Lit 80, Fall 2013

Tag: body

Videogame Critique

I’ve never really been too much of a gamer. Don’t be mistaken, I have played my fair share of video games ranging from Pokemon on the GameBoy Color to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater on the PlayStation 1 to Halo 3 on the Xbox 360. Although these games have brought me enjoyment, I never really got into the stories of most games or was never willing to invest that much time into something I may never complete. After analyzing multiple independent games like Portal, Fl0w, and The Company of Myself, I really regret not getting into video games earlier. My preconceptions of video games as simple or complex challenges with no real meaning or function except to entertain have definitely changed after my realization that games can be used as media.

A medium is a dynamic substance or object that can be used to portray a message, implicitly or explicitly. Classically, artistic and intellectual mediums were restricted to printed books, music, movies, etc. But today, with the surge of technology and the internet, a rise of the Digital Humanities can be seen which incorporates a wide range of mediums from interactive charts to sound banks and even video games. If a medium is a way to express a message, why can’t a video game be a medium? According to Ian Bogost in his book How to Do Things With Videogames , video games are a medium that let us play a role within the constraints of a model world. I completely agree with this idea. The world we live in today is controlled by sets of inherent rules, physical laws, traditions, cultures, that inhibit us from doing many things. Gravity keeps us from soaring into the stratosphere, laws prevent [most] people from ravaging cities and stealing cars, most people are not athletically capable of playing in the NBA. These sets of rules and facts of life are why I believe people play video games and why video games can serve as a medium, a way to escape and test the limits of human imagination, and learn about ourselves doing so.

One way I can justify this is through the game Portal. Portal is a first-person puzzle game where the user controls or is embodied as a women wielding an electronic gun that shoots two distinct portal ends, orange and blue. The portals create a visual and physical connection between the two different areas in 3D space. The user is challenged to solve a series of puzzles using only this device. Portal shows an element of how a game serves as a medium, through its capability of allowing users to experience a ‘cyberworld’ where portal teleportation is available while maintaining general physics. If users jump through a portal on the ground, they will be propelled at the same speed out of the other portal maintaining linear momentum. This serves as a medium for users to break the boundaries of the physical world and explore the ability to travel instantaneously from one place to another. Another main point that seems to be interesting in the game Portal is the choice of a female protagonist. In most video games that are characterized as shooter games, where the character wields weapons and shoots and usually kills others, the main character or avatar is generally male. Portal breaks this stereotype with the female protagonist and I find that very interesting and deliberate by the creators of the game. This is a key example of how a video game can serve as a medium. The main character being female, brings attention to the fact that many first-person shooter games are male dominated. Another possible purpose is to entice more female gamers, in a hobby that is often characterized or stereotyped as male dominated.

Other uses of video games as mediums can be seen through the game Fl0w, which personally kept me entertained for hours on end. At first glance Fl0w may seem like an over simplistic, evolutionary interactive game but after delving into the game you can see that it is way more than just a medium of entertainment. Fl0w’s distinct visual color palettes, image rendering (especially on the PS3), and simplicity deem Fl0w as an artistic medium, along with its playability. Playing Fl0w feels like playing through a piece of artwork and its different layers. As your organism slowly grows, you can progress through different levels or layers of the medium you are in and encounter new organisms, colors, environments, and sounds. Fl0w is much more than an interactive video game, it is more of an experience of ‘flow,’ a term often used in psychology and Neuroscience. Flow is a state between anxiety and boredom where if completely engaged, the user loses track of time and the outside world and becomes fully focused on the task at hand. Personally, through the visual palette and simplistic gameplay and music, I entered a flow like state when playing Fl0w. In that way the game Fl0w served as a medium showing that video games or mediums in general do not have to be over saturated with complex plots, scenery, music, characters, in order to maintain the ultimate stage of focus, flow, of the user.

Overall I think that critically evaluating video games based on principles like the effect they have  on users both mentally and physically, the message they try to get across, and the sheer entertainment level they offer  can be beneficial in many realms. The use of video games as experimental mediums is something I believe can change the way we think about different issues ranging from ethics to physics. I think that video games can be used as tools for people to explore unrestricted boundaries and break away from the constraints of the physical world. Thus by doing this, they can teach us more about the physical world and the mentality of humans in general. Therefore studying video games of the past and present should be at the same priority for scholars, as books and movies are today. We cannot ignore the dynamic and inherently experimental properties of video games and how these properties and the way they are implemented reflect on the zeitgeist of society.

Neuromancer, Life, and Identity

A recurrent theme within Neuromancer is the nature of life. Can a program be alive? What provides a being with its identity? Does identity demand a body?

