whose worldview is decidedly different from yours, to finally take small and tentative steps together, in areas of generative overlap, into a still-uncertain future.

[short-walks]

The Problem With Game Jams

I should preface this by stating I haven’t attended a game jam myself. If that invalidates my opinion for you, there it is.

My main issue with game jams is in regards to wider issues within the video game industry. Video games have a labour problem, and I’m sure it’s not news to anyone for me to say that. There’s been many high profile cases such as the EA Spouse blog and the Rockstar Wives, as well as smaller issues that one may face as a games practitioner, such as being asked to work for free, being underpaid, or given no overtime. It’s a big problem, and one that is only exacerbated by a lack of unions or meaningful games journalism.  We had a very real example of this issue here in Australia with Team Bondi. 

As well as gross mismanagement, there were reports of high staff turnover, an expectation to work overtime and weekends, exploitation of recent graduates, and verbal abuse from management. Then, of course, there was the crunch time. Crunch is when employees are expected to work longer hours for a brief period of time towards the end of a project to meet a certain deadline. Yes, it does sound like a high schooler desperately studying for exams the night before because they’ve been goofing off until that point. It’s an embarrassingly common occurrence in the games industry, and some studios have been known to integrate it into their production schedules. Reports from ex-Team Bondi employees state that their crunch was pretty much perpetual: constantly expanding whenever they met a deadline. They were pressured into working anywhere from 60 - 110 hour work weeks on a regular basis.

To me, crunch isn’t an inevitability in games development; it’s simply a result of poor time management and organisation. I worked in two teams during my final year of my undergraduate degree, and without fail the people who were staying at uni until 3 in the morning desperately trying to put together their projects (not even finish, just trying to make them presentable), were the people who had spent their semester avoiding any and all work. There are plenty of reasons for this phenomenon; high school trains you to behave this way to a certain extent, and some people just don’t have it in them to organise their workload ahead of time.

I also think that crunch is so prevalent in this industry because it is so prevalent in the culture. Without generalising too much, I’m sure many game developers grew up playing video games. There are certain parts of game culture that encourage this sort of behaviour; staying up late, staying up all night, consuming energy drinks to “push through”, and so on. Advertisements, LAN parties, and midnight launches, even if they are relatively harmless on their own, are contributing to the image of the game player, and therefore the game developer, as someone who is willing to work extreme hours in front of a computer for little-to-no pay.

And this, finally, is where game jams fit in for me. Like the aforementioned events, game jams feed into that destructive idea that allows game developers to be exploited. Again, like the above events, they are not solely responsible for game developments labour issues, but I’m sure many will concede that, in an industry plagued by unpaid overtime, extreme work hours, and normalised crunch time, it’s at the very least problematic to hold an event where those same developers work extreme hours in crunch-like conditions to produce a game for free. Yes it’s voluntary, yes they keep their intellectual property, yes for many people it’s fun and productive. But that might just encourage the kind of expectations and behaviours that management force on employees. 

Do LAN parties and midnight launches contribute to these issues just as much as game jams? Yes. But the key difference is that game jams were popularised only in the last few years or so: long after the very real and very serious labour conditions in the games industry were publicised. 

So my issue with game jams is in regards to labour and culture. My supervisor mentioned that he doesn’t like them from a design perspective. With only 24 - 72 hours to finish a project, it’s hard to pack a lot of reflection, testing, and iteration into the process, a key element in any design. I would agree with this to a certain extent; many games created during a jam are relatively shallow, and tend to focus on a novel idea rather than fleshing that idea out until it’s playable for longer than 15 minutes or so. Even higher profile game jam games, such as Titan Souls (below), struggle to reach past that initial concept, even with months of extra development time.

However, I would say that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. As I mentioned, many of the games I want to look at for this research are bred from game jams. Part of that creation is what fascinates me; without the necessary time to allow the ideas develop, they could almost be seen as purer expressions and affects than a tightly controlled a polished work. A psychoanalyst may look at them as more ‘accurate’ expressions of the unconscious, for example. So in that respect I can reconcile the conditions of their development as another method of construction which produces unique works, but I do still have that ideological opposition. There are ways I could justify game jams in a sense; treat them as a positive expression of the gamer’s tendency for late nights and hard work, rather than the negative expression of crunch and exploitation, but I admit I do find it hard to seperate jams from the rather toxic conditions they can be seen to reference. 

