Navigation Simulation:

Gaming Across the Topology of the Screen

 

Jason Farman

 

Vivian Sobchack begins her chapter “Breadcrumbs in the Forest,” with an anecdote from her childhood experience of navigating space, “When I was a child, I always thought north was the way I was facing. Sure then in my purposeful direction, there was a compelling logic to this phenomenological assumption. Bringing into convergence flesh and sign, north conflated in my child’s consciousness the design of my body and the design of an atlas page.” [1] Sobchack’s childhood assumption that north was the direction aligned with the first-person point of view (POV) mirrors the phenomenology of many virtual spaces. In a large portion of video games, the world moves in synch with the player’s character as seen in both first-person shooter games and games that utilize a third-person perspective on the player’s avatar. Facing forward into a virtual world experienced through an avatar, the player’s assumptions about a “true north” (or, in other terms, the direction of purpose) parallel Sobchack’s atlas and transfer it onto the screen. Creating a sense of place within a gaming environment is a process that now corresponds to the process of inhabiting material space in conjunction to the virtual representation of that space (e.g. the map on a Global Positioning System (GPS) device showing what street you are on). As virtual spaces become more and more intertwined with our material spaces, the act of navigating these spaces requires our theoretical attention. How do we, after proprioceptively locating ourselves on the digital stage, enact the process of navigation through this “mixed-reality” space? [2] Through investigating the navigable interface of the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and the emerging GPS games such as GPS::Tron, I seek to show how the mapping of virtual space onto material space (or vise-versa) has altered the cultural metaphor of the interface to the extent that “digital” and “material” spaces are no longer distinct but instead inform and influence one another to the extent that the border between them appears to dissolve.

Digital interfaces have become a mandatory element of new digital technologies and the success of these products depends, in large part, on the intuitive nature of the interface design. This level of “immediacy” does not call attention to its own mediation, and thus appears to seamlessly blend into the material world. [3] Often, we as consumers are so unaware of the interface as an interface that we have tended to simply ignore that the possibility that navigating these digital spaces might require an alternative theoretical approach. Thus, as we navigate through our daily environments, the space between the material world and the interface has become so purposefully indecipherable that one might feel the simultaneous experience of everything being an “interface” and nothing being an “interface.” Sue-Ellen Case compares the integration of digital interfaces and material interfaces to the process of driving a vehicle. She writes,

Designing the space of the screen, rather than the sequence of commands, streamlines the interface. For the user, the mouse is what “drives” the fast interface. It connects the body to the speed of the software, rendering the perception of the machine as what Virilio has termed the “static audiovisual vehicle.” To drive it is to speed along on the “information highway” at such speed that arrival is almost immediate. The transmission to Beijing, then, requires no arduous, lengthy travel, but appears almost immediately upon the “static vehicle’s” windshield.[4]

The vehicle’s windshield in the material world, which is drawn upon for Case’s metaphor of the static vehicle, is a key example of a visual frame of navigation that is currently read as a screen of a navigable interface. For Paul Virilio, the cinematic screen has become the predominant metaphor for driving around the urban landscape. This constantly shifting landscape reformats itself to become more cinematic in appearance (e.g. the large-screen digital billboards on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood) in order to accompany the anticipated interface expected through the windshield. Virilio notes, “The question today therefore is no longer to know if cinema can do without a place but if places can do without cinema.” [5] He continues this thought: “The huge lines of spectators jostling each other Saturday and Sunday before the windows of the temples of film are disappearing because they reform from now on, and as punctually, at the freeway entrances. It is simply the case that what had pushed the masses toward the cinema armchairs now forces them into the seats of their automobiles.” [6] With digital interfaces making their way into the “cinema of the automobile,” the notion of the vehicle as interface is redoubled. Many cars come equipped with GPS navigation devices to assist travelers with the process of navigating from point A to point B. The vast majority of these systems employ a graphical user interface (GUI) that displays a representation of their car on the screen in relationship to their location on the system’s map. Emerging “GPS games” [7]are actually implementing this technology—and the notions of interface that inform this technology—to performatively navigate city streets. In one such game, GPS::Tron [8], player’s cell phones are connected to GPS navigation via Bluetooth technology and when played in an automobile, which is typically the case, the GPS interface corresponds with the interface of the windshield. GPS::Tron draws from the 1982 film Tron, in which players trapped inside a video game computer system are forced to battle each other through various tournaments including a racing game on motorcycles called “light bikes.” This racing game sets players side-by-side on a digital grid, one team driving blue vehicles and the other driving gold vehicles. As the players move forward on the screen, they leave behind a digital trail that corresponds to their vehicle’s color. This trail forms an impenetrable wall that neither player can cross over. The goal of the game is to trap the other player within the digital walls created by the vehicles. In GPS::Tron, both players’ vehicles are represented onscreen by a specific color and they begin movement side-by-side on the GPS interface. The vehicles, however, do not necessarily need to be physically next to each other for the game to work. One player can begin the game on the streets of Los Angeles while the opponent plays on the streets of Sydney. Their pathways are mapped onto the shared digital (spatial) representation of their vehicles on the GPS interface, allowing players from around the globe to compete with each other.

