Tag: gaming

Video Game Spaces: Ace Attorney Courtroom

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This is part of a series of posts exploring video games as spaces players inhabit. If you’re wondering what this is all about, I tried to explain myself here.

The Ace Attorney courtroom is a platonic ideal.

The Supreme Court of Judicature

Perhaps it is the image of justice. The room is an arena of truth. At its center there is a playing field, a boxing ring, maybe a battlefield upon which ideas are contested. At the top of the pitch there is a judge, impartial, a personification of the scales on the wall behind his head. On opposing sides of the pitch there are offense and defense, home and away, prosecution and defense. Opposite the judge, the witness–the panoptical eye of blind justice–sets the contest in motion. Justice is a game.

Perhaps it is the image of power. The room is a terrible mountain. At the summit there is the judge, a bearded demigod of the Upperworld here to enact the edicts of fate. At the mountain’s base, the adjudicated parties are encamped. The prosecution and defense camps struggle to climb, sweating and gloating in proportion to their standing with the inscrutable demigod. The witness camp, summoned against its will, struggles to avoid climbing. The witness is furthest from the steaming volcano, nearest the exit and consequently nearer to freedom. Power is a game.

Like any human architecture, the inhabitants subvert this platonic space. The judge is a fool, a branch leaning constantly with the prevailing wind. He is often powerless, his repeated gaveling as inconsequential as thunder without lightning. The opposing camps battle over context rather than content, surface rather than substance. Race, gender, colonialism, and every category of absurdity shape the proceedings. The witnesses are never impartial, always intertwined with the opposing camps. Justice is neither rehabilitative nor retributive.

The Ace Attorney courtroom is a postmodern ideal.

Video Game Spaces: Super Dodge Ball (1989)

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This is part of a series of posts exploring video games as spaces players inhabit. If you’re wondering what this is all about, I tried to explain myself here.

Cosmopolitan Liberty: Dodgeball Nationalism

“Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.” — Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel”

Super Dodge Ball is an NES game in which the player takes control of an American dodgeball team and competes against other national teams on a journey around the world.* There is an English team–replace New York and the Statue of Liberty in the screenshot with London and the Tower Bridge–an Indian team, an Icelandic team, a Kenyan team, Team Japan, and, finally, a boss battle with Team USSR. You should watch the playthrough here if you want to see the game in action. Nintendo thought highly enough of the game to include it with the NES games on Nintendo Switch Online, which is where the screenshot comes from.

Odds are, if you played this game in 1989, you were familiar with Rocky IV, which debuted in 1985, and Top Gun, which came out a couple years later. You might have watched the 1988 Olympics, which were relatively drama-free following the political scrimmages surrounding the 1980 and 1984 games, but still drew huge audiences to a spectacle of nationalist competition. Maybe, inspired by the World Cup in 1990, you pulled the game down from the shelf to play through it again. That is something I would have done, substituting dodgeball for soccer to reenact the thrill of the television event. Maybe the looming Kremlin in the game’s final showdown flashed across your mind when the Berlin Wall came down and the USSR along with it. Super Dodge Ball probably sat on your shelf when the United States invaded Iraq for the first time in 1991.

Rocky IV, Top Gun, the Olympics, the World Cup, Super Dodge Ball (and other games like it), the fall of the Soviet Union, Operation Desert Storm. These things appear disconnected, but they were woven together in an intricate pattern, disparate phenomena contributing to a noumenon of nationalist triumph in the eye of the American beholder.

Super Dodge Ball USA vs ICELAND - YouTube
Is this the moon? No, just Iceland. Screenshot from Youtube.

Set against world-historical events like wars and political collapse, cultural products like films and video games seem to speak with an infinitesimally small voice in the historical record. We should reconsider this point of view. Because these events take place out there in real time and space, the vast majority of people experience them passively. Movies, games, recorded music, and other cultural products occupy personal time and space. We experience them actively and use them to think through events.

For most Americans, the Soviet Union collapsed on the news. Americans who played Super Dodge Ball contributed to this collapse in their minds when they played the game. Along the way, they internalized certain ideas about difference, about strength, agility, and development. Many of these ideas were expressed spatially. Players have inhabited these spaces for more than thirty years.

* I’m describing the American version, of course.

(Virtual) London: People and Places

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Photos from a single day in London in the game Watch Dogs: Legion. These people and spaces exist on a virtual machine within a Google server.

This photo essay is part of an ongoing exploration of video game spaces on this blog. This is only the second post. I explain what I’m trying to do here. If you like this, maybe you’ll like the rest of the series as it develops.

Video Game Spaces: Halo

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“When we gazed upon all this splendour at once, we scarcely knew what to think, and we doubted whether all that we beheld was real.”  

Bernal Diaz del Castillo, The Conquest of Mexico and New Spain

You land on a strange “installation” and there are a few moments of silence for you to take in this unique world. After a quick look around at the clearing where your shuttle crash-landed, you make your way across a narrow bridge high above a bubbling stream. To the right, the stream cascades down a well-beaten course cut through a precipitous rocky valley. To the left, this. This expanse of land, water and sky slicing the inky vastness of space. There is a dialectic of sublime beauty and precarious terror in this space. You feel as though you could peer into the cumulus distance for hours, exclaiming at the wonder of it all like Bernal Diaz del Castillo and his murderous crew of invaders. They felt as alien in Tenochtitlan as you feel in this place. The only choice, though, is to pass through an evergreen grove up the rough path leading toward the source of the stream. There is gunwork ahead, unfortunately. 

What I want to suggest, in this and future posts about video game spaces, is that games are a new design commons — a new public architecture that we should take just as seriously as we do “real” spaces. We inhabit games for longer periods of time than we inhabit most public spaces. I’ve spent more time running around the archives level on GoldenEye than I have spent in church; far more time driving around the virtual streets of San Andreas than riding the subway in New York City. All of these spaces were shaped by human hands and minds for humans to inhabit. 

I also hope to think through some of the design problems inherent in games. These are not democratic spaces, for example, and they are not free in any sense of the word. Burning electricity instead of calories, too, may not be sustainable for our bodies or the planet. As in Halo, violence is the dark centerpiece of most video game spaces, as well. What cultural work are these costly, undemocratic, and violent realms performing? Are we designing and inhabiting beautiful hellscapes? 

I’ll share spaces in games here when the inspiration strikes. I hope you can use them to question your assumptions about architecture, landscape, and industrial design, as I am. At the very least, I hope that you can appreciate their beauty and the skill that goes into designing and building them. 

The Incredible Machine

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Somehow this 20 second clip of a solution to a level of the 1993 Sierra DOS classic The Incredible Machine represents the entirety of my creative output for today.

Honestly, though, I spent a fair bit of time running into walls all day while trying to solve problems for work. That was after going home sick, too, so I’m going to let this stand for today and get back to it tomorrow.

For what it’s worth, this is the very first video I’ve ever uploaded to YouTube. So there’s that, too. Here’s to more exciting videos in the future!