peter bell realism and subjectivity

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Realism and Subjectivity

in First-Person Shooter

Video Games

By

Peter Bell

Communication, Culture and Technology Program

Georgetown University



1

Video games are increasingly becoming a subject of study as a production of the

West's increasingly visual culture. Games cross paths with cinema and television in

technique and content, and video games have spawned their own niche fields of study in

fields of education, gender studies, childhood development, military training,

entertainment and, notoriously, violence. My intent here is to outline a general

understanding of how realism and subjectivity operate in the genre of the first-person

shooter (FPS) games, games which employ a first-person perspective towards a

representation of three-dimensional space. To be more precise, I will argue that the

impression of realism and interactivity in video games is not due to the advancement of

technologies towards a paragon of interactive reality but from the technological

differentiation of games in production, a differentiation that is naturalized as realistic and

interactive.

Certainly FPS video games involve fantastic creatures and strange surroundings.

These games play host to several if not all of the arenas of study already mentioned. My

treatment of realism, however, is concerned primarily with its role as a technique in the

creation of subjectivity. The acquisition of subjectivity in the game world, or

“telepresence,” is an interactive process often linked to realistic effects such as first-

person perspective, visual detail and immersion.1

I have chosen DOOM (1993) Quake II (1997) to compare and reference. DOOM

and Quake II are representative of the genre and well known, but by themselves cannot

1 See "The Experience of Telepresence in Violent Video Games" a conference paper presented by Ron

Tamborini at the 86th Annual National Communication Association (2000).



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account for all the nuances between FPS.2

It should also be said that they are not the

most recent examples of the FPS. However, as they are benchmarks in the genre's

development, I believe an analysis of these texts can better expose broader currents of

subjectivity and realism in the FPS video game.

Production and Realism

One can hardly begin to think critically about video games without encountering

20th

century critical thought's many probes into visuality. Such thinkers as Walter

Benjamin and Susan Sontag provoked us to look beyond a text's finished form and to

acknowledge its production. The influences of earlier visual media such as film and

criticisms thereof provide a logical starting point for an analysis of video games. Notes

Mark J.P. Wolf:

It is perhaps due to the desire to measure up to thestandards of visual realism set by film and television that

the video game evolved as it has; today there are far fewer of the abstract game designs that were once so common in

the days of Qix (1981) and Tempest (1980). (12)

Importantly, Wolf writes that “standards of visual realism” were “set by film and

television” (12). The standards of visual realism find their most articulated and studied

form in classic Hollywood cinema. As Colin MacCabe argues in Theory and Film:

Principles of Realism and Pleasure, “I argue that film does not reveal the real in a

moment of transparency, but rather that film is constituted by a set of discourses

which…produce a certain reality” (62). It is the hiding of the production process and its

2 Doom, one of the most popular games of all time and the one that did the most to launch the FPS genre is

still popular today. Quake II, also developed by id Software, represents another milemarker in the genre.

The graphics engine developed for the game has been licensed out for use in other games.



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conditions that creates the impression of realism. When one admits to the relationship

between the text and its production, films can be understood as not employing a

transparent route to “things as they really are” but, to borrow from John Berger, involve a

way of seeing (8).

Though video games are more obviously constructed realities than films or

photographs, they are, as Steven Poole notes in Trigger Happy, to be treated as reality

during game play (85). While playing a video game, one rarely considers the production

aspects of the text. But just as the intrusion of a boom microphone into a scene alerts the

filmgoer of production apparatus, if the computer freezes in the middle of a game, a

player becomes similarly aware. In both cases the presented image has been tainted with

evidence of production. As a practice, realism involves hiding production apparatuses

and often means representing the on-screen action from a supposedly objective or

detached point of view. Implicit in this goal of representing visual realism is the notion

that lived reality is scarce. Susan Sontag writes in On Photography,

To claim that photography must be realistic is not

incompatible with opening up an even wider gap betweenimage and reality, in which the mysteriously acquired

knowledge (and the enhancement of reality) supplied by

photographs presumes a prior alienation from or

devaluation of reality. (121)

For a study of realistic or interactive media such as DOOM or Quake II , this loss of lived

experience that Sontag speaks of also implies that there is no baseline of reality to which

we can compare visual representations such as photography or video games. We can

draw upon semiotics and the work of Jacques Lacan to question “reality” as a stable,

knowable baseline to which technological advances are often compared. In doing so, we



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see that the reality outside the film or video game is also a constructed reality—not

necessarily a yardstick for technological progress.

