Photos in Final Fantasy XV and Prompto’s in-game photography

In Final Fantasy XV (Square Enix, 2016) one of the character, Prompto Argentum, has photography skills and will take pictures of the gameplay, which are shown to the player when the characters are resting.

Prompto could be seen as an alternative Photo Mode “outsourced” to an NPC.

 

source: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/719092-final-fantasy-xv/74657693

Prompto’s photography skill is a passive ability that is used throughout your time playing Final Fantasy 15, requiring no input to progress. It generally progresses naturally as Prompto takes photographs of various things as you explore the game world.

At the end of each day Prompto will show you a list of photographs he has taken that day. You do have the option of saving the pictures into a gallery or even sharing them with your friends on social media, although this has no impact on leveling the skill itself.

Typically Prompto will take shots of exciting events throughout the day. Boss encounters, group exploration and meeting new figures within the story are all popular points for Prompto to take a quick snapshot.

At some points during the game you can influence Prompto’s photograph choices. When driving Prompto will ask Noctis what he wants to see in his photographs, you can reply with any of the main characters as a response – prompting Prompto (see what I did there?) to take more photographs featuring that specific character.

source: http://www.gamersheroes.com/game-guides/final-fantasy-xv-promptos-photography-skills-guide/

Interestingly, the photo feature was explicitly built to encourage circulation of images online and “impact social media”:

The photos feature was born out of the idea that more people are using smartphones and thus being connected to social media, and the developers wanted Final Fantasy XV to have an impact in that sphere.

If people are playing on their smartphones, then a lot of them are also using social media, right? So one of my goals in creating 15 was to craft a game that could have a big impact on social media. That’s what you’ve seen with the photographs and all the videos the players are sharing, and that’s a way of sort of reaching this audience. I think we did a pretty good job of it.

—Hajime Tabata, director of Final Fantasy XV

 

source: http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Photos

However, some players have complained about the Prompto’s photographic skills:

The game also contains photography as game mechanics, and photo shoot “missions”.

 

A Photo Mode that can be operated by the player is also available:

 

more info on Prompto’s photography AI: http://gdcvault.com/play/1024023/Prompto-s-Facebook-How-a

The Polaroid

The Polaroid (Christopher Ng, Conrad Fay, Michael Lee, Kenneth Ng, Spencer Lee, 2016) submitted to Ludum Dare 36 (August 26th-29th, 2016)

Inside a mysterious room with no door, you seek a way to get out. A set of polaroid photos on the wall hint at the story of this room’s past. With only an old polaroid camera in hand, you must solve the puzzle of each photo by matching them to the scene.

The Polaroid is a puzzle game that connects the past and present through a supernatural take on the polaroid-within-a-polaroid fad.

source: https://dissonent.itch.io/the-polaroid

 

Time Travel Selfies

Time Travel Selfies (Risin’ Goat, 2016) submitted to Ludum Dare 36 (August 26th-29th, 2016)

You have one goal: Taking selfies of ancient technology pieces in The Classic Greece Era to be the coolest guy of the Fakebook Science Community!

Of course, if a person from the past happens to see a cellphone, the Space Time Continuum will collapse.

source: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-36/?action=preview&uid=111663

Sea Hero Quest

Sea Hero Quest (Glitchers, 2016)

Pokémon Sun and Moon

Pokémon Sun and Moon (Game Freak, 2016).

WE BECOME WHAT WE BEHOLD

WE BECOME WHAT WE BEHOLD (Nicky Case,  2016) is an online game on photographic media and how images affects our perceptions and shape our behaviours and society.

The only photographic function that can be controlled is framing (point & click), before taking a picture. A picture is then automatically “distributed” on the main square’s media channel with an added caption that “interprets” the action portrayed in the image.

Play it online here: https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb

 

35MM

35MM (Sergey Noskov, 2016)

Despite the promising name, 35MM offers a very limited simulation of photography. The game is reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film adaptation Stalker, and it allows the player to take pictures through an analog camera, without the possibility to look through the viewfinder or to customize any function.

