Wed Section, Space to be conquered?

"With its metaphors of navigation and homesteading," the internet is a lot like the frontier of the American west. The idea of being able to conquer the internet, this endless abyss, requires that the web be spatialized into a map, or outlined once someone discovers new places. Movies and video games have given us a vision of the internet to that stays in our heads while we are surfing the web, but in reality there is no way that a physical map of the internet could ever exist.

Instead of being made of places, as we discussed in class on Monday, the internet is more of a space. A space to explore, learn, and speak opinions. Instead of being able to create a map of locations and places, websites give us space to leave our opinion. We leave our mark via blogging, commenting, and sharing files. These message boards and online discussions are proof that humans explore the new frontier, even if nothing physical can be mapped.

Reading other people's posts remind the user that they are not the first to explore a particular site. While exploring western America was a race to see who could discover places first, the internet is the exact opposite. The longer you wait to visit a site after it is created/posted, the more interesting it is to read as you can materialize other opinions and see the marks they left behind.

The only case in which this isn't true is when shopping online. If one waits too long to log on and purchase items, certain items may be sold out. While this is an elementary use of the internet, this proves an interesting connection between the internet being an ethereal space vs. physical place. Online actions that are materialized (ie, something physical is delivered that you virtually ordered) do not fit into the theory that one can always wait to visit the site. The site itself will will exist for a very long period of time, but items may be sold out quickly. Uses of the internet that provide tangible results need to be treated differently than blogs and opinion sites.

As Manovich explains, "navigable space is subjective space, its architecture responding to the subject's movement and emotion." Most websites, other than shopping sites, will exist for months, even years, for users to revisit and take note of all the other users that left their mark behind.

Wednesday Section, Space

Right before the start of the semester, I finished my very first videogame, Dragon Age: Origins. It was, in a word, awesome. I was completely taken with the intricacy of it—the strategy used to win fights, the careful diplomacy used to coerce other characters. My exposure to videogames (RPG or otherwise) before this was basically none. Instead, playing DAO was a journey in which I had to teach myself a completely new technology, or, to reference Daniel’s post, a set of “tools” by which I could navigate this completely fictional world (mainly, learning how to manipulate the game controller).

My experience with this ridiculously cool RPG reminds me of Manovich’s argument that computer games “return us to ancient forms of narrative in which the plot is driven by the spatial movement of the main hero [me].” This is entertainment, I’d be quite happy playing a game exactly like this for an indefinite amount of time. The storyline was derivative, yet I still was hooked. I didn’t feel the need for any expansion of the space the game gave me, in terms of story or in terms of the “virtual world” is presented—there was so much there already.

Yet, it seems that Manovich seeks to push the possibility of navigable space in new media; he sees we are “not moving any closer toward systematic space; instead, we are embracing aggregate space as a new norm.” Do we need to try harder, then, not settle for the default on computers? The reversion to older narrative, the quest, seems well-suited to the enjoyment of a videogame—it works. So, drawing that out to the Web, which is what Manovich discusses, the lack of "perspective", is it a function of immaturity, or does it simply just work, which is why it hasn’t changed? To briefly reference Jameson, who charts 3 different stages of political development, says “urgent political dilemmas are all immediately functions of the enormously complex new international space” (351). If one is a function of the other, does that leave room for the reverse to be true? I suppose in short I’d like to see to what extent society informs (the conceptions of) space/space informs society.

Wednesday 2pm Section

The nice thing for me about reading Jameson is that at least he's always explicit about his political aims. The guy is a Marxist through and through, and we can expect him to always be forthcoming with the political motivations for his analyses. In the example he gives in "Cognitive Mapping" of the failure of the League of Black Revolutionary Workers, I was struck by how a revolutionary political movement was stymied by the very structure of the dispersal of power (and, for that matter, concentrations of people) in the nation/state/city model in America. He puts it succinctly thus: "one of the enormous strengths of the superstate and its federal constitution lies in the evident discontinuities between city, state, and federal power: if you cannot make socialism in one country, how much more derisory, then, are the prospects for socialism in one city in the United States today?" (352).

