With the ↵Fighternight 9 approaching I definitely should have other things on my mind. Namely, ordering the parts of my godbox so that there will be a chance of them arriving in time, and doing some ↑deathmatching in “↑Quake III Arena“ (Q3A), in spite of training ↵trickjumping moves. But somehow I can not help going on with my ↵strafing musings …
When trying to accomplish ↵thick participation as the core methodological approach to the field, at every stage you have to decide how deeply to immerse yourself. Apprenticeship and acquiring ↵embodied knowledge are indespensable to a certain degree, I think. But, out of two reasons, the whole thing has to stop somewhere:
First of all the danger of going native will become virulent. You will loose the last bit of analytically and interpretative distance necessary, and in consequence cease to be an anthropologist. Your reflections on the matter won’t be reflections anymore, but heavily biased accounts of an insider. Your writings will be untterly non-understandable to outsiders as the ethnographical suspense and tension will have vanished. Good ethnography, I am perfectly convinced, relies on ethnographical suspense which, in turn, is born out of the tension between the fieldworker and ‘his tribe’. The reader has to be able to identify herself with the anthropologer, has to feel his efforts to understand, his striving to break through the cultural barrier. Reading an ethnography should be a journey lead by the author—a journey to the cultural other with the ultimate goal to make the obstacles of understanding implode.
Secondly, and that is a sound pragmatic reason, when you have crossed a certain line, the learning will eat up all the time you have at hand. That definitely is the case with trickjumping culture, and time always is the scarcest resource [at least within the caste I belong to].
I will try to illustrate this somewhat detached thoughts by what I am currently dealing with. Although it seems to be marginal and negligible, I think that with the culture of trickjumping I stumbled over something unfolding relevancy into several directions, especially the technical, intellectual, and performative appropriation of computer games; the collective reinterpretation of shooter games into something peaceful, ↵lacking every kind of violence whatsoever; and the strange phenomenon of ↵digital embodied knowledge, its cultural production and redistribution.
The performance side of trickjumping is a central issue, of course, but then again only one aspect of the whole, and it is integrally connected with the practice of trickjumping movies—↵machinima that is. The former I approached by learning certain techniques myself, strafe-jumping in particular. From the latter I shied away, because it means quite some technical stuff to learn which will be tremendously time consuming, and I deemed that I could not afford that. The other reason for my shying away is that I simply can not perform moves worth showing off in a movie. On the other hand, “in the hands of a skilled producer, even a ↵demo of mediocre skill can be turned into a compelling movie.” Additionally, I thought, by cooking up a humorous plot and style even ↵Teh_Lamerer—that’s me—may be able to cook up a halfway decent movie.
With the next LAN-party dreadfully looming on my agenda’s horizon, I started to deal more with Quake III Arena official maps, because on a LAN there hardly will be matches in obscure trickjumping- or DeFRag-maps. Fooling around in DM6 suddenly made me realize that I indeed can do some astounding looking things there. Appropriating the well-known out-of-the-box maps ↵by mastership is a rewarding task, because every Quake player will recognize the environment and be delighted by watching the feats possible on familiar terrain.
Plus, this in a way also stands in the tradition of ↵speedrunning. ↵Deathmatch is to tricking as kumite is to kata. To the follower of the path of the empty hand, kata means a bequeathed timed sequence of prescribed martial-arts techniques, which are, quite naturally, performed using a confined amount of space. It is that space, dictated by the movements, which is at your disposal to enact your mastership. In a nutshell, two nights ago I started demo recording in Q§DM6 “The Camping Grounds.
Some hours into the night I needed a brake and went haunting the archives of ↑own-age for tricking movies shot in DM6. “↑FireSpit Tricks dm6“ [04:29min | .avi | 85MB] is the goods. It has everything, circle- and strafejumps, rocket jumps, plasma climbs, combinations, and a load of incredible overbounces way beyond my reach, as I am a complete looser at exploiting overbounce opportunities. In the movie there is a tremendous example of a sticky overbounce, catapulting the player through almost the whole map at the speed of light.
See what I am doing here? Completely fascinated and delighted myself I am merrilly babbling away on things unseen by, and incomprehensible to the reader—in a jargon nobody is able to understand who isn’t into trickjumping. If you do not know what the hell I am talking about here, please refer to the ↑Wikipedia entry “DeFRaG” which I ↵created in collaboration with the Q3A trickjumping community.
Besides FireSpit’s movie I also had a look into “↑TriCKeD“ [09:42min | .avi | 197MB] by [Afz]P3z, because the description said, that there were tricks in DM6 as well. Well, there are, and they are mindboggling, but the real burner is found at the end of the movie. While the credits are rolling over the screen, there’s an inlay showing a strafe-run over ↑cos1_beta7b‘s black pads. Those are the hardest pads and they are so far apart that a whole Q3 deathmatch map seems to fit between them. The depicted player does the left one of the two rows virtuously, and then—for sheer humiliation—he does the right row, where the pads are even farther apart … and he does them facing backwards. Granted, I would really appreciate to be able to do likewise, but I definitely won’t set out to learn that.
Anyway, in the meantime watch out for the upcoming dazzling movie “Too many … Teh_Lamerer on DM6”.
Those from the field indeed shoot back. In my case with digital camera and weblog. Since last year’s December the 20th, ↵when we first tested the Wii in ↑Munich’s Wii Crib, Wednesday has developed into our Wii evening—now we are kind of regulars at the joint. In our wake meanwhile quite a flock of our institute’s anthropology students has been attracted to the Wii Crib. The day before yesterday our bunch occupied all three machines there and played away the whole evening. Unlike with ‘conventional’ input devices, with the Wii the movements of the player’s avatar are duplicated and performed in meatspace—to a certain degree analogous. What makes this so bizarre and fun to look at is the fact that the meatspace movements completely lack context, quite to the contrary to the avatar’s movements, which are perfectly matching the gamespace environment and the ongoings there in. While playing with the Wii the entanglement of proprioception and perception of avatar and gamespace is even more crossed over than it is the case while playing e.g. a shooter by means of mouse and keyboard. The whole Wii Crib affair of course is a promotional event, and what Nintendo can capitalize on the most are of course pictures and movies of Wii players. That exactly is done on a lot of sites scattered all over the Internet—sites maintained by players and by Nintendo itself. To this ends the Wii Crib Munich has its own weblog, where pictures taken at the Crib are posted. Last Wednesday the Crib’s attendant—or is it nurse?—, a tremendously long-legged girl, caught me in the act of performing an admirable top-spin cross which yielded desastrous impact (point, set, and match). Today an e-mail from ↑just.be, who was also present, arrived and pointed me to ↑the weblog-entry where the nurse had posted some of the pictures she shot on Wednesday evening. Among those is the one above left, accompanied by her comment, “this already looks quite professional.” The irony in all this is, that although I am a genuinely bad player at almost every game, I am indeed professionally occupied with computer games … In spite of all the adversities and shortcomings of the university and the ministry of education above the former, I guess I’ve got the greatest job in the world :-)
