New plan

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Jeffrey Sconce, “'Trashing' the academy: taste, excess and an emerging politics of cinematic style”

Tastes are often asserted negatively
Growing cinematic subculture organized around the most disreputable films, “trash” cinema
“As a most elastic textual category, paracinema would include entries from such seemingly disparate subgenres as 'badfilm', splatterpunk, 'mondo' films, sword and sandal epics, Elvis flicks, government hygiene films, Japanese monster movies, beach-party musicals, and just about every other historical manifestation of exploitation cinema from juvenile delinquency documentaries to soft-core pornography.”
Paracinema as a particular reading protocol or counter-aesthetic – valorize trash
Positioned explicitly against an imagined elite of tastemakers
Many paracinema fans are also familiar with the “official” canon – “calculated negation and refusal”
More than a simple high/low split
Cultural politics of “trash culture?”
Institutionalization and commercialization of trash (avant-garde, academy, mass culture)
Similar to camp in that it is “highly ironic, infatuated with the artifice and excess of obsolescent cinema,” but promotes a completely alternate, oppositional vision and canon of cinematic art (rather than reinterpreting the canon)
“Camp was an aesthetic of ironic colonization and cohabitation. Paracinema, on the other hand, is an aesthetic of vocal confrontation.”
No unity within the paracinema community (different “taste publics” within the same “taste culture”)
Paracinematic discourse possesses and competes for cultural capital, not unlike its enemies
Disaffected middle-class youth – predominantly white, male, middle-class, educated
Intersection with sci-fi fandom and other subcultures
“Regardless of their individual interests and ultimate allegiances, however, the paracinematic audience cultivates an overall aesthetic of calculated disaffection, marking a deviant taste public disengaged from the cultural hierarchies of their overarching taste culture.”
“As the alienated faction of a social group high in cultural capital, the paracinematic audience generates distinction within its own social space by celebrating the cultural objects deemed most noxious (low-brow) by their taste culture as a whole.”
“a calculated strategy of shock and confrontation against fellow cultural elites”
Renouncing their cultural pedigree and distancing themselves
Trend towards valorization of all trash and attacking all high culture exists in the academy also
Upwardly mobile lower-class subjects (ie: grad students) on the borderline between different domains use trash as a “symbolic homecoming”
Pushing the limits of the traditional canon and academic enterprise
Differentiation from traditional values and tastes
What to do with this textual experience and expertise in the paracinematic canon?
Do fan/scholars challeng the legitimacy of the institution they are using to obtain legitimacy?
Relations of power and control
The “autodidact” invests in marginal/alternative forms of cultural capital (not yet fully legitimate) as a site of “refuge and revenge” against the institutions of taste (Bourdieu)
Conflicts over canon are also about the processes and politics of legitimacy
Study of trash cinema suggests a struggle over the task of cinema scholarship in general
“Whether attacking traditional cultural markets and intellectual institutions as a fan, or attempting to bridge the two worlds as a student, the paracinematic audience presents in its often explicit opposition to the agendas of the academy a dispute over how to approach the cinema as much as a conflict over what cinema to approach.”
Not just which films, but what questions about film
Paracinema VS aesthete/academic approaches
The cultivation of various counter-cinemas is a familiar strategy in film studies
Sense of loss regarding cinema's early promise as a revolutionary popular art, destroyed by Hollywood
Endless pursuit of non-Hollywood cinemas, both on artistic/aesthetic grounds (art VS mainstrem) and political grounds (disruption of Hollywod conventions)
