Types of Gaming

I had a lot of fun with the game playing session today, especially with Dance Dance Revolution. Although I was really horrible at it, I found it more fun than most other games there because it involved music and of course, the player’s complete physical involvement in the game. This physical aspect can be said about the Wii as well, but I just did not find Wario Ware very interesting after the initial excitement of this new concept of gaming. People still could not keep their eyes off it as it was the center of attention for most of the gaming session. I think this is because the Wii’s concept of gaming is so natural and easy to learn. I remember the first time I tried video games a long time ago. I think it was Super Mario for the Super Nintendo. I kept moving the controller itself in a jumping motion when I made Mario jump. After some cousins telling me not to do this, I had to force myself just to press whatever controls needed and not do everything Mario was doing. But this natural way of playing that I had is exactly what the Wii uses and is what pulls everyone in. The same set of games on the Wii were also on the gameboy advanced, but I think most people found that boring because of the traditional controls.

When I played the Wii, the time went much faster as compared to when we played other games like clouds for example. Clouds is the exact opposite of Wii in some ways because it is so unnatural and complicated. All the controls are placed at weird places on the keyboard and there were no instructions whatsoever. Some of us finally figured out how to do certain things like move clouds around but it took a while.

Yet another thing that made the Wii more interesting was that each individual game within the Wario Ware set was timed. The tasks were often easy to do in these games but the challenge was to do it before time ran out. The other games, however, were not timed outright but definitely required one to do actions within a certain time. For example, you had to orient the shape appropriately before it reaches the bottom in tetris. You had to make certain steps at the right time according to the arrows in DDR. You had to make certain turns on time and move around the environment fast enough to avoid the ghosts in pac man. After each level usually, the environment gets faster which means you have to be faster as well. This type of gaming involving time contrasts with gaming that give you all the time in the world. In Clouds, for example, you had quite a bit of free time to fly around and look for clouds or land.

Contradiction

Time Code seemed like an experimental film like Man With a Movie Camera. It was experimental in that it had 4 screens showing at the same time, each containing different vantage points of the cameramen. There are many characters in the film and each is shown dealing with different problems at the same time on the screen. The fact that the entire movie was a continuous take in real-time is astonishing to me. It must have been hard for the actors to maintain their characters for such a long time. Also, it must have been hard for the cameramen to coordinate their positions because they had to make sure that one couldn't see the others.

I was very annoyed at times because I couldn't help thinking that I was missing what was happening in some of the other screens. If I was concentrating on one screen, I found that equally interesting things were happening in the other screens when I glanced at them. So I had to decide whether or not I should continue with the screen I was currently watching or move on. This happened several times and I did not like it because I would rather focus on one thing and get all I can get from it rather than feeling as if there are things that I'm missing that are happening at the same time. However, it was definitely more interesting to see the lives of these people depicted in this original way.

The background sounds were interesting to notice because it seemed like the clearest sound always came from the screen that had the most happening in it, while the other screens were muted. The music as well suited best for the screen in which the most significant event was happening.

Dziga Vertov's objective was clear in his experimental film: to separate the human eye from the camera. What is the objective in this one? The best I can come up with is to show that this type of filming and presentation can be used to depict small stories simultaneously. However, just because all these stories are shown on the screens doesn't mean that the person watching them is going to follow them all. In fact, this style of filmmaking only makes it harder to follow the stories. So I think there is a contradiction between the objective of the film and what the film actually accomplishes.

Tension Between Man and Machine

In Paul Virilio's essay, The Third Interval, the idea that technology is a double-edged sword yet again arises. Virilio uses the term "terminal citizen" to refer to those who have been affected by the technological developments that exist in urban areas. He cites examples of certain advances in particular that involve less physical activity. This further relates to his point that the urbanization of real-time ultimately invokes the urbanization of the body of the citizen. This is certainly evident in most technological advancements of today. Home shopping, as Virilio states, is an example because it allows us to save time by ordering products online and eliminates the need for us to go to the specific store. Here, the goal of saving time results in less physical activity for humans reflecting Virilio's statement about the urbanization of the body of the citizen.

Virilio gives a warning about the dangers of technology here: “catastrophic figure...who abandons himself, for want of anything better, to the capabilities of captors, sensors and other remote control scanners that turn him into a being controlled by the machine...”(20). He argues that eventually, humans will become a “catastrophic figure”, using technology in so many ways that we will end up depending on it and being controlled by it. By using the phrase “abandoning himself”, Virilio conveys the notion that humans will give full agency to the machines while retaining no agency for themselves. This would explain the wording he chose for the term that he coined, the terminal citizen. The word terminal refers to an end, implying that he equates the loss of agency of humans to the loss of mankind on Earth.

Tension between man and technology is not a new subject to this class. In the scene that we saw from Metropolis, we saw that the bodies of the workers had been enslaved by the machine time that is established by the movements of the factory machines. Again, time as influenced by technology also affects the physical activity of the humans who use the technology. Also, students pointed out in earlier response essays that one of the themes in Man With A Movie Camera is that people should not be consumed by machines, but should partake in more natural activities. The manifestation of this message can be seen when Vertov shows people engaging in outdoor activities such as swimming, playing basketball, exercising, etc. .

Men With Time Machines

After the discussion in class, it was evident that Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera has many themes such as the celebration of humans and machines, etc. However, the theme that made most sense to me, which takes into account all the different scenes that seemingly have nothing to do with each other is the use of the movie camera as a time machine to view events under different manipulations of time. Because H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine also deals with a time machine, we could explore the differences and similarities of the two works that we have covered thus far.

The obvious difference is that the manipulation of time that is the basis of Wells’ novel is theoretical. While the explanations of the Time Traveller to his visitors seem plausible, the fact is that no one can travel through time. On the other hand, as can be seen in the film, it is very much possible to use editing techniques to show even normal activities such as playing basketball or swimming distorted under altered versions of time.

Both Vertov and The Time Traveller intend their time machines as a way of rejecting the current state of affairs. In the Time Traveller’s case, this is easy to see because everybody believes that one cannot move across time. But as he explains, time is just like the other three dimensions that exist except for the fact that our consciousness moves along it. Due to this, he says that we can move across time just like we can move across space. Vertov was trying to show a way of filmmaking that deviated from the clichéd films filled with misplaced literary and theatrical elements that existed at the time. The movie camera can be seen as a symbol for a time machine because he uses it to to free himself from the constant flow of time that he sees as constraining (according to his manifesto regarding Kino-Eye).

Because they have time machines at their disposal, Vertov and the Time Traveller put them to use, in the process bypassing the governing elements of time as mentioned in class: linearity, irreversibility, and continuity. The Time Traveller essentially speeds up time to go to the future. Vertov shows many scenes that are either sped up or slowed down (the track athletes in slow motion, for example). These manipulations break the linearity of time. The Time Traveller states that theoretically his machine could also go back to the past, meaning that he can speed up time in the opposite direction as well. Vertov shows scenes that occur at different points in time and puts them together. For example, he shows a funeral, then a marriage ceremony, followed by the birth of a child. These manipulations break the irreversibility of time. The Time Traveller provides evidence that his time machine can break the continuity of time because he has the ability to speed it up. Vertov achieves this by drawing the movement of the film to a halt (still images) at certain parts of the movie.