Seeing Through Games

The surreal experience of seeing real-life events as if they were from a video game.

Clive Thompson, writing about finding the cruise ship that crashed in Italy last year on Google maps (Maps link here), made a really interesting point about how we interpret strange visuals in the age of digital technology and video games:

I remember, back when the catastrophe first occurred, being struck by how uncanny — how almost CGI-like — the pictures of the ship appeared. It looks so wrong, lying there sideways in the shallow waters, that I had a sort of odd, disassociative moment that occurs to me with uncomfortable regularity these days: The picture looks like something I’ve seen in a some dystopic video game, a sort of bleak matte-painting backdrop of the world gone wrong. (In the typically bifurcated moral nature of media, you could regard this either as a condemnation of video games — i.e. they’ve trained me to view real-life tragedy as unreal — or an example of their imaginative force: They’re a place you regularly encounter depictions of the terrible.) At any rate, I think what triggers this is the sheer immensity of the ship; it’s totally out of scale, as in that photo above, taken by Luca Di Ciaccio.

Growing up playing video games I definitely know the feeling. I do wonder, though, whether this is actually a new feeling or we could have said the same about feeling like something was a movie when that was still transforming how we saw the world. When I was in Hong Kong in December, for example, I felt like it was more a reflection of Blade Runner than anything else, for what it's worth. Either way, though, it's an interesting notion.