/lit/ - Literature

>>12487315
i have a background in cinema, which is on the whole pretty useless, but there were some takeaways from it.

the whole design of the Hollywood system was, ultimately, to hide the presence of the cameras. that is the genius of it, it's like a surgical incision into reality that gives you a thing that provides the impression of life, exactly as it is. if you go back and watch early silent film, or early experiments in the 1900s and 1910s, you are much more aware of consciously seeing the limitations of the form. Melies becomes a kind of genius of editing, and he can basically Do Magic on screen by way of the cut. and later you get guys like Eisenstein and others who sort out how montage is and works, artist-theorists who really are secret wizards of the nature of ideology today.

with vidya we seem to be engaged in a kind of similar process, with things like MGS5 or Far Cry and the like becoming something like the equivalent of the Hollywood system. you have mini-maps and inventory screens and GUI interfaces and all kinds of stuff that gives you the impression of Being There only because it has seamlessly incorporated all of these little subsystems seamlessly into one collective whole. top-down minimaps in gaming are one basic example, there are lots of CRPGs from the 1980s and 1990s that are basically tortuous to play, unless you like the idea of getting out graph paper and navigating Skara Brae, or fumbling through clunky old combat systems, or whatever else.

with cinema, when the curtain comes up, we really do pretty much get our brains plugged into the screen, but of course an editable cinematic text, in which we control the camera (and can do all of this in private) is a totally different thing. add on top of that something like, for instance, a competitive Street Fighter tournament where the character you main gets nerfed, or a new moveset, or whatever else, and you are really coming in to the 21C: you're getting something like a second virtual body, and moreover, one that you can leverage for IRL cashbucks on a pro tour.

vidya grows out of cinema, and we have really no idea what vidya is eventually going to give rise to. my guess is that it becomes increasingly a kind of testing ground for experiments in augmented reality that Google &c will eventually use to build the Smart Cities in which we live, and the Smart Houses therein, as we link up to the Smart Networks upon which everything is defended, and becoming very Smart People in the process. not because we hit any kind of endpoint at Baudrillardian ideas of the simulacrum, but because those become the new point of departure. all dreams can be made realizable through technocommercial experimentation.

of course, the whole system may collapse before then, or any number of other plot twists.