I wonder about this in the context of new media as maybe the one great hope for the cognitive mapping project Jameson gestures at but cannot envision specifically. For him, this would represent the salvation of Marxism as a radically revolutionary enterprise, and it seems to me that new media, the internet, and the new ways in which we interact with the computer, as we have said, may both reinforce and undermine the traditional divisions of power within our national framework. However, what seems to me most interesting is the question of to what extent does new media and the internet expose the operations of the division of power in the US to a degree which was never before experienced? That is, since we can fairly say that the internet enables us to elide differences in the spatial location of its users all over the country and world, can we then say that it may render those differences moot, or at least trivialized?

Wed. Section; Being in Control.

"Instead of narration and description, we may be better off thinking about games in terms of narrative actions and exploration." (Manovich)
"'We are creating environments 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.'" (Manovich)
"'A lot of them [fiction writers] develop their individual characters in detail, and they say what is their problem in the beginning, and what they are going to grow to learn in the end. That's not the method I've used ... I have the world. I have the message. And then the characters are there to support the world and the message'" (Manovich)
"Given that new media are most often experienced, like paintings, via a rectangular frame, virtual architects can study how painters organize their spaces within the constraints of a rectangle." (Manovich)

During section, I would like to focus on the above quotations from Manovich's article. I find it fascinating that he differentiates the terms "narration and description" with "narrative action and exploration." In particular, I would like to focus on the map versus an exploration/visit/tour. When explorers navigated physical space, they used maps and there are certain ways and protocols involved with reading a map (along with different sets of tools). First with map, you can figure out where you are by using a compass and looking around your surroundings to see if the river is flowing a certain way, or if there is a moutainpeak there etc, etc to orient yourself. With the Internet and videogames, you aren't sure where you are. The map of the internet is so vast and so expansive that you can't for certain say that "YOU ARE IN THE WHITE MOUNTAINS OF NEW HAMPSHIRE" as you would be able to if you went there. However, with the Internet, you can't just say, "Oh I'm on a blogging website" or "I am on a website about China." No, because these aren't specific enough....

I'm not sure exactly what I'm trying to say here, but I just would like to talk about the sets of tools that the interface has in order to "orient" ourselves within the unreal space. The "go back one webpage" button or the "ctrl f" button or the "return to home" or even on this website "dashboard" "my account" "help" "sign out" "view blog" and so on. There are so many choices and so many places to go, which allows for one to get lost in the space, AND/YET feel "secure" about being lost because you can always just type "gmail.com" or "google.com" and click the "back one page" button. So I guess I would like to point out and discuss how Internet, video games (the pause button, the return to home, the save key) all take in to account of our fear of insecurity. I can be sure that when I type in gmail.com, I'll be able to check my email and confirm an interview that I have this Friday...

And does this also play into our the idea that the grass is greener on the unreal side? And how is this problematic? Could this ever create a society of control -- but this is somehow not possible due to its distributive creation (i.e. how Internet/video games are now a writerly text)? And then just as a technical question, why is it that we prefer the navigation in this 2-D model and we haven't made advances with the the 3-D interactive computers? Perhaps this has to deal with our desire to feel "in control" and secure in our ability to exist both in the real world and the unreal world simultaneously.

html malfunction

Hello everyone,

Just to let you know I just realized and fixed some problems with directing html navigation. The Project is now fully functional.

Assignment #1: Getting Hypertextual

Find it here.

Monica Garcia

Control[led] Reproductions

Control[led] Reproductions: A Reading of "Postscript on the Societies of Control"

By Sean Feiner

Introduction

Experiment

Commentary

Midterm Project

Apres Moi, le Deleuze

Liberation as a form of imprisonment

We rely on our senses to perceive the world, and we are also imprisoned by the very senses of our own. As Kant argues, we can’t perceive the world without the concept of time and space --- simply because we as humans must perceive the world within our frames of perception. Various philosophers, starting with George Berkeley, have argued for the dependency of reality on perception. Philosophers of all time have already made the argument that “reality is perception”.

As technology advances, we feel more and more empowered by the explosion of information and the availability of images, videos, texts that are just a double-click away. We are able to have vivid, three-dimensional, and dynamic images of what’s going on in the world just sitting in front of our desktops and seeing through the “Windows”. The emerging technology of virtual reality even shows us a promising future of promoting our experience to an even more vivid level so that we can be immersed in the environment. These devices aid us in perceiving the world by providing an extra layer of perceptual senses: we expand our horizon to the range of the whole Internet and enhance our ability to perceive the world with the aid of the HiFi sound system etc. However, this extra layer of perceptual devices, at the same time of aiding us in perceiving the world, also brings about the danger of preventing us from the true world. Information is highly dependent on interface: the impression we are able to get is filtered by the characteristics of our desktops. We rely on these devices, yet they imprison us as well. Senses, language, and Windows: they are the imprisonment that comes in the form of liberation.

