Materiality and Procedurality

This is my position paper for a seminar in IT Copenhagen's game studies department called 'Against Procedurality'. It has Portal 2 spoilers in it. Also spoilers for my presentation on Tuesday :P Anyway, I don't usually get to put things I write academically up here because they're so long, so I thought I'd take advantage of the opportunity to post a short piece of work. Enjoy!

‘As humans we experience our world through the materiality of things. We walk on concrete, wooden or carpeted floors and drink tea from a ceramic, paper, plastic or polystyrene cup. There is a continuous, invisible exchange taking place between us, our objects and our environment.’- Karen Richmond, Thingness Symposium, Camberwell College of Arts

‘Don’t get yourself all covered in the gel. We haven’t entirely nailed down what element it is, but I’ll tell you this: it’s a lively one, and it does NOT like the human skeleton.’ - Cave Johnson, Portal 2

Materiality refers to the emotional and pragmatic significance of materials. Wood feels familiar, tactile and reassuring. Plastic feels like anything and nothing all at once - it feels more alien the more it attempts to emulate the familiar. When games involve virtual worlds, part of their procedurality is devoted to the materiality of the game-worlds.

Psychologist James J. Gibson, writing in the 1970s, was concerned with the mind’s perception of surfaces and substances in the environment. Gibson claims that the concern of the active being in the inhabited environment is not the physical properties of materials but what can be done with them - affordances, such as ‘sit-down-able’ or ‘stand-on-able’. The way that game engines model affordances highlights something about cultural understandings of materiality.

How materiality is conceived in the virtual world is by nature a procedural question. In Portal 2 the perception of the environment as surfaces and substances with their own affordances is heavily manipulated. The player’s assumption that the affordances of surfaces can be judged by their colour is turned around by allowing the player to repaint the surfaces to change their affordances. It is a creative masterpiece of hyperreal plasticity in procedural form, and it works because of player assumptions about the virtual materiality of the game-world.

Procedural materiality can be exploited rhetorically. Katamari Damacy posed a phenomenological critique of contemporary consumerist society. A small ball can be rolled around the world, picking up any ob jects smaller in mass to itself, growing exponentially as more things are picked up. It answers the question of what matter really is by reducing the products of modern consumer society down to mere material. Nothing differentiates a pylon from the Eiffel tower or a cow from a human being other than their mass. In essence, all things are just lumps of material.

Affordances determine the possible action-paths that players can follow - a virtual environment with a large amount of surfaces posing a wide variety of affordances presents several possible action paths. Final Fantasy games feature beautiful environments in which almost none of the surfaces present affordances other than passability and impassability. Dirt paths are passable, shrubberies are not. The battle screen offers more action paths - a variety of weapons and items can be used in a variety of ways by accessing them from various menus. While the battle system lends itself to mimeomorphic actions, the range of actions the player may choose to replicate is fairly wide. The procedural materiality of Final Fantasy game-worlds is accessed predominantly in the battle screens.

Chris Crawford argues that to exploit procedurality well, games should be as interactive as possible. I suggest instead that simulations of materiality that account for the limitations that materials can place on human agency are more immersive and persuasive. Players want to experience the limitations of a virtual material world as much as they want to try out new possibilities - limitations make these possibilities more meaningful.

‘Look at this! No rail to tell us where to go! Oh, this is brilliant. We can go wherever we want! Hold on though, where are we going? Seriously. Hang on, let me just get my bearings. Hm. Just follow the rail, actually.’

This quote, by a robotic character in Portal 2 who has been recently emancipated from a monorail in the ceiling, seems to be a self-referential comment about game design. Level designs that allow a sudden sense of freedom are entertaining, but only in contrast to the restrictive nature of level design ordinarily. Likewise, aspects of game design which give players more agency over materials are only meaningful when materials are ordinarily resistive to interaction. Portal is a more meaningful franchise because not all surfaces can be modified with a portal-gun. You can’t interact with every surface, because there is something fascinating and fun about the way that materials limit human agency and force us to use our power to interact with the world in a smarter way.