In GPS::Tron, as a player moves forward 200 meters, their position on the GPS interface moves forward one centimeter. As players navigate the city streets, the interface of the windshield corresponds to the interface of the GPS in such an intuitive way that the separate interfaces seem to dissolve into one. Phenomenologically, the act of game play combines the material world with the digital world through the singular conception of the “interface.” A key component of this dissolve of the digital with the material is the representation of the user on the interface. The player’s body locates the vehicle simultaneously in the urban landscape and in the digital landscape, understanding the relationship of movement across streets as translating into movement on the screen. This correspondence between navigable interfaces allows for what I term “proprioceptive-semiosis” to take place: a simultaneous reading of spaces and bodies as culturally constructed and phenomenologically realized. Though the graphical representation of the player on the GPS interface allows this proprioceptive-semiosis to take place, the ways items are represented on the maps and the GPS interface privilege certain notions of spatiality to the detriment of other notions of space. As Sobchack notes,

Although I was aware of the space behind me and to the sides of me, it was the space in front of me—the space I could see—that was clearly privileged….I realize now, of course that printed maps were also responsible for confusing me. The little compass on every atlas page was composed so that north enjoyed a larger or bolder arrow that did the other directional markers, and this was always pointed in a similar direction as the forward-looking trajectory of my eyes as I read. Maps were positioned on the page so that the important spaces of the world were read “in front” and “ahead” of my body just as they were in my child’s world. [9]

Thus, representation and navigation have operated collaboratively since the act of cartography began. In the digital world, these representations extend beyond the images of places and landscapes to include representations of the spectator-user within the larger order of the digital landscape.

 

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and the Culture of Customizability

A recent release from Rockstar Games called Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTA: San Andreas) (2004) demonstrates how the interfaces of materiality and virtuality often blend and blur in order to create a sense of place and navigation through the inhabited digital environment. This game is a third-person shooter game that takes place on the streets of a fictional state called San Andreas (the cities in this state are puns on cities in California, and the characters themselves are often considered exaggerations of California stereotypes). GTA: San Andreas offers the player complete freedom of mobility without the restriction of game-imposed time limits. Gamers can get inside a car and drive to virtually any location in the state of San Andreas if they desire or simply stay in a neighborhood bar and play pool with one of the locals all night. The range of games within this game are remarkable, from getting inside a taxi and looking for fares to earn some extra money to stealing a fire truck and hunting for fires to put out.

The main narrative backstory to the game involves the protagonist, Carl Johnson, who was recently released from prison (framed for the murder of a police officer). While he was incarcerated, his mother was killed, and her death remains a mystery. After returning to his neighborhood (a gang-run area named Ganton, a close mock-up of Compton) he rejoins his old gang. What follows are a series of missions, ranging from simple (getting a new hair cut) to highly involved (robbing the local National Guard of their guns). The missions can be attempted whenever the player wants and, in the meantime, he or she can roam the streets of San Andreas and do almost anything desired—from stealing cars to getting in fights with random pedestrians (typically stealing their belongings after having beaten them bloody).

