Dear Player: Objects to Life

The world is your human-computer-interface. I want to talk about toys, magic, fetishes and yet more toys. To collate some thoughts on the increasing diversity of gaming as an experience, this short piece focuses on new platforms. It’s about video game interfaces, the expanding range of ways we’re able to interact with, or indeed inhabit, virtual worlds. When we think of ‘natural’ or intuitive interfaces, we often think of ‘flashes in the pan’, promised Utopias like the Wii and the Kinnect which captivated millions before quietly dying out. But what is perhaps remarkable is actually how heterogeneous gaming interfaces, gaming objects, have historically been.

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Games always were objects, even in their digital variations. Arcades were shared spaces in which a huge range of machines and experiences co-existed. In 1972 the first popular arcade game Pong was hard coded into its booth, the game and the weird dials used to control it were one and the same, whereas now software is independent of platform. Meanwhile, in 70s Russia, if you check out the museum of Soviet arcade games, there flourished a hybrid plurality of part analogue and part digital games – wooden cut-outs moving in front of screens, periscopes as controllers, wheel cranks and levers, and simple animatronics that reacted to lights around them. In fact, the idea of digital gaming as a singular homogenous thing was arguably a limited historical moment from the 80s to 2000s in which home consoles standardised a lot of inputs and framed gaming as both a private and relatively uniform affair – buttons and joysticks connected to a box and a TV. But right now we’re witnessing a huge explosion in both social and physical terms: VR, mobile gaming, e-Sports, Augmented-reality, bespoke peripherals, in-built cameras, touchscreens, infra-red sensors, NFC chips, accelerometers, eye-tracking, biometric input and voice control.

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We might see a parallel in the history of photography – which began as a diverse medium with no standard parameters (something Foucault calls, hermaphrodite images) – to which it returned with the invention of digital technologies, in photogenic paintings, like this one, medium specificity has been dissolved. And in Instagram, on the right, if you add all the filters the world itself dissolves. Initially, photography was thought of as a kind of subset of drawing and was produced by various means, from daguerreotypes to calotypes to solarography, even stereoscopy. In the twenties and thirties though, photography became a standard format the sole preserve of black boxes and film, but now photography has expanded yet again. Everything has a camera, everyone is a photographer, photography is now ‘part of life’.

I think we’re seeing a similar trajectory in games, and most intriguingly in their material aspect. Games are everywhere, to the extent they might cease to be a useful category – as photography has become ‘pics’, so too maybe games are already ‘experiences’. Reactionary fan communities sense this coming, gamergate closes ranks as it struggles to define what is or isn’t a game, trying to push back the clock to a very particular time. But this is now: haptic feedback vests, to give the sensation of bullet-impacts; the technology to track your whole body moving through space where you can walk, run or crawl around; and even the use of heart-monitors in horror to change the virtual environment based on your emotional state.

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Right now casual, approachable and social gaming is in the ascendant. If some of the utopianism behind designing new interfaces has been based on the idea that we can make the interface invisible, seemless, then we might think of there being two related tendencies to the dematerialisation or re-materialisation of games. They are mutating in form, but they are also activating and involving the world around us. In a post-internet, post-digital world, digital objects are becoming physical – we can print mine-craft, we wear pixel aesthetics, and we use activity trackers to convert our lives into digits and reach gamified targets

And this brings me to my particular interest: toys to life. NFC chips can turn any object into a controller – they are a hair’s-breadth away from magic. If you can build it in Lego, you can manifest it in a game, if you want to make a house call in Animal Crossing, you can press a card to the screen and the character will appear, if you want a Yoshi for a pet just touch them to the gamepad and they can learn and store moves and information in Smash. These may still be early days, but already we’re seeing variation – the most ‘advanced’ current permutation may be Lego: Dimensions, which allows up to seven simultaneous objects to give up to 3 different inputs each. Disney’s recent retreat from their Infinity series is a bad sign for many commentators, but at the same time Disney has been rolling out a new program of augmented reality games combining phone apps, subscription puzzle boxes, NFC and motion tracking to create personalised adventures and subversions of its theme park architecture.

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The post digital is sometimes thought of as a return of the Real, to re-purpose Hal Foster’s phrase – after a period of standardised GUI’s and screen interfaces, digital things are increasingly being made into real objects – from Firewatch’s polaroids to the Witcher’s Gwent cards - but at the same time, the real is becoming digital. I find the translation of virtual material in physical material an especially interesting case-study, and Nintendo’s Amiibo offer us an interesting modern equivalent for Japanese Netsuke. If Netsuke were intimate, hidden tactile sculptures which took on a different life in the hand or under candle light, Amiibo are objects in our palms which reveal hidden content when they touch a screen: avatars, information, unlockable environments, costumes, die-rolls. While Amiibo act as transferable DLC, unlocking games, content, mechanics and avatars, they are also made to be held in the hand. They are palm-sized and reassuring to the touch, and they invoke the virtual through tactile sensations. Nintendo’s designers are having to find the material equivalent of a squid girl’s hair, or the heft of a Mario in your hand. Animal crossing amiibo which move and store characters in a virtual animal village, have a particular, satisfying satin finish which connotes the shaders used in-game, as well as fur, while on Mario’s 30’th anniversary, a toy was devised which would make an HD game screen look like a CRT monitor, and a toy look like a pixelated sprite.

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The potential for NFC tech is vast with 3d-printing on the horizon - great things come from small beginnings - and while it may not realise its potential, there remains more to these Physical/digital objects than a nausea of consuming and tapping expensively reified dlc. As a post-medium interface, they have huge versatility, from carrying information to interacting directly - indeed, with a mix of objects and their receivers we have the potential nuance and versatility of a drumkit.

To return to our soviet arcade - there is no longer a line between the analogue and digital, and perhaps there never was. The world is there for us to play with.

Merlin Seller