Although most of us were not at Ground Zero on September 11, we all experienced the attack on the World Trade Centre in some way or another. For most, it was a thoroughly mediated spectacle – and our physical distance from the reality of the event was further extended by the fabric of the technology that informed us. From here on the other side of the world, it is safe to say that many found it difficult to form deep empathies with the victims of the attack. Unless we knew people personally involved, it was more tempting to celebrate the event as a spectacular undermining of an international dictatorship; one so out of touch with the morality of global equality that it now considers itself free from international law due to self-adorned ‘exceptionalism’.

Personally, I tried to cry over the deaths as I watched live footage of the buildings collapsing, but I was unable to. There seemed some greater force of universal rebalancing going on that overpowered the weight of immediate loss. This apathy was a direct result of the inability of the media to convey the reality of what was happening. Had I been watching the WTC with my own eyes I would no doubt have experienced the paralysing reaction to utter horror which this, and all war atrocities, normally effect in the human conscience. Despite the close-ups of anguished faces, despite the unplanned disconnections of live broadcasts, despite the chokingly desperate amateur footage, I was not being fed convincing information. Instead I was experiencing what is called the Hollywood effect; a state of extreme desensitisation to mediated violence. The logic that 911 was reality not fantasy did not compute in the cognitive equation. Violence in the media is mediated violence.

The Hollywood effect is not limited to films. It is as prevalent in television, radio, print and games. An awareness of this informs the push for computer game censorship; a fear that the desensitisation we suffer from films will be compounded in the computer game generation as they hack-away and blow to pieces anthropomorphised game characters. However, despite all attempts at realism, there remains one defining characteristic of computer games that set them apart from films, tv, radio and print. They are beyond reality. They are complete fantasies. They do not use real actors. Games are rarely contextualised in real locations. They exploit non-realistic physics. Most games are temporally suspended. Games can be compared to animation, which has long been granted acute freedom to display violence as entertainment, even to young children. The reason for this freedom is the blatently illusory nature of animation. Lets take Road Runner as a seminal example. Wile E Coyote, the terrorist, dedicates himself to the assassination of our hero. He manufactures every conceivable killing machine and performs torturous atrocities (albeit usually on himself) all for our viewing pleasure. We laugh, because we know its fake.

Thus our relationship to games. Games involve the act of play. Play is the enactment of fantasy. When questioned about the potential effects of violence in games, gamers always defend themselves by arguing that they are absolutely aware games are not reality. Gamers know they are playing a fantasy. They are indulging in a highly sophisticated, interactive animation. But what is at stake here, when we consider the 911 Survivor mod, in which four gamers have rebuilt the World Trade Centre moments after it was hit – is an understanding of why we indulge in fantasies. Why would these gamers, or anyone for that matter, want to roam around in a virtual replication of a building moments before it became a coffin for over 2000 people? Why would anyone want to spend endless hours practising to kill enemies in a computer game? The answer is specifically because these activities are fantasy, because we can’t perform them in real life. The violence is not the primary motivation; many computer games do not contain any violence at all. But all games allow us to enact fantasies that are otherwise prohibited, restricted or impossible in reality.

The World Trade Centre will never stand again, but in this modification of a computer game, we can use fantasy to imagine ourselves transported there. In this fantasy, we can attempt to understand what it might have really felt like in the last moments of those people's lives. This game mod sets out to provide both the makers, and all other users, with an opportunity to empathically comprehend the reality of what happened at the WTC.

911Survivor hosted by SelectParks here
09/03

You walk away from the game but the cross-hairs don’t recede. The adrenalised thrill of gameplay filters through into reality. cyber café killers places game junkies in Lan-within-Lan heaven. A special experiment constructing strong links between real and virtual violence, designed to study the culture in which street/gang violence spills over into internet cafés, and game violence filters back into the street.

cyber café killers is one of a number of works which maps its site-specific location. Significant in this work is the site it reproduces; a networked gaming environment which, by its nature, is already infused with a psychological association to the thrill of game play. In cyber café killers, players kill their opponents who sit with them in the café, as they would in any normal networked gaming environment. However this virtual reproduction is a catalyst to a psychological experiment. cyber café killers engages standard emotional responses gamers have to the proximity and reality of their opponents, and then amplifies these responses. Firstly by making us consciously aware that these responses exist, and secondly by providing us the oppportunity to test the extent to which they can be manipulated.

