RND/ To consider generic videogame screenshots of nothing – a lament for ‘The Video Real’:
1920 x 1080 .jpg via Steam Community
In which such an exhibition is a historical-cultural record, not of something but of precisely nothing. Images of nothing – of the ‘sickness of seeing’ perhaps – but definitely of little else. The videogame in question is Slipgate, but that hyperreal factoid doesn’t matter. You’re currently staring (skimming over) contextless colored pixels. There’s a certain hollow sadness to such images – a cheap un-animated ragdoll, face down and ass up on the cold bare digital ground. Oh dear. Unknown and unloved – a testament both to The Game’s own inherent existential obsolescence but also to the countless anonymous billions who pass through its virtual videographic arenas – hungry ghosts through a long abandoned desert town. Where anytime you even see a gun on screen – particularly those phallic sci fi monsters taking up a good portion – you instantly get the feeling that yep, this is indeed merely just another hyper-generic FPS multiplayer shooter-of-nothing, for no reason. A violently empty pew-pew, utterly devoid of anything truly meaningful. In many ways a Nihilistic Shooter, shooting out at and into a universe or space which (equally) couldn’t care less about how manly you feel while repeatedly shooting your overcompensatory ballistic e-penis, the sound echoing off the lonely digital canyon walls only to instantly fade away when the final players finally log off in Terminal Boredom aka ‘The Big Meh’ in search of the Next Best Newest Whatever. Alas.