Thursday, February 28, 2008

On Space and Freedom

Professor Chun said something in class on Wednesday that I found particularly interesting: new media "spaces" are not experienced as maps, but rather as tours. As a relatively experienced videogame-player (albeit not always a very good one), this seemed incredibly true to me. One of my favorite things to do in videogames is explore; to have the ability to do almost anything you want, when you want to. Obviously there are games that this doesn’t work with; games like Halo and other cinematic first-person shooters often follow distinct plotlines, and it wouldn’t really make sense to "explore," as you’re basically reenacting a set plot. In this sense, these games are tours; you can move about freely and "do what you want," but to progress through the game, you need to do the right thing. You’re being led on a set path, rather than forging your own.

However, I argue that all games follow a set path, no matter what the developers claim. Manovich quotes Myst developer Robyn Miller in his essay on navigable space: "We are creating environment to just wander around inside of. People have been calling it a game for lack of anything better, and we’ve called it a game at times. But that’s not what it really is; it’s a world." And it is a world, in some sense. But not as much as Miller would like to believe; although you can "wander around inside of it," and even have variable outcomes based on your actions, you’re still following a set path with a definitive ending.

We could examine other games. If anyone remembers the release of Fable for the Xbox, it was heralded as "complete freedom" where you could be as good or as evil as you wanted with your character. What resulted was a good game, but severely limited by a set path you had to follow (also, it only took 10 hours to beat). I recall reading someone’s review on a message board that had a line that emphasized the lack of freedom: "you can do whatever you want, as long as you follow the fucking path."

The Sims might also be seen as a world of freedom. You control a person and all aspects of their life – they eat, work, sleep and bathe on your command. But it is still restricted to the game design; you can’t play with objects in the game in ways that haven’t been programmed. The closest we may get to a new media space that is truly free is Second Life, where you really can do just about anything – as long as it obeys the rules set by the game.

But this suggests an issue with reality; do we live in a map-like space, or a tour-like space? If we say that games like The Sims, and even more so, Second Life, are tour-like because they're limited by rules, then so is our own life. We are limited by laws, expectations, and requirements, and especially by simple laws of nature. What really constitutes freedom in any of these cases?

As an added note, I think it’s interesting that the difference is illustrated by a map versus a tour. After all, when you look at a map, you’re most often looking for a path from one point to another, whether you’re hiking through the mountains or driving to a friend’s house. And how is that much different from a tour?

Also, was anyone else bothered by the frustrating navigation style and long loading times in Myst IV? I mean, it was innovative for the time of the original, but static positions connected by paths are terribly annoying to navigate through when you compare them to modern 3D navigation schemes.

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