Semiotics, or the study of signs was inaugurated by Ferdinand de Saussure, who

theorized that all signs are composed of two parts: a signifier and a signified. A

semiological analysis of what Wolf terms “standards of realism set by television and

film” (12) might be described by Saussure's model as

Signifier Signified

Standards, Reality

codes of realisminteractivity

Decades later, Jacques Lacan argued that signifiers only refer to other signifiers, even as

they attempt to refer to signifieds. The problem Lacan presents is that any representation

of reality therefore incomplete:

From which we can say that it is in the chain of thesignifier that the meaning “insists” but that none of its

elements “consists” in the signification of which it is as the

moment capable. We are forced, then, to accept the notionof an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier

(743).

Meaning is created by differences among the signifiers or elements in the chain. None of

the signifiers are capable of creating the meaning present in the chain by itself.

In other words, a representation of reality always refers to another representation of

reality. This incessant “sliding of the signified" (743) has significant implications for

representations of reality in both film and video games. Mary Klages summarizes,



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…the process of becoming an adult, a “self” is the process

of trying to fix, to stabilize, to stop the chain of signifiers sothat stable meaning—including the meaning of “I”

becomes possible. Though of course Lacan says that this

possibility is only an illusion, an image created by a

misperception of the relation between body and self. (2)

Lacan’s mirror stage, loss or separation from mother and the Real occurs, and the infant

misrecognizes its reflection and physical self as a unified whole, or “I.” The purpose of

such an activity is, as Klages points out, to stop the sliding of the signifier. This is the

realm of the imaginary, “a realm of images, whether conscious or unconscious” (4). For

this reason, self-recognition in video games and film has a similarity to the mirror stage

because, as will be discussed below, films and video games often invite spectators to

identify with an onscreen character or perspective in an act of voluntary misrecognition.

Conflating this visual identification is Lacan's symbolic order or language.

The Real is not accessible to those in the symbolic order (i.e. those who speak language

and produce discourse), according to Lacan, because it is in part structured by the loss of

the fullness (Real) originally present in the infant and mother relationship before “I” or

“me” yet existed. Without delving any deeper into Lacan's work, we might say that

neither visual representation nor symbolic representation (language) can be completely

full and Real, though they try and often claim to be. This will become especially

important as we address both visual perspective and written narrative in DOOM and

Quake II . In the Sausurrean model, “reality” is a stable signified. Under Lacan's theory,

the signified “reality” becomes a signifier as well, making an objective, one-to-one

comparison of realism to reality impossible. As realism and realistic techniques such as



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the use of the first-person perspective attempt to signify reality, realism itself becomes

reality, a description of what can never be fully described.

I'd now like to look at film historian Jean-Louis Comolli's argument that

“realism” is a function of product differentiation and not the advancement of technology

into a stable “reality.” In Machines of the Visible, Comolli writes,

Thus the historical variation of cinematic

techniques…seem to me to depend not on a rational-linear order of technological perfectibility nor an autonomous

instance of scientific “progress,” but much rather on the

offsettings, adjustments, arrangements carried out by asocial configuration in order to represent itself, that is, at

once to grasp itself identify itself, and itself produce itself in its representation. (109)

This social configuration that produced cinema was capitalism, and so the logic of that

system shapes how cinema is produced and consumed:

It is not exactly within the logic of technology, nor within

that of the economics of the film industry…to adopt (or impose) a new product which in an initial moment poses

more problems that the old and hence incurs the expense of adaptation without somewhere finding something to its

advantage and profit. (Comolli, 115-116)

Like films, video games such as DOOM and Quake II are mass marketed and compete

with other video games for consumers. Applying Comolli's argument to video games

frames the development of the signs of realism and interactivity not as a progressive

movement towards a grounded, objective “reality” but as a movement away from other

constructed realities, from other games. Taken as signifiers, realistic games achieve their

realism, their meaning, only from comparison to each other as they seek to differentiate

themselves. This means that the practices of realism in DOOM and Quake II (i.e.

perspective) are not the accurate mimicry of “reality” (unknowable, according to Lacan)



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but that realism emerges from contrasts between signifiers, between games. As Comolli

suggested for the introduction of sound to cinema, these techniques of realism

differentiate games by attempting to “fill in the gap,” the lack that structures any system

of representation (116).

