Caramblogage

When the world no longer meets with your approval, you change it. There is a mod for that.  Every game comes in two versions- the one you buy on the shelf, and the game you make out of that game. As early as the late 1980’s, gamers began modifying certain aspects of games- whether for artistic purposes of gameplay is a fine point that cursive research didn’t provide me a ready answer to. I assume it’s somewhere between the two- experiments into changing gameworlds, activating certain bits and bytes, creating animated sequences with pre-built characters in a certain game, but this is the realm of urban legends and suppositions. We're not going there.  Making a game your own happens in two stages- first you play and master the game, then you discover the limits the game sets upon you and you begin to develop ways of unbuilding the limitations in the original game.  Modding was a new field for me. I became very obsessed with load orders and frame...

Fictional realities have come a long way since the 1980’s. And there is a reason video game narratives don’t translate well into film.  The narrative difference between film and video game is of perspective and design. One allows you to experience a fictional reality through a third eye, no matter how much the film absorbs you into its universes. The other gives you the ability to immerse yourself personally in the narrative of a character- through control or a first-person view- who might bend the rules of luck, science and/or genetics a little. Two narrative approaches- the level of very personal involvement with the world and it’s characters differs, as does the emotional and locational attachment. Film allows you to experience events without becoming a part of them- they unfold without the passive viewer being able to influence them in the narrative world that the events require. A computer game makes the viewer active, an influencer and sometimes instigator of eve...