In late autumn, candidates from Charles University clinched a total of five ERC Consolidator Grants, gamechangers when it comes to supporting cutting edge, next level research. One of the recipients is Associate Professor Jaroslav Švelch, who received 1.8 million euros in funding for GAMEINDEX.
What is GAMEINDEX? Shorthand for indexicality that the researcher from the Institute of Communication and Journalism Studies at the Faculty of Social Studies and colleagues will apply to study how real places and reality are replicated and represented in video games and Virtual Reality (VR). One of its aims is to create a comprehensive database of places and real sites one can ‘visit’ in games set around the world, not just major cities but also lesser-known hideaways and little-known villages that serve as backgrounds or settings for video game environments.
Increased literacy in how games are designed, how real sites are used and how reality is idealised or simplified to meet designer or player needs, are important says Jaroslav Švelch, as we spend more and more time in virtual spaces.
Tell me about the main impetus behind your research project? Why is indexical representation important?
The reason why we are focusing on indexical representation is to remedy a problem that we have been observing for some time in game critiques and analyses. It stems from the prevalent idea that games are virtual and that they show us virtual spaces. In fact, they often show us real spaces or things built from slivers of real elements or real places. They contain imprints of real objects, the faces and voices of real actors and 3-D scans of various objects, or photographs of objects from the real world. And at the same time, they also refer to the real world. Not all of them, but many games take place in cities and landscapes that correspond to real life. And there is really a lack of understanding how the supposedly virtual connects to the real and in that sense of the concept of indexicality is really useful.
One of the important questions must be accuracy and another, whose point-of-view we are seeing.
That is something that we are interested in. If you have a game set in a war zone a certain approach may be taken to make the environment seem more convincing and developers are always making decisions every step of the way: what should be included, what should be left out and so on. Complete accuracy is of course impossible but even if you strive for the game to be as realistic as possible, decisions can and will be taken for various reasons including a certain political point of view or just based on practical circumstances: locations may be chosen for accessibility, or the decision to use voice actors from a city like London is influenced by the fact they have a huge talent base available; locations may replicate buildings or landscapes that are nowhere near where the story of a game is actually set. There are simply practical industry approaches which determine the final look or experience.
Jaroslav Švelch photographed at a Prague arcade in 2023 just ahead of the publication of his second monograph.
In the original trailer for Deliverance: Kingdom Come, I remember one of the voice actor’s having a Yorkshire accent which sounded very much like Sean Bean (and one can not help but wonder if it was deliberate or a happy coincidence, given Bean’s appearances and larger than life presence in The Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones…) I guess that finding similar actors or that with AI now being able to clone voices, that is another aspect to consider.
That is definitely a concern, especially among the actors’ unions.
Tell more about the methodology you are going to apply under the ERC grant to label and analyse different aspects.
There are essentially three major components methodologically. The first are ethnographic studies, basically participant-observation in game studios themselves. We want to get a close look at how they create realistic games using specific techniques like motion capture, 3D scanning, or photogrammetry. These are tools that they use and we want to get a better understanding of the decisions they make, where they gather data, how they do motion capture, how they choose actors, how they modify and process motion capture before it ends up in the game. We really want to do this on the ground, and that will help us to understand how these graphic representations come to be.
Again, the idea is to remedy a research gap: we have a lot of critiques or criticism of the content of video games – what is already in the game – but I think that understanding the process might help us get a more complete picture and more robust answers. For example, why certain places are represented and others are not.
The next element is studying the games themselves. For that we will create a database with an extensive list of games taking place in real-life locations and we want to especially focus on games that show underrepresented or peripheral spaces. There has been a trend in games lately being set in eastern or Central Europe such as Austria or Czechia or places in the south, like Mexico. And these places that historically have not really been present in video games and we really want to understand this trend.
Within game analysis, we will use indexaclity too, but here it will mean something a little different. In the original conceptualisation of index, by the semiotician and logician Charles Peirce, it can mean both the trace of a real thing in the virtual world or medium, but it can also act as a ‘pointer’ to real objects. In this part of our research, we will understand it as a pointer and highlight, for example, a location and examine how the game represents, for example, Mexico City.
