How video games are assimilated in other areas beyond their supposed margins and become a tool to change the world
While at this point, although it seems incredible, there are still discussions about whether the video game is art and culture, the medium, oblivious to everything and more than settled in popular culture, expands without limits. The noise that is always around hides a transversality of such magnitude that it is unattainable by other disciplines. As in FreeGameTips we do not doubt the potential of the most exciting artistic manifestation of the 21st century, our efforts can be dedicated to other needs. That is, how the video game transcends its industrial and artistic environment to be applied, used, mimicked by other arts, other industries, other media.
We will flee in this report of technical and academic explanations. We believe, as they say, that the movement is demonstrated by walking, so we will present, above all, examples of these applications of the videogame beyond itself. Where? In the cinema, of course, but also in medicine, architecture or psychology. We start
The Cinema and its use of the video game beyond the narrative
The rich relationship between cinema and video games not only occurs in the field of arguments (adaptations in one way or another) and narrative (the last sample, the impressive 1917 and its closest sequence shot to how the medium uses it interactive than the film). At a technical level it is very common for findings and advances to be shared. The storyboards, that transformation of the script into something more visual pulling the comic tradition, where the director can get an idea of the frames and the rhythm that the images will have on screen, evolved from the 90s of the paper to a kind of animated storyboard . Animations that showed scenarios and characters without textures, easily modifiable according to requirements, and that visually drank directly from the alpha versions of video games that had already embraced 3D as an essential form of expression. And it was video games that encouraged the cinema to the realistic digital representation of the human being. If you look, there are a couple of decades in the computer animation cinema where you avoid, with exceptions (Polar Express, Beowulf or, of course, the pioneer Final Fantasy: the spirit within, based on the famous playable saga) representation Realistic of the human being. Video games have always opted for it despite the shortcomings according to what time. The CGI sequences of Final Fantasy or World of Warcraft were wonderful and epatant even if we knew that the games themselves would be very different from those lavish short films. In the cinema, the disturbing valley was long scared, that sense of strangeness first and then rejection, that we felt before the artificial representation of a human being. Flynn in Tron: Legacy still gave some repelús, but the strangeness has gone less as technology advanced. Proof of this are Princess Leila and Moff Tarkin in Rogue One: a Star Wars story or the Rachael of Blade Runner 2049.
The green screens, those on which digitally created landscapes will be shown later, serve as a hard and cold background in which film and video game actors must get to the idea of what they have around. And not only the environments are designed separately, with the fears overcome thanks to a technique to the height, today it is usual to see main characters generated by computer. There is a long way since Disney popularized the technique of rotoscopy (drawing the animated character on the recording of an actor to achieve realism in the movements) with his first feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), until the capture today Real actors with black monkey full of balls. What was once a laborious manual work today moves to the screen in real time.
We focus again on the green screens, until they already know what happened after The Madalorian. The celebrated Disney + series based on the Star Wars universe has pulled novel technique: Stagecraft. It is expensive to start, but with a medium-term amortization that will make it essential in the coming years. As we picked up on FreeGameTips a few days ago, the actors were recorded in front of an ultra-high definition semicircular panel where 3D environments were projected in real time in which the, known by the players, Unreal Engine (Stagecraft arises from the project of UE Spotlight. See video at the end of the paragraph). What does this mean? That the post-production scenario is not created, that the actors have a visual reference that helps them in their interpretation, that, and this is the most important at the application level, the funds are generated in real time by a video game engine. To give a comparative example that we have seen a thousand times in cinema, it is not about Cary Grant driving drunk in With death on the heels knowing that what appears through the windows of the car is a small cinema screen where the recording of a cart. The scenarios in The Mandalorian are modifiable on the fly. Orientation, lighting, change of scenery in a few seconds … And all with surprising results. Any video game user who is reading us right now has surely performed those actions with a hand control. Yes, every time you use photo mode in a video game.
Education: if you can't with your enemy, join him. Ah! that they were not enemies
If we had to set a moment in history, learning and play separated their paths when the Industrial Revolution arrived. Play then became unnecessary within a well-oiled mechanism committed to optimizing production. He forgot that the game is productive. Although in principle it may seem otherwise, the educational community of today was aware of this when it asked Ubisoft to turn Assassin's Creed Origins from game to tool. Because although the magnificent video game set in Pharaonic Egypt was thus dispossessed of part of its essence (it eliminated combat mechanics and main story, for example), in some ways the result remained the same game. Discovery Tour, which was called what Ubisoft gave to the educational community, maintained an essential element of the original title: curiosity. Also, of course, interactivity, which confronted teachers with the difficult task of keeping children or youngsters on the rails who had the possibility of leaving the scheduled tour inside the Cheops pyramid for the simple fact that climb it to its top. Perhaps because of rebellion, perhaps because of the pleasure that this entails, perhaps because of observing the magnificent landscape that is observed from there.
