In the following, we shall examine how the character of the avatar undergoes changes in "avatar-consciousness" and how the system of "See you in Walhalla" begins to introduce its levels (challenges, obstacles, and accidents).
1. Notes on Game Design
In general terms, the game theme provides a meaningful context for everything that takes place in the game world. Game environments provide the space for components, procedures, narratives, and actions. It is obvious that the game environment is critical, as it is specific to each individual game. In its defining features, a computer game can be described as ‘a rule-based formal system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable.’ ( James Newman, Videogames. London, 2004, pp.16-18)
While the attraction of games may reside in their theme, the characters, and the aesthetics of the game environment, it has been often been said that the immersive quality of gaming resides in the player activity, and thus it involves a psychological dimension which is collectivized in the theatre with the audience identifying with the avatar-actor carrying the interactive experience. If we apply current thinking on relational aesthetics to this identification, the avatar consciousness thus becomes the participatory audience consciousness: the audience would want the avatar to carry out certain actions or empathize with the challenges faced by the avatar. These challenges are expericed primarily, as in all games, through kinetic consciousnes, through the senses. The relationship is transparent and direct, activated by the movement into the visual environment which is performed continuously as a convivial motion through images. In this respect, the use sensors on the avatar to make the avatar-actor become directly linked to the image-movement generates a heightened, intuitive relationship to the image world, at least in so far as the audience can perceive or feel the direct physical connection of the avatar to the world.A computer game has to challenge, it must provide exciting situations to experience, stimulating puzzles to engage with, and interesting environments to explore. ‘Gratification,’ game theorists have said, ‘is not simply or effortlessly meted out.’ The pleasure of such play, furthermore, ‘is derived from the refinement of performance through replay and practice. Consequently, it is essential that obstacles, irrespective of the form they take, must be “real” in that they must require non-trivial effort to conquer them.’
What are the obstacles in the Walhalla scenario? And how affective is the effort performed by the avatar?
The centrality of participation and the sense of ‘being there’ also suggests that the player demands interaction in order to effectively feel she is enacting or role-playing the fantasy, and thus one of the design questions for "Walhalla" concerned this role playing fantasy, and the moving toward gain or loss. In games, ‘it is the primacy afforded to doing and performing that renders “non-interactive cut-scenes” so unappealing to players,’ as such movie sequences prevent direct control or interactivity.The obstacles in "See you in Walhalla" are less of a thematic nature (plot related) than they are of a kinetico-digital nature: the avatar is a performer using wearable technology (sensors), and her experience of the game is, at the same time, the im-mediate controlling of the image-world and instantaneous muscular/gestural coordination of the image-world which is also, in return, affecting the expressive quality of the movements.
.
.
Ermira in the city at night
2. Notes on Live Performance Games
Can we argue that choreography, in this case, becomes a movement design which challenges the audience not so much in terms of a physical task or physical complexity, as it would be experienced in a dance performance where our brain and kinetic awareness mirror the motor-sensory action, but in terms of the visual journey into the movement-images themselves, the visual affect of the image-world on the senses and on sense perception? Is the experience of the "game" an experience of how the actor navigates, and is navigated by, the images?
Secondly, if we compare the composition of this new work to other advances in the field of dance and technology and digital art, it is obvious that "live game" here means digital choreography with a particular focus on how the dancer using wearable sensors can "edit" or compose image-coordinations in real time and in effect create the illusion of moving inside a virtual game environment (not a physical stage or representational scenic space).
A few months ago, Scott deLahunta refered to a conference at IRCAM on choreographic computations, explaining that the research objective at IRCAM focused on new innovations combining motion capture and computer-based techniques with choreography and performance, an area in which several international artists and researchers have been breaking new ground. The software artists and programmers involved in the IRCAM workshop explored a range of heterogeneous computer concepts and approaches from agent-based aesthetics to the development of new tools and pathways to support collaborative composition (using software platforms and environments such as EyesWeb, Isadora, MnM and Fluid). Through their close collaboration with choreographers (e.g. Trisha Brown, Myriam Gourfink and Dawn Stoppiello), a shared understanding of movement and gesture has evolved to support the application of complex algorithmic procedures to equally complex choreographic creation. Together these practitioners are carving out fresh territory for correspondences between choreography and computation.(dance-tech list, 4.6.2006)
Something similar can be said for the "Walhalla" project, except that our group is not using motion capture but sensors, wearable technologies, and interfaces with live webcam streams incorporated into the performance. The question of choreographic creation, therefore, is shifted to the exploration of the sensorial interface and the tele-communicational dimension - the telepresence of real-time communication and the perceptual choreography of moving the film/wearing the film (manipulating the computer-programmed environment and images of remote physical presence through bodily motility).