(Sorry about the late posting.)

The fiction of reality

The readings in the course thus far keep me coming back to a question. How does media representation affect the way we draw lines around the “real and the non real”. Where is this line drawn and redrawn in the media? How does the new media or the internet, photography complicate these lines?

An important concept that seems to orbit this question is the “promise” of reality that new media engenders. For example the ubiquitousness of the internet mimics the expansive, tangential, chaotic, realm of the human mind. But at the same time the internet is only a 2 dimensional façade of reality.

For me this connects with Foucault’s statement about the mirror: “I see myself where i am not, in an unreal, virtual space, that opens up behind the surface.” The internet similarly contains the same conundrum and mirage. The world opens up behind the screen, but there is nothing there. A persona sees what is not there, in this “virtual space that opens up behind the surface.”

I also want to connect this the recent obsession with the “real” in recent media. We have the rise of reality tv, and the snowballing popularity of documentary film, journalistic photography which seems to accompany every printed news articles, mass mediated lectures, ie the Ted talks, Spoken Word poetry which features autobiographical performances. All of these new media fads are predicated on the fact that truth and reality are inherent. But at the same time reality is forced into narrative structures.

What we can focus on in this new fad is that it operates on the same “lie” or false promise of truth, because while the subjects may not be professional actors, and the material come from the raw trenches of reality, producers must edit and condense footage into a story line that is comprehendible and digestible in a short time span. Thus reality is transported from its orginal context and becomes something completely new. it is filtered through the vector of narrative constraint. In this way reality based media lies in that it hides its discursivity.

SO WHAT?! What are the implications? Why does it matter?

At the turn of the 19th century Picasso said: "Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth". Fast forward to today, where our culture's art proclaims to deliver truth. So then, if we base art on truth are we telling lies? What do we risk when we package truth into narrative arcs and sever it from its context? how does the trend toward comedy, satire, cartoons and scifi complicate this premise? does that reality makes more sense when it is squeezed into narrative and storytelling? How is this façade of reality blurring the traditional lines of real and not real?

The Interface - Friday 11am Section

There were a couple of parts within the Manovich reading for this week that were of particular interest to me. One of these sections begins on page 83 where Lev Manovich talks about how the cinematic interface is transforming into a cultural interface via video games. He starts this discussion by talking about the “cinematic sequences” within games. I find this really interesting because he’s writing this before the truly cinematic games have even been made. Games today have far more elaborate, realistic, and scripted cinematic sequences. I would even extend his argument to say that there is an impending blend between the video game and the traditional movie. In the past two years, I’ve played games like Dead Space and GTA IV that have left me feeling like I starred in a movie of my own. GTA IV even had a movie sized budget of $100 million.

I also found it fascinating how he described the “imprisonment of the body” in the section beginning on page 103. It’s an interesting thought because interfaces are freeing the mind while at the same time imprisoning the body. However, I’m not sure I fully understand this argument. I’m not quite sure how the body is more imprisoned now than it was when cinema or even printed text came around. I see a lot of parallels between the immobilization of the body to interact with a movie or a book and interacting with a HCI. The idea of a chip that places a virtual screen on our retina sounds incredibly liberating. Manovich describes this scenario as us merely “carrying our prisons with us.” This confuses me. Is the prison cyberspace? I interpreted this prison as being a physical one that we had to enter if we wanted to interact with a modern HCI.