In Minecraft you can follow some guidelines, but chaos and anarchy are welcome. Once you get tired of breaking everything and running under free will you will find an immense reward in taking advantage of the creative possibilities it offers you. Microsoft realized this, and implemented a version focused on education. For example, in 2015 it was proposed to install the game in 200 schools and 30 libraries and community communities in Northern Ireland. A shared digital world in which to learn and experience about history, energy, electricity, programming, the composition of materials, agriculture, architecture, sustainable development … Sounds fantastic, right?
Architecture, videogames and shared DNA
And experimenting with Minecraft is precisely what is done in architecture. You only need to take a quick look on the internet to realize the wonders that users do with the game created by Mojang. Users who have worked in groups to build a city from its foundations brick to brick (and we know that in Minecraft that is not a phrase, it is literal), who have made recreations of the continent of Game of Thrones, people who have built elevators or Functional text processors within the game … The essential Arsgames association has among its multidisciplinary projects Craftea. It invites children to reimagine the urban space of Madrid through Minecraft. And it would be curious to know, in a few years, how many architects started from kids raising their first buildings in this game. Because as they will suppose, the creativity without limit that the title allows could not go unnoticed by the architects, who have used it in an artistic, practical and experimental way.
Shortly after we observe any videogame, it is easy to realize the architectural component that they house. We can return to the historical recreation in the Assassin's Creed games, (whose Notre Dame, a design and research process that lasted two years for its integration into the delivery dedicated to the French revolution: Unity, and that will be of vital importance for the reconstruction of the monument after the fire in 2019), but also to the perfect level design of a 2D Mario, for example. Creation tools developed in video games have long been applied in architecture. They allow to lift in three real dimensions the buildings that were previously flat on paper or a computer screen. They can be visited virtually by their creators to get an idea of how they will be once raised. But let's stop here. Nothing better to know about all this than the great documentary Cities and videogames: towards an interactive urbanism. Do not lose detail, when you finish you will perfectly understand the enthusiasm of the community of architects with this fantastic tool that has fallen into your hands: video games.
Psychology: life-saving video games
We are going to tell you a type of initiatory experience when playing Minecraft for the first time. You start heading, and in the initial minutes you stay with that enormous world generated in a prodedural way. You run from here to there. You laugh when you cut down a tree and it turns into bundles of wood or when you see those pink pigs and squares. What happen? That the night is on you without realizing it, a bug appears and kills you. Game Over In the second game you stop wasting your time. You start crazy to collect resources. Neither the wood of the tree nor the pink pig and quadradote make you so funny. The first serves to create a refuge, the second, to feed you by what may happen. Night comes again but this time you are covered. You get to see the square sun announcing a new day. If you are connected online you can associate with other players and create community. It will then be time to build a larger settlement that shelters you all in the face of adversity. The time will come to be able to dedicate yourself within that mini-society and unleash your imagination to build, alone or in the company of others, that crazy and cool cathedral that you have in mind. Well, do you know what this is? An application of Maslow's basic needs pyramid. This popular classification was made by the American psychologist in the 40s and gave rise to a new trend in humanistic psychology. At the base would be the basic needs related to survival, being at the other end, the cusp, concerning the development of Being. The thing was like this: Physiological needs, Security needs, Membership needs, Recognition needs and Needs of self-realization. Now read again about Minecraft at the beginning of this paragraph. Awesome, right?
Let's keep going. One of the qualities that video games allow is empathy. Through direct interaction with characters and surroundings we put ourselves in the digital skin of others. We are he, she, fat, skinny, tall, short, white, black or yellow. But there is more, much more. We can be a character that climbs the mountain of depression in Celeste, who suffers a severe psychotic trauma in Hellblade: Senua´s Sacrifice, who has to make tough moral decisions as a customs agent in a totalitarian regime in Paper, Please or to survive one more day as a civilian in an armed conflict inspired by the Balkan war in This War of Mine. We can be a pregnant woman who travels through the old family home talking to her unborn child about what we leave behind when we leave this world in Edith Finch, or we may try that a classmate does not commit suicide after being a victim of bulling and sexual abuse in Life is Strange Maybe we could opt for That Dragon, Cancer, the game a father played with his sick little boy to understand the unfair hell his family was suffering. It is possible, it is desirable, that one is not the same person after interacting with these experiences. The game can make visible mental illnesses, injustices, abuses, but it can also make people who suffer from them not feel alone.
In Hellblade we worked hand in hand with psychiatrists and patients with psychosis to result in a distressing experience. Listening with the helmets on the voices that Senua has, the protagonist of the game, in his head, is a painful experience, it is a necessary experience. We empathize as much as possible with your pain. When the game was released, hundreds of messages from people thanking began to come to the studio. Many of them sick who appreciated a light on their darkness. In a particular case, a mother told Ninja Theory that thanks to the game her son, who intended to commit suicide, went to her asking for help.
In 2018 Celeste received the Games for Impact award at the Game Awards. The message that was given from the podium by his small team was this:
If the game has helped you fight a mental illness, I just want to tell you that you deserve all the credit because that change came from within you and you are capable of many more. Thank you.
