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Here are some object details photographed in the Blight Town area of Dark Souls. I did this in response to a prompt that is supposed to be carried out in real life: take a photograph of a mundane place, zoom into a detail, and then return to the place to photograph the detail up close. The up-close details photographed above were selected after zooming in on background details of this alarming scene:

Applying this assignment to a game instead of a concrete space is interesting, but not as interesting as I had hoped. [su_spoiler title=“Content Warning for sexual harassment, open to view” icon=“caret-square”]The title of this assignment was a riff on the film Blow Up, which is apparently about a peeping Tom who accidentally finds a dead body in one of his non-consensual photographs. [/su_spoiler] The videogameyness of Dark Souls creates a limited reversal of this situation, since the landscape is already full of dead bodies, and almost none of them pose any kind of mystery - the mundane objects seem like a more subversive choice of target. Like, I know how this dead bug creature got here: it’s something I had to kill in order to photograph that lamp.

However, this activity didn’t feel as subversive as I had hoped. The play style involved in photographing mundane objects is almost indistinguishable from what playing Dark Souls is normally like, since its level design is built around showing the player shining doodads as an enticement to try and traverse the dangerous landscape. Here’s one such view from the same area:

Unlike other play interventions, such as walking as slowly as possible in a game that is supposed to be about fast combat, this one didn’t seem to change the nature of the game all that much. What it did offer is a closer examination of possible environmental narratives. Perhaps an examination so close that it stretches the boundaries of plausibility and crosses over into parody:

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After staring at these photographs for a while in a meditative way, I’m pleased by how complex the objects' textures are, and how they all give the impression of having been made using a similar action: wrapping fibers around structural materials. Look very closely and you’ll see that even the metal base of the standing torch has been wrapped in string for some reason. It’s tempting to read tragic foresight into this: although the implication is that this was once all built by humans, the area is now mostly populated by giant flying bugs and gross spider creatures with human heads: presumably these creatures produce silk. This tragic irony is particularly alluring to me with the eight-spoke wheel in frame - it makes me think about the Rota Fortunae or Dharmachakra, representing the attempts (perhaps futile) of humans to escape their (perhaps inevitable) demise.[/su_note]

It’s likely that none of what I describe above reflects designer intent - there is certainly nothing particularly momentous about this arrangement of objects in the context of the game as a whole. The process of responding to this assignment brings out extra readings of things that would ordinarily not merit attention.

I fucking hate Blight Town, and although this assignment didn’t really encourage me to play it differently than I would have otherwise, it did give me a chance to appreciate its spaces as not just grim, but poetic in their own right.

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This assignment comes from Sarah Urist Green and PBS Digital’s The Art Assignment - a series that began in 2014, and has now given 60 assignments for people to try out and publish on social media. Each assignment is created by a different featured artist - this one was by Assaf Evron, who does a lot of neat textured stuff with photography without fully removing his subject matter from its context.

www.youtube.com/watch