S03. Imprisonment

I was sitting in the lounge of my co-ed fraternity last night working on my homework when an alumni from our fraternity stopped by to say hello. He joined us since the majority of the fraternity was hanging out there. After a few minutes of sitting quietly among us he said, "I haven't been in college for a while, but as far as I remember it, there were never this many computers in one room." Indeed, he had graduated in 2000 and socialized in the same social spaces as we currently were. Despite the fact that not everyone was doing homework, everyone in the room (about 25 people) had a computer. We were all in fact imprisoned by technology.
As Manovich explains, we are being imprisoned by the unreal. It physically separates us from social interactions as we find it easier to gchat our friends rather than hang out with them or to look up pictures of trees rather than going outside and taking one. It also imprisons us by creating an imagined community that we seem very happy to be a part of. Take for example Facebook, in it one can create lists of friends so that you can choose to keep in touch with specific people. It limits what we know about everyone else we are friends with. Although we have a bit more control over these lists, the advertisements on the side of my screen are catered to me. Most of the ads that come u for me tend to be related to Jason Mraz in one way or another. The internet creates a prison for me by limiting the options I have. Thus, the user and the mind become imprisoned within a screen that presents them with the unreal. With this will we ever know what is real?

My Mother and the Case of the Missing File

“As is the case with all cultural languages, only a few of these possibilities actually appear viable at any given historical moment” (Manovich, 70)

As I sat in the basement, I turned to watch my mother at the computer. A regal woman, she sits with her legs crossed, back tall, trying to hide that she is frantically looking for something on the computer. She opens a folder, scrolls, and then slowly closes the folder, hesitant, because she had for once been defeated. She attempts to click around on the screen quietly, not to alert me of her worry.

I let her have her peace but I can only watch someone struggle on a piece of technology they don't understand for so long.

"Mommy, what are you doing?"

She takes her time to tell me because she knows I'll solve it in the end.

"I am looking for a file."

I rise and walk over to her. She's so cute.

Apple+F and we are at the finder window. A few quick strokes of the keys and we see the file, nestled amount many, waiting for us.

"Jamie, my historical context, my background in printed text, made it in impossible to fathom searching in any other way, other than flipping through a table of contents by opening and closing files."

"I know, Mommy. It's okay."

S.03 - Manovich

As I read the Manovich chapter and as we discussed the interface in class, I started to think about the game (or rather, world) Second Life. Second Life purports itself as exactly that: a second, alternate life in a virtual world of possibility. According to Second Life’s Wikipedia entry, creator Philip Rosedale’s initial focus had been on the creation of hardware that would allow users to be fully immersed in the virtual world. As we know, Second Life would turn out not to be some kind of fully immersive VR game, an online, interactive virtual world populated by avatars representing their human users. This brings to mind Manovich’s image of a “twenty-first century cinema [that] involves a user represented as an avatar existing literally “inside” the narrative space” (82). When I thought about Second Life, I wondered why (other than due to the difficulty in developing the appropriate hardware) the game/world was played out in the third person rather than in first person. If the game was meant to be the second life of the user, why didn’t users view the world more in the way they view the physical world? Why didn’t it look more like a first-person shooter?

I think there are several reasons for the more “cinematic” feel of Second Life. Manovich discusses the influence of existing cultural forms on the cultural interface of the computer. “The area of computer culture where the cinematic interface is being transformed into a cultural interface most aggressively,” he says, “is computer games” (83). Second Life, like most other games, fits into his discussion of how various cinematographic techniques are employed by video games. I am more interested, however, in the idea that we in fact prefer to see ourselves in the third person, as if watching ourselves in a movie. We prefer it to seeing this virtual world from a first-person perspective. As Professor Chun discussed in class, there is a pleasure in the cinematic, in drama. In cinema, we can have closure and we can see causality. We can see the results of actions much more transparently than we can see consequences in our lives. This, I think, lends to the pleasure/desire of seeing the avatar acting in a cinematic world and viewing the avatar/self as a third person. Perhaps we feel that we can see more by being outside ourselves, that we have more power and/or knowledge in the second life because we can see connections, actions, and consequences as transparently as we often see them in the narrative of a film.