The connection between the process of navigation and the enactment of a narrative structure does not depend on a set sequence of events in GTA: San Andreas. Navigation is not limited to the scope of the game’s story line. Thus, the player does not have to go on missions to experience the dynamic range of player options in the game. The player does not have to do anything related to the gangs in order to actually “play” the game (though if a player hopes to “beat” the game, he or she must carry out each mission and successfully pass). Elements of narrative exist, but do not have to be played while elements of “pure game” exist (such as playing pool or basketball) but do not have to be played either.

The disconnect between game play and narrative structure is important in the context of the controversy currently surrounding the content of the game. The primary question that plagues GTA: San Andreas is, “Does the process of navigating through the game mimetically mirror the processes of navigating through the material world (and thus have a profound affect on the material)?” Just as the game GPS::Tron highlights the intimate and seamless connection between the virtual interface and the material interface, does GTA: San Andreas offer a similar relationship between our understandings of interface? These questions have arisen from a number of sources who feel the game promotes violence, gang lifestyles, and animosity with the police. For example, David Walsh, president of the National Institute of Media and the Family, has argued that, since an 18-year-old shot and killed police officers in Alabama (and blamed his actions on playing GTA: San Andreas), parents should “watch what your kids are watching. Don't choose killer simulations now that we know they simulate sex, as well.” [10]

The “sex simulations” in GTA: San Andreas have led to the game’s most outspoken critic in recent days: Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Her objections to the game arose when the “Hot Coffee” modification was made available for the PC version of the game through the distribution of a hacker named Patrick Wildenborg. The mod, similar to the Sims Nude patch, opens up a new level of the game that was previously inaccessible. When the character CJ gets a girlfriend and adequately “woos” her, they go inside the house “for some coffee” (a euphemism for sex). When the “Hot Coffee” patch is implemented, the user gets to go inside with CJ and engages in sex with his girlfriend, actually determining his sexual moves. Though the characters are never “nude,” the act is explicit and obvious enough to raise the concerns of the National Institute of Media and the Family and Senator Clinton while moving the rating of the game from “Mature” to “Adults Only.” Though Rockstar Games and its Parent Company, Take Two, initially stated that the mod was not originally in the game and only accessible through extreme “reverse engineering,” Wildenborg contends that his mod only opened access to the code that was already written in the game.

Following Clinton’s objections, the state of California has filed a lawsuit against Rockstar Games. The lawsuit, started by Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, claims that Take Two failed to disclose the hidden components of the game that would have changed the game’s rating. Though the ratings change simply moves the age of purchase from 17 and older (Rated Mature) to 18 and older (Adults Only), such a rating change would have significantly altered the number of stores in which the game could have been sold in California. The lawsuit requires Take Two to change their marking strategy, which the lawsuit argues is geared toward children, as well as paying fines close to $10 Million.

Do the objections to GTA: San Andreas stem from our new understanding of the material world as an interface in the same way that the digital world is experienced through an interface? Thus, the objection seems to be that the game is dangerous because it creates a process of one interface informing another. One such example is the boycott initiated by the organization Sex Workers Outreach Project, which argues,

In the interest of furthering sex worker’s human and civil rights to life and personal safety, we object to any media which represents sex workers as legitimate targets of violence, rape and murder…. Since the video game Grand Theft Auto accrues points to players for the depiction of the rape and murder of prostitutes, SWOP-USA calls on all parents and all gamers to boycott Grand Theft Auto. [11]

One gamer on the Gamespot forum responded to SWOP’s boycott by arguing,

Not to mention, have you ever been required to kill a prostitute in any GTA game? Anytime that happens the players do it themselves. Rockstar never created a mission where the goal was to murder a prostitute or even have sex with one. They just happen to be available if you choose to. And I believe the whole reason prostitutes were put in the games in the first place was to re-create the grittiness of city streets with as much realism as possible. Prostitutes are there in real life.....so to make the game as realistic as possible, they are in the game too. You never have to do anything with or to them though.[12]

This distinction is made throughout the forum, as gamers argue that the modifications and the often-questionable material offer a sense of freedom within the game. This sense of “freedom” is experienced because the act of navigating the space is similar to “real life.” Here, gaming theories must begin to extend beyond looking at the game as a stand-alone artifact and begin to take into account the proprioceptive-semotics involved in “reading” the relationship between the gaming and the material interfaces.