Cho sees the work as responding to social theorists who have sought to understand the feedback loop between real and virtual violence without ever actually playing networked games, instead seeking too-deep answers in their ‘psychoanalytic bullshit’. For Cho, the answer is neatly summed up in the concept of ‘euphoric rage’; a complex emotional blend of aggression and excitement, compounded by the thrill of adrenaline-charged game play. The cyber café provides a natural breeding ground for euphoric rage, and Cho views this as the romantic appeal of the context. “You can see the agony of defeat mapped in real time onto the face of the players sitting across the room from you. Seeing actual physical representations of your online killings creates an incredible sense of pleasure.”

By qualifying our investment in game play, cyber café killers provides an example of the potential of virtual environments to expand emotional responses to physical and/or virtual behaviour. It also contributes to the endless dialogue on the relationship between mediated/real violence; in this case pointing out the obvious correlation between the two, whilst also inviting users to engage with violence as a motivational factor.

Half -life. DLs include video documentation.
06/03

Unbeknownst to online players, their gameplay may be hijacked for the purposes of audiovisual art. In QQQ real time quake games - played by an anonymous international collection of gamers - are displayed to a gallery audience via a local, hacked engine. The modified graphics subvert the function of the gameplay, turning player’s actions into afterimage trails and motion smears – a virtual performance amidst chaotic, abstracted architectural forms. The work highlights an element of existential flexibility that is granted to us by the extension of our corporal form into that of an avatar. Performance artists are borne from game players who remain oblivious to their existence in this capacity.

Using the random actions of the game play as generative input to the hacked engine, QQQ detours data, illustrating the vulnerability of our virtual existence to purposes of subversive modification. In doing so a boundary between the interaction of our corporal and virtual forms is defined. We lack control of those offshoots of our virtual selves that exist in contexts without our knowledge. By employing modified versions of players' avatars, nullpointer illustrates one of the many potentials for alternative realities online – stretching the fabric of the gamers universe to incorporate multiple destinies for our virtual clones.

specs:
nullpointer hacked almost all the aspects of the engine… gfx (both ingame and interfaces, textures, shaders etc), sound (all sounds altered), and some key scripts and bindings. He also had to set up and specify the server to run the maps, game types and impure modes he needed.

In the installation the user is the audience, who participates in the matches as a spectator. There is a pedestal mounted console for the users to interact with the piece. This pedestal has a keyboard sunk into it with all keys except 'W' 'Space' and 'Return' removed - The keys control 3 aspects of the interaction (Switch player being followed, Zoom camera in/out and Step from 1st to 3rd person view), essentially camera controls so the users can 'direct' the action.
02/03

Julian Oliver gave a 5 day QuakeIII level editing workshop to 10 participants of foam's tx0om workshop series. the workshop was set in a tiny castle town in croatia-istria of around 80 inhabitants. participants were taught how to model using the Quake III level editor and then from visual, contextual and mythological material gathered they contructed a playable abstraction of the site that was projected back onto the town walls to a rain-soaked audience of locals and guests. the gamelab workshop was focused on making sure that particpants could freely continue exploring the tools after the workshop.. read on..
11/02

Velvet-Strike: War Times and Reality Games
http://www.opensorcery.net/velvet-strike/about.html

Velvet-Strike is a collection of spray paints to use as graffiti on the walls, ceiling, and floor of the popular network shooter terrorism game "Counter-Strike". Velvet-Strike was conceptualized during the beginning of Bush’s War on Terrorism. Others are invited to submit their own spray-paints relating to this theme. Anne Marie Schleiner is the brain child behind Velvet Strike. These are some of her thoughts on the project:

"When I first heard about the attacks on September 11, just a fraction before I felt a wave of sadness, a nauseating thought passed through my mind. What terrible timing-with this president in office, perhaps even more so than previous ones, he could use this event as justification for dangerous actions on a global scale and at home. A few weeks later, I left for Spain to give a workshop on modifying computer games. When I arrived the next morning at the workshop I learned that the U.S. had declared war on Afghanistan. The workshop organizers had installed a new demo of "Return to Castle Wolfenstein", a remake of an old Nazi castle shooter game, on all the PC's. The sounds of the weapon-fire echoed off the concrete walls of the workshop warehouse space--what I once approached with playful macho geek irony was transformed into uncanny echoes of real life violence. At that moment, that room was the last place I wanted to be. Joan Leandre, (one of the other artists presenting at the workshop), and I discussed creating some kind of anti-war game modification."