Two Camera Point of View: Virtual Video Ethnography Techniques

TG’s embedded videographer and amateur rodent wrangler, E-Male, reporting from the front lines of Project Reality.

Dateline: Thursday March 29, 2007.



While squad leading on Al Basrah (and not doing a particularly stellar job of it), I captured a FRAPs video record of a helicopter journey from the airport to the Mosque. Then I downloaded the game file from TG’s Battlerecorder and videotaped the same trip from the third-person point of view. Using Adobe Premiere I edited the two points of view into the following brief video.

The skilled pilot was Amdak, and my other squad members were Asch, Nex911, and Smok1ingun. I was very impressed with Asch’s style of movement and situational awareness. All squad members performed well.





The initial edits are a bit confusing (too many, I think), but the last few work quite well. You will see me running to the helicopter and getting in it from two points of view, you will see the helicopter flying over roads and river bridges from two points of view (from within the helicopter and from an external ‘god’ perspective of the third person point of view).





You will also see the helicopter approaching a building and flying around it, then you will see the same action from the other side of the building as the helicopter comes around the corner. You will see me coming up some stairs to a roof from my point of view (first person), then from the third person you will see me emerge from the stairwell onto the roof (third person).

[media]http://www.tacticalsites.com/~e-male/pictures/twocamerahelo.flv[/media]

For a better viewing experience, download and play.
This will give you a larger 640x480 screen.

This example of capturing human action within a virtual realm by using two camera angles is intended to demonstrate the fast evolving techniques now available to the virtual ethnographer. Virtual video ethnography stands in a long line of tradition that uses communication technologies such as tape recorders, film cameras, and video cameras to explore human action. The movie camera was first used as an ethnographic tool in 1922 for Robert Flaherty’s film, Nanook of the North, although the use of video recording for exploring human action within the virtual realm is very new. At the beginning of 2007 I was unable to locate any concrete examples of video ethnography being used to explore human action within Internet-based video game communities. Virtual video ethnography may indeed be something very novel.

This example of two-camera virtual video ethnography lacks in-game sounds, the only voice that is available is my own, and the video resolution (800x600) is grainy at best. Nonetheless, we can look forward to a day soon when human action within virtual environments will be captured from multiple angles (perspectives), with full sound and high definition video. This will add a whole new layer of reflexivity to the ethnographic process. Not only will the ethnographer be able to capture multiple perspectives of the same event, but those involved (other in-game players) will have the ability to produce their own version of the event. This will further challenge the authority of anyone point of view or interpretation. We can also anticipate a new forum for human action that adds a god-like perspective to everyday acts of memory.

What happens to identity and the self when individuals gain the ability to see their actions from both the inside (first person) and the outside (third person)? As more time is spent within virtual realms the sociological and psychological impact of the third-person point of view may be significant indeed. The day is soon coming when hundreds of millions of people will most certainly spend as much time inside of virtual online realms as was once spent in front of the television. Virtual video ethnography will prove to be a useful tool for exploring the new type of worlds and the new type of selves that are emerging within these hyperreal playgrounds.

Virtual Video Ethnography: A Brief Definition

This is part of my experimental work in a new field, virtual video ethnography. I am studying Internet gaming culture from the position of the ethnographer, which is to say that I have immersed myself in the Tactical Gamer community. A study of online culture can be said to be ethnographic when the researcher becomes a participant observer of the daily behaviour of an online community.

Over the past two decades the anthropological practice of ethnography has been extended into the virtual realm of online communities. Ethnography helps overcome the excesses of abstract theorectical analysis and the artificial conditions of laboratory experiments by immersing the researcher within the actual experience of new media audiences. Virtual ethnography treats the online community as a shared culture that can be explored using the techniques of anthropological inquiry. Bruce Mason, aptly describes virtual ethnography as a practice that

fully immerses the ethnographer into the consensual reality experienced by groups of people who use computer-mediated communication as their primary, and often only, means of communication … As with any ethnography it is the detailed, systematic, and exhaustive participation within the group and building of relationships over time that allow the ethnographer to build with the help of the participants an account of the culture created within that group.

The virtual ethnographer seeks to enter into the lifeworld of someone else’s virtual persona that has been projected into cyberspace. Thus the object of fieldwork shifts away from the distant individual who is sitting at a keyboard to the online representation of that individual, his ‘virtual persona.’ Of course, this does not mean that the individual at the keyboard is ignored. Virtual ethnography sees the individual as presenting two selves – the self that exists in the physical (‘real’) world and the virtual self that is projected into the online environment. Members of virtual communities such as Tactical Gamer also recognize the duality of selves and frequently use the abbreviation ‘RL’, which stands for ‘real-life’, to indicate which realm of experience they are referring to within conversations.

Enjoy.

Dr. Strangelove
aka, E-Male
www.strangelove.com