This practice of differentiation also extends to the music of video games, and

looking behind the music supplies concrete examples of the theory above. Steven Poole

writes, “in the far-off days of the Commodore 64 and Amiga, videogame music was far

more distinct as a stylistic genre than it is now” (69). How can we account for this in

terms of the realism that DOOM and Quake II profess? All songs are obvious

constructions. What is inherently unrealistic or passé about the melodies of early video

games play? The answer cannot be simply that game developers and the public now

know by some virtue what people 10 years ago were oblivious to: that video game music

of that era was unrealistic. They were natural insofar as most video games had them.

Even today, many games continue to incorporate music. If we say, “It depends on the

game” we have actually hit the nail on the head. Using Comolli as a lens, we might say

that music was incorporated to differentiate video games.3

There is no hard and fast rule

about score and video games. Some games have a lot, some only a bit; some use no

sound, some use pop music, others use elaborate scores. Thus, it not a question of

realism, but of difference.

Presently, the production team behind DOOM III (working for the same company

that created DOOM and Quake II ) is touting the skills of musician Trent Reznor as one of

its sound designers. According to the development team, Reznor is there to make the



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game scarier and more immersive. But just as important that Reznor is creating the

sound for DOOM III is the implicit consumer knowledge that Reznor is not creating the

sound for other games. That it is unclear whether or not musical score is realistic, or

rather that both scored and unscored games can be realistic, suggests that there is no

paragon of reality to reach towards in sound development—merely the desire for

difference. Now that we've addressed production and realism, we need to say what kind

of subjects DOOM and Quake II create and how this is done. Doing so will explore how

the use of product differentiation is naturalized as realistic.

Subjectivity

As film theory can be helpful in thinking about realism in video games, it can also

be useful when considering subjectivity. In The Subject of Semiotics, Kaja Silverman

gives an explanation of how producer and spectator in cinema provide a parallel to Emile

Benveniste's concepts of the speaking subject and the subject of speech, which are both

present at once when one utters the pronoun “I.” Silverman recounts the division

between the level of enunciation (speaking subject) and the level of fiction (subject of

speech) offered by earlier film theorists:

The level of enunciation is in effect that of production—of

camera movement, editing, composition, sound-recording,

sound-mix, script, etc. The level of fiction designates thenarrative within which the spectator of the finished film is

encouraged to find him or herself, and the characters with

whom he or she is encouraged to identify. (46-47)

3 The Minibosses' web site (www.minibosses.com) indicates that the band is not simply poking fun at the songs, but in

their playfulness, respect the complexity and skill of the compositions. That such skill was originally recruited to writethe scores suggests that the songs had a differentiating function among games.



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The moviegoer does not produce the film—she does not speak or invent the dialogue.

But, the moviegoer is encouraged to identify with the characters. This is done through

“suture,” which Silverman explains “is the name given to the procedures by means of

which cinematic texts confer subjectivity upon their viewers” (195). It is by suture that

“Within this semiotic model the viewer does not have a stable and continuous

subjectivity, but one which is activated intermittently, within discourse. The cinematic

text constitutes the viewer's subjectivity for him or her.” (48) We can chart this

distinction as:

Benveniste's “I” Film FPS______

Speaking subject Production Production

Subject of speech Characters, viewpoints First-person

etc, text that viewers perspective,identify with. “me”

In Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo, Eugene Provenzo elaborates on this

situation: “Most video games—particularly those found on systems such as Nintendo—

provide little or no opportunity for children to control the action themselves” (93). In

DOOM and Quake II , one might conceive of a similar “slotted” subjectivity. There is a

role to be filled, and, by entering the role provided, the player enters into the game. If

realistic film acts as a window to the world, realistic video games do the same, but they

also add a key feature: it is a window that can be chosen and manipulated by the player.

It is this appearance of choice that constitutes “realistic” interactivity. When playing the

game “by the rules,” a player may “speak” with his or her actions but only according to



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the laws of the game's production.4

Like the role of the cinematic spectator Silverman

describes, the player of a FPS identifies “intermittently” but not fully with the role

supplied because the gamer does not have a hand in the game's production. “In other

words, the speaking subject of the cinematic text is always situated at the site of

production, while the spoken subject of that same text is most exemplarily found instead

at the site of consumption” (Silverman, 198).

