I’m gradually leaving the malaise of crashing out over the last few weeks behind. I tire of video games, I yearn for normal sleep patterns. I want to press the little nodule next to items on my reminders list and see them fly away.

As an academic my ‘year’ is aligned to September. This can be confusing in conversation with normies when you refer to ‘next year’ as October and they, like common folk, talk about January. However, it does give you a good long run up of August to get your New Year’s Resolutions together. The scramble for virtuous attributes that takes place in the six days at the end of December for others can be stretched out over a couple of guilt-free weeks in August.

I’m currently writing a piece for an architecture journal about rendering and futures and I’m trying to hunt down an idea I glanced across, I’m sure from Ian Bogost related to this tweet about the Last of Us 2. Basically things that video games find easy, cinema finds hard; breaking the laws of physics, the destruction of entire cities, superhuman feats. However, things that cinema finds easy, video games find hard, like having a character put on a t-shirt or have a piece of rope fall convincingly. It made me consider what a counter-narrative of the development of video games and consequently computer generated imagery might be. Steam is now littered with simulators descended from the original Flight Simulator model; farming, truck driving, bus driving, street cleaning, cooking and so on. Rather than being the same stuff of satire as one of the greatest Onion headlines of all time – World of World of Warcraft – these are best-selling ‘games’ that use engines developed for masculine fantasies. They’re a sort of sub-genre of knowingly tongue-in-cheek and cheap to produce play spaces. They’re cheap to produce because they’re basically re-skinning of each other, of existing underlying game engines developed for much bigger games.

But, what if it had been the other way round? What if the search for realism wasn’t in realising the unseen or unvisualised destructive fantasies of young men to blow up cities but in simulating normalcy? What if first-person shooters were janky reskins of AAA cooking simulators? The ironic hilarity of a lot of these simulator games is in the inability of the game engines to deal with macro-level normal physics like picking things up or folding things because the game engines developed for say, blasting your way across the D-Day landings don’t require you to stop and fold anything. However, if the industry started by saying ‘one day we’ll be able to have really convincing cloth folding’ rather than ‘immersive open worlds’ how might folks developing weird, ‘shooting simulators’ have dealt with the lack of explosion or bullet physics in these excellent folding engines?

That’s a project for another time, a speculative alternate history of game engines.

Incidentally, Microsoft has employed some AI in the new Flight Simulator to model the entire world from flat data but it has problem’s – like rendering Buckingham Palace as a 90’s office building.

Anyway, apart from this writing I’ve been playing with the way I use my Instagram. I feel the era of evocative fixed-point perspective shots may be coming to an end. I love the stories feature, and I know they’re trying to make it like Tik-Tok but I’ve started using it for just sharing things I’m seeing and reading. No-one’s said they hate it so I’m going to keep going.

I’ve also returned to an old habit that I used to have of doing a weekly ‘digital sketch’; just playing around in Blender for an hour or so to do something new. This week’s is up there ↑ and I’ll try and do one each week as long as I can.

Short Stuff

• I discovered that John Hansard Gallery have accidentally [?] left up David Blandy’s two online project commissions, one of which – How To Fly –  uses Grand Theft Auto V’s director mode. Grand Theft Auto V is the biggest selling media product of all time, arguably having more of an affect on human culture than any other media product, yet it gets short schrift. I was talking with Mark Hurrell about the fetishisation of indie games as part of a process of acculturating video games to the bougie curatorial class, like it’s ok to talk about video games in intellectual circles as long as they’re indie and niche then everyone goes home and plays Call of Duty. Yes, I am talking about you.
• Here’s a Wikipedia hole via Reddit on the current state of theories of consciousness. The tl;dr is that it’s either a product of information processing which suggests it could arise in non-living things or that it’s an imagined property of all the things the brain does. Or somewhere in between.
• Here’s a thread from hateful Irish microblog Twitter dot com on Moebius transformations to 3D environments. It’s an improvement on the non-Euclidian geometry engine of the other week in that it’s more based in actual modellable maths rather than a trick. Again, there’s some good Wikipedia hole time to be sunk in that thread.
• Feminist Internet have started a new blog: The Recode, not to be confused with Kara Swisher’s notable outfit. Seems like it’s going to be a great site of tech ethics debate. Similarly, my colleague Chirsotpher Lutterodt-Quarcoo has started a new podcast called Manoeuvres which has a lot of vowels in it. It’s got a sense of Reply-All to it, in that it digs deep into the stories behind contemporary stories. I’ve listened to the first one on Khashoggi and it was great. It’s on iTunes and Spotify too.
• I linked it up above while banging on about video games but Let’s Game it Out is good for a laugh.

That’s it for this week. Love you, see you next week.