“In cultivating a counter-cinema from the dregs of exploitation films, paracinematic fans, like the academy, explicitly situate themselves in opposition to Hollywood cinema and the mainstream US culture it represents.”
Adoption of the positions, conventions and language of legitimate discourse even while being excluded from it and positioning themselves against it
Hollywood is seen as manipulative and repressive, paracinema as free and radical (not unlike other counter-cinemas, but positioned against those also)
Constant redefining of the vanguard, maintaining its distinction as an acquired taste
Often ignorant of the fact that trash films are now an accepted field of academic study
“'egalitarian' attempts on the part of the culturally privileged to collapse differences between 'high' and 'low' culture, as noble as they might be, often ignore issues of 'access' to these two cultural realms.” (Gripsrud)
“Double access” for culturally privileged (educated)
Redeem politically suspect pleasures through appeals to ironic detachment
“is the 'ironic' reading of a 'reactionary' text necessarily a 'progressive' act?”
Sophisticated rhetoric on low-brow cinema can make it just as obtuse and inaccessible as avant-garde and art cinema
Very different agendas for counter-cinema in paracinematic community and academic aesthetes
Academic aesthetes stress deliberate, strategic stylistic interventions
Paracinematic culture celebrates failures, distortions, eccentric auteurs working with limited resources and skills as unique, courageous and subversive
“the systematic failure of a film aspiring to obey dominant codes of cinematic representation”
“Paracinematic taste involves a reading strategy that renders the bad into the sublime, the deviant into the defamiliarized, and in so doing, calls attention to the aesthetic aberrance and stylistic variety evident but routinely dismissed in the many subgenres of trash cinema.”
Style becomes the focus rather than invisible – excess
Paracinematic viewers DO concentrate exclusively on the non-diegetic aspects/excess of the image (Thompson suggests that probable nobody does)
Calling attention to the text as a cultural/sociological document, rather than as a coherent diegesis, unlike academic aesthetes who focus on excess as an aesthetic strategy
“Whereas aesthete interest in style and excess always returns the viewer to the frame, paracinematic attention to excess seeks to push the viewer beyond the formal boundaries of the text.”
Ed Wood as an icon of paracinema, actively celebrated as a fringe genius (rather than the bemused derision of camp)
Glen or Glenda as a particularly interesting case because of the extratextual significance of the subject matter
Extratextual information key to paracinema's positioning as counter-cinema (allows the viewer to “see through” the text rather than to enrich its interpretation)
Not just bizarre works of art, but intriguing cultural documents
Collapsing the textual and the extratextual
The action on screen as a trace of an isolated moment of real human activity
“The swamp creature, intended to be a startling and menacing I cinematic revelation, is, in the last analysis, simply an overweight actor standing in weeds with ping-pong balls attached to his eyes on a hot day in Dallas in 1966.”
Look beyond the surface diegesis to the more interesting drama
What the critical viewer does with the freedom Thompson posits is a political question
Trash aesthetic offers a potential critique of:
Neoformalist analysis
Theories of 'radical' textuality
More to a film than its textual devices
Neoformalist divisions between skilled/unskilled audiences, artistic/non-artistic films
Always linked to taste as a sociocultural construct
Paracinematic discourse celebrates excess as cultural, not only aesthetic/textual (as in other forms of “against-the-grain” reading) – contextual questions
Does paracinema have the potential to radicalize even casual viewers (whereas Godard and Sirk can only radicalize experienced academy aesthetes)

Shyon Baumann, “A general theory of artistic legitimation: How art worlds are like social movements”

“a general theory for explaining how cultural products are legitimated as art, whether high or popular art”
“the major concepts that explain the paths of social movements also apply to art worlds”
Distinction between art and not-art, rather than high and low art
“recognition of art is a social process that cannot be reduced to a reflection of artistic merit”
Why some culture gets recognition as art and other does not, and can change over time?
Artistic legitimation as a general process
The way social movements succeed in their goals is parallel to processes of legitimation
In social movements, three explanatory factors:
Political opportunity structures
Resource mobilization
Framing processes
In art worlds, likewise:
A changing cultural opportunity space
The institutionalization of resources and practices
Legitimating ideology
Combining these conceptual frameworks may help to understand other processes of legitimation outside of art and social movements
Legitimacy as acceptance of claims of status/authority as valid
How are cultural products repositioned institutionally and intellectually and thus redefined as legitimate art?
Consensus is never absolute (near-consensus)
Various levels of consensus within an art world
Different kinds of “reward systems” within art worlds (who are the gatekeepers?)
External VS internal legitimacy (artistic consumers in general VS inner members of an art world)
“A justification is an argument made to explain how the unaccepted is in fact acceptable because it conforms to existing, valid norms, values, or rules.”
What about when justifications are made in order to distinguish radically between the new kind of art (as in realist film theory)?
The legitimacy of a form can vary considerably over time and in different contexts
“Rap’s legitimacy has steadily increased so that it now enjoys recognition as a legitimate popular art. This recognition reflects a fairly wide, though by no means absolute, consensus that the justifications for rap as art are valid.”
There is no consensus on whether rap is a high art form, unlike opera
“legitimacy requires consensus only somewhere, not everywhere,” Zelditch (2001, p. 10)
Legitimacy generated through a process of collective action – art worlds and cultural fields are sites of collective action (as are social movements)
General theory of legtimation: opportunities, resources, and framing
Social movement success as a process of legitimation
Social movements attempt to “legitimate – make accepted – an idea that was initially not widely accepted.”
“Success” does not necessarily mean actual change, but the acceptance of the idea as common sense or taken-for-granted
Art worlds are doubly concerned with legitimacy (artists themselves + other agents)
“Not only do the claims about artistic status need to be justified, but the right to make claims, and the bases on which those claims are made, need to be justified as well.”
Many different kinds of “success” in art worlds – usually in relation to some kind of audience acceptance, whatever that audience might be (restricted and elite/internal, mass/external)
Three concepts to explain social movement success:
“Opportunity: exogenous factors facilitate success”
“political opportunities” or “opportunity structures”
The environment in which movements operate – context
Analogous to the “opportunity space” in art
“certain exogenous factors can affect the likelihood that an art world will succeed in attaining legitimacy.”
Structural VS symbolic external variables
Factors influencing mobilization/emergence VS legitimation/acceptance
Factors that members are cognizant of VS unaware
“To be useful, sociologists of art need a concept of opportunity space that provides further guidance about how to understand the different roles played by different kinds of exogenous factors.”
“Resources: endogenous factors facilitate success”
Mobilizing tangible or intangible resources (“they can take the form of money, labor, knowledge, experience, network connections and institutionalized relationships, prestige and status, physical equipment or assets, informal traditions, organizational forms, emotional energy, and leadership.”)
“To explain artistic legitimation, we need to know which resources are mobilized and to understand the particular benefits brought by particular kinds of resources.”
“Resources” can range from institutional settings to prestige or status
Practical work/symbolic work
Distinguish between resources for physical production and resources for symbolic production of its value
Museums, private galleries, universities, etc.
“in order to be in agreement with existing conceptions of what art is” (Again, what about new conceptions of art that emerge alongside the legitimation of a form?)
Tactics and strategies (indie music/indie games) – how do art worlds imitate and learn from one another?
“Discourse, ideology, and frames: legitimation requires an explanation”
The role of ideas – framing of goals and tactics to make them “comprehensible, valid, acceptable and desirable.”
Framing is always linked to/appeals to (but is distinct from) ideology (“a complex system of related ideas that combines an explanation of the world with normative prescriptions for behavior”)
Discourses (“broad systems of communication that link concepts together in a web of relationships through an underlying logic”) provide the tools through which ideology can be invoked in the process of applying/inventing a frame
Discourse (general ways of talking about art) > Ideology (theories of art) > Frame (specific applications of theories of art)
These distinctions can “clarify how ideas function to legitimate culture in fundamentally similar ways across cultural genres”
“aestheticians create ideologies of art, and critics frame particular works of art by appealing to the theories and values of specific ideologies.
“The art world, in the sense of the field of cultural production in general, possesses a discourse of common terms and ideas for discussing art. More narrowly defined art worlds, such as the art world for poetry, possess elements of discourse that are specific to that art world.”
Critics of a new form mimic criticism of established forms (preexisting ideas and values)
“The general theory of artistic legitimation can be stated as follows: Discrete areas of cultural production attain legitimacy as art, high or popular, during periods of high cultural opportunity through mobilizing material or institutional resources and through the exercise of a discourse that frames the cultural production as legitimate art according to one or more preexisting ideologies.”
Parallels also to scientific/intellectual movements
Degrees of success/failure, not a binary – many possible outcomes in many different contexts
Framing “instructs targeted audience members about how to correctly perceive and interpret specific issues, conditions, events, and objects. Framing is made convincing by invoking the ideas and values in ideologies which already have currency. In this way, framing justifies the movement’s or art world’s ideas as legitimate by building consensus.”
Legitimation framework enables “comparisons across symbol-producing realms”

Shyon Baumann, “Introduction: Drawing the Boundaries of Art”

