Avant-garde Videogames: Playing with Technoculture (MIT Press) by Brian Schrank;Jay David Bolter

Author:Brian Schrank;Jay David Bolter [Brian Schrank;Jay David Bolter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-04-16T18:04:00+00:00

Figure 4.10

Darkgarne conveys information through vibrations on a player's head, supplanting the visual dimension of gamespace with a tactile dimension. Images courtesy of Eddo Stern.

Darkgame (there have been several iterations from 2007 to 2013) by Eddo Stern provides another instance of this type of gentler subversion of the cybernetic loop. It allows two players to maneuver avatars in a virtual space. Avatar movements are projected on a gallery wall. Each player is given one of two channels of sensual feedback, either sight or touch, from which they must surmise what is happening. For example, if the player watching the screen gets shot, fuzzy spots grow, which obscure their vision as well the vision of all the gallerygoers. The second player receives information haptically through a force-feedback helmet-an orange octopus with tentacles wrapping around the cranium. Virtual space and in-game actions are felt as vibrations through concordant tentacles. "DZZZT" on the middle-left side, say, indicates that the player just took damage to that side. A milder "dzzzt" indicates that they just brushed a wall. Gameplay is sense "deprivation and sensory overload" simultaneously. While Darkgame has been lauded as accessible to the visually impaired, in a way the reverse is true too. The game also allows sighted players to sense a kind of blindness and play with a slow debilitation of sense. Navigating through the helmet, the player is aware of absence in the visual field. You can see and your eyes are open, but they are oddly useless. Sensations of "skin chatter" replace customary visual sensations. The primacy of sight is so profoundly naturalized that by diverting the visual channel through tactile sensations applied elsewhere, we can feel our familiar sense ratios awkwardly adjusting to the new patterns.

Darkgame enables participatory openness and emergent couplings in its play. Similar to Ono's White Chess Set, players become better competitors if they cooperate. "DZZZT" provokes a player to ask, "Did you just shoot me?" As the visual player becomes "blind," they may rely on the crowd and the buzzing sound of their opponent's helmet to know if they landed a shot. The example of Darkgame is emblematic of complicit formalist strategies, with the artist exploiting whichever connections might be socially, psychologically, or technologically available.

Gentle cyborgs elide virtual game competition in favor of physical pleasure. In her cyborg manifesto, Donna Haraway portrays cyborgs as inherently sexual because they open up alternate kinds of coupling between concepts, objects, and people. Cyborgs "signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling" between "emerging pleasures, experiences, and powers" (Haraway 1991, 172, 173). Playing with cyborgs cross-wires bodies and technologies, enabling things that cannot usually touch to finally hook up.

Massage Me (2007) puts two people in an asymmetrical relationship: the single player operates the game by massaging someone wearing a vest that has embedded sensors on its back. The game's creators, the artists' group Kobakantinen (2007), claim that it "turns a video game player's excess energy into a back massage for an innocent bystander." The game pad becomes a pleasure center for contact, and the "addicted game player becomes an inexhaustible masseur.

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