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And now we're concerned with Simulations and Simulacra in this instance...
There is a campaign to boycott Guitar Hero 5 because of its depiction of Kurt Cobain that has been growing quickly across the internet:
In this brief clip we see Kurt Cobain talking (out of context, or, more correctly - with no context) about how he's been turned into a cartoon character. Then the clip shows footage from the game in which a virtual Kurt is doing virtual performance of a song that I'm sure he never would actually have performed.
There are many clips that demonstrate this strange simulacra of Cobain performing unlike he ever could have or would have before in the game:
These "performances" are, indeed, tacky and probably disrespectful to his death and the legacy of his life as an alienated superstar that struggled with his superstardom and his self-esteem. But this just underlines a greater issue that games such as Guitar Hero bring up.
Simulations are generally the mode in which the gaming world is heading toward. First-person shooters involved crystal graphics and real physics represented in the movement of the characters and projectiles and explosions/gunfire. Racing games are becoming more and more "real". The Nintendo Wii is very popular due to the simulated physical acts that control gameplay. Before the Wii we had Dance Dance Revolution and simulated dancing. Before that we had Duck Hunt.
The history of video games goes back to Pong, which in a sense is simulated ping-pong, but the distance between an authentic experience of ping-pong and pong was so great that there was no question of the difference. With technological improvements, games seem more and more real and also have become more of a total experience.
While I understand the outrage against Guitar Hero 5 for this depiction of Cobain, I think it misses the larger cultural problems we are experiencing in the world of simulations and the following simulacra. Simulated experiences are replacing reality. Guitar Hero in no way makes you an actual guitar hero, as evidenced by the world recorder holder in Guitar Hero, this 12-year-old boy:
Given that the boundaries between real and simulacra are already completely blurred, if not that reality has already been mostly been replaced by simulacra, then I find it interesting when people suddenly find something that offends their sensibilities when all else doesn't.
Is it because Kurt died? It is because of his seeming authenticity that we felt we a relation to (despite not really knowing him at all)? What is it that which repulses us so much about this experience?
I would suggest that it was simply poorly done. The magic of the simulacra is that the creeping world of simulation slowly encroaches on reality and we don't realize the incremental loss of reality. Kurt clearly is not Kurt when he is singing and moving unlike how he'd really sing or move in the game. It is a cardinal sin, because it outlines so clearly for us the emptiness of the representation. We glom onto the metaphorical meaning of Kurt as the rare authentic musician and feel repulsed by the perversion of the metaphor - the metaphor has been flipped upside-down.
This is so much more easily fought against using the strange digital world of YouTube. Archival footage abounds, and is easy to isolate and use in a digital campaign. How ironic that the best way to fight against this digital perversion requires jumping onto the same playing field so readily.
Guitar Hero 5 made the cardinal sin, we aren't supposed to feel this incremental change, else we feel the unreality of situation. Instead of feeling comforted by this generative reality, we feel constricted by it. But it is already too late... because we are only complaining of the choice of Kurt Cobain, not the system that could create this problem.
We are left in a system of incrementally losing the "real" and incrementally fighting this loss with the larger causes that are already taking place in the simulated playing field. The simulacra has extended over the plane of the real, and this battle highlights to the extent to which this has already happened. The colonization is total, and ever-growing.
In this brief clip we see Kurt Cobain talking (out of context, or, more correctly - with no context) about how he's been turned into a cartoon character. Then the clip shows footage from the game in which a virtual Kurt is doing virtual performance of a song that I'm sure he never would actually have performed.
There are many clips that demonstrate this strange simulacra of Cobain performing unlike he ever could have or would have before in the game:
These "performances" are, indeed, tacky and probably disrespectful to his death and the legacy of his life as an alienated superstar that struggled with his superstardom and his self-esteem. But this just underlines a greater issue that games such as Guitar Hero bring up.
Simulations are generally the mode in which the gaming world is heading toward. First-person shooters involved crystal graphics and real physics represented in the movement of the characters and projectiles and explosions/gunfire. Racing games are becoming more and more "real". The Nintendo Wii is very popular due to the simulated physical acts that control gameplay. Before the Wii we had Dance Dance Revolution and simulated dancing. Before that we had Duck Hunt.
The history of video games goes back to Pong, which in a sense is simulated ping-pong, but the distance between an authentic experience of ping-pong and pong was so great that there was no question of the difference. With technological improvements, games seem more and more real and also have become more of a total experience.
While I understand the outrage against Guitar Hero 5 for this depiction of Cobain, I think it misses the larger cultural problems we are experiencing in the world of simulations and the following simulacra. Simulated experiences are replacing reality. Guitar Hero in no way makes you an actual guitar hero, as evidenced by the world recorder holder in Guitar Hero, this 12-year-old boy:
Given that the boundaries between real and simulacra are already completely blurred, if not that reality has already been mostly been replaced by simulacra, then I find it interesting when people suddenly find something that offends their sensibilities when all else doesn't.
Is it because Kurt died? It is because of his seeming authenticity that we felt we a relation to (despite not really knowing him at all)? What is it that which repulses us so much about this experience?
I would suggest that it was simply poorly done. The magic of the simulacra is that the creeping world of simulation slowly encroaches on reality and we don't realize the incremental loss of reality. Kurt clearly is not Kurt when he is singing and moving unlike how he'd really sing or move in the game. It is a cardinal sin, because it outlines so clearly for us the emptiness of the representation. We glom onto the metaphorical meaning of Kurt as the rare authentic musician and feel repulsed by the perversion of the metaphor - the metaphor has been flipped upside-down.
This is so much more easily fought against using the strange digital world of YouTube. Archival footage abounds, and is easy to isolate and use in a digital campaign. How ironic that the best way to fight against this digital perversion requires jumping onto the same playing field so readily.
Guitar Hero 5 made the cardinal sin, we aren't supposed to feel this incremental change, else we feel the unreality of situation. Instead of feeling comforted by this generative reality, we feel constricted by it. But it is already too late... because we are only complaining of the choice of Kurt Cobain, not the system that could create this problem.
We are left in a system of incrementally losing the "real" and incrementally fighting this loss with the larger causes that are already taking place in the simulated playing field. The simulacra has extended over the plane of the real, and this battle highlights to the extent to which this has already happened. The colonization is total, and ever-growing.
posted by Will at 9:47 AM
1 Comments:
Good post.
Peace,
A
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