[short-walks]

Reading: Interactive Environments as Fields of Transduction, Christoph Brunner & Jonas Fritsch

During these first few weeks I’m trying to get back into the swing of regular readings, as well as re-introducing myself to the core concepts of my research. One of those concepts is becoming, influenced by the Simondonian notion of transduction. I came across this journal article, Interactive Environments as Fields of Transduction, from Christoph Brunner and Jonas Fritsch. It discusses physical interactive environments, like most readings I’ve come across so far, but is still useful. I’ve found the focus on physical, rather than virtual interactive environments to be good and bad so far; it demonstrates that there is a significant knowledge gap I can fill, but does make finding articles and books on the subject a little difficult.

This reading mostly details the idea of transduction within process of interaction between a human and a machine. It keeps the concept of becoming quite central to its thesis. Becoming, most simply, is the idea that identity is in a constant process of becoming something else, rather than being one thing. It is dynamic, rather than static, constantly being shaped by surrounding forces. As I stated in my Honours thesis:

“One never has a singular, static relationship with their environment; it is always moving between affective responses, such as disgust, wonder, fear, and calm, as different audiovisual elements and gameplay scenarios shape responses to the environment as a whole.”

My aim with that statement was to position interactive virtual environments as collaborative works which are not complete until a user interacts with them. Brunner and Fritsch take a similar view with the interactive environments they study. They use the notion of a field to denote their idea of transduction, which I think is a useful metaphor. It brings to mind a relatively balanced space, where no one element has too much influence over the others. It also invokes an openness which allows these various forces to travel freely between certain points, rather than in a predetermined motion. The player or user is a part of this field, rather than the central figure in it. 

Another key idea is experimentation. This ties back to my previous post on virtual environments as performance. There is experimentation involved in both the construction and exploration of a virtual environment; a designer is experimenting with the various tools they have to affect their players, and the player is experimenting in their improvisations. Brunner and Fritsch call interactive environments as a “perpetual process of forces negotiating their future composition”, which seems to describe the act of improvisation fairly well, and of course implies an element of experimentation in figuring those compositions out. 

Essentially, the key concept behind this reading is captured in the following statement:

“Interaction in its turn must be considered in terms of processes of individuation unfolding as an experiential field in relation to particular fields of transduction. These fields emerge through the interaction and cannot be pre-determined by either system or user.”

I’ve bolded a couple of lines which I think are particularily important. First, the idea that these affects cannot be pre-determined. The user cannot choose how they will react to the environment, any more than the system, and by extension the designer, can determine those affects. This is explored in my Honours thesis, so I won’t reiterate it too much here. I’m more interested in the other idea, that the fields emerge through interaction. Essentially, to loop back to my original point, an interactive virtual environment is not complete until it is engaged with by a user. The user has to be there for the affects to occur, emotions to be felt, and narratives to play out. The player, designer, and environment, as a field of potential affects, are all key components of the experience of a virtual environment, short-form or otherwise. Or, as Brunner and Fritsch put it:

“The value of Simondon’s thought for the design of interactive environments lies in the inseparable relation between technologies and humans as part of a shared technogenesis.”

[short-walks]

Establishing a Community of Practice

Before my next supervisor meeting I’ve been asked to begin to form a community of practice. I interpret a community of practice as similar to a literature review, in that I should collect designers, researchers, games, and art works which are engaging with similar ideas and themes as my research. I began this process in my first post, but I’d like to flesh it out a little more here.

Media objects in general have been making a shift toward the short-form for many years. Prefaced by short films and short stories, social networking sites are built on the idea of user-generated, disposable media. YouTube videos, Facebook status updates, tweets, and Instagram photos are generated and consumed by the millions every day. I point this out not to directly compare short-form virtual environments to these ideas of disposable media but to acknowledge the general shift in media to the short-form. This is a cultural landscape which is rapidly becoming saturated in works vying for attention, pushing for a shift for micro entertainment and information.