Surface 2

Here's another surface colour experiment on Sonic the Hedgehog. I think this one works a little better - this time I've used Sonic the Hedgehog 2, selecting only the levels with a material name in the title (playing fast and loose with definitions here by including sky...) What you lose in this attempt is the larger perspective on how colour is used to visualise the plot arc, which was an interesting feature of the last one, but what you gain is a perspective on how surface colour and virtual material are linked.

Surface

I'm currently working on a hypothesis that an early stage in the development of virtual materiality in video games was the manipulation of surface in 1980s platformers. As an experiment, I've made color palettes from screenshots of the first six (out of seven) levels of the first Sonic the Hedgehog game, to see if color choice alone is enough to guess the materials the level is supposed to appear to be made up of. I'm not sure my hypothesis is on solid ground yet, but I think the illustration is quite thought-provoking. Color really is a powerful tool.

Desktop Wallpaper 2.5.11

My latest desktop wallpaper is a photograph of an illuminated manuscript of the Koran which I saw at the Islamic Arts Museum on a recent trip to Istanbul. This is one of the wallpapers I've been the most satisfied with so far - I like the tension between media and the way the use of the photo as wallpaper imposes flatness onto an image with a shallow depth of field. Its not too busy, but you can still enjoy picking tiny details out of the small part of the image that's in focus. Hope I can make more like this in future.

DapperQ in Japan

I wrote this for awesome transgressive fashion blog DapperQ.com. Thought I'd repost it here for anybody interested:

All dapperQs know that female masculinity has its own unique style, swagger and sexual charms. But in a world dominated by polarised gender norms, celebrating dapperQs can seem like a pioneering step into unexplored, new territory. So it came as a surprise to me when I learned that in Japan, women taking masculine roles in musical theater are followed by hordes of screaming fangirls and praised for being the ideal man.

Check out this incredibly colourful video of the Takarazuka musical, Monaco:

In Japan’s conservative society, the Takarazuka theatre company can seem pretty anomalous. Indeed, Takarazuka, founded in 1910 by a right-wing businessman, shouldn’t be misunderstood as a miraculously progressive institution; the plays all revolve around heteronormative romances, and reinforce established gender roles in which men act and women watch. However, it proposes an interesting female heterosexual fantasy of the ideal man that is considered only possible when the man is female-bodied.

As a British woman watching videos of Takarazuka plays on my laptop in London, I find myself gazing in adoration and infatuation for these drop-dead-gorgeous women in elaborate menswear, sauntering around on the stage. They sing and dance with a suggestive confidence, occasionally glancing at the audience or the camera as if to say, ‘we all know that I’m your hottest fantasy’. I’m privileged to have grown up in a society where lesbianism is acknowledged, even if it’s not often treated as equally beautiful and romantic as heterosexuality. Perhaps for me, these glamorous, musical romances between two female-bodied people have a slightly different meaning than for audiences in Japan.

Women who act as men, otokoyaku, are described by their fans as beautiful, kind and sensitive. There is a perception among Takarazuka fans that otokoyaku lack the dirt, roughness and dominating attitude of men in real life.

The romantic possibilities portrayed by Takarazuka theatre don’t push the boundaries of conservative, heterosexist society. However, the plays do portray a fantasy partner embodied by the female sex presenting as male. Takarazuka is always framed as an exotic fantasy set in far-off lands and far-gone times. But it’s the reality of the female sex of the actresses that is essential for the unique charm of the male characters portrayed. One fan, interviewed by Professor Lorie Brau, compared two performances of the medieval Japanese epic, the Tale of Genji:

"I had seen the Tale of Genji before, at kabuki [all male, traditional theatre]. When Genji is performed with male actors, there’s something dirty about the man who plays Genji – he doesn’t fit my image of Genji. When I saw Takarazuka’s Genji, I was really moved. I thought, “Yes, this is it!” Genji and Tō no Chūjō [... ] were really handsome young courtiers. A man that handsome and wonderful doesn’t exist in real life; Takarazuka is, after all, a fabrication. But as long as I’m watching this theatre of make-believe, I can forget reality. I can dream."