But how do the techniques of realism in DOOM and Quake II deny themselves as

discourses or otherwise come to be seen as natural, and how do these games offer the

appearance of choice during gameplay? To borrow from Louis Althusser's work, in these

games, this slotted subject believes he or she is freely making these choices. To make

production's discourse seem natural, technological differences (such as being able to look

in 360 degrees) serve production as a means of differentiation. Products are naturalized

as realistic and interactive through interpellation. Key to Althusserian subject formation

is that those interpellated feel unique or individual:

…the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order

that he shall submit freely to the commandment of the

Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and

actions of his subjection “all by himself” (123).

Althusser does not believe that a “clique” of elites has propagated a scheme of

interpellation but, similar to Lacan, that all representations given to individuals which

govern their conditions of existence are imaginary (111-112). This process of

naturalization is similar to the process of suture. Comprehension of the game's rules and

4 A helpful conceptualization of this situation can be found in "the Matrix" (1999). The ironically named"agents" of the Matrix are unable to go beyond their programming to combat Neo, who, by the power of his



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conventions (its technological differences from other games) is akin to being

interpellated, and interpellation naturalizes those rules and conventions as “realistic” and

“freely chosen” by the player. Christine Ward Gailey writes, “The interactive quality of

video games gives the player the impression of limitless choice. What the player does

affects the outcome. But the perception of choice is largely illusory, since the

framework…is predetermined” (84).

To play Quake II or DOOM and accept that the screen view is “your” field of

vision, to say “this is me,” is by itself evidence of interpellation by at least one of the

game's dominant codes, namely acceptance of the perspective that gives a visual

representation of “I.” As Silverman writes, “The cinematic organization depends upon

the subject's willingness…allowing a particular point of view to define what it sees. The

operation of suture is successful at the moment that the viewing subject says, 'Yes, that's

me,' or 'That's what I see'“(205). We can chart the Althusserian model in regard to Quake

II and DOOM:

Althusser's Model FPS

Interpellation The game codes, standards of realism

production)

Individual Player, (consumption)hailed

Though we might reason that to resist suture, or to ignore interpellation, one “speaks”

through action, such a choice paradoxically reveals that the player knew that it was really

he or she that was being hailed. Such recognition is for Althusser the literal “turning

point” at which individuals become subjects.

human imagination, is not bounded by the architecture of the computer generated environment. Gamers,

then, are akin to agents.



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Realism and Subjectivity

Making the subjected (one who is ruled over) feel like a subject (center of

initiative) is naturalized as “realism” because to acknowledge that interactivity is a

production-side phenomenon would remove any notion that the individual is choosing it,

which is essential to Althusser's theory and the claims of interactivity. To preserve the

semblance of autonomy, production must be obscured. Colin MacCabe writes,

Hollywood cinema is largely concerned to make these two

[the speaking subject and the subject of speech] coincide sothat we can ignore what is at risk. But this coincidence can

never be perfect because it is exactly in the divorce between the two that the film's existence is possible. (68-

69)

One might see the purpose of the “realistic” first-person perspective as the shot that most

aptly hides production, and, by taking this perspective, the player is given a “realistic”

sense of autonomy and consequently thinks of himself as a speaker or a center of

initiative. Upon scrutiny, one can observe that game interactivity and realism are

functions of production, an aspect of the text in which players of DOOM , Quake II , or

most video games have no part. 5

DOOM and Quake II cast players as spoken subjects, who do not themselves

“speak” but are given the impression that they do. Interactive game play is not a dialogue

5 One of the reasons for the staying power of a game nearly 10 years old is not only an array of sequels and

similar games, but id Software’s release of the DOOM source code. This allows fans to create additional

levels for DOOM. Savvy gamers can build their own DOOM levels, which are offered on the Internet for

fellow users to try out. Similarly, the popular game CounterStrike started as a modification for the retail

game Half-Life. CounterStrike became popular enough to be sold as a game unto itself. The popularity of “mods” suggests that while rules and goal s are desirable in games, there is also a desire to write the script

or speak the production. As such, “modding” seems to bear some resemblance to “fan fiction,” which

video games seem to encourage.



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between player and game but a script to be read and followed by the player. The

performative/interactive aspects of games are often emphasized because as Aki Jarvinen

writes,

Games offer instant action, instant pleasure. The doses of

pleasure are delivered according to a game mechanism.

