Turn on Your Map–Telepresent Guerilla Gaming
By Sarah Northmore
Meanwhile, game enthusiasts continue to manipulate new games by uploading player-written modifications (MODs) of popular games like it’s their job. In a nutshell, MODs are downloadable codes written for specific games that enable the player to distort the original design and play sequence of the licensed game. Varying in complexity, these add-ons have since mutated in-game variables such as character skins and game sequences. Emerging media artists create MODs not merely to satisfy personal fancy (I want my ninjas dressed as mulletted punk rockers) but to use them as tools for political critique. These artists are recasting the political and social dynamics of interactivity and authorship, player and provider.
Hactivist Anne-Marie Schleiner played with these boundaries when she created Velvet-Strike–a protest MOD for the first-person shooter game Counter-Strike, featured at the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Bringing the protest into the virtual world: players could tag up the walls of a Counter-Strike operation with graffiti.
But what happens when the MOD disrupts the geographical site of play, the literal and physical space of the game?
Schleiner’s newest project, Operation Urban Terrain, engages this question, taking her previous project a step further. On a warm summer night, she brought O.U.T., her guerilla gaming spin on military-commissioned recruitment game America’s Army, to the New York City streetscape, projecting and performing her protest into the real time demonstrations against the Republican National Convention.
America’s Army is an online combat game created by the United States military in their efforts to commercially package M.O.U.T. training (pronounced m�t, an acronym for Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain) for the American public. "It’s creating an acceptance of military intervention in different aspects of civilian life," according to Schleiner. "O.U.T. is a response to how entertainment, virtual, military, and urban spaces are coming together in M.O.U.T."
In O.U.T., a project made possible in part by Creative Time, an organization at the vanguard of public arts innovations in N.Y.C., Schleiner’s team opened a publicly net-accessible game mission of America’s Army; simultaneously, they projected the action onto building facades. In virtual space, online players furnished the operation with a team of commandos (avatars in game lingo).
In real space, Schleiner and collaborator Elke Marhoefer arrived on location clad like goth cyborgs in self-designed black hot pants and hoods. The duo strapped their digital prostheses–a laptop and projector–onto their bodies with backpack harnesses. They then projected the game action live onto three discrete locations in NYC: intersections in midtown, Harlem, and near the Manhattan Bridge in DUMBO, Brooklyn.
Some might think the world of gaming too insular and self-absorbed to engage real space. Many of us know well the battle of wills when attempting to yank a game enthusiast away from the screen world.
But to suggest that Schleiner’s team introduced phreaking real space with a military simulation game would be misleading. Army games have already exercised their power over this virtual-geo divide. If warfare simulation training via online entertainment gives you the willies, then you should know that the U.S. military’s video games have already teleported into our real space, courtesy of the U.S. Military.
The Army’s current marketing strategy, "Taking it to the Streets" aims to do just that: bring America’s Army to game players’ backyards. In a promotional performance at a game conference in Hollywood, they put on a stunning display. Apache helicopters swung over the L.A. conference, offloading soldiers, who rained down onto the streets. It was all for publicity but according to Schleiner, it really scared people.
"I used to try to make a clear distinction between virtual space and real space," Schleiner said. "I liked the argument that games were a kind of dream space–or that violent actions might not necessarily mean the same thing in real space. But since there’s been this increasing interest and popularity of military simulation games which has coincided with the real wartime climate in the world and the U.S., I’ve become more critical of when these spaces merge."
For many of the RNC protesters, permits and planning prevented actualizing the mobility of their plans. In multi-mediated endeavors like O.U.T., mobility’s essential.
"If you deal with space, you need a wireless element," said Wifi artist and activist Yury Gitman. "Because, wireless allows us to move through space. It is a medium just like oils or watercolors. This is a resurgence. That state of fluidity is always present in emerging media."
Gitman supplied internet access via Magicbike: a bicycle he modified with electronics to provide a mobile hotspot. The bike-cum-hotspot then provided the portal between these two spaces–Schleiner’s virtual demonstration and the NYC streetscape.
"Magicbike was trying to play with real space and virtual space," Gitman said. "With internet connection, it was this point of entrance to a very visceral world and an online world." He can (and does) provide this amble-ready access to many diverse projects, including O.U.T.
So if wifi is characterized by its fluidity, shouldn’t (and couldn’t) mobile gaming involve more than a series of projections?
Yes. "Originally, the idea was to travel everywhere around the city but we were given specific permits for specific locations. Because of these permits, it felt kind of static." There was an exception: at one point the team crossed street corners while the projector ran, beaming onto passing cars and pedestrians. It had the invasive quality of a flashlight. "That was kind of a spontaneous idea that we had," Schleiner said, "and I think it’s partly because we weren’t representing the mobile aspect of the project." And perhaps, in order for viewers to appreciate the mobility inside of the virtual world, the artists in the real world had to remain immobile.
