Rogg4n
All the World's a Game ? - Etang de la Gruère - Jura - Switzerland
"All the World's a Stage" wrote Shakespeare. "All the world's a screen" may have wrote some film director during the 20th century. But if I had to pick a version to speak of today, I would choose "All the World's a Game".
It's pretty impressive to see the place the word “game” took in our discourse. Is the Sony a9 a gamechanger, asks DxO ? Some website give us 5 tips to improve our photography game. Of course, the consecration of the word, it’s invasion of the collective unconscious comes probably from the successful “Game Of Thrones” of HBO. The way characters use the concept of “Game” to speak about the over-corrupted political world should also warns us.
I may be wrong on the exact origin of the expression, but I am pretty sure it is related to video games. Please note that I am not saying that there was no game before in a lot of social realm (real new human mechanisms are quite rare). What I am saying is that the thing became recently quite explicit and … inhibited (décomplexé, we would say in French).
If you ever played a little bit seriously, you know that a video game is two things. Firstly, it’s a set of possibilities determined by a set of rules/algorithms. Most of the time, you can discover these “rules of the inner world” by playing or even by reading the manual. Secondly, and more importantly, a game is a set of hidden regularities that haven’t necessary been planned by developers, but that you can exploit to hack, in a certain way, the in-game rules. These things are not directly available in-game, so you find them outside, on forums, on website and so on.*
One thing is undeniable: once you discover this metagame aspect, your in-game efficiency increase … A LOT. It’s also undeniable that if you had pleasure just playing without caring of the outside-game rules, this will ruin your “naive” experience. In some way, you’ll lose you innocence. Every serious gamer confess for time to time how nostalgic he is of his first games, when he was a noob: he was so ineffective, everything was so hard, but it was so fun !
What is particularly disturbing with the expansion of the “Game” word outside the realm of video games – in politics, professional life, love, music, art, photography – is that it carries with it the same fundamental idea: there is a gap between the explicit and the implicit rules. There’s the rules we pretend to follow, but we know that they are part of an illusion. And there’s the rules that we pretend not to follow, but we know that it’s the only thing that matters.
Let’s be frank: if All the world’s a Game, there must be winners (serious gamers) and losers (noobs). The real gamers-winners, are the ones who master the hidden rules while being effective in pretending not doing so. In other words, to win, you have to learn how to cheat. By the way, cheating is not really cheating anymore: it’s just the real understanding of how to play.
Why do I write this on a photography social website? Because Flickr, Instagram, and any other photography platform can be perfectly described as games. Exactly like video games, there’s the official in-game rules: we are here to share images, we can get exposure in proportion of our talent, and we can give and receive constructive critique in order to improve our technique together in a happy world. But there’s also the hidden exploits: we can choose the time we post to get a lot of favs, we can give meaningless comments with the chance to get some attention back, we can randomly follow people without even watching one of their picture hoping that they’ll follow back, … **
This cynical topic came to my mind when I was shooting the Milky Way by the Etang de la Gruère last week. I was quite disorganized : all I had – apart my tripod and my camera – was my smartphone with less than 50% of battery. It was my only source of light, and I realized quite soon that I would not find my way back in the darkness. It was cold, I forgot to take a jacket: in brief, it was quite uncomfortable.
During the 17 seconds of every shot, I had time to think about what I was doing: why do I go out to take nightscapes? Why do I play fair? Couldn’t I use always the same shots (that I could take once for all) and create some fake foreground in Photoshop? After all, isn’t that what most people do on Instagram? The competition is so fierce that “real” nightshots have no chance! Cheating is just the way of playing properly: am I that naive to think that a simple nightshot without the silhouette of a naked-young-woman-holding-a-flashlight-as-if-she-was-painting-the milyway-that-finally-turns-out-to-be-a-swarm-of-butterflies-eaten-by-a-wolf-howling-in-a-blood-moon could still interest someone in 2017 ??! What a noob I am! I felt so stupid with my wet shoes and my torn up pants ! Photography is over, it’s all about artwork now !
Kidding apart, it’s not always easy to keep faith in photography when it comes so close to a game. After all, no one really came for this in the first place. It’s something that come insidiously. It’s simply related to the old cognitive mechanisms of rewarding in our brain. We like to receiving attention – even meaningless – from other people. Nothing’s more normal. The question is why do we stay ? Of course, there’s a part of addiction and laziness, but there’s something more. If the game is not fun when you know too well how it really goes, it’s neither fun to play alone … I don’t think I would still find motivation practicing alone. In some way, I really want to test my picture on public opinion. I need emulation. That’s what keeps me wanting to improve. However, what ruins the experience is that you realize that the only way to “be serious” now is to practice things you don’t approve and that would take crazy amount of time …
Maybe I have the wrong conception of “being serious”, it’s maybe time to find some other sort of motivation. If you really red that far – thank you for that - I would love to know how you cope with “the Game” …
*(Pokemon on Game Boy gave a good example in the 90’ : everyone – below 30 years old – remember the good old days wandering around and training their favorite creatures, sometimes up to level 100 ! The Pokemon was so powerful then, it killed everything in one single shot. What most people didn’t knew is that it was possible to take control on the way creatures received new skills at every level (which seemed random according to in-game rules) : rather than having a big fat jack-of-all-trade, you could have a specialized beast that had huge lacks in some skills, but was top rated on others. Of course, because these skills were well chosen, the guys who applied this strategy were unbeatable.)
**(The award-game is an excellent illustration of this : There’s no in-game awards on Flickr, but gamers figured out a way to create a game-in-the-game from outside. Everybody knows that the small texts that accompany awards are meaningless, but everyone pretend it is sincere. All in all, it’s just a way to get more exposure and more followers. That’s how it goes, everybody knows …).