S.03 Augmented Reality

While researching modern virtual reality technology I stumbled upon this video about augmented reality: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKw_Mp5YkaE. The main premise of augmented reality is to “superimpose graphics, audio and other sensory enhancements over a real-world environment in real time” (Bonsor). While reading ‘The Language of New Media’, I started to wonder how Manovich would respond to augmented reality. In defining what a screen is, he writes: “the visual culture of the modern period, from painting to cinema, is characterized by an intriguing phenomenon—the existence of another virtual space, another three dimensional world enclosed by a frame and situated inside our normal space. The frame separates two absolutely different spaces that somehow coexist” (95). To what extent can augmented reality be said to use such a screen? Augmented reality relies directly on changes in the physical world (and its effects can be seen in “real time”), and it is thus merged with real-life to a much greater extent than, say, virtual reality. Whereas one might suggest that virtual reality is hyper-real, augmented reality—as the name itself suggests—is based entirely on the assumption of the real and has its origins based firmly therein. Mankovich writes, “a screen's frame separates two spaces that have different scales—the physical and the virtual… it discourage[s] any movement on her part: Why move when she can't enter the represented virtual space anyway?” But this is not longer the case. Augmented reality is intimately dependent on the idea of the virtual and the real conforming to the same scale. The alluring thing about augmented reality is neither the virtual technology it utilizes nor the real itself—it is the fact that these merge together seamlessly. While “virtual reality allows us to travel through nonexistent three-dimensional spaces”, augmented reality allows us to do quite the opposite—to navigate familiar landscapes and inject virtual elements (such as graphics) into them. I wonder where this technology will take us in the future—is this a new type of cyberspace being mapped onto the real world?

Bonsor, Kevin. "How Augmented Reality Works." 19 February 2001. HowStuffWorks.com. 24 February 2010.

S03. The Interface and the digitalization of the Text

While usually for MCM readings, I’m in the habit of printing out the required texts and underlining with a pen as I go through them, when I began to read Manovich’s essay on The Interface it occurred to me that would be missing the point.

In his discussion of the progression of digital media, Manovich points out that the original purpose of the computer was to function like a typewriter, processing words and then printing them out. It was created for a print based culture, and the attention Manovich gives to text’s role in its continuation got me to look a little closer.

The level to which the computer has come is fascinating, as is the idea of the hyperreal interface which disguises the actual mechanical workings of the device. At the moment I have 6 word documents open. 6 stored files, open for editing and positioned by the movements of my mouse to allow me to switch between them comfortably. I can write, I can erase and unless I save I leave no marks. It’s a lot easier than having 6 separate print works in progress in front of me. Drafting on typewriter sounds like a nightmare.

If I click on the Preview icon down on my toolbar, an illusory series of visual markers for connections to various programs, I open 5 PDF files. While Digital Media and my History Class’ syllabi were created on a computer, probably in typed in word (just as I’m doing now for this blogpost) before being converted and stored online. My copies of Friedburg and Manovich’s essays as well as the scanned in copy of our assignment for Monday look back at me, the soul of a printed page captured and proliferated far beyond the capacity of their original forms.

To consider Manovich’s essay in this sense we look at its journey from the author’s mind to my desktop. The author himself typed it and assuming he worked from handwritten notes, this is the first step in the process. It was then sent as a word document off to an editor, who made some changes and inserted it into the larger file that would become the book in which it was printed. The book was then printed, hundreds of copies of the same text each taking up 56 pages of the larger work, and then Prof. Chun or perhaps another faculty member bought the print copy and scanned it in page by page, uploaded it to the mycourses site for each of us to download.

Maybe this is why I can’t read, “Two and a half decades before the concept of digital media was born, researchers were thinking about making the sum total of human written production- books encyclopedias, technical articles, works of fiction and so on- available online (Ted Nelson’s Xanadu project),” on my computer without finding it at least slightly ironic.

Blog 3 Alexis Aurigemma

I was pleasantly suprised to read Anne Freidberg's provoking, although exeptionally long, essay on the viewpoints and perspectives of computer screens and film. I was especially captured by her passage, "Multiplicity: The Taxonomy of Variables," because of my extreme interest in filmmaking. It is fascinating how by the manner a scene is shot, it can change the meaning and message that is relayed through the screen. It reminded me of Barthes ideas on Ideology including the referent, the sign and the signifier. The way a word is spoken can change its meaning. The fact that technology allows us this liberalism in creating film allows for a larger sense of convergence. This convergence has made its way into computers. As a teenager I press the limits of my PC's capabilities every day, opening more and more windows and tabs to enhance my viewing pleasure. Simultaneously, I am able to write this blog, listen to music and check my facebook (not that I would ever do that). My question is a broad one, yet an important one: How far are we willing to push this visual stimulant and what will be the next medium it presents itself in?