Is the game an uninterrupted movement? On a technical and computational level, it could be said that the computer program provides a continuous sequencing of digital movies and live webstreams (the prereorded film sequences are looped and run continuously, the webcam streams are live real time), allowing the real time editing and synthesis of all image-instruments. The controlling of the images can be done at the computer keyboard and through the dancer herself who is wearing the sensors transmitting signals to the program. Conceptually, the "Walhalla" game is written to send the avatar into the game world, i.e. the Player sends the avatar on her mission. As the game moves forward, the avatar increasingly learns the movements that are generally controlled by the game engine and is no longer just "animated" by the Player, but animates herself and her environment. This détournement of the "game" amounts to a new interpretation of the meaning of tele-action. The game-engine or computational program does not determine an uninterrupted spiralling course of action, level by level, but allows degrees of freedom which only exist in real-time physical action. On a semantic level, this implies that the avatar can learn how to edit the image-instruments through anatomical play of muscles and limbs, through isolations and release technique, through movement intelligence.
Abandoned avatar in Amsterdam (Nancy on webcam) and Ermira
What is most interesting, therefore, from a conceptual point of view, are the accidents that might happen when the avatar, gaining consciousness of her im-mediate physical incorporation of the digital world as well as her encounters with the completely unpredictable webcam images streaming from Amsterdam and Sofia, acts upon the environment or fuses with the image-interfaces. We cannot really speak of "choreography" in a traditional sense anymore, as movement momentum, energy, individual gestures and reactions are all intertwined with the performer's proprioceptive interactions, her "wearing of the film" and moving through the visual-kinetic world. Whether this world is perceived as a game is another question. In light of the urban film materials and the graphics, it cannot be precisely determined whether the virtual world is computer-generated or realist illusion (representational), often the visual dimensions are intermixed, there are overlays, masks, filters and manipulations of image movement (freeze, forward and backward motion, speed up, slow down, exaggerated pixilation, color, black and white, etc) which make it hard to define real world, remote world, constructed world. There is no ontological ground, but the emotional density and reality of the "live game" appears to happen especially in those moments when the avatar, in her encounter with the abandoned avatar (Nancy Mauro-Flude) in the NewMarkt streets of Amsterdam, realizes a connection to someone whose sense of being lost or being in actual danger is affecting her from a distance. This expresses itself in a different quality of disorientation, or perhaps the live stream here has the effect of a momentary break-down of the game, of the system itself. The digital urban world, which seemed so seamlessly powerful and real, is transformed by a few silent gestures which are captured, ironically, by a webcam that tends to have the perspective of a mute surveillancce camera, blind to what it sees, blinded by the myth of interactivity.
In one of the concluding scenes of "See you in Walhalla," however, this accident happens literally, the avatar is hit by a car that is speeding down the slackhill of the Göttelborn Coal Mine in the dark, the avatar sees the lights too late and is almost run over. She falls and is knocked out, for a moment, before regaining consciousness. She finds herself on the pavement which turns into water, she begins to float on the canals of Amsterdam. The night sky is above, lights merging with lights.
In these concluding scenes, the "destiny" of the system, or the individual destinies of the Player or the Avatars are moving to the foreground. The avatar is about to become a fallen goddess? Consciousness of action is questioned, and coming into being through movement (learning the body, learning wearing the environment, learning certain disciplines and imitating behaviors that can generate new in-sights) punished as an original sin? What are the sights we see, and what are the sights we cannot see (the para-sights)? Can we hear the war and remember it?
(For a critical reflection on interactivity, refering back to last year's Interaktionslabor, see Paulo C. Chagas, "The Blindness Paradigm: The Visibility and Invisibility of the Body")
(For a critical essay on "hearing the war," see Thomas Burkhalter, "Thank you, for letting me listen to the war again", Die Zeit, 03.08.2006)
