"Like dreams, video games stage theatres of individual psyche; like dreams, they image and narrate desires and anxieties; like dreams, they explore dramatization and explore imaginary positions. Thus, video games are devices in which players individually and collectively deposit psychic processes. These are transformative devices by which culture encrypts and decrypts the anxieties of the present time. They expose and explain the transformations we are experiencing and the anxieties they generate, whether they concern social bodies or individual bodies. Video games are one of the places where we can develop the social and individual anxieties that culture offers us."
Yann Leroux
*
In a nutshell, some notes I took before an interview with Yann Leroux about the places in video games, an issue on which he is conducting a study.
– My relationship to exploration in videogames is identical to my relationship to walking in real life. I don't necessarily need exoticism or exceptional places to see; just the need to walk and feel conscious, attentive, open to the outside world. The pleasure of discovering an unknown street, seeing a familiar place from a different angle... Be attentive to my own emotions and thoughts that come with the places visited and their own atmosphere. I consider this as a form of meditation.
– Gone home: the place is a narrative in itself. You also project your own anxieties, regardless of the story behind the game — which made me very uncomfortable almost like a horror game, even though that is not your first or only intention.
– Syberia. Pathologic. Some buildings, some atmospheres remind me of real, dreamlike places, or places that exist in me on these two levels. The city of Nancy and my hometown, their dilapidated industrial zones, dilapidated... I have a complicated relationship to these places: nostalgia mixed with anxiety. But I need to go back there constantly.
– There is a pleasure of seeing a living world (inhabited places, which evolve or at least follow a rhythm) and living a "daily life" — jogging in Los Santos.
– Second Life: move forward as if in an incoherent dream, from zone to zone, from atmosphere to atmosphere. Fantasies of voyeurism (entering people's homes). Real places adapted in SL (Saarbrucken).
– This war of mine: paradox — places that are pleasant to me, where I want to spend time, to be able to act more, that make me feel good, whereas they are objectively places of suffering, of anxiety. The same paradox with Planescape Torment and its aesthetics of dirt, debris, corpses — these games and atmospheres resonate with recurring dreams in me, and "objectively" disturbing, whether they are frightening or not at the moment.
– Fallout 1 & 2: some places are generated randomly, during the encounters on the map, and allow us to fantasize about an immense world even if we only see it in fragments. Isometric 3D also creates a distance, making the experience more "childish" (little men who move on a representation of space, seen from outside and above, as in a board game). Places are perceived and experienced differently depending on the type of graphics used.
– I do not necessarily expect, moreover, that the places of a game offer me an ultra-realistic space, but that they will offer me a space where I can act (places are useless if we can do nothing about it), and an understandable space, which has its identity (even Wasteland has this charm there) and therefore, its beauty.
– Fallout NV: Powerful memory of my first trip without dying to New Vegas, bypassing the most dangerous areas and shooting my way through with a low-level character. Long after, fascinating rediscovery of the game, by the slowness — having fixed myself as constrained to always walk, never run. The ability to move very quickly removes the "weight" of places and distances, and promotes a purely utilitarian relationship to places. We no longer "see" them.
– Daggerfall: intellectual, abstract fascination for the insane size of the map. The places themselves are of no interest (we have seen a city and a piece of countryside, and we have seen everything) but the pleasure they bring lies in the idea, not in the experience.
In a nutshell, some notes I took before an interview with Yann Leroux about the places in video games, an issue on which he is conducting a study.
– My relationship to exploration in videogames is identical to my relationship to walking in real life. I don't necessarily need exoticism or exceptional places to see; just the need to walk and feel conscious, attentive, open to the outside world. The pleasure of discovering an unknown street, seeing a familiar place from a different angle... Be attentive to my own emotions and thoughts that come with the places visited and their own atmosphere. I consider this as a form of meditation.
– Gone home: the place is a narrative in itself. You also project your own anxieties, regardless of the story behind the game — which made me very uncomfortable almost like a horror game, even though that is not your first or only intention.
– Syberia. Pathologic. Some buildings, some atmospheres remind me of real, dreamlike places, or places that exist in me on these two levels. The city of Nancy and my hometown, their dilapidated industrial zones, dilapidated... I have a complicated relationship to these places: nostalgia mixed with anxiety. But I need to go back there constantly.
– There is a pleasure of seeing a living world (inhabited places, which evolve or at least follow a rhythm) and living a "daily life" — jogging in Los Santos.
– Second Life: move forward as if in an incoherent dream, from zone to zone, from atmosphere to atmosphere. Fantasies of voyeurism (entering people's homes). Real places adapted in SL (Saarbrucken).
– This war of mine: paradox — places that are pleasant to me, where I want to spend time, to be able to act more, that make me feel good, whereas they are objectively places of suffering, of anxiety. The same paradox with Planescape Torment and its aesthetics of dirt, debris, corpses — these games and atmospheres resonate with recurring dreams in me, and "objectively" disturbing, whether they are frightening or not at the moment.
– Fallout 1 & 2: some places are generated randomly, during the encounters on the map, and allow us to fantasize about an immense world even if we only see it in fragments. Isometric 3D also creates a distance, making the experience more "childish" (little men who move on a representation of space, seen from outside and above, as in a board game). Places are perceived and experienced differently depending on the type of graphics used.
– I do not necessarily expect, moreover, that the places of a game offer me an ultra-realistic space, but that they will offer me a space where I can act (places are useless if we can do nothing about it), and an understandable space, which has its identity (even Wasteland has this charm there) and therefore, its beauty.
– Fallout NV: Powerful memory of my first trip without dying to New Vegas, bypassing the most dangerous areas and shooting my way through with a low-level character. Long after, fascinating rediscovery of the game, by the slowness — having fixed myself as constrained to always walk, never run. The ability to move very quickly removes the "weight" of places and distances, and promotes a purely utilitarian relationship to places. We no longer "see" them.
– Daggerfall: intellectual, abstract fascination for the insane size of the map. The places themselves are of no interest (we have seen a city and a piece of countryside, and we have seen everything) but the pleasure they bring lies in the idea, not in the experience.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire