Game Face
December 1, 2008 by Barbara
Filed under Barbara Schwartz
Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic pointed to a project at The New York Times: Immersion, by photographer Robbie Cooper. According to the introduction to the slideshow on the Times’ site, Cooper, a British-based photographer, filmed children playing video games from behind the monitor’s glass. The camera snapped shots of the intense stares of the children while they played. According to the write-up:
Cooper, who grew up in Britain and Kenya and played a lot of video games as a child, says he tries to capture “people interacting with worlds that aren’t real.” In his last major project, which was published in the magazine in 2007, he photographed participants in Internet-based games with their virtual-world avatars. Cooper is particularly struck by the intensity of people’s experiences while interacting with digital realms. Drew Hugh, shown above, stares so intently at the screen that he doesn’t blink, and his eyes quickly fill with tears, according to his mother. Cooper says, “It’s fascinating that a world that’s purely visual can have a physical effect.”
Check out the slideshow here. You can also view the YouTube film of the project:
Barbara Schwartz is the editorial director at the Xenia Institute. She lives in Oklahoma City, Okla., and currently is pursuing a Master of Divinity degree at Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa.
