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Unwrapping virtual space through the myth of total cinema

Published: 17 June 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Visionary promises of a 3D virtual future are unfulfilled. Online 3D platforms such as VRML, Second Life, and Open Sim sought a 3D web of worlds and delivered, at best, mixed results. To understand the broad creative and cognitive challenges that drive the design of 3D virtual spaces, a cross-disciplinary design review of early cinema, a technical precursor, is needed. 150 years ago, a simulation oriented "Myth of a Total Cinema" guided and limited the development of the earliest films (Bazin 1958, Manovich 2001). Cinema was first seen as a realistic mirror world made of captured images. It would take decades for film makers to discover how to leave the myth and create montage, literally breaking a simulated reality apart in service to narrative. This text retraces the creative process of discovery, the tension between montage and the myth of total cinema, and then proposes a virtual design foundation stemming from an overlooked aspect of videogame theory.

References

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Andre Bazin. 1967 Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? Paris: Editions. Trans. H. Gray (1958) What Is Cinema? Vol 1 University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.
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Andre Bazin. 1967 Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? Paris: Editions. Trans. H. Gray (1958) What Is Cinema? Vol 2 University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.
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Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams. 2003. Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on game design. New Riders Publishing.
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Anker Jorgenson. 2004 A. Marrying HCI/usability and computer games: A preliminary look. In Proceedings of the third Nordic conference on human-computer interaction, NordiCHI 2004, 82 (2004), 393--396.
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Ben Shneiderman. 2003. Why not make interfaces better than 3D reality? IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 23.6 (2003) 12--15.
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Donald Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson. 1985. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. Columbia University Press, New York NY.
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Janet Murray. 1997. Hamlet on the holodeck: The future of narrative in cyberspace. MIT Press. Boston, MA,
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cover image ACM Conferences
C&C '13: Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Creativity & Cognition
June 2013
433 pages
ISBN:9781450321501
DOI:10.1145/2466627
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Published: 17 June 2013

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Author Tags

  1. cinema
  2. film
  3. interactivity
  4. narrative
  5. simulation
  6. total cinema
  7. videogame
  8. virtual world

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C&C '13
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C&C '13: Creativity and Cognition 2013
June 17 - 20, 2013
Sydney, Australia

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C&C '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 28 of 88 submissions, 32%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 108 of 371 submissions, 29%

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