|
Neo-Baroque Labyrinths
and Computer Game Spaces
Angela Ndalianis
Dr. Angela Ndalianis is a senior lecturer in Cinema and New Media
Studies
in the Cinema Studies Program, University of Melbourne.
E-mail: angelan@unimelb.edu.au
In this paper I will argue that entertainment media such as computer
games are imbued with a neo-baroque poetics. Points of comparison
will be made between C17th baroque art forms and games such as the
Quake III, the Tomb Raider and Resident Evil
series, and Black and White in order to establish the continuous
and contiguous links between both eras. In suggesting parallels between
the seventeenth and late twentieth/early twenty-first centuries it
is not proposed that our current era stands as the mirror double of
the seventeenth. Different historical and social conditions characterize
and distinguish both periods. There are, however, numerous parallels
that invite comparison in the treatment and function of formal features
that include an emphasis on serial, multilinear narratives that rely
on spectacle to unravel their story worlds. The term 'baroque', therefore,
will not only be considered as a phenomenon of the seventeenth century
(an era traditionally associated with the baroque), but, more broadly,
as a transhistorical state that has had wider historical repercussions.
Martin Jay and Christine Buci-Glucksman understand the baroque
as a formal system beholden to an order of vision (or what Buci-Glucksman
refers to as a "madness of vision") that revels in the
articulation of its spectacular spaces. The baroque, however, also
embraces a madness in relation to its narrative formations. The
dynamism and spatial complexity of baroque spectacle applies equally
to the dynamism and expansive nature of the baroque narrative. In
fact, the two are interwoven in that spectacle becomes the means
to unraveling narrative formations that favour multilinearity, instability,
and polydimensionality.
It will be argued that the neo-baroque combines the visual and
textual in ways that parallel the dynamism of seventeenth century
baroque form, but that this dynamism is expressed in technologically
different forms. While engaging with theories of the hypertext,
this paper will suggest the limitations in such an approach given
its primary reliance on textual methods of analysis. Computer games
acknowledge a baroque delight in spectacle and a complexity of narrative
spaces. The spaces of games such as the Tomb Raider series
and Black and White reflect a fluid, multilinear, open and
dynamic form that is articulated in visual and auditory rather than
textual terms. Drawing on the neo-baroque's reliance on multicursal,
labyrinthine structures (and on Deleuze's articulation of the baroque
fold) it will be suggested that narratives unravel through the player's
engagement with an "architecture of vision" that is embodied
in the visual form. This architecture of vision requires a traversal
of multiple spaces which, in turn, unveil multiple story possibilities
- some that converge, some that diverge, and some that lead the
player to narrative dead-ends.
Unlike the enclosed and linear spaces associated with classical
form, Henri Focillon (in The Life of Forms) understands baroque
forms as being able to "pass into an undulating continuity
where both beginning and end are carefully hidden". The baroque
and neo-baroque reveal "'the system of the series' - a system
composed of discontinuous elements sharply outlined, strongly rhythmical
and… [that] eventually becomes 'the system of the labyrinth',
which, by means of mobile synthesis, stretches itself out in a realm
of glittering movement and color". It is the computer games'
capacity to lure its player into the neo-baroque system of the labyrinth
that will be the focus of this paper.
|