All the World's a Game ? - Etang de la Gruère - Jura - Switzerland
"All the World's a Stage" wrote Shakespeare. "All the world's a screen" may have wrote some film director during the 20th century. But if I had to pick a version to speak of today, I would choose "All the World's a Game".
It's pretty impressive to see the place the word “game” took in our discourse. Is the Sony a9 a gamechanger, asks DxO ? Some website give us 5 tips to improve our photography game. Of course, the consecration of the word, it’s invasion of the collective unconscious comes probably from the successful “Game Of Thrones” of HBO. The way characters use the concept of “Game” to speak about the over-corrupted political world should also warns us.
I may be wrong on the exact origin of the expression, but I am pretty sure it is related to video games. Please note that I am not saying that there was no game before in a lot of social realm (real new human mechanisms are quite rare). What I am saying is that the thing became recently quite explicit and … inhibited (décomplexé, we would say in French).
If you ever played a little bit seriously, you know that a video game is two things. Firstly, it’s a set of possibilities determined by a set of rules/algorithms. Most of the time, you can discover these “rules of the inner world” by playing or even by reading the manual. Secondly, and more importantly, a game is a set of hidden regularities that haven’t necessary been planned by developers, but that you can exploit to hack, in a certain way, the in-game rules. These things are not directly available in-game, so you find them outside, on forums, on website and so on.*
One thing is undeniable: once you discover this metagame aspect, your in-game efficiency increase … A LOT. It’s also undeniable that if you had pleasure just playing without caring of the outside-game rules, this will ruin your “naive” experience. In some way, you’ll lose you innocence. Every serious gamer confess for time to time how nostalgic he is of his first games, when he was a noob: he was so ineffective, everything was so hard, but it was so fun !
What is particularly disturbing with the expansion of the “Game” word outside the realm of video games – in politics, professional life, love, music, art, photography – is that it carries with it the same fundamental idea: there is a gap between the explicit and the implicit rules. There’s the rules we pretend to follow, but we know that they are part of an illusion. And there’s the rules that we pretend not to follow, but we know that it’s the only thing that matters.
Let’s be frank: if All the world’s a Game, there must be winners (serious gamers) and losers (noobs). The real gamers-winners, are the ones who master the hidden rules while being effective in pretending not doing so. In other words, to win, you have to learn how to cheat. By the way, cheating is not really cheating anymore: it’s just the real understanding of how to play.
Why do I write this on a photography social website? Because Flickr, Instagram, and any other photography platform can be perfectly described as games. Exactly like video games, there’s the official in-game rules: we are here to share images, we can get exposure in proportion of our talent, and we can give and receive constructive critique in order to improve our technique together in a happy world. But there’s also the hidden exploits: we can choose the time we post to get a lot of favs, we can give meaningless comments with the chance to get some attention back, we can randomly follow people without even watching one of their picture hoping that they’ll follow back, … **
This cynical topic came to my mind when I was shooting the Milky Way by the Etang de la Gruère last week. I was quite disorganized : all I had – apart my tripod and my camera – was my smartphone with less than 50% of battery. It was my only source of light, and I realized quite soon that I would not find my way back in the darkness. It was cold, I forgot to take a jacket: in brief, it was quite uncomfortable.
During the 17 seconds of every shot, I had time to think about what I was doing: why do I go out to take nightscapes? Why do I play fair? Couldn’t I use always the same shots (that I could take once for all) and create some fake foreground in Photoshop? After all, isn’t that what most people do on Instagram? The competition is so fierce that “real” nightshots have no chance! Cheating is just the way of playing properly: am I that naive to think that a simple nightshot without the silhouette of a naked-young-woman-holding-a-flashlight-as-if-she-was-painting-the milyway-that-finally-turns-out-to-be-a-swarm-of-butterflies-eaten-by-a-wolf-howling-in-a-blood-moon could still interest someone in 2017 ??! What a noob I am! I felt so stupid with my wet shoes and my torn up pants ! Photography is over, it’s all about artwork now !
Kidding apart, it’s not always easy to keep faith in photography when it comes so close to a game. After all, no one really came for this in the first place. It’s something that come insidiously. It’s simply related to the old cognitive mechanisms of rewarding in our brain. We like to receiving attention – even meaningless – from other people. Nothing’s more normal. The question is why do we stay ? Of course, there’s a part of addiction and laziness, but there’s something more. If the game is not fun when you know too well how it really goes, it’s neither fun to play alone … I don’t think I would still find motivation practicing alone. In some way, I really want to test my picture on public opinion. I need emulation. That’s what keeps me wanting to improve. However, what ruins the experience is that you realize that the only way to “be serious” now is to practice things you don’t approve and that would take crazy amount of time …
Maybe I have the wrong conception of “being serious”, it’s maybe time to find some other sort of motivation. If you really red that far – thank you for that - I would love to know how you cope with “the Game” …
*(Pokemon on Game Boy gave a good example in the 90’ : everyone – below 30 years old – remember the good old days wandering around and training their favorite creatures, sometimes up to level 100 ! The Pokemon was so powerful then, it killed everything in one single shot. What most people didn’t knew is that it was possible to take control on the way creatures received new skills at every level (which seemed random according to in-game rules) : rather than having a big fat jack-of-all-trade, you could have a specialized beast that had huge lacks in some skills, but was top rated on others. Of course, because these skills were well chosen, the guys who applied this strategy were unbeatable.)
**(The award-game is an excellent illustration of this : There’s no in-game awards on Flickr, but gamers figured out a way to create a game-in-the-game from outside. Everybody knows that the small texts that accompany awards are meaningless, but everyone pretend it is sincere. All in all, it’s just a way to get more exposure and more followers. That’s how it goes, everybody knows …).