The two videogames at the center of this study, Super Mario 64 and Watch_Dogs 2, reflect the technological and game mechanical advancements that initiated the return, and spurred on the ascendance of, digital flânerie—not only as a popular play style but also as a predominant design principle. As the 3D gameworlds of the 1990s laid the foundation for the open worlds of the 21st century, the careful gaze of the Lakitu—once in the background—has been expanded and multiplied by a multitude of digital flâneurs and Watch Dogs. The
respective release dates of Super Mario 64 (1996) and Watch_Dogs 2 (2016) mark two
substantial stages of digital technology: first, the rise of the PC-driven web; and second, the rise of smartphone-driven social media. From the Lakitu to the Watch Dog, digital flânerie—
especially as it emerges in open world games—reflects and critiques the interactivity, the hypervisibility, the surveillance, and the connectivity of life both online and on social media—
life in the digital enclosure. As the training ground for such a life, open world games emulate and perpetuate the incessant data tracking that not only captures the human trace, but also reanimates it as a data double. Open world games have, however, given rise to the digital flâneur, whose aimless wandering and test-like watching not only bear witness to the digital strictures that seem “to close relentlessly around us,” but also point to the cracks in the digital enclosure—to the “vast and unexpected field of action” beyond optimization and compliance.
Benjamin’s flâneur is typically not thought of as a revolutionary figure. But as an avatar of cinematic reception, the flâneur embodies testing as seeing—a developmental leap of the human perceptual apparatus that is nothing short of revolutionary. Seeing surveillantly, the
contemporary corollary of the Begutachter’s test-like gaze, had its flashbulb moment in the summer of 2020, when smartphone camera footage capturing the police killing of George Floyd sparked a series of national (and eventually international) Black Lives Matter protests that have made a substantial impact socially, culturally, and politically. Though they had a revolutionary flashpoint in the summer of 2020, the technological power to document—to capture the human trace—and the perceptual habituation of seeing surveillantly descend from decades of techno-cultural hypervisibility, trained interactivity, and multitudes of mobile gazes—both real and virtual. As the relationship between crowds, media technology, and political power
continue to be negotiated, returning to the work of Walter Benjamin is a crucial step toward reimagining the balance between the Publikum and the Apparatur—between the crowds and their digital traces.
If Benjamin’s flâneur can draw attention to the fissures in the present day digital enclosure, perhaps it can offer guidance as the next techno-perceptual threshold approaches.
Following advancements in Augmented Reality technology and the onset of the 5G network, Kevin Kelley has heralded the imminent arrival of the mirrorworld, the next phase of digital culture, which will merge physical reality with the digital universe in the creation of a true internet of things:
Deep in the research labs of tech companies around the world, scientists and engineers are racing to construct virtual places that overlay actual places. (…) At first, the mirrorworld will appear to us as a high-resolution stratum of information overlaying the real world. We might see a virtual name tag hovering in front of people we previously met. Perhaps a blue arrow showing us the right place to turn a corner. Or helpful annotations anchored to places of interest. (…) Eventually we’ll be able to search physical space as we might search a text—“find me all the
places where a park bench faces sunrise along a river.” We will hyperlink objects into a network of the physical, just as the web hyperlinked words…176
To conceptualize the mirrorworld’s overlapping of the virtual on the real, Kelley turns to the realm of gaming; Pokemon Go “gives just a hint of this platform’s nearly unlimited capability for exploration.”177 The open world genre, too, offers insight into the complexities of the
mirrorworld’s blending of the real and the virtual; like players of open world games, citizens of the mirrorworld will be confronted with the haptic demands of interactive engagement—a constant bombardment of visual data to be parsed, digested, transferred, or—if possible—
ignored. Moreover, Kelley’s description of visuality in the mirrorworld bears a striking resemblance to the player’s process of learning to see anew in open world games:
The mirrorworld promises super vision. We’ll have a type of x-ray vision able to see into objects via their virtual ghosts, exploding them into constituent parts, able to untangle their circuits visually. Just as past generations gained textual literacy in school, learning how to master the written word, from alphabets to indexes, the next generation will master visual literacy.178
Just as WD2 animates the networked undergirding of the digital enclosure, the mirrorworld will impose the camera hack’s “x-ray vision” onto physical reality. Dependent on technology and strategies from the world of gaming, the mirrorworld will not only follow the logic of game mechanics, but it will also look like a gameworld (which, of course, looks back)—testing as seeing will become an everyday aesthetic. Benjamin’s flâneur—a product of layered, liminal realities—will be needed once again as the mirrorworld fundamentally alters the human perceptual apparatus and the (online) crowds are confronted with learning to see, and to navigate, a novel symbiosis of the real and the virtual.
176 Kevin Kelly, “AR Will Spark the Next Big Tech Platform—Call It Mirrorworld,” WIRED, February 12, 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/mirrorworld-ar-next-big-tech-platform/.
177 Ibid.
178 Ibid.