This trend has affected video games and virtual environments too. During their inception video games were quite short, but very replayable. As time went on, and hardware budgets become more lenient, games became longer and longer until a 50-hour plus duration was the expected norm. More recently, several factors have conspiracy to again shorten the lengths of games, and it’s in this climate that my research takes place. Here I will detail as much as I can these industry conditions and the people involved, to attempt to define a community of practice.

Independent Games

Independent games tend to shift their design away from excessively large virtual spaces and play durations to more focused, single-location titles. An obvious is example is Dear Esther, which was originally a research project from the University of Portsmouth.

Dear Esther ushered in a new school of game design; quiet, exploratory experiences focused on explored a single location to uncover a plot by observing objects in the environment. Gone Home would be a key text here, and even Brandon Chang’s games, such as Thirty Flights of Loving, could be considered an offshoot of this philosophy. More recently, similar exploration-based games have expanded their worlds not spatially, but temporally, allowing players to view a specific space at different times of day, over weeks of in-game time, such as Firewatch.

More broadly, small budgets, tight schedules, and limited manpower have shrunk the scope of independent games, to the point where more titles only take an hour or two to complete. An alternative for many developers are episodic games, a concept also worth exploring.

Episodic Games

Taken as a whole object, episodic games span multiple locations and ideas. Taken as individual episodes however, they often resemble short-form virtual environments. Act 2 of Kentucky Route Zero for example features environments which are spatially quite limited, but expand out temporally in some really interesting ways.

I’m thinking now of the forest towards the end of the act . As the player makes their way through the space by walking to the right, time skips ahead to key scenes along their journey. Life is Strange is also divided into five episodes, and generally focuses on two or three spaces per episode. An example is the diner scene, in which the player can rewind time to view multiple instances of the same space across a series of potential temporalities. 

More traditional episodic games, such as The Walking Dead, and Half-Life 2, still maintain a focus on a single environment, such as the farm from episode 2 of The Walking Dead, or the ruins of City 17 in Half-Life 2, Episode 1. Even mainstream, big budget games have divided themselves into smaller, more easily consumable chunks; Alan Wake begins each play session with a “Previously on: Alan Wake”, and Resident Evil: Revelations, also focused on a single location, is split into five acts. To focus in on the types of media objects I’m researching, we need to investigate the conditions these works arose from a little further.

Game Jams  

I’m not the biggest fan or advocate of game jams in the world, but the fact remains that many of the games I’ll mention in the next section were produced during a game jam. Part of what I’m currently thinking of is the limits or conditions which shape these works. As well as budgets and team sizes, game jams often enforce time limits, such as a single weekend, as well as themes, such as the 7DFPS, in which participants must produce some kind of first-person shooter. These conditions which shape these works are just as important to their final form as the developers themselves.

Fringe Works

I refer to these artefacts as “fringe works” for now, because they tend to be found buried on websites such as itch.io and Tumblr, and to recognise that I’m not necessarily identifying them as video games. These are the kinds of virtual environments that I aim to focus on for this research, and as I laid out in the first post, they share a certain amount of commonalities. I’m interested in the culture that surrounds these works, just as much as the works themselves. For example, a lot of these games are made for no-to-little money, in the spare time of hobbyists and seasoned developers alike. Any money earned from these works usually comes from donations, and is rarely enough to earn a decent living. Because of this, many of the works are unpolished, take more risks, and don’t feel an obligation to appeal to a certain audience, or to conform to a more traditional notion of a video game. They are, almost by nature, experimental and strange. It is within this community that I primarily position my research.

This is a community where mistakes are okay, and many of the works aren’t super pleasant to play. They may be buggy, with graphical faults, and lack the comforts of a proper pause menu or mouse sensitivity settings. But these elements are less important than the moods, ideas, and affects these works produce, and indeed form a core part of their aesthetic. 

Practitioners

These works are being practiced by a wide variety of people, and it would be impossible to list them all. But, to begin with, here is a list of names of practitioners who I feel practice with similar ideas and philosophies to my own.

