Final Major Project Proposal

Final Major Project Proposal

My Project is going to be set around the subject matter of videogames, more specifically the way people interact with these virtual worlds and why.

A dominant theme throughout my project will be the social aspect of gaming and people’s perceptions of gamers. From a non gamers perspective it may seem very anti social, but is this entirely accurate?

I have always been interested in video games from a very young age, recently I have been interested in amount of strange news the subject is getting at the moment. Over the past few months there have been several accounts in which actions in virtual worlds have lead to problems in real life. This really interested me because I find it hard to believe that people can get that immersed in something that is not physically real just a form of visual stimulation not really differing from television.      

Within the project development so far I have looked at the variety of different video games on offer to play, in order to learn more about the genres of different games, an example being an educational game played against the way someone would be play a shooter blasting peoples heads off. Something that occurred to me while researching is that the typical joy pad is slowly being pushed away and the age of touch screens and controlling things with brain waves if really not that far off. An example of a game without the use of a joy pad is Guitar Hero, in which you play the entirety of the game with a Guitar peripheral strumming along to notes on a screen.

The stage were I am at the moment is looking into the way people play games and how as a person they play games, the reason being to look at different people and how they each tackle the game in a different way. I have gone about doing this by filming a variety of people playing the same game then showing this as a video college.

Research Sources

Artists

Robbie Cooper, his work relating to his ‘Immersion’ project and ‘Alter Egos’.

Errol Morris, ‘the interrotron’ an interview technique which relates about Robbie Coopers work

Candice Breitz, the way she presents her work and the idea of filming many people performing the same thing. For example her work ‘Karaoke’.

Bill Viola, in particular his set of video portraits "Reverse Television", people being filmed watching television.

Books

Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Ian Bogost

Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, Jesper Juul

Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games, Edward Castronova

Beyond psychology , by Otto Rank

Paul Virilio: From modernism to hypermodernism and beyond / edited by John Armitage and Mike Featherstone.

Websites

http://www.edge-online.com/, The Global Game Industry Network, many blogs, research articles exploring deep theory into video games.

Journals

The British Journal of Photography

I see my project continuing with the idea of watching people playing games, very similar to were I’m at the moment. With further development to my project my work will gradually deepen its meaning and bring to light the information found from my contextual research.

As a presentation method see my work as a video installation based upon the idea of multiples of the same action, similar to the installation methods of Candice Breitz.  

PROPOSAL STILL IN PROGRESS