Friday 11 AM Section - Post #3

Friedburg's article points out society's fascination with multiples... multiple screens, multitasking, etc. By providing examples from history, such as the history of cinema, it is clear that there has always been this drive for more; to see what else technology can provide us. And as we read more articles each week, one theme seems to pop up: time. Namely, technology's relationship with time. It is easy to become drawn in to new media and technology and to want to study the effects it has on our lives. But why are we fascinated? We are fascinated at how quickly a task can be performed, at how multiple tasks can be performed at the same time, at how technology can save us more time. Others have discussed the notions of a sense of control or a loss of freedom at the hands of technology. Perhaps the reason we feel this tension of confinement is the fact that while we use these gadgets to save time, they are at the same time, consuming so much of our time.

At the end of the chapter, Friedburg writes about a newfound determinism: "digital technology inherently implies a convergence of all media forms" (238). I can see the rationalization because it is the way technology developed: Text can be projected on a screen, which can then be projected and condensed in ever smaller sizes through say a laptop. However, I don't understand this inevitability. Just because it did progress this way, does that necessarily mean it had to? Or rather, are we so sure that digital technology is the final link, is "our engagement with a virtual window somehow assured" (239)?

Blog #3 - S03

I was a little puzzled by Manovich’s contention that “a code is rarely simply a neutral transport mechanism; usually it affects the messages transmitted with its help” (64). While I understand the ways in which the computer has become a “filter for all culture, a form through which all kinds of cultural and artistic production [are] mediated,” I struggle to see if this function is truly that disparate from forms of the past (64). To me, it seems that no matter what the form, the way in which one receives information and/or media shapes one’s interpretation and conceptualization of said information: while computer interfaces are the segues through which we receive so much of our information today, thusly making the computer’s interface the lens through which we interpret, I struggle to see how the computer interface has more influence on our conceptualization of information than, say, the novel or the cinema screen.

Manovich asserts that the computer and Internet are far more egalitarian and less hierarchical than previous forms, in that “two sources connected through a hyperlink have equal weight,” while the novel and film (traditionally) are narrative and thus prioritize certain pieces of information over others. However, when it comes to the issue of influence, I wonder if this narrativity – as well as the physical interface of the rectangular page in a neatly-bound book, or the screen in a darkened theater (both of which imply narrativity, as well as a certain positioning of the viewer/reader in relation to the text) – might “affect the messages transmitted” as much as the computer’s codes and interfaces do; thusly, it seems slightly dubious to me that the computer is truly unprecedented in its influence on our reception of information, as Manovich contends.

Video Games and Cinema

In Manovich’s The Language of New Media, the parts that really interested me were his musings about video games. As an avid gamer, I could really relate to and understand his ideas and observations. When he was talking about interactive VR worlds, he says that he feels 21^st century cinema will involve “a user represented as an avatar…rendered with photorealistic 3D computer graphics, interacting with virtual characters and perhaps other users, and affecting the course of narrative events” (82). That is basically the exact description of today’s MMORPGs, or massive multiplayer online role-playing games. The character you control is called your “avatar,” the graphics are 3-D and usually pretty realistic and there are virtual characters called NPCs (non-player characters) that can assist or hinder you. And of course, you interact with other players around the world and what you do with them (talk, trade, fight) affects the outcome of your story. There is some sort of over-arching story, but where you go, what happens next, how it happens, and many other narrative aspects are largely dependent on what you make your avatar do. In this way, these games are somewhat like writerly texts, because everything you do affects something else, and few things are strictly scripted; there aren’t just preset paths for you to follow (or “read”).

Since Manovich writes that video games follow in the steps of and borrow many techniques from cinema, does the fact that games are incorporating these interactive features before movies mean that games are now ahead of cinema? And now the progression of cinema-games has flipped?

He also mentions the “lavish cinematic sequences” (83) and camera controls found in games. Since 2001, when this was written, these two features have become even more important to gaming. The way the camera moves and the degree of control over it in games is something that reviewers consider when grading a game. These cinematic “cut scenes” as they are called by gamers are often the most praised and looked-forward to parts of games. The fact that movies and games have integrated so thoroughly and successfully seems to support Manovich’s ideas about the coming together of all forms media.

Here are two cut scenes, both from Final Fantasy games (a series well-known for its cut scenes) to show their movie-like qualities (music, camera angles, etc.)

The opening of Final Fantasy X (released for Playstation 2 in 2001, coincidentally when this book was published).

The ending of Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core (released in 2008 for the PSP handheld).

Friday 11 AM Section