Some user has pointed out that taking pictures of certain subjects is connected to a reward system in the game, yet the precise role of the camera in terms of game mechanics appears unclear.

source: https://steamcommunity.com/app/466500/discussions/0/350540973996139533/

Russian in-game photography community

Konstantin Remizov has kindly offered a glimpse into the Russian community of in-game photographers that he is part of, existing in its current form since 2016: https://vk.com/ingameph

[Notable projects:]

– a collective take on using the famous “Hall of mirrors” glitch for aesthetic purposes: https://vk.com/wall-122046911_1795

– a recontextualization of Daido Moriyama’s work and methods in the gamespace of Driv3r: https://vk.com/wall-122046911_1508

– an essay on parrallels between in-game photography and the works of Thomas Ruff and Jeff Wall (yup, on russian): https://vk.com/wall-122046911_1548

From time to time we also post notable works from outside the community and translate important texts (or even write our own, as evidenced above). But mostly, of course, the content of the group is constituted by the good old-fashioned thermite art, to borrow Manny Farber’s term – a constant flow of surreal experiences and deliberate deconstructions.

Unlike other communities of in-game photography, this stands out as having a very artistic sense and strongly connected with photographic history and traditions.

Sonicomi

Sonicomi (Nitroplus, 2016).

Super Sonico is a cheerful, hardworking college student and amateur musician who’s about to make her modeling debut. As her personal photographer, you will be responsible for Sonico’s image, balancing the needs of your clients with your own vision for Sonico’s future. Cute, sexy, weird — the costumes you choose will determine her path as a model. Will you cultivate mainstream appeal? Make Sonico a subculture icon? Or will she become something even you can’t imagine? It all depends on you!

Source: http://store.steampowered.com/app/444140/Sonicomi/

 

Alan Butler – Down and Out in Los Santos

 

Down and Out in Los Santos is series of photographs that are created by exploiting a smartphone camera feature within the video game Grand Theft Auto V. Players of GTAV can put away the guns and knives, and instead take photos within the game environment. This operates in basically the same way as ‘real’ cameras do. I walk around a three-dimensional space, find a subject, point the camera, compose the shot, focus, and click the shutter. I have taken a photograph.

Adopting a photojournalistic approach, the series aims to engage in a sort of social-realism for the software-age, documenting poverty and the lives of the homeless within video game environment’s socio-economic hegemony. Through performative engagement with the uncanny simulations of society’s most vulnerable, Down and Out in Los Santos aims to unearth the viewer’s empathy and humanity through manipulative photographic tropes.

Embarking on daily photographic expeditions within this video game, I have already spent over a year capturing these homeless people, their surroundings, the infrastructure, and hopefully the symptoms and causes of their states of being. The initial result is thousands of quasi-photographic images, which depict moments of real intimacy between myself and these virtual people. There are a number of ways that this is achieved – such as waiting for eye-contact with the simulant, or using depth of field to draw focus to objects, poses, limbs and intimate moments between groups of people. These individuals do not provide the game with any functionality per se, as they never intersect with the narrative. Instead they exist as why I think of as an ‘ambient human presence’. I am not proud to say that they exist in a similar place of reality to the homeless people who sit on the doorsteps of my studio every day in Dublin’s city centre.

While the inhabitants of Los Santos possess only a superficial amount of artificial intelligence, it is possible to have real emotional experiences in their presence. This might sound sad and geeky, but it is true. The characters are aware of my presence as I photograph them, some ignore me, other times I am attacked and must defend myself. They chatter to each other, they share alcohol and cigarettes, they ask for money to buy drugs. Programmed to self-identify, they congregate with those in similar social situations to themselves.

Once I have taken the photographs, the images are then uploaded to a social network called the ‘Rockstar Social Club’. The feature called ‘Snapmatic’ is itself is a simulacra of modern photo-sharing apps, such as Instagram. A technical imposition of corporate pragmatism means the images are downsized and compressed, and their journey through these networks is scarred onto the pixelated, low-resolution corrupted surface of these digital photos.

This website is where the project will be initially rolled out, with software automatically posting images every day until some point in 2018. I have already posted hundreds of these images online on various networks. On Instagram, the project takes an interesting turn. Through the use of hashtags, I have been attempting to allow these images penetrate traditional photographic and photojournalism networks. The unexpected result here is that dozens of bots have been ‘liking’ these images. The bots in question have been installed by particular Instagram users to automatically ‘like’ every single post on particular hashtags. I have been calling these the “Sycophant Bots”, since the exist only to flatter users, with the hope that people like me will ‘follow’ their host-account. Perhaps it is poetic, but entirely appropriate that software is the first audience of these empathetic photographs of software people.

source: http://www.alanbutler.info/down-and-out-in-los-santos-2016/

 

“Interview: Alan Butler And The Aesthetics Of The Video Game Re-Enactment” on gamescenes: http://www.gamescenes.org/2017/05/interview-alan-butler-.html