The most recent return of the flâneur finds Walter Benjamin's notable Thinking Figure walking down the pixelated corridors of simulated cityscapes. Assassin's Creed and the Ludotopical Movement," Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association Conor McGarrigle, "Forget the Flâneur, "Proceedings of the 19th International Symposium of Electronic Art.
Structure
DIGITAL FLÂNERIE
Introduction
Benjamin's writing approaches to flâneuria are broad, from an essay ("The Return of the Flâneur") to an autobiographical recording (A Berlin Childhood about 1900) to an aphorism (One-Way Street) to a protocol of drug experimentation ("Hashish in Marseille") on experimentally. However, among all these figures, the flaneur has a unique role as a link between Benjamin's writing on film and his writing on the metropolis.
Digital Flânerie and Open World Games
What might the genre hybridity of Benjamin's flaneur work reveal about the hybridity of the flaneur image. In particular, Benjamin's writing bridges the mediated reception in the movie palace to the gazes exchanged amid the collisions and shocks of urban masses.
THE AVATAR: WALTER BENJAMIN AND GAME STUDIES
Freyermuth provides a comprehensive analysis of the game camera in terms of aesthetic and economic growth. Expanding the boundaries of the on-screen avatar, these game studies researchers conceptualize the interactivity between the player and the video game as perceptually robust.
Benjamin’s Avatarial Framework
Only in the fifth and last completed version of the essay, the term Begutachter, appears. In the essays "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire" and "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire". 74 "It" refers to the Audience, which identifies with the Apparatus by taking the approach of the Reviewer.
Benjamin details the Testleistung by turning his focus to the cinematic image, an exemplary site of the cyborg entanglement of the Audience and the Apparatus. Benjamin's characterization of the Testleistung as a surgical operation complicates the cyborg dynamic between the Audience and the Apparatus. Benjamin shifts his conceptualization of testing to the inner workings of the human mind via the field of psychoanalysis.
Moviegoers are trained to take Begutachter's perspective – and the effect is liberating. Benjamin's strolling Begutachter, showing the way forward, returns at the end of the essay as the embodiment of a now.
Dual Control
Besides their shared gaze, the Lakitu and the player both use a camera that hangs from a wire. The course of Mario and the Lakitu's ongoing narrative in Super Mario 64 emerges as the player grapples with dual controls. Indeed, the Lakitu's background as a cameraman, the in-game presence of the camera itself, and the game's use of cinematic gestures (cross and iris fade, zoom, and voice over) evoke the player's cinematic perspective throughout the game.
In Lakitu's first appearance in Super Mario 64, he points his camera at the player. Lakitu's opening gesture—training his eyes and camera on the player—signals the camera's active and substantive role in the game world. The Super Mario 64 HUD signals that the Lakitu camera is not available for the player to control.
Super Mario 64 Hud indicates that the Lakitu camera is available for player control. When the player is temporarily denied control of the game camera (for example, during a cutscene), the movie camera icon remains, but the Lakitu icon is replaced with a red “X”.
Conclusion
Lakitu's buzz may shock the player, but the true shock effect of the video game is interactivity, which creates - and requires - constant observation. Much more than just a controller scheme, dual control is the perceptual force that has shaped the contours of virtual game worlds just as it has shaped the physical contours of gaming hardware. Now players control the game camera as a matter of course, just like they control the cameras in their phones, cars and drones.
On the one hand, dual control encourages mainstream gaming trends toward incessant measurement, spectacular calculations, and an all-consuming competitive spirit born of achievement and utility. On the other hand, dual control provides digital flânerie, where seeing is endowed with haptic energy and walking - slowly - is how one can choose to see the game world. As the mirror in Super Mario 64 reminds us, the video game experience is deeply shadowed by multivalent acts of seeing and being seen.
Identifying when these acts of observation give way to observation or flaming is the subject of the next chapter. The core concepts of this chapter - cyborg media ecology; Testleistung and camera avatar; and tactile optics and haptic feedback technology—will provide the theoretical foundation for the next chapter, which looks to the fields of observation and surveillance studies to understand the vigilante trends of the video game medium—including the phenomenon of digital flare.