In Baumann, Shyon. Hollywood highbrow : from entertainment to art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Where exactly are films situated in American pop culture?
Active debate throughout their history about their merits
Changes in production, reception and in the films themselves
“the creation of an understanding of the medium of film as a legitimate and serious artistic medium, and a body of film works as being legitimate and serious works of art.”
Change in perception of Hollywood films for a certain segment of the population – art, not light entertainment
Intellectually engage, experience Hollywood films as art
Historically, aesthetically, sociologically interesting
Film as unintelligent, moral deterioration – drastic turn from this perception
“the legitimation of Hollywood films occurred mainly during the 1960s and was a process driven by three main factors”
Opportunity space for an art world of film opened up – changes outside the field of film
“social climate in which the cultural contradictions of film's claims to art were reduced”
Changes within Hollywood brought it closer to established art worlds
Festivals, academia, etc.
Director-centred production, arthouses, relaxed censorship
Creation of a discourse of film as art
Reviews, criticism based on film as “a sophisticated and powerful form of artistic communication”
Social, collective nature of artistic production and consumption
Howard Becker, Art Worlds (1982)
Development of art worlds “is connected to the opportunities afforded by the wider social context”
Not only organizational, institutional achievements, but also intellectual achievements
Sets of ideas that explain and justify film as art (criticism is key)
Absence of clear principles for what is art or not
Authority of “cultural experts” (but they don't all agree)
No guarantee the general public will accept these ideas (abstract art)
“the question of how we decide what is art, and why their judgements are accepted or resisted by the wider public” (and vice versa?)
Tolstoy – art as the communication of emotion
Stephen Davies:
Functionalist definitions (what art does – Michelangelo)
Procedural definitions (process by which art is crafted, rules – Duchamp)
Not seeking definition or an airtight case for Hollywood film as art
Certain films are widely recognized as legitimate art (for diverse reasons)
Beauty (visual usually); innovation/perfection of conventions; communication of messages; personal expression (usually directors)
Art possesses high status and bestows high status on creators and audiences (cultural capital)
Hollywood films can now aspire to this
“How did a body of Hollywood films (though not all) gain this recognition as art?”
Could be a philosophical or a sociological question (quality VS context of art)
“the coalescence of a novel perspective among a large group of people is a social process that lends itself more readily to sociological analysis than aesthetic analysis”
For games, not yet a coalescence – more of a multiplicity of perspectives
“the story of film's valorization as art”
The whole history of commercial American cinema is part of this story
Nickelodeons – working class entertainment
Censorship (MPPDA)
DW Griffith – film grammar
Acceptance of film as art in Europe by intellectuals – conditions of film production and consumption were similar to other arts (not true of Hollywood films)
Mass entertainment (fun, not challenging)
Increasing popularity after sound – middle-brow: picture palaces, prestige, epic scale
For games a this point, the question may be as much about becoming middlebrow art as highbrow, “fine” art;
Breakdown of vertical integration, First Amendment protection – end of censorship
French intellectual attention to Hollywood as an art form (auteur theory), imported via Sarris
1960s: economic uncertainty, social upheaval, different kinds of films being made
Idea of Hollywood film as art gains wide currency
Hollywood films could be approached with an open mind (rather than prejudged as entertainment)
Status of “film literature”
Explain this shift, change in attitude
European scene paved the way for intellectualization of Hollywood films
“Status vacuum” created by TV, drop in film-going – links to working/middle class weakened
Possibility for a cultural redefinition – art world for film developed
Feedback – filmmakers encouraged to create artier films (market)
Blockbuster strategy, conglomeration
The social construction of art
“the categories and definitions we use to perceive and to understand the world are molded by cultural forces” and social processes
Not a denial of objective reality
Art exists even if it happens to be socially constructed
Question the “taken-for-granted” nature of art/not-art
Judgement of quality is normative, not logical (set of arbitrary standards)
Hierarchies are also constructed
Look beyond context to conditions of creation, distribution, production, consumption
“the production perspective”
Peterson: the “aesthetic mobility” of films
“three main factors that sociologists of culture rely on to explain the public acceptance of a cultural product as art”
The Legitimation Framework: opportunity, institutions, ideology
1) an opportunity space
2) institutionalized resources and activities
3) intellectualization through discourse
[Does this preclude un- or anti-intellectual popular aesthetic discourse? Or is this a palpable difference between film-as-art and games-as-art?]
1) “the creation of an opportunity space through social change outside the art world in question”
DiMaggio: “preexisting discursive and organizational resources available for imitation” or adaptation
Film pushed theatre out of the popular middlebrow towards higher status
An already established space by opera, museums, symphonies
Outside factors, new contexts
Likewise, TV pushed film higher
Young people in college – the “film generation” in the 1960s
“Because society had evolved in certain ways, film-going had become a significant cultural activity.”
2) “the institutional arrangements underlying the production, exhibition, and appreciation art, as well as the various activities and practices carried out in those institutional settings”
Becker: creation of art (and thus art worlds) as a collective action
Independent/arthouse theatres
Distribution networks
Academic programs
Changing economics of production
3) “the grounding of value and legitimacy in critical discourse” [and in popular discourse?]
Development of a “cultural field”
Without this third aspect, the other two could apply to any number of other fields/practices
When a field becomes distinct, offers a distinct form of cultural capital
“The development of a field-specific aesthetic both provides a rationale for accepting the definition of a cultural product as art and offers analyses for particular products.”
“academics and aesthetes [and critics] developed a sacralizing ideology to legitimate various forms of high culture” (not usually empirically investigated)
“Intellectualization by cultural specialists helps to legitimate cultural products that entertain as art.”
Content analysis of ideas and linguistic and critical devices that these experts employ
“Masters,” interpreting messages, genres/oeuvres, etc.
Legitmation framework can apply to other media as well
“organize the historical forces at play so that we can understand their respective contributions to the art world for Hollywood film.”
A “researchable phenomenon”
Complex, diverse, wide-ranging – no one single shift
Upward status of all film; canonization of Old Hollywood; differentiation of different kinds of productions; critical communities for “cult” genres; etc.
Historical accidents as well as deliberate efforts play a role
Analysis, not history

