MFA Computational Arts Blog Week 1

During last year’s degree show I presented a collaborative project with artist Jonas Pequeno, Mono no aware, which took form as a game-like endless generative virtual environment. As a player explores, the environment is generated in realtime, spawning objects representing absurd interpretations of nature extracted from metadata scraped as part of Pequeno’s folksonomy research practice.

The passive play mechanics of the work took inspiration from the walking simulator video-game genre, attempting to pose an alternative to the violence historically enacted in video-games. As Hito Steyerl points out, video-games generally perpetuate an ideal militaristic, capitalist worldview, in which players enact violence and are economically rewarded for it. Continuing with this idea, I wanted to research further into the ethics of the military-entertainment complex and the close relationship of the history of video-games with military training simulations to further inform and develop our collaborative project.

Simon Penny points out the indistinguishable similarities between video-games and military simulation software developed by DARPA, such as the multi-player vehicle combat simulation SIMNET, which became intergrated into the Synthetic Theatre Of War. Penny also highlights the MARKS military shooting simulation which is actually manufactured by Nintendo, famous for their family friendly video games, which is essentially the same as their commercial home video game Duck Hunt, however featuring M16s and people as targets rather than the more “family friendly” representation of toy guns and pixelated ducks.

Ed Halter suggests that while not directly created for the military, video games arose from an environment “entirely predicated on defense research”, with the earliest transferable video game software Spacewar! having been created by students in the computing department of MIT on the PDP-1. Many of the technologies that video-games rely on were developed by DARPA, including computer graphics and the navigation of 3D virtual environments.

References:

Hito Steyerl (2017), Why Games, Or, Can Art Workers Think?

Simon Penny (2004), Representation, Enaction, and the Ethics of Simulation

Ed Halter (2006), From Sun Tzu to Xbox