Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Mulvey & Galloway on subjective gaze

On reading Mulvey's article this weekend as well as Galloway's Gaming I found that there was some overlap in regards to their depiction of subjective looking, in both film and video games. Mulvey discusses this in terms of scopophilia in her section on the pleasure of looking, while Galloway discusses this in terms of the POV and subjective shot in his chapter "Origins of the First-Person Shooter." Albeit Mulvey refers to this gaze as the viewer looking on a cinematic production, Galloway primarily focuses on the viewer becoming the viewer depicted in a cinematic production, and later, video game, through use of the 'subjective shot.' I find Marvey's feminist/psychoanalytic description of this gaze especially informative of what Galloway talks about in his chapter. Mulvey states:
Moreover, the extreme contrast between the darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates the spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation. Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world.
I think that this type of inclusion of the viewer in the material being presented is pushed further in the first-person shooter, moving the viewer from the non confrontational voyeur, allowed to objectify and indirectly control the person in the film, to extremely confrontational and active player in the game, no longer allowed to indirectly observe and instead confronted with consequence and repercussion. Galloway describes this transition in his description of the opening sequence of Metroid Prime:
...the transition from third person to first person is accomplished not with an edit but ith a swooping fly-through shot where the camera, in third person, curves around to the read of the player character and then tracks forward, swiftly passing through the back of the cranium to fuse instantly the first-person optics of the character with the first-person optics of the player.



no longer can you just watch, now you have to choose

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