The third is discourse analysis, slightly less but still critical to whole project, which is about how the industry sees itself and talks about these techniques and which benefits they emphasise and how the issues are discussed in the media. We will be looking at the discussions about realism and the representation of real places in virtual worlds.
It is fascinating to study to what degree these artificial, yet supposedly realistic, spaces work. At the same time, I imagine there will be a lot of room to emphasise or parse disproportion of both space and time, a smoothing over of rough edges graphically, an idealisation, all coming together to create spaces that are ultimately fake.
That’s true. One example of that was a news story that appeared not long after parts of Notre Dame Cathedral were largely destroyed by fire, which claimed that it could be rebuilt thanks to 3D models recorded and presented in the video game (Assassin’s Creed Unity, 2014). The story said that the model was so detailed that the restorers would be able to use it to rebuild the space. But that is false. In terms of accuracy here are of course many significant differences from the real world.
Many things are different for gameplay reasons, you know, it is a space of play, so you – as a character in the game - have to be able to navigate it in certain ways. Copyright reasons also play a role: some of the stained-glass windows at the cathedral were completed much later, so are still under copyright and were not reproduced in the game at all. What you have in the game, is an illusion of accuracy. By looking at the process we want to boost game literacy so that these kinds of reports are not taken too seriously: the claim that a videogame was so real that you could rebuild the cathedral based on the game.
A while back, I interviewed the folks behind the trucking videogame sensation called Euro Truck Simulator 2 which puts you behind the wheel of a big rig. We touched upon several aspects: one is time, as obviously travelling across Europe in-game time will be much shorter and distance stylised; another was representation of real-life locations, in this case of a famous restaurant on the D10 highway to Mladá Boleslav, which really exists, where the dining space is inside a real plane – a retired Tupolev Tu-154. The designers were thrilled to have been able to include that and it was a popular destination in the game.
That shows you just how pieces of reality are reconfigured for this experience and the Euro and American truck simulators which are made in Prague are a great example. I have recently visited their offices and they have teams of people looking at maps of real places and remaking them into in-game maps. Of course the scale is different and they want to give players a fun experience, so they have to choose what to include. That is all a part of it.
Švelch with a ZX Spectrum back in 2019. Forum interviewed him after his first book was published by MIT Press.
If you gain a strong insight into this area that hasn’t really been mapped, are there other uses or a greater impact, in the future? Because I imagine that as we spend more and more time in games but also in virtual reality, the lines will become more and more blurred and it will become harder to determine what is real and what is not. Your work could serve as an anchor in reality from which to work in the future, a reminder of what is real and what is fake.
Certainly, a critical literacy is important. Another impact goal is familiarising people with games that represent those peripheral spaces people might be less aware of. Suddenly, someone who has never been there, can spend time in towns in Czechia or Slovakia or elsewhere: games or virtual settings do not always have to be set in Paris or London and the streets of NYC.
I think that the database we create can, in turn, help inspire developers, and this learning from examples is something that is already happening. In Czechia, a lot of that was because of the huge success of Kingdom Come: Deliverance in 2018. It was at that time that developers realised that it was possible to set a successful game in Bohemia and for it to still be successful on the international market. By collecting these examples in a public database, and including a virtual map, we want to spread awareness about different locations where different games take place.
| Associate Professor Jaroslav Švelch |
| Jaroslav Švelch graduated from the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University, where he also defended his dissertation. He also gained experience during research stays in the USA at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Microsoft Research New England Lab and, as a postdoctoral fellow, at the University of Bergen, Norway. He was a successful applicant for an intra-university Primus grant and is the author of numerous articles as well as monographs on gaming and the history of home computing in the former Czechoslovakia and Warsaw Pact countries: Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games (MIT Press, 2018) and Player vs. Monster: The Making and Breaking of Video Game Monstrosity (2023). |