So what happens when the mapping function doubles–becoming both a representation of your location within the game and simultaneously, your location within real space as you’re playing the game?
"You’re given a mission." Schleiner explained. "That controls how you navigate through the game. To me the whole project had this military feel to it. It involved a lot of planning, getting everyone to appear at the same time from all different parts of the world. And that’s partly why I’m not sure I want to do the project again for a while. I felt like I was in the military (laughs)."
In keeping with the nature of M.O.U.T., the game unfolds in virtual urban locations. To bring it to the real city, Schleiner linked the virtual real estate with N.Y.C.’s real topography. "[The missions] were all very planned. The course connected with the location inside the game," Schleiner related. "The first one was a midtown location with lots of taxis and the location we chose inside the game was a collapsed tunnel with a bunch of New York taxis inside it. We did research into each location."
Beyond architectural aesthetic parallels, there is indisputably a social element to navigation within video games. For instance, in the blockbuster driving game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, certain territory in the urban virtual world is gang turf. As you negotiate through it, you perform accordinglyinstigating riots amongst Haitian and Cuban gangs acts as a winning strategy to claim space. Did the rules of engagement within Schleiner’s game comment on the rules of engagement in spaces like midtown New York and Harlem?
"I guess I hadn’t really considered what those rules would be… I assumed it would be a kind of spectacle where people would have various responses and we would interact with them. The original idea was a kind of urban intervention in the every day space and people who inhabit those spaces. To have conversations with passersby on the street," Schleiner explained. Having to focus on the game play on her laptop hindered her ability to personally interact.
Despite that limitation, Schleiner said, "I thought it was really interesting in the range of responses people had. One guy didn’t want us there. He just wanted us to get out of his neighborhood. Other people came by and took photographs with us."
The gathering in midtown was considerably more subdued than the bustling Saturday night crowd in Harlem.
"In Harlem, at that time [the online players] were shooting the shape of a heart on the wall inside of the game when little kids ran by. It was really kind of poetic."
Sure enough, a group of kids jumped and howled in the line of friendly projector-fire, so to speak. They peeled with laughter, eliciting a disturbing question: Which world was playing/exorcizing which?
"I wanted the project to be disturbing–not just completely funny. I can understand if people would be sort of angry," Schleiner commented.
Some curious onlookers, like the elderly woman who wandered into the performance, exclaimed positively, "Well, that’s something! My grandson would love this! I wonder if they’re gonna do it in California!" (Ironically enough, the Army already had. Would her grandson have enjoyed that display?)
Others expressed their discomfort. A city bus driver, unloading his passengers at the street corner, grumbled out the bus doors "More guns in Harlem, just what we need!"
But of these more negative reactions, Schleiner remarked: "I think that’s good. I think that’s a legitimate reaction. That’s one of the things that really struck me, going into the different neighborhoods. The first night we went [to Harlem] there were lots of people yelling and fighting on the street."
Struck by the demographic parallels, she saw "a kind of violent space, thinking–these are the kind of people who get recruited to the army. They go from one violent space to the next."
It gets sticky though, when you consider that the government moderates that next mission. And as the America’s Army website states, "Unlike many other games, America’s Army is an ongoing effort that will expand in terms of occupations, missions and capabilities."
At this point in the technological age, when advancements offer ways to navigate and articulate the space of the virtual-real–and on dizzying layers–it’s easy to get disoriented. As game theorist Bernadette Flynn puts it, "the process of navigation has a mesmeric dislocating effect. This effect places the navigator within a local space–awed by the immediacy of the surrounds whilst being dislocated from a larger sense of geography."
And where there’s disorientation and dislocation–there’s loss of control and agency.
This is where video game play offers such an interesting metaphor for spatial practice. As a medium defined by its interactivity and navigating strategies, agency seems to rest literally in the hands of the player. But when superimposed onto a public geo-social space, who should operate the game? And how many can? Perhaps this is what is so disturbing, watching children take virtual bullets from a game they couldn’t play. The virtual could alter their space, their movement, but the feedback loop short-circuited at an interstice of interactivity. They couldn’t hack back.
As Gitman commented during our interview, "Technology has gotten to the point where we need to be more mature about how we use it. We stop seeing what’s immediately around us, and that’s very dangerous." Remarking on the battle to provide free and public virtual access, he noted, "It’s an interesting moment in history where this technology can be empowering to a few individuals, where internet providers can compete giving access to people–at the level of Sprint and T-Mobile."
Territorialism by means of access has come to include traversing the virtual-real divide. But artists like Schleiner and Gitman are stepping forward as activist vehicles of this geo-virtual agency–quite literally too–one is on a bike, the other’s gear is harnessed to her. They make us question the wiring of new boundaries, and how they are set.
