For some years now, Paul Virilio has spoken about the state of play in our technologically vexed context. He advocates that it is “interesting while maintaining a critical attitude”, that we should not just be the player, but rather play as if to know, or better still create the game itself. Virilio suggests that there are two ways to look at play, one pertains a likeness to playing cards which is a game that requires knowledge of how to play, but not to know the construct of the game itself. If so wished, one can find the combinations/permutations needed for success, however, it is not a requirement. The other is attributed to “the play of a mechanical part when it is loose in its housing” which Virilio remarks as “the play of today”.

This ‘type’ of contemporary play is simultaenously talking about the sophistication of what we are playing with, and also the complexities and the nearness to reality of the games themselves. “What is a game once the virtual invades reality?” says Virilio. “To play today, in a certain sense, means to choose between two realities.” There are obvious reasons why computer games are in epic demand, for example the market has understood that they allow a gamer to be in a position that they cannot attain with their own bodies and/or their environment - because of its limitations. Coupled with the imaginations of the developers and the sophistication of their engines, the realities of gamers can exist in any form. This is the catalyst for a vitual addiction. One can be a sports star, a war hero, or even a town planner as in the SimCity franchises, or even interact with other human beings on a IM program and claim they are in another reality than what is really the truth. One can use this portal to even engage in the act of love-making but not have bodily intercourse, commonly termed as the degrading act of cybersex. A sex without physical interchange, awkwardness, smells, sensational expolosions, all that is very human and real.

Narrative in storytelling allows readers to concoct their own “mental cinema” of what protagonist looks like, or even how soft the sand she is standing in. I see Camus’ Meursault as an intelligent being completely in touch with his surroundings, manipulating what could be a sorrowful existence into a romantic, sensual however existentialist dream - well-dressed but run down and slouched, from the sun, walking and sweating. But the Meursault represented by a virtual gaming narrative is pre-defined, stuck in a carved-out box, set in digital stone and a realisation of someone elses imagination - not yours or Camus’. The beauty of the novel comes in the thought-images of the individual.

When asked what game we should play, Virilio says to “play at being a critic. Deconstruct the game in order to play with it. Instead of accepting the rules, challenge and modify them. Without the freedom to critique and reconstruct, there is no truly free game: we are addicts and nothing more.” To the developer, we should ask the developers to resist pre-definitions, and allow users freedoms to infinite degrees. We should access resources to develop ourselves. Our virtual spaces should be accessible and flexible. There exists virtual spaces that allude to users being allowed to configure environments, but still there is a creation with primary tools to achieve this.

SIAL’s Greg More created Eureka a digital presentation environment that allows users “to navigate spatial collections of multi-media assets.” What appears to be a seamless navigating environment is just a re-alignment of an already known interface.

Phun is an inviting system that turns real-world physics virtual and for this very reason is highly addictive. It arrives closer to the point of simulating realities however abstracting the objects that appear within them. We can set up our own test or experiment with objects that we could not purchase or even construct in this world.

The third example brings closer the relationship between the body and the virtual space as well as being affordable, CamSpace.

And then there is Jeff Han and his VR empire.


Multi-Touch Sensing through Frustrated Total Internal Reflection. Image from Jeff Han’s NYU Homepage.

If you would like to read the full transcript of Jermone Sans’ interview with Paul Virilio, you can see it here at the Watson Institute’s Website.

We’ll leave you with the following, a picture of what Virilio believes the human will be in his own context, ” …a weightless individual in a little ergonomic armchair, suspended outside a space capsule, with the earth below and the interstellar void above. A man with his own gravity, who no longer needs a relationship to society, to those around him, and least of all to a family.” It seems scarily similar to the idea that Peter Sloterdijk holds (but we’ll leave that for another day).