Noclip World: Drawing the disruptions of virtual video game environments

Abstract

Abstract Modern video games give the player ever more realistic worlds to experience; yet they typically remain carefully cultivated virtual spaces. Cheaters and players who operate against the prevailing logic of the system often expose strange digital phenomena that come with attempts to replicate realistic spaces in game engine environments. Noclip World is an ongoing research project in which I seek to expose the underlying logics of video game spaces using hand drawing as a critical tool. The project explores games based on Valve Corporation’s Source Engine that made games from 2004 to 2016. Through a roving ‘counterplay’ using cheats to suspend in-game physics, I produce a taxonomy of behaviours that manifest in the virtual camera when navigated to the fringes of game worlds. The project references Flusser’s notion of the camera as a ‘black box’ and frames the inner coded workings of a virtual camera as equivocal in its opacity. I subsequently propose transcriptive drawing as a tool to unpick the logics of glitched virtual worlds. Protocols of architectural drawing are used to expose and reassemble the fragmentary spaces detailed in-game through the use of screenshots as preliminary ‘photographic’ recordings. Noclip World questions whether the architect producing drawings of these virtual spaces can become surrogates for the opaque zone of Flusser’s camera, becoming a ‘black box’ themselves. By using drawing to expose the disruption of virtual video game environments, the project ultimately seeks to uncover the contingency of even the most realistic digital depictions of space.