Politics and aesthetics of indexical representation in digital games and VR

Many contemporary digital games and VR experiences – including the Assassin’s Creed series of historical games – claim to provide realistic representations of places or people. But how is this realism achieved and which places and people get included? To answer this question, GAMEINDEX focuses on indexical representations – traces of real-life objects or people in the simulated worlds of digital games and VR. Such indices include 3D scans of buildings or the likenesses and performances of actors who provide motion capture data. GAMEINDEX will investigate indexical representation in digital games and VR using the following methods: 1) ethnographic on-site research of indexical techniques, such as motion capture and photogrammetry, 2) qualitative analyses of selected games that represent peripheral locations or groups of people, 3) analysis of the public discourse about indexical techniques. In the final step, the project will synthesize empirical findings into a theory that will chart the relationships between production practices, game content, and public discourse, elucidating political and aesthetic dimensions of indexicality.Due to the pressures to succeed on the globalized market, games have underrepresented and misrepresented peripheral locations and underprivileged groups of people. So far, studies of representation in games have focused on tropes and stereotypes within the games’ content. Thanks to its focus on indexicality, GAMEINDEX will provide a breakthrough in the study of media representations by transcending close readings and content analysis and studying how representation arises in the production process. The resulting theory will serve as a tool for critique, helping us understand how real locations and people are being exploited and reconfigured into entertainment products. At the same time, it will provide inspiration for developers to create more diverse and just representations of real-world phenomena.