Robert Yang

Davey Wreden

Dan Pinchbeck

Brandon Chang

Steve Gaynor

Albert Lai

Pol Clarissou

Kitty Horrorshow

A depressingly male list yes, but I hope to rectify this moving forward. An interesting point is the various names these creators have given their works: micro games, flash-fictions, vignettes. It goes to show how little these experiences have been documented and thought about, at least from a critical perspective.

Finally, I’ve been in contact with researcher Robert What in regards to a couple of projects, and he has something interesting to say about these works which I think is worth repeating here:

“Free of regular, ‘gamey’ elements such as enemies puzzles, obstacles – such landscapes are layered with structures and systems that change over time. Such virtual environments provide disembodied psychogeographers with the possibility to inhabit abstracted geometric topologies of form, where dérives are acted out with spatial connotations generated by memories, real world associations, and other emotional mappings.”

I think a definition like the one above is something I should aspire to over the course of this research. While it doesn’t cover everything I want it to, it’s a good model, and something to build on as I move forward and conduct my own investigations into these media works.

[short-walks]

Reading: Practice Based Research: A Guide, Linda Candy

This is a reading I actually went through at the start of my Honours research, so a lot of the points I’ve already covered during that time. However, I thought it would be a good idea to just go through it again as a refresher. 

The document itself most simply describes the concept of practice-based research. A PhD, as we know, requires an original contribution to human knowledge. In the case of practice-based research, the creative artefact produced during the research is the original contribution to knowledge. There is written documentation in the form of an exegesis to contextualise the artefact, but the artefact is the focus. This is important because it means that everything, from the readings I do to the time I spend prototyping, should be in service to the ultimate goal of producing this central virtual environment, or environments.

“Practice-based research is an original investigation undertaken in order to gain new knowledge partly by means of practice and the outcomes of that practice. In a doctoral thesis, claims of originality and contribution to knowledge may be demonstrated through creative outcomes in the forms of designs, music, digital media, performances and exhibitions. Whilst the significance and context of the claims are described in words, a full understanding can only be obtained with direct reference to the outcomes.”

An important point is that, unlike Honours, the research generates “culturally novel apprehensions that are not just novel to the creator or individual observers of an artefact”. This is something I attempted during Honours, and I certainly learnt a lot myself, but I’m not sure the knowledge generated was necessarily widely applicable. A key quality of a successful PhD seems to be not only the generation of new knowledge, but also the communication of that knowledge. I hope that I’ll be able to clearly convey any findings I generate, and will certainly focus on the presentation of the ideas, as well as the ideas themselves.

“Practice-based doctoral submissions must include a substantial contextualisation of the creative work. The basis of the claim for the originality and location of the original work, it also provides the basis for a judgement as to whether general scholarly requirements are met. Doctoral level powers of analysis and mastery of existing contextual knowledge, in a form that is accessible to and audit-able by knowledgeable peers.”

The remainder of the reading details the general layout of a practice-based PhD, which is useful. I used a basic three chapter structure for my Honours; theoretical context, development of artefacts, and analysis of artefacts. It worked well and was easy to structure the overall research schedule as well. Candy’s reading recommends the following structure: Introduction  Including stating the research problem, context, method, and the outcomes. State of the Art Review Essentially the literature review, but in my case would include similar researchers, practitioners, and works in my field. “What is the purpose of the Literate Review? Provides a basis and context for your research either because you are using the findings to support an argument to extend something or because you have identified a limitation and will be pursuing studies to address it.”

Methodology A detailed justification of the research method used. Foundation Work “This optional chapter is a chance to describe earlier work done by the author/candidate (possibly with others) that provides a foundation or significant background. It may be helpful to revisit and reassess earlier work in the light of the research focus of the PhD. This chapter will not be needed in some PhDs where the work is from a fresh start.” New Studies A detailed account of any new software or techniques developed during the course of the research. Results A summary of the results gained from the research. Conclusions Analysis of the results in context with other research done, a statement of the original contribution to knowledge.

References/Bibliography It’s a useful structure, and I’ll certainly keep it in the back of my mind moving forward, though I’ll likely stick to my Honours structure as a starting point. It may become useful to break those three chapters down even further as Candy has done here, but I’ll see how far I can go with my established structure first.