FROM THE WINDOW TO THE WATCH_DOG: WALTER BENJAMIN, SURVEILLANCE AND FLÂNERIE
That the formation of the stealth genre coincided with the rise of 3D game worlds and dual controls is no surprise. In particular, Super Mario 64's mise-en-scene in the hall of mirrors—where the ever-present and unblinking eye of the player camera is revealed—provides us with a visceral reminder of the "primordial" connection between surveillance and play. Floating on a cloud, Lakitu is the only character in the Mario-verse capable of mimicking the movements of the player-controlled camera, which can hover in place and soar forward in any direction at a moment's notice.
118 Gilyadov, "In the Shadows." This dynamic is at the heart of the gameplay of Stealth Games, a popular. Consistent innovation in the player-controlled camera reveals Super Mario 64's influence on open-world games, especially WD2, where a drone's eye view of the world is not only built into the game's design and the contours of the game's controller, but also the player's approach to and perception of the game world. WD2's reconfiguration of avatar-centric gameplay is most emphatically expressed through the camera hack - the integral element of the WD2 gameplay experience.
With a perspective split between the egocentric view of the avatar and the communal eye of the city's vast network of surveillance cameras, the player moves between the familiarity of dual control and the disorientation of the camera hack. The perspectival hybridity of dual control—between avatar and camera, between left and right thumbstick—resurfaces in WD2 as the player learns to consistently and repeatedly abandon the avatar's mobile camera for the situated perspective of the city.
The Window Interface, Surveillance, Flânerie
Dual Control, Camera Hack
By repeatedly tearing the player's perspective away from the avatar—only to return it later—the camera hack breaks apart and reassembles the player's haptic reflexes, which are tied into the dual thumbsticks of the controller. A typical camera hack gameplay sequence might feature the player's perspective of: Marcus à Surveillance Camera à Marcus. The player hijacks the camera on the freighter and gets a perspective view of the potentially dangerous area.
When the player initiates a camera hack, the perspective shifts from the third-person, extra-diegetic game camera (fixed on Marcus) to the first-person, diegetic control camera (pointed towards a fixed part of the game world). The dynamic element of camera hacking – as the player scans the cityscape for the next surveillance camera – makes for a challenging game mechanic. Camera hacking, aided by the haptic transformation of dual controls, also combines genre expectations that emphasize the hybridity inherent in the avatar, as well as the hybridity of the player and the video game.
The remote three-quarter isometric view of SimCity2000 allows the player to control the game space. As the hybrid perspective of the intruding camera activates the bodily aspects of the interface, it simultaneously reveals the avatar's potential to influence how the player and the screen interact.
EPILOGUE
Although they had a revolutionary focal point in the summer of 2020, the technological power to document—to capture the human trace—and the perceptual habituation of observed viewing emerge from decades of techno-cultural hypervisibility, trained interactivity, and a multiplicity of mobile gazes—both real and virtual. If Benjamin's flâneur can point to cracks in today's digital casing, perhaps he can offer guidance as the next techno-perceptual threshold approaches. Deep in the research labs of tech companies around the world, scientists and engineers are racing to build virtual cities that overlay real cities.
Initially, the mirror world will appear to us as a high-resolution information layer overlaying the real world. To conceptualize the overlap of the virtual world with reality in the mirror world, Kelley turns to the realm of gaming; Pokemon Go “provides just a hint of this platform's virtually limitless possibilities for exploration.”177 The open-world genre also offers insight into the complexity of the world. Just as WD2 animates the networked substructure of the digital housing, the mirror world will impose the 'X-ray vision' of the camera hack on physical reality.
Depending on the technology and strategies from the game world, the mirror world will not only follow the logic of the game mechanics, but also look like the game world (which of course looks back) - testing as viewing will become an everyday aesthetic. Benjamin's flâneur – a product of multi-layered, liminal realities – will be needed again when the mirror world fundamentally changes the human perceptual apparatus and the (online) masses are faced with learning to see and navigate a new symbiosis of the real and the virtual.
APPENDIX A
Transcript of Interview with Thomas Geffroyd
Geffroyd's comments, in summary, indicate a general trajectory in the open-world genre that challenges long-held notions of interactivity, and in turn pushes our understanding of what video games are and what they can be. And then in the end you can expose your own point of view on the problem. It is not just an elite and we are not in the 70s where 1% of the population in 256 had literacy.
So in an ideal world we would like to make an open world hacker game without 293. CM: Right, and I think that shows how this game could be used in the classroom.