Tobey Crockett, “The Computer as a Dollhouse [Exceprts]”

In Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell, eds., Videogames and art (Bristol, UK; Chicago: Intellect, 2007).

Dollhouse metaphor opens an avenue for discussing interactivity, digital media in relation to play, imagination, creativity – conjunction between games and art
Play as a creative, artistic act – aesthetics of play, emphathy
Long history of miniatures, models, enclosed spaces with cultural significance
Prefiguring screen entertainments
Automata, Wunderkammer, dollhouses (virtual)
“cabinet-like housing for complex machines with programmatic functions”
Playing with avatars, building worlds – dolls and blocks
Blurring of subject/object when playing one avatar among many (do something to differentiate oneself)
Identity construction in infants (substitute non-differentiated mother's breast with toy as transitional object)
Avatar/VW as transitional object for embodiment in cyberspace
“We use the avatar, like the baby uses the toy, to understand what is subject and what is object as we create our foundation about how [virtual world/cyberspace] reality works”
Avatar is inseparable from the VW as the place of transformational play
Must take place in a social (ie: multiplayer) context – presence of others (rather than human-computer interactions)
Zimmerman: interface as a (social) activity zone
Meta-gaming (Sims family albums, etc) – social context surrounding single-player games
Sims fan objects – dollhouse/doll furniture crafting (but what about the more sinister side of fan production as a marketing strategy?)
Pearce: “emergent authors”
“Participatory play”
Play in free-form VW as artistic self-expression – craft, decorative arts
Different kinds of VW; different kinds of dolls/toys (Barbie VS home-made ragdoll, etc.)
“lay authors are utilizing digital tools and digitized materials to self-express and, perhaps, coincidentally, subvert the status quo” (de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life)
Escape/release
New technology prompts “urges towards a type of technologically mediated transendence”
Cyberspace/VW should be seen as practical, contemporary, everyday, “down here” social/public spaces, not “out there”
Computer as dollhouse – identity construction + imaginative empowerment
“Substantial social work” taking place in “seemingly innocuous realms of gameplay, persistent environments, MMOs, VW

Laurie Taylor, “Networking Power: Video Game Structure from Concept Art”

In Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell, eds., Videogames and art (Bristol, UK; Chicago: Intellect, 2007).

