Adding context to my thoughts on war and games.
A JOURNEY INTO THE VIRTUAL WORLD #3
If you haven’t yet read my previous post on my photographic adventures within the virtual world, feel free to pop back after you’ve caught up - we may resume afterwards.
In my last post, I detailed the beginnings of the second project in my series pertaining to the photographic practice within the virtual world. I had done some research, toyed around with the tools I would use to create my images, and I took my first set of photographs. As I mentioned in that post, the first set of work I created felt somewhat like a rehash of the previous project on memory and landscape. As this was part of my university work, I felt a strong desire (plus I was told to) to further develop the project, to create something truly unique from my previous attempt. For this to happen, I felt the need to head to the library. Also, as luck would have it, we were given an essay assignment to do (I would have rolled my eyes then, but I like writing now so…). I don’t know if it’s changed at all, but if you are a student of the arts and wander along to St Peter’s House Library - don’t get in the lift. I was quite often stuck in there. Other than that, though, it was, and likely still is a very well stocked library. I was initially a little sceptical about finding research appropriate to the oddly specific nature of my project there, but it turns out everything has been done before to some degree.
While picking up books for my essay - I will probably share those that are pertinent to the virtual world stuff at some point in the future by the way… Anyway, while there and making use of the computers, I did a lot of online searches for relevant thoughts and writings. I was initially drawn to an article by Ed Cumming entitled ‘War Games: Never Just Child’s Play’ (Cumming, 2013). This piece highlighted the thin line my work would perhaps be traversing in terms of ethical considerations. He states that “Children have played at war for as long as adults have fought real ones.” However, prior to the advances in technology that we have today, no one would have really mistaken the fantasies of children and their toys of war play to be the real thing. Orange tipped cap guns might look vaguely authentic but sticks as swords definitely don’t. I will add that there are certain considerations to make outside of ‘war games’, and certain toys do go perhaps too far in function and aesthetics. BB guns are a prime example, and while there are constraints on the design, the aforementioned orange tip can be easily obscured or missed in the heat of the moment. I think that perhaps things are different in England, it was common for my friends and I to shoot our BB guns in our gardens or basements, and no one ever raised an eyebrow. Things might have been drastically different in America, for example, and stories of children being gunned down for carrying toy weapons that originate there are both chilling and tragic. Guns aside for a moment, as we entered the 21st century, the lines have become ever more blurred. Drones and other similar technologies of destruction have evolved from the control pads we use to play videogames with.
The above image is from a previous project of mine which looked at fictional crimes committed around the city of Brighton - here you can see one of our BB guns. This ‘toy’ was purchased from a street market in Greece in about 1999, and if you can believe it, we were allowed to take them on the plane and back to England without any questions asked. I can’t quite image that happening now… As a slight aside, I wrote in an earlier post about my thoughts on the excruciating wait to play Grand Theft Auto 3, and I touched on the playing of a game which was rated several years older than I was at the time. In revisiting this project and going over the finer points in more detail, I find that I have a little more to say. Within the post I was perhaps a little flippant, but looking back to my early years, I feel that personally, I’ve never felt any undesirable personality quirks that might be traced back to earlier than societally deemed acceptable exposure to videogame violence. I still believe that in general these things, if delivered right (when a parent of /or the individual child feels as though they are mature enough) that these things aren’t as bad as media would have us believe. I can see that games can sow the seeds of interest in such things as guns and the military, but I see far more evidence that games like Pokémon get people into collecting stuffed toys than games like Call of Duty get people into collecting weapons… Again, I suppose this is a Eurocentric viewpoint, but I’ve never seen a real gun outside of museums, antiques shops, a shooting range in the Czech Republic, armed police outside of pubs in Belfast, and carried by law enforcements after terrorist attacks in London and Berlin. I suppose that is quite a lot of places… but still, far from common.
“War looks more like a game, while games look more like war” - Ed Cumming
“A child given a wooden gun could turn it into whatever they wanted, while an on-screen machine gun can only have one purpose.” - Ed Cumming
From around the 18th century, games that represented war became hugely popular, this was initially as a means for training and teaching strategy. However shortly after they were adapted and a new way for children to make their fantasies of battle solid were released. The veins of propaganda were worryingly present then, and still are now, however, the lack of resistance to war games, now more than ever, reveals a world that is comfortable with war. H G Wells said in his 1920 book ‘The Outline of History’ that “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” (Wells et al., 1920) His 1913 book ‘Little Wars’ contains a set of exhaustive rules for playing with toy soldiers, and through this, he hoped that if children had an appropriate forum for playing at war it would discourage the real thing. Unfortunately, it seems that the ideals he had dreamt up proved wrong as the First World War soon followed, and conflict has continued to plague the planet since. German toys during the first and second world wars often depicted wounded soldiers, or those performing mundane tasks. There was a desire to see the realistic depiction of war as well as the heroic, and this is something that sparked my interest. Within my photographs I wanted to tap into a similar desire, and to show that war can be both tedious and violent, calm and chaotic, and it became my aim to capture some of the quiet moments as well as the more visually stimulating.
“I think a lot of playing at war is trying to make sense of the big world,” - Ieuan Hopkins
“Toys that let children play with their imagination can be creative and helpful. The problem is that video games dictate the limits of the reality children can play in, rather than inviting them to create their own.” - Ieuan Hopkins
Using my initial results as a starting point I continued to experiment, aesthetically the images I had created were similar in theme to what I wanted, however I decided to further experiment with the format through which I was bringing them into reality. I decided next to experiment with black and white 35mm film - it being a common format for the kinds of war photography I was looking at earlier in the project. After ordering several rolls of Ilford, I booted up SandBox 2 once more and took a new set of images that followed a linear progression through the virtual world, as if taken in real time on location. However, rather than looking more towards the action, I turned my attention to the mundane. For an hour or so I walked the virtual world and examined the scenes which served as dressing to the action the game wanted me to focus on. Once I had these captured enough images, I processed them in Photoshop and set my camera up in front of the telly once more - loading the images up and shooting. After this was done, I took to the dark room to develop the film and to make contact sheets, as well as prints of certain images.
In processing the film, developing the prints, and later examining the scanned film, I found that the results of the shoot broadly pleased me, and it was fun to experiment with the format, and the photo walk that I had undertaken within the game. It matched much of what I was aiming for in terms of aesthetics, form, and content, however I still felt that more was to be done. The subject of wargames, and the use of games and the imagery derived from them seemed to me to be a rich vein, and there was clearly more research to do in order to properly get my head into the state of things.
Cumming, E. (2013) War Games: Never Just Child's Play, The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/10062084/War-games-never-just-childs-play.html (Accessed: March 30, 2023).
Sullivan, J. et al. (2016) In two years, police killed 86 people brandishing guns that look real - but aren't, The Washington Post. WP Company. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/in-two-years-police-killed-86-people-brandishing-guns-that-look-real--but-arent/2016/12/18/ec005c3a-b025-11e6-be1c-8cec35b1ad25_story.html (Accessed: March 30, 2023).
Wells, H.G. et al. (1920) “Volume 2, Chapter 41,” in The outline of history: Being a plain history of life and Mankind. Franklin Classics.
We’ll get into the nitty gritty of that next time and we’ll take a look at the next phase of this project. It turns out there is more than a single posts worth of stuff for this particular part, so expect a good few more, but until then, you may want to check out my latest post!
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