concept // medias // models // interactivity // interface // display

Concept / Storyboard
"It took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did."
- Michael Herr, Dispatches

"However many times it happened, whether I'd known them or not, no matter what I felt about them or the way they died, their story was always there and it was always the same: it went, 'Put yourself in my place.'"
- Michael Herr, Dispatches

" And when I say realism, I mean realism. This isn't just a buzzword. Everything is going to ooze realism."
- review of Soldier of Fortune, 3DActionPlanet.com

This is what we go to first-person action games for: the rush of adrenaline that only comes when your body truly feels like an experience is real. When the danger is real. When what hangs in the balance is... you.

Hence an arms race of ever-increasing "realism" in computer games: splashier blood, shinier guns, more unpredictable enemies, larger and more detailed battle fields that in some cases are modelled after real warzones: Libya, Somalia, Kosovo, Sudan. Real warzones, where real people die.

Of course, you won't die while playing a computer game. No matter how fast the rendering engine, the experience of game play is just you, in a room, with a screen, laying waste to millions of bad guys. The trompe-l'oeil adrenaline of 3D gaming powers the economic dynamo of the 3D industry. Millions of dollars go to counterfeit the "look and feel" of battle without any of the inconveniences - a diet soda kind of hell.

The "realism" of 3D action games depend upon one crucial assumption to be enjoyable: that "you" are on the right side of the gun. Or that you can fight at all. Multiplayer Doom would be a disaster without the gun; a weaponless Castle Wolfenstein would be murder. To take pleasure from these these virtual spaces, we must at the same time believe in them and disavow their reality. To get the adrenaline rush of risk, we must believe that our existence in the virtual space of the game is real; to escape the actual trauma of real war, we must believe that no one else's existence is.

What would it be like to revisit the virtual space of a 3D action game as a noncombatant? The game - and the worldview it promotes - would look very different then. POV/POW mixes screenshots from an actual action game (Soldier of Fortune) with recycled sounds and actions to explore the familiar space of the action adventure game from the perspective of a soldier, a child, and a gunshot victim.

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