Everything (2017): Aesthetics and Politics of Re-Scaling as a Video Game Mechanic video essay En Fr

Résumé En

Everything (2017) is a video game whose main mechanic rests on the process of re-scaling. Its player is invited to move around in the game’s various environments, and to “ascend” or “descend” into any of the organisms or objects they come across. The player can thus travel through the game’s seven “scale levels”, which range from the subatomic to the interstellar. As the user continuously changes their perspective – alternately playing as a horse, a gecko, a stone, a microparticle, a building, a galaxy, etc. – they are led to adopt various stances towards the virtual world they are exploring and inhabiting. Depending on how they decide to engage with the process of re-scaling, the player might go through an experience of transformative self-reflection, one of exhilarating control, or maybe just one of perceptual and cognitive relaxation. With its multilayered journey through scales, Everything could result in either weakening or strengthening anthropocentric assumptions about perspective, immersion, environment habitation, control, and agency. In this video essay, I show the various ways in which a user (in this case, myself) can affect the process of re-scaling the visual; I also show how, in turn, she can be affected by this process both mentally and bodily, as her sense of herself is being reshaped – whether momentarily or lastingly – in relation to the video game she is playing and the technological apparatuses which support it. This video essay was created with the “ACV” (“Arts and Visual Cultures”) research group, in the Anglophone Studies Department of Université Paris Cité.