Part 1, Introduction.
In the video game “The Division 2”, released in 2019 by Ubisoft, you are given the ability to explore the White House building in the U.S. capital, abandoned by the president and his staff after a terrorist attack, and now occupied by the military as a temporary H.Q.
After exploring the various corridors and other less notable rooms, one can finally enter the heart, the nucleus of the building: the presidential Oval Office. Upon arriving there, however, you could find yourself disappointed with what is offered. It does look what one might expect, from having seen countless photos, footage and recreations of the room in the media.
Apart from some upturned chairs, one can see some ornamental vases, statues flanking the main presidential desk, the notable red curtains, the iconic bay windows, the mounted flag nearby at rest, and so on. All seems there, all replicated and accounted for. The sofas, with their cushions nicely resting, the polished seal luxuriously set on the floor. The desk in the centre drawing attention, with some expected stationery and papers strewn upon it. All acting in their visual role as testimony to this impressive mimetic recreation of a normally unapproachable space.
But while exploring the whole room, this now quite readily accessible space, the moving player will soon find themselves empty handed. The Oval Office remains, essentially to anyone concerned with playing the game, an empty room. There is nothing to physically pick up, no notes to read, no non-player characters to interact with, no events to discover, no maps showing new locations, no missions to activate and begin, no cut scenes to trigger. In the context of playing video games, in the context of what is most important for the practice of playing a video game, the room is empty.
One might argue the room still has quantifiable purpose. Even though there is nothing to do or find in that room that is game specific, the room exists to be seen, walked around in and explored. The room still speaks: how it would be to inhabit, to walk and look around, in an existing and recreated space that copies the real room outside of it — a nicely executed facsimile of a unique, singularly existing, normally exclusionary presidential room.
That ability, gifted to the player by the game, remains. A partially mimetic sensory experience that in real life would be improbable if not impossible to achieve.
Furthermore, if one could imagine the representation in “Division 2” having been constructed under a much baser level of representation, say, such as that offered by earlier historic forms of game design, the contrast is far more obvious. When compared with the once popular text based adventures of the eighties, one can see something much richer, more complex, more real being displayed in Division 2’s reconstruction of the oval room, than, say, just a green lit sentence on an old IBM computer screen spelling out: “You are in the Oval Office.”
Just by making a near-enough facsimile of the real room in a virtual world, to make that room be there, it adds to the fullness of the game. It’s not just an unnecessary excess that could be safely discarded by game designers if they wished to do so. if this was done, it would break suspension of disbelief by the player. If the White House exists in this game, why can’t I go and see the Oval Office?
On a more fundamental level, reality as depicted by the game depends on a long chain of created, interlinked and dependent local virtual realities. Without the proper representation of that room in the game, the White House as an existing geographical setting would not ring true as an existing copy of a politically, historically and culturally charged space. Without an Oval Office existing within it, there is no true White House — beyond that, no real surrounding capital, and so on, further on indefinitely, from the smallest significant to the largest.
Stretching out to the confines of the game’s geographical space, each location, each depiction, gives credence to the other.
The veracity of that represented room, graphically portrayed in a three-dimensional space, is necessary for the game to function in the mind of the player. If only symbolically; if only in terms of the experience of a connection of spaces made justified by each other, all for the sake of proper near-verisimilitude.
What of this addition, this qualification: “if only”?
The strategy of “keeping it real” locks the game designers into a forced performance of graphical one-upmanship. If the oval room looks that real, so the pavement in that street has to look proportionally just as real, the garbage can near it, the garbage inside it, the animated rat peering on top scrimmaging its contents, and so on almost indefinitely.
If another game released that year looks “that good”, then the expectation remains that their game “will look just as good if not better”.
All of this production work restrained correspondingly only by time, money, current technological ability and a pool of skilled workers coding away. The strategy thus has to eventually shift away from an idealized, ultimately impossible one-on-one recreation to: “How much realism do we need?” Or: “How little realism can we create and get away with?”
The possibility of varying the level of realism depicted suggests that the graphical factor in a game might be superseded by more pressing concerns during production. It is a background that the player and developer don’t keep as predominantly important, compared to actual performance of the game and game-play. At least, the quality of graphics is a variable of differing flexibility, of workable modality, unrelated or lesser to the direct effect of quality of game-play on the player.
It is a background that is not of sole concern to the player, but it is however the first to be evaluated, to be “seen”. First-look footage of game-play might be released by developers for public consumption well before actual game release, as a method of bringing the game to the wider public’s attention. The media might report on it, and the community of interested gamers might collectively watch it.
However, behind this, for the interested but suspicious viewer, there is always another concern. Behind the graphics as spectacle, the main concern is to try to see how the game operates, without having the full ability to play it in person. If it is real game-play, not doctored or simulated, then the viewer will have the opportunity to see enacted game-play, albeit by another, off-screen “player” playing it as proxy for the viewer’s.
There is usually a precondition of suspicion when the public is only given visual footage of game-play, with no ability to play it. The game’s visual state, cut off from concrete and sustained play experience, remains divorced from the the more vital experience of playing it, and is thus perceived as untrustworthy. It is the unimportant “background” to the game, this offered bare visuality. The more substantive “foreground” is only discoverable by having the ability to actually play the game for a period of time, as a method of evaluating its worth. Its this named “foreground” that contributes to giving the player, the community and game reviewers a more honest, direct experience of the game.
Going in a more crude cultural tangent, “the background” as a metaphor also applies as a condition of experience when outliers experience the game in a partial mode, such as when parents watch their children play a video-game.
Sometimes, one is happy in “the background”, out of choice, out of preference, out of no real desire to play the game. From whatever reason or justification, the outlier occupies “the background” of game experience. To comprehend, all that is needed for them is to see.