 

Hypermediating the Game Interface

Though GTA: San Andreas can be considered to simply be a gang-violence simulator, I want to argue that the relationship between this digital interface and the material space that is assumed to be influenced by it can be altered in such a way as to create a sense of distanciation. This distanciation is necessary to reading the gaming interface as the site of social commentary rather than as a site of negative influence.

What emerges out of game play in GTA: San Andreas is one of two options: players will experience the game as an immersive interface that ultimately becomes a gang-violence simulator or players will experience the game as a hypermediated space that satirizes the violence and the media that such violence alludes to (e.g. the blood-soaked action film). The key to the latter experience is the player’s interactions with the customization controls that allow an alteration of the CJ avatar. The player can alter CJ’s hair, clothing, vehicles, and his physique. The game offers the options of giving CJ a normal haircut, a huge blonde afro, or even a pink mohawk. During the game, if the player desires, they can load CJ up with food without counterbalancing it with exercise. The result is a significant weight gain that makes the CJ avatar obese and much slower on the streets as he runs and maneuvers. On one early mission in the game, CJ must go into the local clothing store, Blinco, to buy clothes that connect him to his local gang (typically something in the gang’s color of green). The options here allow the player to put an array of ridiculous clothes on CJ—from a leopard-print cowboy hat to Groucho Marx joke glasses. Or the player can simply have CJ wear nothing but underwear. The ability to create a character that starkly juxtaposes the dark and gritty streets of San Andreas through the wearing of clothes that would never be socially acceptable in this environment points to the ways that game customization allows for the player to create this hypermediated interface. The distanciation created through hypermediating the interface allows the social satire to be read in the larger game narrative. This satirical narrative is most pronounced in the ability for players to customize their avatar to fit in as a type of clown character in the gang neighborhood. As CJ emerges from Blinco in his humorous and obnoxious outfit, he returns home to begin a new gang mission. As he converses with his fellow Grove Street gang members about the forthcoming mission, his starkly contrasting appearance is never discussed, mocked, nor challenged. He is allowed to exist as an affront to the status quo, clearly marking the social satire and exaggeration the game gestures towards from the outset. As Soraya Murray argues in her article, “High Art/low life: The Art of Playing Grand Theft Auto,” “What emerges is the game's subtext: an experience of the dystopic metropolis, punctuated by a keen satirical comment on the omnipresent corruption and hypocrisy that would mitigate such a reality.” [13] Though Murray argues for this subtext to be explicit in the game narrative itself, such a reading does not clearly emerge without the direct customization of the character to exist as the clown among the ruthless gang members in San Andreas.

 

Game Time and a Sense of Place

Part of the social satire that emerges from game play in GTA: San Andreas depends on the player’s sufficient connection to the navigable landscape of this digital environment. The creators of GTA: San Andreas have designed a gaming environment that adequately simulates the process of navigation in material space. For this navigable interface to correspond to the process of material navigation, the implementation of game time must correspond in very specific ways to the player’s “real time” in the material world. Jesper Juul’s discussions of game time points out that the difference between the player being a player and simultaneously a character in the game world reflects the dual nature of “game time.” Game time exists in two modes: play time and event time. Play time is the time in the material world that it takes to play the game. Event time is the time that passes in the game world while the player. The relationship between play time and event time is what Juul terms as mapping:

