Drawing without light

Giddings, Seth

Abstract

Numerous videogames offer their players opportunities for the production and collection of images displayed and understood as photographs. For some the production of photograph-like images is central to the gameplay, for others it is an add-on activity, an option for the completist or aesthetically minded. Some games do not offer a photographic feature yet something in the quality of their graphics, virtual landscapes or virtual camera stimulates in their players the desire for image capture through screen grabs.

But what is the nature of this simulation of photography? Is it merely a metaphor, or perhaps a remediation, offering a familiar frame to activities and processes that are quite different to photography? This essay will argue that neither the gothic rhetoric of media death / afterlife that attends new media, nor an unqualified application of the notion of remediation, are adequate for understanding the persistence and mutation of photographic media and aesthetics in the post-digital era. For other facets of photography, at least of photography as an everyday practice and experience, persist in videogames. The image that glows only with the electrons of the cathode ray tube or liquid crystal of the flat screen may still capture a moment, a frozen instant in the unfolding of a dynamic, kinetic environment. The virtual camera organizes the flux of digital data in time and as space, from as fixed a viewpoint as that established by the photographic lens and the camera obscura before it.

Though videogame worlds will be the focus, the essay makes suggestions for the theorisation and study of media technological change more generally.

• Publication Date: Sep 9, 2013
• Deposit Date: Apr 30, 2013
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 28, 2016
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 41-55
• Series Title: Comedia
• Book Title: The Photographic Image in Digital Culture
• ISBN: 9780415535298
• Keywords: photography, new media, digital culture, video games
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/927896
• Publisher URL: http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415535298/
• Additional Information: Additional Information : This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in The Photographic Image in Digital Culture on 10 September 2013, available online: http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415535298/
• Contract Date: Jul 28, 2016