That person standing behind you might ask, “Is this the game where you shoot and kill people?” as this might be what they see being acted out before them. Or they might say, “How is this game affecting the player?” having not played it themselves.
The person inexperienced with video games might be told what the game is about by another player. This transference of partial truth goes on and on, to others, as a method of experience being passed on. As untroubled inexperience, as hearsay, as suggestion, as “they said that”. Doubly removed, supposition is passed on and on, unmade and reconstituted, imagined and re-imagined.
This method is structured on not complying, not accepting, closing the open possibility, evident in various strategies of rejection, of dismissal, of risible, intentional disabling: the late night presenter who plays the game as a TV skit, the games company PR team creating a campaign which is seen to undervalue or grossly misunderstand the game, the TV news bite revealing the game as an addiction to warn parents, the radio jock speaking about the social threat present in the game’s depictions, and so on.
All these positions towards the game can be defined as outlier positions, viewing or perceiving the game as background, with someone actively and extensively playing the game occupying the foreground position.
All the cultural baggage surrounding that game, taken from sources that cross-pollinate indefinitely — these outliers, these outlying positions are all, in a way, causing a certain specific understanding of the game. Behind this background outlier stance, there remains the evident lack of experience, partial or otherwise — divorced from how the game expresses itself when played extensively.
It should be noted however, that this “background” view is essentially lesser, not because of the intent or attitude of the outlier, but from their partial acquisition of the totality of the game as an experience. It is not how they peculiarly perceive the game that makes it a state of background knowledge, but their method of acquisition severed from the foreground.
This background stance can only be seen as lesser or partial in comparison to the foreground stance, in how it does not have in possession the foreground experience, or only partially manages to acquire it by viewing gameplay. But also it could be argued that the outlier sees the background more clearly than the player, and correspondingly, the player sees the foreground more clearly than the outlier. The outlier backgrounds foreground while foregrounding background, and the player vice versa. Both have advantaged states of knowledge acquisition which the other one lacks or possesses only partially.
However it could be argued that for the player both background and foreground are meant to work together (in some reciprocal ratio) when he or she plays, or more correctly, when he or she puts the game under a steady practice of playing.
Furthermore, as a player of the game, this method of comprehension, of playing the actual game, is ultimately the way the game was intended to be experienced after release. All the effort, all the construction, all this carefully assembled play was meant to be directed solely to the player playing it. This background and foreground experience, married in some degree of reciprocity (the background helping the foreground work, the foreground bringing the background to focus and relevance), was created for the player’s overall experience and understanding — the end product shaped, controlled and directed by games designers for the target player’s sole benefit of comprehension.
To better understand this background/foreground split, one can take an example concocted from real life. Imagine being presented with a photograph of an office, and asked to figure out what actually occurs in that office.
This hypothetical office, as depicted by a hypothetical photograph, is in reality infested with things to do, things to be done and interacted in a certain way, and not in other ways.
The stapler depicted in the initial photograph might only accept a certain row of staples, which must be requested by the stationery clerk, who comes round each afternoon at 3 pm. That photocopier might need a code to access, so the person in the office handing access has to be spoken to, and its additional scanning functions explained. The laptop on the desk might be available to be loaned to staff if a certain senior staff member is approached. The manila folder resting on a set of books, as seen partially in the photo, details a crucial business strategy that everyone should know during that month. The phone needs to be dialed out first with a “09” for making outside calls, and the other phone depicted on the other side of the photo accepts only certain types of incoming callers, clients making complaints, which have to be dealt with in a such and such manner, by a certain rostered person, and so on.
Out of these, more complex tasks can be imagined. When writing a simple report, the photocopier might be used to scan relevant pages, the stapler for collating pages, the laptop to borrow that night for further work, the folder consulted on while working on the report, businesses contacted by dialing out on that particular phone, and so on.
These functions in the photograph are there visually, but remain hidden. The items that perform these functions, which build further to facilitate more complex functions, are clearly visible in the photograph, but their idiosyncratic and quite specific context-locked functions, the things they do, and the specificity within that act of doing, are not on display in that same photograph. More and more of these items can be presumed, can imagined to exist, from that imaginary photo of that imagined office space. Multiplying in various important and unimportant states of being, linking in cross-purpose indefinitely — thick with presence, local-historical use and function.
Yes, the photocopier depicted in the photograph can deduced to make copies of pages, as all photocopiers do, just as a gun seen in a game screen can be deduced to shoot, or a horse seen in the game suggest the possibility of a player being able to ride it. But the context that locks each item into a set of numerous ranged possibilities, of various set actions linked and built in into the function of that seen thing, that context is not readily available to the eye, but must be learnt by hands-on experience: by working in that office, or playing that game.
So the background (the photograph of the office) is contrasted with the foreground: how functions hidden within that office function when used in person.
Backtracking to that Oval Office in “The Division 2”, the empty room is empty because it lacks those things that make it much more relevant to players, much more important than just visual background. What it lacks is those same functions, things or states of being that have true measurable function in the game.
Functions, or “things” in the game thus can be said to have functional states of being, separate from objects whose only function is to act as visual window dressing — objects or states of being that only have graphical and spatial presence and no interactive play-ability.
I would perhaps metaphorically call these function-laden entities “things” if only to stress their essential solidity within the context of games. Instead of emptiness, of non-function, or barely any function, instead of residing in the background, instead of bearing slight, amorphous and vague qualities that have little or no bearing to the playing of the game, these “things”, these functional things, they instead make themselves evident by their materialism, their facticity, their specificity, their fullness, their function.
They exist far more than is superficially seen, they are foregrounded by play, but remain hidden to the eye.
(upcoming post: “Part 2, Functions in games explored.”)