What have you been doing to ease the tension brought about by social isolation due to the pandemic we are experiencing worldwide? No doubt these are strange times being shared. One of the things that I have been realizing is that audiovisual resources play an important role, a medium that is being explored in many different ways: home movie productions, the massive use of lives, the television itself living from archives, home office news, events being suitable for a virtual environment by videoconference, among others. Among these vast uses of audiovisual in the pandemic, I seek in this post to think about the effects of the pandemic in the audiovisual, turning our gaze to digital games.
Still, in March, the World Health Organization (WHO) began to prescribe video games as a treatment for our continued existence in our homes, due to the coronavirus pandemic. This initiative from WHO draws attention precisely because previously, electronic games were seen as an addiction, leading to mental disorders, a speech designated by WHO itself. Fortunately, we are always learning and relearning in life, and changing ideas (being positive and constructive) is always very welcome. There was mobilization on the part of game developers, such as Activision Blizzard, where another initiative called #PlayApartTogether was launched, to encourage people not only to have fun but as a practice of physical detachment — playful actions that help to flatten the curve of the pandemic’s progress and save lives.
But what about when playing in quarantine time becomes emulated in the routine, present in short videos on TikTok while playing with the idea of choosing your character to face quarantine? Created by Russian filmmaker Alina Polichuk with the tag #ChooseYourCharacter, many users have joined the game (the so-called “challenge”) and produced short videos on the TikTok platform. In these audiovisual productions, the user emulates/assembles his character to face the routine in the middle of the pandemic, presenting different attributes and character styles, bringing sounds and elements from a selection menu, imitating the mechanics of personalization of video games. Among the options, you can choose to be the one who does not take off the robe, the maniac for cleaning, the one who does not stop eating, the one who is in good shape, the one who has not taken a bath in weeks, among other possibilities that the imagination allows.
There is an experience of games related to audiovisual forms. Only, of course, these logics of the video can come to guide many things amid games, but it does not define them — it still has its characteristics. If we look at the game construct present in these TikTok challenges, we start from a platform that is configured by the production and assembly of videos that use visual and sound elements present in digital games. Due to being a space for audiovisual experimentation, bringing a camera frame between the choice of characters (even if from a game origin), the #ChooseYourCharacter videos make us reflect on how much the narrative construction is imagery, playful and a tribute order. Huizinga already thought of the game beyond the game as an object, a playful attitude present in our culture. Many activities that we carry out today in our daily lives are updates of qualities that are typical of playing — games instrumentalize performances. Of course, we cannot say that all systems are games themselves, but we can say that they are crossed by elements of the game/play, as is the case of these videos that we are watching.
Games are cultural objects and, also, producers of culture. Undoubtedly, video games are more than good fun, but essentially a way of socially connecting with friends and family was the same we see reflected in these audiovisual productions that contain the becoming of the game and playing present in itself. This “playing” outside the game space, can also be understood as a way of dealing lightly in this scenario that we are living and sharing our homes. It is to extrapolate the environment and powers of games to everyday life — the world in the game and the game in the world. It is not just the image of the video, of the pixel that is updated in this technical image (Flusser). The image of playing does not disappear over time, they last over time, they are updated in constructs to become in the most different spaces and formats — audiovisual or not. Carrying out this brief reflection about the constructs of digital games in the pandemic brings us closer and places us in a technoculture: thinking about technique and culture in a state of relationship, contagion, coalescence. We have the up-to-date game/play as audiovisuality in TikTok’s video productions.
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Post by Camila de Ávila | Translated by Rodrigo Brasil de Mattos