Video game visuals
Slowly dragging these weekly posts back to Wednesday...
As promised, I’ve decided to lead on from last week and talk a little bit about some cool video game photography. This is going to massively skew towards just raving about my friend Ryan’s cool art practice but I’m not sure that he even bothers to read these newsletters (you can @ ryan_forward124 on Instagram if you would like to tell him off for this behaviour).
Macrodosing on real
The only time I’ve ever played GTA was just to take photos. Well, that and I once spent an absurd amount of time trying to push a sun lounger off a roof. But mostly the photos.
Games like GTA V fully nail the hyperreal. It’s got a very cinematic feel that really pushes that ‘realer than real’ notion. It surpasses being realistic through considered use of sound, colour and lighting that add that additional layer of enhancement. The storylines of course are also cinematic and over the top whilst simultaneously implying a sense of gritty realism.
I recently came across a series of these in-game photos I’d taken. At the time (being new to all these concepts) I was mostly just interested in how close I could get to capturing images that left it unclear as to whether it was a digitally created or real life scene. I look at them now and think that, other than video game screenshots, they are most believable as film stills.
The implications of fingerprints
One thing I’m really fond of in the image above is the indents in the sand. Similar to my previous mention of litter in virtual worlds, I love how these details are added to imply use of the space. The Fallout games are particularly wonderful at this, with every blood splatter or dropped item feeding into the lore and history of that imaginary place. If you’re interested in this stuff I really recommend Oxhorn’s Fallout lore YouTube videos which amazingly break down the intricacies of the in-game locations.
Which leads me on to the aforementioned friend Ryan - Ryan Forward a fabulous South Wales-based photographer whose in-game photography really hones in on some of the most interesting elements of video game aesthetics (in my opinion).
The image above is from the series Sanctuary, a collection of photos of video game beds. Throughout the images, crumpled sheets and strewn pillows exist as fingerprints of use - even though really these places and objects are frozen in time, with neither a history nor future. The title of the series references in-game beds as a place of safety, which makes me think a lot about this...
I recently supported Ryan in the creation of his latest work - Nothing Personal - a photobook featuring images captured in Cyberpunk 2077. It packed a ton of concepts into one piece that I’m sure he would explain better than I (Ryan if you ARE reading this - guest post sometime??) but one thing that I found particularly cool is the instances of character doubling:
Like the photos from last week’s post that evidence the fingerprints of humanness in urban landscapes, seeing an NPC character model cross paths with its doppelgänger immediately highlights the structures that generate and power the virtual world.
And finally
On an unrelated note, do you remember the coffee machine bean game? Let me know over on Twitter as I’m going a bit mad…
See you next week!
Edie x
Love these shots: definitely hyper real and so emotive. The photo of the apartment block windows gives me the same shivers as an Edward Hopper painting.