Medicine: life-saving video games part 2
When control by motion sensors stormed through the masses thanks to the Nintendo Wii, many saw the possibilities inherent in the field of rehabilitation. The ease of use and exercise involved in Wiimote was used in nursing homes for the elderly to exercise their muscles. There were clinics that applied the Microsoft Kinect to assist in the recovery of accident victims or to correct and work back problems. The Juegoterapia association and its use of consoles and video games are also known to make long stays in hospitals for children suffering from cancer more bearable. Speaking of that fearsome and terrible dragon, at a congress in Madrid last November, the Greek mathematician Nikos Paragios (University of Paris-Scali) explained the following about the use in medicine of the 3D graphic processing units so used by the video game developers:
The objective is that these applications of artificial intelligence serve to classify patients, diagnose tumors and choose the best treatment based on the genetic profile of each person, that is, contribute to precision medicine.
They have detailed information on the subject in the article ‘The machine that predicts who will get sick’ published by our colleagues in El País.
Simulation: from the War Games to the royal asphalt
Tennis for Two, created by William Higinbotham in 1958, can be considered the first video game ever. Plasmated on an oscilloscope, I was inspired by a computer that calculated the trajectory of ballistic missiles. The physicist himself, the first president of the Federation of American Scientists, had participated in the Manhattan Project (yes, the one that named a certain Watchmen character and, this, also where the abominable atomic bombs that the United States dropped on Japan were created) . It is not surprising that the army has always sought a close relationship with video games. Russians and Americans use them to recruit young people to send as soldiers to remote parts of the world. Of course, it also uses them to alleviate the post-traumatic disorders that result from their stay in countries in conflict. And then, of course, there is that news that seems of the World Today but no, as the supercomputers of the US army created in the first decade of the 2000s based on adding the heart of thousands of PS3. Then, to know what that kind of Skynet embryo has been used for. Anyway, ending on a positive note, Higinbotham, the guy who started it all, became a well-known activist against the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
On the simulation side we have these exquisite users of flight simulators. Flight Simulator is something so complex that we would not know how to start the plane here, let alone fly. It is common, among those who use this program, to have a good volume with the pilot's manual next to a team with several screens where complex dashboards are distributed. We also know of people who, after their virtual transatlantic flights for a few hours, stay on weekends to fly in real airfields.
In the matter of speed simulators, their use is known by professional pilots, and how they use them to memorize the recreated circuits faithfully via satellite. There has been the case in which players who started running in the GT Academy competitions of Playstation ended up doing it in official teams in the real world, as well as sound news such as the one that counted the triumph on the track of a player over a professional exciter by valuable tenths of a second.
Epilogue: Serious Games, a name almost as ugly as Graphic Novel
Finally, and bypassing the well-known implementations in videogames education to learn subjects such as mathematics or physics, and gamification as the last panacea to apply to work to make it more bearable and effective, we will tell an anecdote. It has to do with politics and society. It was in Video Games: The two sides of the screen, fantastic exhibition at the Telephone Foundation located in Madrid and curated by Euridice Cabañes (yes, again the essential elves of Arsgames). The group of visitors arrives with the guided tour to an area of experimental video games. One of the attendees says that they are not video games because it is vital that they have fun, and the exhibits there lack that objective. The group advances to another room. There is a visitor playing something on a huge screen. From a zenith view, the title shows a city in ruins, dolls running crazy and the player launching missiles without a ton nor are they. The exhibition guide asks the player that if he knows what he is playing, he replies that he has no idea. And the show begins. The girl calls our attention to what happens on the screen. City in ruins, there are dolls that are civilians and others that are compatriot terrorists and are armed. It is the representation of some population in that powder magazine that is always the Middle East. Shoot that group of civilians there, to see what happens, says the girl. The player, who we already assimilate is the representation of the West, presses the button. The missile destroys several buildings and kills several civilians. Those who remain alive become terrorists with a weapon in their hands. Faced with such a crystalline exposition of what really happens in that area of the planet, the guide asks: What is the only way to win in this game? Everyone is wide-eyed, but nobody responds. She does it: Not playing it.
That video game was September 12th (by clicking on the link you can play it), made by the Uruguayan Gonzalo Frasca in 2003 and as fully in force today as then. That phrase that a video game must be fun to be a video game is obsolete, revoked, from the moment we have one that can only be won by not playing it. Video games exceeding the limits of its definition. Political video games for social transformation. We are facing a tool so powerful that it can change everything we know. He is already doing it. And yes, some are still lost in their speech of whether or not they are art and culture when they are already in museums and universities. Meanwhile, the medium expands beyond some definitions that have become very, very short. Video games cover everything, but perhaps its most important branch is linked to education. It is time to travel until the end of the 19th century to change history. Let's join game and learning again, let's give back to children the ability to learn by playing, and let's start building a better world from there. Maybe that way we earn the right to have a future.
