Page 216 - Cyberculture and New Media
P. 216
Tony Richards 207
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Like many games ‘Black and White’ starts with a cutscene which
helps to situate the player in relation to the gamespace they are about to
embark on. Here they are given their ‘character’ and welcomed into the world
of the game’s ‘parameters’. Once this universal-constative cutscene is over
and the particular-performative game-element embarked upon, the player
finds they are actually occupying at least two positions, to a large extent
fracturing any perspectivisation in that traditionally unified sense. Firstly
there is the God-mimicking ‘above’ position (literally ‘a hand’) where all
areas of the game can be mobilised and manipulated, as in any decent top-
down civilisation game. This leaves however a certain sense of de-focalised
third-personage, placed as we are within the “third-person” position of
distance or identificatory absence: ‘outside’ the occupied space of the ground
level. Godlike. A second position is offered in answer to this hovering
absent-outside whereby a second ‘stand-in’ character, now within the space,
can be influenced, coaxed as of a proxy (a ‘Beast’ character chosen from a
line-up of cow, lion or monkey; each with their own initial attributes). Here is
where this game gets its impetus or identity, in this fractured sewing-between
third and first. We are a God who chooses to intervene but we also intervene
on a character which also intervenes on further characters (the population of a
village it will interact with). A double-intervening. A double placement and
interest: expanding as the game unfolds.
One interaction is constant, ready-to-hand and ours; obeying our
controls, one-to-one, as in some I-extension. This extended-I is omnipotent,
immanent and always seemingly ours. The second stand-in however is
relatively autonomous and capable of change, without any exacting
guarantee. Through a sort of Pavlovian conditioning, the as yet ill-formed
Beast’s activities in this island-world are circumscribed, to an extent, given
its relative autonomy, by reward and punishment (a stroke or a punch for
example as it eats up villager or saves one from drowning). Thus the God-
hand (for that is the tool with which we reward, punish and coax) upon the
beast forms a sort of clumsy steering wheel that in attempting to drive the
beast becomes a sort of conscious extension of it, in a Heideggerian sense.
Our boundary with the beast is thus more fluid and removed than our ready-
to-hand (of God) character which would seem also to be the first-person
avatar of ourselves in-play (replacing the gun of the first-person shooter with
the hand of our God-self). The beast-character acted upon by our extending-I
hand then forms a secondary tool more present-to-hand, a tool-towards-a-
narrative-branching that we are constantly and consistently aware of. This
character itself is however never consistent or determined. A problem
already. For these two différant loci of operation (the hand and the beast;
operator and operand) within themselves and within their difference provide
also a variable and bleeding boundary dynamic between positions of first and
the third person (God: for we are the position of the narratological third as in