This belief that the ‘gentleness’ of the male characters and the masculinity of the female actresses are just fantasies, fabricated for entertainment, seems to support the enduring existence of binary gender norms in real life. Takarazuka theatre exists in a confined, liminal space, where new gender possibilities live out a seductively beautiful existence. Like DapperQs, Takarazuka actresses are not simply trying to imitate men. They occupy a separate space on the gender spectrum, with its own beauty and its own sense of cool.

The difference is that DapperQs aren’t just fantasy figures. DapperQs are very real, and this is what makes being dapper such a powerful stance. It takes courage to occupy this subversive space as an expression of who you really are.
To express yourself in a way that privileges your own identity over binary gender norms, is to take a subversive step beyond the Takarazuka fantasy into reality. It is to embody broader possibilities for gender expression in the real world. Still, I find joy and excitement in watching the Takarazuka with a reading that speaks to me, as a glamorous celebration of women who have the confidence to be dapper

Archaeologists

I came across this picture of two very mysterious-looking archaeologists in an article about marble being historically viewed as a form of water. Isn't it nice?

What is an image board? Reflections on Image Threads

I've just taken down the Image Threads installation that I described in my last post. It wasn't a fabulous success, but it was enough to give me some reflections on two issues:
1) Why interactive installations are difficult to set up
2) What is an image board

I'll start on an up-note. While the contributions to the installation were very limited in number, those that did come up towards the end of the installation period were quite interesting in terms of how people made use of the medium. While the system was designed to replicate the topic-threads of web-based image boards, the realisation of the system in a three-dimensional environment led to three-dimensional, cross-thread references. In addition, the flexibility of the materially realised medium, the postcard, allowed people to make additions to other peoples' comments on the same card. This led to a small but recognisable 'trending topic' about squirrels and other small creatures becoming visible at two different trajectories - across different parts of the installation and within a single card.

The limitation on the number of posts to the irl image board was caused by two main factors. Firstly, the timing and placement of the installation to coincide with my MA course's work in progress seminars was ineffective. I had hoped that with over thirty people in the same building for three consecutive days, the installation would get a lot of traffic. However, the schedule for the days was very intensive, with only short breaks during which it was hard for people to relax and take their minds off the content of the seminars. Activity did rise in the last 24 hours of the installation, but this was really too late for any significant dialogue between cards to flourish.

Secondly, the balloon-mounted structure of the installation turned out to be unsuitable. While I had hoped that the balloons would sink a little when loaded with cards, making popular threads more noticeable, they inevitably sank so much that the cards lay flat on the floor or on the table, making the thread appear closed and inactive. This happened regardless of the amount of balloons used to hold one thread, especially after a couple of hours had passed and the helium started to seep out of them, reducing their buoyancy at an alarming rate. It's interesting here to observe the amount of social agency possessed by the balloons, as they effectively silenced the human actors in the installation.

However, the response of users to the failure of the balloons taught me a lot about the nature of the thing I was simulating. While on the first day, when there was very little activity, the sinking of the balloons discouraged people who might have posted something, on the second and third days, as activity increased, people responded inventively to the problem, essentially restructuring the threads around the nearby furniture to keep them alive. Since this furniture just happened to be a computer, the installation seemed to absorb meaning from its surroundings as it was restructured by the users.

For me, this foregrounded the fact that an image board owes very little to its fundamental structure and a huge amount to its users. Even when the structure fails, if the users have enough motivation they will assert their own agency over the structure to make it work. This interpretation illuminates a very important aspect of the history of 2channel (2ch), futaba channel (2chan) and 4chan. All three of these platforms owe their success to people manipulating existing structures for their own ends, be it the ascii art of the text-based 2channel, the set-up of, and migration to, futaba when 2channel was in danger of being shut down, or the impressive ability of the 4chan community to organise powerful, coordinated actions on a mass scale when the hive mind sets upon a target. While Image Threads was a small project with a low level of response, it has succeeded in highlighting the problematic nature of technologically determinist accounts of the development of internet cultures.