Mapping means that the player’s time and actions are projected into a game world. This is the play-element of the games; you click with your mouse, but you are also the mayor of a fictive city. In this way, there is a basic sense of now when you play a game; the events in a game be they ever so strange and unlike the player’s situation, have a basic link to the player….The moment of mapping is one that has a basic sense of happening now, when you play.[14]

This element of mapping game times exists, as Juul notes, in all forms of games. The mapping of game time is often more pronounced in the theatrical setting of the arcade, where there exists both an audience and an economic significance that is not replicated in the home console (arcade game time depends on how much money you are willing to invest to keep the game active). However, within the home console and the personal computer, the mapping of game time can often take on new socio-cultural implications (as seen in gamers who often prioritize the event time of Ultima Online or World of Warcraft over the material time taking place around them). Thus, in some instances, play time is highly removed from any correlation with event time. Often after playing a Massively-Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) a player will look at the clock down in the corner of the screen and realize that what was believed to be two hours of gaming was actually eight.

This type of disconnect between play time and event time alter the sense of place that typically is gained with extended exposure to a particular gaming environment. This is especially true of games that incorporate the travel and navigation from one spot to another as a means to orient the player of the larger spatial layout of the game, as seen in GTA: San Andreas. In conjunction with this game, there are several other games that use the city of Los Angeles as the navigable interface for game play, including Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland (2005), and True Crime: Streets of LA (2003). In each of these games, players can drive (or skateboard) around the streets of Los Angeles (or Los Santos in GTA: San Andreas). True Crime actually reproduced every street in the L.A. Metro area, allowing players who live in Los Angeles to actually drive by their own houses and other landmarks that dominate the scenery in the area. The game actually operates as a type of documentary in this respect. Using satellite imagery, topographical maps, GPS mapping software, and driving “up and down the streets with video cameras in hand,” Activision game designers have accurately recreated 240 square miles of the Los Angeles area. [15] Since the city streets of Los Angeles are accurately mapped out for the character, the drive from Downtown to Beverly Hills (if the player was driving at the speed limit—which they never do) would take as long as it would take in the material world.

The ability to navigate through the city streets of Los Angeles in “real life” has often been compared to navigation in mediated forms. Jean Baudrillard has compared driving through Los Angeles to America’s larger cinematic nature. [16] Sue-Ellen Case’s comparison of driving a car to driving the computer mouse, as quoted at the beginning of this article, also evokes the relationship between the mediated nature of Los Angeles city streets and the interface of the personal computer. The move from a gaming interface such as True Crime or GTA: San Andreas to the interface of the car’s windshield has become almost seamless in American culture, which has come to privilege the interface as a primary metaphor for everyday life. This is especially true in situations where certain gamers (as discussed earlier) actually find the gaming interface more compelling and interesting than the interface of “Real Life.” For many gamers, the interface of the game can and does produce a true sense of place. As Murray notes in her article on GTA: San Andreas,

What is more interesting than the moral panic around the depiction of violence is how GTA, through a simulated “realistic” sense of space and time, conveys an expansive sense of “place.” That is to say, a player’s ability to act within a gaming environment is made palpable through the successful combination of image, tactility, and sound. By learning how to effectively navigate a simulated body within this manifestation, the quality of place comes to life. As such, it represents a compelling human-computer encounter between informational space and lived space.[17]

Though game time plays a significant part to creating this sense of place (especially in True Crime, which requires gamers to spend the actual time driving from one location to the next) this notion of “place” is constructed through the combination of game time and navigation within the larger goals of the game (be that narrative or “pure play”).

Yet, as discussed in my analysis of GPS::Tron, this sense of place can also correspond to the external setting of the game’s system as opposed to the game’s internal construction of place. The game exists in the correlation between the GUI and the material world interface. This is also present in games that are played on cell phones or on the popular PlayStation Personal or GameBoy systems—the game’s portability becomes its trope and informs its semiotic relationship to the material world. Thus, driving through the virtual streets of True Crime or GTA: San Andreas or, while playing GPS::Tron, driving through the material streets of Downtown Los Angeles, the connections between virtual and material interfaces blend and blur through the interactive process of navigating the topology of the screen.

 

Notes