Case resents his physical body, and is plagued by its shortcomings. He suffers from a physical dependency on stimulants, SAS when arriving in space, and all the natural limitations of a corporeal body. He resents this “meat” that he is contained within, suggesting that his identity is defined by his mind, and his body is an accessory. And yet, for most of the novel, Case cannot escape from his body. He is still affected by adrenaline, still feels the aftershocks of his stimulant hangovers, still risks critically damaging his brain. No matter how he dissociates, he remains tied to his body. It is, after all, the vessel his brain was built to fit.

But what about a being which has no body? Neuromancer exists only as a sea of information, yet he insists that he has developed his own identity. He and the personalities he cultivates are able to grow and develop, to think independent of the parameters established around them. They are certainly closer to human than the Dixie Flatline, who cannot create new ideas or store long term memory. Even the Flatline is on the cognitive level of some humans following serious injury. We dismiss him as a program because we know why he cannot create or remember, but he appears by all rights to have a sense of identity just as a human would. He thinks, he remembers, he even desires to be erased. Whether or not these things are human, it is obvious that they are cognizant entities, discrete from the world around them. That could be justification enough to call them life.

And indeed they appear to be as real within their world as the flesh of ours. It is while trapped in cyberspace with Neuromancer’s Linda that Case rekindles ties with “the meat” which he so often dismissed.

“It was a place he’d known before; not everyone could take him there, and somehow he always managed to forget it. Something he’d found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew– he remembered–as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond know- ing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read.”

As he is rekindling these feelings, supposedly unique to flesh and bone, his physical body is in fact dead. It is unlikely, then, that Case’s physical body is reacting to this at all. Neuromancer built his world from people’s memories, so it stands to reason that what Case is feeling originates from something he once felt in the physical world. But if an AI can recreate even these most “human” aspects of life and emotion so convincingly that Case himself cannot tell the difference, then what, if anything, differentiates these entities from humans? Would an existence in that world be any less fulfilling than the physical world we inhabit? Perhaps the entities are simply new life, with new minds housed within new bodies of data. Who are we to judge?

 

Neuromancer Novel Response

Today, majority of the major operations that occur daily whether in the stock market, newsroom, hospital room, and even the classroom, are being aided or often run by technology and computers. Just as Donna Haraway predicted in her “Cyborg Manifesto,” technology has wedged itself into almost all daily activities in today’s society and has led to the formation of what I believe are two kinds of Cyborgs: people physically connected to machines and technology and those mentally attached to their devices.

The novel Neuromancer by William Gibson delves into this topic of “cyborgism” along with the harmony and often dissonance between man and machine. It poses many theoretical questions that are becoming more and more pertinent today, as the gap between human and machine grows smaller. It poses questions like: what defines something or someone is human? Or regarding how the body and mind is split, especially when technology is engrained directly into the body. One of the biggest questions that has arisen from this novel is whether a new being can be created, whether human, cyborg, or something else and the implications of this. In the novel, this can be seen everywhere and in everyone. A prime example can be seen with Molly, who through extensive surgeries has acquired prosthetics, fingernail implants, and mental switches that render her a ‘super-ninja’ assassin. Is Molly classified as a human? A cyborg? Another character, Julius, also has extensive surgeries done to him, which switch out his DNA and allow him to continue living way past the age of 150. The same can be seen, in a less obvious manner, with Case who through surgeries has obtained new drug resistant organs, along with the ability to zap into cyberspace and a virtual matrix.

All of these technological enhancements or changes to the human body is part of a societal stigma Gibson predicted, in which people would become ‘technologically addicted’ and continue to transform and alter their bodies with technology. Although it may seem crazy for someone to undergo some of the surgeries found in the novel, delving deeper into today’s society elucidates that Gibson may not have been to far off in his prediction. Today, mentally people have become more and more engrained with technology, with micro computers (smartphones) at their side at all times. It may not be a full out addiction, but there are noticeable mental effects that occur from being away from technology that can often be seen as symptomatic for an addiction. Gibson’s theory of completely altering the human body with technology also holds true today with the advent of 3-D printing, especially in the medical field. Today, and definitely in the next decade, scientists will be able to print out fully functional human organs and transplant them into people, just as Case had pancreas and liver transplants. With this advent, along with the computer mapping of the human brain, who is to say a new breed of human, cyborg, or new species can’t be created. The implications of this have very serious consequences on society in all aspects from politics to ethics. Maybe Gibson’s dystopian society wasn’t that far off after all.

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