Concept art as ideal – the “real” of a game; the superstructure
“that which each game [in a series] sought to portray correctly”
“the superstructure from which each game unfolds and into which each game enfolds itself”
Quantum physics?!
Metastructure for games
Desire to see structure, continuity makes it “real”
Cohere disparate images within a serial
Significance of paratextual elements
Imaginary underlying system
Concept art is seen as “prime mover” (initial, true, real)
May alter with different iterations
Shows which text is authoritative (the planned-for game)
Concept art has moved beyond planning tool and paratext to become a text in its own right
Early games – concept art is more complex than the final product (the “actual” game world)
Interpret the “real” concept art
Fans accept changes in style/character appearance in sequels as long as their true to the original concept art (?)
All iterations of the “real” structure provided by the concept art
All video game cultures are networked
How does video game culture affect the creation of games?
Cross-generation between players and creators
“The cultures of video gaming all share the emphasis on the importance of concept art as an underlying structure for a particular video game world or universe.”
New games in a series can either be similar to the previous game or to the concept art (no other option?)
“trace of the real”
Game merges with concept art in the mind of the player after using it as the one iteration/unfolding of the concept art “real”
FPS games – avatar is only visible in concept art (or cutscenes, or multiplayer...)
Exists in the culture
Metroid's Samus is known only through gameplay, manual text and concept art
Drastic change in GameCube version to first-person, 3D – “no complaints” about Samus' appearance?
Consistent with concept art/advertising
Nintento Power showed the “ideal” world of a game – early example
Holographic theory – any one particle is a trace of the overall structure
“Concept art [...] is holographic because a single image or set of images are used to represent an entire full world.”
“everything is enfolded into everything”
real/ideal cannot be deviated from without angering players (but it can, surely, in some contexts)
Multiple valid iterations of the same from different perspectives
Continuity can be perceived as long as games “hold to the correct underlying order”
Account for different versions – accepted as existing within the same framework
Presumption of the cohesive whole real/ideal (as shown in concept art) allows for variations in different (technological) versions to be normalized, glossed over
Video game culture suppresses gaps and differences
Concept art as a unifying metaphor
Include marginal aspects, actual gameplay experience, and cultures of gaming in game studies
What is taken for granted, accepted without question/complication?
Taylor makes some interesting points, but her overall theory seems to have extremely limited applicability to very specific contexts

William Huber, “Some Notes on Aesthetics in Japanese Videogames”

In Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell, eds., Videogames and art (Bristol, UK; Chicago: Intellect, 2007).

Wil Wright: games will follow the same trajectory as other art (realism, technique -> impressionism, aesthetic freedom)
When realism becomes trivial on a technical level, the next glorious phase begins
A powerful but problematic narrative
Japanese aesthetic tradition doesn't follow this trajectory at all
“When mimetic criteria are mobilized is is as a tactic”
Engagement between classical terms of Japanese aesthetics are the Western tradition (Huber acknowledges these are arbitrarily defined, and gloss over much historical dynamism)
Blurry boundaries
Classical Japanese aesthetics:
Mono no aware (pathos/feeling of things)
Yojo (surplus of meaning)
Yugen (transcendent beauty without representation)
Sabi (poetic loneliness)
These are mobilized self-consciously in contemporary practice (including games)
Contemporary Japanese aesthetic concepts:
Masks and faces (mimesis/charicature/abstraction)
“Superflatness” (adapt isometric/surface to current encounter with the West)
Aesthetics of manga, anime, otaku culture
Simulation as “representation of behaviour in a dynamic system”
Mimesis is “a different kind of problem in Japanese aesthetic discourse”
“A simulation-sensibility that is more supple in its treatment of the game-subject”
Static background-settings (Ozu?) - avatar moves through, but they remain
Gaze, masks and mirrors
Mimetic tradition in Japan does not pursue the essential meaning of the thing represented – always a “mask,” capture the “mask-action” as/in an act of mimesis
Simulate the act of representing
Gaze: “What sees itself as a self can only do so by knowing itself as a knowable by another”
Influence of Sartre?
“stylized language of affect, a repertoire of gestures and utterances”
Aesthetic performance integrated as a criterion for success (dance, music, karaoke games)
Collectible sets in RPGs as an aesthetic performance that is rewarded (very interesting)
Aesthetic field as an axis of play
Double nature of motion as operant and visible
Blurry distinction between natural and ritual movement
Play includes elements of aesthetic performance
Isometric landscapes + menu-driven combat/interactions/events
“Exploded view” that includes apparatus and labour that constructs/produces it (exposed apparata)
Resistance to absolute perspective
Flatness, embrace“contradictory boundaries” of mimesis (2D)
Parappa the Rapper – flatness extends into 3D space (3D technology affirms 2D aesthetics)
Synaesthesia in Rez – expressive performance (mask/face)
Reward improvisation over rote imitation
Dating sims – player is visible as well as being a viewer (stats, responses, etc. - under scrutiny)
Define ones own mask
Photorealistic backgrounds with 2D animated characters (spaces persist)
Baroque in Final Fantasy – mask/face
Aesthetics of apocalypse