Of Particle Systems and Picturesque Ontologies: Landscape, Nature and Realism in Video Games
- Submitting institution
-
The University of Westminster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- qx829
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.1080/00043249.2020.1765556
- Title of journal
- Art Journal
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 59
- Volume
- 79
- Issue
- 2
- ISSN
- 0004-3249
- Open access status
- Compliant
- Month of publication
- June
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This article is part of the first ever issue on video games published by Art Journal. It offers a unique interdisciplinary perspective on conventional histories of the video game. Typically, video games are situated on a historical trajectory spanning painting, photography and film. Shinkle proposes instead that the history of videogames should be read in proximity to that of the 18th-century landscape garden: a visual representation designed to be encountered by an embodied viewer.
Reading picturesque garden aesthetics alongside the computational basis of videogames, this article complicates both dominant models of landscape, as well as definitions of nature and subjectivity as these relate to representation. It challenges claims that nature is simply a collection of assets represented ‘inside’ the game environment, arguing instead that nature can be understood as a constellation of functional processes with the potential to disrupt the limits of representation. Similarly, player agency is considered not simply as the ability to act ‘within’ the game, but in relation to a matrix of forces – including codes, visual schemas, actions, and processes – that are distributed across human subjects, virtual spaces, and the physical world.
The arguments presented in this article cross disciplinary boundaries and open up key aesthetic and political questions around new materialism and the Anthropocene. They suggest innovative avenues of research into video games not simply as entertainment, but as ontologically complex forms that challenge our understanding of categories like ‘nature’ and ‘the human’. Rethinking nature not as something other but as something that also exists and acts within the digital world, alongside technology and enmeshed with it, may push past binary oppositions of nature and artifice, the digital and the material, the virtual and the human.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
