Stay Active

Been listening a lot more to "Curtis Lane EP" by Active Child (Pat Grossi) of late. It sucked me in dangerously quick, like how religion can be overwhelming if you've never heard of it before. Luckily you can still enjoy the best of a record like Curtis Lane without having to convert, pray and maintain practise; it's just really really pretty music fusing choral and dark, melancholic synths. It's not hard to imagine beautiful music with that description, but i think it would be difficult to 'get it right' if you were going to try. What i love best about Active Child is that Pat grew up listening to really dirty rap- (his dad used to work for the rap label Priority Records) but he was also in Philadelphia Boys Choir for the better part of his childhood, so little Pat was introduced to and met Snoop, Dr.Dre, Eminem and still ends up playing gospel music. That's remarkable.

Where on earth did the inspiration for songs like "Weight of the World" "She was a Vision" "Wilderness" come from when your favourite records growing up were mostly about cunts and guns. Weight of the World reminds me in a strange way of the title music for Ecco the Dolphin on Sega; a little heartbroken, lonely, but hopeful. Can't say Ecco was my favourite game to play, now that i think back on it, it was highly inappropriate for my age at the time! It's about a lonely, aggravated dolphin who tries to organise his grief stricken existence by travelling back in time through seas of chaos at a very poor level of physical fitness where you have approximately 3 minutes to complete a really difficult underwater maze because of your failing respiratory system which means you always invariably DIE!

Despite all that, I love Curtis Lane, and this video gets across that 'expansiveness' quite well

Active Child - Wilderness from Jheri Evans on Vimeo.

Video Gaming and Perceptual Processes

Game Developer's Conference 2009 is upon us.

At home, i rarely experience a personal moment that isn't soundtracked by my brother's nintendo/playstation/computer games. Off late i'm becoming increasingly concerned for him- the amount of time he spends in front of screens is ridiculous, and i'm sure there's actually a very small percentage of reality that his eyes see these days. It's exhausting even thinking about having to prise him away from his digiblip pseudo universe, and i sometimes wonder if he'll develop into what i conceive of as a normal human being. By this i don't mean that i think he is getting aggressive, or anti-social, or using games as a 'emotional vent' or all the other increasingly outlandish claims that 'psychologists' make in newspapers and TV. He's a pretty normal seven yr old, as are the majority of his classmates who are hardcore gamers.

But with this generation, growing up in an age where video games have gone past the loveably defunct graphics and thoughtless, mild mannered gaming of Atari and Sega days, turning more and more to cold, calculated, plotted shootings and murder that bend around basic ethics....something will have to give? I guess everyone wonders how this fantastic world of realistic gaming doesn't change the way kids perceive the world through a physical and communicative medium. Does it necessarily mean corruption?

This is what psychologists should really be interested in.

The past few days i've been studying perception and what it means to 'perceive'. i.e. is perception just an extension of our cognitive abilities? Or are there mechanisms that are uniquely perceptual processes. The basic idea seems to be that perception is a sort of 'slave' to higher-order processes like interpreting and understanding information and cannot be altered by how the participant 'desires' to see the world. BUT a perceptual system can be 'tuned up' to collect evidence of a particular type from the environment. A well known experiment is Blakemore and Cooper's kitty rearing study. Kitty H was grown up in an environment composed of horizontal lines, while Kitty V reared in a vertical environment. Recordings of single neurons in their brains showed that orientation-selective cells had a preferred orientation of within 45ºof the exposed orientation in the environment. The kittens eventually became blind to lines and edges in the non-preferred direction. i.e. kitty H could not perceive vertical lines…

Essentially, perceptual systems at the heart of our biological make-up are sensitive to the environment, their sole purpose is to provide us with a valid account of what there is out there- A ‘best first guess’ is what they say. The action we take upon whatever we see is then up to our cognitive systems to interpret- but this can’t be done without a initial valid account of what we are actually ‘seeing’i.e. perception should be able to communicate effectively to the cognitive system that there is a rabid dog dripping with foam at the mouth running towards us, and the decision to run or lie down silently and wait our horrible death is up to the mind’s central processing unit. Most likely we will choose the first option, and hence perception is of an essential survival value- this makes a lot of sense. But what does this have to do with gaming?

I recently came across an informative article called ‘Rage Against The Machines’, with a refreshing view of video game culture. The article discusses gaming in the perspective of a product created by humans for humans, and therefore the incomprehensibility and insecurities that people have with gaming are entirely irrational. He discusses gaming constructively, with the impacts it has on the way children learn complex social behaviours, as a developing cultural activity (the PS game Ico is apparently visually based on the works of Giorgio de Chirico) and the place of gaming amongst other leisure activities such as reading and sport which gaming has relatively little economic impact on. The article actually mentions a bit from Richard Bartle’s biting article in the Guardian attacking those who discredit the future of gaming.

“Games are mainstream. Drown, or learn to swim”

Soon there will be a society where gaming will be a vital part of developing culture. What of these people? How will they work? How do they perceive? What will they turn into? Indeed Piaget's best work on child development did include 'learning through play'. This is just 21st century play.

Perception seems most important in our modern visual culture, more than it did in generations before. It makes me wonder sometimes whether the pressure of a visual culture is big enough to significantly alter the way our perceptual system works, starting from my brother's generation.

Games such as Bioshock and Mass effect with their uber fancy graphics and painstakingly detailed character descriptions lead individuals through fantastic worlds, where noone can be trusted, yet the need to engage and make a connecion with this freakish world is vital. Bioshock for example, is set in an alternate history 1960 in an underwater world called Rapture, Jack (player) must survive attacks by mutated beings that inhabit Rapture. It's full of DNA harvesting, ex-Nazi collaborators and complex moral decisions with bloodthirsty spatterings...

Bioshock

Mass effect

In reality we look for expressions in people's faces and body language to aid us in our social interactions with other people. In video games, there is no difference (oh apart from the fact that we're dealing with aliens and mutants). The world continues to destruct itself with violence and selfishness, innocent people die everyday, and everything seems to be spiralling into a grim and compassionless future. Maybe it's the hard skin and keen eye that develops from playing games like Grand Theft Auto and Bioshock that's needed to cope. 'Survival of the fittest' taken to the extreme.....

This is the kind of thing that they should include in dull cognitive psychology books.

In line with this i’ve been listening to The Advantage self-titled nintendoesque album- basically covers a lot of video game songs…

And also: This is shit hot.