This is created by the designer, who allows/constructsthings to happen in the game environment, but also by the

player who achieves pleasure by successfully executing the

action that the game requires in order for the game tocontinue. (72)

While technological advances (i.e. tracking perspective, sound effects) “emphasise [sic]

action, spectacle, special effects (‘attractions’) and spatiality instead of narration,”

(Jarvinen, 72) these advances and resulting spectacles are scripted as is the back-story in

which these spectacles appear.

For instance, in DOOM , players must simply survive. This is done by shooting

your way to the exit door in each level. The levels, or boards, are sequential, though each

one must often be explored extensively to find the scattered keys that unlock the path to

the exit. There is time for dallying, and certainly time for killing monsters and

experiencing other spectacles, but this “get to the exit” goal structures the game. In

Quake II , a similar theme persists, but the individual levels are linked together into larger

mission constellations. Individual levels within these constellations may be revisited to

achieve multiple objectives, though larger mission groupings are separate. As games

become more technologically differentiated and “advanced” and seem more interactive,

earlier games such as DOOM seem less so and consequently less realistic. As Comolli

suggests, the introduction of sound to film was realistic because sound was lacking in

earlier films:



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As soon as they are produced, sound and speech are

plebiscited as the “truth” which was lacking in the silentfilm….The decisive supplement, the “ballast of reality”

(Bazin) constituted by sound and speech intervenes

straightaway, therefore, as perfectionment and redefinition

of the impression of reality. (116)

It is only through a comparative difference that one is more “realistic.” For example, in

Quake II , enemies jump out of the way of gunfire, whereas, in DOOM , enemies are more

or less armed, stationary targets. Quake II also uses a more advanced graphics engine

than DOOM does. While DOOM superimposes two-dimensional characters (called

“sprites”) against a background, Quake II 's graphic engine depicts figures in three

dimensions through the use of polygon modeling. One cannot say that Quake II is

realistic other than by comparison to another representation of reality. This is true for

comparisons to earlier and later games but is also true in any comparison to “real life”

because human beings, according to Lacan and Althusser, cannot conceive of reality

without creating a representation of it. Any description of lived experience, a description

of what is realistic, is crippled by the fact that no system of representation can stuff the

whole world and also itself into a presentation of complete fullness.

A further example of how reality and interactivity are dictated by production and

then “smoothed over” can be found in an examination of Quake II 's back story or

narrative. While these narratives are notoriously weak in the FPS genre, the back-story

provides the game’s foundation, or rather the container in which real-time game play and

“choice” occurs.6

Colin MacCabe locates the division of the subject of speech and the

6 In an interview last May with Wired , id Software designer John Carmack said, "I think games are at their

best when they are true to the sense of their activity….games are not stories…the better of the story you tell

in many senses, the worse of a game it becomes." Carmack, who has designed each game in the DOOM

and Quake series, cites the uncooperative nature of the gamer as his reason for going light on plot. This



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speaking subject as the split between discourse (which is produced by a speaking subject)

and narrative, “which must deny the time of its own telling—it must refuse its status as

discourse, in favour of its self-presentation as simple identity, complete knowledge” (69).

This statement clearly recalls Lacan: entry into the symbolic order is evidence of lack, a

separation from the simple identity and fullness of the infant. This gives one reason to

question the authority of narrative, and a look at the narrative of Quake II reveals its

origin as a discourse in production that must present itself as such complete knowledge:

Shortly after landing on an alien surface, you learn that hundreds of your

men have been reduced to just a few. Now you must fight your way

through heavily fortified military installations, lower the city's defensesand shut down the enemy's war machine. Only then will the fate of

humanity be known.

This is the full extent of Quake II 's backstory; this paragraph effectively cordons off the

game world. It creates a beginning, an end, and a required course of action. In other

words, it creates a “full” reality that players are invited to be involved in a personal

way—hence the word “you.”

As Provenzo notes, video games “represent microworlds complete unto

themselves. The images they present are easy to fall in love with, often narcissistic in

nature, allowing the player the potential to function within a self-selected and artificial

microworld” (38). It should not be forgotten that video games are mass marketed and,

for the most part, no more individualized for viewers than a primetime situation comedy.

The apparent individualization and interactive pleasure that Provenzo notes can be seen

suggests that while some form of narrative is necessary, or perhaps inevitable, game designers are quite

cognizant of the prescripted "choice" tied to it. In the same interview, Trent Reznor named what he thoughtmade DOOM important: "When the original DOOM came out, not only was it technologically beyond

anything else…there were chances taken, there were rules broken." This again frames game design and

production as fueled by a desire for difference.



