Karl Hodge

Newspaper article on memetic transfer of cultural data across nascent social network.

We’re finally adapting to virtual spaces. What does the future have in store for cinema?

Since his death in January 2016 there has been almost as much “new” David Bowie material released as there was during his lifetime.

After a debut that many in the media painted as a disaster, No Man’s Sky is now a sprawling masterwork with a loyal userbase. Here's how.

Life is Strange is a modern classic of storytelling in games that allows players to make consequential choices at the level of action as well as at the level of narrative. But does it also allow players to play as their authentic selves, or does it constrain them within frameworks of ethics that are assumed by its authors? This study uses an approach that combines elements of ludology, the focus on games as systems that are altered by players through a mechanistic interface, and the application of structuralist narratology. The latter allows us to textually analyse Life is Strange as a case study of a progression game with emergence characteristics, in which mechanics are treated as functional units of narrative. In addition, we draw from a unique quantitative source. Every choice made by players of Life is Strange is recorded and available to see in the public domain. This allows us to compare the narrative structure encoded into the game at the level of action, with the choices players made at the level of narrative. The outcome shows that players subverted hegemonic expectations, within affordances created for them by the game developers, demonstrating an unexpected level of player agency.

With ChatGPT all the rage, Karl Hodge examines the future of artificial intelligence in music – and why it might be an integral new asset.

This chapter explores some of the affinities and differences between the affective movement of cinematic spectatorship and virtual reality through selected examples and deployment of theoretical frameworks concerning communication, representation, and simulation (Benjamin, 1969; Baudrillard, 1997; McLuhan, 1997). In this chapter, we acknowledge how virtual reality is embedded within social, cultural, and historical contexts alongside other reality media such as linear perspective, photography, cinema, and television (Boulter, Engberg and MacIntyre 2021). Previous studies of virtual reality documentaries provide a useful overview of their affinities with cinema especially in relation to narrative, characterisation, camera work, point of view and empathic connections with audiences (Bolmer, 2017; Nash, 2018; Hassan, 2020). To extend this existing corpus of work, we refer to Benjamin’s view that ‘the relation between the body of the audience and the image on the screen is no longer only by optical means, but by the entire body’ (Mourenza, 2020:53). Rather than examining cinema as a primarily audio-visual experience, we consider how the movement of the camera and sequential flow of screen images can be regarded as eliciting kinaesthetic, affective experiences for the spectator. At the same time, we investigate physicality and affect in relation to how user-participants move through VR simulations using software and hardware which enable ‘magical’ forms of movement such as teleportation, jumps and flying (Nilsson et al, 2018).