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Proposal for an artistic game environment on the internet
"If I Were U / Si j'étais toi" (IIWU) is a game environment
that implements an "economy of the gaze" for collective use
on the internet. This environment plunged in darkness materializes the
gaze of each user into a luminous projection. Each perceives the gaze
of the others and sees what they see. The gaze thus materialized as
a sensorial vector (the light beam is used to see) also becomes a "resource"
that can lead to exchanges. The management of gazes tallied in the currency
of "points of view" or "POVs" ( )
is the basis of IIWU’s ludic aspect.
On the internet, the IIWU environment is shared between the various
players who meet there. The architecture of this environment is modular
and comprises a variable number of "rooms." Each room identifies
a player and symbolizes his or her "home," which can be constructed
and manipulated. Taken as a whole, these rooms, which lead from one
to the other, constitute IIWU’s game environment.
Like building blocks, these rooms are exclusively built and furnished
from a single module common to all: a small black cube, a sort of 3D
pixel that has no texture but which has properties of reflection and
absorption of light. Starting from an elementary three-dimensional system,
the users can engage in a sort of construction game wherein they assemble
these cubes to furnish or lay out their rooms and set POV traps. Totally
black and plunged in darkness, these rooms are revealed by the light
of the gazes: the players’ light beams embrace the forms resulting
from the arrangement of cubes.
While the visual environment in black and white tends toward abstraction,
the sound, on the other hand, not only allows the player to find his
or her bearings but it also completes our visual perception and stimulates
our imagination, much like a branch snapping in the deep of the night.
The various noises constitute the sound of both the environment itself
and of the different players, particularly when they move about. Far
from any redundancy with the visual elements, the sound intervenes off-screen
in a way that is prone to continually revive the desire to see more.
This desire goes hand in hand with the necessity to keep active and
progress in the environment in order to obtain POVs, which allow each
user to develop his or her room and take part in this economy of the
gaze. It is an economy that draws on the materialization of the gaze
in order to valorize it and to provide a hold on a very real situation
today, wherein the "pay per view" concept and audience ratings
could soon become the determining factors of any media paradigm’s
viability.
Credits
"If I were U - Si j'étais toi" is a Samuel Bianchini’s
project
with the collaboration of Yann Creac'h, Peter Hanappe, Johnathan Lee,
Emmanuel Guardiola and Ibrahim Mubarak.
• Technical management and visual development [Muon3D] :
Yann Creac'h with the collaboration of Ibrahim Mubarak.
• Computer development for the sound [FluidSynth] :
Peter Hanappe.
• Sound design : Johnathan Lee.
• Game design : Emmanuel Guardiola.
• Production : Dispotheque.
• Thanks
We would like to thank the Daniel Langlois Foundation for their financial
and technical support, the French Ministry of Culture (the DICREAM program),
and the Civil society of multimedia authors for their financial support.
Thanks as well to Reynaud Olry for his help.
• Contacts : Samuel Bianchini - biank at iiwu.org
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