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through an Althusserian lens as an example of interpellation. This type of relationship to

the game is also suggested by Poole in Trigger Happy:

…because one needs to understand the rules of the semiotic

system present and act as if those rules, and not the rules of the real world, applied to oneself. The requirement is to

project the active consciousness into the semiotic realm.

(185)

Poole's player participation is not in production but in acceptance of the game's codes.

The player's “choice” constitutes his interactivity. Poole goes on to draw what sounds

like a thoroughly Althusserian conclusion: “The videogame player is absorbed into the

system” (185). Poole's player can accept or identify with a role and perform various on-

screen actions but cannot create that role. “This then, is the traditional solution thus far in

video game history: the drama is provided by the prescripted story, the virtual

exploration is interactive, and never the twain shall meet” (101-102). Because

interactivity supposes a center of initiatives, which according to Althusser is illusion, it

might be said better that the narrative of the game is one set hailings (cinematic cut

scenes, for example, or end of level score reports, or the backstory) and that rules for

performance comprise another set.7

Poole's separation of narrative story from the

player’s performative relationship to the environment exposes the naturalized rules of the

performance which makes them seem realistic and chosen when they are, as Jarvinen

notes, scripted and necessary for game play (72). This is why, in Poole's observation,

interactivity seems possible between the narrative cuts and why the narrative itself seems

as oppressive as gravity does in lived experience.

7 In the case of the FPS these rules for exploration have their roots in Western culture's privileging of sight.



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The work of Marsha Kinder and others suggest that video games may involve a

larger player role than indicated by the Althusserian model and that interactivity may be a

function of consumption as well as a function of production. While my concern is mainly

how DOOM and Quake II naturalize production techniques as realistic and interactive

through the dominant goals and means of play, one might also describe a player that

negotiates or replaces the given goals and means of a game as “interactive.” This is a

different kind of interactivity, in which a player intentionally brings to play alternative

rules or goals not prescribed by the game.

In Playing With Power , Marsha Kinder suggests that “The dual spectator/player

position…contradicts this Althusserian notion of a totally passive subject” (12). Kinder's

study synthesizes psychoanalysis and cognitive theory to study the role of popular media,

including video games, on the subject of development of children. In part, Kinder's study

is concerned with to what extent a subject can negate dominant cultural values presented

by the game.

Similarly, Mizuko Ito has drawn upon the work of Althusser and deCerteau to

study how children can create their own goals within game play and in that process take

up subject positions different from the dominant one. This is also an example of non-

prescribed interactivity. Though Ito does not address any FPS, the study does suggest

that alternate subjectivities may be able to squeeze themselves out from under the

dominant discourse of the games.

In these cases, the ability to play the game “against itself” is probably related to

how successfully the game can be played while pursuing alternate means to the dominant

goals. Because games carry a reinforcement component, changing the means or the goals



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(whether during gameplay or programming) must be rewarding if the game is to be

played more than once.8

For example, Quake II is virtually unplayable without firing a

weapon, but, theoretically, winning without shooting could constitute some type of

negotiated subjectivity. Or the gamer might choose a different definition of what

“winning” means and use dominant means to achieve that alternate goal. It should be

said that the choice to not fire a weapon, for instance, should be seen as the product of

interpellation by an alternative discourse. It is not so much that interpellation is

overcome in an act of independence, but that an alternate interpellation is being

responded to instead. This does not overturn Althusser's model of subjectivity, but

suggests some room for negotiation and thus follows in the footsteps of others who have

found Althusser's theory compelling but overbearing.

For both sound and visuals, claims of realism are based in production of

difference and the naturalization of these differences. Steven Poole writes, “The purpose

of a videogame…is never to simulate real life, but to offer the gift of play” (63). As

“realistic” as first-person shooters may seem, Poole's point is hard to dismiss, given the

lack of consequences in game play. But it is in the service of this “gift” that realism is

invoked, and it is the production of “play” between the games that drives claims of

interactive realism.

8 See chapter two of Mind at Play by Goeffrey R. Loftus and Elizabeth F. Loftus for a study of

reinforcement and video game design.



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Works Cited

Althusser, Louis. ““Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus.” Lenin and Philosophy

and Other Essays. Ed. Frederic Jameson. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York:

Monthly Review Press, 2001. 84-126.

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1972.

Comolli, Jean-Louis. “Machines of the Visible.” Electronic Culture: Technology

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